Collage

A multidisciplinary response to Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities

Ivelina Kitina

Jessica van der Boor

Sara Florio

Victoria Giaccherini

In the essay “Collage: A Multidisciplinary Response to Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities (van der Tuin and Verhoeff, 2022),” Humanities Honours students Kitina, van der Boor, Florio, and Giaccherini reviews the suggested definition and application of ‘Collage’ in the field of Humanities. This is done by firstly applying the concept to three disciplines, linguistics, literature, as well as media and culture; whereafter a multidisciplinary approach was employed in order to create a response of its relevance in the aforementioned subjects. By doing so, they conclude that although collage is too broad to be its own discipline, the same broadness allows for versatility especially in analysing new objects and phenomenon.

Introduction

In the book Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities by Iris van der Tuin and Nanna Verhoeff (2022, 50), collage is explained in terms of reflection and critique of the method: collage connects the principles of creativity as a practice and the epistemological work, to arrive at the reflection and critique aspects entailed by the visible traces of removal, transposition, and recombination. Given this, we feel the urge to provide additional disciplinary takes on the practice of collaging to obtain a more complete perspective. In this paper, we evaluate and reflect upon the relationship between academic concepts and creative processes that surround these notions. We selected four disciplinary views on how collage takes shape within these fields: two branches of Linguistics, Literary Studies, and Media and Culture, in order to discuss further how collage takes place in the humanities.

Constructed Languages

An example of collage as creative practice in the field of Linguistics can be found in constructed languages, more specifically, in the two auxiliary languages called “Interlingua” and “Interslavic.” To fully understand why Interlingua and Interslavic can be considered the Linguistics expression of a collage, it is useful to first analyse what constructed languages and auxiliary languages are. Constructed languages, “conlangs” for short, are languages created to serve an auxiliary, creative, or other purposes that are not served by the creators’ native languages (Laufenberg 2019). There are three main subtypes of conlangs: artlangs, engineer languages, and auxlangs. Interlingua and Interslavic are part of the last subtype, auxlangs, which is short for “auxiliary language”. Auxlangs are artificial languages created to be easily learned by anyone and serve as a neutral bridge between speakers of different languages (Emrys, Fink, and Peterson 2010, “Why”). Their function is, therefore, to be a supranational language that facilitates exchanges between speakers of heterogeneous languages (Gode 1953, 83). 

If supranational languages are common and present all throughout History, such as the Greek Koiné spoken in the Alexandrian Age and the Hindustani language present in Northern India being two examples—auxlangs are not. Auxlangs, like Interlingua and Interslavic, but also Ido and the famous Esperanto, are artificial languages designed to be the best option for a supranational language. The International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA) promoted Esperanto and Interlingua to be a universally taught second language for the generations of the 21st century before the association dissolved in 1956. Nowadays, all the auxlangs mentioned are mostly kept alive by the online presence of their speakers and by eventual publishing ventures including translations of books and periodic magazines. Despite all these auxlangs sharing  the rationale they were created with, each of them is different from the other. Esperanto and Ido draw lexical elements, such as vocabulary, from natural languages of the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic branches, and combine them with a novel grammatical system. Gode (1953, 89), calls such a process a “construction”, where the creators subjectively implement what they consider “handy” or “nice to have”. Ultimately, these two auxlangs are not good examples of linguistic collage because the original source material are indistinguishable from each other, the result is a homogenous blend where the origin of the components cannot be derived. 

Interlingua and Interslavic are also derived from natural languages, but through what Gode (1953, 89) calls an “extraction”. They aim to be simultaneously multiple languages and each one of these languages is streamlined by the elimination of its idiosyncratically distinctive features (Gode 1953, 89). In other words, they aim to be intelligible for the speakers of all the source languages by eliminating the aspects that are too language specific and not mutually intelligible. Therefore, Interlingua aims at being understood by speakers of Romance languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, while Interslavic caters to the speakers of Slavic languages like Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, and Hungarian among others. 

