Chapter Ten: Design and Environment or How Political Economy Escalates Into Cyberblitz

Not all cultures produce objects: the concept is peculiar to ours, born of the industrial revolution. Yet even industrial society knows only the product, not the object. The object only begins truly to exist at the time of its formal liberation as a sign function, and this liberation only results from the mutation of this properly industrial society into what could be called our techno-culture, [188] from the passage out of a metallurgic into a semiurgic society. That is to say, the object only appears when the problem of its finality of meaning, of its status as message and as sign (of its mode of signification, of communication and of sign exchange) begins to be posed beyond its status as product and as commodity (beyond the mode of production, of circulation and of economic exchange). This mutation is roughed out during the 19th century, but the Bauhaus solidifies is theoretically. So it is from the Bauhaus' inception that we can logically date the "revolution of the object."

It is not a question of simple extension and differentiation, however extraordinary, of the field of products on account of industrial development. It is a question of a mutation of status. Before the Bauhaus there were, properly speaking, no objects; subsequently, and according to an irreversible logic, everything potentially participates in the category of objects and will be produced as such. That is why any empirical classification (Abraham Moles, etc.) is ludicrous. To wonder whether or not a house or a piece of clothing is an object, to wonder where the object begins, where it leaves off in order to become a building, etc. -- all this descriptive typology is fruitless. For the object is not a thing, nor even a category; it is a status of meaning and a form. Before the logical advent of this object form, nothing is an object, not even the everyday utensils -- thereafter, everything is, the building as well as the coffee spoon or the entire city. It is the Bauhaus that institutes this universal semantization of the environment in which everything becomes the object of a calculus of function and of signification. Total functionality, total semiurgy. It is a "revolution" in relation to
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the traditional mode, in which objects (for lack of a better word) are bound together and not liberated, have no status of their own and do not form a system among themselves on the basis of a rational finality (functionality).

This functionality inaugurated by the Bauhaus defines itself as a double movement of analysis and rational synthesis of forms (not only industrial, but environmental and social in general). It is a synthesis of form and function, of "beauty and utility," of art and technology. Beyond "style" and its caricatured version in "styling," the commercial kitsch of the 19th century and the modern style, the Bauhaus projects the basis of a rational conception of environmental totality for the first time. Beyond the genres (architecture, painting, furnishings, etc.), beyond "art" and its academic sanction, it extends the aesthetic to the entire everyday world; at the same time it is all of technique in the service of everyday life. The possibility of a "universal semiotic of technological experience" [189] is in effect born of the abolition of the segregation between the beautiful and the useful. Or again from another angle: the Bauhaus tries to reconcile the social and technical infrastructure installed by the industrial revolution with the superstructure of forms and meanings. In wishing to fulfill technology (la technique) in the finality of meaning (the aesthetic), the Bauhaus presents itself as a second revolution, the crowning perfection of the industrial revolution, resolving all the contradictions that the latter had left behind it.

The Bauhaus is neither revolutionary nor utopian. Just as the industrial revolution marked the birth of a field of political economy, of a systematic and rational theory of material production, so the Bauhaus marks the theoretical extension of this field of political economy and the practical extension of the system of exchange value to the whole domain of signs, forms and objects. At the level of the mode of signification and in the name of design, it is a mutation analogous to that which has taken place since the 16th century on the level of the mode of material production and under the aegis of political economy. The Bauhaus marks the point of departure of a veritable political economy of the sign.

The same general schema emerges: on the one hand, nature and human labor are disengaged from their archaic constraints, liberated as productive forces and as objects of a rational calculus of production. On the other, the whole environment becomes a
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signifier, objectified as an element of signification. Functionalized and liberated from all traditional implications (religious, magical, symbolic), it becomes the object of a rational calculus of signification.

The Operation of the Sign

Behind the transparency of the object in relation to its function, behind that universal moral law imposed upon it in the name of design, behind that functional equation, that new "economy" of the object that immediately adopts aesthetic value, behind the general scheme of synthesis (art-technique, form-function), a whole labor of dissociation and abstract restructuration in fact takes place:

1. The dissociation of every complex subject-object relation into simple, analytic, rational elements that can be recombined in functional ensembles and which then take on status as the environment. For it is only on that basis that man is separated from something he calls the environment, and confronted with the task of controlling it. Ever since the 18th century the concept of nature has emerged as a productive force to be mastered. That of the environment only shifts it and intensifies it to mean a mastery of signs.

2. A generalized division of labor at the level of objects. Analytic fragmentation into 14 or 97 functions, an identical technical response reuniting several functions of the same object, or the same function in several objects, etc. -- in short, the whole analytic grid that permits disassembling and reassembling an ensemble.

