Hypertext and Temporality

Mitchell writes of metapictures: "the “fort-da” or “peek-a-boo” effect of these images is sometimes associated with forms of “savage thought,” rites of passage, and “liminal” or threshold experiences in which time and space, figure and ground, subject and object play an endless game of “see-saw”" (Mitchell, 46). I see the same case of savage time and liminal experience occurring in the context of hypertext, and I think it happens in much the same way.

Landow describes the "quasi-magical entrances to a networked reality" (37) which Western culture thought of long before the advent of hypertext. Considering that magical time and savage time are the same idea, I see how Mitchell's statement can be applied to hypertext and its shifting, non-linear nature. Landow describes the concept as a structure of space and time in which "any particular person, event, or phenomenon could act as a magical window" and that lexias "become Borgesian Alephs, points in space that contain all other points, because from the vantage point each provides one can see everything else" and "the hypertext document becomes a traveling Aleph" (37). If in hypertext one can access any point from any other point, it is similar to metapicture in that a metapicture is a liminal, in-between existence which serves to lead into another existence when the observer experiences and interprets it as one thing or another.

The plateaus of hypertext create a liminal space and time, one without determined beginning or end. Deleuze and Guattari's statement that the rhizome "is antigenealogy" or "antimemory" (40) also provides insight. The rhizome is "always a middle" (40), so it can have no genealogy  or memory because it has no past and no future. This is an example of magical spacetime, in which all spaces and times are one. I'm still not sure I grasp "being-for space" and "being-in space", but  in this context I might interpret "being-for space", which is inside the person's experience, as experienced linear time, and "being-in space" as the actuality of the magical spacetime, which is the network in crush, or the Aleph.

Metapictures, hypertext and circular thinking

When I think of metapictures I think of russian dolls.  A picture within a picture within a picture.  The same can be said for hypertext--just in a different way.

According to Landow, "Hypertext...provides an infinitely recenterable system whose provisional point of focus...that is composed of bodies of linked texts that have no primary axis of organization" (36).  His "recenterable system" depends upon the lexias of the hypertext.  The lexias create the difference between russian dolls and hypertext.  "Lexias work much in the manner of types...points in space that contain all other points, because from the vantage point each provides one can see everything else" (37).

I feel like metapicture russian dolls are "points in space" within "points in space," then lexias and hypertext are russian dolls scattered around a table--all at once.  

OWS= Hypertext

I've been thinking a lot about text and its relationship to communal self-analysis in artistic performance, political and social performance (such as civil disobedience), and rituals. In my view, coordinated civil disobedience is a more effective way of achieving self-analysis in a community than, say, rioting. The Bedford Glossary notes that images can be interpreted as texts if the material is isolated for analysis. Similarly, the performance of civil disobedience or other political actions often are set apart precisely for the sake of analysis. In my opinion, rituals are the most important candidate for being given provisional text status not only because they pervade our history yet are lacking today, but also because they are participatory.

In thinking about these things, I googled "civil disobedience ritual" and found a call for academic submissions to some ritual studies department that asked specifically for papers related to Occupy Wall Street. I am completely enthralled by the potential for ritual-esque practices being revived within communities across the country and around the world because they offer, like OWS, the potential for communal self-analysis. So the future of rituals will provide a way of framing a community so that it may be analyzed. The frame may be a physical, participatory gathering, and if it is (I hope it will be so), the result will very much resemble a hypertext.

Consider OWS. Everyone in the NYC Zuccotti Park, for the most part, held their own sign or had their own thing to say.  One who entered the park then had access to all of these blurbs or quotations and could talk to virtually anyone they wanted. OWS then operates both in the realm of hypertext as written word and as spoken word. Thus hypertext was achieved through assembly.

Applying Landow

I had a lot I wanted to write about after reading Landow’s “Hypertext and Critical Theory”, but I thought I’d try something a little fun—apply genre theories to a flash game, specifically The Great Gatsby for NES (the link leads to a video of the game; if you'd like to play the game, click here). I had to present a game in my Flash Games class, and I chose a game which was based on The Great Gatsby. After my presentation, my teacher mused on how he thought, as game genres continue to evolve, they might come to be considered “literary.”

In regards to Landow's essay, the game does well in capturing the detachability of a novel’s “reading units”: “The implication of such citability, separability, appears in fact, crucial to hypertext, that, as Derrida adds, ‘in so doing it can break every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable’ (34)”  

The main citation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in the shared title between the game and the novel. A further citation is a very basic plotline; a man seeks another man named Gatsby at a 1920s party.  The game gives this basic, shared plotline a new form, allowing certain parts of the novel to transform and “break” its “given context.”  For instance, Dr. Eckelburg’s glasses shooting laser beams in the context of Fitzergerald’s novel would be strange, but within the context of the game, this function of the glasses is possible. The glasses used in the novel function as a symbolic device working to relate the presence of God. In the game, the function of the glasses expands to represent a God who has active presence as a literal obstacle to the characters’ motives; the glasses shoot laser beams prohibiting the character from moving onto the next level. The game may not capture all of the novels’ intents, but in the case of laser beam shooting glasses, it does capture the symbol’s essential functionality as an obstacle.

An interesting aspect of the game is that the character seeking Gatsby is never named. Having read The Great Gatsby, I assume this character is Nick, but if I had not read the novel before playing the game, then I could make no such assumption. This too hearkens to Landow’s presentation of Deleuze and Guatttari in that a “hypertext…has ‘multiple entryways and exits” (40). Some gamers may play the game having read The Great Gatsby, whereas others will enter and identify with the game through different means.  Essentially, the game exists as a parody in relation to the novel The Great Gastby, but without this context, it can stand alone as a flash game with its own original characters and narrative. This also demonstrates how the game has components which are situated within its own narrative context (laser-beam glasses situated in an alternative universe 1920s), and also, the game itself is situated in a web-like discourse, linking it to The Great Gatsby. 

The idea of the hypertext is that no text stands on its own, representative of an inarguable truth. Instead, texts are themselves and contain extricable units, which come to light by applying them to other texts or modes (e.g. flash games).

To go back to our practice of categorizing the cards in class, I want to ask what genre(s) does this game fall under? Literary? Parody? Also, reading about "breaking given contexts", I was reminded of memes, and how pictures and phrases can come to represent all sorts of differing situations. What do you think about the hypertextuality of memes?

P.S. I almost forgot this. What's really cool about the game is how it takes Fitzgerald's theme of  "being borne ceaselessly into past" and visualizes it. The game was created in Adobe Flash but designed as if it were for the Nintendo. The form the content of the game takes reflects the intention of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The game exists as both a commentary on the past (Nintendo) and the present (Adobe Flash). Perhaps, this goes back to repeating a novel's "mourceau" in a different context in order to expound the possibility of its applications. 

Better late than never

I sat here for several minutes trying to think of a clever way to say how I felt while viewing “Public Secrets”, but I just couldn’t muster up the energy, so I’ll just be blunt; it was depressing.  The subject matter alone was enough to bum me out, hearing about corruption and mistreatment of prisoners never leads to fun times.  It was startling just how much more potent these individuals’ stories were when not reading them, but actually hearing them, in their voice.  It’s because of this, I think, that I found myself immersing myself in many more of the interviews than I originally thought.  I listened to as many as I could in each section, before finally just having to tear myself away from the computer and listen to some happy music to turn my mood around. 

After a short break, I started listening to the interviews again with the ideas of langue and parole in mind.  Though there wasn’t a vast difference, the langue of the prisoners definitely had its own feeling, its own flavor.  Terms were used that any prisoner would instantly pick up on, but us as listeners would probably not understand the meaning, at least not right away.  Some things were easy to decipher; when talking about a correctional officer, the title was often shortened to just CO.  Others needed to be explained outright, we couldn’t quite pick up on the meaning of them from context alone.  What was interesting about this to me was that these terms that I hadn’t heard before, hadn’t been in a position to even learn, weren’t completely foreign to me.  The context that they were used in, the words (the parole?) that surrounded the term, all helped to give me at least a basic understanding of it.  It was the smaller pieces of the prisoners’ language that allowed me to understand the whole of it, or at least the whole of what we had access to.

First half of Landow as I understand him

I'd like to start off by saying my arm's much better!  Nothing a weekend of ice and relaxation won't cure.

On to more important matters:  hypertext.

