Modality Quotes

From Kress and Van Leeuwen's Reading Images
84
-networks "tend to obscure the fact that the range of choices is ultimately pre-designed and limited"
-"the network is modelled on a form of social organization which is a vast labyrinth of intersecting [85] local relations in which each node is related in many different ways to other nodes in its immediate environment, but in which it is difficult, if not impossible, to form a coherent view of the whole"

85
-"may obscure the globalizing tendencies"


99
-"When analytical structures are topological, theyare read as accurately representing the 'logical' relations between participants, the way in which participants are connected to each other...but not the actual physical size of the participants or their distance from each other"


154
-modality is about "the reliability of messages"
-"we regard our sense of sight as more reliable than our sense of hearing"
-modality markers, "cues for what can be regarded as credible," help us to make decisions


155
-modality "refers to the truth value or credibility of (linguistically realized) statements about the world"
-modality markers in language: may, will, must, possible, probable, certain
-modality is composed of "shared truths"

156
-"while the photograph restricts itself to representing what would normally be visible to the naked eye, the diagrams do not: they make visible what is normally invisible"...."they take recourse to abstract graphic elements"

158
-"A 'realism' is produced by a particular group"
-"Each realism has its naturalism--that is, a realism is a definition of what counts a real--a set of criteria for the real"
-"photorealism"...."how much correspondence there is between what we can 'normally' see of an object, in a concrete and specific setting and [159] what we can see of it in a visual representation"

159
-picture of coffee is clearer than soft background, and so holds higher modality

160
-abstraction relative to the standards of contemporary naturalistic representation

160-163
-types of modality markers

163
-"The world 'as we see it' (rather than 'as we know it', and certainly not 'as we hear it' or 'as we feel it') has become the measure for what is 'real' and 'true'"

164
-"the 'hyper-real' does not have the decreased modality it has in 'photographic' naturalism. Magazine photos of food are one example....the more a picture can create an illusion of touch and taste and smell, the higher its modality"

165
-"a realism that takes subjective emotions and sensations as the criterion for what is real and true"

171
-"a multiplicity of ways in which artists can relate to the reality they are depicting and 'define' reality in general"
-food photos both abstract and sensory

Defining "Food Image"

Explaining my project to "non-specialists" always helps me address basic issues that I tend to overlook. My mom asked me what I mean by "food image," a compound phrase I couldn't unpack very clearly for her. So here goes.

First, the institution of food studies has generally taken a more social, economic, and political perspective on food, rather than attempting a wholesale definition. One of the most quoted definitions comes from Arjun Appadurai, who sees food as a "highly condensed social fact." He points out that when we convert a part of our environment into food, we create a "powerful semiotic device." The boundaries of edibility and palatability often separate cultures, serving as grounds for perceived exoticism, primitiveness, or disgust. So food has a complex material and social DNA. 

Second, visual studies sees images as a cultural phenomenon. WJT Mitchell provides a widely cited and coherent definition, understanding images as a family that includes graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal forms. He also understands images, or pictures, as "worldmaking" devices, rather than world-reflecting devices. The definition I use the most comes from N Katherine Hayles's book on cybernetics and literature. Drawing from information theories, she claims an image is a condensation of information that can be both visually evocative and invite visualization. 

The symmetry between her definition of image as a condensation of information and Appadurai's notion of food a highly condensed social fact offers a pathway into defining food images. A food image condenses social information, affording a way of visualizing the world. Although food proper may be a condensed social fact, it does not necessarily lead to visualization or to visually evocative graphics and language. Here, I think, is the boundary between food and food images: it is not edibility that separates them, we can eat food but not food images; rather, it is visualization. When food allows us to visualize, it becomes a food image.

This definition actually accords with Manuel DeLanda's description of Hume's theory of images. Hume didn't think images were reflections of the world. Rather, images, even in the mind, were low-level reproductions of the world. The difference between the actual world and the image of the world was not that one was real and the other was just mental; the difference between world and image was a matter of intensity: the image is a lower-level intensity of the world. A low-level reproduction or image of an apple allows visualization in ways that the material apple cannot. In Proust's famous description of eating a madeleine, he reveals an image of food that allows us to not only represent the actual world but to also produce a world filled with memories, tastes, and psychological drama. 

When food allows us to visualize, then it becomes a food image. 

Defining My Project in 25 Words

Got some good advice from a professor, who recommended that I work on summarizing my dissertation project in twenty-five words or less. This advice became relevant after I tried to explain my project to my dentist. I oscillated between vague generalities and hyper-specialized research findings. Needless to say, I would make a horrible CNN contributor. So here are some dissertation soundbites. (I'll keep revising as my writing progresses).

