Distinctions and Blurred Lines

In reading through everyone else's posts and trying to respond and ask questions, I think through struggling with the material I answered some of my own questions and came to some clarification (though still very murky) about my thoughts on the relation between the aesthetic, the vernacular, and visual rhetoric.  (I actually decided to not respond on some of the posts because in my attempts I actually answered some of the muddled questions I was asking- I think- and so I decided to cover those things here.)  This post, therefore, is rehashing some of the things many of you already said, but with one addition I would make to the definition everyone has been using so far of the vernacular in order to clarify it (if only for my own thoughts).

From what everyone has posted so far, we all seem to be accepting of and in agreement on Helmer's definition of the aesthetic as something that pleases, engages, inspires, and is concerned with beauty. That seems to be the easy part. Molly talks about Georgia O'Keefe's flower paintings as examples of the aesthetic in her post, and so I am using those in this post to illustrate the "easy" distinction of the purely aesthetic here. I don't think anyone in the class would view these paintings and argue that they are rhetorical. (There could be certain situations in which the paintings could be used rhetorically- for example, someone brought up using Dr. Yancey's mountain photo in a strip mining article and how that might make it more rhetorical. Perhaps these flowers could be used in a similar case for pollution, etc., but one could argue for more effective visuals for that goal. This also gets us into context/rhetorical situation, which I will address momentarily.) As for the vernacular, they do not accomplish any task besides presenting the beautiful and providing pleasure- they certainly can't function to keep someone warm, as the quilt in Aimee's post can.

On that note, we get in to the vernacular. We have been using the definition "the everyday, the unschooled, concerned with function" among the blog posts so far. One clarification I would add to this, and may seem obvious but I think necessary for a workable definition, would be that the vernacular is concerned with INDIVIDUAL functions/goals. As we have to distinguish that PERSONAL meaning may be found in the aesthetic, I think we need to distinguish in saying that the vernacular serves to accomplish an individual task or goal; neither is rhetorical unless it works to create public (community) meaning and works towards the goal of influencing the public. I think we need this clarification because otherwise it seems we are effectively equating the vernacular with the rhetorical. (In class, haven't we been trying to determine if a visual is rhetorical by determining if it works towards some function or goal?) Using Aimee's quilt example, there is an image of a quilt that could serve the vernacular function to keep someone warm and maybe also record the family history. Below that is a section of the AIDS Quilt, part of the Names Project. Both could possibly fit into the aesthetic category, but I would argue only one would fit into the vernacular. The AIDS Quilt is not "the everyday serving an individual function", it carries a public meaning and serves a public function, arguably making it rhetorical, not vernacular.

This is where we get into the blurred lines, the "venn diagram" situations some have noted where there is overlap between the aesthetic, the vernacular, and the rhetorical. Some artifacts may fall into more than one of these categories. As many have pointed to already, this usually depends on the context of the artifact. In some cases, this may point to Bitzer and the rhetorical situation. For example, Rockwell's civil right's paintings- they could be considered aesthetically pleasing, but they also work to accomplish a PUBLIC goal, as well. The rhetorical situation that Rockwell was responding to was the civil rights movement and desegregation. Molly notes in her post that "place is important"- this can be illustrated with the quilt examples. If the first quilt was hung in a museum, it would certainly highlight the aesthetic attributes of it. Would it necessarily make it rhetorical? I would say no.

This notion of place and context is interesting and confusing for me. I would argue (and from the other blog posts, it seems others agree) that the setting and context, including place, time, culture, etc. affect the categorization of the aesthetic and the rhetorical, but do these things equate to the rhetorical situation as Bitzer describes it? Bitzer seems to say the rhetorical situation is the situation within which the exigence occurs that calls for a response. What about when we are looking at artifacts outside of or away from the rhetorical situation which brought about the artifact? With Rockwell's civil rights paintings, for example, we are looking back at these images that were directed toward a certain audience. While I would argue that today we still share many of the attributes of that audience, we are not really the exact same audience he was speaking to, the exact situation doesn't exist, and the place these paintings were originally placed in no longer applies. We now see these paintings in a museum, or in an academic article, etc. Has the rhetorical situation changed? From what I understand from Bitzer and his definition of the rhetorical situation, no. So, what do we call these new situations of place, time, etc. in which we find these artifacts? Would we just describe it as context? Whatever we call it (context seems most fitting to me, at least so far), how do context and rhetorical situation interact with each other? Should we consider them both in looking at an artifact (if we know of the situation) or should we consider them separately?