From ‘Motivation’ to ‘Constraints’, from ‘Discourse’ to ‘Modeling System’: Steering Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Towards Cybersemiotics

Much contemporary applied, and externally-funded research requires interdisciplinarity to tackle complex world problems for sustainable future living, especially in the sciences. However, interdisciplinarity is a more difficult approach to adopt in the humanities, as these tend to remain largely skeptical about confronting ideas, findings and methods from the sciences. In order to counteract disciplinary insulation in the humanities, this chapter will attempt to integrate ideas originally developed in the sciences into established theories in the humanities. It will do so by proposing, firstly, to substitute the multimodal notion of ‘motivation’ (Kress 1993) for a less anthropomorphic notion of context, conceived broadly as cybersemiotics constraints (Brier 2008, 2009). This reconfiguration of context allows the cultural analyst to identify the feelings-emotional, environmental, physiological, erroneous, and second-order cybernetics’ observership constraints of verbal communication and culture. Secondly, this chapter will also argue that the originally mathematical idea of modelling system, developed in semiotics by Chernov (1988), Lotman (1967) and Sebeok (1988), and resonant of Brier’s cybersemiotics, would be more appropriate for cultural analysis rather than ‘discourse’. This reconfiguration of discourse into modelling system could enrich Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), including the multimodal type, on the basis of its pragmaticist, qualia-rich and phylogenetic stance. The benefit of such integrative initiative is that a cybersemiotic-inspired analysis of discourse in culture, can produce interpretations driven by a new polis, one that is not so much self-obsessed with the unicity of the human-animal species, and that always situates culture and society within a wider ecosystem.