3. Even more fundamental is the semiological (dis)articulation of the object, from which the latter takes on the force of a sign. And when we say that it becomes a sign, it is according to the strictest definition; it is articulated into a "signifier" and a "signified," it becomes the signifier of a rational, objectifiable "signified" that is its function. This differs sharply from the traditional symbolic relation, where things have meaning, but a meaning that does not come to them from an objective "signified" to which they refer as "signifier." Such, in contrast, is the modern status of the sign-object, which in this respect obeys the linguistic schema: "functionalized" means also "structuralized," that is to say, split into two terms. Design emerges simultaneously as the project of their ideal articulation and the aesthetic of resolution of their equation. For aesthetic is nothing other than that which, as if by excess, seals this operational semiology.

In fact, aesthetics in the modern sense of the term no longer has
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anything to do with the categories of beauty and ugliness. Critics, the public and designers all mix up the two terms beauty and aesthetic value indiscriminately, but they are logically incompatible (the confusion is strategic: in a system dominated by fashion, that is, by sign exchange value, it allows the conservation of the aura of a preindustrial value, that of style).

A thousand contradictory definitions of beauty and of style are possible. One thing is certain: they are never a calculus of signs. They come to an end with the system of functional aesthetics, as the earlier modes of economic exchange (barter, gift exchange) perished with the rise of capitalism, and with the institution of a rational calculus of production and exchange. The category of the aesthetic succeeds that of beauty (liquidating it) as the semiological order succeeds the symbolic order. Contemporary aesthetics, once the theory of the forms of beauty, has become the theory of a generalized compatibility of signs, of their internal coherence (signifier-signified) and of their syntax. Aesthetic value connotes the internal functionality of an ensemble, it qualifies the (eventually mobile) equilibrium of a system of signs. It simply translates the fact that its elements communicate amongst themselves according to the economy of a model, with maximal integration and minimal loss of information (a harmonized interior in the tonality of blue, or "playing" upon the blues and greens; the crystalloid structures of the residential ensemble; the "naturalness" of "green spaces"). The aesthetic is thus no longer a value of style or of content; it no longer refers to anything but to communication and sign exchange. It is an idealized semiology, or a semiological idealism. [190]

In the symbolic order of style frolics a forever unresolved ambivalence -- but the semio-aesthetic order is one of operational resolution, of an interplay of referrals, of equivalence and of controlled dissonances. An "aesthetic" ensemble is a mechanism without lapses, without fault, in which nothing compromises the interconnection of the elements and the transparency of the process: that famous absolute legibility of signs and messages -- the common ideal of all manipulators of codes, whether they be cyberneticians or designers. This aesthetic order is a cold order. Functional perfection exercises a cold seduction, the functional satisfaction of a demonstration and an algebra. It has nothing to do with pleasure, with beauty (or horror), whose nature is conversely to rescue us from the demands of rationality and to plunge us once more into an
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absolute childhood (not into an ideal transparency, but into the illegible ambivalence of desire).

This operation of the sign, this analytic dissociation into the functional duo signifier-signified, always caught in an ideological scheme of synthesis, is found even in the key concepts of design. It is at the bottom of all the current systems of signification (media, political, etc.), just as the operational bifurcation use value-exchange value is at the foundation of the commodity form and of the whole of political economy. [191] All possible valences of an object, all its ambivalence, which cannot be reduced to any model, are reduced by design to two rational components, two general models -- utility and the aesthetic -- which design isolates and artificially opposes to one another. It is useless to emphasize the hot-housing (le forcage) of meaning, the arbitrariness of circumscribing it by these two restrained finalities. In fact, they form only a single one: they are two dissociated forms of the same rationality, sealed by the same system of values. But this artificial separation then permits evoking their reunification as an ideal scheme. Utility is separated from the aesthetic, they are named separately (for neither has any reality other than being named separately), then they are ideally reunited and all contradictions are resolved by this magical operation. Now, the two equally arbitrary agencies exist only to mislead. The real problem, the real contradictions are at the level of form, of sign exchange value; but it is precisely these that are obscured by the operation. Such is the ideological function of design: with the concept of the "functional aesthetic," it proposes a model of reconciliation, of formal surpassing of specialization (division of labor at the level of objects) by a universally enveloping value. Thus it imposes a social scheme of integration by the elimination of real structures. The functional aesthetic that conjugates two abstractions is thus itself no more than a superabstraction that consecrates the system of sign exchange value by delineating the utopia behind which the latter dissimulates. The operation of the sign, the separation of signs, is something as fundamental, as profoundly political, as the division of labor. Bauhaus theory, like semiology, ratifies this operation and the resultant division of labor of meaning, in the same way that political economy sanctifies economic separation as such, and the material division of labor that flows from it.

The term design must be given all its etymological scope. It can be unfolded in three senses: sketch (dessin), plan (dessein), and design
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(design). In all three cases one finds a scheme of rational abstraction: graphic for the sketch, reflexive and psychological for the plan (conscious projection of an objective) and more generally, for design: passage to sign status, sign-operation, reduction and rationalization into sign elements, transfer to the sign function.

