There is not enough space here to treat our readings thouroughly. Wysocki's chapter on beauty really resonates with why I am in graduate school and why I care about rhetoric. She is scraping at an alienating rot within our culture, and ourselves, desperately in need of reconciliation. It is a difficult subject matter to tie into writing pedagogy. I imagine the line of reasoning she takes is too erudite and abstract for meaningful discussion within an undergraduate composition classroom, though I recall Mary touching on some of these issues through her assignments in Visual Rhetoric. That being said, I agree with Wysocki's basic argument that it is irresponsible to teach visual rhetorics in a moral vacuum. Images can be so loaded with meaning and at the same moment vague and ambiguous. A teacher needs an informed philosophy to help students critique visuals. The main thing I appreciate about post-modernism is the ability to state your case without being told to "sit down," by the empiricist. So, as a student of rhetoric and composition, a person who values artistic expression, and as lover of God, I am going to try to address this subject.
I believe humans are Created with a thirst for what we call Beauty, Goodness and Truth. This is self-evident in any examination of mankind and our practices. We want to see, and to be, good and beautiful. Aesthetic considerations and actions largely define our humanity. Sadly, what our souls long for they also destroy and exploit. Yes, we are idealistic, but I also believe we are severely distorted through sin. Sin, as revealed in the Bible, is a violation of God's rule stemming from an elevated sense of self and egotistical pride. This "fallen" state affects all areas of life; i.e., emotions, personality, relationships, thinking, appetites, community and more. Certainly we can agree that rage, paranoia, betrayal, depression, addiction and war are not in our personal or collective best interest, yet they each emanate from the self-centeredness of man. From a Christian worldview art also suffers distortion, corrupted by the same selfishness. God forbade the graven image because the image is not Him as he exists, only a pale egocentric reflection of human desires. The idolater builds an incomplete and impotent version of God, a god to do his bidding, one he finds in the mirror. Likewise, we have received "beauty" as a distorted conception rendered by the musings of philosophers in love with their own self-reflected glory. Their categories narrowly define beauty while ignoring reality with all of its complexity, dissonance and upheaval, preferring forms they can describe and control, idols of the mind. So, in the mirror of self-glorification, the reality of a human being is reduced to a prescription. As Wysocki says, "We are not encouraged to ask about the woman in the ad as a woman, only as a shape."(152) These are not benign abstractions, but horrible lies and painful distortions with real consequences for actual people. These concepts reduce living-breathing, eternal, valuable persons to consumables. These consumable "products" not only transform persons into objects, but also degrade the sensibilities of the consumer. How many men have grown tired of their wives as they approach menopause? How many woman have cut and starved their bodies to obtain an artificial ideal? How many men and boys have sexual ideals rooted in pornographic fantasy rather than in shared intimacy? How many gifted, visual people have employed their talent for the commercial manipulation of the masses, instead of the exaltation of what is noble and good? I believe God sees all of this and grieves. The egocentric mirror of fallen man produces hollow and exploitative art. Real beauty isn't so reductive or constrained. It is sublime and edifying, complex and anchored in reality. Truth, for the Christian, is not an ideal but objective reality. Beauty, like all of life, must conform to the Truth. Eyes informed by Truth see feminine beauty as it exists along the arc of a woman's life in a myriad of expressions that go beyond the physical to include the spiritual, the relational, the intellectual, the emotional, while always maintaining acute awareness of the eternal soul within the body.
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