Knowledge Conditioned by - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Knowledge Conditioned by
the Void: On Complexity and
the Design Problem
Stephen Beckett

What does it mean when we say that design problems are com-
plex? That they are indeed complex is self-evident—if they were
simple, they could be solved with elementary logical deduction.
But what the statement predicates beyond this simple exclusion is
far from clear, and giving substance to this complexity has been
one of the defining tasks of design theory. A sampling of terms
ascribed to design problems—wicked, indeterminate, paradoxical,
ill-structured, near-decomposable—attest to complexity’s refusal
to yield to rational reduction but tell us little of its source or nature.
This reflects the wider ambiguity of the term. Depending
on the field of discourse, complexity can be taken as a quantita-
tive or qualitative property, as a determination of object or subject,
and as reducible or irreducible. Design theory has run the gamut
of these delimitations and come away with little certainty for its
efforts. One might argue (as I do below) that the definition of
complexity in design theory has reached the point of antinomy,
that is, the competing definitions of complexity are logically
sound, but are mutually exclusive when taken together. This am-
biguity limits complexity’s usefulness to design theory because
it offers little clarity to the determination of its concepts. Design
theory finds itself at a logical impasse—we can recognize that
design problems are complex, but we cannot say with any cer-
tainty what this means.

In this article, I argue that this need not be the case. The key
to making complexity useful to design theory, I contend, is in
recognizing that this ambiguity is meaningful in itself. I do this
first by distinguishing between artificial (computational) com-
plexity and social (intersubjective) complexity and then between
complexity as a property of a system and complexity as a product
of observation. I argue that this latter disjunction is the result of
a thorny logical category that Hegel called the determination
of reflection, by which a particular figure is “universalized” into
its own ground, and that social complexity—the complexity pro-
per to the design problem—is the result of the circular reasoning

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00586

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of the reflexive determination of a social system. Recognizing
this logical sleight-of-hand allows us to reconceive the complex-
ity of the design problem as a consequence of the dependence of
every apparently rational social system on some irrational core
that defines it. I conclude by briefly addressing the implications of
this reorientation.

From Artificial Complexity to Social Complexity
The concept of complexity that shapes design theory has roots
in the interdisciplinary speculations of the early cybernetics
movement, where it designated a degree of computational convolu-
tion. Warren Weaver refined the concept by distinguishing
between disorganized complexity (which is of a sufficient magni-
tude to yield to statistical analysis) and organized complexity
(which is not). The latter, he averred, was the challenge of the age:
“These new problems … requires [sic] science to make a third great
advance, an advance that must be even greater than the nine-
teenth-century conquest of problems of simplicity or the twenti-
eth-century victory over problems of disorganized complexity.”1
His contemporaries Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts similarly
saw great potential in the work of disentanglement. Bringing it to
bear on a model of neuronal connection, they prognosticated an
end to all subjective uncertainty: “With the determination of the
net, the unknowable object of knowledge, the ‘thing in itself,’
ceases to be unknowable.”2

The key to crossing this transcendental threshold to pre-
dictability was the reduction of a complex system to the set of
logical propositions that determine its behavior, a task that a new
age of computer technology and interdisciplinary research made
imminent. But the great disentanglement heralded by first-order
cybernetics never came to pass. Despite many research innova-
tions, there always remained some elusive factor that foiled the
complete reduction of any particular system to rational terms. That
factor was ref lexivity: the internal autonomy of every system
appeared to hinge on its purpose being defined from the outside
by an external observer.

The reintroduction of reflexivity to what we could call the
“flat ontology” of first-order cybernetics marked the passage to
second-order cybernetics. Because an autonomous system can only
be defined as such when its purpose is determined by an external
observer, the observer has to be included in the definition of the
system. Second-order cybernetics takes account of this reflexivity.
As Heinz von Foerster surmises: “The cybernetics of observed
systems we may consider to be first-order cybernetics; while sec-
ond-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of observing systems.”3
When the purpose of the observing system is also reflexively
determined, this regress becomes infinite.

1 Warren Weaver, “Science and Com-
plexity,” American Scientist 36, no. 4
(1948): 540.

2 Warren S. McCulloch and Walter

Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the
Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,”
Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5
(1943): 131.

