DEFINING
VISUAL RHETORICS
§
DEFINING
VISUAL RHETORICS
§
Edited by
Charles A. Hill
Marguerite Helmers
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
2004
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS
Mahwah, New Jersey
London
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
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Cover photograph by Richard LeFande; design by Anna Hill
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Defining visual rhetorics / edited by Charles A. Hill, Marguerite Helmers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-4402-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8058-4403-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Visual communication. 2. Rhetoric. I. Hill, Charles A. II. Helmers,
Marguerite H., 1961– .
P93.5.D44 2003
302.23—dc21
2003049448
CIP
ISBN 1-4106-0997-9 Master e-book ISBN
To Anna,
who inspires me every day.
—C. A. H.
To Emily and Caitlin,
whose artistic perspective inspires and instructs.
—M. H. H.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
ix
1
Marguerite Helmers and Charles A. Hill
1 The Psychology of Rhetorical Images
25
Charles A. Hill
2 The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments
41
J. Anthony Blair
3 Framing the Fine Arts Through Rhetoric
63
Marguerite Helmers
4 Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel and Inks of Silk:
Challenging the Great Visual/Verbal Divide
87
Maureen Daly Goggin
5 Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo
111
David Blakesley
6 Political Candidates’ Convention Films:Finding the Perfect
Image—An Overview of Political Image Making
135
J. Cherie Strachan and Kathleen E. Kendall
7 Gendered Environments: Gender and the Natural World
in the Rhetoric of Advertising
155
Diane S. Hope
vii
viii
CONTENTS
8 Echoes of Camelot: How Images Construct Cultural
Memory Through Rhetorical Framing
179
Janis L. Edwards
9 Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: The Photograph
and the Archive
195
Cara A. Finnegan
10 Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics,
and the Emergence of Graphical Conventions:
The Statistical Atlases of the United States, 1874–1925
215
Charles Kostelnick
11 The Rhetoric of Irritation: Inappropriateness as Visual/
Literate Practice
243
Craig Stroupe
12 Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort
in Wild Oats Market
259
Greg Dickinson and Casey Malone Maugh
13 Envisioning Domesticity, Locating Identity: Constructing
the Victorian Middle Class Through Images of Home
277
Andrea Kaston Tange
14 Framing the Study of Visual Rhetoric: Toward
a Transformation of Rhetorical Theory
303
Sonja K. Foss
About the Contributors
315
Author Index
319
Subject Index
325
Preface
A few years ago, we noticed a major shift in the field of rhetoric, one in which
an increasing amount of the discipline’s attention was becoming focused on
visual objects and on the visual nature of the rhetorical process. The phrase
visual rhetoric was being used more frequently in journal articles, in textbooks,
and especially in conference presentations. However, it seemed equally obvious that the phrase was being used in many different ways by different scholars. There seemed little agreement on what exactly scholars intended when
they used the term, and no reliable way to distinguish the work being done under the rubric of “visual rhetoric” as a coherent category of study.
Some scholars seemed to consider visual elements only in relation to expressing quantitative relationships in charts and graphs. Others concentrated
solely on the ubiquity of visual elements on the Internet, which might give the
impression that visual elements are important only in online communication.
Much of the more culturally oriented work was based in art history and art
theory, sometimes using the terms visual rhetoric and visual culture to refer to
artistic images exclusively. In still other cases, the use of the word visual included visualizing, the mental construction of internal images, while other
scholars seemed to use it to refer solely to conventional two-dimensional images. Add those scholarly pursuits to the study of print and film advertising,
television, and cinema, and suddenly a new field of inquiry emerged, rich with
possibility, but sometimes puzzling in its breadth.
The larger problem was not that rhetoricians were analyzing a wide variety
of visuals—we saw this diversity of efforts as exciting and productive. The
problem was that there seemed to be very little agreement on the basic nature
of the two terms visual and rhetoric. To some, studying the “visual” seemed to
consist solely of analyzing representational images, while to others, it could
include the study of the visual aspect of pretty much anything created by human hands—a building, a toaster, a written document, an article of clothing—
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PREFACE
making the study of “visual rhetoric” overlap greatly with the study of design.
To still others, the study of visual rhetoric seemed to necessarily involve a
study of the process of looking, of “the gaze,” with all of the psychological
and cultural implications that have become wrapped within that term.
Scholars engaged in visual analysis have also (with notable exceptions)
largely neglected to discuss the ways in which their work is truly rhetorical, as
opposed to an example of cultural studies or semiotics. What seems clear is
that the turn to the visual has problematized any attempts to distinguish between these methodologies, blurring further what were already quite fuzzy
and often shifting boundaries between them. But while it would make little
sense to try to draw any rigid boundaries between these methodologies, we
think it is still useful to ask of any scholar what aspects of his or her work make
it legitimate or useful to label such work “rhetorical.”
As we thought about the definitional problems surrounding the study of
visual rhetoric, it became immediately clear that the appropriate response was
not to try to “nail down” the term, to stipulate a set of definitions that all rhetoricians would agree to abide by (a naïve notion, to say the least). Rather, we
thought that it would be more interesting and productive to have scholars
working with visuals discuss the definitional assumptions behind their own
work, and to exemplify these assumptions by sharing their own rhetorical
analyses of visual phenomena. Our own assumptions behind this approach
are two-fold. First, any discussion of definitions from which one is operating is
necessarily post-hoc; that is, one discovers such definitional assumptions
through the work, rather than explicating them (even to oneself ) before approaching a scholarly project. Second, at this very early stage in the contemporary study of visual rhetoric, we assume that people are more interested in
writing about and in reading about specific scholarly projects than in lengthy
arguments about definitions.
We asked each contributor to this book to explain how his or her work fits
under the heading of, and helps define, the term visual rhetoric. Using this approach, we hoped to capture the diversity of the work being done in this area
while providing—for readers and, by extension, for the rhetoric community—
some explanation of how this wide variety of work can be seen as complementary and part of a coherent whole. Our goal is not to promote any particular claims about what terms such as visual and rhetoric and visual rhetoric should
or must mean. Rather, we want to prompt readers to think about, and to talk
to each other about, what these terms mean to them and what they could
mean—about how they can be productively used in creative ways to explore a
broad range of phenomena, but without being diffused to the point where
they lose their explanatory power.
We intend this book for anyone who is involved in or interested in such conversations. This includes not just those who are working explicitly on projects
in visual rhetoric, but anyone interested in the rhetorical nature of visuals or in
PREFACE
xi
the disciplinary issues surrounding the increasing overlap between methodologies (rhetoric, semiotics, cultural studies) and disciplines (rhetoric, communication, art theory, etc.) by which and in which visual phenomena are
studied. It is, perhaps, this refusal to be restricted by disciplinary and methodological boundaries that many of us working in this area find so exciting about
visual rhetoric, and we hope that the chapters in this volume exemplify that inherent breadth and diversity, and that they express some of that excitement.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All books are collaborative efforts, and thanks are due to many individuals who
assisted in the preparation of this one. First and foremost is Linda Bathgate at
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, whose belief that visual rhetoric was a developing area of rhetorical study led directly to the production of this volume. Debbie
Ruel at Erlbaum provided us with valuable editorial assistance in the production
of the manuscript. Robie Grant created the indexes. Richard LeFande was enthusiastic when we contacted him about the use of his photo as a cover piece.
Peggy O’Gara at Corbis helped us secure the use of Thomas P. Franklin’s September 11, 2001 photograph for the Introduction. Anna Hill developed several
striking cover designs, and conversations with Anna about art history and
graphic design played no small part in the original inspiration for this collection.
The Faculty Development Board at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
funded research that led to the development of parts of this work. In addition,
the authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Alberta Kimball Endowment at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Large sections of the Introduction to this work were completed during a summer seminar on literature
and the visual arts, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities
and held at the Boston Athenaeum in 2002. The seminar group, led by Director
Richard Wendorff, included Anna Arnar, Laura Bass, Megan Benton, Ellen
Garvey, Michelle Glaros, Christine Henseler, Margot Kelley, Jim Knapp, Lori
Landay, Vincent Lankewish, Jennifer Michael, Peter Pawlowicz, Laura Saltz,
and Thaine Stearns. All of these colleagues deserve praise for their insightful observations, without which this work would not have taken the shape that it did.
We thank our colleagues in the English Department for their friendship, encouragement and support, as well as for stimulating conversations about the
use of images in rhetoric and literature pedagogy, and our students, who traveled with us as we explored some of the initial ideas behind this volume.
Introduction
Marguerite Helmers
Charles A. Hill
In this book, we study the relationship of visual images to persuasion. But
where do we begin? Which images do we select to tell our story or to prove our
case? Which authors do we cite as pioneers in the field of visual rhetoric? We
could extend ourselves as far back in time and place as ancient Egypt and cite
the role of hieroglyphs in conveying meaning and recording memory. Or we
could call up the painted caves at Lascaux. We could invoke the famous example of Xeuxes’ painted grapes that tricked the birds into pecking at them. Or
we could fast forward to the stained glass windows of medieval churches and
the role they played in educating the peasantry about Biblical texts. We could
name the exuberant paintings of the Hudson River School of American painters, whose images helped to broaden people’s imaginations and pushed them
westward across the country, or survey images from Life magazine or National
Geographic and discuss how they shaped a national consciousness of America’s
place in the world. Any of these visual artifacts could shed light on the primary
question that drives the essays in this volume: How do images act rhetorically
upon viewers?
