an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, September 2005,
ISSN 1552-5112
Vanguard Assemblages: New Media and the Enthymeme
Patrick J. McHenry
Scenography
In 1950 Charles Olson published “Projective Verse,” a
year before he became the director of Black Mountain College, working with
experimental artists like John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and
Franz Kline. It marked a significant
event in terms of composition: Olson turned towards restructuring the act of
composing itself—projective, projectile, percussive, prospective verse—by
calling for an open field of composition.
Olson argues that a poem “at all points, be a high
energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge” (345). Olson calls for kinetic composition that
“brings us up, bang, against tenses, in fact against syntax, in fact against
grammar generally, that is, as we have inherited it” (349). In a movement that I now read in postmodern
terms (point, line, field), Olson decrees that “the law of the line, which
projective verse creates, must be hewn to, obeyed, and that the conventions
which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too
set feet of the old line” (350).
Technology, however small the significance might
appear in the essay, provides a foreshadowing of my interests here:
It is the advantage
of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can,
for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of
syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave
and the bar a musician has had. (351)
Olson
and other Black Mountain poets and artists began to think of composing being
active and alive (happenings) instead of reflective and
representational—composing that does not seek description, but promotes
enacting. Olson notes a change in
apparatus; the tools for composing changed, and in accordance, he sought ways
to work with new tools. Within the
Discipline, the computer marks a much more complex changing in tools than the
typewriter. Like Olson, we do not have
any definitive methodologies for writing with digital tools. New media is without a consensus in terms of
applicability. The interest here is in
developing a theory of working with digital tools, mainly with computers with a
“cut and paste” function embedded into their frameworks. Presently, these machines are found in
classrooms and the offices of members of the Discipline among other media tools
and objects like books, videocassettes, DVDs, monitors, projectors,
televisions, etc. Even here though we
may demarcate what is distinctive about the computer: all the previous types of
media collapse together within a computer.
To
discuss these matters, I will theorize about the potentialities that stem from
successive avant-garde movements. At
this level certain logics, techniques, and poetics arise that equip society and
culture to last into the end of the century.
The vanguard aesthetic of collage and montage, which will be extracted
from Peter Bürger’s Theory of the
Avant-Garde, becomes media theorist Lev Manovich’s foundational metaphor
and rationale for new media. Manovich
marks the import of the avant-garde in terms of new media’s foundational steps;
my claim is that the logic of the enthymeme offers a way for continuing
innovation. Following a tool like “cut
and paste” as it moves through successive avant-garde movements, including the
present potential with new media and human-computer interface, a progressive
logic is formed that supplements normative approaches to academic writing.
The
goal is to establish that specialized and quotidian writing methods are
possible with the several logics new media offers: enthymematic decomposition,
inference, indirection, and variation.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories regarding language and
writing will be deployed for defining the operating practices, rhetoric, and
logic of a person using a digital tool with a “cut and paste” function. In particular, avant-garde terminology like
“assemblage” becomes compounded and complicated when juxtaposed with Deleuze
and Guattari’s “assemblage.” Deleuze
and Guattari provide an existing theory of language that operates with Bakhtin’s
dialogical principle, which is to say that we already have a theory of language
that is enthymematic. In this way,
certain terms may be dramatized, interlaced, and projected. Jean-Luc Nancy echoes an important principle
regarding a Deleuzian approach:
“Deleuze’s interest
in the cinema is not just appended to his work: it is at the centre, in the
projective principle of this thought.
It is a cinema-thought, in the sense of having its own order and screen,
a singular plane of presentation and construction, of displacements and
dramatization of concepts (the word ‘concept’ means this for Deleuze—making
cinematic).” (110) As with Olsen,
Deleuze and Guattari, my attempt is to find in what ways composing shifts with
the open field of new media—how to make the vanguard aesthetic projective in
contemporary academic composition.
All of these questions and postulates must be kept
within the frame of academic writing; we want to improve on prior methods for
composing an argument. We need a
modified rhetoric, logic, and poetics that parallels shifts in tools and
technologies. Cinema and advertising,
the entire breadth of entertainment discourse, writes with the tools and
demonstrates their effectiveness. From
Eisenstein forward, the cinema becomes a methodology—it possibly has its own
language. Advertising systematizes our
understanding of images and their inherent arguments through artistic
techniques turned into technical methods.
Multiple methods for arguing continue to surface and their common structures
remain identical for centuries.
Since Aristotle’s codification of argumentation in Rhetoric, Topics, and Prior Analytics,
we find all the essential elements of argument: form, content, induction,
deduction, enthymeme, example, and syllogism.
My interest is not in scientific syllogisms used for analysis, but
rhetorical syllogisms used for persuasion[1]. This is our common thread in the Discipline:
how to effectively persuade
interlocutors of our positions. It is
not a matter of describing our data with accuracy, but it is also not the case
to disband accuracy in entirety either; unlike the sciences, the humanities
must persuasively present the utility and worth of research.
I
would like to combine Roland Barthes’ reading of the enthymeme within S/Z and The Semiotic Challenge to exemplify the enthymeme’s use and then
extrapolate it as a device. Barthes’ S/Z ordinates how the enthymeme
functions in a literary text, Balzac’s Sarrasine,
by showing how the enthymeme is an incomplete, deductive, or probable
syllogism: “La Zambinella is frightened by a popping cork, thus La Zambinella
is timid” (S/Z 148). What Barthes highlights is the movement
between the two propositions: how does one deduce the missing major premise
through association?
As
for the major premise, it derives from the narcissistic zone (woman is
adorable), the psychological zone (woman is timid), the aesthetic zone (woman
is beautiful); what establishes this major premise is, in conformity with the
definition of enthymeme, not a scientific truth, but “common knowledge,” an endoxa.
