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Beyond Media Borders,
Volume 1
Intermedial Relations
among Multimodal Media
Edited by
Lars Elleström
Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1
 Lars Elleström
Editor

Beyond Media
Borders, Volume 1
Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media
Editor
Lars Elleström
Department of Film and Literature
Linnaeus University
Växjö, Sweden

ISBN 978-3-030-49678-4    ISBN 978-3-030-49679-1 (eBook)

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 Foreword: Mediations of Method

As the subtitle of the two volumes of Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial

Relations among Multimodal Media makes clear, these reflections on
media have the mission to begin where medium-specificity or, what I call
slightly irreverently, medium-essentialism ends. The media under discus-
sion here, considered from a great variety of perspectives, are all ‘multi-
modal’, set in more than one semiotic mode. The most readily
understandable example we have rehearsed for so long would be, of
course, cinema or television, the study of which in monodisciplinary
departments seems to take for granted that they are media, whereas the
inevitable combination of words and images, colour, sound, narrativity
and technological effects clearly demonstrates that no single disciplinary
framework will do. As I am also a maker of films and video, I feel I am in
a good place to say this. But as the essays in these volumes make clear,
practically all media deploy more than one modality.
The point is not so much, however, that ‘multi-’ aspect, although that,
too, is important, since it advocates an anti-purist view of the media
products—Lars Elleström’s term for ‘texts’ and ‘images’, ‘sounds’ and
‘words’, and what have you, that it is the Humanities’ mission to study.
What catches my eye is primarily that word ‘relations’, in combination
with the preposition ‘inter-’, which is particularly dear to me, as I have
explained more times than I care to remember. Briefly, ‘inter-’ stands for,
or is, relation, rather than accumulation. It is to be distinguished in crucial
ways from that currently over-used preposition ‘trans-’, which denotes a
passage through, without impact from, another domain. With his consis-
tent interest in media as intermedial and his prolific publication record,

v
vi FOREWORD: MEDIATIONS OF METHOD

many edited volumes, and as director of the Linnaeus University Centre

for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), Elleström has become a
primary authority in that domain that is best characterized as one that
doesn’t fit any of the traditional disciplinary concepts, yet is probably the
largest, most frequently practised mode of communication among humans,
indispensable for human life. Elleström’s ongoing focus on—his intellec-
tual loyalty to—the idea of the semiotic, a concept and field that on its own
already indicates the need for the ‘beyond’ in the books’ main title, dem-
onstrates a resistance to ephemeral academic fashion and a consistency of
thought without dogmatism which I consider characteristic of the semi-
otic perspective. Briefly again, a semiotic perspective asks how we make
meaning. The interest of these volumes lies in the importance of commu-
nication in general, without which no human society is possible.
Media, as the editor explains, are always-already ‘inter-’, as the century-­
old debates about inter-arts clearly demonstrates. The preposition is a
bridge, and the articles brought together here explore what the bridge
bridges. This requires reflection on the concept of media itself. One can-
not understand intermediality without a sense of what a medium is; even
if, as such, in its purity, it doesn’t exist. With exemplary clarity, Elleström
begins his substantial opening and synthesizing article with five tendencies
he finds damaging for intellectual achievement in (inter)media studies.
Anyone interested in this field of study will recognize these tendencies and
agree with the editor’s critique of them. But then, the challenge is how to
remedy these problems. This is where Elleström earns his authority: he
proceeds to announce how these tendencies will be countered, or over-
come, in the present volumes. If only all academics would take the time
and bother to lay out what they are up against and then redress it: aca-
demic bliss would ensue. In other words, this is real progress in the collec-
tive thinking of cultural analysis. Felicitously refraining from short
definitions, he embeds the relevant concepts in what he calls a ‘model’,
but what those of us with a mild case of ‘model-phobia’—the fear of a
certain scientistic demand of rigour before all else—may also see as a theo-
retical frame. Felicitously, he calls his activity ‘circumscribing’ rather than
defining. His approach alone, then, already demonstrates in the first pages
of his long introductory text an academic position that integrates instead
of separating creativity and rigour and thus not only helps us understand
the general principles of communication but, through detailed analysis,
makes us ‘communicationally intelligent’, if I may follow discursively the
example of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas who, in his 1992 book Being
 FOREWORD: MEDIATIONS OF METHOD vii

a Character, sensitizes us to the complexities and thereby, clarity, of how

people are able, and by the media products, enabled, to communicate
effectively, with nuance.
There is not a term or concept here that is not both circumscribed and
relativized and put to convincing use. The length of the introductory essay
is, in this sense, simply a demonstration of generosity. For example, the
central concept of ‘transfer’ that we can hardly do without when talking
about communication is neither defined in a simplistic way, as a postal
service that goes in one direction only, nor theorized into incomprehensi-
bility. The idea of transferring means that a message goes from a sender to
a receiver; we were told in the early days of semiotic theory. Of course, in
order to discuss communication, we must consider the idea that a message
is indeed transferred from a sender to a receiver; without it, we are floun-
dering. In this, Elleström is realistic; he doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Yet,
the implicit (but not explicit) notion that the content of a message, as well
as its form, go wholesale from sender to receiver, as endorsed in traditional
semiotic theory, is clearly untenable. For, the sender’s message, with the
sender always already ‘in’ communication, will always be influenced, or
coloured, by what the sender expects, and has reasons to expect, the
receiver will wish, grasp, appreciate.
What do we do, then? Instead of casually rejecting the idea, concept or
notion, Elleström and his colleagues in these volumes recalibrate and
nuance what we consider a message to be, with the help of the relationality
that the preposition ‘inter-’ implies. This makes the sender-message-­
receiver process an interaction, mutually responsive, hence, communica-
tive in the true sense. The change from ‘sender’ to ‘producer’ intimates
that the former sender has made something. The former ‘receiver’ has
shed her passivity by becoming a ‘perceiver’, a term that adds the activity
performed at the other end of the process. And when the term ‘meaning’
is hurt by a long history of rigid semantics, as is the case of many of the
concepts we use as if they were just ordinary words, they come up with
alternatives, but not without bringing these in ‘discussion’ with the sim-
pler but problematic predecessors. The need for a concept that cannot be
reduced to dictionary definitions compels the authors, guided by the
experienced and ingenious editor, to come up with richer terms that are
able to encompass all those nuances that were always a bit bothersome and
that we liked to discard or ignore. Thus, ‘cognitive import’ cannot be
reduced to ‘meaning’, and neither can it be confined to language. That
would make the substitution of a well-known term by a new one pointless.
viii FOREWORD: MEDIATIONS OF METHOD

Instead, the new term necessarily includes the embodied aspect of com-
munication. This eliminates the mind-body dichotomy to which we are so
tenaciously attached; not because we believe in it, but because, until these
volumes, we had no alternative vision.
The word ‘dichotomy’, here, is perhaps the most central opponent in
these volumes’ discourse. And as with ‘inter-’ as implying relationality, I
feel very close and committed to an approach that does not take binary
opposition as its ‘normal’, standard mode of thinking. And once we are
willing to give up on dichotomies such as mind/body, it becomes possible
to complicate all those dichotomies that structure what we have taken for
granted and should let go in order to recognize the richness of mental
life—mental in a way that does not discard the body but endorses it, along
with materiality, as integrally participating in the thinking that communi-
cation stimulates, helps along and substantiates. Both the partners in com-
munication, who can be singular and, at the same time, plural, and the site
of communication, are necessarily material or bound to materiality.
Moreover, the sense-based nature of communication makes the abstract
ideas surrounding communication theory, not only untenable, but futile,
meaningless. Getting rid of, or at the very least, bracketing, binary opposi-
tion as a way of thinking is for me the primary merit of the approach pre-
sented here.
So, the first thing these books achieve is to complicate things, in order
to get rid of cliché simplicity, and then, right after that, to clarify those
complicated ideas, concepts and the models that encompass them. This is
perhaps the most important merit of these volumes. They complicate what
we thought we knew and clarify what we thought is difficult. With that
move as their starting point, the enormous variety of topics of the chapters
become, thanks to the many cross-references from one article to another,
a polyphony. Rather than a cacophony of loud divergent voices, this
polyphony constitutes a symphony that, as a whole, maps the enormously
large field of the indispensable communication that is human culture,
without pedantically demanding that every reader be an expert in all those
fields. I don’t think anyone can master all the areas presented and exam-
ined in the contributions, but the taste of it we get makes us at the very
least genuinely interested. This is not a dictionary or an encyclopaedia but
a beautifully crafted patchwork of thoughts.
The conceptual travels are stimulating, never off-putting, because they
are completely without the plodding idiosyncrasies one so often encoun-
ters when new concepts are proposed. And devoid of the polemical
 FOREWORD: MEDIATIONS OF METHOD ix

discussions with other terminologies, well explained and labelled mean-

ingfully, the conceptual network towards which these books move fills
itself as we read along and thus ends up offering a ground for cultural
analysis that I am eager to put my feet on. Solid, reliable and, still, excit-
ing. What more would we wish from in-depth academic work? This collec-
tive, collaborative work is based on a deep understanding of what scholarly
work should be: an act of communication between producers and perceiv-
ers, as the view presented here would have it, one that makes its readers
feel involved. This is the only way they can learn something new.

University of Amsterdam Mieke Bal

Amsterdam, The Netherlands
 Preface

In 2010, Palgrave Macmillan published a volume entitled Media Borders,

Multimodality and Intermediality, which I had the pleasure to edit. It
included my own rather extensive introductory article, ‘The Modalities of
Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations’, which has
since then attracted some attention in intermediality studies. It is my most
quoted publication, and scholars and students still use the book and my
introductory article in research and education. For my own part, I apply
the core concepts of ‘The Modalities of Media’ as a basis for all my
research, including in the two Palgrave Pivot books Media Transformation
(2014) and Transmedial Narration (2019). Over the last decade, how-
ever, I have also deepened, developed and slightly modified the original
ideas because I think some of them were formulated prematurely. I have
also noted that people sometimes misunderstand certain parts of the arti-
cle because of my somewhat inadequate and occasionally confusing ways
of explaining some of the concepts. Therefore, I decided to rewrite ‘The
Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations’.
However, the reworking became more substantial than I had expected,
resulting in a text that is not only modified and updated but also signifi-
cantly expanded, incorporating ideas that I have presented in other publi-
cations during the last decade. Therefore, I have called it ‘The Modalities
of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial
Relations’. The new version more clearly frames mediality and intermedi-
ality in the context of inter-human communication and defines the central
concept of media product as the intermediate entity that makes communi-
cation among human minds possible. It retains, but slightly modifies and

xi
xii PREFACE

expounds, the central idea of characterizing media products in terms of

four media modalities, four kinds of media traits. For instance, the discus-
sions now include not only virtual (represented) time and space but also
virtual (represented) materialities and sensory perceptions. Providing a
fuller picture of representing and represented media traits, as well as add-
ing discussions of cross-modal cognitive capacities of the human mind,
makes it possible to offer a much-developed understanding of the con-
cepts of media types and media borders and what it means to cross media
borders. As a result, the new article hopefully better explains the intricacies
of media integration and media transformation. Overall, most of the con-
cepts have been fine-tuned, leading to a more consistent and developed
framework. However, attentive readers will note that I have not men-
tioned a few ideas that I briefly discussed in the original article. This does
not necessarily mean that I have abandoned them; rather, I have decided
to develop them further in other publications instead of trying to squeeze
even more into an already extensive article. Nevertheless, ‘The Modalities
of Media II’ is supposed to replace rather than complement the original
article.
This means that the two-volume Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial
Relations among Multimodal Media is effectively a completely new publi-
cation. All of its other contributions are entirely novel compared to Media
Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (2010) and are written by
authors that (with only one exception) are not the same as those in the
earlier book. The main idea of the new publication is not only to launch
an updated version of ‘The Modalities of Media’ but also to present it
together with a collection of fresh articles written by scholars from a broad
variety of subject areas, united by their references to the concepts originat-
ing from ‘The Modalities of Media’.
Besides being highly original pieces of scholarship in themselves, the
accompanying articles practically illustrate, exemplify and clarify how the
concepts developed in ‘The Modalities of Media II’ can be used for
methodical investigation, explanation and interpretation of media traits
and media interrelations in a broad selection of old and new media types.
To provide space for analysis of such a wide range of dissimilar media
types, without reducing the complexity of the arguments, two volumes are
required. Their title, Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations among
Multimodal Media, reflects the underlying idea that all media types are
more or less multimodal and that comparing media types requires that
these multimodal traits being analysed and compared in various ways. As
 PREFACE xiii

different basic media types have diverging but also partly overlapping
modes (for instance, several dissimilar media types have visuality or tempo-
rality in common), and because humans have cognitive capacities to partly
overbridge modal differences (between, for instance, space and time or
vision and hearing), media borders are not definite; in that sense, one
must move ‘beyond’ media borders.
Overall, the two volumes form a collection with strong internal coher-
ence and abundant cross-references among its contributions (not only to
‘The Modalities of Media II’). Simultaneously, they cover and intercon-
nect a comprehensive range of very different media types that scholars
have traditionally investigated through more limited, media-specific con-
cepts. Hence, the two volumes should preferably be read together as a
unified, polyphonic and interdisciplinary contribution to the study of
media interrelations.

