Questions of Visual Predominance

Has our world become a more visual place? On the basis of the evidence provided on the following pages it would seem to be the case. Having said this, an important argument is developed in this section that will begin to challenge the transparency of this position. The rhetoric of visual predominance is evident in much of the writing on visual communication – art history and graphic design in particular – it is also evident in the work of of Kress and van Leeuwen where there is a prima facie case established that, I argue, too readily accepts the predominance of the visual in contemporary communication.

First, I want to present some examples of where assumptions are made about visual predominance and public engagement in culture at large exemplified by writers such as Gombrich (1972), Berger (1972), and Swann (1991), whereby, that through mass consumption and the saturation of visual messages in the media, advertising, the press etc that the our experience of the world has inevitable become more visual as a consequence of the situation of images. These arguments about the visual amount to hyperbole that tends to exaggerate the extent to which the contemporary communications environment in the West has become dominated and indeed that the world has become saturated by images. In these arguments is generally accepted that due to the development of such institutions as the press, advertising and the mass media generally, contemporary communication in both the urban and domestic environment has become saturated with visual messages. Even the renowned art historian and visual theorist, Ernst Gombrich, was not able to resist the temptation to make sweeping statements about the dominance of visual messages in a paper entitled The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication that first appeared in a special issue of Scientific American in 1972 (reprinted in Gombrich: 1982). He treats the fundamentally visual nature of modern communications and experience as a given, as something already and always in existence:

Ours is a visual age. We are bombarded with pictures from morning to night. Opening our newspaper at breakfast time, we see photographs of men and women in the news, and raising our eyes from the paper, we encounter the picture on the cereal package. The mail arrives and one envelope after another discloses glossy folders with pictures of alluring landscapes and sunbathing girls to entice us to take a holiday cruise, or of elegant menswear to tempt us to have a suit made to measure (137).

Gombrich’s assumptions here about visual predominance are based on evidence from everyday life, in this case a scenario of a typical morning breakfast reading the news etc. But what lies behind this narrative is an assumption about the growing role played by images within the general experience of the population. This then becomes a matter of predominance, the image gaining ground over other modes, especially language, leading him to add a further assumption about how we seem to be entering a new cultural situation, whereby, “it has been asserted that we are entering a historical epoch in which the image will take over from the written word.” (137).

In the same year John Berger’s made similar assertions about the role of the visual in what was at the time a groundbreaking study Ways of Seeing (1972) which also reinforced this growing trend that assumed a new central role for the visual in the modern world, stating that: “In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages” (1972: 129). Here Berger was thinking mainly of advertising and other forms of mass media, but these are often represented as the main culprits in the explosion of visual signs and messages in modern culture. In fact, Berger himself used the communicative potential of the key technologies of the time – the richly illustrated printed pages of a book in combination with video– as complementary media to support his argument.

Writing initially from the point of view of language and its relations to graphic design, Carl Swann (1991) adds a rather dramatic twist to this sense of increasing visuality in contemporary western culture by representing the context of typography in urban spaces as “a cacophony of signs form a large part of the visual environment,” stating also that we are “bombarded” with these visually driven messages (1991: 35).  In this loaded language, Swann is indicating the extent to which the senses have become dominated by visual messages in the contemporary world. It is interesting to add that his hyperbole is backed up with statistical evidence on the amount of actual physical space devoted to advertising hoardings in many major world cities (1991: 35). In both works there is a prima facie assumption in the discourse about communication in the modern world that things are becoming ever more driven by visual message, to the point of saturation.

