According to Barthes' account, indicated in the quote in the previous post, the image is always reducible to language and as such is never seen in the absence of the word. But in tier book Reading Images, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) spend some time taking issue with Barthes' position. Their account tends to look in places where word and image are integrated, in their words, these are "multimodal texts", ones that at the very least combine pictures and words. The first step in their suggests that images can have a structure and a meaning that is separate from language and that visual messages are structure independently from language - in this case the printed word. There problem with Barthes is as follows:
"Barthes' account misses an important point: the visual component of the text is an independently organised and structured message - connected to the text, but in no way dependent on it" (1996, page 17).
But, if according to Barthes, the "linguistic message is present in every image", the, how is this so, and on what grounds can we say that the image relies on language for signification? On the other hand, if visuals can have their own logic of signification, then what evidence can we provide to say that images can work, can embody meaning without the support of the linguistic message.
These are the terms of the debate, the very first issue that raises itself when we think about the possibility of Visual Literacy.
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