What is shock(ing) in graphic design?

Do we need shock? Is today's graphic designer a "living-dead" practitioner? Everything is blurred and ambiguous; there isn't anything new. Graphic design inhabits a spiral of inconsequent revivalism, of a parasitical living, where shock, either doesn't exist, doesn't work or is simply prevented from happening.  

(These 3 parallel perspectives are the result of a conversation between Catherine Guiral, Francisco Laranjo and Randy Nakamura, December 2007)

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Shocking Tale, by Catherine Guiral

Paris Match is a French magazine born in 1949 and very much inspired at its beginnings by the American press magazine Life. It relied strongly on exclusive photographs and series of big reportages. The magazine was both known for its covers and its infamous slogan “Le poids des mots, le choc des photos” (the weight of words, the shock of photos). But what was once considered a very serious magazine turned in the late ‘80s into a ‘faux-trashy’ object relying more on the paparazzi scoops than the war reports. Granted you still had the shocking photos but in comparison the words had lost most of their original weight. Match is not yet at the level of trash magazines but the more you read it now, the more difficult it is to draw a clear line between trash shock and shock tout court. Between fabricated shock and real shock.

Really, what is shock? If we follow the various definitions, shock can either be the feeling of distress and disbelief that you have when something bad happens accidentally, the violent interaction of individuals or groups entering into combat, or a reflex-response to the passage of electric current through the body; shock is also an instance of agitation of the earth’s crust, an unpleasant or disappointing surprise as well as a bodily collapse or near collapse caused by inadequate oxygen delivery to the cells. The synonyms of shock are enlightening in that extent and lead to an interesting list of adjectives: Shock is electrical, stuporous, seismical, scandalizing, outrageous, traumatizing, absorptive, esthetical… There is even a small town in West Virginia, usa, called Shock that I can only picture as filled up with hillbilly inhabitants called Lonnie playing the banjo. But that’s not the point. The point is that shock is there to make you feel and react.

As critic and writer André Rouillé underlines, long gone is the time when Paris Match could “conjugate the shock of images and the weight of words to produce ‘documents’ representative and illustrative of the world.”(1) This was a time of certainties and it has passed. A time when we were persuaded that there were clearly delimitated zones and camps, which could be documented thus providing a mirror on the world, as if the shocking covers and spreads were an accurate reflection of reality. This was the degree zero of shock, unembellished, primeval, and supposedly real. But “the revolutions, declines of empires, fall of walls have shattered the mental, social, philosophical and cultural edifice on which documents were relying, and the world has become another chaosmos”(2). Shock is no longer real because we have entered a regime of chaotic fiction. And shock has become less than the sum of its adjectives.

To be shocked we need (or want?) more than just a slap in the face or an electrical hit where needed. To make us react, the classical means of shock seem no longer sufficient. “The real world has now become a fable” was Nietzsche’s statement in Twilight of the Idols and it couldn’t be truer. Our certainties are lost and reality has been replaced by made-up stories. In his recent book, Christian Salmon(3) uncovers the secrets of the ‘storytelling machine’, adopted by the communication industry in the US and in Europe and which is proving much more effective that all the Orwellian yarns of totalitarian regimes. For Salmon, “it is widely ignored that what started off as a simple collection of narrative techniques taught in American universities to aspiring novelists and screenwriters evolved in the ‘90s into a tool for modeling the behavior of citizens and consumers in the hand of management gurus and spin doctors.”  The applications of storytelling seem endless: marketing is no longer based on brand image but on stories, managers must use tales to motivate staff, soldiers in Iraq now train on video games created by Hollywood and spin doctors create election campaigns as elaborate narratives… Thus if reality is a fable, shock has become a tale. The usual signs of shock can no longer be perceived since shock is now fabricated and so are the reactions caused by this fake shock.  

Fake shock or the pseudo authentic trash shock is a mani-pulation made to provoke a specific chain reaction. An ersatz of a shock, it is only there to sterilise our reactions and somehow prove that, as individuals subjugated to shock, we are preformatted to react according to models nested in the content of fake shock itself. It is the tale of shock. The subject it wishes to format is bewitched and immerged in a fictive universe where perceptions are filtered, affects stimulated and behaviors carefully framed. This new narrative mechanism that could indirectly recall the coup made by McLaren(4) with the Sex Pistols and the genius Rock’n’Roll is dead has removed the necessary notion of sensitivity and experience to shock. For Walter Benjamin(5), the positive aspect of modern life was that all the shocks it generated provoked a sort of post-traumatic reaction where the individual’s consciousness had to make up for all the repeated clashes. Instead of the defensive assimilation of shock based on lived experience (Erlebnis) Benjamin favored the poets’ reaction (especially Baudelaire), which relied on the real experience (Erfahrung) of shock. Shock was there to revive the unexpected in a modern life where uninterrupted and mechanical repetitions led to boredom.

Today when I look at the covers of Paris Match, or other more trash magazines like Choc (!), I have the feeling that the right kind of reaction to shock seems gone.  A particular look at the cover of Choc and I’m contradictorily welcomed in the ‘real’ world (Choc—Bienvenue dans le monde réel) to hear about shocking tales. I have stopped feeling and experiencing shock and am only fascinated by the stories behind it. I live in a fable. Like an automat, I am told to cry and I cry. A princess dies in a crash under a Parisian bridge and we all weep. A plane crashes in a tower and we go to war.



