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.