gutter talk joshua

Gutter Talk: (An)Other Idiom of RhetoricAuthor(s): Joshua C. HilstSource: JAC, Vol. 31, No. 1/2 (2011), pp. 153-176Published by: JACStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20866989 .Accessed: 27/01/2015 05:41

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Gutter Talk: (An)Other Idiom of Rhetoric

Joshua C. Hilst

I will speak, therefore, of a letter

?Jacques Derrida

Wi,h due deference to Derrida, I will speak, therefore, of a gutter. Not the space at the edge of the street where wastewater and trash flow,

although the analogy is interesting. I am speaking of a wholly different gutter. I am speaking about the space in between panels on the pages of a comic book. The artist places the drawings inside of a panel, and then

another set of drawings in another panel. Between these two panels we

typically find a blank space, known to artists and writers of comics as the gutter. When the viewer reads the panels of a comics page, he or she

typically sees some sort of progression between the panels. For instance, not to be too morbid, suppose a villain charges a victim (see Figure 1), then

in the next panel, a large voice bubble appears featuring an onomatopoetic version of a guttural scream.

Figure 1

jac 31.1-2(2011)


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The viewer would likely assume that the victim has just died. Why should we assume any such thing?

Scott McCloud uses precisely this example in his theoretical "comic

about comics," Understanding Comics. McCloud (in Figures 2 and 3)

says:

Figure 2

see ^\ THAT SPACE X &?ZWe&V the \

PANELS? THAT'S \ WHAT COMICS /

AFICIONADOS HAVE / NAMED /

**^Gwrre&r S _ y AND DESPITE^X. / its N / T/Tte, THE GUTTEff PLAYS [ HOST TO MUCH. OF THE AMG/C V AND MXS7&ry THAT ARE

V AT THE VEKyy%55*>P7" J

Figure 3

Similar to Rene Magritte?who reminded us of the infidelity of images when he asserted "this is not a pipe"?McCloud reminds his readers that

when we look at two panels, we have seen absolutely nothing that can

safely be cal led a progression. No murder takes place in the panels shown,


Joshua C. Hilst 155

only the machinations and inclinations of the mind. The mind takes these

two panels and construes a relationship between them. In order to perform such an operation, the mind must close out the gutter (an operation called

"closure," oddly enough).1 When the mind provides closure, it constructs

a relationship between the panels?a relationship the eye never actually sees. The operation is performed continually while the eyes peruse the

panels of the comic. Without this operation of closure, no story occurs, which leads McCloud to state that, in one definite sense, "Comics is

closure" (67). What is necessary, I argue, is to read the rhetorics of paralogy

idiomatically across comics?specifically, how comics embody paralogy

through the gutter.2 As a form of linking-/ogos, paralogy takes its cue from

Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard: "It is necessary to link, but the mode of linkage is

never necessary" (Differend 29). In this spirit, I read these rhetorics

through three other paralogic theorists: Todd Taylor, Victor Vitanza, and

Cynthia Haynes. But, first we need a word about paralogy. Although difficult to define, Lyotard puts forth paralogy (principally in The Postmodern Condition) as a way of breaking up master narratives?

renewing old language games through new meanings. According to

Lyotard, paralogy is

[A] power that destabilizes the capacity for explanation, manifested in the promulgation of new norms for understanding or, if one

prefers, in a proposal to establish new rules circumscribing a new field of research for the language of science. (Postmodern 61)

Whereas Lyotard deploys paralogies here in the context of science, both

Vitanza and Thomas Kent utilize the concept in the province of rhetoric.3

My aim is to situate paralogy inside the gutter, and thereby trouble the

conversation that has made of both a monologic mystery. Identifying an

idiom of rhetoric that cuts up master narratives, that breaks up totalities

(see Davis), I put forth a "slasher rhetoric." My offering will show

where paralogy ?s most useful to the discipline of rhetoric and

composition, where unspoken assumptions suggest that scholars must

do one or the other: rhetoric or composition. The gutter shows how we

possess both?as Cynthia Haynes renders it, rhetoric/Slash/composition

("Rhetoric").


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In Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric, Vitanza

enjoins us to "redescribe perpetually using new idioms" (33). My argument answers the call by proposing an idiom designed to reconfigure how we

teach and practice rhetoric?the gutter. Working out of Lyotard, as does

Vitanza, I take a similar view of the idiom as more than a certain language, or style, or vocabulary. The gutter provides an (un)grounding for another

way of thinking. It occupies itself with (un)grounding in an effort to delay any "final day of rest," and moreover, to ensure "no final point of stasis"

for thinking about rhetoric (Vitanza 72). Forging connections between what various theorists of rhetoric have said about paralogy and the

gutter?that blank space of the comic?I take a walk with our three

theorists whose singular attempts to un-rest rhetoric resonate well with/

in the gutter. Taylor, Vitanza, and Haynes all emphasize paralogy, as well

as find new ways to connect our work in rhetoric and composition. As

rhetorical inventors, they serve as ideal traveling companions for this walk, which will not be a stroll on the street, but in the gutter, a trajectory I think

my companions would appreciate. First we will see parallels between their

work and the work that goes on in the gutter. Next, I provide a few brief

examples from the work of Frank Miller. Finally, I suggest the manner in

which this rhetorical idiom works, as well as some effects of such gutter talk in rhetorical criticism and practice.

