Image and visuality in sociocultural dimension

Abstract

The article discusses the challenges and opportunities posed by the visual turn and visual studies in the investigation of communication. The theoretical framework of the article was found in the modern concepts of multimodal communication. The article focuses on the role of a visual image in shaping our sociocultural experience and knowledge. The main research question is as follows: How communicative actors produce and interpret meanings through visual images. Visuality is considered as a semiotic resource of meaning making that is socially constructed and culturally given. The article looks at images as they are context sensitive and represent information from the sociocultural environment. The methodology of the present analysis is in line with social and cultural semiotics, and reflects the main principles of text and cultural linguistics. The findings and implications can be summarized as follows. First, the article sketches out a linguistic, or, to be more precise, text linguistic, view on multimodality and summarizes the main approaches to the visual medium of communication compared with language. The point of departure is a methodological shift within linguistics from logocentrism towards multimodality and visual resources of meaning making. In the research papers in the 2000s, linguists also legitimized the pictorial and multimodal turn. Visuality is now at the cross-point of research interests of many modern disciplines such as text linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics. Multimodal texts are considered a crucial object to investigate the meaning making in its sociocultural embeddedness. Second, the suggested inquiry is in line with the issue of intericonicity and reveals the explanatory charge of visual intertextuality. I show that pictures, image-language links may emerge as rooted in certain sociocultural practices as a part of the cultural knowledge of communicators. That means they may be dependent upon the knowledge of previously encountered texts or meanings. Visual intertextuality is considered a form of intericonicity, which reflects the intersemiotic translation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems. I show visual intertextuality in current Russian communicative practice as a means of meaning making through reference on images or imagelanguage links. A conclusion looks at some requirements and directions for further research. Images may provide a new access point to investigation of the cognitive dimension of meaning making and its sociocultural dimension. They allow us to observe the forms in which socially shaped and shared experience is fixed. The visual resource provides an access to contextualization: Images are context sensitive and context embedded. The use and interpretation of images gives a special angle for the active, social construction of reality through semiotic (visual) resources.