A Geography of Power: Design History and Marginality

Author(s): Tony Fry

Source: Design Issues , Autumn, 1989, Vol. 6, No. 1, Design in Asia and Australia
(Autumn, 1989), pp. 15-30
Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1511575

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 Tony Fry

A Geography of Power:
Design History and Marginality

Fig. 1) The designed sign names the _....

Design history is understood here as various an

explanatory models of design. As with other
established forms of institutionalized knowledge
exists in and produces conditions of marginality. T
paper is to explore such conditions in the contex
design history in Australia. To engage in such
productively, a complex geography must be pu
traversed. There are two elements of this exercise: one is an
exposition, in general terms, of what is meant by marginality; the
other, an acknowledgment of how the notion of geography being
put into play is marked by the spatial, the social, the historical, and
the economic, as expressed in and by relations of exchange.
Marginality has most commonly been configured in a binary
model in which it is the "other" of centrality. Two ways of viewing
this configuration dominate. One poses marginality on the
geographic edge of a metropolitan center, in either national or
international terms. The second view has, as its basis, power,
rather than location. Being on the edge of centers of political or
economic power thus becomes defined as powerlessness, irres-
pective of physical distance from any center of power. In many
ways, Australia has had a history of marginality to the dominant
forces that have shaped the world economic and cultural order,
both in political and economic terms.
Another way of thinking about marginality must also be
acknowledged here. In this additional formulation, marginality is
a condition of isolation, inbetweenness, and ineffectuality. This
model depends upon a unified center, thus no simple binary

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 15

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 relation can be imposed. The "other" of marginality in such a
schema is a network, a system of circulation, or a community of
knowledge that can function in concentrated or dispersed forms.
Being on the edge, therefore, is not identified so much by an
exercise of mapping as by an appeal to other means. Here, the
second element, based on relations of exchange, comes into play.
Exchange, as the expression of the economic, always requires a
material or a symbolic object, an agency, and a plurality of social
actors. It can be predicated upon an economic or a cultural
transference. Either way, for exchange to take place, it has to be
driven by a particular dynamic (desire, need, greed, communi-
cation, and so on). The elements implicated in exchange always
exist in some kind of relation to each other. Hence, their
disposition can be conceptualized as a geography. Marginality in
this context is being on the edge or outside of the relations of
exchange, no matter where they are located, on what scale they
might be, or who or what is powering the activity. In none of the
ways that marginality has been considered here is a value being
loaded on to it - it is not viewed as either good or bad. This is not
to say that it is not read through such polarities of assessment.
First, my comments aim to extend my own contribution to the
1) Tony Fry, "Design History: A Debate?"
Block 5 (1981): 14-18, and Design History design history debate, which has involved, among others, Clive
Australia (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, Dilnot, Cheryl Buckley, and Victor Margolin.' Without reciting
1988); Clive Dilnot, "The State of Design
History, Part I: Mapping the Field," the details of what has already been written, concerns with the
Design Issues, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring character and function of design history will be picked up and
1984): 4-23 and "Part II," Design Issues,
Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1984): 3-20; Cheryl
sometimes cut across. Second, writing from Australia means that
Buckley, "Made in Patriarchy: Toward a my statements are variously formed in a location on the geographic
Feminist Analysis of Women and De-
margins of the discipline and its objects. Australia is on the edge of
sign," Design Issues, Vol. III, No. 2
(1986): 3-14; and Victor Margolin, "A the "developed" world. What has happened here in design terms
Decade of Design History in the United
- apart from the design of a few icons of place (especially Sydney
States 1977-1988," Journal of Design
History, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1988): 51-72. Harbour Bridge and the Opera House) and a few products that
2) The stump-jump plough (1875, a plough have been mythologized (the stump-jump plough and the Victor
that jumps the obstacles it hits) figures in mower, for example) - is largely unknown beyond its shores.2
the history of technological adaptation
to local conditions. It tells a story of local Internationally, Australia has, as yet, no significance in any of the
innovation, which is familiar during the currently recognized paradigms of the historical study of design or
conquest of the land in eighteenth- and its literature.
nineteenth-century colonial societies.
The Victor mower (a motor-driven Several areas of historical and theoretical inquiry are now
rotary mower), invented just after World
beginning to recognize the importance of understanding the
War II in Australia, is an example of a
functionally well-designed product that circumstances surrounding the production of knowledges of
has been mythologized in a number of
design, seen as readable appearances, objects, processes, and
ways.
practices. Within design studies, for instance, there is a modest
3) See, for example, the special issue on
design of Feminist Art News, Vol. 2, No. but growing concern with its methods, including gender specifi-
3, (December 1985). city, a major marker of the protodiscipline's developments.3 What
a critical view from Australia delivers is a consciousness of just
how flawed is the universal model of knowledge and history upon
which the assumptions of the history of design rests. This
comment holds true for both interesting and insightful work and
impoverished, reductive genres.

