An inevitable return to dialectic

My intent in the last post was primarily to prove that visual rhetoric must follow many of the same rules that traditional arguments have always proven. One cannot rely on mere emotional appeal in order to persuade or convince, just as she cannot rely on isolated images or isolated data to make an entire point. Rather, she, as the rhetor, is the creator of meaning. She is the shaper of dialectic, creating an argument by the organization and arrangement of "things," whether these things be photographs, words, or numeric data. She cannot merely use things in isolation, but must bring them into dialogue with one another if she wishes to grow as a thinker and develop as an arguer. This dialectical mode of thought--which I have mentioned before--dovetails nicely with the process theory of composition (about which my colleague, ROBIDA, has written extensively in his project). If we, as teachers teaching in a postmodern age, are to recognize that we are articulating rhetoric within a discursive framework that we cannot operate outside of, we must recognize that visuality, as one peg of the technoliterate generation in which we live, is inevitable.

In Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition, Lester Faigley writes, "[Postmodern theorists] have shown how no theory can claim to stand outside of a particular social formation and thus any critique must be self-reflexive. In overturning notions of the self and individual consciousness, postmodern theorists stress the multiplicity, temporariness, and discursive boundedness of subject positions" (111-12). I hope that my previous visual analysis of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire has proven effective in stressing the subjectivity of argument that extends even to the medium which one uses to construct that argument. One can still manipulate the argument, whether it be through choice of photos or through the arrangement of objects within the frame, but that rhetor is still bound by the rules of logic within their own discourse to create an effective argument.

Work Cited
Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992.