Rice, J. (2004, January/April). A
critical review of visual rhetoric in a postmodern age: Complementing,
extending, and presenting new ideas. Review
of Communication, 4(1/2), 63-74.
Rice's essay summarizes and critiques two principle theorists--Sonja
Foss and Valerie Peterson--and attempts to extend their theories of visual
rhetoric to provide a heuristic for the analysis of visual artifacts. Rice
limits his essay to a postmodern context, which he characterizes as one ring of
"the large and hard-to-hit bull's eye of visual rhetorical theory"
(73). Extending this analogy, he states that "Foss shot wide, Peterson
used a smaller gauge, and the approach taken here is more of a rifle
approach" (73).
Rice begins the essay by critiquing Foss's schema as too deductive. Foss
suggests a critic first "determine the function of a text," secondly
"scrutinize the composition of the visual artifact," and third
"scrutinize the function of the art, measuring its legitimacy or
soundness" (65). Rice briefly summarizes Peterson's critique of Foss and
then presents Peterson's schema, which "basically reverses the first two
steps, making the sequence more inductive" (65). Rice thinks that both schema
are too linear and methodical for postmodern analysis, and suggests that he
intends to "fuse a variety of ideas and schemas into a complex,
multidimensional perspective" (66).
At this point, Rice introduces "the omniphistic visual
schema," which contains "two planes of perception, content and
form" (66). Rice states that "omniphistic" means "all in
balance" and combines rational and intuitive aspects (73). Rice suggests
that an omniphistic approach can integrate rationality, sensation, interpretation,
and intuition in a way consistent with postmodern thought. Rice also explores
what he calls "abductive thinking" (67), which he compares to
connotation and argues "precedes both induction and deduction and exists
as an 'origin of knowing,' which begins with visual observation before anything
else" (67). A fair summary of this section of the article is that Rice is
attempting to elevate subjective and intuitive aspects of visual analysis to
counter what he sees as overly rational and methodical approaches.
Rice then discusses "four indicators of a postmodern visual
text" (69). These are oppositional elements (internal conflicts);
co-constructed elements (interactions between the text and audience);
contextual elements (interactions between the text and context); and ideological
elements, which "focus on text and all its surrounding elements, which
results in a revelation of rhetorical power" (72), the analysis of which
must be saved for last.
Despite his claims of being as specific as a rifle shot, Rice's essay is
extremely hard to grasp. Part of the reason is probably that he is operating
from a postmodern viewpoint that is inherently slippery. In other words, some
of the difficulty in this essay is probably by design. Rice borrows an analogy
from Foucault--a toolbox--and suggests that rather than attempt to use the
methods of visual analysis he lays out wholesale, that it might be better for
the reader to pick and choose the tools that are useful in a given situation.
Rice writes that "if some small part of the ideas [in the essay] aids in
the analysis and understanding of text, so much the better" (73). It is an
interesting essay, and it is possible that some of his methodology (which he
explicitly resists describing as a methodology) might be useful for visual analysis.
I particularly liked his efforts to raise the intuitive as worthy of analysis.
However, the essay is also vulnerable to one of the big critiques of postmodern
thought: Rice's commitment to avoid proscribing a methodology or schema and his
essential throwing-up-of-hands, take-what-you-want ending leave the reader
confused of what to make of it. His critiques of other methodologies are good,
but he is reluctant to put anything firm in their place.
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