Minutes, weeks, years

I’m using a Kindle version of this text that doesn’t have page numbers, so my citations are weird. I apologize. Also, I’m responding to two quotes, both of which appeared in Berger’s text.

Throughout the text, Berger is asking me to do a lot. He’s asking me to consider the camera as a box of moments that captures images predictably and consistently, while considering the photographer a storyteller who seeks to separate his images from language, but realizes the difficulty in doing so. The latter, I’m ready to do. The former, well, not quite.

“Was it a game, a test, an experiment? All three, and something else too: a photographer’s quest, the desire to know how the images he makes are seen, read, interpreted, perhaps rejected by others. In fact in face of any photo the spectator projects something of her or himself. The image is like a spring board” (What Did I See, para 1).

This quote appears in the section that finds a photographer asking viewers to explain the story of his photos. Very few viewers were able to correctly identify the action taking place in the images. This experiment (test, game) shows us the associative properties of images and their ambiguity. Each viewer offers an interpretation based on his or her experience. Many of them even say “I’ve seen this look before” or “I know this look,” further supporting Berger’s claim that images “claim minutes, weeks, years” in creating any myth or significance. Like Logan, I’m considering what Kress might say about all of this. Berger, unlike Kress, resists the temptation to separate images and words, demonstrating his resistance in this experiment. In my reading of Kress (and I’ve only read selections of his work on multimodality), I got the feeling that he believed images communicated more clearly than words. I remember talking back to this in class and my professor responded saying “if I told you I spilled coffee and to bring me a broom what would you say?” Of course I insisted on a mop. She explained that she meant coffee grounds and if she had used an image to communicate it, we would not have had such a misunderstanding. I still don’t really buy this example, though, because if she had shown me a picture of coffee grounds, I still might not have brought her a broom, but a coffee filter. And if she had just said I spilled coffee grounds, I would have brought the correct tool. As Berger says in this quote, I might have still rejected the truth she was trying to create in the image. While we’ve been reading Hawk, too, the simile here resounded with me: “the image is like a spring board.” It makes me wonder how images might function as invention in composition classrooms.

“The photographic image is produced instantaneously by the reflection of light; its figuration is not impregnated by experience or consciousness” (The ambiguity of the photograph, para 34).

Throughout the text, Berger seems to regard the camera as a merely mechanical tool. Although Berger denies the photographer objectivity, and even draws attention to the social contexts a photographer operates in, he seems to regard the camera as an objective tool. This is troublesome to me.

In his book chapter “Lighting for Whiteness,” Richard Dyer provides a brief history of film and the use of light for photography. Although he is focusing mostly on film and motion pictures, Dyer draws attention to some important social issues that shaped the development of the camera and its use of light. Dyer claims that photography and camera technologies evolved to capture the white human face for historical documentation. Even as color film emerged, the subjects of photos sought to increase their white appearances. Simply and concisely: Dyer argues that cameras were developed in order to capture light because that was the best way to capture white faces on film - not because this was objectively the only way to do so. In motion pictures and photography still, people of color are often distorted in photographs. Dyer points to Rising Sun and A Few Good Men and other 1990s films as examples, but as an editor at a newspaper, where photos of people of color often had to be manipulated to improve the light capture for viewing and printing, I found this to be true also. I don’t know enough about photography or chemistry to say whether Dyer is right or wrong in his history and critique of photography methods, but I do agree with his overarching claim: technology is never neutral or acontextual. Just as an image relies on “minutes, weeks, years,” so, too, does the technology required to capture the image. I don't feel like Berger addresses the social factors that influence the camera itself, although it may be a technology largely unchanged.

Impossible

The most photographed barn in America

I wasn't totally sure what quote I wanted to post about today, but as I looked over my notes from last week's class, I realized that we discussed a really provocative quote from Hill: "When we look at an object, no matter how mundane, our perception of the object is filtered through, and transformed by, our assumptions about it and attitudes toward it, assumptions and attitudes that may be highly idiosyncratic or widely shared within a culture... it is impossible to view a sunset without it bringing to mind a range of associations from literary and other cultural sources" (113-4).

I thought it was pretty coincidental that Hill sets up this quote with a block quote from White Noise. Because As I was thinking about Hill's quote, I realized that every time I see a sign for "World's largest X," or "Most Xed Y in America," I immediately think back to Murray Siskind saying "We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura." (I would probably say it out loud, but I don't think that my parents have read White Noise). I happen to wholeheartedly agree with Hill's assertion, and I think that my brain is a perfect example of what Hill is talking about. I will be the first to admit that I probably think too much about pop culture, but I can't look at a puffy shirt without thinking of Seinfeld, and I can't see an owl without thinking of Twin Peaks ("The Owls are not what they seem."), and these are just two examples. 

I'm not totally sure if this is right, but I think that Hill's idea is similar to Burke's idea of the terministic screen. Our culture, attitudes, assumptions, etc. form the lens through which we view everything, and we can't view an object without looking through that lens.

Another example of Hill's assertion in action can be found in the first part of Another Way of Telling, where Jean Mohr shows his contextless photographs to people from different walks of life and they all have different ideas about what's going on in the photos. For the picture of the Turkish factory worker, the fellow factory worker guesses that it's a Friday night, and the worker is probably excited to be finished for the weekend, whereas the banker guesses that he's showing us that work makes you healthy. In reality, the guy is just saying he is the lone Turk in factory full of yugoslavs. 

