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.

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…)