This inability to begin comfortably, much less securely, at a point in time
with a particular class of images was a cue to begin the work of defining visual
rhetorics. Images surround us in the home, at work, on the subway, in restaurants, and along the highway. Historically, images have played an important
role in developing consciousness and the relationship of the self to its surroundings. We learn who we are as private individuals and public citizens by
seeing ourselves reflected in images, and we learn who we can become by
transporting ourselves into images. We refer to our sense of our own personality as a self-image, and we critique celebrities and politicians when they tarnish their images with poor judgment. Yet images are treated with distrust; in
Western culture, images have often been placed in a secondary and subordinate relationship to written and verbal texts and the potential dialogy between
1
2
INTRODUCTION
images and words has been especially neglected. “One of the crucial mediations that occurs in the history of cultural forms is the interaction between
verbal and pictorial modes of representation,” writes W. J. T. Mitchell. “We
rarely train scholars, however, to be sensitive to this crucial point of conflict,
influence, and mediation and insist on separating the study of texts and images
from one another by rigid disciplinary boundaries” (“Diagrammatology”
627). Mitchell’s caution, about which we will have more to say later, provides
us with a rationale for undertaking this type of interdisciplinary work. For this
book, we invited contributions from authors who situate themselves at the
crossroads of more than one discipline, and we have chosen to survey a wide
range of sites of image production, from architecture to paintings in museums and from film to needlepoint, in order to understand how images and
texts, both symbolic forms of representation, work upon readers.
Rhetoricians working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives are beginning to pay a substantial amount of attention to issues of visual rhetoric.
Through analysis of photographs and drawings, graphs and tables, and motion
pictures, scholars are exploring the many ways in which visual elements are
used to influence people’s attitudes, opinions, and beliefs. There is a diversity in
these efforts that is exciting and productive, but which can also be confusing for
those who are trying to understand the role of visual elements in rhetorical theory and practice. Some people seem to think of visual elements only in relation
to expressing quantitative relationships in charts and graphs. Other scholars
concentrate solely on the ubiquity of visual elements on the Internet. Much of the
more culturally oriented work is based in art history and art theory, giving the impression that, when speaking of “visuals” and “images,” we mean artistic artifacts
exclusively. In English studies, there is no vocabulary for discussing images, or perhaps we might say that there are so many disciplinary-specific vocabularies that
we in English have to borrow extensively. In fact, despite his assertion that
“transferences from one art form to another” are “inescapable” (“Spatial Form”
281), Mitchell encourages cross-disciplinary rhetoricians and cultural critics to develop a “systematic” method for investigating the relationship between arts and
words in order to avoid charges of “impressionism” (“Spatial Form” 291). This
systematic approach would demand a theoretical basis and a set of terms common to the field of visual rhetoric. One of the most important lessons from the
Sister Arts Tradition in literary studies from the late 1950s is that “A student of the
sister arts must learn to work twice as hard” (Lipking 4), training as a scholar in
two disciplines—linguistic and visual—in both primary and secondary materials. Mitchell’s warning draws attention to the institutional fact that, just as earnestly as we seek to join the study of verbal rhetoric with the study of visual
material, so also others earnestly seek to separate the disciplines from “contamination,” a perception that the study of images is soft or non-rigorous because
images are commonly construed to be illustrative and decorative. In order to
counter what has been called a paragonal relationship between word and im-
INTRODUCTION
3
age—a struggle for dominance over meaning between verbal and visual discourse—we suggest that readers and scholars working with visual rhetoric
attend to the notion that word and image are used by writers and illustrators to
accomplish different aims. Printed verbal material is conveyed to us in visual
forms, whether electronically or through traditional paperform methods. Thus
rhetoric encompasses a notion of visuality at the very level of text; it is mediated
by visuality, typography, even the somatic experience of holding the book or
touching the paper.
Art historian Barbara Stafford draws attention to the ways that images are
often considered to be subordinate to written text, logical argument, and
truthful exposition: “In spite of their quantity and globalized presence, for
many educated people pictures have become synonymous with ignorance, illiteracy, and deceit. Why?” (110). In “Material Literacy and Visual Design,”
Lester Faigley explores a similar point, citing an 1846 poem by William Wordsworth that, with characteristic Romantic era angst, bemoans the initial publication of the Illustrated London News in 1842. Wordsworth’s concern is with
progress: It was the word that raised the English from their earliest beginnings
to an “intellectual Land.” The image, because it is mute, or “dumb,” cannot express either truth or love, but rather has a profound national and psychological
effect of reverting the country “back to childhood.” He concludes his poem
with the exclamation, “Heaven keep us from a lower stage!” Faigley’s essay recaptures the notion of progress, however, and records the irrepressible movement of images into our society through various technologies from the
printing press to the World Wide Web.
Where, then, should the rhetorician who is interested in analyzing visual
images begin? What bodies of scholarship are essential to master? What terms
should rhetoricians adopt? Are some images more suitable than others for the
study of images in rhetorical theory?
As we worked together to identify a suitable cover image for this volume,
these questions surfaced. The image we chose to represent a volume of work
on vision and representation had to be multilayered and complex, but not so
detailed as to be inscrutable or to require excessive verbal explanation. On the
other hand, the image had to foster verbal discourse, debate, argument, and
thoughtful reflection while in itself having a visual impact. Furthermore, we
believed the image could not be tied too strongly to one event because its own
rhetorical work was to represent the themes that the authors in this book address: vision, revision, representation, media, memory, presence and absence.
Richard LeFande’s (cover) image of a photograph held against the Manhattan
skyline spoke to these themes, while drawing attention to the strongest visual
event of this new century: the devastation of the World Trade Center in New
York City on September 11, 2001.
Points of crisis in American culture since the Vietnam War have been visually
recorded and widely disseminated to the public. The use of television cameras
4
INTRODUCTION
and the evening news to broadcast the battles of Vietnam gave it the name “the
living room war.” The Gulf War two decades later was a visual event of a
slightly different sort. Anchormen broadcasting with bombs falling over their
shoulders became symbolic of the real presence of the media in our lives. The
use of infrared and computerized piloting devices by the military became symbolic of the depersonalized gamesmanship of an advanced technological war.
In both cases, though, just as with September 11, 2001, the spectator was able to
experience the exceptional power of visual media to create “simultaneity,” a national consciousness of being together as a community (Anderson 132; Baty).
Writing about September 11 in “Images, Imaging, Imagination,” Annick T. R.
Wibben expresses the conundrum of televised access:
We all have images stored in our eyes (how does this differ for those who saw
the events on TV and those that were in NYC or DC?). We are bombarded by
ever more images by the media (how does the replay and information overload numb us to the effects of particular images?)…. We were all there, but
yet we weren’t. We saw it, but saw nothing. We kept uttering this isn’t real,
while knowing that it was. We witnessed death, yet we saw no bodies, no
blood. (Wibben)
One of Benjamin Barber’s main points in his influential book Jihad vs.
McWorld is that information technologies (audio, visual, film, print, and
electronic) “inevitably impact culture and politics and the attitudes that constitute them” (74). The “infotainment telesector”—the connection of technologies, news, and entertainment (60), comprised of “those who create and
control the world of signs and symbols” (79)—is something like a universal
country without borders. As Wibben indicates, significant facts about images and their interpretation and important questions about the relations of
all images to human mediation emerged from the September 11 attacks.
Strong national symbols such as the eagle and the flag are liberally in use in
the popular and mass media as a means of gathering together the imagined
national community, and to these patriotic and sentimental images the twin
towers of the World Trade Center have been added in the way that the red
poppy came to symbolize the First World War. Together, these symbols
form an expressive syntax for what Barber calls American “monoculture,” a
“template,” a “style” that exemplifies a certain lifestyle—but in turn begins
to demand “certain products” (82). Symbols resist individualistic interpretation because they are overdetermined by customary usage, embedded so frequently in conventional discourse that they rarely take on a reflective,
individual meaning. As Edwards, Strachan and Kendall point out in their
contributions to this book, national symbols are employed as a visual shorthand to represent shared ideals and to launch an immediate appeal to the audience’s sense of a national community.
INTRODUCTION
5
At the same time, though, a strong populist movement to remember individuals and their unique testimony resists the immediate temptation to impose a
Master Narrative on the 9/11 tragedy. In his commemorative poem, “The
Names,” U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins stressed that the memory of September 11 is a memory of proper names, “spelled out on storefront windows” and
“printed on the ceiling of the night.” Maureen Daly Goggin demonstrates that
the need to individualize by inscribing one’s presence is not unique to this time
or place in history; women in the 17th century used their needles to illustrate
their histories. While the media may hark the “attacks on America,” the families
and friends of those killed or wounded in the attacks remember names, faces,
and their own stories of where they were on the morning of 9/11.
Thomas Franklin’s photograph (Fig. I-1) of three New York City
firefighters raising a flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, illustrates the possible modes of interpretation and the resistance to interpretation that a single image may have in our interpretive lives.
One of the ways that we understand this photograph is through its reference to other images. Thus, one of the ways that images may communicate to
us is through intertextuality, the recognition and referencing of images from
one scene to another. The reader is active in this process of constructing a reference. If the reader is unaware of the precursors, the image will have a different meaning, or no meaning at all. We first saw the photo by Thomas E.
