Writing Now: Journalism, Criticism, Critical Journalism
Rick Poynor
This is the opening broadside from a review of the book Barthes for Beginners, published in Britain’s weekly design magazine:
The last time I checked everybody I knew had studied Roland Barthes at art college. From media studies to graphic design courses, the theory lectures were full of words like “semiotics” and “structuralism,” usually taught by someone in unmatching socks. If there was a single culprit for this drivel then his name was Roland Barthes.
Those of us who actually attended the lectures might remember that Barthes also has much to say on the nature of pleasure and sexual non-conformity, and applied his ideas on communication to every area of culture and life—from fashion and popular culture to classical French literature and homosexuality. . . . If all that sounds interesting but a bit too much like hard work, there’s a new book . . . that should get you through the most demanding cross-examination on the man’s life and works.1
Note how the writer tries to have it both ways. She wants us to appreciate that she knows about Barthes and takes it for granted that her reader will know about him, too: Oh yes, we have all studied Roland, but only the kind of nerd who is so out to lunch he can’t even match his socks would take the man and his confreres so seriously. Our reviewer affects an air of superiority to Barthes, putting him squarely in his place for his “drivel,” yet she and her editor seem to feel the need to inform us about this book. Overall, despite the ambivalence of its opening paragraphs, the review is fairly positive.
The most interesting aspect of an extract that is in tone by no means untypical of Britain’s design press is the would-be flattering but ultimately patronizing way in which it pictures the reader. It appears to offer insight, but declines to risk anything like a genuine discussion by someone with something worth saying about Barthes and design, preferring to play it for laughs. Who, one wonders, does this publication suppose are its readers, and what does it think they know already, or would like to learn? Slightly rephrased, these are two key questions now facing graphic design criticism as it struggles to be born: Who is the emerging criticism for? And what is it for?
The answers used to be breathtakingly straightforward. Here is the British designer Ashley Havinden, addressing the question, “Does Today’s Criticism Help Design?” in 1952:
The role of the serious critic is that of an educator. By searching out the many examples of good design and appraising them constructively, he may convince the manufacturer or the printer of the merits of good design associated with his product. In the same way he may succeed in inspiring the shopkeeper with the desire to offer good design to the public. Such constructive criticism in the press would teach the public, not only to appreciate, but to demand good design in the products they buy.2
At no point in this short article does the writer define his conception of “good design.” There was no need to because he could take it for granted that his readers—fellow professionals—would know exactly what he meant. Havinden’s concern was with the world beyond the profession—the realms of industry, retail, and the client. The task, as he and other design leaders saw it, was simply to get everyone else to fall into line with their manifestly correct views. To achieve this end, he advised, design would need to receive weekly, nonspecialist press coverage of the kind routinely given to art, music, literature, film, theater, and “ladies’ fashions”—as Havinden so gallantly put it.
Forty-five years later, almost nothing has changed. Ladies’ fashions are covered to excess in the generalist press, while poor old graphic design must make do with only the occasional review for a rare exhibition or an exceptionally noteworthy book. The primary limitation facing today’s design criticism is that its placement in professional magazines—still the primary outlet—means that it consistently preaches to the converted.
This is not to deny that such writing, at its best, retains an educational purpose, though in a narrower, more professionally focused sense than Havinden intended when he described the critic as an “educator.” The critical awareness advocated by a small minority of magazines encourages critical reflection in the designer’s personal practice, while an acquaintance with design history develops an awareness of the profession’s internal dialogues and broadens the designer’s sense of the possible, or the no longer viable. Perhaps these are some of the pragmatic goals that Massimo Vignelli had in mind when he observed a few years ago that “criticism is the instrument that sharpens our tools.”3 Andrew Blauvelt, writing in Eye, puts a 1990s spin on this way of thinking:
The notion of design as a field of study without practical application is unlikely and undesirable. After all, it is the practice of graphic design—no matter how wanting or limiting—that provides the basis for a theory of graphic design. This is not to say that the education of graphic designers needs to be tied so intimately to professional practice that it cannot engage in activities which challenge design’s social function, historical understanding, or professional legitimacy. The calls for graphic design to be a liberal art . . . need to be supplanted by strategies which foster “critical making,” teaching when, how, and why to question things.4
At root, though, despite a much enlarged sense of what might be professionally possible, design commentary remains, even here, at the service of design. Its purpose is still, ultimately, to create “better” designers, even if the conception of “better” has changed.
