Imposing Distortion

There is not enough space here to treat our readings thouroughly. Wysocki's chapter on beauty really resonates with why I am in graduate school and why I care about rhetoric. She is scraping at an alienating rot within our culture, and ourselves, desperately in need of reconciliation.  It is a difficult subject matter to tie into writing pedagogy. I imagine the line of reasoning she takes is too erudite and abstract for meaningful discussion within an undergraduate composition classroom, though I recall Mary touching on some of these issues through her assignments in Visual Rhetoric. That being said, I agree with Wysocki's basic argument that it is irresponsible to teach visual rhetorics in a moral vacuum. Images can be so loaded with meaning and at the same moment vague and ambiguous. A teacher needs an informed philosophy to help students critique visuals.  The main thing I appreciate about post-modernism is the ability to state your case without being told to "sit down," by the empiricist. So, as a student of rhetoric and composition, a person who values artistic expression, and as lover of God, I am going to try to address this subject.

I am not a feminist (not that I can define one), but, as a Christian, I share many "feminine" values. In terms of her critique, I agree with Wysocki completely, though I am compelled to go even further.  Her emphasis on Arnheim's  "egocentric" approach to the visual is right on point. (153-158)  Art is a mirror into which mankind lovingly gazes. I also agree with her take on Kant's reworking of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as nature, morals and taste.(160)  Kant did much violence when he limited inquiry to the material world, placing the divine out of our reach.

I believe humans are Created with a thirst for what we call Beauty, Goodness and Truth. This is self-evident in any examination of mankind and our practices. We want to see, and to be, good and beautiful. Aesthetic considerations and actions largely define our humanity.  Sadly, what our souls long for they also destroy and exploit. Yes, we are idealistic, but I also believe we are severely distorted through sin.  Sin, as revealed in the Bible, is a violation of God's rule stemming from an elevated sense of self and egotistical pride. This "fallen" state affects all areas of life; i.e., emotions, personality, relationships, thinking, appetites, community and more. Certainly we can agree that rage, paranoia, betrayal, depression, addiction and war are not in our personal or collective best interest, yet they each emanate from the self-centeredness of man. From a Christian worldview art also suffers distortion, corrupted by the same selfishness. God forbade the graven image because the image is not Him as he exists, only a pale egocentric reflection of human desires. The idolater builds an incomplete and impotent version of God, a god to do his bidding, one he finds in the mirror. Likewise, we have received "beauty" as a distorted conception rendered by the musings of philosophers in love with their own self-reflected glory. Their categories narrowly define beauty while ignoring reality with all of its complexity, dissonance and upheaval, preferring forms they can describe and control, idols of the mind. So, in the mirror of self-glorification, the reality of a human being is reduced to a prescription. As Wysocki says, "We are not encouraged to ask about the woman in the ad as a woman, only as a shape."(152) These are not benign abstractions, but horrible lies and painful distortions with real consequences for actual people. These concepts reduce living-breathing, eternal, valuable persons to consumables.  These consumable "products" not only transform persons into objects, but also degrade the sensibilities of the consumer. How many men have grown tired of their wives as they approach menopause? How many woman have cut and starved their bodies to obtain an artificial ideal? How many men and boys have sexual ideals rooted in pornographic fantasy rather than in shared intimacy? How many gifted, visual people have employed their talent for the commercial manipulation of the masses, instead of the exaltation of what is noble and good?  I believe God sees all of this and grieves. The egocentric mirror of fallen man produces hollow and exploitative art.  Real beauty isn't so reductive or constrained.  It is sublime and edifying, complex and anchored in reality. Truth, for the Christian, is not an ideal but objective reality.  Beauty, like all of life, must conform to the Truth. Eyes informed by Truth see feminine beauty as it exists along the arc of a woman's life in a myriad of expressions that go beyond the physical to include the spiritual, the relational, the intellectual, the emotional, while always maintaining acute awareness of the eternal soul within the body.

Who is afraid of New Media?

