04 DESIGN STRUGGLES

BREAKING CLASS

Upward Climbers and the Swiss Nature of Design History

Paola De Martin

… when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her, that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural …

-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Introduction

Give us a Break! is the title of my ongoing Ph.D. research based on the biographies of designers with working-class backgrounds in Zurich during the neoliberal era (approximately 1970 to 2010). My oral sources include, first of all, extended narrative interviews with five upward climbers born between 1952 and 1992. One further interview was undertaken by a sociologist asking me to talk about my own social mobility. Shorter exchanges with an ever-growing number of class-passers enrich this corpus, and finally oral and written exchanges with half a dozen experts from the design field complete it. I combine this polyphony with photographs given to me by the interviewees and with visual references mentioned during our talks. I soon realized that my material was resistant to a single analytical approach. This is why, in this essay, which is based on my presentation at the 2018 Swiss Design Network (SDN) conference “Beyond Change,” I will sketch out the combined approach that I’ve developed during the last six years of my research in order to do justice to the matter. In fact, I soon discovered, somehow unsurprisingly, that these biographies are a completely new content for design history, one that provides rich aesthetic and existential details of former proletarian lives, and by doing so says much about the aesthetics of social inequality. Beyond this, I found out – to my surprise – that these transformative paths open up a wholly new perspective on design history. I started to use them like special lenses that enlighten the sociohistorical spectrum of the design world. Before I can explain how and why this is so, I want to give a quantitative and qualitative overview of the Swiss context of class and neoliberalism and its connection to the creative industries.

The Swiss Design of Inequality – Facts and Figures

Most people around the world, I’ve noticed, do not think of Switzerland as a country with a strong working-class presence, but in fact, this was the reality when I grew up as the child of workers in Zurich. Born in 1965, I remember very well that until the late 1970s the city was still a major workers’ capital, with a very vivid and diverse working-class culture. For example, from one of the major magazines in Zurich, my mum – a factory worker first and a cleaner later – would buy workers’ trousers for my dad and the hard plastic tableware that we used every day and for many years before we could afford ceramics. My dad – he was a construction worker – would take his own food to the construction site in a tiffin box and play cards every Sunday morning in one of the many workers’ bars. Living according to a typical gendered labor division – he constructs and she cleans – together they knew quite something about the architecture, the design, and the art of class-making, a knowledge they passed on to me performatively. But there was also a reflexive space and a shared language of sly adaptation and open resistance. The key figures I remember well: a workers’ pastor, a workers’ doctor, a workers’ soccer tournament, a workers’ bowling club, and a workers’ alpine club. We would sing workers’ pop songs, and also leftist intellectual songs, cite famous quotes from workers’ plays and novels that made us feel proud (my favorite: “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated,” from My Fair Lady by George Bernard Shaw). We would go to the workers’ library, read workers’ magazines, and some of us would even engage as photographers in the now perished Workers’ Photography Association, the Swiss Arbeiterfotobund. The great majority of us would vote for the socialist party and sometimes for other workers’ parties more on the extreme left. We would celebrate our immemorial parties on our memorial days all year round. This world was so self-evident and present then; who would ever have thought that it would completely disappear? I didn’t think so much about it when I became a textile designer in the 1990s; at the time, I sensed the connection between my profession and industry. But this industry, too, has almost disappeared, and I went on to become a design historian questioning the social impositions of globalization. Only then did I begin to reflect on the speed and radicality of the downfall of working-class cultures, and I felt the need to exchange thoughts as a lecturer at the ZHdK, the Zurich University of the Arts.

I’m far from romanticizing this era. Proletarian life was a constant struggle. I have no sympathy for populist attitudes that mystify the “simple people,” because I never thought of the milieu of my background as simple. It is a sense of unbelief that overcomes me when I’m at the ZHdK, again and again, and a critical distance towards innovative enthusiasm. It’s also the new architecture of the school that triggers my reserve, again and again. Before it was repurposed as the ZHdK campus, the Toni Areal was a yogurt factory where some of my mother’s best friends were employed. In their free time, she would perform an ostentatiously neat and decent lady, and he would perform an ostentatiously lean and modern, introverted smart-guy. As a child, I was fascinated by the overdetermination of their styles. Today I think that stripping off their workingclass props and conforming to bourgeois gender norms was important for them, as for many other working-class people I knew, because inside the factory they were denied their gender and sex to an extent that dehumanized and transformed them into functional blue-collared tools serving the logic of material production. She would work countless hours of her life on the assembly line, and he would endlessly drive the truck up and down the iconic ramp of the Toni factory.

Today this ramp has become a media icon that stands for the successful transformation of the old, repetitive, and material labor into the new, creative, and immaterial one. Toni is one of the many former factories that have undergone this change. Where in earlier days the poorly educated could find jobs behind the discreet walls of soap, beer, turbine, textile, shoe, weapon, and engine factories, there are now restaurants and museums, galleries, libraries, and educational institutions. In the former industrial areas, you will also find design, art, and architectural studios, as well as advertising, music, and film production sites, and finally, close together, shops selling mass-produced goods, niche design articles, and second-season stuff alike. Over the last four decades Zurich has become a global capital of finance, higher education, insurance, raw material trading, IT – and the creative industries (CI). My own fashion brand Beige, the Freitag flagship store, Google, On running shoes, UBS and Credit Suisse, the expanding Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and ZHdK, among other higher educational institutions – we are all part of this new reality, no less so than the annual Long Night of the Museums and the restaurants that are open all night long and all year round, the Street Parade, the Zurich Film Festival, the extension of the major art museum Kunsthaus Zurich, the Prime Tower skyscraper, the new Europaallee, the Theater Spektakel in summer and the Zurich Marathon in winter. The skin of the city today is the postmodernist, diverse, rich, sustainable, enjoyable – and remarkably red-green ruled – surface of neoliberalism, or what Jan Jagodzinski has aptly coined “designer capitalism.”¹ Not surprisingly, Zurich regularly ranks as one of the cities with the highest quality of life worldwide. But quality always has, whatever capitalism rules, a price which not everybody can afford. Former workers’ areas have been gentrified and the once-strong working class has lost its symbolic capital. While the number of working-poor families and homeless people grows at the margins of the city, white-trash-bashing has become socially and politically acceptable.

