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Sobre la inmutabilidad de la orilla.

Ayer transcribí un texto maravilloso de Vilém Flusser para analizarlo con mis alumnos de la clase que imparto sobre Semiótica para la Licenciatura en Diseño Industrial de la UIA Laguna. Susana tuvo la primicía por la noche y aunque aún no me comenta sus observaciones estoy completamente seguro de que lo ha disfrutado como niña chiquita con paleta acaramelada multisabores.

Al exponer el artículo en la clase de hoy terminé involucrado en un análisis muy complejo sobre la situación tan anómala que tiene la práctica del diseño en nuestro país; por lo que tuve que recurrir al diseño histórico que propone Guy Julier y desmenuzar sus hipótesis -haciendo a un lado el texto de Flusser durante una hora- para poder proveer cierta esperanza, luminosidad y un sentido a la misteriosa tarea que tenemos los diseñadores de encontrar necesidades en una realidad tan....abarrotada de falsos discursos simbólicos.

Resulta claro que Julier tiene razón y que la primera gran ausencia de las disciplinas proyectuales es la del racionalismo, si bien abunda el criticismo en nuestro quehacer eso no implica una reflexión estructurada y sistematizada. Y es evidente que para llegar a construir los mitos necesarios, validados desde la conclusión de la experiencia sígnica, no solo falta racionalismo sino un método apropiado que sea orientado por la historia y la semántica interna de las culturas y sociedades.

Es así que encuentro comprensible las visibles emociones -angustia, enojo, emoción, exaltación y múltiples etcéteras- que presentan los alumnos al exponerles estos tópicos, principalmente porque se tocan fibras sensibles que implican condiciones esenciales de lo que será su futuro como designadores de la realidad que alcancen a nombrar.

Debido a la falta de tiempo, y porque todo a final de cuentas se acaba -esto es una máxima que debe tener siempre en cuenta el diseño-, decidí subir al blog la transcripción del texto con el que tenía pensado abarcar la totalidad del escenario pedagógico -en el que yo soy tan solo el mensajero, nunca un profeta y mucho menos el sumo sacerdote que ejerce poder y establece jerarquías-.

El documento original se encuentra en el libro THE SHAPE OF THINGS escrito por el pensador Vilém Flusser, a quien recomiendo ampliamente si se está interesado en expander los horizontes del universo del diseño y de la filosofía contemporánea -ambos territorios aparentemente consolidados, nada más alejado de la realidad-.

A continuación la transcripición -esperando no violar derechos editoriales ya que no existe una intención de lucro sino de soltar a los leones de la jaula-:

The designers way of seeing

There is a line in the Cherubinischer Wandersmann by the seventeenth-century German religious poet Angelus Silesius which I quote from memory: ‘The soul has two eyes: one looking into time, the other one looking way ahead into eternity.’ (Anyone who wants to be precise can look the quotation up and get it right.) The way of seeing through the first eye has undergone a series of technical improvements since the invention of the telescope and the microscope. Nowadays, we can command a longer, deeper and sharper insight into time than Silesius could have envisaged. Recently, we have even gained the ability to condense all of time into a single point in time and see everything simultaneously on a television screen. As for the second eye, the way of seeing that perceives eternity: Only in the last few years have we begun to take the first steps towards its technical perfection. That is what this essay is about.

The possiblity of looking through time into eternity and of representing what can be perceived in the process has only become relevant since the third millenium. It was in those days that people stood on the hills of Mesopotamia looking upriver and foresaw floods and droughts and marked lines on clay tablets indicating canals that were to be dug in the future. At the time, these people were thought of as prophets, but we would call them designers instead. This difference in the way the ‘second eye of the soul’ is judged is critical.

The people of Mesopotamia in those days, like most people nowadays, held the belief that this way of seeing involved foreseeing the future. If someone digs irrigation canals, he does this because he can foresee the future course of the river. Since the time of the Greek philosophers, however (and in the meantime among all more or less educated people), the opinion has been that this second way of seeing sees eternity, not the future. Not the future course of the Euphrates but the form of all watercourses. Not the trajectory of a rocket but the form of all trajectories in which bodies move in gravitational fields. Eternal forms. Only nowadays, educated people do not share exactly the same opinion as the Greek philosophers.