3 Heinz von Foerster, Understanding

Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics
and Cognition (New York: Springer,
2003), 286.

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We can define the complexity of first-order cybernetics as
artificial. Artificial complexity is reducible to simple, rational
propositions, but only because it overlooks the bounding maneu-
ver effected by the observer of the system when determining its
purpose. The complexity of second-order cybernetics, which rec-
ognizes the illegitimacy of this erasure of the observer, can be
defined as social, given the necessarily social nature of observa-
tion.4 Whereas artificial complexity is a property of an observed
system minus its observer, social complexity refers to the inability
of an observer to reduce the system they observe to simple logical
propositions without effacing their role in defining it.

The cause of this irreducibility is the paradoxical structure
of the system: the autonomy of any system—its closure, its bound-
edness—is dependent on erasing the observer’s participatory role
in defining it as an object. This gives rise to a kind of parallax
structure: from one position (that of the observer), there is a
bounded, rational system minus its founding determination; from
another position, this foundation comes into view, but the bound-
ary is lost because we are obliged to include within the system
some point outside of it (i.e., the observer). There is no way to
behold both foundation and boundary simultaneously. Social com-
plexity thus represents the impossibility of resolving this struc-
tural paradox, and thus the impossibility of knowledge of the
system being totalized.

Far from resolving Kant’s transcendental challenge to phi-
losophy and granting access to the “thing in itself,” cybernetics
found itself reckoning with a structural curiosity that Hegel had
recognized in his radicalization of the Kantian project some 150
years earlier. This formal paradox had beguiled Karl Marx and
Sigmund Freud and became a defining preoccupation of poststruc-
turalist philosophers working contemporaneously to the second-
order cyberneticists, and frustrated the “general theory” ambitions
of systems theorists, economists, sociologists, and design theorists.
Whatever the field of knowledge, the challenge was the same: to
account for what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls “the internal production
of an exteriority”5 on which a system depends for its autonomy.

This concept of an autonomous, evolving system respond-
ing to the conditions of its environment has roots in the systems
thinking approach to biology initiated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy6
and elaborated by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.7
These authors began by delineating the features of autonomous
systems in nature and then cautiously extending this model to
nonnatural contexts. Others have exhibited less caution—sociolo-
gist Niklas Luhmann, for instance, enthusiastically embraced
Varela and Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis in his elaborate theo-
rization of social systems.8 Elsewhere, thinkers such as Freud and

“Let me repeat the three concepts that
are in a triadic fashion connected to
each other. They are: first, the observers;
second, the language they use; and third,
the society they form by the use of their
language.… You need all three to have
all three.” Ibid., 284.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Economy and the
Future: A Crisis of Faith, trans. M. B.
Debevoise (East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 2014), 15.
For a summary, see Ludwig von
Bertalanffy, “The History and Status
of General Systems Theory,” Academy
of Management Journal 15, no. 4
(December 1972): 407–26.
See Humberto R. Maturana and
Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and
Cognition: The Realization of the Living
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980).
See Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems,
trans. John Bednarz and Dirk Baecker
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1995).

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Jacques Lacan began with the components of social systems before
accounting for their interaction, and still others (such as Hegel,
Marx, and Louis Althusser) took the social as a system sui gen-
eris and then attempted to account for its apparent autonomy and
evolution. In every attempt, the stumbling block is the same: the
mysterious presence of a founding term that defines the system
but cannot be counted within it. Hegel calls it the “determination
of reflection” (Reflexionsbestimmung); for Marx, it is found within
the mystical transformations of commodity exchange; Freud
alludes to it in what he calls the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz;9 Lacan
calls it the “master signifier,” Luhmann the “double contingency.”
Whatever its formulation, the formal difficulty it produces is
the same: it acts as a “knot” in the structure of knowledge that
prevents that knowledge from being totalized into a complete,
autonomous system.

Responses to this difficulty fall into three basic categories:
(1) to “desubjectivize” the components of the system and thus
privilege the system ahead of its components (as we see in theo-
ries of Friedrich von Hayek, Althusser, and Luhmann); (2) to con-
strue the unity of the system as a purely subjective attribution
that has no substantial being in reality (the response of the prag-
matists, “soft” systems theorists, and radical constructivists); or
(3) to “ontologize the knot,” so to speak, and thus treat this diffi-
culty not as an obstruction to the full knowledge of reality but as
an irreducible condition of that reality and thus an irreducible
condition of subjective being (as per Hegel and Lacan). Because
these three responses represent distinct approaches to the issue of
complexity, it is worth considering each one in a little more depth.

