Comic Lab #2: Scientific portraiture (course content)

PREFACE

In the first Comic Lab of this course (W4), we began by sketching our responses to the prompt “Being an artist in 2019.” We then heard German comic artist Anna Haifisch reading from her book, The Artist, and later scrolled through that same work, which is her (often satirical) commentary — via comics — on the lives of artists in the present. With our and Haifisch’s drawings as our “data” (i.e. fodder for thinking), we added in artist/educator Lynda Barry’s questions related to *the image* and its functions. Soon after, we added in anthropologist Michael Taussig’s questions about drawings and their functions, especially in the sciences. “What do images/drawings do (and want and say)?” everybody wondered.

My ask within that Comic Lab, placed just before we headed off to begin our own multi-method research projects, was for us to think about what it means “to see” … and to help others “to see.” I wanted us to consider, too, how and what the act of drawing and/or thinking in images (with the back of the brain, as Barry said) allows us as thinker-maker-investigators “to see” (Pankonien W4). Working with texts is important, but just as informative and often much harder to see when we are researching are images (ironic, no?), and also: smells, sounds, tastes, textures… That, perhaps, was my primary message: Go out; don’t forget to observe and learn and gather data with ALL of your senses; we learn and communicate variously.

Source: Graffitimundo.com

INTRODUCTION TO COMIC LAB #2

If in Comic Lab #1 we were learning to take images, and drawings, and other non-text-centric research practices seriously… then NOW (near the conclusions of your investigations), we are going to look at one particular sociologist’s thinking about something she calls “scientific portraiture.” What does it mean to make a portrait of a time period or a social institution or a social problem, etc. and to do so in writing, using scientific findings/data?

What makes this a Comic Lab is the fact that we are going to try to expand the definition of “scientific portraiture” to include more than writing-based “portraits.” We will do so by putting the VERY FAMOUS comic art, El Eternauta (The Eternaut) by Argentine artists Héctor Oesterheld and Diego Solano López, into its historic, political-economic context. You will see what I mean soon. Also, this is far sexier than it sounds here, I promise. I’ve already done the curating, so your job will be browsing sources and considering the following:

How did a particular moment in time (the 1950’s) in a particular place (Buenos Aires, Argentina) inform the story of a particular comic (The Eternaut)?

You might also consider, as Kaila did in an arts case study this semester,* what story a modern-day (perhaps even U.S.-based) The Eternaut would tell — what comic would Oesterheld and Solano López be making today, given the context in which we now live? In Kaila’s words,

I think their research reservoir would be overflowing with today’s politics and the availability of other sci-fi works as reference. In my understanding, post-Videla totalitarian rule, Argentina’s constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, though if the criticism of the government sways towards libel or slander, there can be criminal charges. In these circumstances, I wonder how far-reaching Oesterheld’s work could have been (Larson 2019).

Just like in the first Comic Lab, we will be grounding our thinking in notions of seeing, asking ourselves: How do we see? How do we teach others to see? And relatedly, how do we make knowledge? Also, perhaps: how do we fix the world in which we live, however broken it may be — as artists and scientists alike?

FN up front: Yes, a couple of you bumped into these comic artists and this work in an arts case study already this semester, but: this is my chance to get you an even better, much deeper understanding of what you saw there. Let’s start, in any case, with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s ideas, which are new to you all.

IDEATING SCIENTIFIC PORTRAITURE

As a portraitist, I am witness, archeologist, spider woman, storyteller, and mirror…probing — through art and science, empathy and discernment — the layers and subtexts of human experience; listening for the voices and silences, documenting the good, and honoring the chaos and contradictions, the ironies and ambiguities threaded through our lives (Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ND).

There are all sorts of things that make Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot a bad ass. She has published ten books. She has won loads of prestigious awards (including the MacArthur “genius grant” in 1984). “She is the first African American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor” (Harvard Graduate School of Education 2019)… Even with all of this acclaim, however, Lawrence-Lightfoot is best known in the social sciences for a book she wrote in 1997, along with co-author Jessica Hoffman Davis, titled The Art and Science of Portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot also taught a course at Harvard with this same title for more than two decades). It is this work that I am asking you to consider this week.

