Quarterly Journal of SpeechVol. 90, No. 2, May 2004, pp. 234–256

Book Reviews

Review Essay: Visual Studies and Visual RhetoricCara A. Finnegan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), xxi � 282 pp.$21.50.

James Elkins, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), ix � 230pp. $21.95.

W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994), xiii � 445 pp. $22.50.

Barbara Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996),xv � 259 pp. $21.95.

Barbara Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge: MITPress, 1999), xvii � 219 pp. $21.95.

Visual rhetoric has become a minor theme in rhetorical studies.1 In addition to the usuallitany of evidence I might offer in support of this claim—the growing number of books,articles, and dissertations invoking the term, the ubiquity of conferences and symposiadevoted to the topic, advertisements seeking scholars who “do” visual rhetoric—I also wishto submit more personal evidence. Occasionally I get an e-mail from a colleague who has astudent interested in visual rhetoric or who wants to offer a unit on visual rhetoric in agraduate or undergraduate course. I am asked to send along suitable citations. I hop intoEndnote and dutifully cut and paste an assemblage; my offerings are received graciously. ButI am left unsettled because what I have sent is decidedly not useful. It does not synthesize.It does not clarify. It does not say much about what it means to “do visual rhetoric.” Do weneed, I ask myself, something newcomers to visual rhetoric can use as an introduction?Something students wanting a quick overview can digest quickly? Something scholars doingthis work can recognize as descriptive of their critical practices?

Such a task is difficult because visual rhetoric is hard to track. The rhetorical study ofvisuality occurs across communication departments and rhetoric/composition programs;much of this work does not invoke the term “visual rhetoric.” It also appears in argumenta-tion studies under the guise of “visual argument” and figures prominently in scholarship ongraphic design and advertising.2 Furthermore, with the possible exception of those who dorhetorical studies in communication and composition programs, few scholars talk to oneanother across disciplinary boundaries.3 Very recently, some scholars have attempted tosynthesize literature and clarify the idea of visual rhetoric.4 Although I appreciate theseattempts, I am less interested in tracking the circuitous life of the term “visual rhetoric” thanI am in thinking about ways to engage the broader question of the relationship betweenvisuality and rhetorical studies.

In this essay, I explore some of the relevant questions a visual rhetoric project shouldengage. Rather than offering a prescriptive program for research or a comprehensive synthesis

ISSN 0033–5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) 2004 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/0033563042000227454

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of the visual rhetoric literature, I prefer to approach the question of visual rhetoric differently.My overarching claim is this: visual rhetoric should not be conceived of as a unique genre ofrhetorical artifact (“rhetoric” that is “visual”), but as a project of inquiry that considers theimplications for rhetorical theory of sustained attention to visuality. To this end, I review fivebooks by three visual studies scholars whose work merits our attention. In the process, I seekto conceptualize a visual rhetoric project that expands our vision to something beyond arelatively narrow focus on rhetorical analysis of visual images. I encourage rhetorical scholarsnot only to bring rhetorical analysis to bear on the artifacts of visual culture, but also to bringquestions of visuality to bear on rhetorical theory. Work in visual studies helps to frame orjustify the conceptual grounding of such a project, and it urges us to be reflective about someof the dangers built into this research. I hope that my approach will be of interest to mycolleagues working on visual rhetoric and to those readers like my friends above: interestedbut relatively removed from the conversation.

I selected the three scholars whose work I review—W. J. T. Mitchell, James Elkins, andBarbara Stafford5—because each positions him- or herself at the boundaries of disciplinesengaging visuality, including art history, literature, science, and technology studies.6 Of thethree, Mitchell’s work is most likely to be familiar to rhetoric scholars interested in visualculture. The founding editor of Critical Inquiry, Mitchell has for nearly 20 years pursued thestudy of “iconology,” which he defines as “the general study of images across media.”7 Inaddition, Mitchell’s notion of the “pictorial turn” (discussed in some detail below) has beena common starting point for rhetorical scholars seeking to understand how visual imageswork. If Mitchell stands at the center of conversations about visual studies, James Elkinspositions himself outside those conversations even as he participates in them. In his massiveoeuvre, Elkins plays the part of renegade art historian, tweaking his discipline’s nose whileseeking to bring the concerns of visual studies to a broader public audience.8 Barbara Stafford,another art historian, pursues perhaps the most philosophically challenging project of thethree. Stafford, who calls herself an “imagist,” seeks to show how art historical knowledge cantransform our epistemological foundations if we take visuality seriously. Taken together, thework of Mitchell, Elkins, and Stafford offers a fascinating map of the contested terrain ofvisual studies and raises awareness of the pitfalls we may encounter as we explore theintersections of rhetorical studies and visuality.

By no means a new book, W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and VisualRepresentation is routinely identified as a core text in visual studies; one must read Mitchellin order to engage the key issues. The book merits attention for that reason alone. However,I also highlight aspects of Mitchell’s contributions that have been overlooked by many inrhetorical studies (myself included), who, I suspect, invoke Mitchell too easily. Indeed,Mitchell “gives good quote,” but his work deserves more than aphoristic treatment.

Picture Theory is the sequel to Mitchell’s 1986 Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Iconologyquestioned the possibility of a comprehensive theory of images and instead pursued a“rhetoric of images” in what Mitchell called a “double sense”: “first, as a study of ‘what to sayabout images’” and also “as a study of ‘what images say.’”9 That text used critical readings ofkey texts in image theory, including Nelson Goodman, E. H. Gombrich, G. E. Lessing, andMarx to explore how we talk about imagery. If Iconology constituted Mitchell’s attempt toexplain how iconology is done by other theorists, Picture Theory represents Mitchell’s effortto do iconology. Picture Theory brings together 13 essays linked by an overriding goal: a callfor “a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and thatis capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses” (3). This is alofty goal. For Mitchell, “picture theory” is a play on words. The goal is not to develop atheory of pictures; we already “have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn’t seemto do us any good” (6). Instead, Mitchell would have us think about what it might mean topicture theory. He wishes not to illuminate understanding but rather to offer a chronicle of

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“disillusionment, the opening of a negative critical space that would reveal how little weunderstand about pictures and how little difference mere ‘understanding’ alone is likely tomake” (6). In short, Mitchell uses theory and criticism to highlight our collective ignorance.The purpose of Picture Theory is to show us what we do not know—to explore the gaps,fissures, and tensions inherent in our relation to pictures and in the relation of pictures totexts.

Divided into five parts, Picture Theory employs a critical approach that professes to preferhistorical specificity over grand theory. Yet its value for a visual rhetoric project lies notprimarily in the insights of its critical essays but in the foundational feel of the concepts itelaborates. In part one, Mitchell explores three concepts that inform his attempt to “picturetheory”: the pictorial turn, iconophobia, and the complex questions surrounding the relation-ship between images and text. In a trio of useful essays, Mitchell tackles the question ofpicturing theory in three ways: first, he looks at “pictures ‘in’ theory” in an influential essayentitled “The Pictorial Turn.” Next, he studies metapictures, or pictures about pictures (thinkof the duck/rabbit Gestalt figure) in order to learn what they tell us about “pictures ‘as’theory.” Finally, he uses the third of the essays in part one, “Beyond Comparison,” toquestion the traditional dichotomy of word and image and replace it with the supple“imagetext.”

Rorty’s linguistic turn figured representation as a discourse; Mitchell sees somethingparallel in a “pictorial turn,” which is enacted via the critical “realization that spectatorship …may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading,” and which produces “the realizationthat while the problem of pictorial representation has always been with us, it pressesinescapably now, and with unprecedented force, in every level of culture” (16, emphasis inoriginal). The seeds of the pictorial turn may be located in the stories of philosophy that takeup visuality—Peirceian semiotics, Goodman’s philosophical aesthetics, Derrida’s grammatol-ogy, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture. Such stories lay bare “the riftbetween the discursive and the ‘visible,’ the seeable and the sayable” (12).

For Mitchell, it is iconophobia, “this need to defend ‘our speech’ against ‘the visual’” thatis evidence of the pictorial turn (13). In naming the pictorial turn, Mitchell does not suggestthat it is a new, monolithic theory of visual representation, nor does the pictorial turn meanthat we valorize a newly conceived “culture of images.” Rather we must contend with theanxiety produced by the fantasy that “a culture totally dominated by images” is now possible(15). It constitutes a critical recognition “that pictures form a point of peculiar friction anddiscomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry.” For Mitchell, pictures are primarilysignals of “an unresolved problem” (13).

Until now, rhetorical scholars have invoked the pictorial turn only in passing, mainly as akind of aphoristic support for our turn to the visual. Yet we have underestimated theimportance of the link between the pictorial turn and iconophobia. Rhetorical scholars havenot seriously engaged the pictorial turn because we have not systematically questioned theways in which our theories of representation foster and perpetuate iconophobia. Yet thechallenge is clear: because the pictorial turn reveals itself via the sign of iconophobia, itfollows that investigations of iconophobia in theory and criticism are necessary if rhetoricalstudies is to embrace the implications of the pictorial turn. In the concluding section of thisessay I offer a few ideas about how one might undertake such a task.

In the context of his discussion of the pictorial turn, Mitchell engages the question of therelationship of pictures to texts. Perhaps because of our haste to mark scholarly territory,visual rhetoric scholars tend to overdetermine distinctions between the visual and thetextual.10 Mitchell calls attention to the various ways that we might conceptualize the complexrelationships between images and texts. One way to escape from a strict image-text di-chotomy, he observes, is to find a metalanguage that encapsulates the idea of image and text.But through his discussion of “metapictures” (such as the famous duck/rabbit image),Mitchell shows that a metalanguage is impossible. Despite the desires of semiotics, we cannot

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have a unified concept of language that encompasses the verbal and the visual. Nor is themore traditional comparative analysis of “sister arts” criticism useful. Neither unification norcomparison is the answer.

