A couple weeks ago, John suggested that the strength of How Images Think is that it introduces a lot of issues to be explored more in depth, but leaves us this task. In a way, I think Barry's Visual Intelligence does the same thing and, for me, more than the Burnett. Its still not a masterpiece of writing and the book contains some inconsistencies and essentialist rhetoric, but, as we discussed in class, it engages some of the work done in psychology, neurology, and other sciences.
Our conversation this week seemed to center around the interaction between the sciences and the humanities, with John offering an important insight that each has its distinct methodology, but that the objects of study are not how the disciplines are defined. Barry's methodology is kind of a mix of methodology, but her framing discipline is probably gestalt psychology. A gestalt "implies a configuration that is so inherently unified that its properties cannot be derived from the individual properties of its parts" (42). This holism that Barry derives from the gestalt school provides support for Sid's observation that "visual rhetoric" may be a misnomer. If rhetoric breaks things into parts, then the gestalt considers their total effect as well as their production and formation of wholes.
Perhaps Barry's biggest strength is the physiological and neurological evidence that supports the gestalt hypothesis. Rather than looking at the eye as functioning like a camera, she considers how the eye actually interacts with the environment. The eyes is unlike a camera because the image on our retina is in constant motion and our 'mental image' (which, I take, must a be a metaphor) is created through what stays constant within that motion. Thus, movement is essential to vision because our eyes function by noticing and recording
change (Barry 29-32). Furthermore, while the images in a camera are "bounded" what we see is "unbounded" (33). Barry convincingly argues that the retinal image is only part of the mechanism of seeing and not its product (Barry 33).
And yet, although she has shown that even the images on our eye our involved in a complex process of production and interpretation of our world, she still seems to hold onto an idea of some sort of "reality" or "direct experience" that we can see with our eyes, but that becomes mediated when some sort of technology is introduced. As Sid suggested last week, we may need to think about the eye itself as an incredibly complex technology. Indeed, Barry claims that "human vision is still the most powerful means of sifting out irrelevent information and detecting significant patterns" (34). Why is this? Perhaps because significance can only come through emotions as well as personal and cultural memory. Neurological research suggests that we frequently are affected by the visual before we can evaluate it critically. The amygdala in our brain is what detects emotional significance (see Barry 17-18). As V.S. Ramachandran has shown, however, some of the information we receive may correspond to our physical/topographical map, but does not reach the amygdala, such as the case where a man looking at his mother said "this looks like my mother but it is not her." However, once his mother began to talk he recognized her as his mother.
Why is this? Because the verbal and visual parts of our brains, although intimately connected, are also independent systems. Neurologist VanDerkolk has shown that traumatic experiences are stored in different parts of the brain. Routine thoughts tend to stimulate the 'Broca' area, which controls verbal language, but traumatic experiences do not. This is why people have difficulty putting traumatic experiences into words (Barry 40). This neurological explanation suggests to me the usefulness of certain psychoanalytic techniques to get the patient to verbalize their experience. As Slavoj Zizek has said, the first time something happens it is an intrusion of the Real but the second time is when it enters the symbolic order (the order of language).
Barry's research is drawn frequently from holistic theories such as J.J. Gibson's "ecological optics theory." For Gibson, it is the change that signals visual and the relationship that carries meaning (Barry 41). We would do well to critique Barry's language here of "carrying" meaning, but the ecological model is useful in understanding how she moves from the visual process itself, to gestalt psychology, to her musical metaphors and investigations into the creative mind.
On that note--Music is a prominent metaphorical resource for Barry--particularly when related to gestalt theory. Using Christin Von Ehrenfels argument that 'melody is relationship since it is still recognized in another key, Barry plays out this idea of melody" (see Barry 43). She continues this metaphor: "It is as if we begin by learning to put together different notes into meaningful melodies, gradually building a musical repertoire on which we come eventually to rely for all performances" (Barry 65). I find this a useful metaphor, but I also question Barry's harmonious holistic approach. While Barry, cognitive science, neurology, and optics theorists may be correct that our process of vision tends to look for patterns and creating a whole (see for instance the discussion of the 'blind spot' and filling in on pg 26), I think that we need to consider the inharmonious aspects of vision--those things that we can't quite put into a pattern--what Michel Serres has called "noise," which is as essential to communication as information (according to Mark C. Taylor).
On one hand, Barry's science seems to support many of theoretical humanities' assumptions. We create meaning by our ability to see patterns in essentially disparate elements, but not so much by what we sense, but by what we believe (Barry 27). And again, Barry denies that scientific analysis can ever get to the heart of things alone. She argues that the 'phi phenomenon' shows that scientific dissection could never yield adequate answers because the principles of perception lie in spaces between the elements rather than within them (Barry 44). However, this holism turns slowly into a sort of idealism where resistance to these processes can only be combated by "deliberate thought and active higher reasoning" (Barry 68). This sounds suspiciously to me like a reasoned criticism rather than using the "perceptual logic" found in most visuals and images itself to complicate its own assumptions and (ab)uses. Perhaps rather than hardening our experience into significant patterns we need to pay attention to what we exclude (the visual and audible noise) just as much as what we include.
This leads me to Barry's discussions of the creative temperament. I was reading this section through the recent lecture I heard by V.S. Ramachandran at UF a couple days ago. Ramachandran talks about how a neurological explanation of synethesia can help explain the metaphorical process. Barry recognizes this connection and argues that the creative mind works in metaphors (Barry 72). Indeed, I would argue (and this in no way is a unique claim) that the humanities' "methodology" to return to John's distinction between the humanities and science. Our methodology is metaphorical, creative, and inventive. However, I am not sure I can support this distinction since it is clear that such models of the atom as the "plum pudding" model or even our current model are in reality "images"/metaphors of what *really* is there. Perhaps the humanities are just a bit more honest about the metaphorical and contingent relationship between the Real and our description of it and the necessity for metaphor (see Derrida's "White Mythology" for a brilliant analysis of philosophical metaphor and catechresis).
To return to Barry's work proper: Why does she want to make such a clear distinction between the "abstract" system of language and the "visual" or the "image". In the section "Mental Images," Barry argues that we have this ability to abstract from the world to form--a concept, by the way, that has been around since Aristotle, and indeed someone who Barry relies on extensively. Strangely, its when she gets into the territory of literary works, theories, and authors that her argument becomes a bit messy and problematic for students of English. While it appeals to our literary sensibility, I sense a very conservative program here--as we have discussed in class today.
In the section metaphors of the mind, she turns to neurological researcher Zeki and agrees with him that the task of the brain is one of extracting invariant features from the continually changing information from the environment to provide a unified image, but that each area is synchronous and that there is no master area of the brain controlling the other ones (Barry 93). Drawing on the theories of Crick, we see that from a neurological perspective "the conscious mind receives information from the brain rather than directs it" and thus our sense of "unity and mental control" is an imperfect illusion (Barry 94). What I like about this insight is that we get away from this notion of the "subject" as some sort of transcendental I or some sort of "soul" that resides within us. Consciousness, a subject speculated on by many philosophers (and, I may add, which still needs to be considered philosophically) is materialized, but not in a deterministic way but through material interactions. Zeki argues that "it is no longer possible. . .to divide the process of seeing from that of understanding nor is it possible to separate the acquisition of visual knowledge from consciousness" (Barry 44).
However, I want to repeat--this does not mean that there is no consciousness or "mind" separate from the brain. For Barry and many of the works she draws on, our "mind" is less a director of the brain than an Interpreter. This reminds me of the theory of the "Focalizer," which is not a narrator nor a character but basically a 'voice' that filters and offers a certain perspective on the narrative. A friend of mind used this concept to look at the "Cyclops" chapter in Joyce's Ulysses.
But perhaps a better metaphor would be a "screen" or "filter" because the mind can only pay attention to so much of what the brain is currently doing. Barry argues that if we were to become aware (conscious) of the inner workings of our brain, we would be paralyzed by the overwhelming activity and noise or driven to madness--we may become autistic (Barry 98).
Barry briefly touches on chaos theory in her work, drawing from it the idea of "spontaneous emergence of self-organization" (Barry 96). I think that we should look at Barry and the visual intelligence through Mark C. Taylor's discussion of complexity theory and see where we end up. I will try and also pit Mark Taylor's metaphor of the musical fugue as an alternative to Barry's focus on the symphony, which I think may open up her insights into greater complexity rather than assuming our writing must be as holistic and "experiential" as our being-in-the-world or, to echo phenomenology once again, the lebenswelt (Life-World). Its this sort of generalized universalism that existential phenomenology is frequently accused of that we must get rid of in order to deploy some of Barry's insights. I think Taylor's discussion of complexity theory, particularly the concept of "between order and chaos," needs to be put into conversation with Barry.
Despite Barry's use of chaos theory, she does not take chaos theory seriously throughout her entire work. She makes reference to it, but when distinguishing between the visual and the verbal, she argues that "verbal language is essentially a linear system imposed on a non-linear experience" and that language is a static system. This is patently false and seems to only serve her interest in maintaining a distinction between the visual and the verbal based on human "experience" (which she never really defines in any systematic way). As we have said in class, this essentialist rhetoric without any sort of theoretical justification seems to continue through the work. For instance, in the section "Image Affordance," she argues that "essential characteristics that define the essence of things become meaningful through what they off use as useful within our everyday experience" (Barry 79). This is almost pragmatist in the Deweyian sense, but there is no mention of this theorization, preferring to claim an essence without qualification. Strangely, though we could read Barry as entrenched in a kind of Husserlian life-world approach, she does tend to separate appearance and "reality" without realizing the implications of doing so. For instance, "In Western art we pay attention to appearance rather than the meaning images take on through experience" (Barry 81). This metaphysical opposition is more apparent in her reference to the medieval philosopher, Maimonides: idolatry is "missing the whole concept of the image" and to mistake "surface appearance for essence" (Barry 126). And so we arrive at a different kind of interpretation of gestalt psychology than say, Merleau-Ponty: Barry still seems to maintain this distinction between appearance and reality that doesn't take the phenomenological critique of this metaphysics seriously. She is speaking of the life-world, but ignoring an entire tradition and making the mistake of creating these useless oppositions.
Everything has an agenda and I in no way meant to critique Barry merely for having an agenda (although I think the arguments she makes are conservative in the worst possible way), but its interesting to me that Barry discusses repetition only from a neurological and psychological side. While this may seem an obvious insight, it is nonetheless important for her engagement with the humanities: more repetitive thinking patterns, the more these patterns become entrenched neurologically (Barry 63). While she is insistent that patterns are how we make meaning, she is aware that these patterns can become habits and create stereotypes. Thus, she argues that the more "open and flexible a person's abstract thinking remains, the more open the person is to new learning and change" (Barry 64). Repetition seems to be at once confirmed by the making of "patterns" but also vilified as something that creates stasis. Repetition of something, however, is always repeating within a different context or moment in time and so it is never truly repetition (i'm sure I could cite some theorist on this insight). Barry doesn't seem to outright reject repetition because patterns are in some ways based upon it, but there does seem to be a focus on this concept of "creative thinking" that, while I am not against it in principle, is once again not explored in depth.
