COMPOSING(MEDIA) = COMPOSING(EMBODIMENT)

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Into Between—On Composition in Mediation Anne Frances Wysocki..................................................................11 Drawn Together: Possibilities for Bodies in Words and Pictures Anne Frances Wysocki..............................................................252 Pausing to Reflect: Mass Observation, Blogs, and Composing Everyday Life Paul Walker.............................................................433 Authoring Avatars: Gaming, Reading, and Writing Identities Matthew S. S. Johnson.................................................................604 How Billie Jean King Became the Center of the Universe David Parry...............................................................................725 Information Cartography: Visualizations of Internet Spatiality and Information Flows Jason Farman................................................856 Multimodal Methods for Multimodal Literacies: Establishing A Technofeminist Research Identity Jen Almjeld and Kristine Blair.....................977 Writing against Normal: Navigating a Corporeal Turn Jay Dolmage..................................................................................110ACTIVITIES for PART 1...............................................................................................................................1278 Crafting New Approaches to Composition Kristin Prins.............................................................................................1459 Bodies of Text Aaron Raz Link....................................................................................................................16210 Whose Body?: Looking Critically at New Interface Designs Ben McCorkle...........................................................................17411 Queerness, Multimodality, and the Possibilities of Re/Orientation Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes......................................18812 It's My Revolution: Learning to See the Mixedblood Kristin L. Arola.............................................................................21313 Visible Guerrillas Karen Springsteen............................................................................................................22714 Affording New Media: Individuation, Imagination, and the Hope of Change Kristie Fleckenstein....................................................239ACTIVITIES for PART 2...............................................................................................................................259Works Cited.........................................................................................................................................269Index...............................................................................................................................................279About the Authors...................................................................................................................................291

Chapter One

Anne Frances Wysocki

A few years back, in an interview published in JAC, Stuart Hall suggested one reason production has always mattered to writing studies: Hall ties production to identity. He says that "there is no final, finished identity position or self" to be reflected in one's writing; instead, as he describes the process of producing a written text, he says that

while it's true that you may have a very clear notion of what the argument is and that you may be constructing that argument very carefully, very deliberately, your identity is also in part becoming through the writing. (qtd. in Drew 173)

For Hall, that is, "We therefore occupy our identities very retrospectively: having produced them, we then know who we are" (qtd. in Drew 173). It is not that we find our selves in our work because there was a unified self that preceded the work and that only needed being made present somehow in the work; it is rather that what the work is—its status as a shaped object in front of us—makes visible to us "what we are." "I think only then," continues Hall, "do we make an investment [in the produced position], saying, 'Yes, I like that position, I am that sort of person, I'm willing to occupy that position" (qtd. in Drew 173). One could also just as easily say, "No, I do not like that position ... how can I rework it?"—but in either case the position has had to be constructed—produced—before it can be so judged.

That is, we see ourselves in what we produce. We can look at what we produce to ask, "Is that who I (at least in part) am? Is that who I want to be? Is that a position through which I want to be seen?"

In this chapter, I want to consider (altogether too quickly to be anything more than suggestive, given the space here) what kinds of identities and bodies can be constructed when one can use not only words but also pictures—as in comic books and graphic novels—in composing.

In composing the selves-to-be-considered that Hall describes, we can only work with available cultural categories for shaping texts if we wish to be understood by others, as the New London Group describes when they argue that any composition must begin in "available designs" (the existing social systems of conventions, grammars, and genres upon which all text composers rely) or as Kaja Silverman describes when she writes, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic structures, that "all subjects, male or female, rely for their identity upon the repertoire of culturally available images" surrounding them at any time (295). The argument I build here about words and pictures as available designs or culturally available images depends on understanding words and pictures not as having essential, formal functions but as having histories. And because of the particular histories words and pictures have had relative to each other, and because of how then comics and graphic novels have come to have a particular cultural place at this moment, certain kinds of visible identities—and questionings of identities, and understandings of bodies—are possible, for now.

The available designs of words and pictures, that is, come with attached discourses. How one articulates words and pictures, then, can play with—or against—those discourses.

* * *

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, Marshall McLuhan argues that the serious and repeated look of printed book pages homogenize (some) people. In the book there are men who build nations together because they see similarities in themselves as they learned to see book pages; in the book there is abstraction, but nothing of bodies; there is science and philosophy, but nothing of the quotidian; there are men and words, and men and words only. It is in McLuhan's earlier The Mechanical Bride, first published in 1951, that there appear women, children, class distinctions, cars, nylons, Mennen Skin Bracer, pictures, advertising, and "sex, gunplay, fast action" (14); in this second book, McLuhan claims that

A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living...