Photographs as Memory

I didn't think I would end up pulling a provocative quote from Berger because there is a lot in Another Way of Telling that I don't think I fully understand just yet. I hope that we will dig into the text tonight. But in the second half of Berger, I was really struck by his discussion of photographs and their relationship to memory, particularly his assertion that "The Muse of photography is not one of Memory's daughters, but Memory herself" (280).

What drew me to this quote was how truly bold it is. The use of "bold" sometimes conjures negative connotations, and one reading of Berger could bring up this association; by putting photography on the same level as Memory, the mother of all Muses, Berger is trying to equate photography to the source of all inspiration. However, I think the argument Berger makes to back up his assertion is a little more nuanced than that. He is saying that photographs do facilitate memory making, but they offer a narrower scope than the whole of a person's lived experience. It is only when a photograph, a small snippet of memory, is placed in simultaneity with a person's past experiences of living/viewing that connections are formed and memories are made. I feel like this view of memory resonates with, or is Berger's culmination of, the discussions of meaning making we've been having on the blog, as memory is the preservation of the meanings we make through discourse.

Berger's discussion of simultaneity, placing photographs in a wide spectrum with other photographs and experiences, relates to the idea of intertextuality because they both rely upon the interconnectedness of texts, images, and experiences. I think Introducing these concepts to our students could prove beneficial in the classroom, as it will help clarify that texts and their meanings are dynamic, being constantly shaped and reshaped by discourse. It will also help to move students' critical eyes to artifacts that are not just text-based, showing them that other media can serve rhetorical purposes.

Altering Realities

"...a work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself; it functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world; it performs some task.  In short, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action." - Bitzer, pg. 3

Through (visual) rhetoric, we can/do change the world.That is a big thing to say. As an academic advisor who works with undergraduates, I frequently hear about major and career choices, which are the "real world" packaging for people's dreams. Underneath everything else, underneath the talk of paychecks and prestige, passions and proficiencies, professions and purpose, what is usually uncovered is a desire to change the world. (They won't usually say it in those words, exactly, but if you throw "helping people" and "making a difference" and "doing something meaningful" in a pot, what it boils down to is changing the world.)  And yet being able to change the world seems like this mystical realm to them, just out of their grasp. I have tons of other blog posts I could go in to about the messages we, as a society, and we, as higher education especially, send to students about the merits of wanting to change the world and how I feel about whether or not those messages are "good" or "bad", but that is not really the point here.

The point here is why and how this quote is provocative for me, and again, I say that to assert that we can, and we do, change the world through rhetoric is a big thing to say. And I agree with it.  I think that what we say, and how we say it, creates and changes reality.  Borman, in his Symbolic Convergence Theory and accompanying Fantasy Theme Analysis, says that we construct reality when we buy in to fantasies (stories) and share them with others and they in turn also buy in to those stories.  Symbolic convergence is defined by Bormann as "the communicative processes by which human beings converge their individual fantasies, dreams, and meanings into shared symbol systems." (Bormann, 1980) Burke says something similar in his Dramatism and cluster analysis; the terms that we choose to use to describe and label events, circumstances, and objects reflect our judgments, feelings, and values placed on those events, circumstances, and objects. As others come to use these same descriptions and labels, they share in the values and judgments associated with the labels and come to see the objects or events in the same way as the one who originated the label. And voila- reality is created. Or changed.  

In short, what we say, and how we say it, and, according to Bitzer, when we say it, matters.  It means something.  It means something to the point that we can change the world.  That is big.  And provocative.  How does it apply to the visual?  Can the same effects be had?  If the visual can be rhetorical, and "rhetoric is a mode of altering reality", then the answer would have to be yes.  But, in a more tangible way, what does that look like? (pun intended!)  For example, studies have been done about hurricane Katrina and what terms were used to describe New Orleans in the aftermath.  The term "third world" was used frequently and became associated in people's minds about how New Orleans was before the hurricane, and so their reactions and responses after the hurricane were shaped based on the ideas about "third world" places.  It separated New Orleans from the rest of the U.S., which is thought of as an extremely developed, first world place.  It took some of the fault off of the government, the responders, etc.- a "third world" place obviously doesn't have the infrastructure in place, the knowledge, the resources, to respond to something as devastating as Katrina, so how could the response have been any better?  Perhaps the U.S. was actually a considerably kind and generous country for helping those poor people as much as they did... oh wait, New Orleans is a part of the U.S....  So, following this example, could the visuals be thought of the same way?  Do they have the same kind of influence on reality, specifically the construction of it and changing it, that the words do?  






The first image is from Katrina, the 2nd and 3rd are from the earthquake in Haiti, and the 4th is from hurricane Ida in El Salvadore.  We have discussed in class and on the blog numerous times already the issue of context, authenticity, truth, etc. in regards to photographs, and surely those issues arise in this situation.  But in regards to Bitzer's quote, how does visual rhetoric differ in its ability to alter reality?  Does it differ?  How about in regards to the ideas of a socially constructed reality, especially the ideas from Burke and Bormann that our shared stories and the terms we choose to label and describe something create reality?  The similarity of the images chosen to represent these events, to "label and describe" them,  is similar to these concepts to me- the certain images chosen as representations (terms, perhaps) and the narratives told and shared through these images- create a certain reality of disasters that is repeated and shared across countries and cultures.