Thus the snares Sarrasine sets for himself are based on the most social
discourse. (S/Z 148)
The enthymeme is the rhetorical syllogism of public
knowledge par excellence as it
operates with endoxal knowledge—existing
public knowledge that circulates freely through various zones and social
registers. Within The Semiotic Challenge, Barthes spends more time on the enthymeme
by tracing its use through Aristotelian and Quintilian formations. For Aristotle and his followers, the
enthymeme is a syllogism of probability, not based on the “true and immediate,”
which is to say that it moves “from the probable, i.e., starting from what the public thinks” (SC 57). In opposition to
scientific abstract reasoning for analysis, the enthymeme is public reasoning,
capable of being deployed by anyone.
The enthymeme’s origination in the social sphere and correspondence to
probability and presentation “affords persuasion, not demonstration; for
Aristotle, the enthymeme is sufficiently defined by the probable character of its premises” (SC 58). The example from S/Z demonstrates an adherence to
probability of social knowledge; to solve the interval between the two
propositions, an outside social knowledge (endoxa)
must be called upon to discover the major premise.
The
enthymeme carries a pedagogical residue towards what Barthes terms the
“journey” of the syllogism: “the enthymeme is not a syllogism truncated by
defect or corruption, but because the listener must be granted the pleasure of
contributing to the construction of the argument; it is something like
completing a given pattern or grid” (SC 60). Rather than dealing with the pleasure of
following a direct argument, Barthes locates a pleasure in incomplete reasoning
that values a “surplus of thought over language” (SC 60). Barthes’
terminology hints at notions of interactivity, addition, and process. The enthymeme’s journey is a to and fro
motion, always a movement forward by juxtaposing propositions or utterances,
and then a backward motion of surplus that completes the interval after all of
the data is provided. We confront a
modified grammar that leaps between points exceeding linear expectations. For instance, the logic permits subtraction
of the verb or the suppression of the subject.
Conclusions suspend all security towards completion by relying on
probability and interaction.
The
enthymeme, however, is open to corruption in terms of manipulation; advertising
is the most acute model. The inference
of the excised premise creates an interval of interpretation, which may be
mutated, like Barthes’ example of La Zambinella. As the enthymeme relies on public knowledge, it affords the
opportunity to exploit the stereotypes of the social discourse and thereby
continue the redundancy. What we are
seeking is a method of engaging the enthymeme in an academic discourse where
the excised premise is also simultaneously given on the surface.
How do we use the logic of the enthymeme with new
media to establish a writing method that simultaneously deploys the logic of
the enthymeme—withholding of information and inducing the respondent to create
a surplus of knowledge—but that also exposes the excised premise on the surface
for its artificiality?
Perhaps we may pose this question in terms of a
collage: when composing a collage, we have all the “pieces” available for
viewing—the pieces are themselves images (not essentially pictographic)—which
causes an interval of interpretation to occur by completing the pattern and
grid. In short, we are seeking a theory
of the enthymeme that works in conjunction with the methods of collage and
montage; the collage simultaneously exposes and withholds, like an ideogram
presenting an image without description.
The idea moves from how to describe
the information to how to present the
information. A shift in rhetorical
strategies is required as the emphasis switches from how to persuade directly
to an indirect method.
If we winnow out the search further, figuring a
methodology for incorporating the techniques of collage and montage stem from
arguments decades old. Gregory L.
Ulmer’s 1983 essay “The Object of Post-Criticism” poses a similar question,
with the underpinning of Barthes, by asking our essential question: Will the
collage/montage revolution in representation be admitted into the academic
essay, into the discourse of knowledge, replacing the “realist” criticism based
on the notions of “truth” as correspondence to or correct reproduction of a
referent object of study? (86) After
two decades, the Discipline is yet to make up its mind. We may situate our thought temporally; like
Barthes, Ulmer’s question seems radical at the time due to the current
apparatus present in the Discipline, mainly literate tools (Olson’s typewriter
and now a word processor). Over twenty
years later, the question seems as if it must be addressed since our entire
apparatus is undergoing sweeping changes with the introduction of computers; we
are now operating with Ulmer’s neologism “electracy.” The question is no longer a radical question, but a mandatory one.
Collage and Montage Aesthetic
The media theorist who develops collage and montage
as the foundations of computing is Lev Manovich. Before becoming entrenched in how Manovich aligns the avant-garde
aesthetic and new media, we need to explicate the foundations of collage and
montage with the avant-garde. Peter
Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde[2]
pays particular attention to the idea that as montage and photomontage develop,
cubism parallels but translates the technical device into an artistic device
with collage: “A theory of the
avant-garde must begin with the concept of montage that is suggested by the
early cubist collages. What
distinguishes them from the techniques of composition developed since the
Renaissance is the insertion of reality fragments into the painting, i.e., the
insertion of material that has been left unchanged by the artist.” (Bürger 77)[3] If we follow Bürger’s example of a
hermeneutic circle, organic composition is constructed in accordance with the
syntagmatic pattern where the parts and whole achieve a dialectical unity. In this classic writing mode, the part and
whole may only be understood through one another. In inorganic composition, “The parts ‘emancipate’ themselves from
a superordinate whole; they are no longer its essential elements” (Bürger
80). Turning to Breton’s automatic
texts as an example, the circular flow is interrupted as there need not be a
completed proposition. “In an automatic
text that strings images together, some could be missing, yet the text would
not be significantly affected…What is decisive are not the events in their
distinctiveness but the construction principle that underlies the sequence of
events” (Bürger 80). A new principle
logic is formed with dyadic consequences; the process of constructing outweighs
the final product—a disruption in means-ends rationality—and thought moves to a
modality of inference by causing a leap between incongruent pieces.
The
avant-garde forces collage into extension and modifies its simplistic
attributes. The logic of collage
provides a general attitude towards the language function of the piece.
To speculate beyond Bürger, collage establishes its own logic of
homonymy by incessantly creating puns.
To tear the piece and insert it into a new context is to simultaneously
establish a pun. When Robert
Rauschenberg includes a photograph of John F. Kennedy into a Combine, it should
be noted that the image exists in both contexts; the image becomes stratified
and layered, which causes several signifieds to be triggered
simultaneously. Tearing the piece, even
if the avant-gardist attempts to “kill” the material, is not an act of simple
transposition or translation; residues and traces of prior meanings may not be
eclipsed. This movement of carrying
meanings into various contexts, or to move the piece from situation to
situation, creates the enigma that inference is called on to solve. This act is not the creation of additional
meanings, like adding further associations, but displaces the supposedly fixed
meaning the piece is in initially—a thought process of decomposition,
disassociation, or diffusion. To
compose is to decompose, to effectuate a multiplicity.
