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THE VISUAL RHETORIC OF THE FAMILY PHOTO: ONE CYBORG’S STORY
By

Martine Courant Rife

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Program of Rhetoric & Writing

2005

ABSTRACT
THE VISUAL RHETORIC OF THE FAMILY PHOTO: ONE CYBORG’S STORY
By
Martine Courant Rife
In this partially autobiographical text that challenges the “invisible” intellectual

gaze, the author explores how beginning in the early 1900's United States, her “white
middleclass” family attempted to seamlessly construct a neatly packaged vision of “Our
Family,” a vision that intertwined family stories and mythologizing and supported
dominant ideologies. However, as the author rhetorically reads her family photographs,
she also “reads” acts of resistance by her family members. But the agency needed to
resist, is enough for those same family members to visually erase “Others” who
supported and labored, others who allowed to come to light the “whole” vision of “Our
White Family.” Relying on theorists such as Lacan, Haraway, de Certeau, and Spivak,
and scholars such as Porter, Powell, Johnson and DeVoss, the author uses rhetorical
intervention, animation, and rehabilitation to deconstruct and reconstruct her family story
in answer to Malea Powell’s call to acknowledge history and attempt whatever redress is
possible. As a call to the discipline of Rhetoric and Writing, the author, as she crosses
disciplinary boundaries, asks for a more inclusive, interdisciplinary Visual Rhetorics
trajectory that maps onto Visual Culture Studies, Critical Theory, and Visual
Rhetoric/Technical Writing. After cautioning Rhetoric and Writing scholars writing on
Digital Rhetoric and Technology against cognitively fetishizing the term “Cyborg” the
author ends by answering the question, what can rhetoric as techne, through the

technology of writing, do for the world?

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother and Melinda.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to extend my deepest appreciate and gratitude to the Rhetoric &
Writing program at Michigan State University for its help and support while I
embarked on this excursion. In particular I would like to thank Professors Malea
Powell, Ellen Cushman, and Danielle DeVoss for their support, patience, and
helpful comments on this Master’s Thesis. l’d especially like to thank Malea,
Chair of my Master’s Thesis Committee for her comments on this piece, and her
work in making disciplinary space for this Thesis. I’d also like to thank Bill Hart-
Davidson for his generosity, for helping me better visualize “texts,” and for
treating me like a colleague instead of a student, Jim Porter for his advice,
Douglas Noverr, Jeff Grabill, Michael Wojcik, Leonora Smith, Julie Lindquist,
Marilyn Wilson, the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, and
the WIDE Research Center. I also thank my mother Jacqueline Walther for her
help and support, and my husband Michael Rife, as well as my children Olivia

and Ansel Courant who have basically taken over the house so I could write this.

PREFACE

This is a story.

“Understanding the world is about living inside stories. There’s no
place to be in the world outside of stories” (Haraway, How Like 107)

This is a story about “my family” and how we created “our history”
through visual images by way of the technologically mediated family
photograph. It’s a story of Visual Rhetoric. It’s a story about culture: how
humans interact, negotiate, and manipulate discursive productions. It’s a
story of human psychology playing out visually in photographs as some
people are written in, and some are erased. This is a story about
technology: the giant eye, the camera-machine, “everywhere . . . [and] . . .
invisible . . . They are as hard to see politically as materially” (Haraway,
Reader 12). It’s story about “us” as technology; “we” are communication
systems.

This is a story about what rhetoric can do for the world.

“I offer this beginning, an emergence” (Powell 39).

Here I “see” using rhetoric as techne and “unsee” with the
technology of writing. It’s about saying no to the pictures on walls and in
photo albums, pictures that string together a seamless, whole, linear
narrative, a narrative that has a beginning and end. This story is about
“seeing" and “unseeing,” “coding” and “uncoding.” It’s about
acknowledging history and how history is inscribed as an “event.” And,

finally, it’s all about writing towards alliance, affinity, connectedness and to

redress, restore, and rehabilitate. Here, | engage the art of rhetoric as
techne and rehabilitate old stories with new stories through the technology
Of writing.

My work maps onto the visual rhetoric trajectory of R&W (Rhetoric
and Writing). Rhetoric and Writing, as a discipline, moves us towards
understanding and interpreting the elements that compose the world, what
things mean and how they mean what they do, and, how to change
meaning. Here I want to give my current working definition of rhetoric, but
withhold the name of the author momentarily (l have amended the
following slightly from the original version):

0 an art, a techne — a reasoned habit of mind in making . . .
concerned with coming into being and contriving and seeing how
something may come to be among things that are capable of being
and not being.

0 an art through which meaning is made and action produced across
a variety of human situations;

0 an art that links theory (how the world might work) to practice (how
we make things work in the world);

. an art that sees use as a practice that connects the past to the
present and the future through bodies situated in particular
configurations of history, culture, economics, genders, and

geographies;

vi

0 an art that sees users as engaged in discursive productions across
which human interaction, manipulation, and negotiation are the
common threads.

The reason that l have withheld the author’s name, is that this particular person’s
scholarship is deeply embedded in rhetoric and writing, but does not particularly
(yet) speak specifically and narrowly to issues of the visual, i.e. what we might
call “visual rhetoric” (although she is specifically concerned with bodies). The
author of this thick definition of rhetoric, is none other than Professor Malea
Powell, PhD (with small help from Aristotle on the first bullet), an author
described as a “mixed-blood of Indiana Miami, Eastern Shawnee, and European
American ancestry . . . [whose] research focuses on examining the rhetorics of
survivance used by nineteenth-century American Indian Intellectuals” (38).
lmportantly, for scholars such as Powell, their own positionality as authors is
critically relevant and germane to their work.

Some might say that in the cultural studies/critical theory strand of R&W,
the scholars consider it epistemically violent for an author to remain transparent
while representing others. Gayatri Spivak, certainly not a writer called up often
by visual rhetoric scholars, said it this way: “The banality of leftist intellectuals’
lists of self-knowing, politically canny subaltems stands revealed; representing
them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent” (275). A transparent
intellectual erases a huge chunk of the “why” and “how” part of any given
intellectual inquiry. Spivak makes clear that a field of inquiry is produced by the

questions asked, not by the body of materials determining what questions must

vii

be asked of them (qtd. in Rogoff 384). Images do not determine visual rhetoric
as a field of inquiry. Instead, we the scholars, working from our own positionality,
determine the questions we ask, or that we will allow to be asked by others. The
difference here is important if scholars wish to work towards a collective goal of
developing visual rhetoric as a field that is intellectually rigorous. The irony for
Visual Rhetoric is that since one of its tenants is that “the creation of an image . .
. always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection, framing,
and personalization” (Sturken and Cartwright 16), the field fails to play with the
notion that the authors of visual rhetoric scholarship are also subjective
choosers.

Intellectual transparency momentarily aside, I’ll try to explain throughout
this thesis how and where my work maps onto multiple trajectories within R&W.
Like Susan Sontag, Laura Wexler, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Jo Spence, I’ve
made a story of how the world works visually. I’m a bricoleur patching and
piecing together a rhetorical analysis of photographs and their situatedness. I
draw upon Wexler, Smith, and Sontag for help with the “photography” analysis,
but Spence’s work also connects to mine because of its autobiographical nature.
Like Susan Sontag, Jo Spence, a photographer by trade, challenges the status
quo by seeing users (of rhetoric) as engaged in discursive productions, story
making, that photographs try to maintain, first in her 1986 book Putting Myself in
the Picture A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography, and then in the
1991 collection, Family Snaps The Meanings of Domestic Photography. Spence

challenges visual rhetoric with her own “visual rhetoric.” She creates

viii

photographs that tell a different truth. Laura Wexler uses Spence for Spence’s
proposition that family photography creates coercive, norm making images,
images that “mobilize powerful models of social behaviors and appearances
according to which the major divisions of age, race, class and sex are made to
appear both natural and desirable” (Wexler, Tender 4-5). In other words, family
photographs manufacture and support ideology. Shawn Michelle Smith uses
Spence as a “contemporary feminist photographer and theorist” who investigates
and represents “ways in which family photographs document parents’ . . .
investment in the . . . life of the child” (Smith, American 247).

Spence’s work is the only “published” work I’ve come across thus far, as a
Master’s student, where the author reveals herself, her “identity,” and explores
her own positionality through the visual: photographs. But there is room in R&W
for more of this kind of work, which I imagine full of fruitful possibilities. I also
want to mention here, that, like Spivak (among others), my decision to write
autobiographically and connect my “history” to my scholarship, was exceedingly
political (as is my decision here to rely on Spivak, a Third World Woman, instead
of Peter Elbow or Beth DanieIl—writers clearly within the mainstream canon of
Composition). l have ethical issues with some of the “looking” that I see in R&W
research, and the focus on “public” performance. Robert R. Johnson, referring to
Judith Wacjman, “reminds researchers of technology and culture that we should
be interested in the private spheres: spheres that can illuminate the concrete
‘Iived experience” of women and other marginalized groups “ (xiii). With the

technological interfaces we now have, the private and the public blend together.

So looking at the private is looking at the public. Family photographs are now
commonly posted on the WWW. Additionally, my decision to look “inward” and to
imbricate “myself" in this project, comes from a political/personal philosophy. I
live by the adage, do unto others . . . so it seems to me that the most ethical
choice of method was to begin by “looking” at myself and the sacred texts of my
own blood kin, before I venture out to look at “others.” I like to know how things
feel first hand.

Self-reflexivity means listening for other voices. It means being open to
interdisciplinarity, being open to what Powell might call alliances: “these voices
are a pathway to a middle ground teeming with change and possibility” (40).
Powell, for example, intertwines herself and her community in her scholarship.
lnterdisciplinarity is important -- unless a field wants to be like the law, frozen in
precedent. What I'm wrangling with here are “issues of canon and exclusion of .
. . scholarly work" (Powell 40). I am asking, in Powell’s words, for us to be allies
working towards the same shared goals (42). And I am hoping that I will find
language allowing us to have “respectful and reciprocal relationships” where we
can flourish (Powell 41). For now, I call upon scholars in visual rhetoric to come
out from behind their practices of looking, and reveal themselves to the world (in
stories). To do otherwise is to represent themselves as transparent, risk
unknowingly working towards an essentialist agenda, and flatten out places that
beg for deeper rhetorical engagements.

Malea Powell writes that she learned rhetoric from her home community

(43); l on the other hand learned rhetoric from Malea Powell. She taught me that

telling a story can be valued in Rhetoric and Writing, and that stories are nothing
less than ways of theorizing. This story came to me when I was a student at
Michigan State University in Professor Malea Powell’s class, Contemporary
Theories of Rhetoric, the spring of 2004. In that class, our reading list consisted
of among others, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel de Certeau,
Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Donna
Haraway, Gayatri Spivak, Hortense J. Spillers, Slavoj Zizek and Kaja Silverrnan.
I managed to stumble along in my attempt to grapple with some of this theory.
When we came to the readings in female subjects in black and white race,
psychoanalysis, feminism, I hesitated at Laura Wexler’s piece, “Seeing
Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye.” Unlike our other
readings, this piece actually had pictures.

Wexler’s discussion focused on a set of photographs taken around 1865
by Virginia based George Cook, a white studio photographer who specialized in
photographing both Union and Confederate military officers. After the war his
interest turned to photographing former slaves, and George’s son Heustis “grew
up to be a photographer like his father but specialized in making pictures of
former slaves” (165). In her discussion, Wexler focuses on George Cook’s photo
of “a nursemaid and her charge,” featuring Mr. Cook’s African American
servant/former slave holding his son Heustis. Using a combination of critical race
theory combined with psychoanalysis, Wexler rhetorically “reads” this photograph
against the photograph Cook made of his own wife, Heustis’s mother. It was the

photograph of the “nursemaid” visually and linguistically juxtaposed with the

xi

photograph of Cook’s wife that gave me pause. It reminded me of something I
heard once or twice from my mother. That is, my mother told me that while
growing up in New Jersey in the 1930’s-1940’s, she had a “black nanny.” During
my childhood, this was not an issue my mother was willing to discuss (I did
inquire), and my grandmother Martine (Hartman) Walther, never mentioned the
“servant.” Not once. I reflected on the strangeness of the scenario thinking
further howl never recalled seeing a photograph of this person, and also
wondering how invested “she” was in the life of my mother. So it was specifically
with an intellectual-visuaI-triangulation of the photographic images of Cook’s
white wife, African-American nursemaid, and my grandmother that this piece
began. (See FIGURE 1. Martine’s Initial Visual Triangulation)

Researching my family’s photographs for “evidence,” or “data,” led me not
only to boxes of unremembered family photographs, but to Shawn Michelle
Smith’s work which examines the rhetorical functionality of W.E.B. Du Bois’s
collection of photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition.

Unlike the widely disseminated ’ photographs by George and Heustis
Cook and those collected by Du Bois, the majority of my family photographs
were heaped and stacked randomly in discarded, miscellaneous paper boxes
(some had been displayed publically — and certainly taken in a “public act” - the
taking of photographs is itself a public ritual). I’ve pulled these out of the old
cedar chest, the one my family mythologizes as being built by my great uncle for
my grandmother’s wedding. Prior to my research, none of these photographs

had been placed in albums, and it is difficult for me to trace how I acquired the

xii

photographs. But most of the older pictures, those from the early to mid 1900’s
(the main focus of this excursion) came to me through my mother.

Near the same time I participated in Malea’s class, where we read Wexler
and where I began thinking about this project and collecting “data,” I also was a
student in Professor Danielle Nicole DeVoss’s, PhD, Visual Rhetoric class, and I
taught my first class at Michigan State University as a Graduate Teaching
Assistant. The textbook I selected was Seeing & Writing 2, edited by Donald and
Christine McQuade. The textbook relies heavily on visual rhetoric to facilitate
student writing. " Freshman student writing assignments have used the analysis
of advertisements (i.e. visual rhetoric) as a backdrop for over fifty years.iii I want
to make clear here, that I am a writing and rhetoric teacher, and this project
comes out of that identity. During the last five years, I have taught thirty (30)
sections of basic writing at three different Mid-Michigan institutions. Prior to my
Master’s research, the question I had was, how do I talk about “race” as a “white”
teacher? I had no language I could use because I was uncertain (and wrong,
thinking I was not “raced”) about my own positionality as a “white” teacher among
students of color and “white” students. From a pedagogical perspective, my
research maps onto the Composition (with a capital C) strand of R&W on the
issue of “white” teachers needing to examine and interrogate “their own positions
as raced subjects within writing classrooms” (Goodbum 71). Amy Goodbum
notes that while “[tlheorists and scholars interested in anti-racist and critical
pedagogies have focused for years on the ways students resist notions of white

privilege . . . English teachers (most of whom are white) have not fully considered

xiii

the implications of theorizing their own racial position in terms of their
‘whiteness”’ (69; 68). Goodbum does what “white” teachers ( and visual rhetoric
scholars) rarely do, that is she self-reflectively examines her own racial identity
and the implications thereof. But this project isn’t just an exploration of race, it
acknowledges, as Robert Johnson does when he quotes Judith Wacjman, that
the effects of race cannot be disentangled from gender and class (xiii). My
Master's Thesis research attempts to explore these entanglements. R&W could
deepen and make richer its Composition and Visual Rhetoric strand if writing
teachers become invested in the kinds of self-explorations they so often ask their
students to engage in.

The reason I selected Seeing & Writing 2iv that first semester teaching at
MSU, was so I could tie my scholarship interests to my pedagogy and work
through authorial transparency with my students. This thesis has served me well
in that regard. One of my basic teaching philosophies is that I shouldn’t ask
students to do what I myself am not willing to do. So I used my Master’s Thesis
extensively in my writing classrooms, coupled with an assignment that asks
students to develop critical consciousness and critical thinking, by looking at their
own family photographs and interpreting. Asking perhaps - what’s not stated
here? What’s the purpose of this picture? Why did my family select this picture
to publically display (or not)? Why did this picture get taken? These are the
kinds of questions the art of rhetoric encourages us to ask.

While teaching “visual rhetoric” and reading Wexler in Malea’s class, in

Danielle’s Visual Rhetoric class, I felt dissonance (remember good writing comes

xiv

from dissonance) between the cultural studies strand of R&W, and the visual
rhetoric strand. We read texts on design, typography, graphics, and color by
authors such as Mike Markel who discussed the principles of design, contrast,
repetition, alignment, and proximity, and Ann Wysocki who analyzed the
rhetorical meaning of fonts and visual placements in multiple media formats. We
read texts that discussed creating humanistic visual illustrations (Dragga and
Voss). I had difficulty finding a connection between the deeply analytical and
theoretical writings of Wexler, Smith, Lacan, and Derrida and the visual rhetoric
readings which for the most part came from the professional and technical writing
strand of R&W.

Danielle helped me work through this disconnection in her class. Also, it
is because of her class that dissonance erupted into this Master’s Thesis.
Danielle used two textbooks, in addition to our daily readings, Sturken and
Cartwright's introduction to “visual culture,” and a “visual rhetoric/digital rhetoric”
anthology (Handa). As I discuss in chapter one, there is conflict between these
two “fields,” but there shouldn’t be. Regardless, I understand my scholarly
responsibility to explain how my work is situated in this place of conflict. There is
an empty gap, a void really, in visual rhetoric that needs to be filled with research
and scholarship. This gap might create alliances between the R&W traditions of
composition, visual rhetoric, and technical writing and layer those with cultural
rhetorics and critical theory. The kind of scholarship I need to rely on to theorize
this thesis from a position of purely Visual Rhetoric scholarship, has not yet been

written from a “Visual Rhetoric” perspective. This is why I found it necessary, as

XV

I will explain later, to draw upon the fields of film studies/critical theory/cultural
studies. Jay David Bolter reassures me that such an interdisciplinary effect has
manifested itself as R&W scholarship increasingly focuses on electronic writing
environments and the breakout of the visual. Because of the dominance of
images on the WWW, scholarship/research that’s been necessitated, has had to
try to braid together critical theory and visual analysis in order to theorize. I want
to conclude this paragraph by stating that visual rhetoric as a field, helped me
become technologically skilled enough to scan and manipulate Images to insert
in this text, but did not provide me with a solid theoretical foundation from which
to theorize this Master’s Thesis. For that I had to turn to other fields, and other
theories of rhetoric.

As far as research, I collaborated with my mother in obtaining some of the
photographs. As my mother sifted through her compilation she found not just
pictures I remembered, but many more photographs, some I’ve never seen; she
located birth certificates and family trees that she also fonlvarded to me. In later
conversations with her, I filled in gaps and constructed dates and places for
some of the images. (Of course, many mysteries remain.) She has read my
work and commented on it, and I thank her because without her help and
support, I couldn’t not have completed this project. She has been patient with
me as l have ruptured some of the realities formed in that little metanarrative of
my own family’s “identity.” (I hope in the rupture l have also rehabilitated).

Before I proceed to summarize the four sections of my text in the

“Introduction,” I shall contextualize “My Family’s” photo history by describing the

xvi

relationship I had with my grandmother, aunt , and mother. For the first two
decades of my life, my grandmother lived about three miles away in a rather
upscale Dearborn, Michigan neighborhood. I lived in a brick bungalow with my
mother in a deeply working class area on the edge of Dearborn, where Dearborn
intersects with Allen Park and Dearborn Heights, in the shadow of Veterans’
Hospital. My grandfather died the same year my father left: 1966. So that left
my grandmother, my mother, and me (an “only” child), to fend for ourselves. My
aunt lived about forty-five minutes away first in a working class neighborhood in
Madison Heights, Michigan, and later in a upper middleclass area of Troy.” She
was married to one man and had four children. Her husband died two years ago.

My father did not participate in my life either financially, emotionally, or
with any presence whatsoever. He disappeared. Someday, however, I might
write a paper about he re-appeared recently after finding my presence “on the
web.” He now emails me about once per month, after a thirty year hiatus. My
mother, on the other hand, has always been present. During my youth, she
worked fulltime as a secretary in the Social Science Department at Henry Ford
Community College, and my grandmother worked part-time as a nurse. Because
of my mother’s work obligations, I spent a significant amount of time alone with
my grandmother. I occasionally stayed overnight at her home, and I frequently
visited her with my mother.

My grandmother, my mother, and I also went on occasional driving trips in
Michigan, staying together in roadside motels along the way. Also, during the

years my mother was financially able to travel outside Michigan for summer

xvii

vacations to the oceanside in New Jersey, my grandmother met us and stayed
with us for several days or a week. As for my aunt, my mother and I saw her
mainly on major Christian holidays. Although, in 1969 due to cancer surgery, my
mother was hospitalized for over one month and at that time I stayed with my
aunt and her family. Around 1980, my grandmother moved to Florida, and I
visited her there once. She also traveled from Florida and visited me during the
ten years I lived in Colorado. The last time I saw her she met me in Michigan (I
lived in Colorado and she in Florida) in 1990 after the birth of my daughter Olivia.
My grandmother died in 1991. But that wasn't the end of her story.

Part of this story is of a history I was born into. “The history one was born
into is always so naturalized until you reflect back on it and then suddenly
everything is meaningful - the multiple layers of insertion in a landscape of social
and cultural histories all of a sudden pops out “ (Haraway, How Like 5-6). I think
this is why, as college writing teachers, we often invite our students to begin the
semester with their “own” story,” so they can see how simply thinking on
something takes linearity and makes cat’s cradles, esplanades, and networks.

For that reason, familiar (literally family-er) stories are always good places to

begin.

xviii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................... xix
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE

VISUAL RHETORIC(S) AND VISUAL CULTURE:
LACAN (AND HARAWAY) AS (VISUAL)

RHETORICIAN(S) ...................................................................................... 6
Overview ......................................................................................... 6
Visual Rhetoric versus Visual Culture ............................................. 6
The Historical Connections of Rhetoric to Psychology, Culture,
Technology ..................................................................................... 8
Lacan as (Visual) Rhetorician ......................................................... 10
Psychoanalysis, Lacan’s Critics, and Haraway’s Remediation ....... 15

CHAPTER TWO

VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL TRAJECTORIES:
THE GAZE, THE MASQUERADE, AND MY

GRANDMOTHER’S LEGS .......................................................................... 30
Overview ........................................................................................... 30
Lacan and Visual Analysis: The Split, Lack, and the Gaze ............. 31
Horizontal Connections: DeVoss, Pwell, and Haraway .................... 37
My Family Pictures ........................................................................... 40
Why Legs? The Erotic Mapping of the Body through the Visual ..... 53
Vertical Connections ......................................................................... 55

CHAPTER THREE

RHETORICAL ANIMATION: A SEMIOTIC VIEW OF FAMILY

PHOTOGRAPHS ........................................................................................ 67
Overview .......................................................................................... 67
Lacan’s Unconscious in (Visual) Stories .......................................... 72
My Family’s (Visual) Unconscious in Stories ................................... 77
A Series of (Family) Diffractions ...................................................... 89
Answering Earlier Questions ........................................................... 92
Rebuilding with the Cyborg Subject Position .................................. 95

CHAPTER FOUR

RHETORICAL RECONSTRUCTION: THE BLACK AND WHITE TRUTH OF

TRUE (WHITE) WOMANHOOD ................................................................. 99
Overview .......................................................................................... 99

xix

Everyday Practice .......................................................................... 100

Making the Transparent Visible: Gayatri Spivak ............................ 102
The Family Picture and “My Black Mother” .................................... 104
The Cult of True White Womanhood: “My White Grandmother”... 119
Cyborg Writing and Rhetorical Rehabilitation ................................ 125
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................ 128
APPENDIX OF FIGURES ........................................................................... 134
WORKS CITED ........................................................................................... 143

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Martine’s Initial Visual Triangulation ..................................... 135

Figure 2. Edgar Walther with his mother, sister, and
aunts-in-Iaw. Photographer unknown. 1908.

New Jersey .......................................................................... 136
Figure 3. Edgar with William and Peter. Photographer unknown.

1908 ...................................................................................... 136
Figure 4. Martine Hartman. Photographer unknown.

1923 ...................................................................................... 137

Figure 5. Martine (Hartman) Walther. Photographer unknown.
Mt. Holly Hospital where she worked. Mt. Holly, New Jersey.
1930 ..................................................................................... 1 37

Figure 6. Martine (Hartman) Walther, legs in car. Edgar Walther,
photographer. Vacation in Pennsylvania.
1953 ..................................................................................... 1 37

Figure 7. Network of 1940/50’s legs. From top, clockwise.
Seligmann’s table 1938, Betty Grable 1940, My
Gramma’s legs 1953, Vogue cover
1941 ...................................................................................... 1 38

Figure 8. My Gramma’s legs, 1953 United States bottom
Countess’s legs, 1860’s, France top ..................................... 139

Figure 9. Martine (Hartman) Walther. Martine Rife, photographer.
Northport, Florida. 1982 ....................................................... 140

Figure 10. Kids On Car. From left Jacky Walther and Marty
Walther. Edgar Walther Photographer. Palmyra,
New Jersey, 1938/39 ............................................................ 141

Figure 11. My Family. From left, Marti Walther, Martine
(Hartman) Walther, Jacky Walther. Edgar Walther,
Photographer. Palmyra, New Jersey.
1939 ...................................................................................... 142

 

iCook’s photographs are displayed in the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia and Du Bois’s
collection is part of the Library of Congress’s digital collection and is thus freely available online.

 

" See Common Culture Fourth Edition, Edited by Michael Petracca and Madeline Sorapure, New
Jersey: Pearson, 2004 and Dialogues An Argument Rhetoric and Reader Fourth Edition, Edited
by Gary Goshgarian, Kathleen Krueger, and Janet Bamett Minc, New York: Longman, 2003.

"' See (especially page 20) of Diana George’s essay, “From Analysis to Design: Visual
Communication in the Teaching of Writing," College Composition and Communication.
54.1(Sept. 2002): 11 — 39.

"’ As other rhetoric and writing teachers know, most basic writing textbooks have chapters that
help students explore identity. This is a traditional theme in our discipline. Seeing & Writing 2
took that traditional theme further by pointing out to student readers how identity is constructed in
the visual. The book contains chapters on “Embodying Identity,” and “Capturing Memorable
Moments," with special focus on interpreting photographs.

" All of the neighborhoods I mention were “white.”