Connecting Images with Ideology

1) “The rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to situation” (Bitzer 5).

2) “…[O]ne use of iconic images is their appropriation to new contexts, where they function to create analogies that recall past momments and suggest new possibilities” (Foss 308).

3) “The palimpsest, a paper on which one written text has been effaced and covered by another represents writing again, written upon twice (Helmer and Hill 14).

 4) “Students need to learn to appreciate the power of images for defining and reinforcing our cultural values and to understand the ways in which images help us define our individual roles  within society” (Hill 116).

I chose these quotes because they collectly speak to the means in which images produce meaning. In fact, moving from Bitzer, Foss, and Hill, I immediately connected to one particular image.

1)     “The rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to situation” (Bitzer 5). In effect, the “discourse” came into existence after the release of  this Vogue Cover, Lebron James being the first black man to grace the cover.  Bitzer argues the rhetorical situation invites discourse, but could decay or result in no utterance. Supposably, viewers could have simply praised Lebron James and Gisele Bundchen for their accomplishments; however, due to the “nature of the artifact”, the response was less celebratory and more controversial.

2)     Viewers, I suppose, focused on the “presented elements” such as color, space, and medium. Other choices for the cover, even moreso, challenge meaning through the use of color.  When Jeff posted this image last week, I was shocked that this was a natural representation where the two persons chose to contrast themselves even more with their usage of clothing (possibly unintentionally), so of course I’m led, like many others to question the fabricated pose offered by the cover option.

 “…[O]ne use of iconic images is their appropriation to new contexts, where they function to create analogies that recall past momments and suggest new possibilities” (Foss 308). I made such anaology without the use of Jeff’s contribution of a recalled past, yet it perpetuates the iconic represention of race. It’s unfortunate, of course, that color is not simply a color, and for the case of Jeff’s photo, I can posibly see this, but for the case of Vogue, there are just too many choices to consider. Why this position; why those colors? If not a suit, Lebron James’ Heat uniform would have sufficed, and the array of bright colors used by designers, even red to match James’ ensemble would not have taken away from this model’s beauty.

4) Of course this led to even more associative meaning, as it relates to the “presented elements” of body position, to the “suggested elements” of King Kong. “The palimpsest, a paper on which one written text has been effaced and covered by another represents writing again, written upon twice (Helmer and Hill 14). Critics argued the cover rewrote the ideal of white supremacy and the scary, black brute longing for white women.

4)     When Lebron was asked about the photo, he saw nothing wrong. Now, I’m not suggesting that he has to see in this way, or feel racially conflicted in represntaing himself. I’m sure he was more focused on simply being on the Cover, reveling in such accomplishments. However in after glance, even when given the tools to see, and still not “see” the “possibility” of such representaion or repond, might suggest he lacks a certain cultural awareness that comes with visuals, which makes this statement more true: “Students need to learn to appreciate the power of images for defining and reinforcing our cultural values and to understand the ways in which images help us define our individual roles  within society” (Hill 116). The cover clearly recalled past momments, but knowing this during the production of photo, could have led to new possibilities.

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.

FYC and the Visual -Joe Cirio

Provocative, eh? Let’s see what I can do:

It is true that the typical university writing assignment in many discipline still requires no design elements beyond discrete paragraphs and a centered title. However, with the increasing availability of digital imaging technology, this situation is changing, and it will continue to change. And outside of the academy, such non-visual texts are relatively and increasingly rare. Ignoring graphics and visual design elements in writing classes, even in first-year composition is quickly becoming anarchistic (Hill 127). 

This idea presented by Hill is probably old hat to the audience that I’m presenting to--so its provocative nature may not be realized, yet. The reason I chose this quote to represent the most provocative quote of our readings is shaped by my experiences in boot camp over the summer.  I had entered our summer training with the idea that most of my colleagues would come to an agreement on progressive pedagogical topics such as the integration of technology, digital texts, visual texts, etc. in the classroom; however, I came across several teaching assistants that would disagree directly with Hill’s argument that I presented.  In fact, I defended this point of Hill’s exactly in our discussion of digital and visual literacy--I can distinctly remember (and I stand by this argument today) that we are obligated as FYC instructors to recognize the influence digital and visual texts have on our students, but also, by ignoring these texts, we would be doing an injustice to the central principles of composition which includes having our students think critically of the texts that surround them.

Further, the structure of these digital communities that surround our students are grounded in their participation in creating aspects of the digital culture that they function within: social networks such as facebook, twitter, myspace, online blogging, etc.  Our students are creating digital texts with visuals that express their personal style, ideas, concepts, and experiences.  As Hill describes, “non-visual texts are relatively and increasingly rare” (127).  Our students are--and have been--participating in strongly visual ways in these digital communities; our students have--either consciously or unconsciously--ideas about the rhetorical situations that surround these image, but lack the language to describe them.  Tapping into our students’ experiences with visual texts will allow them to use these experiences in their daily lives and transfer them to their respective discipline of interest in academia by finding the avenues to describe the visuals of their fields through the language FYC can provide for them.

The other TAs who disagreed with this concept are reinforcing the word-image binary for not only themselves but for our students.  From what I’ve seen from the other blog posts, breaking the word-image binary is something that is in common agreement.  FYC has the potential to get students to critically think about their texts on several dimensions--not just one.  By breaking the word-image binary, our students can begin to think about how their texts can function in their rhetorical situation in all modes.