If we follow Plato, for example (who calls the way of seeing through the soul´s second eye ‘theory’), we perceive through fleeting phenomena the eternal, immutable Forms (‘Ideas’) that exist in heaven. According to this scenario, what was happening in those days in Mesopotamia was that some people were perceiving and noting theoretical forms behind the Euphrates . They were the first to employ geometrical theory. The forms they discovered –e. g. triangles – are ‘true forms’ (in Greek ‘truth’ and ‘discovery’ are the same word – i. e. aletheia). Yet when they marked the triangles into the clay tablets, they were recording them. For example, the sum of the angles of a drawn triangle is not exactly 180 degrees, even though this is exactly the case with a theoretical triangle. Mistakes occur in geometry as theory is translated into practice. This is the reason why no man-made water system (or rocket flight) goes totally according to plan.

We see things quite differently nowadays. We no longer think (in a word) that we discover triangles, but that we invent them. People in those days played with forms like triangles so as to be able to work out the course of the Euphrates with some degree of accuracy, and then they applied one after another of the forms they were playing with to the river until the river fitted it. Galileo did not discover the formula of free fall, he invented it: He tried one formula after another until the problem of heavy bodies falling worked out. Thus the theory of geometry (and the theory of mechanics) is a design that we force upon phenomena in order to get hold of them. This sounds more reasonable than the Platonic belief in heavenly Ideas, but in reality it is exceptionally unsettling.

If the so-called laws of nature are our invention, why do the Euphrates and rockets keep to them and not to other forms and formulae that are just as good? Admittedly, whether the sun orbits the earth or the earth orbits the sun is simply a question of design. But is the way stones fall a question of design? To put it another way: If we no longer share Plato´s opinion that the designer of phenomena is in heaven and has to be discovered in theory, but believe instead that we ourselves design phenomena, why then do they seem to be as they are instead of looking the way we wish them to be? This unsettling aspect cannot be sidestepped here.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that forms, whether discovered or invented, whether made by a heavenly or a human designer, are eternal –i. e. free of all time and space. The sum of the angles of a theoretical triangle is always and eternally 180 degrees, whether we discovered it in heaven or invented it at the drawing-board. And if we warp the drawing-board and design non-Euclidean triangles with the sum of their angles being different, then such triangles are also eternal. The designer’s way of seeing –both the human and the heavenly designer’s- doubtless corresponds to that of the soul´s second eye. Here there arises the following intriguing question: What does eternity actually look like? Like a triangle (as in the case of the Euphrates) or like an equation (as in the case of falling stones) or like something else? Answer: It may look any way it likes; thanks to analytical geometry, it can always be reduced to equations.

This could be the beginning of a technology of the soul´s second eye. All eternal forms, all Immutable Ideas, can be formulated as equations, and these equations can be translated from the numerical code into computer codes and fed into computers. The computer for its part can display these algorithms as lines, areas and (a bit later on) volumes on the screen and in holograms, out of which it can create ‘numerically generated’ artificial images. What one then sees with the soul´s first eye is exactly what is perceived with the soul´s second eye. What appears on the computer screen are eternal, immutable forms (e. g. triangles) produced by eternal, immutable formulae (e. g. ‘1 + 1 = 2’). Paradoxically, these immutable forms can change: One can distort, twist, shrink and enlarge triangles. And everything that results from this is likewise eternal, immutable form. The soul´s second eye continues to look into eternity, but this is now an eternity that it can manipulate.

This is the designer´s way of seeing: He has a sort of pineal eye (partitioning just like a computer in fact) that enables him to perceive and control eternities. And he can give orders to a robot to translate into the here and now that which is perceived and manipulated in the eternal (for example, to dig canals or build rockets). In Mesopotamia, he was called a prophet. He is more deserving of the name of God. But thank God he is unaware of this and sees himself as a technician or artist. May God preserve him in this belief.

-Vilém Flusser; The shape of things, a philosophy of design. Transcripción: Andrés Jáquez