The avant-garde becomes marked by a tendency towards
decomposition rather than composition.
Image and representation become disrupted with the invention of
photography and the incorporation of photographs into the work of art. When Kasimir Malevich places a photograph of
the Mona Lisa into his collage Composition with Mona, there is an
immediate disruption in how imaging functions within the visual arts. As Bürger says, “because the advent of
photography makes possible the precise mechanical reproduction of reality, the
mimetic function of the fine arts withers” (32). The avant-garde does not divorce the developing technological
condition from artistic production, but rather mimes its intrusion into art;
technology turns from being an independent variable to a dependent
variable. Like Malevich’s title, the avant-garde
works with media.
Montage
and collage cause an interval to form in interpretation, to leap between social
contexts. There is something outside
the given, something that must be inferred.
We may say that organic composition relies on a certain kind of
syllogistic logic, like categorical and conditional syllogisms; composition and
reception are linear and direct. But
with inorganic composition, we confront a leap in thought as fragments are
strewn together. If we remain within
syllogistic logic, we may say that the avant-garde moves to a truncated or
incomplete syllogism, or the enthymeme (superlinear and indirect). For Bürger, the avant-garde work remains
incomplete: “one can see that although they allow one to discover a principle
construction, they do not show a synthesis, in the sense of a unity of meaning”
(Bürger 79). For example, Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? assembles
marble cubes, a thermometer, and a cuttlebone inside an old rectangular
birdcage. While not a montage or photomontage,
the assembling of disparate ready-mades simultaneously abides by a
montage-logic: “weight (heavy marble), promised sweetness (fake sugar cubes),
missing warmth (thermometer), poetry (birdsong), arrested flight (cuttlebone
and birdcage) and art (Cubism, and also the use of marble)” accentuates the
flippant title of the work; “why not do something like sneezing, that cathartic
reaction that grows from a tickle to a climatic explosion leaving only traces
behind” (Duchamp 7-8)? More succinctly, classicist composition
abides by continuity while avant-garde composition abides by contiguity. Duchamp relies on endoxal knowledge to carry out his argument against art as an
essentialized concept by establishing a new congruency with supposedly
incongruent found objects.
The avant-garde work of art hinges on the idea of an
interval as in allegory, “because it permits one to separate those aspects that
relate to production and to aesthetic effect at the analytical level and yet to
conceive of them as a unity” (70). The
work considers itself in terms of artificiality. If artificial material is incorporated into the work, “it is just
that, material.” For the avant-garde,
the “activity initially consists in nothing other than in killing the ‘life’ of
the material, that is, in tearing it out of its functional context that gives
it meaning” (Bürger 70). There is a
general understanding of how the materials portray different meanings: Picasso
and Braque use any materials to renovate art, the Russian avant-garde sought
mass-produced materials to reflect the new political order, and the Dadaists
exercise photomontage as a means of protest.
Every object always already has a circulating meaning that may be
transferred into other contexts—no object is virginal.
Bürger references Walter Benjamin’s theory of
allegory in relation to collage. The
extraction of this concept assists Bürger’s notion of collage as a break in
meanings, an interruption in anticipated intervals, and a cessation of organic
forms. If we begin to think of the
organic (classicist) composition and inorganic (avant-garde) composition in
terms of writing methods, we may posit that the inorganic “style” relies on
reconnecting fragments into either an incomplete composition or an overloaded
composition where the meanings overlap one another and exceed any organicism.[4] Material for the avant-garde exists as an
“empty sign, to which only they can impart significance” by tearing it out of a
totality and turning it into a fragment (70). [5] Bürger’s language is problematic if read as
a strategy to nullify meaning instead of as a way to nullify notions of fixed
meanings. Meaning is an artificial
socially and culturally inscribed function.
The sign becomes more like a modular unit with the ability to be removed
from one location only to be included in another.
Bürger’s theories regarding the avant-garde highlight
how we approach new media. The
enthymematic logic alters how we normatively approach Aristotelian logic. When the piece is removed from one context and
placed in another, the enthymeme arises from our common endoxal knowledge to re-situate the meanings together. This method of juxtaposition becomes like
Barthes’ example in Sarrasine of a
popping cork and a timid woman. How we
deduce the meaning behind the juxtaposition depends on a level of common social
knowledge. Now we must consider how
collage and montage function with enthymematic logic in new media.
Aesthetic to
Materialization
Manovich assists in addressing how we move from vanguard
aesthetics to new media, or rather, how we recognize vanguard techniques in new
media. His article “Avant-Garde as
Software” allows initial formulations regarding how vanguard aesthetics became
the foundations of new media: “The
techniques introduced by modernist avant-garde turn out to be sufficiently
effective to last for the rest of the century. Mass visual culture only pushes
further what was already invented, “intensifying” particular techniques and
mixing them together in new combinations.” (“AGS” 1)
This initial difference between the avant-garde and
what Manovich terms in relation to new media, the “new media avant-garde,”
hinges on the idea of inventing new methods of accessing information; the
historical and neo-avant-garde established multifarious techniques suitable to
last through the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
twenty-first century. To modify and
collapse some of Manovich’s terms together, and to avoid terms like “new-neo,”
I will refer to the avant-garde in relation to new media as “meta-avant-garde.” [6]
The same techniques developed by the avant-garde Left
at the beginning of the twentieth century—montage, collage, photomontage, “cut
and paste,” etc.—do not alter at a foundational level; instead, their uses intensify
in degree: “In short, as far as the cultural languages are concerned, new media
is still old media” (“AGS” 2).
Accordingly, if we view the avant-garde as a movement that made
composing a polyblend of available styles, then these styles and techniques are
also intensified so as to allow for more combinations. To compose a collage, montage, or assemblage
using avant-garde methods of “cut and paste” changes radically with
human-computer interface (HCI)[7].
