Temporal Seeing as Visual Literacy

Abstract

Temporal seeing is a mode of visual perception that interrupts the spatial bias we bring to visual literacy practices. Although an image only captures one moment in time, there are multiple spatioanalytical tools we can use to consider any image. Spatial literacy, which is the practice of analyzing objects through their properties in space, tends to be the default analytical mode for making sense of imagery. For people to bring a commensurate temporal richness to their articulated visual readings, we first highlight the perspectival richness of time and temporality. We next present five precepts that can guide enriched temporal seeing: contextual histories; relational chronologies; internal rhymicity; desequenced and resequenced narrative; and critique and meaning-making. Finally, we suggest that temporal seeing holds a series of educative possibilities for expanding the interpretive frames and perceptual apparatuses of literacy researchers and practitioners.

Introduction

Time imbues practices of seeing. Hidden within any visual scape lie intersecting temporal relations: the connective chronologies that bind an image's features, the internal rhythms that constitute its parts, the deep histories that inscribe those parts, and the competing narrative sequences they conjure. None of these potentials are obvious to most people because a spatial bias precludes our realizing them. For to see is to spatialize. Backgrounds. Foregrounds. Near views. Distant views. Settings. Locations. Areas beyond, beneath, over, under. Spatial details. Spatial relationships. Spatial seeing. Any act of seeing an image is spatially complex. Yet a single image only ever captures one moment in time.

When interpreting an image's significance, we engage our visual literacy skills (Connors, 2012). Visual literacy extends beyond seeing an image and “involves the ability to understand, produce, and use culturally significant images, objects, and visible actions” (Felten, 2008, p. 60). While it is possible to intuit both temporal and spatial elements that contribute to our visual interpretations, our spatial language for understanding an image is well-developed; however, our temporal language and its associated analytical toolkit is, in comparison, underdeveloped. Spatial reading is the default analytical mode for making sense of what we see.

Bringing the same temporal sophistication to every visual reading is not an intuitive skill. Spatial hegemony gets in the way. Temporal considerations of what we see at any given moment—in a photograph, an illustration, a glance, a conjured image—tend to be overdetermined by the fleetingness of that moment. “All photographs,” Susan Sontag wrote, “testify to time's relentless melt” (2001, p. 15). But it is important to ask what temporal dynamics inform the mise en scène of any given visual sphere we encounter. What pasts, presents, and potential futures help to contextualize their various parts? What rhythmic interiorities inform them? What competing stories are enlivened by encountering visuality in this way? Just because we have not made a habit of reading imagery through its intersecting temporal relations, and just because we are not practiced at seeing or naming these relations, does not mean these relations do not exist, nor does it mean they do not operate upon us or us upon their dynamics.

We seem to be more aware of temporal considerations when engaging with specific visual texts, like comics. Cohn (2013) addressed this awareness in his articulation of visual narrative structure, which encompassed both a spatial interpretation of a comic panel and the narrative structure that attaches meaning to it. This narrative structure attends to several temporal considerations, such as sequences of events and how our interpretations impact the way we understand the connections between individual panels. When interpreting meaning from a comic panel, we therefore engage both our spatial and temporal reading skills. In this article, we have suggested that temporal seeing invites us to go even further to look within, across, and beyond the properties of diverse imageries, whether in comics or other visual images.

In what follows, we articulate a mode of visual perception and analysis called temporal seeing, through which predominant conceptions, vocabularies, and literacies of seeing are deepened. We begin with a theory of the notion of time, highlighting time's perspectival richness in context of popular understandings that tend to bind it to overdetermined notions of linear progression. Next, we examine the notion of temporal seeing by naming and describing five analytical precepts that can inform its practice. In naming these precepts, we are guided by Bakhtin (1981/2010), who defined the chronotope as follows: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to movements of time, plot and history” (p. 84). In discussing these precepts, we are also mindful of a number of long-existing orientations to time that include notions such as land, seasonality, social and bodily rhythms, and more (see Birth, 2012), which also render dominant notions of time more complex. Finally, we offer suggestions for classroom application, noting that bringing considerations of time to the foreground can open new and richer possibilities for making sense of visual texts.

