"Unflattening: Reimagining Scholarship Through Comics" with Nick Sousanis: Response by Carol L. Tilley
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
posted under
by Roman Friedman
[On March 17, the Unit for Criticism
& Interpretive Theory hosted a lecture "Unflattening: Reimagining
Scholarship through Comics" followed by a hands-on workshop,
"Thinking in Comics." The speaker was Nick Sousanis, Postdoctoral
Fellow in Comics Studies, University of Calgary. Below Associate Professor
Carol L. Tilley's (Graduate School of Library and Information Science) response
to the lecture.]
A Response to Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening
Written by
Carol L. Tilley (GSLIS)
Slumped and bowed, they trudge in an endless row. Visionless
humans, lacking not only eyes with which to see, but the ability to imagine
something, anything, more. Nick Sousanis opens Unflattening with this
nightmarish tableau. To me, these characters look broken and defeated, like
prisoners of war. On a more metaphysical level, they are soul-less.But what has
broken them? What has, as Nick nods to Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) One-Dimensional Man, “reduced [them] to
the terms of this universe”? [1]
Industrialized society with its accompanying rationalization
and technological determinism? Neoliberal education and its infantilizing
fervor for high-stakes testings? The primacy, or as cultural historian Walter
Ong might say, the imperiousness [2],
of text that shapes our understanding of and engagement with the world? In
Nick’s view, all are equal contenders for the source of these de-spirited
creatures, who inhabit our contemporary society and “exist as no more than
shades, insubstantial and without agency.” [3] We are those slumped and
bowed, the sightless persons, or at least we are in danger of becoming them.
“Languages,” Nick writes, “are powerful tools...but for all
their strengths, languages can also become traps.” He continues, “In mistaking
their boundaries for reality, we find ourselves...blind to possibilities beyond
these artificial borders.” [4] So it seems that we have not lost our eyes, but only that we are trapped inside
a perceptual and intellectual ‘Flatland.’ Happily for us, Nick proposes an
elegantly and deceptively simple solution: we must only learn new ways of using
our eyes. We can escape the borders—unflatten our worlds—through visual
education and multimodal thinking. Nick’s book, through its sequential,
experimental, and wholly effective visual narrative, models the value of his
proposed solution.
I met Nick online through Twitter in the winter of 2013. Our
friendship was formed around comics. Although I’m a comics scholar, I don’t
really study comics as artefacts or medium; I’m more interested in what people
do with them. And as Nick was quick to tell me back in 2013, although his
dissertation—the text that became Unflattening—uses
the medium of comics, it isn’t really about comics. Instead it’s more about the
value of interrogating our world through comics and visual media. We’re both
comics scholars, but ones that tend to step a little outside the artificial
borders for the discipline. It seems most reasonable then that I step a little
beyond the perhaps expected intellectual boundaries for this talk to consider
how the work of Otto Neurath—my current intellectual crush—might illuminate
Nick’s thesis in Unflattening.
Otto Neurath was a philosopher and social scientist whose
lasting achievements grew from the ruins of World War I, a war that required
Neurath’s hometown Vienna along with the rest of the nation of Austria to build
itself politically and economically anew.
Post-World War I Austria was perceived to be lebensunfähig, unlivable. Despite the lack of food, fuel, and
housing, and a tenuous government infrastructure, Neurath recalled these years
fondly. “After the lost war,” he wrote, “there were more difficulties in the
world, but more chances that things could change.” [5] Neurath, like Nick, saw hope
amid despair, and both scholars believed that the visual is that source of
hope.
In the early 1920s, Neurath established in Vienna the
Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, the Social and Economic Museum. Neurath
conceived this institution as one that appealed to the immediate needs that the
Viennese had to understand and improve their individual and collective status.
It was not a conventional museum; Neurath alternately described it as a
“popular educational institute for social enlightenment.” [6] Rather than exhibits of
machinery or dioramas of ancient times, Neurath’s museum used specially
constructed charts alongside films, lectures, and similar tools as the focus.
Unlike many of his contemporaries who privileged fine arts and classical
literature, Neurath was inspired by the mass media’s engagement and efficiency
in communication. [7]
Neurath believed that visual communication was key to
emancipation. [8] As a socialist working in what was then a socialist government, Neurath viewed
knowledge as a necessity if citizens were to gain full economic, political, and
social rights. Like Nick, Neurath believed in the absolute imperative for
people to be liberated from the boxes, tracks, and systems that constrain them.
Where Nick proposes restoring our abilities to ‘vision’ the world, Neurath
offered us new ways to see the world.
In his work at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum,
Neurath developed and refined his vision for a system for “the metamorphosis of
statistical material into pictorial sketches.” [9] He didn’t want simply to
show how many widgets Austrian workers
produced, Neurath wanted to “visualize invisible
phenomena, that is, social and economic processes that were not accessible
to the naked eye.”[10] Over the course of the next two decades, Neurath worked alongside mathematician
and physicist Marie Reidemeister (who later became his wife) and artist Gerd
Arntz to build the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics. Later Reidemeister
renamed their language system Isotype, or International System of Typographic
Picture Education.
Isotype does not eschew the use of text, but primacy is
given to the pictograms. These pictograms are simplified images, comprising a
vocabulary of sort, and can be combined, ordered, sized, aligned, and repeated
to convey meaning. [11] Isotype: a visual argument; a basic juxtaposition of words and images in
sequential form. [12] We wouldn’t mistake an Isotype chart for Nick’s work, but they arise from the same foundation.
