Roughest Draft of Critical Photo Essay

This is rough, lacking in all of my images, but it's what I have so far. The synthesis is even fucked, but here:


Like Anne Frances Wysocki, I will follow the conceptualization of visual interaction from Imannuel Kant to the present, but I will not stop at Wysocki. I hope to use Wysocki as a launching point through which I can examine and reveal the masculine and feminine power dynamics underlying values of visual interaction. According to Kant, “That is beautiful which pleases universally” (422). Kant’s endeavor for delineating a universal standard of beauty obviously has its merits, but it assumes an essential quality that inheres in an image. It has become increasingly evident that images in and of themselves cannot contain an essential nature that is accessible to human perception. Though they may contain a true and essential nature, we cannot discover that quality because we are limited to mediating that “discovery” through our limited human faculty. To discover what is essential in an object then is to necessarily taint and shape that discovery. The problem is exacerbated upon considering the loss of individuality.

Though we may at times wish to be considered individual and omnipotent in our constructions of self, there is no denying that each individual arises within a social context that shapes him or her. That shaping, that social construction, brings to bear on everything we perceive. Things have meaning insofar as we have been developed to construct that meaning from the social conditions in which we are constructed. Furthermore, those social relations are dynamic and perpetually subject to change. This too presents a problem to a universal standard by which we interact with images.      

The universal approach to image interaction presupposes a static universe, which is evidently not the case at all. The world might instead be viewed as an amorphous mass, one that is in a constant state of flux. There are constantly shifting social relations and values that simply do not allow for a universal standard of image interaction. So how does visual interaction with images proceed? And how do these interactions shape the visual produced and the viewer of the visual? I intend to outline the current state of theory regarding visual interaction with texts and gain insight into how visual interaction functions not only to shape images, but to shape the viewers who produce those images.

The current state of visual interaction seems to be separated into two opposing schools of thought. These schools of thought are summed up in Anne Frances Wysocki’s “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty.” Wysocki makes the distinction between visual text interactions that favor discovery and ones that favor construction: “they propose that the work of shaping texts visually is to result in objects that stop and hold sight; I would rather that what we make when we shape the visual aspects of texts is reciprocal communication” (149). Herein lies the dichotomy between visual interaction that presupposes decipherment of essential meaning and visual interaction that presupposes construction of meaning. While the balance seems to be shifting toward the latter strategy, approaches to visual interaction continue to endorse the former strategy in turn denying the shift.

Wysocki recognizes this in the tendency of theorists of visual design to establish principles of visual interaction. She uses Robin Williams as an example. Wysocki argues that Williams’s design principles—contrast, repetition, alignments, and proximity— are stated in such a way that they have the appearance of being “not contingent, that they are neutral in their effects—that they have no effects other than the creation of organized layout—, that they should apply anywhere at all times, that they are not values” (151). In a similar manner, Stephen A. Bernhardt presents principles that fail to call attention to their contingent nature.

In “Seeing the Text,” Bernhardt proposes the sort of visual text interaction that Wysocki denounces. Though his intent is to demonstrate how “a preoccupation with conventional essay format allows little attention to visual features” (77 Bernhardt), he promotes a conventionalized visual text interaction. The conventions he endorses are the laws of gestalt—equilibrium, good continuation, closure, and similarities. Stephanie Sabar, in her essay “What’s a Gestalt?” defines gestalt as

an attribute of a perception or a thing that has a quality that is different from (not more than) the sum of its components, the components being the stimuli received from the outside world. It is a quality of the entity as a whole, resulting from its configuration, i.e., the relationship, interaction, and interdependence between its parts, rather than the sum or random combination of its parts (9)

Here I will explain my skepticism and aversion to the “laws” of this theory of perceptual organization.

The first law, the law of equilibrium, is erroneous in its objective grounding as a principle in the very definition Bernhardt provides: “the most relevant law is that of equilibrium, or pragnanz, which suggests that items in a visual field strive for balance or equilibrium with other items in the field (71). The definition personifies the elements in the field of vision such that they are understood as seeking balance. The inclination for balance is rather in the subject viewing the image; these elements are not autonomous, but acted upon by the viewer.

The next law, the law of good continuation, “suggests that visual perception works to pull figures out of the background, to give them definition against the undistinguished field with which they are located” (72), recognizing the role of human perceptual interaction to a certain extent. However, it should be evident that the distinction between figure and background does not inhere in the image. On a 2 dimensional surface, the “undistinguished field” might be just as much figure as the “figure” the law purports to give definition to. The “background” might be considered as the distinguished figure. Why this is not so in many cases is something that can hopefully be reconciled later in this analysis.

 

The third law, the law of similarity functions to impose similarity where similarity might not actually exist. This too is a human construct. This law suggests “that units which resemble each other in shape, size, color, or direction will be seen together as homogeneous grouping” (72). This tendency to make that which is dissimilar similar hinges on organization structure inherent in the human condition. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, “we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities” (767). This is due to the process through which we designate objects with words. In doing this we erase differences through homogenization induced by conferring on the non-equivalent a characteristic of equivalence through the concepts we attribute to distinct objects: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent” (Nietzsche 767). For example, every raisin is unique, varying in size and pattern of convoluted folds, but we impose the idea of raisin-ness on each individual raisin and render them similar. In visual textual interaction, the similarity is forced on the elements in a similar matter. While the law of similarity helps to organize a text, I am naturally hesitant of a law that promotes similarity while erasing difference. The differences of the apparently similar elements should be able to call themselves into question.                

