Visuality, Readability, and Materiality :: Visual Rhetoric Essays

My intention here is to acknowledge two problems that I regard all scholars of the visible will encounter at some organise in their wrick. Both showed up early in my research on commemorative artworks, besides I suspect that they crash everyones party at some point. I have no solution to these problems, save I believe they should, actually must, be addressed in work on visual rhetoric. The first, readability, is both a practical and theoretical problem having to do with the possibilities of interpretation in visual culture. The second, which Ill simply label materiality for the moment, has a strawman in numerous arenas beyond the study of visual culture, but remains nearly unaddressed and nearly unacknowledged in rhetorical work on visual images.The first party crasher, readability, probably makes its presence felt in all of our venues at least occasionally, but it haunts our work all the time. At the simplest and most practical level, readability is a hermeneutic problem. But it is a special problem of interpretation, not just the homogeneous old questions that come up in any work involving the production of signs and meaning. We try very hard to reduce the special problem to the identical old problems, as evidenced by terms desire visual, media, and computer literacy. The question is this What makes us so confident that our readings of visual signs are current or defensible? Okay, that does sound a whole lot like the analogous old hermeneutic questions, but I dont believe it is the same in the case of visual rhetoric as in talk or written discourse. Or at least, it doesnt seem the same, given the item of skepticism registered by readers and students about interpretations of visual signs. Leaving aside for a moment the possibility that my interpretations just arent very good and that thats whats provoking this response, our avow colleagues and my students seem to pose far more and greater challenges to such interpretations than they do to those of a speech or a written document. For them, apparently, even in the wake of deconstruction, natural language seems safer, easier, and more stable in its message of meaning generation than does the visual image. I wonder why that is the case, and oddly so in a culture in which seeing is accept and a picture is worth a thousand words.It is possible, of course, that this is an idiosyncratic problem, but I doubt it.