My dissertation analyzed the work of self-described Thai “design activists” who designed a building’s form, programming, and materiality to curtail corruption, encourage social justice, and improve political representation for their polity. Page 99 describes an encounter that is key to understanding why, during a very liminal moment in Thai history, architectural representation became political representation. The scene takes place in a design workshop for Thailand’s third parliament building, and the largest parliament ever built. At this workshop, three of the principal architects were reviewing a prototype of a desk they designed for the Senate’s assembly hall. Having already attended dozens of design workshops, I was startled when the soft-spoken senior architect became incensed at the sight of a green electrical socket, which his drawings had specified as blue. Given the enormity of a complex that was 11 times larger than the US capitol building, and that included spectacular features like an 11-story gilded tower glorifying the monarchy, this reaction appeared disproportionate. But this marks that coveted ‘aha!’ moment in an ethnography when phenomena in the field illuminate epistemological lacuna. What I saw as an inconsequential detail, my interlocutor understood as the materialization of political corruption, a material flow of the sovereign agonism and corruption that had prevented Thailand from approximating democratic governance.

…The parliament’s sprawling layout and labyrinthine layers of internal, multistoried courtyards comprise over five kilometers of surfaces: three times longer than the combined facades of the Palace of Versailles. Never mind the proverbial tree, I felt as if the architects were failing to see the forest for a bent needle. Why did something so relatively small become such a big issue?

Having practiced architecture for almost a decade in Thailand already, I was neither immune nor deaf to the fetishization of the perfect architectural detail among architects, mythologized in stories of Tadao Ando punching a mason for dropping a cigarette butt in his concrete, or Mies van der Rohe spending weeks examining the grain of every travertine slab he installed in the Farnsworth house. But this controversy was different. The design’s flaw was not a material property, or the sign of class tensions between an elite architect and a mason. Bad design manifested bad politics. Detached as the prototype may be from any circuitry, the plug entangled its supplier, its supplanted supplier, politicians, STECON, the Secretary of the parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister into what designers recognized as infrastructural corruption. I failed to see, as they did, the plug’s “totality” (Lukacs 1972), the underlying network of interrelatedness condensed into a coin of miscolored plastic, that allowed the design activists and government brokers to draw the scalar connection of a plug to a polity.

The plug’s polemics is what Barthes would call a ‘punctum:’ the disorienting detail “that pricks me” (Barthes 1980, 25). To its observer, the punctum is the detail that derails orthodoxy and confounds formulaic thought. It is a tiny element that unravels any tidy presupposition of a whole. Or to adapt Mary Douglas’s conceptualization of dirt, it is the detail indexing matter out of place, the threat that catalyzes systemic reterritorialization (Douglas 2002). Thus, to answer my question, and to understand how one plug within a spectacular parliament complex can provoke opprobrium, and how violations of the design are signified as violations of the political system, will be the horizon of this chapter. The short answer is the most obvious: the controversy cannot be reduced to a plug as such, but to the plug as a representation. For their interlocutors, an erroneous hue of a socket or the token of frailty in a sovereign’s body are symptoms of disorder, indexes of systemic derailment…

The plug controversy from page 99, I argued, constituted a cosmopolitical conjuncture of Thervadan, capitalist, design, democratic, and royalist cosmologies. For the parliament architects, the design’s corruption indexed and entailed political corruption: the green plug was provided by an unsanctioned supplier with connections to a member of the military junta. The lamination of political and architectural representation that undergirds the plug’s offensiveness led me to formulate the primary theoretical intervention of the dissertation, which I call ‘design-ification.’ Design-ification refers to the discursive framework that enables design activists to capture political problems as matters of design, a reframing that locates political problems as solvable within the reformist, progressive telos of the design process. In design-ification, activists configure the transformation between the citing de-sign and the cited sign as an ameliorative process with positive entailments for the future interactions that the designed citation will (re)mediate. The plug controversy of pg. 99 underscores how design activists leveraged the play of design’s citationality to propose agentive forms, materials, and spaces capable of acting within the ambiguous political tensions of a transitional moment in Thai history.