The Invisible Middle Ground

A friend of mine and I had a really interesting discussion the other day about how difficult it is for a reasonable, mediating, middle-ground type of theory to survive in the scientific landscape. Within linguistics, there are a lot of debates I think a middle ground position serves the most efficient explanation.

However, there are several things holding back the success of such views. For one thing, extremes are usually louder. People are more vehement when defending/attacking a radical viewpoint. A mediating voice may simply be passed over as "not getting the whole picture" by the extremist views, instead of as a "reasonable middle ground." Both sides then view the middle ground as too much like the other side to be accepted.

As my friend pointed out, it's also the nature of statistics and experimental design to not support middle ground viewpoints. Outside of the rarely used Bayesian stats, hypothesis testing forces a binary distinction of confirmed or denied. That is, scientific methods promote extremist viewpoints.

If a hypothesis is tested and reveals a confirming answer, it is usually taken to mean that it is right and that opposing views are not — even if opposing views also receive confirming experimentation. What ensues is usually an unreconcilable clash of arguments, where neither side can see the validity of the other. Can't two rights exist at the same time?

Moreover, competing views often legitimately belong to differing paradigms of thinking. New paradigms are often asking new and different questions than the old ones, and thus providing new answers. Often, this involves chucking the old paradigm. However, do paradigm shifts have to throw out both the baby and the bathwater?

Perhaps Sinfest has the right idea...

Huh?

Every now and then I come across people who really resist the sort of work I'm doing. They dislike the idea of academic investigation of "comics," as if it somehow degrades the value of the works that are produced.

I'm also confused at the general meme that claims academics are so enveloped in their work that they have "lost touch with the real world." I've often found that people in academia are more in touch with the issues going on in the world (or at least try to be), and often are committed to making it a better place, not holing up and ignoring everyone in their study in their non-existant "Ivory Tower."

What I find even more amazing is the vitriol that some people enamoured with McCloud's work sometimes have against mine. I've heard that I'm "overanalyzing" or "missing the obvious" etc. The funny thing is that McCloud's work was accused of exactly the same thing when it came out. Many people did (and still do) hate it for trying to open a dialogue about this stuff. Now McCloud's work has such a dogmatic following that people have once again closed off their minds to that "debate" that he so willingly opened to everyone.

At this point, I've spent as many years out of academia doing this work as I have in it. And, I'll say that doing it within academia sure beats out, because of the availability of resources to use, people to discuss with, time you can allot to the work, etc. It's great to be on the outside changing the system, but sometimes being on the inside is a good thing. (and sometimes you'll always be on the outside, no matter how inside you are).

It baffles me, what sort of rational thinker would believe that any type of scientific or scholarly investigation is a bad thing?

It is the nature of discovery and exploration that help define being human... Even exploration into the cognition of the "comic" medium.

I'll show you my paradigm if you show me yours

I'm shocked at the response that my quote in yesterday's ¡Journalista! (thanks Dirk!) has generated. Is it really so hard to believe there's a separation between the structure of a system of expression and how it's used in "literary" contexts?

Ok... maybe I'm not so shocked...

For spoken language, this is simply the difference between studies in lingusitics/cognitive science and literary studies. Not seeing that split for "comics" is one of the issues wrapped up in the muddled understanding of graphics and "comics" in our society.

And, I should say, I don't believe that literary and linguistics/cognitive analysis don't or can't complement each other, but recognizing the division is important at the outset. One is involved with idenitifying cognitive processes and patterns of usage and behavior. The other looks at how those patterns are used to create some sort of expression (and possibly, larger level patterns). One discusses meaning for the base semantic understandings of cognition. The other discusses meaning layered on top of those cognitive processes (often "interpretive").

The structural analysis lends itself to informing the literary quite easily. If I were to propose a method for categorizing panels based on how many "characters" they contain (which I have), even as a structural analysis, literary works can use it to discuss the sorts of concerns they have. This doesn't work as well in reverse — categorizing panels (or layouts, as Peeters did) as "decorative" versus "rhetorical" does not offer me a way to study processing or structure (though I'm open to being proven wrong). However, it does work within the contexts of literary analysis.