Mitchell invokes concepts that visualize the problem and embrace the tension rather thanseek to get beyond it. He adopts three terms: the image-text, a concept that can be used totalk about relationships between specific images and texts; the imagetext, a concept thatdescribes an artifact with visual and textual features; and image/text, a figure (like Derrida’sdifferance) that references the gap between image and text, one that marks a “site of dialecticaltension, slippage, and transformation” (106). The concepts of imagetext, image-text, andimage/text are relatively precise ways to talk about the problem of the image by acknowledg-ing rather than papering over the tensions at play.

Parts two and three of Picture Theory take up the relationship of texts and images via aseries of critical essays. In both sections, Mitchell mobilizes permutations of the imagetextconcept as a critical wedge. Parts four and five take up two dominant themes of criticalcultural scholarship of the early 1990s: power and the public sphere. Part four, “Pictures andPower,” considers two sets of dialectical concepts that typically frame our conception ofimages’ relationship to power: spectacle/surveillance and illusionism/realism. Part five,“Pictures and the Public Sphere,” is Mitchell’s effort to engage the issue of the role of imagesin the public sphere. Here Mitchell asks a question that is no longer new, but one that feltpertinent in the era of Disney, Rodney King, and Bush I’s Gulf War: “What is the role of artand imagemaking in a public sphere that is mainly constituted by forms of mass spectacle andthe mediatization of experience—the world as theme park?” (365). In essays on Oliver Stone’sJFK, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and in the conclusion, Mitchell explores an ethic ofpictures, speculating, “Perhaps we have moved into an era when the point about pictures isnot just to interpret them, but to change them” (369).

Such a normative move may seem less curious in our post-9/11 context, but neverthelessneeds to be read critically in light of the theoretical concepts Mitchell develops in the first partof the book. In a final, brief section called “Representation and Responsibility,” Mitchelldiscusses the role of the critic. He appears to enact the very iconoclasm he earlier opposed.Our traditional professional responsibility, Mitchell notes, is generally defined as that ofinterpretation: “attentive, careful, loving reading of texts and images; learned, critical respon-siveness to their meanings; and eloquent testimony to their power” (422). Yet just what ourinterpretations should do is still an open question. The stakes Mitchell outlines are high andfamiliar in our context: “The new legitimations of racism and sexism are mediated byrepresentations about which we have considerable expertise. And the representation of warand mass destruction in narratives that simultaneously erase the memory of Vietnam andreplace it with a fantasy replay of World War II should activate our responsibilities aspreservers of the historical record and cultural memory.” How might critics do this? Mitchellappears to channel Edwin Black: “Though we probably cannot change the world, we cancontinue to describe it critically and interpret it accurately.” In a state of “misrepresentation”and “disinformation,” Mitchell contends, this may be the most important job for the critic(425). Although Mitchell’s point is well taken, he veers close to what might be termed a moreiconoclastic position: our contemporary visual culture is a dangerous place and the critic’s jobis to expose the danger—“accurately.”

This conclusion shifts his argument to a moral ground, which should prompt severalquestions for those of us working on visual rhetoric. What is the moral/ethical component ofour work? To what extent does the specter of iconophobia stand against our attempts toengage questions of representation? Finally, to what extent might our critical work unwit-tingly internalize an iconophobic stance by emphasizing too strongly the need to “expose” the“danger” of images? We do not need to answer these questions conclusively nor do ouranswers need to conform to Mitchell’s, but we do need to ask the questions. The pictorialturn, the specter of iconophobia, and the relationship between images and texts are not

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abstract problems of interpretation apart from politics, but are rather embedded in the modesof critical engagement we enact. A viable visual rhetoric project should recognize thischallenge.

When compared to the linearity of Mitchell’s text, James Elkins’s The Domain of Images isa weird book. It is written by an art historian for art historians but has few art images. Itforces the reader into strange encounters with stereographic projections of crystals, Feynmandiagrams on perturbation theory, cuneiform scripts, and treelike diagrams of mitochondrialDNA types. The book alternately fascinates and frustrates; getting through it requires stamina,yet the investment is worthwhile. Elkins’s premise is that those who study images have notbegun to scratch the surface. What we call “images” are but a tiny class of visual artifacts.Elkins wants art historians, in particular, to open themselves to the full domain of images andnot limit themselves solely to art: “I will be arguing that nonart images can be just ascompelling, eloquent, expressive, historically relevant, and theoretically engaging as thetraditional subject matter of art history” (ix).

The book is divided into two parts. In part one, Elkins sets out an argument that seeks toaccomplish three tasks. First, he explores the question of art history’s lack of engagement withthe nonart image. Through perceptive readings of nonart images such as audioradiographsand sonar charts, Elkins supports his claim that there is much to be found in serious,sustained attention to nonart images. Next, Elkins attempts to convince the reader that thehistory of images belongs no more to the domain of art than it does to anything else. Todemonstrate, Elkins asks what it would mean if the history of images were constructedoutside of art and wedded instead to another field in which images have also been central. Hisexample is crystallography. In describing the parallel visual history of crystal illustration,Elkins stretches the limits of interpretation to prove that the history of images is notnecessarily tied to any particular domain.

Once he has dissociated the history of images from the history of art, Elkins is free toreconstruct a domain of images that has purged itself of the question of art. He offers analternative to art by moving to the idea of “picture.” His exploration of how Wittgenstein andGoodman theorized pictures prompts recognition of a vital paradox: we desire pictures to bepure and apart from language, yet we also desire their legibility. “Picture” becomes anunstable term, a contingent entity that embodies both desires. Elkins argues (as did Mitchell)that traditional juxtapositions of word and image do not work. Elkins shows—in excruciatingdetail—that the tripartite distinction of word-image-notation does not fully describe thedomain of “picture.” There is no such thing as pure writing, pure picture, or pure notation;all we have are hybrids.

Having exposed purity as an unrealizable fantasy, Elkins then explores other ways toconfigure the domain of images. He offers seven types of images that cut across the spectrumfrom “almost” pure writing to “almost” pure pictures: allographs (for example, calligraphyand typography), semasiographs (for example, pictographs), pseudowriting (for example,hobo signs or graffiti handles), subgraphemics (picture writing “with syntax”), hy-pographemics (for example, petroglyphs), emblemata (any image with explanatory text), andschemata (for example, maps and some scientific notation). In offering this list, Elkins pointsout that he is neither advancing a classification system nor suggesting that there are rigiddistinctions among the types; none of the classes is free of the others. The story of part two,then, is the story of a valiant but doomed critical operation. Elkins concludes that the domainof images “exhibits enough of the variousness of pictures to give pause to any theory” (244).He uses classification to reveal the failure of classification.

Although The Domain of Images offers a compelling argument, Elkins’s reach often exceedshis grasp. Framing himself as the expert guide, Elkins invites the reader to come along onwhat turns out to be a dubious journey. Yet we have no choice but to follow him because,for the most part, the terrain is foreign. I read this book for the first time as part of aworkshop at the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study. (Confession: six months

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earlier I picked up the book but abandoned it, frustrated by its strange mix of breadth anddensity.) Our group consisted of biologists, historians of science, sociologists, medievalists,linguists, virtual reality specialists, art historians, and a lone rhetorician. Many participantsdid not recognize their disciplines in the book. They argued that art history was a convenientstraw figure for Elkins, noting that the traditional discipline he describes no longer exists.Others who were knowledgeable in particular aspects of the domain of images, such ascalligraphy, pictographic languages, and medieval emblems, felt that these areas of “imagestudies” were presented incoherently or inconsistently. Elkins sets himself such an encyclope-dic task that it becomes nearly impossible for him to do justice to the complexities of any oneaspect of the domain of images. Elkins’s hubris was not always perceived as a problem; eventhose who charged Elkins with playing fast and loose also acknowledged that his workproductively rattled their disciplinary cages.

The Domain of Images contributes to the conversation about visual rhetoric in importantways. First, it suggests that the preoccupation with drawing firm distinctions between imagesand texts is unproductive and untenable. As we saw with Mitchell, Elkins relentlesslyquestions the image/text dichotomy, while acknowledging the appeal of the fantasy of pureimages and pure texts. For both scholars, one of the dangers of the fantasy of purity isiconophobic thinking; those who seek purity argue that “pictures are the strongest agents forthe corruption of meaning and therefore the most virulent threat to any theory that seeks tounderstand systems of sense-like speech, writing, or notation” (240). Second, perhaps tocounter the iconophobia of some scholarship, Elkins moves to the opposite extreme byadopting an intensely iconophilic stance. Images are objects of endless pleasure and fascina-tion for him, although that fascination is problematically apolitical. Elkins is less interested,for example, in the ideological implications of heraldic emblems of the Pope as the Antichristthan he is enthralled by the ways in which they resemble computer-age graphical interfaces.The pleasure Elkins derives from his objects of analysis is infectious. The Domain of Imagesreminds us that our primary orientation to images does not have to be limited to interroga-tions of the gaze, surveillance, or spectacle. It is okay to enjoy or even love images. Finally,Elkins’s failed attempt to fix and classify images reveals the power of our desire to “fix” themeaning of images and suggests that rhetorical scholars might pursue other ways to articulatethe ways that images come to mean.11

The Domain of Images is a brilliant, dense, and occasionally convoluted attempt to unsettleour assumptions about images. Elkins’s most recent book to date, Visual Studies: A SkepticalIntroduction, is its conceptual partner but rhetorical opposite: a comparatively straightforwardargument about what the field of visual studies needs to do and be if it is to make asubstantial intellectual contribution. One of the reasons for the text’s accessibility may be itsorigins. It results from Elkins’s thinking as his institution (the School of the Art Institute ofChicago) wrestled with the decision to create a visual studies major. As the book’s titlesuggests, Elkins’s goal in Visual Studies is to describe a field of study—its purposes, “canon,”and goals—while retaining the stance of the skeptic. This dual mission produces a readable,cranky, but remarkably upbeat book. In a brief but dense four chapters, Elkins frames a field,complicates it, and challenges its practitioners to be more rigorous. Chapter one, “What isVisual Studies?” attempts to define the realm of visual studies from an institutional point ofview. Chapter two, “The Subjects of Visual Studies,” raises the question of the purportedversus the actual scope of visual studies. Chapter three’s “Ten Ways to Make Visual StudiesMore Difficult” is an often biting critique of scholarly practices in visual studies. The finalchapter, “What is Visual Literacy?” proposes that broader training is necessary if visual studiesis going to help students become more visually literate.

