More Palimpsest Maps . . .

Palimpsest Maps of Visual Rhetoric

Kerfuffle over Logos at Univ of CA

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/10/u-californias-new-logo-sparks-outrage

The Danger in Changing Form

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/christmas-tree-controversy-fires-multicultural-belgium/?src=twrhp

Just a cool thing I thought I'd share

Hi all,
I just saw this video as I was sifting through short films to use for class next semester. I thought it was really interesting given our recent reading of Multimodality and discussions of visual rhetoric over the semester. I posted the text from the original site below, but check out the link to see the interactive experience.

http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2011/06/18/welcome-to-pine-point/

Welcome to Pine Point

A REMARKABLE INTERACTIVE MEDIA EXPERIENCE ABOUT A TOWN THAT’S NO LONGER ON THE MAP, BUT IS NOT FORGOTTEN.

Though it’s been out for a while, NFB’s interactive documentary, Welcome to Pine Point, certainly deserves more recognition.
It’s a story about an abandoned Canadian mining town that sprang up from nowhere, existed for a generation, and then was completely erased from the face of the earth. It tells of the profound impact the town had on a generation of children and neighbors who now feel as if their origins were somehow all a dream. Pine Point is a place that now exists only in memories—memories that tend to erase the bad. It’s become a utopia, a bittersweet home they can never return to.
Welcome to Pine Point is a part of NFB/Interactive—a great collection of interactive stories from Canadian perspectives. Interactive storytelling is still in its infancy and more often than not mishandled. But Welcome toPine Point represents itself beautifully as a scrapbook of yearbook photos, film footage, interviews, and a haunting soundtrack. Thanks to the care taken by its creators, The Goggles (Paul Shoebridge & Michael Simons), the end result is one of the more touching documentaries you’ll experience in a long time.

Kress addresses intent in a way we haven't seen it this class. The ways in which we've discussed intent has been governed by the term evaluation. However by use of design, intent seems to govern evaluation, especially through the example of small children. Modality here cares less about the aesthetic of design but the intention of design. What did you mean by such image and if it communicates in the way it’s intended, then there you have it.

Modality allows for different ways of seeing, and feeling. It’s quite intriguing as I think about how visually impaired students communicate in this conversation. It suggests that even one who is impaired can participate in the layering of meaning. Exciting!

Odd One Out...?

I enjoy Kress' focus on communication, probably for obvious reasons.  I have spent the semester trying to determine the differences or separations between visual communication and visual rhetoric, which I think necessitates a determination first of how one defines rhetoric and communication.  These attempts at defining have me at the point where I feel (mostly) confident in saying all rhetoric is a form of communication (which depends on your definition of communication, perhaps); I have a fairly broad definition of communication and I like how Kress breaks it down on pg. 36 although I'm not 100% sure I agree with everything he says there.  He says "three assumptions are fundamental: communication happens as a response to a prompt; communication has happened when there has been an interpretation; communication is always multimodal.  I am particularly interested in the 2nd assumption.  When trying to define communication, the question is often raised "If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?"  Kress' 2nd assumption that communication has happened when there has been an interpretation assumes that there can be attempts at communication that do not quite reach the level of being communication, that someone can actively try to communicate but possibly not ever actually communicate.  If a message is sent out but no one ever hears it (or sees it, or even somehow senses it, in an extreme case where one might not be able to hear or see, but can still be sent messages via touch sensation), and no one receives that message, communication has not happened.  This situates communication on a sliding scale from failed attempts to imperfect not 100% clear attempts to something more "effective" or perhaps "successful" (although I don't think those words encompass it entirely); a scale in which the interpretation may not be as the sender intended, or could be partially as intended, or very close to as intended by the sender, but it has to happen, this act of interpretation, in order for communication to have happened.  Communication can thus be "measured" as more or less effective at getting the intended message out. 

But, what of rhetoric, then?  I have much less confidence in stating not all communication is rhetorical, not because I don't agree with the statement but because I have a much harder time articulating a defense for it and in defining rhetoric.  In chapter 8, Kress opens the chapter with a description of crossing the street and how all of the things he is experiencing are communicating with him, whether intentionally or not, such as the car blinker, the position of the car in the road, the crossing signal, etc.  There is certainly an interpretation happening there, as he determines whether it is safe to cross the street or not, but could these communications really be considered rhetorical?  They are influencing someone's actions even if the communicators didn't intend for that to happen, but what of the intent and the design behind these messages?  Is rhetoric distinguished by an intent to influence someone in their attitudes, beliefs, or actions, whether to reinforce them or to change them?  In Kress' definition of communication, he says "This model of communication rebalances power and attention, with equal emphasis on the interpreter of a message-prompt and the initial maker of the message, the rhetor.  So, in this way he complicates my "neat and clean" attempt at defining rhetoric by the intent, and the chapter 8 example of the crosswalk, in that it seems contradictory for unintentional, unnoticed "communication" can happen, such as the position of the car in street- the person trying to cross is interpreting, but where is the "equal emphasis" on the "initial maker of the message"?

