Full Description
(Designing) Beyond the Modern is the second volume in a trilogy by Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari, following Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (2020).
This book is a provocation: how can we begin to move beyond the modern when so much of how we think and make remains entangled in its logic? Among the forces that have both shaped and been shaped by the modern project, design occupies a central role. Rather than treating it as a neutral tool, this book approaches design as a practice deeply implicated in modernity's extractive, colonial, and anthropocentric foundations. The parenthesis in the title signals an ambivalence about whether "designing" can remain a relevant or viable practice. Without offering a conclusion, the book confronts the legacy of the Modern and calls for a caesura: a rupture, a pause, or an interval where a critical praxis, whether called design or not, might begin to take shape.
Drawing on philosophy, decolonial thought, and design theory, it challenges the logics that continue to shape modern institutions and imaginaries. Through essays, fragments, and engagements with the work of Tomás Maldonado, along with a conversation with Arturo Escobar and a contribution from Aílton Krenak, this book traces tensions and potential shifts that emerge when thinking and acting beyond the Modern.
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
i. Moving Beyond
ii. Critical Praxis
iii. The Structure of the Book
THE MODERN
Many Faces of Modern
Reframing the Modern
Catastrophe
Colonial
Human
DESIGNING
Designing Today, Tomás Maldonado
Commentary on Maldonado
Design-as-Modern
Dilemma
Nihilism
Dialectics
Expertise
Denaming and Renaming
Idiocy
Tomás Maldonado, Design and The Future of Modernity, Emanuele Quinz
BEYOND THE MODERN
Beyond
A Conversation with, Arturo Escobar
Language
Exteriority
Caesura
Affirmative Critique
Potentialities
Ancestral
Get Out of This Concrete Nightmare!, Aílton Krenak
AFTERWORD
Index
