Acephalous

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

Turns out I owe Jack Cashill an apology.

Because I was wrong, wrong, wrong about the identity of the author of Dreams From My Father. Independent confirmation of Cashill's claim that William Ayers penned the President's memoir comes in the form of a book by celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen. Cashill is right to be excited—it's not every day you blunder to the plate, close your eyes, swing for the fences and have your prayers answered. That's what the arrival of corroborating evidence in Andersen's book amounts to, and no researcher who's found corroboration of the sort in independently researched materials will begrudge Cashill the tone of unreserved glee and grammatical abandon evident in his latest post:

In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.

Who cares that book titles are traditionally underlined or italicized, capital letters belong at the beginning of sentences, or that he uses, commas, like an undergraduate when independent research has provided a factual basis for his speculative argument:

Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published—just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."

Only a killjoy would complain that Michelle Obama couldn't be a source, "quite possibly" or otherwise, because Andersen wrote an unauthorized biography—which, by definition, is a biography whose subject or subjects did not participate in its composition. That those "inside sources" who knew of Michelle's purported recommendation are not named, i.e. sourced, is the sort of thing that, despite being true, only someone who hated joy would point out.

Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant—so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."

Even though Cashill jettisons the very pretense of formatting book titles here, and even though Andersen's claim is couched in a conditional clause ("would be significant") of the sort favored by authors who learned their libel law from the wrong end of many lawsuits, we should not let such quibbles diminish the importance of this independent, corroborating evidence—especially when, even though Cashill doesn't identify him in his post, these claims come from a named source:

In the end, Ayers's contribution of Barack's Dreams from My Father would be significant—so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similiarity to Ayers's own writings . . .

"There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Hyde Park," said writer Jack Cashill, who noted that a mutual friend of Barack and Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, thanked Ayers for helping him with his book Resurrecting Empire. Ayers, explained Cashill, "provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood."

Your eyes do not deceive you. Against odds of astronomical grandeur, Cashill's independent, corroborating evidence for his theory that William Ayers wrote the President's memoir is also named Jack Cashill. But, as Cashill—the one who first made the claim, not the independent researcher who verified it—might say, sometimes the world can be as small as the city of the Chicago.

A New Literary History of the United States in Literature

The publication of A New Literary History of the United States will likely strike a few chords familiar to the participants in the debate that followed Rohan’s latest post.  Written neither in the Emory Elliot mode—a history of items both literary and American—nor that of Sacvan Bercovitch—a history all items written by Americans that can be yours for the low, low price of $299.29—editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors instead decided to write a cultural history of the United States in a self-consciously literary voice.  As Laura Miller at Salon* writes, the two

have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable.” With this in mind, they’ve produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

This is, then, an anthology seemingly written to drive J.C. Hallman to drink, because it doggedly focuses on cultural significance over the literariness of the literary.  However soul-deadening he might consider its subject matter, the manner in which most of it is written would likely meet with approval.  Though idea-driven, the prose in Jonathan Lethem’s entry on Thomas Edison—in which he exclusively discusses the inventor’s place in film history—still sings: 

Next week, George Nash will bemoan the fact that we’ve never had a white President.

I ignore those who insist that there’s something untoward about discussing the life’s work of a man at his own funeral—they can begin with his 1970 Health Security Act and work their way forward to the Kennedy-Dodd bill of 2009 on their own. I decline, that is, to say that had I insisted on codifying my ideological commitments in a Senate bill a month before my passing, I would have done so because those commitments were so important to me in life that I wanted them to define my death. Because, in the end, giving one’s natural death to a cherished cause differs from dying for it only by dint of circumstance and timing: to accomplish with one’s death what one fought for in life is the wish of the true believer, and there is nothing untoward in that.  But, as I said, there will be none of that.

Instead, I will marvel at the stentorian stupidity of George H. Nash, who received a degree in History from Harvard in 1973 then promptly forget everything he learned earning it.  To Nash, the death of Edward Kennedy represents an opportunity to bemoan “a disconcerting historical trend: the royalization of American politics.” Strangely, he does not begin his investigations with the many powerful branches of the Adams or Walker family trees (despite the former being the most prominent and the latter being the most recent). Instead, he claims that from

Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to the Kennedys and Camelot, American liberalism has repeatedly succumbed to this phenomenon. It begins in a cult of personality, extends to the leader’s wife and children, and then to a “court” of retainers and apologists.

The royalists, then, are not the ones descended from the state representative of Massachusetts’s 7th district—they are the descendants of the impoverished Irish immigrant that man represented from 1849 to 1851. That bears repeating: the son-in-law of William Walker, Julius Rockwell, represented Patrick Kennedy in the U.S. House of Representatives from the moment Kennedy disembarked in 1849 until Rockwell resigned 1851 and the only worrisome political royalty Nash can locate here are the Kennedys?