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 The "manmade" designed world, constituted as recovered
history, not only puts women on and in the margins, as an
historical agency, but also puts all peoples in this position - other
than those who populate the few nations at the center of the rise of
metropolitan capitalism.
The issues raised by the investigation of gender formation and
social factors undercut the theories of knowledge upon which
almost all histories stand. For example, the exposure of phallo-
centric assumptions reduces to fiction historical accounts that
claim to be empirically grounded within a rational framework of
4) For a discussion of phallocentrism, ruling historical fact.4 So, too, do the critiques offered by the
history, and theory, see Carole Pateman
nonuniversal accounts negate and challenge the foundational
and Elisabeth Gross, Feminist Challenges,
Social and Political Theory (Sydney: knowledges of many areas of history, including design history.
Allen and Unwin, 1986).
Here, then, two variants of marginality intertwine as produced,
and sometimes contested, material conditions of existence of
those people either rendered silent or who can only speak as an
echo of, or in the tones permitted by, the dominant voice. The
power and the sound of a dominant theory of knowledge, as
embedded in common assumptions, is, of course, found on many
margins as the local expression of the universal (hence, reference is
made to the "echo," a voice characterized by Frantz Fanon as
5) Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth white words out of black mouths).5
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
The above-mentioned issues, which have been set in the context
of Australia and the creation of design studies from an Australian
perspective, can be grounded in a more concrete manner, by
working through the following agenda:
* An outlining of universal accounts that are conceptualized
as Eurocentric, ethnocentric, and logocentric
* Reflections upon design history, modernity, and colon-
ization
* A reading from Australia - another kind of narrative,
another kind of voice (one which is the resonance of an
echo)

A cyclopean project: consideration one, first take

Two eyes become one. The cyclopoid labored to cast thunderbolts
for Zeus. Thus, the myth of a singular locus of knowing is forged
out of the crucible of (en)cyclopaedic knowledge. Let me explain
- rationality has an irrational history. The history of Western
culture, to tread a well-trodden track, cannot be separated from
the establishment of the sited seats of knowledge in canonized
texts, thinkers, and institutions. The West, as cultural, economic,
and political complexity, constituted by a diversity of agencies,
not only set out on an aggressive project of geopolitical global
conquest over several centuries, but it also moved inward to
inhabit the inner worlds of models of thought and knowing. It
impurely occupied the mental spaces of imagination, rational-

