Unflattening

Unflattening began as the first comic-form dissertation at Columbia University, where Nick Sousanis completed a doctorate in education in 2014. It was published by Harvard University Press in 2015 and functions as an argument for visual thinking in teaching and learning. In 2016 the book received the further accolade of the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence.

In a Paris Review interview with Timothy Hodler, Sousanis cited Scott McCloud’s 1993 Understanding Comics as a crucial influence. Sousanis says that McCloud’s text “showed that comics can be lots of things, including educational” (Sousanis, Nick. “Thinking Through Images: An Interview with Nick Sousanis.” Interview by Timothy Hodler. The Paris Review, 20 July 2015. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021). In the same interview, Sousanis states that “[T]he comics I make are a lot smarter than I am, because I can make connections through them that I wouldn’t make in my writing,” indicating that the visual medium affords a richness that text does not. For Sousanis, the visual better documents “the nonlinear, tangential ways our thinking moves,” which the linear, sequential pattern of language can struggle to capture.

The Los Angeles Review of Books offers a mixed reception of Sousanis’s work. Contributor Stephen Asma thinks that while the book’s central argument for the promotion of visual thinking is an important one, “intellectual clichés” hamper its effectiveness (Asma, Stephen. “Imagining Philosophy.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 May 2016. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021). These include the idea of humanity as cogs in a machine “of soul-crushing intellectual manipulation” and Sousanis’s lengthy citations from his favorite thinkers. However, Asma considers that Sousanis makes good use of 19th-century novelist Edward A. Abbot’s 1884 novel Flatland to show the different dimensions of perception and further his “project of unflattening human potential.” He also praises Sousanis’s “breathtaking” illustrations and his use of the comic form to “illustrate the kind of marriage of perspectives” that can lead to a more nuanced appreciation of lived experience.

Summary

Unflattening begins with Sousanis’s contention that human beings have become analogous to identikit assembly line products, with a flattened and therefore highly limited perception of the world. At an early age, humans begin to encounter systems, including traditional education, which prioritize efficiency above values like curiosity and imagination. Humans have thus become like the two-dimensional geometric figures that populate Abbot’s Flatland. In Abbot’s novel, the figure of a sphere baffles a square who has never previously witnessed the third dimension. Once the square opens up his perception to incorporate three dimensions, he tries to convince his fellow flatlanders to do the same.

Sousanis explains how multiple perspectives inform our vision, as each eye sees something slightly different: The idea of a single, accurate view is a myth. Throughout history, there have been revolutions in perspective—ruptures that have provided new views of both the human role in the world and Earth’s position in the universe. However, as human knowledge has advanced, it has also grown increasingly specialized, with experts learning more about their particular fields and losing sight of the bigger picture. On a humanitarian level, such an approach leads to increased conflict, as people are siloed in their echo chambers and closed off to diverging views. Instead, Sousanis argues, we reach truth when “[W]e come to embrace another’s viewpoint as essential to our own” and see perspective as a dynamic and relational exercise rather than a static, self-directed one (Location 51).

Sousanis then critiques Western civilization's reliance on language to transmit knowledge, showing how words alone cannot give a complete picture of reality. The linear, sequential nature of language leaves out key aspects of human experience that the simultaneous nature of images can capture. He suggests that the comic form, with its incorporation of both the efficient linearity of language and the immediacy and complexity of images, can be a crucial educational tool.

Where text and image fail in making sense of the gaps between perspectives and ideas, imagination can help us “exceed our inevitably limited point of view to find perspectives not in existence or dimensions not yet accessible” (Location 101). Sousanis shows how imagination and personal interpretation enable us to make sense of images and entertain multiple realities simultaneously.

Sousanis concludes that when we continually consider the world anew and avoid assuming that our perspective is complete, we can avoid the ruts of seeing and thinking that have plagued our ancestors. By seeing perception as an active and infinite process, we have the chance to make the world anew.