The Unnaturalistic Enthymeme Figuration

ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY
52 (Spring 2016): 236-253
THE UNNATURALISTIC EN'IHYMEME:

F1GURATION, INTERPRETATION, AND
CRITIQUE AFTER DIGITAL MEDIATION
Damien Smith Pfister and Carly S. Woods
This essay theorizes the unnaturalistic enthymeme, an emergent argument formation surrounding analogico-
digital photography. Instead ofpresuming the naturalism of images, we contend that contemporary audiences
have a heightened awareness of the ways that digital photography is altered. Drawing on the quadripartita
ratio, or four categories ofchange associated with rhetorical figuration, we explore a series ofimage controversies
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that denaturalize assumptions about photographic realism. We examine how contemporary protesters respond
to this shift in interpretive conventions by making the unnaturalistic enthymeme visible through culture jamming
commercial billboards. The unnaturalistic enthymeme does not supplant the naturalistic enthymeme, hut instead
enables a "hypersophistic" attitude in visual culture- one that decides the veridicality ofphotographs through
argument instead of assumptions about technological objectivity.
Key Words: visual culture, rhetoric, enthymeme, digital photography, discrete image
In contemporary, internetworked visual culture, digital manipulation of images is ubi-

quitous in commercial advertising, television, cinema, and newer visual genres stimulated by
the internet. A stream of public commentary thematizes this preponderance of digital
manipulation: photojournalists are called out for taking too many liberties in editing images;
blogs document "Photoshop disasters" in which limbs are chopped off; critics wonder if all
this manipulation doesn't degrade our historical trust in the veracity of the image. Digital
media technology dramatically impacts visual culture by simplifying, democratizing, and
making more precise the post-processing editing of images and supporting sites for meta-
communication about new imaging practices.
What, then, are the rhetorical and cultural implications of post-processing digital manip-
ulation executed in programs like Photoshop or apps like lnstagram? Specifically, how have
the interpretive conventions associated with film photography evolved with the increasing
ubiquity of digital imaging technologies? While the myth of photographic naturalism exerted
considerable hermeneutic power throughout much of the 20th century, such that viewers of
film photographs often uncritically presumed their realism, we detect a shift toward another
interpretive practice in the context of digital mediation. Adapting Cara A. Finnegan's (200 1)
theory of the "naturalistic enthymeme," we argue that contemporary interpreters of images
often operate under the auspices of the "unnaturalistic enthymeme" in assuming that an
image is, because of the figurative potential of digital manipulation, less tethered to realism.
We then explore how the rise of the unnaturalistic enthymeme as an argument formation
necessarily recalibrates strategies of resistance. If cultural critique in the era of photographic
naturalism needed to emphasize the unreality of images (e.g., feminist critiques of unrealistic
bodies on magazine covers), what kinds of critique are available when audiences already
believe that what they are seeing is unreal? One available mode of critique, recently
employed by street artists and culture jammers, involves appending Photoshop toolbars on
Damien Smith Pfister, Department of Communication, University ofMaryland. Carly S. Woods, Department of Communication,
University ofMaryland. We thank]on Carter,josh Ewalt, Michele Kennerly, Norma Musih,]essy Ohl, and the editors ofthis special
issue for their helpfol feedback. This essay uses Chicago parenthetical author-date references. Correspondence concerning this article
should be addressed to Damien Smith Pfister, Department of Communication, 2130 Skinner Building, University ofMaryland,
College Park, MD, 20742-7635. E-mail: dsp@umd.edu
237
ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY PFISTER AND WOODS
commercial billboards. We interpret this intervention as reliant on a strategy of visibilizing the

unnaturalistic enthymeme by artfully drawing attention to the grammar of digital manipulation.
Finally, we conclude that the presence of the unnaturalistic enthymeme is evidence of-and
further consolidates-a visual culture that cultivates subjects with hypersophistic attitudes
who play with, produce, and critically interrogate the constructedness of images.
THE ENTHYMEMATIC TuRN IN VISUAL ARGUMENT
That images participate in meaning-making processes is incontrovertible; more contro-

versial is the claim that images might function as a kind of visual argument, a form of
persuasion usually conceived of as a series of linguistic propositions strung together to yield

a conclusion. In his objection to the claim that pictures can argue, David Fleming (1996)
perceives a fault line running through the concept of "visual argument" by crisply defining
"picture" as "any representation meant to look like the thing it represents . . . an artifact
constructed to be iconic with the external world" (11) and "argument" as "an intentional
human act in which support is offered on behalf of a debateable belief' (12). For Fleming, an
argument must contain a claim and support, a two-step relation between evidence and
interpretation supportive of some broader claim. Pictures lack the sequential and syntactical
structure required to be an argument.
Moreover, an argument must, according to Fleming, be two-sided, able to be "refuted,
opposed, or negated" (13). Representational images cannot negate, for the negative is a
peculiar function of language alone: "Because if the picture is perceived to be closer to the
material world than language, then it may be less negatable as a communicative entity. Why?
Because negation is a linguistic function, foreign to the concrete and analogic world of the
non-verbal" (17). This Burkean-inflected characterization of the negative seals images off
from the world of argumentation. If images can only show presence (what is), and not
absence (what is not), then pictures cannot participate in the process of dissoi logoi at the heart
of argumentation. Images cannot refute each other absent the mediation of language.
Fleming's objections, based on the representational logics presumed to be at the heart of
film photography, trenchantly highlight the potential problems of seeing pictures as argu-
ments. However, in what we call the enthymematic turn in visual argument studies, scholars
theorize the argumentative function of images in terms of that most rhetorical of argument
forms, the enthymeme. The enthymeme is conventionally theorized as an argument form
that relies on audience members supplying culturally specific assumptions (hidden premises)
to the publicly articulated premises of a rhetor. According to J. Anthony Blair (2004), "visual
arguments are typically enthymemes-arguments with gaps left to be filled in by the partici-
pation of the audience" (52). Although the argumentative potency of any given image may
vary, David Birdsell and Leo Groarke (1996) describe how certain contexts activate en-
thymematic associations and thus lend argumentative force to images. Images are always
accompanied by the possibility of variant interpretive frames, so scientists interpret fMRI
data differently from lay publics (Gibbons 2007), citizens react to flags of different nation-
states differently depending on their cultural allegiances (Pineda and Sowards 2007), and
tattoos signify different kinds of identification in prison cultures (McNaughton 2007). The
enthymematic tum implicitly responds to Fleming's critique: the addition of a culturally
specific hidden premise creates a two step relation between statement and proof, and
because different assumptions might supply different hidden premises, divergent interpre-
tations of any image support the possibility of dissoi logoi.
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UNNATURALISTIC ENTHYMEME SPRING 2016
Cara A. Finnegan (2001) showcases the utility of the enthymematic turn by theorizing the
"naturalistic enthymeme" in the context of the 1936 skull controversy. The skull controversy
refers to the critical reception of Arthur Rothstein's now iconic photograph of a cow's skull on a
parched landscape in South Dakota's alkaline flats. Rothstein's published photo, circulating in a
culture that largely presumed photographs reflected the real, appeared to warrant the farm relief
that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Congressional allies were pushing. When audiences discov-
ered that Rothstein had moved the skull from its original resting place in order to experiment
with different compositions, and that verdant fields of green surrounded the alkaline flats (which,
even in the wettest of times, are marked by vestiges of cracked earth), they felt duped. Audiences
expected that photography would simply reflect, rather than, in Burke's (1966) inimitable
phrasing, select and deflect, reality. Why? As Finnegan details, the technological biases of film
photography intersected with a specific cultural moment marked by a realist-documentary way

