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strategy of do-it-yourself graphics and music was later echoed in
the use of desktop publishing and graphics software by graphic
designers in the
s. This is not to suggest that Punk had any
influence on the development of these technologies, but it did create
a framework in which they could be understood and used.
Meanwhile, those involved with more mainstream graphic design
were beginning to come to terms with both the possibilities of new
technology and the liberatory messages of Punk and Deconstruc-
tion. In
1980
the influential typography journal Visible Language
published an edition devoted to 'French Currents of the Letter'. 51
This issue looked at how French philosophy and literature was
enabling new approaches to writing. Among those discussed were
many connected with what later became known as Poststructural-
ism, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva
and Michel Serres. This issue of Visible Language was designed by
students from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which, under the
aegis of co-chair Katherine McCoy, was encouraging interest in
the intersection between graphic design and Poststructuralism. The
students involved were given a seminar in literary theory by the head
of Cranbrook's architecture programme, Daniel Libeskind. What
resulted was an examination and critique of the conventional rela-
tions between typographical elements and the concomitant belief
in legibility and transparency. (This approach had already been
anticipated by Derrida with Glas .)
Derrida's innovative use of typography for deconstructive pur-
poses was to enable profound philosophical investigation and
expression. As Ellen Lupton points out, the interest in Poststruc-
turalism shown by graphic designers such as McCoy was more
celebration than critique, invoking the poetic rather than the criti-
cal aspects of the important thinkers. 52 What began to develop
at Cranbrook and continued elsewhere was less a profound exami-
nation of the conditions of design, and more an anarchic form
of self-expression by designers liberated from the ideology of
1978
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