Granted, the family to whom he extends this cultish devotion is direct, “the leader’s wife and children,” so emphasis on the children of the Joseph Kennedy, Sr. is warranted: Joseph Jr., John, Robert and Edward are all direct descendants of a single powerful personage, as are the relatives in his other example, the pair of fifth cousins connected by a great-great-great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Van Rosenvelt, upon whose death in 1742 the family splintered into the Republican Oyster Bay and the Democratic Hyde Park Roosevelts.

Wait—now I’m confused.

Not only are the Roosevelts distant cousins instead of sons or brothers, they also belong to opposing factions of a family that’s been at political odds since before the Revolutionary War. How exactly are Republicans who voted for Theodore and Democrats who voted Franklin Delano symptomatic of American liberalism? Moreover, since Nash wants to talk about cults of personality extending to wives and children and courtiers, how could he not mention the two-term Connecticut Senator, Prescott Bush, whose son, George Herbert Walker Bush, and grandson, George Walker Bush, were both President? Does he believe the royalist inclinations of American liberalism are responsible for the Bushes?

Probably not, because this insidious royalism “starts in hero-worship and ends in nostalgia,” and beloved as both Bushes are, neither are afforded the “disturbing” and “disconcerting” treatment “that for nearly a century has afflicted American liberalism.” Anything that “starts in hero-worship and ends in nostalgia” threatens the body politic with an idiot malignance . . . as Nash himself proves when he starts the first paragraph of his essay with some hero-worship and ends it with nostalgia:

On March 30, 1981, Pres. Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated. What if he had died that day, before he had persuaded Congress to enact his signature program of tax cuts? Would his liberal opposition on Capitol Hill have given up their philosophical opposition to his agenda? Would they have stood silent if militant conservatives had tried to rush through sweeping tax-cut legislation as a monument to Reagan’s legacy?

Translation:

“What if the Great Hero had died in 1981? Would the Golden Age for which I now pine have ever come to be?”

I believe he was better off pretending two of the four most recent Presidents weren’t immediate kin—at least then he made my job a wee bit difficult.

(x-posted.)

This Day in Actual Communist and Real Nazi History

On this day in 1940, an actual Communist leader, Leon Trotsky, was stabbed in the head with an ice pick by Ramón Mercader, who was himself not only an actual Communist, but an agent of Stalin, who awarded Mercader’s mother an Order of Lenin for her part in the plot.  Upon his release from prison in 1960, Mercader moved to an actual Communist country, Cuba, and then to another, the Soviet Union, whereupon his arrival he was awarded a Hero of the Soviet medal from the head of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin.

On this day in 1944, an actual Communist country, the Soviet Union, launched an offensive against a real Nazi country, Hitler’s Germany, over the fate of Romania, which would end the day either a real Nazi or actual Communist coutry, but not both, because real Nazism and actual Communism are such different beasts that Hitler’s Germany went to war against Stalin’s Soviet Union over whose distinct sytem of oppression the Romanian people will be compelled to live under.  The actual Communists won the day, routing the real Nazis and installing an actual Communist government that would survive until 1989.

On this day in 1991, actual Communist tanks pulled in front of the actual Communist parliament building, the White House, in preparation for Operation Grom, a KGB-orchestrated coup against an actual Communist government led by Mikhail Gorbachev.  Within two days, Gorbachev would resign his position as General Secretary of the the actual Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by Christmas of that year, the hammer and sickle—the actual Communist flag of the Soviet Union—would be lowered from the Kremlin for the last time.

For the latest breaking news about mock communists and ersatz Nazis, keep it turned to FOXNews throughout the day.

(x-posted.)

“Certain lives are not worth living. Certain people, we should not spend the money to keep them alive…”

Consider this a bookend to Ari’s post, as those are the words of Hitler according to this protester:

According to her and those like her, Hitler didn’t actively conspire to murder millions of people in the service of a racist eugenics, he passively refused to “spend the money to keep them alive.”  Who are “they” here?  Because she claims that “limiting Medicare expenditures in order to reduce the deficit . . . is the T-4 policy of the Hitler—of a Hitler policy in 1939,” she must be talking about those killed under the auspices of the Aktion T-4 Euthanasie: the lebensunwertes Leben, or “life unworthy of life,” i.e. the elderly, the mentally disabled and the otherwise infirm. Par for the course for those who believe in “death panels.”