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 17

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 ization, and representation. The world became dominated as
much by classification, its order of naming, as by physical
6) What I have done here is allude to one of occupation and the imposition of form. Western culture, as
the major debates of the late twentieth unified cultural difference, synthesized and articulated the social
century which runs across a vast intel-
lectual terrain (Barthes, Baudrillard, subjects' movement between inside (mental) and outside (material)
Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyo- existence. Such binary divisions, which are myriad, are at the very
tard, Rorty, Habermas, Irigaray, Kris-
teva, Derrida, Weber, White, and Virilio heart of the Enlightenment tradition upon which Western
are some of the producers and proper thought stands. These models of structuring knowledge provided
names used as markers and authority in
this debate). The debate has been one of
the means for the Enlightenment is attainment as the intellectual
the main preoccupations of a number of motor of modernity. Latterly, these divisions, as the building
significant journals (for example, New
blocks of rationality, have been specified as the target of major
German Critique, Telos, New Left Re-
view, Theory, Culture and Society, and
theoretical and critical concern.6
October). Much of what has been written
While the West almost, but never quite fully, conquered the
has sought to establish, question, cri-
tique, or displace the rise of post- world, the universal naturalization of its methods of cognition,
modernism/postmodernity. Such has especially in the discourses of science, produced a geographically
been the backdrop to Lawrence Cahoone,
The Dilemma of Modernity (Albany: noncentralized authority, which ordered other knowledges as
State University of New York, 1988); subordinate and of lesser explanatory power. This history cannot
Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA:
be separated from the history of colonization as the latter slipped
MIT Press, 1988); Eugene Rochberg- from an objective of an imperial nation state to a subjective state
Halton, Meaning and Modernity (Chi-
of mind. Modernity, seen as the rise and materialization of
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);
and David Frisby, Fragments of Mod- Enlightenment thought, drove the process of modernization and
ernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
its condition. Modern life evidences the dynamic expression of
Likewise, a revitalized interest in earlier
enquiries into modernity has been driven knowing the world and its manufacture as the forms of mental and
by the postmodern context - the work physical fabrication - all by design. Logocentrism arrived
of Adorno, Bataille, Benjamin, Kracauer,
and Nietzsche have been especially sig- ontologically (that is, as the being of a mind-set), figured in various
nificant.
epistemologies as a lived-by rational irrational knowledge (phallo-
7) The turning back of Western-generated centricism and Eurocentricism themselves negate rationality).7
epistemologies against themselves is
Logocentrism became the sovereign taken-for-granted mode of
interestingly discussed by Zygmunt Bau-
man, in "Is There a Postmodern Socio- thought for a "full certain knowledge of a place in the world."8
logy," Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.
What resides at the core of the tightly packed philosophical
5, No. 2 (1988): 217-37.
observation above is that logocentrism is a foundational condition
8) Elisabeth Gross, "Derrida and the Limits
of Philosophy," Thesis Eleven, No. 14 of the ethnocentric bias of Western thought. And that the
(1986): 26-43. intellectual culture of Eurocentric rationality has a history of
domination, ordering all knowledge through the frame of its own
cognito. At best, such an ethnocentrality has created hierarchies
of knowledge in which the thought of the "other" culture is
subordinate and constituted within the identified classificatory
systems of Western rationality. At worst, ethnocentrism has led
to ethnocide - the total destruction of the culture of the
9) For an exposition of the important "other."9
concept of ethnocide, see Pierre Clastres,
"On Ethnocide," Art and Text, No. 28 Design history has not been as much in the wings of this
(1988): 50-58. philosophical history as it might seem. The fact that design
history is almost exclusively located in those nations economically
formed in the paradigm of Western capitalism (Japan included)
not only centers development but, more significant, it obscures
the effects of design as a social and economic agency. Three
observations follow:

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 * Design history, its objects and historiography, is but one
of a myriad of histories that have been Eurocentrically
constituted.
* Design history, while implicated in the inquiries into the
nature of modernism, has failed to recognize the formation
and place of design in the rise and extension of modernity.
This failure negates the operation of design as a generative
medium in the formation of the modern social subject
through the globalization of the practices of the capitalist
means of production, modes of consumption, and cultures
extended into inner and outer worlds as the effects of
commodities, processes, and appearances.
* Design history has been complicit in the maintenance of
the Second and Third World as almost silent and as
having a "lack" of history. In this and other ways, the
consequences of industrial culture have been omitted
from its purview.
These observations reinforce and move forward the linking of
the abstract and the concrete content of my agenda. They will be
discussed below through the linking of modernity and coloni-
zation, an essential couplet in the nature of Australian history.

Every map has its margins: observation one, continued: take

two

The stated and implied crisis of authority, which has characte

a good deal of postmodern theory, has largely rendered
exercise of "mapping the field" a dysfunctional exercise, or at
a very problematic one. Without a digression into this de
pointing out that such mapping projects are always fabric
from an illusory structural position of observation and writin
worthwhile.10
10) Such a notion of the problematic of the All maps center a point of origin, they are mon
overview is inseparable from the crisis of
the intellectual; see, for example, Jim
logocentrically archetypical (they view from the single I/
Merod, The Political Responsibility of theAlthough maps may serve useful heuristic functions, they in
Critic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
a power of author(ity) that always has to be challenged. Wher
Press, 1987).
stands to point, speak, write, or draw is always a locus of pow
within that being described. Maps start from a specific positi
hence their reference to origin. They cannot be drawn fr
disengaged distance. Every plan - that is, every map - is d
from an elevated point of view that is reached by an ascent f
the ground, literal or metaphorical. Maps are strategic; t
11) The issue of maps and mapping is dealt prefigure discovery rather than record it."
with interestingly by Paul Foss, "Thea-
If you are reading this text somewhere in North Ameri
trum Nondum Cognitorum," Foreign
Bodies Papers - Local Consumption,Europe, then I write from a place on the margins of your
Series 1 (1981): 15-38.
whether you place me where I am, in Sydney, Australia,
somewhere on the edge of your current preoccupations
design history. There are no "classic" or "timeless" d
typeforms here in Australia of which anyone anywhere e