INTRODUCTION

“The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and
perversity. ” Donna Harawa y. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs. ”

Radically different theorists agree on the importance of the visual in our
culture, theorists such as Haraway, Bolter, Faigley, DeVoss, Lacan, Freud,
Frederic Jameson, hooks, Joyce Middleton, Wexler, Hart-Davidson, Haas, Selfe,
and Smith, just to name a few from widely different scholarly backgrounds. The
rhetoric of the visual has become increasingly important because of the
scholarship taking place that examines digital/electronic writing, especially as
that writing manifests itself on the WWW. “On the World Wide Web, the images
often dominate” (Bolter 47). Scholars remind us of the importance, in our
academic work, to engage not just in horizontal research and writing, but also
vertical research, scholars such as Powell, DeVoss, Bolter, Porter, Johnson, and
Haraway. These scholars insist that we need to acknowledge and unpack
history, and we need to “see” how history informs current digital/visual rhetorical
practices:

These new media depend on earlier definitions of self embodied in
print and earlier visual media; the electronic self is a remediated
version of the printed, filmic, or televisual self. (Bolter 190)
Bolter specifically says that the Web “remediates photography” as web designers
take the rhetoric of photography, its design principles, and refashion those
principles when they incorporate images into pages and sites (70). Photography

“contributed to a crisis in painting” (Bolter 58), and so, in some respects, multi-

media WWW writing contributes to a crisis in photography. The problem as I see
it is that our information streams run so fast, we haven’t yet theorized the role of
family photography in everyday practice, and we’re already on to something
“else.” But how can we understand the visual subjectivities unfolding on the
WWW, without understanding how those electronic subjectivities are historically
and culturally informed? This Affinity Project is an attempt to look at the Family
Picture, still a construct alive and well, and connect its “birth” to present day
issues and subjectivities.

I call this project an Affinity Project rather than an Identity Project, because
I don’t want to seal “Myself” off as containing a single, naturalized, essentialized
“Identity.” Instead I want to look for connections and potential alliances, alliances
that include among others, “cyborgs and goddesses working for earthly survival,”
alliances that don’t form in a space of “natural identification,” but instead form in a
constructed space of “conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship”
(Haraway, Reader 14-15).

“The cyborg is a king of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern
collective and personal self” (Harawa y, Reader 23).

And so, the questions I partially (perversely and intimately) answer in this
Affinity Project are:

. Why do people make pictures? Whose fantasies are fed? What are
people’s “habit of mind” when they make family pictures?
. Once made, how does a family picture function rhetorically? What kind of

constructs does it help build?

. In the feeding of fantasy and in the mythologizing work completed by
family pictures, whose subjectivity is flattened? Who is oppressed? Who
is erased? Who leaves traces? And why?

0 How, in all of this rhetorical analysis, do we acknowledge history and write
towards connection and redress? What is the role of rhetoric and writing
in rehabilitation?

Summaries of chapters follow:
Chapter One: Visual Rhetoric(s) and Visual Culture: Lacan (and Haraway)
as (Visual) Rhetorician(s)

My use of Lacan (and Haraway) as (visual) rhetoricians is framed, and I
discuss how their work is useful for scholars conducting visual analyses.
Drawing on Powell, Johnson, Porter, and Aristotle I note rhetoric has always
been connected to culture, psychology, and technology. largue that visual
rhetoric, as an emerging field, should be deeply interdisciplinary and I end the
chapter by calling for visual rhetoric to be an inclusive Visual Rhetorics because
not only will such a field engage intellectually robust scholarship, but it will also
allow for scholarly self-reflexivity.

Chapter Two: Vertical and Horizontal Trajectories: The Gaze, The
Masquerade, and My Grandmother’s Legs

As I attempt to construct a text that is interdisciplinary, in this chapter I
engage a visual-rhetorical analysis that horizontally connects cultural rhetorics
and critical theory with Visual Rhetorics, and vertically connects historical scripts

and how subjectivities were visually articulated through technologically mediated

bodies that travel through space and time (Cyborg Subject Positions). This
chapter serves to lay a theoretical and textually specific foundation that I build
upon in chapter three where I look at the rhetorical functionality of family
photographs through the multiple lenses of psychoanalysis. | end the chapter by
calling for more vertical theorizing that looks at how gendered subjectivities were
(are) able to visually navigate and manipulate subjectivity through technological
interfaces as those interfaces transform through configurations of space and
time.
Chapter Three: Rhetorical Animation: A Semiotic View of Family
Photographs

In this chapter I look at how (visual) discursive productions (at the family
level) take place through the unconscious (i.e. unintentionally), how those (visual)
discursive productions function rhetorically, and on a rhetoric as art performance
level, I link together theory (psychoanalysis) with practice (family production of
photographs). After rhetorically animating the “Kids On Car" image in order to go
past Barthes’ theory of connotative meaning, I offer up this Affinity Project as a
body of knowledge for Visual Rhetorics hoping that other scholars might become
more willing to be less transparent through self-evaluation. I call up Haraway’s
Cyborg Subject Position as a “healing” mechanism and as an act of
lnterdisciplinarity and make a call to R&W scholars who themselves invoke
Haraway’s construct, to avoid linguistic reductionism.
Chapter Four: Rhetorical Reconstruction: The Black and White Truth of
True (White) Womanhood

Drawing upon de Certeau, Spivak, and Haraway, in this chapter I engage
a rhetorical analysis of one photograph in order to make the absent present.
That is, I attempt to ethically conjure up the body of Melinda, an African American
woman who was critical to my mother’s subject formation, but who was erased in
our family mythologizing, both linguistically and visually. As I make Melinda
visible, I also inculcate the intellectual in his/her attempt at transparency when
“representing” the other, finally ending the chapter by reminding the reader that
this Affinity Project is about the power of rhetoric and writing, in particular Cyborg

writing, where l seize the tools in order to rehabilitate.

CHAPTER ONE: Visual Rhetoric(s) and Visual Culture: Lacan (and
Haraway) as (Visual) Rhetorician(s)

Overview
In this chapter I frame my use of Lacan (and Haraway) as (visual) rhetoricians,
and I discuss how their work is useful for scholars conducting visual analyses.
After repeating Powell’s definition of rhetoric from the Preface, and noting how
rhetoric has always been connected to culture, psychology, and technology, I
note that visual rhetoric, as an emerging field, should work towards
interdisciplinarity, and should include visual culture studies/critical theory, and
any other field’s work (film study) that might prove helpful. and the chapter by
calling for visual rhetoric to be an inclusive Visual Rhetorics, and I note how
useful this kind of approach might have to scholarship in R&W because it allows
us as scholars not just to engage in rhetorical analyses of discursive productions,
but it also allows us to reflect upon our own subjectivities as
writers/scholars/researchers.
Visual Rhetoric versus Visual Culture

Visual rhetoric is an interdisciplinary field, and is as yet emerging (Handa
2). Handa acknowledges that visual rhetoric owes much to the study of the
visual in other fields. While acknowledging the importance of interdisciplinarity,
though, Handa backsteps when she argues that visual rhetoric and visual culture
studies are two distinctly separate fields. She posits:

Visual culture as a subfield of cultural studies focuses on vision as

a starting point for tracing the ways cultural meanings form . . .

Visual rhetoric, on the other hand, might be defined as a discipline
that focuses on the visual elements that persuade, taking culture as
just one element among many: culture, along with images, sounds,
and space, work together rhetorically to convince an audience.
(377)
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define culture as an ongoing fluid and
interactive process. They quote Stuart Hall: “Culture is the production and
exchange of meanings, the giving and taking of meaning, between members of a
society or group” (4). Handa, while perhaps justifying the separate and distinct
chapter on “Visual Rhetoric and Culture” in the 2004 anthology, Visual Rhetoric
in a Digital World, blurs her definitions. Visual rhetoric, based on the scholarship
in that field, cannot solely focus on “visual elements” that persuade. Roland
Barthes, Gunther Kress, Donna Haraway, Jay David Bolter (among others) and
basic semiotics make clear that “visual elements” (signs) do not exist in a
vacuum, but are inextricably influenced (framed) by texts, other material
elements(other signs), and Subject interpellation. In other words, as I discuss in
chapter two by invoking the Cyborg Subject Position, visual rhetoric is
interdisciplinary because the visual cannot be analyzed without looking at
context; that’s what rhetoric tells us. For example, academics working in digital
rhetoric “have tried to associate this new form of writing with the various critical
theories. It would seem to be a natural alliance” (Bolter 161 ). The art of rhetoric
insists that we look at situatedness in order to understand how meaning is made.

In order to look at situatedness we need to look at culture/critical theory. “No text

should be “outside the bounds of humanistic study’” (Robert Scholes qtd. in
Bolter 167).

Handa is further incorrect when she argues that visual rhetoric studies can
separate culture from the images, sounds, and spaces that the culture produces.
If culture is a production and exchange of meaning (signs and things), then
nothing is outside the domain of culture, including images, space, and sounds.
Therefore, to study the rhetoric of the image, is to study the rhetoric of a “thing”
that is produced by culture, and is therefore to study, in effect, culture. Carolyn
Handa should be given credit though because she does say that visual rhetoric
might be defined in the way she defines it. An interesting place for scholarship
might take place in research that explores what visual rhetoric means (gather all
the meanings; I’ve seen many, some conflicting), from what field it arises, and
with what fields it intersects. Thus far I see a very strong connection with visual
rhetoric and technical writing, but I also see clear and exciting intersections with
visual rhetoric and cultural studies/critical theory (where my work sits). I have
completed only a small start to that research here.

The Historical Connections of Rhetoric to Psychology, Culture, Technology

Before going on to the detailed discussion of how Lacan (and Haraway)
fits in all of this, remember that rhetoric has, since its inception, been tied to
psychology, cultural studies, and technology. While Powell’s definition of rhetoric
is partially derived from Aristotle (as mentioned in the preface), Jim Porter makes

clear that “Aristotle’s rhetoric, or a truncated version of it, came to be Rhetoric, or

conventional rhetoric, as we know it today” (Audience 15). Like Lacan, Aristotle
links psychology to the art-of-interpretation, or . . . rhetoric. Porter writes:
. . . Aristotle explicitly considers the various emotional states of
listeners and formulates a psychology of types that the rhetor
should be familiar with . . . in effect linking psychology and rhetoric.
(Audience 16-17)
Note that Powell, Porter, and Johnson have no problem as they approach
“rhetoric studies unabashedly” as rhetoricians “who take seriously the historical
breadth of the discipline” (Johnson xiv). So while Johnson, Porter, and Powell
either directly or indirectly link rhetoric to psychology, Johnson specifically points
out the discipline’s longstanding connection to psychoanalysis:
I perceive as a discipline that, for over twenty-five hundred years,
[rhetoric] has had a central investment in revealing the unconscious
and uncovering the mysterious . . . (Johnson xiv-xv)
Not only do Johnson, Powell, Porter, and Aristotle, the “founding father" of
current rhetoric, link psychology to the discipline, but Aristotle also links culture.
While Porter doesn’t explicitly say it this way, he does point out that in framing
the psychology of the audience and its import, Aristotle says: “Young men . . .
have strong passions, are idealistic, and are overly trustful. Elderly men are by
and large cynical . . . one’s birth or family background and station in life affect
one’s outlook: for example, the well-bom man looks down upon others; the
wealthy man is more arrogant; and the man with power is more ambitious”

(Audience 17). The human interaction that Aristotle describes as quoted by

Porter, aligns with Sturken and Cartwright's definition of culture as the production
and exchange of meaning. The production and exchange of meaning between
“elderly men,” “young men,” and those “well-bom,” is “culture.” Aristotle
describes cultural considerations when he describes the importance of
psychology. As for rhetoric’s link to technology, Johnson points out, as Powell
does, that in “the Aristotelian definition of productive knowledge, the concept of
art is referred to as techne” (Johnson 23). Johnson goes on to map the
word/concept techne onto our word/concept technology, noting that both are
concerned with the creation of knowledge, but at the same time, both can accept
uncertainty, mutability, and contingency (24). (Haraway plays with this notion of
uncertainly and mutability in her construct of Cyborg Myth).

Therefore, visual rhetoric, as a trajectory mapping onto rhetoric must not
just include technology considerations, but must also include considerations of
psychology (the unconscious) and considerations of culture. Visual rhetoric and
visual culture, if they are as Handa argues two distinct fields, should overlap
significantly. My work is an effort at adding to the possibility that visual rhetoric
can embrace considerations of technology, culture, and psychology (human
emotion, desire, pain, fantasy, the theoretical construct of the unconscious), in
the tradition of Rhetoric and a capital R.

Lacan as (Visual) Rhetorician

Again, a pared down, paraphrased version of Powell’s definition of rhetoric

might read like this:

10

. an art of seeing how things come into being among things that are

capable of being and not being,

. an art that looks at how meaning is made and action produced across
a variety of human situations, linking theory and practice,

0 an art that creates connections through space and time by looking at
how bodies are situated,

. an art that sees users of rhetoric engaged in discursive productions
containing common threads: human interaction, manipulation, and

negotiation. (43)

Lacan, through his theory of psychoanalysis and the unconscious, is a

rhetorician, that is, one who uses the art to engage in discursive productions. In

very simple terms:

Lacan-as-artist—rhetorician sets forth a theory that sees how things come
into being among things that are capable of being or not being. His
theory that the Subject is defined in the field of the Other, tells us that
whether or not the Subject (a “thing”) comes into being, and how the
being comes about, is defined by “things,” i.e., the “Other,” who in turn is
defined in the same way (by other “things”). Subjects exist as
reflections/diffractions of Others.

Lacan developed a theory that makes meaning and travels across human
situations. His theory can be applied to photographs taken in 1865, or
photographs taken in 1975, and we can use his theory to find meaning in

the situatedness of the photos by analyzing the situatedness of the photo

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taker, the photographed Subject, the viewer, and the “screen” or the
mediating technology, whatever that may be. Lacan himself expected his
theory to be applied broadly to human situations.

Lacan as artist-rhetorician takes his theory and applies it to concrete
examples, linking the two.

Through his theories of the Law-of-the-Father, the phallus, and the family-
matrix, to name a few, Lacan engages in the art of rhetoric as it connects
space and time through situated bodies.

Lacan as artist-rhetorician sees users (Subjects) as engaged in discursive
productions (through semiotics) across which human interaction (the
Subject is defined in the field of the Other), manipulation (think of Lacan’s
“mask” or “paper tiger”), and negotiation (he looks at how agency is

exercised under the gaze) are the common threads.

Lacan’s theory and his positionality as a rhetorician are also especially appealing

for use in a visual rhetoric analysis because he himself skillfully employed visual

rhetoric, and because he developed a rich theory drawing upon semiotics (the

study of signs), and in his theory, he privileges the visual.

While it might be unusual, even shocking, to consider Lacan a visual

rhetorician, it cannot be anymore so than to consider Florence Nightingale one.

However, In “Florence Nightingale’s Visual Rhetoric in the Rose Diagrams,” Lee

Brasseur does just that. While I don’t have space in this thesis to go into the kind

of depth Brasseur did regarding Nightengale's life and use of visual images as

rhetorical device, like Nightingale, Lacan used diagrams and drawings, showing

12

his rhetorical sophistication and his sensitivity to the communication needs of his
audience. He took his theory and linked it to practice by using visuals. He used
diagrams often in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and
occasionally in Ecrits (remembering most Lacanian texts are translated and
transcribed by others from his lectures). Most memorable are his drawings of the
Ladies and Gentleman’s restrooms and his famous drawing of the tree (a

drawing that alludes to and inverts Saussure).

TREE

When Lacan explores the relationship between “tree” and the picture of same, it
reminds us of the discussion in Practices of Looking an Introduction to Visual
Culture, where Sturken and Cartwright define the field’s notion of representation.
They say that representation is a learned process through which we construct
our understanding of the world (14). They argue that representation is based on
the rules and conventions within “systems of representation within a given
culture, “ pointing to the classic pipe painting by Rene Magritte, “Treachery of
Images” (1928-29). In this painting, Magritte paints a pipe but below it paints the
words (translated from French) “This is not a pipe” (15). Magritte tries to break
the conventions of the culture through art, a strategy (breaking conventions) also

engaged in by scholars in visual rhetoric. Like Lacan, visual rhetoric works to

13

deconstruct and examine how discursive (visual) productions emanate from
cultural conventions and rules.

In addition to finding Lacan appealing to use as a theorist in a visual
rhetoric analysis because he used visual rhetoric (how can scholars write about
visual rhetoric if they themselves don’t employ it?), he is also appealing because
of his use of semiotics, and his work has thus been richly drawn upon by
scholars in film studies. Film studies’ scholars analyze an inherently visual
production.

Both Kaja Silverrnan and Slavoj Zizek use Lacanian theory in their
analysis of films and screen shots. In analyzing the visual, Silverrnan uses
Lacan to define the gaze, the field of the Other, and repetition. Silverrnan’s
books World Spectators, The Threshold of the Visible, and Male Subjectivity at
the Margins analyzes the visual by relying heavily on psychoanalysis. Zizek’s
Enjoy Your Symptom! interposes Lacanian theory with the visual again. One
small example (of many) is found in his chapter “Why is Every Act a Repetition?”
where he explains the emergence of the Subject in the field of the Other - using
the film Sophie’s Choice as a backdrop.

One reason that students of film latched strongly onto Lacan’s theory of
psychoanalysis/semiotics, is because of the common assumption held by most
semoticians and traced through Saussure: “language constitutes the signifying
system par excellence, and . . . it is only by means of linguistic signs that other
signs become meaningful” (Silverrnan 5). Barthes’ theory supports this because

he argues that photographic signs have no meaning without linguistic copies

14

surrounding them (Silverrnan 5). As a refutation of the privileging of text-
Ianguage, some students of film studies adopted Lacan so the image could be
privileged. This is why film scholars usually analyze screen shots rather than
dialogue.

The point is, scholars in film studies have been using Lacan as a theorist
for years because of Lacan’s privileging of the visual, and it could be quite
generative for other visual rhetoric scholars to cross over to film studies as l have
done in order to deeply engage the art of rhetoric component of visual rhetoric.
Psychoanalysis, Lacan’s Critics, and Haraway’s Remediation

In order to provide a framework for the rest of this thesis, in this section I
will discuss my use of Lacan, Haraway, Spillers, and Wexler. Notably, the
reason that I spend so much time justifying my use of Lacan is because of the
context in which I’m using him, and particular criticism of his theory. Spillers and
Haraway critique Lacan, and yet in this thesis I use Haraway and Spillers
alongside Lacan. In this thesis I use Lacan and I talk about psychoanalysis and
race, and psychoanalysis and gender, but gender from a feminist perspective. I
use Lacan alongside two of his critics, critics I feel embody the main criticisms of
his work. The questions are, how can I use Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis in
a discussion of race, since Lacan never theorized “race,” and how can I use
Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis in a discussion of gender-from-a-feminist-
perspective when Lacan, supposedly, proposed a theory where the “phallus” was
central, and where human Subjects operate under the “Law-of-the-Father”?

Haraway, in the following discussion, serves as a representative of Lacan’s

15

“feminist” critics, and Spillers serves as a representative of Lacan’s “critical race
theory” critics (although both Spillers and Haraway are concerned with Lacan’s
theory as it intersects critical race theory and feminisms).

But before I venture into the details of the Spillers-Lacan-Haraway-Wexler
discussion, I want to remind my readers that in the study of the visual,
psychoanalysis in general has proved useful. Earlier in this chapter, I made the
points that Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis is particularly valuable to the study
of the visual because:

0 Lacan privileged the visual

c Lacan himself used visual rhetoric

. Lacan has been used for years by scholars in film studies in order
to study the visual

More generally, psychoanalysis gives the study of the visual certain
valuable theoretical tools. Sturken and Cartwright draw upon the strengths of
psychoanalysis as a theoretical tool used to engage visual analysis in their text
book.1 In chapter three, “Spectatorship, Power, and Knowledge.” Sturken and
Cartwright credit film scholars for showing us how a theory of the unconscious is
crucial to theories such as spectatorship, interpellation. and semiotics (73):

. Spectatorship emphasizes the role of the unconscious, fantasy, and
desire in practices of looking. The spectator is simply the ideal
subject position offered by an image.

0 lnterpellation (Althusser) tells us that ideologies possess us and

define us as subjects. Ideology is shaped through the unconscious.

16

. Semiotics, or the study of signification, says that signs are
generated by culture and define subjects. Images can be
understood as language within the realm of signification.

Psychoanalysis, while tied to psychology, is not a theory used for therapy, but is
instead used to analyze systems of representation. That’s why psychoanalysis is
so lovely for conducting image analysis. Images are representations; they are
signs. Psychoanalysis, cemented with semiotics by Lacan, at the very least
gives scholars another way of thinking about the everyday. It inverts our thinking
and leads to new discoveries. But there has been criticism of Lacan’s “phallus
centered” Law-of-the-Father.

This brings us back to the question I posed earlier in this subsection: how
can I use Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis in a discussion of gender-from-a-
feminist-perspective when Lacan, supposedly, proposed a theory where the
“phallus” was central, and where human Subjects operate under the “Law-of-the-
Father”? Donna Haraway, a scholar adopted in the cultural rhetorics/critical
theory/digital rhetoric strand of R&W and by R&W folks writing about computers
and cyberfeminism (Porter, “Why Technology Matters,” DeVoss and Selfe, “This
Page,” DeVoss “Women’s Porn Sites”), wishes for a new theory of
psychoanalysis that doesn’t work from the family matrix: “phallocentrics.”
Specifically, in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” she argues in favor of “pleasure” in the
“confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (Reader 8).2
But Haraway very specifically alludes to Lacan’s theory in a section of Cyborg

Manifesto, in a chunk of text where she actually names Lacan: “As Zoe Sofoulis

17

argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan . . (Reader 8-9).
Here, Haraway invokes the Cyborg in order to imagine:

o a world without gender

3 world without genesis
. a world without end
. a Subject that no longer attempts to “heal the terrible cleavages of
gender"
. a different unconscious
In this particular section of Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway invents the Cyborg
as a being that no longer depends on “the plot of original unity out of which
difference must be produced” (Reader 9). Her allusions to and criticisms of
Lacan’s theory of “lack,” the split, and original unity tell us that she wishes for a
different theory. In “Promises of Monsters,” this criticism continues as she
argues (alluding to Lacan) that Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis is “the story line
of phallogocentrism” (Reader 67):
He [man] gains access to this wondrous technology with a subject-
constituting, self—deferring, and self-splitting entry into language,
light, and law. Blinded by the sun, in thrall to the father, reproduced
in the scared image of the same, his reward is that he is self-bom,
an autotelic copy. (Reader 67)
Haraway “remediates’”3 Lacan because she invents a theory that is in part
a refutation of Lacan’s theory, but at the same time, embraces part of Lacan’s

theory. She embraces Lacan in part because she embraces a theory of the

18

unconscious. Plus, her Cyborg Myth purposely plays upon and tries to undo
Lacan’s three registers. She agrees that there is an unconscious, but Haraway
simply wants a different theory than one wherein our subjectivity is determined by
the split where we are sexed. For example, thinking through her Cyborg Myth
and how this purposely makes Lacan’s three registers (the Imaginary, the Real,
and the Symbolic) blow up, if the Cyborg emerges where the split never occurs,
then it would have to emerge in the Real (and the Real, according to Lacan is the
register where we exist before the split — pre-emergence). Yes, in Lacan’s theory
in the Real we might be “whole,” but we cannot also emerge. You have to
choose being or meaning; there cannot be both, at least not fully. To have
meaning, there must be an emergence into the Symbolic. Therefore, Haraway
takes part of Laoan’s theory and leaves part of it behind (remediation). She
makes two things true at the same time which under Lacan’s theory cannot both
be true. A paradox. Under Lacan’s theory, in the register of the Real, there is no
emergence, that happens as the Subject passes through the Imaginary register
into the Symbolic. On the other hand, according to Haraway’s theory, if the
Cyborg exists post-gender, then under the Lacanian triangulation, it has to both
have emerged and been sexed at some time in the past. Therefore the Subject
would have to exist in the Symbolic. So the paradox of Haraway’s theory is that
it is not possible to be post-gender and pre-split at the same time. The Cyborg,
the way she's mythologized it, would have to emerge both in the Real and the
Symbolic, and that can’t happen under Lacan’s theory. Haraway’s Cyborg theory

does not completely reject Lacan, she just tires to find a new way to think about

19

subjectivity: “It’s not that Oedipal stories aren’t very interesting and don’t do
important work but that too much work has been done there” (How Like 125).
And so, what I do in this thesis is remediate both Lacan and Haraway and
make something partially new, and partially old. I need to use Haraway for a
number of reasons. The reason that I use Donna Haraway’s theory in this piece
is because she gives me the theory of the Cyborg Subject Position, a Subject
Position that allows me to make connections between Subjects without being
racist, essentializing, or practicing imperialism. The Cyborg Myth also gives me
a way to make alliances with others who wish to work towards anti-racist, anti-
sexist pedagogies, scholarship, theorizing, and ways of living. She gives me a
way into one of my audiences for this thesis, those scholars in digital
rhetoric/visual rhetoric who have adopted her. She’s been adopted because
there just aren’t a lot of scholars writing about gender and technology in such a
healing way. There are not many scholars, like Haraway and Powell, who come
right out and ask us to do something— who go beyond pointing to problems and
actually offer solutions. The reason I use Haraway is because she is a scholar
using visual rhetoric but who is not afraid to come out from behind her practices
of looking and reveal herself in stories. In How Like a Leaf she is very clear that
when she theorized the Cyborg, she was in heterosexual, monogamous love with
a gay man who was dying of AIDS. Obviously, a “post-gender” world would be
lovely to her. She says, “Certainly my own life has been hugely shaped by
couple dynamics. But it hasn’t been the whole story and it’s been mixed up. I

am my friends and lovers in fundamental ways” (How Like 126). As I say again,

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and again, and again in this thesis, we as scholars cannot theorize outside our
own subjectivities. Haraway admits this.

And in my following criticism of Haraway, the reality of our existence is
that, by looking at the visual markings of all the Presidents of the United States,
or the men who sit on the United States Supreme Court, or the men who sit on
the United Nations Council, or the men who lead most of the nations on the
planet, we are not anywhere near living in a post-gender world. I also can’t find
much use, presently, for theorizing my family’s existence based on how we are
like leaves even though Haraway says, “if we extend our relationships to our non-
human relations, then there are so many more baroque possibilities” (How Like
124).4 But I will not toss the baby out with the bathwater, because mainly I find
Haraway’s theory useful, brilliant, and in the future I plan on exploring the non-
human relationships she alludes to.5

But for all her usefulness and brilliance, Haraway is wrong in saying that
Lacanian theory is the story line of phallogocentrism . Lacan never said that the
Law-of-the-Father, a clear biblical allusion, was anything more than
human/language invented. In fact, the “Agency of the letter" Lacan points out
that the “spirit” couldn’t live without the letter, but the letter could live without the
spirit (158). In that piece, Lacan writes that the spirit cannot be unassailable
because the letter (language) has “shown us that it produces all the effects of
truth in man without involving the spirit at all” (158). Also, Lacan spent much time
arguing against a representation of the phallus as male organ - instead the

phallus was that object of impossibility and plentitude we can never achieve. The

21

phallus doesn’t even exist - is unobtainable. On the other hand, the unconscious
is all-powerful - “the gap, the split” a place that we have evidence of (that we
witness remainders of - like the birth of live children that come out of some
invisible process) but that we can never “see.” For Lacan, the power wasn’t in
the phallus (thus no phallogocentrism), it was in the unconscious, and the words
he used to describe the unconscious are words that signify to female genitals
and internal organs (vaginal tract, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries -
symbols/organs we know are there but that we never see), not male. So, the
“cented-as-phallus isn’t the center at all for Lacan; it’s the margins. The center is
the unconscious, and that is a female sexuality/subjectivity signifier. This is why I
disagree with Haraway, She misses the point. She falls into the lure of “The
Phallus” by buying the notion that the phallus is central, when what is really
central, Lacan tells us again and again, is the unconscious. This why I think of
Lacan as a feminist theoretician and why I feel no internal contradiction in using
him when theorizing from a perspective of feminisms.

