Three Essays

Threee Essays from Nate Schulman

Introduction

4–7

8 – 31

Awfully Beautiful: Graphic Design and the Vernacular

Attention As Currency 32 – 63

Vegan Chili

64 – 95

Introduction

4–7

Awfully Beautiful: Graphic Design and the Vernacular 8 – 33

Attention As Currency 34 – 65

Vegan Chili

66 – 97

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Introduction:

In the following three essays of design and visual culture, I will take you on a journey through visual pyrotechnics, myths and fables. Awfully Beautiful details the use of vernacular non-design in professional graphic design.

Threee Essays from Nate Schulman

Attention As Currency explores the divide between attention and distraction in a faster and faster world. Vegan Chili proposes that clear lines between technology and the natural are becoming ever harder to discern, and divulges some of how that has come to be. As humans, we are conscious of technology we make, but less so of the way technology moves back in on our consciousness and changes it.

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Intro: There’s No Such Thing There’s no such thing as an undesigned graphic object anymore, and there used to be. —Michael Bierut1 Proper Etiquette What makes something proper and in good taste? Where does professionalism end and naivete begin, and who gets to say? Just as defining art infuriated as it inspired throughout the core of 20th Century Art history, so too have similarly perplexing questions arisen over ‘design’ and ‘undesign’ in today’s history of the field. Some designers have come to wonder—what exactly does Graphic Design have on all the rest? “Who is to say,” asks Design Diety Steven Heller, “that a naively hand-painted sign is less effective than a beautifully executed typeface?”2 While ‘Design’ must surely be defined against its opposite, what this dilemma demands is a look at what’s called the vernacular. ‘Vernacular’ is a multifaceted term requiring a certain clarification. The word is used both a typological classification and a characterization. ‘Vernacular’ language, for instance, means a native language, but also represents a separation from something larger. In standing for something nontraditional, it often represents a kind of informal folklore. Defined another way, “generally, the term vernacular is used to refer to the everyday, the quotidian, or the common in contrast to the important, the significant, or the special.”3 Vernacular design, then, runs counter to what those more

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sophisticated and in power will allow as formal and appropriate. Just as famed Architectural Historian Nikolaus Pevner referred to vernacular architecture as ‘mere buildings,’ and famed Art Historian Arthur Danto to readymades pre-conversion as ‘mere real things,’ vernacular design is ‘mere design’ and simply that.4 It is the endless parade of anonymous work that so endlessly sieges our attention we tune it out without the slightest effort. In full, “Design is logically described as vernacular when it does not involve self-conscious development, advance study and planning.”5 As such that the vernacular designs themselves “are often (but by no mean always) surprisingly successful both in practical and visual ways,” vernacularism takes for its start an uncommon viewpoint and application of the common.6 It is in this way that vernacularism in professional graphic design is less style or even semi-style, but rather more of an approach. While vernacularism has an experimental bent, it does so in a particularly accessible fashion, not an unapproachable one. Vernacular design derives from more public, even democratic means, whether they be finessed sign painting or grotesque graffiti, from both scrawls and structure alike. In its twisting of times and perspectives, there’s a great sense of freedom in vernacularist work, irony and irreverence all run amuck. Heller argues that “type is indeed the vernacular of mass communication,” so being able to appreciate typography in all its permutations takes a certain moxie.7 Simply appreciating the everyday is taking a kind of stand on its own, away from sensationalized media portrayals and towards a more holistic search for inspiration and reality. In that “normally vernacular expressions convey what social reality feels like rather than what it should be like,” there is a particularly genuine sense of truth inside such expressions, however perturbing.8 Those designers intoxicated by the quest for originality can’t help but find appeal in the idea that original forms can be found anywhere. To dig deeper


into the constant process of Vernacularism, let’s put it in a historical context, and look at the effect of postmodernism on its use.

Continental Philosophy, Ooh La La Work with the grid system means submitting to laws of universal validity —Josef Müller-Brockmann9 And Sometimes Gray The 1972 publication of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas was a watershed event in the development of postmodern architecture, and postmodernism in general. Even despite avoiding the epithet itself, Las Vegas saw “modernist architecture as everywhere trying to create and impose a singular language,” and in that sense very much sparked a postmodern revolution.10 Up until this point, the vernacular was almost exclusively forced out of the professional limelight. Though ever-present, simply hidden, client stances on using the vernacular mightily resembled Holiday Inn’s old slogan—“The Best Surprise Is No Surprise.” Now we had people like Venturi saying, “I prefer ‘both-and’ to ‘either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white.”11 Whereas Modernism suppressed the vernacular, postmodernism unleashed it. The real divide with Modernism was not, as one might think, from disgust, but rather disappointment; not from ignorance, but rather alienation. In response to preeminent literary critic Harry Levin’s question—was the intent of Modernism “to have created a conscience for a scientific age?,” Venturi would probably smugly sigh and say, well at least “the Modernists almost got it right.”12

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Modernism Moves On To help us deliberate on Modernism’s decline, Design Historian Jack H. Williamson has charted the three main, positive accomplishments of postmodernism as—“a throwing off of a severe rationalism which denied more intuitive faculties, an exploration of symbolic and decorative values, and a recognition and utilization of the past.”13 It’s illuminating to look within Graphic Design History for these features. For one, it’s interesting to discover Katherine McCoy, co-chair of Cranbrook’s design department for a quarter of a decade, once worked for Unimark International. There, she too learned to perfect the Swiss International Typographic style. Headed by Massimo Vignelli, designers at the New York Unimark office were known for wearing lab coats to work. While it’s true she soon moved towards a more differentiated approach, if it was not for her early experiences, McCoy’s breaking point might have been much different. One of her initial inspirations, after all, was Wolfgang Weingart, who, while a renegade, was no complete rebel from standard Swiss foundations. Weingart understood and put into action the maxim— “Rules are meant to be broken only exceptionally.” Regarding the throwing off of ‘severe rationalism’ that predicated McCoy’s turn, London based designer and educator Phil Baines was one of the earliest to come out fully armed. Lashing out in an early Emigre issue, in a snippet from his thesis, he fumed, “The Bauhaus mistook legibility for communication.”14 This idea was popularized further by David Carson in his version, “Never mistake legibility for communication.”15 It’s easy to blame all this aggression on young newbies attacking their elders. But all that stormed the legibility gates was not merely hot air, no matter its veracity. Former Icograda president Jorge Frascara put things more sensibly when he chimed in that, “Today, the rightness of the Bauhaus’s principles has given way to doubt. One must be critical of attitudes that, instead of being truly international, impose foreign concepts on local culture,


design education and practice. These artificially injected values interfere with and destroy the colloquial and vernacular expressions of an existing culture.”16 It is indeed perplexing that even though “Early modernists spoke of the need to design for the masses,” once, “bits and pieces of that movement finally trickled down into everyday life, it was seldom in a form modernists would endorse.”17 Now rather Carson was reading up on Cultural Imperialism, I’m not so sure. Indeed, he was probably surfing. But the fact remains—postmodern designers, however surprisingly, managed to predict an increasingly conglomerated world. So perhaps they over-reached, and perhaps they were in a bubble (and a dimly lit one at that?). They still managed to foresee certain Globalizing tendencies. Considering today’s politically unstable landscape, they were wise to do so. The Stage Is Set As vernacular cultures are small-scale cultures within larger arrays, the quest of vernacular design becomes speaking in a particular code—that is, to speak only to those spoken to, and to do so well. Baines again, said “We design not for historians to judge or condemn, but for an audience with immediate needs and expectations.”18 In such a viewpoint, Bauhausian ideals of cross the board universal communication were rejected. Ultimately, argues Lorraine Wild, what we really need is “design that talks to diverse groups in specifically made visual languages each group will understand.19 An immediate consequence of this rejection was the freedom to use what was formerly excised. If such freedom was abused, at least it was in the form of an understandable spite. When April Greiman returned to America after studying in Basel with Weingart, the stage was set. The confluence of new technology and her Swiss professor’s expanding appeal egged on Greiman and in-turn, other U.S. New-Wavers. The commercialization of student work from Switzerland which took place in the States increased the

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potential to put the vernacular through its own translated commodification process. And while things are lost in such a translation, it also keeps things in motion. In a world whose ambiguity was for too long shoved out, translated ambiguity would work as a kind of perpetual ambiguity. To summarize, in the post-modern stratosphere, “ironic employment of vernacular or non-designed elements, such as hand drawn typography, constituted a departure from the rationality of earlier approaches.”20 Postmodern ideals had an enormous impact on design ideals. Especially in places like Cranbrook and CalArts, the work of professors and students in Graduate Graphic Design programs across America changed irrevocably, setting into motion a larger effect on the profession on whole. One such effect, out of many, was Vernacularism.

Reaganomics, Meet Your Match Make more from less. —Ed Fella21 Simply as a descriptor, it wasn’t until the 1980’s that use of ‘vernacular’ took off. Though the term “was used rather imprecisely by graphic designers,” it nonetheless became a kind of rallying cry, if not the most coherent one.22 Bold, somewhat silly, definitely unpretentious, the vernacular became a satirical vehicle, as well as, although less overtly, a political one. Who were the main movers and shakers in this time period? One of the key figures in this translation was an unlikely one. Commercial artist for 30 years, graduate


from the infamous Cranbrook at 48, and now professor at CalArts, Ed Fella is a true original. Interestingly enough, it is Fella’s non-commercial projects that have won him the most acclaim, a unique position indeed. Partner in Pentagram’s New York office, Michael Bierut places Fella in that rare and esteemed category of graphic author. He says, “These designers have a visual approach that is easily identifiable and this way of working has, in effect, become a business card for them. It is also self-initiated by definition.”23 How Fella begins his works connects directly to the vernacular’s appeal, and its spread. A big part of his brainstorming process is travel. On his wide-ranging cross-country road trips, Fella documents the vernacular signage of small town Americana through Polaroids. These unrestrained blips and pieces become fodder for experimental illustration work. Many of these photographs can be found filling up ‘Letters on America,’ a book which made many designers instant vernacular enthusiasts. Instead of Mies van Der Roe’s “Less is More,” or Venturi’s chiding “Less is a Bore,” Ed Fella simply states “Make more from less.”24 He exemplifies this in notebook after notebook, attempting to add a new piece a day. “I have about 80 sketchbooks with 100 drawings in each one,” Fella rather shockingly admits.25 Instead of client commissions, Fella blithely tread on, following his own muse, and in his own way. He is Graphic Design’s Fine Artist, or Fine Art’s Graphic Designer. Fella’s works “are scout’s maps, showing the edge of visual language, where it builds up and breaks down, where it can go.”26 Sounds liberating, doesn’t it? No wonder designers of the world of practicality might wish for a muse of their own. And if the vernacular worked for Fella, why not them? Were there any other takers on this? Most certainly. M&Co was one of them, and one of the best. Founded by Tibor Kalman, M&Co was a highly influential firm in the New York Design scene and beyond. Playful and sometimes perplexing, the firm’s work was never lacking in wit. M&Co had an “interest in the visual

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detritus of mass culture,” whereby, “historical artifacts both high and low were recast as contemporary design attributes.”27 Note the use of ‘detritus’ here—its a telling term to use – a bit derogatory yet still an attempt to brim with authenticity. It’s another way of saying—though now dead, these forms once did thrive. Less altruistically, it also speaks of a trash can ripe for the plucking. Adds Tibor himself, “we were in pursuit of the ugly, the vernacular, and using it in a new way.”28 With a hint of hindsight humor former Tibor underling Scott Stowell concurs, admitting that “at M&Co we would spend weeks painstakingly perfecting typography so that it looked like it had been made by someone who had no idea what s/he was doing.”29 Hrmmm. Professional amateurism? Could that possibly work? What was the point, we might ask? Well, here’s what. Kalman knew his stuff. He loved to use the vernacular to create unexpected reactions in the viewer. He also wanted to prod the profession by making designers more aware of their own tastes, and, subsequently, their elitism. In an era of both Thatcherism in the UK, and Reaganomics in the US, Tibor believed elitism was to blame for all the design world’s unnecessarily decadent work. Living in Manhattan at that time, Kalman might have met one too many Gordon Gekkos for his free form tastes. In taking this stand, as Steven Heller comments, “The lack of pretense in vernacular styles served to critique the overly polished professionalism that prevailed in the mid-1980s.”30 For Tibor, all this vernacular use boiled down to more indeed than just the crude versus the refined. At AIGA’s 1989 “Dangerous Ideas” conference in San Antonio, Texas, Kalman took things a step further, prodding Duffy Design’s Joe Duffy into a loud, confrontational debate. In an ad he paid for in The Wall Street Times, Duffy, a package design specialist, had promoted graphic design to big businesses as a tool particularly adept at separating essentially the same packaged goods. In doing so, Kalman provocatively suggested Duffy was promoting a kind of ‘indentured servitude.’ However well intentioned,


Tibor’s taste for politics was more insatiable than his rhetoric was successful. Indeed, Benetton was once rated the 3rd most recognizable brand in the world, after only McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. Nonetheless, the debate was a particularly public showcase of typically more private concerns and it was even harder from then on to deny the power of M&Co’s instigations. While its aesthetics could be silly, the firm’s influential clout was never in question. Pulp Non-Fiction “Raw, no-frills, collaged, fractured, distressed and recycled,” the work of Art Chantry incorporates what he called the real American folk art—graphics produced by untrained craftspersons.31 He espoused the belief that “graphic design is a folk art whose best practitioners are often anonymous and whose best examples may be deceptively rough or naive.”32 Above and beyond his fellow designers, it was Chantry who most successfully conversed with, converted, and championed the vernacular on his own. Not working for a firm or huge clients provided Art’s creativity with unprecedented leverage. Known for his temper, perhaps he needs the space anyway. Nonetheless, Chantry was the unpretentious and delicious roadside stand to a design world’s caviar. And even while Art Chantry’s belief that “All graphic design is ‘vernacular’,” is hopelessly egalitarian, the very fact his work’s accepted as ‘good design’ is one of the design world’s most open acts of acceptance.33 For a designer who doesn’t even use a computer, that in itself is a promising thing indeed. The most practical and likely conundrum in this kind of professionalized acceptance boils down to that same problem it always is—the one of communication. Is the vernacular more for the designers who use it or its audience? Just take one of Chantry’s business card for example. Combined from a grocery store meat department advert, does it advertise Chantry’s love of meat? No, silly author! It’s just a gag. Don’t you get it? But the irony might be lost on some. And what about the ones who get

left out? Is it the fault of the humorless who don’t get the joke or the fault of the comedian for not delivering? Likely a mix of both, it’s an interesting thing to consider when designing work that uses the vernacular. Chantry gleans much of his visual inspiration from his collection of vintage Pulp magazines. Sparkling in wit, his prolific work spans everything from clothing catalogs to punk flyers.

