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In the work of meaning-making, “the rhetor as maker of a message … makes an assessment of all aspects of the communicational situation: of her or his interest; of the characteristics of the audience; the semiotic requirements of the issue at stake and the resources available for making an apt representation.” This encompasses not just speaking and writing, but image-making, embodied gesture, spatial and object representations, and communication, perhaps in “YouTube, Facebook, but also non-legitimated sites such as those created by graffito artists.”²⁸

Agency is established between socially-sourced conventions of meaning and the expressed interest of the meaning-maker, between system-structure and rhetoric-function. In drawing upon available designs for meaning, then in redesigning meanings to express their own representational, communicative, and interpretative interests, rhetors find themselves “uneasily hovering between regularity and repeatability on the one hand – the effect of social stabilities and of regulations erected around text to keep them close to ‘convention’ – and the dynamic for constant flux and change on the other.”²⁹

Even the most ordinary social encounter is never entirely predictable; it is always new in some way, however slight, so that the “accommodations” produced in any encounter are always new in some way. They project social possibilities and potentials which differ, even if slightly, from what there had been before the encounter. As a consequence, the semiotic work of interaction is always socially productive, projecting and proposing possibilities of social and semiotic forms, entities and processes which reorient, refocus, and “go beyond,” by extending and transforming what there was before the interaction …

[E]very event of communication is in principle unpredictable in its form, structure and in its “unfolding.” The absence of secure frames requires of each participant in an interaction that they assess, on each occasion, the social environment, the social relations which obtain in it and the resources available for shaping the communicational encounter. This demands a rhetorical approach to communication.³⁰

In 1994, we had some funds left over from the research we had been doing on workplace literacies. We felt that although we had made progress in an earlier conversation about language conventions clustered around the term “genre,”³¹ our thinking had become overly formalized in its emphasis on structure and convention. So, we brought together three of the former Sydney genre group (Gunther Kress and us) with seven others who had shown interest in this work,^§MS0.0 but who had nevertheless expressed ambivalences – divergent interests of a potentially productive kind: Courtney Cazden,^§AS1.4.1c Norman Fairclough, Jim Gee,^§AS1.4.3f Allan Luke, Carmen Luke, Sarah Michaels and Martin Nakata.

New London, New Hampshire, is a quaint New England town. It was far enough away for us to have an uninterrupted week of discussions, roughly at a mid-point between our geographically disparate locations. By this time Gunther had moved to take up a position at the Institute of Education, London University – old London, old England – and we had moved to James Cook University in North Queensland.

GK I would like now to see the subject at the centre of the theory of representation, the subject is socially constructed, socially located in social and cultural interactions … I mean, here is a human being … and that’s for me the centre of it … I think the theory of … representation needs to have a human agentive social subject at the centre … The individual makes his or her own subjectivity in the context of available resources, which is a sort of paradox between subjectivity [and conventionality] … [M]y reading happens from the point of a particular social interest so that the reading of the semiotic world is already an act of transformation, that is, in the reading of this world through my particular interests and my available resources I transform [that world] …

MK I still like the notion we used to talk about, lifeworlds, and I think they’re important …

GK You used to say, a long time ago in Australia, and I picked it up and have used it, the term “sociality.” … [Y]ou talked about schools in Australia, in Sydney, where there is no commonality in terms of cultural contents; … all there is, I think you said, are ways of being together, pleasantly, humanly, I mean that’s a sort of a brilliant form of being, forms of social living.³²

By the end of that week, the conversation had been summed up in a word, “Multiliteracies.” Then came an article in the Harvard Educational Review, and a book, then more,³³ and now this.

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²⁸ Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge, pp. 26–27.

²⁹ Gunther Kress, 2003, Literacy in the New Media Age, London: Routledge, p. 102.

³⁰ Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge, pp. 34, 26.

³¹ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 1993, The Powers of Literacy: Genre Approaches to Teaching Writing, London, UK: Falmer Press and Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

³² Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2013, “On Transformations: Reflections on the Work of, and Working with, Gunther Kress,” pp. 16–32 in Multimodality and Social Semiosis: Communication, Meaning-Making and Learning in the Work of Gunther Kress, edited by M. Böck and N. Pachler, London: Routledge.

³³ New London Group, 1996, “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” Harvard Educational Review 66(1):60–92; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 2000, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, London: Routledge; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2009, “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning,” Pedagogies: An International Journal 4:164–95; Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Eveline Chan, and Leanne Dalley-Trim, 2016, Literacies (Edn 2), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; James Paul Gee, 2017, “A Personal Retrospective on the New London Group and Its Formation,” pp. 32–45 in Remixing Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice from New London to New Times, edited by F. Serfini and E. Gee, New York: Teachers College Press.

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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. 198–200. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Gunther Kress on Interest and Rhetoric §AS2c