Showing papers in "Substance in 2011"

Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic Narratives

Abstract: Fast tracks for human emotional responses precede cognitive processes, according to the neuroscientific investigation of emotions such as anger and empathy1 and the psychology of “mind-reading,” via fast, unconscious recognition of facial expressions.2 Even simplified line drawings of facial expressions3 activate the “quick and dirty”4 subcortical bases of emotions that are followed by slightly slower cognitive responses routed through the neocortex. In comics and graphic narratives, illustrations of faces and bodily postures may capitalize on the availability of visual coding for human emotions, eliciting readers’ feelings before they even read the accompanying text.5 Little is known, however, about the relationship between the emotional responses evoked by visual artists’ strategies of anthropomorphizing animal faces or dehumanizing people’s faces and bodies, on the one hand, and the invitations to narrative empathy proffered by graphic storytelling, on the other hand. Drawing on my previous work on empathy vis-à-vis print narratives (see Keen, Empathy and “Strategic Empathizing”), the current essay explores the opportunities and challenges that graphic narratives pose for research in this domain. Specifically, I seek to open a conversation about the impact of emotionally charged sequences of word-image combinations used in the service of what I term ambassadorial strategic empathy. At issue are graphic narratives that reach popular audiences (including teenaged readers) with appeals for recognition and justice and ambitions to form citizens’ sense of responsibility for suffering others. I focus on two case studies that highlight how questions of medium specificity need to be taken into account in research on narrative empathy. J. P. Stassen’s (2000, trans. 2006) Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, a graphic narrative about a boy caught up as an unwilling participant in the Rwandan civil war and genocide, renders dehumanization vividly: the boy turns into an animal in four stark frames of transformation. Brian K. Vaughan’s 2006 Pride of Baghdad (art by Niko Henrichon) employs more traditional anthropomorphism to depict the perspectives of a group of lions escaped from the Baghdad Zoo during the invasion of Iraq. Both narratives employ what I have theorized as ambassadorial strategic empathy

Some Medium-Specific Qualities of Graphic Sequences

Abstract: The role of the chosen medium in the creation and reception of a work has been explored by various disciplines, including aesthetics, communication, and narratology. While some scholars defend a doctrine of medium purity (Greenberg), even arguing that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), others deny the influence of a particular medium, like the structuralist narratologists who consider fabula or story as a mental construct that is completely independent of the medium used. In contrast to these rather extreme positions, and like some other scholars (Herman, Davies, Ryan), I would argue for a position that acknowledges variable degrees of influence of media on the process of telling a story. In other words, though stories told in various media may use a common stock of narrative design principles, they exploit them in different, media-specific ways (Herman 51). In what follows I shall focus on some narrative opportunities and constraints in the medium of comics, as compared to those of other narrative media such as printed texts and cinema. Graphic narratives, a term that in my usage encompasses the comic book, bande dessinee [comic strip], and Japanese manga, constitute a spatio-temporal medium that can combine two channels, a visual and a verbal one. Further, this medium is associated with well known narrative traditions and publication formats, such as American superhero comics, Japanese shojo manga, graphic novels and many others. 1 As a hybrid medium, the graphic narrative shares many features with other media, but uses those features in unique ways; think of drawing styles, the mise en scene in panels, the way verbal and visual elements are combined (e.g., in speech or thought balloons), the breakdown (or “decoupage”) of story elements into distinct panels, and the interaction between individual panels and page layouts. It will not be feasible for me to analyze here all these aspects of comics as a medium for storytelling. Hence I will limit myself to just three aspects of graphic narration: drawing styles, the temporal dimensions of individual panels, and the interpretation of sequences of panels.

