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LITERACY AND MULTIMODALITY 47

transformed in the processes of writing and of reading – and in other processes –
into something that is more nearly adequate. At the same time, transformation is
a much better explanation of processes of apperception and of integration – as in
reading for instance – than are notions such as acquisition. Transformation works
at every level and in every mode, though in the theoretical framework here, I use
the term for processes operating within the one mode only. Transformation is a
resource for establishing links between categories, and for producing new
resources out of existing resources. I treat transformation strictly as a process
which works on a given structure and its elements, and changes that structure and
its elements in specific describable ways.
For operations which involve shifts across modes, I use the term transduction.
When a science teacher asks a class to ‘write a story’ of the movement of a red
blood cell around the body, he is asking the class to perform a task in which
‘knowledge’ presented in the modes of (a mix of) image, 3D model, speech,
gesture and writing is to be re-presented in one mode, that of writing. In this
task, knowledge which was configured through the affordances of the various
modes is ‘drawn across’ into one, often a different, mode. This is not the process
of transformation, the process which works on a structure and its elements in one
mode, but of transduction, a process in which something which has been
configured or shaped in one or more modes is reconfigured, reshaped according
to the affordances of a quite different mode. It is a change of a different order, a
more thoroughgoing change.
Communication – whatever the mode – always happens as text. The ‘stuff’ of
our communication needs to be fixed, in the sense of my metaphor above, in a
mode: knowledge or information has no outward existence other than in such
modal fixing. This fixing provides the material resource through which or in
which it is to be materialised. It does not provide the shape that it is to have. That
shape is textual. Text is the result of social action, of work: it is work with
representational resources which realise social matters. Two of these are crucial
in my approach. First, the matter of the social relations of participants in social
events – who is involved, with what purposes, what roles, what power, in what
environments. The expression of these social matters gives one kind of shape to
text, namely that of genre. Second, the social matter of ‘what is at issue’, ‘what
is being talked about’. Following the work of Michel Foucault, I call this
discourse. Here the assumption is that that which is talked about is not simply
there, but is shaped in specific ways in social institutions, whose meanings shape
that which is at issue. When I talk to my neighbour about a complaint that I
have, I do this in my everyday way of talking; when I see ‘my’ doctor, she or he
will immediately talk about the ‘same thing’ in quite other ways, ways that are
formed in the institution of Western medicine. If I talk to another neighbour, he
or she might recast what I am saying in yet other ways, because they might be
followers of some form of alternative medicine – ‘natural healing’, perhaps.
Nothing escapes the shaping influence of discourse, though any text is likely to