January 21, 2021

Occupying

(Vacating)

“Bless you for your anger for it is a sign of rising energy. Direct not to your family, waste not on your enemy. Transform the energy to versatility and it will bring new prosperity.”

Yoko Ono Licensed therapist and longtime Buddhist practitioner Justin F. Miles wrote “Meditation for Militants” in response to the events in Baltimore that were unfolding at the time of this writing. “…please be angry but don’t act as if the only responses to anger are to protest or to be violent. That just displays that we have feelings. Neither one of those behaviors indicates that we know what to do with our feelings besides ask someone else to do something with them. Let us not reduce our anger. Let’s genuinely feel angry. Dive in. Look around. What’s it made of? Let’s know it intimately and not forget it. Let’s act militantly in an unwavering stance against wildness as if that fixes anything. Let’s act militantly against being pulled into battles of the ego. Let us act militantly against the fear of resistance against the issues in Baltimore City, whether that means shutting the city down regardless of how long it takes, or getting arrested, or missing work or getting hurt. Let us act militantly in our own communities to explore and serve the needs of others. Let us act militantly and maintain warmheartedness, not descending into the mind of non feeling and coldness. Let us militantly be fearless by feeling fear and moving forward into resistance even if it means feeling afraid. Especially if it means feeling afraid.“

In a public sphere where hyperbole and oversimplification are the norm, we may come to see blaming as normal. Resistance, retaliation, destructive speech acts do not produce the changes we want. Although it might be motivated by the best intentions such as restorative justice, or equity, this habitual tendency toward blaming, and stereotyping, creates vicious cycles that produces yet more conflict, reactivity, and alienation. Motivations really matter. Activism can be motivated by life positive or life negative motivations. Enemy finding stems from social narrative that insists on labels like victim and perpetrator. Holding onto these reductions is the cause of so much additional suffering (beyond the initial conditions of suffering). In objectifying the issue or the problem, whether it be a person, a regime, a group, or a situation, we create a false separation between that problem and ourselves. Emphasis on invalidating the claims of the Other results in a pathological expression that obscures the otherwise vital messages of the postmodern view, yielding incoherence and polarization (McIntosh). 

Being pervasive and situated, design is defacto political. Design interpenetrates the realms of the personal and the political and is therefore optimally situated for generating momentum at the scale of the lived experience. Yet because the majority of design today is directed toward profitability in the marketplace, its potential in other realms is only beginning to be explored. Many creatives are recognizing the power of design activism in service of alleviating suffering or spurring change. Currently, questions about the very notion of what constitutes radicality, and what tactics will best characterize the new design activism are very much in play. Radical, meaning from the root involves a fundamental or elemental shift in our way of understanding and our way of Being. To be radical necessitates self transformation.

Designers can push identity politics to another level by empathically relating to the Other as Self, as the basis for a foundation of mutual respect from which real and lasting change can arise. We can “be the change” only by integrating aspects of the Other into our own identity. We can recognize a human duty to meet the Other on their own terms without trying to change them. With regard to any change worth dedicating one’s life to, we actually can’t do this without the Other. Any changes on scales that really make a difference will involve alignments of heterogeneous allies in diversity and difference. The strong postmodern cultural vision needs the balancing complementary perspectives that produce the diversity necessary for real sustainable change to take root. We need The Tea Party and the Tea Party needs us.

This is not to deny the existence of evil in the world. Conscious design activism involves being aware of the role that we play in any design brief or negotiation. “Fighting” injustice with the force of hatred and rejection is an outworn toolkit of a bygone era. Reactive critique drags the past into the future, creating only impedance and suffering. Resistance is a tactic that made sense in the postmodern era but now fragments our efforts to move toward our common good. New late-modern power politics are needed to move beyond exclusive reliance on criticality, to an enactment of appreciative and inclusive stances. Judgement and critique have to be recalibrated with compassion. Being right has gotten us only to stalemate. It’s a both/an rather than a zero/sum game.

Considered on the macro societal level, values memes functions as a kind of code for sets of values that are held dear by a diverse cross-section of individuals around the world regardless of race, gender or ethnicity. These values codes enact world views in distinctive and consistent ways cross-culturally. For example the modern worldview is on the ascendancy globally today regardless of country or continent. Memes are like niches in an ecosystem in the sense that they are interdependent and co-producing of one another - in tension and also in cooperation at the same time. The postmodern meme for example, arose in the 1960s as the antithesis to the Modern thesis. Postmodernity has served as a much-needed corrective to the shadow aspects of modernity. Nobody knows how evolution “works” but one way of explaining it is as a dialectic. In this view there is a structure of movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, emergent worldviews arise as responses to life conditions, only to be replaced by their antithesis. In this account of the arising of phenomena, dialectically dynamic worldviews not only produce one another, bring one another into being, and create the conditions where the other is called forth, they also require one another for values ecosystem diversity.

We can participate in the emergence of transpartisan politics. (McIntosh, Phipps, Zimmerman) The evolving practice of radical design activism will involve discarding the “mean boy” and mean girl” for more useful tactics. We can shift the dynamic by discarding old-school bashing and other practices of disrespect for more humane and productive ones. If we take one step back and remain open while holding the tension, we can make some space for possibility while also sidestepping reactive habits that entrench vicious cycles of contempt for those who with whom we disagree.

Our troubled world needs our anger. Anger and dissatisfaction are forms of truth. As Yoko Ono says above, anger is too precious to waste on the other. Trust anger and frustration to guide your choices and actions related to shaping your design practice.To be a design activist one has to be acutely in touch with the pervasive existence of injustice and suffering. Embodiment practices and inner work help us to make sense of what is emerging without collapsing into projection and polarization. It starts with fully occupying our bodies raw emotions and all. Become aware of your feelings of anger and hurt. Locate the feelings physically in your body through daily meditation, yoga and/or body scanning. Allow yourself to fully experience the feelings themselves as distinct from any mental scripts that might also be running. Learn to channel these powerfully human energies into self transformation and contribution.

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