Categories or Method

Like a couple of people have mentioned (Bruce and David), Blair asked a useful question, "What does being visual add to arguments?" (41) It seems like we (vis.rhet@fsu) are oriented a little differently. What does argument add to visuals? We've seen a few answers to this. Hill's two contributions suggest that a study of visuals with a rhetorical framework (theory, methodology) can be useful in understanding the role and effectiveness of visuals to persuade, even transform people. I see Tange's discussion as an example of the latter, transformation. The production of books detailing the layout, function, and quality of middle class homes in Victorian England transformed a society's values by circulating visuals that relied on the reader's ability to understand the principles of domesticity through making connections across materials. Cool. But, it seems like by thinking a little more broadly, in terms of rhetoric, asks a different sort of question and has a different sort of answer. What does rhetoric add to visuals? Back to Blair for a moment. In Blair's last section, he outlines three genres of visual argument -- cartoon, narrative, and advertising. I tend to think in terms of categories (especially when I am unfamiliar with a subject), so I like this. The question -- visual as narrative, argument, and rhetoric -- seems to be a question of categories for me at first. Narrative and argument are modes of rhetoric (some would say genres too) as is expository or descriptive rhetoric. So, initially, I started thinking about qualities of images or kinds of images that might exemplify various modes of rhetoric.

It seems like description would be something like Berger's short quote, looking something like this: The plant's dewy flesh, etc.


So, I wanted to say that narrative and argument are modes of rhetoric rhetoric. I want to say that I feel a little like Jason, anxious about categorizing images as rhetorical, but I am not sure that this is about that process of categorizing. I want to say that this is more about using a rhetorical method to look at the process or continuum of composition, delivery, circulation, reception, and perception with the associated concerns of meaning, discontinuity, & ambiguity. A rhetorical method deals with this continuum, and that is valuable work to me.