Visual Rhetoric as Meaning-Making

Kress pays close attention to meaning in Multimodality and is able to find meaning in visuals that seem pretty mundane and everyday, perhaps vernacular. By breaking down the modes used in constructing meaning, Kress points out that all choices used in communicating and meaning-making realize social relations, and in effect project and construct social relations. Signs used in communication are socially motivated, and every choice is shaped by power. The semiotic work done by the affordances of modes is also specific to each culture. 

So what does meaning making have to do with visual rhetoric? Kress defines rhetoric as the politics of communication. According to Kress, representation gives material realization to one's meanings about the world. Communication makes this representation available to others. Design is the material projection of meaning. Rhetoric deals with the social and political aspects of communication, and at the heart of communication is meaning-making. So, meaning-making is at the core of rhetoric I assume. Much of Kress's theorizing follows an A+B=C which leads to D sort of approach. I'm not sure if I got all the letters in order, but I think some important ones are there.

After reading Christine's response, I thought it was interesting that she saw Kress giving so much agency to the audience. I felt like he was giving a lot of agency to the rhetor/author/creator, while simultaneously giving agency to the audience. It seemed like the rhetor/author/creator makes choices for communication based on social factors, and the way the audience interprets the communication projects these social factors. Agency over communication and interpretation appeared to be sort of cyclical to me. 

On a side note, something that caught my attention in the book was Kress's use of studies based on children. Children's drawings in particular make up several of his examples. With all of his focus on power, politics, and social relations, it seems interesting that Kress would focus so much attention on children who seemingly do not have much power in society.