The “modulation mania”. Impersonal enunciation and visual rhetoric of the data image

Abstract

The growth of contemporary positivistic trust in computational tools inspired semiotics to contribute to the debate on the strategies of communication of truth. In order to study these strategies in data images, the article features a framework modeled on the theory of impersonal enunciation. The computational utterer is believed to assure a super-personal enunciation understood as impartial and true. Furthermore, it will be observed how subjectivities are in any case modulated in the data images: this operation constitutes as much a visual rhetoric to achieve the effect of truthfulness as it is a discursive practice featuring the computational enunciation of the data image.