I began this thread of blogged on the spot essay writing with the question of suggestion in a digitized political moment, the photographed images of Occupy Wall Street, including that of the pepper spraying instance which became quickly transformed into a digital image and a set meaning. Yesterday’s comments and brief responses return to that question. In mentioning my own relationship with the Digital Humanities,  I summarized the talk I will give at MLA and the forthcoming piece the talk is based on. That summary is also based on some older posts which preceded the writing of the essay. The brief summary drew agreement and disagreement even though no one has heard the talk or read the piece. I only said that the pattern of the talk is bullshit. Thus, without argument, suggestion moved an audience’s response. The same holds true for the pepper spraying photograph: there is no argument or evidence or knowledge of a networked situation. There is only suggestion. Suggestion is a logic extended by digital media.

Yesterday’s post is not, as we might read it, an individual text. It has been networked over many fragmented posts, a talk, a 10,000 word essay, two political events unimportant to me (a pardon and the Occupy movement), other texts, spaces of search, disparate sights of interest, responses, etc. I’m interested in networked spaces of meaning. The Digital Humanities, however, does seem largely interested in individual texts (and thus continues the literary studies tradition of studying the text). I don’t mean to pick on Ted Underwood, who I do not know and only discovered in someone else’s Facebook update (another aspect of search), but his description on identifying patterns of authorial diction as a Digital Humanities project speaks to the individuation of the text.  One might be dealing with multiple texts to identify a diction pattern, but one is still within an individual body of meaning (one genre produces results about itself). As Underwood writes:

Of course, once you have an algorithm that convincingly identifies the characteristic diction of a particular genre relative to other publications in the same period, it becomes possible to say how the distinctive diction of a genre is transformed by the passage of time.

This is the individuation of the literary text. And that is fine if one does literary studies, and this is not a critique of Ted Underwood’s project (which resembles many other projects I’ve read about). It’s not particularly digital except that the scanning of documents and usage of “find” allows the repetition to be foregrounded so that a a conclusion about genre can be made. I don’t care if it’s called a Digital Humanities project (since the question of taxonomic “what is” is even less interesting to me), and I don’t care if someone does this type of work. The overall point I might be trying to get at is that its logic is still very much a literary one and not particularly digital in nature.

Another word for text in this context might be space. Whatever I might mean by bullshit in the Billy the Kid piece, I discover it via the search of networked spaces. Only, I network those spaces (I am an agent), and the spaces, in turn, network among each other (they become agents). This, of course, is the basic premises of Actor Network Theory. Separated, the spaces I tag and search (a Pat Garrett memoir, a Billy Joel song, an 1880s Harper’s essay, a Sam Peckinpah film, a Bob Dylan song, James Fredal’s essay, Jim Corder’s work, a news report about who Richardson did, in fact, pardon) have nothing to do with one another. The digital concept of aggregation, however, allows them to be aggregated and put in a space together. As a network, they interact and affect one another (what they cannot do without aggregation). The effect that I trace is bullshit.

I write to aggregated spaces as I make these spaces write with one another as well: the series of blog posts, the Facebook update, the Google + update, the Twitter update, the oral talk, the printed essay, the conversation at home, and so on. I work in the Humanities (I’m still an English professor -  for now). I work in the digital (this is my area of research). I suggest spaces as the primary focus of a networked writing that cannot ignore the individual text or space, of course, but that allows that space to be mobile (Mobile Humanities will be the subject of a talk at Bar-Ilan University this summer). I am not arguing. I am suggesting a meaning over the network. If there is an importance to this type of Digital Humanities project regarding invention  (and this is the overall idea of the Detroit book due out in February) it is that mobile, networked meanings – as Actor Network Theory shows via tracing accounts) allow other types of insights not evident in the study of the individual text (the problem with the Occupy movement’s focus on an individual text called “corporation” or “capitalism”: the should focus on the mobile instead).

