Saying What We See

Visual Literacy and the Rhetoric of Images

An Open Coursebook
for Academic Writing and Composition

by Thom May

This book was created with the support of an Open Educational Resources grant from the Center for Teaching and Learning at Baruch College.

I’m very grateful to Pamela Thielman, the Open Educational Resources Coordinator at CTL, who offered help, advice, and editorial assistance with the book throughout the process and without whom the book would not exist nor be copyright compliant.

Thanks also to Manifold OER specialist Robin Miller for guidance through the Manifold publication process, especially the manifest coding that enables the crucial contents page to exist.

To learn more about Open Educational Resources click here and for context on OER grant funding in New York see this article.

Preface

The aim of this book is to encourage and guide the development of visual literacy in writers. The practical advantages of developing these skills are obvious: the ability to describe art and film in a way that shows knowledge of how they are constructed is a useful tool for academics, journalists, and the socially agile alike. But I hold a deeper conviction than just an awareness of the usefulness of these skills. I believe that the challenge of translating the visual language of images into words is such a powerful and difficult task – when you get into it – that it can greatly benefit the development of academic writing in anyone willing to explore it deeply, not just those concerned with writing about visual culture specifically.

We should all be visually literate. Many aspects of the specific nature of life and art in the twenty-first century can be explained in terms of how rapidly images can be created and transmitted now as opposed to thirty years ago. This proliferation of images affects the daily substance of most people’s lives as powerfully as writing once did, from the videos we see on our phones first thing in the morning to the memes and birthday messages we share online, to the dating profiles made and deleted and the bus stop video screens we pass everyday on the way to work. Often the most successful words are those accompanied by or made into images, while many of the most important images are provocations for important words and actions. It is a commonplace idea that images are as powerful as words in our time; we might then begin to wonder about developing intellectual armor that can protect us from them being used to overwhelm us, as some intend for them to do.

Whether images really have taken primacy over words in the political, financial, artistic, and social worlds is open for debate, but words remain a powerful tool: they are still mostly the way we process, critique, control, and alter the course of what I’ll refer to as our “image world”. This book suggests that the task of becoming a visually-literate writer, capable of understanding attempts by images to coerce and manipulate us, is part of our responsibility to make ourselves informed citizens and voters. Visual literacy is rhetorical analysis, but the rhetoric belongs not to essay writers or public speakers but to the image makers, the unseen speakers behind the creations that dominate our imaginations and shape our lived realities.

This book reflects the belief that visual literacy can bring whole new ways of seeing, that it can alter one’s daily experience of images, that it can activate parts of the brain that writing about other writing misses, and that it can teach a student a whole new language that enables a new way of looking. And, like all writing, learning to write about images involves reading a lot of writing too, so this book is intended to guide a student through some of the key writings on images of the past and present as models for their own explorations.

The first step to visual literacy is a simple one: saying what we see.

Introduction to Compositional Analysis

To analyze the composition of an image is to explain how it works. Being able to identify and articulate how an image works requires an understanding of what we mean by “works”.

In writing, we always know where we’re supposed to start. But in a painting, where we start and where we stop is up to us – sort of. Our eyes are guided by principles that we are not always aware of, but which painters, photographers, and filmmakers use to control the order that we take in an image.

Look at any famous painting. Where did your eyes go first? Can you explain what drew them there? Is there something the painter has done to make sure your eyes are guided to that point first?

Then – and this might be a more interesting question – where did your eye go second? And third? What shape does your eye draw on the painting? How is the painter guiding your eye from point to point using the painting? These are the kinds of movements we make subconsciously when we take in a painting. Being able to say why they happen that way is the beginning of compositional analysis.

One exercise for developing compositional analysis skills is to draw the route your eye takes, from the first focal point to the last, around a painting. Number each point where your eye stops. You can do this on blank paper and see the way your eye has been guided around the painting, or onto the image itself, to show the places where you stopped. Doing this exercise will often expose how small details of a painting are actually being used to control your experience of the painting, much like a novelist thoughtfully orders the plot of their novel.

The following exercises will guide you through this strategy using a famous painting by Vincent van Gogh called Starry Night. You can click the link below to visit the painting:

The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, (1889) Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Exercises: Starry Night

These exercises are designed awaken the core skills of compositional analysis, some of which you will already have. The way we decode images is an intuitive one that most of us will learn perhaps before anything else, even as babies.

Exercise 1: Describe

Look at van Gogh’s Starry Night. You’ve probably seen it before, maybe in passing, maybe in an art class, or maybe you’ve looked at it up close and personal for twenty minutes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You might know a few things about it already, or something about the mythology of its painter and his life.

Forget all that. Instead, start writing. Set a timer for ten minutes. Describe everything you can about the painting, the colors and how they change, the brush strokes and how they move, the shapes and lightness and darkness and the feelings it evokes and how it does so.

Exercise 2: Draw

Reread your description. Observe what you focused on first. What did you focus on second? What drew you from one to the other? Answer these questions in your mind as you analyze your own response to the painting.

Then make a drawing. Draw a frame the same shape as the Starry Night painting. Inside the frame, circle the area of the frame where your eye went first when you looked at the painting. We’ll call this the first focal point. Then draw a circle around the second point your eyes stop at, and draw a line between the first and second focal points. Do this until you’ve charted the route your eye takes across the whole of the painting, noting where it ends.

Exercise 3: Explain

Once you’ve completed these two tasks, you’ll have a diagram of the way you “read” this painting, and you’ll have an explanation of the way you see the painting in front of you. Write a final paragraph without a timer that explains why your eye moves from each point to the next. Find your reasons within the painting: which line, which color shift, which figure looking in a particular direction causes you to move from point to point.

In the next section, we’ll discuss the compositional techniques that are used to control your eye and give them names so we have a shared language for explaining them.

Chapter One: The Principles of Composition

The first principle of compositional analysis is identifying how your eye moves around a painting and being able to describe that movement. The principles that follow here build upon this idea. They become more technical sounding: this is only because there’s a need to give a name to the principles so they can easily be referred to. Donis A. Dondis calls these principles the “syntactical guidelines for visual literacy” (20), arguing that they’re more like grammatical rules than technical tricks: they explain why things are in the order they’re in, like a language. This section is about establishing a shared language for talking about images, so think of it as a lesson in the language of images rather than a secret specialist skill reserved for artists.

These principles are derived from Dondis’s book A Primer of Visual Literacy. They are very simplified explanations, so if you’re interested in knowing more about Dondis’s theories of how we intuitively decode images, I recommend reading the chapter of the book titled “Composition: The Syntactical Guidelines for Visual Literacy” (especially if you’re an artist).

The exercises which follow the explanation are devoted to helping you learn to use these terms: the terms themselves are incredibly useful for describing how paintings work, of course, but they remain powerful for everything from film stills to photographs to graphic design to ads and memes too.

Balance

Sense perception comes before thought. By this I mean that most of the time our senses are not something we think about. Our ability to identify something we’re looking at usually happens before we are conscious of our brain trying to work it out. Before even identifying objects, though, in any visual field our eye looks for which way is up.

This is a search for balance and it is primal – we rely on it to orient ourselves safely in the world. Imagine waking up in the morning and not being able to identify whether you were standing or lying down or upside down or on your side. When we confront a painting, this part of our brain is triggered in the same way: we search for the horizontal axis and the vertical axis in our field of vision.

After we identify these axes, we know which direction gravity is working in, so we can identify what’s balanced and what’s unbalanced, what’s about to fall and what represents a danger, and what’s safely planted on the ground. Take a look at this picture of a man balancing – is he balanced or unbalanced? Leaning or falling? What about the brain and the heart? What if you look at it from a different angle?

Stress

The counterpart to balance is stress. When things are unbalanced, it produces a response in our brains and even in our bodies. We might unconsciously tighten muscles or flinch as we witness something about to fall. This can be true of images too. Try tuning into the feelings an image like the one above produces in you; it’s a good way to begin articulating the unconscious responses we’ve learned to the things we see.

Stress goes beyond just balancing acts and falling over, however. It goes back to our brain’s search for which way is up, and what happens when it can’t work it out. Compare this Mondrian painting (first) with this Kandinsky painting (second).

Mondrian, Piet. Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. 1930, National Museum, Belgrade.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Composition 8. 1923, Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Your brain can likely identify the horizontal and vertical axis comfortably with the Mondrian. You probably find that your eye finds and follows the black vertical and horizontal lines top to bottom and left to right. But in the Kandinsky, you might find that your eye scrabbles across the painting, trying to find the axes. You will probably find them eventually – but it will take longer than with the Mondrian. That period of searching can be referred to as the stress that the painting causes.

Leveling and Sharpening

An artist can use the mind’s response to balance and stress to artistic effect. Imagine a dot dead center in the middle of a piece of paper. That dot is levelled – it is even, balanced, and level with the whole of the composition. It produces no stress in our mind’s eye.

Now imagine the dot in the bottom right corner. The dot has made the composition slightly unbalanced, which is called sharpening. In order to find order in the image, our eye might imagine vertical, horizontal, and then diagonal axes, trying to make sense of the position of the dot. The dot might not sit on an axis, but our brains will be able to understand its position in relation to the imagined axes.

A dot that doesn’t seem to sit evenly related to an axis has gone one step further than sharpening into ambiguity. This is a state where it’s difficult to find any balance at all. We might also call this chaos.

How much stress does the position of each of the following dots cause?

With imaginary axes, we can understand the position of the dots more comfortably – or not. Note the importance of the distance from multiple axes as a form of balance:

In the second, the dot isn’t as stressful when we think of it as near the center of the section it’s been divided into. But the third continues to produce stress, even with all the axes drawn in, because it doesn’t correspond to a balanced position relative to any of them.

This is a very complex way to talk about a few dots on pieces of paper. But it acts as a learning tool for understanding the principle of leveling and sharpening an image, which you’ll see used in much more subtle ways by artists in the future.

