Kress & his Metaphors

The more I read Kress the more than I see his metaphor of dominance/subordination fails to describe the salient features of modes and media. In his article, even as he writes, "These technologies—those of representation, the modes and those of dissemination, the media—are always both independent of and interdependent with each other," a statement I entirely agree with, he undermines it with his domination theme: "The new constellation of image and screen—where screen, the contemporary canvas, is dominated by the logic of image—means that the practices of reading becoming dominant are the practices derived from the engagement with image and/or depiction in which the reader designs the meaning from materials made available on the screen—and by transference back to the traditional media—on the new kinds of pages, which are now also organized on these principles and read in line with them."

Kress' metaphor of dominance takes control of his best intentions. Even as he asserts the "independence" and "interdependence" of modes and mediums, he insists that the, "screen [...] is dominated by the logic of image." I could go into how that is not the case, that in a variety of ways the medium in fact dominates the mode. I rather, though, make a case for dismantling the dominance metaphor because it fails to get at the affordances and potentialities that Kress himself attempts to reach.

I contend that the resource of representation (mode) is in fact conflated with the resource of dissemination (medium), not just because we have perceived it as such (i.e. book conflated with writing), but also because the mode is always already in union with the medium. What I mean is that you can never, under any circumstances, access a mode without a medium. Any given mode experienced by a reader/viewer is already filtered through a medium, taking on the characteristics and logics of that medium simultaneously, or even in contradiction with, with its own logics. Think about it. Does writing actually solely in the system of organization that Kress describes for it? Do we as readers take--have we as readers ever fully taken--the linear structure of the book as the sole organization of writing? Have we not always, especially in the case of the novel or poem or creative non-fiction, discovered and created linkages and performed restructurings among plots, subplots, characters, metaphors, etc., not explicitly identified by the order of the writing or the author but nevertheless present and chosen by the reader? If Kress' assertion about the logics of writing are false, then it is the medium of the book that dominates and often fools us into thinking that the word order, page order, and chapter order is the order.

Just as we cannot access a mode without a medium, likewise we never use a particular medium except in relationship with one or more modes. Though it is certainly useful to distinguish between modes and media, especially since any variety of modes can be represented through any single medium, and identify, as Kress might say, what affordances particular modes might have and what potentialities particular media might offer, I think we need to be cognizant of the fact that medium and mode cannot be easily distinguished from one another, that they are “bodies without organs” as Deleuze and Guattari might say, that one without the other do not function, that one, without the other, do not actually exist. And even as a mode may jump to a new medium, say image to the screen, that image is equally constrained, limited, organized by the new medium into shapes, patterns, and logics that are akin to it nor in all cases assist it.

This interdependence means that the metaphor of dominance cannot hold up. Cannot hold up, that is, if we hope to honestly assess what we can do, rhetorically speaking, in New Media.

One more note: Kress' return to the dominance metaphor, his inability to escape it despite his best intentions, is ironic given his own warning about the epistemological decisions modes force us to make. He himself notes that writing forces us to place words in relationship with other words (hence the example of the cell "having" a nucleus). Here we see that Kress' writing forces him into the the same epistemological decisions, even if he doesn't mean to.