Making Time Visible

Most of us tend to conceive of time as something that just “is” (Hassan & Purser, 2007, p. 4), a rigid, quantitative, mathematical formula of seconds, minutes, hours, and days onto which, and in relation to which, human lives and societies are plotted and lived (Adam, 1992, 2004). This understanding of time, long ascendent in popular consciousness but not at all ahistorical or inevitable, functions as an implicit colonizing force over vast swaths of humanity, disciplining minds and bodies through uniformity, conformity, and compliance.

The preeminent artifact at the center of time's disciplinary gaze is the clock. It was not always so. The invention of the mechanical clock dates to the early 14th century, but less mathematically exacting time-keeping mechanisms long preceded it, such as the sundial, the water clock, and the incense clock; in addition, more and more precise time-keeping mechanisms followed the clock's earliest versions (see Cotterell et al., 1986; Martineau, 2015). The ascendency of clock-time as a global “theology of cohesion” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 138) coincided with the imperatives of modernism and the functions of capitalism (Martineau, 2015).

An important consequence of the emergence of clock-time as the preeminent mechanism in the shaping of modern, temporal consciousness was that clock-time allowed us to outsource temporal measurements to technological instruments (Birth, 2012). Clock-time has also allowed us to abstract time from direct experience, and so consider time as an inevitable system of measurement that happens alongside our experiences of the self and the world, rather than as intrinsic to them (Martineau, 2015, 2017; Zerubavel, 1982).

Yet the ascendency of clock-time also comes with cautions. By formulating these cautions as questions, we can ask the following: What compels us to adhere to this iteration of time as a governing force in our lives? In what ways do sources of power operate to socialize us through our shared allegiances to it? And if such allegiances help us to cohere in the service of social coordination and community-functions, what ethical precepts and operating principles inform these functions?

The historical record offers some answers. The development and growth of clock-time was intricately tied to the overdeterminisms of capitalism, which include production, consumption, wage labor, and time's amenability to conversion into a monetized exchange value (Hope, 2016; Martineau, 2015, 2017; Snyder, 2016). To the extent that the imperatives of clock-time bind us, the processes through which it has come to do so are not neutral nor valueless. In fact, if we form our modern selves in relation to predominant notions of time, time likewise forms us in relation to politically, economically, and socially dominant ways of being (Martineau, 2015, 2017; Snyder, 2016).

At issue, then, is that clock-time's predominant social influence encourages us to disassociate conceptions of time from our experiences of it. It prompts us to conceive of time as something that happens apart from and despite ourselves. Such dissociative circumstances can serve to relegate time to a zone of conceptual thoughtlessness. While we consider ways to save time, to manage time, to maximize time, and to monetize time, we rarely question the socially constructed fact of time. We take time—or, rather, its approximation as objective clock-time—as a given, as pervasive and all-encompassing as the air we breathe; the consequence is that time is understood as linear, inevitable, natural, and endlessly progressing. By exploring the notion of temporal seeing, we propose a different understanding of time.

Temporal Seeing

Time happens, or can make itself felt, in a variety of ways. We could redefine time, as others have, as a fluid, qualitative, malleable, and contextual concept, one not at all bound by quantitative orthodoxies; it could alternatively be conceived as a system of intersecting and overlapping temporal pluralities of which rigid clock time is just one version of its measurement (Adam, 2004). To reduce all perceptions of time to just one iteration of it, however, is to miss a lot. It is to think of time only according to terms set out by the workings of presiding power. But conceiving time only in terms of this power is out of step with how time has been experienced for most of human history. Most of human history has understood time as a multiperspectival set of relationships as opposed to a reductive, singular measurement based on mathematical precision (Martineau, 2015). What we propose to bring to practices of visual literacy is a movement toward temporal multiperspectivalism.