Sociolinguistics

Although the discipline of Linguistics reflects the scientific study of language, experts always consider a degree of creativity in language use by native speakers. A recent case of such creative use resides in the emergence of Spanglish, a contact variety between American English and Spanish (mostly with its Mexican variety). Bilingual speakers that are equally fluent in both languages are able to switch between one and the other with extreme facility, even inside the same sentence or word. In this context, speakers of Spanglish use the creative practice of collage when mixing the syntax of English and Spanish, while seamlessly alternating the two lexicons. We thus define collage as the (un)conscious medium of expressing one’s thoughts by mixing two languages, by the same speaker. At a linguistic level, we can only examine patterns of code-switching in case studies, since Spanglish is not a standardised language; rather, it is being created through everyday use by children and the young generations. Usually, speakers do not plan their speech in detail: they may start speaking in English, then a trigger term or structure causes the switch to Spanish (Poplack 1980, 601).

Spanglish is, above all, a societal phenomenon: it is mainly spoken by the Latinx immigrants’ community in the U.S., to express cultural identity and maintain strong ties to their native heritage. In the words of Rosa Jiménez (1995-1996), “Spanglish is culturally significant because it reflects our identity. Culture consists of customs, traditions, food, clothing, music, art, and language. In the same way that Spanglish unites the strengths of the English and Spanish languages, so too are Chicanos a union of the American and Mexican cultures.” Professionals are working on Spanglish outside the academic world to represent integration through language use, by picturing it as a valid language and not as an artificial construction of illiterate English. Moreover, local associations and non-profit organisations collaborate closely with the Latinx and Hispanic communities in their territories to help them bridge the cultural gap: Think Bilingual promotes information and literacy through bilingual programmes and resources, whereas The Heritage Society (THS) showcases the histories of Houston’s Latinx community through art, media, and language programmes. Nonetheless, the main platform where Spanglish speakers can freely express themselves and their cultural identity is TikTok: here, they promote the use of Spanglish as a prestige variety of English that is tailored to the young generations and can be shaped by the speakers, as opposed to the fixed, strict grammars of both English and Spanish. Furthermore, Latinx creators encourage their followers to showcase the “collage” of their native languages by transforming vocabulary, syntax, and even pronunciation and orthography into a unique speech style.

Therefore, we have seen that a linguistic phenomenon such as the emergence of a new contact variety is becoming socially and culturally relevant for the impact that the language has on both the individual’s identity and interpersonal networking.

Literature

According to the definition provided by the Poetry Foundation glossary of collage in literature, “[c]ollage in language-based work can now mean any composition that includes words, phrases, or sections of outside source material in juxtaposition.” An example of a literary collage in practice given by the Poetry Foundation is T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which is a compilation of newspaper clippings, lyrics, lullabies and overheard speech.

In literature, the epistolary novel is an example of literary collage in creative practice. The epistolary novel is a collage of different means of communication to build the fictional world of the novel. An early example, which takes more liberty with the usage of different mediums of communication, and encompasses the definition of a collage in literature, is Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, which compiles diary entries from several characters, like chapters 1, 6, and 12, which are all from different diaries, letters (chapters 5 and 9, for example), as well as newspaper articles, and flyers (chapter 7). 

Letters are normally non-fictional, and they represent a reality which was not supposed to graze the public, therefore it rests “on the presumption of directness and intimacy” (Hodkinson et al. 2013, 169). Using letters and personal diaries in a story fleshes out the characters by relying on the intimacy and comfort they feel when expressing their true thoughts on the blank page. 

The definition of a collage in the book by van der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022, 50) is that a collage is a whole made from fragments of other whole structures. What Dracula does is it considers specific letters and compiles only a select few relevant news articles, which are a part of a bigger whole. An entry is part of a diary, a letter is but one record of a bigger correspondence chain, etc. All these select pieces of information contribute to create a new storyline, following characters whose communication is separated in time and space from one another. Jonathan, the main protagonist, writes his diary while on his trip to Romania in the beginning of the novel. Meanwhile, his wife Mina is back in England, exchanging letters with her friend Lucy, but both storylines are relevant to each other.

