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Part I
Two Personal Views
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1 Kress on Kress
Using a Method to Read a Life
Bob Hodge
This chapter is an experiment in method. Its focus is on Gunther Kress’ self-presentation of his life, looked at through the lenses of his habitual forms of analysis as I understand them. I have worked closely with him over many years, so to some extent this is an insider’s critique of practices we and others share. However, I try to use this as the basis for understanding the evolving dynamics of his unique and valuable contribution to Social Semiotics and Critical Discourse Analysis.
The Formation of a Semiotician
I begin as an ethnographer, with my memories of the first text of Gunther’s that I read. At the time I found it so aberrant that for many years I did not include it in my mental bibliography of his works, as he has not included it in any bibliography I have seen. Now, in the context of this chapter, I can make better sense of it. It shows that Gunther was not a linguist who slowly discovered semiotics. He was a semiotician from the start.
Gunther’s article presented the argument of an interdisciplinary team, anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay (1969), on colour terms. I remember it as an occasional publication at the end of 1972, just after I had joined the University of East Anglia (UEA). I had come to UEA specifically to work on the conjunction of linguistics with history and literature, drawn by the presence of Roger Fowler, embattled linguist in the new School of English and American Studies. Alongside Roger I discovered Gunther there, the newly appointed second linguist. Fowler was on leave, and Gunther held the linguistics fort alone, only a year into his job, made aware that senior academics in the school saw linguistics as irrelevant.
Halliday’s (1976) two macro-functions, interpersonal and ideational, will frame my analysis, beginning with the interpersonal function. I supposed that Gunther intended the article to offer an expansive sense of what interdisciplinary linguistics could include. The article drew on the scope linguistics had for him, even then. He showed his role as a broker of ideas. The work was stimulated by the challenge of the indifference he felt surrounded him. His response to opposition was to step back and reframe his arguments to be broader, more inclusive.
I also found the ideational content of his article fascinating. Berlin and Kay looked at colour terms from 100 languages, and claimed they found a pattern. They identified a small subset of around eleven basic colour terms, which followed an evolutionary sequence. All languages, they said, contain words for black and white (or dark and light). If a language had only three dedicated colour terms, the third would be red. A language that had a later colour (e.g., yellow) would have all the earlier ones in the sequence (dark, light, red, blue, green, etc.).
Berlin and Kay’s universal schema had an evolutionary aspect which could be used to legitimate a racist anthropology, in which colour schemes, and hence languages and peoples, could be placed along a continuum, culminating in the “higher” forms of colour scheme and intellectual development of Europeans. Their schema is open to ideological abuse, something Gunther was always alert to. Yet he recognises an evolutionary process in individuals (from pre-writing to writing to later stages of semiotic mastery) and in human history, in which new electronic forms constitute a new era of civilisation, as argued by Ong (1982) and McLuhan (1964).
Gunther was similarly ambivalent about Chomsky’s (1975) universalism. He criticised Chomsky’s universal Language Acquisition Device because its asocial nature left nothing to society or human creativity (Kress, 1997, p. 112). The criticism is important. Yet a quest for universals remained on his agenda. They just had to be less linear and reductive, more open to social and other dimensions.
His work is a dialectic between “universalism” and contextualism, not a single fixed position. I call it “contextualised universalis.” Instead of reducing the complexity of things to a few elemental principles, it uses elemental principles to underpin an irreducible diversity, in which society and individual creativity always have a place.
Connections between language and visual phenomena were not evident in his largely linguistic work of this time. His reflections on Berlin and Kay’s work were allowing him to be the kind of semiotician that did not yet exist. Even though Halliday used “semiotic” so influentially in the title of a major book in 1978, Halliday’s analyses were not yet multimodal.
Symptomatically, colour only played a minor role in his earlier work on “reading images” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1990). That important body of work evolved over successive editions. By the second Routledge edition of 2006, the theory had added moving images and colour. I find it suggestive to represent this progression in terms adapted from Berlin and Kay. Needless to say, this schema is my own invention:
The point I want to make with this schema is that there is a place and a moment for a powerful, generative simplicity in the development of ideas, even though that simplicity will evolve into a more comprehensive, more complex mature schema.
