“I am saying, then, that literacy―the mastery of language and the knowledge of books―is not an ornament, but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power. Longer perspective will show that it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgement of ourselves, and the possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow.”
― Wendell Berry
Some excerpts from an interview with Johanna Drucker on design theory, from the 90s:
Does graphic design require a theoretical foundation?
Johanna Drucker: On one level, absolutely not. I don’t think theory is ever going to make somebody better at creating a printed page, a Web page, an object, or anything else. Now, I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me, who think theory is a useful creative tool. I don’t believe that. People who work from a theoretical perspective, whether it’s in design or the visual arts, often do very stilted, self-conscious work that ultimately is only an illustration of the theoretical position.
But should there be something working in design in addition to pure talent or intuition?
I don’t think that design needs theory, but I think designers need theory. Everybody should have a course in Ideology 101, beginning in kindergarten, then in sixth grade, then again in high school, and as a freshman in college-because I think we are so blind to ways in which we absorb the culture around us. We need to be given the tools for thinking through our relationship to the power structure – something for all those people who went to see Forrest Gump, didn’t know that it was a modern version of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and thought, “Wow, what a great movie”.
Can theory tell us anything about graphic design that we don’t already know?
Theory is useful for analyzing historical and cultural codes, but also for tackling new design challenges. You may be familiar with a particular phenomenon, say, Hollywood cinema, but not be able to articulate the way it works as a narrative system. When you gain an insight into the formulas of such a system, you realize they mutate in relation to different expectations about morality, and that’s what I call a “theory moment.” You are able to identify the working of the codes (unfaithful wife must lose family versus unfaithful wife is allowed a second chance). Or you learn the distinction between discourse (which is the structural organization of a text, such as the distinction between an author and narrator) and narrative (the actual story). When you watch an episode of the television series My So-Called Life, you realize that the author of the show is giving you one side of the story while the young woman narrating the episode in first person is telling you another. These simple distinctions are powerful in talking about the structure of news, fiction, documentaries, and any other instance in which we tend to align whoever is speaking with what is being said.
Can theory have an adverse effect on graphic design?
I think too much theory can make you too sophisticated for your market. You can start to produce graphic design that’s interesting only to other designers. I saw that happen while teaching in an architecture department. Theory-doused architects designed some interesting things, but they had nothing to do with living. They might be compelling ideas, but when it really came down to it, I didn’t want to live in an uncomfortable environment in order to have my consciousness raised about how family structures are merely functions of the bourgeois mythology of the nation-state!
One of the current design tropes is multilayer design, which often verges on illegibility. Is this a visual manifestation of theory?
Somebody asked me this question in another interview and I was puzzled by it, and so I asked Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, the head of Yale University’s undergraduate design department, what she thinks. Does it have to do with a phenomenon of the illegible as a cultural notion, or what was this about? She said that, in her experience, students will do that kind of design when they’re working with somebody else’s text. When it’s their own text, they won’t make it illegible; they actually want it to be easy to read. The illegibility trope seems to signal, There’s so much stuff already out in the world that we’re not really trying to get you to read this; we’re just trying to get you to look at it long enough to see whatever logo is on it. This is an admission that most text produced at this point is just
noise.How would you analyze it?
As frustration on the part of the individual: Will anybody pay attention to anything I have to say? And then: Well, why should they? The culture we live in promotes a notion of the celebrity as the privileged object of attention, and people often think that if they’re not being perceived at a celebrity level, then they’re not being perceived at all. Since when has existence been about being perceived? It’s supposed to be about experience.
Who or what do you think exemplifies this noise factor?
David Carson’s work seems like visual noise and style for its own sake, part of this celebrity phenomenon. You do something that’s at the radical extreme of what people think is acceptable to produce yourself as a celebrity. Reasonableness, middle-of-the-road positions, and moderate analysis are never going to sell.
— (via Design Dialogues)
“The poetry of extreme states, the poetry of danger, can allow its readers to go further in our own awareness, take risks we might not have dared; it says, at least: ‘Someone has been here before.'”
― Adrienne Rich
A handful of quotes taken from Ursula K. Le Guin – The Last Interview and Other Conversations:
“Isn’t the real question this: Is the work worth doing? Am I, a human being, working for what I really need and want—or for what the State or the advertisers tell me I want? Do I choose? I think that’s what anarchism comes down to. Do I let my choices be made for me, and so go along with the power game, or do I choose, and accept the responsibility for my choice? In other words, am I going to be a machine-part, or a human being?”
