Visual argumentation in Scandinavian political advertising: a cognitive, contextual and reception oriented approach.

• Author: Kjeldsen, Jens E.
• Position: Essay

On November 15, 2001, the Danish right wing liberal party, Venstre, published an advertisement that caused offence and debate in Denmark and was criticised internationally. All the commotion, of course, stems from the advertisement's visual argumentation. But what exactly is its argument? In this essay, I shall briefly explain how visual argumentation is possible and argue for a cognitive, contextual, and reception oriented approach to visual argumentation. I will illustrate this approach by briefly analyzing the Venstre advertisement's context and rhetorical potential and by establishing which arguments the public actually reconstructed from the advertisement. First, however, let us remind ourselves why we can argue by means of pictures.

Needless to say, arguing with pictures is different from arguing with words. I could not have made my argument about visual argumentation solely by using pictures. However, this does not mean that pictures are not able to communicate arguments.

It has been claimed that we cannot make arguments with pictures because argumentation (1) is characterized by temporal and sequential representations; (2) is based on unambiguous syntactic rules; (3) is linked historically and methodologically to the verbal mode and its conventional, semiotic character; and (4) expresses attitudes and opinions through claims and data and, hence, is confrontational (e.g., Blair, 1996, 2004; Cox & Willard, 1982, p. xlv; Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Kruiger, 1987; Fleming, 1996). Daniel O'Keefe (1982), for instance, asserts that a paradigm case of argument-making "involves the communication of both 1) a linguistically explicable claim, and 2) one or more overtly expressed reasons which are linguistically explicit" (p. 14).

It may seem, then, that pictures cannot function as propositions or arguments. In general, pictures are thought to: (1) present as an immediate, nontemporal, unified whole; (2) lack unambiguous syntactical order and rules; (3) function iconically; and (4) merely "show" things rather than stating or proposing them. However, argumentation is an act of communication, not a text in itself. As long as the act of "argument-making" (O'Keefe, 1982, p. 12) manages to communicate an argument's structure or intention, the mode of expression is irrelevant. The elements of an argument do not need to be presented explicitly as long as the audience is aware that they are faced with argument-making and in turn understand the argument that is being communicated. What is semantically and rhetorically important is not the argument's manifest structure but, rather, its ability to represent latent propositions and claims.

Wayne Brockreide (1992) has reminded us that arguments are found "not in statements but in people," and that an "argument is not a 'thing' to be looked for but a concept people use, a perspective they take" (p. 73). Similarly, Dale Hample's (1980, 1992) "third perspective" finds arguments within people who are arguing: "This theoretical distinction de-emphasizes the role of the message in argument. The only necessary role for the message to play in a cognitive theory is to perform as a stimulus for the receiver's (cognitively generated) argument" (1992, p. 93). Bruce Gronbeck (1995) takes a similar view:

If we think of meanings as called up or evoked in people when engaged in acts of decoding, then not only words, but also pictures, sounds, and other sign systems certainly can offer us propositions of denial or affirmation, and can, as Locke understood trueness and falsehood, articulate empirically verifiable positions. (p. 539)

Argumentation, therefore, can occur in a host of different forms of expression, including speech, drama, or pictures. On the other hand, we can admit, pictures communicate in a different semiotic mode than do words. According to semiotics, verbal communication employs an arbitrary code and pictures an iconic one. As a code based on motivated signs, a picture is perceived to have either no articulation or only second articulation (cf. Barthes, 1977; Eco, 1979). Consequently, "pertinent" and "facultative" signs in pictures cannot be clearly distinguished. Iconic coding in pictures is weak (Eco, 1979, p. 213), which means that pictures lack the syntax that tells viewers precisely what different elements might mean or how they should be connected semantically. Sometimes a cigar is not merely a cigar but there is no certain way of knowing.

This does not prevent pictures from making arguments, however. As with all kinds of rhetoric, context determines meaning. As Birdsell and Groarke (1996) maintain, we would never "banish the consideration of contextual evidence when we consider verbal arguments" (p. 5). So why should we do so when considering visual arguments? According to Birdsell and Groarke, three kinds of contexts are significant when evaluating visual arguments: immediate visual context, immediate verbal context, and visual culture. My own analysis emphasizes the "rhetorical situation" (Bitzer, 1968, 1980), which draws upon all three. Because argumentation is not only a textual but also--and probably above all--a contextual and cognitive phenomenon, it is important to examine not merely images themselves, in order to find the arguments they communicate, but also context and, especially, the rhetorical situation. To do this, I employ a more cognitively oriented perspective that combines contextual analysis, close reading of the visual text, and textual analysis of the text's public reception.

Most research on visual argumentation is theoretically speculative: Argumentation is found through some form of textual analysis in which the researcher deduces, from an image's elements and the context in which they occur, the arguments they may hold (e.g., Groarke, 1996; Hughes, 1994; Kjeldsen, 2000; Shelley 1996). I have attempted to capture an empirical and contextual reception of the visual argumentation in Venstre's political advertisement by collecting 80 newspaper articles (including a few letters to the editor) in which the ad was mentioned. The articles were published in 12 different Danish newspapers from November 15 (when the ad was published) to December 30, 2001.

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