But the meat of my question comes down to how her musical metaphor, with its emphasis on melody contains a certain commitment to consistent and holistic narrative without taking into account other disruptions of our productive and interpretive moment outside of critical reflection and interpretation. For Taylor, following Heidegger, distinguishes scholarship from thinking: "Writing is thinking, but scholarship is not writing" (Taylor 807--JAC 24.4). Although he at first denies that he can make the distinction, he seems to say that not-writing is writing that is accepted in scholarly journals while "writing" is creative: "Writing, by contrast, is transgressive. It violates accepted codes and crosses boundaries guarded. Creativity and invention occur, if at all, in the gaps between disciplines" (Taylor 808). Taylor actually agrees with Barry in her focus on the importance of visual, but the visual in Taylor is meant to be disruptive and transgressive, not a holistic integration: "We can no longer write merely with words but now must learn how to think and write with images and sound. Design--visual as well as graphic--becomes integral to writing" (808). But is this really an accurate distinction? Barry does seem to worry about the ways that images are used to stabilize meaning and stereotypes, but she is so reliant on gestalt theory and holism that she doesn't think about how her musical metaphor may not recognize the potential of writing (in Taylor's broad sense) to disrupt this stabilization without a sort of "active higher reasoning" that she attributes to Spinoza (once again, without a detailed consideration of Spinoza's philosophy).
In Sid Dobrin's soon to be released book Postcomposition, he argues that writing is violence and not just disruption:
Postcomposition works to create tremors in composition studies’ ground,
with the intent of violence. It works within what Victor J. Vitanza would call
the “terrorism of theory” specifically against the “will of the field” (143). It
is a work of disruption and discomfort; it is a work against the discipline’s
pedagogical imperative toward the contingency of writing. (Dobrin 2)
I don’t mean violence as
a negative, destructive act; rather, violence operates to change the object
upon which it is enacted. That is, violence does not work toward destruction
in the negative but instead creates possibilities through disruption or,
at minimum, through Foucault’s notion of thinking “differently.” (Dobrin 113)
In a way this is a bit of a digression, but I do want to consider the sort of "violence" done to music by the likes of John Cage, Webern, and Schoenberg. Indeed, I think that this kind of hyper-order (in particular of Schoenberg) that approaches mathematical theorems is an important metaphor for complexity theory. I'd like to explore this further in another post or in a paper. But for now, I want to look at Taylor's choice of musical metaphor in comparison with Barry's: Fugue as opposed to Symphony.
For Barry, symphony and melody is the primary metaphor. True, she does argue that symphony is actually created by silences which in turn creates rhythm (Barry 125). And indeed, Oliver Sacks has argued in a podcast lecture on one of his books that rhythm is something humans are predisposed to, but the experiments by Schoenberg, et. al. show that music does not necessarily have to contain a consistent rhythm (We might also look at what Muckelbauer has said in his recent book about "singular rhythms" and see if this offers a way out of 'rhythm' in the sense Barry is getting at). As Dobrin argues in Postcomposition, we might want to look at writing in terms of its viscosity, which I think complicates our traditional notions of rhythm. I'm not sure how yet, but I think that we might be able to look at Dobrin's concept of saturation and viscosity of writing in terms of the irregular "rhythms" and "rules" (that are somewhere between order and chaos) of these composers I'm suggesting.
As I mentioned above, Barry seems to think that repetition implies a solidity of thinking patterns, which is indeed supported by neurological research. However, repetition (with a difference) is a key aspect of Fugue, particularly a Bach Fugue. The Fugue, like the rigor (and apparent chaos that is actually regulative) in Schoenberg, was considered at the time "too austerely intellectual for the common ear" (Taylor 158). I quote Taylor at length on what Bach's fugue "Musical Offering":
In a canon, the same melody is repeated by one or more voices overlapping in time, "in order for a theme to work as a canon theme, each of it snotes must be able to serve in a dual (or triple, or quadruple) role: it must first be part of a melody, and secondly, it must be part of harmonization of the same melody. When there are three canonical voices, for instance, each note of the theme must act in two distinct harmonic ways, as well as melodically. Thus, each note in a canon has more than one musical meaning; the listener's ear and brain automatically figure out the appropriate meaning, by referring to context." the complexity of the canon increases as the pitch of different voices or 'copies' is staggered, their speed varied, or the theme inverted by making the melody jump down wherever the original jumps up. The most complex canonical structure results from the inclusion of "retrograde copies" in which "the theme is played backward." Named after the creature that moves backward in space, this type of composition is known as a 'crab canon." What Hofstadter finds so fascinating about Bach's Musical Offering is the way in which the different parts fo the score work together as a whole. He alerts listeners: "Notice that every type of 'copy' preserves all information in the original theme, in the sense that the theme is fully recoverable from any of the copies. Such an information-preserving transformation is often called as isomorphism (Taylor 157-158, all italics mine except the final one)
Thus, the "melody" is indeterminate--no "original" melody can really be discerned unless one appeals to the first "melody" played. Everything cannot be integrated in the same way, but the music only provides a set or a potential combination of ways to formulate the piece rather than foregrounding one particular pattern and creating a figure/ground, gestalt relationship. Or perhaps this is misleading. The gestalt is created by the subject (like the 'melody' created by the listener). This is another issue I'd like to explore further.
To complicate the music metaphor even further, we have to introduce Jean-Luc Nancy's work Listening into the mix, a work that I have already created a long, involved post on. However, I feel I am now prepared to engage Nancy's relationship to Taylor's reading of complexity. If timbre in psychoacoustics is "In music, timbre (pronounced /ˈtæmbər/, like the "tambour" of "tambourine", and spelling pronunciation /ˈtɪmbər/; French: [tɛ̃bʁ]) is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. In psychoacoustics, timbre is also called tone quality and tone color" (wikipedia)
First, this reference to color makes an interesting connection to synaesthesia, but also the attention to timbre adds a new layer of complexity to the strands of instruments. Now, when we consider the material instrument being played, we realize that the same melody with different instruments--though a repetition of the silences and the notes--are actually repetition with a difference. While I don't wish to appropriate Nancy's particular interpretation of this 'resonance' in terms of the subject and the self (even though he strives to separate this talk of the subject from the subject as a stable entity--see pgs 8-9 of Listening--Dobrin's Postcomposition suggests that we need to move away from this notion of the 'subject' and 'self' completely to focus on writing as such--I believe Raul Sanchez also moves in this direction) I do want to call attention to the relationship between noise and timbre, with an aim to extending this connection with Serres' (and Taylor's reading of him) conception of noise. Nancy writes,
Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense. At first it communicates nothing--except itself. At its weakest and least articulated degree, one would call it noise. (there is noise in the attack and extinction of sound, and there is always noise in sound itself.) But all noise also contains timbre. In a body that opens up and closes at the same time, that arranges itself and exposes itself with others, the noise of its sharing (with itself, with others) resounds (41).
Thus, by looking at these smaller *almost* silences at the beginning and at the end of a sound we come to realize that these "silences" between the notes are echoes of the past--perhaps in the same way that Mark Taylor engages with the ghosts of his own writing:
"Rewriting does not merely repeat but also transforms in a way that complicates the parasite/host relationship. As the work takes shape, it becomes the host for ghosts now appearing as parasites [. . .] My words remain ghostly because they are haunted by others who have gone before and will haunt other yet to come. Writing always involves the screening of this spectral interplay of parasites and hosts" (Taylor 196).
And so we arrive at Taylor's idea of the "screen." Like Barry's use of the "interpreter" to describe the mind and like the concept of "focalizer," the "screen" both "hides while showing and shows while hiding," a concept that can be traced back probably to ancient wisdom, but which recalls to me some of the late Heidegger when he discusses truth and error among other things. Taylor writes, "In network culture, subjects are screens and knowing is screening" (Taylor 200). While this may seem like Taylor is saying "then, this was this, and NOW this is this" (a la Burnett) Taylor is aware of historical precedents, citing Augustine's Confessions and going all the way back to Plato's concept of ananamisis: "Augustine finally concludes that cogito (to think, reflect) is, in effect, cogo (to bring together, collect)" and a Heideggerian might add to gather (Taylor 201).
Barry supports this kind of thinking with cognitive psychological research--as cited above--with the idea that we cannot be aware of all the activity of our brain. For Taylor, this extends to the information society: "Though there are multiple sources of turbulence, one of the most important factors creating unrest in today's world is the unprecedented noise generated by proliferating networks whose reach extends from the local to the global" (Taylor 202). Dealing with noise in a way that recalls Nancy's analysis of timbre, and drawing on the work of Norretranders, Taylor distinguishes between information and "exformation."
Exformation is perpendicular to information. exformation is what is rejected en route, before expression. Exformation is about the mental work we do in order to make what we want to say sayable. exformation is the discarded information, everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything all all. Information is the measurable, demonstrable utterances as we actually come out with it" (Norretranders qtd. in Taylor 203)
Taylor reads this in a way that suggests Nancy's "communication" as such, which also recalls D. Diane Davis' attempts to get at the sayable rather than the said, which she gets from the thought of Levinas and, as she says in a recent interview, Nancy. Taylor writes,
"Exformation, in other words, is what is left out as information is formed from noise. As such, exformation is not simply absent but is something like a penumbral field from which information is formed. Since information is constituted by what it excludes, it inevitably harbors traces of noise" (203).
Are the traces of noise that Taylor discusses the inevitable echoes, reverberations, and resonances that result from any material embodiment of musical notes? In this sense, performed music never (or rarely) contains utter silence--there is always some sort of noise in between the notes that itches for acknowledgment. Of course, the question is--does writing echo? Does it reverberate? Or is it something particular to sound? Does writing contain a timbre--an attack and a fade such that the spaces between letters or words are really (here we have the I heart huckabees moment) echoes of the words and letters past and future?
Writing does seem to have this self-reflexive, echoing quality, with each echo simultaneously a repetition of the initial sound as well as a completely new element. Does writing contain reverb or delay?
Perhaps this noise within the notes is what John Cage tried to get at with his 4:33:
The point is not the silence of the written piece of music, but the experience and the minute noises that accompany the piece of music--the idea that the audience is not a passive consumer of the music and that the context (a concert) matters as much as the written piece of music itself. This mirrors writing because some pieces of writing are only validated in a certain context within a certain performance/material situation.
Returning to my example of Schoenberg:
Is this chaos or complexity? I leave this question for another post or another night.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
"Listening" and Composition
Listening"
Is music writing? Is music signifying? If not, how can we teach students to 'interpret' it? How might we use the concepts of "production" and "composition" in the musical sense? Is this "aesthetic" dimension to writing--what we usually reduce to 'style'--an essential component to teach students?
While reading a recent interview with D. Diane Davis on her recent book "Inessential Solidarity" (a book, by the way, I am very excited about reading) I came across the name Jean-Luc Nancy: "I started reading everything I could get my hands on about this notion of a rapport sans rapport, an inoperative (Nancy) or unavowable (Blanchot) “community” that has nothing to do with identity or identification, with communion or contracts" (Davis)
This "community" reminded me of my recent reading of Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community and so I decided I would check out a book by Nancy (I had already encountered Blanchot). I chose the very short book (really just a couple short essays) called Listening.
Nancy has forced me to reconsider the non-signifying aspects of music and how they might be related to the teaching of or the theory of "composition."
If, as we have argued in class, "visual rhetoric" is a difficult terminology to keep for what we are doing in this class because rhetoric is about "breaking it into its parts" I would like to suggest that we consider the (im)possibility of musical rhetoric--all of this prompted by Nancy's poetic philosophizing as the relative inattention given to music (rather than reading lyrics like a poem, etc.) in the composition classroom and theory. (See a future post re-interpreting Do the Right Thing from the musical rather than visual perspective)
For now, I will content myself with commenting on a few key quotations from Nancy:
"I would say that timbre is communication of the incommunicable: provided it is understood that the incommunicable is nothing other, in a perfectly logical way, than communication itself, that thing by which a subject makes an echo--of self, of the other, its all one--its all one in the plural.