I think that Kress' idea of ensembles and multiple modes and frames being a part of all texts (to focus this in on the visual again) is helpful in a view or theory of visual rhetoric.  Throughout the semester we have looked at images and said how it is hard (impossible?) to separate an image from the context in which it is viewed and although Kress might not appreciate me taking this liberty, I connect that with the multimodal (I like Martha's term of multisensory even better).  Martha called it a gestalt, which I love, because I think the context and all of the modes incorporated in the viewing of a text are impossible to separate.  The interpretation is dependent on all of the modes included in the design and even "spills over" to the context in which an image is viewed.  For example, if music is playing in the background (whether purposefully with an intention or not), it will affect our interpretation of the text.  When this intention comes in, perhaps that is where rhetoric comes in?  For example, the museum setting- there would be intentionality behind the music playing in a gallery, whereas if you were walking by on the street, there is not necessarily control of what sounds (and other sensory prompts) would accompany the viewing of the image. 

Mode and Audience

            When one reads Kress, it is tempting to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of terms he throws out. I found his definition of rhetoric as “the politics of communication” to be slightly suspicious at first, but it has slowly grown on me. One of the most interesting implications of social-semiotic theory for rhetoric is the relationship between audience and mode. Where rhetorical theorists until the 20^th century dealt almost exclusively with words (with a limited focus on oratory), here Kress isolates something that is uniquely appropriate for our times: mode is not just a way to consider the available means of persuasion, but mode has a specific relationship to audience that lends itself to the rationale for choosing one mode over another.

            This relationship is best expressed on page 130. Kress, discussing the way the Poetry Foundation’s website changes its presentation of poetry depending on whether teachers, students, or children are viewing the works, points out that the relationship between the mode and the audience is a significant one. In short, each mode offers a different affordance for a different audience, such that some modes paired with some messages work better for a given audience than other modes with that same message.

            In some ways, introducing multimodality into existing rhetorical theory does not challenge much of what has come before. Kress, like Aristotle and Bitzer, places the agency of the audience in a central role. It is because the audience is free to accept or reject the rhetor that the agency of the audience should occupy such a significant space.

Jacob won at awesome titles - I'm not even going to try.

Let me begin at the middle.

This is how excited I am. 

Chapters 5 and 6 were especially helpful to me in defining visual rhetoric and working to understand how it works. The vocabulary presented in these chapters, a much needed and anticipated definition of modes, and discussions of framing and genre were especially useful to me. If we’re thinking of modes as “[naming] the material resources shaped in often long histories of social endeavour and available as meaning resources” (114), the possibilities for making meaning become practically endless – allowing, of course, that a mode has been accepted as a plausible form of communication by the society in which it was chosen to operate. This is really exciting to me on multiple fronts: it provides a vocabulary for talking about nonverbal and nontraditional communications (I’m thinking outside of images, audio, and text) which, in turn, opens a space for the valuing of (perhaps) infinite communication systems. Too, I almost even believe Kress assertion that, while modes are culturally situated, we can use social-semiotics to approach communications across cultures. I’m leery of accepting a universally applicable theory, of course, but there seems enough elasticity to Kress’ framework that such an application might actually be possible.

In defining genre, Kress disambiguates materials from conventions – which was exceptionally helpful for me in my study of visual rhetoric. Kress defines genre as “[addressing] the semiotic emergence of social organization, practices and interactions” (113). Maybe this is a given, but often it seems genre is characterized by its materials or modes, rather than by its organizations or interactions of those modes and communicators and interpreters. Thinking genre as an organization of modes or as a socially recognized way of presenting (being?) helped me to further conceptualize modes and genre in deeper and more meaningful ways. Basically I realized: the use of a mode does not a genre make. The use of a mode in a particular layout, organization, or design might constitute a genre, if such a genre has been normalized into my discourse community.  

This is what it looked like when Kress blew my mind. 

Lastly, Kress’ conception of frames, to be frank, blew my mind. I enjoyed Jacob’s comparison of Helmer’s and Kress’ concepts of frames, and I do believe Kress’ discussion here led me to a better understanding of what Helmers was trying to illustrate. Framing is not just about positioning the viewer, though. What’s more is that it indicates a beginning and an end to the information being presented. Kress likens framing to punctuation, which, for compositionists, may not be the most helpful of metaphors, but his definition includes the “fixing of meaning in a modal, generic and discursive form.” Too, framing helps the orient and communicate.

