English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Position Statement: Alliance of Rhetoric Societies, September, 2003

Focus Issue: Do we have a "rhetorical tradition"? Are we better advised to think of traditions rather than a single tradition? If we do recognize a tradition or several traditions, how do we identify and characterize it (or them)?

Topic: “What Is Visual Rhetoric, and What Is Its Tradition?”

Position Statement: I want to approach this issue by first making the unremarkable claim that the rhetorical tradition is typically flavored by the interests of the day, like any complex historical account. While at any given moment we may have a “rhetorical tradition,” what comprises it (its character) will change with time and circumstance. A tradition is the collected and shared knowledge and practices passed from generation to generation, norms of knowing and experience that we share and act upon, that unify us in principle and spirit. Traditions are acts of socialization, in other words. In perhaps even less glamorous terms, traditions are also ritualized incantations, species of rationalization, the rehearsal of our capacity to identify with each other. Any field of study needs to assert this shared understanding of its past, but its practitioners also need to disassemble and rebuild tradition to explain new circumstances or to account for the unexplainable aspects of new experience. Traditions make new insight possible because they enfranchise resistance, because they unite us in practice, not in principle. They’re made to be broken and rebuilt, especially when old interpretations seem inadequate for the present moment.

We have all noticed the attention devoted to visual rhetoric these days, and as usually happens at first, new interests in the field are grafted to a normalized understanding of rhetoric as (primarily) a verbal art, the art of persuasion in language. What we’re set to discover, however, is that our present understanding of rhetoric and its tradition can no longer account for ways that the visual functions rhetorically. Our first step has been to think of the visual in terms of words or signs, as gestures that make appeals or visual arguments. We have focused primarily on the interpretation of the visual as a rhetorical phenomenon, an act of persuasion in a particular context. In film studies, there have been mostly failed efforts to articulate the ways that a film functions semiotically, as a system of signs, and then to formulate a film language. Our textbooks teach students to analyze advertisements for the ways that they appeal visually and verbally for rhetorical effect. They also (now) teach students how to use visual material to complement or extend arguments or to use layout to advantage. We teach the visual as if it were a discrete element of the rhetorical situation, a device to be wielded effectively (or not).

To understand visual rhetoric better, we need to reanimate its tradition, and in doing so, reconsider our conception of rhetoric itself as primarily a verbal art. The differentiation of the verbal and visual runs deep not only in rhetoric but in mainstream epistemology. I propose that, rather than perpetuate this division of the verbal and visual, we now need to consider their common basis in perception. What we find is that even in everyday verbal expression (orally or in writing) there are profoundly complex visual components. We find also that there are verbal (and rhetorical) components in everyday acts of seeing. What insights does our rhetorical tradition provide on the nature of visual rhetoric? On the nature of seeing and its relationship to verbal and rhetorical processes? Is there a visual component in identification? Analogy? Metaphor? The bending of the will? What is the tradition of visual rhetoric, and how will it change our understanding of the rhetorical tradition(s)?

David Blakesley
Department of English
Purdue University