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Agency (Who or What is doing this?)

Role

0.0 BILL: The action taking place in any event involves roles. Here we classify three main roles as “self,” or the agent from their own perspective, “other,” people or sentient actors incidentally addressed, and “things,” or inanimate objects.

0.32 BILL: Let’s focus first on functional transposition, represented in our grammar diagram on the vertical axis. And let’s consider the speaking “I.” The first person in a conversation is an embodied self, me speaking. This role we call “self.” Others are the person with whom I am speaking (you) and people not with us about whom we are speaking. This “other” may include creatures whose sentience we humans recognize – pets, for instance, or wild animals, or insects. Note how closely speech is related to body, our bodily positions in relation to each other, and our gesticulations. Speech is always multimodal.

This seems straightforward, what could be more distinct and more separate than you and me and them? But in a transpositional grammar, we start to notice that these are in fact relationships that are in constant movement.

1.32 BILL: When we are speaking, I am a “you,” and you are an “I.” In our minds we are always swapping things out like this – when you say “I,” it means you to you, and I when I say “you,” it means I to you. The meaning in the conversation is the swapping out, the transposition. Learning a new language means being able to make these elementary transpositions in a fluent way.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 212-14.

2.11 BILL: I want to give you another example of functional transposition, how self and other are so very interconnected.

Let’s say you are telling me of your pain, and I feel for you. I am in a way becoming you, I have a feeling inside me that is like the feeling you are expressing.

2.27 BILL: Or I am watching a movie where the main character is experiencing pain, so much so that it makes me cry. These are transpositions in which the meaning self puts itself in the position of an other.

2.44 BILL: This is a transposition we call “empathy,” an idea theorized by the great philosopher of meaning, Edith Stein.

Form to form, I actually feel for what the other person, from what they are saying in a conversation or situation of the character in the movie. Function to function I am transposing self and other. The meaning is not in our totally separate persons, but in our sociable sharing of meaning. Of course your real pain and my empathized pain are not the same, and the actor is playing through pain which is not their own, but of an idealized person. Your pain is real, mine and the actor’s are idealized. But by empathy, the real and the ideal connect.

These are just some of the ways, in which, by transposition of other with self, we experience shared meaning.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 312-16.

3.49 BILL: I also want to mention here, in the process of role transposition, this is another place where text and speech are so very different. The self and the other of a conversation is present, but the I in a text is distant, which means it that although the “I” of reported speech would have been a self for a participant in reported dialogue, it is actually an “other” for a reader.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 212-14.

4.11 MARY: Now I want to look at role transpositions in image. Picturing is about getting someone else to see something in a way similar to you. From the artist’s perspective, they want to transpose the other’s eye, the viewer’s eye, with their own. From the viewer’s perspective, they are seeing something as if they were the artist. But what the artist and the viewer see can never be quite the same, even though we can trace a relation. That relation is transposition. I want to talk about how some of the ways this happens.

4.46 MARY: Here’s the first known image of Mary, mother of Christ, a sixth century icon form Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert, Egypt. It’s not very three dimensional. There are only two planes, one for Mary and one for the two angels looking up for the hand of God. There are some shadows on the faces.

Now, I want to show you how the impression of three dimensionality evolves in western imaging by showing you three more Marys.

5.23 MARY: Here is Cimabue’s Santa Trinita Madonna of about 1290, on display today in the Uffici Gallery in Florence. Now, there are many planes, and the architectural frame is three dimensional.

5.37 MARY: Next, also in the Uffici, Giotto di Bondone Madonna of 1310. Mary has gained a more human body – we can see the shape of her breasts and the shadows in the folds of her clothing. Her face is more realistic.

5.52 MARY: … and finally, our fourth Mary, Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna of the Book of 1482. This feels like a much more realistic image of Mary than the first of these four images, the sixth century icon. This two dimensional image depicts a three dimensional world of space (inside the room/the world outside the window), and everyday objects (the bowl of flowers, the book lying on its side on the shelf). The shelves recede into the corner of the room.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-16, 222.

6.28 MARY: One of the main changes across these Marys is the development of linear perspective, where the distance recedes across an infinite progression of planes. This is one of the ways in which a 3D world is transposed into 2D image.

Here is a panel created between 1425–1452 by the goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti for the doors of the baptistry of di San Giovanni in Florence. The panels depict in relief Old Testament scenes. You can see these wonderful doors today in the Museum of the Duomo in Florence. This is a foundational work in the development of linear perspective. The depth effect is created by making things in the background smaller than things in the foreground. Look at the arches.

Ghilberti theorized his art and the art of others in his “Commentarii.” Referring to the baptistery doors he said, “I strove to observe every measure of proportion, seeking the closest possible imitation of nature... The ﬁgures are relieved against the planes so that the nearer ﬁgures appear larger than those further out, just as they are in reality.”

7.51 MARY: Architect Filippo Brunelleschi was a contemporary of Ghiberti’s. Here is a depiction of his 1425 demonstration outside the Florence Baptistery. Using a canvas with a peephole and a mirror, he showed the diminishing size of the walls of the building the more distant they became. The central point in a hypothetical distance was the “vanishing point,” a centering line of sight oriented to the horizon. The relative sizes of seen objects could be ﬁgured mathematically.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 217-18.

8.29 MARY: Scholars today think this may not have been such an original idea, because these principles had already been figured out mathematically by the Arab thinker Alhazen nearly five hundred years before in his Book of Optics – the Florentines had a translation of this book available to them.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 222-24.

8.51 MARY: My point is this – realism is an invention. From form to form, realistic images create the effect of seeing a 3D world on a 2D plane. We think it is realistic, but if we look up, we would discover that vertical lines recede as well – but if we do that, it will look like buildings are falling down, and columns we know are straight. This is also one-eyed vision, and we discover that as soon as we put on the viewing glasses for 3D imaging. And our field of vision is round, clear in the middle and blurry on the outside. So realistic images give us an impression that is not true to reality as we see it. Realistic images are in fact an altered reality, and realism is a visual trick, an optical illusion.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 218-22.

9.48 MARY: Now I want to speak about the transposition on the functional plane with realistic imaging, in this case photography. Here is a wonderful photo of the great philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1946. We have a complicated succession of self-other transpositions here. His eye has become your eye – the picture is taken at the height of his head, looking at his subject, and her eye is, we might assume, or we might assume the photographer assumes, looking into some kind of philosophical distance.

The camera never lies, but of course it always does, because the truth of the photograph is the thing that it shows, or not only that, it is the self-I in the form of the seeing-eye of the photographer transposed into a scene. And now you, the viewer, are transposing yourself into that photographer’s eye, that other self.

This is how we use a transpositional grammar to parse these movements. The meaning of these roles is in the moves they make, each role begging to be swapped out with the another.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 228-34.