The final law, the law of closure, though it has its own flaws, begins to recognize the human role in shaping the visual text. According to the law of closure, “When good continuation or good figure is not provided by the visual stimulus, the perceiver has a tendency to fill in the missing gaps, to provide the missing definition” (Bernhardt 72). This, of course, presumes that there is such thing as a self-contained visual text, that in the case that the visual text is not, the missing gaps and definitions will be apparent enough to be identified. My questions is “What visual text doesn’t contain gaps?” My concern is that by assuming a visual text can be self-contained, we perpetuate the idea of a naturalized text. Regardless of good continuation, every text should be considered as lacking closure. In considering text as such, we might begin to dismantle the naturalized visual text, and make possible the sort of reciprocal communication for which Wysocki calls.

Gestalt theory as enumerated by Bernhardt in 1986 is radically different from current understandings of gestalt (This alone is evidence of shifting beliefs and values). Gestalt theory now holds that “[w]e do not see the world objectively” (Sabar 8), that “what people see is not simply a replica of what is before them” (Sabar 19). Instead, “what we see is interpreted and given meaning by the observer, based on memories, expectations, beliefs, values, fears, assumptions, emotional states, and more” (Sabar 8). The enumeration of factors that control interpretation and give meaning arise out of social relations and experiences with the world. The aforementioned laws of gestalt might be considered amongst these factors, but they are not laws that exist outside of human perception; they are inseparable from learned social values. The visual text necessarily involves construction of meaning, but it does not follow a one-sided construction process. Sabar explains that “one’s existing mind-set shapes a perception or experience as much as the external stimulus affects the mind” (19). The latter part calls attention to the visual texts capability of shaping the viewer, a concern that Wysocki voices in “The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media”: “But what might be the consequences of design that ask me to use it unquestioningly, to acquire through what I see and do the values of efficiency and transparency?” (158).

If a consequence of a visual text is to shape the viewer, the acquisition of these values—transparency and efficiency—might be of lesser concern than other values one might subliminally acquire. So far I have discussed two dominant schools of thought regarding visual interaction, but I have failed to call attention to these strategies for visual interaction being gendered. The gendering of visual interaction, and how the values inherent in that gendering shape the viewer are the values I referred to previously as cause for concern.

As Wysocki so aptly puts it in “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,” the values with which we interact with a text have predominately arisen out of male-controlled discourse in a patriarchal society. She refers back to Kant, stating that his “sense of the world and its functioning grew out of his ability as a man of his time and place to look upon his experiences as being, necessarily, the experiences of all others” (164). This statement at once recognizes the social relations that allow for value-making, but it suggests that the approach is primarily a masculine one. This masculine approach considers beauty as a universal quality inherent in the object/image. Consequently, the power dynamics implicit in Kant’s critique of judgment are effaced. The power that determines beauty is misplaced, removed from the viewer and instead said to arise out of the object. This is not so, however. The implications of Kant’s argument become all the more important when considered against Laura Mulvey’s reckoning of the function of gaze in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

In her essay, Mulvey argues that gazing is a masculine role and to be gazed upon is a feminine one. The object of gaze is always feminized, always determined to be such by a masculine gazer. According to Mulvey, “In world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (2088). The visual text then might be considered as feminized, on object to be gazed upon by masculine power and determined to be beautiful, or not beautiful, by masculine judgment. Kant’s argument can then be understood as rendering the gazed-upon as an object disembodied. The function of this visual interaction promotes the gender disparity that benefited Kant. A female adopting the masculine role as gazer would twice conform to masculine ideology by uncritically accepting Kant’s critique of judgment: “The actual image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the content and structure of representation, adding a further layer of ideological significance demanded by the patriarchal order” (2094). If the content and structure of representation are male-dominated and the gazed-upon is feminine, the adoption of Kant’s particular ideology is utterly disempowering to females.

            This power structure produces circumstances in which feminine empowerment arises out of embracing the masculinized role as gazer so that power for females is permitted only insofar as the power is mediated through patriarchal ideology. In a BBC televisions series with John Berger, Berger states the following:

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” ()

Through their function as masculine gazer, females even objectify themselves. Upon viewing themselves as “objects that stop and hold sight” (Wysocki 149), objects for which they have no role in the determination of beauty, their autonomy is rendered useless. They are powerless in a system that perpetually endorses active masculine agency and passive feminine objects. If what Wysocki suggests—when “we see what does not have beauty as an apparently inherent quality and does not therefore live up to our formal expectations, we denigrate it, or try to lay (or force) perfect form upon it, or we try to erase it” (168)—is true, then females run the risk of self-effacement by failing to subvert masculine principles of visual interaction.

            The issue concerning theories of visual interaction is then much greater than it appears superficially. Wysocki calls for a visual interaction that involves “reciprocal communications, shaping both composer and reader and establishing relationships among them” (173), but no matter the form of interaction, if it continues to be backed by masculine ideology, the position remains the same for females. The values that we carry with us to the visual interaction continue to arise out of a patriarchal hegemony, so they fail to resolve gender disparity. Her suggestion might be understood as the masculine gazer controlling and shaping the object gazed upon. Though a relationship does develop, it is still a relationship of inequity because the values residing in the viewer emanate from the hegemonic structure that shapes the viewer. The real issue is the structure that shapes values. The other issues is that Wysocki’s argument demands what already exists. What Wysocki calls for is recognition of how we actually already perceive things.

