Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics 9781441109408, 9781472541963, 9781441156266

Table of contents :
Cover
HalfTitle
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The zoologists and the hunters
Why Peirce?
The philosophy of representation
Organization of the book
Conventions and abbreviations
Further reading
Chapter One Signs and things1
1.1 Semiotics as logic
1.1.1 The core elements
1.1.2 The action of the sign
1.1.3 The structure of semiosis and the medium
1.1.4 An illustration
1.2 The mature system
1.2.1 Sign or representamen?
1.2.2 Two objects
1.2.3 Three interpretants
1.3 Continuous semiosis
1.3.1 Continuity and the interpretant
1.3.2 Concluding remarks
1.4 Summary
Chapter Two How shall a sign be called?
2.1 Two preliminary distinctions
2.2 Peirce’s first division
2.2.1 Three subclasses of signs
2.2.1.1 Legisigns and replicas
2.2.1.2 Sinsign or replica?
2.2.1.1 Legisigns and replicas
2.2.1.2 Sinsign or replica?
2.2.2 Non-verbal communication
2.3 Illustrations
2.3.1 Iconography
2.3.2 ‘Body language’10
2.3.3 Personification
2.4 Issues
2.4.1 Code or legisign?
2.4.2 Type, token/instance, mark
2.5 Summary
Chapter Three Peirce
3.1 The philosopher
3.1.1 Select biography
3.1.2 The epistemological background
3.1.2.1 Idealism
3.1.2.2 Realism
3.1.2.3 Empiricism
3.1.2.1 Idealism
3.1.2.2 Realism
3.1.2.3 Empiricism
3.1.3 Mind, language and classification
3.2 Inference and perception
3.3 Complexity and the categories
3.3.1 Architectonic
3.3.2 Quality, existence, generality
3.3.2.1 Legisign and replica
3.3.2.2 The implication principle
3.3.2.1 Legisign and replica
3.3.2.2 The implication principle
3.3.3 Two conceptualizations of the sign
3.3.3.1 Saussure
3.3.3.2 Peirce
3.3.3.1 Saussure
3.3.3.2 Peirce
3.4 Methodology and the 1903 classification of signs
3.4.2 Putting it all together
3.5 Summary
Chapter Four Modes of representation
4.1 Three orders of complexity
4.2 Modes of representation
4.2.1 The icon
4.2.2 The index
4.2.3 The symbol
4.3 The object revisited
4.3.1 The dynamic object
4.3.2 The immediate object
4.4 Summary
Chapter Five Medium matters
5.1 An ecology of signs
5.1.1 Degrees of complexity and their implications for the structure of signs
5.1.2 Medium and structure of the sign
5.2 The hypoicons
5.2.1 Hypoiconicity introduced
5.2.1.1 Image
5.2.1.2 Diagram
5.2.1.3 Metaphor
5.2.1.1 Image
5.2.1.2 Diagram
5.2.1.3 Metaphor
5.2.2 Hypoiconicity in pictorial documents
5.2.2.1 Image, diagram, metaphor
5.2.2.2 Metaphor and simile
5.2.2.1 Image, diagram, metaphor
5.2.2.2 Metaphor and simile
5.3 Beyond metaphor: The structure of allegory and personification
5.4 Post scriptum
5.4.1 Metaphor, atomism and the code
5.4.2 Jakobson and iconicity theory
5.5 Summary
Chapter Six The mute poem
6.1 The paradox of the still image
6.1.1 The mute poem
6.1.2 Informative potential
6.2 Peirce and information
6.3 The third trichotomy
6.3.1 The dicent sign
6.3.2 The rheme
6.3.3 Pictura loquens
6.3.4 The argument
6.3.4.1 Abduction, deduction, induction
6.3.4.2 ‘Moving pictures of thought’
6.3.4.1 Abduction, deduction, induction
6.3.4.2 ‘Moving pictures of thought’
6.3.5 Hypoiconicity again
6.4 Classifying signs
6.5 Summary
Chapter Seven Rhetoric of the image
7.1 Theoretical considerations
7.1.1 Common science and special science
7.1.2 From semiotics to rhetoric
7.2 Rhetoric
7.2.1 Rhetoric theory
7.2.1.1 Oratory
7.2.1.2 The loci of classical rhetoric
7.2.1.1 Oratory
7.2.1.2 The loci of classical rhetoric
7.2.2 Speculative rhetoric
7.2.3 Intersubjectivity and the field of the interpretant
7.3 Case studies: Ideology and inflection5
7.3.1 The 2006 Home Office ‘consent’ campaign
7.3.2 Spread the word around . . .
7.3.3 ‘Savoir d’où l’on vient’
7.4 Summary
Chapter Eight Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics

Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics Semiotics has complemented linguistics by expanding its scope beyond the phoneme and the sentence to include texts and discourse, and their rhetorical, performative, and ideological functions. It has brought into focus the multimodality of human communication. Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics publishes original works in the field demonstrating robust scholarship, intellectual creativity, and clarity of exposition. These works apply semiotic approaches to linguistics and nonverbal productions, social institutions and discourses, embodied cognition and communication, and the new virtual realities that have been ushered in by the Internet. It also is inclusive of publications in relevant domains such as socio-semiotics, evolutionary semiotics, game theory, cultural and literary studies, human– computer interactions, and the challenging new dimensions of human networking afforded by social websites. Series Editor: Paul Bouissac is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto (Victoria College), Canada. He is a world renowned figure in semiotics and a pioneer of circus studies. He runs the SemiotiX Bulletin [www.semioticon. com/semiotix] which has a global readership.

Titles in the Series:

Buddhist Theory of Semiotics, Fabio Rambelli Semiotics of Drink and Drinking, Paul Manning Semiotics of Religion, Robert A. Yelle The Structure of Visual Narrative, Neil Cohn

Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics

Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics Tony Jappy

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Tony Jappy, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Tony Jappy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-5163-6 PB: 978-1-4411-0940-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in India

In memoriam Gérard Deledalle, Ficino of the twentieth century

Contents

Acknowledgements  viii Introduction  ix

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Signs and things  1 How shall a sign be called?  Peirce  53 Modes of representation  79 Medium matters  107 The mute poem  137 Rhetoric of the image  167 Conclusion  195

Notes  198 Bibliography  209 Index  215

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Acknowledgements

An introduction to visual semiotics without visuals would be worthless, and so I would like to thank the following for having permitted me to use their marvellous images: Dany Leriche and Jean Michel Fickinger for their photographic allegory, Banksy for his pictorial palimpsest and photographic artist Ben Stockley for the images from the anti-rape campaign. I would also like to thank the following institutions for their enlightened policy towards the reproduction of their images for academic purposes: The National Gallery, London, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Library of Congress, Washington, The Kunst Historisches Museum, Vienna and Associated Press. For generously allowing me to use copyright material I am also heavily indebted to the following: André De Tienne, director of the Peirce Edition Project, Indianapolis, William Barker, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Martin Wynne, head of Oxford University Computing Services, for the extract from the British National Corpus, Bob Hrtanek of Powertrain Systems Delphi, Inc., Michigan, Steven van Leeuwen of Bartleby.com, the Churches Advertising Network, Marie Martine Serrano of Editions Payot & Rivages, Anita O’Brien of the Cartoon Museum, London, for her unstinting help with the Harold Johns comic-strip and various members of my family who provided some of the photographic illustrations. Many thanks, too, to the team at Bloomsbury, Laura Murray and Gurdeep Mattu, for their forbearance and patient advice during the preparation of the manuscript, and to Paul Bouissac, the series general editor, for having given me this opportunity to get the ideas out. These, of course, are my sole responsibility. Finally, heartfelt thanks, too, to F., for the foot, the food and the moral support.

Introduction

Ours, we are frequently told, is a visual culture, a culture which has witnessed enormous growth in the devising and deployment of vision-based technology; a culture in which, increasingly, information is deserting the traditional print media and is coming more and more to be framed in screens of various sorts. It is at the same time a culture fraught with anxieties over the passage from analogue to digital imaging technology which, it has been claimed, is threatening to transform our everyday reality into a flood of simulations,1 while the CCTV camera impinges on and violates our privacy and civil liberties. It is a culture, finally, in which ancient suspicions of analogy, reality and the image are fostered and reinforced by a very modern theory of the sign. 2 It is almost a paradox, then, that although the visual embodiment of this culture is all around us, entrenched, as it were, in our communal experience, we seem unable to assimilate it without careful thought and instruction, and a quick search through the online bookstores nets literally hundreds of more or less academically oriented studies in theory and methodology – textbooks, guides, anthologies, surveys, readers – devoted to the complex interplay of vision, images and culture. Now the interesting feature of this twenty-first-century abundance is that the theoretical bases of these texts are to be found in two theories of the sign which were developed contemporaneously at the beginning of the last century. And they are entirely incompatible.

