Kress & Agreement

I am currently developing a document to contest some points of Kress, but I want to take some time to identify points of agreement I have with this maven of multimodality. Inevitably, though, I see I must qualify what I agree with

"Central assumptions of multimodal approaches to representation and communication are (a) that communication is always and inevitably multimodal; and (b) that each of the modes available for representation in a culture provides specific potentials and limitations for communication (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). The first assumption requires us to attend to all modes that are active in an instance of communication; the second requires us to attend to the specific meanings carried by the different modes in communicational ensembles (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). "

[...]

"The fact that these occur as constellations—medium of book with mode of writing and now medium of screen with mode of image—means that the effect has been experienced in an amplified form. The distinct cultural technologies for representation and for dissemination have become conflated—and not only in popular commonsense, so that the decline of the book has been seen as the decline of writing and vice versa."

I agree, Kress. These assumptions are the foundations of multimodal communication. I wish to extend it further than it appears you do (though perhaps you do extend it, without so many words). When you write, "communication is always and inevitably multimodal," I wish to treat this assumption both backward and forward. Communication has always been inevitably multimodal. All that our new and growing focus on digital technology, hypertextuality, and communication on the screen does is allow us to see what existed the whole time: that most, if not all, of our communicative acts worked through multiple modes, but that because, "The distinct cultural technologies for representation and for dissemination have become conflated—and not only in popular commonsense, [...] the decline of the book has been seen as the decline of writing and vice versa." Because we have perceived writing as a primary mode of communication, represented in particular ways through certain media (not necessarily the book), humanity has allowed itself to perceive writing texts in and of themselves, detached from the multimodal elements surrounding them. This sees its height in the New Critical tradition, which wanted to treat written texts as disembodied idea, rising above the materials of the text into the heavens above. The material technologies at hand mean that we can no longer afford to treat texts in this way, nor can we afford to treat the texts of the past in the way we had. We must look forward to how we think about and do communication through multimodality but we must also look back to think about and read old texts through a multimodality that always existed, always impinged upon human reading of texts but that we never ackowledged. For me, to say, "that each of the modes available for representation in a culture provides specific potentials and limitations for communication," means that it always had and that we can examine these potentials and limitations in the past as well as in the future (and of course in the present).