————
“It may just be a refusal to take the counsel of despair. I think to admit despair and to revel in it―as many 20th- and 21st-century writers do―is an easy way out. Whenever I get really really depressed and discouraged about politics in America and what we are doing, ecologically speaking, globally speaking, [with] our mad rush to destroy the world, it’s very easy to say, ‘To hell with us. This species is not successful.’ Something tells me I have no right to say that. There are good people. Who am I to judge? The problem with despair is it gets judgemental.”
————
“I have a rash piece of advice which is—Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. Then take it and tear it to pieces and squeeze it until the blood runs and rewrite it fifty times. But I think what you’ve got is perfectionism trouble, and perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”
————
“I’ve tried to force myself to write. Just because I wasn’t writing, and it was time I wrote something. Well, it was a disaster. It has to come. Some of us are just at the mercy of our unconscious, I guess. And of course you control it, and of course you get work habits, and you learn that there is a tap you can turn on; you can sit down at your desk and you can write, if you’re working on something already. If the initial gift has been given to you, then it’s your job to write, and that’s work, and it takes discipline and so on. But with me, it is a gift, it isn’t just something I invent by myself. I wish I could. It’d be nice.”
————
“There are times, like when I read about Lady Antonia Fraser, with her big books and her five children and fifteen nursemaids or whatever it is, that I feel a profound and evil envy. Or when I hear about some man who has quite a paying job to ‘devote himself to writing full time’—I get mean. I think, oh buddy. I wrote when I had jobs I got paid for; when I quit those, I still had a fulltime job, the kids and the house, and I still wrote. Who is doing your work for you, Mr. Fulltime Writer? Mrs. Fulltime Writer? And where are her novels?
If I was ‘free,’ as so many male writers have been free, I would be impoverished. Why should all my time be my own, just because I write books? There are human responsibilities, and those include responsibilities to daily life, to common human work. I mean, cleaning up, cooking, all the work that must be done over and over all one’s life, and also the school concert and the impossible geometry homework and so on. Responsibility is privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you’ve copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life, isn’t it, just living, people living and working and trying to get along.”
————
“There is something about one’s body as it gets around seventy years old that induces—strongly—often imperatively—a shift from action to observation. Action at seventy tends to lead to a lot of saying ow, ow, ow. Observation, however, can be rewarding. As I have never been sure where my body leaves off and my mind begins or vice-versa, it seems unsurprising to me that the condition of one of them induces a similar condition in the other.”
————
“The question of nostalgia deserves looking into. Much fantasy, and science fiction too, draws upon an apparently inalterable human longing for ‘the peaceable kingdom,’ the garden Voltaire suggested we cultivate. But terms must be used carefully and respectfully in such a discussion.
Any refusal to accept the abuse of the world by ill-considered, misapplied technologies as desirable/inevitable can be labelled Luddite. All genuine alternatives to Industrial Capitalism can be, and are, dismissed as ‘nostalgia.'”
————
“Sometimes I think I am just trying superstitiously to avert evil by talking about it; I certainly don’t consider my fictions prophetic. Yet throughout my whole adult life, I have watched us blighting our world irrevocably, irremediably, and mindlessly—ignoring every warning and neglecting every benevolent alternative in the pursuit of ‘growth’ and immediate profit.”
————
“How do you know who you are if you’re always with other people doing what they do?”
————
“I have a website. I blog. I get email and send email. But I try to keep my distance. The internet just invites crap from people.”
————
“If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
————
“I don’t expect to win, but I still need to say what I think. When I am afraid to say what I think is when I will really be defeated. The only way they can defeat me is by silencing me. I might as well go out kicking.”
————
“I think a great many American men have been taught to repress their imaginations, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.”
————
“One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it.”
————
“I’ll stop reading because either I’m existentially terrified or it’s just too scary. I get sent a lot of books to blurb. I look at them. And so many have a lot of high tension, a lot of suspense. I’ll get really scared, and then it will turn out to be the first book of a series. To hell with it. I don’t respond well to suspense. I hate it. I’ll look at the end of the story when I’m still at the beginning.”
“I spent the last 40 years of my life writing scripts not made into movies. After a while, you kind of take a certain pride in not having been a success. I’m simply not a commercial filmmaker.”
“If I could have made popular films, I would have. But I believe in something. If I betray it, then I destroy myself.”
“The truth is, failure can be a very honorable thing. It’s not that you have a failure. It’s what you do with it.”