The zoologists and the hunters Writing in 1981, the literary critic Jonathan Culler offered the following perception of the two major contemporary semiotic research activities associated with Peirce’s American ‘semeiotic’, 3 on the one hand, and with the European semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure, on the other: Semiotics, which defines itself as the science of signs, posits a zoological pursuit: the semiotician wants to discover what are the species of signs, how they differ from one another, how they function in their native habitat, how they interact with other species. Confronted with the

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plethora of texts that communicate various meanings to their readers, the analyst does not pursue a meaning; he seeks to describe signs and describe their functioning. For other critics, this general and classificatory project is of minor interest. Like hunters pursuing a particular beast that will make a splendid trophy, they have a more precise goal. A sign sequence is there to be interpreted; one pursues it to capture its meaning. (Culler, 1981, pp. vii–viii) Although at this point Culler makes no reference either to Peirce or Saussure, he returns to this distinction in the second chapter of his study, where it becomes obvious that in his view the first type of research is conducted by the Peirceans, and the second by a neo-Saussurean like Roland Barthes. Culler’s sympathies clearly lie with the hunters, as the title of the book – The Pursuit of Signs  – suggests, and this is even more obvious from the characterization of Peircean-style semiotic research into classes of signs as the preoccupation of ‘masochists’ (ibid. p. 23), surely evidence of Culler’s reluctance to engage with the complexity of Peirce’s thought and evidence also of the very real problems of exegesis which the manuscripts of his enormous philosophical output have engendered. In itself, this is not a real problem, simply a difference of opinion. However, presented in this manner, the major differences between the two conceptions of interpretation appear to concern purpose and methodology, whereas they can, in fact, be traced to a seventeenth-century epistemological rift and, above all, to the fact that while Saussure’s semiology is based upon a theory of language, Peirce’s semiotics is a form of logic.

Why Peirce? There are at least two reasons why we should be wary of this particular linguistics-based theory of the sign and at least examine what the Peircean alternative has to offer. First, one of the problems with the Course in General Linguistics is that while it rejects quite forcibly the old Adamic notion of language as a nomenclature, a set of names for ‘things’, it canvasses a conception of language and its units as a system of sound-meaning correspondences: a sign associates a signifier with a concept or signified. This has led to the analysis of cultural artefacts as a species of code-breaking: given a cultural signifier the task of the semiologist is to identify some obscure and possibly ideologically unsound signified. Jacques Derrida dismissed this ‘nostalgia for an origin’ in the text which rejected the code-breaking project characteristic of the structuralism of Barthes and Lévi-Strauss, and suggested instead that the signifier be given free ‘play’ and that the signified  – the structuralists’ origin  – be dropped from the

