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The rhetoric of stags is a display of raw physical and psychological energy conveyed by the simplest possible techniques and thus illustrates my contention that rhetoric, in essence, can be viewed as a form of energy that results from reaction to a situation and is transmitted by a code. Though costly in energy, since it can go on for as much as an hour, it is less costly and dangerous than an actual fight. From this and from similar evidence it seems clear that nature has encouraged the evolution of rhetorical communication as a substitute for physical encounters. The rhetorical energy a stag can exhibit is directly proportional to his physical strength and potential as the best mate for a female. This is tested by debate. The evolutionary function of the display is to determine who is the fittest to survive and transmit his genes to future generations of the species. The social function is to secure authority, territory, and mating rights.

In terms of the traditional Western concept of the five parts of rhetoric, the confrontation of the stags seems to contain elements of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, though these are natural attributes and not conscious “art.” The inventional elements, the code by which the stag’s energy is transmitted, are of the simplest sort: repetition of the same utterance, with increasing volume, for as long as possible up to an hour. Here, as in all animal communication and to a considerable extent in human communication, overstatement and redundancy are the means of overcoming distracting noise in the environment, securing attention, and expressing confidence and resolve to prevail.

George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric 14.

Following up on my earlier puzzlement about Kennedy’s contention that “rhetoric is an energy,” it seems that this is his formulation rather than something with a solid source. I think that his observations have merit, though I am not at all convinced that rhetoric is entirely “transmitted by a code.” Code implies articulation of the elements into discrete “packets” or symbols—this is the part that I struggle with. I don’t think that visual experiences can be summarized that neatly.

Nonetheless, Kennedy’s articulation of the role of overstatement and redundancy seems particularly key in analyzing the rhetoric of the health care debate—on both sides. Few people seem to have actually read the legislation and insist on repeating hearsay evidence from dubious sources until it secures attention, expresses confidence and cements their resolve to prevail.

What is most menacing about the logic of sustainability is evident to anyone who wishes to look into its language. It will “operationalize” sustainability. It will create metrics and indices. It will create “life-cycle assessments.” It will create a sustainability index. It will institute a “global reporting initiative.” It will imagine something called “industrial ecology” and not laugh. Most famously, it will measure ecological footprints. What the so-called sustainability movement has accomplished is the creation of “metrics,” ways of measuring. It may not have had much impact on the natural world, but it has guaranteed that, for the moment, thinking will remain only technical interpretation. In short, it has brought calipers to the head of a songbird.

Curtis White via wood s lot

(in a Wayne State, pilgrim)

It has been really difficult to get into any sort of “groove” regarding reading or writing. Lucid moments have been few and far between. I feel a weird sort of tension, for no apparent reason. In the past, I would have tried to write my way through it. Maybe I should try it again.

I’ve been reading my mentor Michael Kleine’s book, Searching for Latini. Michael was the chair of my Master’s thesis committee, and a big influence. But it’s strange to read a work of “confessional” scholarship after being steeped in a more hardcore theoretical atmosphere. It isn’t that Michael is less rigorous, it’s just that the form of his writing matches the desired result—a shared reflection, rather than groundbreaking new data/theory—making it hard for me to follow. It’s more aligned with creative nonfiction than academic writing.

I haven’t read that much creative writing in the last while, and I think that might be part of my problem with “brain freeze.” I’ve got to get unfroze, because I have a paper to prepare for C&W 2007 regarding Benjamin’s Arcades and blogging, and that should be (if it’s going to be a good paper anyway) more on the creative/reflective side as well.

Continue reading “Pilgrims” →

Mediums

I’m often surprised how much my perception of particular words is different from other people. They say things and proceed as if their meaning was clear to a “reasonable” person. Dave Weinberger’s post on medium and world is a case in point. Dave clarifies his point in a follow-up comment, and his response confirms how differently we think of the word “medium”:

Reductionists take a rich phenomenon and strip it of meaning. Viewing the Web as a medium does that. Thinking of it as a world does not…at least not as badly.

Dave thoughtfully supplies his definition of medium: “A medium is something through which a message travels from A to B. The communication succeeds if the message arrives at B unaltered.” That is the Shannon-Weaver model, but it isn’t the sort of thing that I think of as a medium. The idea of media as the bearer of “signals” hasn’t really gone very far in communication theory. When I think of a medium, the first thing I think of the stuff in Petri-dishes that grows cultures. Not to get all Kripke about it, but the second thing I think about is water. All sorts of stuff can be dissolved in it. Often, when stuff dissolves, it changes chemically as a result of what it is dissolved in. While it can be precipitated out, it is seldom unchanged after experiencing transmittal through a medium. Water, however, can be purified back to its original state. The web remains unchanged regardless of what is dissolved in it; in this sense, I think the metaphor is apt. In our “world,” water is water. In other worlds, this is not necessarily the case. A compound labeled “water” might be composed of nitrogen there.

There is a third sense of “medium” that seems closer to what Weinberger recommends: mediums are people who channel spirit energy to make long-dead spirits appear. All this talk of the web bringing something into being is reminiscent of that. In my mind, the word “medium” isn’t reductive in the slightest. To call it the web a “world” conjures visions of strange denizens swimming a great ocean of being. Is this really apt? Poetic, yes, but accurate—no.

