Barthes' The Photographic Message

In Roland Barthes’ first chapter “The Photographic Message” in Image Music Text, Barthes seeks to move beyond what sociology has primarily been focused on with photographs, the source of emission (producer) and point of reception (consumer), by  directing our attention to the channel of transmission (the text).  He is interested in the connotative messages images have, especially in the press photograph as such an image is accompanied by a title, caption and article (as well as headlines). Barthes quickly identifies that the newspaper, as a source of information, creates two different structures ― linguistic in which the substance is words and visual/image in which the substance is lines, shades, surfaces ― and that we must analyze both separately in order to understand how each structure compliments the other. The visual/image though is not an isolated structure; rather, such a text is accompanied by a title, caption and article.  But, as Barthes suggests, producers, those sources of emissions (i.e. staff of the newspaper: technicians who took the photo, others who choose, compose and treat it, and those who give a caption, title, and commentary), of the photograph often work to be “neutral” and “objective” in copying reality.  A basic level of meaning, “message without a code,” is evoked in the literal reality (although still manipulated by reductions in proportions, perspective, color, etc.). The “neutrality” intention creates sense of naturalness and eternalness, which will connect and be important for the next layer of meanings. As Barthes continues to the other levels of meanings ― “analogical reproductions of reality (drawings, paintings, cinema, theater) and, more importantly, reception of the image, which in turn signifies a certain ‘culture’ of the society receiving the message (17) ― he begins to explore rhetoric, or the rhetorical dimensions of a text.  A connoted system develops and “the code of the connoted system is very likely constituted either by a universal symbolic order or by a period rhetoric, in short by a stock of stereotypes (schemes, colours, graphisms, gestures, expressions, arrangements of elements)” (18). My first question was what rhetoric means for him. Is it simply a compilation of stereotypes?  A few paragraphs later, in arguing that the status of the photograph has more than a denotation, he suggests that the connotation provides a message with “a code (the ‘art’, or the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric, of the photograph).”  In other words, I gather that rhetoric means a code, or the connotation, that deploys messages that are both “’objective’ and ‘invested’, natural and cultural” (20).

These messages are structured by procedures, which are not part of the photographic structure, and Barthes suggests six of them: trick effects, pose, objects, photogenia, aestheticism and syntax.  Barthes is concerned with the first three, as “connotation is produced by a modification of the reality itself” (21).  In a trick effect procedure, the connotation appears without warning, similar to what I thought of as subverting the denotation, because of the particular historical moment.  The trick effect procedure is done by the producer’s intent, and typically works as the beginning step in naturalizing meanings.  The pose procedure is the content’s pose: the photo subject’s body position and parts position.  Barthes provides an example of JFK, in which he has his eyes raised heavenwards, hands clasped in a high-profile shot.  Barthes suggests “youthfulness, spirituality, purity” (22), although he doesn’t interrogate the image much.  I would have liked to see Barthes unpack the image more, but that isn’t particularly his focus for the chapter (but this is the reason why I think he shouldn’t even bring in a specific text if he isn’t going to unpack).  His next procedure directs our attention to objects and Barthes emphasizes that objects possess meaning and not power. This procedure is particularly interesting for me and my indep. study in the fall with Dr. Gries.  While Barthes wants to focus on objects and their meanings, and I concur with him, I also think power cannot be detached from meaning.  Meanings produce power, as well as eradicate power (I know I need to elaborate).

The object procedure also reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend Kyle today about consciousness and writing.  It was an interesting conversation and I won’t delve into all the details, but he did mention something that relates to Barthes’ third procedure (objects) in connation in images: memory.  Kyle mentioned that we have to write memories in order to produce memories and objects provide us with a sense of memory.  I brought up the idea of objects possessing a memory in that we project consciousness onto objects and give them a sense of consciousness.  Kyle fair warned me though that this may be problematic, and I agree, but I want to clarify what I (think I) mean: a subject’s experience with an object, often and almost always, evokes many different ideas, feelings, and narratives.  The time a subject and object are together will provide numerous opportunities to develop a narrative (which can easily be fantasy or real).  It will also give a subject a consciousness (I know I’m throwing the word “consciousness” around without any solid definition, which was also the issue Kyle and I were discussing), as well as the object, although a different kind of, consciousness.  For example, a painting on my living room has particular meanings for me.  My friend Sandy painted it and offered it to me at a particular moment in our lives. At the time of exchange, I had a consciousness and set of meanings (friendship, gratitude, value of listening), which all held shortly after (a couple of months).  When she and I were no longer around each other and the painting, I continued to have these particular ideas. These ideas structure a memory. But did I have the ideas and memory or did the painting have the ideas and memory?  Sure, I could think about Sandy and some of those ideas and the memory arose, but the ideas and meanings were never as potent in my mind as they were when I looked at the painting.  In addition, I think the objects absorbed meanings and develop a memory that was distinct. I’m unsure right now what the object’s memory would be (i.e. would it be synonymous with my memory). As the months passed, (as you might have noticed already by the past tense) the meanings changed for me, as well as (I’m assuming) for the painting. 

