Keyvan Minoukadeh

Tolstoy on Art and Morality

By Keyvan | Published: 16 December 2009

In all his novels after Bel-Ami … Maupassant evidently submitted to the theory which ruled not only in his circle in Paris, but which now rules everywhere among artists: that for a work of art it is not only unnecessary to have any clear conception of what is right and wrong, but that on the contrary an artist should completely ignore all moral questions, there being even a certain artistic merit in so doing. According to this theory the artist may or should depict what is true to life, what really is, what is beautiful and therefore pleases him, or even what may be useful as material for ’science’; but that to care about what is moral or immoral, right or wrong, is not an artist’s business.

I remember a celebrated painter showing me one of his pictures representing a religious procession. It was all excellently painted, but no relation of the artist to his subject was perceptible.

‘And do you regard these ceremonies as good and consider that they should be performed, or not?’ I asked him.

With some condescension to my naïveté, he told me that he did not know about that and did not want to know it; his business was to represent life.

‘But at any rate you sympathize with this?’

‘I cannot say I do.’

‘Well then do you dislike these ceremonies?’

‘Neither the one thing nor the other,’ with a smile of compassion at my silliness, replied this modern, highly cultured, artist who depicted life without understanding its purpose and neither loving nor hating its phenomena.

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Interaction Design and the Corporate World

By Keyvan | Published: 25 October 2009

I’ve been trying to find texts discussing the role of design and the effects of corporate influence on design (particularly interaction design). There doesn’t appear to be very much written on the topic but I did find the following texts:

HCI for the Real World (PDF)

This paper by Nicholas Knouf looks at the field of HCI and argues that those of us involved in design need to think more critically about the types of problems we work on — problems usually determined by corporations only interested in profit. He cites the work of radical designer Victor Papanek:

“The economic, psychological, spiritual, technological, and intellectual needs of a human being are usually more difficult and less profitable to satisfy than the carefully engineered and manipulated ‘wants’ inculcated by fad and fashion” … What should be clear by now is the underlying critique of capitalism that forms the basis of Papanek’s project. By framing design projects within the limited space of profits, design ignores those who need the most help.

So a major problem is the conflict between the priorities of business (making more money) and the goal of design (addressing real human needs).

With market pressures, relationships with totalitarian regimes, and a legally-bound slave relationship to shareholders, how can we expect corporations to be able to use design as part of the process of social emancipation? And what would be the alternatives? This act of thinking an alternative requires a process of reflection that would focus on (as I have been doing in this paper) the designer’s role within existing structures of power and h/er latent assumptions regarding (un)conscious values that ultimately become framed through the choices of what design problems to consider.

Corporate Influence on Science and Technology

This report by Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) is a more general look at the “the detrimental effects of commercial influence on science and technology”.

One of the conclusions:

Companies have expanded the number and range of partnerships with universities, focusing on business research priorities and goals. The power and influence of some corporations, and the increased …pressure on researchers to bring in funding from business, means that academic departments are increasingly orientating themselves to commercial needs rather than to broader public interest or curiosity-driven goals.

If you know of any other interesting texts, leave a comment…

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A* Search Fun

By Keyvan | Published: 24 October 2009

This is an experiment in creating randomly connected nodes all trying to upset the A* search algorithm by moving apart as soon as the algorithm finds the shortest path. They don’t always succeed.

Left click near the nodes to disturb them.
Right click (or space bar) to see how the algorithm works.
Press ‘c’ to generate a new random set of nodes.

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Chomsky in London

By Keyvan | Published: 17 October 2009

Noam Chomsky will be speaking in London on the 27th and 29th of October. Both talks are free to attend but registration is required for the 29th October.

On 27 October he will be at SOAS with a talk titled Crises and the Unipolar Moment:

It is widely felt that the fall of the Soviet Union left a unipolar world, dominated by the remaining superpower, and that the “moment” is coming to a close with the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon “free market” economic model. Investigation of this two-decade “moment” can provide considerable insight into what came before, and possibilities for shaping the future.

On 29 October he will be at LSE with a talk titled Human Rights in the 21st Century.

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Fromm: Social Character and Social Unconscious

By Keyvan | Published: 11 October 2009

More quotes on social character and social unconscious from Erich Fromm’s Beyond the Chains of Illusion:

The members of the society and/or the various classes or status groups within it have to behave in such a way as to be able to function in the sense required by the social system. It is the function of the social character to shape the energies of the members of society in such a way that their behavior is not a matter of conscious decision as to whether or not to follow the social pattern, but one of the wanting to act as they have to act and at the same time finding gratification in acting according to the requirements of the culture.

…

Just as the member of the feudal society considered an attack against the feudal system immoral, and even inhuman, so the average person in a capitalist society considers an attack against private property a sign of barbarism and inhumanity. He will often not say so directly but rationalize his hate against the violators of private property in terms of their godlessness, injustice, and so on; yet, in reality, and often unconsciously, they appear to him as inhuman because they have violated the sanctity of private property. The point is not that they have hurt him economically, or that they even threaten his economic interests realistically; the point is that they threaten a vital ideal.

…

…each society determines which thoughts and feelings shall be permitted to arrive at the level of awareness and which have to remain unconscious. Just as there is a social character, there is also a “social unconscious.”

…

…ideologies are impressed on the people from childhood on by their parents, by the schools, churches, movies, television, newspapers, and they take hold of men’s minds as if they were the result of the men’s own thinking or observation. If this process takes place in societies opposed to ours, we call it “brain washing,” and, in its less extreme forms, “indoctrination” or “propaganda”; in ours, we call it “education” and “information.”

…

There is almost nothing a man will not believe — or repress — when he is threatened with the explicit or implicit threat of ostracism.

Posted in General, Quotes | Tagged fromm, social character, social unconscious | 4 Comments