Chris Lee in correspondence with Zachary Formwalt
Graphic designer and educator Chris Lee’s book Immutable: Designing History details the long chronology of “the document,” highlighting the implication of published records in processes of violent dispossession and asking what this in turn implies for those charged with their (re)production. In this email conversation with the artist and filmmaker Zachary Formwalt, Lee discusses the form of his book (the second volume, but the first to be published, of an envisioned trilogy), possibilities for resistance both on and beyond the page, and the legibility of critique within academic practice — and in revisiting the history graphic design he also looks forward, to glimpse a possible end.
Zachary Formwalt: I’ve been trying to decide how to begin this exchange on your book, Immutable, and I’ve narrowed it down to two options: start in the middle, or start at the end. Starting in the middle, what you describe as “the lesson that paper contains” suggests a question about immanent critique and so-called primitive accumulation. Starting at the end, where you suggest that Willem Sandberg’s role in the planned “bombing of the Amsterdam civil registry office to foil the Gestapo’s policing of forged documents he had also helped to produce,” might have been among “his most consequential design interventions,” I couldn’t help but return to the beginning where you describe your own “mistreatment of the banal standards and conventions of book design” in Immutable. Though such mistreatment is not, at first glance, comparable to that of blowing up an office full of incriminating evidence, the book suggests that both are part of a critical tradition that challenges the assumption that acts of documental preservation are inherently good. “There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” as Benjamin put it. This also poses a question about accumulation by dispossession, David Harvey’s reformulation of Marx’s “so-called primitive accumulation.” So where should we start, with “the lesson that paper contains,” or with the destruction of barbarous documents, in order to talk about the specter of primitive accumulation that haunts Immutable?
Chris Lee: Thanks for opening up the conversation this way. I’m looking forward to discussing this book with you and working out what kind of contribution it can yield!
I want to suggest starting another way, but first express my appreciation for the fact that the two starting points for this conversation you’re suggesting have to do with obliteration! Both the lesson of paper — that any act of memorialization is premised on a “disciplining” of a surface to form a tabula rasa — and the more spectacular prospect of exploding a filing cabinet, can be characterized as “violent” acts. I like this emphasis because in graphic design practice, education, and discourse, the positive, positivist and affirmative manifestation are unduly privileged.
The dissolution of progressive chronology — the meandering structure of the book — is an important conceit of the project Immutable. The epigraph on the back cover, a quote from George Caffentzis’ Clipped Coins, suggesting that mnemonics is the essential ally of property, invests this conceit with a critique of dispossession premised on a capacity to keep one’s story straight through documents, i.e., “this land is mine, because it belonged to my father; because this document identifies me as the buyer; etc.” Yet, this conceit faces the friction of the progressive linearity of the bound book — bound to maintain the integrity of the object — an enclosure that facilitates the transmission and storage of writing, and makes it available also to commodification, commerce, and other kinds of circulation. In fact, an early production conceit of the book was to scramble the signatures of each copy of the book before being bound, so that no two copies of the book would be the same. Not only would this mess with the linearity of any narration, but it would make the book effectively uncitable, and thereby illegible within value circuits like those mediated by academic and cultural institutions — relegating the book, perhaps, to oblivion. I couldn’t find a printer willing to do this. Anyway, the progressive architecture of the bound book, in other words, is the current against which the story I’m trying to tell has to unfold. Indeed, I wanted the book to embody an immanent critique of the way that form, graphics, might circumscribe the sayable, thinkable, and knowable — that is, what could be remembered.
So, to answer your question, rather than choose middle, or end, I think I’m starting with the cover, the enclosure. I’m not sure if that helps, but I think my answer is coming from my feeling that there’s a bunch of things about the book that are not evident in its more prosaic register, so I appreciate/take here the opportunity to reflect on these!