From Knowledge to Belief
The basic maneuver of the “desubjectivizing” approach to social
systems is to grant the system the upper hand in determining its
operation, thus deeming its component subjects unwitting dupes
to some greater purpose beyond their comprehension. A well-
known formulation of this systemic subject is Adam Smith’s
“invisible hand” of the market, which ensures the stability of the
social system as long as its individual participants act in their own
interests rather than in the interests of the system.10 The lesson of
the invisible hand is that the complexity of the system puts it
beyond the comprehension of its components, and thus it should
be spared their intervention in its operation. Austrian social theo-
rist Friedrich von Hayek marked this lesson well, elevating Smith’s
observation to the basis of a theory of social systems.

Hayek took the conceptual tools of cybernetics and sys-
tems theory and made a model of society in which every subject is
blind to the ultimate cause and effects of their actions. “We never

The term (translated by Strachey as
“psychical (ideational) representations,”
but which could be more literally
translated as “representations of
representations”) appears in Freud’s
1915 essay “Repression,” in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Works
of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV, trans.
James Strachey (London: Vintage,
2001): 146–58. The term is an attempt
to account for the representation of
repressed representations that cannot
appear to the conscious mind but
nonetheless have a formal presence.

10 “He is in this, as in many other cases,
led by an invisible hand to promote
an end which was no part of his
intention.… By pursuing his own
interest he frequently promotes that
of the society more effectually than
when he really intends to promote it.”
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), 593–94.

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act,” he says, “and could never act, in full consideration of all
the facts of a particular situation, but always by singling out as
relevant only some aspects of it; not by conscious choice or deliber-
ate selection, but by a mechanism over which we do not exercise
deliberate control.”11 We rely on rules, norms, conventions, and
institutions to guide our actions—“experience” that is not our own
but has “become incorporated in the schemata of thought which
guide us.”12 Though we may believe ourselves to be rational sub-
jects, a determining portion of that subjectivity belongs to the
social system in which we participate. The autonomy of the partic-
ipants in a social system is therefore a “synoptic delusion”13: it is
the system, not the components, that is rational.

Hayek’s model resembles the model of historically deter-
mined thought elaborated by structuralist Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser. In Althusser’s antihumanist interpretation of
Marx, knowledge is the output of a mode of production in which
thought is the labor and is thus determined like any mode of pro-
duction by social, historical, and economic relations. “This definite
system of conditions of theoretical practice is what assigns any
given thinking subject (individual) its place and function in the
production of knowledges.”14 This “place and function” determines
the thought of the subject: “This determinate reality is what
defines the roles and functions of the ‘thought’ of particular indi-
viduals, who can only ‘think’ the ‘problems’ already actually or
potentially posed.”15 Thus the autonomy of the subject, which
Althusser scorns as “the myth that idealism produces as a myth in
which to recognize and establish itself,”16 is an illusion that hides
the determining function of the system.

Although they draw different political conclusions, Hayek
and Althusser see society as an autonomous system that relies on
the lost autonomy of its component subjects. The subjects are
“desubjectivized” in that they are reduced to machines rather than
autonomous individuals—(over)determined rather than deter-
mining. The complexity of the social system puts it beyond the
comprehension of its subjects. Whereas Hayek sees this complexity
as the ultimate horizon of subjective knowledge that must be
accepted as such, Althusser sees it as a call for a new approach to
analyzing subjectivity that takes account of this “determination by
a structure.”17

An alternative approach to complexity is to construe it as
a purely epistemological (rather than a metaphysical) problem,
whereby complexity is seen as a challenge to one’s methods of
inquiry and validation. We can see this approach as a kind of tac-
tical retreat from the totalizing ambitions of first-order cyber-
netics, with uncertainty replacing certainty as a general condition
of knowledge. Within the cybernetic paradigm, this approach is

11 Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation
and Liberty: A New Statement of
the Liberal Principles of Justice and
Political Economy (London: Routledge,
1982), 30.
Ibid.
Ibid., 15.

