Making a Text without Organs
In the following discussion I utilize Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs (BwO) as way of reading two typographic applications, exploring the implications and possibilities of what I term Type without Organs (TwO). Lucille Tenazas’ Barry Drugs (1981) is the initial reference point for this exploration, but I situate her design in conversation with Katherine McCoy’s See Read (1989), which I argue interrupts and stutters the flow of intensities that induce a TwO; through the interruption, the TwO resolves into organization, into the perpetual circulation of the organizing principles of capitalism and design’s own discourse. This difference could be attributed to the two (connected) avenues through which the designs travel—Tenazas’ design comes out of her graduate school experience at Cranbrook (where she studied under McCoy), while McCoy’s design is an advertisement for the Cranbrook graduate design program.
Tenazas’ design could be said to exist outside of the rigor of the marketplace, a limit conferred as sacred and essential in the discourse despite much handwringing amongst designers about their fluctuating and ethical role to and within consumerist society.[1] Under this assumption, McCoy’s design, having been released into the public sphere as well as canonized in multiple design publications, exists more robustly as a designed object. Yet, Tenazas’ design is found in similar design publications discussing this time period—thus it could be said to be sufficiently canonized—as her student project in many ways exemplifies the stirring of a newly-constructed visuality in American design. As often happens along the limits of perception and defined taste, the edge area elucidates the visual manifestations of change, where the “intensities” of a TwO become easier to locate. I hope to demonstrate the intensity that bubbled within this emerging visuality, pointing to the ways in which similar visual strategies either cultivate or confine the TwO.
Though Deleuze and Guattari write in a manner that allows their theoretical construct to take multiple forms, every once in a while they provide some delineated clues for proceeding with an application of their thoughts. They do so in particular with the BwO: “For each type of BwO, we must ask: (1) What type it is, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predetermining what will come to pass)? (2) What are its modes, what comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and what expected?”[2] I will approach Tenazas’ and McCoy’s designs using these questions as points of departure. However, before proceeding into the application, what is a BwO? And, what might a TwO look like?
There is the creation of the BwO, what Deleuze and Guattari term the “fabrication” as well as what comes to pass on it; “a BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate.”[3] They do not differentiate between the production and passing, the experience or the circulation of “something” on the BwO. The BwO is the creation of an intensity. Intensity can be thought of as sensation unattached to systematic meaning, in the way that the intensity of schizophrenia might be seen in frenetic, disconnected outbursts that exhibit a powerful emotive force seemingly disconnected from how we might interpret mental “health” within an ordered schema.[4] In this way, schizophrenics become conduits for the madness around them as apparently meaningless and highly expressive forms. The BwO is the fabrication of a mode, a situation, as well as a circulation on that field of intensity. As Deleuze and Guattari explain:
The BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension.[5]
Having “nothing to do with phantasy,” the BwO informs a critique of psychoanalysis and the confinement that comes from Freud’s notion of the unconscious. Oedipalizing the unconscious into a methodology or mythology restricts the dynamic expression of desires. The Freudian methodology, for Deleuze and Guattari, emphasizes unconscious representations over what they see as a more productive exploration of desire or drives as sensation or intensity. Their exploration focuses on the intensities rather than the “support” that appears to construct and confine sensation—it takes sensation as the material for exploration in and of itself, lacking “extension” or a movement into a representational, interpretive frame. For this reason, intensity activates the surface for productive insight, rather than relying on depth assembled through representation.[6]
What might a BwO look like in a typographic context? The surface becomes secondary to the effect that it fabricates, the feeling that it generates and continues to circulate without attaching sensation to organ-ized knowledge: “there is nothing to interpret.”[7] Organized knowledge consists of systems that attach across functionality, assigning specificity to form and proper function to content. Organized knowledge reduces affect and intensity, and categorizes sensation. In doing so, it takes on hierarchical power differentials and presents a series of categorized and controllable entities. Text, the formal signifier of oral sounds and abstract thought, appears to function deeply embedded in organized systems, as it requires significant connections across vast cultural and cognitive territories in order to deliver its hallowed message. Rarely are the forms of text—of the letters in and of themselves—taken as a generative, affective mode of sensation beyond standing in as messenger. This messenger role could however be taken on its own to generate TwO if the text were to present form as sensation unhinged from meaning yet still conductive, reveling in nothing but conductivity.
