Helmers, Marguerite & Hill, Charles A. (2008) “Introduction” in Defining Visual Rhetorics (eds.) Charles A. Hill & Marhuerite Helmers: 1-23. New Jersey: LEA.

We learn who we are as private or public citizens by seeing ourselves reflected in images, and we learn who we can become by transporting ourselves into images. – 1

Images work on us synchronically and diachronically. Synchronically, we view the image that represents the present. Diachronic viewing are slightly more complicated, for we view an image that represents the past and was created in the past, but we also view contemporaneous images with a knowledge of their precursors and their previous meanings. – 12-13

I. Intertextuality

“all that sets the text in relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other text” – Gerard Genette  - 14

Paratextuality indicates the presence of material around the primary text, but in which the text is embedded: the framing acts of title, subtitle, preface, illustration, book covers, dust jackets, and the setting of the book which is dependent on external conditions, which the readers cannot ignore. – 14

Metatextuality moves outward to consider the effects of commentary and critical relationships posed between one text and others. – 14

Hypertextuality indicates a level of dependence between texts: Text B is unable to exist without Text A. – 14

architextuality indicates a general classification of the text or object that must result from paratextuality. In other words, the library classification of a text with call letters such as PR or an HQ depends on the degree to which the text is like other texts. – 14

II. Peirce on Semiotics

Peirce’s conviction was phenomenological: Things exist in reality outside of what we perceive or think about them. – 15

Three theories of sign emerge in his [Peirce] philosophy of logic as semiotics, and each of these theories is parsed in detail, but the one that is used most frequently by rhetoricians to discuss both language and images is the triadic theory of icon, index, and symbol. Peirce’s distinctions are useful to rhetoricians because they establish a formal terminology for considering different types of imagistic sign systems, from representational, through diagrammatical, to allegorical. – 15

Two levels of terminology establish the relationship of sign to referent. At the first level, Peirce contended that a sign stands for an object; it “tells about” its object. He gave this sign the name representamen. The representamen is rhetorical; it “addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign is called the “interpretant”. The interpretant represents an idea that Peirce called “the ground of the representation.” The interpretant is thus a mental representation; it is not a person. Thus, both representamen and interpretant relate to the same object. – 15

The icon may be abstract or representational; it possesses a character that makes it significant. A vacation photograph and Charles Schultz’s Snoopy are icons, but so is a pencil streak indicating a geometric line. The Object does not have to exist, for it is easy enough to visually represent and alien from “outer space” or a solar system even though we have not seen either. Peirce refers to the icon as an image. – 15

The index, on the other hand, depends on the existence of the Object to have left what Jacques Derrida, in Dissemination, would later call a “trance”. Therefore, the indexical image holds an existential relationship to its Object and often raises in the viewer a memory of a similar Object. The classical example of an indexical sign is a bullet hole. The interpretant indicates, “here is a hole in the front door” and relates the hole to the other holes, but not to the Object (a bullet making a hole) because the object – the bullet and the gun – are missing. In Roland Barthes’ words, the index “points but does not tell”. Peirce describes the index as a diagram. – 16

The symbol is the most abstract of the three sign types. It depends on the interpretant, that is, the mental representation in the mind’s eye. Therefore, the symbolic image holds a conventional relationship to its object that is not contingent on resemblance. […] Peirce calls the symbol a metaphor. – 16

III. Barthes on Signs

According to Saussure, understanding is established by difference; practically speaking, we understand cat because cat is different from dog. The names are merely arbitrary, established by social and linguistic convention, rather than having any existential link to the object itself. – 16-17

Visual Rhetoric, An Indiscipline