Building a Rhetoric with Spider Web(s) & Cake: Melanie’s Wysocki Analysis

Wysocki’s OPENING NEW MEDIA TO WRITING: openings & justifications visually adheres to standard academic composition design principles—mostly. Its title, part large, all-cap, bold, sans serif font and part smaller, bold all lower-case font, overlays a screen print of text that bleeds from the top, left, and right corners, fading to white beneath the subhead. Size and placement emphasize the phrase OPENING NEW MEDIA TO WRITING. Screened text beneath the title appears in diagonal lines that read, in part (we cannot see the whole, and myopic vision figures in Wysocki’s STICKY EMBRACE argument) “all the rest,” “the last 15-20 years,” “like in the following quotation,” situating her discussion historically and contextually. Wysocki’s name appears on the top left side of chapter pages in vertical orientation. o p e n i n g s & j u s t i f i c a t i o n s appears on the top right side of chapter pages in vertical orientation. Page numbers appear to rest on their sides. Chapter sections are marked above the left text margin by the same screen print image that the chapter title overlays, only in smaller squares that fade from bottom to top and each of the five “OPENINGS” is marked with the same image in longer rectangles, to the right of which subtitles appear. The ACTIVITIES section uses horizontal, screen-printed bars containing section titles to announce activity and topic shifts.

Wysocki writes for an academic audience from a social constructivist perspective and evokes the image of a web as a construction trope. (social constructivist theory contends that knowledge is not neutral or independent of cultural norms and values, but “socially constructed in support of particular values and understandings” (answers.com)) Wysocki argues in both chapters from a social constructivist perspective, opposing current traditional emphasis on form. The web image rhetorically performs two ways: it visually recalls a spider web’s ethereal strength and connectivity. It metaphorically represents the World Wide Web, the space in which new media takes shape. Wysocki quotes Kress’s claim that we are at a time “’in the long history of writing when four momentous changes are taking place simultaneously: social, economic, communicational, and technological’” (1). The centrality of image in communication is “’challenging the dominance of writing’” (qtd. in Wysocki 1). Writing as we know it “circulates, shifts, and has varying value and weight within complexly articulated social, cultural, political, educational, religious, economic, familial, ecological, political, artistic, affective, and technological webs” (2).

This chapter introduces Writing New Media. Wysocki offers “openings—some range of active possibilities” for making “actively present in our classes how writing is continually changing material activity that shapes just who we can be and what we can do” (2-3). She outlines five needs to which her theory and teaching responds: 1. “The need, in writing about new media . . . for material thinking of people who teach writing”; 2. “A need to focus on the specific materiality of” texts; 3. “A need to define ‘new media texts’ in terms of their materialities”; 4. “A need for production of new media texts in writing classrooms”; and 5. “A need for strategies of generous reading” (Wyscoki 3).

Wysocki explains the “materiality of writing” as concrete circumstances that create our writing realities: technologies used to produce writing, the conditions in which they are produced, the classroom environment, or “socioeconomic conditions” that contribute to writing production, the “number of students in writing classes,” or the “networks” of writing distribution and publishing through which social and global relations of power are expressed (Wysocki 3). For writing faculty, “the materiality” of “teaching composition” can include “physical classroom conditions . . . the teacher’s physical health,” resources and support offered, “teaching load, salary, and job security,” student population characteristics, “relationships between the academic institution and state and commercial institutions” (Wysocki 4). Materiality of writing is important. Our agency and ability to affect change depends upon recognition of our position(s) within “contingent material structures” (Wysocki 4). We must know where we are, and where we have been, before we can figure out where we are going, how we can “construct new relations between the different structures that matter to us” (Wysocki 4)—how to spin webs that connect composition and new media. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_9-ntUMXWE
(what does Joan Osborne’s Spider Web have to do with this discussion? open the lyrics to see)

Opening 1: Wysocki argues that “new media needs to be opened to writing,” that writing faculty need to fill the materiality gap between individual texts and their contexts with rhetorical knowledge. Present-day teaching of composition in the new media lacks critical discussion of rhetorical considerations the materiality of new media choices offer compositionists and why (or even if) certain composing choices are made and others are not.

Opening 2: Wysocki suggests that the materiality of writing raises questions about the relationship between compositions and audience: “what we don’t see allows our practices and products to connect to each other in ways we may neither intend nor like and to shape the ways in which they are connected—and hence to shape what we are capable of doing and knowing” (qtd. in Wysocki 13). The materiality of our texts always contributes to meaning whether we make material choices about them or not. Digitality may offer compositionists new choices that were not previously available, or limit choices through technologies that have already made default design decisions previously available to compositionists.

Opening 3: Wysocki claims that new media text is conscious of its own materiality and uses its materiality to express values and meaning. It involves both composer and audience in dialogue; it is often characterized by interactivity.

Opening 4: Wysocki turns toward praxis in recommending that writing faculty ask students to use new media, to compose from “a wide and alertly chosen range of materials” (Wysocki 20).

