Rhetoric, from the ancient grecian days, is an artsy science of explaining things to the audience. Originally, the acts of rhetoric consisted of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and actio. In simpler english, rhetoric is the art of ‘finding out what’s to be said and how to contextually speak of it;’ ‘putting a structured train of thought on how it’s to be said;’ ‘stylishly elaborating the arguments;’ and ‘moving the general audience.’
In the visual version, the actio and elocutio of rhetoric coincides. So, simply put, visual rhetoric spoke about how to design a picture that’s communicative enough to move the audience. And, given the salient usage of pictures, specifically in advertising, we could well say that in the advertising, visual rhetoric is about designing an illustration that could win audiences’ attention and persuade them enough to think about the message.
As Barthes said, in the publicity picture, contrary to the case of art, every detail (in the said picture –Lurino) has been calculated to convey a message. So let’s take it that pictures in advertising are rhetorical figures. As McQuarrie and Mick said, echoing someone, a rhetorical figure is about an artful deviation. So there must be some deviations needed to produce a certain meaning. This would be a basis for later thoughts.
But before we go to such an extent, we should remember that as a mean of mass communication [no matter how artsy and how consumer-oriented, advertising is a mode of one-way communication to the general audience], advertising models derive from a particular model of communication –the exact mention would be Information Transmission model, developed by Shannon and Weaver.
This model exemplifies on the transmission of a certain information from the source to the receiver through some spatial objects where noise(s) may interfere and reduce the quality of the received information. But something’s wrong with this spatial metaphor, mainly because we now understood that meaning is co-created instead of transmitted. Thus Sonesson came up with another model which he calls The Prague schools’ Model of General Communication.
What the Prague model said is that the two subjects involved in a process of communication may initiate their acts in time using different sets of norms. This echoes the fact that meaning is co-created between the two parties, and that none of the two parties means the exact same thing. In terms of the conduit metaphor, what goes in is not what comes out.
Since the two starts from a different point, then there would be adaptations. The sender adapts to the receiver –as what actio is all about, while the receiver also adapt to the sender. The sender then produced an artefact –like speaking the concept in some language or writing this article, to be perceived by the receiver.
Further, this artefact metaphor could well explain the nature of advertising pictures. An advertiser came up with an advertisement and threw it to the general audience via some media. Any given part of the target audience could pick up the ad from the media and interpret it, more or less, as one likes it. And how to persuade this someone is exactly what rhetoric is all about. It’s all about explaining the relationship of, as well as the paths taken by, the sender to create adhesion from the receiver.
From Barthes’ era, due to the binary opposition in structuralim, there are two divisions of rhetorical figures: metaphor and metonymy. The former was when a concept-thing was used to signify another concept-thing, where the latter was the substitution of the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant. And before we go further, let’s review metaphor specifically.
Theory on metaphors spoke something like a tenor-vehicle relation where the attributes of the tenor was imposed to the vehicle. In the metaphor love is a battlefield, for instance, the attributes around battlefield was imposed to love. So we could infer something like “love is about fighting, love hurts, love kills,” to something like “love takes a lot of guts.” And to make a personal metaphor out of it, let’s just imagine a tenor singer driving a car where the tenor would drive the car anywhere to reach his goal.
McQuarrie and Mick enlisted something like 20 rhetorical figures found in advertising language, and divided them to schemes and tropes. Schemes are about the excessive regularity of words –something like Eco’s version of Overcoded message, while tropes are about irregularity of words –Undercoded message. Metaphor fills in as one of the tropes, and it’s basically due to it’s figurative nature.
So, rhetorical analysis is not just about analyzing the metaphors, since there are other rhetorical figures involved. But in the realm of visual communication, some rhetorical figures are just impossible. You can’t really invert some pictorial syntax like in an Antimetabole. The most possible and the most commonly found is metaphor and metonymy, though I could argue that character depiction could be a form of synechdoche. So, the rhetorical analysis of advertising pictures would consist mostly in talking of pictorial metaphors and metonymies.