What Manovich assists in relaying with precision is
that the avant-garde rationale is carried into new media by integrating a vast
amount of varying writing methods into one machine; we may now compose with all
artistic dimensions at once, from the Renaissance to the cinema. It is not that the avant-garde intended to
invent the foundations of new media, but rather the logic and techniques
created by them become the most equipped devices and tools to create an
unintentional rhetoric for new media.
As Manovich highlights with his cinematic analogy in The Language of New Media, Dziga
Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera functioned
as a significant signpost for future writing systems, from the socially
embedded kino-eye to a visualization of not only the foreground of the
cinematic process (raw materials, filming-in-process, reception, etc.), but the
background (how film anticipates the database with editing, nonlinear editing,
and compositing).
Manovich
relays directly that what had been the foreground in technical procedures and
information processing—the vanguard aesthetic—now becomes meshed with the
background of computing on a single surface: “The techniques invented by the
1920s Left artists became embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of
computer software. In short, the avant-garde vision became materialized in a
computer” (“AGS” 3). The avant-garde’s
foreground becomes the background of computing. In terms of institutional practices, this acts as a metaphor for
writing conventions; the avant-garde has become the background, their artistic
devices turn into technical achievements, and “cut and paste” becomes a
normative function for programs like MS Word.
We are not seeking methods to improve writing in terms of efficiency,
but how an efficient machine permits complex writing.
We
are dealing with an inverse relationship that Manovich will assist in
addressing and aid in theorizing how to bring the vanguard aesthetic to the
surface, how to intensify and translate Bürger’s vanguard aesthetics in terms
of new media, and how to allow both the vanguard techniques and rationale to be naturalized in
writing. For example, “the avant-garde
strategy of collage reemerged as a ‘cut and paste’ command, the most basic
operation one can perform on any computer data,” but it is problematic to
reduce “cut and paste” to a basic command for composing a classicist’s
work. The tools inherent to HCI
inaugurate new ways to access and organize any information that includes a
change in apparatus and social methodologies.
In short, I wish to explicate Manovich’s arguments that the
avant-garde’s techniques are materialized in HCI and does not embed the
vanguard aesthetic into the background; HCI promotes a radical potential to
maintain vanguard aesthetics as a writing methodology and procedural set in the
foreground of institutional and academic writing—how to continue the
intensification inherent to the avant-garde.
If the avant-garde establish the basic commands for computing, then they
also continue to command our attention to realize that inventive writing methods
may continue to flourish.
The
current task, as Manovich says, “is to create an efficient structure and tools
for working with arbitrary information, information which is always changing
and always grows” (“AGS” 6). The
avant-garde task of tearing the piece from its context and thereby denouncing
the unity of the particular and universal is advanced through the logic of
hyperlinking: “Hyperlinking separates
data from its structure. This makes creation and distribution of messages
extremely efficient: the same data can be endlessly assembled in new
structures; parts of a single document can exist in physically distinct
locations (i.e., a document has a distributed representation).” (“AGS” 4) Hyperlinking, as a logic, allows
simultaneously disparate manifestations of data establishing a continuous
assemblage of decomposition. The
instinctive logic behind hyperlinking permits not only variation but also
permits varying reception and recycling.
One HTML statement, image, java script, media object, etc. may be
accessed—its source viewed and copied—without a terminal stopping point, a
writing procedure of continuous variation.
Hyperlinking accentuates the vanguard interval with a web of intervals;
pieces simultaneously transform and relocate.
We
now have a single plane that obfuscates any centralization. HCI simultaneously establishes window frames
with multiple “pages” and “windows.”
Classic writing tools like the “page” maintain their original function,
but also add new functions; the page as a discursive spacing allows for
multiple windows and various objects to be dealt with on a single surface—a
solidifying of background and foreground.
Manovich associates these attributes with montage: “In window interface,
the two opposites—temporal montage and montage within the shot—finally come
together” (“AGS” 5). The progression of
the avant-garde into the meta-avant-garde creates this potential of
simultaneity; the combining of both montage effects on a single surface exceeds
prior methods and creates new writing potentials; prior avant-garde techniques
overlay and overlap in ways impossible before HCI[8]. The notion of “new” itself, however, must be
placed in suspension. One of Manovich’s
most intriguing arguments comes across in a postmodern context. The meta-avant-gardist is similar to
previous avant-gardists by not being concerned with “new” in a sense of
“original”: “The new avant-garde is no
longer concerned with seeing or representing the world in new ways but rather
with accessing and using in new ways previously accumulated media. In this
respect new media is post-media or meta-media, as it uses old media as its
primary material.” (“AGS” 10) The new
in this sense acts as a trope for re-accessing and re-developing old media;
this is the method for how the avant-garde became embedded in computing. Man Ray’s assemblages and Bruce Conner’s wax
sculptures[9]—created
to be destroyed so as to allow a new object to take its place—do not need to
destroy their objects; the logic of hypermedia solicits a constant reshuffling
of information and points of entry into varying data. The meta-avant-garde writing procedures resemble Duchamp’s film Anemic cinéma: endless revolutions of
textual rhythms and images circling in successive punning—only the meta-avant-garde
is without a terminal stopping point.
If
we stay with Duchamp as an example, his notion of found objects and Ready-Mades
receive increased significance in new media:“In computer culture a media object
is typically assembled from ready-made elements such as icons, textures, video
clips, 3-D models, complete animation sequences, ready-to-use virtual
characters, chunks of Javascript code, Director Lingo scripts, etc. “(“AGS”
4) Like a classicist composition process—referencing
grammar books, handbooks, prior argumentative structures—a meta-avant-garde
composition has similar reference points through help files, instruction
manuals, etc. New media may be composed
accurately with incomplete comprehension, like a Ready-Made composition that
does not require prior artistic skills; java scripts, images, text documents,
HTML code, may be “cut and pasted” into various applications due to all media
being modular.