            Visual perception proceeds in such a way that much of what is perceived is imposed on the scene by the viewer.  According to Aude Oliva, a principle research scientist at MIT, “viewing a scene is an active process in which perceived images are combined with stored knowledge to create an internal reconstruction of the visual world… The visual features extracted from the image (e.g., color, lines, and patterns of texture) are rearranged according to our expectations and knowledge of the world” (Oliva). The shaping of the text is already a process through which we inevitably interact with visuals. We bring our expectations, values, and all that is stored in our minds to create a scene that is uniquely our own. The creators of the visual text do the same thing in producing the visually interactive text. There is no fidelity between the image intended and the image perceived. Whether one recognizes interpretation of visual text as contingent on values or not, it is already happening through the way our brains process images. Consider the following picture:

How one interprets the image depends on the meaning one places in eagles and a man chained to a rock in a barren land. An American initiated into knowledge of the eagle representing freedom and American patriotism might read the message as anti-terrorist. The man chained to the rocks then might be interpreted as a man bound by his amoral heathen ideology in the desolate Middle East with the symbol of America reigning over him. This, of course, is a painting of Prometheus, which I know because I’ve conducted research on the mythological archetype. The point here, though, is that my knowledge of what this image is intended to represent is irrelevant. No matter what knowledge one brings to the visual text interaction, that knowledge will shape the nature of the interpretation.    

With this understanding visual interaction, it seems interpretation doesn’t just vary across people, time, and culture, but can vary across an individual as well, depending on his or her particular affordances at a given time. Endeavors to find universal principles underlying visual interaction and even ones that seek value-contingent principles are futile attempts to impose order on what is inherently chaotic. There is really no tracing the myriad factors that lend themselves to each individual’s visual interaction on a micro-level, but this is not to say that amendments to visual interaction should be abandoned.

If we understand theories of visual interaction as a structure that reinforces power disparity between males and females and continuously objectifies women, we should alter the features of visual communication. However, the solution to gender inequity relies not on recognition of value contingency, but rather on re-examining the power structures that shape those values. I’m not calling for a radical revamping of patriarchal society. That seems incredibly unrealistic. But maybe I should be.   

 

Odd Future of Gaming

            Networks and gaming meet online. Odd Future and I meet online too. If Dash didn’t talk about OFWGKYA, I might be able to contribute something of worth for this blog post, but all I’ve been doing since I saw that video is listening to Wolf Haley and the Golf Wang Hooligans. I think I might quit school and integrate into the collaborative rap network. This rap makes me think of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and The Signifying Monkey. Most the messages these guys are sending are pretty perverse, but their literary capacity is undeniable. If nothing else, their contribution is a linguistic one.

            I’ve already considered living my life as if it were a game before I saw these videos, but I got my inspiration from Elder Scrolls. My life is an RPG, but most of my missions are boring. My education is integral to my leveling up process. I actually try to treat all of my experiences as a leveling up of skills. I'm a level 0 rapper, for example. I better work on that. I think if the leveling up and reward system were more tangible, I might be a little more motivated, though. I’d like it if all progress were quantifiable.

            There was a brief mention of the grade system in school and how it’s a gaming strategy, but it must be flawed because grades give me very little fulfillment. And yet, I still try to excel at all that I do. There is so much effort and careful consideration that goes into academics for which grades are scarcely a reflection. Maybe we should render achievements more visible on a day-to-day basis. I’m thinking about the level-whatever Paladin and how much cooler the higher-leveled one looked. Real life on campus should proceed through leveling up and visible status.

            I see why WOW is a better model than Elder Scrolls for McGonigal’s games-can-make-a-better-world concept. The collaborative nature of it is more akin to real-world operations. The network aspect of it ties into Chris Anderson’s idea about networks causing Crowd Accelerated Innovation. According to McGonigal, I, having played over 10,000 hours of video games, am likely an expert. I don’t think I’m expert at any of the 4 things she mentions. I am certainly not adept at urgent optimism

A Feminine Critique of Judgment

Both of the texts this week deal with a gendered sense of perception in respect to visuals and speech. If the world was a man’s world before, it seems we are shifting into a feminine one now. And I welcome the shift wholeheartedly. Though I don’t want to readily and uncritically accept that the origin of values that underlie principals of visual interpretation as gendered, inseparable “from how [Kant’s] sense of the world and its functioning grew out of his ability as a man of his time and place to look upon his experiences as being, necessarily, the experiences of all others” (164), the disparity between males and females and the male control of discourse at his time is undeniable. Our capacity to make judgments on beauty has indeed arisen from a male standard favoring standardization, universality, efficiency, disinterestedness, and discovery. Anne Francis Wysocki’s essay, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,” then indicates the shift (which has likely been going on for a while now) into a female gendered critique for understanding visual communication. In the female critique, the word communication implying a message/transmission/receiver paradigm will no longer suffice; the communication alluded to here involves interlocutors, reciprocity, and interaction.
            We can see traces of this female gendered critique in Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s “Eloquence in an Electronic Age.” The propensities Jamieson attributes to women are strikingly reminiscent of the shift advocated by Wysocki. Jamieson states, “It is natural for a woman to define herself through social relations…They tend to be more pro-social particularly in their stress on relationships rather than autonomous action” (806). These qualities can be found in Wysocki’s endorsement of a new paradigm for interaction with visual composition. In stating, “The web of social and cultural practices in which we move give us the words and concepts, as well as the tastes, for understanding what we sense” (171), Wysocki grounds our capacity for taste and judgment-making in social relationships. In fact, she even establishes visual compositions as being socially interactive texts that embody “reciprocal communications, shaping both composer and reader and establishing relationships among them” (173). This is precisely the feminine proclivity for social relations asserted by Jamieson.

            While Jamieson’s enumeration of feminine qualities might be bordering on stereotypes, the qualities to which she refers are more empowering for women than they are debilitating. In our present technological age, it seems these qualities will thrive. Our world is becoming an environment that accommodates these “feminine” tendencies. The postmodernist school of thought also seems to accommodate these tendencies. In the same way that we perceive textual interaction as a disentanglement rather than a decipherment of singular meaning, seeing “beauty as a quality we build, rather than one we expect to discover” (169) follows the line of thinking of the postmodernist movement. What Wysocki calls for seems like a necessary movement in our understanding of textual interaction.  

