Perspectives and Knowing: A Review of Unflattening
In Unflattening, Nick Sousanis builds the argument that knowing is an exercise in joining multiple perspectives and vantage points, as opposed to finding the singular “correct” vantage point, because the latter will only set boundaries to greater forms of knowing, while the former allows for new dimensions of knowing to be discovered. Sousanis defines “unflattening” as “a simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing” (32).
Primarily an exercise in epistemology, Unflattening borrows from developments in philosophy, mathematics, biology, and art to take the reader on a journey intended to free the mind from the boundaries of a singular perspective by replacing it with the continued upending quest for knowledge that goes beyond current ways of knowing. Sousanis argues that comic books are in a unique position to fulfill the objective of this journey more than any other form of communicating ideas that humans currently possess. Comics, according to Sousanis, create a symbiosis between language and image in a way that allows the reader to view and consider multiple perspectives and invites the reader to interact those perspective with their own imagination. He calls this the “sequential-simultaneous ecosystem” where “words and pictures, long kept apart, are allowed to cohabit” and provide “a means to capture and convey our thoughts, in all their tangled complexity” (64, 67).
What I appreciated most in Sousanis’s argument is how artists can convey texture, movement, emotion, and more in the way they construct their images to match with embedded human knowledge in order to invite an investigation of knowing in the reader that engages their imagination in ways that can create new perspectives for the reader.
Unflattening one of the most brilliant graphic novels I’ve read, not only in the argument it makes for comics, my favorite visual medium, but that it makes the argument in the form of a comic. Sousanis weds text and art in such a way that if you lose either of those components then the argument would lose its meaning. Ultimately, Sousanis’s work shows how useful comics can be as an academic medium when presenting complex ideas through the merging of text and art.