Franklin now known as Ground Zero Spirit on September 12, 2001, the day after
the World Trade Center collapse. Immediately, we were struck by its obvious
resemblance to the famous photo of U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima.
Thomas Franklin himself notes that he saw the three men raise the flag and
thought “Iwo Jima.” Our students even make this association, knowing no
more about the battle in the Pacific than the name “Iwo Jima.” The immediate
distribution through newspapers and magazines gave the image an instant
power and authority over the interpretation of the day’s events. Institutions
such as news media and magazines implant “modes of knowledge in each individual, family, and institution” (De Lauretis 15), and the knowledge that was
imparted to the American public about 9/11 was not that of sorrow or loss,
but of resilience and triumph.
Acknowledging that the title Ground Zero Spirit affects the interpretation of
the image, we refer to Franklin’s photograph by this name in this essay. As a
documentary photograph, the image is untitled. Because we address the image as a slice of time, a moment frozen from a historical sequence, and because we also discuss the three firefighters as actors, we have chosen to
distinguish the photograph as an object and icon by referring to it by its commodified designation. Having said this, we should also acknowledge that the
image itself is more easily recognizable than either its name or the facts of its
production. Our students are unsure if the firefighters raised the flag on 9/11
or some later date, and it’s clear that the exact date doesn’t matter to the effect
6
INTRODUCTION
FIG. I.1. Firefighters at Ground Zero. Photograph by Thomas E. Franklin, 2001. Copyright © 2001, The Record (Bergen County, N.J.). Reprinted by permission of Corbis.
of the photograph. It is the act captured on film that matters. The three men
raising the flag do have proper names, of course—George Johnson, Dan
McWilliams, Bill Eisengrein—and due to the popularity of the photograph,
their individual names are now protected by copyright and licensing agreements; however, in viewing the photograph, their names are less important
than their symbolic value as “firefighters.” They intended to use the American
flag as a sign to rally the spirits of those working amidst the rubble of the
Trade Center. McWilliams had been working at Ground Zero since late in the
morning on September 11, when he was called to evacuate. He saw the flag on
the yacht the Star of America docked at one of the piers on the Hudson River, to
INTRODUCTION
7
the west of the Trade Center site. It was an immediate symbol. He was, in the
words of the Bergen County Record, where the photograph was originally
published, “inspired.” “Everybody just needed a shot in the arm,” McWilliams
later noted (Clegg). The flag was raised on a flagpole emerging from the rubble at the site at 5:01pm in the afternoon of September 11. Photographer
Franklin was at Ground Zero all day, despite threats to arrest him. He commented later that the photo “just happened,” although he immediately recognized the pose of the firefighters as being similar to the pose of the Marines in
Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph. “It was an important shot,” Franklin explained. “It told of more than just death and destruction. It said something to
me about the strength of the American people and of these firemen having to
battle the unimaginable. It had drama, spirit, and courage in the face of disaster” (Franklin, “Photo of a Lifetime”).
When the photograph was published the next day, its impact was powerful
and immediate, seized at once as a symbol by millions. Newsweek cemented
the photograph’s popularity and significance by running the Ground Zero
photo as the cover image for the September 24, 2001 issue. “I have just received
my Sept. 24 issue, ‘After the Terror,’ wrote Jodi Williams to Newsweek:
I haven’t even had time to read it yet, but I wanted to say thank you for the
cover picture. I have wondered what the icon of this event would be and
am pleased with your choice. In showing the flag being raised out of the
rubble, you have chosen a positive image—the strength and resilience of
Americans, and the specific bravery of those members of the NYPD and
FDNY who risked and sometimes lost their lives in the hope of saving
others.
The simple composition of the image is both essential and non-essential to the
meaning. The fact that there are three figures involved in the flag raising,
rather than two or five, invokes the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost. Inscribing the Trinity over the rubble of the Trade Center offers a corrective to the “Islamic fundamentalism” of the ad hoc pilots of the aircraft that
blasted into the buildings in the morning. The immediate symbolic value of
the American flag encodes “appropriate” and conditioned responses of patriotism, loyalty, and invincibility. Whenever an image of the flag appears, the
American public associates it with such abstract ideas—even if individuals do
not respond to it emotionally. The colors of the flag have symbolic meaning:
red for valor, white for innocence, and blue for justice. When the American
flag was created, it was designed to represent ideas rather than a monarchy or a
particular religion. By the early decades of the 20th century, the flag was recognized as denoting freedom and democracy. In being designated a national
symbol, the flag is synecdochic. To defend one’s country and people, and possessions, is synecdochically known as “defending the flag.” It is the embodiment of national spirit, a shorthand for the words of the Pledge of Allegiance
8
INTRODUCTION
(to the flag): “liberty and justice for all.” Furthermore, like any icon, the flag
becomes meaningful to the public through repeated imaging and storytelling.
“[I]t is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism”—poetry,
painting, song—“show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms
and styles” (Anderson 120). In Franklin’s image, the flag’s importance is emphasized because it occupies the central axis of the photograph. The diagonal
placement of the flagpole across the ground of the rubble physically cuts
across the devastation with something whole, purposeful, strong, and integrated. It marks the connection to an imagined community called “America”
that, in turn, recognizes the photograph as symbolic.
New York firefighters were the first on the scene and were inside the towers
when they collapsed, leaving 343 firefighters dead. The rubble—the background to this photograph—provides meaning to the image, for it is this
“ground” of rubble, which encompasses half of the scene but does not intrude on the activities of the men, that gives meaning to the figures’ resilient
action. They are not rescuing or digging out here, but taking time to reflect on
the spirit that gives meaning and purpose to the activities at Ground Zero. It is
because the men stand in the foreground that the photograph achieves its
power. Imagine a different photograph, one taken through the rubble, framing the men, dwarfed by the gothic arcs of the burning, decaying steel, or, as
seen through the charred cruciform windows of buildings adjoining Ground
Zero. Decreasing the physical relationship between men and rubble would decrease the importance of the working man, the New Yorker, in overcoming disaster. It would place disaster in the foreground and as the protagonist of the
photograph. In fact, photographers such as James Nachtway, Anthony Suau,
Susan Meiselas, and Gilles Peress made images such as these; yet these images
failed to become icons.
When Joe Rosenthal’s image of the Marines raising the American flag on
Mount Suribachi appeared in 1945, the photograph immediately symbolized
the triumph over adversity and death that the Marines had encountered in taking the island. Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall write that the “act of
planting a flagstaff meant: enemy terrain captured, the highest point seized—
triumph” (73). Thus, the meaning of the American flag in this context depends
on a notion of an enemy, the adversary who held the ground initially.
“Rosenthal’s picture spoke of group effort, the common man—working in concert with his neighbors—triumphant. The very facelessness of the heroes sanctified a common cause” (73). Similar meanings are associated with Ground Zero
Spirit as well. Franklin’s photograph of the three firefighters shifts the emphasis
from military might to the exemplary actions of common men. The three are
self-assured and attentive to duty. Hands on hips, focused on the stars and stripes
of the rising flag, they don’t cry over the disaster behind them, but stoically resolve to raise the symbol for their lost and living comrades as an indication that
INTRODUCTION
9
there is courage in the collective will of the nation. Like its precursor in the Pacific a half-century earlier, this flag in New York City “calls the audience to the
task of building their society in the same manner as the men in the picture,
through sacrifice and coordinated labor” (Hariman and Lucaites 372).
As Marling and Wetenhall point out, “[T]he Stars and Stripes took on a new
symbolic weight during World War II …. Beginning with the Memorial Day
parade in Washington in 1942 … flags appeared everywhere and, thanks to
[President FDR’s] example, the display of Old Glory on private homes, businesses, and commercial products became common practice” (76). The ability
of the flag to grace a private home meant that everyone could partake of its
meaning, share its association, mark the national community. The 1946 Congressional Flag code made the flag a religious object, with rules for devotion.
The flag unified a country that was based on diversity; without allegiance to a
common religious goal, the country could focus on patriotism, on protecting
the country that allowed individual and collective freedom to flourish. The
flag aspires, pushes upward, and lifts the spirit, as Marling and Wetenhall comment (204). Furthermore, it is itself an intertextual symbol, “a field of multiple projections,” as Robert Hariman and John Lucaites describe:
Such projections include direct assertions of territorial conquest and possession, totemic evocations of blood sacrifice, demands for political loyalty to suppress dissent, representations of consensus, tokens of political
participation, articulations of civil religion, ornamental signs of civic
bonding amid a summer festival, and affirmations of political identity and
rights while dissenting. Given the rich intertextuality of the iconic photo,
it is unlikely that only one of these registers is in play, and probable that
any of them could be activated by particular audiences. (Hariman and
Lucaites 371)
At a simple denotational level, however, there are questions about Franklin’s
Ground Zero Spirit that cannot be answered without association to Rosenthal’s
photograph from Iwo Jima. For example, abstracting ourselves from immediate
history, how do we know, on the basis of the photograph alone, that the three
firefighters are raising the flag? Is it not possible that they are lowering a flag left
standing amidst the ruins of the Trade Center? Secondly, without the context of
the photograph and the immediate, collective memory of the events of September 11, there are no indications that the photograph takes place in New York
City, amidst the rubble of the former World Trade Center, or in September
2001. The necessary historical detail that contextualizes the photograph also
gives the photograph its profound meaning. Furthermore, the Ground Zero
Spirit photograph is significant because it is like and unlike Iwo Jima.