Kress offers visual rhetoric a reflexive working vocabulary that looks backwards as it looks forwards that allows for rhetoricians to analyze affect and production as connected, rather than disconnected communicative moments. A few weeks ago, when we were asked to draw our concept maps of visual rhetoric, my group struggled to articulate this – Kress might have helped.

I used to not like Kress, but I do now.
It's sort of like this. 

Moreover, Kress draws attention to the parts of a multimodal communication and assigns rhetorical agency to each mode and to the communicator/rhetor who selected the mode. While dissection or isolation of all components of a visually rhetorical artifact may not be advisable (ok, probably don’t do that; visual rhetoric is obviously greater than the sum of its parts), the isolation of modes can allow us to broaden our definitions of communications by demonstrating the possibilities of modes, genres, and framing, while simultaneously solidifying definitions of communication by presenting a (mostly) transparent communication process. In so doing, visual rhetoric may become more easily defined, studied, and produced.

Throughout my reading of Kress, I kept thinking of gifs, probably because I find them most entertaining. But it's interesting to me that they are often scenes taken from movies/tv shows that are stripped of their original framing and several modes. Through motion and gesture, and through my textual framing, these gifs take on a truly new and unique meaning and make new links between the theoretical concepts I've explored here and pop culture, but are still reliant on your understanding of the images presented and the appropriateness of the genre (I'll let you decide how appropriate they are...). 

The Politics of Communication

One of the things that I really liked about Multimodality was that Kress talks about meaning being made through the interplay of the author and interpreter. (I'm having trouble remembering back to the beginning of the semester,  but...) It seems like most of our readings have given the agency to the interpreter when it comes to meaning making. While I agree that, especially with visuals, the scales would be tipped toward the interpreter, I liked that Kress gave a "shout out" to the author. Without the author's socially-informed manipulation of his/her available modes, the interpreter would be able to exercise his/her socially-informed making of meaning.

More than Kress' author/interpreter interplay though, I liked his idea of affordances. Before reading Kress (who I first read a couple of years ago), I had never really thought about affordances. I'm sure I had thought about things that could be done through text that couldn't be done through visuals—and vice versa—but I hadn't thought about each mode having their own sets of advantages and disadvantages. I like that thinking about the affordances of different modes establishes a kind equilibrium among them. It seems like many people (outside the fields of semiotics and rhet/comp), want to establish some kind of universal/static hierarchy of modes, but thinking about affordances allows us to say "X mode is good in this situation, while Y mode is good in that situation.

Outside of the theoretical aspects of Kress, I both liked and disliked his multitude of examples. In many cases I was glad that he was making sure that I/we understood what he was talking about, but there were other times when I was like "Gunther, I get it! Give me a break with these examples."

Visual Experts

I know a few people have questioned Kress' use of examples from children, but I think they're important to demonstrate our development of (a certain kind of) visual literacy--Kress seems to struggle with the word itself and what kind of meanings it implies, but finds use in it for a term of understanding.  So, I would say that Kress raises, for me, questions about visual literacy--especially a model for a development of a visual literacy (which, as he says, is culturally bound).  I think one thing that is often overlooked in our class is that people are visually literate for the most part.  Since the days of stain glass windows in cathedrals telling stories for the "illiterate" (in terms of reading and writing), mankind has been able to "read" visuals. We're all visual experts but most of us lack the ability to articulate how we are visually literate.  Kress, I feel, understands this; he uses examples from children to show how a child--who may be presumably illiterate or yet-to-be-fully-developed--organizes their visual experiences.  What are the things that catch the attention or interests of an individual and how does that shape how that image's meaning is processed? By understanding how humans become visually literate, a theory for visual rhetoric can be born. 

This is where--I feel--rhetoric and literacy collide.  To make an effective visual--in terms of the success of its portrayal of an idea or concept--there needs to be a degree of understanding about the context your working within.  I think this might tie into his idea of "framing" but I really have no idea.  Every item is processed within a frame of that individual; the individuals' experiences are shaped by the communities that individual has participated within.   The individual's interests shape which aspects to pay attention to--responses to prompts demonstrate our interests which, in essence, demonstrate what kind of person we are.


Who knows if Kress would agree with any of this, but these were the kind of questions I had throughout reading him.  Where does literacy and rhetoric collide? How is visual literacy developed? What is "visual literacy" for Kress, anyway? Things like that.

Reframing Kress, and an Aside About Critique/Design

I wanted to talk about frame, but Jacob beat me to it. I am going to talk about frame anyway.