Three Traveling Companions

Todd Taylor addresses the paralogical aspects of ethos in his essay, "If

He Catches You, You're Through: Coyotes and Visual Ethos." Taylor

argues for a far more visual than textual ethos, based on cues picked up

by seeing and not seeing, or better yet, seeing and ignoring. Centering his

conversation on the Looney Tunes characters, Wile E. Coyote and the

Roadrunner, he presents each. Anyone fami 1 iar with them 1 ikely knows the

disheveled and distraught appearance of the Coyote, as opposed to the

more cheery look of the Roadrunner. We sympathize with the Coyote

through his pathetic characterization. We come to such conclusions,

Taylor tells us, through "blindness, that which we do not literally see," which "determines what we 'see' as much as that which consciously


Joshua C. Hilst 157

dominates our vision" (46). "Once we recognize that we merely glimpse small fragments of what we think we see," he continues, "the extrapola

tion, the guesswork that we use to complete the rest of the picture grows

increasingly important" (47). Our "moments of greatest blindness," Paul

de Man reminded us, "are also the moments at which [we] achieve [our]

greatest insight" (109). Put yet another way, Kenneth Burke famously observed: "A way of seeing is a way of not seeing" (70). In short, the

viewer must do a great deal of guesswork to fill in the rest of the picture.

Taylor most directly addresses Thomas Kent's application of paralogy to rhetoric. Kent's theory is based principally on the work of philosopher Donald Davidson (as opposed to Vitanza's more Lyotardian concept of

paralogy), where Davidson "resists the idea that discourse can be codified

in meaningful ways because it is such a complicated paralogic hermeneu

tical dance" (Kent 58). The reason for this resistance lies in the guesswork inherent in discourse, according to Kent: "When we guess, we shift ground

linguistically in order to convey information or decipher information, and

the guesswork that allows us to shift ground relies on paralogical elements

of language use" (40). These paralogical elements involve both intuition

and taste, to which Taylor adds seeing?that is, seeing that also does not see.

Taylor refers to the visual aspects of rhetoric that we miss, but that

nevertheless inform us, as paralogical. In similar fashion, viewers com

plete the story of comics panels as they read, filling in whatever action is

interpreted as being there.4 So, then, Scott McCloud is correct: we read across the panels, the eye providing closure in order to interpret the story. Hence, comics is closure. However, the gutter represents a space that, like Kent's conception, cannot be codified. Taylor conceives ethos as a

similar kind of guesswork: "Psychologically, we broadcast our gaze within the limited range of our instruments, and that which registers, that which returns a blip on our screen, defines not only our field of vision but also the nature of our vision itself. That which does and does not register . . .

makes us who we are" (52). Although Taylor limits his argument to ethos, I would expand this concept of paralogy to include the gutter. The gutter is an uncodifiable space, and the panels help to hold our will-to-codify at

bay. In an effort to read from panel to panel, certain paths, or jumps from

panel to panel, must be taken. However, what the gutter does not show us


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determines what the panels do show us. The gutter is, as Taylor argues, not so much unseen as it is ignored. This first concept of paralogy should

show us that the ignored is often the determinant of the perceived. In Vitanza we find a second conception of the gutter?specifically,

excess. Vitanza's project more closely follows Lyotard's own conception of paralogy, as previously mentioned. Paralogy is a means of breaking up master narratives through generating new forms through new linkages. In

Negation, Vitanza argues, "This is what paralogy is all about?'just

linking.' For Lyotard,paralogy, not rules, precedes consensus" (42). In

this case, the linkages refer to Lyotard's privileging of parataxis over

syntaxis or hypotaxis. Parataxis is, of course, the rhetorical technique of

arranging, side by side, simple sentences without conjunctions. The

purpose is to further Lyotard's project of overturning negation (also an

important theme of Vitanza's book). Lyotard writes, "Parataxis thus connotes the abyss of Not-Being which opens between phrases, it stresses

the surprise that something begins when what is said is said" (66). Vitanza

works toward a denegative function that brings in what he terms, "the

excluded third," working out of Michel Serres' formulation that a dialogue always presupposes a third term and then excludes it. This third term, which Lyotard's paralogy also acknowledges through the abyss of Not

Being, is a term of excess, or what Serres cal Is that "prosopopeia of noise"

(67). The classical form of dialectic is designed precisely?according to

Lyotard, Vitanza, and Serres?to exclude a third term of excess because

of its role in fostering doubt about certainty and finality. Vitanza under

stands the excluded third as pivotal in the move to delay a final point of rest.

In his influential "Three Countertheses," Vitanza claims that paralogy bears witness "to the unintelligible or to disputes or differences of opinion that are systematically disallowed by the dominant language game" (146).

Moreover, it does not simply make the weaker argument the stronger, but

"favor[s] a radical heterogeneity of discourses over" a dominant single

discourse, or a homogenous group of discourses. In other words, such

continual overturnings and denegations may be seen as ways of ensuring that no discourse is excluded: paralogy is a passage for excess. Vitanza

works to bring all the excess back into the conversation.

The gutter is similarly excessive. If a successful reading of a comics

page is one that steps over the gutter and connects two dissimilar panels,


Joshua C. Hilst 159

it can only do so by canceling out that same space, the abyss. Panels, like

the ones shown in Figure 1, can actually show the viewer no action, and

yet we may still perceive a narrative. While it would be strange, indeed, to suggest that what takes place in the panels (logos) is unimportant, we

cannot fail to acknowledge the excess (para/logos) that the panels cover, and the operation of closure that predicates "successful" readings. The

operation of closure bears a decided similarity to the dialogue that closes

out the third term, the prosopopeia of noise. The excluded term makes

itself felt as the viewer pieces together the various panels of the story.