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 19

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 going to take much notice. Talking up the local product is a flawed
exercise in self-deception that obstructs development rather than
enables it. The history of the visual arts in Australia, with its
constant drive for global recognition, continually demonstrates
this. Likewise, Australia has no major designer heroes of inter-
national standing, no outstanding design institutions (commercial
or educational), and no pathfinding avant-garde groups that have
grown out of nonmetropolitan sources. There are no degrees in
design history here, only a few courses within other programs.
Thus, there are only a few students who would contemplate
becoming specialists in the area.
None of this is to say that interest in design and its history is not
burgeoning, for, with prompting, interest is slowly developing.
The situation suffers from a mix of imitation and an absence of
orthodox design history preoccupations, yet there are also very
significant opportunities. In particular, Australia has been
historically constituted by the process and forces of import as a
diverse and nuanced range of social appearances. This can be
regarded as a materialized bricolage formed from eclectic patterns
of objects of immigration and appropriation, drawn from the
forms of a modern world elsewhere.
What can be frequently found in Australia is a fallout and
modification of that which was originally created for other
circumstances. Australia is the land of the simulacrum, a place of
original copies and unplaceable familiarity. In this vast, under-
populated, and often environmentally harsh country, there are 16
million people scattered across historical time, from the prein-
dustrial to the postindustrial age. Equally, major divisions of
distance create spatial isolates - pockets of urban development
within which there are many divisions of unevenness. The rule of
geography is absolute in this land, colonized so as to become the
invisible outpost of the designed instruments of British imperial
12) Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (Lon- penal discipline and punishment.12 Dislocation is an internal and
don: Pan Books, 1987).
external condition, of long-term and short-term existence, and of
this history.
Dislocation is inseparable from marginality as a state of mind.
Such a lived condition has a consciousness or repression of
yearning as its foundation. A key part of this yearning is the
knowledge/feeling that what is wanted can never be. Desire, on the
other hand, can be momentarily sated - the whole seduction of
consumption depends upon the continual remaking of this
moment. Conversely, the nonrealization of yearning, in all its vast
array of forms, delivers nothing but a deepening bitterness and
resentment. The yearning of the marginalized, regardless of
geographic location, generates a tradition of wishing for tradition
and belonging. As a perpetual condition of being, it creates partly
a culture of despair, no matter what signs of pleasure and frivolity

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 appear on the social surface. All of this, for Australia, is grounded
in the passage across time in the despair of the gulag as experienced
by convict and jailer alike in their mutual exile in the vast space of
the continent.
Design, however, conceptualized, is but one object in passage
across the global and local geography which becomes deposited in
fragments - signs, products, processes, practices, and environ-
ments of the late-modern world. These fragments arrive as
manufactured forms, or as prefigurations of local production, via
13) A traffic of arrivals, lateness and losses what Edward Said calls "the traffic in texts."13 The limited scale
-see Edward Said, The World, The Text and concentration of the means of distribution contribute to the
and The Critic (London: Faber and Faber,
1984) - Said explores the relations of unevenness of modern Australia, a small nation with a lot of land
textual production, power, theory, and
that is hinged between the First and Third Worlds.
the geography of cultural domination in
several essays in this book; see, especially, Implied in this quick characterization of the Australian con-
pages 32-53 and 226-247. dition is an opportunity for a new approach to design history,
where work in Australia has the capacity to lead development as it
creates its own nonuniversal model. This model itself increases the
scope of concerns of the protodiscipline. Taking marginality as its
key focus of inquiry, this approach offers an opportunity to
research and write a history of design on the margins. Such an
undertaking is inseparable from and a potentially valuable
contribution to increasing knowledges of modernity and late-
modernity. This way of thinking about modernity is specifically in
terms of the process of transfer and transformation of the material
fabric of one social text, from one culture of place to another
across time and space. Here social text implies the total reading
surface of the appearances of a society, be they cultural or
economic.

