Flying, Stealing: Design's Improper Criticism

Imagine "design criticism" as the space for developing an unrestricted and sometimes playful form of writing on design, a writing which could be quite distinct from the more obviously practical or serious-minded concerns of most design history and design theory, and which would certainly throw into question the privilege traditionally given to the claims of both history and meaning: this will be the direction of my initial remarks. In their introduction to the "Design History or Design Studies" debate of 1995, the editors of Design Issues began by seeking reasonably safe ground on which to discuss a historical writing on design. To this end they offered the following "minimal definition of history: to provide an account of the facts about a subject," which they imagined that "most historians and readers are likely to accept as a beginning." 2 Minimal as it may be, it will, nevertheless, strike those of us who are sympathetic to poststructuralism's critique of history and of "facts" as a contentious definition. One reader who might well refuse it outright is Eugenio Donato, and it is his words which will begin to lead us away from the familiar territories of history and meaning. Donato's 1979 essay "The Museum's Furnace" focused on Gustave Flaubert's hapless characters Bouvard and Pecuchet, and on their frantic succession of failed attempts to collect knowledge and expertise from the texts, objects, and institutions around them. Drawing on certain correspondences between what is known of "the objects that caught Flaubert's fancy" on his own visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the willfulness of his characters' interpretation of museum displays (what impressed them most about the cedar in the Natural History Museum in Paris, writes Flaubert, "was that it had been brought over in a hat"), Donato expresses his conclusion without compromise: "As for the past of our globe or of human societies, it is given to us only in the form of senseless fragments without a memory, and any attempt of ours to reconstruct a history is nothing but vain fabulation."3 It is perhaps apt that it is a fictional text, and a subversively ironic one at that, which provokes this statement. If history, with its positivist claims to objectivity, can even be imagined to collapse 1 Adam Phil lips, Terrors and Experts (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), xiv. 2 Richard Buchanan, Dennis Doordan, and Victor Margolin, "Introduction: Telling the History of Design," Design Issues, 11, no. 1 (1995):1. 3 Eugenio Donato, "The Museum's Furnace: Notes Toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pecuche(' in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 225, 220, 231. See also Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, eds. Post-Structuralism and the Question of History(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). ( Copyright 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Design Issues: Volume 13, Number 2 Summer 1997 65