Växjö, Sweden Lars Elleström

 Acknowledgements

The support and help of my colleagues at the Linnaeus University Centre

for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) has been invaluable for my
work. I am also in debt to all the contributors to these two volumes,
including Mieke Bal, who is currently a guest professor at IMS and kindly
agreed to write the foreword. Moreover, I am grateful to those esteemed
colleagues who acted as peer reviewers: Kamilla Elliott, Anne Gjelsvik,
Pentti Haddington, Carey Jewitt, Christina Ljungberg, Jens Schröter,
Crispin Thurlow and Jarkko Toikkanen. Finally, I would like to acknowl-
edge the financial support from the Åke Wiberg Foundation and IMS,
which made it possible to make the publication open access.

xv
 About the Book

Although all of the contributions can be read as separate articles, the two
volumes of Beyond Media Borders form a whole. Because the contributions
are written in concert and include some dialogues, reading the publication
in its entirety adds substantial value. Part I in Volume 1, ‘The Model’,
contains the extensive theoretical framework presented in ‘The Modalities
of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial rela-
tions’. Part II in Volume 2, ‘The Model Applied’, offers a brief summary
and some elaborations that end the two volumes. Between these two
opening and closing parts, one finds Part II in Volume 1, ‘Media
Integration’, and Part I in Volume 2, ‘Media Transformation’, which con-
tain the majority of contributions. As explained in ‘The Modalities of
Media II’, media integration and media transformation are not absolute
properties of media and their interrelations, but rather analytical perspec-
tives. Hence, the division of articles into two parts only reflects dominant
analytical viewpoints in the various contributions; a closer look at them
reveals that they all, to some extent, apply an integrational as well as a
transformational perspective.
This is the first volume of Beyond Media Borders. The complete table of
contents for both volumes is as follows:

xvii
xviii About the Book

Volume 1

Part I The Model

1. The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding
Intermedial Relations
Lars Elleström

Part II Media Integration

2. A Recalibration of Theatre’s Hypermediality
Mark Crossley
3. Multimodal Acting and Performing
Andy Lavender
4. Electronic Screens in Film Diegesis: Modality Modes and Qualifying
Aspects of a Formation Enhanced by the Post-digital Era
Andrea Virginás
5. Truthfulness and Affect via Digital Mediation in Audiovisual Storytelling
Chiao-I Tseng
6. Reading Audiobooks
Iben Have and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
7. Language in Digital Motion: From ABCs to Intermediality and Why
This Matters for Language Learning
Heather Lotherington

Volume 2

Part I Media Transformation

1. Finding Meaning in Intermedial Gaps
Mary Simonson
2. Transferring Handmaids: Iconography, Adaptation, and Intermediality
Kate Newell
3. Building Bridges: The Modes of Architecture
Miriam Vieira
 About the Book  xix

4. Media Representation and Transmediation: Indexicality in Journalism

Comics and Biography Comics
Ana Cláudia Munari Domingos and José Arlei Rodrigues Cardoso
5. Towards an Intermedial Ecocriticism
Jørgen Bruhn
6. Metalepsis in Different Media
Liviu Lutas
7. Seeing the Landscape Through Textual and Graphical Media Products
Øyvind Eide and Zoe Schubert

Part II The Model Applied

8. Summary and Elaborations
Lars Elleström
 Contents

Part I The Model   1

1 The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for

Understanding Intermedial Relations  3
Lars Elleström
1.1 What Is the Problem?  4
1.2 What Are Media Products and Communicating Minds?  9
1.2.1 A Medium-Centred Model of Communication  9
1.2.2 Media Products 14
1.2.3 Elaborating the Communication Model 16
1.2.4 Communicating Minds 24
1.3 What Is a Technical Medium of Display? 33
1.3.1 Media Products and Technical Media of Display 33
1.3.2 Mediation and Representation 38
1.4 What Are Media Modalities, Modality Modes and
Multimodality? 41
1.4.1 Multimodality and Intermediality 41
1.4.2 Media Modalities and Modes 46
1.5 What Are Media Types? 54
1.5.1 Basic and Qualified Media Types 54
1.5.2 The Contextual and Operational Qualifying
Aspects 60
1.5.3 Technical Media of Display, Basic Media Types and
Qualified Media Types 64

xxi
xxii Contents

1.6 What Are Media Borders and Intermediality? 66

1.6.1 Identifying and Construing Media Borders 66
1.6.2 Crossing Media Borders 68
1.6.3 Intermediality in a Narrow and a Broad Sense 71
1.7 What Are Media Integration, Media Transformation and
Media Translation? 73
1.7.1 Heteromediality and Transmediality 73
1.7.2 Media Integration 75
1.7.3 Media Transformation 79
1.7.4 Media Translation 83
1.8 What Is the Conclusion? 84
References 86

Part II Media Integration  93

2 A Recalibration of Theatre’s Hypermediality 95

Mark Crossley
2.1 Introduction 95
2.2 Recalibration 97
2.3 Hypermedium and Hypermediacy 99
2.4 Temporality and Sensoriality101
2.5 Signification and Participation104
2.6 Angles of Mediation and Exclusivity106
2.7 Architecture of Commerce107
2.8 Conclusion109
References111

3 Multimodal Acting and Performing113

Andy Lavender
3.1 Modes, Modalities and the Actor as a Medium113
3.2 On Analysing Acts of Performance (in a Multimodal
Situation)118
3.3 Modes and Modalities of Performance124
3.3.1 The Favourite (2018)129
3.3.2 ear for eye (2018)131
3.3.3 Black Mirror—‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley
Too’ (2019)134
 Contents  xxiii

3.3.4 Sanctuary (2017)135

3.4 Towards a Multimodal Performance Analysis137
References139

4 Electronic Screens in Film Diegesis: Modality Modes and

Qualifying Aspects of a Formation Enhanced by the
Post-digital Era141
Andrea Virginás
4.1 Screens and Frameworks141
4.2 Diegetic Electronic Screens as “Basic Media Types”146
4.2.1 Changes in the Material, the Sensorial and the
Spatiotemporal Modality Modes of Diegetic
Electronic Screens147
4.2.2 Diegetic Electronic Screens on the Verge of the
Presemiotic and the Semiotic Modalities152
4.3 The Qualifying Aspects of Electronic Screens159
4.4 The Intermedial Processes at Work in the Examined Filmic
Sequences163
References169

5 Truthfulness and Affect via Digital Mediation in

Audiovisual Storytelling175
Chiao-I Tseng
5.1 Introduction175
5.2 Perennial Paradox: Achieving Affective and Truthful
Impacts177
5.3 Tackling the Paradox via Semiotic Approach to Narrative
Functions179
5.3.1 Multi-leveled, Semiotic Approach to Narrative
Functions180
5.3.2 Media Frames, Human Memory, and
Truthfulness182
5.3.3 Distinguishing Embodied and Contemplative
Affects183
5.3.4 Forms of Digital Mediation in Film and
Affective Engagement185
5.4 Final Remarks190
References192
xxiv Contents

6 Reading Audiobooks197
Iben Have and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen
6.1 Introduction198
6.2 The Formats of the Audiobook200
6.3 Do We Read an Audiobook?202
6.4 Narrative and Themes in Ned til hundene by Helle Helle204
6.5 Technological Framework206
6.6 Reading Situations208
6.7 The Voice210
6.8 The Aspects of Experience in Reading an Audiobook: Time
and Depth212
6.9 Conclusion214
References214

7 Language in Digital Motion: From ABCs to Intermediality

and Why This Matters for Language Learning217
Heather Lotherington
7.1 Introduction217
7.2 Language and Literacy219
7.2.1 The Literate Bias of Education220
7.2.2 Mobile Language Learning220
7.3 The Expanding Borders of Language in Digital
Communication222
7.3.1 DIY Language Norms and Conventions223
7.3.2 Language in Mobile Digital Context224
7.4 Theorizing Multimodal Communication: Two Views225
7.5 Modality, Mode, and Media in Digital Communication227
7.5.1 Emoji228
7.5.2 Conversational AI231
7.6 Conclusion: From ABCs to Intermediality235
References236

Index239
 Notes on Contributors

Mark Crossley is an associate professor at De Montfort University in

Leicester, UK, specializing in contemporary intermedial theatre and
applied performance. He recently edited Intermedial Theatre: Principles
and Practices (Red Globe/Macmillan, 2019).
Lars Elleström is Professor of Comparative Literature at Linnæus
University, Sweden. He presides over the Linnaeus University Centre for
Intermedial and Multimodal Studies and chairs the board of the
International Society for Intermedial Studies. Elleström has written
and edited several books, including Divine Madness: On Interpreting
Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts Ironically (2002), Media Borders,
Multimodality and Intermediality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Media
Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Transmedial Narration: Narratives and
Stories in Different Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and
Transmediations: Communication Across Media Borders (2020). He has
also published numerous articles on poetry, intermediality, semiotics,
gender, irony and communication. Elleström’s recent publications,
starting with the article ‘The Modalities of Media: A Model for
Understanding Intermedial Relations’ (2010), have explored and
developed basic semiotic, multimodal and intermedial concepts aim-
ing at a theoretical model for understanding and analysing interrela-
tions among dissimilar media.
Iben Have is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Aarhus University,
Denmark. Her research focuses on media sound and audio media

xxv
xxvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

such as radio, podcasts and digital audiobooks. She has published the
books Listening to Television: Background Music in Audiovisual Media (in
Danish 2008), Digital Audiobooks: New Media, Users, and Experiences
(2016), Tunes for All: Music in Danish Radio (2018) and Quietude (in
Danish 2019). She is one of the founding editors of the academic
online journal SoundEffects.
Andy Lavender is Vice-Principal and Director of Production Arts at
Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, UK. He is the author of
Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engagement (2016).
Heather Lotherington is a tenured full professor at the Faculty of
Education and the Graduate Program in Linguistics and Applied
Linguistics at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses
on language and literacy education in superdiverse, digitally connected
societies. She is engaged in researching mobile language learning with a
view to developing appropriate production pedagogies. Her latest book,
co-edited with Cheryl Paige, is entitled Teaching Young Learners in a
Superdiverse World: Multimodal Perspectives and Approaches (2017).
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is associate professor at the School of
Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research
interests cover sound, literature, digital culture, digital reading and phe-
nomenological aspects of aesthetic experiences. She has published a book
entitled The Digital Audiobook: New Media, Users, and Experiences (2016).
From 2018 to 2021 she is leading the collaborative research project
Reading Between Media—Multisensorial Reading in a Digital Age. She is
one of the founding editors of the academic online journal SoundEffects.
Chiao-I Tseng is a senior researcher affiliated to the University of
Bremen, Germany. Her research focuses on narrative designs across differ-
ent media such as films and graphic and interactive media. Tseng special-
izes in developing frameworks for analysing narrative forms and contents,
particularly methods for systematically tracking types of events and actions,
character features, narrative space and motivation and emotion. Her pub-
lications include the monograph Cohesion in Film (Palgrave Macmillan,
2013) and over 25 international peer-reviewed journal articles and book
chapters.
Andrea Virginás is associate professor at the Media Department of
Sapientia University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Her research interests
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxvii

include film genres, European cinema, cultural theory, intermediality and

narratology. Her main publications are (Post)modern Crime: Changing
Paradigms? From Agatha Christie to Palahniuk, from Film Noir to
Memento (2011); The Use of Cultural Studies Approaches in the Study of
Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories (2016); and Film
Genres in 21st Century Eastern Europe: Global Puzzles and Small National
Solutions (Lexington Books, forthcoming 2020).
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 A medium-centred model of communication (Elleström

