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This is work we have undertaken at times with Kress, or in parallel with his work.³

Fig. 0.1: Meaning forms

In this grammar, we stay with Michael Halliday’s notion of metafunction, as does Kress,⁴ though we simply name its components “functions,” modifying and extending the theory somewhat. In our exploration of multimodality, we also want to stay faithful to the new tradition Kress has established, pushing Halliday’s approach beyond speech and text. However, at various points we find ourselves revising the terminology of multimodality and reconsidering details in its ways of thinking and seeing.

So why describe the constituent components of multimodality as “meaning forms” rather than modes? While there is wide agreement in the literature that multimodality is an important focus for analysis, particularly in the era of digital media, there is little agreement about the conceptualization of modes. In Kress, modes are what you will have them to be: photography or layout; image or language.⁵ Hartmut Stöckl says mode is a “rather heterogenous concept,” with at least three strands of meaning: organized code systems such as music, image, and language; channels of sensory perception defined by visual, auditive, tactile, olfactory, and gustative signs; and media determinations, of which printed poster, podcast, or recorded music might be examples.⁶ Jay Lemke says we “ought to question whether the division of meaning-making into language, gesture, drawing, action etc. is not mostly artificial.”⁷

However, delineation of what we now call forms of meaning is for us an important task. For instance, a central question: Is language a meaning form with a unitary character, or are text (closely allied with image and space) and speech (closely allied with sound and body) different meaning forms – as different from each other as text is from image or space and speech is from sound or body? The multimodality literature points us towards this question, but the blurry elisions that come with the word “mode” do not allow the kinds of conceptual distinction that we need to make before we can attempt an answer.

“Mode,” moreover, means something rather different in Halliday’s scheme from the new literature on multimodality – it is an again rather vaguely and inconsistently specified “role … being played by language and other semiotic systems in a situation.” It includes a peculiar mix of things such as rhetorical orientation and turn-taking, for instance monologue or dialogue.⁸

“Mode” in ordinary language also tends to mean quite different things. It can mean media, process, or method – three more, distinct meanings. This lack of conceptual clarity is the reason we prefer to call the different aspects of multimodality meaning forms, rather than modes.

In support of “form,” there is a neat contrast of form with function. This is occasionally taken up in linguistics. Canale and Swain and then Calderon and Cummins distinguish between language teaching that focuses on the forms of language (learning the rules of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis) and the communicative or functional approaches to language-in-use that they advocate in their applied linguistics.⁹ We extend this distinction to other forms of meaning, but not to favor one side of the dichotomy over the other.

Besides, the term “form” has a long and storied history in philosophy and the social sciences, evolving through series of distinctions that we believe are helpful in the work of tracing patterns in meaning. This history is without doubt fraught, but the ways in which it is fraught are themselves revelatory. If we work through the contentious alternatives the term raises, we can reach a point where we have a useful tool for analyzing this dimension of meaning.

Plato was first. We inhabit an imperfect and unreliably varied and uncertain material world, he said, and the task of philosophy is to determine essential and eternal meanings – ideas or forms – “that which essentially is: … the Beautiful, Good …, Bigness, Health, Strength.”

Says Plato’s interlocutor, Socrates, “he who will do this most perfectly, who approaches the object with thought alone, … tries to track down reality pure and by itself … because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth.” For “the soul reasons best when none of the … senses troubles it, neither hearing, nor pain, nor sight nor pleasure, but when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact with it in its search for reality … Philosophy … persuades the soul to withdraw from the senses.”¹⁰

When it comes to writing, it is the very materiality of its form that dooms it to inadequacy. Those who “put trust in writing” fall prey to “forgetfulness into the soul” because it is “external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.”¹¹ Unmediated, pure thought works from mind, not media. It is wholly cognitive, without material distraction.

In the philosophical split between idealism and materialism,^§MS3.1 Plato is unabashedly an idealist. However, to achieve his idealism he needs a dualistic conception of the world that recognizes the pervasive – albeit, in his conception, corrupting – presence of the materialized meanings. He needs to be a dualist in order to be able to favor one side over the other, to prioritize the ideal form over its material manifestations and sensible apprehensions.