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analysis altogether and be allowed to ‘wither’.4 One might add that such a methodology is clearly redundant in most of the events of everyday life, in which we pick our way – most often, successfully – through the multitude of very familiar signs we encounter: for Peirce, semiotic activity and the interpretation of the world we live in is a constant demotic process, not the hieratic field of the specialist. Second, the whole of twentieth-century French thought, linguistics-based structuralism and poststructuralism included, seems to have rejected, more or less explicitly according to the authority involved, the alleged ocularcentrism and excessive visuality of contemporary culture. Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes (Jay 1994) charts the evolution of this movement in France through the twentieth century, an evolution which, allied to two features of Saussure’s first principle of linguistics, namely that the relation holding between the two components of the sign is arbitrary and that every means of expression used in society – images included, of course – is rooted in social convention, has resulted in a species of iconoclasm that ill accords with a theory of such motivated, analogical signs as images. Enter, then, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a permanently impoverished and an often embattled American polymath with important innovative contributions to philosophy, mathematics and, above all, logic, to his credit. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family of academics. Over a period of approximately ten years at the beginning of the twentieth century he developed a semiotic theory which dispensed with reference to linguistics, and instead placed the science of signs on an entirely neutral footing. In short, his brand of North American ‘semeiotic’ is not linguistics but logic, and to determine to what extent a complex but empty formalism of this sort can help us to understand better the nature and rhetorical function of both verbal and pictorial representation is one of the purposes of this book. However, to demonstrate just how and why this should be compels the important methodological requirement of contrasting the two means of communication within this unusual conception of logic, which Peirce defined as the philosophy of representation. In other words, to understand fully a semiotics of the image it is useful to examine not only images, but words, too, for, to paraphrase Kipling, ‘What should they know of images who only images know?’ Where the present study differs from other expositions of semiology and semiotics is by taking images as the major theme and, for once, relegating the verbal to a secondary status. There is an inevitable risk of distortion if we talk about images using concepts derived from the discussion of language and speech. 5 This applies both to theories of the image inspired by Saussurean semiology as described above and to references to the so-called languages of art and languages of the image, since the basic premise of such studies seems to be that what is true of a linguistic unit is necessarily true of an image. This is not the case.

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The philosophy of representation Peirce’s logic is in essence a reworked and modernized version of the medieval trivium composed of grammar, logic and rhetoric, applied not to education but to a theory of knowledge. In Peirce’s version, the old trivium disciplines are replaced by the following branches: Speculative (i.e. theoretical) Grammar, Critic and Speculative Rhetoric, and the three together constitute Peirce’s conception of logic as a veritable philosophy of representation. The first is a general theory of what constitutes a sign and how it functions; the second is more concerned with establishing the validity of a specific class of signs and is only of passing interest to the study of pictorial data; the third branch he defined as the study of the conditions under which all classes of signs determine their intended effects upon the user. The first is by far and away the best known of the three, and indeed throughout the book the terms ‘semiotics’ and ‘speculative grammar’ are used interchangeably although it is probable that the branch Peirce himself spent most energy in developing was the second. Given the scope of the present volume – an investigation into the relevance of the semiotics to the analysis of pictorial documents – the bulk of the material in the book will be devoted to the first branch and most of the final chapter to the third. In view of the multitude of definitions and the rapid development of Peirce’s conception of logic, and given the important position it occupied within his theory of knowledge, I have deliberately adopted what might be considered a hybrid approach to the exposition of the theory. I have taken the period 1902–3, when Peirce established his first full-fledged system and classification of signs, as a theoretical watershed. This is not entirely arbitrary as what we now see as the final versions of his semiotics were only expounded in a piecemeal fashion prior to 1903. However, by 1904 he had considerably expanded the original system. The chapters of the book are thus organized around the original trio of three-way divisions or trichotomies as they were set out in 1903 – a system he described quite fully and never abandoned – but describe in detail the components of signactions as Peirce conceived them from 1904 on. The specialist scholar will understand the reasons behind this, and I think it entirely beneficial for the reader and for the advancement of Peirce’s semiotics. The hybrid approach adopted in this book, then, following Peirce, proposes to define and describe the following fundamental aspects of the sign: The sort of thing a sign can be. The various modes of representation signs can adopt. Just how we obtain information principally from pictorial signs. How such signs might produce their intended effects upon the interpreter.