Communication is not transmission, but a sharing that becomes subject: sharing as subject of all 'subjects'. An unfolding, a dance, a resonance. Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense [. . .] In a body that opens up and closes at the same time, that arranges itself and exposes itself with others, the noise of its sharing (with itself, with others) resounds" (Nancy 41).
Thus, communication in sound (as well as in the visual) is not a transmission of content--a "vehicle" or "medium" for the transmission of signs or meaning. This is what D. Diane Davis attempts to get at when she uses the Levinasian distinction between the saying and the said. Davis attempts to describe the saying--which is a difficult, if not (im)possible task. The communication of communication--the intent to communicate--the desire to be-with (mitsein?). In a way, the performative dimension of language.
However, music, does seem to be divided into its parts more than the visual--music has its own time whereas painting (or the visual) is determined by the perceiving subject. This thought stems from Nancy's observation:
"Whereas visible or tactile presence occurs in a motionless 'at the same time', sonorous presence is an essentially mobile 'at the same time,' vibrating from the come-and-go between the source and the ear, through open space, the present of presence rather than pure presence. One might say: there is a simultaneity of the visible and a contemporaneity of the audible" (16).
Timbre and Arrangement
For both the visual and the audible, it seems that we can locate an "excess" outside of signification. For the visible, we have Barthes "obtuse meaning"--for the audible we have Nancy's concept of timbre.
Timbre is defined as "the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices of musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. Timbre is also known in psychoacoustics as tone quality or tone color" (wikipedia)
In other words, timbre is the quality of an instrument that distinguishes it as that instrument even if instruments can only play a certain number of notes (in the Western scale) (see Nancy's note on the word 'instrument' with reference to Deleuze pg 78 in Listening). Indeed, the different 'voices' of instruments is what makes possible the compositional activity of "arrangement".
Arrangment asks the question: what instrument should play this note? how many of them? How many different parts should there be per instrument (this is tied up in the 'composing' process proper)? Where should the instruments be placed?
In other words, arrangement is in a way the invisible part of the composing process--it involves just as much selection (and perhaps more) as pointing a camera at a group of objects!
Anyone who has played in a symphony can tell you that giving a typical "clarinet" part to a bassoon has technical as well as aesthetic consequences. For example, listen to the bassoon at the beginning of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring:
Look at homeboy's face! that is hard as all hell to play well on bassoon. The bassoon is typically a lower instrument, but the timbre of the bassoon in the higher register makes for a particularly unsettling experience. If a usual clarinet had made these sounds, a completely different effect would take place. These are arrangement issues. Imagine, for instance, if the 3 bassoons were playing that opening line? The same effect? the same musical piece? no.
Arrangement, incidentally, is one of the 5 rhetorical canons. In rhetoric, arrangement "concerns how one orders speech or writing." In composition, this has meant that we pay attention to the order of sentences and the order of paragraphs. We have typical ways of organizing paragraphs--particularly in closed-form prose--the form we primarily teach our students is essential to academic writing.
But arrangement, if taken in its musical sense, is not merely providing a linear and temporal order to one's writing, but concerns the entire process of composition--you may write the melody, the harmony--the notes are there--now who's going to play them? How are they going to sound? How is performance possible. How will the music be (re)pre-sented?
We all know the cliche that no music performance is exactly like another one. Furthermore, we know that no "reading" of a text is the same one everytime. In the case of texts, we usually think of the multiple readings by a perceiving subject as the variable element.
However--in music we see that variation occurs on both sides. The listener of music will get 'new' things out of the piece as the piece is repeated--snatches of melody will stick in the head, key moments will become moments for interpretation--the composition and the performance will take on some sort of order and arrangement. BUT ALSO--besides the listener--we have to take into account that in a concert there are many "invisible" choices made about the performance of the music on the "production" side--on the "musician" side. How does each musician "attack" the note? How does each music phrase the notes? How does the conductor speed up or slow down--in short, how is the page performed?
Why not think about writing in this light? How are the pages of theory "performed" in composition studies? What invisible "arrangement" (in the musical sense) choices are being made when we (re)present a theory on the page. How do we musically perform Foucault or Derrida on the page? in our words?
Kanye West, Music, and Pedagogy
In my 1102 course, we have found that one of the ways to get students to learn how to interpret/read is to use music videos. Jen and Melissa had the brilliant idea to use Kanye West's video for his excellent song, "Power." The video is short, but chock full of "symbolism" (we'll come back to the quotation marks):
When we were assigning the music videos, we asked the students to pay particular attention to the visual elements. Before we showed them the Kanye West video, we prepared them for this type of interpretation with the Rhianna video for Disturbia--with a catch--we turned the sound off. I had never seen nor heard this video before, but watching it with the sound off was, frankly, powerfully affecting.
However, when I got home, I decided to watch it with the sound on and was disappointed with the result. Instead of a dark Manson-esque guitar riff (which is what the video makes one thing of) I got a pansy ass pop song with typical beats.
The strange thing about the videos is we asked them to pay attention to the visual elements in the video, while indicating that it was also ok to "discuss the lyrics." It seemed as though we gave the song the shaft. I realize that this is precisely what I did with the Rhianna video. Frankly, its just not that good of a song--or at the very least--the video seems as far away from the song as possible.
But not because of the lyrics. Indeed, the lyrics to Disturbia fit the video's dark atmosphere:
"Your mind's in disturbia, it's like the darkness is light
Disturbia, am I scaring you tonight?
Disturbia, ain't used to what you like
Disturbia, disturbia"
Profound? no. Dark/creepy? yeah. But the music, the tone, the atmosphere--this didn't "fit".
Contrast the Kanye West music video. The song begins with a sort of "primitive" chanting "ah uh, oooohhhh oohhhh" that recalls West's lyrical and visual content. West has done more than merely compare himself to an Egyptian pharaoh--he has merged a kind of pan-africanism ("in this white man's world, we the ones who chosen") that connects Africa to Egyptian heritage with samples from perhaps one of the "whitest" bands from one of the "whitest" genres--King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man.
Unlike Rhianna's video, West is saying something with his music as well as his lyrics. To interpret the video along with the lyrics as Kanye West's ego on the fritz, I think, denies the complexities of the music and lyrics. First, let us look at the "rhetorical context." West's record that Power is from is called Dark Twisted Fantasy. West's fantasy is like a crazy dream (see the full video for "Runaway") Consider the chorus of Power:
"No one man should have all that power/
The clock's tickin, I just count the hours/
Stop trippin, i'm tripping off the power
(21st century schizoid man)"
(alternately: "till then, fuck that--the world's ours")
And what I will call for convenience's sake the "outro"
"this will be a beautiful death/jumpin out the windooowwww/lettin everything go"
West says that no one man should have all that power--we assume that he is talking about himself (particularly from the visual elements presented). While I would hardly argue that this is incorrect, I think another couple lines from "Power" might give a different interpretation:
"They say I was the abomination of obama's nation/that's a pretty bad way to start a conversation"
"Ye got the power to let power go"
"I treat the cash the way the government treats aids, I won't be satisfied till all my niggas get it, get it?" (Gorgeous)
Maybe I'm crazy, but I would argue that Kanye could be addressing not only himself, but president Obama. I wouldn't say this is because Kanye doesn't like Obama, but that he may be addressing many white liberal opinions that now that we have a Black President we have really progressed. How come we can take obama seriously, but not West? How come people say he is the "abomination of obama's nation?"
I say all of this to both digress and preface my real concern: why aren't we paying attention to the music when we have people interpret music videos? Why do we consider musical interpretation a skill that is basically "subjective" and according to "taste". Furthermore, and I get this point from Greg Ulmer, why do we not take more seriously the concept of "taste" in both it physical, sensorial dimension AND its Kantian aesthetic connotations? Can "taste" be trained? Is there a common "taste"--a "sensus communis" (Kant?). Why do we not explore this in composition courses? Why must music videos and songs be reduced the lyrical/textual signification?
In an era of hip hop sampling from Public Enemy to Kanye to GirlTalk and in an era where, to paraphrase one of my students, "anyone would rather be listening to a song then listening to a lecture," why is music not a more prominent metaphor for writing and composition. We speak of music in today's world as not the product of a band (such as Beatles) or a single artist, but as a collective. Furthermore, "production" has become just as important as chords, melody, and lyrics--perhaps moreso.
When we were assigning the music videos, we asked the students to pay particular attention to the visual elements. Before we showed them the Kanye West video, we prepared them for this type of interpretation with the Rhianna video for Disturbia--with a catch--we turned the sound off. I had never seen nor heard this video before, but watching it with the sound off was, frankly, powerfully affecting.
However, when I got home, I decided to watch it with the sound on and was disappointed with the result. Instead of a dark Manson-esque guitar riff (which is what the video makes one thing of) I got a pansy ass pop song with typical beats.
The strange thing about the videos is we asked them to pay attention to the visual elements in the video, while indicating that it was also ok to "discuss the lyrics." It seemed as though we gave the song the shaft. I realize that this is precisely what I did with the Rhianna video. Frankly, its just not that good of a song--or at the very least--the video seems as far away from the song as possible.
But not because of the lyrics. Indeed, the lyrics to Disturbia fit the video's dark atmosphere:
"Your mind's in disturbia, it's like the darkness is light
Disturbia, am I scaring you tonight?
Disturbia, ain't used to what you like
Disturbia, disturbia"
Profound? no. Dark/creepy? yeah. But the music, the tone, the atmosphere--this didn't "fit".
Contrast the Kanye West music video. The song begins with a sort of "primitive" chanting "ah uh, oooohhhh oohhhh" that recalls West's lyrical and visual content. West has done more than merely compare himself to an Egyptian pharaoh--he has merged a kind of pan-africanism ("in this white man's world, we the ones who chosen") that connects Africa to Egyptian heritage with samples from perhaps one of the "whitest" bands from one of the "whitest" genres--King Crimson's 21st Century Schizoid Man.
Unlike Rhianna's video, West is saying something with his music as well as his lyrics. To interpret the video along with the lyrics as Kanye West's ego on the fritz, I think, denies the complexities of the music and lyrics. First, let us look at the "rhetorical context." West's record that Power is from is called Dark Twisted Fantasy. West's fantasy is like a crazy dream (see the full video for "Runaway") Consider the chorus of Power:
"No one man should have all that power/
The clock's tickin, I just count the hours/
Stop trippin, i'm tripping off the power
(21st century schizoid man)"
(alternately: "till then, fuck that--the world's ours")
And what I will call for convenience's sake the "outro"
"this will be a beautiful death/jumpin out the windooowwww/lettin everything go"
West says that no one man should have all that power--we assume that he is talking about himself (particularly from the visual elements presented). While I would hardly argue that this is incorrect, I think another couple lines from "Power" might give a different interpretation:
"They say I was the abomination of obama's nation/that's a pretty bad way to start a conversation"
"Ye got the power to let power go"
"I treat the cash the way the government treats aids, I won't be satisfied till all my niggas get it, get it?" (Gorgeous)
Maybe I'm crazy, but I would argue that Kanye could be addressing not only himself, but president Obama. I wouldn't say this is because Kanye doesn't like Obama, but that he may be addressing many white liberal opinions that now that we have a Black President we have really progressed. How come we can take obama seriously, but not West? How come people say he is the "abomination of obama's nation?"