Kress's idea of framing is one of the things that really jumped out at me in this reading. I think his explanation of sentence punctuation as framing was really helpful, and I began to think of framing as delineations in discourse. Sentences need frames for coherence (I'm dating myself here, but I remember reading Indigo Girls lyrics in high school. They would provide liner notes, song lyrics with no line breaks, no punctuation. Just big undifferentiated blocks of text, like Greek writing. The effect was fascinating; I tried to duplicate it in my high school and early college efforts).

So frame helps us break modes into manageable pieces. It says "for our purposes, here is the beginning, and here is the end," though we know that discourse does not begin or end in frames. We frame our writing with paper or screens. We frame speech with silence.

But "without frame no meaning?" I don't know. Maybe the deal is that we cannot help but frame discourse. What, indeed, would unframed discourse look like? I'm trying to imagine. It would be a perpetual motion machine.

I also really like Kress's discussion of design and critique. I'm thinking, especially, about p. 133, where he wrote, "When critique replaced convention, composition became problematic." Shebam!! Has a defter summary of the field ever been composed? Perhaps this one, same page: "Yet critique can work only in relation to stable structures and environments; its task is to bring these into crisis." I think his temporal positioning of design and critique is effective: critique is backward-looking, design is forward-looking. The field exists, I assume, in the kairotic moments that make both possible.

Kress-tify

I want to point to an aspect of Kress that has been hashed out by Ryan via wikis and Christine's & Aimee's emphasis on Kress's concept audience (agency). Kress's theory offers an incredibly interactive account of communication. Everybody has agency. Every piece of communication changes something whether it be the rhetor/designer, the resources/material of modes, or the interpreter. I feel like before Kress, I had not thought of materials/resources/material of modes/stuffness as things that could be changed by a single rhetor/designer. Goggin's "Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel" discusses a change in practice that occured over a long period of time and resulted from cultural and historical developments -- protestantism to name one. Faigley does indicate that an individual can choose to use a mode (verbal/pictoral representation) whenever the need arises, but I do not feel like he offered a model that was as interactive. Modes were used more than remade.

I do want to add that while Kress was dense and rich, I did not feel like he was coming out of left field. In some ways, like Bret, I felt like I was reading a synthesis. But it was a synthesis of familiar concepts reconfigured, repositioned, and reemphasized in a way that made them feel kind of unexamined. For example, David and Bruce talked to me about frame. They seemed really excited about frame and Kress's frame most specifically. I thought back to Helmers's frames and wondered if Kress's frame was that different. They are.

Helmers's and Kress's frames are comparable in some ways. Both account for the person perceiving. Kress talks about this as interest; Helmers discusses prior knowledge. They even share an example -- the museum exhibit. But there is something fundamentally different (and because of the order of the reading list, new) about Kress's frame. Helmers discusses the frames through which we view art. Kress discusses frame as an essential semiotic resource that seems to have everything to do with meaning-making, "frame provides unity, relation and coherence to what is framed, for all elements inside the frame. Without a frame we cannot know what to put together with what, we cannot establish relations between them" (149). Kress poises frame to be essential, "without frame no text" (154). The most overwhelming difference seems to be that Kress's frames are scalable. Frames include entire texts (the faded picture at the end of movies) as well as punctuation and characters.

What does all of this mean for my understanding of visual rhetoric?

Kress did much for me to position visuals/texts in the world, “Signs are means of making knowledge material. Signs-as-knowledge are tools in dealing with problems in the sign-maker's life-world” (30). As soon as Kress used tools, I was thinking activity theory, so texts whatever the mode that they are constructed with are objects that we think with and interact through. Is it all visual rhetoric? To use Kress to make that case would look like tightening a screw with a hammer. But I might say that if a cultural resource was used to create a sign (visual) that serves a set of interests, yes. Because if the sign does not serve interests, than the interpreter may devote attention to the sign.

Visual Rhetoric as Meaning-Making

Kress pays close attention to meaning in Multimodality and is able to find meaning in visuals that seem pretty mundane and everyday, perhaps vernacular. By breaking down the modes used in constructing meaning, Kress points out that all choices used in communicating and meaning-making realize social relations, and in effect project and construct social relations. Signs used in communication are socially motivated, and every choice is shaped by power. The semiotic work done by the affordances of modes is also specific to each culture. 

So what does meaning making have to do with visual rhetoric? Kress defines rhetoric as the politics of communication. According to Kress, representation gives material realization to one's meanings about the world. Communication makes this representation available to others. Design is the material projection of meaning. Rhetoric deals with the social and political aspects of communication, and at the heart of communication is meaning-making. So, meaning-making is at the core of rhetoric I assume. Much of Kress's theorizing follows an A+B=C which leads to D sort of approach. I'm not sure if I got all the letters in order, but I think some important ones are there.

