More “Seriously Visible” Reading - National Council of Teachers of

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b r o o k s / m o r e “ s e r i o u s ly v i s i b l e ” r e a d i n g
Kevin Brooks
More “Seriously Visible” Reading: McCloud,
McLuhan, and the Visual Language of
The Medium Is the Massage
This article provides an analysis of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium
Is the Massage, a visual-verbal text that is generally acknowledged as innovative but
seldom taken seriously or read carefully. The analysis draws on the visual language
vocabulary developed by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics and argues that
the field of composition studies would benefit from more sustained and sophisticated
readings of visual-verbal academic texts even as the field shifts from analysis to design.
F
or the past ten years, compositionists have called for a move from “analysis to design” in the teaching of visual communication. This historical shift,
sketched by Diana George, has been carried forward in curricula that includes
document and Web design, video production, and even video-game design as
the purview of composition studies. While I am sympathetic to this call and
have participated in this transition from analysis to design in my own teaching
and scholarship, this article takes a step back and argues that as compositionists, we still have analytical work to do in reading the visual, and that we have
extensive vocabularies of visual language available to us that we have not yet
CCC 61:1 / september 2009
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Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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tested in substantial ways. Anne Frances Wysocki provides a good framework
for reading “the multiple media of texts,” and Craig Stroupe and Mary E. Hocks
have applied the general concepts of “hybridization” and “juxtaposition” to
make sense of visual-verbal compositions, but we could bring much more
fine-grained analyses and understanding of visual-verbal composition to our
readings and our teachings if we employed the extensive visual language vocabulary of comics theorist and practitioner Scott McCloud.
I test McCloud’s language of comics, and specifically his concepts of
closure and word-picture relations, on what Steven Heller and Karen Pomeroy
in Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design call “the first book for the
television age” (192), Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is
the Massage. If McCloud’s language of comics is going to be useful to the field,
it will need to help us make sense of a text like The Massage and not simply
comics or graphic novels. The Medium Is the Massage is an excellent test case
for compositionists and their students to practice reading the visual because the
book’s content is relevant to many of the courses we teach; the text is relatively
cheap, accessible, and available; it presents plenty of interpretive challenges; it
draws on a wide-range of visual-verbal composition strategies; there is a small
body of published readings of the text that can provide a context or conversation
for reading the book; and the text influenced art books, experimental books,
and experimental scholarship that followed in its wake. While I run the risk of
presenting The Massage as a monument worthy of admiration and veneration,
my intention is to follow Gregory L. Ulmer, who was following Jacques Derrida,
in suggesting that we “receive the past and its texts as gifts, as relays, for future
work” (Teletheory 204).
Calls for More “Seriously Visible” Reading
I am not alone, of course, in calling for more sustained attention to reading visual-verbal texts. Patricia Harkin’s “The Reception of Reader Response Theory”
provides a history of the recent neglect of reading pedagogy, a history that ends
with a look to the future and the need to re-engage reading pedagogy within
the context of the rise of visual culture and multi-modal texts (420–21). Rich
Rice, in a collaborative Web text with Cheryl Ball about “Reading Multimodal
Texts,” suggests that the field of composition studies is not providing the kinds
of detailed analysis of visual-verbal texts that scholars in rhetoric and composition provide on written texts, whether published or student-produced.1 Charles
A. Hill, in “Reading the Visual in College Writing Classes,” acknowledges that
“the analysis of visual rhetoric does not yet have a detailed vocabulary and
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methodology on the scale of the ones that have developed for the analysis and
critique of persuasive verbal texts,” but he points briefly to the work of Charles
Kostelnick and David Roberts and to Robin Williams as potential guides for
strengthening that vocabulary and methodology.2
Most relevant for this study has been Wysocki’s “Seriously Visible” essay,
in which she performs a detailed reading of two highly visual hypertexts in
which the visual elements, not the supposedly innovative and liberating hypertextual elements, present the interpretive challenges and pleasures (44–55).
She uses these detailed readings to counter the “old and not uncriticized news
that documents that give more weight to their visual rather than their verbal
components ought not to be taken seriously or ought to be relegated to children
and the illiterate” (37), and she argues that this kind of serious, close reading
of visual-verbal texts is still needed because the denigration of visual texts “is
still very much present and repeated” (37). In “The Multiple Media of Texts,”
Wysocki offers a general framework for serious reading while acknowledging
that the following steps are just a beginning:
1. Name the visual elements in a text.
2. Name the designed relationship among those elements.
3. Consider how the elements and relations connect with different audiences, contexts, and arguments. (137)
Wysocki goes on to illustrate how her framework can be used on a number of
different texts, including Mark C. Taylor’s Hiding, a book in the experimental
scholarly tradition of The Medium Is the Massage. Within the constraints of
this chapter, Wysocki is not able to offer any specific conventional relationships between words and images, and she seems to be advocating that students
“[look] hard at and analyz[e] the genre that is most appropriate for [their] ends”
(159), a kind of phenomenological, inductive approach to analysis within her
framework.
