Monday, March 17, 2008
Manovich, "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-Sublime"
M anovich, Lev. "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-Sublime." Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools. Eds. Byron Hawk, David Reider, and Ollie Oviedo. Electronic Mediations Ser. 22. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
Why render data visually? Lev Manovich, in "Data Visualization as New Abstraction and as Anti-sublime," the opening chapter in Small Tech (reprinted from ArtPhoto, 2003), responds to this with an answer that, in spirit, moves beyond the "data epistemology" of a cumbersome, old (perhaps even mythical) scientism. Why render data visually? "[T]o show us the other realities embedded in our own, to show us the ambiguity always present in our perception and experience, to show us what we normally don't notice or pay attention to" (9). By the end of this brief article, Manovich begins to get round to the idea of a rhetoric of data visualization, even if he never calls it this. Despite being caught up in a representationalist framework as he accounts for what data visualization does, Manovich eventually keys on "daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages" as the "more important challenge" facing us. That is, we are steeped now in a new "data-subjectivity."
Manovich provides four sections in his short essay: Visualization and Mapping, Data Modernism, Meaningful Beauty: Data Mapping as Anti-Sublime, and Motivation Problem. The "Visualization and Mapping" section begins with Tufte and Descartes; these are the precedents for the "dynamic data visualization" Manovich wants us to consider as it has spilled over from its origins in the "pure and applied sciences, from mathematics and physics to biology and medicine" to the greater "cultural sphere" (3). Next, Manovich attaches this to a mapping paradigm, considered here as a kind of direct conversion of data into image (1:1 precision in the translation of territory into map). This risks making visualization its own end; I question whether his approach does enough to keep the image open on the side of play, preferring a contingent and flexible (more model- or relay-like) image than one fixed and declarative in its presentation. The section on Data Modernism builds toward an understanding of data visualization as new abstraction. Here abstraction is matched with the same tradition in twentieth century Modernist art: the reduction of chaos into simple patterns. Given my own interest in abstracting practices, I tend to prefer drawing closer parallels between "new abstraction" and network studies. I deal with some of this in the diss; Manovich's take on abstraction might find a small place there. Of course, one of my reservations about "new abstraction" tracing back through art traditions is that it holds onto a faint notion of representable reality as a backdrop against which every movement is defined. Perhaps this is one of the ways a rhetoric of data visualization would do justice to Manovich's interest in subjectivity, agency, and motive, while also offering a greatly expanded vocabulary for complicating strict evaluative rules regarding chart junk and clarity (e.g., following Tufte).
In the third section of the essay, Manovich touches on scale. He describes data visualization as "anti-sublime" as it contrasts with the Romantic art concerned with the sublime." This section seems, again, to position data visualization as an end--an end in an aesthetics and epistemology valuing concretization--rather than a means, a model, or a relay. The stuff on scale is encouraging, but then he ends the section, saying, "Yet, more often than not, the subjects of data visualization projects are objective structures (such as the typology of the Internet) rather than the direct traces of human activities" (7). What's not clear is why this is so or how Manovich knows it. This isn't to dispute his claim as much as to call into question its basis, and also ask how these "objective structures" square with the "data-subjectivity" he introduces in the final section. In the final section, he is concerned with motivations and choices: why this or that design choice when several others are available? An arhetorical treatment of data visualization entertains the prospect that there is always one best way to present the data visually; a rhetorical approach, on the other hand, seems to me to create a situation--a conductive role, an agent, an exigency--in whatever comes between the data and the visualization of it. In other words, while Manovich is concerned that "computer media simultaneously make all these choices appear arbitrary" (7), a rhetoric of data visualization would frame those choices as "available means" rather than an automated function of the computer technology. Manovich: "One way to deal with this problem of motivation is not to hide but to foreground the arbitrary nature of the chosen mapping" (8). Yes, foreground it, but also let the "it" be a "rhetorical nature" in equal measure to an "arbitrary nature."
"Thus data visualization moves from the concrete to the abstract and then again to the concrete" (6).
Cross-posted at Earth Wide Moth.
