White Space

As I said in my last post, this is an iconic image of war - particularly of the Iraq War. And I defintely think it was a powerful piece of visual rhetoric back in the mid 2000's. What I didn't get into was the elements of rhetoric this image uses to convey its message. Feelin a little rusty, but here goes.

The flags draped over the coffins certainly is an iconic image. It represents our country, it represents a fallen soldier. In that way I suppose this is a paradigm. But there is also an enthymeme here, which is that we send over to Iraq our troops and equipment in this cargo plane and they come back to us like this, in coffins. The pathos is pretty clear - my first emotion is sadness, then regret, then anger.

But then I notice the spectacle of it. I see the people at the top of the photo in poses that seem altogether too casual. Who knows. Maybe it's just regret or reverence. In any case, the coldness of the temporary steel tomb probably doesn't help this feeling I get of irony. We send our people, our money and this is what we get in return. They give their lives, forsake their families and this is what they get in return.

Photography is a tricky thing to understand, because you have to be there in the moment and many times you must take what you can get at that very moment. Obviously, the photographer here did not arrange the coffins just so, nor did you likely ask the people to stand as they are. He didn't pick the harsh light at the end of the tunnel so to speak, but he is probably using a flash in the foreground of the picture. So his composition must be thought of in those terms. He certainly has plenty of constraints at work. But that also seems to make the message more authentic. Photography has a sort of ethos that some other forms of visual rhetoric do not.

Paying attention to any and all of the visual elements that something like a photograph represents also lets you emphasize things using those visual "tricks" like lighting, color, focus, etc. It tells you what is important in the photo, how your eye should travel can even be aesthetically pleasing. Visuals are also a lot quicker to absorb. They don't "overburden readers" as the article I analyzed says. And they can even be aesthetic. Even this photo, with its vivid colors could be interpreted as beautiful in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's description of a human being being murdered can be strangely poetic.

The last thing I wanted to point out was the light at the end of the tunnel effect this photo gives. It almost is reassuring, perhaps to those with religious beliefs that include bright, white lights. But it also sort of links the US with that white light, as if their arrival on US soil is a sort of reinforcement of the idea that WE are good and THEY (over there in the Middle East) are bad. In a way it also gives confirmation to the war. Perhaps that's not something that was intended, but if you stare at it long enough I think it starts to make sense.

Visual Rhetoric - White Space & More...

Text + Graphics = Visual Rhetoric

That's the link to the pdf above. I hope it works. I like how this article points out that the letters that I'm typing into this blog, even the white space that surrounds those letters, is a form of visual rhetoric. It's not just charts and graphs. I won't spill all the beans here since I think we're going to talk about these pieces in class on Monday.

Anyway, what I really think of when I think of visual rhetoric are things like this:

If anyone remembers this they'll also remember what an absolute shitstorm these photos caused. The pentagon banned the release of such images, citing a right to privacy. The press and the left pushed back, citing the citizens' right to see how our troops were coming back from Iraq. After all, WE had sent them there.

What I think this says about visual rhetoric is that it can be powerful - so powerful in fact, that a government can ban its composition. The DOD was so afraid of what these images would conjure in the minds of Americans that they decided they were too dangerous for us to see. It wasn't national security they were protecting, but rather the security of their war. The support of the American people would surely flag if they continued to watch the coffins roll out of cargo planes on a daily basis. A body count on the nightly news was one thing, but seeing the bodies, or at least a flag-draped representation of them, was apparently quite another. In the end, visual rhetoric is no different than verbal or textual rhetoric. It can be productive, it can be persuasive and it can be banned by those who would censor our right to speech in favor of bombs.

Visual rhetoric seems to convey a sense of authenticity, an ethos that the written or spoken word may have lost. Even words, though, have the power to conjure images in our heads. Think of the "smoking gun...in the form of a mushroom cloud" that 'ol Bushy deposited in our brains in the runup to the war. So is text that has the power of sparking our imagination more or less powerful than an actual image? What if Bush simply gave us a visual of a nuclear warhead detonating? I don't know. I think the visual in my head is far more powerful than the visual any Hollywood producer could create. But the visual is almost a sort of enthymeme. You use it and allow the audience to interpret it. Obviously some visuals are going to work better than others, just like an enthymeme. So I suppose visuals are only as good as their authors can create. And the author must keep in mind the same things that we keep in mind when we create text-based rhetoric.

Actions Following Patterns

Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of rhetorical situations I encounter on a daily basis, it is incredibly hard to think of just one. For some reason it's the situations that involve conflict that seem to stick out in my memory. So maybe I'll just take a mundane sort of situation and see what happens. The exigence of this particular situation was that my boss wanted to know how my project was going at work. In fact, it's going less than optimally. I suppose he created this situation, but, as Grant-Davie points out, he was not wholly responsible. I suppose I was also a part of the exigence. Otherwise he would not have asked me.

