Page 180 - Literacy in the New Media Age

AN AGENDA FOR FURTHER THINKING 169

A fully requisite theory will rest on the understanding that the resources
of representation are always in a process of change. While there is – necessarily
– convention, the stability of the resources for representation is always contingent.
The assumption that there are rule-systems will be replaced by an understanding
that systematicness is socially produced, and is a sometimes more and a sometimes
less useful fiction. The signs of all representational resources are recognised as
‘motivated’ conjunctions of form and meaning, produced out of the interest of
the sign-maker, whose ‘use’ of representational resources is agentive and
transformative. Sign-makers act out of their interest but with an awareness, more
or less explicitly held, of the history of the resources, expressed as the force of
convention.
The assumption of the centrality of language will be replaced with an
understanding that modes of representation are used in relation to a multiplicity
of factors, such as the sign-maker’s sense of what are the apt modes for
representing, given a certain audience and therefore specific relations between
sign-maker and audience. Out of this awareness of the always rhetorical task of
communication arises the arrangement of modes which are in play in a message/
text. This is reflected in the foregrounding or backgrounding of modes,
determines their communicational load in a specific instance of communication,
and indicates their centrality or otherwise in instances of communication. Of
course the message-maker’s action does not guarantee the reception of the sign-
complexes in the way they might have been intended. Here too, the theory which
sees reading as transformative overcomes a long-standing problem in debates on
communication. ‘Rationality’ is lodged equally in the use of all modes. At the
same time there is a serious challenge both to the assumption of a single kind of
rationality with a single set of features, and to the separation of rationality and
affect. There will be much more open notions, which bring materiality,
bodyliness, sensuality and affect into the centre of attention together with
rationality and cognition – or challenge the distinctions between such categories.
The notion of competence in use will give way to that of interested design.
Competence in use starts with that which exists, shaped in the social history of
the group in which the user acts. Hence competence in use is oriented to the past.
It is also oriented to allegiance to the conventions of the group. Design, by
contrast, starts from the interest and the intent of the designer to act in a specific
way in a specific environment, to act with a set of available resources and to act
with an understanding of what the task at hand is, in relation to a specific
audience. Design is prospective, future-oriented: in this environment, with these
(multiple) resources, and out of my interests now to act newly I will shape a
message. In design, resources are transformed in any number of ways – whether
in new combinations of modes or in the constant transformative action by sign-
makers in producing newly made signs.
Creativity is an automatic consequence of such action – both in the new
combinations of resources and in the inevitable transformations of existing
resources in the design and production of the message. Creativity becomes