In a newspaper industry journal (Printers' Ink, 1921), Fred R. Barnard launched what would become over time a powerful slogan: "One look is worth a thousand words." To make his remark sound more convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture is worth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Few slogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one. Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power of images. It took some years until the new underlying structure of our continuous practical self-constitution confirmed an observation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be added that, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners of engineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and to plan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realized through their own experience how powerful images could be, although they did not compare them to words.
Images are more concrete than words. The concreteness of the visual makes images inappropriate for describing other images. However, it does not prevent human beings from associating images with the most abstract concepts they develop in the course of their practical or theoretical experience. Words start by being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so far removed from the objects or actions they name that, unless they are generated together with an object or action (like the word calculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seem arbitrary. Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especially onomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what the word refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect the abstract rules of generating statements, or even our understanding of such language signs.
Images are more constrained, more directly determined by the pragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated. Red as a word (with its equivalencies in other languages: rot in German, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish, 赤 (aka) in Japanese, adom in Hebrew, and красный in Russian) is arbitrary in comparison to the color it designates. Even the designation is quite approximate. In given experiential situations, many nuances can be distinguished, although there are no names for them. The red in an image is a physical quality that can be measured and standardized, hence made easier to process in photography, printing, and synthesis of pigments. In the same experiential framework, it can be associated with many objects or processes: flowers, blood, a stoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared to them, it can trigger new associations, or become a convention. Once language translates a visual sign, it also loads it with conventions characteristic of language-red as in revolution, cardinal red, redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its physical determination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation) to the reality of cultural conventions. These are preserved and integrated in the symbolism of a community.
Purely pictorial signs, as in Chinese and Japanese writing, relate to the structure of language, and are culturally significant. No matter to which extent such pictorial signs are refined-and indeed, characters in Chinese and Kanji are extremely sophisticated- they maintain a relation to what they refer to. They extend the experience of writing, especially in calligraphic exercise, in the experience conveyed. We can impose on images-and I do not refer only to Chinese ideograms-the logic embodied in language. But once we do, we alter the condition of the image and transform it into an illustration.
Language, in its embodiment in literacy, is an analytic tool and supports analytic practice quite well. Images have a dominantly synthetic character and make for good composite tools. Synthesizing activities, especially designing, an object, a message, or a course of action, imply the participation of images, in particular powerful diagramming and drawing. Language describes; images constitute. Language requires a context for understanding, in which classes of distribution are defined. Images suggest such a context. Given the individual character of any image, the equivalent of a distributional class for a language simply does not exist.
To look at an image, for whatever practical or theoretical purpose, means to relate to the method of the image, not to its components. The method of an image is an experience, not a grammar applied to a repertory, or the instantiation of rules of grammar. The power of language consists of its abstract nature. Images are strong through their concreteness. The abstraction of language results from sharing vocabulary and grammar; the abstraction of images, from sharing visual experience, or creating a context for new experiences.
For as long as visual experience was confined to one's limited universe of existence, as in the case of the migrating tribes, the visual could not serve as a medium for anything beyond this changing universe of existence. Language resulted from the need to surpass the limitations of space and time, to generate choices. The only viable alternative adopted was the abstract image of the phonetic convention, which was easier to carry from one world to another, as, for instance, the Phoenicians did. Each alphabet is a condensed visual testimony to experiences in the meanwhile uncoupled from language and its concrete practical motivations.
Writing visualizes language; reading brings the written language back to its oral life, but in a tamed version. Whether the Sumerian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, or Slavic alphabet, the letters are not neutral signs for abstract phonetic language. They summarize visual experiences and encode rules of recognition; they are related to anthropologic experience and to cognitive processes of abstracting. The mysticism of numbers and their meta-physical meanings, of letters and combinations of letters and numbers, of shapes, symmetry, etc. are all present. With alphabets and numbers the abstract nature of visual representation took over the phonetic quality of language. The concreteness of pictorial representation, along with the encoded elements (what is the experience behind a letter? a number? a certain way of writing?), simply vanished for the average literate (or illiterate) person. This is part of the broader process of acculturation-that is, breaking through experiences of language. Experts in alphabets show us the levels at which the image of each letter constituted expressive levels significant in themselves. Nevertheless, their alphabetic literacy is as relevant to writing as much as a good description of the various kinds of wheels is relevant to the making and the use of automobiles.
The current use of images results from the new exigencies of human praxis and developments in visualization technology. In previous chapters, some of these conditions were mentioned: 1.
the global scale of our activity and existence; 2.