Page 80 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 69

Figure 5.3 Quadrant of spatial meaning potential in ‘Western’ images

depiction of a theoretical formulation in science; in fact in a school textbook it
corresponds to the placing of the diagrams and photographs of folding and
faulting above the photograph of the mountain (Ingleborough in North Yorkshire)
and the caption accompanying it. Placement in this scheme leads to particular
readings; in the case just mentioned precisely that of the ‘empirically real (the
photograph of the mountain)’ and the ‘scientifically ideal’ (the diagrammatic/
theoretical account). These potentials for meaning play a part in the multiplicity
of ways in which word and image interact.
To a common-sense view, trained in seeing meaning in language but not in
image or in layout, this might seem implausible, and the question ‘but how do
you know?’ poses itself. Making use of the meaning-potential of space is no
different in its principle to making use of the meaning-potential of sequence in
the case of speech. To go back to my earlier examples, in ‘Mary married Bill’ the
meaning differs from that of ‘Bill married Mary’. The first is said by someone
who is likely to focus on Mary more than on Bill, for whatever reason – maybe
they are closer friends; the second is likely to be said by someone whose focus is
more on Bill. That meaning is carried by the affordance of sequence, of sequence
in time as a signifier. And if I say ‘Bill and Mary married’, then this differs in
ways which we understand, because I am attempting to overcome the meaning of
sequence by constructing a joint entity ‘MaryandBill’. The principles at issue
here are semiotic principles of great generality: whatever is available for making