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Transcript

Now that we've thought about the historical trajectory of high and low

literacies, let's get back to the future.

Richard Lanham, "The implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge" (1994)

Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World

Carolyn Handa (2004)

(This collection of essays might be better titled:

"Visual Digital Rhetoric in a Changing World."

Most of the book focuses as much on digital rhetorics as on the visual.)

Handa's introduction explains that visual rhetoric deserves

a more central place in rhetoric curricula because of its

pervasiveness. We need to examine visual arguments using

the same concepts that are familiar to us from verbal

arguments, including audience, purpose, tone, and structure.

This book rarely addresses non-digital visual arguments.

In places, the contents of this book make tragically outdated arguments concerning technology and the potential future of technology. I feel that encountering work that already feels false or irrelevant after a short space of time can be an excellent learning experience for writers. Why does this argument ring false? Is it too dependent on using contemporary tech jargon that never actually caught on (a common issue)? Does it make utopian predictions that go further than its research could support? Did too much of the argument focus on establishing the importance of the technology itself, rather than what that technology can generate or reveal? How can I best avoid creating rapidly outdated work?

But let's get back to what Handa is trying to

accomplish.

Handa wants the readers of this collection to accept not only the importance of visual rhetoric, but the

necessity of increased visual criticism in academia.

She assumes technological literacy (which can be problematic), and explains that within the context of a digital world, readers are likely to encounter

visual arguments as often as verbal. Visuals can be used both as tools for understanding more about rhetoric and as texts of study, themselves. It will be rare, according to Handa, to encounter text or image alone: most arguments will be hybrids of the two.

Handa "bookends" her collection with a pair of what she feels are especially important essays in the field: Craig Stroupe's "Visualizing English," and Richard Lanham's "The implications of Electronic Information for the Sociology of Knowledge." These two pieces are meant to frame the project by taking a critical eye to the past (Stroupe) and looking toward the future (Lanham).

Now let's take a step back....

Craig Stroupe (2000)

"Visualizing English: Recognizing the Hybrid

Literacy of Visual and Verbal Authorship on

the Web"

First of all, we are not just living in a world of "hypertext," but a

world of "hypermedia." Not only are we moving between segments and packets of text at a click, but between various types

of digitally embedded media.

(Stroupe would like you to think back to clipart here.)

A writer at a word processor can now easily insert images at any point they desire in their text! (Some of them probably shouldn't have, though...)

Our mission now, should we choose to accept it, is to combat

widespread iconophobia. According to Stroupe, visual discourse

has long been coded as a "racial, social, and sexual other."

Visual rhetoric must be discussed as a serious field, rather than a

lightweight alternative. It isn't an alternative at all - it is, as Handa

claimed, part of a dominant hybrid class of argument.

Verbal literature is not being replaced by images but layered into this

hybrid discourse. The inherent interactivity of the hypermedia driven world causes readers to act as writers and composers, determining the path of their consumption.

Although most discourse is now hybrid, visual and verbal rhetorics have distinct literacies that should be recognized. Stroupe encourages his readers to engage in a disciplinary process he calls "visualizing English." Don't subsume images under the dominant field of the text. Don't let images be only illustrations of what the text explains. Instead, use images to enhance and converse with accompanying textual arguments.

Stroupe feels that we have twin demons here: The possibility of seeing "text-heavy gray chunks" as "iconographically dead weight"

vs seeing images as supplementary illustrations.

A Northren Grey Squirrel

Ideally, the image and the text should mutually interrogate one another.

The trouble is the common tendency to seperate texts or media into artificial categories of "high" and "low" discourse. This dichotomy threatens the advance of visual rhetorics because many visual media are traditionally labeled as "low," and more denotative than connotative.

We need to recongize more possibilities for image rhetoric than the iconic vs. the iconoclastic.

Motherhood

Stroupe supports Cynthia Selfe's argument that writing technologies are themselves political and cannot be innocent. Each writing technology has produced a different form of literacy. He makes a fascinating comparison between the ways that rhetorical moves are used in Elbow's -Writing without Teachers- and the -Netscape 3 Quickstart Guide.-

Both texts address history, players, difficulty, and desire, but in dramatically different ways.