12
13
14 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar,
Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster
(London: Verso, 2009), 44.
Ibid.
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 203.

15
16
17

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exemplified in the work of von Foerster, as well as in the conver-
sation theory of Gordon Pask18 and the radical constructivism of
Ernst von Glasersfeld19 and Ranulph Glanville, all of which reassert
the role of language and reflexivity in the construction and testing
of knowledge.

In contrast to the desubjectivizing approach, the construc-
tivist approach focuses its attention on the subject rather than the
system, regarding the latter as never more than a construct in the
mind of the former insofar as it is ascribed purpose and direction.
Because the role of the observer is inseparable from the system, the
task for the researcher is to discover how knowledge of the sys-
tem—of “external reality”—is constructed by the observing subject
and how mental representations of objects are confused with the
“thing in itself”: “Forgetting that we are treating our constancies as
if they were objects, we treat each object as is instead. And forget-
ting that the qualities we find in these constancies are attributed
by us, we treat these qualities not as attributes but as if they were
properties of our objects.”20

Accordingly, the main concern of this approach is the analy-
sis of truth claims and the construction of objects of knowledge. As
emphasized in systems theory versions of this approach, such as
Werner Ulrich’s critical systems heuristics,21 the description of a
system and its components is inseparable from one’s beliefs about
its purpose and goal and thus can never be reduced to objective
propositions. Complexity stands for this irreducibility to objective
truth. As theoretical biologist Robert Rosen puts it: “Complexity is
not an intrinsic property of a system nor of a system description.
Rather, it arises from the number of ways in which we are able to
interact with the system.”22

The concept of complexity is thus conditioned by whichever
entity is granted determining priority: either the social system
determines its subject or vice versa. The two positions represent
an antinomy: both cannot be true at the same time, yet neither is
logically flawed. The truth of a social system is either noumenal or
groundless, and as long as the positions remain contradictory, our
analysis is constrained to a choice of one or the other. The only
possible way to overcome this aporia, it seems, is to refuse the
choice and turn to the conditions that necessitate it. The third
approach to complexity begins by identifying complexity precisely
with this “impossible” point in the structure of the social system at
which both positions are true, that is, the point at which the sub-
ject determines the system that determines it as subject.

The challenge of pinning down this elusive formation
in language is in evidence in the circuitous constructions to
which it frequently gives rise. Hegel sets the standard early in this
regard, with his description of the Reflexionsbestimmung in his Sci-
ence of Logic:

18 See Gordon Pask, Conversation,

Cognition and Learning: A Cybernetic
Theory and Methodology (Amsterdam:
Elsevier, 1975).

19 See Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radical
Constructivism: A Way of Knowing
and Learning (London: Routledge, 1995).

20 Ranulph Glanville, “An Observing

Science,” Foundations of Science 6, nos.
1–3 (2001), 64 (emphasis in original).
21 See Werner Ulrich, “A Brief Introduction
to Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH),”
available at http://www.wulrich.com/
downloads/ulrich_2005f.pdf (accessed
October 1, 2018).

22 Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems:
Philosophical, Mathematical and
Methodological Foundations (New
York: Springer, 2012), 298.

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The determination of reflection … has taken its otherness
back into itself. It is positedness—negation which has
however deflected the reference to another into itself,
and negation which, equal to itself, is the unity of itself
and its other, and only through this is an essentiality.
It is, therefore, positedness, negation, but as reflection
into itself it is at the same time the sublatedness of this
positedness, infinite reference to itself.23

Through the determination of reflection, a particular entity
comes to stand for the universal of which it is a particular—it is
defined with reference to itself and thus closes the loop of deter-
mination by forgoing reference to a higher category that encom-
passes itself and its other. An example Hegel gives in a later work
is the figure of the monarch, who as a personification of the state
universalizes in a particular entity that which unifies his or her
particular subjects. The monarch is at once a person like any other
and simultaneously manifests in one particular entity the univer-
sality in which every other particular person partakes.24 The deter-
mination of reflection is thus a kind of short-circuit—it halts the
regress of determination by turning back in on itself: “Because of
this ref lection into themselves, the determinations of reflection
appear as free essentialities, sublated in the void without recipro-
cal attraction or repulsion.”25