Rather than succumb to the perceptual predominance of clock-time, which can render visual readings of time into an analytical afterthought, we suggest that if time were to enter our visual–perceptual apparatuses of meaning-making instead more resolutely, it would enliven novel modes of perceiving. We offer five isolated precepts that can inform a practice of temporal seeing. Of the five precepts we use, none are meant to be mutually exclusive, nor are they meant to render any notion of temporal seeing as systematized or final. Our intentions are subtler: to initiate contemplations that bring notions of the temporal more firmly into the sphere of visual literacies to broaden perceptual apparatuses and interpretive frames of visual study.

While we previously observed that many seem aware of temporal considerations when engaging with specific visual texts like comics, it is important to remember that the following precepts render the practice of temporal seeing amenable to any visual text. To make this point more concrete, readers may wish to bring these precepts into conversation with any number iconic images; these could include two people kissing in Time's Square at the announcement of the conclusion of the Second World War; the massive mushroom cloud created by the Atom bomb moments after it was first dropped in the New Mexico desert; six-year-old Ruby Bridges flanked by U.S. Marshalls as she walked into her newly desegregated Louisiana school, to name just a few. In each of the precepts we discuss below, we will use a single iconic image to illustrate how these precepts can be put into a practice of temporal seeing. For our iconic image, we have chosen one that will be familiar to most: the 20 July 1969, photograph of the first moon landing, taken by Neil Armstrong of his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, which depicts Aldrin standing alone on the moon's surface beside a recently planted U.S. flag.

Precept 1: Temporal Seeing as Intersecting, Plural, and Contextual Histories

This mode of seeing refers to the practice of consciously considering visual fields of perception and imagery in historical context, whether in their entireties or broken down into their constituent parts. In so doing, this mode seeks to locate practices of seeing within a wider sphere of sociohistorical, sociocultural, and/or sociopolitical analysis. The first question this precept asks is how do particular historically informed narratives help to constitute the objects of study that comprise a given image or visual field. The second question is how do the narratives we read onto these objects of study interact. This practice can be thought of as a mode of seeing from without, a mode whose achievement relies on the interplay of presence and absence, inclusion, and omission. It prompts observers to consider visuality though the practice of linking what we see to the presence of what we do not see, or in other words, to the set of prior circumstances, not immediately visible, that have helped bring our understandings of what we see into existence.

In returning to our image of the moon landing, it is possible to read onto it various conditions of historicity and futurity by widening our temporally informed, interpretive gaze. For example, in considering the figure of a lone astronaut standing on the moon's surface, we can ponder all of the technological advancements that brought the 200,000-year-old history of humanity into contact with the 4.5 billion-year-old moon. In observing the fresh boot marks evident in the lunar soil surrounding the astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, and the fact that none exist in the vast expanse beyond him, we can conjure, through various symbolisms, the intensities with which famous historical moments make their impressions on us before fading into the greater march of time. And finally, in projecting onto the image all that we know about humanity's potentially perilous future on earth, we might imagine the sorts of lunar colonies that could occupy this very space in the coming centuries. All these interpretive possibilities encourage temporal seeing as an encounter of intersecting, plural, contextual histories.

Precept 2: Temporal Seeing as Relational Chronologies

This mode of seeing considers objects of visual study in temporal relation to each other. Contrary to Precept 1, which emphasized texturing one's seeing through the historical presence of what is not seen, Precept 2 elevates object interrelationality, or the encounter of the presence of multiple objects through a consideration of what their temporal juxtapositions can signify. Barbara Adam's notion of timescapes, which Snyder (2016) defined as “the unique sychnronizations and desynchronizations, pauses and progressions, harmonies and dissonances created when multiple rhythmic processes interact” (p. 13) is paramount here. In any given image or visual field, temporally inscribed material entities interact to produce a series of contested meanings, such as “the eons it takes for a lump of quartz to reduce to sand, the birth and death of a civilization, the lifetimes or minutes that permeate a memory or dream, or the life span of the fruit fly” (Hassan & Purser, 2007, p. 12). Seeing through the lens of relational chronologies names and elevates these temporally informed object interactions in the exercise of seeing them more deeply.