Lower-left Preference

Look back at the Mondrian painting above (the red square).

Do you find the image satisfying? Does it seem balanced in ways that go beyond simply enjoying balance and straight and horizontal lines? One reason for this might be what Dondis calls the “preference for lower left”. Dondis argues that our eyes scan a painting somewhat like a book: we start at the top of the page and read downwards. We then scan left to right. This causes our eye to do a loop in the lower-left corner, as shown below.

This movement might be more specific to cultures that read from left to right. But the result is that many of us tend to focus most on the lower left of an image and find that when a composition puts its most important activity or “information” here that the image is less “stressful” and more balanced. Notice in the Mondrian painting the structural focus of the composition on the lower-left, with all of the activity placed along the vertical and horizontal edges. Does the rotated version below seem like a less balanced or more stressful composition to you now? Why?

Attraction and Grouping

The idea of attraction and grouping is that our eyes draw connections between similar objects. The best example of this is the way our eyes are able to work out what a “connect the dots” image is before we have actually drawn in the line that connects everything together. As a child, this is usually less true, and there’s more of a surprise at the end when the object we’re drawing is revealed. So as we’ve grown up we’ve developed the ability to connect the dots in our minds. This ability is called attraction and grouping.

With a dot drawing, there is only one “group”: the dots. But in an image involving a series of squares and circles, for instance, your mind will usually connect the squares together into a shape and the circles into a separate shape. Notice in the Frida Kahlo painting at the end of this chapter how the black strands of hair form a separate group in the painting to the white one: color is also involved in grouping.

Positive and Negative

Images where it is difficult to tell what is positive and what is negative fascinate us. Positive and negative are not about black and white, but rather about what dominates an image (positive) and what becomes the background (negative). When it’s unclear, our eyes move between two states, first seeing one as positive and the other negative, and then seeing it the other way around. The use of “negative space”, large patches of vacant background in an image, is an artistic strategy. Watch out for it in Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas.

Consider the following images and determine whether the black or the white seems to be positive or negative to you. Can you see it the other way?

Those are the basic compositional principles for describing an image. Learning to use them will improve your ekphrastic abilities – your ability to describe the technical structure of an image. The following exercise will encourage you to practice using these new terms on a painting, and then to see how they’re mirrored in literary techniques in a poem.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Bruegel, Pieter. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1560, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium.

Dondis, Donis A. A Primer of Visual Literacy. MIT Press, 1973.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Composition 8. 1923, Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Mondrian, Piet. Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. 1930, National Museum, Belgrade.

Exercises: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Bruegel, Pieter. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1560, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium.

Exercise

Without writing, look at the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel. Note where your eyes go first, and then how they move around the painting. Think about what makes your eyes move that way – what has the artist done to guide your eye?

Now begin to write. Describe how each of the following principles works to guide your eyes. Try to write prose (standard full grammatical sentences, organized in paragraphs) rather than bullet points. Draw connections between each of the “principles” to show how they work with each other to create their effects, as well as how they work on their own.

The principles:

Balance

Stress

Leveling

Sharpening

Lower-left Preference

Attraction and Grouping

Positive and Negative

Exercise: Diego on My Mind

Kahlo, Frida. Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana). 1943, Gelman Foundation Collection, Mexico City.

Exercise

Without writing, look at the painting by Kahlo. Note where your eyes go first, and then how they move around the painting. Think about what makes your eyes move that way – what has the artist done to guide your eye?

Now take a pen and paper. Describe how each of the following principles works to guide your eyes. Try to write prose (standard full grammatical sentences, organized in paragraphs) rather than bullet points. Draw connections between each of the “principles” to show how they work with each other to create their effects, as well as how they work on their own.

The principles:

Balance

Stress

Leveling

Sharpening

Lower-left Preference

Attraction and Grouping

Positive and Negative

Chapter Two: Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is a word that means something that describes art. Often the thing doing the describing is art itself: much poetry has been written about paintings, for instance, just as painters have painted images of sculptures and ceramics made by other artists. Other examples might be a short story about an opera or a piece of music that responds to a film. All of these may be considered ekphrastic. But a film or music critic who describes the piece of work they’re considering is also engaging in ekphrasis, as are students of literature and painting who describe the work they’re studying in their own words before they move on to analyzing it.

Ekphrastic writing is an act of translation: it is the challenge of translating a work of art from one medium into another, reforming it for a new purpose or context, which might be analysis or it might be explanation or it might be to create new art from the old. Inevitably, the viewer or reader’s own “eye” will impact what they choose to describe, in what order, and in what way, and what they accidentally or intentionally leave out. Evaluating your own or other’s ekphrastic writing will reveal the values and interests of the ekphrastic writer. Some writers deliberately use this fact to create rhetorical, political, and artistic effects that build on another’s work, as both Anne Sexton and W.H. Auden do in their poems about two great paintings, discussed below.

While much academic writing will rely on rhetorical analysis – the analysis of how a writer or speaker makes an argument – in order to develop visual literacy, you must be good at ekphrasis alongside rhetorical analysis. The origins of the words ekphrasis and rhetoric (both Ancient Greek words) is a useful one for illustrating how they fit together. The word ekphrasis comes from “speaking” (phrasis) “out” (ek), while the origin of “rhetoric” is simply “speaker” (rhetor). So while ekphrasis involves “speaking out” about a piece of artwork, rhetorical analysis is interested in who the speaker – or artist, or poet, or filmmaker – is and what they’re doing to achieve the effects that the artwork, essay, or argument demonstrates.

You cannot successfully analyze the rhetorical effects of an artwork or text without being able to describe it effectively, and you cannot respond to an artwork without leaving a trace of your own preconceptions inside of that description. The challenge of developing visual literacy is one that requires advanced ekphrastic as well as rhetorical capabilities. The following pages will aim to help you develop those advanced capabilities and prepare you to write essays that perform “rhetorical analysis” on images.

The good news: You’ve already begun to write “ekphrastically” with your exercises on compositional analysis. Now it’s time to look at how other writers use ekphrasis to engage with art.

Works Cited and Further Reading

The following works are either cited in the chapter or used in my teaching about ekphrasis. Note that the citations are in MLA (Modern Languages Association) format. Mastering a citation format will be an important part of demonstrating competent academic writing and practice and an integral part of preventing accusations of plagiarism.

Many guides can be found online for how to accurately cite almost anything in an essay. Throughout this book you’ll find paintings, poems, chapters, essays, films, anthologies, and books cited.

Auden, W.H. “Musée des Beaux Arts”. The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden, Random House, 1945.

Bruegel, Pieter. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. 1560, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Belgium.

Foucault, Michel. “Las Meninas”. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books, 1994.

Kahlo, Frida. Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana). 1943, Gelman Foundation Collection, Mexico City.

Marshall, Kerry James. Untitled (Studio). 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Sexton, Anne. “The Starry Night.” The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

van Gogh, Vincent. The Starry Night. 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Velázquez, Diego. Las Meninas. 1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Walker, Kara. Gone. 1994, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Exercise: Ekphrastic Poetry

Return to your description of Starry Night from the introduction chapter. Read over it and look at the painting again (there are very high-resolution copies online that you can use to look at the painting really closely). Notice what you focused on.

Now find the poem “Starry Night” by Anne Sexton. It is available in books and online.

Looking at the poem, answer the following questions about Anne Sexton’s take on Starry Night.

What does Sexton mean by “The town does not exist”?

What is the effect of describing the tree as “like a drowned woman”? Is it how you understood the dark figure in the foreground of the painting?

Why does Anne Sexton think the sky is “hot” and “boiling”?

“The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars” might make us think that Sexton sees the sky as the inside of a snake or dragon’s mouth. What other details of the painting support this dark interpretation of the sky?

The speaker in this poem is clearly in a powerful emotional state. What other ways does it affect their interpretation of the painting?¹

Look back at your earlier work and the painting. How is the interpretation of van Gogh’s painting in this poem different to the way you see or saw the painting? Has the way you see the painting now been affected or changed by the poem?

We might think of the speaker as Anne Sexton, or she might be writing as Vincent van Gogh as he paints, or she might be writing as someone else looking at the landscape or at Van Gogh’s painting.↩

Exercise: Musée des Beaux Arts

Exercise

Find the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden and then respond to the following essay prompt:

In Musée des Beaux Arts, what does Auden present as the most important feature of Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus? Compare three features.

This is as assignment for a mini essay. Use integrated quotations from the poem and analyze each quotation. Format the essay in MLA with a Works Cited (even when you’re only using one source, you still need a Works Cited like the one below). Ask your instructor for a word count requirement.

Works Cited

Auden, W.H. “Musée des Beaux Arts”. Emory English Department. http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html. Accessed 28th July 2020.

Exercises: Diego on My Mind

Kahlo, Frida. Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana). 1943, Gelman Foundation Collection, Mexico City.

Exercise

Find the poem “Diego On My Mind” by Pascale Petit. Read the poem and respond to the following essay prompt:

In Pascale Petit’s poem “Diego On My Mind”, what details does Petit focus on from Kahlo’s painting and how does she transform them into a narrative from the perspective of Kahlo? Consider three details.

This is as assignment for a mini essay. Use integrated quotations from the poem and analyze each quotation. Format the essay in MLA with a Works Cited (even when you’re only using one source, you still need a Works Cited like the one below). Ask your instructor for a word count requirement.

Works Cited

Petit, Pascale. “Diego on my Mind”. What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo. Black Lawrence Press, 2011.

Writer’s Corner

Writing the Visual Literacy Essay

By this point, over the course of your writing about various paintings and ekphrastic poems you will have practiced the basics of visual literacy. You have:

Described the painting

Broken down the composition of the painting

Discussed another writer’s interpretation of the painting

Explored your own interpretation of the painting in contrast to another writer’s

We might describe this process as:

Description of an image or object

Explanation of its inner structure and how it works

Exploration of other writers’ thoughts about the image

Ideas about others’ opinions that represent original thought.

