RELATED TERMS: Historicism; Historical materialism - Marxism;

For Georg Lukacs (c.1971), “history lies precisely in the changes undergone by those structural forms which are the focal points of man’s [sic] interaction with environment at any given moment and which determine the objective nature of both his [sic] inner and his outer life.” ‘Inner and outer life’ is conceived in the design of narrative environments as public imagination, while the imagination defined as both private (the Imaginary) and communal (the designed, material world and the Symbolic or public order it actively maintains). The conjunction of the inner and the outer, or rather the interpenetration of the one and the other, constitutes a storyworld or narrative environment world as transmedia, environmental phenomenon.

Designs, in this context, are focalisers of historicity and ‘passing’. They are, thus, potential vehicles for re-articulating the public imagination through re-designing the public regime defined by ‘the order of things’. The Lukascian-Marxian approach is one way of translating the ‘thing-ness’ of designs into an understanding of the kind of interventions they make into socio-economic, socio-cultural, socio-political and socio-ecological practices and realities. For the Lukascian-Marxian approach, ‘things’ mask not just the transitoriness of all entities but also, more importantly, in their commodity form as fetish, the political economy, or the praxis, through which they were produced.

It is a question of how one understands the insight that the object or the objectification is, “not a thing but a social relation between persons mediated through things”. A double-edged sword, this may, on the one hand, be an anthropological recognition of our necessary dependence upon or entanglement with ‘things’, but, on the other hand, it may also be a political recognition of our vulnerability to being manipulated through specific articulations of ‘things’. This is a particularly knotted question for social semiotics.


Dilnot, C. (1984) ‘The State of design history, part II: problems and possibilities’, Design Issues, 1(2), pp. 3–30. doi: 10.2307/1511495.

Lukacs, G. (c.1971) History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.