more on MIT and visualizing cultures
Apologies for disappearing from Frog in a Well, but the recent discussions on the controversy at MIT presents the perfect excuse for me to resurface. Here’s a take from an “MIT Chinese student” who is a little bit more sympathetic to the stakes raised by MIT’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association [see their letter] than Jonathan and Alan have been.
Andrew Field and Frank Conlon on H-Asia asked whether the whole controversy is really about images or texts. But, as many scholars have been pointing out, this debate is interesting not because it is about specific images or texts, but rather, because it is about the contexts in which they are presented. With that thought in mind, this is my rehashing of recent events:
At MIT, protests began after the images were posted on the MIT Homepage (not the Visualizing Cultures or Opencourseware site where they were available for quite some time). Anyone who has visited the MIT Homepage more than once will know that, like many university homepages, images operate on it as daily, disposable, and interchangeable advertisements for MIT, subsuming any critical information under the MIT brand. Most days in fact, the image showcased is of the MIT logo redesigned in some cute or clever way. Thus, it was not through the scholarly project that most people at MIT were introduced to the images, but rather, through the decontextualizing visual language of advertising, coupled with the institutional authority of the MIT Homepage.
The downloading and circulation of the images by an unnamed student through email is egregious also because it decontextualizes the images from the scholarly project, as Professor Perdue at MIT explains. Again, it is the circulation of the images by email that misrepresents the scholarly project, not the images themselves. We wish to censure the way that they were circulated by this unnamed student, not the images themselves.
In response to such actions, Professor Perdue wrote an “Open Letter to Chinese Students at MIT” advising all Chinese students to cease aggressive and personal attacks against Professors Dower and Miyagawa. Many Chinese graduate students at MIT and throughout the US, however, read this letter with trepidation, for they felt targetted in it simply because of their race, ethnicity, place of birth, first language, and citizenship, even though Professor Perdue only intended to address it to a small group of individuals at MIT. Again, it is not the content of the letter which an individual who looks like myself and has a name like myself finds problematic, but rather, its title, its public address, and its authoritative place on the MIT History Department’s Homepage.
Last week, I attended a panel discussion held by MIT’s Campus Committee on Race Relations on “Visual Imagery and its Cultural Implications”, at which a fully uniformed police officer was conspicuously posted in an auditorium of 30 or so attendees. Once again, it’s not the illuminating panel discussion that was at all problematic, but rather, the image of an institution exercising uniformed power in an open forum on race - visualizing race, as it were.
It’s for this reason that this controversy, which began with the Visualizing Cultures project at MIT, can be reclaimed as a productive intellectual debate: Not by framing it as Chinese nationalists censoring American experts (a topic which receives more up-to-date coverage in the NYT), but by framing it in terms of the presentation and production of knowledge in the new global, digital, multicultural, public order. How will academe, and its different disciplinary traditions which have different ways of treating images and texts, adjust itself? Certainly not by focusing solely on broadcasting the content it produces, but also by reconsidering its means of distribution — its websites, homepages, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, and digital classrooms. Of course, as Alan writes, scholars should always ignore some criticism and consider others, but I think, with the ambitions the MIT’s OCW has set out for itself - no less than to teach the whole world through the internet - it would not do to reduce all its critics to nationalist caricatures.
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As an aside, for example, I do have an art historical criticism of the revised Visualizing Cultures webpage on “Old China, New Japan”. My critique is that the formal analyses of the propaganda images on this webpage purports to be mere description. As art historians, we teach our students that no formal analysis is objective, and that the description of historical evidence needs to critically reinforce the thesis at hand. In other words, “The Mona Lisa is beautiful” is as subjective and unhelpful a sentence as “The prototypical Chinese is grotesque.” How in the world we all came to see the Mona Lisa as beautiful, how the image functions to do that, is as important a question as: How does the image make the notion of ‘prototypes’ function? What are the historical demarcations of Chineseness that are produced in this image? How is an aesthetic of the grotesque made visible? These are questions incumbent upon an art historian, but they also pertain to one who is addressing the ‘representation of the other’ in the enterprise of history. I could suggest an edit like: “In this woodblock print, the depiction of Chineseness in the form of a repeated stereotype operates through specific visual markers of ‘the grotesque’, such as heightening differences of hair style, skin color, and clothing, pervasive in Japanese propaganda imagery of the time.” I’d work on it, but this is the main rhetorical strategy we have to demonstrate that we are trying to understand how specific images communicate. Ever more important to do, when we’re talking about propaganda that enacts a sort of visual violence upon its viewers.