A Quote on Language

"It is impossible for us to give a verbal key or storyline to this sequence of photographs. To do so would be to impose a single verbal meaning upon appearances and thus to inhibit or deny their own language. In themselves appearances are ambiguous, with multiple meanings " (Berger 133). 

I was drawn to this quote because of the claim that photos have their own language. I would think that photos escape language and transpire meaning on a different cognitive level. An image's meaning, on some basic levels,  can be understood without language. If I say cat to someone who does not understand English, he or she will not understand the meaning of cat from the word, cat. However, if a photo of a cat is shown, meaning will be understood. We see before we learn how to speak. Sight is instinctive; language is learned. Basic images are universally recognized, whereas language inhibits universal understanding. I became more confused by the idea of photos having their own language because earlier Berger stated that photography has no language. We can see this in the quote Bruce brought up in his blog, "It is because photography has no language of its own, because it quotes rather than translates, that it is said that the camera cannot lie" (Berger 96). So does Berger believe that photography has a language or doesn't he? Or is photography's system of quoting a language form? 

I can relate this idea of images and language to my experience living and teaching abroad in Japan. Whenever I could not find the Japanese word to convey my English thoughts, I could find an image or gesture to represent it and convey my meaning. Trying to find the meaning of a word by giving an example of similar words is ineffective when those words are given in an unknown language. Likewise, when teaching children, I spoke entirely in English to two and three year olds who could barely speak Japanese, let alone English. Yet through big gestures and images, we could communicate basic ideas. Lastly, one of the three Japanese alphabets, Kanji, is pictorial. I could often understand the meaning of a word by looking at the symbols that made up the written word. However, if I were to hear that spoken word, I would not understand the meaning. For example, if I know the symbol for tree is 木, I could guess that 森 means many trees, or forest. However, if I heard the pronunciation for forest, "mori," I would not make the verbal connection in meaning between tree, pronounced "ki" and forest (mori). I spoke to many Japanese students who said that although they could not speak Chinese, they could get a basic understanding of written Chinese words because the symbols in the Kanji alphabet are derived from the Chinese alphabet. Although they cannot understand Chinese words when pronounced, the written Chinese symbols translate meanings that are similar to the meanings of Japanese symbols. 

It seems that an image holds meaning, and language is used to decode or translate the meaning. So if photos have their own language, what is it? 

Hill Challenging Kress

“The most basic, and perhaps the most misguided, of these assumptions is that we could ever draw a distinct line between the visual and the verbal, or that concentrating on one can or should require ignoring the other” (Hill 109).

     For me, this is the most provocative quote of the reading so far, and, I think, it will be the most provocative quote from any of the readings, because it so directly counters what Kress will argue in his book on multimodality (and in his work leading up to that book). Kress argues that writing is giving way to the image, which, for him, is a semiotic revolution in the cultural position of modes. However, by making that argument, he implicitly lends credence to the convenient fiction that the two modes can actually be separated: image can only “overtake” word if the two are categorically different. And sure, I do agree with Kress that the two have different semiotic capabilities and processes of meaning-making (and Martha provides an excellent and succinct summary about why we have multiple modes of semiotic representation in her blog), but there is no way to know or to make meaning visually without language, just as written text is always already visual (and that visuality inevitably affects the way it is read). I think this quote and several of the points that Hill made in his chapter resonated with me so powerfully, because they function as support for the work that I did in my thesis. Anne Wysocki, Paul Prior, Jody Shipka, and Lester Faigley all work against Kress’s “easy” distinctions between image and word and work to challenge his now-canonical presentation of multimodality. Kress makes a lot of really smart claims about design and the rhetoric of the (web)page in his book, but he relies heavily on what Hill claims is the convenient fiction that separates image and word. I think Josh would agree with me on this point, because he too is uncomfortable with the separation that Foss places on the two modes (and the way in which she seems to privilege the written word).

      Like Molly, I’m also on board with Hill that the Visual needs to be fully integrated into our understanding of rhetoric, because written rhetoric is visual. It shouldn’t, however, end there. Rhetoric can (and often is) aural, kinesthetic, and embodied. For me, this quote argues for a more encompassing curriculum of rhetoric, because it emphasizes the ways in which the different modes of rhetoric cannot be kept discrete. For me, this quote allows for a more capacious understanding of literacy, communication, meaning-making, and our semiotic tools of representation. 

Rhetorical Curriculum 1: University System 0

1) Most Provocative Quote: "The university system is doing a good job of training a select group of students to produce persuasive visual messages. But shouldn't we be at least concerned with helping the rest of our students respond to these messages in an informed and critical way? If we can tap into the experience, expertise, and interest in visual communication that exists across campus, then we can build a new paradigm, one that takes rhetorical education seriously and that recognizes it for the multidisciplinary endeavor that it is" (Hill 129).
2) This quote is provocative to mean because it is a call to action; an action that would truly shake the university system as we know it, not just within the "English department" but campus wide.  This rhetorical curriculum Hill calls for sounds good, but I am very unsure how it could be successfully implemented. I'm wondering if there is a smaller scale change that could create a chain reaction. It is also provocative to me because it appears to claim that the university system (shockingly? no) does not serve its entire student population. Phrases like "a select group" and "be at least concerned" really connect to a emotion filled argument. I'm doubting that administrators appreciate hearing that the system they maintain does not train all students.
3) For me this quote can also be situated within the realm of the producer/consumer binary that we discussed in Convergence Culture in the spring (producer+consumer=prosumer). I see Hill's rhetorical curriculum as a space to create prosumers as opposed to the binary of producers (a select group) and consumers (the "masses"). Especially with the technological atmosphere, the importance of this rhetorical curriculum Hill calls for is going to increase. It also connects to some of the bigger issues I have experience as both a student and a faculty member at my previous institution. Learning where the boundaries existed for course offerings was eye opening, but if we approached rhetorical education as multidisciplinary, these boundaries would be less rigid and potentially create more spaces for learning, and collaborating.
4) I haven't read everyone's blogs yet... so I will probably add comments to my blog or others' as I map the connections of our discussions.