of seeing. In contrast to drawing or painting, the author's hand appeared to be so far removed
from the production of images that film photographs could be sold as truly mirroring nature. By
combining mechanical capture with chemical processing, the trope of "taking a picture" subli-
mated the craft involved in "making a picture" in the staging of a scene and in the dark room.
For Roland Barthes (1977), film photography eventually gave rise to the myth of photographic
naturalism. Despite the many manipulations a film photographer might conduct in camera or in
the darkroom, audiences of film photography historically acknowledge that "the thing has been
there' (Barthes 1982, 76) and that "a sort of umbilical cord" stretches from the referent of the
photograph to the viewer of the photograph through the interplay of light and silver halides (81).
Moreover, viewers of film photographs at the time were positioned in an ocular regime
that privileged coming to knowledge through sense perception, specifically the objectivating
power of sight-the ability to come to knowledge through sight's ability to make objects into
objects of inquiry. This explains why audience members, upon viewing Rothstein's skull
photograph, enthymematically supplied assumptions about the photograph's fidelity to the
real. As Finnegan (200 1) explains,
When the audience for documentary photography {trained in the conventions of the dominant ocular regime)
assumes the naturalism of the photograph, it is tapping into an argumentative resource that I call the
naturalistic enthymeme. The enthymeme, according to Aristotle, is an argument that is drawn from premises that
do not need to be stated "since the hearer supplies it" ... That is, the enthymeme leaves space for the audience
to insert its own knowledge and experience; it assumes an audience of judges capable of "filling in the blanks"
of an argument To extend this notion to the photograph, the viewer of the photograph "fills in the blank" with
the assumption that the image is "real" in the three senses discussed above: that it is a representation of
something in the world (representational realism), actually occurring before the camera in a particular time and
place (ontological realism), captured by the camera with no intervention from the photographer (mechanical
realism) . . . regardless of what else a photograph communicates, at minimum it is continually making an
argument about its own realism. {143)
As the "paradigmatic realist discourse," Bryan Taylor (1998) argues that film photography's
products "compelled viewers to accept their authority as accounts [and] to gloss the contingencies
of their production" (333). The naturalistic enthymeme provides a rhetorically sensitive expla-
nation, attuned to culture, audience, and situation, for why subjects inducted into the broader
ocular regime of photographic naturalism interpreted film photographs as real.
These observations about photographic naturalism dovetail with Bernard Stiegler's (2002)
claim that film photography extends a "contiguity of luminances" underlining the this-was-ness
of a film image (152). But Stiegler's distinction between digital and analogico-digital pho-
tography shows how the purported naturalism of film photography is troubled in the context
239
of digital imaging technologies. For Stiegler, digital photography or imaging only refers to the
ability of digital technologies to produce computer-generated images "that can imitate reality
quasi-perfectly," like three-dimensional modeling or cinematic special effects (148). There is
a quality of never-was-ness to natively digital images. The colloquial use of the term digital
photography actually refers to a hybridization of analogical and digital processes. Contempo-
rary digital cameras, like the kind now usually integrated into mobile phones, produce what
Stiegler terms "analogico-digital images": they rely on the analogical process of using a lens
to make an impression of light on a sensor, then converting that impression into digital
information. If, following Stiegler, "[t]he rule is that every analog photo presupposes that
what was photographed was real" then "[m)anipulation is on the contrary the essence, that
is to say, the rule of the digital photo. And this possibility, which is essential to the digital
photographic image, of not having been, inspires fear-for this image, at the same time that it
is infinitely manipulable, remains a photo, it preserves something of the this was within itself,
and the possibility of distinguishing the true from the false dwindles in proportion as the
possibilities for the digital treatment of photos grow" (150). Digital malleability makes for a
more tendentious claim to photographic realism.
This more tendentious claim to photographic realism is connected to how digital media
technologies offer new tools to manipulate images. "Photons become pixels that are in tum
reduced to zeros and ones, on which discrete calculations can be performed," notes Stiegler,
who contends "essentially indubitable when it is analog (whatever its accidental manipula-
bility), the this was has become essentially doubtfol when it is digital (it is nonmanipulation
that becomes accidental)" (153). Whereas photographers in a darkroom could manipulate an
image, they were often forced to do so holistically by using differently grained photographic
paper, dodging and burning, or varying the kind of developing solution. The whole image
would be changed. There were exceptions, of course, evidenced by detailed and convincing
manipulations in the history of photography (Farid 2009). Nonetheless, when an image is
turned into pixels, the range of control is much greater: calculations can be performed on a
single pixel or on a group of pixels related in space or by type. When an image can be
separated into discrete pixels instead of continuous gradients, it requires the constitution and
imposition of an explicit underlying "grammar" of the image to identify and name the
constituent parts as discrete elements that can then be manipulated (Mitchell 1994). For
example, a digital pixel on the Mona Lisa's lip, perhaps described as "pinkish-brown" in
non-digital terms, is coded in a hexadecimal format as 4fb3591 b. In a photo editing program,
the red in that particular pixel could be punched up, turning it into a color coded as
4fb4591 b. The grammar of digital manipulation is reflected, in part, by the toolbars of
Photoshop and other image editing software, which allow the adjustment of these different
grammatical constituents of the image.
Stiegler calls the analogico-digital image the "beginning of a systematic discreti<.ation of
movement-that is to say, of a vast process of the grammmaticalization of the visiblt' (148-9). An
analogy to the movement from speech to writing helps clarify this rather abstract claim. In
oral societies, speakers have a "relationship of continuity" to their own speech and that of
others-they "hear no discrete elements" like nouns and verbs, interrogatives or declarations
(160). On this point, Stiegler is in line with Havelock's (1986) "special theory of Greek
literacy" and Walter Ong's (1982) work on how oral cultures are interested more in functions
and contextual meanings of words than in definitions. By contrast, the way in which writing
materializes words allows subjects to acquire capacities for reflexivity about definition and
usage. The development of writing is what prompted the systematic theorization of rhetoric
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by the classical Greeks, leading Douglas Ehninger (1968) to describe rhetorical theory of this
time as essentially "grammatical," interested in identifying and explaining discrete types of
speeches, components of a speech, modes of proof, kinds of affects, and so on. If grammati-
calization of newly visible language practices was useful in the transition from oral to literate
cultures, might an analogous accounting of the newly visible grammar of the analogico-
digital image be similarly useful in our contemporary cultural moment? Developing a
grammar of digital processes helps critics and theorists work through the rhetorical practices
and cultural changes afforded by new imaging technologies.
Before we answer this question more forthrightly, we must underline how the rhetorical
theory of the naturalistic enthymeme is a necessary supplement to Stiegler's (2002) claims
about the analogico-digital image. Stiegler argues that, between the apparent "objectivity of
the lens" and neuropsychological processes (presumably referring to the old adage that
seeing is believing), film photography produced subjects engaged in a "spectatorial synthesis,"
conducive to a belief in photographic naturalism (156-9). This position risks emphasizing
technology and cognition at the expense of culture. It is not the mere fact of technology-film
or digital-that produces new ways of seeing, but how technology interacts with existing
cultural currents that produce dominant ocular regimes. Similarly, some of the cognitive
processes associated with sight and belief are neither innate nor immutable; they are, instead,
shaped by culture (Horizon 2011). Indeed, the early history of photography illustrates how
even photographic naturalism is a contingent interpretive frame for film images. Most
photography in the late 19th and early 20th century adhered to the style of Pictorialism, an
aesthetic that resisted realism by adopting a more painterly and impressionistic approach to
photography. Only in the late 1920s did film photographers adopt a plain style, concealing
their own figuration in a way that invented and affirmed the myth of photographic natural-
ism. Thus, even the naturalism of the "naturalistic enthymeme" must be seen as a historically
contingent interpretive convention and not the inevitable result of technological innovation
or neuropsychological processes. The language of the enthymeme usefully amends Stiegler's
theory of the discrete image by providing a more robust vocabulary for considering how
subjects' cultural assumptions are brought to bear on visual imagery, thus signaling the
co-constructedness of technology, cognition, and culture.
If culture matters in shaping interpretive patterns, then what does Finnegan surmise about
the fate of the naturalistic enthymeme in a visual culture increasingly shaped by digital
imaging processes? She maintains that "[t]he continued strength of the naturalistic en-
thymeme is evident in growing public anxiety about the ways in which digital manipulation
may alter photographs and as a result detract from their evidentiary force ... Rather than
destroy our belief in the naturalistic enthymeme, digital imaging has only served to reinforce
and intensify it" (147). 1 Writing with the benefit of over a decade's worth of developments
in digital mediation and visual culture, we would revise Finnegan's claim to note simply that
the naturalism of photography continues to be a frequent topos of public argument about
images, but that subjects bring, in Stiegler's terms, a "new cognizance" of "perhaps this was
not" as rhetorical critics of analogico-digital images (15 7). This ongoing complication of film
1
Finnegan's article was published in 2001 and focused on a distinct historical episode. It could not foresee the rapid
changes in digital imaging technology and visual culture in the following decade. Similarly, given how quickly
technical innovation is proceeding, we cannot assume the permanence of the unnaturalistic enthyrneme as an
interpretive convention. just as the dominant realist-documentary ocular regime existed for a bounded period of
time, so might the hypersophistic visual culture we are theorizing be a temporary condition. As visual technol-
ogies become more sophisticated and capable of more exacting mimesis, Finnegan's claim that the naturalistic
enthyrneme is a resilient argument formation may become newly salient.
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photography's representational logic did not happen with the mere advent of digital imaging
technologies, nor can it be said to be a totalizing renovation of how subjects interpret digital
images. However, the denaturalizing effect of recent image controversies, or deliberative
episodes about images circulating in digitally networked media ecologies, initiated an
argument formation we identify as the unnaturalistic enthymeme.
THE UNNATURALISTIC ENTHYMEME
To destabilize the purported naturalism of any communicative claim, whether proposition