Abstraction in Comics

Abstract: The study of narrative in comics (which I will use as a general term covering both mainstream comics and more highbrow graphic novels) has often been a mere copy of the study of narrative in other fields (mainly literature, but sometimes also film). This a priori approach to narrative in comics as a mere instantiation of narrative in general is now under pres- sure. However, the aim of this contribution is not to defend the necessity of a medium-specific analysis of narrative in comics (Groensteen, System; Smolderen), but to make a plea for the enrichment of narrative theory in general by investigating its relevance for a wide range of narrative corpora, and to address questions and methodological issues thereby brought to light. In this article, the quite remarkable corpus of abstract comics will provide the opportunity for such cross-fertilization. I will draw on several examples from this corpus to highlight directions for further inquiry into the structures and uses of abstraction in comics. Abstract, Yes, and Narrative as Well? Since the beginning of the 21st Century a wide range of abstract com- ics have emerged online and even gotten into print (see for instance the "Abstract Comics" blog: http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/ as well as the anthology edited by Andrei Molotiu). The hype about abstract comics has been an occasion to rediscover similar yet much less known material in previous periods. Moreover, the material is not limited to the US or the Anglo-Saxon world, where it flourishes in the shadow of the boom- ing graphic novel industry, but can be observed worldwide—a tendency that perhaps confirms the gradual breakdown of historical differences between the European bande dessinee tradition and American comics and graphic novel production. The concept of abstract comics might seem to challenge the doxa of comics and graphic novel as a basically sequential-and therefore narra- tive-art. However, as suggested by comics connoisseur Douglas Wolk in his article in the New York Times Book Review, prominently displayed on the "Abstract Comics" blog, readers actually rely on their knowledge of the narrative potentialities of the medium to make sense of a genre that challenges many of their expectations:

Realism without Materialism

Abstract: After years of obsession with written texts, continental philosophy has recently raised the colorful banners of materialism and realism. The two terms are often linked by a hyphen or a slash. And yet everyone vaguely senses a difference between them, as can be detected in the more fashionable status currently occupied by materialism than by realism. This article will begin by driving an explicit and (I hope) permanent wedge between the two terms. It will conclude by asserting the minority position, exalting realism at the expense of materialism. Nothing could be more urgent for present-day philosophy, which for two centuries has lost touch with all the specific real and fictional entities that populate the cosmos. My claim is that reality is object-oriented, and that a corresponding shift is needed from the analysis of consciousness and written words towards an ontology of dogs, trees, flames, monuments, societies, ghosts, gods, pirates, coins, and rubies. Despite appearances to the contrary, materialism can only ruin this shift. For it either undermines objects from below, reducing them downward to their material underpinnings, or it overmines them from above, reducing them upward to their appearance for human beings. Both strategies have abundant prestige, but both are disasters, since they strip objects of their autonomy and enslave them to a less worthy principle. To make this case will require some initial precision in how we define realism and materialism. Once this labor is accomplished, the reader will enjoy the spectacle of numerous past and present philosophies collapsing into one of two basic fallacies. What survives this collapse is a promising new standpoint in which the jaded and cynical human observer of recent centuries is dethroned in favor of a landscape riddled with countless mysterious entities. In this way, philosophy regains much of its ancient vigor and innocence. 1. Realism There have been flirtations from time to time with the word “materialism” in continental philosophy. “Realism” has been less lucky. If we consider that the continental tradition arose largely from phenomenology, then the reasons for this become obvious—both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger usually express disdain for the crusty old dispute

Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us

Abstract: Entering into presence with an other is generally submitted to the rules of a world that is presumed to be neutral with respect to each one and to which each one must conform. Communicating with the other would require the neutralization of the singular belonging of each and the adoption of an artificially neutral attitude that cuts us off from our energetic resources. Our natural energy is not yet educated towards a communication with respect for our difference(s). This energy is both left uncultivated and repressed. It remains in a natural state in which only degrees of intensity exist, an intensity that sometimes needs to be released through acts of instinctive domination or submission, unless it is transformed into a neutral energy that cannot stop increasing and thus, it also, necessitates being reduced.

