Loading...

In the Beginning was the Image: The Omnipresence of Pictures

Time, Truth, Tradition

by András Benedek (Volume editor) Ágnes Veszelszki (Volume editor)
©2016 Edited Collection 190 Pages
Open Access
Series: Visual Learning, Volume 6

Summary

The authors outline the topic of visuality in the 21st century in a trans- and interdisciplinary theoretical frame from philosophy through communication theory, rhetoric and linguistics to pedagogy. As some scholars of visual communication state, there is a significant link between the downgrading of visual sense making and a dominantly linguistic view of cognition. According to the concept of linguistic turn, everything has its meaning because we attribute meaning to it through language. Our entire world is set in language, and language is the model of human activities. This volume questions the approach in the imagery debate.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Preface (Ágnes Veszelszki)
  • Truth, Time and Visuality
  • Towards a Theory of Common-Sense Realism (Kristóf Nyíri)
  • Truth in Testimony: Or can a Documentary Film ‘Bear Witness’? Some Reflections on the Difference between Discursive and Existential Truth (Sybille Krämer)
  • Space and Action to Reason: from Gesture to Mathematics (Valeria Giardino)
  • Visual Management of Time (Daniel L. Golden)
  • Husserl on the Right Timing of Depictions (Javier E. Carreño)
  • Visual Rhetoric, Iconography
  • Rediscovering the Visual in Rhetorical Tradition: Persuasion as Visionary in Suasory Discourse (Petra Aczél)
  • The Rhetorical Lives of (Cold War) Maps (Timothy Barney)
  • Paintings and Illuminated Manuscripts as Sources of the History of Childhood: Conceptions of Childhood in the Renaissance (Orsolya Endrődy-Nagy)
  • Online Visuality
  • Digital and Visual Literacy: The Role of Visuality in Contemporary Online Reading (Krisztina Szabó)
  • Images in the Hungarian Online News (Gergely Havasmezői)
  • The Selfie Moment: The Rhetorical Implications of Digital Self Portraiture for Culture (Trischa Goodnow)
  • Selfies as interpersonal communication (James E. Katz and Elizabeth Thomas Crocker)
  • #time, #truth, #tradition. An Image-text Relationship on Instagram: photo and hashtag (Ágnes Veszelszki)
  • Visuality in Teaching and Learning
  • Dewey on Arts, Sciences and Greek Philosophy (Matthew Crippen)
  • SysBook as a Visual Learning Frame (András Benedek)
  • Micro-content Generation Framework as a Learning Innovation (János Horváth Cz.)
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index

← 6 | 7 →

Ágnes Veszelszki

Preface

In the beginning was the image… The main title of the sixth volume in the Series Visual Learning (VL) was borrowed from William Horton’s The Icon Book (and also appears in Shlain’s book). The slightly altered Bible verse was cited in the workshop presentation Forgotten Theories of the Image delivered in June 2016 by Kristóf Nyíri, co-founder, with András Benedek, of the workshop and the series. In this presentation Nyíri argued that “there are not many famous authors whose works are, so to say, must-reads for their contemporaries, and there are not many sub-disciplines whose professionals naturally – for their own good and as an obligation – make reference to each other. VLL members do not constitute such a sub-discipline; but they might as well put their efforts in a somehow convergent theoretical direction.” This aim is pursued by the events of the Visual Learning Lab (VLL), organised by the Budapest University of Technology and Economics for seven years now since 2009: the monthly seminar-like workshops and the annual international conference. A peer reviewed selection of such conference papers is published every year in the Series Visual Learning by the Peter Lang publishing house.

