Damián Baca

Thinking About Damian Baca's Essay "Rethinking Composition, Five Hundred Years Later"

Damián Baca (PhD, Syracuse University) is author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (Palgrave Macmillan), lead editor of Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114BCE to 2012CE (Palgrave Macmillan), and has published in JAC: An Interdisciplinary Journal in Rhetoric, Culture, & Politics, College English, and Dialogue. He works at the intersection of rhetoric, comparative technologies of writing in Mesoamerica/later America, and globalization. Generally, he looks to cultures across Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinidad as a lens through which to complicate and inform two correlative domains of inquiry:

The disciplinary formation of the study of alphabetic writing as it emerges during a crucial period of Western territorial annexation, and
The imperial complicity between "racialized" subjectivities and economy, from the development of the transatlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century to the present stages of late global capitalism.

I enjoyed reading this essay because it brought to mind some questions that I had about whether or not it is possible to think in pictographs versus using an inner monolog comprised of words. My belief is that a person has the capacity to learn how to think in images rather than words because dreaming suggests that that kind of brain function already exists. I can easily imagine image sequences without using words, and technology allows for some direct although basic communication between humans and between humans and machines (see: "Tech That Can Hack Your Brain"). Technological development brings up another question about how much meaning is in the words that people use during the thought process of a so-called inner monolog. When the level of potentiality reaches a particular state, is the idea of a word even necessary to claim that people think in words? Since much of the thought process occurs subliminally, in a quasi-consciousness state, where competing potentialities of meaning behind each word-sign generates pathways to word formation, the claim to word choice is made quasi-consciously--without words. Is this not what the function of thinking is rather than an inner monolog? And, when in communication with others, the claim on diction is bound by external regulation. Thus words allow for the navigation or narrative of thought processes but thinking provides the means to alter the course of narration by better word choice or by chosing a completely different narration. Although words are the signs of language, and words direct the thinking process, we do not think in words. I realize my claim's counter-argument, but I'm differentiating between the thinking process and others' claim that we think in words, for the purpose of this post. 

The Dresden Codex, first redrawing by Humboldt in 1810. Image Source Wikipedia

Baca's essay argues for the inclusion of historical pictographic languages into Rhetoric and Composition because of "moral and political responsibilities," but I thought of his paper concerning my search for what consciousness and meaning are. Although languages that enable communications constrain us, the thought processes of thinking are universal. Baca's essay states that "cultures across the Americas and the Caribbean maintained their own local, complex, and equally suitable tools of literacy [during the Pre-Columbian era]" (230). The image above written between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries depicts a way that the potentialities of thinking culminate in pictographs rather than in words. The question of whether or not words are necessary to claim that people think in words becomes, is it not possible to have the potentialities of the thinking process constellate into/onto pictographs, and what does this mean? The author refutes our present day Euro-centric rhetoric and suggests that digital, global communications through the internet allow for "adjustment to different media," and that "the multimodal, multilingual nature of Internet communications requires the introduction of 'new' mechanisms of handling information in different graphic forms and languages . . . --ideograms, logograms, iconography, pictograms, and competing alphabets" (234). The author also suggests that pictography is as "complex and equally suitable communicative form of inscription" as is the Roman alphabet. In light of Baca's claim, the image above made me think of how written languages might co-exist with pictographic systems and helped me think about my idea of thinking in images. Visual thinking is likely closer to the misty nature of quasi-consciousness, and therefore closer to the space where thinking rapidly converges into words. And, visual thinking potentially contains a sense of reality, and meaning equal to that of being a subject within a dream.

Taking this idea a step further into the realm of virtual reality and extrapolating it into a back and forth communication between two individuals that use storylines to get their message across, we can imagine what this might mean. A person in Syria walks into an underground storehouse containing poison gas: stashed for use by Al-Queda. Since he records his five senses real-time into a virtual reality accumulator that in turn authenticates his DNA certificate and transfers his experiences into an unhackable blockchain database, his storyline--the future use of the word narrative--is irrefutable. He sends this message to his associate in America who then experiences, without a doubt, the facts, as the Russians claimed, that the Syrian air force accidentally bombed a secret Al-Queda weapons depot. Would WWIII start in such a scenario? Fantasy aside, what are the benefits of using pictographs rather than language as a form of communication? The question may be answered by the Digital Humanities.

So, I thought about how digital humanities deformance criticism might be used to analyze pictographs of various cultures. Currently, I'm using deformance criticism to study medieval texts. We first take digitized texts written in Old and Middle English and strip them of all punctuation and then convert the words into tokens. The tokens are analyzed quantitatively to reveal things such as whether or not the Pearl Poet authored both Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Does quantitative data support the humanities claim that the Pearl Poet authored both books? If quantitative analysis of pictographic systems reveals meanings outside the realm of the humanities then might it give us an answer to how pictography might be a better communications system than language for the transmission of some meanings? Can we quantitatively reveal the thinking processes behind different pictographic systems of different cultures? What affinities exist between thinking processes, pictography and culture?