There is another, more combative view of criticism, however, summarized in an essay by Anne Bush, writing in Emigre in 1995:
Criticism in its most rigorous form is analytic contestation. Its goal is not to reinforce, but to reveal. As an interaction between internal disciplinary conditions and outside influences, it must ultimately eschew consensus to maintain its critical eye. Thus to promote pragmatic criticism because it appeals to a professional body actually thwarts analytic introspection. . . .
By separating reflection and action, a singularly professional criticism depoliticizes graphic design. Preferring to focus on internal questions, it implies that design is only important to itself, privileged and immune, distanced from social and cultural conditions that it actually has a hand in constructing.5
Exactly how radical Bush envisages such a criticism to be remains unclear. One of her sources, literary critic Terry Eagleton’s The Function of Criticism, ends with the proposition (not quoted by Bush) that “Modern criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless its future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might have no future at all.”6 In this view, criticism breaks free from narrow professional goals and becomes an instrument of radical social transformation. One could indeed imagine design criticism as part of a wider cultural criticism conducted along such lines, but given graphic design’s intimate role, as usually taught, in serving the bourgeois state, one supposes such an approach would be highly critical of many of the institutions, practices, and beliefs that design holds dear. I don’t intend to pursue this here, but I do want to suggest that there is a need for much greater clarity on the part of graphic design criticism’s more radical exponents when it comes to design’s sociopolitical dimension.
Anne Bush’s analysis is valuable as one of the few recent attempts to explore issues surrounding the development of a graphic design criticism, but it stops at the point where it might more fruitfully have begun. Bush does not tell us which audience or audiences she envisions for her brand of “analytic contestation,” what the vehicles—real or even hypothetical—would be for this kind of writing, who is going to write it, or how it would be funded. She offers only the vaguest sense of what such a graphic design criticism would be like to read and mentions no one who is actually doing it. The lack of examples in her essay makes it almost impossible to test the cogency or viability of a position with which, in outline, I have a great deal of sympathy.
I will return to some of the practicalities that Bush overlooks because they offer the best guide we have to the state of graphic design criticism today. First, though, I want to look in broader terms at the relationship between academic writing and journalism on the subject. Here, there is a long-standing tension that can also be seen in many other subject areas, but this need not be a case of either/or. Both kinds of writing have their purpose and their place; both kinds of writing have their problems and their pitfalls. The inadequacies of much design journalism hardly need spelling out. The quotation with which I began exemplifies its anti-intellectualism and compromise, and the way it consistently underestimates its readers. But nor is academic publishing completely untouched by external factors. Academia has its politics, its personality clashes, its career paths, its tendency on occasions to encourage orthodoxy or to domesticate dissent, all of which exert a subtle influence on what gets written.
Neither of these positions, however, represent the ground we have attempted to occupy with Eye. As an editor, what I tried to encourage and develop is a “critical journalism” positioned somewhere between the two poles. The choice of term is deliberate because most journalism on the subject is not critical at all. But the concept is hardly new: broadsheet newspapers and magazines, such as Harper’s, New York Review of Books (and its London counterpart London Review of Books), and the British film monthly Sight and Sound, all publish critical journalism.
