Inside the Vanishing Point
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Several years ago, I picked up a strange little paperback in a basement bookshop in New York’s Chinatown. It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and slim enough to read all the way through in the time it takes to ride the F train to Coney Island. The cover is mostly black, with white sans-serif text printed at a slant. The title is intriguing: The Medium is the Massage. You read that right: the massage. With an A. I couldn’t leave the shop without it.
The book was published in 1967, a collaboration between philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore. It picks up on a thesis McLuhan developed a few years earlier in his seminal work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). In that book, the first chapter of which is titled ‘The medium is the message’ (with an E), he argued that a medium’s content – the writing in a book, the news report on television – was much less important than the medium itself. According to McLuhan’s son, the word ‘massage’ on the cover was a result of human error, a mistake made by the typesetter. It should have been ‘message’, but McLuhan liked the wordplay and kept it. ‘A medium is not something neutral’, McLuhan wrote in the New York Times in 1967, ‘it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around.’
Once we were individuals each gazing towards a single, vanishing, point; now we are a mass.
A little less than a third of the way through the book, there is a greyscale reproduction of a fifteenth-century perspectival painting known as Architectural Veduta. Four pairs of columns give way to a broad, empty city square, marked by grid lines. The square’s central strip of paving stones points like a runway towards the distance, where we see ships passing by. McLuhan writes: ‘The Vanishing Point = Self-Effacement, The Detached Observer. No Involvement!’ The Renaissance viewer, he argues, stands at a fixed point outside the frame, looking in. Electronic media has done away with both the fixed point and the frame. Over the five centuries since a man in Siena painted a geometric urban landscape, something has shifted. Either we, the viewers, have stepped into the frame and populated the square, or the frame has moved towards us, engulfing us, trapping us all within its bounds. In both cases, the result is the same: once we were individuals each gazing towards a single, vanishing, point; now we are a mass.
McLuhan was not exactly the darling of the academy. He wrote in aphoristic sentences, liked puns and jokes, appeared in a Woody Allen movie. But sixty-odd years later, his too-neatly formulated idea that ‘we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us’ has real resonance, especially as Artificial Intelligence slowly seeps into every facet of our lives. Electronic media such as television and the internet once seemed to foster connection; the rise of hyper-personalisation (AI-generated music made to suit your taste, for example) disperses us into far corners of virtual reality. It seems as though we have gone through the painting and are living inside the vanishing point: creating the means of our own self-effacement, using them, bemoaning their existence and continuing to use them anyway.
In a recent article in the New York Times, Sam Kriss broke down the linguistic quirks of writing produced by AI. He details the patterns AI favours (such as ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’) as well as the words and punctuation marks it likes to use. It’s fun, for a while, to laugh at the silly robot stuck ‘delving’ into anything and everything, writing as though its virtual finger is stuck on the virtual em-dash key. But the hypothesis with which he ends the piece is less cheering. ‘Humans are mimics as well’, he points out. Soon, we might find AI language coming out of our mouths, spilling into the pages of our books. It’s probably already happening.
Talk to almost any writer about this likelihood and you’ll notice a slightly fearful disgust. But no writer, really, is afraid of tricolon phrases sneaking into their prose. The ones I know certainly aren’t afraid of em dashes. The fear is less about the degradation of their own writing and more about a creeping sameness settling over the way we talk and write. In the world of visual rather than linguistic communication, the great flattening has been underway for quite some time. Book covers feature either neon lettering over cleverly cropped paintings or amorphous blobs of suggestive colour; advertisements are all the same; as one brand strategist put it, we are living in the Age of Average. While the images which surround us have become steadily more monotonous, they have only increased in quantity. Screens are ubiquitous and the images with which they glow are often disconnected from any individual artist. A robot may as well have produced them. Sometimes it has. It’s as if the advertising industry set out to confirm, finally and undeniably, the death of the author.
As strange as it sounds, the dissolution of this boundary between artist and viewer – or writer and reader – was once the dominant ideal. Way back in 1930, before a screen in every home was even an aspiration, a young typography scholar named Beatrice Warde stood in front of the members of the British Typographers’ Guild at the St Bride Institute in London and asked them to imagine two goblets: one of gold and one of crystal-clear glass. According to their choice, she said, she would know if they were connoisseurs of wine. Any who chose the novelty of drinking from a cup of solid gold gave themselves away as posers. True oenophiles would want the wine to be the focus.
