Ein Blackout ist noch keine Revolution

Between the possible and the given, social determinism and individual practice, means to an end and immediate material experience, use remains ambivalent. Because of this ambivalence, use permeates the whole fabric of society’s countless overlapping subject-positions, with the field of design right smack in the middle. There is a certain hope clinging to use-value, a hope of immediate, real relations between objects beyond those of commodities. A kind of gift from designers to users. A utopia based on the true determination of use-value beyond the constraints of capitalism. And yet the revolutionary potential ascribed to it by, among others, Wolfgang F. Haug (1973), the book Non Intentional Design (Brandes, Stich, Wender 2009), or any belief in technological progress, to name a few, has not materialized.¹  Design’s efforts to create new, better, or even genuine use-values has not freed us from the conditions that hold back necessary change and the voices of marginalized subject-positions; indeed, for the conditions in which use is embedded remain subservient to the instrumental rationality of the commodity form.

When forms of use break down, as in a blackout, the ability to transform these naturalized determinations is revealed. In a blackout, emancipatory practices emerge that can transform existing, cemented use-values into mutual concern for one another.  However, the shared experience of this use-value of mutual aid does not automatically lead to employing these use-values after the blackout. Even when users posit new use-values, there is no guarantee they will be reproduced socially. While solidarity and emancipatory practices initially rise to the fore, they slowly give way or struggle against the gradual process of translating and reintegrating the state of exception back into the prevailing conditions. In this process, the rehabilitation of normal relations appears as a necessary prerequisite for guaranteeing the maintenance of use-values themselves. The already entrenched hegemonic interests and their hegemonic power do not break automatically. The breakdown opens up new perspectives, revealing other possibilities in the meantime. But another world still has to be fought for.

The blackout points unexpectedly to another different possibility. However, when formulated in terms of use, this different possibility is made compatible with the interests of regulation (if it is at all possible). On the other hand, the active misuse of the regulated and thoroughly designed world demands this other possibility and opposes the existing interests that preclude it. This misuse brings interests into the field of possibility that are external to present conditions. As a conceptual model, misuse is therefore suited to those interests that remain unmediated.

Misuse reveals the limits of thinking about use as it is determined by the instrumental rationality of the commodity form and the violence that lurks within its limits. A good example of the totalitarian nature of many people’s claims about proper use — of roads, for example — is the way climate activists who use superglue are met with violence to their own bodies and in the media. By violating boundaries, the misuse of the manufactured world is always teetering on the edge, either like a trauma in which everything always relates only to itself, or instead — in pointing to a horizon that has yet to be conceived — where the organization of relations must be drawn anew. Thus, a lorry misused as an instrument of murder opens the way to nothing but the insanity of the totalitarian claim to eradicate others.  Occupying houses or coal mines, on the other hand, create conflicts of interest between present manifestations of the commodity form and the urgent interests of those who are affected. As urgent questions of justice, such conflicts penetrate the existing relations and make these relations themselves the subject of dispute.

Misuse can be an emancipatory strategy to create concrete realms of agency: a blanket over the NATO fence,
a message painted on a wall, a truck driven
into the prison wall, or a shoe that holds open the courtyard door for the children to play. 
In these cases, misuse can have direct emanci-
patory potential for everyone involved. For designers, on the other hand, it calls attention to one’s own challenges and perspectives. Whereas in the case of use, different interests (in-
vestors, workers, traders, users, etc.) are brought together in production, in the case of misuse these interests are diametrically op-
posed (determining use here becomes the “wick-
ed problem” [Rittel/Webber 1973: 155–169]
that it has always been). In this way, misuse re-
frames the question of use as a question of power relations and interests, which can no longer be conceived in terms of a universally rec-
ognized authority, because it always invokes some other authority that has yet to be estab-
lished.  With misuse, the focus is no longer on a closed subject-object sphere (e.g., unem-
ployment benefits, in which someone else cal-
culates and defines for someone else what their basic needs are). Instead, the demands of an active subject are made manifest. Misuse thus
pertains to the subject as it constitutes reality and not to reality as it constitutes the subject. But this requires a space in which the formu-
lation of this demand can resonate (the blackout
can temporarily serve as just such a resonance chamber).   ow should designers respond to positions that clash with their own field of work (or at least with the structures in which it is most often embedded)? It is absurd to de-
sign for misuse, that is, to anticipate it (even if it
happens by mistake all the time). Firstly, the relationship between the design and those for whom it is designed (and who do not have
the means to be direct clients) changes. Instead of the grand gesture of the universal advance-
ment of the public good, the public suddenly responds with refusal, interference, disruption, outright demands, resistance to implementa-
tion, and so on. For designers, misuse is first and
foremost a reflexive moment. The determina-
tion of use enables designers to claim their au-
thority over the proper object-user relation-
ship without ever having to come into contact with users and without exposing the limits to that authority and those that stand behind it. With misuse, design does not simply embark on
a new field of open negotiation. More than
anything, design is bound by its limitations, by its position within social relations. The ques-
tions this raises cannot be answered by design-
ers alone. They cannot devise new worlds in isolation from everything else, nor can they play
shadow games for those sitting in the cave of commodities. Design only becomes political when it takes seriously its position in the social field. This includes awareness about our own working relationships and the power structures in which designers work, as well as the influ-
ence that design has in shaping our environment.

