Rhetorics of Display

By Lawrence J. Prelli

Groundbreaking case studies mapping the rhetoric inherent in acts of presentation and concealment

Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together a distinguished group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasive form of rhetorical activity. Editor Lawrence J. Prelli notes in his introduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. The volume provides an integrated, comprehensive study of the processes of selecting what to reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Surveying major historical transformations in the relationship between rhetoric and display, this book also identifies the leading themes in relevant scholarship of the past three decades.

Seventeen case studies canvass a representative and diverse range of displays—from body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in gambling casinos—and examine the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences. Collectively the contributors shed light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643362793

Book preview

Lawrence J. Prelli

1

Rhetorics of Display An Introduction

This is a book about rhetorics of display. Display evokes commonplace associations about (1) how things look or appear, (2) exhibition or demonstration, and (3) showiness or ostentation.¹ Rhetoric summons similar commonplace associations: rhetoric often is said to deal with appearances rather than reality; to manifest demonstrations and exhibitions of feelings and commitments rather than of reason and sound judgment; and to involve exaggerated style or ostentatious self-display rather than sober presentation of substantial matters for impartial consideration. But these commonplace correspondences obscure the full range of displays that could be said to operate rhetorically—that is, persuasively—when they engage with those who become audience to them. Nor do they enable consideration of how rhetorical or persuasive acts manifest or display how things appear to those addressed. This book opens consideration of the many ways that displays operate rhetorically and that rhetorics enact display. When we suspend the pejorative connotations popularly associated with the words rhetoric and display, we find that much of what appears or looks to us as reality is constituted rhetorically through the multiple displays that surround us, compete for our attention, and make claims upon us.

The chapters in this book together explore a representative and diverse assortment of displays and how they rhetorically manifest the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, or cultures appear before those who become audience to them. Displays are manifested rhetorically through the verbally generated image in speeches and literature. Displays appear rhetorically in sketches, paintings, maps, statistical graphs, photographs, and television and film images. Displays are manifested rhetorically in the homes we inhabit and in the many places we visit—museums and exhibitions, memorials and statuary, parks and cemeteries, casinos and theme parks, neighborhood street corners and stores. Displays are manifested rhetorically in the demonstration of a scientific finding, of a political grievance, of a preferred identity. In whatever manifestation, displays also anticipate a responding audience whose expectations might be satisfied or frustrated, their values and interests affirmed, neglected, or challenged.

Rhetorics of Display is the first book-length work that offers a conceptually focused perspective on rhetorical studies of display. That focus does not mean that the authors share the same theoretical, critical, or methodological approaches in their studies; clearly they do not, but that diversity in approach helps to disclose the richly textured and multifaceted rhetorical workings of displays. But all the studies in this book—as rhetorical studies—presume that the meanings manifested rhetorically through display are functions of particular, situated resolutions of the dynamic between revealing and concealing. Put directly, whatever is revealed through display simultaneously conceals alternative possibilities; therein is display’s rhetorical dimension. Rhetorical analyses of displays proceed from that presumption, probing its situated manifestations, assessing the implications of that which is manifested for those who become audience to it. Whether constituted through vocal enunciation, textual inscription, visual portrayal, material structure, enacted performance, or some combination, rhetorical study of displays proceeds from the central idea that whatever they make manifest or appear is the culmination of selective processes that constrain the range of possible meanings available to those who encounter them.

One of the claims of this book is that rhetorics of display are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture and, thus, have become the dominant rhetoric of our time. Attempts to relate rhetoric and display certainly did not originate with this book. The history of the communication arts can be read as a series of transformations in how rhetoric is associated with and dissociated from display in thought and practice. I make no pretense of giving an exhaustive account of that history in this introduction, but in the first of three sections, I want to offer a series of historical exhibits or vignettes—displays, if you will—that exemplify some of the distinctive attempts to draw and redraw that relationship in rhetorical theorizing and practice. From that exhibition, the chapters included in this book and related current scholarship in rhetorical studies appear within a wider perspective that underscores some of the distinctive—as well as not so distinctive—features of how rhetoric and display are related and studied in our times. The second section of the introduction articulates the central themes that together offer a comprehensive perspective on contemporary rhetorical studies of display. Ongoing scholarly projects and lines of inquiry in contemporary rhetorical studies coalesce around these articulated themes and, thus, imply strongly that rhetorics of display could very well be the dominant rhetoric of our day. The introduction ends with a third section that previews this book’s chapters in relation to the themes elucidated in the second section.

Rhetoric and Display: Some Historical Vignettes

The rhetoric of display is an idea of ancient lineage, traceable to the Greek word deiktikos, which meant exhibit, show forth, make known; it is the opposite of the verb conceal. According to Aristotle, the rhetoric of display was one of two ways of exhibiting or making known. Richard McKeon, philosopher and historian of rhetoric, explained that Aristotle modified the verb deiktikos to form the words apodeiktikos and epideiktikos and, thus, to distinguish logical and rhetorical forms of showing forth.² Apodeictic meant show forth from or by, as in the demonstration of a well-ordered scientific proof. Epideictic meant show forth on or for, as in the disclosure of a person’s virtue through an eloquent ceremonial speech.³ The manifestations of rhetorical display were thus separated from demonstrative processes of making known through scientific proving.

Many students of classical rhetoric associated Aristotle’s discussion of display oratory in his Rhetoric with amusement or diversion; epideictic showing forth became rhetorical showing off through stylistic ostentation and verbal self-display. From that vantage, the rhetoric of display paled in public significance when compared with the oratory of politics and of law. Lawrence W. Rosenfield, critic of rhetoric and aesthetics, deepened appreciation of the rhetoric of display when he explained that the term epideixis (to shine or show forth) does not mean mere display, as though orators simply were exhibiting their skills; rather, it means making manifest or highlighting the fleeting appearance of excellence in human experience that otherwise would remain unnoticed or invisible.⁴ At its best, epideictic calls for collective acknowledgment of virtue’s presence; it acts to unshroud … notable deeds in order to let us gaze at the aura glowing from within.⁵ The orator’s task is not to demonstrate or prove virtue but, through verbal ornament and stylistic embellishment, to set an example of excellence for listeners to behold and take heed of its meaning.⁶ Those who behold excellence Aristotle aptly called witnesses (theoroi).⁷ They are called to gaze upon the reality of excellence disclosed through the exemplary instances manifested before them and, through intensified awareness and contemplation, undergo an epiphany or otherwise draw inspiration from the epideictic encounter.⁸ According to Rosenfield’s reading, Aristotle’s epideictic is oratory of paramount civic importance since it commands members of a community to join together in thoughtful acknowledgment, celebration, and commemoration of that which is best in human experience.⁹