Marx describes the same structural formation in his analy-
sis of commodity exchange, such as in his accounting for how one
particular commodity (money) becomes the universal equivalent
of the exchange value of all commodities. Commodity exchange
presupposes the equivalence of all commodities, but money is just
one particular commodity among others and is therefore somehow
both universal and particular:

What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity
becomes money because all other commodities express
their values in it but, on the contrary, that all other com-
modities universally express their values in a particular
commodity because it is money. The movement through
which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own
result, leaving no trace behind.26

Marx deploys the language of religion in his account of this mirac-
ulous transformation, referring to it as “transubstantiation” and
the power it confers as a “fetish.” Commodity exchange appears
to rely, he says, on some belief on the part of participants whose
logic is irrational but the affirmation of which is necessary for
exchange to take place. No explicit disavowal of reason is re-
quired—the affirmed belief is implicit in the act of exchange:
“They do this without being aware of it.”27

23 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The
Science of Logic, trans. George Di
Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 353 (emphasis
in original).

24 See §§ 279–80 of G.W.F. Hegel, Outlines
of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M.
Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 267–73.

25 Hegel, The Science of Logic, 352

(emphasis in original).

26 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political

Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes
(London: Penguin Books, 1980), 187.
Ibid., 166–67. The English translation of
this sentence loses the biblical allusion
of the German original (“Sie wissen das
nicht, aber sie tun es”), which bears
close resemblance to Luke 23:34 (“Father,
forgive them, for they know not what
they do”; in German: “Vater vergib ihnen;
denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun”).

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As economic theorist Alfred Sohn-Rethel emphasizes, this
moment of “practical solipsism” by which particular values
become subject to universal exchange-value not only allows the
process of exchange to take place but also grounds the social sys-
tem it unifies by determining all value (of labor, of materials, of
usefulness) as equivalent:

The relations of exchange transacted in a market express
themselves in quantitative differences of this uniform
denominator as different “prices” and create a system of
social communication of actions performed by individuals
in complete independence of one another and oblivious
to the socializing effect involved. The pivot to this mode
of socialization is the abstraction intrinsic to the action
of exchange.28

Thus the act of exchange is what makes values equivalent—they
are not exchanged because they are equivalent; they are equiva-
lent because they are exchanged. The subjective belief implicit
in this action “closes the loop” of the social structure by presup-
posing the condition it produces. For their coherence, subject and
system both depend not on any rational knowledge but on an irra-
tional belief, that is, the belief in the equivalence of all forms of
value. This belief—implied by the abstraction necessary to social
action—must remain ‘“unthought” to be effective. It must remain
unthought precisely because it is irrational, and it is irrational pre-
cisely because it is the moment of logical sublimation through
which the subject presupposes the system that determines it as
subject, a process that then “vanishes in its own result.”

We find the same paradoxical figure in the work of Jacques
Lacan in the form of the master signifier. Lacan uses the termi-
nology of semiotics to frame the relation between a subject and the
system that defines it (what Lacan calls a “field of knowledge”).
Within this schema, the master signifier is the signifier of “pure
difference” that guarantees the consistency of a field of knowledge
because it is the signifier to which all other signifiers ultimately
refer through their relations of difference. As such, it performs
the formal function of the determination of reflection: “Knowledge
initially arises at the moment at which S1 [the master signifier]
comes to represent something, through its intervention in the
field defined, at the point we have come to, as an already struc-
tured field of knowledge.”29 The autonomy of a field of knowledge
relies on the exceptional status of one particular signifier, which,
like the monarch or money commodity, intervenes in a field of
knowledge so as to bound it. This exceptional signifier stands
for the field of knowledge itself; its “signified” is “the unity of all
signifiers in the field of knowledge.” The master signifier therefore

28 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual

and Manual Labour: A Critique of
Epistemology (London: Macmillan,
1978), 30.

29 Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of

Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg
(New York: Norton, 2007), 13.

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DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 2 Spring 2020

represents the action of the observing subject on a system: it signi-
fies the suturing effect on the system of the erasure of the
observer—the very action that reduces social complexity to artifi-
cial complexity.