Hopefully practicing this condensing method will help during job interviews, grant and fellowship applications, and most importantly help me explain to friends and family why I'm not an inane, overspecialized academic.

My dissertation project is about:

-the role that food images play in shaping our image of political, social, and economic systems that affect food production and consumption.

-the way food images can spice up the way we eat and grow food.

-cross-cultural food images that can provide new relationships among cultures, foodways, and vision.

-the way writers, communities, and nations visualize the role of food in social, political, and economic systems.

-how food images function as efficient statements about individual and collective identity

1/16/10
My dissertation, "Complex Foodscapes: Visualizing Cross-Cultural Networks through Food Images," studies the complex system of food images that help define our relationships with food. Food might be succulent, as in a juicy piece of meat. It might be exotic, as Thai food and Mexican food are often presented. Or, food might be comforting, like a hearty bowl of chili. The types and combinations of relationships with food are endless, but they remained constrained by our economic, political, and social relations. Putting food images from literature, cookbooks, and social movements in a broader cross-cultural context characteristic of today's global food system, I describe the way images both constrain our ways of perceiving food and liberate our vision to perceive new food worlds. In Chapter One, using the concept of emergence--a process in which novel food images emerge, or self-organize, from simple rules--I demonstrate how John Dryden's efforts to control the interpretation of his historical poem, Annus Mirabilis, as a type of advertisement for free trade and English nationalism unintentionally produces an image of a decentralized economic system based on the early modern spice trade. Against assumptions that Annus Mirabilis univocally reflects an imperialist politics, I draw attention to the images of decentralized systems that emerge out of Dryden's poem. Chapter Two...

Intensification Notes

DeLanda Intensive Science

Definitions

56-traits that characterize intensive thinking in biology: populations and rates of change/heterogeneity (58)

68-the term, intensity, comes from thermodynamics

70-Two Deleuzian modifications to thermodynamics definition, inspired by biological sciences: a) when intensities are divided they are divided by critical threshold, "its extensive properties suffering a radical change in nature"

72-b) new capacities become apparent through high intensification, far-from-equilibrium conditions; "capabilities to form assemblages with other individuals, organic or inorganic"; "We may have exhaustive knowledge about an individual's properties and yet, not having observed it in interaction with other individuals, know nothing about its capacities"

Other

70-Deleuze: "Difference is not diversity"; diversity is a given, it's like a cardinal series of numbers; difference operates like an ordinal series (81)

76-"zone of intensity" informs what expressive capacities appear

77-intensive sciences "reveal how one and the same 'virtual limb' is unfolded through difference intensive sequences"; he's talking about the tetrapod limb

78-"we need to conceive a continuum which yields, through progressive differentiation, all the discontinuous individual that populate the actual world"

-"we need a way of meshing these together into a heterogeneous whole....as a plane of consistency"

79-differential relations & function

80-"Unlike trajectories, a vector field is not composed of individuated states, but of instantaneous values for rates of change"

81-"condensation of singularities....a metaphor of this process....is the occurrence of a phase transition in an actual material such as water"

82-"Russell introduced the term distance (or intensity) to define relations of proximity between the elements of an ordinal series"

84-"When two separate series of events are placed in communication, in such a way that a change in probabilities in one series affects the probability distribution of the other, we have an information channel"

87-"In the vicinity of the bifurcation the capacity to transmit information is maximized"

114-coupling influenced by intensity held at a critical threshold of strength

120-degree of connectivity

Bonata and Protevi Geophilosophy

100-Deleuze borrows from Kant's study of "intensive magnitude" in "Anticipations of Perception" in the Critique of Pure Reason

-"while one must add together the parts of an extensive quantity to achieve a grasp of its unity...one does not add, for example, three 'units' of ten degrees of heat to apprehend a temperature of thirty degrees"

Massumi A User's Guide

69-7?- infant & BwO, going through threshold changes

8-"a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax leading to a state of rest"

66-"Actual intensity has extension (form and substance), virtual intensity does not: it is a pure intensity"

60-attractor: "state towards which a system tends"

-intensity: "the differential potential created by the contradictory motion and density requirements of the two attractors (equilibrium & far from equilibrium)

47-"Stirrings that are not just prepersonal, but impersonal, bodily but inhuman, outside intentionality, open irrevocably to chance"

-"How there can be sensation without a unified subject"

Parr The Deleuze Dictionary Constantin V Boundas "Intensity" def

131-force refers to the relation between forces

-"the encounter of intensity--being the task of sensibility--is the first necessary link in the interaction of all faculties striving to generate the differentiated virtual within thought"

