viz.

Over at No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman pieced together a rather precise visual argument by sequencing a series of images from 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While we could spend many a blog entry on the imagery of terror and war or on the function of visual images in argument, the Hariman sequence seems to provide an excellent in-class opportunity to dwell on the different persuasive registers present in visual communication and political speeches that invoke the same imagery.

Hariman’s sequence is as follows: 1) the moment of the second plane impact at the WTC, 2) President Bush as Air Force pilot, 3) the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph, 4) a photograph of (presumably) a former American soldier and his 3 prosthetic limbs, 5) the wreckage of a Baghdad neighborhood, and 6) the wreckage and casualties of a Tikrit car bombing. Images 1, 3, 4, and 6 are particularly disturbing. But seeing these images and hearing them brought up in speech are two very different experiences. It would not shock anyone, I don’t think, to hear a U.S. politician reference the plane attacks of the WTC, or to speak of a former solider dealing with the physical and emotional fallout of war, or to call attention to the violence and loss of life of street violence in Baghdad. And yet the violence of the images in the No Caption Needed post seems much more acute, potentially offensive, and may even execute a metonymic kind of violence on the viewer. This may make images more effective in imparting the emotional register of public memory, but a counterpoint to that utility is that speech offers a type of protection against the pathos of those images. I offer the contrast between visual reminders and vocal reminders, in part to show how the visual might refuse a kind of whitewashing that is possible in non-visual discourse. More importantly, I think comparing and contrasting the No Caption Needed sequence to other discourses on the public memory of 9/11 and the war on terror is an exercise that can create a more precise account of the virtues and limits of visual rhetoric in general.