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

At the last minute, just this week, I realized that, through the feminist discourse of drag and performativity, I could really have some fun with avatars. By that I don’t mean the obvious topic of avatar-transvestism, but rather using theories of performativity to question how avatars both posit and challenge ideas of a stable self. At the same time, this will allow me to consider the ways that a subject position changes when it transitions from observing to being observable. Avatars will not be the topic of this paper, rather I will address them as a technology which is linked in a causal loop with a certain ideology which makes epistemological assumptions and produces specific types of subjects. Unfortunately, this little revelation makes many of my previous sources somewhat irrelevant and brings numerous new players into the field. In an attempt to limit the texts I could potentially use, I’ve decided to take a feminist approach to the project.

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York:
Hill and Wany, 1978.
While I’ve already been warned to avoid investing in semiotics above rhetoric for this project, Barthes work will provide a good introduction so I can see how that field relates the visual to other media.

Bartlett, Laura and Thomas B. Byers. “Back to the Future: The
Humanist ‘Matrix.’” Cultural Critique 53 (2003): 23-46.
My token Matrix reference: using the framework established in N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman, this article considers the liberation of Neo not as a return to the body which currently defines a subject, but as a new way of existing within the matrix and thus a new subjectivity.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. New edition. Boston: Belknap
Press, 2002.
---. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:
Schocken Books, 1968.
As was explained in my clarification project, this massive work is the foundation upon which much of my theoretical models are based.

Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity : Essays on Cartesianism and
Culture. New York: State University of New York Press, 1987.
While there is no shortage of feminist epistemology out there, this book in particular cites what Andre Bazin calls the “original sin of Western painting”: perspective. By naturalizing a stable vantage point for the viewer, perspective also naturalizes an objective knowledge of objects by subjects. Bordo is a clear and fundamental example of how technologies of spectatorship correlate with ideology.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
“Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York: Routledge, 1999.
It is nearly impossible to discuss these two particular works of Butler separately. Although Elizabeth Grosz takes the argument further in Volatile Bodies, in these books the impact of questioning the ontological being of the body is shown to pose a threat to the very idea of a subject. This is also the origin of theories of performativity and drag which draw attention to the constructedness of both gender and sex.

Cox, Geoff. “The Digital Crowd: Some Questions on Globalization and
Agency.” Design Issues 15.1 (1999): 16-25.
If the new subjectivites available through cyber-spectatorship include new relationships between individuals and communities, what will happen to responsibility for crowd behavior? Certain types of information and certain styles of presentation (visual) dominate the “public” sphere, and these may not be a proliferation of ideas, but rather the sort of winner-take-all attention economy which Lanham warns against.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Borrowing from Marx and Freud, Deleuze and Guattari posit the body itself as a technology of capitalism. A true escape from capitalism would necessitate an escape from the oedipalized body, a return to the state of schizophrenia. Anti-Oedipus is useful both to begin denaturalizing the individual which exists within a skin boundary and as a methodological model of using a fallacy (oedipal bodies or avatars) to trace the assumptions behind it.

Foucault, Michael. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Vintage, 1977.
While the internet is not a disciplinary space, it differs from other viewing positions in that the spectator is invited to make herself visible. Along with Lacan, this book establishes the power of the “gaze” to alter the sense of self of those it observes.

Hardack, Richard. “’Infinitely Repellent Orbs’: Visions of the Self
in the American Renaissance.” Languages of Visuality: Crossings
between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature. Ed. Beate Allert.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. 89-110.
This article traces the ways that the American Transcendental ideology manifested in beliefs about spectatorship. It will serve as an alternative model that proves the same assumptions in Benjamin, namely that post-Enlightenment subjectivity is constructed through the act of looking.

Jones, Amelia, et al. “The Body and Technology.” Art Journal 60.1
(2001): 20-39.
In this article, six artists tackle the question of technology and embodiment. As artists, they are already immersed in a discourse of spectators.

July, Miranda and Harrell Fletcher. Learning to Love You More.
Web-based Art. 25 Feb. 2007. Webmaster Yuri Ono. 8 Mar. 2007

Miranda July is feminist performance artist, writer and film maker. Her work revolves around the general theme of communication. This project, along with others, uses the internet to establish networks. By far the most exciting of the Miranda July web projects, Learning to Love You More in a truly interactive hypertext for which content is jointly provided by the spectator and the conceiving artists. Periodic assignments are posted to the website and then the record of those assignments (videos, pictures, texts) are posted onto the site. Most theoretically interesting, however is the decentralized theme of the art: “the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.” This conception of art can also be linked to Lanham’s “stuff and fluff” discussion.

Kintz, Linda. “Performing Virtual Whitenes: The Psychic Fantasy of
Globalization.” Comparative Literature 53.4 (2001): 333-53.
If cyber technology is truly making the world more visually accessible, the myth of whiteness as normal will be increasingly difficult to sustain. This article looks as rhetorical techniques, including the flooding of news channels with blond spokeswomen, employed by conservative groups to perpetuate internalized racisms. This article crosses the line into ethics and I couldn’t be happier about that. Not only must attention be paid to who influences and benefits from the new subject positions created, but racial representation is also an essential part of the performativity of avatars.

Rhodes, Jacqueline. “’Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action’: Women
Online.” CCC 54.1 (2002): 116-42.
You rhetors and your insistence on this so-called “real world.” By looking at the possibilities made available to radical feminists by the internet, Rhodes assumes a less individualized, more community-oriented subject position that new technologies may be rejuvenating.

Williams, Linda, ed. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
This collection contains several essays on spectatorship and spectator technologies. In Jonathan Cray’s “Modernizing Vision,” the camera obscura is contrasted with the development of photography to trace epistemological shifts and perhaps suggest that the ideology allowed the technology rather than vice-versa. Anne Friedberg takes-up Benjamin’s Arcades Project in “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition” to argue that our role as spectators determines our sense of self. The final two articles in the collection, by Carol Clover and Rhona Berenstein, challenge the male-coding of spectator positions and reveal the viewer to be not only vulnerable, but performing a position of power to entice feelings of vulnerability.

Additional books and articles I’d like to get my hands on in the future:

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media (A whole journal of goodies).

Cohen, Alain J. “Virtual Hollywood and the Genealogy of Its
Hyper-Spectator.” Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions
of Cinema Audiences. Eds. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby.
London, England: British Film Institute, 2001. 152-63

Halberstam, Judith. Posthuman Bodies.

Haraway, Donna.
Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse :
Feminism and Technoscience

Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and
Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Ouellette, M. “'Two Guns, A Girl and a Playstation': Gender in the
Tomb Raider Series.” TEXT Technology 13.1 (2004): 157-84.

Parisi, Luciana and Tiziana Terranova. “A Matter of Affect: Digital
Images and the Cybernetic Re-Wiring of Vision.” Parallax 7.4
(2001): 122-27.

Poster, Mark. What’s the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Sosnoski, James and Ken McAllister. “Circuitous Subjects in Their
Time Maps.” JAC 25.1 (2005): 31-53.

Weston, Kate. Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual
Age. New York: Routledge, 2002.