Introduction to Visual Rhetoric

If our lives are, as the authors argue, “increasingly dominated by the visual” (p. 1), why is it that we still privilege print so much? Why is it, for instance, that books are still predominantly made up of words and letters?

I think we privilege print for three primary reasons. First, it is a way to record complicated thoughts in a way to aid or influence collective memory. (I swiped this idea from Derrida.) Second, it can promote deeper understanding of those complicated thoughts because it takes time to absorb and process the written word. Finally, it is relatively durable and fairly inexpensive to produce and distribute thanks to the printing press.

On the other hand, the authors claim that “We are thus at a moment in history in which the visual matters more than ever” (p. 1). Do visuals matter more than they did in the past? If so, why?

I do not know that I agree that we are at a point in history where the “visual matters more than ever” (Sturken 1). The visual is perhaps more present than ever. However, the ubiquitous nature of the ‘visual’ does not make it matter more today than in the past. For example, following the Council of Trent (1545-63) and the Catholic Reformation the importance of the visual gained a renewed sense of purpose that was a reaction against the iconoclastic aspects of the Protestant Reformation. The power of the visual messages via painting, sculpture and architecture of the Catholic Church to the illiterate masses was meant to bring wayward sheep back into the fold. Those images are still very powerful to many for various reasons.

Therefore, I would assert that visuals do not matter more than they did in the past but are probably more widely available. I am not convinced that that makes them more ‘powerful.’ I suppose it depends on how you ‘look’ and that is determined by a myriad of factors including culture.

How is culture defined in the introduction? What does culture have to do with visual rhetoric?


Certainly, how one ‘looks’ is filtered by one’s culture. Sturken and Cartwright define culture in several ways. However, I will defer to their italicized form of culture in the anthropological sense. Culture is “ a whole way of life” (Sturken 3). In terms of visual culture, Sturken and Cartwright define it as the shared practices of a group, community, or society through which meanings are made out of the visual, aural, and textual world of representations and the ways that looking practices are engaged in symbolic and communicative activities (Sturken 3). How one ‘looks’ can certainly influence how one uses visual rhetoric.

Citation: Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, Inc. 2009.

Image: Caravaggio, Entombment of Christ, 1602 now at the Vatican in Rome, Italy. http://www.artinthepicture.com/artists/Caravaggio/entombment.jpg