On Multimodality

A Manifesto

Rick Wysocki, Jon Udelson, Caitlin E. Ray, Jessica S. B. Newman, Laura Sceniak Matravers, Ashanka Kumari, Layne M. P. Gordon, Khirsten L. Scott, Michelle Day, Michael Baumann, Sara P. Alvarez, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

Introduction

We offer this chapter as a manifesto; specifically, it acts as a set of tenets about multimodality and its place in our pedagogy and research. Additionally, this manifesto articulates and frames activities of thinking, being, and making from our perspectives as rhetoric and composition scholar–teachers occupying a particular cultural, historical, and technological moment. We draw our manifesto approach from design studies and employ the genre in a way that ties it to scholarship in and histories of design thinking, but our work is anchored in writing studies.

The First Things First Manifesto was originally published in 1964 and primarily drafted in England; it responded to a particular cultural moment of advertising, capitalism, and speed––that is, to the Modern values dominant in the culture at the time (e.g., the individual Self, Science, Technology, Progress, and other capital-letter values that trumped notions of complex subjectivity; more cautious, critical engagement, and multivocality; truths rather than Truth). In it, the twenty-one authors called for a more humanistic approach to design — a reversal of priorities away from gimmickry and slick sales and toward the importance of street signs, books, catalogues, and other design objects that influence our everyday lives.

In 1999, "First Things First Revisited" was published by Rick Poynor in Emigre Magazine. In this text, Poynor offers a rich historical and cultural discussion of the importance of context to the original 1964 piece. Poynor argues further that although historically anchored, the claims of the original piece are as meaningful in 1999 as they were in the 1960s, and that, indeed, "we live and breathe design. ... Designers are engaged in nothing less than the manufacture of contemporary reality." That same year, a "First Things First Manifesto 2000," authored and signed by thirty-three designers, was published simultaneously in Emigre, AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Eye Magazine, and Blueprint. In it, the authors point back to the 1964 document and toward the future of design, arguing that design has a significant role to play in public discourse.

In 2014, the website firstthingsfirst2014 was launched, and it attracted more than one thousand six hundred signatures and continued the distribution of the 1964 tenets along with new tenets. By drawing attention back to the effects of design on the lived experiences of human beings, "First Things First" marked a particularly significant moment for design studies that has rippled throughout these later texts. While we are not necessarily claiming writing studies is in a historical, institutional, or cultural position similar to the one design studies was in the 1960s (indeed, we argue we are not), we do want to leverage the rhetorical velocity (Ridolfo and DeVoss 2009) of the manifesto genre in similar ways and for similar purposes to those of "First Things First."

Our manifesto is multivocal. It emerges from the combination and pluralism of our voices and positionalities as we articulate our shared — and, at times, conflicting — perspectives on multimodal composing. We also draw in voices from scholars in our field to situate and amplify our claims. We lean on stories and experiences. As Malea Powell (2012) has importantly reminded us, "Stories take place. Stories practice place into space. Stories produce habitable spaces" (391). Although the bullet points below in some ways obscure the rich tapestry of stories underneath them, this piece is informed by story — by the research shared by scholars, by our experiences in classrooms and discussions in our hallways, and by the narratives we weave as we present our work at conferences. In this piece, then, we combine our voices with others in order to further situate rhetoric and composition as a habitable space for multimodality.

Manifestos, moreover, can live and breathe. They can circulate. Their tenets are organic, flexible, and malleable. Ideally, they have rhetorical velocity and are repurposed, taken up, adopted, altered, and live beyond their original contexts and places of publication. Taking up these affordances, what we hope to offer in the chapter is a replicable stance — a series of processes, approaches, and practices readers can adapt and put to use in their scholarship, at their institutions, and in their classrooms.

The Tenets

On Thinking Rhetorically

Rhetorically informed scholarship shapes our thinking on multimodality and technology. Stuart Selber (2004), for instance, calls attention to the ways functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies must be balanced in fostering digital literacy, and we extend that perspective to multimodality writ large. Such a perspective, specifically, can help composers employ...