Statements from these different disciplinary perspectives -art history and graphic design - indicate the issues relating to the academic analysis of visual communication and the dominance of the visual in the study of communication. There is, in the arguments presented above and in what follows a tacit assumption that the world, at least in contemporary Western society, that primarily through the rise of technologies and mass communications has indeed become a more visual place. More recently, however, James Elkins 2008) in the preface to his book Visual Literacy, begins, “[a] tremendous force of rhetoric has been brought to bear on the notion that ours is a predominantly visual culture” (2008: vii). The previous authors, with their transparent acceptance of the dominance of the visual, or what I will continue to label as a tendency towards “visual predominance” have made their own contributions to this “force of rhetoric” here alluded in the preface to beginning of Elkins’. In addition, the work of Elkins and others suggests a more critical inclination towards less of a transparent acceptance of visual predominance in reaction to a similar orientation to the visual, therefore, has taken place in the analysis and interpretation of a wide variety of cultural artefacts. So, the second level I want to isolate, is where debates around “visuality” and Visual Culture, both as still relatively new concepts and areas of study in the Human Sciences, where it has become important to deal with images and the visual from a theoretical standpoint in what Mitchell (1991) has termed “the pictorial turn”. That is, a specific shift in recent years in theoretical discourse towards emphasizing the visual in a wide range of cultural text, the apparent move towards treating “visuality” as singular object of study (Mitchell, 1994: 11-34). In fact, rather than suggesting this pictorial turn is itself a form of visual predominance, Mitchell argues against the, so-called, “fallacy of a pictorial turn” (2002: 173), stating that, "the modern era is not unique or unprecedented in its obsession with vision and visual representation." (ibid.), and "to acknowledge the perception of a turn to the visual or to the image as a commonplace, a thing that is said casually and unreflecting about our time" (173). This is the point, that whilst we may accept that there is this greater role for images in contemporary, it is, however, questionable as to how unique this phenomenon is and more important that we are careful about this tendency towards visual predominance to assume uncritically the notion that our experience of contemporary life is more visual.

Mitchell also suggests that there are many instances in the past where a shift in the technology has brought about a consequent shift in the potential of visual perception:

The invention of photography, of oil painting, of artificial perspective, of sculptural casting, of the internet, of writing, of mimesis itself are conspicuous occasions when a new way of making visual images seemed to mark a historical turning point for better or worse (ibid.).

It is interesting to note here that the internet, as a most recent transformation in the production and distribution of images, sits alongside such inventions as say, photography, indicating in their own way the transformative potential of technology in these processes. Though, similar to visual predominance, there are risks in being to deterministic in relation to the role of technology in these, so called, “communication shifts”. In the list of technologies provided in the above quote by Mitchell, there is what seems to be an important omission, the invention of printing. This point will be taken up later as so often current media transformations have been compared to those of the invention of printing. What is important at this point is that the role of images and related technologies there is always the potential to too deterministic. Granted, technology is most certainly an agent of change, but to assume that current shifts in modes of communication are sole responsible would seem to miss the point. By questioning these assumption it is possible to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between technological transformations an various forms of communication including the visual.

In terms of theory, however, there are some important questions to be asked about the transparency and apparent obviousness of this phenomenon in mass culture and the communications environment that we find ourselves in in the modern era that is represented here. As Mitchell advocates in his essay “Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture” (2002), the first thing to do in so-called Visual Studies is to make “vision itself visible”. This is a paradox because it is impossible for us to actually see vision but in his view the object of study in relation to visuality is that of unconcealing or revealing the act of vision itself, that is, vision as a distinctly social and mediated phenomenon. That the work to be done here in relation to contemporary forma of visuality is to see what actually lies behind the apparent obviousness of phenomena like that of visual predominance. In the same article, Mitchell lists ten, so called “myths of visual culture” and one of these being that “we live in a predominantly visual age” (Mitchell, 2002:169 – 70).

In relation to a later argument developed in a critique of the concept of “visual media” he begins by arguing that:

On closer inspection, all the so-called visual media turn out to involve other senses (especially touch and hearing). All the media are, from the standpoint of sensory modality, 'mixed media'. The obviousness of this raises two questions: (1) why do we persist in talking about some media as if they were exclusively visual? Is this just shorthand for talking about visual predominance? And if so, what does 'predominance mean’? Is it a quantitative issue (more visual information than aural or tactile) or a question of qualitative perception, the sense of things reported by the beholder,   audience, viewer/listener? (2) Why does it matter what we call 'visual media'? Why should we care about straightening out the confusion? (Mitchell, 2005:257-8)

Here, Mitchell is indicating some of the pitfalls attached to the problem of visual predominance, in particular, that there is a danger of excluding the important role played by other modalities. I have tried in the previous sections to expand on this notion of visual predominance both in terms of what it stands for, as a way of prioritizing the role of the visual, and more important, how this notion is adopted uncritically within some of the theoretical literature on visual communication. This would actually seem to reinforce the multimodal approach advocated by Kress.