Aristotle’s sharp distinction between rhetorical display and logical proof collapsed in the writings of Roman rhetoricians who called epideictic demonstrative oratory and thus signaled the intermingling of qualities of proving—making known from or by—with rhetorical display—showing forth on or for. According to McKeon, Cicero’s demonstrative oratory of praising virtue (laudatio) and censuring vice (vitupera) merged the certainties and necessities of proof with the estimations and necessities of action.¹⁰ Quintilian later puzzled over this shift from epideictic to demonstrative, wondering how Roman writers derived demonstration from the Greek epideictic, which meant display rather than demonstration, and then applied it to the narrower category of laudatio, which the Greeks called encomium. He speculated that the terminological change was not, in fact, derived from the Greek but was a Roman innovation: "But it may be that Romans are not borrowing from the Greek when they apply the title demonstrative, but are merely led to do so because praise and blame demonstrate the nature of the object with which they are concerned."¹¹ Thus, we might surmise that Roman laudatio demonstrates a person’s praise-worthiness by or from conventional understandings of life’s values and virtues. As Gerard Hauser argues, display oratory became for the Romans a special mode of proof, though they did not go so far as to consider the demonstrations of scientific proving as rhetorical displays.¹²

Jeffrey Walker details an alternative sophistic view of epideictic in Greco-Roman antiquity that extended the range of rhetorical display beyond the oratory of public ceremony to encompass all discourses that shape the beliefs and desires constituting a culture.¹³ His perspective is based partly on the sophistic theory of Hermogenes of Tarsus, who broadened panegyric to include not only epideictic speeches but also the literary discourses of philosophy, history, and poetry.¹⁴ That broadening meshes nicely with Aristotle’s distinction between two kinds of audience function. The discourse of pragmatikon—the oratory of politics and of law—is addressed to an audience of kritai, or decision makers, who are empowered through direct public action—such as a vote—to decide whether to enact a policy or a law, whether to convict those accused of crimes, or whether a particular penalty is just. The discourse of epideiktikon is addressed to an audience of theoroi, or observers, who are not called upon to cast votes but, according to Walker, to form opinions about and in response to the discourse presented.¹⁵ Epideictic thus functions as a "suasive ‘demonstration,’ display, or showing forth (epideixis) of things, leading an audience of theoroi to contemplation (theoria), possible insight, and to formation of opinions and desires on matters of philosophical, social, ethical, and cultural concern."¹⁶ As Walker explains it:

Epideictic appears as that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives; it shapes the ideologies and imageries with which, and by which, the individual members of a community identify themselves; and, perhaps more significantly, it shapes the fundamental grounds, the deep commitments and presuppositions, that will underlie and ultimately determine decision and debate in particular pragmatic forums. As such, epideictic suasion is not limited to the reinforcement of existing beliefs and ideologies or to merely ornamental displays of clever speech (though clearly it can serve such purposes as well). Epideictic can also work to challenge or transform conventional beliefs—plainly the purposes of Plato’s dialogues, Isocrates’ panegyrics, what remains of Gorgias’s epideictics (particularly Helen and the surviving paraphrases of On the Nonexistent), and the sophistic or Protagorean practice of antilogy that is parodied in the speech of Lysias in Plato’s Phaedrus. All such discourses, again, are epideictic according to the late-sophistic theory of Hermogenes of Tarsus, and according to the definition I am emphasizing here. When conceived in positive terms and not simply in terms of lack, epideictic discourse reveals itself … as the central and indeed fundamental mode of rhetoric in human culture.¹⁷

For Walker, then, epideictic cannot be relegated to secondary importance or dismissed as mere display relative to the rhetoric of practical civic business because the discourses of epideiktikon constitute the very grounds of culture upon which the much narrower discourses of pragamatikon depend.¹⁸

The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Renaissance humanists offer a view of epideictic as aesthetic, moralizing display. Epideictic poets and orators advanced conventional moral standards of civic humanism by adducing images, patterns, or examples of virtue ornamented to please audiences aesthetically, move their sentiments, and, perhaps, induce them to emulate exemplified deeds in their own civic conduct.¹⁹ According to Rosenfield, this kind of epideictic readily is seen as display oratory in the sense wrongly attributed to Aristotle’s original formulation. The poet or orator could presuppose dogmatic assumptions about right moral conduct as they exhibited their artistic talents in richly detailed examples that comported with received standards of decorum. Aesthetic execution of conventional moralizing exemplars thus became the central focus of rhetorical display—rather than disclosing quite unconventional, extraordinary manifestations of excellence—with the corollary expectation that audiences would register their pleasure by bestowing praise (or blame) upon the artists in accord with the perceived virtuosity of their performances.²⁰

This transformation in epideictic is part of a larger shift in thought signaled by Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura (1435) and its first systematic presentation of fixed-point perspective. Alberti showed how excellent artistic execution brought a profusion of details into proportionate, ordered, visual perspective. The science of perspective that Alberti explained not only permeated the Renaissance arts but also presaged the stance of detached observer so central to the emergence of modernist sciences. Alberti’s elaboration of fixed-point perspective and other components of the painter’s art invites a view of the artist as a detached but self-conscious and shrewd observer of how things that are seen appear. Based upon that learning, the artist can re-create similar appearances through artful merger of matter and form manifested in the shadings, textures, and colors that constitute the painting’s visual display. Much as the artist must be sufficiently detached to observe material and formal means available for enacting aesthetic creation, members of the audience also become detached and even passive viewers of the art, as though spectators at a performance.²¹

Renaissance humanists theorized and practiced a visual aesthetic that integrated the arts through rhetorical—and especially epideictic—categories.²² Alberti saw the art of painting as rhetorical display in that the elements of visual composition operated according to the precepts of rhetoric, and the art itself aimed at giving spectators "a heightened sense of virtù" comparable to the task Cicero assigned to his ideal orator in De oratore.²³ The traditional arts of rhetorical display—poetry and oratory—exhibited a decidedly visual consciousness parallel to that of the visual arts. Emphasis on the visual rather than cognitive in oratorical display is illustrated by epideictic preachers who beseeched their audiences to ‘look,’ to ‘view,’ to ‘gaze upon’ exhibited actions and deeds rather than to think, to meditate, to consider.²⁴ An audience, of course, might also reflect upon actions and deeds displayed, but it must first hear them described in a word-picture.²⁵ Orators and poets thus crafted their examples of virtue or vice by investing their narratives with qualities conducive to imaginative seeing through ekphrasis, or detailed description.²⁶ The commonplace humanist expressions Painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture and "ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry") are fitting epigrams for the Renaissance integration of the verbal and visual arts as modes of rhetorical display.²⁷ Both the speaking picture (the poet’s pictura, or verbal exemplary narrative) and the silent poetry (the painter’s istoria, or visual narrative) are conceived in terms of making visible idealized images or patterns or examples of people and events limned with moral meanings so that audiences could gaze upon and, perhaps, strive to mirror or otherwise emulate them in their own conduct.²⁸ The visual aesthetic and moralizing implications of Renaissance epideictic extended to architecture and urban design (the piazza).²⁹ Landscape gardening and park design, too, exhibited a similar epideictic semiotic that glorified republican civic ideals while affording visitors opportunities for re-creation so that they could resume full participation in civic life.³⁰

