Chapter Six

Noticing and Mattering

Figure 65. An emaciated polar bear. 2017. Photograph. Cristina Mittermeier.

In December 2017, a video of an emaciated polar bear stumbling through a snowless Canadian landscape went viral. Picked up by National Geographic from conservation media nonprofit SeaLegacy, the magazine retold the story through their signature gold and black design that included textual descriptions of the scene. In the opening shots—the polar bear walking slowly, bones visible through a molting coat—, an early caption stated, “This is what climate change looks like.”1 The video was seen directly by over 2.5 million viewers and reached an estimated 2.5 billion more. Its creators, Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, were interviewed by a variety of print, online, and television media, all seeking the story behind the “gut-wrenching” images. The response was so strong that media even dubbed the polar bear the “Face of Climate Change.”

Instagram post showing an emaciated polar bear captioned “This is what a starving—not old—polar bear looks like.”

Figure 66. Instagram post of Paul Nicklen's starving polar bear video. 2017. Screenshot. Sea Legacy (Instagram).

However, the image was also critiqued, particularly by conservative outlets, as misleading “tragedy porn meant to provoke a visceral response.”2 Many challenged the effort to connect the image of a single polar bear to the whole of climate change. Climate scientists and Indigenous leaders pointed out that this polar bear might be sick or injured. Additionally, while the video was shared in December, it was filmed in August, when the region is usually snowless. This backlash led National Geographic to change its captions and publish a reflective essay from Mittermeier titled “Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong”:

With this image, we thought we had found a way to help people imagine what the future of climate change might look like…Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story—that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear.3

That task—helping people imagine what the future might look like—is frequently posited as a rhetorical function of the visual or, equally often, a rhetorical problem of the visual.4 It is, as chapter 1 explains, the responsibility of the deliberative. In his reflections on the rhetorical trope of megethos, Thomas Farrell identifies this function and problem as a matter of magnitude and marks it as a constitutive concern of traditional rhetoric in general: “whether an audience may care about any topic sufficiently to attend to it, to engage it, and to act upon it."5 As with the photograph of the starving polar bear, visual rhetoricians have long grappled with the role of the visual in creating import. If attention to the future invokes the deliberative, this inclination to prioritize magnitude in order to garner response also gestures toward the forensic function of the visual, where pictures that convict and activate are particularly prized. Yet just as Mittermeier, Nicklen, and National Geographic went wrong by over-prioritizing spectacular magnitude, so too do rhetoricians miss out on an important rhetorical function of the visual when we locate its effects in the dramatic and obvious—the one picture that will help all possible audiences change their behaviors and work toward other possible futures.

In this chapter

We draw attention to noticing (and not noticing) as visual processes that are profoundly rhetorical, that happen incrementally, and that have real, often significant, effects yet are extraordinarily hard to track. They happen outside of conscious persuasion or in its background but wield pervasive rhetorical power. We illustrate noticing as a slow and ambient rhetorical function of the visual using the example of the ongoing challenge of visualizing climate change to highlight its characteristics and complexities. We suggest that emphasizing catalytic images meant to spark political action limits our critical depth of field and, in the process, reduces our means of understanding the visual rhetorics of climate change (as well as other pressing public problems).

Naming “noticing” as a rhetorical function helps us identify visual rhetorics of acquiescence and normalcy that are equally prevalent, enormously influential, and essential for rhetorical scholars to notice. We encourage rhetorical attention to the difficulty and power of seeing that which is small, gradual, or unimpressive and the danger involved in relying on spectacular visual magnitude in order to prompt imagination and action.

Figure 67. Sheets of ice on a frozen lake. Photograph. Cate Barry.

Being Seen and Not Being Seen

When pursuing questions of visibility, rhetorical scholars have most frequently focused on social movements and on rhetorical strategies used to gain recognition and sustain community (i.e. the rhetorical functions of the visual highlighted in chapter 2 and chapter 3). As we note in chapter 4, scholars attending to those rhetorical functions consistently highlight the potential and the risk of being visible. Such scholarship emphasizes strategies for making a community visible to itself and efforts to leverage policy action through visibility.6 Scholars have also complicated visibility as a means of rhetorical agency, demonstrating that invisibility can be a rhetorical strategy and noting that being seen can bring risk and precarity.7 In addition, in contexts where images and information travel quickly and widely, being visible can lead to what Jiyeon Kang terms “uncivil attention.”9 The right to not be seen has renewed importance in such contexts. All this work, however, treats “being seen” and “not being seen” as important rhetorical tactics that are wielded intentionally by rhetors in pursuit of political ends.