Perhaps I’ve got my disciplinary blinders on, but I think that such art historical conventions are useful to place against the Dower text because the Visualizing Cultures project is specifically one that analyzes art images. Thus, I think that that the text could be improved not only by ignoring nationalist readers as Alan suggests, but also by heeding some of the practices of art historians, literary historians, and media historians.
Finally I emphasize that I fully support the Visualizing Cultures project, and fully condemn the inexcusable personal attacks on Dower and Miyagawa. My main disagreement with posters on Frog in a Well is that some of the criticism of it at MIT was indeed reasonable, and that there is an important debate we can have here about history, imagery, and the digital 21st c.
May 16th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Dear Winnie,
Thanks for your comments. It must be difficult to find yourself inadvertently near the center of something like this.
I agree that the Dower text is inadequate as art-historical scholarship and would no doubt be turned down by any art history journal. It would also probably be turned down by any historical journal. It’s not really art history or academic history, it is teaching, or more broadly, public history. I think that editing the site in the way you suggest would not really add anything and would subtract a great deal. As I pointed out before, no amount of critical distancing and explanation is going to satisfy those audiences who are not interested in scholarship, and at least in academic terms they are best ignored.
“The prototypical Chinese is grotesque” is a phrase you edit to
“In this woodblock print, the depiction of Chineseness in the form of a repeated stereotype operates through specific visual markers of ‘the grotesque’, such as heightening differences of hair style, skin color, and clothing, pervasive in Japanese propaganda imagery of the time.”
Do you note how lawyerly you have become here? Most of the things you put into this sentence are clear elsewhere in the Dower text. He emphasizes the role of clothing, and hair in making the Chinese look ridiculous. He makes it quite clear that most of these pictures are stereotypes by emphasizing the two that are not. If you wrote the whole text that way it would be repetitive, deadly dull, and be aimed more at defending yourself against an audience that was interested in deliberately misreading you then at an audience you were trying to reach. You also lose a lot of the emotional impact.
The audience for the Dower text is M.I.T. undergrads, but more generally the public. That requires a text that is readable and aimed at drawing in a popular audience. One of my great frustrations as a China historian is that my Americanist colleagues get to teach with all sorts of wonderful texts that are real public history, both academically rigorous and genuinely popular with students and the public. (Yes, there is a lot of junk too.) Dower’s is one of the few Asia-related texts that bridge the academic/popular gap and does it quite well. I don’t think they do it by sensationalizing or over-simplifying. I don’t think the type of editing you are talking about would add clarity for any audience, nor would it add much meaning.
Best
Alan
May 17th, 2006 at 9:17 am
Hi Alan - Thanks for your thoughts.
I think, unfortunately, that “to lose the emotional impact” is exactly my goal here, and perhaps this is where we might agree to disagree. In my mind, to describe the images without analyzing them, without breaking them down to its components, is to re-enact their violence. Keep in mind that, in Dower’s text, there are full paragraphs of such descriptions that you have to read before you get to a paragraph that offers any critical analysis. I wouldn’t suggest rewriting if these weren’t propaganda images, if the images weren’t racist, if they weren’t graphic and violent. You say that you want to teach images that are genuinely popular - would you say that these propaganda images are ‘genuinely popular’? I hope not - nor that anyone would want to borrow or promote their emotional or popular power to further their own academic popularity.
I guess the worldwide protest against the site has proved exactly what you say about the webpage - that it emotionally reaches out to the public through something presented as ‘popular’ - and the reaction has thus been in kind! Too emotional, very public, one person’s popular against another’s traumatic. It would be at our own peril to ignore that the attempt to bridge the popular/academic gap has failed for a whole constituent of the public here - and they have made themselves heard, whatever we individual historians think of the site.
