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Fig. 1.4: Medium

Medium is the Latin noun for middle, and mediare the verb, to occupy a middle position – hence “mediate.” In modern English usage, Raymond Williams points out, media and mediation can mean three quite different kinds of between-ness: tools for communication in the sense of transmission of meaning,^§AS1.2.2 interpretation,^§AS1.2.3 and rhetorical appeal,^§AS2.1 directing meaning to the communicator’s interest; or when interests obviously diverge, intercession with a view to reconciliation of antagonistic positions.²⁰⁴ Or another three, this time in Galloway, Thacker, and Wark: media as exegesis (purporting); media as hermeneutics (interpretation); media as symptomatics (what is missing).²⁰⁵

Friedrich Kittler says that philosophers since Aristotle have tended to ignore their media, as if they were transparent.²⁰⁶ To avoid this error, he arrives at a media determinism: “the only thing that can be known about the soul or the human are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time.”²⁰⁷ Or, in the famous formula of Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message.²⁰⁸

Then there is mediation on mediation: “transmediation” (Elleström), when media content is mediated for a second or third time;²⁰⁹ or “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin), when one medium is represented in another.²¹⁰

Ease of mechanical reproducibility of media in the industrial era, says Walter Benjamin,^§MS0b both reduces the aura of authenticity in art (the presence of a stage actor, versus the film actor, for instance,) while at the same time making its depths accessible to the masses.²¹¹

The effect of media, says John Peters, is that they have at once “extended and handicapped the human sensorium.” Radio, for instance, freed speech, allowing it to span space, but with the deletion of vision. The gramophone freed sound, allowing it to span time, but with the deletion of embodied presence. The extensions are created “by recording media that compress time, and by transmitting media that compress space.”²¹² The deletions give shape to the arts and sciences of media practice.

Sometimes the lossiness of media are as meaningful as their gains – the poignancy and power of the medium. The constraint can be generative: the metric line of iambic hexameter, for instance, or the two-dimensional oils-on-canvas, stilled to a moment and confined within the edges of the frame. The technique and the art are in the taming of the medium, the domestication of its constraints. The closures and openings of media are their “affordances.”

Psychologist James Gibson coined the word “affordance,” an idea that is critical to our understanding of the ways in which meaning forms are shaped by the materiality of their media. His work was at an elemental, creaturely level: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.”²¹³ They are the bases of systematic action, for good in the example of objects that afford walking-on or sitting-on, or avoidance of ill in the case of “visual cliffs”.²¹⁴ Gibson is a radical empiricist in the Lockean mold,^§MS1.3a perhaps even more radically so. We have become what the world of our affordances has allowed.²¹⁵

However, for all the sway of the material that we must of course acknowledge, we also want to recognize the co-presence of the ideal, as the non-stereotypical Locke would, too.

In this grammar, we propose text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech as distinct meaning systems, operating simultaneously across all five meaning functions: reference, agency, structure, context, and interest. When it comes to media, we are interested in examining the affordances for meaning offered by the necessarily material manifestations of these forms. Gunther Kress calls these “resources for meaning.”²¹⁶

Media are made of raw materials that have been called out, pulled down – grabbed if you will – from context. They are available resources not only in the sense of their meaning forms (say, writing), but the unavoidably materiality of their media (pens and paper; printing presses and books; and iPhones “designed in California,” – which must be a country? – but “made in China”).

Media are what Roland Barthes calls the “material substance of signifieds.”²¹⁷ They are found objects, then once found, they demand of us work, with our hands, eyes, ears, and sensuous bodies. We take media out of their context. Refashioning them in our own hands and minds, we make meanings whose precise contextual coordinates and material manifestation has never been made before. Such is design.^§MS0.4.1

Then, what of the media-shaped differences in forms of meaning? There is nothing that language can’t express, any language, every language, says Louis Hjelmslev,^§AS0.2 conflating, as is the habit of linguists, text with speech.²¹⁸ Yes, we can show a mountain in a picture and speak of it as well.^§MS0.0 But we can sometimes do more with a picture, because the picture and speech are not the same. We often do the two at the same time precisely because of their differences in affordance. This is why we mix our media, why we need our multimodality.

Transposition from form to form, using one medium then the next or several media juxtaposed, is how we exceed the constraints to meaning in media. There may be some redundancy, but that may be a good thing to the extent that interpreters’ meaning proclivities are different. This grammar does not propose that each form is straightforwardly a creature of its media; it’s about meaning as incessant movement and metamorphosis.

Because the functions of reference, agency, structure, context, and interest cross all forms and their media, this may suggest congruence, or the possibility of simply “standing for.” Far from it. Transpositions always involve slippage, bending, and refraction. A multimodal grammar must track these processes of reversioning. It will track changes, acknowledging provenance and tracing patterns of transformation through the processes of transposition. In every act of transposition the result is always something never-before-meant – an artifact of meaning uniquely reconfigured, not only in its form but in its media as well.

This process is a play of the material as well as the ideal.^§MS3.1 Now transposition creates its own marvels. Something material, in the media of the here and now, can take us across time (the persistence of the material trace), and space (its transportation). By fiat of media, the past and the future become radically simultaneous; and the anywhere and everywhere else become radically here and now. Media are prostheses that can turn material impossibilities into the ideal of imaginary possibility; and paradoxically, they achieve this by means that are nothing but material. The result is every bit as magical as Einsteinian physics^§AS1.3.1a and quantum mechanics.^§AS1.4.4b

For Sigmund Freud, such powers are cause for anxiety: “Man has … become a kind of prosthetic God,” whose “auxiliary organs [are] truly magnificent.” Still, these same organs “give him much trouble at times … ; present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.”²¹⁹

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²⁰⁴ Raymond Williams, 1976, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Glasgow: Fontana/Croom Helm, pp. 169–72.

²⁰⁵ Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, 2014, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 153–54.

²⁰⁶ Friedrich A. Kittler, 2009, “Towards an Ontology of Media,” Theory, Culture & Society Message 26(2–3):23–31.

²⁰⁷ Friedrich A. Kittler, 1999 [2010], Optical Media, translated by A. Enns, Cambridge: Polity, p. 35.

²⁰⁸ Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, 1967 [1996], The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press; Marshall McLuhan, 1964 [2001], Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge.

²⁰⁹ Lars Elleström, 2010, “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations,” pp. 11–50 in Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, edited by L. Elleström, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 4.

²¹⁰ Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 1999, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 45; Lev Manovich, 2001, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

²¹¹ Walter Benjamin, 1936 [2008], “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by M.W. Jennings, B. Doherty, and T.Y. Levin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

²¹² John Durham Peters, 2015, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 25, 37; John Durham Peters, 1999, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

²¹³ James J. Gibson, 1979 [2015], The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, New York: Psychology Press, p. 119.

²¹⁴ James J. Gibson, 1977, “The Theory of Affordances,” pp. 67–82 in Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, edited by R. Shaw and J. Bransford, London: Routledge, pp. 68, 80.

²¹⁵ James J. Gibson, 1966, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 47–48.

²¹⁶ Gunther Kress, 2009, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, London: Routledge, pp. 12–14.

²¹⁷ Roland Barthes, 1964 [1977], Elements of Semiology, New York: Hill and Wang, p. 47.

²¹⁸ Louis Hjelmslev, 1963 [1970], Language: An Introduction, translated by F.J. Whitfield, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 39–41.

²¹⁹ Sigmund Freud, 1930 [2005], Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by J. Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton, p. 76.

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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. 90–94. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Medium §AS1.4