Multimodality begins from an apparently unassailable premise:
meaning is distributed across multiple modes.
Language, image, gesture, music, layout—each is treated as a semiotic system contributing to the overall meaning of a text.
This premise is wrong.
Fundamentally wrong.
1. What Multimodality Sees
Multimodality is not without insight.
It observes that:
different resources co-occur
speech is accompanied by gesture
images appear alongside language
music and movement unfold together
It recognises:
that meaning does not occur in isolation.
This is correct.
But from this, it draws a conclusion that does not follow:
that all co-occurring resources are themselves modes of meaning.
2. The Core Error
The central error of multimodality is simple:
it treats all organised phenomena as semiotic.
3. What the Series Have Shown
Across the preceding analyses, a different picture has emerged.
music is not a semiotic system, but a system of value
dance is not meaning-making, but coordinated value
gesture and posture are not “body language,” but configurations of value and sites of coupling
images are not intrinsically meaningful, but epilinguistic systems dependent on language
These are not variations within a single category.
They are:
fundamentally different kinds of system.
4. The Category Mistake
Multimodality attempts to unify these under the concept of “mode.”
But “mode” has no coherent referent.
It conflates:
biological value systems
social coordination
semiotic systems (language)
semiotic systems made possible by language (images, diagrams)
These do not belong together.
They cannot be analysed by the same principles.
“Mode” is not a category. It is a collapse of categories.
5. Coupling Misread as Multiplicity
What multimodality encounters is real.
Different resources do operate together.
But what it misrecognises is the nature of that togetherness.
it mistakes coupling for multiplicity of meaning.
multimodality sees:
multiple modes contributing meaning.
What is actually occurring is:
distinct systems being coupled across strata.
6. The Inflation of Meaning
This misrecognition produces a systematic inflation.
Meaning is projected onto:
movement
sound
spatial arrangement
visual form
structured
coordinated
effective
Value begins to look like meaning.
Coupling begins to look like integration.
The result is a field in which:
meaning is everywhere—and therefore nowhere in particular.
7. What Actually Exists
If the inflation is reversed, a different ontology appears.
Not:
multiple modes of meaning
But:
biological value systems (perception, movement)
social coordination systems (alignment, shared salience)
semiotic systems (language)
epilinguistic systems (images, diagrams)
couplings across these systems
This is not a multiplication of modes.
It is:
a stratified organisation of fundamentally different processes.
8. Consequences for Analysis
Once this distinction is enforced, multimodal analysis cannot proceed as before.
It can no longer:
treat gesture as meaning
treat images as intrinsically meaningful
treat music as semiotic
treat all co-occurring resources as equivalent contributors
Instead, it must ask:
what is value here?
what is meaning?
where does semiosis actually occur?
how are systems being coupled?
Without these distinctions, analysis describes phenomena.
It does not explain them.
9. The Persistence of the Error
Multimodality persists not because it is precise, but because it is permissive.
It allows:
everything to count as meaning
every phenomenon to be analysed in the same way
complexity to be flattened into plurality
This makes it:
flexible
expansive
widely applicable
It also makes it:
theoretically incoherent.
10. A Stronger Claim
It might be said that multimodality overreaches—that it extends semiotic analysis too far.
This is not the problem.
The problem is more fundamental:
multimodality is not wrong because it overreaches—it is wrong because it never distinguished what it was dealing with in the first place.
11. The Field Repositioned
What is required is not a refinement of multimodality, but its replacement.
a theory of stratified systems and their coupling.
Such a theory:
limits meaning to where it actually occurs
distinguishes value from semiosis
explains why different phenomena appear unified
accounts for interaction without collapsing difference
12. Final Position
The conclusion is unavoidable:
multimodality does not reveal how meaning is distributed across modes; it obscures the distinction between value and meaning, and mistakes their coupling for a multiplicity of semiotic systems.
What appears as a rich ecology of meaning is, in fact:
a structured interplay of fundamentally different kinds of organisation.
To see this is not to reduce the field.
It is to make it, for the first time:
analytically precise.
No comments:
Post a Comment