Abstract
‘What should we understand by “Semiotic Remediation”, the title and theme of this work?’ Judith Irvine (p. 235) poses this question at the beginning of her ‘Afterword’, and it is a useful question for framing a review of Prior and Hengst’s edited volume. The nine theoretically and methodologically diverse papers that comprise this collection aim to further our understanding of semiotic practices by more fully accounting for their distribution across time and semiotic resources, in the process describing how signs (the semiotic) are taken up and used in human activity. The research contexts for these works range from the micro to the macro: from instances of communication among teachers and students in an elementary school classroom to longitudinal tracings of semiotic practices and textual remediations within a local environmental activist organization; from videoed conversations between researchers, individuals with aphasia and their partners to a policy’s resemiotization throughout a large-scale public health initiative. What binds these divergent papers together is their emphasis on practice and signs-in-practice, with the editors deliberately and explicitly employing an expansive understanding of sign, one which encompasses ‘… modes, media, channels, and so on …’ (p. 1). The aims are ambitious, the results somewhat uneven, but this is a volume that will provoke researchers to reconsider how they frame their own studies of discourse, even if the guidance provided here is somewhat unsteady.
The strength of the volume lies in the extent to which the seven empirical studies illustrate three shared tenets that are set out in the ‘Introduction’. First and foremost, semiosis is understood as a dialogic process in which ‘… we constantly take up others’ signs, use them, and to varying degrees make them our own (or not)’ (p. 3). Often, these processes are illustrated by framing the study around a core group of participants. For example, in Shipka’s study, three university students hang out together, play guitar, send emails, draw flowcharts, and write about their interactions as they prepare for an in-class presentation, with Shipka highlighting the dialogic processes that shape: (a) their goals, motives and strategies and (b) the semiotic resources that are remediated in their presentation. The second shared tenet is that interactions are historically situated, and that the concept of remediation signifies a semiotic practice’s place within temporal chains, as well as the heterogeneous resources in which it is constructed. Thus, it is not surprising that the volume contains several longitudinal studies.
Roozen’s chapter traces over several years the use of mathematical symbols by an undergraduate mathematics education major, observing how symbols are repurposed in poetry, narratives, role-playing games and sketch comedy routines, as well as in classroom discussions of mathematics. Across these varied contexts, π (pi) engages, entertains and informs, and Roozen uses this to critique studies of literate activities that use school and work as their temporal boundaries. Paradoxically, Prior sharpens the focus on the extended histories of semiotic objects by examining activities over a shorter duration. In his analysis, technical discussions accompanying reinstallation of the digital artwork IO reveal ‘a heterogeneous collection of tools and acts’ (p. 231), including software, professional discourses, physical and digital texts, and formats. Each has its own historical trajectory, which designers, programmers and others must remediate to develop shared practices. Here, as in other chapters, the volume’s third tenet, the sociogenetic dimension of remediation, is illustrated. Discursive practices are understood as enmeshed in the everyday co-development of individuals and sociocultural formations, but while re- encompasses repeatability and recognizability, it also signifies remaking. Whether viewed synchronically or diachronically, remediation is a practice of creation as well as re-creation.
Irvine’s ‘Afterword’ plays a critical role in drawing the chapters together, not least because she poses questions that will have dogged many readers. Perhaps most pressingly, though the temporal chains of semiotic remediation are well-illustrated in this volume, how did the authors choose which chains to analyse and which to ignore? Several authors, including Roozen and Prior, highlight the issue without appreciably addressing their own choices. Shipka attempts to address the question with a ‘Variations on this theme’, drawing on Law and Hofstader to imagine ‘the possibility of tracing other pathways, potentials, and remediations’ (p. 74). Irvine suggests that we might consider the social significance of the semiotic repurposing, or perhaps employ Silverstein’s concept of a ‘baptismal event’ (p. 241); however, the quotidian is equally vital to our work. The argument put forth in this volume is that we need to go beyond a narrow definition of text, but once we accept that argument – and like many others, I do – then how do we legitimate our research choices?
There is also a certain irony that a volume intent on more fully accounting for semiotic practices is so heavily dependent on the linguistic. Nowhere are the limitations of privileged academic practice more evident than in Saferstein and Sarangi’s analysis of public education exhibits, in which descriptions of the displays’ colour and layout cannot compensate for the low-resolution black and white photos included in the chapter. As an instance of remediation, the book is a counter-argument to the authors’ positions, as it reinforces the power and primacy of the printed text and demonstrates how we have yet to grapple with this ongoing incongruency in our own practices.
However, there seems to me to be a more fundamental issue with the elaborated language that accompanies these inquiries into semiotic practice, and that is the extent to which the relationship between agent and sign remains underspecified. Our interest in signs and sign systems is underpinned by a more fundamental interest, our interest in our human capacity to mean. The laminations, chains, etc. are meanings realized as texts and/or signs, never isolated texts, but nonetheless texts that can only mean and (however imperfectly) be understood in relation to contexts of place and time and purpose. If we are interested in explaining as well as describing remediation, then our theoretical frameworks must have the capacity to address which meanings are taken up by whom and when and why. It is in this respect that I would return to the work of Halliday (1978; Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999) and Kress (Hodge and Kress, 1988; Kress, 2010), not the embryonic multimodal grammars that this volume sometimes critiques, but to the work on social semiotics which provides the explanations from which the grammars proceed.
And yet the questions that are provoked by the gaps and ambiguities in this volume are some of the best reasons to read it. We should ask Irvine’s question: ‘What should we understand by semiotic remediation?’ Prior and Hengst make no claim that they will provide a full and complete answer. Rather, they and their fellow authors offer this work as a remediation: a point in a process of understanding this thing called discourse that we all set out to study.