2018a: 282) 16
Fig. 1.2 Virtual sphere, other virtual spheres and perceived actual sphere
(Elleström 2018b: 432) 31
Fig. 4.1 De-solidifying alien and solid human screens in Arrival (dir.
Denis Villeneuve, 2016). All rights reserved 148
Fig. 4.2 Transparency as an essence: Louise facing the alien creatures in
Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2016). All rights reserved 149
Fig. 4.3 Human screens losing solid materiality in Arrival (dir. Denis
Villeneuve, 2016). All rights reserved 150
Fig. 4.4 When noise specifies a diegetic electronic screen: Lost Highway
(dir. David Lynch, 1997). All rights reserved 161
Fig. 4.5 Caught between decor screens and diegetic screens: Loveless (dir.
Andrei Zvagintsev, 2016). All rights reserved 163
Fig. 4.6 A meta/diegetic embedded electronic screen in Commune (dir.
Thomas Vinterberg, 2016). All rights reserved 164
Fig. 5.1 Strata of narrative functions in film analysis 181
Fig. 5.2 Selected screenshots of Lebanon (dir. Samuel Maoz, 2009). All
rights reserved 184
Fig. 5.3 Selected screenshots from Profile (dir. Timur Bekmambetov,
2018). All rights reserved 185
Fig. 5.4 Selected screenshots from Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves, 2008).
All rights reserved 187
Fig. 5.5 Selected screenshots from Redacted (dir. Brian de Palma,
2007). All rights reserved 189

xxix
xxx List of Figures

Fig. 5.6 Selected screenshots from Searching (dir. Aneesh Chaganty,

2018). All rights reserved 189
Fig. 5.7 Selected screenshots of computer screen scenes from Redacted
(dir. Brian de Palma, 2007). All rights reserved 191
Fig. 7.1 An excerpt from Henson’s grammar (1744) 223
Fig. 7.2 Parallel keyboards available on smartphone 230
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 Rudolf Laban’s eight efforts of movement and their four
components (the system is tabulated in various forms;
the one given here is from Espeland 2015) 124
Table 3.2 Modalities of performance (Lavender, after
Elleström 2010: 36) 126
Table 3.3 Relationship between performance modalities and modes 128
Table 3.4 Modal analysis of Olivia Colman’s performance in an excerpt
from The Favourite130
Table 3.5 Modal analysis of performance in an excerpt from ear for eye133
Table 3.6 Modal analysis of Miley Cyrus’s performance in Black
Mirror—Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too135
Table 3.7 Modal analysis of performance in Sanctuary136
Table 7.1 Basic and technical media of emoji 230
Table 7.2 Basic, qualified, and technical media of emoji 231
Table 7.3 Basic media modalities of conversational digital agent voice 232
Table 7.4 Basic, qualified, and technical media of conversational digital
agent voice 233

xxxi
 PART I

The Model
 CHAPTER 1

The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded

Model for Understanding Intermedial
Relations

Lars Elleström

Contents
1.1  hat Is the Problem?
W 4
1.2 What Are Media Products and Communicating Minds? 9
1.3 What Is a Technical Medium of Display? 33
1.4 What Are Media Modalities, Modality Modes and Multimodality? 41
1.5 What Are Media Types? 54
1.6 What Are Media Borders and Intermediality? 66
1.7 What Are Media Integration, Media Transformation and Media
Translation? 73
1.8 What Is the Conclusion? 84
References 86

L. Elleström (*)
Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
e-mail: lars.ellestrom@lnu.se

© The Author(s) 2021 3

L. Elleström (ed.), Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49679-1_1
4 L. ELLESTRÖM

1.1   What Is the Problem?

All human beings use media, whether in the form of gestures, speech,
news programmes, websites, music, advertisements or traffic signs. The
collaboration of all these media is essential for living, learning and sharing
experiences. Understanding mediality is one of the keys to understanding
meaning-making in human interaction, whether directly through the
capacities of our bodies or with the aid of traditional or modern external
devices.
Media can be understood as communicative tools constituted by inter-
related features. All media are multimodal and intermedial in the sense
that they are composed of multiple basic features and can be thoroughly
understood only in relation to other types of media with which they share
basic features. We do not have standard communication on one hand and
multimodal and intermedial communication on the other. Therefore,
basic research in multimodality and intermediality is vital for further prog-
ress in understanding mediality—the use of communicative media—in
general. Intermediality is an analytical angle that can be used successfully
for unravelling some of the complexities of all kinds of communication.
Scholars have been debating the interrelations of the arts for centuries.
Now, in the age of mass media, electronic media and digital media, the
focus of the argumentation has been broadened to the interrelations
among media types in general. One important move has been to acknowl-
edge fully the materiality of the arts: like other media, they depend on
mediating substances. For this reason, the arts should not be isolated as
something ethereal, but rather seen as aesthetically developed forms of
media. Still, several of the issues discussed within the old interart paradigm
are also highly relevant to multimodal and intermedial studies. One such
classical locus of the interart debate concerns the relation between the arts
of time and the arts of space. In the eighteenth century, Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing famously argued in Laocoön that there are, or rather should be,
clear differences between poetry and painting (1984 [1766]). Lessing’s
core question of what implications spatiotemporal differences have for
media remains acutely relevant today.
I believe it is equally important to highlight media differences and
media similarities when trying to get a grip on multimodality and interme-
diality. If we have earlier seen a bent towards emphasising differences,
recent decades have shown a tendency to deconstruct media dissimilari-
ties, not least through the writings of W. J. T. Mitchell (1986), who
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 5

criticised ideologically grounded attempts to find clear boundaries between

media types and particularly art forms. Other scholars, like Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan, have emphasised that media differences come in grades:
‘It seems to me that (1) most of the distinctions between media will turn
out to be matters of degree rather than of absolute presence or absence of
qualities; and (2) what is a constraint in one medium may be only a pos-
sibility in another’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1989: 161). I feel that this is a pro-
ductive view that still needs to be developed methodically. I find it as
unsatisfying to continue talking about ‘writing’, ‘film’, ‘performance’,
‘music’ and ‘television’ as if they were like different people who can be
married and divorced as to find repose in a belief that all media are always
fundamentally blended in a hermaphroditical way.
In brief, one might say that the crucial ‘inter’ part of intermediality is a
bridge, but what does it bridge over? If all media were fundamentally dif-
ferent, it would be hard to find any interrelations at all; if they were fun-
damentally similar, it would be equally hard to find something that is not
already interrelated. However, media are both different and similar, and
intermediality must be understood as a bridge between media differences
that is founded on media similarities. The primary aim of this article is to
shed light on precisely these differences and similarities in order to better
understand intermedial relations.
I identify five tendencies in exploration of mediality, including what is
known as multimodality and intermediality studies, which I find problem-
atic. Although these tendencies were stronger a decade ago when I pub-
lished the initial version of ‘The Modalities of Media’ (Elleström 2010),
and several scholars have proposed ways to tackle them, they still exist.

1. Research is carried out without proper explanations of the concept of

medium. Just as multimodality studies are often conducted without
accurate definitions of mode, intermediality tends to be discussed
without clear conceptions of the medium. I argue that if the concept
of medium is not properly defined, one cannot expect to compre-
hend mediality and intermediality, which makes it difficult to inte-
grate medium with mode and other related concepts. This is not
only a terminological problem; on the contrary, it concerns the for-
mation of conceptual frameworks capable of operating over large
areas of communication.
2. Only two media types at a time are compared. Following the tradi-
tions of interart studies, intermedial work has a strong tendency to
6 L. ELLESTRÖM

compare no more than two media types at a time. Countless publi-

cations have focussed on word and image, word and music, film and
literature, film and computer games, visual art and poetry and other
constellations including two or perhaps three media types. While
such studies are legitimate and may offer great insights, they usually
delimit the field of vision in such ways that the outcomes are not
helpful for analysing other forms of media interrelations. This results
in a multitude of incompatible terms and concepts that blur the
essential core features of media in general.
3. Media in general are studied through concepts developed for language
analysis. Twentieth-century research in the humanities has been
strongly affected by the language-centred semiotics of Ferdinand de
Saussure (2011 [1916]). Although Saussure has been seminal for
understanding language better, his ideas have also, to some extent,
harmed the conceptualisation of communication in general. This is
because his concepts lack the capacity to explain anything other than
the conventional aspects of signification, which Saussure explored in
terms of arbitrariness of signs. This excludes core features of several
media types. The strong bias in a lot of Western research towards
trying to understand all kinds of communication in terms of lan-
guage has been counterproductive, overall, and is still a major threat
to a cross-disciplinary understanding of media properties. This is
true even for the significant amount of research that clearly focuses
on non-verbal aspects (multimodality research in the tradition of
Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), although the field is currently mov-
ing towards a less language-centred approach (Bateman et al. 2017).
4. Misleading dichotomies structure the arguments. Although advanced
terminology and theoretical sophistication are not lacking, many
researchers still use largely undefined and deeply ambiguous lay-
man’s terms, such as ‘text’ and ‘image’, to describe the nature of
media. Although such terms are indispensable for everyday use, and
valuable for preliminary scholarly categorisations, they refer to noto-
riously vague concepts, which causes misunderstanding and confu-
sion to become standard features of academic discussions. Attempts
to create systematic and comprehensive methodologies and theo-
retical frameworks fail because the most basic concepts are not
clearly delimited. For instance, the terms ‘text’ and ‘image’ may
refer to media with fundamentally different material, spatiotemporal
and sensorial features. Consequently, efforts to understand the
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 7

r­ elationship between so-called texts and images are doomed to fail,

leaving us with nebulous and insufficient ideas of ‘mixtures’ of text
and image unless more fine-grained explanations are made. Similarly,
the ‘verbal’ vs. ‘visual’ media dichotomy is inadequate. Although it
may be practical for upholding rough differences between some
media types, it is actually confusing and counterproductive when
trying to understand media similarities and differences in a deeper
way. Because being visual is a sensorial trait and being verbal is a
semiotic trait, it is pointless to oppose the two. Some media are ver-
bal, others are not; some media are visual, others are not; and some
media are both verbal and visual.
5. Media traits are not distinguished from media perception and signifi-
cation. Another recurring problem is the failure to distinguish
between inherent media traits and the perception of those traits.
This is understandable since it is, in practice, impossible to separate
the two. Nevertheless, it is crucial to discriminate theoretically
between the modes of existence of media and the perception of
these modes in order to apprehend media differences and similari-
ties. Although this is doubtless a slippery business, it is important to
acknowledge that, for instance, the quality of time in a movie,
understood as a mode of existence, is not the same as the time
required to perceive a still photograph. Furthermore, time can be
said to be present in many forms in the same medium. A still photo-
graph, which does not have time as a mode of existence, can never-
theless represent temporal events. If one avoids taking notice of
these intricacies, one is left with a featureless mass of only seemingly
identical media that cannot be compared properly.

