Unflattening

“Not only space, but time and experience too, have been put in boxes […] divided up and neatly packaged into discrete units […] for efficient transmission.”

Here Sousanis references the boxes that frame his text. The box is a figure of containment and limitation. Ironically, human society has boxed up the vast and potentially endless phenomena of time and experience in order to maximize efficiency. This establishes a theme that will feature throughout the book: the tension between true perception and efficiency.

“What had first opened its eyes wide […] darting, dancing, […] animated and teeming with possibilities […] has now become shuttered, […] its vision narrowed.”

Sousanis contrasts a curious newborn human who is open to a sense of infinity with the closed-off adult “shuttered” by conditioning. The wide, dancing eyes of the infant that travel from object to object and continually make new sense of the world give way to static, blinkered vision and a decreased sense of possibility. For Sousanis, the transition from childhood to adulthood constitutes a loss of perspective.

“Having been, as Marcuse put it, reduced to the terms of this universe […] they exist as no more than shades, insubstantial and without agency […] In this regard, they resemble the two-dimensional geometric inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland.”

Here Sousanis introduces the idea that humans in our current state of reduced perspective have come to resemble flat, geometric figures. He first likens modern humans to the shadows of the Greek philosopher Plato’s cave, which are two-dimensional and do not move according to their own volition, and then to the geometric silhouettes in Edwin A. Abbot’s novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The analogy indicates a lack of subjectivity on the human actors’ part in addition to limited intelligence. Since the reader knows the world is three-dimensional, the comparison introduces tension between the world the reader perceives and the state Sousanis describes. The difference highlights the idea of a perceptive gap and invites the reader to admit their own ignorance of further “dimensions.”

“Italo Calvino wrote, ‘whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.’”

Sousanis cites the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, whose metafictional narrative makes use of magical elements to highlight the profound reasons to widen one’s perspective. Rather than escaping into a magical realm like the Greek mythical hero Perseus, Calvino proposes that an altered perspective can change how we view the details of our everyday lives. Different ways of thinking about what we see and know can change our picture of the world and open up new possibilities for getting through the “heaviness.”

“The distance separating our eyes means that there is a difference between the view each produces—thus there is no single, ‘correct’ view.”

Here Sousanis explains how multiple perspectives are woven into the structure of our anatomy, as each eye witnesses a different picture of the world. This dissolves the myth of the singular correct view that underpins many systems. Given the structure of our eyes, such an approach to life is unnatural.

“To probe deeper and peer still farther […] more powerful instruments were built […] this in turn meant that operators became increasingly specialized in their training […] and then set their sights on more specific targets […] this narrowing of focus […] led […] to […] fragmentation- […] a cascade of individual searchlights.”

Here Sousanis reflects on the limitations of increasing scholarly specialization. Each specialist probes deeper into their particular area of study while losing a sense of the whole. The format of Sousanis’s text, which is scattered across several boxes and culminates in boxes that only house one word, visually parallels the idea of fragmentation through specialization. Sousanis highlights how what has fragmented becomes increasingly difficult to read and construe.

“Seeing through another’s eyes—from where they stand and attending to what they attend to […] serves to shift our vision from the one-dimensional to a more multidimensional view.”

Sousanis explains the role that other people play in widening our individual perspectives. Other pairs of eyes and, by extension, other brains mimic and multiply divergent perspectives. The depth of our perception of the world correlates with the number of eyes and consciousnesses there are perceiving it. By communicating with others and learning their perspectives, we have greater access to truth, which is multiple as opposed to singular. 

“Languages are powerful tools for exploring the ever greater depths of our understanding, […] but for all their strengths, languages can also become traps. […] In mistaking their boundaries for reality, […] we find ourselves much like flatlanders, blind to possibilities beyond these artificial borders, lacking both the awareness and the means to step out.”

We often fall into the trap of thinking that language can explain all the complexities of reality. As soon as we think we have the key to reality, we become like Abbot’s flatlanders, who believe that their two-dimensional world is all there is. Instead, we need to be aware of the artifice and limitation of languages and see the gap between them and reality.

“The visual provides expression where words fail. […] What have we been missing? […] And what can be made visible when we work in a form that is not only about, but is also the thing itself.”

Sousanis posits that the visual can take over where the linear structures provided by language fail. Potential for understanding and creativity is lost when we ignore the visual, which provides meaning on its own terms. Moreover, unlike language, which perennially refers to something outside of itself, the visual embodies the object itself. We thus instantly arrive at truth and meaning without the interpretive gap between linguistic signifier and signified.

“While comics are read sequentially like text, the entire composition is also taken in—viewed—allatonce [sic] […] associations that stretch across the page braiding fragments into a cohesive whole.”

Here Sousanis highlights the multi-perspectival power of the comic form, which functions both as a linear text and a whole—a sum total that the mashed-up phrase “allatonce” tries (and perhaps pointedly fails) to evoke. He thus presents the case for comics being useful tools in a multi-perspectival approach to learning. The structure of the page, which includes several boxes that divide up an illustration and can be read either left to right or up to down, proves Sousanis’s point that comics enable both verbal and visual understandings.

“Rudolf Arnheim says that ‘to see means to see in relation’ […] [F]rom the relationship between the separate views from each eye […] to how the movement of our head and bodies alters our relationship to the environment […] perception is a dynamic activity.”

The psychologist Rudolf Arnheim’s idea that perception happens through a constantly evolving relationship between our bodies and the world bolsters Sousanis’s notion of multiplicity in perception. Once again, perception is an interactive activity. 