From the beginning, this process of signification is systematic: the sign never exists apart from a code and a language. Thus, the semiotic revolution (as in its time the industrial revolution) concerns virtually all possible practices. Arts and crafts, forms and techniques both plastic and graphic (keeping to domains that have obvious affinity with design, but once again the term goes far beyond the plastic and architectural), which until then were singular and distinct, are synchronized, and homogenized according to the same model. Objects, forms, and materials that until then spoke their own group dialect, which only emerged from a dialectical practice or an original style, now begin to be thought of and written out in the same tongue, the rational esperanto of design. [192] Once functionally liberated, they begin to make signs, in both sense of the phrase (and without a pun): that is, they simultaneously become signs and communicate among themselves. Their unity is no longer that of a style or practice, it is that of a system. In other words, as soon as the object is caught up in the structural rationality of the sign (cloven into a signifier and signified), it is simultaneously hooked into a functional syntax (like the morpheme in a syntagm), and assigned to the same general code (like the morpheme in a language). The whole rationality of the linguistic system regains possession of it. On the other hand, if we speak mainly of "structural" linguistics and of the "functionalism" of design, it must be seen that:

1. If the structural vision (signifier-signified, language-speech) is imposed in linguistics it results from, and is contemporaneous with, a purely functionalist vision of language (strictly finalized as a method of communication). The two are the same thing.

2. With "design," objects are also born simultaneously to functionality and to sign status. In the same instant, this restrained and
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rational finality assigns them to structural rationality. Function and structure involve the same "revolution." This means that functional "liberation" amounts to nothing more than being assigned to a code and a system. Once again, the homology is immediately visible in the liberation of labor (or of leisure, or of the body, etc.), which is never more than their assignment to the system of exchange value.

Let us summarize the essential characteristics of the homology (of the same logical process, even if they are separated chronologically) between the emergence of a political economy of the sign and that of political economy (of material production):

1. Political economy: Under the cover of utility (needs, use value, etc., the anthropological reference of all economic rationality), it institutes a coherent logical system, a calculus of productivity in which all production is resolved into simple elements, in which all products are equivalent in their abstraction. This is the logic of the commodity and the system of exchange value.

2. The political economy of the sign: Under the cover of functionality (objective finality, homologous to utility), it institutes a certain mode of signification in which all the surrounding signs act as simple elements in a logical calculus and refer to each other within the framework of the system of sign exchange value.

In the two cases, use value (utility) and functionality, the one given as final reference of political economy, the other of design, serve in fact only as the concrete alibi for the same process of abstraction. Under the pretext of producing maximal utility, the process of political economy generalizes the system of exchange value. Under the pretext of maximizing the functionality of objects (their legibility as meaning and message, that is in the end their use value as sign), design and the Bauhaus generalize the system of sign exchange value.

Just as a product's utility, unattainable when no coherent theory of needs is capable of establishing it, is revealed to be simply its utility for the system of exchange value -- so an object's functionality, illegible as a concrete value, no longer qualifies anything other than the coherence of this sign-object with all the others, its commutability and thus its functional adaptation to the system of sign exchange value. Thus the functionality of an object (of a line, of a form) in an oblique architecture is not to be useful or equilibrated, but to be oblique (or vertical by contrast). It is the coherence of the system that defines the aesthetic-functional value of the elements, and this value is an exchange value insofar as it always refers to a model as general equivalent (same abstraction as for economic exchange value).
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It is no accident if this homology is even reflected on the ethical level. Like the capitalist revolution that instituted the "spirit of enterprise" and the basis of political economy as early as the 16th century, the Bahaus' revolution is puritan. Functionalism is ascetic. This fact is revealed in the sobreity and geometric lines of its models, its phobia of décor and artifice, in short, in the economy of its discourse. But this is only what one might call the writing effect (which moreover has once again become a rhetoric like any other) of the fundamental doctrine: that of rationality in which the functional liberation of the object has the effect of establishing an ethic of objects just as the emancipation of labor as a productive force has the consequence of establishing a work ethic. Three centuries apart [193] an identical morality (and an identical psychology) corresponds to an identical logic. And the terms in which Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) analyzes the rational economic calculus as worldly asceticism are, mutatis mutandis, entirely valid for the rational calculus of signs.

The Crisis of Functionalism

Before analyzing how this crisis is lived today by designers, it must be seen that its elements have always been present. It is derived from the will of functionalism to impose itself in its order (like political economy in its order) as the dominant rationality, susceptible to giving account of everything and to directing all processes. From the outset, this rationality, which is of necessity blind to its own arbitrariness, gives birth to an "irrational" or "fantasy" counter-discourse, which circulates between the two poles of kitsch and surrealism (the one a subtle accomplice of functionality, the other directly antagonistic, while they are not mutually exclusive: surrealism plays very much upon a derision of kitsch and kitsch often adopts surrealist values).

