and linked to experiences of the world around us. To understand artifacts of cartographic practice and visual rhetoric as embodied knowledge allows us to consider the ways in which visual artifacts help provide more intimate understandings of or connections to a place, and in doing so, perhaps a closer relationship and feeling of responsibility toward it. An analysis of photo 22727 begins to show that to better understand the consequences of the rhetorical work of visual and material artifacts in the world, we must understand visual rhetorics as also attentive to studies of space, place, and the body.
Visual Culture, Space, and the Body: A Move Toward Materiality
Understanding photo 22727 as an artifact of visual rhetoric clearly helps demonstrates Cosgrove’s view that “geography’s words and images have always had a certain power to construct as much as to reflect the orders which it represents” (“New World Orders” 130). That is, as Pickles and others have pointed out, artifacts like the map participate in situated practices of visuality and are part of a broader visual culture. Understanding the significance of the artifact beyond its immediate function in the rhetorical situation is integral to framing visual rhetoric as a project of inquiry engaged in the practices of visuality. In this way, Olson et al. define visuality as referring not only to “images or visual media but [to] the totality of practices, performances, and configurations of the visual” (xvi-xvii). Compatible with the discussion earlier in the introduction, Carolyn Handa describes visual culture “as a subfield of cultural studies [that] focuses on vision as a starting point for tracing the ways cultural meanings form” (377). Visual culture is again implicated in the study of visual rhetoric, which she defines more broadly “as a discipline that focuses on the visual elements that persuade, taking culture as just one element among many: culture, along with images, sounds, and space, work together rhetorically to convince an audience” (377). A holistic approach to the study of visual rhetorics must then attend not only to these visual elements of persuasion but also to the situated and often multimodal practices in which they are immersed.
Also acknowledging the connections between visual culture and spatiality, Irit Rogoff writes that to open up “the field of vision as an arena in which cultural meanings get constituted, also simultaneously anchors it to an entire range of analyses and interpretations of the audio, the spatial, and of the psychic dynamics of spectatorship” (381). This understanding of spatiality as implicated in visual culture is likewise of interest to Handa, who writes: “If space, as Rogoff argues, is part of the intertextual mix that needs to be studied, we can learn much from those who critique, imagine, dictate, and analyze how space is inhabited” (378). Prelli too notes that built structures and places are “disposed rhetorically in their physical design so that their arrangement works to dispose the attitudes, feelings, and conduct of those who visit, dwell within, or otherwise encounter them” (13). Spatially-based, rhetorical artifacts such as maps, places, and built structures then tap into and rely on visual culture, which Kathryn Henderson further defines as “a way of seeing that reflects and contributes to the specific manner in which one renders the world,” or “a particular way of seeing the world that is linked to explicit material experience” (197–198, emphasis added).
In understanding ways of seeing as tied to explicit material or corporeal experience in the world, Henderson broaches the idea of how visual culture affects contextualized, bodily experience. Gregory Clark describes a similar idea when he explores Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification through the lens of American tourism. Here, Clark examines the ways in which national identity is shaped by public experiences of symbolic landscapes. Clark demonstrates how “the rhetorical power of a national culture is wielded not only by public discourse, but also by public experiences” (4). He describes identification with a place as necessarily tied to personal experience, when he writes eloquently of Burke’s eventual meditation “on the way one’s sense of self and possibility are transformed by the wordless symbols that constitute the experience of being present in a place” (29). Finally, Greg Dickinson and Casey Malone Maugh more explicitly address the connections between visual and material rhetorics in their analysis of visual rhetoric, place, and the Wild Oates Market, when they write that “buildings, and the institutions they house do not simply respond to the contemporary through visuality, instead they draw on the fully embodied subject” (260). Dickinson and Maugh go on to write that “how a definition or theory of visual rhetoric should address materiality is a complex problem, a problem for which we have, at best, partially constructed solutions” (260).
In this acknowledgement of the need for visual rhetoric to address materiality and the embodied subject, Dickinson and Maugh take a crucial step in moving toward an embodied, visual-material rhetoric that is attendant to the impact of space and place on the body. For, as they note, to understand visual, multimodal representations and physical structures as concerned with more than their immediately apparent features—to understand them also as embodied—allows us “to locate our bodies in relation to other bodies in the world” (Dickinson and Maugh 272). This act of locating allows us to engage in a richer mode of rhetorical analysis that considers the broader consequences of the rhetorical situation—that allows us to understand visual-material rhetoric as a project of inquiry. As Dickinson and Maugh also note, to incorporate materiality into the study of visual rhetoric, or conversely, to incorporate visuality into the study of material rhetoric, can pose a challenge, for it requires once again a nuanced interpretive lens that can accommodate multiple ways of knowing and multiple sites of inquiry. It is thus one goal of this book to take up such a challenge.
To this end, I propose a methodological framework for understanding visual-material rhetorics that applies and extends Carole Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and merges that theory with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. Foucault’s concept of heterotopias focuses on understanding spaces as heterogeneous, selective, contested, and culturally situated. Blair’s theory of material rhetoric then helps us better understand the consequences of different spaces on the body. While Blair speaks primarily of physical, material spaces, I describe how we may extend her theory to also account for visual and multimodal spaces and artifacts. In the next chapter, I take a closer look at discussions related to material rhetoric, situating among them Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s concept of heterotopias. I understand the ideas of Blair and Foucault as stepping stones that allow for a point of entry into the more important question of how a visual-material rhetorical approach can provide a window into the larger consequences that these artifacts have in the world. I maintain that an approach that merges and extends their theories can provide the foundation for a visual-material rhetoric that not only accounts for the multimodal, spatially-situated artifact but is also mindful of its impact on the embodied subject. Again, it is the acknowledgement and understanding of embodiment that I feel begins to situate visual-material rhetorics as a continued project of inquiry as opposed to a more insular and immediately available analytical tool.
2 The Visual-Material Spectrum
To understand the study of visual-material rhetorics as a sustainable project of inquiry that can provide a window into the larger consequences that these artifacts have in the world means uncovering an analytical approach that can account more explicitly for the ways in which visual-material artifacts and particular spaces can shape or influence the practices of the contextualized body. In other words, visual-material rhetorics must account not only for the cultural work of the spatially-situated artifact but also specifically for its impact on the embodied subject. To understand rhetoric as embodied is to explore rhetorical practice as it manifests through the action of the body, or “to follow the expressive ebb and flow of expressive energy through human bodily activities: through gesture, through contact with and manipulation of objects, through movement and space” (Marback 62). This chapter not only takes a closer look at conversations focused more explicitly on the idea of embodiment and material rhetorics but also sees Blair’s theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as appropriately situated when considered among them. Subsequently, I contend that the theories of Blair and Foucault can function symbiotically to allow for a more nuanced and embodied understanding of visual-material rhetorics as a mode of inquiry.
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