Multimodality and Identity

Theo van Leeuwen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000408645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book brings together the work of leading theorist, Theo van Leeuwen, on typography, colour, texture, sound and movement, and shows how they are used to communicate identity, both corporate and individual. The book provides a detailed approach to analysing the key elements of multimodal style, and shows how these can be applied to a wide range of domains, including typography, product design, architecture, and animation films.

Combining sociological insights into contemporary forms of identity with multimodal approaches to analysing how these identities are expressed, the text is richly illustrated with examples from fashion, the built environment, logos, modern art and more. With sample analyses, this user-friendly text provides clear methods for analysis and creative strategies for the practice of multimodal communication.

Providing an invaluable toolkit to analysing the key elements of multimodal design and the way they work together, this book is essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in the field of multimodal communication, whether in communication studies, linguistics, design studies, media studies or the arts.

1
The social semiotics of identity

Introduction

The term “identity” plays a key role in today’s social and cultural life. While it may seem to suggest something fixed and definite, as often as not it refers to something searched for, something lost that must be rediscovered, or something to be created anew from a bewildering range of possibilities. As Bauman has put it (2011: 19):

One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure where one belongs; that is, one is not sure how to place oneself amongst the evident variety of behavioural styles and patterns, and how to make sure that people around would accept this placement, so that both sides would know how to go on in each other’s presence. ‘Identity’ is the name given to the escape sought from that uncertainty.

In seeking to understand identity, we will need to draw on two kinds of resources, sociological (and sometimes philosophical) resources for understanding what identity is, and semiotic resources for understanding how identity is expressed.

There are many different ways of thinking about identity. Some focus on the unique individual characteristics that distinguish the “self” from others, whether in psychological terms such as “personality” and “temperament,” or in terms such as “character,” which carry moral overtones. Others focus on dimensions of our social selves, for instance gender, skin colour, religion, nationality and culture. Appiah (2018) has stressed how complex such identities can be – he himself was born in England with an English mother and a Ghanaian father, grew up in Ghana, is black, gay, and lives in New York. While Appiah accepts and even appreciates this complexity, others may turn a single strand of their complex identities into the core of how they see themselves and want to be seen by others. And that is not all. The social self also includes the roles we have to play in life, as partners in different kinds of relationships, as parents or children, as workers of one kind or another and so on, and the attitudes and lifestyles of the real or virtual communities we belong to or would like to belong to. Again, some think of identity as something that can change, or even be chosen, for others identity is an inescapable label that constrains the rights and opportunities they have in life. All of these are discursive resources for understanding and for making identity.

The second set of identity resources is semiotic – resources we use to express our identity in ways that others can recognize and accept as evidence of our identity. As already foreshadowed in the introduction, these are stylistic resources – styles of embodied performance (the way we speak, the facial expressions we use, the way we hold and move our bodies) and the styles of the material artefacts we use to express identity – styles of dress and grooming, the styles of the objects we use, and the styles of the settings we create for our lives.

This chapter will describe four concepts of identity, together with the way they manifest themselves semiotically – social identity, in which our identity essentially derives from our place in the social order; individual identity, in which our identity is a set of consistent, individual and inner characteristics; role identity, in which we have as many identities as the roles we have to play in life; and contemporary “lifestyle” identity, which focuses on leisure time activities and consumer preferences, but also on attitudes and worldviews. I will try to show that these different concepts of identity have different semiotic realizations which, however, often co-exist in complex combinations.

Social identity

Social identity, as I use the term here, stems from people’s place in a pre-existing social order. It has no place for a deeper self, a “real me,” separate from society. It has two key characteristics. First, it defines identity in terms of people’s relations to each other, for example in often complex kinship systems. Von Sturmer (1981:13) has described how Aboriginal Australians, when they first meet, introduce themselves in terms of their relation to each other before a conversation can be properly started:

MAREEBA MAN: Where you from?

MICKEY: I’m Edward River man. Where you from?

MAREEBA MAN: I’m Lama Lama man …do you know X?

MICKEY: No, do you know Y?

MAREEBA MAN: No, do you know Z?

MICKEY: Yes, she’s my auntie.

MAREEBA MAN: That old lady is my granny, I must call you daddy.

MICKEY: I must call you boy. You give me a cigarette.

This differs from contemporary Western introductions, where, in meetings with strangers, people’s names (hence their unique identities) and professions (roles) are usually the first questions asked, together, of course, with nationality or ethnicity if you happen to have a foreign accent or “look different.”

Second, in this kind of social identity, the social order mirrors the order of the known world. Social identity has meaning, through stories that describe this known world and its creation by real or mythical founders or original ancestors. It relates people, not only to other people but also to things, places, animals and their spiritual values.

Social identity is crucially expressed on the body. Durkheim (1976 [1915]: 232) already noted that people “are led by an instinctive tendency, as it were, to paint or cut upon the body images that bear witness to their common experience.” The face is a specially important signifier of identity, and in the case of social identity, the unique face we are born with must become a social face. Maori face tattooings or mokos (traditionally they involved chiselling the skin to form furrows) are a case in point.

The face shown in Figure 1.1 is a kind of identity card in which each area conveys specific identity markers – the centre forehead (ngakaipikirau) indicates rank; the area above the brows (ngunga) position; the temples (uma) marital status; the eyes and the nose kinship group (uirere); the cheek the man’s kind of work (taiohou); the chin prestige and sacred power (wairua); the jaw birth status (taitoto) and the area under the nose (raurau) bears a “signature” used, for instance, in buying property or signing contracts. But the patterns do not just signify the elements of social identity. They are also, as Lévi-Strauss noted (1963: 257) “messages fraught with spiritual and moral significance. The purpose of Maori tattooings is not only to imprint a drawing onto the flesh, but also to stamp onto the mind all the traditions and philosophy of the group.”