And as I write this, I feel other suggestions, I hear other ideas and moments begin to form relationships with one another. I type. I try to type with one hand as I hold a 14 month old boy in the other. He is very mobile. He climbs up on my lap. He wants to get down. He wants up again. He throws toys across the room. He heads quickly for the pantry to slam the door shut. He hits the cat. He is a vehicle of mobile meaning spread out across our networked space of toys, remote controls, furniture, computers, books, papers, and other odds and ends that make up his world from below. His movement offers me further suggestions regarding writing, professionalism, kids, and …..and….and…I think I will take a digital picture of this moment as well. I want to see what the image suggestions, too.

In The New York Times, Stanley Fish discovers the Digital Humanities. Fish isolates some of the panel titles associated with the Digital Humanities and offers commentary. Fish writes:

Upward of 40 sessions are devoted to what is called the “digital humanities,” an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything.

While Fish names some panels in his short commentary, I wish he had named my talk as well since I, too, am speaking on a Digital Humanities panel at the MLA:

Debates in the Digital Humanities Sunday, 8 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., 615, WSCC

My talk is entitled “Twenty-First-Century Literacy: Searching the Story of Billy the Kid,” and it is appropriately listed as the last talk of this panel on this last day of the conference. It would have even been more appropriate had I been the last talk of the conference itself, since my talk basically uses the 2010 Bill Richardson decision to pardon Billy the Kid as exigence for a discussion on the Digital Humanities, search, and search as writing (not as object of critique, as Siva Vaidhyanathan and Alex Halavais have recently done). My talk is not an endorsement of the Digital Humanities, and the essay it is based on is not either. It is no surprise that metaphorically (or maybe literately), I would be shoved to the end.

What I  tease out subtly in an exploration of search as writing (I search Billy the Kid through Digital Humanities endorsed online resources) is the pattern of bullshit. The proclamation that I have discovered bullshit instead of hegemony, cultural dominance, lack of access, problematic representation, or a “new” something or other is revealing. Much of the burden of being a part of an up and coming movement or what Fish calls “fast moving developments” is the burden of being important. My only response, borrowed from this very textual, online search through relevant texts tagged (since online information is tagged for search purposes) as history, film, music, writing, and news is bullshit. Bullshit is the pattern I discover. Bullshit is my response to a political moment but also to a specific Humanities methodology calling itself digital.

Fish’s commentary is an obvious response to literary studies’ crisis.  And it is easy to call Fish on bullshit as well. The Digital Humanities is not as new as Fish thinks, of course, but as we watch our English colleagues suddenly “doing” Digital Humanities we see that they are putting their hopes (and university funding) in this movement because there is nowhere left to go in a world that has long been digital (while many insist it is not), and a world where reading is dominated by writing.  Typically, though, the Digital Humanities advocates are still stuck in their own paradigm: reading and interpreting texts (scanned literary texts or software studies texts). Or else they are telling us what they’ve always told us about ideas: While you thought X was innocent, it is, in fact, a coded/hegemonic force (see The Googlization of Everything and all of its clones). We are reminded yet again – only now it’s Google instead of Milton – that power circulates. Textual Power, of course is not a new idea.

I have no objection to the Digital Humanities – we have formed a group here at the University of Kentucky as well. But most of what I see is banal and extremely familiar. And there is an insane amount of navel gazing (“What is Digital Humanities?”) that accompanies all these movements (aren’t people still asking the cliche: What is new about new media?). The burden of self justification is the burden of being important. We are important. Let’s define who we are over and over so everyone else understands we are important. Let’s repeat the tropes of critique to justify our importance.

For that reason, my piece takes up an issue completely unimportant in the political sphere. The pardon of Billy the Kid is not war, social uprising, access to information, a presidential election, the right to something or other. It is banal. It is unimportant. And in that unimportance, the burden of hermeneutics relaxes (if just for a bit) so that one may finally learn something rather than confirm what one already feels (ain’t Google awful? ain’t life unfair? ain’t it bad that such and such is such and such?).

