kress & co

I know that Pam encouraged us to be “generous” as we read the theorists, but I think because the other scholars are in dialogue with Kress, that taking issue with him is appropriate in this week’s post.

I find myself agreeing with Wysocki as she questions Kress in positing that the temporal/sequential are within the domains of words, while the spatial and simultaneous are within the domain of image (p. 57). I would argue that the image is made of individual elements, such as strokes, shapes, angles, perspectives that are broken down and even processed in much the same way as the alphabetic. Anyone familiar with whole language approaches to reading—as opposed to phonetic approaches—understands that the words are read as units and not as separate letters or sound once the system is internalized. I think the same is true of our reading of other images as well—and I do think that words are images, as wells as syntactically structured phonemes. I think we learn that a picture of a cat (which looks little like a real cat) represents a cat. I think though that the language-like qualities of picture reading has become invisible to us. I also agree with Prior that images are not as Kress charges—infinite, specific, natural, and transparent. Images, too, are designed to be read in a particular way, but are not necessarily resistant to interpretation. That is the function of perspective, foregrounding, composition in a triangle to encourage or privilege certain relationships among parts of the whole. It is not only words that construct relationships. Classic representations of the Madonna and Christ-child have connotative meaning based on relations of power. I don’t think that any representations are disinterested—even the most abstract. Prior notes that “even single images may have preferred vectors for sequential processing” (p. 27). Not only do they have preferred vectors, but Kress and Van Leeuwen focus on systemic functional grammatical readings of multimodal texts in both Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, and in Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Norman Fairclough does the same in his texts on critical discourse analysis. I also found myself thinking—as I read Kress’s argument—that magazines, newspapers, and catalogues also have multiple entry points. The difference is their material instantiation. Prior also mentions this fact (p. 25) and includes hymnals, menus, quilts, atlases, books of poetry, field guides—and many other genres. These print texts are not necessarily coded by order. Their order of presentation in terms of traditionally privileged reading practices might be fixed—but that is merely a matter of convention. They do indeed have multiple entry points—and readers use the texts to read in a manner they choose—to suit their needs. And readers are not bound—even in traditional texts—to read in a strict order as Kress claims (p. 9). Readers often skip paragraphs, pages, sections, chapters.

And while this “traditional” manner of reading might dictate how the writer writes for the reader, it is the manner of reading and not the text that determines this manner. Kress is quite correct when he notes that rhetoric accounts for audience needs—but that is their need within the realm of the conventional manner of reading the genre, not of the genre itself. Kress argues that the the IoE assumes its traditional structure and the knowledge” and that needed by the reader are one and the same (p. 9), that this old way presumes to know—even dictates—how readers from their own “life-worlds” will read. But that also seems to be the case when the IoE shows up on the Web. The constraints for the reader are still the organizing principles as imagined through the website’s author. The page construction—whether in word, image or combination-- always imagining and consequently constructing its audience and what it assumes will be agreement between her/himself and the visitors. In this way, a web page is not “open,” as Kress avers, but rather IS “relatively open” (p. 10).


I also took issue with Kress’s comment that with images, we can “draw whatever [we] like when [we] want to draw it” (qtd. in Prior p. 28). In fact, we cannot draw whatever we want. We can attempt to put down on a surface what we “mean,” but that meaning is never any more “specific” than a word, nor is an illustration more specific than a descriptive paragraph. Kress argues that “[s]peech and writing tell the world; depiction shows the world” (16). I have to take issue with this. Fiction can indeed show; bad fiction tells. In either case, it is the writing on the mind that the reader does. Fiction AND EVEN depictions can only suggest via print or visual text.

I have more, but I’ll save it for class. There are other articles.