ZF: I think this is one of the difficult things about an immanent critique: How to begin? It’s what makes the first chapter of Capital so difficult. Marx starts with the result of the very process he will unfold for the reader because this result, the commodity (which encloses — and thereby gives form to — value), is at the same time the point of departure for that process. In the preamble to Immutability, you mention that it is part two of a trilogy. The first and final volumes have not yet been published. Is there a particular reason why the second volume was put out first? I could imagine that this volume is more bound up with the actual process of making it, as a book, than the other two. That here the book is the object through which your critique of immutability could immanently unfold (as the dissolution of that object). It is this aspect of it that I think will make it a great pedagogical tool — it being both a collection of design techniques aimed at achieving immutability and an example of how such techniques might be undermined in order to open up the discipline of design to its larger role as “historiography,” as you put it in the preamble. There you also suggest that the other two volumes will be dealing with different aspects of design pedagogy. Could you say something about the scope of this overall project and why its middle came first?
CL: There’s at least a couple of ways to account for this sequencing. The first is banal. The second is that it’s an excuse. The third is maybe more interesting as a provocation to myself.
When I started this project, I was in a tenure track position at the University at Buffalo SUNY, which is classified as an R1 research institution. Maintaining an active creative/scholarly practice is a way to signify to my eventual tenure reviewers that I will continue to be engaged in a “relevant” practice. However, since I was on an H1-B visa, work and income outside my primary employer was prohibited. A bit of a catch-22. While maintaining a low-intensity client-oriented practice for non-US clients, I put more energy into independent, research-oriented, speculative work. There was some urgency around the book in that I needed to work towards something that would represent some kind of major achievement. In most traditional scholarly disciplines, that’s a book published by a recognized academic press. For artists, it may be a major solo exhibition at a prestigious institution. For designers, there’s less certainty about what an equivalent achievement entails — what’s legible as “scholarship” and “knowledge production.” I had the question as to what form one could rest on to make a claim to a professorship in design in the American university? Or were we kept in the institution anyway as a necessary evil, in order to help with enrollment in art departments? The book was a hedge, but also it became a vehicle for contemplating the book form and its status as a legitimate standard in academia.
The excuse was that by saying that this book was “part 2,” the project was figured as incomplete (anticipating a third component), and that it was not itself a coherent and completely thought-through work of theory, in case there was any risk of it being mis-recognized as a practicing designer’s “home-baked” attempt at disciplined thinking about their field. And so, it’s also a mea culpa for the theoretical assumptions and gaps that I know are there, and that I know that I don’t have the training for or capacity to work on, but that I hope to someday, if this project still interests me.
So indeed, this second part, taking the form of a book, was a way of actuating my thinking in a form that circulates in the “political economy” of academia, and perhaps the broader (though niche) world of graphic-design-inflected cultural production. The first part, is also planned as a publication that I think will manifest in some more formal, disciplined fashion. A very condensed version of it will be published in the proceedings of Attending [to] Futures conference, which was held online in 2021. It was in fact a ~20,000-word primary section of Immutable, but was cut because it needed a lot of work.
To summarize severely, Part 1 schematizes the ways that graphic design historiography figures the disciplinary imaginary of its practical cousin. Conventional graphic design history is cast as privileging what I call an “imperative to publicity” and is populated by objects like cave paintings, typography, books, posters, corporate identity systems, websites, and so on, and the subject figured therein, I call “designer1.” This subject is akin to the bourgeois individual artistic “genius” who produces ostensibly singular masterpieces. It is a graphic design history that borrows uncritically the historiographical methods of art history. Counterposed to this is a design history that privileges an “imperative to immutability.” The objects therein are the ones I touch on in my book: cuneiform tablets, coinage, papal indulgences, stock certificates, cadastral surveys, etc. The subject of this history is “designer2,” who is less the auteur and more the bureaucracy. In fact, in this scenario, “designer1” is the instrument of the more radical agency that is the colonial state, or the capitalist enterprise. This graphic design history of the document, rather than serving as an affirmative telos, arraying history’s best practices of the document, rather functions as the basis of an indictment — implicating design in the banal yet apocalyptic impositions of imperialistic administrators. This indictment is the ground against which a third category of history, of a “designer3” might be figured.
