Invisible Ink

In Stuart Hall’s, “The Hard Road to Renewal” I share a common concern not just about Thatcherism’s ability to remake common sense, but the ability of any dominant entity or medium to remake common sense (8). I think questioning the conventions in forms of media that are, “simply ‘taken for granted’ in practice and thought,” (8) leads to the understanding not only of the message but of the intended use of the message. Because the “hope of every ideology is to naturalize itself out of History and into Nature, and thus to become invisible, to operate unconsciously” (8) I believe that dominant institutions and dominant forms of media go hand and hand, and that different conventions in certain forms of media have been so internalized that they lend themselves to invisible consumption.

One such convention that comes to mind is Noam Chomsky’s take on “concision” in journalism (which unfortunately seems to be expanding into social media such as Twitter). In an interview in 2002 Chomsky states: “If you want to say something that questions the religion, you're expected to give evidence, and you can't do that between two commercials.” While this convention of concision is hidden in plain view, on a certain level I think most people realize that concision is a major factor in journalism, and in some cases even necessary. I don’t even think concision would be as much of a problem if all the major news organizations didn’t simply regurgitate what their competitors are reporting, which they tend to do. So instead of different major news organizations summarizing their findings into key points with different takes on different stories (which wouldn’t be all that bad), we have pretty much all the major news organizations giving slightly varied accounts of the same story and the same opinion, e.g., the march to war after 9/11 led by the “liberal” New York Times.

I think Stuart nails it when he states: “common sense, however, natural it appears, always has a structure” (8). This reminded me of Cara Finnegan’s dissections of visual arguments in her piece, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument.” Here she makes use of Aristotle’s “naturalistic enthymeme” to understand the visual rhetoric in what has become known as the “Skull Controversy” in a campaign for Roosevelt’s New Deal (143). This naturalistic enthymeme “leaves space for the audience to insert its own knowledge and experience; it assumes an audience of judges capable of ‘filling in the blanks’ of an argument” (143). So with this new “time-saving device”(142) of visual technology, the rhetoric is as old as Aristotle. However, we fail to grasp the importance of teaching the members of our society to question the visual representations that bombard us on a daily basis. I still have to explain to people that the Dominos “hidden camera” commercials are not real. “Random” people don’t simply “happen” to look that good on camera. Finnegan also finds this lack of critical analysis curious, “Rather then destroy our belief in the naturalistic enthymeme, digital imaging has only served to reinforce and intensify it” (147).