And so, for scholars invoking Haraway, as a number of digital
rhetoric/technology scholars do, I offer these words of advice. You can’t
understand Haraway unless you get your head around Lacan. Her writing is ripe
with Lacanian allusion. Her theory is a remediation of Lacan. And although she
criticizes Lacan’s “phallocentricity,” Haraway points out bluntly the reason
psychoanalysis is so valuable: “I think the notion of this theoretical entity called
the unconscious is a useful theoretical object. We need to understand how we

are blindsided from somewhere; notions of rationality and intentionality are way

22

too thin to get us very far in cultural analysis” (How Like 124). Haraway
extensively uses and analyzes images to unfold her theory, and to show how her
theory unfolds in the world (“Promises of Monsters” “Manifesto of Cyborgs.”
“Modest Witness”). Haraway is open about how our subjectivities are
interpellated with the visual, telling how she includes as many visual images in
her books as she can, and that the artwork of Lynn Randolph (whose art appears
in Haraway’s texts) has “really” influenced Haraway. In turn, Haraway influences
the artwork of Randolph (How Like 12-121).6 The interconnectedness of the
visual and the textual is critical to any theory building that takes place both in
visual culture studies, and in visual rhetoric. And, Haraway, like Lacan, is a
visual rhetorician who uses psychoanalysis as a thinking tool to break out of old
minds sets.

Another criticism of Lacan’s theory is that it has no theory of race. This
brings us to the question I posed earlier in this subsection: how can I use Lacan’s
theory of psychoanalysis in a discussion of race, since Lacan never theorized
“race”? Since he doesn’t speak of race per se, Lacan has received criticism
from scholars7, including Hortense Spillers who posits a fourth register to his
Symbolic order (Rife). Traditional psychoanalytic theory offers a tool to think
about issues of race and gender, but Spillers points to the problems with this
theory as one examines “race.” Freud and Lacan built their theory on the
traditional family, theory dependent on genderedness (Rife). How does race and

can race fit within these theories?

23

Spillers suggests that psychoanalytic and race matters theories (“All the
Things” 135) can both be used if classical psychoanalytic theory is amended. Her
text “Mama’s Baby; Papa’s Maybe” is illustrative on this point. She writes of the
Law-of-the-Mother. How does Lacan’s Law-of-the-Father work for black civil
society? Neither the father nor the mother had property rights in the child
(matriarch is therefore a “fatal” misnomer because the black mother couldn’t
claim her child, plus in the dominate culture matriarchy is not legitimate) (Spillers,
“Mama’s” 80). The African American father was removed. This removal,
coupled with the named “matriarchy,” signifies that the African American male is
“touched” by the mother in a way that a white male is not. Only the mother
stands in the flesh before the duality of an “African father’s banished name . . .
and the captor father’s mocking presence . . . the black American male embodies
the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to
learn who the female is within itself” (Spillers, “Mama’s” 80).

Instead of a father signifier, at the time the child enters into the Symbolic,
is a mother signifier. She is the phallus, that symbol of impossibility and
plentitude.

Spillers describes this Mother Right culture within the dominant culture,
pointing to a discussion that aligns “matriarchal” culture with that of brute
animality (“Mama’s” 80). This historical analysis of black civil society is
important because no one doubts that the slavery of African Americans in the
US. continues to reverberate today (Spillers discusses the Moynihan report in

“Mama’s”). How can Lacan’s theory be further amended to account for “race”?

24

That’s part of what Spillers offers up in her text “All the Things You Could Be by

Now.

In her discussion, Spillers points out that the “African American community
is more precisely ambivalent than any American case, in light of its incomplete
‘Americanization’ even at this late date” (139). She expounds on this “precise
ambivalence” by using a metaphor of space traversed by media and urban
byways, and says “that it is not always easy to designate what is ‘black’ and
‘white’ here” (139). That’s the problem with the “always already” (duCille 21); it’s
a definition derived from negating a definition set (blitzed) by the dominate
culture. Spillers says that the individual is “traversed by ‘race’ . . . before
language and its differential laws take hold” (“All the Things” 136) This hold
takes place before the child enters into the Symbolic; the child is already being
defined by and absorbing “race.”

Looking at Lacan’s scheme of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real,
Spillers poses a correction or addition to Lacan: “What one anticipates, then, is
that a fourth register will be called for in establishing ‘reality’ (of the dominated
political positions) as the psychic burden, acquired postmirror stage, that reads
back onto the Lacanian triangulation a distended organizational calculus” (“All the
Things” 140). She names the process “interior intersubjectivity” (140).

The fourth register is offered as a way to avoid the endless repetition: “the
most promising of trails may be false, since it does not necessarily lead to a
destination but circles back to the same place (Spillers 142). Her fourth register,

a potential emancipatory remedy, is one that acknowledges the political and

25

erupts from speech in a forum of “the everyday, the dimension of the practical
and pragmatic, and the dimension of the contemplative”(146). This remedy
might take place in everyday talk that is exercised in the public forum of a black
church (footnote 15). Everyday talk comes from and is itself contemplation.

In defining contemplation, Spillers looks to the self-reflexivity that arises
from Du Bois posing an “ontological meaning” (143) beyond that “I” found in the
field of the Other:

For Du Bois, the African American Subject Position is a psychological
space, mediated by a ‘white supremacist gaze’ (hooks 50), and therefore divided
by contending images of blackness — those images produced by a racist white
American culture, and those images maintained by African American individuals,
within African American communities. (Smith, “Looking” 581)

Spillers’ discussion of doubleness asks for the Subject’s attempt, through
contemplation, self-reflexivity, and interior intersubjectivity, to send off its own
double. This double is sent off without accepting that definition already in the
existing Real. She sees the Real as “always in the same place” and “status quo”
(150). For Spillers, the Real is the “most persistent perversity” (130). In her story
of the “bone ignorance of curiosity,” what Spillers suggests then, is to somehow
debunk the Real without the process of negating it — to start from scratch as it
were. Instead of overcoming, she suggests building from the ground up. Please
note here the similarities between what Haraway does with her Cyborg Myth,

how she blows apart Lacan’s three registers, and what Spillers does. Haraway

26

and Spillers are doing the same thing with Lacan’s theory - they are keeping part
of it and rejecting part.

To this end, Laura Wexler’s approach fits better within classical
psychoanalysis. She posits a rupture in the Real, rather than a whole other
register or a whole new subjectivity. This is where I sit, theoretically. I agree with
Wexler that a fourth register is not necessary. However, Wexler relies on
Barthes and I don’t because in Kaja Silverman’s discussion she points to some
problems with Barthes. Barthes’ early discussion of “myth” and “ideology”
suggests that “ideology is a condition of false consciousness promoted through
fictions sponsored by the dominant class” (Silverrnan, The Subject 30).
However, Althusser says that we “cannot step outside of ideology since it is only
inside of it that we find our subjectivity and our social reality” (Silverrnan 31).
Silverrnan herself then states: “While it may not be possible to step outside of
ideology altogether, it is possible to effect a rupture with one, and a
rapprochement with another” (31 ). I see this as the issue between Spillers,
Haraway, and Wexler: can we step outside ideology? Is there another register?
Is there another matrix that isn’t of “the family”? Well, for my purposes, I am
looking at family and I am looking at ideology, therefore I do not need to look
beyond those constructs as they already exist. I do not need a fourth register.

Instead of positing a fourth register, Wexler gets around Lacan’s lack of
attention to race by literalizing “the Freudian picture of the sentimental family” to
find that rupture, see it, touch it, and thereby effect healing (“Seeing” 160).

Wexler points out that “[t]he comparative neglect of critical attention to the raced,

27

classed, and gendered production of the photographic image is a form of cultural
resistance” (163).

Like Wexler, I keep Lacan’s three registers, and I theorize that race fits
with gender and sexual orientation in the Lacanian triangulation. That is,
Subjects emerge having to Ieam in the Symbolic how to be raced, just as they
learn how to be gendered and how to be heterosexual.8 This Ieaming takes
place through a variety of means, including interpellations supported through
visual rhetoric. I understand this may be quite shocking to some audiences, but
this is my argument and I am aware of no proof that race, gender, or sexual
orientation are pre-deterrnined biologically, pre-birth. In fact, all evidence points
the other way. And so, I look at my family’s images in order to rhetorically
deconstruct how they shaped and were shaped in their subjectivities as raced
subjects; how they used rhetoric and were interpellated by it to cement a “whole”
(as in full, without lack) subjectivity as white, middleclass, gendered.

As I stated earlier in this subsection, there is no scholar who can theorize
outside his own subjectivity. And like the rest of us, Lacan was human. He had
shortcomings. One of the reasons his texts are so difficult to understand is
because he tried to write in a way that could span space and time. But some
think he failed, because he did not speak outright about “race.” Perhaps he was
writing from a place of blindsightedness on this particular issue. In the end
though, this doesn’t matter because race can still fit within his triangulation. He
left room for that. Raced Subjects emerge in the Symbolic where they are

continually taught how to be raced, in large part through the visual.

28

“Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is simply heavenly, insofar as it has no
eyes for the grammar and politics of power” (Spillers, “All the Things” 140)

In this chapter I’ve argued how important cultural analysis/critical theory is
when analyzing images. Plus, the usefulness of psychoanalysis for Visual
Rhetg_r_i_c_s_ (l have purposely inserted an s here to include visual culture/critical
theory in visual rhetoric) is that it can help us in our scholarship not just in
analyzing images, but because it gives us a “different” story of how the world
works; it helps us to analyze our own subjectivity as we analyze images. This
opens up exciting possibilities and at the same time, lessens our chances of
working from positions of blindsightedness. But no matter, none of us can rise
up completely out of our own subjectivities, but that does not mean we shouldn’t
try to work towards theorizing in ways that are anti-racist and anti-sexist. In this
chapter, I have tried to explain why I selected the theorists that I have, how they
fit together, and how I have remediated their theories in order to invent
something partially “new.” And so I believe that l have offered enough proofs
here to ask my readers to kindly suspend their disbelief and let me make my
arguments:

We don’t have to believe one another’s beliefs, but we do have to

acknowledge their importance, understand them as real, and

respect/honor them in our dealings with one another. (Powell 42)
And I have something important to say in the following chapters, something that
sure feels “real” to me, and so my readers, I ask you to go with me, alongside

me.

29

CHAPTER TWO: Vertical and Horizontal Trajectories: The Gaze, The
Masquerade, and My Grandmother’s Legs
Rhetoric: an art . . . that looks at how meaning is made and action
produced across a variety of human situations, linking theory and
practice, creating connections through space and time by looking at
how bodies are situated in particular configurations of history,
culture, economics, genders, and geographies, and an art that sees
users of rhetoric engaged in discursive productions across which
human interaction, manipulation, and negotiation are common
threads. . . what my gramma calls “talk fancy” . . . Malea Powell.
(partially paraphrased) 43
I must, to begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the
gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture.
Jacques Lacan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis. 106
Overview
In the previous chapter I pointed out the necessity that visual rhetoric and
visual culture studies have scholarly overlap. I called for an area of visual
studies in R&W that is deeply interdisciplinary, and that welcomes scholarship
from critical theory/cultural rhetorics. I looked at the historical connections of
rhetoric to psychology, culture, and technology, and I argued in favor of using
Lacan as a theorist for studying the visual because he himself was a visual
rhetorician, plus his theory specifically privileges the visual. I argued in favor of
using Haraway as well, because she tropes on Lacan but offers a remediation of
Lacan with her Cyborg Subject Position. I ended the chapter with a call for

interdisciplinarity in the field of visual rhetoric, such that it becomes the inclusive

Visual Rhetori_cs.

3O

Attempting to construct a text that is interdisciplinary, in this chapter I
engage a visual-rhetorical analysis that horizontally connects cultural rhetorics
and critical theory with Visual Rhetorics, and vertically connects historical scripts
and how subjectivities were visually articulated through technologically mediated
bodies that travel through space and time (Cyborg Subject Positions). This
chapter serves to lay a theoretical and textually specific foundation, with my use
of Lacan, Haraway, Powell, DeVoss, and select family photographs, a foundation
that I can build upon in my next chapter where I look at the rhetorical functionality
of family photographs through the multiple lenses of psychoanalysis.

Lacan and Visual Analysis: The Split, Lack, and the Gaze

While as I mentioned in chapter one, Lacan’s theory is frequently used in
film studies and “has [had] an enormous influence over the direction recently
taken by semiotic theory” (Silverrnan, The Subject 149), I find his theory useful as
a lens, in the (young) traditional of Visual Rhetorics, to examine the family
photographs I’m working with. So, how might Lacan’s theory travel from film
studies and semiotic theory to the analysis and examination of images, i.e. family
photographs? Lacan’s theory speaks directly to this issue. His lectures compiled
in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, particularly “Of the Gaze
as Object Petit a,” are especially relevant because they tell us how to analyze the
visual.

The “gaze” of the photographer is unavoidably represented in a
photograph (Sontag), and the cinematic apparatus of the camera itself (the giant

eye) as well fixes its gaze upon the Subject; the picture exists as a material

31

artifact representing the subject-now—object’s image whose fate “appears” to be
sealed forever on the flat surface. How can we break out and define the “look”
and the “gaze” in the common family photograph? How can we gather semiotic
meaning from the photograph utilizing Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory? By
pursuing these inquires, we can engage rhetoric as a techne that allows us to
understand how some meanings arise, while others are silenced. It is helpful
here to go directly to Lacan’s theory because it can be difficult and abstract, and
is sometimes incorrectly summarized. For example, in chapter three of Sturken
and Cartwright’s textbook, they define the “gaze” for Visual Rhetorics students,
connecting it to advertisement analysis, Foucault’s notion of panopticism, and the
“Othering” done through photographic images taken by anthropologists and
ethnographers. While these connections are helpful and the chapter does a
wonderful job blending together discussions of the gaze and spectatorship with
insertions of image analysis and examples, it does not adequately unpack
Lacan’s notion of the gaze, merely stating that the gaze is “a viewing relationship
characteristic of a particular set of social circumstances” (76). To their credit,
Sturken and Cartwright later say in passing, “The split self of the viewer is always
connected to the idea that the gaze is omnipresent” (81 ). Further, while at one
point in the chapter they say, “the gaze is not the act of looking itself” (76), the
authors othenlvise textually blend together and confuse the “practice of looking”
and the gaze, failing to be exact in their words choices and potentially causing
student confusion. Clearly, the look, the gaze, and the eye of the cinematic

apparatus are distinct constructs. Lacan distinguishes between the look and the

32

gaze, between the eye and the gaze. There is vision and representation (the
look), there is the “eye” (a technology), and there is the gaze, that thing which
“slips forever from our grasp — ” (Glowinski, Marks, and Murphy 79).

According to Lacan, the gaze is connected to the look but is distinguished
from the look because the look is a conscious act. “The gaze, however,
surrounds us from . . . all sides even before we are born” (Glowinski, Marks, and
Murphy 79). Lacan says, “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am
looked at from all sides” (The Four 72). Sturken and Cartwright attempt to
explain the Lacanian Subject’s lnterpellation of the gaze: “One of the primary
elements of the concept of the gaze is a kind of split that viewers experience in
looking at images” (81). But to say that viewers experience a “split” when they
look at images is an understatement and an unfortunate attempt at
decontexualization. Viewers always experience a split; the split is the core of
Subject formation; it is what causes “lack.”

Lacan’s theory of “lack” derives out of this split, explained in the story of
Plato’s Symposium about the birth of desire (Silverrnan 151 - 57). The story of
the split is central to Lacanian theory because the Subject is almost entirely
defined by it (151). Aristophanes tells the story. At the beginning of time
humans were divided into three categories of sex: male, female, and a sex that
was both male and female simultaneously. The three categories of beings were
“globular”; each had four arms, four legs, and two heads. They existed this way
until they disturbed Zeus by attempting to “scale the heights of heaven and set

upon the gods” (151). To solve this problem, Zeus had them cut in two, but each

33

being yearned for its other half, so much so that the beings started dying. Zeus
had their privates moved to the front of their bodies so they could “propagate
among themselves” (151). The act of propagation is evidence of “our innate love
for one another, and how this love is always trying to reintegrate our former
nature” (151).

Aristophanes” story is a metaphor for Lacan’s theory that the human
subject endures a split even before birth when the organism is sexed: “the
division suffered by the subject was sexual in nature - that when it was ‘sliced’ in
half, it lost the sexual androgyny it once had and was reduced to the biological
dimension of either a man or a woman” (Silverrnan 152). The Subject gradually
(moving through the Imaginary register past the mirror stage) becomes aware of
the split after birth - the split produces “lack.” Lacan shares with Aristophanes
the belief that the only resolution to the loss suffered by the Subject as the
consequence of sexual division is “heterosexual union and procreation . . . [tjhe
notion of an original androgynous whole, similar to that projected by
Aristophanes, is absolutely central to Lacan’s argument” (Silverrnan 152--53).9
Heterosexual union and procreation though will never satisfy the urge to be
whole; they are poor compensation for the Subject’s lack:

Lacan’s aphorism “there is no sexual relation” turns on the
asymmetry and nonreciprocity of the sexes. Sexual difference is
marked by the impasse of signification, and the impossibility of

gratifying desire, of love as jouissance. (Seshadri-Crooks 6)

34

Sexual difference defies language and exists in the Real;10 how that difference
plays out is determined in the Symbolic.11 In his lecture “Alienation,” Lacan
describes the androgynous Subject who has nothing in the Real that defines
“gender” or sexual orientation. He says, “In the psyche, there is nothing by which
the Subject may situate himself as a male or female being . . . the human being
has always to learn from scratch from the Other what he has to do, as man or as
woman” (The Four 204). Part of what the Subject learns under the gaze, it
seems to me, is what he or she is not. The Subject Ieams in the Symbolic what
the Subject lacks.

It is in the Symbolic where “images” are situated. Lacan’s theory tells us
plainly, gender and sexual orientation are constructed for us; we have to be
taught. This is where the rhetoric of the image is important. Images are teaching
tools, embodiments of gender performances that tell us how “to be.” Our
personal and collective identities are in part constructed through the influence of
images, powerful, even aggressive signifiers that are infinitely repeated, sit in our
unconscious, and do their work, helping to interpellate our subjectivity. The
awareness of this, the habit of mind, is what gives us as scholars, and can also
give our students, tools for understanding our existence. The lure of
photographs is their “realness,” but “all possibility of understanding is rooted in
the ability to say no” (Sontag 23).

This is why Lacanian theory is so powerful as a tool for image analysis,
and why images themselves are powerful: they play upon our lack by offering

wholeness, but Lacan gives us a story about how the world works that helps us

35

say no to the lure of the photograph. We are not whole except at that moment
when we are (impossibly) united with another human. Family photographs offer
a “legacy,” a connection to other Subjects, a linear seamless story that says,
“here is our family,” a little narrative that defines us as part of a group identity.
“Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait chronicle of itself — a
portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness” (Sontag 8). We
are vulnerable in our lack, and photographs give us “imaginary possession of a
past that is unreal” (Sontag 9), a satisfaction to our nostalgic longing for lost
origins (Lyotard).

Though these longings can never be satisfied, they continue because it is
lack that defines our subjectivity. We are continually reminded of our lack as we
are interpellated by the gaze, emanating from a privileged object. “I propose
that the interest the subject takes in his own split is bound up with that which
determines it - namely, a privileged object, which has emerged from some primal
separation” (Lacan, The Four 83). Without the privileged object, the gaze, the
Subject ceases to exist, as the gaze of the Other defines the Subject.

The Subject is defined in the field of the Other.

What this means is that if we are not gazed upon, if we are not
acknowledged, we become invisible and we are erased. Our subjectivity
depends first on us seeing a reflection of ourselves, a screen image from which
we are forever alienated, and it depends on us seeing our reflection in others
with whom we can never be fully united. Our subjectivity is thus fundamentally

technologically mediated, whether that be through the technology of the retina,

36

the technology of the camera, or the technology of the computer screen. Our
existence is technologically mediated, and through that mediation we are forever
separated from ourselves.12 Lacan tells us how we are visually mediated. The
Subject is seen by the Other as a “picture” on a screen, mediated by the screen.
So, for Lacan, our access to subjectivity is rooted in the visual and in the rhetoric
playing out in the Symbolic order which arises from this “seeing” — a seeing
mediated by the technology of the screen.

However, while Subjects are captured on the screen, they may “move”
while under the gaze. In “What is a Picture,” Lacan tells us that in this mediation,
the Subject might deflect the omnipresent gaze of the Other by use of the mask.
The mask is a product of “a fracture, a bi-partition, a splitting of the being to
which the being accommodates itself” (The Four 106). The mask is “that paper
tiger it shows the other” or its “display” (107). Gender (class and racial)
performances play out in the Symbolic by way of the mask: “It is no doubt
through the mediation of masks that the masculine and the feminine meet in the
most acute, most intense way” (Lacan, The Four 107). In other words, it is the
“pictures” on the “screen” that play out sexual difference in gender performance.
It is this sense of visual rhetoric and the technology of the screen that Lacan
helps me bring to my family photos.

Horizontal Connections: DeVoss, Powell, and Haraway

While Lacan gives us a theory that is built upon our subjectivities being

constructed visually and mediated by technology, DeVoss, Powell, and Haraway

tell us where our scholarly work in R&W should be located as we complete the

37

kinds of analyses Lacan’s theory begs for. In a piece where she studies the
subjectivities visually manifested in W women’s porn sites,13 DeVoss tells us
it is important to recognize “the everyday public acts of postmodern life,” and to
do so, we “must pay close attention to how individuals establish identity and
assert agency” (7980).“ She urges us to pay scholarly attention to the World
Wide Web in this venture, but reminds us:

If we forget the history of the cultural script in which these women are

actors, we are in danger of . . . removing “the traces of belonging to a

network.” (quoting de Certeau 81)

To DeVoss’s words, I imbricate Powell’s insight from a recent piece about the
rhetoric of Susan La Fleshe Picotte (Powell quotes Royster and Robert A.
Williams):

History is important, not just in terms of who writes it and what gets

included or excluded, but also because history, by the very nature of its

inscription as history, has social, political, and cultural consequences. (49)
Powell and DeVoss tell us not to forget the cultural script, and remember history
because history helps to write that script.

DeVoss calls for more work on the subjectivities represented on the web;
Powell urges alliance; And Haraway reminds us that we need interdisciplinarity,
“both vertical deep studies and lateral, cross-connecting ones” in order to nurture
new theories (How Like 46). In order to do this nurturing, to form the alliances
Powell calls for, we need to connect the technologically mediated past, to the

present, to the future. This chapter works towards that goal. It acknowledges

38

the history of women’s technologically mediated subjectivities as performances in
an historical/cultural script informing the current representations constructed by
white women on the W. This chapter also shows how “family” photographs
have import not just because they knit together, constructing history, but simply
by their power to be inscribed as “history” (Powell). DeVoss and Powell’s work
connects, and this chapter tries to make that connection visible in answer to
Powell and Haraway’s call for interdisciplinarity and scholarly connections.

The reason I have selected Powell and DeVoss in order to make the
horizontal connections I ask for in R&W, the connections between “Culture” and
“Visual Rhetorics,” is because, for purposes of this thesis, Powell and DeVoss
represent those two “master” trajectories in our discipline.15 Malea Powell’s work
focuses on Native American Intellectual survivance rhetorics. For purposes of
this thesis, I define her work as soundly situated in “cultural rhetorics” and/or
“cultural studies.” Danielle DeVoss, on the other hand, consistently generates
research and writing emanating from the “visual rhetoric” or even “technical
writing” strand of R&W. Yes, Powell’s scholarship focuses on Native American
survivance rhetorics and her recent College English piece, “Down by the River,”
looks at the complex textual production and rhetorical turns engaged in by Susan
La Fleshe Picotte in the late 1880’s and turn of the century. And yes, Danielle
DeVoss’s Sexuality & Culture piece, “Women’s Porn Sites,” focuses on textual
productions and rhetorical turns taken by “white” women in 2002 on the WWW.
Nonetheless, there is a connection between their work. And it is in that place

where DeVoss’s work and Powell’s work intersects, that this thesis exists.

39

Powell and DeVoss’s work connects through mine because we are all looking at
how “bodies situated in particular configurations of history, culture, economics,
genders, and geographies,” use rhetoric.16 The technology used to produce the
family photographs of my grandmother, connects to the networks and computer
screens that discursively produce the images of DeVoss’s research subjects.
And so, along with the framework of technologically mediated subjectivity that
Lacan gives me, I also insert this study of family photographs into the
conversation in R&W between and among Powell, DeVoss, and Haraway, and in
doing so, I try to make vertical as well as horizontal connections in the rhetorical
analysis of my family pictures.
My Family Pictures

My mother Jacky tells me that my (maternal) grandfather Edgar was the
picture taker in the family. Edgar was born in 1904 in Hainesport, New Jersey,
and my (maternal) grandmother Martine was born in 1908 in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania. My grandfather was the only son of William and Lena Walther.
William died when Edgar was in eighth grade. At that time, Lena required Edgar
leave school and go to work holding lanterns to guide trains at the local railroad
company because she said, his two older sisters Florence and Margaret needed
further education. My maternal family knew that education for the women was
crucial to create a vision of middleclassness. The ideology of the time held that
working class (white) women were “evil, stupid animals” and only educated
women were ladies or “women of the world” (Solomon-Godeau 84) This explains

why Florence and Margaret went on to receive post secondary education by way

40

of business school. Both became clerical workers, stayed in the same jobs for
over thirty years, and never had children.17 On the other hand, my grandfather,
with only an eighth grade education was able to move into a higher status
employment situation. After working as a steam railroad clerk for many years, he
went on to become a Vice President of a chapter of the D,T & l (Detroit, Toledo,
Ohio) railroad. This vertical, upward movement by Edgar was culturally
sanctioned even though he had only an eighth grade education. He did not need
the education required by Florence and Margaret because he was a white male,
a Subject supported by the larger culture to be the “breadwinner.” Gender and
race both were important factors as far as economic survival in mid-1900’s US.
Because gender and race were important, it makes sense that my family
enhanced its “whiteness” in our family photo history. At the same time, gender
defined what roles one was permitted to take. In order to maintain the status
quo, it makes sense that my family also supported existing gender roles through
visualizations of gender performances

Remembering that according to Lacan, Subjects are surrounded by the
defining gaze, and the construct of gender, while always-already present, must
be learned by Subjects. The picture on the screen, a technologically mediated
representation, as evidenced in the two photographs I have of my child-
grandfather, can be read to show his rhetorical sophistication as he plays out
gender performance (See FIGURES 2 and 3). For example, in Figure 2 my
grandfather Edgar relaxes in the grass with his aunts, sister, and mother. Figure

3, taken the same day features the young Edgar with his father William and his

41

grandfather Peter. Looking broadly at these images, rhetorically these family
photographs reproduce the following linear narrative(s):

0 They repeat the stories of my family, our mythologizing, that we are
German, if only because there is nothing to disrupt that narrative, and
Peter looks a bit like Freud (Barthes’ connotation).

