Telling Stories of Meaning

Like Jacob and Bruce, this idea of meaning-making and the ambiguity of photographs is what struck me as most provocative in the readings so far, and I think it actually extends a little bit beyond Visual Rhetoric. Originally having identified the same quote as Bruce before coming to the blog and perusing the posts (the pitfalls of being late off the start!) the surrounding pages offered a little bit more for me to think about. Though he is referring to the inherent discontinuity of any photograph, Berger writes:

"Discontinuity always produces ambiguity. Yet often this ambiguity is not obvious, for as soon as photographs are used with words, they produce together an effect of certainty, even of dogmatic assertion...and the words, which...remain at the level of generalisation, are given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photograph." (91-2)

Now, I'm going to try to put these pieces together as best as possible, but bear with me, because this path leads through Hawk (the dangers of multiple concurrent readings!). While Berger is directly speaking to the power of photographs when paired with words, and the way in which words grant a kind of solidify or specificity to the image, I don't think that this effect is necessarily limited to photography. Meaning itself is created through the narratives we construct, and the combination of photograph and image leaves open some interesting questions concerning how stable we should consider those meanings. But, I think that we also face the same dilemma in the course of any kind of research--in ANY attempts at making meaning.

In conducting (or reading) research, we often view the results with some amount of certainty. We code our data and come to conclusions, but we do this through the construction of a narrative, even if that narrative is performed through the genre of the quantitative research report. We draw connections between our text and between the case studies which ground said text in some kind of "reality," and while we accept that ideas and perspectives change, we can't help but feel as though the contributions we make are solid, steady things. They might lead to additional clarification or greater meaning, but in themselves, they're solid. Or do we consider them solid? Now I'm starting to wonder.

Maybe instead of holding knowledge as solid, we make assumptions about the external voices we hear in our scholarly exploration, assuming that those voices saw their conclusions with some measure of finality. And that is what then leads to narratives that attack and seek to marginalize various research agendas. We look back at the narratives constructed previously and, instead of granting them some measure of fluidity or adaptation, we prefer to cut and slice away at them as if we are so clearly beyond such inferior expectations. Looking at Hawk's investigation of vitalism, it's fairly clear how we managed to generalize away this perspective, misreading it with a kind of certainty that denies the term (or surrounding philosophy) with room to grow, move, or change. All we can then see are these discontinuities, but instead of reflecting upon the varied nature of the ambiguities produced, we envision the narrative as certain and therefore, open to summary dismissal.

Why is this provocative? Because as writing instructors, we deal so much in ambiguities of knowledge, trapped as we are in a postmodern movement that oftentimes draws our scope of attention so far afield that it's hard to keep everything in perspective. We cling to points of stability as a way of dealing with the fluid and unpredictable nature of our studies, because maybe so much relativity is hard to keep in check while retaining a sense of purpose. Since words are also images, maybe they alone (or at least with the help of studies or experiments) can have the same dualistic pull of ambiguity and specificity that Berger attributes to the combination of words and images together.