awaywithwords

Wysocki starts "awaywithwords: On the Possibilites in Unavailable Designs" with example of a similar concept we have used for multiple purposes: water. It can be used for soup or leisure or violence but it is still water. Wysocki applies the same logic to writing. The essential essence of the writing is the same whether it is handwritten or put up on a blog and Wysocki asks us to think of it that way, which is opposition to what some other academics, such as Kress, have claimed over the course of our readings. Where the idea of writing to a digital audience changes the way we compose and the way we think about the piece being written. Wysocki asks us to consider the comparison to water. Water as a cleanser and water as a whirlpool, while serving different purposes, are still made of H2O and are still universally accepted as the same thing.

Wysocki also contends with Kress’s idea of dichotomy. She says that by assigning certain qualities to words such as sequential logic and predictability, he himself is being predictable. Because if words have those qualities, then his dichotomy assumes that non-words such as images follow a simultaneous logic and unpredictability. Wysocki then questions this, arguing that alphabetic text is, by its nature, visual as well. It is an image as much as a picture of the pope is. There is space around it. There is arrangement so that the reader’s eye is drawn to certain points.  All things that would be affording only to images with a dichotomous thinking.

Then, like she asked us to compare our modes of thinking about water to writing, she asks us to compare how we dictate the laws of an image to how we dictate the laws of a word. She says if we “were to consider “word” in the same commonsensical was as “image”…it would be as though we were asking people in our classes to go out into the world believing that the only writing everyone everywhere ever does is the academic research essay” (306). Every word and every image has a different social function.

I mentioned in an earlier blog post about the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies that using such umbrella terms to predict everything that will ever come of the internet was like assuming Metallica and Elvis Presley were the same thing just because they came from a similar ancestry. Wysocki agrees with me. She says using these umbrella terms is “to try to encompass a class so large the encompassing term loses function” (306). She argues that such umbrella terminology deprives words of their time, space, and most importantly, their social function. A tattoo and a movie are both images, but they function differently in their spaces and are intended for completely different audiences like Elvis and Metallica composed music for different time eras and for different listeners with different tastes. “To say that all these objects rely on a logic of space is to miss their widely varying compositional potentials” (306).

Wysocki offers a solution to the dilemma she brings to our attention. Because the format and use of space has been methodized and locked in, the meaning arising from such systemization is also locked it. The intention of the words are trapped in their arrangements. By attempting “new spaces on pages or exploring the visuality of alphabetic text” (306), we can start making changes to the practices and beliefs of such a system and all its social implications.

In conclusion, Wysocki claims, in simplest terms, that humans shape the material that shapes human practices in turn. We chose what to do with the water that either comforts or harms us. We chose how and when we use the words that either comfort or harm us. And different words do different things, but only because we allow them to because, like the water, words are not inherently built with purpose and meaning other than the reasons we give them.

Personally, taking in the essay and argument as a whole, I would argue that she could have taken the argument into a more alphabetic sense. Every single piece of literature, poem or book of poetry, short or long fiction, tweet, facebook post, or post-it note is the same combination of 26 letters. Everything you have ever read in the English language is the same rearrangement of 26 symbols and the meanings we have arbitrarily assigned to those symbols. The clumping of those symbols is visual, spacial, and dependent on a commonly accepted standardization. And while a breakdown of word meanings may work to influence the social practices of the future, if broken down to their most basic forms, letters, all applied meaning is essentially lost