There is a moment in his book Chronicle of a Small Town, where Jim Corder is doing a search (pre-Internet), and as he finds information, he asks:

I found myself wondering, again and again, what I would have learned, what would have startled me, what I could have seen in a new way that I had misremembered, if only I could read the missing papers. There are always missing papers. (Chronicle of a Small Town 17)

The point of an unimportant search is to find the metaphoric missing papers because they can’t be found. They are always missing. The burden of importance, however, pins our work (and sense of self definition) among the metaphoric found and already known. Jstor. Project Muse. A library’s holdings. Textual citation. The question of power. These are the knowns. We don’t search them. We already occupy them.

I’m drawn to another remark Corder makes about search, sources (such as those I use in the Billy the Kid essay and talk) and ethos:

“It occurred to me that a scholar’s reputation, supposing he had one, could be ruined if the world found out that he had discovered his sources at Aunt Mary’s house.” (Chronicles of a Small Town 5)

Indeed it could. Search as writing takes a backseat to search as legitimacy. I don’t find (yet) the willingness to search Aunty Mary’s metaphoric house in the Digital Humanities (or in other areas of academia, of course). But I don’t care anymore either. My search has already revealed a response to all of this, a response that may share Fish’s language, but not his overall meaning by any shape or form: bullshit.

My interests over the last few posts regarding a specific movement, suggestion, programability, the repetitive image could be framed as a Digital Humanities question. The question of the Humanities – and its implied teaching of thought, critical awareness, matters of the human and the digital  juxtapose in an attempt at disciplinarity. The reasons why the Humanities need a Digital Humanities are political and complex. But, as we see, the Digital Humanities is still very much in debt to previous logics.

I’ve found the Digital Humanities to be overtly concerned with limited issues based on such previous logics: categorization, archiving, definition, accessing archives, hermeneutics, and literature and the arts. In the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies, the introduction begins with the “new media encounter,” that is”between the literary and the digital.” In Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities, the forward proposes ” textual hermeneutic informatics.” We remain in the realm of literary interpretation. This desire to interpret because self directed at some point (as it does with all Humanities movements); chick and egg questions surface as the movement attempts to interpret itself (all texts, we see, demand interpretation). New media, as if it is some kind of separate category, has gone down this path as well.

Thus, to respond to an event, such as Occupy, is to respond by interpreting: What does this mean? In doing so, we run into cliches and commonplaces since interpretation depends greatly on past arguments, such as the inevitable question performed by cultural studies: who speaks for whom? Another circulated cliche: the binary between labor and wealth. There is nothing particularly digital about interpretation, other than we practice expected practices when we move among media. With this interpretative gesture comes the reliance on critique. Everything must be critiqued. Only, it’s not really critique when a given decoding reveals what all past decodings have shown us. The story Occupy tells or its interpretation tells is a familiar one. People vs Police. One class vs another class. 1% vs 99%. Critique is the culture of the binary, a limited digital association.

Despite the opposite occurring, to explore digitally a movement such as Occupy, there is no obligation to interpret or critique as the Digital Humanities might require. Cathy Davidson wants us to understand Digital Humanities (or its projects like HASTAC) as a continuation of the overall project of “critical thinking,” but such ambiguity leads us nowhere (who preaches the merits of “uncritical thinking”?). The so called “shallows” associated with digital logic is not shallow for its fragmentation, drifting, aggregation, and related features. If it is shallow, it is shallow for maintaining the party line of “critical thinking.”  Indeed, we might call catch phrases like “critical thinking” or the expected critique of capital or hegemony as shallow. They are merely placeholders in discourse, but they are also not digital in logic. For every person who claims the skill of critical thinking, they are as likely to be guilty of what Roland Barthes called the arrogance of affirmation. One who so quickly and easily affirms (i.e., the situation reflects “hegemony”) is arrogant. Knowing is not so simple, in the digital or the non-digital.

