Making Common Sight

Figure 31. Aerial photograph of a snow-covered area. United States Geological Society. February 17, 2020. Photograph. Unsplash.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is perhaps today’s best-known cliché about visual objects. It also encapsulates numerous assumptions about the rhetorical functions of the visual.¹ We start with it here not because we buy the cliché but because its ubiquity in US visual vernacular tells us a great deal about how people [in the United States, at least] perceive the rhetorical force of pictures. Because this chapter is about how shared sight links people to one another, beginning with a commonplace about sight helps illuminate the actual and presumed rhetorical functions of the visual for community building.

The cliché, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” emphasizes the indexical power of visual objects: This happened. This is real. A picture, in the cliché, is a truth claim, and looking at pictures is a mode of information gathering.² The cliché, in other words, names witnessing as a primary rhetorical function of the visual. Apprehending what a picture shows, viewers enter into relationship with the subject matter and take on a sort of responsibility toward it. In this sense, both pictures and the process of seeing act on viewers via what the Greek rhetoricians called ekphrasis: vivid or lively description. Witnessing “brings before the eyes” what must be seen in order to be understood, acted upon, or made real. That belief that vision entails witnessing, and that witnessing carries obligation, power, and access to the real, are fundamental presumptions of Western visual culture.

Now, obviously, that “witnessing” function of the visual could find a home in either of the two previous chapters, alongside the collections of visual functions we have categorized as pedagogical-deliberative and catalytic. When documentary photographs are brought before decision-makers as pieces of evidence that demand policy action—a sort of “visual rhetoric event” that has inspired many articles and books about visual rhetoric³—they invite viewers to serve as witnesses toward both catalytic and deliberative ends: By seeing, viewers are asked to indict what has happened. Having been seen, the pictures then point toward necessary change.

More fundamentally, however, the rhetorical function of the visual that is identified by “a picture is worth a thousand words” is one where viewers are asked, as witnesses, to participate in a common reality. This rhetorical function highlights how seeing makes a claim on viewers, engaging them in something larger by virtue of having seen. Witnessing, as a key visual phenomenon, is, in this sense, an epideictic function of the visual. It is exemplary of the circumference-drawing work of rhetoric that ancient Greek rhetoricians described as speech of praise and blame.

Rhetoricians have found this epideictic function alluring even as we have cast doubt on the truth value of pictures. No visual scholar worth their salt would forget that pictures have always been infused with symbolism, manipulated, and falsified. A picture may be worth a thousand words, we shrug, but which thousand words? The image vernaculars of the late twenthieth and early twenty-first centuries make clear that scholars are not the only ones who are skeptical. The prevalence of terms like photoshopping, filters, face swap, and deepfakes make clear that few if any of us are comfortable with the truth of the pictures around us.

Figure 32. In each of these image pairs, one photograph is real while the other is AI generated. Can you tell which? 2024. Screenshots. Whichfaceisreal.com.

And yet, even the most skeptical of us are also affected by the visual activities that Margaret LaWare calls “witness[ing] the present” and places within the community-forming realm of the epideictic. Such visual engagement “illuminat[es] [a] community’s inherent reality,” LaWare writes, and she calls that community-forming, witness-driven function of the visual, “visual epideictic.”⁴ Scholars not explicitly invoking Aristotle’s term have likewise emphasized the role the visual plays in building up communities and establishing their borders—asking people to “bear witness to [their] historical legacy as well as [their] present.”⁵ LaWare’s initial elaboration of the visual’s epideictic function was celebratory: It focused on how marginalized communities can use public display of cultural values as a tool for building solidarity. Subsequent scholarship in this vein (including LaWare’s own return to the same site a decade later) makes clear that identifications driven by witnessing can turn in other directions and that visual epideictic’s pictures of praise and blame are available for good and for ill.⁶ For this reason, rhetorical scholars continue to be fascinated by the slippery, untrustworthy, yet powerful rhetorical function of making common sight.

Figure 33. The picture in color is the real face. The picture in black and white is AI generated. 2024. Screenshots. Whichfaceisreal.com.