or image, requires thematizing the figurative dimensions that undergird symbolic action.
Finnegan (2001) deftly makes this move in explaining why the naturalistic enthymeme is a
fundamentally flawed argument formation (147). Compositional choices undermine photog-
raphy's claim to represent the real because, in framing a picture, photographers make
choices about inclusion, exclusion, and emphasis. A host of technical choices like aperture,
shutter speed, and exposure have figurative potential in, for example, creating a motion-
blurred dancer that serves as a synecdoche for the possibility of human movement. Photo-
graphic technology itself is designed for figuration. Different kinds of cameras, lenses, film
types, and flashes produce different kinds of images; a fisheye lens, for example, gives a
different perspective than a telephoto lens. In this way, the history of photography is a history
of photographic manipulation: there is no way to create a photograph that is not already a
manipulation of the real.
Manipulations through digital capture and post-processing thus ought to be seen as an
intensification rather than a break with film photography. The figurative dimensions in-
volved in any effort to take a photograph at the point of capture are now complemented with
richer, easier, and now ubiquitous ways to make a photograph through post-capture digital
manipulation that performs modifications on discrete images. The priority of taking over
making in the imaginary of film photography is inverted under conditions of digital tech-
nology, as photographers often downplay the necessity of a perfect in-camera capture
because of the affordances of post-processing. Post-processing manipulation expands the
possibility and potency of enthymematic visual argument, as in the example of an adver-
tisement created for the World Wildlife Foundation, "Lungs" (TBWA/Paris 2008). "Lungs"
features a lush, green landscape with two stands of trees digitally manipulated to resemble
two human lungs. Half of one lung is missing, implying a recent clear-cutting. This powerful
visual metaphor invites a viewer to make the connection that trees are the lungs of the Earth's
atmosphere, and that deforestation thus risks the health of the planet-an argument that
would seem to meet Fleming's conditions of having two parts and being two-sided. The
analogico-digital photograph is not simply an iconic representation of the external world; it
is an accomplishment of figuration, an accomplishment magnified by how digital post-
processing expands the meaning-making (and thus argumentative) repertoire of images.
If photographic realism is associated with the naturalistic enthymeme, then the more
explicit figurative dimensions of post-processing digital editing give rise to what we are
calling the unnaturalistic enthymeme as an argument form. In an inversion of Finnegan's claim
about the naturalistic enthymeme, the unnaturalistic enthymeme cues us to how, regardless
of what else an analogico-digital photograph communicates, at minimum its (digitally
post-processed) figurative dimensions are continually making an argument about its own
unrealism. To make this case, we aim to construct a grammar of these newly visible editing
practices by drawing on the ancient concept of the quadripartita ratio.
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Associated most strongly with Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 1.5.38), the quadripartita ratio
refers to the four categories of qualitative change that can take place within specific elements of
a speech for rhetorical effect: addition (adiectio), subtraction (detractio), transposition (transmutatio),
and substitution (immutatio). 2 Every rhetorical figure either amplifies, through expansion or
repetition; subtracts, through abbreviation or omission; transposes, through changing the gram-
matical order of a sentence or sequence of events; or substitutes, through interchanging or
switching words. The quadripartita ratio fell out of fashion because it appears overly schematic
and may, in ungentle hands, become unnecessarily obsessed with classification. Although there
are limits to classification, typologies like the quadripartita ratio provide useful heuristics to
organize production and criticism. Much like the initial "grammatical" tendencies of early
rhetorical theorizing, this foundational vocabulary for identifying and analyzing the figurative
dimensions of analogico-digital images can be endlessly sophisticated. Our point is that digital
post-processing affords more granular control of these four categories of change, which has
increased cultural cognizance of image editing as a deeply figurative practice. In what follows, we
use the quadripartita ratio to identify acts of figuration in recent image controversies.
Digital manipulation that amplifies an element already present in the image, or adds an
element to the image, is performing addition. For example, a hoax photo circulating on
Face book features the "Angolan witch spider" on the side of a house, the span of its body and
legs almost reaching from the ground to the roof. The Angolan witch spider is said to eat cats
and dogs-and require several bullets to kill. It is, however, only a wolf spider that has been
digitally manipulated to appear much larger.
Subtraction occurs when digital manipulation removes an element of the image. In the
wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the june 19,2010, cover of The EconomiSt featured
President Barack Obama with his hands on his hips, looking frustrated, head tilted toward
the ground, as an oil rig loomed in the distance. The image was, as The New York Times
commented, "the ideal metaphor for a politically troubled president" (Peters 2010). How-
ever, the metaphor worked only because Charlotte Randolph, the president of a Louisiana
parish, and the Coast Guard's Admiral Thad W. Allen, were edited out of the image. The
original image demonstrates not a forlorn and overwhelmed Obama, but an engaged,
thoughtful, and listening Obama.
In the context of language, transposition refers to any figure that alters the accepted
grammatical structure of a sentence, as in Yoda's famous "take you to him, I will." Visually,
transposition refers to a kind of change that involves elements that are already present in the
image, or, in the case of video, a change in the sequence of events. For example, the official
profile of Aimi Eguchi indicated she was a 16 year old from Saitama and a member of the
Japanese pop group AKB48, and, though she never performed live with them, she was
featured in publicity shots of the band. Why did she not perform live with the rest of AKB48?
Because she was a computer simulation: a composite of the other band members' best
2
Of course, the quadripartita ratio can be used to understand film photography and practices of digital image
capture too, as any act of framing is an act of figuration (inclusion of an element functioning as addition, exclusion
working through subtraction, and so on). The definitive source on the quadripartita ratio is Lausberg (1998). One
critique of Lausberg's conception of the quadripartita ratio is that it presumes a neutral or natural language that is
then changed through one of these rhetorical operations. We think this critique underestimates the relationship
between the quadripartita ratio and imitatiu; symbol use always already occurs in an imitative register, and imitation
occurs through one of these fundamental rhetorical operations. However, shifting the quadripartita ratio from the
linguistic to the visual may dodge this critique, as there is an "original" image captured in camera and then operated
upon. Thanks to Michael Hoppman for this latter observation. See McQuarrie and Mick (1996) for a similarly
systematic, but conceptually different, way of organizing rhetorical figures in the context of visual images.
243
features. That Eguchi was a computer-generated model did not prevent legions of fans from
developing crushes on what appeared to be an uncannily beautiful singer.
The final category of change in the quadripartita ratio is substitution. This category
introduces new elements not present in the original. Technically, it is a combination of
subtraction, which deletes an element, and addition, which inserts in its place a new element.
An example of substitution can be found when H&M, the Swedish "fast fashion" clothing
retailer, became embroiled in controversy for a marketing campaign in the winter of 2011.
Most of H&M's advertising for its holiday lingerie featured a single body type, which was
actually a slim mannequin made to look human with editing software. The advertisers
appended different "facial models" onto the mannequin's body, and adjusted the skin tone
to match. Thus, the campaign featured an ostensibly diverse range of ethnicities that all had
the exact same skeletal frame, bust, and waist.