Some Challenging Quotations

“Visual rhetoric is symbolic action in that the relationship it designates between image and referent is arbitrary, in contrast to a sign, where a natural relationship exists between the sign and the object to which it is connected.” - Foss

 You know who really grinds my gears? Foss. When we first read Foss, I found her useful because she lays the groundwork of theoretical terminology and provides a narrow scope of inquiry for what we have been calling visual rhetoric. But although I found her useful, her model seems too fixed and finished. When I returned to the text, I isolated this segment as an example of how Foss’s dichotomous framework limits our ability to interpret visuals as more than just a substitute for words.

 First of all, her sign/symbol and arbitrary/natural dichotomies strikes me as too simple. Not only am I troubled by her logical reduction that reduces a visual artifact to either a sign or a symbol, I find her justification for it highly problematic. It is simply too easy to say that a symbolic image has an arbitrary relationship while a signatory image has a natural relationship. What constitutes a natural relationship as opposed to an arbirtrary one and how we do recognize the difference? If a relationship is natural, is it fixed and permanent? I ask these questions because they will be very difficult to answer when applied to our experience which, I think, is usually our first method of testing a theory.

 The most troubling implication of this framework is that I don’t think it can account for the ambiguities inherent in human interpretation. What does it mean if one person interprets a visual as a sign where another interprets it as a symbol? If we accept Foss’s model, then one person must simply be wrong. But who, and how do we determine it? The very fact of disagreement seems to me to encourage us to challenge or at least remain suspicious of dichotomies and the logic of either/or.

 I much prefer Berger, who noted that “appearances both distinguish and join events.” It strikes me as a far more functional way to view visuals - it does not ask us to say that a visual does one or the other, but that it can do both and more. When I read Berger, I noted that he reminded me of Kenneth Burke’s notion of rhetoric as a process of “identification and division.” I have always appreciated how Burke notes that to identify with one concept or group of people is to divide yourself from another. Berger struck me as Burkean throughout, but especially when he made that claim.

 Foss also aggravates me because she seems to have a logocentric theory of visual rhetoric. Hill observes “images are not just another method for expressing propositions that could otherwise be expressed in verbal form. Rather, they are essential for expressing, and therefore knowing, things that cannot be expressed in any other form.” We do not “read” visuals the same way we read words - one , sentence, paragraph, or page at a time. We take them in as a whole and make distinctions as we go along. Foss’s clean-cut distinction between sign and symbol, arbitrary and natural, invites us to think of images too much like words, as being composed of gradually smaller and smaller units until we reach a basic unit. Who reads visuals that way?

 As we have observed throughout class, visual data remains highly ambiguous data. Our theories do well when they leave room open for the ambiguities in the objects we view and the imaginations of human viewers. It may be hard to avoid making these fine, neat distinctions, but I think when we resist the urge to fit visual rhetoric progressively neater and more reductionist categories, we can better communicate with one another with them and about them.

Snapshot

“We are far from wanting to mystify...The photographs of this sequence are not intended to be documentary. That is to say they do not document the woman’s life, not even her subjective life. We have tried here to speak this language so as not only to illustrate, but also to articulate a lived experience...All photographs use the language of appearances....She was making sense of herself to herself.” --- Berger, 133 and 134.

Forgive me. I have presented this “quote” out of order and omitted huge chunks of it as well. By doing so, I have done what photographs do, though I acknowledge this only as an after-thought. But these lines from Berger, taken in this order, represent the most provocative quote. For me. They make sense to me for me in this particular order. That is to say, that I agree with Berger’s statements about what photographs can and cannot do. They can reveal a historical moment. They can disrupt history. They are a stick in a river. But they can never articulate fully the thoughts of those whose experiences they attempt to capture, if in fact they attempt that at all. The wise photographer knows this, and knows better than to assume she can do it. The wise viewer ought to recognize this fact, too, but often we do not. As Foss writes, “[l]ay viewers’ responses to visual artifacts are assumed to be constructed on the basis of viewers’ own experiences and knowledge, developed from living and looking in the world,” (306). We try to understand images using the tools we have. As my dad often told me, “wherever you go, there you are.” Even as readers, writers, and viewers, wherever we go, there we are. Maybe, especially so.