The key to Isotype is the transformer. It is the transformer
that enables the metamorphosis of raw data into visual arguments. [13] Neurath wrote, “A scientific specialist may be ever so eminent in his own
field—indeed, he may even have high qualifications as an educator—but that is
no reason for supposing that he necessarily knows what is the best way of
translating his intentions into visual reality.”[14] The transformer oversees
the translation process, serving as a partner to both scientist and designer,
but primarily as an advocate for the learner. The transformer is “a sympathetic
listener who gently refuses to go away” until the communication process is
complete.[15] It is probably not coincidental that Marie
Reidemeister was both Neurath’s transformer and later his wife. There’s an
intimacy and sensitivity required in the transformer’s work, much the same as
what is required for a loving relationship.
Neurath’s museum and visual education projects led him to a
partnership with Belgian Paul Otlet, a pioneering information scientist. One of Otlet’s many aspirations was to create
the Palais Mondial (World City), a
global scientific information repository and cooperative resource network.
While Neurath was skeptical of some of Otlet’s plans (and vice versa), they
agreed to cooperate on a new project Novus
Orbis Pictus, an atlas of human civilization, that combined Neurath’s
interest in visual education and Otlet’s goals for information sharing. It’s
worth noting that the project’s name pays homage to Johann Comenius, a Moravian
theologian who created in the 1650s the first illustrated textbook, Orbis Sensualium Pictus. In the book’s
opening, Comenius’ tutor apprises the student reader, ibimus Mundum, & spectabimus omnia. “We will go into the
world, and we will view all things.”
Although Neurath conceptualized a new mode for scientific
discourse and education, he did not live long enough to see it fully realized.
In fact seventy years later, we are still waiting. In Reading Images, semioticians Kress and van Leeuwen propose that
perhaps, “visual representation is more apt to the stuff of science than language
ever was, or even that a science which is visually constructed will be a
different kind of science.”[16] Nick’s work, which asserts that it is past time for the visual to have primacy
over text, encourages us to discover whether a different kind of science
happens. Some of my own work reflects on young people’s use of media and
technology. For many young people, stories and information, narrative and
content, matter far more than than format or platform. Thus, I have hope that
while it may be too late for our generation of scholars to see the kind of
radical social and scientific change that such a revolution in representation—a
transformation to the visual—would bring, a future generation soon will.
In a reconsideration of Neurath’s contributions to visual
communication, designers Michael MacDonald-Ross and Robert Waller provided an
apt synthesis of the transformer.
“The message is humanistic: break
down the barriers in the interests of the reader. Take responsibility for the
success or failure of the communication. Do not accept a label or a slot on the
production line. Be a complete human being with moral and intellectual
integrity and thoroughgoing technical competence. Be a transformer.”[18]
With Unflattening,
Nick is scientist, transformer, and designer all at once. Like Comenius’ tutor,
he is leading us into the world, encouraging us to view all things. Moreover,
he is showing us that comics themselves have the power to serve as
transformers, bridging scholars and lay readers, encouraging all of us to break
down barriers and be more than another slot filled on the production line.
Burke, Christopher, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker (eds). Isotype: Design and contests 1925-1971. London: Hyphen Press, 2013.
Cartwright, Nancy, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, Thomas E. Uebel. Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Comenius, Johann. Orbis Sensualium Pictus. 1658 (1887 edition). Retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/cu31924032499455#page/n41/mode/2up
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006.
MacDonald-Ross, Michael and Waller, Robert, “The Transformer Revisited.” Information Design Journal 9 (2000): 177-193.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Neurath, Otto. International Picture Language: The First Rules of Isotype. London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner, & Co., 1936.
Neurath, Otto. “Museums of the Future.” Survey Graphic 22/9 (1933): 458-463, 479, 484.
Ong, Walter. Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought. In The Linguistics of Literacy, edited by Pamela A. Downing, Susan D. Lima, and Michael Noonan, 293-319. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1992.
Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Stadler, Friedrich. Written Language and Picture Language after Otto Neurath—Popularising or Humanising Knowledge? In Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science and the Arts, volume 2, edited by Richard Heinrich, Elisabeth Nemeth, Wolfram Pichler, and David Wagner, 1-30. London: Verlag, 2011.
Vossaoughian, Nader. Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2007.
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[1] Sousanis, Unflattening, 21.
[2] Ong, Writing is a Technology, 293.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 52.
[5] Burke, Kindel, and Walker, Isotype, 23.
[6] Ibid, 47.
[7] cf. Vossaoughian, Otto Neurath, 59.
[8] Neurath believed that knowledge was emancipatory (cf. Cartwright et al, Otto Neurath, 92) and because of his valuing of visual communication as a means of educating for knowledge, it fits that he would view visual communication as a tool for emancipation.
[9] Burke, Kindel, and Walker, Isotype, 63.
[10] Vossaoughian, Otto Neurath, 59.
[11] cf. Neurath, International Picture Language.
[12] cf. McCloud, Understanding Comics. Although I find weaknesses with McCloud’s definition in terms of what it excludes, it works well enough for this essay’s purposes.
[13] Burke, Kindel, and Walker, Isotype, 85.
[14] Neurath, “Museums of the Future,” 479.
[15] cf. MacDonald-Ross and Waller, “The Transformer Revisited,” 179.
[16] Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images, 37.
[17] MacDonald-Ross and Waller, “The Transformer Revisited,” 188.
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