Bezemer and Kress’ handling of semiotics and multimodal literacy seems to take the discussion out of the signifier/signified paradigm and shift the focus to the context in which these two elements work with authors and readers to make meaning. Of course, Bezemer and Kress also call into question whether or not a word need always be a signifier and explore the effectiveness of both word and image as signifiers, as in their discussion of modes of meaning (237), but “Writing ad Multimodal Texts: A Social Semiotic Account of Designs for Learning” ultimately moves on to cover contexts, even positioning on the page, of different modes of meaning makers based on their individual qualities, but also on their relationships to each other.
I will scaffold this attempt to summarize Bezemer and Kress’ article with definitions. Early in the article, we get an explication of their semiotic stance, specifically their social semiotic theoretical framework that asks, “’what exactly is the relation between the semiotic designs of multimodal learning resources and their potentials for learning?’” (235). In other words, what are the pedagogical benefits and drawbacks of the makeup of signs (shape, color, and medium) and their relationship to what they signify? Does a photograph tell us more or less about a subject than a textual description, and does that change when that description is written as opposed to spoken? Bezemer and Kress ask these questions to analyze how student perception of the signified is affected by the signifier.
To make this relationship and its effect on perception evident, Bezemer and Kress explain the transition from one mode (or medium) of signification to another. This process proves to have more of an effect on meaning-making than translation, so the term transduction is necessary. I am admittedly a little fuzzy as to why Bezemer and Kress see the need for a whole new term, but a surface-reading of the article gives me some idea.
The first seven pages of their 23-page article are dedicated to describing the components of the sign. From the relationship between sign makers and their signs (236), which supplants the author/text relationship to break “texts” down to component parts (words, images), to the modes of signification (237), a description that takes into account modal resources to show the limitations of style on signification, to frame and genre (239). There is an important difference between these two terms, but I have trouble with this. I think frames can exist within genres. For example, a biology textbook would be a genre, while an inset describing the mating rituals of whales would be a frame. I think this relationship is spatial.
Since Bezemer and Kress dedicate nearly one third of their article to describing the nature of signs and signification before mentioning transduction, I can guess that the process and opportunity for meaning to shift in transduction is more complicated than with translation. For example, let’s look at Saussure’s tree and horse image.
Whether we call the animal “horse” or “equos,” whether the signifier changes languages, the signified remains the same, meaning that there is no intrinsic relationship between the signifier and signified.
But let’s see what happens when we change more than just the language of the signifier. Here, the signified (horse) changes though the signifier (equos) remains the same. The image shows us the color of the horse, implies that the horse is further divisible (and each part has yet another signifier), and suggests that Chris can Photoshop.
Bezemer and Kress use the example of a protractor to show that words can tell us some ways in which the tool is used and by involving the tool with its user, implying that this is a specific protractor. But an image, the image they chose, suggests an Platonic, idealized protractor (242, 243). Instructions tell us how to use our protractors, while drawings show us how to use a protractor. Ironically, this actor-based specificity comes from the deletion of the actor in a set of instructions made of imperatives (244). Transduction, therefore, is more complicated than translation because it allows for the changing of both the signifier and signified. That is not to say that translation is simple, but it does not change modally. A writer of a language may not be an excellent speaker of it, and the skills needed to translate within a mode are different than the ones needed to switch modes.
In a more practical sense, translation can mean the changing of the signifier alone. “Equos” can change to “horse” or “Pferd,” and that would be a translation. Transduction is the transitioning between modes. Switching a photo for a word (the activity that Saussure’s image invites us to perform) would be transduction.
But, as I noted before, Bezemer and Kress do not limit their conversation to the signifier/signified to understand meaning, and they cite four important elements in meaning making (and transduction) that may lie outside of this relationship: selection, arrangement, foregrounding, and social repositioning.
Selection can refer to the signifiers chosen for meaning making, but selection must also account for the context in which a meaning is transduced (248). Changing the drawing of the horse for a photo was a selection, and I hoped to alter the meaning made.
Arrangement considers the spatial relationship of signifiers. This may encode a poster, for example, with a hierarchy by placing certain images physically above others. Bezemer and Kress use the example of a page in a modern science textbook that they’ve manipulated to show how this works. “Using rearrangement [they] transform the original to produce something closer to a real-ideal structure (in a semiotic culture where placement at the base of a visual frame implies ‘the empirical real’ and placement at the top suggests an ‘ideal’), while retaining the sign elements of the original” (253). Of course, this real-ideal semiotic structure is very much rooted in Western thought, and it proves an excellent example of the interplay of history, context, and meaning making.
Foregrounding is the consideration of how elements of a sign and modes change in priority during transduction (249). Bezemer and Kress show how written language fails to foreground certain elements of a set of directions by using punctuation to insert this foregrounding into a set of directions on how to use a compass (245). The speaker performs foregrounding by stressing certain syllables and taking short (but significant) rests while delivering these instructions, but the written text must do this differently. I, for example, may have chosen italics and bolded words if I were writing this out.
Social Relations directly involve teachers and students to exploit (but not in a bad way) the allowances of certain modes. For example, a teacher may invite a student to transduce a short story into a comic using Dan Awesome’s Rage Maker, if this teacher were super cool, and the choices that student would have to make would necessitate a unique interaction with a text as well as a knowledge of the limits of this chosen mode: “A certain pedagogy emerges as the consequence of the re-contextualization” (249). Here, signifier and signified play a subordinate role to the interactivity between teacher, student, and sign.
This is an admittedly muddled summary, and it does not cover the entirety of Bezemer and Kress’ article. But I hope that scaffolding my summary with definitions brings the terms to light in a useful way.
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