Many of Eye’s writers are academics. The style and presentation of this writing is, however, journalistic—up to a point. If someone submits a piece titled “Figurative Boundaries: The Body in Early German Graphic Design,” we will probably suggest something colon-free and snappier, such as “The Modernist Body.”7 It looks better on the page and is a much stronger hook for the uncommitted reader. If writers are overfond of jargon or needlessly circuitous, we will encourage them to rephrase, or make some suggestions. Most professional magazines ban footnotes, which are seen as distracting to nonacademic readers. Eye is sparing in their use, but retains them where a piece would be compromised without, or where they will be helpful to readers with research interests. We have always published lists of suggested further reading if it seemed useful to do so. Aesthetically, Eye has elements of the bookishness and sobriety found in an academic journal, but combines this with the visual resources of a professional magazine. The politics of reproduction make an interesting subject in itself, but we can at least show the reader clearly what our writers are talking about.8
The point of these techniques is to attract readers and hold their attention. I have sometimes been challenged for the assumptions I make about what readers will or won’t accept, but unless you are going to commission detailed market research, this is all you can do. Editors navigate by instinct, experience, and the feedback their magazines receive. An editor’s guiding sense of the “ideal” reader—a composite individual made up of many actual people—helps to give a magazine its coherence and shape. In Eye’s case, this notional reader was also, to a large extent, myself, and many an editor has admitted as much. We hoped to appeal to a mix of designers, educators, students, and anyone with a wide-ranging interest in contemporary visual culture, and as far as we can tell, this is Eye’s readership.
I would like now to change the angle of view and take a look at the individual on whom the development of design criticism must necessarily depend: the critic. Without people consumed by a regular urge to write, there can be no writing or criticism. The presence of committed critics in reasonable numbers, as well as their availability to do the job, is the real measure of graphic design criticism’s state of health.
When we started Eye in 1990, I had a clear sense, from reading American publications, that the United States was ahead of Britain in developing an English-language criticism of graphic design. It would be satisfying to report, after seven years of concerted effort, that there had been real developments in this area. In the United States, there has undoubtedly been progress. Existing writers have grown stronger. Ambitious new writers, would-be critics, have arrived on the scene. Anthologies of critical writing are being published. Graphic design conferences include discussions of criticism. In Britain, however, despite the undeniable buoyancy of the graphic design scene, we still lag behind. More people are writing about graphic design, but, disappointingly, the standard of this writing has not, on the whole, improved. It lacks breadth and ambition and even the best of it is journalism, not criticism. I am not sure how to account for this. With Eye, we created a platform, issued frequent invitations, showed we were ambitious for the writing to develop and that we would give it the freedom and space to do so, but eager, would-be critics did not come flocking to join the cause. With a few exceptions, British academics teaching in humanities departments (as opposed to design schools) have not seen Eye as a place they want to publish; and not every academic writer is, in any case, a critic.
Perhaps I should define what I think it takes to be a critic and achieve a critical presence:
1. The critic needs to be identified with a strong personal point of view or position. This is one of the factors that sets the critic apart from the journalist. One of Britain’s best-established graphic design journalists once told me that he liked to sit on the fence. So far as I know, he’s still there.
2. The critic will probably be identified with a particular area or subject matter.
This is the most obvious way of distinguishing yourself from other writers. It can only be achieved over time and it is harder than it sounds.
3. As a sign of seriousness, the critic will need to publish in the right places. This sounds horribly snooty, but it is a fact of life. Some publications have critical credibility and others don’t.
4. In time, the critic will certainly publish books as well as articles. The critic will almost certainly need to stick his or her neck out. Not everyone is going to like what critics have to say, but their willingness to do this and risk the possible consequences is another mark of their critical seriousness.
5. Last, but absolutely central to the enterprise, the critic will need to be an exceptionally good writer.
This is what a critic needs in outline, but there is more to be said about the last two points. First, sticking your neck out. My disappointment with some academic writing about graphic design is that, while it can be very outspoken when addressing general issues or abstract ideas, it is not nearly so brave when criticizing individuals or institutions—in other words, when it involves saying something that could entail some personal cost to the writer, if not now, then at some imagined future point. It is the difference between calling for “analytic contestation” as a desirable goal and actually practicing it by analytically contesting real design phenomena out there in the world. Academics writing for Eye could be surprisingly gentle even when, for instance, reviewing a book. Their real opinions, which sometimes emerged in conversation after the writing was done, were not vigorously reflected in the writing itself. But why not? This is why we went to them in the first place. If I single out academic writing, it is only because the ambition to develop a graphic design criticism is coming principally from that direction. If we are to have it, it will need to grow sharper teeth.