Paratactically, the gutter continually opens up and allows the viewer to see

a blank space, but one that is determinative of what is seen. The term

"closure" is perhaps a more felicitous term than has been acknowledged. The operation of closing off all other possibi lities (V itanza might cal 1 them

incompossibilities) shuts off the excess and allows a single reading to

emerge. However, following Lyotard and Vitanza, I acknowledge this

blank space, an abyss of rhetoric, by inventing an idiom for it (Lyotard's

process of "bearing witness"), which will be my goal in the latter half of this paper. For now, we are building an argument by adding to Taylor's notion of blindness the Vitanzan conception of excess.

I have saved Cynthia Haynes' "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory" for last since it is a more unusual case, inasmuch as she does not employ the term "paralogy." This does not make

her thinking any less paralogical. She will provide a third point of

triangulation (appropriate since paralogy is concerned with excluded

thirds), so that I may place the idiom of the gutter among Taylor's and

Vitanza's para-terms. Haynes seeks to unground rhetoric and composi tion as the teaching of argument by promising "to probe the ground beneath

teaching argument (nee critical thinking) that compels us to teach good

writing as the invention of good reasons" (670). She explores the metaphor of grounding and ungrounding extensively in an attempt to "maneuver us

(rhet/comp) in a different direction, to draw us away from the shoreline of

philosophical investigation and its alluring beacon of argumentation" (671). Her principal interlocutor is Martin Heidegger, specifically the shift in his

thought from anchoring Being in a given homeland in the earlier work (such as Being and Time), to releasing it "into its essence as the principle of

ground itself (675). In lookingatthe metaphor of ground, she finds a topos


160 jac

of argument in rhetoric and composition: the street. Haynes maintains that

composition pedagogy is fraught with calls to connect writing with the street, to appeal to the street-smart student. We find this call in rhetoric and

composition all too commonly enough?connecting writing to the real

world, outside the classroom. The problem, she writes, with this particular

topos is that the "street, and all the subcultural resistance that the term

evokes, is emblematic of a well-oiled logic of containment" (684). The

street, a particular locale or topos, in this connection finds writing just as

contained as writing confined to the classroom. Both are logics of

containment, albeit well-rehearsed ones.

Haynes moves to deconstruct the street topos, to move composition offshore. The streetwise topos, always combative, invents writing as

fighting. Haynes wants to proceed differently, to find a place off the street

from which to think about writing. In Haynes, I find a welcome traveling

companion in that I also want to move out of the street, or from out of the

topos, and into the gutter. The gutter demonstrates for us not a topos, but

atopos?the (non)place that Haynes also seeks. Where is the gutter in

terms of the dialectic between two panels? It is neither "here" nor "there," neither "fish" nor "fowl" in any proper sense of reasoning. It is not of the

panel, but between and among panels. Without the gutter, no panels exist.

I would even suggest that the panels are not primary, creating the gutter between them, but rather the artist begins with the blank page: all gutter.

Haynes writes that her "design is not meant to actively un-build spaces so

much as to step back and view the unground (der Abgrund?abyss) beneath the structures, and to sketch a rhetoric of the unbuilt" (688). In

this idea of the unbuilt, a rhetoric that, as Haynes later adds, disinvents

logos, an ungrounding might be found from which to think about the gutter. What Geoff Sire calls "the (other) story that dwells in the (purported) story," the gutter is beginning, is the abyss, from which al 1 possible stories

can begin to emerge (193). As long as we have a gutter, we can construct

different relations between the panels. We are not looking for the correct

reading, which is a will to mastery (Nietzsche), to authority over the comic, but for understanding different readings, all made in the gutter.

Not content to merely sketch a rhetoric of the unbuilt, Haynes detaches rhetoricians/compositionists from the comfort zone of "ground"

mentality and hails us into a shifting vessel where we must understand


Joshua C. Hilst 161

ourselves as boat people?people without a proper place or topos. For

Haynes, people without a place understand rhetoric as otherwise: "Rheto

ric as refuge rearticulates the paths of the poets and illuminates their abstract trajectories. Displacing argument is rhetoric's supreme task;

disinventing logos is rhetoric's sacred duty" (707). She seeks another way of talking about rhetoric and writing. Whereas logic and reason, typically

thought of as the ground of our discipline, have become the predominant way, Haynes looks for other ways, other trajectories, that might serve to

disinvent logos. To locate other trajectories, and in the process disinvent

the logos that resides in the panels, enacts the paralogic operation of the gutter. Haynes makes my point that the gutter, the non-place from which

this operation happens, forms the abyss from which all these trajectories emerge. In this case, the gutter is rhetoric. Let us take from our traveling

companions, then, these ways of thinking about the gutter: as the blindness

that provides insight, as the excess that must be disallowed in order to provide a single explanation, and as the atopos, the abgrund that

disinvents logos. To illustrate both literally and rhetorically, we should look at some examples.5

Figure 4

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TO 0&8. v WMAT?...C#,e. 7M?

