sssh! this is a working library.

Kinross on the typographer’s bible:

For all its learning, for all the width of its reference, Bringhurst’s book lacked a critical or historical sense. In this vision, concentrated so exclusively on the well-resolved product and neglecting the dimension of process (and thus the unfinished, the disputed, the failed and discarded), there could be no power of explanation. Kinross, Modern Typography (175)

I love the language here. “The unfinished, the disputed, the failed and discarded” evoke the poor, the neglected, the tired and sick; he’s appealing to our sense of democracy. No government can succeed if it oppresses or ignores the majority of its people, just as no theory can be complete if it forsakes the process by which a work is created. Criticism does not admit of immaculate conception.

Criticism for the new grotesques:

Both Univers and Helvetica came in for some criticism from Karl Gerstner: as being too smooth and producing too even a colour. If this was a ‘graphic’ advantage, it was not a ‘functional’ one: ‘what has ocular clarity may appear monotonous when read’. Kinross, Modern Typography (155)

This is an irrelevant criticism when addressed towards display faces, but a book face that doesn’t serve the reader is a failure. Adrian Shaughnessy’s book (How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul) is beautifully set in Akzidenz Grotesk, but fuck if my eyes weren’t bleeding while I read it.

A self-conscious experiment

Any intellectual endeavor is bound to be more interesting if it is unsure of itself. A supremely confident effort will only reach as far as necessary to confirm its assumptions; it will go no further, and it will not question its reasons for existing. By contrast, an insecure process will act out its doubt by exploring, looking for the ways in which it may prove to be incorrect or incomplete or even irrelevant. Instead of searching for tautologies that prove its own effectiveness, it will seek out every plausible way to be discredited and dissect them, one by one.

It’s an exercise in discomfort, but one which can be fruitful if you’re persistent.

I was intentionally abstract about the purpose and methods at work on this site when I started it, knowing that if I prescribed a path from the beginning it would be easier but less engaging. Now, a little more than a month later, some of that purpose is coming into relief – a few edges of a path that is still being carved. This act of tracking and responding to books – collecting the texts that strike me as holding some truth – is an attempt to sketch out the foundations of a personal critical approach, the first step of which is to define the shape of my own beliefs; from there, I can better explore and question them.

The critical approach questions: and it questions its own assumptions as part of a refusal to take anything unquestioned. There are no beliefs – not of a golden age, nor of transparent communication – that can stand free of these questions and doubts. In this way the critical approach will always live on, never quite satisfied. It is coloured by dissatisfaction, even melancholy: it lives in the contexts with which it finds itself, but questions the terms of those contexts and is often unhappy with them. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (361)

So, the process I now find myself involved in is one of definition (seeking out the source of my beliefs in the books I’ve read and reread) and simultaneous questioning (following these beliefs from book to book to see if they become clearer or merely dilute, turning them inside out as they pass through different writers) all the while paying attention to the language itself, cognizant (and accepting) of my prejudice for ideas that are articulated with beautiful prose.

I am also beginning to think more clearly about the relationship between design and criticism, whether it be of a criticism that itself addresses design, or of a critical approach that is communicated through design. When developing any critical method, you must consider why it needs to exist in the first place: what are we to learn from it? How will it reshape what we already know (or think we know)? Who does it benefit?

The reproduction and distribution of text is part of the life-blood of social-critical dialogue. The argument for openness and clarity in typography is made, most importantly, for this reason. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (362)

This part of the path is still woody and overgrown, but I can just make out an opening ahead: if typography is the means by which criticism is distributed, then criticism owes much of its existence to typography. And typography – when executed in such a way as to serve the text and not compete with it – is a participant in that criticism. It is the parameters of that participation that I am keenly interested in.

That, it seems, is the direction I’m headed; and I’m happy to say, I don’t know where I’ll be when I get there.

