Structuralism

This fast-paced film features some of the most important living Postmodern practitioners -- Charles Jencks, Robert A.M. Stern and Sir Terry Farrell among them -- and asks them how and why Postmodernism came about, and what it means to be Postmodern.

-Philosophy movement in Europe late 1800's - 1960's

- Focuses on society as a system (key issue was to understand how things are organized and how they work)

- Differential relations are the key to understanding culture and society (asks questions like why is it different/same?)

- Focuses on material practices as points of analysis

Ferdinand de Saussure
1857-1913

(born Nov. 26, 1857, Geneva, Switz.—died Feb. 22, 1913, Vufflens-le-Château), Swiss linguist whose ideas on structure in language laid the foundation for much of the approach to and progress of the linguistic sciences in the 20th century.

Semiotics - structural system of analysis, how language works and its meaning. Semiotics or semiology is the study of signs, sign systems, and the way meaning is derived from them. The life of signs in society.
SIGN or WORD is made of two parts - SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED. Signifier is the material object of sign, wich can be image or a word. Signified is meaning which is reliesed in your mind when the word is heard/seen, for example what do you picture when you hear someone saying "RED"?

Semiotics

Google search images for 'semiotics':

Paradigm and Syntagm
One of the structures of language is the way in which words relate to each other. The words in a sentence flow from one to the next in an orderly way. Different languages use different word orders, but within the language there are orderly structures. In English, for example, you can say, “The cat scratched the dog,” but not “Scratch catted dog the the,” unless you’ve had a stroke. The order of words in a sentence are governed by the rules of syntax, and the relationship between words in a sentence or phrase is syntagmatic and the individual words are syntagms.

Words in a sentence have syntagmatic roles: subject, verb, object, modifier, article and so on. Each of the words in each of these syntagmatic roles can be substituted for any other word that fulfills that role. All the words that can be subjects have a paradigmatic relationship, just as all the words that can be verbs are paradigmatically related. Said another way, words that can be subjects are in the same paradigm, as are verbs and objects and so on. You can envision a horizontal axis as the syntagmatic axis and a vertical axis as the paradigmatic axis. This will be useful next week when we distinguish the paradigm shift

The structuralist thinker, who devoted his five-decade career to the study of the human species around the world, is credited with having revolutionised the study of anthropology for the 20th century.

Claude Levi-Strauss 1908-2009

Structuralist thinkers are interested in how people interact, how they relatr and communicate. Structuralist anthropologist and thinker Claude Levi-Strauss looked at : how family works; kinship structures; language; personal relationships.

Vladimir Propp was Russian philologist and structuralist who analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. Like his followers Barthes, Greimas and Levi-Strauss he tried to approach the same task looking for simplest narrative elements in contemporary everyday narratives 'from newspaper chronicle to mass novel' (Barthes. Mythologies, 1957) or in the semantic of literary texts (Greimas. Semantique structurale: Recherche de methode, 1966) or analysing the tales of primitive people (Levi-Strauss. Anthropologie structurale, 1958) and their elementary structure of kinship (Levi-Strauss. Les Structures elementaires de la parente, 1949).

Vladimir Propp
1895-1970

'The study of the fairy tale may be compared in many respects to that of organic formation in nature. Both the naturalist and the folklorist deal with species and varieties which are essentially the same.'

Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folktale

Modernism

Until recently, the word ‘modern’ was used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all art is modern at the time it is made. In his Il Libro dell'Arte (translated as ‘The Craftsman’s Handbook’) written in the early 15th century, the Italian writer and painter Cennino Cennini explains that Giotto made painting ‘modern’ [see BIBLIOGRAPHY]. Giorgio Vasari writing in the 16th century, refers to the art of his own period as ‘modern.’ [see BIBLIOGRAPHY]

In the history of art, however, the term ‘modern’ is used to refer to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and describes the style and ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art. The term ‘modernism’ is also used to refer to the art of the modern period. More specifically, ‘modernism’ can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art.

Josef Muller-Brockmann
1914-1996

Brockmann accomplished a great number of beneficial things but mostly he is known as a Swiss graphic designer who used the grid system as well as wrote books about the grid system.

For more info about JMB click on his image

Modernist Graphic designers are evangelical about grids, order in not just visual but also conceptual meaning. Josef Muller-Brockman said that designer can work out the design and that is his ultimate goal. He also believed that there is right and wrong in design and if you work with grid you work with universal validity. As a designer he believed you need to find the laws, find pattern and work to it. Very prescriptive approach.

