BENJAMIN BAS

Dasein is design is a slogan that 2 of my old professors have coined, at least according to them, and which one of them did is not entirely clear as they’re still fighting about it. As a design student coming into philosophy, it’s a phrase that felt true, despite me not knowing what Dasein meant. 

I often have this feeling with concepts that I encounter, an immediate feeling of ‘there is something to this’, that it is valuable. In a way, I need this feeling in order to get myself to really delve into a concept. Dasein is design is an interesting concept in this regard, as it simultaneously explains why I have this feeling while also being one of the first times I have had this feeling. This is why I want to engage with this phrase once again, after it being in the back of my mind for a long time. 

So let’s start with dissecting the phrase itself. We of course have some idea what the second term in the phrase is, design is something that has a lot of different meanings  for us. The word Dasein is the unknown factor. Dasein is a German word that means something in the ballpark of “being there”. In this phrase, its meaning is linked to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, but the word has been used by other philosophers as well. For Heidegger, Dasein is a description of the human-being, or being human. The human-being is distinct from other beings according to Heidegger, because it is a form of being that has to engage with the question of being itself. It can not merely BE, it has to BE in the context of its being, it has to relate to itself about being. With that, human-being can not be reduced to a singular point, it is always a situated being. This is why Henk Oosterling, one of the two professors I hinted at earlier, when talking about humans, speaks about the intervidual instead of the individual. Individual refers to an undivided unity, while intervidual is about a-being-in-between, its being is defined by the interstices. This is the most important thing about Dasein, it sketches out a being that has the desire to be a constitutive whole, which is what a being is, but is forced to always be at a distance from the constitutive identities that would comprise its being. This distance is forced on it because it engages with these identities in the form of reflection, and reflection implies an outside position. This being is never an identity, but always in some relation to an identity, and in this way it forms a web of relations out of which the human-being emerges as an emergent quality. And this web is not static, it is constantly changing as the human-being seeks new relations and negates old ones.

Heidegger’s concept is not the easiest to understand, so it might help to make the step to the second predicate of the phrase so we can slowly start to equate the two. A simple conception of design can be understood with the help of a quote of Marx:

 _{“A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”}

If we follow this notion, design becomes the specific activity of prefiguring an other world before the activity of physically changing the world. 

What Dasein is design says is that the human condition is necessarily one that through its reflective relations with the world constructs said world, and it is in that construction that this being unfolds. This is still very abstract, so let’s try to unpack it. 

Firstly, this reflection with a world is not with a world that is essential, one that is static and never changes. In order to get why, we have to establish what we mean when we say world or reality. We often see the world as the unity of all that is, a constant environment that does change, but has a certain consistency about it. Here we are gonna break from this conception of world a bit. World here is what is created by us through our cognitive framework of language, technology, and culture. This means that world is dependent on these categories and thus not consistent between people, world is the result of Dasein. It is reality become concrete for us in the form of a relation. Reality is then the potentiality of world, all worlds. It is the abstract possibility of every form within which world can be, it is existence in itself but not for us. The step from reality to world means the step from existence in itself to an experience of existence for ourselves.

Why this new conception of world is important is because it now means that the way in which we experience the world is one of many possible ways to experience it. If reality carries in it all forms of world, none of them are correct and all of them are, at the same time. This means that we no longer have to be only concerned about portraying reality as truth. The notion of truth makes no sense within this framework of reality and world, as it is always experiential and every form of a “true world” is already a speculative relation from Dasein. What matters more now is the question: does the world that we have created cater to our needs?

Back to Dasein is design, this reflection of experience that defines what dasein is, constitutes a context within which there can be such a thing as a determined concept of a world and man relating to that world. It is a retro-active move, where the relation causes what it relates to. So the creation of world is always twofold, it is the creation of a relation of, on the one hand, a world, and the other side you. Dasein is the relationary field within which a human being can map in one move who he is and what the world is. Being-human means designing the relations with what is outside of you, and this act of designing not only changes the world, it changes who you are. World is thus a fiction in a sense, a fiction within which you have the agency of being a writer and a character. Oosterling describes this as follows: 

_{“Neighbourhood, city, world – together, all these scales of publicness and publicity make up a layered gallery with no exit. The spaces between are not vacuums; they pulse with designed interactions and transactions.”}

There are thus different domains that can function as outsides or environments. We have a different relationship as a human-being towards the environment of a city than we have towards the environment of a family. Within a city we are citizens within a family we are brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, different environments call for a different form of relating towards what is surrounding you. Here Oosterling gives us a warning, familiar environments can make it so that we forget that there even is an outside that we can relate to, the outside of reality. His example is that of our current situation in regard to technological media. 