The changes in Zurich over the last few decades

1. Jan Jagodzinski, Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

2. Bundesamt für Statistik (BFS), Statistisches Jahrbuch der Schweiz 2018 (Zurich: NZZ Libro, 2018), 106, 624.

3. Toni Ricciardi, Breve storia dell’emigrazione italiana in Svizzera (Rome: Donizelli, 2018), 122–32.

are representative of the structural changes that have taken place in Switzerland as a whole. For example, the agricultural or first sector employed 14.5% of the Swiss working population in 1960, and now employs just 3.3%. This small share is even more dramatic if we take into consideration that it is bolstered by notoriously high public subsidies for agricultural products and services. In contrast, the tertiary or services sector, which includes the creative industries, now employs two and a half times as many people as it did in 1960: 75.5% as opposed to 39%. The secondary, industrial and craft sector, employed 46.5% of the Swiss working population in 1960. This percentage has more than halved to just 21.1% today.² Who are these new workers now?

When I talk in public about Swiss working-class issues, the audience – be it in Zurich, Buenos Aires, Oslo, Ahmedabad, or Berlin – tend to assume two things. First, that in Switzerland, the super-rich country, there aren’t any “real” workers anymore, and second, that I’m talking about migrants. It seems so unthinkable that there are workers in this country at all, and that not all of them are from abroad. But in fact, Swiss workers have always represented the majority of the working class. Between 1970 and today, the share of migrant and low-skilled employees in the first and secondary sectors fluctuated between 20% and 40%, depending on the region, the branch, and the economic situation. In the early 1970s, migrant workers numbered more than half a million and were almost all Italians. After the oil crises of the 1970s, almost two-thirds of the Italian community were instrumentalized as economic buffers and had to leave the country to save the Swiss economy. In the early 1980s, the country recovered from the oil price shocks and more and more small but significant groups of Spaniards, Portuguese, Yugoslavs, and others came with precarious regular permits to work in the agricultural and industrial sectors and the building, care, and cleaning branches.³ Many illegal migrants came from non-European countries to seek better lives for themselves and their families. The estimated number of these “sans-papiers” lies in the six-digit range.

A new phenomenon since the late 1980s is the so-called working poor, which today numbers 145,000 people. Together with their non-working family members living in the same household, this adds up to more than 571,000 people living in relative poverty, equivalent to 14% of the 8.2 million inhabitants of Switzerland. Seven percent of children and teenagers in this country suffer from relative poverty. This means that they survive, of course, in the medium-term, but don’t have the means to live a dignified life, which leads to stress-related illnesses and a lower life expectancy. Relative poverty puts a moral and economic pressure on people to enter – at a young age and without undertaking further education – the ever-shrinking labor market for poorly skilled professions, which typically leads to a life of low pay and diminished opportunities for themselves and their children. Shame at being poor is widespread, and the remarkable numbers of working poor who do not claim the state welfare to which they are entitled can be seen as a quantitative proxy of this social shame. Invisibility is what most characterizes poverty in this country.⁴

The middle class, in spite of all the pessimistic gloom, has not disappeared at all but has undergone a transformation resulting in new winners and losers in the financial, technical, knowledge-based, and creative economies.⁵ Compared to the structure of the middle class some forty years ago, the middle class of today is on the whole more hierarchical, but less hierarchical on the microscale of everyday business. Status angst, passive-aggressive symptoms of depression, along with eager assimilation to a normative optimism are widespread among this diverse middle class.⁶ To complete the picture, the new phenomenon of the neoliberal era must be mentioned at the other end of the social scale: the super-rich. The growing inequality in Switzerland can be traced back to the racing away of their incomes, and much more of their fortunes.⁷

In Zurich, besides these economic elites, the other winners of neoliberalism, the cultural capitalists, are also highly concentrated. The proportion of Zurich’s population older than fifteen holding a degree in higher education was less than 10% in 1970 and is 47% in 2010. This is the highest of all Swiss cities (Geneva: 44%; Bern: 43%; Basel: 38%; St Gallen: 31%; Swiss average: 29%). Whereas the working-class migrants who arrived during the three decades of the post-War economic boom delayed the shift from a manufacturing to a services economy for longer than other European countries, the new migrants accelerate it. In Zurich, the high concentration of cultural and economic elites is fed by international employees, of whom 80% hold a degree in higher education and 10% have a Ph.D. The share of Zurich’s population with only nine years of compulsory schooling or less diminished from 33% in 1970 to 19% in 2010.⁸

