Blink!

Or lick, or sniff. Tap, listen. Malcolm Gladwell's book probably refers to the speed of blinking, but the title also suggests a strongly visual element to this thin slicing. Perhaps because it's the sense we're most used to relying on, perhaps because English has more words to describe things visually than via other senses, but our (whose?) minds seem primed to deal with optical input more efficiently.
The experiment described on page 52 ("Primed for Action"), the "old," "grey," "Florida," test, shows how easily our language deals with the visual--after all, what words could they have used to invoke oldness that dealt with old smells? Or old sounds? No, Old is definitely a visual category, minus a few outliers, like "musty" or "rotten." The visual is essential, then, to rhetoric, if only because our descriptors tend toward the visual.
As rhetoricians, we need to learn the exact mechanism by which readers come to snap judgments so that our constructions are most efficient. What is it about certain commercials that cause us all (or most) to react with the same laugh, at the same moment? What is it we are identifying with at that moment? And what counts as a moment, whe we talk about things in terms of blinks and nanoseconds? It's a wonder we've figured out rhetoric as much as we have, before we were able to break down time in computer graphs.
While this book doesn't help us figure out what visual rhetoric is, it does point to some of the mechanisms at work--and it does so via several anecdotes, themselves steeped in visual adjectives and descriptors. Gladwell argues that the Warren Harding factor, that separate visual elements work together to "carry so many powerful connotations" (76) (either positive or negative), is what is responsible for many of our decisions. Gladwell and his publishers obviously took this into account in creating the book itself: Small, large print, with a similar simple design as Gladwell's previous best seller, lack of capitalization. Clean, white, textured cover. The book says "You can read this. And it's interesting! It will make you seem sophisticated and cultured at parties when you quote it!" Put it on your coffee table for guests. Some mechanism is linking all those things together very quickly. And the next thing you know, you've bought the book, the DVD, the stuff that's supposed to get all the coffee stains out of your clothes (whatever, OxyClean).
What Blink makes evident is that we don't yet know this mechanism, and that what we don't know can trip us up. Does the finding the most efficient visual rhetoric, the best way to move someone to action, require us to find the electrical impulses that occur in those nanoseconds? Or can we bypass the eternal MRI scans and biofeedback meters (not that I mind those; they're kind of fun) and figure out visual rhetoric without understanding the human brain? There are all sorts of illnesses doctors don't understand, and yet can fully treat by looking at symptoms--can't we look at the "symptoms" of visual rhetoric in order to come up with an underlying structure? Are we in danger of moving rhetoric from an Art to a Science?
And is this a bad thing?