Bear in mind that this is about 17 years old.

Lanham describes what he sees as a shift in the rhetorical

"operating system." We have shifted away from the humanist ideology of the authoratitive Text. Once upon a time, texts were printed and unchangeable, and images were far more expensive than words to produce and reproduce. We are headed into a very different textual future. The "screen" is volatile, and introduces to rhetoric a new time scale: you can argue back to a text, comment on a composition, and receive a reply.

Ricky's cellphone pic of Peter Elbow playing with my sparklepony at CCCC.

A blast from the 90s.

We're getting further from the visual here and closer to the digital, but Stroupe would like you to remember that we're in a world of hybrids now anyway.

Lanham believes that digital text has no material embodiment (I'd argue otherwise, but this is not the place) and therefore becomes an unordered, DIY collage of reading and hypertext. All old notions of copyright, fair use and ownership must be reevaluated.

In fact, he would like to know why plain text is still called "normal?"

Here we go!

We no longer simply write "normal" words that, as Elbow says, "talk to one another," but digital and iconic texts that talk to every feature on the page.

These images are neither "low" nor "high," but must be critically read as a site of multiple and hybrid literary possibilities.

We have entered the time of Multimedia. Originality, text, and authority have new meanings. The future of the humanities is at stake now that "words and images share an isomorphic representative code" (458).

Multimedia is a cluster of technologies. It is highly visual, and Lanham feels terribly limited when trying to describe it in black and white text. If publication allowed, he could use the new technologies of text color selection and change how you read these words in ways unrelated to verbal order.

Whereas the printed page enabled a transparent window

to the meaning of the text, Lanham labels the screen as "opaque." I believe he is referring to the ability of multimedia to call attention to the details of its own production.

He makes a wise prediction about grammar in cyberspace: "What becomes, for example, of the stability of spelling, punctuation, and syntax? Will we now return to the chaotic days of Elizabethan orthography?"

(We went... somewhere... interesting, for sure.)

Now that we can discuss flowing text and image, we may

someday be able to examine even comic books. Comic books, he believes, have brought about the devaluing of image rhetoric, because scholars have long associated the iconic with the comic.

Comics are a good start, because we need to renegotiate the relation between verbal and visual thinking. Thinking is the key word here. Lanham wants to advance a science of visualization and rhetorical hybridity, although he cautions us that, as in the case of Plato vs the rhapsodists, this will be widely opposed.

Hypertext is collage, and collage is, for Lanham, the "basic artform of our time." The new "god term" in multimedia studies is "interactivity." This might seem unbelievable, but Lanham assures us that this is not mere futurism.

Grrrrr....

The other cultural action performed by the multimedia revolution is the democratization of training, music, performance, and talent. What was once performance art can be created and disseminated privately by private citizens.

Replay can be as authentic as play.

Lanham gives an interesting (and dear to my own heart) example of the future of multimedia representation: the After Dark line of early Macintosh screensavers and their (in)famous Flying Toaster. Randomly generated art revolutionizes the way we think of composition. Soon still images may be unacceptable. Art now moves. I'm not so sure about his claims that "even housewives" can participate in creation, but he makes an interesting argument for the importance of studying motion in visual rhetoric.

Lanham believes that new fields of primary interest need to replace our "current race-gender-class obsession." Instead, we need to turn our eyes to behavioral biology, neuroanatomy and chaos theory if we want to enrich the humanities.

So where does this leave us?

Maybe this book wasn't really about visual rhetoric so much as

hybrid rhetoric. In a digital world, we don't encounter image without text, even if only because, if you want to get really technical about it, every digital image IS text. And every bit of that text is ones and zeros. Lanham and Stroupe both recommended recognition of multiple literacies, but their work seems to require hybrid literacies.

Of course, most current multimedia work focuses heavily on video and audio in addition to text and still image. Into how many pieces should we break our rhetorical study? Do we need a rhetoric of 3D media, virtual reality, or podcasts? Can we seperate any or all of these rhetorics?

While all these media are connected, we could still use vocabularies, theories, and pedagogies of the parts (and I wish these articles had contained more of this). But then, I'm a graduate student, so I might not be the right person to ask whether or not someone can study too much....

(I'm done now.)

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