Now, let’s say the painting gets damaged, maybe it falls off the wall, the glass breaks and the painting nearly tears in two, and I have to throw it away.  I dispose of it in the dumpster in my parking lot and someone else finds the painting.  They decide to keep it, maybe restore it or whatever, because it evokes certain meanings for this person.  Maybe the image evokes from their memory sadness or joy or tranquility.  Now does the object’s consciousness change?  Does the subject pack the object with new meanings and a new memory? I would say yes because the context changed.  The environment of the exchange with me and Sandy, the traveling from Chicago to Gainesville, and my living room in Florida all packed the painting. The breaking of the glass, the tearing of the painting, and the travel of the painting to the dumpster packed a new set of meanings (no value or reason in keeping or restoring the painting, my lack of effective hanging, etc.). At the same time, the painting’s position in the dumpster has a set of meanings for why it ended up in the dumpster.  But those meanings and memories seem to be lost with interjection of the other person and the painting absorbs new meanings and memories. Of course, if you’ve reached this point in my writing, my whole babble here is nearly meaningless without a definition of consciousness and memory.  Is consciousness defined by memory?  I have always thought of consciousness as the ability to make meanings, as well as a self awareness (which I know is loaded).  Possibly I need to rethink what consciousness is with attention to memory.  And maybe a definition of consciousness is impossible as meanings are constantly fluid and shifting (as definitions for words also do). And of course, I haven’t even discussed how writing connects to this memory and object example, but I would like to explore further some of these ideas.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about visual rhetoric as it relates to multimodal composing, particularly in the classroom. It would be impractical, as far as I know now, to have students compose a visual essay, such as a 10 minute documentary.  I cannot expect students to have the necessary access to a video camera (although they probably have video cameras on their phone) and an editing program.  However, in 1102 last semester, we had students do visual maps, where they had to design a visual representation of their research sources.  The idea was to have students demonstrate the complexity of weaving together sources, as well as aid students in organizing their papers. I thought it was an interesting assignment.  As a way for students to begin thinking visually about their research and their research paper, on one my lectures days, I showed the video on Ken Robinson’s paper on “Changing Education Paradigms” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U).  After the ten minute video, I busted out colored pencils and sheets of paper and asked students, with their five annotations from their annotated bibliography, to represent visually the conversation of their sources, as well as their own position around their topic.  Students seemed to really enjoy the activity and many mentioned it gave them a different way of thinking about their topic and argument. I wonder if we (teachers) had spent some more time in discussing visual rhetoric, specifically production and invention, would students be able to create a much different argument in the end  A nascent idea, but something I wish to explore more in the next couple of weeks.    

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print.

Raul Sanchez "Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity"

I had a chance to read Raul Sanchez’ “Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity” the other day and want to summarize some of his ideas, as well as discuss my conversation with my friend Jake.  Sanchez posits that composition studies has traditionally differentiated between the writer and the subject ― “the latter remains a figure with which to theorize systematically, while the former is encounterd materially and individually” (234) ― with the field focusing on the former.  But he argues that, because of “recent and emerging technologies” (234), the distinction is withering.  Theories of the subject, particularly in the 1980s and 90s, positioned the subject as an abstract phenomenon: “agents, texts, and contexts are interconnected” as Sanchez remarks “and are all, in fact, participants in thoroughgoing textuality” (235).  But new technologies (I would imagine he means new media writing apparatuses, although he alludes to “nodes,” “networks,” and “clouds”) have engendered the discourse of the subject to become a materiality, one in which Sanchez hopes can be susceptible to empirical research and pedagogy.  Such a reconfiguring, or rather retheorizing, of the discourse of the subject will provide composition studies with a writing-subject figure, as well as a way to explore a “complex relationship between agency and textuality” (235).  This retheorizing also redefines identity, which Sanchez argues, “names an aspect of the idea of traffic between textuality and the ‘outside’ of texuality, the aspect with which composition studies historically is most concerned: agency” (235).

