In editors Charles Hill and Marguerite Helmers’s collection Defining Visual Rhetoric a major thematic concern is very early introduced: shared visual experiences and/or iconic images create a shared cultural community. Hill first discusses this referencing times of national crisis. Says Hill: “Points of crisis in American culture since the Vietnam War have been visually recorded and widely disseminated to the public” (18). He continues to discuss how shared visual experiences such as the Vietnam War and September 11 create a cultural community united by the visual experience, the visual icon. Says Hill of September 11, “the spectator was able to experience the exceptional power of visual media to create ‘simultaneity,’ a national consciousness of being together as a community (Anderson 132; Baty)” (18). And a national community at that. The shared participation, the shared viewing of the spectacle and the iconic image create the illusion of shared experience which then serves to emotionally bind the viewers into a shared community.
Hill later expands his argument, noting how symbols “form an expressive syntax for what Barber calls American ‘monoculture,’ a Template,’ a ‘style’; that exemplifies a certain lifestyle—but in tern begins to demand certain products” (82). Symbols resist individualistic interpretation because they are over-determined by customary usage, embedded so frequently in conventional discourse that they rarely take on a reflective, individual meaning” (19). Being literate in these symbols grants one access to this shared community. These iconic images, symbols, and shared visual experiences communicate to those who share them not only a sense of meaning, but a sense of understanding others and there being a connection to others. These visuals become a part of our identity—the way members of this shared community thinks, interprets, and remembers is altered in a way that is both individualistic (personal perspective, for example, or environmental experience accounts for differences) and communal. The repetition of particular chosen images (the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, the September 11 photograph Ground Zero Spirit, the photograph of a young JKF, Jr. saluting his father’s coffin, etc.) work to create a shared Master Narrative that, even when resisted, succeeds in creating a shared knowledge of the image, the event as interpreted by that image, and the general accepted interpretation by the larger shared community. Reactions to and interpolation of these images affects how we construct and perform our identities both as individuals and as community participants.
Janis L. Edwards in the later chapter “Echoes of Camelot: How Images Construct Cultural Memory through Rhetorical Framing” revisits the notion of shared visual icons creating a shared narrative when she asserts that “[remembered] and re-posted images transcend their positions in relation to specific events and create larger rhetorical frameworks that revives and reimagine the narratives that constitute cultural myth” (282). This cultural myth is created through the manipulation and constant bombardment of these iconic images. The question to consider now is, what happens to those who do not—who cannot—participate in visual acculturation of the community, either through an inability to encode the visual data in the same way as the majority or through the inability to view the visual data at all.
Hill, in his chapter “The Psychology of Rhetorical Images” emphasizes the importance of Presence. “Presence, as the term is used by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, refers to the extent to which an object or concept is foremost in the consciousness of the audience members” (55) The indication here is that the visual object must make a lasting imprint on the viewer to be effective, either or both from particular potency and/or repetition. It must, as it were, seep through the short term memory to lodge itself in long term memory; it must exist in consciousness strongly enough that it becomes a part of the unconscious. If the image is unavailable, Hill reminds readers of Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecht-Tyteca (The New Rheotirc, published in 1991) who “advise the rhetor to use concrete words and specific terms in their verbal arguments, because doing so helps the audience members construct a mental image of the object or event being depicted” (57). But what of the audience members who are incapable for constructing a mental image from these descriptions? What of the community members who, being is some way visually (or mentally) impaired, cannot follow the rest of the community down the rabbit hole because they cannot see to follow the rabbit? And what difference does it make, knowing it is a white rabbit, if one has no concept of the color white?
What concerns me here is the absence of this discussion in the text.
A search of the entire text revealed that the terms blind and blindness appear only five times—once metaphorically (“it tends to blind us to theorizing” (142)), once parenthetically (“The graphical displays in the initial 1874 atlas visualized the distribution of people across the country, their religious affiliations, occupations, literacy, mortality rates, and health (including charts for blindness, deafness, idiocy, and insanity)” (345)), and three times in examples (“For example, the circle chart (h) was used in the 1874 atlas to compare the size of the blind population in each state… the thicker the filled area the greater the increase in the state’s blind population” (348) and “[Readers] are taught to interpret a pie chart that shows four groups of blind people in the United States” (350)). A major argument in this text is that shared images create shared community and shared identity—but an entire portion of the population is, by this account, ostracized—separated, identified as sub-standard, maybe even sub-human. That there is a lack of discussion in this text about this issue threatens to create it as a non-issue. Yet, it should be of high concern to examine and understand how the none-seeing is incorporated or excluded from a shared community and national consciousness built upon, as the texts in this book argue, image. The iconic images and shared visual events that Hill and others describe in this text are not available for an entire section of the community. This raises several questions, including, does not sharing in an iconic image create a sub-culture and sub-community of people? A community of none-seers? And how would individuals of this community connect with other individuals? How would they react to the larger community of seers? Would this community be distinct and separate? A sub-community hierarchically, lower or less than the other shared community? These are questions that need to be addressed.
