Thinking Things Differently

Throughout the Western world, for the past few decades we have seen a concerted movement toward removing certain “non-essential” academic programs from universities. Usually, these are programs centered in the Humanities; and often, the rationale given is that they are not “economically viable” and do not prepare students for taking their proper place in The Economy.

History departments are often targeted for staff reduction, and severe cuts in funding; and Philosophy departments are usually also among the first to be considered extraneous to “a good education”.

This seems to be a fairly recent development; but outside of academia, as someone who has been involved with environmental issues since the late 1970s, I have noticed a parallel course of action taking hold: the criminalization of dissent. It is of interest to note that the great dissenters who promoted humanistic values and issues are remembered within academia almost exclusively through The Humanities — and that, in contrast, the coarsest aspects of the human psyche almost invariably recoil from any celebration of difference, of alterity, and of diversity. To think differently, then, has become anathema to some who would be perfectly happy to see “being different” (from them) made illegal.

Somewhere, Gilles Deleuze notes that ‘things become political when three or more people become involved’; which is to say, when those promoting opposing points of view find others they can attempt to sway toward one side or the other. For my awareness poster, I chose to address the idea of thought itself, and Deleuze’s thesis that difference is fundamental to thought in a way which makes it essential even to recognition, to representation, and to repetition. To raise awareness of this, I decided to employ some very basic and simple typographic principles to draw people into ideas that are as deep as unfathomable gets — while still retaining clarity. 

I start with a “headline” of a quote from Deleuze, which simply introduces the idea that thinking is not about recognizing something already know — it is about encountering the new, and thinking differently than before because of such an encounter. For this, I use a sans serif typeface (Sumner Stone’s ITC Stone Humanist Sans); and I add a little urgency through the use of a earthy orange fill surrounded with a thin, brighter orange stroke.

At the bottom of the poster, I use a longer quote from the last book written by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari — a quote that expands upon the idea conveyed through the larger headline quote above, and which does so in a way which is a little more intriguing than what would be considered the dry and lifeless norm for most of Western philosophy. This text I set in Sumner Stone’s SFPL typeface, a font designed specifically for the San Francisco Public Library system to meet their need for a typeface that remains legible while allowing for a lot of text to be placed in a small amount of space. To tie this text in with the headline quote, I stroke the SFPL body text with an orange outline that visually connects to the main quote.

Anchoring the poster is a photo of Gilles Deleuze that I have rendered in Photoshop as a graphic done in the style of a charcoal drawing. This I converted to a tritone using colors that were balanced to the oranges I used to highlight the text. I then took a very solid block of text, set with about the same leading as the point size (in Helvetica Neue for legibility), composed entirely of terms taken from a glossary of concepts, terms, and references employed by Gilles Deleuze throughout his writing. This I blended into the graphic image of Deleuze, coloring the text block in contrast to but also in harmony with the colors used in creating the tritone image. These terms are not entirely legible: someone trying to read them would need to have more than a passing interest. But then, perhaps that nascent interest might be aroused by the text below — as introduced by the headline quote. Perhaps someone would be interested enough to further inquire about the works of Gilles Deleuze, a “philosopher’s philosopher” considered by some as the greatest thinker regarding thought that the 20^th century produced — even if philosophy has been reduced to the rumor of a joke wherever they might have studied whatever was left in place for them to learn.  

Perhaps, I have at least given people something different to think about.