If the digital is also a question of display (making apparent through connectivity, access, visuality, aggregation, and so on), then the need to be critical or to be a so called critical thinker can yield to the need to show.  Digital Humanities could relent on its drive to interpret or decode a supposed image for some reality (a Humanities passion exemplified maybe best in literary studies) and begin to understand how to gesture, demonstrate, juxtapose, show among actors and media. The power of Occupy is not in its meaning (since it lacks meaning) but in its gestures. Its gestures are hardly novel, bu they demonstrate a long standing usage of suggestion to persuade. Occupy is a digital movement (human megaphone included) since it depends on aggregation to exist. But it’s hardly a “critical” moment despite its dependence on that commonplace for self definition. The response to Occupy is seldom digital. A digital response might not turn to “critical thinking” (and thus, arrogance and shallowness) as the Digital Humanities typically requests, and instead might consider what I’m really calling here “delivery.”

“We don’t live dramatically anymore,” Vilem Flusser writes, “rather we live programmatically.” We can read the statement as an observation regarding how meaning becomes scripted (script as computer or ideological code) and followed. As the previous posts sketch, I fine one obvious moment of programmatical living to be in the commonplace of “protest” or its particular manifestation in the Occupy movement. “Programs,” Flusser tells us, “enhanced by the most diverse array of actions awaken sensations, feelings, suffering in us, so that we will allow them to stimulate us.” Suggestive imagery plays a role in the process. Pepper spray. Police in riot gear. Signs and demands. These non-human elements align with others: inequity, bonuses, foreclosure, student debt. Out of that alignment, public emotions flare. Flusser frames his discussion as one of “scripts,” meaning “script writing” as much as a scripted program. “One who writes scripts is committed body and soul to the culture of images.”

And whether the script is or television/film or the political, programming is the central logic. The protest is a programmed gesture.  Scripting is another version of franchising. Take the main idea and replicate it for purposes of familiarity. One moment’s resistance is interpreted as another’s resistance. Thus, Time makes The Protester the person of the year. We program our rebellions. Tahir square to Oakland. You can find McDonald’s to be the same wherever you go, and supposedly, you can find protest to be the same.

2011 might as well be 1968 in terms of franchised, programmed emotion, for the Occupy movement is an emotional movement borrowing heavily from circulated images. People are upset with everything. All images are presented. Thus, the movement is critiqued for lacking focus. The programming is overriding the metaphoric server. Emotional overload.

What is not programmed, however, is the objection to war.  At least, not anymore. The war in Iraq lasted mostly without protest. Washington (or whatever we believe represents war) was never occupied. Instead of calling for an occupation of the forces that manage war, calls are directed towards those that manage consumption: the generic entities called corporation, Wall Street, business, and so on. One central image, for some reason, is missing. The public image. Instead, we get the personal image: I owe money.

We spent too much, and we are mad as hell. Adbusters, who have long critiqued the programming of consumption, programs its own response, which, in turn, is picked up by the Occupy movements as logic. The logic of the protest – 99%/1% – is the logic of the ad.  It is a sound bite. An image that is sticky for its emotional push.

With only the emotion to go on, programmable commonplaces take over: Capitalism is evil. There is no argument or protest, only a continuing running program. Mobs respond to commonplaces. Commonplaces are the language of the program. The next programmable stage is just as obvious: racism. Occupy does not feel dramatic (though it believes it is). It feels programmed. It feels like a series of commonplace and expected images.

A series of blog posts focused on a topic suggests. The suggestion thread together by dates (Nov 18, Nov 28…). The series could argue (I have grown tired of arguments, though). It could illustrate (but to illustrate would be to claim, and I don’t want to illustrate or support an argument I do not have). I’ll believe (for now) that I am suggesting something here.

Social media have revived argumentation. These arguments, however, occur not in well supported claims or through documented evidence, but in fragmented moments of anger, displeasure, disgust, alarm. As Bradley points out, outrage dominates. At any given moment, out of 20 – 30 Facebook updates I read on my stream, at least half are moments of outrage: a state’s local politics, gender, occupation, race, the national government’s politics, the military, a country’s indiscretion, higher education’s indiscretion,  Google’s indiscretion, scandal, and so on. We are not only forever involved; we are forever outraged. We are outraged by the suggestion (often, not by the proof) of a moment. A moment suggests a problem, our response, to paraphrase the Comic Book Guy, is to express our outrage online.