More on Commodities

            Rhetorical and literary theory have become more debilitating for me than any physical malady I’ve experienced. And I thought knowledge was supposed to be power. I’ve never felt so discouraged, so artificial, so constructed and absent of free-will as I do at this moment. Postmodernism is a disease.

            All this talk about rhetoric/composition theory, and what purpose does it serve other than helping us come to terms with a loss of identity, creative license, and autonomy? The trajectory of IP laws makes me sick. If this—“You need to seek permission to quote even a single word from one of our texts”—is where writing is heading, then I might as well give up on this major right now. I better just sit back and wait for the policing of every word that leaves my mouth. And how will I ask for permission when the very words I wish to speak don’t belong to me in the first place? We’re trending towards silencing anything that doesn’t have a dollar sign attached to it. “Money talks” has never carried so much weight. The only discourse that matters is inscribed on hundred-dollar bills.

            Knowledge has become inextricable from economics, and art can scarcely be said to exist anymore. The arts are usurped by the capitalist system and channeled into commodities. What’s the point of knowledge other than the purposeless fragmentation and re-circulation in a system that continually promotes class disparity and conceals its mechanisms? I find myself questioning the purpose of my college education. The transaction doesn’t take place directly between student and professor, but essentially we give them money in exchange for knowledge. And it appears this knowledge imparted to us by professors is made up of fragments of knowledge that too had to be paid for. We buy the knowledge, and then we exchange our knowledge-laden services for money. Each act feeds and perpetuates the capitalist machine. I don’t know a better alternative than education at the moment, but I refuse to lead a life in which money is the chief goal.

            Reading and writing are some of the sole sources of pleasure for me in this life that seems so meaningless at times, but this will no longer be so if writing is reduced to a commodity. My love of books is starting to seem paradoxical now that I think about it. Books are indeed material commodities, but maybe it’s not the content I pay for, but the material artifact. The content can be read aloud and shared indefinitely—it’s not a finite resource—and no laws can do shit about it until they learn how to police my words. Karl Marx's notion that “the worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” seems in some ways relevant to this discussion. Y'all better just strive to not create commodities in that case because, as Chuck Palahniuk so eloquently put it in Fight Club, “You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis."

 

Time and Space

                Certain statements Professor Downs made early in the semester are just now starting to make sense to me after reading Stephen A. Bernhardt’s “Seeing the Text,” namely that certain media proceed with a function of time while others proceed as a space to navigate and that certain media afford localized availability while others do not. However, if my memory serves, I think Downs treated linear text as having localized availability while Bernhardt states, “one must actually read what is written to get any sense of how one point is related to the next” (68). If we treat Gunther Kress’s “Multimodality, Multimedia, and Genre” as a space to be navigated, though, we can soon see the merit in Downs’s statement.

I think I became nearly ill from consuming Kress’s reiterations when all he really had to say for my sake is the following: “If we contrast the two examples, they are nearly an inversion of each other: in the first, the written part of the text is realist; in the second it is schematic-theoretical; in the first text, the visual part is theoretical/abstract, while in the second it is empirical/realist” (47). The aforementioned couple with the statement, “What is important is to recognize that texts realize, among other things, the kinds of social relationship pointed to here” (44), would have served to make a similar point to that which he stretched across about 8 pages. Nevertheless, Kress does say something that brings me back on point: “each mode, writing and image, does distinctly different and specific things. The specificity is the same at one level: the affordance of the logic of time governs writing, and the affordances of the logic of space governs the image” (47).

The visually informative text from Bernhardt’s essay affords the logic of both time and space, which makes it more accommodating for a greater variety of readers. It is relevant to a vaster audience and can be multi-purposeful as well. Because of its increased functionality, I would initially think that all text should be written as such, but increased functionality comes with learning the language of visual representation. The laws of gestalt are just a starting point. Hell, I didn’t even know what gestalt meant, let alone all the subtle meanings implicit in visual representation. As the affordances of visual representation are more widely accepted, a shift in pedagogy must occur to provide students with the knowledge necessary to produce and interpret these more effective kinds of texts.

Who's Afraid of Mishra and Wolf?

In Mark J.P. Wolf's "Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation," Wolf asserts that all documentaries are subjunctive to a certain extent. Reading through Punyashloke Mishra's "Role of Abstraction in Scientific Illustrations," I got the impression that illustrations are in effect are just as subjunctive as computerized simulation, just as imagined. While Wolf discusses phenomena that cannot be depicted with high resolution to actual occurrences, many of Mishra's examples included a physical reality that could essentially be depicted through photography which could in turn confer a sense of fidelity between object and representation. This isn’t the case though. Textbooks tend to include iconographic and abstract illustrations rather than pictures of the real thing.

This issue can perhaps be reconciled by the assertion that “The paradoxical nature of pictures is that they must convey information about a three-dimensional world through marks on a two-dimensional surface” (Mishra 145). Pictures of the real thing might not be able to accomplish this feat as successfully as an abstraction. However, I am still concerned about the abstraction for 2 reasons. First, the disconnect between abstraction and reality poses an issue for those who navigate beyond the abstract into reality (e.g. open up actual human chest and work with real heart). Second, abstract illustrations tend to operate as a means of endorsing theories of functionality surrounding the physical world they represent. The functionality in a sense becomes naturalized through this endorsement and doesn’t call itself into questioning.