One, it took me forever to find to what hypertextuality refers.  According to the Bedford it "refers to writing that is nonsequential...represents ideas in a nonlinear way, contrasting hypertext with the authorially-organized linear mode of presentation typically used in other media" (232).

Naturally I had no idea what this meant.  I want to argue that even while I'm browsing through pages on the internet (hypertext and whatnot) I still feel it to be "sequential."  Ever play the wikipedia game.  Think of two completely unrelated topics, then use only (at most) seven wikipedia page links to get from your first topic to your second.  That's a linear sequence, but I suppose in terms of reading a novel it's completely different.  While reading a novel you go from what scene to the next with each scene in reference to the last.  Researching tends to take you everywhere as Landow so describes:

"All hypertext systems permit the individual reader to choose his or her own center of investigation...if they enter the system looking for information about an individual author, they tend to spend most time with lexias devoted to specific texts" (38).

Lexias:  "points in space that contain all other points, because from the vantage point each provides one can see everything else.

Apparantly lexias are the zenith of the internet.  And here I thought it was Facebook.  I've lost my train of thought.  ....sequences...lexias....there's no real way for me to prove any sort of point in this argument.  I think I'm just babbling, but essentially I don't agree with the whole "nonsequential" nonsense.  There doesn't have to be a plot for their to be sequence.
 

I tried to think of a "hypertext" pun but failed

My first thoughts about hypertext were fairly simple.  It’s a text that isn’t just words staying static on a page; it’s somehow more than that.  My mind jumped almost immediately to the internet, and not only because I was on the verge of being irrevocably distracted from the reading by a website I had open on my laptop.  I started tracing the thought process, as I usually have to do, that led to this connection.  Hypertext had more than likely made me think about hyperlinks, which are of course found on, you guessed it, the internet.  I feel like this connection may be too obvious to really talk about in depth, but it seemed to make sense to me given the examples in Landow’s essay.  My understanding of hypertext is that certain phrases can send a reader off on a tangent in a way, making references that put them in a different setting or mindset, or make them think about another body of work, research, mythology, things like that.  I wasn’t entirely sure about why Landow says that the idea of a rhizome is an impossibility however.  The comparison between rhizomes and hypertext seemed to be apt, so maybe I missed something.  

Network, Prisons, Plateau-Things and Hypertext

First of all, I want to say that the idea of a purely unstable network is self-defeating. The "rhizome" as it is explained in the George Landow is essentially an unachievable ideal (Landow, 42). But is it an applicable idea at all? It has the appearance of a being a "logical" extreme, representing "neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills" (Landow quoting Deleuze and Guattari, 40). And yet even this picture, this analogy collapses under itself. If there is no beginning or end, then how can it overspill? You essentially reach an infinity from which any point can be arbitrarily termed a "center" because any direction is infinitely far from any end. Literally, the center does not exist and cannot be scientifically or mathematically determined.

I do not mean to propose, though, that this concept has no worth or application, as it most certainly does, but I think it is essential to view this as only an illustration of a concept. I do not wish to propose either that this is the concept itself, because it simply cannot exist. I consider it an analogy and I think that is where it should be left.

That said, this has some truly fascinating implications for text, hypertext and the human mind. This kind of hypertext theory illustrates a wonderful application of the idea that a text is interpretable by any given individual without the necessary risk of them being "wrong." Because each person brings their own presuppositions to the table, each person creates their own "center of their movement through an information space" (Landow, 41). This is important also because it differentiates something I think many people miss: the center is still within the context of the network. That is, a unifying force must exist at least on some level. It would be foolish to propose that the author has absolute control over the text, or even that a text has full control over itself, however a text can define its bounds.

If you think about a text (for the purpose of this example, let's say a hypertext) as a circle and a reader of the text as a line, the reader can begin from any point along the edge of the circle and continue through until they achieve a "center." Now, while this center may not exist at what we might call the center of the circle, it does exist at the center of the experience. That is, we can think of the line itself as an actor. The act and path of reading a text change where the center might be. Since each person follows a different line, the center might be anywhere within the circle. However, the center will never be outside the circle because the experience of reading does not (at the specific moment of reading. Rumination, citation, allusion, etc. all complicate the idea in a way the analogy does not and cannot address) exist outside the circle of the text.

This I found to be very true of Daniel's "Public Secrets." Everyone in the class came to the text differently and followed vastly different paths through it. However, there were unifying principles that all of us could catch on to. Because the project is not simply "the internet," we were able to define a unified reading experience and identify our reading paths with others'. This is because we all, at one point or another, must needs have crossed paths within the confines of the "circle" in order to form our opinion and conception of the text's "center."

This idea could definitely be fleshed out a little more, but I thought I would throw it out there.

You remind of something I read once, but why?

In trying to start a conversation between Public Secrets and Miller, I began applying the traits of Public Secrets to a list in my notes titled "Miller's Properties of Rhetorical Conceptions of Genre".

1. Rhetorical genre does not lend itself well to taxonomy (or stable organization).

The project had me thinking a lot about taxonomy. Her binary categories (Inside/Outside, Bare Life/Human Life, The Public Secrets/Utopia) are obviousness at first but make sense in a prison context. I would assumed a sorting of Daniels' research, other researchers' comments, and prisoner comments. Those are categories for sorting data but that isn't the goal of this division. These categories almost carry emotional triggers. This division is designed not only to sort data but to also contribute to the Daniels' overall message via awareness of these dichotomies. They paint a negative picture of the prison system before they are even explored.

2. Rhetorical genre refers to a conventional category of discourse that acquires meaning from situation and social contexts.

I would love to see someone argue this as not situated in social contexts. This project was completed in 2008 which I would put in the category of recent considering the information is still extremely relevant. This project gains power from where it's situated in social contexts. The Prison Industrial Complex is a current issue that needs to be addressed and, in fact, is one area of concern for the in current political debate.

3. Rhetorical genre is interpretable by means of rules that occur at a high level of symbolic action

This takes me back to my initial observation of perceiving the Public Secret menu binaries as unobvious. Maybe the symbolic action being referred to here is like the emotional triggers I was attempting to explain earlier.

4. Rhetorical genre is NOT the same as form (it serves as the substance of forms).

I'm still wrapping my head around this statement. I can't tell if the aspects of Public Secrets that I've been discussing pertain to this or not. I guess I've been mentioning the structure of the division of information. Is that form? But, I decided it had extra qualities. Could those qualities be seen as substance of form? I attribute substance as less abstract than form and the qualities I pointed out as more abstract than form and that's where I get stuck.

5. Rhetorical genre offers keys to understanding how to participate in given communities.

I could say the different perspectives offered throughout the project, the specific division of information, and the supplement of audio with transcript would allow someone to better communicate in a radical 'community'. Is that the genre or just the discourse leading me to believe that?
 

Is this a 'situated action' as Prof. Graban asked?I don't know the structural rules that apply to talking about genres, and that's really preventing me from articulating my thought on the relationship I've outlined. I don't know what I've just written about knowing.

Multiple Layers of Hypertext...

My last post dealt with the confusion I felt going through the online system that was set up by Daniels.  I would like to continue on with that post by also discussing the idea of  how hypertexts are, intentional or not, part of a system that consists of multiple layers.
Landow writes, "As readers move through a web or network of texts, they continually shift the center - and hence the focus or organizing principle - of their investigation and experience," (Landow 36).  This idea of a constant shifting of focus further exemplified as Landow brings up Christ.  Throughout the Bible, multiple figures are associated with the coming of Christ and figures such as Moses, as mentioned by Landow, is associated with Christ because of his part in prophesying.  The constant shifting of centers throughout this historical/religious text gives light to how there are hypertexts within literary works such as these but also how there are multiple layers that are created with the idea of hypertexts.  A layer of hypertexts dealing with Moses and his associations are then put together with layers of hypertexts associated with other figures in the Bible.  As confusing as it sounds, the layers of hypertexts remain organized due to the associations being solid but can be open to changes.  The online system, "Public Secrets," in which the voice links to each testimony is also part of various layers in which the two sides are associated with other testimonies (life on the outside and life on the inside).  This entry might be confusing because of the complexity that comes along with Landow's "Hypertext and Critical Theory", but it's interesting to note how hypertext has been especially more common in today's society.