Shock is dead.  

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1  André Rouillé, Le document à la derive, in Paris Art, 07 Décembre 2007 
2  the word Chaosmos was first coined by James Joyce and defined as a composed chaos. Deleuze and Guattari use it to define the state of art as this composed chaos, which is there to fight against clichés. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce-que la philosophie ?, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1991
3  Christian Salmon, Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits, Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2007
4  Malcom McLaren was the producer of the Sex Pistols. In January 1978, their first album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols was released. Four months later, and in total confusion, the group abruptly splitted. On that day McLaren coined the phrase “Rock’n’Roll is dead” in a combined gesture of marketing and provoked shock.
5  Walter Benjamin, A propos de quelques motifs baudelairiens, in Écrits français, Gallimard, Paris, 2003  

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Shock(ing)-gun, by Francisco Laranjo

Presently in graphic design, the taboos, conservatism, revivalisms, clichés and boundaries of the discipline are so blurred and merged that "shock" is either easily absorbed or continuously bounced around with no real effect. However, American economist Milton Friedman’s shock tactics have been recently revitalised in Naomi Klein’s popular book The Shock Doctrine (2007): “only a crisis actual or perceived produces real change”. We live in a state that continuously shifts between imminent or actual crisis – and this has normally been achieved through shock.  

What if we are submerged in a perpetual state of crisis? In this reality, shock can only be used to create two scenarios: paralysis or action. In the present realm of graphic design, do we want/ need paralysis (even more) in a speeded-nomadic discipline that moves and stretches its boundaries every second? Or, should we promote reinvigorating action/ reaction to the numbness that this nomadism generates? In both cases, change will occur, but it seems that change can no longer happen through shock, as we know it – predictable, indifferent, and effortlessly digestible.  

While this reality sets in, graphic design increasingly feeds itself on the content that the discipline produces. Can this act be auto-cancelling the possibility of shock, of resonating beyond “club graphic design”? Does the speed of society and especially the blurriness of the professional/ educational environment (generating loss of identity), prevent graphic design from looking outside of its own spheres, generating shock neither “inside” nor “outside”? I have come to realize that whenever I look at examples where a rupture happened, I notice that high levels of "contamination" from external factors were absorbed by graphic design. I'm talking about music, politics, philosophy, society... the polis.   

Perhaps the continuous flux, the driving-aimlessly mode, the dodging and dribbling of a defined position from this discipline, prevents any contamination. It is a safe and protective kind of living, which paradoxically generates numbness and escapes almost any responsibility other than navel gazing. Perhaps this is why there isn't space (or time) for surprise - that essential condition for shock to arise. Perhaps this is a strategy to run away from the debate, from action, from questioning design’s parasitic living. Framing this described scenario, the word ambiguity emerges: this is the word that prevents shock from happening, because when there aren't identifiable differences, shock can't exist.  

Let’s abruptly sail away from graphic design. A few weeks ago, I read a headline that announced that there was another incident with the Taser gun in Utah, USA. Thus far nothing new (or shocking). However, I didn't know what a "Taser gun" was, so I quickly tried to read about it. On Wikipedia I read that a Taser is "an electroshock weapon, which is an incapacitant weapon used for subduing a person by administering electric shock that may disrupt superficial muscle functions”. They have now developed a new model contained in a shotgun cartridge that administers the same shock. As additional information - in a website where I read the word shock 45 times - we are told that "the trademarked name Taser is an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle". Arizona inventor Jack Cover designed it in 1969 and named it after the science-fiction teenage inventor and adventurer character Tom Swift."  

In a world where images don't shock us anymore, when guerrilla actions are powerless, it seems that the physicality of the word is being absorbed - more than ever. According to Amnesty International, over 275 people died because of these self-proclaimed non-lethal weapons. Apparently, it appears that if it doesn't kill, the law enforcement can use it more often... it is "just" a shock. Symptoms like temporary paralysis in the form of a spasm, relate very well to what Friedman argued in his theories of using collective shock to introduce profound changes in economy and society. This “discovery” induced me to make natural connections with graphic design. It was at this moment that I jumped to Taser's website.  

This was a totally impressive experience. When the website loaded, the first thing that could be seen was an image of a mad/ serious Santa Claus announcing: “What does Santa bring you when you have been good, but the world is getting bad?” Well, the answer is obvious: a Taser gun. The logo has a 3D image of the globe with an electrical shock symbol over it. The silver terminator-style typeface and the shock symbol reminded me immediately of Flash Gordon's logo (with his gun). The connections with a super-(self)hero mania make more sense now: Tom Swift, Flash Gordon and everyone that has a Taser. Perplexed, I continued to wander through the website, until I found - yet again - another motto, with a pink bar overlaying an executive-dressing woman, saying: "I will control my own destiny”. Of course she will. How? Through shock, naturally (and literally). Underneath, the caption was the following: “in today’s world, maintaining self-confidence involves the need for self-protection”. Graphic design? It continued, stating that “for independent, self-reliant women, the Taser C2 is an effective protection device that fits any lifestyle”. The shock-gun is pink and comes in different colours, with a kind of “Zaha Hadidean” design (described as having a non-gun design!), to truly include this object as another gadget of everyday life.  At this point, I was already reading "in shock" where it was actually written "in stock", because on the bottom of the page, very visibly, there were two words that don't shock anyone: buy now.