The surrealist object emerges at the same epoch as the functional object, as its derision and transgression. Although they are overtly dys- or para-functional, these phantasmic objects nevertheless presuppose -- albeit in a contradictory sense -- the advent of functionality as the universal moral law of the object, and the advent of this object itself, separated, autonomous and dedicated to the transparency of its function. When one ponders it, there is something unreal and almost surreal [194] in the fact of reducing an object to its
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function: and it suffices to push this principle of functionality to the limit to make its absurdity emerge. This is evident in the case of the toaster, iron or "undiscoverable objects" of Carelman. [195] But the calculus of human aspirations in the large ensemble is also stunning and justifies the presence of both sewing machine and umbrella on the dissection table of Lautrémont.

Thus surrealism too is born a contrario from the advent of the object and from the extension of the functional (and semantic) calculus to the whole field of everydayness. In this sense, the Bauhaus and surrealism are inseparable, like the monstrous, anomic critical discourse of objects with respect to the rational discourse of objects. (Yet little by little, this subversive discourse grows quickly more customary and will come to be integrated into the functionalized universe as an anomalous variant. In its banal version it enters our whole environment in homeopathic doses.)

Magritte's shoe-foot, his woman in a dress of skin (or nude dress) hung in a closet, men with a chest of drawers, or anthropomorphic machines: everywhere surrealism plays upon the distance instituted by the functionalist calculus between the object and itself, or between man and his own body, upon the distance between any term and the abstract finality that is imposed upon it, upon the cleavage that makes men and things suddenly find themselves split apart as signs and confronted with a transcendental "signified": their function. Fusion of the skin of breasts and the folds of a dress, of toes and the leather of a shoe: surrealist imagery plays with this split by denying it, but on the basis of separate terms separately legible in the collage or superimpression. That is to say that it does not restore a symbolic relationship, where there would be no room for the concept of separation, because the relation is integrated in reciprocity and exchange. In surrealism the symbolic relation no longer appears except as the phantasm of subject-object adequation. The surrealist metaphor defines itself as a compromise formation, as a short-circuit between the two orders of functionality (here transgressed and made ridiculous) and the symbolic (distorted and made into a phantasm). It seizes the moment when the object is still stuck in anthropomorphism and has not yet given birth to its pure functionality, that is, the moment when the object is on the way to absorbing man into
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its functional unreality but has not yet done so. In depicting their contamination to the extreme, surrealism illustrates and denounces the gap between subject and object. It is a revolt against the new reality principle of the object. To the rational calculus, which "liberates" the object in its function, is opposed surrealism, which liberates the object from its function, returning it to free associations from which will re-emerge not the symbolic (in which the respective crystallization of subject and object does not take place), but subjectivity itself,"liberated" in the phantasm.

As subjective poetry, where the primary and combinatory processes of dreaming come to upset the functional combinatory, surrealism thus briefly and contradictorily illuminates the growth crisis of the object, which is the generalized abstraction of life under the sign of the functional object. As celebration of the agony of a despairing subjectivity, all nonsense verse (that of Lewis Carroll, for example, a precursor of surrealism) negatively illustrates, through its revolt and parody, the irreversible institution of a political economy of meaning, of a sign form and an object form structurally linked to the commodity form. (In their time, the Romantics represented a similar reaction to the industrial revolution and to the first phase of the development of political economy.)

But the surrealist transgression itself still corresponds to a relative extension of the political economy of the sign. It acts upon figurative, formal objects, upon the contents and the "signifieds" of representation. Today, when functionalism has graduated from the isolated object to the system (hyper-rationality quite as Kafkaesque as the other), when the still almost artisanal functionalism of the Bauhaus is surpassed in the cybernetic and mathematical design of the environment, surrealism can survive only as a folklore. From this moment, we are beyond the object and its function. A "being beyond" the subject in the contemporary systems of relations and information already corresponds to this "being beyond" the object. The hybrid game of the surrealists, legitimate between the face of the object and of man, between function and desire (both instances, separated in reality, still celebrate their impossible conjunction in the surreal) -- that subtle mixture of a functional logos with a dismembered, disunited logic of the symbolic that haunts it, resulting in the illogic of a phantasmagoric representation, is resolved when confronted with the cybernetic order. Nothing retains the place of the critical, regressive-transgressive discourse of Dada and of surrealism.

After surrealism, the outburst of abstraction (dreamlike, geometric
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or expressionist -- Klee, Kadinski, Mondrian, Pollock) corresponded to an ever-advancing systematization of the rational order -- this was the last critical tirade of art, for where are we today? Presently art limits itself to a kinetic or lumino-dynamic manipulation, or to the psychedelic staging of a flaccid surrealism -- in short, to a combinatory, which is the very image of that of real systems, to an aesthetic operationality (whose biblical specimen is the "New Artistic Spirit" of Schoeffer), which is in no way distinguished from that of cybernetic programs. The hyper-reality of systems has absorbed the critical surreality of the phantasm. Art has become, or is on the way to becoming, total design, metadesign.

