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

One of the first discussions we had in our film theory class was, predictably, how film is different than previous art forms. One criteria that came up over and over was whether film should be seen as an art of time or an art of space. Music, for example is an art of play in time and paintings/sculptures are arts of play in space. Dance is an art of both. Television is an art of time in ways that DVD movies are not but screen movies are. Cyberspace can be a temporal art, but it is more often a spacial art. CNN, when it attempts to adapt internet genre conventions, needs to recognize the different temporal access limitations of the two media.

To relate this back to yet another class, I want to map that distinction onto two basic assumptions of Western epistemology: identity and time. Identity requires temporal stability and spacial boundaries of objects of knowledge. Time requires a logic of cause and effect which is a uni-directional phenomenon.

My paper for the class will attempt to engage the ways that internet (cyberspacec?) subjectivities can challenge these assumptions (oh, so postmodern, a la Buddhism, Nietszche and Borges). In a way, I see the way that the internet constructs spectator positions (cyborgs) is only possible because of postmodern ideologies which predate the internet.