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the visual. Viewed in light of institutional situations, consideration of visual texts in the writing classroom may seem an unremarkable development.
Students are much more likely than we are to be immersed in visual culture and to feel comfortable talking and writing about what they see. As each of the teachers we worked with in creating this anthology has discovered, bringing the visual forward can intensify student engagement with assignments. Teachers of English who make the visual a salient theme may find that students who recognize how an image can persuade may be better able to articulate what constitutes written persuasion or even argument; these students likely will grasp, at the very least, that the distance between visual and written cultures is less vast than they had imagined. Some eventually may intuit that an argument can be conceptualized as an image composed in the mind of the writing subject; for, as Mitchell notes in regard to the discourse-focused epistemological tradition of our discipline, there is a “counter tradition which conceives of interpretation as going in just the opposite direction, from a verbal surface to the ‘vision’ that lies behind it [. . .], from the linear recitation of the text to the ‘structures’ or ‘forms’ that control its order” (Iconology 45). Indeed we are all familiar by now with the etymology of theory.
What Mitchell’s Art Forum article labeled the “pictorial turn” is underway. With Porter’s forecast and the goals of rhetorical education and critical pedagogy in mind, we offer this anthology in the hope of better equipping colleagues and students to grapple with the diverse texts they encounter in daily life.
Cultural Studies
In 1972, psychologist Rudolf Arnheim asserted in his groundbreaking book Visual Thinking that the visual is the “primary medium of thought” (18). The cognitive process, according to Arnheim, begins with identification of familiar objects, and concepts subsequently take form out of the subject’s lived experience and knowledge. More recently, Ann Marie Seward Barry examines emotional reactions to the visual and extends Arnheim’s work. She explains in Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication that our reactions to the visual are our first reactions—that “we begin to respond emotionally to situations before we can think them through” (18).
Barry indicates not only that visual images automatically evoke a stronger emotional reaction than discourse does, but also that our emotions make us especially receptive to images gratifying our preferences in art and design and in ideology. Attraction to the form of an image may lead us to accept its content indiscriminately because analysis would entail an extended, and at times irksome, process of thought. Hill and Helmers concur (33): “cultural studies,” they note, “constitute one type of attempt to understand how visual appeals operate” (26). Not surprisingly, the power of images is of concern to many teachers committed to critical pedagogy.
Art historian E. H. Gombrich argues in Art and Illusion a central assumption of visual critique in English studies—namely, that culture influences how we see. His exposition of the history of artistic styles illustrates his thesis regarding the cultural position of the painter: what matters is “not a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational mode” (78), and the painter’s problem is one of “conjuring up a convincing image” (45). Gombrich cites, as one of many examples of the influence of culture on art, the landscape paintings of John Constable, whose familiarity with new methods of studying cloud formation may have made his innovative representations of the sky possible (20). Presumably it was because of his immersion in this cultural change that Constable was able to “break through” the artistic conventions of his day. According to Gombrich, such breakthroughs by “exceptional beings” mark changes in artistic style and tradition and are understood best in their cultural contexts (20). After being introduced to the works of painters such as Joseph Turner, Vasily Kandinsky, or Georgia O’Keefe, students of writing might explore the influence of cultural context and material conditions on the contributions of pivotal artists. Students might also gain insight into these issues by exploring the homelier industrial arts, as Maureen Daly Goggin does in her account of transformations in the situation of embroidery work during the print and Protestant revolutions.
Art critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a short and highly readable critique of painting and commercial reproductions that is based on his 1970 BBC series on art. The author (and collaborators he names as helping to “make” [5] the book) asks what essential change occurs when original artwork is transformed into a reproduction. His response is “commercialization,” and his definition of image conforms to his thesis regarding the reproduction of art. Image, for Berger, is a “sight which has been recreated or reproduced” (9).
Ways of Seeing demonstrates that commercialization was a part of the early history of painting in the West, but on a smaller scale than occurs today. Although much of the value of an original painting derives ultimately from its ability to bring viewers close to the (usually dead) artist and the painting’s (often recondite) context, paintings have, from the beginning, belonged to the culture of the rich, whose portraits often have featured their material possessions (their clothing, buildings, elaborate gardens and grounds, and the “intimate” rooms of their homes) and evoked mythological themes investing the owners with heroic qualities.
Through reproductions, “great art” has entered the mainstream, but without training or educational support the general public has remained largely uninterested in “high” culture (33). Berger posits that, in its place, advertisements of glamorous lifestyles and locales are consumed by a mass audience that dreams of being rich. In representing wealth and luxury, advertisements often allude to painting styles (138). Fashion and beauty photography, for example, often mimics poses and settings of eighteenth and nineteenth century portrait painting. Such parallels suggest that one of the functions of high art in contemporary society is to feed capitalism.
Berger credits Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in l936, as the source of many ideas appearing in Ways of Seeing. Benjamin, a Jewish art critic and philosopher writing in Germany in the days leading up to the Second World War, decries mass-produced art for losing the “aura” of the original and for detaching the art object “from the domain of tradition” (223).1
Critical Approaches
Berger presents an analysis directed to a broad audience, but images also can be analyzed on the basis of semiotics, which derives from the philosophy of C. S. Peirce and whose concepts icon, index, and symbol, among others, have been appropriated by visual theorists. Loosely, icon refers to a sign bearing a resemblance, real or imaginary, to what it is meant to signify (e.g., images of a smiley face or of two hands shaking). Index refers to a physical indication that another thing exists (e.g., a jet stream or the howl of a coyote). Symbol refers to a sign whose connection to an object is culturally determined (e.g., most verbal language). Peirce, an American pragmatist, did not reject outright the assumption of a correspondence between material world and language, as many postmodernists have.
An alternative to Peirce’s semiotics can be found in the structuralist approach of Ferdinand de Saussure, which, as Stuart Hall explains, consists of a system of signs including images, words, and sounds (30). The signifier is the form itself, and the signified the idea or concept that accompanies it; the relation between them, the representation, is created through codes, or culturally agreed upon meanings and judgments (31). Because meaning is never fixed and always in flux, analysis is a requirement for understanding interpretation, and “[t]he reader is as important as the writer in the production of meaning” (33). Hall is a poststructuralist who uses structuralism in a modified and flexible way to highlight the power system of cultural signs (35).
Image-Music-Text, one of French critic Roland Barthes’s many works, elaborates a semiological theory to critique a variety of artifacts, both verbal and visual. Barthes argues in this book and in Mythologies that, whether in advertising or in other media, representations repeated over time become cultural myths that the public immediately recognizes and responds to in predictable ways. Without either means or motivation to understand their responses, viewers do not consciously notice the strategic character of the message they encounter and so react as its designers have anticipated—positively. To illustrate, Image-Music-Text describes a Panzini spaghetti ad incorporating a photograph