gutter talk joshua
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Gutter Talk: (An)Other Idiom of RhetoricAuthor(s): Joshua C. HilstSource: JAC, Vol. 31, No. 1/2 (2011), pp. 153-176Published by: JACStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866989 .Accessed: 27/01/2015 05:41
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Gutter Talk: (An)Other Idiom of Rhetoric
Joshua C. Hilst
I will speak, therefore, of a letter
?Jacques Derrida
Wi,h due deference to Derrida, I will speak, therefore, of a gutter. Not the space at the edge of the street where wastewater and trash flow,
although the analogy is interesting. I am speaking of a wholly different gutter. I am speaking about the space in between panels on the pages of a comic book. The artist places the drawings inside of a panel, and then
another set of drawings in another panel. Between these two panels we
typically find a blank space, known to artists and writers of comics as the gutter. When the viewer reads the panels of a comics page, he or she
typically sees some sort of progression between the panels. For instance, not to be too morbid, suppose a villain charges a victim (see Figure 1), then
in the next panel, a large voice bubble appears featuring an onomatopoetic version of a guttural scream.
Figure 1
jac 31.1-2(2011)
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The viewer would likely assume that the victim has just died. Why should we assume any such thing?
Scott McCloud uses precisely this example in his theoretical "comic
about comics," Understanding Comics. McCloud (in Figures 2 and 3)
says:
Figure 2
see ^\ THAT SPACE X &?ZWe&V the \
PANELS? THAT'S \ WHAT COMICS /
AFICIONADOS HAVE / NAMED /
**^Gwrre&r S _ y AND DESPITE^X. / its N / T/Tte, THE GUTTEff PLAYS [ HOST TO MUCH. OF THE AMG/C V AND MXS7&ry THAT ARE
V AT THE VEKyy%55*>P7" J
Figure 3
Similar to Rene Magritte?who reminded us of the infidelity of images when he asserted "this is not a pipe"?McCloud reminds his readers that
when we look at two panels, we have seen absolutely nothing that can
safely be cal led a progression. No murder takes place in the panels shown,
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Joshua C. Hilst 155
only the machinations and inclinations of the mind. The mind takes these
two panels and construes a relationship between them. In order to perform such an operation, the mind must close out the gutter (an operation called
"closure," oddly enough).1 When the mind provides closure, it constructs
a relationship between the panels?a relationship the eye never actually sees. The operation is performed continually while the eyes peruse the
panels of the comic. Without this operation of closure, no story occurs, which leads McCloud to state that, in one definite sense, "Comics is
closure" (67). What is necessary, I argue, is to read the rhetorics of paralogy
idiomatically across comics?specifically, how comics embody paralogy
through the gutter.2 As a form of linking-/ogos, paralogy takes its cue from
Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard: "It is necessary to link, but the mode of linkage is
never necessary" (Differend 29). In this spirit, I read these rhetorics
through three other paralogic theorists: Todd Taylor, Victor Vitanza, and
Cynthia Haynes. But, first we need a word about paralogy. Although difficult to define, Lyotard puts forth paralogy (principally in The Postmodern Condition) as a way of breaking up master narratives?
renewing old language games through new meanings. According to
Lyotard, paralogy is
[A] power that destabilizes the capacity for explanation, manifested in the promulgation of new norms for understanding or, if one
prefers, in a proposal to establish new rules circumscribing a new field of research for the language of science. (Postmodern 61)
Whereas Lyotard deploys paralogies here in the context of science, both
Vitanza and Thomas Kent utilize the concept in the province of rhetoric.3
My aim is to situate paralogy inside the gutter, and thereby trouble the
conversation that has made of both a monologic mystery. Identifying an
idiom of rhetoric that cuts up master narratives, that breaks up totalities
(see Davis), I put forth a "slasher rhetoric." My offering will show
where paralogy ?s most useful to the discipline of rhetoric and
composition, where unspoken assumptions suggest that scholars must
do one or the other: rhetoric or composition. The gutter shows how we
possess both?as Cynthia Haynes renders it, rhetoric/Slash/composition
("Rhetoric").
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In Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, Vitanza
enjoins us to "redescribe perpetually using new idioms" (33). My argument answers the call by proposing an idiom designed to reconfigure how we
teach and practice rhetoric?the gutter. Working out of Lyotard, as does
Vitanza, I take a similar view of the idiom as more than a certain language, or style, or vocabulary. The gutter provides an (un)grounding for another
way of thinking. It occupies itself with (un)grounding in an effort to delay any "final day of rest," and moreover, to ensure "no final point of stasis"
for thinking about rhetoric (Vitanza 72). Forging connections between what various theorists of rhetoric have said about paralogy and the
gutter?that blank space of the comic?I take a walk with our three
theorists whose singular attempts to un-rest rhetoric resonate well with/
in the gutter. Taylor, Vitanza, and Haynes all emphasize paralogy, as well
as find new ways to connect our work in rhetoric and composition. As
rhetorical inventors, they serve as ideal traveling companions for this walk, which will not be a stroll on the street, but in the gutter, a trajectory I think
my companions would appreciate. First we will see parallels between their
work and the work that goes on in the gutter. Next, I provide a few brief
examples from the work of Frank Miller. Finally, I suggest the manner in
which this rhetorical idiom works, as well as some effects of such gutter talk in rhetorical criticism and practice.
