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Introduction

Every year, nearly 700,000 people visit the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts. Home to the historic mills of the early New England textile industry, the park tells the story of the industrial revolution through its restored mills and boarding houses, exhibits, parks, green spaces, and public art installations (Lowell National Historical Park). When describing visitors’ first reactions upon entering the park and seeing the historic textile mills where female workers labored in the 1800s, a long-time park ranger there notes without hesitation that visitors “are struck by the size of the buildings.” Even those visitors who come to the park with knowledge of the textile industry in early New England, or who have ancestors who worked at the Lowell Mills, the ranger says, “see the high ceilings [. . .] they see the brick [. . .] the physicality of the buildings,” and experience the site differently than they have through texts. Visitors are struck by the fact that the mill workers lived next to the huge factories where they labored for fourteen hours a day. Moreover, when visitors juxtapose the size of the boardinghouses with that of the Agent’s House, they begin to make connections about the unfairness of the workers’ living conditions; that is, the Agent’s House (now the Park Headquarters) was home to the agent’s family, “but is about the same size as a boardinghouse, which housed up to 250 women” (Park Ranger). Thus the visual and cultural landscape of the park “drives home the tension between emerging classes” (Park Ranger). As the ranger describes, many visitors soon note that they “don’t feel like they’re getting the big picture” of the history of the Lowell Mills unless they make the time to “see everything.” For visitors to the Lowell Mills National Historical Park, then, “seeing comes before words” (Berger 7).

When, in 1972, the art historian and critic John Berger first wrote that now-familiar sentence, “seeing comes before words,” he might not have guessed that his influential essay, “Ways of Seeing,” would be invoked to support a park ranger’s ideas about how visitors’ initial experiences of an historic site are visual and corporeal rather than expressly verbal. Nor might he have guessed that his essay would later be anthologized in collections such as Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading and subsequently become the inspiration for many a first-year writing assignment, or that his ideas would be used to help describe the subdiscipline of visual rhetoric at the beginning of a book about the rhetorical elements of national parks, maps used in environmental debates, and in-car navigational devices like the global positioning system (GPS). Nonetheless, Berger’s ideas about how we see in many ways constitute what we might refer to as visual culture and can serve as an accessible point of entry for understanding what, in the mid-1990s, became known among scholars of rhetoric and composition as the burgeoning subdiscipline of visual rhetoric.1 “Ways of Seeing” is perhaps most well-known, at least among those who have taught the essay in their first-year composition courses, for its ability to prompt discussions about how we see based on what we know. That is, our prior knowledge, cultural contexts, and learned assumptions about the world around us influence our interpretations of visual artifacts like, as Berger argues, paintings and photographs and, as this book will soon discuss, physical sites and material artifacts such as parks, green spaces, and public monuments. In the well-known quotation that opens the essay, Berger emphasizes the prevalence of the visual within society when writes that “seeing comes before words” (7). Rather than create a binary between word and image, he sees an ongoing interplay between them: “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” (7). While this book starts from the point of assuming a wider array of devices than just words to help “explain the world”—again, public monuments, cartographic representations, and even multimodal devices like the GPS are all artifacts that help us interpret and explain the world and, as we will see, are themselves products of visual culture—Berger’s larger point is well-received and holds true today: the relationship between what we see and what we know is always shifting and is a product of changing cultural contexts, public understanding, and modes of human communication. Thus, what Berger alludes to here is in fact a working definition of what may be understood as visual culture.