0 They repeat my family’s “whiteness” narrative. The Subjects pictured are
visually marked “white” and this identity sits comfortably with “German.”

0 They repeat my family’s mythologizing that a female kin of Edgar’s family
was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The
white dresses and bow ties signify privilege and good citizenship.

0 They repeat the master narrative that men are not women and women are
not men (sexual difference), but children are afforded some flexibility in
these matters. In other words, the images are signs playing out gender
difference in the Symbolic.

Applying Lacan’s theory of the gaze, and how that gaze constructs gender for us,
I can point to visual cues of gender performance and the ability of my child-
grandfather to employ the art of rhetoric. He used rhetoric, under the eye of the
camera and the gaze, to move between the women and men. In Figure 2, the
four year old adopts a mimetic feminine position, relaxed, lying in the grass with
his aunts; Edgar does not return our gaze; with rhetorical skill he dons the mask.
While in Figure 3, the photograph of male subjects, he stands stiffly facing

forward, confronting the camera straight on.

42

Sexual (and racial) difference is performed for us in these images by
Edgar and the other Subjects pictured, and by the photographer who did the
framing. Who took theseimages I do not know. But the person, I argue, was
interpellated such that he visually separated men and women, and separated
peoples based on how their bodies were visually marked. These photographs
are not “multi-cultural” (they present a unified vision of whiteness) and therefore
repeat the cultural values of that historical period that supported segregation.
The photographer chose to separate the men and women in two separate
photographs, thus rhetorically supporting the master narrative that separated
men and women politically and economically (in 1908 women did not have the
right to vote). While this separate political existence isn’t written in text on these
photographs, it is written here visually for us, and it sits now on my desk,
functioning rhetorically to repeat these stories that are all so familiar to us.
Family photographs such as these are lures because they offer a wholeness that
can never be, a “full identity,” a pure “identity,” a continuation of “whole” and well-
defined gender and pure-blood (the photographs are passed down generation to
generation).

These pictures have survived somehow in my family as silent but powerful
story tellers and identity makers. My family mythologizing cements these
images, producing the discourse of our seamless little narrative. The
photographs function rhetorically as embodiments of cultural practice that
connect the past to the present and future through bodies. In my family, we are

repeatedly reminded by the legacy of the photographs of our supposed

43

connectedness and “our identity” (Sontag). It is difficult to rupture these kinds of
compelling, seamless stories. However, as Sturken and Cartwright note, while I
am drawn to these images because they connect me to “my relatives,” I am
alienated from them also because they aren’t me, and frankly, they lie.

For example, though the images provide a unified front, we have no family
records that are in one piece and tell us we are “German”; on my father’s side of
the family, our story is that my great paternal grandfather, a swarthy, dark fellow
was illegitimate (note the family myth cementing darkness and sexual deviance),
and that when he arrived on the shores of the United States in 1906, he burned
all the family records in his possession and changed his name (we have no
pictures of this man). There is no documentation that says my mother’s family is
“pure,” as has been my family’s story, and in fact in conducting this research I
have found not just visual, but textual ruptures in this linear mythologizing.

My grandmother Martine and her brother Lamar (born 1904) were the
children of Rachel and Robert Hartman.18 Both Rachel and Robert constructed
their identity as “white” not just in the visual, but also in “official” state sanctioned
documentation. This is evidenced by an odd find in my family records. While
both Rachel (born 1884) and Robert (born 1878) assert on their “Delayed Birth
Certificates” they were born at home (by leaving the hospital inquiry blank), and
that they are both “white,” it is curious why they had a need to procure birth
certificates apparently for the first time so late in life. Rachel’s birth certificate
was signed in 1948 and Robert’s signed in 1943. The scope of this paper does

not allow me to research the social context that might describe the need for birth

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certificates at age 65, but I intuitively feel this documentation was perhaps
necessary in the face of World War II and the post World War II era combined
with the increased importance of citizenship, especially for those of German
decent. I have been told that my grandmother’s family was Pennsylvania Dutch,
and that older generational members of her family spoke a mixed dialect of
German-English.19 But my family, through the technologically mediated visual
rhetoric of photographs, along with “stories,” has worked very hard to smooth out
“our history.”

In hoping to imbricate Malea Powell’s call for alliances, Lacan’s theory
helps me rupture the discursive productions my family has worked so hard to
make, and not ignore my history (as other scholars and teachers most certainly
do), but acknowledge it with this text, and try in a respectful fashion to redress
that history’s wrongs. There is no way, I believe, to be the rhetorician-as-agent-
of-social-change that Ellen Cushman tells us we can be, without
acknowledgement and redress. What happens instead, is that like the
photographic images that repeat themselves insidiously at every look, we end up
circling back to the same place.

The images are supported in this repetition by stories and language. In
“The Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes argues that text and images work together
to make meaning. This is also how our family photographs are imbricated with
our family stories, and how family “identities” come into being. But in heeding
Powell’s call to acknowledge our histories, it has been beneficial to me in my

research on family photographs and how they might make space for affinity, to

45

read across cultural studies scholars. For example, it has always been
celebrated in my family that one of my Grandfather’s sisters or aunts (maybe
pictured in Figure 2), was a member of the DAR. But after reading Shawn
Michelle Smith’s chapter in American Archives, “America Coursing through Her
Veins,” I have come to see a female kin’s membership in the DAR not something
I celebrate. The DAR came about because of the separate political, cultural, and
social existence of white men and white women in the late nineteenth century,
separate lives that are visually performed for us in Figures 2 and 3. This
separate existence, according to Smith, is what prompted the formation of the
DAR. On April 30, 1980 when the Sons of the American Revolution voted to bar
(white) women from their society, those women voted to establish the DAR (136)
DAR was a group that cemented the importance of “pure” white patriarchal
bloodlines in the national metanarrative of pure “American” (Smith). The DAR
excluded all women of color and even those of mixed racial heritage, even those
women of color who had relatives that “rendered material aid” to the cause of
independence were excluded. A white body was the origin point from which the
Daughters began to trace American bloodline images to be both Anglo-Saxon
and “pure” (138).

Whether a woman of my grandfather’s female kin was in fact a DAR
member or not, it still remains a part of my history since it was emphasized on
more than one occasion; it is not refuted visually in any of our photographs - this

links logically to my family’s mythologizing that all of our family members link

46

neatly back to a white body as our point of origin, even if to do that we need to
obtain birth certificates at age 65.

Because the DAR purposely excluded women of color, I define it as a
racist organization. I therefore choose not to celebrate my family’s connection to
the Daughters of the American Revolution, but instead tell this story,
acknowledging that the events contained herein occurred, and inviting other
Visual Rhetorics scholars writing on cultural issues to self-examine their own
histories before engaging in “practices of looking.” This now ruptured family
mythologizing also serves to rupture the linearity of my older family photographs,
as it contextualizes them as something less than innocent and “real.” Just the
existence of the 1908 images functions rhetorically to both erase the violence
taking place in the rest of the US (eugenics, the fall-out of the Dawes act, racial
segregation, oppression, etc.), and signify the place of privilege of my family, that
they could have such affordances and that their bodies were culturally
sanctioned to be objects of such attention, that their bodies were inscribed in this
particular fashion (lying on the grass, dressed in fine clothes, engaging in leisure)
in “history.”

Since my grandmother always held herself out to be “white,” and the early
1900’s textual production of “woman” by way of US photographs appears to have
been limited almost exclusively to images of white women, my grandmother’s
subjectivity must have attempted visual alignment with those same widely
circulated images (mainly advertisements and family photos). My grandmother

went to great lengths to assure herself and the world that she was white. In the

47

mid-1900’s of course, whether one was white or not might be the difference
between being interred, or forced to live a separate cultural existence (think
Indian Territory, “inner-city,” Manzannar). Therefore, the use of rhetoric by my
grandmother was a techne of adaptation (Powell).

While Edgar was the only son, my grandmother Martine Hartman
(Walther) was the only daughter, the younger of two children. Her younger
brother Lamar never left the family home or had children and died in his late
fifties. My grandmother attended nursing school at Lankenau Hospital School of
Nursing, near Philadelphia, graduating in 1928. She died in 1991. Census
information that I’ve located indicates that her father Robert worked as a shipping
clerk for a pottery company (United States). Rachel was a “housewife.”
According to their delayed birth certificates, Rachel’s father was a butcher and
Robert’s father was a farmer. The farmer and butcher identities, newly
discovered, were erased in my family’s mythologizing in order to construct a
middleclass identity. The last thing my grandmother wanted was to be
associated with “farmers.” She did not like farms and found the smell of farm
animals repulsive”, and while she enjoyed purchasing meats at her own
specialty butcher shop in Dearborn, Michigan, she was not one to speak of the
“work” of butchers. Middleclass people don’t work on farms, don’t engage in
physical labor, and certainly don’t do their own butchering. What did not fit within
the white middleclass family visual matrix was erased in the photo narrative as
well as any oral history. We have no images surviving of life on the farm, or the

slicing of meat. From a rhetorical perspective, my family’s “identity” was allowed

48

to come to be, by erasing the butcher and farmer occupations: those could have
been emphasized, but weren’t. So the family photographs I have, function
rhetorically to reinforce the meanings that my family purposely (and
simultaneously unconsciously) worked towards.

This grasping for a family vision of raced, classed, gendered subjectivities
is further evidenced by a photograph my mother favored and repeated by
publically displaying in my childhood home (See FIGURE 4). In it my
grandmother, age seventeen, poses in a studio setting. Thinking of each
component of this image as a sign, making meaning with other signs, as I
contextualize the historical period (1923), and the stories that have been told in
my family, I explore the visual rhetoric of this image. Before I do, I want to make
clear that to “know” my grandmother in this way, to “see” this image, to “look” at a
technologically mediated subjectivity, visual representation, and its story, history,
economics, and text, is to place my “grandmother" in the “Cyborg Subject
Position,” a place that illustrates “the absurdity of separating the technical,
organic, mythic, textual, and political threads in semiotic fabric of the [photo] and
of the world in which this [photo] makes sense” (Haraway, Reader 71).

I cannot simple “look” at the visual.

The “visual” only makes sense with the un-visual. Because my
grandmother’s subjectivity emerged “visually” not just out of the “white family
Lacanian triangulation,” but also out of a specific history of WWII “militarization”
and specific historical theories of information and information processing

(eugenics, animal-brain implants, technologically mediated “identities,” human-

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machine “bodies”) she occupies the Cyborg Subject Position (Haraway, How Like
128-129); perhaps she’s of the first regenerations to do so. It was thus
necessary for me to contextualize her subjectivity first (above), in order to “see”
her, before looking at these photos of her.

The beaded and embroidered satin dress and the polished, rather ornate
chair, signify to middleclass. Her hair, neatly and modestly pulled back, and the
pleasant but not openly gregarious expression on her face appear proper, again
connecting to middleclass identity. The photograph is the earliest photograph l
have that evidences my grandmother‘s increasing rhetorical sophistication as she
poses, adopting a mask, for the camera’s lens. That this 1923 studio
photograph, an affordance of race and class, was publically displayed and
treasured by my mother, and the image features my grandmother alone, her face
and neck surrounded by elaborate embroidery, accentuates her importance as
an “individual,” a treasure within the culture. “To photograph is to confer
importance . . . there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all
photographs to accord value to their subjects” (Sontag 28). This photograph
serves as a reminder of what was valued ideologically by the larger culture, and
how that ideology interpellated “my white family.” Additionally, it reminds us that
Lacan said the Subject is a picture looked at by Others: this image is offered up
for the Other’s gaze, and composes a raced, classed vision, made “real” through
the technology of the camera.

Shortly after the 1923 studio photograph was taken, my grandmother

attended nursing school and after a short courtship, Edgar and Martine were

50

married in 1929. In my collection of photographs is a series of images of my
grandmother taken by my grandfather between 1930 and 1953. In the series, my
grandmother poses in a clean white nurses uniform (1930), stands in her yard
modeling a new beaver skin coat (1943), poses near her house in a leopard skin
coat (1943), sits on the bumper of a Studebaker in a skirt suit, wearing a
corsage, nyloned legs, knees pressed tightly together (1943), poses on a picnic
table top, arms back and chest out, starlet fashion (1946), sits on a white ledge
with a feathered hat, tailored blazer-skirt set, high heels, crossed legs, and black
gloves on vacation in Florida (1948), and sits again on the edge of a car seat in a
plaid dress and heels, showing her stocking-ed legs (1953). In all images, my
grandmother poses for the camera. I have selected two images in the series
taken by my grandfather, the earliest (1930) and the latest (1953) to illustrate the
argument I will make regarding my grandmother’s subjectivity and her use of
rhetoric to subvert the gaze.

In the first image (See FIGURE 5) my grandmother poses: her feet are
symmetrically aligned, her left toe points neatly as her calf muscle appears to be
purposely flexed. Her arms are gently pressed in her lap; hands, the signifiers of
“work” and “working class” are hidden as they invisibly hold down the skirt. Her
hands are hidden to negate what the clean white outfit also erases: nurses work;
nurses work with their hands; they often tend to the most basic functions of the
human body; the hands touch bodies; hands touch sickness; hands touch

ruptures in the human body.

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The image isn’t just one of a middleclass white nurse. That is its mere
denotative meaning. Instead it is a sign playing out in the Symbolic as a vision of
a raced, classed, gendered Subject. I see traces of my grandmother’s
subjectivity that exist in a space outside “white nurse.” Below the hidden hands,
the wind teasingly lifts up the skirt’s edge; this element, along with the pointed
toe and flexed leg work against the white purity of the outfit, and against the
persona of white nurse as selfless, self-sacrificing cultural edifice. Her shoulders
curve inward, suggesting submissiveness or acquiescence, and the upper
portion of her body inclines slightly fonNard suggesting vulnerability. “To take a
photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability”
(Sontag 15). She smiles openly - her eyes also caught up in the smile. While
the body position, especially the legs, are “posed,” my grandmother with an
uncanny willingness exposes a fragment of her subjectivity. She appears open,
willing, in line with the wind opening her skirt to the viewer. This trace of
subjectivity is covered over, like every inch of her body is covered in fabric or
hidden. The photograph attempts to seize her subjectivity, by appropriating and
turning her into an object (white nurse) “that can be symbolically possessed”
(Sontag 14).

My grandmother learned to resist this symbolic possession, negotiating
representations of her body while working within the cultural script and
technological framework available at the time. While she was aware of her duty
to serve as an object of male pleasure, she also learned to resist that gaze,

ironically by playing into it.

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In Figure 6 we see increased control over her representation as she offers
a teasing show of legs in the 1953 car photo. Notice again her “working” hands
are gloved or completely hidden. To offer up a distinct body part, one that was
fetishized by the dominant culture, is to redirect the gaze. When my
grandmother offers up her legs, she removes the rest of her “self’ from the gaze.
Understandably, it might be argued that her show of legs and only legs in Figure
6 are evidence of her subjectivity that agreed with visions of objectified and
fragmented female bodies: “[O]bjectification of women’s faces, bodies, and
subjectivities has historically formed a cornerstone of women’s oppression and a
constraint of their agency” (DeVoss 76). I select this photo to look at because it
is the last in the series, although in each photo I have, my grandmother makes
an effort to show her legs.
Why Legs? The Erotic Mapping of the Body through the Visual

My question is, why legs? The emphasis on legs, as women’s skirt lines
rose, was part of the dominant culture that increasingly fragmented female
bodies and provided fodder for spectatorship. It wasn’t until after the mid-
nineteenth century that European women wore underpants, therefore the leg was
a direct route to the female genitals (Solomon-Godeau 87). Women’s legs were
mapped as erotic, and the cultural norm in the West was to cover the eroticized
leg until well after the World War I. “The legs of Betty Grable or Marlene Dietrich,
or the prominence of legs in modern advertising, are evidence of the enduring

potency of this particular mapping of the erotic” (Solomon-Godeau 87-88, Yellin).

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During the 1940’s visual rhetoric supported the fascination with women’s
legs. In addition to images of Betty Grable and Marlene Dietrich that circulated
widely, magazines such as Vogue featured cover shots of women in bathing
suits, their legs the main focus of the representation (Vogue, Yellin). In 1938,
Kurt Seligmann produced a post-modem table that featured mock-ups of real
women’s legs in nylons and pumps as the table legs. These representations of
white women’s body parts mark the visually supported ideologies that controlled
who was allowed to be represented and who wasn’t, and how those
representations played out in the Symbolic. “[Slexuality and how we choose to
define, present, and represent it . . . [is[ very much culturally constructed and
maintained” (DeVoss 80). It is easy to find visual rhetoric from the 1940’s that
controlled representations of white women as “sexual.” How much leg could be
shown was culturally constructed and maintained.

In the mid-1900’s as hemlines rose and nylons were demanded by
consumers (Haskell, Grass), advertisers produced multiple images of (white)
women’s legs that functioned rhetorically to discursively produce certain female
subjectivities and supported that particular mapping of the erotic. The visual
rhetoric of the mid-1900’s selects and repeats which body part is erotized
defining what and who we are, and which parts of us are sexually or otherwise
important. Psychoanalysis points this out by describing how the erotic zones of
the infant are mapped out and territorialized by the attention lavished on them.

White women’s legs were historically sexualized and visually repeated

(valued) as objects-erotica. And so, it is not surprising that my grandmother

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inserted her body, by way of her legs, into the conversation of her day. She
inserted her legs in a Latourian network, a conversation between “legs,” legs
acting both as “human” objects because they are connected to a “body,” and legs
acting as “non-human” objects because they are disconnected from a body.
(See FIGURE 7. Network of 1940/50’s legs). When my grandmother offered up
her legs, she inserted her subjectivity into a vertical and horizontal network, a
signifying chain of representation, by and across the visual. The question arises
then, in my consideration of subjectivity and rhetorical skill: was my
grandmother’s posing for the camera, (her imitation of the circulating images that
mapped out legs as erotica) her show of legs, an act repeating the “cornerstone
of women’s oppression and a constraint of their agency”? In other words, was
my grandmother’s show of legs that of scribe or author?
Vertical Connections

Heeding Powell and DeVoss’s call for acknowledgement of historical
scripts, and Haraway’s insight that vertical and horizontal cultural analysis are
needed, can I make visible scholarly connections in R&W by vertically connecting
in analysis, images that circulated of an 1865 white woman, the Countess de
Castiglione, my grandmother’s image, and the visual subjectivities of DeVoss’s
WWW women? Can all Subjects thus be rehabilitated, through rhetorical visual
analysis, away from stereotypical notions of female subjectivity and sexuality?
(See FIGURE 8). This is my project, just as Powell rehabilitates the stereotypical
image of Native peoples from “helpless” objects to sophisticated, strategic,

discursive producers well-aware of the expectations of the “gaze” and just as

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DeVoss rehabilitates the subjectivities of the women articulating multiple
identities on the W.

A 1986 essay from October engages the same kinds of inquires as do
Powell, DeVoss, and myself, only Solomon-Godeau’s object of inquiry is the
French Countess de Castiglione photographs (later 1800’s).21 Solomon-Godeau
poses the questions (67): “What are we to make of the countess’s having herself
photographed in her chemise? Or exposing her legs?” Solomon-Godeau tells us
that Castiglione herself arranged for the portraits, and that while the photographs
were taken by a professional photographer they could be perceived as being
authored by Castiglione (70). According to Solomon-Godeau the Countess, “far
from passively following the directives of the photographer, substantially
determined her own presentation to the camera, dictating the pose, costume,
props, and accessories, and occasionally decided upon the coloring and/or
retouching of the photographs” (70). Nonetheless, Solomon-Godeau concludes
that the portraits are “testimonials of the power of the patriarchy to register its
desire within the designated space of the feminine” (67). The Countess’s
portraits are “undenNritten by conventions that make her less an author than a
scribe” (67). Solomon-Godeau’s thesis is a hopeless one, as she sees the
photographs as “somber reminders that the psychic determinations of patriarchy
and the material ones of capitalism are as inescapable for us as they were for the
countess” (69).

While the October text is comprehensive and insightful, there Is a rupture

in the logic used to arrive at the thesis. It is in that break in logic between

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Solomon-Godeau’s insistence that the Countess orchestrated these
photographs, and her insistence that the Countess was merely an empty
reflection of the patriarchy that Shawn Michelle Smith inserts her own theory of
the Countess’s subjectivity as author and agent in the textual production of her
own images (Smith 97). I am reminded here, moving forward in time, that
DeVoss writes:
Historically, the “public” is associated with individuals with action
and agency, with subjects who can assert themselves in the public
world . . . Women, not seen as political or public agents, are seen
as creatures through or to whom things simply happen . . . or as
“beings without reasons” . . . without entry into the collective social
and political space of the larger public realm, women face isolation
and the continued seizure of their contributions by those who can
easily travel back and forth between the public and the private. (78)
DeVoss notes that this seizure of women’s contributions especially includes
women’s “participation with and contributions to certain technologies, “further
commenting that the more cultural capital a technology has, the more likely the
woman’s contribution will be excluded or written out of history.

DeVoss reminds us that white men and women have been technologically
segregated from each other, women of course the “oppressed” - this proves true
in the historical script because it was Edgar and the Countess’s professional
male studio photographers who held the camera. DeVoss’s research subjects

(WWW women) though are able to rupture the omnipresent male gaze by

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articulating multiple subjectivities. Like La Flesche, they use the tools available
to them, in their case, multiple copies and multiple screens. My grandmother did
not have those technologies to work with, and the Countess, while not having
multiple screens, did have access to multiple copies (she had over 400
photographs made). Solomon-Godeau’s argument that the Countess was
without reason, allowed things to happen through her, and that the Countess
made no contributions to her photographs (technologically mediated
representations) merely repeats the historic violence DeVoss describes that
effectuated itself to disenfranchise women and to exclude them from authorship.

Smith’s analysis, like DeVoss’s, works against Solomon-Godeau’s
conclusions. Smith argues that the body is not merely a space where
representations are mapped, but, Smith argues while gender maps the body, the
body does not necessarily pre-date this mapping (101 ). As Lacan tells us, the
Subject’s origins are in the Real where there are no signifiers of gender or sexual
orientation. Once the Subject emerges in the Symbolic order, Lacan says the
Subject must learn what to do. What is defined as “body,” and where that
mapping occurs, is constructed for us in the Symbolic through the interplay of
signs.

“Organisms are not born, but they are made . . . as objects of knowledge .
. . ‘Objects’ like bodies do not pre-exist as such” (Haraway, Reader 68). The
body “is an object of knowledge produced at the locus of gender performances”

(Smith 101 ). As Judith Butler describes it, the body is “a signifying practice within

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a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality” (qtd. in Smith
101). What I am saying here is that at “birth,” the human has no body;

the body and gender are mapped onto the Subject through discursive acts. The
body emerges from a discursive process. A huge component of the discursive
process is visual rhetoric which produces “texts” that hold themselves out as
reality, and repeat themselves through a variety of technological mediums, such
as pages of the WW and family photographs. Both the body and sexual
difference are mapped onto all bodies and it is the mapping that creates the
“body” as object of knowledge. Sexual difference and “the body” are reinforced
in the Symbolic, and are interpellated as objects of knowledge by Subjects in part
through visual rhetoric. So, it can never be that the Countess possessed a
female body that was then mapped upon by the patriarchy. To subscribe to
Solomon-Godeau’s argument is to believe no human subject is capable of
agency. According to her, even mimicry cannot be an act of agency.

The ideological forces that work to continually erase (white) women’s
agency and their contributions to technology must be unseen. In virtually every
representation of the Countess, she challenges the viewer’s gaze by throwing the
gaze back upon us, and making the viewer self-conscious about his position as
voyeur. The poses, the “masks,” the multiple subjectivities configured by the
Countess in the 400 photographs, visually intersect with other historically similar
“authors” (translate “white male”). Paintings by French artist “author” Gustave
Courbet shows female subjects in poses similar to the ones the Countess chose

in the portraits she commissioned for herself.

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The Countess as a prominent figure among the French aristocracy had
access to the “arts” as a viewer, but as a female in France in 1850, she would
have had little opportunity to exercise any culturally sanctioned artistic agency.
Considering DeVoss’s point that women’s authorship has been seized as have
their contributions to technology, how can we know whether the Countess
mimicked Courbet, or whether he mimicked her? Either way, the Countess, not
the photographer, is the author of her photographs. Instead of a male “artist,” in
the Countess’s case we have a female artist, like the women in DeVoss’s study,
taking into her own hands the representation of “female,” and in the Countess’s
poses, she, like the women on DeVoss’s WWW, rupture mainstream notions of
“female,” and creates what DeVoss calls an Identity Project. Like the women on
the W, the Countess articulates multiple subjectivities in her multiple
costumed poses, poses that often included props. The Countess ruptured
dominant notions of “female” by articulating multiple subjectivities as a
technologically mediated vision.

The ability of women in the 1800’s and 1900’s to act as authors of their
own identities is especially manifested in photographs. Even women who did not
have means to make multiple copies of “themselves” found ways to exercise
agency. They may not have been permitted to contribute by handling and
manipulating the technology, but they surely could have resisted with their
bodies. While an “artist,” a male painter like Courbet Gustave or Edoudard
Manet (Gilman) paints his own nuisances of pose and facial expression on his

representations of female body, in the photograph, some nuisances can never be

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erased by the male hand. One need only think of the eyes of the African-
Americans in Zealy’s daguerreotypes captured in the photographic lens to prove
their places as “species,” or the eyes of the models in some of Du Bois’s 1900
collection, or the faces of the Native children sent off to the Hamptons for
civilizing, or the poses of the Countess de Castiglione, or the poses of my
grandmother, to know that some elements of subjectivity can never be erased.
The photograph then holds a special place in my mind as an artifact that might
rupture the narrative of white male hegemony, where women could potentially
author their own identities regardless of who held the camera.22

Like DeVoss’s WWW women, the Countess’s portraits go a long way in
representing her as one who sees herself being seen, and questions the seeing.
Lacan describes this phenomenon as “[t]hat in which the consciousness may turn
back upon itself. . . as seeing oneself seeing oneself. . . [a]n avoidance of the
function of the gaze is at work there” (74). The Countess turns back the
patriarchal gaze upon itself. She derides the male gaze, and as Lacan says, .
. man defies his very destiny when he derides the signifier” (“The Agency” 158).

