We Are the Primitives

Abstract

This article was originally published in Italian in Modo, June 1985. We are the primitives in two ways at least: analogically and linguistically. We are analogically primitive because our condition is that of those who, having fallen from an airplane into the middle of the Amazon territory, find themselves operating with technologically advanced elements still on board, as well as with natural materials of the forest. The ideological parachute no longer works, and the transformations we accomplish in that jungle are meant to realize an accelerated renewal circuit rather than a design for global progress. Culture and design no longer are forces that slowly but heroically move the world toward salvation through logical and ethical radicalism. They are mechanisms of emotions and adaptations of changes that fail to drag the world toward a horizon; they only transform it into many diffuse diversities. Progress no longer seems to be valued; instead, the unexpected is valued. The grand unitarian theorems no longer exist, nor do the leading models of the rational theologies. What exists is a modernity without illuminism. We are witnessing a definitive and extreme secularization of design, within which design represents itself and no longer is a metaphor for a possible unity of technologies and languages. Human nature and the artificial nature of mechanisms, information, and the metropolis cohabit in sensorial identification, just as the Indian who identifies with the forest. That neoprimitive condition is not a design in the sense that it does not wish to be the latest trend of avant-garde fashions; but it is precisely a condition into which various languages and already diffuse attitudes fuse. To perceive that condition helps move postmodernism out of reactionary equivocations and, probably, gives greater freedom and awareness to our mode of designing. The communication of the primitive, indeed, achieves its maximum efficiency inside a closed system: It operates by archetypes and myths, working inside a circuit of users capable of perceiving its metaphorical keys and subject to its specific energy. Outside those conditions, the culture of the primitive is nothing but a formal repertory that currently is heeded and used by a large number of operators, artists, and designers. A password has not yet become effective, and already we detect the symptoms of a great attention paid to neoprimitive languages,