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Romantic Marxism and Bonehead Design “Bad is good.” —David Bryne34 A Quiet Retrieve, and The Master’s House I’d like now to venture a point of politics—that those graphic designers who use the everyday enjoy the vernacular for its how as much as for its what. For professional designers, especially those surrounded by similar ilk (New Yorkers, say), the vernacular is seen as a way out. Its small stories inscribe an escape from slavish stylistic devotion, its small towns a quiet retrieve from the piercing perch of the city. Outside of the vernacular’s exotic properties, there lies within certain allied designers a shared political interest in new forms of decentralized representation. Now, if the vernacular doesn’t seem inherently political, that’s understandable, but consider this. In Latin, the term ‘verna’ refers to a slave born in the house of his master, and many have argued this is as much the root of ‘vernacular’ as the Latin ‘vernaculus,’ itself meaning


‘indigenous.’ In that first way, the premise of the local holds but only in a separated class delineated and opposed to another, its superior. This association recalls a sense of what noted literary critic Houston Baker called “romantic Marxism” – an appeal overwhelming in sentimental populism.35 Graphic designers are an intrinsic part of a wider, cultural production network, one which has been onesidedly deemed the ‘culture industry’ by elitist neo-Marxist theoretician Theodor Adorno, and even more disparagingly the ‘distraction’ or ‘illusion industry’ by neo-Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Use of the vernacular may stem from a certain designer guilt over differentiating essentially similar products in the glut of the contemporary marketplace. Shades and Shadows As Professor and social critic Stuart Ewen recalls, “in a hand-to-mouth world, material goods were scarce; they were simple vernacular products, made from readily available resources, and crafted at home.”36 But Capital grew and the sands shifted. As Haug has even gone so far as to say, today, “with shades and shadows the illusion industry populates the spaces left empty by capitalism.”37 The power elite of Capitalism surely speaks in a proper language, of its own choosing, and its dissidents another. Designers might be seeking to re-evaluate the commodification and consumption paradigm through approaching the everyday, analyzing those very spaces they supposedly so populate. Instead of promising happiness onto users, they look to see what those users are doing themselves, on their own terms. Alas, the promises of earnest aesthetic expression in unlikely places could enlighten otherwise bleak situations or areas. The fear of cultural imperialism, of a McWorld, has grown louder in recent years. In his essay, “Nostalgia For The Real—Or, Bad Is Good,” David Byrne mirrors his former buddy Tibor when he writes “The faster and great the spread of globalization, neo-liberalism, and

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multinational corporations, the greater the nostalgia for that which they replace.”38 Standardization might be reducing the complexity of the world, washing out what it wishes. But this is not to say it isn’t benefitting the world in other ways, standards of living and spreading human rights among them. And anyhow, while this Marxist angle may illuminate former SDS member Mr. Tibor, its not terribly all encompassing for graphic designers on whole, nor hard to attack. While we’re surely spoiled, does a hand-to-mouth world really sound like something worth idealizing? The viewpoint puts a stranglehold on aesthetics by condemning it as bourgeois manipulation, and manipulation alone. Here to Stay? In viewing all marketing across the board as an encroachment on purer values, it empties style of pleasure, and ignores, in its determinist rush, any sense of control from within its appreciators. Former editor of the Libertarian Reason magazine, Virginia Postrel takes offense to this, writing, “Aesthetic skills are real skills. While not analytical, they nonetheless help us to perceive and understand the world.”39 Aesthetic value is here to stay, Postrel writes, and not only that, it enriches the very consumers who have a say in their enjoyment. On top of that, she would argue, such self-determination is much stronger than what Marxists will allot for. Of course, purposing varies, as do results. By all means, not all politicize. By most means, many strive not to. More aesthetically speaking, vernacular use has much to do with the fact that, as Heller tells it, “in a sea of Starbucks, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Gap and all the other large and small, international corporate brands, anything that looks the least bit human-made stands above the fray.”40 And for other designers, the vernacular simply involves a great deal of play – much more than could be expected given this interpretative subtext of oppression and revolt. I mean, for goodness sake, Charles Spencer


Anderson jokingly calls his creative process “Bonehead Design.”41 Think Global, Design Local Nonetheless, taking the vernacular politically makes good sense. The Post-9/11 curtailment of dissent is worrying and re-asserting the rule of free speech in democracy is always a good one. Focusing on the local is a positive manifestation of that well known slogan—Think Global. Buy Local. Let’s be prudent though. We mustn’t forget the dependence of perspective on definition. Modernist architecture Philip Johnson also quested for what he called ‘pure’ images of design. The vernacularist search for community is, in its own way, a search for the universality of brotherhood not so different from that vision spouted, however dogmatically, by Vignelli and the like. While they both rely on a broad attempt to unite, in comparison to modernism, vernacularism includes through meaning, instead of excluding through form. What other concerns might we take notice of here? Unfortunately, the testy beast of Appropriation rears its ugly head once more. Gunnar Swanson rightfully wonders—why is it that, “when designers appropriate forms from non-designers/non-artists, it is called ‘recognition of the vernacular’”?42 Isn’t there some co-option involved, perhaps even in a snobbish fashion? How about, as Swanson answers himself, it is because since “graphic designers do not know the authors we pretend they do not exist.”43 Almost always anonymous, vernacular authors are by their very nature required to be reticent. If the work’s ‘bad’ after all, why would one want to take credit? But that anonymity is also an ability to ignorantly delineate from higher standards. Keeping these standards is of utmost importance. Acknowledging difference is as well. This doesn’t mean vernacularist appropriation should be as unfettered as vernacular works themselves. While some vernacular authors probably want to keep their way of speaking to themselves, probably all are inaccessible for interviews or

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requests. And so, since tracking down is an impossible task, designers just need to be careful of what they take and how. Questions of authorship notwithstanding, in the wrong hands, applying a historical surface treatment in lieu of historical context could be mightily detrimental. Robin Kinross even worries that “the fad for vernacular bad taste may be an attempt by designers to survive by blending into the landscape, chameleon-like.”44 The opposite extreme is that designers will want a renaissance in anonymous forms only as long as they are signed, sealed and delivered on their own terms, and, of course, they still get famous for it. Fortunately for more than the both of us, neither Kinross’ extremity nor my own is highly likely, not in any acceptable sense at least. I Still Want To Believe Now that I’ve charted out some potential problems, let’s look onto some positive examples. The conversion of draftsmen created and hand-painted and typography into digitized forms is the most judicious example of Vernacularist conversion. While maybe connected most prominently to eccentricity, this kind of design doesn’t always have to be so flamboyant. Take, for instance, some of Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ typefaces. With an interest in what goes unseen, Frere-Jones first utilized the vernacular in his Garage Gothic font, one based on the ultimate in banality—utilitarian parking garage tickets. He followed that with his Interstate designs, based on American Highway signs. Most recently, Frere-Jones released his Gotham design, the cream of the crop. Just as modernist skyscrapers became a kind of bread and butter of the metropolis, so too is Gotham now part of the corporate vernacular, prominently and widely used throughout the Manhattan of its namesake and creation. Originally designed for GQ magazine, and based on New York’s urban signage, Gotham speaks to how the vernacular can define a place. The face is mere lettering from mere buildings, but also so much more.


In a similar vein, another vernacular font of interest is Christian Schwartz’s Los Feliz, built around signage from within the greater Los Angeles are. Fonts are not concepts in and of themselves, but just as Los Feliz feels LA, Gotham feels NY. And without their vernacular origins, could such roots be inscribed?

Pro & Con (fessions) Letting The Sunshine In Architectural Historian James D. Kornwolf has argued that “vernacular architecture is generally a contradiction, an oxymoron.”45 Thought of this way, can vernacularism really ever hope to be professionalized within the disciplines of design? Perhaps it can’t, but that may be for the best. As soon as the local becomes universalized, it becomes the next status quo, one exodus of status after another. But just as naive typography isn’t fine, and a cloudburst isn’t art, that doesn’t restrict our capacity to enjoy either one of them aesthetically. On a limited scale, in limited ways, representation can put the everyday into a new perspective. Let’s let it.

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Notes from the Manager: A Quality Assured Glossary Bonehead Design Charles Spencer Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek term for his design process. Bourgeois “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and the employers of wage labor.” (source: The Communist Manifesto) Colloquial an informal expression, one not used in formal speech or writing. Commodification the transformation of relationships, formerly

untainted by commerce, into commercial relationships, ones of buying and selling. Continental Philosophy Continental philosophy is a general term for several related philosophical traditions that originated in continental Europe from the nineteenth century onward, in contrast with Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Decentralized withdrawn from a center or place of concentration; especially having power or function dispersed from a central to local authorities. Determinism the philosophical conception which claims that every physical event, including human cognition and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. No mysterious miracles or totally random events occur. Detritus dead or decaying organic matter.


Dissident a person who actively opposes an established opinion, policy, or structure. Elitism the attitude that society should be governed by an elite group of individuals. Globalization a set of processes leading to the integration of economic, cultural, political, and social systems across geographical boundaries. Indentured Servitude an unfree laborer under contract to work for another person, often without any pay, but in exchange for other essentials. Legibility the ease with which type characters can be read. Moxie fortitude and determination. Neo-liberalism refers to a political-economic philosophy that de-emphasizes or rejects government intervention

in the domestic economy. Pretense pretending with intention to deceive. Pulp inexpensive fiction magazines widely published from the 1920s through the 1950s. Utilitarian having a useful function.

1 Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 17.

9 Josef Müller-Brockmann, “Grid and Design Philosophy,” Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), p. 198.

2 Juan Carlos Mena and Oscar Reyes, Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), p. 22.

10 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 16.

3 James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), p. 599.

11 John Docker, Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 83.

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4 “Indeed, these readymades, as he termed them, had been mere real things before they became works of art by Duchamp.” ~ Arthur Coleman Danto, Connections to the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 8. “What distinguishes works of architecture from mere buildings is that they are designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.” ~ Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 23. 5 John F. Pile, Design: Purpose, Form, and Meaning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), p. 40. 6 Ibid., p. 40. 7 Steven Heller and Philip B. Meggs, Eds, Texts on Type: Critical Writings on Typography (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), p. vi. 8 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 14.

12 Harry Levin quote: Frank C. Lu, Modernism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 303. Robert Venturi quote: Jon Lang, Urban Design: The American Experience (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), p. xi. 13 “The Grid: History, Use, and Meaning,” in Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 186. 14 Gerard Unger, “Legible?,” Emigre 65 (2003), p. 100. 15 Elizabeth Dye, “Will Graphic Design Save Fashion?...(Or Kill It?),” Williamette Week (Williamette Week Online: 29 May 2002), . 16 Jorge Frascara, User-Centered Graphic Design (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997), p. 130. 17 Brent C. Brolin, Architectural Ornament: Banishment and Return (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), p. 263.

18 Laurel Harper, Radical Graphics/ Graphic Radicals (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999), p. 14.


19 Rick Poynor, “Building Bridges Between Theory and Practice,” in Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings on Graphic Design (New York: Allworth Press, 1997), p. 67. 20 Russell Bestley and Ian Noble, Visual Research: An Introduction to Research Methodologies in Graphic Design (London: AVA Books, 2005), p. 188. 21 Sean Adams and Noreen Morioka, Logo Design Workbook: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Logos (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers, 2004), p. 28. 22 Steven Heller, Design Humor: The Art of Graphic Wit (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2002), p. 78. 23 Jane Austin, Graphic Originals: Designers Who Work Beyond the Brief (East Sussex: RotoVision, 2003), p. 141. 24 Sean Adams and Noreen Morioka, Logo Design Workbook: A Hands-On Guide to Creating Logos (Gloucester, Massachusetts: Rockport Publishers, 2004), p. 28. 25 Sarah Dougher and Plazm Media, 100 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers: Insider Secrets from Top Designers on Working Smart and Staying Creative (Gloucester, Massachusetts: RockportPublishers, 2003), p. 98. 26 Lewis Blackwell, “Character Witness,” Creative Review 20.8 (February 2005), p. 56.

27 Steven Heller and Louise Fili, Typology: Type Design from the Victorian Era to the Digital Age (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999), p. 174. 28 Michael Bierut and Peter Hall, Eds, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), p. 34. 29 Michael Bierut, “Authenticity: A User’s Guide,” Design Observer: Writings about Design & Culture (Design Observer: 8 February 2005), . 30 Steven Heller and Christine Thompson, Letterforms: The Evolution of Hand-Drawn, Humorous, Vernacular, and Experimental Type (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2000), p. 30. 31 AIGA Orlando, “Art Chantry,” AIGA Orlando (AIGA Orlando: 20 October 2004),. 32 Julie Lasky, “The Cult of Subcultures,” AIGA New York (AIGA New York: 2002),. 33 Jessica Helfand, “Our Bodies, Our Fonts,” Design Observer: Writings about Design & Culture (Design Observer: 15 January 2006), . 34 Juan Carlos Mena and Oscar Reyes, Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), p. 12. 35 Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A

Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 67. 36 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p. 30. 37 Wolfgang Fritz Haug, A Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 121.