Rosenthal’s Marines gaze at the ground, struggling enmasse to plant the flag on
inhospitable, rocky, and unwelcoming ground. Ground Zero’s men gaze at the
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INTRODUCTION
flag, adjusting its folds and presentation, very much aware of its meaning for the
workers at the site. It is this attentiveness that provides interpretive clues.
McWilliam’s and Eisengrein’s hands are on the flag; they look up at its folds.
Iconographically, to look downward is to lower, and lower the spirits of the spectator. Looking up, as in the Renaissance images of the Madonna and the saints,
represents hope. The attention of Johnson, McWilliams, and Eisengrein attests
to the need to raise the flag as a symbol on this day.
Rosenthal’s photograph was compared to other works of American patriotic art: Archibald M. Willard’s The Spirit of ’76 (1876; 1891) and Emanuel
Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), both of which employ, like Franklin and Rosenthal’s images, triangular formats. In both Spirit of
’76 and Washington Crossing the Delaware, the American flag occupies the central axis of the painting and is the highest physical point of the image. In a
now-famous editorial from February 1945, the Rochester Times-Union compared Rosenthal’s photograph to DaVinci’s Last Supper and drew attention to
the structural gesture in which “the outstretched arms and the foremost man’s
left leg leads the eye directly to the flag.” The writer continues:
Oddly, though, the eye does not rest there. A slight breeze is stirring, not
enough to unfurl the folds of the flag, but enough to enlist the forces of nature on the side of the Marines who are hurrying to raise the staff. So the
eye, turning back to a line parallel to the outstretched arms, follows the
blood-red stripes to the entirely empty space in the upper right where the
flag, in just a moment, will be. Few artists would be bold enough to make
empty space the center of their picture. And yet this bit of art from life has
done just that. In that space is a vision of what is to be. (qtd. in Marling and
Wetenhall 204)
There are, however, three versions of Franklin’s photograph, which complicates the analysis. In the first, the original, the tip of the flag pole is visible.
The men occupy the lower one third of the image. The flag is directly centered
over the rubble. The second version is cropped; the top of the flag pole is not
visible, the flag moves slightly closer to the top of the image space, and the
men occupy half of the picture. The United States postage stamp commemorating “heroes” further crops the image, so the men occupy more than half of
the image space. Trimming the visible picture space thus alters the meaning of
the image, moving from a struggle of the individual in the face of adversity to
a new hero that is not superhuman, but a common man.
Following the original appearance of Franklin’s photograph in the Bergen
County Record, it began to appear in other locations, in both borrowed and direct representations. Newsweek chose one of the cropped versions for its cover
on September 24, 2001, thus establishing the picture’s popularity. Franklin
won several awards as a photojournalist. By the 1-year anniversary of 9/11,
INTRODUCTION
11
the Record established a special website to accommodate requests for use of
the photograph. Its reprint could include buttons, pins, mugs, cups, cards, CD
covers, clothing, stationery, needlework, jewelry, mousepads, posters, rubber
stamps, sculptures, and computer wallpaper. Franklin reports that he began
collecting authorized and unauthorized uses, “carved pumpkins, Christmas
ornaments, miniature statues, key chains, paintings, tattoos, humidors,
clocks, watches, light switches, snow globes, and leather jackets” (Franklin,
“Sept. 11”). The photograph “has been spotted in places like prisons, barns,
front lawns, fake dollar bills, tree ornaments, chocolate bars, bumper stickers,
light switches, billboards” (Szentmiklosy). The U.S. Post Office released its
Heroes 2001 postage stamp on June 7, 2002, affixing a seven-cent surcharge to
benefit the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
A proposal for a life-sized memorial of the three men created for the FDNY
Brooklyn headquarters caused controversy, when the men were physically altered to represent the multicultural “spirit” of New York rather than the individuality of Johnson, McWilliams, and Eisengrein. This is a battle of
specificity and symbolism. Johnson, McWilliams, and Eisengrein view their
act as a specific contribution to history. It was their choice to intervene at this
moment and they would like to be remembered as the men who took the initiative. John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, the surviving members of
the Marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, became celebrities after the
Rosenthal photo achieved popularity. They recreated the flag raising in cities
across the United States for the war bond fund-raising tours. Gagnon was offered a contract from Hollywood. Although Johnson, McWilliams, and
Eisengrein eschew publicity, they consented to allow Madame Tussaud’s to
recreate their flag raising into wax for the New York museum because it was
the action and spirit that was represented and not their own selves. Yet their
fight to retain control over the image as an act of historical particularity is partially in vain, because their act was symbolic and strong symbols like the flag
immediately transcend their historical context. As the letter to the editors at
Newsweek attests, Americans were waiting for a symbol, and this was it.
As with any work of art (or photojournalism) in the age of mechanical reproduction, the question of what the photograph means depends on its dissemination and reception. Ground Zero Spirit is in such demand that a strict
licensing agreement is employed to control its appearance on commercial—
and academic—projects. In the world of image studies, the paragonal contest
between word and image is here exemplified, with word winning. Legal discourse restricts how the image is received by the public, placing the image into
certain contexts where it can be viewed. Some artist/interpreters have
avoided the licensing fee by creating an image that echoes but does not reproduce Franklin’s photograph. Is this plagiarism? Or intertextuality?
A potent critique of the photograph, for its absence, its denotation and connotation, has come from the Women firefighters of New York City. While the
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INTRODUCTION
temporal fact that three men raised an American flag at Ground Zero exists
ontologically, the idea that three White men (and not women, gays, or Blacks)
could represent work at Ground Zero, but also the community of “America”
and its spirit, seemed to test the capacity of imaging to be inclusive. The photograph functions, with the absence of women, as a powerful persuasive device that women did not exist at Ground Zero. Lt. Brenda Berkman of the New
York Fire Department, in remarks made at the National Women’s Law Center’s 2001 Awards Dinner in Washington, DC, listed the roles that women
played in the immediate rescue at Ground Zero: firefighter, EMT, police officer, ambulance driver, nurse, doctor, construction worker, chaplain, Red
Cross worker, and military personnel:
The reality is that women have contributed to the aftermath of the World
Trade Center attack in every imaginable way. But the face the media has put
on the rescue and recovery efforts in New York City is almost exclusively
that of men. Where are the pictures or stories of Captain Kathy Mazza
shooting out the glass in the lobby of one of the towers to allow hundreds
of people to flee the building more quickly?
In becoming the iconic image of 9/11, Ground Zero Spirit imprints an idea of
heroism on the collective consciousness of Americans, and that idea is entirely
male. Ultimately, it must be read for what is absent as much as for what is present. As the women firefighters in New York—the 25 out of 11,500—attest, the
representation of the males in the photograph is fact, evidence of the discriminatory policies of the FDNY against hiring women. That the losses at the
Trade Center were male “reflects the way the FDNY has tested and hired over
the past two decades,” writes Terese Floren, editor of WFS Publications, but it
does not attest to “the merits or failures of women firefighters.” Berkman returns to the issue of representation: “When we were growing up, we did not
see any women role models in firefighting and the trades” (qtd. in Willing).
That Ground Zero Spirit exemplifies the male ideal is disturbing in the long run
because it represents rescue work as the domain of men. Berkman’s point is
important, yet even she, like the three men themselves, does not realize the
full measure of the photo’s significance: The image relies on the interpretant,
the mental representation that is individuated for each viewer. The photo
means, not because Johnson, McWilliams, and Eisengrein were there physically, but because they represented the millions who were there only “in
spirit”—or perhaps more accurately, and to echo Wibben’s thoughts, those
who were there due to electronic and print media.
One of the important concepts for any discussion of the role of the viewer
in images is the relationship between viewing and time. Images work on us
synchronically and diachronically. Synchronically, we view the image that represents the present. Diachronic viewings are slightly more complicated, for we
INTRODUCTION
13
view an image that represents the past and was created in the past, but we also
view contemporaneous images with a knowledge of their precursors and
their previous meanings. “As American attitudes and values changed, so the
public estimate of the Iwo Jima motif shifted from near adoration to neglect
and back again to a patriotic pride mingled with nostalgia for the lost age of
unambiguous heroes” (Marling and Wetenhall 196). Intervening in the history
of the image was the suspicion over the military fostered by Vietnam and,
even earlier, post-war films that were critical of the violence of war. The nostalgia for the masculine American hero is evident again in the Ground Zero
photograph, in which the flag raisers are common men, focused on their duty
and, symbolically, on their country. Some of the commentary following the attacks of 9/11 praised the return to the “unambiguous hero” of the 21st century. However, just as the fiction was in place in 1945, it is again in place.
Heroes are manifestations of national desire.