Renaissance humanists presumed that all aesthetic displays are rhetorical performances before audiences capable of appraising the virtuosity of their execution. The attending public, educated in rhetorical precepts, could enjoy the pleasures of aesthetic discernment and judgment, bestowing praise or its opposite, with the artist’s fame—more than the subject’s—hanging in the balance.³¹ Art criticism itself became something of an epideictic art of display, exhibiting critics’ discernment and judgment as they assigned praise or blame.³² Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier serves as a paradigm for enacted rhetorical displays before appraising audiences.³³ The courtier’s performance is manifested through self-display. The act of characterizing oneself as an aesthetic creation is comparable to the efforts of the painters, poets, and playwrights of the day to develop characterizations worthy of praise.³⁴ The courtier attempts to appear before others in socially advantageous ways, striking a graceful pose while exhibiting sprezzatura, or a kind of negligent diligence, that conceals the artistry behind the performance.³⁵ But Castiglione also anticipated that audiences were positioned to respond as critics of the rhetorically enacted performance. He not only sketched the conduct of the gracious courtier but also depicted the responses with which the courtier’s audience should properly reward his performance.³⁶

The showings of the arts were rhetorical displays, but rhetorical displays were not thought to constitute knowledge in the physical and theological sciences. The discourses of the sciences included overt rhetorical displays as well as dialectical arguments about the probable, but the processes of establishing certain knowledge were recognized as the domain of apodeictic demonstration.³⁷ During the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, making known was the showing forth of certainty increasingly aided by disciplined methods of logical and mathematical reasoning or by instruments and technologies for attending more closely to objects under observation. The writings of Descartes mark a convenient starting point for tracking the trajectory of these developments: he formulated procedures for making relevant facts visible through algebraic representation and diagraming in a step-by-step process for solving problems in his Rules for the Direction of the Intellect (or Regulae); he described a disciplined method of thought for arriving at clear and distinct ideas in his Discourse on Method; and he brought algebraic equations into visual, geometric representation through what we now call Cartesian coordinates.³⁸ Galileo would make another convenient starting point. His use of the telescope arguably is among the first in a long line of subsequent instrumental and technological innovations that scientists would use to disclose, probe, isolate, measure, represent, or otherwise bring to attention the objects of investigation.³⁹ Making known from the Renaissance up until and through the Enlightenment became associated with visualizing forms of demonstration that enabled the seeing of objects—whether ideas in the mind or things in the world—with ever greater clarity, accuracy, and precision.

Eighteenth-century rhetoric and poetics grounded principles for verbally enacted rhetorical displays on the primary presumption of Enlightenment thought that human attainments are founded upon the psychological predisposition to believe what we experience through the visual sense. Isaac Newton’s development of nonrhetorical processes of making known through the observational method, as well as the emergence of philosophical empiricism, influenced that development.⁴⁰ Since oratory and poetry could not make audiences actually see objects directly through the senses, theories of rhetoric and poetics incorporated a network of interconnected psychological and aesthetic concepts for understanding how words could engage powers of imaginative seeing. For instance, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, George Campbell predicated his theory of moral reasoning upon that primary presumption. Influenced by David Hume’s empirical philosophy, Campbell explained how poets and orators needed to verbalize experiences so vividly that the image evoked would possess such vivacity as to seem the product of sense experience rather than of imagination.⁴¹ Dramatic and visual arts are immediately present before spectators and, thus, might be expected to deeply impress them, but Henry Home (Lord Kames) explained that the verbal arts could, through accurate description, so vividly evoke imagery that audiences would undergo the fantasy of ideal presence, as if transported to the scene and actually perceiving the event or object rather than hearing or reading a verbal account.⁴² Given the primary presumption that seeing is believing, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, James Beattie, Archibald Alison, and others stressed the need for orators and poets to make use of descriptive verbal portraiture to create concrete, specific, clear, factual, picturesque imitations of the phenomenal world.⁴³ And those verbal portraits engaged with the audience’s moral as well as aesthetic senses, prompting their discernment of beauty in accord with received standards of taste and stimulating sentiments conducive to the experience of sympathy, benevolence, and other moral virtues.⁴⁴

Twentieth-century rhetoricians Richard McKeon, Chaim Perelman, and Kenneth Burke offer ideas that broaden the range of displays that are considered rhetorical and the kinds of rhetorical phenomena that are manifested through display.⁴⁵ They also are among the scholars who presaged what I will contend is a major development in rhetorical studies today. McKeon offered an expansive view of demonstrative rhetoric as a productive art of showing or manifesting facts or values in all fields of discourse and action.⁴⁶ Alluding to the political demonstrations during the late 1960s and early 1970s, McKeon claimed that critical reactions against and declining faith in the apodeictic certainties of nineteenth-century idealist and materialist metaphysics brought about a transformation of demonstration from proof to manifestation that he thought was among the significant, distinguishing phenomena of the rhetoric of his times. Demonstration applied as much to actions that show forth feelings and commitments as it did to making known through inferential patterns and rules of proof. But, from McKeon’s perspective, both are products of a demonstrative rhetoric conceived as a universal, productive, inventive art of discourse and action that constitutes and makes known all facts and values through rhetorical exhibiting, presenting, and manifesting.⁴⁷

Chaim Perelman’s concept of presence broadens the range of rhetorical display to encompass nearly all verbal emphasis in discourses addressed to situated audiences.⁴⁸ According to Perelman, "Choosing to single out certain things for presentation in a speech draws the attention of the audience to them and thereby gives them a presence that prevents them from being neglected.⁴⁹ Presence is identified with rhetorical display through presentation: the displaying of certain elements on which the speaker wishes to center attention in order that they may occupy the foreground of the hearer’s consciousness [emphasis added].⁵⁰ Presence is, as Carroll Arnold put it, a matter of emphasis or highlighting, of actively bringing thoughts … before the minds of the audience addressed.⁵¹ Perelman acknowledges that displays making an object visually present have rhetorical influence, but he is concerned primarily with verbal emphases that make realities … distant in time and space present to an audience’s consciousness even as they allow alternative possible realities to fade from conscious attention.⁵² Hence, all arguments for Perelman exhibit a partiality in perspective since they consist of a preliminary selection of facts and values, of a specific description in a given language, and of an emphasis which varies with the importance given them."⁵³ Rhetorical display creates presence for these selected elements through presentational forms that shape how the substance of discourse appears in the minds of audiences addressed.⁵⁴

Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism, which depicts all of human relations as symbolic drama, offers a perspective of direct relevance to rhetorical studies of display. Burke’s dramatism maintains that since humans literally possess a special aptitude for ‘symbolic action,’ drama affords a literal vocabulary for the study of human relations in terms of action.⁵⁵ Burke’s dramatism is predicated on a view of language as symbolic action. His concept of terministic screens depicts all language use as rhetorical insofar as our choice of words enacts a partial perspective toward a situation by simultaneously directing attention toward some meanings while deflecting consideration of others.⁵⁶ The very use of verbal symbols, then, is meaningful symbolic action laced with rhetorical motivations and inclinations. Accordingly, Burke offers his pentad as a critical vocabulary for mapping linguistic depictions in terms of action—acts, scenes or settings, agents or actors, agencies or instruments, purposes or goals—with the aim of disclosing the motives behind enacted symbolic dramas.⁵⁷ He also stresses that symbolic drama indelibly permeates social hierarchies or orders. Inevitably, as we encounter symbols of authority, status conflicts, and prestige issues, we find ourselves violating rules (what Burke calls the thou shalt nots) that constitute social hierarchies and, thus, manifest much of the drama of our lives. Violation of hierarchical rules generates guilt and the corresponding desire for atonement and redemption. From Burke’s vantage, much of the drama of our lives consists in agonistic struggles to expiate guilt through purifying symbolic acts—acts of mortification or of scapegoating—that foster a sense of movement toward redemption and restoration of place within the hierarchy.

Burke’s dramatism is even more far-reaching in its implications for rhetorical studies of display than Perelman’s presence and McKeon’s view of demonstrative rhetoric as a universal, productive art. Display is manifested in the screening or attention-directing function of language; language highlights, points out, or shows forth even as it diminishes, ignores, or conceals. Display is involved in terminological enactments of symbolic dramas that exhibit, consciously or unconsciously, attitudes and motivations. Display is rhetorically manifested in the symbolism of hierarchical rules, in our experiences of adhering to them or violating them, and in our undergoing guilt should we violate the thou shalt nots, with corresponding desires for redemption. Burke’s depiction of human life literally as symbolic drama carries the all-encompassing implication that life itself, insofar as it is experienced by symbolizing animals, consists largely, if not entirely, of rhetorically enacted performances or displays.⁵⁸

These vignettes show that questions about how rhetoric and display are related did not originate in our time but are of long-standing significance in the history of the communication arts. McKeon, Perelman, and especially Burke imply that rhetorical displays manifest and permeate communication and culture far beyond what the earlier vignettes exhibited, but those earlier characterizations still yield distinctive perspectives that have resonance even today. Showing forth through rhetorical disclosure still often is distinguished from nonrhetorical processes of making known through logic, mathematics, and science; but it also is the case that we could work out the implications of Burke’s, McKeon’s, and even Perelman’s ideas to challenge that distinction and mount the argument that all acts of showing forth and of making known are rhetorically manifested displays. However one might stand on that issue, we still experience rhetorical displays in the classical sense of ceremonial speeches that seek to inspire audiences with images and exemplars of the excellent and wonderful in human experience. We also encounter rhetorical display in discourses and actions that constitute and show forth the opinions, facts, or values that manifest the grounds of argument and proof—if not of what Walker called the codes of value and belief that constitute an entire society or culture. Surely we still encounter multiple aesthetic creations that attract attention and work to please us, even as they exhibit moral—or moralizing—implications. The means of emphasis, amplification, or ornament conceived in the past ranged across the inducements of verbal figures, visual images, material structures, and enacted performances. These remain among the resources of rhetorical display even today in our televisual, mass-mediated culture. And the anticipated orientation of those who become audience to rhetorical displays still varies along a continuum running from the engaged, contemplative witness to the passive, pleasure-seeking spectator.

Nearly all of the chapters in Rhetorics of Display analyze or theorize relationships between rhetoric and display as manifested in the communicative practices and cultural contexts of our times. Some of those studies transform ideas encapsulated in the historical vignettes for fresh application in disclosing the situated rhetoric of particular contemporary forms of display. Not only do the ideas of McKeon, Perelman, and Burke still generate theoretical insight and lend critical utility, but, depending upon the display examined and its situated context, so, too, do the ideas of Aristotle, Quintilian, Castiglione, and others. Even when not explicitly treated, specific relationships between rhetoric and display that were articulated in the past periodically echo throughout these chapters. However, the studies collected here move beyond those ideas by examining cases that afford opportunities for theorizing new understandings about displays as rhetorical and about rhetoric as display. Without at all rejecting resources from the past whenever they have utility, the essays in this book offer exemplars for fresh thinking about a range of rhetorical displays that, together, mark out the leading themes of an emerging field of rhetorical inquiry that is especially suited to our times.

A characteristic feature of rhetoric in our times is the absence of widely authoritative standards for gaining compliance and commitment from audiences. In the absence of taken-for-granted standards, we find ourselves amidst multiple, ever-changing, and always-contestable manifestations of interest and worth. The amplifications of multiple visual, textually inscribed, or televisual images exhibit before us a plurality of conceptions of fact and of value, of attitudes and judgments. The places we visit or inhabit embody in their physical structures and material ornaments symbolic inducements that work to dispose our attitudes, emotions, or sentiments. Our encounters with others enact displays of self and of others that imply who we desire or otherwise take ourselves to be. We always are potentially an audience to these multiple displays, sometimes as thoughtful witnesses but oftentimes as passive spectators of the passing show who hope, at best, to be amused. But the general conclusion to be drawn is that whatever is displayed or made manifest—whatever commands and sustains attention relative to a vast field of competitors—addresses a claim about value and attitude to those who somehow become audience to it. In view of the nearly ubiquitous nature of display in contemporary communication and culture, it is tempting to conclude that the rhetoric of manifestation and showing—the rhetoric of display—is the dominant rhetoric of our times.

It is not surprising, then, that rhetorical studies are today coalescing around themes related to display. In the next section I identify some of those themes and suggest that they together mark out a comprehensive perspective on a newly emerging—though far from new—field of rhetorical inquiry I call rhetorical studies of display.