Otherwise written as:

Ekphrasis > Analysis > Research > Synthesis

This writing formula isn’t limited to writing about images. This is a structure that can be used to produce an effective academic research essay on almost any subject. It is also the format of many reviews, journals, newspaper and magazine articles, books, blogs, and other forms of informative, analytical writing.

A visual literacy essay would use something like the following prompt:

Find a painting you want to discuss. In 1000 words, follow the formula above for describing and analyzing the painting. Then find an example of another writer discussing the painting (find this before you start the essay) and compare and contrast your response to theirs.

You would need to describe the painting, analyze it, introduce another writer’s ideas about the painting, and then make a judgement on the painting using your own and your source’s ideas that you couldn’t have come to before you started the essay.

Writer’s Corner

Writing Academically: Integrated Quotations

The following two sections offer a guide to two important aspects of writing as an academic: integrated quotations and sentence control. Both are skills that any writer can continue to develop over the course of their life as soon as they have a good understanding of how to do them effectively. The first, “integrated quotations”, is a useful piece of terminology for something that on the surface seems quite simple and we do naturally in speech all the time: reporting someone else’s words.

Integrated Quotations

Being able to add quotations into your own sentences is a key part of almost all academic writing. Being able to do it not just accurately but also smoothly is the sign of a capable writer and when a writer struggles with it, it can really disrupt the flow of their writing.

In fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, and magazines, quotations are often allowed to stand alone. They don’t need to be “integrated”. But in more formal writing, like the kinds of academic writing this book is designed to train you for, quotations almost always need to be integrated.

An “integrated” quotation is one where the quote sits as part of a frame sentence in a grammatically correct way. There are two ways to integrate: a “colon quotation” and a full “integrated quotation”.

Colon quotations look like this:

The nature of colon quotations is that, unsurprisingly, they rely on a colon: “The quotation has been given an introductory sentence and a colon to tell us the quotation is connected to that sentence”.

Integrated quotations look like this:

The trick of an integrated quotation is to join the frame sentence and the quotation in a way that makes “a single, grammatically accurate sentence, that probably wouldn’t make sense if you removed the two parts from each other”.

So one way of thinking about the difference between the two is that one relies on two separate whole sentences and the other relies on one single whole sentence. That means you can’t have:

The nature of colon quotations is that, unsurprisingly: “been given an introductory sentence and a colon to tell us the quotation is connected to that sentence”.

Or

The trick of an integrated quotation is to join the frame sentence and the quotation in a way “if you don’t have a single, grammatically accurate sentence, that probably wouldn’t make sense if you removed them from each other”.

You probably have a degree of practice with both of these types of quotation integration already, especially if you’ve done lots of close analysis of individual quotations in a book in English class. But being able to name them should give you greater control over which you choose to use, and being good at using them will make your writing seem smooth and professional.

Side note: Quotation is the noun, quote is the verb. That means we quote another writer in our essay and we insert a quotation. However, in normal speech, it’s typical to call something “a quote” as a shortened version of quotation. It’s only important to observe the rule in writing.

Writer’s Corner

Writing Academically: Sentence Control

Sentence control is about being aware enough of the subtle effects of different sentence types that you can use them to control the way your reader takes in information. Sound cool? It is.

Sentence Control

Returning to think about sentence types, possibly for the first time since middle school, is important in a similar way to integrated quotations. It is about becoming more in control of exactly what you’re doing with your writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Read back through the paragraph you’re reading right now and you will notice the way it’s constructed. The first three lines are three different sentence types: complex, simple, and compound.

It is about becoming more in control of exactly what you’re doing with your writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Simple sentence: a subject and a verb. In this sentence, the subject and verb are placed in the first two words. “It”, the subject, and “is”, the verb. The rest of the sentence is an extension of those two words and can’t exist without them. That makes it a simple sentence, the same as “The cat sat on the mat”.

Read back through the paragraph you’re reading right now and you will notice the way it’s constructed.

A compound sentence joins two simple sentences together. The most well-known chemical bond between two sentences is “and”, but there are thousands of alternatives. Note how the two parts of the sentence have their own subject-verb pair so you can separate the sentences and they can survive on their own ( “you’re reading” and “you will notice”).

Returning to think about sentence types, possibly for the first time since middle school, is important in a similar way to integrated quotations.

A complex sentence has a main clause and a subordinate clause. The subordinate clause relies on the main clause. You can tell the two clauses apart because if you extract the subordinate clause from the sentence the sentence still makes sense, but the clause doesn’t. I can’t call “Possibly for the first time since middle school” a whole sentence. But “Returning to think about sentence types is important in a similar way to integrated quotations” is a complete sentence. The sentence is more structurally complex than the others – hence the name.

Who cares? How could this possibly help my writing? Should I start using random sentence types to seem like a more varied and interesting writer?

Sentence types guide your reader through a paragraph. They tell the reader which piece of information is important. They tell your reader which information is connected to, or relies on, or supports another piece of information. If you write without knowing how to control that, you’re painting with your fingers when you could be using a brush. You’ll fail to guide your audience from focal point to focal point effectively.

Example

Read the following paragraphs and notice how your focus changes in the different versions.

1.

It was nature and the people living closely to it that first stirred van Gogh’s artistic inclinations. In this he was not alone. Landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art. This was driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city. Many artists sought out places resembling earthly paradises. Here they could observe nature firsthand. This allowed them to feed its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work. Van Gogh was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside. His early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes. They were rendered in dark, moody tones.

2.

It was nature and the people living closely to it that first stirred van Gogh’s artistic inclinations, which he was not alone in, as landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art, because artists were driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city to seek out places resembling earthly paradises, where they could observe nature firsthand, feeding its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work, and Van Gogh himself was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside, and as such his early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes, rendered in dark, moody tones.

The first paragraph is a series of simple sentences. It starts well but quickly becomes difficult to follow. It becomes rhythmically repetitive, but more importantly, each of those periods is forcing us to stop on the information we’re reading, like a focal point. When every sentence is a focal point, all of the information seems equally valuable, and so its hard to know what’s most important.

The second paragraph is the same text rewritten as a complex compound sentence. We don’t get a chance to stop on any of the information, and it gives us the sense that we’re supposed to treat all of the information as one big piece, rather than lots of connected pieces.

Now read the final version of the paragraph, as it was published by the Museum of Modern Art in an essay about van Gogh called “Emotion, Vision, and a Singular Style”:

It was nature, and the people living closely to it, that first stirred van Gogh’s artistic inclinations. In this he was not alone. Landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art. Driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city, many artists sought out places resembling earthly paradises, where they could observe nature firsthand, feeding its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work. Van Gogh was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside; his early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes, rendered in dark, moody tones.

Notice how the writer produces dramatic pauses in the paragraph with simple sentences (“In this he was not alone”) that also tell us that this is an important piece of information to the essay (it’s important to note that van Gogh was not the only person painting landscapes). They also connect key ideas together into causal chains (“Driven by dissatisfaction… many artists sought… where they could observe… feeding into their work”) that allow us to understand how the ideas in the sentences are related to each other and what they add up to mean.

One final note: colon quotations are sort of like compound sentences with a colon instead of an “and”. Integrated quotations are more like simple or complex sentences – the quote just has to fit with whatever type of sentence it all adds up to make.

You can find the full essay on van Gogh from the MoMA here.

Chapter Three: Aura

In early 1940 Walter Benjamin was living in Paris, having just been released from a prison camp south of the city. As a Jew, his German citizenship had been stripped from him by the Nazis the previous year, leaving him without a nationality or a legal right to be in France. As the Nazis forced their way into France, Benjamin was forced to flee by land. He traveled south, narrowly escaping the Nazis as they entered Paris and came searching for him. He traveled through the Pyrenees mountains carrying his only remaining belongings as well as a black leather suitcase full of papers and writings that he wouldn’t be parted from. He crossed the Spanish border into, he thought, safety.

Some of those papers in the suitcase might well have included a copy of his important essay from five years earlier, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Perhaps more than any other essay about art in the 20th century, this essay has had a profound and wide-reaching impact on the way people think about art and how it is spread across the world. Many common ideas about an artwork’s “aura”, about the role of history and politics in our reception of art, and about the impact of the “reproducibility” of art on how we view it all come from this essay, and they have only become more relevant today, especially as we settle into a world driven by an image-circulation system we call “the internet”.

The essay is in many parts and makes a range of arguments that are sometimes easy to misunderstand. This is due to the way they occasionally appear more simple than they actually are, which is partly due to the plainness of Benjamin’s writing. The most common misapprehension about Benjamin’s essay is that Benjamin’s conception of art’s lost “aura” at the hands of mechanical reproduction is either a wholly positive or negative effect. By “mechanical reproduction”, we might take Benjamin to mean medieval Chinese woodcut printing or the Gutenberg printing press as much as the lithography, photography, and automated printers of Benjamin’s time, or the websites and social media of our own. It is too simple to say that Benjamin thinks that the ability to “mechanically” reproduce artwork is a bad thing because it destroys the “aura” of an original work of art. In fact, Benjamin suggests, the destruction of aura might in some ways be considered a positive, democratizing force on art and politics.

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (sometimes translated as “Technical Reproducibility”) requires close attention in order to unpick what might seem like a simple argument. But some things from the essay have stuck around for a long time in the world of art, and the idea that old paintings have an aura that can be destroyed by reproduction is the main one. What this “aura” consists of is a more difficult question. Who can see or feel the aura? How is it made? What is it made of? Why does reproducing art destroy it? It can help to apply these questions to a particular work of art to work out some answers and begin to explore the more advanced depths of the essay. Take the Mona Lisa, for instance.

da Vinci, Leonardo. Mona Lisa. 1503, Louvre Museum, Paris.

