Page 182 - Literacy in the New Media Age

AN AGENDA FOR FURTHER THINKING 171

writing to others, this is a crucial question. Are there forms of imagination which
will be less prominent, less usual, less habituated? And if so, what should our
response be to this possibility? This is, however, quite a different approach to
one that bemoans the withering away of imagination as an already decided, a
foregone, event.
If we take seriously the goal of facility in design as the new essential
pedagogic aim in communication, then the work and the place of imagination
will in any case be entirely different to what it has been so far. It will extend to
semiotic work involving the entirely ordinary, the everyday, and the banal.
Competent performance in relation to one mode as hitherto envisaged, with
imagination reserved for interpretation involving specially valued texts or, more
rare still, the making of such texts, will be replaced by the much more
demanding tasks precisely of selection, arrangement and transformation,
involving many modes, in always new environments, with their always changing
demands.

Modes, bodies and dispositions
In all this, the questions around gains and losses are entirely in the foreground.
Forms of imagination are inseparable from the material characteristics of modes,
from their shaping in a society’s history, and from their consequent interaction
with the sensoriness, the sensuousness, of our bodies. Introducing a concern with
materiality and the senses into representation brings the long-standing separation
in Western thinking of mind and body into severe question, and therefore
challenges the reification and consequent separation of cognition, affect and
emotion. It becomes untenable to assume that cognition is separable from affect;
all representation is always affective, while it is also always cognitive. In fact,
the existence of these two terms is shown to be a problem. Even now, in writing
this, I am tempted and really forced to say – because the lexical and syntactic
resources of written English are organised in this way – that representation is
always both cognitive and affective, and I am forced into using both terms, as
distinct, discrete, as seemingly real. There is a need not just for rethinking, but for
re-lexicalising, the language.
Once this has been achieved – it has not, so far – we can begin to look in a
fuller sense at the interrelations of modes and human social dispositions. What is
the effect on dispositions of the dominant use of the visual rather than of the
oral, of the visual-written rather than the oral-spoken? Not just in terms of effects
on memory, but in terms of deeper bodily dispositions? What would human
dispositions be like if we were to rely much more on actional modes? Or on the
visual? These questions have complex and multiple answers. As I suggested in
earlier chapters, the language modes dispose us towards seeing the world in
terms of temporality and sequence, and in doing so they tend to make us see the
world in causal relations. This is more so in languages such as English because it
is combined with lexicalisations of actions on the one hand and, on the other,