Caged Freedom: Expression Beyond Bars

Daniel's hypertext essay helped to trigger a realization, concerning the mixture of language, in my mind.  The manner in which the audio, text, and visual sequences are presented relieved me of a limiting thought.    The common sense version of my experience was that less can be more.  I understood this phrase, but I wasn't ready to apply it whole-heartedly to a piece until Daniel's hypertext essay.  I feel that because of the essay's lack of human visual representation, more humanity is released in its interpretation.  We are not shown the prisoners or the prison, only a graphic design with intermittent flashes of gray and white text.  This struck me as especially powerful on the bare-life/human-life section.  Given the context, but not being presented with a face or body to attribute our interpretation to, the meaning we attribute to the text and audio is produced and reflected back on us.  Instead of empathizing with the "unknown" prisoner, we are forced into the predicament of audience creation, while also being the audience.  This creates a cyclic pattern where we feed our perceptions into the meaning of the text, which then repeats returning as a new more personal-emotional perception.  This is unavoidable due to our systematic instinctual nature through which we perceive the world.  By limiting our viewpoint to audio, text, and graphic design; Daniel has forced the participant to engage in the construction of some meaning for themselves.  Essentially, the meta-pictorial or hyper-iconic effect wears the colors of existentialism.  This essay makes its participants construct more meaning than they would have garnered through viewing video-clips.  The participant is lead to labor and produce, instead of lazily accepting a view.  More thought must be applied, so Daniel's essay does its job, in bringing the reader's thoughts to the issue at hand rather than a passing glance.

Rhetorical Genre Is Pointless?

I probably would have posted this way earlier in the week, like back when we were actually discussing Miller actively, but I wanted to post the question all the same because her essay really interested me because, at least in how I read it, she hinted that attempts at creating and re-creating genre have become to problematic in their subjectivity and therefore... should be given up?  She doesn't outright say it, but it is heavily implied.  Humans and their natural need to sort things, even intangible and ungraspable things, into sorted categories has become the problem of genre.


She mentions that the goal of examining the problem of genre is to make “rhetorical genre a stable classifying concept” and “to ensure that the concept is rhetorically sound” (151), but then goes on to say how all sorting attempts have been to narrow-minded and confining and how all admittance to defeat is correct, such as the idea that “a collection of discourses may be sorted into classes in more than one way” (152).  After making that clear, she goes on to point out that discourse and situation are tied, but since discourse is an every-varying action and “genre becomes a complex of formal and substantive features that create a particular effect in a given situation” (153), that the possibilities for classification are too limited.

Late in her essay, she praises two critics because  “they do not attempt to provide a framework that will predict or limit the genres that might be identified” (153).

So, does that mean we should give up on classification of rhetorical/situational genre as a whole?  Or should critics be more open and their stratagems more flexible in order to satisfy her anti-limting criteria?  I was confused on this, and would be happy to hear other opinions on this, but that is the big puzzle for me.  Does Miller think we should give up on sorting genre, only because it would mean putting limits on a limitlessly developing social phenomena?  Or does she only prompt future critics of genre to build criteria that remain open and conscious of the never-ending changes to genre when rhetoric and situations (within the wider awareness of exigence) are always changing?    

Crime, Hypertext, and Punishment

In "Hypertext and Critical Theory" Bahktin is quoted on the polyphonic, dialogic, multivocal novel, saying "[it] is constructed not as a whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other." He then cites Dostoevsky as an example of a "hypertextual fiction in which the individual voices take the form of lexias."  I think that Crime and Punishment is useful when making the connection between hypertextuality  in the form of a novel and hypertext in digital media. In a bar scene in Crime and Punishment the protagonist, Raskolnikov, listens to an alcoholic tell of his problems with poverty, which includes selling his daughter into prostitution to support his habit. The voice of this man, Marmeladov, does not come across as a product of the author's consciousness being absorbed by the protagonist, but as a separate entity, used to function as an individual voice. While this voice alone does belong to what I would call the "St. Petersburg" speech genre, it does not act as an sound object for Raskolnikov's ears alone. It seems to exist as its own life force, and I must add that this was one of the first moments in literature I began to pity the struggles of poverty.

So now I will go to the crime and punishment of the ladies in Daniel's online hypertext. While the form is non-linear in comparison to the novel, meaning you can pick and choose voices to listen to in no particular order or form, the polyphonic, multivocal aspect of the novel is present. The women in the prison system are real, which makes their voices  much more powerful. There is not a unified consciousness on the site, nor merely personas represented as intertwined objects. You find, instead conscious objects (subjects) like the character of Marmeledov. Each one gives an independent account of their life, their oppression, and in many cases, their addictions. I think the Daniels site is effective in this regard, because the more human the voice, the more likely it is that the reader will make an empathetic connection with individuals who are isolated from society, in many cases, unjustly.

Places of Entry

Reading the prompt, I've had trouble seeing the connections between our critical readings and Daniel's "Public Secrets." I felt that my initial wonderment--caused by the exposure of my complete ignorance of the public perception of prison systems--placed me directly inside the content, outside a critical perspective. Without being more familiar with the structure of the prison system, why it's set up as it is, what is the general public perception, I found myself completely enveloped by the prisoners' stories. This is has prompted me to attempt to answer our third question for today on the essay's interpretability. What are the tropes that stand out in the essay that cue the reader to viewing it as a critique?

After clicking on "Inside/Outside", stylized quotations pop up on the screen: "I was in beauty pageants, I was a ballet dancer..and then I just made a mess of my life" and "I guess I wasn't worthy of protecting" and "I knew I was diabetic prior to being institutionalized." These quotations pull out common places, topoi shared among large audiences, from very personal accounts of how these topics work in the environment of the prison. We come to the topoi with our perspectives and expectations--constructed by our positions in society on the outside--of what might be discussed. I believe this speaks closely to Miller.

Miller claims, "recurrence is an intersubjective phenonmenon, a social occurrence, and cannot be understood on materialist terms." (Miller 156). In other words, what we note as recurring throughout works is based largely on how we interpret society, and our methods of interpreting society is largely based on Burke's idea that interpretation derives from " the cultural group into which we are born." It reminds me of Mitchell's use of the cube picture. The way we saw the cube changed depending on how we conceptualized ourselves in viewing the cube. We, as the audience, are not actually standing in different positions looking at the cube, but we create imagined selves to orient around differing imagined places around the cube. We project ourselves through an entry point, the simple concept of an observable cube (the common place), into new spaces. In regards to Miller, that entry point is our concept of self created by our positions in society. We may have to enter a work from that perspective, but the work can re-position that self to new places (therefore creating new societies) . 


The entry point for Daniel's essay are appeals to the body (diabetes) and supposed inalienable rights ("...worthy of protecting"). This appeal to rights strongly highlights the essay as a social critique. She is directly appealing to the audience's knowing of their own places and rights within society. The audience comes to the essay with certain expectations of society, which they have collected from typification. In elementary and middle school, we study our rights e.g. "freedom of speech", and these rights become types observable in performances throughout society. Daniel assumes an audience that will be familiar with these kinds of topoi. She desires this audience, with very specific societal positions, in order to deconstruct their expectations. Her goals are to provide an entry into the prisoners' comments through the audience's idea that they exist in a stable society, which is determined based on the similarity among interpretations of common places (e.g. diabetes works the same across all classes of society) and then deconstruct that stability. 


It's similar to Killingsworth's concepts on irony. Irony takes on the guise of the subject they wish to critique in order to show its wrongness. Daniel relies on the audience having an identity that has been constructed in the stable society she wishes to argue against. To do so, she first has to take on the guise of that stability through the common and recurring instances which supposedly evidence stability. 