How does Lucille Tenazas make a TwO in her typographic triptych Barry Drugs? Tenazas shifts and subtly distorts the letterforms of various words and a smatter of letter parts; the letterforms become dis-organized, unhinged from a conventional linguistic function. “b-a-r-r-y” stretches across the top portion of the first panel of the triptych. The staccato letter-spacing, or tracking, interrupts the word’s cohesion, tenuously threaded together by the italic font in which it is set. The lowercase b sits slightly lower than the baseline of the rest of the word. A larger B mimics the small b and is set just behind it, repeating the roundness of the letterform. Prominent words—“drugs,” “books,” “Lampcraft,” “CB radio,” and another oversized “B”—pepper the visual field, initiating a sense of dense objects standing out in the visual space. Various fragments of words associated with commercial signage populate the rest of the field, either horizontally or vertically and at various sizes. In the disorganization, Tenazas produces letterforms as pure intensity. The forms do not connect through a linear understanding, the way text functions linguistically, though each form responds and interacts with those surrounding it. As we see this design, we do not necessarily build a statement from it. Instead, we feel the forms. Tenazas exploits a movement towards intelligibility of type as she creates form as intensity, as a way of expressing variations in time and space—thereby negating both—through formal manipulation.
An additional intensity could be located in this TwO, as Tenazas’ formal manipulations interact with our own expectations of legibility. The unhinging of meaning touches on a discomfort brewed from the possibility of unleashing the psychic chaos that dwells behind symbolic ordering. Her typographic disordering unsettles this, raising the chaos as conductive sensation.
In following the line of inquiry proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, how was this TwO fabricated? It is likely, given the time period in which this typographic experiment took place, that Tenazas transformed the letters through a photographic typesetting process similar to the Visual Graphic Corporation’s Photoypositor.[8] This film-based process utilized filmstrips of fonts and lenses to create text layouts as photographic negatives to be processed and transferred to a paste-up for offset printing. Machines like the Phototypositor resulted in greater manipulation of the text forms, since the film stock fonts allowed for the setting of individual letters. The letters could easily change size and orientation, as well as be warped and italicized by the various lenses. The process of phototypesetting is considered a cold type process, since it does not involve any hot metal type. Hot metal type—either in the form of individually cast lead letters, clichés or stereotypes, and monotype lines of text—dominated printing processes since Gutenberg’s 1440 invention up until the 1960s. Phototypesetting had an additional influence on the printing industry, as it leveraged a newly re-emerging, cheap labor pool—women—to set type without the need for heavy, industrial processes.[9]
Thus, advertisements from the International Typeface Corporation’s newsletter Upper and Lowercase (U&lc) reveal both the rough manual labor pool that previously populated the industry (seen in the gruff faces of the men apparently sitting down), in contrast to the whispy-haired, dainty, and well-dressed (female) labor-pool that is implored to “stand up.” Additionally, Tenazas, along with April Greiman, Katherine McCoy, and Lorraine Wild—just to name a few—represent the first generation of female designers to “stand up” within the discourse. Previously, the acknowledged canon had consisted of men, only a few of whom were esteemed enough to rise above anonymity, including Paul Rand and Milton Glaser. One would have to look to Russian constructivists for any acknowledgement of female designers.[10]
Moving from this nod to the TwO fabrication, we can return to Tenazas’ design, and see the way in which she continues to push the technical and formal qualities of the letterforms towards TwO affectations in connection with the boundary-pushing allowed for and contained by the technical conditions within which she worked. “Barry” repeats on the second panel of the triptych (see figure 9). The oversized “B” recedes into the distance, establishing a perspective in the flat space of the two-dimensional image. The perspective is furthered by a large grey square that enacts a vanishing point. A full “barry drugs” continues down the established linear perspective, interrupted by layers of competing texture and letterforms. A region of repeated words seen in the first panel echoes the street map and interacts with the lowercase r-r-y in the upper right quadrant, and word fragments line the right hand side of the image; a pixelated grid and various letters litter the center and bottom half of the visual field. The type becomes temporal and spatial as fragments of words and text layers build into the residual experience of navigating a constructed landscape. The landscape could be reduced down to a multitude of recognizable or categorizable entities, mimicking imagery or evoking specifics. However, Tenazas’ design does not necessarily guide the viewer towards one specific point—if anything it opens up into many, even as words form and repeat, since the text is unhinged from a unified message.
