Some Challenging Quotations

“Visual rhetoric is symbolic action in that the relationship it designates between image and referent is arbitrary, in contrast to a sign, where a natural relationship exists between the sign and the object to which it is connected.” - Foss

 You know who really grinds my gears? Foss. When we first read Foss, I found her useful because she lays the groundwork of theoretical terminology and provides a narrow scope of inquiry for what we have been calling visual rhetoric. But although I found her useful, her model seems too fixed and finished. When I returned to the text, I isolated this segment as an example of how Foss’s dichotomous framework limits our ability to interpret visuals as more than just a substitute for words.

 First of all, her sign/symbol and arbitrary/natural dichotomies strikes me as too simple. Not only am I troubled by her logical reduction that reduces a visual artifact to either a sign or a symbol, I find her justification for it highly problematic. It is simply too easy to say that a symbolic image has an arbitrary relationship while a signatory image has a natural relationship. What constitutes a natural relationship as opposed to an arbirtrary one and how we do recognize the difference? If a relationship is natural, is it fixed and permanent? I ask these questions because they will be very difficult to answer when applied to our experience which, I think, is usually our first method of testing a theory.

 The most troubling implication of this framework is that I don’t think it can account for the ambiguities inherent in human interpretation. What does it mean if one person interprets a visual as a sign where another interprets it as a symbol? If we accept Foss’s model, then one person must simply be wrong. But who, and how do we determine it? The very fact of disagreement seems to me to encourage us to challenge or at least remain suspicious of dichotomies and the logic of either/or.

 I much prefer Berger, who noted that “appearances both distinguish and join events.” It strikes me as a far more functional way to view visuals - it does not ask us to say that a visual does one or the other, but that it can do both and more. When I read Berger, I noted that he reminded me of Kenneth Burke’s notion of rhetoric as a process of “identification and division.” I have always appreciated how Burke notes that to identify with one concept or group of people is to divide yourself from another. Berger struck me as Burkean throughout, but especially when he made that claim.

 Foss also aggravates me because she seems to have a logocentric theory of visual rhetoric. Hill observes “images are not just another method for expressing propositions that could otherwise be expressed in verbal form. Rather, they are essential for expressing, and therefore knowing, things that cannot be expressed in any other form.” We do not “read” visuals the same way we read words - one , sentence, paragraph, or page at a time. We take them in as a whole and make distinctions as we go along. Foss’s clean-cut distinction between sign and symbol, arbitrary and natural, invites us to think of images too much like words, as being composed of gradually smaller and smaller units until we reach a basic unit. Who reads visuals that way?

 As we have observed throughout class, visual data remains highly ambiguous data. Our theories do well when they leave room open for the ambiguities in the objects we view and the imaginations of human viewers. It may be hard to avoid making these fine, neat distinctions, but I think when we resist the urge to fit visual rhetoric progressively neater and more reductionist categories, we can better communicate with one another with them and about them.