Design + Culture: A Return to Fundamentalism?
"whilst the application of design is multiplying exponentially, it is also loosing its validity as an authentic cultural icon. It has become synonymous with cloning the face of global culture itself, more often representing the uniformity of mass globalisation, rather than reflecting the facets of cultural difference and diversity.
The cultural attributes of difference and diversity have been fundamentally weakened, and like face that has undergone cosmetic surgery, the result is a facsimile vaguely familiar but disturbingly without a true sense of identity. It is everyone's and no one's, and belongs in no single place more than another. ...
Design has become omnipresent within Culture, as it has been adopted as a convenient badge to add value and market commodity, and to signify identity. Following Designer era of 1980's, the added value of design was replaced by design as cultural value, embodied in leading Brands of the 1990's. ...
in the 21st Century the task of capturing Culture has become more and more difficult in terms of expressing culture through the medium of design. Design increasingly struggles for a clear sense of definition, and one is left asking, what can Culture really mean today, if it is no longer tied to consumer lifestyle? We remain in a post-contemporary state where we require a redefinition of meaning, value and identity. ...
The uncertainty of a designed fusion Culture has replaced the certainty of traditional cultural monoculture. Which in turn has been diluted by an obsession with ‘cultural materialism’. What remains of the original cultural sources are being plundered in order to restock our lack of creative DNA. The net result is an erosion of the remaining authentic sources, but also the creation of a ‘cultural time lag’ which has been generated by a convergence of trans-cultural fusions, hybridisation, and of recurrent cultural cross referencing."
(David Carlson on 21 Mar 21 2011, David Report)
Fig.1 paper sculptures made by Jennifer Collier [http://jennifercollier.co.uk/].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Empathic Civilisation: our (collective) empathetic consciousness
"Never has the world seemed so completely united-in the form of communication, commerce, and culture-and so savagely torn apart-in the form of war, financial meltdown, global warming, and even the migration of diseases. ...
The human-made environment is rapidly morphing into a global space, yet our existing modes of consciousness are structured for earlier eras of history, which are just as quickly fading away. Humanity, Rifkin argues, finds itself on the cusp of its greatest experiment to date: refashioning human consciousness so that human beings can mutually live and flourish in the new globalizing society…
As the forces of globalization accelerate, deepen, and become ever more complex, the older faith-based and rational forms of consciousness are likely to become stressed, and even dangerous, as they attempt to navigate a world increasingly beyond their reach and control. Indeed, the emergence of this empathetic consciousness has implications for the future that will likely be as profound and far-reaching as when Enlightenment philosophers upended faith-based consciousness with the canon of reason."
(Jeremy Rifkin)
[A noble effort to explain the consequences of post-traditional society framed through a biological deterministic lens.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Phillip Blond: Rise of the red Tories
"We live in a time of crisis. In such times humans retreat to safety, and build bulwarks against the future. The financial emergency is having this effect on Britain's governing class. Labour has withdrawn to the safety of the sheltering state, and the comforts of its first income tax rise since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the Conservatives appear to be proposing a repeat of Thatcherite austerity in the face of economic catastrophe. But this crisis is more than an ordinary recession. It represents a disintegration of the idea of the 'market state' and makes obsolete the political consensus of the last 30 years. A fresh analysis of the ruling ideological orthodoxy is required.
...
On a deeper level, the present moment is a challenge to conservatism itself. The Conservatives are still viewed as the party of the free market, an idea that has collapsed into monopoly finance, big business and deregulated global capitalism. Tory social thinking has genuinely evolved, but the party's economic thinking is still poised between repetition and renewal. As late as August 2008 David Cameron said: 'I'm going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer,' and that 'radical social reform is what this country needs right now.' He is right about society, but against the backdrop of collapsing markets and without a macro-economic alternative, Thatcherite economics has been wrongfooted by events."
(Phillip Blond, Prospect Magazine February 2009 issue 155)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
A globally networked system of non-governmental actors
"'Globalization' is a term that has only recently become widespread - whereas the phenomenon that it designates can be traced back far into the past. Therefore, it was rightly emphasized by George Modelski that (political) processes of globalization had already begun in the Middle Ages (see 17). Thus, in the course of time, there came about a globally networked system of states. Today there exists alongside of and parallel with the state-centred system of international politics, which is represented by institutions like the 'United Nations', an even more powerful globally networked multi-centric system of non-governmental actors (see 18 as well as 19), for which the term 'World-Society' (20) possesses a certain justification (see also 21). However, the politics of the institutional (nation-)state lag behind especially this latest development (see 22: 179) and they therefore contribute to their own critical scrutiny and decline. That's true though it does not mean the final 'End of Nation State' (23): Even in view of efforts towards regionalisation, as in the 'European Union', the nation state has not yet been replaced as the defining structural moment of world politics (see e.g. 24 and 25).
Naturally, when speaking of globalization, we - whether euphorically or in a critical vein - most often refer to economic processes rather than the sphere of politics. Here, too, 'real' history does not begin at present but can be traced far back into the past. For already in antiquity, but especially since early modern times, there existed strong commercial relations, which reached as far as the world known at that time (see 26: ch. 2). Particularly in the era of imperialism, in the 19th century, worldwide commerce was flourishing - because the gold standard provided for security and the 'unequal exchange' (Emmanuel) between the colonies and the imperialist nations guaranteed enormous profits (see 26). It is not surprising therefore that Marx and Engels in 'The Communist Manifesto' could already in 1848 portray a picture of a highly globalized economy. Yet, the development of international trade suffered considerable setbacks - on account of the First World War, which resulted in the total breakdown of the gold standard, and then once again in the 1970s, evoked by the oil crisis. This relative level of internationalization/ globalization attained in the commercial sector at the beginning of the 20th century would only be reached again in the middle of the 1980s (see 27)."
(Anil K. Jain, Heiner Keupp, Renate Höfer, Wolfgang Kraus)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Systematic humiliation of MPs over their expenses is a threat to democracy in Britain
"In his article, Dr [Rowan] Williams agreed that action was needed to restore confidence in the political system and that the 'no rules were broken' mentality that featured in many MPs' responses represented a 'basic problem' in contemporary moral thinking.
But he argued the point had now been made and that further revelations could have a damaging effect.
'The continuing systematic humiliation of politicians itself threatens to carry a heavy price in terms of our ability to salvage some confidence in our democracy,' he said."
(BBC News, 23 May 2009)
[The recent controversy surrounding UK MP expenses claims acts to undermine the traditional authority of the UK political class and in so doing represents a consequence of post-traditional situation.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
