Beautiful Theology

2011-10-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

Musée des Beaux Arts

Dusting off the old blog, and leaving a link here to Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ with Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’, with a view to using them if I again lecture on Fun Home for ‘Woman as Hero’.

2009-02-20T04:52:00.000-08:00

about Digital Comics

Here’s a link to Yves Bigerel’s “about DIGITAL COMICS,” and one to “About ‘about DIGITAL COMICS’ ” thrown in for good measure.

Oh, and I just remembered: the Snack Pack Cartoon Course. Who needs to spend years at SCAD when you can learn everything you need from a pocketable tract? And the comments there point to more goodies: the U.S. Army’s Handicraft Guide to Cartooning, parts One and Two (sexism and racism alert).

2009-02-07T13:23:00.001-08:00

Comics Grammar

Nate Piekos, letterer and type designer extraordinaire, has published the Manual of Style for comics lettering. As with most prescriptivist efforts, it blends public convention with private preference, and it invites rebellion from venturesome avant-gardistes, but it very helpfully codifies an array of contemporary norms as they prevail at major comics-publishing houses.

2008-10-15T14:26:00.001-07:00

2008-05-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

“Not Just Remembering But Visiting”

The New York Times Mothers Day op-ed page featured this comic by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. Margaret and I each made theological connections to the short narrative and the way that the Tamakis represented it.

2008-02-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

Seeing the Bible

Two links:

First, a connection at Boing Boing pointed to Clarence Larkin’s marvelous (if theologically debatable) charts illustrating the principles of dispensationalist biblical interpretation. I’m wondering whether it might not make a good assignment or exam question to ask students to explain problematic aspects of these charts, or to design alternatives.

Second, Bibliodyssey pointed to blockbook illustrations of the Book of Revelation. This, too, would make a useful assignment; compare the illustrations with what you read in Revelation, and come to class prepared to discuss the congruence (or the discontinuity) of the illustrations with what your text suggests.

2007-08-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

Magritte in London

Saturday I indulged my fascination with Magritte by buying a second-hand copy of The True Art of Painting, which — to my delighted surprise — includes not only a version of “Les Mots et Les Images” (hitherto I’ve made do with photocopies) but also a relate presentation that he gave at Marlborough Fine Art Ltd in London, in 1937. The numbered sections seem to correspond to images displayed at the same time he spoke, but the source does not make that explicit. The typescript does include some very rough sketches at particular points; I’ve represented these with words in braces. The argument of the presentation tends to follow that of “Mots et Images,” as you’ll see. Occasionally, though, his text departs from the compressed prose of the published predecessor.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
The presentation we are about to undertake together will endeavor to show several characteristics proper to words, to images, and to real objects.

(1) A word can replace an image: (followed by the words “Chapeau” and “HAT”)

(2) An image can replace a word. I will show this using a text by André Breton in which I will replace a word with an image:

[Magritte inserts a few words of French followed by his translation of the whole passage; I’ll omit the French and give only his translation, with an indication of the picture in braces.]

IF ONLY THE {SUN} WOULD SHINE TONIGHT.

By Jean Scutenaire:
ONE CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO A {FOAL} WITHOUT BEING ONE ONESELF.

By Paul Eluard:
THE DARKEST {EYES} ENCLOSE THE LIGHTEST.

By Paul Colinet:
THERE IS A {SPHERE} PLACED ON YOUR SHOULDERS.

By David Gascoigne: [apparently blank]

By [E. L. T.] Mesens
WIDOW’S {MASK} FOR THE WALTZ

By Humfrey Jennings:
THE FLYING {BREATH} OF EDUCATION

(3) A real object can replace a word [“real” inserted with a carat]
THE {BREAD} OF CRIME

(4) Any form whatsoever can replace ~~the image of an object~~ a word.
THE {blobs} ARE BORN IN WINTER.

(5) A word can do the work of an object:
THIS BOUQUET IS TRANSPARENT.

(6) One can designate an image or an object with a different ~~word~~ name than its own.
{image of an egg} THE BIRD
{image of a bird} THE MOUNTAIN
{obscure image} BEHOLD THE SKY [Magritte writes this out phonetically in French: “skaie”]

(7) There is a hidden affinity between certain images. It applies equally to the objects represented by these images. Let’s examine [“rechercherons”] together what one should say about this. We recognize the bird in the cage. Our interest is awakened anew if the bird is replaced by a fish or a shoe.
These images are peculiar. Unfortunately they are arbitrary and accidental.
{images of a cage, bird, fish, heeled shoe, and an oval}

It is nonetheless possible to obtain a new image that would better resist the spectator’s examination. A large egg in a cage seems to be the needed answer.
{image of a doorway beside a gap in a wall}
Let’s now consider the door. The door might open on a landscape seen on the other side.

The landscape can be represented on the door.

Let’s try something less arbitrary: beside the door let’s make a hole in the wall which also makes another door.

This juxtaposition will be perfect if we reduce the two objects to a single one. The hole thus fits naturally in the door, and through this hole one sees darkness.

This image could be enriched again if one illuminates the item made invisible, hidden by the darkness [originally: “by illuminating the invisible thing that the darkness hides from us”]. Our gaze always aims always to go further, aims to see at last the object, the reason for our existence.

I’m not going to comment further in the body, here, save to note that the translation is my own, though I consulted the translation offered by Harry Torczyner in the appendix to The True Art.

2007-07-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

More At The Art Institute

As I reported in my Random Thoughts, we went to the Art Institute last night, where Pippa guided us to the photographs of Sarah Hobbs and Angela Strassheim. Both photographers explore matters of signifying in visual media. I especially admire these artists’ deliberate use of posing (a pejorative term even in the post-Madonna-“Vogue” era) to communicate. I’d have taken some pictures myself, but there’s a rule at the Institute against photographing material that's not in the permanent collection (and the photos were in a dim room anyway). Still, Google around for more about these remarkable artists, and check out “Small Problems In Living” (by Hobbs – download a PDF of her Periodic Table of the Traits) and “Left Behind” (book from Amazon)and “Pause” by Strassheim.

2007-06-11T09:32:00.000-07:00

Noli Me Condemnare

On our trip to the Art Institute, Margaret and I delighted in this painting of Job, which the title card identified as an anonymous Spanish work from the early seventeenth century:

(Job is saying “Noli me condemnare,” “Do not condemn me,” from the Vulgate of Job 10:2: “I will say to God, ‘Do not condemn me; show why you judge me so.‘ ”)

The way the painter adopted lettering that looks like metal type tickles us pink. What does this imply about the way the anonymous painter thinks about speech, about print, about communication? Would a brush script not have sufficed? What models did the painter have — perhaps only the blackletter banner-lettering from cheirographic and woodcut Bibles? Did he think that by emulating a Roman text metal typeface, he rendered the image “modern”?