Second, the need for talent. As an editor, I was looking for opinionated writers who were not shy of telling us what they really thought, but I was also searching for a much harder-to-define quality that I will call a writer’s sensibility. By this I am trying to suggest the manner of thinking, the areas of personal emphasis, the unique life experiences, the peculiarities of outlook, perhaps even the tics and quirks that inform a writer’s writing and help to set it apart. The medium of an individual sensibility is, to a large degree, a writer’s style and its resulting tone. This is one of the problems with jargon: it is the language of a certain kind of officialdom. By using it, you join the club and make yourself intelligible to other members, but you make it hard for nonmembers to enter and you also surrender something of yourself. It takes a fine writer to incorporate a professional jargon and transcend it. The British writer on popular culture, Dick Hebdige, dean of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, has achieved this brilliantly. At a lower intellectual level, the same problem affects large tracts of graphic design journalism. Many journalists write with an interchangeable vocabulary and the same tone of voice. But journalism doesn’t have to conform to a single style any more than academic writing does. Good writers can satisfy commercial and generic requirements while bringing something of their own to the writing. Mark Dery, for instance, an American writer on cyberculture, is a first-rate practitioner of an informed, incisive, always personal, critical journalism.
One of the ironies of recent design writing is that designer-writers who are sensitive to every tiny nuance of style in a piece of design sometimes forget (or perhaps never really understood) that writing is just as much a craft as design, and that style in writing is just as much a medium of meaning and a means by which you seduce and hold your reader as it is in design. There has been a lot of straining after the grand effect in recent design writing—small or medium-sized ideas eked out to would-be definitive bulk until the whole construction, or perhaps the reader, collapses under a weight that simply cannot be supported by the material’s level of intrinsic interest. But writing does not always have to be about the huge, world- or epoch-transforming idea. Most writing is far more quotidian. Whatever its field, it makes a modest contribution to a cultural dialogue in which we are all, as readers, already taking part. It deals with smaller but still significant things, new information, new angles and interpretations of familiar issues. The best writing pays careful attention, as it proceeds, to the little observations that lead to a sense, as they connect with each other, of how things are. An insight doesn’t necessarily need a whole paragraph—it can be imparted in a sentence, a clause, a parenthesis. It is the accumulation of little insights that gives strong writing its density. As an editor, I was less interested in the ponderous application by a writer of someone else’s theories than I was in the writer’s original perceptions and freshness of insight. Until we produce such a writing, we will never appeal to the world of potential readers outside the profession.
The necessity for craft is equally true of another recent tendency, the “essay,” which aims to readjust the conventional boundaries between writing and design and allow design to take a more active and discursive role in the articulation and framing of the content. As a genre, such experiments are intriguing, but that doesn’t rule out critical appraisal of the results. A collaboration between a London-based design educator and John Warwicker of Tomato in Emigre (still the main outlet for such experiments) showed how the process can go awry. The piece’s claim, made near the beginning, is that ordinary publishing formats and editorial frameworks would be inadequate for what it has to say. The writer explains:
I knew that it could not be constructed as a conventional interview. Tomato, and John himself, had been instrumental in building a reputation for developing a philosophy concerning new approaches to thinking about design and communication. To settle for a simple question/answer would not do. . . . We agreed the piece should provide the “evidence” which mapped the developmental process of discussion, through our individual and collective journeys.9
In terms of its informational content, the fourteen-page piece, constructed as a patchwork of statements and quotations, contains little from Warwicker that is not available elsewhere. A “simple question/answer,” skillfully conducted, might have elicited new insights into his background and motivation. (Anyone who imagines there is anything simple about seeing an interview through from the formulation of appropriate questions to its final appearance in print should try it.) But the main problem lies not so much in the conceptual framework, which might have been made to work, as in the unconvincing tone of the writing and the lack of critical distance the writer brings to an undeniably timely subject. The pair meet in the Rose Garden in London’s Holland Park, where the “tranquillity is shattered,” we are told, by the arrival of “London’s infamous graphic design anarchist.” John—it is first-name terms throughout—is wearing a pair of “all-essential” Arnett sunglasses, and he is in an “upbeat and chatty mood indicating that things were going very well for him.” It seems that for Tomato, the paragraph concludes, “everything is coming up roses.” Even journalists who prefer to sit on the fence would have avoided a corny punch line like this.