As visual rhetoric scholar Cara A. Finnegan notes, there are many ways to understand the concept of visual culture, but broadly construed, it “recognizes that visuality frames our experience and acknowledges ‘that vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication as fundamental and widespread as language’” (“Recognizing Lincoln” 62). Visual rhetoric then draws on visual culture to consider the ways in which rhetorical action is “enacted primarily through visual means, made meaningful through culturally derived ways of looking and seeing and endeavoring to influence diverse publics” (Olson et al. 3). Visual rhetoric is likewise attuned to the many persuasive components of visual artifacts and how they function relative to specific audiences, or the social contexts that shape how such artifacts might be interpreted by their viewer. Berger’s focus in “Ways of Seeing,” for example, is largely on the assumptions that viewers bring to their interpretation of a given work of art. Through his analysis of two portraits created by the painter Frans Hals, Berger argues that works of art can serve to obscure or revise history, as viewers bring their own learned assumptions to bear on interpretations of these visual objects. When we interpret works of art or other visual artifacts based on our own learned assumptions about “beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste, etc.,” he writes, we perpetuate what he calls an obscuring or “mystification” of the image, one that may work to distance the viewer from the artifact’s original meaning or context (Berger 11). Moreover, images are invariably reproduced over time (for example, in advertisements or photographs, or in sculptures or on websites). On the one hand, reproductions and appropriations make famous works of art accessible to the public. On the other hand, because those reproductions tend to manifest mostly in advertising images and in the mass media, they not only perpetuate capitalism, as Richards and David suggest in their discussion of “Ways of Seeing,” but also create a sort of mystification that distances viewers from the work’s original context and meaning (7). As social understandings continue to change, our interpretations of that which was originally represented by the image will likewise continue to shift.

The shifting interpretations that these visual artifacts can help perpetuate, then, have varied consequences. For, as Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites note, popular media and the arts (specifically photojournalism, as they discuss) “can extend an essential but imperfect capacity for connecting with and caring for others”; to do so, however, “they have to be capable of being misleading or misused” (92). As Hariman and Lucaites describe of iconic photographs, and as I also suggest can be the case, though to different ends, with visual and material artifacts such as cartographic representations, green spaces, and public monuments,

[t]hey provide models for action and assurances that we need not lose what we value most. Ultimately, they function as evidence of things unseen, referring not just to what has past but to what always is outside of our given frame of perception. Whether such images will serve the ends of mystification [. . .] or movement towards a better life they cannot themselves represent, remains to be seen. (92)

As I hope to show in this book, our perceptions of visual and material artifacts and the interpretations that such artifacts help foster can have varied consequences not only on our understandings of history but also on our individual, lived experiences and for broader societal issues such as legislation and policy-making. To understand visual artifacts (like photographs and maps) or physical sites (like green spaces and public monuments) as able to shape our understanding of the world around us means understanding these artifacts as rhetorical, or as Carole Blair has put it, as “partisan, meaningful, and influential,” to the extent that they have the capacity for consequence, have the ability to persuade, and may influence our interpretations and understandings of specific contexts in ways that impact both the mind and body (Blair and Michel, “Commemorating” 72). Rhetorical criticism is typically concerned with the study of text and discourse in order to achieve “a greater understanding of human action” (Segal 2). To account also for the visual and material within rhetorical criticism then involves two main components: first, as Finnegan argues in “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual,” we must understand the visual and textual and, as this book will soon argue, the material, not from the point of their distinction but from the point of their interplay; second, we must understand visual and, again, material rhetorics “as something more than merely a genre category or product.” That is, on the one hand, a photograph or map would count as an artifact of visual rhetoric because “it consists of non-textual or non-discursive features.” On the other hand, to understand the photo or map in this way not only serves to perpetuate a visual-verbal divide, but may also be viewed as subordinating visual rhetoric to broader studies of text and discourse, which then get to count as “just rhetoric.” To account for a more inclusive understanding of the artifacts of rhetorical criticism, Finnegan suggests that we “conceptualize visual rhetoric as a mode of inquiry, defined as a critical and theoretical orientation that makes issues of visuality relevant to rhetorical theory.” As such, she says, the “visual rhetoric project would urge us to explore our understandings of visual culture in light of the questions of rhetorical theory, and at the same time encourage us to (re)consider aspects of rhetorical theory” relative to the new challenges brought about through analyses of visual artifacts. Projects of visual rhetoric would then understand visual culture as able “to illuminate the complex dynamics of power and knowledge at play in and around images”; they would also understand the “complexities of the relationships between images and texts” as opening up rather than closing off interpretive possibilities (Finnegan, “Rhetorical History” 198). As I will soon discuss in more depth, it is a task of this book to show how material and multimodal rhetorical artifacts are also implicated in the projects of visual rhetoric, and subsequently, to illuminate a more inclusive understanding of the projects of visual rhetoric through what I will call visual-material rhetorical analysis.