Manovich
credits the 1920s Left avant-garde for creating the forms to represent and see
the world in new ways, but also highlights that meta-avant-gardists are
concerned with new ways to rework the codified forms and manipulate information
with the techniques of “hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining,
image processing, visualization, simulation” (“AGS” 10). Meta-avant-garde techniques are “media access,
generation, manipulation and analysis. Forms remain the same, but how these forms can be
used changes radically” (“AGS” 11). For
formulations on how the techniques become embedded into software, another of
Manovich’s articles is of use. “New
Media from Borges to HTML” is straightforward in approaching who the
meta-avant-gardists are and what “works” they create. Manovich locates various computer scientists, engineers, and
software developers as the greatest artists of the twentieth century (from
J.C.R. Licklider to Tim Berners-Lee).
The current great avant-garde works are Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut
Pro: “The greatest avant-garde film is
software such as Final Cut Pro or After Effects which contains the
possibilities of combining together thousands of separate tracks into a single
movie, as well as setting various relationships between all these different
tracks—and it thus it develops the avant-garde idea of a film as an abstract
visual score to its logical end, and beyond.” (“NM” 15)
My interest in this statement is what leads Manovich
to such a claim. No longer are we
concerned with the creation of artworks or manifestos, now the focus turns to
development, application, and execution.
We find in these thinkers and computicians a full and complex
understanding of prior avant-garde methods as
techniques. The logic of new media
and that of the art world clash; a significant break occurs in terms of how
writing is produced and presented. New
media installations and net.art projects undercut normative avenues of
distribution; art assumes proper channels of distribution, a correct order and
authorial control over a one-of-a-kind work of art, and viewed in proper
locations like galleries, museums, and auctions (“NM” 14). New media “privileges the existence of
potentially numerous copies; infinitely many different states of the same work;
author-user symbiosis (the user can change the work through interactivity); the
collective; collaborative authorship; and network distribution (which bypasses
the art system distribution channels)” (“NM” 14). To correlate this statement with the present status of academic
publishing, composing and publishing with new media acts with subversive potential;
distribution changes radically along with publishing, but perhaps more
importantly, how one composes a piece to be published[10].
If
we begin rethinking at this base level, not only are methods of distribution and
composition shifting, but also how writing interacts with the world. The logic of new media presents a
significant cultural shift in methods and techniques of representation. Like previous avant-garde movements, we
level traditions and engage several cultural practices simultaneously (working
with the radically disparate)—alphabetic, phonologic, pictographic, cinematic,
hieroglyphic, rebus writing, etc. The
metaphor of HCI is only beginning to be translated into cultural logic. The logic of montage, collage, and
enthymematic inference becomes naturalized in image-orientated graphical user
interfaces. Notions of fixity and
concreteness with regard to information and distribution are being unmoored;
the personal and social machines act as ongoing assemblages, open-ended and in
perpetual interchange.
Manovich relays how these cultural changes
occurred. He demonstrates that the late
twentieth century went through radical changes like that of the avant-garde at
the beginning of the century:“In the last few decades of the twentieth century,
modern computing and network technology materialized certain key projects of
modern art developed approximately at the same time. In the process of this materialization, the technologies overtook
art…As a result these technologies have become the greatest art works of
today.” (“NM” 15) These postulations
assist in formulating a trajectory in terms of composing; it is not the
artistic dimension of the avant-garde that changes our interaction with writing
(although, indeed, these are not laid to waste either), but rather it is the
logic and techniques that have become the most pervasive and
instructional.
The
difference between prior avant-garde movements and the meta-avant-garde is,
Manovich says, an issue of centralization: “Of course some artists already
began to react to the emerging media environment by making collages and
photo-montages consisting of newspaper clippings, existing photographs, pieces
of posters, and so on; yet these practices of manipulating existing media were
not yet central.” (“NM” 22). These
techniques become materialized in computing, embedded by
meta-avant-gardists. The social
dimension of these techniques is currently defining operating procedures for
individual and collective knowledge production, communication, and
expression. As Duchamp’s Ready-Mades
prescribe, I am interested in how to infuse these operations into composing
within the institution; how to write collaboratively, collectively, with images
and found cultural objects, and within a networked environment that permits an
assemblage to continue varying with immense speed.
If
it is possible to group Manovich’s various themes into an overarching concept,
we must return to his focus upon postmodernism. This notion arises repeatedly by underpinning the logic of new
media with re-thinking and re-working past cultural objects, media, and
technologies. The postmodern
“accumulation of huge media assets and the arrival of new electronic and digital
tools which made it very easy to access and re-work these assets” serves as a
relay for my current argument (“NM” 23).
Even if viewed as a metaphor, I would like to stress notions of how new
media acts so as to simultaneously re-think how we interact with past cultural
forms and techniques (especially Aristotelian enthymematic arguments), while
also proposing vast room for invention of new forms. We have the techniques, technology, and logic to theorize a
method for composing “works” that re-situate and intensify past writing
techniques; ways to create assemblages that desire variation and inference; and
methods for developing writing collaboratively and collectively. These establish the operating practices,
rhetoric, and logic for a meta-avant-gardist using a digital machine with an
intensified “cut and paste” function.
To formalize these methods, Deleuze and Guattari provide a theory of
language and writing essential to new media and enthymematic writing.
Enthymeme
as Method
Turning to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is a
movement to locate an existing theory of language and writing that corresponds
to an avant-garde rationale. We may
locate theories that not only have the characteristics of language being a
collage, but our selves being an inorganic composition that resembles a collage. These theories assist in understanding what
it means for a person to write, what this act entails, and what potential
results will follow from such an act.
We may think of this as a method to unpack Bürger and Manovich by posing
a question: how do we continue writing with enthymematic logic and further
modify the inherent strategies of probability, suppression, and persuasion?
I would like to take an indirect course and map out
an overarching notion of collage. If we
begin with Henri Bergson, we find a corpus of thought towards disassociation
and decomposition. Bodies[11]
begin to be placed in extension: memory is located in matter, which is to say
that bodies begin to function through inorganic diffusion. In Matter
and Memory we find Deleuze’s inclinations towards bodies without organs and
the self-as-collage: “Itself an image,
the body cannot store up images, since it forms a part of the images, and this
is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localize the past or even
present perceptions in the brain: they are not in it; it is the brain that is
in them.” (MM 151) Bergson’s thought leads to decentralization,
a piecemeal composition where memory and perception become external. In Deleuze’s theory of the cinema we find
Bergsonian principles that intensify the collage effect of a body’s inorganic
makeup. Deleuze’s statements on
experimental cinema in Cinema 2 have
an underpinning of collage logic.