Three Traveling Companions
Todd Taylor addresses the paralogical aspects of ethos in his essay, "If
He Catches You, You're Through: Coyotes and Visual Ethos." Taylor
argues for a far more visual than textual ethos, based on cues picked up
by seeing and not seeing, or better yet, seeing and ignoring. Centering his
conversation on the Looney Tunes characters, Wile E. Coyote and the
Roadrunner, he presents each. Anyone fami 1 iar with them 1 ikely knows the
disheveled and distraught appearance of the Coyote, as opposed to the
more cheery look of the Roadrunner. We sympathize with the Coyote
through his pathetic characterization. We come to such conclusions,
Taylor tells us, through "blindness, that which we do not literally see," which "determines what we 'see' as much as that which consciously
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Joshua C. Hilst 157
dominates our vision" (46). "Once we recognize that we merely glimpse small fragments of what we think we see," he continues, "the extrapola
tion, the guesswork that we use to complete the rest of the picture grows
increasingly important" (47). Our "moments of greatest blindness," Paul
de Man reminded us, "are also the moments at which [we] achieve [our]
greatest insight" (109). Put yet another way, Kenneth Burke famously observed: "A way of seeing is a way of not seeing" (70). In short, the
viewer must do a great deal of guesswork to fill in the rest of the picture.
Taylor most directly addresses Thomas Kent's application of paralogy to rhetoric. Kent's theory is based principally on the work of philosopher Donald Davidson (as opposed to Vitanza's more Lyotardian concept of
paralogy), where Davidson "resists the idea that discourse can be codified
in meaningful ways because it is such a complicated paralogic hermeneu
tical dance" (Kent 58). The reason for this resistance lies in the guesswork inherent in discourse, according to Kent: "When we guess, we shift ground
linguistically in order to convey information or decipher information, and
the guesswork that allows us to shift ground relies on paralogical elements
of language use" (40). These paralogical elements involve both intuition
and taste, to which Taylor adds seeing?that is, seeing that also does not see.
Taylor refers to the visual aspects of rhetoric that we miss, but that
nevertheless inform us, as paralogical. In similar fashion, viewers com
plete the story of comics panels as they read, filling in whatever action is
interpreted as being there.4 So, then, Scott McCloud is correct: we read across the panels, the eye providing closure in order to interpret the story. Hence, comics is closure. However, the gutter represents a space that, like Kent's conception, cannot be codified. Taylor conceives ethos as a
similar kind of guesswork: "Psychologically, we broadcast our gaze within the limited range of our instruments, and that which registers, that which returns a blip on our screen, defines not only our field of vision but also the nature of our vision itself. That which does and does not register . . .
makes us who we are" (52). Although Taylor limits his argument to ethos, I would expand this concept of paralogy to include the gutter. The gutter is an uncodifiable space, and the panels help to hold our will-to-codify at
bay. In an effort to read from panel to panel, certain paths, or jumps from
panel to panel, must be taken. However, what the gutter does not show us
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determines what the panels do show us. The gutter is, as Taylor argues, not so much unseen as it is ignored. This first concept of paralogy should
show us that the ignored is often the determinant of the perceived. In Vitanza we find a second conception of the gutter?specifically,
excess. Vitanza's project more closely follows Lyotard's own conception of paralogy, as previously mentioned. Paralogy is a means of breaking up master narratives through generating new forms through new linkages. In
Negation, Vitanza argues, "This is what paralogy is all about?'just
linking.' For Lyotard,paralogy, not rules, precedes consensus" (42). In
this case, the linkages refer to Lyotard's privileging of parataxis over
syntaxis or hypotaxis. Parataxis is, of course, the rhetorical technique of
arranging, side by side, simple sentences without conjunctions. The
purpose is to further Lyotard's project of overturning negation (also an
important theme of Vitanza's book). Lyotard writes, "Parataxis thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being which opens between phrases, it stresses
the surprise that something begins when what is said is said" (66). Vitanza
works toward a denegative function that brings in what he terms, "the
excluded third," working out of Michel Serres' formulation that a dialogue always presupposes a third term and then excludes it. This third term, which Lyotard's paralogy also acknowledges through the abyss of Not
Being, is a term of excess, or what Serres cal Is that "prosopopeia of noise"
(67). The classical form of dialectic is designed precisely?according to
Lyotard, Vitanza, and Serres?to exclude a third term of excess because
of its role in fostering doubt about certainty and finality. Vitanza under
stands the excluded third as pivotal in the move to delay a final point of rest.
In his influential "Three Countertheses," Vitanza claims that paralogy bears witness "to the unintelligible or to disputes or differences of opinion that are systematically disallowed by the dominant language game" (146).