Modernism in graphic design

From Grid Systems by Josef Müller-Brockmann

Otto Neurath
1882-1945

Neurath was a social scientist, scientific philosopher and maverick leader of the Vienna Circle who championed ‘the scientific attitude’ and the Unity of Science movement. He denied any value to philosophy over and above the pursuit of work on science, within science and for science...

Gerd Arntz
1900-1988

Born in a German family of traders and manufacturers, Gerd Arntz was a socially inspired and politically committed artist. In Düsseldorf, where he lived since his nineteenth, he joined a movement which wanted to turn Germany into a `soviet-' or `council republic', a radically socialist state form based on direct popular democracy...

For more info about Arntz click on his image

Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz are developers of ISOTYPE (International System Of Typographic Picture Education). Arntz was image maker of all ISOTYPE figures, but Neurath had all the idea, he was sociologist and thinker.

‘Typography is not self-expression with in predetermined aesthetics, but that it is conditioned by the message it visualises.’ HB 1967

Herbert Bayer
1900-1985

For more info about Bayer click on his image

In 1925, Gropius commissioned Bayer to design a typeface for all Bauhaus communiqués and Bayer excitedly undertook this task. He took advantage of his views of modern typography to create an "idealist typeface." The result was "universal" - a rather simple geometric sans-serif font. It utilized simple curves and has other unadorned attributes.

The Crystal Goblet
by Beatrice Warde
Excerpt from a Lecture to the British Typographers’ Guild

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in color. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery hearth of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-pages? Again: The glass is colorless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its color and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of "doubling" lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The “stunt typographer” learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

Poststructuralism

Move from uncovering and investigating the system to looking at how the audience and users of the systems utilise, impact on and interact with these systems

Roland Barthes
1915-1980

French social and literary critic, whose writings on semiotics made structuralism one of the leading intellectual movements of the 20th century. In his lifetime Barthes published seventeen books and numerous articles, many of which were gathered to form collections...

In post Structuralism:
-Signs are complex cultural chains of meaning, not indisputable and baring singular meaning released by the author/god.

-Visual and linguistic signs combine to direct meaning.

-Myth - ‘indisputable image’
R. Bathes ‘Mythologies’ 1957
‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’, R.Barthes ‘Image, Music, Text’ 1977.

-Total opposition of neutral, universal structuralist idea about image and signs. One image can carry information on different levels build layer upon layer.

FROM http://seacoast.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/culture/myth3.htm about Paris Match cover.

...Barthes then, is at the barber's and is handed a copy of Paris-Match. On the front cover he sees a photograph of a black soldier saluting the French flag and he instantly recognises the myth the photograph is seeking to peddle. However, Barthes provides a methodological justification for this essentially intuitive `reading' of the photograph, a methodology derived from Saussure's theory of the sign. Barthes sees the figuration of the photograph, that is to say, the arrangement of coloured dots on a white background as constituting the signifier and the concept of the black soldier saluting the tricolour as constituting the signified. Together, they form the sign. However, Barthes takes this reading one step further and argues that there is a second level of signification grafted on to the first sign. This first sign becomes a second-level signifier for a new sign whose signified is French imperiality, i.e. the idea that France's empire treats all its subjects equally...

Originator of the meaning is reader not the author any more.

Michael Foucault
1926-1984

Michel Foucault was a French historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. He has had wide influence not only (or even primarily) in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines.

Why Can Michel Foucault Be Considered Post Structuralist?

In Michel Foucault’s essay “What Is An Author?/The Author Function” (an extension of Barthes’ “Death of the Author) Foucault denotes the author as a historical construct- that the figure and significance of the author varies across time and from one culture (and discourse) to another. It questions the author as a “saint-like figure” and so as “endlessly creative.” In Foucault’s opinion, if readers believe the author to be a constant fountain of brilliance, their practice of reading and criticism gives the author complete authority, confining meaning and significance of the text. As Foucault puts it, “The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”

Although Michel Foucault’s work is mainly structuralist, it is in “What is An Author” that one sees post-structuralist thought (in taking away power from the Author and striving for multiple interpretations of the text by the reader, which is a tenant of post-structuralism) emerging as a shift in Foucault’s chosen philosophy.

Information from: http://people.uwec.edu/juettjc/post-structuralism/focault.html

Born in 1941, Wolfgang Weingart is an independent graphic designer and a very influential teacher at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel.

Wolfgang Weingart
1941-