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.