Epilogue

Spectrum Shift

Figure 76. Rainbow reflected in water. 2018. Photograph. James Wainscoat.

Over the course of six chapters and many pictures, On Visual Rhetoric has theorized six essential rhetorical functions of the visual which rhetoricians ought to engage and reckon with. The chapters have highlighted both the affordances and the limitations of each rhetorical function, showing how they forward hegemonic power and how they can be co-opted or undermined in service of the counter-hegemonic. In addition to elaborating those six rhetorical functions, which we hope will enable future scholars to name, analyze, and extend their rhetorical engagements with the visual, our purpose in this project has been to reorient the visual work of rhetorical studies. In this conclusion, we draw outward—to a birds-eye view—and describe the terrain ahead for rhetorical study of the visual. We offer that mapping in two ways, asking first “how does the account offered in this project change what we know about rhetoric and the visual?” and second “what ought rhetoricians do next?”

What Do We Know Now?


At the heart of our argument is a recognition that the term "visual rhetoric" is too narrow to encompass the relationship between rhetoric and the visual. While we still use the term—especially to name an area of scholarly expertise or membership in a subfield—and we recognize that it is not inherently narrow, we also note that what might have meant “a VISUAL orientation to the RHETORICal” has far more often come to signal “kinds of RHETORICal objects that are VISUAL” or, more simply, the rhetoric of pictures. We have no objection to visual rhetoric as a visual orientation to the rhetorical, but we suspect that scholars and students of visual rhetoric will need to stipulate that definition explicitly in order to avoid kneejerk recourse to visual rhetoric = studying pictures.

Pictures have been the bread and butter of visual rhetoric and will almost certainly continue to be important objects of analysis for rhetoricians into the future. Much of Christa’s career has been built on pictures, and this project—even as it decenters pictures—is filled with them. However, we invite rhetoricians to reorient our relationship to pictures—pull back a bit from Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism—and find the message not in the medium but in the confluence of the medium, its contexts, its circulations and pauses, and the visual norms and habits that shape each encounter with it. For those well-steeped in the canons of visual rhetoric, this assertion places us firmly on Cara Finnegan’s side of the debate over the rhetorical power of pictures, not because Kevin DeLuca was wrong to emphasize the immanence of pictures but because even that immanence is situated, learned, habituated, and part of a larger visual milieu. It is that milieu, we argue, that ought to be palpable in even our more object-focused analyses.

And speaking of milieu, our account of visual rhetoric has demonstrated that the subfield of visual rhetoric has been troublingly quiet about its own contexts, particularly its enmeshment in Western frameworks and the most traditional notions of what rhetoric does and is for. Because studying pictures (rather than texts) was received as such a radical and troubling idea, scholars taking up visual rhetoric as a subfield have—probably unintentionally—generally avoided rocking the boat in other areas. This means that in a larger discipline rightly critiqued for being #SoWhite, the self-identified subfield of visual rhetoric has been noticeably white—even when we have regularly published about race and racialized images. This subdisciplinary whiteness does not mean that rhetoricians of color are not writing about the visual but rather that those colleagues often engage the intersections of rhetoric and the visual in ways that exceed the traditionalist frameworks that have too often become the boundaries of visual rhetoric as a subfield. Letting go of those frameworks, we will find that the study of vision and rhetoric is already more capacious, less picture-focused, and more attuned to the rhetorical functions of the visual outlined in part II.

In short, orienting toward the "rhetorical functions of the visual" not only expands the purview of visual rhetoric, it also changes where and how we look for the rhetorical in the visual and the visual in the rhetorical.

We have already reflected a bit on the first of those changes (where and how we look for the rhetorical in the visual). It involves a spectrum shift. In essence, pictures, the traditional center of visual rhetoric, are the equivalent of the visible spectrum—the ROYGBIV of rhetoric. As with light, however, the rhetorical functions of the visual extend beyond what is readily visible, into the infra and the ultra. We should not turn away from the beauty and complexity at the center of the spectrum, but if we want to understand the nexus of rhetoric and the visual, we cannot neglect its expanse. This means that visual rhetoric must engage the rhetoricity of visual processes, technologies, and habits, finding them in more places and engaging with more interdisciplinary frameworks. The rhetoricity of the visual calls us to learn alongside work in Indigenous studies, psychology, disability studies, neurobiology, and more. It demands the practice of racial rhetorical criticism. It reminds us that even seemingly innocuous vision is infused with habits best understood through the lens of the rhetorical (assessments of probability and importance, habit, attention/inattention, etc).

The shift in how and where we look for the visual in the rhetorical is equally capacious but perhaps more simply stated. To echo Baskerville’s famous and frustrated query (“Must We All Be Rhetorical Critics?) we ask: Must we all be visual rhetoricians? And our answer is: Yep. One significant implication of the six rhetorical functions of the visual that we outline here is that even seemingly non-visual objects of study are implicated in the spectrum of visual rhetoric. Likewise, vision-based modes of assessment, control, and normalizing are at work in the whole spectrum of rhetoricity. Rhetoricians need to be equipped to notice how those spectra participate in the rhetorical work we analyze.

What's Next?