Moreover, it does not simply make the weaker argument the stronger, but
"favor[s] a radical heterogeneity of discourses over" a dominant single
discourse, or a homogenous group of discourses. In other words, such
continual overturnings and denegations may be seen as ways of ensuring that no discourse is excluded: paralogy is a passage for excess. Vitanza
works to bring all the excess back into the conversation.
The gutter is similarly excessive. If a successful reading of a comics
page is one that steps over the gutter and connects two dissimilar panels,
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Joshua C. Hilst 159
it can only do so by canceling out that same space, the abyss. Panels, like
the ones shown in Figure 1, can actually show the viewer no action, and
yet we may still perceive a narrative. While it would be strange, indeed, to suggest that what takes place in the panels (logos) is unimportant, we
cannot fail to acknowledge the excess (para/logos) that the panels cover, and the operation of closure that predicates "successful" readings. The
operation of closure bears a decided similarity to the dialogue that closes
out the third term, the prosopopeia of noise. The excluded term makes
itself felt as the viewer pieces together the various panels of the story.
Paratactically, the gutter continually opens up and allows the viewer to see
a blank space, but one that is determinative of what is seen. The term
"closure" is perhaps a more felicitous term than has been acknowledged. The operation of closing off all other possibi lities (V itanza might cal 1 them
incompossibilities) shuts off the excess and allows a single reading to
emerge. However, following Lyotard and Vitanza, I acknowledge this
blank space, an abyss of rhetoric, by inventing an idiom for it (Lyotard's
process of "bearing witness"), which will be my goal in the latter half of this paper. For now, we are building an argument by adding to Taylor's notion of blindness the Vitanzan conception of excess.
I have saved Cynthia Haynes' "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory" for last since it is a more unusual case, inasmuch as she does not employ the term "paralogy." This does not make
her thinking any less paralogical. She will provide a third point of
triangulation (appropriate since paralogy is concerned with excluded
thirds), so that I may place the idiom of the gutter among Taylor's and
Vitanza's para-terms. Haynes seeks to unground rhetoric and composi tion as the teaching of argument by promising "to probe the ground beneath
teaching argument (nee critical thinking) that compels us to teach good
writing as the invention of good reasons" (670). She explores the metaphor of grounding and ungrounding extensively in an attempt to "maneuver us
(rhet/comp) in a different direction, to draw us away from the shoreline of
philosophical investigation and its alluring beacon of argumentation" (671). Her principal interlocutor is Martin Heidegger, specifically the shift in his
thought from anchoring Being in a given homeland in the earlier work (such as Being and Time), to releasing it "into its essence as the principle of
ground itself (675). In lookingatthe metaphor of ground, she finds a topos
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of argument in rhetoric and composition: the street. Haynes maintains that
composition pedagogy is fraught with calls to connect writing with the street, to appeal to the street-smart student. We find this call in rhetoric and
composition all too commonly enough?connecting writing to the real
world, outside the classroom. The problem, she writes, with this particular
topos is that the "street, and all the subcultural resistance that the term
evokes, is emblematic of a well-oiled logic of containment" (684). The
street, a particular locale or topos, in this connection finds writing just as
contained as writing confined to the classroom. Both are logics of
containment, albeit well-rehearsed ones.
Haynes moves to deconstruct the street topos, to move composition offshore. The streetwise topos, always combative, invents writing as
fighting. Haynes wants to proceed differently, to find a place off the street
from which to think about writing. In Haynes, I find a welcome traveling
companion in that I also want to move out of the street, or from out of the
topos, and into the gutter. The gutter demonstrates for us not a topos, but
atopos?the (non)place that Haynes also seeks. Where is the gutter in
terms of the dialectic between two panels? It is neither "here" nor "there," neither "fish" nor "fowl" in any proper sense of reasoning. It is not of the
panel, but between and among panels. Without the gutter, no panels exist.
I would even suggest that the panels are not primary, creating the gutter between them, but rather the artist begins with the blank page: all gutter.
Haynes writes that her "design is not meant to actively un-build spaces so
much as to step back and view the unground (der Abgrund?abyss) beneath the structures, and to sketch a rhetoric of the unbuilt" (688). In
this idea of the unbuilt, a rhetoric that, as Haynes later adds, disinvents
logos, an ungrounding might be found from which to think about the gutter. What Geoff Sire calls "the (other) story that dwells in the (purported) story," the gutter is beginning, is the abyss, from which al 1 possible stories
can begin to emerge (193). As long as we have a gutter, we can construct
different relations between the panels. We are not looking for the correct
reading, which is a will to mastery (Nietzsche), to authority over the comic, but for understanding different readings, all made in the gutter.
