If I speak here of design, it is not as an art historian or a philosopher of technique.  I am neither.  What interests me is the way in which, by drawing lines, arranging words or distributing surfaces, one also designs divisions of communal space.  It is the way in which, by assembling words or forms, people define not merely various forms of art, but certain configurations of what can be seen and what can be thought, certain forms of inhabiting the material world.   These configurations, which are at once symbolic and material, cross the boundaries between arts, genres, and epochs.  They cut across the categories of an autonomous history of technique, art or politics.  The surface of design…in The future of the image Jacques Ranciere  91