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162 jac

Frank Miller's comic, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, serves as a

prime example of what can happen in the gutter. In this case, the movements between the panels do not function chronologically; rather,

they jump between times and spaces (see Figure 4). The instants are

unevenly divided, and the relations between the panels are anything but obvious. A character (not a sympathetic one?but recounting Taylor, it

seems obvious), recounts pushing a beggar onto a subway track, he claims, because he didn't know whether the beggar was there to mug him. The

panels jump from the reporter in the studio to the man on the street. These televised panels are, of course, in the shape of television screens (again,

probably not actively registered, but picked up nonetheless). Spliced in between cuts, we view images of the events that transpired: the push, the

panic of a man in front of an oncoming train, and then a rush of wind. But

notice the physical position of the man in the final panel?blown back by the rush of wind. Likely we have all stood next to a train as it pulled into the station and were probably blown back by the rush of wind. In this case, the man moves backwards. Miller conveys the intensity of the scene, and

the death of the individual, through a rush of air from the train emerging out of the tunnel. The relations between the panels become completely

disjointed. We must struggle to look through the panels and pick up subtle cues to put a narrative together.

Figure 5


Joshua C. Hilst 163

The above panels (see Figure 5) find Miller at perhaps his most rhetorical. We find a series of diptychs. Diptychs, in comics, show a single image broken into two panels (triptychs break into three, quadriptychs into four, polyptychs into still more) and have the cinematic effect of a slow pan,

pulling the eye closer to the action by subdividing time and space. We see

here a series of slow pans as a character, having undergone extensive

plastic surgery, pulls off his bandages for the first time. It seems, in looking at the panels, hardly necessary to even divide these up?that whole images

might be more useful to us than these diptychs. However, when we

consider that the character in question is a villain named TwoFace, then

the delight Miller takes in playing on the different levels of duality comes into full frame. When the doctors remove the bandages, the line dividing the diptychs finally disappears.

Again, Miller demonstrates this disorienting effect. What automatic

relation do the panels share? How might we see the narrative passing

through them? We walk through the gutters, j uxtaposing panel with panel, and yet what we do not see is just as important as what we do see (the line

down the center of the diptychs, the doctors in later panels). Our blindness

is exploited along with our insight. The last panel (Figure 6), a close up of one of the diptychs, shows a

line depicting part of TwoFace's bandages moving across the panel,

through the gutter. It is, so far as I can tell, the only spot in the book where

Miller allows a line to travel outside the panels into the space of the gutter. Here, it seems Miller plays with the whole notion of outside and inside.

What is part of the gutter, and what is part of the panels is now thrown into

question. Our traveling companions, no doubt, would perceive this move

as an ungrounding of the panels that makes the gutter visible. All of the excess of the gutter returns to spi 11 into the topos of the panel. Having seen

this operation first hand, I would now like to move into a consideration of

the rhetorical operation of the gutter, hence bearing witness to this idiom.

Theorizing the Idiom

Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen claims in his recent book, The System

of Comics, that "the gutter, in and of itself (that is to say, an empty space)


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Figure 6

does not merit fetishization" (112). He gives several reasons for suggest

ing that it ought not be fetishized, arguing that some comics have only a 1 ine to separate them, never actually a given empty space. Where it might be

objected that the gutter posits a virtual image (an image inferred or

imagined by the viewer), Groensteen responds: "Comics exist only as a

satisfying narrative form under the condition that, despite the discontinu ous enunciation and the intermittent monstration, the resultant story forms an uninterrupted and intelligible totality" (114). The system of comics, he claims, finds its truth in the sequence of images, rather than any single

image. On this last point, Groensteen is absolutely correct. However, I

take issue with a number of his points regarding the gutter. First, the suggestion that panels that have on ly a line to separate images lack a gutter seems an odd one. We are not here arguing over size or length of gutter,

only that there is an interstitial space, a pause between images that causes

the viewer to implicitly place those two images in relation to one another.


Joshua C. Hilst 165

Whether this is done with an infinitesimally small line or a wide blank space is insignificant: what is significant is that we close out the in-between of the images, and bring them together.6 But more importantly, Groensteen's

terminology is problematic in that he rules out, a priori, rhetorical

considerations of the gutter by referring to them as "fetishization," a

troubling formulation. I leave it to the reader to determine whether or not

my discourse on the gutter might be a fetish, but the space seems to be

important for all of the reasons listed heretofore (its paralogy, excess, relation of blindness and insight, atopical nature, and so forth). If this is

fetishizing, make the most of it! More importantly, the way in which he articulates the system of

comics rules out other possible systems. Groensteen's argument could be

considered what Vitanza calls the "will to control" ("Countertheses" 140).

Regarding composition studies, Vitanza writes that the field possesses "the will to systematize" and the will to be composition's "author(ity)"

(140). Similarly, Groensteen will only allow for a reading of comics that is the reading, one that produces a satisfying and coherent narrative. While

Groensteen takes up Wolfgang Iser's suggestion of a "wandering view

point," wherein sequences of words (or in comics, images) leads to the

modification of expectation as the viewer proceeds, he nevertheless

employs these modifications toward a closed ending, the satisfied cus

tomer. There can be no interruptions in such a reading, no excesses: it must

eventually produce a totality. Like the difference between third sophistic and hermeneutic ears that Davis describes, "The latter do not attend to the

incessant murmur/mutter of the exiled-exscribed excess that must be

tuned out for meaning to land, to stabilize" ("Finitude's" 134). The issue

is less Groensteen's focus on the panels (which are, of course, important,

just as messages are important for Davis), but rather his aversion to finding the paralogy of comics and noting them?by rendering them abject before

we've even begun to notice them. Groensteen would leave the excess in

the outside in order to totalize meaning, but I would bring back the excess

to have us dwell in it, as Miller does. We must bear in mind Lyotard's formulation: the end goal isnot consensus(the totalized meaning Groensteen

wants). The goal, rather, is paralogy (Postmodern 65-66).