After reading Christine's response, I thought it was interesting that she saw Kress giving so much agency to the audience. I felt like he was giving a lot of agency to the rhetor/author/creator, while simultaneously giving agency to the audience. It seemed like the rhetor/author/creator makes choices for communication based on social factors, and the way the audience interprets the communication projects these social factors. Agency over communication and interpretation appeared to be sort of cyclical to me. 

On a side note, something that caught my attention in the book was Kress's use of studies based on children. Children's drawings in particular make up several of his examples. With all of his focus on power, politics, and social relations, it seems interesting that Kress would focus so much attention on children who seemingly do not have much power in society. 

A Hearty Ramble in Response to Kress

I think I said it in my other SRR to no end, but nonetheless, I’ll subject all of you to it: trying to synthesize Kress is mighty, mighty difficult. To say there is a lot going on in this book would be a woeful understatement. Nonetheless, one of the elements I found compelling here was the emphasis Kress places on communication. In many ways, what the creator of a text is interested in seems to prove vital to the text and its frameworks, and based on the modalities selected by the creator, the affordances and limitations lead to varying degrees of success—but the matter of “success” or “failure,” (terms I’m using too loosely, and am well aware of) seems to hinge again on this notion of communicating. Kress outlines in brilliant ways how communication is shaped, how texts are framed, and how all of these components shape various modes. I tried it last week in my SRR, but let’s see how my definition of visual rhetoric (based on Kress) changes based on how well (if at all) I understood the remainder of Kress’ book:

Visual rhetoric = the politics of communication, and an attempt to produce the rearrangement of social relations by semiotic means, as afforded by the modalities and frames of a text.

That’s about as much of a hodgepodge of Kress-isms as I could muster, and while it sounds fancy, I don’t know that it provides insights or meaning of any kind. Feel free to let me know if it does, or if I should be on the lookout for hate mail from Kress.

With the competing and contentious spaces of what constitutes visual rhetoric, I find it hard to pick sides, making placing Kress in my mind difficult. I’m not sure I even have a good handle on what visual rhetoric is. But what I gathered from Kress is that, for one, social elements are key. Communication is vital—something I hadn’t necessarily considered before. Whether or not an image constitutes an argument seems less important in the wake of the creator’s interest. Then there’s the matter of the viewer’s interest and how they interpret a given image/text. This points clearly to circulation, an issue we’ve discussed in class many times and seems increasingly valuable. While our previous readings have seemed intent to show whether visual rhetoric involves argument, or not, this never seemed to be a crucial point for Kress (or maybe I’m a terrible reader). By not dwelling on what visual rhetoric isn’t, it was a bit easier to see what it is.

Without resorting to a bunch of acadamese, I’d say that Kress has emphasized for me the importance of author interest and intention, the importance of viewer interest and understanding, and the notion that visuals are used to communicate—what, exactly, is an open question and can shift depending on the goals and viewpoints of the creator and receiver of this communication. I see visual rhetoric as a matter of an author choosing modes of composition wisely based on their interests and the mode’s affordances, in the hopes of communicating something to an audience. I doubt it’s a coincidence that I can see connections between Kress and the 1101 course I’m teaching currently, based on one of the FSU strands, because I can see clear elements of influence between this definition and precisely what my students are doing for the “Anti-Ad” project where they must analyze and produce a text which responds to an advertisement by choosing what elements of an ad to criticize, a medium to work in, and who the audience would be. This seems to be based in many ways on what Kress is talking about in this book, and reading it has helped me to see connections between visual rhetoric, a term which constantly feels outside of my grasp, and things (like my teaching) which I feel are pretty well in hand now.

Rethinking purpose and function

Kress’s text has caused me to rethink the notions of agency, audience, purpose, and function in visual rhetoric. While I recognized, prior to reading Multimodality, that an artifact could be rhetorical for one audience and not another, that an audience had agency to decide the rhetorical capacities of an artifact, I still saw the greater amount of agency as belonging to the creator of the artifact, not the audience.  In my pre-Kress mind, the creator makes a series of choices during the formation of an artifact.  These choices are based upon the creator’s conception of the audience, the creator’s purpose for the artifact, and the surrounding contextual situation. How accurately the creator conceives of his/her intended audience directly correlates with the rhetorical impact (the function) of an artifact.

