The title of the project Show Us Your Type implies that every time the project is launched a new set of typographic posters would mirror the idiosyncratic identity of a city and the culture it fosters. The virtual nature of this pseudo-gallery however brings together submissions from all over the world, as shown by the captioned work. Most of the submissions come from people who aren’t residents of the city but people who based their artwork on preconceived notions and internet searches for what that place is about and what landmarks it holds.

What is meant to be reviving showcase of handpicked typographic work ends up as a collection of imagined realities.

The latest exhibition was about Beirut. Several posters had disconnected reversed arabic characters; a result of not knowing the language and not having the Middle Eastern version of the Adobe Creative Suite. Other posters used arabic letters by layering them in a textural and gratuitous approach that fetishizes the oriental look of the Arabic script more than anything else. A lot of the designs submitted from Lebanon however, portrays Beirut as a self-destructing burning city, a response to the recent yet familiar situation.

Below is my submissions, probably a mix of all the above.

Exhibition curated by: Amanda Hu MFA 13 PR and Saman Sajasi MFA 13 PR

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Post-structuralism’s emphasis on the openness of meaning has been incorporated by many designers into a romantic theory of self-expression: as the argument goes, because signification is not fixed in material forms, designers and readers share in the spontaneous creation of meaning. This approach represents a rather cheerful response to the post-structuralist theme of the “death of the author” and the assertion that the interior self is constructed by external technologies of representation. According to the writings of Barthes and Foucault, for example, the citizen/artist/producer is not the imperious master of systems of language, media, education, custom, and so forth; instead, the individual operates within the limited grid of possibilities these codes make available. Rather than view meaning as a matter of private interpretation, post-structuralist theory tends to see the realm of the “personal” as structured by external signs. Invention and revolution come from tactical aggressions against this grid of possibilities.

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We have seen that metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms. This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system.

Definitions for a concept are seen as characterizing  the things that are inherent in the concept itself. We, on the other hand, are concerned with how human beings get a handle on the concept – how they understand it and function in terms of it. We are concerned primarily with how people understand their experiences. We view language as providing data that can lead to general principles of understanding. The general principles involve whole systems of concepts rather than individual words or individual concepts. We have found that such principles are often metaphoric in nature and involve understanding one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience.

Such a concern for how we comprehend experience requires a very different concept of definition from the standard one. The principal issue for such an account of definition is what gets defined and what does the defining.

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“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”

-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

The following is a compilation of loosely connected ideas. It is the current state of an ongoing research and readings rather than an exhaustive essay towards a conclusive end. I will deliberately omit citing a bibliography because most of the content is not my own. It’s more of a compendium of writings by other people; collected, amalgamated and sometimes re-written, beyond just ‘referencing’. I will however try to keep track of my sources in the bibliography page.

The metaphor of Identity as strata inspired a series of posters found here.

Edward Said (1935-2003) is a Palestinian-American literary theorist known for his book Orientalism. Orientalism revolutionized the study of the Middle East and helped to shape entire new fields of study such as post-colonial theory. Orientalism tries to answer the question of why, when we think of the middle east for example, we have a preconceived notion of what kind of people live there, what they believe, how they act, even though we may never have been there or indeed even met anyone from there. More generally Orientalism asks how do we come to understand people, strangers who look different to us by vertue of the color of their skin. The central argument of Orientalism is that the way we acquire this knowledge is not innocent or objective, but the end result of a process that reflects certain interests. That is; it is highly motivated. Specifically, Said argues that the way the West, Europe and the U.S., looks at the countries and peoples of the Middle East through a lens that distorts the actual reality of those places and those peoples. He calls that lens through which we view that part of the world: Orientalism, a framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and the strange. This concept became clear to Said gradually as he grew up and encountered representations of the Orient in the art and literature that had very little to do with Said’s background in life.

