When I was flipping through Book 3, I had to stop immediately and read chapters 10 and 11, which include "Bringing-Before-the-Eyes" in the subtitle.
Of course my immediate thought was in regard to visual rhetoric. In my master's program, the instructor taught the class the old memory trick of memorizing spaces and then populating those spaces with people to help remember both their names and the order they were supposed to appear in. Therefore, I could remember that Bill Clinton appeared in the list of people he gave us just prior to Madonna because I could see Bill Clinton standing in the foyer of my apartment and Madonna just over his shoulder in my living room.
What struck me here, or at least what I was hoping for, was more discussion of how images are tied to memory or how visualization creates knowledge because it enables us to "see" something as a possibility. And seeing is believing.
What I did not expect was the connection between visualization through metaphor and urbanity. On page 219 we have Aristotle arguing that "[urbanity is achieved] by means of bringing-before-the-eyes; for things should be seen as being done rather than as going to be done."
In addition, Kennedy writes that "asteia, 'things of the town,' came to mean good taste, wit, and elegant speech."
"I call those things 'before-the-eyes' that signify things engaged in activity" (222)
"He makes everything move and live, and energeia is motion" (223).
Sorry, just wanted to get those down while I had the pages open. So, if I'm reading this close to correctly, it seems like visuality is valued because it promotes learning. Therefore, visuality through language is associated with good taste and elegant speech. So the ability to conjure images in the minds of an audience was something that was considered the sign of an expert rhetor back in the day?
I wonder what Aristotle would say about the ability to incorporate effective visuals into contemporary presentations.
If only I knew someone who was interested in topics like visual rhetoric, pop culture, and the construction of "good taste....."
Gee Mr. Sura . . . you calling me out there (oh-so-subtly) in your last line (tee hee).
I’m not sure I’m in any way qualified to suggest what Aristotle might think about incorporating visuals into contemporary presentations; I don’t think I could say what he’d even think about doing it during his time (considering the emphasis on oratory).
However, the connection of visuality and learning, and framing it in those terms, is very interesting and likely still in the process of being explored in our field. In some ways, this is close to the ol’ idea that we can’t have thoughts that we don’t have the language for (related to the best reason to teach foreign languages– you can simply think things not always possible in your native language). Can we think something if we can’t visualize it? Not sure: the question strikes me as odd, but I think that makes it interesting too.
I think it’s clear that as we increasingly become an even more visual culture than we are now (genie is out of the box, if you will, and it might be Pandora’s box based on an individual’s proclivities), the ability to persuade by either using visuals or creating visuals in the audience’s mind is going to become increasingly important too. This goes beyond simple value– in many ways it’s an issue of presence and construction. Our current students have lived in a visual, digital, and wired culture since birth. They’ve been constructed to think in images since birth in ways that other generations can’t even imagine (which of course partially creates the value). So for the postmodern rhetor to take advantage of this situation, the skills of rhetoric seem to begin with the rhetor’s own visualization powers. This makes me think of Richard Lanham’s term “attention economy” and his idea that rhetoric and the humanities are more important than ever because attention is the new currency of daily life (i.e. information overload is a myth, people construct a myriad of ways to sift through the info tides based on their own interests). Getting attention is a largely visual act in our current media-saturated environment, so the better visual thinker you can become, the better chance of attention-getting you possess.
As for where “good taste” comes into all this? Well, that probably remains one of the tricker issues. Obviously, I’m not going to go so far to suggest that taste and the “good” are issues that either our instruction or own subject(ed)ivites should be concerned with. Nor would I link the visual to the good or taste. In fact, one of my fears with the direction visual rhetoric study is currently going involves the tendency to be creating a formulaic system just as bad as the ol’ five-paragraph essay dinosaur. If we teach contrast, alignment, hierarchy, whatever, as always good standardized features of a design, aren’t we repeating mistakes of the past in regards to alphabetic texts? Is this visuality promoting learning? As Vitanza might say, nes and yo.
Feel like I barely scratched the surface of the possibilities here, but it’s a start.