Phrases: "Platonic schemas" (5), "new abstraction" (5), "reversibility" (6), "organic abstraction" (6), "modernist abstraction" (6), "anti-sublime" (6), motivation (6), "data epistemology" (8), "data-subjectivity" (9)
Postied by at Thursday, August 23, 2007
Richards, "The Resourcefulness of Words"
R ichards, I.A. "The Resourcefulness of Words." Speculative Instruments. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1955. 72-78.
"Are we perhaps like mathematicians who had never thought of using the working of examples as a technique of instruction?" (77).
I.A. Richards ends "The Resourcefulness of Words" with this, posing a question of limitations, narrow perspectives, and a missed opportunity in thinking through the techniques of instruction appropriate to a course in dialectic (which, in this context, I take to refer to argumentation). This statement bears some resemblance to the David Foster quotation from JAC I have referred to again and again about the limits of what we will know.
Richards is responding to the suggestion from the President of Yale (Mr. Hutchins) that nothing coheres a course in argumentation, nothing "except talk of personality, 'character', and great teachers, the slogans of educational futilitarianism" (73). But what holds the course in argumentation together, answers Richards, is the resourcefulness of words--their versatility, their crucial part in structuring and connecting (ideas and things).
To a degree, Richards is concerned with stasis--with ways specific language in philosophy and metaphysics can lead to misunderstanding. His rhetoric is one that reconciles, patching up misunderstandings caused by words. He is not interested in "attempting to show our students (much less tell them) what Plato or Aristotle really meant" (76). Rather, students would study the ways shifting meanings in "central intellectual terms" (viz., being, have, cause, connection, same, etc.) has "give[n] rise to varied misunderstandings" (76).
The challenge I find in working with Richards is his proximity to New Criticism. Following through what Berthoff adds in "Abstraction as a Speculative Instrument," and what Haynes does, subsequently, to invoke Berthoff's notion of abstraction as a beginning point and an answer for pedagogies seeking to move beyond reason and argumentation, I would expect to find, in Richards, something that resonates with abstraction in this discussion of the resourcefulness of words. Maybe it will turn up in How To Read A Page, in chapters called "Random Scratching and Clawing" (the rustle of language?) or "To Unite, Abstract." Distant reading methods do not, per se, read a page, but a pile of pages.
The section on more expansive abstracting practices can get by without Richards. Yet his concluding thoughts in this brief essay relate to the semantic networks that are presented in, among other forms, tagclouds:
To develop a spatial metaphor here, which being all but unavoidable should be made as explicit as possible, all these words wander in many directions in this figurative space of meaning. But they wander systematically, as do those other wanderers, the Planets. By fixing a limited number of positions, meanings, for them, we may help ourselves to plot their courses. But we should not persuade ourselves that they must be at one or other of these marked points. The laws of their motions are what we need to know: their dependence upon the positions of other words that should be taken into account with them. (77)
In a fairly obvious sense, Richards is talking about context here. Words appear on a page, spatialized there--arranged in such a way that their sequentiality is implicated in their meanings. But I see no reason why this spatialization, this systematically observable wandering, and this hesitancy to fixate--why any of these should be incompatible with tagcloud as a visual model of a semantic network that drifts breezily along the same trajectories as the discipline of composition studies. Doesn't Keywords in Composition--"the first systematic inquiry into compositions' critical terms" (1)--advance this very idea? Yes. But Keywords in Composition Studies, like the class of texts dedicated to keyword extrapolation, including Williams' Keywords, is limited by its mode of presentation to a historical account of a term's wandering. [This is better elaborated in c. 3 than in c. 2]. The "systematic ambiguity" bears a past-ist orientation; its refresh rate is nullified by the limitations of its medium--print.
Note: Heilker and Vandenberg cite Richards' Speculative Instruments and How To Read A Page, but rather than going to the original publications, they draw on the excerpts reprinted in Enos and Brown's Professing the New Rhetorics: A Sourcebook.
