More questions than answers

How can we posit that the photograph or image is either making an argument or presenting a narrative, when in reality, it is an inanimate object? Surely, it has a presence and therefore it acts (for lack of a better word) as a rhetorical device in the ways that Olbrechts-Tyteca and Perelman describe presencing. But it is our *own* narratives and arguments that *we* as viewers of the image compose as we attempt to  interpret its meaning. If I must decide that the image has a “purpose” and therefore an “intent,” how can we think of the psychology involved in interpreting culturally familiar representational images as a collaboration of sorts between the image and the viewer?
Moreover, how can we frame visuals as having an intent when, in literature for example, we avoid all discussions of author intent like the plague? The image is also “authored” -- the photographer, the sculptor, the t-shirt printer--all of these “author” visual “texts.” Sure, rhetoric and oration are different this way--rhetoric, at its foundation, is the art of persuasion. But if the “text” is a visual image, a photograph, for example, does it also have in common with a written text whose first purpose is not rhetoric, a “purpose” that seeks not to persuade, but possibly to entertain or to please as a written work of art like a story? What then can we claim about its purpose or its function? Does it even have one?

Though Hill aptly bases much of his discussion of rhetoric on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, I was also reminded as I read of Grassi’s notion of human need and urgency as the basis of what he calls “the Herculean act,” the “ingenium,” The materiality of the here and now, the need of the moment is the genesis of language. Language is lodged in sensory perception; how do you move from sensory perceptions to language? The means is metaphor. For Grassi, who rejects the idea that there exists A Truth with a capital T, rhetoric and poetry become the means by which knowledge/thought/logic is created. Metaphor provides the bridge for rational speech. With ingenium, there is pressing need posed by the environment itself. The urgency becomes generative. The need to bridge the gap between urgency and understanding is more pressing when there is something in your immediate environment that needs to be done. Does the image, by way of its “vividness,” “act” for us as a metaphorical bridge between our initial, emotional apprehension of it, and our need to make meaning from it, either through narrative or
argument or metaphor?

My post this week has turned out to be a list of questions rather than answers as I’m working through the readings, attempting to process them and make meaning that makes sense to me.