Rethinking the Situation

          I spent most of today thinking about this question. When I first thought about it, I thought I would simply respond to the ideas of vernacular and aesthetic found in Helmer, perhaps with an example and a little bit of analysis. But that seemed just a little too simple. The more I thought about that question, the more trouble I had with it. Having spent the day with these concerns, I’d like to raise the question of whether a distinction between the “vernacular” and the “aesthetic” are useful, coherent distinctions, or whether they have become intellectual barriers that require us to artificially separate and rank different objects, rhetorical styles and, by extension, the people who use them.
Martha raised an excellent point when she pointed out that Helmers’ analysis of the fine arts was in fact an analysis of paintings that had been commissioned for a fee. There is a sense in her suspiciously simply definition of aesthetic work which “edify...[and] please” that she believes there does, in fact, exist art which serves no practical purpose but merely exists for an aesthetic experience. It’s very reminiscent of the 20th century formalists who chose to isolate books from their social and material conditions of existence, as if geniuses were producing these great works of literature with no mind to whether or not they could make any money off of them or whether their publishers would actually, say, publish them.
But although I am challenging the distinction of the first of the question, I think we can observe both an answer to “how we see today” and the dismantling of this distinction in how people create art and rhetoric today. Although works of art made for digital space might be directed to a particular audience with a specific, sometimes exclusive discourse for understanding the work, the public space that is the Internet allows for incomprehensible variability in who may view, consume, and contextualize a given work. I would say that everything has become vernacular if that didn’t preserve what I think to be an outdated distinction. Perhaps we are learning to create and consume faster than we are capable of theorizing about our own creation and consumption.
Although I could live a million lifetimes without developing Goggin’s enthusiasm for embroidery, her analysis left me with a lot to think about. From start to finish her title “challenging the great divide” said a lot about how we distinguish between the the visual and the verbal and, similarly, how we distinguish between the aesthetic and the vernacular. In a world where, as she puts it, “semiotic resources are best understood as multiple complex of technological conditions and sociocultural landscapes that overlap like Venn diagrams” (89), these clean distinctions no longer provide the intellectual tools to describe how we actually experience either the visual or the verbal.
What does this mean for visual rhetoric? So far in this course we have encountered this category in at least three concrete forms: the photograph (Sontag), the painting (Helmers), and the image (Foss). Where have these three forms taken us? We have seen that each comes with their own associated technologies, cultural contexts, and rhetorical purposes. But we have also seen that even these concrete distinctions are not so distinct (you can take a photograph of a painting, for instance, you contextualize an image with words). Things are getting tricky, people.
In the same way that I don’t think we can totally distinguish between the aesthetic and the vernacular, the visual or the verbal, I think what we are seeing is that it is becoming harder and harder to distinguish between when something is rhetorical and when it is not (or to rephrase the question so often asked in class, whether something is rhetorical or not). Because so much now relies on the situation, because there is rarely a single “ideal” audience for a given work, I think (unfortunately because this means I was probably wrong and hasty in my dismissal of him) we would do well to re-examine, maybe even re-imagine Bitzer’s rhetorical situation to take into account the new ways we communicate with one another. What new exigences are created in an age where there may not be one, but many "situations" which a given artifact can respond to? Furthermore, these separate situations need not be synchronous or even related. Lloyd Bitzer, old and retired somewhere in Wisconsin, just may provide the groundwork we need to theorize about the situation that faces us today.