Gunther Kress and the craft of meaning making

This special issue titled Gunther Kress-Explorer of the semiotic landscape continues in the uniquely distinctive tradition of special issues of Text & Talk, as a way of recognizing the contributions of key scholars who have been associated integrally with the development of the journal. The preceding luminaries include Aaron Cicourel (Briggs 2007), Dell Hymes (Blommaert 2009), John Gumperz (Auer and Roberts 2011), Michael Halliday (Thompson 2013) and Geoff Leech (McEnery and Brookes 2021). These special issues are intended as a platform not so much to eulogize these distinguished scholars but to occasion a deeper engagement with some of the key ideas and methodologies espoused by them, accompanied by critical and evaluative judgements in terms of current and future research trajectories (Sarangi 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2021). With the exception of the editions concerning Aaron Cicourel and Michael Halliday, the special issues were published posthumously, as is the case with the current issue dedicated to Gunther Kress.

The guest editors, Theo van Leeuwen and Jeff Bezemer, as well as the contributors (comprising some of the close collaborators of Gunther Kress over the past decades) provide excellent illustrations and extensions of Gunther Kress’s pioneering work in what can be overarchingly labelled ‘meaning making’, with specific reference to social semiotics and multimodality, beyond the realm of linguistics. Meaning making can be likened to the art of crafting, e.g., the activities of pottery, knitting, woodwork and quilting. In using all modes/modalities available to us as material resources for making meaning, we endeavour to align ourselves optimally with our target audiences, while remaining aware of the effects and consequences of what we (do not) communicate.

In the introduction to the co-edited special issue of Text & Talk, titled Multimodality, Meaning-Making, and the Issue of “Text”, the notion of text itself is problematized within the remit of the journal as follows:

[…] “how do we think about ‘text’ in a world where multimodal semiotic entities are beginning to dominate the semiotic landscape?” For a journal that has, enshrined in its title, the aim to expand the notion of “text” to include “talk,” what developments, threats, challenges does the appearance of the notion of “multimodality” foreshadow for its field of enquiry?

(Adami and Kress 2014: 231)

These observations were as pertinent ten years ago in 2014 as they are now, as “the phenomenon of multimodality shifts the center of gravity from linguistic to semiotic concerns” (Adami and Kress 2014: 231). The need for going beyond the conventional linguistic tools to address key concepts such as genre, style and mode is indubitable. Over the years, Text & Talk (formerly Text) has remained an active outlet for disseminating conceptual and empirical studies in semiotics and multimodality as well as studies addressing the seminal topics within visual and embodied communication. A key feature of this special issue is the extension and critique of some of the core ideas such as mode/modality, affordance, agency/subjectivity, meaning-making in the spoken and written domains. Befittingly, Carey Jewitt writes the Epilogue, where she selectively draws on Kress’s inspiring work to illustrate the ongoing work in the domain of sensory touch.

Gunther Kress’s intellectual journey, which involved key collaborators along the way, has been charted comprehensively in the guest editorial with various milestones suitably foregrounded. In following his work, it becomes abundantly clear that his thinking and writing were evolving all the time, with no finality in sight. In the spirit of multimodality, he embraced pluralism, remaining open to new ideas which could be illustrated through mundane exemplars, while being self-critically aware of the intended and unintended consequences of such ideas for the root disciplines of language, communication and discourse studies.

Throughout his professional life, in a sense, Gunther Kress remained a disrupter, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about usage of signs, language included. However, in proposing and operationalising novel ideas, he was not in favour of establishing any kind of doxa with a bandwagon effect. For instance, I recall him being wary of multimodality research getting too far ahead of itself to the extent that the ‘language baby’ is at risk of being thrown out with the ‘multimodal’ bath water. This is not exactly how he articulated his concerns, but I sensed his disquiet about ‘excesses’ from my conversations with him on numerous occasions. For him, it was crucial that a harmonious balance must always be strived for across the various modalities, including language itself, in the meaning making process. In essence, there is bound to be a division of labour across the modalities in terms of both competitiveness and complementarity in any act of communication.

It is difficult not to remember Gunther the man – both in size and in spirit – and the ever-cordial collaborator when engaging with his scholarly work, as is abundantly clear in the guest editorial by Theo van Leeuwen and Jeff Bezmer. I never had the opportunity to be a colleague of Gunther in the same institution, but our relationship thrived via annual dinner meetings and at various conference venues where our interests intersected. He has collaborated with me over many years under the auspices of the journal, TEXT & TALK. When I took over as Editor of TEXT in 1998, my relationship with Gunther instantly took off. He served as a specialist board member until his death and his critical and frank opinions were instrumental not only concerning individual decisional outcomes but also for the overall steering of the journal’s remit and distinctiveness. I truly miss his gentle mentoring presence!