Gunther's Kress' annoying and dubious assertions

I've read but pages of Kress yet and even that much is terribly annoying. Not that I contests all of his views on writing and the image (though indeed the man needs to equivocate far more than he does to be believable), but on one point he has gone too far.

I am not inclined to call such theorizing lies, but on one point, I can call it none other than a shame-faced lie. Fie, Kress, you should know better. I'll quote:

"[...]words are, relatively speaking, empty of meaning, or perhaps better, the word as sound-shape or as letter-shape gives no indication of its meaning, it is there to be filled with meaning" (3).

So far so good. True enough, us and our contexts, the act of reading/listening gives words their meaning. But Kress establishes this premise to stake out a lie in his comparison:

"the image itself and its elements are filled with meaning [...] Images are plain full of with meaning, whereas words wait to be filled" (4).

You are plained filled with deceit, Kress. Images are as much invested with meaning by the viewer as words are by the reader/listener. Here, I give myself authority by quoting a rhetorician on the matter. I. A. Richards writes, as if to back me up...

"I can make the same point by denying that we have any sensations. That sounds drastic but is almost certainly true if rightly understood. A sensation would be something that just was so, on its own, a datum; as such we have none. Instead we have perceptions, responses whose character comes to htem from the past as well as the present occasion. A perception is never just of an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort" (The Philosophy of Rhetoric 30).

What Richards means here is that sensations, whether seeing/hearing a word or seeing an image, is meaningless without perception, an interpretation of the word/image. Our interpretation of the sensation is itself built upon context, not only the word/image/elements relationship with other words/images/elements contemporeously present but also the history of our meaning-making throughout our lives. We cannot perceive any image with any meaning unless we can, in Richards words, perceive it, "as a thing of a certain sort," unless we have had contextual encounters with the image in other contexts so that we can adequately render possible meanings.

An example is abstract art--composed of blotches of color, sharp or curved lines, geometric or amorphous shapes, etc.--which, if we are quite honest with ourselves, is all quite meaningless to the lay observer. It take a viewers engagement in artistic discourse--the discussion and understanding of composition styles, textures, and paints; the understanding of the historical developments in painting, the intertextual responses certain abstract patterns, shapes, and color have with and against other abstract patterns, shapes, and color.

Or another example... one I learned from a co-worker in a bookstore so that I cannot authenticate it but will nevertheless illustrate my point. My co-worker told of an anecdote he heard about Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence, interacting with bedouins in one Middle-Eastern dessert or another, decided to sketch a pencil image of the bedouins for their amusement. Afterward, he showed them the sketch and was subsequently befuddled. The bedouins could not make out the two-dimensional image. Not being accustomed to such two-dimensional image making, their eyes were not prepared to take in the sight. They had not learned to see such lines and shadings on a paper as a rendering of a human rather than, indeed, lines and shadings on a paper. They had not been taught the discourse of such two-dimensional sketchings and it was thus incomprehensible to them.

One more example... I remember hearing about an interesting case in Africa of a tribe of people who could not make out colors. To be precise, there exist a spectrum of color, hues of yellow, that to western eyes can be clearly distinguished, one from the other, but to the African men and women the hues were all the same color. Not only did they not recognize them linguistically as different colors, they saw them all as the same color, could not tell where one hue ended and the other began. Their culture had no contextual need to render these differences, created no language for them, and indeed could not perceive the differences.

Of course, maybe I am harsh in suggesting that Kress lies. But at least his assertions are ill-informed. And I suspect that I will continue to find more ill-informed judgements by the author.