Today’s Plan
- Go over syllabus
- What is (Visual) Rhetoric?
- Homework
Welcome to visual rhetoric. As I mentioned describing the syllabus, we will be spending this semester analyzing, designing, constructing, sharing, and revising various kinds of visuals (including posters, documents, graphs and charts, and more). I imagine everyone here has a pretty good sense on what “visual” means, but I bet the term rhetoric might cause a bit of confusion. So I want to begin today by explaining what the term means, and I want to invest even more energy setting up the (difficult) Gries reading, by exploring what she means by a “new materialist rhetoric.”
Traditionally, rhetoric means “persuasion.” Its origins trace back to ancient Greece, and it reached its highpoint in ancient Rome. The study of rhetoric and oratory concerned how a speaker could and should construct a speech to have the biggest impact on an audience. Aristotle identified three main components to rhetoric: logos, ethos, and pathos. Additionally, other sophistic thinkers of the day discussed the importance of kairos. I want to take some time to think about these terms individually. Over the last two centuries, as we’ve seen technological advances particularly with imagery, we’ve seen these ancient principles for oratory and writing applied to the development of images and other electronic media (like web design, advertisements, powerpoint, etc). All in all, this theory works to maximize how a single, autonomous individual can impact others–how they think, feel, and act, through direct communication. And, in terms of visual rhetoric, it often means coming up with guides and rules to aid in the design process (a site like this or our White Space is Not Your Enemy book). It also means teaching people to be intelligent consumers of visual materials and to be alert to clear instances on unethical visual manipulation. And this too.
But we’ve also had a major theoretical shift from ancient times. This new shift goes by many different names and flavors, which include materialism, ecology, network, complexity and other theoretical frames. These theories challenge the agency of an individual, meaning that often our behavior isn’t shaped by direct communication, and that we aren’t necessarily “free individuals.” Our behavior is often limited, shaped, manipulated, impinged by the world around us. New materialism is a new (duh) strain of this thinking, and it emphasizes the extent to which objects “act” independent of human will or intention. Gries’ work–at least the parts that we will be reading–is an extended case study of the Obama Hope image from the 2008 Presidential Campaign.
We’ll be reading Gries’ study in order to shape and inform our first project. Essentially, we want to extract from her case study a recipe for making a viral Presidential poster. We’ll try to identify methods and ingredients, a general plan, that you will alter and transform to produce your own poster. Additionally, we will consider how images travel through and affect culture, the technologies that enable such travel, and the ways human agents receive and transform an individual’s original rhetorical intent.
The Gries reading will be challenging, but I encourage you to stick with it. Read for process, for descriptions of how Fairley (and others, human and nonhuman) contribute to the development and distribution of Obama Hope. Additionally, look for moments in which Gries describes the purpose of her work, look for key terms and definitions.
Homework
Homework: For Thursday, read the introduction to White Space and do one of the exercises on page 8 (you don’t have to write it out, but I’ll want to talk about them in hte beginning of Thursday’s class). For Tuesday, Read Gries Chapter 1, pages 1-14 and 135-145.