Everything is an argument? Or everything is an outrage. What if we switch from our demand to argue and to argue around outrage to a concern (not a demand) with suggestion. I’ve been suggesting as such by briefly focusing on the suddenly canonical image of a cop pepper spraying protesters at a university campus. Arguments quickly become canonical. Repetitive. An argument becomes a story we tell over and over until it is believed. In outrage, we are trapped in the same argument circulated as novel, but it is frequently a repetition of a previous argument. The image repeats. It becomes canonical. It becomes an argument on the basis of its repetition.

The logic of repetition: Say it enough, and it has meaning.

Vilem Flusser tells us that writing – as opposed to imagery -  resists suggestion. “Writing set out to explain images, to explain them away. Pictorial, fanciful, imaginative thinking was to yield to conceptual, discursive, critical thinking.”  For many, the image I am interested in of violence done to protesters does not suggest; it argues (“we are a state dominated by brutality” etc). Arguments often are not imaginative. In their contemporary form, they are the products of writing. Once we are trapped in repetition, we have no need to imagine. Detroit is in ruins. Detroit is on the brink of rejuvenation. Such were the arguments that motivated my writing about Detroit. Casinos will save an economy; casinos will continue to devastate an economy. These are also two Detroit arguments. They are picked up as well in a recent Slate article, “In the Heartland, the Occupation of the Near Poor”:

Predatory capitalism follows the failed service economy. Across America there appears to be a direct relation between the casino economy and poverty. Depressed economies from Detroit and upstate New York to Mississippi and Washington have turned to some form of state-sanctioned gambling, which now exists in 41 states. It’s no accident that as inequality began widening in the 1970s, states turned first to lotteries and then to video poker, gaming rooms and full-fledged casinos in the following years.

Casinos are good. Casinos are bad. Barthes was interested in binaries for the ways they posed paradigms; he also was interested, however, in working between the paradigm, not in embracing it as reality or argument. That in between/seam state, for him, posed a space where another meaning occurred that the binary could not provide.  In the casino/economy/poverty argument, we can replace – as the author of the Slate piece does – Detroit with Kentucky.

The rolls and folds of the inner bluegrass are partitioned by winding white-washed fences, which Morgan explains signifies wealth because they are harder to upkeep than black fences. Sprawling manors are tucked away from the road and sublime thoroughbreds nibble at the grass. But the idyllic landscape hides an ugly “back stretch,” the area behind the racetrack where abusive conditions are the norm. It’s one of the deadliest sports for horse and animal alike, with 24 jockeys having died during races in the 1970s alone. Morgan describes frequent drug abuse and deaths as jockeys struggle to make weight of 112 pounds.

This argument is as follows (and it could be found in any other space): what seems lovely, innocent, and wonderful (sport) is really marked by something horrible (death). Or the argument could be (as one reads the passage in full): what looks beautiful (homes funded by the horse economy) hides what is ugly (immigrant labor that goes without benefits and proper compensation). Switch this formula to the current argument circulating: What we thought was a vibrant economy we all contribute to and benefit from is really controlled by the 1%. The puppets have strings. Let’s pull back the curtains. X is really Y.  Barthes also called this imagery or representation “mythology.” What seems natural really hides a history.  Only, Barthes did not advocate deconstructing or breaking mythology in order to be more aware (you can’t do so, he tells us, because we still believe in myths even after we decode the myth); instead, he proposed mythologizing the myth. Or, we might add, suggesting. We can critique the Occupy movement for its inconsistencies, but that critique does not cause the movement to stop, reconsider its position, and move on. Nor does a critique of capital stop capitalism or a critique of oppression stop oppression or a critique of representation stop problematic representations. Outrage continues.

Please don't argue about our contradictions. All arguments include contradictions.

