What does race have to do with Scandal and March Madness?

After reading Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Writing Race and the Difference It Makes” and E. Pauline Johnson’s “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction”, it was evident that even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended all state and local laws requiring segregation, race, more specifically its integration into literature, is still very much an issue and a heavily debated subject matter.

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.

Race as a Terministic Screen

Reading Burke's Terministic Screens, set the pace for Gate's Writing "Race" And The Difference It Makes. The class discussion we had about terministic screens and what it truly stands for made it really easy for me to make the connection between race and terministic screens, and how race functions as a terministic screen. While reading Gate's, I quickly picked up on the functionality of race as a terministic screen that is used by people who exist outside the minority race. I grasp the concept of race as a language that can be continued and discontinued by choice.

Does Hegemony Even Exist? Does Race?

We all know that society is extremely stereotypical. We also know that society is categorized into what is "dominant" and what is "inferior" based off of what is perceived by society as "reality". This week, my task was to discussion lead the word "hegemony" for lecture in tomorrow's class. As I read and reread through Gates' text about race, I obviously traced it in terms of hegemony. What I found was that yes, although hegemony is defined as what is dominant, I found that what classifies something as dominant, really has no true, solid meaning and therefore, should not exist. A white man is no better or worse than a black man, and a woman is no better or worse than a woman. Hegemony, in my opinion, does not really exist, because to each race, gender ethnicity, whatever it may be, they have their own classification of what is "hegemonic" and therefore, there really cannot be any sort of "top hegemony" unless it is God, but even then, God doesn't exist to atheists, so even then, there is no hegemonic category. 

Terministic Screens and Classifying Discourse

Burke's "Terministic Screens" and Miller's "Genre as Social Action" come together for me on a lot of levels. Burke discusses the transcendental nature of terministic screens and Miller discusses the classification of discourse and how genres help us to respond in certain ways to certain situations. In a way, terministic screens and genres seem to have a lot of similarites.

Human Rights Through Terministic Screens

In Burke’s text, he addresses a concept he coined, named terministic screens. This concept acknowledges a language system that determines how an individual perceives abstract notions such as symbols, meanings, and reality on a multimodal scale. Burke states in his text how there are two different kinds of terministic screens in existence. The first type is the scientistic approach, which “Begins with questions of naming, or definition (language as definition)” (44). Likewise, Burke invented the term scientistic. Secondly, we have the dramatistic approach which reads that it “Stresses language as an aspect of ‘action’ that is, as ‘symbolic action’ (language as act)” (44).

Correlation does not Equal Causation; Writing Race into Humanity

The term "race" forces a division within humanity similar to Burkes metaphorical associations of experience.  Instead of categorizing experiences into frames of meaning, language is used to categorize people into perceived biological and ideological casings, each is like the last and all are alike within their “compartment”. These casings that Gates refers to in terms of race share strong similarities to Burkes terministic screens, which he describes as means for “directing attention into some channels rather than others” (Burke 45).  These channels can be considered similarly to the mental avenues Burke described in previous works- they direct attention in a direction based on previous processing of similar information.  Burke explains his concept of terministic screens as “I have particularly in mind some photographs I once saw. They were different photographs of the same object, the difference being that they were made with different color filters. Here something so “factual as a photograph revealed notable distinctions in texture, even in form, depending upon which color filter was used for the documentary description of the event being recorded” (Burke 45). We can consider race as one of these filters- it imposes no intrinsic change on the photograph itself, it is still the same image and same materiality, yet it has a new implication because of the emotions evoked by the filter.

Canonical Rights In a Racist Society

It is apparent that Western Culture has been encaging "black" people inside of this arbitray concept of "race" by preaching false canonical right and wrong in literature.

TV Screens > Terministic Screens

     "A 'scientistic' approach begins with questions of naming, or definition. Or the power of language to define and describe may be viewed as derivative..." (Burke. 44.). As English majors, or at least for myself, it's hard to understand that there is can be a scientistic approach to language. While yes there are steps we go through to write an essay or present a project, we never think of these steps scientifically. Language for me has just been something we've learned to speak and write and the power of language simply defines the way you feel about a particular piece of work.

     "What I mean by the 'dramatistic,' stressing language as an aspect of 'action,' that is, as 'symbolic action'" (Burke. 44.). Now for me, the word "dramatistic" is not a difficult idea to apply when speaking about language and trying to understand what language is. Language can create action, such with a person telling someone to "go" or "leave" or "run." By using these terms, the speaker is hoping their audience will use these commands to create action, by literally going somewhere, leaving, or running to another place.

