Disegno: Grammatology as Design; Design as Grammatology

Abstract

While there is a Greek term for “design”, schédio, meaning plan, drawing, project, etc., design as a concept is strangely absent in the orthodox lexicon of foundational philosophical terms; at best it possesses an outlier status. It is implied but never directly articulated by the more familiar terms for the material manipulation or manifestation of nature (physis), namely technê and mimêsis, but also rarely defined independently alongside the various skills associated with bringing something into being (poiêsis); whether, for example, the pursuit of excellence, arête, an eye for strategy or foresight, stratêgía/mêtis, the selection of the right course of action, prohairesis, or indeed practical wisdom in general, phronêsis.

What, then, is the status of design in philosophical thought, and therefore in any deconstruction of philosophy?

To answer this question, the paper will first fast-forward from the Greek context to the Renaissance and use Vasari’s definition of design (disegno) to elaborate its modernity and its crucial bipartite formulation: design as at once concept and representation, intellection and illustration, scheme and schema, plan and graphic presentation of the plan. It will then examine this duality in terms of Derrida’s notion of the written as the mark that not merely re-presents intellection but makes it possible. I will therefore reread ‘grammatology’ as a theory of design. Is design the missing link between ideality and inscription, theory and practice, between epistêmê and technê?

This question is gaining increasing importance as we supposedly move away from the scientific paradigm and its values of analysis, propositional truth and its mechanistic worldview (cause-effect), to a ‘science of the artificial’1, indeed an ‘age of design’, and its corresponding values of synthesis, innovation and a teleological worldview (means-end). Given the urgent necessity to address the design of the immediate future, is there an ethics, even a politics, of design derivable from Derrida’s grammatology? Show more