While Kress’s text didn’t cause me to reject the above ideas, his emphasis on the agency of the audience has caused me to reconsider how I understand the role of agency and audience in visual rhetoric.  Repeatedly, Kress emphasizes the agentive action of the audience as central to meaning.  The meaning of a multimodal artifact, according to Kress, rests on the interests and needs of a given audience.  Instead of the power for rhetorical meaning residing with the choices a creator makes in the creation of a text, it seems that the power rests with the audience: “‘Reading’ is now a matter of the design of the ‘page’ or the ‘screen’ by the reader. That suggests – and projects – a different disposition for the reader or learner, a different identity to one which is expected to follow a predetermined path” (176). 

My pre-Kress mind asks, ‘But doesn’t the design of a page guide a readers interest? Isn’t there always some elements of a predetermined path? Is Kress giving all agency to the readers?’

A little further down the page, Kress acknowledges the power of the designer/creator: “An exhibition [of a museum] is designed; its designer(s) have specific aims: not just to show objects, images, reconstructions, or to tell stories of the prehistory of the nation; they have specific social purposes in mind” (176).

Again, my pre-Kress mind responds, ‘So, if Kress recognizes the role of the creator here, why does he continue to focus so much on the agency of a given audience?  Why is the reader’s interests positioned so centrally? Regardless of a reader’s interests, wouldn’t a reader’s familiarity with the conventions of the museum genre [to continue the above example] impact how the reader interacts with an exhibition, their reading path, and how they choose to navigate their interests and needs?’

I don’t want to criticize and question Kress’s emphasis on the agentive power of the audience while clinging tightly to my own previous notions.  I want to add his ideas to my understanding because I have found the vast majority of his text insightful and exciting.  

So, what does this focus on an audience’s agency add to my understanding of visual rhetoric? For me, it blurs the boundary between purpose and function.  As a class, we’ve often discussed purpose (as decided by the author/creator/designer) and function (as decided by the audience)– and how purpose doesn’t always align with function.  However, Kress’s perspective has led me to consider purpose and function in a new way.  Perhaps purpose and function are not separate entities; perhaps both purpose and function are defined by the audience; that is, the purpose of an artifact is based upon how it functions with a given audience, the ways in which an audience interprets an artifact. Maybe the purpose (as separate from the function and defined by the creator during the creation of an artifact) is arbitrary; why does it matter what the creator intended? Perhaps it only matters how an artifact is interpreted and received by an audience, regardless of the creator’s original intention(s).

This line of thinking asks us to redefine what we mean by purpose and function, and I think that a lot of what Kress offers is a redefinition/reconceptualization/reconfiguration of how we see and discuss visual artifacts and communication.  Additionally, maybe thinking about the act of redefining can help with Logan’s concern that we need to immediately adapt education, assessment, and pedagogy in light of Kress’s claims.  For example, instead of teaching visual arts instead of Language Arts, as Logan states in his example, for example, maybe what Kress’s text asks us to do is redefine what we mean by “Language Arts” and what this pedagogy encompasses.

Movement, Gesture...and Dance?

For me, Kress opened up some possibilities for the inclusion of movement within the confines (lose though they are) of Visual Rhetoric. He has pushed me to think of movement (and I extrapolate from gesture to dance...which might be a stretch) as a mode. I think that I probably saw dance functioning within multimodality...though I was seeing it more as a medium, but the body is the medium.

So Kress does look into what he calls gesture, moving image, and, even at times, movement  in several sections of the book. My first major interaction with it was positioned within his discussion of space and time in Chapter 5: "some modes, gesture or moving image for instance, combine the logics of time and of space. In gesture there is sequence in time through movement of arms and hands, of the head, of facial expression, as well as their presence against the stable spatial form (the background) of the upper part of the torso" (81). I'm wondering what would happen if we push the movement beyond gesture and include the entire body. What would be the "stable spatial form"? I think he is referring to moving images as film since he discusses the sequence of images immediately after the material I have quoted here. But it immediately called to mind an improv technique called "moving sculpture" wherein bodies must stay in contact, but use the positive and negative space differently.Think of a somewhat artistic version of playing twister.

As Kress asserts at multiple instances, frame and framing is key. So, with bodies in motion. I wonder what he would posit as the frame. I'm tempted to claim the "stage" (which may or may not include a backdrop and scenery). The stage would potentially be the stable spatial form, and the body functions within its frame.

The latter chapters also fuel my interest in movement as visual rhetoric, especially chapter 8: "I, as a make of meaning move in the world, literally, in different ways; and the world around me is in motion, in constant movement; and more often than not, I move in a world of motion" (159). For me, this calls attention to the importance of acknowledging movement in relation to visual rhetoric. He also states (I really like his topic sentences, by the way) "All communication is movement" (169). Yes!! Obviously we physically engage when speaking and when writing, but our movement (dancing or not) has a purpose and a function. Frequently, you can tell exactly what I'm thinking just by the faces I make...so much so that my sister (especially at family gatherings) has to say "MOLLY! Face." to remind me that people can see my reactions whether I voice them not.