Advocating an approach from the margins returns me to

arguments about the necessity of refusing design history as a
14) Fry, "Design History: A Debate?", discrete discipline.14 At the same time, it advances the claims of
14-18.
the possible usefulness of the area of study. Such usefulness can be
addressed in a number of ways - my own characterization is close
to Zygmunt Bauman's proposals for a sociology of postmodernity,
15) Bauman, "Is There a Postmodern Socio- as a "sociology of the consumer society."15 Here I am making a
logy?", 235.
broad interpretation of sociology as an arena of disciplinary
convergences and dialogues rather than yet another discipline in
16) One of the key characterizations of the crisis.'6 The appeal of such a sociology is that it does not invite a
crisis of sociology was the influential text
by Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of
division between cultural and economic inquiry. Thus, it could
Western Sociology (New York: Basic advance the paradigms of knowledge set running by studies of
Books, 1970).
material culture (limited by attachments to economic anthro-
pology) and cultural studies (limited by attachments to culturalism,
a relative autonomy of the cultural sphere). One major proviso - a
sociology of consumer society is not simply an investigation of
consumption. Rather, drawing on but extending Bauman's
argument, it is an inquiry of the dialectical relation of "seduction
and repression" across the geography of the late-modern world.

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 21

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 Acknowledging internal local, national, and international divisions
in which marginality is created is essential in this schema.
The designed production of commodified pleasure and mech-
anisms of its control are inseparable in the past, present, and
future of the Enlightenment ideas by which the drive to rationalize
the modern world generates increased nonrationality. What this
means is evident across a range of institutionalized forms. The
relationship among science, education, industry, products, and
museums is one such example. The logic of scientific education,
product research and development, and the presentation of the
narratives of the history of science, in printed texts and museums,
are all grounded in the idea of progress. This idea of progress is at
the very core of the Enlightenment. Within the orbit of this logic,
overcoming encountered problems that stand before the path to
progress is accomplished by technologically determinist methods.
The consequences of this applied history are familiar: problems
are often outside the general terms of agreed-upon human need
and, frequently, for every problem solved, many new ones are
generated. Of course, science itself is not to blame for this
situation. Rather it is what and who directs science and why - as
well as the way science becomes an object of faith. From this
perspective we can consider again commodified pleasure through,
for instance, the relationship between science and television - a
product delivered by rationality but one that generates many
effects which cannot be identified or understood by rationalist
models.
No longer can the discourses of rationality be called upon
uncritically, because, as already stated, these knowledges are
Eurocentrically grounded and have shown historically that they
can deliver regress as much as progress. What can be said of design
history can be said of most disciplines: if they reject an inquiry of
marginality, they simply continue to contribute to producing
marginality in all its forms and on all levels. The history of
modernity - its objects, its subjects - is a history that also
figures the regress of progress, although it is not yet widely read or
written this way. Design history, in this context, is not only too
discrete; it is also too clean and celebratory. We need to gain a far
better understanding of how design is articulated in the mess of
history. Beware of neat narratives.

Modern part players on the field of modernity: observation

two

A number of comments already made must be reitera

expanded. To begin with, applying the discussion of moder
modernism is worthwhile, not least because of the way the
17) See, for example, Dilnot, "The State of reductively figured in design history.17 Modernism
Design History, Part I," 17-19. term applied to encompass the multiple moments and

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 the attempt to create the high culture of modernity, was neither
stable nor always coherent across its nineteenth- and twentieth-
century history. Modernism should be viewed against modernity
as the economic, political, and cultural structure of the moder
world, viewable as a means of production and consumption, the
state and its agencies, and everyday life and its institutions.
Modernity has its own culture: mass culture. Modernism is thus
18) For a full exposition of these ideas, see
Tony Fry, Old Worlds, New Images posed against that which it appropriated in order to reinvigorate
(Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1989). itself - mass culture constituted as popular culture.18

Fig. 2) Mac Robertson exports

chocolates to England 1924 (author's
collection).

From the above framing of modernism, contemporary cultures

can view the utopian ambitions of the European avant-gardes to
either produce, represent, and become the culture of the new at
the turn of the century as a very different formation from, for
example, the faltering faith in progress that underscored the
degeneration of the high culture of modernity into the formalism
of modernism in post-World War II USA. The horrors of two
world wars, the consequences of fascism upon European culture,
the lasting effects of the atomic clouds over Nagasaki and
Hiroshima, and the loss of idealism in the promise of science and
technology, along with the vast expansion of the culture industries,
not only transformed a Eurocentric perception of its own
humanity (or lack of it), but also changed many of the aims and
agencies of modernist culture.
Modernism, as the high culture of the culture of modernity, has
become increasingly defined against the designed world of the sign
economy of popular culture. In this economy, style and taste drive
both demand and promotion. Such was and is the terrain of the
First World sign war - the conflicts of style. Notwithstanding
the attempts of modernism to appropriate and to be loaded onto
the imagery of mass-produced commodities, popular culture and
the commodity sphere won the conflict with art. Art as aura or

