Contextual & Theoretical Studies: DECONSTRUCTION

TASKS

find 5 examples of deconstructive graphic design and talk about why they are
want us to think about what frames typography and wrighting and in particular what elements of typography influence content - what is the content of a text/book - the knowlege/ideas/message. The form of the book is type and image (the way it is communicated) (design is secondary to content - be a crystal goblet as a graphic designer)
read the sheet and write a 500 word summary about what you understand from it - pick out main points which it says about the role of typography and creating meaning - when found key points, use them to discuss one piece of deconstructive graphic design.

The implication for thinking about text

Think about text and typography in a critical way - the function of typography in a vehicle of meaning and what its role is
Introduction to the term 'deconstruction' - the philosiphy of jacque derida
Graphic design which has used the philosophy of deconstruction as a model

DECONSTRUCTION became the dominant mode of graphic design in the 80's (especially in America) - people who considered themselves a GD - considered themselves as A DECONSTRUCTION
its a model for the integration of theory and practice together - a theory which is understood in practice

it is an approach which comes out of post modernism - deconstruction is a tequnique of post modernity

POST MODERNISM

po-mo attitude of questionin conventions (especially modernism) -
po-mo aesthetic = multiplicty of styles and approaches - get replaced by millions of different competing styles

the pictures - anti aesthetic, designed to be as tastless as possible, doesnt rely on any colour theory. references to different eras (high and low culture) - pluralism. There is a critique of the modern world -

DECONSTRUCTION/ DECONSTRUCTIVISM/ DECONSTRUCTIONISM

Deconstruction and Graphic Design

Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller. Published in special issue of Visible Language on graphic design history, edited by Andrew Blauvelt (1994). This is an earlier version of the essay “Deconstruction and Graphic Design,” published in our book Design Writing Research.

Since the surfacing of the term “deconstruction” in design journalism in the mid-1980s, the word has served to label architecture, graphic design, products, and fashion featuring chopped up, layered, and fragmented forms imbued with ambiguous futuristic overtones. This essay looks at the reception and use of deconstruction in the recent history of graphic design, where it has become the tag for yet another period style.

We then consider the place of graphics within the theory of deconstruction, initiated in the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. We argue that deconstruction is not a style or “attitude” but rather a mode of questioning through and about the technologies, formal devices, social institutions, and founding metaphors of representation. Deconstruction belongs to both history and theory. It is embedded in recent visual and academic culture, but it describes a strategy of critical form-making which is performed across a range of artifacts and practices, both historical and contemporary.

Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of “deconstruction” in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967 and translated into English in 1976. “Deconstruction” became a banner for the advance guard in American literary studies in the 1970s and 80s, scandalizing departments of English, French, and comparative literature. Deconstruction rejected the project of modern criticism: to uncover the meaning of a literary work by studying the way its form and content communicate essential humanistic messages. Deconstruction, like critical strategies based on Marxism, feminism, semiotics, and anthropology, focuses not on the themes and imagery of its objects but rather on the linguistic and institutional systems that frame the production of texts.

In Derrida’s theory, deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality. How does the external image of things get inside their internal essence? How does the surface get under the skin? Western culture since Plato, Derrida argues, has been governed by such oppositions as reality/representation, inside/outside, original/copy, and mind/body. The intellectual achievements of the West—its science, art, philosophy, literature—have valued one side of these pairs over the other, allying one side with truth and the other with falsehood. For example, the Judeo-Christian tradition has conceived the body as an external shell for the inner soul, elevating the mind as the sacred source of thought and spirit, while denigrating the body as mere mechanics. In the realm of aesthetics, the original work of art traditionally has carried an aura of authenticity that its copy lacks, and the telling of a story or the taking of a photograph is viewed as a passive record of events.

“Deconstruction” takes apart such oppositions by showing how the devalued, empty concept lives inside the valued, positive one. The outside inhabits the inside. Consider, for example, the opposition between nature and culture. The idea of “nature” depends on the idea of “culture,” and yet culture is part of nature. It’s a fantasy to conceive of the non-human environment as a pristine, innocent setting fenced off and protected from the products of human endeavor—cities, roads, farms, landfills. The fact that we have produced a concept of “nature” in opposition to “culture” is a symptom of our alienation from the ecological systems that civilization depletes and transforms.