Figure 1.1 Evolution of Reading Images, adapting Berlin and Kay (1969)
Gunther and Theo’s work on layout which underpinned their mature theory of multimodality started from an excessively powerful explanation of their discovery of the multimodal page, a unity made up of words and images. In a seminal article (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1998) they saw the space of this interaction as a new semiotic mode, and asked how it made sense.
To guide their analysis they proposed a simple grid with two axes: given-new (Halliday 1985) and ideal-real (from Halliday’s [1985] ideas of modality, as developed in Hodge and Kress [1988, 1993). The four spaces created by these axes acted as motivated signifers of elemental meanings. This system of elemental signs formed a meta-language they claimed was nearly universal in the West, though not in Chomsky’s sense. This scheme applies to individual semiotic objects yet is designed to travel across space and time, the space and time of Western Civilisation.
Beyond Critical Linguistics
Gunther and I did exciting and important work together at UEA in 4 short years, 1972–1976. What we called “Critical Linguistics” has been re-badged as “Critical Discourse Analysis,” and continues to prosper. However, over time both Gunther and I have come to see some problems with an excessive emphasis on the merely critical: “One of my own aims is to move beyond critique” (Kress, 1995c, p. 4).
I illustrate some strengths and limitations of this early form of critical analysis by deploying it on the first paragraph of the first chapter of his most recent book:
Multimodality: Simple, Really
On my way to work the bus gets held up before a large intersection, even quite early in the morning. Sitting on the top deck, my eye is drawn to a sign, high up on the wall opposite; it shows how to get into the car park of a supermarket. It is not a complicated sign by any means, nothing unusual about it really. But I have puzzled about it: how does it work here? (Kress, 2010b, p. 1)
I will begin with the interpersonal function again. This is the first paragraph of the first chapter, so the directness of its address is startling, without abstract language except for the heading, “Multimodality,” which is immediately dismissed as simple. The present tense carries the strongest “modality” (impression of truth). The language is plain, with traces of speech (e.g., the repeated “really”), as the world’s leading theorist of multimodality chats about the bus trip he takes to work every morning. Simple, really. Powerful, too.
Of course, Gunther is not so simple as this may imply. Nor do his readers want him to be. The familiar tone shockingly breaks the expectations of the academic genre, while framed by a promise that these expectations are only deferred. This performance connects directly with an audience and with commonplace reality, informed by a powerful theoretical framework. All three components are real, as is their skillful integration by Gunther (Halliday’s third metafunction, the textual).
Thus far this analysis is not really “critical.” But I am struck by the first sentence: “On my way to work the bus gets held up.” Gunther has always been fascinated by the ways causality is represented or evaded. In this case, the bus is reported as agent of one verb, “gets,” as though being held up is its possession. In the process, the agent of this hold-up is deleted. How is being obstructed seen as a possession? And not by a human, but a bus?
I have jumped over the first example of a possessive in the sentence: “On my way to work.” I hardly noticed this when I first read it, but on closer inspection it also came to seem strange. It makes his going to work his possession, as it is, in a sense, since he paid money for his ticket. Yet this transforms an activity into a kind of commodity, in a world seen as relations between commodities.
Another effect of this slightly twisted form of sentence is that “I,” Gunther’s direct presentation of his ego, has been displaced from the risky first position. What he avoids saying is “I was on my way to work in a bus.” He puts himself forward as the hero of his own story, a high-risk strategy in an academic text, yet at this crucial first moment he ducks out of the line of fire.
In a related shift, he writes an almost ungrammatical phrase: “Sitting on the top deck, my eye was drawn …” Is his eye sitting on the top deck? Does he have a glass eye I did not know about? More likely this is a grammatical effect of a deletion of “I” (was sitting). As well as being displaced, this eye is passive. It is “drawn to” the sign, although he is the semiotician whose agency creates this response.
The analysis so far is a perverse demonstration of the power and limitations of Critical Linguistics. In its early days Critical Linguistics tended to live up to the name “critical.” Its analysts looked for devious reasons, none good, for these displacements of causality. That was appropriate for our targets, authors and texts aligned with power. They were enemies in the struggles we engaged in.
But this form of criticism locks analysts into a single relationship with those being analysed: rigid, relentlessly hostile, unable to manage any other relationship. If we yoked this kind of analysis to an exclusively critical orientation we would be declaring war on everyone, including ourselves.