The painting Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci sits in the Louvre Museum in Paris behind an inch of bulletproof glass. Tourists line up for long periods of time to see the painting even amid bustling crowds and distanced by a security cordon, stretching to get a glimpse of a portrait that is only two and a half feet high. Many people try to get a photo of the Mona Lisa while they’re there, even though high quality photos are freely available online or in books like this one.

Grigas, Victor. Crowd Looking at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Photograph. 25 June 2014. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Why? Why do people from every continent seek out this painting from 1503 of a seated woman and cram into uncomfortable surroundings to look at it from a distance and take photos of it in person? It’s a question that goes right to the heart of Benjamin’s essay. Benjamin would say that the painting has aura, a kind of residue of history that exists only in the original copy. To get a proper understanding of aura, you’ll need to read Benjamin’s essay in full. But take note here of the ways that aura is capable of making people act – even “rational”, modern people – unusually. We might describe people’s relationship to images here as irrational, but we might also notice that it’s one that matches the behavior of our ancient ancestors towards images, as W.J.T. Mitchell argues in What Do Pictures Want?. It’s also important to note here that even though the Mona Lisa can be mechanically reproduced, it has somehow retained its aura (perhaps even gained some), suggesting a limit to Benjamin’s theory.

Publicity photo of Charlie Chaplin for the film Modern Times (1936).

An illuminating artwork to look at alongside “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a seminal (and hilarious) film made by Charlie Chaplin in 1935 and released in 1936, around the same time as Benjamin’s essay. The film, named Modern Times, is about the impact of the modern world on the modern mind and the modern worker, and has been written about as both an example of great political art and great comedy. If mechanical reproduction is destroying the aura of art, what is it doing to us as people and a society? This film offers some answers to that question, and the film and the essay can illuminate one another in interesting ways as a result. The film is also a great introduction to the impact of mechanical reproduction and labor in the 20th century, the topic of our final chapter.

By the time Walter Benjamin was being pursued by the Nazis through France, Charlie Chaplin was making a film called The Great Dictator. It’s another good companion to Benjamin’s essay because it’s possible to think of it in terms of aura in a different way. Chaplin’s parody of Hitler, Adenoid Hynkel, seems to be a “reproduction” of Hitler that attacks the aura that Hitler’s own filmic propaganda created so effectively (more on that in the next chapter): sometimes known as the “cult of the führer”. The political nature of this aura-attack is already predicted by Benjamin at the end of his essay when he says that after aura is destroyed art “begins to be based on another practice – politics”.

Unfortunately for Walter Benjamin, he would not escape the violence that Hitler promised to Jews in his propaganda. When Benjamin was across the border into Spain, the group of Jewish refugees Benjamin travelled with were detained by police. Awaiting deportation back to France and into Nazi hands to probable murder, the refugees stayed in a Spanish hotel overnight. In his room, believing he had no hope of survival, Benjamin overdosed on morphine tablets. The authorities’ shock at his suicide is considered one of the reasons the refugees were allowed passage the following day. But the suitcase full of writings he had with him was lost to history, unreproduced.

Benjamin’s death at the hands of the Nazis was a great tragedy, as was the loss of his future work. The following chapter will stay with the Nazis and look at the way they used images to affect the imagination and politics of their citizens. Benjamin was right: the mechanical reproduction of images did lead to the increasingly widespread use of images for political ends (think about every campaign video, billboard, or leaflet you’ve seen around an election). And he worked this out by watching the Nazis who, even then, knew how to make a powerful political image better than almost anyone, to terrible effect. The next section will explore the creation and reproduction of political images; but first, some comprehension questions on Benjamin’s essay.

Works Cited and Further Reading

W.J.T. Mitchell. “Cloning Terror”. What Do Pictures Want? University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Belknap of Harvard U, 2008. 19-42. Print.

Chaplin, Charles, dir. Modern Times. Perf. Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. United Artists, 1936. Film.

Chaplin, Charles, dir. The Great Dictator. Charles Chaplin Film Corporation, 1940. Film

Cornelius Eady, Charlie Chaplin Impersonates a Poet

Cornelius Eady. “Charlie Chaplin Impersonates a Poet.” Autobiography of a Jukebox. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997.

da Vinci, Leonardo. Mona Lisa. 1503, Louvre Museum, Paris.

Osborne, Richard, and Natalie Turner. “Walter Benjamin.” Art Theory for Beginners, For Beginners, 2009.

Olopade, Dayo. “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.” The New Republic, 20 Apr. 2008.

Richter, Gerhard. September. 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Aliza Shvarts. Untitled [Senior Thesis], 2008.

Exercises: Mechanical Reproduction

Exercise 1: Aura

Read the essay by Benjamin, focusing most closely on the first four sections (I – IV). Then answer the following questions in prose – about a paragraph each.

What role does the “original” play in the concept of “authenticity”?

How is technical reproduction distinct from manual reproduction?

What role does history or “historical testimony” play in an object’s authenticity?

How is distance related to aura?

What does Benjamin suggest is the difference between art based on ritual and art based on politics?

Exercise 2: Film

This activity will allow you to use compositional analysis skills in a new arena – film analysis. It will also add some new film-specific compositional analysis principles and expand our compositional analysis vocabulary.

Find a still frame from Modern Times. Perform a compositional analysis of the still as if it’s a painting. Alongside the original set of compositional analysis principles (Balance, Stress, Leveling, Sharpening, Lower-left Preference, Attraction and Grouping, Positive and Negative) also consider:

Camera Angle and Distance

Lighting and Filters

Subject Matter

Costumes, Hair, Makeup, Accessories

Gestures and Poses

Rule of thirds (division of the film screen into thirds producing a more satisfying composition)

Exercise 3: Reproductive Organs

In 2008, an art student at Yale University repeatedly attempted to impregnate herself before inducing miscarriage two weeks later as an art project intended to serve as her senior thesis in her visual arts degree. The artwork caused great international controversy and a wealth of comment, including by Dayo Olopade in her essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction” in New Republic.

What connection does Olopade draw between Aliza Shvarts’s work and Walter Benjamin’s essay with her title? How does Shvarts’s work affect the “aura” of conception, contraception, and abortion? Explain in standard prose.

“L0059976 Model of a contraceptive pill, Europe, c. 1970” by Wellcome Library is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Writer’s Corner

Writing the Rhetorical Analysis Paper

Traditional (non-visual) rhetorical analysis is the analysis of the structure of a person’s argument. When you read a complex academic essay and decide to write about that essay, you are performing a rhetorical analysis. In doing so, you follow the same process described for visual literacy essays, moving from ekphrasis to analysis to synthesis. But instead of your “ekphrasis” being a description of a work of art, traditional academic rhetorical analysis requires that you describe the movement of another writer’s argument from point to point.

Why would someone ask you to describe an argument when they could simply read it themselves? As with images and any kind of art, the way a person describes an argument tells you about what they believe is valuable or interesting in an essay. When they misinterpret something the essay says, it tells a reader that the rhetorical analysis writer didn’t understand an aspect of the essay properly, which allows the reader to see the writer’s weaknesses. Once the writer has finished with analysis, they can then apply the ideas they’ve analyzed to areas that the original essay writer didn’t apply them to themselves, which is called “synthesis”.

Ekphrasis > Analysis > Research > Synthesis

How can our work on the “rhetorical analysis of images” help with the more traditional rhetorical analysis of arguments? First, with ekphrasis, we can still think of the essay as something that needs to be described before it can be analyzed. A reader’s understanding of the essay is revealed in the accuracy of their description of the argument.

Then there’s technical rhetorical analysis – like compositional analysis but for an essay – of how the argument is “composed”. In this aspect it might help some people to think of the argument visually: is it balanced or chaotic? Even or uneven? Which lines are the focal points and which simply guide us between them? While in a rhetorical analysis it is not generally necessary to do “research”, because you’re providing your own evaluation of an argument rather than someone else’s, more advanced writers might incorporate other people’s opinions on the essay into their analysis later on that they find in academic journals or book reviews of the essay.

The final stage, synthesis, is about synthesizing something new: it might be a new interpretation of the essay, a new application of the essay’s ideas to some other realm that the essay doesn’t address, and it might be a challenge to the essay’s conclusion or a suggestion of the essay’s limitations. Synthesis is the most difficult and advanced aspect of academic writing and will become important especially with research papers, so it’s a good chance to practice here.

One of the ways I try to give students training in the synthesis aspect of writing using a rhetorical analysis paper is by making my rhetorical analysis assignments look like this:

Perform a rhetorical analysis of W.J.T. Mitchell’s essay and then, using quotes from Mitchell to support your argument, discuss these ideas in reference to an image of your own choosing.

When you do your question analysis for this prompt, you’ll notice that it has two parts. 1) Perform a rhetorical analysis and 2) discuss with reference to an image of your own choosing. In a traditional rhetorical analysis assignment, the second part wouldn’t be there. But it is added here as a chance for the student to synthesize: to apply ideas from the essay they’re analyzing to create original thoughts about a different artwork. The task both allows students to demonstrate they understand the essay well enough to apply its ideas accurately and offers an opportunity for them to synthesize new ideas for themselves.

Hopefully, thinking about the similarities between the rhetorical analysis of images and the rhetorical analysis of essays can allow you to strengthen your skills at both. If one of those is easier to you, think about how you can use skills from the one you’re better at to improve the one that’s more challenging. Or, if you prefer, keep them totally separate and compare them later, after you’ve written them. The only person who can find the strategy that works best for you is you. Just know that analyzing an argument isn’t necessarily all that different from analyzing a painting.

Chapter Four: Aesthetics

What is a political image? We are all familiar with the idea of images designed to persuade us to act, vote, and behave in particular ways that we might describe as political: billboards and ads on social media for political candidates, paintings and murals that express political ideals or protest injustice or memorialize people who died, and photographs and videos of political events, like political rallies or police brutality. But how can an image be political without seeming to depict anything political at all?

“The German Student”, Nazi Propaganda circa 1936, encouraging students to support the Nazi party.

