English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

So we were reading a book in my Caribbean Lit class about anthropoligists doing field work and how impossible it is to transcribe the conversations and storytelling into a coherent, logical narrative. It got me thinking about how the "book" is not the best model by which to understand how visual rhetoric will work in a technological age (aren't all ages technological?)

So here's some characteristics of oral traditions that I thought were relevant to our developing modes of communication:

1) Communal ownership - the events of the story don't have to happen to a specific person, but merely to a community member; also, the story can be retold by any number of storytellers

2) Unstable Identity - Oral cultures are often also cultures in which a single person can have multiple names and identities through -out a lifetime, likewise, different people can occupy the same roles, in a sense, becoming the same identity

3) Mutability of the Facts - Details can change without threatening the validity of the story

4) Fluidity of genre - fact and fiction are not functionally different

5) Circularity - storytelling is not teleological, therefore themes can followed as opposed to cause and effect relationships

6) Mnemonic Devices - these themes can be used to link stories, to mark significant figures, or to inscribe common themes

7) Play on ambiguity/midrash - because there is no stability in content, authority or audience, meaning remains elastic and latteral interpretive structures are encouraged (different people have different meanings, there is no authority over interpretations)

Charisma of storyteller - style is priviledged over content (and accidents such as the formatting that made my 8 into a smiley can actually add to the conent)

9) Creole and other hybrid languages - dialects, different symbolic matrices, to a degree even different literacies can be mutually comprehensible

10) International - oral cultures, free of the relic of the book are able to travel

11) Reviving the debate over suitable content - there are rarely canonized stories (except perhaps myths) and determining which stories should be told and how is up for negotiation in the community between each storyteller and audience, thus it can be a
response to the Crisis of populat culture that Lanham terms the winner-take-all attention economy

12) Attention to silences - timing, silence, ambiguity and other stylistic factors are anticipated as conveying content

13) Ontological use of trauam - trauma is not the subjective experience of a character, but is rather a communal truth which can be inflicted and healed as a community

14) Continual appeal to outside research - the story never stands alone, it is never complete, in addition to being able to ask questions, the audience is invited to pursue inquiry on subjects beyond the storytelling experience

15) Masks, spirit channeling, ritualized roles - all can be seen as analogies to avatar

16) Speaking to power or from power - in oral transmition, and this is just a theory, power relations that affect the transmission of information are more explicit and often become part of the story itself, either in conent or in style

There's no copyright in an oral culture, and this is allows us to consider the efforts of creative commons. Looking at the Black Atlantic, there's a great deal of exchange through sailors (now we have the www). They would debate where songs originated, and those savvy enough could trace mutations in the lyrics and various harmonial styles back to specific cultures. But oral culture, like a culture of attention is not a culture of information scarcity. The more you give a story, the more story you have and the more people have that story, so again, the scarcity is of attention.