The Politics of the Superficial: Visual Rhetoric and the Protocol of Display

The Politics of the Superficial

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Jeffrey A. Bennett

Barbara Biesecker

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Claire Sisco King

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Phaedra C. Pezzullo

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

The Politics of the Superficial

Visual Rhetoric & the Protocol of Display

BRETT OMMEN

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

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ISBN: 978-0-8173-1918-2

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-8993-2

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Visual Colonization of Surface

1. Spanning Design’s Surface

2. First Things First: Graphic Design and Meaning

3. The Protocol of Display

4. The Public Chamber of Fear

5. The Politics of the Superficial

Conclusions and Caveats

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

For the entirety of my career, my work has been described by its somewhat odd position among the various fields of Communication Studies. It is not classical rhetoric, not design studies, not media studies, and not cultural studies, but something a bit like all those things. In retrospect, it is apparent that my work falls in between the comfortable seats of scholarship. My best ideas have always come in the carved-out, in-between spaces of academia. I do not point this out to suggest that I am some kind of maverick. I mean instead to demonstrate that my work and ideas have benefited from the charity and the company of a wide range of people who were looking for the same intellectual alcoves.

This project would not exist but for the encouragement of some of my oldest friends, who eschewed the high school cafeteria in order to eat lunch in the storage spaces of the band room. This project would not exist but for the support of my Northwestern University writing cohort, who worked out of the forgotten spaces in the attic of the Hardy House. This project would not exist but for the feedback and conversations of my former colleagues in the University of North Dakota’s Working Group in Digital and New Media. My work, here and elsewhere, depends on the kind of collaborative community that seems to develop in adjacent or interstitial spaces. If you find that this book does not seem to dwell in any particular disciplinary position for very long, you have my apologies. But I want to thank all my friends and peers who showed me the possibilities of eschewing the comfortable seat in favor of the comfortable space—even when that space is hard to find.

All romantic reflection aside, I want to thank Dilip Gaonkar, Robert Hariman, and Keith Topper for their invaluable feedback and guidance as I developed this project at Northwestern University. I want to thank my peers who talked and read and inspired me in the early phases of the project: Leslie Harris, Ebony, Utley, Christian Lundberg, Dan Fitzmier, Randy Iden, Tim Barouch, Randall Bush, and Caitlin Bruce in particular. Thanks also go to my colleagues Bill Keith and David Beard who kept me working through the late phases of the project. I enjoyed the support and feedback of my working group colleagues Mike Wittgraf, Bill Caraher, Paul Worley, and the late (great) Joel Jonientz. I miss Joel a lot. I also need to thank my former graduate student, Joshua Young, for helping me proofread earlier manuscript drafts. I want to especially thank my former colleague Kyle Conway, who set the perfect example for scholarship and human decency while I was in the professorate and who made this project better—directly and indirectly—in so many ways.

The project benefited immensely from the rigorous critiques of reviewers. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in the summer 2010 edition of Public Culture. I thank that journal for its permission to reprint the essay and the editorial staff and reviewers for improving the project. Similarly, the reviewers at the University of Alabama Press have been wonderful, gracious, and demanding. Their fresh eyes and expert sensibilities forced me to rethink some arguments and ideas in favor of what I believe is a more concise and much stronger book.

While thanking the proverbial village, I want to express my gratitude to my family for its support. My children are the perfect palate cleanser after a rough day struggling with ideas and critiques. My wife, Kate, has long supported my sprawling curiosity by giving me the time and space to work as well as the great joy and comfort of knowing that wherever my work ends up, there is always a comfortable and comforting space for me at the end of the day, next to her. Thank you, Kate. I thank my broader family: parents, stepparents, grandparents, cousins, stepsiblings, aunts, uncles, and people who are simply around so often that we call them aunts and uncles. This kind of copious support structure and network makes a big difference.

Finally, I thank you, whoever you are, who picked up this book. I thank you for reading the acknowledgments. I thank you for your support of university presses and the University of Alabama Press in particular. The editorial staff at that press are great people. I thank you for supporting academic work and for giving my ideas an audience.

Introduction

The Visual Colonization of Surface

On May 15, 2003, the former president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Scenic America testified before a US congressional subcommittee on the preponderance of billboards on US highways. Meg Maguire testified that in 1991 the Congressional Research Service estimated that 425,000 billboards were located along federal aid highways and that the number was increasing by 6 percent annually. This means that any way you look at it, there are between 731,000 and 885,000 billboards on America’s federal aid highways alone—not counting city streets or state and country roads.¹ The website of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America reports that spending on billboards and other outdoor advertising increased from $3.5 billion in 1995 to $6.3 billion in 2005, with an average annual growth of 6.5 percent, outpacing inflation.² These numbers dipped in the wake of the 2008 recession but rebounded to nearly $6.4 billion in 2011.³ Whether we fret over the encroachment of advertising along with Scenic America or cheer over this indirect sign of economic health, we can all conclude that our public spaces are increasingly covered with visual messages.

