Visual Communication

David Machin, David Machin

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110370522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The primary goal of the volume on "Visual Communication" is to provide a collection of high quality, accessible papers that offer an overview of the different academic approaches to Visual Communication, the different theoretical perspectives on which they are based, the methods of analysis used and the different media and genre that have come under analysis. There is no such existing volume that draws together this range of closely related material generally found in much less related areas of research, including semiotics, art history, design, and new media theory. The volume has a total of 34 individual chapters that are organized into two sections: theories and methods, and areas of visual analysis. The chapters are all written by quality theorists and researchers, with a view that the research should be accessible to non-specialists in their own field while at the same time maintaining a high quality of work. The volume contains an introduction, which plots and locates the different approaches contained in it within broader developments and history of approaches to visual communication across different disciplines as each has attempted to define its terrain sometimes through unique concepts and methods sometimes through those borrowed and modified from others.

Part I

dp n="14" folio="" ?

dp n="15" folio="" ?

David Machin

Introduction

1 Introduction

For several thousand years there has been scholarly debate about the nature of visual communication, about the nature of seeing and how this differs to language, through Plato, Kant, Freud, Wittgenstein, Peirce and Goodman. And over the past century at least, visual communication has been studied across many fields in different ways, asking quite varied kinds of questions and going about analysis in very different ways: archaeology has studied the meaning of cultural artefacts; anthropology the meaning of gesture and expression in humans and primates; psychology the way the brain and psyche process visual information; the philosophy of mind has analysed the nature of sight itself and of images in the mind; Classics has studied the meaning of classical art and iconography; art history the patterns, techniques and materials of painting; linguistics the study of sign language; semiotics the tools of visual communication; design studies the way to best make information accessible, appropriate and attractive; film and media studies have looked at the nature of the visual industries and the kinds of representations they produced, with a view to the kinds of ways that they construct the world and persuade people. The list could go on and on.

Yet a number of commentators point to a more current growing popularity in the analysis of visual communication (Elkins 2003; Pauwels 2012; Rose 2012), across a wider range of disciplines, and increasingly in a way that shows awareness of the need to look outside of our own specialist fields for fresh ideas. It is noted that this is evident in the growing number of academic journals that address the visual which have emerged in the last decade: Visual Communication, the Journal of Visual Culture, Visual Communication Quarterly, and also in the form of journals that deal with the visual side of their own academic field such as Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine, Journal of Visual Literacy, Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, Journal of Visual Culture and Gender, Journal of Visual Cognition, Visual Culture in Britain, and Visual Art Practice.

To some extent this increase in visual journals should be seen as part of a general trend in both the flourishing of academic journal titles which has, in itself, been part of a wider trend in the increase in pressure for academics to publish, to get promotions, attain tenure or to just hold on to their jobs. Even graduate students realise the need to publish to find a job. This in one part explains the huge profusion of academic journals. But on the other hand it is clear that there has been an actual surge in interest in visual aspects of communication and culture across academic fields, with an increased awareness in the value of interdisciplinarity, and such journals provide sites where scholars are able to publish their work and find that of others. And it does appear that each of these more specialist approaches is often able to increase our knowledge of the visual as they come at it with their own specific set of questions and interests. And, as Smith (2008: 7) points out in regard to the field of Visual Studies, such specialisms have grown out of a frustration with what can be the stifling processes of disciplinary policing. Although as a note of caution he does point to the way that such new fields can then themselves become subject to new sets of border controls.

There has also been a wave of handbooks and introductory texts, many of which clearly reflect the sense that scholars need to look outwards from their own fields to be aware of the kinds of visual methods and approaches being pursued in other fields. One of the first of these was Van Leeuwen and Jewitt’s (2000) Handbook of Visual Communication, which brought together a number of scholars from different fields to show how they would deal with the visual. More recent have been Spencer’s (2010) Visual Research Methods in the Social Sciences, Rose’s (2012) highly successful Visual Methodologies – which offers a range of visual methods from the humanities, including semiotics, art history and discourse analysis – and Pauwels and Margolis’ (2012) Handbook of Visual Research Methods which brings together systematic approaches to analysis from the Social Sciences and Reavey’s (2011) Visual Methods in Psychology which presents the diverse ways of dealing with visual data in psychology. Each of these excellent volumes presents handbook-style contents from a particular scholarly perspective as do the journals above. For example, Visual Communication and Visual Studies carry different kinds of work, the former with a tendency towards design and semiotics and the latter with a tendency towards cultural theory. So, too, this present volume comes from my own scholarly experience that I will discuss shortly. But what this volume contributes specifically is a resource that gives access to work in visual communication in the form of a larger collection of original research papers written by leading scholars from a much wider range of scholarly fields. These chapters are part of authors’ ongoing innovative research in their own specialism. They are designed to get the authors to foreground their assumptions, theories and methods, making them accessible to non-specialists.