I once took a photography class at an art school near my home. The professional photographer and collage artist who taught the course despised the word “snapshot” and therefore forbade his students from using it. His repulsion for the word was grounded in the fact that it represented a layman’s point of view: “we do not take ‘snapshots,’” he said. “We take photographs.” As an artist, he demanded (understandably) a more  respectable, sophisticated word to represent the work of the photographer, and he insisted that his students begin to develop a vocabulary, as well as an understanding of the art of photography. Yet now, when I look at Berger’s photographs and read Berger, I can’t help but think word “snapshot” is an apt, if not excellent, word. Why do I say this? Because the verb snap fairly well captures (albeit in lay terms) the action that occurs when a photographer takes a picture, and the noun shot is what we, the viewers, really all get to see. When we view a photograph or an image, we always get a “palimpsest” that is both “transtextual and intertextual” (Genette), but which fails even in its best attempts--even when the “moment” is captured by a professional, talented, artist photographer--to fully articulate, explain, interpret, know. As Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, said in a 1974 interview with Playboy, “we do fail if we attempt art... [i]t’s a sense of things passing—so regretful, regretful—of things being beautiful yet mortal, that makes life worth living” (86).

Photographs show one millisecond of a life or of many lives, but they cannot capture their individual meanings, any more than a person’s own narrative can. Words are merely inexact signs or representations of thoughts and things, but they fail even when they do their best to represent. Yet, upon what else can we lean? All we have are words and images (add sounds--music, laughter, sobs; add the tactile--touch) when we attempt to make meaning with others (thinking about I.A. Richards and Burke and Derrida here). We cannot accurately articulate our thoughts, but we must make the attempt. Berger writes, “[t]here are photographs included of moments and scenes which she could never have witnessed” (134). He is writing about scenes and moments of photographs taken in Paris and Istanbul here. But even the photographs OF the woman herself are scenes she could “never have witnessed” because of the angles they represent. Sure, those are her hands knitting, so we might assume she witnessed her own hands knitting (if we also assume she is sighted). But she could never have witnessed them from the angle from which the photographer witnesses them. She makes sense of herself to herself, and that is the bit we can never know, even when the photograph shows us that she is knitting, and we can read or take knowledge from the photo--her fingernails, her hands, her ability to knit--these are things we can see. But her desire or intention or her interest in knitting--we can never know. Even if she tells us these things, we can only hear what she says at the moment, but her narrative, if we were to ask her, “what are you thinking about” (133), would be “simple,” “because the question, when taken seriously, becomes unanswerable. Her reflections cannot be defined by any answer to a question beginning with What?” (133). 

I read Christine’s post this morning about her recent research which focuses (pun--ouch) on “photographs on Facebook to commemorate those who have passed away” and it occurred to me that my own profile picture at this moment is one of those. Here it is:

My dad and me. Taken on January 16, 2011, my 48th birthday, at my home in Seminole, Florida. In my kitchen to be exact. It’s blurry, and I’ve messed with the original color so it now appears in sepia tones, but it is the last and best (recent) picture I have of us together. According to Foss, “[v]isual rhetoric as artifact, then, is the purposive production or arrangement of colors, forms, and other elements to communicate to an audience” (Foss, 304). What does it communicate? What is my purpose for posting it? What am I trying to say by posting it, cropping it, changing its color? How does it function? I posted it to Facebook on or around Father’s Day 2011, but just put it back up yesterday because yesterday was the third Saturday in September, and last year on the third Saturday in September, I was awakened at 6:47 a.m. by a phone call from my mom. Through blurry eyes, I saw that my iPhone read, “Mom and Dad” and I knew in that split second before I answered the phone I would hear one of two voices delivering some sort of bad news. In that split second I remember thinking “maybe there will be time” -- for me to get there (Michigan). Maybe one of them was rushed to the hospital. I hope there will be time. I can go there today and help mom/dad get through this. “Hello?” “Martha, dad’s gone.” “What! My dad? What? Mom! What? My dad?” The actual anniversary is this Monday, September 17th. But it was the third Saturday morning in September last year, at daybreak, when mom called. I remember the light in my bedroom, just before the sun came up. 

So, this picture. “When particular objects are given enough presence, they can crowd out other considerations from the viewer’s mind, regardless of the logical force or relevance of those other considerations” (Hill, 119). It was taken on my birthday, several months before September 17, 2011. We laughed a lot that night. We danced in my living room. Whenever my dad laughed--which was often-- he threw back his head, his smile was wide, his laugh was nearly silent--but his levity was contagious. This moment caught on film was a moment of levity. But now, on Facebook, that moment is crowded out by other considerations. For those who see it this weekend, it commemorates his passing more than his joy. Yet, thinking about Christine’s research, I’m interested in this passage in particular: “A photo of a person who is no longer alive often garners written feedback expressing how the photo has impacted a viewer, reminded a viewer of a specific memory, and/or caused the viewer to react with happiness or sorrow. In this context, the photographs become a component of history (it is a picture of someone who is no longer with us) while at the same time allowing the viewers to hold on to a piece of that person...” She is correct in that this picture allows me to hold on to a piece of my dad, but I could hold on to that piece without the photo. Or, could I hold on to a piece of him without it? I can’t articulate what that piece looks like or the shape of it, or how it comes in large and small doses, or of how memories fade or become vivid at different moments. Can a viewer of this photograph understand what it means to me? He or she can try, certainly. But I can’t understand it. I can’t articulate it.

I did not add commentary when I made this photo my profile picture yesterday. My sister commented only with a heart emoticon. I replied with the same. We knew and didn’t know what that meant: it meant everything but nothing we could articulate fully. A couple of family members and close friends who’ve known my dad forever wrote short sentiments, but my sister and I did not. Foss writes, “[t]he world produced by visual rhetoric is not always--or even often--clear, well organized, or rational, but is, instead, a world made up of human experiences that are messy, emotional, fragmented, silly, serious, and disorganized” (310). In the case of my picture of my dad and me, all of these things exist, for me. She was making sense of herself to herself. 