Mixed Media: The Stacking Issue

Daniel's hypertext project is impressive through its incorporation of audiofiles, images, and text.  However, is this hypertext a speech genre?  I would say yes and no, but I believe this answer holds great value for our interpretation of all things genre, not just the hypertext.  The value of this hypertext is its mixed media form, or incorporation of various communicative forms.  As participants in the hypertext adventure, we are presented with action-potential in the form of the text itself.  By viewing the text by itself, we are left to decide what meaning to place in it.  This action of placing meaning into the text is our existential contribution to our understanding of the work.  The text layer's content can serve as its own genre, in its own realm.  When audio is added, the interpretation still lies within us, but the meaning we perceive often changes.  We are provided with additional information such as inflection and tone from which to discern our conception of relevancy and meaning.  This additional information no longer solely comes from a book or text, it is coming from a person.  A social element is added, unless you are an individual who lacks empathy.  Additionally feeling is generated and the text takes on a more social-personal relationship.  As such, the genre it once was has been transformed to encompass this new information.  The original text genre still exists, but has been overwritten in our minds to allow our more complete interpretation to reign.  The addition of graphic design to the project adds another layer to the genre interpretation.  The use of black and white separations with gray smudges all over has a meta-pictorial quality or heteroglossia all to itself.  The black and white give us a sense of finality between text and audiofiles on each side.  One side is the opposite of the other, but both reflect the same issue.  The gray smudges call in the question of morality, and that maybe our distinct perceptions or interpretations are not so clear cut.  So, our interpretation of the work must grow to encompass all of these associations and still fit into a genre.  This hypertext work is a genre and is not a genre.  It is no more or no less of a situated action than anything else is.  This problem with genre and categorization is a problem with probability and scope.  Genre is the recognition of patterns of differences and similarities, then labeling its subject accordingly.  Daniel's hypertext can be viewed on any level (at the distinct textual, audio, or visual level; or from any combination or perspective).  Also these relationships may have a probabilistic rate of occurring naturally in any person who perceives them, but there are always differences in our perceptual systems.  The outcome is that there are an infinite number of genres, and the societal genres are simply approximations, probabilistic interpretations of what a work means.  There is no certainty in our knowledge or perceptions, simply possibility.  So when approaching genre, it should be important to keep an open mind and recognize our thoughts as our personal constructions, that nothing is certain, and that when approaching language the possibilities are endless.        

Pulling Art From Those Pushed Away

I was immediately driven to assess the purpose of the artistic value of Sharon Daniel's hypertext essay, which we were assigned for today's class.  The most immediate factor I was drawn to was the emphasis placed on dichotomy.  This separation is accomplished in multiple ways, however, not just through the variance in the provided quotes and audio interviews, but through the sharply divided frame upon which the information faded in and out.  It is almost as if the artistic quality of the hypertext essay predetermines ones response to the information they are fed.  The fact that this information is heard, as opposed to read, also limits the extent to which it is open for more thorough and intense interpretation. The immediate association of black with darkness, sadness, and hopelessness is intrinsic and drives the listener to particular types of listening, while the white, and bright, portion of the frame, that represents freedom, pulls a different response.  I, naturally, would question how important this association is (that of art as a form of audience manipulation) but the essay itself begins with an artistic and florid description.  This description fades into a seemingly unrelated mentioning of the painting the "Ambassadors" which supposedly blurs space using a smear "resolves into a skull" and reverses the viewer view of the gestalt.  I would argue that it isn't only the prison mates being reversed, but the viewers of Daniels essay.

Confused and Heterglossia

To be honest, weaving through the multiple voices of the prisoners was confusing.  The brief snippets of their stories that are given are so momentary.  After one is heard, another is heard again and the multitudes of stories that are given can make give anyone a variety of emotions.  For me, I was confused.  I was confused as to the lines that are set up in this node and how the lines set up for the "life on the inside" and the "life on the outside" can become blurred.  When listening to stories from both sides of the supposed "line", they both sound the same.  They're all humans dealing with problems and sharing their stories with Daniels in order to obtain some kind of response.  One woman brought up the idea of control that is within the prisons and how everything around her is constricting everything she does.  This is also peculiar because the line between control is very sketchy.  Both sides are at a battle of control and trying to gain this "power" of control and the lines becomes even more blurry as to which side is which.  The term "heteroglossia" comes to mind because as these voices are constantly heard and the line is being blurred, the various discourses that are given come into one existence and become a whole rather than these two separate entities of "life on the inside" and "life on the outside."  Am I still confused?  Yes, but I have a better hold as to why I am and maybe should be confused.

Heteroglossia's Insistence on Authorial Agency in Daniel Case

Responding to Question 1. Thinking back to pp. 324-325 in Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel," what would be the usefulness of justifying Daniel's essay according to this notion of heteroglossia? What other ways can you describe the multiple-voiced interactions in Daniel's text (notusing heteroglossia, or not using Bakhtin's language)?

Defining Daniel's project "Public Secret" in terms of Bakhtin's heteroglossia is advantageous for a number of reasons. First, Daniel's project seems to have been perfectly crafted to explore Bakhtin's principle of heteroglossia. Bakhtin states, "Heteroglossia... is another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way" (324). This is exactly the experience of maneuvering Daniel's piece the each of the women on the inside's discourses about various injustices of the prison system cooperate with Daniel's authorial voice and intention. They play off one another again quoting Bakhtin, "It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author" (324).  To illustrate this point we have the woman inmate Genae powerful expression about how her alias in prison removes her from getting to know other inmates. Genae's speech reflects her intention of speaking with this trusted advisor about the her detrimental emotional experience in prison, while Daniels inclusion of this discourse in her project reflects her intention on shedding light on the humanity within these people, and the alienation the prison system thrives on in both separating the inside from the outside, and then further alienating the inmates from one another.

This last point draws on an important undercurrent in Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia. We are only allowed to experience these refracted voices of "characters," because of the author's language which incorporates their voices. In this way the only reason we are able to listen to these womens' testimonies is because of Daniel and her authorial agency. This seems like a relatively simple concept, but we are forced to ask ourselves, would we or other people who view this project have experienced these testimonies differently without Daniel's framing of the project. I think these voices are discredited by most of American society and so their discourse is only taken as seriously as the person who presents them to society and the form in which they are presented. I find this fact problematic, but I think these individual stories would carry a much lighter weight without the author's interaction and organization of them into a unified purpose of exploring the injustices of the prison system.

Life's A Stage....

Putting Sharon Daniel’s work in the terms of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia would be useful because it would be an easy way of explaining Daniel’s intentions with her work in regards to her use of multiple interviews and voice recordings.  Daniel’s intention in making this piece was obviously to communicate the terrible conditions and treatment of female prisoners in that specific, tri-prison area of California in order to point out to society not only the problems with that one location, but also to provoke thought about the effectiveness and justice of the prison system in general.  If Bakhtin’s definition of heteroglossia is described as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way”, than Daniel’s authorial intentions to highlight the injustice of prison systems is refracted through the many vocally recorded interviews and transcripts.  She is using other voices within her work to reflect her own opinion.

However, while summing up the journalistic work with the term heteroglossia certainly makes an explanation easier, it doesn’t quite work because I don’t feel that a work like this really fits Bakhtin’s criteria of heteroglossia on one very key issue; the refracted multiple voices (the female prisoners) that Daniel (the author) is using does not come from one source.  In order for Bakhtin’s setup to work, I think, the multiplicity of voices must come from the same mind because in the novel disourse can go, “into individual argument and conversation between two persons, even while the exchanges in the dialogue are immanent to a single unitary language”.  Even though Daniel is using the testimony of female prisoners to highlight, support and reveal her own opinions, she is using outside sources that do not originate in her own mind.  Her mind started the provocative discourse of this piece, plays a key part in it to be sure, but she used other voices to finish it.  So for me, describing it in other terms of vocal multiplicity is easier, in fact preferable.

I would describe Daniel’s multiple-voiced interactions are legitimizing and verifying.  Since she is not merely using fictional characters to refract her opinions on the environment, love, war, or something else, she has to use other voices to back her up.  With a topic this serious, this accusatory of something real and working and concrete, it doesn’t work to stand alone, so you use the voices of others.  As far as analogies go, I see this setup of interviews and voices as a sort of play, with Daniel as the main character who doubly serves as narrator.  Her job in the story is to point out what’s wrong with these prison systems and the treatment of female prisoners before calling upon her supporting cast to come and finish the explanation where lack of firsthand experience fails her.  I know, I do too many theater analogies, but I would definitely describe Daniel’s use of multiple (and physically separate) voices as a sort of like-minded, legitimizing employment of a supporting cast, where the channels of refracted opinion are not made up characters, but real people.

Deconstruction and Heteroglossia Working Together

Bakhtin defines heteroglossia as “another’s speech in another’s language” (Bakhtin, 324). The relation to “Public Secrets” acts on a series of levels. First, Sharon Daniels acts as the author in the piece and even, in some cases, as the narrator. However, most of the project reflects the people she interviewed because it is those people who tell the stories that make up the central aspects of the project. Along those same lines, Daniels imitates to an extent the reality of the “Public Secret” of the prison system by illustrating the duality and co-dependence of the inside and outside, which seems very Derridian to me (once the relationship is realized, it falls apart and there is no longer “us” and “them”). Daniels also creates a frame for the reader/listener/observer that forces them to be interested. This is not an essay, but borrows the intellectual terms of knowledge generation from the institution from which it was gathered by forcing the observer to search for the aspects of “Public Secrets” which have been hidden in plain view. This, of course, is taking Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglots and applying it to an action of interpretation, rather than what it originally seems to be meant for, which is primarily linguistic “double-voicing” (Bakhtin, 325).