Unfortunately, we lack long-term data on the social backgrounds of those working in Zurich’s creative industries. We know that exclusion in the admission process exists for design studies at the ZHdK, and has increased since the implementation of the Bologna reforms in the first decade of the new millennium. It is less pronounced than in medical studies, for example, and comparable to exclusion rates in humanities at the Zurich University. At the ZHdK, the percentage of students whose parents hold only a mandatory school degree is 6% (compared to an average among the Swiss working population of 14%) and is mostly accounted for by poorly educated migrant workers, whose children are more likely than the offspring of poorly educated Swiss workers to grasp their chance in design education. The percentage of students at the ZHdK whose parents hold a secondary school degree is 28% (compared to an average among the Swiss working population of 42%). When it comes to higher education, the relation between ZHdK students and the general population reverses. The parents of approximately 60% of ZHdK students hold a degree in higher education – half of them a Swiss degree and the other half a foreign one (compared to an average among the Swiss working population of 29%). A majority of the growing number of international students who move to Zurich to study design are the relatively well-equipped heirs of cultural capital, mostly coming from Germany and other European countries.⁹

The most recent data on employees in the CI sector illustrate a remarkable growth of 8% in the period from 2005 to 2008 in Zurich’s greater area. The growth of the CI sector is more dynamic than the economy as a whole and continues to be so after the crisis of 2008. This is especially true for the CI in Zurich, according to the creative industry reports of 2010 and 2016. But one has to take into consideration that in the 2010 report an employee is counted as such only if they’ve worked at least six hours weekly,¹⁰ whereas in the 2016 report the threshold for being considered an “employee” is just one hour of work per week.¹¹ In other words, someone working for just 52 hours per year – an intense one-week project, say – would, in the 2016 report, be considered as employed in the sector and thus contribute to the creative industry’s seemingly miraculous growth. Such quantitative enthusiasm disguises the precarity that all designers experience.¹² The market is highly competitive, the wages are notoriously low, permanent job contracts are extremely rare, and to make a living is almost impossible without public subsidies, cross-financing, and wealthy parents who can support their offspring through the many lean periods. Not surprisingly, when asked about their satisfaction a year or two after graduating, a consistently high share of former design students – approximately 40%; twice as many compared with other studies – would not choose the same field of study again.¹³ However, the boom of design courses, design events, design museums, and design shops alike, attracts more and more students from social milieus who would not previously have been informed about the existence of such studies. As yet, we know little about the correlation between the social background of designers and the long-term rate of success. However, all scholarly literature agrees that we should keep on questioning “the mechanisms through which social class continues to have a sizeable effect beyond education.”¹⁴

Give us a Break!, indeed. I use the exclamation mark in the title of my Ph.D. to demand a shared public pause, a break to think and reflect on our time of massive social transformation. Furthermore, I ask for the subaltern voices of my interviewees to be recognized, my own included. What does it mean for designers and the children of Zurich’s workers to trespass the class boundaries of our society – the old one and the new one in the making? What does it mean to climb the ladder in a society whose inequalities one has become so accustomed to as to think they are “quite natural,” to quote my epigraph from Alice in Wonderland?

What does meaning mean after all in the context of design and social inequality? In the following sections, I will describe how I engaged in the endeavor of this quest. First, I will explain how a habitus break, a concept coined by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, can be fruitfully deployed by design historians for the development of alternative meanings. I will set out how I conceptualize human bodies as walking social archives in general, and the symptoms of ease and unease of upward climbers who encounter institutional design settings in particular as knowledge of the social history of design under seal. Second, I will expose how I break this seal together with my interviewees, and then analyze the manifest articulation of this break. Finally, I will turn the concrete articulations of habitus breaks into concrete historical questions. This will bring to the surface a huge gap in social theory, which is also a huge social practitioner’s trap. My call for new design historians, practitioners, and activists to cover this tricky void will conclude the picture.

Class-Passers Break the Seal of Social Nature

When we are in the modus of everyday action, we can’t ask history why we are doing whatever we are doing. To be functional in our everyday actions, we constantly forget the making of society and transform social history into “social nature.” If we want to know which history we forget, we must interrupt this naturalizing process. Biographical disruptions and transgressions like the ones my interviewees experience, therefore, are key narratives for historical knowledge production. As Michel Foucault noted: “One of the most essential features of the new history is probably this displacement of the discontinuous, its transference from the obstacle to the work itself.”¹⁵

Social upward movers from the working classes that make it into the design field embody precious memories, because their trajectories cross more limits than many other paths. They move from the lowest classes to the hot spots of cultural production while trespassing the middle classes. They get in touch with poor and wealthy milieus, they learn from fields that focus on economic accumulation and those that focus on the accumulation of cultural capital, and they accustom themselves to very dependent and then also to very self-determined lifestyles. My interviewees don’t just reproduce social status, nor do they completely internalize the common-sensical “social nature” that justifies inequalities, but rather break with its sense. By doing so they experience ruptures with the self-evident “nature” of society. These ruptures, again, produce continuous ruptures in their habitus.¹⁶ This is the symptomatic moment when social nature points its finger to social history.