Beyond the Book: François Bon and the Digital Transition

Abstract: In numerous entries on his website Le Tiers livre (tierslivre.net), the French writer Francois Bon insists on the momentous nature of the transformations taking place in the contemporary literary world ("Si la litterature"; "Ceci n'est pas"; "Qu'est-ce qu'un livre numerique"). Bon argues that the advent of the Internet is equal in significance to the print revolution brought by Gutenberg. According to this view, the Web is not just one more medium among others, but in fact operates a number of crucial displacements in our modes of writing and reading and ultimately alters literary and social practices: "Internet est 'transparent', il traverse la totalite des pratiques mais en tant que lie a cette pratique elle-meme, et non pas sa mediatisation" ("Vers un Internet"). It would be a mistake to see these claims as an expression of faith in progress, on the part of an author whose works (from Sortie d'usine in 1982 to Daewoo in 2004) have documented the damage to human com- munities wrought by technological and economic change. In texts posted on Le Tiers livre between 2005 and 2011, Bon acknowledges that we are currently on unstable ground; we do not yet know precisely what new configurations of the literary object will emerge, which developments will shape the material and social field of writing and reading (electronic paper is still unconvincing, new devices and interfaces for reading can- not yet compete with the book format). Nevertheless, in accepting the inevitability of change, Bon expresses a guarded optimism regarding not only the survival of literature, but also the possibility of its renewal: "Le paradoxe d'Internet, c'est d'accepter que le livre ne soit pas le seul destin de l'ecrit, mais, nous conferant effectivite du langage sur le monde, parce qu'on va faire circuler des phrases sur un ecran, renouvelle que la langue soit encore corrosive sur le monde" ("Si la litterature"). The following pages will relate Bon's wide-reaching claims about the new digital landscape to his recent literary work, with a particular focus on the curious Web-project and novel Tumulte (2006). Bon has increas- ingly placed the Internet at the center of his literary activity. His Web- based projects, which date from 1997, span various forms and functions.

Archiving in the Age of Digital Conversion: Notes for a Politics of "Remains"

Abstract: ����� ��� Over the last few decades, the public institutions responsible for archiving have been confronted with new challenges arising from electronic communication. Nevertheless, as a specialist in such national institutions has noted, “although some actions have been taken, digital preservation research and implementation are still in their infancy” (Steenbakkers). There have been numerous inquiries and research projects on archiving, and there is no doubt that studies on the digitalization of manuscripts, printed matter, photos, films, sound recordings and more have resulted in a number of short- or intermediate-term solutions. However, solutions often differ from country to country, and the rapidly evolving techniques for preserving and reproducing require frequent updating. Hence the problems posed still need to be pondered in their breadth and depth. The archive is located at the intersection, on the one hand, of the materiality of the means of preservation and communication of documents, and on the other hand, of the relationships of power and of the institutions of the past. The archive is a particular case of social transmission. One could even say that it transforms a text, an image, or a sound into a document, in the same way that a rubber stamp gives a letter an official status. The archive is an authorization to endure beyond the ephemerality that characterizes human productions. In the strict sense, an archive is “an assemblage of documents, no matter what their form or their material support, whose increase is ensured automatically through the activities of a private or public person” (Andre, 29). However, it is judicious also to think of the archive as every trace of the past that has been documented, thus giving it an authority (at least potential) by this act of conservation or of extraction. Now, in the age of digital communication, the ways of recording our present have mutated. Thus it is essential to address the question of the contemporary archive with epistemological and historical breadth, in order to better grasp its difficulties and possibilities. These stakes concern not only archival technology, though this is important. Recall the Stasi archives recovered ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: they were on the hard drive of an obsolete computer, whose

Electromagnetic Thought in Balzac, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Joseph Breuer

