Theorize

An adequate theory of visual rhetoric must account for the production of an image, the image's reception, and the circumstances by which image came into viewing (circulation). 

Production

We haven't spent as much time with this as I thought we would. Some of our readings and discussions have pertained the role of elements within a piece. In Foss's definition of rhetoric as an area of focus, she discuss the nature of the artifact -- the substantive and stylistic features of an artifact that are seen in the presented elements (materiality and arrangement) and the suggested elements (elements that are inferred by the reader). I am calling this part of Foss's discussion as related to the production of rhetorical images, because a rhetor is making choices about elements in the artifact. Goggin's discussion of needlepoint expands Foss's gloss of materiality (medium, space and color) by using needlepoint to suggest that the overlap between visual and verbal resides in the notion of semiotic resources. Goggin's rhetor learns what semiotic resources are available and how to use them in the context of the cultural, political, and social world that shapes the rhetor's ability to access and practice rhetoric. Goggin's rhetor is situated whereas Foss's rhetor seems to ignore what it means to compose. Helmers, Sontag, and Berger nod to the rhetor that is producing images and the kinds of choices that a rhetor makes when producing images.

Overall, I am dissatisfied with the lack of attention spent on production by these authors. Maybe it is the nature of the discipline and the way that we accumulate knowledge -- we read and study texts. It seems like because we have been interested in composing processes in the past and have used some of the rhetorical canon to figure some things out about the production of texts, we would be interested in the production of rhetorical images and the composing process of the rhetor. Maybe I am conflating rhetoric and composition.

Reception

We have spent a ton of time talking about the role of visuals in the world, meaning-making with visuals, and interpretation.

Visual rhetoric has an audience, and it encourages change in that audience by challenging, reinforcing, de-emphasizing, or complicating positions/propositions that the audience draws from to make decisions or to act. Some of this comes from Bitzer. Some comes from Barton and Barton. Bitzer emphasizes the notion of positive modification through persuasion. Barton and Barton seem to open that idea up a little by illustrating the use of maps to reinforce privileged values by de-emphasizing or outright neglecting less favorable values, people, and realities. I'm drawing from Sontag, Berger, and Helmers to suggest that images complicate. Sontag suggests that photographs are "inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy" (23). Berger suggest a similar notion in his account of the role of ambiguity in the photo where meaning-making is a response to the presence of the known and the unknown (89). Meaning occurs in the process of narrativizing the photograph, accounting for its certainty and lending "a past and a present" to its ambiguity (Berger 89). Helmers suggests that the meaning of an image changes across viewings, and the image does not necessarily need to be in front of the viewer for a change in meaning. The viewer only has to recall the memory of a viewing (84). Associated with these ideas is the concept of the effectiveness of an image to change or present or move the viewer. I'm leaving people out.

Circulation

How, where, and through what medium an image circulates has profound effects on the rhetoric of images. Helmers' second frame, Interfacing Nature, touches on the idea of a framing an image. Her subject, fine art, is a little different than antifacts that function as visual rhetoric like commercials or cartoons or graphs, because people have to come and see the piece. Other pieces have treated circulation as associated with the purpose of the piece. Images that are made to challenge an ideology like LUNPFM or the Rockwell paintings are distributed widely. The pieces by Lucaites and the piece dealing with Norman Rockwell discuss images that are reproduced and circulated in larger works. In the case of Rockwell, he was publishing in magazines. LUNPFM was a book. Pieces that are more performative like the samplers in Goggin's piece have a more narrow circulation. 

And So

There are a couple of things missing. Reception and related acts of interpretation have been sufficiently covered in my mind. A theory of visual rhetoric that I would like to see would make use of the canons with circulation as a sixth concern. I think chronologically, so a theory that uses the canons would address all of the writing events that happen before the piece is received by a viewer. So a theory that made us of the canons might start to address production, an activity that is absent or only implied in the work that we have read. I think that the groundwork has been laid for the kind of theory I am proposing. I see Goggin's semiotic resources are related to invention and Foss's present elements related to arrangement. I see Sontag's kinds of acquisition are related to style in that the kind of acquisition that occurs -- personal, consumer, and informational -- is indicative of the photo's subject and what kind of audience is present.

This is just a start.