Vilém Flusser calls this kind of contempt for the raw, resistant world, the “Platonic prejudice.”¹² Gilles Deleuze^§MS3.1.1b criticizes the “Platonic motivation: to distinguish essence from appearance, intelligible from sensible, Idea from image, original from copy, and model from simulacrum. Copies are … well-founded pretenders, guaranteed by resemblance; simulacra are like false pretenders, built upon a dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion or a deviation.”¹³

Later and still in the idealist mold, Immanuel Kant^§MS3.3e follows Plato’s notion of idea or form, where pure intellectual intuition represents “maximum perfection” in an elevated place of philosophical thinking, and where “the principle of cognition” is “exempt from the laws of the senses.”¹⁴ Kant makes a distinction here between empirical and pure concepts. “The pure concept, in so far as it has its origin in the understanding alone (not in the pure image of sensibility), is called a notion. A concept formed from notions and transcending the possibility of experience is an idea or concept of reason.”¹⁵ So, form is the categorical ideal, and Kant places this at the center of his system of reason.

Flusser and Deleuze are just two in a long line of the materialist critics of Platonic forms and their derivatives. Of course, we must join them. The ideal and the sensuously material are immanent in each other. They are not opposites where one side is to be prioritized over the other as a site of essential meaning.

However, in the millennia-long discussion of form, some distinctions emerge that are worth maintaining in a theory of meaning. This grammar contains many refractions of the form/sensuous matter distinction, principally in contrast of form with medium^§AS1.4 made in our theory of context, where form is the shaping and patterning of meaning offered by their material realizability in textual, imaged, spaced, objectified, embodied, sounded, and spoken artifacts of meaning – the affordances of these media. Form is the meaning that can be made. Medium is the stuff from which the meaning has been made. Medium determines the scope for meanability that is form.

Another refraction of form in this grammar is the play of the ideal (now close to Plato’s sense of form, but without his one-sided favoring) and the material that in tandem constitutes structure.^§MS3.1 Another: between meanings-in (systemic patterning as forms) and meanings-for (meanings put to work in their messy variability).^§MS0.3.3 And another: designs (the forms of patterning, conventional by virtue of their repeatability) and designing (their uniquely voiced and never-repeatable reconstruction).^§MS3.2 Still another: concepts in their criterial generality and instances in their unique specificity.^§MS1.1

If the first half of these theoretical contrasts resonates with form and the second part with matter, these remain Platonic distinctions. But for us, these contrasts must be accompanied by foundational disagreements with their originator: neither can be prior, either in terms of process or in its explanatory power. Nor can they be these dualisms. They are immanences, the one impossible to mean without the other.

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² Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge.

³ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 2000, Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, London: Routledge; Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Eveline Chan, and Leanne Dalley-Trim, 2016, Literacies (Edn 2), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

⁴ Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge.

⁵ Gunther Kress, 2014. “What Is Mode?” pp. 60–75 in The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, edited by C. Jewitt, London: Routledge, p. 65.

⁶ Hartmut Stöckl, 2014, “Semiotic Paradigms and Multimodality,” pp. 274–86 in ibid., pp. 276–77.

⁷ Jay Lemke, 2014, “Multimodality, Identity, Time,” pp. 165–75 in ibid., p. 166.

⁸ M.A.K. Halliday and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, 2014, Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (Edn 4), Milton Park: Routledge, pp. 33–34.

⁹ Michael Canale and Merrill Swain, 1980, “Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing,” Applied Linguistics 1:1–47; Margarita Calderon and Jim Cummins, 1982, “Communicative Competence in Bilingual Education, Theory and Research, Packet I: Language Proficiency Acquisition, Assessment, and Communicative Behavior, Series B, Teacher Edition,” Bilingual Education Teacher Training Packets, Dallas, TX: Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center, Dallas Independent School District.

¹⁰ Plato, c.399–347 BCE [1997], “Phaedo,” in Complete Works, edited by J.M. Cooper, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 57, 72.

¹¹ Ibid., pp. 551–52.

¹² Vilém Flusser, 1991 [2014], Gestures, translated by N.A. Roth, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 47, 43.

¹³ Gilles Deleuze, 1969 [1990], The Logic of Sense, translated by M. Lester, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 256.

¹⁴ Immanuel Kant, 1770 [1894], Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, translated by W.J. Eckoff, New York: Columbia College, pp. 55, 77.

¹⁵ Immanuel Kant, 1787 [1933], Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N.K. Smith, London: Macmillan, p. 314.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Meaning Form §AS0.1