Ontology

Structure (What holds this together?)

Ontology

0.0 MARY: “Structure” refers to the ways meanings cohere, the patterns in their holding together. We’re going to explore these coherences from several different perspectives. Ontology is meaning-in-being. Design is the process and outcome of meaning. Relations are the connections that hold meanings together. And metaontology is the holding together of the holding together.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 259.

0.42 MARY: To take the first of these, ontology is a play between the material and the ideal. The material consists of the complex coherences of the sensuously experienced world. The ideal consists of the meanings we attribute to them.

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. 271-72.

0.58 MARY: I want to read to you a short passage from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

‘They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!’

‘Would you tell me, please,’ said Alice ‘what that means?'

'Now, you talk like a reasonable child,’ said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased.

‘I meant by “impenetrability” that we’ve had enough of that subject and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.

‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

2.12 MARY: Philosopher of sense, Gilles Deleuze, spends a good deal of time pondering Alice. Here is what he says. In Alice, we have a “play of sense and nonsense… Humpty Dumpty (whose waist and neck, tie and belt, are indiscernible) lacks common sense as much as he lacks differentiated organs.” He “opposes… the impenetrability of incorporeal entities without thickness to the mixtures and reciprocal penetrations of substances, …the ‘pride’ of verbs to the complacency of substantives and adjectives. Impenetrability also means the frontier between the two—and that the person situated at the frontier, precisely as Humpty Dumpty is seated on his narrow wall, has both at his disposal. Things and propositions are less in a situation of radical duality and more on the two sides of a frontier represented by sense.”

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. 277-79.

3.18 MARY: And quoting another philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz: "concepts, processes, frames, … are somehow different from and other than simply material? … How do materialists understand meaning or sense in terms beyond their materiality as sonorous or written trace? … Substance is both material and incorporeal.”

Or, to say this in the terms we are working with in this grammar, sense is at the frontier of the ideal and the material. Even though meanings in the ideal can at times push beyond the material by way of imagination, the starting point was the material. And even though the meanings in the material are greater than what we have so far managed to comprehend, meanings in the material can at times be pushed out into new discovery.

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. 276-77, 279.

4.15 MARY: The ontology of the material structures of meaning is the designs in being—the patterns we sense in the leaves on trees, in buildings, in clothes, in food, in the sounds we utter to make conversations, in paintings. The ontology of ideal structures is the meanings we make in our knowing of them, in our remembering of them, or in our recognition of them when we see these things again. There is no ideal without there having been an ideal. For practical purposes there is no meaningful material without it having been idealized.

5.09 MARY: The material can exceed the ideal, meanings in the material world that have yet to be discovered, that are potentially knowable but as yet unknown. Physicists keep trying to discover aspects of matter we don’t understand, astronomers aspects of the universe, medical scientists aspects of the body. In an ordinary way, so does your desire to visit a place you haven’t been before, and the surprises you get after you have arrived.

5.28 MARY: On the other hand, there is the imaginable; there are possible worlds. Scientists often they find things in the material world by confirming theoretical conjecture, the ideal exceeding the material which leads the way towards discovery. Then there are worlds that have some basis in the material, and so feel realistic, but we know are unlikely – the imaginary of science fiction, for instance. So, our play of meaning in the world involves these two kinds of pushing, into material worlds that are knowable and ideal worlds that are imaginable.

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. 301-03.

6.08 MARY: The play of the material and the ideal is the loveliness of life - and the awfulness of the Red and White Queens in “Alice.”

Here is Salvador Dali’s Alice – see her with her skipping rope down there in the left corner? Alice is the perfectly well tempered inhabitant of the world. She encounters nonsense, and makes of it what she can, always testing it against her common sense, as if the imaginable could be true. She is ever-ready to contemplate the possibility that meaning might exceed experience. She encounters the smile of the Cheshire Cat that can linger after its body has vanished. She heeds the advice of the Queen to think of six impossible things before breakfast … Alice is cautious but never conquered by fear of the unknown. She is careful and at the same time courageous. She remains curious, tolerant of difference, and self-reflective about the comparative conditions of her knowing. She is always willing to move between sense and nonsense, where nonsense is a test of possibility and imagination is a journey into knowability.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 280.

7.32 MARY: And here now are some of the ways in structures of meaning are materialized, and the ideal structures which may push those meanings into imaginable realms. Just a couple of these by way of example.

Words (lexis) are arranged in order (syntax) on pages or screens. The ideal structures these represent are among other things, things we choose to name and reasoning connecting these things. The text may push our thinking – our naming and our reasoning. And our naming and reasoning might push our writing. Such is the generative tension all writers feel.

Or, a space example: our experiences of buildings give us senses of space and flows in wayfinding, and these ideal structures of meaning come back into play for architects in their designing and inhabitants in their living.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 280-81.