Coming back around again to criticism and ideology:

… cultural studies has been developed in application to popular culture and is in opposition not only to an exclusive, high culture but also to all distinctions of value within culture. It thus conflicts with the highminded, reforming and occasionally revolutionary way of designing (of William Morris – and company), which would certainly maintain distinctions of good and bad in the ways in which the material world is ordered: on such presuppositions must any confident design education be based. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (322)

There are two ideologies at play here: that of the cultural critic and that of the typographer. The practice of cultural studies is informed by concerns of oppression and driven by an interest in culture at the margins; as such, it treats with suspicion any attempt to discern the value of a particular cultural element, believing that such distinctions are usually an attempt by one culture to oppress another. This relativistic stance emerges from a deeply held interest in reducing inequality.

However, the typographer is an aesthetician, someone who is rooted in the material world (and not just the intangible world of ideas); he believes in craftsmanship and skill. The iterative process of design – start with something rough and slowly work to refine it, improving its physical qualities with each step – gives birth to a belief system that registers the difference between good and bad without apology. As such, the typographer requires a critical perspective that embraces the work of assigning value and formulates a process for doing so; he cannot make sense of an approach that denies all distinctions of value in the name of equality.

Kinross’ larger point here is that we cannot simply borrow literary theories and apply them to design without first considering their effectiveness – and, I would argue, their underlying beliefs – with respect to this different medium.

Against criticism

Part of the underlying tension in Diary of a Bad Year surrounds the purpose of criticism. The narrator has been commissioned to write a series of essays which will appear in a German publication called “Strong Opinions.” The essays range in topic from statehood to Al Qaida, Machiavelli to intelligent design, music, and the afterlife. Nearly all express dismay with the political or social caliber of the world as it is now, with little anticipation that things will change. “These are dark times,” he says.

But neither the woman he hires to type his essays – nor her boyfriend – sees the world as he does. The woman encourages him to write about lighter fare, to tell stories about the birds, for example. The boyfriend goes further, and suggests that the narrator’s commitment to protest is a façade:

You put yourself forward as the lone voice of conscience speaking up for human rights and so forth, but I ask myself, if he really believes in these human rights, why isn’t he out in the real world fighting for them? What is his track record? And the answer, according to my researches, is: His track record is not so hot. In fact his track record is virtually blank. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (197)

It’s not clear what the boyfriend is looking for in his research; but one could hazard a guess: a count of legislation passed, boycotts organized, fundraisers held? Perhaps a product endorsement or two? All things more substantial (more quantitative) than words on a page. The “real world” has no use for words; the “real world” measures everything in money.

Which is, of course, true; we don’t much value words – especially written words – anymore, if in fact we ever did. But it does not necessarily follow from that fact that words are themselves valueless. I suspect quite the opposite is true: we devalue words because they are a threat to our comfort, to our continued sense of well-being in dark times. We devalue words for the same reason that certain governments lock up activists in hidden jails: because unleashed they would wreck havoc on the systems they challenge. The only effective weapon against the word is to abort it before it can reach even one person’s ear.

And so the boyfriend, and many others like him, become convinced by the status quo that words are not the means to change. They become convinced that money and celebrity have more currency in the global market than words, that indeed words have no place in a modern world such as this. Words are archaic, relics of a past that we will not return to, like tuberculosis or polytheism.

It’s as if every potential writer carries a loaded gun, but has been convinced, through many and various methods, that the gun is not, in fact, loaded; that it’s a harmless toy, not worthy even of children, who play with much more sophisticated toys these days. And so every potential writer (every potential critic) tosses the gun aside and walks away, unaware of what they have relinquished.

There is, however, an upside: if at any point someone realizes their error – if at any point they remember the gun was loaded after all – they have only to lift their eyes to see the roads are littered with guns, every one loaded, every one longing to be raised and aimed, every one ready to fire.