Bringing these chapters together has also allowed me to make some of my own reflections on visual enquiry: what this is about, and whether, indeed, there is, or should be, a broader field of visual communication studies, or integrated set of visual methods. It may be one thing to share our approaches and avoid pointless repetition and reinventing of the wheel, but another to expect there to be anything meaningful in suggesting that the huge range of interests and specialist questions that are asked about visual communication could be brought together in one place.

From my own perspective, as an academic writing mainly within linguistics, pragmatics and critical discourse networks, I have become aware of the growing interest amongst my own colleagues in the role of the visual. Formerly, those working in the study of grammar, sociolinguistics and stylistics saw their job as analysing language. But there was a realisation from the late 1990s that most of the texts they examined contained visual components and that words located in space, such as shop signs and advertisements, could communicate beyond their traditional linguistic sense as they brought with them meanings of global references and higher status languages. For the most part, however, such scholars have found it difficult to move out to the exploration of different kinds of visual methods, preferring those that emerge from within their own networks and which tend to be based on or around theories of language.

As happens in other fields where a “new” realm of investigation is “discovered” it can then herald a new flurry of activity that can, to those outside looking in, appear rather arbitrary. New network leaders will emerge in this pioneering area of research. New terminologies will appear to account for the very same things already documented decades before in a different field. Ginette (1982) has written of certain tendencies in academia towards “the passion to name which is a mode of self expansion and self-justification: it operates by increasing the number of objects in one’s purview”, even if terms for these same objects have been established and challenged in other subject areas. In my own field of linguistics, the specialism of “multimodality” has over the last decade seen linguists draw models from their own field to attempt to identify the building blocks of the visual: a visual grammar. But it soon became clear that these scholars were largely ploughing the same furrow as over a century of semiotics, yet still not asking very basic and important questions about the nature of visual signs that had long been standard fare in this long standing tradition (Machin 2009). Pauwels (2012: 4) too has argued that effort is often put into trying to appropriate a field through a process of renaming and imposing field specific theories rather than integrating them into existing work. (p. 4). And it can even be the case that the leaders of the new field begin to neglect existing skills and expertise to take on a weakly informed sense of how others investigate the visual. Visual collections can therefore offer a resource for those who wish to know what has been done on the visual in different fields so that they can have methods to take away with them. If they lay claim to developing a new analytical approach then they can place it next to what already exists out there.

Spencer (2008), using the example of the field that calls itself Visual Studies, also makes an excellent case for the way that different sections of emerging academic fields may then go on to produce genealogies, often arbitrarily identifying founding thinkers as a process of legitimising their own movement. Such a process can, of course, exclude as much as they include both important and influential work that suits the cause less well.

Elkins (2003), writing about his own field of Visual Studies in the humanities, points to another limitation that can be found within disciplines. He was concerned by the way a limited number of models and topics of analysis seemed to have been settled upon. He suggests that in Visual Studies there has become a lazy overreliance on a few theorists such as Foucault, Lacan and Barthes and a very limited set of interests that focus on TV, photographs and the Internet. He also argued that there was too much interest in social meanings and theory rather than form. And indeed it can be quite bewildering, moving from one academic field to another, to see the reliance on one or two theorists that appears arbitrary and isolated. Such observations are important for this collection. We need to be open to different kinds of theories and also to different kinds of instances of visual communication. And from my own perspective I would agree with the view that there has been a tendency to theorise about visual phenomena rather than providing more concrete accounts of their composition, design and purpose. In fact, the huge impact of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996) Reading Images may lie exactly in their attempt to provide tools that allow a much more precise way to describe and document the details of images, suggesting a wider feeling that there has been a lack of this kind of work.

Bringing a collection of visual research together in this way, I am also mindful of the comments of Mitchell (1994) who asked the question as to the politics of why we should want to study the visual in a way that is set apart from other forms of communication. What really is the justification and use in analysing the visual apart from other modes of communication, from language, sound and materiality? Most of the communication we come across happens in different modes simultaneously. The chapters in this volume, while they offer an insight into the different kinds of research going on in the visual, may therefore help us to look outwards and share our models, theories and approaches in dealing with gesture studies, painting, architecture, fashion, psychoanalysis, toys, guns, archives, classroom design and memory. But, for me, they also raise the issue of whether it would be meaningful to ever think of these papers as part of a coherent field of “Visual Communication Studies”. Elkins (2003) himself argued that what comes to be dealt with under the rubric of Visual Studies in the humanities is not so much a defined discipline but a broader set of overlapping concerns. In the case of the chapters in this book the overlap may be little more than the fact that the topics of study involve visual perception which hardly seems the making of a concrete field of enquiry given that the visual embraces much of human culture.

2 What is Visual Communication?

One way to think more about the meaningfulness of integrating Visual Communication Studies is to consider for a moment what we mean by visual communication. We often hear that our society is increasingly saturated by the visual. Presumably, therefore, it is a society that is saturated by acts of “visual communication” and dominated by the “image”. But what does such an assumption actually mean in itself? Thinking about what this statement glosses over brings us to what this volume is about and why it is useful to always be mindful of wider forms of research being done in an area, of the different kinds of questions that get asked, or could be asked, about the visual.

