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Context (What else is this connected to?)

Materialization

0.0 MARY: Context is what surrounds an act or artifact of meaning. Meanings only make sense in terms of the context.

First, materialization, what is the manner of their referring? Is the immediate meaning like its referent, does it point us to its referent, or does it mean what it does as a matter of abstract conventionality?

Next, participation, in what way is the agent of meaning participating in the meaning process, by meaning to themselves by way of representation, by communicating with others, or by interpretation of a communicated meaning for themselves?

Where, practically speaking, is a meaning positioned in time and space?

What media does it use – the raw resources pulled from the material world and fashioned into a meaning?

Then, how is a meaning associated with others – by juxtaposition, by being within another meaning, or by being a causal aspect of another meaning.

And finally, how are meanings like each other, historical novels, for instance, or mosques or apple pies? We call this last aspect of context, “genre.”

These are huge questions, so huge in fact that it takes us half a book to explore them, the second volume in our transpositional grammar, and even then, we feel we have barely begun to scratch the surface.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 21-22.

1.48 MARY: To start with materialization, I want to explore three primary ways in which meanings connect to context, three fundamental transpositions. Here, we want to rework and extend some ideas that have a long history in the discipline of semiotics.

2.06 MARY: First, I want to you to meet Victoria Welby, a great and sadly neglected founder of semiotics.

MARY: She just signs herself off “V,” in order not to be dismissed as a woman. The Victoria of her “V” was because she was named after Queen Victoria – the Queen in fact was her godmother, and later the younger Victoria became one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting—her full name was Lady Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Welby, but that wouldn’t do for a book on semiotics. However, just like the great computer scientist, Ada Lovelace, the few women who managed to live and document intellectual lives in recent centuries were mostly able to do so in the leisure of the ruling class.

Victoria Welby makes some distinctions that resonate with ours in this grammar. Welby’s main concepts are sense, meaning, significance and inter-translation. Welby’s “sense” is more or less our reference; “meaning,” more or less our agency and structure; “significance,” more or less our context and interest; and “inter-translation,” more or less our notion of transposition.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 22-24.

3.31 MARY: Welby begins a correspondence with the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. In fact, this correspondence becomes one of the main ways in which this other great semiotician eventually comes to be more widely known. Peirce thought Welby’s work was enormously important, and in some key respects, he recognized that she had reached the same insights he had.

3.55 MARY: Here’s a diagram representing some of Peirce’s key ideas. Between the object being represented and its representation, there are three cardinal relations: icon, index and symbol. We rename and slightly reframe these as three kinds of materialization: likeness, directedness, and abstraction.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 24-27.

4.19 MARY: By materialization, we mean that meanings are remade via one of these three processes of transposition—likeness, directedness and abstraction.

In text, some written words represent sounds—“whosh,” “bang” and such like. Many Unicode characters are pictures of what they are representing, most emojis for example. These are likenesses.

Directedness points to things, outward from the text in the case of proper nouns, or inward across a text in the case of pronouns referring to already-mentioned persons and deictics like the word “this.”

Abstraction is the arbitrary or purely conventional expression of 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. 31-32.

5.09 MARY: Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of modern linguistics, says that signifieds have arbitrary and so purely conventional relations to signifiers. “Dog” only refers to a kind of animal by convention in English, “skili” by convention in Greek. This is just an abstraction, where “bark” in the sentence “The dog barks” sits in connected contrast to “dog.” We can afford to stay inside the language system to make sense of this sentence. But he doesn’t have a very satisfactory account of words where the meaning depends on things outside of the system—“woof” by likeness, and “here” by way of directness when we say “the dog is here.”

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. 266-68.

5.58 MARY: One of the interesting phenomena of the digital era is the increasing use of likenesses in text. One example of this is the reliance of ideographs in text. Here are the very first emojis, created by Bruce Parello, a student working on the PLATO IV e-learning system at the University of Illinois in 1972.

6.22 MARY: And here are one hundred and seventy-six emojis designed by Shigetaka Kurita and made available on mobile phones by the Japanese telephone company NTT in 1999. Today, many more ideographs in Unicode than phonemes, and the majority of these are likenesses.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 33-34.

6.47 BILL: Now to image, because we want to be able to demonstrate parallels in the processes of materialization of meaning across the different forms.