The increased volume of visual messages colonizes our public spaces in the name of capital and covers over the routine surfaces of our daily lives. The Magazine Publishers of America reported that outdoor advertising makes up a relatively meager portion of all advertising dollars spent. In an age when two-dimensional, static, semipermanent displays like signage—however large and imposing—seem technologically archaic, the advertising dollars spent on newspaper ads, magazine spreads, Internet-based pop-up and banner ads, and outdoor advertising nevertheless equal the dollars spent on advertising that employs moving pictures, actors conversing, and chatty radio voice-overs.⁴

Static signage, for lack of a better term, still holds its own in this era of multimodal media, and it does so rather lucratively. Not content to be limited to the glossy magazine page or the imposing billboard, companies are finding ways to turn the singularly functional materials of everyday life (which once performed their own brand of work) into dual-purpose objects of mechanical and communicative force. Clear Channel Outdoor and other surface sellers can turn the moving stairs of an escalator into a modern iteration of the Burma-Shave signs, pillars into load-bearing banners, taxicab doors (and tops and seats) into miniature and mobile murals, and benches at bus stops into seating that (metaphorically) speaks.⁵ Surface sellers have transitioned from outdoor advertising to out-of-home advertising, the relabeling indicating the expansion of territory in the process.

Although Clear Channel trades in the more conspicuous surfaces of contemporary visual culture, the expansion and availability of visual surfaces extends into the most banal spaces of everyday life. Louise Story writes in the New York Times that take-out containers, airplane sick bags, transit-center turnstiles, and even the shells of eggs are just some of the items of everyday life that have been repurposed for visual communication.⁶ Some companies focus on a particular brand of space; Outcast Media, for instance, targets viewers in fitness clubs and gas stations, to the tune of 68 million viewers.⁷ Zoom Media offers its clients digital screens and backlit poster displays along with surfaces that promote a strategic face-to-face encounter along with the guarantee that its products are 100% targeted by gender.⁸

Such a surface exists as close as the nearest restroom stall. Not since church architects managed to use stained glass to convert windows into narrative displays has the surface of social space undergone such a dramatic shift in utility. And unlike stained glass, these materials of social space continue to function under their slick surfaces, making the shift seem seamless. The escalator still carries us up, the bench still offers us rest, the pizza box still keeps our pizza warm, and the restroom stall door remains in place.

The trend of making useful things more interesting and doubly useful is everywhere. We can order a seemingly limitless range of products, from playing cards to smartphone cases, covered with our favorite images. Maybe this impulse to repurpose surface as a visual stimulus indicates consumerism run amuck, but even then we must recognize that the impulse to decorate surfaces is not a top-down phenomenon; it is not merely the result of advertisers wanting to put messages everywhere. It is something else. It is a particular brand of visual culture. If the surrealist artist René Magritte were around today, he might no longer paint a pipe and declare, Ceci n’est pas une pipe! Instead he might paint the pipe on his phone and assert, This is not a phone. But if Magritte did that, he would not be a surrealist painter in that moment; he would be a graphic designer (not that he wasn’t or couldn’t have been both).

GRAPHIC COMMUNICATION

What follows is an effort to track two coevolving conversations: the communicative possibilities of visual objects in contemporary public space, and the ways the notions of graphic design influence or escape the public understanding of visual communication. To fully appreciate our encounters with visual images in public life, we must also consider how graphic design—in all its varieties—articulates and addresses all segments of the public. In some ways this investigation represents an extension of Lawrence Prelli’s edited volume Rhetorics of Display. Prelli notes that the terms rhetoric and display are easily treated with derision but that a closer examination of their combination reveals that much of what appears or looks to us as reality is constituted rhetorically through the multiple displays that surround us, compete for our attention, and make claims upon us.⁹ Prelli asserts that rhetorics of display are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture and, thus, have become the dominant rhetoric of our time.¹⁰ Yet even though we can easily identify the range of graphic displays in everyday life, we—viewers, critics, and designers alike—have a more difficult time explaining how that visual communication operates. That is, we can easily count the growing number of soliciting surfaces but have yet to fully account for them.

Indeed, one of the central challenges of accounting for the force of contemporary visual communication is its ubiquity. The fields of rhetoric and graphic design introduce a variety of objects, practices, and experiences into our contemporary communication environment, many of which escape critical attention (e.g., the rhetorical strategies of a couple’s breakfast conversation or the design strategies of a flyer for a church bake sale). As a result, both rhetoric and graphic design tend to explain the value of their communicative contributions not by the ubiquity that proves their cultural frequency but by exemplary cases that instead demonstrate a narrow moment of cultural importance.

