Unnatural Juice

Since I have been utterly immersed in rhetoric in Kate Ryan’s class, I’m going to leave Gross out of this post.  It’s an extremely useful article, as persuasion seems to make the world turn, but I wanted to focus my word count toward Mishra, Lakeoff, and Johnson.  As per my usual style, I will grab quotations from the readings and stretch them wildly until I’m nearly off topic. 

Mishra fascinated me the most.  I like to arrogantly assume I’ve pondered most ideas, but Mishra’s explanation of how images affect us blew my mind.  Because pictures have been around since my consciousness, I never considered the world before their existence.  “Pictures are not natural,”(145).  Starting with just this small statement, I started wondering what constitutes a picture.  My grandparents call the television a ‘picture box’, which is exactly what it is.  Computers must follow suit, as well as phones.  Then things get a little obscured, and I’m wondering if everything is a picture.  Briefly touching on rhetorical concepts of truth, I think back to Plato’s version of truth, which is basically that only the divine hold true knowledge and humans get a restrained perspective of truth through our five senses.  With this in mind, our eyes generate a picture that may or may not be the real thing, and therefore our very existence may be unnatural.  (there’s the stretch)

 

Mishra goes on to say that, “Biologically this is most odd since for millions of years animals had been able to respond only to present situations and the immediate future” (145).  I’m finding a paradox here, as I type into my picture box in the present that will be published for the public in the immediate future.  This is still incredibly unnatural, and maybe that’s why I approach these blogs with such anxiety…this feels wrong.  This post can only be part of the present for me and me alone, and then it becomes a picture for all of you who read this.  It’s a very strange time to be alive. 

But if this is a picture, and you read it and understand it, this derails one of Mishra’s claims, “The psychology of art tells us that there are artistic conventions that have to be learnt in order to understand pictures,” because pictures are “creations of time and culture.”(148) This is a fancy way of saying it’s all made up, but in order to play our game you have to learn our made up conventions.  I don’t know much about art or psychology, but I know that when the picture box shows a person telling a joke, I get it, and I laugh.  Perhaps my understanding of understanding is shallow and uncultured, but I don’t see the need to learn artistic conventions for the sake of interpretation.

The Thinking Chair, With Our Handy-Dandy Apple Juice

Moving right along to Lakeoff and Johnson, the concept of the apple juice seat was brilliant.  It has no meaning without context, “But the sentence makes perfect sense in the context which it was uttered…and even the next morning, when there was no apple-juice, it was still clear which seat was the apple-juice seat. (12) This means that the next morning, a mental image served as the justification for something that was present, but a part of the past.  How does this fit in with Mishra’s definition of image interpretation?  All that is required to understand the apple juice seat is presence during the conversation, and has nothing to do with artistic conventions.  The concept of what it means to understand probably deserves it’s own dissertation to answer some of my questions, as well as mental imagery, because it differs with each person.  Much like rhetoric, a concrete definition is impossible to reach when a concept revolves around interpretation.  Still, I’m happy to chill in my apple juice seat, watch moving pictures in a box, and recall mental images that possibly further my unnatural existence.