Specificity Vs. Generality

For a long time during this class I've been mulling over a question of specificity versus generality. When we communicate with different forms of texts, it seems to me like we are always doing so with the aim of getting another person to feel what we are feeling. But for a variety of reasons (mostly to do with what Doug was just beginning to touch on earlier in the semester with the 'filters' that keep us from ever really knowing what other people know) we are never sure that anyone has ever really 'gotten the message'. In fact, it would seem like the only thing we could be really certain of is that no one else has gotten the message, or at least not in the exact same way that we are feeling it.

Needless to say, as someone who believes in the power of communication through the written and the visual so deeply that he will pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to learn about it, this kind of conundrum is the type that keeps me awake and thinking at night. (or at least, hypothetically would, if the crush of senior classes didn't knock me out on the living room floor before I can even get to the bed.) As I was reading McCloud, the passage on the simplification of cartoons allowing for greater transfer of emotional empathy struck extremely close to home. While I thought the 'masking' theory he explores was rather tangental (wonderfully interesting, but not really tied to the core of what the chapter was he was talking about), the continuum he presents between complex images to simple images to simple words to complex words was fascinating. It made me think of all the different kinds of combinations there are of this continuum out there: photo-essays combine photographs on the hyperreal end of the visual spectrum and very complex words; infographics and similar use very simple images and very complex words; captions in photo-books or art galleries provide very simple words with very complex pictures, etc. 

But then there seems to be another way to break off of this continuum altogether. For example, complex words do not inherently mean complex ideas.  

Put another way, the words themselves are not the only images at play in a piece of writing. The images that you conjure with your words also contribute to what a reader 'sees'.  In other words, I think that there is less difference on the writing end of things than McCloud would have us believe. Some of the greatest poets I know (W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, even Eliot at his more restrained) make terrific, mind-boggling imagery out of words that you could read at the end of elementary school. In other words, in trying to convey our inner feelings most effectively, is it better to keep your language keyed-down and simple? We are always told to 'show not tell' but is the best way to 'show' in fact to show *less*? I have a hypothesis that the reason writing and radio are said to be more stimulating and engaging than television is because they demand more creation on the part of the viewer; by communicating less to us, they are actually communicating more. The more of an idea we have to create for ourselves (our role as a viewer of texts that McCloud describes) the more connected we feel to a text -- the more we feel like the idea is our own, or at least something we can feel as our own. Here perhaps is where that tangental theory of masking McCloud describes could get a second life: the incredibly obscure, non-realistic "images" that combinations of words present are links to our own experiences. We can inhabit them, like simplified cartoon drawings, and through our ownership of them can feel them as our own. 

If only we could know what people really mean...

I am still wondering about the best way to convey information through text (more specific images to allow readers to feel more specific ownership and feelings at the risk of going too specific or obscure and alienating them, or less specific images that a wider number of readers could make their own, at the risk that what those readers make out of your words will not be what you intended) but McCloud's article has got me thinking about this... A lot.

I'm seeing a critical photo essay in the works.