It seems the computer simulation discussed in Wolf’s essay hints at a technology that goes beyond illustrative functionality by allowing a user to operate within a three-dimensional virtuality that bears greater fidelity to the natural world, but there are reasons to be leery of this as well. No matter how similar the simulation is to reality, there still exists a disconnect between the two. The degree of disconnection varies, but it remains nonetheless. Furthermore, computer simulations on the surface appears to be devoid of a subjective point of view. The objectivity that it purports is rather a point of view composed of “programs, theories, and assumptions controlling the simulation, in such a way that a particular theoretical stance may steer an authorial voice” (Wolf 428). In same way that illustrated abstractions tend to efface the conventions they endorse, the computer simulation creates the illusion of objectivity free of worldview. This sort of naturalization of the conceptual is not necessarily a bad thing, but one should be able to recognize that it is indeed naturalized rather than metaphysical. That is to say it is not infallibly related to the natural world.

Wolf discusses the shift from perceptual to conceptual as something novel, but based on Mishra’s essay, this shift seems to be nothing new. Mishra states, “Many diagrams take the form of “conceptual models”” (Mishra 151). Science seems to be following a trend in which the representation of something bears greater fidelity to its reality than our perception of the reality. For things that the human eye cannot perceive, this seems necessary, but no matter how magnified or computer simulated something is, observation is still mediated through a limited human perception. So where does evidence end and speculation begin? How much dinosaur fossil reconstruction is really going on?

Light Made Flesh

So blogger wouldn't let me embed because damn YouTube fears a copyright violation. My Ben Howard version will not reach you folks I guess, but here's this one.

The Ultimate in Icon Abstraction from Reality, or Beyond Smiley Face

      Though the art in Watchmen resonates much more with representational art than iconic abstraction on the spectrum from representational to abstract, one of its characters, Rorschach, offers the ultimate in terms of an abstract icon. Rorschach’s visage is a shapeshifting, amorphous inkblot image. If what McCloud states about an icon abstracted from reality’s ability to mask a reader in a character, Rorschach must compellingly mask the reader in his seedy, misanthropic persona. This might allow for the uninhibited incorporation into the Watchmen environment.

      Judging by the first panel on the first page of Watchmen containing what McCloud asserts to be the ultimate in an icon being abstracted from reality, the smiley face, I’m led to believe that Dave Gibbons and Allan were McCloud-savvy. But Watchmen was published in 1987, and apparently McCloud is from 1992. I can’t help but wonder if McCloud pilfered Watchmen for many of his ideas. Watchmen seems to make a statement about its medium from within its medium. I haven’t even read it, and I can see it as an area of endless study.   

Jump From a 7th Story Window into Watchmen

Rather than bore you all by restating the reading, I thought I’d try to apply some of McCloud’s ideas:

 Here we have a page from Watchmen, a graphic novel by writer Allan More and artist Dave Gibbons. The first six panels are equidistant and equal in size, followed by a final panel which occupies the space equal to the space of the 3 previous panels. The expansion of size might be interpreted as a stretch in time that contrasts with previous 6-panel representation for which time can be perceived as proceeding chronologically at a consistent pace. The change in size might also point to the significance of the image or demonstrate the quality of this image accommodating all that proceeded it. The zoom out from point of origin in the first panel following a linear progression from panel to panel onto the 7^th panel unifies the whole scene, conferring a sense of synecdoche on the first panel.  

The closed panels act as a static medium; motion is not represented within each discrete panel, so only by following the panel-by-panel progression can the passage of time be demonstrated. The artist demonstrates time’s movement by the displacement of the trench-coat pedestrian. Time proceeds in a sequence of bloody footprints. Though images are not the only thing that represent time’s passage, the words in this case (with the exception of those in the 7^th panel) are separate from the action taking place within the panels because they are depicted as a journal entry exhibiting a quality of past-ness. This quality makes for an interesting exchange between words and pictures.   

The combination of words and pictures in this example blurs the parallel and inter-dependent relationship categories. Because the narrative is first person and depicted in text boxes representative of scraps torn from journal entries unrelated to the time in which the action proceeds, there seems to be a disconnect between the two initially. They might be read as running parallel. Conversely, the pictures seem to demonstrate an interrelatedness between the words and pictures.

The inter-dependency operates on multiple levels through numerous juxtapositions. The following three examples should demonstrate this point. First, the blood in the image may not be the same blood as the blood in the gutter, but the layering of the two gives the reader a sense of interconnectedness. Second, subsequent to when Rorschach says, “and all of the sudden nobody can think of anything to say,” the man overlooking the drop has nothing to say but a tawdry “That’s quite a drop.” And third, the words incorporated into the picture in panel 3 through an iconic sign that reads, “the end is nigh,” echoes Rorschach’s narration. Furthermore, the words in the picture are closer to the border between picture and words, drawing on the phenomenon of simplicity that allows for being more instantaneously received than the narration that requires a higher degree of perception. Panel 3 is a microcosm of comic elements operating concurrently to reinforce the overarching message.

This is just a brief overview of the comic elements at work in this single page, and it is far-off from being exhaustive. We can see how complex a text becomes when it incorporates words and images. With McCloud’s analysis, we can begin to develop a respect for the combination of words and pictures that has been stigmatized as a childish pursuit or a childish art form. Comics have an intrinsic intellectual value that is obviously being overlooked by many. It was certainly overlooked by myself.

