A visual rhetoric

 A visual rhetoric

August 19, 2022

I should preface this by saying that even though I took some classes on "visual rhetoric" in college, I am generally very skeptical about rhetorical effects. This particular category, however, I have heard confirmed by many other people. Yet, it's the rhetorical "remedy" for this effect, that I found examples of today, that really interested me and I think would interest others. 

The initial genre of content is called "bone hurting juice", and it can be found on the internet in the form of comics and occasionally memes. Several people have confirmed to me that reading these comics does cause a sort of psychosomatic pain, yet, interestingly, all of those people have reported that they have broken a bone in their life. The feeling of psychosomatic (i.e. "not real" or "phantom") pain may be stronger if you have broken a bone, therefore, or, it maybe be conditioned on the memory of breaking the bone entirely - this is not clear to me. I have broken a bone; for me, the psychosomatic pain of looking at "bone hurting juice" comics is slightly akin to the actual pain of slapping a palm on a flat surface. However, some people have reported that having stress fractures, for instance from running, does "count" toward feeling the bone-hurting juice. Strange, but anyway. 

There's been a consequent development of a counterpart genre to "bone-hurting juice" called "bone-healing juice". And, even more strangely, there seems to be a psychosomatic healing effect, or soothing effect, from reading "bone-healing juice" comics and memes, and it is roughly equivalent but opposite in direction to the psychosomatic effect of "bone-hurting juice". I don't think you can deny the genius of internet projects like these. And sometimes they're so useful they should all be getting paid, like here. This whole project was a several-year development. Honestly, rhetorically, it is very impressive. Imagine, for instance, a whole graphic novel full of bone-healing juice type content, and the usefulnessof that. 

Now, some would object that "bone-healing juice" is perhaps cloyingly too wholesome in tone, and this is valid criticism, absent context. The tone of "bone-hurting juice" was darkly cynical in the worst possible way. And I can reassure that the secret of a rhetoric, and I actually think that this counts as a new rhetoric, isn't strictly confined to tone and structure of the content; rather; the tone and structure created a rhetoric that was not entirely bound to the tools that created it. I see a lot of promise for this rhetoric, and for the structure of social striving that created it. Honestly, people saw a problem, and then fixed it. And what they created in the end may have more application widely, than they even imagined. Very admirable. Of course the remedy is not yet perfect, and can, should, be improved, but look what the Internet just did...the Internet should be proud of it.