6.54 BILL: Here’s a realistic image, its meaning is the similarity with an identifiable person. This is a self-portrait by the great abstract expressionist artist, Lee Krasner, painted in the 1930s. Her person her is materialized as likeness.

7.08 BILL: And here she is working in her studio thirty years later, where this image captures certain lines of directedness, the movement of her body, the “this”-ness of and “here-ness” of the artist’s body in relation to the size and shapes of the painting.

7.28 BILL: Now here is this painting, Portrait in “Portrait in Green” of 1966, in the center, in the distance - one of her famously abstract-expressionist paintings in a retrospective of her work. But abstraction seems to demand multimodal explanation, hence the large stretch of writing on the wall on the right, and a photo showing the artist’s message, as if the sweep of her arm as an important part of the meaning in the making of the work.

8.00 BILL: Abstractions are meanings that are not obvious in the manner of likeness and directedness. They are that by convention (as in the case of the word “dog”), or leave a lot of space for the viewer to interpret the meaning. Or they need some hints that may in fact point the viewer to likeness – if you work hard you may be able to see a person in “Portrait in Green,” in which case the meaning is in the transposition, in the movement from what is initially an abstraction without conventional likeness, to seeing a likeness.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31-33.

8.40 BILL: And another example: object.

8.43 BILL: Here I am going to take an example which has tortured Christian theology for nearly two millennia, the meaning of the eucharist. This is a picture of John Wyclif, fourteenth century religious reformer. Was the bread and wine of the communion service really the body and blood and Christ?

For hundreds of years Catholics had said, yes it was. They called this “transubstantiation” – when the priest rings the bell, the bread becomes the body of Christ and the wine the blood. Of course, it’s not the same time, place, and taste. But a likeness has in that moment been materialized.

Wycliff disagreed – he thought the bread and wine were not really likenesses; they only pointed in the direction of Christ’s crucifiction. Later the protestants were to push this further, and to say that the bread and wine are just symbols, abstractions. These may well be just as meaningful, but the manner of the materialization of Christ’s suffering in the eucharist for each kind of supplicant is quite fundamentally different.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 35-37.

9.58 BILL: And now a body example. We can create bodily likenesses—actors do it all the time. Some of our most ubiquitous gestures are examples of directedness, pointing or gesturing someone to move on. Other gestures are purely abstract, such as nodding yes, or a thumbs-up.

10.14 BILL: Here are three unnamed Anindilyakwa men, photographed with anthropologist Fred Rose on Groote Elyandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. Rose was studying Anindilyakwa kin classification, which as he soon discovered, is incredibly complicated.

10.30 BILL: Here are some of the research results from Rose’s collaboration with the Anindilyakwa, a diagrammatic representation of embodied kin abstractions. Every time one Anindilyakwa person saw another person, they saw a complex web of relations, far more complex in their rule- and role-bound relations than our scrappy ragbag of Facebook friends, more complex even than the fancy algorithms which sort them for you into your activity streams.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 42-47.

10.01 BILL: And a final example, sounds. Likeness is to imitate a sound, or play a recording. Directedness is to heed a siren, or respond to an alert on a phone. Abstractions is the feeling of a blues riff, or the sound track of a scary movie.

The reason why we have run through these examples is to show they ways in which, in a multimodal grammar, we can apply a shared language of materialization. Of course, the process of materialization is different for each form, which is why we live our meaning-lives multimodally.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 108-10.

11.34 BILL: I want to end with the question of the meanings made by all sentient creatures. Here is researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh working with Kanzi, a bonobo who managed to learn to manipulate abstract symbols to a remarkable degree.

Without doubt, all sentient creatures mean with likeness and directedness. But to what extent can they also mean abstractly? Some say this is a special human attribute, to connect arbitrary and conventional signs with meaning. But Kanzi managed it.

Abstractions are meanings that only make sense by conventional agreement. Theorists who focus on language think this is what makes it special, and makes humans special too. We don’t agree - all materializations of meaning are equally important to our human lives, likeness and directedness as well. And humans are not the only creatures to make meaning.

If we can stop privileging language, and if we can stop wanting to disconnect language from its reality, then sentience becomes the most spiritual achievement of nature, not the way we happen to make meaning in our ego-centered species.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 38-41.

Context - Materialization