After all, it is no secret that immigrant labor is oppressed labor. I know that. I agree with the argument. And yet, immigrant labor is still oppressed labor. And those Kentucky homes still look beautiful. And the horses continue to race and be sold for outrageous amounts of money. Might we suggest rather than argue? To do so does not imply a weak response (“if you would please stop oppressing, that would be great”) but possibly a return to Flusser’s understanding of the image. What, then, would the imaginative, suggestive approach (as opposed to its possible binary opposite, argumentative approach) look like? I feel I must suggest such an approach….and not just a response to an approach. Such is the nature of practice. We need “fanciful, imaginative thinking” as opposed to critical thinking. A job for the Humanities? Finally.

The image intrigues for another obvious reason:

The narrative of the image is not entirely, as the memes dictate, the pepper spraying. The narrative of the photograph is also this:

The presence of photography. The moment is being watched. “The whole world is watching,” demonstrators chanted outside of the 1968 Democratic Convention.  They knew that their beatings were being filmed for the nightly news. Watching would occur, but delayed. We get a sense of that “watching” toward the end of Medium Cool where the accident is incidental to its coverage:

The world is always watching, these images tell us. The world is watching demonstrators pepper sprayed. I state the obvious: The framing of the pepper spray incident suggests a watching. How was the cop not aware of this watching as cameras photographed his act? Maybe he was. Maybe the response to a protest was amplified because of the watching. The protestors are aware of the photographers. They are aware that they are being watched. We can assume the same about the cop. In the age of information, McLuhan wrote, we know too much about each other. We are too aware. We are aware of our awareness.

Even though we are aware of this watching, the suggestion is the accident is other. Though somewhat countered by Medium Cool’s narrative of personal involvement or Normal Mailer’s coverage of the 1968 Democratic and Republican Conventions, accidents or events or other moments’ meaning is formed out of suggestion. The whole world is watching; thus, I am watching. I am participating by watching. My watching suggests to me what happened (as anyone who deals with the issues of representation already knows). This is the basis of McLuhan’s notion of involvement. Suggestion is powerful as I make associations with other events or moments. I am involved in a chain of representations, each acting upon the next so that I feel that I understand a meaning. With that feeling, I affirm a given knowledge (a knowledge based on suggestion). Even if, for instance, I am not in Wisconsin, I identify with the representation of labor protest for what it suggests (as an academic, I realize that the suggestion, too, is obvious).

We connect social protest to watching because, obviously, if it is not watched, it does not happen. Still, whatever happened happens to us because of what it suggests, not because of what occurred. A group of kneeling students were pepper sprayed. We know that occurred. But our reaction is based on the suggestion the spraying creates, not the pain the individuals felt (i.e., the larger implications of a given social protest in the context of the situation it is located within – with all of its associated meanings at play).

I find the first image intriguing because the watching is not captured by accident or chance. It is there with the accident from the start. The Occupy social movement begins with the media: advertising motivated campaigns based on immediate watching. The cameras are there waiting for the moment to watch. The cameras are in the moment that bothers us. They are already a part of the image they produce. The spraying bothers us, it upsets us, it repulses us. But the cameras are right there with the spraying. We cannot read the spraying without reading the cameras as well as connected to this event.

This photo intrigues:

It intrigues not only because of the sense of moral outrage it evokes, an outrage best summed up as “police brutality” or as one organizer of the UC Davis protest comments, the suppression of “free speech and peaceful assembly. ” All of this may very likely be true. And the photograph obviously intrigues those commentators for such reasons. But, for me, it intrigues because this photograph merely, like all photographs taken in the name of a given political moment, suggests. The photo does not tell us what actually happened (prior to and following). It suggests what happened.  Suggestion, as an enthymematic enterprise, is the focus of the response to this or any similar photograph. We make assumptions based on what is not present as much as we do based on what is present. Whether it is a child running from a napalm attack in Vietnam or a female soldier pointing her fingers at an Iraqi prisoner whose face is covered by a bag, the information of the image gets quickly reduced to suggestion. The suggestion in the above photo is brutality and oppression. There is, as well, a sense of communal wounding by this suggestions. That wounding sparks public outrage.