Not content to merely sketch a rhetoric of the unbuilt, Haynes detaches rhetoricians/compositionists from the comfort zone of "ground"
mentality and hails us into a shifting vessel where we must understand
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Joshua C. Hilst 161
ourselves as boat people?people without a proper place or topos. For
Haynes, people without a place understand rhetoric as otherwise: "Rheto
ric 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). She seeks another way of talking about rhetoric and writing. Whereas logic and reason, typically
thought of as the ground of our discipline, have become the predominant way, Haynes looks for other ways, other trajectories, that might serve to
disinvent logos. To locate other trajectories, and in the process disinvent
the logos that resides in the panels, enacts the paralogic operation of the gutter. Haynes makes my point that the gutter, the non-place from which
this operation happens, forms the abyss from which all these trajectories emerge. In this case, the gutter is rhetoric. Let us take from our traveling
companions, then, these ways of thinking about the gutter: as the blindness
that provides insight, as the excess that must be disallowed in order to provide a single explanation, and as the atopos, the abgrund that
disinvents logos. To illustrate both literally and rhetorically, we should look at some examples.5
Figure 4
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Frank Miller's comic, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, serves as a
prime example of what can happen in the gutter. In this case, the movements between the panels do not function chronologically; rather,
they jump between times and spaces (see Figure 4). The instants are
unevenly divided, and the relations between the panels are anything but obvious. A character (not a sympathetic one?but recounting Taylor, it
seems obvious), recounts pushing a beggar onto a subway track, he claims, because he didn't know whether the beggar was there to mug him. The
panels jump from the reporter in the studio to the man on the street. These televised panels are, of course, in the shape of television screens (again,
probably not actively registered, but picked up nonetheless). Spliced in between cuts, we view images of the events that transpired: the push, the
panic of a man in front of an oncoming train, and then a rush of wind. But
notice the physical position of the man in the final panel?blown back by the rush of wind. Likely we have all stood next to a train as it pulled into the station and were probably blown back by the rush of wind. In this case, the man moves backwards. Miller conveys the intensity of the scene, and
the death of the individual, through a rush of air from the train emerging out of the tunnel. The relations between the panels become completely
disjointed. We must struggle to look through the panels and pick up subtle cues to put a narrative together.
Figure 5
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Joshua C. Hilst 163
The above panels (see Figure 5) find Miller at perhaps his most rhetorical. We find a series of diptychs. Diptychs, in comics, show a single image broken into two panels (triptychs break into three, quadriptychs into four, polyptychs into still more) and have the cinematic effect of a slow pan,
pulling the eye closer to the action by subdividing time and space. We see
here a series of slow pans as a character, having undergone extensive
plastic surgery, pulls off his bandages for the first time. It seems, in looking at the panels, hardly necessary to even divide these up?that whole images
might be more useful to us than these diptychs. However, when we
consider that the character in question is a villain named TwoFace, then
the delight Miller takes in playing on the different levels of duality comes into full frame. When the doctors remove the bandages, the line dividing the diptychs finally disappears.
Again, Miller demonstrates this disorienting effect. What automatic
relation do the panels share? How might we see the narrative passing
through them? We walk through the gutters, j uxtaposing panel with panel, and yet what we do not see is just as important as what we do see (the line
down the center of the diptychs, the doctors in later panels). Our blindness
is exploited along with our insight. The last panel (Figure 6), a close up of one of the diptychs, shows a
line depicting part of TwoFace's bandages moving across the panel,
through the gutter. It is, so far as I can tell, the only spot in the book where
Miller allows a line to travel outside the panels into the space of the gutter. Here, it seems Miller plays with the whole notion of outside and inside.
What is part of the gutter, and what is part of the panels is now thrown into
question. Our traveling companions, no doubt, would perceive this move
as an ungrounding of the panels that makes the gutter visible. All of the excess of the gutter returns to spi 11 into the topos of the panel. Having seen
this operation first hand, I would now like to move into a consideration of
the rhetorical operation of the gutter, hence bearing witness to this idiom.
Theorizing the Idiom
Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen claims in his recent book, The System
of Comics, that "the gutter, in and of itself (that is to say, an empty space)
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Figure 6
does not merit fetishization" (112). He gives several reasons for suggest
ing that it ought not be fetishized, arguing that some comics have only a 1 ine to separate them, never actually a given empty space. Where it might be
objected that the gutter posits a virtual image (an image inferred or
imagined by the viewer), Groensteen responds: "Comics exist only as a
satisfying narrative form under the condition that, despite the discontinu ous enunciation and the intermittent monstration, the resultant story forms an uninterrupted and intelligible totality" (114). The system of comics, he claims, finds its truth in the sequence of images, rather than any single
image. On this last point, Groensteen is absolutely correct. However, I
take issue with a number of his points regarding the gutter. First, the suggestion that panels that have on ly a line to separate images lack a gutter seems an odd one. We are not here arguing over size or length of gutter,
only that there is an interstitial space, a pause between images that causes
the viewer to implicitly place those two images in relation to one another.
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Joshua C. Hilst 165
Whether this is done with an infinitesimally small line or a wide blank space is insignificant: what is significant is that we close out the in-between of the images, and bring them together.6 But more importantly, Groensteen's
terminology is problematic in that he rules out, a priori, rhetorical
considerations of the gutter by referring to them as "fetishization," a
troubling formulation. I leave it to the reader to determine whether or not
my discourse on the gutter might be a fetish, but the space seems to be
important for all of the reasons listed heretofore (its paralogy, excess, relation of blindness and insight, atopical nature, and so forth). If this is
fetishizing, make the most of it! More importantly, the way in which he articulates the system of
comics rules out other possible systems. Groensteen's argument could be
considered what Vitanza calls the "will to control" ("Countertheses" 140).