Opening 5: Wysocki calls for writing faculty to approach composition in an open way that accepts alternative modes of writing and evaluating, in a spirit of generosity.

On pages 24-41, Wysocki outlines six classroom activities and assignments that enact her theory. These activities ask students to carefully consider new media choices they (and others) make in composition design and to be mindful about how those choices relate to ideas they emphasize (or de-emphasize). They attempt to get students, and faculty, to see composing and to compose in new, rhetorically aware and rhetorically effective ways.

Wysocki’s STICKY EMBRACE OF beauty chapter visually embodies the standardized form subverting, social-constructivist (see above) rhetorical design principles she asserts. The title overlays a screen print of feathery, flowery, Victorian wallpaper that bleeds off the top, left and right corners of the page, fading to white behind the subtitle. The choice of Victorian-era wallpaper is significant and, like Victorian sexual repression, implied but never overtly stated, lies quietly beneath the title’s surface, contextualizing and situating Wysocki’s piece. Title fonts and formats, THE STICKY EMBRACE OF beauty, visually echo two images Wysocki opens with: the HEAVY (i pictured, masculine) BODY STUCK TO THE BARCALOUNGER represented in all-caps, bold, sans-serif; and the curvy, thin image of the woman staring provocatively back from the Peek ad represented in all lower-case, flowing, curvilinear script; the b’s ascender in beauty gently touches the R of EMBRACE, and the long sweep of the y’s descender touches the top tips of “hin” in the word teaching contained in the subtitle, “On some formal relations in teaching about the visual aspects of texts,” below. These gendered fonts, their placement, their overlay on Victorian wallpaper, foreshadow ideas Wysocki examines throughout this chapter about how certain gender and power relations manifest
u n q u e s t i o n e d
in visual composition design principles.

Before Wysocki offers these images, quotes from Eagleton and Hine appear in small font above the first paragraph of her text, below the subtitle. Eagleton’s quote outlines three theoretic areas underlying Wysocki’s discussion: cognition, ethics, and aesthetics. Hine’s quote presents the idea of design as control.

This chapter's breaks from standard form seem to suggest gender, social, and historically specific messages. On page 149, the second paragraph’s last four lines extend beyond the right margin, and white space between the words “I’ll be arguing that” is tripled. Shaded horizontal bars appear beneath certain lines of text; on page 150, one of these broken, shaded, horizontal bars connects paragraph text to the Peek ad, overlaying, seeming to pierce the abdomen of the woman pictured, with its right-pointing arrow tip tilted down. Page 152 features a large oval illustration, a floral arrangement on which composing tools lie: a paragraph of text rests centered in the illustration. Another broken, shaded, this time vertical bar with a downward pointing arrow tip appears in the right margin of page 154, seeming to pierce an illustration of an apple. Page 164 reproduces black and white halftones of paintings by William de Kooning and Pablo Picasso.

Wysocki argues that today’s visual composition epistemologies cannot facilitate visual literacy because they separate form from content, privilege form, fragment content, and enact one-way, (literally) top-down communication that destroys reciprocity and dialogue. Her analysis of the Peek ad (148) attempts to explain her conflicted response to it. Applying Robin Williams’s “design principles,” noting how they lead to “professional, organized, unified” and consistent layout standards (150), Wysocki sees these as enacting certain unquestioned values. These values are historically grounded and consequential; they grew in post WWI industrial contexts that “entwined information and desire,” disseminating compositions that embodied fragmented content and valued efficient form—ideas found in current traditionalism. While such design principles offer framework for discussing composition elements, the framework enacts and replicates its unquestioned values. Thus composition elements are treated as abstract, disconnected, decontextualized, missing necessary social-historical grounding.

Rudolph Arnheim’s and Molly Bang’s visual communication principles for composition go further in recognizing value(s) informing visual composition principles. Arnheim’s ideas are gravitationally grounded, and Bang’s “principles of how we make meaning of abstract shapes” (Wysocki 154) rest on those grounds. But analyzing the Peek ad like detached, egocentric, masculine power portraits Arnheim notes that prevail in western cultures, like those of the pope, giving “visual expression to some divine or exalted power” is problematic, obviously (Wysocki 154). Analyzing the Peek ad like curved shapes or landscape elements Bang notes is also problematic; the woman’s living (specific) body does not correspond to lifeless (abstract) shapes or landscape. Reading the ad through the “archetypal” mother’s appeal is complicated by its un-motherly-ness, the powerful “counterpoint” Bang fails to address (Wysocki 156). For Wysocki, the principles of Arnheim and Bang rely on a “character-less self,” a “generalized body” (Wysocki 157). The uncomfortable abstraction remains yet requires viewers to see their “essential” selves “and experiences made visible” through it (Wysocki 157). Wysocki cannot see her essence or self in the ad or feel the ad connecting with her. Its composition lacks dialogue, reciprocity, but enacts reproduction of certain values.