Craig Stroupe and Mary E. Hocks offer analyses of visual-verbal texts that
add some specificity to the “designed relationship” of words and images, and
they both do so through analyses of experimental academic texts. Stroupe, in
his influential “Visualizing English,” provides insightful analyses of the close and
illustrative relationship between words and images used in George Landow’s
Victorian Web (620–21) and the more dialogic and less illustrative relationship
of words and images in the “hybrid composition” of Gregory Ulmer’s “Metaphoric Rocks” (622–25). Stroupe’s use of Bakhtin’s concept of hybrid discourse is
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a valuable reminder that word-pictures relationships are “not simply . . . formal
or generic, but ideological and historical” (620), yet in setting up the LandowUlmer comparison, Stroupe also seems to imply that visual-verbal elements
within a text or Web page have only two possible relationships—complimentary
or contrasting. In “The Rhetoric of Irritation,” Stroupe elaborates on this reading of Ulmer by naming the word-picture relationship one of “‘irritating’ juxtapositions [that] represent a ideologically expressive dialogue—what Mikhail
Bakhtin calls ‘dialogism’” (245). Although Stroupe is seeing and advocating a
specific kind of juxtaposition strategy as one method of composing visually, I
will argue below that “juxtaposition” seems to be the default design concept
used in English studies to describe all word-picture relationships; McCloud,
by way of contrast, suggests seven possible word-picture relationships, which
should enable nuanced readings of visual-verbal texts.
Hocks uses the terms hybridity and juxtaposition in “Understanding Visual
Rhetoric” as key terms for describing visual-verbal compositions; she explains
these terms (and others) through close readings of two academic hypertexts,
Anne Wysocki’s “Monitoring Order” and Christine Boese’s “The Ballad of the
Internet Nutball.” Like Stroupe’s analyses, Hocks’s use of these conceptual terms
offers a broad, rather than detailed and specific, understanding of word-image
(or media-to-media) relations: “The hybridity of the Web interface allows Boese
to swap different kinds of media—texts, pictures, sounds, links, data sources,
and citations—in and out of the various sections of the screen and pop up
windows. She juxtaposes textual explanations with purely visual arguments”
(641; emphasis in original). Hocks’s terminology gives readers a way to make
general sense of the complexity of Web texts, especially those that break printdesign conventions, but what McCloud’s six kinds of closure offers is a more
precise way to describe the demands put on readers when they have to move
from panel to panel or screen to screen and make sense of the diverse elements
in those panels, pages, or screens.
While we can be more precise in our visual-verbal analysis than Wysocki,
Stroupe, and Hocks were in these examples, their work prepared the way for the
kind of analysis I am advocating. Their choice of experimental academic texts
for analysis—Taylor’s Hiding, Ulmer’s “Metaphoric Rocks,” Wysocki’s “Monitoring Order,” and Boese’s “The Ballad”—also establishes for academics a body of
literature and scholarship that we and our students can work in, distinct from
commercial and non-academic texts so frequently analyzed. By offering a close,
detailed reading of McLuhan and Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage, I am trying to push the vocabulary for reading visual-verbal texts beyond “hybridity”
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and “juxtaposition” and I am adding to our understanding of how academic
writing might enact its arguments, integrate form and content, control the
degree of difficulty in experimental projects more effectively, and potentially
enact various word-picture relationships.
Scott McCloud on Closure and Word-Picture Relations
McCloud’s Understanding Comics is an appropriate interpretive aid for reading
The Medium Is the Massage because McCloud acknowledges various debts to
McLuhan and would count The Massage as a comic in the broadest sense of
his definition: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence,
intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in
the viewer” (9). McCloud’s book enacts its visual communication principles
effectively, and either this book, or his more recent Making Comics, will be an
engaging entré into the serious study of visual communication for a generation
of students familiar with comics, manga, and graphic novels. Ultimately, compositionists will benefit from being aware of the array of visual communication
heuristics available to them and their students, but McCloud’s meta-language
seems ideally suited to the treatment of a complete and complex work like
The Massage. I focus on two chapters and two heuristics that illuminate key
elements of The Medium Is the Massage: McCloud’s six categories of closure
and his seven categories of word-picture relations.
McCloud does much more with “closure” than the standard textbook
treatment of the gestalt principle that describes the human cognitive process
of filling in information that the writer or designer has not included in prose
or pictures. McCloud identifies six categories of transitions that are regularly
found in comics, each demanding different degrees of closure. Not all of these
conventions are employed in a nontraditional comic like The Massage, and
there might even be a need for additional labels appropriate for academic
visual-verbal texts, but McCloud’s language is flexible and adaptable enough
to apply to a work that is frequently textual rather than visual. Even though
the verbal-visual explanations of each principle of closure in Understanding
Comics are clear and efficient (70–72), I supplement McCloud’s definitions with
brief explanations of how each form of closure is employed in The Massage.
