Design of the Self

Superhumanity This page intentionally left blank Superhumanity: Design of the Self Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, Mark Wigley, Editors e-flux Architecture University of Minnesota Press The Graham Foundation This page intentionally left blank Contents 77 Are They Human? Eyal Weizman 9 Introduction 89 Designer and Discarded Genomes Ruha Benjamin 13 Self-Design, or 95 Productive Narcissism Spaces of the Learning Self Boris Groys Tom Holert 19 103 No You’re Not History for an Empty Future Keller Easterling Sylvia Lavin 25 111 Prescribing Reflection Masters and Slaves Brooke Holmes Lydia Kallipoliti 33 119 Cardboard for Humanity On Snow Dancing Andrew Herscher Ina Blom 43 127 Carceral Architectures In the Skin of a Lion, Mabel O. Wilson a Leopard … a Man Lesley Lokko 55 Some Sketches on 135 Vertical Geographies As if by Design Trevor Paglen Raqs Media Collective 69 143 Mass Gestaltung An Apology to Survivors Zeynep Çelik Alexander MAP Office 149 215 Couple Format: Our Heads Are Round, The Identity between Our Hands Irregular Love and Work Hu Fang Shumon Basar 221 159 The Birth of Design Lesser Worlds Spyros Papapetros Felicity D. Scott 231 169 Beyond the Gene Spatial Thought Alexander Tarakhovsky Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein 235 Aestheticization 177 and Democratic Culture Down with the World Juliane Rebentisch Tony Chakar 247 185 Beyond the Self The One-Foot Shop Jack Self Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty 255 The Duck Is the 193 Übermensch Designer Sex Chus Martínez Rubén Gallo 265 201 Amplified Humanity and Storage Space the Architectural Criminal Giuliana Bruno Lucia Allais 209 283 Real Estate Porn; or, Facilities for Correction How to Liberate Us from Francesca Hughes Being Slaves of Our Own Houses 293 Ingo Niermann In the Forest Ruins Paulo Tavares 305 365 After the Third End The Matter of Scale Ahmet Öğüt Pelin Tan 309 373 Surrogacity: On Anthropolysis Just like James Franco Benjamin H. Bratton Andrés Jaque 379 315 Blockchain Future States We Are Red Parakeets Simon Denny Mark Cousins 383 321 Right-wing Spaces How to Kill People: Stephan Trüby A Problem of Design Hito Steyerl 393 Our Vectors, Ourselves 329 Kali Stull and Self-Engineering Etienne Turpin Franco “Bifo” Berardi 405 335 Analysis: Synthesis I Spy with My Machine Eye Sophia Roosth Liam Young 411 347 The Story of Peter Green Art without Death Peter Chang Arseny Zhilyaev Brian Kuan Wood in conversation with Anton Vidokle 419 The Return of the 359 Have-Lived Workplace Aesthetics Yongwoo Lee Might Not Be Enough Liam Gillick 427 “Or are we human beings?” Thomas Keenan 439 Biographies 443 Image Credits Introduction Superhumanity is first and foremost a question, a self-question, even a radical questioning of the self. It is not a species, a thing, a condition, or a phenomenon. It is not supercharged humans extended by shiny tech- nologies and ideologies—as if the creature with a cell phone in its hand is existentially different from the creature holding a stone axe. Rather, it is an all-too-human questioning of the very category “human.” The 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial of 2017—“ARE WE HUMAN?: The Design Of The Species: 2 Seconds, 2 Days, 2 Years, 200 Years, 200,000 Years”—made the following proposition: “Design is always design of the human.” Design, then, is the very means by which that question is asked. The Biennial explored the radical implications of the thought that we have always been continuously reshaped by the arti- facts that we have shaped. If the penetration of design into life is any measure to go by, perhaps we have never been more human than we are today. As the Biennial manifesto points out: The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body. But 9 unlike the spider, we have spawned countless overlapping and interacting webs. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.1 To recognize oneself as human might be the strangest act of all, yet it is a position whose assumption, in spite of whatever complications it may bring, we take to be of utmost urgency. Superhumanity, a project by e-flux Architecture, seeks to reposition the idea of a form of life by exploring the intimate relationship between the concepts of “design” and “the human.” What, then—rather than who—is it that is capable of asking such questions? In asking about the lives we inhabit, about the ones both once and soon to be designed, we point to the sites, and the techniques, to design others. Wielding the weapon of design, the fifty contributors to