However, if people like this protester possessed a perspective of more depth and extension than the Wikipedia Brand Knowledge currently bandied about conservative discussion boards and listservs, they would know, for example, that the T-4 initiative was prohibitively expensive. Its predecessor, the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, or “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring,” which mandated the sterilization of the physically and mentally disabled, had been scaled back because it was too expensive. That is, they stopped, not started, the ideologically-based murders of those they considered defective because it would save Germany a few million Reichsmarks.

This should go without saying: the Nazis wanted to kill these people, they simply couldn’t afford to. In fact, it was only in 1939, after they’d planted a war on both horizons, that Hitler could justify the expense required to expand the T-4 initiative into the concentration camps.

In short, whatever Obama’s policy will be, if it is, as this protester claims, designed to reduce the national deficit, it won’t resemble Aktion T-4 one whit. Moreover, the category of lebensunwertes Leben wasn’t limited to those with mental or physical handicaps as we currently understand them: opponents of Nazi policy were routinely deemed to be insane and euthanized, meaning that so long as this protester and those like her are free to berate Barney Frank with patent nonsense, Godwin’s Law is still in full effect.

(x-posted.)

Rob Liefeld hates it when you gay up his straight characters...

. . . but he doesn't help his cause when he makes arguments like this:

He's a warrior, a Spartan, and not a gay one.

The evidence that the actual Spartans were homosexual [thanks James] is scant and somewhat contradictory.  In the most frequently cited classical source, "The Polity of the Lacedaemons," Xenephon insists that the Spartans were not homosexual in the manner of the Boetians and Eleians:

I ought, as it seems to me, not to omit some remark on the subject of boy attachments, it being a topic in close connection with that of boyhood and the training of boys.

We know that the rest of the Hellenes deal with this relationship in different ways, either after the manner of the Boeotians, where man and boy are intimately united by a bond like that of wedlock, or after the manner of the Eleians, where the fruition of beauty is an act of grace; whilst there are others who would absolutely debar the lover from all conversation and discourse with the beloved.

Lycurgus adopted a system opposed to all of these alike. Given that some one, himself being all that a man ought to be, should in admiration of a boy's soul endeavour to discover in him a true friend without reproach, and to consort with him—this was a relationship which Lycurgus commended, and indeed regarded as the noblest type of bringing up. But if, as was evident, it was not an attachment to the soul, but a yearning merely towards the body, he stamped this thing as foul and horrible; and with this result, to the credit of Lycurgus be it said, that in Lacedaemon the relationship of lover and beloved is like that of parent and child or brother and brother where carnal appetite is in abeyance. (301, emphasis mine)

Note that while there are no carnal relations allowed in Sparta, the male-male couple is still referred to as "lover and beloved," which leads me to believe this could be a rough Spartan equivalent of the Sacred Band of Thebes.  The other most frequently cited ancient source cited on homosexuality in Sparta is Plutarch's "Life of Lycurgus," in which he describes the wedding night and connubial bliss of the married Spartan couple thus:

Then the woman that had the direction of the wedding, cut the bride's hair close to the skin, dressed her in man's clothes, laid her upon a mattress, and left her in the dark. The bridegroom, neither oppressed with wine, nor enervated with luxury, but perfectly sober, as having always supped at the common table, went in privately, untied her girdle, and carried her to another bed.

Having stayed there a short time, he modestly retired to his usual apartment, to sleep with the other young men; and he observed the same conduct afterwards, spending the day with his companions, and reposing himself with them in the night, nor even visiting his bride, but with great caution and apprehensions of being discovered by the rest of the family; the bride, at the same time, exerted all her art to contrive convenient opportunities for their private meetings. (112, emphasis mine)

The Spartans are still not homosexual in the manner of the Boetians, Eleians, or a host of my closest friends; however, on their wedding nights they gave the bride a man's haircut, dressed her up men's clothes, did their thing, then "retired to [the] usual apartment, to sleep with the other young men."  Lycurgus seems to have mandated that all young men need and must be double-super-secret beards, which means that because no one is gay, everyone is; or that because everyone is gay, no one is—or maybe they were Heisenbergian beards, in that no Spartan could be measurably gay while being observed and vice versa because we have inadequate tools. 

So even the most charitably homophobic reading of the classical literature puts to lie the notion that someone can be a Spartan warrior and unquestionably straight at the same time.  From our perspective, being a Spartan warrior entails engaging in behaviors that range from "overtly homosexual" to "extremely homosocial," so Liefeld's claim that his character is "a Spartan, but not a gay one" smooths the wrinkles of historical truth in the name of hospital corners. 

Unfortunately for Liefeld, in the years since history there's been this, which this (inarguably NSFW) image pretty much sums up.

(h/t Bill Reed.)