VizRhet, no tech

Scrapbooking normalizes and formalizes the American experience visually, encoding and decoding memory in the same way that newspapers regulate and contain public events via column space and AP regulations. Scrapbooking allows the users a sense of mastery over memory (that elusive faculty that disappears with age, can be not only lost, but modified as time passes) through a new kind of iconography. Although commodification of the process has allowed for seemingly endless design possibilities, users are limited by not only artisitic ability, but by the commodification itself. Companies that make scrapbooking materials limit how the users can describe (and thus remember) their own experiences: the trinkets and stickers become simulacra, more real than the event itself. The pompoms used to *represent* cheerleading end up defining for the cheerleader what his/her experience should have been. Quote Baudrillard here on difference between representation and simulation.
Moreover, as commodification continues, scrapbooking itself becomes normalized. The medium of the book encourages/invites categorization of life events into temporal or spatial modes "Wedding" "School" "Christmas" Plato's fear of writing's ability to erase memory might now well be replaced with a fear of photography replacing memory--of "memoirs" becoming iconography, with all the worship due to that practice. The books become sacred, like the family tree in the front of the family bible used to be: Instead of dates of deaths and births, we now use brightly colored stickers and ribbons. All of this to stave off the fear of death the disappearance of the self represented within those pages. A chance to write our own eulogies long before we die. Herein lies Amy Clemons at her best--all else has been cropped with scissors, erased with red-eye remover pens.

See my Ego grow

We've flooded ERC with grad students. In the corner by the window, open to passers-by, ready to show their faces, sit the founding members of the North American Levinas Society. Sol Neely has his back to the window, and I keep looking at them and smiling--I hope he doesn't think I'm trying to flirt. It just amuses me that "The North American Levinas Society," such a big name, such a prestigious sounding organization, is really just those five people I know by association, if not better, just kids in my head even though they're all over 25 and have mortgages and the like. My colleagues are doing things that are becoming knowledge, public record, authority, something to be cited, part of a body of philosophy. ANd they're sitting in ERC around a cheap table, drinking really good espresso drinks, making hand gestures that have something to do with "Community" (open hands, spreading wide) and the Other (clasped hands, drawing inwards).
Dave's revelation that our course material--the kinda fluffy little blogs we're posting almost haphazardly (trying to meet his weekluy requirements)--will most likely be cited by someone has made me freeze up a little, mentally. It's one thing to post blogs here, where few will find me but my friends, but it's another to Google "visual rhetoric and technology" and find my posts on the third page.

Google me

Go ahead. Google Amylea and Rhetoric and our ENGL 680V course website pops up. Then this blog. Then Dana's site. Then Lou's blog, then Kari's blog.
Google "What is visual rhetoric" and you get the 680V site and Wikipedia. I am now a resource. I feel all Ethos-y.

Elocute me, baby

"Staged-ness": The sense that what you are viewing is not unfolding naturally, but has been prearranged for some rhetorical effect. The feeling that you are being duped. This sense often emerges from over-use of gesture, metaphor, or crescendo. See, "Elocution."

Behind this is a fear that there is a lack of truth in the words themselves. If movements are natural, then the speaker must be speaking truth (it's ethos-based). And if there is truth, we assume the audience will act upon it, or change their attitudes. This link between truth and action is so assumed, so obvious, that when we say we are "raising awareness" about some event or misunderstood stereotype, we assume there will be an automatic change in the scene. That when we see the Truth of the dystopia we now live in, we will react against it. I'm not so sure. Wish I were.

Late nights at the Wit: Design content vs images. Hierarchies set up, lines drawn, emotion in the boldlines. Paragraph breaks tell us what is connected to what. Pull out quotes do what? (Other than give us more column space).

Elocute this: are there elocutionary gestures in online, moving avatars? The winking smiley on MSN?

Blink!