In the introduction of this visual text, we have drawn upon a text that is popular, widely imitated, photojournalistic, and symbolic in order to introduce
key ideas about the problems of vision and representation and in order to introduce key terms—paragonal, intertextual, interpretant—which we explain
further a bit later. We have also, after much debate, decided to reproduce the
newly famous photograph by Thomas E. Franklin, despite it being readily
available to readers’ consciousness due to its reproduction and extensive distribution. In addition, there is evidence from psychologists and historians who
have studied memory and “flashbulb” memories that “the distortion of memory traces” occurs at the level of the interpretant, at the moment that the visual image or event is encoded (Winter and Sivan). In other words, our
memory of the photograph may habitually encode distortions. According to
Winter and Sivan, this is a frequent predicament with visual memory:
[I]nterference operates either by manipulating major so-called “facts” and/
or by introducing key interpretive terms which have clear-cut resonances
for the semantic memory of the individual and are, of course, culture-dependent. The result is a new script which integrates pieces of information
brought to bear upon the interpretation of the event. As we all know, such
new scripts may vary dramatically from the original memory, let alone the
event itself. (13–14)
As David Campbell commented in the online edition of INFOinterventions,
“what we saw on television on September 11 wasn’t what the event was like.
The event was much more horrific than the impression conveyed by the television pictures” (in other words, if you were there, physically present). The caution is well placed in the context of a discussion of visual rhetoric: As readers
of image texts, we must always be aware that the photograph does not reveal
the truth. And while intertextuality can be a positive means of enabling inter-
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INTRODUCTION
pretation through comparison of the image at hand to a previous image, it can
also be a means of negating the veracity of memory by introducing image
texts that have very little to do with the events of a particular time and place.
This aspect of what Henry Louis Gates calls signifying—texts talking to one
another, repetition, revision—is introduced below.
I. INTERTEXTUALITY
Although there is not space here to do justice to Gerard Genette’s fascinating
study of intertextuality titled Palimpsests, an overview must suffice to gather
interest in his work for visual rhetoricians. Genette prefers the term transtextuality to intertextuality and he defines this quality of a text as “all that sets
the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts”
(1). By “concealed,” Genette intends to invoke the subtle allusion, or the palimpsest, that which is hidden behind the writing rather than directly articulated within it. The palimpsest, a paper on which one written text has been
effaced and covered by another, represents writing again, written upon
twice. Intertextuality is “a relationship of copresence between two texts or
among several texts,” writes Gennette (1), but it is only one of five modes of
allusion that can bring an occluded precursor to the fore. Readers of this text
may find it useful to see these acts of copresence delineated as “forms of
transtextuality.” In Genette’s categorization, intertextuality alone refers to
quoting (with or without quotation marks), plagiarism, allusion, and the
perception by the reader of the relationship of one work to another. Paratextuality indicates the presence of material around the primary text, but in
which the text is embedded: the framing acts of title, subtitle, preface, illustration, book covers, dust jackets, and the setting of the book that is dependent on external conditions, which the readers cannot ignore. (See Philippe
Lejeune, Calinescu for excellent readings of paratextuality.) Metatextuality
moves outward to consider the effects of commentary and critical relationships posed between one text and another. Hypertextuality indicates a level of
dependence between texts: Text B is unable to exist without Text A. At this
point, Gennette’s work borrows from that of Peirce’s concept of the index,
and further, as we note later, echoes Jacques Derrida’s description of the
trace as a mark that points to the past and the future. Finally, in a play on
words, Gennette’s concept of architextuality indicates a generic classification
of the text or object that must result from paratextuality. In other words, the
library classification of a text with call letters as a PR or an HQ depends on
the degree to which the text is like other texts. Similarly, the description of a
photograph as a family snapshot or a work of photojournalism such as
Ground Zero Spirit indicates the existence of outside factors in classifying the
object. The categories, it is evident, are interrelated and fluid. One object
may move, over time, from one architextual category to another.
INTRODUCTION
15
II. PEIRCE ON SEMIOTICS
In the late 19th century, the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce articulated
several theories of signs and representation that have continued to influence
rhetoricians. Peirce’s theory derived from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which Locke proposed that the study of “semeiotic”
(now commonly referred to as “semiotics”) would afford a theory of knowledge. Peirce’s conviction was phenomenological: Things exist in a reality outside of what we perceive or think about them. His background in the natural
sciences caused him to search for a logical, scientific method that would not be
confused by what he termed “beliefs.” Three theories of signs emerge in his
philosophy of logic as semiotic, and each of these theories is parsed in detail,
but the one that is used most frequently by rhetoricians to discuss both language and images is the triadic theory of icon, index, and symbol. Peirce’s distinctions are useful to rhetoricians because they establish a formal
terminology for considering different types of imagistic sign systems, from
representational, through diagrammatical, to allegorical.
Two levels of terminology establish the relationship of sign to referent. At
the first level, Peirce contended that a sign stands in for an Object; it “tells
about” its Object (100). He gave this sign the name representamen. The representamen is rhetorical; it “addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that
person an equivalent sign” and this equivalent sign is called the “interpretant”
(Peirce 99). The interpretant represents an idea that Peirce called “the ground
of the representation” (qtd. in De Lauretis, Alice 19). The interpretant is thus a
mental representation; it is not a person. Thus, both representamen and interpretant relate to the same Object. In using the work of Peirce to establish a
semiology of art, Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson contend that the interpretant is associative and connotative. “The interpretant is constantly shifting; no
viewer will stop at the first association” (189). Nonetheless, this does not mean
that interpretants are unique; interpretants are shot through with “culturally
shared codes” (De Lauretis 167). “Interpretants are new meanings resulting
from the signs on the basis of one’s habit. And habits, precisely, are formed in
social life” (Bal and Bryson 202). At this point, ideological constructions of
gender enter into the creation of the interpretant.
Once these terms are understood, they facilitate understanding Peirce’s distinction between icon, index, and symbol. This trio of signs is not graded or hierarchical; rather, each term describes ways that different types of images may
be understood. The icon may be abstract or representational; it possesses a
character that makes it significant. A vacation photograph and Charles
Schultz’s Snoopy are icons, but so is a pencil streak indicating a geometric line.
The Object does not have to exist, for it is easy enough to visually represent an
alien from “outer space” or a solar system even though we have not seen either. Peirce refers to the icon as an image.
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INTRODUCTION
The index, on the other hand, depends on the existence of the Object to
have left what Jacques Derrida, in Dissemination, would later call a “trace.”
Therefore, the indexical image holds an existential relationship to its Object
and often raises in the viewer a memory of a similar Object. The classical example of an indexical sign is a bullet hole. The interpretant indicates, “here is a
hole in the front door” and relates the hole to other holes, but not to the Object
(a bullet making the hole) because the Object—the bullet and the gun—are
missing. In Roland Barthes’ words, the index “points but does not tell” (62).
Peirce describes the index as a diagram.
The symbol is the most abstract of the three sign types. It depends on the interpretant, that is, the mental representation in the mind’s eye. Therefore, the
symbolic image holds a conventional relationship to its Object that is not contingent on resemblance. “The act of interpretation … brings [the symbolic
sign] to life,” write Bal and Bryson (192). Peirce calls the symbol a metaphor.
Ground Zero Spirit operates on all of these levels. As an image/icon, at the
literal level, the three men who raise the American flag are performing a common action in American civil society. Thus, denotationally, their action is recognizable to that group that Benedict Anderson called “the imagined
community.” Memory of similar flag raising ceremonies, of the soaring existence and the dreadful collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, of the deaths of hundreds of firefighters and rescue workers moves the
image into the realm of indexical and diagrammatic sign, for the index points
to the prior existence of these Objects, even though they are not directly visible within the frame of the photograph. Metaphorically, the idea of the
firefighter in American culture carries symbolic weight; their triangulated
pose evokes the memory of the Marines at Iwo Jima, of courage under fire, of
American ideals of toughness, grit, and masculinity. Again, while Peirce does
not propose his levels of signs as a hierarchy, Ground Zero Spirit fulfills all aspects of his taxonomy, making the photograph appealing, disturbing, popular,
contentious, and powerful.
III. BARTHES ON SIGNS
A third linguistic approach to the study of images derives from the work of the
French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose published lectures titled A
Course in General Linguistics provided the foundation for the study of signs in
French thought of the late 20th century. It is neither practical nor theoretically
sound to reduce Saussure’s ideas to a single thesis, but we will focus here on his
system of linguistic differences between words, or signs, which was adopted
and further explicated by Roland Barthes. According to Saussure, understanding is established by difference; practically speaking, we understand cat because cat is different from dog. The names are merely arbitrary, established by
social and linguistic convention, rather than having any existential link to the
INTRODUCTION
17
object itself. Barthes extended this refusal to name to the differences between
literature and painting. “Why not wipe out the difference between literature
and painting,” he asked, “in order to affirm more powerfully the plurality of
‘texts’?” (55). The question is not as polemical as it may seem. Barthes raised it
in the context of his analysis of Balzac’s short story Sarrasine, S/Z, a treatise
that set out to exhaustively identify the codes that comprise written work and
the experience of reading it. Rather than seeking to overthrow two disciplines,
textual studies and art history, he wanted to parse vision and experience as
semiological.
