Holding on
Henri Cartier-Bresson Pour l’amour et contra la travail industriel (For Love and Against Industrial Work). 1931. Paper collage
This blog has stayed in a holding pattern for the last few years. It’s overdue for a change, and that will happen in the next few months. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I started blogging right before I started teaching—in 2001. I will continue to blog as I quit teaching, as of now. Perhaps “quit” is too strong of a word. It’s more like refuse to participate in a degrading system that values teachers at about the same level as Walmart greeters. My wife has secured a good job as a teacher, one that pays a worthwhile salary—most don’t. File me with the most. I was offered an adjunct post, but I feel as if the time has come for a career shift.
I am not really bitter about the situation—but as a profoundly middle class guy, I was actually looking forward to making that good “professor money.” Oddly, along the way I figured out how to make substantially more with far less effort; surrendering teaching comes easy when it only involves nearly trivial wages. In this environment, perhaps even because of it, intelligent investing pays quite well.
I won’t be deprived of anything, and my wife’s job will allow me to maintain access to research databases, good libraries, etc. without missing a beat. I plan on being one of those weird people labeled as an “independent scholar.” But I wear that label with no illusion that it is better or worse as being affiliated with an institution—each approach has its perks. This is just the situation that life has dealt me; I’m quite comfortable, perhaps for the first time in my life. I plan to continue following and creating rhetorical scholarship, just not as a poorly paid “professional writing instructor.”
I’ve got seven years of being a writing instructor in, so I feel like I’ve made some contribution, but shifts in the field make me feel increasingly estranged from the educational “industry.” You see, educational institutions are at their core focused on institutional environments and practices. I have no hardcore interest in “technical writing” though I have a degree and years of coursework in it. Yes, I’m interested in technical subjects but not technical communication practices. I’m interested in communication practices, and increasingly I’ve found myself more aligned with scholars in communication studies rather than the emergent field of writing studies. But my degree path has not pointed me there, and crossover is difficult on the professional level.
At the core, what I have practiced/taught is Rhetoric (with the capital R) which is a discipline that seems to lack any specificity or exclusivity within academic departments. It wanders, passing in and out of fashion without ever really disappearing or finding a home—labeled as techné, not epistemé. Thus the containers are filled with it, e.g. communication uses rhetoric, but is not necessarily rhetoric; most if not all writing deploys rhetorical methods, but is not strictly speaking rhetoric. It is confusing to anyone outside the problem—why not call it communication, or writing? Well, because it’s different—but what is it? The modern trend is simply to pluralize the practices as rhetorics as if that resolved the definition.
Surrendering the element of teaching writing (or composition, if you prefer), what remains is my research agenda—which I have tried to place inside the container of “visual rhetorics” with little success. The fundamental problem with this, simply swept under the rug for the last several years, is the stature of visual images as propositions. The propositional nature of images, hotly contested for a time, is simply assumed without proof and endless interpretations are being spun from those propositions. But the assumption bothers me. Although I’ve made the claim myself for photographs—each photograph includes an implied verb “to be” making it implicitly a proposition that the subject “is”—I am no longer so sure that this is a sufficient explanation.
The problem of photographs as rhetoric lies in the domination of rhetorics that lie completely outside the object itself; thus the rhetorics are not at their core “visual” at all. The label itself is a red herring, an argument based simply in indirection. As W.J.T Mitchell has argued, “visual studies” may not necessarily need to exist as a self-contained discipline because cannot be mapped into a stable configuration. Just as “writing” is unstable, moving from English departments to business schools to writing studies departments, etc., visuals also migrate to where they are welcomed most. Photography first found a home in chemistry and physics departments, then art departments and journalism schools (coexistent with writing!) and now it seems to be taking up shop in communications departments (as visual rhetorics) at least to a minimal degree. My two obsessions, it seems, have no constant home.
