Visuality, Readability, and Materiality :: Visual Rhetoric Essays

My intention here is to acknowledge two problems that I believe all scholars of "the visible" will encounter at some point in their work. Both showed up early in my research on commemorative artworks, but I suspect that they crash everyone's party at some point. I have no "solution" to these problems, but I believe they should, actually 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 I'll simply label "materiality" for the moment, has a presence in numerous arenas beyond the study of visual culture, but remains nearly 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 special problem of interpretation, not just the "same old" questions that come 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 defensible? Okay, that does sound a whole lot like the "same old" hermeneutic questions, but I don't believe it is the same in the case of visual rhetoric as in spoken or written discourse. Or at least, it doesn't seem the same, given the degree of skepticism registered by readers and students about interpretations of visual signs. Leaving aside for a moment the pos sibility that my interpretations just aren't very good and that that's what's provoking this response, our own colleagues and my students seem to pose far more and greater challenges to such interpretations than they do to those of a speech or a written document. For them, apparently, even in the wake of deconstruction, natural language seems safer, easier, and more stable in its capacity of meaning generation 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 "picture is worth a thousand words." It is possible, of course, that this is an idiosyncratic problem, but I doubt it.