These examples show how the technologies of analogico-digital photography and digital
post-processing afford a greater range of embellishment and the cultures of contemporary
photography encourage experimenting with, and critiquing, these new affordances. Al-
though the categories of the quadripartita ratio are analytically useful, they blur in practice.
Digitally manipulated images often feature multiple kinds of changes instead of just one:
commercial advertisements often feature thousands of subtle edits. Moreover, the same
manipulation might be described in terms of two kinds of change-the crafting of Eguchi
could be seen as a series of additions as well as transposition.
These examples of addition, subtraction, transposition, and substitution show how post-
processing editing amplifies the figurative potential of imaging. But is this potential enough
to claim a broader cultural shift in audience assumptions about the unnaturalism of images?
Just as Finnegan found evidence for the naturalistic enthymeme in letters to the editor in the
1930s, today evidence of the unnaturalistic enthymeme can be found all over comments on
blogs, news stories, and discussion forums. 3 For example, one commenter said of the
Angolan witch spider, "That is a really, really bad photoshop. Abysmal. Doesn't look even
remotely real" (Cydaea 20 13). In response to the cropping of Randolph and Allen out of the
Economist cover, a reader commented, "The majority of Economist covers are heavily
photoshopped" {Javaun 2010). Regarding the Aimi Eguchi construct, a commenter exhibits
digital sleuthing in explaining "they got most of the face right, but look at the ear ... the ear
looks like a Photoshop mistake" (General Public 2011). Commenter MichellePar (2011)
ruminates on the H&M controversy thusly: "So much is Photoshopped as it is that it is
probably easier to start with an actual blank canvas, than to have to 'perfect' those hideous,
imperfect, icky human models. Just leave the damn heads off, and be a little more honest
with us, designers!"
We posit three underlying causes for the wider recognition of analogico-digital photog-
raphy's figurative dimensions, or unrealism. First, the democratization of digital image
making through widely available software for computers, tablets, and smartphones familiar-
izes publics with the tools and techniques of image manipulation. Crafting images through
filters, face swaps, or other photo editing apps-figuring them, through addition, subtraction,
3
In order to show how the enthymematic assertion "this is not real" manifests across the argumentative practices
of diverse networked publics, we have opted to analyze a breadth of examples rather than a single, in-depth case
study. It is our hope that this approach encourages additional research to investigate the nuances of the
unnaturalistic enthymeme in more focused case studies. Such work might identify variations of social knowledge
that the unnaturalistic enthymeme mobilizes in different networked publics (e.g., Reddit vs. YouTube vs.
Facebook vs. Flickr) or in different genres (e.g., commercial advertising vs. photojournalism vs. personal
photography).
244
transposition, or substitution-is part of everyday life for public cultures that are intensively
digitally networked. "The more consciously people write with pictures and seek to understand
what others have written," legal scholars Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel (2009) argue, "the
less tenacious should be the cognitive default of na!ve realism" (24). This "renewed awareness"
of the manifold interventions required to produce an image destabilizes the assumptions of iconic
representation attached to film photography (Kessler 2009, 190).
Second, high profile controversies involving the manipulation of analogico-digital images
denaturalize interpretive conventions associated with film photography. The success of an
enthymeme relies on an audience smoothly supplying a cultural assumption. When the
cultural assumption that photographs are real is repeatedly and publicly made dubious
through controversy, the naturalistic enthymeme inevitably exerts less hermeneutic force.
The skull controversy was a rupture in photographic trust because, for film photography,
intensive and transformative manipulation was the exception rather than the rule. We agree
with Paul Messaris (2012): "it seems reasonable to assume that, as a result of such publicity
[about digital manipulation], the broad public is becoming increasingly knowledgeable about
the capabilities of digital media" (109). Each of the examples we share above-alongside
countless others-was eventually thematized by networked publics, sparking criticism that
functioned as a public pedagogy teaching citizens about the grammar of image manipulation.
Third, the rise of the unnaturalistic enthymeme can be explained by patterns of digitally
networked circulation. As Finnegan andJiyeon Kang (2004) explain, though every image has
a history of circulation, that history is "often concealed or inaccessible" (395). This is
certainly the case with film photography, where photographic technique and darkroom
manipulations were often guarded secrets and circulation was difficult to track through
analog media. By contrast, the publicity of digital circulation often allows internet sleuths to
suss out the original image and trace its transformations and flow through the networked
media ecology. Being able to detect and map this flow destabilizes photographic naturalism;
as Bruno Latour (2002), who Finnegan and Kang draw on for their theory of circulation,
writes, "the more the human hand can be seen as having worked on an image, the weaker
is the image's claim to offer truth" (7). Instead of the image confidence inspired by early film
photography, the culture of the analogico-digital photograph becomes one of "image diffi-
dence" (Latour 2002, 22).
The interaction and accretion of these contributing factors are responsible for a decline in
the inferential dominance of photographic naturalism and a rise in interpretations that
presume gradations of photographic unnaturalism. If the prevailing documentary-realist way
of seeing shaped audience interpretation in the early years of film photography, then a
unique, culturally specific way of seeing is being cultivated with the digitization of visual
culture. This new ocular regime inverts what Finnegan identified as the representational,
ontological, and mechanical axes of photographic realism: audiences often presume the
image is not a representation of something in the world; that it did not occur before the
camera in a particular time and place; and that the camera made the image with (perhaps
substantial) intervention from the photographer. For example, the images of Aimi Eguchi or
the H&M models are not representations of something in the world (representational
realism); the Angolan witch spider did not occur before the camera in a certain place and
time (ontological realism); and The Economist cover photo was not captured by the camera
with no intervention from the photographer (mechanical realism).
The widespread assumption of digital manipulation presents a broader exigency for
inventive cultural strategies to re-assert the realism of un-altered images. Instagram and
245
similar apps have become so widespread as to inspire a backlash hashtag, #nofilter, that tries
to reconceal the human hand by claiming the absence of post-processing. 4 Recognition of
the unnaturalistic enthymeme has similarly seeped into commercial advertising discourses.
The cosmetics company Make Up For Ever responded to the hyper-retouching that domi-
nates most advertisements with a campaign proclaiming "You're looking at the first unre-
touched make up ad" and "Real life is unretouched, just like this ad." As one blogger noted
in response, "the feminist critique of retouched images of models has gone mainstream, so
I'm not surprised to see a make up company engage with it directly. But I see this more as
an attempt to co-opt the critique in order to sell a product than actual progress" (Truitt 2011).
The consequences of the unnaturalistic enthymeme's diffusion as an argument pattern are
as ambiguous as they are profound. A more widely distributed hermeneutic of suspicion is

