ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the relationships between multimodality, poetics and rhetoric and argues that the poetic is always political and thus rhetorical. It suggests that the aesthetic dimension to dialogue, public communication, personal and private communication has been largely unexplored in multimodality studies to date. The rhetorical can be aesthetic and/or poetic as well as public. In the 1970s, the British Broadcasting Corporation worked with John Berger to produce Ways of Seeing, a groundbreaking, radical look at visual and verbal encoding and perception. John Berger's contribution is to have helped to think about looking and seeing, to understand that seeing depends on habit and convention, and is shaped not only by personal experience but also by social and political framing. The film The Seasons in Quincy is a tribute to the many faceted contribution of Berger to thinking about still and moving images, and their relation to politics, power and social interaction.