I say all of this to both digress and preface my real concern: why aren't we paying attention to the music when we have people interpret music videos? Why do we consider musical interpretation a skill that is basically "subjective" and according to "taste". Furthermore, and I get this point from Greg Ulmer, why do we not take more seriously the concept of "taste" in both it physical, sensorial dimension AND its Kantian aesthetic connotations? Can "taste" be trained? Is there a common "taste"--a "sensus communis" (Kant?). Why do we not explore this in composition courses? Why must music videos and songs be reduced the lyrical/textual signification?
In an era of hip hop sampling from Public Enemy to Kanye to GirlTalk and in an era where, to paraphrase one of my students, "anyone would rather be listening to a song then listening to a lecture," why is music not a more prominent metaphor for writing and composition. We speak of music in today's world as not the product of a band (such as Beatles) or a single artist, but as a collective. Furthermore, "production" has become just as important as chords, melody, and lyrics--perhaps moreso.
(Sidenote: I believe that this is part of the battle between major and indie "bands" or musics--a lot of indie bands have taken it upon themselves to sound "rawer" and messier in order to refute the slick production of pop music. The question is not whether or not universally this is "better" or "more authentic" but rather does it contribute to the music itself?)
Production, composition, sound, resonance, feeling, mood, atmosphere, "timbre"--all words we should take seriously as writers in rhetoric and composition.
Composition is a musical term, and, I believe, an inherently intertextual term. Taking a minor course where we focused on the history of Western music, I have come to realize that even Baroque, classical, and Romantic composers were "quoting" one another constantly within their music. Composers never were singular "geniuses" that worked in a vacuum (just as writers never were)--they borrowed from nature (Olivier Messiaen--see Natoya's recent blog post) as well as each other.
Let us return to Kanye West's "Power," and ask ourselves why he may have taken a cut from King Crimson:
Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Particularly, "Nothing he's got he really needs" undercuts many who believe that Kanye just wants to be rich and famous. He is the 21st century schizoid man--divided between what he has and what he sees, what he says and what he sees or how other people see and say about him.
Never in a million years would I have expected to find so much in Kanye West. Furthermore, I do not want to feed his ego, but, a la Mitchell, want to take a work and ask how it puts an entire institution or thought-structure into question. Above, I was still involved in the act of hermeneutic interpretation--making non-signifying elements, signifying. It means something that Kanye has chosen King Crimson for his sample. Particularly in light of the sort of pan-africanism that seems to permeate the video. Mitchell speaks of the imagetext--is this what "Power" is? Is it an imagesong? The video itself is structured like a slightly moving painting--a tapestry. Kanye is in the center as Christ would be in the center of religious works of art, surrounded by modern cherubim. The painting is moving and yet contains a stiffness, a solidness that is hard to ignore.
All the visual symbols seem to point toward Kanye's glorification even as he feels constantly threatened by "haters" ("Screams from the haters/got a nice ring to it/I guess every superhero need his theme music).
However, if we take the hybridity of the music into account--we can see that this is not just some un-examined Garvey-esque back to Africa fantasy with West on the throne, but a self-aware song about the precarious postmodern condition of famous black men.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Let us return to Kanye West's "Power," and ask ourselves why he may have taken a cut from King Crimson:
Death seed blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs
Twenty first century schizoid man.
Particularly, "Nothing he's got he really needs" undercuts many who believe that Kanye just wants to be rich and famous. He is the 21st century schizoid man--divided between what he has and what he sees, what he says and what he sees or how other people see and say about him.
Never in a million years would I have expected to find so much in Kanye West. Furthermore, I do not want to feed his ego, but, a la Mitchell, want to take a work and ask how it puts an entire institution or thought-structure into question. Above, I was still involved in the act of hermeneutic interpretation--making non-signifying elements, signifying. It means something that Kanye has chosen King Crimson for his sample. Particularly in light of the sort of pan-africanism that seems to permeate the video. Mitchell speaks of the imagetext--is this what "Power" is? Is it an imagesong? The video itself is structured like a slightly moving painting--a tapestry. Kanye is in the center as Christ would be in the center of religious works of art, surrounded by modern cherubim. The painting is moving and yet contains a stiffness, a solidness that is hard to ignore.
All the visual symbols seem to point toward Kanye's glorification even as he feels constantly threatened by "haters" ("Screams from the haters/got a nice ring to it/I guess every superhero need his theme music).
However, if we take the hybridity of the music into account--we can see that this is not just some un-examined Garvey-esque back to Africa fantasy with West on the throne, but a self-aware song about the precarious postmodern condition of famous black men.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
How Images Think: A Report on Common Knowledge
I'm really just not sure to start with this book. Perhaps I'll start with a series of rhetorical questions that I won't really address: Why were we assigned this book? Why did I actually read all of this book? Why didn't a stop after I realized I wasn't learning a damn thing? How did Ron Burnett get this past the publishers? Why did I ever think I was a bad writer?
Well, these are obviously very complex questions that we should research further. But for now, we'll just say that involves a complex set of relationships between my mind, the book, and Western culture.
Anyone who has read this book should recognize my deliberate parody of Burnett's style. The series of questions that Burnett thinks make up a paragraph, a point, or even an argument is pathetic. Furthermore, he uses more useless passive voice constructions than most of my freshman students.
I apologize for the harshness of this blog post, but I really feel like I could have been doing something else better with my life. There were brief glimpses of text where I thought "ok, he'll elaborate this/define it better later"--but no, he never does. I call the book a report on common knowledge because Burnett doesn't seem interested in making any strong or unique arguments. Of course one could argue that much of my favorite French Theorists also tend not to make arguments. That may be true, but at least Baudrillard, Bachelard, Derrida, and Foucault define their terms well and at length. They not only offer a new language to describe reality, but they also make subtle distinctions rather than leaving it to the cop-out (argument?) of reality and illusion are "on a continuum." This move is how he pedantically avoids binaries. . .good for him, but i'll take binaries over useless descriptions.
I will now list all of the things that piss me off about this book. With each complaint, I will reference specific moments in the text as evidence.
1.) Reductive readings and considerations of major thinkers (who are not only better writers, but better thinkers than Burnett.
Exhibit A: "It is precisely because images are the product of a particular moment that more must be added to them than is ever present in the images themselves. This excess, which is often seen as somehow interfering with the meaning of the image, is a necessary staging ground for interpretation and analysis (Deleuze 1986; Eco 1984)" (Burnett 15).
Now, before you get angry, I realize that he is using a different citation style than MLA, but WHERE is this in Deleuze and Eco? Its such a general statement anyone could have said it. Barthes says a similar thing in Image Music Text about obtuse meaning. I think Burnett just wanted to cite Deleuze and Eco. Deleuze is never quoted at all in the rest of the text--which is a shame because he is a much better writer than Burnett.
Exhibit B: "Ironically [we'll return to this constantly misused adverb] it is also why so many new technologies and new media have been criticized for being artificial than extensions of existing mediums of expression that allow the exploration of new image terrains (Baudrillard 1990). In addition, for Baudrillard (1996) the virtual is described as "something that doesn't happen" as if mediated experiences negated or reversed the relationships between the real and the artificial" (Burnett 113).
So B (1990) is cited in the bibliography as Fatal Strategies. I just read Fatal Strategies in its entirety, taking detailed notes for Ulmer's course and I'm not sure that one can ascribe the position of critiquing new media to Baudrillard. Like Burnett, he seems to be making broad sweeping generalizations about the loss of the "scene" to the "obscene" that occurs with news media, but Baudrillard's position cannot be so easily pinned down. Baudrillard is just as generalizing, but he is aware that his philosophy is "poetic"--Burnett tries to cite both french theory and scientific studies to fool people into thinking that he is more 'credible' and 'interdisciplinary'. This is the approach he calls for and I presume what he thinks he's doing, but I think he lacks any rigorous argumentation and evidence.
2.) The use of the adverb "ironically" without any elaboration of why something is ironic. Furthermore, no one should use "ironically" as much as it appears in this book.
pg 113, above
pg 137: "Ironically, so much of what happens in the human body is not in anyone's control"
pg 139: "It is an irony that machines, particularly computers, are allowing researchers to rewrite the underlying codes for the natural world"
pg 164: "Ironically, as the pipes have grown larger and as more and more people have connected to them, there has been increasing pressure to develop additional content"
(you get the point--this is annoying as hell).
3.) The juvenile use of barrages of rhetorical questions never addressed subsequently; other meta-language indicators that are useless due to his use of headlines.
(explained above)
4.) His relentless insistence that we not describe the mind as mechanical, but offering us a vague alternative he never elaborates on called "reverie" and "imagination"
"Reverie is often referred to as 'suspension of disbelief' with respect to viewing films and television shows, reading novels, listening to music, and so on. But the process is more complex than that. Reverie is one of the foundations for all these activies, one of the fundamental ways in which humans are able to activate the relationships among their own thoughts and daydreams and the requirements of viewing and listening experiences. Reverie permits and encourages empathy" (Burnett 53).
First, who the hell ever called reverie/imagination a "suspension of disbelief" and how exactly is that applied also to the other media he discusses. Second, we might think that we are going to get an elaborate discussion of what he can possibly mean by the connections between reverie, empathy, and daydreams. Indeed, I expected an engagement with Bloch, who talks at length about the importance of daydreams. Or at the very least, since reverie encourages empathy, we might expect a discussion of the ethical implications of this. However, Burnett will give us none of this. Reverie is referred to again and again with little elaboration on the concept--it is assumed we know what it means. 15 pages from the end, Burnett returns to reverie:
"Reverie is a crucial concept that explains how the experiences of interacting with images and stories of all sorts connect to listening and daydreaming. Reverie is a reflective process that allows for what I call 'waves of interaction.' This metaphor refers to the complex movements of waves on a beach as viewed by the human subject" (204).
He then goes on to connect reverie to "gaze" as opposed to "look," where he actually makes a clear distinction: "gazing is not the same as looking. To gaze is to scan, while to look means that an effort has to be made to focus on some features of the environment being observed [. . .] Gazing is more of a background activity" (204). So reverie is linked with gazing. . .
Ok, so he gives us a little blurb about reverie at the end, but if this is such a "crucial concept" why is it not explained earlier? Why doesn't it permeate the majority of the book? (oh god!! I'm beginning to ask rhetorical questions--his style has rubbed off on me and I am now yelling "Unclean!!!! unclean!!)
5.) His fetishism of technology--as if he is shocked or surprised by mundane objects; related: useless adjectives like "fascinating, interesting, interestingly, is interesting" etc. etc. Over and over again, it seems like he has taken our class's mode of engagement "hey, this shit is cool" and decided he was going to write an academic text in this manner.
Example: "The extraordinary thing is how ready users are to 'play' with these limitations and how so much energy has been devoted to conquering the problems that the interfaces pose" (Burnett 185)
6.) un-insightful comments on technology:
See "What telephones have done. . ." (Burnett 132)
And his reflections on word processors (insights that I made in my freshman year of college) (Burnett 114-115)
7.) His uncritical attitude toward his own concepts, terminology, and assumptions, preferring to endorse the 'virtual' as sites of interaction and relying on only one mode of posthuman thought (Futurism) that privilege the Mind over body (even though he tries desperately to talk about the body).