undoubtedly useful as a personal coping mechanism, since understanding that many com-
mercially circulated images are digitally manipulated might attenuate the pressure to live up
to the impossible beauty ideal of having no pores. Of course, the cognitive recognition of
manipulation might not relieve the affective identifications that such images continue to
animate-a thorny issue beyond the scope of this essay. In public culture, healthy skepticism
about photojournalism, news programs, and other images that circulate is similarly useful.
Although five hundred years of the "print effect" has "conditioned [people] to put great trust
in documents that are publicly disseminated," public life is undoubtedly enriched by critical
conversation about images rather than uncritical acceptance of them as simplistic reflections
of the real (LaGrandeur 2005, 130). A more widely ensconced hermeneutic of suspicion
serves subjects past and present in inoculating themselves against various hoaxes involving
faeries, spirits, Sasquatches, and aliens. Needless to say, skepticism in the visual realm is a
useful orientation toward propaganda, official and otherwise. Persistent questions about the
realism of images cultivate publics more invested in interrogating visual culture-looking,
asking, doubting, arguing.
However, what appears as a sound coping strategy vis-a-vis commercial advertising risks
callousness and apathy when applied to images of atrocity. If the unnaturalistic enthymeme
throws into question the evaluative standards of narrative fidelity and probability, then how
are citizens supposed to judge visual narratives, especially those important to collective
remembering or ongoing tragedies? Historically, trust in the veracity of images animated
public concern about social justice, like images of lynchings (Ohl and Potter 2013), the
Holocaust (Zelizer 1998), or the body of Emmett Till (Harold and DeLuca 2005). The
elevated levels of skepticism that accompany the unnaturalistic enthymeme may, then,
dampen compassionate ways of seeing required for a healthy democratic public culture
affectable by images of suffering and despoliation (Hariman 2009). However, we surmise
that the emergence of the unnaturalistic enthymeme leads subjects to organically develop
savvy methods of making judgments about images on a case-by-case basis. As we demon-
strate in the next section, when cultural critique focuses on the "grammar" of the discrete
image, it provides viewers with more sophisticated tools for judgment.
4
Whenever a claim to realism is articulated, a corresponding effort emerges to ensure its veracity. For example, the
FilterFakers.com website now monitors when lnstagram users claim #nofilter, exposing those who falsely invoke
the hashtag by re-publishing the photo, the usemame, and the filter used to alter the original image with a red
"fraud" banner across a comer. Ostensibly without a political or commercial agenda beyond exposing filter usage
for purportedly #nofilter photographs, Filter Fakers algorithmically visibilizes the unnaturalistic enthymeme,
even providing a tutorial about common lnstagram filters so that viewers can detect and debunk those who
continue to assert photographic realism.
246