(Cross-posted to Beautiful Theology)

2007-05-17T06:13:00.000-07:00

Worship As Meaning

I don’t have time to give a chapter-by-chapter survey of Worship as Meaning; I’ll try tp patch together some reading notes and queries based on passages I’ve flagged with Post-It notes. My notes don’t identify the best, most important passages, but the ones that trigger digressions in my thinking. The book is denser, and richer, even than I remembered.

Pp. 102-103: Hughes narrates an incident in which he, presiding at Communion, raised the bread and cup in order physically to express the words, “we praise you and we bless you [for these gifts],” but an observer thought that he was demonstrating reverence for the material signs of God’s presence in the elements. Hughes pays special attention to this incident as evidence that the expression always bears with it the possibility of miscarriage. In the seminar, we’ve talked about futile efforts toward “securing meaning,” and here Hughes works through some of the tangles that misplaced emphasis engenders.

P. 108: Hughes discusses the “joke” as a clue toward meaning, a great topic (I wrote a paper comparing parables with jokes in my own seminary years). On my Post-It I’ve written, “The problem isn’t with ‘entertainment’ per se, but with people trying to make liturgy ‘entertaining’ on Hollywood/Broadway terms. Liturgy should be entertaining!”

Pp. 115-16: Hughes narrates three moments of liturgical performance, and teases out various ways in which the “meaning” of the liturgy involved the material, enacted components of the liturgy (the settinghttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif, the attitude of the pray-er, the social interaction involved). Hughes notes that these elusive (arguably “subjective,” though his whole book sets out a way of thinking abgout the contingency of these matters that is not reducible to “subjectivity”).

Pp. 125 and surrounding: In these pages, Hughes articulates the extent to which the linguistic model for meaning itself thwarts our efforts to arrive at the soundest possible account of liturgical meaning. On 126, he notes the semiotic power of silence — but silence, in the nature of the case, can’t have a “meaning” (where would you look it up? Not under “s“, smarty-pants!). In this context, Hughes touches on the problem that people without a developed sense for meaning can’t tell when they’re missing the point — related to the research the full report of which I can no longer find online, summary here, that indicates that incompetent people over-estimate their own ability, and can’t recognize incompetence (their own or others’). (Found a PDF of the article.)

(There are many other Post-Its idnentifying provocative aspects of Pierce’s semiotics, the usefulness of the triad “iconicity, indexicality, and symbolism,” and so on. I may flesh this out later.)

Pp. 222ff. Hughes’ typology of liturgical thinking: “church theology,” “evangelical (biblically-centered),” and “mainline Protestant” — how satisfactory is it? On the “no typology without ideology” premise, where does the ideology inflect Hughes’ characterization?

2007-05-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

Practical Exercise

Now that you’ve been thinking hard about meaning, communication, design, and so on, meander over to the U.K.’s College of Preachers site and download their PDF booklet called “What Did You Make Of Your Sermon?”

Considering the use of graphic elements for communication (Magritte, McCloud, Tufte, Bechdel), the implied textual hermeneutics (Tufte, Wittgenstein, Irigaray), the pragmatics of preaching (Tufte, Wittgenstein, Irigaray), and the professor’s rantings about all of the above, plus writing, how would you evaluate this booklet as a device for preachers to improve their art?

2007-05-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

Philosophical Investigations

I’m not even going to begin to discuss the Investigations in this post — I’ll just transcribe some of my favorite phrases. The long-dormant site where Joe Duermer and Christopher Robinson were talking through the Invesigations provides a much more productive matrix for discussion than I could on short deadline, in short compass.

§11: “What confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print.”

§28: “an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case.”

§34 “Neither the expression ‘to intend the definition in such-and-such a way’ not the expression ‘to intepret the definition in such-and-such a way’ stands for the process which accompanies the giving and hearing of a definition.”

Footnote on p. 18e: “It is only in a language that I can mean something by something. This shews clearly that the grammar of ‘to mean’ is not like that of the expression ‘to imagine’ and the like”

§40: “. . .the word ‘meaning’ is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that ‘corresponds’ to the word.”

§78: “Compare knowing and saying:
     how many feet high Mont Blanc is—
     how the word ‘game’ is used—
     how a clarinet sounds.
If you are surprised that you can know something and not be able to say it, you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.”

§85: “A rule stands there like a sign-post.”

§88: “If I tell someone ‘Stand roughly here’—may not this explanation work perfectly? And cannot every other one fail too?” [cp. Magritte on vague images and expressions]

§90: “Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one.”

§109: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

§110: “ ‘Language (or thought) is something unique’—this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions.”

§115: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat5 it to us inexorably.”

Footnote on 54e: “I see a picture; it represents an old man walking up a steep path leaning on a stick.—How? Might it not have looked just the same if he had been sliding downhill in that position? Perhaps a Martian would describe the picture so. I do not need to explain why we do not describe it so.”

§194: “When does one have the thought: the possible movements of a machine are already there in it in some mysterious way?—Well, when one is doing philosophy.”

§208: “Teaching which is not meant to apply to anything but the examples given is different from that which ‘points beyond’ them.”

§251: “What does it mean when we say: ‘I can’t imagine the opposite of this’ or ‘What would it be like, if it were otherwise?’—For example, when someone has said that my images are private, or that only I myself can know whether I am feeling pain, and similar things.”

(Class beginning)

2007-05-03T10:33:00.000-07:00

Sexes and Genealogies, “Women, the Sacred, and Money”

In this essay, Irigaray ponders the strong association of sacrifice and gender: women as excluded from the role of the officiant at sacrifice, and as the object of sacrifice. She reades the sacrificial economy as entailing gender-asymmetry, which heightens the question of whether women and men can live in community when that community is constituted by sacrifice.

Women’s exclusion from the sarcifical economy (except occasionally as the sacrificed and this asymmetry again is not innocent, since the male sacrifical victim can be, usually is, “redeemed” by an alternate sacrifice, whereas for Jephthah’s daughter no alternative avails — but maybe that’s just a coincidence). Irigaray extends this reflection to include natural fertility, which in industrial society stands in the relatively less-valued relation to the “refined,” “developed,” processed products which industrial-commercial culture vests with greater honor (but which nonetheless depend for their existence as “produced objects” on the materials and resources and fecundity of the natural order). She imagines an inaugural sacrifice that founds industrial culture, where the (male-identified) order of domination and abstracted exchange value sacrifices the (female-identified) natural condition of fertility and abundance.

