Abstract: Images are ontological. so many words, Bradford Vivian articulates this in his important essay, In the Regard of the Image. As scribes from Gutenburg's Galaxy, our reflex response is to chain images to the regime of representation. Vivian deftly acknowledges this tendency while diplo matically suggesting that engaging images through the screen of words may not be the most productive strategy for exploring the rhetorical force of images. Lacking Vivian's tact, I want to push his points and develop some of the implications of his argument. To that end, I will summarize Vivian' s argument, contest the word-image relation, deny the primacy of meaning and representation, dwell on the ontological status of images, and explore the pragmatic consequences of our encounter with images. We have witnessed over the past couple of decades the emergence of a general rhetoric, what Rorty termed the linguistic turn. This move is certainly theoretically justified by the multiple posts (poststructuralism, post-Marxism, postmodernism). It is also a practical necessity, since focusing exclusively on the sainted words of dead white men courts irrelevance if not suicide in our diverse, image-centric media matrix. General rhetoric has led to a greatly expanded empire. Under our province we survey the rhetorics of science, architecture, technology, memorials, public memory, film, bodies, images, and so on. Fortuitously, a certain reading of Aristotle provides ancient cover: Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion ... Rhetoric seems to be able to observe the persuasive about 4the given' (36-37). Although a restricted rhetoric is conventionally concerned with persuasion via words, the turn to the visual suggests a general rhetoric characterized by contingency, arrangiasti, the art of making do in civic space. Rhetoric is the art of discerning and deploying the available contingent means of constructing, maintaining, and trans forming social reality in a particular context. Clearly in our current context, advertisements, fashion, bodies, buildings, and images are seen as at least as persuasive as speeches.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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