Connecting the Countess’s photographs to my grandmother’s images, she
who chose to offer herself up to the lens, the eye, who chose to offer up her legs,
I wonder then, looking at the object-image of my grandmother and imagining
behind the screen at one time long ago a human “body” lived and breathed, do
my grandmother’s poses evidence a reflection of gender hopelessly and
inevitably mapped onto the body by the patriarchy, or something else? At first

glance I might believe that these seemingly superficial poses by my grandmother

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are evidence of her loss of agency to the demands of patriarchy. The images
might be seen as images of her mindlessly mimicking the poses of current
models, nylon hose advertisements, bathing beauties, and contemporary female
pageantry. And yes, she does mimic. But mimicry does not signal a loss of
agency; it represents increased agency. Lacan says, “The effect of mimicry is
camouflage, in the strictly technical sense” (The Four 99). And the theory of
writers like Judith Butler and Mary Ann Doane construct the posing and the
masquerade, as in Lacan’s mask, not as acquiescence to the claims of
patriarchy, “but subversions of their claims to truth” (Doane qtd. in Smith,
American 104). My grandfather was never one to lay out my grandmother’s
outfits, choose her hat, jewelry, shoes, or shade of lipstick. He did not decide
how she would wear her hair. My grandmother worked; she is said by both my
mother and aunt to have ruled the house. Therefore it is virtually impossible to
imagine my grandfather orchestrating Martine’s poses, her pulling back oh-so—
slightly her shoulders on the picnic table, the show of leg peaking forcefully from
inside the automobile’s interior, the clever squeeze of the knees on the car’s
bumper. These decisions alone were my grandmother’s. I see her many poses
in this narrative of family history and “identity” as evidence not of my
grandmother’s submission under the will of white hegemonic patriarchy, but
instead as a “masquerade and double mimesis deflect[ing] the masculine
viewer’s presumption to see, to know, to penetrate an essentialized feminine

interiority” (Smith, American 105).

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If, as Lacan says, it is the “mediation of masks” that produces a “most
acute, most intense” meeting of the masculine and feminine, what better
evidence of agency through rhetorical skill but a photograph taken by a male
subject of “his” female subject, a trace embodying the mediation of masks. As
the white middleclass male subject in a mid 1900’s American household, Edgar’s
role was well defined. It was culturally sanctioned for him to attempt to
appropriate his propertied wife by snapping the photograph. What better way for
my grandmother to avert that appropriation than by exercising agency and
donning the mask, by posing, by dressing in furs and wearing silk (or nylon)
stockings. She was accustomed to being the object of male pleasure and the
gaze. Traces in her facial expression, her increasingly controlled body
positioning, her less-open smile, are traces of her increasing rhetorical skill as
she matured. Remarkably, in the photograph of my grandmother’s legs, her face
hides in the shadows while she offers up only her legs, as did the Countess de
Castiglione. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, offering only the legs surely
gives the viewer less opportunity to see subjectivity.

The legs are there as a lure, like the cuttlebone in Holbein’s picture The
Ambassadors. Lacan says: “This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for
the gaze” (The Four 89). It is not my grandmother who is caught in the gaze, but
us the viewers. The painter, or in the present case the photographer, my
grandfather, “gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to
whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down

one’s weapons. This is the pacifying . . . effect” (Lacan, The Four 101). We

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could sum up the message of such family photographs as Lacan does — the
photo taker says: “You want to see? Well, take a look at this." (Lacan, The Four
101). I can say then that when my grandfather snapped the shot, my
grandmother put upon herself the mask and said, metaphorically to him, “You
want to see? Well, take a look at this!”

As DeVoss notes in her 2002 research, images on the WWW constructed
by white women rupture mainstream representations of women’s bodies and
sexualities just as my grandmother ruptured mainstream 1940’s notions by
offering up her married, white, middleclass legs. When DeVoss’s research
subjects saw themselves being seen, and failed to conform to stereotypical
notions of women’s sexuality, they exercised agency. When my grandmother
showed her legs, she pushed on the culturally constructed norm that said she
shouldn’t. She, like DeVoss’s research subjects, took control of her sexuality,
leaving a trace of her subjectivity on the photographic “screen.”

We can further attribute authorship by way of rhetorical skill to my
grandmother because while she did not have available to her the WWW, she
sensed the linearity of the narrative being constructed by each snapshot.
Imagine representations on the W as esplanades, cat’s cradles, and
networks. However, family photographs were traditionally displayed linearly in
albums. Therefore, I argue that my grandmother took the appropriate rhetorical
turns by not presenting multiple subjectivities as did DeVoss’s research subjects,
but instead presented one “whole” unified Subject. She was always dressed

middleclass, always had her hair neatly arranged, always wore dresses,

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stockings, and heals, often hid her “working” hands either visually or with gloves,
and always “posed.” She attempts to cover over the Lacanian lack by offering us
the viewer, a fantasy of oneness. Like Powell says, we must give credit where
credit is due (40).

In Figure 9, (See FIGURE 9) I am the photographer. It was 1982 and
women were permitted to engage the technology of the camera (its feminization
having diminished its value as cultural capital). l was visiting her in her new
home in Florida, and my grandmother and I had “dressed up” to go out to dinner.
After we adorned ourselves in dresses (i.e. gender performances in the
Symbolic), we took pictures of each other. Still, my grandmother presents her
legs, as l unwittingly snap the picture. When I see this picture, it’s difficult to
unsee it, because it makes me think my grandmother was smarter than me in her
awareness of how representations of her would travel. She is incredibly
consistent in her visual rhetoric; almost 80 years old, still in a dress and heels,
with earrings, hands posed, gaze averted (no need to hide her hands; she was
“retired”). This representation functions rhetorically as a connector to the other
existing photographs of my grandmother. We have to admire her skill that from
the age of seventeen, and even before that, until her death, she systematically,
through space and time, controlled the textual productions that embody her
materially. I read photos of my grandmother as evidence of how with the passage
of time, my grandmother became rhetorically sophisticated, carefully selecting
the “signs” that would be passed down as “our family story.” Unlike DeVoss’s

WWW women, my grandmother presents a unified “whole.” We need more

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deeply vertical theorizing that looks at visual rhetoric and how gendered
subjectivities such as “white” women and women of color were (are) able to
navigate and manipulate subjectivity through technological interfaces as those

interfaces transform through configurations of space and time.

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CHAPTER THREE: Rhetorical Animation: A Semiotic View of Family
Photographs

Derrida’s conceptualization of differance takes the form of a critique of the

binary logic in which every element of meaning constitution is locked into

signification in relation to the other (a legacy of Saussurian linguistics’
insistence on language as a system of negative differentiation). lrit Rogoff

“Studying Visual Culture”

Overview

In chapter one I called for a Visual Rhetorics that is deeply
interdisciplinary.

“You see, I was less and less happy as I tried to develop a dissertation”
(Haraway, How Like 18).

Calling on this need for interdisciplinarity, | justified my use of Lacanian
theory by reminding the reader that Lacan himself was a visual rhetorician, that
his writings very specifically address how subjectivity is formed through the visual
(we are all pictures on screens), and how his theory of the unconscious has been
germane to folks in film studies (folks who intensely study the visual). I also
discussed the void | see in the intersection of visual rhetoric/visual culture, and
made a call for an inextricably intertwined Visual Rhetorics that includes visual
culture/critical theory. I just want to reiterate that point and ask for reciprocity.

In order for Visual Rhetgrjg to produce scholarship that is intellectually
rigorous, and in order for that field to flourish, it needs to see culture as an
integral part of every visual product, and it needs to understand that any product

is a product of culture and must be contextualized as such, geographically,

historically, economically, etc.

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“So I spent the summer depressed and in tears, working in the lab and
getting nowhere and not like what I was doing. ” (Haraway, How Like 19).

At the same time, folks in cultural rhetorics/studies need to acknowledge
the power and impact of the visual in subject formation, interpellation. and even
colonization. This requires Visual Rhetorics as a field to imagine an open-ended
and cross-disciplinary study of images, and for cultural rhetorics folks to
occasionally focus on “texts” other than purely linguistic discursive productions
(Rogoff 381 ):

Much of the practice of intellectual work within the framework of
cultural problematics has to do with being able to ask new and
alternative questions, rather than reproducing old knowledge by
asking the old questions. (Rogoff 382)
Rogoff’s “new” questions are not necessarily questions such as: “How much
white space do we need? How can I construct a power point that will engage my
audience? ”23 but instead align more closely with the questions I am asking in this
Affinity Project. It is helpful, as a writing teacher and conference presenter, to
learn how to engage my audience with power point. But a more interesting
question is, why do we like power point? (Think of Lacan’s theory of the gaze,
voyeurism, and spectatorship and imagine how those play out during a power
point presentation). And as I discuss in the next chapter, while it is beneficial to
know how much white space to use, the more interesting question is, what is in

“white” space? What does the “blank” space mean?

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“. . . and so I moved over to his lab and did a dissertation that was a hybrid
between history of science, philosophy, and biology” (Haraway, How Like 19).

Like these “new” questions, RogofI’s questions are questions such as:

. Whose fantasies are fed by which visual images?

0 Which aspects of the historical past have images that circulate and which
dont?

. In what political discourse can we understand looking and returning [or
averting] the gaze as an act of political resistance?

. Who do we get to see and who is erased?

To further recap, in chapter two I illustrated how family photographs are
used to seamlessly construct family stories, i.e. little narratives that tell “happy”
stories of wholeness and how we can simultaneously read these photographs
resistantly, unseeing their intended meaning, and instead seeing traces of
subjectivity and agency in the Subjects photographed. Noting how white women
have historically had their authorship and their contributions to technology
seized, we can see how family photographs consciously and unconsciously do
work in order to support this seizure. Heeding Powell’s call for alliances through
acknowledgement of history (of seizures) and redress, I framed this thesis as an
attempt to answer Powell’s call. The issues of oppression/resistance, seizures of
authorship, agency, unconscious discursive (visual) productions, and the
rhetorical function of family photographs are important nodes in my discussion
here, and in this chapter I thread these nodes together in another way as I lay the

foundation for the last chapter. Chapter four tries to “see” the white space. It

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tries to acknowledge multifarious components of history, take responsibility for
that history, and effect redress. In order to call for responsibility, there has to be
a component of intentionality (however ignorance is not bliss). Therefore
whether a discursive product is conscious or unconscious matters. But our need
to know whether an act is conscious or unconscious doesn’t just assist in
assigning responsibility. In the knowing, we can break the network of violence
that only lets certain subjectivities come to light as valid visualizations. Such
validity is powerful because it allows only certain visualizations to repeat and
strengthen in cultural circulation. We “see” what’s happened along the visual
cultural/historical script in the US, so that we can “unsee” and rebuild.

In order to “unsee,” in this chapter, I first explain Lacan’s theory of the
unconscious as it relates to semiotics and signs having meaning based on
displacement: the free play of signifiers. The work completed by free play of
signifiers in the unconscious must be factored into visual analyses because to do
so removes us from the realm of intentionality and give us the “freedom to
understand meaning in relation to images . . . spaces, not necessarily perceived
to operate in a direct, causal, or epistemic relation to either their context or to one
another” (Rogoff 382). To look at diffractions of the unconscious, l “unsee” what
Barthes calls the denotative meaning, and I see the connotative meaning,
contextualizing images, since visual elements do not exist in a vacuum but are
influenced by other signs floating in the culture (Barthes, Haraway). Pushing
past Barthes with psychoanalysis, I will push these photographs past their

“connotative” meaning by using and remediating Barthes‘ theory of pictures and

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“animation.” To do such visual “animation” is to displace meaning. Feminist
deconstruction writing theory holds that writing itself is an “endless displacement
of meaning”; therefore “visual culture provides the visual articulation of the
continuous displacement of meaning in the field of vision and the visible” (Rogoff
382)

In this chapter, Freud is used to help displace meanings as l conduct
rhetorical analyses of the visual. Lacan is indebted to Freud for his work, and
Freud gives us a very sophisticated scheme for “understanding the relationship
between visual and linguistic signification, and the equilibrium that the scheme
established between the two registers” (Silverrnan 5). Very simply put (based on
Freud’s dream work): Dreams are rebuses.24 This notion strongly connects with
Barthes’ theory of denotative and connotative meaning, but takes it a bit further.
Images have meaning through what we associate with them, but associations
have associations themselves, and so meaning is gathered infinitely by the free
play of associations.

The larger questions addressed in this chapter (as framed above by
Rogoff’s first three inquires) and the intellectual work I will complete are as
follows:

0 What (visual) discursive productions (at the family level) take place
through the unconscious (i.e. unintentionally)?

. How do those (visual) discursive productions function rhetorically?

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o On a rhetoric as art performance level, can I (a Master’s student)
link together theory (psychoanalysis) with practice (family
production of photographs)?

RogofI’s last question regarding who do we get to see and who is erased is the
focus of the final chapter.

In addition to looking at discursive (visual) productions in order to
acknowledge history and my family’s role in that, this Affinity Project’s
autobiographical, self-reflexivity should, I hope, produce an object, a body of
knowledge for Visual Rhetorics such that the scholars writing in the field are
inspired to work at becoming less transparent through self-evaluation. Finally, in
this chapter I make a small move to imagine rebuilding (a crazy asymmetrically
designed structure) by calling up Haraway’s Cyborg Subject Position. The small
reference I make in this chapter to Haraway’s Cyborg Subject Position shall
serve as a way in to a deeper discussion of that concept in chapter four’s
subsection, “Cyborg Writing and Rhetorical Rehabilitation.” As an act of
interdisciplinarity, in conjuring up the Cyborg Myth through rhetorical analysis of
historical family photographs, in this chapter I make a call to R&W scholars who
themselves invoke Haraway’s construct, to avoid reductionism. I urge them to let
the Cyborg transform, always transform.

Lacan’s Unconscious in (Visual) Stories
The associations of symbols are what make language.
“The unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan, The Four 20).

Lacan describes the unconscious as a place between cause and effect, a

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gap, a cut, a slit: the unborn (22-23). Lacan is skeptical about our ability to
access the language or code within the unconscious; while the unconscious
manifests itself, the unconscious itself is held in limbo and. suspense — not to say
that the unconscious is unreal, but rather is unrealized (23). The
unconsciousness’ unborn nature is something forgotten, something that surprises
us. We are surprised, Lacan argues, when we see some kind of previously
unrealized connections between behaviors.

“The left hand must not know what the right hand is doing” (Lacan, The
Four 42).

The element of surprise (of pleasure), that Lacan gives to us in his theory
of the unconscious, is lovely to me as a scholar because I am a curious person,
and I should like to think my colleagues are as well. Curiosity often leads to
surprise. It also often leads to unsettling finds and lets us have “a notion of
things outside the realm of the known, of things not yet quite understood or
articulated; the pleasures of the forbidden or the hidden or the unthought; the
optimism of finding out something one had not known or been able to conceive of
before” (Rogoff 386). Rogoff calls upon the field of visual culture to embrace a
spirit of the “curious eye” rather than “the mean eye, the jaundiced, skeptical eye”
(385), and through Lacan’s theory, we can be delightfully curious (and surprised).

But the unconscious as a construct that produces discursive effects that
surprise us, produces effects that are disconnected from their origins. Between

“cause” and “effect” is a gap, and in that gap is the unconscious.

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“We find here once again the rhythmic structure of this pulsation of the
slit, whose function I referred to last time” (Lacan, The Four 32).

In a series of seminars, Lacan uses Edgar Allen Poe’s tale of “The
Purloined Letter” in order to illustrate his conception of the unconscious.
Applying rhetoric as a techne that connects theory to practice, | in turn use my
family photographs to illustrate Lacan’s theory of the unconscious, a theory
important to visual analysis because as I mentioned in chapter one, the theory of
the unconscious is a powerful tool for visual analysis since it supports theories
such as spectatorship, interpellation. and semiotics (Sturken and Cartwright 73).
Plus, a theory of the unconscious has always been historically tied to “rhetoric”
(Johnson)

Edgar Allen Poe’s 1844 tale,25 “The Purloined Letter,” involves a letter
stolen (by the Minister) from the Queen (the purloined letter). The Queen sees
the theft but cannot address it because she is entertaining a visitor. During the
theft, the letter, in plain view, is replaced by another letter (i.e. the displacement
of signifiers). While the police search the Minister’s home and person they fail to
find the letter. Dupin, the investigator finally solves the crime by searching out
the Minister’s apartment and spotting a crumpled old letter in a basket (in plain
view). Dupin then replaces the purloined letter with his own facsimile
(displacement of signifiers, again). During Poe’s story, the reader never learns
the contents of the letter, but is instead entertained by the actions of the
characters with respect to the letter (i.e. the effects of the unconscious). Lacan

perceives the unconscious as an envelope (3 gap, a slit) causing certain

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behaviors, an envelope with contents we might fleetingly glimpse, but whose
interiority we never fully comprehend.

Lacan sees the letter as a metaphor for the Subject and the Signifier
which gather their meanings through displacement. None of us escape this
closed system of signification and as I mentioned in chapter two, it is the
Subject’s emergence into the Symbolic field, that closed system defined by
language, that forever cuts the Subject off from the unconscious.

Lacan’s definition of the signifier requires that it be totally disconnected
from the Real and “take up residence within a closed field of meaning” (164).
The following are paraphrased main points from Lacan’s celebrated “Function
and Field of Speech and Language”:

. Symbols envelop the life of man in a network so total they join together,
before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him “by
flesh and blood”;

. Symbols are so total they bring to his birth the share of his destiny;

0 Symbols are so total they give the words that will make him faithful or
renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place
where he is not yet and even beyond his death; and

0 Symbols are so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the
last judgment, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it.
(Silverman 165)

For my purposes, Lacan’s theory is helpful because I simply insert “visual

images,” or in this case, “family photographs,” in the place of “Symbols.” Family

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photographs function rhetorically to create the always-already we are born into,
the “joined together” chain of signifiers that define our destiny. Lacan mentions
the “Word,” but Visual Rhetorics tells us that words and images function together,
and that like words, images are powerful meaning makers. Lacan integrates
images with words to make meaning with his use of diagrams, as I do in this
Master’s Thesis with my use of photographs. As I mentioned in chapter two, my
family photographs function rhetorically to reinforce a vision of my family as
raced, classed, and gendered. In that chapter I focused on a series of
photographs of my grandmother, Cyborg Subject; in this chapter I look first at
one picture (See FIGURE 10. “Kids On Car"), and then a series of other pictures.
These photos are image-symbols playing out in the Symbolic, a closed system of
signs, separating forever the Subject from the Real.

“The real is that which always comes back to the same place” (Lacan,
The Four 42).

The Real contains both the “subject’s own ‘being’ (its libidinal resources or
needs) and the phenomenal world . . .[m]oreover, since language speaks no
more to the reality of objects than it does to that of subjects, it effects a complete
rupture with the phenomenal world” (Silverrnan 166). It is through this rupture I
view my family photographs.

The narrative constructed through the photographs is rhythmic. After
being initially surprised by one photograph (and then not surprised) and
subsequently searching for further explanation (curiosity), I found a melodious

rhythm that I argue is a remainder (effect) of the unconscious at work. This

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pulsating rhythm, a beat, is not a discourse of the unconscious, but is subtler

evidence of its existence. The photograph is a discursive product not of the

unconscious, but of an effect of the unconscious: a diffraction, the play of light,

the gap, the pulsation within the slit. The unborn.

My Family’s (Visual) Unconscious in Stories

The unsettling photograph I located, was one found during a routine sifting

of my collection (it was not purposeful). I was looking for connections and tropes,

explanations that might surround the photograph of my grandmother, aunt, and

mother (My Family, Figure 11) I discuss in the next chapter. Figure 10 rather

caused me to pause and take a breath because of its rhetorical motion.

The image seemed to lift itself out of the box to my attention. On this

phenomenon of movement, Barthes writes:
In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it
animates me, and l animate it. So that is how I must name the
attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph
itself is in no way animated (I do not believe in ‘Iifelike’
photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every
adventure. (Camera Lucida 20)

A photograph that appears in the Lacanian rupture, a rupture of the Real, is one

then that is animated. By animation I mean that this image moves — it shifts

meaning, it displaces signifiers. Like Barthes, “I wanted to explore it not as a

question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I

think” (21 ).

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Looking simply at the denotative meaning, the “Kids On Car" image shows
my mother on the left, and her sister Marti on the right. According to the back of
the photo, it was developed on January 3, 1939 by the Photo Art Co., Inc.,
Trenton, New Jersey (note how text informs the meaning of this image, as
Barthes tells us). The license plate is clearly visible, and under magnification
gives the state and the year 1938. We can conclude from linguistic signifiers
then that this image was taken in 1938-39. In the background is the family’s
home in Palmyra, New Jersey, new bikes (the second bike is barely visible), and
the undeveloped, rural area across the road. The two girls are four and five
years old, and wear crisp clean matching snowsuits. Neither child looks at the
picture taker, but instead Marti looks at Jacky, while Jacky looks off to her left.
Marti seems somewhat relaxed and smiling at Jacky, while Jacky’s expression is
a bit more uncertain as she tries to balance solidly on the car’s fender. Both girls
appear to be grasping the back of the headlight to keep from sliding off the car.
Since their poses are so symmetrical, one assumes that they were placed on the
car by adult hands and asked to hang on until the photograph was taken. The
overall denotative meaning of this image is: Happy well-to-do American 1930’s
middleclass white family - happy family.

Now that I’ve looked at the sentimental-plain denotative value of the
photograph, I will animate it. I will begin by disengaging the denotative meaning
and gradually animating the photo past the point of “seeing” connotative
meaning. That is, l contextualize the photograph and connect it through

networks, symbols, associations, and displacements of meaning, and l transform

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its meaning. I move, shift the rhetorical function of this image using
psychoanalysis to show it, animated in the rupture, or wound. My ability to do
this with a psychoanalytic tool is why psychoanalysis is so useful for visual
analysis. The psychoanalytic notion of displacement I mentioned earlier is a
concept that inherently contains “movement.” Remember the purloined letter
moved as did the human players in Poe’s story. Psychoanalysis lends itself to
rhetorical movement.

Featured prominently and centrally in the image is a car. But what is the
meaning of car?

“But the tropic qua/in! of any word can erupt to enliven things for even the
most literal minded. ” (Harawa y, Readier 201).

Foucault tells us that to understand a meaning we must look at birth (qtd.
in Porter, Audience 89), therefore I look at the birth of “automobile” in the US,
both linguistically and symbolically. In doing so, I displace the intended forthright
“denotative” meaning of the image. It isn’t simply “a car.”

Knowing that I cannot possibly unpack every nuanced meaning of the
automobile as signifier, I simply start somewhere.

“Words trip us, make us swerve, turn us around; we have no other
options. ” (Haraway, Reader 201).

The car is a Studebaker, a car they had “during the war.”26 Generally,
however, what did the automobile signify in 1938 American culture? I have
chosen the word automobile purposely in order to illustrate the linguistic

associations of this symbol.

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Historically, both the horseless carriage and the word for same were born
in France.27 From the very beginning of US. receptivity to the new contraption,
the automobile was tied to French aristocracy; it was 1899 New York society that
settled the debate about naming the vehicle “with the adoption of the French
name automobile” (Lipski 176). New York society was “the American
godparents” of the automobile and was the final decision maker of the name
(176). French influence was so strong in the artifact’s invention, the influence
was able to span the language barrier and the Atlantic Ocean. The automobile’s
success in France was tied directly to the rapid success of the French
Automobile Club., and the club’s success in France was in turn tied to
“undisputed agreement concerning its financial and social status,” and the fact
that the club was populated by an abundance of “the most prominent men” (176).
Those original French entrepreneurs who were involved with the automobile
were “the cream of French Society” (178).

This connection to rich, privileged white men carried over to the US; the
first American owners of the vehicle were prominent high-society white men such
as “William Rockefeller, George Gould, Edwin Gould, John Jacob Astor, William
Waldorf Astor, Jacob Ruppert, C.P. Huntington, and Claus Spreckels . . . New
York society fostered the automobile just as the aristocracy had in other nations”
(178). This American “aristocracy” expanded upon and experimented with the
automobile as a signifier of prominence and a toy of the well-to-do.

So, linguistically we have associating signifiers that connect the car to

French aristocracy, cream (whiteness), clubs (community), France (exoticness),

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New York high society, and rich prominent white men. This chain of signifiers,
tied now visually to “the car,” was picked up by the US advertising industry, who
used visual rhetoric to copy, repeat, commodify, and fetishize. From the earliest
days of advertising, the discursive place of the automobile can be read as a
fetish. Beginning in the early 1900’s, the automobile was visually coupled with
the already fetishized white female body (Bowers). Why were white female
bodies visually coupled with car bodies? Lacan specifically stressed that in
Poe’s story, the Queen (who was stolen from) was a female subject (a female
body) and connected that to his theory of “fear of castration.” Fear of castration
(a female association) is in turn connected to the fetish: “. . .with regard to the
correlation of women and fetish: ‘The fetish, as replacement for the missing
maternal phallus, at once masks and reveals the scandal of sexual difference.
As such it is the analytic object par excellence” (Lacan qtd. in Muller and
Richardson 65). The use of fetish (the visual image of the automobile and the
female body) both masks and reveals sexual difference. It masks it by coupling
the female body (no maternal phallus) with a “phallus.” It reveals it by cementing
together a “female” body and a body that is “male-like” (the car-as-phallus).
Re-seeing the “Kids On Car” image, looking next at its connotative
meaning, it’s not simply a picture of happy white kids. Instead, it functions
rhetorically and semiotically as a sign, networked with other associative signs. It
is a teaching tool. Recall the Subject is born with no knowledge of how to be a
man or a woman, those gender performances are played out in the Symbolic

through the free play of signifiers, in this case visual images of girls and cars. In

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the Symbolic, the children learn at a young age that their subjectivities are
equivalent to cars. Since they are visually associated, child-bodies and car-body,
the children’s value as human is thus equivalent to the value of the Studebaker.
Human = Machine. The picture embodies a visualization of a hybrid “Subject,” a
human-machine “thing.” One picture. A human-machine “body.”

“The soul of machines constitutes the social element. The body of the
social element is constituted by machines” (Latour 213).

The picture not only manifests an image of a hybrid organism-machine, it
also functions to cement a family narrative that says, “We can afford this car, and
we have two healthy kids. We are successful middleclass Americans.” The
photograph of white middleclass children upon an individually owned automobile
in 1930’s United States further connects a middleclass identity to the upper
echelons of “society” - thus functions rhetorically not just to say “we are
middleclass,” but also, given the historical and geographical configuration, says
“we are [or wish we were] above middleclass.”