“Noticing” invites rhetorical scholars to step away from the actions and intentions of rhetors who pursue visibility or invisibility and focus instead on rhetorical recipients—the viewers who encounter that which is visible, absorb it, and make meaning from it. In the process, we turn away from big pictures and heart-wrenching scenes to the aggregate of everyday visual experience.

By highlighting noticing, we offer a different framework through which to understand the visual politics of sight, drawing attention not to rhetors making something visible but to viewers encountering the visual world around them. "Noticing" invites rhetorical scholars to step away from the actions and intentions of rhetors who pursue visibility or avoid it and focus instead on rhetorical recipients—the viewers who encounter that which is visible, absorb it, and make meaning from it. In the process, we turn away from big pictures and heart-wrenching scenes to the subtle aggregate of everyday visual experience.

In pursuit of persuasive images about climate change, scholars in environmental communication have consistently sought to understand what audiences see (and don’t see) about climate change. They have often been stymied by what they find. The familiar rhetorical functions of visibility—catalyzing and community building—just don’t seem to work all that well. Tracing environmental imagery’s persuasive functions, Julie Doyle’s studies of Greenpeace photography reveal how the temporal challenges of climate change can make photography less effective for catalyzing action.9 By the time climate change can be seen in a photograph, Doyle explains, the damage is already done. Likewise, Lynda Walsh has argued that seeing climate change data visualizations and graphics can actually work against public engagement with climate change solutions.10

Figure 68. Infographics showing climate change data visualization. National Oceangraphic and Atmospheric Administration. Graphic. Annual 2022 Global Climate Report.

Because these graphics usually present the problem at such a global and “superhuman” scale, they can stall deliberation by communicating that climate change is an “out-of-reach problem that can or should be solved only by elites."11 Because of these limits to still visual media, some scholars have turned to performance art to understand strategies for making climate change visible.12 Others have looked extensively at how specific sorts of photographs create particular effects and have developed guidelines for their use.13 Still others have turned away from the visual entirely, arguing that visuality is insufficient for capturing the ongoing, interdependent threat of climate change.14

Perhaps more than any other rhetorical function of the visual, matters of noticing and not noticing draw attention to audience and to the fact that imagined audience matters a great deal. When Farrell asks “whether an audience may care about any topic sufficiently to attend to it,” he is presuming that the people affected by an issue are also the people who make decisions about it.15 However, as transnational public sphere theory16 and the debacle of the COP26 climate summit of 2021 make clear, that is often not the case. In climate change, the people most responsible for environmental destruction and most able to make a difference are, generally, the last to be directly affected. And audiences for climate change rhetorics may be not only physically but also temporally distant from their originiators; they may not even be human.17 It is easy not to notice something—or at least not to notice it “sufficiently”—when you see it only at a distance or you are not its proper audience. A thing’s magnitude for a given audience, in other words, is a terrible measure of something’s actual importance. Yet, what various audiences notice—or fail to notice—remains of immense rhetorical consequence, even when there is no identifiable rhetor in the picture.

Generally speaking, rhetoricians are aware of the consequences around what is seen. We tend, however, to think of them as all-or-nothing propositions driven by rhetorical action—issues are either clearly and consequentially brought before the public eye or they are hidden from it. Creeping, ambient awareness has not been a prominent part of the visual rhetoric conversation. It should be.

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke opens her essay re-theorizing rhetorical ecologies in trophic terms with a story about an alewife. For three to five years after hatching in a New England pond and making its way to the Atlantic Ocean, Druschke tells us, the alewife meanders “the edge of the continental shelf, doing its fishy business."18 But then, “on cue and en masse—water temperature, moon, spring rains, chemistry, and scent signal the river herring to begin a journey upstream” to the “same headwater pond” where it hatched.19 Naming noticing as a rhetorical function of the visual, we recognize an affinity with that alewife and its species peers, attentive to the subtle cues we cannot name, quantify, or pin down yet, which consistently assure us that all is as it should be or, conversely, that spark a restlessness, a sense of unease, or even an urgent need to move.