However, this analysis can be reframed as an ethnographic instrument, a way to see Gunther’s thinking more from inside. From this perspective it brings out traces of unease he seems to have felt about the risky prominence of his self in this text. It is true that his particular mix of public and private, polemical and vulnerable constantly exposes him to risk.
Earlier I suggested that he used language to connect with ordinary people, trying to appear simple, like them. What I am suggesting now is that he shows traces of the insecurities he shares with them. He does not merely appear humble. He is humble. Yet he is also exceptional, the world authority on multimodality, drawing on many years of deep thinking about language and society and the contemporary condition. He makes sense as his readers cannot of the world he shares with them, travelling with them on that journey.
This is what I would want of the kind of analysis we worked on together many years ago. That is also how Gunther increasingly used it in the latter stages of his career. His increasing use of “mundane” examples, especially from children and ordinary people, was a shift towards a greater scope for what this analysis can do, not a renunciation of it.
Theory and Analysis
The text I have quoted illustrates a key to Gunther’s creativity. His mind is informed by theories, but these are deployed on specific examples, in this case the car park sign, out of which the theory is discovered anew. Examples from real life have been his source of strength as theorist from when I first met him. In this respect he is at the opposite pole from Chomsky, who generated examples from his theory rather than the other way around. Gunther’s use of examples to think with is his greatest strength.
In earlier days I saw and admired versions of this achievement. For many years Gunther successfully managed a heavy workload as a senior university administrator and an inspiring speaker in great demand. I often wondered how he coped with these competing demands, and still managed to develop leading-edge ideas, translated prolifically into good publications.
Part of the secret I believe was his use of cards he prepared for lectures. Each card contained a comment or a text he was going to analyse, often presented via other technologies in those primitive days, as duplicated texts or overheads. He spoke to the cards directly, continually making contact with his audience as if he was thinking these thoughts for the first time in their presence.
Thinking about speech and writing, as Gunther has persuaded me to do, I have come to see two surprising things about what made his performance so good. One is its development of techniques of oral composition, as described in the Parry-Lord thesis about Homer (Lord, 1968). Lord argued that Homer’s greatness rested on specific devices of oral composition that allowed him to compose on the epic scale that otherwise seemed to require technologies of literacy.
Or from another perspective, Gunther invented PowerPoint before it became commercially available. PowerPoint is a multimodal technology. It has been accused of having numbing effects on discourse, “death by PowerPoint.” Gunther’s version of this semiotic practice is innovative precisely because it echoes the practices of the apparently superceded technology. Gunther’s strategy mediates between very old technologies and technologies still to come.
Not any images from any bus trip will do the trick. In Writing the Future (Kress, 1995c) a brief polemical text I especially admire, Gunther uses an exemplary instance at even greater length to outline his theory and practice of analysis. His explication starts from what he calls a “mundane text,” as are most of his important examples. This is a set of rules governing behaviour in a Beach House site, in 1988 in New South Wales, Australia.
Gunther begins to open out his analysis of this text from what he calls his sense of “unease.” This is a quality in the makers of this set of signs, matching something like the puzzlement the car park sign generated in him. His intuitions are the foundation of his theoretical capacity, yet they are often invisible, seen only in their effects, likely to be discounted by observers.
In both cases, what sets him going is an intuition that there is something that does not work as it should. The car park sign could not be read by its apparently intended readers. Their incompetence signals flaws in the new world view. The makers of this sign do not recognise the effects of speed on social relations in this world they feel at home in, but it creates the conditions in which their attempts to exercise power break down. They produce illegible messages. The intended ideational function is stripped down, leaving only the interpersonal function they had not attended to, the message of their power and presence.
The rules for the camp site are also incompetent. To put this in formal terms, disturbance in the ideational function comes from and signals something anomalous in the interpersonal function. Or, as a complementary formulation, the production of cohesion that is an important aspect of the textual function is erratic, signalling trouble in the other two functions.
But Gunther has sympathy for the incompetence of the Beach House rule-writers, since it reflects their sense of alienation. They have not fully adapted to the demands of the contradictory world that is overwhelming them. Gunther shares their unease with this wo...
