ABSTRACT
‘There is no higher critique than the graphical arrangement of texts’, the Austrian media critic Karl Kraus once stated. It is this rationale that drives the projects at the centre of this chapter, each the result of a close collaboration between historians and designers. Writing Rights is a set of diagrams that investigate the formulation of The Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). The Fackel Schimpwörterbuch is a corpus dictionary that examines the role of context in the meaning of pejorative terms in Karl Kraus’s journal Die Fackel (1899-1932). The historical interpretation of the documents in both projects is enacted purely through the graphical arrangement of primary texts. There is no written narrative, verbal argument or exegesis. There is only the spatial arrangement, typographic codings and visual display of the historical material. The ‘histories’ are intentionally not written, only designed: they generate new knowledge, serving as an example of ‘visual epistemology’. The chapter will demonstrate how graphic action can operate as historical interpretation. More than simply ‘visualisations’ meant to explain what exists, these works demonstrate the generative capacity of visual forms of knowledge production.
