Multimodality, politics and ideology

David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

Örebro University, Sweden / University of Southern Denmark

This journal’s editorial statement is clear that political discourse should be

studied not only as regards parliamentary type politics. In this introduction we
argue precisely for the need to pay increasing attention to the way that politi-
cal ideologies are infused into culture more widely, in entertainments media,
software, administrative processes, children’s apps, healthcare and even office
furniture design. We point to the way that there have been massive shifts away
from traditional state forms of politics to the rule of neoliberalism and the power
of the corporation which, like the former regime of power, requires meanings
and identities which can hold them in place. We explain the processes by which
critical multimodal discourse analysis can best draw out this ideology as it is
realized through different semiotics resources.

Keywords: Multimodal, critical discourse analysis, politics, ideology

1. Introduction

The editorial statement of this journal states that “political discourse does not
remain limited to the institutional field of politics (e.g. parliamentary discourse,
election campaigns, party programs, speeches, etc.) but opens to all linguistic
manifestations that may be considered to be political”. If by politics we here un-
derstand the institutional practices of individuals or organizations holding power,
including the tensions and alliances between them, as well as the processes of gov-
ernance that implement and maintain social practices and disseminate the beliefs
that support them, then it is clear that, today, the power of governments is increas-
ingly shared between government and the media, and increasingly shifting from
government to private capital, with complex relations of mutual dependence and
complex tensions between these three.
As a result, state institutions which have not (yet) been privatized, or are in
the process of privatization, such as education and the health system, but also

Journal of Language and Politics 15:3 (2016), 243–258.  doi 10.1075/jlp.15.3.01mac

issn 1569–2159 / e-issn 1569–9862 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
244 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

traditional politics itself, are in a state of crisis and exposed to constant critique
by the mainstream media, while the formerly relatively autonomous professions
which, over the past two centuries, have played such a role in developing medi-
cine, science and education, are equally relentlessly undermined by the media and
eroded by contemporary management culture. In this constellation, public com-
munication, even when emanating from government, increasingly addresses the
public as consumers rather than as citizens, adopting and adapting genres origi-
nating in the advertising and entertainment industries in a process which Fair
clough (1993) called the ‘marketization of discourse’ and which is characterized
by a conversational style, aestheticizing design, and increased use of multimodal
resources, and facilitated by technologies for everyday communication that are
made available worldwide by global IT corporations.
For the study of language and politics, all this points to an urgent need to pay
attention to the multimodally mediated discursive implementation and mainte-
nance of these distributed forms of power and the equally multimodal expres-
sion of the ideas and beliefs that support it. As a consequence this special issue
covers topics such as everyday computer software, television reality shows, apps
and games targeted at young children, the use of strategic diagrams, the design of
office furniture, the promotion of health care services and new kinds of corporate
images which claim to promote, yet in fact colonize, gender diversity — viewing
all these as manifestations of political power and political ideologies, that is, as
evidence of the new configurations of power inscribed in contemporary multi-
modal texts and arte facts. In this introduction we will first discuss the power of
the media, then focus on the shift from government to private capital, to finally
address the consequences of these developments for a social semiotic approach to
the study of language and politics.

2. Ideology beyond the institutional fields of politics

Political science and critical discourse analysis have generally stuck to a relative-
ly narrow ‘institutional’ definition of politics. Media and cultural studies, on the
other hand, have long focused on the role of the mass media in disseminating
dominant political ideologies.
Early media scholars, mostly coming from sociology, were chiefly interested
in the ownership of media such as news organizations and advertising compa-
nies and the alignment of journalism with state organizations, driven by an in-
terest in the power of these institutions to disseminate political ideologies. They
showed how advertisers withdraw support from media and news outlets critical
of the capitalist system (Curran and Seaton 1980), how movie studios are closely
 Multimodality, politics and ideology 245