Viewing Disability Through Terministic Screens

While reading Kenneth Burke’s “Terministic Screens,” I could not help but think back to Ellen L. Barton’s reading, “Textual Practices of Erasure: Representations of Disability and the Founding of the United Way.” Barton’s reading includes images of posters that advertise charities for children and adults with disabilities. In Burke’s reading, he discusses a concept called terministic screens which acknowledges a language system that determines how a person perceives things such as symbols, meanings, and reality as whole. Burke states that there are two different kinds of terministic screens. First we have the scientistic approach which “Begins with questions of naming, or definition (language as definition)” (44). The dramatistic approach “Stresses language as an aspect of ‘action’ that is, as ‘symbolic action’ (language as act)” (44).  The posters that Barton shows us in her essay essentially lead us to Burke’s concept of terministic screens. When we as viewers look at these posters, we are all prone to different terministic screens that direct our attention to these images and ultimately determine how we perceive these campaign advertisements.

In manner of becoming a genre?

Deleuze and Guattari's "Rhizome" was a particularly difficult read, which I found while tripping over my thoughts, grasping for whatever I'd learned in biology my sophomore year in high school.

Hypertext

Books, plays, poems, and literature of all kinds commonly refer to what has come before it. These references can sometimes be missed without prior knowledge by the reader. The intertextuality in writing is made more apparent and present with the use of hypertext.

Hypersimilarities between theories of similarities.

On the first written page of Landow's text, he writes of the similarities between his predecessors and contemporaries in the language that they used; those being words like web, network, link, and interwoven. Landow's theories are nothing different, he simply uses the word hypertext to make, that he seems to be an original point and articulation. Hypertext is the way he describes the flow of ideas, both in discourse and internal thought processing. The term, similar to a rhizome, is an infinitely interconnected web branching idea to idea. The differing principle between the two is that rhizome is distinctly non-centralized and hypertext can have centers of original thought that precede and influence further texts by sharing some “hypertext” between them. The critical theory of hypertext is required, according to Landow on page one, because it can generalize writing into a connected web of central ideas, they themselves centralized by core principles and writings. This critical theory would explore the roots of knowledge and show how diverse subjects branch off of similar core ideas.

They are similar ideas, really, with rhizome differing by advocating for a decentralized view of relation.

In terms of the metapicture, the same case will be found: that all these ideas are insanely similar because they're dealing with the same biological entity in the human brain, which is always involved in interpretation, regardless if one is reading an image as text or any combination of the sort of sensual and cognitive reasoning and connections. All these theories are, in a sense, connected by the same generalization they're trying to prove as being their own model, whether it be similarities caused by a similar metapicture shared between ideas, or a rhizome, or hypertext. This creates a similarities between the author's version of similarities, creating a metasingularity in the same tone as a metapicture.

As for Marxism, I don't believe so. All ideas aren't as applicable or thought out as others, as far as layman rhetoric goes. Giving merit to ideas should be based on exactly that: merit. Authorship, in the form of an author-function, exists for a reason, however, based upon their past work's consistency of quality. 

hypertext and metapictures and self-reflexivity: oh my!

                Take a moment, think about how you interpret an image: do you read it as a text or use textuality to construe what the picture is saying? In “Metapictures,” Mitchell discusses, “…pictures about pictures–that is, pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is” (35). In order to derive meaning from an image, it is imperative for it to be self-reflexive, like a hypertext. Throughout Mitchell’s essay, he mentions that visual theory is only made viable through self-reflexivity. Self-reflexive images focus on how it came to be. Similar to Landow’s theory of hypertext, Mitchell offers a sort of consciousness to an image.

Picture About a Picture & Hypertext: Mitchell vs. Landow

Both Landow's essay on hypertext and Mitchell's essay about metapictures discuss the importance of images and their effect on the reader. For Landow, one fundamental characteristic of hypertext is how it is composed of bodies of linked texts that have no primary axis of organization, in other words it essentially has no center. I can't take all of the credit for this idea, but after reading another classmates blog post they asked the question: how is one able to find the center? Before finding out the answer to this I think it's essential to note how Landow's idea of hypertext in some some ways relates to that of Mitchell's idea of metapictures. 

What is the relation?

When reading Metapictures by W. J. T. Mitchell, I could not help but be reminded of hypertext and rhizome. These three ideas relate to the reader itself when comprehending a text.

The Duck-Rabbit

In Mitchell's essay, she discusses the arguments that always come with an image that is considered a metapicture. Though metapictures seem to address a certain global concept, they still leave room for interpretation. The self-reflexivity of a metapicture is dependent and subjective to the 'self' currently observing.

Anna Karenina Needs Hyperlinks

While reading and trying to understand Landow’s  “Hypertext and Critical Theory and Mitchell’s, “Metapictures” I couldn’t stop thinking about the literary theory, reader-response criticism from my discussion leading this week and how both Landow and Mitchell discuss how readers interact with particular texts and how that response could alter the text or how the text could alter the reader. Reader-response criticism is “the response of a reader to a text, esp. as arising from the effect of cultural context and other factors on the reader's experience of the text”(OED). It primarily focuses on “how reading affects readers and how readers respond” as well as “reading as an active process” which creates a “diversity of readers’ responses to literary works” (Bedford Glossary 425-429).