Like Martha and Logan, I am drawn to his discussions of design as well...with a different spatial situation in mind. I am interested most by how design and arrangement function: "multimodal design refers to the use of different modes--image, writing, color, layout--to present, to realize, at times to (re)-contextualize social positions and relations as well as knowledge in specific arrangements for a specific audience" (139). Again I see this surfacing in my musing about dance and movement because design and arrangement are key to the production of choreography. Dance is multimodal design. All the modes (with the exception of "writing" as written text) have major roles in choreography design. Everything from costumes and lighting (color), backdrop and (image) plus the body (number of bodies, kinds of movements), and shapes (lay out) inform every moment of a dance.

Gunther, Visual Rhetoric, and Literacy

I’ve enjoyed our time with Gunther for a variety of reasons. As others have already discussed, I thought the inclusion of multimodal ensembles in his principles of design expands our understanding of composition. Before Kress, I would have told you “I know nothing about design,” but it turns out I know nothing about graphic design. I’m fairly confident in my ability to compose multimodal texts and tailor them to my audience and purpose, so I know a little bit about design based on Kress’ articulation. This tailoring of texts is rhetoric’s contribution to Multimodality and I think its importance is understated in the book. While the book only pays lip service to rhetoric as a discipline, it pervades social semiotics in the framing, interpretation, and creation of sign systems. By providing an encompassing framework to interpret communication, Kress allows us to contextualize signs in the culture that produced them, making them rhetorical in and of themselves. With that as our starting point, we can then interpret these signs, anticipate audience reactions to them, and use this knowledge to shape our composition of future texts. As Bruce brought up, Gunther has a place for analysis in social semiotics: “A rhetorical approach draws on the resources both of competence and of critique and utilizes them in the process of design” (26). Given this passage, I’m hesitant to jump on the “composition only” train I’ve heard rumbling; analysis has its place in rhetoric, but it should be placed on equal footing with design.

I’m not sure if my next thread of thought is related to the last, but I wanted to chime in on our discussion of visual rhetoric vs. visual literacy from our last class meeting. And in a roundabout way, I hope to get at what Gunther adds to visual rhetoric. I understand the hesitation to give “literacy” credence as the word itself has been watered down in the public sphere, but I think it is a necessary evil of visual rhetoric and rhetoric as a whole. If we conceive of literacy as a gradient depending on an individual’s ability to access and communicate information, it seems to me that visual rhetoric is a high degree of literacy in which a person can articulate the ways meaning is made in texts depending on its cultural context, design, and its intertextual relationships. By being able to parse out the ways meaning making is attempted, no matter the mode, we are then more adept at designing our own texts in many modes, depending on their affordances, to best persuade our audience. So, I think what I’m getting at is this: You can have literacy without visual rhetoric, but you can’t have visual rhetoric without literacy. In this regard, I think Gunther gives us a way to articulate visual rhetoric as an “advanced literacy” of sorts that plays in the interpretation of existing texts and the composition of new multimodal ensembles.

Musings re: Kress

    Kress complicates my and our understanding of visual rhetoric in several interesting ways.  Like Ryan and Martha, I am drawn to his interest in design and what design means in terms of the ways in which a “text” can be used in accordance with its design and framing. Like Kress says, we move in a world of texts, and (if they have been framed and designed appropriately) they remain with us even after we have encountered them and affect the way we move. The ways in which modes can and do frame one another and the ways in which a rhetor can organize, arrange, and design those framings are something that we haven’t seen given considerable treatment in the scholarship we’ve read so far.

     Additionally, while rhetoric isn’t given a full treatment, it seems to be one of the driving forces of his theory of multimodality. Kress uses it as a way to explore and analyze the field or system in which communication takes place or texts participate. The term, working within a theory of multimodality, recognizes the ways in which composers understand the system, compose in/for it, and compose to the needs of different users/audiences. In fact, I see Kress’s work as participating within the same conversation we’ve been reading through in reading group this semester: that we should be paying attention to the system of composition and communication as much as (if not more than) we pay attention to individual composers or individual texts within that system. However, even after reading Kress, I’m still not sure what that kind of analysis would look like.  Or, should I be more focused on how to describe the system rather than break it down into meaningful pieces and dissect it?