Before moving forward, however, it is necessary to better explain what we mean by “the projects of visual rhetoric” in the first place, or how we might apply an understanding of visual rhetoric as a mode or project of inquiry. To do so, I highlight two such projects stemming from the recent work of Finnegan and Hariman and Lucaites, who focus primarily on the visual genre of photography, arguably one of the genres most readily associated with studies of visual rhetoric.2 I should note that my aim here is not necessarily to provide an extensive review of scholarship in visual rhetoric, nor is it to paint an overly narrow picture of what studies of visual rhetoric ought to resemble. Rather, I am interested in describing for the reader who is perhaps less familiar with the subdiscipline some clear ideas about what approaches to visual rhetoric might entail or what it might mean to understand visual rhetoric as a mode of inquiry. Namely, Finnegan’s study of Abraham Lincoln and what she calls image vernaculars, and Hariman and Lucaites’s work with iconic photographs, engage nicely the components necessary for understanding visual rhetoric as more than a product or mere genre category. Thus, a general understanding of the goals of their work and what visual rhetoric projects can “look” like will help provide a more solid foundation or schema for discussing visual rhetoric, thereby allowing the reader to build on that understanding when, following these initial discussions, I will situate visual rhetoric more specifically in terms of its relationship to studies of space, place, and cartography and describe its more material and embodied components.

Using the tools of rhetoric and informed by understandings of visual culture, Finnegan analyzes the earliest known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, a daguerreotype that dates to the 1840s and was later published in McClure’s magazine in 1895. To carry out her analysis, she says, “requires careful, situated investigation of the social, cultural, and political work that visual communication is meant to do” (“Recognizing Lincoln” 62). She situates the rare photo of an uncharacteristically well-coifed, youthful-looking, head-to-shoulders portrait of Lincoln in what she calls the “image vernaculars of late nineteenth-century visual culture” (“Recognizing” 62). Doing so allows her to fulfill the three main criteria of a visual rhetoric project. First, by understanding image vernaculars as “enthymematic modes of reasoning employed by audiences in the context of specific practices of reading and viewing in visual cultures” (“Recognizing Lincoln” 62–3), she is able to understand the artifacts of visual culture “in light of the questions of rhetorical theory,” while simultaneously situating rhetorical theory relative to analyses of visual artifacts (“Rhetorical History” 198).3 This approach then paves the way for fulfillment of the subsequent criteria of the visual rhetoric project. That is, next, Finnegan’s analytical approach “illuminate[s] the complex dynamics of power and knowledge at play in and around images” (“Rhetorical History” 198) by revealing that readers’ overwhelming responses to the daguerreotype reproduction in McClure’s “tapped into myths about Lincoln circulating in the late nineteenth century” (“Recognizing” 62). Based on their understandings of photography at the time and interpretations of the “‘scientific’ discourses of character such as physiognomy and phrenology,” readers felt comfortable analyzing the physical qualities of the Lincoln they saw in the photo (“Recognizing” 62). They then recognized these traits as evidence of his moral character and used the photo “to elaborate an Anglo-Saxon national ideal at a time when elites were consumed by fin-de-siecle anxieties about the fate of ‘American’ identity” (“Recognizing” 62). Finnegan again invokes the tools of rhetoric when acknowledging that, “in the nineteenth century, portraits were thought to be ekphrastic—that is, they were thought to reveal or bring before the eyes something vital and almost mysterious about their subjects” (“Recognizing” 68). By juxtaposing her analysis of the history of how the image itself came to be reproduced and published in McClure’s with a historically and socially contextualized analysis of readers’ written responses to the photo, Finnegan demonstrates how the complex interplay of image and text can open up new possibilities for the creation of rhetorical histories, one that “illustrat[es] how visual rhetoric constitutes a powerful world-making discourse” and a viable mode of inquiry (“Recognizing Lincoln” 74).

Hariman and Lucaites’s extensive work with iconic photographs provides additional examples of visual rhetorical analysis that speak to Finnegan’s criteria for the visual rhetoric project. Specifically, their analysis of the photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima and its subsequent reproduction in society, as well as its echoes in the more recent image of the three firefighters raising the American flag after the events of September 11, 2001 not only provides a helpful example of important work in visual rhetoric but also allows us to transition into a discussion of the material and spatial components of visual rhetoric.

