I usually find it simultaneously disappointing and thrilling when I find that someone’s already said what I’ve been wanting to say or have been saying. The latest instance has to do with composing with images as a mnemonic practice. There’s still plenty of room for me to negotiate, I think, so my initial reaction was more one of the thrill of affirmation rather than a sinking feeling of disappointment. Reading Keith Kenney’s essay “Building Visual Communication Theory by Borrowing from Rhetoric” (Journal of Visual Literacy 22.1 (2002): 53-80; rpt. in Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Carolyn Handa. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. 323-43):

Medhurst and DeSousa were ingenious when applying the canons of memory and delivery [to political cartoons]. (( Medhurst, M. J., and M. A. DeSousa. “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse.” Communication Monographs 48 (1981): 197-237. )) In the classical tradition, a speaker had a good memory if he (normally a man) could construct a mental image filled with specific icons, which the rhetor then associated with particular ideas, and the placement of icons correlated with the order in which the ideas were to be presented. Movement was from visual mental construction, to specific idea, to oral discourse. With political cartoons, Medhurst and DeSousa write, the movement is reversed. The cartoonist stats with the universe of discourse–oral, written and pictorial–from which he (again, cartoonists are usually male) selects a specific idea and then draws a visual sign to represent that idea. In graphic expression, therefore, memory is primarily an art of evocation. The cartoonist attempts to compress into a single image the various streams of cultural consciousness from which he has drawn his idea. Readers then are expected to unpack one or more layers of available cultural consciousness that the cartoon has evoked from them. The cartoons “work” to the extent that readers and cartoonists share cultural symbols. (323)

What I’d take issue with here, what I do take issue with, is the characterization of the movement as one way, from visual mental construction to specific idea to oral discourse for the rhetor and from discourse to specific idea to visual construction for the cartoonist. As a rhetor’s visual mental construction a doesn’t exist ready-made but must be constructed by the rhetor, the rhetor, like the cartoonist, must be able to move from discourse to specific idea to visual mental construction as well as from mental construction to image to discourse. Just as importantly, skilled rhetors create images (mental, verbal, or graphical) for their audiences. These images, whether they are powerful examples, strong symbols, effective visuals, etc., have a mnemonic function for our audience as well as for ourselves. Memory Lane, as I’ve said before, is a two-way street: good examples not only illustrate our points, they help our audience and ourselves to remember what our points are and why they’re important.