Shona's Response to Wysocki:Drawn Together

[Anonymous]

#445

I enjoyed Wysocki’s opening presentation of the idea that writing is a form of composing the self, an implement of selfhood cultivation – she quotes Stuart Hall, “your identity is also in part becoming through writing” (25). This seems to address to a degree the statement presented in the book’s introduction (last week’s reading), that we do not necessarily develop into a complete sense of embodied identity, which can ever be unmediated, “prior to or grounding our sensuous experiences” (3).  In this chapter, writing is presented as a tool of self-formation, or self-mediation which occurs privately, in the process of becoming one’s self and before being mediated in the external realm, “we see ourselves in what we produce” (25). This bolsters a notion of human agency capable of producing a reflective sense of self; rather than being solely the product of socially mediated forces, one is also the producer.
This all sounds delightfully hopeful, yet when it comes to composing with words and pictures, Wysocki points out that we can only build our identities with the materials of creation provided by a seemingly narrow “repertoire of culturally available images” (26) and within the passivity encouraged by mass media.  Wysocki articulates a historical relationship between words and images which has promulgated certain associations and dichotomies. She cites Mcluhan’s claim on distinct “male/female” correlations made between: thought via words with men and no thought via pictures with women. This historically rooted word and image association has seeped through the theoretical fabric of language and communication forms from the Pythagoreans to Marx.
Awareness of the restrictions imposed by culturally produced word/image relationships might offer an opportunity for the expansion of self-formation fueled by an agentic process, “ it is not that there is something inherent in words that makes one look smart or male; it is that a cultural history supports one in so believing, seeing and making sense of one’s body” (29).
I was intrigued by Wysocki’s explanation of the cultural beliefs depicted by the arrangement of words and images on a page, “about the places and representations of class, gender, ethnicity, and other identities and embodiments” (37). Ignoring this fact can have the effect of carrying forward the dichotomies and antagonisms historically chartered to carve out certain identities and disqualify others. Word/image presentations in comics worked to help “create a sense of the essential.” (33). Wysocki overviews an example of the surmount of such essential representations in her discussion of Bechdel’s comic narrative “Fun Home”, she notes the story’s traverse among identity formations made visible through Bechdel’s depiction of her own journey of self-realization.  This results in a word/image relationship in which “male and female or thought and emotion come to be across words and pictures – and the words and pictures get complex as a result.” (40)
All of these suppositions on the interaction between words and images, the surpassing of historically and culturally written antagonisms which encourage the formation of certain identities over others are very interesting. But within this chapter, I did not pick up on a response to the questions on the first page titled “Part I- Media = Embodiment”  What about differing sense of bodies in the world and bodies in relation to others?  I believe I am missing the connection between how identity is written about and the manner in which it is lived within a human physical form? Again, I think I need more exposure to the meaning imbued in the word embodiment. As it was used last week and again this week, it does not strike me as relating to the human physical being. But rather as a philosophical term perhaps relating with an idea of humanness that has little if any material grounding?

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