Unflattening

Nonfiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Adult | Published in 2015

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapter 4-Interlude 2

Chapters 7-8

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Systems of Flattening and Standardization

Sousanis argues that the ruts that have flattened our experience are not intrinsic to human nature but a product of our ancestors and the systems they invented. Both through text and image, he uses the metaphor of a river current to show how repeated human actions create momentum, and how potentially contrary, idiosyncratic ideas “borne by individuals […] are in turn swept away by the current” (Location 119). When we are born, we arrive “midstream” in this standardizing system, and we do not get much of a chance to define ourselves against it before the educational and professional spheres begin to shape us (Location 120). Sousanis illustrates this phenomenon in his first chapter with the example of a rounded, curious infant becoming a stooped adult automaton (Location 21). Unless we are lucky enough to reach a state of awareness, we find ourselves becoming flattened by default.

The benefit of flattening and losing what distinguishes us as individuals is efficiency—in other words, attaining maximum productivity. Although he does not name labor economist Fredrick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), Sousanis features his assembly-line style of production in the first chapter, depicting different stages of mechanical production in which man is both the orchestrator and the final product. Sousanis also draws upon the work of Marxist thinkers such as Erich Fromm, who wrote:

[I]n capitalism economic activity, success, material gains, become ends in themselves. It becomes man’s fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself. Man became a cog in the vast economic machine (Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. Rinehart, 1941).

For Sousanis, this machine not only encompasses the economy but other elements of social life, such as the educational system. He writes, “[S]o pervasive are the confines, […] inhabitants neither see them […] nor realize their own role in perpetuating them” (Location 21). The structures eventually become internalized as we lose the ability to think of ourselves outside of these terms. We chase material products and the accolades that come from successfully completing the different stages of life.

The cog in the machine metaphor continues through to Sousanis’s depiction of academic specialization, where different branches of scholarship use increasingly advanced technology to make progress in one area while losing sight of the bigger picture. While these scholars develop increasingly sophisticated knowledge of one topic, they ironically lose intelligence in their ignorance of how everything fits together. Although the milieu of academic scholarship is a privileged one, Sousanis shows that no stratum of existence is immune from flattening.

Throughout Sousanis’s book, an illustrated figure of a man features prominently. At first his athletic build is stooped, but as the chapters progress and he learns more about perception, he gains the tall, broad-shouldered, and dynamic figure of a typical comic book hero. On occasion, he even gains superhuman appendages such as flippers that enhance his manner of experiencing the world and allow access to different dimensions. He is thus using not just his mind but the whole of his body to gain a more rounded view of the world—i.e. becoming “unflattened.” The persistence of this male figure at the expense of other types of humans arguably (and ironically) “flattens” the possible perceiving subject. However, Sousanis counteracts this tendency in the final chapter, when he insists that to see the world in the most rounded way, you “have to find it for yourself […] on your own feet from the beginning” (Location 157). Presented alongside images of different styles and sizes of shoes, this statement reinforces that numerous paths and perspectives are the antidote to flattening.

The Importance of the Visual in Education

Both in Unflattening and in his promotion of the book, Sousanis argues that images are a crucial way of transmitting knowledge and that the linear, sequential confines of language cannot express all insights. As our education has over-relied on the verbal, our ability to use images in this way has atrophied. However, Sousanis argues that this is reversible: “When we start thinking about those kinds of spatial relationships and how our fundamental ideas are grounded in that way of thinking, when we have that kind of training, it might change how we write and how we are able to communicate” (Sousanis, Nick. “Thinking Through Images: An Interview with Nick Sousanis.” Interview by Timothy Hodler. The Paris Review, 20 July 2015. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021).

Learning from images involves an awareness of simultaneous phenomena. Coupled with the linear logic of language, imagistic learning therefore utilizes the entire brain: “[T]hese two distinct lines of awareness—the sequential and the simultaneous—correspond with psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s characterization of the left and right hemispheres of the brain” (Location 76). An overreliance on verbal language means using the logical left brain at the expense of the right, which “addresses the whole in context” and is therefore responsible for spatial awareness (Location 76). As “the very fabric of our experience emerges from the interaction and integration of each hemisphere’s separate means of perceiving” (Location 76), we narrow our perceptive channels and by extension limit our intelligence when we confine ourselves to one hemisphere’s functions. This separation from a distinct and important branch of intelligence contributes to the flattening that Sousanis writes against.

Sousanis argues that the comic “holds sequential and simultaneous modes in electric tension” (Location 76), as readers have to skip back and forth between the text, the images, and the interpretations that arise from each. There will always be differences between these interpretations, as pictures cannot exactly illustrate the words; they also evoke possibilities that language can’t convey. Thus, comics invite a more active form of learning where the reader gets to make the meaning as much as the author. Moreover, as Sousanis progresses to consider more complex or abstract modes of thinking such as kinetic and imaginative, the requisite jumping between text and image better enables him to convey what his static medium cannot directly express.

Some readers, such as Los Angeles Review of Books contributor Stephen Asma, consider Sousanis’s images deeper and more original than his text. Asma writes that “Sousanis is a master draftsman, he rescues many of the intellectual clichés of the book with clever and sometimes breathtaking images” (Asma, Stephen. “Imagining Philosophy.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 May 2016. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021). Asma thus extends Sousanis’s argument by suggesting that, far from being secondary to language in imparting knowledge and ideas, images have the potential to exceed it.

The Social Consequences of Perception

Sousanis frames the conflicts that plague today’s world as perception problems. The fixed viewpoints and singular lines of thought that our systems of education promote lead to an inability to see life from other people’s points of view. Sousanis cites Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) as an example of how this process works; when she says, “[B]ut isn’t everything here green,” the wizard replies, “[N]o more than in any other city [...] but when you wear green spectacles, why of course everything you see looks green” (Location 49). Here, Dorothy’s monochrome spectacles are a metaphor for any bias that causes us to view the world in a particular way. In order to see other perspectives, we have to deprivilege “this absolute vantage point” (Location 49), an act that will open up the world.

We do not lose our distinct viewpoint by deprivileging it, Sousanis argues, but rather ensure that it is “no longer isolated” and “viewed as integral to the whole” rather than as an absolute truth (Location 50). He demonstrates this idea in graphic form by using distinct boxes to convey separate ideas and linking them with a white line (Location 50). Sousanis also likens this process to a dance between our viewpoint and those of others, with images of partnered dancers showing how “[W]e come to embrace another’s viewpoint as essential to our own” (Location 51). Thus, rather than shutting down others’ ideas as our environment of curated media platforms and hostility towards outsiders encourages, we can arrive at a fertile place where the “channels of communication remain open and alive” and differences in view are welcomed (Location 51).

The metaphor of the dance further shows how engaging with perspectives other than our own facilitates both interpersonal harmony and personal enrichment. Sousanis argues that the “well-attached” human is freer than the one who harbors the fantasy of being liberated from bonds and siloes themself off in their own imagination (Location 148). He accompanies this idea with overlapping illustrations of humans using complex networks of ropes to climb and advance themselves, or to create sailing boats that will travel into the distance, underscoring that connections can enrich our experience on both an individual and collective level (Location 148).