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38 Juan Carlos Mena and Oscar Reyes, Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), p. 12. 39 Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: how the rise of aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture, and consciousness (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 170. 40 Juan Carlos Mena and Oscar Reyes, Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), p. 22. 41 Steven Heller, “Through the Past Knowingly?,” AIGA (AIGA: 10 May 2005), . 42 Gunnar Swanson, “What’s Wrong with Plagiarism?,” in Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility (New York: Allworth Press, 2003), p. 150. 43 Ibid. 44 Kenneth Fitzgerald, “I Come To Bury Graphic Design, Not To Praise It,” Emigre 66 (2003), p. 35.

45 James D. Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America Volume 1 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 10.


2

Attention As Currency


“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” —Herbert Simon, Nobel prize-winner, economist1 As a guide to take us out of darkness into light, the cognitive process of attention is as Jesus, the guide from ignorance to enlightenment. Buddhists speak of beinghere-now, quieting your mind, being at present so as to come into deeper existence. Most agree attention is “the starting point for every type of planned and useful activity.”2 So while we deify, let us some more. Deliberation breathes new life into whatever subject it takes on. Because it seems so conveniently good and capable of conjuring with mere dedication, we admire it, seek its grace. Distraction is the Devil, the Fallen Angel who God produced. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the breakdown to a multiplicity of languages was a punishment from God—there could be no emphasis where there was no hierarchy. This fate was worse than the silence of non-contact between peoples, because in that case, you wouldn’t know what you were missing. You can’t be a glutton when you don’t know what you’re ordering. For something we admire so much, we’re unable to expand attention at will. Why is that? Flip, flop, zip, zap. Change lanes, change channels. Speed has become us, a barometer of furthering access to information and goods. Visionary Jean Baudrillard opines, “Time itself, lived time, no longer has time to take place.”3 The potency of leisure has been conquered by a power more scarce than gold, and more bust and boom: attention, as currency. Defined, attention is the ability to focus on certain stimuli to the detriment of others. In a world of less and less of it, the memory of a product, or the experience around it, can substitute for the product itself. This is why attention is a new currency in a new type of monetary system—the experience economy. If one of leisure’s by products is distraction, how come we have become distracted even amongst our distraction? What true satisfaction is to be had from chronic diversion? Value must be placed on non-activity—you cannot work at

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leisure. You can just be at peace with it, during it, in varying forms of intensity. ‘Tis smooth cogency, this wealth-as-speed, smoother still through the forces of industry. Upward mobility means never having to say you’re sorry. As Paul Virilio remarked “If time is money, as they say, then speed is power.”4 But as he also warns, new industrial developments produce new accidents as they do new successes. Driving a car on the superspeed highway feels less like freedom of choice when you crash it. The ability to conveniently travel is always wavered by the sordid possibility of death. Though its well to lump simultaneity and speed in the credo against urban isolation in America, lest us forget the Germans have their autobahn. These phenomena are global. Beijing may have acupuncture, as NY has Central Park, but its denizens drive their motorbikes and beep their taxi-horns most vengefully. Bungee-jumping tops lists of things to do before you die, but that opportunity to die is a luxurious pick. Its a choice reserved for none but our cognition. A squirrel may have near-death experiences every day, but it can’t contemplate why this new one was more thrilling than the last. Stress is an animalistic life-preserver, but who willingly jumps out to sea without a literal one of those? Put less drastically, the more bags checked onto a plane, the more time you’ll spend unloading them. Your effort might have been allayed with less. As McLuhan referred to ‘hunter-gatherers’ of information in the 60’s, we’ve now reached agriculture. We don’t use all we get, all at once. We’re stockpiling. To the problem of cluttered consciousness, many religions offer an extreme alternative: the erosion of content altogether. Professor of Religion Robert Forman defines these, what he calls “pure consciousness events,” as “wakeful w consciousness.”5 Yogis have samadhi, as Jews have ayin, nothingness. That state within is not meant as a boredom of silence, but rather a reverie. Is this paying attention to what is by not paying attention to anything in particular? It feels less than corporeal. Its


hard for me to flesh out the concept. And when Oprah teaches an online class covering Eckhart Tolle followed by plugging Rhonda Bryne’s “The Secret,” I start to wonder. Why would you keep needing the self-help if the first didn’t work for you? When Martha Stewart’s on board, you know simple living is big business. Its amazing that the term ‘conscious’ has been branded into an industry, as if such a thing can even have a singular meaning. Many artists speak of the joy of stream-of-consciousness creation. While at worst disconnected to a reader or viewer, the author at least feels attentive to each skipping rock along that stream. There’s a fullness associated to this psychology, because no one could notate with nothing to note. Then again, maybe the library at the monastery feels even less active than its meditation rooms if no one talks at all there. More and more are trying to convert the vacation into a retreat, well-intentioned antidotes to the pessimism of Virilio’s tourism. But do these voyagers have anything to write home about? Ever secularly, science tells us analytical processing strives for the removal of sensory clutter in particular. But applied to the sensuality of form, this analytical mode can also reduce the viewer’s attention to detail. When Nietzsche’s prognosis was that “time for thinking and quietness in thinking are lacking,” he was complaining about speed before he could have known how bad it was going to get.6 I wonder if dear Friedrich was bemoaning brevity as an inherent evil. I don’t think so. Instead, he’s more likely calling out for a new open-mindedness. Otherwise, we’re automatons to the newest business management theory. Despite some authentic heft to this argument, this complaint is historically broad. Situational bubbles burst, but that’s nothing new. The Tulip Mania wasn’t intended, yet happened all the same. Everyone may be able to congregate around common fears more complicity, but that doesn’t mean T1 lines increased the bankruptcy of the y2k myth. And who would have dreamed a critic like Walter Benjamin would celebrate

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film’s arrival as “the dynamite of a tenth of a second.”7 I’m not buying it. Early film-halls showed shorter clips with musical accompaniment, separated so people could talk during the breaks. The cinema then held less sway as a pure distraction; one could not lose oneself—one came in and out. Yet the association of distraction with vertigo remains, and illuminates the dark, dizzying tumble perceived with modern times. The idea of a schism between work and play in America is outdated, but still present. At its most extreme, the Protestant ethic placed the seriousness of work with nobility, play merely its frivolous cousin. The model divides neatly as: Attention at work, distraction at home and at play. The dour face of a businessman on lunch break was supposed to leave no space for flare. It confirmed the denial of sensory stimulation contrary to productivity. The task at hand should not drop to the floor. In such a visage, scrutiny is far-reaching, taut as the salute “Ten-hut!” (literally meaning, ‘Come to attention!’). The business lunch cannot be off topic because it will break with the long held tradition of comply/defy, male/female, city/suburban. In such, each divide serves its role as a symbolic glue. But attempting a surgical divide between any of these is liking doing the same between the body and mind—its just as fruitless. From border-line to line-drive! As controversial as he is influential, philosopher Martin Heidegger pushed for a critical evaluation. He believed we devalue ourselves and others by seeing them merely as vessels for further control of the world, things, clay to mold. When we outsource to overcome labor laws, essentially to allow for ‘overtime’—we sense the pressures which would segment the present so as to control it. At work, there’s punching in the clock, punching out, undertime, overtime, time is money, or everyone’s favorite crisis credo: ‘there’s no time!’ As over-work requires over-time, something has to give. The constancy of possible laboring on other things to do, to focus on, begets productivity at

“Ten-hut!” (literally meaning, ‘Come to attention!’).

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the expense of sleep. American workers are ratcheting up a sleep debt, as well as the other kinds of debt we’re already accustomed to, though in an unexpected way. A movement of ‘fatigue risk management’ has popped up: nap pod chairs. Ever again, capitalism ingeniously glues itself back together. Stylistically designed, these recliner chairs are bought for those powerhouse cities and offices which never sleep. Uncontrolled but natural ‘microsleep’ is the body’s way of catching up with itself at certain extremes. In other countries, this was the root cause of bringing the mid-day siesta into the workplace. If leisure is religious, and hard-work Protestant, is instability sacred? Why else do we pray to it? From border-line to line-drive! As Virilio might have framed it, with overwork as the accident, sleep substitutes were its airbags. They were meant to assure your safety, while they’re actually secondary to your own steering. And as microsleep is pockets of fragmented sleep, surfing the internet can be pockets of fragmented time—choppy waves, not smooth ones. Even if you’re in diehard attentive mode, it’s hard not to slip—there’s other stimuli grabbing at you from all sides. It’d be like trying to read a dense book while watching a parade. You could do it, but you’d be going back and forth. This is why so many people have to print out web articles to really grasp them. This mirrors the micro burst and boom circulation of the news at its worst: sensational stories act like a wildfire, but as soon as they’re doused, quickly forgotten. That we would conduct procedures of absolutist categorization on the world makes utter sense. But we even turn fiction into precise taxonomy: there are blueprints to starships which never existed. We’re obsessed with it! We bookmark because we don’t want to lose, we don’t want the polaroid-in-reverse effect of Marty McFly. But then we just need bookmark managers. He was just handling one in his hand, while we’re trying to juggle. A great project was recently completed to respond to this ‘short here and now.’ Made in part by Brian Eno, the Long Now Foundation has created the world’s slowest comput-

Fatigue Risk Management: Nap Pod Chairs

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er: a mechanical clock which only ticks once per 10,000 year period.8 This conjectural invention promotes a world-view where the very-far future is thought of seriously, where the focus of now can expand its terms. Benjamin talked about time and the image in this way: “An image is that in which the then and the now come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words: an image is dialectics at a standstill.”9 And Deleuze’s concept of the ‘crystal-image’ mirrors that: when one looks into the image, “what he sees is the gushing of time as dividing in two, as splitting.”10 Each image presents two time-frames, a trace of the past and an unfolding present. Then why is it we devour them so ferociously? We should take some of the time for contemplation. Even as a willful choice, attention differs from memory in its long-term capabilities. A traumatic event will become a memory, of that we have no choice. Even if one tries not to pay attention to it as its happening, its no use. In a test of nerves we can only go so far. The viewer has not arrived anew as if never before seeing, but indeed the human sensorium has been heavily challenged by machinic developments. We’ve come a long way, but not if we think we’ve come the whole way. Not if we think we can become the superheroes we write about. Indeed, the maximal limit of what we can retain is 7 packets at a time. To travel towards immersion in a subject doesn’t as a rule mean each part of the whole grows in importance. The quality will differ severely from one find to another and with multiple internet tabs, who’s counting? The quest is on, and where it will stop nobody knows. Why not keep going? The hole grows deeper. How is one to know the quality of a find without comparing it to more, spiraling out tentacle after tentacle. But we don’t work that way, we don’t keep growing simply out of desire to do so. In fact, despite how hard we try to recall a memory, we actually have to remake it after forgetting it. The key question holds firm: When to say when? Its an ever graver matter of discretion day to day.


When the worker returns to the hive, he may play his own music at his desk, but the muzak in the elevator is always a background to never offend. With an equal audacity of consideration, communication specialists want to get you everywhere they can, in varying volumes. Instead of the more often-heard ‘promoting,’ information managers now have to ‘foster’ info to their audiences. They have to not so much target as to ‘nurture.’ The top-down model is not enough. So more and more, information persuasion is thought of in memetic terms, where you spread it like a virus, but because you want to. A controversial or enticing program will less likely show on Saturday night if its plans include a takeover of the workplace the next day. This is unlike those horrific film sequences in A Clockwork Orange or Dario Argento’s Opera where eyeballs are forced open, a punishment of terror. You won’t mind giving up your attention when your Amazon frontpage is so good personalizing your interests. With this bundle of time-as-money and time/moneyas-speed forever entangling information, neo-Marxist philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug can’t help but despair. Beware the prospects, for the ‘illusion industry’ is here!11 They will take your eyes off your fellow man, and focus them on commodities instead. Christianity has a similar critique, with a keen difference: As C.S. Lewis brings up, “according to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.”12 Self-conceit is distraction from the primary consideration which has to be placed on God the Father. A response to this unnecessary engagement can also be found in the Christian tradition. It is prudence, one of the four cardinal virtues, a distinguishing ability between the virtuous and non, between limits of self and what is truly only God’s provence. When focus is pinpointed ever so laser-like, “context mostly disappears into a blur.”13 The horrific brand of the second Iraq war, ‘shock and awe,’ troublingly attests to just that. Its detachment from real space seems to argue real people would look up with a glee of salvation. To see bombs as fireworks, and planes as a mere air show reduces the subject