1. Moment-to-moment: These transitions “require very little closure”
(70) because the elements are closely related, illustrated by McCloud
through the blink of an eye. Because The Massage is an expansive history and “look-around” (10), this kind of small-scale transition is used
only once.
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2. Action-to-action: In these transitions, a single subject is communicated, with changes illustrated from panel to panel, explained by McCloud
through a drink being poured, sipped, then followed by a burp (70), as
well as the batter seeing then hitting a ball (72). Something close to
action-to-action transitions are used when Fiore illustrates the famous
McLuhan concept of technology being an “extension of man [sic]” (26).
3. Subject-to-subject: These transitions stay within a scene or idea, but
demand that the reader fill in significant pieces of information. Instead
of a ball coming at a batter and then that batter hitting the ball (actionto-action), subject-to-subject transitions, according to McCloud’s illustrations, consist of related subjects conveying an unfolding of events: a
runner crosses a finish line, followed by an image of a stopwatch being
pressed (71). The subject-to-subject transitions in The Massage are
more complex than this example because the book deals with abstract
subjects like the cultural effects of the invention of the printing press,
but subject-to-subject transitions are common in The Massage; they
just demand that readers fill in some large gaps.
4. Scene-to-scene: Each transition type in McCloud’s categories is a
little more demanding than the preceding transition type, and sceneto-scene often requires deductive reasoning as readers have to fill in
large gaps “which transport us across significant distances of time and
space” (71). McCloud illustrates this concept with a three-panel series
that puts side-by-side figures who represent Bombay, Paris, and New
York; readers would need to figure out why these cities are being placed
beside one another based on other elements in the text. Scene-to-scene
transitions function like chapters in The Massage’s overall organization, but one of the reasons the book has been so perplexing to readers
is that the scenes have not been clearly defined or demarcated.
5. Aspect-to-aspect: These transitions “bypass time for the most part
. . . [emphasizing] different aspects of a place, idea, or mood” (72).
McCloud illustrates this kind of closure by showing three panels that
represent a beautiful day: sun shining brightly, a man in sun-glasses
seemingly enjoying the day, and then birds soaring high in the beautiful sky. This type of transition is used extensively in The Massage, and
because it is not typical of academic prose to use aspect-to-aspect transitions without clearly explained connections, McCloud’s terminology
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proves to be particularly useful for making sense of the McLuhan-Fiore
collaboration.
6. Non-sequitur: These transitions offer no logical relationship between
images, illustrated by a satellite in one panel followed by Grant Wood’s
American Gothic in the next panel (72). Impatient readers of The Massage will think the book is full of non-sequiturs; if relationships among
elements of the book can be worked out, the transitions will likely turn
out to be particularly demanding aspect-to-aspect or subject-to-subject
transitions, rather than non-sequiturs.
McCloud’s attention to the role of closure as central to visual storytelling, and
the various demands readers will encounter throughout a text, is valuable for
understanding the whole of an unconventional work such as The Medium Is the
Massage in which a single page or layout may be comprehensible and concrete,
but the connections between the pages or layouts that precede and follow it are
tenuous, if not almost completely incomprehensible to many readers.
The second heuristic from Understanding Comics that is particularly
relevant to reading The Massage is McCloud’s list of word-picture combinations, visually and verbally explained in both Understanding Comics (153–55)
and Making Comics (130). McCloud identifies seven typical word-image relationships found in comics but he does not assume that one element (visual or
verbal) will always take precedence over another element. This recognition of
the range of word-picture relationships is crucial for seriously reading visualverbal academic texts like The Medium Is the Massage.
1. Word-specific: The picture illustrates a textual message that is complete; these images “don’t significantly add” to our understanding of the
text but provide visual interest (153).
2. Picture-specific: The words augment a complete picture; “the words do
little more than provide a soundtrack” (153).
3. Duo-specific: “[B]oth words and pictures send essentially the same
message” (153); such combinations provide emphatic stress.
4. Additive: “Words amplify or elaborate on an image, or vice versa” (154).
McCloud now calls this relationship “intersecting” in Making Comics:
“words and pictures working together in some respect while contributing information independently” (130), but “amplification or elaboration” are still the important concepts in this relationship.
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5. Parallel: The image and text each conveys a complete message, but
their messages are distinct and “seem to follow very different courses
without intersecting” (154).
6. Montage: Words act as images, illustrated by a smiling face occupying
the space of “a” in the word “happy” (154).
7. Interdependent: Neither message would be complete without the
other—the word and image work together to express a complete idea
(155).
Additive, montage, and interdependent relationships are used frequently in The
Medium Is the Massage and require more reader participation than the other
combinations. The simpler combinations like word and picture specific provide
an occasional interpretive break from the overall demands of the text, but the
wide variety of combinations presents another kind of interpretive challenge
for a reader who wants to take all elements of the text seriously.