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Organization of the book The exposition incorporates material tested in classes and seminars taught at the University of Perpignan over the years, in papers presented at congresses and colloquia, and in various published articles. It also draws on material published in Jappy 2010a. This was an introduction in French to Peircean visual semiotics and took as its major theme the way information can be obtained from pictorial data. The first six chapters of the present volume, however, deal with the semiotics in far greater detail, while the final chapter investigates the relevance of the semiotics to a rhetoric of the image. This material is organized as follows. Chapter One begins the process of describing Peirce’s semiotics in medias res and identifies the three core elements common to all three branches of his philosophy of representation. After a brief discussion of the notion of logic, it initiates the exposition of his theory of the sign and the process in which it functions – sign-action – and its three correlates: sign, object and interpretant as this action was initially defined. Since Peirce adopted an innovative and sometimes surprising terminology to formulate his theory of signs and the ways in which they function, there are sections devoted to the definitions of the sign with examples of how they apply. Chapter Two begins the process of identifying both the sorts of things that can function as signs and the widely varying complexity of the most familiar types of signs we encounter every day of our lives. Having defined sign-action and established the role a sign plays in it in Chapter One, Chapter Two examines the way signs can be classified by means of the first of the three-way divisions or ‘trichotomies’ which Peirce established in 1903. Chapter Three builds upon Chapters One and Two and offers a general presentation of Peirce the man and his thought: a short biography, his complex epistemological standpoint and the status experience enjoys in his philosophy, and, finally, the most relevant aspects of his conception of semiotics as a form of logic, justifying the application of an empty formalism to the analysis and interpretation of pictorial data. Chapter Four introduces and discusses the three distinct ways in which a sign can represent its dynamic object, that is, the three ‘modes of representation’ and the properties defining them. This, the best known of Peirce’s trichotomies, and the most easily accessible, has received most critical attention and is the part of Peirce’s semiotics most frequently referred to in the literature on visual culture, for example, even figuring in competing theories of the sign. Chapter Five presents Peirce’s theory of the three sub-iconic configurations which structure all signs, pictorial or otherwise. The nature of these configurations is analysed as a consequence of the relation holding between the sign and the existential medium through which it is communicated,

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which is a far less complex phenomenon than the sign itself. The chapter is abundantly illustrated and shows how Peirce’s sub-iconic forms constitute the basis of an ecology of signs. Chapter Six deals with signs and the nature of the information we can obtain from them, and concludes the description and definition of the various sign-types introduced by Peirce in 1903. Like Chapters Two and Five, the present one is innovative in that it introduces material which has rarely been used in previous accounts or applications of Peirce’s semiotics. This final trichotomy discriminates between the various ways in which pictorial signs afford information about their objects and the chapter describes two stages in Peirce’s conception of information. Chapter Seven introduces the third branch of Peirce’s philosophy of representation, namely his speculative rhetoric, an enterprise which is itself speculative in a more modern sense, and potentially controversial: only since the mid-nineties has serious research on this aspect of Peircean theory really developed and never, to the best of my knowledge, has this research been studied in relation to images. The chapter thus explores the relevance of this branch of Peirce’s logic to the analysis of pictorial data and their communicative value. Most of the chapters have, in addition to their specific theoretical material and the illustrations, a section which expands upon some of the more complex ideas introduced in the course of the exposition and a summary of the chapter’s main points. The chapters cover as wide a variety of pictorial representations as our immensely restrictive copyright laws allow, together with any verbal elements accompanying them. Finally, three caveats. First, it should be remembered that this is an entry-level introduction to Peirce, visual semiotics and visual rhetoric, not a full-scale explanation of his philosophy. My intention is to make the complex theory that Peirce worked out over those ten years at the beginning of the last century accessible to the modern, uninitiated reader, although a little familiarity with linguistics will be helpful. I am perfectly aware that there is a danger of over-simplification in sifting out the semiotics and the rhetoric from the rest of Peirce’s general philosophy, from his better-known pragmatism, for instance. But if I can interest the non-specialist reader in Peirce’s powerful brand of semiotics, and more particularly in the subtleties of its application to pictorial signs, then I feel that I shall have nevertheless advanced the Peircean cause and offered the interested reader a new approach to images. Second, I should like to quote the opening remark in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it speaks’ (Berger, 1972, p. 7). This suggests that the multifaceted process leading to the categorization of the world we live in begins before we acquire speech, and that the content of images is probably scanned and understood before we learn to communicate verbally with others. It follows, then, that images are semiotically a less complex medium than

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language, and this will become apparent in the course of the study: a visual semiotics targets artefacts which are more easily assimilated than the units of language, but are no less interesting and diverse for that. Given the verbocentrist bent of most contemporary presentations of semiotics, the reader may at times be surprised by one that takes images as its starting point and principal data. Third, what the study is not. It will not propose a recipe for finding the meaning of a sign, as the Peircean position with respect to this issue is that it is the experience of the interpreter which is the major determinant of how anyone interprets a given sign, not some pre-established mindgiven inventory from which the interpreter picks, discovers or decodes an appropriate ‘value’. Moreover, with the exception of material in Chapters Three and Seven, I have made little effort to contextualize the concepts discussed by comparing them with potential ‘equivalents’ in other theories. In other words, this is not an iconology in the sense of W. J. T. Mitchell, that is, a book on ‘the things people say about images’ (1986, p. 1).6