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to an unthinking one. Questions were not supposed to be part of the picture, only paying heed to American primacy. A shopper won’t think of a department store’s labor policies when window shopping, just as a God-fearer won’t disavow false idols so long as they hold strong. Both are flips of the coin—past times versus piety. The processing of one thing at a time, has to be the processing of one thing over another. Design critic Ellen Lupton chimes in cleverly: “this brute fact of cognition is the secret behind magic tricks: sleights of hand occur while the attention of the audience is drawn elsewhere.”14 It reminds me of an anecdote I rather like about the film director and special effects pioneer Georges Méliès. An magician thru and thru, he gave effects and ploys such prominence they became his stock and trade. He admitted once the story line was merely to string you from one grab-bag of spectacles to the next. But this kind of earnest admission doesn’t mean the mirage was a surprise in a general sense, only specifically, during the film. Méliès delighted in breathing new life into fairy tales, and the public oohed and aahed. As they demanded more, their purveyor of whimsy had to ratchet up his needed level of special effects expertise. The crowd may not have known exactly what was going on, but they knew they wanted more, nay, needed more. But if an age of information is also an age of disclosure, how would these tricks continue to pass? Because their efficacy is overstated. If you’re well off enough, the world is discoverable, and at your choice, your pace. So what might another result of time/leisure and speed/wealth beget? Wired editor Chris Anderson keenly predicts: “the mainstreaming of the niche.”15 For reasons both precise and fuzzy, wholesome and salacious, anyone can find their ‘place’ through the net’s non-place anonymity. Rather than go to a record fair or cult movie theatre in the nearest city, even the most remote surfer can grab films and music online, regardless of how obscure. Instead of top-down corporate sorcery, review websites like Yelp.com allow a new, mass-collaborative Consumer’s Report. And don’t doubt it, corporations


have gotten the memo on this. Particularly in software, they’ve begun working with everyday crowds of end-users, fostering their own ‘crowdsourcing’ in a neologism-filled era of ‘wikinomics.’ The quicker they can adapt to new wants the better. This indeed makes up a large part of the defense of capitalism: since it works to serve, empty gaps will be fixed up by the glue of entrepreneurial spirit. The ponds may be microscopic, but everyone with the ability becomes the big kahunas of their very own. But in doing so, the exposure to things you never selected can seem more troublesome than before. When everyone can tailor, why not delimit the field as much as possible? In the long run, its your world. Democratizing technology gives people more of what they want, but also more ways to get around what they don’t. Goals of an open society transform into the kind of filtering you alone desire, and with a quantity just-so. Why be a part of the mass if you don’t have to be? Define yourself by excluding all others! Is it any wonder “conservatives are increasingly seeking only conservative views, liberals are seeking only liberal views”?16 The chasm becomes as blunt as hidden lies versus visible truth. It’s never that simple. When you google “definitive truth” you more often come upon the Nostradumus and Alex Jones followers of the world. A promulgation of irresponsibility saved by ever-benign truth-tellers, who need no counter, no baseline for validation! Certainly, this will pop up more than last Sunday’s respectable op-ed. But though the newspaper editor playing god was always a problematic function of mass culture, the amateur-as-god has it own problems, one of homeostasis. It’s easier to sell yourself yourself than anyone else. All this customization implies the move from hell (distraction) to heaven (attention) is a one-way track, but as easily flipped. Rarely would you seek to go to hell on purpose. But when push comes to shove, if a Tony Soprano mobster needs to ‘do what needs to be done’—after the ‘hit’ his partners in crime will simply chide any further guilt—‘fuhgeddaboutit.’ An ethos of erasure

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becomes therapeutic when you’ve seen things you didn’t want to see, in this fictional case because you did them. Sensory overload morphs into the sensible. But of course to be fair, that choice is up to the user—I won’t attack strip club distractions as the den of inequity that criminals like Tony visit to clear their mind. Any more so would I deem videogame players in a certain way as group just because sickos like the Columbine killers used them for their deranged fantasies. The victimization of audiences in young Cultural Studies comes worryingly close to bluntly berating them as “cultural dupes,” argues scholar Pamela Robertson.17 The tendency of the Frankfurt School to diagnose people they don’t know was too all-encompassing. It denied the power of their pleasure in perceiving and in other ways interacting. Which is to say, the culture of commerce brings up great self expression. Everyone has both ethical and unethical reasons to rest their mind and consume as such—the entire framing of the question is too multiperspectival to grab at. But anyone with a broken heart is told to ‘move on,’ the sooner the better, the quicker the better. Go to a movie. Move from one ‘hit’ of pheromones and oxytocin to others. Hyperspeed assumes you have a direct place to go— one point a and one point b. In such a case, certain situations might get you there faster, like having another passenger and taking an uncluttered carpool lane. But this presumes you’re not taking that lane to get lost, quicker. It sounds counterintuitive because for most purposes it would be. But only a diligent internet use can be so instrumentally precise with their voyage—getting lost is an enormous part of the pleasure of the media, of films, of web, not just the pain. Put crassly, if the ‘illusion’ industry is the criminal, then how come being disenchanted seems like such a travesty? If you tell me you’re disillusioned with films, I’m going to guess you never go anymore. Where’s the fun? It’s like watching David Blaine’s Magic Trick exposes and then wondering why Houdini was ever famous. It precludes that not being in


on the fact was, in fact, the very point! I agree with Voltaire when he admits, “illusion is the first of all pleasures.” High culture braggarts like Adorno can’t offer love (best love this!), without bowling us over with hate (never enjoy that!). They have unrealistic expectations—we choose the easy way more than they’d like to admit. They’d rather us study in the monastery retreat of the high, than ever drive to work and listen to the low of pop culture songs. I think Adorno would have had a heart attack if lived to see the Madonna-Britney kiss, the grump. Put this way, those escaping from work find no peace in it. They are completely disinterested in any particularity of the escapism. Benjamin put it succinctly, when he said on cinema in particular, “the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.”18 But what are exit polls about? Word-of-mouth means not a thing? If this were just an issue of manners, I’d understand better, but even there, the majority of movie crowds follow the same decorum as opera fans: silence. And if particular people talk to the screen, not showing respect, it may well be because they know their time is being stolen! And you want to tell them their engagement isn’t critical enough? The constraints of what’s proper in clothing and etiquette have lost opera respect, not gained it. No matter how beauteous their respect for the high arts, the glitterati haven’t had much time for the messiness of movie-hall. They keep their McDonald’s and Wal-Mart visits to themselves. I understand the desire for more critical assurance as the proper form of deliberation. As a initial step towards action, we cannot remain overly dissolved in leisure. But what obligation can I find from wearing a tux to watch a show in a language I don’t speak? I think the contract between pop culture and its audience speaks rather to futurist Bruce Mau’s daring salvo, “for most of us, design is invisible, until it fails.”19 Just because we’re acclimated to, and dependent on something, doesn’t necessarily mean we pay attention to it. Waterworld may not have won out in money currency, but it grabbed our attention currency as a fiasco. While

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crowds take breaks, it doesn’t mean they wont examine a breakdown: it means neither they’re meditating actively nor nodding off. Quality works will win the fans they deserve, so we can hope, and they will actively choose their level of criticality either before or during. Clint Eastwood’s buddy flick with an Orangutan will strike gold at the time, but be forgot, while Letters from Iowa Jima will be validated by praise for long to come, not financial fireworks at release. A life of passions will have fruitless and fruitful wanderings. When he wasn’t doing anything theoretical, getting plastered instead, did Situationist leader Guy Debord berate himself as unengaged? The world isn’t just peachy just because we want it to be. I can’t turn it around single-handedly and neither can you. Thus, we both digress. How willful this is for others I cannot say. In the acts we take on, what happens in the balancing movements between too slow and too fast? When Einstein’s pictured with his tongue out, or riding a bike, we enjoy the silliness as if its separated not just from him, but work on whole. The dreadfully intense blackboard calculations bore responsibility, the bike-rides did not. But why the twain never shall meet? As he put it, “it is the same with people as it is with riding a bike. Only when moving can one comfortably maintain one’s balance.”20 In a spirited defense of leisure, Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper argues just the opposite, “only the person who is still can hear.”21 This absolute opposition basically says: if it works for you, it works for you. Practice takes some of mystery’s luster away. In an Aristotelian frame, the concreteness of poiesis privileges at the expense of theoria’s otherwordly wooziness. In the first, the ‘bringingforth’ as Heidegger deems it, birth is thought up to think away decay. Titillation is bought and sold because titillation is that functionless which takes on a function. Pleasure is not always satisfaction, but for some it must be. I don’t feel I have the right to own how others go about finding that divide, and making it work for them. It may not be prudent, but distraction is natural because


it’s an acting out. The most extreme party might be the most extreme defense against death. How ironic that in trying to fight the beyond, someone might bring it upon themselves. As drug overdoses go to show, whatever floats your boat may also sink you. You sink or swim by your own decisions. This is where I simply must bring up boredom. Malaise is that in-between of too stagnant and too vicious. But boredom could just as easily be defined as stasis, ‘a state of stability in which all forces are equal and opposing, therefore they cancel each other out.’22 Longing to kill time presupposes the same violence contra boredom. But I can’t understand how boredom seems to be growing despite how many more ways there are now to quell it. Nor does treating it as a virulent pestilence makes sense to me, when it could really be a disguised stanza of stillness for the overly active. Instead of the extreme moment between jumping from a hot tub into icy waters, as often done in Scandinavia, business execs can go to spas and stay put. They’ll become insulated in ways not unsimilar to the avid rss subscriber. These coats of comfort are natural pursuits, mind you. Afterall, the lap of luxury is just a poor man’s substitute for the lap of the gods. That remains forever above our grasp. Yet expecting rising affluence to not reduce the visceral is silly. It’s protective. And not only that, we’re in a very privileged place to be if we’re even having the conversation. It’s a phenomenon much of the developing world doesn’t have offered to it. I guess it really does depends on how you’re acclimated: a Taiwanese drama will hardly work for a fan of Van Damme, will always lull to sleep. Likewise, too many mega-explosions and there’s no heart for the Tsai Ming-liang fan to feel soothed by. Only a rare hybrid like Crouching Tiger could bring enough balance to both fans, East-West and Romance-Violence blurring. Speaking of films, a movie queue is a voluntary example of boredom, time-value suffered now so for future exhilaration later. But there’s also the insufferability of the breadline— a daunting task where everyone must stay calm, while they

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need something badly. This is less voluntary, and there’s a raging sadness, tempered hopefully by solidarity and restraint. The point being - it doesn’t matter if something is unchanging if that something is enthralling however it comes to be such for you. Sometimes boredom can be the only way to filter the superfluous. A library reduces the excessive sights, sounds, and motion of other medias or locations to allow an intensity of reading. Likewise, “a patient may not experience pain at the dentist when distraction is provided through the use of earphones and loud music.”23 In such a case, one’s boredom another’s focal point, though for too many, a drag. Are we making out a cure to be a symptom? But if attention on one side and distraction on the other were exactly proportional, a paradox of indecision could erupt, as in “Buridan’s ass” - the philosophical story of a donkey who can’t decide between two equal haystacks and ends up starving. We’re certainly not starving for lack of information, but we have many more than two, and we get into trouble deciding all the more. Returning to Virilio for a moment, his concept of a ‘phatic image’ is useful. Sharing its root with ‘emphatic,’ this typology describes “a targeted image that forces you to look and hold your attention.”24 In this way, brands work through extremity of discrimination, the “immediacy of their recognizability.”25 And so when surrounded by phatic images at every turn, one does not feel this constancy— the only thing steadfast about the World’s Fairs of the past or the Times Squares of today are the perpetual motion to navigate through and around them. But I disagree in the constant assumption that we’re drowning in a torrent we have no control over—one still chooses whether they take LA’s Red Line subway to Universal CityWalk or to the mundane ‘burbs a stop after. The first is far more entertaining, and a good bit less depressing too. It doesn’t matter how overpriced or crowded it is. Window-shopping is a more tactical exploration, and a more overarching strategy of frivolity. It’s just not formal-


ly imparted as tasteful by the utmost in trendsetters, who must sell stylishness but not capitalism. The delectable feeling of getting lost in fun was appropriated by the life-to-the-brim exploits of France’s Situationist pranksters. Bumpy, myriadic drifting (dérive) was attempted as a way to have it all. Take in as much ambiance as possible, and as soon as you feel too comfortable, change it, run the other, use a map of another city for the one you’re in. Situationist striving for an eternal festival could only make sense in relation to work. A heaven requires a knowledge of hell, or it would become Huxley’s soma. These merry Marxists were more to the point distraught, battling boredom as if their life depended on it. Irreverence is one thing, but this was a conundrum: here leisure was worked on in a workaholic manner. The rushed nature of jerky starts and stops mirrors a contemporary chart showing the average web-user’s eye movements. One primary element bothers me about the rise of the amateur, while with very much else I am most optimistic. The whole thing with this wandering-as-resistance is that its a bit short-sighted. Dérive really goes back to Baudelaire’s flâneur, the saunter, a man of the streets, with the city at his feet. But there’s no mention of mobility as economic mobility here! The tourist is glorified in differently parsed words. The homeless of LA’s Skid Row are drifting too, moving from one general area to another, but when the night falls, the city is very literally at their feet. It’s as if we’re in the film The Darjeeling Limited— bored because we’re rich, a spoiled place where so many majesties don’t add up because there’s nothing to compare to. The flâneur and Situationist sound like the type to get drunk and fall asleep in needle-infested alleys for the sake of it. I lose sight of how either trekking serves anyone but themselves, not that they aren’t welcome to it. But parody isn’t the sincerest form of flattery when you so clearly calling out another as the fall guy. It’s precocious to think you’re the only one who can newly hierarchize their city. What would they have done with Google Maps

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mash-ups? Since so many can taxonomize their own lay of the land, would they get an inferiority complex, finding themselves less special? I think they would. The escapades of these renegades made light of myth by trying to avoid it’s everydayness, sure. But for whom? Those already interested, agreeing with their view, who come to find their work? I’d say yes. Free to settle, they never did. Joe Sixpack’s channel surfing is nomadic too. All this organizing doesn’t talk enough about information gatekeepers. Take typography—what words look and act like. Marinetti the Futurist chief played with how much a hungry reader could be barraged. They’ll never know what hit them, he schemed! The result? ‘Parallel lines’ of stories from different angles and at different sizes. Marinetti was a wanna-be war-maker. Spontaneity was to be a new kind of war! His love of ‘the beauty of speed’ was matched only by his propaganda skills. His belief in violence were matched by a new violence of form—words as the spirit of the new age, typography its combat armoured flesh. Many decades later, another vivacious typographer arose on the scene. Less violently minded, David Carson was still a rocket in the national press, and an absolute phenomenon in the design circuit. His work was idiosyncratic to the max, disorder as the new order. Decoding the grungey muck of illegibility that marked his famous layouts for Ray Gun magazine, Carson defensed, “I really think it makes it more interesting to the reader, especially our reader, where you’re competing with all these other things [like music video and computers].”26 What a stark contrast from the banal yet holy newspaper. Designers of that most established cultural gatekeeper keep it simple, stupid. Sainthood fights profanity. The sacred news allots only a restrained formal language in the most considerate and readerly of papers. There’d be no product placement embedded here—advertising was separated from the mass of news in both style, page placement, and speed. As ad men sought new ways to entice, exciting form permeated, twinned by the instability of continuing change. Visually though, the