Postied by at Thursday, August 16, 2007
Speculative Instruments
I 've taken lately to thinking about the thinspreaden feeling of dissertating like this: the writing moves in a forward direction, advancing ideas and discussions, attempting claims, suggesting reasons for limiting the discussion to these few pages. The reading, on the other hand, moves in a backward direction, filing through influences before influences before influences--something like tracking the (non-)origin of the Missouri River. Writing and reading in this way at once leads to the thinspreaden feeling--it is a stretch.
For example, I was, for a while (~15 pp.), writing about abstraction. The very concept of abstraction. From Cynthia Haynes to Berthoff. Berthoff's work with abstraction draws from I. A. Richards and Susanne Langer. I trailed off, reading some of Langer's work in Philosophy in a New Key and Philosophical Sketches. I also have a copy of Feeling and Form on my night stand. I've read zero pages of it. Every time I leaf it through, I feel this dreadful drain of energy until...lights out. I can see the tiny threads of influence running from Langer to Berthoff, but I still can't decide how much I need to write about them or how explicit those familiarities should be in the chapter itself. Langer and Berthoff have in common that they attempt to recover abstraction from the General Semantics movements and their strict verticalization of the Ladder of Abstraction. They tug abstraction over to the side of connotation, to the side of the "rustle" of language, away from scientistic referentiality. Were they successful? I don't know.
But what they were attempting accords with what I am trying to emphasize, following Moretti, in the discussion of visual models as abstract. Why call them abstract? The data they present are concrete enough (he calls the "consequences" concrete)? I mean that the data are replicable; any other researcher would come up with the same citation counts for articles published in CCC over the past 20 years, no? Berthoff reworked abstraction in her '86 essay "Abstraction as a Speculative Instrument." "Speculative Instruments" matches up with the title of I. A. Richards' book from 1955. It's a collection of "pieces [that] were composed at different times and for very different occasions and audiences" (ix). One six-page "piece" stands out: "The Resourcefulness of Words" which comes "[f]rom a Bergen Lecture given at Yale in 1940." It goes at matters of comprehension and interpretation: language is ambiguous, meanings are multiple. There is a certain "wandering" quality to the resourcefulness of words, Richards explains, trying to finesse systematic misunderstandings in language and this wandering quality. A few pages of this were reprinted in Enos and Brown's Professing the New Rhetorics. Richards also mentions that this short piece developed into his book, How To Read A Page. That stretch I mentioned earlier, it is sometimes a yawn (or a yowl of exasperation).
Another opportunity in this for digression (or call it redirection): Will I connect How To Read A Page with distant reading and the abstract visual models produced by these methods? Maybe. But not yet. I like the riff that goes for distant reading as How To Read An Epitome (of Composition)--something along the lines of layering metadata onto relatively stable forms (i.e., models), shoring up disciplinary data-sets, and so on.
What else can I say about Richards' Speculative Instruments? What a shame that the title--a title I like--was used up on this grab bag of "pieces." With this in mind, Berthoff's "Abstraction as a Speculative Instrument" comes back into the spotlight. For the chunk of this diss on the concept of abstraction, Berthoff's piece will have to do the leg work. But it shouldn't have to do all of the heavy lifting. Sure, there's Langer, but that's not the direction I want to go in. Berthoff's recuperation of abstraction--a recuperation Haynes says failed and must be broached once again--sticks with abstraction as forming. Berthoff entangles concept formation and writing as knowing: "[Abstraction] can show us how to think of forming concepts as a matter of composing" (236). Continuing, she goes at issues of writing across the curriculum (the relevance of language to all disciplines) and also to "abstraction as a speculative instrument [that] can help us re-think the nature of the relationship of 'the contingent and the particular' to 'the general orders" (237). I can't decide whether this last part has more to do with compositionists being "great minds" or whether it is an allusion to scalability constrained by the General Semanticist's Ladder analogy (referentiality, from particular to obtuse). Berthoff's is a discussion of abstraction I find to be slotted with a space for what, of late, is more commonly discussed in terms of networks, traces, and formative, inventive association--abstraction as forming (with or without reference to "speculative instruments" and the "wandering resourcefulness" of words) gives way not to a Ladder of Abstraction, which Berthoff firmly and persuasively argues against, but to networks, impermanent paths of activation, instigating clicks of fascination and intensity, and various other evocative, uncanny encounters. It's on this point that the pre-digital foundation of Berthoff's work on abstraction seems most conspicuous.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Haynes, "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory"
H aynes, Cynthia. "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory." JAC 23.4 (2003): 667-724.