It is unnecessary, perhaps, to go into further stylistic analysis of this piece. A much higher degree of writing competence is needed before such an exercise lives up to its claim of offering forms of insight that are inaccessible—in some way that is never properly explained by the author—to more conventional means. The brevity of the individual text components calls for, if anything, a particularly concentrated and specialized form of writing—almost a screenwriter’s skill. The larger question that might be asked is whether real critical detachment is possible when a writer allows the critical framework to be determined at the outset by the personal preferences of the subject.
One of the factors shaping this piece, I suspect, is the writer’s desire to become at least half of its subject. “I was of the opinion,” the author says, “that the process of us working together on this piece in a collaboration would ultimately lead to a positive exploitation of each person’s cognitive abilities and personal viewpoints.” What we are increasingly seeing, as the new graphic design criticism unfolds, is writing by writers who wish they were the star of the show. Unless the author is a Garrison Keillor, whose life is his subject matter, readers aren’t reading because they want to know about the writer, but because they want to know about the writer’s subject. Naturally, readers do get to know some—though by no means all—writers over time by what they choose to write about, by their point of view, by their writing style, and by personal details they sometimes let slip where appropriate, but it can take years, and a lot of writing, to build up such a relationship with an audience. It is a big mistake to imagine that just because you suddenly find yourself in print, you are instantly fascinating to readers as a subject in your own right.
And yet, having sounded this cautionary note, in a much subtler and more positive sense, the most compelling critical writing is a journey of self-discovery in which the critic is at times quite nakedly exposed. Critics undertake a prolonged and sometimes profound dialogue with their own instincts, sensibility, understanding, and intellect in the hope of discovering what they think in the first place and why, precisely, they think it. They are learning in public. Readers come to criticism for very similar reasons, to take part in this dialogue using the writing as guide, touchstone, and punching bag. With so much at stake, critics need a nose to uncover the truth and a willingness to speak as they find—not truth in some absolute sense, but truth to their own experience and perceptions. The most valuable criticism does not simply sharpen our tools; it is a tool—a tool for revelation, analysis, and reflection. As such, it should occupy a place at the very heart of the educational process.
Notes
1. Yolanda Zappaterra, “The Art of Barthes,” Design Week (February 28, 1997): 32.
2. Ashley Havinden, “Does Today’s Criticism Help Design?” Printing Review 60 (Winter 1952–53): 36.
3. Massimo Vignelli, foreword to R. Roger Remington and Barbara J. Hodik, Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1989), ix.
4. Andrew Blauvelt, “Dumb,” Eye 6, no. 22 (Autumn 1996): 54–57.
5. Anne Bush, “Criticism and the Politics of Absence,” Emigre 36 (Fall 1995).
6. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (1984; reprint, London and New York: Verso, 1996), 124.
7. See Eye 6, no. 24 (Spring 1997): 57.
8. For a brief discussion of the implications of high-quality reproduction in the context of Eye, see Robin Kinross, “In the Same Bed” (letter to the editor), Eye 3, no. 12 (1994): 3.
9. Teal Triggs and John Warwicker, “Inthisworldtogether,” Emigre 40 (1996): 33–47.
Thanks to Eric Kindel