related to political power and the wider corporate network (McDonald & Wasko
2007), how news organizations are owned by large conglomerates with tight links
to other areas of industry and how the four major agencies providing the world
with news are closely interwoven with the stock market (Herman & McChesney
1997). Indeed, journalism itself was shown to be closely linked to state power in
what Schudson (1980), Ericson et al (1989) and others described as a symbiotic
relationship. Journalism may adopt an adversarial tone, but it does so from within
the system. Journalists are socialized to see the world from an official point of view
and to represent it as it is defined by powerful organizations. Hence the world of
everyday experience remains largely invisible, except for some ‘snapshots’ that fit
easily into the established frame of reference (Fishman 1980).
In all of these ways media studies showed large media organizations to be
closely aligned with the dominant ideologies of the time. Classic studies from this
period looked at news coverage of industrial disputes involving strikes by miners,
teachers and transport workers, showing how the reports took an official stance
and presented the actions in terms of damage to wider society and the public inter-
est (Glasgow Media Group 1980). This work led to what we now call journalism
studies, showing that news is structured by themes that are consonant with domi-
nant sets of values and closely aligned with elite interests and concerns (Cottle
2009), while media coverage of institutional politics leans on an existing culture of
simplification of issues into easily graspable polarities and personalities (Franklin
1994).
In cultural studies, as pioneered by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart
in the 1970s, culture itself became political, and was redefined as the system of
practices and beliefs that form the common sense of a community — its sense of
how things are, who we are, how the world works. Culture was seen as ‘indivis-
ibly linked to social structure’ (Fiske 1992, 285), and hence as ideological, with
ideology defined as a set of mental frameworks structured by dominant interests
and realized through the language, images and other systems of representation
“which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of (…)
the way society works” (Hall 1996, 26). Early studies, for instance, were interested
in how schools (Willis 1977) and scouts organizations (Grimshaw 1980) reinforce
dominant ideas and values, legitimizing the inequality and the social relations and
identities required by capitalism. But most of the work focused on news and en-
tertainment media, which were seen as key sites for the dissemination of the ide-
ologies that supported the politics of the time. Fiske (1987), for instance, argued
that during the 1980s, popular television series re-established the more masculine
and direct approach to conflict resolution of the Reagan and Bush era, after the
soft years of Carter. Kellner & Ryan (1988) saw movies like Rambo as legitimizing
imperialist international relations and forceful, aggressive military intervention,
246 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

and also as expressing the raw masculism and entrepreneurial individualism that
sits at the heart of conservative ideology.
All such studies related popular culture and the media to politics — to the
state, to capitalism and to the kinds of social relations they favor. All of them had
at their core Hall’s (1984) view that “a set of social relations obviously requires
meanings and frameworks which underpin them and hold them in place”. And all
of them also stressed the crucial role of different systems of representation in the
dissemination of ideology (Allen 1992, 217), and the need to consider the multi-
modality of contemporary political communication.

2.1 The decline of state institutions and shift in political power

Since the 1970s there has been a major shift in the nature of political power. The
power of centralized nation states has waned and the power of the global economy
and the neoliberal principles that underpin it has been on the rise (Sewell 2005).
Understanding this shift is, today, crucial to the study of language and politics.
From the 19th century to what some authors date to the late 1970s, the nation
state controlled the market through the Keynesian welfare system. It sought to
secure full employment and to promote forms of consumption that would support
growth (Jessop 1997), based on the idea that stable employment and reasonable
wage levels are necessary to create demand (ulHaqu 2004). All this operated in a
relatively closed national economy (Jessop 2003) in which economic and social
policies were interconnected with rights and citizenship of the state (Jessop 1990)
and embedded in a culture which sought to create cohesion, integration and ho-
mogeneity — a sense of national identity with shared values and ideas about the
world shaped by the goals of the state and fostered by cultural and educational state
institutions. It was a top-down system, grounded in given authoritative knowledge
that was enshrined in stable genres and canons (Zizek 1997), and controlled by the
ratified knowledge developed within the professions (Beck 1986).
From the 1970s this system began to shift to market-controlled state insti-
tutions, with the state even acting as a servant to the market (Kress 2010, 19).
Instead of maintaining demand, the new neoliberal and global economy (known
as Schumpeterianism) intervenes on the supply side, so as create an economic cli-
mate that will promote competitiveness, rather than maintaining demand. Instead
of ensuring a stable labour force, it holds that labour must function flexibly and
freely, without government regulations and negotiations with unions (ulHaque
2004), making social policies subordinate to economic imperatives, that is to the
discursively constructed ‘needs’ of structural competitiveness and labour market
flexibility (Jessop 2003). Instead of supporting traditional national state manufac-
turing type of employment, it favours service oriented jobs which require flexibility
 Multimodality, politics and ideology 247

in skills, with, as one result, shifts in education from authoritative knowledge to

