Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.
One of the most important strands in Unflattening is Sousanis' concern with the routines of education. From the first image, he imagines education - and by implication, society itself - trapped by the past, following paths that have been well-worn by previous scholars and, consequently, limiting the possibilities of research and perception.
Perhaps Sousanis' main worry is the assumption that 'the word' is more important than the image. In Judeo-Christian culture, the primacy of the word could be traced back to John's Gospel, which associates Christ (the manifestation of God in the physical universe) with the logos.
The privilege afforded to words manifests across anglophone culture: Christian fundamentalism stresses the literal truth of The Bible (an obsession reflected or originating in the status of The Koran in Islam), the primacy of the script in theatre (thank you, Shakespeare), the oaths sworn in the legal system, Plato's collected works (despite Plato's ambiguity about the written word). Sousanis recognises this hidden assumption, and counters that words can be enriched by images - not as illustration, but as a competing and complimentary presence. He draws an analogy with the way that academic training, through an emphasis on appeals to authority (footnotes, accepted boundaries of discourse), reduces education to a rote process. Unflattening itself is an example of how words can be challenged. The placement of words within a comic book text, and their relationship to images, attacks their simple semiotic reading. Rather than 'a word' being defined within its own system (by other words), it shifts into a conversation with the image and the overall design. It also contains a powerful expression of how words define experience without drawing attention to themselves. In the chapter Strings Attached, a happy puppet suddenly realises how their actions are determined by invisible guides... but far from being discouraged by this revelation, the puppet realises that awareness of the strings suggests a new way to play.
Unflatteningis an unapologetic polemic for the value of 'sequential art' as both an educational and academic medium. Written by Nick Sousanis as a PhD thesis, it explores how comics challenge the 'flatness' of current educational practice. Slipping between meditations on the nature of existence, the conformity enforced by traditional approaches to learning, the aesthetics of comics and wider reflections on the relationship between form and content, Unflattening claims a place for this 'low art' that challenges the hegemony of academic writing. Across ten chapters - each of which offer a self-contained analysis of a particular aspect of his argument, Sousanis works steadily towards his conclusion: words and images can combine to create a more immersive text, and provide new perspectives. But, appropriately, the chapters leap between subjects, variously decrying the limitations of academic routines (Flatness and Strings Attached), the philosophical thought experiment presented in Flatland and celebrating the potential of comics to encourage new perspectives (Awakening). While there is little to surprise the regular reader of comics - for example, his discussion of fractals is familiar from Godel, Escher, Bach - he articulates both the aesthetic potential of comics and their epistemology with a wit and clarity.
Despite being an academic text, with an impressive density of information - Sousanis never loses a lightness of touch. The striking images of the first chapter, which echo the mechanical complexity and horror of Escher's trick pictures, establish his vision of an education caught in its own ruts, and the final chapter illustrates the exciting of thinking between mathematics and mysticism. Unflattening is a step forward for the comic book: simultaneously playful and intelligent, it combines an argument for the medium and challenges established thinking on the nature of perception. There's a clear lineage for the material - Robert Anton Wilson followed a more psychedelic version of the arguments, and Abbot's Flatlandis explicitly referenced - but, balanced between the creative and the academic, Sousanis' achievement is to question the relationship between these apparently disparate categories.
Sousanis recognises this hidden assumption, and counters that words can be enriched by images - not as illustration, but as a competing and complimentary presence. He draws an analogy with the way that academic training, through an emphasis on appeals to authority (footnotes, accepted boundaries of discourse), reduces education to a rote process.