Because, traditionally, the epideictic was separated from the institutional, productive functions of the polis—policy making (see chapter 1) and judicial determination (see chapter 2)—, it was long framed as the least necessary (and most disreputable) of the three Aristotelian branches. In the last several decades, however, rhetoricians have drawn attention to the generative potential of the epideictic, particularly—though not exclusively—in imperial contexts.⁷ Scholars of visual rhetoric have been particularly drawn to the epideictic, perhaps because of that function’s deep connection to witnessing practices and, thereby, to vision. While vision’s catalytic capacity might be the most celebrated function of the visual in existing rhetorical scholarship, community formation is its most readily agreed upon and frequently observed rhetorical function. Rhetoricians are repeatedly “sighting the public” and its discontents.⁸ Pictures, images, and bodily presentation, we understand, are crucial to identification and circumference drawing. While Kenneth Burke’s original formulation of identification, “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his,” recenters identification on words (“talk his language”), the underlying action of identification in Burke’s formula leans heavily on visual means (gesture, order, image, attitude).⁹ As rhetoricians of all stripes have increasingly turned to the ambient character of the rhetorical, the epideictic function has grown in prominence and importance, making it ripe for reevaluation.

Who are we?

During and after the 2016 presidential election, where Donald Trump’s virulent racism and misogyny, the possibilities and shortcomings of Hilary Clinton’s historic candidacy, and the fraught state of U.S. democracy itself were all regular topics of discussion, the epideictic task of showing the US public to itself was both urgent and problematic. Pundits, journalists, and scholars regularly debated the best ways to treat Trump’s candidacy, particularly his most troubling comments, and how to read the signs of misogyny and bias that dogged media coverage of Clinton. Who are we? Who ought we be? And What is wrong with those people?—all epideictic questions—were asked repeatedly, though not always in such explicit terms. The tools of visual epideictic showed viewers possible answers to all of them.

On October 11, 2016, popular statistician and political commentator Nate Silver tweeted out a link to a story on FiveThirtyEight with the below left image captioned, “Here’s what the map would look line [sic] if only women voted.” The map is overwhelmingly blue, projecting 458 electoral votes for Clinton. Silver replied to this tweet with a counter image of the very red map below right, “if just dudes voted.” Although this kind of data (and even this kind of map) were not unusual in the months before the 2016 election, these two maps were particularly viral. They were retweeted over 20,000 times, picked up by several other outlets, and sparked over 500 derivative maps, both serious and satirical.

Figure 34. Two electoral maps: "What would 2016 look like if just women and just men voted. October 11, 2016. Tweet. Nate Silver.

In many ways, Silver’s “If Only X Voted” maps were unremarkable in the 2016 pre-election digital landscape. Pundits daily forecasted the results in new ways, hoping to isolate and account for various voting blocs. FiveThirtyEight was particularly known for this type of analysis, offering three different statistical prediction models and regularly posting stories breaking down polling minutiae, especially by demographic categories. However, few other versions gained the immediate response generated by this quick tweet, typo and all. What made these images so resonant that they were retweeted thousands of times and that so many variations circulated? One reason, we suggest, is that by tapping into the epideictic function of the visual and a particularly exigent communal concern over the composition of the national “we,” the tweets invited viewers on social media to actively visualize something they were already craving: ways to picture how the identity markers made salient by the politics of the moment collided with the identity constituting processes always at work in a US presidential election. In other words, the maps were fertile ground for playing out those fundamentally epideictic questions, "Who are we? (and what is wrong with them?)."

Both before and after the election, pretty much no one liked what they saw. In their pairings and contrasts, the maps provided many opportunities for projecting blame onto others alongside a circumference-drawing pride at any maps that showed one’s own preferred picture of the national electorate.