I couldn't agree with Wysocki more, or less, or more.  One one hand, she brilliantly "flips the script" on much of our class discussion when she writes about the valuable critique teachers of writing can bring to new media, "...to help composers of texts think usefully about effects of their particular decisions as they compose in a new media text." (6) Our class discussions often focus on new media in terms of its utility, complexity and questionable benefit to the task of teaching writing. For good or bad, invasive new media are assaulting and changing our established methodology.  A reactive gesture that merely adjusts writing instruction to the onslaught misses opportunities and obligations. I hear her saying that although new media may be exotically compelling, using modes that are visually, aurally, interactively and in other ways stunning, they are still a philistine presence in our well-established and thought out discipline, and badly in need of rhetorical critique and accountability.  New media needs a scholarly spanking to be shown who is boss. The thinking and scholarship invested in composition and communication studies needs to be applied toward all new media. Socrates has been speaking across the millennia to inform our rhetoric and writing.   Surely, he has something to say to the web page, the social network, the online journal, the audio essay, etc.  Just because it is new and and uncomfortable to stretch, doesn't mean it isn't the job of rhetoricians.


One the other hand, I don't quite get where Wysocki is going with her argument about raising consciousness about the interface,"texts where we keep their materialism visible." (19)  Composition that is self-conscious about its form is Warholian in its ironic newness, and in its stimulating and self-important manner.  Twisting texts in the ways she describes does indeed change the thinking processes involved, privileging the form over the content.  For rhetorical criticism and for and investigation of  new possibilities, of course, enhanced awareness is useful.  Just like when critiquing an argument we look at its claims and warrants.  She seems to want to go further, looking not only at new media but even the written word in terms of the paper and ink it is written with.  Something is lost here.  We possess a well honed means of communicating complex thought through words on an invisible interface.  That means has value and purpose.  Slowing down to notice the margins, and font on each .pdf Mary assigns limits my time and ability to address the ideas.  I know Wysocki is after something, an awareness and equivalence that puts new media on a level playing field for criticism perhaps?  While I am comfortable welcoming new means of communications, I am not interested in the deconstructing written text to the point of distraction, or even meaninglessness.


On the final hand, I agree with Wysocki's call for "...producing texts using a wide and alertly chosen range of materials." (20) Digitally comprehensive composition instruction can only be a good thing in a culture where people are already "reading" and "writing" multimodal compositions everyday.  They are just doing so in relative ignorance.  Writing teachers, willing to embrace these new modes and methods, are in a great position change that.  They simply need an expanded view of what they are already doing, teaching literacy and knowledge through composition, and increasing awareness and meaning through practice.

Images

Robot           http://io9.com/5013950
Draw Good  http://drawinghowtodraw.com
Bob Dylan   http://withloveandswallow.blogspot.com

Speech-osition

I am presenting this week, so instead of writing about the readings I want to relate some thoughts about the intersection of writing composition and speech.  My undergraduate degree was in communications, Political and Public Speaking.  Even though there were only three classes where speaking was the goal, almost every class required getting up an giving presentations.  The big research projects were often papers and accompanying presentations.  In this academic context there is not as much difference in the two disciplines as one might imagine.

A formal speech reads like an essay (with pauses for applause).  Go online and read a Presidential Speech.  You will find it well organized, attentive to audience and context, internally supported by presented evidence, and written in clear prose.  This is true about speeches given by acknowledged masters of oratory like Reagan or candidate Obama, (he doesn't use his stirring, soaring style as President) and less skilled speakers like the clumsy Bush, or exceedingly verbose Clinton, who created amazing sound bites buried within interminable speeches.  In fact, President (W) Bush's speeches would get surprisingly high marks from English teachers because he was always purposeful, clear, and driving to make his point.  Presidential speeches, like essays in The New Yorker, represent the highest forms of public composition, with the same types of rhetorical considerations and attention to detail.  They communicate, and argue, and engage their audiences.  They do, however, differ in one particular and all-important detail, delivery by sound.

In an oral presentation the voice of the speaker carries a weight that is hard to match, even by the most skilled writers.  The immediacy, the subtle emphasis, the silent pause, the intonations, the give-and-take of the audience, the energy of a room full of people staring at and listening to one, create qualities impossible to capture with a pen.  These strengths, however, are mitigated by attention span, small vocabulary, sentence and paragraph complexity (read thought complexity).  Advantage here goes to the writer who engages the reader's mind directly challenging its ability to wrestle with the text until they decipher its meaning, even if they have to re-read the text many times.  The weakness of speech is the strength of writing and vice versa  Combining, the two in a meaningful way, means playing to the strengths of both. Whether assigning aural composition or preparing for conference presentations seeing the two as complimentary and friendly is an asset.