Irigaray ties the question of women’s liberation to their exclusion from both the sacrificial order and the order of exchange; women are symbolically homeless, as it were, without unfettered access to an interactive mode that befits their identity as women, they face the choice of participating in the male-dominated orders on men’s terms, or giving way to pathologies of symbolic deprivation (for which “hysteria” may serve as an emblematic cover term, not an exhaustive diagnosis). Women, on Irigaray’s account here, do not manifest “penis envy,” but they show the signs of exclusion from an imaginary economy that systemically denies their humanity. Where women cannot express themselves as women, their expressions appear to be distorted, muffled, incoherent versions of “something a man would say (or ‘do’ or ‘show.’ ”

By way of resistance, Irigaray challenges her readers to think and imagine possibilities for social organization that do not presuppose the sacrifice of some proportion of the populace, or of the environment that sustains all (her exhortation rings more clearly now, in the “Incovenient Truth” era, than when she wrote in the 90s). . .

My interst in Irigaray doesn’t depend on her being right-about-everything, but derives from her naming some truths that have not come to expression under the discursive regimens I’ve known elsewhere. That interest intensifies as she rejects both simple submission to the Christian tradition (of the “Father knows best” variety) and a reactive rejection of Christianity in the name of a feminist alternative. Irigaray takes as granted the prevalence of Christianity, and looks within it for the resources to bring to expression possibilities consonant with, but not constrained by, the churches’ understanding of the world. If at last I remain more pervasively entwined in the tradition’s account of itself, I benefit at least from her astringent analysis of what sort of world that account produces, at whose expense.

2007-05-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

Sexes and Genealogies, “Divine Women”

We’re dipping into twop essays from Irigaray, and I’ll address them pretty cursorily online; I’ve already heard some cries of vexation from the seminar about these, so I’ll concentrate my energies on talking through specific problems that arise in our discussion.

That being said, “Divine Women” raises issues that pertain very directly to the questions of representation, self-representation, imagination, expression, and beauty that we’ve been considering all along. Irigaray poses the question of how our self-understandings, shaped by agencies over which we do not exercise control, have limited our growth into the fullness of the possibilities open to us. Specifically, she asks why women cannot become divine (in the way that the Incarnation has united divinity with masculinity).

If we resist hierarchies (the man/woman hierarchy, or state/woman, or a certain kind of God/woman, or machine/woman), only to fall back into the power (pouvoir) of nature/woman, animal/woman, even matriarchs/women, women/women, we have not made much progress.

Irigaray takes her point of departure from the Feuerbachian that God’s identity amounts to the heavenward projection of human identity and aspiration — though she calls attention to the masculinity of the picture Feuerbach sketches. Man can exist, can envision his identity as a history and a project, without reference to women; men and their God define reality and their prospect. Women — without a God to call their own — derive their identity (under current circumstances) through men and men’s God, and women have no access to divinity that has not been mediated by masculinity.

Irigaray plays with God, to elicit clues to how women might have unmediated access to divinity. Adopting Feuerbach’s characterization of God as magnifying mirror for Man, Irigaray imagines the mirror as a clue to women’s emergence/fulfillment as an ideal ( non-male-mediated ideal); hence, in this essay, the mirror signifies the double-sided danger/possibility of reduction to an object of the other’pleasure (on one hand) or emergence as a self-projecting beauty (on the other, an ideal divine woman). A transcendent abstraction does not suffice for women to become; women as much as men need an Incarnation (“what he did not assume, he did not redeem” cast in gender-theological terms). . . .

2007-04-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

Visual Explanations part three

If the preceding chapters dealt with the grammatical rhetoric of visual communication, this chapter concerns composition and imagination. From the epigraph and its accompanying diagram at the bottom of p. 121, I’m enchanted by this chapter. It amplifies the non-functionalist aspect of Tufte’s information-aesthetic; he espouses no ascetical Bauhaus modernism, but delights in the effulgent semiotic abundance of these intricate confections of text, image, and the resonances and echoes and allusions that weave among them.

(Regarding the illustration on p. 124 — I hesitate to challenge the majestic authority of Sir Kenneth Clark, but isn’t the sun in the illustration rising in the East? Must it not be so, especially with the high-church associations of Pugin’s Gothic Revival?)

My fascination with Tufte’s category of confections corresponds to my advocacy of allegorical — or more specifically, “figurative” — biblical interpretation. Just as Tufte’s attention to visual grammar brings rigor and intelligible criteria to fantastic concoctions of images, so attention to the grammar of theological interpretation provides an infrastructure of criteria to lend stability and coherence to figurative reading (especially when these are pursued with attention to the non-verbal dimensions of interpretive practice). The practice of figurative thinking and expression doesn’t entail a retrograde submission to a leaden past, as Mark Tansey’s postmodern confections demonstrate; indeed, it is the modern “absence of reference” that casts figurative modes as a tangle of dangerous chaos.

[More later]

2007-04-26T08:31:00.000-07:00

Visual Explanations part 2

Beginning with chapter 4, Tufte articulates principles for interacting with another’s perception. The principle of the “smallest effective difference” emphasizes the value of permitting an observer to recognize distinctions based on differences that a diagram (or performance, or text) shows; if one designs pointing-lines with the same weight as the lines that compose a diagram, the reader will have a harder job telling these grammatically-different lines apart from one another — and as we know in Writing Boot Camp, the harder we make the reader’s job, the less charity the reader will extend to us, and the less ground we have for expecting the reader to arrive at the conclusion we desire (for which we’ve invested so much energy in composing the image, or text, or performance, in the first place). Differences displayed help us articulate differences explained.

Chapter 5 walks us through the power of parallelism in reinforcing similarity and heightening difference (not incidentally, Tufte — whose mother has written a valuable book on English composition — cites as the paradigm example of parallelism a passage from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Throughout, he affirms (and repeats) the power of adjacency in communication — picking up a point that McCloud makes in his work on comics.

Isn’t the development in the information desnsity allowed by contemporary computer screens striking? The screen on p. 88f. looks to be a 640 × 480 screen; I’m typing this through a screen whose native resolution is 1440 × 900 pixels, giving a tremendously richer field for communication (and that’s not even counting the difference in color resolution in the newer screens). The fact that Tufte can commend this interface as “superb” underlines how far the technology to which we have access has come.