He cites McLuhan on telephones as 'extensions' of our body and says its only "partially correct" (134), explaining "The notion of extension still makes it seem as if the machine were other to the humans who use it. Clearly, incorporation is a better term to describe the breadth and extent of human-machine relation. Incorporation works both ways. And incorporation is, in my opinion, an ecological term" (134).
So incorporation (inc.) is an ecological term. Ok, I can buy that, but why does he say that "clearly" we have to make sure we don't represent the phone as other? Does he privately fantasize about Kurczweil and Moravec's dream of getting to the point where we can become disembodied--or that we basically morph into machines (but machines with "imagination"?). There are no extended reflections on the body. . .just some gestures toward Katherine Hayles and Donna Harroway. Also, what does he mean by "ecological term"? Does he ever really go into what he means by "ecology"? Not really. (damnit, there I go again with the questions).
8. A sort of teleological, "phase" approach to technology--believing that technology's progress is inevitable and mostly using the phrase "will be" to describe what he *knows* is goign to happen as technology develops.
"I regard the period of aesthetic experimentation in video and computer games to be in its early phase" (193).
9.) The random placement of blocked off text on the sides of pages, with no real rhyme and reason--some of them are quotes, some reflections. This seems like a cool idea, but they add nothing to what he is saying. Are these simply things he wished he could put in the book but didn't think he could fit them into his argument?
(pgs 193, 134-135, 130, etc.)
The text also seems "dated" somehow. How, we might ask, can Burnett's 2004 text seem more dated than Mitchell's written in the 90's? Well, this is a question I will attempt to answer: Mitchell's text uses subtle analytical and philosophical techniques located within a specific text and cultural/historical situation. Burnett's text relies on a cataloging of various technologies that he thinks have affected us differently.
Burnett never gets into questions about what technology is in its essence. This is the province of technics (which I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to these days).
I'll take Heidegger's obscure struggles and meditations on language any day to this mess of scholarship.
Well, these are obviously very complex questions that we should research further. But for now, we'll just say that involves a complex set of relationships between my mind, the book, and Western culture.
Anyone who has read this book should recognize my deliberate parody of Burnett's style. The series of questions that Burnett thinks make up a paragraph, a point, or even an argument is pathetic. Furthermore, he uses more useless passive voice constructions than most of my freshman students.
I apologize for the harshness of this blog post, but I really feel like I could have been doing something else better with my life. There were brief glimpses of text where I thought "ok, he'll elaborate this/define it better later"--but no, he never does. I call the book a report on common knowledge because Burnett doesn't seem interested in making any strong or unique arguments. Of course one could argue that much of my favorite French Theorists also tend not to make arguments. That may be true, but at least Baudrillard, Bachelard, Derrida, and Foucault define their terms well and at length. They not only offer a new language to describe reality, but they also make subtle distinctions rather than leaving it to the cop-out (argument?) of reality and illusion are "on a continuum." This move is how he pedantically avoids binaries. . .good for him, but i'll take binaries over useless descriptions.
I will now list all of the things that piss me off about this book. With each complaint, I will reference specific moments in the text as evidence.
1.) Reductive readings and considerations of major thinkers (who are not only better writers, but better thinkers than Burnett.
Exhibit A: "It is precisely because images are the product of a particular moment that more must be added to them than is ever present in the images themselves. This excess, which is often seen as somehow interfering with the meaning of the image, is a necessary staging ground for interpretation and analysis (Deleuze 1986; Eco 1984)" (Burnett 15).
Now, before you get angry, I realize that he is using a different citation style than MLA, but WHERE is this in Deleuze and Eco? Its such a general statement anyone could have said it. Barthes says a similar thing in Image Music Text about obtuse meaning. I think Burnett just wanted to cite Deleuze and Eco. Deleuze is never quoted at all in the rest of the text--which is a shame because he is a much better writer than Burnett.
Exhibit B: "Ironically [we'll return to this constantly misused adverb] it is also why so many new technologies and new media have been criticized for being artificial than extensions of existing mediums of expression that allow the exploration of new image terrains (Baudrillard 1990). In addition, for Baudrillard (1996) the virtual is described as "something that doesn't happen" as if mediated experiences negated or reversed the relationships between the real and the artificial" (Burnett 113).
So B (1990) is cited in the bibliography as Fatal Strategies. I just read Fatal Strategies in its entirety, taking detailed notes for Ulmer's course and I'm not sure that one can ascribe the position of critiquing new media to Baudrillard. Like Burnett, he seems to be making broad sweeping generalizations about the loss of the "scene" to the "obscene" that occurs with news media, but Baudrillard's position cannot be so easily pinned down. Baudrillard is just as generalizing, but he is aware that his philosophy is "poetic"--Burnett tries to cite both french theory and scientific studies to fool people into thinking that he is more 'credible' and 'interdisciplinary'. This is the approach he calls for and I presume what he thinks he's doing, but I think he lacks any rigorous argumentation and evidence.
2.) The use of the adverb "ironically" without any elaboration of why something is ironic. Furthermore, no one should use "ironically" as much as it appears in this book.
pg 113, above
pg 137: "Ironically, so much of what happens in the human body is not in anyone's control"
pg 139: "It is an irony that machines, particularly computers, are allowing researchers to rewrite the underlying codes for the natural world"
pg 164: "Ironically, as the pipes have grown larger and as more and more people have connected to them, there has been increasing pressure to develop additional content"
(you get the point--this is annoying as hell).
3.) The juvenile use of barrages of rhetorical questions never addressed subsequently; other meta-language indicators that are useless due to his use of headlines.
(explained above)
4.) His relentless insistence that we not describe the mind as mechanical, but offering us a vague alternative he never elaborates on called "reverie" and "imagination"
"Reverie is often referred to as 'suspension of disbelief' with respect to viewing films and television shows, reading novels, listening to music, and so on. But the process is more complex than that. Reverie is one of the foundations for all these activies, one of the fundamental ways in which humans are able to activate the relationships among their own thoughts and daydreams and the requirements of viewing and listening experiences. Reverie permits and encourages empathy" (Burnett 53).
First, who the hell ever called reverie/imagination a "suspension of disbelief" and how exactly is that applied also to the other media he discusses. Second, we might think that we are going to get an elaborate discussion of what he can possibly mean by the connections between reverie, empathy, and daydreams. Indeed, I expected an engagement with Bloch, who talks at length about the importance of daydreams. Or at the very least, since reverie encourages empathy, we might expect a discussion of the ethical implications of this. However, Burnett will give us none of this. Reverie is referred to again and again with little elaboration on the concept--it is assumed we know what it means. 15 pages from the end, Burnett returns to reverie:
"Reverie is a crucial concept that explains how the experiences of interacting with images and stories of all sorts connect to listening and daydreaming. Reverie is a reflective process that allows for what I call 'waves of interaction.' This metaphor refers to the complex movements of waves on a beach as viewed by the human subject" (204).
He then goes on to connect reverie to "gaze" as opposed to "look," where he actually makes a clear distinction: "gazing is not the same as looking. To gaze is to scan, while to look means that an effort has to be made to focus on some features of the environment being observed [. . .] Gazing is more of a background activity" (204). So reverie is linked with gazing. . .
Ok, so he gives us a little blurb about reverie at the end, but if this is such a "crucial concept" why is it not explained earlier? Why doesn't it permeate the majority of the book? (oh god!! I'm beginning to ask rhetorical questions--his style has rubbed off on me and I am now yelling "Unclean!!!! unclean!!)
5.) His fetishism of technology--as if he is shocked or surprised by mundane objects; related: useless adjectives like "fascinating, interesting, interestingly, is interesting" etc. etc. Over and over again, it seems like he has taken our class's mode of engagement "hey, this shit is cool" and decided he was going to write an academic text in this manner.
Example: "The extraordinary thing is how ready users are to 'play' with these limitations and how so much energy has been devoted to conquering the problems that the interfaces pose" (Burnett 185)
6.) un-insightful comments on technology:
See "What telephones have done. . ." (Burnett 132)
And his reflections on word processors (insights that I made in my freshman year of college) (Burnett 114-115)
7.) His uncritical attitude toward his own concepts, terminology, and assumptions, preferring to endorse the 'virtual' as sites of interaction and relying on only one mode of posthuman thought (Futurism) that privilege the Mind over body (even though he tries desperately to talk about the body).
He cites McLuhan on telephones as 'extensions' of our body and says its only "partially correct" (134), explaining "The notion of extension still makes it seem as if the machine were other to the humans who use it. Clearly, incorporation is a better term to describe the breadth and extent of human-machine relation. Incorporation works both ways. And incorporation is, in my opinion, an ecological term" (134).
So incorporation (inc.) is an ecological term. Ok, I can buy that, but why does he say that "clearly" we have to make sure we don't represent the phone as other? Does he privately fantasize about Kurczweil and Moravec's dream of getting to the point where we can become disembodied--or that we basically morph into machines (but machines with "imagination"?). There are no extended reflections on the body. . .just some gestures toward Katherine Hayles and Donna Harroway. Also, what does he mean by "ecological term"? Does he ever really go into what he means by "ecology"? Not really. (damnit, there I go again with the questions).
8. A sort of teleological, "phase" approach to technology--believing that technology's progress is inevitable and mostly using the phrase "will be" to describe what he *knows* is goign to happen as technology develops.
"I regard the period of aesthetic experimentation in video and computer games to be in its early phase" (193).
9.) The random placement of blocked off text on the sides of pages, with no real rhyme and reason--some of them are quotes, some reflections. This seems like a cool idea, but they add nothing to what he is saying. Are these simply things he wished he could put in the book but didn't think he could fit them into his argument?
(pgs 193, 134-135, 130, etc.)
The text also seems "dated" somehow. How, we might ask, can Burnett's 2004 text seem more dated than Mitchell's written in the 90's? Well, this is a question I will attempt to answer: Mitchell's text uses subtle analytical and philosophical techniques located within a specific text and cultural/historical situation. Burnett's text relies on a cataloging of various technologies that he thinks have affected us differently.
Burnett never gets into questions about what technology is in its essence. This is the province of technics (which I'm becoming more and more sympathetic to these days).
I'll take Heidegger's obscure struggles and meditations on language any day to this mess of scholarship.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Contested Public Space: A Contemporary Extension of Mitchell's discussion of the Public Sphere
"Identifying the use of space in any given moment--the occupation of space in any given moment--provides the opportunity to reveal contrasting, contradictory uses of space, to identify the ideological struggles that look to inscribe meaning" --Sid Dobrin, "The Occupation of Composition"
In the second half of Mitchell's book, Mitchell takes on the problem of public space, art, and representation. Clearly, we have not moved beyond this important debate about public space. While so many things have overshadowed it, who could forget the fiery debate about the plan to build a mosque at ground zero in New York?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t2QEjZjVII&feature=fvst
Rather than take one side or the other--particularly because the debate seems to have calmed down or simply been forgotten by the media and the American public--I would like to look at why people care so much. First, as many have pointed out, the "mosque" is actually a community center. Furthermore, this center is two blocks from ground zero itself. So why the contesting of the mosque?
Well, I would say that even though I agree that they have the right to build there--it IS a big deal. And it is not because, as the firefighter in the above youtube video proclaims, that we don't want the dead's families to suffer more. Its not the families independently that will suffer (unless they are told that they should be suffering by the media). This argument focuses on the "private" reasons for not building a mosque. We might ask, why the hell do we all of a sudden care about people's private suffering, when we usually pass it by (myself included)? I would argue that people are trying to express a concept of space that will confuse our conceptions of a rational democracy. The space is not only "symbolic" either. . .it is even more than that.