In some right-wing circles, Silver’s paired maps prompted vituperative circumference drawing along gender lines. The choices of women and men, pictured, reaffirmed masculine political integrity and rekindled century-old assumptions about feminine political immaturity, even exhuming a dormant hashtag: #Repealthe19th. Though the hashtag reached viral proportions because it was used in response to conservative posts or offered up with tongue-in-cheek, original and sincere uses drew on the maps to not only blame women for a potential Clinton victory but also to assert that women should not be part of the voting public. One tweet responded to Silver’s map by noting that “women are not fit for politics.” Witnessing a political community divided along gendered lines, some viewers went from visualizing “what a 15 point lead [among women] looks like” to rethinking who ought to be included in their ideal community. The maps, in other words, weren’t functioning primarily as tools for data visualization. They were “claims about the community [they address], about how it should view itself” and be constituted.¹⁴

Likewise, in the election’s aftermath, commentators on the left saw these and similar maps as pictures of communal failing. Using maps showing voter demographics divided along both gender and race, those commentators often called on white women in particular to witness their own complicity in Trump’s election and so realign their identifications for the future. Using data from FiveThirtyEight's Swing-O-Matic visualized through 270towin.com, which was only one of the many freely available electoral map-making tools during the 2016 election, Ste Kinney-Fields expanded on the “If Only ___ Voted” format to include race and education as definable communities. In these, Kinney-Fields increased the options for visualizing the electorate, providing new visual resources for locating praise and blame.

Figure 35. "How the Electoral Map would look if only _______ voted." Graphic. In "Do you know this image? I made it. Here's why." October 23, 2016. Graphic. Medium. Ste Kinny-Fields.

In particular, Kinney-Fields’ maps made clear that race, not gender, created the greatest disparity in voting. In fact, Kinney-Fields chose not to include iterations of the map that broke down how people of color vote by education and gender because “it was always 100% blue.” These maps were then widely used on the left to understand who was to blame for Trump’s electoral victory as well as invite communities into different relationships. Eight years later, maps showing shifts toward Trump in urban areas and in working-class communities of color likewise became reources for imagining not just electoral behavior but larger values and identities. In all those uses, maps offered visions of community—gone wrong or gone right—not through “a clear and rational case” but by generating “a vivid picture of the shared definition” of who “we” are.¹⁵

Attending to these maps through an epideictic frame, rhetoricians are well equipped to understand how the purportedly factual visualizations of statistical information in these maps serves arguments about the flaws and possibilities of the nation, inviting viewers to witness not merely voter demographic information but assertions about their proper relationships to one another. Recognizing the epideictic function at work also helps explain how the maps devolved as anxieties heightened, leading to satirical maps that kept the original concept but played to a collective sense of anxiety and lack of control, particularly among those on the left. Maps like “Nuclear Waste,” with states on fire, buried in nuclear waste, or overtaken by “intelligent apes,” untethered blame from statistics, but remained tethered to both the shape of the nation and the epideictic underpinnings of more serious maps. New York Magazine’s tongue-in-cheek explainer of these maps captures the small comfort and solidarity this community found: “You don’t even have to limit yourself to a true physical shape of the United States … Welcome to 2016! Traditional politics as we knew them have basically gone to hell anyway!”¹⁶ In their absurdity, these maps showed what was also true of the earlier ones: their rhetorical function was to witness the community and its feelings.

Figure 35. Viral election maps, 2016. Image. Anna T. Donahue, Ryan George, and Brian Feldman. @FreddieChampion. Twitter. Twitter.

Scholars studying the rhetorical force of citizenship have long warned that—because nations demand borders, with insiders and outsiders—any celebration of citizenship must be tempered by recognition of the harms that come with circumference drawing.¹⁷ Citizenship demands the existence of those who are not citizens. Therefore basing access to rights on access to citizenship likewise requires the existence of people without rights. The epideictic, as one of three options for rhetorical function in the Aristotelian frame, carries the same flaw. Building and sustaining communities through speech of praise and blame (or pictures of praise and blame) depends on praise for the insiders and blame for those who threaten them or, alternatively, a purging of that which is (or those who are) blameworthy within the community in order to regain the community’s true, praiseworth self. Community formation, via the epideictic, presumes insiders and outsiders. Paying attention to the epideictic function of the visual thus allows rhetoricians to notice how witnessing makes claims and strengthens identifications—“who we are.” It also functions within a framework where identification “is compensatory to division” and is a practice of division.¹⁸ Rhetoricians studying the visual, therefore, can attend to its epideictic functions to illuminate both how vision includes and how it excludes.