What makes this useful for the interpretation of Daniel’s hypertext is that she purposely has constructed the hypertext in a way that represents the different voices and uses these different voices to create a larger utterance that she, the author, has framed. They appear to be voices in and of themselves, but function through the direct lens of the author, who only appears when one has to switch from one block to the next. Essentially, the author-voice is dissolved into two things: the framing of the project and the voice of its parts. When an author and speaker dissolve into one another, they become an example of heteroglossia.

W.J.T. Mitchell’s article on metapictures is also very appropriate, especially for the opening scene of the project which is narrated by Daniels. The picture itself morphs and changes, completely upsetting any conventional idea about the “inside” against the “outside,” which is exactly what Mitchell claims happens in the “New World” drawing of a man drawing a spiral around himself. Daniels creates a black/white picture that changes so frequently and switches erratically which “dissolves the boundary between inside and outside…” (Mitchell, 42). This is essential for the interpretation, because in framing the duality of “us” and “them” or “inside” and “outside,” Daniels shows how the relationship is codependent, and thus any hierarchical representation deconstructs in a very Derridian way. And if “us” and “them” are equal, that then presents the question: why are we treating “them” like we are?

What Daniel Calls "Ignorance," I Call "Bliss"

I see Sharon Daniel's point, I really do. And I would never be one to say that dehumanizing practices should be condoned, because that's just "inhumane." But I do take a slight issue with her idea that the public needs to strip away this veil of ignorance and see the reality. I don't necessarily think the public is completely unaware of what happens in prisons, I think they could give you a really awfully violent answer were you to ask, they just prefer not to think about it. It's an intentional "out of sight out of mind" type of situation. And can you really blame them? People don't like to think about their taxpayers dollars going towards prison inmates "cushy" lifestyles. They also don't like to think of their money used for inhumane practices. So the solution? Let's not think about it! It sounds wrong, I know, but we tell ourselves what we must in order to put a complacent smile on our faces for the day. Daniel seems to really believe in the ignorance of people, and by showing these conditions, she's hoping some great enlightenment and sense of pity will sweep upon us all. I looked at this case for class, because I was required to and then blog about it. Why would anyone else? Not to say it's not interesting, because it definitely is. But why would someone who's so content pretending unawareness suddenly want to become aware? It sounds so completely wrong, but I'm telling you, people don't care about prison inmates. Unless of course you know one personally. They're seen as a menace to society, hence their crime? Whether they deserve it or not, people simply don't want to acknowledge the issue. It is rather unpleasant and they've more important things to think about, like what to make for dinner.

Atlanta Post

Hey class! I'm en route to Atlanta trying to do homework (Hoosiers!). Havin listened and looked at the website, I find myself wondering what the agency is of these women and their stories. I feel that inmates are separated into a genre of their own, but also one not respected that much. In the sense of respect, I mean that it's not a recognized genre in the way horror or drama is--it's a subcategory of the genre. These women have come forth and shared experiences, but what agency does that leave them? Their stories are available, but does that provide them agency or do they merely act as entertainment for readers? I think in order to have true agency, ones view has to be respected in the sense that its considered valuable. For many stories, some perspectives are read but not considered important. In giving these women a space to tell their stories, they are entitled with an agency previously not Given to them. Is this genre though? As Miller states, a genre is classified by "comparable responses" so prior to this, I'm sure there were female prison accounts, but were they that common? With the creation of sites like this, I think it creates a genre for writers and, in addition, gives inmates an outlet to tell their stories. However, as Loywr states in his introduction, "Unabl to do justice for what is going on in them"--so how affective is this the ? While I want to think that there is agency given to the writers, if their words are unable to encapsulate the full story, is it affective? I know that was a lot of rambling/ stream of consciousness...sorry. Go IU!

The Impenetrable Boundary

I find this case really interesting, as it touches on a subject that is not often spoken about in an analytical way. Rather, society as a whole views this group of people with disdain, and instead of trying to understand what makes prison inmates so fearful and strange to us, we tend to discriminate and place them in a sort of impenetrable box that removes "them" from "us." I also am fascinated with this case because one of my brothers spent some time working as a detention officer, and I find a lot of the things mentioned in this case match up with my brother's feelings and experiences.

One thing that is most interesting to me is this divide that Sharon Daniel mentions between "us" and "them." She says in her provocative invitation, "Walk with me across this boundary between inside and outside, bare-life and human-life, and listen to Public Secrets." (Daniel) This statement alone reaffirms the idea that there is a distinction or "boundary" between inmates and people who have never committed a crime. There is a line drawn, and if you are on the inmate side you are "bad" and "other," and if you have not committed a crime (or have never been caught, rather), you are part of the "us" group, and you are good. Judging by the statements made by several of the inmates, I think it is fair to say that they are not only aware of this "othering," but they are also marred by it. The fear that the general public feels toward prisoners is sometimes unwarranted. And this causes the prisoners hardship when they are released as well as hardship while they are on the inside looking out.

This is a complex thing for Daniel to take on, and the way that she handles it makes me wonder, can this hypertext critique be called a "speech genre" as defined by Bakhtin? To answer this, I will offer my opinion. I think that this critique could be categorized as a speech genre. There are certainly aspects that are easy to identify and compare to different genres. But I think that to put this critique into a box would do nothing more than to perpetuate the box that the prisoners discussed in this critique have already been placed in. Really, we would be looking at boxes within boxes. And I think that detracts from this case. Instead, I would propose that we employ the concept that Derrida applies to his term "differance," and apply it to this case. Derrida argues for a liberation of thinking, and a freedom from categorization. I think that this is exactly what we owe not only this case and its author, but also prisoners. If we could free this critique from all speech genres and simply examine it as an art form in its own rite, perhaps we could really get it without trying to apply constraints to it. In the same way, if we could examine prisoners as people rather than concepts (of bad and wrongdoing), perhaps we could really get them on a human level. Which seems to be what Daniel wants.

Double-Down on Double-Voiced Discourse

     In Sharon Daniel's "Public Secrets" there is an interesting and complicated form of heteroglossia at work. We see not only a double-double voiced discourse but a triple-voiced discourse. First and foremost we see Daniel as the author making her intentions know through the presentation of the pages of the essay and through the interviews themselves. The pages are designed to mingle the voices from "outside" and "inside" prison which creates an ambiguity for readers. This post modern presentation of the pages clearly show that Daniel thinks that in reality there is a separation of the voices inmates of the prison and people outside the prison when actually all voices should count for the same. Daniel also carefully selects small quotes to display to the reader as a summation of the entire interview. These include quotes like "this isn't a correctional facility, it's a penal colony" and "I haven't seen my kids since the night I was busted." Daniel again makes her intentions know through these quotes. They show a more specific instance of injustice in the prison.
   
     It gets interesting when you actually look at the interviews themselves, though. In the interviews there is another more explicit form of double-voiced discourse. The women are not just giving a monologue about what the think, instead they are telling stories about things that have happened to them. In the course of doing so they engage in discourse with attorneys , guards, doctors, and other inmates. Usually the interviewees adopt the language of their characters to the best of their ability make them very dismissive. In that way their intentions become known: they are dismissed continually and they suffer many repercussions of that.

     Now, if you take another step back, you can see that Daniel's conveys authorial intent in the interviewees while the interviewees convey authorial intent in the attitude of the figures in their stories. It follows that Daniel's authorial intent is also conveyed by the character's in the stories. So as a fun label for this type of double-voicedness we could call it triple-voiced discourse or a double double-voiced discourse. I'm sure the label doesn't matter too much though.

     Anyway all this double-voiced discourse seems like it leaves a whole lot of room for bias. I don't mean to suggest that Daniel's critique is wrong (the merits of here argument are tangential to the point of this writing) but "Public Secrets" seems to constantly point back to the agenda of the author, Daniel, and may be less effective than an essay that is more objective.

The Role of Language in our Perception of Prisoners

I have to say, I was pretty excited when I found out we would be examining prison life for this case study, since it has always been a fascinating subject for me. I simply thought about it in terms of sociology and psychology and didn't realize just how important the role of language is in perpetuating the American prison system.