In fact the matter of the “image” or “the visual” is itself not as clear as might first be assumed. Images can comprise photographs, abstract paintings, mirror images, the image we see through our eyes, dreams, memories, verbal descriptions. Even writing itself comprises an image, composed of kinds of typeface, alignments, font colour and paper quality. When we hear words, even if we cannot see the speaker, we will be in a particular setting which will lend meaning to those words. And work in Conversation Analysis has considered the way that such context works on understanding. But clearly not all of the phenomena we have listed are visual communication per se. What is important to note from this, however, is that “the visual”, and “the image”, may be less easy to bring together in one place as a field of study, to integrate these in ways that on first sight may seem possible. But this does not mean that we cannot learn from each other, expand our own horizons, by bringing out research questions and processes together in one place for such purposes.

When we refer to visual communication we mean acts of representation where on the one hand we have a text maker who uses a set of visual resources to communicate a set of ideas, attitude and values to others. But on the other hand, as semiotics has taught us (Cobley 2010), things like natural phenomena can communicate to us by virtue of their form or cultural meanings such as the moon, or patterns on an animal to mean danger. Visual communication can occur through the clothes we wear, through gesture, a children’s board game, through the way we lay out our homes, through the way houses are built to suggest austerity and conformity or their opposites. Visual communication occurs through computer software, the way weapons are made to look, the design of cars and bicycles, shoes, the way we are taught to look at the sky at night. And it is not so much that humans experience these things through the visual apparatus alone but also through our “haptic sense”. In other words through our physical sense of being in spaces comprised of, and in relation to, these phenomena.

All of this kind of communication involves the exchange and promotion of ideas, attitudes and values. For example, windows in schools were once positioned at a high point so that children could not look out, cutting them off from their everyday world. More recently there has been a trend towards more open classrooms with much larger windows, often spanning the whole wall. Each of these choices communicates ideas, attitudes and values as to what education is about and about the identities ascribed to the learners themselves, whether potentially unruly children are to be controlled with perceptions limited, framed and disciplined, or where innocence and imagination are to be given free-reign. Each of these choices has psychological and physiological effects on us as we understand their meanings or feel the experience of living with them.

In these classrooms, other aspects of visual communication will take place: how the desks are arranged, the gestures used by the teacher, the postures struck by the children at their desks, the importance and prominence given to technology and the colours of objects, furniture, walls and toys. Children’s toys also communicate particular kinds of ideas and values. When I was a child I was given construction toys to play with. In the spirit of the Enlightenment I was tutored in the importance of the rational, to build massive, powerful structures that in some way changed or controlled nature. My own 18 month old daughter has a toy telephone that has a face with huge eyes and wheels encouraging her to make interpersonal connections with the values of both communication and transport. She also has a pair of jeans that carry a large stamp in the manner that a military munitions crate would be marked. We might view such as stamp as simply fashion. But why do we find a military stamp and not one from, say, a crate of fruit or medical equipment? In all of these cases there is communication through visual resources that tell us about how the world is, how we should act in it, and what kinds of identities we should foster. Such military references can point to the values of adventure, “rough and tumble” and durability, as opposed to those of death, maiming, destroyed families or occupation.

All of these are instances of visual communication. So when we say society is increasingly visual, what is it that we mean?

The claim that we live in a more visual society tends to mean, as Elkins (2003) points out, a rather limited view of the visual. We tend to be talking about photographs and film. And we tend to mean that more variety of visual communication is placed before our eyes. So we come across masses of advertisements each day, showing images of different locations on the planet. We can quickly scan through thousands of images on Social Networking sites, but also more words. News and lifestyle magazines can use more images, but also more words. It is a more communication saturated world in some senses. But is it also more about a changed relationship with the visual, given the possibilities offered by technology, and also as Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) argue, a changed role of the visual and its relationship to words and language. Most of the texts we now read are made up of bullet points and visually designed – no longer meant to be read out loud but to communicate through a different kind of relationship between words and visual design. My old electricity bill was formerly filled with numbers and writing. My new one has very little text or numbers and includes lots of white space and a diluted blue square containing the words “save money” in a friendly, rounded, forward-leaning font. Here the ease of paying is communicated not through words but through the meaning of visual layout and colour. Diluted colours point to more muted moods as opposed to the emotional intensity of those that are highly saturated. Letter forms suggest something light, dynamic and soft as opposed to those that are more angular, heavy and fixed. Here, these visual components are harnessed instead of words and numbers to point to the need to pay, presenting the facts as something easier and less formal than in the case of the earlier bills.

Such forms of visual representation are not simply new ways to reveal and show. Tufte (1997) has shown that all kinds of graphical representations used to represent information are not simply value neutral but shape, control and also misrepresent the world they claim to simply record and document. He shows that this can be with sometimes tragic consequences where charts have meant that the way that diseases spread, due to the need for simplif...

Table of contents

• Visual Communication
• Handbooks of Communication Science
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series
• Table of Contents
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Biographical sketches
• Index