Utilizing just these two heuristics leads to a much more detailed and
nuanced analysis of The Medium Is the Massage than McLuhan’s readers have
provided in the last forty years. Donald Theall, in one of the first academic
responses to the book, limits his formal analysis to three observations: “The
fact that the letters run into each other, and furthermore, are not set evenly,
adds to the jarring effect”; he notes the “violence of the typography”; he points
out that “images are juxtaposed” with text (156–57). Richard Cavell in McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography also relies on the general concept of word
and picture “juxtaposition” to describe the book, but he adds (in a bit of an
overstatement) that “[t]he main visual techniques of this book are close-up
and magnification (or blow-up), thereby destabilizing the visual as occupying
a single, perspectival space” (128). Jan Baetens offers the simplistic formula
that “once one has understood whether the image is a picture of the text or a
picture in itself, it should become easier to analyze whether the specific use of
the image is coherent with the use of the images supposed by the text” (187;
emphasis in original). Baetens performs almost no formal analysis of The Medium Is the Massage even as he ends up evaluating the book as a flawed initial
attempt at innovative scholarly work.
A detailed, primarily formal, analysis of The Medium Is the Massage will
clarify an important visual-verbal text that has been frequently purchased but
not well understood. If convincing, this analysis might encourage further testing
of McCloud’s terminology—closure, word-picture relations, the realistic-iconic-
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abstract plane of communication, and other important concepts explained in
Understanding Comics, Re-inventing Comics, and Making Comics. If intriguing,
this essay might also encourage further analysis of other academic visual-verbal
texts in the McLuhan-Fiore tradition, building on the work already done by
Wysocki, Harkin, Rice and Ball, Hill, and others who are taking visual-verbal
and multimodal reading seriously.
Seriously Reading The Medium Is the Massage
The Medium Is the Massage presents a number of interpretative challenges. The
book has no table of contents, no obvious introduction, no clearly demarcated
sections, no footnotes, and only this brief explanation of its purpose: “‘The
Medium Is the Massage’ is a look-around to see what is happening. It is a collideoscope of interfaced situations” (10). That brief clue offers a justification, if not
an explanation, for the wide range of material used in the book—ads, comics,
photos from leading photographers of the 1960s, photos from news services,
composed graphics, icons, prose text, and typography as images—designed to
be a cohesive whole while employing various arrangement strategies. Assuming
that these diverse elements were not randomly thrown together by Quentin
Fiore, an experienced and successful graphic designer, McCloud’s six types
of closure can provide a guide to understanding how the book as a whole is
put together and a sense of how hard readers might need to work to fill in the
text’s many gaps.
Closure in The Medium Is the Massage
The Medium Is the Massage, although without table of contents or chapters, is
not without logical groupings, or “scenes.” Other readers of The Massage have
not suggested the following divisions, and I read the text numerous times before
I realized how this specific form of closure, scene-to-scene transitions, might
help me make sense of the text. Theall suggests that the book is an “aesthetic
realization” of Understanding Media (155), but the clear historical content of
one section and the media-specific content of another section make it more
likely that each section corresponds to one of McLuhan’s three previous books:
The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man, The Gutenberg Galaxy:
The Making of Typographic Man, and Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man. The scenes can be broken down as follows:
1. An introduction (1–7) that poses the question “. . . the massage?” followed by an initial tentative answer—“‘The major advances in civiliza-
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tion are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur’
(A. N. Whitehead)”—punctuated with a large display font “and how!”
2. The Mechanical Bride reworked (8–24), with fairly coherent ideas presented in verbal form about the massaging of identity—an important
theme in The Mechanical Bride—and each idea paired with a single,
related image.
3. A visual inter-chapter: “All media are extensions of psychic or physical
human qualities” (25–43), which elaborates on the subtitle of Understanding Media. This section is composed of photos, innovative layout,
and one important icon.
4. The Gutenberg Galaxy reworked (44–75), an abridged history of
communication eras, from the pre-literate oral era through the age
of printing and into the electronic age, each era all but wrecking the
civilization that preceded it.
5. Another visual inter-chapter: “When information is brushed against
information . . . ” (76–91), a photo montage scene that visually and
verbally explores information brushing against information, including
an emphasis on the clash between new information and old forms of
communication.
6. Understanding Media reworked (92–149), following up on McLuhan’s
notion of a sustained “look-around” or “collide-o-scope” of the contemporary environment. This section employs a topical approach similar to
that used in Understanding Media, with micro-analyses of education,
movies, art, television, music, and other mediums.
7. A conclusion coming full circle (150–60), the “worldpool of information” circling back to The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and
Understanding Media, but ending where The Medium Is the Massage
started—with A. N. Whitehead: “It is the business of the future to be
dangerous” (160).
Once scene boundaries are established, the relationships between text and images, between isolated ideas and the overall construction of the book, become
easier to discern, although the reading by no means becomes easy or transparent. These scene divisions are supported by my knowledge of McLuhan’s other
books, but I did not discern these groupings and breaks until I began to apply
McCloud’s visual language concepts. It is important to note that even as this
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essay emphasizes formal elements used in visual communication, background
knowledge is still relevant, perhaps essential, for a serious comprehension of
any text.
