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Gérard’s mother had mistaken her husband for a stranger who needed impressing. We laugh at her misconstrual in one moment, and for her “correct” construal in another. The play of interactivity in agency in the routine of house entry works perfectly well when her bourgeois friend arrives. Her earlier misconstrual was in the context of ellipses in meaning.^§MS2.1.2a

When the uncle brings Gérard home from school one day, his sister is entertaining the bourgeois friend. The gate-opening routine is one thing, but M. Hurlot takes fright at the fish-fountain, fleeing the house and its modernity.

Today, we might have an intercom or a camera at the door to avoid such mistakes. In this case, the mistake when her husband came home was caused by limitations she experienced in the affordances of space, object, and body. “The door opened” – in speech, we have problems with ellipses in meaning. Gérard’s mother had different kinds of problem in the multimodal event of opening her modernist compound.

If we need to know more about something so straightforward – and problematic for the construal of meaning both in speech and space/object/body – if we need to recover further meaning, today we can, and to an unprecedented degree because so much of ordinary life today is incidentally recorded. We live in a future that not even Jacques Tati could have imagined.

Here, for the twenty-first century, is a rough typology of “smart locks”: RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) locks trigger door opening from a fob on a keyring; Bluetooth enabled locks allow you to open a door from a phone; biometric entry uses a fingerprint or iris recognition.⁹³ We always know who is at the door – or whether the person is a stranger – because these locks are linked to definitive instantiations of this door and that person via unique identifiers, such as a GMail address in the case of locks connected to a Google account or the number of a smartphone.

Then, we can supplement this information coming from our doors with indoor navigation, leveraging smart phones and security systems to track and record movements in finely granular detail.⁹⁴ Smart cameras can recognize people and follow their movements in real time. Comprehensive real-time transmission of activity is possible, and historical records are stored using Google Home or Apple HomeKit.

Nest IQ is connected with Google:

Nest Cam IQ is a best-in-class indoor security camera with top-of-its-class brains. Get an alert when Nest Cam IQ spots a person. Open the Nest app to follow them as they walk across the room, then grab their attention with the built-in speaker and mic. It’s a sharper way to look after home.⁹⁵

In an earlier modernity speech was mostly ephemeral. Writing and drawing were the primary technologies for retaining meanings across time and space. And then there were the necessary and unnecessary but deliberate ellipses in writing. In the twenty-first century everything can be continuously “written,” to speak metaphorically of persistent multimodal recording. In the past, we were captive to fallible memories of having seen and the spoken hearsay of witnesses.

Today, in the era of the Internet of Things,^§MS1.1.1g multimodal meanings are recorded incidental to experience. The vast bulk of this is quite unnecessarily recorded, only to be recovered from the digital archive with the benefit of hindsight – to trace the identity and actions of an intruder, for instance. The ellipses of speech and the unreliability of memory make speech and memory less significant for our recovery of meaning.

Any of these technologies would have avoided Gérard’s mother’s error of construal. She was fumbling part way along the journey of modernity, and we can laugh at that.

Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hurlot would have taken even greater fright today – as did KiloSierraAlpha, a web reviewer of Nest Cam IQ:

1984 Camera. Stay creepy Google! There isn’t a company I trust less.

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⁹³ www.safewise.com/resources/electronic-door-locks-buyers-guide

⁹⁴ Davide Carboni, Andrea Manchinu, Valentina Marotto, Andrea Piras, and Alberto Serra, 2015, “Infrastructure-Free Indoor Navigation: A Case Study,” Journal of Location Based Services 9(1):33–54. doi: 10.1080/17489725.2015.1027751.

⁹⁵ www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C0V9d6HVRo

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 202-204. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle §MS2.1.2b