If we accept Wysocki’s views of Arnheim, Bang, and Williams and agree that “form comes from one’s egocentric experiences and one takes pleasure in seeing these experiences comfortably inscribed in other objects,” and if the selves around which a culture of images are organized are heteronormative patriarchs, then the Peek ad’s appeal to the “generalized body” and Wysocki’s conflicted response makes sense (157). Is the “generalized body” male? Wysocki argues, (and i agree), that “formal approaches to the visual” are neither “neutral” nor “univeral” (Wysocki 158). They are political. They are powerful in their abstract, taken-for-grantedness, embedded in cultural framework. Can we see them at work in one of the most powerful rhetorics a culture can have, religion? Their grounding in groundless monotheistic patriarchy?
(what does this video set to Cake’s “Comfort Eagle” have to do with this discussion?)







Repetition of “standardized, linear” thinking manifests deeply in western culture and echoes unquestioned values of “unity, efficiency, and coherence” through factory lines, “parking lots,” “rows of desks,” academic texts. But Wysocki advises against reductive pedagogies that teach form separate from content, for “form is itself always a set of structuring principles, with different forms growing out of and reproducing different but specific values” (159).

Because of the influence of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy on western composition, Wysocki summarizes his three critiques (which align with Eagleton’s three theoretical strands) and examines the positions of Nature and form, or “intellectual design,” and the role of “universal thought” expressed in connective arcs of “understanding,” “reason,” and “judgment” (160-61). An oppositional dialectic emerges, nature vs. man, real vs. ideal, grounded vs. abstract, from Kant’s critiques, opposition which paradoxically embodies “universal thought.” For Kant, judgment allows recognition of beauty, connecting pleasurable feeling with “concept of the purposiveness of Nature” (qtd. in Wysocki 162). Yet Kant claims that a curious, counterintuitive disconnect between the beautiful object and judgment—disinterest—must exist. Aesthetic judgments “start with the object, but quickly” move to “appreciation of the formal relations suggested by the object” (Wysocki 162). Beauty following the line of “universal thought” universally pleases and is thus “formally inherent” (Wysocki 162).

But is there any such thing as “universal thought”?

Wysocki introduces Wendy Steiner’s ideas that Kant’s philosophy is not “disinterested,” rather, it is specifically masculine and speaks to specifically masculine interests. Femininity is rendered invisible by disinterested “universal thought.” Kant’s “certainty in the possibility of universal intellectual conditions—cannot be separated from how his sense of the world and its functioning grew out of his ability as a man of his time and place to look upon his experiences as being, necessarily, the experiences of all others” (Wysocki 164). Wysocki discusses Steiner’s use of Mary Wollstonecraft’s arguments that women’s so-called “inferiorities” result from unequal opportunities and that these “inferiorities” cause their enslavement “to sensation” against “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a response to Kant’s aesthetics” (164). Wysocki also shows how Steiner traces men’s so-called aesthetic “disinterest” through recent “art and literary practices” that widen gaps between the concrete, “factitious,” real and the abstract, ideal, unreal (165). Visually supporting this discussion are halftones of de Kooning and Picasso paintings that depict fragmented, disembodied, unrecognizable, ?supposedly beautiful? feminine forms. Their “beauty” eludes me; I cannot see it; it does not reciprocate. (is this why i dislike these paintings?) Wysocki suggests a reason why: this kind of “formal beauty has nothing to do with me or with you” (167).

Wysocki connects this analysis to the Peek ad and her conflicted response. She sees the body in the Peek ad “departicularized,” yet her formal training encourages her to see this as pleasing. At the same time, she recognizes disjunctive flaws in her formal training that disregard particulars of content and can lead to “objectification,” devaluation, even “violence toward women” (Wysocki 167-68). It angers Wysocki that her “very (learned) idea of what is beautiful, what is well-formed, is dangerous for women and any anestheticized Others” (Wysocki 168-69).

Wysocki concludes that a new sensual aesthetic grounded in “reciprocal relationships” is needed to replace this bifurcation of form and content with views of form as emanating from, and integrated with, content (170). She suggests seeing “beauty as coming out of the day-to-day necessities of our social existence—an ‘experience of community and shared values’”(qtd. in Wysocki 172). I argue that a foundation of this formal revision requires “building a [new] religion,” building a reciprocal rhetoric, that values feminine and masculine principles equally.

On pages 175-197, Wysocki outlines seven classroom activities and assignments designed to teach how content and form interconnect. These activities ask students to carefully consider how contexts and histories affect content, to see composing and to compose in new, rhetorically aware and rhetorically effective ways.

Work Cited

Wysocki, Anne Frances. “OPENING NEW MEDIA TO WRITING: openings & justifications.” Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 1-41.

--. “THE STICKY EMBRACE OF beauty: on some formal relations in teaching about the visual aspects of texts Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Wysocki, Anne Frances, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, Geoffrey Sirc. Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 147-197.