To briefly define “fascism” for the purposes of this chapter: Fascism is a political system structured around a single leader who is given great power to dictate the actions of the government and the military without having to go through voting processes with lower levels of the government in the way that democracy is supposed to. As a political system it took hold in various forms in the twentieth century across several European countries and elsewhere. The horrific effects of fascism are most obviously and infamously demonstrated by the actions of the Nazi party and the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, communists, and myriad other groups in the Holocaust.

Fascists are people who believe that fascism is the best system of government. But can an image of something entirely unrelated to fascism be “fascist”? One of the most effective strategies that led to the success of the Nazis was their control over the politics of non-political images. By flooding German culture with images of their own choosing, the Nazis successfully used images to manipulate the politics and imaginations of the populace. Later, when the Nazis were in government, there would be a whole ministry devoted to propaganda, and their successful installation of a fascist ruler is in part due to this successful creation and proliferation of a political aesthetic that affected the way people thought without constantly having to always spell out their politics explicitly.

Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most important filmmakers of the early twentieth century. Riefenstahl’s career began in Germany, where she made successful films throughout the early 1930s to great acclaim and pioneering success, especially as one of the earliest female filmmakers. Her career was greatly accelerated by the rise of the Nazis and her friendship with Adolf Hitler: as a filmmaker, Riefenstahl made one of the most famous films of the twentieth century, The Triumph of the Will, in collaboration with Hitler and the Nazi party itself, depicting an epic and calculatedly cinematic Nazi political rally and military parade at Nuremberg in 1935 (the same year as Modern Times and Benjamin’s essay).

Alongside romanticizing military power and an almost godlike leader, the film (freely available online) uses footage taken from a plane that demonstrates the order and unity of the military forces, their arrangement in straight lines, and the ecstatic admiration of the crowd, with a particular focus on excited women. The images that the film constructs – through framing, lighting, and arrangement within the context of the film – are political images even ignoring the politics they depict, because they match and contribute to what we’ll call the political aesthetic of fascism.

“Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-04062A” by Georg Pahl is licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Though the term aesthetic is used in a myriad of ways and contexts nowadays, in art and literature aesthetic generally means the logic of how things look. The term is useful to this discussion because the aesthetic logic of Riefenstahl’s work is what Susan Sontag writes about in her essay “Fascinating Fascism”, which takes a critical look at Riefenstahl’s work from a more contemporary perspective. Sontag explains that the fascist aesthetic – the things the Nazis valued artistically and architecturally – was already prominent in Riefenstahl’s films before the Nazi party even came to power. So while Riefenstahl’s film The Triumph of the Will demonstrates an obsession with the physically and intellectually superior individual rising to great heights, for instance, her earlier films also romanticize similar aesthetic principles. But could films about courageous mountaineers like Storm Over Mont Blanc (acted in by Riefenstahl and directed by Arnold Fanck) really have somehow led to people voting for fascist ideas?

Riefenstahl’s early work played a part in an extensive network of images that were being used to shape the imaginations of the voting population in 1930s Germany. Images of blond-haired and blue-eyed physically fit and strong young men wrestling or playing sports were circulated widely in Nazi propaganda; the archetype of the “Aryan” ideal. As were their racist counterparts: antisemitic cartoons designed to turn people against the Jewish population in Germany. We all now know in retrospect that these were political images, even if they weren’t explicitly suggesting people do anything political, but at the time they may have seemed as innocuous as a leaflet for the girl scouts or a cartoon in the New Yorker does to us now. The challenge is how we describe the politics of images when they don’t seem on the surface to be political..

Sontag goes on to demonstrate that long after the Second World War, Riefenstahl’s photography in the 1970s was no less fascist than her early films or her Nazi propaganda. This is a key transition in the essay, away from a focus on Riefenstahl’s creation of images designed to empower a political group, towards images that don’t seem to have a political purpose but still have some “political” aspect, in this later case unintentionally. This unintentionality is perhaps the most interesting part of Sontag’s argument. Sontag’s essay is about a book called The Last of the Nuba, a book of photography that Riefenstahl released in 1976. On the surface the images may appear to be beautiful and striking photographs of a community of Sudanese tribespeople, and certainly it seems that Riefenstahl thought that’s what they were. But with the help of Sontag, you can look at the images of the Nuba tribe and see the ways that the aesthetic logic behind the way things have been photographed and organized has been derived from fascist ideas.

The Last of the Nuba was a bestseller in America. Looking across the many photographs after reading Sontag’s essay, you might even start to see similarities between the contents of the book and the Triumph of the Will. Riefenstahl, even thirty years after the war and having acknowledged the evils of fascism, the Nazi party, and the Holocaust, was still following and producing a fascist aesthetic. Sontag spends her essay making these points that are compressed here into a couple of pages; for a proper understanding of Sontag’s argument, turn to the essay itself.

Walter Benjamin would say that giving politics an aesthetics – giving it a kind of fashion or look – is inherent to fascism. It replaces actually giving the masses better lives with letting them “express themselves” and be part of a group. He ends The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by saying

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life. (41)

So is it important to be able to identify the aesthetic logic of something? In a world that increasingly communicates visually and through images, being able to understand the logic behind the way things appear in the world around you is an exceptionally powerful tool – especially if you make images yourself. This is the political power of “visual literacy”. The importance of doing the kind of work Sontag does, connecting the aesthetics of the past to the present, should be clear when thinking about identifying and preventing the repetition of such dire history. And when you begin to think about ways you can change the way the world looks, these skills can become a political tool, as we’ll see in the next chapter on “Branding”.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Belknap of Harvard U, 2008. 19-42. Print.

Fanck, Arnold, dir. Storm Over Mont Blanc. Aafa-Film AG, 1930. Film.

Hohlwein, Ludwig. “Der deutsche Student kämpft für Führer und Volk in der Mannschaft des NSD-Studentenbundes”. 1936.

Janell Hobson. “The Nubian Body, African Aesthetics, and Cultural Imagination”. African American Intellectual History Society, 15 February 2018.

Riefenstahl, Leni, dir. The Blue Light. 1932. Film.

Riefenstahl, Leni, dir. The Triumph of the Will. Reichsparteitag-Film, 1935. Film.

Riefenstahl, Leni. The Last of the Nuba. Harper and Row, 1973.

Sartwell, Crispin. “Red, Gold, Black, and Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics.” Contemporary Aesthetics, University of Michigan Library, 2009.

Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” Under the Sign of Saturn. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980.

Exercises: Anti-Fascist Aesthetics

Exercise 1: Antonyms

We now know what even a concealed fascist aesthetic looks like. But what might an anti-fascist aesthetic look like? Complete the following table by pairing opposing words to produce a description of an anti-fascist aesthetic.

Fascist | Anti-Fascist
Hard, Strong, Bold |
Orderly, Obedient |
Hierarchical, Patriarchal |
Militaristic, Aggressive |
Uniformity, Controlled |
Elitist, Exclusionary |
Violent, Powerful |

Now, in prose, describe what this anti-fascist aesthetic might actually look like. If you’ve seen examples in the world around you, in film, television, advertising, or media, name them.

Exercise 2: Aesthetics

Watch the video “How to Recognize a Fascist” on YouTube, made by Contrapoints. Consider the video a documentary film much like Riefenstahl’s. How has Contrapoints created an anti-fascist aesthetic for delivering her anti-fascist message? Write an exploration of her aesthetic in standard prose (around 400 words) – what does it achieve for her argument that couldn’t be done with a different aesthetic?

Exercise 3: Political Aesthetics of the Baseball Hat

What does the baseball cap represent in American culture? How is it different to, for instance, a trucker hat in terms of what it says about the wearer?

This exercise asks you to consider the political aesthetics of the clothes we wear – by considering the aesthetic choices behind the “Make America Great Again” hat. The “MAGA” hat has been one of the most successful pieces of politicized fashion in modern history. What are the choices behind the design of this hat, and how are they designed to convey a political message in a seemingly non-political way? And what exactly is that message?

In standard prose, explore the message and the medium of the MAGA hat (around 400 words). Relate it to the politics of other examples of seemingly innocuous political choices in our contemporary world if you can.

“Make America Great Again” by James McNellis is licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

Chapter Five: Branding

How did advertising become the most ubiquitous aspect of our culture? More so than any other form of media or image, we are exposed to thousands of images from advertisement every day in every area of our lives. We see it on our phones and computers, on social media and news websites and episodes of TV shows, we see it emblazoned on everyone’s clothes in the form of logos, we see it on buses and cabs and subway cars and hood ornaments, hidden in plain sight by our favorite influencers and a cultural event of its own during the Superbowl. A massive part of our culture is advertising. It’s unsurprising then that we often form identities around it, valorize it, and even brand ourselves. But to what extent are we controlling it, and how much are these images controlling us?

Karl Marx made a distinction between two kinds of value. When looking at an object, you can think of it as having both a use-value and an exchange-value. The use-value of an object, like a purse, is how useful it is: how good it is at carrying stuff. The exchange-value, on the other hand, is how much that object is sold or traded for. A hammer, in general, is an example of those two kinds of value being very similar. You can generally expect how useful a hammer is to be generally reflected in its cost. There aren’t many hammers with designer logos on them. A Fendi bag, however, might be as useful as a $20 bag sold on the sidewalk, but its exchange value is totally different.

Why is that the case? One argument might be that the use-value of a Fendi bag is in making us look good, so it has to be expensive. In this case, its use-value isn’t different from its exchange-value, but is actually about the same. But that requires us to believe that the value of what a brand tells the world about you is very high and very useful. Are brands really that useful?