skills, entrepreneurialism, market relevance, innovation and self-management.
Instead of providing welfare for citizens, it holds that citizens are responsible for
their own welfare in matters of health care, insurance and education through the
market (Myles & Quadagno 2002, 40). And instead of seeing people as a labor
force or citizens (or, in the context of the professions, patients, students, etc.), it
prefers seeing people as consumers (Kress 2010) subject to a regime of choices that
fosters niche markets and fragments homogeneous identities into a wide array of
life style choices (Chaney 1996).
This shift away from the control of central government has been referred to as
a ‘hollowing out’ of the state. The state has retreated from many of its responsibili-
ties, passing them on to the private sector, to public-private partnerships (Rayner
2007), or to the public itself. Central powers are devolved to regions and local
authorities and to quasi-governmental private sector bodies (Martin 1997). This
‘hollowing out’ has also been referred to as ‘unbundled government’ where for-
merly monolithic government departments break down into smaller and semi-
autonomous agencies (quangos) which are no longer subject to central rules and
regulations (Talbot 2004, 3) but nevertheless continue to provide services and even
involve themselves in regulation, adjudication and certification (Talbot 2004, 5).
Their growth was part of New Public Management reforms from the 1980s which
increasingly assumed that public organizations could no longer provide value for
money and no longer be held responsible for specific issues, policies and process-
es (Lodge & Gill 2011). They were separated from government departments and
made to demonstrate responsibility through private sector kinds of reward and
punishment systems. As a result there was a shift from government to governance
(Jessop 1997) in which the state mainly functions to oversee a highly complex
system of non-governmental, quasi-governmental and private bodies whose chief
executives and boards(‘boardization’, Wilks 2007) create action plans, run the ac-
tivities of the organization, undertake governance functions, and are involved in
financial and performance monitoring. Even fully public organizations become
managed along these principles as this is thought to align them better with the
private organizations they must now work with (Flinders & Buller 2006). These
changes have created considerable accountability problems, even though many
of the new organizations operate within regimes of ‘transparency’, for instance
through showing how they meet targets and rank in league tables (Power 1997).
In short, there has been a process of ‘de-politicization’, a breakdown in connec-
tion between the electorate and the process of government (Cole 2000; Gains &
Stoker 2009). However, from the point of view of our broader definition of politics,
these changes constitute a different kind of politics rather than a de-politicization.
They are also to a large extent discursive, creating new vocabularies, new kinds of
248 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

images and new genres from which no one who at all participates in contemporary
social and cultural life can stay immune.
Globalization has been a further factor, putting an end to closed national
economies, reducing the authority of the state to act independently, and forcing
it to align with the needs of mobile global capital (Beck 1986) and to hand over
control, or work in tandem with, transnational bodies such as the IMF and the
World Bank (Jarvis 2007), which act as the ‘missionary institutions of neoliberal-
ism’ (Stiglitz 2002) and reconstitute global trade as a free and self-regulating mar-
ket (Fougner 2006). As a result, governments must deregulate their economies and
accept that international investment will tend not to arrive where employment is
heavily protected and where regulatory standards are high (McBride, McNutt &
Williams 2007, 80). Within the European Union, for instance, monetary policy is
no longer in the hands of national governments, with the European Central Bank
responsible for monetary policy and decisions on inflation targets and money sup-
ply (Hiks 2007, 310; Wells 2008, 41).
Finally, there has been a decline in the power of the elites and professions
that emerged in the context of the modern nation state (Freidson 2001). This has
not only allowed neoliberal interventions in traditional state institutions such as
schools and hospitals, in the name of cost efficiency and performance manage-
ment, but also led to a decline in the relative stability of genres and canons (Zizek
1997) and the possibility of regulating knowledge and authorship through the law
(Beck 1996), replacing authoritative, ratified knowledge with diverse and frag-
mented user-produced opinions that are narrowly based on the cultures and inter-
ests of a wide range of diverse communities. But, although many have seen this as
empowering users, the way in which they can have their voices heard is strongly
regulated by the formats and constraints of the technologies through which they
must do so and continues to feed on information provided by powerful media
organizations.

