If you really want to call yourself informed about comics scholarship -- and have the educator's interest in psychology or linguistics -- you need to know Cohn's work. I'm not sure it represents the best or most thorough theories of comics, but his ideas are very important and respected among comics scholars.
Hear and see his lecture "What is 'Visual Language'? What 'Comics' Can Tell Us About The Mind" by clicking on the title of this post.
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Here are my rough running notes as I viewed his presentation (emphasis on rough):
*He begins talking about definitions of "visual language," many of which sounds fairly similar to WJT Mitchell's imagetext, but he is very discriminating in what qualifies as "visual language" for him.
*Cohn's definition of the term moves away from the reliance on metaphor that is found in many others. He does not assume that communication = language, rather, language is part of communication, but not all of it.
*On cognition, Cohn states that humans convey concepts via three modalities, and only three modalities: auditory, manual/facial, and visual-graphic.
* Cohn says each modality can take on rules or structured sequences (sentences [spoken languages], hand motions in [sign languages], and comics [visual languages]).
*Comics use the verbal and written modalities, of course. He calls writing a synethesia in that it turns a verbal language into a written language understood graphically.
* I like his phrasing here in that he is overtly stating that writing is a form of graphics. Remember, the Greeks only had one word for both writing and drawing: graphein. As I have mentioned several times in print, letters are just signified graphemes.
*He makes a distinction between comics and other forms of sequential art and illustrated books. Comics do not = visual language. "Rather, comics are to visual language what novels are to English," he says. "Comics are the sociocultural contexts in which the biological capacity, or the cognitive capacity, is used. Comics are written in visual language and maybe written language."
*I'm not sure here. I worry that he is not tackling the larger term/category of sequential art.
*His overall claim is that there is a visual language on par with written language. Nothing particularly new here to the comics theory reader. This is a revolutionary or radical statement only to those who haven't heard it before.
*He discusses Charles Sanders Peirce as a semiotician who says meaning gets made in three different ways: iconic, indexical, and symbolic reference. Iconic reference suggests resemblance or similarity (he gives examples of a smiley face and the Mona Lisa); Indexicality refers to causality or indication (the example here is a finger pointing to the moon; the finger does not equal the moon but points us towards it); Symbolic reference suggests conventionality or systematicity alone (he offers a peace sign, an American flag, a heart, etc.) Conventionality is a variable in the first two. Not so much in the third.
*I'm a Derrida man myself.
*Traditional thoughts on drawing are from perception and from memory. Memory is the stand-in for perception. Cohn thinks this is short-sighted. A better view would deal with patterns in the mind. An object is "scanned" through what he calls "graphemic properties" such as lines and curves and dots; the mind sees this as tree, then articulates it.
*His ideas do seem to match with concepts from brain research, which tell us that we do not remember things in one specific place in the brain, but, rather, different aspects of things are stored in different areas, and when we access memories or schema or what have you, the different ganglions and neurons in different places fire together to bring all elements of the "thingliness" to our consciousness.
*He says drawing from memory, then, has nothing to do with perception, but rather accessing those visual patterns. Sort of sounds a little round-robin to me. Isn't the visual pattern somehow based on remembering the object? Do we just remember the abstract elements, which then come together when we metacognitively remember? It seems a chicken-egg issue that I'm not sure he resolves. Basically, he seems to say that drawing via visual memory is simply one more step removed from the thing itself than what others have articulated. Patterns are remembered more so than details.
*All languages, even visual ones, have patterns and grammars (within particular sequenced systems -- here he sounds like Thierry Groensteen a bit). Visual languages are more like sign languages than spoken languages, he claims.
*From here, he gets to his older ideas of visual grammars in comics. Lots of parsing out sequences and labeling them as clauses, etc. This is why I call him the Todorov of comics scholarship. The critique of Todorov's literary algebraic labeling, of course, is that is has been considered to be of limited utility. When I see his diagrams essentially turning a comic strip into a sentence diagram, I have real trouble thinking about practical applications as well.
*In basic terms, though, it does show us how innately complex a process reading comics can be. His thoughts remind me of a quote from a recent article on graphic novels by Johanna Drucker in which she says (perhaps without knowing it) that reading and creating comics is essentially the equivalent of running through the higher order levels of Bloom's taxonomy.
*Communication happens via "mutual intelligibility," those with "mutual intelligibility" are in communities. Some communities overlap; some do not, based on mutual intelligibility.
*So, is this a psycho-linguistic appreciation of fanboys and fangirls? Sounds good to me, lol. ;)
*Wow, he actually does go on to discuss elements of the comics reading community.
