Abstract
Since the publication of Reading Images (RI) by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen kick-started the study of multimodality in the 1990s, the field has grown and flourished. It is now common to find multimodality addressed in research across discourse studies, and van Leeuwen’s latest book Multimodality and Identity, provides a particularly important and exciting resource for this maturing scholarship.
The huge breakthrough and sheer wealth of ideas which RI brought has meant that, for many, the systems and models it developed have remained the go-to model for working with multimodality. Perhaps because of this impact, subsequent work by Kress and Van Leeuwen involving a more social application of multimodality has received less attention. In this book, van Leeuwen brings together the toolkit qualities offered by multimodality and a foregrounding how and why texts they must be understood in their social and political contexts. Multimodality and Identity, provides a model for researchers to be mindful both of the social and systemic parts of multimodality.
The book credits two intellectuals in the acknowledgements, M.A.K. Halliday and the semiotician Roland Barthes, who was interested in how power, identities and mythologies are coded into everyday communication, mundane practices and objects. Multimodality and Identity, like van Leeuwen’s earlier work in Critical Discourse Analysis, is indebted to the project of showing how concealed ideology can be revealed. Multimodality can be used to reveal the more buried myths, expectations, power relations and ideologies which shape our lives and societies.
There is much that is familiar from Van Leeuwen’s groundbreaking work over the past few decades in the chapters of Multimodality and Identity. There are about colour, textures, typography, shape and movement. But this book is so much more than inventories for documenting the semiotics of these things. This is not a book about the systems themselves, but is rather concerned, in the fashion of Barthes, with how the meanings they carry can be studied in relation to societies and ideology – and specifically in this case, how identity and style are ideological.
The more familiar chapters looking at different kinds of semiotic resources follow three opening chapters which provide the social of the social semiotics which takes place in this book. Here the books sets up how it is that identity is a matter of ideology and explains how it has been shaped by broader shifts in capitalist societies where consumerism is now infused into so much of what we do and how we think about ourselves. These three chapters lay out why any analysis of discourse and communication might want to study style and identity. This kind of social semiotic approach, must embed analysis at the textual level into broader contextual information. We must place the uses of semiotic resources into observed historical and ongoing sociological processes. In practical terms, this can be accomplished by engaging with wider literature beyond linguistics and discourse analysis itself. And these opening chapters are rich with accounts of identity from psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and historians as well as semioticians. The micro level analysis that multimodality offers can only be meaningful if we place texts and communication into wider contexts. This is the social, of which history, is a key part. Part of understanding the semiotics of the present day, what is naturalised in everyday communication, taken for granted, lies in looking for their origins as a means of revealing their ideological and arbitrary nature.
In these first three chapters we learn that identity has become something not so much fixed by stable social categories but something that we create, build, rediscover, assemble. Van Leeuwen views identity not just as what we are but as something we must express so that we distinguish ourselves from others. This is done through semiotic resources that are strategically and systematically preloaded into our everyday semiotic landscape by commercial interests. As the later chapters in the book show, such resources do not only include relatively obvious ways of self-expression such as clothing, but also subtler aspects coded into the objects we use, the settings we create, the computer software we use, the documents we use to run our meetings, all which lay claim at the surface level to offer benefits at functional level.
Semiotic resources must thus be understood in relation to identity: in terms of how they can code not just how a person seeks to express themselves in regards to style, but also in ways that communicate world views, attitudes and even moral character. Though not always clearly and precisely articulated, these are connoted through configurations of choices. Here we see a kind of semiotic analysis that reminds of the very best work of Barthes, showing how the more salient and compelling ideas, values and attitudes of any social and political time may be articulated mostly not as clearly laid out explanations, but rather through complex combinations of symbolism. Van Leeuwen draws on analyses of consumer capitalism to show how our societies prize individual expression but at the same time commodify and prepackage the resources for doing so. The lifestyle templates it creates increasingly colonise all parts of our lives, including the very spaces between people.
This book then, is not about colour, typeface or other semiotic resources. It is a book about creating insights into society and also about our personal freedoms and choices. Even, concepts like choice and personal expression can no longer even known outside of the ideologies of consumer capitalism. And this is precisely because this has become inscribed into the objects, settings and actions we find all around us – into the very stuff of our realities, to take Hjelmslev’s expression. Van Leeuwen shows how multimodality offers a set of tools for revealing how this takes place. We can study how identity manifest itself semiotically. But to know what we are looking at in the semiotics, we must understand social and historical contexts. This very point was also at the heart of RI. But, for us, Multimodality and Identity really shows how to study this. And as such provides, we would argue, an invaluable resource for discourse studies right now. This book tells us what can multimodality offer that is unique. It shows what its inventories of meaning potentials add to existing knowledge. And of course as discourse analysts this is what we are about.