Figure 69. Alewife. Photograph. US. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Though visual rhetoricians have not spent much time tracking the trophic force of seeing, Laurie Gries’ work on viral images and her theorization of visual dispersal and diffusion likely get us closest. Her Still Life With Rhetoric emphasizes rhetorical processes that are often about viewers’ encounters with pictures, emphasizing “how an image becomes rhetorical in divergent ways as it circulates with time, enters into new associations, transforms, and generates a multiplicity of consequences."20 As such, Gries tracks the “complex rhetorical life” of an image on the move, including moments that pre- and post-date consequential visual events. However, because viral images are always already consequential (by virtue of having gone viral), even when investigating the larger rhetorical life of those images, Gries is still focused on extraordinary images and substantial effects. Indeed, “becoming rhetorical” for Gries is largely synonymous with “gaining overt public attention.” Therefore, though Gries’ focus on process, circulation, and subtle movement provides a useful starting place, we ultimately push in a different direction, considering aspects of the visual that remain under the radar or just barely register on it, yet becomes consequential. In this sense, we build on the theorizing that Christa offers in her work on accumulation, noting that “studying accumulation allows us access to the quiet rhetorical practices that [lead]...to acquiescence and certainty."21 Our work here is also resonant with theorizing done by ecological and everyday rhetoricians whose insights emphasize previously under-noticed speeds and scales at which persuasive material accumulates.22

Theorizing noticing as a rhetorical function of the visual provides rhetoricians with tools for dealing with what happens before visual intake rises to the level of urgent, conscious awareness and what happens when such awareness never occurs. It provides, in other words, an understanding of visual attention and disattention and of amegethos—of that which exists outside the bounds of rhetoricians’ usual criteria for import and effect.23 This chapter builds on the previous chapter’s treatment of the physiology of sight, acknowledging the cognitive, cultural, and sensory processes by which human brains identify relevance and filter out irrelevance. It extends it by moving beyond the physio-cognitive realm, by paying attention to accumulation, and by turning toward the everyday ecologies that noticing creates and reflects.

Figure 70. A buoy line extending into lakewater. Photograph. Cate Barry.

Getting to Noticable

“Attention is the … mechanism that turns looking into seeing."24 As a physical function, attention happens in both overt and covert ways. Overt attention involves moving the eyes in order to look straight at something. Covert attention allows viewers to notice peripheral objects or movement without turning their gaze directly towards them. In short, covert attention is attention that happens when (and because) viewers don’t register that they’re seeing something. And yet, while the effects of overt attention might be most obvious—viewers register and respond to what they look at intentionally—viewers also experience the effects of covert attention all the time. They duck to avoid an object flying from the side; they jump at an unexpected peripheral presence; they guide cars around a curve or past stationary objects.

As we use it in this chapter, noticing is the rhetorical manifestation of attention—both covert and overt. The rhetorical implications of overt attention, like their physiological ones, are relatively clear and have some history of analysis (see, e.g., studies of staring or of the gaze). Covert attention has, perhaps not surprisingly, remained largely unacknowledged by rhetoricians. Even so, covert attention has significant rhetorical implications, especially—but not exclusively—as matters move from covert to overt attention. We are particularly interested in developing theories of noticing as a rhetorical function of the visual that account for these more implicit aspects of attention.

Covert attention happens socially and culturally, in everyday environments and over long spans of time. Like physiological covert attention, this social covert attention functions outside of conscious awareness most of the time yet can suddenly and precipitously emerge into view: familiar clothing suddenly feels out of fashion, a relationship is abruptly recognizable as abusive, what were subtle aches and pains compound to limit movement. In theorizing accumulation, Christa writes, “Sediments (objects, ideas, feelings) build up within publics and within individual lives. Even when no single thing seems to spark change…they are agglutinative, sticking to us and to each other. Piling up, they become momentous."25 In this sense, covert attention makes noticing a rhetorical function of normalcy and the status quo, rather the opposite of the catalytic function outlined in chapter 2. By acknowledging the work of covert attention, "noticing" registers what viewers take in and accept as normal, what we don’t notice, and what we notice but don’t deem worthy of comment. As it pervades daily life—influencing without rising to the level of conscious persuasion—covert attention is a major driver of what is noticeable, even when it, itself, is not noticed. Through covert attention, noticing (and not-noticing) become one the most prolific, common, and consequential rhetorical functions of the visual not despite but because the objects of covert attention so often aren’t registered as important. They are the stuff of amegethos—that which lacks magnitude.

Figure 71. Fern branch in the sun. Photograph. Cate Barry.

