Jens E. Kjeldsen

Visual Argumentation in Scandinavian Political Advertising: A Cognitive, Contextual and Reception Oriented Approach

In a Danish election campaign in 2001, the party Venstre published an advertisement whose visual argumentation caused offence and debate. But what exactly was the argument? And how do we best locate such visual arguments? This essay argues for a cognitive, contextual, and reception oriented approach to visual argumentation. It illustrates such an approach by briefly analyzing the context and rhetorical potential of the advertisement and by establishing which arguments the public actually reconstructed from this advertisement.

Pictorial Argumentation in Advertising: Visual Tropes and Figures as a Way of Creating Visual Argumentation

Departing from the facts that imagery dominates advertising and that advertising is a kind of argumentation, this article examines the argumentation of advertisements that are predominantly pictorial. In most cases, visual argumentation is best elicited though the audience knowledge of a specific rhetorical situation with a mixed difference of opinion, where two parties hold opposing standpoints. Commercial advertising, on the other hand, is best described as a single, non-mixed difference of opinion where only one party (the advertiser) is committed to defending only one standpoint, namely the common claim shared by all advertising: Buy this! This ultimate proposition is defined as the final claim. Knowing the final claim, the advertising genre and its general context of difference of opinion, gives the viewer a starting point for discovering the premises supporting the final claim, which makes it possible to reconstruct the pictorial argumentation. Such reconstruction is challenged by the semiotic ambiguity of pictures. However, the author proposes that visual rhetorical figures – meaning both tropes and figures – can help delimit the possible interpretations, thus supporting the evocation and creation of the intended arguments about product and brand. Because figures are regularised patterns, they offer cognitive schemes enabling the (re)construction of the embedded arguments. This theoretical point is illustrated through analysis of four predominantly pictorial advertisements. The author demonstrates how visual figures function argumentatively by directing the viewer’s attention toward certain elements in the advertisements, thereby offering patterns of reasoning. This guides the viewer towards an interpretation with certain premises that support a particular conclusion. The analyses support three general theoretical points: Firstly, it illustrates the ethotic argumentation of an artful visual execution. Secondly, it demonstrates how the presence of visual figures helps delimit the possibilities of interpretation, creating advertisements that are semantic and semiotically open in some respects and closed in others. They are closed in the sense that particular rhetorical figures guide the viewer’s construction of the arguments in the ad in question. Thirdly, the analyses support the theoretical claim that pictures can offer a rhetorical enthymematic process where something is condensed and omitted, and, as a consequence, the spectator has to provide the unspoken premises. Rational condensation in pictures is considered the visual counterpart of verbal argumentation. The author ends by advising against the view that pictorial argumentation is simply a matter of extracting verbal lines of reasoning and presenting them in argumentation models. Pictures are able to provide vivid presence (evidentia), realism and immediacy in perception, which is difficult to achieve with words only. Pictures may offer a semantic thickness in the richness of visual detail, and a semantic thickness in the semantic condensation of the thoughts and emotions connected with the actual, depicted situations. These are important argumentative dimensions.

Talking to the eye: Visuality in ancient rhetoric

Abstract It can hardly come as a surprise that the ancient rhetoricians all define rhetoric as an art of speech. However, in Institutio oratona I Quintilian also observes that: ‘many other things have the power of persuasion, such as money, influence, the authority and rank of the speaker, or even some sight unsupported by language, when for instance the place of words is supplied by the memory of some individuals great deeds, by his lamentable appearance or the beauty of his person’.Abstract It can hardly come as a surprise that the ancient rhetoricians all define rhetoric as an art of speech. However, in Institutio oratona I Quintilian also observes that: ‘many other things have the power of persuasion, such as money, influence, the authority and rank of the speaker, or even some sight unsupported by language, when for instance the place of words is supplied by the memory of some individuals great deeds, by his lamentable appearance or the beauty of his person’.