In “What is Visual Studies?” Elkins takes an administrator’s perspective: if there is a fieldcalled visual studies, then what is the concrete evidence that it exists and how do we defineit? One clue is to look for common markers of status, such as departmental location and theexistence of a professional literature. Surveying the varied institutional location of visual

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studies in cultural studies, film, art history, and English departments (he misses communi-cation), Elkins suggests that visual studies has no center; however, it has a canon. Noting theproliferation of “visual culture readers” since the late 1990s, Elkins observes that althoughvisual studies defines itself as an “interdiscipline,” it has adopted an implicit core set ofjournals and texts that perpetuate and validate a narrowly defined visual culture canon.12

In “The Subjects of Visual Studies,” Elkins takes up the question of that canon. He observesthat there is a standard list of theorists one must read if one is to do visual studies “properly.”The “big four” are Barthes, Benjamin, Foucault, and Lacan. (W. J. T. Mitchell appears on asecondary, slightly less canonical, list with tens of others, including Jonathan Crary, MartinJay, Helene Cixous, Barbara Stafford, and Susan Sontag) (33). Elkins does not deny theimportance of these theorists so much as he questions the blindness with which their keyconcepts are often invoked. Although visual culture studies claims to be a generalistdiscipline, its theoretical foundations are relatively narrow. Conceptually, the field is domi-nated by critiques of spectacle, investigations of the gaze, and charges of surveillance. Inaddition, visual studies, with a few exceptions, is relentlessly contemporary; its practitionersexamine popular culture of the last 50 years. Such narrowness, Elkins contends, belies thefield’s claims: “There is an entertaining consequence of pondering lists like this: theydemonstrate with great clarity that visual studies, no matter what it might be, cannot yetclaim to be a general approach to images of all kinds. Reading through this list of principaltheorists—a list that is at once known to everyone and scarcely noticed—it becomes apparentthat visual studies has a very specific, very disciplinary set of interests” (33). For those of uspursuing visual rhetoric, the lure of this canon is a powerful siren song, particularly becauseit often gives us relief from the perceived textual bias of our discipline. Yet Elkins reminds usthat visual studies, too, has its biases. As we seek to legitimize our work in light of broadermovements in visual studies, rhetoricians should recognize that visual studies as currentlytheorized has limits of which we must be aware.

In “What is Visual Literacy?” Elkins takes issue with an oft-invoked goal of visual studiesprograms and suggests that we might complicate that goal. Elkins observes that contemporarythinking about visual literacy emphasizes interpretive/critical tasks involving the “unmasking”of the constructed nature of images. Elkins does not refute the desire for visual literacy somuch as he argues that we must recognize its limits and go beyond them. Arguing that “visualliteracy will be crucial throughout a university that gives serious attention to visuality” (127),Elkins considers the range of competencies that should be required in visual studies programs.Education for visual literacy should include training in Western art historical knowledge,non-Western competencies, science imaging, and even the practice of making images. At thesame time, Elkins is mindful of the paradox of visual literacy. If we are to teach an orientationtoward visuality that is at all sophisticated, “it is entirely misguided to construe such acollection as an emblem of some general visual literacy” (195). In other words, there will beno end point at which we might declare our students suitably visually literate.

The most provocative chapter in the book is “Ten Ways to Make Visual Studies MoreDifficult.” Elkins taps into many of the core problems he has signaled earlier in the text. Ingeneral, visual studies is too easy and predictable. Elkins wants visual studies to be moretheoretically reflective about history, wary of old standby theories, and more eclectic insubject matter: “I would love to see the field become so difficult that it can do justice to theimmeasurable importance of visuality, which is still slighted throughout the university” (65).In “Ten Ways,” Elkins adopts the persona of Sherlock Holmes because each of the “ways” is“really a ‘case’—a conundrum posed to the field” (66). The “Case of the Calvin Klein Suit”questions the ease with which pseudo-Marxist “unmasking” critiques of consumer culture arepropagated in our classrooms. The “Case of the Neglected Crystal” returns to the argumentElkins made in The Domain of Images and asserts that visual studies neglects scientific imagesat its own peril. My favorite is “The Case of the Benjamin Footnote,” in which Elkins chargesthat visual studies scholarship often uncritically invokes the likes of Benjamin and Foucault

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in contexts where such references are not necessarily warranted.13 The Benjamin footnote isproblematic for several reasons, among them: “His purpose was very different from ours, andhis mood was wholly alien to our intransigent happiness. In addition, his leading concepts areoften ambiguous or opaque and therefore not amenable to simple citation” (97). Elkins is notarguing that visual studies should abandon Benjamin, or any of the rest of its canon. Rather,he wants us to reflect on the contexts in which these figures are invoked. He wants us to thinkdifferently about our purposes.

Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction gives us Elkins at his best: gently (and sometimespolemically) prodding us to be ambitious, creative, and innovative in formulating ways toengage the domain of images. In doing so, Elkins offers important correctives to those of usat the intersection of rhetorical studies and visual studies. Given the relevance of the visualstudies canon, it may be tempting to mobilize it to build a visual rhetoric. Yet, followingElkins, we should be aware of the intellectual dilemmas inherent in doing so. Enacting anElkins-like skepticism means thinking more critically about the e-mails with which I openedthis essay. What canon do I construct with my innocent lists of sources? What is (or shouldbe) the place of visual rhetoric in rhetorical studies curricula? What kinds of courses wouldwe teach? What sorts of graduate training would be most appropriate? What should ourstudents read? Elkins pushes us to think about these questions. Rather than create for Elkinsanother conundrum—say, the Case of the Uncritical Adoption of Visual Studies by Rhetori-cians—we would do well to take Elkins’s skepticism to heart.

Mitchell and Elkins are skeptical about the utility of postmodern approaches to visuality.Mitchell briefly observes at the end of Picture Theory that the endless irony and skepticismoffered by postmodern approaches leaves us unable to account for the ethical impact ofpictures. Elkins notes in Visual Studies that our unreflective reliance on certain conceptsmakes our scholarly writing predictable and uninteresting. Barbara Stafford directly engagesthe problematic stance of contemporary theories of knowledge toward the image. GoodLooking: Essays on the Virtue of Images opens with the problem: “Recent academic rhetoric issaturated with terms of rejection, revision, revolution” (3). Such approaches, Stafford argues,are fashionable but problematic: “I have serious trouble with the deprecating rhetoric thatstakes our bookish literacy as a moral high ground from which to denounce a tainted ‘societyof spectacle’” (4). In response to iconoclastic critical approaches, Stafford offers essays thatshe calls “unfashionably positive and frankly polemical,” presenting “an alternative view ofthe pleasures, beauties, consolations, and, above all, intelligence of sight” (4).

Building on earlier work that demonstrated what she calls the pervasive “antivisualism” inWestern discourse,14 Stafford sets forth two assumptions: first, that images should not bemaligned as forms of knowledge and, second, that many of the problems wrought by thelate-twentieth-century transformation from “lens culture” to “digital culture” could be betterunderstood if historically situated. Stafford’s goal is to suggest ways to develop an iconictheory of knowledge that is not dependent on iconophobia. Like Elkins, then, Staffordembraces art historical knowledge but also argues that art historians must go beyond thetraditional domain of art history in order to have an impact on public conversations aboutthe problem of the image. She largely abandons talk of art for talk of “images, imaging,imagists” (9). Stafford encourages movement beyond the narrower disciplinary goals of arthistory into the broader context of image studies.

Perhaps because Good Looking consists of essays that were originally offered as lectures, thecollection is occasionally uneven and repetitive. The reader should not look for a linearargument, but for meditations on a theme: how we might recuperate what Stafford calls “theimage of images” (73). The book is divided into three parts, each of which takes up therelations of images to knowledge: modernity’s response to images; the critic’s intellectual andmaterial role in “practicing vision”; and the aesthetics of ethics. Stafford’s skill rests in herability to mobilize her expertise in eighteenth-century art history to reframe contemporaryimage studies. Stafford argues, for example, that if we are to understand contemporary

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controversies about the capacity of digital images to deceive, we must historically situatethem. In the eighteenth century, a “radical sensory skepticism” fostered a linguistic bias thatfueled an iconoclasm that (interesting for rhetoricians to consider) “identified visualizationwith the lures of sophistry” (45–46). The goal for Enlightenment thinkers was to free imagesfrom contamination by the tricks of charlatans; Enlightenment devices were invented tocontrol and discipline vision (46). Today, concern about the “purity” of digital imagesproduces the same impulse, one that cannot be understood without seeking out the genealogyof unstated premises about purity. Contemporary theory offers little help in this regard. It ispart of the problem: “Worry about digital hybrids has resuscitated the old Platonic andJudaeo-Christian rhetoric of corruption” (52). Rather than back away from images by takingan iconoclastic stance that reasserts the primacy of the verbal/textual, Stafford models anotherapproach.

