Musings re: Kress

    Kress complicates my and our understanding of visual rhetoric in several interesting ways.  Like Ryan and Martha, I am drawn to his interest in design and what design means in terms of the ways in which a “text” can be used in accordance with its design and framing. Like Kress says, we move in a world of texts, and (if they have been framed and designed appropriately) they remain with us even after we have encountered them and affect the way we move. The ways in which modes can and do frame one another and the ways in which a rhetor can organize, arrange, and design those framings are something that we haven’t seen given considerable treatment in the scholarship we’ve read so far.

     Additionally, while rhetoric isn’t given a full treatment, it seems to be one of the driving forces of his theory of multimodality. Kress uses it as a way to explore and analyze the field or system in which communication takes place or texts participate. The term, working within a theory of multimodality, recognizes the ways in which composers understand the system, compose in/for it, and compose to the needs of different users/audiences. In fact, I see Kress’s work as participating within the same conversation we’ve been reading through in reading group this semester: that we should be paying attention to the system of composition and communication as much as (if not more than) we pay attention to individual composers or individual texts within that system. However, even after reading Kress, I’m still not sure what that kind of analysis would look like.  Or, should I be more focused on how to describe the system rather than break it down into meaningful pieces and dissect it?

    Bret’s reading of Kress suggests a more capacious reading of visual rhetoric, one that encompasses multiple modes under the umbrella term of visual rhetoric. While I agree that’s what Kress does for us, I’m not sure that Kress would see visual rhetoric in the same way. For Kress, the logics of written text and visual image are very different. He seems to say that, yes, written text can be visual, but that’s not how it makes meaning. His description and classification of modes, I think, makes his reading of their meaning-making capabilities as reductive.

     What I find most interesting in Kress’s scholarship is also what I find most problematic: his claim of the semiotic revolution that is taking place as the visual takes over the word. The implications of his claim are fairly severe. If this is true of the current “semiotic realm,” education curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy need to be adapted immediately. We should be teaching visual composition instead of textual composition; Visual Arts would be taught rather than Language Arts (or L.A. might be an elective); something that looked like Art History would/should overtake courses like Literature. I might be cheating here, because I’ve read his argument about pedagogy and curriculum in other works, but that kind of academic revolution can’t really take place because those of us in the academy are still deeply entrenched in the written word and the ways in which knowledge is made solely through the dialogue that takes place among written texts (print or digital). Also, I’m not sure that such change could take inside the academy because I’m not sure that it has really taken place outside of the academy. While it is easy to see and to make visuals with digital technologies and their increasing availability, like Lester Faigley, I think that we have always been visual, and we need to be paying more attention to that history.