At the opposite end of the visual spectrum from the starving polar bear whose lumbering steps drew billions of viewers lies the flat pigtoe, a freshwater mussel from the southeastern United States that was “identified in the wild only a few times and never seen again."26 It was slated to be declared extinct in late 2021 and the news reports announcing its fate were likely the first and last that most people heard of it. “By the time they got a name,” one article on the decision comments, “they were fading from existence.”27 The biologists who seek (but don’t find) that multitude of beings caught in the wave of mass extinction are paying overt attention, of course, but for the rest of us, missing mussels probably aren’t even in our metaphorical (let alone literal) peripheral vision. However, the story of the flat pigtoe’s (lack of) noticeability and the ways that neither its presence nor its absence shifted widely-held perceptions of normalcy has a great deal to tell us about how noticing works to sustain and (slowly, imperceptibly) shift the status quo. It also illuminates how rhetoricians’ failure to notice noticing hamstrings our understanding of climate change rhetorics.

The classical frameworks of rhetorical importance are profoundly humanist. They index what matters based on a human scale and fail to engage relationally and on interspecies terms. Post-human, Indigenous, and cultural rhetorics scholarship has made this point repeatedly and effectively.28 Those same Western, humanist frameworks are also deeply seated in hegemonic public consciousness, showing up as a preference for compelling human interest that is easily exemplified by the wide dispersion of Mittermeier and Nicklen’s polar bear video. It is easy for rhetoricians to recognize such hegemonic preference for spectacular magnitude and allow it to shape our understandings of how rhetoric works (i.e., that it largely functions through moments of grand import). However, although twenty-first century, white, Western, settler viewers, at least, do tend to be particularly invested in magnitude and most readily persuaded by appeals to self-interest, rhetoricians' choice to consistently center magnitude and instances of overt attention risks contributing to the disaster of the anthropocene. It ignores both subtler forms of influence and creates hierarchies of rhetorical importance that privilege Western and hegemonic frameworks for what is made to matter.

The National Geographic image of the starving polar bear undoubtedly captured collective attention in the United States among those already concerned with climate change. It sought to help some audiences understand the future of climate change by imagining extinction before it occurs. As we note above, such strategies have already been roundly critiqued in terms of their effectiveness for combating climate change and catalyzing meaningful political action. Our interest in the shortcomings of the polar bear video, however, has little to do with whether such images are effective. Instead, we ask what visual rhetoric loses when it directs its attention primarily to what is already noticeable to those who are positioned to make noticing matter in the halls of power.

Figure 72. Black and white shadow of branch on stucco. Photograph. Cate Barry.

Every act of noticing involves a concomitant opacity. As Christa writes elsewhere about “discovery”—one of the ur practices of overt ‘noticing’—“for something to be claimed as a discovery, other possible understandings of that thing must be covered over, obscured."29 “Revelation,” she explains, “also hides."30 This point, too, has physiological and rhetorical roots. Psychologists have written extensively about what they term “inattentional blindness,” or the fact that viewers—when intently focused on one visual task—will fail to notice that which is right in front of them. "Research,” writes Arien Mack, “conclusively demonstrates that, with rare exceptions, observers generally do not see what they are looking directly at when they are attending to something else."31 Viewers are constantly judging what is relevant, and “attention can serve as a filter for [what they deem to be] irrelevant information,” meaning that “items that do not receive attention typically do not reach awareness” even if they are alarming or distinctive.32

This phenomenon of inattentional blindness and failure to notice haunts Western visual and discursive approaches to climate change. In many cases, the frameworks that would be best equipped to address climate collapse that are obscured when keystone species and ecological disasters take center stage. Zoe Todd writes, “It is easier for Euro-Western people to tangle with a symbolic polar bear on a Greenpeace website or in a tweet than it is to acknowledge arctic Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems and legal-political realities."33 Those knowledge systems and legal-political realities have been there all along. They have not needed to be noticed by Western scientists or political structures in order to exist, matter, and do persuasive work. Indeed, as the dodo and the carrier pigeon could once have attested, earning Western overt attention can be fatal. And yet, rhetoricians need to, um, notice, how much the things that we already deem to be important affect what we notice—both as everyday viewers of climate change and as analysts. There are rhetorical consequences to our processes of covert and overt attention and our tendencies to ignore what we aren't already focused on. Those consequences can be amplified, as Todd notes, when cultural, individual, and learned ways of noticing themselves go unnoticed.

Figure 73. Frog in grassy water. Photograph. Cate Barry.