Deleuze’s cinema requests “give me a body” and “give me a brain,” which
is to say that we are dealing with a cinema-body symbiosis: “Body or brain is
what the cinema demands to be given to it, what it gives itself, what it
invents itself” (204). Bergsonian
externalization becomes a Deleuzian cinematic philosophy—the brain is the screen, the camera is the eye.
I
say the preceding remarks not to imply that collage is the overarching thread for Deleuze, and thereby reduce his thought
to a concept, but only to highlight
its existence in a larger scope before focusing narrowly. Like the logic of decomposition being at the
base of collage, Deleuze seems to incorporate Bergson’s notions of
decomposition and disassociation to a large extent in establishing successive
inorganic theories[12]. Even if we turn briefly to Deluze’s second Cinema book, we find notions of
decomposition again: “The
movement-image does not reproduce a world, but constitutes an autonomous world,
made up of breaks and disproportion, deprived of all its centres, addressing
itself as such to a viewer who is in himself no longer centre of his own
perception. The percipiens and the percipi
have lost their points of gravity.” (Cinema
2 36-7)
We should not forget that Deleuze’s Cinema books are a taxonomy of signs, a
vast index of how the cinema writes. However, the hybrid body that the cinema
creates is due to a symbiosis between the body and the cinema-machine. We find correlating hybrid bodies in terms
of literature; Proust & Signs
initiates the bodies without organs at the end of the text with a
spider-narrator symbioses: “the web and the spider, the web and the body are
one and the same machine” (182). What
we are interested in are the possibilities of human-computer interface: what
writing may be produced with a machine that incorporates the rationale,
rhetoric, and logic of collage and montage?
Deleuze
provides an example with montage in Cinema
1. The enthymeme operates within
the action-image
(Action–Situation–Action'). Following
the taxonomical approach to the regime of signs for the cinema, Deleuze labels
the action-image with Peirce’s index. Peirce’s example of the index acts as a
pragmatic example of the enthymeme: “for example, a piece of mold with a
bullet-hole in it as a sign for a shot; for without the shot there would have
been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to
attribute it to a shot or not”[13]
(“Logic” 10). Deleuze carries the
enthymematic index to situate montage-as-indirection: “The situation is thus
deduced from the action, by immediate inference, or by relatively complex
reasoning. Since the situation is not
given for itself, the index here is an index of lack; it implies a gap in the
narrative” (Cinema 1 160). Deleuze’s abbreviation for the shot sequence
is misleading if the prior passages are not accounted for. It is not that the camera-eye shows us ASA',
but instead we move immediately from A to A' without the situation being framed
directly.
The
importance of the action-image as an example is that Deleuze is already
searching for methods to write indirectly.
The importance of the cinema, especially the action-image (ASA'
montage), is that the situation (S) is a common horizon of social knowledge (endoxa). Deleuze uses the example of the cinematic Western as the great
example of the situation as interval (S) when two opposing gazes relay a
complete scene of tension and opposition.
The cinema begins to argue indirectly, which is to say that we have a
logic of suppression. We are
approaching what Barthes explains as a type of enthymeme that is Quintilian,
made predominant in the Middle Ages.
The value of this type of argument is that it is “a perfect syllogism in
the mind, but imperfect in expression; in short, it is an accident of language,
a deviation” (SC 58). We receive on the screen AA', but we
comprehend the perfected syllogism ASA' mentally without forestalling the
argument. But it will take combining
Manovich, Deleuze and Guattari together to map out how the enthymeme becomes
demonstrative in new media.
If we recall that Manovich posits author-user
symbiosis as a main logic of new media, then we have an entry point into A Thousand Plateaus:“Even technology
makes the mistake of considering tools in isolation: tools exist only in
relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them
possible. The stirrup entails a new
man-horse symbiosis that at the same time entails new weapons and
instruments. Tools are inseparable from
symbioses or amalgamations defining a Nature-Society machinic assemblage.” (90) Deleuze and Guattari effectuate a new way to
think about “machines” and “assemblages” by providing an abstract theory of
language that solicits a type of writing that is relevant to a person using a
digital tool with a “cut and paste” function.
Like the avant-garde techniques that became embedded in the logic and
foundational metaphors of new media, Deleuze and Guattari begin to theorize
about a method of composing with a language-machine that escapes fixity and
order through a variable state of decomposition.
Deleuze and Guattari view language as a constant
assemblage, without fixed limits and solidified zones of signification. In short, because language is an assemblage
it goes through all prior flows simultaneously (semiotic, material, and
social). Within the plateau “Postulates
on Linguistics” a language model is put forth, consisting of the order-word,
assemblage, and indirect discourse. How
these three interact serve as our rhetoric and logic for a
meta-avant-gardist. The order-word
replaces a speech act in qualified degrees: the term acts as a pun that plays
on all flows simultaneously. The
order-word signifies direction in language, orders as commands, and order as a
type of organization. Already we are
dealing with a language function outside of normative comprehension;
order-words are marked by redundancy, not by rules: “Rather, it is a relation
of redundancy. The order-word itself is the redundancy of
the act and the statement. Newspapers,
news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain,
expect, etc.” (ATP 79).
In an Aristotelian sense, this redundancy regulates
the success rate of the enthymeme. How
often a certain image, the Mona Lisa
for example, circulates corresponds to the effectiveness of the argument. To argue in this way has a two-fold
consequence: it is highly effective and this may be exemplified through
advertising and film (and the entire commodity-oriented Entertainment
discourse). We may associate this to
the view of an enthymeme with a diminished logic as in advertising. If we adapt our level of comprehension to
the level of the public, common sense, or normative opinion, the success of the
argument is not only more likely, but more persuasive (repetition on par with
persuasion). But we have the other side
of the order-word, so to speak, which allows us to break with redundancy. This is what the avant-garde, through all
periods (and what the meta-avant-gardist maintains the potential for),
demonstrates with extreme precision; we may disrupt
the redundancy and move in the other direction. We may raise the disparate nature to a higher degree and rip the
piece from its normative role. We may
construct enthymemes that expose the inherent stereotypes of a social
body. Duchamp and the Dadaists become
our forerunning leaders in this movement: they tear objects from their
prescribed social roles and use them as an attack on a knowledge system, Art
for example.
