Repurposing Deleuze and Design
Datum
2019-09-18
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University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
Gilles Deleuze’s interdisciplinary reception privileges the term, “assemblage,” but this translation runs the risk of appearing as jargon, whereas the original agencement would appear to a French audience as a more ordinary term. In the absence of a better alternative translation, I propose that we translate the problems motivating Deleuze’s word choice rather than the word, agencement, itself. I consult a wide range of the figures influential for Deleuze and Félix Guattari who are relevant for the many contexts in which agencement appears in their work. This leads me to propose design as suitable terrain for redescribing Deleuze’s philosophy.
At the other end of the project, I note that design has its own share of problems. Theoretical approaches to design are often limited to particular kinds of design, and there are few efforts to reconcile design theories and definitions rooted in different designs, e.g. cinematography and engineering. Most accounts, though, define design primarily or exclusively in terms of its purpose or intended function. This poses problems for understanding changes in function and design’s unintended effects. Deleuze scholarship and design both have problems, and therefore I use each as an intervention into the other: design affords us the opportunity to redescribe Deleuze’s philosophy, while the problems at stake in Deleuze’s philosophy allows us to redescribe design and treat design in a more comprehensive manner.
In the end, I propose that we understand agencement as the interaction between coinciding, heterogeneous considerations or perspectives of the same substance; a living room is a series of activities, a spatial configuration of things, a collection of ideas, an arena of feelings and affects, and so on. We can tell a similar story with design, which explains why intentional design decisions can have unintended consequences. I arrange furniture while considering quantity, but unbeknownst to me, the change in quantity results in a change in quality. Both agencement and design are ways of describing how considerations which are different in kind can nevertheless coincide and affect one another.