Gunther Kress is Professor of Semiotics and Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. His interests are in meaning-making and communication in contemporary environments; with an interest in developing a social semiotic theory of multimodal communication.

“In periods of fragmentation and individuation communication is fraught: each environment of communication asks that social and ‘political’ relations, tastes, needs and desires be newly assessed. The question of rhetoric - how to make my communication most effective in relation to this audience, here and now - has moved newly, urgently into the center. Rhetoric has become a major issue for design” (Gunther Kress, 2004).

Some relevant books are Social Semiotics  (1988, with R Hodge); Before Writing: rethinking the paths to literacy (1996); Reading Images: the grammar of graphic design (1996/2006); Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication (2002) both with T van Leeuwen; Multimodal learning and teaching: the rhetorics of the science classroom (2001); Literacy in the new media age (2003); Multimodality: a social semiotic approach to contemporary communication (2010).

ABSTRACT: Rhetoric as the politics of communication

The question that underpins my interest (not an expert’s interest by any means) in the notion of rhetoric is ‘why has a concern with rhetoric become so prominent over the last two decades or so?’ I speculate that in part this might be due to the instability and provisionality of a social world in which the older, ‘traditional’, established communicational grooves of ‘convention’ can no longer be relied on: every occasion of communication has to be assessed newly in terms of the constituent entities of that occasion – the criterial characteristics of the participants; the distributions of power; the requirements of that which is to be communicated; and of course, the interests of the rhetor. The situation is complicated by changes in means and sites of dissemination and access to these – that is, the effects of the ‘new media’, so-called. And even more so maybe, there is the relatively ready availability of a wide range of resources for representation – modes. If one adds the power of the market, with its dominant notion of choice - rather than older notions such as responsibility, obligation, role - into the mix, then it becomes clearer, maybe, why that may be so.

These factors together require a theory of communication apt for these conditions, one which insists on the centrality of the agency of the rhetor as sign-maker and at the same time a full recognition of all the modes, together with other semiotic categories (eg genre, discourse), available and used in a specific social environment. That of course entails the use of (social) semiotics rather than linguistics as the necessary theoretical frame for rhetoric. 

I will exemplify my approach with a range of - generally speaking – banal examples and outline how the approach is or can be applied in ‘environments of learning’. My examples will be ‘multimodal’, and so they will entail some comment on rhetoric in a multimodal (including visual) view. I will show the effects of the use of such an approach on notions of learning and assessment / (e)valuation. Of course, all social interactions can be seen as sites of learning. If that approach is taken, learning becomes a lens through which broad social issues can be seen: such as the shaping of identity and ‘knowledge’, providing alternative ways of viewing, conceptualizing and potentially at least displacing categories such as ‘socialization’.

Gunther Kress

13 July 2010

Back to conference homepage