Reframing Kress, and an Aside About Critique/Design

I wanted to talk about frame, but Jacob beat me to it. I am going to talk about frame anyway.

Kress's idea of framing is one of the things that really jumped out at me in this reading. I think his explanation of sentence punctuation as framing was really helpful, and I began to think of framing as delineations in discourse. Sentences need frames for coherence (I'm dating myself here, but I remember reading Indigo Girls lyrics in high school. They would provide liner notes, song lyrics with no line breaks, no punctuation. Just big undifferentiated blocks of text, like Greek writing. The effect was fascinating; I tried to duplicate it in my high school and early college efforts).

So frame helps us break modes into manageable pieces. It says "for our purposes, here is the beginning, and here is the end," though we know that discourse does not begin or end in frames. We frame our writing with paper or screens. We frame speech with silence.

But "without frame no meaning?" I don't know. Maybe the deal is that we cannot help but frame discourse. What, indeed, would unframed discourse look like? I'm trying to imagine. It would be a perpetual motion machine.

I also really like Kress's discussion of design and critique. I'm thinking, especially, about p. 133, where he wrote, "When critique replaced convention, composition became problematic." Shebam!! Has a defter summary of the field ever been composed? Perhaps this one, same page: "Yet critique can work only in relation to stable structures and environments; its task is to bring these into crisis." I think his temporal positioning of design and critique is effective: critique is backward-looking, design is forward-looking. The field exists, I assume, in the kairotic moments that make both possible.