Towards a Rhetoric of Tactile Pictures

Carol Wiest

continued . . .

I have chosen Kress and van Leeuwen's model of the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions as my theoretical starting point. The tools they present in Reading Images provide ways of talking about pictures as messages structured by the society in which they were created (18). As they explain, "In our view the meanings expressed by speakers, writers, printmakers, photographers, painters, sculptors, etc., are first and foremost social meanings, even though we acknowledge the effect and importance of individual differences" (18). Further, since society is not homogeneous, the texts and images which individuals produce will reflect the tensions, contradictions, and competing viewpoints of society.

A rhetoric of tactile pictures needs this social approach. Tactile pictures, like visual images, are structured by the society in which they are created. Images, whether tactile or visual, construct interactive and represented participants in particular ways. Kress and van Leeuwen point out the enormous impact images have on our daily lives and propose a new visual literacy (32-33). As tactile pictures become more prevalent, blind and visually impaired individuals will benefit from a similar "new tactile literacy." The development of such a literacy requires a tactile rhetoric based on a social approach to communication.

I have chosen to concentrate my discussion on the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions because I find that these metafunctions provide the most interesting and significant insights into the semiotics of tactile pictures. The ideational metafunction deals with how a semiotic system "represent[s], in a referential or pseudo-referential sense, aspects of the experiential world outside its particular system of signs" (40). In other words, how do tactile pictures represent the world? The interpersonal metafunction deals with how a semiotic system "project[s] the relations between the producer of a sign, or complex sign, and the receiver/reproducer of that sign" (41). In other words, how do tactile pictures construct social relations between the producer of the image and the readers of the image? The textual metafunction, which I have not dealt with explicitly in this paper, deals with how different compositional arrangements realize different textual meanings (41). A study of this metafunction would be best served by a broader set of tactile pictures than those in the alphabet book I am discussing in this paper.

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