Current Radical Propositions

Abstract

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“Ethics? Design?” is a 46, 000 word text resulting from a lecture by Clive Dilnot to the audience in Archeworks a School founded by Eva Maddox and Stanley Tigerman in Chicago. The author explains in an introductory note that he decided to preserve the lecture format because of pedagogical reasons. So the reader may expect to sometimes hear the lecturer. However, those not familiarized with the School of Frankfurt style mastered by Theodor Adorno, for instance, may expect some difficulties in reading it.

Only during the twentieth century the concept of “Design” gained its full global meaning, a century in which the human actions especially challenged the millenary notions of Ethics.

Clive Dilnot faces this demanding coincidence: When Design as a concept inflated up to the dimension of encompassing all of the artificial production, no longer being innocent in the existential drama, a century of unexpected methodic destruction and suffering occurs. Therefore, a reasonable number of thinkers about Ethics have something to say, or to be read, about design. On the other hand the particular audience of Archeworks is related with architecture by disciplinary institution linked to Ethics.

One must not expect in Dilnot’s text a simple engineered structure of arguments; the text has a complex musical structure, almost symphonic even though if only with two greater movements: The first digresses through the Ethical thinking of the past century ending with some chords, through the notion of Heterotopia that annunciate the second part, propositional in its structure. It can also be described as the confection of the mille-feuilles gateaux with arguments being folded and pressed, folded and pressed on and on.

The grand themes come from Giorgio Agamben and Herbert Simon in a permanent confrontation of content and form respectively. Agamben last exhortation about art becoming the artness of Design, in Dilnot’s argument, is consecutively constructed by a myriad of authors ramifying from Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger.

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