So, the third part, which departs from the end of Immutable, as well as the conclusion of this forthcoming first part, may not take the form of a publication at all, because for me, it would be a matter of pedagogical praxis in design. I don’t know what this entails practically, but I’m interested in the idea of a kind of “performatic” form and praxis that the performance theorist Diana Taylor talks about, and the possibility that this form is effectively illegible to the institutions that regulate form-making, knowledge production, memorialization, and so on. Perhaps this is also an immanent critique of graphic design education and the hubristic inflation of its impact and capacity to “create change,” when it effectively only valorizes forms that are legible and regulatable. It may even, as the coda suggests, eschew “design” as a category in order to meaningfully undertake the charge of studying and exploring other ways of claiming, remembering, and knowing. There would, invariably, be other people and sources of knowledge to learn from. If I were to truly pursue the questions I pose in Immutable in my pedagogical practice, I’d probably find myself disciplined into toeing the party line, or just plain out of a job.
ZF: I think all of these reasons are important and that they point to another kind of materiality of the book. Not a crude materiality of paper, ink and glue, but a historical materiality — a historical materialism — in which a whole set of social relations and their attendant contradictions condition and ultimately shape what reaches the reader as a book. What is done here with the book, is then expanded to the larger discipline of design education as such when your entire project is considered.
Something that struck me in reading Immutable was that it was more of a kind of working through, than a reading experience. Your particular way of working against the progressive flow of the book by simply reversing the order of the notes — I’m not sure they can really be called footnotes — so that they begin on the final page and end on the first. The page numbers ascend and the text unfolds in one direction, while the notes are arranged in reverse. It seems like such a simple idea, maybe even a trick, but it made the experience of reading it into a kind of active challenge to the material format. It’s a tactile experience of flipping back and forth, weighing at some moments whether or not it’s worth it to lose one’s place to pursue the reference. Small details, like the arrows that accompany each number that indicates a note in the text, in order to direct the reader forward or backward, work to balance the disruptive and confusing nature of this inverted setup. The book really feels like it is balanced just right in this respect, so that the experience in reading it is tensed between this assault on the linearity that the book format secures and a bigger story about the ways in which various technologies of graphic design have secured a space for the accumulation of capital through dispossession — “the banal yet apocalyptic impositions of imperialistic administrators,” as you have just mentioned. There is a suggestion that there is no act of memorialization or documentation that does not involve an act of erasure, or more strongly as you put it earlier, obliteration. That a struggle is at stake in even the most banal and seemingly neutral acts of documentation, storage, and preservation. How do you feel about that characterization? And would you consider the process of working through Immutable as a kind of training for the reader in becoming more attentive to this?
CL: I refer regularly to James C. Scott’s reminder that the generalization of a standard is the result of struggle, and I think the same goes for what documents memorialize. In fact documents are the very enactment of this struggle in that their mandate is to try to put to rest any contingency or potential for dispute. It may be obvious, but I think that this puts into relief a schism that figures on one side those that write history, and those that don’t, while calling into question the purpose of the writers’ narration. I also want to be careful, though, not to give the document sole responsibility for the capacity to erase or obliterate, and even to actuate any of the contingent memories, knowledges, claims, etc. it carries. That work is done in collaboration with agents who have a capacity to exert physical force to stabilize the contingent. The document’s role here is perhaps more to justify, encode, and attempt to make inevitable the violence that reinforces these contingencies in moments of controversy. Linear, progressive time, the conventional unidirectional sequentiality of a book, for instance, but also as a kind of metaphysical foundation for things like property and sometimes (nation) state, is largely treated as a banal, uncontroversial inevitability. But, indeed, I do imagine that such forms and formats habituate “literates” (to borrow a subject category from Hobart & Schiffman’s Information Ages) to ways of thinking that make alternatives seem absurd, frivolous, primitive, irrational, invalid, etc.
There is an epitaph on the back cover of the book, a quoted passage taken from George Caffentzis’ Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government, which reads: “The great enemy of property is oblivion, since the loss of conscious mastery over time and succession leads inevitably to the breakdown of property. Thus the forces of oblivion are antagonistic to the self and property, while all the techniques of mnemonics are their essential allies.”
I hope that Immutable, as you say, is encountered as a thing to be worked through to exercise a capacity to be in contingency. If capital and colony can be said to be imbricated in the phenomenon of property — that is, a thing that the various institutions and agencies of the state work to make not contingent — becoming attentive to this would perhaps be the most that the book might do, but the least of what is required! Like, what registers of violence are operative when, say, a wampum belt is circulated/stored as a political document in one moment, and then it is hijacked into the academy as a museological document? What kinds of resistance (imagination and direct action) are then required to restore what this document tried to memorialize?