Suggestion may, in fact, match a set of moments that occurred. Or it may not. I’m reminded of one set of images broadcast years ago on one of the major networks that showed two separate moments as one: An elderly Arab man walking down a series of steps in Jerusalem; two Israeli soldiers firing tear gas. Two separate moments were juxtaposed for suggestion (despite the two moments occurring separately). Intellectual montage, as Eisenstein argued, is powerful. In the political moment, this form of juxtapatory suggestion often leads to emotional outrage.

The pepper spray photograph, however, brings together a present image (the police officer spraying kneeling and arm locked protesters) with a series of images not present: the Occupy movement up until now. Added to that series is another set of images not present: 1960s protest on California campuses (the emotional connection is obviously present, even though the period is not since this photo occurs on one such campus, and California is an emotional focal point of American protest because of the 1960s). What we understand, then, is a suggestion based on one momentary representation (the spraying) as it is juxtaposed with other non-present moments.

That is not necessarily a faulty way to understand a moment. But it is also an immediate way to believe one has understood a moment. Saying that, I don’t deny the moment occurred or that the moment is problematic. I’m more interested in the image’s ability to interact with non-present images so that a network of meaning occurs, a network that has a largely emotional component or response to these actors. As legitimate as the critique may be, then, it can also be problematic since immediacy is not the best means toward understanding (consider Richard Jewell as one obvious example).

With the spraying photo, we immediately “know”  that someone should be fired because of this immediacy of emotional response. Barthes might call this response the arrogance of affirmation. Regardless, and as many note regarding the sense of immediacy or involvement digital dissemination allows for, we believe we know. We believe we know many things, but as the Occupy movement continues to demand attention, we believe we know this moment. We know based on a single image of a man pepper spraying kneeling protesters.

These are rhetorical questions and not value based questions. And they deserve some meta attention as well: The blog response, too, participates in such immediacy. I immediately blog in response to the photograph. My emotional response is different than what is publicly expressed regarding the photography, but it is still immediate (a focus of Internet critique – we don’t think through our ideas). Overall, then, I’m intrigued by immediacy in ways others are as well – via the blog or the photo. Immediacy is central to digital expression and understanding. We may not entirely understand that point yet.

Supercut.org makes explicit what we deny to ourselves culturally at times: Meanings are tied up in commonplaces. What appears to be a novel argument or narrative is often a repeated commonplace (Lyotard’s insistence on narrative as recitation).  Waxy does a nice overview of the supercut genre.Waxy’s point is that YouTube made the genre easier to engage in (locating, downloading, cutting up, uploading video). But we have always been caught within this system of repetition (a point The Daily Show often drives home). Roland Barthes called this practice “phraseology.”

“Contemporary myth is discontinuous. It is no longer expressed in long fixed narratives but only in ‘discourse’; at most, it is a phraseology, a corpus of phrases (of stereotypes)” (Image Music Text 165). The pleasure of the text, as Barthes writes, is the stereotype.

Phraseology is funny when applied to popular culture. It’s humorous to watch Robin exclaim holy:

And its humorous to watch the zoom and enhance scene play over and over across story lines:

But commonplace repetition extends far beyond TV and film montages to politics (“uprising,” “revolution,” “change,” “restore”), culture, art, and so on. We have to draw on familiar story lines whatever the narrative we adhere to may be. Waxy, however, shows little interest in the rhetoric of the supercut (my interest) and instead examines the work involved in producing such texts. “The average supercut is composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25% of the videos. Some supercuts, about 5%, contain over 300 edits!” When Dan Anderson was here at UK recently, I pointed out that the student mashups he showed were more than homage or recognition of genre. They were revisions, revision in the sense of revising the concept (and not revision at the level of word or sentence correction).  Revision, as many teachers struggle to note, is a difficult process; its difficulty increases when posed to new writers whose command of language is still be learned (or as Nancy Sommers famously writes, when teacher response is lacking). But the contemporary, online media texts many students are familiar with (posed as memes or YouTube sensations) are complex revisions with 100s of edits and changes. To do a supercut revision takes a considerable amount of time.

The move from commonplace (at the level of idea or even of revising practice) to supercut might be a worthwhile gesture to make. Time consuming, but worthwhile.