Las Microfinanzas y la Lucha Contra la Pobreza

In their book Reading Images, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996: 13) set out to

“broadened critical discourse analysis” by addressing the fact that CDA, including

SFL, has focussed mostly on verbal texts, largely ignoring the visual mode or seeing it as secondary to the verbal. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996: 45), pictures do not simply reproduce realty; rather, they “produce images of reality which are bound up with the interests of the social institutions in which the pictures are produced.” They see pictures as tools of ideology in the same way that verbal texts are seen as tools of ideology in CDA and SFL.

Since the primary theoretical approach of the present study is CMT, I will not employ Kress and Van Leeuwen’s theory. However, it is important to mention it here, and point out some aspects of their approach, since it is the first major study within CDA to focus primarily on the visual mode. They view the visual mode as an important mode of communication in itself, instead of one that is secondary or complementary to the verbal. This is the view that I also take here. I also share their views on the connection between “art” texts and social critique, since this has some bearing on the study of cartoons in a critical context. Specifically, Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996:

13) state that “art can and should be approached from the point of view of social critique”. They place their own study, and the shift to the visual medium in general, in the context of a history of study of non-linguistic texts. I reproduce that context here since this current study should be seen as forming part of this progression.

According to Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996: 5) three schools of semiotics have applied linguistic ideas to non-linguistic modes of communication in the past, of which they place themselves in the third, or “social semiotic” school. The first school, the Prague school, during the 1930s applied the work of the Russian Formalists with a linguistic basis to many different semiotic systems. They applied formalist concepts such as ‘foregrounding’, ‘deviation’, and communicative functions such as

‘referential’ and ‘poetic’ to art, theatre, and cinema.

The second school, the Paris school, during the 1960s and 1970s applied ideas from authors such as De Saussure, Schefer, Barthes and others to photography, fashion, cinema, music and comic-strips (which differ from cartoons in that they are narrative texts consisting of multiple frames (McCloud 1994: 20-21)). This approach is often referred to as “semiology”, and is the background against which Kress and Van Leeuwen set their own work.

The third school, of which the work by Kress and Van Leeuwen forms part, is the

“social semiotic” school. Starting in Australia, this movement applies the ideas of Michael Halliday and SFL to literature, visual semiotics, music and other modes. In their own approach, Kress and Van Leeuwen set out to apply the principles of CDA and specifically SFL to the visual mode (1996: 13). They claim that images fall

“entirely within the realm of ideology” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 12), and that the production of images is driven by ideological interest. In describing the visual mode, they use a linguistic metaphor, talking about the creation of a “grammar” of visual design, to describe the way in which images “say” things, and are used to perform the three metafunctions of language from SFL that were described in section 2.4.2.

The influence of the critical approach to semiology has meant that Kress and Van Leeuwen’s use of certain terms differs from that of the other approaches. The first of these is the notion of a ‘sign’. Unlike as in the semiology approach, they do not see the sign as a “pre-existing conjunction of a signifier and a signified” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 6). They see it rather as a process of sign-making where signifier and signified are relatively independent. The focus is on sign-making as a complex process, guided by the interest of the sign-maker. This interest is situated within an author’s cultural, social, and psychological context and history (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 6). They claim that, as is clear in the case of cartoons, it is never the whole object that is represented. Rather, the interest of the sign-maker suggests certain criterial aspects, which come to represent the essential meaning of the object for the sign-maker in the specific context of the moment.

Kress and Van Leeuwen do not discuss metaphor at length; however, they do claim that the process of sign-making is metaphorical in nature. Specifically, they state that it is a “process of the constitution of metaphor in two steps” (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 7). The example they provide is of a child drawing a car as a set of circles on a page, describing the process of this creation of the visual sign as consisting of the following two metaphoric steps: “a car is (most like) wheels” and “wheels are (most like) circles”. They describe this metaphoric process as a process of analogy of the form “X is like Y” in criterial terms. The interest of the child in the car at that instant is in the motion of a car. To the child at that moment, the most apt criterial features of the car are its wheels, so that the car comes to be understood metaphorically as

‘wheels’. The ‘wheels’ are in turn understood as ‘circles’, which can be drawn (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 6). They claim that people are constantly engaged in the creation of such metaphors, guided by the interest of the moment. They also claim that the choice of which metaphors are considered conventional and which are not is the result of social relations (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 7). Since they do not say any more concerning metaphor or conceptual metaphor theory, it is unclear how exactly they understand this analytic or metaphoric process and how it differs from the approach of CMT. The most they say is that these analogies, like the forms of sign-making, are motivated by interest (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 7).

With this description of the metaphoric process of sign creation, Kress and Van Leeuwen seem to agree with Lakoff on two points. The first is that the process of meaning generation is at least partly metaphoric, and the second is that conventional metaphor is socially governed. Lakoff also conceives of the fundamental meaning that is to be expressed as metaphoric – unless it is based on concrete experience. Whether Kress and Van Leeuwen would agree with this is unclear.

According to Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996: 2), “some things can be ‘said’ only visually, others only verbally.” Some things can also be said in both modes, but the way in which it is said differs. They (1996: 6) claim that the author of a text chooses to express his message in “the semiotic mode that makes available the subjectively most plausible, most apt form”. However, I question the universal validity of this claim. The choice of which medium to use is not necessarily free. If one works as a cartoonist, for example, and one is expected to produce cartoons, it may not be possible to switch over at whim to the production verbal newspaper articles, and back again, based simply on the ideas one wishes to express. The same is true for writers of newspaper articles. In this sense, then, it may not be true that authors of verbal and visual articles choose their medium purely because it is the best way to communicate their message, but rather because it is the medium which they know best, or prefer for some other social or personal, rather than textual, reason. I would also question the idea that there is a “best” medium for expressing a given message in all cases, though it is beyond the scope of this thesis to address this issue.

In the same way that CDA focuses on language, Kress and Van Leeuwen focus primarily on visual form. However, through CMT it becomes clear that the choice

open to an author is not only at the level of form, but also at the level of conception.

Although an author uses the basic metaphors of his/her culture, there is choice in how such metaphors are enriched poetically, as discussed in section 2.2. Thus, even before the choice of form comes into play, there is already a choice of metaphor. Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996: 7) refer to this when they say that the choice of “analogy” is driven by interest. They (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996: 7) claim that children have more freedom of choice, being less constrained by their culture and thus their metaphors. They suggest that the more freedom one has, the more control one has over the text and therefore the discourse. This is a question that will be discussed together with the contribution of poetic metaphor to the power of criticism of cartoons in section 5.4. The important point for this study is that it is not only the form of expression, but also the choice of conceptual metaphor that is motivated by ideological interest.