The goal of this article is to suggest solutions to these problems through

the following means:

1. A methodical elaboration of the concept of medium

2. A systematic development of concepts that are applicable to all
media types
3. A multifaceted understanding of communication that is not
anchored in linguistic concepts
4. A fine-grained manner of conceptualising the multitude of media
traits beyond standard formulae
8 L. ELLESTRÖM

5. A nuanced investigation of the relations among basic media traits,

perception and signification

I hope that fulfilling this objective will make it possible to understand bet-
ter what media borders are and how they can be crossed, how one can
comprehend the concept of multimodality in relation to intermediality,
what it means to combine and integrate different media and how it is pos-
sible for different media types to communicate similar things.
My suggested conceptual solutions are not the only ones available.
However, to keep my lines of argument as clear as possible, I refrain from
engaging in excessive critique of other positions. Furthermore, my ambi-
tion is not to propose anything like a complete model for analysing com-
munication; instead, the objective is to scrutinise precisely intermedial
relations. Understanding such interrelations may be vital for various forms
of investigations, and, depending on the aims and goals of those investiga-
tions, the concepts and principles that I propose here must be comple-
mented with other research tools.
The term ‘medium’ is widely employed, and it would be pointless to try
to find a straightforward definition that covers all the various notions that
lurk behind the different uses of the word. Dissimilar notions of medium
and mediality are at work within different fields of research, and there is
no reason to interfere with these notions as long as they fulfil their specific
tasks. Instead, I will circumscribe a concept that is applicable to the issue
of human communication. However, a brief definition of medium would
only capture fragments of the whole conceptual web and could be coun-
terproductive. Instead, I will try to form a model (which actually consti-
tutes a conglomerate of several models) that preserves the term ‘medium’
and still qualifies its use in relation to the different aspects of the concep-
tual web of mediality. Thus, the concept of medium can be divided into
several deeply entangled concepts in order to cover the many interrelated
aspects of mediality.
The core of this differentiation consists of setting apart four media
modalities that may be helpful for analysing media products. A media
product is a single physical entity or phenomenon that enables inter-­
human communication. Media products can be analysed in terms of four
types of traits: material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic traits. I call
these categories of traits media modalities. During the last decades, the
notion of multimodality has gained ground (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001;
Bateman 2008; Kress 2010; Seizov and Wildfeuer 2017), stemming from
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 9

social semiotics, education, linguistics and communication studies.

Although my notion of media modalities is inspired by this research tradi-
tion, it differs significantly in ways that will become evident. Likewise, I
am strongly influenced by the research field of intermediality, which has its
historical roots in aesthetics, philosophy, semiotics, comparative literature,
media studies and interart studies (for details, see Clüver 2007, 2019;
Rajewsky 2008). These research traditions have been decisive for how I
have come to circumscribe the various aspects of mediality.
As my arguments unfold, I will distinguish among media products,
technical media of display and media types (basic media types and qualified
media types). Basic and qualified media types are categories of media
products, whereas technical media of display are the physical entities
needed to realise media products and hence media types. Consequently,
the term ‘medium’, when used without specifications, generally refers to
all of these media aspects.
Thus, various media aspects are not groups of media. Instead, they are
complementary, interwoven, theoretical aspects of what constitutes medi-
ality. Accordingly, the wide concept of medium that I will present in this
article comprises several intimately related yet divergent notions that I will
distinguish terminologically. I believe that multimodality and intermedial-
ity cannot be fully understood without grasping the fundamental condi-
tions of every single media product, and these conditions constitute a
complex network of both physical qualities of media and various cognitive
and interpretive operations performed by the media perceivers. For my
purpose, media definitions that deal only with the physical aspects of
mediality are too narrow, as are media definitions that only emphasise the
social construction of communication. Instead, I will emphasise the criti-
cal meeting of the physical, the perceptual, the cognitive and the social.

1.2   What Are Media Products

and Communicating Minds?

1.2.1  A Medium-Centred Model of Communication

The starting point of this investigation of media interrelations consists of
an examination of the concept of media product, which is the core of all
further elaborations in this study. To delineate the concept of a media
product properly and thoroughly, it is necessary to have a developed
10 L. ELLESTRÖM

model of human communication that is devised for highlighting precisely

the notion of medium (Elleström 2018a, b, c). Although I have designed
my model to scrutinise primarily human communication, it is at least
partly applicable to communication among other animals as well. It con-
sists of what I take to be the smallest and fewest possible entities of com-
munication and their essential interrelations. If one of these entities or
interrelations is removed, communication is no longer at hand; thus, the
model is irreducible. I submit that three indispensable and interconnected
entities can be discerned:

1. Something being transferred

2. Two separate places between which the transfer occurs
3. An intermediate stage that makes the transfer possible

These three entities of communication have been circumscribed in various

ways in established and influential communication models. In the follow-
ing, I refer to some of these classical models (from linguistics, media and
communication studies and cultural studies) to anchor my concepts in
well-known communication paradigms and make clear the many ways in
which I depart from the standard concepts. Although it is debatable, I
have kept the traditional concept of transfer because I think it is part and
parcel of the concept of communication. While the term ‘transfer’ may
have misleading associations with material things being moved around,
one can hardly avoid the deep experiential similarity between sharing and
transferring material and mental entities—as in human communication.
These issues will be continuously scrutinised in the ensuing discussions.
Roman Jakobson used the term ‘message’ to capture the first entity,
‘something being transferred’, but did not delineate the notion underly-
ing his term (Jakobson 1960). Wilbur Schramm vacillated between two
incompatible arguments: that there is no such thing as an entity being
transferred, and that the transferred entity is a ‘message’—not ideas or
thoughts (Schramm 1971). Stuart Hall was also rather vague when he
implied that ‘meaning’ is transferred in communication. Instead of clearly
stating that communication is about transferring meaning, he emphasised
that ‘meaning structures 1’ and ‘meaning structures 2’ may differ; there
are degrees of ‘symmetry’ and degrees of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunder-
standing’ (Hall 1980: 131). In other words, if there is transfer of meaning
in communication, this involves transformation of meaning. This conten-
tion is certainly feasible.
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 11

While the second entity, ‘two separate places between which the trans-
fer occurs’, arguably consists of two units, they can only be outlined in
relation to each other. Jakobson’s terms were ‘addresser’ and ‘addressee’,
but Schramm preferred ‘communicator’ and ‘receiver’. Finally, Hall
avoided outlining the two separate places between which the transfer
occurs as persons; in fact, he avoided pointing to such places at all.
However, his notion that ‘meaning structures’ are to some extent trans-
ferred implies that such meaning structures indeed need to be located at
places that are capable of holding ‘meaning’—which must be understood
as the minds of human beings, given that human communication is
at stake.
The third entity, ‘an intermediate stage that makes the transfer possi-
ble’, has also been conceptualised differently. Jakobson’s ‘contact’ notably
incorporates both a material and a mental aspect; it was described as ‘a
physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and
the addressee’ (1960: 353). Schramm used the term message to represent
not only the transferred entity, but also the intermediate stage of commu-
nication (he seems to understand the message as something that is both
‘transferred’ and ‘transferred through’). Importantly, however, Schramm
described the transmitting message not only as a material entity—such as
‘a letter’—but also as ‘a collection of signs’, thus indicating the capacity of
the material to produce mental significance through signs (1971: 15).
Hall also emphasised the semiotic nature of the intermediate stage of com-
munication. His term for this entity was ‘meaningful’ discourse; however,
his terminology is generally rather incoherent, resulting in uncertainty
about the more precise nature of the intermediate stage.
Regarding the first entity of communication, ‘something being trans-
ferred’, there is certainly a point in Schramm’s notion that no ideas or
thoughts are transferred in communication. As Hall indicated, transfer of
meaning is likely to entail a change of meaning; this modification may be
only slight or more radical. Nevertheless, I claim that communication
models cannot do without the notion of something being transferred. If
there is no correlation at all between input and output, there is simply no
communication, given the foundational idea that to communicate is ‘to
share’; thus, a concept of communication without the notion of some-
thing being transferred is nonsensical. However problematic it may be, the
notion of something being transferred must be retained and painstakingly
scrutinised, instead of being avoided. To begin with, I think it is clear that
one cannot confine the transferred units or features to distinct and
12 L. ELLESTRÖM

consciously intended conceptions, and perhaps not even to ‘ideas’ as

Schramm understands them.
My suggestion is to use the term ‘cognitive import’ to refer to those
mental configurations that are the output and input of communication
(thus, ‘import’ should not be understood here in contrast to ‘export’).
The notion that I want to suggest using this term is clearly closely related
to notions captured by terms such as ‘meaning’, ‘significance’ and ‘ideas’,
although the term ‘cognitive import’ is perhaps less burdened with certain
notions that a term such as ‘meaning’ seems to have difficulty ridding itself
of. Meaning is often understood as a rather rigid concept of verbal, firm,
definable or even logical sense. Instead, cognitive import should be under-
stood as a broad notion that also includes vague, fragmentary, undevel-
oped, intuitive, ambiguous, non-conceptual and pragmatically oriented
meaning that is relevant to a wide range of media types and communica-
tive situations. It is imperative to emphasise that although cognitive import
is always a result of mind-work, cognition is embodied and not always
possible to articulate using language; hence, according to my proposed
model, communication cannot be reduced to simply communication of
verbal or verbalisable significance.
The second entity, ‘two separate places between which the transfer
occurs’, is usually construed as two persons. However, this straightfor-
ward notion is not precise enough for my purposes. Because it is impera-
tive to be able to connect mind and body to different entities of the
communication model, it is also essential to avoid crude notions such as
that of Jakobson’s addresser–addressee and Schramm’s communicator–
receiver. These notions give the impression that the transfer necessarily
occurs between two persons consisting of minds and bodies and with a
third, separate, intermediate object in the middle, so to speak, an interme-
diate object in the form of a ‘message’ that is essentially disconnected from
the communicating persons. It is better to follow Hall’s implicit idea that
communication occurs between sites that are capable of holding ‘mean-
ing’. Warren Weaver’s description of communication as something that
occurs between ‘one mind’ and ‘another’ is simple and to the point
(Weaver 1998 [1949]).
My suggestion is to use the terms ‘producer’s mind’ and ‘perceiver’s
mind’ to refer to the mental places in which cognitive import appears.
First, there are certain mental configurations in the producer’s mind, and
then, following the communicative transfer, there are mental configura-
tions in the perceiver’s mind that are at least remotely similar to those in
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 13

