ENGL 759k:

Word and Image

Spring 2002

Quotations

[T]he relation of language to painting is an infinite relation.

--Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

W. E. B. Du Bois said “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” As we move into an era in which “color” and “line” (and the identities they designate) have become potently manipulable elements in pervasive technologies of simulation and mass mediation, we may find that the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the image. . . . [T]he tensions between visual and verbal representations are inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political culture.

--W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory

Although we have thousands of words about pictures, we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of them.

--W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory

From the invention of letters the machinations of the human heart began to operate; falsity and error daily increased; litigation and prisons had their beginnings, as also specious and artful language, which causes so much confusion in the world. It was on these accounts that the shades of the departed wept at night. But, on the other hand, from the invention of letters all polite intercourse and music proceeded and reason and justice were made manifest; the relations of life were defined, and laws were fixed; governors had a lasting rule to refer to; scholars had authorities to venerate; the historian, the mathematician, the astronomer, can do nothing without letters. Were there not letters to give proof of passing events, the shades might weep at noonday as well as night and the heavens rain down blood, for tradition might affirm what she pleased, so that the letters have done much more good than evil; and as a token of the good, heaven rained down ripe grain the day that they were first invented.

--Henry Noel Humphreys, The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing, 1853

Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word.

--Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

The word is an image after all.

--Stuart Moulthrop, “Web Wisdom”

When a “word” is a series of keystrokes stored as information which can be mutated into another output form simply through a series of electronic moves, then the material existence of the word becomes rethought, reconfigured. Similarly, when the “word” is put into a photo-shop image as part of a pixilated tapestry so that it loses all relation to keystroke or letters and functions just like another element in the image—subject to the same “stretch,” “whirl,” “twist” and other visual commands, then the status of the word as such becomes a moot point. It is merely and only—or finally and last—an image. This newly fluid boundary of identity, though prefigured by photographic media, is unique to the electronic environment.

--Johanna Drucker, “Synthetic Sensibilities”

All language is visual when read.

--Charles Bernstein

I can't I I I I can't simultaneously read I can't read a book I can't READ a book and LOOK at it at the same time.

--Random Cloud [Randall McCleod]

Literary language is Optical, speaking language Vocal, and the gap between them must spread till it becomes a gulf. My reading machine will serve as a wedge. Makers of modern words will be born; fresh, vital eye-words that will wink out of dull, dismal, drooling type at startled or smug readers. New methods crave new matter; conventional word-prejudices will be overcome, from necessity reading-writing will spring full blown into being. The Revolution of the Word will be won. Reading-writing will be produced not so much for its sonorific sleep-producing qualities as for its mental-eye-provoking pleasures.

--Bob Brown, The Readies

A page is literally one side of a two-sided sheet of paper—the surface of a three dimensional object.

--Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, “Twenty One Facts that Could Alter Your Life”

In the Graphic Arts, you cannot get rid of matter. Every drawing is in a substance and on a substance. Every substance used in drawing has its own special and peculiar relations both to nature and to the human mind.

--Philip Gilbert Hamilton, The Graphic Arts, 1882

The essence of the problem is that visual communication, like all other forms of communication, has a material base. While an illustrator purports to convey to us the Raphael painting of St. Cecilia, what we actually experience is a black smear of ink on yellowed paper, or a complex network of crosslines within which certain larger or smaller blobs of ink convey to our minds certain visual implications. These implications are perceived through learned habit, just as all sight may be said to be learned. Just as we somehow learn to rectify the upside-downness of our retinal images, and so without consciously paying attention to such a miracle, so we piece together the dots and lines—the codes—of our culture’s graphic media.

--Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts

[A]ll tools signify compromises that This World makes necessary. There are no burins in eternity.

--Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy

Every picture tells a story—a story of delay, complication, and increased demand on fragile systems.

--Stuart Moulthrop, “Web Wisdom”

Contemporary life is more saturated with signs, letters, language in visual form than that of any other epoch—T-shirts, billboards, electronic marquis, neon signs, mass-produced print media—all are part of the visible landscape of daily life, especially in urban Western culture.

--Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth

[I]t is obvious that the visual is the pre-eminent arena of contemporary mass culture to the extent that literacy appears to be declining in many affluent societies, not only perhaps because of declining educational resources but because the skill seems less and less relevant to many people.

--Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua

The Romans stole the alphabeta from the Greeks through war. Then, in medieval times, monks ornamented letters to hide their meaning from the people. Now, the letter is armored against further manipulation.

--New York City graffiti artist Rammellzee on the “Ikonoklast Panzerism” style he invented

ALL OF YOU TAKING PHOTOS: I WONDER IF YOU REALLY SEE WHATS HERE OR IF YOU’RE SO CONCERNED WITH GETTING THAT PERFECT SHOT THAT YOU’VE FORGOTTEN THIS IS A TRAGEDY SITE, NOT A TOURIST ATTRACTION. AS I CONTINUALLY HAD TO “MOVE OUT OF SOMEONE’S WAY” AS THEY CAREFULLY TRIED TO FRAME THIS PLACE MOURNING, I KEPT WONDERING WHAT MAKES US THINK WE CAN CAPTURE THE PAIN, THE LOSS, THE PRIDE & THE CONFUSION—THIS COMPLEXITY—ONTO A 4x5 GLOSSY. I ♥ MY CITY.

--Hand-lettered poster at the site of the former World Trade Center, signed “FIREGIRL,” 9/17/01