Intertextuality as Rhetoric

     I forgot how awful it is to be one of the last to post on a class blog – there’s already been such good work done here. Instead of simply adding an amen to what others have said, I’ll offer a different interpretation of the question.

   To me, it seems that seeing visuals as rhetorical allows for a more capacious understanding of the semiotic work that visuals do. In class, we’ve offered a few different definitions of what constitutes rhetoric: documentation, narration, argumentation, epistemology, and reality. For me, all of these seem to culminate in an understanding of rhetoric as the making and shaping of knowledge and reality (I am hyper-aware that this is a very simplified working definition – no tomatoes, please). In this definition, rhetoric operates at the intersections of its different definitions. If we apply the same to the visual, we can see the different ways in which visuals operate and how the boundaries between the categories don’t seem to be so rigid. I think the visual-as-rhetorical is a much more complex and nuanced framework than, say, Berger’s visual-as-narrative approach.

     Also, looking at rhetorical and the visual through this framework emphasizes the that no one text can fully construct knowledge or reality, which are made from the intersections of multiple texts and the ways in which those texts talk to one another. Much has been said here about Blair and Hill, which is great. However, I’d like to focus on Tange for a moment. I appreciated Tange’s chapter for the way in which it made good on a promise made in the introduction of this book: that of the importance of intertextuality in (visual) rhetoric. This chapter is really the only one we’ve seen so far in which the author explicitly addresses the ways in which multiple texts inform one another. Here, that process culminates in the construction of the ideal Victorian middle class. Indeed, social realities (like class) are re/made at the intersections of the visual and the textual/verbal. For me, seeing visuals as rhetorical means also seeing the way that multiple modes work together in both the texts they are a part of and the knowledge and reality those texts work to construct. I hope that more of the works we read in the following weeks will address this inherent intertextuality and modal slipperiness.