Discourse: Ellen Lupton’s Deconstructivist Theory Essay

Key concepts from Ellen Luptons A Post-Mortem on Deconstruction? * Deconstruction is part of a broader empyrean of criticism known as post-structuralism, whose theorist have included Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, among others. Each of these writers has looked at modes of bureau from alphabetic writing to photojournalism as culturally powerful technologies that trans puddle and construct reality. The phrase deconstruction quickly became a cliche in object journalism, where it usually has described a style featuring fragment shapes, extreme angles, and aggressively asymmetrical arrangements. This collection of formal devices was easily transferred from architecture to graphic design, where it named existing tendencies and catalyzed bare-assed angiotensin converting enzymes.The labels deconstructivism, deconstructionism, and just plain decon have served to blanket the differences amongst a broad range of design practices and an every bit b road range of theory-based ideas. Rather than viewing it as a style, you open fire view deconstructivism as a process an act of questioning. In Derridas original theory, deconstruction asks a question how does delegation inhabit reality? How does the external appearance of a thing get inside its internal totality? How does the surface get under the skin? For example, the Western tradition has tended to value the internal mind as the sacred source of soul and intellect, while denouncing the body as an earthly, mechanical shell.Countering this view is the understanding that the conditions of somatic experience temper the way we think and act. A parallel question for graphic design is this how does optic from get inside the content of writing? How has typography refused to be a passive, transparent vessel for scripted texts, developing as a system with its own structures and devices? * The Western philosophical tradition has denigrated writing as an inferior, dead copy of the li ving, spoken word, when we speak, we draw on our inner consciousness, however when we write, our words are hibernating(a) and abstract.The compose word loses its connection to our inner selves. Language is set adrift. * It has recently become unfashionable to par talking to and design. In the fields of architecture and products, the paradigm of phraseology is losing its luster as a theoretical model we no longer think of buildings, tea pots, for fax machines as communication cultural messages, in the manner of post-Modern classicism or product semantics. For the design fields, deconstruction has been reduced to the name of a diachronic period rather than an ongoing way of approaching design. Derrida made a similar point in 1994, saying that deconstruction will never be over, because it describes a way of thinking nigh language that has always existed. For graphic design, deconstruction isnt dead, either, because its not a style or movement, but a way of asking questions thr ough our work. Critical form-making will always be part of design practice, whatever theoretical tools one might use to identify it.Apollinaires Il Pleut is a absolute example of the juxtaposition of language and design of typography and content. Like the other structural games calligrammes are a great deal referred to, Il Pleut uses typography as an active picture rather than a passive frame, demonstrating only the reference of the possibilities available for manipulating type to reflect language. Often graphic design can reveal cultural myths by victimization familiar symbols and styles in new ways, and Apollinaire does exactly that in this futurist, poetic, and exciting way.Marinetti, another Futurist-classified poet, was a predominate in deconstruction letting the words themselves build imagery both literally and figuratively the letterforms and sentences themselves adequate the building blocks of his compositions. This 1913 work by Marinetti, Words of Liberty, is a perfe ct example of the theory of metalanguage, proposed by Roland Barthes. In his work, Elements of Semiology, he advanced the concept of the metalanguage a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language in a metalanguage, symbols alternate words and phrases.Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may very re distinguish first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore deconstruction itself is in peril of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny.A work of design can be called deconstruction when it exposes and transforms the established rules of writing, interrupting the sacred inside of content with the profane outside of form. Weingart is the perfect example of this, using not only letterforms themselves but also nonobjective elements within his composition to distort the typographic content. Yet, the merge between language and typography is so close that typography is, essentially, the frontier between languages and objects languages and images.Typography turns language into a visible, tangible artifact, and in the process transforms it irrevocably. While researching the link between the inside and outside form of content, George Orwell seemed to hold very similar views in his The Politics of English Language, speaking not of the link between typography and language but alternatively the written and spoken versions of English itself. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to photograph the necessary trouble and what trouble does this necessarily include?Protecting ones writing from triteness of imagery, and of course lack of precision. Both are marked by vague writing or perhaps, in some cases, sheer incompetence of modern English prose, as well as the use of dying(p) metaphors. He concludes for us that verbal false limbs and pretentious diction are the downfall for our mangled language, and we, the ambitious struggling writers of the world, can unite against its seemingly inevitable destruction. But let us look nigher at Orwells reasoning for a moment that if thought corrupts language than surely language can also corrupt thought.Although written nearly 60 years before our time, he shares this ideal with a modern behemoth of writing Stephen King. King has already imparted a great secret to us about the nature of writing that ideas come from nowhere, and that vocabulary is one of the first steps toward a clean which actually functions as it should. One should not begin writing from the abstract, severe to dictate with impressive words or alliterative sentences one should have an idea in mind and then set about t rying to convey that idea to an audience.Vague writing only begets vague understanding, which is not the vehicle in which your novel should be riding. I personally feel that this is a powerful parallel to language and typography that the fountain should have in mind what exactly they are trying to communicate before beginning their design, instead of taking text copy and moving it around, trying to design without a firm message at hand. This eventually will end in a vague, incomprehensible and garbled communication, one which has no place in todays world unless of course you happen to be a self-proclaimed Dada-ist.