GASK KUTNÁ HORA, KUTNÁ HORA (CZ)
The loss of one’s initial narcissism is the loss of one’s self. It is a loss of faith, a resignation towards the future, a loss of uniqueness, dissolved within the exponentially growing fragmentation operationalized by marketing. This, in a nutshell, is the state of the world today, which Bernard Stiegler calls the loss of participation in symbolic creation.
What role is played in this by design and its *product*? Is it still a solution for our problems? Does it allow us to participate in its creation (in design, this is called affordance)? Does it still help us to find our way within this fragmentation? Is it still a curative, shared symbol? How can a product help us to rediscover our narcissism, a means for re-establishing our self and our own integrity, without pushing us into the arms of artificially driven individualism? If a product is poisoned bait, can it also be medicine?
If this sounds like another static, self-enclosed and thus potentially problematic utopia, let us try to understand it not as a place, a picture or a narrative, but as a process, a careful method that, unlike spatial utopias, works with real materials, here and now. Let us imagine this utopia-method as a craft, a layered process whose outcome is not a product, but a non-product.* Just as in the past crafts were a kind of magic, a public secret with a ritual social structure and complex social ties to majority society, today’s socially sensitive secret is data-driven marketing. The artisanal process is not driven by anonymous data, but by a fundamentally narcissist (not, however, individualist) occultism whose purpose is not consumption but knowledge.
The non-product is an autonomous and entirely realist alternative to the product (but it is not primarily intended as its opposite). The non-product is a transitional object, a homeopathic spiral. In a certain sense, it is an insufficient and thus ephemeral container for the discarded and tangled record of our knowledge and experience. One of its pitfalls is quite certainly a feeling of misunderstanding that it uses to help us overcome creative reminiscences. Its seeming hermeticity and its inner spiral-like repetition forming an external shroud are a cure for the fragmentation and unstoppable acceleration of time. The purpose of the non-product is to explore a product’s blind spots, its ecology, rhythm and memory, and to increase our level of participation.
Jiří Maha