Sanchez believes that composition studies’ deployment of modernist and postmodernist frameworks are necessary and useful in understanding the writer and writing, but also posits that these frameworks need to extend further in terms of developing a writer-subject and the study of writing.  These two texts (I’m calling them texts) can be explored by appropriating empiricism. Since we already “look at texts ― graphic, filmic, electronic, or otherwise ― in systematic ways,” (238) as Sanchez contends, and hence we engage with empirical methods through which to understand the inside and outside of texts, resistance to empiricism is unproductive. Rather, a redeployment of empiricism in composition studies (or writing studies, as Sanchez highlights, which is where comp. studies is headed) will be fruitful Sanchez also identifies the opposition, likely from a postmodernist, to his argument: reimagining empiricism as the “old and familiar idea of strategic essentialism” (238). But Sanchez seeks ways to understand the systems that give texts the function of representations. It is here where I feel Sanchez is calling for a reenvisioning of structuralism, as he sees identity as an “event” of and in textuality (Raul might be frowning now as I’m attempting to cast his theory into a category). 

Sanchez also argues for what he calls neo-empirical theory: the act of writing, which is an “identity-based cultural activity” (240), produces identity as a rhetorical act (rather than a philosophical concept) (240). This theory, as Sanchez says Satya Mohanty articulates, suggests that experience ― as a way to process information, rather than an ontology ― is “mutable or plastic.” 

Sanchez’ theory does appear to contrast with Barthes’ theoretical concept signifiance, a term that suggests the subject is positioned as a “loss”, a “disappearance” (in other words, is deconstructed) during production, enunciation, symbolization (and in our case, writing) (Stephen Heath’s Note, 10). Of course, Barthes connects this moment of deconstruct to jouissance (an English translation is difficult because of the range of meaning in jouissance), but what’s interesting is that while both Sanchez and Barthes see identity and the act of writing as a process, each scholar differs in the content of the subject in the process: the former scholar does not suggest a sense of “loss” in the subject or act of writing, but (I believe) implies that a production produces identity ; the latter scholar suggests that in the act of writing, or speech, or language production, the subject is subjected to a deconstruction, a “loss.”  I’d like to think more about both these scholars' positions and as I will read Barthes in the next couple of days, I plan to return to some of these ideas in another post.

Identity, as Sanchez argues, “is a function of social and historical relations and interactions; it is not an epistemological or ontological concept.  It is a rhetorical action-an event” (241). Shortly after this claim, Sanchez brings his argument back to emerging technologies.  Such apparatuses offer events, and, as Sanchez remarks, an event or “eventiness” may be better understood “as a function, one that can emerge at once within and as the discourse of identity: at the level of bodies, whether utterly material or thoroughly discursive” (243), I conceptualized an event as a process, but also wondered where the particular moments in which events materialize are.  Sanchez suggests that events take place in the act of writing; and that this act of writing is identity.  In other words, Sanchez’ theoretical position is that identity and acts of writing are both events, which would complicate simplistic notions of experience as constructions of identity or objectivistic, or essentialist, approaches to identity.

I’ve summarized and cited much of Sanchez’ article for the purposes of my own understanding. I think Raul’s article will fit nicely with Sid’s Writing Technologies course in the fall.  I’d possibly like to explore more of the writing-subject (or, as Raul articulates in the end of his article, writingsubject), in particular with a certain technological apparatus.  Ultimately, Sanchez seeks a new methodology in considering what happens in the act of writing in relationship to technology, and so I’d like to work with this methodology and see what arises.  

Jake and I also spoke a couple of days ago about the piece and I wish I had written more notes, but here are some basic ideas.  Jake highlighted the point that Raul was saying that postmodernism and postmodernists are still caught in epistemological concepts.  Jake also underscored a key line from the piece, “Rather than retheorize the question, postmodern composition theory simply set it [the writer] aside on the grounds that it was too ideologically loaded with bad epistemological assumptions” (242). Hence, the reason why Raul encourages scholars to consider the limitations of postmodernism and move beyond its theoretical framework.