Enter the “imagist.” The imagist recovers visuality in the name of non-iconoclastic formsof knowledge. The imagist is neither a logocentric, nostalgic figure, nor an ironic postmod-ernist focused on perennial fissures and irreconcilable gaps. Stafford’s imagist is a latemodernist (or a cautious postmodernist) who refocuses the conversation. She observes thatall media problems are image problems. Our anxiety about media culture needs to beunderstood in light of a history of iconoclasm, which gives art historians much to contribute.Imagists, who critically value the historical and contemporary role of visuality in knowledgeproduction, should not only debunk individual instances of scholarly iconoclasm, but alsotransform scholarly discourses as we know them (70). The imagist, then, faces a pressingquestion: “In the postmodern era of degravitation, disconnectedness, and disembodiment,how might visualization as an innovative, integrating and bridging field spanning the arts,humanities, and sciences be imagined from and within a historical perspective?” (71). Suchquestions should resonate with scholars interested in thinking more broadly about the waysin which visuality is implicated in rhetorical inquiry.

Stafford’s reflections on the role of the imagist in a reconfigured world of image studiesmake up the final portion of the book. Stafford is not only concerned with the role of imagestudies in the academy but also in the public sphere. As an image-based discipline, art historyhas much to contribute to public conversations about art and science, but it has not done so.Although images produce intense public deliberation and, on occasion, controversy, they arenot analyzed in public policy debates: “No one of political importance, no business director,no college president, no think tank, no prominent social agency, not even the McNeill-LehrerReport asks for our opinion or finds it to the common good that we apply what we know.Nor, it seems, have we offered” (87). Yet Stafford points out that the possibilities are there.For example, in the O.J. Simpson trial, a “script-bound legal profession” could have benefitedfrom imagists capable of “establishing guidelines for the interpretation of videotape, three-di-mensional models, and other types of visual evidence” (89). Although it may be true thatimagists have much to contribute, Stafford does not offer concrete advice on how imagistsmight achieve such public relevance. Unlike Elkins, who, for example, offers specific ways toimprove education in visual literacy, Stafford’s suggestions are not so much suggestions asthey are wishes—nice, but underdeveloped.

Wishes aside, what Stafford offers in Good Looking is relevant to any project exploring theintersections of rhetoric and visuality. Stafford joins Mitchell and Elkins in interrogatingiconoclasm, and she activates concepts from rhetorical theory such as invention and analogyin order to counter iconoclasm. In her conclusion, Stafford signals her desire to exploremodels of knowledge that rely not on disconnection and disjuncture, but on “investigatingthe galvanizing force of creative association, its empathetic drive to find and fuse—withoutdisfiguring—the likenesses in unlike things” (89). This desire leads to her next project, VisualAnalogy.

Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting says much to scholars interested invisual rhetoric and to all rhetorical theorists. Visual Analogy is Stafford’s attempt to articulate

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the non-iconoclastic epistemology she wished for in Good Looking. The problem, accordingto Stafford, is that a focus on disconnection and difference has left us unable to account forconnection and similarity, modes of knowledge for which Stafford argues human communi-cation possesses a “pressing need” (49). To counter this loss, Stafford seeks to recover analogyas a “general theory of artful invention and as a practice of intermedia communication” (8).

Stafford argues that analogy is inherently visual, making the visual arts a necessary domainfor recuperation of a theory of analogy (sounds like a job for the imagist). In addition,Stafford builds her account on the premise that at particular moments in history, analogy wasreplaced by dis–analogy, or allegory. This change made difference the order of the day anddiminished methods of knowledge associated with similarity (3). Because it no longerdominates the epistemological landscape, analogy, defined by Stafford as “the vision ofordered relationships articulated as similarity-in-difference” (9), might seem quaint orretrograde. Yet for Stafford the task of recovering a theory of analogy is an urgent one: “Inlight of the current fragmentation of social discourse, the inability to reach out and build aconsensus on anything that matters, analogy’s double avoidance of self-sameness and totalestrangement again seems pertinent” (10). Stafford frames analogy as a rhetorical concept,one that facilitates communication, brings ideas into being, and enables critical discernment.In doing so, she figures analogy as nothing less than the savior of the Great Community.

In the first chapter, “Postmodernism and the Annihilation of Resemblance,” Stafford spinsa decline narrative that explains how analogy came to be denigrated as a mode of knowledge.As Stafford tells it, analogy thrived from antiquity to the end of the Baroque period. The earlymodern period later abandoned polymathic impulses to collect and compare disparate ideasand objects, choosing instead to focus on Cartesian dualisms (11, 19). Analogy was conflatedwith excess, the occult, paganism, animism, and, rhetoricians take note, sophistry. Why was(and is) analogy so problematic? Stafford suggests that its visual nature is the culprit.Associated with mimesis, or the collapse of difference, analogy constituted a dangerous,“irrational” form of knowledge (23). In contrast to allegory, which is “intrinsically textual”and abstract, analogy is demonstrative and evidentiary, “putting the visible into relationshipwith the invisible and manifesting the momentary unison” (23–24). In this way, analogy is“incarnational”; its figures “materialize, display, and disseminate an enigma that escapeswords” (24).

Stafford extends the question of the historical relationship between analogy and allegory insubsequent chapters. Through historical analysis and exploration of relevant works of art, sheshows how analogical thinking became allegorical thinking. Allegory represents a class ofdevices that works by exploiting difference over similarity and pursuing “obfuscation ratherthan clarity” (63). Analogy and allegory are opposite sides of the same coin. Allegory emerges“when there is no hope that a compelling similarity might be established, or even pursued”(87). Stafford contends that the historical shift from analogy to allegory was devastating, giventhat cognition is an analogical process: “I want to recuperate the lost link between visualimages and concepts, the intuitive ways in which we think simply by visualizing” (61).

In chapter three, Stafford turns to the sexual metaphor of “coupling” to demonstrate howanalogy may be reclaimed as an “eroticized theory of correspondences” (99). This chaptershould be of interest to rhetoricians because Stafford engages the classical rhetorical tradition.For example, Aristotle matters because he offers an analogical theory of invention that makespossible “the activity of visibly converting and reconverting words in order to see phenomenain a new or better light” (116). Analogy is figured as a way of dealing with contingency, theperennial problem of “how to conjoin an accumulated body of practices to the shiftingpresent and elusive future” (133).

Once Stafford recuperates analogy as a mode of invention, she turns to a contemporarymanifestation of the utility of the concept: current metaphors for cognition. Stafford arguesagainst the metaphor of the brain as computer. To demonstrate its problems, she exploresvisual artifacts that seem to concern disconnection and disjointedness: cabinets of curiosities,

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collages, the Netscape browser. Yet such artifacts are inherently analogical: they force theviewer to invent relationships in order to make sense of what is before the eyes. Acomputational metaphor of the brain is not sufficient to account for such operations (141).Seeing, Stafford contends, is a form of invention: “We realize something constructive whenwe see. We do not merely illustrate or copy what is given, but give birth to something thatwould not otherwise exist. Seeing is about being struck that something is, or can be,connected to something else” (138). If seeing invents, then we need theories of cognition thatare analogical, not computational.

Stafford’s postscript to Visual Analogy makes a strong statement about the power ofanalogy, one with implications for rhetorical scholarship. Analogy, Stafford suggests, offers“diverse human beings real agency” (180). Analogy not only constitutes Stafford’s attempt toenvision a theory of the icon apart from iconoclasm, it also marks a space of subjectivity,invention, and action free from the binary oppositions encouraged by allegorical modes ofknowledge. Stafford’s case for visual analogy illustrates that rhetorical studies and visualstudies do not have to be “made relevant” to one another as if they constitute separatetraditions. One goal for visual rhetoric might be to think beyond the association of rhetoricwith the textual and verbal, and, instead, explore what it might mean to think of rhetoric andvisuality as related rather than opposed.

Visual Studies and Visual Rhetoric

At the beginning of this essay, I wrote that I wanted to use the work of Mitchell, Elkins, andStafford to explore some of the ways that we might conceptualize a visual rhetoric project.Throughout, I have suggested how these scholars’ ideas should resonate with those of usworking at the intersection of visual studies and rhetorical studies. By way of review, and toinvite further conversation, I offer a brief synthesis of this set of claims here.

Most of the work that calls itself “visual rhetoric” collapses the idea of “visual” into“image,” framing visual rhetoric as a genre category. Thus, to do visual rhetoric is to studyvisual artifacts from a variety of perspectives. Although the best of this work is insightful,visual rhetoric scholars can and should do more. Limiting ourselves to a definition of visualrhetoric as a rhetorical artifact with visual characteristics poses at least two conceptualproblems. First, labeling as “visual rhetoric” artifacts such as photographs, memorials, artimages, and advertisements creates a false category. Photographs, for example, possesslinguistic components or often find themselves contextualized through narratives. GivenMitchell’s and Elkins’s recognition of the impossibility of “pure” image or “pure” writing, thelabeling of some rhetoric as visual ignores the often untenable distinctions between the visualand verbal in practical discourse. Furthermore, by isolating the visual as a genre of rhetoricaldiscourse, proponents of visual rhetoric may face unintended consequences. That is, if visualrhetoric is visual rhetoric, and verbal rhetoric is rhetoric, then the iconophobic dominance oftext remains unquestioned, and visual rhetoric is forever subordinated to the traditionalartifacts of public address.15 Conceptualizing visual rhetoric solely in these terms may domore harm than good.

Mindful of these problems, I offer as useful a conception of visual rhetoric as a project ofinquiry, rather than a product. Such a move is suggested by the work of these scholars.Framing visual rhetoric as a project of inquiry suggests two related trajectories for research.First, a visual rhetoric project should be interested in the rhetorical study of the artifacts ofvisual culture. Although the notion of “visual culture” is a hotly contested term,16 itrecognizes the ways that visuality frames our experience of the world, acknowledging, inMitchell’s words, “that vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication asfundamental and widespread as language.”17 In rhetorical studies, analysis of the artifacts ofvisual culture involves attention to visual images, but such attention would not stop at thelimits of the artifact, nor would it become mired in overwrought distinctions between text

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and image. Rhetorical analysis of visual culture should recognize the influence of visualartifacts and practices, but also place them in the contexts of their circulation in a discursivefield conceived neither as exclusively textual nor exclusively visual. Such scholarship is alreadyhappening in our field; I would like to see more of it.18 This work enriches our understandingof what properly constitutes public address and deepens our approaches to rhetoricalcriticism and history.

