Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication Book

Another in the long line of books I'm reading on sociolinguistics and social semiology as background for my thesis. This one seemed to have the benefit of being short - but it is so densely packed with ideas its shortness was only apparent - it still took me ages to get through it - although, other things have gotten in the way.

I guess the first idea that one needs to come to terms with is that we tend to think of language as the main way we understand signs and their meanings - they end this book by saying while there was, "a past (and still existent) common sense (view) to the effect that meaning resides in language alone - or, in other versions of this, that language is the central means of representing and communicating even though there are 'extra-linguistic', 'para-linguistic' things going on as well - is simply no longer tenable, that it never really was, and certainly is not now". The point of this book is to show that while language often functions to organise signs, that meaning is simply not dependent or exhausted by language. One of the nice ways they make this clear is by talking of drinking coffee.

"Drinking coffee from a pottery mug is not the same experience as drinking coffee from a porcelain cup - a difference due to a different sensory response to the materiality of substance (porcelain vs fired clay), to the touch of the libs as much as to the weight of the cup or mug in the hand, and also to the cultural provenance of coffee-mug rather than porcelain cup."

They also have long sections discussing the use and meaning of colour in home decoration magazines of various kinds and the types of discourses these imply. They compare both French and English magazines - essentially Home Beautiful type things - and also an Ikea catalogue. They make the very interesting point that there is a kind of grammar to colour and that a magazine must, to be consistent with itself, communicate within that colour grammar. That this grammar is hard to put into words, but, "all one needs to do is to take a page from the English magazine, by contrast, and to interleave it with the pages of the French magazine. The entire differing rules are immediately apparent: the one does not fit with the other; interleaving produces an 'ungrammatical' structure. The precision and the clarity of the rule system of each becomes immediately apparent."

Although they base this work on that of Halliday's functional linguistics, they are developing his work, rather than slavishly following it. They make a very strong case that what they are not doing is providing a kind of code book for understanding the meaning of colours. You know, as they say, one that says, "green means hope". But they are also not saying that green can mean anything you want. In many ways this is harking back to Lakoff - that we are embodied and our bodies respond to the world in ways and it is based on its physical responses that we then use to give meaning to our metaphors. Or to take this a step further (or a step not quite as far - I'll need to think about that), the ideas of Ramachandran on synesthesia. The point being that there is no code book to understanding the meanings of colours - not like we have with sentences - in English the Adjective generally comes before the Noun - but that doesn't mean printing something on green paper will mean exactly the same thing as printing it on pink paper. Or that printing something on green paper has 'no meaning'.

Their key point here is, "We say that all social action is semiotic and all semiotic action is social; that social action changes both the actor and the 'acted-on' or 'acted-with'." They see all action by people as being action intended to communicate some meaning and therefore the choices people make have meanings - and generally these meaning are social in nature. Let's take a couple of their examples.

The one that I really found fascinating was their discussion of a Dutch confection (I was going to call it a sweet and then a lolly - you will understand my hesitation in a second). This is a liquorice, and rather than being like English liquorice - which tend to be sweet - it is hard, black and tastes of salt. As they say - only the Dutch like it. But they also say that it is liked because it fits within the Calvinist preferences of the Dutch - you know, this is basically the hairshirt of confectionary. The sort of thing that mothers could use to threaten their children with, "If you don't sit still I'll give you another piece of liquorice." To understand the confection you need to understand the culture.

The other I particularly liked their explanation of home renovation of terrace houses in both England and Australia. Once upon a time - when these places where built - it was important to have a front room where one could entertain people off the street. Although this was part of the house, it essentially faced the street. It was halfway between the public space of the street and the private space of the kitchen at the back of the house. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, people started to renovate these houses. Generally this involved pulling down walls and so the entire house suddenly turned away from the street. The entire house became 'private' - ironically enough, by becoming more 'open'. But what is really interesting is that these renovations all happened at more or less the same time and in the same way. "These changes (renovations to houses) were not accidental, they were not arbitrary, nor where they 'individual', even thought each individual imagined that she or he was doing this redesign as the expression of individual taste. The changes reflected changed notions of the family, of divisions of public and private - in Australia as in England." This idea - of us wanting to be individuals even when we act as a herd - is also underscored when they talk about advertising: "advertising often seeks to address its audiences as unique individuals, rather than as the groups of people with conforming consumptions which they really are."

The most important thing about this book is what I've neglected to mention until the very end - it is that the book is divided into four main 'strata' - now, they say that communication can be understood in terms of the socially constructed discourse in which it occurs (and in this case I think they are using the term 'discourse' in the same way Foucault uses it), how the communicator has chosen to design the message, how that design is realised within a production process - you know, the difference between an architect's drawing (design) and the builder's house (production) and finally the technology used to distribute the message - "Signs in neon light do not mean the same thing as hand-painted signs on a wooden board".

Parts of this book are quite hard going, I'll admit it, but it is one of those books that has lots of ideas to the page and some of the explanations and illustrations really clarify the points they are making - so much so that you can feel the ideas jumping off the page. I enjoyed this book very much - but I'm going to end with yet another paragraph that made me go, 'oh, yeah.'

"When, in the early seventeenth century, the Counter-Reformation in Europe began its attack on Protestantism, it did so in a variety of ways, not least in the field of the aesthetic. Those who had initially been wooed away from the excesses of Roman Catholicism by the austerity of the new Protestant faiths and of their places of worship, might now be won back (or those who might have been wavering might be convinced to stay) by the exuberant, multi-sensorial appeal of the new churches of that era. The churches of the high baroque in southern parts of Europe make an appeal to the senses, not to reason; to the body, not to the mind. The differences of a theological/ideological kind between Catholicism and Protestantism are realised in the modes of representation, which acted to communicate that message powerfully."

And that pretty much sums up their argument.