Blog Week 3!

For this week’s readings, the majority of my comprehension and analytical notations focused on crossover and similarities in argument. I had to go back and re-read Kenney’s article in conjunction with Blair and Gillian, but for the most part - each scholar is in tune with one another in terms of visual literacy and the rhetorical flow of the image on an audience.


To start with, I read Birdsell and Groarke first in Toward a Theory of Visual Argument that plainly argues for “students [to have tools] for proficiency in assessing visual modes of reasoning and persuasion[.] [They need] a more adequate theory of argument which makes room for the visual” (309). Birdsell and Groarke plan out their article with clear examples as to what imagery can do in the argumentative/rhetorical fashion- but also depict examples where it is unclear or unfocused and can cause confusion to an audience.


McCloud’s The Vocabulary of Comics argues that one must read the visual closer than they might originally think. The rhetorical layers in an image, specifically that being ink on paper - reveals symbols and cultural meanings that are specified to be understood as “icons” that reveal a deeper understanding in a culture.


Gillian’s Researching Visual Materials Towards A Critical Visual Methodology speaks to the notion and terms of a visual culture: the effects of the simulacrum, multimodal literacies and the practices involved, and the layers of audience on a specific image or work that can be viewed in a serious manner.


Kenney continues this discussion in Building Visual Communication Theory by Borrowing From Rhetoric by arguing that traditional rhetoric can be used to interpret and analyze the more abstract visual elements in our society. The samples used in this article base its argument on common advertisements, billboards, and a set example {using the character of Dan] to portray community involvement and interaction as an audience. Kenney associates key rhetorical elements like depiction, genre, identification, symbolic perspective (ect.) to prove the effect of the visual on convincing arguments made to an involved audience.


Blair’s article The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Arguments is arguing for the legitimacy of visual arguments - meaning, do they exist? The terms are made in the beginning to decide if they can be proven, what they look like if they are encountered upon, and how to associate oneself with them in the formats usually seen in society and in media.


Davis’ article, “Leeroy Jenkins!” What Computer Gamers Can Teach Us About Visual Arguments asserts itself to portray the game World of Warcraft and the video sample as a rhetorical key for writing teachers and students to decode visual culture and communities as examples that have rhetorical components with rich capitol for teaching. The examples in Davis’ argument present a digital example most likely suited for digital natives who are in the classroom.


Barthes extends this argument in the article Rhetoric of the Image where he asks the focus questions of meaning in images and the spectral analysis that confronts itself in the picture. On a basis of advertising and images that signify more in rhetorical appeals, Barthes utilizes classical rhetorical traditions to make meaning in his article.


To look at three articles a bit closer, I am choosing Blair, Gillian, and Kenney to conversate with one another.


In Blair’s text, the assessment of “propositional arguments” is brought up: “...their argumentative roles [and functions] are expressed visually, for example by paintings and drawings, photographs, sculpture, film or video images, cartoons, animations, or computer-designed visuals. Is it possible to express argumentation visually?” (348).


The answer to this question seems to be answered as yes, but it is not a hard or concrete “yes” - it seems to be a “yes, and…” to add a bit more depth to the paper. Gillian seems to confront a similar topic, but exposes the associated terms and vocabulary needed to confront the topic head on. The terms that most agree and become supportive here are “visual culture...the plethora of ways in which the visual is part of social life” (4) as well as the mimic appearance of the image acting as the “real” or as the “simulation” - hence the simulacrum (4).


It would seem that Gillian in some respects answers Blair in the conversation that if there are visually simulated “things” that create opinions and arguments, then Blair has the reaction necessary to close the questioning that begins the article - there is then an actual argument being constructed about “real-like” interpretations of material objects.


Kenney moves on with the discussion of magazine advertisement using a trope like a visual metaphor “...to increase the number of associations and to make [customer meaning-making] easier” (57) - which I find intriguing.  A couple other articles also speak to the visual metaphor that crosses across audiences to enhance meaning and interpretation.


Questions:


1)  Can the visual ever not be an argument? When is the visual image a static entity?

 2) Can an image be experienced in more than just a singular mode? What other modes         
            might the visual cross-over into?