Such work can only make a substantial contribution, however, if we conceive of a visualrhetoric project that takes an additional step, one that explicitly brings visuality to bear onrhetorical theory. Following Elkins, we should not uncritically import the canon of visualstudies, but instead do rhetorical theory in such a way as to recognize the ways in whichvisuality affects, challenges, or changes our understanding of rhetoric. Following Stafford,such a move necessitates a deconstructive and a constructive component.

First, the deconstructive move: we should embrace Mitchell’s pictorial turn by recognizing,acknowledging, and challenging the complex and iconoclastic relationship of rhetorical theoryto the visual.19 For example, in recent work Jiyeon Kang and I have studied the ways in whichour received theories of the public are predicated on models of communication that areiconoclastic. Such work, we hope, will help rhetorical studies to address its unwillingness tocome to terms with its own iconoclasm.

Beyond deconstructing iconoclasm, the visual rhetoric project should also embrace aconstructive move. Acknowledging visuality is ekphrastic; it “brings before our eyes” newways of conceiving rhetorical theory. For example, Stafford’s conception of visual analogy andits links to invention is a relevant counterpart to recent discussions of allegory by RobertHariman and James P. McDaniel.20 Furthermore, the genealogy of analogy reveals affinitiesbetween rhetoric and visuality that we tend to forget. Typically, those justifying visual rhetoricemphasize the opposition of textual rhetorical studies to the visual, but if we set aside theneed to dichotomize images and texts, we may open new avenues for theorizing. Therhetorical tradition shows us that from Plato forward, the rhetorical and the visual have beenassociated with the danger of appearances. Thus, the relationship between vision and rhetoricis one of opposition and affinity. The constructive move asks us to revisit the assumptions ofrhetorical theory and challenges the strict opposition that we assume between rhetoric andvision.

These ideas are admittedly sketchy and incomplete, but my hope is that I have shown someof the ways in which we might frame visual rhetoric as a project of inquiry. James Elkinsreminds us in Visual Studies that we have to be reflective: “Whatever we decide to make ofvisual practices, it is best if we do it in full awareness of the fact that the desire to interpretmay take us in directions that ruin the very theories and concepts we want to use and evenundermine our understanding of the objects that we set out to study” (201). The work I havereviewed suggests various ways of engaging visual rhetoric and reminds us of the pitfalls alongthe way.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Anne Demo, Michele Koven, and J. Gardner Rogers for reading andcommenting on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

[1] By “minor” I do not mean unimportant. I use the term in the musical sense: a themeapart from the major theme, but one that is still identifiable, recurrent, and relativelydistinct within a piece of music.

[2] On visual argument see the two-volume special issue of Argumentation and Advocacy 33(Summer–Fall 1996), ed. David Birdsell and Leo Groarke. On visual rhetoric in graphicdesign, see Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, “Doubly Damned: Rhetorical and Visual,”

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Visible Language 32 (1998): 200–233. On visual rhetoric and advertising, see Linda M.Scott, “Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric,” Journal ofConsumer Research 21 (1994): 252–273. Use of the term “visual rhetoric” is not confinedto scholarship. Undergraduate textbooks in argumentation, rhetoric, and compositionfeature exercises in visual rhetoric or “visual argument.” Such exercises typicallyencourage the idea of visual literacy (a concept critiqued by James Elkins; see this essay).See, for example, Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer, Good Reasons With ContemporaryArguments (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001) and Sylvan Barnet andHugo Bedau, Current Issues and Enduring Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking andArgument, With Readings, 6th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002).

[3] See Charles Hill and Marguerite Helmers, eds., Defining Visual Rhetorics (Mahwah, NJ:Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), which includes contributions from composition and speechcommunication rhetoricians.

[4] An initial attempt at a comprehensive literature review is Keith Kenney and Linda M.Scott, “A Review of the Visual Rhetoric Literature,” in Persuasive Imagery: A ConsumerResponse Perspective, ed. Linda M. Scott and Rajeev Batra (Mahwah, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum, 2003), 17–56. Kenney and Scott survey 172 sources and sort them into threedifferent critical categories, which they somewhat strangely label classical, Burkeian, and“critical” (their quotation marks). One conclusion they draw is that most rhetoricalstudies of visuality do not investigate the empirical effects of images on readers andviewers; I do not dispute this, but I am not convinced that the empirical study of imageeffects is the necessary domain of a project in visual rhetoric. The first book-lengthattempt designed to clarify the idea of visual rhetoric in the domain of rhetorical studiesis Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Hill and Helmers.

[5] Note that each of these scholars works out of Chicago (Mitchell and Stafford at theUniversity of Chicago, Elkins at the School of the Art Institute), a city that has embracedits visual culture perhaps more consciously than any other U.S. city. Perhaps we have anew “Chicago School”? I thank J. Gardner Rogers for suggesting this point.

[6] I hesitate to say “interdisciplinary,” given the promiscuous and often problematic use ofthe term. On the problem of interdisciplinarity, see W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarityand Visual Culture,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 540–544, and James Elkins, Visual Studies:A Skeptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 25–30.

[7] W. J. T. Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture,” 540.[8] To date, Elkins has published 15 books since 1994. At least two more are in press at the

time of writing.[9] W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1986), 1.[10] In particular, this is a feature of some visual argument scholarship that considers the

question of the existence of visual argument by isolating the visual from the textual. SeeDavid Fleming, “Can Pictures Be Arguments?” Argumentation and Advocacy 33 (Sum-mer 1996): 11–22.

[11] Recent scholarly attention to the question of circulation helps us see beyond the needto “fix” meaning. See Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSAPhotographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books), 220–224; Bruno Latour, “How toBe Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?” in Picturing Science–Producing Art, ed.Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 418–440; MichaelWarner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 49–90. Robert Hari-man and John Louis Lucaites’s ongoing project on iconic photography depends on animplicit theory of circulation; see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissentand Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State IconicPhotograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (2001): 5–32; Robert Hariman and JohnLouis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The

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Image of ‘Accidental Napalm,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003):35–66.

[12] Popular readers include Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader(London: Sage, 1999); Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., The Visual Culture Reader (London:Routledge, 1998). A recent and popular introductory textbook is Marita Sturken andLisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York:Oxford University Press, 2001).

[13] I count myself guilty as charged. See Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, ix, 220.[14] See Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse

of Visual Education (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); and Barbara Maria Stafford, BodyCriticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MITPress, 1991).

[15] On this point, see also Cara A. Finnegan, “Doing Rhetorical History of the Visual: ThePhotograph and the Archive,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, 197.

[16] A vivid and oft-cited example of the contested nature of the term “visual culture” maybe found in the journal October’s infamous “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77(1996): 25–70.

[17] Mitchell, “Interdisciplinarity,” 543.[18] To offer but a few examples: Kevin M. DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demo, “Imaging

Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies inMedia Communication 17 (2000): 241–260; Hariman and Lucaites, “Dissent andEmotional Management”; Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Mem-ory”; Lester C. Olson, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: AStudy in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991);Lester C. Olson, Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community: A Study inRhetorical Iconology (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004).

[19] Kevin M. DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples attempt this in their work on the “public screen,”but in arguing for the relevance of spectacle to public discourse, they oversimplifycontemporary public sphere theory, reducing it to a straw figure in order to make anargument about the importance of paying attention to visuality. As a result, they comeclose to reifying a view of visuality as antithetical to “rational,” textual publicity. SeeKevin M. DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democ-racy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication19 (2002): 125–151.

[20] See Robert Hariman, “Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era,”Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 267–296; James P. McDaniel, “Liberal Irony: AProgram for Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 297–327.

Robert A. Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), x � 167 pp. $27.95.

In 1991, the endocrinologist Simon LeVay released his findings that a nucleus in the preopticarea of the hypothalamus was smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men. Twoyears later, Dean Hamer correlated homosexuality and a genetic marker on the Xq28chromosome. Many homosexuals rushed to embrace these and other studies because theyseemed to suggest that homosexuality was not a perverse lifestyle choice but an immutablecharacteristic written in the genetic structure. At last, the old canard about homosexuals’willful and sinful behavior could be trumped with the genetic card and, with it, the groundsfor denying legal protection for gay men and lesbians.

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In fact, the early optimism was unwarranted because the gay gene research has neitherdiminished bigotry nor ushered in a time of increased political liberties. During the pastdecade, the political and legal status of gays and lesbians has remained on the cultural frontburner, a ready wedge issue in electoral contests, and manifesting itself in debates over gaysin the military, gay adoption and, recently, gay marriage. Scientists, too, have continuedproducing theory and research that attempt to demonstrate that gay men are biologicallydistinct from their heterosexual counterparts. It is into this fluid political and scientificenvironment that Robert Brookey intervenes with his book Reinventing the Male Homosexual:The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene.

Part polemic, part trenchant warning, and part political statement, Brookey’s book strivesto answer a deceptively simple question: What is the “evidence on which the biologicalarguments constituting the gay gene discourse are based?” (118). His answer, meticulouslyresearched and described, should give pause to scientists and political activists alike. Theevidence, he has discovered, assumes that male homosexuality is aberrant and pathological,and that gay men are physically feminized. The resulting studies reflect the intellectual andfinancial turf battles that are at stake, as well as being deeply flawed in their methodology. Inother words, the new gay gene discourse is bad science that “reinvents” limiting stereotypesabout gay men. Brookey argues that adopting this discourse as the basis for progressivepolitical and legal claims bodes ill for gay rights advocates.