A more modern take on the genre comes in the book Illuminae (2015) by authors Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Illuminae is a futuristic version of what Bram Stoker did back in the end of the 19th century where he sought to expose the existence of Count Dracula and vampires as the horrific creatures of the night. Illuminae is a science fiction novel set in the year 2575 and is composed of a series of redacted documents aimed at exposing the crimes against humanity committed by a fictitious corporation. 

The visibility of the seams, or where the fragments were stitched together, van der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022, 50) argue, are an essential part of the collage. In Illuminae, for example, each page transfers the reader into another medium of communication abruptly. The reader gets introduced to the main characters through classified interviews (Kaufman and Kristoff, 9–25). They discover more about the world through letters between official governmental figures (26), Unipedia entries, which is this universe’s version of Wikipedia (39–40), blueprints (31–32), etc.

Media and Culture

Media and Culture studies is an interdisciplinary discipline by default, in which a scholar navigates the themes of film, television and digital media to get a deeper understanding of aesthetic conventions and ideological dynamics. The process of collage seems evident when looking at the content of film and television programs, since scenes are cut and assembled to convey the story in a certain way—in a process named editing (Monaham and Basam 1998, 282). Nonetheless, the collage procedure gains a new complexity if we move away from content, and analyse the forms that these edited pieces are afforded to the viewers.

Within the traditional broadcasting format of television, the practice of collage can be spotted in its scheduling. Raymond Williams has described the programming of television as a flow, in which “watching television” has been turned into an experience that is continuous and unbroken—the individual programs are just a piece of the schedule (Gripsrud 1998, 27–28). The commercial breaks are not intervals, but assembled advertisements, in which shows are produced to accommodate such additions (Gripsrud 1998, 27). Hence, the flow is made possible through the collage of television shows, commercials, live broadcasting, and informational segments about the network’s schedule (Gripsrud 1998, 27–28). To watch broadcasting television is to watch an assembled programme made to be seen in an order determined by the networks. 

Currently, however, the telegenic collage does not take place only in a scheduling form but is also practised by viewers and their multiple screens. The emergence of new forms of (mobile) technology has granted new affordances of television (Amanda Lotz 2018, 492). Think of smartphones, tablets, and smart-tv, and each is connected to extensive networks of internet-based platforms and applications. One can watch television while simultaneously navigating on their smartphone through the TikTok, which in turn contains small fan clips of scenes from television shows. These clips are created on user-friendly mobile applications for editing videos. This highlights the claims by van der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022, 51) that collage can act as a reflexive, engaging practice, for viewers obtain a new form of agency. Therefore, new technologies have afforded collage to be practised at the audience level, rather than taking place only at the stage of media production. 

This collage practice creates individualised hypermediated spaces. For instance, one is not necessarily confined to a single video but is able to explore videos, images, sound and texts. This process is mentioned by van der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022, 50) as digital navigation, which can also be referred to as hypertext. Lister et al. (2009, 26) defines “hypertext as a work which is made up from discrete units of material, each of which carries a number of pathways to other units.” The user can choose which links to click, which webpages to access, which films to watch. Moreover, this plethora of paths and possibilities allow for the creation of heterogeneous cyberspaces with multiple windows and multiple media being viewed at the same time—a hypermediacy environment (Lister et al. 2009, 29). The individual is able to open, watch and interact within multiple windows, even on a single screen or across multiple devices, and this configuration is highly stylized and personal. Mediated collage is then both a practice and a result of the blurred lines between technological devices, digital networks and content. 