Lawrence-Lightfoot’s thinking about a science of portraiture started with her own experiences as a portrait model, and so … let’s begin by looking at her description of one of those experiences:

And next, let me let Lawrence-Lightfoot describe for you the thinking that led her to scientific portraiture:

…The experiences [of sitting for two very different portrait painters] taught me some of the same lessons — that portraits capture essence: the spirit, tempo, and movement of a young girl; the history and family of the grown woman. That portraits tell you about parts of yourself about which you are unaware, or to which you haven’t attended. That portraits reflect a compelling paradox, of a moment in time and timelessness. That portraits make subjects feel “seen” in a way they have never felt seen before, fully attended to, wrapped up in an empathetic gaze. That an essential ingredient of creating a portrait is the process of human interaction. Artists must not view the subject as object, but as a person of myriad dimensions. Whether the artist feels the body stiffening and offers the woman a cup of tea, or tells the young girl that she does not have to be still like a statue, there is a recognition of the humanity and vulnerability of the subject. The artist’s gaze is discerning as it searches for the essence, relentless as it tries to move past the surface images. But in finding the underside, in piercing the cover, in discovering the unseen, the artist offers a critical and generous perspective — one that is both tough and giving (source).

[Pause for a moment here. Think about what Lawrence-Lightfoot means when she says, “portraits reflect a compelling paradox, of a moment in time and timelessness.” How will your own research projects, once written, reflect both a moment in time as well as timelessness? Next, think about what it means to be both tough and giving in your own research this semester. Can you be both critical and kind to those whose knowledge you borrow? Be wary not to set your interlocutors, knowing or unknowing, up as straw men. Your gaze, whatever your research topic, should be an empathetic gaze. Beyond: if a good portraitist must see their/her/his subject as “of myriad dimensions” then does it not make sense that we, as good researchers, must attend to (and later communicate) the varied dimensions of the topics we have chosen to explore?]

I recognize, of course, that portraits do not always capture these myriad human dimensions, nor do the encounters between artist and subject always have these empathetic, piercing qualities; but my experiences with the medium and the process influenced my work as a social observer and recorder of human encounter and experience. As a social scientist, I wanted to develop a form of inquiry that would embrace many of the descriptive, aesthetic, and experiential dimensions that I had known as the artist’s subject; that would combine science and art; that would be concerned with composition and design as well as description; that would depict motion and stopped time, history, and anticipated future. I also wanted to enter into relationships with my “subjects” that had the qualities of empathetic regard, full and critical attention, and a discerning gaze. The encounters, carefully developed, would allow me to reveal the underside, the rough edges, the dimensions that often go unrecognized by the subjects themselves. I hoped to create portraits that would inspire shock and recognition in the subjects and new understandings and insights in the viewers/readers.

[Here, again, think for a moment: how might you, in presenting your findings, “inspire [surprise] and recognition” among those to whom you listened (authors, conversants, passers-by, Reddit commentators, and the rest) while also inspiring “new understandings and insights” in your readers? — what among your data will allow you to achieve these feats?]

I am not an artist. My medium is not visual. My concern became then how I would translate the lines and shapes into written images and representations. For many years, I have been laboring over the development and refinement of “portraiture,” the term I use for a method of inquiry and documentation in the social sciences. With it, I seek to combine systematic, empirical description with aesthetic expression, blending art and science, humanistic sensibilities and scientific rigor. The portraits are designed to capture the richness, complexity, and dimensionality of human experience in social and cultural context, conveying the perspectives of the people who are negotiating those experiences. The portraits are shaped through dialogue with the portraitist and the subject, each one participating in the drawing of the image. The encounter between the two is rich with meaning and resonance and is crucial to the success and authenticity of the rendered piece (Ibid.).

[Lastly, give your non-human data agency, too. Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist, and thus she sees humans everywhere in her own research. She sees portraitists and their human subjects. I want you to be in conversation with all of your best data sources, whether or not they are human. How might you be in conversation with the court cases you discovered? Or the DIY sewing projects? (and not just the sewers — can the sewn works, too, tell us something?) How might you dialogue with the images of cryptids you found on Tumblr? Yes, I am asking you to think beyond the box in order to do this.]

SCIENTIFIC PORTRAITURE AS METHOD

In your projects this semester, precisely because you have been utilizing multiple research methods to interrogate your question(s) — thinking not only alongside of the books and articles written by others on your topics but also alongside of real human beings, past and present, living their daily lives, thinking in real time, posting to the Internet and behaving as human beings — you have been doing (albeit unknowingly) what Lawrence-Lightfoot calls scientific portraiture.