In the context of, and as a supplement to, the marvelous Garofalo/Rarey graphical history of rock, I commend to you Jeffrey Lewis’s “History of Punk on the Lower East Side” (which I may play in class, fair warning). Observe Tufte’s point that the illustration displays the growth of the market for rock music over time (which would be a fair two-axis graph in itself), but also the relation of various performers to one another, to the [always somewhat arbritrary] categories within rock to which they belong, to their history and future, and various other dimensions. The chart doesn’t assign various performers their space in proportion to their market share; that would make it impossible to see some acts, while others occupied large spaces — but it’s a terrific exercise that invites us to consider other possible examples. (I have no recollection of “Brenda and the Tabulations.”:) The cosmonauts’ graphical record of their space flight uses color to add dimensions of information to a layout that fundamentally resembles the history of rock.

[Participants in Gospel Mission class should appreciate Tufte’s comment on the NY Times photo on p. 102. Participants in this seminar will delight to see Tufte cite McCloud on p. 108, n. 3. People with an interest in infromation design and a sense of whimsy will enjoy the video for Royskopp’s song, “Remind Me.”]

Tufte illustrates ways that we can use multiples for effective (and ineffective, misleading) communication with special attention to the grammatical dimensions of tone, color, scale, arrangement, and so on. (Note that the concluding frame of the Ad Reinhardt multiple on pp. 188-119 reminds readers, “Ye must be born again.”) All this analysis serves the end of enhancing our understanding of how visual communication works (and we can easily infer from this conclusions relative to auditory and tactile communication; gustatory and olfactory communication I leave to the side for the moment). If we understand what we’re trying to express and how we’re trying to express it, and if we attend to the grammar of images as well as of language (and the two are not as radically distinct as custom might impel us to think), we have available a stronger, richer repertoire of expression that we can deploy more effectively. And if we care about expressing the truth, our expressions should, presumably, bespeak some of the beauty of holiness about which we’re talking, for which we’re designing, which we’re enacting. (Hence, “Beautiful Theology.”)

That leads us to the last chapter on “confections,” for which I’ll leave a separate post.

2007-04-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

Visual Explanations part 1

I’ll restrict my postings on Visual Explanations somewhat, since Kristin will only be skimming, and I’ve got a lot to square away in relatively little time. I’ll try to put up two posts, one emphasizing the first chapter (and following matter), and the second emphasizing the last chapter (and preceding matter).

I’ve assigned Tufte for a variety of reasons. First, it’s an exquisite example of craftsmanship; this shows us what books look and feel like when someone cares about their quality — and such examples matter to theological communicators, because our vocation involves us in communication about the greatest excellence (which passes all understanding). If we try to communicate about sublime truth in slipshod gestures and haphazard words, we risk conveying to our audiences the message that God, truth, beauty, don’t matter so much. As Thomas Merton says,

We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well. I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead. Saint Paul and Saint Ignatius Martyr did not bother about grammar but they certainly knew how to write . . . . A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book, even though it may be about the love of God. There are many who think that because they have written about God, they have written good books. Then men pick up these books and say: If the ones who say they believe in God cannot ﬁnd anything better than this to say about it, their religion cannot be worth much.*

Or Stan Hauerwas, in his recent commentary on Matthew: “. . . [O]ne of the essential tasks of the church is the ‘care’ of words,” or Gerald O’Collins whom I recollect to have said “A theologian is someone who watches his language in the presence of God” (I’ll look that one up later).

To specifics: the Introduction takes up a premise that informs my interest in this whole theme: “. . . Clarity and excellence in thinking is very much like clarity and excellence in the display of data. When principles of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight” (p. 9). The first chapter sets out some premises about communicating information — setting a scale relative to which the communication can be correlated to other information, applying consistent criteria (measurements) across a body of data, using gestures for maximal information (while eschewing irrelevancy and distraction), finding a way to allow the information to set the agenda for expression (rather than wrenching the information to fit the vehicle of communication, illustrated comically in the map of Britain on p. 24, tragically in the space shuttle catastrophes in subsequent pages).

In subsequent chapters, which I’m traversing quickly and lightly, Tufte makes a case for the paramount value of context for ascertaining what’s important — and not “context” only, but “the right context.” Note — in the context of discussions we’ve had elsewhere about “aggregation” — the point on p. 36, that how you parse data shapes the “obvious” conclusions about what it means. The Challenger engineers presented correct data about launch experience, temperature, and O-ring damage, but presented it in such a way as to impede our perceiving that it was a virtual certainty that a launch temperature in the 20s would entail dangerous damage to the O-rings (the graph on p. 45 shows the data pattern that suggests a curve that has already veered toward increasing frequency and seriousness of O-ring damage by the 50s — 25 or 30 degrees warmer than the day of the Challenger launch). Now, Tufte has the advantage of being able to display the array post facto to reveal what actually happened — but we should allow that his graph doesn’t involve any legerdemain, but the display of plain data on a clearly-marked, evenly-articulated field.

Legerdemain, by contrast, involves manipulating our attention so as to distract us from useful information. Tufte takes up the topic of magic both because it’s an instructive exercise in disinformation, and because the process of illustrating magic helps us understand how to render clear, illuminating visual explanations. His analysis of illustrating objects in motion draws on, yes, the techniques of composing comics that we’ve been studying for several weeks now (cf. p. 61; note in the illustration on p. 62 that Tufte calls attention to the use of blank space as a gutter).

This chapter reinforces Tufte’s polemic against distraction, visual noise that does not contribute to a project’s communicative purpose. His point applies as well to the physical actions of a conjurer (or presider, or a teacher) as to the graphic display of information. What we do affects the shape of our audience’s (or congregation’s, or class’s) attention; though one may well want to eschew deliberation about the communicative quality of actions, the decision to opt for “natural” behavior entails the choice to communicate without such critical attention as heightens the clarity, effectiveness, impact, and precision of our expressions. In this regard, Tufte’s prescriptions relative to making presentations command our vigilant regard (though not, of course, slavish obedience). In the end, we may apply Tufte’s criteria for information design to many more areas of communication than only information design.

*The Sign of Jonas, 56-7.

