| Graphic design is often referred to as visual problem solving, a language that gives power and precision to visual communication. By setting meaning to typographic form and abstract shape, it is a process that pictures words and writes images. However, when design is analyzed in any detail, its reliability as a transmitter of accurate information dissolves into complexity and variety.;This thesis examines different ways in which words-as-images and images-as-words---or wordimages---disrupt and escape many of the categories and assumptions common to the study of visual culture. The marks we make do have meaning; however, the abstract, visual aspect of things does so only contingently, never necessarily. This argument is traced through the discipline of art history, philosophies of structuralist interpretation and of aesthetics, cultural theory, and design practices themselves, which are all challenged by the persistent, rhizomic (dense, root-like, invisible) interweaving of word and image.;The idea of the 'discipline' is reimagined as a changeable and limited pattern traced on a flow of meaning and desire, which is never more than partially or temporarily ordered. Works examined include those by Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, W. J. T. Mitchell, Gunther Kress, Nelson Goodman, Johanna Drucker, Theodor Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, and Sut Jhally. The contingency of visual practice is studied through several key terms, in particular Pierre Bourdieu's habitus, and Jacques Derrida's economimesis .;However, the final chapter reverses the general direction of this argument. It discusses one kind of enclosure, the economic, which contains meanings and desires in the regime of exchange-value. It critiques the work of a number of writers who attempt to show that the play of signs and meanings has displaced the central importance of economic relations. In a reworking of the Marxist metaphor of base and superstructure, this thesis argues that economic enclosure is an irreducible and determining order. It works not as a hard, controlling structure that directly shapes everything built upon it (in the common mechanical interpretation of 'base'), but precisely because it is utterly flexible, abstract, and universal. Like the visual itself, exchange-value casts its unavoidable light across the entire flow of materials and signs. |
