Kress: easy to read, very difficult to synthesize or summarize. This dense little book is packed with so many ways to talk about and think about multimodality and social semiotics, so I am grateful that our prompt asks only that we discuss what Kress adds to our perspective on visual rhetoric. That, I think I can do in the confines of this blog post.
As an interior designer I have always been heavily influenced by the visual, but it never occurred to me until this course that my design knowledge would inform my work as a rhetoric student/scholar. Several of the works we’ve studied so far--Tange and Hill to name two--have helped me begin making connections between my design background and my rhetoric studies. But Kress has really brought design to the front for me. His chapter six, “Meaning as Resource: ‘naming’” in particular is one I will turn back to as I proceed with my work. Here, Kress provides a thorough dissection of processes and effects of meaning making, showing us how we do make meaning through design. He shows me that design is not simply one mode of rhetoric, but rather, it is a series of rhetorical choices that taken together provide a gestalt of rhetoric modes. This chapter is likely to become my new bible.
By extension then, I agree with Bret that looking at visual pieces purely as visual is a kind of simplification because, as he points out, even within the visual artifacts lie multiple modes with multiple affordances. Kress has me thinking that in some important ways, understanding visual rhetoric is really to understand a rhetoric of complex sensory perception. This is what good design does. A well designed room affects those who enter in multiple ways with the visual being only one of them. I also agree with Bruce that Kress has completed my developmental process of seeing design as a crucial element in visual rhetoric, and that, ironically, it was though words, through a new vocabulary, that Kress helped me see design as rhetoric and rhetoric as design.
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