2007-04-23T11:20:00.000-07:00

Intermezzo

I hope to blog some remarks abouty Prof. Tufte’s Visual Explanations before class on Thursday, but in the meantime I’ve been reminded of how little time remains unto those of us who’re pursuing this course in the confines of an academic term. I consulted Beth and Kristin, and we’ve decided to read Tufte this week, some smatterings of Irigaray (“Divine Women” and “Women, the Sacred, and Money” from Sexes and Genealogies) and Wittgenstein (the Philosophical Investigations) next week; Graham Hughes’s Worship As Meaning the week after; and The Sparrow and The Children of God by Mary Doria Russell (which books I don’t know, but which both Kristin and Beth assure me pertain to our course’s intersts) in the last week.

Since we can squeeze in so little else, I’m giving Beth and Kristin photocopies of various articles. One of my favorites is Terry Castle’s article “Contagious Folly: 'An Adventure' and Its Skeptics” from Critical Inquiry 17, reprinted in Questions of Evidence,” about the friends who traveled back in time to encounter Marie Antoiette at Versailles. I’ll give them copies of Mark Cousins’s essay on “The practice of historical investigation” from Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, and will point them to this essay by John Dixon, that summarizes John Fleming’s book, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis .

2007-04-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

Wait and See

Fun Home was nominated for two Eisner (comics) Awards for the year. I’ll be curious to see how the voters respond to the book.

2007-04-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

Fun Home Advance Discussion

Very much to say about Fun Home, particularly right after having read Understanding Comics. With more time, I’d parse Fun Home for McCloud’s categories with regard to the pyramid of abstraction, the kinds of transitions, the six “steps” of conceptualization and execution — but maybe some of that will come out in class discussion and web comments.

Some points that strike me as particularly pertinent to our course: First, although Bechdel’s narratorial voice dominates the book, I have a difficult time imagining the work as unadorned prose. The comics format intensifies the memoir in a way that pure prose would have a hard time equalling. Bechdel doesn’t have to remind us how rarely her father smiled; we see his stony expression in frame after frame. Likewise the frames powerfully show us resonances between Alison and her father, and the extended quotations — reproducing by hand the appearance of the printed pages — signifies very differently than just quotation marks on a page, or a block quotation. Bechdel uses comics optimally to heightter her literary and graphical gestures; I admire it more, the more I examine it.

Second: Any comments on Bechdel’s use of color?

Third: (Special for our purposes): In a narrative dominated by questions of life and death, of integrity and deception, in which “church” plays a recurring role, what do we as theologians have to say about the extent to which church functions solely as a backdrop? I’m not asking anyone to fantasize about “what I would have said to Bruce” or “young Alison” — but Fun Home shows us what we look like to a particularly apt, alert observer. And we’re invisible.

Fourth: Fun Home challenges us to confront the whole matter of identity and truth-telling, not just with reference to Bruce’s life and death, but with the ways Bechdel illustrates the memoir. She adopts a highly realistic style, incorporates maps and typeset pages, frequently labels incidental objects so as to emphasize their “real” significance, all with the effect of cueing us to read the comic as a very direct representation of what happened. But she also warns us that even when writing in her journal she resorts to ellipsis and even misrepresentation; why would she not deceive her readers? How does a communicator evince trust from an audience, and what happens when trust-building becomes a technique?

Fifth: I would have to check carefully before I made a strong claim about this, but I don’t remember seeing Alison Bechdel as an example in any of Scott McCloud's three books.

More if I think of it.

2007-04-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics ch. 9

OK, again with the disagreement — McCloud’s wistful picture of individuals in radical isolation, whose incapacity to communicate without mediation generates “nearly all human problems,” gets off on the wrong foot. Mediation isn’t an undesirable artefact of our inability perfectly to share thoughts; mediation, with its attendant phenomena of ambiguity, predictable misprision, finitude, and so on, is just how we communicate (James K. A. Smith has an excellent theological book about this premise, The Fall of Interpretation). Or in the words of John Hollander:

The Widener Burying-Ground

In spite of all the learned have said,
We hear the voices of the dead.
Not scholiasts who like Burke and Hare
Turn dead leaves in the living air,
Unlock the Essay and exhume
Philosophy from its dry tomb,
Nor wise embalmers of the text
In humble buckram or perplexed,
Carved, interlaced half-calf, who come
To show how gold they are, and dumb –
We strike from silent lines a fire.
Troped sea-shell, loud Aeolian liar,
Nymph-haunted cave and mountain-peak
Choir with voices that we seek
As, scholars of one candle-end,
We hear the hush of dusk descend.
We unfired vessels of the day,
Built of a soft, unechoing clay,
Grow obdurate of ear at night
When images of voice are bright:
The dreamingale, the waterlark,
Within the present, silent dark
Echo the burden (on these stairs
Mistranslated) the singer bears –
He who packs, with a glowing faith,
In that portmanteau, fame and death.
Our marginalia all insist
– Beating the page as with a fist
Against a silent headstone – that
The dead whom we are shouting at,
Though silent to us now, have spoken
Through us, their stony stillness broken
By our outcry (we are the dead
Resounding voices in our stead)
Until they strike in us, once more,
Whispers of their receding shore,
And Reason's self must bend the ear
To echoes and allusions here.

So McCloud’s “gauntlet” of obstacles that a pure “message” traverses on its way to a receiver’s mind involves a whole litany of tangles. All the aspects of the gauntlet form inevitable parts of a message, not extrinsic deflections of meaning. Without the gauntlet, no communication.

So rather than accepting McCloud’s schema of message and media, we can take this section as a reminder of how very complex are the webs of signification, and how many dimensions of mediation we need to attend to. Thus, when McCloud says “The mastery of one’s medium is the degree to which that percentage [of successful transmission of conceptual content from mind to mind] can be increased, the degree to which the artist’s ideas survive the journey,”* we can reread him to be saying, “The more you want to control someone’s uptake of your communication, the more attention you need to pay to the fullest range of dimensions of your communication.”

His closing series of panels, evocative of the vast power of comics for stimulating imagination and enriching communication (and alluding yet again to Magritte, p. 207 lower right), aptly suggests my interest in the many dimensions of expressive, interpretive practice that extend beyond word-for-word substitution. And, as McCloud assures us, “the truth will shine through.”

