Visuality, Readability, and Materiality :: Visual Rhetoric Essays

My end here is to acknowledge two problems that I believe all scholars of the visual will encounter at some point in their work. both showed up early in my research on commemorative artworks, further I suspect that they crash e rattlingones party at some point. I have no solution to these problems, but I believe they should, very must, be addressed in work on visual rhetoric. The first, readability, is both a practical and theoretical problem having to do with the possibilities of interpretation in visual culture. The second, which Ill simply label materiality for the moment, has a presence in numerous arenas beyond the study of visual culture, but remains tight unaddressed and nearly unacknowledged in rhetorical work on visual images.The first party crasher, readability, probably makes its presence felt in all of our venues at least occasionally, but it haunts our work all the time. At the simplest and most practical level, readability is a hermeneutic problem. But it is a spec ial problem of interpretation, not just the same aged(prenominal) questions that make up in any work involving the production of signs and meaning. We try very hard to reduce the special problem to the same old problems, as evidenced by terms like visual, media, and computer literacy. The question is this What makes us so confident that our readings of visual signs are legitimate or defendable? Okay, that does sound a whole lot like the same old hermeneutic questions, but I dont believe it is the same in the brass of visual rhetoric as in spoken or scripted discourse. Or at least, it doesnt seem the same, given the degree of skepticism registered by readers and students about interpretations of visual signs. Leaving aside for a moment the misadventure that my interpretations just arent very good and that thats whats provoking this response, our own colleagues and my students seem to come out far more and greater challenges to such interpretations than they do to those of a des tination or a written document. For them, apparently, even in the wake of deconstruction, cancel language seems safer, easier, and more stable in its capacity of meaning extension than does the visual image. I wonder why that is the case, and particularly so in a culture in which seeing is believing and a celluloid is worth a thousand words.It is possible, of course, that this is an idiosyncratic problem, but I surmise it.