We all “know” a lot about this history, basically, but this knowledge is implicit and encapsulated in our bodies. Only when triggered by certain settings that are different from what we learned to be natural does this sedimented knowledge come to the surface. This is why, in an upper-middle-class-dominated field like the design field, only the class-passers feel the upper-middle-class norms. For designers with a middle-class and much more for those with an upper-middle-class background these norms are so natural, they cannot even think about it. This is what makes normativity so powerful as a tool of domination: the rulers cannot see its contingency like fish cannot feel water, and if the dominated dare to speak about it, it is easy for those in power to accuse them of being insane. Institutions cannot talk and think about power relations, but humans can, and I encourage my interviewees to “think over afterward” and “wonder about” this strange social wonderland of design. My interviewees describe the fascination for the design field and the general feeling of being very welcome initially, but also their unexpected unease and a thrilling pressure to adapt to it that follows up, as soon as they enter the culturally loaded spaces. They tell me about their sudden fast heartbeat and stutter when they try to explain this unease, about a dry mouth and a tension in their neck when they get overruled by somebody more accustomed to the legitimate habits of the design field, somebody who behaves in it like a fish in water, while they learn to breathe in this new atmosphere. Most of them express a feeling of social shame about their former tastes and preferences, a shame that is totally new to them. And some relate to me their indecipherable nightmares in which they try to be normal according to the rules of art and design, but regularly fail to do so.

Women experience similar bodily manifestations when entering a male-dominated space, people of color when entering a predominantly white space (remember the movie Get Out! by Jordan Peel), and LGBTQIA+ people when entering a heteronormative space where nonbinary sexes and genders are considered an impossible thing.

If a shared language to reflect on these difficulties isn’t available, class-passers will get lonely like the prisoner at the reform school in Alan Sillitoe’s novel The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and they will endure a lifelong estrangement. I remember the embarrassing encounter with a famous designer whom I wanted to interview, but couldn’t win over to do so. He talked very disparagingly about working-class lifestyles, that of his parents included. When I met him by coincidence many years later sitting in the row in front of me at the theatre he couldn’t take his eyes from me and at the same time pretended not to know me; his gaze was full of shame and at the same time full of desire to be recognized. Another one tells his colleagues that his father, a worker, died a long time ago, but this isn’t true. I understand their behavior as a way of breaking contact with their working-class selves. Steep upward climbers from the underprivileged milieus never completely match the legitimate habitus and fight a constant inner fight between their former, primary and their adapted, secondary habitus. Speaking with Bourdieu, they experience a clivage de l’habitus, a “habitus divided against itself” – or just a “habitus break.”¹⁷ This inner division can be as painful and dizzying as severely injuring a part of your body, and the sociological literature mostly focuses on the hardships that all upward movers encounter and must be strong enough to bear if they want to resist the ousting forces of the so-called leaky pipeline – a metaphor for the increasingly unlikely survival of all degraded social groups during their moving up within a structurally discriminating system.

I certainly don’t want to play down these hardships, for I have experienced them myself. But I have two additions to make.

First, representatives from lower classes traditionally lack the self-confident eloquence that the representatives of the educated bourgeoisie learn from childhood onwards. This deficiency draws working-class kids and petty-bourgeois agents not so much into high academic fields (such as philosophy, literature, theater, classical music, or architecture), but far more into fields where they imagine they will do a “real” job and can express symbolic sophistication through popular material rather than through powerful talk: fields like the design field. Within this field, where one becomes a professional symbolic producer of status objects, a habitus divided against itself is – paradoxically – the most fitting disposition, because the social tension caused by the division can be transformed and eased by designing distinctive objects. This leads to an ambiguous state of mind, one that is empowering and alienating at the same time, over and over again. But exactly for this reason upward movers are real experts of design, and the design field is the ideal field of activity for ambitious and skilled young representatives from the lower classes who are eager to become part of the upper-middle classes.

Second, following the call of the SDN conference “Beyond Change”, I want to draw more attention to the fact that design historians can actually do something very insightful and of broader interest by starting with the impulses that come from habitus breaks, instead of just registering their impositions. I highlight the emancipatory potential of such breaks. Like Pierre Bourdieu, I stand up for social history and design sociology as a kind of intellectual martial art of knowledge production.¹⁸ We can take the chance given by habitus breaks for an intellectual break. Which reflexive space opens up if we do so? Which common histories can be seen if we look outside the fissures that the habitus breaks of class-passers open up? Inspired by Alice’s hand grasping outside the window in the illustration, I will point to the stories that connect our habitual dispositions with the yet-undiscovered sources in our design archives.

![[Pasted image 20251118174536.png|Illustration by John Tenniel, from Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998 [1865]), 33.]]

Design – a Clean Thing?

The first attempt at answering the above questions was made by collecting biographical anecdotes, which one by one added up to a more or less reflected overlook on the lifelong trials and errors of myself and my interviewees. Biographical anecdotes are connected through an existential weave, by a time- and space-specific psychological, historical, social, and sensual (or aesthetic) tie, and that is what “makes sense,” a commonly shared sense, above all. Sigmund Freud once noted, somewhat surprised, that the stories his patients told him in psychoanalytical sessions were structured more like novels; yet they were of great scientific interest even though they did not look like scientific anamneses at first glance: “It still strikes me myself as strange that the case stories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.”¹⁹

Bourdieu says quite the same thing according to the sociological analysis of anecdotes, be they biographical or literary:

These representative and representational samples, exemplifying very concretely, like swatches of cloth, the reality described, thereby present themselves with all the appearances of the commonsense world, which is also inhabited by structures, but one dissimulated in the guise of contingent adventures, anecdotal accidents, particular events. This suggestive, allusive, elliptical form is what makes the literary text, like what is real, deliver up its structure, by veiling it and by snatching it from our gaze.²⁰

