Critiquing Kress

At the onset of the Iraq war, I found myself feeling very small and helpless. I remember seeing televised images of aerial bombings--vivid depictions of the "shock and awe" phase of the war. At the time, most of the people that I know were interpreting these images in a positive way. They were seeing in these explosions the destruction of an enemy aimed at killing Americans. Meanwhile, I was seeing in these explosions the destruction of communities and the needless killing of Iraqi civilians. They were both impressed and satisfied with the images. I was was depressed and horrified.

Of course, their interpretations were guided by a powerful discourse that had been circulating in the country long before the bombs were actually dropped. Political leadership had been constructing an Iraqi in words (speeches and texts) for over a year. News media had been disseminating these words of political leaders on a mass scale, making it impossible for the public to miss or ignore them. Furthermore, when the News reported what the polticians said, it added words and images of its own, which further suggested that there was a dangerous man in Iraq with connections to terrorists and ambitions to supply them with nuclear weapons. Given this discourse that created an enemy--the discourse of political leaders combined with the metadiscourse of news media outlets--it was really difficult to "read" the image of bombs dropping on Iraq as a bad thing. It seemed like our very lives depended on these bombs being dropped. It seemed like these explosions required our approval.

I share these recollections not just to make a political point, but because they tend to suggest some limits to the arguments posited by Gunther Kress in his C&C article. First, Kress argues that images, unlike words, are full of meaning, and very specific. They show the world, while words merely tell the world (15-16). But the above story illustrates that images, just like words, are open to interpretation. Certainly, the image of bombs were being dropped on Baghdad was concrete and specific. Nevertheless, the meaning attached to the bombs varied from person to person. The meaning of the image was hardly precise.

It is also worth pointing out that the binary the Kress suggests between words and images is, as many other authors have pointed out, a bit misleading. What the above example suggests is that a given image always exists within a universe of words. The image of exploding bombs simply could not be understood without the words that surrounded it. First, there the words on the screen in the news broadcast: the words that said, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Begins: Bombing Baghdad" or some variation on this. These metadiscursive words shape the understanding of the image. Without them we might not know who is dropping the bombs or where. But with them, we know who and where and are able to connect these facts to the already-constructed discourse that talked about an "Iraq War" before these bombs were ever dropped. Thus, the image of the bombs exploding plus the words in the caption connect us to those other words that came before--the speeches, the reports that constructed the enemy in Iraq, that made possible this bombing campaign. Kress notes that communication is always multimodal, but in his piece he seems to separate the word from the depiction--as if they are exclusive categories. In practice, words and images are constantly interacting with each other; moreover words and images in the here and now are easily connected to words and images from the recent past. Meaning is made over time, over weeks, months and years, and across many images and texts. It is not made in single moment through a single image or text. The images of the dropping bombs "meant" only insofar as they were connected to the news reports and speeches leading up to this event.

Finally, I would like to question Kress's notion that we are somehow beyond a project of critique because we have entered into a period when social systems and structures are already in crisis. First, I agree with Kress on the crucial point that the current situation is requires more than critique. It does indeed require action, agency, reform. Still, I stongly dispute Kress's claim that social systems and structures are in crisis. Certainly, in the sphere of communication new media opens up new possibilities and challenges old realities. On the other hand, some old realities are very much stable. The above example shows how power concentrated into the hands of political leaders and news media can influence public understanding. If you ask me, this power, which rests in the assumed authority of the politicians and their access to the means of mass communication, shows no signs of crumbling. Indeed, there is a very secure system in place when it comes to manufacturing enemies, a system that is challenged only a little by the new media revolution. To oversimplify the process--when a President wants a war, s/he constructs an enemy, knowing very well that the news media will report this construction to the public. Thus a powerful political system is intimately tied with a powerful press. The words and images of these conjoined twins reach the ears and eyes of every single American. This is a reality. It is a reality that is not in crisis. It is a reality that does not shake at its foundation because people are using youtube and blogging.

Kress argues that the affordances provided by the screen allow reader to become author--to become designer--and to challenge existing notions of authority. He argues that the individual acquires a kind of agency that allows him or her to act transformationally in the world. Critique, he says, unsettles, but design transforms. I simply do not see how designers are doing anything to transform the extraordinary power of the political-military-industrial-press complex. And as far as I know, the systems that support racism and sexism, the systems that keep two thirds of the world in poverty, that allow half of the world's population (3 billion people) to live on less than 2 dollars a day--these systems are not in crisis and they are not being brought to their knees by designers and their depictions. Is it our western bias--our myopic view of a wealthy, technological society--that allows us to claim that we are redesigning the world? Why do we continue to ignore the global system of social injustice that stands stable as ever, unscathed by our design? Why do we ignore that communication--however it may be changing--can be controlled by powerful actors when they so desire? And what is the actual effect of individual designers and their transformations of the world when compared to the actual effect of these powerful actors and their transformations of the world?

The answer to these questions should trouble us. They should cause us to think critically about what new media really afford individual designers. They should cause us reign in the rhetoric of "transformation" and "revolution". There is still a place for critique. Certainly there needs to be a place for reform. But let's not lose our heads: the system is not in crisis. Transformation of the system has not occured and is not likely to occur just because images are displacing words.