Domination/Subordination Metaphor and an Alternate Heirarchy

Am I the only one who finds Kress' Domination/Subordination Metaphor problematic? First of all, it's already been done and undone. One need only read Plato to see a construction of speech over writing and Derrida's deconstruction of that binary. A little effort (more than I'll put in here) would see Kress's image/writing binary fall apart.

Instead, I'll make an analogy: the world domination/subordination theme of Britain and the US after WWII. It is said that after WWII, the US became dominant in the world; this assertion supposes but does not realize the notion that Britain is subordinated to the US. Even a cursory look at Britain will show that it is not subordinated. Britain remains an independent global power despite the US's dominance. Furthermore, a closer look shows that the US has only a contextual dominance, particularly in economics. The US's attempts at colonialism were always infantile, and indeed Britian educationally, socially, and culturally remains far more dominant due to its history of colonialism.

I see a similar problem occuring in Kress's assertions, as he writes: "It is possible to see writing becoming subordinated to the logic of the visual in many or all of its uses." This remark presupposes, quite inadequately, that we somehow consume writing in some other way than visually. To read, we see the signs of letters as images on the page and interpret the visual data. Writing is always already visual, and one can as easily presume that writing has always already been subject to visual logic. This is to say that even if writing was ever dominant (questionable, except in specific contexts, at best), it matters little whether it was or is subject to the image.

Further, the heirarchical structures of media and modes that Kress presents is dubious. He presents the writing mode aligned with the book and the image mode aligned with the screen as if writing invented the book and image invented the screen. For instance, on page 19, he writes...
"If the book was organised and dominated by the logic of writing, the screen is organised and dominated by the image and its logic."

Such passages presuppose that the book is the primary or penultimate or fully realized form of writing. This is hardly the case, as looking at writing in history will reveal. Well before the book, writing was quite successfully articulated in other media: the cuneiform tablet; the scroll; the hieroglyphic staele, or pillar, or relief. This last, where the hieroglyphic image actually corresponds to the sound of the syllable signified by the image, illustrates how misinformed the notion of writing as non-visual is. And contemporary examples can be found as well in the written form of Mandarin Chinese, which contains characters that often represent pictorally, as it were, the sound or meaning of a word, or in the age-old practice of calligraphy, where the the letter and word image matter as an artform.

Each of these media, I would argue, were not subordinate or dominant to any other. Rather they existed functionally, where the economic means of production available to these cultures (clay vs. stone vs. papyrus vs. paper vs. leather vs. wooden spool vs. binding glue vs. binding thread vs. ink/pen vs. paint vs. chisel and hammer vs. printing press and moveable type, as well as the material and human resources to find and make use of these) and the particular needs for dissemination of knowledge in the culture converged to produce an adequate media technology. Books come in a long line of writing media, where changing demands for dissemination converged with changing means of production to create the book, which itself was highly visual (the manual transcripton of books made it not significantly more costly to produce images than writing), until the full inclusion of the printing press (a device that made it far cheaper to produce writing compared to images).

I would argue that, given this arrangement of history, writing conformed not to its own logic but rather to the logic of the medium, that the shape writing took and what it could convey was very different depending the writing media used. To overturn Kress' example, it wasn't writing that "subordinated" the image to illustration. Instead, it was the book that conformed writing and image to shapes, patterns, arrangements, organizations, and discourses that would fit this profoundly more efficient medium.

Given how media, swaying to the demands of dissemination and means of production, in fact governs the shape and form and function of modes, I would reverse Kress' statement, quoted above to say, "The logic of writing was organized and dominated by the book; the logic of the image is organized and dominated by the screen." Though I might also say that, "the medium of the screen (as metonymic for interactive digital technology) frees writing and image from the logic of the book and will in turn conform both to the logic of the screen." And these two modes were always already dominated and organized by the media with which they were distributed and will continue to be.

The last is partly a side note: Kress argues that writing is limited by time and order. But this, I argue, is a myth--begun by writing's association with speech (which indeed must necessarily happen in an order, conditioned by the time it takes to convey the utterance) and perpetuated most recently by modernists of the early 20th century, who envisioned the written word as somehow transcendent, hovering above the page into some sort of Platonic Word Ideal, disconnected from its sensual material and thus superior to other modes that were stuck to their material. I would argue that Kress' notion of the dominance of writing until recently comes only from this modernist notion of high culture. Even the notion of grammatical syntax, the ordering of words in a sentence, which we are so dependent upon in English to make meaning, falls apart when looking at nothing more than Old English (not to mention other dead languages), which offered an almost limitless word order since the relationships between words were determined largely by inflections. This example might help prove my previous statements about mediums governing modes. Students might know that Modern English word spellings only solidified as the production of books and othe printed texts increased; the spellings seen in major written works became the norm. Noting that modern languages are much more dependent on word syntax than dead languages, one could even imagine that it was the production of writing in its media forms that began to discard inflections and made the language dependent on word order, as the word orders predominantly used in major written works became the norm.

In any case, I believe that digital technology, with its potential for interactivity and non-linear arrangements, will help divorce writing from the notion of order and, once from order then also from time.