Everything's Rhetorical (!/?)

Seeing also as rhetorical, to be honest, makes things a whole heck of a lot more complicated. Not that it should be surprising that adding a third lens might risk making things blurrier and more focused at once, but as I wrestle my way through how images operate as narrative, as argument, and as rhetoric, I find myself trying to reconcile the three. I feel compelled, if I can be honest, to pick sides between the three. I’m not sure why I do, but I do. So I’ve found myself trying to see which of these I fall more in line with, and with the readings we’ve done, I’m not sure where I, or these approaches, stand.

I think I really found myself loving Blair’s “The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments,” this I can definitively say. I think I’ve had such profound troubles understanding visual rhetoric because I’ve been under the impression that everything is rhetorical, which simply isn’t true. I know, we’ve discussed this matter in class, but it’s a tough notion to shake. I’m pretty sure I have quite a few books on my desk which claim “Everything Is a ______” where the blank ranges in meaning from Argument, to Text, to Remix. So, why can’t there be an “Everything is Rhetorical”? Blair touches on a couple places where this may not be true, and some where it certainly is. His insight into ads like the Pepsi one with the children and dog frolicking in the field (which I’ve scoured the internet for, to no avail…how could the internet let me down on a cute pet video???) made me start to wonder: what images are rhetorical, and why.

Like the books above, I think it’s easy to make and defend a statement like “everything’s a text” or “everything’s an argument,” and I admire Blair’s “not so fast” cautioning. This, however, made me feel even less secure over what actually is visual rhetoric. I guess I was content before to say that “everything’s visual rhetoric,” save for personal items, but if something like that Pepsi commercial isn’t an argument, then where does that leave visual argument and rhetoric? He suggests the importance of association and persuasion in situation like the Pepsi as, but now I’m not only unsure what should be considered visual rhetoric, but I’m more skeptical now that I know it’s not just a matter of me “not getting it,” and that in some cases, an image or a video may well not be rhetorical.

So, as you can imagine, this means a good deal of confusion and skepticism bubbling up on my end, but I think that as we move forward and I have a firmer grasp on what visual rhetoric and/or argument are, I’ll feel far better and everything will translate to a healthy analytical viewpoint. I like being challenged the way I am by these readings, and I’m looking forward to having a way to channel this energy going forward and try to start seeing these lenses more clearly. Berger’s perspective came to me rather naturally, and so seeing the visual as a narrative was hardly a stretch, but the fork between visual rhetoric and visual argument, while interesting, is still something I know I’ll be wrestling with going forward.

In that vein, and to reach my minimum required mention of videogames in a blog post, I'll finish out this way: while Bruce points out that the Sesame Street gang can be rhetorical, is this image, a screenshot I took but didn't use for last week's blog entry of spraypainting in Jet Set Radio, rhetorical? Why or why not?