critique
A distinct and complementary stance
Scholars and critics
Starved for good journalism and criticism
Downsides of the internet
The McClusky Curve
The dying art of the hatchet job
An Article by Dorian LynskeyI find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, thatâs fine by me, especially when itâs something that has been almost universally acclaimed.
...Itâs not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.
Discourse in web design
An Essay by Jason Santa MariaA website is its own, singular thing. We know it isnât a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress.
It was then I wondered if the problem wasnât that web design lacked its own EmigrĂ©. What if we actually lacked a shared language to critically discuss web design? Art, architecture, and even graphic design, have critics and historians that give context to new work through the lenses of culture and important work from the past.
Design Discourse is in a State of Arrested Development
An Essay by Khoi Vinh[Designer News] is good, useful content, but most of it is written by designers themselves. Taken as a whole, itâs also a useful illustration of something vital that our industry lacks: balanced, insightful, independent writing that critically evaluates the profession.
One Designer's Response to Khoi Vinh's Complaint
An Article by Brandon DornThere is a place for discussing technique, for which forums like r/Design, Designer News, and the like are well suited. Yet expecting these platforms to provide insightful, serious critical discussion is like going to McDonaldâs for an artisanal sandwich. Sure, they may advertise that, but thatâs not really what youâre getting.
Gods of the Word
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue
Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldnât we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body?
Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates.
Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground...
Hermogenes: I donât see that we could do anything else.
Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express?
Hermogenes: I think, it must be so.My name
âI am the utterance of my name.â
â Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library
Reference and Is-ness
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
It flows out and fills
This deeper meaning of a word isnât confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crewâs actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.
No less than a Zeus
I too am a true believer in the autonomy of the archetype. A
/t/
or an/h/
is no less than a Zeus. The consonants are not essentially physical, but they live, evolve and influence human affairs. We overlook something essential if we deny that they can get up and walk around. This is not to say that their existence is independent of the human psyche. But then everything depends on everything.Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like âlengthâ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things âlongâ and âshortâ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Fracturing
If we step back and view from afar this process of One-ness and Is-ness to fracturing and interpretation â of inherent meaning to reference, it follows that what lies at the foundation of language is simply what it is â sound â free of reference and interpretation. What makes what we know as language from its sound is fracturing and interpretation or using a word for a function other than what it simply is.
To evolve the language itself
So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had âmeaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself.
Scooting over
There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word âscoot overâ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different.
The element becomes a sign
Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a âsignâ. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another.
The demand of a new word
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well?