*His thoughts on human development:
* There must be some level of innateness in drawing. Other species do not learn to draw like humans do. His dotting over a 7 year old's sequenced drawings remind me of one of Kress's articles from the New London Group book.
* There must be a learning period. He says there is a drop off in ability to draw around puberty. The ability stagnates in many cultures, but not Japanese culture, where the development keeps going, because everyone continues to draw sequential images due to a widespread love of Manga.
Hmmm... but what about motivation? What about the person in American culture who returns to art late in life?
*Language consists of:
*Concepts conveyed through a modality by a sequential grammar that is governed by hierarchical rules, that is infinitely creative, that is used for communicative purposes by a community of speakers, that is diverse for that community, that gives them identity; it is processed unconsciously; it might be relativistic; some aspect of that is innate, some is learned.
PHEW!!
*Not Language:
Communication = concepts and modality.
Language adds the grammar.
*OK, I get it.
*Computer language is not language; paintings are not language; music is not language;dancing is not language; diagrams and charts are not language.
*I feel he is probably most wrong in these points. He doesn't adequately parse out various types of paintings, for example. What about a sequence of paintings or art works, like Hogarth's? Another critique: for someone who seems to be bringing thought from different disciplines together, he sure seems to miss a lot from current comics theory, literary theory, and education. That's a lot to ask of a person, to be sure, though.
*Well, there are grammars in these forms, but not language. Huh? didn't he just say that language adds the grammar? Again, he gets a little round-robin in his thinking at times.
*Some things don't use concepts but do use a grammar and a modality. That's how he's resolving this issue. But, I'm not sure I agree here. Is he forgetting that dance, painting, art -- all have visual and abstract mental iconography of their own? That the people who create them and enjoy them and know about them bring schema based on history, knowledge of form, composition, etc?
*Next step: How does our culture treat graphic communication? He says "as art." But, visual language and the capacity to draw are not the same as art to him. "Art is the sociocultural context in which we use thus biological capacity."
*Interesting....
*He says that art and language are competing paradigms. Any proponent of comics art in classrooms or in conservative college English departments knows this, or at least knows that art and language have traditionally been bisected, whether they should be or not.
* He believes the language view is what we are primed for, our biological, cognitive orientation. The art view, or individualistic view, is oppressing that. HUH???
*To sum: communication is not language. Why is this important? In education, visual representation is in the "art box." We can move it to the "language box," he says. It can be seen as core and integral to our ability to communicate rather than frivolous.
*Of course, education is already there/not already there. NCTE/IRA define the English Language Arts as reading, writing, listening, speaking, visualizing and visually representing. New Literacy and Multimodal literacy scholars such as myself already advocate for arts integration in the ELA classroom. Yet, we still have teachers who resist these progresses based on the "schism thinking" that Cohn is referencing.
* Cohn says that "comics," as a term, with acceptance of the split notion rather than the schism notion, can "do its thing," keep its sociocultural context, but expand. I think he needs to consider notions of genre and form here. Actually considering literary theory/comics theory would help him a bit. He hasn't referenced a single other comics scholar beyond Scott McCloud.
*To the audience's questions/points made from there:
* Eye tracking studies don't show much, no systematic patterns.
*Someone asks about panels. Cohn references a system, but not Groensteen. He has mentioned "linear" a couple of times. Wonder if he would buy my "it is but it isn't" thoughts on comics as a non-linear narrative.....
*"What do comics do that written and spoken languages don't?": Great question from the audience. [This, to me(as in Bucky), is another "it is but it isn't but it is" thing. Comics can do things differently, or via a meshing of modes or paradigms, as Cohn touches on, than traditional print texts or spoken languages, but they do things similarly as well.
We shouldn't focus on one point over the other. In education, this means we can't just try to focus on what graphic novels do that other narratives don't. We miss important opportunities to help students learn and to advocate for the form when we do so.
We don't have to stop using current best practices to teach graphic novels. This fact should help teachers want to use them/be less afraid of integrating them. This is a point that many, many people -- including scholars and editors -- seem to be missing when we consider using graphic novels or comics in the classroom. Do comics do things that are unique to comics? They do but thy don't but they do.
Actually, comics, like all other texts, don't do a damn thing until a reader engages them.... That's another point we shouldn't forget. There may be comics about magic, and students may respond to them with mystical fervor, but comics aren't magic in and of themselves. Waving a copy of American Born Chinese around three times and saying "Read!" won't automatically cure what ails us]
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