Reconsidering the Available Means of Persuasion

        The first thing that the phrase “episteomology of the visual” suggests to me is a consideration of how our sense of sight relates to our ability to perceive and construct knowledge based on the information our eyes ascertain from the world around us. Underlying each of the authors we have read, as well as the series of threshold concepts that we discussed in class on Tuesday, are general assumptions about what it is that we know or do not know when we see something. An epistemology of the visual seems like a theoretical framework just as, if not more fundamental, than the premise of threshold concepts (because these concepts presume the epistemology), and like most things we have encountered in this class it’s a tricky subject.

Although Blair’s weakness for puppies and children made me question his scholarly ethos, I nevertheless appreciated his theory of visual argumentation. The classicists among us probably appreciated Blair’s straightforward, Aristotaleian approach to visual rhetoric. As someone whose primary interest in this course is visual rhetoric as argumentation, Blair stood out to me in an especially personal way. Blair provided a useful framework for understanding visual rhetoric as argumentation, but I do not think the Aristotaleian model applies quite as smoothly to visuals as he seems to think. As Blair himself pointed out, “Aristotle took for granted that the agent of persuasion is the orator, and from that it follows on his conception that the principal tool of persuasion must be the orator’s medium, namely language” (41). Although Blair offers a nuanced account of the relationship between visual persuasion and visual argumentation (namely, that not all persuasion is argumentation), it is worth noting that his Aristotaleian model depends upon an Aristotaleian epistemology. Aristotle believed that our sense of sight directly perceived the world in and of itself and that, in fact, our sense of sight was the most reliable and useful of our senses. It follows that if we grant Aristotle’s epistemology to Blair, we have to dispense with our favorite class buzzword: ambiguity. For visual argumentation to function in the way Blair describes, not only must our sense of sight directly intuit the facts of the world, but it must also have direct, unambiguous knowledge to the propositional content of a visual. In order for it to be really argumentative, it seems a visual could, like a sentence, contain a single proposition. This seems to contradict our actual experience of the visuals. As we saw in our discussion, the rhetorical situation transforms the propositional content of visuals. Just as the photograph of the burning child could be use to raise social awareness, so too could it me employed as propaganda. Without denying that visuals can function as arguments, I think we can see how Blair places limits upon visual argumentation that do not quite agree with our experiences.

There is a clear contrast here with Berger, for whom visuals were first and foremost ambiguous. Berger’s epistemology, which suggested that a priori categories assemble meaning out of visual data, leaves far more room open for rhetoric to be “the art of the probable” that even Aristotle acknowledged. Although Berger didn’t explicitly discuss visual argumentation, his emphasis on narrative allows to synthesize him and Blair. As Blair suggested in his analysis of the Goldwater ad, visual narratives can suggest argumentative propositions. Berger’s epistemology even seems to enhance Blair’s theory of visual argumentation because by acknowledging the way pre-existing categories shape our interpretations of visuals, the locus of persuasion becomes a matter not of finding the right audience for your visuals, but finding the right visuals for your audience. A single proposition need not be bound to one and one visual only, but can be adapted to suit the expectations of an audience and a situation. While it is true that not any image can be made to contain every or any proposition, I think that in the end a synthesis of Berger’s epistemology with some of the aspects of Blair’s theory of argumentation meet a decidedly Aristotaleian goal for rhetors by increasing the available means of persuasion.

Like my predecessors, I leave you a nice, clean example of visual argumentation.

That is from a religious tract called "The Beast." If the image quality isn't high enough, that is indeed a picture of the Pope leading the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to visit Satan's fury upon the Earth. As an illustration of my "multiple proposition" idea, you can imagine it containing arguments about how the world will end, arguments about the relevance of Biblical prophecy, and, of course, arguments about whether the Catholic Church was, to quote our friend Martin Luther, "the whore of Babylon."