In recentering our image of the moon landing, we might now consider the various relational chronologies that can occupy an image. In studying the image of the moon landing, we can perceive that a shadow lurks just behind our lone astronaut, temporally unifying a 39-year-old adult male, with a 4.5 billion-year-old moon, and a slightly older 4.6 billion-year-old sun. Conversely, we might choose to guide our chronological perceptions differently, focussing on the intersecting temporal relationships between the fleeting life cycle of our astronaut and those of all the inorganic materials that surround him: the beta-cloth space suit he wears, the nylon flag he has just planted, and the aluminum shuttle he has traveled on, which peeks through the left edge of the frame. We can also consider what other meanings we could infer from these temporal juxtapositions—meanings about life, progress, legacy, pollution, finitude, infinitude, and much more. When considering the relational chronologies that can inhabit any image, we open these to nuances that extend beyond just our sense-making practices about their physical connections, which in turn invite additional directions for inquiry when we dwell on their connective temporalities.

Precept 3: Temporal Seeing as Internal Rhythmicity

Temporal seeing as internal rhythmicity considers reading temporality through notions of object interiority. If the first two temporal seeing precepts were concerned with locating visuality through histories (Precept 1) and object interrelationality (Precept 2), internal rhythmicity elevates the idea that any discreet aspect within a visual field can be understood in terms of its internal temporal machinations. When considering any object at all, whether a human, a rock, a river, or a calculator, it is possible to contemplate how temporality inhabits each differently, how each shapes and is shaped by the highly particular temporal interactions that constitute their respective workings, and how each communicates these meanings outwardly in various ways. Internal rhythmicity prompts a consciousness of all these communications.

To illustrate this precept in our moon landing image, we might consider the temporal pluralities simultaneously at work within just the figure of our astronaut: his beating heart as he steps out onto the lunar surface; his breathing from within his sealed space helmet; the very slow generation and regeneration of the trillions of cells constantly at work in his body up to, including, and beyond this moment; the interplay of perception, projection, experience, and memory that his mind might be cycling through as we perceive him. Or we might guide our focus away from the astronaut to contemplate the internal temporal properties of a series of additional objects on the photograph: the soil he stands on, the rocks nearby, the flag pole he faces, and more. In each case, this precept prompts us to open our perceptions to the deeper temporal qualities that sometimes remain hidden in our overdetermined practices of spatial seeing.

Precept 4: Temporal Seeing as Desequenced and Resequenced Narratives

Having moved through each of the previous levels of temporal analysis, Precept 4 suggests considering all of them together in the service of constructing new narrative possibilities from a visual text. This precept suggests that we ask what stories the elevation of temporal seeing allows a visual text to convey. Possible stories will emerge from the kinds of questions we ask. For example, what is our own implication in decisions about how and why we narrativize what we see? And, how can a practice of temporal seeing facilitate the telling and retelling of these stories in various ways? Moreover, we can expand our questions by asking whether we should move between different alternatives or points of emphasis in identifying the contextual histories and internal machinations of objects that comprise images. Should we elevate or deelevate different kinds of temporal relationships that circulate between objects? Should we access a range of temporal pasts, futures, beginnings, endings, and points in between in making decisions about how and why to sequence, desequence, and resequence our narratives of seeing toward various effects and implications?

In considering the above questions, a predominant narrative may emerge depending on how we perceive the image of the moon landing. Broadly conceived, an astronaut has arrived to the moon and planted his country's flag to mark having done so. But is this sequence of events the only way to narrativize what we see, or can temporal seeing open us up to different possibilities (e.g., in staying with notions of narrative sequence, have we deferred politicizing this image for a moment, as in Precept 5, below)? Rather than positioning the astronaut as the image's protagonist who has initiated our sequences, it is also possible to center any number of other possibilities. For instance, we might choose to interpret this photo by centering the temporal story of the flag planted in the lunar soil, first by moving back in time to consider the initial extractions of crude oil on earth needed to construct its nylon fabric, then to the industrial processes and impacts of the chemical-to-nylon conversion process, and finally to the human stories of the factory workers who stitched the flag together. Likewise, we might bring the same temporal complexities to the space suit the astronaut is wearing, to the construction of the shuttle he arrived on, or to the big history that charts the story of the moon up to the moment on 20 July 1969, when a foreign entity suddenly appeared on its surface; by these reconsiderations, we have thus relocated our narrative emphases on the temporal configurations that bring any of these considerations into being. By using temporal seeing, we are able to complicate the narratives available to us when we fixate only on the spatial.