Discussion

Our disciplines deeply resonate with collage’s nature to recontextualize. In fact, as we have seen in Linguistics, languages can be cut up according to cultural needs and recontextualized so that a particular group is able to understand it. Within literature, recontextualization takes shape in, for instance, selecting letters and placing them in a context that is no longer limited to sender and receiver. And finally, media studies discusses recontextualization in a level that a particular medium exists within a hypermediatic space that is individualised to the viewer’s own context. In this line, collage has implications that seem to explain relevant phenomena within these different disciplines.

If following the definition of collage given by van der Tuin & Verhoeff (2022), Interlingua and Interslavic are a good example of collage as creative practice in Linguistics. They are a recombination of various source materials, different languages, into a new whole where the joints that hold the end result together are visible and the languages of origin are still identifiable. The traces of different sources are an integral part of their essence. However, their creation does not share the politically critical engagement that van der Tuin & Verhoeff (2022, 51) consider characteristic to collage. While collage uses recombination to critically engage with the sources and the relationship between each of its components in a political and critical way, Interlingua and Interslavic do not. The political aspect of these auxlangs resides in their purpose of being a lingua franca for speakers from different countries.

On a similar note, the concept of collage as defined by van der Tuin & Verhoeff applies to Spanglish in a couple ways. Since it arose as a contact language, it implies political engagement: the Latinx culture is emerging and represented as unique and whole. Moreover, the joints holding together English and Spanish are still visible in the final product: switching between the languages is never neat or clean, but it leaves traces in the morphosyntax of speech. 

In literature, the seams are in no way meant to be “effaced,” and though they are not completely in the epistolary novel, they are not meant to be as perceivable either. Keeping the junction between the pieces distinctively visible might affect the natural plot progression in its narrative coherence.

Both authors also discuss how collage is a process that invites engagement. Languages, books, and television programs are taken as objects that can be explored, deconstructed and constructed again. They are not fixed, and are not meant to be fixed, since their meaning arises from the interaction between them and readers. And they invite for an interdisciplinary engagement. Van der Tuin and Verhoeff mention convergence culture, defined by Henry Jenkins (2006, 6) as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” For instance, a book might be written in English with elements of an invented language that the book author has created usings fragments of real languages. This same book might tell a story that takes places within a cinematic storyworld, one that initially existed in the form of films. The reader is invited to engage with several types of media to fully grasp the collage environment that has been created. And the joints between objects are not transparent, readers are aware that this is a process of construction and deconstruction.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the term collage is flexible in its use. It is meant to represent “cutting, tearing, folding, glueing, stapling” objects in a new context (van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, 52). The definition works with broad terms such as “fragment” and “whole,” which are, at large, applicable to every discipline. However, this is also one of the shortcomings of the chapter. By no means is it exhaustive precisely due to the wide variety of applications the term collage has. In this light, our objective was to bring to the foreworld some dynamics that are given meaning through collaging.Collage as a creative practice cannot be a discipline on its own, since it is a practice incorporated by several disciplines. As seen in the examples, this type of creative practice can be applied in many fields of the humanities. This versatility broadens indefinitely the scope of collage and makes it too all-encompassing to be its own discipline. Collage is, rather, a point of contact and connection. It is not a fixed and well-defined end-product with its own boundaries, but a starting point for the creation of something new instead. Many new disciplines, for example, can be considered the result of a collage between pre-existing ones. Sociolinguistics was born from the combination of sociology and linguistics and discipline media and culture incorporates collages in the level of moving images, text, sound, and medium afforded by new technology. In light of this, collage as creative practice is advantageous and prolific, as it can turn a multidisciplinary set of disciplines into a new and interdisciplinary one. By combining the useful aspects of each discipline, this creative practice can ultimately push boundaries and cater to the needs of the academic community. Unlike a fixed discipline, collage is therefore timeless and a tool of change. In summary, collage cannot be its own discipline due to its broad and versatile nature. These same characteristics, however, make it a good creative practice, allowing to change and recombine according to the needs, as shown by the newest disciplines in the academic landscape.

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