Future Past

Because epideictic rhetorical functions inevitably draw on well-established assumptions about what is right and authentic and because they rely heavily on beliefs about common pasts and common places, they have typically—and rightly—been understood as inherently conservative and normalizing.²⁴ The epideictic “draws on customary symbols, topics, and rituals” in order to unify audiences and invite identification.²⁵ In the process, custom constrains what the community does, looks like, and imagines about its possible futures. The “we” constituted and addressed by epideictic discourse often begs the question of where that “we” comes from—how its past constrains its present and its future.

Figure 41. North American map. Screenshot series. February 27, 2022. Native Land Digital.

Oddly, then, visual rhetoric scholarship relying on the epideictic functions of the visual has frequently treated those functions as liberatory, even revolutionary. Focusing most frequently on pictures and images produced within and for marginalized communities, this work emphasizes the epideictic’s invocation of what was in order to instantiate what ought to be. In essays on public art, the built environment, fashion, and more, the epideictic functions of the visual serve to provoke conversation, visualize alternative pasts and futures, and redraw communal borders.²⁶ Reclaiming pasts and emphasizing seemingly lost origin stories, this use of the epideictic in visual rhetoric has emphasized that neither borders nor communities are stagnant. Rather, they can be remade and recontextualized and the epideictic functions of the visual can aid in imagining and working toward more just futures. The epideictic may be conservative in its turn toward a presumed-common past, this scholarship suggests, but the visual also offers unique rhetorical resources for self-making and community change.

And yet, we suggest, rhetoricians would do well to keep in mind the conservative, normalizing frameworks underlying the epideictic functions of the visual. Their “dorsal turn”—a moving forward by orienting backward—relies on definitions of communal bond that require shared pasts in order to envision shared futures.²⁷ When there is no shared past, over-reliance on epideictic frameworks might well lead rhetoricians and rhetors to imagine pasts that do not exist, appropriate others’ stories in order to build their own pasts, or resign themselves to a desolate future.

Figure 42. Views of North America on Native Land Digital using filters for (L to R) treaties, territories, and languages. 2022. Native Land Digital.

Rhetorical scholars, pundits, and social media posters alike have spent a great deal of ink (and pixels) on the fictional past imagined in Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again.” They note that the phrase mobilizes resentment, xenophobia, nostalgia, and white supremacy and demonstrate that the golden era invoked by the slogan is a fantasy. Even so, the communal vision focused by that fantasy carries extraordinary staying power. It generates images of normalcy and possibility that—for those on the inside—makes possible a deeply desired return to greatness in the present. Even if it is fake news, the America mapped out by making America great is exemplary of the work that epideictic frameworks do when they invite audiences to “bear witness to [their] historical legacy as well as [their] present.”²⁸ As an analytical tool, the epideictic helps rhetoricians recognize what is happening in Trumpian visual culture. As a primary tool available for rhetoricians who seek to understand community formation, however, it risks overemphasizing the need for a shared and celebratable past—one with minimal conflicts, clear boundaries, and mutually agreeable definitions.

Appropriation is frequently a sub-function of the epideictic function of the visual, particularly in colonial contexts. Your place becomes our place; your past, our past. That appropriative sub-function goes hand-in-hand with the invented pasts just discussed. It is audible and visible, for example, in the endless repetition of “This land is our land” and “Immigrants go home!” by white nationalist protestors over the years. National and world historic sites, likewise, frequently claim others’ space as commonplace, inviting publics to imagine themselves in light of a great, presumably shared past.²⁹ Mestizo national identities rooted in pre-Colombian sites, as Christa has detailed elsewhere, are exemplary of the erasures, conflations, theft, and violence often required by epideictic invocations of a shared past.³⁰ Here again, rhetoricians can effectively engage epideictic frameworks to name, analyze, and undermine such claims, but we must also be careful to name the appropriations at work even in largely liberatory epideictic appeals and recognize that such appropriations are, if not inevitable, at least fundamentally constitutive of epideictic frameworks. Especially in settler colonial societies, a shared past is, inevitably, an appropriated past.