Neither approach is inherently better or worse within the contexts of its own intents. However, the motivating factors behind the paradigms need to be recognized as very different. To this end, the label "comic theory" is being used in very disparate ways that do not necessarily inform each other. While I've found many who go ga-ga over it, I find French "comic theory" as largely unusable and uninformative to my conception of "comic theory"—because it is of a totally different paradigm. (...and also why, I'm guessing, that they tend to dismiss McCloud's work, which I find to be far more interesting than theirs)

My point is, that like the divisions between any paradigms, it's not so much the answers being provided that are different, but also the questions. The clearer this can be made, the more there is potential growth for "progress" on all sides.

Probing "art" and "literature"

I belong to a "comics scholars" listserve that has been discussing whether there needs to be an established "Comics Studies" field (I say a resounding "no"). This has had me thinking about disciplines in general, and what it is that various fields actually study, despite their names.

I had a thought about the oft-stated presumption that "comics" are the merging of "art" and "literature." To me, this seems to miss the point a bit. Why bother tying it to such surface forms as art or literature? The base idea is about text and image, which don't necessarily have to appear in "art" or "literature." Its identifying the surface context without extending to the deeper forms of expression (drawing, writing).

Furthermore, underneath it all, I think the study of "literature" and "art" (and "film") are basically the same field. They all have the same basic characteristics of analyzing creative expression, usually with some sort of "looking for deeper meaning" bent to it (outside of their "how to" contexts that is). The only real differences between them are the manner by which this expression is made (words vs. pictures vs. moving pictures). In my view, this is somewhat discriminatory, since the basic processes are the same. To me, the differences between these fields are superficial.

This is partially why I don't think that "comics" belong in a discipline of their own, if the context is for "literature" type analysis. Of course, the fact that language can be studied for its various manifestations in an astounding array of departments simplifies the issue for me. Just use whatever field your analysis applies to, only do so with "comics" or "visual language" (depending on what you're studying of course).

Subjectivity and a rant on Comics Scholarship

So, this is a review of a paper that is listed in my bibliography. If you'd like to see more of these, let me know...

Driest, Joris. 2005. Subjective Narration in Comics. Masters Thesis. Utrecht University.

This piece covers a broad overview of the ways in which “subjectivity” is represented in the “comics medium.” Of particular note is its analysis of word/thought balloons. The piece is largely influenced by film theory, and its relationship to comics and writing, however, it does not include citations to John Barber or other relevant works along those lines.

However, the piece didn’t seem to have a directed and focused hypothesis of sorts that it was out to prove. It hovered at the level of “these things are there” without probing that topic deeper. This isn’t necessarily terrible, considering that no other studies really cover this topic previously, except maybe in Saraceni 2000 & 2003 (which also weren’t cited).

It also seemed to comment upon a number of phenomena that occur in the “comics medium,” but didn’t seem relevant to the thesis (such as conventional graphic symbols). This is a trend I’ve noticed a lot in papers about VL & comics. Since they don't have an established a cannon of scholarship (or an recognized field to study them), people often feel the need to insert every interesting thought they have about it regardless of how pertinent it might be to what they’re actually writing about.

Relatedly, most essays on anything comics-related feel the need to define what a comic is in the paper – whether or not the paper is about how “comics” are defined. To me, this just seems to cry out an underlying complex that “nobody knows what comics are, so I need to define it.”

Guess what: whether they actively read comics or not, most everyone in our culture knows what a “comic” or “graphic novel” is to the extant that most scholars write about. People don't need to define what a novel or a film is every time they write about them, nor should they need to be told what a comic is. (Similarly, linguistics papers don’t define “language” in every paper – they just get to the meat of the issue).

At least from my perspective, the less exceptional we treat visual language and comics, the more they can be considered as equal with other forms of communication/literature. To invoke the metaphor: "Separate but equal" does not work, because it’s NOT equal. You need to have complete non-discrimination. By continually defining it where its not needed, “comics” (the social objects, and thereby the visual language associated with it) is implicitly placed into a “minority” position in the realm of criticism and scholarship.