3. Four characteristics of contemporary political discourse

Contemporary political discourse is articulated in many contexts and genres, in-

cluding not only the media- new and old -, but also interior design, architecture,
fashion, product design, and a range of entertainment genres. Authoritarian pow-
ers have always used forms of ideological dissemination that by pass democratic
participation and rational debate, and, today, again provide the modern equivalent
of ‘bread and games’ — consumer products and forms of entertainment that are
consonant with the interests of the powers that produce and disseminate them.
This special issue demonstrates this, showing, for instance, how neoliberal values
 Multimodality, politics and ideology 249

and practices inform children’s stories and games, the design of Microsoft Word,
the websites of health providers, and the design of offices. In story-telling apps
for children, for instance, preschoolers encounter heroes who embody the neolib-
eral values required in the contemporary workplace even before they enter formal
education, and these stories come in multiple modes and media — apps, games,
action figures, and playsets allowing children to don the clothes of the hero, as
demonstrated in Mike the Knight in the Neo-Liberal Era by Lindstrand, Insulander
and Selander.
Later in life, neoliberal values and practices such as flexibility and deregulation
find durable expression in the design of offices, so becoming part of our everyday,
and eventually taken for granted, environment, as shown in Roderick’s The Politics
of Office Design. In the domain of education, authoritative knowledge must be
reframed according to representation schemas deriving from the corporate world,
as Kvåle shows in her Software as Ideology, which discusses how Microsoft Word,
through its SmartArt resource, offers ways of representing ‘your ideas’ through
diagrams originally designed to represent organizational structures. Ledin and
Machin show how the strategic diagram used in many institutional and personal
contexts, infuses all activities with the logic and identities required by neo-liberal-
ism, fragmenting complex and interrelated issues into artificial segments, whether
this be products, ideas or the attitudes of early-years school children. The websites
of health providers give patients ‘consumer choice’ and innovation, as shown in
Brookes’ and Harvey’s Opening up the NHS to Market, which describes how, in the
UK, the National Health Service is broken up into no less than 222 regional practi-
tioner-led service providers which reframe health provision in terms of corporate
values and practices, using images that evoke a serenely happy world of smiling
patients and doctors. Aiello and Woodhouse, show how corporations who create
stock images have shifted to colonize definitions of gender diversity. On the one
hand this appears to challenge cliche images of the family and gender roles, but
on the other reduces difference and complexity to a set of standard tropes which
ultimately serve the purposes of niche marketing.
In Ridicule as de-legitimization of the working class, Eriksson discusses how
a Swedish reality television show uses comedy to devalue the working class. As
we saw above, developed countries are phasing out the manufacturing industry
which created the working class and the state provisions which, in the age of the
welfare state, guaranteed the quality of life, access to education and emancipation
of the working classes. This period saw many positive representations of working
class culture, for instance in the work of cultural studies scholars such as Richard
Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and in the films of filmmakers like Ken Loach,
or, in Sweden, Bo Wider berg. Contemporary popular culture. Eriksson shows,
undoes this and depicts the working class once again as ignorant and incompetent.
250 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

A second characteristic of contemporary political discourse is its reliance

on the new digital technologies that codify the forms and contents of everyday
work practices, of public and private communication, and of entertainment.
Kvåle’s Software as Ideology argues for the semiotic analysis of, not only the texts
produced with ubiquitous software such as Word and PowerPoint, but also the
structure of the software itself, seeing it as a semiotic resource which on the one
hand facilitates new, multimodal forms of representation, but on the other hand
constrains how these can be used. The modes of representation of traditional au-
thoritative fields of knowledge such as linguistics, for instance, are not provided,
and must be replaced by forms of representation that are informed by the interests
of organizational management. Lindstrand, Insulander and Selander show how
young children, in playing a Mike the Knight game, must match pictures of potions
in exact sequence in order to cast a spell. In another game they can choose build-
ing blocks to construct a castle, but which which blocks are to be used and how is
pre-ordained by the design of game. ‘Software takes command’, in Lev Manovich’s
phrase (2013) and rewards are provided for obeying this command. Ledin and
Machin also show how the kinds of diagrams used to create flow charts to repre-
sent processes and relationships used often to represent the logic and structure of
organizations or to help visualize the results of assessments are produced through
software packages that are preloaded with certain kinds of templates and shapes.
In their analysis they show what gets ignored through the use of these templates
which carry with them the ideology and discourses of ‘efficiency’, of ‘competition’
and of increasing outputs.
A third characteristic of contemporary political discourse is its aestheticiza-
tion (Van Leeuwen 2015). This was pioneered in advertising, through its focus on
beautiful people, places and things, and on aesthetically pleasing design, but has
now extended to many formerly purely functional and austere texts, arte facts and
environments, including everyday documents such as invoices and reports, as can
be seen in the many templates Word provides for such documents, the tradition-
al representational forms of authoritative knowledge, whose austere charts and
graphs now acquire depth, colour and pictorial elements, and on formerly formal
and functional environments such as offices which now acquire ‘cool’ and colour-
ful furnishings and decoration. In her contribution to this special issue, Kvåle de-
scribes how students use SmartArt to draw linguistic tree diagrams, which thereby
acquire an aesthetic dimension (colour and three-dimensionality) and notices the
emphasis on ‘art’ in Microsoft’s naming of the tools it provides (ClipArt, SmartArt,
WordArt) — art has generally found its place in corporate and corporate-led con-
texts, in a way that differs significantly from the era of national monuments, stat-
ues, and portraits of dignitaries and royalty. Ledin and Machin show how corpo-
rate strategy diagrams used for schools and universities also take on aesthetics
 Multimodality, politics and ideology 251

