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.