Later in his life, Said became interested in a particular field of literature: Comparative Literature. Comparative literature is an interdisciplinary field whose practitioners study literature across national borders, across time periods, across languages, across genres, across boundaries between literature and the other arts (music, painting, dance, film, etc.), across disciplines (literature and psychology, philosophy, science, history, architecture, sociology, politics, etc.). Defined most broadly, comparative literature is the study of “literature without borders.”

“The idea behind Comparative Literature is not to show how English literature is really a secondary phenomenon to French literature [...] or any of those silly things, but to show them existing as contrapuntal lines in a great composition by which difference is respected and understood without coercion. (…) And it’s that attitude that we need”

For Said, comparative literature is the perfect metaphor of a person coming face to face with the reality of who he/she is in respect to who the other is. He uses the methodology of comparative literature to bring this utopian interaction to the level of humans. He goes-on to quoting Gramsci elaborating on the idea of an identity that is formed through the accumulation of traces, some sort of sedimentary process stratified through time. This never ending identity formation is sustained by time and history (of the nation, family, traditions,…) which deposit in us person an infinity of traces and all kind of marks through heredity, collective experience and individual experience, through our relationships… A whole “book”, a series of infinite traces. But, this system has no inventory, no orderly guide for it. This book has no title, no contents page, no index. Therefore the task is to compile an inventory of the traces that history has left in us, to try to make sense of all those traces. For Said, this is one of the most interesting of the human tasks, it’s the task of interpretation, the task of giving history some shape and sense, for a particular reason: to understand a people’s history in terms of other people’s history, to move beyond, to generalize one’s own individual experience to the experience of others, to transform itself from a unitarian identity to an identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference. This process would be so transformative it will eventually leads one to become someone else. And that would be the notion of writing an inventory, to understand oneself in relation to others and understand others as if you would understand yourself.

Parallel to Said’s ideas, Amin Maalouf (1949-) said ‘I sometimes find myself “examining my identity” as other people examine their conscience. I scour my memory to find as many ingredients of my identity as I can. I then assemble and arrange them. I don’t deny any of them.’ Being born in Lebanon and having lived most of his life in France, Maalouf writes in french and as much French as Lebanese. In his book ‘In the name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong’ he discusses how the notion of identity – personal, religious, ethnic or national –  is one that has given rise to heated passions and crimes through the history of mankind.

Originally Palestinian, Said sees the Middle East crisis as a perfect breeding ground for his idea to proliferate. Palestine is so important in that context because of its local complexities: Arab muslims, Arab Jews, Arab Christians, American Jews, European Jews… He asserts the right of the land to both Jews and Arabs and believes there’s a way to live together on a land that is drenched and saturated with significance on a world scale  unlike any other country of the world.

Said thinks that “This idea that somehow we need to protect ourselves against the infiltrations, the infections of others, is the most dangerous idea of the twentieth century”

Infiltrations and infections are as much cultural as they are geographical. On this note, Emma Goldman(1869 – 1940), an American anarchist, political activist and writer argues against the idea of ‘patriotism’. In her speech of 1908, Patriotism, she says,  assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others. The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc. When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that hen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose t chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that governments are always clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition…

Pop singer Massari with a cedar tree tattoo, Pop singer Shakira waving Lebanese flag

The feeling of ‘patriotism’ is however different from the feeling of ‘nationalism’. According to the American Journalist Sydney J. Harris, the difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war. In his differentiating definition Harris seems to be favoring the idea of pride of one’s belonging whenever there was something ‘good’ done. In other words, a country’s success on any level, be it cultural, economic, athletic, is a justification for one’s pride just because he/she happened to be born in that country, regardless of direct or indirect contribution of that person to the success story. But If nationalism leads to arrogance that leads to war, patriotism then, leads to chauvinism that also leads to war. One’s pride in values achieved by people he/she happens to share common ground with – because of the era or place he lives in – is questionable. In this respect, Said’s idea of a cumulative identity inherited by ancestral past experience might seem to conflict with the universal – as opposed to the unitarian – identity he advocates.