A Thousand Words

Elevating students' awareness to George's "aggressively visual culture," that is composed and targeted with forethought, purpose and intent, is as critical a role for composition teachers as introducing them to the construction of persuasive arguments.  In our culture, where arguments rarely stand in stark relief against an objective backdrop, spotting the visual argument may be even more critical.  Consider these examples involving our government:

President Bush and use of numerous American flags.

Stimulus road signs, the recovery act logo and President Obama's campaign logo.

 

In advertising, images are used to created cognitive dissonance.  An unspoken disquieting of the mind and spirit breaks up the fallow ground of the subconscious so the advertiser can sow the seeds for comforting, satisfying, packaged, consumable and profitable (for someone?) solution:

Journalists use the power of images to help tell their stories.  A photo of a family sitting on the roof of a flooded New Orleans says more than the proverbial thousand words and draws the reader into the devastation on a human level.  Questions arise when these same "objective" story tellers modify these potent images to make statements they might not dare say in words:

Newsweek used OJ's actual mugshot; Time retouched photo to make darker.

In her essay, George works to deliver a precise definition of a visual argument.  She knows they exist.  She knows they work in rhetorical ways.  She knows they have some verbal equivalence, but it is elusive.  I think that is the point.  Images do what words cannot. They represent a different language requiring a different literacy.  Pulling back the veil on all sorts of rhetorical devises used in our world can be done in classrooms teaching critical thinking, communication, or psychology, and in a composition classroom as well.  We teach argument and persuasion heuristically.  Students purposefully composing with visual elements will never look at magazines, commercials, movies and art the same way.  We empower students, not necessarily to be proficient in the creation and use of images, but in the understanding of how and why the invisible composer chose that image.  Finding an argument is not always easy, even with the full text right in front of you.  Consider the various cultural and personally interpreted references at play in any newspaper commentary.  Now add the extra layer or layers of ambiguity found in an image.  Grappling with visual arguments is difficult, although in the context of our visual culture, critical.   The digital composition classroom, where arguments are both discovered and constructed, seems like a well-equipped and ideal laboratory.

Personalizing Technology

The human touch, the personal, the interaction between teacher and student, these are all challenged when we use technology in the classroom setting.  We have come to see the interfaces between ourselves and our machines, and our writing and our reader, as potential barriers to communication; they are membranes obscuring understanding with rising levels of complexity.  Just the act of writing is so much more difficult than speech.  Walter Ong, in The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction, explains how difficult transacting communication we normally do with ease, "Except for a small corps of highly trained writers, most persons could get into written form few if any of the complicated and nuanced meanings they regularly convey orally."  Spoken to written word is just one obscuring membrane, familiarity and comfort level with technology, structural limitations for each medium, habits of use, and personal detachment in the writing lab are others.  I've taken several classes in computer labs, composition and other.  Sitting behind the monitor, I often felt a sense of distance from the teacher and from the other students.   It reminded me of courses I have taken in sculpture where we worked alone and the professor moved from station to station.  Had I been uncomfortable or unfamiliar with computers I might feel even more lost, especially if the teacher is a slave to his own work station.  The separation between student and teacher, student and student, student and technology hinders learning, at least my conception of it.   I see the ability to bridge that divide as a strength of the technology autobiography.

The TA (technology autobiography) has the potential to put computer in a subordinate role to both the teacher and the student because of many characteristics.  The TA is diagnostic, giving the teacher an idea of the familiarity, comfort level, and proficiency of each student.  This allows the teacher to take steps that ensure the student disadvantaged by inexperience, or a lack of opportunity to use computers receives the technical remediation needed.  Sharing personal stories might also make students aware of their own level of technological "privilege." The TA is constructive because the writing process helps the student gain perspective into the subject and teaching environment by using thinking both critical and personal.  The TA is flexible, it can be used for beginning students and all along the educational path to Ph.D. and beyond.  Many of our readings include personal anecdotes involving technology. Importantly, the TA reasserts the human primacy over technology.  Computers are employed for the student's benefit, not the other way around.  Finally, computers being such a large part of our culture, we have an unique opportunity to both critique and use them within our humanistic, rather than scientific, approach to learning, an viewpoint they may not get elsewhere.