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.