Post script: I cannot locate the *real* photograph, the photograph that existed before I cropped out my husband and my mother, the photograph that existed before I changed the color, the photograph which probably captures the moment more completely, and reads very differently, in and out of context. In its place I give you this, a photograph of my parents and my cousin and his friend.


In this un-retouched photo, also taken in my kitchen on another night of levity, my father is laughing. This is something I remember about him, and it’s something I thought of even as I posted the other photo yesterday, the one of the two of us together.

Purpose and function are two different pieces of the pie.

She was making sense of herself to herself.

Doubt, Certainty, and Meaning

Like Bruce, I'm intrigued by Berger's discussion of facts and information in "Appearances." In Berger's section about meaning-making, he makes a couple of claims.

And in life, meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts, information do not in themselves constitute meaning... Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration; meaning is born of the two. An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and future. (89)

The photograph's absence of certainty allows a reader potential to grant the photo a past and future. The presence of doubt gives enough room for the photo to be as potentially meaningful. The process of creating a narrative tailored to the photo's ambiguity, a process marked by doubt and time, grants the photograph meaning. Berger's implication is that a photo which only transmits information cannot have meaning. I'm not sure what a photo like that may look like. Maybe something like a stock photo or a photo we see in newscasts?


Bruce brought up an idea that add something to Berger's quotation, "[W]e make narratives out of numbers and it is the narratives that are more important than the numbers." I am reading numbers here as pieces of information, and I think that Bruce is right. As readers or viewers or thinkers, the narratives that we compose about pieces of information -- data, arguments, statements -- can be more important that the data itself. I am not trying to reduce arguments or statements to pieces of data. They have complex meaning without my reading. But for me, for the sake of growing in understanding, I have to take everything that I read and internalize it through narritivizing it. I have to let time pass to allow doubt to become articulable. Then, I return to my narrative, reexamine it, and weigh its merit. So, initially, I "lend" information the past and future that it claims , granting it the benefit of the doubt. That is how I find gaps, questions, and deeper understanding.

I am talking about to written text here, but I think that the idea for images is the same. On the composing end of making images and visuals, there has to be a point of critical mass where a reader can focus on what is present to draw associations between what is absent and what they know. That is what counts as a meaningful contribution. Drawing from Helmer, "[T]he creator assembles and arranges 'blocks of meaning' so that the descriptor becomes yet another meaning" (17). Blocks of meaning must exist for there to be a narrative. The visual must have a degree of ambiguity to be lended a past and future.

Heroes are Manifestations of National Desire.

Of all of the readings we've done so far, the most powerful quote, in my reading, does not even directly relate to the visual. In fact, the sentence seemed tossed out casually, almost as if the authors missed its import: Helmers and Hill wrote, in the introduction to Defining Visual Rhetorics, "Heroes are manifestations of national desire." A perfect sentence.

And to be sure, they wrote this in service of an explication of the visual, specifically the post-9/11 image Ground Zero Spirit. Helmers and Hill showed the intertextuality between this and the Iwo Jima monument, where the masculine "unambiguous hero" image is constructed through national desire. In this, the element of time works through a culture and an image, for on the one hand, we view an image in the present (Helmers and Hill call this synchronic), but on the other hand, we view images through knowledge of previous images (they call this diachronic). This resonates with Berger's ideas about light and time being the primary elements of photography, where an image "quotes" a scene, and arrests it in time, detaching it from past and future actuality while remaining there in potentiality. This corresponds, in part, to Christine's post about the relationship between photography and time.

And this idea of national desire also connects to our reading of Hawk's A Counter-history of Composition, specifically in his treatment of desiring-machines (the idea comes from Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari). While Hawk reads Deleuze and Guattari through the lens of rhetoric and composition, with an eye toward explicating and defending complex vitalism, I am interested in the way the authors of Anti-Oedipus conceptualize desire as a productive force, where it is not merely the acquisition of an object of desire by a desiree, but a process that produces reality. Heroes are called into being by national desire.

But maybe to say that they are "called into being" is too strong. Helmers and Hill use the word "manifestations," which carries the idea of a disembodied spirit appearing in physical form. As matter rushes to fill a vacuum, heroes appear at times of need, like when traditional values need to be re-inscribed: patriotism, or family, or the essentially goodness of humanity. Are we to understand these heroes, then, as ersatz, or merely constructed?

And this resonates with the issue I chose to represent 2010: the Chilean mine collapse. It is probably safe to say that most Americans do not spend much time thinking about Chile, much less about miners in Chile. Disasters happen weekly, even daily. Why were we so fascinated by these men? Perhaps we needed heroes. In the midst of religiously motivated warfare and economic upheaval, we needed a story with a happy ending. Maybe we subconsciously seized on the hell/purgatory metaphor, where they fought their way free through bravery and cooperation, a triumph of the human spirit. Or perhaps, as other readings suggested, the heroes were not the men themselves, but other forces, like God or capitalism.