First, let’s consider you: You surveyed or interviewed or read interviews conducted by others, for example. You scrolled through letters — archived online — and listened to audio content held in digital archives, too. You *listened-in* on participants in online social networking platforms (so much Reddit this semester! — except for the one of you who discovered a would-be useful thread quickly terminated by another participant’s rebuff: “Offer an Anishinaabe Elder some tobacco and ask them, Reddit is not the place for sacred discussions.”

Beyond Reddit, you went to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LiveJournal, Facebook and more to listen in. And/or you deep hung-out in places and among people who could help you find answers (by, for example, sitting at a table on campus and listening to passers-by recount their stresses, or by paying extra attention in your normal daily rounds to how you and others around you use self-talk).

You chose cases (case study analysis) to examine, in order to better understand your question(s), and then dug deeper into those cases, whether they were events or people or time periods, dreamers or cults or serial killers, etc. Or, you focused on court cases and became a legal researcher. Several of you focused on how and what we say (linguistic analysis) — in Spanish-language hip-hop or in our self-talk, for example. You considered people’s behaviors online (web analytics). ONE of you conducted a commodity chain analysis. Again: etc.

That was you, all of you combined, during the past four weeks. Next, let’s consider Lawrence-Lightfoot’s description of portraiture as she imagines it in the sciences:

Portraiture pushes against the constraints of ethnographic traditions and practices in its explicit effort to combine empirical and aesthetic description, in its focus on the convergence of narrative and analysis, and in its goal of speaking to broader audiences beyond the academy, thus linking inquiry to public discourse and social transformation. In its standard of authenticity rather than the traditional standards of reliability and validity, and in its explicit recognition of the uses of the self as the primary research instrument for documenting and interpreting the perspectives and experiences of the people and the cultures being studied, portraiture remains an innovative method of social science inquiry (source).

Lawrence-Lightfoot’s bringing together of “narrative and analysis” in the above passage is a sign of our times. The 1990’s brought to academia “the narrative turn” — a shift in scientific focus, from numbers to stories and to language (one key idea is that in language we can see power and “the social,” for example, and so all we need are narratives to make sense of society). This embrace of “the narrative” is something that is still growing in popularity three decades later (you see it every time someone proclaims the importance of storytelling in business or in education and/or every time someone calls theirself/herself/himself a professional storyteller), and while I, for example, am somewhat old school in my own thinking (I still like numbers, even while I like narratives; I worry narratives can mislead and/or lie), knowing that many scientists today trust and often prefer narratives is key to understanding why Lawrence-Lightfoot’s five key elements in her “method of portraiture” are what they are.

Those elements (again, these are key concepts to scientific portraiture, listed by Lawrence-Lightfoot) are: context, voice, relationship, emergent themes, and the aesthetic whole, and you can find out more about each of these here, if you wish to do so. Because my goal, however, is to move us from thinking about scientific portraiture to seeing what the Argentines did in The Eternaut, and to do so in fewer than ten total pages, I am going to introduce you, only, to Lawrence Lightfoot’s reflections on context. Ready?

CONTEXT IN PORTRAITURE

The narrative is always embedded in a particular context, including physical settings, cultural rituals, norms, and values, and historical periods. The context is rich in cues about how the actors or subjects negotiate and understand their experience. But the portraitist is interested in not only producing complex, subtle description in context but also in searching for the central story, developing a convincing and authentic narrative. This requires careful, systematic, and detailed description developed through watching, listening to, and interacting with the actors over a sustained period of time, the tracing and interpretation of emergent themes, and the piecing together of these themes into an aesthetic whole. In creating the text, the portraitist is alert to the aesthetic principles of composition and form, rhythm, sequence, and metaphor (source)…

[Pause for a moment here. You are each studying phenomenon of the present — 2019. What are the physical settings, cultural rituals, norms, and values that characterize this present? How might these inform / shape your findings? And how will you, in recounting your findings to your readers, contextualize those findings? What do your readers need to know about 2019 to understand your questions as well as your answers?]

By context, I mean the setting — physical, geographic, temporal, historical, aesthetic — within which action takes place. Context becomes the framework, the reference point, the map, the ecological sphere; it used to place people and action in time and space and as a resource for understanding what they say or do. The context is rich in clues for interpreting the experience of the actors in the setting. We have no idea how to decipher or decode an action, a gesture, a conversation, or an exclamation unless we see it embedded in context. Portraitists, then, view human experience as being framed and shaped by the setting…

In a provocative and influential essay titled Meaning in Context: Is There Any Other Kind? (1979), Eliot Mishler argued that to create ephemeral, isolated laboratory settings for the study of human science is to risk misinterpretation of people’s meanings, perspectives, competencies, and actions, and to risk inflicting the researcher’s lens and standards on the subject’s reality.