The white children’s bodies are in turn coupled (associated with in the
Symbolic) to the white female body because the female body is one place the
viewer “knows” they have been (they were “inside” her). Visually, the signifiers of
white children, females, and cars in this technologically mediated image
represents raced, classed, gendered Subjects, but Subjects who’ve been
hybridized with “machine,” and a machine that’s been mixed with human “blood.”

Animating this image now past connotation, beyond the linguistic-visual

associations, pushing it into a more deeply psychoanalytic space, past the

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denotative and connotative meaning, it is generally understood that the

I?" Does

automobile in American culture has always served as a phallic symbo
the image serve thus in the family picture, and if so, why? It is clear to see why
auto-as-phallus arose as a signifier when one remembers the automobile and its
original significations in the US, i.e. power, wealth, prominent men. However,
“phallic symbol” is a bit of an elusive term, worthy of further unpacking. Lacan29
explained the “phallus” as that signifier of both fullness and impossibility that is
always strived for by human subjects, but which is never attained (remember
how I described “lack” in the first chapter). Freud’s definition of phallus
connected it more directly to the actual male organ. Male organs, in the
signifying chain and free play of signs, visually associate with things that
“resemble it in shape”:

0 Things, accordingly, that are long and up—standing, such as sticks,
umbrellas, posts, trees;

0 Objects which share with the thing they represent the characteristic of
penetrating into the body and injuring - thus, sharp weapons of every
kind, knives, daggers, spears, sabers;

0 Things which share the “remarkable” characteristic of the male organ
which enables it to rise up in defiance of the laws of gravity;

0 Dreams can symbolize erection in yet another, far more expressive
manner. They can treat the sexual organ as the essence of the dreamer’s

whole person and make him himself fly.

(Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis 190-91)

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Remember that Freud gave us a very sophisticated scheme for analyzing visual
images as they play out in the Symbolic, and that’s why his theory is so useful for
visual rhetoric analyses. The automobile has a strong connection to phallic
symbol under Freud’s view because of its shape, its ability to penetrate or injure,
and its ability to metaphorically fly.

In this photograph, the automobile appears to have penetrated the
children’s bodies as it rises up from the centers of the girls’ open positions. It is
the image of the child bodies, my mother and aunt, mounted upon the phallic-
symboI-Studebaker that is the wound. I find this image striking in fact because of
the signification of the automobile as phallic symbol combined with the
positioning of the female children’s bodies. It is important to note as well that my
grandfather Edgar was the picture taker (i.e. the male gaze). Thinking then upon
this image of female children’s bodies, automobile, and white male photographer,
how does the photograph represent a remainder of the unconscious? How might
its rhetorical meaning be further shifted? To answer this question, it is beneficial
to use a 1994 film analysis written for Cinema Journal.

The essay psychoanalyzes an image of one automobile along with its
accompanying “body.” Under examination is a 1965 film fragment from Kenneth
Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos. Anger’s image manipulation of the car is
useful in understanding my rhetorical animation of the Studebaker and children.
Anger’s film fragment, only a few minutes long, features a teenage boy in tight
blue jeans lovingly and sensually polishing his customized car. The film begins

with the opening of the car door, a survey of the interior; the camera then moves

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to view the exterior of the car where the teenage boy stands up from behind the
engine and the camera focuses momentarily on his crotch. With “Dream Lover”
playing in the background, the boy sensually polishes his car with an oversized
pink powder puff . The entire episode occurs in a place that remains
“unidentified and basically undefined” (Cagle 24). Cagle’s main points are as
follows (paraphrased):

- The work has the visual quality of a sexual fantasy;

0 The teenager’s movements suggest a kind of masturbatory — or auto-
erotic—fantasy with the auto playing both the idealized phallus as well as
object of desire;

. The image links the “body” and the car in an economy of
narcissistic/homoerotic interaction. (24-25)

As I argue along the lines of Cagle’s points with respect to Figure 10, I wish to
state one caveat. In no way do I believe that my grandfather, the picture taker,
purposely set forth to create an image - auto-erotic.30 I don’t believe my
grandfather to be extraordinary in any sense, not particularly normal nor
perverted. In fact, from all descriptions, oral histories, and family artifacts, (my
family’s mythologizing) my grandfather was a “responsible” productive member of
the American macro-culture: a good-citizen. But that is my whole point of
course, that this photograph is just one in a series, in a rhythm, that represents
the unrepresentable. The image cannot only be used to argue in favor of a
theory of the unconscious, but it can be used to argue that through that theory,

the meanings of images can be shifted with rhetorical animation.

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The family image and Anger’s film clip contain movement. The image
because I rhetorically animate it, and the film clip because it is animated with
technology. Both image and film clip are technologically mediated
representations that feed fantasies, in this case the fantasies of the photo taker.
The family photo is a visualization of the Lacanian fantasy, a fantasy that
answers the Subject’s fear of castration, and functions discursively as evidence
of the remainder and dispensation of the unconscious’ effects (it was
unintended). Remember the unconscious is inaccessible and unborn,
unregulated and untamed (although orderly and not chaotic: it is structured like a
language).31

The unconscious can be revealed by what it repeats. (Lacan)

And in my Introduction I specifically said that this Affinity Project is an
attempt to stop the circling back.

“What cannot be remembered is repeated in behavior .” (Lacan, The Four
129).

My purpose here is to animate, to move, to rhetorically shift the meaning
of this image and remember in order to disrupt the repetition.

The “Kids On Car” image couples the automobile’s body, signifier of
aristocracy and wealth, with children’s bodies, commodifying the human bodies
(Sturken and Cartwright 200). The car as phallic symbol reveals the subjectivity
of the photographer, the male gaze, reflecting back his narcissism: “Look at this.

This is what I have.” Like the sexual fantasy in Anger’s film fragment, the

location here is “unidentified and basically undefined.” It’s only context is what I

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have given it with my own interpretation, i.e., taken in Palmyra, New Jersey,
1930’s, etc. And photographs have notoriously been coupled with sexual
fantasy:
0 Photographs can abet desire . . . as an aid to masturbation. (Sontag 16)
o . . . [P]rofessional photographers often have sexual fantasies when they
are behind the camera . . . fantasies [that] are both plausible and so

inappropriate. (Sontag 13)

. Porn was an immediate product of the daguerreotype, and the “beaver

shot” is an invention of the camera. (Solomon-Godeau)

Like Anger’s sexual fantasy, this photograph plays upon the “filmic symbol of
death: an image-based orgasm (the ‘little death’)” (27). Death is played upon by
the precarious positioning of the children; falling from their place could at least
cause small injury. Remember that Lacan said the only (insufficient) method
Subjects have of being “whole” is through heterosexual union (there is no sexual
relation). Since Subjects are defined in the field of the Other, death is a moment
when the Subject is not alienated from the Other but is “one”: the sexual union
equals a little death.

The photo plays with the mandatory subjugation of movement by trying to
resist rhetorical animation. This car is still; not the known way and function of
automobiles. If this car moved, these children, posed precariously, gripping for
balance, mounted directly above the front tires, would surely suffer fatal injury.
That image of “little death” animates this photograph, which is especially, most

certainly in the literal sense, unanimated (and must be to avoid injury to the

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Subjects pictured). Surely death is as present here as is the distorted skull, the
death-head in Holbien’s The Ambassadors. Death floats before our eyes.

And not only does the car’s exterior function as a visualization of the
phallus merged with the female children’s bodies, but the visual signs equated
with femaleness are covered over. “The female genitals are symbolically
represented by all such objects as share their characteristic of enclosing a hollow
space which can take something into itself: by pits, cavities, hollows” (Freud,
Introductory Lectures 192). While the automobile’s exterior serves as a
visualization of the phallus, its interior serves as a visualization of its femaleness.

Rhetorically animating this image, unlike the car interior the viewer is able
to fully inspect in Anger’s film (thus Anger emphasized the femaleness of the car
and it made sense for him to use a human-male-body for balance), the interior of
the Studebaker is a dark, empty hollow; details are only hinted at. This
dramatizes by contrast the hard, flat headlight “eyes” of the car, eyes which
penetrate with light (eyes that signify both the cinematic apparatus and the male
gaze), and its bulbous protruding metal fenders. In the place where female
organs should reside on the children, the fenders permeate and overtake. Not
only is the female symbol within the automobile (its interior) deemphasized, but
the femaleness of the children’s bodies is covered over. This covering over
signifies the male photographer’s need to cover over his own lack. He
manipulates the shot, unconsciously deemphasizing the female interiority of the

automobile, visually merging “lacking” female children’s bodies with the

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automobile-as-phallus, thus reflecting back his own “auto-erotic” desire, the little
death, covering over his own lack at the same time.

As the children “ride” the automobile, the girls and the automobile together
become the fetish. “The fetish object allows the subject to recreate illusorily a
scenario of (castration) anxiety and then to ‘master’ it through disavowal,
facilitating the necessary ‘relocation’ of the object from an economy of difference
to an economy of sameness based upon narcissistic . . . desire” (Freud qtd. in
Cagle 25). The female children create an illusory scenario of castration anxiety;
they cannot “have” the phallus. This scenario is mastered by disavowing the
castration: the automobile through its fenders provides relief. The difference of
the children and the car to the male picture taker is thus relocated to “an
economy of sameness” based upon narcissistic desire.

A Series of (Family) Diffractions

In chapter two I analyzed family photographs, looking for traces of my
grandmother’s resistance, through rhetorical skill, to the dominant culture. I
concluded that through visual rhetoric, my grandmother covered over her
subjectivity by wearing the “mask,” i.e. mimicry and posing. Earlier in this
chapter I mentioned that after finding the “Kids On Car” image, curiosity spurred
me to look for more family images of “girls and cars.” What I found was a series
of photographs taken across three generations: “girls on cars,” images of my
grandmother, my mother and aunt, and myself (1938 to 1978).

The question is, as “we” were pinned down and objectified as “bodies” and

nothing more, did we (they) resist? And will it help if we do? Be clear that l have

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no utopian feminist dream of a common language or a common method of
victimization and survival to offer (according to Donna Haraway, to do so is
“totalizing and imperialist” [31]).

“There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds all women”
(Haraway, Reader 14).

The question concerns “us.” I said above, what did “we” do? I am troping
in stumbles and swerves and trying to find a friendly relationship with these
“white” women whose DNA I share (considering the discourse of genetics we
interpellate, the discourse that replaces in like-kind “eugenics”).

The series of women-on-cars images in my family shows this same kind of
resistance by my grandmother and my aunt, my aunt manipulating discursive
(visual) production by wearing the “mask,” by actually laying on a car’s hood in
an intentional pose for the photographer. I find that in images of myself, I also
engage purposefully in this kind of gender performance. My mother though
embodies a different kind of resistance, but it is important to acknowledge her
resistance as well, in order to acknowledge white women’s contribution to
technology and authorship in whatever form. Like DeVoss’s WWW women, my
mother used the rhetorical tools available to her.

My mother never posed on or in a car, other than that time when she was
politely coerced by her father to sit upon the Studebaker at age four. My mother
was never one to embrace in any fashion, the sentimental white family matrix.
Well, she tried for awhile, but after she and my bio-father divorced in 1966, she

partially came out as a lesbian and lived a double life, in and out of queer culture

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(simultaneously in-and-out, depending on the time of day), life behind and in front
of the veil, a double-life I experienced along with her. I want to state another
caveat here - I do not mean to essentialize the “lesbian” experience; I just want
to explain and point out that my mother consciously and unconsciously refused to
fit into the Lacanian matrix. To illustrate her refusal visually, l have examined the
photographs I have of my mother in the vicinity of an automobile. My mother did
not resist by posing, she systematically resisted by avoiding and averting, not
returning the gaze. In the photographs of my mother she either does not meet
the camera’s gaze at all, or looks from behind the mask of dark sunglasses.

Like my grandmother “posed” for the camera with rhetorical skill, my mother
refused to pose by averting her gaze, and by this refusal she slips from the
discursive hold (she refuses to be defined in the field of the Other) and reminds
me that tactics will be employed by those less powerful (de Certeau).

As further evidence of resistance, in the “Kids On Car” image, the child-
girls, my mother and aunt, exercise an adult level of “agency” by refusing to look
back at the camera. “In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the child works in this
[psychoanalytic] experience as a subject in his/her own right and in the full sense
of the term” (Glowinski, Marks, and Murphy 19). By averting their gazes, the
female child-subjects leave their trace on the photograph, the trace that maybe
things are not as they seem. Maybe, they refuse, if even at the unconscious
level, to be victims of another Other’s “auto-erotic” desire. By averting their
gazes, the unconscious attempt at auto-eroticism by the white male, their father,

is disrupted by this trace. This series of human-car, human-machine images

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function rhetorically to visually support status quo gender performances playing
out in the Symbolic, how we as Subjects learn “to be.” But they also leave traces
of the subjectivities, acts of resistance, of the human components pictured.

“In human destiny, the remainder is always fruitful. The slag is the
extinguished remainder” (Lacan, The Four 134).
Answering Earlier Questions

By rhetorically animating my family photographs in this Affinity Project, I
can make meaning travel through space and time; I can deconstruct and
rehabilitate. I make esplanades, networks, and cat’s cradles from simple
linearity. To answer the questions I posed in the first paragraphs of this chapter,
the visual/textual productions created by the white American family can be
unconsciously configured by members of the family (those with access to
technology) as ways to maintain the status quo and suppress by providing visual
illustrations (teaching tools) of appropriate gender performance, and by providing
visualizations for Subject absorption of mainstream ideology. Such productions
function rhetorically to copy, repeat, and strengthen the master narratives that
emphasize the importance of whiteness, appropriate gender roles, and the value
of middleclassness (Smith, Wexler, Hill). Photographs’ rhetorical functionality is
further strengthened since image collections are a historical past that survive
generations and are permitted to unquestionably (and infinitely) circulate (move,
shift meaning through time and space) through a variety of public displays

(Smith, Wexler, Hill).

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For example, it is significant that while plenty of historic family
photographs of white people circulate in the culture (posting on the networks of
the web is a common practice), Powell points out that after the US Army Seventh
Cavalry’s South Dakota “Ghost Dance” massacre of 1890, the burial of the
”bodies of dead Lakotas . . . piled into wagons and shoveled into mass graves”
were photographed by George Trager, and the eleven images “are widely
distributed and reproduced even today” (54). It is difficult to see a way out of this
closed system of signification when what constitutes an “event,” such as the
Ghost Dance massacre and everyday “white family life” are determined to be
events and cemented technologically as images for public display and cultural
circulation (Sontag 19). It is difficult to see a way out when certain communities
of people were historically permitted access to technology like the camera in
order to construct their own identities (like my family was), while others were
disenfranchised from the same technologies (Wexler). It means something when
the images circulating of one group of people are by-and-large “live” people, and
the other images circulating of a different group of people are “dead” people.
Photographs are a way of at least “tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever
is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in
things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged” (Sontag 12). What
I’m offering in this chapter is a way out of the status quo. The way out of the
endless repetition, the coming back to the same place, is through applying
rhetoric. If we rhetorically animate we can change meaning — so of course we

move together in alliance, shifting meaning to make the world better.

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Soto answer Rogoff’s earlier question: Whose fantasies are fed by which
visual images?, using psychoanalysis I argue that in this case the image
functioned to fulfill the fantasies of a white American middleclass male. It
allowed him to unconsciously engage in behavior prohibited by the larger culture
by negotiating a discursive production specifically sanctioned within the existing
culture. It also serves as proof of how the male gaze is a by-product of
subjectivity that interpellated the culturally sanctioned mixing-and-matching of
white-female-bodies-and-cars in order to produce meanings that supported
hegemony: white females have equivalent meaning as cars, but women of color
are not even worth “seeing.” The fantasy has been fed, and since this image has
survived for almost seventy years, and is now posted on my professional
website, in addition to appearing (again) in this thesis, it is an aspect of the
historical past that is culturally sanctioned to circulate. It denotatively appears to
reproduce middleclass whiteness, a happy family, but past connotation to
rhetorical animation, I “see” it first as reproducing violence and oppression, but
finally I “see” traces of resistance. The women in my family then, are tied
together through the systematic marginalization we have endured under the
unconscious (maybe conscious) refractive behavior of one or another white male
each time we are “shot” sitting on a car: my grandfather, perhaps a boyfriend,
perhaps a “male fiance.” But at the same time, we leave traces of survivance.

In answer to Rogoffs question asking what political discourses can be
read for resistance, the discourse of the family photograph, its power, certainly

forms a political discourse in what it tries to do, that is, cement a smooth linear

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narrative of gendered, raced, classed Subjects. The discourse of “our family” is a
political discourse that maintains hegemony, but can also be read for traces of
resistance (Wexler).

Finally, using psychoanalysis as a tool for rhetorical animation can work
towards some small step on a path in the other direction, ending the repetition
that plays out between and across visual images as they interact in the Symbolic,
and can work towards an end to the always-already beginning where we already
began. I have hope that the future is not already-written (and that even the
always-already can be re-written, as Powell does in her scholarship). I hope that
in the endless displacement of signifiers in the Symbolic, displacements
constructing networks that define Subjects even beyond death, like the purloined
letter, we won’t always end up in the same place.

Rebuilding with the Cyborg Subject Position

In this chapter I have looked at pictures of female Subjects in my family.
However, I have carefully tried not to essentialize the category “female.” To this
end, in the earlier subsection of this chapter, “A Series of (Family) Diffractions,”
while I acknowledge that I look at pictures of female Subjects across generations,
Haraway reminds us that there is nothing about being “female” that binds all
women (Reader). To say all women experience the same existence, according
to Haraway is “imperialistic.” And so, as a “feminist”32 through what lens can I
find some connection to the women in my family, without essentializing? The
category “feminist” has undergone much painful splitting, and as a partial answer

to that, Haraway offers up the Cyborg Myth, a hybrid organism -machine. She is

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very particular about how the Cyborg should be defined, and while I don’t think
any scholar should try to colonize a term, even one she invented, I see why she’s
concerned. I haven’t focused on the emerging field in R&W of “Digital Rhetoric,”
but in that field (and in other areas of R&W where scholars write about
technology), the term Cyborg is (reductively) coming to mean “all kinds of
artifactual, mechanic relationships with human beings” (Haraway, How Like
128).33 It’s beneficial for writers to take a term and stretch it’s meaning, make
cat’s cradles and esplanades, but what needs to be guarded against is taking a
rich term like Cyborg and sealing off its meaning, i.e., being linguistically
reductive, or doing what Haraway names “cognitive fetishism,” or creating what
Whitehead calls “simplified editions of immediate matters of fact” (Haraway, How
Like 92).

In order to lay an initial foundation for further development of this concept
in chapter four’s subsection “Cyborg Writing and Rhetorical Rehabilitation,” I am
going to briefly unpack the term “Cyborg” as Haraway defines it. I pointed out
earlier that according to Haraway, the Cyborg emerged from the specific histories
of WW II, and the theories of information and information processing that came
out of that time. My grandmother’s coming of age time. The time my mother was
“born.” 1938, of or near the year the “Kids On Car" image was cemented, is the
same year C.R. Carpenter had his first ideas for “behavioral experiments using
primates with brain ablations” (Haraway, How Like 205). 34

The Cyborg image, “Kids on Car,” cements the signs of child-bodies and

car-bodies through the technology of the camera, and is now again mediated in

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this chapter through the technology of the computer. The Cyborg, like my
grandmother (and mother and aunt) is a Subject skewered by discourse,
ideology, culture, machine, and technology whose visualization cannot be
understood without contextualization. The contextualization of the Cyborg
Subject Positions of my “kin,” points to the leaky distinctions between human-
machine, and physical-non-physical subjectivities. My relatives now are ghostly
traces, but they are “real.” They are me, but they are not me. They transform.
They move. Cyborgs are animated creatures. And they offer only a partial
commonality among Subjects interpellated with gender, race, and class.
Cyborgs make a space (in refutation to Lacan but built on Lacan) “to be” post-
gender (like the girl-bodies and car-bodies were cemented in sameness to the
“male” photographer’s body). The Cyborg Subject Position takes the polluted
inheritances we have but still isn’t hopeless. My chapter here is only a small
beginning to the kind of research and theorizing I’d like to see in R&W, especially
in the Digital Rhetoric strand. We need work that complicates, historicizes, and
maybe even remediates the notion of Cyborg Subject Position.35 It may prove
useful.

I will end this chapter by emphasizing that there is a connection between
the female Subjects in my family, but the only way I can make this connection
without essentializing, is to place all of us in the Cyborg Subject Position. This is
exactly how Haraway intended the concept be used — in order to avoid

imperialism and essentialism. That is why I have taken the time in closing this

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chapter to further unpack this term. I will further discuss this issue in chapter

four.

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CHAPTER FOUR: Rhetorical Reconstruction: The Black and White Truth

of True (White) Womanhood

Many women have been caught - have split themselves — between
two mothers: one, usually the biological one, who represents the
culture of domesticity, of male-centeredness, of conventional
expectations, and another . . . who becomes the countervailing
figure. Adrienne Rich. Of Woman Born
The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be
some kind of sentimentalism . . . a semblance of knowledge, a
semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is a semblance
of appropriation, a semblance of rape. The very muteness of what
is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what
constitutes their attraction and provocativeness. Susan Sontag. On
Photography
Overview
In the first three chapters, I argued that visual rhetoric needs to become
Visual Rhetoics and include visual culture by way of including and allying with
cultural rhetorics scholarship. I’ve argued that Lacanian psychoanalysis is
helpful in analyzing the visual because Lacan said that subjectivity is mediated
by a “screen” wherein we all appear to others as pictures. I have also illustrated
how family photographs are used to mythologize family stories of linear, pure
“identity,” but how we can challenge these stories by reading resistantly and
rhetorically animating pictures, unseeing their intended meaning, and instead
seeing traces of subjectivity and agency sometimes unconsciously constructed. l
have described how photographs functioned rhetorically in my family to make
appear a vision of raced, classed, gendered subjectivities. Photographs are a

way to encourage and maintain the status quo (Sontag 12). I have conjured up

the Cyborg Subject Position as a partial “healing” explanation of my family’s

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subjectivities: our connectedness. However in chapter three I posed a question
that l have left unanswered until now: Who do we get to see and who is erased
(Rogoff)? Or my way of putting it: What does the blank space mean?

At this point I am going to engage a rhetorical analysis of one photograph
that was prominently and publically displayed on the walls of my childhood home.
My rhetorical analysis in this section moves away from focusing on images
hidden away in boxes, uncovering what was literally hidden, to uncovering what
was hidden in plain view, like the purloined letter.

Everyday Practices

Like most white families in my working class neighborhood, my mother
displayed pictures, photographs of family members. Her habit of hanging family
photographs on our home’s walls was an everyday practice embraced by most
neighborhood families, and my mother’s purpose in displaying the 1939
photograph, “My Family” (See FIGURE 11) was consciously well-intentioned; the
photo gave her pleasure; it was an assurance to herself and “the world” that she
was a “loved child,” and it was a remembrance of “safe times” and “a time in my
life that I had no problems” (Walther). The function of the photograph for my
mother was to “actively promote nostalgia” (Sontag 15). Commenting on the
function of family photographs in American homes, bell hooks writes that she
“was somewhat awed and frightened at times by our extended family’s emphasis
on picture taking . . . every wall and corner of my grandparents’ (and most
everybody else’s) home was lined with photographs” (49). Hooks’s grandmother

was the “keeper of the walls,” and the display was one that asserted the hooks

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family’s “collective will to participate in a noninstitutionalized curatorial process”;
to hooks the photo covered walls were “essential to the process of
decolonization” and a way her community averted the gaze of white supremacy
(50). In contrast, the practice of photo display in my “white” family’s home served
a different rhetorical function. Hooks’s family and my family both displayed
photographs, but because we are two different subjectivities, those displays do
not mean the same thing. This cultural and rhetorical awareness is critical to
Visual Rhetorics’ scholarship as academics complete WWW “identity” research.
The importance of increasing awareness through retelling stories is
emphasized by Johnson as he invokes Michael de Certeau’s call for us to look
more closely at everyday practice. The stories that need retelling, Johnson says,
are the stories of “technology.” My family pictures, created by the technology of
the camera, hide the story of their production, of how they mediate subjectivity for
us and then present an artifact by way of “the picture” that seems “real”: “The
knowledge of everyday practice has become nearly voiceless: a colonized
knowledge . . . Yet the voices and the knowledge embedded in the stories are
still there - they are just more difficult to hear, more difficult to recognize”
(Johnson 5). So technologically mediated subjectivities hold power in what they
hide. De Certeau writes: “the skin of the servant is the parchment on which the
master’s hand writes . . . [ejvery power, including the power of law, is written first
of all on the backs of its subjects” (140). The family photos in my childhood
home were an ideologically constructed “law,” a law literally inscribed on the back

of one servant, but inscribed as well on the bodies of my “family” Subjects. The

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photographs I have serve as visual talisman of how dominant ideologies were
inscribed on the bodies of my family. Photographs of “my white family”
commodity their Subjects, erasing means of production and excluding those who
enable, those who labor and build; excluding those Subjects who don’t visually,
politically, culturally, or economically, fit the definition: “White Middleclass
Family.” Those laborers are absented. But “absence” signifies presence of
meaning; “ . . . meaning is to be found precisely where it is no longer in its place“
(Lacan, The Four 217). Family photographs make meaning through
displacement. A decision on what to picture is also a decision on what to
exclude.
Making the Transparent Visible: Gayatri Spivak

Conjuring up the absence that’s been achieved through displacement,
means that in order to act ethically I must acknowledge my position as a
researcher from whom emanates the Western lntellectual’s gaze (Spivak)?6 In
my Preface and Introduction, and in the autobiographical self-reflexive nature of
this work, I’ve made clear that for me to represent myself as transparent not only
risks working towards an essentialist agenda, but restricts my intellectual
engagement with the images I study. Because I have been open about my
positionality as I’ve laid it out for the reader in this Affinity Project, I hope I am not
transparent, because this rhetorical investigation now requires me to conjure up
a woman’s body, a body erased by “my white family.”

I hope that at this point in my text it has become clear that I write from the

position of feminisms. but that I also cannot escape my “blood.” I wish to heed

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Spivak’s warning that a failure to question or consider the potential transparency
of myself as investigating intellectual, even though investigating something as
“mundane” as family photographs, is a failure to engage in the feminist project
she suggests: “The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task
which she must not disown with a flourish” (308).