Figure 1: Photoshop culture jam in Berlin, Germany. Photograph by just. Source: http:/I
www.ekosystem.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=43571. Licensed under Creative Commons.
VISmiLIZING THE UNNATURALISTIC ENIHYMEME

How does the rise of the unnaturalistic enthymeme challenge traditional modes of cultural
critique? Following the logic of the naturalistic enthymeme, feminist critics of advertising
show how commercial images are unrealistic as beauty ideals. Although this conventional
mode of critique will continue to be useful into the future, more inventive methods beyond
the rhetoric of expose may be required to critique that which audiences schooled in
photographic unnaturalism already presume. Such approaches puncture established atten-
tion routines and provide alternatives to cycles of negative critique that Jodi Dean (2005)
indicts as part of the new structure of communicative capitalism. In 2009, one such creative
tactic of cultural critique began appearing on billboards in Berlin, Germany, where activists
altered advertisements by using wheatpasting, a cheap method of affixing paper to surfaces.
For example, a promotional billboard for new albums by pop stars Britney Spears, Leona
Lewis, and Christina Aguilera had numerous Photoshop toolbars wheatpasted on to it Qust
2009) (see figure 1). The main Photoshop toolbar is on the left, while the right side features
a tool bar with about twenty different layers that theoretically constitute the composite image.
One layer is labeled simply "****Consume****." Another layer identifies the crew respon-
sible for the additions to the billboard as FTW. Three toolbars float in the middle of the
billboard. One is the "History" toolbar, which indicates that "Clone Stamp" has been used
five times in a row. Another is a "Brushes" tool bar that has a box labeled "Shape Dynamics"
checked (shape dynamics allows Photoshop users to control the size, angle, and roundness
of the brush in an attempt to replicate the feel of actual paintbrushes). Finally, a "Tool
Presets" toolbar has one preset named and highlighted "Don't Forget." The toolbars, as well
247

Figure 2: Photoshop culture jam in Hamburg, Germany. Photograph by Daniel Soares.