Haynes calls for composition-theory in motion, a willingness to drift all the while cognizant that "so much defies reason" (669). If composition's theoretical currents are akin to waters upon which we float, in much that same way Haynes was when she launched from the Norwegian shore into the Artic Sea in the scene that opens the essay, argumentative writing with its commitment to ground/reason is the anchor that has dragged "until it took hold among the bedrock curricula of grammar and style, aims and modes, claims, grounds, and warrants" (668). Haynes sets out "dissatisfied with teaching writing that is primarily argumentative writing qua reason" (669). Invoking Crowley, Haynes expresses skepticism toward the "discourse of needs" (i.e., "students 'need' to write and think in particular ways" (668d)). Composition, is, in effect "rotten with reason" (668)--poisoned with a mindset in relentless pursuit of "the why, the reason, the rationale" (668). Writing offshore desires the disappearing coastline while acknowledging a need for movement; "it is suggestive" (670), preferring something like Elam's "groundless solidarity." Haynes writes, "Equally charged and similarly moved, I mean to probe the ground beneath teaching argument (née critical thinking) that compels us to teach good writing as the invention of good reasons" (670).
Unlearning a Pedagogical Apparatus (671)
Haynes creates a polarity between argumentation and abstraction, preferring the
latter, but not as something the belongs exclusively to the authority of the
teacher and not as something that stirs in smoothly with the "discourse of
needs" (viz., "students need abstraction"). That is, as we move
away from the shoreline of composition theory, we would move toward an "abstract
horizon" (671), shifting our relationship to ground, footing, and finitude. The
"pedagogical juggernaut" (Ong) composition has inherited suffers from a Ramist
attachment to logic and reason; teacher training (replication of the juggernaut)
collapses ars (art) and doctrina (teaching), reducing pedagogy to
argumentation: "Reason is perfected in pedagogy, for pedagogy, by pedagogues"
(673). Haynes argues for "unbuild[ing] this pedagogical apparatus" (673), for
unlearning as the "defamiliarization vis-Ã -vis
unquestioned forms of knowledge" (673). With a Derridean willingness to "disturb
the doxa in its slumber", Haynes acknowledges the chance that she will be
charged with "irresponsibility," but she is willing to bear this charge if it
allows her "to probe the depths of a more responsive relation to students, to
each other, and to each Other" (674).
The
Ground of Reason (674)
Haynes "prepare[s] us to need the sea" (674), as she works at the joint between
argumentation and abstraction. Reason, logic, and ground are the anchors, the
root system of too much composition theory; Heidegger's turn on Being (from
anchor, a release toward Being as "the principle of ground itself") moves such
thinking offshore: "Just there, beneath the seas of [Meister] Eckhart's
theological detachment and Heidegger's secular withdrawal, we witness the
thunderous breach of our whale--abstraction" (677). But abstraction
requires yet more training: "We need to hear this word, and we need to tread
slowly" (677) (sounds like Latour on slowciological accounts). Abstraction risks
"the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (677) (i.e., going aground where
determinate meaning is built). "We cannot leap from ground to ground unless we
keep moving; and we cannot build castles in the air on solid foundations" (678).
Still, from the withdrawal/detachment, we drift away from "representational
thinking." Persistent problem: "Resting in our not-leaping poses the ultimate
hazard: we become so rooted in reason that our feet sink deep into the sand at
low tide, and each attempt to step out and up is futile" (680).