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stories stayed mostly steady as a rock. While most book and newspaper story typography is ascetic in comparison to initial headlines, generally even the most bracing news stays in a general size-zone. The New York Times main page had only used 96 point typography for it’s main header three times, before “OBAMA” becomes it’s fourth weeks ago.27 The Times has a forcible upper hand because it tells us what is history by comparing it to the normal. And it stays formally as that normal to define it, maintaining a neutral baseline. What a difference a few point sizes make. This rigidity may have made sense journalistically, conceptually, but not always market-wise. The newspaper format had to fight with louder counterparts like tabloids, and their very own ads for their voluminous seduction. This is all to say, the attentive medium matters—a viewer can’t so passively flip channels on a film while they’re in the cinema. They can really just stay or leave, and as a reward, a filmmaker better make it worth their time. As Hitchcock’s quoted saying, “Unlike cinema, with television there is no time for suspense; you can only have surprise.”28 TV needs more impactful jolts to sustained a viewer pressed for time. Hitchcock’s Rope was filmed in real-time but so masterfully by the king of playful strain it doesn’t feel it. And the more recent technical miracle Russian Arc one-upped Rope, increasing its grandeur by unfolding one literal moment after another. By not quick-cutting those up, expectations remain high—as time flows on, the quiet moments remain concentrated. This construction couldn’t, wouldn’t, happen in a live-feed of a house of strangers as in The Real World. As Hitchcock summated, “there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” Before hypertext, this fluctuation wasn’t so much of a problem unless you were a student/ scholar hard at work, pressing on from one book to the other. Even then, there’s a level of physicality—the table, the books, the motion to move them—dissipated when attempted through the screen. This is paradoxical because tv shows are inherently shorter. One imagines that


would make it easier to maintain attention span. But because there is so much to find, you can feel you’re missing out and keep floating around other shows. Tivo revolutionized this, but today, even that can feel like a chore: if you overflow the friggin’ thing, its like overbooking a calendar. You’ve not just lost the ability to do what it was that you didn’t end up doing, you’ve also lost time when you were doing the original planning—energy and value that could have been placed towards something you actually would do. Say It Ain’t So! For ages, seduction has been a key tool in the mad-dash for as many eyeballs as possible. But through over inundation, imposed by force, choice, or necessity, we are growing desensitized. The next stage towards grabbing attention is shock—squeezing it for what its worth, changing what’s blasé, charging at its basis for fact. As the argument goes, distraction is a firm deterrent of the ‘real worries’ of the world. So say, for instance, cnn.com’s front page featuring the newest hotdog eating champion, rather than making a big deal about that latest roadside bomb. Truly though, both are there, the novelty bit meant as a fun break. It’s only shockingly tasteless in juxtaposition. But the world doesn’t stop at the daily paper, and it’s non-interactivity is becoming old hat. You can’t search the paper, you can’t pick your own context to dig into. You have to trust in it. Now particularly with the net, shock can be astonishment simply out of novelty. Its in-your-faceness feels interactive, even if its not. Reading about a police chase won’t match watching the damn thing. Before that wasn’t so much an option, now it is. Shock sites thrive on infamy, yet thats not what it used to be. Notoriety can be fame itself today. The Paris Hiltons of the world are as famous for being famous as anything else, except maybe flashing paparazzi photographers without panties. The vulture industry around celebs allows the L.A. Confidential Danny Devitos to have their own blogs now, to post immediately. Because these days,

“While most book and newspaper story typography is ascetic in comparison to initial headlines, generally even the most bracing news stays in a general size-zone. The New York Times mainpage had only used 96 point typography for it’s main header three times, before “OBAMA” became

it’s fourth weeks ago (Strupp). The Times has a forceable upper hand because it tells us what is history by comparing it to the normal. And it stays formally as that normal to define it, maintaining a neutral baseline. What a difference a few point sizes make.”


really, any press is good press. Case-in-point: specialized user-contribution message boards and videosharing sites. LiveLeak.com promises to show ‘real life’ but does so mostly through mudslides, wrecks, bullies, chases, blood. The videos are ‘caught’ as much as any other way you could describe them—accidental monstrosities of an increasingly filmed world. Another site, the messageboard 4chan.org, specializes in racism and scat porn, strange results of the largest English imageboard on the web. The most violent offenders make light of themselves in their names. Before it was shut down, nowthatsfuckedup.com, was used for American troops to trade pictures of dead Iraqis for porn. And the Stolen Honeymoon of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee was just that, and a big hit. Firstly, not even the most intimate celebration can’t be kept as such. Second, not even a fakely ‘leaked’ celebrity sex tapes raises much of an eyebrow, rather its from Paris or Screech. We’re left with nothing but a “Holy Fuck” of adrenaline. How does Marilyn Manson shock the third of fourth time? How does Batman over-take its superhero origins? Through the bracing, the unexpected, the ‘no-way!’ Now that’s fucked up! Artists have an uphill climb with the burden of historical knowledge they must shoulder. They might shake off convention less for hipness, or novelty, but from sheer malaise at the background of context which coats eve the untouched canvas. Without this gravitas, its no wonder certain audiences couldn’t connect with the supposed conundrum of friends debating the buying of an all-white painting in the theatre production “Art.” But its now generally agreed that there’s no ability to overcome your cultural conventions from which you’ve came. Your time is your time. In that case, I predict shock tactics might be the by-product of a trek for newness rather than an end of itself. This differs quite some bit from the cinematic destruction of Paris in Independence Day or Anna Nicole Smith marrying a gazillionaire geriatric. So when Eduardo Kac makes his bunny a very green and special one, I can’t deem the difference

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between a ploy for attention or a stunt which all the same holds scientific merit. Can we realistically expect new astonishment in the unyielding torrent? I predict we’ll yield more and more to bad taste in all its wry terror. When faked celebrity sex tapes are met with a shrug, our cynical acknowledgement of ‘reality tv’ reveals itself. We stretch the parameters until they pop and then we keep going. We’ve come a long way from The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch to The Osbournes and Hogan Knows Best because while the former were likely never accepted as truthful, they were still kinds of ideals. With the more recent families, we accept the tragic hilarity of dysfunction, but confuse the goals of our wryness. A jab towards past earnestness is replaced by a gross regime of crassness merely for the sake of it. Or maybe, merely for the sake of showing what hasn’t been seen because it must be. We’re facing no less than a question of sincerity! What’s the difference between Hirst monkeying around with a split up pig versus Thomas Edison more marketably electrocuting an elephant to promote a new vessel for battery power? It may be cruel, but bring on the brilliance! Where would we be with the McCain campaign’s crocodile tears over the ‘Pig In A Lipstick’ comment? They win any way you look at it. This is more than a conjuring, its the croupier on the take! What Kac is selling, I’m not so sure, but its something alright, and he’s stolen my attention to the point I gladly give it up. Cheer’s to them, then? Well... yes. And no. I certainly couldn’t have done it, but hopefully thats for the best. I don’t think I’d be capable of keeping a straight face. When Christopher Hitchens goes on Fox News and feels insulted, you’ve got as good a bet as that cheating casino dealer he’ll be back. He gets a weird thrill from the ability to counter such unfair treatment and so do we. Otherwise, we’d never watch O’Reilly at all. That hatemonger couldn’t have the power if he weren’t so popular, and no-one’s forcing you to watch. Don't forget–it was 7-11 who invented the term “brain freeze” to describe the pain of consuming its slurpee too fast. Its not just the pleasure


of something that can be bought and sold, but the pain too. Maybe after watching those Blaine specials, we’re practicing those magic tricks on ourselves. We surprise ourselves to feel surprised that we went ahead and went there. Does the sick fascination with demented photos match the fact that they are not one, but five releases of the “torture-porn” series Saw? This neologism mirrors Baudrillard’s “war-porn,” what he deemed the spectacle surrounding Abu Ghraib.29 Unlike shocking disclosures from previous battles, coming out after the fact, those photographs inflamed while the situation was ongoing. They took on almost a religious significance, as they shamed America in the world’s eyes. What was so engrossing here? Was there a relishing of repulsion, in Baudrillard’s terming, “in the first case a feeling of wonder, in the second, a feeling of abjection”?30 Literary critic Frederic Jameson has an audacious prognosis: “the visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.”31 In a world where attention is currency, shock is awe indeed. When and where nothing else can, the rapture will have us rapt.

1 Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers communication and the public interest. Martin Greenberger, Ed (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 40 – 41. 2 Michael Hagner, “Toward a History of Attention in Culture and Science,” in Modern Language Notes 118, p. 673. 3 Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. (Berg: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 30. 4 John Armitage, Ed, Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2001), p. 26. 5 Robert Forman, The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. (Oxford University Press, 1990) 6 Friedrich Nietzche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 132. 7 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Translated by Harry Zahn. (New York: Shocken, 1969), p. 236. 8 “Clock of the Long Now,” The Long Now Foundation, .

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9 Walter Benjamin, “N (Arcades Project).” Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Edited by Gary Smith. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 50.

10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The TimeImage. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 79. 11 Haug, Wolfgang. A Critique of Commodity Aesthetics. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986) 12 Clive Staples Lewis, Mere Christianity. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 121. 13 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 14. 14 Ellen Lupton, “The Birth of the User,” in Looking Closer 5: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, edited by Michael Beirut, William Drenttel, and Steven Heller. (New York: Allworth Press, 2007), p. 23. 15 Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. (New York: Hyperion Books, 2008), p. 244. 16 Ben Van Heuvelen, “The Internet is making us stupid,” Slate (7 November 2007, 23 November 2008), . 17 Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures—Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1996), p. 16. 18 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” pp. 240-1. 19 Bruce Mau, Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future Global Design (New York: Phaidon, 2004), p. 1.

20 Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 565. 21 Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Trans. Gerard Malsbary. (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), p. 63. 22 “Stasis,” Wikipedia, . 23 M. Lewis, J. Haviland-Jones, and L. Feldman-Barrett, Eds, Handbook of Emotions (New York: Guilford Press, 2008), p. 312. 24 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 14. 25 Celia Lury, “The United Colors of Diversity: Essential and Inessential Culture,” in Global Nature, Global Culture, edited by Sara Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (London: Sage, 2000), p. 169.


26 Joe Clark, “ ‘Illegible’ David Carson cannot not communicate,” . 27 Joe Strupp, “Page One Heads and Graphics Reflect Obama’s Historic Moment,” in Editor & Publisher (7 November 2008, 25 November 2008), . 28 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 65. 29 Jean Baudrillard, “Pornographie de la guerre (“War Porn”),” Libération (19 May 2004).

30 Ibid. 31 Frederic Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc., 1992), Introduction.

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Vegan Chili

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A. In the beginning, in the land before time, there was but speech. Yet in the beginning for the Christians, there was only the Word. The materiality of the ‘Good Book’ was in fact immaterial because it was merely a non-computerized interface to His Word. B. Before the onslaught of the printing press, mass reproducibility, and the photograph, there was the aura of images, while far less of them to be found. This term from Walter Benjamin references a primacy of presence due to the specific uniqueness of the art material’s creation. And yet as Plato wrote “the written discourse may fairly be called a kind of image” to “the original” of “the living speech.”1 Is only speech alive, and other representations less so? Guiding light! What does this all mean? How we are in the dark, without a guide! Higher total amounts of writing, but less reading; the desire for mystification, the desire for coherence; the stagnant vs. leeway; these divisions, all, are irreducible to the zing, zip, and terror of the contemporary moment. Because if there is no private language, only private thought, the ways in which words can only be words, speech speech, words like images, or words like links, is of dire importance. The tautness of overlap there, or its lack, problematizes the synthetic when all pray to it. Language, too, is a media, just one cut mostly out of the picture in today’s media deluge. Dynamic Substitution is afoot, and this is no dead man walking. In the realm of writing, and inside the fixture of the book, we’ll greet the substitution of speech for text. Steps later, we’ll follow the transposition of text for hypertext, facing the realm of networked writing with its unfixed visuality bursting through new interfaces. From A to B, I’m creating a linearity, as I’m also enacting a present because “discourse is always realized temporally and in a present, whereas the language system is virtual and outside of time.”2 The bricks of Letters are not buildings until they are, but the threads of those

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bricks already were. They already were since they were invented to record language, and yet traditionally considered inferior to language itself. We want a Language beyond language, one on par with Nature, because Nature has the final hand, the ‘utter’ truth. The novelty of the ever-ancient tree, the mountain, the creek bed, is in their nobility, is in their singularity, their ability to outlive us, transcend us. An even grander fact is there, and it’s something we choke to swallow. That fact is this: none of these natural things need to be named to exist and instead would do so all the same, all the more. With the traditional (and as we’ll see, anachronistic) privilege pairs of Speech over Reading, and Reading over Seeing, it boils down, once more, to hierarchy, to subservience: of these, what is the origin, which serves it, which comes in which order? And most importantly, how are we to say for sure? The ‘project’ (as opposed to the ‘theory’) of Deconstruction asks us to define something, anything, wholly by that anything’s difference to whatever it is not. In this way, the divide seems keenly and irrefutably a chasm. This applies fundamentally, as Deconstruction itself has to be called a ‘project’ so as not to be a ‘theory’! A dialectic arises asking whether a more fortified theory and enaction of writing is at all moveable to a more porous one. In poetry, where words are presented in-andof-themselves, the figural and thus fictive nature of those words is never in doubt. The words are not necessarily meant to be clear as information, history, or anything else for that matter, but as formal. If those words do happen to be recorded, more care is generally given to the typography therein: line-breaks and spacing as figurations of cadence and aural breaks. But poetry without flourish goes by another name. Speech. Figures of speech are not wrapped in a blanket of neutrality since they make their rhetorical nature known. And ever still does speech, like poetry, maintain gesture when written, in the italic, or the bold. There is more in spoken addresses than writing is capable of translating exactly, but there’s close-calls in this race to the finish. And this is it: In moving to the