Like Finnegan, Hariman and Lucaites are concerned with the ways in which visual artifacts draw upon, communicate, and reproduce social knowledge. More specifically, they are concerned with the connections between iconic photographs and the shaping of public opinion and specific events, not only during the time of a particular photo’s publication but over the course of its subsequent reception within society (11). They define the photojournalistic icon as “those photographic images appearing in print, electronic, or digital media that are widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significant events, activate strong emotional identification or response, and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics” (Hariman and Lucaites 27). While they note on the one hand that “few images meet these criteria” (27) and thus provide detailed rationale for the set of images they choose to analyze in No Caption Needed, all of which they feel have had “distinctive influence on public opinion,” they also acknowledge that “claims regarding influence are notoriously difficult to prove,” and thus leave the door open for further identification and analysis of iconic imagery (7). Their study of the iconic photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising, which they see as “unquestionably the most popular image of World War II,” exemplifies and fulfills the criteria for visual rhetoric projects (Hariman and Lucaites 21).

Hariman and Lucaites understand the Iwo Jima photo, which depicts six U.S. soldiers raising the American flag at the top of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima, relative to the questions of rhetorical studies when they analyze the photo’s composition, its appropriation over time, and its reproduction within popular media. Similar to Finnegan’s work with the Lincoln photograph, they begin by contextualizing the photo’s original publication on February 25, 1945 on the front page of newspapers nationwide (93). They then go on to describe how the photo’s meaning has shifted over time and across generations (105). In the original photo, they eloquently analyze the significance of the men’s poses and the meaning conveyed through the photo’s visual composition of their coordinated efforts to plant the flag pole in the ground atop Mount Suribachi:

There is a palpable harmony to the bodies as they strain together in the athleticism of physical work. Although the poses shift from being bent close to the ground to bearing a load to lifting upwards, one can draw a horizontal line across their belt lines, their knees all move together as if marching in step, all their physical energy flows along their common line of sight to the single point of impact in the earth. [. . .] We see the sure coordination of bodies with each other and with an instrument dedicated to their task. (Hariman and Lucaites 96)

Through their visual analysis of the image, Hariman and Lucaites are able to attribute its iconic power to “the combination of historical setting, visual transparency, and selfless action” (97). The complexity of the photo’s power, they feel, is rooted in the “three codes of American public culture” conveyed through its composition (97). The anonymous but collective work ethic of the men working together conveys a sense of egalitarianism, while the flag raising conveys a sense of nationalism in its symbolism of “the nation’s sacrifice and victory in World War II” (97). Finally, the “photo as a whole has the aesthetic quality of a sculpture” (97) thus affording it with a sense of civic republicanism; that is, the photo’s monumental or sculpture-like quality affords it with the commemorative function often associated with public monuments and art installations, many of which represent civic virtue or political successes (101). In fact, as Hariman and Lucaites note, Congress later passed a bill subsidizing a memorial based on the photo; the memorial was unveiled in 1954 and resides outside Arlington National Cemetery (94).

The Iwo Jima photo’s “compositional richness” (98) helps account for its subsequent appropriations within society over time. Like an original photograph or visual artifact, reproductions and appropriations of original works rely on social knowledge and reflect shifting contexts, and so the study of appropriations or reproductions that involve “copying, imitating, [or] satirizing” can make important contributions to visual rhetoric projects. Moreover, like the Iwo Jima Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, appropriations need not take the form of solely textual media or visual photographs—they may involve sculpture, public art installations, or other forms of memorializing. While some reproductions retain the direct meaning of the original, as does the Iwo Jima Memorial, for example, others may stray from the original relationship between image and context, arguably creating a mystification of sorts. One of the more recent indirect appropriations of the Iwo Jima photo, for example, occurred just following the events of September 11, 2001, when reporter Thomas E. Franklin shot the now-iconic photo of the three firefighters raising the flag at ground zero.4

Aptly described by Hariman and Lucaites as a “profoundly visual event,” the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. were immediately followed by a huge, multimodal media response that served as a “direct and comprehensive emotional response to the event,” joining “images of the destruction with depictions of the emotional reactions of ordinary people” (128). These large scale visual representations of responses to the disaster helped portray and constitute the public “as a unified nation whose civic virtue guaranteed triumph over disaster” (Hariman and Lucaites 128). One outcome of these visual narrative representations was that, by the close of the week, as Hariman and Lucaites put it, “a nationwide flag mania was underway” (128).

