Kress, Richards, and Nietzsche

Much like Jeff, I had issues with some of the assertions Kress makes regarding “images…being full of….meaning, whereas words [are] waiting to be filled” (4); in particular, I had qualms with the fact that Kress doesn’t seem to adequately extrapolate the subjective nature of meaning with regard to the visual (though he does acknowledge the social, cultural, and economic factors that may influence interpretations of meaning). Instead, Kress seems to be implying throughout his treatise that the visual supersedes the written word in terms of allowing a multitude of people to achieve some commonality of meaning, but (again, as Jeff stated in reference to I.A. Richards) there can be no consensus of meaning since our individual perceptions of a word / image / element differ considerably. Consequently, this lack of consensus or truth reminded me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s text On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense where “what is usually called language is actually all figuration” (Bizzell and Herzberg 1169), and Bizzell and Herzberg further explain Nietzsche’s argument “that ‘truth’ is a social arrangement necessitated by the powerful tendency to tell lies…we put our subjective impressions of things into our words and therefore must negotiate their meanings…(while) social pressures reinforce the conventional ways of speaking of things and also encourage us to regard those ways as truth” (1169).

Although Nietzsche is qualifying language as the written and spoken word, his notions of language as figuration (and the resulting lack of universal meaning) can easily be adapted to the visual (particularly with our changing definitions of literacy and language which attempt to include images). As Nietzsche states “Every word [or image] instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather a word [or visual] becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means…cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal” (1174). Through this lens propagated by Nietzsche, words and visuals, subjects and objects, have no causality, no correctness, no true expression, and any semiotic relationship is reduced to mere aesthetics (1176).