Reinventing the Male Homosexual proceeds in two parts. Following an introductory chapter,chapters two to five utilize a Foucauldian genealogy to show how arguments about homosex-uality are produced in the biological sciences. Brookey examines theory and research insociopsychology, behavioral genetics, neuroendocrinology, and sociobiology/evolutionarypsychology. Moving inductively, he lays bare faulty assumptions in the research such asscientists’ assumption that human sexual desire manifests itself in strictly hetero- or homosex-ual behavior. He also faults the researchers for conflating homosexual orientation withhomosexual practice. Methodically critiquing one study after another, he leaves the readerwith a damning indictment of the biological grounds for the gay gene discourse.

Purposeful or not, another effect of his approach is to undermine the authority of scienceand scientists even as he engages these scholars on their linguistic grounds. Brookey hasfamiliarized himself with a range of concepts and discursive practices particular to thebiological fields that have produced the gay gene literature and, in so doing, saved his readersa great deal of trouble. The author’s analysis and critique of the biological basis for the gaygene argument is meticulous, convincing, and thorough.

The second part of Reinventing the Male Homosexual is undoubtedly the beauty of thisbook. It is also disappointing that it is a single concluding chapter. Here, Brookey reveals hiscapacity for lively argument and rhetorical dexterity. Cut loose from the incrementalism andspecialized language of the previous four chapters, he develops what he admits is his primaryinterest and the real significance of the gay gene discourse—its impact in the social andpolitical arenas. Drawing on John Lyne’s concept of “bio-rhetoric,” the author demonstratesthat that gay gene discourse has failed to meet expectations in the political and legal realms.Moreover, he argues, it is likely to be disadvantageous to gay rights advocates in the future.

To his credit, Brookey is as scathing in his critique of the gay rights movement forembracing the gay gene discourse as he is of the scientists who produced it in the first place.Especially fascinating are his discussions of the medical potential of the gay gene research toproduce new drugs to assist individuals in verifying their heterosexuality or in makingdecisions about unborn children who carry genetic markers for homosexuality. But Brookeyhits his stride when he demonstrates the limitations of the gay gene discourse in an array oflegal and political contests. Although he is circumspect about the gay gene research that hasbeen published so far, he urges gay rights activists not to shun all related research findings.He notes: “Gays and lesbians should not reject the possibility that sexual desire may havesome biological etiology. It should be understood, however, that such knowledge provides

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little understanding of how sexual orientation is socialized and politicized” (147). It is an aptwarning.

Reinventing the Male Homosexual is a fine addition to the growing literature on the rhetoricof inquiry as well as the rhetoric of gay rights. It invites important questions aboutbio-rhetoric and the ways in which scientific literature is utilized in the public sphere toinform public policy. Some readers may be reluctant to work their way through severalchapters of detailed scientific critique; nevertheless, the first and last chapters of RobertBrookey’s text offer a compelling and richly rewarding rhetorical analysis.

Adrienne ChristiansenMacalester College

Kurt Ritter and Martin J. Medhurst, eds., Presidential Speechwriting: From the New Deal to theReagan Revolution and Beyond (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003), 248 pp.$39.95.

In his introduction, “Presidential Speechwriting: Ten Myths that Plague Modern Scholar-ship,” Martin J. Medhurst points to the importance of the modern presidential speechwriter.In debunking some common myths about presidential speechwriting, Medhurst makes itclear that this topic is often misunderstood and underappreciated. Each of the selected mythsreceives an interesting, if truncated, discussion and defense. The overall effect is to invite thereader into an important dialogue that continues throughout the book.

In chapter one, “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Rhetorical Politics and Rhetorical Rhetorics,”Halford Ryan argues that in the case of FDR, traditional assumptions about the speechwritingprocess must be reconfigured. Rather than being a mere “handmaiden of statecraft,”speechwriting was a critical factor in how policy was fashioned. In Ryan’s words, “The successof FDR’s presidential rhetoric was his ability to invent a policy rhetorically for its eventualacceptance politically” (22). For his case study, Ryan describes Roosevelt’s use of metaphor.In the main, he argues that when the metaphors failed or were largely absent, FDR’s policieswere unsuccessful, and when the metaphors worked, the policies they represented flourished.Ryan clearly and forcefully implicates the role of rhetoric in effective and ineffective publicpolicy decision making processes and products. The rhetoric-policy relationships posited inRyan’s case study provide fertile ground for the future investigation of this topic.

In chapter two, “Harry S. Truman: From Whistle-Stops to the Halls of Congress,” DianaB. Carlin employs some judicious archival research to plumb the speechwriting apparatus ofthe Truman administration. Carlin usefully describes the Truman speechwriting system, thespeechwriters’ origins, and their principal roles within the speechwriting process. ProfessorCarlin’s stellar research uncovers the fact that Truman had a remarkable speechwriting teamand that the president was adroit enough to take full advantage of it. The descriptionsprovided evoke a time when there was a bit less bureaucracy attached to the speechwritingprocess (and therefore more direct access to the president), while simultaneously uncoveringa finely-tuned, proactive system in place to support this particular president. Carlin makes acompelling case for the need for archival research as a means to gain a more preciseunderstanding of speechwriting processes and products.

In chapter three, “Dwight D. Eisenhower: The 1954 State of the Union Address as a CaseStudy in Presidential Speechwriting,” Charles J. G. Griffin investigates the speechwritingapparatus that supported Eisenhower’s presidential rhetoric. Ike’s 1954 State of the UnionAddress provides an effective focus for this analysis. Professor Griffin provides a meticulousdescription of the six-month process of crafting this address, highlighting contributions by ahost of personnel and documenting the evolving philosophy behind this important address.

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Griffin’s study extends our knowledge of Eisenhower’s flexible staffing system, the president’s“hands on” involvement in the writing process, and the “deliberate integration of speechwrit-ing and policy-making activities” (74). Griffin argues that all three of these characteristics arerepresentative of the way that the Eisenhower White House approached presidential rhetoricalresponsibilities.

In chapter four, “John F. Kennedy: Presidential Speechwriting as Rhetorical Collaboration,”Theodore O. Windt, Jr., maintains that “traditional approaches” to the study of speechwriting“are not particularly useful in the Kennedy administration” (93). President Kennedy andTheodore Sorensen “wrote most of the major presidential speeches” (93). On the question ofexactly how much Kennedy contributed to the speechwriting, Windt observes, “The truth ofthe matter seems to be that Kennedy got involved whenever he felt like getting involved….But that he was intimately involved in each of the major speeches and most of the others isindisputable” (97). Ultimately, Kennedy’s speechwriting operation is described as“freewheeling and ad hoc in nature,” but it was a process that seemed to serve this presidentwell.

In chapter five, “Lyndon B. Johnson: From Private Deliberations to Public Declaration—The Making of LBJ’s Renunciation Speech,” Moya Ann Ball explicates the historical contextthat led to LBJ’s decision to announce his intent not to run for reelection in 1968. Accordingto Professor Ball, many of Johnson’s speeches “resembled a mosaic,” a complex combinationof contributions from a variety of agents, agencies, ad hoc committees, and major and minorspeechwriters; “sometimes” LBJ’s input was “rather minimal” (115). A number of powerstruggles between the speechwriters vying for influence was often manifest. The result wasthat many speeches tended to be the products of compromise; they were “bland, watereddown,” and often bore little of the stamp of the president’s personality. The Johnsonadministration also sent out a confused and confusing message on Vietnam. Professor Ball’scareful analysis of the development of the March 31 address allows us an insider’s view of theslow transformation of a prototypical “war” speech into a newly polished “peace” initiativedelivered in the form of a public address.

In chapter six, “Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford: Lessons on Speechwriting,” CraigR. Smith, relying on his special experience as a speechwriter for President Ford and on hisextensive interviews with Nixon and Ford speechwriters, concludes that President’s Nixon’sbackground as an orator and debater was an advantage in later political life while PresidentFord’s lack of oratorical training left him at a decided disadvantage. Professor Craig arguesthat Nixon made use of extensive polling data to identify issues and formulate his stances.Ford’s carefully rehearsed nomination acceptance address contained more stylistic devicesthan his usual oratorical efforts, and it also contained more “memorable lines” (142). Hissuccess with that speech affected how his White House speech team operated during hisrelatively brief tenure in office. Professor Smith indicates that a speechwriter’s “influence withthe president is a matter of luck, timing, effectiveness, and infighting” (146). Smith’sdescription of his own influence is an interesting case study in itself. Finally, Professor Smithargues that presidential speechwriters need to be more concerned about the president’sdelivery and that one of their duties should be to “coach performance.”

In chapter seven, “Jimmy Carter: The Language of Politics and the Practice of Integrity,”John H. Patton explores a certain unresolved tension in President Carter’s discourse. Carterhad employed approximately 12 speechwriters during his tenure as president, and theyseemed to operate on an ad hoc basis. In addition, they had little direct access to thepresident, leaving the process rather fragmented and the speechwriters themselves frustratedwith a speech-writing process divorced from the policy decision-making process. Accordingto Professor Patton, the Carter speechwriting team was smaller than that of previouspresidents “and, more importantly, [it] was given scant resources” (169). When PresidentCarter delivered policy addresses, Patton argues, his “strong sense of humanity and sponta-neity” was suppressed. This resulted in a policy speech of “description and announcement”

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rather than “appeal and influence” (170). An exception to this set of circumstances can befound in Carter’s speeches on human rights policy and in ceremonial addresses where he wasable to expound on personal and public values. Carter was unable to resolve the tensionbetween what Professor Patton describes as “the programmatic language of description andthe powerful personal rhetoric of moral conviction” (188).

