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.