Rhetorical Studies of Display

Peter Wollen characterized studies presented during the 1993 Dia Center for the Arts conference on visual display and subsequently published in the book Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances as concerned with unlocking various manifestations of rhetoric that, in turn, worked to occlude or otherwise conceal truths behind visual displays.⁵⁹ Displays such as shrines and curiosity cabinets, wax and other museums, statistical graphics in classical economics, medical displays and displays about medicine, performances of ethnicity, sports and art exhibitions, images in science fiction films, and others manifest rhetorics that conceal truths behind whatever they visually reveal. But since rhetoric always offers opportunities for decipherment and unmasking, Wollen tells us, we always can learn to approach the world of spectacle with skepticism, to locate it within history, to decipher its signs, to deflect its imaginary power.⁶⁰ These studies of visual display are depicted as cutting through illusory rhetorical manifestations of visual displays to gain revelations of culture beyond appearances.

Visual Display is an important and provocative collection of essays that resonates with the generative idea for this book on rhetorics of display: whatever is rhetorically manifested through displays also necessarily conceals. Wollen’s distinction between rhetorics of display and the truths about culture behind or beyond them also raises an important related issue. To be sure, we can argue about a visual display in its situated context, point out what it may conceal, and explore the political, cultural, and artistic implications of whatever our criticisms reveal. At the same time, our efforts to disclose truths are complicated by the introduction of our own critical perspectives. Even skeptical acts of decipherment and unmasking depend upon perspectives that necessarily foreclose alternative possible meanings even as they disclose purported truths and, thus, conceal as well as reveal. There is, to put it directly, no way to see that which is displayed as it really is, unencumbered by our own partial points of view.

Three recent essay collections indicate current scholarly interest in themes directly related to rhetorical studies of display. The first two of the three collections I shall discuss are decidedly rhetorical studies written primarily by rhetoricians. One is Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers.⁶¹ This book explores the rhetorical operations of visual displays. The studies reveal the visual rhetoric manifested in photographs, in painting, in embroidery, in film, in advertising, in graphical displays, in the upscale shopping market, and in the home. The chapters together indicate that an important dimension for rhetorical studies of display is how visual displays influence our attitudes and feelings, shape and reinforce our beliefs and values, and constrain what we write, say, or otherwise think about them. The second is Rhetorical Bodies, edited by Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley.⁶² This book examines rhetorical relationships between the symbolic and the material. The studies explore those rhetorical relationships as manifested in public memorials, medical dissections, literal acts and political images of cannibalism, body images in poetry, photographs of the body, and the verbal figuring or inscribing of types of embodied persons. As a collection, this book indicates that both verbal inducement of body images in relation to material practices and the symbolic dimensions of the material as manifested in built structures and in corporeal forms are important aspects of display. The third is The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, edited by Sharon Macdonald. Macdonald characterizes the volume as exploring the processes involved in, and the political consequences of display in science museums and exhibitions since, of all types of public display, it is these that have most frequently presented themselves as, and been thought to be, outside—or above—politics.⁶³ Most of the studies in this book are not conceived as rhetorical analyses, but as they work to expose the play of politics behind science museums and exhibitions, they also imply that what is displayed before the public as unequivocal and celebrated achievements are manifested through the selections, styles, and silences of rhetoric.⁶⁴ This book thus suggests that museums, exhibitions, and other presentations are displays of rhetorical interest and significance.

Other ongoing projects in rhetorical studies intersect with these themes and, thus, further indicate the significance of display in contemporary rhetorical studies. For example, consider rhetorical studies of public memory.⁶⁵ Rhetorical studies of public memory grapple with tensions between revealing and concealing characterized in terms of remembrance and forgetfulness, recollection and amnesia. Rhetorics that constitute public memory are displays that manifest contingent resolutions of those tensions, whether through speeches, photographs or films, memorials or monuments, or exhibitions and other public performances. Rhetorical studies of public memory expose those situated rhetorics and their special allures and inducements; they thus reawaken contingently resolved tensions associated with remembering and forgetting and thereby show that public memory always is potentially contestable. And they do so by questioning what is and is not remembered, whose interests become present in public memory and whose remain absent, who has authority to define public memory and who challenges and counters that authority, and what constitutes past transgressions and who is accountable for them. And, perhaps above all, these studies examine rhetorics of public memory that often are overtly epideictic and, thus, imply an additional parallel, if not direct, association with studies of rhetorical display. Full understanding of the rhetorics that constitute public memory requires attention to how they manifest assumptions about what is worth remembering about the past and about whether the remembered is worthy of praise or condemnation, acknowledgment or disparagement, celebration or lamentation.

As the books surveyed here and the entries to the selected bibliography indicate, contemporary rhetorical studies often coalesce around or intersect with themes related to rhetorical display. Rhetorical studies of display are distinguishable from other studies in that they presuppose in their theoretical and critical practices the classical idea that to display is to show forth or make known, which, in turn, implies its opposite—to conceal. That dynamic between revealing and concealing—deepened and extended by contemporary rhetorical theorists and critics—is the core presumption behind rhetorical studies of display. Hence, the studies collected in Rhetorics of Display presume that displays are rhetorical because the meanings they manifest before situated audiences result from selective processes and, thus, constitute partial perspectives with political, social, or cultural implications. Rhetorical studies typically disclose the partiality of displays by reawakening tensions contingently resolved through those selective processes. Thus, the rhetorics of display often are deconstructed by exploring how those situated resolutions conceal even as they reveal, what meanings they leave absent even as they make others present, whose interests they mute as well as whose they emphasize, what they condemn as well as celebrate, and so on. This is so regardless of whether those rhetorics are enunciated through speech, inscribed in linguistic texts, depicted visually, circulated and viewed electronically, embodied in material structures or materialized in bodily form, or enacted through exhibitions, demonstrations, or other performances.

The perspective on rhetorical studies of display offered here, then, incorporates the presumption that displays are constituted rhetorically through situated resolutions of the core dynamic between revealing and concealing. Put otherwise, rhetorics of display are manifested through processes of what I shall call rhetorical selectivity.⁶⁶ There are at least four overlapping but distinguishable selective processes that manifest the rhetoric of displays. These four selective processes designate the organizing themes of a perspective on rhetorical studies of display in contemporary scholarship. Rhetorical studies of display examine rhetorical selectivity manifested in (1) the verbal depiction of the visual and the visual depiction of the verbal; (2) the disposition of place and the placing of disposition; (3) demonstrations as rhetorical display and rhetorical displays as demonstrative; and (4) epideictic identifications and divisions. I shall discuss these themes in turn.

