Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics. Amy Propen
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invites a new set of methodological questions. On the one hand, as Finnegan notes, “labeling as ‘visual rhetoric’ artifacts such as photographs, memorials, art, images, and advertisements creates a false category,” in that many of these artifacts include textual or linguistic characteristics (244). Thus, to place such artifacts under the rubric of visual rhetoric “ignores the often untenable distinction between the visual and verbal in practical discourse” (244). On the other hand, visual and material artifacts arguably require specific methodological treatment, thus necessitating that we acknowledge such categorical and analytical distinctions within our analyses.2 I suggest that it is possible to understand the textual, visual, or material qualities of rhetorical artifacts as functioning along a spectrum, without necessarily creating the false categories about which Finnegan cautions, so long as we are attendant to the nuanced readings that such artifacts require. Such mindfulness will only serve to further our understandings of how multimodal contexts and artifacts can influence, affect, or shift our understandings of rhetoric.
Moreover, the idea that the study of visual artifacts and practices should be contextualized within their discursive field is, to my mind, not incompatible with an understanding of visual rhetoric as always already concerned with embodied practice. In How We Became Posthuman, for example, N. Katherine Hayles describes the idea of embodiment as related to but different from the body; the difference, she feels, is linked to a consideration of the cultural contexts in which the subject is situated:
Embodiment differs from the concept of the body in that the body is always normative relative to some set of criteria [. . .] In contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. [. . .] Experiences of embodiment, far from existing apart from culture, are always imbricated within it. (196–97)
To understand visual rhetorics and the rhetorical study of visual, spatial artifacts as embodied practice not only allows us to more explicitly consider the contextualizing features of “place, time, physiology, and culture” that Hayles describes but also requires that we understand the visual as concerned with space, place, and the body (196). In other words, to fully understand the broader implications and consequences of the rhetorical work of visual and material artifacts in the world, we must understand visual rhetorics as also concerned with and receptive to studies of space, place, and the body.
Space as Rhetorical
To engage in a study of visual-material rhetorics from a vantage point that understands space as rhetorical requires a brief review of how space and place may be understood to function in this book. As mentioned earlier, I borrow from the ideas of philosopher Michel de Certeau, who has familiarized the notion that “space is a practiced place” (117). Space, he notes, “is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. [. . .] Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by its walkers” (117). These “walkers,” or the subjects residing within a space, also give that space its sense of “place.” Subsequently, place is concerned with relationships among the elements within the space and the ways in which they interact and coexist (117). In this sense, space and place function together and may be understood as constituting the power relations that make possible particular ensembles of movements and intersections of mobile elements. Again, de Certeau understands a place as “an instantaneous configuration of positions” (117). For example, the green spaces and public commemorative sculptures at sites such as the Lowell Mills Park (the subject of chapter three) may foster a specific sense of place largely because of the interactivity invited by their layout and subsequently by the activity of their “walkers,” or the movements of visitors within the park. Likewise, specific representations of the park as performed through the park map, or the features deployed within the map, may be seen as constructing more nuanced versions of a place. Human geographers have also suggested that certain places engender a specific sense of place, or particular feelings or emotions associated with a place (McDowell and Sharp 210).3 To view a space as rhetorical is to acknowledge the capacity for consequence borne out of the interaction of the texts, artifacts, bodies, and discourses deployed within it, and the sense of place engendered by those interactions.
The Map Can Take Us from Here to There
The idea that space and place are socially produced and contextually relevant has implications for cartography as well. A discussion of cartographic representation serves as an ideal point of entry into understanding how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between space and the body. Scholars aligned with critical cartography, for example, not only take as given that the cultural work of the map relies on multimodality and intertexuality but they also understand the map as rhetorical, and as always already shaping and shaped by the cultural contexts in which it is immersed. Contemporary cartographic practice has largely begun to acknowledge that mapping, while historically understood as an objective, scientific practice,4 is also a cultural practice that may impact “how the space is perceived and what action takes place within it”; in other words, mapping may also “represent an exercise in power” (McDowell and Sharp 25). As geographers Jeremy Crampton and John Krygier note, mapping invites participation and dialogue: “If the map is a specific set of power-knowledge claims, then not only the state but others could make competing and equally powerful claims” (12). Moreover, they write, “critical cartography assumes that maps make reality as much as they represent it” (15). Critical cartographers then understand mapping as an active practice that can shape knowledge, reflect power dynamics, and serve as a means for advancing social change (15). One type of mapping made possible through a critique of critical cartography is what Crampton and Krygier refer to as “everyday mappings” (25). Everyday mappings may be “experiential or narrative, and creatively illuminate the role of space in people’s lives by countering generalized and global perspectives” (25). The digital maps created by GPS devices, for example, fit the bill well; as chapter four will discuss in more detail, they are multimodal, rhetorical, everyday texts created in the moment by users who want tailored information about their immediate environments. These cartographic texts, much like the work of other spatial artifacts and representations, have both an immediate impact on contextualized, bodily experience as well as broader consequences within and beyond the rhetorical situation. Other mappings may resemble more traditional modes of visual representation such as photographs, more so than what we might typically consider to be a map. In the discussion that follows, I first describe more specifically how maps function as rhetorical artifacts through their potential for visual and textual interplay, selectivity, and modes of projection, as well as the ways in which they are always already implicated in cultural practice. Next, to better contextualize the intersections of visual rhetoric and critical cartography, I provide a brief analysis of a visual artifact that counts as both iconic photograph and map: Photo 22727, also known as the “Blue Marble.” An analysis of this image not only helps show the connections between visual rhetoric and critical cartography but also begins to demonstrate how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between materiality, space, and the body.
The Map as Rhetorical Artifact
The late geographer J.B. Harley conveys an understanding of the map as rhetorical and able to present arguments about the world when he writes: “My position is to accept that rhetoric is part of the way all texts work and that all maps are rhetorical texts. [. . .] All maps strive to frame their message in the context of an audience. All maps state an argument about the world [. . .]. All maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such as invocations of authority” (242). While Harley understands the map as contextually-specific and as requiring a specific audience and purpose, his work is sometimes critiqued for its more inward focus on the production of the map itself, rather than on the “nuanced and multiform” processes of mapping and the social and political contexts that inform “the production of geographical images” (Pickles, A History of Spaces 146). In describing cartography’s recent turn to “processual” modes of knowing, Leila Harris and Helen Hazen advocate for a focus on the “multiple, reiterative production and reproduction of maps as they are engaged in multiple times and spaces,” rather than focusing solely on the power dynamics that inform the production of specific maps (51).
Interplay of Text and Image.
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