But the conjunction of his text and his images makes his point for him. (Psst - he’s talking about comics!) The act of drawing, he writes, “allows us to step outside ourselves, and tap into our visual system and our ability to see in relation.” The original version of “Unflattening” was Sousanis’s doctoral dissertation, and its rambling captions occasionally make it read like one (as when he cites Herbert Marcuse, by last name only, a few pages in). The solution he proposes is admitting visual elements, and especially drawings, into the intellectual domain of language. Abbott’s “Flatland”: the inability to understand that there might be more than one can immediately perceive. “Flatness,” for Sousanis’s purposes, is not the quality of abstraction that Clement Greenberg lauded in modern art, but the lamentable condition of the inhabitants of Edwin A. Nick Sousanis’s UNFLATTENING (Harvard University, paper, $22.95) is a genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form.
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