    Bret’s reading of Kress suggests a more capacious reading of visual rhetoric, one that encompasses multiple modes under the umbrella term of visual rhetoric. While I agree that’s what Kress does for us, I’m not sure that Kress would see visual rhetoric in the same way. For Kress, the logics of written text and visual image are very different. He seems to say that, yes, written text can be visual, but that’s not how it makes meaning. His description and classification of modes, I think, makes his reading of their meaning-making capabilities as reductive.

     What I find most interesting in Kress’s scholarship is also what I find most problematic: his claim of the semiotic revolution that is taking place as the visual takes over the word. The implications of his claim are fairly severe. If this is true of the current “semiotic realm,” education curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy need to be adapted immediately. We should be teaching visual composition instead of textual composition; Visual Arts would be taught rather than Language Arts (or L.A. might be an elective); something that looked like Art History would/should overtake courses like Literature. I might be cheating here, because I’ve read his argument about pedagogy and curriculum in other works, but that kind of academic revolution can’t really take place because those of us in the academy are still deeply entrenched in the written word and the ways in which knowledge is made solely through the dialogue that takes place among written texts (print or digital). Also, I’m not sure that such change could take inside the academy because I’m not sure that it has really taken place outside of the academy. While it is easy to see and to make visuals with digital technologies and their increasing availability, like Lester Faigley, I think that we have always been visual, and we need to be paying more attention to that history. 

Wikis and Rhetoric as Epistemic

Since there’s so much going on in Kress’s book, I’ll note one specific way in which I see online spaces such as wikis as rhetorical in how they make meaning/knowledge. I’ve done a small amount of research on wikis and how they distort traditional binaries of author/reader and challenge absolute “Truth” by hosting competing perspectives of “truths.” So to be clear, Kress has helped solidify my understanding of current instantiations of rhetoric as epistemic (which is, in my view, one of the most fascinating issues surrounding rhetoric and composition studies and one that I’m constantly looking to get involved in). Kress notes that currently knowledge is made in online spaces such as wikis, blogs—and we could, I think, add social-networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest. Of the knowledge produced in these spaces, he writes, “When knowledge is made anywhere, by anyone, ‘knowledge’ ceases to be ‘canonical’” (133). Later, in differentiating between knowledge and the circulation of information, he asserts:

a new sense of ‘knowledge’ [has been accepted] that is always made rather than being communicated. What is communicated is ‘information’. Knowledge is produced by individuals according to their interest and their need in their life worlds at the moment of making (Boeck, 2004). Knowledge and meaning, as much as the texts and objects which are their material realizations, are seen as the outcomes of processes of design motivated by individual interest. (134)

First of all, to acknowledge the larger implications of Kress’s discussion, he is using this reflection on knowledge-making, in one sense, to develop his argument for the current definition and uses of design, and its prominent role in contemporary meaning-making. Secondly, Kress frames the emergence of wikis and other aforementioned online spaces in which knowledge is produced against the backdrop of larger social changes: namely, the rise (or emphasis) of individual agency as well as the growing prominence of the capitalist market above—which favors a wide array of individual choices/options—to the state—which, traditionally, favored a top down rule/established convention (133-34). 

For my purposes I want to go back specifically to the design of wikis. I understand them to be rhetorical insofar as they are open-source forums in which knowledge is constantly evolving and being contested by a multiplicity of people who bring to bear their own unique understandings and experiences on the existing information. This effaces the idea of top-down knowledge making in which a few professional produce and disseminate knowledge that the mass of consumers passively accept—or, for the most part. Now, by way of wikis and the like, everyone has the opportunity to be not only consumers but producers, not only writers but editors. (As an aside: I’m not suggesting that there’s no gate-keeping community involved in the knowledge that goes onto wikis, as if anyone could simply post anything and expect it to pass; there is still consensus.) Kress helps with my understanding of knowledge-making as rhetorical by his attention to design, which gets me back to visual rhetoric. Wiki design through being open-source makes clear the contemporary belief that knowledge is fluid, that it is produced socially, that it is very interconnected with other forms/branches of knowledge, and that there are competing ideas of truth. The links located throughout any given page suggest a kind of nexus of knowledge/meaning that you might not necessarily (or as clearly) get the sense of from reading a traditional text book or hearing a lecture. Its open calls for verification (primarily through citations to external links) calls for/provides a richer context in which to frame any given subject, and verification(like everything else on a wiki) can be potentially provided by anyone; no one professional or exclusive group of professionals is needed to authorize or verify anything. Finally, that you can rate the trustworthiness of the page gives a sense of power to the individual; everything is decided by consensus. In summation the design of wikis (and I’ve been considering Wikipedia) argue rhetorically for a certain approach/outlook on the production of knowledge and the important of 1) the individual and 2) the consensus of the given community.