Thus, both paint and word refer not to an external reality, but “from one
code to another” (55). Reality is always framed by codes that determine what
the writer or painter looks at—what they believe is worthy of vision and representation—and what mode of representation they select to describe that reality (such as the selection of word or image, but also of poetry, Cubistic canvas,
film, etc., what Barthes terms a “code of the arts” [55]). As Hariman and
Lucaites acknowledge in their discussion of Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima image, the
frame created by the boundaries of the photograph “marks the work as a special selection of reality that acquires greater intensity than the flow of experience before and after it” (366). As Andrea Kaston Tange demonstrates in this
book, 19th-century middle-class homemakers selected socially coded home
design items to represent their position in society. Quite literally, these objects
conveyed the meaning of their lives. Rather than depict reality accurately, or
event impressionistically, the creator assembles and arranges “blocks of meaning” so that the description becomes yet another meaning. Rather than reveal
truth or provide understanding, the poem or the image offers yet another
meaning. The import of Barthes’ insights for the study of visual rhetoric is
that the assembling of these “blocks of meaning” is a rhetorical act. Furthermore, Barthes reminds us to avoid seeking the transparent, definitional relationship between image and referent. While an image may index something
exterior (that which is “real”), “it points but does not tell” (62).
For the rhetorician studying visual material, Barthes’ work is significant in
instructing us to continue following the chain of signifiers and connotations.
S/Z alone is rife with words that reference fluidity, movement, and instability,
words such as “layering,” “agglomeration,” “sequentiality,” “dynamic,” and
“infinite thematics.” Just as Peirce allowed for an infinite series of connotations in his concept of the interpretant, so also does Barthes’ thesis allow for an
infinite series of meanings built from blocks of text. “Visual representation
gives way to visual rhetoric through subjectivity, voice, and contingency,” comments Barbie Zelizer. With photojournalism, or with other representational
media, we are able to project “altered ends” for the representations we see.
This insertion of the spectator’s desires for the future is like the tense in verbal
discourse, as tense can locate a moment into the past (that which has already
happened and cannot be changed; visual representation), the present (what
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INTRODUCTION
Zelizer terms the “as is”), or the future (the moment of possibility that Zelizer
calls the “as if ”). Rhetorically, “as if ” has the greatest power because it directly
involves the spectator and depends on the spectator’s ability to forecast and
manipulate contingencies in order to create a meaning.
This sophisticated reading between disciplines—between linguistics, rhetoric, and photojournalism—offers the next step to the Sister Arts Tradition as
a bridge between disciplines. We must offer a caution, nonetheless. Certainly,
the idea that verbal and visual modes of representation could be understood as
symbolic practices, each with a signifying grammar, is a powerful argument
for the founding of a visual rhetoric. Yet it denies the fact that verbal and visual
representation work with particular media that also, in themselves, signify. A
daub of paint is existentially different from a stitch with silk thread, and each
has its own mode of conveying meaning. One of our projects as visual rhetoricians is to differentiate ourselves from semiology by studying material as rhetoric. What does the character of and texture of pencil on paper or a smooth
and reflective wall with names etched into its face impart to the meaning that
the spectator takes from the object?
VISUAL RHETORIC, AN INDISCIPLINE
In a commentary published in Art Bulletin, Mitchell explores the problems of a
discipline that could be termed “visual culture studies.” Primarily, Mitchell’s
concern is that visual culture is by its very nature interdisciplinary. In explicating the image through verbal media, scholars occupy two spaces of inquiry.
“On the one hand,” he writes, “visual culture looks like an ‘outside’ to art history, opening out of the larger field of vernacular images, media, and everyday
visual practices in which a ‘visual art’ tradition is situated, and raising the question of the difference between high and low culture, visual art versus visual
culture” (“Interdisciplinarity” 542). On the other hand, Mitchell continues, art
history has always engaged issues of spectatorship, pleasure, and social relations, the interests of theorists of cultural studies. The positive outcome of
this interdisciplinarity is that “visual culture is … a site of convergence and
conversation across disciplinary lines” (540). The more negative aspects are
that more conventional disciplines argue to claim the new work, to institutionalize it as a concept or field of study, or argue for its insubstantiality, the very
pluralism that gives it meaning diluting its impact.
Thus, Mitchell proposes a term that we feel describes the cross-disciplinary
work of visual rhetoric, the mingling of verbal and visual emphases, and the
exciting possibilities for inquiry. That term is indiscipline. Mitchell locates the
“indiscipline” “at the inner and outer boundaries of disciplines,” sites of inquiry characterized by “turbulence or incoherence”: “If a discipline is a way of
insuring the continuity of a set of collective practices (technical, social, professional, etc.), ‘indiscipline’ is a moment of breakage or rupture, when the conti-
INTRODUCTION
19
nuity is broken and the practice comes into question” (“Interdisciplinarity”
541). The breakage in this sense occurs within the interdiscipline, when “the
way of doing things” is restated so many times, in so many new ways, that
there is no coherence—nor is there a way to return to a pre-critical moment
prior to when two or more disciplines merged.
The type of paradigm shift that Mitchell captures with the term “indiscipline” is occurring at this very moment across the humanities. The previously unquestioned hegemony of verbal text is being challenged by what Mitchell labels
the “pictorial turn” (Picture Theory)—a growing recognition of the ubiquity of
images and of their importance in the dissemination and reception of information, ideas, and opinions—processes that lie at the heart of all rhetorical practices, social movements, and cultural institutions. In the past decade, many
scholars have called for a collaborative venture, in essence for the disciplining of
the study of visual phenomena into a new field, variously labeled visual rhetoric, visual culture studies, or “image studies” (Roy Fox). This proposed new field
would bring together the work currently being accomplished by scholars in a
wide variety of disciplines, including art theory, anthropology, rhetoric, cultural
studies, psychology, and media studies. Barbara Stafford argues that the current
situation, in which researchers and scholars in varied disciplines study the production, dissemination, and reception of images independently, is counterproductive, at best, and ultimately unsustainable:
It seems infeasible, either intellectually or financially, to sustain multiple,
linear specializations in art, craft, graphic, industrial, film, video, or media
production and their separate histories. Instead, we need to forge an imaging field focused on transdisciplinary problems to which we bring a distinctive, irreducible, and highly visual expertise. (10)
Disciplines provide structures and conventional practices for supporting, disseminating, and responding to projects based on a common area of inquiry,
and these structures and conventions can be highly productive by increasing
efficiency, sharing ideas among scholars, and enhancing the credibility of individual studies as well as of the discipline as a whole. An important part of the
work of any discipline is to develop common terminology, with fairly settled
definitions of the terms that the discipline recognizes as important for doing
its work. But disciplinary conventions also filter and constrain, and disciplines
are defined by their boundaries—as much by what topics, questions, and practices are not accepted as part of the disciplinary discourse as by those that are.
At this early point in the history of image studies, it may be too soon to settle
on accepted practices, disciplinary conventions, and perhaps even on terminological definitions.
When we solicited contributions for this volume, we asked all of the contributors to think about and to express in their chapters their own definitions of
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INTRODUCTION
the term visual rhetoric. We deliberately did not set out to develop a single definition of visual rhetoric that we would try to persuade others to accept; rather,
we wanted to collect definitions from which individual scholars were working. We felt, here at the beginning of what may prove to be a renaissance of image studies, that collecting some of these definitions and allowing individuals
to demonstrate how their own ideas and assumptions about the term influence their work would provide more heuristic value than trying to settle on a
single definition.
Some of the contributors have answered our call very explicitly; others
have implied more than expressed their notions of the term visual rhetoric. But
all of them attempt to explicate and demonstrate methodologies for analyzing various types of visual texts. It is important, at this point in the history of
visual studies, to collect a wide range of such methods, examining the explicit
and implicit theoretical stances behind them, before disciplinary conventions
begin to restrict the kinds of work that disciplinary structures will reward.
In some ways, the contributors’ responses indicate a surprising level of
agreement. At one level or another, every contributor rejects the notion that a
clear demarcation can be drawn between “visual” and “verbal” texts. In almost
every chapter, the reader will find some discussion of the ways in which the visual and the verbal bleed over into each other’s territory. In popular film
(Blakesley), political cartoons (Edwards), captioned photographs (Finnegan),
needlepoint samplers (Goggin), advertisements (Hope), political campaign
films (Kendall & Strachan), statistical graphs (Kostelnick), and in some of
Blair’s examples of “visual arguments,” we see visual and verbal expression
working together in an effort to prompt a desired response from the audience.
Stroupe discusses this blending of the visual and the verbal explicitly in his discussion of “hybrid” literacies.
The chapters by Kaston Tange and by Dickinson and Maugh push the definition of visual rhetoric to include the study of constructed spaces, but even
here we see the importance of verbal text for a rhetorical process that seems, at
first glance, dominated by the visual. Dickinson and Maugh discuss the verbal
text on a Wild Oats store’s display signs, text that explicitly points out the
global nature of the commercial enterprise, even while the visual and spatial
design of the store works to emphasize a sense of “locality.” And Kaston
Tange examines the ways in which home design and images of home life in
Victorian culture reflected dominant ideologies, assumptions about which
were disseminated largely through written texts. Finally, Helmers’ analysis of
the rhetorical nature of visual art points out the necessity of verbal discourse—in particular, the ways in which narrative discourse is used—to comprehend, to interpret, and to respond to works of an entirely visual medium.