So, if we’re talking of visual –and hence pictorial, metaphors, there are two standards of comparison we could take to interpret the visual message: the natural meaning of the depicted object and the natural properties of such object. This comparison would lead to Gibson’s ecological physics and Husserl’s perceptual lifeworld, along with some gestalt theories.
We perceive the natural world –this lifeworld, as a whole. This lifeworld is a myriad of independent objects existing in relation with other independent objects. There are certain ways which things tend to behave, said Husserl. It’s from this ‘customary’ things that we could analyze a picture to assess the degree of deviations it contains, and co-create the meaning implied.
But before we see how things behave, we should first see how things exists. Each and every lifeworld object is relatively independent, but still they maintained somekind of relationship with another objects. There are two forms of relationship between independent lifeworld objects: factorality and contiguity. Each object also has some integration with another objects, and yet maintained enough difference to be told apart. The last categorization would be how these objects are categorised within the society.
To put things simply, a chair would seem normal enough to coexist with another chairs, a desk, and a whiteboard in a class. We could differentiate between each chair, we could differentiate the chairs with other non-chairs, and it formed a whole of ‘classroom.’ This classroom holds its’ meaning and the society has meanings about classrooms.
But when the said chair was depicted being in some snow-covered mountain peak, or in the middle of pacific, then there are deviations involved. And the meaning that came from this deviation would be different from the usual meaning. The case would also be different if some polar bear sat on the chair and fishing on top of an ice hole.
Given this case, then we should dissect the picture in some rhetorical analysis.
First, let’s agree that we perceive these objects as a gestalt of its own. Like the polar bear, for instance, we see it as a superstructure consisted of polar bear-ish properties like color, texture, shape, and all it’s other properties as well as its extension classes and so on and so forth. To some certain extent, we also perceive other non polar bear-ish things to appear along with it, like an igloo or a penguin. It could be said that the penguin and the igloo has a contiguity relationship with the said polar bear. Further, though we could only see a side of the bear, we already have a prorotypical image of it in our head. So, even if the said polar bear is just a carricatural one, we instantly compare it to our prototypical image of a polar bear –along with all its extension classes and its properties, to grasp the gestalt of the said polar bear.
In the sense of metaphoric pictures, there’s always a certain deviation from what’s supposedly existed taken-for-grantedly from the lifeworld. So, what’s factoral or contiguous in the lifeworld might be depicted differently in the ad. Further, what’s seen in the lifeworld might be depicted differently in the ad, thus came degrees of similarity, degrees of difference, degrees of reality, and degrees of divergence. This far, we already have enough boxes to analyze in the iconical layer.
As Scott puts it, depiction is all about style. I think she proposed something more gestalt in nature than what semioticians like Saint-Martin and Sonesson does. The style of depiction is a gestalt prägnanz in itself. Why does the Panzani pasta be depicted this way instead of the other? Why was it photographic instead of carricatural in depiction? The 5W+1H for the style of depiction, that is.
And this style also covers a lot of ground, vast enough that we could start budding trees to replace the great forests we forested throughout humanity. It covers angle, lighting, details, and most everything that’s visually perceived by the audience.
It was from these relation between gestalts that we could infer the deeper meaning of things. Visual metaphors should be analysed as a whole, instead as a part of another abstract superstructure. It’s methodical to do it like Groupe μ, Saint-Martin, Lévi-Strauss, or Sonesson does, but it’s more practical to do it my way. This methodology is also in many ways more similar to the casual viewing conditions. I’ll spare you from all the philosophical debate and debauchery, so I’ll just leave you at this.
After the iconical analysis we could start plastic analysis, or simplier put, meaning analysis. Let’s agree that in the sense of making sense of an ad, everything’s a metaphor that needs to be deciphered in a metaphorical sense. Each and every depicted object would, then, be a vehicle to some tenor driver [of course, this is just my personal metaphor of the tenor-vehicle relationship].
