The difficulty with denotation is that it is built on the assumption that there is a shared meaning or interpretation between individuals. We all know what the word "car" means but I'm sure the mental image everyone reading that word had will be different. So even after we've agreed on a definition, how we interpret that word, what we think of, will differ. This is what Finnegan means when she talks about the "fiction of denotation" (119), the idea that there can be an agreed upon meaning for an image or text.
Denotation is even harder now because you can't assume that people are going to share similar experiences or exposure to particular texts. McGee laments this change from a discourse of "totalizations," in which "all discourse within a particular language community was produced from the same resources" (284), to a more heterogeneous discourse, in which "there is no longer a homogeneous body of knowledge that constitutes the common education of everyone" (286). Today you can no longer say "The Gettysburg Address," or "the Constitution" in the case of the Tea Party, and just assume that everyone is going to know what you are talking about.
While McGee laments this transition from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous discourse, I believe that it is a positive change that gives voice to a wider range of people, but it does make the job of the critic more difficult. Because the critic can no longer assume that his/her audience shares knowledge of or an interpretation of a text, the critic must now make more use of description in his/her analysis. This is why Ehrenhaus employs an extended description of Mellish's death in Saving Private Ryan; he cannot assume that his audience has even seen the film or that they would have interpreted the scene in the same way. Pointing out the SS badge on the Nazi soldier's collar as evidence of his reading of the film as basing the moral justification for the war in the Holocaust is connotative; many other people could see the same scene and not read it in that way. The description is essential to his argument because just saying "the scene of Mellish's death at the hands of an SS soldier illustrates my point about the Holocaust as justification for the war" would have assumed that the reader of the essay would have seen the film, would have remembered that scene in sufficient detail and/or would have interpreted the scene in the same way. The level of description allows the reader to decide if he/she agrees with Ehrenhaus' argument.
Works Cited
Ehrenhaus, Peter. "Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan." Critical Studies in Media Communication 18.3 (2001): 321-337.
Finnegan, Cara A. "What is This a Picture of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9.1 (2006): 116-123.
McGee, Michael C. "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture." Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 275-289.
You raise a lot of interesting and important questions here. At some level we need to reconcile the presumptions made in rhetorical criticism which do not address every available contingency or variable in rhetoric and its response. I tend to favor an emphasis on "choice." How does a rhetor's choice of langugage, arrangement, setting, or timing factor into their discourse? How does a critic choose which fragments constitute a discourse? Description, as you say, helps bring the reader to the critic's point of analysis.
ReplyDeleteWhile I doubt many would disagree with McGee's claim that we live in a heterogeneous culture of disocourse now, I sometimes wonder how we remember the past as homogeneous and the presumptions which support such such a claim. The Constitution, for example, has always been a living document, even outside of the legal sense of the term. William Lloyd Garrison, for one, lit a copy of it on fire and proclaimed it a "covanent with death, an agreement with hell" in the 1840s. It is challenging though sometimes helpful to consider the audience in terms of multiple publics, which is where, I sense, a constitutive angle on disocurse becomes a key tool. What choice is made to include which fragements that target what audience(s)?
Keeping the questions you've addressed in careful, earnest, and frequent check seems to be the long game of responsible criticism.
Do you really think that McGee laments this change from homogenous to heterogeneous education? Knowing McGee, I suspect any lamentation was sarcastic at the very least.
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