_{“Media render our environment transparent. Media are self-evident; their message is often empty. This mediocrity is radical because these media – headphones, handsfree, car GPS systems – interlock in such a way that they fix us in the world: ‘radix’ means ‘root’. Who could manage without their car, PC, mobile or GPS these days?”}

What Oosterling is saying here is that these technological media create a web of relation within which we get stuck, this getting stuck means getting stuck in a fixed environment, a fixed possibility of worlds. In this techno-landscape, we forget that there is an outside to it, because our ways of relating to the outside are over coded by the technological infrastructure. I refer to this quote by Deleuze way too often, but here it rings trough once again:

_{“Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.”}

The same can be said of technology. So how do we get unstuck? We have to keep in mind that there is this outside to the structurations of our environment. That our world is merely one way of many ways of relating to reality. We have to watch out that our way of relating to the world does not create a world within which we are only characters and no longer writers. 

This is the point where a designer would say that we as designers carry the responsibility of creating these worlds! We, the chosen ones. Either that or you go in a direction of some sort of design panism as Silvio Lorusso describes it in their book “what design can’t do”. 

_{“Two oft-hear assertions inform today’s understanding of design: ‘ everyone is a designer’ and ‘everything is design’. This all-embracing view of design can be named design panism. It is within the realm of design panism that designers (struggle to) articulate their role and position.”}

Is this then what Dasein is design says? It certainly sounds like a form of design panism. Both of these option would double down on the productivist framework that has become the meaning of design as captured by capitalist ideology. Maybe we could even ask if there could be such a thing as design outside of capitalist ideology. As the problem solvers of the world, designers function as paramedics that are desperately trying to salvage the body of a world that is slowly eating itself. Only in such a world can these people exist. As long as designers are worried about the productive quality of work, what they can create, what they can foster, be it ‘ a sense of community’ or an apartment complex, they will never escape the system they are trying to produce away. The designer will only validate the system of capitalism as something that they can “fix” if we would just produce the right things, relations, etc. Design takes the critique of a system, appropriates it and commodifies it, it creates a world where every problem can be solved with a product. It functions as an auto-productive machine that through its appearance constitutes its repeated necessity. By commodifying critique, it structures the way in which you are able to relate to the world and with that, it structures what world can be and who you can be against such a world. In a productivist world where solutions always come in the form of products, we are indeed all designers, it forces this design panism on us in this way.

Realizing this means realizing I can not identify as a designer anymore, I can no longer relate to the world in the way a designer does. A designer can not offer us salvation, it can only offer us the promise of it. And this is exactly the problem, the designer needs this promise in order for himself to be necessary in the system. If we agreed the system is unsalvageable, then the role of a designer would no longer have any place in this world. The promise of a better world is capitalism’s main message, and the designer is his prophet. It presupposes the field of where solutions can lie, namely in products and in the individual. Here the design panism comes back in, if only we do these little things in our daily life we can stop climate change, we can all design a better world. The designer upholds this deeply individual position. My design professors would disagree because ‘ it is an interdisciplinary position you have to take in!’, but the only thing this interdisciplinary approach does, is centralize the designer as the centre point around which the other disciplines should congregate. It puts the designer in the middle, from where they can lay out the map to other disciplines. This is not what a being-in-between is, a true being-in-between, which Dasein is design refers to, is never central. Nor does it hold on to its identity in the same way that a designer does. The designer would agree that there are many problems today in the world and that design is partly to blame, and then they follow up with saying that the solutions of these problems should come from design. Design does not allow what it does to actually change or even uphold itself, reflections can only return in a narrowed down category of what can make sense to design. With that, it is not a being-in-between, it is being-insufficiently. 

Dasein is design is not as naive as merely a design panism. It sees that being-in-between can not hold on to these categories within which it can exist and practice its being in the same way a designer is doing. It recognises the need of being-there which means, albeit temporarily, leaving behind constitutive identities of individuality, concrete definitions or operative fields. The being must dissolve in the there and open itself up to being changed. This is more of a material praxis to experience than it is a methodology to follow, you can not map this out, or it would fall back to a form of design. This is also not a self-design, a term that gets mentioned in Silvio Lorusso’s book what design can’t do. 

_{“Self-design carries a risk, though. In its extreme forms, it is navel-gazing and pathologically self-reflexive – it’s bad literature. By measuring itself obsessively against the ghost of identity, it is perturbed by an essence that does not always manifest. It is not difficult, then, to understand the disappointment of students who go to an art and design school believing they will grapple with a system of ideas and instead find themselves placed in front of a mirror.”} 

The design school’s obsession of self reflectivity and finding out who you are centralizes the process of design around the designer, once again. The question of who am I as a designer, in these institutions becomes then the most important one. A hard question because, for one, you are most likely 19 maybe early 20’s, who the fuck can you be at that point? And secondly, all political and ethical stances that you get introduced to around this time now become identities to take on as a designer. 

In the invisible committee’s book “the incoming insurrection” they talk about this question as follows: 

_{“WHAT AM I,” then? Since childhood, I’ve been involved with flows of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges-at certain times and places-that being which says “1.” Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.}  

It is of course important to make people think about what they are doing in the world, but the wrong way to go about this, is to start from the position of this unmovable I. You first have to do before you can reflect on that doing which can then evoke feelings of identity, you can not skip this step. Identity can not be the starting point or a goal, it has to be a consequence. 