The meaning of a polar bear in a cartoon depiction would be different than if it’s photographed. And the meaning of something versus something else would also different as I care. So, meaning analysis is about making sense of what the tenor singers sung together as a gestalt prägnanz. In this stage, we no longer need to care about what vehicle the singers drive, but we only care about what the singers sung.
So, to put it in an Ainulindalëan [as in The Music Of The Ainur –J.R.R. Tolkien] kind of way, let’s imagine Placido Domingo brought up a certain theme, that other tenors would join and sing together, or others like Il Divo would came and ruin the theme Domingo had built.
A song where everything’s themed and every note supports the theme could be, IMHO, an equal to Eco’s proposition of an overcoded text. But a song where Il Divo stepped up and ruined the theme, or added up some dissonant notes would be a lousy example of an undercoded text. The better way of exemplifying an undercoded text would be something like a piece of an instrumental music where the general audience were asked to imagine a fullness of the music.
But, saying that Simon Cowell’s Il Divo sucks wasn’t what this was all about. Rhetorical analysis, along with visual rhetorics, is a way to decipher the meaning of pictures. And further, it’s about how people understand the things they perceived visually. It’s about making sense of the picture on the basis of the perceptual lifeworld, so it shouldn’t be done nonsensically, instead it should be done commonsensically.
And the most commonsensical thing I could take, this far, is all about this. But what about the in-depth analytical procedures that required atomic divisions? Well, I don’t really give a damn about them.
It’s not wrong to divide things to its’ foundational basis, but let’s take a human body as an exemplary system to analyze. We could analyze the body per se, without any dissections whatsoever, to gain enough aesthetical understanding of the body itself. Or we could frame the body and analyze just a part of the body. Or we could dissect the body and analyze one of its organs. Or we could analyze the body as a system made out from various proteins, fats, and other things. Or we could analyze the body as a superstructure of so many cellular things. It goes further down the line, until we analyze the atoms forming the body.
The problem is, if we analyze just a cell and its relationship with another cells, we’ll stop at the level of cellular understanding. We couldn’t really say a thing about the human body, for our vision is limited to the cellular system of the body. And if we go deeper to the level of atomic analysis, we’ll see no grand difference between a human body and another organic object, or in other words, the human body lost its humanity.
We perceive the lifeworld as being a whole, or in other words, as a gestalt perception. We don’t see human beings as a superstructure made of atoms and atomic regularities, though our knowledge covers that. Only in the Matrix trilogy could we see fictituous lifeworld objects being seen as a myriad of codes, but that is a hyperrealism in itself. So, technically, we don’t really give a damn about the details behind a thing, we just see things as they are.
That, and the fact that, if we divide a given depiction to its coloremes, we’ll fail to see the picture. What’s pictorial about a blob of pigment? If we’re to divide pictorial depictions to blobs of pigments, then structuralist linguistics should divide sentences to its sound wavelength and conduct some magnitudinal analysis of the phonemes, instead of stopping at phonemes –for colors are merely representations of a reflected spectrum of light. But the said object of analysis would be a meaningless object then, wouldn’t it?
Thus, I resent the methodological procedure of dividing a pictorial object to its atomic meaning bricks. It’s probable and possible, if we need to understand the underlying foundation of things. But to understand the metaphors in a given picture, we don’t really need to cover that far. Instead, if we go that far beyond, we’ll fail to see the gestalt of the independent objects, and the gestalt of the general picture.
This far, my argument seems to echo Forceville, but I believe I’ve covered things that he failed to explain in his theory of pictorial metaphors. His reductionism would fail to see how minute details over a given metaphor could shift the metaphor interpretation vastly. A smiling face with different hue and saturation would mean different, even with the same metaphor construct. The same smiling face, with the same metaphor construct, with a different style of depiction, i.e.: carricatural instead of photographic, would mean different.