Regarding composition studies, Vitanza writes that the field possesses "the will to systematize" and the will to be composition's "author(ity)"
(140). Similarly, Groensteen will only allow for a reading of comics that is the reading, one that produces a satisfying and coherent narrative. While
Groensteen takes up Wolfgang Iser's suggestion of a "wandering view
point," wherein sequences of words (or in comics, images) leads to the
modification of expectation as the viewer proceeds, he nevertheless
employs these modifications toward a closed ending, the satisfied cus
tomer. There can be no interruptions in such a reading, no excesses: it must
eventually produce a totality. Like the difference between third sophistic and hermeneutic ears that Davis describes, "The latter do not attend to the
incessant murmur/mutter of the exiled-exscribed excess that must be
tuned out for meaning to land, to stabilize" ("Finitude's" 134). The issue
is less Groensteen's focus on the panels (which are, of course, important,
just as messages are important for Davis), but rather his aversion to finding the paralogy of comics and noting them?by rendering them abject before
we've even begun to notice them. Groensteen would leave the excess in
the outside in order to totalize meaning, but I would bring back the excess
to have us dwell in it, as Miller does. We must bear in mind Lyotard's formulation: the end goal isnot consensus(the totalized meaning Groensteen
wants). The goal, rather, is paralogy (Postmodern 65-66).
Groensteen, however, is helpful in understanding the gutter inasmuch as he looks to the panels: "[Demonstrating that meaning is inherent to the
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image is not something that speaks directly to comics, since it is between
the panels that the pertinent contextual rapports establish themselves with
respect to narration" (107; emphasis added). Here Groensteen is not
turning around and looking to the gutter, but rather articulating the
metonymic linkage between panels. He does not focus on the gutter as I
do, but on the action in the panels, only suggesting that metonymic linkages bring those panels together. Like the action in a filmic shot, what takes
place in the panels is important, of course. It would be foolhardy to deny such a claim. However, the in-between, the ignored, the abject, is just as
important. Comics attest to the importance of what we do not see.
Groensteen posits several operations of the panel lines that border the
gutter, but two specific ones in which I am most interested for this
discussion are closure and separation. In closure, "the frame is ... attached to the frames that surround it"
(Groensteen 43). Here he demonstrates the syntagmatic linkages be
tween panels through the operation of closure. As a syntagm, these panels are metonymically linked. The viewer moves from one panel to the next,
linking the actions perceived in each across the interstitial gutter. Not
surprisingly, the horizontal movement finds a paral lei with Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, who famously posit the poles of metaphor and me
tonymy as the two basic functions of language (90). Metonymy (the horizontal axis of the graph), links various symbolic elements together.
Metonymy functions syntagmatically by combiningelements. Atthe other
pole, we find metaphor, which they claim is the paradigmatic function of
language?the basis of which is similarity (if we were to draw a graph, which is often done, metaphor is the vertical axis). The individual using
language selects from a series of elements, each of which might have a
kind of similarity. Separation, the second of these two functions, seems to work along
this vertical axis. The bordering off of the panels one from another
separates them, obviously. Groensteen writes, "It is a condition of read ing that the panels are physically isolated from each other, or cognitively isolatable, ofthe sort that they can be read separately" (43). Paradoxically,
however, the equation of two elements has a similarly divisive function. In
equating two things, we also differentiate them. If I say, "Your eyes are
the stars," I have of course made a metaphor. Yet, the metaphor is based
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Joshua C. Hilst 167
on the equation of two different things. Picture an equal sign, with two
different elements on either side. While the two elements posit a degree of comparability or agreement, the equation works only on the basis of an
unbridgeable chasm.
We have to bend this chasm somewhat and search for a rhetorical
bridge that allows for the binding/separation movement operating within
the gutter. Catachresis is typically a category of metaphor and refers
specifically to a metaphor "misused" to rhetorical effect, a kind of abuse
of the comparison function. The Silva Rhetoricae site lists the following
example: "He was foolish enough to order the new music CD sight unseen," and then explains, "No parallel idiom to 'sight unseen' exists for
things auditory, so the idiom is wrenched from its proper context to this
unusual one." Catachresis, then, is metaphor, but a metaphor so different
from the everyday context that it merits a different term. Quintilian explains further in the Institutes of Oratory, "Metaphor, in which much
of the ornament of speech consists, applies words to things to which they do not properly belong. Hence, the propriety of which we are speaking, relates, not to a word absolutely, but to the sense in which it is used, and
is to be estimated, not by the ear, but by the mind" (8.2.6). Metaphor, as
we have seen in its traditional conception, is paradigmatic, equating one
thing for another through similarity. The operation of this rhetoric, then, through the gutter, consists in
creating a new relationship that may not be accounted for in strictly
metaphoric terms. It is metonymic in its linkages, but that does not account
for what is happening. In other words, while there is a metaphoric
operation in the separation of panels, the meanings emerge through the
operation of catachresis. As McCloud notes, we will conjoin two panels no matter how dissimilar. In his taxonomy of six types of gutters, the last
of the six is the most interesting, and perhaps the most appropriate to my work here: non sequitur. According to McCloud the non sequitur
suggests "no logical relationship between panels whatsoever" (72). When
linkages occur through the gutter, a syntagmatic relationship is established
(Groensteen 22). Jakobson and Halle render the syntagmatic along the
horizontal axis. One panel is linked to the next, and the "reader" can "read" across the page, not all that different from regular text. Yet, at the same
time, it is hugely different because of the operation of closure. Closure asks
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the viewer to take these two panels and establish a relationship. This is an
operation of metaphor?find the relationship, equate the two panels. The
gutter then is the joining together of two disparate ideas syntagmatically and paradigmatically, linked as well as equated. The parataxis (and . . .