The value of employing McCloud’s terminology can be seen in a re-reading
of a contested passage of The Massage. Glenn Willmott, in McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse, praises the use of pastiche in The Gutenberg Galaxy but
finds what he thinks are near non-sequiturs in The Massage. Willmott writes:
In The Medium Is the Massage . . . the ties are barely intelligible that relate together
a proposition that the Theatre of the Absurd is a modern variety of the medieval
Dance of Death (both representing the failure “to do a job demanded by the new
environment with the tools of the old”), with a photograph of a naked woman
wrapped in cellophane preparing to play the cello (with the quotation printed
above: “‘The thing of it is, we must live with the living.’—Montaigne”). (160)
The scene is Understanding Media, a book devoted to the task of understanding the media as environment, as ecology. The subject-to-subject movement
within that scene is from the printing press and mechanical age to the electric
age, from the medieval Dance of Death and early modern Montaigne to the
high modernism of Theatre of the Absurd and proto-postmodernism of the
Fluxus movement. McLuhan’s linkage of The Dance of Death and Theater of
the Absurd is cleverly illustrated by the Dance of Death scene from Ingmar
Bergman’s absurdist-influenced film Seventh Seal, and Montaigne’s claim is
cleverly illustrated by a picture of the naked cellist and Fluxus artist, Charlotte Moorman. If the Dance of Death and The Theatre of the Absurd both
represented “a fear of the new . . . technology” as McLuhan says, Moorman and
Montaigne represent “living with the living”; they represent adapting expression to the new technologies of their time. The time frame for this subject-tosubject transition is significantly different in The Massage than in McCloud’s
example of the runner crossing the finish line and somebody else clicking the
stopwatch, and perhaps we would benefit from additional vocabulary like
“concept-to-concept” transitions when dealing with academic texts, but the
principle of closure is definitely at work here, and the ties are discernable, if
admittedly difficult to make out.
My analysis may not be entirely satisfying to Willmott or other readers, but
the logic of the text, images, and narrative sequencing in The Massage is intelligible, and understanding these relationships as “subject-to-subject” provides
a more precise understanding of this sequence than general concepts such as
hybridity of words and images or juxtaposition of visual-verbal elements. This
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short sequence in The Massage does illustrate that the interpretive challenges
of a visual-verbal text such as this are going to be both formal (How are the
parts related?) and cultural (Who is this cellist wrapped in cellophane?). The
process of seriously reading a visual-verbal text like The Massage will require
multiple readings, some of which try to clarify earlier readings (as I have tried
to do here), others providing different interpretive perspectives on a text. A
feminist analysis of The Massage would undoubtedly raise important questions
about gender representations in this text, in which women occasionally appear
naked or nearly-naked, while men are fully clothed, often stern and serious.
One of the strengths of McCloud’s breakdown of closure into six patterns
is that a book such as The Massage employs a wide range of strategies, not
just the scene-to-scene and subject-to-subject transitions identified above,
therefore requiring an extensive visual language vocabulary to perform an
adequate analysis. The highly visual inter-chapters, especially the sequence
about “extensions,” employ moment-to-moment, action-to-action, and aspectto-aspect transitions. Over a six-page sequence, the first four images employ the
technique of moment-to-moment transitions to create a sense of movement
and tension: extreme close-ups of toes, moving from a baby to a big toe (27–31).
A simple and small phrase, “The wheel,” is finally placed just above the big toe,
and then the transition becomes action-to-action, as readers learn on the next
page that the wheel “is an extension of the foot,” illustrated by a close-up of a
wheel and part of a car (32–33). The “action” described here is not as literal as
the drinking action McCloud illustrates this transition with, but Fiore’s visual
transition is not particularly demanding as foot-becomes-wheel. Recognizing
the transition as action-to-action helps readers understand the pacing of this
section. The slow moment-to-moment transitions are followed by an actionto-action transition, which in turn is followed by three more action-to-action
transitions: the book (represented only by two thumbs holding a blank page,
requiring readers to fill in the fact that they are holding the book) is an extension of the eye (single eye, extreme close-up, looking back at us; 34–37); clothing is an extension of the skin (a naked, female torso fully stretched out as if
flying or jumping—hands on left hand page, torso on right hand page; 38–39);
“electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system” (40), illustrated
with an icon, rather than a photo—arrows moving in six directions out from
a circle. Once the movement and pacing of this visual inter-chapter is understood, McCloud’s notion of “aspect-to-aspect” transitions helps make sense
of the visual-verbal phrases within the scene. In other words, the foot-wheel,
book-eye, skin-clothing, and circuitry-nervous system pairings use action-to-
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action transitions, but when the two elements of each pairing are treated as a
whole unit, the McCloud concept needed to understand each unit is aspectto-aspect closure.3 Fiore is illustrating four aspects of one of McLuhan’s most
famous assertions, that media are extensions of the body and self. The initial
moment-to-moment development, which seems to have been employed to
build some tension and to disorient readers slightly, gives way to the fasterpaced action-to-action transitions, but the scene as a whole “by-passes time”
and emphasizes “different aspects of . . . an idea,” best understood through a
recognition of the aspect-to-aspect transitions (McCloud 72).
