Prison Tattooing As Visual Argument

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Interpreted as part of a more unique context due to the highly specialized environment, the concept of visual encoding through body/art is one with broad applicability. For example the epideictic functioning of tattoos either inside or outside of prison holds, albeit again with varying identifications. Participation in the art form itself can be argued to function as a reflection of ones’ understanding of their role and possible influence within social space. As neatly summarized “identity does not just happen. Rather, identity is an ongoing process that emerges from individuals’ interpretative and communicative efforts”

 

| ‘The penitentiary offers an intriguing opportunity to engage the rhetoric of the everyday, to investigate how people make arguments–particularly for specific identities and social selves–in the absence of significant (or even any) face-to-face dialogue. The penitentiary also offers an intriguing opportunity to explore the body’s role in visual argumentation. Although visual argument is increasing in popularity and focus among communication scholarship, the role of the body in visual argumentation, particularly the operation of tattooing as visual argument, remains unexplored. Given daily contact with the bodies of others, understanding the ways that bodies argue visually is important to understanding the operations of rhetoric in our lives.

 

Claiming the body as a site for visual argument is not without difficulties and is quite possibly a contentious argument in itself. Scholars traditionally celebrate argument as belonging to the classical public sphere–a wide-reaching construction unhelpful for understanding argumentation as it functions in nonpublic communities. In particular, because the body cannot be fully public (1) and is understood as the antithesis of deliberative discourse, the belief that argument is public axiomatically excludes the body as a site for argumentation. (2) Furthermore, the almost exclusive attention paid to public qualities of argument has obscured the ways in which argument might function in nonpublic but still social settings like the penitentiary…

 

One of visual argumentation’s distinctive features is that claim and grounds are not separate elements but are fused together in a holistic, inseparable unit in which both are “argued and answered in the seeing experience that [the visual argument] structures”. That visual arguments readily can be made, interpreted, and evaluated is an important consideration among populations with high illiteracy rates, as in a penitentiary. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca restrict argumentation to the “discursive,” with the caveat that this “by no means implies that the technique in question is the most efficacious way of affecting minds” (8). Indeed, their holism may mean that visual arguments are more, if not the most, efficacious… | full article

 

 

 

 

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