Of course, others have argued before us that words and images most often,
perhaps inevitably, work together in persuasive discourse, and that a “visual
turn” in scholarly work in the humanities should not ignore the insights into
INTRODUCTION
21
the primary influence of language on all human enterprise, including the dissemination of, interpretation of, and response to visual texts. James Elkins argues perhaps most explicitly and forcefully against any sharp demarcation
between words and images, insisting that “the word–image opposition is …
demonstrably untrue” and persists largely because it “correspond(s) to institutional habits and needs” (84). In this volume, though, the contributors do not
stop at arguing that visual and verbal modes of communication work together
in complex ways; rather, they offer analyses of the workings of these interrelated modes in a wide variety of rhetorical situations.
A glance at the table of contents will demonstrate that the contributors to
this volume analyze a wide variety of visual modes of communication. One of
our aims, of course, was to demonstrate some of the many kinds of texts that
could be considered instances of visual rhetoric. However, it is also important to
note the wide variety of rhetorical situations in which these texts are operative,
with their attendant variety of rhetorical methods, motives, and cultural assumptions. A hint at this variety can be gleaned merely by noting the different
physical sites in which these texts are located—for example, political conventions, editorial pages, movie theatres, art museums, suburban food stores, government documents, as well as the Victorian drawing room and, as in Goggin’s
examination of needlepoint, orphanage schools in the 19th century. This wide
range of texts, rhetorical situations, and sites of praxis supports our point that it
may be premature to begin constructing the boundaries that would define a
“discipline” of visual studies in the formal sense. Perhaps, at least for awhile, it
would be more productive to continue pushing against existing disciplinary
boundaries and to maintain the “indiscipline” status, continuing to question all
current practices while developing new ones. This may be a romantic idea, and
it may be impractical, as Stafford argues, to maintain this undisciplined stance
for long, but it is, we believe, both necessary and desirable to maintain the current unsettled state of visual studies for at least the near future.
Perhaps the most useful possible outcome of a volume such as this—one
that attempts to capture a small part of the wide range of work that is possible
when a field begins to take seriously the study of images as important cultural
and rhetorical forces—is that it makes explicit the seemingly infinite range of
possibilities for those who are interested in studying rhetorical transactions of
all kinds. It is this openness, this resistance to closure, that drew us to the field
of rhetoric in the first place. And, as we hope the chapters in this volume demonstrate, every new turn in the study of rhetorical practices reveals yet more
possibilities for study, for discussion, for wonder. The visual turn is just the latest of these, but it has revealed a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new questions, problems, and objects of study—so many that any one volume can
contain only a tiny fraction of the possibilities. Knowing that one has barely
touched on the range of possibilities in a vast new area of inquiry is humbling,
but tremendously exciting. It is, perhaps, the best of all possible worlds.
22
INTRODUCTION
WORKS CITED
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Elkins, James. The Domain of Images. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.
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Franklin. Thomas E. “Getting the Photo of a Lifetime.” The Record. 13 September 2001.
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Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism.
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Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and
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Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
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Lipking, Lawrence. “Quick Poetic Eyes: Another Look at Literary Pictorialism.” Articulate
Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson Ed. Richard Wendorf. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1983. 3–25.
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Roger Woolhouse. New York:
Penguin Books, 1997.
Marling, Karal Ann, and John Wetenhall. Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American
Hero. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Diagrammatology.” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (Spring 1981): 622–633.
—. “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture.” Art Bulletin 70.4 (1995): 540–544.
—. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
—. “Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory.” The Language of Images. Ed. W.
J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. 271–99.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings. Ed. Edward C. Moore. New
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Stafford, Barbara Maria. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1997.
Szentmiklosy, Chris. “Photographer Discusses Famous Sept. 11 Photo.” The Mosaic.
.
Wibben, Annick T. R. “9.11: Images, Imaging, Imagination.” INFOinterventions. 6 October
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Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge UP, 1999.
Zelizer, Barbie. “The As If of Visual Rhetoric.” Paper delivered at Visual Rhetoric,
Bloomington, IN, 6 Sept. 2001.
CHAPTER ONE
The Psychology of Rhetorical Images
Charles A. Hill
The range of visual elements that could be considered rhetorical is vast, as evidenced by the many types of visuals that are examined and analyzed in the
chapters of this volume. The rhetorical analysis of visuals could be extended
even further, to include types not directly addressed in this volume, including
landscapes and public memorials. It is exciting and important that the field of
rhetoric is taking account of so many different types of visuals, partly because
doing so helps us understand how rhetorical elements work in forms of expression that are not obviously and explicitly persuasive. For my purposes in
this chapter, I will concentrate on representational images—visuals that are
clearly designed to represent a recognizable person, object, or situation—
while recognizing that such images constitute only a subset of the types of visual elements that could be productively examined as rhetorical elements.
Most rhetorical studies of images, including many of the ones in this volume, focus on a specific genre, medium, method of distribution, or rhetorical
purpose for which images are often used. Most of the insights now available to
us about the rhetorical nature of images have come from these types of studies. In this chapter, though, I intend to approach the rhetorical study of images
from a slightly different direction. I begin with a question that is both broad
and simple in its formulation: How, exactly, do images persuade? In other
words, how do representational images work to influence the beliefs, attitudes, opinions—and sometimes actions—of those who view them? To be
sure, many practitioners (e.g., advertisers, political consultants, and other professional persuaders) instantiate, in their daily practice, a variety of principles
about how to take best advantage of the persuasive power of representational
images. Any good undergraduate course in marketing, advertising, or public
relations includes some discussion of specific methods for using images to influence viewers’ opinions, beliefs, and actions. These principles and methods
are based mostly on past practice, and sometimes on experimental studies that
demonstrate the relative effects of a number of variables on the persuasive25
26
HILL
ness of visual appeals. But a full theoretical treatment of visual persuasion will
involve not only identifying individual variables that appear to strengthen visual appeals in certain situations, but also attempts to explicate the processes
by which images exert their rhetorical influences.
Cultural studies of visual rhetoric constitute one type of attempt to understand how visual appeals operate. In these types of studies, scholars analyze
the ways in which culturally shared values and assumptions are utilized in persuasive communication, and how these shared values and assumptions influence viewers’ responses to mass-produced images. The psychological
approach that I take in this chapter is not meant to replace or to compete with
cultural or textual studies, but merely to address the phenomenon from a different perspective. Neither is it meant to denote a set of processes that are entirely distinct and separate from the cultural and social processes that are
explored so well in some of the other chapters in this volume, for psychological processes and cultural practices are inextricably linked. At the very least,
cognitive processes may be said to be the mechanisms through which the influences of culture operate. Therefore, although it may be useful to explicate
them separately, psychological and cultural influences on individual response
and action are not, in reality, distinct and separate. While I take psychological
processes as my starting point for this discussion, I also discuss the influence of
shared cultural values in an attempt to demonstrate how the cultural and psychological work together in the persuasive process. Ultimately, a comprehensive theory of visual persuasion will need to incorporate the insights gathered
from a variety of viewpoints and methodologies, including cultural, psychological, and textual studies, and attempt to explicate how the mechanisms
identified by these different methodologies work together in the production
of, reception of, and response to persuasive images.
To ask how images work to influence viewers’ beliefs, attitudes, and opinions
is ultimately to ask about the very nature of images and about how people respond to them. Conventional wisdom says that representational images tend to
prompt emotional reactions and that, once the viewer’s emotions are excited,
they tend to override his or her rational faculties, resulting in a response that is
unreflective and irrational. Psychological research suggests that this conventional explanation of the rhetorical power of images is broadly accurate in outline, though inadequate for explaining how persuasive images work.
More importantly, the simple description of the power of rhetorical images
as “emotional” has contributed directly to the relative neglect of such images
by the fields of rhetoric and argumentation, a neglect that has only recently
begun to be corrected. Argumentation scholars, especially, have always been
concerned not just with describing the ways that persuasion can occur, but
also with discovering and promoting methods of persuasion that are epistemically useful and valid (van Eemeren 38). If images, by their nature, prompt irrational and unreflective responses, then they are best avoided rather than
1. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RHETORICAL IMAGES
27
studied closely, and they certainly have no place in the classroom, where the
goal is to help students develop useful and sound reasoning habits.
Until recently, the scholar interested in the serious study of rhetorical images faced a problem. If one accepted the description of visual input as being
largely “emotional” in nature, then rhetorical visuals would be largely dismissed as not worthy of serious study. The interested scholar would then be
faced with the task of explaining that people respond to visuals in much the
same way as they respond to verbal arguments, an assertion that would deny
much of the psychological research into persuasive images, not to mention
the everyday experience of nearly everyone who deals with images in persuasive contexts. (This perceived need has also contributed to the adoption of linguistic terms for the study of images in an attempt to capture for images some
of the cachet that has largely been reserved for verbal elements, a tendency
which has, I believe, led to some misleading assertions about the nature of visual communication.) Only recently, now that simple binary distinctions such
as “emotional vs. rational” have been problematized in the theoretical literature and demonstrated as invalid by much of the empirical research into cognitive and neurological processes, has it become acceptable to treat rhetorical
images as objects worthy of serious study without feeling the need to deny
their largely emotional nature.