This distortion of words into landscape could be seen as simplistic to contemporary readers, whose eyes are accustomed to seeing text treated as an entity in and of itself, yet at the time Tenazas produced it, this surface was blown open (deterritorialized/disorganized). Tenazas attended Cranbrook in the early 1980s, and this design was the product of Katherine McCoy’s “label sequence” assignment.[11] Tenazas presents a subjective, nearly-phenomenological interpretation of the surface of commercial signage through vernacular splices of text (here, words taken from street signs along a commercial street) that she renders in various layers of shifting sizes, weights, and sequences.
In the third panel, “barry drugs” appears larger, in the background receding into the distance. A slice of a photograph of a building’s brick corner anchors the receding signage in the left corner of the spread. “Barry” returns slightly displaced in a lower position, shifting out of the frame, and recognizable fragments from the previous two panels repeat at varied sizes and distances, receding and coming forward in the visual field, rendering a dimensional quality to the typographic intensity. Words reappear and layer on top of each other and recede into the horizon, invoking a passage, furthering the notion of conductivity as intensity. Shifting and distorting time and our spatial expectations of text, Tanazas’ design is not didactic by any means; instead it requires an engaged reading of the word-images she presents in the shifting and altered text forms.
What happens when, as readers of this text, we are asked to engage so deeply with form, which seems to take the place of content, giving rise to an ambiguous meaning? Legibility as the primary service of graphic design comes into question and the expectations of the role of typography remain visibly in flux. In this space, meaning is held in tension through ambiguity. As Tenazas herself states, “I have always been interested in ideas that are ambiguous because it relies on the viewer or reader to complete its meaning.”[12] Thus, part of what the ambiguous intensity incites is a different ordering of the relationship between the receiving viewer and the designer; assumed practices deterritorialize. The designer in effect loses control of the outcome. The assumption then is that the reader constructs (multiple) meanings, enabled through the delay supplied by ambiguity. The affect is one of apparent becoming, a constantly shifting end-point that varies in the eyes, perceptions, and disrupted reading practices of the reader. In this way, the TwO is additionally fabricated in the reception, as the reader accumulates a series of intensities and enacts new ways to see and read text, the limits of which are constantly expanding. As Deleuze and Guattari maintain, “It [the BwO] is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices. You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit.”[13]
Because it is a limit, Deleuze and Guattari explicate the BwO through several different models of the BwO in crisis in order demonstrate that the intensive spatium of the BwO requires constant flow. Masochism is one model of the BwO in crisis. A masochist creates a BwO in relating to the world through pain as pleasure: “The masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire.”[14] Stimuli circulate through this pain-pleasure zone. However, Deleuze and Guattari quickly point out that though masochism could be seen to fabricate a BwO, the masochist treads a fine line that borders on crisis, with the potential for emptying rather than filling the BwO. The masochist holds on so tightly to impulse, stagnating it, voiding it by not simply letting the stimuli pass; the masochist in “looking for a BwO that only pain can fill…” instigates a situation upon which “nothing passes, nothing circulates, or something prevents things from moving.”[15] The pure BwO by contrast is a productive development, a continual process (albeit a precarious one) that requires constant flow or else it borders on crisis.
A movement into masochistic crisis might be seen in Katherine McCoy’s See Read (see figure 11). This poster demonstrates a visual strategy that sought to unhinge and complicate the form and content of typography, yet it closes down and confines the TwO. McCoy’s design reaches a limit wherein the productive capacities of the TwO become stunted, confined by the overwhelming desire for organization—scrambled organization, but organization nonetheless. This poster falls in line with McCoy’s concept of “typography as discourse,” as it includes various statements, images, and words that contradict each other in conversation across the piece. Through her pedagogical processes as well as her design applications, McCoy sought to demonstrate that text could be seen as image and images could be read as text.
The goal of this poster is to advertise Cranbrook’s design program, which (as previously discussed) was a hotbed for design experimentation. Thus, this poster has to contain experimentation, exhibit newness, while also communicating to prospective students what they can expect to buy into for their graduate education. Contrasting word pairs in black adjoin and obscure each other as they march down the center of the poster. Critical/lyrical, mathematical/poetic, desire/necessity, authentic/simulated, language/thought, analyze/synthesize, art/science. The pairings are bound by four main, boxed in words: “see” and “read” towards the top of the poster set in a black box with red and blue type: and text/image, set in red and blue boxes with black type towards the bottom of the poster. Dashed lines connect “read” and “see” to both “text” and “image”, though “read” and “see” remain separated in the space. The dashed lines intersect a panoply of images (which are images of Cranbrook student Ed Fella’s work, amongst others), some set in boxes along the lines. The lines cross and become obscured by the central collage that contains images of a human head, 3D renderings of the letters “F,” “O,” “R,” and “M” (Ed Fella), a spherical ball, amongst a smattering of other items. Along the center line of the poster, a red gradient from the left side of the poster meets with a blue gradient from the right; this meeting reflects the notion of two sides of the design department coming together in the middle, as the objects set in red are the 2D objects of graphic design, and the blue objects are 3D, or product design.
