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

Does that title seem confusing? Well, it's my smoke and mirrors to make you think that this assignment was somehow turned-in on time. . . . sure.

What is the role of the screen phase in a personal experience of yours?
I decided to write this paper as a means of exploring why I’m so dern obsessed with self-presentation on the internet. Be it Myspace/Facebook, gaming, blogs, on-line dating, on-line resumes or even that new fangled tracking technology, it seems the internet, rather than merely an ocean of information, is an elaborate stage from which we can conceivably target any audience (the racial and class violence inherent in that claim will certainly be explored in my project) and utilize any form of knowledge as a prop in the performance of the self. My personal experience is that I’ve always loved on-line dating sites because I love attempting to manifest a page (hybrid textual/visual self-portrait) which expresses not only “me” but the version of me most likely to attract whatever sort of mate that version of me would want to attract. And yet I’ve never considered actually meeting anyone via these sites. The explicit purpose of the site is completely alien to me. On a similar front, despite nearly a decade of journaling, I found that attempting to post a personal blog was horribly awkward. I find that my audience awareness on the internet, and the ways that these new cyber communities overlap and conflict with my other communities make sincere-feeling self-expression near impossible. I can’t even post to discussion boards because of the complexity of creating an e-image of myself that will conflict with my self image. Recently, I’ve embraced this frustration. I’ve been creating digital personas. Avatars? Perhaps. But my process of learning to access my avatar potential needs to be theorized. I want to call this process of self-performance the screen phase, and be able to talk about internet-invested conceptions of self in terms of avatar literacy.

What are the social consequences of the screen phase?
As with the next three questions, perhaps the easier question would be an inversion: what are the consequences of the social on the screen phase. But in good faith, I’ll try this format. I’ll risk a speculation that when the average person accesses an avatar, they are unable to conceive of a real person on the other end of the interaction. They are more aware, if still inarticulate about, the rhetorical choices made in the creation of this essentially two-dimensional mask. By thinking in terms of the screen phase, these interactions would acknowledge that such choices are both socially predetermined and inseparable from the person performing. Which leads me to ethics . . .

What are the ethical consequences of the screen phase?
Rhetoric is persuasion and, according to the common slippery slope, thus is deception. Those who participate in rhetoric are thus unethical, exonerating those of us who don’t recognize our own rhetorical choices from our ethical responsibilities to those wily rhetoricians. But if rhetoric is removed from its association with hegemonic top-down power, if mutual participation in such rhetoric (including reading seen as enacting power) exerts influence over the ideal egos of everyone involved, then there are no victims. We are all ethically implicated. When the Romantic humanist subject (a construction who legitimates ways of being and knowing that are coded as white, male, American, capitalist and middle-class) prevails over the (Baroque?) posthuman subject (a construct whose implications I’m still trying to wrap my head around) it will not be the white, middle-class, American, capitalist males who are responsible.

What are the educational consequences of the screen phase?
For my personal pedagogical needs, I’m always looking for ways to get students to locate themselves and to recognize their own locatedness. If I can articulate the screen phase, if I can sell it to my students as the postmodern self, then I can get them to see the specificity of their own views and thus make them ore aware of their audience. If I can get them to see the self as a text, they can talk about rhetoric in an increasingly personal way. Maybe I can even get them to write literacy narratives about their own discovery of their avatar/performative status.

What are the psychological consequences of the screen phase?
Forgive me if I find this question simply funny. The screen phase is psychology, or perhaps the site where psychology and rhetoric can no longer deny their conjoinedness. In other research I’ve found that the mirror phase, indeed, much of pop-psychology, is a naturalized ideology rather than a description of lived experience. I want to exploit this demystification, not to reject the pantheon of Phallus, Ego, Mother, Father, Super Ego, Id and all the other gods of modernist self creation, but rather to use these tropes to empower and make relevant the gods of rhetoric, like hybridizing oral traditions by creating a new landscape upon which the heroes can encounter one another. Each story is useful, each articulation encourages new (dare I say it?) lines of flight.