the producer’s mind. The term ‘mind’ should generally be understood as

denoting (human) consciousness that originates in the brain and is par-
ticularly manifested in perception, emotion, thought, reasoning, will,
judgment, memory and imagination. The term ‘mental’ refers to every-
thing relating to the mind. The term ‘cognition’ should be understood as
representing those mental processes that are involved in gaining knowl-
edge and comprehension, including, among other higher-level functions
of the brain, thinking, remembering, problem-solving, planning and judg-
ing. However, even though the mind and its cognition are founded on
cerebral processes, mental activities are in no way separated from the rest
of the body. On the contrary, I subscribe to the idea that the mind is pro-
foundly embodied—formed by experiences of corporeality (Johnson 1987).
Most of the researchers that I refer to here have recognised, either
explicitly or implicitly, that the third entity, ‘an intermediate stage that
makes the transfer possible’, is in some way material. As stated succinctly
in a more recent publication, any act of communication ‘is made possible
by some form of concrete reification of the message, which, at its most
elementary level, must abide by physical laws to exist and take shape’
(Bolchini and Lu 2013: 398). Furthermore, Schramm and Hall clearly
discussed the intermediate stage in terms of signs. In line with this, I sug-
gest that the intermediate entity connecting two minds with each other is
always in some way material, understood broadly as consisting of physical
entities or phenomena, although it clearly cannot be conceptualised only
in terms of materiality. As it connects two minds in terms of a transfer of
cognitive import, it must be understood as materiality having the capacity
to trigger certain mental responses.
My suggestion is to use the term ‘media product’ to refer to the inter-
mediate stage that enables the transfer of cognitive import from a pro-
ducer’s to a perceiver’s mind (what Irina O. Rajewsky called ‘medial
configuration’ (2010)). As the bodies of these two minds may well be used
as instruments for the transfer of cognitive import, they have potential to
attain the function of media products. I propose that a media product may
be realised by either non-bodily or bodily matter (including matter ema-
nating directly from a body), or a combination of the two. This means that
the producer’s mind may, for instance, use either non-bodily matter (say,
paper) or her own body and its immediate extensions (moving arms and
sound produced by the vocal cords) to realise media products such as
printed texts, gestures and speech. Furthermore, the perceiver’s body may
be used to accomplish media products; for instance, the producer may
14 L. ELLESTRÖM

realise a painting on the perceiver’s skin or push her gently to communi-

cate the desire that she move a little. Additionally, other bodies, such as
the bodies of actors, may be used as media products.
In contrast to influential scholars such as Marshall McLuhan, who con-
ceptualised media as the ‘extensions of man’ in general (McLuhan 1994
[1964]), I define media products as ‘extensions of mind’ in the context of
inter-human communication. Thereby, I avoid the classical distinction in
communication studies between mediated and interpersonal communica-
tion—communication that needs and communication that supposedly
does not need mediation. This distinction has been criticised because of
practical difficulties in upholding it (see Rice 2017). I avoid it also because
of the theoretical and more profound obstacle of thinking about interper-
sonal communication as not being mediated (it would be absurd to con-
sider interpersonal communication independent of media capacities and
media limitations). The only thing that justifies such a distinction is that
so-called interpersonal communication is entirely dependent on specific
(but not fundamentally different) forms of media products, namely, those
that rely on the producer and perceiver’s human bodies and their immedi-
ate extensions instead of external devices.

1.2.2  Media Products
Given that being a media product must be understood as a function rather
than an essential property, virtually any material existence can be used as
one, including not only solid objects but also all kinds of physical phenom-
ena that can be perceived by the human senses. In addition to those forms
of media products that are more commonly categorised as such (like writ-
ten texts, songs, scientific diagrams, warning cries and road signs), there is
an endless row of forms of physical objects, phenomena and actions that
can function as media products, given that they are perceived in situations
and surroundings that encourage interpretation in terms of communica-
tion. These include nudges, blinks, coughs, meals, ceremonies, decora-
tions, clothes, hairstyles and make-up. In addition, dogs, wine bottles and
cars of certain makes, sorts and designs may well function as media prod-
ucts to communicate the embracing of certain values or simply wealth, for
instance. Within the framework of a trial, surveillance camera footage and
spoken word testimony from witnesses both function as media products,
as do fingerprints, DNA samples and bloodstains presented by the prose-
cutor—because they are drawn into a communicative situation.
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 15

Because the function of being a media product is initially triggered by

the producer’s mind, media products can be said to be produced by the
producer’s mind. As I define these concepts, producing a media product
does not necessarily mean fabricating it materially. Fingerprints presented
in a criminal trial are evidently produced by the prosecutor not in the sense
that she materially fabricates them, but in the sense that she gives them a
communicative function by placing them in the context of the trial.
It may also be the case that someone uses an ‘old’ media product, pro-
duced by someone else, to communicate. For instance, one could play a
recorded love song, written and sung by others, to communicate love to
someone special on a certain occasion. In this way, the recorded song,
which already has the function of a media product, is appropriated, so to
speak, and given a more specific and partly new communicative function.
Like the fingerprints (disregarding other differences), the recorded love
song is not fabricated by the (new) producer’s mind, but rather exposed
and given a (new) communicative function.
Given this conceptualisation, it is pointless to try to distinguish between
physical existences that are and that are not actual media products. Instead,
it is important to have a clear notion of the properties of physical exis-
tences that confer the function of media products on them. Clearly, these
properties, which I will investigate in the following, are in no way self-­
evidently present. Perceiving something as a media product is a question
of being attentive to certain kinds of phenomena in the world. As humans
have been able to communicate with each other for thousands and thou-
sands of years, this attention is partly passed on by heredity, but it is also
deeply formed by cultural factors and the experience of navigating within
one’s present surroundings. Knowledge of musical performance tradi-
tions, for example, leads to specific attention to certain details while others
may be ignored; thus, accidental noises and random gestures may be sifted
out as irrelevant for the musical communication and not part of the media
product. Practical experience of the environment normally makes us pay
attention to what happens on the screen of a television set rather than to
its backside. However, if the television set is used in an artistic installation,
or if a repair person tries to explain why it does not work by way of point-
ing to certain gadgets, it may be the backside that should be selected for
attention in order to achieve the function of a media product.
Thus, media products are cultural entities that depend on social praxis;
media products and their basic characteristics are (more or less) delimited
units formed by (often shared) selective attention on sensorially
16 L. ELLESTRÖM

perceptible areas of communication that are believed to be relevant for

achieving communication in a certain context. This means that there is no
such thing as a media product ‘as such’. I argue that not even a written
text is a media product in itself; it is only when its function of transferring
cognitive import among minds is realised that it can be conceptualised as
a media product. The archaeologist who inspects the marks on a bone and
believes that they are caused by accidental scraping is not involved in com-
munication. If the archaeologist believes that the marks are some sort of
letters in an unknown language, she may be engaged in elementary com-
munication to the extent that she understands a communicative intent. If
the marks are eventually deciphered, communication that is more complex
may result. If the deciphering actually turns out to be mistaken, the belief
that communication occurred is an illusion. Of course, border cases like
these could also be exemplified by everyday interaction among people
who may or may not be mistaken about the significance of all kinds of
movements, glances and sounds.
McLuhan suggestively argued that not only the spoken word, the pho-
tograph, comics, the typewriter and television are media, but also money,
wheels and axes (1994 [1964]: 24). In relation to that, I argue that
whereas nothing is a media product as such, virtually everything can attain
the function of a media product. In that sense, money, wheels and axes
may also function as media products, although they do not actually do so
as regularly as spoken words and photographs.

1.2.3  
Elaborating the Communication Model
I will now display my communication model in the form of a visual dia-
gram (Fig. 1.1) and explain some of its implications. Construing this dia-
gram from left to right, the act of communication starts with certain

Fig. 1.1 A medium-centred model of communication (Elleström

2018a: 282)
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 17

cognitive import in the producer’s mind. Consciously or unconsciously,

the producer forms a media product, which may be taken in by some per-
ceiver. Thus, the media product makes possible a transfer of cognitive
import from the producer’s mind to the perceiver’s mind. This is certainly
not a transfer in the strong sense that the cognitive import as such passes
through the media product (which lacks consciousness), but in the sense
that there is, ultimately, cognitive import in the perceiver’s mind that
bears some resemblance to the cognitive import in the producer’s mind.
The visual diagram contains the three entities of communication cir-
cumscribed above:

1. Something being transferred: cognitive import

2. Two separate places between which the transfer occurs: producer’s
mind and perceiver’s mind
3. An intermediate stage that makes the transfer possible: media product

Additionally, the visual diagram displays four essential interrelations

among these entities:

1. An act of production ‘between’ the producer’s mind and

media product
2. An act of perception ‘between’ the media product and the per-
ceiver’s mind
3. Cognitive import ‘inside’ the producer’s mind and the per-
ceiver’s mind
4. A transfer of cognitive import ‘through’ the media product

I will now elaborate on these interrelations, especially the fourth one. I

submit that the notion of media product, and the question of how cogni-
tive import may be transferred through a media product, is essential for
understanding communication.
The first interrelation, ‘an act of production “between” the producer’s
mind and media product’, is always initiated by the producer’s mind and
always, to begin with, effectuated by the producer’s body. Sometimes, this
primary bodily act will immediately result in a media product. For instance,
when one person begins talking to another person who is standing beside
her, the speech emanating from the vocal cords constitute a media product
that reaches the perceiver directly. At other times, the primary bodily act
is linked to subsequent stages of production, and the primary bodily act
18 L. ELLESTRÖM

can be connected to a broad range of actions and procedures before a

media product comes to be present for a perceiver. For instance, talking
through a telephone often requires manual handling of the telephone in
addition to the activation of the user’s vocal cords, and always requires
constructed, technological devices that are suitable to transmit the initial
speech to another place, in which the actual media product is consti-
tuted—that is, the speech that can be heard by the perceiver. Similarly, a
child drawing a picture for her father who is sitting at the same kitchen
table only has to perform, in principle, one primary bodily act in order to
create a media product that is immediately available for the perceiver.
However, if the father is in another place, additional stages of actions and
procedures must be added: the drawing may be posted and physically relo-
cated, or scanned and emailed, after which it appears in a slightly trans-
formed way as a media product that is realised by a computer screen.
Thus, the act of production may be simple and direct, as well as complex
and indirect. It may also include stages of storage.
There is an abundance of devices for the production and storage of
media products. Although involved in mediality, and often called media of
production and media of storage, I prefer not to call them media, in order
to keep the terminology clear. Thus, cameras are technical devices of pro-
duction (with the capacity to register light chemically or physically) that
can be said to be attached, more or less distantly, to technical devices of
display with various properties, such as silver-plated sheet copper, photo-
graphic paper or a screen (a computer screen or a display on the camera
itself). Book pages are technical devices of storage and technical devices
for the display of visual sensory configurations. In contrast, because they
quickly disappear, sound waves generated by vocal cords do not store sen-
sory configurations but only display them.
The second interrelation, ‘an act of perception “between” the media
product and the perceiver’s mind’, is always initiated by the perceiver’s
sense organs and always, to some extent, followed by and entangled with
interpretation. Interpretation should be understood as all kinds of mental
activities that somehow make sense of the sensory input; these activities
may be both conscious and unconscious and are no doubt already present
in a basic way when the sense impressions are initially processed. Thus,
compared to the potentially extensive act of production, the act of percep-
tion is brief and quickly channelled into interpretation, which of course
occurs in the perceiver’s mind. Nevertheless, the type, quality and form of
sensory input provided by the media product, and actually taken in by the
 1 THE MODALITIES OF MEDIA II: AN EXPANDED MODEL… 19

perceiver’s sense organs, are crucial for the interpretation formed by the
perceiver’s mind.
For the moment, I will only comment briefly upon the third interrela-
tion among the entities of communication, ‘cognitive import “inside” the
producer’s mind and the perceiver’s mind’. One cannot state, without
intricate implications, that there is a certain amount of confinable cogni-
tive import inside a mind, and it is undoubtedly difficult to judge the
actual extent of similarity between the two amounts of cognitive import in
the two minds. Deciding this in a more precise way is probably beyond the
reach of known scientific research methods. However, I find the notion
that the transferred cognitive import is only one part of the producer’s and
the perceiver’s minds unproblematic. The cognitive import is ‘inside’ the
minds, in the sense that it is closely interconnected with a multitude of
other cognitive entities and processes and, ultimately, with the total sum
of mental activities in general that surrounds it.
The fourth interrelation, ‘a transfer of cognitive import “through” the
media product’, is central for my arguments. Until now, I have only
described the media product simply as the entity of communication that
enables a transfer of cognitive import from a producer’s mind to a per-
ceiver’s mind—a material entity that has the capacity of triggering mental
response. However, to give a somewhat more detailed account of this
notion, the very capacity itself must be scrutinised.
Of course, the transfer of cognitive import is only partly comparable to
other transfers—such as the transfer of goods between two cities by train.
The cognitive import transfer is not a material transfer but a mental trans-
fer aided by materiality. In one respect it can be compared to teleporta-
tion, which is the transfer of energy or matter between two points without
traversing the intermediate space: the cognitive import is indeed trans-
ferred between two points (two minds), and, contrary to the transfer of
goods, it does not traverse the intermediate space. Nevertheless, as the
transfer depends on the media product, it is reasonable to say that the
cognitive import goes ‘through’ the media product. Actually, the media
product is neither a neutral object of material transfer, like a freight car,
nor an intermediate space without effect, as in teleportation; it constitutes
a crucial stage of transition, not only transmission. As Beate Schirrmacher
suggested to me in personal communication, the transfer of cognitive
import ‘through’ the media product might alternatively be described as ‘a
chain or interactions’ involving producer’s mind, media product, perceiv-
er’s mind and everything in between.
20 L. ELLESTRÖM