--------------------------
* Here’s an interesting “beautiful” point: HTML mark-up permits various ways of signalling the browser to compose a page (and these in turn are complicated by divergences among different browsers, alas). I try to adhere to semantic mark-up conventions when I write HTML, so I distinguish the use of italics for emphasis (a <em> tag) from the use of italics for a foreign language (a generic <i> tag), and so on. When quoting from Understanding Comics, then, what interpretive decision should I make about rendering McCloud’s lettering effects? Often he makes emphatic phrases heavier, obliqued, and larger than surrounding copy; should I thus increase the letter size when I mark up my quoted text? Can I reliably distinguish “emphasis” in his copy from other possible rationales for changing type styles? What about in Hollander’s (typeset) poem above — do I accurately interpret his decision to set one phrase in italics when I mark it with <em> tags, or should I adopt the more neutral (less semantically-precise) <i> tag? And can we make different interpretive decisions about McCloud’s second book, in which he used computer-controlled type to simulate hand-lettering, thus already complying with a roman-italic-bold distinction of type styles?

2007-04-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics ch. 8

One might think that a chapter on “color” in comics would promise less for a seminar on Beautiful Theology than the more semiotically-specific chapters. but no! (Or perhaps you already didn’t assume color was irrelevant.)

Let’ start by agreeing not to tax McCloud for soft-pedalling the extent to which “technology” is already implicated in comcis style even apart from the application of color (lower right, p. 187), as though cheirographic, xylographic, lithographic, engraved, intaglio, screen-printing, and other technologies of monochrome reproduction haven’t affected comics style along with commercial interests.

McCloud’s observations relative to different ways color can affect communication (190-191) do indeed pertain to theologically-interested communication. We need only think of the examples of rubricated printing, color-coded ceremonial (the calendar & vestments), clerical attire (what’s traditional, what’s appropriate, and so on), and stained-glass windows to hit the most obvious ways that color enters into our communications. Imagine, though, that a theologian or congregation took seriously the relation of color to discourse; what might change? How might one anticipate various audiences to respond?

2007-04-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics ch. 7

OK, granted that I don’t have a big investment in “what counts as ‘art,’ ” I appreciate McCloud’s account of art as what the formalists would call “overcoded” communication (or behavior) — expression beyond what is required for transmitting information (“THPLPLP!!” p. 165). My reservations about investing heavily in this definition derive from the extent to which it presupposes a degree of clarity about what constitutes “necessary” information, and about the priority of explicit linguistic data over other modes of communication — but as a heuristic device for exploring some dimensions and purposes of expression, it’ll do fine. Note, though, that when McCloud parses the “evolutionary” “instinctual” roles of art (boy, do glib invocations of evolution and instinct set my teeth on edge — it’s a mark of how much I respect McCloud that I skip past that junk with only a snarky aside), he omits mention of “transmitting information,” “teaching,̶¡; or other such pedestrian communicative actions. I take that omission seriously; it occludes many vital elements of my work and identity as a teacher and preacher.

But McCloud, I think, recoups that lost ground when on p. 168 he allows that “in almost everything we do there is at least an element of art.” If we concentrate on the “how” or expression, we don’t need to ground our accounts of communication in restrictive functional typologies or evolutionary psychology; they’re red herrings. (And McCloud loses traction when he proposes that “some activities have more art in them than others,” his emphasis; the whole survival/not spectrum distracts from more important ideas.) For the purposes about which I care, we can say that certain gestures evoke a greater intensity of attention — and among those who devote heightened attention to that gesture, it partakes of art. But that’s still beside the point.

The claim that creative expression always follows a six-step path, though worth attention for helping clarify certain aspects of expression, oversimplifies and generalizes so painfully that I will skip over it without further comment. OK, not without further comment, but with only the comment that these somewhat-distinguishable elements of expression don’t exhaust the constituent elements of expression (where, for instance, is “attention to audience” here — to name only one missing element?) nor are they sequential or quite separable from one another. These pages make some helpfully points, but they do so despite the rhetoric; it’s a significant weak spot.

2007-04-11T12:07:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics ch. 6

Delightful as the preceding chapters have been, you who know me can understand that the topic of ”Showing and Telling” entails particular joys for me. Look at the bottom right-hand frame on p. 139 — “It’s considered normal in this society for children to combine words and pictures [the continuity with Magritte would have been perfect if McCloud had said ‘images’], so long as they grow out of it.” Without splitting hairs over the specifics here, let’s take the point that contemporary U.S. culture conveys the forceful message that adults derive their most serious information (and entertainment) without pictures; we tend to steer children away from picture books to “chapter books,” and ultimately to books with no illustrations at all.

Note on p. 144 — McCloud ignores, at this point, the familiar motif of the medieval illustration with a text-ribbon that serves variously as a caption or a depiction of spoken words.

I don’t find McCloud’s description of the literary condition of modernity (on p. 147) very convincing; I suspect that this may have to do with what I take to be his very careless use of “meaning,” but it may also involve my relative ignorance about art history, and my somewhat greater acquaintance with twentieth-century literature. That being said, I agree that he’s onto something with the re-emergence of attention to the interaction of glyphs and images, typography and representation, in the early twentieth century.

McCloud’s point (this must have roots in McLuhan, mustn’t it?) that “each new medium begins its life by imitating its predecessors” pertains emphatically to contemporary explorations of unfamiliar modes of communication. To take just one familiar example, note the way that “courseware” tends to facilitate online equivalents for familiar educational interactions.

Note that on p. 152, McCloud doesn’t suggest that comics be used for instruction or reference, even though the “instruction manual” has provided one of the most persistent, widespread venues for comics.

Back to Chapters 4 and 5
On to Chapter 7

2007-04-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics ch. 4 & 5

You may have more to say about the representation of time in comics than I do. I take McCloud’s point, and I would point yet again to ways that the comics sensibility informs church cokmmunication (stained glass windows, stations of the cross, etc.) — but his argument in chapter 4 doesn’t jump-start my inclination to monologize.

Chapter 5 hits some of my favorite topics again, though. “Don’t all lines carry with them an expressive potential?” The “expression” isn’t encoded in any particular shape or shading; “expression” involves the ways that particular designs draw on conventions, and gamble that observers will respond according to those conventions. I emphasize “express,” “infer”(for reception), and conventions, because these (it seems to me) successfully do most of the work that more typical terms in interpretive discourse such as “intention,” “meaning,” and “understanding” fail to do. That is, if I stick to describing what an artist does as “expressing,” and what a hearer/viewer/taster as “inferring,” and the grounds for predictive expression as the conventions that develop for mutually-satisfactory communicative interaction, I don’t need an account of “real meaning.” McCloud’s treatment of lines seems concordant with the semiotics I’m pushing here. (The cultural relativity of these conventions comes to the fore in the bottom right frame on p. 131; I never really grasped the Japanese blood-from-nose convention for “lust.”)

(I tend to suspect that McCloud over-reads the tenor of the lines in the various styles of p. 126, though.)