I was jarred when listening to one the inmates express that, "if society wasn't taught to be so afraid of us, I would probably right now be home with my children, going on with my life... but they want to keep dehumanizing us and putting us down" (Misty Rojo). There's a lot of interesting comments that could be made about this quote, but I think the most important notion to examine is that of society being taught to fear inmates. It's not like crime and punishment is a mandatory class for all American students, so how exactly are we being taught to fear prison inmates?

I think the answer lies within the concepts of parole (i.e. utterances) and langue (i.e. the larger linguistic system). Another inmate in her audio clip uses the phrase "tough on crime", which to our ear, sounds like a positive phrase. Who doesn't want to elect a government representative who's tough on crime? Crime is a bad thing, it should be punished. But looking to see how this phrase works in the larger linguistic system has to give us pause. It is a dangerous phrase because people don't stop to realize its implications.

First off, it dehumanizes the person committing the crime by removing any references that he or she really is a person. It also removes the complications that come with knowing the specific circumstances of each criminal act. Does "tough on crime" mean being equally tough on all criminal activities, regardless of its context? Would we give less prison time to a man who sold drugs because one of his children had cancer? Obviously, in a just world, this context would be important. But using catch phrases like "tough on crime" discourages looking into the situational context of each individual criminal act by lumping all of different types under one category-- "crime".

In this sense, we are taught (implicitly) that crime is bad, punishing it is good, and we shouldn't care to look into the details. Granted, this is not a one-sided relationship. This goes back to Bahktin's "The Problem of Speech Genres", where he says, "any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree" and "any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances" (69). It's not just that we're being taught to view prisoners in this manner, but we're allowing this perception to persist by not questioning or working against the assumptions that seemingly innocent phrases like "tough on crime" make. Communication is not simply about the speaker but about the active role of the listener as well.

So what does it say about our thoughts on the people incarcerated in prisons if this kind of phrase has been popularized and repeated over a long period of time? Well, it says overall that society would prefer to forget or cast aside those who have been deemed "criminals". Why though? Are we simply lazy? Too worried about our own lives to care? Too scared to find the very real horrors these prisoners go through? It's not an easy question to answer but one that needs to be addressed.

Tropes in "Public Secrets"

Daniel's statement is understood as a critique because of the language she uses. That is clear to us readers, however, it is important to explore why. What are the ways that Daniel uses language that help the reader understand her writing as a critique?

Interpreting it through the lens of Killingsworth's "Appeal Through Tropes," Daniel utilizes some tropes to make her case. The phrase "public secrets" in itself is a critique. It is ironic and oxymoronic for something to be both public and a secret. Daniel says, "There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are 'public secrets' - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself, like the troubling 'don't ask, don't tell'" (Daniel). This particular public secret about which she is writing is "a secret kept in an unacknowledged but public agreement not to know what imprisonment really means to individuals and their communities" (Daniel). The phrase "Public Secrets" serves as a critique on the collective voluntary ignorance of the public. "When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism, poverty, addiction, abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical" (Daniel). Killingsworth says, "The ironic appeal, involves as it does the development and maintenance of emerging communal relationships, proves extremely important in the destabilized, ever-shifting social relations of modern times" (Killingsworth 133). Thus irony is without a doubt a useful tool in a critique.

At the conclusion of the editor's introduction, the question is posed, "What function does the three million dollar razor wire fence at the California Correctional Women's Facility serve? Certainly, it keeps people 'in' the prison, but perhaps, more crucially, it gives society an easy 'out,' functioning as a convenient screen for our disavowals about systemic injustice, social inequality, and the crippling effects of poverty" (Daniel). In this way, the "three million dollar razor" is shown as a metaphor for society's "easy out." About metaphors, Killingsworth says, "We can see that metaphor is not merely one technique among many but is instead a crucial way of thinking, an attempt to bridge conceptual gaps, a mental activity at the very heart of rhetoric" (Killingsworth 123). Daniel attempts to figuratively break down the razor wire fence by letting the reader know that it is destructive and a product of blissful ignorance.

Exigence and Revelation

In "Genre as Social Action", Miller writes that "rhetorical genres stem from organizing principles found in recurring situations that generate discourse characterized by a family of common factors" (153). These genres can be as varied, simplistic, or specific as the types related by M. A. K. Halliday: "'players instructing novice in a game,' 'mother reading bedtime story to child,' 'customer ordering goods over the telephone,' 'teacher guiding pupils,' 'discussion of a poem,' and the like" (157). The only real criteria is that they represent a recurring situation. In the case of Daniel's "Public Secrets", the type or genre is that of female inmate inside prison relating story to person from outside. (Although I don't think I have space to go in to it here, the inside/outside dynamic of Daniel's piece really interested me.) There is also the genre of marginalized/forgotten woman relating story to listener, such as the woman who describes how "so many women... at one point or another before they ever committed a crime, said 'Help'" and were ignored (Misty Rojo, "Public Secrets". Statements like this and others make the presence of a willing listener essential to the genre.

Behind the rhetorical genres and recurring situations is exigence, which I have tried (perhaps unsuccessfully to understand). What I think I know is that when it comes to relating a story, exigence is predetermined. It is the "factual component" (156) or the actuality of a situation, and it is objective. It also seems to form a cycle with rhetorical action, as rhetorical action stems from exigence and then leads back around to it again.
The fact that exigence is objective leads to difficulty in applying it to "Public Secrets" and works of any genre, because the voices of a piece such as "Public Secrets" are subjective. Miller asks if "rhetorical situation is not material and objective, but a social construct... how are we to understand exigence, which is at the core of the situation?" (157).

The problem is that genre is related to individual situations, which are subjective, and exigence is in the social world, not in individual perceptions. It is the bare bones of the way things are in society, but it is exigence which links the individual situations and perceptions to form "an objectified social need" (157). As I understand it, without exigence as the overarching social situation there is no way for individual stories to come together into social action.

Herbert Blumer says that "the preponderant portion of social action in a human society, particularly in a settled society, exists in the form of recurrent  patterns of joint action" (qtd. Miller, 158). This is what Daniel is accomplishing in "Public Secrets". By bringing together many voices she creates a recurrent situation, and by acting through the exigence or actuality of that situation moves toward social change. The existence of the recurrent provides insight into the human condition. In this case, through the voices of many women we learn the state not only of female inmates specifically, but of minority and lower-class women and the ways they are ignored. They were ignored as one voice, but many voices are more difficult to refuse. Working through the exigence of the situation, Daniels and the women she interviews are "[provided with] an occasion, and thus a form, for making public [their] private versions of things" (158). While the state of women's prisons in Southern California is unfortunately a "Public Secret", it is a secret told from the outside, and perhaps telling it from the inside will be a step towards social change.

Awareness

Through some strange serendipity, many of our readings for this course have matched up quite beautifully with the things I have been thinking of or reading about at the time. In this case, I am reading a book and came to the chapter on awareness on the same evening I read Mitchell's "Metapictures" article.

What first caught my attention in Mitchell was the statement that "the Duck-Rabbit, and multistable images in  general, reveal  the presence of a 'mind's eye' roving around this storeroom [of the mind], interpreting the pictures, seeing different aspects in them" (51). Because the Duck-Rabbit can be seen in more ways than one, it makes us aware that we are seeing in general the Duck-Rabbit and everything around us. The book I am reading suggests awareness is something different than the brain or than thinking; I guess this is because we can be aware that we are thinking. It suggests that most of the time we just live, without being aware of the sensory experience around us, generally until an event occurs in one sensory aspect that makes it impossible to ignore.

To illustrate this, I could use an example from McCloud. He says that when two people  are speaking to each other, they see each other "in vivid detail" (35), and "each one also sustains a constant awareness of his or her own face, but this mind-picture is not nearly so vivid; just a sketchy arrangement... a sense of shape... a sense of general placement" (36). My book suggests the visual things we perceive are the easiest to be aware of, but when it comes to things like feeling the shape of one's own face, we generally ignore it. McCloud, moving on from his discussion  of faces, states "the phenomenon of non-visual self-awareness can, to a lesser degree, still apply to our whole bodies. After all, do we need to see our hands to know what they're doing?" (37). He illustrates this with an image of a man holding a glass but looking at a woman. However, my book would say that knowing one is holding a glass does not constitute awareness, but that one must feel one's self holding the glass.