Or lick, or sniff. Tap, listen. Malcolm Gladwell's book probably refers to the speed of blinking, but the title also suggests a strongly visual element to this thin slicing. Perhaps because it's the sense we're most used to relying on, perhaps because English has more words to describe things visually than via other senses, but our (whose?) minds seem primed to deal with optical input more efficiently.
The experiment described on page 52 ("Primed for Action"), the "old," "grey," "Florida," test, shows how easily our language deals with the visual--after all, what words could they have used to invoke oldness that dealt with old smells? Or old sounds? No, Old is definitely a visual category, minus a few outliers, like "musty" or "rotten." The visual is essential, then, to rhetoric, if only because our descriptors tend toward the visual.
As rhetoricians, we need to learn the exact mechanism by which readers come to snap judgments so that our constructions are most efficient. What is it about certain commercials that cause us all (or most) to react with the same laugh, at the same moment? What is it we are identifying with at that moment? And what counts as a moment, whe we talk about things in terms of blinks and nanoseconds? It's a wonder we've figured out rhetoric as much as we have, before we were able to break down time in computer graphs.
While this book doesn't help us figure out what visual rhetoric is, it does point to some of the mechanisms at work--and it does so via several anecdotes, themselves steeped in visual adjectives and descriptors. Gladwell argues that the Warren Harding factor, that separate visual elements work together to "carry so many powerful connotations" (76) (either positive or negative), is what is responsible for many of our decisions. Gladwell and his publishers obviously took this into account in creating the book itself: Small, large print, with a similar simple design as Gladwell's previous best seller, lack of capitalization. Clean, white, textured cover. The book says "You can read this. And it's interesting! It will make you seem sophisticated and cultured at parties when you quote it!" Put it on your coffee table for guests. Some mechanism is linking all those things together very quickly. And the next thing you know, you've bought the book, the DVD, the stuff that's supposed to get all the coffee stains out of your clothes (whatever, OxyClean).
What Blink makes evident is that we don't yet know this mechanism, and that what we don't know can trip us up. Does the finding the most efficient visual rhetoric, the best way to move someone to action, require us to find the electrical impulses that occur in those nanoseconds? Or can we bypass the eternal MRI scans and biofeedback meters (not that I mind those; they're kind of fun) and figure out visual rhetoric without understanding the human brain? There are all sorts of illnesses doctors don't understand, and yet can fully treat by looking at symptoms--can't we look at the "symptoms" of visual rhetoric in order to come up with an underlying structure? Are we in danger of moving rhetoric from an Art to a Science?
And is this a bad thing?

Hunger Strike

Damn, she says, and he's not heard that before--not like wisp and bone falling just short of a ticket home. He knows he should be careful when the hours pass so quickly, he knows the stillness of her chest and the redness of her eyes are just symptoms of the sky lights. Too many broken things to catalog, beginning at the head and moving down.
She should hate this, because it itches in her brain, in the center like she told him. How can you not know the signal, the sign behind your eyes announcing the missing? She has run from the echoing walls that thrust their thoughts back on her, and still here, in the open nothing, they close in and whisper back. Not so raw here, but the details are not shrouded either.
If they follow the next time, she'll be convinced it's not her fault.

Amateur Auteurs

"Democratization of production" = anyone with a keyboard can make cultural artifacts that used to be in the hands of the gatekeepers.

Do our skills lag behind what we are able to imagine?

How are knowledge and skill different?

What do our students know about peer review from their interaction with technology? Comment functions?

