In the true spirit of visual argument, I am going to hope that this will make sense and stand on its own.
If you have trouble ascribing some meaning to it, I'll gladly elucidate. It might be complete nonsense, given that I'm rather sleep-deprived.
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Um-- is it "you can't see the forest for the trees?" Anyway, it's very nice, Bri. And I am sure it has meaning beyond my ability to comprehend. I'm jealous. I wish I could make cool visuals on my computer.
Yep, that was pretty much it. But, more than that, when you zoom in too closely, sometimes you can't see anything. That is sort of how I'm feeling right now with all my research, so it was my chance to sort of vent.
I, too, very much like your argument. My problem is that I generally require an explanation, and may not have gotten it without Darren's interpretation. It looks like the trees are wearing shoes. Are they? If so, what does that mean?
I had the same reaction Darren had, though I missed the legs and shoes! I thought I could sex up the old yarn a bit and add a Marxist bent, a la Lukacs' concept of totality. Lukacs said that bourgeois society tends to destroy proletarians' ability to see images of the whole of society (in a very forest-for-the-trees sort of way) and therefore preventing them from acquiring true knowledge of the way things really are.
I know this is completely arbitrary, but that's intentional. I wanted to add something completely different because, unlike *some* people who will remain unnamed here (*cough* Leta *cough*), I like the idea of texts --visual, academic, whatever--being open to multiple interpretations.
They aren't wearing shoes; I'm just a lousy artist!
And that is my objection to using visual argument by itself! While I think that it is nice to interpret things in multiple ways, I also think that clarity is key when making an argument. I mean, what is the point in having someone agree with you if they don't agree with what you're actually saying, only with what they think you're saying?
Now I CAN'T look at this without seeing trees with shoes. And I like it that way.
See, I didn't interpret that huge *thing* in the middle of the composition as a magnifying glass at all. I saw it as a pot full of green paint, sitting on top of a painting of a forest. I thought the meaning had something to do with the artificiality of our concept of "nature."
I like your reading, Tim!
And, I'm ashamed that my trees are wearing shoes.
Yeah, I thought the thing in the middle was the end of a bong for a second, and that the message was that you're smoking trees.
Bri, what you describe a few comments up reminds me of the "conduit metaphor" in linguistics. Michael Reddy used this metaphor to describe how we like to think of communication--that ideas are like objects and words are like containers, and that in communication we "pack up" ideas in words and send them to someone else to "unpack" (like in a conduit). Reddy critiques this metaphor for several reasons, but salient among them for me is the fact that it just doesn't describe what actually happens in communication and, within that, argument--visual or otherwise. Traditional forms of argument are interpretted in multiple ways all the time--and it's not a matter of clarity, but rather points-of-view, of the shared and divergent experiencs that producers and consumers of texts bring to the exchange. I can actually work Wysocki in here--she comments that when composing their visual arguments, her students "see their work as reciprocal, shaping themselves as well as those for whom the work is made" (173). Wysocki's description is analogous to an alternate metaphor Reddy offers us, that of the tool-box, where communication is done in terms of work between interlocutors (something that also came to mind: is meaning centered in the producer of a text, or in the audience, or both? what about the trans-historical and cross-cultural interpretations?).
I value clarity, too--and I'm going to emphasize it in my classes. But I think alongside that (not in opposition to it), it's important to also allow for nuance, for multiple points of view and multiple interpretations, and for contigencies--for flux. At the end of the day, we're all black boxes--we can't ever really know what someone else means. Most of us share Arienne Rich's "Dream of a Common Language," but what we experience is the Tower of Bable. How do we fight that? We strive to grease the wheels of communication, we do things like foreground assumptions and back-channeling (forgive me--another term from linguistics). Clarity exists on a coninuum, of course, and there are strategies to teach it. But absolute clarity--a true one-to-one connection between interlocutors--is rare. It's a dream, a thing to strive for, but in the meantime, there's all this work to be done.
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