The
“sentence” is an example of how the order-word, through redundant usage,
becomes established. The sentence
becomes a pun: to follow a sentence in a linear order, as it orders the reader
to do, is a death sentence. The
sentence becomes a wounding projectile through redundancy. Avoiding the death sentence of redundancy
becomes a main goal, and this becomes the exercises of the avant-garde. To decompose and kill meaning is precisely
to reject the structured order of expectations in visual writing. To tear the piece and disassociate acts as
methods to reassemble the order-word in different combinations. The key to this method is to cause the
direction of language to turn indirect, to force language to change vectors,
take off on a “witch’s line,” skewing into unterritorialized zones, to force a
displacement and make language bear the weight of what it is not.
As Deleuze and
Guattari say, the order-word is dyadic and if we are to write with the logic of
the order-word, we must write with both of its functions: “But the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected:
it is like a warning cry or a message to flee.
It would be oversimplifying to say that flight is a reaction against the
order-word; rather, it is included in it, as its other face in a complex
assemblage, its other component” (ATP 106). Part of the order-word’s intrinsic makeup is
the pass-word, an element within the order-word that allows an element of
passage from the given to the non-given:
“There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas
order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this
two-fold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the other—to transform the
compositions of order into components of passage.” (ATP 110)
We may not separate the order-word from the
pass-word; their logic promotes a certain homonymy. By always including at least a double-function and a
double-articulation within the order-word, there is an underlying stress on
indirection, a way to disorganize the order-word and de-limit the
stoppages. The task becomes to notice
and operate with both meanings, to recognize the disorder of the order-word and
to stratify its meanings. Aligning the
order-word and the avant-garde piece produces similar logical functions. To remove the piece from a totality allows
its pass-word to be exposed and its meaning to escape fixed and delimited
zones. The enthymematic persuasive
writing we are seeking operates with the pass-word. We may say that this is what the avant-garde demonstrates
repeatedly: to recognize the repetition of certain cultural forms, and to place
those repetitions against expectations, to suppress the expected, and to make
recipients responsible for what they allow to be repeated socially. Discourses like advertising suppress the unexpected
so as to induce a standard repertoire of redundant images.
The order-word
becomes at all moments a mediated discourse.
Like the logic of montage and collage, a situational context always
exists, which is to say there is always a type of interference that functions
outside of the given in language. To
locate this surplus situation and context, Deleuze and Guattari cite Bakhtin:
As
Volosinov [Bakhtin] says, as long as linguistics extracts constants, it is
incapable of helping us understand how a single word can be a complete
enunciation; there must be “an extra something” that “remains outside of the
scope of the entire set of linguistic categories and definitions,” even though
it is still entirely within the purview of the theory of enunciation or
language. The order-word is precisely
that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation. The instantaneousness of the order-word, its
immediacy, gives it a power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the
transformation is attributed. (ATP
82)
To write with the extra something is the opportunity
collage and montage provide. Displacing
a piece and moving it into another context is to bring the extra something to a
new situation—to effectuate a different meaning with the same piece. New media accelerates the circulation of
pieces.
If
we reference Bakhtin, we may begin to unpack the immensity behind indirect
discourse through his dialogical principle.
Tzvetan Todorov’s Mikhail Bakhtin
highlights that the logic of the dialogical principle is the enthymeme, or as
Voloshinov/Bakhtin says, “The quotidian utterance endowed with signification is
therefore composed of two parts: (1) a realized or actualized verbal part, and
(2) an implied part. That is why an
utterance can be compared to an ‘enthymeme’” (41). Underneath the quotidian utterance (order-word), we have an
interval of inference among situational contexts. Like the Deleuzian action-image, the situation is the index that
deduction must be engaged to solve.
This is a modular approach to language.
The order-word or piece is an empty sign without any permanence. Transposing the piece into a new context via
“cut and paste” is to effectuate and shape a new meaning.
Deleuze’s
example of the action-image develops a method to write pragmatically but with
vastly different attributes than a classicist direct composition. The action-image can be paralleled to the
structure of an enthymeme: Action (premise 1) à a present but not articulated Situation (premise 2) à Action' (conclusion). As Deleuze stated earlier, it is the case that we receive the
withheld situation after both action
shots (we see the gazes and then deduce the conflict). Grammar and language bend and curve: to
proceed forwards, but then backwards to complete the sentence—the means-end
rationality of subject and predicate are removed. This results in a sufficient break to the syntactical and
grammatical sentence as we have a method to place obligatory demands in
variation: “For the question was not
how to elude the order-word, but how to elude the death sentence it envelops,
how to develop its power of escape, how to prevent escape from veering into the
imaginary or falling into a black hole, how to maintain or draw out the
revolutionary potentiality of the order-word.” (ATP 110)
To write with the
enthymeme is to engage the logic of hypermedia. The sentence and syntax becomes superlinear, by leaving gaps and
indexes of information to be retrieved: “This implies superlinearity, in other
words, a plane whose elements no longer have a fixed linear order: the rhizome
model” (ATP 92). Diagramming a sentence would no longer be
like tracing out a crystalline structure, for the hypersentence is more
amorphous and mutable. Language is
without a grammar; language(s) have
grammar(s).
To argue with the enthymeme is to argue with all the
previous social and public meanings brought with a particular object. New media facilitates this method with the
vastest cultural archive to date: the internet. To compose with a computer is the ability to compose a collage,
to effectuate new meanings for already circulating objects. When Duchamp places his Fountain in an art exhibition, he counts on the public to
understand and retain their normative meanings towards the objects (urinal and
the institution). Duchamp makes both
objects take a new responsibility, to show their linkage on the surface, to
make both bear the weight of artificiality.
