Responsibility of the imagination

In the mid-nineties I left my professional career as an architect almost at its beginning to focus on “Disegno” [drawing for design] intended as a technique for the conception of artefacts, and as part of that long tradition of studies that the naturalist D'Arcy Thompson summarised with the Goethian term "Morphology", intended as the « Science of Form which deals with the forms assumed by matter under all aspects and conditions, and, in a still wider sense, with forms which are theoretically imaginable » (On Growth and Form, 1945, p. 1026). In those years I thought I had only postponed the appointment with the construction sites in order to study aspects of a much wider site. Cultivating a little more my passions as a student trained in the previous decade through Gramscian readings, I believed that, even in the concrete (artistic and technical) design practices, the real issue was ideological and political criticism. My (perhaps unrealistic) ambition was to work as a designer in a different way compared to the professional one: by making the archaeology of the current design knowledge that operates in the various forms of design and in the production of aesthetic artefacts. By “archaeology of knowledge” I literally mean the one outlined by Michel Foucault in the homonymous 1969 text – L'Archéologie du savoir – that, since my passionate reading during the first year of university, has offered me the point of view through which I approached the courses at IUAV that really trained me – those of history and aesthetics held by Giorgio Ciucci, Manfredo Tafuri, Franco Rella, Paolo Fossati and Massimo Cacciari – and that asked me (karst) questions to which, in the following decades, I sought answers, especially in the “semiotics of discourse and practices” formulated by Jacques Fontanille and in the theory of iconicity by Jean-François Bordron. In short, in more than a quarter of a century, my research has been carried out as if had to meet two appointments: i) as if Foucault's archaeology of knowledge had given an appointment – forty years later – to Fontanille's semiotics of practices, that is the generative model of the expression plane; ii) ii) as if the Morphology of D’Arcy Thompson had given an appointment – eighty years later – to René Thom's Semiophysics, that is, to a “Morphology of the artificial”. However, it is not easy to briefly explain why I believe that the concrete discipline of “Disegno” is based on a semiotics of the visible, somehow already implicit in Foucault's text. First of all, it must be remembered that Foucault's “archaeology” was proposed as an essentially political and Enlightenment-based point of view – although it is inscribed among the fury of a post-modern Nietzschianism – focused on the “ideological” theme of the relations between “knowledge and power”, trusting (from an “enlightened” point of view) in the critical (deconstructive) and emancipatory (constructive) power of rational and positive (documental) knowledge. That particular type of “knowledge” was called “archaeology” precisely because it dealt with the theme of the relationships between “knowledge and powers” not as much in the dimension of the “history” (of the epos, of the story) as in that of the “genealogy”, that is, of the archaeological reconstruction of the networks of concrete technical lineages between discourses, practices, conceptual devices, procedures, institutions. In other words, making the “archaeology of the present” meant to suspend the authority of the great historical and aesthetical tales, forcing oneself to the naked positivity of the document, to its “traceability”, thus safeguarding – as “images” and not “words” – the network of possible relationships between the bare finds of history. Since the finds on which this “archaeology of the present” works are relationships between physical objects and social objects – between performances and competences, between bodies and documented knowledge – it was completely logical for me to use an “archaeological” point of view in order to analyse the (more or less historical) objects of our present – the city, clothing, home, tools, parks, cockpits, works of art, museums, hospitals, ... – and the "skills", the practices, scenes, of their use in the social domains of arts, architecture, design, religion, everyday life, etc. Therefore, dealing with Disegno I have done nothing but alternate and correlate historical and empirical research on real aesthetic artefacts – especially by drawing and studying the genesis and reception of architectural artefacts – to theoretical investigations into the categories and models that try to explain why those artefacts “have the shape they have”, identifying the aspects of those shapes that allow the functioning of the valences on which the current valorisations of those objects are played. As Belting's anthropology of images and Simondon's techno-aesthetics, above all, made it clear to me, many aesthetic artefacts function as “image-objects”, that is, as bodies conceived or used as a support for images intended as “social objects”, not only and always as representations. Thus, understanding the meaning of these “image-objects” is something that, in my opinion, concerns the informative specificity of Disegno – an activity that in turn produces other image-objects – and forces the research on Disegno to oscillate between bodies and theories, between “physical objects” and “ideal objects”, because this is the only way to grasp them together in their unique and incorrigible reality of “social objects”. By this I mean above all to argue that “ideas” exist and evolve regardless of us – not (platonically) a-priori, but a posteriori – just like natural species. As a consequence, “ideation” is not infinite and unconditional fantasy, but it is the – responsible or irresponsible – exercise of the design imagination that is measured according to the incorrigible and unique reality of ideas. The Morphology of the artificial is “Really” an archeology of knowledge. This is, therefore, the reason why I deal with Disegno, intended as the study of the responsibility of imagination, based on an adequate theory of “images” as "social objects".