Street-Smart Writing Students (682)
Haynes is skeptical of calls to "connect the text and the street" because such
gestures tend to conjure up the flaneur as the prototypical city-goer, along
with its problematic "attitude towards knowledge and its social context" and its
"writing safely hidden by anonymity and insignificance" (683). Here, the
dismissal of the flaneur feels too deliberately pursued; he never stood a
chance! But this particular framing of flanery, although it doesn't account for
how such an attitude might be an improvement on certain other attitudes (some of
this in the flaneur's preference for social realities as preferable to the
hermeneut's disposition)...this particular framing is used to "glimpse an
unhappy association in whose folly we are unwittingly complicit by connecting
'the text and the street'" (683). Haynes puts it bluntly: "'the street' serves
as a metonymic substitution through which the old 'bait and switch' of
'reinventing the university' is accomplished" (683). "Street smarts" flattens
into argumentation, keeping with "Hellenic male ceremonial combat" traditions,
in which conflict is performed in such a way that maximally manages tensions.
Haynes works through a series of references--T.R. Johnson's "School Sucks," ETS
research on "Extending Intelligence," and a program called
Reason!able that supports argument
maps--visual renderings of a text (Haynes is especially critical of this; it's
not clear that she has much tolerance for visuality, especially where technology
is concerned).
What
Should Not be Built (686)
Check the foundation. Is it rotten? In this section, Haynes works from
Virilio's notion of the "trajective" (rather than objective or subjective) to
explore the mode of being that involves "movement from here to there" (686). The
nomad, transcience. She couples the trajective to questions about architecture
(and ground), borrowing from Rajchman: "What would an architecture of such
trajectories and movements look like?" (686). Here, Haynes also recombines the
flanuer (taken apart previously) and replaces him with the refugee as "the
figure of the dispossessed" passing and dwelling different "zones of intensity"
(687). Citing Sirc, she mentions the change he articulates, drawing on
avant-garde architects, artists, and theorists, from street "as mere topos
to the street as event" (687). Clearly she prefers the latter, aligning
with Sirc in "groundless solidarity." Lebbeus Woods comes up, too, as Haynes
draws up a "rhetoric of the unbuilt" (688). Woods' work is that of
speculative, imagined architectures, the pre-concretized abstractions that peel
layers from reality with uncertainty. More examples follow, of a "peace park"
between North and South Korea proposed by Natsios and Young, and of Libeskind's
proposed model for the World Trade Center memorial: "Such projects remind us
that a rhetoric of the unbuilt must also consider (and rendered in
in/visible textures) unqualified hope" (691). Haynes calls
this section an "attempt to locate (and appropriate) permissible isomorphisms
between theoretical architecture and composition theory" (693) in such a way
that can "bridge the expanse between reason and refuge" (695). "What
clearly was needed were not new objects, but a new orientation toward a
phenomenal field of events and interactions--not objects, but the abstract
regimes of force that organize and deploy them" (84) (694) [Read this alongside
Latour's renewal of objects; could this be taken as an undesireable sort of
abstraction compatible with the sociology of the social?]
Pedagogy
and the Refugee (695)
"One answer, then, to the question of what an architecture of trajectories would
look like is: a boat in an intensive zone" (695). Instensive why?
What puts a boat in an intensive zone? (Piracy, mutiny, scurvy?) The density is
sharply up in this section; Haynes works at the problem of the "tourism
experience" as relates to invoking refugee-as-figure for "abject forced
mobility" (696). The irrationality (unreasonableness) of refugees primes an
ethical muddle: "It cannot go without saying that removing the ground has
profound implications for re-moving students into the murky waters of border
politics" (697). Agamben, Agamben. Can't be oblivious to matters of the
un-reason-able. Heidegger, Derrida (slow down!). Quarantining terms. Reason
threatens to turn us away from Being itself (701). But a poetics of the trace
remains (some hope in this): Heidegger: "What is presumed to be eternal merely
conceals a suspended transiency, suspended in the void of durationless now."
Haynes finds in Heidegger a revived current (charge, voltage) for the poet,
still, "Thus far we have scarcely issued a reading that can properly stand
beside the refugee without addressing the incongruity of poetizing in the face
of their immediate and devastating dangers" (703).