I earlier mentioned Kenneth Burke’s trenchant observation that all meaning, insofar as it is mediated through language, is inherently persuasive because language use is a selective process that conceals even as it reveals. Using Burke’s language, words direct attention toward some possible meanings and simultaneously deflect from consideration meanings that would be implied with different words.⁶⁷ And this notion of verbally directed seeing is literally intended since observations made about experiences are implicit in the terminology you have chosen, whether your choice of terms was deliberate or spontaneous.⁶⁸ Even so natural and sensual an experience as walking along a forested trail in northern New England is mediated through language. For example, some might see only an undifferentiated grouping of sparrows flutter across the path before them, while those terminologically equipped to see distinctive markings would be impressed by the variety of birds: chipping sparrows, white-throated sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, slate-colored juncos. The point is that without verbally directed attention, much of what we do see would remain unseen. This acquired verbal capacity for directed seeing is exhibited in any field guide for classification of the birds and is put to full use in books that promise to instruct readers on how to read the surrounding habitat or environment. One such book teaches a vocabulary needed to read the forested landscape by directing attention to signs indicative of events in the forest’s past. Thus, the reader learns to see signs of previous pasturage, of logging, of fire, of blow-downs, and of blights that, quite literally, would otherwise have remained unseen.⁶⁹ These examples illustrate that much of the rhetoric of display is manifested through selective processes of terminological depiction of the visual.

But selectivity also is at work in visual as well as in verbal dimensions of display. Paintings, sketches, photographs, and other visual images are rhetorical in that they, too, emphasize some meanings even as they diminish or conceal others. Peter Burke observed that visual images operate according to conventions and styles, including the style of realism that has (as would any style) its own rhetoric.⁷⁰ W. J. T. Mitchell characterized his essays in iconology as a rhetoric of images in the dual sense that they are studies both of what to say about images and of ‘what images say’—that is, the ways in which they seem to speak for themselves by persuading, telling stories, or describing.⁷¹ Art historian Michael Ann Holly contended that the rhetoric of the image manifested in Renaissance paintings prescribed and prefigured rhetorical strategies that art historians such as Jacob Burckhardt incorporated in their own interpretive accounts.⁷² Thus, the visual as well as the linguistic cajoles and persuades:

By using it [rhetoric] to refer to pictorial constructs (especially those of the Renaissance, the age that was itself obsessed with the power of rhetoric) rather than linguistic principles, I intend to underscore its classical power to cajole: the art of expressive speech or discourse … persuasive or moving power in dictionary terms; in Quintilian’s, "The task of the artist is to persuade, while the power of persuasion resides in the art. Consequently, while it is the duty of the orator to invent and arrange, invention and arrangement may be regarded as belonging to rhetoric." Just as obviously, any viewer (or listener) for that matter has a mind of her or his own, a situatedness in history, a context for understanding that ultimately shapes what she or he chooses to see. Cajolery is not tantamount to indoctrination. Yet to ignore totally the shaping impulses of the work as it throws itself into—or even forms its trajectory through—time is to deny the power of images, and ultimately to fool ourselves into thinking that there is some truth for the asking in the abstract, away from context, away from rhetoric, away from imagining, away from history.⁷³

As often as language teaches us to see, Holly wrote, art instructs us in telling. The exchange works actively in both directions.⁷⁴ That point is generalizable. Visual depictions rhetorically constrain our verbal responses, much as verbal depictions rhetorically constrain what we are prompted to see. Rhetorical studies of display examine the nexus of visual and verbal depictions that selectively manifest the rhetoric of displays.⁷⁵ Words shape what we imagine or actually see. Names, labels, and narratives direct attention to whatever purportedly is significant or desirable about visually displayed objects. Thus, Halloran and Clark indicate that an ordinary lump of metal becomes a valued object—a musket ball used during the American Revolution; Jorgensen-Earp points out how ordinary objects salvaged from the Titanic’s debris field on the ocean floor become valued as sacred relics from a hallowed grave site or as rare artifacts that must be conserved for study and understanding.⁷⁶ But visual images also constrain what we plausibly can say, or write, or even think about them. Consider, for example, the widely circulated photographic image of Pfc. Lynndie England, posing with thumbs up before helpless, naked captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Susan Sontag wrote that we see not only on this and other similar images expressions of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted but also the deep satisfaction of being photographed presumably for lighthearted circulation among friends: The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of them.⁷⁷ This account of the soldiers photographed as having fun while performing degrading and humiliating acts is difficult to contest based on the visual evidence.⁷⁸

Displays also are manifested rhetorically through the structures of built places. The material structure of a place’s tangible features resonates with symbolic implications generated through selective namings, conventions, styles, narratives, and rituals. Places are thus disposed rhetorically in their physical design so that their arrangement works to dispose the attitudes, feelings, and conduct of those who visit, dwell within, or otherwise encounter them.⁷⁹ As Halloran and Clark succinctly put it, places exert influence,⁸⁰ and rhetorical studies of display often examine the manifestation of that influence in relationships between the dispositions of places and the placings of dispositions.⁸¹ Gambling casinos are structured to stimulate pursuit of desires. Cathedrals are designed to inspire awe and reverence. Memorials are constructed to encourage contemplation and remembrance. All three are places that do the rhetorical work of redisposing the inclinations of those who enter them from the familiar, everyday world. Of course, the rhetoric of places also is manifested in the workplace, the home, and other ordinary places since they, too, are arranged and adorned in ways that redispose and regulate the inclinations of those who dwell within them. All constructed and designed places can be considered as material embodiments of preferred attitudes, feelings, and valuings. Thus, an important dimension of the rhetoric manifested in display is the symbolic resonance of material places that inclines those who occupy them to experience social meaning from particular, selectively structured vantage points or perspectives.

One example of how built structures exhibit rhetorical qualities is Richmond, Virginia’s, famous tree-lined boulevard, Monument Avenue. Before 1996, a drive along Monument Avenue brought successively into view a series of impressive monuments to Confederate president Jefferson Davis and generals J. E. B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. (Also included is a monument to naval commander Matthew Fontaine Maury.) Erected between 1890 and 1929, the monuments together manifested in material form an internally consistent narrative, with each offering an exemplar of the Confederate leadership’s valor and statesmanship.⁸² That consistency was visibly disrupted with the unveiling, on July 10, 1996, of statuary commemorating African American tennis player and Richmond native son Arthur Ashe Jr. for his achievements as an athlete, literacy spokesman, and AIDS activist. A drive along Monument Avenue today either begins or ends with the Ashe statue, tennis racket in one hand and books in the other, surrounded by children with upturned faces and outstretched arms. The Ashe monument commemorates civic virtues exhibited by ordinary citizens for the benefit of their community (which includes the presence of children) rather than those of great leaders in service to a political or military cause. And, of course, the presence of Ashe as the exemplar of those virtues itself functions as a material synecdoche of African American emergence into metropolitan, regional, and national civic life—a synecdoche jarringly incongruous with the embodied Confederate story celebrating leaders who defended a cause that barred that political possibility. The incongruity experienced when moving from one to the other material emplacement of clashing attitudes and values illustrates the general point that selective composition, design, and placement of built structures manifest some meanings even as they conceal others and, thus, operate rhetorically.