Since the text forms words that build concrete binary statements, it would appear that this poster does not fabricate a TwO. This analysis, however, could go a few steps further. Similar to Barry Drugs, the eye dances around this design. However, the movement is much more plotted, as dashed lines and lines of text lead the viewer around the design. Images interrupt the linguistic plotting, and seem to imply that we can read the images just as we can purely see the text. But, McCoy does not actually let us simply see text—we must read it. The only text forms that exist to be “seen” are the rendered F, O, R and M that populate the central collage. While the text and image are scrambled in the design, this scrambling does not produce any new sensations. It renders both image and text as cerebral, logistic, and linear, voiding sensation and cutting off the flow into organized knowledge.[16]
Tenazas’ design, on the other hand, would be what I consider a pure TwO. In exploring conductivity of the letter and word forms, as well as their formal relations in a visual field, Tenazas’ maintains a realm of sensation and intensity by unhinging content from form. McCoy, on the other hand, leverages form to plot a constructed meaning. There is little of the “unknowable” expressed in McCoy’s design. It appears to speak a more elite language, one that may read as witty or complex but steadies on an expression of knowingness rather than exploration. Additionally, the confinement of the TwO, its descent into masochism or crisis, could be seen as many designs from this time were labeled as enacting elite languages that only “those in the know” would be able to decipher, or would even take the time to decipher. I see more of this distanced knowingness in McCoy’s designs, which seem to isolate the viewer through apparent complexity. Tenazas (and Carson’s) designs appear more approachable from multiple standpoints and entry-points; they are about not knowing as much as they are about knowing the right thing, or the current right way to read or design.[17]
Organized modes of knowledge, however, are part of a continuum of design discourse that constructs what and how the designed surface is read and understood within the design community. In this way, American graphic design exists as a double articulation, in that it not only speaks and delivers messages to the “public,” it also crafts and discusses messages internally, canonizing some and ostracizing others. It dismantles one and nurtures another, with arguments and tensions popping up over what could be considered the most mundane of details to the “outside world,” such as the kerning between the letters of the AIGA logo in 1994.[18] This detail may seem insignificant, but Rudy VanderLans’ deduction that the kerning issues related to the chosen typeface for the logo were “amateurish, tasteless and bland” came in response to Steven Heller’s outright condemnation of the new visuality of 1990s design, which was layered, distorted, and even more ambiguous than those from the 1980s. Heller referred to this new “style” as empty and ugly, as discussed in the introduction to this thesis. He balked at the new generation’s reverence for chaos at the cost of harmony. The kerning of the logo then rises as node of power, as the positioning of blank space becomes rife with contention—it stands for everything either right or wrong depending from which side of the visual pendulum one swung.[19]
That pendulum, were it swinging in the direction of the New Wave, would also point towards a current of relativism that sought to obscure the designer in the process, as McCoy explicates:
[t]he presence of the designer is sometimes so oblique that certain pieces would seem to spring directly from our popular culture. Reflecting current linguistic theory, the notion of "authorship" as a personal, formal vocabulary is less important than the dialogue between the graphic object and its audience; no longer are there one-way statements from designer.[20]
In this process, the designer is tasked with inciting individual members of their “audience” to build their own sense of meaning from a conversation across and with the formal elements of the design, such as in Tenazas’ design.
The “audience” would then also be considered an author. This process of reading through illegibility is part of a greater design movement that intended to involve individual observers in the production of meaning rather than relying on designers to deliver targeted messages to a receiving audience.
Typographic experimentation in the early 1980s intensified as technological developments allowed for an increasing amount of malleability of the text form. This gave way to more regimented styles of disorganization seen in the 1990s. Disorganization catapulted to the level of official discourse as the designer moved from a value-free messenger (in the 1960s-1970s), on to an inciter of desire (1970s-1980s), and then to a producer (1980s-1990s). Ellen Lupton discusses a designer’s wresting of control in her 1998 essay, “The Designer as Producer”; “There exist opportunities to seize control—intellectually and economically—of the means of production, and to share that control with the reading public, empowering them to become producers as well as consumers of meaning.”[21] Here, then, is where the TwO demonstrates that it has been attained, the limit reached, as the shift from intensity must be grouped into a larger discourse, and the TwO meets masochism.
