AWTP

‘Helvetica is part of a psy­cho­lo­gic­al enslave­ment. It’s a sub­con­scious plot: get­ting people to do, think, say what you want them to… It assumes you accept some sys­tem. It means it’s pre­de­ter­mined that you’re on their route, that it’s not cas­u­ally hap­pen­ing to you.’

James Wines, quoted in Leslie Savan’s essay, ‘This typeface is chan­ging your life’ (1976)

This has par­al­lels with Jan Tschichold’s rejec­tion of the same mod­ern­ist prin­ciples he estab­lished in 1928 in Die neue Typographie (1928).

“In time, typo­graph­ic­al mat­ters, in my eyes, took on a very dif­fer­ent aspect, and to my aston­ish­ment I detec­ted most shock­ing par­al­lels between the teach­ings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fas­cism. Obvious sim­il­ar­it­ies con­sist in the ruth­less restric­tion of typefaces, a par­al­lel to Goebbel’s infam­ous Gleichschaltung (enforced polit­ic­al con­form­ity) and the more or less mil­it­ar­ist­ic arrange­ment of lines.”

It seems that mod­ern­is­m’s uto­pi­an search for abso­lute truth and a means of uni­ver­sal com­mu­nic­a­tion, has become, for some, a means of author­it­ari­an con­trol and a tool to enforce the status quo.

What do you all think? I’m think­ing of basing my essay some­where in this loose area, and would value your input on pos­sible areas for exploration..