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Benjamin’s convolutes were, by accident of genocide, never synthesized into a book. In the Arcades Project, we are left with the contiguities of a card index, each card distinct but left at one place in the convolute according to its rough-best fit. The space of the supermarket and the medium of the card index demand selection of a single location – physically, practically. In ordinary life, the meaning connections are of course much less definitive than the logic of singular contiguity that such spaces and media practically demand.

In sifting through the ways meanings of ordinary life are expressed, this book creates the same oversimplifications as the supermarket or card index. Our medium demands that we put things alongside each other. The best we can do is throw things together into a rough-best fit. So, in our five parts about meaning functions (Fig. 0d(i)), we put reference beside agency, agency beside structure, structure beside context, and context beside interest. All five always happen together, but to make the analytical distinctions we have to discuss one at a time. Each of these pairs seems, more or less, to go together, though there are a myriad of cross-connections.

Meaning Functions

Reference

Agency

Structure

Context

Interest

Fig. 0d(i): Meaning functions

This book is organized around these meaning functions, which is why the meaning forms (text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech) are mixed up across the parts of this book, appearing as exemplifications of the meaning functions in the five parts (Fig. 0d(ii)). We might have also sorted them into supermarket order, and if we had, we would have placed text beside image, image beside space, space beside object, object beside body, body beside sound, sound beside speech – this is the way we organized the Literacies book.²⁹ There, we deliberately put speech a long way away from text – and we do this again now – if only to make a point contrary to much conventional wisdom, that these two modes are as different from each other as any of the meaning forms. In fact, in important respects, text is more like image (it is image) which is close to space; and speech is more like sound (it is sound) which is close to body.

Meaning Forms

Text

Image

Space

Object

Body

Sound

Speech

Fig. 0d(ii):Meaning forms

These seven meaning forms support representation (making sense to oneself) and communication (making sense to others). They are the stuff of representation and communication. They render, they embody, they express, meanings. To render is to make manifest, in the mind or using media. Meaning forms are renderings of our thinking, or resources for thinking. They are forms of action. They are kinds of work, mental and physical. They are objects that we make in material or mental reality, at the same time as they are expressions of our will and identities as subjects.

Then there are the processes of transposition that tie forms and functions together. Meanings can be re-represented and re-communicated across the different forms, though never in the same way – this is why we must have multimodality.

And functions are simultaneous, kinds of attention to meaning that are always open to transposition, one perspective on meaning for one moment, then another for a different moment. Then, within each of the functions, meanings are always ready to move. For example: a single instance is always ready for transposition when classified into a multiplicity captured by concepts;^§MS1.1 or “I” transposes for “you”^§MS2.2 in the case of empathy.^§AS2.5b

More than ready, meanings beg transposition. This is written into their nature.

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²⁹ Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Eveline Chan, and Leanne Dalley-Trim, 2016, Literacies (Edn 2), Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 18-19.

Supermarket Order §0d