Abstract: Electromagnetism as Scientific and Literary Breakthrough In La Vie et ses Problèmes (1939), French biologist Jean Rostand writes “They say a living being is always born of someone similar to him. But until the discovery of electrical magnetization, one could also have said that every magnet originated from a pre-existing magnet” (14). Since Thales of Miletus, the understanding of the elusive notion of “life” has been linked to magnetism.1 Rostand’s analogy partakes of this tradition but also alludes to a rupture. Following the discovery of electromagnetism during the first half of the nineteenth century, the generation of life could be conceived not only in terms of the reproduction of the same, exemplified by magnetic contagion, but also in terms of a relation based on the difference between two forces of nature--electricity and magnetism--distinguished by their own physical laws. Thus the advent of electromagnetism and its subsequent applications--most notably the dynamo--provided a new physical model for conceptualizing difference and repetition. Rostand points to this epistemological breakthrough as a new type of magnetic trope--what I shall call a magnetotrope--that can be traced throughout the nineteenth century in the various magnetic analogies that evolved in discourses attempting to convey the nature of vital and cognitive forces. The conceptual matrix of Balzac’s oeuvre was originally based on an eighteenth-century interpretation of magnetism popularized by Mesmer’s “animal magnetism,”2 before progressively registering the epistemological transition Rostand attributes to the discovery of electromagnetism. During the 1830s, Balzac even started to conceive of the mind as a kind of dynamo. At the close of the nineteenth century, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future and Joseph Breuer’s proto-psychoanalytic theory would give full expression to the electromagnetic mind by turning vital and cognitive forces into “dynamo effects.” Electromagnetism was discovered in 1820 when Hans Christian Ørsted realized that a current-carrying wire induced motion in a nearby compass needle, and concluded that the wire was endowed with magnetic power. The proof of the interrelation between magnetism and electricity gave birth to electromagnetism, a new field of research prompted by the

Deleuze and Lacoue-Labartheon on the Reversal of Platonism: The Mimetic Abyss

Abstract: Among Friedrich Nietzsche’s many daring philosophical declarations, one of the most infamous and renowned is an early formula coined in his posthumously published notebooks: “My philosophy an inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the better it is. Living in semblance as goal.”1 As one can discern here, the theme of inverted Platonism entails a re-valuation of being, truth and the hierarchy between the real and apparent worlds as these notions are conceived within the framework of Platonic thought. Nietzsche’s style of describing his philosophy as a reversal of Platonism has served as a major point of debate in the reception of his work, particularly since Martin Heidegger’s influential lecture courses on the topic. Heidegger endeavors to illuminate Nietzsche’s reversal through reference to The Republic and the Platonic division between the sensuous and suprasensuous worlds. In exploring this division, Heidegger describes how Plato sunders truth (the realm of Ideas) from art (the realm of copying or mimesis), since the latter is incapable of reproducing the Idea in its self-presencing, or eidos, and hence falls short of the corresponding notion of truth as non-distortion, or aletheia (Nietzsche 162-87). For Heidegger, Plato’s philosophy distances art from truth and relegates art to the status of semblance or the merely apparent. Thus in his manner of adhering to the strategy of reversal, Heidegger suggests that where Plato subjugates the sensuous world (the domain of aesthetics) to the suprasensuous realm of Ideas (the domain of being and truth), Nietzsche must oversee the subjugation, in turn, of the suprasensuous to the sensuous; if truth is worth more than art for Plato, then Nietzsche—in his “reversed” position—must declare that art is worth more than truth (Nietzsche 142-50, 188-99). Yet in claiming to advance beyond any hasty interpretation of the theme, Heidegger attempts to complicate Nietzsche’s reversal as a philosophical problem that exceeds a mere inversion or substitution of values. As he repeatedly emphasizes, only to reverse Plato’s thinking without re-evaluating its underlying structure would be to remain caught within this structure, without overcoming it in any essential way. Therefore, Hei-

The Theater of History : Carnivàle, Deleuze, and the Possibility of New Beginnings