DECONSTRUCTION - approach associated with post-structuralism and JAQUES DIRRIDA
Blended with 20s Russian constructivism - deconstructivism in architecture
Visually interpreted in Graphic Design = sometimes called Deconstructionism
Hilight rose of Cranbrook Academy of Art, US
Emphasise not a style but an approach - it is a way of analysing and thinking about something

JACQUES DIERRA I

approach to texts which analyses their systems of representation - the systems which frame their communication
instead of looking at the surface level meaning - you look for the HIDDEN CONTRADITIONS beneath the surface level meaning, in particular the systems which surround text which GIVE them a meaning - we try and uncover these meanings and how things are given a closed/single meaning.
in the west we have a philosophical approach things in a black and white format - interesting for us is the idea of FORM AND CONTENT/SPEACH AND WRITING as oposition - he talks about getting under the surface
he says how there isnt 2 sides to things there are a million.
talking about communication - spoken and written - the speach is more privalidged as it is more spontaions and requires the presence of a person - under this theory, wrighting is the INFERIOR copy of speach, wrighting is just there to copy speach - wrighting is artificial.
ORIGIONAL vs COPY in relevance to graphic design
NOTHING is either one or another, they are similtaions both and simultanious neither.
he says wrighting is not inferiour to speaking but it is speaking itself - gramatology - taking something which is given, breaking it up and then show that it isnt as black as white as it origionally appears.

characteristics of typography - type/weight/serifs/san serifs/spacing/page setting/grid - do these convensions are just a vehicle for the content or do they affect the content - are they secondary to content or do they create the content e.g. book - text is about being legible - it doesnt have a voice whereas a poster has a character and voice and says something about it. FORM MATTERS AS MUCH AS CONTENT

THE TEXT (sheet)

typography as a dicaplin aims not just to make it easy, to almost do the reading for you - the way paragraphs are spaced and sentaces are stopped/one font means something and the other means something else - it reads for you and stops the effort of reading - takes you out of the process of reading. STANDARD IDEAS OF TYPOGRAPHY MAKE YOU STOP READING - when you are reading it isn't you that is reading it is the writer that is reading thought your head.
ERRORS AND OWNERSHIP - it is inarguable, its the one true meaning (books hand written to books typed) - when a page is printed it is insists that it is correct and there is one meaning that is unchangable and you don't start to think about how the writer could be changing his idea etc - gives one signified.
LINEARITY - the difference between a work and a text -
each typographic act is an attempt to capture the book........

CRANBROOK ACADEMY OF ART

where deonstructavists started
the page - columns - the tactic of making it look like columns makes you aware of the mechanism that makes you read...through the reading of it it makes you think about how you are reading it...using the internal contradictions - every word and every space on the page affects the meaning - the juxtaposition of meaing and text - you dont and you do - both work together and both work seperately. It is a text which uses typography to expose the hidden meanings of typography - it makes you read, it doesnt allow you to mindlesssly read through, it makes you look at form - typography which is critiquing itself.

ROLAND BARTHES

the illusion which creates something and which you can communicate to someone else and they understand it as that. People can and should be readers and bring their own interpretations to the table, people chose not to but they still should

STRUCTURALISM

Structuralism argues that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure—modelled on language—that is distinct both from the organisations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the "third order". In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the Imaginary"; similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood. According to Alison Assiter, four ideas are common to the various forms of structuralism. First, that a structure determines the position of each element of a whole. Second, that every system has a structure. Third, structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change. Fourth, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.

In the 1970s, structuralism was criticised for its rigidity and ahistoricism. Despite this, many of structuralism's proponents, such as Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence oncontinental philosophy and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's critics (who have been associated with "post-structuralism") are a continuation of structuralism.

IMAGES - DECONSTRUCTION examples

(david carson is a very good example of deconstruction)