BTW - As someone who works on the worst of the worst in popular consumer culture - hello kitty, doom, star trek, louis vuitton, james bond - part of my responsibility is not to turn my work into free advertisement for the brands I study. Obviously, the pedagogical goal - and I do consider it a public role - is to break down the emotional impact popular things have over us, and understand how they function. Otherwise, I’d just be a pr-man and not a scholar, wouldn’t you agree?
May 17th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
I think I must have been unclear. I think this is a popular site in that it is pretty clearly aimed at the general English-speaking, probably American public. I did not say that I wanted to “teach images that are genuinely popular”, but rather that I wished Asianists produced some of the good-quality public history that gets produced in other fields, i.e. works like this that a non-scholar could read and find informative and useful. I agree that you have to read several paragraphs of Dower’s text to get his full point, but I don’t think that is asking too much of the reader. He does analyze the images, and in a way that is, as far as I can tell, impossible to misread unless one is deliberately trying to misread him.
As for losing the emotional impact, I think understanding emotional impact is vital to teaching and understanding history. Dower claims that “the purpose of Visualizing Cultures is to gain a more accurate, first-hand sense of all the many ways in which people have presented and viewed their times.” The whole point of using primary sources of any sort is to bring students (in a classroom or wherever) into contact with what people in the past thought and how they thought it. That’s why rather than just telling my students “people were persecuted in the Cultural Revolution” I assign memoirs. There are all sorts of practical and theoretical problems with this, but I don’t think they are best dealt with by trying to drain the emotion out of history.
I don’t think that Dower’s purpose was to “be a pr-man” for Japanese atrocities, and I don’t think that that he is providing free advertisements for Japanese militarism, so I’m not sure what the point of the final comparison is. Nobody today is or can be influenced by these images the same way 19th century Japanese were, which I take it is what Dower is trying to re-create. Analysis of these images is, I think, categorically different from Hello Kitty.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:32 am
In the interests of defending prose style, I have to agree with Alan. It is challenging to describe the views of others at any length, especially odious or controversial views, and yet write pleasing prose. Since conveying an understanding of worldviews often remote and sometimes offensive is a major task of historians, and the historian’s primary medium is still prose, this is a matter of some importance.
Certainly, every sentence can begin (for instance) “In Stalin’s clearly depraved perspective…,” or “Hitler, whose ideas I do not endorse, needless to say, but only discuss here for the interests of historical study, considered…” Yet if I were writing a book on Stalin or Hitler I would probably try to avoid the needless overuse of such sentences. Similarly, if I were writing about the attitudes inherent in Japanese imperialist artwork I would hope to dispense at some point with such devices, after having made clear elsewhere in the text that I was trying to explain the attitudes of another group, not endorse them. One would not have to poke very far into a biography of Pol Pot or a monograph on the Klu Klux Klan to find sentences which *if taken grossly out of context* could be deliberately misconstrued to suggest that the author was in fact in agreement with his subject.
The bigger issue is that any sort of writing contains an implicit minimal contract between the author and the reader. The author undertakes to express his ideas clearly but in an engaging style. The reader undertakes to make an effort to understand the point and spirit of the text. If in the course of my readings I stumble on what appears at first glance to be an outrageous statement, such as “the prototypical Chinese is grotesque,” my first obligation is to reread the entire paragraph and determine if the author was endorsing this view, or merely relating the manifestly objectionable view of another to provide historical context. If I ignored this duty, and leapt into a half-baked criticism, I and not the author would be culpable.
In the present case, anyone who would think that Profs. Dower and Miyagawa were endorsing Japanese Imperialist views of the Chinese is 1). An incompetent reader and completely out of touch with the norms of American academe, 2). Not actually interested in the views of Profs. Dower and Miyagawa, or familiar with the whole text, but ready to be outraged by something, 3). Deliberately misconstruing the text to spark controversy. In the present instance the first factor probably dominates, or at least one hopes so.