Explaining this in some detail requires attention to the whole spectrum,

from the material to the mental. My angle for coping with this challenge
is to suggest that all media products can be analysed in terms of four kinds
of basic traits. As already noted, I call these categories media modalities
(Elleström 2010). I will describe these modalities briefly to prepare the
ground for further elaboration of the communication model and then
come back to them in a lengthier discussion later in the article.
The first three modalities are the material modality, the spatiotemporal
modality and the sensorial modality. Media products are all material in the
sense that they may be, for instance, solid or non-solid, or organic or inor-
ganic, and comparable traits like these belong to the material modality. All
media products also have spatiotemporal traits, which means that such
products that do not have at least either spatial or temporal extension are
inconceivable; hence, the spatiotemporal modality consists of comparable
media traits such as temporality, stasis and spatiality. Furthermore, media
products must reach the mind through at least one sense. Hence, sensory
perception is the common denominator of the media traits belonging to
the sensorial modality—media products may be visual, auditory and tactile
and so forth.
Of course, these kinds of traits are not unknown to communication
researchers. For instance, Hall discussed the two sensory channels of tele-
vision (1980), David K. Berlo highlighted all five external senses (1960),
and Schramm at least briefly mentioned that ‘a message has dimensions in
time or space’ (1971: 32). However, a thorough understanding of the
conditions for communication requires systematic attention to all modali-
ties. It is clear that cognitive import of any sort cannot be freely commu-
nicated by any kinds of material, spatiotemporal and sensorial traits. For
instance—to use some blatant examples—complex assertions cannot easily
be transferred through the sense of smell, and it is more difficult to effec-
tively transfer detailed series of visual events though a static media product
than through a temporal media product.
The fourth modality is the semiotic modality. Whereas the semiotic
traits of a media product are less palpable than the material, spatiotempo-
ral and sensorial traits, and in fact are entirely derived from them, they are
equally essential for realising communication. The sensory configurations
of a media product do not transfer any cognitive import until the per-
ceiver’s mind comprehends them as signs. In other words, the perceived
sensory configurations are meaningless until one understands them as rep-
resenting something through unconscious or conscious interpretation.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 General Miles,
Report
(Annual Reports of the War Department, 1898,
volume 1, part 2, page 36).

{618}

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1898 (July-September).

The War with Spain.
Capture of Manila.
Relations with the Filipino insurgents.
General Merritt's report.
Aguinaldo declared President of the Philippine Republic.

"Immediately after my arrival [July 25] I visited General

Greene's camp and made a reconnaissance of the position held
by the Spanish, and also the opposing lines of the insurgent
forces, hereafter to be described. I found General Greene's
command encamped on a strip of sandy land running parallel to
the shore of the bay and not far distant from the beach, but
owing to the great difficulties of landing supplies, the
greater portion of the force had shelter tents only, and were
suffering many discomforts, the camp being situated in a low,
flat place, without shelter from the heat of the tropical sun
or adequate protection during the terrific downpours of rain
so frequent at this season. I was at once struck by the
exemplary spirit of patient, even cheerful, endurance shown by
the officers and men under such circumstances, and this
feeling of admiration for the manner in which the American
soldier, volunteer and regular alike, accept the necessary
hardships of the work they have undertaken to do, has grown
and increased with every phase of the difficult and trying
campaign which the troops of the Philippine expedition have
brought to such a brilliant and successful conclusion.

"I discovered during my visit to General Greene that the left

or north flank of his brigade camp extended to a point on the
'Calle Real' about 3,200 yards from the outer line of Spanish
defenses of the city of Manila. This Spanish line began at the
powder magazine, or old Fort San Antonio, within a hundred
yards of the beach and just south of the Malate suburb of
Manila, and stretched away to the Spanish left in more or less
detached works, eastward, through swamps and rice fields,
covering all the avenues of approach to the town and
encircling the city completely. The Filipinos, or insurgent
forces at war with Spain, had, prior to the arrival of the
American land forces, been waging a desultory warfare with the
Spaniards for several months, and were at the time of my
arrival in considerable force, variously estimated and never
accurately ascertained, but probably not far from 12,000 men.
These troops, well supplied with small arms, with plenty of
ammunition and several field guns, had obtained positions of
investment opposite to the Spanish line of detached works
throughout their entire extent; and on the particular road
called the 'Calle Real,' passing along the front of General
Greene's brigade camp and running through Malate to Manila,
the insurgents had established an earthwork or trench within
800 yards of the powder-magazine fort. They also occupied as
well the road to the right, leading from the village of Pasay,
and the approach by the beach was also in their possession.
This anomalous state of affairs, namely, having a line of
quasi-hostile native troops between our forces and the Spanish
position, was, of course, very objectionable, but it was
difficult to deal with, owing to the peculiar condition of our
relations with the insurgents, which may be briefly stated as
follows:

"Shortly after the naval battle of Manila Bay, the principal

leader of the insurgents, General Emilio Aguinaldo, came to
Cavite from Hongkong, and, with the consent of our naval
authorities, began active work in raising troops and pushing
the Spaniards in the direction of the city of Manila. Having
met with some success, and the natives flocking to his
assistance, he proclaimed an independent government of
republican form, with himself as president, and at the time of
my arrival in the islands the entire edifice of executive and
legislative departments and subdivision of territory for
administrative purposes had been accomplished, at least on
paper, and the Filipinos held military possession of many
points in the islands other than those in the vicinity of
Manila. As General Aguinaldo did not visit me on my arrival
nor offer his services as a subordinate military leader, and
as my instructions from the President fully contemplated the
occupation of the islands by the American land forces, and
stated that 'the powers of the military occupant are absolute
and supreme and immediately operate upon the political
condition of the inhabitants,' I did not consider it wise to
hold any direct communication with the insurgent leader until
I should be in possession of the city of Manila, especially as
I would not until then be in a position to issue a
proclamation and enforce my authority, in the event that his
pretensions should clash with my designs.

"For these reasons the preparations for the attack on the city
were pressed and military operations conducted without
reference to the situation of the insurgent forces. The wisdom
of this course was subsequently fully established by the fact
that when the troops of my command carried the Spanish
intrenchments, extending from the sea to the Pasay road on the
extreme Spanish right, we were under no obligations, by
pre-arranged plans of mutual attack, to turn to the right and
clear the front still held against the insurgents, but were
able to move forward at once and occupy the city and suburbs.

"To return to the situation of General Greene's brigade as I

found it on my arrival, it will be seen that the difficulty in
gaining an avenue of approach to the Spanish line lay in the
fact of my disinclination to ask General Aguinaldo to withdraw
from the beach and the 'Calle Real,' so that Greene could move
forward. This was overcome by instructions to General Greene
to arrange, if possible, with the insurgent brigade commander
 in his immediate vicinity to move to the right and allow the
American forces unobstructed control of the roads in their
immediate front. No objection was made, and accordingly
General Greene's brigade threw forward a heavy outpost line on
the 'Calle Real' and the beach and constructed a trench, in
which a portion of the guns of the Utah batteries was placed.
The Spanish, observing this activity on our part, made a very
sharp attack with infantry and artillery on the night of July
31. The behavior of our troops during this night attack was
all that could be desired, and I have, in cablegrams to the
War Department, taken occasion to commend by name those who
deserve special mention for good conduct in the affair. Our
position was extended and strengthened after this and resisted
successfully repeated night attacks, our forces suffering,
however, considerable loss in wounded and killed, while the
losses of the enemy, owing to the darkness, could not be
ascertained.

"The strain of the night fighting and the heavy details for
outpost duty made it imperative to re-enforce General Greene's
troops with General MacArthur's brigade, which had arrived in
transports on the 31st of July. The difficulties of this
operation can hardly be overestimated. The transports were at
anchor off Cavite, 5 miles from a point on the beach where it
was desired to disembark the men.
{619}
Several squalls, accompanied by floods of rain, raged day
after day, and the only way to get the troops and supplies
ashore was to load them from the ship's side into native
lighters (called 'cascos') or small steamboats, move them to a
point opposite the camp, and then disembark them through the
surf in small boats, or by running the lighters head on to the
beach. The landing was finally accomplished, after days of
hard work and hardship; and I desire here to express again my
admiration for the fortitude and cheerful willingness of the
men of all commands engaged in this operation. Upon the
assembly of MacArthur's brigade in support of Greene's, I had
about 8,500 men in position to attack, and I deemed the time
had come for final action. During the time of the night
attacks I had communicated my desire to Admiral Dewey that he
would allow his ships to open fire on the right of the Spanish
line of intrenchments, believing that such action would stop
the night firing and loss of life, but the admiral had
declined to order it unless we were in danger of losing our
position by the assaults of the Spanish, for the reason that,
in his opinion, it would precipitate a general engagement, for
which he was not ready. Now, however, the brigade of General
MacArthur was in position and the 'Monterey' had arrived, and
under date of August 6 Admiral Dewey agreed to my suggestion
that we should send a joint letter to the captain-general
notifying him that he should remove from the city all
non-combatants within forty-eight hours, and that operations
against the defenses of Manila might begin at any time after
the expiration of that period.

"This letter was sent August 7, and a reply was received the
same date, to the effect that the Spanish were without places
of refuge for the increased numbers of wounded, sick women,
and children now lodged within the walls. On the 9th a formal
joint demand for the surrender of the city was sent in. This
demand was based upon the hopelessness of the struggle on the
part of the Spaniards, and that every consideration of
humanity demanded that the city should not be subjected to
bombardment under such circumstances. The captain-general's
reply, of same date, stated that the council of defense had
declared that the demand could not be granted; but the
captain-general offered to consult his Government if we would
allow him the time strictly necessary for the communications
by way of Hongkong. This was declined on our part for the
reason that it could, in the opinion of the admiral and
myself, lead only to a continuance of the situation, with no
immediate result favorable to us, and the necessity was
apparent and very urgent that decisive action should be taken
at once to compel the enemy to give up the town, in order to
relieve our troops from the trenches and from the great
exposure to unhealthy conditions which were unavoidable in a
bivouac during the rainy season.