Groensteen, however, is helpful in understanding the gutter inasmuch as he looks to the panels: "[Demonstrating that meaning is inherent to the


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image is not something that speaks directly to comics, since it is between

the panels that the pertinent contextual rapports establish themselves with

respect to narration" (107; emphasis added). Here Groensteen is not

turning around and looking to the gutter, but rather articulating the

metonymic linkage between panels. He does not focus on the gutter as I

do, but on the action in the panels, only suggesting that metonymic linkages bring those panels together. Like the action in a filmic shot, what takes

place in the panels is important, of course. It would be foolhardy to deny such a claim. However, the in-between, the ignored, the abject, is just as

important. Comics attest to the importance of what we do not see.

Groensteen posits several operations of the panel lines that border the

gutter, but two specific ones in which I am most interested for this

discussion are closure and separation. In closure, "the frame is ... attached to the frames that surround it"

(Groensteen 43). Here he demonstrates the syntagmatic linkages be

tween panels through the operation of closure. As a syntagm, these panels are metonymically linked. The viewer moves from one panel to the next,

linking the actions perceived in each across the interstitial gutter. Not

surprisingly, the horizontal movement finds a paral lei with Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, who famously posit the poles of metaphor and me

tonymy as the two basic functions of language (90). Metonymy (the horizontal axis of the graph), links various symbolic elements together.

Metonymy functions syntagmatically by combiningelements. Atthe other

pole, we find metaphor, which they claim is the paradigmatic function of

language?the basis of which is similarity (if we were to draw a graph, which is often done, metaphor is the vertical axis). The individual using

language selects from a series of elements, each of which might have a

kind of similarity. Separation, the second of these two functions, seems to work along

this vertical axis. The bordering off of the panels one from another

separates them, obviously. Groensteen writes, "It is a condition of read ing that the panels are physically isolated from each other, or cognitively isolatable, ofthe sort that they can be read separately" (43). Paradoxically,

however, the equation of two elements has a similarly divisive function. In

equating two things, we also differentiate them. If I say, "Your eyes are

the stars," I have of course made a metaphor. Yet, the metaphor is based


Joshua C. Hilst 167

on the equation of two different things. Picture an equal sign, with two

different elements on either side. While the two elements posit a degree of comparability or agreement, the equation works only on the basis of an

unbridgeable chasm.

We have to bend this chasm somewhat and search for a rhetorical

bridge that allows for the binding/separation movement operating within

the gutter. Catachresis is typically a category of metaphor and refers

specifically to a metaphor "misused" to rhetorical effect, a kind of abuse

of the comparison function. The Silva Rhetoricae site lists the following

example: "He was foolish enough to order the new music CD sight unseen," and then explains, "No parallel idiom to 'sight unseen' exists for

things auditory, so the idiom is wrenched from its proper context to this

unusual one." Catachresis, then, is metaphor, but a metaphor so different

from the everyday context that it merits a different term. Quintilian explains further in the Institutes of Oratory, "Metaphor, in which much

of the ornament of speech consists, applies words to things to which they do not properly belong. Hence, the propriety of which we are speaking, relates, not to a word absolutely, but to the sense in which it is used, and

is to be estimated, not by the ear, but by the mind" (8.2.6). Metaphor, as

we have seen in its traditional conception, is paradigmatic, equating one

thing for another through similarity. The operation of this rhetoric, then, through the gutter, consists in

creating a new relationship that may not be accounted for in strictly

metaphoric terms. It is metonymic in its linkages, but that does not account

for what is happening. In other words, while there is a metaphoric

operation in the separation of panels, the meanings emerge through the

operation of catachresis. As McCloud notes, we will conjoin two panels no matter how dissimilar. In his taxonomy of six types of gutters, the last

of the six is the most interesting, and perhaps the most appropriate to my work here: non sequitur. According to McCloud the non sequitur

suggests "no logical relationship between panels whatsoever" (72). When

linkages occur through the gutter, a syntagmatic relationship is established

(Groensteen 22). Jakobson and Halle render the syntagmatic along the

horizontal axis. One panel is linked to the next, and the "reader" can "read" across the page, not all that different from regular text. Yet, at the same

time, it is hugely different because of the operation of closure. Closure asks


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the viewer to take these two panels and establish a relationship. This is an

operation of metaphor?find the relationship, equate the two panels. The

gutter then is the joining together of two disparate ideas syntagmatically and paradigmatically, linked as well as equated. The parataxis (and . . .

and... and) that we are looking for utilizes both functions, accounting for

unpredictability.

Unfortunately, McCloud's taxonomy misses the point that the rela

tionship between panels always requires the viewer to learn to construct

the relationship, which is not a natural relation. The relation between two

panels is constructed, asking that the viewer determine what is happening in this new language. These relationships, I would argue, are less natural, and more developed over time until they appear that way. In other words, all gutters are non sequitur. Nietzsche reminds us that all language is

tropic. Specifically, in his "Notes on Rhetoric," he maintains: "The tropes, non-literal significations, are considered to be the most artistic means of

rhetoric. But, with respect to their meanings, all words are tropes in

themselves, and from the beginning" (Gilman et al. 23). In other words, there is no basic, non-literal language.

