ABSTRACT
We live in era of the wor(l)d picture: The portmanteau word composed of “word” and “world” comes to us through the screen cultures of the 21st century. Image and language have been combined together through the politico-economic system of what I call de(sign)er capitalism (jagodzinski, 2010c) to enforce subtle forms of movements and flows, which appear to be free and liberatory but fall in what Deleuze (1995) and Guattari (1997) call “societies of control.” This is but one of the many reasons for revisiting Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (1996) 1 to rethink and update the play of the image in what has become a multimodal communicatory and informational wor(l)d. Communication and information, in and through the image, are two separate yet conflated concepts. Images communicate in the sense that they inform, but such communication in and of itself is not simply cognition, but affect and images are often riven when it comes to meaning. This is the aspect I wish to raise when it comes to engaging with Kress and van Leeuwen’s book, to see aspects that can continue questioning “visual literacy,” if indeed that is the term that still applies since it carries such heavy linguistic baggage of “reading” where the signifier plays such a major role when it comes to representation. I put this aspect of their work into question. I do so in the spirit that they themselves evoke when they differentiate their social semiotic approach to that of the “Paris School” and maintain that they “do not seek to repudiate those who went before” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 5) and that they do “see a continuity between their work” (p. 5) and their own. 2