Though it is decidedly unpopular, I really feel that the web is a technology. It is neither a medium in any conventional sense, nor a “world.” It contains media, to be sure—both the mainstream and countercultural currents can be easily found. But they are not what the web is. Messages do not travel across it unchanged; they are constrained by both technical and social limitations. Technologies have several levels of function which often occur simultaneously. To call the web a technology is not to reduce it; actually, it complicates things. Technologies are not static like the normal notion of a medium. They are not holistically constituted like the notion of “worlds.” They exist purely as an interaction with the world, an amplification of it that bridges distance and time. To call the web a technology is not to suggest that it can be reduced to the wires and circuits that form it.

The hazards of leaning too hard on technology to explain human actions is well demonstrated by the failures of art history as suggested by Friedrich von Blowhard:

Another thematic definition of Modern Art might be that of art that responded to the impacts of the reproductive and distributive technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution—photography, the cinema, the phonograph, the high-speed press, mass advertising, etc. This is perhaps the most logical thematic definition in general use, but it makes me scratch my head a bit. I’m not aware of the art of any other period being explained quite so literally by contemporary technological innovation. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall much discussion suggesting that medieval art was the obvious result of the revolutionary application of water- and wind-power during the period between 1000 and 1350. Or that Renaissance art was the obvious outcome of the period’s advances in optics, leading to the mass manufacture of eyeglasses in Florence and Venice during the mid-1400s. Generally, such technological explanations are considered, well, rather reductionist (at least when advanced by David Hockney) but appear to be accepted without much demur in the case of Modern Art.

Ultimately, I think the “world” problems Weinberger wants answers to are not so much a problem of figuring out what brave new world we’ve entered, but rather a matter a figuring out how our preexistent world is amplified or attenuated by technology. Technology does change things, but it is not an explanation—especially when social factors are involved. It would be ludicrous to speak of a new “photographic” world, for example, with the proliferation of imaging technology. Images have been around for a bit longer—at least as long as communication has been around. I don’t think that photography is a medium or a world—I think it is a technology—just like writing. Admitting that doesn’t explain much, but at least it avoids consulting any sort of seer into new worlds to divine an answer.

Mediums have a questionable heritage. However, I agree with McLuhan that the medium is the massage. Media are technologies which extend our senses as well as comforting us with conventions we are used to. They do not create worlds—mostly, imagination does that.

Composition 3x

A strange progression occurred to me a few weeks ago and I’ve meant to jot it down. It’s hard to identify exactly what it is that interests me. People who link my site don’t necessarily have much of a clue. I put some things on my about page, but these things really don’t explain much about the diversity of things that I have written about in the past, and hope to write about in the future once I get past this hellish semester. What I’m really interested in is composition, in the broadest sense of the term.

I first became interested in composition as a viewer of pictures (perhaps at the age of ten or eleven). For some reason, certain pictures fascinated me more than others. It wasn’t just the subjects, but the way that the images were put together. I used to sort them into piles, ranked by the relative level of obsessive compulsion to look at them they held. It wasn’t simply proportion, or composition in the usual sense—there was just something troubling about some pictures which had more to do with how they were put together rather than what they were ostensibly about. When I became a photographer as an adolescent (a calling that seemed almost religious at the time), I did the same sort of thing with my own pictures. I’d arrange them into groups and tack them to every square inch of wall available, staring at them obsessively. I hoped something would come to me about them, especially as I began to notice my tendency to take what seemed almost the same picture over and over until I got it right.

At first, I wasn’t really very subtle about it. Simple graphic things fascinated me for a while, but eventually it seemed like the real way to stay interested in a picture was to make it complex. The more levels, the more ways of looking at it there were, the better I liked it. Then it seemed like that was a trap too. It’s hard to present anything that has “meaning” when your mind is racing too many directions at once. Eventually, I settled on a fairly organicist view—I was done with complex Mondrian-like block constructions and more interested in vortexes and swirls, what seemed to me to be more suggestive of life. I noticed that this fit well with my general taste—I always liked pictures that sort of sucked you in and refused to let you go. Not in the sense that they were optically confusing, but rather that the congruence or incongruence between the subject and the object which represented it was problematic in one sense or another. Not just simple irony (all the rage in 60s and 70s photography) but a deeper sense of complexity brought about by a particular arrangement of items in the visual field. But the subject never became secondary to me—what a picture was supposed to be about was still important, it’s just that I wanted them to be arranged in a more interesting way.

I wrote quite a bit as an adolescent, but I was never able to take any classes in literature or writing. Writing and literature classes were forbidding, full of gatekeepers that slammed doors shut. Photography was open, by comparison. But I’ve always read a lot. I never realized that just through reading a person learns to write pretty well anyway, without help. When I came back to school in my late 30s, I thought I would get a degree in art history, since I’d been studying that all along. But I was seduced by literature instead. What interested me most about literature was the way that things were put together—why some things hold your interest, regardless of subject. I was particularly fascinated by William Blake, not only for his thought, but also for the way that he put words and pictures together in a way that seemed so much greater than the sum of their parts. But getting a job as a literature professor seemed like a pipe dream for someone my age. Instead, I focused on technical writing, or more properly, rhetoric, because it was indeed about the way words were put together to make sense and convey messages. The job opportunities are better for writing teachers, and besides that, I am less interested in aesthetic judgments and more interested in just how things are composed.

Now I find myself obsessed with a third, and perhaps the most intense dimension of composition—the philosophical one. Just what is the relationship of parts to wholes? How is meaning composed from an aggregate of elements (verbal, aural, and visual). That’s how I got into this mess. It’s mainly my interest in composition. I never dreamed, as I was looking at things and sorting them into piles, that it could get this damn complex.