On p. 134, McCloud calls attention to the specifics of how words are presented in comics for the first time, and he leaves the topic fairly quickly; the graphical quality of glyphic communication, though, pertains more widely (and more specifically to an interest in ecclesiastical communication) than this cursory notice allows.

Back to Chapter 3
On to Chapter 6

2007-04-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics chap. 3

In chapters 1 and 2, McCloud has made his case that the hybrid verbal/graphical form of comics should be treated as a medium of communication with as much claim to “artistic” standing as any purely verbal or graphical mode (and yes, I’m keeping in mind that he and Magritte have just renedered the distinction between “verbal” and “graphical” porous — I’m using the terms for convenience; maybe “glyphic” and . . . what? I suppose “non-glyphic” would be requisite).

In chapter 3, McCloud illustrates the very powerful point that comics (and here his requirement that comics include more than one frame kicks in) communicates as much by what it omits as by what it displays. Moreover — and this really impresses me — he illustrates that comics uses the gutter, the un-shown, to communicate in a variety of different ways. That’s just very cool; the syntax of comics permits silence, the invisible, to signify any of several ways.

I’m hesitant to go all the way with McCloud’s speculation that the “goal-oriented” Western culture accounts for the predominance of certain types of transition in Western comics, whereas the more “meditative” Eastern culture accountsd for the aspect-to-aspect transitions in Japanese comics. There’s a superficial rightness to the observation, but we spent enough time in Gospel Mission attending to hybridity and the internal contestation of cultures to swallow so vast an aggregation of culture and expression. Yes, the styles of traditional art in China and Japan differ from traditional styles of art in Europe — but the comics McCloud examines all arrive in the post-WWII cultural mash-up; I’d try to avoid the gross aggregating that McCloud proposes here.

A couple of thoughts on the last few pages of the chapter: First, I would want to remind us (and McCloud) that although what he says about gutters and gap-filling apply with particular obviousness to comics, his earlier points about words and images imply that we deal with gutters and gap-filling even in glyphic and non-glyphic epxression (and indeed, the topic of “gap-filling” occupies a great deal of attention in literary-critical circles). Second, McCloud’s points in these pages all concern the power of evocation, of the way an expresser can [try to] elicit recollections and anticipations from an inferring audience. As McCloud points out, the effect of an evoked sound, or scent, or feeling, can impress a reader (listener, etc.) all the more forcefully by its remaining implicit. (The implicit is not, after all, bound by the contraints of particularity; if you and I appreciate different sorts of breakfast smells, we will each imagine different things to suit us; whereas if the implicit is made specific, “she smelled Alice’s coffee perking and the chili with which she always smeared her toast,” we stand to be distracted by particulars that don’t match our own memories and imagination.)

Page 93 is worth quoting in extenso in our context (though I won’t reproduce the accompanying images; what difference does that make?):

Here in this studio, I’ve tried to control that process and use it to make my case. But I can only point the way. I can’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go.
All I can do is make assumptions about you and hope that they’re correct --
-- just as we all assume, every day, that there’s more to life than meets the eye.
All I ask of you is a little faith--
--and a world of imagination.

Back to Chapter 2
On to Chapters 4 and 5

2007-04-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

Treason

Micah points to this column by Jon Carroll. I’d quibble (“it’s in my nature!”) with some details, but affirm Carroll’s primary point that all discourse entails selection, exclusion, emphasis, and positing causality — none of which re-present “reality” in itself.

2007-04-03T11:21:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics chap. 2

The convergence of UC with “Words and Images” kicks into high gear with this chapter. Of course, the initial two-page spread on “Le Trahison des Images” triggers our attention to the McCloud-Magritte connection; but note also the image of the leaf at the top center of p. 26, the “word-eye” on p. 28, perhaps the experiment with indistinct shapes on p. 32, the argument involving “meaning” and “resemblance” on pp. 46-47 (culminating in the claim that “words are the ultimate abstraction”), all take up points that Magritte had opened in “Words and Images.”

I don’t agree with McCloud on all these points — we’ll probably end up arguing about a lot of this when we meet to talk about UC — but he provides us with a superb argument to evaluate.

Before I start complaining about the bits I dissent from, what impresses me positively? First, McCloud’s willingness to split hairs productively; his attention to degrees of abstraction provides one strong example. Whether or not we buy his explanation of the effect (“increasing abstraction allows for greater identification”), we should appreciate his attention to this element of comics style, and his attention to its relation to other such elements.

Likewise, his argument in pp. 46ff. that (to adapt Magritte’s phrase), “In a comic, the words are made of the same substance as the images”; in our discussion, this point drew a “So, duh?” but as McCloud points out relative to the comics industry, the world operates as though they were ontologically distinct from one another. Let’s grant that I’m pretty good with words; I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag; but that doesn’t mean that the words and the drawings belong to different metaphysical domains. It just means that I manipulate some of them more effectively than others. Once you begin from the notion that these two discourses interpenetrate and affect one another, you can recognize that different people negotiate that overlap differently. I exercise particular interest in typography, and try to enhance the visually-communicative elements of my verbal practice to the extent possible, but some other writers just pound out Times Roman in single-spaced 8.5 x 11 pages. Some people adhere persistently to typewritten manuscripts, and others hand-write everything.

And although I’ll want to cavil with his assigning “meaning” to the lower-right vertex of his pyramid of comics communication on pp. 52-3 (note that that vertex was “language” on p. 51), that pyramid itself represents a highly ingenious heuristic device for parsing graphical communication into its characteristics. One might see whether you could perform a similar exercise for typefaces, or photographs, or other such items. (I’m interested that although McCloud calls attention to the role that words play in comics, he doesn’t differentiate different sorts of lettering in his analysis — but the examples show pronounced differences in the way they represent words, from Cynicalman’s roughly-lettered phrases to the very plain lettering with even color in the lower right panel (I don’t recognize the comic), with the Fantastic Four’s highly varied emphasis and style and Mary Fleener’s wordless panels. (I omit consideration of Hergé’s lettering, since I don’t recall offhand to what extent that changes in the translated versions of Tintin versus the original French.)

I applaud MCloud’s claim on p. 59: “There is no life here except that which you give to it.” That’s true of bare words as much as with photographs, or etchings, or pen-and-ink sketches. We should go McCloud one better and say, “There is no meaning here except that which we ascribe to it” — with the theological reservation that meaning finally belongs to God (Gen 40:8). . . .