and... and) that we are looking for utilizes both functions, accounting for
unpredictability.
Unfortunately, McCloud's taxonomy misses the point that the rela
tionship between panels always requires the viewer to learn to construct
the relationship, which is not a natural relation. The relation between two
panels is constructed, asking that the viewer determine what is happening in this new language. These relationships, I would argue, are less natural, and more developed over time until they appear that way. In other words, all gutters are non sequitur. Nietzsche reminds us that all language is
tropic. Specifically, in his "Notes on Rhetoric," he maintains: "The tropes, non-literal significations, are considered to be the most artistic means of
rhetoric. But, with respect to their meanings, all words are tropes in
themselves, and from the beginning" (Gilman et al. 23). In other words, there is no basic, non-literal language.
We might, then, call the operation of the gutter a metonymic catachresis. That it functions in such a manner, bringing together opposite
"poles" of language, is precisely what makes the gutter paralogic. It does
not present a divide between the metaphor and metonymy, but rather
functions on both levels. There are continuous linkages between panels, but the divide that brings the two together is a function of catachresis.
Impossible to codify, it keeps the viewer in a kind of guessing game. As
Thomas Kent suggests: "Unlike rule-bound grammatical structures that
describe the nature of a particular language or semiotic system, paralogy . . . possesses no positive elements, no innate structure, no codifiable
grammar, and, therefore, no normative rules that we may violate" (5). What I am suggesting is that we can claim that it isn't rule-bound because
of the element of catachresis.
Unpredictable, catachresis brings together dissimilar elements, as I
have noted. Catachresis is not rule-bound, but rather creates new rules,
giving birth to metaphor. To refer to the "legs" of a table might seem
perfectly reasonable and natural. However, this metaphor has to be
invented; we have to invent the similarity between these two elements.
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Joshua C. Hilst 169
The first instance of placing two ideas in juxtaposition is the instance of
catachresis. Eventually, we may find that certain of these catachreses
work better, and they become more normalized. But the relationship between comics panels is no more natural or literal than is literal language. Gutters always present us with two images and require us to construct the
relationship between them. We've only forgotten that the gutter is a non
sequitur, an operation that occurs over time. So what we have, then, is a
special case of metaphor. Two panels are both linked and equated in an
unpredictable, unassimilable fashion. Both contributions from McCloud
and Groensteen are, of course, valuable, but they do not account for the
excess of paralogy, for that which is excessive to the system. As Davis
claims, once communication can be defined as "successful interaction," we can once again rule out all of the "'marks and noises' that can't be
immediately appropriated" (129). Paralogy, however, is our goal.
Conclusions: Reveling in the Noise
There are two distinct and important conclusions to draw from th is idea of
metonymic catachresis. The first regards the notion of so-called visual
rhetorics, in which there is a tendency to see the composition of images in a unified way. I am thinking here especially of Gunther Kress, who tends to focus on the semiotics of a given image, especially in his Reading
Images: The Grammar of Visual Design and Multimodal Discourse.
And while he looks at the way that images, and even pages, can be brought into relation (see especially Grammar 25), the emphasis tends to be on
coherence and how to produce it. Kress' penchant for looking at the
composition of images overlooks the noise that such juxtaposition can
produce in the interstitial spaces. If my arguments are persuasive, then we
must acknowledge that it is not only the composition of a distinct image, but the arrangements of elements within them that give rise to any suasi ve
capacity that images possess. While Kress would no doubt agree with
such a claim, the unseen, excessive, atopical gutter presents an entirely different issue for visual composition. Visual rhetorics often focus on
composition atthe levelofcoherence(followingtrajectoriesin information
design and visual perception), but less so at the paralogical level.