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 23

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 spirit is now dead. In spite of a seamless stream of inflated rhetoric
by a universal rear guard, clinging hopelessly to traditional or
avant-garde culture as either a redemptive force or a fetishized
hiding place from a cruel world, there is nothing but the culture
industries, with art being nothing more than the commodity form
of a micro or macro niche market. Such developments mirror and
are part of the actions of modernity as a global order. This can be
seen as the pluralization of capitalism as a co-existent spectrum of
old and new modernities and the continued growth of consumer
society across ideological difference.
The form of contemporary modernity as consumer society (de
facto and desired) is readable as a social text, that is, as the
designed world and the semantic structure of its forms, functions,
and mediated appearances. The designer in such a context has to
be named and interrogated not as creative subject but as deployed
laborer, as expression of the corporation and commodity. (Where
is the design history of this shift? - still looking for true meaning,
the real object, the DNA of design?)
Marginality, from subject to nation, manifests itself as an
almost complete inability to shape the world. The geography of
this moment in the frame of neocolonialism was, and still is, a
heightened colonization of the imagination; common desires for
centeredness extend across massive divisions of difference in
wealth, status, class, race, sexuality, age, culture, and geolocation.
Singular universal dreams of design worlds (modern "lifestyle")
contradict, and certainly do not unify, great unevenness, differ-
ence, and ideological division in this late modern world. They do,
however, bring differences to an imagined space of sameness of
consumption, which acts normatively as a reference point of
measured proximity to the modern.
It is worth replaying the drift of these general observations
through the Australian context. The modern world for Australia
has not been an evolutionary development based on the rise and
continual remaking of capitalist modalities and the passage of the
social theory, formed in the Enlightenment, into the creation of
nation states and industrial society. Similar to many other
postcolonial societies, Australia was first constituted by impo-
sition. The slow progression to self-determination, in conditions
of dependency, was bonded to models of the modern drawn from
elsewhere - especially Britain and, later, the USA. Modernity was
thus not a driving historical condition of transforming social and
economic conditions and their cultural consequences. Rather, it
was a regime of signs - the arrived appearances of the modern
world of metropolitan capitalism. Such signs were nodal connec-
tors, they stood for absent totalities, systems, and ensembles. The
representative singular substituted for the integrated plural; for
example, one modern product, factory, or industry acted as the

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 representative of moder production and consumption per se.
Even from a limited characterization, we can see that design
served quite a different sign function within colonial society and
its movement to semi-independent nationhood via the process of
modernization. Objects, such as imported machinery and manu-
factured goods, and images, such as imported illustrated publi-
cations, acted to create a typology that registered the look and
operation of a moder world. The condition of modernity was an
eclectic assemblage of typeforms of the representative modernity.
Design, even prior to the management of a design profession,
intervened to undercut the formation of modern Australia as
discordant bricolage. Appropriation was organized but not within
a systematic plan. There was neither total chaos nor directed order
but a pragmatic falling together of fragments. The disparate
arrival of Ford and Fordism is one contained example of this
history.

Fig. 3) The Ford Motor Company

arrives - an assembly building
under construction at the plant in
Geelong, Victoria, 1925 (Ford
Archive).

The first Ford car was brought to Australia in 1904. Commercial

importing began in 1909 with the Model T. As sales increased, an
ad hoc system of distribution became locally established. Because
of corrupt and profiteering practices that grew up around this
network, the Ford company refused to trade with it and set up its
own local administrative and distribution system instead. Ford
Australia was formed in 1925. Fordism, however, as an industrial
system of mass production based on the in-line assembly of
interchangeable parts, arrived in Australia a year earlier. A
Sydney-based manufacturer of compressors introduced such a
method to its factory in 1924. Ford's own plant, in Geelong,
Victoria, built in less than 12 months, began manufacturing and
19) Tony Fry, Design History Australia assembly in 1925.19 Product design and advertised image (the
(Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1988),
symbolic forms) were drawn from the USA. Here, then, was a
114; and Geoff Easdown, Ford: A History
of the Ford Motor Company in Australia mixture of appropriation and imposition, order, disunity, and
(Sydney: Golden Press, 1987).
disorder, and the object (the car, its system of production and