 

 

 

 

All Aboard the Loss-of-Meaning Train

             I read the Stanley Fish essay referred to in James Sosnoski's "Hyper-Readers and their Reading Engines," and I'm still trying to figure out how it was meant to support Sosnoski's claim about filtering. Sosnoski states, “As inheritors of the work of Fish and other reading theorists, most teachers now readily admit that reading is a highly selective process, one in which the majority of details are forgotten, leaving the reader to be content with plot summaries, thumbnail characterizations, representative scenes, and themes, most of them memorable because they can be assimilated into what Frank Smith taught us to call “cognitive structures”” (Sosnoski 165). The most memorable aspects mentioned here falling into cognitive structures resonates with what Fish says (“students did not proceed from the noting of distinguishing features to the recognition that they were confronted by a poem; rather, it was the act of recognition that came first--they knew in advance that they were dealing with a poem-- and the distinguishing features then followed.”), but Sosnoski gives those words to Smith. The more I think about this, the more convoluted it all becomes and the more I demand a hypertext for sorting this mess out. This essay on hypertext would in fact make for a decent hypertext setting, but then Sosnoski would lose parts of his message, become de-authorizied. And yet I can’t help but think he’s already being de-authorized by citing Fish and Smith. Eva-Maria Jakobs might agree with this notion as she draws parallels between footnotes/references and hypertext (Jakobs 357). I’m straying from the point which is that Fish has more to say about cognitive structures than he does about filtering, and if Sosnoski would go ahead and hypertextualize this essay already, I could follow Frank Smith’s link and better see what the hell is being proposed.

My issue with filtering as it is presented here is that if inherent in reading is this notion that what is read necessarily disintegrates into oblivion, what will happen when even less is read? It seems skimming, pecking, fragmenting all pertain to less being read about a particular subject. I suppose it’s not that the cumulative content being read is lessened, but rather that each piece receives less focus. It allows for extension rather than depth which makes for a vaster overview of a topic. At the same time, though, each piece will undergo this “highly selective process” which will cause most to be forgotten. Don’t the elements matter? Doesn’t it allow for a greater understanding of the whole when one intimately knows the pieces that constitute it?

I’m noticeably expressing my anxiety over hypertext, and it’s a serious anxiety. I’d like to incorporate a link to the chaos that ensues inside my head at the moment, but it seems technology’s reach is not yet capable of the feat. And at the same time, everything I write is a link, a sort of hypertext that allows readers into the recesses of my chaotic mind. I can’t help but wonder if the reading this week was meant to be a manifestation of the idea that “information devours its content (Sosnoski 164), because I’m feeling an information overload in which the content is devoured, and I’m left writing a post bereft of any meaning.

Maybe the loss-of-meaning train will inevitably be boarded (more and more information, and less and less meaning (Sosnoski 164)). Maybe I’m boarding right now.

 

My World Commodified

In Anne Francis Wysocki’s “The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media,” she goes beyond merely informing readers of the various media for creating texts and analyzing them and argues that the visual representation of texts through media have a relationship to the values of the society from which they stem. For example, the traditional layout of American books and textbooks are indicative of our proclivity for standardization and order, “for the quick and efficient transmission of information” (Anne Francis Wysocki 125). If this is true, texts are in agreement with the same qualities we have come to expect and admire in economics.

We are a consumer culture and texts do not fall outside the umbrella of economics. We act like knowledge is this one thing and commodities another, but we forget that in order to transmit knowledge we must necessarily commodify it, that is to say mediate it through texts. Texts are more than a simple mediation, though. Texts do not simply arise from commodifying knowledge but rather  are the commodification of knowledge. They are inseparable from the means through which they become disseminated. Knowledge could not be packaged and sold without them.

                 According to the essay “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation” by Johndan Johnson-Eilola, this is precisely the direction in which texts are going. In fact, intellectual property laws are going so far as to protect texts as a commodity. Johnson-Eilola states, “From the IP perspective… textual content has become commodified, put into motion in the capitalist circulation, forced to earn its keep by moving incessantly” (203). Texts are now fragmented and packaged such that the packaging constitutes the intellectual creativity and not the content. And you might be wondering how this relates to Wysocki’s argument, but this process reveals those values that Wysocki suggests are related to texts’ visual representation. It causes one to wonder about the real relationship between texts’ visual representation and our values.

The argument might proceed such that the texts reflect our values or it might proceed conversely: one might postulate that the visual representation of texts do not reflect our values but rather create them, that they do not reinforce but rather influence. Beyond a certain age, much of what engenders our values emanates from the texts we encounter in college. If these texts have become neatly packaged commodities, the majority of which are mediated through a standardized form, might we then be receiving messages that influence our values. These values are aligned with the economic system and redirected to advocate ideals that promote the growth of corporations through efficiency and standardization, processes that often require eliminating individuality and autonomy from the human equation. Innovation and self-sufficiency are not encouraged, but rather performance of a single, fragmented task. The process of fragmenting, packaging, and selling knowledge begins to look a lot like the industrial machine. And this machine produces the very texts that relate to our values.

And I think this relates to Wysocki’s primary concern about the design of our texts: “But what might be the consequences of design that ask me to use it unquestioningly, to acquire through what I see and do the values of efficiency and transparency?” (158). What does the tendency to accept without questioning say about our value system? If these texts operate as an argument, as persuasion, then what is the effect of the seemingly naturalized text? I stand firm in believing that the most insidious kind of persuasion is the persuasion that operates unseen, the kind of persuasion that makes it appear as if its message arises within ourselves. So the question remains: do our values create texts that imitate them, or do texts create values that we imitate?

Now the question remains whether or not I buy this argument, and it seems all the more pressing and appropriate. The answer can be nothing other than a simple and defeated Yes. I do buy it. I’ve been buying arguments all my life. I just didn’t know it.