We might, then, call the operation of the gutter a metonymic catachresis. That it functions in such a manner, bringing together opposite

"poles" of language, is precisely what makes the gutter paralogic. It does

not present a divide between the metaphor and metonymy, but rather

functions on both levels. There are continuous linkages between panels, but the divide that brings the two together is a function of catachresis.

Impossible to codify, it keeps the viewer in a kind of guessing game. As

Thomas Kent suggests: "Unlike rule-bound grammatical structures that

describe the nature of a particular language or semiotic system, paralogy . . . possesses no positive elements, no innate structure, no codifiable

grammar, and, therefore, no normative rules that we may violate" (5). What I am suggesting is that we can claim that it isn't rule-bound because

of the element of catachresis.

Unpredictable, catachresis brings together dissimilar elements, as I

have noted. Catachresis is not rule-bound, but rather creates new rules,

giving birth to metaphor. To refer to the "legs" of a table might seem

perfectly reasonable and natural. However, this metaphor has to be

invented; we have to invent the similarity between these two elements.


Joshua C. Hilst 169

The first instance of placing two ideas in juxtaposition is the instance of

catachresis. Eventually, we may find that certain of these catachreses

work better, and they become more normalized. But the relationship between comics panels is no more natural or literal than is literal language. Gutters always present us with two images and require us to construct the

relationship between them. We've only forgotten that the gutter is a non

sequitur, an operation that occurs over time. So what we have, then, is a

special case of metaphor. Two panels are both linked and equated in an

unpredictable, unassimilable fashion. Both contributions from McCloud

and Groensteen are, of course, valuable, but they do not account for the

excess of paralogy, for that which is excessive to the system. As Davis

claims, once communication can be defined as "successful interaction," we can once again rule out all of the "'marks and noises' that can't be

immediately appropriated" (129). Paralogy, however, is our goal.

Conclusions: Reveling in the Noise

There are two distinct and important conclusions to draw from th is idea of

metonymic catachresis. The first regards the notion of so-called visual

rhetorics, in which there is a tendency to see the composition of images in a unified way. I am thinking here especially of Gunther Kress, who tends to focus on the semiotics of a given image, especially in his Reading

Images: The Grammar of Visual Design and Multimodal Discourse.

And while he looks at the way that images, and even pages, can be brought into relation (see especially Grammar 25), the emphasis tends to be on

coherence and how to produce it. Kress' penchant for looking at the

composition of images overlooks the noise that such juxtaposition can

produce in the interstitial spaces. If my arguments are persuasive, then we

must acknowledge that it is not only the composition of a distinct image, but the arrangements of elements within them that give rise to any suasi ve

capacity that images possess. While Kress would no doubt agree with

such a claim, the unseen, excessive, atopical gutter presents an entirely different issue for visual composition. Visual rhetorics often focus on

composition atthe levelofcoherence(followingtrajectoriesin information

design and visual perception), but less so at the paralogical level.


170 jac

Exceptions may, of course, be found in some new media scholars, such as Nicholas Burbules, Jeff Rice, and Sean Williams, all of whom have

focused on the rhetorics of juxtaposition and the implied gutters in between screens when one navigates a webpage. Williams' two-part essay, "An

Integrated Pedagogy in Hyptertext," focuses, in part, on the ways in which

"juxtaposing competing representations" allow students to rethink the

relations between various aspects of an argument and enables exploring alternative forms of argument. In Rice's Rhetoric of Cool: Composition and New Media, he claims that "Juxtapositions among ideas as well as

word and image prompt assumptions and inferences absent in most

argumentative or narrative writing." (74). His epigraph from William

Burrough'sA^va^x:/?^^ is equally telling: "The basic law of association and conditioning is known to college students even in America: Any object,

feeling, odor, word, image in juxtaposition with any other object, feeling, word or image will be associated with it" (85). Burbules' article "Rhetorics

of the Web" suggests that having one page on a website link to another

always suggests a connection between the two, and the goal must be for

rhetoricians to consider this relationship. Whereas a great deal of work has

been done investigating whether or not visuals can present an argument, what is just as important (because paralogical) are the ways in which

visuals are associated.7 Whether or not association and juxtaposition constitute a "proper" argument is less significant than the association

itself. This is the work that most exemplifies the function of the gutter:

The undecidable figure is the blade, Abraham's raised knife, to be exact. Although both noun and verb, to slash is the predicate with which the scapegoat enters culture and unleashes a devastating mechanism upon humanity. The slash / signals an image?Abraham standing over Isaac, knife raised at an angle, prepared to sacrifice his only son?that marks a moment of indecision; but the undecid able dynamic is set in motion?rhetoric, and/or composition, caught in an act of faith. ("Rhetoric")

Haynes seizes upon the slash as an undecidable location: an interstitial

space. She extends the metaphor (or catachresis) of the slash to account

for the blade. This same blade begets the logic of the cut?slashing the

whole into pieces in order to re-cut, recast, and continually reinvent


Joshua C. Hilst 171

something new. The gutter slashes between panels, inventing new

rhetorics and new ways of seeing. I take this same blade as a point of

departure by which to describe a slasher rhetoric. Slasher rhetorics

match disparate phenomena, different ideas, pairing them together to

invent new topoi, new idioms. This same slash of the gutter resides in the

most crucial part of our discipline, the slash between rhetoric and

composition, a site of frequent and contentious relation in our discipline.8 The slash, which was so jarring to the MLA editor in Haynes's article, is

a call to us not to select one at the expense of the other, but serves rather

as an invitation to inhabit both, and to construe and reinvent continual ly the

relation between them.91 hope that through this exposition of the gutter, we can learn to see how our discipline might be connected through the

same slash.