Symbolic Condensation and Thick Representation in Visual and Multimodal Communication

This essay explores the concept of symbolic condensation in pictures in order to explain the possibility of visual argumentation and the benefits of so-called thick representation offered by many pictures. Symbolic condensation makes it possible for pictures to perform argumentation enthymematically and provides a thick representation that adds an epistemological gain to the communication of arguments as premises and conclusions.

Where Is Visual Argument

It has been argued that the reconstruction of pictorial and visual argumentation is especially problematic since pictures contain neither words nor precise reference to premises, nor do they have syntax or explicit conjunctions that coordinate premise and conclusions.

The affordances and constraints of situation and genre : Visual and multimodal rhetoric in unusual traffic signs

Visuals are generally considered to be rich in information, but also to be open to many different interpretations. As a consequence, many argumentation scholars doubt that visuals can constitute argumentation (e.g. Fleming, 1996; Johnson, 2003, 2010; Patterson, 2010). In this paper, we argue that the rhetorical and argumentative potential of visuals and multimodal texts is strengthened if they belong to recognizable genres, genres being governed by discourse-internal factors as well as situational/pragmatic understanding. The genre of traffic signs can draw on specific genre conventions thanks to these signs’ highly coded nature. As a consequence, traffic signs constitute an exemplary category to make the point that visuals and multimodal texts can function rhetorically or even argumentatively. We support our claim by first analysing a number of unusual instances of the genre and then discussing a few visual and multimodal signs whose argumentative potential no longer depends on specific traffic-related circumstances but crucially depends on the pretence that they are traffic signs.

Visual rhetorical argumentation

Abstract In semiotics and the study of pictorial communication, the conceptualization of visual rhetoric and argumentation has been dominated by two connected approaches: firstly, by providing an understanding of visual rhetoric through tropes and figures; and secondly, by interpreting pictures as texts that are read and decoded in the same way as words. Because these approaches provide an opportunity to understand pictures as a form of language, they contribute in explaining how pictures can be used to argue. At the same time, however, these approaches seem to under-communicate two central aspects of pictorial argumentation: its embedment in specific situations and the distinguishing phenomenological aesthetics of pictures. This paper argues that the study of visual argumentation must understand pictures both as language and as a material aesthetic event. The possibility and actuality of visual argumentation is partly explained by understanding argumentation as a cognitive and situational phenomenon, and partly by introducing the notion of symbolic condensation. It is suggested that reconstruction of visual argumentation should be supported by reception analysis.

Audience Analysis and Reception Studies of Rhetoric

Without audiences, there would be no rhetoric. Understanding audiences, therefore, is essential for understanding rhetoric. If we do not understand when, how and why audiences are influenced by communication, or see how they negotiate and reject rhetorical messages, then we do not understand rhetoric. In light of this, it is surprising that rhetorical scholars have paid so little attention to audiences—or to be more precise: to empirical audiences. This book encourages researchers to do more studies of empirical audiences and their reception of rhetoric. The chapters offer examples of central methods of understanding reception and empirical audiences: historical approaches such as archival-historical methodology and historiography, interviews and focus group research, protocol analysis, ethnographic participation and observation, appropriation as reception and finally triangulation, where the researcher applies several methods in unison. While these methods are common in media studies, anthropology, cultural studies and other fields of research, they are surprisingly rare in rhetorical studies.

The Rhetorical Power of News Photographs: A Triangulatory Reception Approach to the Alan Kurdi Images

This chapter examines the power of news photographs through triangulating reception-oriented analyses of the photographs of the dead Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, who was found drowned on a Turkish beach September 2, 2015. The images were immediately described as powerful and iconic. However, the analyses by Kjeldsen and Andersen demonstrate that their visual power is more complicated and complex than often assumed. The chapter also suggests that the power of the images can be divided into three temporal phases: (1) Evoking, exercising a power of emotional presence and immediacy; (2) Fading, being challenged, moving out of public agenda, and losing attention; and (3) Iconic renaissance, finally, because they are established and remembered as symbols for a specific event, people return to them when discussing this and similar events.