Figure 1.1 Maori moko. Wikipedia

Today, many people again seek to imprint a durable identity on their faces, or on other body parts. But, as I will discuss in more detail later on, the identities they convey are now individual identities. A New Zealand tattoo studio (http://www.metadigital.co.nz) explains “how to tell your story in kirihuto (skin art) tattoo otherwise known as ta moko” and provides potential customers with a catalogue of motifs, whose meanings now convey individual character traits, a dog skin cloak (hikuaua) representing courage and strength, for example, and fish scales (unaunhi) abundance and health. As the catalogue explains, you can then “add the important people in your life journey” as well. In short, tattoos are now seen as giving meaning and value to people’s individual identities and life stories.

To give another example, Lévi-Strauss (1962: 171) has described how the hair of boys from the Native American Osage and Omaha people was traditionally cut to indicate their clan. These clans were named after the totems (objects, animals or parts of animals, etc.) which provided the main motifs, not only for the boys’ hair styles but also for other body decorations and for objects and dwellings, and which represented the clan’s key values and ideas and its rules for what the members of each clan could eat, who they could marry, and so on. All this, and more, was expressed quite precisely and quite specifically by hair style.

Like Maori tattoo motifs, such Native American “scalp lock” hairstyles have also come back into fashion, for men, women and children alike, sometimes even representing animals (the “Lizard Mohawk”). But again, rather than specific social identities, they now embody generalized values, often based on an association with warriors. In specific contexts, this can then come to signify, for instance, aggressive vigilantism (e.g. Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver (1979), rebellion (e.g. punks’ “Mohawks”), non-conformity (e.g. David Beckham, in one of his many guises) and more.

Dress is another key signifier of social identity. The Prague School semiotician Bogatyrev (1971 [1935]) has described how traditional dress and hair style signified social identity in Moravian Slovakia. It could tell you where the wearer came from – there were 28 costume districts, and you could, for instance, recognize a man from Pozlovice because he would wear two velvet bands round his hat and two carmine ribbons with a green one in between, while a man from Biskupice would wear one velvet band and a red ribbon. It could tell you the wearer’s occupation – magistrates wore boots, workers the rough leather krpce, a kind of moccasin. It could tell you the social class of the wearer – squires wore bright blue breeches, peasants black or coarse white ones. It could tell you the age and marital status of the wearer – in the Mutinece-Novorany district, for instance, unmarried men wore hats with narrow rims and red and white ribbons, while married men would widen the rim and wear a broad gold band. It could even tell you the wearer’s religion – Protestant girls would twist their hair around lacing, while Catholic girls would wear “horned” head pads. In short, costume very visibly indicated one’s place in those small, rural communities, a place which would have been experienced as necessary and meaningful, and grounded in as yet unquestioned divine authority.

Bogatyrev wrote in a time of accelerating industrialization and urbanization, where such traditional communities began to be affected by the emigration of the younger generation. Earlier, Tönnies (2001 [1887]) had influentially written about the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – “community” and “society” – the former based on durable relations of kinship, neighbourliness and friendship, the latter on ever-changing, purely functional, contractual roles in which people act from individual rather than communal interest and values. This had created a nostalgia for (and perhaps idealization of) the idea of “community” and an interest in dialects and folkloristic customs which were in fact gradually changing or even disappearing. But few things disappear entirely. The costumes could still be revived in national celebrations, or, for instance, in the work of fashion designers such as Edwina Hörl (quoted in Mora, 2009: 75):

My collection celebrates the rediscovery of my Austrian culture and multicultural traditions. It embodies a humorous mix of elements from Central and Eastern Europe: artistic handicraft, like handmade straw shoes from Austria and embroidered fabric from Czech and Switzerland. I picked up clothing themes and silhouettes that are frequently inspired by what ordinary people wear in these regions, like aprons or a Sunday suit.

Traditional societies can also themselves recontextualize their identity signifiers. Anna Crane (2019) has described how the Aboriginal artist George Mung Mung created the sculpture shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 The Mary of Warmun (George Mung Mung, late 1970s). Reproduced with kind permission from the Warmun Art Centre

The sculpture is hand-carved from wood and painted with charcoal, white and red paint and natural ochre, and was made for a school which the Sisters of St Joseph had established for the Gija people of North-Western Australia at a time when cattle barons had evicted them from their native lands to avoid complying with a new law that obliged them to pay Aboriginal workers the same wages as white workers. George made the “Warmun Mary” after the school’s plaster statue of the Virgin Mary had broken. To mention just two examples from Crane’s detailed analysis, the dotted design traditionally identifies unmarried girls, but now also came to stand for Mary’s status as a virgin, while charcoal traditionally refers to Gija birthing practices, but now also came to stand for Mary’s role as the mother of Christ. Thus the sculpture could be used in the school both to tell the story of the Virgin Mary and to explain traditional Gija female identities and spiritual and social practices. In the words of George’s friend Hector Jandany (cited by Crane, 2019: 16), George “was looking forward to a blackfella way and a kartiya (white person) way, he was a two-way man for the Dreaming.”

To give one other example, in the Pacific kingdom of Tonga, the fakaleiti, who dress like...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The social semiotics of identity
• 2 Functionality and identity
• 3 Analysing style
• 4 Shape
• 5 Colour
• 6 Texture
• 7 Movement
• 8 A social semiotic theory of synaesthesia
• References
• Index