Souls of Black Folk, Part II

In Chapter III, DuBois writes "of Mr. Booker T Washington," the chapter for which this book is famous. His standpoint is obvious even by the epigraph he chooses (from Byron), but he makes the statement more clearly a few paragraphs later: "And yet the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill than well in the world" (par 5). Yes, the time has come. And gone, and come again.
One cannot deny that Washington made a rhetorically savvy choice: he knew his audience and context well. DuBois says as much in this chapter. Washington did what was needed for a particuylar time. Unfortunately, his kairotic choice became reified into standard procedure and ideology. DuBois wants to undo that.
DuBois also, however, wants a return to the canon. This seems almost archaic after all the canon-destruction we've been doing the last twnety years. "Classic" doesn't mean much anymore; it's a starting place for us to ask: But what values do these "classics" promote? Who chose them as classic? Why these particular ones? Socrates is lovely, yes, but he's also only one bit of a much larger world of philosophy occuring at the same time. What about the Chinese? (Our new favorite question: What were the Chinese doing?)
DuBois is often read as the first person to analyze African American rhetoric (whatever that may mean?)--while he does not use the term "rhetoric," his analysis of Washington's "tact and power" (par 7), his ability to sway his own people, is succinct and apt. He recognizes the exigency, the audience, the constraints that Washington is under, and yet still has the agency to criticize Washington for giving in to those. For silencing his opposition and allowing himself to be occasionally silenced. And not silenced in a strategic way--silenced as a way of stopping social change.
Again, I come to the point where I feel uneasy, where my dystopian rhetoric threatens to fall apart at its Burkeian seams: Can rhetoric, even rhetoric as powerful as Washington's, actually insight revolution? How quickly must something happen for it to be revolutionary, and how complete must the change be? Can we really attribute cause and effect in this case, or are is the rhetorical situation far too complex to tease out what, exactly, criticism does? Particularly today, when the best critics, the critics within the academy, are never heard except within their own communities?
Do we do what bell hooks did? CAN we do what bell hooks did, and still be radically effective?
Last night, I was listening to Relient K's Jefferson Airplane, my second favorite RK song, when the proverbial ton of bricks hit me: When, exactly, did I stop believing that I was doing good in the world? When did I stop trying to do good in the world? And how can I get it back?
DuBois wrote this book, and we keep reading it, debating the two ideologies (Washington v DuBois) and doing absolutely nothing about it. The pile of books I just bought seem to want to fix the problem through text alone. But despite the years since alterity studies, public knowledge and ideology has not shifted. My students still think blacks can be racist. They still think racism is over.
Agency doesn't mean anything unless you actually use it. And while DuBois created quite a maelstrom, when we write the same things today, no one pays attention. No one who can help us reach a tipping point, anyway.

Souls of Black Folk: Thoughts Part I

In Bonnie TuSmith's MultiEthnic Literature class, I played with the rhetoric of Otherness, but I played alone. No one else quite had the skills or knowledge I had to do this sort of work, and my words seemed new and wise. I cannot expect this at Purdue, however; here, some things are a given.
Sure, I could point out DuBois's structure: How you must always begin a race-theory text with a narrative about your first moment of feeling Othered. Because it gives you ethos to continue your argument, because retelling a moment of trauma or betrayal is one way to work through it, because that is the moment when Hegel/Husserl/Heidegger's lovely White Ontonlogy fails and we have to point that out. Because it's good for his "Gentle Reader" who is most certainly a white person dependent on Others for identity, and retelling that moment of Othering defamiliarizes us all: With whom am I to identify? My standard WhiteMale gaze for Burke's consubstantiation is gone. The world tilts as I read.
A description, then, of the feeling of Otherness, a feeling which is nearly impossible to describe in the first place. "One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (Ch 1). The sentence is full of commas and dashes and semicolons, dancing around the thing he can't seem to say. He makes up a word: "two-ness" and emphasizes this multiplicity by multiplying his clauses. Too much. Two is too much for one neat sentence.
He speaks for his race throughout, without the hesitations and hedgings we're used to: "The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self." and " He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face." He names his desires as the desires of the whole, to simplify matters--to unify his radical argument.
But is this "critical race theory"? No, it's the rhetoric of Otherness. I have no theory, and I'm not being "critical" in the sense that I am attempting to change the system. I'm not advocating, I'm not giving agency--I'm just noting things. Who's going to listen to a white girl from Ohio anyway? How could I possibly have the ethos to be "ethical"?
Of course, I can always try to figure out a Burkeian approach to agency for the Other. Is consubstantiation really possible? Do we even really want that?

Semester-ness

T.S. Eliot may have measured his life in teaspoons, but mine is measured in semesters. I didn't realize just how semester-driven my life was until I started trashing some stuff in my old (paper) files. In trying to figure out what YEAR these were from, I referenced what SEMESTER I took the class in.
Of particular interest was a cheap, Walmart, pink, falling apart notebook I'd tossed on the shelf apparently half-heartedly. From my first semester at NEU, my first semester as a real live adult, my first semester in grad school. The notebook begins just after my birthday--I'd had a legal pad up until then. I don't remember writing any of the stuff in this notebook, which is interesting. So, some stuff by someone apparently named Amylea Clemons...from 7 semesters ago.