It may be possible to see both Tenazas’ and McCoy’s designs as intensive responses to a changing media environment and the dissolution of the notion of passive consumers. Previous design methodologies allowed for a fairly direct communication model, one that married form and function in the production of a sent message that would be received and clearly decoded by the clearly defined “target audience.” Yet, the 1980s saw an increase in media outlets and the increase of information processing at the dawn of the digital age. Printed matter had been competing with radio, cinema, and broadcast television for nearly one hundred years, and had been able to maintain some sense of authority in the midst of a competitive media marketplace. These media outlets were built on top-down communicative processes of production and dissemination. In the computer age, the methods of information production and dissemination were re-wired around mainframe computer networks that delivered broken down packets of information across vast networks. The disassembling of information and its reconfiguration across multiple, articulating nodes is reflected in the disassembled graphic surface, as is a loss of hierarchy in the message delivery. The postmodern printed material and experiments capture the heat of a dynamically evolving multi-media environment, which Tenazas started to explore in Barry Drugs.
In postmodern approaches, McCoy distinguishes between the early typographic applications from the late 1970s and early 1980s that repeated Modernist tenets through disassembled forms versus applications that more fully destabilized the generation of meaning and authorship. The modernist stereotypes took the materials of modernist design and disassembled them, simply scrambling the elements, producing:
Complexity, layering, syntactical playfulness, irony, vernacular forms, and classical pre-Modern typography and composition…explored in an outburst of energy. But for all its rules breaking, this dissecting and recombining of the grammar of graphic design was a logical outgrowth of the Modernist emphasis on structural expressionism.[22]
In those early days, which McCoy characterizes as repeating modernist tenets through the disassembly, I believe we see more instances of TwO. We see a disorganization start to take place, as the surface unwinds within the given framework and materials, rising as states of productive intensity. Designs that, as McCoy sees it, more successfully destabilize the generation of meaning reflect the influx of post-Structuralist theories on the discipline, primarily through McCoy’s influence on design’s pedagogy at Cranbrook. Yet, if we look at McCoy’s own design, the plotted construction of meaning seems to still emphasize “structural expressionism.” The formal and structural provides the expressive dialogue across image and text. The expression is one of knowledge—a confinement into organization.
In comparing a typographic experimentation with a publicly-released poster, and calling out the TwO fabricated along one and confined by the other, I do not mean to simplify the situation in assuming that the productivity in one aspect of the TwO requires a lack of productivity in terms of the supposed marketplace; nor would I want to drain all nuance and criticize McCoy’s poster for participating in a capitalist system that annihilates all intensity or productivity in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic movement. The point of the BwO is production. It is just production that requires a shift in perspective in order to develop an alternative position, a reformulation. The fabrications of TwO fall into and out of the discourse with each new technological shift, each movement of focus from ligature to italicized emphasis, each distortion and stylistic reproduction. In this light, one could even say that McCoy’s design contains the mapping of a TwO, as the fabrication of such enables the “contemporaneousness of a continually self-constructing milieu;” an intensity which design manifests in each and every object it then assigns and classifies, reterritorializing the discourse.[23] As Deleuze and Guattari remind us:
Disorganizing the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territorialities and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor.[24]
McCoy speaks to this “opening the body to connections” when she describes what she and her students at Cranbrook were attempting to do:
The free flow of ideas, and the leaps from the technical to the mythical, stem from the attempt to maintain a studio platform that supports each student’s search to find his or her own voice as a designer. The studio is a hothouse that enables students and faculty to encounter their own visions of the world and act on them—a process that is at times chaotic and conflicting, and occasionally inspiring.[25]
It is this same chaos and conflict that Heller had a problem with and enumerates in “Cult of the Ugly,” since he held so tightly that form should follow function. Following this logic, if design does not follow the injunction of “function,” it necessarily lacks substance. But what is function? What is functioning? What is the surface making us feel or see?