The second highly visual inter-chapter is formally more demanding than
the first visual inter-chapter, although the scene as a whole works on roughly
the same principles. I am going to leave it up to readers to test out McCloud’s
language of comics on this scene, however; my argument for McCloud’s usefulness will be strengthened or challenged by others’ readings, rather than my
ongoing performance. These inter-chapters could be dismissed as interludes,
innocuous background music, filler, or just a collection of interesting images
and enigmatic text. But their purposeful placement between text-dominated
scenes, the careful illustration of various aspects of McLuhan’s understanding
of media, and the employment of specific visual communication strategies all
attest to the important role these inter-chapters play, and the serious reading
image-word sequences deserve.
Word-Picture Relations in The Medium Is the Massage
In contrast to the visual inter-chapters, the scenes that correspond to McLuhan’s three books rely on words to do most of the communicative work. But
understanding the word-picture relations is still important to understanding
the point of each section, as well as the general interpretive demands of The
Massage. The design of the second scene in The Massage, which invokes McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride, is clear, coherent, and consistent—a
gentle opening to the storm that follows. The images throughout this section
precede the text that then clarifies the image. For example, a fingerprint (11)
is followed by a page titled “You” that asks “How much do you make? Have
you ever contemplated suicide?” and then forwards an idea closely linked
with fingerprinting: “Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical
womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our
claim to privacy and the community’s need to know” (12). The fingerprint is
reprinted much smaller and alongside the text, and this section of The Massage employs this kind of repetition throughout. The next image is a series of
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rings—an iconic whirlpool—that illustrates the ever-expanding “worldpool of
information” contributing more and more to children’s education, as well as
the expanding “family circle” (14). This scene continues with a coat-rack image
illustrating “Your Neighborhood,” a school boy for “Your Education,” an electric
circuit for “Your Job,” a series of noses repeated for “Your Government,” and
Grant Wood’s American Gothic for “The Others.”
Using McCloud’s terminology, the words carry the message throughout
this section, which means that the images are either additive and “amplify or
elaborate” the words, or the words and images are interdependent, a relationship that McCloud says does not necessarily need to mean balanced: “Generally
speaking, the more is said with words the more the pictures can be freed to
go exploring and vice versa” (155). The circuit image followed by “When this
circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?” results in a tight relationship between words and images, but because the section is labeled “Your Job,”
the image is not simply or easily “word specific,” but is better understood as
additive. This choice of image has turned out to be apt and prescient, but the
image itself does not carry extensive connotations worth exploring. American
Gothic as an illustration of “The Others,” however, takes more interpretive work
on the part of readers, as the text says nothing specifically about the painting,
its history, or its meaning; instead, the text is “The shock of recognition! . . .
We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other”
(24). McLuhan and Fiore presumably chose American Gothic for its “shock of
recognition”—identified by The Art Institute of Chicago as “one of the most
famous paintings in the history of American art,” a painting that represents
small-town America where citizens were already “irrevocably involved with,
and responsible for, each other.” Like McLuhan’s notion of “the global village,”
however, American Gothic does not evoke an idyllic small-town life, but instead
one in which the tightness of relationships are sometimes uncomfortable,
even gothic. The electric circuit image and text, when compared to the use of
American Gothic, is definitely additive, while Grant Wood’s painting, because
it has such cultural capital and rich connotations of its own, functions interdependently with the McLuhan text—the picture and reader can “be freed to go
exploring.” Even in this relatively straightforward scene, McCloud’s language
of comics can bring more specificity to the analysis of The Massage than the
more general concepts of “hybridity” or “juxtaposition,” both of which would
be relevant here, but not as illuminating.
The abridged history of human communication eras, corresponding to
McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, begins with the claim that “The dominant
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organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear—
‘hearing was believing’” (44) and ends with the claim that “We march backwards
into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land” (75). In between
is a chronologically organized history of communication: the oral era followed
by the manuscript era, the manuscript age replaced by the emergence of the
printing press, and the printing press era placed alongside the Renaissance
painters’ invention of perspective. Both the printing press and perspective
influenced the modern predilection for straight lines and enclosures; the lines
on a page, bars in prison, and fighter jets perfectly organized are all presented
as emblematic of the age of print, while the electric age’s reorganization of space
and time is summed up in the montage “allatonceness” (63). While a doubting
reader might question the historical narrative, a serious analysis of the visualverbal text can identify sophisticated visual communication strategies and
some of the strongest visual-verbal messages in The Massage.