The public was soon inundated with images of the American flag both in the media and in everyday life; these images came to represent “fear and anger” on the one hand, and instances of patriotism and “civic pride” on the other (128). Soon, a photographic icon emerged from these images: that of the three firefighters raising the U.S. flag at the site of what was just formerly the World Trade Center. The public immediately recognized the image as reminiscent of the Iwo Jima photo. Even Thomas Franklin, the photographer who took the photo, saw the firefighters raising the flag “and thought, ‘Iwo Jima’” (Hill and Helmers 5). As Charles Hill and Marguerite Helmers describe, this photo demonstrates an instance of intertextuality, “the recognition and referencing of images from one scene to another” (5). Appropriations, for example, rely on intertextuality for their reception and tap into social knowledge in their ability to construct connections from one context to another. While the photo of the firefighters is now officially referred to as “Ground Zero Spirit,” a version of the image was initially captioned by People magazine as “‘an echo of Iwo Jima’” (Hariman and Lucaites 131). Like the Iwo Jima photo, say Hariman and Lucaites, the firefighters in the photo are “dominated by their anonymity and working class norms of hard physical labor, self-sacrifice, and loyalty” (132). In addition, like the Iwo Jima photo, the flag pole “cuts across the frame on the same diagonal [. . .] while the flag itself is moved upward by coordinated effort” (133). The background is bleak and empty and, like the Iwo Jima photo, the image itself does not depict war in progress, though “precipitating events and surrounding discourse might suggest otherwise” (133). While the context has shifted, the result is again the reflection of the American codes of public culture: “egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic republicanism” (Hariman and Lucaites 133). On the one hand, while a pervasive symbol such as the American flag carries with it particular “ideological formations such as nationalism,” it is also open to appropriation and serves not only as a means for perpetuating a particular normative mode but also allows for “inflection and critique” (135). Finnegan describes the way in which viewers bring their own contexts to bear on the interpretation of images. Likewise, one goal of Hariman and Lucaites’s discussion of the Ground Zero photo is to show how iconic photographs, rather than adhering to a “fixed meaning,” function as malleable resources that invite the public to construct connections and “coordinate available structures of identification within a performative space open to continued and varied articulation” (135).

Moreover, these articulations and appropriations need not be purely or traditionally visual in nature, and need not take the form of solely print media or photographs. That is, just as the Iwo Jima Memorial emerged as a direct appropriation of the original photo, following the emergence of the iconic Ground Zero Spirit photo, “there was an immediate call to establish a memorial park at ground zero in Manhattan that would include a statue of the firefighters raising the flag” (Hariman and Lucaites 129). Certainly, the events of September 11 set into effect their own course of memorializing.

In the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, the public witnessed and participated in various acts of memorializing that spanned modes of visual and material representation. Such activities included the creation of makeshift memorial spaces constructed by citizens, media documentaries and reports, and other objects of print and popular media. As L.J. Nicoletti describes, we were “consuming political rhetoric and visual forms of memorialization as never before” (56). To help her first-year writing students cope with the events of September 11 and respond to the types of memorialization they were witnessing in the mass media, for example, she developed an assignment in which her students designed their own memorials, thus enabling them to take part in what she calls the “language of memorial spaces” (56). While this is not a book about the rhetorics of public memory per se, it is clear that an interest in memorializing or commemoration often serves as a catalyst for the creation of many public sculptures, exhibits, and other multimodal displays or artifacts. When planning their own memorials in response to the events of September 11, for example, Nicoletti asked her students to consider design components such as “symbolism, setting, audience, scale, permanence, and inscription,” thus reflecting the idea that appropriation, intertextuality, and social knowledge are important components of commemoration (56). Moreover, the consideration of design elements such as scale and permanence speaks to the physicality and spatiality of rhetorical artifacts that are not only visual but also material in composition. Visual artifacts that are also tangible and spatial, and invite engagement not only with the mind but with the whole body, can then be understood as objects of material rhetoric.

