Later, on symbols, he says, "Written lines relate their symbols to their meaning point by point (they "conceive" the fact they mean), while surface relate their symbols to their meanings by two dimensional contexts (they "imagine" the fact they mean--if they truly mean facts and are not empty symbols). Thus, our situation provides us with two sorts of fiction: the conceptual and the imaginal: their relation to fact depends on the structure of the medium" (28).
Well, my friends, I bring to you his challenge of line/surface, conceptual/imaginal with a medium that may or may not combine the two (you tell me!), with my primary text, The People in the Trees (abridged).....Emojis!
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Is this, as Flusser suggests, the (dis)topian future where "imaginal thinking will not succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking" and thus leads to "alienation of humankind, to the victory of consumer society, and to the totalitarianism of mass media" and brings "history to an end in any meaningful sense of that term"?!
Or...will history continue after all?!
Ha, I definitely think this brings history to an end. ;) In all somewhat-semi-seriousness though, I think this is a great challenge, most likely because I have been reading Lacan. Though I cannot claim to fully understand all of Lacan's thoughts as expressed in in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," I do think that his idea that "these very structures [of culture found in tradition] reveal an ordering of possible exchanges which, even if unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language" is applicable here. Though emojis are obviously a relatively new creation, the idea of expressing oneself through symbols, even if only facial cues as symbols, can be located in "the elementary structures of culture." I guess what I am saying is, Lacan sort of reads symbols as text, or says that our unconscious can read symbols as text/derive a whole backstory from one image, and he therefore sort of undermines Flusser's separation of the line and image. You also just attempted that by challenging us to sort out the progression of "The People in the Trees" by reading your images. I like it.
ReplyDeleteI was just talking about emojis in class last week in terms of Lacan... I dig the turtle party that seems to repeat here Rebecca. There also seems to be a Benjamin Button moment with a old man turning into a baby, but he's actually a turtle? Your text also seems to be quite multi-ethnic. And full of people wearing hats. Maybe we should all make our texts into images like this, compare the results?
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ReplyDeleteI thought reading critical theory was difficult until I came upon Rebecca’s post—emojis are not very easy reading either :-(
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, they provide a value that is missing with the written word: they are equally accessible to the literate and illiterate. You ask, Rebecca, if your symbolic rendition of your novel is what Flusser’s assumes will bring "history to an end in any meaningful sense of that term"?! And, then you ask: “Or...will history continue after all?!”
This is a stretch, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while: in Liberia, where Ebola is rampant, many citizens are illiterate. They cannot read the materials given to them that suggest ways to prevent the spread of the disease (which, of course, is crucial.) However, informational posters, composed of essentially emojis (although a bit more graphic,) are plastered wherever Ebola is endemic to provide enough information to get the main idea of preventative care. This blog won’t let me post images in the comment box, but you can access an example of these posters with this link:
http://dalexfinance.com/uploads/imgs/dalex/ebola-fund/ebola-poster-small.jpg
Since we still live in a world in which literacy is not a given, the power of the emoji might be the device of choice for informing people of deadly diseases (or any other humanitarian crisis) in their midst and—in a very real sense—might allow human history to continue.
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ReplyDeleteI was so excited when you talked about putting together this post, and now that I have a better idea of what you were moving toward, I find it even more intriguing. I think that every few decades a culture like ours (i.e., mobile and global) goes through this sort of intergenerational language barrier in which the difficulties of cross-temporal communication seem almost to equal linguistic "language barriers." That's my first thought when looking at your example. My next involves wondering whether images are more narrowly constitutive of ideas than words, or the other way round. I suspect that spoken/written language controls our development of ideas just as much as pictures do, but more invisibly. What does this mean for the conventional wisdom about books leaving more to the imagination than film? :-O
ReplyDeleteYou guys are good! Bethany, I would love to see everyone's texts in emoji form--although I don't know that we would be able to find *appropriate* ones for yours. Jess, I love the connection with Lacan. This also make me think of Derrida's "there is nothing outside the text." And Sally, I definitely think there is function in this form. While I don't think there's much of a future in emoji novels--the challenge in deciphering it being the large barrier, of course--I do think you make an interesting point about illiteracy, and perhaps to expand on that, on interpretation in general. In that regard, I wonder what Scholes would think of my emoji novel--literature, non-literature, or heaven forbid, pseudo-literature/creative writing? Is it something we interpret? Or we merely "read"?
ReplyDeleteRebecca, I think you brought the old white men whose art I wrote about in my post into the present, and, well, emojis are just better! I am curious about pictures as objects in this context. Is each individual picture a surface or are they to be read as an overall picture? What's the difference between an emoji language and a language of symbols?
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