And so, we return to the flat pigtoe, the southern acornshell, the stirrupshell, the tubercled-blossom pearly mussel, the turgid-blossom pearly mussel, the upland combshell, the yellow-blossom pearly mussel, and the green-blossom pearly mussel—all freshwater beings slated to be removed from the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species list due to presumed extinction. We turn toward the po’ouli, a miniscule bird native to Hawaii that was “discovered” in 1973 and last seen in 2004. And we point to the harm it does to link noticing and mattering so tightly. If a species (or an issue) must be overtly (or even covertly) noticeable [to humans] in order to matter, we lock ourselves into a human-centric world. And that world is made all the more rhetorically dangerous—for endangered human and non-human animals alike—given that human noticing is so often deadly. The “discovery” of the po’ouli or the flat pigtoe may not have drawn violence to them, but the whole framework of discovery (its ‘doctrine,’ we might say) has a rhetorical function in Western colonial history that leads quickly from noticing to exploitation and from exploitation to destruction. If rhetoricians are to take on noticing as an important rhetorical function of the visual, we must do without fetishizing that which is noticed. We must recognize that both covert and overt attention are forms of noticing and that both simultaneously obscure.

In other words, even as we ask rhetoricians to recognize noticing as a powerful rhetorical function of the visual—one that “makes things matter”34 and that is crucial in determining that to which people will say yes35—we simultaneously urge attention to that which is unnoticed, to inattentional blindness as, also, part of the rhetorical function of noticing. Many things that are not noticeable to those in power or even to humans in general, matter. We cannot speak to the rhetorics of that separate-from-human mattering, and we recognize that the verb “making” is crucial to Farrell’s definition (that rhetoric may reside more in the “art of making” than in the sheer fact of mattering), yet we find it important to confirm that noticing, mattering, and rhetorical consequence are, and always will be, distinct from one another. Any effort to “make things [including climate change] matter” has to grapple with that more-than-human reality.

Figure 74. Lakewater bubbles. Photograph. Cate Barry.

Filtration Problems

“The Merit Of Mussels,” an article about the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s fall 2021 endangered species delisting that was published on the Xeres Society blog, draws readers’ attention to the magnitude of freshwater mussels and their loss. Emilie Blevins, the author, begins with a capacious and extra-human case for mussels, noting that “These are animals that share our rivers and enrich our natural and cultural connections.”36 Blevins moves quickly, however, to claims of mussel magnitude for human concerns. Mussels, Blevins explains, “act as Brita filters,” with each individual purifying an estimated ten to twenty gallons of water each day. “Though mussels are filtering water in order to breathe and feed, as they do so, they provide other benefits,” including benefits to humans. Blevins’ list of those benefits includes the microscopic. Mussels remove “things much too small to see, such as pollutants and bacteria” and even address biomedical contamination, “remov[ing] pharmaceuticals and personal care products, among other contaminants, from our waterways.” In Blevins’ frame, mussels, themselves barely noticeable to human viewers, are important in part because they help confront unseen threats to humans. Blevins points us to matters of covert attention, in other words, but still in service of a traditional argument about magnitude.

The visuals of the article, likewise, participate in classical appeals to magnitude. Multiple photographs taken by Roger Tabor of the US Fish and Wildlife Service strive to make mussels matter for reader-viewers. The photographs depict important mussel features and—thanks to captions—show them at work. On their own, the photographs might be just patterns—the curve of shells against rock, repeated again and again. The captions provide a “pedagogy of sight” through which amateur viewers can recognize mussels’ primary characteristics and perceive them, overtly, as important environmental features with human consequence.37

Figure 75. Mussel beds. 2021. Roger Tabor. US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Without demurring from the assertion that mussels are important—even vital—parts of freshwater ecosystems, we find it fascinating how these freshwater mussels had to be “polar-bear-ized” in order to fit into the framework of climate change rhetorics. Even the Xerces Society, whose mission focuses on invertebrate conservation, cannot seem to find its way past an emphasis on human magnitude. Here, as with the starving polar bear, “mattering” is a matter of overt attention.