In honour of the traditions, the main title of the November 2015 conference was again a triple alliteration: Time, Truth, Tradition. The editors of the current volume selected 16 of the 30 papers presented in the conference. The papers can be divided into four major thematic groups: the theoretical questions of visuality; visual rhetoric; online visuality; and visuality in teaching and learning. Using a fashionable way to visualise keywords, the full content of the book can be compressed into the following word cloud (W1) which reveals the main points of contact:

image1

← 7 | 8 →

The keynote paper of the book is authored by Kristóf Nyíri, and titled: Towards a Theory of Common-Sense Realism. In his paper he aimed to “outline a specific philosophical strategy for the defence of common-sense realism and the rejection of relativism. The strategy is specific in that it is based on the assumption that the human mind is a visual one – indeed […] fundamentally a kinesthetic or motor one. The primary contact we make with reality is not verbally mediated; rather, it is direct, kinesthetic, perceptual, visual”. The paper distinguishes common sense, common-sense realism and scientific realism from relativism and from each other as well. Referring to, among others, Gombrich, Arnheim and Gibson, the author makes a case for (common-sense) realism in connection with visuality. In this regard, Nyíri concludes that “contemporary common sense does not have room, just as common sense never had room, for relativism. Common sense believes that it relies on the best available sources of knowledge. It understands that it might hold erroneous views, but trusts that progress will correct them.”

The same aspect, Truth, is reflected in Sybille Krämer’s paper Truth in Testimony: Or can a Documentary Film ‘Bear Witness’? Some Reflections on the Difference between Discursive and Existential Truth. An Austrian with Bosnian roots, director Haris Bilajbegovic filmed a documentary about the cruelties committed by Serbian militiamen in a Bosnian village in 1992. The mass execution had only one survivor whose testimony provided the grounds for the Hague Tribunal to convict the perpetrators years later. The 2012 film, which also cites statements from the testimony, was presented as a documentary. This provides the setting for the author to examine the dilemma of eye-witnessing, making reference to, among others, Derrida and Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of “Existential Truth”: “The dilemma associated with eye-witnessing can be expressed this way: speaking the truth constitutes the foundation and function of witnessing, yet at the same time nothing is as fallible and prone to error as witness testimony.” Going back to the film Svjedok – The Witness, he establishes that it “can be understood as not only a documentary film but also a form of ‘testimony’ because the medium of film instantiates a social relation between the survivor witness and the filmmaker”.

Referring back to the Krämer text in the fourth volume of the VL series and her own paper, Valeria Giardino presents her “hypothesis about the existence of a human capacity labelled diagramming”, and connects it to a philosophy of mind. Thanks to the capacity of diagramming, “humans are able to recruit a variety of cognitive systems – spatial perception and action systems – that are already available in other contexts, with the specific aim of reducing cognitive loads for memory and assisting problem solving”. The diagramming hypothesis can be linked to the moderate approach to embodiment. The author’s hypothesis is based ← 8 | 9 → on evidence brought from experimental psychology and philosophy of mathematics: gestures in mathematical explanation (as “gestures show that spatial and motor elements might help comprehension”), formulas in algebra and diagrams in topology. Giardino says that “spatial cognitive artefacts act as multi-recruiting systems”.

Daniel L. Golden focused on the visual management of time, and examined what tools of visuality (sundials, clockworks, time lines, calendars and time tables) help to put the flow of time under control. Such tools are “built upon visual components in order to make the abstraction conceivable, communicable, and operable for the human mind”, he says. The “main driving force behind the requirements on timing, tracking, and synchronizing human activities” was the set of events called taylorism, which is connected to industrialization and free competition, and resulted in the increasingly fashionable concepts of time management and time economy. Golden presents the most important concepts of time (including the dichotomies organic vs. mechanical time; public time vs. private time, linear vs. cyclical time), as well as the traditional and novel tools of visualisation.

In the following chapter, Javier E. Carreño examines, on the basis of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, how static images can “apparently ‘without a time’, strike us as having a ‘right’ timing”. This issue is raised in the phenomenological analyses of image-consciousness, time-consciousness, and aesthetic consciousness. He says: “the awareness of the ‘right timing’ of an image is a temporal awareness that an image triggers by intensifying the awareness of the depicted subject in a particular time-phase”, and “in the case of a ‘perfect timing of images’, the viewer will be drawn towards the ‘image now’ phase in its completeness to a degree that can even disengage further phantasy continuations”.