Jake also highlighted Raul’s primarily interest is in agency.  Early in the piece, Raul remarks, “More than ever, the study of writing needs a working and timely theory of writing, of which a crucial component would be a newly theorized writing-subject.  This theory of writing would try to explain how texts are made, distributed, received, and redistributed in contemporary systems” (236). When Jake brought up the point that Raul may be attempting to identify an agency outside of the text (or maybe I misunderstood Jake), I think Raul, and other scholars, would hit a wall and develop a flawed position.  Agency outside of a text would mean that the agent exists outside the text and any historical and spatial moment. But cultural, economic and political factors always constitute agents and agency, as texts move with, against, work off, destroy, produce, and transform each other and evoke and disseminate meanings. The only kind of agency that would exist outside a text would have to be a God-figure or some kind of omnipotence.  Yet, I still conceive of texts as symbiotic. I know Raul wants to move away from epistemological and ontological concepts, but I’m not sure one could propose an agency outside a text without some considerations of these philosophical branches. In other words, Derrida’s famous remark, “there is nothing outside the text” continues to ring true. (Btw, it is quite possible that Raul is NOT trying to identify an agency outside the text; in fact, I think, and Raul alludes several times, he concurs with Derrida’s idea of texts and the “outside.” Jake and I, or maybe just I, may be completely wrong in reading Raul’s argument).

I wonder though if Raul is trying to articulate an agency more along the lines of invention, but invention in the sense of an inconceivable agency now, but materialized in the process in the future. Just a last thought.  

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Print.

Sánchez, Raúl. “Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity.” College English 74.3 (2012): 234-246.

First set of readings for Independent Study: Spencer and Nietzsche

While I would love to read more chapters in A Thousand Plateaus, I need to begin my summer independent study. I do plan to return to D&G, hopefully, in the next couple of weeks.Friends of mine are continuing with A Thousand Plateaus and having virtual meetings, and I hope I can join them, but for now, my blogs will focus on my study.

As part of my indep. study, I am taking on several excerpts from The Rhetorical Tradition.This book is massive, dating back to Gorgias and the Sophists (circa 480 BCE), and I do not intend, at least for this indep. study, on reading the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance or Enlightenment texts. I have read some scholars ― Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Locke and Hume ― before, but I plan to focus on a couple nineteenth century pieces (Spencer and Nietzsche) and several Modern and Postmodern texts (Bakhtin, Burke, Perelman, Foucault, Derrida, Gates, and Fish).

Herbert Spencer remarks, “A reader or listener has at each moment but a limited amount of mental power available. To recognize and interpret the symbols presented to him, requires part of this power; to arrange and combine the images suggested requires a further part; and only that part which remains can be used for realizing the thought conveyed.Hence, the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived” (1155).

Herbert Spencer’s “The Philosophy of Style” is a basic nineteenth-century theory on economy writing.Spencer, ultimately, argues for some essential principles ― ones that I see Joseph Williams argues for in Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace ― that one ought to deploy for direct, clear writing.Spencer posits that “childhood” words rather than “adult” words (e.g. ‘have’ rather than ‘possess’, ‘wish’ rather than ‘desire’,et al.), words with one or two syllables, concrete terms rather than abstract ones, and main ideas (for the most part) should always come first in a sentence (subject à predicate) and constitute clear writing.This style of writing, as Spencer argues, is needed as the system of literature and composition becomes more complex. And this is where Spencer’s paradigms structure his argument. Spencer, as a promoter of social Darwinism, believed that the main principle of evolution ― homogeneity to heterogeneity ― exists in all systems (physics, arts, et al.).As these systems develop further and become much more complex, individuals are able to specialize or be specialized, yet also rely on more and more on the system for their existence.

