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Place of Visual Rhetoric

In Randall Collins’ chapter “The Mutual Focus/Emotional-Entrainment Model,” he asserts that television is a combination of picture and sound, claiming that “the stronger sense of involvement, of being pulled into the action, is from the sound” (55). A burst of cheering will bring us back into the room to discover that the game is in its final minutes, runners are about to score, the team is making a drive, etc. Connors’ claim is that a person seeks the sound of the crowd in order to fully share in the excitement of the moment (55). In forwarding a strong argument for auditory rhetoric over visual rhetoric, he is also suggesting that we start giving more attention to other rhetorics (namely auditory).

Submitted by Morgan S. on Wed, 2007-04-04 00:08.
Morgan S.'s blog

Auditory Rhetoric
Ryan's picture
Submitted by Ryan on Thu, 2007-04-05 09:54.

I agree with this Morgan - I think that visual rhetoric is a somewhat misleading name because it excludes the auditory and written elements that so often accompany the visual. Usually, visual, auditory, and textual elements work together - in the news, for instance, or in a television ad. Though we mean the whole package when we say visual rhetoric, that meaning doesn't always come across.


Display
nrivers's picture
Submitted by nrivers on Thu, 2007-04-05 10:00.

There is a new edited collection about the Rhetoric of Display. I think "display" as a term is a helpful alternative as it does more adequately account for the interplay of sound and text and other potentially suasory elements than "visual rhetoric."


Attention to other rhetorics?
Morgan S.'s picture
Submitted by Morgan S. on Sat, 2007-04-07 15:41.

I agree. But I'm also curious about how some of these different rhetorics might look if they were taught in a course. What would we teach, and how? In what ways could we address auditory elements with some of these others? Why has so little work been done on examining these issues?


Beats and Movements
mark p's picture
Submitted by mark p on Sun, 2007-04-08 09:38.

I guess the closest I've come is on the aforementioned music video assignment I gave. I was very clear that I wanted the chosen song to relate thematically with the argument, but even more important, for the beats and movement of the song to coincide with the shifting visuals in a meaningful and purposeful way. I must admit, I asked for this, but did little in the way of teaching how to do it. Nevertheless, most of them seemed to know what I was talking about and pulled it off in their videos. Does this count as auditory rhetoric? I'm not sure.


They watch your videos muted
Adryan's picture
Submitted by Adryan on Mon, 2007-04-09 13:48.

(The following is my closest memory of specific lyrics from a song by Dead Celebrity Status) "You're not cut out to sing, you might as well be an actor or write a chapter how sex sells music. Nobody likes your songs, they watch your videos muted." The interplay and co-dependancy of multiple senses is part of our cultural literacy. Trying to isolate audio from visual or textual is like teaching ethos as separate from pathos or logos. Or teaching audience as distinct from rhetorical situation. It might seem more managable, but it will only result in students having an impoverished understanding of the terms.