which help to naturalize the ideologies they carry. Brookes and Harvey, in their
contribution, comment on the influence of advertising aesthetics on the websites
of health providers, with photos of attractive (even ‘angelic’) models representing
doctors and patients, and a pleasingly calm and soothing palette of colours. And
Eriksson points at the fundamental role of music in guiding audience responses to
the antics of Morgan and Ola-Conny, the working class characters in The Mighty
Journey of Morgan and Ola-Conny, the reality show he analyzes in his contribu-
tion. Aiello and Woodhouse show how diversity in gender and sexual identity
itself becomes aestheticized and a means whereby all kinds of media and pro-
motional documents can signify their ‘politicization’ and alignments with easily
recognizable signifiers.
The fourth and final characteristic of contemporary political discourse is its
multimodality, and here we want to point at some principles of a social semiotic
approach to multimodal analysis.

4. Principles of the social semiotic analysis of multimodal political

discourse

The social semiotic analysis of contemporary multimodal political discourse can

be seen as comprised of three stages which, together, form a kind of loop, so that,
in the end, the investigation can begin at either end of the process, as we will dis-
cuss in more detail below.
The first stage focuses on the signifier, the visible or audible evidence (or evi-
dence from other senses) which the text or other object of analysis provides. In
analyzing, for instance, the language of a news article on an industrial dispute,
we might identify the forms that express the verbal processes engaged in by the
participants in the dispute, such as ‘say’, ‘claim’, ‘state’, etc, and we might then agree,
on the basis of our common knowledge of the English language, that if one of the
participants, e.g. the Union, is represented as ‘claiming that…’, and another, say the
Government, as ‘showing that…’, the former is represented as less credible than
the latter. In other words, while we may disagree about the rights and wrongs of
the actual issue, we are less likely to disagree about these baseline linguistic facts.
Again, in analyzing the logos of oil companies for instance, we should be able to
agree that the BP logo (at least as we write, in December 2015), uses the colours
green, yellow and white, while the Shell logo uses the colours yellow and red. Such
an agreement would of course be based on a culturally specific system of colour
names (cf Van Leeuwen 2011 for a discussion of different ways of classifying co-
lours), just as ‘claim’ and ‘show that’ are part of a historically and culturally specific
semantic field, but within the broad context of a particular period and cultural
252 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