That, in short, is why I have found myself largely out of sympathy with those who have complained about the Visualizing Cultures website. I am not persuaded that a good-faith reader who took the time to read the text at length would be genuinely puzzled by the intentions of the authors of the site. If you have a few minutes to write an angry letter, you have a few minutes to read the text carefully.
There are two reasons why I think it is important to defend the website. First, as Alan points out, if a scholar is forced to hedge not only against errors of fact and interpretation, but also against any conceivable (or inconceivable) misreading by someone reading a small snippet of your text, or even bad-faith attempts to willfully impute a meaning that no reasonable person would attribute to the text or its author, then scholarly prose will deteriorate even further than it has.
Second, consider scholars of that fractious region, the Middle East. I am sure there are many working on the area, whatever their intellectual loyalties or inclinations, who are widely abused in various internet forums, on various websites, and occasionally the targets of campus protests. I suspect both Edward Said and Bernard Lewis spark “global outrage,” if that is defined as small groups over large distances. Such outrage or protest may simply indicate a group or chatroom with a chip on its shoulder and a predisposition to be outraged. There is no shortage of such groups (I understand that some American groups frequently outrage themselves over Disney films). If the fact that a piece of scholarship drew protest was taken to indicate that it was ‘offensive,’ or even faulty, this would: 1). intimidate those who next address the topic, and 2). make future protest more likely by demonstrating the effectiveness of the tactic, and 3). Force scholars to write clunky prose in an effort to ward off the attacks of a small but loud constituency. None of these outcomes seems desirable.
May 19th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Matthew - You raise some important pointsn Taking up your thought, the question that comes to my mind is, does the ‘minimal contract’ between an author and reader change when the medium is no longer a history book or textbook assigned in a classroom, but a global and public website? Or, an advertisement on a homepage? I suppose that theoretically, a book is global and virtual too, but my instinct is that when one is addressing the global classroom, there’s a difference in academe’s relationship to the popular that is worth considering. Academe-to-public-on-web is a different relationship than Prof-to-student-in-classroom, maybe?
If you have been following H-Asia discussion, I’ve been thinking that most of the criticism of the site could actually be used to improve the current site with basic html. Firstly, for example, some have debated the definition of ‘culture’ on the site, and others pointed out that in another part of the site it was defined. Well, html easily allows us hyperlink terms to each other, for example, clarifying things for a web reader that jumps from section to section instead of reading intro, chapter, conclusion. Secondly, as the discussion about the website has unfolded, certain phrases have been changed and edited from the text. The phrase about a ‘modern, beautiful war’, for example, has been removed. Wikis allows us to see the unfolding process of editing, illuminating for another layer of discussion such as we are having, for those who want to understand that writing is also a process. Thirdly, our little blog here has allowed us to comment upon each other posts, and disagree with each other, in an archived and public manner. That’s helpful to acknowledging that information on the web can be contested, and creates a public history that is far more representative of our respective viewpoints. It seems that these widely available web practices demonstrate to me that the contract between author and reader, on the web, can be nurtured into a productive and rich exchange between authors and readers. If we’re going to write public history on the web, it seems that these new strategies can help us communicate better with the public.
May 20th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Hi, Winnie,
Perhaps the judicious use of hyperlinks could clarify a few terms, but it seems that most debate has concerned the misinterpretation of passages through inept readings or malice, which is impervious to hyperlink assistance. A section for comments might also be of service, although I suspect many comments in this instance would have been intemperate and unhelpful.
Still, I think we disagree on a fundamental premise. The aim of developing open courseware, I assume, is to educate the public. If the web is analogous to the world, and open courseware analogous to a campus, then I think a basic premise in education still applies: not everyone is going to be interested in being educated in a particular subject, nor will everyone have the skills or open-mindedness required to understand the professor. It would follow that the success or failure of this model depends on the responses of those approaching the website in the spirit of open-minded interest in the subject, and who give it careful attention, just as the success of a course at MIT would be judged on the reaction of the students who come with a respectful interest and desire to learn. On the net or in the flesh there are also those who do not have the interest, attention-span or open-mindedness to take the course profitably, or may in fact actively wish to oppose it. Should the attitude of people who approach the site as non-students be considered when evaluating a web-based project aimed at those who are, in spirit, students?
