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...).