The problem—even if we accept this human-centric framing as a rhetorical tactic by the author and image-maker—is that overt attention is mentally and emotionally taxing. As such, human adaptability works, partially, by not needing to mark that to which we become accustomed. A river that suddenly dries up or abruptly turns orange38 will kill aquatic life and capture immediate attention from everyone around. A body of water that gradually becomes more saline39 or recedes by centimeters over repeated seasons will also kill aquatic life, but the changes happen slowly enough that they remain in the realm of covert attention—noticed but not noticeable. “It’s very hard for people to see that fish eggs don’t hatch or that tadpoles die” even as they might register that they “have stopped hearing frogs and other amphibians over the years."40 Indeed, they likely won’t even register that they no longer hear frogs until something reminds them that they once did hear frogs and and see tadpoles, and the absence suddenly shifts into overt attention. The flat pigtoe, likewise, disappears almost before anyone knew to look for it.

Figure 10. Untitled landscape. Photograph. Cate Barry.

Small, Slow, and Systemic

Having warned against overemphasizing what is noticeable, we still argue that visual rhetoric has much to gain by noticing noticing. In short, noticing turns rhetorical attention to visuality—in Mirzoeff’s sense41—as small, slow, and systemic. The organizing power of the visual is all around us, insinuating itself into the values, beliefs, and actions of every person who interacts ocularly with the world and, indeed, even those who do not. What is visually normal, and what becomes visually normal over time, wields significant persuasive force, largely because it functions in the realm of covert attention—noticeable yet not consciously registered. Here again, the rhetorical challenge of envisioning climate change is illustrative.

Climate change can be simultaneously too large and too small to make visible. Though journalists and activists have often tried to capture the threat of climate change via a single visual condensation point (a particularly charismatic species like the polar bear, the hockey-stick curve showing global temperature change, formerly fertile land turned to desert, etc.), the story of climate change repeatedly resists being captured in any one image. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is huge yet creeps up on us, unseen. When we started work on this chapter in 2018, discussion of climate change visuals in environmental communication texts often struggled with how to represent climate catastrophe when its effects were not universally noticeable. Even today, many climate variables are themselves not visible to human eyes (e.g. carbon dioxide, aerosols) and often require scientific instruments to become measurable (e.g. solar radiation, sea ice extent and depth). Perhaps more rhetorically challenging, other climate variables exist at scales or speeds that by definition escape notice until it is too late to address them. Temperature increases are small and gradual, yet they lead to devastating fires, crop failures, and mass migration. Annual sea level rise is measured in millimeters yet threatens to engulf whole nations. Over the last decades, climate scientists, ecological activists, and environmental communicators have repeatedly warned that gradual change would, eventually, become exponential and all-too visible. Again and again, they urged anyone who would listen (or look) to start noticing the changes before they were unignorable. As we neared the end of this project, many of those predictions came true. Maps showing record heat and photographs depicting wildfire raging through neighborhoods suddenly made climate change highly visible and catastrophic. They also provoked outrage—among some—as tipping points passed without meaningful action and even those extraordinarily noticeable scenes failed to catalyze action.

While we are sympathetic to—indeed, urgently feel—the need for effective, traditional rhetorical action in the face of climate change, our purpose in invoking climate change rhetorics in this chapter is not to offer better strategies for making public arguments about climate change. Instead, by drawing attention to noticing, we illustrate the underlying challenge confronting those aiming for better arguments. While those working for public, policy-level action against climate change are making their arguments and building their cases, they are pushing against the exceedingly strong visual rhetoric of accumulating normalcy. Even beyond the recalcitrance of climate change deniers and those whose political and economic power depend on the status quo, part of why it’s hard to make [climate change] matter is that so much of the agent-less rhetorical work of climate change is happening at the slow, small, systemic scale of covert attention, and it falls into the trap of what psychologists term “change blindness,” a counterpart to inattentional blindness in which viewers “can miss changes to attended objects if they do not focus on and compare the features that changed."42 Human tendencies to adapt to our environments, to become accustomed to the previously unimaginable, are working against the effort to generate magnitude, to drive home the importance of climate change. Even as the slow, small, and systemic variables of climate collapse are rapidly accumulating into widespread disaster, failure to notice change and the power of normalcy conspire to maintain the status quo.

Greater visual rhetoric attention to the visual information about the world that people take in covertly and to the changes that viewers do not notice can help us understand the full scope of the rhetorical problem confronting our world. We wish that we had the answers—that we knew the right way to argue about climate change. We don’t. Instead, we hope that those who are more expert at crafting overt, public, policy-focused arguments will be aided by greater understanding of how evolving visual normalcy works against them. Noticing and not-noticing, the rhetorical functions of attention, are at work all the time and every day. They move slowly, incrementally, and profoundly to shape our values, beliefs, and actions. They are, in other words, a fundamental and ubiquitous rhetorical function of the visual.