Displays also are rhetorically manifested through enacted demonstrations. Demonstration denotes a much wider range of meanings than anticipated by Aristotle’s sharp distinction between proving and rhetorical display.⁸³ It still is not unusual for people to think in terms of irrefutable proof when discussing the demonstrations of science, logic, or mathematics, but they would as readily associate demonstrations with the showings of individual and group feelings and convictions through protest rallies, candlelight vigils, picket lines, and parades.⁸⁴ As demonstrations, both are rhetorical displays through portrayal, exhibition, and presentation. To demonstrate, then, is to enact a rhetorical performance that anticipates the presence of others; it is the staging of a spectacle to be seen. Standing for the national anthem before the start of a professional baseball game is a staged performance that demonstrates identification of spectators, players, and the game itself with patriotism; other public gatherings, such as theater productions or musical concerts, do not require spectators to demonstrate that particular allegiance, though theatergoers and concertgoers might well be expected, through their personal comportment, to demonstrate some other sort of allegiance. The performative aspect of demonstrations is revealed whenever the virtuosity of their execution is questioned, as would be the case, for instance, of accusing someone of acting badly by refusing to stand for the anthem before the game. But that refusal, of course, might itself manifest a demonstration of convictions and feelings that run against those enacted by the ritual—an entirely different staged performance.

Many rhetorical displays exhibit demonstrative qualities of proof, manifestation, and performance. The rhetorical displays of scientists and other technical communicators often involve adducing proof for claims through staged performances that make known noteworthy features of some occurrence or event or object by simulation, exhibition, or presentation.⁸⁵ Museums of science and art create the rhetorical displays of exhibits and exhibitions that, often at one stroke, prove (through making purported facts known), make manifest (by showing valued artifacts for immediate inspection), and enact (through staging the context for viewing purported facts and valued objects). The image events that display much of what constitutes the new rhetoric of emerging social movements also exhibit these demonstrative qualities.⁸⁶ Rhetorical displays in much of politics, advertising, and entertainment are performances that manifest or show forth, through televisual and other images, the values, sentiments, and desires presumably taken for granted as proof of the worthiness (or the reverse) of particular events, personalities, and products. Rhetorical displays that exhibit demonstrative qualities might very well permeate daily life. People do demonstrate or act out preferred identities and conceptions of self through words and deeds that enact, with varying degrees of virtuosity, self-portrayals exhibiting the right attitudes and feelings or proving the right commitments and allegiances.⁸⁷

Displays manifest through verbal and visual depiction, through the disposition of place, through demonstration—or all three—specific, situated, rhetorical resolutions of the dynamic between concealing and revealing.⁸⁸ And such rhetorical resolutions exhibit partial perspectives—an orientation, a point of view, a way of seeing—that both open and restrict possibilities for meaning for those who become audience to them. What rhetorician Richard Weaver wrote about linguistic forms of rhetoric applies to all forms of rhetorical display: displays emphasize and diminish, amplify and mute, select and omit, disclose and conceal, and, thus, exhibit perspectives that embody an order of desire.⁸⁹ The perspectives they enact are laced with assumptions about what is or is not desirable or to be valued, about what is and is not praiseworthy, about what ought and ought not to be.⁹⁰ In that respect, displays exhibit epideictic qualities. To claim that displays exhibit epideictic qualities does not imply the privileging of any particular order of goods or values. The displays we encounter in our daily lives make manifest a wide variety of possible conceptions of the good, or values, that compete for our potential interest and desire. But they all do manifest rhetorically some particular order of desire that necessarily places some conceptions of the good before others and, thereby, works to influence those who become audience to them.⁹¹

The assertion that displays have an epideictic dimension does not entail the view that audiences necessarily respond as contemplative theoroi; nor does it rule out that possible response. Depending on the situated context, audiences could function along one or more of the lines of response exhibited earlier in the vignettes. Audiences still are engaged as thoughtful witnesses or stimulated as passive spectators; they can participate in authentic experiences that inspire or in aesthetic experiences that please; they can take part in manifesting the grounds of knowledge or of political thought or action; they can pursue entertainments that excite, provoke, or, perhaps, merely relieve boredom. These are among the possible inclinations of situated audiences as they respond to exhibited values with some degree of enthusiasm or detachment, praise or blame, acknowledgment or disparagement, celebration or disdain, affirmation or disavowal.

Displays are manifested in anticipation of appearing before some situated audience, but those who actually become audience to them bring to the encounter their own orientations or points of view; they themselves embody an order of desire whose more or less settled patterns of valuing and attitudinizing may or may not resonate with the meanings disclosed before them. Monument Avenue originally addressed southern white audiences, perhaps calling up nostalgic and romantic images of the Old South, but the statuary of Confederate leaders today evoke different sentiments and valuings from many, if not most, whites who become audience to them; they surely would resonate in the same way with very few—if any—African Americans. We can see from this example that the valuings and attitudes made to appear through display are potentially contestable and subject to being rearranged in accord with some distinctive, alternative order of desire. In that respect, a display confronts audiences with what Burke called possibilities of classification in its partisan and, we should add, unifying facets.⁹² If we accept Burke’s view, rhetorics of display, like all rhetoric, incorporate resources of identification and of its inescapable counterpart, division. It does not matter whether the display is intended for us as the addressed audience.⁹³ Opportunities for identification and division arise regardless of who becomes audience to the display. It is not surprising, then, that we encounter displays nearly on a daily basis that somehow engage with our sense of belonging and identity, with our sense of social relationships, and with our sense of history.⁹⁴ We might find that a display affirms our identity, magnifies our interests, and celebrates our values, but it also might generate feelings of being ignored, belittled, debased, or diminished. And, as often is the case, it might leave us ambivalent, disengaged, or indifferent. Insofar as displays manifest some particular, situated ordering of desires, their rhetorical dimension invites us to do some attitudinizing of our own, whether through expressions of identification, alienation, or some intermediate inclination.