Like projects of visual rhetoric, material rhetoric seeks to understand physical artifacts and sites such as memorials, parks, or green spaces, and even multimodal artifacts such as the GPS in the context of the questions of rhetorical theory, while also reconsidering rhetorical theory relative to the challenges brought about by the study of materially rhetorical artifacts. Like the projects of visual rhetoric, material rhetoric too seeks to uncover the power and knowledge dynamics related to the study of rhetorical artifacts that incorporate visual, textual, physical, spatial, or other multimodal components. The relationship between these different generic modes is likewise seen as inviting new interpretive possibilities. Finally, building on those criteria of visual rhetoric projects, and fully compatible with them, material rhetoric seeks to more explicitly understand the influence of rhetoric on the body.

As chapter two describes in more depth, material rhetorical analysis has at its core a focus on the impact of rhetorical artifacts on contextualized, bodily experience. Carole Blair’s approach to understanding material rhetoric, one that underpins much of the work of this book, provides a toolkit for analyzing visual texts that also have material and spatial components. In her landmark essay and important project of material rhetoric, “U.S. Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality,” she begins from the point of acknowledging that within the field of rhetoric, “we lack an idiom for referencing talk, writing, or even inscribed stone as material”—that we struggle with “the lack of a materialist language about discourse” (17). To better understand rhetoric’s materiality, she examines five memorial sites: the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Civil Rights Memorial, Kent State University’s May 4 Memorial, and the Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial.

Within the context of her study of these five memorials, which she sees as “not necessarily representative of all memorials” but rather as able to reveal unique ideas about material rhetoric, Blair poses five questions that help to redefine what counts as a text (24). She asks, for example: “(1) What is the significance of the text’s material existence? (2) What are the apparatuses and degrees of durability of displayed by the text? (3) What are the text’s modes or possibilities of reproduction or preservation? (4) What does the text do to (or with, or against) other texts? (5) How does the text act on people?” (30). Blair describes the ways in which a text’s physical composition will affect its durability, vulnerability, and possibilities for modes of preservation and reproduction. She compares, for example, the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) with the relative vulnerability of the fabric of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and the types of spaces engendered by the types of interactions that each invites. She also describes also how the use of black granite has become appropriated and has subsequently been reproduced indirectly in other memorials. For instance, to best understand the Kent State Memorial (KSM), it is first necessary to know that the VVM is composed of black granite. At the KSM, visitors follow a prescribed path of black granite into the memorial. The black granite composition of the KSM implicitly describes the shootings as embedded within the context of the Vietnam War. The physical composition of the VVM, then, not only becomes prerequisite knowledge for understanding the KSM but also encourages an intertextual reading of it. Similar to the intertextual relationships between visual texts, such as that of the Iwo Jima and Ground Zero photos, one consequence of the appropriation of physical features of material texts is that they begin to develop their own textual and intertextual identities over time. Blair describes how our reading and bodily experience of material texts can shape our perceptions of the events they represent in ways that allow for a fuller understanding of the consequences of these events on the mind and body. By exploring the material aspects of a text’s durability, modes of reproduction, and visibility, Blair not only implicitly builds on the goals of visual rhetoric projects but also taps into the materialist language about discourse that has for so long been a missing component of rhetorical analysis.

The study of visual rhetoric, then, when also understood in light of the questions posed by material rhetorical analysis, has the potential to help illuminate the spatial components of texts, places, and other physical artifacts. The idea of a rhetorical approach that merges visuality and spatiality is greatly appealing, for as someone particularly attentive to the intersections of rhetoric and geography, I have often understood visual and material artifacts largely through both a rhetorical and a geographical lens—as discursive objects that facilitate spatial understanding, are situated in time and space, and make important claims to knowledge. 5 Again, visual and material artifacts may include physical sites such as factories, public monuments, or art installations that function commemoratively to reflect or perform particular cultural moments, often guiding both the mind and body toward specific interpretations. They can also include multimodal technological devices such as global positioning systems (GPS), which, through their physicality, use of audio and visual cues, and the cartographic texts they produce, can function rhetorically to make specific knowledge claims, influence bodily practices, or guide movements and decision-making. To understand visual rhetoric as also concerned with studies of space, the body, and materiality will, as I argue in this book, allow us to more fully understand the broader implications and consequences of the rhetorical work of visual artifacts in the world. In short, it will allow for a more inclusive understanding of the sort of work that projects of visual rhetoric can accomplish.

