Adversarial Design Quotes

“today, ludic, reflective, and pleasurable are common qualifiers and themes against which many systems are judged.17 This does not mean that the topic of productivity is resolved and that the contest over productivity is completed. From an agonistic perspective, the contest is never ended: one “needs to be always switching positions, because once any given position sediments, it produces remainders”
― Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design

“Using visualizations to express political positions introduces a bias into the form, thereby distancing these visualizations from their social scientific counterparts that strive to report without prejudice. From an agonistic perspective, the bias in these expressions is appropriate, not problematic. Centrality, or neutrality, is impossible in agonistic pluralism because the broad and divisive differences of positions are considered to be constitutive of the political condition (Mouffe 2005b). Bias is required to do the work of agonism.”
― Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design

“Theories of agonism emphasize the affective aspects of political relations and accept that disagreement and confrontation are forever ongoing. For political theorist Chantal Mouffe, this is a consequence of what she calls the “paradox of democracy”: we strive for a pluralism that we know can never be achieved. As she states (Mouffe 2000b, 15–16), What is specific and valuable about modern liberal democracy is that, when properly understood, it creates a space in which this confrontation is kept open, power relations are always being put into question and no victory can be final. However,”
― Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design

“democracy is not simply order and rationality displayed in voting, structured decision making, and legislating, but that it also and necessarily is contentious affect and expression.”
― Carl DiSalvo, Adversarial Design