In chapter eight, “Ronald Reagan’s Bully Pulpit: Creating a Rhetoric of Values,” WilliamK. Muir, Jr., who worked in the Reagan White House as a speechwriter for vice-presidentGeorge H. W. Bush, provides an excellent overview of Reagan’s speechwriters and the speech-writing process. While acknowledging that Reagan was perhaps at his best when delivering aceremonial address, Muir’s case study, a 1984 address to the National League of Cities,demonstrates how well Reagan’s speechwriters could work together to deliver a policyaddress. Interestingly, this speech focused more on public philosophy than on specific policiesfor urban communities. The principal speechwriter, Al Myer, helped to define Reagan’s urbanpolicy because, prior to the speech, it had yet to be defined. Muir argues that throughout hispresidency Ronald Reagan advanced his agenda based on three philosophical “truths”: “socialpartnership, human imperfectability, and personal responsibility” (210). Muir helps toilluminate Ronald Reagan’s “moral” leadership and his study invites readers to “consider themoral value of coherent presidential rhetoric” (213).

In the afterword, “Enduring Issues in Presidential Speechwriting,” Professor Medhurstcomments on four key themes raised by this collection: access to the president, the relationof speechwriting to policy making, constraints on the speechwriting process, and finally, therelation of speechwriting and speechmaking to presidential leadership. This discussion,although brief, is a useful way of tying the essays together and provides common ground forfuture investigations.

In sum, this set of essays gives us a very fine, often intimate and revealing portrait of thepresidential speechwriting process; they also help us to account for the oratorical product ina more intelligent and enlightened fashion, and they inescapably argue for the connectionbetween and importance of presidential words and deeds.

Steven R. GoldzwigMarquette University

Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR’S Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (CollegeStation, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2003), 160 pp. $32.95.

In this book, Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe bring together traditional and contemporarythreads of rhetorical study. Traditional rhetorical study is apparent in the close attention topresidential documents from the Roosevelt library that enliven the era immediately precedingRoosevelt’s election to the presidency. The book goes beyond conventional public addressstudy, however, and integrates a rhetoric of the body to connect rhetorical scholars to morecontemporary approaches initiated by scholars ranging from Foucault to Blair. Ultimately, thebook explains the ways in which Roosevelt’s physical struggle with his body becomes acompelling metaphor extended throughout his political arguments to become president.

Although employing the conventional and significant work of scholars like Frank Friedel,Houck and Kiewe bring an expected rhetorical richness to their biographical tale of Roo-sevelt’s life from August 10, 1921, until his presidential election in November 1932. Moreover,the authors offer Roosevelt’s body as a “body politic” that incorporates the speaking candidateRoosevelt and the hearing U.S. electorate. Roosevelt’s disability becomes a fascinatingrhetorical artifact artfully crafted to manage public anxiety about a leader lacking traditional

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masculine strength. Houck and Kiewe convey with sharp detail the metaphorical extension ofRoosevelt’s vision of “walking” found in his public addresses. The biographical examinationsuggests that Roosevelt seemed caught up in a self-deception about the thoroughly debilitat-ing nature of his physical condition. His deception eerily mirrors that of the public, whichcatches odd glimpses of a leader “walking” and mysterious appearances orchestrated by aidesconfident they can create the needed public persona of strength.

Chapter one explains the rhetorical interests undergirding the book, pointing to scholarssuch as Hart, Bitzer, Campbell, Jamieson, Blair, and Foucault as contributing to the authors’understanding of language’s role in shaping history. It also points to the FDR memorial inWashington as a kind of exigence that encapsulates the controversy over Roosevelt’s physicalcondition. That controversy conveys the symbolic tension that is the historical subject of thisbook. Chapter two begins the chronological review of Roosevelt’s confrontation with physicaldisability within his political body. Personal correspondence adds to the richness of thishistorical interlude. Commentary from doctors and family members convey a complex webof speculation guiding Roosevelt’s struggle against a paralysis that left the lower half of hisbody largely dysfunctional. The authors argue for a formative role of these moments in FDR’slater public life.

In chapter three, the public reconstruction of Roosevelt’s political body begins. Roosevelt’spersonal vision of “walking” becomes the animating metaphor of the book and arguably ofFDR’s political rhetoric. In this chapter, the struggle to convince the public that Roosevelt isovercoming the effects of a severe illness begins in earnest. The chapter focuses on the years1921–1928, when Roosevelt offered little public comment. Chapter four turns to the criticalyear 1928. The pivotal political moments of FDR’s nominating speech for Al Smith andRoosevelt’s election as Governor of New York are critical to any effective understanding ofRoosevelt’s political career. This book makes a unique contribution to presidential scholar-ship by demonstrating the role of illness in shaping Roosevelt’s strategic responses to politicalleadership within a Democratic party that sought to use FDR for its own purposes.

Chapter five focuses on the rhetorical significance of Earle Looker. Currently a minorcharacter in biographies of Roosevelt, this chapter recognizes Looker’s role in rehabilitatingthe Roosevelt image, beginning in 1930. Journalistic work in publications like LibertyMagazine helped to convince the public that Roosevelt was recovering from his illness.Looker’s apparent role as an objective observer in these publications is exposed in these pagesas a more strategic relationship with Roosevelt. Once “objective” journalism had certifiedFDR’s recovery, the story could then turn to his presidential campaign. Chapter six detailsRoosevelt’s dramatic appearance at the Democratic convention in 1932. Roosevelt chose toarrive at the Chicago event by plane. His unusual mode of transportation attracted mediaattention and conveyed a technological agility to his campaign. A notion of urgency andpersonal importance was expressed by Roosevelt’s physical presence at the convention.Traditionally, such a presence was not expected or required at a nominating convention.Roosevelt’s break with precedent mattered.

Chapter seven offers a general review of Roosevelt’s campaign arguments, with a focus onhow the human body is extended as a metaphor within this discourse. The chapter grappleswith underlying issues of gender within the electorate and how voters perceived the contentof the campaign. A central metaphor is the notion of illness as it relates to the devastated U.S.economy. The chapter concludes with the decisive electoral landslide victory of Roosevelt overHoover.

Chapter eight concludes the book with a brief review of the contemporary relevance of thisdisability controversy. Of note is how disability continues to be viewed in relation tocontemporary candidates like Robert Dole in 1996. The book concludes that the enigmaticpower of FDR in metaphorically extending his own medical struggle over disability createda compelling political vision during a heartbreaking period of U.S. history.

Although this is a fine book, it might have been useful for the authors to connect their

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work more extensively to the literature on metaphor. Equally important, the more traditionalperspective offered by the book focuses the reader on FDR the speaker while leaving the U.S.audience somewhat blurry. I expected a “Seabiscuit” moment through which we couldappreciate the public’s need for a struggling disabled figure like FDR to complete its ownimagined, furtive escape from the Depression. This point is far from absent in the book, butit was a point that I felt required more concentration and comment.

FDR’s Body Politics is a fine contribution to the study of public address and a work thatusefully bridges contemporary identity theory and the rhetorical canon of FDR. Houck andKiewe provide a fine interpretation of a grand U.S. figure. I encourage scholars of Rooseveltand his rhetoric to read this innovative study.

Ben VothMiami University

Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback, eds., The Words of Cesar Chavez (CollegeStation, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), xxviii � 199 pp. $19.95.

The Words of Cesar Chavez provides the reader with a thorough introduction to the rhetoricof an important political figure. This collection is tied closely to an earlier book by JohnHammerback and Richard Jensen, The Rhetorical Career of Cesar Chavez (1998), whichanalyzed the rhetoric of Cesar Chavez and filled a void by providing important research onan individual who, although a key figure in the U.S. labor and civil rights movements, hadlargely been ignored by rhetorical critics. The earlier book was well received, but it left readersthirsty for a collection of Chavez’s speeches, and The Words of Cesar Chavez is that collection.Choosing from among the 160 texts that the editors gathered from the United Farm WorkersPapers at Wayne State University and other sources, the book presents over 35 speeches,statements, and letters spanning Chavez’s rhetorical career. Many of the works have not beenwidely available until now.

The collection gives a sense of the ways in which Chavez’s rhetoric matured and changedfocus over the years. Arranged in a chronological fashion, the book clusters Chavez’s worksinto major periods. The introduction includes a brief history of Chavez and the United FarmWorkers. Each chapter begins with background on each period and speech. Chapter oneexamines Chavez’s rhetoric during the creation of the movement (1962–1970). Chapter twoviews the rhetoric during the early, successful years of the movement (1970–1975). Chapterthree explores the ways that Chavez rhetorically maneuvered through more challenging times(1976–1983). Chapter four includes speeches from what Jensen and Hammerback call the“difficult last decade” (1984–1993) when the farm labor movement struggled with a hostilepolitical climate and failures. Finally, chapter five is a collection of Chavez’s ceremonialspeeches delivered throughout his career.

The organization of the book allows the reader to gain a clear sense of Chavez’s evolution.For example, in his earlier works (chapter one), Chavez educated his audience about the farmworkers’ situation in an effort to motivate them to get involved in the movement andunderstand the value of union activity. Because farm workers at this time were “unseen orignored,” Chavez focused on “mak[ing] them visible” (3). Although his writings and speechesduring this period accomplished this, they did so without rhetorical flourish. As themovement grew in size and strength (chapter two), Chavez began to speak to a wider varietyof audiences and adapted his message accordingly. He related the farm workers’ experiencesto other oppressed groups in an attempt to draw more people into the movement. He alsodepended more on statistics and specific political details, for example, in order to bolster hisarguments with these audiences. In his later speeches (chapters three and four), the signs of

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strain on the movement began to show. Chavez was forced to admit some defeats and refocusthe movement in a hostile political climate. To do so, he used more attack strategies andworked to unite his audience against their opponents. He emphasized the differences betweenhis audiences and their “enemies”—the growers and the state and national Republicanadministrations. By this time, his rhetoric was more polished, relying on rhetorical deviceslike anaphora, narrative, and carefully crafted language. Finally, the collection brings together(chapter five) many of Chavez’s ceremonial speeches (eulogies and statements) and offers awindow into Chavez’s life philosophy through those works. In other words, the collectioncarries the reader through a variety of rhetorical contexts that Chavez faced and illustrates theways in which he grew as a speaker over the years. Some speeches may not be rhetoricalmasterpieces, but they are an important part of the movement history.