Abstract: Time and history have come to play a particularly important role in the understanding of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. While his conception of time—built among other things on the Bergson’s radical understanding of time, and developed perhaps most famously in Deleuze’s work on cinema—has been seen as one of his major preoccupations, he is frequently accused of disregarding the importance of history. As Claire Colebrook points out in her introduction to the recently edited Deleuze and History, the skepticism toward Deleuze in this respect may be based on the fact that he and Guattari seem to dispute the explanatory capacity of historicism. At the same time, Colebrook notes, Deleuze’s understanding of time opens up other ways of reading history. Deleuze and Guattari aim to rethink the relationship, or maybe the balance, between man and history. Part of their historiographic method is to read man as an event of history rather than as an a priori from which to interpret it. This would yield a non-linear history that could not be narrated according to a chronological, causal narrative. Rather, it would be based on time in its pure state—that is, time not tied to a specific object, but shifting with the different speeds of different events. The potential to read a different and highly political kind of history through Deleuze is picked up by Christian Kerslake in his recent article “Repetition and Revolution: Primary Historicization in Deleuze, Regnault and Harrington” where he connects Deleuze with Marx as well as Regnault and Harrington, with the aim of proposing an important relationship between history, repetition, and agency. Deleuze, Kerslake suggests, sees interventions into history as enabled by a kind of theater of identification and repetition. This understanding of repetition as a necessary element of historical agency, Kerslake argues, is at least partly built on Deleuze’s recovery of a misinterpretation of Marx. This misinterpretation suggests that Marx’s idea of historical agency through repetition is reserved for

In Rhythm: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract: So: Being is always being-in-contact. Contact presupposes a prior separation, and neither precedes nor overcomes it. Contact is never established or given as presence, it is (only) the rhythm or vibration of its own touching and separating, its own touching (even poignant) separation. Separation has a certain priority in this story. Not: Being first, then relation. Nor: Subject first, then contact. The subject is “subject to the outside,” as you say, always already. Which means that the touch (without which the alterity of the other would not impinge at all) is already withdrawing in its very touch, vibrating away again and becoming, intrinsically, a trace of itself, a trace of touch. Once touch becomes trace in this way, and once touch is given a certain priority over the other senses (which are themselves differential vibrations of the rhythm or vibration you here choose to call “touch,”) then phenomenology, ontology, “metaphysics of presence” are themselves touched, moved, upset, shaken up. Touch, presented the way you present it as becoming-trace, is already a conceptual insurrection in philosophy, however accommodating you also seem to want to be toward Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Husserl or Heidegger. (Descartes’s “Je suis” may, as you say, not exactly “contravene” the necessity that being be intrinsically relational, but it is nonetheless all shaken up by that discovery—and the same with all the rest, except perhaps Heidegger.) This can go different ways, depending on the conceptual register chosen: towards a kind of erotology of touch, for example, centered on the human body, which seems to have its attractions for you. But it can also move away from that center, let’s say in two different directions. First, zooming in to a kind of hyper-micrology, it can rub up against something more cosmo-ontological, as it were, not so human, where rhythm and vibration would take us back towards the ruthmos of the ancient materialists, or (perhaps more promisingly) forward to the most modern so-called string theory, which suggests that differential vibration of one-dimensional “strings” subtends the atomic and the subatomic, all “particles” and “matter” resolving into a kind of pure rhythm without presence or substance. Moving this way, your logic of relation-as-rhythmas-trace might put you in touch with theoretical physicists. Moving in another direction, this time more logico-semantic, we might find ourselves looking at a kind of differential-relational view of language and conceptuality that has been making its way since Saussure, as famously radicalized by Derrida, “difference-without-positive-terms”