A comic idiom, a slasher rhetoric recalls Davis' Breaking Up [At]

Totality, wherein she writes for those who want to produce something other than "the same old modernist text" (6). It is in the breaking up of

totality?the gutter?that this idiom of rhetoric takes (non)place. The

information inside the panels is, of course, important. However, we need

to recognize the paralogies at work here. A new relationship is introduced

by inserting this space that the viewer closes over and ignores. In not

ignoring this space, and hence closing off the excess of which it is part, a

different idiom of rhetoric is produced. Such an idiom has great value for

understanding visual rhetoric, but also calls us to recognize the slash that

is so important to our discipline. In particular, it assists in finding new ways in which we might reinvent their relationship, in returning ever again to the

gutter and allowing its excess to flow, in allowing logos to be disinvented.

A logic of the cut is an idiom suggested by extensive parallels in the work of Taylor, Vitanza, and Haynes, and remixes another idiom with which we

bear a catachretic witness?a slasher rhetoric.

Utah Valley University Orem, Utah

Notes

1. Readers familiar with visual perception theories will understand closure somewhat differently. Closure, especially in Gestalt theories, refers to a type of


172 jac

optical illusion, wherein a circle that is not quite closed in proximity to another

shape will deceive the eye into perceiving it as a full circle. Here, while there is an

operation in the mind that brings together panels, the panels remain quite distinct. That is, there is no optical illusion that fools the viewer into thinking two panels are one. See Ware.

2. This reading will no doubt reflect similar conceptions that have been

developed in other fields. For instance, in Louise Rosenblatt's theory of trans actional reading, she claims that interpretations ignore "elements in the text or

[project] on it experiences for which there is no defensible basis in the text" (137). While I take no issue with Rosenblatt's theory, let me differentiate my own

position by saying that while there are common principles at work, Rosenblatt's

gaps are more metaphorical in nature, whereas the gutter is more literal. Where Rosenblatt discusses ignored elements as gaps, she speaks metaphorically, at the level of the content of the text. In the gutter, we are dealing with form?that is, the

gutter is a gap inasmuch as it is an actual, physical gap in the story of the comic. 3.1 do refer to Kent's definition of paralogy, despite also referring to one of

Kent's critics on the subject of paralogy, Diane Davis. While Davis is critical of Kent's normative claims regarding paralogy, she does not criticize Kent on the basis of his descriptive claims. That is, she rightly critiques Kent's placing paralogy in the service of hermeneutics and ultimately allowing its reappropria tion. However, I think Kent's general description of what paralogy is seems to accord well enough with Lyotard's to merit inclusion here.

4. This idea no doubt draws comparisons to schema theory, a psychological concept drawn from the work of Jean Piaget, but exposited by more current research in educational psychology (see Anderson), artificial intelligence re search (see Arbib), and elsewhere. Schema theory looks at the ways in which

knowledge equips learners with a means, as Anderson writes, "often not repro ducible in sentences, which provides [a student] with a framework or context for

interpreting new experiences" (416). In other words, past experience provides a basis for understanding. Though I may see a limited view of a cube, I recognize it and still know it has six sides. Memory and knowledge provide an expectation that can fulfill what is seen. Anderson suggests that the ways in which schema interact can be viewed as assimilation, and the change in schema as accommo

dation, a dialectical process. This view of schema certainly would fit wel 1 with the ideas espoused in Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics, since Groensteen is interested in the ways in which viewers assimilate information and construct narratives of closure (see my section on "Theorizing the Idiom"). However, where I differ is precisely in the concept of assimilation. I am less interested in seeing how panels are assimilated, and more interested in gutters that play with closure and seek to interrupt closed and unambiguous viewings?an excessive take on the gutter.

5. One certainly ought not to base a theory on a single example, and I do not.


Joshua C. Hilst 173

While Miller is used to illustrate presently what the gutter can do, there are many

examples of similarly radical uses of the gutter (and perhaps more so). I would refer the reader to Moore and Hickman.

6. In Information Visualization, Ware distinguishes two types of visual

representation: sensory (biological) and arbitrary (conventional). Ware's goal is to establish better models of design based on how we see. Visual perception theory notes the idea of gaps in perception that arise from the structure of the retina. The suggestion that visual acuity drops off sharply outside of certain lines of vision produces gaps in what we perceive. These, of course, might also be kinds of gutters. Ware suggests that most designs are a mix of both sensory and

arbitrary representation, and the gutter is undoubtedly no different. I am focused here on the conventional side. Moreover, where Ware is interested in understand

ing visual perception in an effort to create visual designs that produce the most efficient readings, I would prefer to show how the excess that escapes us can also be valuable. There is most certainly value in the scientific research of Ware, as it contributes to the development of improved information systems and technolo

gies. However, as distinct from Ware's perceptual theories of design, I am less interested in visualizations that "derive their expressive power from being well

designed to stimulate the visual sensory system" and more interested in how to

"interrupt" such systematic ideas (Ware 12). 7. See especially J. Anthony Blair. 8. As an exemplar, we might look at Bruce Horner's Terms of Work for

Composition: A Materialist Critique, where he examines (133-64) three "disci

plines" to which composition looks in an effort to improve its situation within the

academy: English, cultural studies, and rhetoric. However, to understand the

discipline not as composition (or writing) studies, but as composition and

rhetoric, construed through the gutter of the slash, is to understand them as

already part and parcel of the same thing. Rather than parsing the two out from each other, and understanding them as different disciplines only conveniently and incidentally placed together, I want to see them connected through paralogy, a paratactical relationship with the possibility for reinvention.