Allow me to digress: a lot of Americans don't understand the significance of the Israel-Palestine debate over the gaza strip. I myself have once said--"its just a piece of land." To our christianized nation--yes--its just a piece of land, but for these people the land is sacred.
But how would we (the educated mostly left leaning academics at UF) react if Sarah Palin or any of the right called the space "sacred"? This would only be one more reason for us to argue that the right is once again confusing religion and politics. The very word 'sacred' echoes in our head as a religious battle--a battle between the Christian West and Islam--with Islam occupying the space of the Other.
While I think we are correct in criticizing the critics of the community center as coming dangerously close to denying a core American value of freedom of religion, I think that rather than dwell on that issue we need to understand that we cannot just get rid of a space that has been claimed 'sacred'--that if we admit that space is never innocent or neutral, that we cannot always uphold this illusion of religious freedom.
I turn now to an excerpt from Henri Lefebvre on monuments to elaborate on the connection between the sacred and what we now know as 'ground zero'.Ground Zero has already become an American Monument (albeit a negative one) indicated by the eventual building of a memorial/museum where the WTC stood (on a side note, its interesting to note that we have transformed the event to 'ground zero' rather than the WTC, eliminating the crucial context of the WTC as the hub of global capitalism). Lefebvre claims that a monumental space, as opposed to a mere 'building' "is determined by what may take place there and consequently by what may not take place there (prescribed/proscribed, scene/obscene). A memorial and museum can take place there, because these are (without using the words) 'sacred' objects in our culture (indeed, the connection between the sacredness of museums and monuments in contrast to 'public art' may be a fascinating study--or rather, a fascinating career). An islamic community center cannot take place there, because to our Christianized nation in the wake of islamic terrorism, Islam is a profane religion--even, to some, a religion of hate and violence (in other words, no religion like me know).
Another short digression, while above I argued that we need to focus on the public meaning rather than the private meaning (the families of 9/11 or firefighters of 9/11) Lefebvre does claim that "monumental space permits a continual back-and-forth between the private speech of ordinary conversations adn the public speech of discourses, lectures, sermons, rallying cries, and all theatrical forms of utterance" (355). Though I'm not quite sure what to make of this, I suspect that it complicates my above claim.
This final quote from Lefebvre is important for understanding why the monumental space of 'ground zero' is so sacred to Americans:
"Thus each monumental space becomes the metaphorical and quasimetaphysical underpinnings of a society, this by virtue of a play of substitutions in which the religious and political realms symbolically (and ceremonially) exchange attributes--the attributes of power; in this way the authority of the sacred and the sacred aspects of authority are transferred back and forth, mutually reinforcing one another in the process [. . .] The famous bar which, according to the followers of Saussure, separates signifier from signified and desire from tis object, is in fact transportable hither and thither at the whim of society, as a means of separating the sacred from the profane and of repressing those gestures which are not prescribed by monumental space--in short, as a means of banishing the obscene" (356).
I hope that my brief comments are not taken as support for the Right's Islamophobia. Rather, I want to ask how monumental space confuses American so-called separation between church and state as well as freedom of religion.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Mitchell--A sutured text
Introduction
Mitchell's book, Picture Theory, is an erudite exploration of the relationship between images and text (or word and image). Rather than take a side and argue that images are translatable into texts and vice versa, Mitchell tries to complicate the relationship between them in a series of essays. The individual essays are rich, but they tend to concentrate on very particular works, images, or texts. This makes it difficult to find a way to talk about Mitchell's general point in relation to the text. As I was reading him, it seemed I was reading an analytic philosopher's engagement with french theory (Derrida, Foucault)--something like reading Stanley Cavell. Like the three previous mentioned philosophers, there is a reason that it is difficult to 'take away' (what Louise Rosenblatt might call an 'efferent' reading). Rather, we are left with a complex labyrinth of ideas. Mitchell weaves together the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political to create a dense (and yet, inspired by Foucault, a very 'surface') reading of the works in question.
Mitchell is not so much interested in the "meaning" of these works, as with the way they may structure a way of thinking. Thus, we are not supposed to necessarily come away with a new 'understanding' of Blake, slave narratives, or cartoons. Mitchell, writes, that "knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them" does not give us power over them, so perhaps if we can "open a negative critical space that would reveal how little we understand about pictures, and how little difference mere understanding is likely alone to make" we could do something with them" (6). "Mitchell attempts to use these 'pictures' as a way to think differently about the image/text relationship and the way this reflects theory and ideology. He writes in the introduction,
"My aim has not been to produce a 'picture theory' (much less a theory of pictures) ,but to picture theory as a practical activity in the formation of representations" (6).
Thus, we are to understand the word 'picture' as a VERB, not as an adjective or part of a proper term 'picture theory'. Furthermore, his own methods I believe reflect this task and so it is very difficult to "understand" Mitchell. I cannot pin him down into a position--he does not reveal a particular affinity for Marxism, deconstruction, or new criticism. Through a few of his comments, it seems obvious he is politically left and deeply interested in the political implications of a picture (or theory's) perspective. Yet, it goes beyond this.
So, in the spirit of Mitchell's own work, I will attempt to perform an ekphrastic description, tracing some of the concepts, motifs, metaphors, in the work and ultimately attempt to describe Mitchell's practice--or perhaps--his 'principles' of engaging with images, texts, and imagetexts. Furthermore, I surmise that this first part of Mitchell will go quite well with our film for Monday, "objectified" since it seems that Mitchell is describing how images in some sense 'rule our world'--such that graphic designers consciously see this as their task.
Picturing Theory
In his first chapter, "The Pictorial turn," it is no surprise that he would look at two thinkers' "primal scenes" for their entire philosophy. When we think of Althusser, we think of interpellation, and we think of the scene with the cop or the person at the door--we think of the images/anecdotes that not merely 'illustrate' their philosophy, but are integral to our understanding their philosophy. Indeed, we could find many examples of this fictive anecdotes that most people may think of as harmless 'illustration' or harmless 'metaphor', but we are right to look at these frameworks of philosophers. For instance, Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic--we think of this in terms of a narrative and story. Just as importantly, Sartre's colorful anecdotes illustrating 'bad faith' and his major tropes in Being and Nothingness of sado/masochism for describing our relationship with the Other. I think Mitchell is trying to say that there is a reason these stick in our heads as opposed to the pages upon pages of working through the metaphysics of Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl (in the case of Sartre).
And so he does this with Althusser and Panofsky. Rather than collapsing them into one, he traces their differences, only to find at a certain level of 'discourse' or images a commonality (a multiplicity?) refusing a reduction of their thought, but realizing that this implies a certain view of the world (but at the level of the scene). The common 'space' that both Althusser and Panofsky occupy is
The way Mitchell describes this insight is (perhaps ironically) in terms of "recognizing" the problems of basing a 'science' of ideology or iconography on a scene of recognition/acknowledgment that in turn implies certain relations on an ethical and political level. Strangely, Mitchell reproduces the rhetoric of recognition/acknowledgment in his discussion of what this connection may imply:
Thus, each figure tells us something about the other, but does not solve the problems that we can now see by looking at this similarity. Our connection does not lead us into a further understanding of the picture or the scene, but leads us (basically) to a deconstruction of both systems of thought that pretend toward an objective scientific stance.
Metapictures
Mitchell's next chapter, "Metapictures" is a key chapter for many reasons. We do not have to 'discover' Mitchell's method, because he tells it to us in the first couple pages: "My procedure, therefore, will be ekphrastic. That is, I'm simply going to attempt faithful descriptions of a series of pictures that seem to be self-referential in various ways" (38).
Ekphrasis is 'description', but does this not give us a sort of false sense of 'objectivity'?. . .or perhaps 'objectivity' is the wrong word. Innocence? The use of the term "simply" or when he uses "merely" (recalling Kant's annoying use of 'merely', allowing him to equivocate in his philosophy) seems to attempt to reassure the reader that he is not trying to 'dig into' the image--he is not going to do it violence--he is going to try and take the picture 'as it is'---he is going to attempt to see if pictures themselves have their own 'metalanguage', a second-order discourse without the explicit need for verbal articulation (although this is what Mitchell can do given the limitations of academic prose). I am suspicious of this method, yet intrigued. We will have to go to the chapter on "Ekphrasis and the Other" to fully see what is going on in Mitchell, but before we do this, let us look at a few of his examples in the chapter "metapictures."
Throughout the chapter, instead of defining the meta-picture, he will unravel the very concept: "Perhaps the most obvious thing called into question by the metapicture is the structure of 'inside and outside', first and second order representation, on which the whole concept of meta- is based" (42). In the spirit of Wittgenstein (and, the more I think about it, in the spirit of Archaeology era Foucault), Mitchell traces the different kinds/ways a picture can be what he will call a meta-picture. Thus, like Wittgenstein's notion of 'family resemblances' in the concept of 'game', Mitchell does not collapse all of these metapictures into one definition except that it is a "picture that is about itself." But, we must remember, it does not explain anything--this is particularly difficult for me to grasp.
Duck Rabbit
The duck-rabbit is a meta-picture that Mitchell calls "dialectical pictures" because their primary function is "to illustrate the co-existence of contrary of simply different readings in the single image" (45). The most famous use of the duck-rabbit is in Wittgenstein. We cannot say that the duck-rabbit 'illustrates' Wittgenstein's philosophy or concept: "The Duck-Rabbit is the ideal hypericon for Wittgenstein because it cannot explain anything (it remains always to be explained) and if it has a 'doctrine' or message, it is only as an emblem of resistance to stable interpretation, to being taken in at a glance" (50). The Duck-Rabbit, and some other meta-pictures have a different 'subject' than themselves--they "call into question the self-understanding of the observer" (57).
As we can see in the duck-rabbit example, meta-pictures are migratory--meaning that they are not only part of a particular discipline, but have a wide-ranging status in the cultural field. They puzzle us.
Instead of thinking about the 'meaning' of the meta-picture, Mitchell moves in an almost conventional rhetorical dimension: the consideration of the effects of the meta-picture: "the effect [ of "This is not a Pipe"] is to be a certain infinite reverie activated by the density of the image and the legend, how they are drawn and inscribed" (74). Mitchell uses tropes to describe these effects (another one is the "Vortex" effect)--just as he points out that Wittgenstein cannot get outside the picture/use of trope. The reference to 'reverie' reminds me of Kant's aesthetic contemplation, but Mitchell would not wish to claim that the effect is purely aesthetic. As he writes about Magritte's picture, "the idleness and reverie connoted by the pipe are not incompatible with disciplinary pedagogies, especially the sort that involve initiation rituals and exercises in self-understanding" (74). Mitchell points out that we can 'return' the pipe to the world by 'erasing' the legend and placing another text there.
These 'effects' cannot be collapsed into a single 'effect' of meta-pictures. I think that Mitchell thinks these are different effects that must be described on their own terms. If meta-pictures really are concerned with effects, then we can understand Mitchell's final move in the essay: "The metapicture is not a subgenre within the fine arts but a fundamental potentiality inherent in pictorial representation as such: it is the place where pictures reveal and 'know' themselves [. . .] where they engage in speculations and theorizing on their own nature and history" (82).
Suture
Surgery
Mitchell's use of the word "suture" to describe the image-text relationship is an interesting one. Suture can mean, in the surgical sense, "a stitch used by doctors to hold tissue together." Etymologically, it means 'to join'. And yet, 'suture' to me seems so close to 'sever'--it doesn't sound like a word that holds something together. Perhaps it is important that suture refers explicitly to the closing of a wound. So, although suture means to 'join' it also has the connotation of wound. It only holds together the wound while the wound heals, but I think that Mitchell would argue that the image/text relationship never quite heals--it never merges into one--it is always the relationship of the suture--an on-the-way to healing, but never quite getting there.