I cannot help but connect this with my time in seminary. Perhaps in contradiction to a Jewish reading of Jesus's appearance, the early Christians saw the coming of Christ as running counter to the national desire of the Hebrew people, who longed for a warrior-hero to deliver them from Roman rule. Jesus, instead, came in the guise of a "suffering servant" (see Isaiah), sheathing Peter's sword and replacing the servant's ear, and thus distancing himself from the sword as a symbol (John 18), and instead taking the visual symbol of the cross (some have noted that in ancient times, wearing a cross around ones neck would be roughly akin to wearing an electric chair necklace today). Thus his legacy became a site of struggle, much in the same way as that of the miners.

What heroes do you see manifested by national desire? And what counter-interpretations of those events are offered?

Fantasy as Rhetoric

“I have [discussed] the difference between concrete objects and visual representations of those objects, but rhetorical images do not necessarily have to portray an object, or even a class of objects, that exists or ever did exist. A picture of a unicorn can carry meaning because the viewer has been exposed to other representations of unicorns, both visual and verbal, and can associate the new representation with memories of those encountered previously. And, like words, visual representations can stand in for abstract ideas” (Hill, 115). 

I chose this quote from Hill’s essay “Reading the Visual in College Writing Classes” as the most provocative quote so far because it directly coincides with my research interests: fantasy as rhetorical. The quote is provocative, for me, in two senses. First, it is exciting because it appears to validate my conviction that fantasy is, or can be, rhetorical. It touches, however briefly and unwittingly, on an area of rhetorical study that hasn’t really been dealt with in any significant way, to my knowledge. However, in another respect I’m puzzled by what Hill has to say here. He seems to be arguing that fantasy cannot act as a rhetorical agent unless the recipient has previous associations with the visual. In my own studies, I’ve looked at the ways in which fantasy might act as an agent of rhetorical invention. I define fantasy as a subordinate faculty to the larger imaginative faculty that produces novel images which not only don’t exist but could never exist in reality as we know it. There is much more to be said about the distinction I see between fantasy and imagination (or, how I define imagination) and how fantasy acts as invention, but for my purposes here, it would be diversion to go into it. What I’m really concerned with is Hill’s idea that a visual cannot be rhetorical to an audience unless that audience has previous similar associations. I don’t mean that I doubt the idea that the more we can associate visuals with experience from seeing and reading similar visuals, the more meaning we can derive. That seems evident enough. If I see a picture of a unicorn, I immediately think of a genre of visuals—namely, fantasy—and am keyed to a kind of message, by virtue of that genre, that will be conveyed. Yet, why can’t completely new visuals be rhetorical? Hill says further down on page 115 that the meaning of unfamiliar visual symbols will depend upon how much meaning the viewer is willing to assign to it. But what of visual depictions of fantastic objects (or, again, those objects that cannot be found in reality)? To make my line of thinking less abstract let me go back to Hill’s unicorn example: is a unicorn not rhetorical for someone who has never seen a unicorn? What amount of information does someone need to know before the visual becomes rhetorical? For instance, must one know that it does not and cannot actual exist? Then does it become rhetorical? In what ways will an unfamiliar fantastic image be rhetorical? Of course, like Hill says, it first and foremost depends on how it is received by the viewer—as with any visually rhetorical image.  I don’t have answers to any of my questions, just more questions. 

After all my talk about unicorns, I couldn't resist. This is rhetorical, right?

Most provocative quote

1. Most provocative quote: “All photographs are possible contributions to history, and any photograph, under certain circumstances, can be used in order to break the monopoly which history today has over time” (Berger 109).
2. This quote identifies one of the most provocative paradoxes about photographs: photos are both components of history and disrupters of history. A photograph is a past tense medium; that is, when a photo is taken, the exact moment photographed ceases to exist outside of the photograph. Because of this inevitability, the photo contributes to history.  However, this is not the extent of the power of a photograph.  For just as the photo records moments for history, it also allows us to retain those moments in the present. The smile on someone’s face, a family gathered around a table, a child on Christmas morning – photographs allow moments like these to exist beyond the scope of our memory.  We can look back on these photographs and see every detail captured by the camera, every detail that would have been forever lost to history without the photo being taken.  The passage of time is inevitable and photography doesn’t stop this.  Still, photographs, while contributing to and documenting history, allow us to preserve moments.  The photograph does not allow us to experience the moment with the same level of sensation as we did when we lived it; yet, it does allow us a visual experience of that moment – and sometimes, depending on the moment, this visual experience leads to other sensory experiences too…perhaps the sounds swirling around that moment or the feeling you felt just as the photo was taken.
3. One of my current research projects is looking at the use of photographs on Facebook to commemorate those who have passed away.  In thinking this through and looking at how people use Facebook to mourn loss and celebrate lives of their loved ones, I’ve been really amazed at the role photos seem to play in these interactions.  A photo of a person who is no longer alive often garners written feedback expressing how the photo has impacted a viewer, reminded a viewer of a specific memory, and/or caused the viewer to react with happiness or sorrow.  In this context, the photographs become a component of history (it is a picture of someone who is no longer with us) while at the same time allowing the viewers to hold on to a piece of that person and remember specific times in ways they may not have remembered without the trigger of the photo.
4. Connections to other’s quotes:
1. The quote Jason chose is about how photos can memorialize individuals. Although I remember reading this quote, I hadn’t made the connection to my own research interest until Jason posted it. (So, thanks!) The meaning of a photo taken when a person is alive changes after the person has passed away; although not the original purpose of the photo, the photo can function as a memorial to that person after his/her passing. (Uh oh, we’re back to purpose and function again…)