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Exceptions may, of course, be found in some new media scholars, such as Nicholas Burbules, Jeff Rice, and Sean Williams, all of whom have
focused on the rhetorics of juxtaposition and the implied gutters in between screens when one navigates a webpage. Williams' two-part essay, "An
Integrated Pedagogy in Hyptertext," focuses, in part, on the ways in which
"juxtaposing competing representations" allow students to rethink the
relations between various aspects of an argument and enables exploring alternative forms of argument. In Rice's Rhetoric of Cool: Composition and New Media, he claims that "Juxtapositions among ideas as well as
word and image prompt assumptions and inferences absent in most
argumentative or narrative writing." (74). His epigraph from William
Burrough'sA^va^x:/?^^ is equally telling: "The basic law of association and conditioning is known to college students even in America: Any object,
feeling, odor, word, image in juxtaposition with any other object, feeling, word or image will be associated with it" (85). Burbules' article "Rhetorics
of the Web" suggests that having one page on a website link to another
always suggests a connection between the two, and the goal must be for
rhetoricians to consider this relationship. Whereas a great deal of work has
been done investigating whether or not visuals can present an argument, what is just as important (because paralogical) are the ways in which
visuals are associated.7 Whether or not association and juxtaposition constitute a "proper" argument is less significant than the association
itself. This is the work that most exemplifies the function of the gutter:
The undecidable figure is the blade, Abraham's raised knife, to be exact. Although both noun and verb, to slash is the predicate with which the scapegoat enters culture and unleashes a devastating mechanism upon humanity. The slash / signals an image?Abraham standing over Isaac, knife raised at an angle, prepared to sacrifice his only son?that marks a moment of indecision; but the undecid able dynamic is set in motion?rhetoric, and/or composition, caught in an act of faith. ("Rhetoric")
Haynes seizes upon the slash as an undecidable location: an interstitial
space. She extends the metaphor (or catachresis) of the slash to account
for the blade. This same blade begets the logic of the cut?slashing the
whole into pieces in order to re-cut, recast, and continually reinvent
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Joshua C. Hilst 171
something new. The gutter slashes between panels, inventing new
rhetorics and new ways of seeing. I take this same blade as a point of
departure by which to describe a slasher rhetoric. Slasher rhetorics
match disparate phenomena, different ideas, pairing them together to
invent new topoi, new idioms. This same slash of the gutter resides in the
most crucial part of our discipline, the slash between rhetoric and
composition, a site of frequent and contentious relation in our discipline.8 The slash, which was so jarring to the MLA editor in Haynes's article, is
a call to us not to select one at the expense of the other, but serves rather
as an invitation to inhabit both, and to construe and reinvent continual ly the
relation between them.91 hope that through this exposition of the gutter, we can learn to see how our discipline might be connected through the
same slash.
A comic idiom, a slasher rhetoric recalls Davis' Breaking Up [At]
Totality, wherein she writes for those who want to produce something other than "the same old modernist text" (6). It is in the breaking up of
totality?the gutter?that this idiom of rhetoric takes (non)place. The
information inside the panels is, of course, important. However, we need
to recognize the paralogies at work here. A new relationship is introduced
by inserting this space that the viewer closes over and ignores. In not
ignoring this space, and hence closing off the excess of which it is part, a
different idiom of rhetoric is produced. Such an idiom has great value for
understanding visual rhetoric, but also calls us to recognize the slash that
is so important to our discipline. In particular, it assists in finding new ways in which we might reinvent their relationship, in returning ever again to the
gutter and allowing its excess to flow, in allowing logos to be disinvented.
A logic of the cut is an idiom suggested by extensive parallels in the work of Taylor, Vitanza, and Haynes, and remixes another idiom with which we
bear a catachretic witness?a slasher rhetoric.
Utah Valley University Orem, Utah
Notes
1. Readers familiar with visual perception theories will understand closure somewhat differently. Closure, especially in Gestalt theories, refers to a type of
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optical illusion, wherein a circle that is not quite closed in proximity to another
shape will deceive the eye into perceiving it as a full circle. Here, while there is an
operation in the mind that brings together panels, the panels remain quite distinct. That is, there is no optical illusion that fools the viewer into thinking two panels are one. See Ware.
2. This reading will no doubt reflect similar conceptions that have been
developed in other fields. For instance, in Louise Rosenblatt's theory of trans actional reading, she claims that interpretations ignore "elements in the text or
[project] on it experiences for which there is no defensible basis in the text" (137). While I take no issue with Rosenblatt's theory, let me differentiate my own
position by saying that while there are common principles at work, Rosenblatt's
gaps are more metaphorical in nature, whereas the gutter is more literal. Where Rosenblatt discusses ignored elements as gaps, she speaks metaphorically, at the level of the content of the text. In the gutter, we are dealing with form?that is, the
gutter is a gap inasmuch as it is an actual, physical gap in the story of the comic. 3.1 do refer to Kent's definition of paralogy, despite also referring to one of
Kent's critics on the subject of paralogy, Diane Davis. While Davis is critical of Kent's normative claims regarding paralogy, she does not criticize Kent on the basis of his descriptive claims. That is, she rightly critiques Kent's placing paralogy in the service of hermeneutics and ultimately allowing its reappropria tion. However, I think Kent's general description of what paralogy is seems to accord well enough with Lyotard's to merit inclusion here.