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Nothing’s shocking
Eight notes on the idea of 'shock' in graphic design, by Randy Nakamura  

1– When I hear the word 'shock' I immediately think of the cinema as in 'shock cinema' or Sam Fullers 'shock corridor'. There seems to be something inextricably linking 'shock' to visual culture. You may read something shocking, but the idea of  'shock' lends itself to a visceral, mass medium (and what we consider mass media today are almost all visual media or have a strong visual component). To talk of 'shocking' an individual is absurd, a shock propagates through the entire body of culture. Can you be shocked alone? It is a mass phenomena. To bring it back to the basic idea of shocking to re-start, revitalize: to restart a stopped heart, you do not shock a single cell but an entire organ (the heart) to resuscitate the entire body.  

2–The problem with the living dead is that they are beyond shock. They exist in an uneasy purgatory neither human and susceptible to shock, nor dead and having exited all human categories. You can only kill the undead, if only to make their non-existence definitive.  

3–Shock implies a value system, often what is most shocking can only occur in the most conservative and narrow of systems, with clearly defined taboos and boundaries.  

4–In order for shock to propagate through a culture, a society or a system the medium must be pliable and homogeneous. Earthquake travels through the earth in different ways, depending on the composition of the soil, geography etc. it is the difference between a faint rumble in the ground and the foundation of the building beneath your feet collapsing!  

5–The idea of shock can be seen as ranging between two poles: horror and terror. To clarify (and to rip-off a few of Octavio Paz's ideas) terror is visceral, it is appalling, it is a pile of dead bodies, it is a pack of rabid dogs coming at you in the dead of night. Horror on the other hand is a metaphysical concept, it is transfixing, it is staring into the abyss, it undermines all of your ideas about reality, so that reality may be transformed. There are many examples of 'shocking-terror' types of design. Any number of underground rock/music poster artists, lo-brow illustration, much of the Makelas work (who granted straddle this terror/horror divide), and early Sagmeister esp. the notorious body as canvas for bloody lettering. This type of work transgresses boundaries involving sex, violence, etc. The 'shock' is immediate. But 'shocking-horror' type of design is much more harder to define... which leads to...  

6–Deconstruction. Visually shocking but also subversive. The upshot of the whole 90s arguments about 'cult of the ugly', legibility, etc. was never really about the style of the work. In the end our Great Modernist Forbearers big fear was the fundamental terms of how design was talked about and judged were being shifted away from absolutes and dictates. If it was merely a bunch of crazee kidz doing weird shit on their Mac Pluses and laserwriters, that would have been easy to dismiss or assimilate. But suddenly the whole Cranbrook gang busts out with all their Continental Theory: Barthes, Derrida etc. They had a PHILOSOPHY behind the design, something modernists thought they had down pat. It was a SHOCK to the system, but one also that had started (at least in the US) in the late 60s and early 70s (and ironically enough it was through Yale, Paul Rand's academic headquarters). We designers got around to it in the mid-80s.  

7-Post-Shock or Future Shock? It is truism to say that the bar is being lowered everyday on what is considered 'unacceptable' in the media environment. To put it bluntly: what could possibly shock this culture when pictures of Britney Spears' vagina are easily available for anyone to download off the internet? We perhaps reached this point six years ago on 9/11 when we were subjected to the horrifying spectacle of the mass murder of thousands of people broadcast live on just about any channel that had a news affiliate. There is no bar low enough anymore. The idea of design shocking anyone, anywhere is quaint. Yet it is entirely possible we are victims of 'future shock'. Alvin Toffler coined the term in his 1970 book of the same name to mean "too much change in too short a period of time". Perhaps the repeated shocks are numbing us, or we have become so used to this succession of upheavals they no longer register. Whether we like it or not, this is the background in which design operates. We are the small fish wriggling in an ocean of tidal waves.  

8-It is often shocking how irrelevant design is to most people once you poke your head outside of Designland. We designers all took the red pill. The bluepills walking around only care if the computer works, they don't care about any of the nuances of the interface or how the fonts were hinted to make them readable on the grid of pixels of a computer screen. They think Microsoft Word is a design program. Perhaps the only thing shocking in design is how peripheral we are to a culture that is absolutely steeped in design at every level. Perhaps we have accepted our well-lined niche a bit too easily. We have the vision but no real power. Art historians continue to write our history—very badly. The lovely wallpaper is beginning to look a bit too much like prison bars. How shocking this all is...    

The pig is led to the slaughter
Pig is led to the slaughter
This he says
Is the price some pay
For a simple life
How he feels
Thats proof for him
Pig's in zen  

(lyrics from "Pigs in Zen" from Jane's Addiction Nothing’s Shocking)

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