Livestock have been branded for centuries to identify ownership. But we brand ourselves to identify ourselves with systems of belief, values, ideas, politics, and class positions. We get to choose our owners, but we also usually pay for the privilege, sometimes exceptional amounts. In the early 20th century, a man called Edward Bernays revolutionized the industry of advertising, essentially inventing modern advertising as we know it today. Bernays was the nephew of the much more famous Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, a theory of human psychology that believes that all of our decisions, feelings, and behaviors are governed by unconscious childlike desires for pleasure and safety. Bernays put Freud’s principles to work by using them to sell products.

Bernays did this by trying to suggest that the product he was advertising would satisfy some of those unconscious desires. There are several famous examples. Believing that cigarettes represented powerful masculinity because of their shape (Freud believes we are obsessed with that shape), Bernays staged a media event that connected female empowerment, a Women’s March, to smoking. He did this by having the suffragists smoke as they walked – in front of many cameras – through Manhattan. He wanted to connect women’s desire for power, representation, and enfranchisement, to smoking a cigarette. Cigarette sales among women skyrocketed, though of course that probably had more to do with admiration for the suffragists and less to do with his theory of cigarettes being unconsciously associated with erections.

“Reach for a Lucky” is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Bernays had a lucrative and prolific career in advertising and press relations, describing his work as the “engineering of consent”. It’s a powerful phrase. It tells us that Bernays values the “consent” of the people he is trying to control, and also that he believes that consent can be tactically “engineered” with unconscious tactics. We might question whether that’s really consent. And Bernays didn’t believe this “consent engineering” was limited to advertising. The engineering of consent was really for politics, a set of tactics and strategies for how visual culture and images could be used to control the masses (ring any bells?).

Bernays – and many other powerful people of his time and ours – did not believe that people could adequately govern themselves; they needed to be guided to the right answer by the world around them. The engineering of consent is about engineering the world around people to affect their actions. When you think of how we see ads, brands, and logos every place we go, you might begin to think that they have been successful.

Brand literacy requires visual literacy. The following exercises are designed to explore advertising and how it relies on us not being “visually literate” to be most effective. Visual and brand literacy promise to help you limit and decode the amount your consent is being engineered by the world around you, and so to make you more free. That’s if you believe that you and everyone else should be.

Works Cited and Further Reading

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.” Mad Men, written by Matthew Weiner, Weiner Bros. Productions, 19 July 2007. Netflix.

Bernays, Edward L. “The Engineering of Consent.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 250, no. 1, Mar. 1947, pp. 113–120.

Curtis, Adam, dir. “The Engineering of Consent”. The Century of the Self. BBC, 30 Apr. 2002.

Martineau, Paris. “What is an Influencer.” Wired. 6 December 2019.

Exercise: Influencers

One of the many profound shifts in advertising that has taken place in the past twenty years due to the invention of the internet, and social media soon after, is the rise of “Influencers” – online personalities who advertise products to their followers for a surprising amount of payment. For an introduction to the backstage world of influencers, read the article “What is an Influencer?” by Paris Martineau and then, once you’re done, answer the following questions in full sentences.

What is the “different relationship” between content and viewer that Martineau describes?

What gives influencers their perceived “authenticity”?

Where does “influencing” begin and how?

How does PayPerPost change influencing?

Why is influencing more attractive than advertising to some marketers?

What is “engagement fraud” and why does it matter?

Using your own thoughts, experience, and/or further research to answer the question:
what impact have influencers had on the future of advertising?

Writer’s Corner

Writing the Research Paper

This guide is designed to help you to use the particular method of essay writing we’ve practiced with the Visual Literacy essay and the Rhetorical Analysis essay to write a Research Essay. You may be familiar with “research essays” in a different form: sometimes that name is used for long essays that give an historical explanation of some phenomenon using research, sometimes ending up close to a Wikipedia-style overview, or its also used for essays that discuss a range of scientific data and a conclusion on what it all means. The academic research paper described in this book is different to that, although elements of what you might have done before will be useful in different ways here.

The core of a research paper is research. It succeeds or fails on the quality of the research that you engage with, and on your ability to make use of and effectively analyze that research. “Research” does not mean, in this specific academic context, each factoid you find scattered across the web: it means academic, peer-reviewed journal articles or academic book chapters. Your work needs to be addressing, reviewing, analyzing, and challenging the work of other researchers, or it’s not a research essay.

Reliable Academic Sources

If a journal is “peer-reviewed” it means that every article you read was read by a team of experts and academics in the field and deemed “good research” by those academics before it was ever published. You can rely on a journal that “peer-reviews” its work for cutting-edge, contemporary research that has been carefully vetted by people who are specialists in the subject.

The same happens for chapters in academic books. If you compare the level of academic evaluation that texts like these have gone through before publication to almost any other publication in print or on the internet, including newspapers, blogs, museum websites, Wikipedia, magazines, and non-academic books, it is very clear that an “Academic Source” is a much more serious and reliable text than almost any other.

This “reliability” is important when writing a research paper, because if you’re building your argument on the basis of weak sources your own research paper is going to be weak. For a paper about 2500 words long you can expect to use at least five serious academic research papers and to explore some of them in more depth than others. These are the foundation of your argument – you are a critic and these are the other critics your paper is having a conversation with in writing.

It’s also important to engage with these papers in-depth, to read them in full, and to understand their arguments and the ways they differ from each other and you in the conclusions they draw from the same information, as a framework for establishing what you think about the topic. They are not simply a jumping-off point for your own writing, but a speaker you have to engage with and to speak back to with your essay.

TIP: You can find out if a text is peer-reviewed by searching for the journal the article is published in. The web results will probably say straightaway whether it is a peer-reviewed journal.

Research Questions and Answers

To talk to other researchers means you need a research question: something you’re trying to talk about and explain and answer, and preferably something you don’t know the exact answer to going in. The most common way students produce weak research essays is by failing to come up with a real question and to address how they’re going to answer that question in their introduction. The result is a paper that floats around without purpose from idea to idea and requires a large amount of rewriting in the second round. Skipping that crucial first stage of writing a specific, precise question leads to essays that aren’t really about anything, even when they have a lot of research cited during the essay.

After you write the first draft of your research question, try making it clearer and more specific by asking:

WHO is this about: Americans? Westerners? Midwesterners? Men? Women? African Americans? Africans? Asian Americans? Singaporeans? Each of these is important and you can’t assume your reader knows the scope of your research field without defining it in your question (or at least in your introduction).

WHEN is this about: This year? Last year? Next year? Four hundred years ago? Two hundred? How big is the timeframe you’re tracing (if it’s very big, you might risk writing an “historical survey” essay that limits your opportunity for analysis)?

WHERE is this relevant? Are these phenomena taking place in the West or the East or both? Which countries? How is the same phenomenon different in different countries? What’s culturally specific about the research problem?

WHY research it? If you don’t have something to add and are going to rely too heavily on long quotations from your research, we might as well just read your research rather than your paper. Often that “something” comes from the clash of different pieces of research that you bring together, compare, and analyze. That’s you adding to the critical conversation and synthesizing new ideas from the old – the most important part of achieving highly in a research paper.

HOW are you going to do it? This is more for your introduction than the question you write for yourself. Set out your plan of action for answering your question to some degree by the end of the limited space of your paper. How will you make a meaningful contribution to research in 2500, 5000, 20000, 100000 words?

Use your introduction to explain your question and to set out a plan of action. Often people write an essay and then return to write their introduction once they know what the essay is going to be about. I don’t recommend that for a research essay: get your question and your introduction sorted before you start. You can always go back and edit them as you go along. But if you can’t already write at least a draft of each at the start, you’re probably not ready to write the body of your essay.

Writing a “Saying What We See” Research Essay

So how does this all connect to the work you’ve done so far?

Ekphrasis > Analysis > Research > Synthesis

There are a few ways of looking at it. Your ekphrasis skills – your ability to describe objects of study, like paintings and films – kick in immediately. You need to describe your object of study: whatever your research topic is. After the introduction, you set out what exactly it is you’re looking at, describe the relevant elements of its history, and what the problem ‘looks like’ to you. So if you’re writing a paper on the history of Blackface minstrelsy, you’ll need to describe what you think that is and some of where it came from, and that would be your “ekphrasis”.

Rhetorical analysis, the skill of the second essay described in this book, becomes useful immediately, only you’re not just analyzing one research paper: you’re examining five or more. That skill that you honed is suddenly in high demand in a research paper. You can look back on the guidance for “Writing the Rhetorical Analysis Paper” for more help with that aspect of dealing with analyzing each source and apply it to differing degrees for different sources as appropriate.

After each source we return to further research, integrating new papers into the essay or going away to find more relevant ones to help the essay achieve the goal it set out in the question and the introduction. And then, after some reflection on our own writing and the writing of our research sources, it’s time to synthesize. Synthesis works in two ways in a research paper: one, in that fantastic big-bang moment of two colliding research papers that you compare in a way that allows you to develop a third conclusion, different even slightly to either of theirs. The other way is to then take that “third conclusion” and apply it to something elsewhere in your research, especially (in this book) some kind of image from your research. This second form of synthesis comes directly from the rhetorical analysis section too.

Since research papers are driven by you, the writer, discovering your question is your own journey. You might consider building a question like the following:

What continuing consequences does the legacy of Blackface performance have for the cultural representation of people of color in contemporary America, and what impact do those consequences have?

Notice how the question addresses when and where (contemporary America), who (people of color), and how (by identifying consequences and their impact). The “why” can be addressed in the introduction and each of these aspects of the question can also be elaborated on.

Conclusion: Becoming an Expert

A good question enables a good introduction which enables a good plan of action which enables good structure which enables good argument which enables synthesis which enables a unique contribution to research! Don’t skip those early, knotty, difficult discussions with yourself about what the essay will do, what it can achieve, and what it will really be about. Read your research before you start writing and you won’t start off on the wrong track. Skipping the early steps makes the later ones more and more difficult.

And when you make your question, the best advice is to choose something that you want to be an expert on by the end of the paper: something you want to bring up to your friends and family as something that you know something deep and special and unique about, something that interests you personally and profoundly.