As I mentioned in the Preface, Spivak is not called up much by Visual
Rhetorics scholars, but she should be, since she specifically addresses
transparency and visibility, two major elements of the “visual.” She supports
Derrida in saying we should read space, blank space as it fits with text (or
images). “Thought is . . . the blank part of the text’ . . . [t]hat inaccessible
blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text is what a postcolonial critic of
imperialism would like to see developed within the European enclosure as the
place of the production of theory” (294). Haraway says, “Gayatri Spivak’s work
has been more important to me [than Derrida’s] because of the way she
incorporates deconstruction into anti-racist feminist theory” (How Like 21). l have
referenced Powell’s (anti-racist) calls on these pages, and here I reiterate her call
for R&W to stop its reliance on “Greek, Roman, European, even European
American thinkers” (39). And while Spivak is a “thinker,” an intellectual, she is
nonetheless a “Third World Woman” (and so does not fall within the old reliance’s
Powell refers to). To unframe the boundaries of canon by using Spivak is to
proceed in the spirit of Powell’s call. So I shall try on the pages I have left, to

write with Spivak by translating (not sublating) her theory as it pertains to the

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blank space circumscribed by an “interpretable text,” i.e. the representation of
faces, bodies, objects, in the typical “white” American family photograph.
The Family Picture and “My Black Mother”

When one glances at Figure 11, the interpretable “text” (Barthes’
denotative meaning), the images expressed are my grandmother, my mother,
and my only maternal aunt, female Subjects who bear their father’s name.37 My
grandmother Martine wears a fashionable, neatly buttoned white coat; a tasteful
scarf nestles symmetrically in her coat’s collar, and my mother and aunt sport
matching snowsuits that echo the newness of their tricycles. One sees an
always already image of seeming happiness, an image that embraces the
sentimental white middleclass family that is the basis for Freud and Lacan’s
theory.

Looking at the space this photograph creates, the blank space
circumscribed by the obvious (my female kin, clean clothing, new bikes, and so
on) my task is now to read the blank space circumscribed by the obvious, to
rupture the Real, as a place where meaning might be produced and to do so in
such a way that I as an investigating intellectual, am not transparent. Of course,
the reader is free to draw his or her own conclusions and make his or her own
insights on my positionality. While I am not present in the interpretable text of the
photograph, I am present in this rhetorical reading. We can look at the child body
of my mother and know it is the one place I have been; I am not there yet but I

have been there now.

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The picture was taken by my grandfather Edgar, and it is clear he
captured the approving look of all three subjects. In the facial expressions of my
female kin and their body positioning I do not read resistance. My mother’s face
(on the right) appears a bit hesitant, but for the most part, this photograph
captures a moment in time where perhaps the photo taker and the Subjects were
in complicity towards the story: “Truth” they together produce.

Because the photo was taken on New Year’s Day, it is likely these
Subjects show off commodities recently received as part of a white protestant
middleclass Christmas tradition. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
American family photographs served not just as spaces for gender and class
performances, but also as constructors of racial identity (Smith). My
grandmother’s racial identity stands appropriately as a centerpiece of white
female perfection. This central positioning is a representation of eugenicists’
image of the white female body. Albert Edward Wiggam, a “prominent
popularizer of eugenics in America,” encouraged and posited [whitejwomen at
the very center of fantastical white perfection: “It is peculiarly to woman that
America looks for the realization of this ideal. She is the natural conservator for
the race, the guardian of its blood” (qtd. in Smith, American Archives 122). A
number of scholars point out the direct connection between eugenics and
American family photography as rhetorically constructing, through both textual
and visual discursive productions, a national metanarrative of white blood
inheritance (Smith, Wexler).

The metanarrative of white blood inheritance with white female at the

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center was threatened by my grandmother and others like her working in the
public domain. She threatened “the livelihood of her elite white social class by
refusing to procreate” (Smith, American Archives 122), and in fact it was unusual
for a woman to wait five years after marriage before having children as she did.38
For my grandmother, special pressures were exerted since neither her only
sibling, brother Lamar, nor her two sisters-in-law, Margaret and Florence, had
children. The family lineage, blood of “whiteness,” but for my grandmother could
have failed to reproduce itself. Thus this photo has a special exigency.

The white female body, like the family photograph, was looked to as the
reproducer of middleclass whiteness: “white woman emerged as the foundation
of racialized class and national discourses” (Smith, American Archives 122). My
grandmother’s white female body is an object of repetition, a commodity, as are
the two children’s bodies. With what Susan Sontag defines as a “semblance of
rape” (24), Edgar took this picture of the three female subjects in answer to a
perceived moral duty to reproduce a linear legacy of middleclass whiteness.
Wexler writes that “[p]hotography was part of the master narrative that created
and cemented cultural and political inequalities of race and class [and
gender]”( 164). This photograph hung on the wall of my family home then,
unquestioned until now, functioning not as a resistance to white supremacist
hegemony (as did the photos in hooks’s life world), but as a reproducer of that
dominant ideology, an ideology internalized by the Subjects assigned to

reproduce it.

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In my attempt to read absence in this photograph, rupture the Real, to
speak of something unrepresentable. to look not at connotative or denotative
meaning, but something else, I cannot help but note the jutting barren trees or
the unsettling scuffed white baby shoes that violently negate, even rupture the
photo’s othenrvise sentimental perfection. These imperfections give me an entry
point to reinterpret what this picture denies in the blank space circumscribed by
the interpretable text. The bottom of my grandmother’s white coat folds
uncannily open at the hem, as if held back by an invisible hand. The image asks
for a peeling away of the coat, the snowsuits, the gloves, a peeling away the
layers.

In peeling away the layers, the middleclass white simulation is abruptly
halted. The blank space from which the law of middleclassdom and white
heritage spring, the blank space itself becomes a vision of a woman inscribed
with “My Family Story” : this photo is written on the invisible but literal physical
body - on the back of the absent servant named and thus objectified by Western
macroculture as “black nanny,” “post-emancipation African-American domestic
worker,” “mammy”; but indeed this woman had a name, and in saying her human
name, which was never uttered by my “white” family, I hope to use de Certeau’s
metaphor of fragmented mirrors, not to reconstruct her but to see her as a mirror
reflecting back on my own “white” heritage.39

Her name was Melinda.

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Based on the dozens of emails I have exchanged with my mother the last
few months, Melinda was a complex female subject who literalized W.E.B. Du
Bois’s notion of double-consciousness. Jacky wrote:

One other thing I remember is that when our mother would take
Melinda home we would go with her and sometimes we would go in
her house, which I thought was wonderful. Melinda had a couple of
kids much older than us and she talked to us about them all the
time, telling us what they did. (Walther)
Melinda lived in two worlds, that of mother in black civil society in Riverton, New
Jersey and that of domestic worker in my grandmother’s home in neighboring
Palmyra; Du Bois describes this double existence as one of “two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals” (2). She worked for the
family from Jacky’s birth (1935) until the high school years, only taking time off
when my grandmother stayed home to nurse Jacky through polio.40

Jacky’s email goes on to say:

One time Melinda talked about the wonderful 16th birthday party
she was having for her daughter and I wanted to go. She told me I
was too young, but I kept begging and begging; I told her I would
stay in the kitchen and just peek around the door, but she still told
me I couldn't go to the party. She finally told me my mother
wouldn't want me to come because they were black and l was
white. I really don't know how my parents would have answered

but they certainly weren’t prejudiced and at age 8 I wasn't aware

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that black and white was so different and weren't friends with each
other (not in the 1940's). That was [the] first I knew of it and it
shocked me and I knew that there wasn't any use taking the
request any further . . . I sure loved her and felt very safe when she
was in the house. (Walther)
Maybe my grandparents weren’t “prejudiced” in a crude, in-your-face manner but
they were direct participants in maintaining what Patricia Hill Collins calls the
“fundamental relationship of injustice” (49). Collins explains that after
emancipation, black women workers were confined to either field labor or
domestic work (53-54). African-American women who withdrew from the labor
force to tend to their own families were highly criticized by whites for aspiring to a
womanhood that wasn’t theirs (Collins 54). “A common migration pattern was for
Black girls to train for domestic work in the South by doing chores and taking
care of siblings. Around age 10, they went to Northern cities to assist working
relatives . . .They eventually — often after years of search - found employment in
day work” (56). Collins writes that domestic work was often exploitive since
workers were judged by their personality and ability to act with deference: “those
women who were submissive or who successfully played the role of obedient
servant were more highly valued by their employers” (56). In puncturing the
unwritable, unspeakable Real of Figure 11, it must be stated that in order for my
mother to have that “safe time” with “no problems,” a sacrifice, a giving up of the
“bone ignorance of curiosity” (Spillers, “All the Things” 151) was made by a

collective of black female domestic workers who were socialized to be domestic

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workers from early childhood on. And the category of white supremacist racism
my grandparents practiced is persistently perverse in its hiddeness and self-
negation. It’s a racism left largely unexamined by “my people,” and although I
can offer neither an “answer nor a cure” (Spillers, “All the Things” 138) perhaps
me speaking on this practice might end a repetition.
To conjure up Melinda, I have my mother’s emails. I acknowledge those

are only fragmented reflections of my mother’s perceptions of Melinda; I
understand the debate among scholars on the African-American Subject being
Othered and constructed through a lens of white supremacy. However, it is not
overreaching to say that Jacky-the—child experienced the Law-of-Melinda.41 It’s
clear in Jacky’s bountiful writings that Melinda spoke, and Melinda made the law
(at least as to the children). Melinda made the law for my childmother — but in
Jacky’s writing she remembers: “She finally told me my mother wouldn't want me
to come [my emphasis] because they were black and l was white.” Jacky has
remembered Melinda not as making law from Melinda’s place of authority, but
deferring to white supremacy first, and then speaking. Sometimes in my
mother’s remembrances though - Melinda speaks directly from Melinda’s place
of authority. My mother remembers:

[A] girlfriend and I went to the movies. I was probably about 8;

when we got home Melinda was ironing in the kitchen; she asks us

how the movie was, and I don't know what the girl was describing

but she uses the word nigger, and Melinda got absolutely outraged;

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she told that girl if she used words like that she wasn't welcome in

the house and she wanted her to get out of the kitchen. (Walther)
In this part of my mother’s discussion, she tells me that she was not afraid of
Melinda, but implies that her white girlfriend was. Whoever Melinda was, she
had power in the home of my “white” family. She had enough power to exercise
territoriality over the domain of the “white family home” - the power to make rules
and even to eject “white” Subjects: “. . . she wasn’t welcome in the house . . .
get out of the kitchen . . .” Melinda had the power to influence “white family”
discourse. Power and influence that’s been unacknowledged: influence on the
subject formation of my mother, my mother the only place that I know I have
been. However, I am not trying to valorize Melinda or speak for her or even
make room for her to speak.

This is the place where, remembering Spivak’s criticism of the Western
intellectual, I am powerless to do anything more than invoke an “‘appeal’ to or
‘call’ to the ‘quiet-other’ . . . ‘of rendering delirious that internal voice that is the
voice of the other in us’” (Derrida qtd. in Spivak 294). This is why I have
consulted such authors as Patricia Hill Collins, Ann DuCille, Hortense Spillers,
Shawn Michelle Smith, Donna Haraway, Malea Powell- in an attempt to
disengage any tendency in myself to assimilate the Other as my family did in this
picture. In this picture, my family’s assimilation of Melinda was so complete, they
erased her and all that’s left to represent Melinda now, is the techne of rhetoric.
What is interesting to me is Spivak’s emphasis upon Derrida’s notion of “the

voice of the other in us.” The voice, Melinda’s voice is rendered delirious, but it is

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not the voice of the Other; it is the empathized, passionate voice of the other in
us. Melinda’s voice is inside, has penetrated my mother. My mother is in me.

It’s made clear by such feminist writers as Haraway, Spivak and others,
that there is no essential female experience, no universal woman language, no
place for me to stand as a writer engaging the art of rhetoric as techne and say
that it was my grandmother and Melinda together against white male hegemony.
Instead, employing the art of rhetoric as an intervention tool, I “unsee” the white-
mother-and-her—two-kids, and I “see” a blank space of precise complicity of
whites together, male and female, in a conspiratorial, poisonous plan to suppress
any story that negates the magical purity of the white sentimental family matrix.
The blank space in its passivity and ubiquity, as it constructs a photographic
record is “its aggression” (Sontag 7). To unsee the blank space as “empty” of
meaning and to see that space as aggressively and poisonously making
meaning, is to acknowledge our family story where my grandmother was a
superwoman who worked and cooked and cleaned and raised two dutiful white
faced daughters, that story is false. Rhetorical intervention tells me that our
family story has been partially constructed through visual rhetoric, and that
rhetoric has let certain ‘truths” come into being, while others have been
suppressed. In my story however, instead of saying “Melinda erased herself
from this photograph,” I say, “My family erased Melinda.” Because that is what I
think is true based on my subjectivity and my own understanding of history.

All I can offer here is Melinda as mediated by myself, my mother, and so

on, and attempt to examine her absence in oral history or family pictures. Even if

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Melinda was sitting here next to me, once I interpret her existence, all I can ever
offer is my own reading, springing from my life world.42 This is what I want R&W
researchers, writers, and scholars to understand. There is no objectivity. Your
work is defined by the questions you ask, and the questions you ask are defined
by your subjectivity. You define your theses based on what you allow to come to
light. It is so simple and so obvious. Therefore, the intellectual must not remain
transparent, must not look “outward” without first looking “inward,” must not
represent without realizing in that representation is a reflection of the
intellectual’s subjectivity. Now, in my story, Melinda cannot represent herself and
I cannot “represent” her either.

My choice then is to remain silent and actively maintain the erasure that’s
taken place, or speak, articulate. This articulation can never be a speaking for
Melinda. But what I can do is try to understand her place in my family as a
meaning maker, as a discursive place holder, like the purloined letter in Poe’s
story. I can also retrieve glimmerings of her presence as a human agent in this
world. To do that, l have to create a sort of rhetorical bricolage in order to
surface the effect of Melinda’s absent presence in the material life of my family
and on the story the family “tells” about itself visually. In patchwork, l piece
together scholarship, and my family photos with my mother’s writings.

My mother’s writings represent Melinda as a woman with a life and
children of her own that needed tending to and if Melinda hadn’t left her own
home and children for a low status, near invisible position as “black nanny,” it’s

highly likely my grandmother wouldn’t be pictured in her new leopard skin and

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beaver coats; she wouldn’t be sitting on a sparkling new car (when Melinda
apparently did not have one since she needed a ride home); my aunt and mother
wouldn’t have had new tricycles and life size doll houses and matching snow
suits, because if Melinda hadn’t been ministering to my aunt and mother, my
grandmother couldn’t have accumulated the wealth from her own publically
statured employment as a nurse.

I spent time in earlier chapters showing that my female relatives were not
helpless victims, and were able to use rhetorical skill as strategies to avert
dominating ideologies and the male gaze. As far as responsibility for purposes of
redress, if my grandmother was not helpless, then it was my grandmother's
subjectivity as well as anyone’s who erased Melinda. Yes, the taking of
responsibility is in order. Now, the question becomes, was Melinda a powerless
“victim”? Did my family completely oppress her as it erased her? Here I have to
piece together a history. In her double roles as mother and “Othermother,”
Collins says the black domestic worker was able to develop oppositional
knowledges in her unique place as “outsider-within” (10-11). On this point Collins
writes:

Black women not only performed domestic duties but frequently
formed strong ties with the children they nurtured, and with the
employers themselves. On one level this insider relationship was
satisfying to all concerned. Accounts of Black domestic workers
stress the sense of self-affirrnation the women experienced at

seeing racist ideology demystified. But on another level Black

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women knew that they could never belong to their White “families.”

(10-1 1)
Jacky’s emails make clear that at some point, at the point where the white child
wished to attend something as familiar and intimate as a birthday party, the
social reality of Melinda’s situation as “black nanny” became real. In Jacky’s
emails she says she loved Melinda, and she believes Melinda loved her back:
“She took care of us and did housework, like washing clothes, ironing, cleaning
floors, etc. I remember her (and so does aunt m) as very warm, willing to hug
(something we didn't get in our house) and I always knew what to expect; I didn't
have to do any second guessing. Think I already mentioned, but can't tell you
enough how so very important that was” (Walther).

No matter how she loved Jacky or that love was returned, these two
female subjects could never be “family” in the traditional sense, in the space of
“natural identification.” But the positive that came out of this duality of existence,
according to Collins, was both the white family’s raised awareness of the black
female subject’s humanness, and as importantly, Collins attributes the
foundations of black feminist thought to the outsider-within status which spurred
oppositional knowledges.43 So in answer to my question, what about Melinda? I
have to hope, to dream, to make a story, that like my grandmother, her
subjectivity allowed her to rhetorically navigate the path she had to in order to be
“black nanny.”

I have spent a number of hours researching images of African American

women from that time period in a futile attempt to have some kind of visual

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representation of Melinda (certainly a longing for lost origins). But the images I
find are those made by white women such as Doris Ulmann (1882-1932) and
Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978), both artists known for their desire to find certain
African-American women “types” to fulfill their own fantasies (Davidov). And in
examining the memories of both my mother and myself, we both saw my white
grandmother as pure and distant, and my mother saw Melinda as warm and
nurturing. It is difficult to know to what extent the subjectivities of my
grandmother and Melinda were performed to meet the larger culture’s
expectations, and to what extent our memories are clouded by the stereotypes of
“pure white lady” and “black mammy.” In her comments on this Master’s Thesis,
Malea Powell says that simply Ieaming that black women equal love and white
women equal distance might deeply inculcate a Subject into one of the central
logics of white supremacy: that black folks are “emotional” and white folks are
“rational.” I agree with Powell. This is also very unsettling because it makes one
wonder just how deeply the simulacra goes, and one wonders whether
Baudrillard is correct in that we are existing in layers of simulacra with nothing at
all underneath.

And so, as simulacra, and as a representation of a white family, Figure
11, in order to function as the rhetorical meaning maker it was intended to be, the
image could not include Melinda even though she was intimately involved with
this family.44 Her physical presence would have splayed the visual rhetoric of
white family. No ideological space existed where she could be a picture of “a

woman.” A visual representation of Melinda would acknowledge what my

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grandmother never did: a black female Subject contributed — supported on her
back - this white family’s “success.” Melinda was used to cover over the family’s
lack, and then my grandmother blinded herself to that contribution. Melinda is
absent, unnamed, erased. “She [My Black Mother] was meant to be utterly
annihilated” (Rich 255). Ann duCille rightly points out the brutality inflicted on
“My Black Mother” by Rich’s failure to name her while possessing her. My
grandmother never mentioned Melinda’s name nor her existence although she
frequently, even obsessively spoke of white folks “back east.” Here I must
release that which was exiled and bring to light the violence of my own ancestral
legacy by acknowledging and redressing what I can (Powell). I attempt to
“honestly engage . . . [my] own autobiographical implication in a brutal past. . .[in
hopes of] provide[ing] nuances such as that of the black feminist critic”
(Henderson qtd. in Abel 108). In my discussion here I have taken duCille’s
words to heart.

I do not wish to create a “silent racial matemalized Other” nor a “black
mammy” nor someone who “mothers the ignorant white infant into
enlightenment” (duCille 41). I did not know Melinda: no one in my family did.
Patricia Hill Collins notes that one technique early 1900’s employers of domestic
workers used to maintain a power structure was to address them by their first
name (56-57). I cannot speak Melinda’s last name because it has been erased
by years of silence, just as her presence in my mother’s life has been erased in
our family’s photo narrative. However, Melinda’s presence reflects back tellingly

on how my grandmother constructed her own whiteness through discursive

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productions — whiteness as a raced designation that is inextricably intertwined
with genderedness and class. De Certeau writes:

Every particular study is a many-faceted mirror (others reappear

everywhere in this space) reflecting the exchanges, reading, and

confrontations that form the condition of its possibility, but it is a

broken and anamorphic mirror (others are fragmented and altered

by it). (44)
Here is where the art of rhetoric is so lovely, because rhetoric is what I use to
acknowledge and redress. There is no other redress l have but my ability to use
rhetoric. This is what I offer.

Having looked at how Figure 11 came to be, having “unseen” it, I can now

“see” that image freshly as Melinda reappears everywhere in the black and white
space. Her appearance fragments that linear narration of wholeness, the lost
origins of white supremacy and in doing so, alters my own interior
intersubjectivity. I think of Hortense Spillers’s positing “the blankness of race
where something else ought to be, that emptying out . . . the evacuation to be
restituted and recalled as the discipline of a self-critical inquiry” (“All the Things”
140). This Affinity Project is an attempt at self-critical inquiry wherein I have
rhetorically deconstructed and tried to reassemble in pieces and patchwork; like
the women Web authors in DeVoss’s study who are “bricoleurs” mixing rituals
and makeshifts in order to manipulate space (85). l construct a rhetorical
bricolage: My “Identity.” It is the discipline of self-critical inquiry that makes clear

to me my grandmother’s identity, the visual legacy she left behind, as a white and

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middleclass “body,” was dependant on the body of Melinda. The Du Boisian
double consciousness of Melinda’s existence appears and disappears (as in the
pulsation Lacan writes of), and I see my grandmother’s own existence, her life,
predicated on that disappearance. “[W]hen the subject appears somewhere as
meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading’, as disappearance. There is,
then, one might say, a matter of life and death [my emphasis] between the unary
signifier and the subject” (Lacan, The Four 218). My grandmother needed
Melinda’s presence in order to construct herself as middleclass True (White)
Woman. My grandmother could not be white unless another Subject, an Other,
was somewhere being “not white.” “I wish to stress the operation of the
realization of the subject in his signifying dependence in the locus of the Other"
(Lacan, The Four 206). My grandmother’s life, her subjectivity, her ability to be a
sign in the chain of signifiers, required her own signifying dependence on the
blank space that is the locus of Melinda.

The Cult of True White Womanhood: “My White Grandmother”

Like Melinda, my grandmother’s existence was founded on a double
consciousness, a split persona: New Woman versus True Woman. The four
cardinal virtues of America’s True (White) Womanhood were “piety, purity,
submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter 21). America’s nineteenth century
woman held the “pillars of the temple with her frail white hand” (21).

Positioned centrally in a variety of discursive productions including the
visual, America’s True (White) Woman was the foundational pillar and

gatekeeper of civilized “white” American society. She was thought of as naturally

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religious, and to this end my grandmother regularly attended church and tithed
appropriate amounts to respectable charities. Welter writes that for the true
woman purity was so important that one should choose death over status as a
“fallen woman” (23). My grandmother posited herself as faithful always to Edgar
and celibate for ten years after his death — until her second marriage (of course
to a widower, not a divorced man).

It is on the virtues of submissiveness and domesticity that | see my
grandmother’s double consciousness evolve. She was submissive to Edgar’s
will when it behooved her, but in her job she had some non-culturally sanctioned
power, i.e., she appeared to “have” the phallus. Welter points out nursing was an
important private skill for the true woman, but the cult of that “trail white hand”
condemned working in the public domain.

So my grandmother experienced conflict in working outside the home.
This is where she crossed over from True Woman to New Woman. My argument
is that my grandmother as well as our family mythologizing by way of its visual
rhetoric, worked towards discursive productions that constructed my
grandmother’s identity against the New Woman of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. “The good bourgeois wife [New Woman] was to limit her
fertility, symbolize her husband’s affluence, and do good within the world” (Smith-
Rosenberg 177, 225).

This order to do good, to care, that was imposed upon the white woman is
tied directly to the advent of the nursing profession where my grandmother

existed. Her attachment to nursing was lifelong and as I’ve illustrated in this

120

work, was reinforced and valued visually in our family story. I have several
pictures of her in uniform. What is photographed is valued; this cannot be
suppressed.

Maybe in the larger culture it might have been acceptable for a white
woman to be a nurse; in small-town Palmyra it was highly irregular for a white
mother to work; no other neighborhood families had nannies of any race
(Walther): the New Woman was not culturally sanctioned. However, in Figure
11, Martine the nurse who did “good within the world,” visually demonstrates for
us the material affluence of her husband and “his” two healthy children (but only
two). To her chagrin, she fulfilled all the requirements of New Woman. It was in
this split consciousness of New Woman versus True Woman that my
grandmother needed Melinda in order to construct herself as still one within the
cult of true (white) womanhood. My grandmother may have worked with her
hands, but she had a “servant” — putting her back into the middleclass. Someone
else cooked the family’s meals and did the wash. Melinda provided a
constructive link to domesticity. By attending to her dutiful responsibilities,
Martine (vicariously enjoyed) and secured Melinda as Otherrnother to fulfill the
domestic function of True Woman.

Looking at the virtue of submissiveness through a Lacanian lens where
“the man must appear to ‘have the phallus’ and the woman must appear to ‘be
the phallus’” (Walton 230), Melinda’s implication in the white family matrix
complicates. Martine may have submitted to Edgar on issues like who-takes-the-

photos and when-do-we-go-on-holiday, but to work outside the home was a

121

negation of her white female duty to cover over his lack by being the phallus, as
in reflecting the power, supplying a site for penetration (Walton 230). Edgar as
white male is the one looked to for possession of the phallus, and my
grandmother should have merely reflected that by assisting in the construction of
our family’s visual narrative as she posed with commodities like fur coats, new
cars, and children, etc. And my grandmother did pose. She masqueraded.
Melinda’s presence was a lifeline to my grandmother’s way out from under
the posing. After the ungendering experience of the middle passage, the
enslaved black woman carried a “patriarchalized female gender” (Spillers,
“Mama’s” 72-73). Falsely named matriarch,45 the black female was viewed by
dominant culture as the possessor of the phallus within black civil society. Thus,
Martine could pose as a visual reflector of the phallus, covering over Edgar’s lack
and at the same time have the phallus by possessing “my black nanny” who
herself was a site of reception and a reflecting back of power. This possession
however, is visually erased in the photograph in order to maintain the linearity of
our family story. Martine could visually masquerade as True Woman but still
contain within her own secret subjectivity, New Woman. In order to deliver this
feeling of fullness, I posit that Melinda’s race mattered. To employ a white nanny
would have further violated cultural norms in that it would be a constructive
approval of a white domestic who herself violated the cult of true white
womanhood. On the other hand, it was culturally sanctioned to employ the black

domestic “matriarch” or “mammy” or masculinized “mule uh de world” (Collins

71).

122

My grandmother’s employment of Melinda is a metaphor for that paradox
of hate-love that Lacan writes of. In setting up a racially nuanced “hate” situation
of white master - black slave, my grandmother at the same time internalized the
Other by loving her to the point that Melinda was in direct everyday intimate black
body to white body contact with Martine’s children.46 Melinda’s presence in the
white family’s home, a presence of the One, a living, breathing embodiment of
black civil society, elucidates the precise ambivalence of this photo and my
family’s claim to “whiteness.” My family’s claim is not seated in a universal reality
or a mandate that comes from heaven like the ray of light upon the white female
nurse’s body as that body appears in visual rhetoric of the mid 1900’s; my
family’s claim is a rhetorical construct. This construct has been aggressively
recapitulated in the visual, by our display of family photographs on the walls of
our homes. This is part of my history. I

My grandmother’s claim to whiteness then has no “inherent” meaning: “it
gains its power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to
meaning” (Spillers, “All the Things” 137). I don’t need Spillers's fourth register,
because I theorize under the Lacanian triangulation, like gender and sexual
orientation, race plays out in the Symbolic in racial performance. The
photographs on the walls of my home functioned rhetorically as teaching tools,
telling me (and my friend and neighbors) who I was and where l was going. The
picture’s display was itself a racial performance playing out in the Symbolic. This
visual racialized construct was waiting for me, always-already, when I was born.

