Position

Context (What else is this connected to?)

Position in Time and Place

0.0 MARY: Now, to another important aspect of context. Something meant – whether it might be said, or an object, or a gesture, or a sound - in one place means something different in another. Something meant at one time means something different in another. Again, we have a movement, a transposition, where the meaning changes because time and place change, not willfully and perversely at the expense of that meaning’s essence, but because it was always meant to be movable across time and space, and to be adaptable in the move.

0.48 MARY: Philosopher Immanuel Kant considered time and space to be figments of our thinking, but we are going to dare to disagree. Here is Kant on time:

“we deny to time all claim to be absolute reality; that is to say, we deny that it belongs to things absolutely … independently of any reference to the form of our sensible intuition. … [I]f we abstract from the conditions of sensible intuition, time is nothing, and cannot be ascribed to the objects themselves.”

Now, here is Kant on space:

“Space does not represent any property of things in themselves, nor does it represent them in relation to one another… It is… solely from the human standpoint that we can speak of space. If we depart from the subjective condition under which we alone can have outer intuition, namely, liability to be affected by objects, the representation of space stands for nothing whatsoever.”

We’re going to argue that time and space are real. We are creatures of experiences of meaning that we can parse as time and space. We have learned our time and space from their material and social experience.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 63-64.

2.14 MARY: Philosopher of time, Hans Reichenbach, says that there two cardinal types of time, points in time and durations. In this diagram, E is the point of an event, R is the point of reference, and S is the point of speech – which we would want to rename more broadly as a moment of participation in meaning.

We want to make a simple point for now, which becomes of course more complicated when we discuss it at greater length in the Adding Sense book, that these experiences of time are real. We learn these meanings of time from having experienced it. We feel time, we live time, we materially mean time.

3.00 MARY: Time exists in all the forms of meaning, though of course in different ways. Here, for example are some of the ways of meaning duration, “while” statements in text are “during” statements in speech. Durations might be expressed in image as timeline, episodes in embodied experience, or tempo in sound.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 64-67.

3.24 MARY: In the digital era we have time that is absolutely, relentlessly grounded to number (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds), and a universal ontology of event that allows all our apps and devices to talk to each other.

Not that time means has always meant same thing for all members of our species. Time may be a universal, unavoidably material part of human experience, but we can figure it quite differently in our multimodal experiences of event.

3.58 MARY: A fire insurance inspector and amateur linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf, spent a long time working with Ernest Naquayouma, a native speaker of the North American indigenous language, Hopi, who was at the time living in New York City. The harder he looked, the more different the Hopi system for dealing with time seemed to be from English tenses. From this, came the famous “linguistic relativity” thesis. People speaking different languages think and live the world in different ways.

Whorf could have made this a multimodal grammar – he seems to concede this with the little figures and the idea of an objective field where bodies are gesturing and configured in space. The Hopi experience of time may be reflected in their speech, but there is more to its meanings than that.

The question, then, is how different is the Hopi experience of time? What do the differences mean? And what is the scope of possibility for being human? Could we throw away the stress that comes with the merciless march of numbered time?

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 75-77.

5.08 BILL: And now place. The “here” of the speaker is not the same kind of “here” to which the writer refers in text, which is in reality a “here” that has been transposed in communication to the reader’s “there.” Objects and bodies can be meaningful because they are nearby, and differently meaningful when at a distance.

Incidentally, multimodal grammar helps us to see the radical differences in the patterns of meaning in speech and text. The phonemic transposition of “here” from speech to text is in fact a radical transposition of meaning across space. It unmasks the illusion that text is a transliteration of speech – far from it.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press. Pp. 77-79.

5.50 BILL: As for distant places, what can we make of the transposition of the distant and the proximate that we call “the virtual”? You’re here and now, but what you see gives you the impression of being there and then. We gasp in awe, what a miraculous transposition!

We love the verisimilitude of digital media, but is “the virtual” experientially so terribly new?

6.11: Here’s an advertisement for Bell Telephone from the 1950s. The housewife is home alone, apron on and vacuum cleaner at the ready. But Bell Telephone will make sure she is reassuringly not alone. Now she’s on the phone talking to a friend. And there, reassuringly, is the photo of her virtual husband, presumably off at work.

The non-present speaker is a wonder of telephony and the radio, though speaking at a distance is quite different from speaking in person.

Context has to be framed differently on the phone, more explicitly because space is not shared, where “here” means something quite fundamentally different from what it does for co-present speakers. As for the photograph of the husband, imaging is much older, as old as humanity in fact, where a distant subject is evoked by its re-representation.

The virtual is just another transposition, a traffic of meaning between distant and proximate places. We have been doing this for as long as our species has been drawing, and later, writing.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 79-80.