The next section presents this book’s chapters according to the four pivotal themes that together define the perspective toward contemporary rhetorical studies of display that I have offered here.

Structure of the Book

Rhetorics of Display contains studies that exhibit different theoretical and critical approaches, but each study, as a rhetorical study, presumes that whatever becomes manifest or appears through display is the culmination of selective processes that constrain the range of possible and permissible meanings available to those who become audience to them. The rhetorics examined in these chapters are always situated and, thus, contingent resolutions of the dynamic between revealing and concealing that enable partial and always potentially contestable perspectives. The authors thus examine how displays open and foreclose possibilities for meaning and with what consequences for those who become audience to them. The chapters furnish exemplars that disclose rhetorical manifestations of displays through (1) the verbal depiction of the visual and the visual depiction of the verbal; (2) the disposition of place and the placing of disposition; (3) demonstrations as rhetorical display and rhetorical displays as demonstrative; and (4) epideictic identifications and divisions.

The Verbal Depiction of the Visual and the Visual Depiction of the Verbal

The chapters in this section direct attention to verbal depictions of the visual and visual depictions of the verbal as manifesting the rhetorics of displays under examination. In chapter 2, Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp discloses how verbal narratives framed objects seen at the Titanic exhibition in Chicago through a rhetoric of display that reawakened the sense of Titanic’s place in public memory while legitimating the controversial project of disturbing the Titanic’s resting site for commercial exploitation. The controversy involved two conflicting metaphorical systems. Critics of salvage evoked a sacralizing system of metaphor that depicted the sunken ship as a tomb, the seabed as hallowed ground, and the salvagers as no better than grave robbers for disturbing them. Defenders of salvage turned to a secularizing metaphorical system in which the ship and seabed became an archeological dig and the salvagers heroic, entrepreneurial adventurer-scientists. The exhibition drew positive associations from both systems in two narratives that brought visitors to a simulated site of the Titanic’s sinking. One displayed objects within the familiar tragic narrative about the night when the great ship sank. The other enacted a memorializing story in which a piece of the ship’s hull became a simulated grave marker situated in sand at an ersatz gravesite. Both narratives induced visitors to see Titanic objects as valuable both as scientific artifacts and as sacred relics, thus reconciling otherwise conflicting implications of the opposed metaphorical systems. The exhibition, then, was a celebration of science’s secular powers of retrieval and restoration that, by displaying objects otherwise consigned to oblivion at the bottom of the sea, afforded visitors opportunities to contemplate and memorialize the meaning of the Titanic tragedy.

In chapter 3, James Michael Farrell examines nineteenth-century British newspaper accounts of the Irish famine that enacted what he calls an economy of display, combining the visual image of an artist’s sketch and an accompanying verbal description to induce emotional and moral responses from readers. This analysis shows that, although the sketches are affecting in both respects, verbal depictions heighten their emotional and moral power. Both verbal and pictorial images functioned figuratively by synecdoche, representing part of the horrible spectacle that they attempted to depict. Farrell shows that these synecdoches were accomplished through the verbal trope of describing the indescribable and the visual trope of representing the unrepresentable, which, respectively, alluded to the full magnitude of suffering beyond the expressive powers of words and images. But Farrell also illustrates, with examples of exclusively verbal accounts of the famine, that verbal description—what rhetoricians traditionally called ekphrasis—surpasses visual portrayal in so firing the imagination that the scene of suffering is made, as Kames would have it, ideally present to the consciousness of readers. Whether through verbal or visual depiction, or a combination of the two, the famine was evoked in ways that stimulated readers’ powers of imaginative witnessing so that they, in turn, could display in their sympathetic responses a right appreciation of suffering in accordance with standards of taste and sensibility expected of Britain’s social elite.

In chapter 4, I investigate how maps and other graphics used during a World Court case about placement of an international maritime boundary between the United States and Canada in the Gulf of Maine manifested a rhetoric of visual taxis that both structured how the gulf’s major features were seen and disposed the attitudes of those who saw them. This study attends to how visual patterns and images participate in rhetorical displays that engage the nearly ubiquitous dynamic between literalizing metaphorical associations as factual attributes and refiguring purportedly factual attributes as metaphorical or otherwise fanciful. The United States advanced as a purported fact the claim that the Northeast Channel—a deepwater trench—is a natural boundary in the gulf area and, as such, a suitable location for the legal boundary, which, among other functions, would divide jurisdiction over separate, intact commercial fish stocks. Images and patterns exhibited on U.S. graphics invited viewers to see natural boundary associations as factual attributes of the Northeast Channel as it is rather than as resemblances for thinking about the channel as if it were a natural boundary. Canada sought to refigure those attributes as mythic, fanciful, or merely metaphorical, even as they, too, urged a presumably factual perspective on natural boundaries of their own. Both parties enacted a visual rhetoric of display that invited viewers to see the gulf’s features through structures that would incline them toward preferred partisan perspectives on the most desirable legal resolution of the conflict.

In chapter 5, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites show that the famous man confronting tanks photograph exemplifies what they define as a photographic icon. Through their close inspection of visually manifested assumptions that constitute this widely celebrated image, Hariman and Lucaites disclose how it ideologically constrains or screens the range of plausible interpretations that viewers could bring to the event that it depicts. The image manifests an abstract modernist aesthetic that decontextualizes the event, placing the viewer in an objective perspective for seeing the man and the tanks as figures against an almost grid-like background. Concealed from view is the lush context of local cultural expression, its rich variety of colors, textures, and details. The image enacts a stark realist drama between absolute state power and the opposition of the solitary individual. The drama’s immediate outcome is not in doubt, but it also is harbinger of the inevitable triumph of liberal individualism as the unquestioned ideology of globalization. Concealed from view are political possibilities including that of Chinese democratic self-determination that might offer an alternative vision for a global society beyond that of endless assimilation into Western liberal-democratic culture. The photographic icon of the man confronting tanks, then, becomes an exemplar for global order that enables Westerners to see this complex political event in their own image, celebrating liberal-democratic culture and diminishing alternative cultural visions, circumscribing and restricting political possibility.

The Disposition of Place and the Placing of Disposition

Chapters in this section highlight relationships between the dispositions or structures of material places and the dispositions or structures of attitudes exhibited by those who encounter them. In chapter 6, S. Michael Halloran and Gregory Clark discuss national park landscapes as rhetorical displays of places sacred to an American civic religion. The sublimity of the nature parks and the symbolism of redemptive sacrifice at the historical parks function as an epideictic that prompts visitors to overcome differences and join together as a congregation of citizens sharing a common American identity. Halloran and Clark exploit parallels with religious encounters with the sacred in their analysis of Saratoga Battlefield National