Another argument for criticism:

Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature, is too ill to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. But in a recorded lecture he makes what can fairly be called a savage attack on Tony Blair for his part in the war in Iraq, calling for him to be put on trial as a war criminal.…it takes some gumption to speak as Pinter has spoken. Who knows, perhaps Pinter sees quite clearly that he will be slickly refuted, disparaged, even ridiculed. Despite which he fires the first shot and steels himself for the reply. What he has done may be foolhardy but it is not cowardly. And there comes a time when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say speak.¹ Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (127)

1. Emphasis mine. ↩

Further discussion of anti-theoretical language:

In private moments men like Blair defend themselves by saying that their critics (always labelled armchair critics) forget that in this less than ideal world politics is the art of the possible. They go further: politics is not for sissies, they say, by sissies meaning people reluctant to compromise moral principles. By nature politics is uncongenial to the truth, they say, or at least to the practice of telling the truth in all circumstances. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (125)

They call them “armchair critics” because it connotes an image of leisure. The critic is maligned as a member of the privileged class, averse to hard work, spending his many hours reclining in a soft chair, a drink within arm’s reach. He knows nothing of the real world. Once this image of the critic takes hold, there is no need to engage the criticism that emerges from him; it becomes, a priori, irrelevant.

Supporting this image is the belief that physical action is somehow superior to intellectual actions such as speaking or writing. Nevermind that those who denigrate critics for being too soft in the middle, too unaware of the physical labors of the world (think farmers, construction workers, etc.), have themselves never broken a sweat over anything but the treadmill at the nearest luxury gym (a fresh towel nearby, afterwards a massaging shower and a $6 smoothie). In other words, an elite person in power waves aside criticism by attacking his critics with terminology that suggests it is the critic who is the true elite. Nothing short of brilliant, if it wasn’t so disastrously effective.

Here, then, is the critic’s eye turned towards something which would ordinarily be ignored, with revealing results:

“Family Feud” would seem the most straightforward family show on television.…And yet, in fact, it isn’t the familial bond that wins the prize on “Family Feud,” but the family’s successful self-erasure. Each of Dawson’s questions is a test of sameness, its answers based on tallies of “one hundred people surveyed,” well ahead of time, by the show’s producers. A “correct” reply is therefore not the smartest, but the least inventive answer, matching an alleged “consensus” expertly defined and validated by the show itself. Thus the irresistible appeal of “Family Feud” is also the attraction of TV, which tells us endlessly what “we” believe, thereby using our supposed group sentiments to reconfirm its own authority¹.…For all its seeming family pride, then, each group that plays on “Family Feud” does not come on to manifest its own discrete identity, but rather struggles to get rid of it. Miller, Boxed In (54)

This is why we talk of TV as being “mind-numbing”; why, after watching it, you can feel sapped or empty, or, like the narrator in Fight Club, even violent. By addressing “Family Feud” critically, Miller reveals the “truth” of it (there’s that word again). And he reveals his own perspective, namely, that television’s depression of our individual identities in the name of commercial success is a dangerous practice deserving of resistance. If we’re all unflinchingly in agreement, then the conditions for democracy have not been met; we have to be willing to assert our differences meaningfully if we’re to be effective citizens:

We retain the rhetoric of liberal democracy, but in concrete terms this supposed democracy gets enacted as the commodity culture, in which freedom of choice really means Wendy’s versus Burger King. Berman, Dark Ages America (73)

The first – and arguably most important – step towards resisting this phenomena is to bring it out from the shadows; that is the critic’s role.

1. Emphasis mine. ↩

Two concerns need to be set aside before criticism can escape its literary chains and venture into mass culture. The first is the mistaken assumption that the products of mass culture are somehow less worthy of criticism, because they just aren’t all that complex or interesting:

We are accustomed to think of these subtleties in quasi-Pavlovian terms, as hidden stimuli that “turn us on” without our knowing it: nipples airbrushed into sunsets, lewd words traced into some ice cubes, etc. But this conception of the way ads work, and of the way we apprehend them, is much too crude. They function, not mechanically, but poetically, through metaphor, association, repetition, and other devices that suggest a variety of possible meanings. Miller, Boxed In (31)

In other words, there’s not as much distance between a poem and an ad as the poet would have you think. At least, not inasmuch as the critic is concerned.

The second assumption is that in order for a critic to establish that a meaning is evident in a text (wherein a text can consist of words or images or both), she must establish intent; i.e., she must not only convince you that the text means something, but that the author of the text intended it to mean so:

If criticism can demonstrate convincingly that a commercial uses certain strategies, then we can assume that those strategies are, in fact, at work, whether or not the advertisers might acknowledge them. Ibid. (32)

As with advertisements (or designs) as with poetry: the author’s intent is unknowable (perhaps even to the author) and irrelevant: once written down, the text takes on a meaning of its own.

