NOTES ON TYPOGRAPHY

by Harry Polkinhorn

With typography came the suppression of history. Labor, the life it channels, got sublimated out of the picture. What was left was realism, the illusion of the real as a necessary correlative to science, especially to the technological sedimentation thereof upon which printing with movable type was based. Gutenberg, who rearranged parts already known to produce the new medium, first used it to print what else but the Bible, that arch-denier of the darker fruits of secular time (suffering, sickness, madness, death).

So typography is a meta-category, a deuterological force. In order to know, the subject splits. This accomplished, the knower constructs patterns of types-the emblems which Taylor saw in the wilderness, Panofsky's icons, Plato's forms, Talmudic numerology, Kantian imperatives. Epistemology serves to explain power; the rulers control language and its dissemination throughout the social formation.

Hence the primacy of writing over speech's ephemerality, locking down in a grid of letter forms whose rate of change in Western history was relatively slow until very recently. A myth of meaning was necessary, something "really" there which could be transmitted through print, as if the type face mattered little or not at all. The cold precise print (point) was the clear glass through which the light of perfect and pure meaning hypothetically passed into the reader's eye, yet,

what about the graphic or visual base to this print, its origins in hand-writing conventions slavishly imitated by early die-cutters? Let's look at the connection between this base and the alphabetic system itself, i.e., phonemic contrasts which structure the sound. So a small number of such visual sound-symbols can be permutated to form an infinity of words. A lever. What is being concealed? As with all machines, human limitations are overcome (the human gets redefined); new levels of productivity are squeezed out of the system. Hierarchy. The randomness and horizontal spread of non-phonemic writing systems are defeated. Similarly, those of speech are defeated as writing itself concentrates labor vertically to produce the optical illusion of transmissible meaning. Gütenberg simply permutated the permutation, raised the system to a higher power, necessary as the new banking and manufacturing economy was getting underway in Europe. To perpetrate this illusion, vision had to be canceled. Letter forms, type faces were necessary which did not call attention to themselves visually. One was trained not to see.

Hence the birth of classical graphic design, all based on these early faces. What do the theoreticians call for? Balance of positive and negative spaces, the framing capabilities of margins and gutter, subservience of parts to whole, harmony, subtle variations among ascenders and descenders, grace, body, lightness, attention to the page unit as a whole. These terms also characterize Palladian architecture, Mozart's symphonies, the heroic couplet, Racine, Dryden, David, Chardin, in short, the fullest expressions of neoclassical culture. (That this was tenuously based on a millennium or more of exploitation of a vast peasant class was soon to become obvious during the French Revolution, followed by those of the nineteenth century.)

Mechanical reproducibility of non-type imagery accompanied this social/political sea change. The new factory system required mass advertising to stimulate consumption. Senefelder's stone lithography, invented about the same time as Nièpce, Fox Talbot, and Daguerre invented early photographic processes, was used almost exclusively for such purposes until the close of the century. Separation of imagery into positive and negative modes in these new media exactly parallels classic graphic design mentioned above as well as analysis and re-synthesis of work movements in the proliferating manufactories. Mass "culture" spread with the evaporation of individuality. With the generation of series, origins disappeared, replaced by equivalencies. If a machine part or letter breaks or wears down (they all do sooner or later), replace it with an identical one.

The New Typography of the Russian and Central European designers of the early twentieth century dealt a blow to static and rigid page design, tied as it was to ruling hierarchies of power, money, and culture. An opacity was introduced into the system, as the designs began to signify visually. The sans serif face became synonymous with a utopian drive to reform society once again, this time from the bottom up. Irreverent and shocking Dadaist and Futurist sensibilities (both Russian and Italian versions) got transformed into the socially responsible currents of the 1920s and 1930s. A clarity was to be returned to design, which would lift the masses into a fuller awareness of their revolutionary potential to transform society. Yet the whole enterprise has remained distressingly conservative no doubt because most typography is used primarily by designers bound by self-definition into the high-inertia structures of society, i.e., books, magazines, and print and video ads. Artists' uses of typography have remained minor, as with photography, lithography, film, and indeed almost all other media. It would be mistaken to measure cultural values based on the practices of its oppositional avant-garde.

Photo-composition and the impact of the small computer upon typography have produced some curious results in terms of unwitting violations of traditional standards of design. Paralleling the disappearance of the "hand" (of style understood as the expression of personality or Eliotic impersonality) we have shrinking, expanding, stretching, compressing, duplicating, over-layering, as well as creating of highly eccentric "display" faces, all of which accompany deterioration of the older visual awareness of the function of positive and negative spaces between letters, words, lines paragraphs, as well as of the functions of margins, gutter, support, binding, presentation. One might attribute this to the eye's inability to deal with still imagery (having been reconditioned almost exclusively by the moving imagery of television and films), or to the dissolution of subjectivity, or both. Only in the hands of sophisticated visual artists can typographical and experiments command respect (I mention Kolar and some lettrist and hypergraphic work of the 1960s as early examples). Electronic control of letter forms and spacing simply repeats Gütenberg's permutation, and as with the course of typography's early developments, so today. That is, whereas earlier, typography was instantly subjected to the elitism of the class system as it then existed, from our contemporary position there is no one at the controls, so anything can happen. Sheer randomness quickly becomes boring, yet the reconstruction of subjectivity is historically impossible, so