Recent scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of visual politics notes a turn in presidential rhetoric.
Keith Erickson argues that contemporary politics has taken a visual turn as “Presidential images were exposed as mystifying political reality, bypassing the public forum, serving partisan interests, and misdirecting the citizenry’s attention.”
As a result, there is a need for scholars to develop critical perspectives drawing upon a combination of disciplines including visual culture, visual rhetoric, and public memory.
To build a critical lens to analyze the Obama-Hitler image, I combine scholarship in the areas of visual culture and public memory.
An interdisciplinary critical perspective will provide the necessary tools to analyze the image.
My goal is to create a methodology that encourages interdisciplinary discussions with the intersection of visual culture and public memory.
The first portion of this essay explores images and visual culture, and the second part discusses literature on public memory.
I conclude the perspective by looking at constitutive and performative rhetoric.
Visual Culture:
Visual culture offers valuable insights into how images create the everyday cultural world. In contemporary culture, there has been a pictoral turn resulting in an image-based society.
W.J.T. Mitchell defines the pictoral turn as the “widely shared notion that visual images have replaced words as the dominant mode of expression in our time.”
Mitchell focuses on shifting our understanding of images from vehicles of meaning to objects of desire.
Within the pictoral turn, our culture becomes a visual culture.
The primacy of visuals and images trumps the spoken or written form of discourse and rhetoric.
Furthermore, images function to create the world of reality.
The relationship between images and meaning is vital to the American culture.
Mitchell notes, “The relationship between words and images reflects, within the realm of representation, signification, and communication, the relations we posit between symbols and the world, signs and their meanings.”
Although there is no language in imagery, the relationship between words and images interact to create visual culture.
To understand how images function in American culture, scholarship on iconic images provides insights.
Hariman and Lucaites dig deep into visual culture and imagery with their focus on iconic photographs and public culture.
Images are vital to public culture and have “developed historically through use of modern communicative media to define the relationship between the citizen and the state.”
Furthermore, Hariman and Lucaites develop five essential characteristics with iconic photographs.
First, the image must contain an element of aesthetic familiarity, which the image uses the conventions of public arts and persuasive practices familiar to a public audience.
Second, the image functions as a mode of civic performance for a culture.
A visual icon is situated and reflexive, and offers a performative embodiment of social codes in the public media and provides a public a sense of collective agency.
Third, images are a form of semiotic transcriptions.
Imagery operates within visual and verbal semiotics and offers artistic, social, and political codes that are used to provide multiple representations of an event.
Fourth, images are emotional scenarios that provide audiences powerful evocations of emotional experience.
Emotions are a vital component with iconic images as they evoke feelings of pride, outrage, hostility, pain, pleasure, and so forth.
Fifth, images are contradictions and crises with the ability to “reveal how the political structure inhibits fulfillment of the social contract.”
More importantly, iconic images become “an aesthetic resource for performative mediation of conflicts.”
These characteristics for iconic images provide valuable analytic perspectives to consider with the Obama-Hitler image.
It is not my claim that the image is iconic, rather it displays and features several aspects of visual rhetoric.
With an understanding of how visual culture functions, I now turn to literature on public memory.
Public Memory:
The intersection of visual culture with public memory demands a response from scholarship.
To understand how images create American visual culture, the concept of cultural memory provides an answer.
The term cultural memory is defined as, “Memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural projects and imbued with cultural meaning.”
Thus, cultural memories are symbolic representations of history and enable visual politics to create particular social, cultural, and political meaning through collective social belief.
Furthermore, the relationship between public/cultural memory and rhetoric provides insights into how language whether visual, written, or spoken triggers the rhetorical process of how memories attain meaning, compel others to accept them, and are themselves contested, subverted, and supplanted by other memories are essentially rhetorical.
Kendall Phillips articulates public memory as essentially a rhetorical process and defines public memory as a way of understanding the “complex interrelationships among past, present, and future.”
The relationship between image and word to create public memory becomes an important issue.
W.J.T. Mitchell claims, “Images are active players in the game of establishing and changing values.
They are capable of introducing new vales into the world and thus of threatening old ones.”
In a rhetorical sense, the tension between images and words is a “dialectical struggle in which opposing terms take on different ideological roles and relationships at different moments of history.”
The dynamic relationship between visual culture and public memory offers an opportunity to further explore how rhetoric functions.
In particular, the publics’ consciousness of reasoned discourse in the public sphere offers a tension to be discussed.
Drawing upon the work of Kevin DeLuca, he questions the function of image events in the public sphere.
While DeLuca focuses on image events to disrupt and challenge discourse, his application of rhetoric, reason, and the public sphere is applicable to this project.
DeLuca scholarship studies how protest groups reconstitute identity of a dominant culture by challenging and transforming mainstream society’s key discourses and ideographs.
While the focus here is on the ability of rhetoric to challenge dominant culture and discourse, to further understand how rhetoric is constitutive, I turn to literature on deliberative rhetoric and the public sphere.
Rhetoric in its deliberative nature is able to construct reality.
The ability of rhetoric to deliver knowledge is the premise of social knowledge.
Thomas Ferrell defines social knowledge as “symbolic relationships among problems, persons, interests, and actions, which imply (when accepted) certain notions of preferable public behavior.”
Thus, imagery functions as a performative constitutive rhetoric that creates social knowledge concerning issue of public interest.
However, as McGee reminds us, the collective activity of individuals to be persuaded by ideologies creates an epic problem between “true” and “false” consciousness.
McGee claims that ideology is a “political language, preserved in rhetorical documents, with the capacity to dictate decision and control public belief and behavior.”
In this framework, ideographs are constitutive of the people or the public.
Thus, the task ahead is to understand how visuals and imagery functions as representations of ideographs.
It also provides the basis to uncover the publics’ political consciousness.
Understanding how images affect public political consciousness is central to this project. While the Obama-Hitler image is only one example of the dynamics with visual culture and public memory, it offers an opportunity to extend our theoretical understandings. The combination of multiple interdisciplinary studies contributes to developing this critical perspective.
**Please excuse and forgive all grammatical and sentence structure problems. This is only a barebones rough draft ideas and I've experimented with a different writing approach.