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recorded, language fulfills a sense of itself as data. The desire for decisiveness is met in the move from the particular to the general. Words become things, but flexible, moveable—‘physical type.’ This ‘thing-ification’ begs the question of reification (a fallacy where the abstract is seen as real). We put language on a pedestal at the cost of our understanding of it. More temporally, it outlives ephemerality. While the author is not there, they don’t have to be. Books can be reprinted with more letters than a gravestone could ever fit, on more gravestones than a cemetery could ever fit. You have to have thought and speech before writing. If only all just was, and didn’t need to be questioned, no substitutions would be needed, no interpretive measures belabored. If words are mere records, that “locates truth in what is immediately present to consciousness with as little mediation as possible.”3 Then the story all but writes itself. The ultimate synthesis would utterly be “no gap between form and meaning.”4 This perceived “pipeline to the psyche” is the supreme source of ire for Jacques Derrida, and the reason deconstruction began.5 Down with this ‘metaphysics of presence,’ they said!6 Down with saying writing is incongruous and impure in its absence from the true, centered existence. In such a case, intention stands in for the truth where this true emanates from deep within the soul. The author-as-God, there, live and direct, but direct in the flesh, not in a book. Jesus, incarnate? Not quite. Metaphysical. Pre-body. Holy! That directness lives only in temporary auditory space is why music, too, is so ritual, magic, hard to write about. The feeling it gave you then and there has to be deemed only in relation to what it makes you want to do later: it made me want to dance. Improvised drums in a circle may ‘talk’ to each other, visitors may sway to their fury, but they can only forevermore have been: not ever the same again even with absolutely precise re-enactment. In that absence is a quest to revitalize it, a resurrection through narrative. Nearly primordial, Architecture has also been deemed just the opposite: impossible to dance to. But at least

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both skyscrapers and symphonies, both ancestors to the written word as communicators, are not take it or leave it. If an Author-God can mesh with a Reader-God, why are artist statements so dreadful? Heavens no, you know it’s so! This is nowhere near Derrida’s fun-sounding “play of possibilities”: not a system but a silence. Today’s Vagueness, Irony, Facebook: none of these make me write home, and certainly not to dance, because none of them are developed play. ‘Unthought’ anyone? In the non-linear universe of our contemporary moment, the vestiges of textual analysis leave a frail option. Therefore, “everything is to be disentangled but nothing deciphered,” because that would absolutely “close the writing” since it would “furnish it with a final signified.” 7 Fighting a single stranglehold on interpretations would seem adventurous, daring, a roller coaster. But fearing there’s no right one way can lead to wrongly assume there’s no right ways to continue at all. No referee making the call to end the game. Where one sees elegant wooziness another finds the crass. A slidingscale between logic and accident. But be it Spanish store sign or drunken stupor, Roland Barthes’ onion-peeling model of analysis has ‘grander’ objects to analyze. That we agree upon what we do, the way we do, becomes more important than how we do, and that we do. Who cares? For all effective purposes, we are not going to create a new language as we read or speak for what we read or speak. We, the readers, can find readings in new ways, and synthesize them through more medias, and more easily, than ever before. But that neither furthers their efficacy as original arguments, nor that we’d swim that stream at all: what’s to win? As almost everything can be grabbed at, our reach is half-assed: why should I keep one thing over another? I’ll just bookmark everything and flatten it all together in the process. Or maybe I’ll just grab cursory knowledge of more and more attempting to be well-rounded. This is a globe of less and less distance, but more and more sub-categories balkanizing particular

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spaces and times. With so much inventiveness capable at every turn, why is each day just another day? For the ‘targeted’ communication of media-producers, of print, this could be the death of play, not a new beginning for it. The graphic designer as intermediary stands in for the original and actual communicator. These professional inbetweeners are the ones with the most knowledge of typography, and are usually asked to mediate a positive unchallenging view on behalf of their benefactors the clients. The sender expects a return investment on their initial one. They’re not selling short, expecting money from a debacle of missed intentions. Even the messages seemingly less commercial work this way. Take airport way-finding: its iconographic signs subbing for a docent can have no trace of ambiguity. Gate A needs to stay there, and always, in history, but ahistorically. It does not move and its meaning could not be done by a person’s performative presence in precisely this way. The primary scholar of orality Walter Ong wasn’t fucking around when he explained as such: “Oral performance is situational... rather than objectively distanced.” 8 He was looking at the word as a technology, which is of course not unconnected to the mind-as-mothership-as-technology. The statement of the Terminal billboard is not only an “exactly repeatable visual statement,” it is a kind of smallscale opus.9 'Tis a work which does exactly what it does. If it does it well, people get where they are going, but there’s not an individualist demeanor of intention or reception. It neither performs itself anew, or allows any subsequent co-creation, be it by lay reader or scholar. Instead, the communication is performed like modern science, with “clinical attention” in Ong’s words once more. This was the one-to-many, Mass Communication model of the past, and it’s dying a quick death. Just as writing is used “to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience,” the ‘prosumer’ wants their Chipotle burrito made before their eyes, their water-cooler talk replaced by their very own YouTube remixes.10 The communicative intermediation is slippier now, and that’s

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just what writing a blank check to the reader was going to allow for. For all who loathe the blog as nowhere near the Socratic dialogue, find and show me Socratic dialogues on your daily. We’re not talking college debate teams here, we’re talking understanding sought for the sake of itself. This is a world we once belonged to, while no less hard to envision: knowledge before College .© Oddly enough, the Deconstruction project works together like other flexibilities in postindustrial economies. Consumption and Culture made mashable. Meanwhile, meaning is made debatable speech, not the ‘final word,’ interfaced and configurable, but not bookishly physical. If something can never move into what its not, even ever slightly, it seems coherent on pain of death. Wholeness, not the fragment. The concept then breathes as a thing, not just a thought. Engageable as a final decision for then and there, it lives on as that finished decisiveness, physicalized. The space between other texts and discourses may be called ‘intertextual,’ may even go so far as ‘interdiscursive,’ but is not considered a bridge between these physicalities. It is just once more that ‘living’ speech of the tongue and brain. Going back to the Bible example, speech in early frames of communication is given the magisterial intimacy of God speaking down from the sky into a mind capable of deciphering it, speaking it. Such a mind must reside within a special enough person that when they too represented it to others, making up this special event, listeners would take their word for it. They would not look upon the messenger for the message with skepticism but love them, privilege them. This person, this Moses of a kind, has been for literate culture’s history it’s very historians. Only, so the theory goes, once the stories became editable, consensus-driven texts were they the source of err. This allows one to say, “I follow the Christian God, but not the Christian church.” Akin to ‘Up with purity, Down with bureaucracy,’ it’s so easy to say, so incredibly easy-going. So the task of of listening to words and inscribing them, from place to place, tide to tide, is

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open to error, and so opens an in-between place—one of plurality but also liminality. It moves from a centralsource (God to Abraham, and so Abraham as God’s Vessel), to the fallibility of a Humankind without mindindependent judgement. Hold up. Though Deconstructionist critique implies a God’s-Eye view was in every way implicit in how language and meaning were twinned, the Jewish use ‘YHWH’ for the name of the Most-High. The missing (A) and (E), fully spelling out ‘YAHWEH,’ is an absolute self-critique about the transferability of names and knowability. It also speaks to an eternal nature, that the Lord was before language, above it, beyond it. The naming is prohibited in this special case because it is sacred, just as the figural representation of Allah is prohibited in Islam (strived for in sacred geometry instead). Weigh this with the now. Today’s missing parts can simply be abbreviations for the sake of expediency. Dow and Nasdaq quotes. Blogging to tweeting. Emails on half a dime. To condense: all is and must be ‘FSTR,’ as so goes a recent book.11 YHWH is FSTR than YAHWEH. There’s a reason being glib is never popular. There’s also a reason speech can say the spelling out loud in the mind but never speak it in brilliant exactitude. The unsayable name is named only in the mind, in that monastic space of solitude. Whether we move to be more open from there is anybody’s guess. Likewise, the lack of imagery corresponds to our transfixion on the visual as evidentiary. God had to mythically turn flesh for worldwide Christianity to take hold. Which just goes to show, as Hannah Arendt has said, “no discourse…can ever match the simple, unquestioned and unquestionable certainty of visible evidence.” 12 Not all is free and well in this blurry land. Politically charged film director Jean-Luc Godard once commented he didn’t want a just image, he wanted naught but just an image. We just want images when they’re from the paparazzi, justly acquired or not. Besides, Jean-Luc’s desire came well before the mysteries of photo-retouching. Surrounded by computer-mediation, we feel it embedded within us—a

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coming of the cyborg. It’s why we get esteemed actor Meryl Streep demeaning acting with special effects by saying—“You stand there like a piece of machinery.” This is not the robot’s drudgery outside of us, but somehow locked up within us. We want justice, and we’ll take what we can get. We’ll settle for the image though we know it’s words that can never go back in time. The presentation of an image, on the other hand, could have gone through many stages of alteration in its past simply for its present incarnation. As a twist on logocentrism would have it, newer and media-laden: “The picture must always be elucidated by the word more than the word by the picture.” 13 Even before the image-hating, Derrida tries to create the antidote for the original divide, when he argues for flipping the binary exactly upside-down: writing is ‘not a supplement to the spoken word,’ and even more especially, “the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language.” 14 Penmanship is not puny! With language above and beyond, a single use is always tied to a person, where this “I/eye” acts as the self-as-sacred simply for being the self. To look past that beyond is beyond itself. It is a humbling. This is why artists like Margaret Kilgallen or John Baldessari painted words in traditional painstaking detail, rather than silkscreening them: owning up to slips, opening up human lapse. According to Derrida, undecidability at the core means any binary can be flipped. First, the grandiose Tubby Clinton subs Capitalism for Socialism, and viceversa with his and Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way.’ Then he questions what is is: saying it is is only what is is, not what is isn’t. It was as much the look on his face as actually asking us to believe him. There was no substitute for that. The metaphysics of a laughable presence. Big Bubba’s venn diagram applies here in another way too. The space between ‘is you’ and ‘isn’t you,’ you and your other, is a place critic Paul Ricœur deems the true “spirituality of discourse.” 15 But here it’s just a cover-up, never sacred, and too a pedantic cover-up. Who knew?

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Literary criticism uses a framing of ‘theory’ where it looks at meanings and not observable ‘facts’ while wanting to be made science, made fact. All the same, asserting neither authors nor readers are in control of meaning is not the same thing as willing the deceit of fraud into being. For one, meaninglessness in the sense of minddependence cannot be affirmed so much as understood. The premise is not the pit of despair, it is simply the pit of us and just us. Only... here... now. All Alone. Our vision of what lies past is but a kind of interior: in seeing we are in that seeing, still inside the mind. Like a reader as an interpreter, “ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer.” 16 Second, it never meant mistakes and misleading can’t happen or do not. They do. Deconstruction was meant to make light of fallibility, spoken or written. Not, as for so many, to become it. Imagine a billion targets covering every surface but the bull’s eye, and so making it the center by leaving it out. This is in Roland Barthes’ terming, “the text-between of another text,” where we see evaluation of meaning as the process of elimination.17 A field of study called orality deals with the event of speech, in cultures that transmit without literacy technologies. Akin to the early ‘oral tradition,’ meaning becomes lock-step in the occurring moment, as it lives in its living. It may be beautiful or ugly, but once the speech-event is over, then it is dead and gone.18 It lives on in the mental, but not print. Even words set down immediately by the courtroom typists are substantiations, though not the events of speech in their event-ness. Instead of the practical ‘It’ll be what it’ll be,’ it falls back to ‘It was what it was.’ A replacement but never a replica. So we seek a synthesis for speech in its strengths as well as weaknesses. What’s lost is major, the acute capability of mobility. With endless reproducibility, its harder than ever to chide a friend with ‘You missed it!’