We were each other's audience, but there happened to be another person in the room - our general manager. However, his role was strictly informational and sporadic at best. He was dealing with other things while he was in the room. I suppose there was also another indirect audience member - that of an investor in our company. His participation in these kinds of rhetorical situations is often fuzzy to me. But I suppose he would want to know from my boss what the status of my project is as well. On the other hand, Bitzer points out, the general manager might not have actually been rhetorical, because "the rhetorical audience must be capable of serving as mediator of the change which the discourse functions to produce" (8). As far as I have observed so far, the only way he has been involved in my project so far has been to take credit for the things I've done right. ;)

Now, obviously there are constraints that have already been placed on this situation. He is my boss. I am his employee. And we have a history of about six years in which we've both probably learned how to interact with each other in a meaningful way. For my part, I knew that saying "we're behind and I need more money" was probably not the best way to start out the conversation. But ultimately my goals were to communicate that message to him. I didn't want to hide the fact that we were behind. Nor did I want to leave the conversation without expressing the fact that I need more resources in order to have the project succeed. I started out comparing sales from my particular division with previous sales. In essence, I put the project into context for him. But putting my project into context involves using a lot of technical (internet-type) terminology that he just doesn't understand. So I brought in visual aids - namely that of Google, which probably helped to reinforce my ethos a bit as well as helped him to "get it" a little bit better. In many cases, I seemed to be pointing out a lot of the constraints I encountered in the project. So in a way, they kind of paralleled some of my rhetorical constraints.

I never thought about it this way, but Bitzer also points out that "one cannot say that the rhetorical situation is simply a response of the speaker to the demands or expectations of an audience" (9) because I too wanted to have this conversation. I needed to have this conversation in order to get the resources I needed.

Prezidentz on Rhetoric

Above is my rhetorical analysis of the piece below. I hope you enjoy it!

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I Like Big Bird Too

I tried a little experiment for these debates. I admit, it wasn't intended. On Wednesday night I tried watching the debates online while my 20-month old ran around the living room trying to get me to read books to him. Eventually I gave in. I was totally distracted, but not so much to agree with most people that Romney, despite the weird eye blinky thing and the constant constipated grin, "won" the debate decisively. The next night I listened to NPR's audio of the debates and got a totally different perspective. It actually seemed like a debate. I was able to concentrate more on the substance of what the two candidates were saying. Oh, and I didn't have Sawyer in my face this time. He was in bed by the time I got to this last night. If I had enough time I would have liked to read the transcript from the debate and see if/how that might change my perspective even more. In fact, it would probably make a great experiment in rhetoric to see how people in general would respond to the various means of delivery - tv, audio and print. The one enthymeme I can't get past is that Romney's flag pin was bigger than Obama's. Obviously he is more patriotic. So since it seems the visual is so important in determining the outcome of the debate, let's look at that. In fact, let's look just a facial expressions. I tried to pay close attention to both candidates when they were talking and when they were listening. Here's what I saw: Obama talking: Obama seemed to have a hard time knowing where to look. He made brief "eye" contact with the camera, but most of the time he seemed to be looking at Lehrer, the moderator. Beyond that it appeared like there was just black emptiness. He rarely looked at Romney and addressed him directly. He seemed more comfortable looking down at his podium. He seemed unsure of his words at times. He definitely looked professorial, which seems to imply to some that he has a superiority complex. Saying things like "it's instructive" probably helped. Romney talking: When Romney was speaking he seemed sure of himself, as if he really believed all the BS (sorry, can't help myself) he was shoveling onto the stage. But in the made for tv environment of the debate, it didn't really matter that his plans had no specifics. In fact, after the debate I heard one commentator say "I think Obama was thrown off by all the specifics that Mitt Romney had to present." Anyway, Romney seemed excited. Maybe even a little coked up. Who knows. His demeanor couldn't have been better. He seemed cured of that whole talking out of the side of his mouth thing. He was definitely on the attack and had refutations for almost everything that Obama said. He was prepared to spin away anything that Obama had to sling at him and he did it confidently. The guy is like a pro lier (sorry again). He does it deadpan. People believed him. Shit, I almost believed the guy! My wife, who is a staunch democrat, but who doesn't follow politics very closely, said "he seems like a nice guy." But what I think Romney did most effectively was that he seemed to be looking at Obama almost the entire time (while Obama looked at his shoes). He was addressing Obama (not the audience it should be noted) and I think that shaped his overall demeanor during the debates. Obama when Romney was talking: The thing that bugged me the most about Obama was that, when his head wasn't tilted to the side and looking down, he seemed to be nodding in agreement with Romney! "Yes," he seemed to be saying, "I agree with you Mitt." Was this just a nervous twitch? I would think that if when they practiced and Obama was doing this his coaches would have told him to stop doing this. It's one thing to be cordial. It's another to act like you agree with everything your opponent is saying! The rest of the time he just looked pissed that he wasn't drinking wine and eating a steak dinner with his wife. Romney when Obama was talking: He seriously looked like he was pooping...painfully. What was that grin on his face? But at least he looked like he was paying attention and he was quick to jump into the conversation or demand more time from Lehrer to rebut what Obama was saying. Stylistically, I think these social cues were perhaps the most influential part of the debate. Obama looked awkward and on sedatives. Romney looked at ease and excited. Romney spoke plainly and in generalizations while Obama tried to dazzle the audience with numbers, which easily became a blur. The fact-checking folks had a field day with both candidates and concluded neither were very accurate. But I think Romney's "victory" came largely with his ability to appeal to the common man, something he has had a hard time doing up until this point. Contrasted with Obama's performance, Romney seemed like someone you'd rather have a beer with, even though, like our last president, he doesn't drink.