Heads
It takes a lot of time to record commentary, but there are still some things I wanted to note from the second day of panels at RSA. The panel on “Visual Rhetoric and Visual Culture” chaired by Robert Hariman embraced three fine and polished papers. In fact, the presentation was so smooth it seemed choreographed (other than the chair’s unfashionably late arrival). About the first paper . . .
Michelle Gibbons’s “How to Look at Heads: The American Phrenological Journal and Nineteenth Century Visual Culture” made a bold claim at the onset: previous scholarship has failed to address the bidirectional nature of phrenological and physiognomic claims. In other words, phrenology didn’t just read head-bumps, it sought to modify the shapes and features of heads by modifying the behavior of the owners of said heads.
Perhaps that’s true in rhetorical/speech communication scholarship—it isn’t true in American Studies/Literature. Her presentation reminded me somewhat of “Monica Lewinsky, The Music Man, and The Scarlet Letter,” a lecture delivered flamboyantly by Chris Castiglia that I attended in 2002. Besides belting out show-tunes, Castiglia made a pretty compelling case that phrenology and physiognomy in the nineteenth century externalized not only positive virtues, but also sins so that they could be cast-off. Behavior modification, not just interpretation, was key to Castiglia’s presentation. I don’t write this to undermine the core of Gibbons’s paper, because her presentation and research was hardcore and specific, but merely to suggest that perhaps “great minds think alike.” To be fair, Castiglia was concerned with, as he puts it in a related article, “the redisposition of delinquent interiority” while Gibbons seems more interested in the visuality of these claims. Fun stuff. I can’t help but think of a Talking Heads song, “Seen and Not Seen”:
The final frontier
Shell Station, Newton, KS
Arrived in Memphis yesterday, but had to sit most of the day out. Chills, fever, and general nastiness. After regaining some equilibrium, got up this morning to see a panel on “Postmodern Variations on a Theme of Agency.” R. Scot Barnett delivered a paper titled “Spatializing Rhetorical Agency: Capacities for Action in Non-Place” or something like it (I can’t accurately remember who changed the titles of their papers and who didn’t). Barnett’s paper was interesting to me because it suggested that defining spaces in terms of “presence” or “lack” did not address the way that space is “performed.” The theme of possession that is part-and-parcel of these conventionalized modes of thinking about space misses key aspects of the way that we commonly encounter space.
Using the term “non-place” set up some fierce debates in the Q&A afterward, particularly in regard to the third paper by John Mucklebauer about Levinas (the title on that one changed severely and I didn’t note it). “Locative Art and Rhetorical Agency” by David Rieder hit on some of the same cylinders. Using some pomo critics that I’m not familiar with, they suggested that regularized spaces like airports, Starbucks, etc. promote a feeling of “non-place.” It didn’t ring true for me. The thought that occurred to me (which I said nothing about, due to a sore throat) is that these sorts of regularized spaces are much like what Latour called “immutable mobiles,” transportable spaces that make us feel at once “at home” and “displaced.”
This reminded me about taking the photograph (above). The woman inside the gas station wanted to know what I was taking pictures of—I answered “wide open spaces.” Every space is a little different, and lots of places do not feature empty space. The idea of a non-space (according to the academic who verged on heckling) is absolutely ludicrous. If it’s not in space, we can’t conceive of it.
Carolyn Miller’s paper in this same session forged a distinction between “potential” and “kinetic” energy—a distinction as difficult to conceptualize as “non-space.” The primary way I could translate it to myself is the distinction between the inertia of a moving body and a potential for movement present in a body at rest. When Miller talked about it, kinetic energy seemed like the most positive attribute of human interaction; naming it as inertia places it in a different light.
A friend asked a few days ago: “how many pictures of the back-ass of a gas station can you take?” It seems to me that there are endless variations on the theme of place.
I. Rock
From Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology by Stephen E. Palmer
I. Rock rocks, apparently.
