"Mashup of Discourses: A Critical Analysis of the Videotext, 'Dream America Movie'"

About the Author

A teacher of writing and multimedia texts for nearly 30 years, Nancy Fox is working on her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in Seattle where she serves as Associate Director of the Expository Writing Program. She holds an M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from San Diego State University, where she initiated the use of visual text construction as a mode of teaching argumentation and rhetorical strategy to first-year composition students. Her abiding interest is in the development of a Critical Discourse Analysis that addresses the complexities of multimodal texts by student composers in particular.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography

Part 1: Competing Views of Multimodal Discourses in Academia and “Remix” Culture

Despite expansion of semiotic resources and van Leeuwen’s persistent signaling of the construction of multimodal “text objects” and their functions in discourse, scholars of linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis did not embark on equally enthusiastic research.[6] Indeed, in a position paper he published recently inVisual Studies, van Leeuwen calls for more field study in the ways that digital texts in particular enact a new and still-evolving visual language whose “grammars” and normative values remain unexplored and undefined—despite the fact that they may be, given the visual resources available to text-makers (Power Point, Microsoft Moviemaker, Microsoft clipart, etc.) both codified and highly prescriptive. He notes the development of “a new writing which integrates writing and image in new ways and increasingly blurs the distinction between the two, a distinction which only yesterday seemed so clear-cut and obvious” (132). Although he uses the words “new writing,” his work in this respect indicates emergence of an entirely new field of inquiry since 1964, when Roland Barthes, a pioneer in studying “the semiology of images,” asserted that “we are still more than ever a civilization of writing” (“Rhetoric of the Image”). Fifty years later, van Leeuwen identifies “a new visuality” that calls for “wide-ranging analysis of actual data” that “map(s) out that new visual languages, their properties, parameters, and so on” and “investigate(s) how those ‘languages’ are learnt and applied as people work with the new writing forms of communication” (135). He thus challenges future scholars of linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to move beyond the constraints of praxis—including admittedly his own—and begin to explore creatively these new genres of text.

O’Halloran et al.’s study of software environments is one response to van Leeuwen’s call, an urgency O’Halloran herself identified six years ago in her 2004 anthology, Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic and Functional Perspectivesand continues to emphasize in her Multimodal Analysis Lab at the University of Singapore. She supports van Leeuwen’s position that “linguistics has overlooked the contribution of other meaning-making resources” (1), a point further reiterated in this collection by Cheong Yin Yuen, who notes that “research in this realm has not been as extensive as the examination of purely linguistic texts” (163). Both O’Halloran and Yuen (as well as O’Halloran et al. most recently) directly tie the exploration of multimodal texts to discourse analysis: O’Halloran notes that the result of ignoring these multidimensional texts is an “impoverished view of the function and meaning of discourse” (1), and Yuen expands this view by stating that “the disregard of non-linguistic features … is tantamount to annihilating the efflorescence of meaning that can emerge from a multi-semiotic analysis” (163).

The astonishment of these scholars at the indifference of linguists to multimodal discourses is not accidental, since Van Leeuwen himself derives his work in discourse analysis from what he calls the “systematic functional grammar of English” developed by the linguistics scholar, Michael Halliday. Halliday describes grammar as constitutive of a language user’s interpretations of experience—i.e., how the language user “makes sense of reality” (Grammar 4)—and not simply a vehicle for delivering statements. But van Leeuwen extends Halliday’s linguistics into the realm of images, noting a fundamental difference between language and visual communication. Linguistic categories, he says, cannot be imported into the visual field, and in this respect departs from Halliday’s linguistic focus[7] in a way that enhances both theories without diminishing either or establishing conflict with a thinker he considers his “starting point” (Grammar 2). He notes that “linguistics does not offer a model for semiotic modes other than language,” and calls for the application of “broader semiotic principles” to all modes in communication, here, specifically, the visual. Thus, he launches a theory of visual semiotics which he defines—in terms of Halliday’s deep grammatical structure—as the “way in which elements (people, places, things) combine in visual statements of complexity and extension” in order to produce meaning (Grammar 4).

This argument for the integrity of the visual field in discourse analysis is particularly urgent at this moment since, as van Leeuwen and O’Halloran consistently note, there is in the culture an increasing use of visuals, particularly digital forms. In support of this stance, Yuen suggests the “irony” that multimodal discourse is “underrepresented … since in this information age it is indeed a rarity for texts not to be illustrated” (163). In “Discourse as the Recontextualization of Social Practice,” Van Leeuwen recognizes the ways that images are essential features in multimodal texts which can use all semiotic modes—speech, gesture, color, moving images, etc.—to realize a discourse. Van Leeuwen’s interest in the ways we realize discourse through visual and ultimately multimodal material is not only a purely academic one.  He is an active adherent of the kinds of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter CDA) defined specifically by Fairclough, i.e., a mode of inquiry that “is not just concerned with analysis, (but) seeks to discern connections between language and other elements in social life that are often opaque” (“Discourse of New Labour” 230). Van Leeuwen productively analyzes how discourse constructs what he calls “legitimation” for social practices in both the private and public spheres (“Legitimation” 91), a field of investigation that seems not only timely but necessary in a rapidly developing digital age.

