Monday, October 12, 2015

Composer <===> Audience: Communication, or the Twice-Social-Semiotic Exchange

In the first half of Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, Gunther Kress attempts to articulate a "social-semiotic theory of multimodality" through which composers and audiences might make productive distinctions between design practices, insofar as they do or do not promote "competence," on the one hand, or "critique," on the other. For Kress, the current media and communication landscape is far less stable and immutable than previous generations. The act of meaning-making therefore requires composers and audiences alike to navigate and respond to differing distributions of power. In so doing, the composer's interests are juxtaposed alongside those of their audience, therefore creating important spaces in which knowledge can be produced as opposed to merely acquired.

Kress' emphasis on the prospects for producing and/or fashioning knowledge is integral to understanding his overall project in Multimodality. Indeed, his entire schema seems predicated on the idea that the rhetorical choices that both composers as well as audiences make in the course of their representative and interpretative acts, denote or communicate a sort of agency and style that is indispensable to understanding the scope and tenor of the ways in which social spaces might produce communicational and semiotic change at the level of culture and identity politics. Leaving the possibility for this sort of negotiation open, then, accentuates the ways in which both composers as well as audiences might circumvent the "grooves of convention" and perhaps even realize the political and semiotic aspirations of their communicative acts. In so doing, the semiotic work that they engage in serves as a potent and realistic forum through which to re-think the existing epistemologies and ontologies that comprise communication writ large.

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