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 25

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 distribution, and its symbolic form) as a sign of modernity. All of
this adds up to one example of a local sign of a particular
conjuncture and paradigm of modernity - "Americanism and
20) Antonio Gramsci, "Americanism and Fordism" in Australia.20
Fordism," Selections from the Prison
Notebooks, edited and translated by The kind of structural condition that I have outlined suggests
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell- that a moder post-neocolonial nation like Australia is dependent,
Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1971), 277-318. Gramsci's seminal essay
as is often the case, not just on the geospatially diffuse metropolitan
is significant here not simply because of capitalisms, which do not reduce to clear or singular centers, but
its early acknowledgment and theoriza-
tion of the relation between an economic also on the local modalities of metropolitan modernity. Design,
modality and a cultural order but also then, is configured in relations of dependence, with the local
because the conjuncture being interro-
designer, whether individual or corporation, as one of the key
gated (divisions in Italy) is formed by
uneven development. Marginality and mediators gatekeeping the induction of the elsewhere. The history
modernity were key concerns of Gram- to unfold here, then, is of the knowing or unknowing sign
sci's analysis, which was contemporary
with Ford's arrival in Italy (roughly the management of bricolage. The delay in the establishment of an
same time as Ford arrived in Australia). infrastructure of modernity was also a crucial factor - mass
For a description of the new labor
process, see Andrew Sayer, "New Devel-
production did not really arrive in Australia until the 1950s and
opments in Manufacturing: The Just-in- even then it could not be fully established because of the limited
time System," Capital and Class, Vol. 30
scale of the nation's home market, which was the focus of national
(1986): 43-72.
economic policy. The late arrival and the underdevelopment of
both design education and the design profession are inseparable
from this history. What has only just begun to be realized by a few
technologically literate members of the national economic
community is that new development in labor processes could
liberate Australian manufacturing from the limits of market scale.
But Australia's problems include declining local manufacturing;
foreign ownership masking assembly as manufacture; gaining
high-volume capital investment; and a small "mass" home market
linked to the underdevelopment of export-led economic expan-
sion. The new labor processes, especially the just-in-time system
and its incorporation of FMS (flexible manufacturing systems),
have the ability to produce difference in volume. The very
structure of manufacturing is changing as are the service/culture/
information industries. The history of the past is thus not fully
determinate of the history of the future, in both general economic
and cultural terms and specifically in relation to design and
marginality.

Fig. 4) The Australian-designed GM

Holden - the car Detroit did not
want (Holden Archive).

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 Fig. 5) The car Detroit did want -
the F. J. Holden is launched in 1948
by Prime Minister Ben Chifley as
"Australia's own car" (Holden
Archive).

A story similar to the one of modernity can be told of

moderism(s). Its twentieth-century signs first arrived in Australia
in the 1920s and 1930s, before a local modernity was secured. The
diversity of the projects of the European modernists and their
grounding in the concerns and conditions of metropolitan
modernity were unknown, overlooked, or filtered out - often by
the processes of mediation via Britain. The guardians of British
culture neutralized and diluted the avant-garde objectives of the
variants of European modernism as they were represented to
British society and its tastemakers. Although Britain was not the
sole source of cultural forms for Australia, it was dominant and in
modernism's transposition to here, it again screened out the
21) Australia, art, and the preoccupation vanguardist dimension of the avant-garde projects.21 The conse-
with national identity is the basis for the
forthcoming book by Anne-Marie Willis,
quence of the double mediation was a contentless and stylistic,
Illusions of Identity: The Art of Nation periodized modernism - a modernism stripped of everything save
(Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1989).
exterior appearance. Thereafter, in disadvantaged local hands, it
further degenerated into a deformed reflection of unconvincing
simulation.
The first coming of modernism centered on Sydney; the second,
in the 1940s, on Melbourne (the two cities, incidentally, are a
two-days' drive from one another). The later modernism was a
very different configuration from the earlier one. The war gave
artists a heightened sense of marginality; the condition was felt in
new ways. Australia was not only on the edge of the action but it
was a point of external view upon the thought disintegration of
the center. Fascism seemingly was destroying European culture;
thus, the margin's feeling of placement was disoriented by
witnessing this scene, while, at the same time, the center arrived on
its shores clad in khaki, a weapon in one hand, nylons in another.
The response was complex. A variety of local hybridized
modernisms were assembled via raids upon expressionism,
surrealism, and social realism, the strongest synthesis being an
expressionist/social realist axis. This new visual culture was