Boxed In was published in 1988, and it occasionally shows its age with respect to the current state of mass culture, but much of it is still relevant:

The impending culture of the world by TV entails not just the homogenization of the spectacle, and the capitulation of the whole public, young and old, and the incorporation of all once wayward elements, and the renovation of our country into one transcontinental shopping mall. More damaging than these elements, perhaps, has been the subtle and coincident trivialization of criticism – the one action that could still counteract TV. Miller, Boxed In (20)

I particularly like the use of the word “renovation” here, as it suggests the unstoppable optimism that so pervades American consumerism, where any change – any new thing – must be good.

Miller goes on to bemoan the “thumbs up / thumbs down” aspect of criticism that TV encourages, and which (since the book’s publication) has morphed into the ratings game we all play on Netflix and Amazon. Actual criticism requires more patience than that.

If criticism’s role is to interrogate texts and uncover (or attempt to uncover) their meaning, then it is a subversive tool, and there will always be those who benefit by suppressing criticism:

Like propaganda generally, advertising must thus pervade the atmosphere; for it wants, paradoxically, to startle its beholders without really being noticed by them. It’s aim is not to jolt us into thinking … but specifically away from thought, into quasiautomatic action … for, once isolated and deliberately interpreted, an ad will betray not only the devices that may enable it to work, but certain larger truths about the system that requires it, and that (therefore) requires that you not think about it. Miller, Boxed In (11)

If a critic isn’t wanted some place, you can be damn sure that place is deserving of vigorous critical attention.

More on criticism and ideology:

There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power relations this involves; … the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. … Indeed literary theory is less an object of intellectual enquiry in its own right than a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times. Eagleton, Literary Theory (169)

In other words, the study of criticism reveals the ideologies that pervade a place and time. The critic is both arbiter of that ideology – being a powerful force in its construction – and an at times unwitting victim – unable to escape the very same power structures he drags under his pen to critique.

In his commencement address to the class of 1984 at Texas A&M University, Vice President George Bush, making a familiar point, invoked George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Mr. Bush spoke of the novel as a prophecy that will not come true as long as America and her allies “stand together, firm and strong, in defense of freedom.” … This bellicose interpretation of Nineteen Eighty Four is nearly as old as the novel itself. When it first appeared, some American rightists hailed Nineteen Eighty Four as a vivid anticommunist manifesto – a misreading that Orwell himself publicly repudiated. … Vowing to oppose “Big Brother” by keeping the U.S. permanently mobilized, Vice President Bush spoke exactly like the fictitious managers of Big Brother’s own regime, who also strive to keep their system “firm and strong” against the enemy. … His proclamation that the governments of, say, El Salvador, Chile, Honduras, and Guatemala are “freedom-loving” recalls the perverse official language of Oceania, where the “Ministry of Peace” promotes war, and the “Ministry of Love” promotes torture, and so on. Miller, Boxed In (309)

Aside from proving that history is doomed to repeat itself, there is an interesting intersection of criticism and ideology in here. Bush sees in Orwell’s novel a vision of an enemy, and onto that vision he graphs the vast, communist empire – not because the text suggests it, but because he is incapable of thinking critically about his own position. Rather than investigate the text, he holds it up as a mirror and finds (erroneously) confirmation of his own simple philosophy. Mark Crispin Miller – who, as is evident from even this short passage, is not a Republican – effectively interrogates Bush’s misreading and points out that Bush has in fact assumed the very position he claims to be against.

It is, in fact, a skill of anti-theory (or, as has been stated before, anti-thinking) – to suggest you hold the opposite position that you do, by means of a distortion of words and their meanings. If the “Clean Air Act” and “No Child Left Behind” aren’t Orwellian descendants of the “Ministry of Love,” I don’t know what is.