In this book, I aim to cast a brighter light on the important connections between visual rhetoric, material rhetoric, space, and bodies, in order to show the value of these connections within and beyond the field of rhetoric; ultimately, I aim to create a unique space for material rhetorics along the spectrum of what I envision to be a visual-material rhetoric. Again, when I refer here to rhetoric, I am describing the idea that texts, artifacts, and discourses are “partisan, meaningful, and influential,” to the extent that they have the capacity for consequence and may influence our understandings of specific contexts in ways that impact both the mind and body (Blair 72, “Reading”). Compatible with this notion, material rhetoric considers the text from the perspective of its relative durability and reproducibility, its ability to work with and against other texts, and most important, its ability to understand space and place as rhetorical and as affecting both the mind and body.

When I use the terms space and place in this book, I borrow from Michel de Certeau’s ideas about how a particular space is composed of mobile elements that are in constant motion and relationship with each other. Subsequently, the interactions of texts, artifacts, bodies, and discourses within that space constitute a more specific sense of place as they move and interact with and against each other within particular contexts and configurations. Given this understanding, place may be viewed as happening within a space. Place, writes de Certeau, “is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions” (117). For example, the parks and public commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts (the object of focus in chapter three of this book), may foster a specific sense of place largely because of the interpretation invited by their layout and constituted by the activities and movements of park visitors. Likewise, specific representations of the park as performed through the park map, or the features deployed within the map, may also be seen as constructing a more nuanced version of a place. To view a space as rhetorical, then, is to acknowledge the capacity for consequence borne out of the interaction of the texts, artifacts, bodies, and discourses deployed within it, and the sense of place engendered by those interactions. With these ideas in mind, this book progresses along a contextual continuum that explores and tests the value of visual-material rhetorics from three interconnected perspectives: that of the human body, the posthuman body, and the nonhuman body.

In chapter one, I begin by telling the story of visual rhetoric largely from the perspectives of geography and space. Specifically, I see visual rhetoric through the lens of critical cartography, a subdiscipline of cartography that sees geographic knowledge as tied to power relations, and understands mapping and the practices of visuality as informed by cultural contexts (Crampton and Krygier 11). Here, I situate visual rhetoric as able to help account for the spatial dimensions of texts, and I subsequently describe my understanding of space as rhetorical. I describe more specifically how maps function as rhetorical artifacts. Then, in order to better contextualize the intersections of visual rhetoric and critical cartography, I provide a brief analysis of Photo AS17–148–22727 (commonly referred to as photo 22727), the famous NASA photo of the whole earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972. As a visual artifact that functions as both iconic photograph and cartographic representation, an analysis of photo 22727 helps pave the road for a discussion of how visual rhetoric can be more attentive to the relationships between materiality, space, and the body. I then move on to identify some possible limitations in an understanding of visual rhetoric that does not explicitly consider a text’s influence on the body, and thus call for a mode of interaction with the text that more explicitly does so. Within the context of this call to action, I introduce Blair’s theory of material rhetoric in more detail and Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, and I understand their ideas as providing a point of entry into a more embodied approach to visual-material rhetorics. As Katherine Hayles describes the concept, embodiment understands bodily experience as imbricated in and shaped by specific social, cultural, and temporal contexts (Posthuman). Because contextual experiences shape and perpetuate ways of knowing, embodiment may also be understood as contributing to embodied knowledge, or ways of knowing and discursive practices that are informed, perpetuated, and sustained by contextualized, bodily experience.

In chapter two, I take a closer look at discussions related more specifically to material rhetoric, situating among them Blair’s (1999) theory of material rhetoric and Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopias. Briefly put, a heterotopia may be understood as a heterogeneous, contested space that nonetheless includes identifying characteristics specific to that space. For example, the maps, green spaces, and sculptures at the Lowell Mills National Historical Park work with and against each other to represent and perform specific moments in Lowell’s history. Combining and extending the theoretical approaches of Blair and Foucault not only allows for an emphasis on spatiality as the common thread linking visual and material rhetorics, but also provides the foundation for what I then call a visual-material rhetorical approach, one that not only accounts for the multimodal, spatially-situated artifact but is also mindful of its impact on the embodied subject. With these ideas in mind, the following three chapters work to better understand how a visual-material rhetorical approach that accounts for embodiment can illuminate the rhetorical situation, or more pointedly, how conceiving of visual-material artifacts as rhetorical and embodied reveals a more nuanced understanding of the particular moments, events, and debates—and the consequences of each—that these artifacts set out to represent.