Superhumanity took the concept of the “self” as a privileged site to analyze, debate, and speculate upon these and other questions from a diversity of viewpoints. In “The Obligation to Self-Design,” Boris Groys traces a possible genealogy of design from the design of the soul to the design of the body and the emergence of “self-design”: With the death of God, design became the medium of the soul, the revelation of the subject hidden inside the human body. Thus design took on an ethical dimension it had not had previously. In design, ethics became aesthetics; it became form. Where reli- gion once was, design has emerged. The modern subject now has a new obligation: the obligation to self-design, an aesthetic presentation as ethical subject.2 Far from its origins as a luxury of leisure time only the aristocracy could afford, the self has become fully integrated into the core of contemporary economic systems and social structures. It is the very medium through which interpersonal exchange takes place, be it of a commer- cial, romantic, or violent nature. You must have a self, know your self, and be your self, for otherwise, well, what are you? And how can you pos- sibly expect, not to mention hope, to become? The self and platforms for its careful design dominate contemporary mediascapes, from avatars 10 and surrogate identities with virtual plastic surgery to digital streams of consciousness that disappear before they can become memories, incessantly hungry feeds that devour one’s voice like screaming into a black hole, endless personal museums for the exhibition of one’s tastes and interests, and profiles never quite perfect enough, always in need of further attention. Yet the field of design has radically expanded, “from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes,” as the manifesto of the Biennial puts it. Well beyond what we typically think of as either media or the social, the self today has nearly limitless potential for its own design. But to return to the words of Groys, “the ultimate problem of design concerns not how I design the world outside, but how I design myself—or, rather, how I deal with the way in which the world designs me.” With reference to the utilitar- ian art of Russian Constructivism that sought to use design as a way to transcend the individual and manifest the collective soul, Groys ultimately identifies the “design of life as a whole” as the very means of realizing a political project. Reading Groys in reverse, we could say that the self cannot help but live as a project, understood as political design. The self is a trap that we are born into and sink further down with every day that passes, but its design might just be its only means of escape. The notion of “self-design” is a provocation. It is a call to chal- lenge any assumptions we may have about both the “self” and “design,” again and again, now and tomorrow, so that we might be able to catch a fleeting glimpse of what it might mean to be human. For humanity has, and always will have, a design problem. A problem of whose future is sculpted by design. Of the shape of its user. Its actual interface. The human is this question of arranging physical, chemical, elec- tromagnetic, and genetic apparatuses in time and space. How long a finger is needed to reach the trigger, or stroke another animal? How far must it extend in space? Elevated from humble materiality to a meta- physical program, the collective constellation of these design exten- sions is the humanist project. But what happens when that program is itself extended beyond its own limits? 11 Superhumanity emerged from this crack. It names the fetishes of humanism when costumed in the inherited clothes of an older body politic. Clothes that don’t fit, can’t fit, and when we voice our discomfort in protest, the response is our total destruction. The political environ- ment currently boiling over makes it necessary to materialize the super- human so that we may, one day, finally recognize ourselves as human. History, as we know, proceeds by its bad side, and the battle for the design of the twenty-first century has just begun. Freedoms, insti- tutions, and alliances are under assault by populism, nationalism, and fascism, with no sign of deceleration in the near future. The machine currently in power can learn—it has proven itself capable of that—but it cannot think for itself. Its thought is driven by feedback. It is caught in a loop, yet not the type of loop that draws circles over itself, but rather one that spirals out of control.

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