Geography
In geography, 'suture' also means "a major fault zone through an oregen or mountain range. Sutures separate terranes: tectonic units that have different plate tectonic, metamorphic, and paleographic histories."
Although this geographical meaning is derived in a kind of metaphorical drift from surgery, in some ways it seems more appropriate to Mitchell's methods. Furthermore, suture means in paleontology a "fossil exoskeleton, as in a suture line."
Considering Mitchell's insistence that the 'metapictures' are like figures (or, in verbal terms, tropes) which migrate across disciplines, it seems appropriate to look at the meaning of the word outside of the two that Mitchell mentions--film theory and psychoanalysis. If we take Mitchell's work to be influenced heavily by Deleuze's reading of Foucault, we can see that this 'structural' meaning of suture may be useful for understanding his methods. On a related note, we should also consider the importance of shifting from the model of suture in psychoanalysis/Lacan to suture as geography given Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus and their geographical metaphors: "de-territorialization." I find it hard to believe Mitchell did not capitalize on this metaphorical relationship.
Fault zones are zones of complex deformation in earth's tectonic plates. It is not a simple fracture, but a set of complex relations. Foucault's archaeological method is based on the idea of looking at the surfaces of different levels. Mostly, he applies this to history, changing the very meaning of the "history of ideas," and so the definition of suture as separating 'terranes'--which have different 'histories' seems an appropriate figure. The various 'histories' are like the various levels. Foucault writes, "archaeology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of its discourse" (AK 171). He speaks of "discontinuities" and redefines rupture as a sort of re-organization and transformation:
This recalls to me the shifting of tectonic plates, where, as Baudrillard puts it "at the bottom (!) the ground never existed, only a cracked epidermis; nor were there any depths" (Baudrillard 40). Mitchell himself uses this geographical metaphor, but does not take it further: "But [Magritte's] real aim is to show what cannot be pictured or made readable, the fissure in representation itself, the bands, layers, and fault-lines of discourse, the blank space between the text and the image" (Mitchell 69).
Thus, the suture in Mitchell, I think, should be understand more as a sort of 'suturing' (joining together) the senses of suture in the medical and the geographical sense such that the geographical sense structures spatially the medical sense (as Foucault would do in his own work).
Ekphrasis
Mitchell begins his book with a quotation from Richard Rorty's Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature. This is his starting point for discussing the "Pictorial turn." But Rorty is important for Mitchell in another way as well: Rorty is known for his (at the time--particularly in the 'analytic' tradition) statement that philosophy is less about 'arguing' and more about re-describing the world. Philosophy is description, or, 'ekphrasis'.
(And--a question I've been pondering--is there a difference between ekphrasis and tropes? Ekphrasis as 'description' seems to be opposed to the use of tropes, but we find every major figure Mitchell discusses and Mitchell himself using tropes rather than creating a meta-language)
Mitchell distinguishes three 'attitudes' towards ekphrasis:
1. Ekphrastic hope: "the impossiblity of ekphrastic is overcome in imagination or metaphor, when we discover a 'sense' in which language can do what so many writers have wanted it to do: 'make us see' (152). It is also when "the estrangement of the image/text division is overcome and a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext arises in its place" (154).
2. Ekphrastic fear: "the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually (154).
3. Ekphrastic indifference: ekphrasis is strictly impossible, it is a curiosity--an obscure literary genre and of a more general topic (the verbal representation of visual art (152).
Mitchell attempts to look at these three "moments" from the perspective of the "relatively neutral viewpoint of ekphrastic indifference, the assumption that ekphrasis is, strictly speaking, impossible" (156).
Before moving on to the rest of the chapter, I want to lthink for a moment about 'ekphrastic hope' in terms of Mitchell's use of the word 'suture'. Here, suture would be the sort of ideal, healing suture that is 'ideal and utopian'--one that will eventually heal the division so that 'imagetext' could be a legitimate hybrid. I think that Mitchell's attention to the mutual dependence of ekphrastic hope and fear shows that we must reveal the assumptions inherent in whatever 'suture' we sew.
Homer and Ekphrasis
Mitchell argues that 'ekphrastic poetry' is a site where ekphrasis as a "sham or illusion" is "worked through" like ideology (163). The key moment of ekphrasis in this essay for Mitchell is Homer's description of Achilles' shield.
Mitchell sets up his analysis by referring to the commonplace of Marshal Mcluhan's "the medium is the message." Mitchell writes,
In other words, Mitchell seems to be asking why we must collapse materiality and message into the same 'level'. Why can we not describe the material/practical/social differences as part of the message, but not as the end all be all. This is something I think we need to discuss more in class.
While there are many debates about the function of Achilles shield, Mitchell believes that these are not mutually exclusive:
Here we return to the problem of the 'suture'--it seems as though Mitchell argues that when an imagetext conceals its own suturing, pretending to be a utopian moment where imagination can conquer the gap, it is an ideology that needs to be worked through. Whereas, when the imagetext reveals its own suturing, it allows us to see that the utopian moment is elsewhere. I am not quite sure I understand Mitchell's next move:
I am just not sure what to do with this passage and what he means by a "utopian site"--what is Mitchell saying about the reader? It has something to do with the 'suture' and so I am led back to Mitchell's long footnote on pages 91-92:
What is utopian about this relationship? As readers, are we really in a 'no-place' or 'good-place'--in a sort of "neutral" positioning? Mitchell seems to back out of his claim that ekphrastic indifference leaves ekphrasis as a "curiosity"--ekphrastic poetry instead seems to be very important and paradigmatic for the imagetext. The canonical examples show how
And I don't really have a conclusion for this. Of course, I am only halfway through the book and so perhaps the rest of the book will answer (or at least "describe better") some of my questions, concerns, and confusions. All in all, I felt like moving through Mitchell's text very closely, tracing his language was the only way to really 'get' this text. I can only hope that the rest of the book provides as much food for thought as the first half.
Mitchell's book, Picture Theory, is an erudite exploration of the relationship between images and text (or word and image). Rather than take a side and argue that images are translatable into texts and vice versa, Mitchell tries to complicate the relationship between them in a series of essays. The individual essays are rich, but they tend to concentrate on very particular works, images, or texts. This makes it difficult to find a way to talk about Mitchell's general point in relation to the text. As I was reading him, it seemed I was reading an analytic philosopher's engagement with french theory (Derrida, Foucault)--something like reading Stanley Cavell. Like the three previous mentioned philosophers, there is a reason that it is difficult to 'take away' (what Louise Rosenblatt might call an 'efferent' reading). Rather, we are left with a complex labyrinth of ideas. Mitchell weaves together the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political to create a dense (and yet, inspired by Foucault, a very 'surface') reading of the works in question.
Mitchell is not so much interested in the "meaning" of these works, as with the way they may structure a way of thinking. Thus, we are not supposed to necessarily come away with a new 'understanding' of Blake, slave narratives, or cartoons. Mitchell, writes, that "knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them" does not give us power over them, so perhaps if we can "open a negative critical space that would reveal how little we understand about pictures, and how little difference mere understanding is likely alone to make" we could do something with them" (6). "Mitchell attempts to use these 'pictures' as a way to think differently about the image/text relationship and the way this reflects theory and ideology. He writes in the introduction,
"My aim has not been to produce a 'picture theory' (much less a theory of pictures) ,but to picture theory as a practical activity in the formation of representations" (6).
Thus, we are to understand the word 'picture' as a VERB, not as an adjective or part of a proper term 'picture theory'. Furthermore, his own methods I believe reflect this task and so it is very difficult to "understand" Mitchell. I cannot pin him down into a position--he does not reveal a particular affinity for Marxism, deconstruction, or new criticism. Through a few of his comments, it seems obvious he is politically left and deeply interested in the political implications of a picture (or theory's) perspective. Yet, it goes beyond this.
So, in the spirit of Mitchell's own work, I will attempt to perform an ekphrastic description, tracing some of the concepts, motifs, metaphors, in the work and ultimately attempt to describe Mitchell's practice--or perhaps--his 'principles' of engaging with images, texts, and imagetexts. Furthermore, I surmise that this first part of Mitchell will go quite well with our film for Monday, "objectified" since it seems that Mitchell is describing how images in some sense 'rule our world'--such that graphic designers consciously see this as their task.
Picturing Theory
In his first chapter, "The Pictorial turn," it is no surprise that he would look at two thinkers' "primal scenes" for their entire philosophy. When we think of Althusser, we think of interpellation, and we think of the scene with the cop or the person at the door--we think of the images/anecdotes that not merely 'illustrate' their philosophy, but are integral to our understanding their philosophy. Indeed, we could find many examples of this fictive anecdotes that most people may think of as harmless 'illustration' or harmless 'metaphor', but we are right to look at these frameworks of philosophers. For instance, Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic--we think of this in terms of a narrative and story. Just as importantly, Sartre's colorful anecdotes illustrating 'bad faith' and his major tropes in Being and Nothingness of sado/masochism for describing our relationship with the Other. I think Mitchell is trying to say that there is a reason these stick in our heads as opposed to the pages upon pages of working through the metaphysics of Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl (in the case of Sartre).
And so he does this with Althusser and Panofsky. Rather than collapsing them into one, he traces their differences, only to find at a certain level of 'discourse' or images a commonality (a multiplicity?) refusing a reduction of their thought, but realizing that this implies a certain view of the world (but at the level of the scene). The common 'space' that both Althusser and Panofsky occupy is
"the placement of the recognition scene at the center of their reflections. The main importance of recognition as the link between ideology and iconology is that it shifts both 'sciences' from an epistemological 'cognitive' ground to an ethical, political, and hermeneutic ground" (33).
The way Mitchell describes this insight is (perhaps ironically) in terms of "recognizing" the problems of basing a 'science' of ideology or iconography on a scene of recognition/acknowledgment that in turn implies certain relations on an ethical and political level. Strangely, Mitchell reproduces the rhetoric of recognition/acknowledgment in his discussion of what this connection may imply:
"Althusser reminds us that Panofsky's relation to pictures begins with a social encounter with an Other and that iconology is a science for the absorption of that other into a homogenous and unified 'perspective.' Panofsky reminds us that Althusser's local instances of ideology, the greeting of subject with subject (s/s), are all staged within a hall of mirrors constructed by the soverign Subject (S/s) and that the ideological critique is in danger of being nothing more than another iconology" (34).
Thus, each figure tells us something about the other, but does not solve the problems that we can now see by looking at this similarity. Our connection does not lead us into a further understanding of the picture or the scene, but leads us (basically) to a deconstruction of both systems of thought that pretend toward an objective scientific stance.
Metapictures
Mitchell's next chapter, "Metapictures" is a key chapter for many reasons. We do not have to 'discover' Mitchell's method, because he tells it to us in the first couple pages: "My procedure, therefore, will be ekphrastic. That is, I'm simply going to attempt faithful descriptions of a series of pictures that seem to be self-referential in various ways" (38).
