Visualizing Digital Discourse

Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives

Crispin Thurlow, Christa Dürscheid, Federica Diémoz, Crispin Thurlow, Christa Dürscheid, Federica Diémoz

• Editorial: De Gruyter Mouton
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501510182
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filología
• Categoría: Lingüística

The first dedicated volume of its kind, Visualizing Digital Discourse brings together sociolinguists and discourse analysts examining the role of visual communication in digital media. The volume showcases work from leading, established and emerging scholars from across Europe, covering a diverse range of digital media platforms such as messaging, video-chat, gaming and wikis; visual modalities such as emojis, video and layout; methodologies like discourse analysis, ethnography and conversation analysis; as well as data from different languages. With an opening chapter by Rodney Jones, the volume is organized into three parts: Besides Words and Writing, The Social Life of Images, and Designing Multimodal Texts. From the perspective of these broad domains, chapters tackle some of the major ideological, interactional and institutional implications of visuality for digital discourse studies. The first part, beginning with a co-authored chapter by Crispin Thurlow, focuses on micro-level visual practices and their macro-level framing – all with particular regard for emojis. The second part, beginning with a chapter from Sirpa Leppänen, examines the ways visual resources are used for managing personal relations, and the wider cultural politics of visual representation in these practices. The third part, beginning with a chapter by Hartmut Stöckl, considers organizational contexts where users deploy visual resources for more transactional, often commercial ends.

1 Towards an embodied visual semiotics: Negotiating the right to look

Rodney H. Jones

1 Introduction

On July 6, 2016, Philando-Castile, a 32 year-old African American man was shot after being pulled over, ostensibly for a broken tail-light, in the town of Falcon Heights, Minnesota. While her boyfriend lay bleeding, Diamond Reynolds videoed the scene from the passenger seat, livestreaming her video to Facebook.¹ “Stay with me,” she said into the screen, and then tilted her hand to reveal Castile, still strapped into his seatbelt, his head tilted back, his while shirt stained with blood. “We got pulled over for a busted taillight in the back”, she continued, “and the police just, he’s … he’s … he’s … covered.” Here she pulled the camera back to her own face, revealing a jerky close-up of her mouth and her eerily composed eyes. Then she turned her head towards the window on the other side of the car, and pointed her phone in the same direction, saying, “He … they ah killed my boyfriend.” At that moment, the disembodied voice of the officer could be heard through the window. “Fuck!” it said.

The aim of this chapter is to explore issues around the embodied nature of the visual in the age of the smartphone, in particular, the ways in which people use everyday practices of making images of themselves and others to negotiate how they are looked at and the rights and responsibilities they have to look at others. In it I will take a post-phenomenological approach, framing looking and being looked at as a matter of what Heidegger (2008) calls “being-in-the-world” (Dasein) and “being-with” (and for) other social actors (Mitsein).

The rise of the web, digital imaging and graphic user interfaces in the late 1990s precipitated an intense interest in the fields of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis in multimodal communication, resulting in a range of approaches to the ways people make and construe meaning with visual signs (see for example Baldry & Thibault 2006; Bateman 2008; Forceville 1996; Kress 2009; Kress & van Leeuwen 1996; O’Halloran 2004), including some approaches that focused on the impact of image making on issues of power and social identity (Machin & Mayr 2012; Machin & Van Leeuwen 2007). The more recent rise of mobile digital communication via social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, which invite users to produce themselves and their experiences visually and construe meaning from the visual representations of other people’s experiences, however, presents significant challenges to the “semiotics” and “grammars” of visual communication developed at the turn of the century, forcing analysts to engage more fully with the ways multimodal meaning emerges not from “signs” per se, but from techno-somatic entanglements in which the most important communicative resource is not what is visible but communicators’ embodied experiences of seeing it. “Seeing” and “being seen”, in this regard, are never neutral, uninvolved acts: seeing is always entangled with the mediational means through which it is accomplished, with what is seen and what is happening to it, with what seeing does to the watcher and the watched, and with sets of rules and expectations associated with particular contexts and particular societies about who has the right to look and who has the right to be seen (Mirzoeff 2011).

