o_19po8js951tvs1r0t1r8s4bb1vpla.pdf

Gui Bonsiepe
Everyday, there are more questionings about the prevalence of the “market”,
combined with an unceasing practice of privatizations. There are doubts whether
these are the proper instruments to solve the current and future problems, with
any chance of success.
The sociologist Jürgen Habermas alerts: “Before the problems of the 21 st
century, re-emerges the old doubt if a civilization, in its totality, can allow itself
to be captured by the vortex of the driving forces of only one of its sub-systems,
although it is converted in the dominant model of evolution” (HABERMAS, 2009,
p. 97). This phrase reflects the European context in which it has been formulated. It
is criticized by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, who coined the concept of
“coloniality” to denote the dark side of the project of modernity and emancipation
(QUINTERO, 2010).
In the same line of thought, we find the concept “epistemic disobedience”
(WALTER, 2010) which, in relation to the design practice, has not been discussed One
of the results of the current crisis, might consist in a design practice, re-configured
and characterized by the projectual disobedience that, so far, seems to be a mere
undefined possibility, but not necessarily impossible.
The growth of the symbolic aspects in the economy and in the management
of companies and institutions and its predominance in the economist-monetarist
discourse, fueled the appearance of branding, in which culminates a process that
stays inoperative before everything that cannot be expressed in monetary values.
No one will deny the omnipresent and even asphyxiating force of the market, but
one thing is accepting the market as a reality, and another thing is wanting to
impose the market as the only reality.
In the past decade, the majority of the Latin-American countries celebrated
the bi-centenary of independence. In this context, they talked about the Second
Independence, revealing that the process of conquering independence has not
finished yet. For that, we have a lot of explanations. I limit myself to mention the
international division of work as one of the main indicators of the still present nonindependence.
According to this division, the peripheral countries receive the role of
serving as exporters of commodities, that means, raw products, not processed and,
therefore, without a projectual component, such as ore, oil, wood, soy, meat, cereals.
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Cadernos de Estudos Avançados em Design - design e humanismo - 2013 - p. 131-139