“Visuality”, therefore, indicates a shift on a cultural level in assumptions made about the role of the visual in public communication as well as in theoretical discourse. It suggests a move towards a more prominent role played by images in communication and in theoretical approaches to this and provides an alternative view of culture which has lately challenged the seemingly once dominant paradigm of textuality. Moreover, in recent theoretical writing on communication there has been a tendency, exemplified by Kress and van Leeuwen, towards the notion of multimodal communication, whereby a variety of systems or modes of representation are employed in order to construct meaning within texts and within many forms of text.

In relation to theories of visual literacy, the term visuality is used to distinguish sight or vision as a “social fact” (Foster, 1988: ix) from vision as a physical phenomenon, as in the stimulation of the human sensory system. Visuality locates images (as visually constructed messages) and their interpretation completely within the realm of the social and in theories of Visual Literacy the visual is always identified as being situated in some way within social processes and institutions such as education, the mass media (including the press) and so forth. Thus, the dominance of the visual as a means of communication is implicit in Visual Literacy, which is located within the theoretical discourse on visuality and linked to the institutionalisation of the image and vision, for example in the production of news discourse mediated by the institutions of the press and mass media, or in illustrated textbooks as part of the discourse of education. Both of these instances form major concerns for Kress and van Leeuwen. As a “social fact”, then, Visual Literacy is bound up within practices and processes that both prescribe and mediate the meanings that are realised through the visual. Associated with the phenomenon of visuality it is accepted that, largely as a consequence of the rapid development of communications technologies, most modern cultures have shifted towards more visually oriented ways of communicating, and that according to Kress and van Leeuwen

[REF.]

I argue, that Kress and van Leeuwen in their book Reading Images (1996) whilst advocating a multimodal approach – accepting the a multiplicity of modes behind any communicative act – have, in fact, fallen into exactly the same trap as the authors presented earlier in this section. That is, that they have overemphasized the role of the visual and have done so by assuming visual predominance uncritically.

The point about multimodality is that by making reference to the multiplicity of senses involved in perception, sign making and so on, is that it avoids visual predominance and accepts the necessary fact that all communication engages with many modes. That said, Kress and van Leeuwen, in their, so called "new visual literacy (1996: 23-34) have a tendency to fall right back into justifying their approach in Reading Images by making reference solely to the visual as a singular mode, marked out for special attention as a central feature in their "semiotic landscape".
Granted, the examples that they give, from illustrated children's book, instructional texts, newspaper design aand forms of electronic media, all are used to indicate the ascendancy of the visual in contemporary media. However, this position is still flawed in its tendency to be uncritical of the transparency and given-ness, or already always association towards the visual. The assumption about the visual goes unquestioned in their account. Unlike the perspective taken by Mitchell (1994, 2002 and 2005) whose historical perspective takes on a rather different approach and one that clearly acknowledges the phenomenon of visuality but does so from a skeptical and critical stance and by doing so avoids the pitfalls of visual predominance.

There are a couple of problems here that need to be addressed; both constitute questions concerning visual predominance as well as a more general critique of Visual Literacy. If we reject visual predominance, what do we put in its place? What role is played by technology in the shift towards new, different and potentially multiple modes of communication in what Kress and van Leeuwen call the “semiotic landscape” (1996: 16-20)? Visual Literacy and subsequent debates about this in relation to mass communication can be seen as part of a trend in theory, articulated by Mitchell as the "pictorial turn", towards emphasising the visual over and above other modalities. If the aim of this chapter is to situate the work of Kress and van Leeuwen within more general studies of Visuality, it is evident that their work also can be seen in the context of this turn towards the visual. In the next section I want to continue this line of questioning and provide something of a critique of what the approach taken by Kress and van Leeuwen in Reading Images and what they call the “new visual literacy” (1996: 21), not from the point of view of visual predominance, but by comparing it with other forms of Visual Literacy current in theoretical literature in Visual Studies and Visual Culture.