ZF: Oblivion and violence seem inextricably linked to — deployed in order to establish and support, rather than simply being opposed to — regimes of property. Grasping how these forces continue, beyond the origin/institution of a given regime of property, to maintain it in the present, seems crucial for understanding the stakes and possibilities of direct action. Reading the epitaph on your book cover, I couldn’t help but think of that on Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline: “Property will cost us the earth.” Malm ends that book, as you do yours, with an invocation of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, suggesting that the prohibition of violence within resistance movements is linked to a failure to grasp the everyday forms of violence that maintain the status quo — that maintain the colonial as a necessary and ongoing moment, or condition, of the accumulation of capital.
If the least of what is required, as you say, is to become more attentive to the role of the state in securing property as a way of foreclosing contingency, and if the most that we can do, in a way, is to develop a capacity to be in contingency, would you say that, as a graphic designer, to “smash the state” means first of all to refuse the imperative to immutability that makes one into an organ, or subject (designer2 as you call it) of the state? That it is only in this mode of refusal of, or resistance to, being implemented as a designer of immutable documents, that it becomes possible to begin to imagine how to answer questions like the ones you just posed about a form of memorialization outside of, and perhaps even hostile towards, forms of property? This, it seems to me, would be graphic design become historiography.
CL: This is something that I hope will be clearer and better elaborated in that forthcoming text I mentioned, but I think the kind of designer that I was trained to be, and am, falls into the designer1 category. Maybe it sounds a bit harsh, but I’m of the opinion that to “smash the state” from this position may be a kind of vanity, though I wouldn’t discount at all that there are other tactical impacts that, say, protest graphics might have (it also depends on the timeframe of how impact is discerned). Designer2 is a rhetorical convenience for me to label the bureaucracies of the colonial state and capitalist enterprise as a kind of designing agency, with an eye to casting their onto-epistemological impositions (via the document) as designed (designations?), that is, contingent. Designer1 in this picture, might indeed be an instrument of designer2.
I mentioned earlier this figure of a “designer3” (I should come up with less schematic, more imaginative names!) as a subject of an historiography of those opposed to the documental impositions of the aforementioned bureaucracies. This story, I imagine, would be populated by anyone who has forged, counterfeited, détourned, exposed, reframed, or destroyed documents to oppose the state and capital. It would also be populated by people whose practices and lifeways might preclude or deliberately eschew documental forms of memorialization in favor of what the performance theorist Diana Taylor calls “performatic” forms of knowledge production, storage, and transmission, or what Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman might call practices of commemoration in “non-literate” societies (to use a literate-centric term).
The formation of a history of designer3 would not narrate the typical object/subject of graphic design history (which itself tends to be modelled uncritically on the object/subject of art history), i.e., the masterpiece/genius. The primary reason for this would presumably be because the object/subject of this story would be the evidence and suspect of a “crime” (“criminals” typically do not want attribution for their work, no?) and/or that the work is an act of obliteration for which the methods of its representation might pose a challenge (how do you show a void — an absence of the state, perhaps?).
Well, it may be that this “void” is actually formed by the kinds of memorialization that do not leave stable traces in the way that conventional historians might prefer. Such things might include Indigenous land claims/customs of land stewardship that are “stored” within traditional practices, or it may be in the creation of wampum belts that serve as mnemonic objects for certain political arrangements, and so on. To be sure, such things are now legible to the colonial gaze as historical, and not as living — circulating more in the realm of the academic, and less in the political or other mode of sociality. I once went to a museum at a Buddhist temple in Beijing, and one of the monks cleaning the exhibition stopped to pray at one of the “artworks.” This was the only time I’ve witnessed the dissolution of the artistic conceit of museological display. This is perhaps akin to what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay might call “rehearsal.”
In other words, designer2 is the enemy of designer3. Designer3’s history is less about “look how much progress we’ve made” and more about “look what they did to us.” I would imagine that a history of designer3 would be circumscribed by an oppositional framework for design pedagogy entailing the study of precedents, and the experimental exploration, of other ways of remembering, making claims, and articulating knowledge (entailing strategies and tactics for assertion and defense). I hint at this in my book, but at a certain point, graphic design might simply stop being useful as a category of practice for pursing the questions this kind of study would entail.