Metapictures, Hypertext, and the Fear of Self-Reflexivity

We live in frightening times. The average person is inundated by scores of interactions that could not have been conceived of fifty years ago. Your phone can talk to you. Your search engine of choice customizes results for you, based on recent searches. Even your books interact with you, allowing terms and references to be searched, while you are still reading. The future is here, and George Orwell is rolling in his grave. Or so it would seem, based on the vitriolic response of critics and theorists to this new age of self-reflexivity. An example of this hair-trigger, fear-induced response can be found in Mitchell’s Metapictures. He quotes Saul Steinberg’s analysis of his own drawing, The Spiral, as “a frightening picture”.

Self-Reference, The Sublime, and Meta

Mitchell discusses the artists self reflexivity in his article, and in regards to art I believe it is best summed up here: "Everything in his world, including himself, has been created by himself(Mitchell, 40". Mitchell relates this notion to modernism and the sublime, which I think are perfectly exemplified by this. Modernism in itself is self-reflexive; 'meta' principles are prominent in many modernist works (one that comes to mind is the literature of James Joyce; he references his own genre, himself, his critics). The sublime, too, as defined by Longinus, can be considered "the expression of spirit", and what better way to achieve this than to use art to reflect ones self. Meta Pictures, then, are works of art/drawing that reflect the author.

Hypertext: It's a Small World After All

Landow’s hypertext and critical theory passage was attention grabbing due to the fact that I had never thought of hypertext in that fashion. To me whenever I had heard the word hypertext I had always thought a clickable link on a webpage that would take the user to another point in the web, nothing more nothing less.

Rhizomes, Hypertext, and Metapictures! Oh My!

Similar to rhizomes and hypertext, metapictures are more like maps in the sense that there is no tracing, no center, just open to interpretation where the reader follows the path they want to follow. What do I mean by open to interpretation? Well, although a metapicture may be self-reflective, there are various possibilities of what an image could mean and there are various ways of reaching that meaning. For example, the most obvious would be to observe the image alone. That’s where the possibilities are really endless because it’s all up to you. You have to try to find viable allusions. But, if you read a text of words describing the image, then the answer is right in front of your face and you don’t have to exert your critical thinking skills as much. Thus this option of reading a descriptive text is narrower and focuses on just one “correct” answer.

Take Steinberg’s metapicture on page 39 of Mitchell’s “Metapictures” for example. What did you first think it meant? You probably thought of something relatively different than what it was described as on the following page. And that is fine, because the reading then goes on to say that instead of the sublime image Steinberg describes it as from the insides, it is also seen as the complete opposite from the outside: a ridiculous New Yorker cartoon. Like Wittgenstein, even though he was specifically talking about the Duck-Rabbit metapicture, I believe that we should just listen to the words that come out of our mouths while we ponder instead of explicitly trying to explain (Mitchell, 61).

What is Self-Reflexive?

Perhaps one of the most interesting concepts that Mitchell explores in his discussion of meta-pictures is self-reflexivity. We've discussed it in class, but before this piece I'd never seen it discussed so thoroughly. I'd thought I had a decent grasp of the concept, but Mitchell expanded the term in a way I hadn't considered. Self-reflexive can simply mean self-referential (as with the meta-picture: a picture about a picture). But there are less explicit examples of meta-pictures that employ a different sort of self-reflexivity. Mitchell explains on page 48: "The ambiguity of their referentiality produces a kind of secondary effect of auto-reference to the drawing as drawing...  [Self-reference] has as much to do with the self of the observer as with the meta-picture itself." This claim leads to the conclusion that an image may not be self-reflexive on its own, but through the discourse that surrounds it.

Image Inception: The effects of Hypertext and Metapictures on the Reader

      It seems that no matter what the specific topic is that we are reading about, we are always brought back to the idea of "the reader" and how their role is played when dealing with a text. This applies with this weeks readings, especially with the concepts of "hypertext" and "metapictures."
 
     Landow explained that a hypertext could have any effect on a reader because it was dependent on what the reader took out of the hypertext. This same infinity applies to metapictures and the idea that a picture within a picture could continue on into forever. Which begs the question of how could we ever identify the beginning or rather the center of these ideas?

    Would we ever know if what we are reading or seeing is just what we see on our own as an individual reader or is it also what others see as the intended center?

Is a Picture Really Worth 1000 Words?

            In "Metapictures," Mitchell is seeing if pictures provide their own metalanguage rather than deriving a model for pictorial self reference from art or language (Mitchell, 38). Pictures are capable of reflection on themselves and providing a second-order discourse that tells/shows something about pictures (Mitchell, 38). As stated on page 38, Mitchell's essay is an essay about pictures, not an essay in pictures. It is an essay about pictures, but in words, so instead of an image as a text, it is full of text about images. He uses Foucauldian concepts of the relationship between pictures and words to ultimately prove that textuality can be used as an approach to attempt to read images, but images and words are so far removed from each other than one can never truly represent a picture in terms of words or a word in terms of pictures.