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

Visio-textual collaboration (can you tell I've been reading Foucault?) is a useful synthesis of media that not only enriches the meaning of both but also encourages new ways of reading.  As John Muckelbauer suggests  in "On Reading Differently: Through Foucault's Resistance," approaching Foucault's theories from a productive rather than reproductive critical position enables new, more expansive readings, which in turn generates new perspectives and ideas.  While Muckelbauer doesn't refer to visual texts in his article, I think that his idea of "productive reading" can be useful for visual rhetoric.

In the exchange between Robert  Miltner and Wendy Collin Sorin, collaboration created texts based on each author's/artist's  productive readings of the other.  "Where the Visual Meets the Verbal" reminds me of Donna Haraway's Modest Witness where her theories are written in collaboration with the painter Lynn Randolph.  Significantly, they are not illustrations after the fact nor is Haraway's theory a response to paintings already created.  The paintings and the writing were completed simultaneously through a sharing of each's chosen medium.  To me that is an ideal collaboration that enhances both the rhetoric of the visual and that of the textual because it affords each equal importance.  It's especially important to me because it does this with theory and I think that it shifts the way that we can approach the theory.  That is, I think that it encourages us to look at theory as a creative act rather than a strictly critical one.  By combining the use of the visual rhetoric of painting with text-based rhetoric, I think that it imbues the visual rhetoric with a sense of legitmacy among those who might not look at painting as having the intellectual status that theory has.  Showing that theory and painting can be created through collaboration produces a different way of reading both.