Chapter Six: Representation

By now we have established that images are a lot more complex than we tend to give them credit for, even (or especially) when they seem simple. They reveal our own interests and prejudices; we imbue them with an atmospheric aura, made up of their history and intentions; they hide their politics behind beauty; they have secret codes that contradict what they seem to be saying; the way they are consumed can change the course of history; the ability to describe them enables the ability to analyze them; analyzing them can protect you from them and allow you to use them for your own purposes.

In a time when images are everywhere – we scroll through them for hours a day, we watch them tell stories for hours more, and in New York you are statistically more likely to see an ad when you look outside than not – it has become a common opinion that who is in those images is an incredibly important question. From who is cast in films and television shows to who is modelling in the ads on the sides of buses to who is selling the soda on the billboard to which influencer is getting paid the most for product placements, there is no sphere of the media and advertising complex that hasn’t had a degree of activism and discussion about the big question of who: who is being included in our “image world” – and who isn’t.

One might argue that the “image world” we occupy is a reflection of our society. The disparity between the number of white actors and models – and how much they are paid – and the number of people of color in those professions is an accurate representation of the overall unfairness and discrimination in our society, and simply reflects those problems. In the past, we might have expected people to focus on reducing discrimination across society and then to wait for film and television and advertising to reflect that progress, rather than focusing on how things look in the media. For instance, as women fought to get better jobs and fairer pay to some degree of success, we might have expected that to have been reflected in the content of the TV shows we watched and in the way they were made, as a natural extension of the progress being made in the world.

But often that wasn’t the case. Even as discrimination in the contemporary workplace was (only partially) diminished over the past fifty years, films and television didn’t reflect that in either pay, casting, or production roles. In 2019, women comprised about 13% of the directors of the top 250 movies of that year. The same year, people of color comprised around 20% of television serial lead characters, though people of color represented around 40% of the population. So while there have long been people arguing for better representation of marginalized groups in the media, the new and mainstream focus on diversity initiatives suggests a change of tack from hoping that the media will reflect society’s changes to making it produce the change by representing the world closer to how it should be.

This is an interesting phenomenon because what it tells us is that people are recognizing that the content of our “image culture” has the power to change society and the economy itself. Culture is mirrored by society as much as it reflects society. Life imitates art. Aside from being important battlegrounds in themselves, studying the nature of these battles tells us a lot about how people feel about the role of images in the twenty-first century, including the similarities and differences in how images function under capitalism rather than fascism.

Some Categories of Representation

Some of the major contemporary battlegrounds of representation are discussed and summarized below. When you take in contemporary culture, try to spot not just which of these aspects of representation are done poorly (stereotypical depictions, for instance) but also which are absent: who’s missing in your favorite show?

Race: This extends not only from the employment of people of color in the media industry, but also to how well they are paid compared to their white counterparts, how long they are on screen, and whether their characters are well-developed or if they fall into offensive or repetitive stereotypes. The hiring of white directors and writers continues to be unrepresentative and often leads to television and films with poor racial literacy.

Gender: That women are underrepresented and underpaid in the media, especially film and television, is well-documented. They too can be represented in stereotypical ways – often in concurrence or “intersection” with race – and/or be used as sexual props in ads and drama alike. The rights of trans and non-binary people to be represented accurately and complexly have been more prominently asserted in the last ten years, though transphobic material still often gets through the filters. For each of these groups, the right to have non-abusive workplaces in these industries has been a great struggle throughout their history and continues to this day, as demonstrated in part by the #MeToo movement.

Sexuality: The question of fair representation for gay, lesbian, and queer actors, writers, performers, directors, and media creators is very much one of visibility. While queer artists have had creative roles for a long time in the media industry, the question of both if, how, and when queer people could be portrayed or marketed on screen and in media remains a fraught one. While undoubtedly we have continued advancing from Dawson’s Creek in 2000, which included one of the first ever gay kisses ever shown on television, into a time when shows about the sex lives of trans people can be mainstream television (Transparent), the battleground of adequate queer representation on and off screen remains a difficult one for creators to navigate successfully.

Class: An often-overlooked aspect of representation is the representation of economic and social class. It is often an intersectional question that follows from successes in other arenas: for instance, black people may be getting more roles, but are the only stories being told about upper middle-class black people? Why are working class black people not deemed worthy of representation in stories about their lives? But these questions don’t always follow from another category: a problematic class stereotype might be a show that depicts white Southern poor people as ignorant, violent “trailer trash”. This is an example of class discrimination that uses stereotypes about class to diminish the characters and the overall representation of working-class people in general (though it’s not related to any kind of racism: there’s no such thing as racism towards white people, as the term “racism” describes a power-structure that privileges white people).

Age: As the Western world has an ageing population due to low birth rates, longer life expectancies, and diminished immigration, we will begin to see more and more focus on advertising and media directed towards the older portions of our population, driven largely by it becoming an increasingly lucrative demographic. This movement is mirrored in labor law and disputes about “age discrimination” and ageism, so as legal protections against discrimination based on age in the workplace develop, so they will in the media. This is a good reminder of one of the key principles of representation in the mainstream media: It only gets changed when it’s bad business not to.

Body Type: Also often intersectional with race as well as with gender, the question of the kinds of body type that get represented in modelling, advertising, television, and film is another question of visibility. This began as a complaint about the exaggerated presence of very thin and thin-framed (usually white) models in ads and magazines throughout the 20th century, and developed into a call for body types to be represented across the spectrum of shapes, races, sizes, and disabilities. This is an interesting moment, because it evidences how deep our relationship to the media goes: many feel they need to see themselves represented in mass media in order to feel their place in society is “validated” in some way. This makes it slightly different to some of the other questions of representation, as body-type is less an identity category that needs to be enfranchised or represented and more a demand for the media to accurately reflect back to us the reality of people’s bodies.

It is a striking factor that advertising is such a key part of the questions of representation as it may not have been that way fifty or even twenty years ago, when the fight might well have been for fewer rather than better ads. It evidences a generational advancement in visual literacy - the ability to critically describe and analyze the content of images – but also a generational decision to critically approach the images we are given and told represent our culture. The less hopeful aspect of this change is that we have accepted the constant barrage of the media; the most hopeful aspect of that decision is that it suggests that we want it to change. The following chapter will bring the discussion to one of the biggest changes of all in our image environment: the internet.

Exercises: Representation Presentations

The exercise for this chapter involves making a slide show about representation in the contemporary media landscape. Before we look at the task, there are some compositional principles of good slide shows to explore. These principles build on the compositional principles we’ve used in an analytical way so far on paintings and films. This is a moment to begin practicing using those visual skills to create something of your own.

Compositional Principles of Slide Creation

Read the following section to help you design a strong, professional-grade slideshow – a key skill across a wide range of careers, workplaces, and environments.

Study the principles. On the slide show you create, you will be asked to name and explain how you are using a different one of these compositional tools for each of your slides.

Identify – Your viewer needs to be able to find the main point quickly. You can identify the main point using size, shape, emphasis (underline, italics, emboldening), color and brightness, distance, or combinations of two or more. Think of it as a focal point. Making these aspects different to other information on your slide guides your reader’s eye to what’s important first.

Guide – As a painting does, your slide must control the movement of your viewer’s eye towards the focal point and around the slide. Thankfully with a slide, we don’t have to be as subtle. You can use arrows, numbers, bullets, diminishing size, and other visual tactics to guide your viewer around the slide and through the major pieces of information. If you use images of people or animals, make sure they’re looking towards the focal point.

Order – If you’re choosing to put more than one point or piece of information on a slide, it’s important to establish a hierarchical relationship between the information using visual cues. Font size and indentation give us a clear sense of how information relates on a slide. Try to avoid more than three or four pieces of information on a slide, as it becomes exponentially more difficult for a reader to take in at a glance.

Arrange – The way the objects on your slide are arranged is a form of information for your reader. Their balance or unbalanced arrangement should reflect the content of the slide: are you discussing order or chaos? Algebraic precision or real-world process? The compositional principle of balance can convey this information in the visual layout of your slide alongside any words you use.

Map – Imagine a grid over your slide. Is it arranged in three, four, or five columns? Some objects might occupy multiple squares, and some sections of the slide might be empty. An imaginary grid allows you to measure the amount of space being used on your slide for different aspects, and whether you’re overloading the slide.

Negative Space – Blank or negative space is an important part of any slideshow. It will be present on almost every single slide in a good slide show, to differing degrees. The one or two slides that don’t have it should stand out – not be yet another in a relentless series of overloaded slides. Negative space allows the focal point of your slide to take precedence and allows it to convey its message to your viewers most powerfully.

Exercise: RePresentations

Prepare a 5 slide presentation on a film of your choice discussing how it relates to issues of representation.

Your presentation can focus on race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, age, body-type or an intersection of two or more.

As you create your slides, consider the principles of composition for each slide. On each slide, write at the bottom of the slide one of the principles that you’ve used in your slide design and give a brief explanation on how it applies to your slide, for example “Negative space – I left the top right of the slide empty to focus the viewer’s attention on the important text on the bottom left”. Use a different principle for each slide.

Chapter Seven: Networks

It is difficult to overestimate how radically changed the world has been by the internet, and a big part of that power has been in the power to rapidly and widely share, search, edit, and reproduce images. It’s an interesting phenomenon that what we choose to do with the power of the internet at our fingertips, what we spend the most amount of our personal time doing, is circulating and viewing images. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook are only the most prominent of the forms of image-sharing that have become a part of our daily lives; the ability to search for images using Google, to scan the internet for different iterations of the same image, to view exceptionally high-resolution images of paintings, and to easily edit, process, and reproduce them infinitely, are all radically new abilities that have become commonplace and accessible.