So, what does this mean for visual rhetoric? It is nearly impossible, after all, to study something that doesn’t rise to the level of overt attention for the person doing the research. Instead, visual rhetoricians likely need to pair overt and covert attention, need to reckon with inattentional blindness and change blindness—despite their ableist names—in order to adequately process noticing as a rhetorical function of the visual. In climate change rhetorics, both the moments of catastrophic vision and the creeping habits of normalcy that surround the catastrophe need to matter. This work may look something like Jennifer Clary-Lemon's "nestwork," redefining what it means to matter to—and alongside—others, and how humans and non-humans engage one another in subtle rhetorical ways.43 Or it might look like a climate version of Karma R. Chávez and Annie Hill's examination of how pandemic contexts laid bare the subtle visual and sonic means by which neighbors are made strange.44

As Christa explains elsewhere, the evolution of normalcy “is sometimes so subtle and slow that its sediments cannot even be identified as 'new.'"45 However, tracking the accumulation of those sediments—of the unhatched eggs, the dwindling mussels, the growing saline—and the ways they become acceptable because they go unnoticed can help us account “for the rhetorical particulates that gather around everyday lives and, over time, shape their terrain in dramatic ways."46 And paying attention to those various mechanisms of noticing as crucial rhetorical functions of the visual, we suggest, can help rhetoricians understand how and why the things that accumulate, over time, "precipitat[e] new (or newly concrete) feelings about the shape and nature of" our world and what must be done to sustain it.47

Footnotes

  1. “Heart-Wrenching Video: Starving Polar Bear on Iceless Land,” National Geographic. December 11, 2017. ↩

  2. Susan J. Crockford, “The Real Story Behind the Famous Starving Polar-Bear Video Reveals More Manipulation,” Financial Post, August 29, 2018. ↩

  3. Cristina Mittermeier, “Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong,” National Geographic, August 2018. ↩

  4. Debra Hawhee, “Looking Into Aristotle’s Eyes: Toward a Theory of Rhetorical Vision,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 14, no. 2 (July 2011): 139–65. ↩

  5. Thomas Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 472. ↩

  6. For the former, see, for example, LaWare on the visual epideictic and Pritchard on fashion. For the latter, see, Beasley on vision and disability activism and Johnson on the 1963 Birmingham campaign. Margaret R. LaWare, “Encountering Visions of Aztlan: Arguments for Ethnic Pride, Community Activism and Cultural Revitalization in Chicano Murals,” Argumentation and Advocacy 34 (Winter 1998): 140–53; Eric Darnell Pritchard, “Black Girls Queer (Re)Dress: Fashion as Literacy Performance in Pariah,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 3 (2017): 127; Vanessa B. Beasley, “The Trouble with Marching: Ableism, Visibility, and Exclusion of People with Disabilities,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 50, no. 3 (May 26, 2020): 166–74; Davi Johnson, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign as Image Event,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (2007): 1–26. ↩

  7. See, for example, Dan Brouwer, "The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos," Text and Performance Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1998):114-36; Rubén Casas, “Maps as Inscription of Power: Imposing Visibility on New York’s “Shadow Transit,” Rhetoric Review 40, no 2 (2021): 167-82; Jiyean Kang, “Call for Civil Inattention: “RaceFail ’09” and Counterpublics on the Internet,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 2 (April 3, 2019): 133–55; Anjali Vats and LeiLani Nishime, “Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘Idea of China,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99 (2013): 423–47; LaCharles Ward, “‘Keep Runnin’ Bro’: Carrie Mae Weems and the Visual Act of Refusal,” Black Camera 9, no. 2 (2018): 82–109. ↩

  8. Kang, “Call for.” ↩

  9. Julie Doyle, “Seeing the Climate? The Problematic Status of Visual Evidence in Climate Change Campaigning,” In Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, and Nature, ed. Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 279-98; Julie Doyle, "Picturing the Clima(c)Tic: Greenpeace and the Representational Politics of Climate Change Communication," Sciences as Cultures 16, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 129-50. ↩

  10. Lynda Walsh, “The Visual Rhetoric of Climate Change.” WIREs Climate Change 6, no. 4 (July/August 2015): 361-68. ↩

  11. Walsh, “The Visual,” 366. ↩

  12. Joshua Trey Barnett, “Toxic Portraits: Resisting Multiple Invisibilities in the Environmental Justice Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 2 (April 3, 2015): 405–25; Avi Brisman, “Representing the ‘Invisible Crime’ of Climate Change in an Age of Post-Truth,” Theoretical Criminology 22, no. 3 (2018): 468-91; Debra Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023). ↩

