CASE  STUDY  ||  "What  Goes  Around  Comes  Around":  Arguments  of  Shape  and  the  2009  Global  CoaliCon  for  Peace  Campaign  to  End  the  Iraq  War  By  Avery  Jacob  Wiscomb

Recently, we were researching visual arguments for a client and came across this image:

The visual belongs to Global Coalition for Peace and advertising agency Big Ant International, who, in 2009, created a campaign to help stop the Iraq War. Their argument consists of four vinyl posters made to be wrapped around public utility poles or building support columns. Laid flat, the poster is a single image. But when you wrap the poster around a pole or column, so that its two ends meet, the argument of the campaign becomes much clearer.

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Much more than a representation of military might, the posters offer a visual critique of the U.S. presence in Iraq, and of war and violence in general. Each of the four posters features the catchphrase, “What Goes Around Comes Around,” and each features one of four different images: a grenadier , a sniper, a tank, and a fighter jet (immediately below).

I got to wondering, what makes these particular visual images so powerful? Surely, lots of people have argued that "violence begets violence," or that when we make war, war

comes back to haunt us. But not many people show it. For this reason, I kept returning to the shape of the argument as the primary source of its force, and I’ve come to three basic conclusions about the campaign that I thought I would share:

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(a) the visual amplifies the force of its message with its shape

(b) the visual appeals to a commonly held principle in an unexpected way 

(c) the visual demonstrates an inconsistency in human action and encourages a sense of immediacy in terms of human stakes

THE SHAPE OF THE THINGThe first thing that struck

me about the shape of these visual arguments was just how little force they had when laid flat. Laid flat and viewed from a distance, the campaign’s message seems to purposefully lend itself to a contradictory misinterpretation.

What do I mean?

I mean that, laid flat, the image will remind most audiences of the sometimes gritty, sometimes high-definition images more recently embraced by U.S. military and video game makers for recruitment, sales, and propaganda. When the photo is coupled with its catchphrase, the poster's argument can even easily be misread as a warning against past and present enemies: “What goes around comes around,” it seems to say, and we are coming for you.

Wrap the poster around a pole, though, and the flat interpretation, or contradictory misinterpretation, is inverted and amplified. The audience must now make sense of the message’s two meanings, signaled by its two different,

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possible shapes—one where we make war righteously and mightily and free of reprisal, and one where, in making war, we make war on ourselves. In this way, the audience “participates” in the argument by their way of having to read or view it, or to “unread” or “unview” it, as it were, since the image will usually be encountered in a pubic space, already wrapped around an object in seamless orbit.

Using physical shape to influence meaning reminded me of a similar phenomenon that poets call “concrete poetry.” In concrete poetry, poets add meaning and force to their poems by manipulating their typographic elements and organizing them into shapes. So a poet might write a sincere love poem, one

whose content describes the wonder of being in love, but the poet might also decide to complicate this content by arranging the same poem in the shape of a broken heart.

The syntactical features of our new “broken” heart have remained exactly the same, but in changing the shape of the poem the poet’s second, “real” or intended meaning has been disassociated from and juxtaposed against the first and amplified, turning the possibility of misinterpretation against itself in changing the shape of the poster. What has been added to the force of the "love" poem? This is something like what has been added to the force of the poster and its message.

In the case of the poster, too, the shape of the image also makes a concrete visual argument for the likelihood of an otherwise abstract, "unseen" event: "What goes around comes around," it says, and this is what "comes around" looks like.

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EXPECTED AND UNEXPECTED“What goes around comes around” is, to my ear, immediately cliché. But then, so is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Our abstract notion of retributive justice, of being held accountable by cosmic and earthly powers for our actions by way of equal or greater reactions, is as old as recorded human accounts—of justice, physics, or just about anything—and it cuts across most cultures in most parts of the world. What makes this instance of our tired, abstract maxim new is that here it’s been plainly and practically visualized for its audience by way of its shape, in an unexpected way.

We can also see that the force created in showing a commonly held principle in an unexpected way also holds when showing a commonly held association between concepts or ideas in an unexpected way. Consider another, related expression: “Give me your hand.” For many, myself included, the expression is part-and-parcel associated with the notion of showing or being shown a way, or with protection and being protected (we take up the hand of a young child when they cross the street, for example).