An illustration of this comes to mind. Online course catalogs are a rudimentary form of open courseware, showing the reader how knowledge is categorized and handled in a modern university. Every so often a web commentator, or even a newspaper columnist, will browse the offerings of English departments in America, and conclude that civilization is going downhill. They may simply heap abuse on the professors offering courses in ‘Queer Shakespeare’ or ‘Chaucer and the Other’ or the like, or they may call for a boycott of the school or some sort of sanction on the discipline. I will sidestep the issue of who is right and wrong in this debate. What is important is that few schools, if any, have taken these criticisms to heart. If MIT had open courseware about ‘Queering Shakespeare’ I’m sure they would eventually attract negative attention from certain segments of the internet, perhaps even on their own campus, and I’m sure they would dismiss it.
Likewise, Profs. Dower and Miyagawa are interested in the forms of visual culture produced in the service of Japanese imperialism. I very much doubt that the outraged students who protested the site had any original genuine interest in trying to get inside the minds of Japanese imperialists and their visual culture. I would imagine, to put it crudely, that in their view the Japanese of that time were generally villains, and their art, if not burned, should be put in a hall to be reviled, not studied. That’s a rather harsh but, I fear, fair assessment of the attitudes of many who denounced the site. And if they had no desire to learn, then their opinions and responses have no bearing whatsoever on the success or failure of open courseware. Profs. Dower and Miyagawa did not fail them, they failed Dower and Miyagawa.
In short, I cannot agree with the idea that an internet reader of open courseware has a diminished responsibility to understand the text being dealt with. Just because they can scan the page cursorily without understanding it does not mean the authors of the page should be responsible for their misreading.
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:27 am
I greatly enjoyed the exhibit and downloaded many of the images for use in future classes. At the same time, reviewing many of the comments, I am thankful that I did not become an art historian. It must be painfully tiring work.
May 22nd, 2006 at 4:03 am
As an addendum, a friend of mine has passed on to me the following link:
http://www.tianya.cn/new/publicforum/content.asp?stritem=no04&flag=1&idarticle=540251&idwriter=0&key=0
It is essentially a series of pictures of the meeting between Profs. Dower and Miyagawa and interested MIT students, with annotated ‘commentary’ (peppered with personal abuse). It seems to give a particularly good insight into the attitudes of at least a segment of the protestors. Note that the suggestion of a moderated comment board seems to have been shouted down. There’s a lot that could be said about this, but I will leave it to the reader to form their own impression. My own immediate response is that Profs. Dower, Miyagawa and Perdue are endowed with a degree of patience and a self-sacrificing commitment to education that borders on the heroic.
May 22nd, 2006 at 8:11 am
Matthew - Though I have failed to convince you or Alan of my ‘art historical’ critique of the text, I am still not ready to assume that my critique is not one of an open minded student with the interest in learning or understanding Japanese visual culture. Speaking of the protest in general (as opposed to just my response), without any information about who did/did not use the Visualizing Cultures site, nor the content of their individual responses to Dower and Miyagawa (eg web-comments might help with that), I have a hard time making generalizations about the protesting audience as a whole, how ‘open-minded’ they were, how ‘respectful’ etc. None of the initial response has been made available to us to evaluate, and the original use of the image as advertisement (as opposed to a teaching product) has been excised from the debate as well. We do know from reports on both sides that there were ‘irrational’ and ‘abusive’ attacks, and that one decontextualizing email was sent by one unnamed student. We also know that there were ‘hundred’ of responses from all over the world. Many have told us that the irrational few stands for the whole, but I personally have no evidence of that. Two different MIT professors attended the Open Forum with the Chancellor and Dower and Miyagawa, but both came away with opposing impressions. At the forum I was at, the discussion was very thought-provoking, and brilliant points about visual culture in general were raised by both professors and students. The only written evidence of protest I have to go on is the CSSA letter, which, in my reading, respectfully asks for historical contextualization and disclaimers. You and I can disagree on its tone or the fairness of its demands, but neither do I think the CSSA letter represents all protestors of the site. Without a chance myself to evaluate the actual content of messages sent to Dower and Miyagawa (aside from the CSSA letter), I don’t know how I can get inside the minds of the protesters. In such a situation, I tend to naively err on the side of caution, and not guess as to the mindsets of “certain segments” of the public.
