Revisiting Lanham’s Analyzing Prose

I was recently rereading sections from Richard Lanham’s Analyzing Prose as I am prepping for a course I’m teaching this fall titled Writing for Digital Environments, and I had forgot how much I enjoyed the book and particularly the epilogue, “What’s next for text?”, which he added in the 2nd edition of the book.  Granted it has some of the thinking from his Economics of Attention book, but he does a very nice job of setting up many threads or issues that persist in multimedia scholarship and/or its relation to text (as in the legacy of the printed word).  He tells us, in no particular order, that electronic texts allow the author to speak from the margins (236), that we readers of texts and/or consumers of information “crave the rich signal” (237), and that the fixity of print will always remain a choice, but we should acknowledge (more explicitly than we have) that fixity is, in fact, a choice and not the de facto position of text (236).

He also writes, “We always have wanted to mix word and image, abstract and behavioral space [. . . . and we] have always wanted to put words in motion, dramatize their relationships to one another” (237).  This desire, it seems, comes from our existence as beings in a multimodal and multimediated world.  Words alone, while of value, cannot do what multiple media together can do.  It is the same with human-to-human (face-to-face) interaction, where the combination of words, voice, gestures, setting, context, situation, and so on are all at play.  To reduce ourselves to a single mode of expression is, in a certain way, a reduction of self, a reduction of capacity, a reduction of human possibility.

One of my other favorite lines, which reminds me of Ulmer’s work, is when Lanham writes, “digital prose works in, around, over, and through images” (237).  Prose, aside from its existence as an image as well, works in image reasoning and/or Ulmer’s “image reasoneon” (which he builds/borrows from Walter Benjamin).  There is not only something visual about prose (or text in general) , but there is an image logic that can be found moving amid the at/through oscillation Lanham speaks of.  Ulmer picks this up with Derrida working at the level of the gram, but also with this notion of “image reasoneon” where we might think of the importance of neon words in advertisement and, more generally, our larger consumerist culture.

There is much more in this chapter, and this work, especially his working with/through his notion of “alphabetic counterculture,” but I do enjoy this work and will be

Mike Wesch’s digital scholarship…oh, and he speaks to the Library of Congress

Digital Ethnographer (and anthropologist) Mike Wesch spoke to the Library of Congress about YouTube, providing an anthropological introduction to the global phenomenon. On his YouTube channel, Wesch (and his digital enthnography students) have posted a video of this presentation (which can be seen below). Aside from the dynamic content, and beyond the quality of scholarship involved in this presentation, the Wesch et al.’s video creation really showcases a different way of thinking/making with/about scholarship in our current culture. While I am sure the presentation was good, I have to believe that the video posted on YouTube works better, as it becomes a more integrated way of working through the material. In this one creation, there is oral discourse (and we can see parts of Wesch’s oration—the gestures, the facial expressions, and so on [hearkening us to Ong’s discussions of secondary orality), textual discourse (with text on screen, among other literate-based influences), visual/image discourses (with still shots, but also with issues of juxtaposition or examples of collage in various moments), and numerous other discourses. We could classify some as video-based practices (though not sure if that is “discourse”), where the use of jump cuts and other editing techniques help communicate the message(s) involved. Or we might see comic-based techniques emerging, with sections that work relationally—multiple things that together communicate something greater than they can individually: where text, image, video, oration, etc. work together intricately, relationally, not mimetically.

This creation, in terms of our focus here, is by far as interesting, if not more interesting, than Wesch’s discussion of YouTube, which itself is fascinating. The video mode opens things for the message that traditional print-based text cannot do. It creates a possibility for communication that text, even multimodal text (e.g., image/graphic and alphabetic writing) could not do. This, I think, is the kind of scholarship that Virginia Kuhn’s dissertation tried to open up, but because her constraints were within the genre of doctoral dissertation, she had to adhere (or remain noticeably close) to the expectations of that kind of creation: a print-dominate culture, adhering strictly to literate practices; thus, her TK3 dissertation was noticeably print-literacy based. More than just incorporating multimedia (like Kuhn’s approach, which itself challenged many limitations and significantly pushed boundaries for digital/multimedia scholarship in positive directions) Wesch’s video opens us to something else. It is scholarship that works orally, but also scholarship that works literately, and scholarship that works electrally. The medium, and the creation, do as much for the message as does Wesch’s scholarship (and the situation…as this would be received in completely different terms if he wasn’t speaking at/to the Library of Congress).

Nonetheless, I am once again amazed, informed, and inspired by Wesch’s work, and despite its lengthy viewing time (55 minutes), especially for YouTubers, it is an excellent piece of digital/multimedia scholarship.

___________________________________
http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson

The resistance…

Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, tells us that electric technology will meet with much resistance in American culture because it threatens (to alter) literate thought, which has been instituted (uniformly) in education, government, society, industry, and so on. Additionally, as Walter Ong has told us, in his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, literate thought is total, is unquestioned, and this is the world we encounter within the walls of the academy. Despite the multimedia push occurring across the University, noticeable in the growing multimedia nature of Freshman composition and its related texts (visual readers, companion websites & CDs, etc.) as well as the common practice of cannibalizing lecturer positions so departments and colleges can afford various education technologies (necessities in our current climate), the academy is still overwhelmingly a literacy club (and maybe it should be, to a certain extent, as it was the institution given rise by literacy–i.e., Plato’s Academy). We talk of multimedia, theorize about the effects (and affects) of multimedia, and engage the various emerging new media technologies daily, but yet we don’t necessarily value the multimedia in terms of “acceptable” scholarship: dissertations are still predominantly text-only creations, even with a pdf option, which tends to be a mere digital copies of the would-be print version; or, in terms of tenure-track mobility, multimedia creations may be “appreciated,” may be conversation fodder, even may be considered impressive work, but are significantly less valued compared to the printed article–with the online (printed) article residing somewhere between the two–and all this despite the often immense effort, insight, research, and ability needed to create multimedia scholarship.

This is an issue making its way into various current conversations, creating some buzz about scholarship in the 21st century, and it is the root/rhizomic issue at the base of this blog, which I hope to explore in a variety of posts as I work to complete my own dissertation (regarding this and other related issues).

Work Cited
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1964. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the Word. New Accents Series. NY: Methuen, 1982.

___________________________________
http://www.clemson.edu/~hodgson