-Aaron

 

 

All This Media and I Can't Layer a Message

                In Dennis Barons “From Pencils to Pixels,” I notice a common theme throughout the history of writing technology. It seems at the advent of new technology, the public is initially apprehensive. Whether this is due to the inaccessibility of the new technology or a deeply embedded fear that the technology might radically alter the fabric of their existence is unclear, but the common feature I attribute to the surviving technology is the incorporation of its precursor.

I propose that our most recent writing technology subsumes all the technology that preceded it. So the romance we associate with the rudimentary technology is not lost. It is rather channeled and reconstituted into the new. Therefore, we should not be lamenting a loss, but embracing the myriad possibilities that new technology offers. As writers we are driven to create meaning for our readers, and advancements in technology allow us to do that with various media that we can combine in innovative ways that achieve an effect that was once inconceivable. In “The Multiple Media of Texts, ” Anne Frances Wysocki offers a look at these media we as writers now have at our disposal and the ways in which they can be manipulated to shape transmission and reception of messages.

Each element—words, photo, chart, graph, video, sound, drawing, color—is but a piece referring to a much larger whole. When considering these elements alongside the “web of meaning” created by intertext, we can see the possibility for an infinitely layered visual representation to construct and deconstruct. One can follow one written text which refers to others, which still refers to others, and do this endlessly. And this is only one of the visual elements containing meaning.

Even the visual representation of the written words contains its own meaning independent of the content of the words themselves and yet inextricably linked. The messages of form and content can coincide with one another for emphasis or conflict to call attention to the disconnect, but the main point is that each is a message in and of itself that multiplies meaning through interconnectedness. Now, with the addition of other elements, ways of producing meaning become even more complex. The layers are endless.

With the introduction of these new forms of media, I wonder how they will fit into Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s argument about the trend of intellectual property (IP). As the line between creative works and non-creative becomes more blurred, I wonder where these things will fit. Will these elements too be seen as fragments, as manageable chunks of information suitable for commodification? If we approach these peripheral media (video, sound, drawings, photos) in the same manner as the traditional media (written words), we might conclude that each has an interconnectedness within their own medium analogous to intertext, that they derive meaning from the things to which they are connected. As with traditional media, these too could be fragmented and reconfigured as an “original” work.

This has lead me to conclude that IP laws are destroying the very things they are meant to protect. With our postmodern conception that all works arise in a social context, that these works can then be fragmented and reconfigured into a composite that constitutes originality, I can imagine IP becoming obsolete. This new form of IP is the antithesis to IP, and yet its construction is contingent on the production of actual original thought. Will we eventually cease pursuit of intellectual innovation in exchange for the perpetual breakdown and reconfiguration of the existing IP? Or has this already been going on since the beginning of time?

Intertextuality in the Narrative Paradigm

I feel I haven't given the narrative paradigm its due consideration in my blog. While reading through the text for the second time, I had an epiphany. The narrative paradigm in some ways parallels the discourse community and intertextuality. One can consider the forum for public moral argument as the discourse community. Within that community there are the stories that inform our operation and understanding of narrative probability and narrative fidelity. The storytellers or experts might be the ones considered regulating the discourse or imposing the constraints. It is an interactive process, however, and all members have the opportunity to alter the discourse with their own story (implantation of intertext). This creates a dynamic environment in which each story redefines and alters, if only a trace amount, the entire constitution of the narrative paradigm. The main thing here is that the entire discourse hinges on the interrelated narratives that constitute the community.

The Recursive Structure to Which All Text Is Heir

James E. Porter's "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community" follows a tradition of exegesis that places the worth of a work in the tradition in which the text is steeped. He refers to the text as intertext, and takes the notion so far as to assert that all text is necessarily intertextual. All text is made up of the text that precedes it. In a way, the writer is destined to be constrained by its predecessors. In regard to the rhetorical situation, the rhetor is of even less importance than the situation in which the rhetor exists. The rhetor does not create the situation, but is shaped by it.

The extent to which the rhetor is constrained becomes even more severe when considering his placement in a discourse community. The discourse community is a sort of specialized forum of intertext which presupposes rules and constraints characteristic of the particular community in which a rhetor finds himself. The audience and traditions of the community exercise the most force on the rhetor's textual product. He must conform to the expectations of the community or else find himself alienated.

It seems pretty dreary for the rhetor, but Porter argues that it is within the constraints of intertext and discourse community that a rhetor can find freedom. The content that can be employed by the rhetor is unchanging, but the form in which he can represent it is his own. This hints at an analysis that manipulates the established codes of conduct in new and interesting ways.

This entire concept of the discourse community seems to be echoing the philosophy of compatibilsm ,and intertextuality seems to be echoing T.S. Eliot’s take on the role tradition plays in a work or literature in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” This is actually quite appropriate considering the subject matter being discussed presupposes the intertexual nature of all text.

Compatibilism asserts that free will and determinism can exist in harmony with one another. While events unravel following a deterministic cause-and-effect relationship, an agent operating within that system can still exercise free will. Here is a video in whose fabric this concept is deeply embedded:

 

Although compatibilism is difficult to substantiate if we take into consideration the myriad factors—social conditioning, biological make up, brain chemistry—that might be operating unseen and determining an agents decisions, this philosophy is still available for intertextual implantation. In the discourse community, the free agent is the rhetor operating in the deterministic system. He is necessarily subject to constraints, but maintains the freedom to alter or redefine the community through the contribution of his work: “Every new text has the potential to alter the Text in some way; in fact every text admitted into a discourse community changes the constitution of the community” (Porter 41). It is here that the echoes of T.S. Eliot can be heard most clearly.

