so i was totally on the same page with tom as i read book 3--the section on bringing-before-the-eyes was really intriguing to me. in part, because i've read a little bit of wittgenstein, barthes, and fleckenstein, all of whom have something to say on the relationship between image and text. they would all argue, i think, that text calls to mind image(s). or that to say the word tree is to call to mind an image of a large plant with a brown trunk, branches, and green leaves. gunther kress argues that language is less precise than images--that language has the potential to call to mind /any/ tree whereas images give an exact image of one specific tree. his argument (the CCCC address from 2006, i think) was contested greatly in computers and composition (or it was at least complicated), but i see his point...
so where does aristotle fit in, is what i thought. what does he see as the relationship between image and text? and, to address mark's question, what does oratory have to do with it?
aristotle focuses on /energeia/, the movement the metaphor brings to the text--or, making the lifeless move. i wonder if this would also lead to movement in the audience? and if we might consider how a moving text--a bringing before the eyes--results in a bodily affect. "urbanities in most cases come through metaphor and from an added surprise; for it becomes clear [to the listener] that he learned something different from what he believed, and his mind seems to say, 'how true and i was wrong." aristotle seems to locate an internal movement--the transfer from one position to the next. is there a point at which we can move into the physical realm?
i liked mark and tom's musings about visual rhetoric--and i just wanted to add that it's easy to forget the body in visual rhetoric. that is, we can't escape our bodies, and during oratory, the presence of the body works as a visual rhetoric, doesn't it? in later years, orators were taught gestures and posturing as part of their training. would we consider this a visual rhetoric, a bodily rhetoric? both?
I hadn't really even made the connection between the movement of the metaphor and the movement of the mind and the movement of the body. And isn't part of persuasion, perhaps mostly in the deliberative sense, to get people to DO something, to get bodies moving in a certain direction.