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| The more specific symbols get, the harder it is to relate to them. |
On page 157, Wysocki has a line that I would have highlighted myself, if she hadn't highlighted it herself already. It reads "…form comes from one's egocentric experiences and one takes pleasure in seeing those experiences inscribed in other objects."
She's talking, of course, about that glowing white ass. As she goes on about how it is a lovely ass, she gives the impression with this quote that the form of that ass is lovely because it is iconized, because it is (in reverse of Jamison's discussion of the historically masculine tendency to 'remove an idea from form') a form removed from all most all particularities/'ideas'. It is a simulation, a shell we can inhabit, a representation of the bodily that we can project our own bodily experiences into. We can do this less and less easily the more particular things get, right? If we want to remain crass (we do) and stay on the topic of women's asses (ladies, feel free to imagine men's asses), then witness: it is often much easier to find such an image evocative when it is a random person or when it is a person we do not know the particulars of than it is to find a 'real life' person evocative. When 'real life' people are most evocative, it's often when they're still strangers across the room or we've only been dating them for a short time; in short, the more and more particulars we know about someone, the harder and harder it is to imagine that they are what we
thought they were or what we
wished they were. The so-called villain at play here might be called assumption, because the less we know about something, the more we have to assume. Whereas the more we know about someone, the less we
can assume.
But this so-called villain has had another name in this class. McCloud called him
closure. And in that context, he wasn't really so villainous at all. The same susceptibility we have to sterotypicalizing icons of vastly generalized beauty, sex, masculinity, nobility, strength, etc is also what allows us to create any meaning from one another through communication in the first place. After all, we
never get the 'unfiltered', the true, or the whole picture. We get some — a small hint at a start. And then we have to assume the rest by filling in the blanks. How we fill in these blanks is both how we make meaning and why no two meanings are ever the same: we create them with recombinations of our own sensual experiences. In other words, the only things we ever truly
know without any assumption is that which we have experienced personally, right? So when we hear a story of something we've never gone through, or when we meet someone who is entirely unlike us, the only way we can really relate to or empathize with or indeed even admit to 'understanding' that person or those things is by connecting them to things that we do know, connecting them to things we have experienced for ourselves. Taken on a very limited scale, this is why everyone will have a different image of what the word 'tree' means: we all have different experiences that we use to fill in the blanks presented by that word. On a much more complex scale, this is also where empathy comes from: It's only because we can imagine that we know 'how someone else really feels' that we can give them the truth of presence and understanding that is so essential to our reaffirming interactions every day. This kind of assumption and generality is a lot harder to call villainous, but really it's not all that different when you look close-up.
And, to bring it back around to that white ass, this is why as a culture almost every one of us will find a picture like the one in the Peek ad Wysocki talks about as appealing or attractive in some way. It's general enough and configures, if not exactly, closely enough to what we all feel that it 'works' on a much, much larger percentage of people than an image or symbol (unfortunately in this case a living woman) who might be described as more 'specific' and 'real' (wrinkles, 'flaws', etc), but would only click into the experiences of many fewer individuals.
"The so-called villain at play here might be called assumption, because the less we know about something, the more we have to assume. Whereas the more we know about someone, the less we can assume." I have been playing with this idea a lot with these readings as well. It's something I find interesting to explore. Digital rhetoric forces us to question the ability to create meaning and the effectiveness of actually doing it (I think I mentioned this in a previous comment). I'm interested in thinking about the role of assumptions in both writing and other media. Think about, let's say, a passage describing emotion. There are so many behaviors that we easily associate with emotion. If I were to describe someone's heart feeling as though it had been cracked, you may assume that person may be sad or let down. In this sense, it seems as though words are much easier at displaying specific meaning, there are less possibilities. Drawing from my Dark Romanticism course, however, looking at a painting can be much more difficult in interpreting emotion. Just a few weeks ago, there was a painting (that is now my screensaver, though that is irrelevant) of an eroded abbey in the middle of what appears to be a cemetery in the middle of a forest in winter. There is a line of monks carrying a coffin into the abbey. What was interesting about this painting was the wide variation of interpretations from the class as well as their varied emotional responses. My response was that it was unusually beautiful for something that is Dark Romantic. Some students agreed with me while others found it to be incredibly disturbing. So, what can we assume from things like this? I question your discussion of, "the more we know about some[thing], the less we can assume". In this instance, we see an exact representation of the author's imagination. So, in some ways, we can see exactly what they were thinking, but as for what they were feeling, we are completely in the dark. Even if we were to know the emotion, there are still so many questions remaining.
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect in your post that I found interesting, was your discussion of empathy and its relation to our ability to interact. One of the things we have discussed in my Animals and Society course, is anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is, essentially, projecting perceived emotions and behaviors (that we have experienced ourselves and come to recognize) onto others. The reason I bring this up, though it is not the intention of your post, is to bring attention to the idea of interaction based on empathy in a way that makes us question what it is that we really know. Just because I know what it is to be frustrated and how I externalize my frustration, does that mean I understand frustration when I see it? Or do I associate a statement of "I'm frustrated" to their actions and then project that onto others who act in a similar fashion? If I do either (or both) of these, what does that mean of my understanding of interaction? Think about people whose actions are misinterpreted. What do we really know about anything, then? My point then, I guess, is that no matter how much we know about something, I think there are always things we can assume (maybe a lot more than we initially realize).