For Warde, there was an obvious parallel between choosing a wineglass and laying out a page of text. Later published as ‘The Crystal Goblet’, her speech is a sermon extolling the virtues of ‘clear’ typography – design and printing that promotes textual clarity by itself becoming transparent. ‘The book typographer’, she wrote, ‘has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words.’ Any aspect of the design that gets in the way is ‘bad’. In other words, if the designer has done her job properly, her design will disappear.
In our current moment, art (a product of expression) is privileged over craft (a product of skill).
It’s easy to see Warde’s insistence on simplicity as a product of her times. The excesses of the Arts and Crafts movement’s aesthetic were still fresh in the memories of designers who were glad to see the end of elaborate, ornate pages. But Warde, along with Stanley Morison (of Times New Roman fame), was in fact advocating for design principles that were partially modern and partially revivalist. She and Morison believed that centuries of book making had already shown the best way to set type for long-form reading. At the Monotype Corporation, Morison oversaw the reinterpretation and subsequent release of historical typefaces. Bodoni, Bembo, Baskerville and other typefaces beginning with other letters of the alphabet all took inspiration from letterforms more than one hundred years old.
The Monotype system (and its competitor, the Linotype system) revolutionised printing technology for the first time since Gutenberg first printed the Bible in the mid-fifteenth century. For hundreds of years, printers had been commissioning or purchasing metal type, then placing individual letters in rows ready to be inked and pressed into paper. Determining how much space should go between each word – perhaps even each letter – to create a neatly justified block of text was time-consuming, fiddly work. With the invention of machine typesetting at the end of the nineteenth century, all that changed.
This is how the Monotype system works: first, someone types the text into a keyboard, which punches a pattern of holes into a paper ribbon. Then, the paper is handed to a different person, who feeds it into a casting machine. Using a complex pneumatic system, the casting machine ‘reads’ the perforated paper and selects a specific matrix (a small piece of brass bearing the negative impression of the letter), which is positioned over a mould. A molten lead alloy is injected into the mould and cooled by water; the resulting piece of type is ejected. Each character is cast and assembled in sequence into a line, which is automatically and perfectly justified. In motion, the whole process makes loud clunking sounds but requires far less in the way of mental maths.
Everything within the machine – every one of its thousands of parts – had to be perfectly aligned, else the type would come out too short or too tall and wouldn’t print. Indeed, it was partially this precision that gave Monotype its appeal. Machine casting was designed to produce perfect lines of type so that the reader wouldn’t trip over poorly spaced letters and the rivers of distracting blankness surrounding them, so they could forget they were reading at all and see straight through that clear window to the author’s thought beyond.
These systems laid the groundwork for the digital typesetting most designers use today. On industry-standard software InDesign, letters are kerned (spaced) by an algorithm that analyses the shape of adjacent characters and adjusts the gap between them for seamless reading. InDesign will even decide where to splice a word in two with a hyphen at the end of a line, all in the name of creating an even block of text and, therefore, a page that does not impose itself on the reader. ‘Printing demands a humility of mind’, warned Warde. Some of this attitude is built into the common circumstances surrounding how a page design comes into being in the first place. A client hires a designer, pays them to communicate a specific text which is almost always authored by someone else. The designer is not, in this case, an artist in service of herself; she is a craftsman in service of her client.
But in our current moment, art (a product of expression) is privileged over craft (a product of skill). As design has become more widely seen as an arena in which art making might happen, designers have increasingly rejected Warde’s transparent-window ideal. A clear view of the author’s thoughts is no longer always the priority. Add to that the sea of machine-generated media threatening to drown us all, and the designer of today is understandably tempted to inflate her lifejacket, blow her whistle, shine her light. ‘Look at me! I’m human,’ she yells. Although the primacy of invisible typography has not completely vanished from the pages of books (most authors still, for good reason, don’t want their words in puffy, shrill, flashing typography), elsewhere we have seen a resurgence of purposefully ‘bad’ design. Magazine covers, album artworks and websites all hit the viewer in the face with their appearence. Take a look at the Yale School of Art’s online homepage, which features the kind of aesthetic choices more common in the 1990s than 2020s. Ours is a precarious world, especially for creative practitioners who are often self-employed. Without grabbing attention, it’s almost impossible to find success.