"The seacoast batteries in defense of Manila are so situated

that it is impossible for ships to engage them without firing
into the town, and as the bombardment of a city filled with
women and children, sick and wounded, and containing a large
amount of neutral property, could only be justified as a last
resort, it was agreed between Admiral Dewey and myself that an
attempt should be made to carry the extreme right of the
Spanish line of intrenchments in front of the positions at
that time occupied by our troops, which, with its flank on the
seashore, was entirely open to the fire of the navy. It was
not my intention to press the assault at this point, in case
the enemy should hold it in strong force, until after the navy
had made practicable breaches in the works and shaken the troops
holding them, which could not be done by the army alone, owing
to the absence of siege guns. … It was believed, however, as
most desirable, and in accordance with the principles of
civilized warfare, that the attempt should be made to drive
the enemy out of his intrenchments before resorting to the
bombardment of the city. …

"All the troops were in position on the 13th at an early hour

in the morning. About 9 a. m. on that day our fleet steamed
forward from Cavite and before 10 a. m. opened a hot and
accurate fire of heavy shells and rapid-fire projectiles on
the sea flank of the Spanish intrenchments at the powder
magazine fort, and at the same time the Utah batteries, in
position in our trenches near the 'Calle Real,' began firing
with great accuracy. At 10.25, on a prearranged signal from
our trenches that it was believed our troops could advance,
the navy ceased firing, and immediately a light line of
skirmishers from the Colorado regiment of Greene's brigade
passed over our trenches and deployed rapidly forward, another
line from the same regiment from the left flank of our
earthworks advancing swifty up the beach in open order. Both
these lines found the powder-magazine fort and the trenches
flanking it deserted, but as they passed over the Spanish
works they were met by a sharp fire from a second line
situated in the streets of Malate, by which a number of men
were killed and wounded, among others the soldier who pulled
down the Spanish colors still flying on the fort and raised
our own.

"The works of the second line soon gave way to the determined
advance of Greene's troops, and that officer pushed his
brigade rapidly through Malate and over the bridges to occupy
Binondo and San Miguel, as contemplated in his instructions.
In the meantime the brigade of General MacArthur, advancing
simultaneously on the Pasay road, encountered a very sharp
fire, coming from the blockhouses, trenches, and woods in his
front, positions which it was very difficult to carry, owing
to the swampy condition of the ground on both sides of the
roads and the heavy undergrowth concealing the enemy. With
much gallantry and excellent judgment on the part of the
brigade commander and the troops engaged these difficulties
were overcome with a minimum loss, and MacArthur advanced and
held the bridges and the town of Malate, as was contemplated
in his instructions.

"The city of Manila was now in our possession, excepting the

walled town, but shortly after the entry of our troops into
Malate a white flag was displayed on the walls, whereupon
Lieutenant Colonel C. A. Whittier, United States Volunteers,
of my staff, and Lieutenant Brumby, United States Navy,
representing Admiral Dewey, were sent ashore to communicate
with the Captain-General. I soon personally followed these
officers into the town, going at once to the palace of the
Governor-General, and there, after a conversation with the
Spanish authorities, a preliminary agreement of the terms of
capitulation was signed by the Captain-General and myself.
This agreement was subsequently incorporated into the formal
 terms of capitulation, as arranged by the officers
representing the two forces, a copy of which is hereto
appended and marked.
{620}
Immediately after the surrender the Spanish colors on the sea
front were hauled down and the American flag displayed and
saluted by the guns of the navy. The Second Oregon Regiment,
which had proceeded by sea from Cavite, was disembarked and
entered the walled town as a provost guard, and the colonel
was directed to receive the Spanish arms and deposit them in
places of security. The town was filled with the troops of the
enemy driven in from the intrenchments, regiments formed and
standing in line in the streets, but the work of disarming
proceeded quietly and nothing unpleasant occurred.

"In leaving the subject of the operations of the 13th, I

desire here to record my appreciation of the admirable manner
in which the orders for attack and the plan for occupation of
the city were carried out by the troops exactly as
contemplated. I submit that for troops to enter under fire a
town covering a wide area, to rapidly deploy and guard all
principal points in the extensive suburbs, to keep out the
insurgent forces pressing for admission, to quietly disarm an
army of Spaniards more than equal in numbers to the American
troops, and finally by all this to prevent entirely all
rapine, pillage, and disorder, and gain entire and complete
possession of a city of 300,000 people, filled with natives
hostile to the European interests, and stirred up by the
knowledge that their own people were fighting in the outside
trenches, was an act which only the law-abiding, temperate,
resolute American soldier, well and skillfully handled by his
regimental and brigade commanders, could accomplish. …

"The amount of public funds and the numbers of the prisoners

of war and small arms taken have been reported in detail by
cable. It will be observed that the trophies of Manila were
nearly $900,000, 13,000 prisoners, and 22,000 arms.
Immediately after the surrender my headquarters were
established in the ayuntamiento, or city office of the
Governor-General, where steps were at once inaugurated to set
up the government of military occupancy. … On the 16th a
cablegram containing the text of the President's proclamation
directing a cessation of hostilities was received by me, and
at the same time an order to make the fact known to the
Spanish authorities, which was done at once. This resulted in
a formal protest from the Governor-General in regard to the
transfer of public funds then taking place, on the ground that
the proclamation was dated prior to the surrender. To this I
replied that the status quo in which we were left with the
cessation of hostilities was that existing at the time of the
receipt by me of the official notice, and that I must insist
upon the delivery of the funds. The delivery was made under
protest.

"After the issue of my proclamation and the establishment of

my office as military governor, I had direct written
communication with General Aguinaldo on several occasions. He
recognized my authority as military governor of the town of
Manila and suburbs, and made professions of his willingness to
withdraw his troops to a line which I might indicate, but at
the same time asking certain favors for himself. The matters
in this connection had not been settled at the date of my
departure. Doubtless much dissatisfaction is felt by the rank
and file of the insurgents that they have not been permitted
to enjoy the occupancy of Manila, and there is some ground for
trouble with them owing to that fact, but, notwithstanding
many rumors to the contrary, I am of the opinion that the
leaders will be able to prevent serious disturbances, as they
are sufficiently intelligent and educated to know that to
antagonize the United States would be to destroy their only
chance of future political improvement.

"On the 28th instant I received a cablegram directing me to

transfer my command to Major-General Otis, United States
 Volunteers, and to proceed to Paris, France, for conference
with the peace commissioners. I embarked on the steamer
'China' on the 30th in obedience to these instructions."

Report of General Wesley Merritt

(Annual Reports of the War Department, 1898,
volume 1, pages 39-45).

"Aguinaldo … retired to Malalos, about 25 miles to the

northward, leaving his troops entrenched round Manila, and
there with considerable pomp and ceremony on September 29th,
1898, he was declared First President of the Philippine
Republic, and the National Congress was opened with Pedro
Paterno as President of that assembly."

G. J. Younghusband,
The Philippines and Round About,
page 27.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1898 (July-December).

War with Spain.
Suspension of hostilities.
Negotiation of Treaty of Peace.
Instructions to American Commissioners.
Relinquishment of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba and cession
of Porto Rico, the island of Guam and the Philippine Islands
to the United States.

In his message to Congress, December 5, 1898, President

McKinley gave the following account of his reception of
overtures from Spain, for the termination of the war, and of
the negotiations which resulted in a treaty of peace:

"The annihilation of Admiral Cervera's fleet, followed by the

capitulation of Santiago, having brought to the Spanish
Government a realizing sense of the hopelessness of continuing
a struggle now become wholly unequal, it made overtures of
 peace through the French Ambassador, who, with the assent of
his Government, had acted as the friendly representative of
Spanish interests during the war. On the 26th of July M.
Cambon presented a communication signed by the Duke of
Almodovar, the Spanish Minister of State, inviting the United
States to state the terms upon which it would be willing to
make peace. On the 30th of July, by a communication addressed
to the Duke of Almodovar and handed to M. Cambon, the terms of
this Government were announced, substantially as in the
protocol afterwards signed. On the 10th of August the Spanish
reply, dated August 7th, was handed by M. Cambon to the
Secretary of State. It accepted unconditionally the terms
imposed as to Cuba, Porto Rico and an island of the Ladrone
group, but appeared to seek to introduce inadmissible
reservations in regard to our demand as to the Philippine
Islands. Conceiving that discussion on this point could
neither be practical nor profitable, I directed that, in order
to avoid misunderstanding, the matter should be forthwith
closed by proposing the embodiment in a formal protocol of the
terms upon which the negotiations for peace were to be
undertaken.
{621}
The vague and inexplicit suggestion of the Spanish note could
not be accepted, the only reply being to present as a virtual
ultimatum a draft of protocol embodying the precise terms
tendered to Spain in our note of July 30th, with added
stipulations of detail as to the appointment of commissioners
to arrange for the evacuation of the Spanish Antilles. On
August 12th M. Cambon announced his receipt of full powers to
sign the protocol submitted. Accordingly, on the afternoon of
August 12th M. Cambon, as the plenipotentiary of Spain, and
the Secretary of State, as the plenipotentiary of the United
States, signed a protocol providing:

Article I—
Spain will relinquish all claim of sovereignty over and title
to Cuba.
Article II-
Spain will cede to the United States the island of Porto Rico
and other islands now under Spanish sovereignty in the West
Indies and also an island in the Ladrones to be selected by
the United States.

Article III-
The United States will occupy and hold the city, bay and
harbor of Manila pending the conclusion of a treaty of peace,
which shall determine the control, disposition and government
of the Philippines.

The fourth article provided for the appointment of joint

commissions on the part of the United States and Spain, to
meet in Havana and San Juan, respectively, for the purpose of
arranging and carrying out the details of the stipulated
evacuation of Cuba, Porto Rico and other Spanish islands in
the West Indies.

The fifth article provided for the appointment of not more

than five commissioners on each side, to meet at Paris not
later than October 1st, and proceed to the negotiation and
conclusion of a treaty of peace, subject to ratification
according to the respective constitutional forms of the two
countries.

The sixth and last article provided that upon the signature of
the protocol hostilities between the two countries should be
suspended and that notice to that effect should be given as
soon as possible by each government to the commanders of its
military and naval forces. Immediately upon the conclusion of
the protocol I issued a proclamation of August 12th,
suspending hostilities on the part of the United States. The
necessary orders to that end were at once given by telegraph.
The blockade of the ports of Cuba and San Juan de Porto Rico
was in like manner raised. On the 18th of August the
muster-out of 100,000 Volunteers, or as near that number as
was found to be practicable, was ordered. On the 1st of
December 101,165 officers and men had been mustered out and
discharged from the service and 9,002 more will be mustered
out by the 10th of this month. Also a corresponding number of
general staff officers have been honorably discharged from the
service. The military commissions to superintend the
evacuation of Cuba, Porto Rico and the adjacent islands were
forthwith appointed: For Cuba, Major-General James F. Wade,
Rear-Admiral William T. Sampson, Major-General Matthew C.
Butler. For Porto Rico, Major-General John R. Brooke,
Rear-Admiral Winfield S. Schley and Brigadier-General William
W. Gordon, who soon afterwards met the Spanish commissioners
at Havana and San Juan respectively. … Pursuant to the fifth
article of the protocol, I appointed William H. Day, late
Secretary of State; Cushman K. Davis, William P. Frye and
George Gray, Senators of the United States, and Whitelaw Reid,
to be the peace commissioners on the part of the United
States. Proceeding in due season to Paris they there met on
the first of October five commissioners, similarly appointed
on the part of Spain."

Message of the President to Congress,

December 5, 1898.