context a reasonable degree of intersubjective agreement can be achieved and so

lay a relatively uncontroversial foundation for analysis.
The second stage focuses on the signified, on meaning, and this necessarily
opens up the possibility of different interpretations. But this does not mean that
interpretation is entirely subjective. It needs to be argued for, and in social semiot-
ics such arguments are of two kinds: arguments for positing the meaning potential,
the range of possible meanings, of a particular signifier, and arguments for in-
terpreting how that meaning potential is actualized by the particular co-text and
context in which it is deployed.
Arguments for positing a meaning potential are also of two kinds. They can
be based on first-hand experience or on cultural provenance (cf eg Kress & Van
Leeuwen 2001; Machin, 2010). An experiential meaning potential is based on
shared physical experience, whether primarily sensory or sensori-motor. As an
instance of primarily sensory experience, we all have experience of day and night,
and therefore of ‘dark’ and ‘light’, and all the brightness values in between. As an
instance of sensori-motor experience, we all have experience of what can cause
graphic traces, letters or drawings, to be regular or irregular. We know from ex-
perience that irregularity can be caused by an inability or unwillingness to cre-
ate neat, regular forms, by inadequate tools and materials, or by temporary or
permanent physical disabilities, for instance intoxication. On these experiences
metaphors can be built, and which of the characteristics of the experience will
be selected as the basis for a metaphor will depend on the context — light will be
‘light-hearted’ in the lighting of a Hollywood comedy and revelatory in a religious
painting by Rembrandt, for instance, and irregularity will be childish in the co-
lourful and irregular fonts used on an invitation for a children’s party or the cover
of a children’s book, and rebellious on the cover of a heavy metal CD.
Arguments for positing a meaning potential can also be based on provenance,
on ‘where the signifier comes from’. In this case, the argument must be based on
documentary evidence of that origin and the common or traditional associations
attached to it, although in many cases, knowledge of provenance will be well-es-
tablished and appear plausible at first sight. The colour green in the BP logo can
be interpreted as indicating ‘concern for the environment’ on the basis of docu-
mentary evidence, for instance intertextual comparison with other texts in which
this meaning is linguistically anchored, and the application of this selection from
the overall meaning potential of green to BP, a company with a history of culpabil-
ity for a massive oil spill in the Caribbean, then becomes plausible, though not of
course proven — there is no proof in matters of interpretation. It is also possible
and valid to find documentary evidence in the briefs given to the designers of the
logo, or in statements by these designers, though these sources do not necessarily
cover every aspects of the design (sf Abousnnouga & Machin 2013 for use of such
 Multimodality, politics and ideology 253

documents in the analysis of the form of monuments). The colour red in the Shell
logo can be interpreted on the basis of our shared experience of red, rather than
of provenance, as we know that red, despite its wide range of possible meanings,
always involves a sense or energy, whether it is the red of passion, the red of dan-
ger, the red of warmth, or any other kind of red. When this colour then appears in
the logo of an energy company, interpreting it as ‘signifying ‘energy’ seems at least
plausible. Any other interpretation should be argued in similar ways.
In many cases experiential meaning potential and provenance combine. Our
understanding of the meaning of dark and light, and of regular and irregular, is
in practice often a mixture of firsthand experience and of a cultural knowledge of
the metaphors that have been built on these signifiers and the contexts in which
they have been used. When metaphors become commonplace, the experiences
on which they are ultimately based may recede into the background. There are
nevertheless two reasons why experiential meaning potential remains important.
Firstly, experience is the source of true creativity, and, in an age where the ‘intui-
tive’ understanding of design is highly valued, this is important both for the cre-
ation and the understanding of designs. And secondly, it reminds us of the link be-
tween materiality and meaning that is fundamental in social semiotics. Roderick
formulates this well in his contribution to this special issue: “meaning is never
independent (…) from the materiality of the semiosis in which it is realized, but
neither is the material ever without meaning” (this issue. P XX)
In the case of fixed codes, meaning potential and context are fused, so that
the meanings, in the given context, are not potential, but actual and mandatory.
Thus fixed colour codes exist in a number of domains — traffic signs, the maps of
railway systems, the different uniforms in a complex organization, and so on. But
such fixed codes are restricted to limited domains of meaning — and it should
also be remembered that ‘fixing’ can have different degrees of precision (dress
codes, for instance, may be more or less mandatory, leaving more or less room for
personal expression) and the normative discourses that impose codes can also be
more or less binding, taking the form of absolute rules or guidelines, for instance
(cf Van Leeuwen 2005, 47ff).
The third stage of the analysis focuses on the wider significance of the texts or
semiotic resources analyzed, and in social semiotics this wider significance is to
be analyzed in terms of more abstract social theories. In the case of the green logo,
we could, for instance, think of Habermas’ account of legitimation (1976) in which
he argues that contemporary legitimation disengages ‘generalized motives’ from
the discourses they derive from. The colour green, as interpreted above, seeks to
legitimate BP as an environmentally aware company, but does so in a way that
does not even begin to make explicit what that might mean. Ledin and Machin
in their paper in this special issue show how strategic diagrams are built from
254 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