Unbuilding the Logic of Containment (704)
Haynes seems to be reassembling deconstruction, re-accounting for its
over-simplification, which made possible its take-down by proponents of
"practical reason" (704). Haynes goes back over deconstruction with an
abstraction-toothed comb, citing Caputo's explanation that "Deconstruction
offers no excuse not to act....Undecidability does not detract from the
urgency of decision; it simply underlines the difficulty" (704). Working through
"Derrida's call for 'forms of solidarity yet to be invented'" and matters of
hospitality and cosmopolitanism, Haynes works toward an assertion of "renegade
rhetorics" (707), incorporating nods to Ulmer, Worsham, Sirc, Vitanza, and
Davis, as she shows that "[r]hetoric as refuge rearticulates the paths of
the poets and illuminates their abstract trajectories. Displacing argument is
rhetoric's supreme task; disinventing logos is rhetoric's sacred duty" (707).
For the concentrated push against argument and reason, this bit comes very close
to sound like an assertion--an argument for the heretical. "Into these uncommonplaces,
I submit rhetoric as refuge, writer as refugee, and abstract
pedagogy" (708). Haynes also admits her own (t)reason: an account of the program
at UTA, which was undone, some believe, by the "steady poisoning of rhetoric
with the principle of reason" (708). Haynes continues to challenge the behemoth
of argumentation: "Our collective (t)reason will be necessary to
dismantle this edifice" (710).
Writing
Nomadically (711)
"Keeping still to [her] desire to remain suggestive," (711) Haynes
declares several musts in a string of manifesto-like challenges (take off the
garb of the flaneur, dispossess our monopoly on abstraction, etc.). She tells
about the "quasi-journal Archigram", which "rendered radical creations such as
capsule apartments, walking cities (on the ocean), instant cities, university
nodes, most of which were never meant to 'take up a finite configuration'"
(711)--the "unbuilt spoof in response to their view of traditional architecture
as hoax" (712). Receivables? Much like what Saper writes of in
Networked Art (on-sendings, kits, etc.). Archigram included a course with an
assignment called "depth probe" (713). Haynes correlates the depth probe
to Berthoff's "abstraction as a speculative instrument" and then accounts for
the discipline's tenuous relationship to abstraction (713). Although it was a
"failure" in terms of uptake, Berthoff's work, explains John Clifford, "takes
seriously her call to weld philosophical frames of reference to classroom
techniques" (714). How much drift can we tolerate? Berthoff lamented that
"seemingly broad-minded theorists...refuse to see how far from shore we can
drift on theoretial currents" (714). Abstract writing, abstracting practices are
overdue.
"The diverse senses of converting argumentation pedagogy to teaching abstraction could also include teaching how to achieve distance, to detach from one's preconceptions, distill concepts, condense language, and translate meanings. Leaning to abstract would involve learning the alluring nature of language, how it draws you away, how it seduces you" (715).
End: "at times I need this depth/ forgive me" (715).
Returns
- Re: Braddocks and argumentation (707, 717). Consider uptake/notake with Hiatt.
- Berthoff, Langer, speculative instruments (see Berthoff on speculative instruments in "Problem with Problem Solving").
- Reason, rational, the why, etc. as relates to rigid models (rather than relays-Ulmer).
- Detachment from representational thinking (678): rose, being without cause, knows not why.
- Coercion (681) and reason - Tufte.
- Argument maps (Haynes' critique); what maps then? Or maps as abstraction? Monmonier writes only of map generalization. See abstraction/generalization distinction in Haynes and Berthoff (685).
- Virilio on trajective (686).
Phrases: (gore-texTM)ual tourists (668b), argumentative writing (668), discourse of needs (668d), groundless solidarity (670), writing offshore (670), abstract horizon (671), Ramist dialectic (672), Ong's "pedagogical juggernaut" (673), unlearning (673), violent realities (674), castles in the air (677), abstractus (677), without why (678), marionettes (680), flaneur (682), normative catachresis (683), fliting (684), argument maps (685), trajective (686), zones of intensity (687), rhetoric of the unbuilt (688), brutal foundations (693), refugees (694), abject forced mobility (696), quarantining terms (700), metaphysical homelessness (704), renegade rhetorics (707), abstract pedagogy (708), testing contradistinctions (715), aphorism (715).
Postied by at