ABSTRACT
Increasingly, educators demonstrate an awareness of visual studies and its potential for learning, marking the migration of a peripheral consideration toward a center: “The growth of scholarly interest in visuality marks a cultural reality: that images have become a predominant means of transmitting information in the 20th century and may be even more so in the 21st” (Heller, 1996, p. A8). This statement implies that our awareness of how important the visual has emerged in tandem with our advancing ability to encode and display images. However, certain theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim and W. J. T. Mitchell might characterize this shift as our finally recognizing divisive practices between visual and verbal modes in both theory and application. Mitchell (1994) describes the dichotomy between the image and word as representing underlying sociocultural power issues that are “linked to things like the difference between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other; between telling and showing; between ‘hearsay’ and ‘eyewitness’ testimony; between words (heard, quoted, inscribed) and objects or actions (seen, depicted, described); be-
tween sensory channels, traditions of representation, and modes of experience” (p. 5). Text culture resists the influx of a visual culture, fearing displacement in a media-oriented, image-driven world. To exert a degree of control, text styles of interpretation are often superimposed on discussions of imagery (Mitchell, 1986). The language used to describe images frequently carries a word-based agenda, thus giving us no way to describe the dynamic qualities inherent in visual thinking and mental imagery or in their external representations. Even the very word language implies a verbal system of symbols and not something pictorial or sensory in nature (Mitchell, 1986). Thus, any aspect of visual thinking and mental imagery must be accounted for through language-based frames in order to enjoy legitimacy; that is, the visual must operate according to the principles of language, although visuality is characteristically nonverbal.