And quite the same, again, can be stated about the single works of designers. Creative manifestations are “representative and representational samples” that contain social structures; they are somehow material and visual “anecdotal accidents.” One of my interviewees highlighted this fact when he said that after he started thinking about the source of his imagination he realized that all his works had a deep connection to his social background. After all, and quite obviously, this can also be said of my research. As the sociologist Diane Reay says: “I have written extensively elsewhere on reflexivity and research methods. … I believe all research is in one way or another autobiographical or else the avoidance of autobiography.”²¹

This said, we can go on asking: how exactly are the biographies and the designs of my interviewees connected? And to which concrete social structures? If one understands biographies of a certain social type as parts of a collective biography, then it is striking that class-passers from working-class milieus that make it into the design field systematically use similar concepts and metaphors to describe the loss of their habitual self-evidence. I condensed these concepts and metaphors as far as possible, and the following hierarchy and polarization emerged. First, the legitimate lifestyle of the design field appears to be one that is naturally superior to the lifestyle of the working-class milieus. Second, the superiority is described by the chain of terms progressive-clean-civilized-right, the inferiority by the chain of terms backward-unclean-primitive-false. The central concepts and metaphors are clean (and its connotations such as sterile, white, brilliant, hygienic, enlightened, healthy) v. dirty (and its connotations such as infected, trashy, dark, dull, stuffy, sick).

All my interviewees stated that this kind of hierarchical dichotomy was new to them, and that they didn’t look down in this way on their own families and friends before getting accustomed to the legitimate tastes of the design field. Quite the opposite. Most of my interviewees have mothers who worked as cleaners in the wealthy areas of the city, while living in the poor ones. They were often taken along to their mothers’ workplaces when no one else could look after them. It is amazing how they describe their epistemic shock when they enter the same spaces many years later as designers, but of course through another door, not only metaphorically speaking. They know a lot about cleansing and erasing, they know what it means to be judged as negligible, invisible, and dirty, as their mothers were judged while cleaning.

The clean aesthetic of the design scene echoes certain painful biographical experiences of the sons and daughters of workers. For example, most of them have experienced the forces of gentrification, which have turned un-cool, neglected urban spaces into cool and shiny ones, but only after their families were displaced from these areas. Others tell me about their fear of being separated from their families by the authorities because they were judged as white trash or Black trash, no matter. I grew up for the first years of my life excluded from Switzerland, the clean country, because my parents, Italian migrant workers, were assigned a status that denied them to live in Switzerland with their children. The neighborhood where we lived in Zurich was called disparagingly Negersdorf, i.e., “Negro village,” a racist designation dating back to the rise of xenophobia in the early twentieth century in Switzerland, when Italians were considered una razza sfruttabile, “an exploitable ‘race.’”²² The othering of Italian migrant workers functioned in a similar way to the othering of freaks in the circus and of people of color displayed in the Zurich zoo and in many fairs in the city’s center until the late 1960s.²³ I feared physical and verbal racist anti-Italian attacks, and one of the most common insults was that Italians were dirty and stinking and that their presence would spoil the country. The darkening (or blackening) of inferiorized and the brightening (or whitening) of superiorized social groups is a very common, implicitly racist epistemic bias. Richard Dyer noted in his critical book on normative whiteness: “Class as well as such criteria of proper whiteness as sanity and noncriminality are expressed in terms of degrees of translucence, with murkiness associated with poor, working-class, and immigrant white subjects.”²⁴ As James Baldwin says, “white is a metaphor for power,”²⁵ and so an inferiorized person becoming whiter in the eyes of the unconsciously sexist, racist, or classist beholder is a metaphor for becoming more powerful. Also compelling in this context is Sigmund Freud, who coined the discriminatory idea of women as a “dark continent.” Keeping all of this in mind, it is only one of the most extreme examples of structural violence within a wide intersectional spectrum, that the mother of one of my interviewees was sterilized for reasons of racial hygiene in the late 1950s, against her will and without her knowing. She had Swiss nationality, she was white, but she was a very poor working-class woman.

The anecdotal way in which my interviewees connect their habitual breaks to their social experience of racial discrimination is remarkable and disturbing. Strangely, in all my interviews the perception of a real social cleansing comes very close to the perception of working-class tastes, manners, and memories being symbolically washed off the design field. As if symbolic hygiene would echo social hygiene, they must first adapt their lifestyle to a new cleansed color palette and sober patterns. But that’s just the beginning. After that, they must whitewash themselves from deep habitual reflexes that are considered dirty and rough and quickly train themselves to desire in a distinctive, “clean” way. And last but not least, they must erase their dirty memory from their soiled background, for the stigma of bad taste seems also to be directed to the lively details of one’s own working-class background. Annie Ernaux, who moved up from the French working class and became a writer, describes in her socioanalytic novel La Place her subjugation to the rules of good taste that imposed her to remain silent about her working-class background. But Ernaux, too, seems to stress the move of sociology as a martial art when she highlights that it’s only thanks to this classist and humiliating silencing that she remembers all the details of her proletarian life. A nice paradox: the memories that she was supposed to break away like bad tastes turn out to be the core of her literary coming-out.²⁶

