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09/12/2005 Archived Entry: "Documenting Mythology II"

Documenting Mythology II
The encounter is a main principle of digital methodology. What you encounter becomes what you write.
Barthes reminds us of the impact of encountering - phrased in his understanding of the punctum whose encounter is always felt as a prick or cut - as the non-signifying moment: "I dismiss all knowledge."
I place that statement at the center of some kind of digital methodology which - for now - poses visual writing as a goal. The preference for the visual comes from Barthes, but it also comes from the large number of writing textbooks which call themselves "visual" or which profess "visual rhetoric" as a goal for some reason or another. The "popularity" of visuality seems indicative of the superficial meaning of cool. While cool is dismissed as anti-knowledge (in Alan Liu's work), the visual cool (oooh images) is framed by textbook publishing as knowledge based: you must learn how to read images (we leave aside for now the economic pull flashy images has for increasing sales). This knowledge is hardly visual since its origins are in literary readings, text based analysis for meaning.
That said, I still feel drawn to this statement: I dismiss all knowledge. What does it mean to engage with a methodology which dismisses all knowledge? What kind of visual rhetoric is one which is not based on knowledge? Or, at least, not based on understanding a certain notion of "meaning"?
Mythology. "What I can name cannot really prick me." This "third meaning" is impossible if based on naming. The purpose is not to name, then, but to imagine. To mythologize.
In terms of cool, I have spent time identifying a visual tradition in 1963, part of which is found on Blue Note record covers. Not one 1963 Blue Note record was recorded in Detroit, despite the presence of the nation's oldest Jazz club, Baker's Keyboard Lounge (8 Mile and Livernois). Most of the '63 recordings were done at the Rudy Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
I'm not satisfied with this knowledge. I want to mythologize these recordings so that a digital tradition of visual production is not in New Jersey (also site of a well known composition studies publisher), but near Baker's on 8 Mile, at the now infamous Studio 8, where Eminem first recorded and where owner Amjed "AJ" Abdallah was murdered this year. I mythologize Herbie Hancock recording My Point of View at Studio 8. I document this as the beginning of visual rhetoric - for Hancock echoes the question of point of view triumphed by McLuhan in his two texts which surround '63, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. McLuhan tells us that in electronic culture, visuality transforms "fragmented and specialist extensions into a seamless web of experience." Renaissance fixed point of view yields to everything at once point of view.
One track on >My Point of View guides me in this echo: "The Pleasure is Mine."
Pleasure. Pleasure motivates this kind of work which encounters in order to generate "webs" of experience, moments like seeing something allusive in a long converted Woodward Ave synagogue or a bizarre coincidence in one's place of work (from synagogue to the Maccabees). The pleasure is not word play (to stop at this point is not enough), but "what the..." As in "what the hell..." Because that moment of astonishment - why this encounter - is quite pleasurable as well as odd. It grants enough pleasure that it serves me as always the beginning of the invention process….what the hell/let me figure out what this is. The “what the…” is the new media principle of perspective, of point of view.