remove to dispense

so what has us confused about film as rhetoric? i have recently heard a linguist say that visual images (central to filmic meaning) are merely “stimuli” because  they cannot provide for Toulminian warrants and that thus film cannot operate as rhetoric apart from language (as words). but it seems to me that visual images in filmic texts operate rhetorically in ways that may or may not align w/ authorial intention, the latter being fairly irrelevant. but still some rhetoricians and linguists will say that rhetoric is nothing w/out a centralizing exigence which is discerned and acted upon by a human agent. and this may be true in a limited way, limited because we know that meaning emerges regardless of these authorial hunches and actions.  it seems absurd to deny film’s status as rhetoric on the basis of an absent Toulimian warrant rendered in words; in fact, recognizing this absurdity reveals rhetoric’s disciplinary vulnerability and the ego instabilities of people working in these fields (and i am one of them), where claims to generalizing concepts that enable or reject other concepts assist the field (and careers) in their coherence/power projects.  Toulmin — one rhetorical conceptualization, the warrant, not the whole of rhetoric and meaning and intention and linguistic action and social exchange but a potential rhetorical choice, a choice that often emerges regardless of intention (and intention is where the argument hinges). within film,  meaning evolves (just as a filmmaker intended, let’s say) via adherence to genre conventions . . . and/or they are emergent and diverse, and they happen beyond what a filmmaker means or intends or imagines. this is nothing new, the fallacy of authorial intention, but it seems to me that my colleague’s rejection of film as rhetoric hinges upon authorial intention as a determinant of a language project’s status as rhetoric; i keep coming back to this insistence as a form of absurdity that is frustrating in the extreme. and i think it’s about ego and disciplinary identity and power. thus, my new little film, “remove to dispense,” which i hope to complete within the next month or so. inspired by a scrap of cardboard i found on the bathroom floor at MoMA, it’s a throw-away object, but in its graphic and ideational simplicity, it appealed to me as art. maybe this is because of how my intellectual interests converge with my aesthetics or my punk roots or because i had just watched some warhol video . . .