Blog 8

The focus of this study is the annotated spread: the selection of an image from Shaun Tan's Arrival, presenting that image to bilingual children, asking questions about that image to the children, and studying how the children create and impart meaning to the image.

The study divides the children's responses to the images within a "borrowed" aesthetic taxonomy(see below): experiental, compositional, interpersonal, and interprative.

I would redesign this study, taking the following propositions into account:

Are the proposed scribes actually articulating the child's genuine aesthetic experience with the image? Or as a function of their superior command of English, are they superimposing Anglo ideas that may not even have a quality of congruence with the child's original thought?

The group proposes to mitigate this "aesthetic imperialism" by tape recording the sessions. However, I would point out the curious paradox that exists within this study: the judging aesthetic in this study will be always be Anglo-centric; the stated purpose is to find out how children create meaning, but if that meaning has already been classified into genus and species before it comes out of the child's brain, then both researcher and child are conducting an exercise in futility. I cannot help but look at the studies' definitions of the kinds of "Annotated Responses"--experiental, compositional, interpersonal, and interprative-- and see them as a corollary of previous aesthetics, like the work of M. H. Abrams with his defintions of the mimetic, pragmatic, expressive and objective. As an undergraduate, I find it absolutely mind boggling how so many people can reinvent the same taxonomy, just with small tweaks and a different nomenclature. (This is not to say that Abrams came up with the "magic" 4-- I merely use him as example)

Just as this study involves a "relatively new" type of text (The Arrival), perhaps it is time for a "relatively new" aesthetic to go with it; one that compliments the bilingual nature of the people being studied, so that they can articulate and form an hierarchy of meaning within the context of their personal experience. If objectivity is our goal, then the child must be allowed to be the self, to obtain the whole of their identity--which is bilingual--and make a judgement upon the object being considered without interpreter. Let there be two rules to this study if you want a true and unbiased result: (1) just write, anything in any language, hell make one up if you want; if it is devoid of academic jargon so be it, give the linguists something to do. (2) once the child has made aesthetic judgements, he or she must classify them--if they feel the need for differentiation--within that state of affairs that created those judgements--their actual world, not the researchers. Once this is generated, if the researchers so wish to compare apples to oranges, then they will have their vector.

If this is not accomplished, then the aesthetic imposed will always be an external one. The "children are not capable of articulation" argument generates fallacious results if the true aim of this study is to indeed find how children create meaning from visual images. If the purpose of the study is instead to verify the researchers' metaphysical wizardry in children's' aesthetics and semiotics, then by all means, carry on because they are doing a marvellous job.