Page 51 - Literacy in the New Media Age

40 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

The resources through which meaning is made are changed in the process of
meaning-making, but so is the inner disposition of those who have made
that meaning inwardly in interpretation or outwardly in articulation. The process
of inward meaning-making and the resultant change to the state of an inner
semiotic resource is called learning. However, the process of outward meaning-
making also has a transformative effect. Again, the signmaker’s resources have
been changed, because the sign made outwardly is a new sign, and even though
it is made from existing meaning-resources, it is nevertheless made into a new
sign by the conjunction of an existing form with the new meaning; a conjunction
which, it is safe to say, will never have been made in that way before. The inner
transformations produce learning, and learning is the shaping of the subjectivity
of the maker of signs. The transformations that are part of outward articulation
produce new syntactic, textual or lexical forms, which play their role, however
slightly, in changing the resource which was used in making meaning. This is
how semiotic change happens – whether a change to writing, to speech, to
gesture. But it is also the way in which that semiotic change, the change in the
modal resources, always reflects and tracks the values, structures and meanings
of the social and cultural world of the meaning-maker and of the socio-cultural
group in which they are.
Learning is not a term that belongs in semiotics; sign-making is. However,
learning and sign-making are two sides of one sheet of paper as Saussure might
have said; which side we choose to look at depends on the perspective from
which we are looking. Both learning and sign-making are dynamic processes
which change the resources through which the processes take place – whether as
concepts in psychology or as signs in semiotics – and change those who are
involved in the processes. This makes both learning and representing/
communicating into dynamic active processes, far removed from inert notions
such as ‘acquisition’.
The process of sign-making that I have outlined here entails that the sign is
always new, whether it is the sign made in interpretation or the sign made in
articulation. This is far removed from notions of language use in which a stable
system with stable elements is used by the language user but not changed by her
or him. In that approach to semiosis – and of course this would be the case with
all modes – creativity is rare, it is special and exceptional, allowed to special
individuals – poets, painters, musicians. In my approach, creativity is ordinary,
normal; it is the everyday process of semiotic work as making meaning. Such an
approach has, I believe, vast pedagogical, social and political consequences.
From this new perspective it is possible to see that until now we have viewed
human semiotic work in a way which is distorting: seen from the older
perspective this now normal creative activity is classified as deviation or error;
that which is most characteristically human is ruled out of court, not admissible.
Semiotics is the science of the life of signs in society, according to Saussure. The
move from linguistics to semiotics is first and foremost a move from a primary
concern with form to a concern with form-and-meaning; it is a move from a