The mortal enemy of design is kitsch. Ostensibly destroyed by the Bauhaus, it always rises again from its ashes. That is because it has the whole "economic system" behind it, say the designers; whereas they have only their virtue. So, in 1967, in an article in Esthétique Industrielle [196] Abraham Moles analyzes the crisis of functionalism as the overflowing of the sober rationality of design, and of its strict ethos of function, through the irrational proliferation of consumption goods. The "absolute consumer mentality promoted by the economic machine" progressively buries the functionalist blueprint under a jumble of neo-kitsch. Functionalism suffers from this contradiction and dies.

In fact, this analysis absolves design of any internal contradiction: the fault then lies in an "obsession with status" and a "strategy of desire." But Moles (with many others) forgets that the system (and the whole process of consumption that it implies) is also rational and perfectly consistent with itself. It triumphantly fulfills the claims of functionality. It is precisely through the "anarchic production" denounced by our virtuous functionalist academics that it suffices to its goal, which is its own survival and extended reproduction. So there is no contradiction: the model of rationality was originally and still remains fundamentally economic; it is normal that the functionality of the economic system embody it. Hard and pure design can do nothing, for rationality based on calculation is precisely the kind that inspires it. From the very beginning, it rests on the same basis of rational abstraction as the economic system. Undoubtedly this rationality may be potentially absurd, but for both design and consumption in the same way. Their apparent contradiction is only the logical debt of their deep-rooted complicity.
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So, designers complain of being misunderstood and of their ideal being disfigured by the system? All puritans are hypocrites.

This crisis must in fact be analyzed on an entirely different level, the level of semiology, the elements of which we have explained above. In summary, the formula of the Bauhaus is: for every form and every object there is an objective, determinable signified -- its function. This is what is called in linguistics the level of denotation. The Bauhaus claims to strictly isolate this nucleus, this level of denotation - all the rest is coating, the hell of connotation: residue, superfluity, excrescence, eccentricity, ornamentation, uselessness. Kitsch. The thing denoted (functional) is beautiful, the connoted (parasitical) is ugly. Better yet: the thing denoted (objective) is true, the connoted is false (ideological). In effect, behind the concept of objectivity, the whole metaphysical and moral argument of truth is at stake. [197]

Now today this postulate of denotation is in the process of breaking up. It is finally beginning to be seen (in semiology as well) that it is arbitrary, not merely an artifact of a method, but a metaphysical fable. There is no truth of the object, and denotation is never more than the most beautiful of connotations. This is not only theoretical: designers, urban technologists and programmers of the environment are confronted daily (if they pose themselves a few questions) with the demise of objectivity. The function(ality) of forms, of objects, becomes more incomprehensible, illegible, incalculable every day. Where is the centrality of the object, its functional equation, today? Where is its directing function, where are the parasitic functions? Who can tell, when now the economic, the social, the psychological and the metapsychological are so inextricably mixed together? Can anyone demonstrate beyond a doubt that a particular "superfluous" form, a given "irrational" trait does not find its echo elsewhere, after all (in the unconscious, for all I know), in some more subtle equilibrium, and thus does not in some way have a functional justification? [198] In this systematic logic (for functionality is nothing
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other than a system of interpretation), everything is potentially functional and nothing is in fact. The guiding Utopia turns upon itself. And it is not surprising that, as things gradually lose this quality of objective finality, it is transferred to the system itself which, in its process of reproduction, completes on its own terms what remains. In the end, the system becomes the only bearer of active functionality, which it redistributes to its elements. It alone is admirably "designed," and its own finality envelops it like an egg. [199]

If there is no further absolute utility of the object, it is also the end of the superfluous, and the whole theoretical edifice of functionalism crumbles. This works to the interests of fashion, which plays entirely upon connotation, not encumbering itself with objective denotation (though it claims to). With its unstable,"irrational" rhetoric, and sanctioned only by the contemporaneity of signs, fashion appropriates the whole system. And if functionalism defends itself weakly against fashion, it is because the latter expresses the total systematic potential, while functionalism, rooted in the metaphysic of denotation, expresses only a particular case, which it arbitrarily privileges according to a universal ethic. Once a sign calculus has been instituted nothing can oppose its generalization. Neither rational nor irrational any longer exists. The Bauhaus and design claim to control the process by mastery of the signifieds (the objective evaluation of functions), but in fact it is the play of signifiers that carries the process forward (the play of sign exchange value). Now the latter is unlimited, and escapes all control (as in political economy, with respect to the system of exchange value: it invades all spheres, despite any opposition by liberal and pious souls who believe themselves able to circumscribe it).