  13. Adam Corner, Robin Webster, and Christian Teriete, “Climate Visuals: Seven Principles for Visual Climate Change Communication,” Climate Outreach (2016): 41pp. ↩

  14. Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks, “The Sounds of Climate Change: Sonic Rhetoric in the Anthropocene, the Age of Human Impact,” Rhetoric Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 165-75. ↩

  15. Farrell, “The Weight,” 472. ↩

  16. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. ↩

  17. Hawhee, A Sense, 20-48. ↩

  18. Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, “A Trophic Future for Rhetorical Ecologies,” enculturation, no. 28 (2019): 1. ↩

  19. Gottschalk, “A Trophic,” 1. ↩

  20. Laurie E. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics, (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2015), 14. ↩

  21. Christa J. Olson, American Magnitude: Hemispheric Vision and Public Feeling in the United States, (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2021). ↩

  22. See, for example, Jenny Edbauer, “Big Time Sensuality: Affective Literacies and Texts That Matter,” Composition Forum 13, no. 1–2 (2002): 23–37; Bridie McGreavy, E. Fox, J. Disney, C. Petersen, and L. Lindenfeld, “Belonging to the World: Rhetorical Fieldwork as Mundane Aesthetic,” in Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion, ed. Candace Rai and Caroline Gottschalk Druschke (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2018), 148–70; Thomas J. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). ↩

  23. For more on the alpha privative in rhetorical theory, see Michelle Kennerly, ed., A New Handbook of Rhetoric: Inverting the Classical Vocabulary (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021); José Manuel Cortez and Michael J. Kennedy, "Uncommonplaces of Rhetoric," Philosophy & Rhetoric 55, no. 1 (2022): 97-103. ↩

  24. Marisa Carrasco, “Visual Attention: The Past 25 Years.” Vision Research 51, no. 3 (July 2011): 1484. ↩

  25. Olson, American, 45. ↩

  26. Matthew Brown, “US Says Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, 22 Other Species Extinct,” Associated Press, September 29, 2021. ↩

  27. Brown, “US Says.” ↩

  28. See, for example, Gabriela Raquel Ríos and Donnie Sackey, “Biocultural Diversity and Copyright: Linking Intellectual Property, Language, Knowledges, and Environment,” in Cultures of Copyright, ed. Dánielle Nicole DeVoss and Martin Courant Rife (New York: Peter Lang, 2015), 211-25; Donnie Johnson Sackey, “Introduction. Perspectives on Cultural and Posthumanist Rhetorics,” Rhetoric Review 38, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 375–78; Gottschalk, “A Trophic.” ↩

  29. Olson, American, 137-8. ↩

  30. Olson, American, 137. ↩

  31. Arien Mack, “Inattentional Blindness: Looking Without Seeing,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 12, no. 5 (October 2003): 181. ↩

  32. Melinda S. Jensen, Richard Yao, Whitney N. Street, and Daniel J. Simons, “Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness,” WIREs Cognitive Science 2, no. 5 (September 2011): 535. ↩

  33. Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 6. ↩

  34. Farrell, “The Weight,” 4. ↩

  35. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). ↩

  36. Emilie Blevins, “The Merit of Mussels," Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. October 14, 2021. ↩

  37. Jordynn Jack, “A Pedagogy of Sight: Microscopic Vision in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (May 2009): 192–209. ↩

  38. “Three Million Gallons of Contaminated Water Turns River Orange in Colorado,” ABC News, August 10, 2015. ↩

  39. Sophia Dramm, “Don’t Be Salty: The Negative Effects of Road Salts on Water and Madison’s Efforts to Reduce it,” Friend of Lake Wingra. https://www.lakewingra.org/dont-be-salty-the-negative-effect-of-road-salts-on-water-and-madisons-efforts-to-reduce-it. ↩

  40. Dramm, “Don’t Be.” ↩

  41. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). ↩

  42. Melinda S. Jensen, Richard Yao, Whitney N. Street, and Daniel J. Simons, “Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness.” WIREs Cognitive Science 2, no. 5 (September 2011): 535. ↩

  43. Olson, American, 43. ↩

  44. Olson, American, 43. ↩

  45. Olson, American, 64. ↩