Typographic Marginality
Linking to ideas around cultural citizenship, that a typographic practice can become one means of practicing cultural citizenship.
Towards (New)typographical Ways of Knowing
- If Flusser’s argument that this is being diminished and marginalised is accepted.
From the conceptual margins of typographic practice. That there are non-traditional, non-Western or subcultural approaches and contexts within which typography can be said to exist (both historically and in the ever-present now). The premise may be that these sites of typographic marginality are also instances of alternative models of (cultural) citizenship. These margins become spaces to practice and assert a sense of identity and belonging. That their being ‘functionally separate from the concrete reality’ (Flusser) of what is thought to constitute the centre of things (socially and politically) allows for an imaginal function to emerge — a typographic ‘field of possibilities’ (Zuluga) that can signpost (represent and project) visions for what ‘makes the world, and thus politics, possible’ (Zuluga).
From the Centre to the Margins of Contemporary Communication
The role of ‘text’ in shaping our perceptions of the world, what Flusser terms a typographic way of knowing. What are the consequences of ‘post-typographic thinking’? Typography itself (the practices and knowledges) are moved to the margins, occupying a position of service to other forms of representation as our attentions shift towards other modes (and their combinations). The authority of text (Flusser’s claim that it ‘captures the world’ through abstraction and typification) is eroded, and the pace demanded by ‘typographic reading’ is being disturbed and displaced by the immediacy and ephemerality of much contemporary communication Typography now often exists in a temporal margin.