I just came across this Brian Massumi quote on nomad thought (which I mentioned last class) hidden in the Gonzales-Crisp reading, attributed to Putch Tu:
A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of the above. “What interests us are the circumstances.”19 Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act.
This is interesting in relation to Lyotard’s Paradox of the Graphic Artist, in which he posits graphic design as an object of circumstances; the design object being inseparable from the context where the “thing” the object promotes happens. Concepts are responses to problems, created in order to free thought from the restrictive images of opinion, reactivity, and so forth. I would argue that this is (or should be) the aim of the design process, rather than the reductive, solutionist discourse that plagues much discussion in and of the field.
Last year I spoke at a lecture series in Toronto loosely on the topic of design process. For it, I interpreted this quote literally, with an demonstration following the transmutation and subsequent transmission of a brick through social media. To clarify what you’re looking at: I scanned in a brick and then recorded the 20 participants’ desktops as the image made its way around the Internet. The accompanying text is a bit rudimentary, and this version’s computer-narration is insufferable at times, but maybe useful regardless.
For some reason, I’m unable to embed a video, so here’s a link instead:
player.vimeo.com/video/38222679
