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Fig. 2.4(i): Measures of sociability in the expression of interest

The disjunctions of interest are always there. However, some disjunctions are complementary, others antagonistic. Some are explicit (rhetorics, denotations), others implicit in things and states of affairs (reifications, connotations). What seems or is made to seem solidary (rhetorical alignments and activations in states of affairs) can be antagonistic in fact (rhetorical realignments and reifications that alienate).

Such functional transpositions of meaning are always ready to happen, juxtaposed as they are in the metaphorical supermarket^§MS0d of meaning functions. They are imminent because they are immanent. Their immanence makes them imminent.

It follows also that any momentary occlusions are always ready to be revealed for what they are. Meanings that are hidden, surreptitiously or not-so surreptitiously favoring some interests at the expense of others, can always be exposed. In a transpositional grammar, so can the manner of their hiding.

Here now is a rough map of some indicators of solidary and antagonistic interests across the various forms of meaning:

Fig. 2.4(ii): Solidary and antagonistic interests

In the preceding sections of this book we have looked at shopping and commodities. The ones that now follow are on money and markets. However, we could have taken for our examples any number of other equally expansive and fraught meanings – “race,” “gender,” “environment,” or such like. Each of these examples may have yielded meanings just as complex, just as significant in our lives, and at times just as misleading. The commodity is just one site of sociability around states of affairs and their meanings, albeit a centrally important one in modernity given its elemental meaning in the market, and its relations to the meanings of waged work, shopping, and a panoply of other “economic” as well as social things. Insofar as it is just one of a number of possible examples, the commodity merely serves us as an illustration, allowing us to demonstrate a method with which to parse the multimodal relations of differential interests.

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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. 274–276. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Sociability §AS2.4