A change in the notion of function is evident in an interview with Stephen Heller that appeared in Emigre following the strong response to Heller’s article. Michael Dooley notes, in response to Heller’s cries against the crimes of harmony, that what he sees in layers of conflicting chaos is the:
[…]process of taking information from all the possible stimulus. Info coming from various technologies at different speeds and types of presentation causing . . . the random or conscious ordering of that information into a personal meaning and exploring the process or structure of that ordering or meaning. Diagraming. Taking information (trash) and by reordering (measuring) it becomes something new. Diagraming the process in which that new meaning was achieved.[26]
In this way, the TwO points towards new directions that were being reconfigured with the discipline of graphic design. The text forms become conduits as designers explored new ways to develop communications that could speak to the conflicting and dissembled mediascape that was both shaping and was shaped by their production. They were also attempting to understand and map what they were starting to see as a fractured audience, one that couldn’t necessarily be reduced to the limited channels dictated by the principles of universalized, modern design. Their chaotic surfaces incite an intensity of communicative functioning, enacting a line of flight in design methodology.
Notes
[1] Heller discussed this limit in “The Cult of the Ugly,” as discussed in the introduction.
[2] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 152.
[3] Ibid, 153.
[4] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 132.
[5] Ibid, 153.
[6] In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari present the unconscious as the production of desire that, being Oedipalized (reterritorialized) in psychoanalysis, moves from a desiring machine into a mode of representation. With schizoanalysis, they aim to “…reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having shunted it into representation” (their emphasis) (Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, 296). Schizoanalysis “…overturn[s] the theatre of representation into the order of desiring production” by describing decoded, deterritorialized flows as production. Ibid, 271.
[7] Ibid, 153
[8] This is a literal, material interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “fabrication.” They would not limit how their ideas were applied (that would be fundamentally antithetical to their project), though I realize that their fabrication has intense psycho-socio-political overtones and my literal interpretation could be seen to simplify their concept. Still, the discussion of the material fabrication raises an interesting set of cultural implications and questions, which are necessarily tied up with psycho-political dimensions; Deleuze and Guattari embrace this notion, as it builds towards their concept of “materialist psychiatry”.
[9] It should be noted that women were typesetters and binders for much of the history of printing, as their smaller hands were seen as better able to set small pieces of type; thus, there was often a gendered division of labor at the press. This changed once male-only unions began to dominate the industry in the early 20th century. Even when women were found in the industry, a gendered division of labor existed, as men more often cranked the actual presses, which were unwieldy and required greater arm strength. There are, of course, exceptions to this, generally found in woman-run presses like the Victoria Press in London, the Women’s Co-Operative Printing Union established in 1868 in San Francisco, and the Grabhorn Press. See Unseen Hands, Women Printers, Binders & Book Designers (http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/ga/unseenhands/printers/walltxt.html (accessed December 15th, 2012)), an exhibition of women’s roles in the printing industry at the Princeton Library, as well as a published catalogue.
[10] And, indeed designers did—at this time, when graphic design became incredibly interested in itself and constructing its history, many books were released that were historiographic interpretations of the lineage of design. Constructivist and Futurist designs were hot topics, due to their concentrations on and explorations of linguistic signs.
[11] Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, (New York: Rizzoli, 1990): 61.
[12] http://sce.parsons.edu/aftertaste-2012/ (accessed January 5th, 2013).
[13] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 152.
[14] Ibid, 155.
[15] Ibid, 152.
[16] McCoy had set out to develop a new visual vernacular that did more than simply disassemble the objects and tenets of Modernism. She hoped to deploy a choreographed surface that would destabilize the generation of meaning.
[17] Though, admittedly, Carson’s un-knowingness bordered on egomaniacal perversion at times, since he staunchly applauded his own outsider-ness.
[18] Rudy VanderLans, “Fallout,” Émigré, no. 30 (1994). http://www.emigre.com/Editorial.php?sect=1&id=31 (accessed January 11, 2013).
[19] Apparently, this pendulum found its footing as a coastal rivalry, as the west coast bred visual experimentation, while the east coast was seen as staunch conservatives, deeply entrenched and grabbing for the continuation of modernist design tenets. This conversation abruptly stopped in 1999, having raged from about 1984 until it lost traction.
[20] Katherine McCoy with David Frej, “Typography as Discourse,” ID Magazine (March/April 1988): 36.
[21] Steven Heller, ed., Education of a Graphic Designer, (New York: Allworth Press, 1998), 162.
[22] Katherine McCoy, “The New Discourse” in Hugh Aldersey-Williams, ed., Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 15.
[23] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 165.
[24] Ibid, 160.
[25] McCoy, 14.
[26] Dooley, http://www.emigre.com/Editorial.php?sect=1&id=32 (accessed December 16, 2012).