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.