Further, the same polar bear, given different hue or saturation, could mean different. If this polar bear-object was set to be a factoral part to the whole metaphoric message, then the interpretive scheme of the message would be changed as well. The philosophy of color, together with philosophy of depiction –if there existed any, governs the mind mutually as salient as other visual things. And if the said polar bear-object was set as the sum of non polar bear-ish factoral parts, the message would change too. Hue, brightness, and saturation is just as important as any other means of deviation when it came to gestalt understanding.
A fault of a giant –even a gigantic layman, given his gigantic size in nature, would be a gigantic fault compared to the fault of an ordinary nobody like me. Forceville, for one, also failed to explain when reality became fused –and thus blurred, with depiction. Let’s take an ordinary fashion photographic ad, for instance.
Fashion ads utilized ‘ordinary’ people as its model when it comes to mass-produced clothing, and thus they grew to be an iconical symbol –and not necessarily metaphoric, of the specific class the advertiser targeted. People looked at this ad and interpreted it as if they’re the ones wearing the advertised clothing. These stylistic ads do not pose as some pictorially metaphoric mean of visual communication, though essentially it’s still a metaphor [if you’re the model, then … ].
A seemingly no-metaphor condition such as the aforementioned photograph should’ve been considered a metaphor too, given the rhetorical nature of advertisements. It might be not contain any apparent vehicle-tenor relationship, but the model rendition of the general audience is a synechdoche in itself, and should be treated like other forms of rhetorical figures. Unlike in the verbal world, visual metaphors could exist beyond the apparent face value.
To some extent, even the figurative depiction of a full set could be metaphorical when there’s enough deviation from standard factorality/contiguity/similarity/difference of fashion norms, like when a black tux coexists with a bright yellow tie instead of a black or red bowtie. That, or a three-piece clothing being wore together with the absence of a proper pants or proper leather shoes. Or a carricatural tux accompanying a real life model.
So, I conclude, metaphor –and every extension classes it may has, also correlates with the style of depiction in order to create a full gestalt prägnanz. It’s only from this holistic view that we could analyze the degrees of deviation appeared in –or absent from, any given pictorial, and thus visual, modes of communication.
Visual metaphor works like any other verbal metaphors. There’s a tenor to every vehicle, only that in visual metaphors, each object exists independently, and the tenor-vehicle relations are much more complex than its verbal cousin. This complexity came mostly from how the objects depicted, or for short, it’s complex because any deviations from the lifeworld objects we know, is already a metaphor in itself.
Or the contrary, where the lifeworld object derived from the schematic idea in some given picture. It couldn’t really be said a metaphor, since the picture is not, in any way, a depiction of some lifeworld object. The picture is a symbolization of some abstract idea, and thus doesn’t have any relation to the object derived from the picture.
But we could still analyze how the picture communicate with its viewer. We make sense of pictures based on our perceptual lifeworld, and it’s not uncommon to find the objects in the lifeworld that have some resemblance to the depiction. It’s from these resemblances that we abduct hypotheses to understand the picture.
Allright, this is just speculative, but insofar I learned that we are gestaltic animals. By making sense of things, we inherently fill the gap we perceive from a source. And we make sense by deriving from our previous knowledges –also by asking from other sources, to gain some complete idea of something. Thus, my theoretical scheme could also be applied to the said picture.
The deviation coming from the realization of the said picture to the lifeworld object is not in itself metaphorical. There needs to be a certain sacrifices whenever an idea needs to be communicated, or as in Shannon-Weaver’s model, there will be certain noises. Such noises would require us to either accept it as some expectable loss, or to find some ideas, concepts, whatsoever, to complete the incompleteness of the realization.
That, and all its’ extension classes, is basically what visual rhetorical analysis is all about. That’s how we make meaning out of some visual message, and that’s how we basically perceive what we see. Sorry for writing this long, but some times, I am this obsessive –especially when it came to proving my worth and my merit over anything else.