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But to the Historian’s disavowal, to share in the speechevent as audience meant you really did have to actually be there. Even there a biased language of the mind interferes intuitively, the first media which is under the influence of so many other external medias. Compare this to telecommunications. As a pristine definition from visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff has it, the virtual is “a space which ‘comes into being when you are on the phone: not exactly where you happen to be sitting, nor where the other person is, but somewhere in between.” 19 Whereas when you were present rather than telepresent, that space between the speaker and listener had a specifics we can’t go back to. In the sense, then, that we work and bond together through signs, of course we are living in “the culture of real virtuality,” where, “there is no separation between 'reality' and symbolic representation.” 20 But the framing is given to us on a silver platter as if this is something new. Higher rates of signs seen per day just puts the question on a higher order. It doesn’t create the query. This analysis is an organization with a curious mission. What does it affirm? I believe its really more so the word ‘virtual’ has latched into our parlance. All connotations of cool despair, with no heat of the moment. Reality for us is mind-dependent, but how compare it to a mind-independent reality anyway? Any conception of that couldn’t be what it said or wrote it is. That uncertainty which dare not speak its name is that which should: ever-transcedent History, the stories beyond the stories. The discontiguity is anything but medical, anything but scientific, anything but realized absolutely. We can’t get to that place beyond, but we never could before. Our very inability to do so must be shared through bonds of accepted communication, acceptable norms, relations of community. What we try to understand best together we also try best to agree on the rubric for common understanding. Without that flooring, we’re walking on spikes. The possibility of an empty consciousness is an idealized projection, of ‘clearness,’ not emptiness. Despite exceptions of the impaired, the vast majority of consciousness

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can never truly be empty, only at rest, or in focus. Thinking otherwise is phantasmagorical, as thinking otherwise goes to show. The process leaves a mark as it makes marks, because it has to. To ‘be here now’ would be a being before data—namely, a pre-literate inscribed existence. To write more data without any preceding is impossible, but just because I or you don’t know of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Why do we let Historians alone try and fill those empty spots exclusively? For a meaning to lose its soul is a conundrum—the soul is immaterial and meaning takes a material as soon as it meets an audience, or moves into discourse. Otherwise, a ‘soulful meaning’ stands for a tree growing without a ground, a cloud raining without a sky, software running without hardware. As Hannah Arendt would have it, “if in thinking we carry out this dialogue with ourselves, it is as though we were ‘writing words in our souls’; at such times, ‘our soul is like a book,’ but a book that no longer contains words.” 21 This book without words doesn’t refer to a sketchbook to be filled neither. It stands in for saying: consciousness is superior to the book, precedes it, but they are not incomparable. Even absence was signified with the creation of zero, and oh how that certain circle took upon itself four letters beginning with the alphabet’s end. To all at once tangibly perceive meaning and sight, reconciled with all that was was would be the supreme repose. Instead, we feel livid because we have lived. We are but beside ourselves if we try to escape outside of ourselves. Writing a history is possible, while writing the history is not. Striving for that is only instead the escape it portends to be the opposite of. I’m caught in a maelstrom, follow and concurring with two strong arguments. On the side democratizing speech, Ong, ever provocatively: “The spoken word... lends itself in quite full pliability to virtually everyone, the written word only to the select few.” 22 But!—“human action, too, is opened to anybody who can read,” counters Ricœur.23 At the least in this dueling, the synthesized Western ability to speak, write, and make imagery, is an

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incredible luxury and privilege. All the more incredible is how underrated these foundations are. We can manage our own archives and classify within. So what about action we wish we could unmake, not enact? What’s said is said, we know this for sure. It cannot be decimated, taken back. No delete button. A taxonomy has begun, a narrative-turned-natural. The world into a word, of course, but also the world into a visual culture. New putative transactions and articulations occur when so much visual communication is seen daily. To concoct history, audiences render these visible brews anew. No more canons, nor pretense of Kantian ‘disinteredness.’ The reader is investing dammit, to what end will be their reward? Their interpretation is situated in the totality of other perspectives—and it should be likened to how important this interestedness becomes. Since the space between the study of word and image are separate, institutionalization runs much of the show. For all the radiant overflow of meanings, they’re ever but denigrated for the very bursting. Art History can unfortunately treat words as “mere instrumentalities in the service of visual images,” just as it needs images “as mere grist for the mill of textual decoding.” 24 Semiotics does not want to believe what it sees, it wants to believe what words it can describe, What it can best iconicize are words. The battle is another creation of an Other. But it’s not a trader trekking the arduous silk road across sea just to get to protectionist Japan. It’s more America and Mexico: routes are intensely criss-crossed and scrutinized, but the two still distinguishable, speaking in different tongues. Landmassed continuously, their symbolic borders are less amenable. Conception is not a sponge porous to blithely accept both the image and word as one, any more than speech and the written equidistantly. In that way, words in images, words on images, or words-asimages all act as Spanglish, a less-than-fulfilling result for everyone involved. Namely, the disrespect of literary critics-as-art historians, and art historians-as-literary critics. Beware! Turf is turf. When Derrida analyzes the

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structure of the phrase “I will not mix genres,” he could be talking about this as well: the summons to stay pure, and the admonishment if one strays into the impure.25 I’m sticking with Arendt: we one way or the other reach for the image as evidence. That doesn’t mean the defense lawyer or prosecutor are out of the picture. They will try to swing the wind just so (and so the wind swings their way). But going back to the presence of speech, practices of reproducibility mean anyone can be jury: you’re not in light of either rhetorical orators when you are watching the news, you’re not in the newsroom when you’re reading the AP story. Distinction is marginalized in the context of the missing context, in the realm of the sound bite. Mr. Dubya, Mr. Clinton, Yes You! Mr. Corrupt Such-And-Such and So-on-And-So-on, are not brought into a lie by the press, by the public, you are ‘caught’ in it. The truth is ‘out.’ Out ‘there.’ And it is an out ‘there’ in a place we can re-listen to or replay over and over. And you are caught over and over again with more and more perspectives put out there. Two speakers have to wait their turn to understand and return the favor of consideration. They cannot drown each other out. But depending on where you’re at that day, reader-interpretation means your inner voice can be as loud as it wants, talking on top of what’s being read or listened to. I'm supposed to believe that this is Radical Plurality? Even non-verbal communication can be ‘written’ with film, sounds re-recorded and enacted just so, and placed back in. You’d never know. Like writing, film and audio recording also ‘fix’ the ‘speech event’ well beyond the ‘finite horizon of its author.’26 Even well beyond that, they all three divest the language-situation from its surrounding. This allows reinvestment as the snippet, the sound bite. Just as well for Nietzsche, who could only counter that new perspectives always “means believing in new horizons.” 27 Reversely politically correct: from too much one-sidedness to too-much too-much-sidedness. A teacher can only teach what they know, so it better not be dead white male philosophers! A burgeoning subculture

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halfway cross the earth would be much better. There’s also the acknowledgment of a lack, a desiring not met: presence. Here it is again, and how. It moves like our economy into recession, as we have fewer friends on the phone but sure as hell more on Facebook. Likewise: less local, public control but sure as hell more media consolidation masked as commiseration. All-Access TV so you can shut up at town-meetings! In that space of distance, left with the inability to ‘save face’ to all spoken to, today’s author of communication is left with no choice. For power to intone away any misunderstandings with those members of the audience (students/TV-watchers/whoever) that misunderstand is a spatiotemporal impossibility without the media. And very nearly one even with it. One must reply, by media, to the media’s treatment. No YouTube questions at the debate without discretion, no Nader either. Or the answer to anything becomes simply to joke it away: ‘Let history judge me.’ To valorize is not always to validate. Since original sin begins the crux of the Christian salvation story, decreeing speech original takes on a paradoxical nature. Why would that be good? Why wouldn’t Speech too be unblushingly, blindingly defected? Nullifying spoken communication’s primacy would have been one thing. That didn’t happen, and a kind of reconciliation between oppositions took its place. Only to shift a Godly sanctification on ourselves could we so begin the path. Centered but anonymous prestige. Loudspeakers in the town square with no origin to speak of, but no questions asked. Then interpretation would be easy. If only then. If only it would be so internalized as believing superior others when they just tell us what to think. As an Aesthetic automation: you don’t know the beauty in scientific terms—inside the rapturing you just trust in it. If only then when authorial intent was inert, meaning what you say would turn and stay redundant. Another paradox: why is both the spoken pure because it is whole in being, but then the spoken pure because it is tangibly questionable? While generally not taken this way in the

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day to day, the spoken is theoretically a universal declaration of itself becoming universal. For the speaker: There is this, and only this, and this is why... This is the one right way and that is why I am saying it like this. For the listener and co-engager: How am I to question that, how am I to question your intention? It is to say in its singularity what it can assure in that very singularity. No ideal text comes before materialization. Without that abstraction, they can only go on what they have before them. This means never an Ideal text so never an Ideal Interpretation, as in soulfully sole. Innumerable is the depth of this artificiality: language in all forms in fact. But to no less is this mode more or less alien than other constructed communications. Nor less capable of fictiveness hiding as something its not. The word ‘Times’ in the font Times is both a word and a kind of image, but visualizing both at once is not possible. The only thing capable is comprehending both can exist that way and at the same time. Nonetheless, both are. And that word could be slightly affected by the inflection of it being set in 10,000 other typefaces separately. Rejoicing in this life-affirming freedom of expression, we forget the ‘Times’ concept never cares what we name it. The ambivalence is tantalizing. Typography can push for an intensity of meaning while minimizing the extent of others. But much of the structuring goes without saying—we intuitively feel out a genre in our midst, even while not ‘looking’ at the type per se. We see free verse in one conventional way or just a story in another and our window of preconceived notions follows from this less than apparent frame. Yet once it’s shared in a language community, no one can re-name a use of a sign while referring to the same sign without much confusion. Origins of the word-to-symbol may have been random originally, but they’re not so in its use. Of that, there is a contractual obliging. The arbitrariness up front may be nonsensical but more nonsensical would be denying that others accept it. Further, the concept of “Times” was in no times belonging to an

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independent meaning whereby any one typesetting or another destroys its essentiality. The range of this dynamic substitution is too nightmarish a free-fall for most. But key is this: the exchange lives on by its omission, its subservience. As long as everyone reads history the same way it is like everyone staying on with their papers all set in Times. Anything else pales in comparison. It’s a leniency that lives on only by referring to the bigger and better of a past prior: a ‘vegan chili’ living in the lack of what typically makes it up. Let’s take a small moment for example. When the goal of skillful form in art started to be cast aside for the more conceptual and relational, then as of now it asked to be judged on separate terms. New critical terms were to take over historical notions of privileged beauty. But some begged to differ, sweeping and chiding that ground away as anti-aesthetic. The move backfired, turning a pro-active attempt about form into a regression against it. Nothing but another vegan chili. Where can makers and critics, or speakers and listeners, find common ground, and where can they only find quicksand? The consequences extend far beyond a joke fallen flat: the choice could be explained as intended to be murky and nothing more. Forget judgemental, how about judging at all? The judgement is suspended because it becomes inarguable. If “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination,” as Barthes remarked, then this wasn’t what we expected.28 Instead: History As A Poetry. History In And For Itself. To backpedal a moment: what was all that buzz belittling Palin being a hunter but for its senselessness. Nothing ticks people off like seeing an unnecessary where others see such a natural they can’t be bothered to defend it. They’ll see no reason if no one in their own group of comfort puts them in that spot. Ambiguousness comes part and parcel with those things said and done for their own sake. Sarah never hunted for me, future Mr. Voter, so I would determine her merits just on that. History As A Hunt. A Hunt, As History, As Poetry. All pointing, making up worlds

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without being complicity at one with them. Sure enough, how could one ever over think it a whole? But back to the real question: how could the Deconstructionists fret the meta-universe of seeing and writing language wasn’t yet here? The most ancient poems looked at language and saw and said it was media. They didn’t point back to language as in a space before it. No one, unlike today’s reaction to hunting in a post-scarcity culture, saw it futile, cruel, unnatural. Deconstruction’s disunity lies not in its origin—laying out its necessity, but in its destination. The problem of the trap’s acknowledgement is no solution, just more of a trap. We feel prey to the hunt of knowledge, but fear it would be worse to return hungry and empty-handed. As the speaker owns what they say in how they say it, they are a producer in charge of their very own factory. They own their means of representation. Typography, the alphabet made flesh, is due its fair-share by scholars, an informed re-evaluation. It is as truly part of the true in ‘the thing itself’ as speech is truly language made material. I use ‘writing’ here not to mean marks, but the alphabet (otherwise any effortless trace-leaving like footprints could be considered ‘writing’). A mechanic grows with their tools, adapting, maintaining, and becoming adept with them. Homo sapiens, as Homo significans must meander through this faulty, beautiful tool of interpretation—making and reading written signs. Acknowledging the brain is not an objective reading machine can only help; its all part of the fastening of the tool. Keep giving the gold-medal to the cerebral crux and sooner or later the game feels like a jip. The greater the modes typography takes as fodder, the more those audio and motion capabilities approximate presence. Within the typographic realm, motion and sound could more specifically promote a telepresence closer to speech. Stored in the computer, shared to other computers, the possibilities for language-into-new-media are intense. When the body of the word is fleshy only on screen, its sense of material framing is less intimidating

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to recreate, reappropriate. These new tools desire to be new tongues, if for making gobbledygook as actual words. Or, too, for being inward-looking: like ‘gobbledygook’ itself, a made-up new word for made-up new words. But in doing so, they are locked in the grab for rapture: furthering their place as a supplementation for the unadulterated. Still! As if all the potentials were just the whisper of a word: that passive miscomprehension which was not the word’s fault, just the how of the presentation. It could be anything but! The doors are thrown wide open though the changes in literacy are swift, and in their own way intimidating. In electronic communication “the computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image—an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water.” 29 More than that: sink or swim. Some learn by seeing, others by hearing, and yet others by outright doing. The character of audiovisual media to impart the desire to make could turn the tweenies growing up right now into techno-utopians. A Generation of the Generative. Adaptable like never before. Always ready for the always changing. In such an estimation, those out of the loop, would have to stay always on the catch-up. Namely adults. If type becomes water, it’s the young ones who will swim not sink. We are given an important new ability with texts on screens in animations versus static on the page. Dynamic typography means words on a screen can be anywhere within it. All direction within that is possible, as texts can also be made to appear three-dimensional. At times three-dimensional words are actually created, but for that presence to be reproduced, back into the screen they must go. But imaginative of what, for what? Because any and all techno-utopian glorification avoids a problematic: a huge amount of work done for you. In educational multimedia, say, a documentary-style strict script would leave only leftovers for the imaginative interpretation. Type as water may be hard to image now, and harder to grow into, but we could conceivably adapt to its new openings for narrative. When George Washington’s

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looking back up at me from a piece of paper I’m going with it. Money is what Marx called a ‘real’ abstraction: you know its a construction, and yet do nothing but proceed as if it were ‘real’ all the same. Credit stored in a bank feels both less tangible and yet more malleable. The ATM at every corner is a metaphor for hypertext’s visuality: everywhere and yet not. Beneath the surface, but ready for action: connections made at warp-speed while you’re doing something else. This simultaneity of digitality everywhere does not delimit hopes of a world whose digitality could stay within our individual control. Embedded and inconceivable are all the conversations happening in the plane of existence right now. Yet even more so are the way hypertexts are escaping their author, being confiscated by the reader, twisted around, turned, warped. Today finding others through yourself can be machinelike: blog responses as the public sphere, multi-tabbing for the right thing to say. The ‘spirituality of discourse’ is not quite at peace with this artificiality, because it didn’t expect such a cybergetic process. Attached at the hip, speeches come heavily from our computer-laden fingers today. The wish for the beyond: a beyond-thought, and a beyond-text, practically beseeches a genie. But for now, new media will do. We’ll give it a shot as we square with being so overstretched. Only the novelty of novelty dies in such an outpouring of immediate a/v mediation. In the meantime, we’ll face no less a desire than for bullet-time direct from the world of movies, The Matrix and multipleangle DVDs. Words materialized at multiple angles, the hope for abundance and the new. Conceivable is the misdirection this could throw open even as it does the unlocking. Not just left to right, top to bottom. Restricted to your acculturation, you will not read right to left or vice-versa clearly if that’s not your first predilection. We’re still stuck with those predilections of course. But the novelty will be real—advanced e-book tablets and personalized advertisements will unlock new discoveries in stranger forms and forums of words and images.