― Michael Roemer (via)
“A lot of people just completely miss the point that there actually can be joy in doing design, pushing the boundaries and exploring visual culture. New things have to happen somehow and somewhere; otherwise, what’s the point of going on? If new design is based on what was considered ‘good’ in the past, what’s the point? The models for ‘goodness’ are inevitably going to be challenged and I’m not saying that this may be for everyone or to everyone’s taste. Isn’t this about opening up your realm of influences and inspiration to other sources? I like to draw on my own personal history, like comics and Letraset. I’ve had experiences common to a lot of other people, but not everyone is going to respond to the same things or in the same way I do. My work often gets labeled as ‘cute,’ but can’t work be playful or funny? To be considered serious, does it need to be stripped down, severe and universal? Everything would be so homogeneous.
I want to slow people down and find something I think is humorous or interesting. If I were making stop signs, for instance, I’d do my job, and of course I’d make stop signs that could be read quickly. But I’m not making stop signs. We all know the difference between a stop sign and a poetry book, and we wouldn’t design them in the same way. There’s an audience and a function for different things. You can’t have interpretations with a stop sign, you must have instant understanding. But a poetry book you understand within its context.”
— Barbara Glauber (via)
Some quotes from Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel about ‘a totally automated American society of the future’:
“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
“Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis.”
“For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men-and boom! It’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s been shot to hell.”
“This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job becomes today’s sermon.”
“People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”
“What have you got against machines?”
“They’re slaves.”
“Well, what the heck, I mean, they aren’t people. They don’t suffer. They don’t mind working.”
“No. But they compete with people.”
“That’s a pretty good thing, isn’t it – considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?”
“Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.”
And from 1980, an excerpt from an interview with Vonnegut where he explains the origins of the novel:
“I began that book before the word ‘automation’ had been coined by the Ford Motor Company. As I recall it, I was a public relations man—a public relations boy, actually—for General Electric and part of my job obliged me to work with a group of engineers. One day I came across an engineer who had developed a milling machine that could be run by punch cards. Now at the time, milling machine operators were among the best paid machinists in the world, and yet this damned machine was able to do as good a job as most of the machinists ever could. I looked around, then, and found looms and spinning machines and a number of textile devices all being run the same way and, well, the implications were sensational. I now realize that the textile industry was dedicated to devising ways to run its machines without people and, to a great extent, it was highly successful.”
“The world is violent and mercurial – it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love – love for each other and the love we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent, being a writer, being a painter, being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
— Tennessee Williams
“I had better say that the ‘Guilty Pleasures’ feature seems to me an entirely deplorable institution. If one feels guilt at pleasure, isn’t one bound to renounce either one or the other? Preferably, in most cases, the guilt, which is merely the product of that bourgeois elitism that continues to vitiate so much criticism. The attitude fostered is essentially evasive (including self-evasive) and anti-critical: ‘Isn’t this muck – to which of course I’m really so superior – delicious?'”
— Robin Wood
“Design fame seems to be based more and more on which stylistic label you are bestowed – suddenly your work is lifted out of its context and plopped down firmly into this or that camp. And when a style is so easily identifiable, it’s certainly easier to rip off. But you can’t duplicate someone’s whole life experience, and that’s where you, the originator of your own funky, quirky style, and your sincerest flatterers part ways. Clones aren’t known for having a wide spectrum of emotions or depth; evolution and growth are ruled out.
I never expected to be some sort of super-hyphenated-ever-qualified-and-categorized designer. But for better or worse, stylistic or other kinds of labeling are inescapable. I wear my ‘CalArts’ badge on my sleeve; I like it there. But I’m not interested in having my ideas stay put.
When my pal Jenn and I recently showed our work to a prominent design headhunter in New York, a pronouncement was handed down on our careers: ‘I really dislike this work. This is not ‘real’ design, it’s just ‘playing around.’ Furthermore, she informed us to get a ‘real’ job in a real studio, now. No time to waste. Assimilate or starve. Coming face-to-face with corporate design America was sobering, but it placed me within a design context and continuum – I can better see my work by knowing what it’s not. And playing around? Does work have to fit some corporate or other mold to be considered seriously? Isn’t it by pushing the edges that what is considered ‘real’ design moves a little bit further along in its history? And why does it have to be called ‘work’ as opposed to ‘play?’ Most of my work isn’t geared toward a corporate giant like Dow Chemical. Nor am I interested in working for Dow Chemical. I can’t. I’m not trained that way, I don’t have that kind of sensibility. But most of all, I don’t like what they do.”
— Gail Swanlund, 1993 (via)
