Enculturation: Blakesley and Brooke on Visual Rhetoric - The Diigo Meta page

• 29 Sep 07
  

  Bill Wolff

  rhetoric visual

  • Just as rhetoric involves more than the deployment of words and sentences in the right order, visual rhetoric involves more than just spatial arrangement or the effective use of page or screen space, font faces, headers, or visual evidence.
  • How does the visual communicate meaning? Or, putting it another way, how do we interpret the visual world? Do we interpret words any differently than we do visual images? If so, what’s the difference? And what’s rhetorical about this process?
  • We need to believe to see, in other words. If believing is seeing, then we need to ask what difference it makes for rhetoric that we only see what we already believe, or that we only know what we already believe, or that we only believe what we already see.
  • Texts and images may represent other worlds, but a sophisticated approach to visual rhetoric will range beyond what Mitchell dismisses as "naive mimesis," acknowledging that texts and images also express a world of their own, a kind of self-referentiality that also has meaning.

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