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 27

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 mobilized against an older colonial conservative landscape tra-
dition. Of course, all of this was happening at a moment of change
in the nature of Australian nationalism. The focus upon a center
shifted from Britain, bathed in the after life of the Empire's
dimming star, to the rising star of North America.
Every nation believes in a need to claim the uniqueness of its
culture as proof of its identity. On this basis there has been an
enormous cultural and economic investment in Australian
modernism. Its emptiness has been inscribed and reinscribed with
national meaning, through the agency of the art market and art
history joining in the common hegemonic objective. Wha
matters in this collaborative context is not agreement, valu
judgments, or quality but visibility, noise, and exchange valu
The degree of "critical" attention and the market price is wha
directs the reading of the work, rather than its qualities.
Marginal modernity is built upon appropriation. In addition, its
economy is sign driven (as word and image), by more than the sign
relations described but also because desire is produced by th
circulation of directly or indirectly imported signs. What such a
history of marginality throws into question is a good deal of the
conceptual geometry of postmodern theory in its various guises.
What this means is that although postmodern theory has bee
variously conceptualized, it has almost always been so though
with a Eurocentric model. Appropriation and decenteredness
(Jameson, et al.) and the political economy of the sign (Baudrillar
are longstanding features of Australian modernity - its non
22) Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism or modernity and postmodernity are, in fact, inseparable.22 Because
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,"
New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984):
Australia has never been other than a culture of appropriat
53-92, is one representative text; Jean fragments and difference, postmodernism, at least as a rhetoric,
Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political
was taken up here with vigor.23 What has received less attention, a
Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos
Press, 1981) is another. a feature of this historical postmodern condition, is the long
23) Meaghan Morris, "Jetsam," D'un Autre standing presence of the sign driven economy - the sign as i
Continent: la reve et le reel (Paris: Musee prefigures production.
National d'Art Moderne, 1983). This is
one of the most significant of the texts
that address Australia in this way. Design history - sending signals here and there: observation
three
I am writing for myself, as a reification of a moment of knowing. I
am writing for design history, which, as I have argued, needs to
question further the nature of the discipline as it is and might be.
At the same time, what I have stated is also a communication (via
the direct line and the echo) to some of the members of the
Australian design community.
What I have outlined in this article travels two ways - away
from the margins and toward them. Meaning will alter with
geography. Consider these summary points below, for more is at
stake than the development of a discipline and its academic
recognition:

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 a) Design history on and in the margins [the "other" story
and (her)story of (his)story] is a different kind of history.
b) A nonuniversal design history is not simply an additional
or supplemental approach within a plurality of positions.
Rather, it is a fundamental challenge to the nature and
authority of the current Eurocentric models of history
writing. It will not be based on the same agenda, objects,
rhetoric, or concerns.
c) Design is implicated in the history of colonialism and
neocolonialism. It has been used (which is not to claim
ordered directional function) to prefigure the made
nature of the social world we occupy as an environment
and as an imaginary.
d) The potential of design history is not as a discipline in and
for itself (although holding such disciplinary space can be
institutionally strategic). Rather, it can play a major role
as a means to interrogate the social text within an organic
relation to a sociology of consumption. This is to say it
can and should provide useful and critical transformitory
knowledges.
e) Design history has the potential to illuminate the history
of modernity and late-modernity in its metropolitan and
marginal forms.
f) We cannot have a reductive theory of design's totality or
its specific sign functions if we are to understand its
multiple forms. In the geography of design, where
meaning shifts by movement and conjuncture, there is no
essence outside of a logocentric view.
g) Australia has little to offer design history as currently
constituted. It has a considerable amount to offer a design
history that might be.

j . ' ,. .. .. ....I
IEIif . ..

~~~~~~~~~~s ?l~~- a
i~~~~~~~~~~ - -
i?i I :? .g i .:I :r~~~~i;iIfi
i i ? - -

Fig. 6) Local signs.

Design Issues: Vol. VI, Number 1 Fall 1989 29

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 A postscript
I have taken liberties with the notion of geography. It has been
used as a concept of the disposition of mind, matter, and space
upon a material, geophysical, and cultural terrain. This is
acknowledged and if blame is to be apportioned, let it be directed
24) Michel Foucault, "Questions on Geo- at the late Michel Foucault: "Geography acted as the support, the
graphy," Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin
Gordon (London: Harvester Press, condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I
1980), 77. tried to relate."24

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