Such is the crisis of functionalism. Nothing can successfully oppose whatever form enters the unlimited combinatory of fashion -- whose only function, therefore, is its sign function. Even the forms created by design do not escape. And if "styling," which the Bauhaus believed it had disqualified, re-emerges through design without the latter ever being truly able to eliminate its traces and regain control of itself in its severity, it is because what appears pathological to it is already contained in the logic of its own design (i. e., plan, project). If our era nostalgically salvages all the kitsch of the 19th century, despite the Bauhaus revolution, it is because in fact this already
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belongs to it. The floral motif on the sewing machine or the metro entrance is a regressive compromise, but by its resurgence today it takes on a surrealist value of fashion and it is logical: surrealism in a way only formalizes the hybrid production of commercial kitsch as an artistic transgression. Today, pure design spurns the floral motif but it carries the naturist ideology much deeper: the branching (étoilé) structures of organic bodies serve as models for an entire city. There is no radical difference between the two. Everywhere, ever since the concept was born, nature, whether taken as décor or as a structural model, remains as the projection of a social model. And the branching structure is always that of capital.

But if design is immersed in fashion, one must not complain, for this is the mark of its triumph. It is the mark of the territorial scope established by the political economy of the sign, whose first rational theorization was design and the Bauhaus. Everything that today wishes to be marginal, irrational, insurrectionary, "anti-art," anti-design, etc., from pop to psychedelic or to street art -- everything obeys the same economy of the sign, whether it wants to or not. All of it is design. Nothing escapes design: that is its fate.

So we are discussing much more than a crisis. It is pointless to deplore the fate (fatalité) of consumption as Abraham Moles does, and to refer appeals to a neo-functionalism that puts into play "the stimulation of fantasy and of the imagination by a systematic effort"! This neo-functionalism can only be a re-semantization (resurrection of signifieds), [200] and thus a recycling of the same contradictions. More likely, neo-functionalism will be the image of neo-capitalism, that is, an intensification of the play of signifiers, a mathematization and cybernetization of the code."Humanist" neo-functionalism has no chance when faced with operational metadesign. The era of function and of the signified has revolved, the era of the signifier and the code is beginning.

The Environment and Cybernetics:

The Highest Stage of Political Economy

This revolution of the sign inaugurated by the Bauhaus was at least foreseen by it and has since been brought relatively to light by the analysts of design. In Critique (November 1967), Van Lier sees clearly that "these new forms and their operation...refer gradually to the very extremities of the system," and that functionality is not
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utility but "transforming things into reciprocal information, permitting them to become signs, creating significations," and he adds as if it were self-evident,"food of all culture and of all humanity."The eternal humanist metaphor: the more signs there are, the more messages and information there are, the more one communicates--the better it is. Having revealed the advent of sign value and its indefinite extension on the basis of rational productivity, he sees in it, without hesitation, an absolute progress for humanity. It is an analogous reaction to that which sees the industrial upsurge more or less in the long run as abundance and happiness for all. This was the 19th century illusion with respect to material production. In the 20th century, it takes off again with even more strength in sign productivity. Now we have cybernetic idealism, blind faith in radiating information, mystique of information services and the media.

In both cases the fundamental error is the same: only the use value aspect of the product or sign is retained, and the industrial (or semiurgic) mutation is understood exclusively in terms of an infinite multiplication of use values (signs as messages). Profusion of goods and profusion of signs in the interest of maximal consumption and maximal information. Account is never taken of the fact that this mutation institutes first and above all a system of exchange value, a generalized abstract social form that is by no means "the food of all culture and all humanity."This idealism of content (of production or of signification) never takes form into account. This idealism of messages forgets that it is the hegemony of the code that is installed behind their accelerated circulation. In fact, the two quite simply forget political economy and its strategic, political social dimension, in order to be situated from the outset in the transparent sphere of value. This optimism can seem to be in good faith, it can take on the benign air of the designer who plans, for his small part, to contribute to increased information by his creativity, or the prophetic air of McLuhan, who exalts the "already present" global communication. Everywhere, this ideology of communication becomes mistress, a myth in which cybernetics presents itself as neo-humanism. The profusion of messages in a way replaces the profusion of goods (the myth of abundance) in the imaginary (imaginaire) of the species.

Everywhere the ideologues of use value have been the accomplices and henchmen of the political extension of the system of exchange value. Thus, in the order of material goods, consumption came to perform the function of reviving the system of production, not by being the apotheosis of use value, but as the blind social constraint of
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satisfaction. Thanks to consumption, the system not only succeeds in exploiting people by force, but in making them participate in its multiplied survival. This is a considerable advance. But this participation only takes on its whole fantastic scope at the level of signs. It is there that the entire strategy of "neo-capitalism" is articulated in its originality: in a semiurgy and an operational semiology, which are only the developed form of controlled participation.