Figure 42. Land surrounding the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk territory. 2022. Screenshot series. Native Land Digital.

For that reason, the epideictic is not well suited for community making that does not rely on a shared or idealized past. Likewise, scholars approaching community formation via the epideictic might well miss modes of community formation that don’t look backward in order to shape the present and the future. As we end this chapter, then, we turn to another sort of map to invite reflection on visual rhetorical functions for community building beyond the epideictic. How might maps like those produced by Native Land Digital, a geospatial visualization project where Indigenous communities “can represent themselves and their histories on their own terms” welcome settler rhetoricians into new frameworks for analyzing community-formation that don’t require shared pasts?³¹ What might it look like, for example, to picture shared presents and futures among settlers, Indigenous people, and peoples whose ancestors were brought to the Americas against their will without appropriating a mythic Indigenous past or an imaginary shared place of origin?

On the one hand, the maps produced by Native Land Digital are presented in epideictic terms. The maps are intended to “better facilitate self-representation” of Indigenous nations and peoples and enhance “narratives that combat colonialism.” The map provides several ways to understand the relationships between spaces and communities. Users can toggle on and off various types of boundaries, including territories, languages, and treaties. When those boundaries are visible, the Native Lands maps simultaneously participate in and co-opt the familiar visual force of the epideictic. The lines drawn around communities are different from the ones that contemporary US viewers expect to see laid out across the territory they likely perceive as the United States. State boundaries are missing, replaced with overlapping color fields that articulate Indigenous space and pose a distinctly different orientation toward the landmass now known as North America. And yet, viewing these maps and their reimagination of space in terms of the epideictic ultimately means maintaining a Western frame for how the map functions visually and rhetorically. Settlers engaging with the map project often use it in order to picture the past of our place—to tell a story about the lands we occupy and the people who preceded us. Preparing for land acknowledgements rather than decolonial engagement, we phantasize and appropriate a shared past to authorize present action.

Figure 44. Land surrounding York University, which occupies the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, 2022. Screenshot series. Native Land Digital.

Seeing the map as a means of epideictic community formation relies on habits of circumference drawing that presume at least temporary fixity of location and of membership. Whether what is pictured is a Westphalian nation-state or a Native nation, an epideictic orientation typically presumes that the community pre-exists rhetoric even as it is formed by rhetoric. It encourages viewers and analysts to treat the spatial organization depicted as something real and natural. It connects past to present. In the process, even when visual epideictic intends to undercut that which has been treated as normal or natural (e.g. the shape of the United States), there's a tendency to replicate the strategy, merely naming new pasts, drawing new borders and delineating new circumferences that will replace the old ones with better divisions between us and them.

If the epideictic’s “dorsal turn” asks us to look for something in common behind us in order to imagine our future together, then it is not well equipped for imagining community possibilities in the context of uncommon pasts. Kyle Powys Whyte, Zoe Todd, and Simón Yampara, along with numerous other Indigenous scholars have made this point repeatedly—though not specifically about the epideictic. They note that our present condition of ecological injustice and climate collapse—and their inequitable impact—is not the result of a shared past but a specifically divergent one that was driven by Western white supremacist, capitalist, extractive colonialism.³² Our present is formed by histories of violence, exclusion, and theft, and imagining community by envisioning a shared past inevitably downplays that destruction. What might it look like, not to wipe the slate clean or ignore those histories of violence, but to identify rhetorical functions of the visual that enable uncommon but just, communal futures? We don’t think the epideictic gets us there, and so we invite rhetoricians to picture new rhetorical functions of the visual that can carry community formation beyond the cliches of witnessing and the frames of the epideictic.

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