This text originally appeared in Everything within range, Yale University MFA thesis book, 2011.

This book should be read two ways. The first speaks to a manner: the methods and means by which I design, a mapping of an approach, be it aesthetic, conceptual, or otherwise. The second speaks to something more like a pathway to everything within range, what is closest as well as farthest away.1 Interspersed throughout the book are other excerpted texts from various projects from the past two years. In the vein of the rhizome, these texts should be read as equally-weighted ideas concerning themselves with similar issues.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I haven’t even begun to describe the rhizome in relation to my approach to graphic design.

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”2 In these opening two sentences of A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari summarize the six principles of the rhizome:

• 1–2 Any point of a rhizome can be and must be connected to any other.
• 3 There is no point or position in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root.
• 4 A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.
• 5–6 The rhizome is a map, not a tracing: it fosters connections between fields.3

In the case of writing Anti-Oedipus, both Deleuze and Guattari brought to bear their own idiosyncratic histories, consisting of various references and experiences. Thus the authors inevitably (re)define their references and experiences through continued interaction.

My work is rhizomatic in that it is constantly pushing outward while simultaneously pulling in, tightening all references and relationships to past, present, and future works. My work—and perhaps more important, my approach—is in a constant state of transformation. It adapts itself to new contexts while maintaining its relationship with previous ones. Each project influences the other—a growing network of autonomous projects, each in a dialogue with the others that is neither linear nor hierarchical.

Describing an approach to graphic design as being rhizomatic is somewhat paradoxical. Traditional notions of graphic design define it as the aesthetic refinement of content: the graphic designer as problem-solver who creates order and hierarchy, shaping the contours of an aesthetic object to distinguish it from all others. The rhizome, however, isn’t concerned with order and hierarchy, nor isolating the individual from the group, but instead, an anti-hierarchy that establishes a series of interconnected relationships—a plane of consistency as D&G call it. “The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple.”4 D&G assimilate this concept into the actual reading of A Thousand Plateaus itself. There is no imposed linear structure, no single chapter more important than any other—and the same holds true for this book. In fact, D&G describe the ideal form for A Thousand Plateaus as “[laying] everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.”5 It’s as if they’re asking to design this book for me—I won’t allow them!

I should note here that the rhizome also pushes well beyond my own work and into the field at large—interacting with both the past and present alike. My work can’t escape the history of modernism and the forms tied to it, nor the ideologies associated with those forms, and what’s more, the corporatization of those forms. It also interacts with a contemporary context that struggles to define its own forms as well as ascribe for itself newer definitions of graphic design.6 Certainly what interests me now may not interest me in five years, but there should be a consistency that holds everything together, a sense of elevation—something learned from previous efforts.

So maybe graphic design is rhizomatic by default. I’m not sure. Regardless, I find situating myself within this construct an appropriate method for understanding how I operate within the discipline.

Sometime in early October 2010 Linda van Deursen gave a presentation to a small group of us about a handful of books she designed with Armand Mevis. As we talked about the books, she flipped through them haphazardly. There was a casual quality to the way she handled each book that seemed to be reflected in the design of the books themselves. This moment has become a model that represents my approach to graphic design.

In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that the underlying power structure of the globalized world has marked a shift from the imperial model to what they call Empire—a borderless, all-encompassing rhizomatic power structure that penetrates all aspects of our lives. Empire marks a shift in the way that productive labor functions. In Empire, productive labor tends to “become increasingly immaterial.”7 Through this shift the communication industries play a central role in aiding the exertion of power in Empire:

[Communication industries] not only organize production on a new scale and impose a new structure adequate to global space, but also make its justifications immanent. Power, as it produces, organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses itself as authority.… It is a subject that produces its own image of authority. This is a form of legitimation that rests on nothing outside itself and is reproposed ceaselessly by developing its own language of self-validation.8

Now more than ever, graphic design is a self-validating form of communication that has an immense amount of power and influence over how an individual perceives and interacts with a designed object. It is in opposition to this notion that I have developed my visual method.

The International Style distanced itself from history in an attempt to create new forms relevant to its own time—a stripping away of nostalgia. These new forms came from an ideology centered around order, legibility, and above all, the objective of neutrality: a whiteness, a utopian universalism attempting to remove illusion or spectacle surrounding the designed object. I feel aligned with these intentions, however, I don’t believe the aesthetic qualities, nor the way that they distanced themselves from history achieved such ideals.

Instead, I see the rhizome as a more effective model for subverting the power inherent in graphic design; by accepting the various references that enter my work, this power is modified or possibly even denied. My approach is to respond to the specificity of a given subject, to work by extracting and understanding the narratives embedded within the subject. This establishes a responsibility to myself and the content I choose to interact with, a responsibility to go beyond the surface of a thing, to be exhaustive and rigorous. In a way that doesn’t misrepresent the content, in a way that isn’t overly serious.