Touch in the Abstract

Abstract: One expresses oneself at the computer almost exclusively through the mouse and keyboard. Vision is nearly indispensable, and hearing plays a supporting role, but these senses are unusually constrained at the computer, as active input falls to the fingertips. At the computer, you express yourself, communicate your desires, by executing a gesture chosen from among a very few possibilities: you can click a key on the keyboard, move the mouse, or click the mouse. That’s it. Specialized speech-based interface augmentations are available; there are eye motion detectors and other alternative mouse-control techniques; touchscreens are proliferating in certain categories of device. But the great bulk of us continue to use the mouse and keyboard as our primary and even our only means of communicating desire to the computer. It is remarkable that so much desire gets expressed, such a breadth of different ideas passes through this restricted interface, fingertips against plastic. The interface evidently assigns the sense of touch a particular prominence in the expression of desire. What kind of desire gets expressed via touch, and what kind of touch touches the interface? The interface appears particularly narrow when it is recognized as a sequence of elementary commands: the expression of desire breaks down into individual keypresses and mouse clicks. Atomized, self-identical, and absolute, each keypress or mouse click is an abstraction; the k key generates not a particular, concrete k but only the selfsame, abstract command, k. (In general, interface components transduce between the material and the abstract. This is an appropriately vague definition of the interface: hardware and software that mediates between digital and actual or between abstract and material.) The job of mouse and keyboard is to render materiality as abstraction, just as the monitor and speakers take the abstraction of the digital code and present it to material sensation. A single click, the paradigmatic action at the interface, might involve hundreds of muscles, a finely tuned machine of flesh and nerve, plastic and silicon. But in the end, the mouse button is either pressed or not at any given instant of mouse clock time; nothing else matters at the computer. The materiality of the press becomes the abstract binarity of 0 or 1. The case of mouse movement is only slightly more complex: The now-standard optical mouse photographs images of the surface pass

At the Confluence of Etymology and Thinking: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract: While searching for the original meanings of the river names of Germany, the etymologist soon discovers that in many cases the names derive from words meaning “river.” So prevalent is this semantic phenomenon that it can be found even in the case of confluent rivers. Thus, the name Rhein, Anglicized as “Rhine,” derives from the same complex of words that gives rise to such modern German verbs as rennen (“to run,” as in the running of a race) and rinnen (“to run,” as in the running of water), both of which are cognates of rhein, the Greek verb that can be found in the famous Heraclitean or pseudo-Heraclitean apothegm, panta rhei, ouden gar menei (“everything flows, nothing remains”). Apropos the name “Ruhr,” which flows into the Rhine, however, the etymologist hesitates. There is a common noun in modern High German, antiquated though it may be, which corresponds to the name of the river and is, in addition, closely related to archaic words that are probably not themselves cognates of rennen and rhein but nevertheless mean something very similar. And yet, in the eyes of the etymologist, there is something perverse about the proposal that the proper name “Ruhr” be associated with the corresponding common noun, as though in this instance, unlike so many others, the name of a river cannot be referred back to a word referring to a flux and thus to the appearance of a Fluss (“river”). The etymologist therefore goes in search of a source for the name Ruhr that remains unencumbered by an ugly association with the identical common noun. The name of the etymologist is Theodor Lohmeyer, whose passion for tracing the source of geographical terms is comparable to that of the Cure, an “excellent man,” who, as recounted in the first volume of A la Recherche du temps perdu, descends upon Marcel’s aunt at particularly inauspicious moments. About the origin of the Rhine, Lohmeyer is both brief and unequivocal: it emerges from the Germanic root-term rana, cognate with both the English run and the Greek rhein (Lohmeyer 1904, 5). Apropos the name “Ruhr,” by contrast, he is highly circumspect: it doubtless could derive from similar-meaning words in Middle German, roren or ruren, themselves derivatives of the Old High German verb hruoran or ruoran and thus related to the modern High German ruhren and

The Force of Noise, or Touching Music: The Tele-Haptics of Stockhausen's "Helicopter String Quartet"

Abstract: The article examines the sensorium and how it is has been divided to argue that touch underlies what we refer to as hearing It explores Stockhausen's "Helicopter Quartet" as an extended meditation on the mediation of the senses and the foregrounding of touch in the piece through teletechnologies that serve as prosthetic devices for sound, sight and touch