The instructions given (September 16) by President McKinley to

the commissioners appointed to treat for peace with Spain, and
the correspondence between the commissioners at Paris and the
President and the Secretary of State at Washington during the
progress of the negotiations, were communicated confidentially
to the United States Senate on the 30th of January, 1899, but
not published until February, 1901, when the injunction of
secrecy was removed and the printing of the papers ordered by
vote of the Senate. The chief interest of these papers lies in
their disclosure of what passed between the American executive
and the peace commissioners on the subject of the Philippine
Islands which led to the demand for their entire surrender by
Spain.

In his instructions of September 16th to the commissioners, on

their departure for the meeting with Spanish commissioners at
Paris, the President wrote on this subject: "By article 6 of
the protocol it was agreed that hostilities between the two
countries should be suspended, and that notice to that effect
should be given as soon as possible by each Government to the
Commanders of its military and naval forces. Such notice was
given by the Government of the United States immediately after
the signature of the protocol, the forms of the necessary
orders having previously been prepared. But before notice
could reach the commanders of the military and naval forces of
the United States in the Philippines they captured and took
possession by conquest of the city of Manila and its suburbs,
which are therefore held by the United States by conquest as
well as by virtue of the protocol. In view of what has taken
place it is necessary now to determine what shall be our
future relations to the Philippines. …

"Our aim in the adjustment of peace should be directed to

lasting results and to the achievement of the common good
under the demands of civilization rather than to ambitious
designs. The terms of the protocol were framed upon this
consideration. The abandonment of the Western Hemisphere by
Spain was an imperative necessity. In presenting that
requirement we only fulfilled a duty universally acknowledged.
It involves no ungenerous reference to our recent foe, but
simply a recognition of the plain teachings of history, to say
that it was not compatible with the assurance of permanent
peace on and near our own territory that the Spanish flag
should remain on this side of the sea. This lesson of events
and of reason left no alternative as to Cuba, Porto Rico, and
the other islands belonging to Spain in this hemisphere. The
Philippines stand upon a different basis. It is none the less
true, however, that, without any original thought of complete
or even partial acquisition, the presence and success of our
 arms at Manila imposes upon us obligations which we can not
disregard. The march of events rules and overrules human
action. A vowing unreservedly the purpose which has animated
all our effort, and still solicitous to adhere to it, we can
not be unmindful that without any desire or design on our part
the war has brought us new duties and responsibilities which
we must meet and discharge as becomes a great nation on whose
growth and career from the beginning the Ruler of Nations has
plainly written the high command and pledge of civilization.

{622}

"Incidental to our tenure in the Philippines is the commercial

opportunity to which American statesmanship can not be
indifferent. It is just to use every legitimate means for the
enlargement of American trade; but we seek no advantages in
the Orient which are not common to all. Asking only the open
door for ourselves, we are ready to accord the open door to
others. The commercial opportunity which is naturally and
inevitably associated with this new opening depends less on
large territorial possessions than upon an adequate commercial
basis and upon broad and equal privileges. It is believed that
in the practical application of these guiding principles the
present interests of our country and the proper measure of its
duty, its welfare in the future, and the consideration of its
exemption from unknown perils will be found in full accord
with the just, moral, and humane purpose which was invoked as
our justification in accepting the war.

"In view of what has been stated, the United States can not
accept less than the cession in full right and sovereignty of
the island of Luzon. It is desirable, however, that the United
States shall acquire the right of entry for vessels and
merchandise belonging to citizens of the United States into
such ports of the Philippines as are not ceded to the United
States upon terms of equal favor with Spanish ships and
merchandise, both in relation to port and customs charges and
rates of trade and commerce, together with other rights of
protection and trade accorded to citizens of one country
within the territory of another. You are therefore instructed
to demand such concession, agreeing on your part that Spain
shall have similar rights as to her subjects and vessels in
the ports of any territory in the Philippines ceded to the
United States."

On the 7th of October, Mr. Day, on behalf of the American

commissioners, cabled a long communication from Paris to Mr.
Hay, his successor in the United States Department of State,
summarizing testimony given before the Commission by General
Merritt, lately commanding in the Philippines, and statements
brought by General Merritt from Admiral Dewey, General Greene,
and others. In part, the telegram was as follows:

"General Anderson, in correspondence with Aguinaldo in June

and July, seemed to treat him and his forces as allies and
native authorities, but subsequently changed his tone. General
Merritt reports that Admiral Dewey did not approve this
correspondence and advised against it. Merritt and Dewey both
kept clear of any compromising communications. Merritt
expresses opinion we are in no way committed to any insurgent
programme. Answering questions of Judge Day, General Merritt
said insurrection practically confined to Luzon. Tribal and
religious differences between the inhabitants of various
islands. United States has helped rather than injured
insurrection. Under no obligation other than moral to help
natives. Natives of Luzon would not accept Spanish rule, even
with amnesty. Insurgents would be victorious unless Spaniards
did better in future than in past. Insurgents would fight
among themselves if they had no common enemy. Think it
feasible for United States to take Luzon and perhaps some
adjacent islands and hold them as England does her colonies.
Natives could not resist 5,000 troops. … General Merritt
thinks that if United States attempted to take possession of
Luzon, or all the group as a colony, Aguinaldo and his
immediate followers would resist it, but his forces are
divided and his opposition would not amount to anything. If
the islands were divided, filibustering expeditions might go
from one island to another, thus exposing us to constant
danger of conflict with Spain. In answer to questions of
Senator Frye, Merritt said insurgents would murder Spaniards
and priests in Luzon and destroy their property if the United
States withdrew. United States under moral obligation to stay
there. He did not know whether the effect of setting up a
government by the United States in Luzon would be to produce
revolutions in other islands. It might cause reforms in their
government. … Answering questions of Mr. Gray, Merritt said
consequences in case of either insurgent or Spanish triumph
made it doubtful whether United States would be morally
justified in withdrawing. Our acts were ordinary acts of war,
as if we had attacked Barcelona, but present conditions in
Philippine Islands were partly brought about by us. Insurgents
not in worse condition by our coming. Spaniards hardly able to
defend themselves. If we restored them to their position and
trenches, they might maintain themselves with the help of a
navy when we withdrew. Did not know that he could make out a
responsibility by argument, but he felt it. It might be
sentimental. He thought it would be an advantage if the United
States would change its policy and keep the islands. (He)
thought our interests in the East would be helped by the cheap
labor in the Philippines, costing only from 20 to 80 cents a
day, according to skill. … Answering questions of Mr. Reid,
Merritt said he considered capture of Manila practically
capture of group. Nothing left of Spanish sovereignty that was
not at mercy of the United States. Did not think our humanity
bounded by geographical lines. After Dewey's victory we armed
insurgents to some extent, but Dewey says it was
over-estimated. Insurgents bought arms from Hongkong merchants
with Dewey's cognizance, but Dewey was not in favor of allowing
this to continue. Spaniards would destroy Aguinaldo and his
principal followers, if allowed to do so."
 October 25, Judge Day cabled a message to Washington, saying:
"Differences of opinion among commissioners concerning
Philippine Islands are set forth in statements transmitted
herewith. On these we request early consideration and explicit
instructions. Liable now to be confronted with this question
in joint commission almost immediately." The differing
statements then transmitted were three in number, the first of
them signed by Messrs. Davis, Frye, and Reid, who said:
"Information gained by commission in Paris leads to conviction
that it would be naval, political, and commercial mistake to
divide the archipelago. Nearly all expert testimony taken
tends to this effect. As instructions provide for retention at
least of Luzon, we do not consider question of remaining in
Philippine Islands at all as now properly before us. We
therefore ask for extension of instructions. Spain governed
and defended these islands from Manila, and with destruction
of her fleet and the surrender of her army we became as
complete masters of the whole group as she had been, with
nothing needed to complete the conquest save to proceed with
the ample forces we had at hand to take unopposed possession.
{623}
The Ladrones and Carolines were also governed from the same
capital by the same governor-general. National boundaries
ought to follow natural divisions, but there is no natural
place for dividing Philippine Islands. … If we do not want the
islands ourselves, better to control their disposition; that
is, to hold the option on them rather than to abandon it.
Could then at least try to protect ourselves by ample treaty
stipulations with the acquiring powers. Commercially, division
of archipelago would not only needlessly establish dangerous
rivals at our door, but would impair value of part we kept."

Disagreeing with this view, Judge Day said:

"I am unable to agree that we should peremptorily demand the

entire Philippine island group. In the spirit of our
instructions, and bearing in mind the often declared
disinterestedness of purpose and freedom from designs of
conquest with which the war was undertaken, we should be
consistent in our demands in making peace. Territory
permanently held must be taken as war indemnity and with due
regard to our responsibility because of the conduct of our
military and naval authorities in dealing with the insurgents.
Whether this conduct was wise or unwise is not now important. We
cannot leave the insurgents to mere treaty stipulations or to
their unaided resources, either to form a government or to
battle against a foe which (although) unequal to us, might
readily overcome them. On all hands it is agreed that the
inhabitants of the islands are unfit for self-government. This
is particularly true of Mindanao and the Sulu group. Only
experience can determine the success of colonial expansion
upon which the United States is entering. It may prove
expensive in proportion to the scale upon which it is tried
with ignorant and semibarbarous people at the other side of
the world. It should therefore be kept within bounds." Judge
Day, accordingly, suggested a division of the archipelago that
would give to the United States Luzon, Mindoro, and Palawan,
and control the entrance to the China Sea. Senator Gray, in a
third statement, dissented from both these views, saying: "The
undersigned can not agree that it is wise to take Philippine
Islands in whole or in part. To do so would be to reverse
accepted continental policy of the country, declared and acted
upon throughout our history. Propinquity governs the case of
Cuba and Porto Rico. Policy proposed introduces us into
European politics and the entangling alliances against which
Washington and all American statesmen have protested. It will
make necessary a navy equal to largest of powers; a greatly
increased military establishment; immense sums for
fortifications and harbors; multiply occasions for dangerous
complications with foreign nations, and increase burdens of
taxation. Will receive in compensation no outlet for American
labor in labor market already overcrowded and cheap; no area
for homes for American citizens; climate and social conditions
demoralizing to character of American youth; new and disturbing
questions introduced into our politics; church question
menacing. On whole, instead of indemnity—injury. The
undersigned can not agree that any obligation incurred to
insurgents is paramount to our own manifest interests. … No
place for colonial administration or government of subject
people in American system. So much from standpoint of
interest; but even conceding all benefits claimed for
annexation, we thereby abandon the infinitely greater benefit
to accrue from acting the part of a great, powerful, and
Christian nation; we exchange the moral grandeur and strength
to be gained by keeping our word to nations of the world and
by exhibiting a magnanimity and moderation in the hour of
victory that becomes the advanced civilization we claim, for
doubtful material advantages and shameful stepping down from
high moral position boastfully assumed. We should set example
in these respects, not follow in the selfish and vulgar greed
for territory which Europe has inherited from medieval times.
Our declaration of war upon Spain was accompanied by a solemn
and deliberate definition of our purpose. Now that we have
achieved all and more than our object, let us simply keep our
word. … At the very least let us adhere to the President's
instructions and if conditions require the keeping of Luzon
forego the material advantages claimed in annexing other
islands. Above all let us not make a mockery of the injunction
contained in those instructions, where, after stating that we
took up arms only in obedience to the dictates of humanity and
in the fulfillment of high public and moral obligations, and
that we had no design of aggrandizement and no ambition of
conquest, the President among other things eloquently says:
'It is my earnest wish that the United States in making peace
should follow the same high rule of conduct which guided it in
facing war. It should be as scrupulous and magnanimous in the
concluding settlement as it was just and humane in its
original action.' This and more, of which I earnestly ask a
re-perusal, binds my conscience and governs my actions."

But the President had now arrived at a different state of