From this perspective, in which the production of signs seen as a system of exchange value takes on an entirely different meaning than in the naive utopia of their use value, design and the environmental disciplines can be considered as one of the branches of mass communication, a gigantic ramification of human and social engineering. From this moment on, our true environment is the universe of communication. [201] It is in this that it differs radically from the 19th century concepts of "nature" or of "milieu."While these latter referred to physical, biological (determinism of substance, of heredity and of species) or "socio-cultural" (the "milieu") laws, environment is from the beginning a network of messages and signs, its laws being those of communication.

The environment is the autonomization of the entire universe of practices and forms, from the everyday to the architectural, from the discursive to the gestural and the political, as a sector of operations and calculation, as sending-receiving of messages, as space-time of communication. The practical concept of design -- which in the final instance is analyzed as the production of communication (man to signs, signs among themselves, men among themselves) -- corresponds to the theoretical concept of environment. Here one must be made to communicate -- that is to say, participate -- not by the purchase of material goods but in the data-processing mode, by the circulation of signs and messages. That is why the environment, like the market (which is its economic equivalent) is a virtually universal concept. It is the concrete summary of the whole political economy of the sign. Design, which is the corresponding practice of this political economy, is generalized proportionately, and if it began by being applied only to industrial products, today it embraces and logically must embrace all sectors. Nothing is more false than the limits that a "humanistic" design wishes to fix for itself; in fact, everything belongs to design, everything springs from it, whether it says so or not: the body is
[p. 201]
designed, sexuality is designed, political, social, human relations are designed, just as are needs and aspirations, etc. This "designed" universe is what properly constitutes the environment. Like the market, the environment is in a way only a logic: that of (sign) exchange value. Design is the imposition of this sign exchange value at all levels of models and operational practices. Once again it is the practical triumph of the political economy of the sign and the theoretical triumph of the Bauhaus.

Like public relations, human relations and the psycho-sociology of enterprise, like planning and participation, marketing and merchandizing strive to produce a relationship, to restore it where the social relations of production make it problematic. Similarly, the task, the strategic function of design in the contemporary system, is to produce communication between men and an environment which never exists precisely save as a foreign agency (still like the market). Like many other ideological concepts,"environment" designates by antiphrasis that from which one is separated; it designates the end of the proximate world. Beings and things are held as far away from one another as possible. And the mystique of the environment is proportionate to the moat between man and nature which the system digs deeper every day, whether it likes it or not. This split, this fundamentally broken and dissociated relationship (in the image of social relations) between man and his environment is the raison d'être and the site of design. There it tries desperately to restore meaning, to restore transparency by means of a great deal of information, and "comprehension" by means of a great number of messages. If one considers it carefully, the philosophy of design, echoed by the whole theory of the environment, is in the end the doctrine of participation and of public relations extended to all of nature. Nature (which seems to become hostile, wishing by pollution to avenge its exploitation) must be made to participate. With nature, at the same time as with the urban world, it is necessary to recreate communication by means of a multitude of signs (as it must be recreated between employers and employees, between the governing and the governed, by the strength of media and of planning). In short, it must be offered an industrial contract: protection and security -- incorporating its natural energies, which become dangerous, in order to regulate them better. For of course all this only aims at the better and better alignment of this participant nature (which is contradicted and recycled by intelligent design), along the norms of a rational hyperproductivity.

Such is the political ideology of design, which attains its global
[p. 202]
scope today in the discourse of environment. From Gropius to Universitas [202] there is a continuous succession of stages toward what could be termed a metadesign, a meta-political economy which is to neo-capitalism what the classic liberal economy was to capitalism.

If one speaks of environment, it is because it has already ceased to exist. To speak of ecology is to attest to the death and total abstraction of nature. Everywhere the "right" (to nature, to the environment) countersigns the "demise of."This gradual destruction of nature (as vital and as ideal reference) is strictly linked to what we have called the gradual decline of the signified in the analysis of the contemporary sign (of an objective, real referent, of the denoted function, of the truth of the world as the real guarantee of the sign -- a little like its gold backing. The gold of the signified-referent has disappeared; it is the end of the gold exchange standard. The sign is no longer convertible into its reference value, as is seen in the trend of the current international situation, where there is no longer anything but the free interrelation of floating currencies). The great signified, the great referent Nature, is dead, replaced by environment, which simultaneously designates and designs its death and the restoration of nature as simulation model (its "reconstitution," as one says of orange juice that has been dehydrated). And what we have said about nature -- that it was always the projection of a social model -- is of course also valid for the environment. The passage from a concept of nature that is still objectifiable as a reference, to the concept of environment in which the system of circulation of signs (sign exchange value) abolishes all reference, or even becomes its own referent, designs (i. e., sketches) the passage between societies. We pass from a society that is still contradictory, non-homogeneous, and not yet saturated with political economy; from a society in which the refractory models of transcendence, conflict and surpassing still exist; where a human nature is shredded but still present (cf. the affinity of Marxism itself with a substantialist anthropology of needs and nature), and where there is still a history with its revolutionary theory, etc., to a cybernetized society. We enter a social environment of synthesis in which a total abstract communication and an immanent manipulation no longer leave any point exterior to the system. It is the end of traditional political economy, and simultaneously the commencement of the meta-political economy of a society that has become its own pure environment. (It is this that McLuhan has outlined, in the exalted mode. ) As Mitscherlich says:
[p. 203]

"Insofar as manipulation of the environment succeeds, there simultaneously succeeds a manipulation of man, who has himself become an object of manipulation, that is to say, simple environment."