IMAGES AND RHETORICAL PRESENCE
As argued above, simply applying methods and concepts designed specifically
for verbal language to persuasive images is not the most productive or accurate way to develop a methodology for the study of visual rhetoric; doing so
often results in misleading (or sometimes simply useless) assertions about the
ways in which persuasive images work. However, many rhetorical concepts already exist that were not developed exclusively for the study of verbal elements, and it makes sense to begin a study of rhetorical images by mining
these concepts to see what insights they may offer that could be applied to
such images. One such concept that seems especially applicable to the study of
images is the concept of presence as discussed by Chaim Perelman and Lucie
Olbrechts-Tyteca (The New Rhetoric 115–120). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca
recognize that most rhetorical situations are complex, and often involve two
or more advocates stating their respective cases, attempting to win adherence
from audience members who are simply trying to determine what they
should believe and how they should feel about the issue at hand. In many of
these situations, the audience is faced with a bewildering array of elements to
consider—elements that may include statistics, charts and graphs, anecdotes
and other narratives, items of physical evidence, and abstract ethical and
philosophical arguments. Each of these elements can be potentially important
for convincing audience members to accept a particular viewpoint, but the in-
28
HILL
dividual rhetor is faced with the danger that any particular element may be forgotten or get drowned out in a sea of information, anecdote, and argument.
To counteract this danger, a good rhetor will attempt to prompt audience
members to focus their attention on the specific elements that the rhetor
thinks will most benefit his or her case.
Convincing people to change their minds or to take a stand, especially on
important policy issues, can be exceedingly difficult for several reasons. For example, many controversial issues are very complex, and arguments about
such issues may involve assertions about facts and principles that not every
novice audience member may feel confident to evaluate. We also know that
factors external to the argument can greatly influence the effectiveness of any
rhetorical appeal. For instance, audience members will often be influenced by
the tone in which the arguments are expressed and by various traits of the arguers that might influence judgments about their credibility and sincerity. And
the effectiveness of any particular appeal on any complex issue will be greatly
affected by how much the appeal supports or conflicts with the beliefs, values,
and assumptions that the audience members already hold about relevant topics. Many psychological studies of persuasion have found that, when faced
with opposing verbal arguments, a reader or listener will usually accept the
one that reflects or reinforces his or her already-held opinions and assumptions (see, for example, Evans; Johnson-Laird and Byrne; Kuhn; Lau, Smith,
and Fiske; Voss et al.). People often accept and come to defend a particular
viewpoint, not because they have carefully thought through and evaluated the
available alternatives, but because they identify with other people holding the
same position (Burke) or because challenging or denying the position would
challenge their own self-concept (Cederblom). With all of these factors coming into play, it is easy to see that any particular appeal, no matter how logically
valid or relevant, may become insufficient, almost even irrelevant to the success of the larger argument.
The challenge for a rhetor defending any particular position or forwarding
any particular proposal is to make the elements in the situation that are supportive of that position or proposal stand out for the audience members, to make
these elements more salient and memorable. This can be done partly by the simple act of explicitly naming and pointing out those elements: “By the very fact of
selecting certain elements and presenting them to the audience, their importance and pertinency to the discussion are implied. Indeed, such a choice endows these elements with a presence” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 116).
Presence, as the term is used by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, refers to the
extent to which an object or concept is foremost in the consciousness of the
audience members. Skillful rhetors attempt to increase the presence of elements in the rhetorical situation that are favorable to their claim because they
know that elements with enhanced presence will have a greater influence over
the audience’s attitudes and beliefs. But presence is not a binary phenomenon;
1. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RHETORICAL IMAGES
29
the rhetor’s goal is not merely to create some presence where before there was
none, but rather to endow the elements in the situation that are favorable to
the rhetor’s case with as much presence as possible. In fact, the rhetor’s ultimate goal, whenever possible, is to make the relevant object, concept or value
fill the audience’s entire “field of consciousness” (118). In other words, when
particular elements are given enough presence, they can crowd out other considerations from the viewer’s mind, regardless of the logical force or relevance
of those other considerations. The rhetor’s hope is that this process will
prompt audience members to accept his or her claim based on one or two
pieces of powerful, vivid evidence, and not stop to think about issues such as
the relevance or actual importance of the evidence, or about what other arguments and opinions should be brought into the equation and weighed before
making a decision.
Several verbal forms can be used to increase the presence of an object,
idea, or person, but the desired element receives the greatest amount of
presence from being directly perceived; an object or person is most present
to us when we can see it directly (117).1 (The most effective way to increase
an object’s rhetorical presence is to make it physically present—to actually
bring it into the room—but, of course, this is often not possible.) The phenomenon of presence is inherently linked to visual perception. It has often
been remarked that a picture of one starving child is more persuasively powerful than statistics citing the starvation of millions. In Perelman and
Olbrecht-Tyteca’s terms, the one child depicted in a photograph becomes
undeniably more “present” to us, whereas the million individual children
whose tragedy and suffering are summed up in a statistic are not. Although
we can all recognize this phenomenon from our own experiences, it is difficult to explain why this should be so.
If we assume that we are talking mostly about photographic images, then
we could say that the suffering portrayed in the photograph carries more
epistemic force than a verbal description because the existence of the photograph proves the existence of its subject. As Barthes points out, a photograph
is, by definition, a captured reflection of an object or person that actually exists
or that existed at one time, so the photograph at least proves the existence of
the person or object, no matter how much the circumstances surrounding
that existence may be manipulated in the darkroom. (Let us bracket, for the
time being, any discussion of the new digital image manipulation techniques
that make such an assertion far from certain.) In Peirce’s terms (239–240), a
photograph is an “index” (as opposed to the other types of signs, “icons” and
“symbols”). Unlike icons and symbols, indexical signs would not exist if their
objects did not exist, so the very existence of the sign proves that its object also
existed. (Other indexical signs include bullet holes and footprints.) Messaris argues that the indexical aspect of photographs and of videotaped evidence
helps define the ways in which people respond to them.
30
HILL
Such an argument assumes that people reflect on the nature of evidence to
an extent that would prompt a line of reasoning something like this: “The
starving child depicted in the photograph must be real, while the statistics
could be inaccurate, misleading, or even made up. Therefore, it is rational to
place more weight on the one ‘real’ child in the photograph.” But empirical evidence, as well as everyday experience, suggests that powerful images do not
prompt such rational reflection. Besides, we do not really disbelieve that the
children in the statistics exist; yet somehow, the child in the photograph seems
more “real” to us, and the photograph is much more likely to prompt a visceral, emotional response.
My point here is supported by the fact that visceral reactions to visual input
are not limited to photographic images. In fact, rhetorical presence does not
necessarily rely on actual seeing. In many rhetorical situations, displaying the
actual object, person, or event under discussion—or a representational image
of it—is not practical. In these situations, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca advise the rhetor to use concrete, descriptive words and specific terms in their
verbal arguments, because doing so helps the audience members construct a
mental image of the object or event being depicted: “The more specific the
terms, the sharper the image they conjure up, and, conversely, the more general the terms, the weaker the image” (147). When direct visual perception of
the desired element is not feasible, then using concrete language to help the
reader or listener construct a mental image can be quite effective for enhancing the presence of the favorable rhetorical element. And words are symbolic,
not indexical—they neither rely on nor prove the actual existence of the object, person, or situation that they purport to represent.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RHETORICAL IMAGES:
HOW VISUALS WORK TO PERSUADE
Psychological studies have confirmed the common assumption that, in general terms, images tend to elicit more emotional responses while print messages tend to elicit more analytic responses (Chaudhuri and Buck). But this
easy identification of the visual with the emotional response and the verbal
with rational responses is clearly too simplistic. Some visual appeals are highly
rational (e.g., bar graphs, line graphs and other visuals designed to demonstrate statistical relationships). And psychological studies demonstrate that
words can also elicit highly emotional responses. In particular, these studies
support Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s contention that imagistic and concrete words prompt emotional responses more than non-concrete and non-visual words (Campos, Marcos, & Gonzales). We commonly speak of readers
constructing a “mental image” while reading a narrative or descriptive text,
and neurological studies show that this occurs quite literally—i.e., reading a
descriptive text can actually activate the same parts of the brain used to pro-
1. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RHETORICAL IMAGES
31
cess visual images (Howard et al.; Rebotier; Sinatra). These mental images can
result in emotional responses similar to those that are prompted by the viewing of actual pictures.
Because imagistic language can prompt mental imaging and therefore
elicit emotional responses, it seems likely that using such language would increase the rhetorical effectiveness of the message. The relationship between
the creation of mental images through reading text and the process of developing or revising one’s beliefs and attitudes based on these mental images has
been studied by psychologists as the concept of vividness. In psychological
studies, vivid information is identified as information that is emotionally interesting and concrete (Nisbett and Ross). (Of course, describing vivid information as “emotional” is a bit of a tautology, because one of the questions that
psychologists study is whether such information prompts more emotional responses than non-vivid information.) Vivid information takes the form of concrete and imagistic language, personal narratives, pictures, or first-hand
experience. Vividness is a matter of degree, of course, but the most vivid type
of information would be an actual experience (being attacked, being involved
in an accident, etc.), and the least vivid type of information would be information that one is exposed to by reading or listening to abstract, impersonal language and statistics. A comprehensive continuum of vividness might look
something like this:
Most Vivid Information
actual experience
moving images with sound
static photograph
realistic painting
line drawing
narrative, descriptive account
descriptive account
abstract, impersonal analysis
Least Vivid Information
statistics
Several experiments have demonstrated, not surprisingly, that vivid information tends to prompt more emotional reactions than non-vivid, abstract...
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