The rise of modernity saw both the demise of rhetoric, the emergence of natural science and the dominance of logico-mathematical analysis. What was not mathematically expressible ----fantasy, passion, memory and emotion---was simply ignored by the mathematization of modernity. The question of rhetoric is dead and buried.

What was ignored was taken up by modern art, which fundamental rejection of the "style of vision," the "way of experiencing the world" characterized by the new physics of nature and the new physiology of the body of Galileo, Descartes and Newton.

The metaphor of the seeing eye as a camera that becomes literalized in the invention of linear perspective is a vision that allows for the Cartesian cogito's primacy over the social and historical dimensions of existence. Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. The critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world.

In response to the the mathematization of modernity modern art centred on a subjectivism, that emerges partly out of the romantic preoccupation with the subject thrust back upon itself, and upon its emotions of personal life experience. The immediate appeal to raw feeling was exhausted with the romantic's turning inward in opposition to the dominance of instrumental reason.

Can rhetoric and metaphor "live on" in a postmodern world. Can we express our relation to the social, historical, and cultural without sacrificing personal experience? Can photography become a visual rhetoric---a form of observing and a means of persuasion? Does the postmodern" marks the return of rhetoric as a disruptive critical force?