very design draft is a visual language that opens up a (usu-
ally narrowly defined) field of negotiation. The
draft is the concrete image where all the struc-
tures of the commodity intersect.  As much
as the design is predetermined by these struc-
tures, it initially exists in a state of suspension. The image, in which all of these determina-
tions are condensed, still must be worked out (usually the image is found by slight deviation from preexisting products and forms.) Without a shared underpinning principle to support such a design process as universally valid, it would always be a request to others, a “strong maybe” . In the best case, this is where de-
signers can provide a space for communication among others and for partisan communica-
tion.   eyond that, designers often have very limited means to create a space of resonance
in which marginalized interests can formulate themselves and be communicated to other ac-
tors. They can offer the language of design to help exclude interests and positions, and in this
way the design process can become a method by which others can come to understand and shape the world (von Borries 2016 [2020]). For example, how militant inquiry (as a tool of operaism) aimed to provide workers with a space for expression, not only to produce knowl-
edge about themselves, but also to provide space for them to develop their own conscious-
ness and subject-positions.  That said, in terms of misuse, the term militant is clearly on
the side of demanding (and it can also be read here as a kind of investigation of one’s environ-
ment through concrete interventions), not on the side of designing. The radical gesture of mis-
use is the gesture of the other.  Design does not become radical or revolutionary if it does not
create and give space to others, not only at certain stages, but all the way up to the end. In-
terests elaborated by participants must be-
come an integral part of the draft, and not be filed away as a side note. In this respect, a draft doesn’t follow some automatic process. Un-
like working for investors to specifically produce
their interests on their behalf, this space of
resonance must be fought for, and its fruits car-
ried out.   n the broad field of design,
there are countless methods and possibilities to speak the language of design in concert with others. But the task is not one of form. Here, no method guarantees that their demands will
be realized. For example, participatory design has experimented with countless methods to lower the obstacles to the design process, but mostly without setting aside one’s own au-
thority or the authority one represents.  In this
way, design borrows from the social positions
of others (and recycles them) instead of lending its language and its field for others to play
with. In other words, instead of working with and for marginalized people. In order to ally with the interests of those still fighting for their place, the habitual authority of design has to
be brushed against the grain.  What used to be
the authority of the finished plan, the meticu-
lous rendering, and the established matter of fact is now like guns pointed in the opposite di-
rection.

Beyond the scope of a single project, the misuse of the thoroughly designed world calls for keep-
ing the resonance space open for those voices that have not yet been raised so that their de-
mands may always be formulated anew, so that the conflicts into which these demands lead thinking are not closed off, and so that the viru-
lence of the breach is unceasingly sought and maintained. Thus, for example, when the flag of the Refugee Olympic Team (Sachs 2018: 118), with the colors of the life jackets distributed
in the Mediterranean, functions like a national flag at the Olympic Games, its design un-
equivocally testifying to the failure of those very
nation-states. It expresses the resounding de-
mands of those spat out and disenfranchised by
states, just as they are incorporated into the spectacle that is the contest among nations.
   f design is a matter of negotiating use and
how it is shaped, then we must misuse design
in order to give a voice to those interests that have so far been left out. It is not ambivalent use
that we are in need of, but instead the unam-
biguous misuse of the designed world. The ex-
tent to which this is possible remains to be explored.