So, what do these theoretical and disciplinary claims mean for the actual work of rhetorical studies? If we’re going to claim that all rhetoricians need a working knowledge of the visual spectrum, what are we actually saying? What does it look like for rhetorical scholars and students of rhetoric to engage the rhetorical functions of the visual? We have a couple ideas.

1. Be explicit about our choices to emphasize powerful pictures.

First, when studying or teaching “visual rhetoric” we ought to be explicit about our choices to emphasize powerful pictures. When we draw attention to powerful pictures or engage with scholarship about them, our analyses ought to include reflection on the features that set powerful pictures apart from everyday visual engagement, what those features can tell us about the rhetoricity of the visual, and what they obscure. We ought also to consider matters of power: what factors lend these particular pictures power and why did they rise to the top of collective attention?

2. Spend more time with mundane vision, visual habits, and processes.

Second, as a corollary, we ought to spend more time with ordinary or mundane vision—not only less-than-powerful pictures but also visual habits and processes. We might educate ourselves and our students on the physiological nature of sight and point out how thoroughly rhetorical that physiology is. It simply isn’t the case that rhetoricians add matters of politics, social influence, and persuasion after the fact. Instead, students and scholars need to know that contexts, frameworks, and assumptions quite literally shape what each of us sees. Likewise, spending more time with ordinary and mundane vision means that projects investigating features of our everyday worlds would become both normal and necessary.

3. Shift the definition of "visual rhetoric."

Third, within rhetorical studies we need to shift the definition of "visual rhetoric" so that already existing rhetorical scholarship that is implicity or explicity about visuality and rhetoric can shape what it looks like to engage the visual as a rhetorician. This more capacious sense of scholarship on vision and rhetoric might, for example, include Anjali Vats's work on intellectual property and race and Gabriela Ríos and Donnie Sackey's work on copyright and Indigenous culture; Kristen Arola, Angela Haas, Rachel Jackson, and others' work on Indigenous rhetorics; cultural rhetorics correctives to posthuman and new material theorizing; interventions into racialized vision; and more.

4. Make additional interdisciplinary engagement.

Fourth, we need to make additional, strategic interdisciplinary engagement. In particular, work in visual rhetoric must engge more deeply with colleagues in psychology, security studies, disability studies, and science and technology studies in order to investigate rhetorical vision without the presumption of sight. Such analyses will generate insight about how visual norms and processes impinge even when vision is obscured, sight is impossible, or the physiological processes of seeing are unavailable—all fundamental questions about the rhetorical functions of the visual.

5. Develop further work and additional rhetorical functions of the visual.

Finally, we offer a call for further work: The scenes and functions treated in this project greatly expand the available frameworks for rhetorical scholars engaging the visual, and they offer a crucial conceptual reorientation—from “visual rhetoric” to “rhetorical functions of the visual.” They do not, however, exhaust all possible rhetorical functions of the visual. In particular, we encourage visual scholars to take up the essential task of theorizing non-hegemonic rhetorical functions of the visual, including those sustaining decolonial and anti-racist vision. What are the possibilities of visual world-making that launch beyond our project’s admittedly pessimistic account of the rhetorical functions of the visual? We believe that the theoretical turn in On Visual Rhetoric, and especially the emphasis on rhetorical functions rather than particular kinds of objects or particular genres, prepares the way for such work. It invites rhetoricians to approach the visual capaciously and conceptually, moving into new relationships and orientations. We look forward to future rhetorical accounts of the visual.

Footnotes

  1. See, for example, Kristin L. Arola, "A Land-Based Digital Design Rhetoric," in Routledge Companion to Digital Writing & Rhetoric, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes (New York: Routledge, 2018), 199-213; Andrew Parayil Boge, "US v. Thind and the Rhetorical Labors of 'Where are You From?'" Ethnic Studies Review 46, no. 2 (2023): 69-92; Christina Cedillo, "Smoke and Mirrors: Re-creating Materil Relation(ship)s through Mexica Story," in Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman & New Material Rhetorics, ed. D.M. Grant and J. Clary-Lemon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022); F. Chrifi Alaoui, Raquel Moreira, K. Pattisapu, S. Shukri, and Bernadette M. Calafell, "I am Not Maria/Samira: On the Interchangeability of 'Brownness' in U.S. Pedagogical Contexts," in Claiming a Seat at the Table: Feminism, Underserved Women of Color, Voice, and Resistance, ed. Sonja M. Brown Givens and Keisha Edwards Tassie (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014); Angela M. Haas, "Wampus as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedial Theory and Practice," Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 77-100; Rachel C. Jackson, "Red Flags of Dissent: Decoloniality, Transrhetoricity, and Local Differences of Race," College English 84, no. 1 (September 2021): 78-99; Gabriela Raquel Ríos and Donnie Sackey, "Biocultural Diversity and Copyright: Linking Intellectual Property, Language, Knowledges, and Environment," in Cultures of Copyright: Contemporary Intellectual Property, ed. Dànielle Nicole DeVoss and Martine Courant Rife (New York: Peter Lang, 2014): 211-25; Donnie Johnson Sackey, Casey Boyle, Mai Nou Xiong, Gabriela Raquel Ríos, Kristin L. Arola, and Scot Barnett, "Perspectives on Cultural and Posthuman Rhetorics," Rhetoric Review 38, no. 4 (2019): 375-401; Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020). ↩