Quarter Logic

I have appropriated a lesson from a former professor that involves a set of questions and object X, X being for the lesson a U. S. quarter.  Though I use this lesson in a different type of class and for different purposes than my former professor, the general outcome is the same: a detailed examination of a seemingly innocuous and mundane object reveals layers of meaning most (if not all) of the students had never really considered before.  The first question, What is X?, delivers a variety of responses from the denotative “money,” “metal,” and “coin” to the greater connotative responses like “a wish,” “propaganda,” and “history.”  The second and third questions follow suit, thus “What does X do?” will elicit responses from “flip,” “purchase,” and “hold its shape” to “symbolize,” and “declare a belief in God.”  This pattern follows suit in every class: the early responses reveal only surface level, denotative insight into the object while the latter responses delve into more connotative, symbolic possibilities. 

In Image-Music-Text, Roland Barthes discusses the assumption of reality that is often given to the press photo.  That is to say, people tend to take the press photo at face value and assign a certain quality of factualness or truthiness, though neither of these MacGyvered terms are either fully accurate.  He identifies this quality as denotation—when one looks at a press photo, one assumes that the information gleamed is literal and direct. The thing to consider here is this: people understand the press or realistic photo is not the same as a studio portrait photo or art photo, and this provides the press photo with a certain verisimilitude—a verisimilitude that does not really exist.  It is easy in a studio photo or art photo to see the emphasis on the stylistic and the artificial; it is natural to see these images as posed.  Barthes argues that the press photo is just as staged and posed, but, of course, that’s not what most viewers perceive.  Even the significance of camera angle is often overlooked.

 What the quarter lesson suggests to me is that the assumption of denotative meaning does not end with press photos (and the like)—this assumption is not relegated to the realm of realism or the realistic, but exists as much in the realm of the symbolic and metaphoric, especially when the symbols and metaphors in question are common-place everyday objects.  The ubiquity of the quarter makes it banal.  The metaphoric and symbolic images don’t simply lose their meaning, it’s like they cease to be taken in as part of the meaning-creating process.   They slip into the background, into the movement and necessity of the everyday, and yet, as the latter responses that my students eventually come up with in examining what the quarter is, what it does, and what it means, there is a complex web of meaning attached to these banal objects that if considered bespeaks a multitude of connotations.  Before my students leave the class on the “What is X?” assignment day, I ask them to check their pockets, wallets, and backpacks for loose and ready cash.  I tell them to look for coins as well as paper currency, in American as well as foreign, and although the onset of debit cards has reduced (slightly) the number of individuals in any classroom who possesses ready cash, the truth is most students have a cache of quarters or a few dollar bills they keep in reserve, if nothing else than for use in the vending machines or parking meters.  I ask them to look at their bills and their coins, the symbols and the words stamped upon them, the connotations that they mean, and I ask them to consider the next time they go to purchase a Coca-Cola, or to feed the meter, or to grab a quick Starbucks, just what it is they are declaring by using that cash.