Mode and Audience

            When one reads Kress, it is tempting to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of terms he throws out. I found his definition of rhetoric as “the politics of communication” to be slightly suspicious at first, but it has slowly grown on me. One of the most interesting implications of social-semiotic theory for rhetoric is the relationship between audience and mode. Where rhetorical theorists until the 20^th century dealt almost exclusively with words (with a limited focus on oratory), here Kress isolates something that is uniquely appropriate for our times: mode is not just a way to consider the available means of persuasion, but mode has a specific relationship to audience that lends itself to the rationale for choosing one mode over another.

            This relationship is best expressed on page 130. Kress, discussing the way the Poetry Foundation’s website changes its presentation of poetry depending on whether teachers, students, or children are viewing the works, points out that the relationship between the mode and the audience is a significant one. In short, each mode offers a different affordance for a different audience, such that some modes paired with some messages work better for a given audience than other modes with that same message.

            In some ways, introducing multimodality into existing rhetorical theory does not challenge much of what has come before. Kress, like Aristotle and Bitzer, places the agency of the audience in a central role. It is because the audience is free to accept or reject the rhetor that the agency of the audience should occupy such a significant space.