132-"Sensation is the affect"

Patton Deleuze: A Critical Reader Daniel W Smith

37-"They [intensive forces] can only be sensed from the point of view of the transcendental sensibility that apprehends it immediately in the encounter as the limit of sensibility itself"

-"'sensation ceases to be representative and becomes real'"

43-shift in modern art from matter-form relation to material-force

-44-drawing from Lyotard, "the figure is the form that is connected to a sensation" (different from figuration, a representation practice)

-"In Bacon's paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure: it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation"; he deforms the body, undoing its extensive unity to reveal its intensive reality

Deleuze and Guatarri A Thousand Plateaus

37-the proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity....the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity"

22-Bateson and Balinese culture, "plateau of intensity"

54-"One travels by intensity; displacements and spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritorialization (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define complementary, sedentary, reterritorializations"

Definitions from Ch.2 of Grammar of Visual Design

Not quite, but almost exhaustive list of terms from the second chapter, "Narrative Representations": 

Locative: relate landscape to subject by locating them in a particular place (subject is passive)

Instrumental: relate tool to subject as an instrument (subject is active)

Vectors: like action verbs, they connect Participant (Actor) to Goal.

Participants: are either Interactive (participants in the act of communication) or Represented (which constitute the subject matter of communication). In formal art theory: participants are "volumes" or "masses" with their own distinct weight or gravitational pull. 

Processes: In formal art theory are called "vectors" or "tensions."

Visual Schemas: reducing visible world to simple geometric forms.

Transaction/Transactional Structure: something done by an Actor to a Goal. 

Classificatory Structure: includes analytic structure; lines without arrows; Participants can lost their separate identity to different degrees; never have a vector. 

Analytical: the Participants are not Actor or Goal, but Carrier and Attribute. Like a map. 

Embedded analytical processes: detail (or Attributes) in naturalistic images say things about the Carriers: the men wear hats, scarves, and socks. 

Squares & Rectangles: can be stacked and aligned; form geometric patterns with each other; does not exist in nature.

Circles: self-contained, complete in themselves, warmth, protection.

Triangles: unlike square, it is tilted, so it is both a Participant and a Vector because it can convey directionality; sense of process; symbol of generative power.

Vertical/Horizontal Elongation: 

Interchangeability: of visual and verbal participants in a diagrams.

Narrative: connected by a vector; doing something to or for each other.

Conceptual: represent participants in terms of class, structure, and meaning; generalized, stable, timeless essence.

Narrative Visual Proposition: 

Indicator of Directionality: like an arrow, pointer.

Realist/Abstract images: the latter are harder to transcode, or translate into language. 

Transport: movement from one place to another.

Transformation: causally determined. 

Non-transactional structure: has not goal, is like an intransitive verb.

Transactional process: the Participant (Actor) instigates movements.

Actor: from which the vector emanates.

Goal: participant at whom or which the vector is directed. 

Events: representations of actions which include only the Goal.

Interactors: double role of Actor and Goal.

Reactional process: when a vector is formed by an eyeline.

Reacter: the Participant that looks at the Phenomenon.

Phenomenon: formed either by being looked at by the Reacter, or by a whole visual proposition, like a transactional structure. 

Speech/Mental processes: dialogue and thought balloons.

Conversion processes: a chain of transactional processes. 

Relays: do not just pass on, in unchanged form, what they receive, they always transform it. 

Geometric symbolism: does not use an participants, only a vector; like a helix; get meaning from symbolic value; abstract patterns extend the "Vectorial Vocabulary" by drawing our attention to possibilities. 

Locative Circumstances: relate participant to Setting.

Setting: a type of Participant. 

Circumstances of Means: like tools, but no clear vector between the tool and its user.

Circumstances of Accompaniment: like penguin with baby pic, no clear vector between the two but they form two distinct participants. 

Linguistic events: have processes that are happenings which cannot have an Actor.

Behavioral process: the meanings of visual non-transactional reactions form a more restricted filed, tied up as they are with one kind of behavior: looking (77). 

Projective processes: mental and verbal processes, processes of perception, affection cognition. 

Senser: the person that does the seeing. 

What is spice-2-spyce?

This blog is basically my working out of academic issues I need to write about. Right now, its mostly dissertation stuff. So there is a lot of stumbling, some experimentation, and vain attempts to articulate what can't be articulated. As a nice poet once said, sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.

It has also become an archive of my writing process. So, I record my attempts to carry out advice from friends, professors, and how-to-write books and websites. Part of the challenge and benefit to my current position is staying at home full-time with my infant son and two cats while my incredibly generous partner finishes her medical residency, an eighty-hour-a-week job.