Identity therefore seems to be a constant mesh of notions and understandings that keep changing. Deleuze and Guattari’s work elaborates extensively on those ideas under the philosophical notions of ‘becoming’, ‘deterritorialization and reterritorialiszation’ and the ‘rhizomatic’ pattern of thinking and transforming. For Deleuze (Deleuze reframed by Damien Sutton and David Martin-Jones) identity itself is always in motion: the identity of the individual subject, pressured from all sides by forces that will making him/her or articulate him/her, organize him/her; but also the collective subject pushed together through environmental, governmental, or social forces, or coming together in a resistance to these. This restlessness creates the subject through coalescence, coagulation and coordination, here moving swiftly, there moving slowly. Identity is always in motion no matter how rooted it seems or how fixed. It is this simple fact of continuously ‘becoming’ that is behind the creation of the rhizomatic pattern of thinking.
A rhizome, literally referring to a plant stem that grows horizontally underground sending out roots and shoots, encapsulates a manner of thinking favored by Deleuze over the dominant thought process of Western philosophy. Dating back to the ancient Greek, Plato and Aristotle, this dominant Western model is causal, hierarchical and structured by binaries (one/many, us/them, man/woman, etc.). Due to this dominant emphasis on cause and effect, Deleuze and Guattari compared the dominant Western model of thinking to the tree. This image refers not only to the literal shape of the tree but also – for instance – to the genealogical lineage attributed to ancestry in the family tree. In a family tree there is an obvious causal relationship between a single point of origin and its offsprings. The image of the tree expresses how the dominant model of Western thinking creates a single version of the truth, from which the ‘Other’ is then defined.
Deleuze and Guattari did not establish rhizomatic thinking in opposition to the dominant Wester model, however. It is not exactly a case of tree versus rhizome. Such a move would have recreated a binary opposition. For Deleuze and Guattari, when thinking we should not always reduce things to ‘one thing and its Others’, but rather consider that everything always contains many truths. For this reason they attempted to discard the hierarchical image of though of the tree as somewhat illusory, and replace it with the horizontal image of the rhizome. Not one and its multiple Others, but a singular multiplicity.
‘Becoming,’ therefore is a process that follows a rhizomatic pattern and in which actions of deterritorializations and reterritorialization happen simultaneously. The concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization represent ideas of disintegration and formation and have been used in several fields such of anthropological and postcolonial studies.

Revisiting the archive can therefore be considered a way of tracing activities of ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari) and documenting the infinite traces left by history (Gramsci). In fact, among art’s most significant developments worldwide since the 1960s has been a turn to the archive the nexus of images, objects, documents and traces through which we recall and revisit individual and shared memories and histories. Archive has become central in visual culture’s investigations of history, memory, testimony and identity.

In this respect, ‘The Atlas Group‘ and the ‘Arab Image Foundation’ are two cultural and artistic practices that use the archive as a starting point for their work ethos.

The Atlas Group

The Atlas Group, founded by Lebanese artist Walid Raad,  is an imaginary foundation whose  objective is to research and document Lebanon’s contemporary history. It produces, finds several documents including notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs, and other objects. Organize these works in an archive.

Arab Image Foundation

The Arab Image Foundation is a non-profit organization established in Beirut in 1997. The Foundation’s mission is to collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora. The Foundation’s expanding collection is generated through artist and scholar-led projects. The Foundation makes its collection accessible to the public through a wide spectrum of activities, including exhibitions, publications, videos, a website and an online image database. The ongoing research and acquisition of photographs include so far Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Argentina and Senegal. To date, the collection holds more than 400,000 photographs.

The posters were part of the RISD Graphic Design Graduate Student Exhibition (2011) at the Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery.

Kufam is a bilingual typeface originally commissioned by Khatt foundation, part of the Typographic Matchmaking project.