One could oppose at this point in my argument, and in fact a lot of people argue against me as follows, that these bourgeois, modernist exclusions no longer exist in our diverse postmodern times, when everything seems possible, from pastiche to high trash. But quite the opposite is the case, for what makes this triple cleansing even more alienating and complex today is the fact that working-class lifestyles are considered a kind of cheap, “natural” resource for designers. One interviewee said that it’s exactly these tastes and manners that designers eagerly look out and take without asking permission, use for their own purposes in their design work, make experiments with, and then forget and get rid of. What designers take from poor and underprivileged cultures as a resource to gain a sublime surplus is “everything but the burden,” as Greg Tate aptly presents it in the context of the appropriation of Black culture by white cultures.²⁷ My interviewees express an ambivalent attitude toward this new edition of slumming practices. They must adopt them, but they can never identify completely – for very obvious reasons – with their sophisticated cynicism. This double play makes them lose speed and wit, which again leaves them behind, kind of uncool. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes that those who cannot play these fast-changing, witty games quickly are considered the boring losers who do not pass the ultimate postmodern test, and are therefore “the ‘dirt’ of postmodern purity.”²⁸ Everything is possible today in terms of trashy lifestyles, yes, but only if a socially cynical surplus whitewashes the dirt of social empathy away.

As already mentioned, class-passers are welcome in the design field at first and given the chance to become “pure” in this postmodernist sense, as well as to become “clean” in a more modernist sense. But it’s an unfair chance. Those who cannot cut off that “dirty” part of themselves must either accept a lower status in the field or fall completely out of the leaky pipeline. These strange inclusive and exclusive rules of an unfair game strongly remind me of the context of the civilizing mission practice, where the colonized were given a Western bonus – or what Gabriele Dietze has coined the “occidental dividend”²⁹ – if they assimilated to the legitimate tastes and manners of the ruling power. This paternalism is often referred to as “positive racism,” but in fact, racism is never positive. “Positive racism” is a symbolic game of trade, where the privileged systematically gets a higher share than the underprivileged.

Reloading History – the Martial Art of Knowledge Production

It might seem exaggerated to connect macro- and micro-perspectives to this extent, and to stress the connections between the present manifestations of habitus breaks of designers with working-class backgrounds with colonialism and racism in Swiss design history, especially in a country – Switzerland – that was never a colonial power. But at this point it’s important to remember that the design field, also in Switzerland, emerged thanks to the reformers of the Arts and Crafts movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, i.e., the age of free trade imperialism, and it consolidated its professional and relatively autonomous position in the artistic field thanks to the modernist avant-gardes of the interwar period, i.e., the age of revolutions and the crises of liberalism. Switzerland was not an “innocent” colonial player but entangled through and through with these violent adventures.³⁰ It seems, therefore, that during these periods the unequal relationship between the working-class milieu and the design field was shaped in a way that continues to manifest its effects to this day. We just don’t know much about it yet. Colonialism, racism, classism, sexism – and then formal, habitual, discursive, and finally aesthetic cleansing. It’s as if inexplicable, subtle, and grueling ghosts of the past were triggered by the encounter between the former working-class selves and the design field. I’m always surprised that this is the case even in more technical or mechanical design studies where one wouldn’t expect it, like industrial design or photography. The design space seems soaked as a whole with these ghosts of a strange racism of good and cool taste. And it’s impossible to get rid of it on your own; we all seem to have been hijacked by a system we don’t know the origins of.

What if we turn over the impositions of these ghosts and seriously ask if they are based on facts? What if we enter our design archives and ask history to what extent colonialism, racism, and social hygiene are constitutive components of the modernist mission, just as machine aesthetics, functionalism, reductionism, rationalism, and scientific management are? What if we, design historians, practitioners, and activists seriously ask ourselves why these questions emerge now, in postmodern times?

Whatever the answers to these questions turn out to be, as long as we have not found them and mediated them broadly, the epistemic violence of a racism of cool and good taste – quite undisturbed by critical design history so far – remains a poison that in the long run wears its victims down. It is a hardship to survive the ousting effects of the leaky pipeline, fighting all alone against old ghosts kept secret from the dominant design discourse. And in my experience, it’s a tangible relief to share with others the speculative indexes of our bodily manifestations, our habitus breaks – indexes that point to undiscovered sources that nourish these ghosts. This is why, at the end of this essay, I have placed some photos of my interviewees handed out to me in support of my work, showing them standing nearby pipelines and running water, a subject all of them choose without my input and independently of each other. Coincidence? I don’t believe so.

Sometimes we can only wonder after a delay, like Alice in Wonderland, and then we might start to question what it’s all about. Sometimes we understand immediately and wonder why we mirror from scratch things that are usually invisible. We can see these things if we stand in- and outside at the same time, as one of my interviewees put it. I want to encourage young researchers and practitioners to trust their eyes when they have these speculative moments. Stand in- and outside and you will see that we are all interlaced through meanings of which we lack the proof. Teju Cole calls the strong sense of a connection without a proof “poetry,” which is “the secret channel that connects the work to other work.”³¹ It needn’t be secret, it could be concrete. This channel – I learned during my research process – cuts through layers of deep history. I want to encourage young historians to follow the index given by the habitus breaks of the class-passers, to enter the design archives and make sense of all our blind spots, and finally banish the ghosts of the past with their research. I like to encourage new generations of design practitioners and activists to engage with these new historians. Be brave, connect all formulas of beauty without discrimination – the past, present, and future ones.