Through the determination of reflection, antinomy becomes
autonomy. In the foregoing examples, the action of the determina-
tion of reflection assures that the social system functions as an
autonomous system and remains irreducible to rational knowl-
edge. At any given moment, its status as a bounded system
depends on its content—knowledge—always being supplemented
with a subjective action that remains purely formal (i.e., uncon-
scious). This action implies belief because it cannot be reduced to
knowledge—the subject must act as if the system is a system for the
system to function as a system.

This suggests that complexity emerges from the irreducible
gap in knowledge introduced by belief. Attempting to bridge this
gap with rational knowledge can only lead to a position of antin-
omy—the gap, once bridged in this way, simply opens up else-
where. The path beyond this antinomy is via the elaboration of the
proposition that the complexity of a social system is the result of its
autonomy being dependent not on some missing piece of rational
knowledge but on an irrational subjective belief.

The Design Problem as Symptom
We can see the passage from the first to the second approach to
complexity play out in the field of design theory in its own passage
from rationalism to pragmatism. The former approach is best
exemplified in the work of Hebert A. Simon and the first genera-
tion of the design methods movement, and the latter in the reflec-
tive practice of Donald Schön and the second generation of the
same movement. Simon’s pioneering and influential work on the
structure of design problems is widely acknowledged, but he can
be also credited as the first to make the antinomy between the two
approaches to complexity explicit when he conceded in a 1962
paper that “in the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist
may at the same time be a pragmatic holist.”30 Although he recog-
nized the limits to which complex problems could be “decom-
posed” into rational propositions, he failed to embrace the
transcendental challenge presented by this inherent limitation.

The theorists of the first generation of the design meth-
ods movement similarly failed to bridge the “rationality gap”31
that prevented their various programs from fully desubjectivizing
the design scenario and thus achieving systemicity. For instance,
J. Christopher Jones attempted to develop a “unified system of

30 Herbert A. Simon, “The Architecture of
Complexity,” Proceedings of the Ameri-
can Philosophical Society 106, no. 6
(December 1962): 468. This line was
omitted when the essay was reproduced
in Simon’s later work, The Sciences of
the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996).

31 The term comes from Jane Darke,

“The Primary Generator and the Design
Process,” in Developments in Design
Methodology, ed. Nigel Cross
(Chichester: Wiley, 1984), 175–88.

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DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 2 Spring 2020

design” by maintaining a programmatic separation between
logical analysis and creative synthesis.32 Christopher Alexander
argued that design needed new rational methodological tools
based on the hypothesis that “for every problem there is one
decomposition which is especially proper to it … usually different
from the one in the designer’s head.”33

The second generation of the movement was born of the fail-
ure of these programs to cohere into a system. Once this defeat
was conceded, the support of rationalism fell away: knowledge lost
its secure status, the design problem was reclassified as “wicked,”34
and the vanguard of the first generation vituperated their earlier
efforts. What remained is a much more cautious methodology
based explicitly or implicitly on the principles of philosophical
pragmatism. The high theoretical ambitions of the rationalists
were abandoned for what Donald Schön called the “swampy low-
lands” of real practice, wherein problematic situations are “confus-
ing messes incapable of technical solution” and one’s progress
relies on “experience, trial and error, intuition and muddling
through.”35 Design theory has been largely content to remain in
these regions.

A danger of this pragmatic turn, however, is that the social
dimension of design should remain forever a “given” in the back-
ground of any particular design problem. The role of the social as a
determining structure eludes a pragmatistic approach due to the
reluctance to posit the social as a system (albeit one with a mean-
ingful constitutive gap). The result is that the transformative
power of design is foreshortened because it is restricted in each
case to addressing a unique and isolated problem that disappears
as soon as it is solved. “The truth is a moment of correct practice,”
wrote Max Horkheimer, in a critique of American pragmatism,
“but whoever identifies it directly with success passes over history
and makes himself an apologist for the reality dominant at any
given time.”36 When treating design problems as merely wicked,
design theory does so at the risk of failing to discover a deeper
critical purpose.

I suggest that this depth can be realized by a definition of
the design problem that recognizes its complexity as an effect of
the reflexive determination of a social system. The autonomy of a
social system depends on some defining truth that produces its
formal unity. A complex problem arises when this truth is no lon-
ger self-evident and thus fails to “close the loop” of the system. The
subject’s knowledge of the social is thus deprived of its master sig-
nifier—it is not sutured by truth but holed by the void of doubt.
Complexity no longer unifies the system but decenters the subject.