We assign graphic design, like all forms of communication, cultural significance because it appears everywhere. But rather than talking about the stakes of living in a world where there are images everywhere, we tend to focus on how interesting particular images are. Such close readings of visual images certainly represent a useful mode of inquiry, but that hermeneutic mistakes the forest for the trees. The consequences of persistent and variable visual communication remain implicit in and between our critical accounts of a narrow (and uncommon) range of (exemplary) visual experiences.

Take Prelli’s volume as an example. In it we learn what it means to witness newspaper photographs and museum exhibitions, monuments and parks, tattoos and politicians. But outside of Prelli’s own introduction, the consequences of a ubiquitous visual culture remain underexplored as we favor critiques of exemplary visual practices.

As a result, visual cultural criticism allows exemplarity to stand in for ubiquity, confusing one argument—images are important because they are everywhere—with a much more aggressive argument: images are everywhere because they are important. Once images are granted the latter significance, the stakes of controlling them grow rapidly. Thus visual rhetorical scholarship and graphic design studies in particular have a vested interest in proving, by exemplary cases, that images are not only meaningful but also purposefully so. Victoria Gallagher, Kelly Martin, and Magda Ma connect visual rhetoric and graphic design as rational expressions of cultural meaning. A rhetorical approach to graphic design, they argue, examines the relationship between images and texts and adds the element of invention, wherein the interpretive insights of the critic result in enhanced sources of invention for both practitioners and theorists.¹¹ The need to account for and control meaning make the arts of rhetoric and graphic design fast friends.

Certainly one strain of rhetorical scholarship focuses on informed practice, but the field of rhetorical studies also spends a great deal of time considering the relationship between communication and the public. In particular, rhetorical scholarship examines the ways various forms of public address constitute, activate, and even marginalize the political possibilities of communities. That is, rhetorical studies recognizes that rhetorical practice has effects beyond the ambitions of the practitioner and that communicative meaning operates in cultural registers beyond an instrumental account of message transmission. When we approach visual communication with this kind of instrumentalist practice in mind, the criteria of visual experience becomes a very narrow notion of meaning and practice (applied as well to a very narrow set of exemplary cases). Consequently, this approach to visual culture privileges practitioners and theorists at the expense of the public audiences addressed by designers and rhetoricians alike.

If we make taking public experience central to justifying the public significance of visual communication, we must acknowledge the limits of an instrumentalist approach to communication. Further limiting that approach are the aesthetic and affective dimensions of images and the language of fine arts that graphic design inherited as an accident of history. As a result, efforts to document the certainty of visual meaning tend to denature the visual by translating it into verbal equivalences. Even Prelli’s project, which starts with the ubiquity of visual display and treats the fine arts as a kind of rhetorical performance, eventually links display to Chaim Perelman’s concept of presence to broaden the range of rhetorical displays to encompass nearly all verbal emphasis in discourse addressed to situated audiences.¹² Prelli then moves on to Kenneth Burke’s dramatism and effectively expands the notion of display from a material reality to a metaphor for all communication. We should instead follow Prelli’s initial impulse that there is something particular about display and that the particularity depends on the display’s encounter with a situated audience.

In contrast, the instrumental approach is based on a certainty of meaning that figures the public as an afterthought to the inventive abilities of a practitioner or graphic designer. Again, the tension between ubiquity and exemplarity is instructive. In the exemplary case, visual communication demonstrates its power by its quality, its conditions of invention, and perhaps its context. When ubiquity is stressed over exemplarity, the power of visual communication bears very little relation to the genius of the designer and is instead a measure of the kind of encounter an object has with its audience. If we want to ask a question about the public work of visual communication, we must eschew modes of inquiry that favor the practitioner and theorist and instead embrace an approach to display that focuses on the public that experiences the images in a crowded visual landscape.

The literature of graphic design and design studies makes an effort to address these issues. Maud Lavin, for instance, calls on graphic design to move beyond exemplary histories and the search for a style lexicon and a design canon and instead approach design from the broader field of visual culture criticism and ask ambitious questions about power and communication.¹³ My project asks questions about power and communication, but it does so from a position that tries not to denature the public experience of visual culture. Prelli is right that displays represent the prominent rhetoric of our time. Indeed, visual images have become the primary mode of public address. But if such a claim is to mean anything, it must be explained not by the number of practicing graphic designers but by the public that stands before the visual surfaces. If graphic design has become the preeminent practice of public communication, let us focus on the public in the communication transaction.

GRAPHIC CULTURE

Visual rhetoric and graphic design scholarship has certainly not overlooked or ignored the viewing public of visual cultures. Visual scholars embrace (then elide) ubiquity because the scale of visuality necessarily brings with it a scale of audience that legitimates the practice as meaningful. But as discussed above, we have an obligation to mark the difference between a publicly meaningful practice and a