Boxed In is a work of critical analysis that takes the tools of literary criticism and applies them elsewhere, most notably to television. Mark Crispin Miller was a student and professor of Renaissance poetry by day, and an author of pop-culture essays on film, TV, and music by night; eventually, the walls between those two efforts came down. I’ll be spending some time with it in the next few days as I venture further into these (as yet embryonic) ideas about criticism.

On being a critic

The first definition of critic is often negative: “one who expresses an unfavorable opinion of something.”¹ The principal image here is of one who complains, who judges – probably prematurely and harshly – that which would be well enough left alone. A critic is one who spoils the dinner party with her invocations of disapproval.

Let’s put that aside for now. For while the negative connotation persists in sticking to the critic’s shoes, it’s really not her fault. A more effective definition of the critic is one who looks for the truth. By “looks” I mean looks with an attentiveness to the details, to the hidden meanings or sideways connections, to what is on the surface and what lies beneath; by “truth” I mean just that: real, reasoned truth, not the postmodern display of it – overwrought with self-doubt – but the real fucking thing. As hard as it may be to believe in some circles, we all still know what truth is; we’ve just allowed ourselves to become convinced that since truth is hard to find we shouldn’t bother to look.

Where the critic chooses to look is her prerogative, but she may look anywhere and still be a critic. Literature and film are natural points of focus, as is design; but I’ve seen criticism applied as effectively to Shakespeare as to TV commercials. In fact, in many ways, criticism today is more interesting when it looks to those areas that have traditionally been ignored; Shakespeare does not lack for critical attention, but Starbucks may.

How the critic looks is more interesting. For every critic harbors an ideology that informs her criticism. She may not admit of that ideology; or – bless her heart – she may not recognize it, so ingrained is it in her thinking that she cannot step back far enough to see it. But it’s always there. The application of her criticism is, then, a test to see if the object of study lives up to this ideology; or, if it fails, to dissect the nature of its failure such that something may be learned from it. It is through her criticism that she spreads her ideology, and as such, her criticism is a method for promoting a better world.

Put another way: criticism is the means by which an ideology is promoted and distributed with the aim of making the world a better place. Each critic may have a different idea of what that “better place” may be like (meaning, they may have different, and even conflicting, ideologies), but the methods and nature of their goals are always the same. To judge the critic, then, you must judge her vision of what the world should be.

It is my belief that the methods and ideas that make up the field of literary criticism are in fact most effective when allowed to escape the traditional field of literature. It is also my belief that these methods – in particular, those of close readings and an attention to historical and political context – are as applicable to literature as they are to design. And, furthermore, that these methods are especially suitable to that breed of critic known as the designer.

Designers possess the natural attentiveness that is at the heart of any critic. If you’ve been trained to notice that single awkward moment on the page where an ff ligature is missing, or that one extra pixel of space that offsets a column, then you already possess the skills of a literary critic. You just need to heed the words as much as the type. And since design is already entangled with the text itself – being the physical means by which a text is produced – an attentiveness to the meaning of words is hardly outside the designer’s purview.

I have read and listened to many a designer profess their disgust with the way things are in the world today. Many an organization has been created whose stated goal is to leverage the talent of designers to reduce world poverty, or combat the malicious spread of globalization, or end the war. What seems to follow is a lot of hand wringing and poster design. Let’s be honest with ourselves: no war will come to an end because of a poster. We don’t need more posters; we need critics – people who have the skills and persistence to uncover the truth and proclaim it loudly.

What I hope to do in this space over the next few weeks and months is to demonstrate how what we traditionally know of as “literary” criticism is applicable beyond literature, and how it can be an effective tool for designers. I’ve begun to lay the groundwork for this already, but it’s going to take some time to really work out all my ideas here. I hope you’ll bear with me; this is the kind of argument that is likely to proceed in fits and starts, and I may change my mind about some things along the way; the path to an idea is often as interesting – if not more so – than the idea itself.

As we follow that path, think again of our poor critic, as she’s forced from the dining room and told never to return. Now look, instead, at who’s asking her to leave: who is he protecting? Why is he so afraid of what the critic has to say that he tries to silence her? What does he have to lose? What do you have to gain?

1. From the Oxford American Dictionary.↩