Petra Aczél – for the sixth time in the Series Visual Learning – argues for the need to rediscover the visual in the rhetorical tradition. As a recent development in scientific discourse, the importance of visuality is now accepted in the fields of human cognition and communication, and “the prevalence of images has apparently won over the scepticism of science towards the non-verbal”. By contrast, in rhetoric, which is considered as a mainly verbal field, the role of visuality has still not been rediscovered (except for the topic of “visual tropes”). Following a consistent logic, this time the paper focuses on the “persuasion as visionary in suasory discourse”, with particular respect to “the function of wonder (thaumazein), the connection between the verbal and visual and between the visionary and the persuasive-charismatic”. In this regard, the connection between rhetoric and visuality can be concluded this way: “rhetoric and the rhetorical style is persuasive because of its visionary – making audiences to see, to feel, to enact – potential that is rooted in the speaker’s visual-sensual encounter with the world.” ← 9 | 10 →

Timothy Barney’s paper adopts a rhetorical approach as well in examining the rhetorical lives of (Cold War) maps. The rhetorical life of a map, in his views, means that “a map has a particular lifespan in which it exists as a communicative practice, as it works through the intersections of public and private spaces, institutional and popular contexts, and artistic and scientific modes of collection, synthesis, and expression”. According to this concept, maps are linked both to the immediate document-level context and to the historic context. Using the concepts of Denis Wood and John Fels, Barney calls this context (which involves dedications, inscriptions, epigraphs, prefaces, notes, illustrations, and advertisements for the map, reviews, production information) paramap. This way, “a map is never just a map, but a confluence of social forces that constrains a culture’s sense of its relationship to, and in, the world”. To support his theory, the author analyses an American map taken about the Gulag in the Cold War era.

In her paper Paintings and Illuminated Manuscripts as Sources of the History of Childhood: Conceptions of Childhood in the Renaissance, Orsolya Endrődy-Nagy gives insight into a larger qualitative research project. Her goal is to “describe how the conceptions of childhood changed in a specific period during the 15th and 16th centuries”, with the help of Renaissance paintings and other visual documents (manuscripts, old-prints and wooden-block prints), using qualitative analysis methods of semiotics, iconography, visual anthropology and visual sociology.

With a big leap in time (but without departing from the topic of visuality) we arrive to our present days and our focus is shifted toward the online world. All the papers in this bigger unit are connected to digital communication: online reading and online media; selfie as a special type of image shared over the internet; and hashtags, that is the labels attached to images.

Details

Pages
190
Year
2016
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631698716
ISBN (PDF)
9783653070071
ISBN (MOBI)
9783631698723
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631678602
DOI
10.3726/b10396
Open Access
CC-BY-NC-ND
Language
English
Publication date
2016 (December)
Keywords
Visual learning Visuality Visual rhetoric Image Online reading Selfie
Published
Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2016. 190 pp., 11 b/w ill., 10 coloured ill., 1 b/w table

Biographical notes

András Benedek (Volume editor) Ágnes Veszelszki (Volume editor)

András Benedek is Professor and Head at the Department of Technical Education, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He has published several papers on human resource development issues. Ágnes Veszelszki is Senior Assistant in Hungarian Linguistics at the Corvinus University of Budapest. Her research interests are focused on the impact of infocommunication technology on the (Hungarian) language.

Previous

Title: In the Beginning was the Image: The Omnipresence of Pictures
book preview page numper 1
book preview page numper 2
book preview page numper 3
book preview page numper 4
book preview page numper 5
book preview page numper 6
book preview page numper 7
book preview page numper 8
book preview page numper 9
book preview page numper 10
book preview page numper 11
book preview page numper 12
book preview page numper 13
book preview page numper 14
book preview page numper 15
book preview page numper 16
book preview page numper 17
book preview page numper 18
book preview page numper 19
book preview page numper 20
book preview page numper 21
book preview page numper 22
book preview page numper 23
book preview page numper 24
book preview page numper 25
book preview page numper 26
book preview page numper 27
book preview page numper 28
book preview page numper 29
book preview page numper 30
book preview page numper 31
book preview page numper 32
book preview page numper 33
book preview page numper 34
book preview page numper 35
book preview page numper 36
book preview page numper 37
book preview page numper 38
192 pages