_{“I AM WHAT 1 AM,” then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything that prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn’t everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement park or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well­ ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities.} 

By making the I rigid, and connected to inherent identities, you isolate the human-being to a human being. An individual disconnected from the world, a prisoner of his merely reflective self propagation. There is a certain safety in the feeling of an inherent identity, a destiny, something you’re supposed to be. Your goals are frozen, they don’t change as you move towards them. You yourself become a closed circle that rejects anything that does not help fulfil your preconceived destiny. In this way, everything that is outside of you can only take on the form of something that serves you, mere steps on a road towards that goal. The result of this thinking is that we try to schedule things in life that are supposed to be messy. We schematise every aspect of our life because we think we can put such a schema over it, this only works if your world is static. We say we are not ready for this, because we have to first achieve this and that and only then can do I have the necessary tools to engage in for instance: love, passions or other human-doings. And I myself am the biggest perpetrator of this, this is in no way a lecture but more a call-out to myself.

Let us stick with the example of love. I never understood the idea of a type, something you always fall for. I do not think that love works that way, I can not reduce love to a checkmark of features I appreciate, and I think that most people would agree with that. Zizek, when talking about love, explains that the question: “why do you love me?” is the most horrible question of them all. 

I can not say I love you because of your lips or eyes or smile etc. it is precisely because I love you that your lips your eyes and smile entice me. Love is this event that suddenly appears, not because of causal reasons. It is a manifestation of a circular structure in which the evental effect retroactively determines its causes or reasons.

Only after I have fallen in love, everything about you becomes the reason.

We can not reduce this to checkmarks or even a feeling of readiness, no one is ever ready for love. The moments you try to avoid by saying you’re not ready are the very moments that make you ready. Readiness as a concept only starts to exist when something is tried, you can only say I was ready when you have taken the leap and proven that you were. This leap is essential and in my opinion something that makes us human, the less I take this leap myself the more secluded I feel, the more imprisoned in myself I become. Earlier I called this leap an event, this concept of the event has a long history in philosophy. Here we make it to mean a happening that restructures the way in which you relate to the world, it recontextualizes how you see things. This works in between time, it rips open the linearity of time and constitutes its own past, future and present. A true event disrupts you as an inherent identity and unearths you from your core. It is a negative experience in the sense that it negates your consistency and distances you from yourself, from your past and from your future. I like to quote a line here from the podcast episode from Acid Horizon ‘no one is ready for love’:

_{This idea that we can set out in advance this figure of a partner… that’s what the search bar on Pornhub is for, but that is not a question of that art of coexistence or that art of being with an other.}

So let’s recap, dasein is design can not mean design panism that says ‘everyone is a designer!’ as this is way too individual of an idea. The human being, who has a schema for everything and thus is entirely overcoded and immovable. We have to be dividuals, things outside of us have the ability to penetrate our consistency, and it is in these moments of penetration, moments of dividednes that we are truly being-human. You see here that while we started with the notion of being a designer, dasein is design does not refer to design anymore as a profession or as anything else than being-human. Design as a profession is too limited, when we reflect on it will disintegrate as a mode of being, as insufficient. And I think that this is an honest way to approach reflection, if reflection does not dissolve the identity you are reflecting on in some way, it is not really re-flection. Then it just serves a way of solidifying the identity you are reflecting on. 

When I first encountered the phrase, what was interesting was not dasein capturing the essence of design in its concept. What was exciting was that by capturing design, it broke down what design could mean in the context of which I had been taught it. It broke down the limits that were set by my education without immediately filling in where the new boundaries should be. This was, at the time, exactly what I was looking for, I was getting disillusioned of what design turned out to be. A stuckness was present in my body, and it was this simple equation that seemed to provide some relieve. Not by giving me an alternative, but by breaking down the walls. I lost what design is, but through this loss I also lost the limits that design imposes on the world. This is the thing about this equation of dasein is design, dasein has this transient nature to it, it is hard to capture truly as a concrete concept. Its goal is not to define, its goal is exactly the opposite, to deterritorialize, deconstruct, negate, unconceal whatever you want to call it. It is being- human against a frozen world, it rips open and lets the outside leak in.

It is not like this was immediately clear to me when I encountered the phrase. That foreign element of dasein had an element of hope in it which coincided with a feeling of fear. It was initially a relation to something that I could not understand, it had to be, the other is always foreign to us. Yet we have to stay with this uncomfortable feeling, not jump to resolve it (like a designer would do). We can not simply try to understand what is outside of us in order to make it real, we have to let the outside be other and not jump to appropriate it. 

This other comes before world, before the realm of understanding and concreteness, and speaking of the other will limit it. Yet if you let the other in, it will always uphold your world and therefore change you, and letting the other change you is what being-human is.