Eliot’s argument deviates from the romantic belief that the worth of a work is measured by the author in favor of measuring a work by the tradition in which it is immersed. The tradition he refers to can be considered as the broadest receptacle of intertextuality, containing the entire literary canon. This constitutes the discourse community which he refers to as the “existing order.” His assertions regarding this order is where Porter’s text and Eliot’s essentially overlap. Eliot states, “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new” (http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html). Is this not the very essence of what Porter concludes on page 41?

It is fascinating that even in essays, intertextuality is evident. The very nature of Porter’s essay reinforces his argument.

And now I will digress to some philosophical questions pertaining more intimately to the human condition. The implications here about intertextuality cannot be ignored. If each writer is merely a mosaic made from the fragments of the varying texts to which he has been exposed, then what does this say about our make-up as humans? This might presuppose the idea that we are entirely determined. If our expression is the effect of the absorption of knowledge and observation, then we are determined by our multifarious experiences. We operate within a framework that is constantly being dictated by the past while concurrently redefining the past, creating an illusion of free will in the present. There is an ongoing and elusive interplay that cannot be monitored. I’m going far beyond my scope of understanding, so it is here that I stop.   

Character Assassination of Aaron Plowman by the Coward Aaron Plowman

Rhetoric Aimed to Assert the Truth about Rhetoric

In Stanley Fish's "Rhetoric," Fish alludes to an ongoing battle between rhetorical man and serious man. Rhetorical man is said to manipulate reality rather than discover it while serious man is said to know and express the fundamental reality. In other words serious man sees himself as an agent independent of reality while rhetorical man perceives reality as subject to his interpretation. In a way, rhetorical man believes that reality is created by human agents. Between the two, there is an ongoing debate in which it seems neither side could ever be the victor. While rhetorical man accuses serious man of conforming to a fabricated reality of rhetoric, serious man marks the accusation as a rhetorical sleight of hand contrary to common sense. To rhetorical man, "common sense" is just as fabricated as the rest of reality. The debate is ongoing and seemingly never ending, but considering the fact that the argument itself is presented as a form of rhetoric (an essay disseminated to readers), rhetorical man might necessarily prevail.

The very act of me writing this is rhetorical, originating from my interpretation of the text as the reader (audience) and the other constituents--rhetor(s), constraints, and exigence--of a rhetorical situation. In writing his piece, Fish, the rhetor, was forced to adhere to the constraints Keith Grant-Davie describes in "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents," the most compelling of which I believe to be the "emerging discourse."

In any act of writing as a means of communication, the writer must temper his piece to maintain coherence for the reader. The very nature of coherent writing requires that the piece follows a sort of natural order as it emerges. A writer might have numerous points that he wishes to express all at once, but the nature of transmission and reception prevents it. He must follow the coherent order. Consequently, communication is inevitably rhetorical. Our limited mode of maintaining message fidelity between sender and receiver denies the possibility of a pure message transmission. This notion is expanded upon, not necessarily explicitly but to a greater degree, in Robert Scholes's "Toward a Semiotics of Literature."

In Scholes’s “Toward a Semiotics of Literature,” he argues that “the formal qualities of literature are the result of a process that multiplies or complicates the normal features of human communication (Scholes 119). His argument relies on 3 sets of opposing binaries—absence/presence, semiotic/phenomenal, and abstract/concrete—to determine the extent to which an utterance is literary. Something non-literary would be something that is present, phenomenal, and concrete. This is what I would determine to constitute reality in its purest form. J.L. Austin might refer to this as “constative.” By testing our reality against these binaries, it seems that any act of communication could never assume the constative form in reality. This is due to an issue over presence that is induced by our natural process of recollection.

According to Scholes, when we attempt to recover memory by reconstructing it, it necessarily becomes fictionalized. This is because we are absent from the context of the memory in its present and immediate form. With the unstinting progress of time it seems we could never grasp anything and express it in the presence. Each utterance becomes fictionalized as it is mediated through the human condition. The degree to which we struggle to present the truth is the degree to which it becomes increasingly more fictionalized. We operate within a vehicle in which rhetoric is inevitable.

I’m digressing from the readings, so I will present one final observation. Both Fish’s and Grant-Davie’s pieces mention a universal agent. The former mentions a universal rhetor and the latter a universal audience. Fish mentions the “ideal speech situation” “in which all assertions proceed not from the perspective of individual desires and strategies, but from the perspective of a general rationality upon which all parties are agreed” (137), and Grant-Davies mentions the “universal audience” which is an "audience encompassing all reasonable and competent men” (271).

I mention this because while reading the Geisler essay, I began to think that the internet and the Itext revolution would offer the only forum in which this might be possible. According to both Geisler’s and Grant-Davie’s essays, the audience and the rhetor are interdependent. The relationship is dynamic. While it might be true that “the audience determines the appropriateness and success of communication” (Geisler et al 271), the rhetor is required by the exigence to convey the message. Through the dynamic exchange between agents, they might reach a point in which they necessarily come to reaching universality on both parts. However, this could potentially only occur for an instance in a vacuum in which no historical or political constraints might alter the situation. There is also the issue of digital divide of course and I’m sure many other factors my limited mental faculty is too lazy to grasp.

The complexity of the world and limitations of the human condition might never allow for a situation in which the “truth” is realized. This has all been rhetoric, however, which is cunning and deceit at its core.

Introduction

Hey Y'all,

I'm Aaron Plowman. I'm originally from California, but now reside in Montana, which is to say I'm a resident here. I no longer have ties to the abominable state with the exception of my family that unfortunately still endures the exorbitant cost of sales tax, traffic tickets, gasoline, and, most importantly, a considerable fraction of their lives spent in traffic. While the final cost might not be quantifiable, I believe it to be the most important. And that--placing a higher value in time than place-- is, in essence, the reason why I am here.

-Aaron