I know theory is not saving lives (yet), but I'll try to sketch out my theoretical position.

My Disciplines:

main: Food Studies, Visual Studies, Complex Systems Theory

minor: rhetoric, semiotics, postcolonial theory

overarching: feminism

I bounce a lot of ideas off semiotics, so I have a traditional streak. I like structuralism. But I''ve read enough Bruno Latour to be cautious about framing debates between structure and agency. Semiotics, especially the Peircean strand from C.S. Peirce to Yuri Lotman, doesn't meddle with those terms anyways. Even Saussure, our paternal structuralist, never talks about "agency." He was a linguist, c'mon.

My philosophies:

Since I'm fashionably caught up in the complex systems buzz, I focus on processes, relationships, and becomings (rather than being, identity, or structure). In itself, this approach is nothing new. My pleasure derives from synthesizing literary theory, complex systems theory, and visual studies in order to think about food in ways that depart from historical and anthropological accounts.

Who to read:

If you're in the humanities and want to use complex systems theory, you'll first want to get an idea of how the humanities borrows from researchers studying complex systems. John Urry, Mark C. Taylor, and N. Katherine Hayles provide accessible texts that synthesize their respective fields--sociology, philosophy, and literature--with complex systems, or more broadly, with chaos theory. If you're in rhetoric and composition, Margaret Syverson and Byron Hawk provide applications that are ready to use in the classroom.

Next, check out some of the scientists who have helped make complex system accessible to people in other fields. John Holland, Francisco Varela, Ilya Prigogine, and Stuart Kaufmann have all provided interdisciplinary accounts. Melanie Mitchell, an accomplished theorist and computer scientist, offers a very nice introduction to the scientific end.

Then move to philosophers and social critics that not only borrow from complex systems but also create novel syntheses of their own; many of these thinkers, in fact, do not use complex systems, but their thoughts are easily fused within a complexity paradigm. Philosopher Manuel DeLanda offers the best synthesis of complex systems theory with social, political, and historical thought. He is accessible and translates the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze into useable language. John Protevi and Mark Bonata provide insight into DeLanda's and Deleuze's relationship to complex systems. Deleuze and Guatarri's A Thousand Plateaus, however, is an endless source of inspiration, frustration, and amusement, and it can be productively read against Donna Haraway and Slavoj Žižek--both of whom have issues with Deleuze. Jacques Derrida and Edward Said offer intellectual roads to critique and extend Žižek's Lacanian side. And speaking of Lacan, Hayles builds on cybernetics to go beyond the presence/absence binaries that Lacan and Derrida scrupulously critique.

If you want to link this short list of complex thinkers to visual studies begin with C.S. Peirce, who Derrida and Deleuze draw on. His triadic models of the sign will drive you nuts, but it is the most dynamic approach to semiotics and an in-road to understanding the way signs, language, and images are complex systems. Yuri Lotman and Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian giants of semiotics and literary theory, likewise present language and signs as complex systems. Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, and W.J.T. Mitchell depart from semiotics, offering throughly historical accounts of vision that mesh well with the important role that time plays in complex systems.

Gender studies naturally flows from visual studies: the relationship between "scopic regimes" and gender date at least to the invention of writing; see Elise Kermani's dissertation on the mythic origins of langauge and anthropologists, like Nancy Makepeace Turner, accounts of pre-literate societies. Some of the most cited feminist, visual studies crowd borrows heavily from Western male thought: Judith Butler borrows from Foucault; Laura Mulvey and Jacqueline Rose borrow from Freud; Gayatri Spivak borrows from Derrida.

For the true intellectual juice read Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands, a text that synthesizes myth, politics, and spirituality in ways resonant with Deleuze and Guatarri's fusion of semiotics, music, and the physical sciences in A Thousand Plateaus. Read together, these texts can "queer" almost anything, making new lines of flight wherever you take them.

Spice-2-Spyce:

This is basically an attempt to create a line of flight for vision. That is, I don't do away with vision as a privileged source of perception (like anyone, I need to see the road as I drive), but by combining my interests in food studies with visual rhetoric a new way of seeing is possible. Spice-2-spyce embodies this new way of seeing. By changing "i" to a "y" in spice, the repressed maternal visual element is made salient (the phallic "i" is turned into a vaginal "y," a letter Kermani writes about extensively). The "2" and the "y" disrupt our sense of linear reading, making the word or phrase a visual display rather than a mere word. The reader can turn into a viewer, a spectator, an observer. The word "spice" has etymological roots in "species," a term used to organized reality according to "appearances."