viz.

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with summer; and I know it's the end of summer, because people are sending me urgent messages requesting a description of the course I plan on teaching this fall. What I've come up with so far is a course on "Crisis Rhetoric". One of the primary questions the course will seek to answer is whether there is such a thing as a legitimately, discretely definable "crisis rhetoric." How does the art of persuasion change in situations of crisis, and how can the art of persuasion be used to create a sense of crisis in any given public sphere?

My interest in these questions is related to the work I'm doing for my dissertation, which draws on the work of political theorists--in particular, Giorgio Agamben--who have increasingly pointed to the significance of crisis for our understanding of the formation or disfiguration of the public sphere, of traditional concepts such as the nation-state, and on the definition and meaning of citizenship. These theorists of the "state of exception" (or "state of emergency," depending on which terminology you prefer) have provided a useful framework for understanding many of the most ferocious legal and political debates in the U.S. in the post-9/11 world, including torture, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, and so on. In a few previous posts on viz., I have addressed these topics as they have come up in different areas of popular culture (see here, here, or here).

This brings me to the topic of this post (such as it is): is there a visual rhetoric of crisis, or a visual rhetoric of emergency? I am asking in earnest, as I gather materials for my course. What do viz. readers have to say about this subject? The question is open-ended, by design: but consider:

• how are visual arguments deployed in situations of crisis?
• how are visual arguments deployed to create or enhance feelings of crisis?
• what visual mode is most suited to crisis?
• is there a consistent, identifiable visual vocabulary of crisis?

And so on... I hope to post more thoughts on these questions as I finish thinking through the planning for my course.