GRAPHIC DESIGN / GRAPHIC DISSENT: TOWARDS A CULTURAL ECONOMY OF AN INSULAR PROFESSION A Dissertation Presented by MATTHEW A. SOAR Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2002 Communication © Copyright by Matthew A. Soar 2002 All Rights Reserved GRAPHIC DESIGN / GRAPHIC DISSENT: TOWARDS A CULTURAL ECONOMY OF AN INSULAR PROFESSION A Dissertation Presented by MATTHEW A. SOAR Approved as to style and content by: __________________________________________ Sut Jhally, Chair __________________________________________ Lisa Henderson, Member __________________________________________ Susan Jahoda, Member ________________________________________ Michael Morgan, Department Head Department of Communication DEDICATION To Jen, Kate and Max with love and affection. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I'd like to acknowledge the support and generosity of Sut Jhally throughout my years at UMass, and to those exceptional individuals with whom I've had the privilege of working. In no specific order, then: UMass faculty, particularly Lisa Henderson, Kathy Peiss, Justin Lewis, Carolyn Anderson and Briankle Chang; and, fellow grad students James Allen and Susan Ericsson. Thanks also to Paul du Gay of the Open University for taking an interest in my work, and for inviting me to participate in a Workshop on Cultural Economy held in January 2000 at the OU (du Gay & Pryke 2002; Nixon 2002). I also owe a debt of gratitude to all of the interviewees who agreed to speak with me, and the individuals who went out of their way to facilitate my explorations of the graphic design profession. I'd like to single out Steven Heller and Andrea Codrington in particular, for encouraging me to write about graphic design and graphic designers for the AIGA's journal, and thereby easing my access to this fascinating milieu. Finally, thanks to my students at Hampshire College, especially those who took my course HACU 293 The Design of Dissent in the Spring of 2002, for their ideas and enthusiasm, and for responding positively as I attempted to craft a course out of a work in progress. v ABSTRACT GRAPHIC DESIGN / GRAPHIC DISSENT: TOWARDS A CULTURAL ECONOMY OF AN INSULAR PROFESSION SEPTEMBER 2002 MATTHEW SOAR, B.Sc., NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY M.A., SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Sut Jhally This dissertation is an exploration of the realm of cultural production associated with graphic design. Graphic design is a ubiquitous, yet largely invisible, professional practice that nevertheless contributes substantially to the make-up of our visual culture. Drawing on emergent strands of enquiry associated with critical cultural studies and especially with ethnographic approaches to the study of cultural production, Graphic Design/Graphic Dissent investigates the ideological limits to agency of graphic designers by focusing on calls for greater social responsibility emanating from within this milieu. It begins by drawing on Richard Johnson's model of the circuit of culture (Johnson 1986/87), a conceptual schema intended to represent the production and reproduction of meanings and values within culture. A modification of this model - called the "short circuit" - is proposed as a way to account more fully for the rarefied habitus (Bourdieu 1984) associated with the cultural intermediaries. Graphic designers, then, like ad creatives (Soar 1996; 2000a), fashion designers (McRobbie 1998), and radio (Henderson 1999) and television (Dornfeld 1998) producers, embody a series of contradictory impulses, which are both institutional and subjective. vi Graphic Design/Graphic Dissent also reviews the body of critical, historical, and journalistic writing emanating from within graphic design culture, evaluating it for both its advancements and limitations; a key strand of debate within this discourse relates to the politics of feminism and professional practice. Chief among the graphic design interventions explored here are: culture jamming and Adbusters magazine; and, the First Things First Manifesto 2000 (a formal call for greater social and professional responsibility among designers). Also discussed are the following groups and individuals: Gran Fury, Queer Nation, RTMark, Women's Design and Research Unit (WD+RU), We Interrupt the Programme, Jan van Toorn and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. It is ultimately argued that a formal distinction must be made between the notions of "politics" associated with high-profile, even spectacular, interventions, and those relating to more modest, local, and marginal initiatives. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ v ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... xi CHAPTER 1. WHY STUDY COMMERCIAL CULTURAL PRODUCTION?........................ 1 A Model: The Circuit of Culture........................................................................... 3 On Semiotics......................................................................................................... 5 Beyond Dead Authors: Advertising and Design as Cultural Production.............. 7 The "Children of Marx and Coca-Cola": A Brief History of the Cultural Intermediaries.............................................................................................. 10 From Commercial Artists to Cultural Intermediaries......................................... 13 The Short Circuit................................................................................................. 14 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 17 2. LITERATURE REVIEW: GRAPHIC DESIGN & CULTURAL THEORY .... 19 Introduction......................................................................................................... 19 What is Graphic Design? .................................................................................... 20 On the Emergence of Critical Voices within the Design Community................ 23 The Look of Critical Writing .................................................................. 24 The Emergence of Graphic Design Criticism......................................... 26 In Summary............................................................................................. 27 viii Critical Scholarship on Visual Culture and Graphic Design .............................. 27 Critical Sociologies of Art ...................................................................... 27 Histories of Art in the Service of Commerce.......................................... 29 Sociological Perspectives on Graphic Design ........................................ 32 Theories of Cultural Production.............................................................. 36 So why hasn't this research been done already?: Further obstacles........ 38 In Summary: The Potential for a Cultural Economy of Graphic Design............ 39 3. LIFE INSIDE THE SHORT CIRCUIT: GRAPHIC DESIGN'S HABITUS...... 41 Introduction: Design/Work/Lifestyle.................................................................. 41 Habitus and Graphic Design ............................................................................... 42 'Essential Ambiguities': Sustaining the Short Circuit and Protecting the Habitus .................................................................................................. 45 A General Outline of the Habitus ........................................................... 46 Education, Professionalism, Taste .......................................................... 50 Design Culture: From Ritual Journalism to Scholarly Debate ............... 53 The Fate of Theory in the Habitus of Graphic Design............................ 59 Graphic Design History and Criticism in the Service of Design Practice ............................................................................... 62 Feminist Challenges to the Habitus of Graphic Design.......................... 64 Messing Things Up................................................................................. 65 ix 4. THE HABITUS AND THE SPECTACLE OF DISSENT................................. 70 Introduction......................................................................................................... 70 First Things First?............................................................................................... 71 The Usual Suspects: Interviews with Intermediaries about First Things First... 73 Relative Sinners: Intermediaries on Advertising vs. Design .............................. 80 Fall-out from First Things First .......................................................................... 83 The Lasn-Dixon Line: Intermediaries as Revolutionaries.................................. 86 The Politics of Culture Jamming ........................................................................ 90 Conclusions......................................................................................................... 91 5. 'SMALL IDEAS': DISSENT BEYOND THE HABITUS.................................. 94 Introduction......................................................................................................... 94 A Qualification.......................................................................................