2 The hegemony of vision

The fact that we are living in a “visual age” has become somewhat of a cliché. We are reminded of it constantly in the discourse that circulates in our halls of learning, in the media that we consume, and the products that we buy. In our daily lives, we are constantly compelled not just to confront the visual, but to produce ourselves visually through technologies such as smartphones and social media sites. It seems we have finally arrived at what Guy Debord (2000) called “the society of the spectacle”, a society totally dominated by images, commodities, and images of commodities, or that we have finally become captive to what David Levin (Levin 1993) calls “the hegemony of vision”. In her book Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska (2017) argues that we live in an age in which being human has become defined through the representations we make of ourselves, and are made of us, through photography. She writes (pp. 2–3):

All-encompassing in the workings of traffic control cameras, smart phones, and Google Earth, photography can therefore be described as a technology of life: it not only represents life but also shapes and regulates it – while also documenting or even envisioning its demise. Thanks to the proliferation of digital and portable media as well as broadband connectivity, photography has become pervasive and ubiquitous: we could go so far as to say that our very sense of existence is now shaped by it. In the words of Susan Sontag (2004), “To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions.”

This ascendance of the visual, of course, is not something that began in the digital age, or even with the invention of photography. In his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger (1977) argues that the hegemony of vision had its beginnings in the philosophies of ancient Greece, but came to fruition in the work of Descartes, who, in his 1644 Principles of Philosophy (1985) formulated a model of vision that came to dominate enlightenment thinking, a model which involved the implicit separation of subject and object, the seer and the seen, in which all that is seen in essentially representation within the mind of the seer.

Of course, the invention of photography helped to naturalize this model. By the mid-20th century, photographs had come to take on a “truth value” that exceeded even human experience and memory (Sekula 1982), and the physical act of photographing someone materially instantiated the separation between the seer and the seen, mediated through the technology of the camera lens. Taking a photograph of someone, as Ron Scollon (1998) points out, invariably transforms the unit or participation from a “with” (Goffman 1966), a group of people perceived to be together, to a “watch”, which Scollon defines as “any person or group of people who are perceived to have attention to some spectacle as the central focus of their (social) activity. The spectacle together with its watchers constitutes the watch” (p. 283). What characterizes this type of participation unit, of course, is its asymmetry, the fact that the watcher can invariably claim the right to pass judgement on the spectacle (R. H. Jones 2012).

By the time Heidegger got around to writing about it, there was a sense that we had entered a “new epoch”, one in which “the ocular subject [had] become the ultimate source of all being and the reference point for all measurements of value of being” One in which “the very being of the world is equated with our images and representations” (Levin 1993, p. 6 summarizing Heidegger). To put it in Scollon’s terms, the state of “being in the world” (Dasein), which for Heidegger was crucially a matter of relating to people in the context of withs (Mitsein), has become more a matter of relating to people in the context of watches.

Most approaches to visual semiotics that dominate discourse analysis today, rather than getting us beyond the Cartesian ocular centrism that Heidegger so worried about, have tended to more firmly reinforce it. The empirical frame of most scholars of the visual in social semiotic and discourse analytical traditions, with some notable exceptions (see for example Thurlow 2016), has been to take “bodies”, “images” and “media”, as objects that exist separately and have relative ontological stability. The preoccupation of the analysis has been mostly on representation, what pictures (or bodies or gestures) “mean”, rather than with the more fundamental ways image-making has come to transform the very nature of meaning and the very nature of being.

3 Bodies in technology

Ironically, mobile digital photography, especially since late 2003 when Sony Ericsson and Motorola introduced front-facing cameras, rather than perpetuating this hegemony of the representational, has actually acted to destabilize it, opening up possibilities for a more post-representational perspective. Digital media have not only compromised the “truth value” of photographs (Mitchell 1994), but have also forced us to see “images”, “bodies” and “media” not as separate objects but as relational categories that intersect in complex moments of action, categories that can only be understood by engaging not just with what they mean but with how they are lived (Barad 2007). They have opened up space for a new form of visual semiotics that focuses less on “meaning” and “representation” and more on how people use the embodied and affective dimensions of visual communication to negotiate their physical experiences in the world and their relationships with others.

By the “embodied” dimension of meaning I do not just mean the tricks of perspective that scholars like Kress and van Leeuwen talk about by which image makers employ technical devices to make viewers feel like they are “part of the picture”. What I’m trying to get at is more complicated than that, somethi...