4. This idea no doubt draws comparisons to schema theory, a psychological concept drawn from the work of Jean Piaget, but exposited by more current research in educational psychology (see Anderson), artificial intelligence re search (see Arbib), and elsewhere. Schema theory looks at the ways in which
knowledge equips learners with a means, as Anderson writes, "often not repro ducible in sentences, which provides [a student] with a framework or context for
interpreting new experiences" (416). In other words, past experience provides a basis for understanding. Though I may see a limited view of a cube, I recognize it and still know it has six sides. Memory and knowledge provide an expectation that can fulfill what is seen. Anderson suggests that the ways in which schema interact can be viewed as assimilation, and the change in schema as accommo
dation, a dialectical process. This view of schema certainly would fit wel 1 with the ideas espoused in Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics, since Groensteen is interested in the ways in which viewers assimilate information and construct narratives of closure (see my section on "Theorizing the Idiom"). However, where I differ is precisely in the concept of assimilation. I am less interested in seeing how panels are assimilated, and more interested in gutters that play with closure and seek to interrupt closed and unambiguous viewings?an excessive take on the gutter.
5. One certainly ought not to base a theory on a single example, and I do not.
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Joshua C. Hilst 173
While Miller is used to illustrate presently what the gutter can do, there are many
examples of similarly radical uses of the gutter (and perhaps more so). I would refer the reader to Moore and Hickman.
6. In Information Visualization, Ware distinguishes two types of visual
representation: sensory (biological) and arbitrary (conventional). Ware's goal is to establish better models of design based on how we see. Visual perception theory notes the idea of gaps in perception that arise from the structure of the retina. The suggestion that visual acuity drops off sharply outside of certain lines of vision produces gaps in what we perceive. These, of course, might also be kinds of gutters. Ware suggests that most designs are a mix of both sensory and
arbitrary representation, and the gutter is undoubtedly no different. I am focused here on the conventional side. Moreover, where Ware is interested in understand
ing visual perception in an effort to create visual designs that produce the most efficient readings, I would prefer to show how the excess that escapes us can also be valuable. There is most certainly value in the scientific research of Ware, as it contributes to the development of improved information systems and technolo
gies. However, as distinct from Ware's perceptual theories of design, I am less interested in visualizations that "derive their expressive power from being well
designed to stimulate the visual sensory system" and more interested in how to
"interrupt" such systematic ideas (Ware 12). 7. See especially J. Anthony Blair. 8. As an exemplar, we might look at Bruce Horner's Terms of Work for
Composition: A Materialist Critique, where he examines (133-64) three "disci
plines" to which composition looks in an effort to improve its situation within the
academy: English, cultural studies, and rhetoric. However, to understand the
discipline not as composition (or writing) studies, but as composition and
rhetoric, construed through the gutter of the slash, is to understand them as
already part and parcel of the same thing. Rather than parsing the two out from each other, and understanding them as different disciplines only conveniently and incidentally placed together, I want to see them connected through paralogy, a paratactical relationship with the possibility for reinvention.
9. This is a tendency, I fear, that is opposed by the recent Norton Book of Composition Studies (Susan Miller) almost certain to foment canon formation around writing studies rather than rhetoric and composition.
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Article Contentsp. [153]p. 154p. 155p. 156p. 157p. 158p. 159p. 160p. 161p. 162p. 163p. 164p. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168p. 169p. 170p. 171p. 172p. 173p. 174p. 175p. 176
Issue Table of ContentsJAC, Vol. 31, No. 1/2 (2011), pp. 11-406Front MatterBunnies for Pets or Meat: The Slaughterhouse as Cinematic Metaphor [pp. 11-44]Hybridity, Ethos, and Visual Representations of Smokey Bear [pp. 45-69]Ableist Rhetorics, Nevertheless: Disability and Animal Rights in the Work of Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum [pp. 71-101]Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability [pp. 103-121]Fair Trade and Unequal Exchange: Painful Realities of Defensive Writing [pp. 123-151]Gutter Talk: (An)Other Idiom of Rhetoric [pp. 153-176]Queer: An Impossible Subject for Composition [pp. 177-206]Response EssaysThe Spatial Turn in Rhetorical Genre Studies: Intersections of Metaphor and Materiality [pp. 207-224]Rhetorics of e-Health and Information Age Medicine: A Risk-Benefit Analysis [pp. 225-235]So Who Are These New Consumers of Internet Health Information? [pp. 235-240]Listen to Strangers: A Response to Dale Jacobs' "The Audacity of Hospitality" [pp. 241-248]Embodying/Disabling Plagiarism [pp. 248-266]Transformative Reframing: From Theft to Passing On [pp. 267-273]Bobby Who? [pp. 273-283]Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and the Reconceptualization of Rhetoric and Composition [pp. 283-307]Butler Unclarifies the Issues [pp. 308-314]Revisiting the Evidence: A Reply to Donald Lazere [pp. 314-322]
Review EssaysReforming Method: An Invitation to Enchantment [pp. 323-337]Environmental Sustainability: Witnessing, Embodiment, and the Grotesque [pp. 338-349]A Perduring Phenomenon [pp. 349-361]
ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 363-368]Review: untitled [pp. 369-375]Review: untitled [pp. 375-381]Review: untitled [pp. 381-389]Review: untitled [pp. 390-394]Review: untitled [pp. 395-400]Review: untitled [pp. 400-405]
Back Matter