Back to Chapter 1
On to Chapter 3

2007-04-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics ch. 1

I get excited every time I go back to reading Understanding Comics. I’ll probably wax exuberant here from time to time, but as I blog about UC, I’ll try to emphasize lines of continuity with the points of the course. So, first of all, I’m uninterested in the effort to establish comics as an “art”; I can take comics seriously as a mode of communication without adjudicating its status as “art.” Still, the definition McCloud offers — “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” — will serve him well as a point of reference for analyzing his topic.

Now, notice the connections McCloud himself makes to ecclesiastical dimensions of his topic. We’ll rule out “Trajan’s column” (p. 15), since that’s of peripheral relevance to our main themes; “The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus” (blurry image here; you'd think that someone would have posted a good scan somewhere, but I can’t track one down) takes an explicit theological subject, and McCloud notes the pertinence of stained glass windows on p. 20. His strictures against “single-panel” units militates against counting altarpieces and timpanum sculptures, but they complement the point. The church has long, perhaps “always” in an elastic sense of that word, attended to non-verbal modes of communication such as comics (and single panels); if anyone should revisit the value and effects of comics for communication, we should be at the front of the line.

On to Chapter 2

2007-04-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

You'll Get It

Laura calls my attention to this episode of the webcomic Sinfest, alluding subtly to a point Scott McCloud makes in Understanding Comics. You may spot the reference as you read Understanding.

2007-03-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

Understanding Comics Pre-Reading

The “Meaning and Ministry” group got together yesterday to have a marvelous talk about biblical, pastoral, and visual semiotics; we’ll focus more closely on Magritte next week, with (perhaps) some conversation in the comments section, and then go on the Understanding Comics.

But before we begin Understanding Comics, Micah thinks we should look at what Scott McCloud left out. . . .

2007-03-17T05:17:00.000-07:00

“Words and Images” Wrap-Up

I greatly appreciate the help from Pascale and Tom on translating and thinking through the frames of Magritte’s essay. And just because I finally ot around to posting them all, and wil move on to Scott McCloud or Tufte doesn’t mean that I’m not open to further discussion and improvement; I opted to use Blogger for this exactly because I wanted to leave comments open.

Let me pause for an anecdote before I go on with discussing Magritte. A little less than twenty years ago, during the first round of Gallaudet University controversies, I heard a report on NPR that emphasized the cultural difference of life in the deaf community. That rang true to me — it brought into focus a variety of unformed intuitions I’d been wrestling with. Then I participated in a discussion of the Letter to the Romans, where someone referred to Rom 10:17, “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.” In the context of my then-recent epiphany about deafness as culture, Paul’s vigorous assertion of what would become the Reformation watchword fides ex auditu* struck me as gravely problematic. Sure, we can rush to assure everyone that Paul and his heirs were relying on a figure of speech; but if deafness itself constitutes a cultural difference, Paul (the advocate of a blissfully integrated differentiated community) seems to have characterized the defining feature of participation in the community he imagines in culturally-exclusive terms.

So add that to my Wittgensteinian proclivities, my engagement with Derrida and postmodern hermeneutics, and you can trace the beginnings of my sense that more must be going on with textual interpretation than just the substitution of the correct interpretive words for the words of the source text. Intensify that by the power of my resistance to merely academic interpretive discourses, discourses in which theoretically correct conclusions are divorced from practice, and you have most of the roots of the interest that came together in the Poaching on Zion lecture that’s caught up into the Reading Scripture volume, and my argument in “This Is Not A Bible” in the New Paradigms In Bible Study book. Well, almost all of my recent writing.

OK, end of digression. Magritte’s essay, which I first encountered shortly after graduate school, figures in all this as a fulcrum for advancing my thinking toward the hermeneutics I’m now working out. Although I had already bumped my head into Saussure and was immersed in Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, et al., I was groping to pull together the elements of my intuition that all of this pointed to an integrated perspective on communication. As I read through the essay over and over, it finally began to sink in that glyphic communication and graphic communication (or whatever we might call it) could not be as radically distinct as my training in philosophical hermeneutics would have led me to believe. (I had not yet read in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Iconology, nor more than a superficial encounter with Marshall McLuhan).)

In a summary, I’d say that although we have plenty to work out about the individual units of the essay, the whole thing reminds its readers that images and words overlap and infuse one another, that a hermeneutics that tries deliberately or tacitly to treat of verbal meaning in a way that occludes the mutuality of verbal and graphical expression, must fall short of adequacy. Words are a peculiar kind of picture — not simply a picture, but a sort of picture nonetheless. And pictures do not simply reproduce three-dimensional reality in a two-dimensional medium; their selection and editing, their mode-of-representation and style, all of these effect a kind of communication that warrants art-critical queries about “meaning” (even though images don’t “mean” the same way that glyphic communication means).

And after having read Magritte and begun making the connections between expression in images and expression in words (and expression that deliberately involves both), I started thinking differently about biblical (and other textual) interpretation.

* “For this reason, Luther quipped that the ears are the most important organ of a Christian! Thus, fides ex auditu (faith by means of hearing) maintains an important place in traditional Reformation theology.” Peter Anders, 2006.

Beautiful Theology

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about Digital Comics

More Comics Links

Comics Grammar

“Not Just Remembering But Visiting”

Seeing the Bible

Magritte in London

More At The Art Institute

Noli Me Condemnare

Worship As Meaning

Practical Exercise

Philosophical Investigations

Sexes and Genealogies, “Women, the Sacred, and Money”

Sexes and Genealogies, “Divine Women”

Visual Explanations part three

Visual Explanations part 2

Visual Explanations part 1

Intermezzo

Wait and See

Fun Home Advance Discussion

Understanding Comics ch. 9

Understanding Comics ch. 8

Understanding Comics ch. 7

Understanding Comics ch. 6

Understanding Comics ch. 4 & 5

Understanding Comics chap. 3

Treason

Understanding Comics chap. 2

Understanding Comics ch. 1

You'll Get It

Further Reading

Understanding Comics Pre-Reading

“Words and Images” Wrap-Up

Words and Images 18

Words and Images 17

Words and Images 16

Words and Images 15

Words and Images 14

Words and Images 13

Timeout

Words and Images 12

Words and Images 11

Words and Images 10

Words and Images 9

As Sandman

Words and Images 8

Comics News

Words and Images 7

Words and Images 6

On A Related Note

Words and Images 5

Words and Images 4

Jacobs on Tufte

Words and Images 3

Words and Images 2

“Words and Images” 1

The story so far

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