The portraitist believes that human experience has meaning in a particular social, cultural, and historical context — a context where relationships are real, where the actors are familiar with the setting, where activity has purpose, where nothing is contrived (except for the somewhat intrusive presence of the researcher). The context not only offers clues for the researcher’s interpretation of the actors’ behavior (the outsider’s view), it also helps to understand the actors’ perspective — how they understand and perceive social reality (the insider’s view). In addition, it allows the actors to express themselves more fully, more naturally. Surrounded by the familiar, they can reveal their knowledge, their insights, and their wisdom through action, reflection, and interpretation…

Just as people move from being subjects of inquiry in the laboratory to being actors in their own natural environments, so too does the researcher shift position from being the one defining and controlling the experimental conditions to being the one learning to navigate new territory. The researcher is the stranger, the one who must experience the newness, the awkwardness, the tentativeness that comes with approaching something unfamiliar, and must use the actors in the setting as guides, as authorities, as knowledge bearers. As newcomer and stranger to the setting, the researcher inevitably experiences surprises: events, experiences, behaviors, and values that she had not anticipated, and to which she must adapt and respond. Whether she is coming to the setting with a well-developed, discrete hypothesis, or with a theoretical framework that she is testing and refining, or with a number of relatively informal hunches, the realities of the context force the reconsideration of earlier assumptions. There is a constant process of calibration between the researcher’s conceptual framework, her developing hypothesis, and the collection of grounded data. Working in context, the researcher, then, has to be alert to surprises and inconsistencies and improvise conceptual and methodological responses that match the reality she is observing. The researcher’s stance becomes a dance of vigilance and improvisation.

… The portraitist makes deliberate and specific use of context in several ways that reflect her focus on descriptive detail, narrative development, and aesthetic expression, as well as her interest in recording the self and perspective of the researcher in the setting. There are five ways in which portraiture employs context: the first use of context depicts a detailed description of the physical setting; the second refers to the researcher’s perch and perspective; the third underscores the history, culture, and ideology of the place; the fourth identifies the central metaphors and symbols that shape the narrative; and the fifth speaks to the actor’s role in shaping and defining context (source).

CONCLUSION

During the next three weeks, as you sit down with your findings from this semester and begin to order what you have, to sort out the usable data from the unusable data, you will see quickly that you have a variety of themes and patterns. (Sometimes you have to find the patterns, to be clear, and sometimes this is hard.) Your first challenge will be to curate: what will you include in your final paper and what will you discard or save for another project at a later date? Your second challenge will be to construct the narrative of your paper, and it is in doing this that I want you to remember Lawrence-Lightfoot’s scientific portraiture.

What if every time someone said or typed “research project” you heard instead, the word “portrait.” How would that shape your research and your writing? What if you came into this course to write a “scientific portrait”? Would that shape your practices while here? I am hoping that your last answer is “yes,” and I will be working with you during the next few weeks to design and draft that “scientific portrait.” But just before that, I would like us to consider one 62-year-old comic strip — written and drawn in Buenos Aires, Argentina but of global fame by now — as its own kind of “scientific portrait.”

The narrative of The Eternaut is fictionalized, of course, and so this is not quite the same as your own projects this semester, but it is nevertheless a work that was largely informed by the “history, culture, and ideology of the place” in which it was composed. It is a work that tells the story of a very particular context: a time of brutal dictatorship in a country awash in then-recent coups and whose peoples were increasingly aware of the disappearances of individuals who resisted then-current political powers… It is also a work that was composed in a time and place when and where to tell the story of Argentina, as research, perhaps, or in nonfiction in any case, was especially likely to be … suicidal. When nonfiction is too dangerous, can deeply contextualized fiction stand in for research-based critique?

Lawrence-Lightfoot wrote, in explaining how she created the concept of scientific portraiture:

I wanted to develop a document, a text that came as close as possible to painting with words. I wanted to create a narrative that bridged the realms of science and art, merging the systematic and careful description of good ethnography with the evocative resonance of fine literature. I wanted the written pieces to convey the authority, wisdom, and perspective of the subjects, but I wanted them to feel — as I had felt — that the portrait did not look like them, but somehow managed to reveal their essence. I wanted them to experience the portraits as both familiar and exotic, so that in reading them they would be introduced to a perspective that they had not considered before. And finally, I wanted the subjects to feel seen as I had felt seen — fully attended to, recognized, appreciated, respected, scrutinized (Ibid.).