Used with permission.
as the names of layers and presets, are calibrated to draw attention to familiar themes of
culture jamming: the artifice of commercial simulation, the soullessness of consumerism, and
the passivity of too many citizens. The "Don't Forget" toolbar simultaneously implies that
subjects recognize the intensity of digital manipulation but also need occasional reminding
of the extent to which it occurs.
In 2012, another street artist reprised this tactic in Hamburg, Germany on a number of
H&M advertisements. A lone Photoshop toolbar was pasted on the left side of an advertise-
ment for a bikini top at the cut-rate price of €4.95. In these advertisements, the fairly
light-skinned Brazilian supermodel lsabeli Fontana appears in what can only be described as
an "ultrabronzed" state. Photographs of the image with wheatpasted toolbar circulated
widely through feminist blogs, culture jamming websites, and other hubs for street art and
graffiti (see figure 2). As one blog noted, "Yes, it's an in-joke. But with campaigns like Dove's
phenomenally successful 'Evolution' campaign and grassroots movements like 14-year-old
Julia Bluhm's petition to Seventeen Magazine [which requested one unaltered photo spread per
issue], pretty much everyone is 'in' on the Photoshop reference by now" (Megginson 2012).
This nod to the widespread cultural understanding that (especially commercial) images are
extensively digitally manipulated underlines the prevalence of the unnaturalistic en-
thymeme. We would note that the image with appended toolbar only makes sense as a
resistant visual argument when viewers, spurred by the visible editing tools, make explicit the
hidden premise "this is not real." The rhetorical work of the toolbars is precisely to visibilize
the grammar of the unnaturalistic enthymeme by exposing the tools of post-processing digital
manipulation. 5 The wheatpasted toolbars do not just announce the craftedness of the
5 Although the term "visibilize the grammar" may strike the reader as unnecessarily clunky, we think it is a useful
inversion of Stiegler's (2002) "grammaticalization of the visible" that is preferable to "make visible" because of
248
UNNATURAUSTIC ENTHYMEME SPRING 2016
billboards; they make visible the discrete elements of the analogico-digital image, showing
the myriad of ways that these components can be manipulated through brush sizes, layers,
lasso tools, cloning, and color changes.
This strategy of visibilizing the unnaturalistic enthymeme modifies Kathryn Olson and G.
Thomas Goodnight's (1994) theory of blocking the enthymeme for contemporary configu-
rations of digital media and visual culture. Olson and Goodnight dissect the 1980s contro-
versy over fur by exploring how "oppositional argument functions to block enthymematic
associations and so disrupt the taken-for-granted realm of the uncontested and common-
place" (250). As they explain, critics of wearing fur were faced with contravening longstand-
ing cultural assumptions about the human use of non-human animal pelts, including (1) the
killing of non-human animals is justified so long as it is not unnecessarily cruel, (2) the
wearing of fur is a glamorous act of conspicuous consumption, and (3) decisions about fur are
private, not public concerns. Each of these assumptions historically forms a crucial hidden
premise in enthymematic argument supporting the wearing of fur. As Olson and Goodnight
document, the success of fur activists hinged on their ability to explicitly thematize each of
these hidden assumptions through discursive and non-discursive argument in order to block
the uncritical fulfillment of the pro-fur enthymematic argument. Anti-fur protestors restore
the "absent referent" (Adams 1990) by focusing on the absurdity involved in making a
sentient non-human animal painfully die so that a human can strengthen a claim to class
status. This resilient strategy is exemplified more recently by PETA's "Here's the Rest of
Your Fur Coat" advertisements, featuring skinned animals being held by celebrities. By
bringing the grisliness of this particular kind of death front and center, the advertisements
destabilize the conventional assumptions subtending pro-fur enthymemes.
For Olson and Goodnight (1994), the key speech act governing oppositional argument is
the "objection," an act that they connect to discursive modes of critique, refutation, and
indictment (250-251). Yet, they are also sensitive to the nondiscursive: "In social contro-
versy, nondiscursive arguments usher into the public realm aspects of life that are hidden
away, habitually ignored, or routinely disconnected from public appearance. By rendering
these aspects noticeable and comment-worthy, performed arguments expose specific social
conventions as unreflective habits and so revalue human activities" (252). We would rechar-
acterize oppositional argument to suggest that the nondiscursive-visual, embodied, perfor-
mative-visibilizes the enthymematic assumptions of co-arguers. The discursive, then, moves
to block the seamless functioning of that enthymeme by explicitly objecting to the hidden
premise. However, the strategy of wheatpasting toolbars on commercial advertisements
uncouples the non-discursive and discursive phases in oppositional argument. For obvious
legal reasons, the street artists responsible for wheatpasting the Photoshop toolbars did not
stick around to propositionally explain their criticism of the advertisements. Unlike fur
protestors and many other cultural critics, they are not trying to "block" the functioning of
the unnaturalistic enthymeme so much as they are trying to surface photographic unnatu-
ralism. 6 The political intervention is in making public, reminding, thematizing; it is in
how it implies an ongoing, processual movement. "Make visible" suggests that the resistant articulations of the
. unnaturalistic enthymeme are stuck in a binary invisible/visible.
6
Although figure 1 is closer to meeting Olson and Goodnight's objection criterion because of the words "Con·
sume" and "Don't Forget," the linguistic messages are more geared to a critique of consumerism than an argument
against the unrealism of the image. Certainly, in figure 2, where only a toolbar modifies the original image, there
is nothing like an explicit objection to digital manipulation. It merely draws attention to the fact that "this image
has been digitally edited." Perhaps if some text had been appended that specified an argument along the lines of
249
converting subjects from a position of synthesis to, in Stiegler's (2002) terms, "analysis" (156).
Visibilizing the unnaturalistic enthymeme positions one to look "at" and not just "through"
the image. Richard Lanham (1993) originally used this distinction to explain how the
dynamism of digital text invites interpretive strategies that oscillate between looking
"through" the text for the meaning conveyed, but also "at" the stylistic and design conven-
tions of the text. Making the Photoshop toolbar visible thus imports a reading strategy native
to digital environments into the material context of the billboard advertisement. Onlookers,
who might otherwise just look through the images to see that a trio of pop stars have new
albums or that H&M has a killer sale on bikini tops, are invited instead to look at the
grammar of the image.
In isolating the specific technologies and laborious processes used to make bodies appear
flawless in advertisements, the street artists aim to spark follow-on conversations about
the unnaturalism of the jammed advertisement. The pictures of onlookers pointing at the
billboards and the circulation of the images through intemetworked media attest to the
success of the strategy in making the post-processing manipulation of the image, in Olson
and Goodnight's words above, "noticeable and comment-worthy." This strategy of visibil-
izing the enthymeme appears to operate as a relatively undirected conversation starter that
sparks inquiry into the constructed dimensions of the image. It is, of course, difficult to
ascertain how these conversations flow: surely, some observers take the opportunity to
consider the hyperreal fantasy of the image, just as others might celebrate the adver-
tisement as an example of the power of ideal forms, and yet others might pass it by with
nary a glance.
As a resistant visual argument, the strategy of pasting Photoshop toolbars on advertise-
ments relies on what Christine Harold (2007) describes as the power of "confiscating a small
space from commercial advertising and using it as a site for rhetorical invention" (96). Such
a strategy has long been a tactic of street artists, pranksters, and culture jammers. As Harold
notes, "pranking repattems commercial rhetoric less by protesting a disciplinary mode of
power ... than by strategically augmenting and utilizing the precious resources the contem-
porary media ecology affords" (108). Visibilizing the enthymeme by strategically fixing
Photoshop toolbars on commercial advertisements at least partially evades the endless cycle
of dialectical, agonistic, negative critique that seems increasingly ineffectual in puncturing
attention routines in highly mediatized societies. Perhaps the greater interpretive latitude
created by subtle artistic defamiliarization-what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie-
offers citizen-critics enhanced opportunities to animate networked publics through the
circulation of image and commentary.
This strategy of visibilizing the enthymeme is increasingly gaining currency in other
contexts. On February 27, 2013, a user posted a Photoshop plug-in (called an "Action") to
the Reddit Photoshop Community that claimed to be for portrait retouching. The plug-in
was supposed to enhance skin glow. However, when the Photoshopped file was exported,
the Action reverted the image back to the original, untouched, version with the text "Don't
manipulate our perceptions of real beauty" and a Dove branded Twitter handle and hashtag.
As it turns out, this was an effort to orchestrate viral marketing by Dove's Real Beauty
campaign: the action was planted pseudonymously on a subreddit with the hopes that the
plug-in would organically circulate through a Photoshop community. After their shenanigans
"digital manipulation of models is bad" then the case would more closely resemble Olson and Goodnight's fur
protestors.
250
were found out, Dove released a YouTube video explaining their intention: "After nearly a
decade of promoting Real Beauty, Dove wanted to raise the stakes ... By speaking directly
to those responsible for manipulating our perceptions. Art directors. Graphic designers.
Photo retouchers ... But how do we catch them in the act and get them to reconsider? By
disguising our message as a Photoshop Action" (Ogilvy Toronto 2013). Thus, a strategy of
street artists can easily become a blueprint for corporate actors to commandeer attention.
Dove's Real Beauty campaign, while taking a potentially radical stance against monolithic
beauty ideals, is like the unretouched Make Up For Ever ads: ultimately about moving a
product (for critical analysis of the Dove Real Beauty campaign, see Banet-Weiser 2012 and
Johnston and Taylor 2008).
HYPERSOPIDSTIC ATTITUDES IN CoNTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTIJRE
In order to theorize the evolving interpretive conventions of visual culture, we have

