Being prescient concerning Obama, or Notes on the politics of configuration (part one)

Abstract

What is dissent in the case of the image? What are the politics implicit in the critical use of configuration? Design has a general difficulty with being critical. Though less so in the graphic arts, where a tradition of picture-as-commentary is (just) maintained, the technological instrumentality to which design is always prone let alone its obeisance to money means that design generally prefers not to think that it can think. But design is perfectly capable of thinking. Or, to put it another way, configuration is a thought-act. Politically speaking therefore the politics of the image happens when by design (by choreography, by reconfiguration, by (re-) working of the given conditions of representation) the graphic figure is transformed, through re-configuration, into a proposition. It is as a proposition, i.e., as a contribution to thought, that the image undertakes political work.