Our family “whiteness” gains its meaning by what it allowed to come to meaning

123

 

in the interpretable text of visual productions. Melinda as a component in the
blank space is pushed out, but she lived, and by exercising the agency that
erased her, my grandmother signified by point her own identification with
whiteness.

But, like the African-American community’s “cocoon of kin and
relatedness” that is “always crossed by something else,” surely Melinda’s
presence in my family’s home and her life in Jacky’s unconscious (as she was a
presence in my mother’s childhood home; she was an Other defining the Subject
[my mother]) is a quintessential embodiment of “conflicting motivations so
entangled that it is not always easy to designate what is ‘black’ and ‘white’ here”
(Spillers, “All the Things” 139).47

The photo’s visual rhetoric of “black and white” oversimplifies. The impact
of everyday symbols, seemingly mundane “white” family photographs playing out
racial performances in the Symbolic, by aggressively asserting, copying, and
repeating the legacy of white supremacist annihilation is underestimated:

While the subject doesn’t think about it, the symbols continue to
mount one another, to copulate, to proliferate, to fertilise each
other, to jump onto each other, to tear each other apart. (Lacan
qtd. in Seshadri-Crooks 28)
The importance of symbols and images is further elucidated by bell hooks who
argues that ”[t]he history of black liberation movements in the United States could
be characterized as a struggle over images [my emphasislas much as it has also

been a struggle for rights, for equal access” (46). In the present case, the master

124

signifier “whiteness” has so objectified the black female body “that the Other
simply disappears” (Collins 71).
Cyborg Writing and Rhetorical Rehabilitation

But did she? Disappear? If it’s true, as Adrienne Rich posits, that “women
have been caught - have split themselves — between two mothers” a biological
one symbolizing conventions, domesticity, and male-centeredness, and an
Otherrnother, a “countervailing figure,” I can say with complete certainty that my
grandmother, the quintessential symbol of True (White) Womanhood, was utterly
rejected by my mother. It is not doubtful that the countervailing Otherrnother that
was Melinda embedded herself in my mother’s interior in fertile inextricability. I
don’t speak for the Other here, instead I render “delirious that interior voice that is
the voice of the other in us.” Because we as rhetoricians have the ability to
employ the art of rhetoric restoratively, here on these pages I change meaning.
Figure 11 has shifted, has moved, as I moved and shifted meaning in chapter
three when l rhetorically animated the image of “Kids On Car.” No longer does
Figure 11 function as a talisman of white supremacy.

Because I see Melinda.

Melinda’s presence in the blank space circumscribed by the interpretable
text is the figure of a woman who endured a violent shutting, an attempted

annihilation. In a voice of “delirium” then I say that the picture is a visual

125

metaphor for the love-hate symbiosis, the split, existing inside my grandmother, a
visual metaphor in the bodies of three white female subjects, my grandmother,
my aunt, and my mother, like Lacan’s three registers, the Real, the Symbolic,
and the Imaginary, a visual metaphor for the duality of mother and Otherrnother,
that symbiosis tied in a knot by invisible working hands that ultimately manifested
itself in a remainder, something fruitful, not slag; a material duality, a double
entendre: bodies of two “white” female children, one (my aunt) who embraced
True (White) Womanhood,48 and one (my mother) who embraced some other
entangled ideology.

So this story is a feminist cyborg story. It “unsees” and “sees” again, it
“uncodes” and “recodes” communication and intelligence to give Subjects
command and control. This story uses rhetoric and writing. This story is about
writing. Cyborg Writing . “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive . . . on the
basis of seizing the tools” (Haraway, Reader 33). Yes, I have used the tools of
the “Master" - but as one who lives in the house the Master built, I know better
than Lacan how to invert his theory for restorative ends. And, it’s not just Lacan
who is the “Master,” but so are Haraway, Spivak, Powell, Bolter, and DeVoss,
“Masters” of their “trade.” They’ve built the scholarly “house” I live in, and its by
seizing their tools that | build something a little asymmetrical, and a little
precarious. Something post-modem. I also need to acknowledge the “private”
Masters, my family members who strung together photographs, as bricoleurs, to
seal up “our history.” I take those same mini-master narratives and disassemble

to reassemble. I do it with writing. Cyborg writing seizes the Master’s tools. It’s

126

by writing that we survive. That’s how we make the absent present. We engage

in the techne of rhetoric through the technology of writing, and rehabilitate.

That’s what I mean to tell you. On the other side of the place you
live stands a dark woman. She has been trying to talk to you for
years. You have called the same name in the middle of a
nightmare, from the center of miracles. She is beautiful.

This is your hatred back. She loves you.

Joy Harjo “Transformations” In Mad Love and War

127

Conclusion

“And if the assumption of responsibility for one’s discourse leads to
the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and
therefore inconclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, that
responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be
cause for gloom” (Spivak qtd. in Derrida xiii).

“And we must be prepared for the difficult work of reconciling
responsibility for the meaner events within those histories, not with
guilt, but with a larger, more honest sense of who and what ‘we’
are” (Powell 57).

Some of the writers I’ve merged together on these pages in scholarly
matrimony, as I stood, a writer, in there writing with them, performing what felt to
me, at times, like a shotgun wedding between “cultural rhetorics/critical theory”
and “visual rhetoric,” made me feel pretty uneasy. But without the union and the
formality of the wedding, this Master’s Thesis, a genetically mutated
child, a machine-organism mixed-blood, a monster, could not have emerged.

“So here’s a real monster” (Latour 174).

In examining the visual-rhetorical history “on this continent,” we have to start
somewhere, and as Spivak (Goodbum and Powell) suggests, looking at our own
“selves” and our “stories” is a fine place to start. And, simply put, to engage in
self-reflexivity and self-critical inquiry and open up narratives in order to form
alliance and connections, is really an act of love.

“[A]ll things must begin with an act of love” (Haraway, Reader 220).

We are all products of our childhood, and engaging in the art of rhetoric

through “love” is surely an outcome of what I Ieamed in my in-front-of-the veil

protestant upbringing, an upbringing that still echoes in my actions now when l

128

say, as I did in the Introduction, do unto others . . . Remember that in the
Lacanian triangulation, the Subject is defined by the split, and it’s through the
split, and our “innate love” for each other, that all of our behaviors are defined.
It’s no mystery, that the rhetoric of Powell, Lacan, and Haraway is a loved-based
rhetoric. When you go looking for alliances and connections, you’re looking for
“love.”

“That is, I learned I was a cyborg, in cultural-natural fact. . . I too, in the fabric
of my flesh and soul, was a hybrid of information-based organic and machinic
system” (Haraway, Reader 204).

I am not ashamed to say that this Master’s Thesis was an incestuous act of
self-love.

“So, my act of love with primatology is more like sister/y incest than alien
surveillance of another family’s doings ” (Harawa y, Reader 200).

But “I” am not I as in singular. I am a communication system, a technology,
like my computer. I’m networked in. Deeply networked.

“Yes, it’s definitely a strange monster, a strange physics” (Latour 1 74).

I began by making visible the network of this Affinity Project; and now I
choose to end. I’ll write this conclusion to ease disciplinary contractions, hoping
that this will be my conclusion that is not a conclusion at all. To write a
conclusion will defeat the purpose of my excursion.

“The purpose of this excursion is to write theory; i.e., to produce a patterned

vision of how to move and what to fear in the topography of an impossible but all-

129

too-real present, in order to find an absent, but perhaps possible other present”
(Haraway, Reader 63).

I hope these pages (mine) suggest a way to move among one’s own family
artifacts, how to move not by going back to the beginning, but from and in a place
Donna Haraway might call elsewhere. I have tried to embody the disembodied,
connect the unconnected, and take responsibility, knowing that I cannot address
nor invoke a full presence, knowing that to speak, to articulate at all I cannot be
invisible, knowing that I cannot rhetorically read the story of “my family” without

rewriting it. And it needs to be rewritten. How can I as a scholar think of

 

responsibly and ethically rewriting larger stories if I haven’t looked at “Myself” and
“My Family” first? And so, I really haven’t just looked at “My Family”; that linearity
I turned into cat’s cradles, esplanades, and networks. But more connections
need to made, vertical, horizontal, and even diagonal, not just in my family, but in
the R&W Family. And so, it’s really a culmination of this project, and my “love”
for R&W as a discipline, for Visual Rhetorics, my “hope” that it will survive and
flourish and be a place where other disciplines will look for guidance, that I end
with a list of suggestions for my colleagues.

0 We need more historicizing along the different trajectories of R&W,
including the trajectory of Visual Rhetorics. An interesting place for
scholarship might take place in research that explores what visual
rhetoric means, from what field it arises, and with what fields it

intersects.

130

As I see Digital Rhetoric scholars increasingly invoking the Cyborg
Myth, we need to keep that myth complicated to avoid cognitive
fetishism. The Cyborg, by nature, must be defined and redefined as
times change. It needs to be complicated and remediated.

Do not guard the canon too closely. Welcome interdisciplinarity even
if it threatens the master narrative of Rhetoric & Writing. I am
specifically thinking of further connections that need to be made
between Visual Rhetorics and Critical Theory/Cultural Studies, but the
possibility of going outside of R&W and making connections may also
prove fruitful (as Lacan and Haraway did).

R&W specifically needs more scholarship that vertically connects
current happenings and manifestations of subjectivity on the WW
and in electronic writing, with the technological interfaces they are
remediating. For example, we need studies that historicize
subjectivities as those are manifested on the W with pre-WWW
manifestations.

Be self-reflexive and self-critical. Know why you ask the questions
you do not just on a disciplinary level, but on a personal, family level.
This allows for deeper intellectual engagement and helps avoid
working towards an essentialist agenda. Tell your reader, out of

honest respect, who you are.

131

 

Embrace uncertainty and partiality. Avoid deep reliances on crisp,
neat, sterile taxonomizing. Take scholarly risks. This is what leads to
new discoveries.

Do scholarship that you can bring in the classroom and share with
your students. Do what you ask them to do so you’ll know the kind of
scholarly and personal investment you’re asking for. Also, it gives
students a way to connect with you personally and as you represent
the “institution.” It gives students an entry point.

Make space for connections and alliances, not just for other
“scholars,” but across and between organisms and machines. Make
visible how our scholarship and our subjectivities are technologically
mediated. Specifically, R&W needs research and writing that focuses
on how technology mediates subjectivity, and how technology shapes
us, not just as writers, but as people.

Yes, do scholarship because you need to be published, because you
want to make the world a better place, but remember, the “blessing” is
always goes to the giver, not the receiver. Therefore, always begin a
project as an act of love doing something you love to do (and be open
about admitting your motivations - because you love The Word —
there is no scholarship that is not in part masturbatory, or if that’s too
perverse for your taste buds, not in part “self-love”).

Remember that our engagement with the techne of rhetoric has ends;

have a vision of the networks you are making, and leave scholarly

132

traces that others can play upon, always rehabilitating. Make space

for rhetorical “bodies” and the work they do, especially in Visual

Rhetorics.
And as for answering the big question I posed in the Introduction: What can
rhetoric do for the world? Well, it’s only by applying the techne of rhetoric that we
contest the meanings of “texts.” Obviously, lots of texts need to have their
meaning contested (such as the script of American history, or the script of My
Family). And it’s only by applying the art of rhetoric that we can change the
meaning of texts. It isn’t just a matter of “communication” for rhetoricians.
Rhetoricians can animate and actually change meaning. Therefore, to be in
scholarly alliance with a rhetorician, is to have the power to change meanings,
and also to be able to seek advisement so that you might foresee and guard
against others changing your meaning. This is the one thing that rhetoric offers.
It’s kind of like the linguistic practice of medicine, or the linguistic healing arts.
Rhetoric, not with literal scalpels, pills, or anesthesia, but with nothing more than

language“, can change the world, can cure, and can also rehabilitate.

133

APPENDIX OF FIGURES

134

 

FIGURE 1.

Martine’s Initial Visual Triangulation.
PICIIJI'ed from top, dockwlse, Martine Wither, Nursede and
Heustis. Cook’s lee.

135

 

FIGURE 2. Edgar Whither with his mother, sister. and aunts-in-Iaw.
Photographer unknown. 1908. New Jersey.

FIGURE 3. Edgar with \MIllam and Peter. Photographer unknown.
1908. New Jersey.

136

 

FIGURE 4.

  

Martine Hartman. FIGURE 5_
Photographer Unknown. 1923.

Martine (Hartman) Walther.
Edgar Walther Photographer
Mt. Holly Hospital where she
worked.

1930. Mt. Holly, New
Jersey.

 

FIGURE 6.
Martine (Hartman) Walther.

Legs in car. Edgar Walther Photographer.
1943. Vacation in Pennsylvania.

137

- u!

 

 

FIGURE 7.

Network of 1940150’3 legs. From top, clockwise. Seligmann’s table

1938, Betty Grable 1940, My Gramma’s legs 1953, Vogue cover
1941.

138

 

 

FIGURE 8.

My Gramma's legs, 1953 United States bottom
Countess’s legs, 1860’s, France top

139

 

   

FIGURE 9.

Martine (Hartman) Walther. Martine Rife Photographer. Northport,
Florida. 1982.

140

 

FIGURE 10.

Kids on Car. From left Jacky “hither and Marty Walther. Edgar Walther
Photographer. Palmyra, New Jersey, 193mg

141

 

FIGURE 11.

My Family. From left. Marti Walther, Martine
(Hartman) Vlhlther, Jacky Walther. Edgar Mlther.
Photographer. Palmyra, New Jersey. 1939

142

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1 Used by Danielle DeVoss at Michigan State University in 2004 and 2005 to teach Visual
Rhetoric.

:This is almost exactly what Powell asks for — acknowledgment and redress.

3Throughout this thesis, I use the term “remediation” the way that Jay David Bolter defines it.
Remediation' IS a process whereby something“ new” builds upon something already in existence,
taking parts and leaving parts behind, and at the same time, inventing new parts. The process of
remediation also includes the changing of the “something already in existence.” For example,
texts on the WWW draw from elements of traditional print texts, but also have a newness to them
(the hyperlink, for example). At the same time, we see that “traditional” print texts now reflect the
existence of the W (for example, in several places in this thesis I use a techne wherein I
insert italicized quotes that relate to the larger text, but are in part largely ignored by the larger
text - I do this because it IS my way of invoking a “hyperlink" in a “traditional” print text).

And yet I do acknowledge that our subjectivity is mediated by technology— a non-human entity.
So I have no problem with the importance that Haraway places on this factor. I just think it’ s the
family matrix AND the other matrix that isn ’t human. If s everything.

5I touch on those issues when I discuss how technology mediates our subjectivity.

:The Haraway-Randolph influences are another example of “remediation.

7For a collection of texts, an anthology wherein psychoanalysis and critical race theory' is
discussed by numerous authors, see Abel, Christian, and Moglen’ s female subjects in black and
white race, psychoanalysis, feminism. It is cited in the Works Cited.

:And how to be “disabled”: All of the big “to be’s splay out in the Symbolic.

9'It IS interesting to note here that Donna Haraway’ 3 view on this, since I use her theory later and
because she is often cited by visual rhetoric scholars, is that she wants a new theory of
psychoanalysis wherein this split never occurs. In her recent interview (How Like A Leaf), she
suggests a theory that would place humans in a matrix with nature rather than in the family
matrix. This is something I’ve yet to envision.

°Lacan' 5 three registers are the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. My own definitions are
as follows:
Real: This is the register where the Subject is born, from which the Subject emerges. The
Subject is in the Real before the Subject goes through the Imaginary register, and before the
Subject emerges in the Symbolic. In the Real, the Subject doesn’t yet have its body mapped out.
In the Real, the Subject experiences phenomena and “being” but does not experience meaning.
The Subject isn’t aware that it is a separate “being.”

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Imaginary: This is the order between the Real and the Symbolic, where the Subject sees its own
reflection and realizes it is a separate being (the mirror stage). Once the Subject sees its
reflection, it is always alienated from its “self” and from “others.” During the Subject’s stay in this
register, the body is territorialized and mapped out.
Symbolic: This is the register where gender, race, and class are performed through semiotics
(Lacan focused on sexual difference). In the Symbolic, the Subject Ieams what and how “to be.”
1 This is why I find it confusing that Sturken and Cartwright spend so much time talking about the
mirror stage. Maybe this is one thing they thought students could relate to. Mirrors are more
familiar than the “Symbolic.”
‘2 Folks familiar with Vygotsky’s students’ Activity Theory Triangle can imagine the top point of
the triangle representing the technology, while the right bottom point of the triangle is “identity,”
and the left bottom side is the “Subject” as a container. Except in this triangle, a thick (but
dashed), black, straight line must be drawn vertically and extending down from point B, the
technology, and it must separate the Subject from its “identity.” We need the technology to see
ourselves, but in seeing ourselves we are forever separated from ourselves.
‘3 l have no problem comparing subjectivities manifesting themselves on women’s porn sites to
any manifested “female” subjectivity. The reason is that “women” are, in the dominant ideology,
deemed recipients of sexual activities. That is what they are for, to be bred and to bear offspring.
Therefore any visualization of a “woman” is a visualization of “sexuality.” These two “signs”
cannot be separated.
1‘ I understand DeVoss was looking at public and private displays. However, family photographs
in my opinion, were meant for public display, were taken in public, and were meant to be passed
down to the generations. Therefore, taking a picture, a ritual in itself, and displaying the picture is
a public act. Also, I don't hold much stake in any difference between public and private - I don’t
think there’s a valid distinction that matters much. What matters is how we think about these
spaces, these taxonomies. It is the project of feminism, as well, to erase the distinction between
public and private (as far as import). Therefore, in this thesis I’m operating under the premise
that the private is the public. They are the same thing.
‘5 And DeVoss and Powell are “masters” of their trade in the R&W discipline, not just because
they have been widely published and have presented at a multitude of professional conferences,
but also because as of July 2005, both are Directors of major programs at a top ten university in
the United States of America; Powell directs the Rhetoric 8 Writing program and DeVoss directs
the Professional Writing program. Both women are at Michigan State University.
'6 The Subject of Powell's study, however, might be deemed as having made the most important
contribution to humanity, depending on your point of view.
‘7 The importance of the role of white women as reproducers of the “white race” and the
importance of their duty to reproduce will be discussed later in the essay.
‘8 How could we re-write history if the goal of genealogy was to find fractures in family history
rather than seamlessness? What if the goal of creating a family tree was specifically to find
missing pieces, rather than fill-in-the-blanks?
‘9 The back of the photograph reads in blue in, “Martine Hartman 13 years olds LaMar Hartman
16 years old.” In black ink it says, “Brother and Sister.” This is interesting because it suggests
the linguistic layers, different people, different times, that stitch together, along with the visual, our
subjectivity.
2° One time in 1986 my grandmother visited me in Colorado Springs and we went to the White
House Ranch at Garden of the Gods and she made clear to me she didn’t care for the smell of
the various farm animals. She made quite a fuss about this.
2' The photographic collection of the Countess was created in France mainly between 1856 and
1860 (although taken as late as 1896-97) by the Second Empire photographic firm of Mayer &
Pierson. Over four hundred photographs of the Countess remain, having been purchased in
1899 (after her death) by “the epicure and dandy Comte Robert de Montesquiou” (Solomon-
Godeau 70).
22 For a woman to be able to do this, maybe she would have had to be worthy of being a
photographic subject. On the other hand, by refusing to be photographed, women also author
their own identities. But, looking back historically on the United States, it might be said that white

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women have had more opportunity to access this kind of authorship — although many pictures
were created in the 1800’ s and 1900’s of women of color as they, according to ideology of the
time, represented “types."

23These questions are important questions that we need to answer. However, we also need new
questions. New questions should be allowed.

24A rebus' IS a symbol or picture that represents a word or syllable. Sometimes riddles are made
in rebus form. If a dream IS a rebus, then what that means is that dreams are filled with
visualizations that are representative. For example, in a child's rebus, the word “be” might be
represented by a bumble bee. The connections between words, pictures, and things are slippery
asnd available for interpretation because of such connotations.

25My decision to, yes, go into any detail at all on Poe’ 5 story was a political decision. I am a
former English major of University of Michigan (with high distinction, 1982, A. B. English). In R&W
I’ve heard numerous criticism of “English Departments” and although I’ve been told that literary
criticism and English Departments are two separate things, I don’t buy that - because of the free
play of signifiers. And so, to criticize English departments is to criticize literary criticism, which is
nothing less than generative intellectual work. It is not helpful to criticize intellectual work that has
served as the foundation for many of my colleagues here in R&W. I have no truck with
intellectual work of any kind even if it’s pure play. Therefore, I put in Poe’s story to keep
“literature” alive as well as literary criticism.

26I cannot read the emblem on the car’s hood even with a blown up version of the photo in Adobe
Photoshop. I can make out the outline of the emblem however. My mother told me this in a
telephone interview September 25,2004.

27Of course, I wouldn’ t be at all surprised if the pre-France beginnings of automobile nest
somewhere in the cultures of indigenous peoples.

28As for the term “symbol”' in phallic symbol, for this text I mean “sign” or “signifier,”
acknowledging that“ sign” seems a overly simple term. Kaja Silverrnan argues that “[t]he
Lacanian signifier is . . . an elusive blend of idea and form” (164). For this discussion then,
symbol as sign is not a flat term, but is a term that holds both idea and form, and which as I noted
above, can never be totally unpacked.

2°Lacan went to great lengths to distinguish the term phallus as a discursive place holder, rather
than a referent to anatomical status.

3°Of course if he made the meaning I find here purposefully, than he was evil, and I don’t think
that he was. He was just a normal white guy.

31Remember for a moment Haraway’ s transforming, untamed Cyborg Subject Position.

32 Malea Powell, among others. argues there can be no “feminist” experience— exactly because
of the arguments Haraway makes about imperialism.

33My critique here is particularly of the scholars I mentioned earlier who freely conjure up
Haraway’ s Cyborg Subject whenever they talk about humans and “technology. ” I don’ I believe
that just because a Subject evidences multiple subjectivities through the use of technology, that
Subject is a “Cyborg.”

3‘ Ideas that developed into a theory of psychiatry of primate “anti-social behavior . . . alienation .

.vvar, aggression” .and territoriality” that carried over to human psychiatry. Carpenter
believed primates could teach “modern man.”

:Historicizing a myth would work just like any other historicizing.

36As I understand it, Spivak’s text speaks to the issue of the Western intellectual’ s positioning as
she or he engages in the creation of theory and commentary on power structures functioning in
and through ideology, meaning, subjectivity, politics, the state, and the law, etc. Particularly,
Spivak’s text is a criticism of the method of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, wherein both
theorists write from the position of invisibility. They make themselves transparent; they write from
a place of seeming total objectivity holding up in paradigm “an unquestionable valorization of the
oppressed as subject, the ‘object being’” (274). Spivak sees the failure to question such
positioning as “an unacknowledged political gesture that has a long history and collaborates with
a masculine radicalism that renders the place of the investigator transparent” (295). She says
that Foucault and Deleuze theorize from a place of contradiction: “The unrecognized

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contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed while being
so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage” (275).
7 My grandmother is Martine, my aunt is Marti — her full name is Martine. My grandmother, my

aunt and I all share the same first name. I suggest the female namers of children in this family
used what tactics they could to avoid the name-of-the-father.
39 39Edgar and Martine married in 1929. Marty was born in 1934, and Jacky in 1935.

39During my childhood my mother perhaps once or twice mentioned that she had a “black
nanny. My feeling is that this was an issue I was not to press upon. Looking back reflectively, I
believe I was afraid to deal with the implications of this racially charged situation. I know I always
thought the “black nanny” was a symbol of my mother’s privileged childhood from which I was
excluded.
4° Not only did my grandmother never discuss Melinda, but she completely blotted out of
conversation the troubling year my mother had polio.

““ln Lacanian psychoanalysis, the child works in this experience as a subject in his/her own right
and in the full sense of the term” (“A Compendium” 19).
‘2 And I was (wrongly) raised to believe I was in a privileged place of whiteness that needed no
examination.
‘3 I also understand that some may argue Melinda received the benefit of an income and
employment in a stable situation. However, that alone does not negate the points Collins make.
Melinda' 5 employment certainly was “at will” and without benefits or retirement.

4“My mother was a secretary in the Social Science department at Henry Ford Community
College' in Dearborn, Michigan for 35 years. She worked. I had countless caretakers- the three
most loved were Eva O'Brien, David O’Brien, and Cecilia O’Neil. I have pictures of all of them in
my massive (unorganized) photo collection. Where is Melinda’s picture? She had a more
intimate, long standing relationship with my mother than any of my caretakers had with me. My
mother says that people did not take that many pictures back then, and I know this is true. She
reminds me that my caretakers were also close neighbors. But Melinda had no chance of being a
neighbor to my grandmother because blacks and whites lived in different neighborhoods, so that
closeness was never allowed to develop. Patricia Hill Collins reports that in the early 1900’s
“racial segregation in housing separated African-Americans from White Americans”(55). And my
mother has a point about the amount of pictures taken in the 1940’s and 50’s; but when I look at
the family photos I have, amount is not the issue. The issue is what the family photos were
attempting to do: mother with daughters, daughters with father, daughters with grandmother,
father with sisters, father with aunt, and so on. The family photos attempt to validate the family’s
blood right to whiteness— to make an irrefutable visual argument about white heritage.

5,Because according to Spillers, she could not claim her child and matriarchy“ IS not perceived
as legitimate.

“In the Freudian matrix where children are ”penis” replacements for the castrated female,
Martine gave over her “phallus” to Melinda.

47Melinda-the-One signified upon my mother and my aunt and as Henry Louis Gates Jr. says, no
matter how far we get from the signified, it’ 3 always there: “It would be erroneous even to
suggest that a concept can be erased from its relation to a signifier. A signifier is never,
ultimately, able to escape its received meanings, or concepts, no matter how dramatically such
concepts might change through time”(48). If Melinda signified upon Jacky and Jacky in turn
signified upon me (while holding Melinda in her unconscious), then Melinda signifies upon me as
well (as does the white supremacist legacy of my “blood” relations).

49My aunt graduated from the same nursing school as my grandmother, stayed married to the
same man for 46 years, and had four children (stopped working to raise them).

9Since language is everything of course, I m being really sarcastic here.

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