The social control of air, water, etc., in the name of environmental protection evidently shows men entering the field of social control a little more deeply themselves. That nature, air, water become rare goods entering the field of value after having been simply productive forces, shows men themselves entering a little more deeply into the field of political economy. At the limit of this evolution, after natural parks, there may be an "International Foundation of Man" just as in Brazil there is a "National Indian Foundation": "The National Indian Foundation is in a position to assure the preservation of the indigenous population in the best conditions, as well as (sic) the survival of the animal and vegetable species that have lived alongside them for thousands of years." (Of course this institution disguises and sanctions genocide and massacre: one liquidates and reconstitutes -- same schema.) Man no longer even confronts his environment: he himself is virtually part of the environment to be protected.

Chapter Ten: Design and Environment or How Political Economy Escalates Into Cyberblitz

Note from page [185]: 1. Echoing Galbraith's "techno-structure." Neo-capitalist, neo-industrialist, postindustrial: many terms can designate this passage from an industrial political economy to a trans-political economy (or meta-political economy).

Note from page 186: 2. Jeremy J. Schapiro,"One Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience," in Paul Breines, ed., Critical Interruptions (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970).

Note from page 188: 3. As early as 1902 Bemadetto Croce was writing an "Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic".

Note from page 189: 4. But this fundamental operation of form is what is never mentioned, in either case.

Note from page 190: 5. In his own way, using Marcusian terms, Schapiro (op. cit.) gives a similar analysis, but with more stress on machinery and technology: "The evolution of modern design is an essential component of the process of one-dimensionality (and indeed serves as an index of the latter's temporal development), since it derives from the machine process the forms for creating a total (totalitarian) environment in which technological experience defines and closes the experiential and aesthetic universe" (p. 161). Totalizing abstraction, undimensional homogeneity, certainly, but the machine or technology are neither the causes of this process nor its original models. Technological mutation and semio-linguistic mutation (passage to the abstraction of the code) are the two concurrent aspects of the same passage to structural-functional rationality.

Note from page 192: 6. Rather, these are logical guideposts to mark what in fact was a continuous historical process. However, the moment of formal theorization (which the Bauhaus is for the political economy of the sign) always marks a crucial point in the historical process itself.

Note from page 192: 7. Similarly, there is something immediately Kafkaesque in the reduction of man to his (bureaucratic) function.

Note from page 193: 8. Jacques Carelman, Catalogue a objets introuvables. [English version: Catalog of Fantastic Things (New York: Ballantine Books). In fact these things (like a double-headed hammer which will work in both directions, or for either left-- or right-handed carpenters) might be found in joke stores -- "gimmick" might be an accurate translation. -- Trans. )

Note from page 195: 9. This review which originally had the name "Esthétique Industrielle" has changed title several times since its first publication in 1952 and is presently called Design Industry. --Trans.

Note from page 196: 10. The Platonic and Kantian heritage of functionalism is striking: morality, aesthetics and truth are confused in the same ideal. The functional is the synthesis of pure reason and practical reason. Or again: the functional is the beautiful plus the useful. Utility itself is simultaneously that which is moral and that which is true. Stir up the whole thing, and we have the Platonic holy trinity.

Note from page 196: 11. In any case, something else radically escapes any calculus of function: ambivalence, which acts such that any positive function is in the same movement denied and decomposed, annulled according to a logic of desire for which a unilateral finality never exists. This level is beyond even functional complexity. Were one to have achieved a perfect computation of even contradictory functions, this ambivalence would forever remain insoluble, irreducible.

Note from page 197: 12. It is known that the egg is one of the ideal tendencies of design -- a formal stereotype, as "kitsch" as any other. This means that the finality of the system is quite simply tautological. But the completed stage of development of function is tautology -- the perfect redundancy of the "signified" succumbing to the vicious circle of the "signifier" -- an egg.

Note from page 198: 13."Social" design will be redone with human contents, or alternatively the game, playfulness, the "free" combinatory, etc. will be reintroduced. But make no mistake: it is still the "game" which is taken into account, the game as a particular function, a liberal-modernist variant of the same code.

Note from page 200: 14. Paradoxically (and undoubtedly symptomatically) the British Ministry of the Environment presides over almost all sectors, except the media.

Note from page 202: 15. An internationally founded project "for a post-technological society" inaugurated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.