Untitled, 10/24/2003 (Fairly certain Kari's mother was the inspiration, but I don't know what the hell it's about
)
She constructs just like me
--in the basement, in the sawdust--
in the bold strokes of science and observation.
Where it is dark, she shaves and splits
the single light hallowing the center.
There are nodes here to smooth
walls that need rebuilding; sketches of the inside
show the need--we drink the milk from our cereal bowls--
so she slides under the sharp edge to complete it in emptying.
I have eternal papercuts from sleeping with the book
We say: A witty ending goes here. But not without
careful measurement

Untitled, writen while reading Marianne Moore, as is obvious by its diction
"Nothing like" is a certain negation
So Whole! So sure of its emptiness!
Not at all "Something like"--
which is something like a hesitation--
"Nothing like" is made with cement,
creates media of content sighs.
It is not, therefore it is.

I wonder: That's all.
We want a predicate for it, for purpose
"Observations" under a microscope
I will not hit my friends
I will not shake the table
I will not know my father in his rants
The press loved that sort of thing
they love it: How do you sort out
the charming eccentric from the genius?

That crust was there last century,
but it did not permeate everything
(like quotations around your own words)
invisible and inaudible
and then it falters, letters are added,
and No becomes Some,
Necessary Fictions become
Necessary Fictions.


November 1 (title or date? Or both? Written during a Yeats phase)
There's a space between the words
that indicates time's wake
The roughened guitar twangs through
electricity say only "Me-mor-y"
It's beautiful, it's brutal, it's a tall candle
flickering on a board in the lake
His vision of her causing him to think quickly
sharpening his grief on grass blades

December is the slowest month, waiting for
that precious birth to shake our fears
All Souls' has pierced the air with cold
wreath and cranberry sauce
William is not here; Lucille has gone,
Woodrow sleeps; I have no tears for them
Today they move more thickly upon the earth
among the costumed bodies and faces

Today they walk in those flares arranged
to call to them, on which to say a prayer
The good catholics inhaling wick-smoke
whisper cannons for me, aloft
And frozen in the system of the hours,
always, alreayd, almost there
Unable to move from the crook of the gears
rotated to repeat, I was born in.

To remember is too much for tired synapses
too used to routing around that Thing
It's like stiffling a yawn, though: eventually
your jaw aches, and head throbs and out
Comes the suppressed with its reliefs and its
givings-in to sleep or embarrassment
There's time enough, he says from below, for dwelling
thanatopsically. This one day where all the spectres are about.

11/2/2003 Haiku
Snickers' wrappers
oh what a beautiful shade
my foot in the lamp

In the margin of notes on Kierkeggard and HD
Hope, she wrote for him
and hope he brought home
in the length of his hair
having seen his father live and die
and live again
returning younger and with more
fire in his hands than any previous incarnation
thirteen labors for him to perform
now that hope has descended and the soulless deed
(he must drink from chipped teach cups) shut down
the grand experiment: He must return!
Wash the jacket that went to hell with him
build a new room
raise his master from his mounting sleep

He must cut his hair

He must fall in love
must clear the decadent rubble
and find the leftover parts
he must keep going
must hold the gravity at bay
create a way to find the old world under the new
he must reread it to her
without crying for himself

It's not that they can't coexist
but he is the type who must have one or the Other
And the Other has been killed

He beings with cutting his hair

Untitled During a William Carlos Williams phase, so it must be Semester Fall 2003
Put down your smooth affect
and quit kidding us.
We know you only walk like that
when you're ready to flee
So much depends
Upon the stride of your gait.
I read something about
New Wave Romanticism
What to do about it, and these visions I have?
Where I try not to be sleepy and
simply stumble one day into a week
I have a tendency to pull to the right
when not paying attention
Repeatedly someone approaches the throttle
then backs away from the solar flares
I have imagined myself at that bar
desperate and tripped up on football
God and Pour Patria Mori
Then skipping, singing some punk anthem
with real spirit I toss change in the air
not rocks at the hill climbers
I placed a jar in tennessee
just to see if poets will follow me
and they DO and we LOPED on
I can see for miles and miles
which is good because that's
where we're headed.

Untitled Same page
With the lights on, it's fading
Here we are, in these containers
I feel stupid and unmade here
There we are having facelifts
Always spinning
Always willing to be undone
I forget what it tastes like
and this too makes you smile


Right, so, from this we can conclude that how I write depends upon (a red wheelbarrow) which poet I'm reading. Given that all I read lately is Theory, 19th century novels, and Bad Fan Fiction (soon to be an academic discipline), it's no wonder I can't seem to write more than a line or two. Well, I can write quite a bit, but it all sounds like it was written by dead French guys...