Ultimately, I think that rhetoric and photography are intellectual twins. Both are wedded to industry, but at the risk of sounding maudlin, both can be attached to the humanities in an urgent sense. As Jim Corder once described it, “Rhetoric is love, and it must speak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities.” Classical documentary photography began from the same premise. I started revisiting Corder today because my mentors at the University of Arkansas, when I first started this public writing project had placed him high on the reading lists for teaching composition. Perhaps it is just nostalgia, revisiting where I began as a teacher, or perhaps Corder has been lost through consistently shallow readings.
The Rogerian approach has long fallen out of fashion (both as documentary photography classically conceived from the "family of man," and expressivist composition centered on actualizing the self) but it had an influence deeper than I sometimes admit. I prefer love to industrial work.
What next? I suspect that my sidebar for this Public Address 5.0 will change from “rhetorician/photographer” to “photographer/rhetorician”—because photography is always what I have loved the most. I’ve just been away from it for a long time. It’s a large move, physically, from Minnesota to New York. But it’s a small move linguistically. As I suggested back in 2002, “It’s easy to move, hard to change.”
Pluralize this!
Robert Frank, 40 Fotos
In an effort to fight the oppressive nature of a “master narrative” the easiest step is to pluralize narrative(s) with, as Jim W. Corder would have it, “a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities” (“Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love” 31). Corder’s time is conceived as narrative time:
We must pile time into argumentative discourse. Earlier, I suggested that in our most grievous and disturbing conflicts, we need time to accept, to understand, to love the other. At crisis points in adversarial relationships, we do not, however, have time; we are already in opposition and confrontation. Since we don’t have time, we must rescue time by putting it into our discourses and holding it there, learning to speak and write not argumentative displays and presentations, but arguments full of anecdotal, personal, and cultural reflections that will make us plain to all others, thoughtful histories and narratives that reveal us as we’re reaching for others. The world, of course, doesn’t want time in its discourses. The world wants the quick memo, the rapid-fire electronic mail service; the world wants speed, efficiency, and economy of motion, all goals that when reached, have given the world less than it wanted or needed. We must teach the world we want otherwise, to want time for care. (31)
Published in late 1985, email and electronic communication had already begun to nibble its way into our consciousness. In a sense, the personalized self-written web could be seen as a backlash against efficiency in its messy twit-stream of personal narratives. I think one of the interesting influences of Corder on most of my teachers at the University of Arkansas was the emphasis on the personal in scholarship, the instance on weaving not only the research, but the narrative of that research into the final paper. I was resistant to this move then, as I am now. I think my misgivings stem from the simplified conception of time and space in conventional narratives.
The pairing of images from Robert Frank at the top of this entry are not narrative; they are, at least in the scholarly narrative constructed by curator Sarah Greenough, a thematic confluence. [excellent resources and inspiring podcasts here] They are taken from Frank’s 40 Fotos showcase book, which secured him work with Alexey Brodovitch in 1946. Pairing in a page spread was a technique pioneered across the 1930s, and it is the seminal insights which grew from this which made possible the more complex sequencing of Frank’s book The Americans.
The Americans was essentially anti-narrative in nature, resistant to the conventionalized narrative that emerged in the photo stories of the 1950s. In my opinion, a simple image pair is to The Americans as twitter is to blogging. The difference: apprehension at a glance contrasted with the reflection of reflections in complex series.
In a profound sense, The Americans made new flavors of compositional complexity the alternative to simple stories with beginning, middle, and end. Like literary modernism before it, it pushed the limits of what could be considered sensible in communicating a message. One has to work hard to apprehend it, and in the end you can never be sure that you have embraced all the riches that lie within the confines of the book. Photographic books, in my estimation, have a lot to contribute to our understanding of communication—even in more standard written forms. Consideration of non-narrative works has much to offer in improving the relatively simplistic conception of communication (at least taken at its surface value) offered in Corder. Nonetheless, writing always emerges from conflicting narratives always in progress—this much, I really appreciate about Corder:
There is only our making, sometimes by design, sometimes not. None of us lives without a history; each of us is a narrative. We’re always standing some place in our lives, and there is always a tale of how we came to stand there, though few of us have carefully marked the dimensions of the place and where we are or kept time with the tale of how we came to be there.