I believe The Eternaut does all of these things and more. Let’s go to Argentina to see if you agree.

COMIC LAB CONTENT

Argentine coups, a “Dirty War” and The Eternaut as portrait.

FIRST, THE CONTEXT

So-called “Revolución Libertadora” coup d’état (1955)

Oesterheld wrote The Eternaut in a pre-Dirty War, already dangerous as well as precarious political economic context — one which led into the Dirty War twenty years later. This (the mid-1950’s, communicated in video format below), therefore, is the time period that contextualizes The Eternaut, even while most journalists write instead of the work’s relation to the Dirty War.

1. Optional video: DiFilm. 1955. Coup against Juan Domingo Perón 1955. On YouTube. Accessed October 30, 2019. *Vintage footage, narrated in Spanish.
2. Optional video: HistoryPod. 2018. 16th September 1955: Uprising against Juan Perón begins in Argentina. HistoryPod. On YouTube. September 15. Accessed October 30, 2019.
3. Optional video: Wondershare. ND. Bombing and coup 1955 Argentina. On YouTube. May 31, 2013 Upload date. Accessed October 30, 2019.

Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976–1983)

1. Required text: Blakemore, Erin. ND. 30,000 people were “disappeared” in Argentina’s Dirty War. These women never stopped looking. History Stories at History.com. Accessed Oct 26, 2019.
2. Optional skim: McSherry, J. Patrice. 2001. Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. role. Global Policy Forum. July. Accessed October 26, 2019.
3. Optional text: Graffitimundo. ND. El Nestornauta. Graffitimundo.com. Accessed October 30, 2019.

SECOND, THE COMIC ART

About The Eternaut

1. Required text: Martens, Janina. 2016. Cult sci-fi comic “Eternaut” still gives lessons in political resistance.” DW / Books. March 18. Accessed February 26, 2019.
2. Optional text: Umile, Dominic. 2016. A post-apocalyptic graphic novel by a “disappeared” Argentinian writer.” Hyperallergic. January 28. Accessed October 30, 2019. *Here for those of you who read the above at W8.

El Eternauta (The Eternaut)

1. Required comic art: Oesterheld, Héctor and Diego Solano López. 1957–1959 (2015). El Eternauta… first published as a serial in Hora Cero Suplemento Semanal.

OPTIONAL DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How did a particular moment in time (the 1950’s) in a particular place (Buenos Aires, Argentina) inform the story of a particular comic (The Eternaut)?
2. When nonfiction is too dangerous, can deeply contextualized fiction stand in for research-based critique?
3. Any thoughts on my suggestion that we might think of The Eternaut as a kind of a portrait (as Lawrence-Lightfoot describes the portrait), one that is fictionalized, but still grounded in a very real context?
4. What story would a modern-day (perhaps even U.S.-based) The Eternaut tell us? What comic would Oesterheld and Solano López be making today, given the context in which we now live? (Or what comic artist is today’s Oesterheld and Solano López?)
5. “How can you translate real politics into something digestible (which withstands time) as a comic?” (Larson 2019)
6. How do we see? How do we teach others to see? And relatedly, how do we make knowledge? Also, perhaps: how do we fix the world in which we live, however broken it may be — as artists and scientists alike?
7. How will your own research projects, once written, reflect both a moment in time as well as timelessness? …
8. How might you, in presenting your findings, “inspire [surprise] and recognition” among those to whom you listened (authors, conversants, passers-by, Reddit commentators, and the rest) while also inspiring “new understandings and insights” in your readers?
9. How might you be in conversation with the court cases you discovered? Or the DIY sewing projects? (and not just the sewers — can the sewn works, too, tell us something?) How might you dialogue with the images of cryptids you found on Tumblr? Yes, I am asking you to think beyond the box in order to do this.
10. What are the physical settings, cultural rituals, norms, and values that characterize the present? How might these inform / shape your findings? And how will you, in recounting your findings to your readers, contextualize those findings? What do your readers need to know about 2019 to understand your questions as well as your answers?
11. What if every time someone said or typed “research project” you heard instead, the word “portrait”? How would that shape your research and your writing? What if you came into this course to write a “scientific portrait”? Would that shape your practices while here?