Engaging the enthymeme is to follow the avant-garde
in terms of being at the cutting edge of social formations. If we reference Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas
of tensors—the cutting edge of the assemblage whose side faces
unterritorialized zones—opportunities for variation underscore the
enthymeme. It is not a process of
association, but of decomposition and disassociation by way of subtracting and
tearing a piece from a totality. As
Deleuze and Guattari say, the process is a double movement: “Subtract and place
in variation, remove and place in variation: a single operation” (ATP 104). Like the enthymeme, this method of variation operates by an
equation of (n – 1). To place in variation with tensors is a
method of cutting that “assures the variation of the variable by subtracting in
each instance the value of the constant (n
– 1)” (ATP 99). In comparison with the enthymeme, n acts as the redundant socially
inscribed meaning where the interval is initiated by suppression or
truncation. We may conclude that the
respondent, operating on the level of endoxal
knowledge, completes the equation with (n
+ 1) by supplementing the incomplete logical equation with a shared horizon
of social knowledge. Throughout various
interlocutions or interactions, n remains
a variable without constancy as it slides along the intersections of common
social knowledge. The variable n is without fixed and demarcated social
registers because each participant stratifies the meaning at a different
level. Perhaps more succinctly, the
variable n ensures that redundancy
never becomes a constant by always positioning the assemblage in constant
variation as it continues to carve, continues becoming, even as it attempts to
reach a plateau.
Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking corresponds closely
to an avant-garde approach to language.
They presuppose a complete inversion of normative language models. For example, when the avant-garde tears the
piece from its totality, we may speculate that they are placing the piece back
into its habitat of indirect discourse.
In this way, as Deleuze and Guattari say, it is no longer about opposing
constant and variable, but that to make something a constant is a treatment of
the variable (ATP 103). To make language constant requires more
effort than to make it vary. To make an
image redundant is much more difficult than to break its redundancy.[14] The relationship of the pass-word and
order-word are noteworthy here. The
order, direction, and command of the order-word seem natural only to the extent
that their redundancy parallels. What
Deleuze and Guattari highlight is that breaking with the order-word’s redundancy
is to bring the pass-word out from a dormant status, which also foregrounds a
language system based on variation rather than linear constancy.
There is a Bakhtinian principle at work, or as
Todorov says, “every utterance is also related to previous utterances, thus
creating intertextual (or dialogical)
relations” (48). What we find at work,
and the potentiality of which is brought to the fore with new media, is the
ability to constantly reshuffle and reorganize writing due to the logic of
hyperlinking: “they are not only superlinear and ‘suprasegmental’ elements, in
contrast to linear segmental elements; their very characteristics give them the
power to place all the elements of language in a state of continuous variation”
(ATP 103). There is an opportunity to separate data from its structure, to
chop the links of redundancy into pieces and re-piece them together. We are approaching a language model and a
grammar with variable rules instead of obligatory rules. As Deleuze and Guattari say, it is like a
game that has “not invariable and obligatory rules, but optional rules that
ceaselessly vary with the variation itself, as in a game in which each move
changes the rules” (ATP 100). But to limit the radical inclinations thus
far, it is not the goal to remove prior grammatical structures and language
functions in a supposition towards proclaiming their ineffectiveness. New media does not concern itself with
reducing any language function to degree zero; we are interested in
supplementing and adding on new wings to an institutional structure that has
reached its occupational limit with current methods.
The
method for arguing with the enthymeme is to engage in a social discourse. Aristotle aligned deductive enthymemes with
rhetorical syllogisms, and writing with new media offers a chance to continue
this method. To tear a piece from its
redundant role and paste it into a new context is to force the recipient to
complete the logistical movements. The
enthymeme may be used in academia on par with the effectiveness of advertising,
but with more responsibility. New media
allows the collage to be responsible for what it exposes. It allows one to create a hyperlink, to
separate the data from its structure and expose its origins; the image can be
hyperlinked to pre-established sources.
To compose a new media collage would be to have the opportunity to
provide links to the redundant contexts the piece came from. For example, a collage may be made using
HTML statements, each object taken from an archive like Google.com to
coordinate a new superlinear sentence, with all the information on the screen
at once. How all the varying images,
media objects, etc. combine to form an argument relies on the recipient to turn
the incomplete syllogism on the screen into a perfect syllogism in the mind.
We may demarcate essential features of how the
enthymeme is used in new media: (1) the approach towards enthymematic
persuasive arguments continues the logic initiated by Aristotle to work with
social knowledge; (2) the aim for new media is to disrupt the standard
repertoire of redundancy circulating with cultural objects, to re-access them;
(3) new media performs these tasks by disassociation and decomposing the
established fixity of order-words.
Rather than institutions like advertising where the manipulation relies
on association, new media has the potential to continue the vanguard aesthetic
of disassociation by forcing the individuated object bear its pass-word
characteristics as a multiplicity.
Collage and montage are slow processes that begin
with the accumulation of data that can take exorbitant amounts of time. New media, with inherent algorithms and
modularity, are catalysts to these procedures.
The amount of material on the internet, all of which carries social and
cultural meanings, accelerates the speed and ease of composing an enthymematic
argument. The richness of the process
lies in its social dimensions. The
enthymeme, from Aristotle forwards, marks a way to argue socially. The most acute model for this argumentative
practice is within entertainment and political discourses. We find irresponsible arguments that
manipulate social knowledge and funnel redundancy into a pseudo-transcendental
repetition through “image” circulation (a nationalistic image, or myth-creation). Images become iconic, which is to say that
the social and cultural meanings are immediate. By intersecting the avant-garde and new media, we find an
opportunity to subtract from redundancy and make the enthymematic argument
carry its immense power of persuasion.
Even without a current pragmatic consensus towards academic writing, the
pedagogical value cannot be dismissed; the enthymeme is a thought process of
exposure that alludes to ways of deducing how image repertoires form and become
redundant to the point of normalcy.
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an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, September 2005, ISSN
1552-5112