Mitchell's multistable image can create awareness because "it has as much to  do with the self of the observer as with the metapicture itself" (48). He says the multistable is image is "a device for educing self-knowledge" and "a kind of mirror for the beholder" (48). Perhaps the most clear statement he makes to illustrate this, one I quoted on the board yesterday, is: "If the multistable image always asks, 'what am I?' or 'how do I look?', the answer depends on the observer asking the same questions" (48). In this way the multistable image might help an observer move beyond the state of the man simply knowing he is holding a glass into a state where he or she really becomes aware of the glass, their hand, and themselves.

In conclusion, I read some unusual books.

Exploration of Irony in Booth and Killingsworth

In consideration of Killingworth's concepts on irony as a liberating device, I found Booth's concepts of irony as an exclusionary device to be quite ironic (hyak, hyak, hyak, OK, I'll stop). Booth points out that irony’s reliance on contextually, the meaning of a work depending on works external to itself, permits it to become a disguise for a work’s lack of authorial intent: “impersonal ironic narration lends itself neatly, far too neatly, to disguised expression of snobbery which would never be tolerated if expressed openly in commentary” (Booth 391).

In my PE on Killingsworth I found that irony was successful in revealing the hidden immoral intents of discourses by taking on the guise of that intent. The reader sees the intent themselves through an appeal by the author to the inner, moral conventions which conflict with the immorality of the piece. In other words, the author reveals his true intent in terms of inner realities already present in the reader’s self. This is why irony is so powerful because it makes it appear that the author and reader formulated the idea together. This cooperation also positions the reader and author against an excluded other, the supposed immoral.  

The reason irony can be misused in the sense that Booth points out is because of the innerness of the reader’s realities to which the author appeals. How can a reader be sure that their inner realities match those of others in society? When irony is used in a work but the work lacks authorial intent, the reader may think that they do not see the intent because they are part of the other being excluded. It may put in the reader’s mind that the inner realities which were guide his/her life silently is opposed to those realities which govern society, causing them to become marginalized and excluded. It may be safer, therefore,  to accept the work instead of questioning its intent.

Irony works in liberating immoral intents by uniting the author and reader’s inner realities, and by excluding an “other.” A fear of becoming “other”, however, is also what causes readers to accept false irony.

Author Humbleness through Interactivity

Looking over the "Morality of Narration", I was considering the problem of how an author might "humble" himself to audiences today if these audiences truly have "no outer world left to which [the author] could appeal" (Booth 393).

I was reminded of certain interactive narratives online which progress depending on how the audience reacts. I can't remember the name, but a year or so ago, there was Facebook page for a web show about a girl who had been kidnapped but had access to the Internet. She would post videos every week asking for her Facebook audience to help her with some problem she was facing that could potentially help free her from the kidnappers. The audience would respond, and in the next week, she might act out one of the suggestions.

A web comic, too, I know of called Homestuck has a set narrative, but the author often changes parts of that narrative to include the audience's suggestions.

I was wondering if this kind of interactivity might be the solution to today's lacks of common "outer worlds." According to the article, for a work to be successful the author must humble himself and to humble himself, he must "plumb to universal values about which his readers can really care" and "help the reader to accept his view" of the world (395). These "universal values" are apparently not as visible as they once were in past. To access the values of the audience, then, why not just ask them what they are? An author becomes snobbish by presenting himself as a kind of untouchable God figure; his private understanding of the world is true, but no one can understand it but himself. The author fixes this by allowing the audience to co-create the narrative or at least, provide the illusion of co-creation.

Understanding Miller's Idea of Genre

I feel extremely confused by Miller's proposal/argument on genre, but I suppose I'll try and work out my frustration here. I understand that what Miller is saying is that genres are the product of social constructs. Or maybe not the product so much as the manifestation on recurrences in situations that have become socially perceived. I was particularly confused on the use of the word exigence, because it seemed to fit so many abstract definitions. One of those instances in which we define a word by, not what it "is," but by the productivity of the thing...it's strange to think, about, I know, which is why I think I may have been so confused. I think I have come to understand exigence though, as some sort of awareness in the social world that "provides an occasion, and thus a form, for making public our private versions of things." (Miller 158) I think then this idea of form takes us to another level when we're talking about Miller's whole argument and the genre. Substance and form are fusing to create meaning, which is what determines genre, the meaningfulness, or the similarities, of experiences or situations within our culture (159). In some ways, I see a lot of Bakhtin present here in Miller's argument. The idea of social constructs we see being developed as the basis of genres reminds me of heteroglossia, and the way that social/historical implications give something meaning. In that same way, we give situations, or the recurrence of situations, meaning by applying them to ourselves and then coming up with a construct as a community. I think Bakhtin would agree that not only historical, but situational factors determine meaning. And I also think it can be said that situational factors often have a huge bearing on the historical as well. Basically, Miller denotes the usefulness of genres, saying they help us to better understand situations we arrive at, and we learn our role for productivity. "As recurrent, significant action, a genre embodies an aspect of cultural rationality." (165)

Pattern of Appeals in Comics

Killingsworth relates metonymy to symbols, icons, and logos in his discussion of tropes being a pattern of appeals.  Scott McCloud also discusses symbols and icons, but would he see an icon as a trope?  And, to go further, would McCloud view the icon in comics as functioning as metonymy does with appeals?

Killingsworth explains metonymy as “substituting a thing for a closely associated (contiguous) thing” (Killingsworth 127).  Metonymy “can be reductive, functioning much as a stereotype does, reducing a whole person to an object” (Killingsworth 128).  A clear example that Killingsworth uses is the use of symbols, icons, and logos.  “Metonymy also often gives rise to the kinds of symbols, icons, and logos used as cultural indicators in everything from literature and psychology to advertising, sign-making, and brand names” (Killingsworth 129). 

McCloud defines an icon as “any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea” (McCloud 27).  McCloud introduces the idea of “amplification through simplification” which happens as “we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details” (McCloud 30).  McCloud explains that cartoons’ imagery (icons) have a “universality” that allows the image to describe more people (McCloud 31).  This universality may be the same thing that Killingsworth is referring to when he says “cultural indicators” (Killingsworth 129).   A “universal identification” happens when we are able to see ourselves in “an empty shell” of an abstract image which allows us to “become” the cartoon” (McCloud 36).  We may see ourselves in Killingsworth’s example of “the icon of a knife and fork used to indicate restaurants” (Killingsworth 129).  However McCloud might describe it as an “extension” of ourselves (McCloud 38).  The knife and fork may “become hands” thus appealing to a mass audience aka hungry traveler’s on the highway (McCloud 39).

I think McCloud would see icons in comics as functioning as a trope as defined by Killingsworth.  The pictures that are being presented in a comic are abstracted to be more universal in order to appeal to a more universal crowd.  Icons in comics are seen as tropes, because they are creating a turn in language.  The picture is representing something more than what’s on the surface, and in doing so it is reducing the larger meaning to a simple picture.

Ways of thinking about Tropes

Is a trope a way of thinking or is a trope separate from a way of thinking?  This seems to be an easy answer after reading Killingsworth’s “Appeal Through Tropes”, but I had a moment of confusion through two statements found in this article. 

As Killingsworth looks at where tropes emerge in the history of modern rhetoric, he states that “a second response to the critique of rhetoric in modern philosophy and science has involved reducing the number of key tropes and revisiting their functions, considering tropes not merely as embellishments of language but as ways of thinking” (122).  He then goes on to say that Kenneth Burke was one of the “leaders in this movement” (122).  Then Killingsworth decides to write the rest of his article using Burke’s findings with a “slight reinterpretation” (123).  So it seems that Killingsworth is agreeing with how Burke looks at tropes, but he just wants to build on it to show a connection with the “theory of appeals” (123).  And, Burke seems to see tropes as inherently functioning as ways of thinking.  Thus far it seems straight forward.

Then when getting into metaphors, Killingsworth references Lakoff and Johnson who are “theorists” that take metaphor “as the root of all tropes” (123).  “According to Lakoff and Johnson, the cognitive power of metaphor—its significance not only as a trope but a way of thinking—has to do with the tendency of al metaphors to connect the world to the body, to relate unfamiliar things to familiar experience of physical existence” (124).  So in essence, Killingsworth seems to be pointing out that these theorists also see tropes as ways of thinking.  However, I can’t get past the way that it is stated.  They seem to be separating trope from a way of thinking.  They state “not only as a trope but a way of thinking”.  So it seems that they don’t think that a trope is inherently equated with a way of thinking.  They seem to be saying that a metaphor should be thought of as a trope, and a metaphor should also be thought of as a way of thinking.  Killingsworth and Burke seem to be saying that if a metaphor is thought of as a trope then it’s assumed to be thought of as a way of thinking, because tropes are ways of thinking.