But, more importantly socially, “The Philosophy of Style” and Spencer’s historical moment was undoubtedly a time of an oppressive racial society.Binary oppositions were ubiquitous, and Spencer’s discourse illuminates such ideologies.He suggests that savages/uncultivated peoples use an indirect method in their colloquial expressions (e.g. “Water, give me”).He remarks that, “the fact that the indirect mode is called the natural one, implies that it is the one spontaneously employed by the common people ― the one easiest for undisciplined minds” (1162-1163). Spencer’s discourse here engenders a hierarchical language use that sustains class and racial divisions, as well as resonates with the civilizing mission: a way for the bourgeoisie to exercise cultural, as well as economic and political, hegemony. Of course, I understand that Spencer is a product of nineteenth century empiricism, but, even outside politics (although I do understand that we cannot ever step outside politics), Spencer’s discourse is problematic in assuming an essentialist, and naturalist, idea about language use. All dimensions of language use, even those much more apparently fixed, for example grammar, as Chomsky contended as a hard-wired, universal aspect of language, may appear to be inherent in usage. But this would assume that language isn’t cultural. However, at times, I wonder if language as strictly cultural holds true: the classic example is the word mom.In various languages, the signifier and signified for “mom” has a similar phonetic: the “mmm” sound.Yet, while a vast number of languages have close phonetics with “mom,” several languages do not have the “mmm” sound. How can we rest on the idea that language is inherent in an individual?

My next reading was Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” from Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s.I’ve always found Nietzsche fascinating, not just in his writing style and rhetorical approach with aphorisms, poetry and metaphors, but in his ideas.He begins this essay by considering why “the proudest of men, the philosopher” uses “the intellect mainly for dissimulation”(1172). But Nietzsche quickly shifts the direction of what man desires, suggesting that man (humans) wants “to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes [war of each against all]” (1172).And, furthermore, Nietzsche directs our attention, and connects these previous two ideas, to how man typically attempts to use words to articulate truth. Nietzsche argues though for the arbitrariness of language (e.g. trees as masculine and the plant as feminine, a snake behaves similarly to a worm, et al.) and that truth is a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropolmorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified,, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding” (1174). In analyzing Socrates/Plato’s claim that words/sounds have a natural, inherent connection to the things they signify, Nietzsche unveils the shortcomings of this idealist position and proposes the arbitrariness of language.In addition, words engender concepts that fit to the situation and relate to and within the rhetorical context, as well as things outside the rhetorical context.Nietzsche remarks, “Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to server as reminder of the unique . . . experience . . . but rather . . . as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases . . . Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things” (1174).

Most post-structuralists have deployed Nietzsche’s framework, and thus language as arbitrary, words as signifiers, speech as fragmented is common understanding for those academics in the liberal arts and humanities.Ultimately, Nietzsche sees philosophy as inseparable from language, and, more importantly for my study, all language as rhetoric. For philosophy to seek truth beyond language is impossible and unfruitful. To consider language as literal is impossible.For Nietzsche, both truth and lies are conventions of discourse, meaning that since there is no way to transform things directly into language, we project our impressions onto the thing and in return attempt to articulate our impression. Consequently, all things become metaphors, and “truth” becomes a rhetoric by humans creativity in language.

One quote that I think will be valuable in my studies of visual rhetoric is when Nietzsche remarks, “the concept ― which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die ― is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept” (1175).The translator’s footnote remarks, “i.e. concepts are derived from images, which are, in turn, derived from nerve stimuli” (1175).What I’m interested in is how nations and communities develop their narratives, which are complied of numerous concepts, as well as consciousness via visual and material artifacts. In other words, I want to take Nietzsche two steps further: nerve stimuli àimages (as well as words) àconcepts à narratives à consciousness.Obviously, this outline is a very nascent understanding of the connections between a subject/text and text, but if concepts are the remnants of images and words/metaphors, then narratives would possibly all be allegory (the residue of multiple metaphors); yet, what happens to my outline with consciousness?Would consciousness have multilayered allegories? What does that even mean?And, finally, how does this brief outline I’ve developed here connect to the nation or community?

I’m also interested in how Nietzsche connects to Roland Barthes.I plan to read Image Music Text next, and I know, as the title suggests, that Barthes discusses the production of meanings in photographs/images and music.Nietzsche suggests that empty space and empty time provide an empty metaphor, which produces every concept.We begin with space, time and causality.Then, an act of transference into images creates the matter. Next, “the qualities which we believe in” are created.In this last “step” or transference, Barthes’argument about mythologies appears to resonate.

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. Print.

D&G A Thousand Plateaus Chapters 15 and 14

I finally got a chance to read chapters 15 and 14 in A Thousand Plateaus and have some thoughts, which still need more fleshing out.   