In chapter three, I account for the impact of visual-material rhetorics on contextualized, bodily experience. I draw from a combination of observation, interviewing, and archival research to conduct a visual-material rhetorical analysis of the maps, wayfinding devices, green spaces, and public commemorative sculptures at the Lowell Mills Park. The chapter not only demonstrates how the park’s spatially-focused, cultural artifacts engage visitors and facilitate their navigational decision-making, but also how these artifacts reflect and perform the impacts of the mills on the lives of the Mill Girls who labored there in the early 1800s. I demonstrate how a visual-material rhetorical approach can help create room for more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the contexts in which these women lived and worked, thereby allowing audiences to engage with greater empathy in the lives and struggles of tangential groups, such as, in this case, the lives of the Mill Girls.

In chapter four, I again explore the ways in which visual-material rhetorics can help account for contextualized, embodied experience, this time considering the rhetorical actions of drivers who navigate their routes with the assistance of GPS devices. Drawing on interviews with GPS users, I explore the ways in which GPS technology helps mediate particular experiences, or how GPS users work with and against the technology to make purposeful decisions that sometimes foster, and sometimes constrain spatial understanding. In this sense, I see visual-material rhetorics as able to function in the service of advocacy—to function rhetorically in such a way that enhances informed decision-making and influences our capacity to understand our worlds. A visual-material rhetorical approach helps reveal the processes that shape these levels of interaction and their implications for the technologically-mediated, posthuman body. Hayles writes that we ought to understand the posthuman body as able to interact with information technologies without necessarily being seduced into “fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality”—that we must understand modes of being as inextricably linked to the material world (Posthuman 5). Likewise, for Collin Brooke, a posthuman rhetoric entails “a return to embodied information, [and] involves a revaluing of partiality” (791). Moreover, I would add that understandings of the posthuman body and the idea of a posthuman rhetoric need not be constrained solely to the consequences of rhetorical action on human animals. For, as Cary Wolfe notes, our understanding of the posthuman is also tied to larger issues of “nonhuman modes of being” (193). Given these views, then, understandings of the posthuman body may extend beyond human ways of knowing to the consequences of rhetorical action on nonhuman animals such as, for example, marine mammals, as chapter five helps show.

In chapter five, I show how a visual-material rhetorical approach can help advocate for the bodies of nonhuman animals who may otherwise be unable to advocate for themselves within a specific rhetorical context. Set within the context of a recent federal court case between the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), this chapter explores how the map, as an artifact of visual-material rhetoric, can function as a mediating device in policy-making, or as a persuasive tool in debates between institutions. In this case, the map functions rhetorically to illuminate competing knowledge claims about contested space in order to influence a contemporary debate about environmental policy and marine mammal protection, and advocate for nonhuman bodies who cannot be physically present in the setting of the debate. From a rhetorical perspective, then, I understand advocacy both as referring to the ways in which texts, artifacts, and discourses have the potential to promote new knowledge among certain groups or individuals, as well as support or promote the interests of tangential voices, underrepresented groups, or groups who may otherwise be unable to advocate for themselves within the setting of a particular debate.

Finally, chapter six concludes the book by considering how these three cases, when understood together, demonstrate the implications of visual-material rhetorics for the body, the posthuman body, and the nonhuman body. Viewed holistically, I show how these cases and the theories underpinning their analysis help demonstrate how visual-material rhetorics can illuminate the contexts that shape our various lived and embodied experiences. I discuss the implications of visual-material rhetorics for rhetorical analysis and understanding rhetoric as advocacy work, as well as consider future directions for research and undergraduate and graduate pedagogy. Subsequently, as I hope readers will find, visual-material rhetorics, when understood as embodied knowledge, can work across rhetorical situations in the service of advocacy to constitute a sustainable project of inquiry.