I think that Killingsworth was using Lakoff and Johnson to support his findings, and that he just breezed over this small difference in how it’s stated.  I didn’t even catch it until I was reading the article for the second time.  I suppose the meaning is still there.  I still get the purpose of the article and how Lakoff and Johnson do seem to support Killingsworth, because they both associate some sort of trope with a way of thinking.   I just wonder if Lakoff and Johnson think that metaphor is the only trope that can be seen as a way of thinking, or if they would see metonymy, irony, synecdoche, etc. as being ways of thinking as well. 

Fallacy of Intention

Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “Intentional Fallacy” had me thinking about the very title of this article.  On first look, I thought that this article would be something similar to Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction”.  Fictionalization is like a falsification that the author is purposefully using in order to accomplish a successful writing.    Wimsatt and Beardsley are not saying this.  Their definition of “intentional fallacy” is the idea that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (811).  So, the intention seems to refer to the author’s “design or plan” or the author’s “attitude toward his work”, and the fallacy seems to refer to the critics taking into account the author’s intention when looking at the success of a work (811).

I think what gets me is the use and placing of the word “intentional”.    The critics are not intentionally judging a work in a false manner.  The author doesn’t have false intentions.  The author is also not intentionally creating a falsehood.  According to Wimsatt and Beardsley it’s the critics that are creating the falsehood by saying that the author’s intention is the way we should read a piece of work.  So, would that be an intentional fallacy or would there be a “fallacy in looking at intention”?  It doesn’t sound as smooth as intentional fallacy, so maybe a “fallacy of intention”?  Or maybe there needs to be an adjectival form of “fallacy”, like fallical.  Then the title/ term could be a “fallical intention”. 

On the other hand, I am a new reader of the idea of “intentional fallacy”, but I bet many critics and professors would know exactly what “intentional fallacy” means.  Wimsatt and Beardsely created a term and clearly defined it, so when referring to the idea that a work should not be judged based on an author’s intention, professors and critics and students, etc. can use the term “intentional fallacy” without worrying that someone will think they mean something else like the idea of “fictionalization”.

What the Foucault Happened this Spring Break?

So I am spring breaking in California right now (my flight got canceled, so I have to fly home Sunday), visiting my brother who goes to school here. He is in grad school right now to become a clinical psychologist. Anyway, so my brother had this paper to write for a class the other day, and he hadn't done much of his reading- so we divided and conquered.

So the short book I skimmed for my brother was about speech (I don't remember the author or title...oops). I couldn't help but notice that the teachings of Michel Foucault were referenced several times- and pretty much all of his ideas about speech that we read and discussed for class were included. But the author of this speech book sort of challenged the merit in Foucault's idea that the author can be an "alter ego" for the actual writer. The author of the speech book pretty much said that rather than present an alter ego, an author should instead attempt to open up and bear his/her heart to his/her readers. Interesting. It might be helpful to mention that this speech book was written by a Christian author and was intended to be read by Christians who want to learn to better themselves as speakers/communicators. (My brother goes to Fuller Theological Seminary)

I think of my brother as a very intellectual person, so a chance to connect with him in a discussion about speech was very cool for me. After a talk about the two sparring opinions, we found some common ground. So Foucault seemed to feel that the author finds effectiveness through a persona. In contrast, this other author finds the persona useless when presenting a speech- she says that the audience will see through it and feel deceived, so the heart must be displayed rather than a false creation. I can roll with that.

A weird note: After reading the speech book that talked about Foucault, my brother and I went to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. While we were there, we noticed that there was a large crowd huddled around a giant pendulum. The significance? This pendulum (along with a little plaque and engraved thingy) were dedicated to a Foucault for his discoveries (the pendulum being one of them). So there I was kind of feeling a little haunted by Foucault, and I was like, "Whoah, no way! Weird! I am soooo blogging about this for 371." When we got home from the observatory, I began my vicious Wikipedia hunt. After googling Foucault's pendulum, I had a realization. The Foucault that created the pendulum is not the same Foucault that we read about. Sad day.

In summary, I had a brush with Foucault this spring break...and Leon Foucault. Kind of cool. Maybe?

Narrative Frame

The last few posts seem to really be focusing on the "moral" aspects of narration, and I wanted to go back and address something I find very interesting that has been less addressed: types of narration. Booth makes some very interesting and important claims about narration and the reader's relation to the speaker. His first proposal, that "perhaps the most overworked distinction is that of person. To say that a story told in the first or the third person will tell us nothing of importance..." (Booth, 150) is absolutely true. Writers and those writing about writing have long known this truth, that all point of view does is give the writer a certain pivot point to write from. It may be useful to think of narration in terms of plays. What "person" is a play in? Answer: for most plays this is unanswerable. But if a play is considered literature, then where would that lead us? This, I think, is Booth's point.

However, this leaves us with the question of what to do with the speaker and how we can identify him/her. Certainly all speakers/narrators differ and there are many similarities in how they differ. Booth has chosen to identify the speaker's reliability as his method of rating or qualifying various narrators. "Perhaps the most important differences in narrative effect depend on whether the narrator is dramatized in his own right and on whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by the author" (Booth, 151). This definition is complicated by the fact that "the author" is perhaps one of the most uncertain terms in literary theory. Does the author exist? Who is the author? Are the writer and the author the same person? But for the moment, I believe it doesn't really matter. We will pretend that the author is some being of consciousness floating around in a timeless space (thank you Doctor Who).

Anyway, what based upon these assumptions, I think it would be safe to summarize Booth's proposition as the following: what separates one narrator from another is how different the created speaker (narrator) is in his beliefs from those of the author (our being of timeless consciousness). For the moment, we will call this "reliability" or how true a narrator is to the author's own views. This is an important distinction because of its effects for the "morality of narration" later in Booth's commentary. Most notably, the question of how to identify an unreliable narrator (one who differs greatly from the author) is very impactful. Booth discusses in his "Morality of Narration" section the fictionalizing of an audience properly so that they understand when satire is being used (388-389). What he is essentially saying is that figurative language (such as Kilingsworth's irony break down) is used to distinguish the narrator's views from the author's. This is how we identify an unreliable narrator. Using Killingsworth's ideas of closing and increasing distance would allow one to identify the reliability of any given narrator. It is the success of the author in showing the reliability that Booth later claims a work should be judged on.

Now for a brief mention of what really irritates me about Booth:

My irritation with Booth began principally with this quote: "If the novelist waits passively on his pedestal for the occasional peer whose perceptions are already in harmony with his own, then it is hard to see why he should  not leave everything to such readers. Why bother to write at all? If the reader were really the artist's peer in this sense, he would not need the book" (396).
Basically, what I'm getting from this is the sense that an author is not creating art for art's sake, but instead intends his work to be didactic. This quote implies a need for the reader to be someone who thinks differently from the author, and the only reason I can see for this to be necessary is if the author is intending to change the reader's mind about something. According to Booth, the author should make his novel accessible in order to make it "communicable" and therefore relate the "moral judgments" the author has made to a wider audience (397). Booth says moral judgments are naturally inherent in the novel, because "when human actions  are formed to make an art work, the form that is made can never be divorced from the human meanings, including the moral judgments, that are implicit whenever human beings act" (397). Booth says it is "base" (392) to write novels which only a few people can appreciate, presumably because the moral message cannot be conveyed to as many people.
He quotes Thomas Hardy's statement that "a novel which does mortal injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence" (386), and interprets it in such a way to make it seem the instruction of morality is the purpose of the novel.

I would agree with Booth that moral judgments are inherent in a novel. It comes from a human mind, and humans are terribly judgmental creatures. But when he starts making statements about writing a novel which everyone can understand in order to communicate with more people, I start to get wary. I think Booth makes the novel seem more like a propaganda method than an art form. If it is "base" to write a novel which only a few can understand, it seems Booth intends the novel to be merely something which teaches people. While I agree that any novel can be a teaching method to impart understanding of certain value systems, I think that Booth is implying that this is the only thing of value which the novel does.