I do not agree, or possibly understand, the claim that “Articulation, which is constitutive of a stratum, is always a double articulation (double pincer). What is articulated is a content and an expression. Whereas form and substance are not really distinct, content and expression are” (502).  But I imagine content and expression are interlocked in their existence, similar to form and substance.  I’m curious if earlier chapters will elaborate on this claim, because for now I’m unsure how D&G arrived at this content and expression distinction.  Any circulating text/object/artifact deploys an expression because of difference (and not to mention meaning-making by culture).  And whenever a text is articulated, expression inherently accompanies the articulation.  To articulate means to speak, to write, to express (which all produce and carry contextual meanings). I cannot think of a moment where articulation has no meaning, no expression. 

Obviously, D&G’s articulation of stratums are allegorical for a capitalist society.  As capitalism functions in a state of chaos, it simultaneously sustains a stratified order.  With intention to consume completely the limited resources, stratification is stretched, eventually causing the system to implode.  Such a collapse renders ― typically a reactionary or conservative ― nostalgia for and reinforcement of distinct social, political and economic structures (often how fascism emerges).  One line that I liked was when D&G remarked that “it [destratification] will sometimes end in chaos, the void and destruction, and sometimes lock us back into the strata, which become more rigid still, losing their degrees of diversity, differentiation, and mobility” (504). 

Much of these last two chapters reminded me of post-colonial theory, specifically what Bill Ashcroft argues in his book Post-Colonial Transformation. In fact, Ashcroft applies D&G’s rhizome metaphor for his larger argument that colonized subjects can exercise agency within power structures.  Ashcroft argues against Louis Althusser’s claim that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” and posits that ideology is more elusive and that “interpolation” filters in and through culture.  He remarks that “interpolation is the access such ‘interpellated’ subjects have to a counter discursive agency” (47). Thus, within the rhizome power structure, colonized subjects can “interpolate” empire by appropriating dominant imperial discourses and representations. In doing so, he posits that colonized subjects transform these discourses of representations, histories, spaces, places, et al.  Such a movement, and consequently transformation, emulates what sounds like D&G suggest: “The line no longer forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space” (505).  In other words (as I read it), the marginalized/colonized/oppressed subject navigates spaces in order to expose and subvert Western/dominant imperial discourses and binaries.

Also, Ashcroft’s interpolation connects to, or seems similar to, deterritorialization.  I was a little confused though in regard to what the four forms of D (deterritorialization) are.  Following the claim that four forms exist, D&G summarize what I consider is the first form: Abstract Machines.  I found this section interesting, and thus I’d like to reflect briefly on some of the ideas.

1. Abstract Machines (Diagram and Phylum)- “constitute becomings.”  “They know nothing of forms or substances.”  Although D&G explicitly say that this form of deterritorialization is not a Platonic idealism ― or a form situated within a dualistic world ― I still find their explanation of Abstract Machines as intangible because why and how could this form be separate from forms and substances?  Does their “unformed matters and nonformal functions” (511) allow them to resist the imperial/dominant dualistic paradigm?  This may be so, because D&G also regard Abstract Machines as the agents that unveil the distinction between content and expression, as well as unifies the two.  Again, I’m having difficulty seeing the distinction with content and expression, and this distinction sounds an awful like the objective/subjective dichotomy.  Such a distinct could lead to a classic Marxist materialism: the science of history.  Yet, what I believe D&G also suggest is that Abstract Machines emulate, or maybe deploy, a potentiality (which also makes me think about Alain Badiou’s Event).  As Abstract Machines navigate the between spaces ― the lines of flight in which they can escape hegemony ― they eradicate the binaries and become/open up third spaces.

And what happened to the three other forms? I have no clue, but some possibilities: (1) I interpreted the forms wrong ― Abstract Machines are deterritorialization, and we find the four forms within Abstract Machines (even though Abstract Machines “know nothing of forms”) or (2) the other forms are irrelevant for D&G’s larger argument.

Mic Check 1, 2

I have finally created my own blog! As before with cell phones and laptops, I’m typically anywhere between two and five years after such techno fads. Nevertheless, I have begun a blog, which I hope will be fruitful as I develop my pedagogy and scholarly work around visual rhetoric, material culture and new media.  Over the next two months or so, I plan to write often and familarize myself with the site and blogging in general.