New Critical Writing in Graphic Design

As the historian David Jay Bolter has explained, despite significant developments in the field of writing technologies – such as the emergence of scripting software applications and the World Wide Web - the promise of a ‘semiotic revolution’ has not been systematically explored in formal terms. The majority of critical writing, for example, has not taken account of the tangible differences between the modes of inscription available today and their analogue precursors. It assumes and maintains a sense of ‘objective’ distance from both the referent and the space of representation even though subtle transformations ‘of writing surfaces and instruments’ have occurred (Bolter 1991: 85). He states that:

In other media the text has been all image, never anything more than the ink we see on the paper or the scratches in clay or stone. And because there has never been anything behind the text, the process of reading and interpreting has always taken pace in front of the text – in the eye and mind of the reader. The electronic space is unique in that its textual structures are kinetic: the structure can alter or regroup its elements behind the screen as we look on.

(Bolter 1991: 85)


This continuity of critical approach, therefore, is maintained in the face of experiential differences in the scripting process whereby the digital machine writes with the ‘author’ in the real time of his/her engagement with the interface . In spite of this challenge to the subjective autonomy of the writer, however, Bolter finds that: ‘The assumption of critical distance is deeply engrained in critical theory’ (David Jay Bolter in Liestol et al 2003: 17).

As I have indicated, there is the suggestion that in spite of technology exerting a presence in the act of writing, the majority of academic institutions have been negligent of (or attempted to suppress) the implications of the emergent experiential surface of electronic writing. Bolter states that: ‘very few scholars have exploited the possibilities of multi-linear rhetoric’ (Bolter in Liestol et al 2003: p.20) . He describes how structures of critical documentation have resisted the technological push towards new forms of inscription .

In S/Z Barthes describes such new forms of textuality as ‘readerly’, that is, as de-centred works that encourage the intervention of an active participant or reader; who is now seen as a producer – of meaning - in his/her own right. Such a notion of post-scripted acts of textuality – as outlined by Barthes and echoed by Landow - challenges the centrality of the author as an original producer (and source of all meaning for a text) within a range of discourses. Not only this, but it also suggests that meaning should no longer be understood as fixed and tied to a truth (such as to the intentionality of the original scribe). Rather it should now be seen as fluid, unpredictable and open to interpretation . He concludes that:

In terms of hypertexuality this points to an important quality of this information medium: hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice. Rather the voice is always that distilled from the combined experience of the momentary focus, the lexia one presently reads, and the continually forming narrative of one’s reading path.

(Landow 1992: 11)


In the spirit of Barthes’ readerly texts then, it could be argued – I would suggest – that many contemporary design critics have relinquished the notion of authorial control, adopting the stance of something tantamount to a post-critic. Indeed, they appear to be caught up in a process of quotation, paradigmatic play and the ‘infinite deferment of the signified’ (Barthes 1977/1968: 158). In this respect, they have evacuated the traditional role of a questioning critical subject. Their attitude, I would argue, is encapsulated by the following depictions of Barthes who says that:

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture … the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter ones with others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.

(Barthes 1977/1968: 146)


In this way, it could be argued that writers such as Anne Gerber in All Messed Up, for example, might actually represent the new kind of critical writing that Bolter et al have been describing. A light-touch approach that puts signifiers into play without evoking a strong sense of trajectory/narrative or determinancy/purposive meaning, could be viewed as satisfying the (albeit loose) criteria for postmodern textuality. For Barthes these might be listed as follows: dilatory, paradoxical, playful, plural and ‘held in language’ (not in the hand). He states that: ‘the logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define ‘what the work means’) but metonymic; the activity of associations, contingencies, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy …’ (Barthes 1977/1968: 158). Gerber, should she wish to exploit it, might argue that his methodological approach is one of ‘the open text’, whereby:

The text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an over-crossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.’

(Barthes 1977/1968: 159)


Furthermore, it could be argued that such criticism is caught up in the now-ness of its own operations, evincing a past with which it makes a few connections and evoking a future which appears dispossessed and uncontainable: the infinity of the signifier . Again, this complies with Barthes’ reading of postmodern textuality, whereby signifiers are generated in the playing out of a text, ‘not according to an organic process of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations’ (Barthes 1977/1968: 158).

Perhaps, in light of this reading, we might see the work of contemporary design writers as fulfilling Bolter’s earlier call for academic writing that responds to the tangible realities of technological change. For this reason, one might challenge the idea that academic writing has not responded to socio-technological changes. As mentioned above, at the level of literary cultures, Bolter argues that new writing might respond to a heightened capacity for variability (Manovich 2001: 227). Perhaps graphic design criticism can be understood as the literary equivalent of a the symbolic economy of the database, providing a range of signifiers for the reader to constitute his/her own theoretical syntax or opportunity to engage in ‘deferred action’ (Barthes 1977/1968: 158).

References:

See David Jay Bolter ‘Electronic Signs’ in Writing Space: the computer, hypertext and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Assocs 1991) and Remediation: Understanding New Media Massachussetts: MIT Press 2000
The rejection of this method of communication is largely attributed to people’s continued reliance on print as a way of distributing philosophical ideas. Hypertext is an activity that lends itself to digital forms – to the World Wide Web and the hyperlink – but reading by scholars is still largely based on linear forms (even when they are located on the web). The work of Peter Lunenfeld is a notable exception.
This is a view supported by N. Katherine Hayles in her book Writing Machines where she argues that: ‘we can no longer afford to ignore the material basis of literary production’ (Hayles :19)
This is also an aspect of contemporary theory pertaining to the visual arts, explored by Beyond Interpretation
Marc Auge describes such use of history in terms of an acceleration of ‘moments’ and the collapse of monumentual or social events into personal, daily triumphs. See Non-Places: an introduction to the anthropology of supermodernity London: Verso 1995