The catch is that, though we are all fiction-makers/historians, we are seldom all that good at the work. Sometimes we can’t find all that’s needed to make the narrative we want of ourselves, though we still make our narrative. Sometimes we don’t see enough. Sometimes we find enough and see enough and still tell it wrong. Sometimes we fail to judge either the events within our narrative or the people places things and ideas that might enter the narrative. Sometimes we judge dogmatically, even ignorantly, holding only to standards that we have already accepted or established. We see only what our eyes will allow us to see at a given moment, but eventually we make a narrative of ourselves that we can enjoy, tolerate, or at least not have to think about too much. (16)
Time ultimately flattens most stories into manageable proportions—but the world and our experience of it happens in 3-D. I find it hard to believe that the simple version is often considered the best. Pluralizing the narrative(s) into rhetoric(s) doesn't really increase the complexity, it simply increases the volume— already nearly deafening— emerging from our fellow man.
Offering new ways to see/read/think like Robert Frank seems more useful. While I still think that there should be as many stories written as there are people on the planet, there is a special significance in altering the extension—depth/breadth/height of what gets recorded. Simple stories, for me, are not necessarily the best stories.
There are some odd confluences that should be noted. Jim Corder started teaching at TCU the year I was born; the year that The Americans was first published, just over a half century ago: 1958.
Love and Ethos
Colin Pantall linked to a post about Goldin (among other things) at World Press Photo 09 that reminded me of this bit on the BBC photography series. It offered this observation:
In a bravura presentation that had many in the audience wondering if she would make it through to the end, she covered her life in pictures, in a literal sense as her autobiographical exploration of human relationships, psychologies and emotions. She echoed Mayes’ desire to see more work from communities the photographer lives in rather than the exotic, declaring ‘ I think you can only really photograph your own tribe’. Yet in a gratifying admission for the audience, she admitted that despite her early animosity to journalism, that the need to find out about the rest of the world had led her to a realization that to photograph someone else’s tribe in a far away land could have some validity in informing us of the lives of far away others.
The ethos of any photographer is their primary currency, and I feel sympathetic with Goldin. Thinking about Jim W. Corder’s hippyish pronouncement “rhetoric is love” I found myself tracing some of the path that took him there in 1985—an early essay with the twisty title “Varieties of Ethical Argument, With Some Account of the Significance of Ethos in the Teaching of Composition”
Last spring I went to a concert at our daughter’s high school. From where we sat, we could just see our daughter with her violin. Father’s being what they are, she being lovely and the music sweet, I found myself welling over. Among other things, I thought, “How can any other outside the family know her and love her so, not being joint members as we are of her whole history?” I wanted to answer, “No one can.” But then I remembered that there is such a thing as love between a young woman and a young man who did not participate in her whole history. And that let me think that it is possible for any of us—if the stars are right and we work to make ourselves human—to enfold another whose history we have not shared. In this act of enfolding, the speaker becomes through speech; the speaker’s identity is always to be saved, to emerge as an ethos to the other, whose identity is also to be cherished. Then they may speak, each holding the other wholly in mind.
Jim W. Corder, originally published in Freshmen English News 6, No. 3 (Winter 1978), Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Invention in Writing (1994).
I feel that there is a connection at the basest levels between documentary photography and documentary rhetorics.
Big Fish Supper Club
Aerial, the ace photography pigeon
Hey gang. I'm Aerial, the ace photography pigeon. Did you know pigeons were once used to take secret pictures? They took pictures to help gather intelligence.
My family started taking secret pictures in 1903. They worked in the Bavarian Pigeon Corps. Some of my relatives worked really hard and took a lot of risks to help their country.
Me? I'm all-American, just like an eagle. And I still get up and take a few pictures with my trusty camera.
A Bird's Eye View of CIA History — Central Intelligence Agency
