Page 81 - Žagar, Igor Ž. 2021. Four Critical Essays on Argumentation. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
P. 81
is there anything like visual argumentation?
packs in the lower right corner (for obvious reasons, we can‘t reproduce the
photo). On the ‘busted’ version, we just see the horses in an empty grave-
yard, covered with snow, while the tombstones symbolically replace packs
of cigarettes.
Figure 8.
What is the mechanism at work here? It appears that a kind of ‘gestalt’
(warm, yellowish/brownish colors in the background, cowboys in the fore-
ground ...) sets the frame (= Marlboro advertisements), while the text or
the setting in the photo activates a (kind of) polyphonic reading: we can
only make sense of and understand the busted advertisements if we con-
nect them to the original advertisements, i.e. we can only understand them
on the background of the original ads, i.e. as a kind of meta-ads.
When I am mentioning polyphony, I am referring to Bakhtin, of
course, but even more explicitly to Ducrot’s theory of polyphony, informed
by Bakhtin, but much more elaborated. You may recall that Ducrot (2009:
32–44) is distinguishing between a producer, a locutor and several enuncia-
tors/utterers or uttering positions. A producer is the person/organization ...
that is the ‘material’ author of a given piece of text (or visual). In our case,
the producer(s) would be the Adbusters (and their collaborators), the peo-
ple who produced the anti-ads in question, those who had the idea, set the
scenery, took the photo, developed it, and so on ...
81
packs in the lower right corner (for obvious reasons, we can‘t reproduce the
photo). On the ‘busted’ version, we just see the horses in an empty grave-
yard, covered with snow, while the tombstones symbolically replace packs
of cigarettes.
Figure 8.
What is the mechanism at work here? It appears that a kind of ‘gestalt’
(warm, yellowish/brownish colors in the background, cowboys in the fore-
ground ...) sets the frame (= Marlboro advertisements), while the text or
the setting in the photo activates a (kind of) polyphonic reading: we can
only make sense of and understand the busted advertisements if we con-
nect them to the original advertisements, i.e. we can only understand them
on the background of the original ads, i.e. as a kind of meta-ads.
When I am mentioning polyphony, I am referring to Bakhtin, of
course, but even more explicitly to Ducrot’s theory of polyphony, informed
by Bakhtin, but much more elaborated. You may recall that Ducrot (2009:
32–44) is distinguishing between a producer, a locutor and several enuncia-
tors/utterers or uttering positions. A producer is the person/organization ...
that is the ‘material’ author of a given piece of text (or visual). In our case,
the producer(s) would be the Adbusters (and their collaborators), the peo-
ple who produced the anti-ads in question, those who had the idea, set the
scenery, took the photo, developed it, and so on ...
81
