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“PRAYING MANTIS” “PAPOU LOVES INSECTS.”

BY SOPHIA 1.31.12

On the paper below these words, there is a large expanse of black, in broad brushstrokes. Sophia, aged two and a half, wanted to make a present for her Papou (Greek for grandfather).

Her teacher helped her make an artwork, there in My Little Village, Sophia’s preschool on Avenue A, “Alphabet City,” in New York’s East Village. “A” is for assault, “B” is for battery, “C” is for crime, “D” for death, they used to say for each of these Avenues, before the East Village became fashionable. Sophia said what the picture meant and her teacher wrote it for her. This was for Papou’s birthday.

Later her Papou had the picture framed, in pink because he knew it was at the time her favorite color. (By five, she was in partial gender revolt; blue had become her favorite color, and she couldn’t understand why Papou had framed it because by then, she had learned to do “better” pictures.)

What is this picture? To cycle back over some ideas we have been developing in this grammar, Sophia is representing something she and Papou had seen together, though not in New York City, at Papou’s place in the country. Papou’s gender game is not to be scared of these beautiful, delicate things – you can take one gently without hurting it, and it will walk up your arm, funny feeling, but be brave! Look at these creatures with love and care. Be a scientist!

From representation to communication, there is a transposition of form to form: from the embodied meaning in the feeling of a praying mantis on the skin of your arm, to a painting; from Sophia’s experience to her speech; from Sophia’s speaking to her teacher’s listening and writing; from art as communication to the interpretative aids of title, date, and descriptive gloss following the conventions of art and galleries, with an explanatory gloss after the title, all pointing to the artist’s intent; from the gesture of the gift to birthday rituals and “papous” of Greek, a language whose presence in New York is at once exotic for the polis and normal for the cosmopolis. Sophia must have told the teacher what a “Papou” was, and the teacher must have liked that, not to have translated it into English. These are just a few vectors of interest in a polyphony of multimodal transpositions.

Here we have the complex warp and weft of shared, but also critically different interests in meaning – where love, science, and teacherly support come together in the social project that is participation in meaning. “Praying Mantis” is to be located in a community of parties to some very special pleadings. Papou loves insects, and Sophia is trying to love them too, for him. Both parties’ participation is born of their difference: Papou wishing Sophia to love science but Sophia’s anxieties about the crawly materiality of its creatures; Sophia’s living in the city and Papou’s living in the country; Papou’s grandfatherhood and Sophia’s granddaughterhood; Sophia’s studentliness and her teacher’s teacherliness. The interests in this context differ in these and so many other ways.

So there is the meaning, but not the false hope of isomorphism that accompanies the word “communication.” Communication in this sense cannot be more or less effective by virtue of its faithful transmission of meaning, because there can be no such thing. But the meanings-in-difference can be parsed and understood.

The practice of meaning is multimodal, and the meaning happens in the work of transposition. Any account of meaning must extend way beyond the making and the seeing of the picture and the reading of its text. Then, on a functional vector, this is not just an act of communication because the meanings integrally depend upon and anticipate acts of representation and interpretation.

And another vector of functional transposition: Sophia starts with abstraction – in Peirce’s terms, the symbolic – and later learns to value “better paintings” because they offer a more realistic likeness – Peirce’s iconic.^§AS1.0b The form of this communication is just a function of Sophia’s capacities at age two and a half, and painting as her chosen form of visualization.

Michael Halliday^§MS0.3a studied his Nigel, where the linguist found his son meaning before he had language. “Before he can talk about meaning, a child is engaging in acts of meaning.” When babbling comes, that is meaningful too, even for the habituated linguist: “before he has a mother tongue, he is using his own child tongue to organise his view of the world (and of himself), and to interact with the people around him.”¹⁹ This is representation without (so much) communication.

Gunther Kress^§AS2c studied his Michael, where he traced one small step in learning to conceptualize using image, moving from the abstract to the concrete.

“Do you want to watch me? I’ll make a car … got two wheels … and two wheels at the back … and two wheels here … This is a car.”

This, Kress says, is double sign, where each of the circles means “wheel,” and more than one wheel means “car.”²⁰ In the terms we have been developing in this grammar, Michael is at once instantiating wheels and conceptualizing cars.^§MS1.1

Kress uses Saussure’s sign terminology,^§MS3d but he will also argue against Saussure. Not merely, as Saussure would have it, arbitrary, for Kress these are “motivated signs; … it is the interest of the sign-maker at the moment of making the sign that leads to the selection of the criteria for representing … ‘wheel-ness’ and ‘car-ness’.” Michael’s “interest arises out of his (physical, affective, cultural, social) position in the world at that moment, vis-à-vis the object to be represented. His sign reflects his ‘position.’ Generalising, we can say that interest at the moment of sign-making arises out of the sign-maker’s position in the world; it shapes attention; that frames a part of the world and acts as a principle for the selection of apt signifiers.”²¹

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¹⁹ M.A.K. Halliday, 1977 [2003], “Ideas About Language,” pp. 92–115 in On Language and Linguistics, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 3, edited by J.J. Webster, London: Continuum, p. 115; M.A.K. Halliday, 1975, Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language, London: Edward Arnold.

²⁰ Gunther Kress, 2003, Literacy in the New Media Age, London: Routledge, pp. 42–43.

²¹ Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge, pp. 70–71.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 194–196. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Sophia’s “Praying Mantis” §AS2a