Glossary

Design field

Design can be replaced here by other historical terms, such as applied arts, handicrafts, decorative arts, industrial art, styling, or the German Formgebung and Gestaltung. Field is a sociological term that can also be replaced by the colloquial term scene in the context of this essay. By design field or design scene I mean the professional environment of teaching, practice, theory, media, market, conservation, exhibition, and promotion, which deals with the design of consumer goods from the smallest series to mass production. The design field is relatively autonomous, i.e., it both follows and distinguishes itself from other fields of cultural production, such as marketing, art, or architecture. The social history of the hierarchical differentiation between and within these fields has not been written yet.

Working-class milieus

Working-class milieus are all milieus just above, on, and below the line of respectability which represents the contested boundary to the large group of the middle-class milieus. According to the European ISCO- and ISEIindices, workers have little cultural and economic capital and little access to profitable networks. They have at most a secondary school qualification and/or not more than compulsory education, and found occupations in industrial production, sales, and services with little social prestige. Milieu is a current sociological concept that differentiates the old class concept horizontally. Horizontal differentiation means that in each layer of a hierarchically structured class society further typological distinctions can be made on the vertical level of groups that are coherent in themselves. Since the 1970s, the most important horizontal differentiation in the social sciences has focused on the increase of professional self-determination, which varies greatly within all social strata, but is much less pronounced within the lower ones. The working-class milieus account for about 20% of the population in Switzerland.

Habitus

A habitus, as defined by the sociologist of taste and class, Pierre Bourdieu, is a model developed to understand systematic social behavior and social judgments. A habitus models the unconscious template of inner dispositions, a limited set of reflexes that one uses to make sense and act spontaneously according to one’s place in society. Limitations make these dispositions useful and economic, because they reduce the complexity of social history and social future. A habitus also translates our selective historical projections into projections for our future and this gives coherence to all our present actions. Doing this or that, we believe quite naturally, is not/working well for working-class people, or is un/typical for well-educated people, or is un/natural for women, or who talks like this is/not truly a Black/white person, or is/not something you should desire if you hold a certain position. A habitus is creative in the sense that the concrete emanation on the surface of our “social nature” changes constantly, driven by the competitive dynamism of capitalism, and constantly needs to be designed anew. But what remains as a constant, if we do not resist it, is the existence of an exploitable difference between more or less valuable social groups.

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Footnotes

1. Jan Jagodzinski, Visual Art and Education in an Era of Designer Capitalism: Deconstructing the Oral Eye (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). ↩

2. Bundesamt für Statistik (BFS), Statistisches Jahrbuch der Schweiz 2018 (Zurich: NZZ Libro, 2018), 106, 624. ↩

3. Toni Ricciardi, Breve storia dell’emigrazione italiana in Svizzera (Rome: Donizelli, 2018), 122–32. ↩

4. BFS, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Schweiz 2018, 528; Christin Kehrli and Carlo Knöpfel, eds., Handbuch Armut in der Schweiz (Lucerne: Caritas-Verlag, 2006), 78–79; Claudia Schuwey and Carlo Knöpfel, eds., Neues Handbuch Armut in der Schweiz (Lucerne: Caritas-Verlag, 2014), 68. Margrit Stamm, “Arbeiterkinder an die Hochschulen! Hintergründe ihrer Aufstiegsangst,” Dossier 16, no. 2 (2016), 25–27, margritstamm.ch/images/ Arbeiterkinder%20an%20 die%20Hochschulen!.pdf. ↩

5. For an up-to-date insight into the debate around the erosion of middle class, see Daniel Oesch and Emily Murphy, “Keine Erosion, sondern Wachstum der Mittelklasse. Der Wandel der Schweizer Berufsstruktur seit 1970,” Social Change in Switzerland no. 12 (2017), www.socialchangeswitzerland. ch/?p=1377. ↩

6. For a very good sociohistorical summary of this aspect, see Oliver Nachtwey, Die Abstiegsgesellschaft: Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016). ↩

7. For quantitative and qualitative survey of the Swiss super-rich, see Ueli Mäder, Ganga Jey Aratnam, and Sarah Schilliger, Wie Reiche denken und lenken: Reichtum in der Schweiz: Geschichte, Fakten, Gespräche (Zurich: Rotpunktverlag, 2010); Ueli Mäder, Macht.ch: Geld und Macht in der Schweiz (Zurich: Rotpunktverlag, 2015). ↩

8. Daniel Frizsche, “Zürich, die gebildete Stadt,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 1, 2017, 19. ↩

9. Catrin Seefranz and Philippe Saner, Making Differences: Schweizer Kunsthochschulen. Explorative Vorstudie (Zurich: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, 2012), 38–45, blog. zhdk.ch/artschooldifferences/ files/2013/11/Making_ Differences_Vorstudie_ Endversion.pdf; Philippe Saner, Sophie Vögele, and Pauline Vessely, Schlussbericht. Art. School.Differences: Researching Inequality and Normativities in the Field of Higher Art Education (Zurich: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, 2016), 150ff, blog. zhdk.ch/artschooldifferences/ files/2016/10/ASD_ Schlussbericht_final_web_ verlinkt.pdf. ↩

10. Christoph Weckerle and Huber Theler, Dritter Kreativwirtschaftsbericht Zürich: Die Bedeutung der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft für den Standort Zürich (Zurich: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, 2010), 52, preview.tinyurl. com/yyovz5vn. ↩

11. Christoph Weckerle, Roman Page, and Simon Grand, Von der Kreativwirtschaft zu den Creative Economies: Kreativwirtschaftsbericht Schweiz 2016 (Zurich: Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, 2016), 83, www.creativeeconomies. com/downloads/creativeeconomy-report-2016.pdf. ↩

