A theory of history

Posting late, as Logan noted last week, is never a very good idea, because my colleagues have already made so many excellent points, and now it’s up to me to contribute more than just handfuls of atta-boys. That said, in response to the prompt, “What is the role of history in shaping visual rhetoric?” I will attempt to make meaning.

After struggling to come up with an answer to this question all week, I’ve settled, at least for the moment, on the hypothesis that history is foundational to shaping visual rhetoric. By this I mean to suggest that visual rhetoric in all of its epistemologies, i.e., rhetoric as persuasion, argument, narrative, et al., requires exigence or, what Grassi calls ingenium, without which there would be no need for change, no urgency, no creation of the artifact. Ingenium is rooted in human need, from which a metaphor is created (a word or utterance for Grassi), and a Herculean act is performed to create meaning. Applying Grassi’s notion of urgency to the visual, rhetorical artifact, the insinuation is that there must be some need or lack that forces its creation. Since the act of creation is located in need, cannot the assumption also be made that the need is already historical since the Herculean act--the moment of creation--is also rooted in history, albeit immediate?

As Logan points out, “for Bitzer, rhetoric is situational, contextual, performs some text, alters reality, and is always persuasive.” Again, without ingenium, there is no need to alter reality, no need to persuade, and therefore no need of rhetoric, if we use this definition. The urgency is always located in history, hence my claim that history is the foundation for all rhetoric, including the visual.

Logan also notes that visual rhetoric theory “must pertain to artifacts that can be perceived by the eyes (this is important, because up until now, it seems like we’ve assumed that all people can see or that all people see in the same way),” which is a concern I have with Lacan’s mirror theory as well--how does one make meaning if one is born without sight, in Lacan’s version of “truth”? But I digress...

This makes sense to me at the moment, but it’s closing in on 1 a.m., so it remains to be  seen how it holds up in broad daylight.