Points of Praxis

My Blog Reflects on Visual Rhetorical Theory and Disability Rhetoric and their Connections to Classical and Contemporary Rhetorical Theory

It seems only appropriate that I begin my blog this semester addressing any challenges as to "why study visual rhetoric?"  Does visual rhetoric qualify as a legitimate area of study?  Perhaps, a more "worthy" area of study might be 20th century British Literature or maybe 16th century French Poetry (the host of Trading Spaces Family Edition actually majored in that at Yale).  Such claims concerning the legitimacy of visual media are often made in regard to new media and electronic literature--as alluded to in First Person:  New Media as Story, Performance, and Game edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan.   (One of the major rhetorical moves throughout the book seems to be to justify a scholarly inquiry into new media and electronic literature and games.)

Still, the pervasiveness of visual media is a point that seems obvious considering the popularity of television, movies, magazines, and the internet.  In 1988, the National Endowment for the Humanities noted in its report Humanities in America that "our common culture seems increasingly a product of what we watch rather than what we read" (qtd in Mitchell 1). Marshall McLuhan seemed to observe and even anticipate the importance of visual media in his book Understanding Media and his seminal essay "The Medium is the Message" in 1964.  French theorist Roland Barthes, likewise, addressed the importance of visual media as it relates to our cultural mythologies in S/Z, Camera Lucida, and Image, Music, Text. And, over the next thirty-plus years, the interest in visual media continues with W. J. T. Mitchell's books Iconology and Picture Theory, John Bergin's Ways of Seeing, and Gunther Kress and Theo VanLeeuwen's The Grammar of Visual Design--to name merely a few works in the discipline. 

However, simply listing bibliography of works on visual media doesn't necessarily justify its importance just as identifying several large bridges doesn't explain their functions.  Visual media or visual rhetoric constitutes a legitimate area of study considering the pervasiveness of visual culture (as I've just shown) and because of the power associated with it.   As Mitchell notes in his essay "The Pictorial Turn" in Picture Theory, "[T]he fear of the image, the anxiety that the 'power of images' may finally destroy even their creators and manipulators, is as old as image-making itself.  Idolatry, iconoclasm, iconophilia, and fetishism are not uniquely 'postmodern' phenomena" (15). 

One can look to the biblical story of the golden calf or the censorship of Hitler's Triumph of the Will as examples of the fear often associated with particular "graven" images.   And, while such fears are understandable, the study of visual rhetoric is also necessary so as to understand what Mitchell identifies as the "pictorial turn," or the "postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality" (16).  Because of the image's "complex interplay," "traditional strategies of containment no longer seem adequate, and the need for a global critique of visual culture seems inescapable" (Mitchell 16).

posted by: rgregory at 22:32 | link | comments (2) |

Comments:

#1  02 September 2006 - 18:53

 

There's a pictorial turn now? I had just read up on the linguistic turn as alluded to by Rorty in "The Contingency of Language." Looks like I still have much to learn. That's always good to know.

This is really fascinating, Rochelle. I'll never forget what my English professor told me my freshman year of college: "Film is the literature of the age." And, as you've obviously already discovered, visual rhetoric is the discourse of the age. It looks like you might be among the first to really forge ahead full speed with this.

A book you might be interested in looking at is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business. It's not a scholarly text, of course, but his discussion of the difference between a print culture and a visual culture has some good material.

Well, I'm off to get coffee and read some more theory. Exciting stuff.

Mo'nonymous

#2  03 September 2006 - 01:58

 

Marc just bought that book, so I'll have to check it out this weekend... Thanks for the comments and the heads up.

I'm really excited about the visual rhetoric thing, too. My instructor, Dr. Greer, was talking about how novels were "the" genre of the 19th century, movies were "the" genre of the 20th; I would argue that new media--electronic literature, video games, internet, and television is "the" genre of the 21st.

And, visual rhetoric is just so much fun. I'm actually watching movies this weekend for homework. It doesn't get much better than that...

Mo'nonymous

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