Preamble: Every year, for the past 27 years, a group of 20 to 30+ designers and educators has assembled at HighGround, first in Buena Vista, Colorado, and now in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Initiated and organized for its first quarter century by designers Katherine and Michael McCoy, HighGround is an informal gathering where each participant is charged with offering a brief ‘rant’ about what they find relevant, perplexing, wrong, and right with design. This year my ‘rant’ was more of a ramble.
I love this quote from the writer Alfred Kazin: “I am dissatisfied, profoundly so, with the world as it is. But I would be dissatisfied with any world. And I’d hate to lose my dissatisfaction.” (It’s not unlike the prompt an Italian colleague used as the modus operandi for a course. He called it Complain Design.) That said, I also know that this same dissatisfaction predisposes me against any form of critique that smacks of sentiment, even when it’s well-intentioned.
But I found I had to suspend that instinct after coming across an essay by the textile artist Catherine Murphy. In it, she shared a story about Sarah Corbett, a British activist who coined the term ‘gentle protest’ and established The Craftivist Collective in 2009. Apparently, Sarah had written several emails to her local M.P. that were ignored. In fact, she was asked to stop contacting the office. So she changed her tactics. Despite their rudeness, Sarah decided to respond in a way that was non-confrontational.
Catherine writes that she “embroidered a message on a handkerchief that said: ‘I know being an MP is a tough job but please use your power and influence for good. She signed off with lots of smiley faces and ‘yours in hope from Sarah’.” We’re further told “that the M.P. (who kept the handkerchief on a pin board in her office) did, in fact, change her relationship with her constituent.” Yes, Sarah’s message was a bit mawkish, but the medium made it undeniably present. At any rate, I was moved enough (and desperate enough) that I tried to imagine doing something like that here. But my imagination failed.
In our political climate, I’d probably model myself on Madame Defarge—she of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. If you recall, Madame Defarge sat next to the guillotine every day, quote “knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads.” Lord knows the misanthrope in me would love to see a few heads drop, but we don’t need any martyrs for the cult. In any case, Defarge’s ‘craftivism’ was nothing like the virtuous British model. She was engaged in a malignant kind of political action: Her stitches encoded the names of people to be killed.
Now Defarge is usually seen as a one-dimensional embodiment of the Reign of Terror. Though some scholars say Defarge was exacting a righteous revenge for the rape of her pregnant sister by aristocratic brothers. Others claim that Defarge’s story is evidence that sexual violence against women helped fuel the French Revolution. This last assertion effectively—and erroneously—positions Defarge (and Dickens) as a feminist craftivists, avant la lettre.
I have to say, this transposition of present anxieties on the past wrankles. But I’m going to use my ‘dissatisfaction’ to pivot to a different direction, moving from the microcosm of stitching to the macrocosm of history. Case in point, when I was teaching, if you’d asked me about the Enlightenment, I probably would have said that it was the root cause of Eurocentricism, of colonialism, and concomitant white privilege. After all, what else would account for the ravages done to people and the planet in the name of reason and progress?
But I recently came across a book that takes a different view of the Enlightenment. I’m not crazy about its title – “Left is not Woke” – given how “woke’ has been abused, but its arguments are compelling. Its author, the philosopher Susan Neiman, isn’t making the case that we should go back to sleep. Instead, she takes issue with a ‘woke’ approach to social justice because, in her view, wokeness doesn’t work on the principle of a shared humanity. Not that there isn’t comfort in being among one’s own when confronting a history of pain. There is.
The problem is that our identitarian politics run the risk of self-colonizing. They sacrifice the aspiration for a greater politics—one fostered by the self-same Enlightenment, which espoused a universalist view of humanity. Now, Neiman readily admits, and I paraphrase her here, that universalism is under fire on the left because it’s conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity. One that turns out to reflect a dominant culture, like corporate globalism, which holds that the key to human happiness is a universal mall.
It is this kind of corruption that misjudges Enlightenment thought as exclusionary, when instead, its chief contribution was a secular concept of human rights. As Neiman points out, those who dismiss Enlightenment thinkers gloss over their writings. Diderot believed that it was impossible to make judgments about China without being immersed in its language and literature and traveling through its provinces. Rousseau argued that compassion comes before reason, and that it’s not just found in humans but in animals too. He also said that Europeans were more interested in filling their purses than understanding the inhabitants of Africa and the East Indies. Similarly, Kant attacked colonialism, protesting the way “civilized intruders” saw the Americas as “lands without owners.”
Did they miss things? Yes. The philosophes didn’t address the rights of women, of children, and differently-abled people, and few, apart from Locke, addressed slavery and none did anything about it. That work was (and is) left to future generations. And as much as the idea of progress has been debunked of late, those rights have been taken up in the ensuing centuries. Though it’s certainly true that the gains won can seem so illusive that it’s hard to have hope at all.
This mindset is having an effect on design, where hope is a prerequisite for practice. I’ve seen students retreat to identity silos, and demand that their faculty do the same. I’ve worked with young designers who are justifiably fearful of becoming ‘part of the problem.’ But it can go too far. One woman told me she couldn’t contribute to a community project about because it would be too arrogant. We tried to persuade her that she could contribute a perspective that might complement, and, potentially, expand said-project. But she wasn’t persuaded.
The risk here is that this kind of self-effacement on the part of designers will lead to nihilism. It suggests that curiosity about others is merely voyeurism, or worse, the first step toward oppression, when, in fact, change is fueled by curiosity. Our hesitations need to be modulated by conscientious efforts to find spaces of mutuality—while still retaining the differences that make the world interesting. It was Salman Rushdie who said that “Melange, hotchpotch, a little bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.” We need to find those resonances between ‘this’ and ‘that’ and not let them define us.
To close, I want to circle back to the work of my friend Catherine Murphy—she of the small gestures. Catherine also stitched a piece of cloth, which she posted on her substack. It read “The altar of Liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood.” This was said in 1786 by Daniel O’Connell, an Irish orator, who campaigned tirelessly for a free united Ireland. But he was also a product of the Enlightenment, and as such, he advocated for “a complete severance of the Church from the State.” No self-serving papist, he. Furthermore, O’Connell was an ardent abolitionist. Frederick Douglass said that his voice was “enough to calm the most violent passion, even though it were already manifesting itself in a mob.”
Douglass is essentially praising O’Connell’s universalist ethos, one that made it possible for him to serve in the British Parliament and without compromising the cause of Irish independence. Do we think of the two men as ‘allies’—in the parlance of today? Or do we think of them as united in the cause of freedom? Neiman would say alliances are temporary and would advocate for a bond that transcends the particularities of their causes. I do too.
Coda: I have since read Samuel Clowes Huneke’s review of Neiman’s book in the LA Times Book Review. He aptly points out that the gap between the espoused views of Enlightenment thinkers and the realities that they tolerated and engendered casts shade on her thesis. While Clowes Huneke skillfully takes Neiman to task, he still confirms my thinking that the problem with the Enlightenment is its legacy, not its aspirations.
Sources:
Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke, Polity, 2023.
Catherine Murphy, https://thesewciallifeof.substack.com/
Assaying 