“Perspective: Notes toward the Remediation of Style”
Collin Brooke
This is an earlier derivation of Brooke’s work, Lingua Fracta, and this smaller meditation is a discussion on the canon of style. Brooke explains that
One of the guiding assumptions of this essay (and my larer project) is that we have wasted too much effort in the attempt to articulate distinctions among media. Rather than fixing our attention to individual media, we should (by analogy to Dawkins) attend to the genetic (or memetic) level of these technologies. I would argue the canons of classical rhetoric can provide us with a heuristic for doing so. There is only so far the analogy with genes can be pushed, but it can provide a potent basis for understanding distinctions within media as well as among them. (“Remediaition” <http://enculturation.gmu.edu/4_1/style/>).
It seems Brooke is claiming we can understand how technology, as a cultural practice, transmits ideas about how people make meaning through the repeated use of meaning making techniques embedded within these technologies. At the moment, print text denies this concpet since it has a “will to transparency” whereas the rhetorical canons, such as style, are seen as natural outcomes of print technology, and not a matter of strategic placement by a writer. In this way, macroconceptions (hermeneutics, cultural) have engulfed our microconceptions (bodily, sensory). The reader is affroded a universal, ominoptent position through contact with print text, and anything that calls attention to the fabrication of the text and the reader as a moment of universality is merely an exception; an exception that is glossed over once the point has been raised, discussed, and moved beyond.
A return to the more critical perspective concerning style–one awarded to oral traditions–is possible, Brooke asserts, by attention to the design of technology used to communicate. And through this we can understand how text actually works: what we look at (print text) we actually look through onto some phenomenon; the text coerces the reader into using a specific cultural and hermeneutical lens to make meaning of the object being studied. Brooke proposes we add a third element to this conceptual model: the concept of looking from, explaining:
Looking from is not something that is done to a text, but rather with it, and provides an entry point for the physical, social, cultural, political, and textual factors.
In this way style is seen as perspective. Style affords the vantage point from which a reader looks through a text at an object of study. Critical perspective about how meaning is made is possible through a return to the traditional canons of rhetoric.
1 Comment
February 7, 2009 at 12:47 am
[...] or arrange, or compose the technologies so as to promote certain uses. Does this relate to Brooke and Nardi and O’Day? Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)IT that learnsI know [...]