Publishing as practice as resistance (2018)
This text was first delivered at the Boston Art Book Fair (October 13, 2018), and then subsequent versions at Boston University (November 13, 2018), California College of the Arts (January 24, 2019), Parsons School of Design (March 25, 2019), and Stevens Institute of Technology (March 26, 2019).
Building on the work of Jack Halberstam and the launch of Queer.Archive.Work #1 at the NY Art Book Fair in September 2018, this text marks the first time that I posed the question of legibility in design and typography. Without exactly referring to it as queer, I started to explore what I described as bad typography and messy reading, and seven years on, this core question remains central to my writing and research—
“What if we take this all the way, and talk about illegibility as a design strategy. I’m not sure it’s a valid idea, but I want to test it.
The clarity of a binary structure is an illusion. Rather than insisting on clarity we could go the other way, and expand the illusion. What would it mean to design a text using this strategy? Is there room in our vertiginous condition for illegibility, at a moment when truth is more and more difficult to recognize?
I think so. I imagine what it would be like to publish a text that can’t be ranked by google, or stored on dropbox, or hosted by godaddy. Or a collection of texts that can’t be read in any one order, or from any one perspective. The idea of bad typography, and no dominant read, reading that isn’t fixed. A variety of reads that are all equally valid.
In a recent conversation with Nick Konrad, one of my students, he called it “messy legibility.” Messy sense-making.
So maybe resisting legibility means encouraging—or creating—new kinds of reading. Close reading, imperfect, difficult reading, messy reading.”