This Screen is so Hyper

When I look at my roommate’s messy, next-door bedroom, I visualize a bigger mess, a slob. She’s not a slob, of course, but because my house was always pretty clean growing up, I have high standards for my own living quarters now. This is one tiny sliver of what makes up who I am and what I like, a fraction of my terministic screen. Here, I will compare the Landow’s concept of hypertext and intertextuality to Burke’s terministic screens.

The author of “Directing the Attention” says that he visualizes a particular set of photographs after speaking about “terministic screens.” The pictures were of the same objects, but were taken using multiple angles and color filters, which highlighted differences in texture and even form when he looked at the prints. The entire mood was altered simply by tweaking a few things. A very obvious example of this today is the photographic social media platform known as Instagram. Every photo uploaded is given the invitation to be filtered, changing the color tone, the shadows, and virtually anything that the user wants to adjust. Each individual person who sees a post will then interpret it in a new way, not necessarily a better way, but a singular, unique way that no one else but them can. This can be said for any text, as well, because every single human being grows up with a different kind of “screen” or “grid” of intelligibility through which they perceive the world, and through which it makes sense. These “screens” or “grids” are a unification of things like the discipline they received as a child, television shows they were exposed to, and the kind of relationships they were engaged in. Terministic screens are rhetorical because they are reflective, deflective, and selective of our knowledge, but they also become projections of ourselves, shaping the ways in which we act.

But how many of our actions are determined by terministic screens? Do these screens bring things into being? Can we look at this like the concept of hypertext and/or intertextuality? And does the terminology construct reality? I think the short answer is yes. But how do we reach these answers, how do we reach transcendence in understanding this?

It’s difficult to answer with a mere “yes” or “no” when it’s in regard to terministic screens. Much of what shapes our individual perceptions are our experiences, but a large portion of our personalities are also influenced by our id, ego, and superego, some of which are unconscious. These lay the framework for our due course of life choices, but the details can and are warped by our encounters with other people and the theories we find in texts that are constantly circulating. Without these screens, though, there is nothing. They are made up of happenings in the world, definitions we give common objects like plants and animals, and without these, we have no connotation or connection. There would be no way to relate or communicate what we need to. Therefore, they are absolutely necessary, but if you think about it, the term is a combination of situations that are unavoidable. We can’t simply sit in a plastic bubble for our entire lives. Every occasion, no matter how “boring” or “uneventful” it seems, adds up to represent segments of our lives that then merge into a canopy that encompasses all our traits. Burke even mentions how he hopes his examples “suggest how fantastically much of our 'Reality' could not exist for us, were it not for our profound and inveterate involvement in symbol systems” (Burke, 48).

We are able to consider these theories in relation to hypertext and intertextuality, because both of these are umbrella terms that operate by building up a large concept (similar to a life) and utilizing a multitude of associations, like hyperlinks and connections to other well-known texts. These are comparable to the experiences that make up a person and his/her attitudes. “The word ‘assemblage’ seems more apt for suggesting that the kind of bringing-together proposed here has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of sense or force to separate again, as well as being ready to bind other together” (Landow, 34-35). Like a hyperlink, terministic screens are a network of texts, part of a interconnected approach to the nature language, that works to operate together to reach transcendence, or some understanding/contentment in the world.