12. For a short introduction to the historical making of precarity in the creative sector, see Franz Schultheis, “Kreativarbeit zwischen Beruf und Berufung,” in Kreativität als Beruf, ed. Franz Schultheis, Christoph Henning, and Dieter Thomä (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019), 87–142. ↩

13. Schweizer Dienstleistungszentrum Berufsbildung, Berufs-, Studien- und Laufbahnberatung (SDBB), Die erste Stelle nach dem Studium: Die Beschäftigungssituation nach einem Studium an einer Fachhochschule (Heft 4, 2009) (Bern: SDBB-Verlag, 2009), 16–20; SDBB, Die erste Stelle nach dem Studium: Die Beschäftigungssituation nach einem Studium an einer Fachhochschule (Heft 4, 2011) (Bern: SDBB-Verlag, 2011), 20–24; SDBB, Die erste Stelle nach dem Studium: Die Beschäftigungssituation der Neuabsolventinnen und Neuabsolventen von Schweizer Hochschulen (Bern: SDBB-Verlag, 2013), 86–91. ↩

14. Francesco Laganà, “Inequalities in Returns to Education in Switzerland,” in Education, Occupation, and Social Origin: A Comparative Analysis of the Transmission of Socio-Economic Inequalities, ed. Fabrizio Bernardi and Gabriele Ballarino (Cheltenham, UK/ Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016), 211. For a general critique of neoliberal meritocracy, see Jo Littler, Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (London: Routledge, 2017). ↩

15. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), 9. design and social inequality? In the following sections, I will describe how I engaged in the endeavor of this quest. First, I will explain how a habitus break, a concept coined by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, can be fruitfully deployed by design historians for the development of alternative meanings. I will set out how I conceptualize human bodies as walking social archives in general, and the symptoms of ease and unease of upward climbers who encounter institutional design settings in particular as knowledge of the social history of design under seal. Second, I will expose how I break this seal together with my interviewees, and then analyze the manifest articulation of this break. Finally, I will turn the concrete articulations of habitus breaks into concrete historical questions. This will bring to the surface a huge gap in social theory, which is also a huge social practitioner’s trap. My call for new design historians, practitioners, and activists to cover this tricky void will conclude the picture. ↩

16. For the context of habitus in design history, see my glossary and Pierre Bourdieu, “Introduction” and “The Sense of Distinction” (from _Distinction: A Social Critique of Tast_e), in The Design History Reader, ed. Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze (London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2010), 402–8. ↩

17. Pierre Bourdieu, La misère du monde (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 522; Andreas Bremer and Andrea Lange-Vester, eds., S_oziale Milieus und Wandel der Sozialstruktur: Die gesellschaftlichen Herausforderungen und die Strategien der sozialen Gruppen_ (second updated edition) (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 29; Eva Barlösius, Pierre Bourdieu (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Studium, 2016), 87–89. ↩

18. Pierre Bourdieu and Pierre Carle (director), _Soziologie ist ein Kampfsport: Pierre Bourdieu im Portrai_t (DVD recording) (Frankfurt am Main: filmedition suhrkamp, 2009). ↩

19. Sigmund Freud, “Fräulein Elisabeth von R.,” in Studies on Hysteria, eds. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 160. ↩

20. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1996), 336. ↩

21. Diane Reay, Class Work: Mothers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Primary Schooling (London: UCL Press, 1998), 2. ↩

22. Ricciardi, Breve storia, 37–39. ↩

23. For a good overview on this with striking visual material, see Rea Brändle, Wildfremd, hautnah: Zürcher Völkerschauen und ihre Schauplätze 1835– 1964 (Zurich: Rotpunkt, 2013). ↩

24. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 113. ↩

25. James Baldwin, Raoul Peck (director), et al., I Am Not Your Negro (DVD recording) (Los Angeles: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2017), 107 sec. taken along to their mothers’ workplaces when no one else could look after them. It is amazing how they describe their epistemic shock when they enter the same spaces many years later as designers, but of course through another door, not only metaphorically speaking. They know a lot about cleansing and erasing, they know what it means to be judged as negligible, invisible, and dirty, as their mothers were judged while cleaning. ↩

26. Here I’m paraphrasing the original quote, which reads: “Le déchiffrement de ces details s’impose à moi maintenant, avec d’autant plus de necessité que je les ai refoulé, sûre de leur insignificance. Seule une mémoire humiliée avait pu me les faire conserver. Je me suis pliée au désir du monde où je vis, qui s’efforce de vous faire oublier les suovenirs du monde d’en bas comme si c’était quelque chose de movais goût.” Annie Ernaux, La Place (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 72–73. ↩

27. Greg Tate, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2003). ↩

28. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1997), 14. ↩

29. Gabriele Dietze, “Okzidentalismuskritik: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer Forschungsperspektivierung,” in Kritik des Okzidentalismus: Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)Orientalismus und Geschlecht, ed. Gabriele Dietze et al. (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2009), 23–54. ↩

30. For an up-to-date and general introduction, see Patricia Purtschert, Harald Fischer-Tiné, and ETH Zürich, eds., Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). For the more detailed, intersectional connection between colonialism, classism, sexism, and racism in Switzerland, see Patricia Purtschert, Kolonialität und Geschlecht im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Geschichte der weissen Schweiz (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019). ↩

31. Teju Cole, Blind Spot (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), 110. ↩