Precept 5: Temporal Seeing as Critique and as Meaning-Making

A necessary last stage of temporal seeing situates its ethical possibilities. The purpose of temporal seeing is to encounter imagery in deeper and more meaningful ways, but such a disposition is not meant to be without political ramifications. As discussed earlier, a political project imbues the hegemonies of clock-time and its legacies with the functions of capitalism (production, consumption, monetized exchange) and favors dispositions toward a thoughtless notion of time that is premised on sanitizing human differences and replacing them with values such as consistency, rationality, and objectivity. In contrast, temporal seeing is imbued with an ethic that seeks to dismantle these hegemonies so that we can open new possibilities for meaning-making. A comprehensive articulation of temporal seeing must finally ask: What kind of alternative meanings has the practice of temporal seeing made available? What opportunities for social critique have arisen? And what intellectual and actionable ways forward have emerged?

Having sought to unbind the iconic moon landing photograph from strictly spatial readings of it, we see further opportunities for oppositional readings and critiques. As a result, we can link the image of a freshly planted American flag on the moon's surface to a more textured history of imperialism, conquest, colonization, capitalism, and the domination of lands. We can likewise link this image of a human astronaut on the moon's surface to climate change on earth, while at the same time consider this new moment of possibility in relation to the longer, antagonistic relationship of land exploitation on the planet from which the astronaut arrived. Another way to make meaning is to consider the massive economic commitments it would have taken to help this astronaut arrive to the moon, commitments that necessitated relocating public money from other projects, not to mention the human implications of having done so at the time and far into the future. By perceiving this or any image through the lens of its multiperspectival temporal properties, more opportunities proliferate for moving our textual readings in various critical directions: social, cultural, economic, political, and educational.

Conclusion

To understand time consciously does not deny the visual hegemony of space, but it does allow us to encounter images in ways of perceiving that might not have been possible otherwise in context of the following three questions: Where does temporality exist within any visual scape? How does elevating time's presence help to open a series of interpretive lenses? And what compelling opportunities for meaning-making emerge from engaging in this practice?

The reality is that myriad temporal relations infuse any moment in time. If we look carefully, it is possible to see time in perspectives and places that we might not have otherwise perceived. Temporal seeing offers us analytical tools for broadening our interpretive gazes and practices of meaning-making. Inherent in any visual scape are multiple points of temporally informed articulation for interpreting what we see, ranging from the broadly historical to the deeply interior, from chronological relations located in presence to those marked by absence. In all these ways, temporal seeing adds to our vocabulary of literacies, offering us new possibilities for reinterpreting and restorying ourselves and our worlds.

We see a space for temporal seeing within classroom inquiry, building on educators’ existing practices. Having drawn on an iconic photo to illustrate each of the five temporal precepts we have named and described, we conclude by returning to the earlier example of comics to provide a further glimpse into temporal seeing's interpretive possibilities within the classroom.

We might begin by asking questions about which historically informed narratives inform our interpretation of a comic; then we could articulate which visible and invisible elements inform these understandings. The second precept of temporal seeing invites us next to do a deeper reading of a single panel, asking us to pause and consider the multiple and interrelated timescapes depicted therein. We might then zoom in even further to consider how temporality inhabits each individual object differently. The five precepts also invite us to question our inferences to reveal how time is woven within, across, and beyond each panel. These steps enhance the process of decoding visual texts. We might then ask students to think about the new narrative possibilities that have emerged. This inquiry moves students from deconstructing panels to resequencing narratives, which is an active reimagining of the comic that prepares us for the final step, where we articulate alternative meanings that have become available. By bringing temporal seeing into current visual literacy practices, we can support students in identifying alternative meanings, creating opportunities for social critique, as well as the potential for deep action–oriented inquiry within classroom spaces.

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