“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities
Relation, flow, dialogue, connectivity, emergence, network, becoming.
These terms seem to be the buzzwords in the current vocabulary of
design.
Within the context of postmodern theoretical writing, (phonetic) writing is a limiting medium. From Plato to Saussure and onwards to a bevy of structuralist and post-structuralist writers, words are acknowledged to have only an insecure relationship to the objects or concepts they seek to represent. For Jacques Derrida, the Western philosophical tradition has prioritised the spoken word over the written; a conditioning cultural factor he identifies as logocentricism. In the presence of a speaker we hear not only the author but the authority of a statement: written and, even more so, printed texts are denied this authority. However many claims are made in support of handwriting as an authentic representation of an individual, not least the authority invested in an autographic signature, writing, it has been claimed, does not possess the same degree of conviction as the spoken word. The printed word is, therefore, seen to be at yet one further remove from the authority of the speaker.