Iconographic Communication

While trying to grapple with images in their multiple meanings--as narrative, argument, or as inherently rhetorical--I kept thinking how we were setting it perpetually in opposition with verbal, alphabetic language. The articles by Blair and Hill definitely draw out some important implications concerning how we read and make meaning through images, but I wondered at how image and word are connected. Recently I had the chance to explore a text on ancient languages that took a quick (and abridged) look at the progression from written language as a movement from iconographic symbols and syllabic alphabets. Written language at one point focused on the accounting of things, and symbols were typically infused with a direct physical meaning. In order to write or read, individuals needed to have some degree of expertise in reading the hundreds of signs that bore meaning--a meaning which was often dependent upon the context surrounding it. This is a bit of a simplification, but there was no way to "read" without understanding, because the symbols weren't attached direct relations to the phonemes of speech.

Because of this, interpretation was of key importance in reading, almost the same as identifying elements of a picture. When we eventually moved to a syllabic, alphabetic symbol-system, suddenly text became different in that you could read words without understanding their meanings. I think this had a pretty significant impact on the way we read words -- which can be argued, refined, defined, and developed -- compared to images --which merely are interpreted, sometimes wisely, sometimes not. Whereas scribes needed to possess understanding of the various signs, alphabet removed that kind of necessary knowledge. Instead, is it that images become more connected to cultural commonplaces? Not quite the same as the symbol systems that first comprised language, but still based on symbols that represent concepts and ideas.



I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't necessarily think images have to be those things that unconsciously impact us, like the example of the cute kids and animals in the Pepsi commercial. Rather, have we become so unfamiliar with images that we mostly accept them unconsciously? After all, as images have been devalued so much, relegated to the realm of comics, children books, and the low-arts of television, I think we've become less devoted to interpreting those images. Certainly we also might share less in the way of defined cultural commonplaces, and that lack of a centralized understanding of symbols could result in a wider array of interpretations.

I think one of the strongest elements of imagistic communication concerns the idea of closure, which Scott McCloud develops in his book, Understanding Comics. For McCloud, closure is the "phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole." We see visual texts and draw narratives based upon our pre-existing understanding of conventions and commonplaces. An example can be found in the tropes of horror. Show an individual a picture of a silhouetted man standing behind a shower curtain with what looks like a knife, then show a picture of blood running down the drain, and we can fill in those blanks.

 
We render the missing meaning and build a picture of the whole. What happens in our minds could be more vivid than anything actually pictured between those two images, functioning in the way of the enthymeme that Blair describes. Images allow the audience some amount of agency in "buying" into a concept. And some would say that it is completely unconscious, but is that because it really is something beyond our control, or because we aren't accustomed to treating images as critical artifacts?

I think we've simply reached a point where we are simultaneously too mediated and too diverse for images to speak in terms of specific concepts, except when referring to the absolute broadest cultural commonplaces. We understand cuteness, we understand pathos-driven images that feed off values, we understand the memes and tropes that inform popular media, but we still don't grant images the kind of critical attention (outside academia, at least) they deserve, instead treating them as gimmicks or fluff. We read images as narratives or persuasion in which we fill in a major unspoken premise, but without that distinct, wide-spread understanding of different representations, the ways in which we accomplish closure will only match up in the broadest sense.