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Interest (What is this for?)

Transformation

0.0 MARY: And now, to our last dimension of interest, transformation. We may transform the meaning of the world by seeing it in a new way. This is a transpositional process that we call parsing, making sense of the world by seeing it in a deeper or perhaps broader way. The orientation of parsing may be purely observational or ideal, as well as pushing this parsing into realms of imaginary possibility.

Then, the second aspect of transformation, to change is to act on meanings in a way that changes the world in one way or another.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 303-05.

0.49 MARY: Michel Foucault is one of the twentieth century’s greatest parsers of modern meanings. Foucault studied modern institutions: prisons, asylums and hospitals. This image is of one of his best-known objects of study, Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon,” a design for a circular prison where the guards were placed in the middle, able to see into every cell, but none of the inmates was able to see one another.

The places Foucault chose to study are all sites of forced confinement, at least compared to shopping malls or museums or neighborhoods where power is expressed in more complicated and subtle ways.

1.31 MARY: Here’s an image from Foucault’s book, “Discipline and Punish.” It’s as if this is a metaphor for power generally in modernity.

Our problem with Foucault is that this is a very limited parsing, just descriptive of one selective slice of the modern world, and without imagination of alternatives or agendas for change. This is an occupational hazard for any attempts at disinterested parsing.

Besides, digital modernity is nothing like this. In Foucault’s day, he focused on isolated, power-deprived individuals and their being watched by those positioned in centers of power—prison warders, psychiatrists, or teachers. Think of the owners of a newspaper as a paradigmatic power centers of knowledge in the era of mass media, and their program of interest that we have called assimilation.

Today in social media we have everybody looking at each other and narcissistically watching their own display, while the manipulators of programs of differentiation have slipped out of view. Think of social media, and the invisible algorithms that manipulate our thinking. Today’s world is very different from Foucault’s, which means we need to parse it differently.

3.51 MARY: Foucault came to love America for its personal and sexual freedoms. Here he is on the left with a friend on a trip to Death Valley while he was on sabbatical at the University of California, Berkeley in 1975.

Pessimistic by nature, like watching a horror movie, Foucault in his private life indulged in heavy duty sado-masochism, and we often get the sense that the constraints he places upon his parsing of the modern world is a projection of sado-masochism onto modernity. Yes, modernity is indeed painful at time, but in Bob Dylan’s words, “there must be some way out of here.”

Social science without imaginative design for better futures, and without an agenda to try out these designs in meaningful human and material reality is, we would argue, entirely unconscionable. Of course, Foucault’s eloquently written horror show is true in its narrow parsing of modernity. But without broader transpositions into a changeable world, it lacks the ethical spine we would want for social science.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 305-10.

4.07 MARY: Now, another kind of transformation. To parse is to make sense of meanings. To change is, by transposition, to act on that parsing.

And there is changing and changing. Every act of meaning is a unique redesign; every act of meaning transforms the world. But some redesigns replicate the underlying configuration of interests. Purchasing a new commodity will change your life in a little way, but it won’t change the underlying configuration of interests in the social world of commodities and the environmental world of their production.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 316-18.

4.49 MARY: Then there are changes that transform the configurations of interest in the world in small ways.

This is a picture of the club room in the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT. This is where the word “hack” was coined, by the faction of the club working on the wiring and improvised computer systems below the baseboard that controlled the trains. In model railroading, to hack is to take a commercially produced model and modify it in some way. From here, the word spread to modification of computer software. We want to appropriate this word to describe incremental change.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 324-32.

5.30 MARY: And there are big changes, transformative changes.

Here now is the image we have used for the cover of the second volume of our transpositional grammar, “Adding Sense.” It’s from Yirrkala in North East Arnhemland, Australia, by Yolŋu artist Rerrkirrwaŋa Munuŋgurr. We’ve been there a number of times for our literacy research work.

The Yolŋu have partly managed to escape the revolutionary change of life that many First Peoples have experienced with the spread of colonialism around the world. They have kept their tens of thousands of years of meaning.

The Yolŋu have a lovely concept for the unified meanings of the world, “Galtha.” This is “a connecting spot,” which might be a place, a sacred ceremony, people coming together for the preparation of bread from cycad nuts, or sitting on the ground to negotiate collective purpose. The middle area in this image is one such connecting place.

Once we appreciate how differently the Yolŋu configured the meanings of the world in their relationships between each other and within nature, we may come to realize that we humans have made big changes in the conditions of our existence, and this means that we can make changes this big again.

And surely, parsing the world must tell us that transformative change is needed.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 332-35.