Appalled by the vices and hypocrisies of the Church in Rome, St Benedict of Nursia (c.480–543) devised The Rule of St Benedict, laying out an ideal form of institutional life. This writing becomes the foundational text of Western Monasticism.⁹²

“There are four kinds of monks,” Benedict says in the first of the seventy-three chapters in his Rule. There are hermits, who strive alone to find the meaning of God. There are societies of cohabiting monks with no rules. There are monks who are wanderers. But a fourth kind of monk lives under the rule of an abbot.⁹³ It is this kind of institutional sociability – of participation – that the Rule prescribes.

“To thee, therefore, my speech is now directed, who, giving up thine own will, takest up the strong and most excellent arms of obedience, to do battle for Christ the Lord, the true King.”⁹⁴

The Rule is presented as speech transcribed into text. It is definitively communication, the traces of representation erased in abstract commands. The commandant – the ultimate speaker – is Christ-God, and the abbot an interlocutor. In the constitution of social meanings, the authority of God is communicated through the authority of the abbot. The abbot commands, however these commands are God’s, not his. Nowhere is there an account of God the dialogical deliberator. God just commands. God communicates without knowable representation. The communication comes down the line, and when the abbot communicates God’s commands, no scope is allowed for divergent re-representation, for interpretation.

“For it belongeth to the master to speak and to teach; it becometh the disciple to be silent and to listen. If, therefore, anything must be asked of the Superior, let it be asked with all humility and respectful submission.”⁹⁵

These are habits we have developed in unequal societies with their bias towards communication, erasing deliberative agency in prior representation, and then, with communication, dialogue, and subsequent interpretation. This is how our theories of meaning have come to focus on communication as if that were the focal form of participation in meaning, at the expense of representation and interpretation.

Sometimes, this communication-as-command presents itself as gentle power, only exposing its more fundamental social conditions of participation in moments of potential or actual transgression. In Benedict’s Rule, the relation of master and disciple was made to seem perfectly reasonable, expressing hierarchy in ways that were also at times delicately cajoling. But when in other moments command is its fundamental purpose, the commandant must be direct in their communication and severe in their enforcement.

“For in his teaching the Abbot should … show the severity of the master and the loving affection of a father. He must sternly rebuke the undisciplined and restless; but he must exhort the obedient, meek, and patient to advance in virtue.” The monk, for his part, should adopt a demeanor of humility, so “if hard and distasteful things are commanded, nay, even though injuries are inflicted, he accept them with patience and even temper, and not grow weary or give up, but hold out.”⁹⁶

The Rule is the stuff of text, whose injunctions communicants must heed. It also prescribes certain forms of speech: listen silently to the speech of the master, and if speech is required, it must be submissive. These rules of text and speech are also framed by context, or what Giorgio Agamben calls, after Wittgenstein, ^§MS2.3.2a a form-of-life. This includes the architectonics of the monastery, its “total mobilization of existence” through the strict timing of prayers and work. The monk’s affectedly modest habit with its leather belt constitutes the monk as a “soldier of Christ.” The speaking master and the listening disciple cannot assume these positions except in embodied social behavior, in collocated space and simultaneous time. The meaning of the Rule is in the reciprocal relations of text and speech to its form-of-life. These are “constitutive norms.”⁹⁷

One such configuration of objects and bodies in time and space is the lectio – when the abbot speaks or reads aloud the Rule or the Gospel. This is a peculiar halfway practice, somewhere between reading and speaking. Functionally, it is an artifact of meaning where participation is reduced to communication, at the expense of representation and interpretation.

In the parallel development of global modernity, this is not just a Western form – Islam in its first centuries invents the same hierarchical relations of meaning: the “Qur’an” or Koran means recitation,^§MS3a from the Arabic verb qara’a; lectio derives from the Latin verb legere, to read out, read aloud, or recite.⁹⁸

In human history, this is a new configuration of meaning, where speech and action are constitutionally regulated by textual rule. It becomes not just the social relations of the “lecture,” but later becomes a central practice in the modern form of life that is institutionalized education. Or at least this is the case in its most didactic forms, where transmission via communication is emphasized at the expense of participation through representation and interpretation, where command is at the expense of agency, where epistemic replication is at the expense of creative thinking and rethinking, where repetition is at the expense of creative divergence, and where reproduction of meaning is at the expense of generative (re)design.

* * *

In 2012 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) were new, and Coursera only six months old. Already, said its co-founder, Daphne Koller, in a TED talk, Coursera had offered courses to “640,000 students from 190 countries. We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed.”⁹⁹ These numbers seem small by web standards, but were impressive for a start-up company.

The difference in communication was not in the manner of participation. That was still fundamentally that of lectio or the qara’a.^§1.2.2a MOOCs are essentially video recordings of lectures, assembled into “courses,” and where it still becometh the disciple of knowledge to be silent and listen. The difference is only a minor recalibration of the terms of participation.

In MOOCs you can view the lectures in your own time and place, and they are free or affordably cheap, depending on the level of recognition the learner wants for their participation. They are conveniently broken into 8–12 minute pieces. A viewer can replay something they didn’t understand the first time. They skip the parts they already think they know, or they can play them at double speed, and the lecture is still intelligible. For these recalibrations in the lecture as a medium of communication, MOOCs soon had millions, then tens of millions of enrollments.

Koller continues, and you can hear echoes of St Benedict’s cajoling:

Of course, we all know as educators that students don’t learn by sitting and passively watching videos. Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it … even simple retrieval practice, where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions. We’ve tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform … For example, even our videos are not just videos. Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question.¹⁰⁰

This is a minor refinement of St Benedict’s relations of communication. The spread of digitally recorded, internet-delivered lectures has been rapid, in ordinary classrooms too, where in the wake of MOOCs, the craze of the “flipped classroom” has taken off.¹⁰¹ Instead of lecturing in real time and collocated space, the teacher records their lecture on video. With a camera today on every computer and phone, recording is easy and cheap. But, fundamentally, this is still the lectio or qara’a. New life has been breathed into a communicative form that is a millennium and a half old.

When we went back to Daphne Koller’s TED Talk, two and a half million people already had viewed it, itself a lectio or qara’a. We work in e-learning too. We know Daphne Koller and have ourselves been creating MOOC courses since Coursera’s early days. But we only feel we know MOOCs because we have participated in these things, not just as the objects of communication, but as subjects, turning our representations into these recalibrated forms of communication. This is how we have learned the meaning of the MOOC, by mastering this transposition from representation to communication, not just by being its disciples. As for the interpretation of our meanings, apart from star-ratings and short reviews, that is as lost on us as it is in any communication-centered medium.

• Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 54-58 [§ markers are cross-references to other sections in this book and the companion volume (MS); footnotes are in this book.]