The same is true outside of the design world. In the UK, over three hundred newspapers have closed since 2005; one 2022 report put the median income of full-time authors at just £7,000 a year. The world’s biggest online book marketplace, Amazon, is bursting with AI knockoffs, print-on-demand volumes filled with plagiarised or nonsensical material. Publicity budgets have been slashed and authors are often expected to promote not just their books but themselves on social media. Surely related is the fact that, despite some claims to the contrary, the first-person essay still dominates the glossy and pixellated pages of periodicals. In 1946, George Orwell proposed that ‘one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality’. But personality is the hottest commodity on the internet.
In a world of encroaching homogeneity, we have learned to insist on our own personality.
Orwell’s next sentence is one of his most famous lines: ‘Good prose is like a windowpane.’ Like Warde before him, he saw his craft as best when invisible, when it doesn’t get in the way of the real meat: the idea, or the truth, depending on how worthy you’re feeling. It’s possible he was influenced in this by the radical writer William Hazlitt, who, a little over two centuries prior, wrote ‘On the Prose Style of Poets’. Hazlitt claims that poets’ writing is often too concerned with beauty to arrive at truth. In good prose, he contends, ‘nothing can be admitted by way of ornament or relief that does not add new force or clearness to the original conception’. Here, too, extraneous decoration is the enemy. Clarity is the goal.
It might seem as though neither Hazlitt nor Orwell were concerned with the substance of a piece of writing and instead were focused on the author’s style. But for Hazlitt, the prose writer can only arrive at pleasure through truth. Style should be a result of substance, not the other way around. Perhaps it is not that twenty-first-century writers have left Orwell and Hazlitt behind, but that they are increasingly placing themselves within the landscape beyond the window.
Personal writing is nothing new, but the genre has seen a recent surge in institutional recognition. In 2022, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’. Last year, the judges of the Baillie Gifford Prize gave the award, one of this country’s most prestigious for non-fiction writing, to Helen Garner for her collected diaries. They wrote: ‘There is a skilled narrative drive which presents a lot of personal material that keeps you hooked, not necessarily on what is happening in terms of the story, but about Garner’s whole life and about what’s going on outside her window.’
I wonder what Hazlitt would have made of Ernaux, of Garner. Neither uses particularly ornate language or unnecessary metaphor; neither relies too much on the sounds of words or the rhythm of a string of them. Garner’s sentences are clean and clipped: ‘My intellectual equipment has gone rusty.’ ‘A fresh, clear morning: pink light on buildings: an edge on the air.’ ‘Out here they pray for rain.’ Perhaps it matters that these are sentences culled from Garner’s diaries, writing for which the intended reader is herself, but then again it was Garner who decided to publish them. About the preparation for doing so, working on a text detailing her own daily existence, Garner wrote: ‘if the writing is doing its job, it has a double effect: first, to show you the world from the writer’s point of view, but then at the same time to keep turning your attention back to your own experience, thus giving you a deep sense of comradeliness.’ What she is describing here, something that can reflect as well as reveal, is a window.
Orwell’s ideal prose had authority because of the invisibility – and therefore implied impartiality – of its author. But we have grown suspicious of those claiming neutrality, and the value we place on individuality has shot up. There is a reality television star in the White House. ‘Influencer’ is a real job title. In a world of encroaching homogeneity, we have learned to insist on our own personality. Designers are spray painting their names over Warde’s transparent pane of glass.
Flicking through The Medium is the Massage again now, I am struck by how much Warde would have hated it. Text is collaged over image, printed backwards so that the reader must hold the book up to a mirror and read its reflection, placed at the bottom of the page with the bases of the letters shaved off. If Fiore’s design had been invisible, I probably would have left the paperback in Chinatown. But let’s take a closer look. That page I read in front of a mirror encourages the reader’s active engagement with the book, something McLuhan addresses directly. As wild and experimental as Fiore’s layout might seem, every design decision is made with the content of the book in mind. Warde was wrong and Warde was right: design does not have to vanish in order to communicate the author’s words most effectively. Good prose suits its subject. After all, a window does more than reveal and reflect; it conceals too, directing our attention with its frame.
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Zoe Guttenplan is a writer and designer. She works at Literary Review.
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