Page 176 - Literacy in the New Media Age

READING AS SEMIOSIS 165

such choice: a written text was to be read as a written text, and a page as a page.
Reading paths in many new pages are relatively open; I am thinking here of the
pages of contemporary magazines with many images, and ‘blocks’ of text, often
quite small blocks of text arranged around the page, not in a linear order (left to
right, top to bottom) but in an order either deliberately left (relatively) open for
the reader, or open because settled conventions do not yet exist in the same way
as they existed for the ‘densely printed page’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996) of
the former era. The relative openness of the reading path applies to most images
also, and for similar reasons (which is not to say that visual representation does
not ‘have’ a grammar; it is to say that the grammar is open to different use). Here
as elsewhere we need to bear in mind the contexts of reading, and the
distributions of power which obtain. As I suggest below, the school, as an
institution founded on the mode of writing and on the medium of the book, has
its valuations, deriving from a former era.
The shifts in power are not all in one direction. In the case of the reading path
it seems to be the case that conventions have not yet reached as far or in the same
detail as they had in the case of the densely printed page. No doubt that will
change, and I am aware that work such as that here and in relation to images
much more generally – establishing ‘grammars’ of the image – will make its own
contribution to that development. But I mentioned above that ‘lexis’ works very
differently in speech and writing than it does in image. Images demand an
epistemological commitment, a precision of representation, which words do not.
To repeat my earlier example, if I say, in a science lesson ‘every cell has a
nucleus’, I have made no ‘commitment’ about where in the cell the nucleus is
located. As an answer to an exam question, ‘Mention the most important
constituents of …’, this would constitute (part of) a correct answer. If I am asked
to draw a cell, I am forced, whether I wish it or not, to make a ‘commitment’
precisely on this issue: I have to place the nucleus somewhere. It is a
consequence of what I have called the logics of the visual mode of representation.
The effect for the reader, however, is that something which is open in language
(the meaning of ‘has’) is not open in image. A possibility of supplying meaning
which in the case of speech or writing rested with the hearer or reader is taken
from her or him. To cite again the well-known experience of the disappointment
in seeing the film of the novel: the written text calls forth the work of ‘filling’
relatively vague lexis with the meanings of the reader or hearer. The ‘lexis’ of
the visual is in that respect precise, not open, and does not call forth that work.
There is a paradox here in that the traditional view had been that image needed
the precision of the word, to give it, in the terms of Roland Barthes, ‘anchorage’.
This has consequences for the work of the imagination: the world of the word
demands and permits work of the imagination which is not facilitated by, and is
perhaps even closed off in relation to, the world of image. At the same time the
image permits kinds of imagination not facilitated by the word. In relation to
reading paths, for instance, the image (or the new page) offers possibilities to the