Imagining how Walter Benjamin would have viewed this technological reproducibility and its impact on art and politics is a difficult task. We might start by thinking about Benjamin’s theory that being able to reproduce images has a democratizing effect. This can be explored in a number of ways with the internet; for instance in the way that it can give people who can’t get to a particular gallery a chance to view a work of art in detail; or in the way it enables citizens to share pictures and videos of instances of civic events like police brutality or the indiscreet behavior of government representatives, allowing them to better participate in democracy in a more informed way.

If mechanical reproduction affected us mentally, as we see in Chaplin’s Modern Times, how has this new networked reproduction affected our minds? How are the minds of those who have grown up with the internet different to the minds of those who never interacted with it? In her essay The Communal Mind, an essay we might call “experimental creative nonfiction”, Patricia Lockwood explores her relationship to the internet and her sense of being part of a shared intelligence or “communal mind” online. The essay depicts a life spent engaging with mainstream and niche aspects of online culture, including its particular sense of humor as well as its visual aesthetics. The impact of living your life on the internet – which the essay calls “the portal” – is reflected in her first creative choice with the essay, which is to shift into third person because, she says, “I no longer felt like myself”. Alongside the positive, democratizing elements of the internet, we see from the beginning that this essay might explore what the internet might be taking from us in exchange for all its gifts.

An early meme? “Venus vom Hohle Fels” by Gerbil is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

“Meme” meant something different before the internet. In The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Dawkins uses the word (which he invented) to describe small pieces of culture that circulate within a society. From the statuettes made by Ice Age humans, 35000 years ago, to the rapidly circulated gifs of the 2020s, memes have always been a part of human life. In some senses, they mark the beginning of our humanity: many anthropologists consider the statuettes evidence of behavioral modernity – the practice of art, music, and religion that distinguished us from other primates.

Now, the “internet meme” has taken hold of the world. Internet memes are unique in the sense that they are a small piece of culture like a statuette but they’re also already wired into a massive network that allows them to spread and reproduce quickly. It is possible to argue that internet memes are the fastest and most prolific way that our society and our online world processes world events. A day’s political events, a musician’s behavior at a gas station, an athlete’s tears at an awards ceremony, the simple shocked blink of an actor in an interview: all can be processed and shared before a journalist who witnessed them can even get to their desk. And they have become a way to process national and international trauma as a society, too, in the form of coronavirus and systemically racist police violence, and those just in 2020. Of course, it’s worth noting that they’re often funny too, which is also part of their power.

Dawkins had a point about those early memes that range from small statues to big novels, from the written word to Renaissance frescoes, and that was that they behave like genes. The way they spread, proliferate, and die out, is similar to the way that specific parts of a human or animal’s genetic coding are passed down and spread through a species or “die off”. This model can be used to think about internet memes in the same way: which ones are the fittest, and how do they survive? Why do some die quickly, others slowly, others get big and then disappear, while others quietly refuse to go away? And, in the case of internet memes, what effect does their rapid mutation (in the form of different versions and edits by different users) have on their lifespans and how widely they reach into the culture and the world?

Think of the most recent internet meme you noticed. Was it successful? How? What do you mean by success? Beginning to ask these questions of memes – close-reading them – can give us insights into what’s going on in our culture today. It requires the same analytical skills for analyzing advertising, but these images aren’t generally trying to engineer our consent – we can think of them as trying to survive.

In Jennifer Egan’s Black Box, Egan writes a story entirely composed of tweets. Tweets can be considered memes of a sort: they are traded and shared and liked and rise through the ranks like more traditional image memes. But Egan uses these small missives of information to tell a story about an undercover agent observing a national security threat. The missives are part of the agent’s communications, so they take the form of information. But the agent who transmits them is also trying to convey the trauma, fear, longing, and hopes that she’s feeling while on the mission, hiding them in these very direct tweet-length messages. The process of turning all of her thoughts into tweets has left her robotic and (literally) part-machine. Like Lockwood, Egan demonstrates the impact of the medium we choose to communicate with on the way we are able to think and what we are able to say. Considering that our new polis (a Greek word for the meeting place of a body of citizens) is in memes, how will that impact how we behave in the future and what we value?

Works Cited and Further Reading

Egan, Jennifer. “Black Box.” The New Yorker. 25 May 2012.

Jackson, Lauren Michele. “A Unified Theory of Meme Death.” The Atlantic. 7 Dec. 2017.

Lockwood, Patricia. “The Communal Mind.” The London Review of Books. 21 Feb 2019.

Exercises: Memetics

Exercise 1: The Portal

Read Patricia Lockwood’s essay “The Communal Mind”. Then make a list of the kinds of things you ask Google. This might look like:

Leg workouts
Cleanest Parks in NYC
Riddles
Can dogs eat blackberries?
Best thai restaurant near me
Britney Spears lyrics

Aim for 15 search terms. Look at your actual search history if you like. Once you’re done, make three observations about the kinds of things you search for. Is it information? Guidance? Recipes? Locations?

Exercise 2: Meme Death

Read Lauren Michele Jackson’s essay “A Unified Theory of Meme Death” then answer the following questions in a standard prose paragraphs. You can answer more than one question in each paragraph.

How are memes like genes?

How are memes not like genes (according to Jackson)?

How did we trade “memes” - in the Dawkins sense of the term – before the internet or modern technology?

What makes memes attractive?

How do memes survive?

What kills memes?

What is the parallel between jokes and memes in theories of how they die?

If memes are reflective of specific aspects of our culture, what does it mean about our culture when they die?

Exercise 3: Black Box

Read Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”. Answer the following questions in 140 character “tweets”. You can use more than one tweet per question.

Name the primary characters.

Why tweets? Explain in terms of the story and the style.

What is the grammatical structure of the tweets? Why are so many framed as directives/commands?

What kind of story Is Black Box? What are its main themes and ideas?

What is the Black Box in the story? What is its role?

Synopsis: Labor and The Image Economy

Walter Benjamin was a communist: someone who engaged with the political, economic, and social theories of Karl Marx, a radical thinker of the 19th century, as a philosopher and a writer. His essay on mechanical reproduction ends with the line “Communism replies by politicizing art”. Benjamin saw that the solution to the way that the Nazi party had “aestheticized” art, how they had managed to make fascism fashionable, was to make political art that could remedy and attack that fashion, and beat back the expansion of fascism that he believed ended in no less than the end of the world (an aestheticized, fashionable one that was pleasing to watch, but still the end of the world).

Benjamin was an important thinker and one of the things we see in Benjamin’s final line is that the kind of thinking that he believes is the reply and the antidote to fascism is communist thinking. Benjamin’s use of the word “communism” is a demand that we think about how our world looks as an expression of its economic structure, and how it works through images to uphold that structure. What does it mean to think like a communist about the movies we watch, the social media we produce, the ads that harass us, and the teachers who make our syllabi?

In Boots Riley’s film Sorry to Bother You, we get a glimpse of both “politicized art” and “communist” thinking. The movie follows Cassius, a call-center worker in Oakland, California, as he tries to make enough money to pay rent on a bedroom in his uncle’s garage and to keep his beaten-up junker going long enough to get him to work. He is barraged by adverts offering him a way out of his life of poverty, including one with “life contracts” and “free accommodation” that seems suspiciously like a form of modern slavery. When selling yourself into slavery is beginning to seem like a less precarious, safer kind of work than the job market of the new economy, we’re forced to consider how sustainable the world Cassius lives in – one that looks suspiciously like ours – can be.

As the call center staff begin to organize a union and strike for better pay, Cassius is selected to become a “power caller”, and to leave his colleagues behind in exchange for fancy surroundings and an inordinately large paycheck. His whole life turns around: his apartment is fabulous and new, his car is slick, his TV gets bigger, and he leaves his uncle’s garage behind. But his newfound money causes a shift in Cassius that his girlfriend Detroit doesn’t like, and the lucrative work he’s doing as a “power caller” sounds suspiciously like selling weapons to fascist dictators massacring their own people. Cassius is forced to choose between wealth, comfort, and safety, as a class traitor and arms dealer, and his old friends, family, and the girlfriend he loves.

It’s not an easy choice, and Cassius’s boss doesn’t make it any easier to decide, with bigger and bigger paychecks to match Cassius’s darker and darker insight into the world of the rich, their racism, and their disregard for human life and suffering. It’s not an easy choice because the economic structure Cassius lives in doesn’t give people many choices. It’s this job, or no job, or slavery. There is no ethical, well-paid alternative in his world. The dehumanizing effects of the work on the workers become increasingly literal, as the film produces an array of shocking images that work both as brilliant artistic creations as well as a powerful political critique of the economic world the characters live in, until Cassius finally snaps. These might be the kinds of images that Walter Benjamin means when he says “communism replies by politicizing art”.

“Riley speaks at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally in Emeryville, California, January 2016” by Pax Ahimsa Gethen is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Considering the role of images in upholding and protecting an economic system is a political act. How do films encourage us to accept inequality? How do they use racism to achieve that effect? Does the world of influencers really empower people? Or are the influencers who are paid $50,000 a post simply “power callers” in a world full of underpaid call center workers? How are visions and images of great wealth throughout our world used to make us aspire to be uber-wealthy? Are they also used to normalize extravagance so we’re less shocked by it and so less likely to notice how unfair it is?

These question are provocations: they’re designed to engage a way of thinking about the world and about images that we don’t typically use or discuss. They’re the final stage of a survey of visual literacy that has ranged from how our brains read images (Compositional Analysis) to what role they have in creating and transmitting our history (Aura), to how they can be altered to improve our relationship to each other (Representation) and the flipside, how people are actively using them to control our behavior (Branding), then finally to how they spread in an online world (Networks) and how they reflect and produce our economic system, for better or worse (Labor). As with images, a powerful reaction to a leading question can tell you a lot about yourself and your values, ultimately allowing you to know yourself and your beliefs better. Visual literacy is that leading question: how do you think your world and life is shaped by images?

Open License Image Links

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/balancing-in-love-cartoon-character-2969965/

https://freesvg.org/dolphin-connect-the-dots-vector-image