Lyric Culture: Ontological Design for Back Loop Realities (pt 3)

Introduction to the 2024 Course (Jan- July)

Ontological Design

The phrase “a time between worlds” has inspired many people. It is a lovely evocation of both the precarity and the preciousness of the world that is being left behind. We talk about “a new world waiting to be born.” We ask What wants to emerge? These were good responses to the shocks we were experiencing. The shock of extinction, the realization that in order for the new forms to be born the old forms have to be taken out of existence.

When you fall through the ice into the freezing water, your body goes into a shock response and you cannot breathe. But it doesn’t last forever. Knowing this, you know you need to pause for a few seconds until you start to breathe again; and then … well, you can get on with swimming your way out.

This year I want to breathe again. This year I want to swim out from the icy depths to the verdant land. The panarchy cycle tells us that back-loop realities open up spaces for new life to enter where the old forms and connectivities have been taken out of existence. In Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Arturo Escobar, describes ontological design as 1) examining primarily how design, through its very materiality, “hardwires” particular kinds of politics into bodies, spaces or objects” [here citing Rubio and Fogue] and 2) focusing on design’s ability to broaden the range of possible ways of being through our bodies, spaces, and materialities. Escobar identifies the prevailing practices as defuturing, because they all lead to a singularity — a kind of post-humans AI-led, techno-authoritarianism— instead of opening the possibility space to many new possibilities. This practice he calls the futuring of the pluriverse.

The video of Eutopia that I posted in the first essay of this series, seems to me to represent a pluriversal view of the future. His argument goes as follows:

1. The contemporary crisis is the result of deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing and doing. (What I call malware, and it runs very deep.)

2. Ontological design involves a critical overturn of the dualist ontology of separation, control and appropriation. (Hence, putting the mind back into the body and the body back into nature and the material world.)

3. We need to design for transitions (the great simplification), cultural autonomy (the protection of cultural and historical difference) and place (secure places for those cultures to thrive).

4. Rediscovering people’s abilities to shape their worlds through relational and collaborative tools and solutions.

“The book should be read along three axes” he writes:

ontology, concerned with world making from the perspective of radical interdependence and a pluriversal imagination; design, as an ethical praxis of world making; and politics, centered on a reconceptualization of autonomy precisely as an expression of radical interdependence, not its negation.

The next three essays in this series will introduce three authors and their works, which I believe are foundational to ontological design, as well as prefiguring Lyric Culture:

Generating a Living World: Christopher Alexander

Pragmatic Imagination: Ann Pendleton-Julian & John Seely Brown

Wuwei/ Effortless Action/ Effortless Attention : Liu Ming, Edward Singerland, Bryan Bruya