Circumstance

Reference (What’s this about?)

Circumstance

0.0 BILL: Now, a function we call circumstance. Entities are things, actions are what happened in their making. Entity and action - the one thing can’t happen without the other.

0.20 BILL: Let me take an example from one of the most important works of Isaac Newton, the famous English scientist and mathematician.

One of Newton’s great achievements was to explain the spectral decomposition of light. When light shines through a prism, it is refracted into all the colors of the rainbow. White light is made up of different colors. This is the 1704 edition.

I want to show you how Newton says this. The way he says it contributes to a practice of seeing and thinking the world that we now call science. In text, I might write the word “light” as a noun or a verb. As a noun: “Light comes from the sun into the prism.” As a verb: “The sun lights through the prism.” Nouns and verbs are not such different things, because the one can become the other. But of course, they are at the same time very different, and to use the terminology we are developing in this grammar, these are not two distinct things, but transposable meanings. Each of noun and verb is not a thing, but a kind of readiness, the one to become the other.

1.33 BILL: Now here is how Newton, in his book, represents entities and actions in diagrams. A number of entities are represented in these diagrams – an eye, some prisms, rays of light. This is the stuff of light, a kind of visual noun. But there is also movement, indicated by lines, from a light source to a destination. This is light as a kind of visual verb. So in this visual language, entities are represented by points and volumes, actions by vectors.

As an interesting aside about how the affordances of media affect meaning, in the era of letterpress printing, it was more convenient to put images on different pages than text because the technology for their reproduction was different. So in his text, Newton refers to figures and letter labels from the text. “See point F in figure 17” he might say in the text. This is a particular kind of multimodal image-text relation that has become essential to modern science, making the same meanings about light in this case, but using the one form or meaning to supplement the other in a cohesive whole.

2.59 BILL: Now, let’s look at some of Newton’s text. Watch the red words: “For it has been proved… that the changes of Colours made by Refractions do not arise from any new Modifications of the Rays impress'd by those Refractions, and by the various Terminations of Light and Shadow… It has been shewed also, that as the Sun's Light is mix'd of all sorts of Rays, so its whiteness is a mixture of the Colours of all sorts of Rays… [I]t may be concluded, that the white Colour of all refracted Light at its very first Emergence, where it appears as white as before its Incidences is compounded of various Colours.”

3.42 BILL: The white words are all actions that Newton has turned into entities. This is a process that in text is called nominalization. This is a typical move of science. By thingifying actions, it makes whatever is being referred to sound objective. Newton is one of the inventors of this kind of discourse. If you are a science teacher, tell your students to turn the main verbs into nouns, and they will get a better mark. “Refraction occurred when light passed through the prism” sounds much more scientific than “We refracted the light through the prism.” This is another space where the grammar of text becomes quite different from the grammar of speech. Speech is action-oriented. Scientific and academic language is entity-oriented.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 239-41.

4.37 MARY: Let’s take a more contemporary example, in this case the representation that a developer may use in order to design software for selling theater tickets. The diagram you see here is expressed in UML or Unified Modeling Language. This is multimodal text with image, where the boxes do the job of representing entities – customers, reservations, tickets and performance, and the lines indicate actions – a customer makes a reservation, the theater gives them a ticket, the customer goes to the performance.

5.14 MARY: Then, of course, if we are designing software, we expect there will be a multimodal transposability of the scenario mapped in image plus text in UML, into the configuration of spaces (the box office in the foyer), flows (from the box office into the theater), involving objects (tickets and their printing) where there are certain kinds of enactment (the person who is visibly the ticket seller and handing the ticket to the theater goer). These are transpositions across the horizontal axis in our grammar, things which make no sense if they are not transposable in multimodal practice.

6.03 MARY: Going back to the text-image representation of the theater going, let me say as an aside, this is a yet another example of how different text is from speech. Oral instructions would be completely inadequate for a software developer — first this, next that, finally something else. Speech is relentlessly temporal. In order to think through this scenario, I need this kind of text-image alliance, we need to a spatialize meaning. This is how it becomes possible to anticipate a number of repeatable variables across many similar though different contexts. Then of course, the software needs to be tested, and we have to go back to a theater for that.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 122-25

6.54 MARY: So, what are we saying here? Philosophers of meaning have grappled with the entity-action tension. Alfred North Whitehead, English mathematician and philosopher and coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the monumental Principia Mathematica or “Principles of Mathematics,” said that language itself prioritizes objectification, where the subject as an object precedes and is separated from the predicate as action. As a consequence, we tend to atomize “the extensive continuum of the world” into separate entities. “We analyze the world in terms of static categories.” We spatialize the universe at the expense of fluency. We freeze moments in time at the expense of the life history of the object.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 130-32.

7.50 MARY: French philosopher Henri Bergson said something similar, that the problem of philosophy to date had been to freeze reality into entities and their states for the purposes of construing it as facts (the empiricists) or concepts (the rationalists). Words deceive to the extent that they seem to denote changeless things. Conceptual analysis tends to freeze reality into entities. Images deceive to the extent that they freeze objects and persons in moments of time. Instead, we need to conceive reality in cinematographic terms, as movement and change.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 129-30.

8.30 MARY: Now we are saying something a bit different. We don’t want to prioritize entities or actions as if they were distinct things, nouns as if they were so very different from verbs, points and volumes as if they were so very different from vectors. Because the one has been the other and can always be the other again, any moment. We should focus on the movement, or what we call the transpositions. Here we are looking at movement on the vertical or functional axis in our grammar diagram, where one function is impatient to become the other, in this case entities and actions. So, when science objectifies, when it conceives an action as an entity, it does not create a thing, it makes a move.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 126-27.