Odd One Out...?

I enjoy Kress' focus on communication, probably for obvious reasons.  I have spent the semester trying to determine the differences or separations between visual communication and visual rhetoric, which I think necessitates a determination first of how one defines rhetoric and communication.  These attempts at defining have me at the point where I feel (mostly) confident in saying all rhetoric is a form of communication (which depends on your definition of communication, perhaps); I have a fairly broad definition of communication and I like how Kress breaks it down on pg. 36 although I'm not 100% sure I agree with everything he says there.  He says "three assumptions are fundamental: communication happens as a response to a prompt; communication has happened when there has been an interpretation; communication is always multimodal.  I am particularly interested in the 2nd assumption.  When trying to define communication, the question is often raised "If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?"  Kress' 2nd assumption that communication has happened when there has been an interpretation assumes that there can be attempts at communication that do not quite reach the level of being communication, that someone can actively try to communicate but possibly not ever actually communicate.  If a message is sent out but no one ever hears it (or sees it, or even somehow senses it, in an extreme case where one might not be able to hear or see, but can still be sent messages via touch sensation), and no one receives that message, communication has not happened.  This situates communication on a sliding scale from failed attempts to imperfect not 100% clear attempts to something more "effective" or perhaps "successful" (although I don't think those words encompass it entirely); a scale in which the interpretation may not be as the sender intended, or could be partially as intended, or very close to as intended by the sender, but it has to happen, this act of interpretation, in order for communication to have happened.  Communication can thus be "measured" as more or less effective at getting the intended message out. 

But, what of rhetoric, then?  I have much less confidence in stating not all communication is rhetorical, not because I don't agree with the statement but because I have a much harder time articulating a defense for it and in defining rhetoric.  In chapter 8, Kress opens the chapter with a description of crossing the street and how all of the things he is experiencing are communicating with him, whether intentionally or not, such as the car blinker, the position of the car in the road, the crossing signal, etc.  There is certainly an interpretation happening there, as he determines whether it is safe to cross the street or not, but could these communications really be considered rhetorical?  They are influencing someone's actions even if the communicators didn't intend for that to happen, but what of the intent and the design behind these messages?  Is rhetoric distinguished by an intent to influence someone in their attitudes, beliefs, or actions, whether to reinforce them or to change them?  In Kress' definition of communication, he says "This model of communication rebalances power and attention, with equal emphasis on the interpreter of a message-prompt and the initial maker of the message, the rhetor.  So, in this way he complicates my "neat and clean" attempt at defining rhetoric by the intent, and the chapter 8 example of the crosswalk, in that it seems contradictory for unintentional, unnoticed "communication" can happen, such as the position of the car in street- the person trying to cross is interpreting, but where is the "equal emphasis" on the "initial maker of the message"?

I think that Kress' idea of ensembles and multiple modes and frames being a part of all texts (to focus this in on the visual again) is helpful in a view or theory of visual rhetoric.  Throughout the semester we have looked at images and said how it is hard (impossible?) to separate an image from the context in which it is viewed and although Kress might not appreciate me taking this liberty, I connect that with the multimodal (I like Martha's term of multisensory even better).  Martha called it a gestalt, which I love, because I think the context and all of the modes incorporated in the viewing of a text are impossible to separate.  The interpretation is dependent on all of the modes included in the design and even "spills over" to the context in which an image is viewed.  For example, if music is playing in the background (whether purposefully with an intention or not), it will affect our interpretation of the text.  When this intention comes in, perhaps that is where rhetoric comes in?  For example, the museum setting- there would be intentionality behind the music playing in a gallery, whereas if you were walking by on the street, there is not necessarily control of what sounds (and other sensory prompts) would accompany the viewing of the image.