identified the unnaturalistic enthymeme as a sign of how enhanced skepticism about the
representative veracity of images increasingly prevails in public conversation. Whether
initiated by artistic experimentation or cultural critique, public argument about images
increasingly features the topos of naturalism and unnaturalism, signaling the complex argu-
mentative ecology spawned by digital mediation. The claim that everyone always analyzes
images with an arched eyebrow of skepticism is too far-reaching. Yet, given the constant flow
of images bearing the imprint of post-processing digital manipulation, and the inevitable
controversies that reveal images as intensively crafted artifacts, uncritical and unwarrantable
assumptions about photography's naturalism appear to be fading. In naming the unnatural-
istic enthymeme, we aim to stimulate more critical attention to the rhetorical and cultural
implications of analogico-digital photography. Furthermore, in drawing on the quadripartita
ratio to grammaticalize these newly articulated practices made possible by the discrete image,
we hope to provide scholars of visual argument an expanded theoretical vocabulary and new
ways of thinking about cultural critique.
In looking ahead to the next twenty years of visual argument scholarship, we ask: if the
naturalistic enthymeme emerged in the context of a documentary-realist ocular regime, then
what kind of ocular regime is implied by the presence of the unnaturalistic enthymeme?
What larger cultural discourses are mobilized by this interpretive pattern? How are subjects
positioned in relation to images and their sensations of them? We might begin to address
these questions by taking note of Stiegler's (2002) claim that the analogico-digital image spurs
"a great crisis, a generalized questioning, comparable to what had taken place in Greece with
respect to language (of which sophistry and the philosophical response to it are epistemic
consequences)" (160). The discretization of language enabled by writing was responsible for
the very genesis of rhetorical argumentation in the studied word play of the ancient Sophists.
The discretization of the image, analogously, opens up novel opportunities for visual
argumentation. We might say, then, that the unnaturalistic enthymeme is evidence of, and,
in a co-constructive spirit, further enables, a hypersophistic attitude in contemporary visual
culture. Nathan Crick's (2010) read of the ancient Sophists defined a sophistic attitude thusly:
"An experimental approach to things, people, events, and ideas that brings intellectual
resources to bear on the means and ends of artistic production in order to generate new
methods of invention necessary to master the contingencies of life and guide the flux of
251
nature" (28). 7 These sophistic keywords resonate as descriptions of the contemporary visual
media ecology: experimental, productive, poetic, ingenious, artistic, playful.
As a prefix, hyper- means "over, above, beyond." In using hypersophistic, we mean to signal
how these sophistical attitudes are intensified through the affordances of hypertext, or the
hyperimage, made available by digital media technology. We sketch three intensifications.
First, the velocity of image circulation has increased in hypersophistic visual culture, with high
speed proliferations and iterations, makings and remakings. Novelty and inventiveness are
ever more prized, as evidenced by the rapid flow of clever remixes, homages, and parodies.
"Visual eloquence" is sought after to encourage judgments great and small (Hariman and
Lucaites 2003). Second, the sites of publicity for visual hypersophistry have multiplied. No
longer is the sophistic attitude limited to display in the Agora and symposium, flowing
instead through a range of networked publics and into many different material spaces. Third,
the participants in hypersophistic visual culture have expanded. While the ancient Sophists,
their clients, and their supplicants were the leisured elite of a homogenous class, contem-
porary hypersophists better reflect cultural pluralism (if not economic pluralism). Both
professionals and everyday people are experimenting with the affordances of a new medium
to play with expressivity. Quite simply, more people are producing, scrutinizing, analyzing,
critiquing, and arguing over images in today's rich, intemetworked media ecology.
If film photography concealed the techne of image production with the purportedly
objective, naturalizing technology of the camera, then the figurative dimensions of digital
photography and post-processing allow for image-making to be re-recognized as a craft and
as crafted. The "mono logos" of photographic naturalism, enthymematically asserting "this is
real," is now coupled with a "counter logos," the "this is not real" of the unnaturalistic
enthymeme. This sets in motion that key sophistic mode of invention: dissoi logoi. When
subjects bring the natural/unnatural topos to bear on specific images, they create new
knowledge about both the issue at hand and the grammar of digital manipulation. When
viewers contrast the published Economist cover featuring a forlorn Obama musing about the
Deepwater Horizon spill with the original image of Obama engaged in listening to local
officials, they can make nuanced assessments of how the grammar of the image affects its
rhetorical potency. Subtract the officials, add a darker overall tone to the image, transpose
the leaky rig more proximate to Obama's head-all of these discrete operations can be made
visible and theorized following the logic of the quadripartita ratio. Contemporary viewer-
critics do with images what the Sophists did with words: figure them, interpret them, and
critique them through an ever-evolving vocabulary capable of explaining more precisely
how the grammar of an image shapes rhetorical potency. When the rhetoricity of images is
foregrounded, subjects are positioned to make judgments on the degree of an image's
naturalism or unnaturalism through argument instead of sight alone.
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The Unnaturalistic Enthymeme Figuration

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ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY

52 (Spring 2016): 236-253

THE UNNATURALISTIC EN'IHYMEME:

In contemporary, internetworked visual culture, digital manipulation of images is ubi-

ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY PFISTER AND WOODS

commercial billboards. We interpret this intervention as reliant on a strategy of visibilizing the

THE ENTHYMEMATIC TuRN IN VISUAL ARGUMENT

That images participate in meaning-making processes is incontrovertible; more contro-

persuasion usually conceived of as a series of linguistic propositions strung together to yield

UNNATURALISTIC ENTHYMEME SPRING 2016

photography intersected with a specific cultural moment marked by a realist-documentary way

ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY PFISTER AND WOODS

UNNATURALISTIC ENTHYMEME SPRING 2016

ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY PFISTER AND WOODS