PRECARIOUS DESIGNERS AND THE TRANSFORMATIVEPOTENTIAL OF BIOPOLITICAL PRODUCTION AND THE COMMONS

Cumulus Conference, Politecnico di Milano, 04.06.2015

Bianca Elzenbaumer / Brave New Alps/ @bravenewalps Junior Research Fellow, Leeds College of Art, UK

Access text: http://tinyurl.com/qgzfakl

In this text, I draw on noncapitalist and anticapitalist notions and practices – mainly by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Judith Revel and J.K. Gibson-Graham – to trace ways in which designers can transform conditions of precariousness and precarisation.

Precarious (working) conditions to be transformed

bulimic work patterns, low pay, work in isolation, no paid vacations, no or only minimal social protection, no sick-leave, work taking over life, work-related health issues, no unemployment compensation, innability to plan ahead...

Precarious (working) conditions to be transformed

bulimic work patterns, low pay, work in isolation, no paid vacations, no or only minimal social protection, no sick-leave, work taking over life, work-related health issues, no unemployment compensation, innability to plan ahead...

Induced both through precarising procedures such as the dismantling of the welfare state and self-precarising work practices in the creative industries.

Design, biopolitics and the common

Biopolitics as the «power of life to resist and determine an alternative production of subjectivity» (Hardt & Negri, 2009, p. 57).

The work of designers contributes to constitute contemporary subjectivities.

This creation of subjectivities is a battle ground for transformation, if we take labour as non-linear driving force of history

Design, biopolitics and the common

Designers today produce “the common”, i.e. that which is not inscribed in capitalist framework as it is neither private nor public but governed by the people who produce it.

Through “the common” people express a desire to not be governed, managed and precarised in the ways it currently happens.

Dilemma of the common

Designers produce the common in the form of languages, images, codes and relations, but often don’t considerably challenge how this common functions within the real economy.

The sharing practices of “open design” – for example – mostly don’t challenge how material value is being distributed.

The power of politicized subjectivities

Start to intervene in how economic relations are played out. The common invites us to challenge competition, private property and profit as the norm.

Linking the production of designers to concerns of socio-economic and naturo-cultural justice allows to create novel economic subjects that have the desire and capacity to create de-precarising economic cultures.