On the paradoxes of resistance, co-optation, and the aesthetics of dissent

In recent years, the field of design has experienced a notable shift—a swelling chorus of critical voices emerging from within its own ranks. Designers have turned to publishing not only as a mode of self-expression, but as a method of critique: books, zines, panels, workshops, and speculative manuals proliferate, denouncing the complicity of design in systems of inequality, ecological collapse, and capitalist excess. Yet embedded within this boom of critical discourse is a nagging contradiction: the critique of design often becomes another design product, folded back into the circuits of commodification it ostensibly opposes.

As Metahaven (2015) put it succinctly, design is “increasingly aware of its own paradoxes”—aware that even its most radical gestures may circulate as stylized content, seamlessly reintegrated into institutional, market, or academic frameworks. The question is not only whether critical publishing can escape commodification, but whether it is in fact designed to do so.

From Resistance to Product

Consider the visual culture of critical design publishing. The risograph aesthetic, the bold typography of independent presses, the manifesto-as-poster—all carry the affect of dissent. Yet these materials are increasingly seen on coffee tables, in curated book fairs, or as limited editions sold through design boutiques. This is not to dismiss their content, but to observe that their mode of existence frequently aligns with the same economies of visibility, prestige, and accumulation they critique.

Federici (2019) warns that capitalism “cannibalizes everything that stands in its way, even our resistance” (p. 13). In the context of design, critique risks becoming another consumable format—resistance with a barcode.

Institutionalization and Legibility

One reason this paradox persists is the need for legibility. Critical work often requires institutional support to exist at all—grants, publishers, university platforms. But institutions demand coherence, professionalism, outcomes. As Ansari and the Decolonizing Design collective (2016) argue, critique often gets filtered through Western norms of academic acceptability, market readability, and visual familiarity.

The challenge, then, is not merely to critique design from within, but to question the structures of recognition and validation that make such critique visible or legible in the first place. When design criticism is polished, branded, and catalogued, it often reaffirms the very structures it sets out to unsettle.

Performative Critique or Structural Refusal?

Ahmed (2021) discusses how institutional critique is often metabolized by the institution itself: “The complaint is heard as noise rather than as information” (p. 37). Applied to design, we might ask whether critical publications are heard as instruments of change—or simply as aestheticized noise, folded into a stream of content that demands ever more production.

Are we, as designers and publishers, rehearsing critique in ways that maintain our legitimacy while avoiding true structural risk? Are we staging criticality rather than enacting refusal?

As Fisher (2009) warned, contemporary culture often allows for the representation of critique without the possibility of rupture. In other words, we are encouraged to critique, so long as our critiques remain productive—so long as they generate discourse, panels, merchandise, and new publishing ventures.

Toward a Non-Extractive Practice

Despite these contradictions, there are openings. The concept of “non-extractive publishing,” as proposed by Set Margins’, insists on ethical, careful, and collaborative modes of production—ones that resist urgency, authorship-as-ownership, and exploitative labor. Temporary Services speaks similarly of “publishing as a practice of care and proximity, not scale.”

Set Margins’ describes itself as “a support structure, a production platform, a network and a publisher,” highlighting a focus on “inclusive production” and “critical experiments, discourse and dialogue” (Set Margins’, n.d.). Their mission includes facilitating “inclusive access to production and communicative clarity in output,” with the aim of supporting marginalized voices and fostering a community based on care and cooperation.

Yet we must ask: is this not, too, a familiar vocabulary—one increasingly adopted across cultural and academic institutions to signal virtue, without altering the underlying economic and power structures? As Han (2015) warns in The Transparency Society, transparency can become a neoliberal dispositif—a mechanism for managing appearances. “Transparency is a regime that relies on visibility, but not on truth” (p. 2). In this sense, the rhetoric of care, inclusivity, and visibility may offer the illusion of transformation while preserving the status quo.

This concern echoes Moten and Harney’s (2013) critique in The Undercommons, where they argue that the invitation to participate often comes at the cost of co-optation. The institution—whether academic, design-centric, or publishing-based—offers legitimacy only on its own terms. The risk is that non-extractive publishing becomes yet another branded discourse: something that circulates as content, while extracting attention, labor, and symbolic capital.

What, then, would truly challenge these patterns? Perhaps the answer lies not in greater visibility, but in opacity (Glissant, 1997). Not in ethical branding, but in deliberate structural refusal. Not in scale or dissemination, but in intimacy, slowness, and disappearance. Perhaps we must be willing to operate at the margins—not just rhetorically, but materially—to inhabit what Halberstam (2011) calls “the wild beyond”: spaces of unbecoming, fugitivity, and illegibility.

Conclusion

The contradiction of critical design publishing is not a reason to abandon the practice—it is a reason to deepen it. To remain critical of critique itself. To ask, continuously: who benefits from this? What kinds of practices are being reproduced? Can we imagine publishing ecologies that resist replication, prioritize slowness, and open new ways of being in relation—outside the market’s logic?

To critique design is also to critique the ways we critique. Only then can publishing become not just another product of design, but a possibility for its unmaking.

Coda: Staying with the Paradox

Yes, even this critique—like the ones before it—risks becoming another product, another gesture folded into the circuits of cultural capital. But to recognize this is not to render critique futile. It is to practice a more vigilant, self-aware form of engagement. A form that admits: we are not outside the system, but we can still disturb its flows.

Praise, then, lies not in purity or escape, but in persistence. In returning again and again to the question of how to live and work otherwise—even when the answer remains incomplete. As Fred Moten reminds us, “the coalition emerges out of the recognition that it is impossible to stand apart.” We are entangled. But entanglement, too, can be a site of resistance.

To critique critically is to hold a mirror up to the mirror. It is a refusal to let contradiction become complacency. It is an ethics of attention, and perhaps, of hope.

References

Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint!. Duke University Press.

Ansari, A., Del Gaudio, C., & Piccolo, L. S. G. (2016). Decolonising design education: Towards a transnational feminist approach. Decolonising Design. https://www.decolonisingdesign.com/

Federici, S. (2019). Re-enchanting the world: Feminism and the politics of the commons. PM Press.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.

Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.

Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press.

Han, B.-C. (2015). The transparency society (E. Butler, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Metahaven. (2015). Can jokes bring down governments?. Strelka Press.

Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. Minor Compositions.

Set Margins’. (n.d.). Engage. https://www.setmargins.press/engage/