How I Explain Visual Rhetoric...

Visual Rhetoric is no simple topic, consisting of several interpretable elements that aid our understanding of what Visual Rhetoric means.One interpretation of rhetoric alone by James J. Murphy states, "A rhetorician is someone who provides his fellows with useful precepts or directions for organizing and presenting his ideas or feeling to them". I particularly like this definition as it encompasses several Visual Rhetoric elements we have studied so far.

First, Murphy's use of feeling applies directly to the term affect, coined by Massumi in The Autonomy of Affect. Affect is the half second between the moment when a person first eyes a visual and the moment a person creates a story of the visual to interpret meaning. Plainly, affect is the physical response that instigates interpretation. Because of the complexity and unique experience for each person, affect is described as the ultimate struggle of language.

Unlike Professor Kyburz, I am a lover of words. That might sound like an extreme statement; in this case, it is not. Upon understanding the term affect, I finally realized why I love words just so much. Writing is the act of continually trying to describe and recreate the feeling of affect through a textual medium. This realization has been my favorite "ah, ha!" moment this semester.

Similar to affect is the idea of punctum, the element that pierces each individual differently. Again, punctum is something a person can not always articulate which is why the attempt through words is so enchanting to me. Documenting the individual interpretation or meaning a visual creates, attempts to capture the physical reaction or the affect. I love this.

Requiring acknowledgement is my least favorite element, studium. Studium is attempting to understand the photographer's intentions. For me picking apart the creation of a visual is interesting, but not as much compared to identifying the physical feeling. Studium looks at the facts of the picture, meaning most viewers will identify.

So, how do I plainly explain Visual Rhetoric, you ask?
Visual Rhetoric is the study of the facts (studium), the individual interpretation (punctum) and the physical feeling (affect) of images. Once these concepts are identified, intentional creation of all three is projected. The viewer becomes the artist.