such undefined components, yet are able to connote logic and precision. This third
stage, however, could also be the first stage of the analysis — an investigating of oil
company logos, for instance, could begin with the idea of logos as ‘generalized mo-
tives’ and then move to the detail of specific logos, the resources they employ and
the contexts in which they are used. The outcomes of such an investigation could,
in turn, lead to extending, or even rethinking, the abstract theories that formed its
original inspiration.
The three stages of social semiotic analysis point at the disciplines which social
semiotic analysis seeks to integrate: a knowledge of language and other semiotic
modes, a knowledge of culture and history, and a knowledge of sociological theory
to help us understand the role of multimodal discourse in social life. In this way
social semiotics renews and reinvigorates the age-old art of interpretation in a way
suited to our time and relevant to its crucial issues such as the new forms of politi-
cal power we have reviewed in this introduction.
The papers in this special issue include all three of these stages. They describe
the semiotic resources used in the texts and communicative arte facts and envi-
ronments they explore. They argue for their meaning potential, and relate it to
the neoliberal values that underpin contemporary political discourse, so demon-
strating the diverse and distributed nature of contemporary political discourse.
Roderick’s account of the politics of office design, for instance, shows how kinetic
design allows the creation or removal of partitions between office workers, so re-
alizing values such as flexibility and collaboration, and how accent colours such
as red and orange add an aesthetic effect which was absent in traditional offices
The papers by Kvåle and by Ledin and Machin discuss the ‘templatized’ semiotic
resources brought into play by Word — how they constrain what meanings can
be made, and how these meanings reflect and reproduce the interests and values
of corporate communication. Lindstrand, Insulander and Selander describe the
wide range of semiotic resources used in contemporary toy franchises, and ana-
lyze how gestures and facial expressions evoke neoliberal values such as leader-
ship and competitiveness, so as to help create the contemporary ‘superchild’. Ledin
and Machin show how the the logic of managing all things to act in an efficient
and strategic manner ca become infused into all things through the strategic dia-
gram and flowcharts — already placed there in the logic provided by the software.
Brookes and Harvey detail how language, images, layout and sound are used in
the website of a medical quango to express neoliberal values, identities and re-
lationships, and Eriksson describes the musical signifiers in The Mighty Journey
of Morgan and Ola-Conny, then shows how classical music built their meaning
potential, and finally discusses how they are used in the context of the Swedish
reality TV show to devalue the working class. Aiello and Woodhouse show how
stock images provide a set of meaning potentials in the form of images coded as
 Multimodality, politics and ideology 255

representing diverse expressions of gender identity. Yet these meaning potentials

are themselves driven by the need to serve the purposes of marketing and lifestyle
choice and fits with the logic of the shift away from the centrally defined and the
stable, yet results in corporations, rather than the state, coming to control repre-
sentations of gender.
All this can also show what is not communicated, and hence reveal the gains
and losses (Kress 2005) or the extent of recontextualization (Machin 2013) engen-
dered by the new forms of political discourse we have outlined. What the mod-
ern office does not facilitate, for instance, is individual work, long-term projects,
prolonged concentration. What Mike the Knight does not allow children to do is
collect their own resources, improvising, working outside the system. What the
software used to create strategic diagrams does not allow is the representation of
social context, complexity, or the presence competing interpretations. In each case
we can think about the ways that semiotic resources are used to recontextualize
social practices in the service of neoliberal ideology — what kinds of identities,
ideas, values and sequences of activities are represented? In this process differ-
ent kinds of semiotic resources can be harnessed for ideological purposes and it
is the role of multimodal critical discourse analysis to reveal the work done with
each (ibid), whether sound, graphics, colour, etc. And It is the ability of social se-
miotics to identify such gaps that can form the basis of a critical evaluation of the
consequences of the shifts in power these discourses implement and legitimize, so
contribute to the further development of critical multimodal discourse analysis.

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Authors’ addresses
Theo van Leeuwen
David Machin Department of Language and Communication
Department of Humanities, Education University of Southern Denmark
and Social Sciences (HumES), Media and Denmark
Communication Studies
Örebro University leeuwen@sdu.dk
701 82 Örebro
Sweden
portvale100@gmail.com
258 David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen

Biographical notes
David Machin works in the department of Media and Communication, Örebro University,
Sweden. His interests lie in multimodality, critical discourse studies and visual design. His books
include The Language of War Monuments (2013) and Visual Journalism (2015).
Theo Van Leeuwen is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern Denmark. His pub-
lications include Introducing Social Semiotics (2005) and The Language of Colour (2011). He is
also co-editor of the Sage journal Visual Communication.