Your comments makes me wonder than, for the future, when attempting to perform public pedagogy through the internet, whether we as teachers should adopt the position of increased caution (vs. classroom) or not. This, I think, is where we might agree to disagree, and I’d submit, as long as it’s a matter of choice for the scholar, and so long as criticism as aired respectfully, we can let our own publics judge our writing.
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Matt, [this is in response to your comment #8 which I have just read now] thank you for sending that link. It is very useful to know, and I agree with you that Professors Dower and Miyagawa should absolutely be commended for their response to the protests. I was proud to be associated with MIT when I learned of how the administration and these two professors in particular responded to what was an emotional event for so many. Gross generalizations such as some comments expressed by posters on this tianya forum are indeed dangerous. Just this week, another article taking the MIT events to an extreme were published in The Chronicle for Higher Education. In summing up the MIT events, it says:
Culture clashes can occur between scholars and students of any nationality, several observers noted, but Chinese students who have been schooled in extreme nationalist sentiment are likely to present special challenges.
Mr. Perdue has recommended to the MIT administration that it set up orientation programs for foreign students who arrive on a campus where they may “have to face difficult, painful questions about their history.”
Full article is here: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i37/37a01401.htm
The prospect of institutions rounding up anyone with non-American passports for acculturation classes is now being recommended as a broad institutional response to some students shouting irrationally. I hope that you will join me in condemning this kind of overreaction to the incident we have been discussing.
May 24th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Hi, Winnie,
I suppose the most obvious disagreement one might have about this entire issue is the extent to which it should be narrowly construed as pertaining to a single issue (the editing and layout of one particular website), or broadly construed as involving wider and more fundamental topics (the state of academic freedom and the influence of forces hostile to it). How one sees this probably depends on one’s personal experience (recent and long-term), sympathies in this case, and general worldview. Time will reveal how justified these different perspectives are. Personally, I am quite curious about whether this is a single blip or the start of a trend on other campuses. One could make the argument that MIT is a somewhat unusual campus, and that this is therefore not to be expected elsewhere. I’m not sure I agree, but I will wait and see.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:21 pm
[...] When preaching to the converted, I’ll be sure to show off a post that Alan Baumler presented more on MIT and visualizing cultures posted at Frog In A Well ~ China, and another that Sharon nominated, Subsidizing Public/State Education posted at crooked timber. Both comment threads define the type of collaborative learning community instructional designers dream of. [...]
June 27th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
[...] Finally, I would be deeply remiss if I didn’t note the historical brouhaha in which I had a small hand: the protests and controversy over Sino-Japanese War Art at MIT. Even within the confines of our own little blogfamily here, we had some sharp disagreements. While Alan Baumler and I (linked above) tended to side strongly with Dower/Miyagawa, Winnie Wong made a case that — from her perspective as an art historian — the exhibit was indeed flawed. [...]
November 11th, 2006 at 8:21 am
I suppose the most obvious disagreement one might have about this entire issue is the extent to which it should be narrowly construed as pertaining to a single issue (the editing and layout of one particular website), or broadly construed as involving wider and more fundamental topics (the state of academic freedom and the influence of forces hostile to it). How one sees this probably depends on one’s personal experience (recent and long-term), sympathies in this case, and general worldview. Time will reveal how justified these different perspectives are. Personally, I am quite curious about whether this is a single blip or the start of a trend on other campuses. One could make the argument that MIT is a somewhat unusual campus, and that this is therefore not to be expected elsewhere. I’m not sure I agree, but I will wait and see.