The collection includes a variety of historical artifacts: impromptu, extemporaneous, andmanuscripted speeches, written statements, and documents in English and Spanish. It is alsoapparent that Chavez adapted to his different audiences (Chicano versus Anglo, farm laborersversus university students, and so on). The collection includes speeches given at rallies,university protests, conventions, and organizational meetings. In testimony before a Senatesubcommittee, he relies more heavily on evidence to build his case. In front of a universitycrowd, he relates the farm worker struggles to those of student protestors. In a speech tolaborers, he includes more Spanish phrases, dichos (maxims), and cuentos (stories with amoral lesson). In choosing this set of speeches, the editors have represented superbly thedifferent facets of Chavez’s rhetoric.

Although the collection provides a much-needed addition to the field of rhetoric by addingthe voice of a major Chicano and labor leader, The Words of Cesar Chavez does more. Forthose unfamiliar with Chavez’s rhetoric, this collection is a rich introduction to his work andthe farm labor movement. His words, as the editors argue, offer the clearest understandingof the movement because Chavez made rhetoric an integral part of his strategy. “Tounderstand the career, impact, and indeed the very meaning of Chavez,” Jensen andHammerback write, “is to understand the rhetorical discourse upon which he consciouslybased his career as organizer/leader and to which he devoted much of his life” (xiii). Chavez’sprimary and consistent rhetorical persona was that of teacher because he often was forced toexplain union history, describe the importance of union activity, and give current politicalinformation to his audiences. He inserted details about the conditions of the farm worker, thelegal and political climate, and the failures and successes of the movement into his rhetoric.Reading Chavez’s words presents an alternative view of the evolution of the farm labormovement and supplements the numerous historical writings that do not adequately take hisrhetoric into account.

The book may not offer a complete history of the general movement or of each speech, butit provides ample introductions. If the book were written purely for rhetorical critics, morebackground and analysis of each speech might be ideal but for a general audience andcombined with the previous book, the analysis is sufficient. For a more comprehensivetreatment of Chavez’s rhetoric, the earlier (1998) book might be a better choice, but TheWords of Cesar Chavez invites readers to search for new explanations of why Chavez’s rhetoricwas so effective with his audiences. Those interested in Chicano rhetoric specifically or inbroadening the rhetorical acts to be included in classes will find this collection to be a gem,and social movement scholars will find it interesting to see how Chavez’s messages evolved.Jensen and Hammerback have made a significant contribution by collecting and publishingthese works. Chavez’s rhetoric may slowly find its way into more general speech collections;until then, this book offers a much-needed resource.

Wendy Atkins-SayreUniversity of Georgia

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Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2000), 96 pp. $12.95.

Religious belief has survived the fruition of modernity. Indeed, many recent commentatorshave suggested that something like religious belief has an important and continuing politicalrole. To the extent that they are right and religious belief still influences public life, it isincumbent on the rhetorician to understand the ways in which private beliefs intersect publicinterests. Confession, or the disclosure of religious beliefs, is just such a practice. In theposthumously published The Confession of Augustine, Jean-Francois Lyotard draws on Au-gustine to argue that confession is a linguistic and memorial practice marked by itsconspicuous failure to capture religious belief in words. Belief, for Augustine, constitutes animmediate knowledge of absolute truth. Rhetorical practices, exhausted as they are bysymbolicity, cannot obtain such certainty. This failure as a rhetorical practice, Lyotard argues,marks confession as a compelling memorial practice. Lyotard’s account of the confessional actwill intrigue all rhetoricians, but especially those interested in the intersections of rhetoric andmemory studies. In this review, I first summarize the argument and elaborate the ways inwhich Lyotard’s volume renegotiates the limits of the ever-malleable constituents of con-fession: rhetoric and memory. I conclude by recommending the book in spite of somefundamental reservations.

Augustine’s confession is, in part, an attempt to recount his conversion, and as such,Lyotard argues, it presupposes a memory act beyond the limits of symbolism. The Christianconversion, he contends, is a transformative event charged by the “shattering visit” of Christ(4). Christ’s visit is necessarily “shattering” because it is the visitation of the absolute in time.Lyotard imagines the convert as a finite sponge “steeped in infinity, impregnated andpregnant with [Christ’s] overabundant liquid” (11). Although Lyotard never explicitlyinvokes Kant, the repeated allusions suggest that conversion is best understood through theKantian sublime: “[I]nfinity made flesh is accomplished without the concept … It cannot besubmitted as evidence to the tribunal of ideas, which declines comment” (4, emphasis added).Consistent with Kant, Lyotard argues that the sublimity of conversion renders the eventincommunicable. Conversion is beyond confession, Lyotard insists; “the words to express itare lacking” (11).

The ineffability of conversion precludes its own symbolic remembrance. The event “isprimitive,” Lyotard argues, “not locatable in memory” (53). The allusions to Kant multiplyas Lyotard suggests that the limits of the intellect (animus) preclude remembrance: “Suchapprenticeship exceeds the mind,” Lyotard reasons, and “the encounter with … God does nottake place in the stores of memory” (51). As Kant would have it, the intellect balks at theabsurdity of recalling or confessing the immemorial. “[T]he mind lays down the stilus,”Lyotard writes (51), but the soul, the inner human, the anima, is quick to take it up andconfess the immemorial. Note here the extra-rhetorical processes by which the inner humanrecalls the extra-memorial event: “A wound, an ecchymosis, a scar attests to the fact that ablow has been received, they are its mechanical effect. Signs all the more trustworthy sincethey do not issue from any intention or arbitrary inscription” (6–7). Conversion scars theconvert and creates the extra-symbolic memorial practice of Augustine’s confession: memoryvia mechanics—unquestionable because “the inner human attests ab intestat [without will]”(8).

If the object of confession is an event recalled mechanically, the confession itself is arhetorical process laden with the frailty of symbolicity. Lyotard notes that Augustine’s wordsdo not “bend unprotesting to a regime whose rex is not of him and whose rule lies beyondhis grasp” (13). The scarring event of conversion, in other words, does not remove Augustine“from the hurried, limp course of regrets, remorse, hope, responsibilities, from the ordinaryworries of life” (17). The temporality of this hurried life affects the limits of confession. Asthe “absolute word inflicts upon itself the becoming of signs” the certainties of mechanical

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memory are condemned to an “evanescent state” in which “marks of suspicion” haunt the“validity of linguistic units” (44). The security of memorial mechanics is compromised by thesemiotics of temporality: “[T]he eyes of your creatures blink, they are veiled, adapted to thenight of sin. We mumble our way through the traces left by the absolute that you are” (40).

Between the mechanics of memory and the temporality of confession there exists an“uncrossable divide,” a differend, or a fissure (43). Confession cannot disclose presence; thetemporal act cannot account for the event of conversion, yet it is driven to try. “I pant afterthee,” Augustine relates: “I tasted thee, and now do hunger and thirst after thee.” Woundedby presence, confession single-mindedly pursues disclosure: “the soul can think of nothingbut returning to its crimes” (52–53). Yet at the end of The Confession, Augustine still “findshimself on the threshold of your door, still stuck in the pall of affairs.” The lesson, Lyotardsuggests, is that confession is bound to futility. “Confessive writing bears the fissure alongwith it” (49); it is immanently inadequate. It is, however, this inadequacy that marksconfession as the memorial act par excellance.

In Lyotard’s mind, complete disclosure is the condition of oblivion. This is the hauntinglesson of the Holocaust: totalitarianism effects effacement. Inscription on the “tables ofmemory” prefigures forgetfulness. Thus, the memorial power of confession arises from itsown immanent incapacities; it cannot attain totality. It is precisely this condition ofconfession as unavoidably fissure-laden that accomplishes its memorial work of preservingthe “unforgettable forgotten.”

Confession is thus always already a sublime rhetorical act. Lyotard writes, “[T]o confess isto bring into language, to language what eludes language…. To confess explicitly to thatwhich has said nothing and says nothing, to give what one has not been, what one is not, isthe exorbitant work to which Augustine harnesses himself” (26–27). Here it is appropriate toreturn to the last sentence of Lyotard’s landmark Report on Knowledge: “Let us wage a waron totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable.” Confession accomplishes both tasks; itprecludes totality through its always-fissured status even as it recalls the immemorial. It is,Lyotard argues, a recollection of the absolute in time, an “uncanny anchoring” of presence inevanescence (73).

The rhetorician will be intrigued but not satisfied with Lyotard’s account of the memorialpowers of confession. The idea of mechanical memory is, of course, anathema to rhetoricalnotions of memory rooted in language and social frameworks; Lyotard threatens theinheritance of Maurice Halbwachs, the Durkheimian sociologist who first posited thelinguistic foundations of memory and enabled the confluence of rhetoric and memorystudies. Fundamentally, Lyotard’s willingness to play at the limits of symbolism will troublea generation of rhetoricians raised on the all-encompassing symbolism of Kenneth Burke. YetI suspect that Lyotard would argue that it is this agitation that recommends The Confessionof Augustine to rhetoricians. Returning once more to Kant, we are reminded that thetransgression of limits has an important purpose. So it is, Lyotard suggests, with confession:“[I]t increases the faculties of the flesh beyond their limits, and without end. The ability tofeel and to take pleasure unencumbered, pushed to an unknown power—this is saintly joy”(12).

David TellThe Pennsylvania State University