Multimodality, Oh My

Like Bruce, Kress had me looking at ordinary examples of design in more detail, though I guess the same could be said for our discussions of the vernacular. In particular, I really enjoyed the way in which Kress made use of the everyday to illustrate his points, showing that his framework is as applicable to ordinary writing as it is to scholarly and professional artifacts. But, now I'm thinking: what does this add to my understanding of visual rhetoric? Well, in many ways, Kress reminded me of the embodiedness of experience, when he talks about how each sign is made anew whenever it is used. In that way, we draw upon the specific instances of our utterances and how they are informed by the entire scheme of sensory perceptions we bring to bear.

In the later chapters, I think Kress ties his theory to concepts we've discussed when he brings up the concept of framing. Comparing it to photographers and directors, he writes "In this, the frame provides unity, relation and coherent what is framed, for all elements inside the frame. Without a frame we cannot know what to put together with what, what to read in relation to what" (149). But more importantly, I think looking at visual pieces purely as visual is a kind of simplification. Looking at the texts we have created and analyzed throughout the semester, our interpretations of the visual have been extreme to say the least, and not consisting of singular modes. Words, gesture, facial expression, and countless other modes have been the object of our analysis and critique, and so we find ourselves looking more at what affordances each mode allows us.

In short, Kress really provides a kind of synthesis (though a convoluted and sometimes overdeveloped synthesis) for much of what we've studied this semester. He examines the affordances of different modes and how their logics affect meaning. His comparison of the alphabetic word with the spatial awareness of maps highlights how different modes can accomplish the same task--describing a process--while emphasizing and creating meanings with different nuances and understanding. And in short, I think it really highlights the importance of avoiding modal fixing so that we do not naturalize one method of representation above another.

I guess in the end, his work makes me want to take a broader stance in terms of what constitutes visual rhetoric. Instead of focusing entirely upon "visual" elements, or photographic elements, I feel as though we need to take into account the ways that different modes establish meaning among the audiences a piece is intended for.