What is another concept that is broader and more important than screen phase?
Drag. A la Judith Butler, in terms of performance and performativity. Drag does not seek to pass as the costume, but rather to draw attention to the audience’s recognition of the cues in the costume. “Look, by putting on a beard, I’ve become something to you that I was not when I had no facial hair. Look how much facial hair symbolizes to you.” Drag is commentary. I want all avatars, all internet-invested modes of self-presentation to be sites of drag, rather than their current role as performative. Performativity is distinct from drag because it naturalizes the performance. It masks the ideology by which the performance is readable. While drag is libratory, performativity is disciplinary. Currently avatars, in that they claim to represent real instances of the individuals who create them, inscribe specific ways of understanding what a self is, what sorts of characteristic define a self and how selves experience one another. If the screen phase can be theorized, it will articulate these mechanisms and reveal them as artifacts.

What are some past uses of the screen phase?
The internet is not the first screen through which selves have been altered and presented. Indeed, like the mirror is only mythically the site of self-encounter and perception, the screen is merely an analogy for the act of locating the self within a culture, or within a community of selves. But if we choose to look at how the screen has transformed from a site of receptive identity to a site of constructive identity, we can consider the power of film (a community-wide screen encounter) and television (a individual or otherwise intimate community screen encounter) as performances which are often also performative. The computer screen, on the other hand, has become a site of active performance, be it drag or performativity. In the past decade, this screen has transformed from a textual to a visual medium. This shift is crucial because visual rhetoric is always performative. As the technology of the image becomes more digital, the image is granted increasing truth value. While the word is a symbol, the image is an index.

What is the screen phase a symptom of?
As I’ve insinuated earlier, the mirror phase is a symptom of a Romantic, humanist, capitalist sensibility of rugged individuals who retain control over their lives, who have access to knowledge/reality and who can exercise agency over the world around them. For these individuals, perfection is attainable and should be strove after; in other words, life is teleological. But in art, in philosophy, in ways of enacting communities, there are other modes of self. This semester we’ve encountered a variety of texts which each butt their heads against this distinction. Rhetoric, it seems, requires a more communally-defined self and reality. Not only is this other sensibility difficult to define, it may inherently resist definition as a valid mode of knowledge. The previous paradigm has never achieved a satisfactory ethics. Now, as the humanist individual status has been expanded to include corporations, the potential destructive wake of independent agents is becoming intolerable and impossible to ignore. The rhetoric of Enlightenment humanism is so pervasive that it stops being acknowledged as rhetoric, freeing it to define the terms by which resistance can occur. But this other paradigm, while discredited, is still prevalent. As the hegemonic power of our “official” ideology crystallizes, it alienates more and more, creating sites of dissent. Simultaneously, technology is refuting the digital/analogue binary and denaturalizing the image. The internet is also recreating spectatorship, threatening what film and theater theorists refer to as the fourth wall, the invisible divide between the world of the stage and the reality beyond it. In other words, we are loosing our stable sense of self and becoming increasingly aware of our impact on one another. The screen phase extends this knowledge to the creation myth of the self, thus denaturing the individual and recreating borderlands, spaces of play.

What are five things everyone should know about the screen phase?
1. The mirror phase is a myth that functions to naturalize a specific ideology
2. The screen phase is not locatable in a specific time (age 12-16, for example) or in specific metaphors (the screen, the stage, drag performers). It is a methodology rather than a discrete process
3. Denaturalizing an ideology does not refute it. We need not sacrifice humanism so that posthumanism can win the debate. A change of regimes can only create temporary play. To grant truth value to posthumanism is to perpetuate the same limiting binary.
4. The avatars we encounter on the internet are no more stable, rhetorically savvy or real than the avatars we create for ourselves.
5. Even in the most utopian conception of the internet, we are still being interpolated into the same old script.