“Through our everyday perceptual and bodily activities, we form dynamic image-like structures that enable us to organize and make sense of our experience. […] These structures operate below our conscious awareness and shape our thinking and behavior. […] [C]oncrete experiences serve as the primary building blocks from which we extend our capacity for thought and give rise to more abstracted concepts. […] We understand the new in terms of the known.”

This passage explains the relationship between the known and unknown in perception. While concrete experiences make up what we know, they also form structures that help us reach towards what is as yet unfamiliar or abstract. Sousanis emphasizes that these structures that help us engage with the unknown are more like images than words, underscoring the relationship between visual learning and the new or unexpected.

“To prepare good thinkers we need to cultivate good seers.”

Here Sousanis indicates the importance of vision and perception to innovative thinking. People who view the world through a singular narrow perspective deny themselves access to other intelligences and consequently will never be the best thinkers. In contrast, those who cultivate perceptive richness will automatically find that they are more innovative thinkers.

“Imagination lets us exceed our inevitably limited point of view to find perspectives not in existence or dimensions not yet accessible.”

Imagination is a key tool for expanding our perception and incorporating views as yet unperceived. This is because it enables us to bridge the gap between what we perceive and what others perceive, or even the gap between what humanity collectively perceives and what might exist.

“If we have a superpower […] it’s the capacity to host a multiplicity of worlds inside us […] all of us do.”

Sousanis considers the superpower of human beings not flight or invisibility (in the manner of comic book heroes) but the ability to hold multiple worlds and therefore perspectives within us. When itself viewed from a fresh perspective, the ability to entertain multiple realities is miraculous, and it is common to all human beings.

“Trickle becomes stream, tributaries run together, gathering force. […] The march of ideas carves channels into the landscape—ideas borne by individuals who are in turn swept away by its current. […] The river is our history.”

Sousanis uses a water cycle metaphor to describe the idea of a rut, or a habit so strongly formed it is difficult to shift. Each droplet could represent the behavior of a human actor, which other humans repeat until it seems like the only way of proceeding. The idea that the river is our history highlights how most of these habits formed in the past and therefore have little to do with the possibilities available to us in the present. 

“Over time […] the means we created to track celestial and earthly activity […] were inverted […] and became what Lewis Mumford calls a mechanism to synchronize our actions.”

Philosopher Lewis Mumford shows how the technological means we invented to transcend mundane reality and empower us were then “inverted” to disempower us, synchronizing our actions to maximize efficiency. Sousanis’s references to Marxist thinkers like Erich Fromm suggest that this synchronization has developed alongside and furthered the interests of capitalism.

“When ideas are written in stone with the certainty that we got it right […] we risk following without reflection […] [U]nlike Perseus, who never lost sight of himself, […] when we stop questioning, […] we become transfixed as if by Medusa’s gaze […] rendered inanimate.”

Sousanis argues that an attitude of certainty is the first step to becoming hardened and unquestioning in our perspectives. Where the Greek hero Perseus was able to defeat the gorgon who turned those that looked at her into stone, we become “transfixed” and see things in a set and artificial way that has nothing to do with reality. The metaphor suggests that in this process we also lose some of our distinctive humanity, becoming “inanimate” objects rather than thinking and feeling agents.

“Something had stirred, and it awoke very hungry. […] What had begun small, little more than a pinprick, soon exceeded its bounds… […] and crept into every part of his emergent awareness.”

This passage describes the moment the stringed puppet awakens and becomes aware of a different truth than that of his clockwork-regulated existence. Sousanis suggests that once begun, the grain of awareness spreads at an unstoppable pace until it overthrows one’s current existence. He thus demonstrates the revolutionary potential of becoming aware of different perspectives and a broader picture of reality.

“We can be both present and at the same time removed […] separate yet connected […] and so see ourselves simultaneously from these vantage points.”

Sousanis demonstrates our ability to hold two contradictory truths simultaneously using the mathematical figure of the vector. The vector resembles the profile view of an eye and encompasses two lines that look in separate directions. The idea of being both present and removed indicates that we can be both fully immersed in life and also at enough of a distance to reflect upon it.

“To set ourselves free […] we can’t simply cut our bonds […] for to remove them (if we could) would only set us adrift, […] detached from the very thing that makes us who we are.”

Sousanis revisits the puppet-on-a-string analogy from Interlude 2 in order to show that the fantasy of freeing ourselves from earthly associations is futile. If we succeeded, we would be completely “adrift” and therefore detached from the connections that make us who we are. 

“Emancipation, Bruno Latour writes, ‘does not mean freed from bonds,’ but well-attached […] the strings stay on […] [B]y identifying more threads of association […] we are better able to see these attachments not as constraints but as forces to harness.”

Here, Sousanis uses philosopher Latour’s theory to upend the cliché that freedom means lack of attachment. Instead, the greatest range of movement comes from having many attachments. Sousanis illustrates this idea with images of mighty ropes that enable us to have the broadest perspective possible. Thus, being richly and diversely engaged in the world enables us to better access truth.

 “We don’t know who you are until you arrive. […] We don’t know who you’ll become until you’ve explored the possibilities.”

This text, accompanied by a baby’s profile, invites the reader to contemplate the mystery and potential for discovery inherent in each human being. However, while some human potential is innate, its fulfilment depends on broad and curious engagement with the world. If we do not explore the possibilities, we will not maximize our potential.