(Daemian cont.)
Colin Ward: a mutualist. Spent 40 years trying to be a counter to Foucault. He would have agreed with Foucault about discipline but wanted to write counter histories of fraternal and autonomous institutions from below. The social history of squatting. Self-built housing. Cultural history of pre commercial holiday camp.
No refined continental philosophy background. Stumbles into really interesting set of ethnographies of everyday life.
Most people working with “nature” unpack nature but leave capital in a very un-unpacked way. What Ward does is when he talks about capitalism he says all societies have hybrid elements in them. They are coordinated in contradictory ways. A society can't be run by a single logic. Pockets of capitalism and socialism within their opposites.
While everyone is refining Althusser Ward is arguing that there are many hybrid spaces.
Political ecology has trouble scaling up and locating places for alternative design endeavors.
Ward in the 70s and 80s tries to defend idea that design is occurring all the time and is done by lay people. An aesthetics in which a self organized made nature is optimal.
Working people trying to occupy rural space. England 5% of population owns 65% of land space.
Drunkenness of eco design on apocalypse or one true ontology (really? that's kind of a scary term still). Avoiding the terrain of politics. Hegemonic struggle that designers have to be engaged with.
Kate Soper on alternative pleasure and hedonism.
Rather than get stuck in technological fixes vs. rebound effect. No cultural politics in there.
Suggestion that if we're interested in agencies we might have to recognize that human agencies need to theorized even more.
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