The organization Greenpeace effectively harnessed this association of ideas when it adopted the expression “Give me your hand” as a catchphrase, then visualized it for its audience by way of a shape.

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IMMEDIACY AND HUMAN INCONSISTENCYLet’s look at the last of the four posters laid flat.

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Although we can imagine something like it (I guess), I wouldn’t expect this (or any tank, for that matter) to intentionally shoot itself. I can say that we ought to try to live our lives as if what we do to others will also be done to us, but because the future is hidden from us, we'll oftentimes do things with long term, and as of yet unknown and invisible consequences, that we would not do if those consequences were known to us, made immediate, and personal. In this sense, it’s the shape of the visual that points out to us that consistency in our actions means acting the same way whether the consequences are immediate or not.

Of course, we will often rationalize ourselves away from the golden rule when pressed by other concerns; in this case, concerns such as national dominance, the security of loved ones back home, personal safety, or abstract notions of “freedom,” “justice,” and so on. We do so neither realizing nor fearing the ramifications, thinking of the danger as far off, or as something that can be, when it eventually shows up, counter-attacked. 

Yet it’s the shape of these visuals that shows us what life might be like if what we did was done to us, by us, in real time. The long term consequences of making war for the protection of ourselves, the posters argue, of terrorizing others (in the many ways that one can make war or terrorize), will only be more war and terror waged against us.

It’s the shape of the argument—warping, even collapsing, space and time in impossible ways—that demonstrates to us something we could never see immediately, arguing that we ought to live as if the violence we perpetrated was returned to us immediately, or else.

BUT THE CAMPAIGN VISUALLY DEPICTS HARM TO SOLDIERS. IS THAT OK?Browse the comment threads attached to various galleries of this campaign for long and you will find that the most common objection to them is that they irresponsibly display soldiers in danger. The underlying assumption to this

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objection, it would seem, is that soldiers are people, too, usually following orders, like soldiers do, and that somehow this should excuse them from personal blame or retributive justice. We should only wish soldiers the best of luck, for “safe” combat. Why wish harm on anyone?

And yet the series of visual arguments would seem to reply that it’s only in personalizing the consequences of violence that we might persuade humans to give it up. Notice that

the posters, of one sniper, one plane, one tank, and so on, seem to argue that individuals can no longer be entitled to the standard practice of exoneration. Soldiers, too, must live their lives as if their actions affected themselves immediately and personally, whether begrudgingly following orders, holding back tears, or singing songs over intercoms atop a sky of raining bullets.

In the final analysis, no external, abstract force can cause a human to kill another human so long as that human values herself and equates killing others with killing herself, which U.S. soldiers are now doing at alarming numbers. The way to peace, argues the posters, is not to excuse soldiers from violence until such time as a winner can be determined, but for soldiers to personally abandon violence now–-at all costs-–to live as if violence done is violence immediately done to one’s self.

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ARGUMENTS OF SHAPE IN FUTURE ADVOCACY PROJECTSA more rigorous, philosophical conversation could be had about these posters than I deliver here. But it seems clear that one of the chief goals for harnessing the power of shape to our own visual arguments will always be to encourage our audience to participate in our message by their way of having to read, view, or understand that argument.

Ideally, the shape we choose for our argument should make clear the argument’s significance to our audience, demonstrating to them an association, irony, allusion, or implication, by way of its shape. We ought to try to do this with the shape of our images, the shape of our typography, or both, to combine the structural or pictorial nature of our message with its prose for maximum impact on our audience.

Lastly, in thinking more about the persuasiveness of these images, I was also reminded of the fact that the shapes of certain word arrangements, or words in certain shapes, feel more persuasive to us than others. For example, symmetrical language patterns like AB-BA have become models for “clear” or “logical” thinking, and by their form of balanced sight and sound impel an initial acquiescence to their content, much in the same way as a visual argument might impel an initial acquiescence to its content because its shape so properly expresses the form of its argument.

Aristotle pointed out to us long ago that language patterns like AB-BA (“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”), or their forms, are not merely ornamental or emotive. Certain visual patterns and ways of seeing or hearing information are compelling to us because they map function onto form and closely model certain inculcated patterns of thought or argument in human thinking (Art of Rhetoric 3.12.2-4). Knowing this, the potential for effective advocacy, by way of visuals, shapes, and arguments, increases considerably.

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