This digital age has engendered its own theories of multi-semiotic texts that serve further to anchor such communications to CDA with its focus on political and/or social exigencies. The relevance of such textual integrations as a discourse with its own integrity can be derived from Fairclough’s study of Michel Foucault:

It is a commonplace in sociolinguistics that statements (or ‘utterances’) are so determined (by situational context). The important addition that Foucault makes is that relationship between an utterance and its verbal and situational context is not a transparent one: how context affects what is said or written, and how it is interpreted, varies from one discursive formation to another. (Discourse and Social Change 47)

The “situational context” that has deepened multimodal “discursive formations” is the digital technology culture that has developed over the last two decades. This culture has described its own ethos as “Remix Theory,” i.e., “the global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste” (Remix Home). While scholars of multimodal discourses derive their context from the kinds of verbal and visual texts that Barthes analyzed in his 1964 study, “The Rhetoric of the Image” (i.e., a French advertisement for Italian food), the current Remix theorists locate the source of such texts to musicians in late twentieth-century genres of reggae and hip-hop: “The concept of Remix often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which were produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City, an activity with roots in Jamaica’s music”—which hip-hop musicians and deejays developed into a practice known as “sampling” (Remix Theory “Remix Defined”). Current Remix theorists focus on “sampling” (i.e., taking pieces of existing materials and, in van Leeuwen’s terminology, “recontextualizing” them) as the precursor for multimodal cultural texts, including those visual constructions that have been the purview of academic inquiry. Where Remix Theory extends that inquiry, however, is in its keen awareness of the “vital role” that multimodality plays in communication on the global level, delivered via the internet—a way of “visual knowledge building” and “new media literacy” that forms its own “cutting edge” culture in which “consumption and production” of informational content and structure cohere creatively (Remix Theory “Remix Defined”).

On the level of discourse, wherein van Leeuwen reminds us that “what is said or written”—here, “remix” and “sampling”—is “evidence for the existence of discourses” (“Recontextualization” 145), this media-savvy culture defines itself as “mashup”—a term also used generally to described the activity of “remix” itself, as in this introduction to an interview with O’Halloran on a nanotechnology site: “We have so much media coming at us at any one time and it is increasingly being ‘mashed up’, remixed, reused, and repurposed” (“Kay O’Halloran”). A recent publication defines this “mashup” cultural discourse as enacted in the Web 2.0 environment. It characterizes its citizens as creative and productive, “media-theoretical, -practical and—educational,” whose ideology is social interaction, “on and off the web” (but in fact the dominant medium throughout the literature is the internet).[8] In a CBS report entitled “The Mashup Culture,” Scott Conroy investigates the specifically generational context of this discourse and, on the basis of his research into the millennials’ technological activities and aptitude, concludes that “it is easier (now) for (teens) to create their own multidimensional identities” through the content they “remix.”  It seems, therefore, productive and timely to discuss the pedagogical use of a “remix” genre that incorporates diverse elements of composition, linguistics, rhetoric, and visual media.

The following analysis will examine a student videotext, created as a final project in a first-year university writing course, that exemplifies this Remix Theory and represents discursively a Mashup Culture. As a multi-semiotic text, however, the video further serves the purposes of multimodal discourse analysis that scholars in the academic sphere, such as O’Halloran et al. and van Leeuwen, advocate with both enthusiasm and exigency. The position of student text-maker here as a full participant in popular culture—specifically, the internet and new media cohort—and also in the academic sphere which defined and assigned this task leads naturally, perhaps, to an equally multimodal and “mashup” analysis. Generally speaking, it seems fitting for texts that acquire meaning and salience from a multiplicity of semiotic resources and travel far afield from the limited space that van Leeuwen and his colleague Gunther Kress have called “monomodality” (O’Halloran et al. 2) to summon an equally heteroglossic method of analysis. It is indeed through attention to the “mashup” cultural context that gave rise to such texts that, as Norman Fairclough emphasizes, CDA itself is possible: “CDA asks: ‘what changes have taken place and are taking place in forms of interaction around political and social issues? … It has to be transdisciplinary (and) committed to producing new theories and new methods of analysis” (230). I’d argue that only such a multidimensional approach would enable researchers to recognize and analyze the languages and valences, both linguistic and visual, as well as other dynamic and still undefined elements, that give such videotexts their potency as Critical Discourse from a transformative era.

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[6]It should be noted that Norman Fairclough agrees that “most CDA focuses on language” (“The Discourse of New Labour” 229).