9. This is a tendency, I fear, that is opposed by the recent Norton Book of Composition Studies (Susan Miller) almost certain to foment canon formation around writing studies rather than rhetoric and composition.

Works Cited

Anderson, R.C. "The Notion of Schemata and the Educational Enterprise." Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge. Ed. R.C. Anderson et al.

Hillsdale:Erlbaum, 1977.415-31.


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Arbib, Michael A., Jeffrey Conklin, and Jane C. Hill. From Schema Theory to

Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Blair, J. Anthony. "The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Arguments," Argu mentation and Advocacy 33 A (1996): 23-39.

Burbules, Nicolas C. "Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and Critical Literacy." Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Ed. liana Snyder. New York: Routledge, 1998.102-22.

Burke, Kenneth. Permanence andChange: An Anatomy of Purpose. Berkeley: U

ofCaliforniaP,1984.

Burroughs, William S. Nova Express. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1992.

Davis, D. Diane. Breaking Up [At] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.

-. "Finitude's Clamor; Or, Notes toward a Communitarian Literacy." College Composition and Communication 53 (2001): 119-45.

De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971.

Derrida, Jacques. "Difterance." Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.3-27.

Gilman, Sander L., Carole Blair, and David J. Parent, eds. Friedrich Nietzsche on

Rhetoric and Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007.

Haynes, Cynthia. "Rhetoric/Slash/Composition." Enculturation5. \ (2003). http:/

/enculturation.gmu.edu/5_l/index51 .html. 14 April 2008.

-. "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory." JAC23 (2003): 667-724.

Helms, Jason. Personal Interview. 30 Mar. 2007.

Hickman, Jonathan. The Nightly News. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2007.


Joshua C. Hilst 175

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000.

Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language. New York:

Mouton, 1956.

Kent, Thomas. Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction.

Cranbury,NJ: Associated UP, 1993.

Kress, Gunther, and Theo Van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse. London: Hodder, 2001.

-. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

-. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper, 1993.

Miller, Frank, with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: D.C. Comics, 1986.

Moore, Alan. Promethea. New York: Wildstorm Comics, 2001.

Quintilian. Institutes of Oratory. 1856. Trans. Rev. John Selby Watson, http:// honeyl.public.iastate.edu/quintilian/index.html.Accessed 14 April 2008.

Rice, Jeff The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2007.

Sire, Geoffrey. English Composition as a Happening. Logan: Utah State UP, 2002.

Taylor, Todd. "If He Catches You, You're Through: Coyotes and Visual Ethos." The Language of Comics: Word and Image.Ed. Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001.40-59.

Vitanza, Victor. Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997.


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-. "Three Countertheses: A Critical In(ter)vention into Composition Theories and Pedagogies." Contending With Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Era. Ed. J. SchilbandP. Harkin. New York: MLA, 1991.139-72.

-. "Seeing in Third Sophistic Ways." Rhetoric and Composition as Intellec tual Work. Ed. Gary A. Olson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002.

Ware, Colin. Information Visualization: Perception for Design. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Morgan, 2004.

Williams, Sean D. "Part 2: Toward an Integrated Composition Pedagogy in

Hypertext." Computers andComposition\S.2(200\)\ 123-35.


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Issue Table of ContentsJAC, Vol. 31, No. 1/2 (2011), pp. 11-406Front MatterBunnies for Pets or Meat: The Slaughterhouse as Cinematic Metaphor [pp. 11-44]Hybridity, Ethos, and Visual Representations of Smokey Bear [pp. 45-69]Ableist Rhetorics, Nevertheless: Disability and Animal Rights in the Work of Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum [pp. 71-101]Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability [pp. 103-121]Fair Trade and Unequal Exchange: Painful Realities of Defensive Writing [pp. 123-151]Gutter Talk: (An)Other Idiom of Rhetoric [pp. 153-176]Queer: An Impossible Subject for Composition [pp. 177-206]Response EssaysThe Spatial Turn in Rhetorical Genre Studies: Intersections of Metaphor and Materiality [pp. 207-224]Rhetorics of e-Health and Information Age Medicine: A Risk-Benefit Analysis [pp. 225-235]So Who Are These New Consumers of Internet Health Information? [pp. 235-240]Listen to Strangers: A Response to Dale Jacobs' "The Audacity of Hospitality" [pp. 241-248]Embodying/Disabling Plagiarism [pp. 248-266]Transformative Reframing: From Theft to Passing On [pp. 267-273]Bobby Who? [pp. 273-283]Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy, and the Reconceptualization of Rhetoric and Composition [pp. 283-307]Butler Unclarifies the Issues [pp. 308-314]Revisiting the Evidence: A Reply to Donald Lazere [pp. 314-322]

Review EssaysReforming Method: An Invitation to Enchantment [pp. 323-337]Environmental Sustainability: Witnessing, Embodiment, and the Grotesque [pp. 338-349]A Perduring Phenomenon [pp. 349-361]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 363-368]Review: untitled [pp. 369-375]Review: untitled [pp. 375-381]Review: untitled [pp. 381-389]Review: untitled [pp. 390-394]Review: untitled [pp. 395-400]Review: untitled [pp. 400-405]

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