This is not an autonomy
Even though this word is widely spread, most of its uses aim to empty its political roots; here's what an actual autonomy must have
Reading for Designs of the Oppressed — Week 4
Words are tools we employ to guide us in our experiences of the world. Even though we like to pretend things have stable meanings, deep down we know they don’t. This has become painfully clear in the last few years with post-truth, fake news and outrageous conspiracy theories. By the way, this raises another remarkable point: words are in dispute. The direction they give us is embedded in the discourse they are a part of. That’s why a single word can sometimes point to very different — or even opposite — things.
Belchior, a Brazilian composer and singer, would say words are razors. Razors become dull: by using them, their meaning is lost, they become powerless and simply serve to fill blanks. Usually, what remains is a ghost of the value they held — whether positive or negative — but we end up forgetting what exactly they are pointing to in the world. We have several cases of this phenomenon: freedom, empathy, (…). Maybe design is one of those words. Nevertheless, as Belchior would also say, I hope these crooked words ahead will slice your flesh like knife.
One of these dull words, which I have been discussing, is autonomy. I work as an instructor in an undergraduate Industrial Arts Graphic Design curriculum at Instituto Federal de Pernambuco (IFPE), Brazil, and I simply can’t avoid it. My everyday challenge is to create an environment for students to develop their articulation skills by organising elements in any given interface. By the way, that’s how I would define Graphic Design.
“Develop their articulation skills”, that’s what I wrote. This excerpt reveals one of the meanings of autonomy: to own one’s voice. This might be the most common sense in which the word is employed; so it might be the vaguest and most easily misconstrued by our neoliberal system. In fact, I have seen several kinds of coaches saying something in those lines. Brand strategists do advocate for “brand voices”. So, am I talking about the same thing as they are?
In platform-mediated relations, there is the fundamental assumption that each of us is the main character of a narrative that everyone madly wants to watch. And we can edit this reality whenever we want: anyone can have their own voice. Nevertheless, as we build those narratives, we commodify ourselves for platforms because it is impossible to detach personal and economic dimensions of whatever happens in social media. Hence, autonomy transmutes to entrepreneurship logic of “self-branding” and “influencing”. In other words, in this commodifying dynamic, autonomy is corrupted into meritocratic individualism and social relations boils down to networking. To watch this happening live, you just have to log into your LinkedIn.
Another shabby meaning autonomy can deliver — very common in the design field — is that of authorship. Echoing the neoliberal meritocracy, the “author” is taken to be a superior entity holding a singular worldview, generous enough to endow us with their creations. Well, we all do have our singular worldview; we might ask, then, what makes their views so special. Not to delve deeply into this, but it’s enough to state that from a materialist perspective, this mechanism is employed to add exchange value to authors’ labor: clients are willing to pay much more for prestigious designers’ and studios’ work.
This leads us into thinking about the designer as autonomous professional. In Brazil’s legal terms, profissional autônomo is a category of worker that has no employee attachment and to whom a series of rights are not guaranteed, such as paid vacation or unemployment benefits. Indeed, most designers do fit in as profissionais autônomos. But as gig economy trails on, we might employ the right words: precarization of labor. The service business model known as freelancing that is usual in our practice nudges us to valuing the author as self-brand. It might even work for the few on the top, but what about the rest of us? Uberization and looser employment relations are old news for designers that have undergone what is eerily called steady freelancing, which is actually precarious — and often underpaid — work. If it takes time to “build a brand” then we might consider who are those people that can actually afford this time.
In teaching, it is also possible to corrupt autonomy. Classrooms are not impermeable in our neoliberal leakage; nothing is farther from the truth. In our context of accelerated commodification of education and precarization of teaching jobs, some set of procedures that once aimed to empower students end up impoverishing the classroom experience. Why this happens is complex: it entangles various stakeholders and aspects. However, in the factory floor of education — the classroom — what is known as active methodologies (strategies such as flipped classroom and problem-based learning) way more often than not turn into oppressive dynamics in which instructors disclaim their responsibilities and students are thrown into Google to “develop their autonomy”.
It is none of those autonomies I try to foster because none of those are actually autonomy. Sure, autonomy does require one to develop one’s own voice, also needs building and expressing a singular worldview and also implies that students engage actively in their learning; but none of those alone characterises autonomy. These corrupted fragments of the word engender the same result when they are employed: depoliticization. Not by chance, these pseudo-autonomies can be commodified without any critical thinking: they are sold as an achievement or badge that students might earn in their gamified journey.
Autonomy is necessarily a collective articulation — and thus political — of why things work the way they do. That’s why people involved must recognise structures as something built and that can therefore be transformed. Hence it becomes critical. If autonomy is possible, it is as a testimony of here-and-now that emerges from the dialectic dance between freedom and responsibility. In graphic design education — in which I happen to work — this means making people see each other; design practice serves almost as an excuse. To quote another Brazilian singer and composer, Emicida, I would say that designing “is just a seed; smiling is still the only language that everyone understands”.
I believe this is the only way to recover the edge of autonomy as a razor-word: to refuse any of its depoliticised meanings and look towards material relations that we are able to build. It is necessary to care for the base, not aim to the top; caring for people, not for prestige. And I believe one of the first challenges is to open spaces for dialogue — far away from social media platforms.
A Portuguese version of this text is available here.
All images were taken during préocupe, a set of autonomous workshops held by IFPE graphic design students. This text is a reflection they led me to in our collective work. I also take the opportunity to thank them for this experience, especially Beatriz Vasconcelos, Danielly Guerra, Isadora Clemente, Laura Linck, Rodrigo Victor, Regina Silva and Sabrina Guimarães.