Because this section of the book is largely about the reorganization of
space in relation to the dominant mode of communication in an era, it also contains one two-page layout in which the text is printed in mirror image and one
two-page layout where the text is printed upside down. Those rearrangements
of space function as montage—the actual presentation of the text functions
as an image that continues to reinforce the argument. The mirror-image text
is a quotation from John Dewey, “compartmentalization of occupations and
interests bring about a separation of that mode of activity commonly called
‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive ‘doing’” (54–55), and above
this text are three rows of three-dimensional boxes with black, negative space,
forming a sense of infinite compartmentalization. The mirror-image text that
initially functions as montage through its rearrangement of space also functions as a primary message carrier, supported visually by these additive boxes.
The demanding act of either puzzling out the mirror image text or the act of
holding the spread up before a reflective surface highlights more effectively
than any other layout in The Massage the process of “involvement” and “fillin”—reading as active participation and manipulation, not passive reception.
Taking a cue from McLuhan and Fiore, I am going to encourage readers
to “fill-in” the final text-heavy section of The Massage, the one corresponding
to Understanding Media. This scene is the most diverse in the text, using not
only additive, interdependent, and montage word-picture relations but also
word-specific and parallel constructions. I conclude my analysis of The Massage by using the concepts of closure and word-picture relationships together,
in support of a reading of one spread from the final scene of The Massage.
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The Final Scene: Coming Full Circle with Closure and
Word-Picture Relations
If a reader puzzles his or her way through The Medium Is the Massage, does
some background research to become familiar with McLuhan’s earlier books,
and takes seriously the likely scenario that all images, text, layout, and font
choices are purposeful and meaningful, that reader will see that The Massage
comes full circle. The concluding section (150–60) echoes McLuhan’s previous
books and returns to where The Massage starts: with a quotation from A. N.
Whitehead. My analysis of just one spread of the concluding section applies
McCloud’s concepts of closure and word-picture relations, demonstrating how
these categories can be used in conjunction, rather than applied separately, to
support seriously visible reading.
If closure, as McCloud uses it, means filling in the gaps between panels,
closure as applied to the final section of The Massage means filling in the gaps
that signal “concluding section” and that tie this conclusion to the rest of the
book. The first layout of the final scene shows a businessman surfing—suit on,
briefcase in hand, hat on head—accompanied by a quotation from and explanation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Descent into the Maelstrom.” The Medium Is
the Massage has now returned to where The Mechanical Bride starts, with both
texts using the same line from Poe, in which the mariner describes watching
objects being sucked into a whirlpool: “I must have been delirious, for I even
sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their severe
descents towards the foam below” (Massage 150; Bride v). The demands for
closure placed on readers in The Massage include recognizing that the text
has transitioned from scene-to-scene and that this two-page layout signals the
beginning of a final scene similar to a concluding chapter. Having significant
background knowledge in McLuhan’s work enables a reader to see the literal
connection to The Mechanical Bride, but even without that knowledge, the
additional explanatory text, that the mariner’s “insight offers a stratagem
for understanding our predicament, our electrically configured whirl” (150),
echoes the “worldpool” image presented early in The Massage (13–14), perhaps
signaling the common narrative strategy of coming full circle even for readers
unfamiliar with McLuhan’s work.
The word-picture relationship is additive, with the text carrying most
of the meaning—as this particular text had been doing for McLuhan since
at least 1950—but the image adds to the meaning of the text because the
person pictured is a surfing businessman rather than mariner spinning down
the whirlpool. The surfing businessman on his own is not as rich an image as
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American Gothic, nor does the image capture the idea of “rational detachment”
that McLuhan sees as central to the mariner’s act of studying the whirlpool, but
the image does add contemporary relevance to Poe’s “Descent of the Mariner,”
and for those familiar with McLuhan’s work, the image foreshadows Culture Is
Our Business. The abrupt transition from scene-to-scene is tempered by the
accessible and straightforward word-picture relationship, suggesting that Fiore,
as the designer, applied careful and deliberate strategies of visual language
throughout the work.
Conclusion: More Serious, Not Less Serious?
The Medium Is the Massage, like most visually intense books, has received
some feint praise over the years but generally has been dismissed as nothing
more than an academic comic book. Scott McCloud’s description of visual language, employed as analytical concepts for both traditional comic books and
nontraditional comics such as The Massage, can help any reader make sense
of the variety of transitions and word-picture relations used, and can help any
reader understand the complexity and sophistication of the work. Baetens
goes so far as to say, “There is no trace of an attempt to employ some kind
of visual language and hence visual thinking in The Medium Is the Massage”
(192). Baetens seems to believe that “visual language” and “visual thinking”
must be free of text, but visual communication theorists and practitioners like
McCloud, Robert Horn, Gunther Kress, and Theo Van Leeuwen have all shown
that visual communication and visual thinking involves an amalgamation of
words, images, and shapes. While images can function without words, being
free from words is not a necessary condition for visual language and thinking.