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Speaking of: Images which depict rather than represent try to be what they are, just as they are, just as precisely. Deep-seated, unquestionably, a bathroom stick-figure yields a man without dress, woman with. A poem is ‘free’ in its motion and its sphere of society, but it’s also ‘free’ to be ignored, as is wont to happen. Since it can be read multiple ways, a society can take it or leave it at large. But as soon as even the neutrality of icons are judged, their grayness toned blacker or whiter, this strikes all as heresy! But though an accent but underpins a latter pronunciation, it is no less than vital. Like the term ‘hyper’ in ‘hyperspace,’ it extends the definition of a term. Even the banal accent is frankly magnetic, for while it constrains what is, can still take many forms. These marks, like all written marks for speech, substantively belong, and they maintain a way of speech not by killing the speech-event, but separating it. For anyone able to, speaking is only here as it is. Even before its propulsion from one’s lips, grammar rules are embedded, unconsciously ‘known.’ It is radically unnatural to write, a technology. This sounds pejorative though it does nothing but acknowledge humans adapt. And what graciousness we should have for our adaptations. After all, what other dimension is ever actually at the kernel of reality? Mediated meaning is skipping rocks in a pond, then calling ‘it’ it by where they land and stop, rather than ever of what they skip over. Just as the title of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book drifts between ‘the Visible and the Invisible,’ he concurs inside the text that “one is never at the thing itself.” 30 As a result, Derrida tries to remind us writing is not coming-andgoing, it will stick around. Counter-intuitively, printing on paper is within the edit-able sphere, while it is saying that’s wholly unalterable! Even what’s said inside, not outside—namely, the event of thinking, is temporally unchangeable, only later re-thinkable, regrettable. Once it’s done it’s done. But since you’re the only way to record it, you’re stuck. By chance or choice, a great deal of it you merely forget. Writing a history of your self or others

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requires an inconceivable backpedaling—the perfecting of the mind as archive. This impossibility is what makes it all the more juicy. As an archive, the traditional book (‘the codex’) reneges any desire to enliven speech in its living on. You are left with one of two options: writing notes in the margin, or discussing it with others. No questioning of the book can or would bring any answer. These concepts of speech and writing can oddly become their binary opposites depending on how you look at them: speech as alive, but quickly dead; books as resurrections, but also dead closures. An artifact was enlivened by its creation in a past-present, but no cooperation in a now-present is alive like that one was before you. And so “the idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.” 31 Both restricted but unrestricted. On the binary A, a degradation, on binary B, a perpetuation. This all-the-while implies a key idealization. Specifically—that what ever would-be articulable would be debatable once emitted. Since when is everything any one ever said such a gift? Many times it is a scolding, a forced admission. Compared to a grump, words are also without the personality of toil and trouble. Just because a speaker and a listener are present together does not make that space between them dynamic. If a misunderstanding happens, it doesn’t mean the instructor will solve it for the sake of it. Such benevolence we can only hope for. And though learning by reading is a dialogue with the self, but it doesn’t necessarily mean tranquility at the point of boredom. You read something you love differently than something you’re bored with, and you do so simultaneously—you come with your own concerns and you decide as-you-read. Too, writer’s words might be asked of them, even required of them in schools or offices. Such texts, dutifully written, are just as oft dutifully read. But let us not let that one thing overshadow any other. In many cases they are keenly a gift from one person’s interior onto/into another’s. And for everyone else who we can

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read, we should be so lucky. If every teacher requires only to get students to give what’s required, no one can really be happy in that exchange. Giving is not recording because it has to be recorded, but rather recording because it wants to be. Hence—many writers are bad public speakers, just reading what they’ve labored over so intensely. But what they read can be labored on beautifully in the past as it ambles into the present: it just makes for a bad veiling of a past work. To be merely sympathetic, or even frankly seductive, intersubjective communication wants to crackle in ‘beyond-ness,’ in unrepeatability. In short, written communication wants to make history, not just be it in its printed form. We cannot escape the confines of the parent who begets the child: the world as a perception according to us, captured within. Clear lines between technology and the natural become harder to discern. As humans, we’re conscious of technology we make, but less so of the way technology moves back in on our consciousness and changes it. To be aware of this void is to debunk eternal truth and make of technology a prosthesis for our weary, relativist selves. With no finality, with no stopping place. Originally, photography was doubted for fear it stole from ‘the world as is,’ taking pasts to present onto presents. We still went through with it. We lived with the unpredictability of how what we create can co-create the world. Now we can vastly acknowledge the types of forgery that can shape photography. This should merely throw light back on the unsoundness of fully trusting our soundness. Can’t we agree on having that stopping place only be temporary? This is really not so radical. Buddhism agrees with, and argues for, a kind of permanent impermanence. The Dalai Lama “has repeatedly claimed that if compelling scientific evidence refutes any Buddhist assertion, Buddhists should abandon their own discredited assertion.” 32 Refutation is not religion’s cup of tea. The practicality of such a reverse means all it can practically mean: re-thinking, re-saying, re-editing, republishing. The printed is not a placeholder for an

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absolute permanence, but the best we can do with what we have. Buddhist publishing seems a delightful oxymoron, but with the spoken never unspoken, just misspoken, this is where the changes would have to occur. Combined with their self-consciousness, maybe Buddhist publishing isn’t so loopy in the long run. Instead it is the best example of something pristine: owning up to mistakes as the most honorable kind of failure. I know I’m jumping at the bait here. Buddhism is culturally specific afterall and I can’t expect to universalize it further just like that. Maybe if we got too humble we’d feel less to prove. All the same, science’s proofs are only so existing as not yet disproved. The indifference of this yet, its not caring either way, is terrifying. The see-saw feels less in seek of balance than floating mid-air in a gulf. With a different agenda then religion, science still lacks the transcendence of even the most corruptible divination. The point is not that writing and interpretation are corrupted, but that we’d doubt that. Just as no smells exist in the world but only in our brains, the complexity of unembedding reality bit by bit cannot be overstated. I cannot un-smell when I smell, I can’t think my way out of it. The spoken vessel is incredibly complex and its summoning by the alphabet and alphabetic construction at all is a refinement even as it becomes another restriction. As the one literacy produces and contradicts another, writing in space and time is a most conductive chronicler, translator and thematic builder. The realization one communicable range could drift into another was an amazing feat. The susceptibility to change means more change is coming. And again I truly believe that next curve is from text to hypertext. How we will subvert modern restrictions into the new without dismantling education is left out there to be explored. A parable: Relatively new and experimental, the design and design-writing journal ‘…’ (Dot Dot Dot) is one of the few advisably fresh markers of professional discourse in the field of graphic design. Trade journals and blogs rule the day, but this feisty

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bugger has a fight in it. Even so, the title Dot Dot Dot means trepidation, waiting for the on-coming of something else. As a bound and printed amassing of the mass move to unbounded motion graphics, the journal represents the disease of connected texts today, not just in design, but in printed journalism and narratization all together. The inability to stay put. A loosening inertia. Exactitude is delayed when “what can be said in one language cannot be said in another, and the totality of what can and can’t be said varies necessarily with each language and with the connections between these languages,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it.33 This storm of shooting stars has too many to focus on, too many for any one in the depth of the particular. The one-to-one graphic translation of that untranslatability (what Ricouer deemed “the ensemble of references”) was attempted all the more: literally, the many, the layered, the blur, the fast cut. Perception is a kind of vicious trap, so perception was made aware of the viciousness. A prime culprit of error happened with post-modern graphic design’s typography, which sacrificed legibility for the ambiguity. Thoughts materialized only to be turned back in on themselves. In many cases, rather than différance as a deferral to difference between things, they prevented the first reads from taking place to begin with. A venn diagram seeking the center but with fucked-up blotches covering up the left and right. Non-sensical. They became what Lyotard would call differends—disagreements beyond any common language, for here they are impossible, nonoverlaps.34 Turned into something incomprehensible. In due fact: noise (in no way danceable). Turned into something bordering on libertarian catastrophe. The blur for one was not a visual symbol with discernible meaning to begin with. Such a visual was not an agreement of nonagreement, merely a deduction as absolute reduction. Instead of owning up to ‘distinction’ between signs as a basis for how they stand apart, all is reduced to the irreducible. Distinction seems mighty close to discern-

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ment, visions of snobbery in the exclusion, and class warfare is mighty gossipy. True, exclusion exists as meaning becomes, but it doesn’t feel like the heist of the century—the robbery of all which it could have been. Throw too much noise into the equation of interaction and both sides are left spent—non-processing all together. Whether its what you can decisively include successfully or of what you’re excluding, what good is the blur as symbol? Wherein lies its clarity for sake of the Deconstructive dialectic!? An understandable critique of non-overlap was put in a non-understandable way. Take as a precarious response: a duo from the world of film. In his 1996 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, director Baz Luhrmann hypermanically kitsches-up our famous star-crossed lovers of fiction, using typography as bawdy breaks from the original play. The pauses come so fast and heavy they add, rather than subtract, from both the fury and any remaining pretensions of its fictitiousness. To break free of its stringency from a top-down, teacher-student ‘canon’ classic, the flow is reversed—a most adult drama about most young lovers becomes an adult, playing child, for teens. The tools are there, and so the student-to-teacher becomes a new top-down. Alas, as different languages means different worlds comes a Shakespeare for a new age. This stands in opposition to the play-as-symbol trapped in the classicist of “for the ages.” Traditionalists bemoan as the uber-stylization runs free. Even to those skeptical of the undertaking admired the audaciousness. If literature is unordinary language, one person’s vernacular can be another’s literature. So be it. But the niche worked itself into a hole. Coming 10 years upon Leo’s heels, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette ruptured continuity with disastrous effects. Anachronisms led to charges of nepotism—the reader-as-Author-as-God: how dare she get a deal just because of her dad! A Tokyoesque hyperspeed treatment for the Holy Roman Empire? Huh? Sure enough, connections like this could come from nothing other than the internet age. The bigger problem-

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atic was how a networked remi-xability like this came at such a sheerly glossy level. At its worst, Marie reflected YouTube at its worst: as nothing more than America’s New Most Favorite Home Videos. Unexpected but only in a silly way. Nobody used to really ask the audience for their creative input but now they had, and look what they got! Deconstruction as a Crowdsourcing User-Poll, History-from-Below as American Idol. Maybe the gatekeeper has died a fast death but this ship was off-port. It needed steering and fast. In some weird way, a traditional remake of Marie in this day and age would have been a salvaged reclaiming: the most radical thing of all. This empty signifier would for the moment seem less so. Ring around the Rosy. If bookishness is the straight and narrow, hypertexts are the road hypersonically and hyperbolically travelled. Sure the speed and breadth of the trip was unparalleled versus before, but whether destinations were actually stopped at or just passed over is itself passed over. Transitory text gains in its migratory ability what it loses in its ability to transcend the cursory. The archival nature of the codex is nothing near the rhizomatic randomness. Refashioning the fluid way words both look, and are found, online into the material book is essentially incommensurable. The metahistory of metahistory’s death is ever so Google-searchable. Without boundaries of the past where will our hyperliteracies take us to next, and so why don’t we feel free yet?

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1 Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Reginald Hackforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. p. 159. 2 Ricoeur, Paul. “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.” New Literary History 5 (Autumn 1973). p. 91. 3 Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 154. 4 Ibid. 5 Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 166. 6 Culler, p. 154. 7 Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. p. 147. 8 Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. p. 41. 9 Ibid., p. 125. 10 Ibid., p. 42. 11 Gleick, James. Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. 12 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981.

13 Ong, Walter. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. p. 322. 14 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. p. 8. 15 Ricoeur, Paul. “The Model of the Text...” p. 95. 16 Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Harcourt, 1997. p. 12. 17 Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text” in Image, Music, Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. p. 160. 18 I adapted this phrase from Martin Venezsky's book title, It Is Beautiful...Then Gone. 19 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. p. 89. 20 Castells, Manuel. The Rise of The Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume I. Second Edition. New York: WileyBlackwell, 2000. p. 403. 21 Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. p. 116. 22 Ong, Walter. The Presence of the Word... p. 116.

23 Ricoeur, Paul. “The Model of the Text...” p. 103. 24 Mitchell, W. J. T. “Word and Image,” in Critical Terms for Art History. Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. p. 53. 25 Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. p. 223. 26 Ricoeur, Paul. “The Model of the Text...” pp. 91, 95. 27 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. New York: Random House, 1967. p. 330. 28 Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” p. 54. 29 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. p. 26. 30 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1969. p. 192. 31 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. p. 18. 32 Wallace, Alan B. “Overlapping Worlds: What do Buddhism and science have to offer each other?,” in Tricycle Spring 2003. 33 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “What is a Minor Literature?,” in Mississippi Review 11, no. 3, 1983. p. 24.

34 Lyotard, Jean Francois. “The Differend, the Referent and the Proper Name.” Diacritics 14:3. Fall 1984. 4-14.

Printed by Lulu.com. Typeset in Larish Neue, by Radim Peško. Design: Scott Reinhard Haynes Riley Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution— NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. More writing by Nate Schulman at www.grittyglossy.com Special thanks to Joseph DiGioia Ed Fella Patrick Hogan Martin Plot Louise Sandhaus James Wiltgen

Three Essays

Three Essays

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