deathoftheauthor

Theory became a big part of graphic design education and practice. Analyzing the ideas of Structuralists and Poststructuralists gives us the opportunity to (re)define today’s role of the designer.

Structuralism is a philosophy movement that took place in Europe starting in the late 1800’s and lasting until the 1960’s. Structuralists focused on recurring patterns, on material practices as points for analysis and looked for differences to categorize things and break them up into different sections. According to the structuralist way of thinking, differential relations are the key to understanding society as a system and that elements must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system. The point of this practice was to acquire deeper knowledge and power about culture, society and language thanks to investigation and documentation. With that new perception, the position of the author in that enormous system of communication was questioned. This gave birth to the idea of the designer as an 'author'. The most known personalities, which are considered Structuralists are Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp. Structuralist ideas can be recognized these days in works of graphic designers like Josef Müller Brockmann and Herbert Bayer.

De Saussure (1857-1913) was one of the most significant Swiss linguists and semioticians of the 20th Century. He is considered father of the Structuralist movement and has left remarkable traces in linguistics, literary theory, philosophy and the social sciences. Being a linguist, De Saussure created a so-called two-side model of a sign. In other words, he was convinced that language was made up of signs and that every sign has two meanings. On the one hand, a sign consists out of a signifier, the phonic component of a word and on the other hand, of a signified, the concept, which appears in our mind, when reading the signifier.

Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) is considered a key character of structuralism and anthropology. Being one of France’s leading thinkers in the 20th Century, he changed the Western attitude drastically towards community and culture. In fact, he developed a theory through investigations, which argues that culture is a system with underlying reoccurring structures for every society. His work, influenced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, was an immense contribution to the study of kinship systems. Not only did he strive for structure in society, he also wanted to put end to incest.

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.'

Anthropology is a profession in which adventure plays no part.'

Russian Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) was a Soviet folklorist and scholar. He mainly devoted himself to examining Russian folk tales and their patterns. He declared that stories all over the world have similarities when it comes to their genre, their story-telling and their narrative forms. Until today, he remains one of the fathers of structuralism for his work and his ideas.

The number of functions known to a fairy tale is limited.'

Post-structuralism is a late 20th Century movement in philosophy and literary criticism, accrued in France, which followed Structuralism. Poststructuralists moved from uncovering and investigating the system to looking at where exactly the audience is positioned in this whole web of communication. They emphasized instability of concepts of Structuralism and scrutinized its established theories. The post-structuralist approach states that to understand an object, it is essential to study not only the object itself, but also the systems of knowledge that produced the object. Post-structuralism is best known in the work of writers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Examples of designers, who took up post-structuralist ideas are for example, Katherine McCoy, who talked about how graphic design was influenced by post-structuralism, or Jenny Holzer, a conceptual artist, who puts expressive taglines into an environment in order to mimic advertisements.

French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was highly interested in the relationship between text and image, but also in old myths. According to the French philosopher, signs are part of complex cultural chains. In his opinion, communication only works if signifier and signified come to one point in the reader’s mind. Therefore, he analysed advertisements, magazine covers and publications in order to detect how visual and linguistic signs work together. By radicalizing structuralist theories, he became one of the founders of post-structuralism.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.'

We should reexamine the empty space left by the author's disappearance.'

The famous French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault is known for his poststructuralist and postmodern way of thinking as he was one of the most important names in the 20th Century. He occupied himself particularly with discursivity and textuality, but also dived into a lot of different sectors. In his transcript 'What is an author?', he encourages to examine the empty space left by the disappearance of the author. Furthermore, he was deeply interested in things that looked perfectly normal from outside and opened them up in his publications.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.'

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is one of the major characters related to structuralism and the founder of “deconstruction”. He contributed enormously to graphic design, writing research, design research and fought for numerous political causes, like for example anti-apartheid. He looked precisely at speech and writing, looked at spaces between letters and played a lot with the weight and power of oral and written text. Moreover, he took over the idea of differential relations of structuralism.

Remix refers to creating or recombining already existing material and elements into a new version. Remix culture describes a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new product. The principle of a remix culture is taking samples of other people’s work. It’s all about sharing, reusing and borrowing content, which is most of all possible thanks to the Internet. Before the end of the 20th Century, our society was a read-only culture as authors and publishers existed as separate entities and creativity was professionalized. Due to the unlimited Internet access these days all over the world, technology has enabled everyone to take over work samples of other people, which is why remix culture can be found everywhere today. Some online platforms and websites like 'Fixperts', 'YARN' and 'Thenounproject' offer that service of sharing and using others’ pieces of art. A remix can be anything from visual arts, music to videos. The goal of remix culture is not only to create something new, innovative and creative, but also to get people connected.

Although today’s culture benefits highly from the nowadays existing remix culture, the mixing process has also led to licensing and creative issues. The following conditions must be respected when copying an original:

1. The copy is made for research purpose or private study.
2. The copy is made for non-commercial purposes.
3. The source of the material is acknowledged.
4. The person making the copy should not duplicate and distribute the copy to others.

Fair use is a resistance against a claim of copyright infringement and has an quite expansive meaning. If a piece of work is considered 'fair use', it means that it’s legal and not breaking any copyright laws. Comments, parodies and criticism, for instance, are allowed.

Here are a few examples, which clarify the term “remix culture”:

The famous pop-art image from Obama in solid red, beige and blue, which came up at Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, was made by Shepard Fairey. In fact, he took an already exisiting photo of Barack Obama and edited it.

As mentioned above, remix culture does not only appear in art, but also in music. One example, is the song ‘Fight for you’ by the American singer Jason Derulo, which is a remix of the already existing song ‘Africa’ by Toto, which was published in 1982. More precisely, Derulo used the chorus of Toto’s song and created his own song out of it.

The same thing happened with the song ‘Ain’t nobody (loves me better)’. Although the original came out in 1983 by Chaka Khan, Felix Jaehn made a cover version of the song, which appeared in the top charts of 2015.

Parodies are also considered a remix. Not many music videos have been imitated as much as Miley Cyrus’ song ‘Wrecking Ball’. Here's only one example of thousands.