32 See J. Christopher Jones, “A Method of
Systematic Design,” in Developments in
Design Methodology, ed. Nigel Cross
(Chichester: Wiley, 1984), 9–32.
33 Christopher Alexander, Notes on the
Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1964), 83.

34 See Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M.

Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory
of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2
(1973): 155–69.

35 Donald Schön, The Reflective Practioner:
How Professionals Think in Action
(London: Basic Books, 1991), 43.
36 Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy
and Social Science: Selected Early
Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1995), 200.

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This definition of a complex problem aligns to Lacan’s defi-
nition of the symptom: that which “attaches itself to a truth that no
longer functions.”37 Accordingly, a design problem, as social symp-
tom, can be understood as the metaphoric elaboration of the loss of
efficacy of a founding truth. The advantage this symptomatic
approach has against the constructivist approach is that this
realization need not lead directly into the spurious infinity of
“observer-defining-system” because it recognizes that any found-
ing truth achieves the status of truth only insofar as it predicates
belief; that is, its necessity derives only from being posited as foun-
dational so as to retroactively suture the system that it founds (as
per its function as reflexive determination). This grounds all ques-
tions of boundaries in the actions and knowledge of the subjects
whose belief defines the system in which the problem obtains. It
addresses not the validity of this truth but its determining effect
on the system and its boundary (i.e., its formal closure). If the truth
that predicates this belief no longer functions, then the boundary
(relative to the subject) is precisely the problem.

This symptomatic approach to complexity distinguishes
truth from knowledge by recognizing the former as the necessary
irrational supplement to the latter if the latter is to take the form of
an autonomous system. This truth is in evidence in the actions of
subjects—it is the implicit belief that must be held if the system is
to appear rational to its subjects (per Althusser, it is the “answer
which does not correspond to any question posed”38). Social com-
plexity derives from the indeterminability of this truth: it is irre-
ducible to rational knowledge because it is reflexively determined
and thus can only be predicated on belief. Accordingly, a complex
problem arises when this noumenal truth on which the system
depends no longer inspires faith—when it no longer “goes without
saying.” Without this truth to close the loop of the system, its ratio-
nality becomes corrupted and disordered. Its boundaries are no
longer clearly delineated. When this loss of belief is widespread,
the system may disintegrate entirely.

The designer is summoned to arrest this decline. When her
actions are successful, she instates a new truth around which the
knowledge of a system can cohere (she does this without being
aware of it). The novelty of this truth never appears as such; first
because this truth is only ever implied in the actions of subjects
and remains “unthought,” and second, because this truth is retro-
actively posited as a founding moment in some distant past such
that it appears that it was “ever thus.” Her solution to the problem
is seen as having revealed some essence of the social system that
was until then misrecognized—some common cause uniting the
interests of every subject of which they had lost sight.

37 Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire: Livre

XIX … ou pire [The Seminar: Book XIX …
Or Worse] (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011),
46: “Voilà pour le symptôme en tant
qu’il se rattache à la vérité qui n’a plus
cours.” [Here is the symptom in so far
as it attaches itself to a truth that no
longer functions].

38 Althusser and Balibar, Reading

Capital, 29.

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This might appear to suggest that design acts in an essen-
tially conservative fashion, restoring wayward social systems to
the status quo. If this is so, it is because design theory has been
reluctant to posit the social dimension of design problems as any-
thing other than a given. To recognize social complexity as a sign
of the determination of reflection that unifies a system is to recog-
nize that for its appearance of autonomy, every social system
depends on the beliefs implicit in the actions of its subjects (whom
the system constitutes as subjects). The social system is therefore
not simply the backdrop before which a design problem is staged;
it is the essence of the complexity of a design problem.

This belief that sutures the social should properly be called
ideological, and I suggest that via a turn toward the ideological,
design theory can sublate the rationalist-pragmatist deadlock. This
would allow the field to advance in productive new directions
because it would add both the subject and the social system to its
objects of study—an elaboration that the antinomy of complexity
has heretofore proscribed.

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