A little too sticky?

As I read Anne Frances Wysocki’s piece on visual composition, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,” my mind returned to Phyllis Lassner’s piece on Rogerian argument. Lassner suggests, among other things, that the Rogerian method is not equally empowering to all. Some, she suggests, actually lose power by engaging in the Rogerian method. As I recall, she assumes that the extent to which an argument is effective at reaching a particular audience is heavily based on cultural factors—a context—rather than innate human characteristics that are universal across time and space. In other words, not everyone is affected by argument in the same way.
Wysocki takes this assumption that Lassner makes about alphabetical argument and brings it to bear in her piece about visual argument—arguing that design techniques that some perceive to be universal principles should not be perceived to be universally effective. It makes sense to me that the principles of “contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity” (150) have culturally-weighted meanings and that in another context, some other principles, perhaps, might come into play.Yet, it seems I am foiled again! So much has been written on this blog about the difficulty of teaching students to analyze visual argument. Now it seems that even if one thinks he or she knows how visual argument works, that knowledge is limited to a particular context. I should have seen it coming. Is analyzing visual texts in English 1000 really worth the trouble?