Let me start this with something fun.
This semester I have–I think–done a pretty good job of introducing you to the fundamentals of visual design. I have presented design in terms of a set of rules: rule regarding typography, spacing, alignment, color, contrast, etc. I do this in large part because rules are teachable. I can reduce something infinite, complex, contradictory, affective, subjective to a set of finite principles. There is an intoxicating gravity to this movement from the infinite variety to the fixed list. As a writing instructor, as a design instructor, it is easy to get drunk on control. But, as a theorist, a philosopher, a rhetorician, I have spent my life in suspicion of this very desire–the desire for control, the desire to quell the other in the form of the same. Similitude becomes a demand. Let me share two quotes, the first from Victor Vitanza, the second from Julia Kristeva.
- “We are not at home in our world/whirl of language. And every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations. […] Any and every attempt to unconceal or answer definitively [the question of what is [human] B/being] is to perpetrate and act of violence on Being and on human being
- “To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts”
Postmodernism in two sentences:
The desire to *know* what something *is*.
The resistance to invite the strange.
I think, in this class at least, I am aware of the insecurity that haunts me: I am not an artist, but rather one who attempts to unconceal art, to pin it down into something “knowable” (in a different philosophical language: to transform the infinite into the ontological, the knowable, to make the nomad live in a home). To make the other the same. To erase differance in the name of the universe. One reason I ended the Helvetica documentary with the discussion of Carlson–a designer who didn’t set out to break rules, but rather simply set out to express.
I end on what might perhaps feel an excessively philosophical note. If I have a critique of this class, it is that amongst the rush to teach both design principles and technological tools, I haven’t quite figure out how to incorporate rhetorical theory. That remains a challenge. And, unlike past semesters, I didn’t really have an “avant garde” challenge in this class. I haven’t asked you to make me a map that isn’t a map, to make me a mystory or a MEmorial, to push beyond established genres and–to borrow from Nietzsche–design with a hammer.
To be a designer isn’t necessarily to follow rules (although, rhetorically speaking, the rules will rule, will always, already influence judgement; we disseminate without control over how a work will be received and–if educated–aware and sensitive to the many ways it will be mis/read). To be a designer is to design, to create, to express, to write perhaps without care, but more likely with suspicion, of what we are told is right.
