reading Rose

Thank you all for the smart discussion Thursday night: I hope you enjoyed (as I did) the fineness of our talk, the good questions, and the understandings we built around Rose's arguments about visual methodologies. What follows is my memory of our main concerns -- so, please, in the comments, add to / subtract from / take issue with what I've written so that we have as strong a memory together as possible.

The place our discussion took off, it seems to me, is with what happens after Rose's claims that any "critical visual methodology" must do three things: "take images seriously," "think about the social conditions and effects of visual objects," and "consider" the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images." After she sets up those criteria (the latter two of which will come back soon) she describes the "sites" of sighting practices in which "meaning is made" (production / image / audience) and the modalities with which those sites intersect (technological, compositional, and social). We spent our time focusing on the sites and the modalities, and somewhat on their intersections, but we did not have time for asking what the resulting "grid" of intersections implies in terms of the judgments it encourages; I am pretty sure, though, that in the coming weeks, as we explore further some of the methodologies that Rose describes, as well as others, that more questions about the grid -- and what it encourages us to see or overlook, and how it positions us as reflexive viewers-critics, and about other possible configurations for considering visual objects -- will emerge.

You all noted how Rose's sites -- of production / image / audience -- parallel the 'traditional' triad of writing studies, of author / text / audience. We discussed why Rose would use "production" instead of "artist" or "composer," which would parallel the writing studies triad: this is a direct result, it would seem, with her concern that we consider the social conditions and effects of visual objects, such that we do not want to reduce production to an individual person purposefully and intentfully in control of a text. Rose's treatment does not come to production as Foucault's notion of the "author function" does, with the author/composer composed by readers out of and in response to a text (the closest to this would be her discussion of the what the "good eye" does in constructing ideas about great artists); instead, Rose's use of "production" seems aimed at keeping us imagining production as a coming together of a multiply scaled set of social / cultural / political /economic /technological processes.

But then why does she still hold to "audience," which keeps us imagining discrete people? Why does she not use "reception" as the parallel term? Alexa asked if this might be connected to a desire to make "audience" concrete as possible for us, to keep reminding us that this site is indeed real groups of real people responding, so that we do not think of passive reception. I have to admit, though, that "audience" carries precisely that connotation for me, of passivity. So why point us away (rightfully so, I think) from thinking of the producer as a single individual while keeping to the old term for the receivers?

We also asked whether "image" is inclusive enough for what she hopes to achieve, given that the word asks us to imagine static, 2D, realistically representative art works or photographs -- and such works are a tiny subset of the range of visual objects we compose for each other. The word also asks us to think of such work as statically contained, as objects that sit still before us; again, this goes against Rose's other attempts to encourage us toward more dynamic conceptions of processes. Here, for example, is where Christine pointed out the Eurocentricity of this -- and the other -- parts of this system: from her work with local tribal groups and photography, Christine noted that there is no word that captures, as "image" or "photograph" does for us, that sense of a stilled or caught object; she told us how the closest words always mean movement, someone doing something or on the way to somewhere. This, then, is a question we need to raise of the methodologies we consider this semester.

This also leads us into questioning after Rose's emphasis on reflexivity, her insistence that critical methodologies must consider the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images"; this is where Heather and Yang each asked about -- reminding us very appropriately -- of the place of the teacher in relation to the methodologies we teach. For each of the methodologies Rose presents in the book, she raises the objection that it is not or not sufficiently reflexive -- as we are noting that there is reflexivity about larger cultural positioning vis-à-vis historically/culturally developed systems of seeing and talking about seeing and the objects of sight. As our class talked, we realized that her complaints seem related to her grid of sites and modalities: within the grid, the alertness to social positioning that characterizes reflexivity is present for the sites of production and of reception -- but there is no overtly marked place in the grid for the reflexivity that Rose argues ought to accompany the work of the critic. In other words, Rose's grid does not, apparently, allow for there to be a methodological system in which reflexivity is necessarily called forth by the relation of the parts of the grid. If the grid is meant to encompass all the possible components of systems of looking and objects, then the critic -- and hence the critic's reflexivity -- is left out. The critic *could* be considered under audience, as some part of audience: how might the critic/analyst/teacher be woven into a visual methodology so that reflexivity would of necessity be part of the practice?

In addition, Steve wondered whether compositional methodologies are necessarily a part of any methodology that hopes to consider visual objects, since it is compositional methodologies that allow us to say anything about the structure of visual objects. Although Rose seems to dismiss such methodologies as the simplest and least reflexive of the methodologies, we noted that every other methodological approach -- when applied -- starts by describing in the object being analyzed its elements and the relations established between them. Rose's concerns about compositional methodologies ought to whisper behind us as we read for next week, for those readings -- the Donis and Arnheim (as with the Bang) -- are at the core of what many use for compositional analysis (as with Kress and van Leeuwen): are they as concerned with the "good eye" as Rose claims is the central point of compositional analysis?