CityReads│Thinking through Images: A Phd Thesis in Comics

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Thinking through Images: A Phd Thesis in Comics

A thesis-as-comic presents new possibilities for words-and-images in academic realms.

Nick Sousanis, 2015.Unflattening, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sources: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431

http://imaginativeethnography.org/drawings/unflattening-a-review/

This is the last post in 2018. I would like to talk about a comics, Unflattening by Nick Sousanis , I just read. It is not a usual comics, it is the author’s doctoral dissertation from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Done entirely as comics, the work is said to be the first graphic dissertation and a work that presents new possibilities for words-and-images in academic realms. The stated goal of the work is "to discover new ways of seeing, to open spaces for possibilities, and to find ‘fresh methods’ for animating and awakening".

Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.

In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of "upwards", Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

A sketch of the flow of the book

The opening chapter presents a dreary landscape with generic and zombielike humanoid figures trudging along narrow pathways. The figures are labeled "inhabitants" and "creatures," "humans" who are converted into data. The space they inhabit shifts from a vast Piranesian structure of elevated walkways to conveyor belts and associated machinery to a world of cubes and slotted spaces—including one space for the transmission/education of the "receivers" who are fed data directly into their heads.  Words explain that the wider universe of possibilities for thought and behavior  becomes flat/one-dimensional, a dystopian world full of industrial, educational, urban, white-collar gloom.

This leads to an "Interlude" chapter in which Sousanis presents a brief rendition of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, which serves as a metaphor for the larger project of Unflattening. For those unfamiliar with Abbott’s work, the beings of Flatland live in two-dimensional space. We who live in 3-D can easily understand Flatlanders’ limitations, but how are we to understand our own? This helps frame the basic question of Sousanis’s book via geometric considerations: what are we missing that the very conditions of our life restrict us from experiencing? Winged sandals allow Sousanis’s every-person Flatlander to leap into three-dimensional space.

In subsequent pages, Sousanis presents other instances where limitations of seeing/understanding are broken because people recognize, appreciate, and combine multiple viewpoints. These viewpoints can be literal: for example, Sousanis explains parallax and related phenomena (e.g., human vision; the earth as spherical, not flat; new vision technologies leading to new knowledge). In this mix there is reference to culture and the challenge of understanding across a space/abyss. There follows the statement that "seeing through another’s eyes . . . serves to shift our vision from the one-dimensional to a more multidimensional view". But how to do this? Turn the page and Sousanis talks about the sense capacity of dogs (their senses of sight, smell, and hearing) .

Subsequent chapters consider the nature of thought, movement and thinking, and imagination. Sousanis continues to argue for multiple dimensions of understanding, with explicit reference to combining words and images. Leading up to his statement of preference for the term "comics" is a brief history of the triumph of words-as-thought in Western history and an explanation of the preference for the written word in academia. But what about words and images? Words versus images? Words visualized? Hybrid forms? If words are a line, then images are a plane and offer very different “routes” to understanding.

This spatial interplay of sequential and simultaneous imbues comics with a dual nature—both tree-like, hierarchical, and rhizomatic, interwoven in a single form.

Embedded within the sequential-simultaneous ecosystem that is comics. Each informs and enriches the other to achieve a meaning, that neither conveys alone without the other.

The chapters on seeing and thought move on to a consideration of the body in motion and then to what Sousanis calls a fifth dimension. Visual perception not only depends on the eyes but also the positions of bodies that move. Here he stresses the worth of drawing in his quest to "unflatten" a conventional way of thinking/(re)presenting. He notes: "Putting thoughts down [via drawing] allows us to step outside ourselves . . . . We thus extend our thinking—distributing it between conception and perception—engaging both simultaneously. We draw not to transcribe ideas from our heads but to generate them in search of greater understanding”. The fifth dimension enters his discussion as “boundless possible perspectives beyond where we’ve been" and the power of one’s imagination.

Chapter 7 & 8 are "Ruts" and "Strings Attached." Here his words and images are concerned with the well-trodden pathways humans follow. The visuals echo those of early chapters: footprints, ranks of humanoid figures on paths/runways/treadmills, babies, walking, and the act of learning becoming routine: for example, a marionette/man lives a routine life. But then something happens that breaks the usual: a caterpillar (with references to Alice in Wonderland) becomes a question mark and asks, "Who are you?".

The book finishes with more visual/verbal contemplations on the social and biological bonds/attachments/fabrics that constrain us and shape identities. The body of the book ends with an eyeball filled with angles/eyes—referring back to relational positions/distances/gaps— and the words: "unflattening, we remind ourselves of what it is to open our eyes to the world for the first time".

There is a parallel in a passage from anthropologist Franz Boas.  In "An Anthropologist’s Credo" published in 1938, Franz Boas reflected on his life’s work and the concerns that shaped his thinking. He wrote: "In fact, my whole outlook upon social life is determined by the question: how can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us? For when we recognize them, we are also able to break them".

Dear readers, see you in 2019.

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