Ekphrasis is 'description', but does this not give us a sort of false sense of 'objectivity'?. . .or perhaps 'objectivity' is the wrong word. Innocence? The use of the term "simply" or when he uses "merely" (recalling Kant's annoying use of 'merely', allowing him to equivocate in his philosophy) seems to attempt to reassure the reader that he is not trying to 'dig into' the image--he is not going to do it violence--he is going to try and take the picture 'as it is'---he is going to attempt to see if pictures themselves have their own 'metalanguage', a second-order discourse without the explicit need for verbal articulation (although this is what Mitchell can do given the limitations of academic prose). I am suspicious of this method, yet intrigued. We will have to go to the chapter on "Ekphrasis and the Other" to fully see what is going on in Mitchell, but before we do this, let us look at a few of his examples in the chapter "metapictures."
Throughout the chapter, instead of defining the meta-picture, he will unravel the very concept: "Perhaps the most obvious thing called into question by the metapicture is the structure of 'inside and outside', first and second order representation, on which the whole concept of meta- is based" (42). In the spirit of Wittgenstein (and, the more I think about it, in the spirit of Archaeology era Foucault), Mitchell traces the different kinds/ways a picture can be what he will call a meta-picture. Thus, like Wittgenstein's notion of 'family resemblances' in the concept of 'game', Mitchell does not collapse all of these metapictures into one definition except that it is a "picture that is about itself." But, we must remember, it does not explain anything--this is particularly difficult for me to grasp.
Duck Rabbit
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The duck-rabbit is a meta-picture that Mitchell calls "dialectical pictures" because their primary function is "to illustrate the co-existence of contrary of simply different readings in the single image" (45). The most famous use of the duck-rabbit is in Wittgenstein. We cannot say that the duck-rabbit 'illustrates' Wittgenstein's philosophy or concept: "The Duck-Rabbit is the ideal hypericon for Wittgenstein because it cannot explain anything (it remains always to be explained) and if it has a 'doctrine' or message, it is only as an emblem of resistance to stable interpretation, to being taken in at a glance" (50). The Duck-Rabbit, and some other meta-pictures have a different 'subject' than themselves--they "call into question the self-understanding of the observer" (57).
As we can see in the duck-rabbit example, meta-pictures are migratory--meaning that they are not only part of a particular discipline, but have a wide-ranging status in the cultural field. They puzzle us.
Instead of thinking about the 'meaning' of the meta-picture, Mitchell moves in an almost conventional rhetorical dimension: the consideration of the effects of the meta-picture: "the effect [ of "This is not a Pipe"] is to be a certain infinite reverie activated by the density of the image and the legend, how they are drawn and inscribed" (74). Mitchell uses tropes to describe these effects (another one is the "Vortex" effect)--just as he points out that Wittgenstein cannot get outside the picture/use of trope. The reference to 'reverie' reminds me of Kant's aesthetic contemplation, but Mitchell would not wish to claim that the effect is purely aesthetic. As he writes about Magritte's picture, "the idleness and reverie connoted by the pipe are not incompatible with disciplinary pedagogies, especially the sort that involve initiation rituals and exercises in self-understanding" (74). Mitchell points out that we can 'return' the pipe to the world by 'erasing' the legend and placing another text there.
These 'effects' cannot be collapsed into a single 'effect' of meta-pictures. I think that Mitchell thinks these are different effects that must be described on their own terms. If meta-pictures really are concerned with effects, then we can understand Mitchell's final move in the essay: "The metapicture is not a subgenre within the fine arts but a fundamental potentiality inherent in pictorial representation as such: it is the place where pictures reveal and 'know' themselves [. . .] where they engage in speculations and theorizing on their own nature and history" (82).
Suture
Surgery
Mitchell's use of the word "suture" to describe the image-text relationship is an interesting one. Suture can mean, in the surgical sense, "a stitch used by doctors to hold tissue together." Etymologically, it means 'to join'. And yet, 'suture' to me seems so close to 'sever'--it doesn't sound like a word that holds something together. Perhaps it is important that suture refers explicitly to the closing of a wound. So, although suture means to 'join' it also has the connotation of wound. It only holds together the wound while the wound heals, but I think that Mitchell would argue that the image/text relationship never quite heals--it never merges into one--it is always the relationship of the suture--an on-the-way to healing, but never quite getting there.
Geography
In geography, 'suture' also means "a major fault zone through an oregen or mountain range. Sutures separate terranes: tectonic units that have different plate tectonic, metamorphic, and paleographic histories."
Although this geographical meaning is derived in a kind of metaphorical drift from surgery, in some ways it seems more appropriate to Mitchell's methods. Furthermore, suture means in paleontology a "fossil exoskeleton, as in a suture line."
Considering Mitchell's insistence that the 'metapictures' are like figures (or, in verbal terms, tropes) which migrate across disciplines, it seems appropriate to look at the meaning of the word outside of the two that Mitchell mentions--film theory and psychoanalysis. If we take Mitchell's work to be influenced heavily by Deleuze's reading of Foucault, we can see that this 'structural' meaning of suture may be useful for understanding his methods. On a related note, we should also consider the importance of shifting from the model of suture in psychoanalysis/Lacan to suture as geography given Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus and their geographical metaphors: "de-territorialization." I find it hard to believe Mitchell did not capitalize on this metaphorical relationship.
Fault zones are zones of complex deformation in earth's tectonic plates. It is not a simple fracture, but a set of complex relations. Foucault's archaeological method is based on the idea of looking at the surfaces of different levels. Mostly, he applies this to history, changing the very meaning of the "history of ideas," and so the definition of suture as separating 'terranes'--which have different 'histories' seems an appropriate figure. The various 'histories' are like the various levels. Foucault writes, "archaeology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of its discourse" (AK 171). He speaks of "discontinuities" and redefines rupture as a sort of re-organization and transformation:
"rupture is the name given to transformations that bear on the general rules of one or several discursive formations. Thus the French Revolution [. . .] does not play the role of an event exterior to discourse, whose divisive effect one is under some kind of obligation to discover in all discourses; it functions as a complex, articulated, describable group of transformations that left a number of positivities intact, fixed fro a number of others rules that are still with us, and also established positivities that have recently disappeared or are still disappearing before our very eyes" (AK 177).
This recalls to me the shifting of tectonic plates, where, as Baudrillard puts it "at the bottom (!) the ground never existed, only a cracked epidermis; nor were there any depths" (Baudrillard 40). Mitchell himself uses this geographical metaphor, but does not take it further: "But [Magritte's] real aim is to show what cannot be pictured or made readable, the fissure in representation itself, the bands, layers, and fault-lines of discourse, the blank space between the text and the image" (Mitchell 69).
Thus, the suture in Mitchell, I think, should be understand more as a sort of 'suturing' (joining together) the senses of suture in the medical and the geographical sense such that the geographical sense structures spatially the medical sense (as Foucault would do in his own work).
Ekphrasis
Mitchell begins his book with a quotation from Richard Rorty's Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature. This is his starting point for discussing the "Pictorial turn." But Rorty is important for Mitchell in another way as well: Rorty is known for his (at the time--particularly in the 'analytic' tradition) statement that philosophy is less about 'arguing' and more about re-describing the world. Philosophy is description, or, 'ekphrasis'.
(And--a question I've been pondering--is there a difference between ekphrasis and tropes? Ekphrasis as 'description' seems to be opposed to the use of tropes, but we find every major figure Mitchell discusses and Mitchell himself using tropes rather than creating a meta-language)
Mitchell distinguishes three 'attitudes' towards ekphrasis:
1. Ekphrastic hope: "the impossiblity of ekphrastic is overcome in imagination or metaphor, when we discover a 'sense' in which language can do what so many writers have wanted it to do: 'make us see' (152). It is also when "the estrangement of the image/text division is overcome and a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext arises in its place" (154).
2. Ekphrastic fear: "the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually (154).
3. Ekphrastic indifference: ekphrasis is strictly impossible, it is a curiosity--an obscure literary genre and of a more general topic (the verbal representation of visual art (152).
Mitchell attempts to look at these three "moments" from the perspective of the "relatively neutral viewpoint of ekphrastic indifference, the assumption that ekphrasis is, strictly speaking, impossible" (156).
Before moving on to the rest of the chapter, I want to lthink for a moment about 'ekphrastic hope' in terms of Mitchell's use of the word 'suture'. Here, suture would be the sort of ideal, healing suture that is 'ideal and utopian'--one that will eventually heal the division so that 'imagetext' could be a legitimate hybrid. I think that Mitchell's attention to the mutual dependence of ekphrastic hope and fear shows that we must reveal the assumptions inherent in whatever 'suture' we sew.
Homer and Ekphrasis
Mitchell argues that 'ekphrastic poetry' is a site where ekphrasis as a "sham or illusion" is "worked through" like ideology (163). The key moment of ekphrasis in this essay for Mitchell is Homer's description of Achilles' shield.
Mitchell sets up his analysis by referring to the commonplace of Marshal Mcluhan's "the medium is the message." Mitchell writes,
"The mystery is why we have this urge to treat the medium as if it were the message, why we make the obvious, practical differences between these two media into metaphysical oppositions which seem to control our communicative acts, and which then have to be overcome with utopian fantasies like ekphrasis" (161).
In other words, Mitchell seems to be asking why we must collapse materiality and message into the same 'level'. Why can we not describe the material/practical/social differences as part of the message, but not as the end all be all. This is something I think we need to discuss more in class.
While there are many debates about the function of Achilles shield, Mitchell believes that these are not mutually exclusive:
"Homer's whole point seems to be to undermine the oppositions of movement and stasis, narrative action and descriptive scene, and the false identification of medium with messsage, which underwrites the fantasies of ekphrastic hope and fear. The shield is an imagetext that displays rather than concealing its own suturing of space and time, description and narration, materiality and illusionistic representation" (178).
Here we return to the problem of the 'suture'--it seems as though Mitchell argues that when an imagetext conceals its own suturing, pretending to be a utopian moment where imagination can conquer the gap, it is an ideology that needs to be worked through. Whereas, when the imagetext reveals its own suturing, it allows us to see that the utopian moment is elsewhere. I am not quite sure I understand Mitchell's next move:
"We are stationed at the origin of the work of art, at the side of the working Hephaestos, in a position of perceptual and interpretive freedom. This is a utopian site that is both a space withint he narrative, and an ornamented frame around it, a threshold across which the reader my enter and withdraw from the text at will" (178).
I am just not sure what to do with this passage and what he means by a "utopian site"--what is Mitchell saying about the reader? It has something to do with the 'suture' and so I am led back to Mitchell's long footnote on pages 91-92:
"Film theory's emphasis, not surprisingly, has been on the suturing of the image sequences and the construction of the subject as spectator. But the question of the image/text suggests, I hope, that the notion of suture might well be extended to include the subject as reader and listener" (92).
What is utopian about this relationship? As readers, are we really in a 'no-place' or 'good-place'--in a sort of "neutral" positioning? Mitchell seems to back out of his claim that ekphrastic indifference leaves ekphrasis as a "curiosity"--ekphrastic poetry instead seems to be very important and paradigmatic for the imagetext. The canonical examples show how
"the 'workings' of ekphrasis, even in its classical forms, tends to unravel the conventional suturing of the imagetext and to expose the social structure of representation as an activity and a relationship of power/knowledge/desire--representation as something done to something, with something, by someone, for someone" (180).
And I don't really have a conclusion for this. Of course, I am only halfway through the book and so perhaps the rest of the book will answer (or at least "describe better") some of my questions, concerns, and confusions. All in all, I felt like moving through Mitchell's text very closely, tracing his language was the only way to really 'get' this text. I can only hope that the rest of the book provides as much food for thought as the first half.
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