Understood within McCloud’s framework, The Medium Is the Massage draws
thoroughly on the specific conventions of comics and the general conventions
of visual language. Perhaps the reason works like The Massage get dismissed is
because they are more demanding than their text-only counterparts.
While I have not foregrounded pedagogical applications of McCloud or
McLuhan in this article, the impetus for this analysis has been my students’
positive reception of both of these texts. Both books talk the talk and walk the
walk of visual communication; they are not textbooks packaged and presented
for students, but instead have been successful texts designed for a curious and
intellectually engaged readership. Understanding Comics can be used hermeneutically, but either it, or Making Comics, can be used as a guide to production
as well. McCloud’s work has already been applied to texts as diverse as the
Quaker Tapestry (Graves) and Japanese pornography for women (Shamoon),
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and it has been positively reviewed in the IEEE Transactions on Professional
Communication (Manning). I have found it useful in my visual culture and
language course for analyzing timelines, photo essays, and video; McCloud’s
concepts integrate nicely with the meta-language of typography, photography,
and film. The strength of his work is its treatment of multifaceted, storytelling
texts, rather than single-image ads or photographs; McCloud does not use what
Peter D. Stebbing has identified as the four most commonly used concepts for
visual analysis and production—contrast, balance, rhythm, and proportion—
but because of McCloud’s distinctive language, he complements rather than
repeats some of the more familiar design and visual language vocabularies.
McLuhan and Fiore’s text, as I have already suggested, is not a neglected
monument or treasure from the past, but a model or relay for the essai concrète,
the photo essay, the research re-mix, or the micro-analysis of figures, mediums,
and concepts. Anthony Ellertson’s students drew on The Massage as a relay
for their video projects, and the book’s influence on experimental academic
writing is hard to overestimate. A quick look around shows that The Massage
has influenced Mark C. Taylor’s work (especially Imagologies and Hiding); the
MIT Mediawork Pamphlet Series, which includes N. Katherine Hayles’s Writing
Machines and Paul D. Miller’s Rhythm Science (see McCloud, “Image Tree”); and
architectural texts such as Rem Koolhaas et al.’s Mutations. David Carson has
gone so far as to use McLuhan’s text to produce the equivalent of The Massage
for the twenty-first century, The Book of Probes. The Medium Is the Massage
is not a monument to be admired or revered, but it can be understood, and it
may be a gift that can help us with our future work.
Notes
1. Recent scholarly collections devoted to understanding visual communication
and visual rhetoric have few examples of seriously visible readings. In addition to
Wysocki’s chapter in Eloquent Images, only Carol S. Lipson’s application of Robert
Horn’s work to Egyptian hieroglyphics is a sustained close reading of a visual-verbal
text. Carolyn Handa’s Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World includes Craig Stroupe’s
“Visualizing English,” but no other close, extended analyses of visual-verbal texts.
Nancy Allen’s Working with Words and Images includes her analysis of the composition of a photo essay, but no other sustained analysis of a visual-verbal text. Charles
A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers’s Defining Visual Rhetorics includes Stroupe’s “The
Rhetoric of Irritation,” which continues his analysis of Ulmer and compares it to
another piece of visual-verbal composition. Robert Watkins’s manifesto, calling for
wider adoption of McCloud into composition studies, offers only minimal application of McCloud’s concepts.
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2. Kostelnick and Roberts offer a powerful “visual language matrix” as a sophisticated guide to reading and producing visual-verbal communication; Williams offers
a memorable introduction to design with the acronym CRAP. Robert E. Horn offers
an interdisciplinary framework for analyzing the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
of visual language, and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Reading Images offers concepts
such as impact, coherence, salience, and organization, which can be used to shape a
heuristic for analyzing or producing visual communication. Compositionists would
benefit from more extensive testing and application of these meta-vocabularies as
we try to strengthen our approaches to reading and writing the visual.
3. Neil Cohn has been extending McCloud’s work by using a linguistically informed
tree-diagram approach to explain “visual syntactic structures” (77–104), and I am
implicitly drawing on that notion to describe how the different elements of this
photo-montage scene work together.
Works Cited
Allen, Nancy. “Telling Our Stories in
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179–99.
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Quakers: Scott McCloud’s Theory of the
Comics Employed to Unravel the Quaker
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Heller, Steven, and Karen Pomeroy. Design
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of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels.
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Miller, Paul D. Rhythm Science. Mediawork
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Shamoon, Deborah. “Office Sluts and
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Taylor, Mark C. Hiding. Chicago: U of Chicago
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Watkins, Robert. “Words Are the Ultimate
Abstraction: Towards Using Scott Mc-
. “The Multiple Media of Texts: How
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123–63.
. “Seriously Visible.” Hocks and Kendrick 37–59.
Kevin Brooks
Kevin Brooks is an associate professor of English at North Dakota State University
where he teaches courses in visual culture and language when he isn’t directing and
teaching upper-division writing courses. He has essays in the collection Going Wireless, the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, and Computers and Composition.
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