Conventions and abbreviations Much of Peirce’s considerable output was published posthumously in the period from 1931 to 1958 in the form of the well-known Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, and many quotations of Peirce’s original statements in this book will be by volume and paragraph number in the Collected Papers, for example (CP 2.277), a referencing system which up to now has been the traditional scholarly convention. However, since this is an introductory text, and consequently not aimed at the confirmed Peirce scholar, quotations will frequently refer to page numbers in the more freely available two volumes of the Essential Peirce (Houser et al., 1992 and 1998) published by the Peirce Edition Project (henceforth EP1 and EP2), rather than to the Collected Papers: such quotations will take the form of, for example, (EP2 498). While the paragraphs of EP1 and EP2 have a vaguely monolithic appearance, they are free from editorial interference: what the reader gets is Peirce, and not somebody’s idea of Peirce; moreover, each chapter has an excellent introduction. The paragraphs in the Collected Papers are set out in clearly and logically numbered paragraphs, but present a number of disadvantages: (a) they often present as continuous matter texts and parts of texts which come, in fact, from different periods and manuscript sources; (b) they contain several unfounded ‘corrections’ to Peirce’s theory by the editors; (c) they were published in eight volumes which are either now out of print or not readily available; and (d) unlike EP2, for example, do not include some of the most important semiotic topics discussed by Peirce in his letters to Lady Victoria Welby.7 Since it is assumed that the novice Peircean will at some stage wish to consult the

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original writings, the excellent selection of material in EP2 is one obvious choice. Another is the newly reissued selection of texts by Justus Buchler, The Philosophical Writings of Peirce (Peirce, 2011), Chapter Seven of which conveniently offers a very useful range of Peirce’s statements on semiotics. These will be referenced in the text as for example (PWP 101). Many of Peirce’s texts still only exist in manuscript form, and references to this material will take the form of for example (MS 321) or (MS L75). Some of the most semiotically relevant extracts from Peirce’s correspondence with, for example, William James and Lady Welby, are to be found in the final sections of EP 2, but on occasions material from Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C.S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby (Peirce, 1977) will be referenced as SS plus a page number, for example (SS 32). Finally, certain of Peirce’s texts on pragmatism plus three important letters to Lady Welby are to be found in Philip Wiener’s Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, (Peirce, 1996) and will be referenced as for example (SW 80).

Further reading For readers who would like to broaden their appreciation of Peirce’s semiotics, there are obviously two sources: the master himself and his commentators. Although Peirce supplies interesting autobiographical details in his letters to Lady Welby, how he learned to taste wine with a famous sommelier during a stay in Paris, for example, the best source is Joseph Brent’s meticulously researched (1998), Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (1998), both for the biographical details it offers and the documentary material it contains (including a rather poignant photograph of Peirce on his deathbed). The simplest way into the more complex aspects of his theory is through the introductions to various anthologies of his texts, some of which, it must be said, are now beginning to show their age. For the readers who would like to go straight to the texts, an early exposition of his theory of the sign, entitled ‘What is a Sign?’ and dating from 1894, is reproduced as the second chapter of EP2: this takes the reader through the complete process of establishing the definitions and classification criteria from his phenomenology but is not as exhaustive as the mature theory beginning in 1902–3. This particular text can also be downloaded from the internet from the Peirce Edition Project site using a link given in the notes.8 Furthermore, EP2 also contains a sequence of two chapters (pp. 267–99) which offer a comprehensive overview of Peirce’s semiotics and the system of categories on which he based it. One of the best all-round introductions to Peirce is Christopher Hookway’s Peirce (1985). Chapter Four of Bergman (2009) contains a very useful, but technical, discussion of the two objects and the three interpretants and

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also of the differing reactions these have provoked among Peirce scholars. The first two chapters of Anderson (1995) offer respectively an excellent biography and a comprehensible overview of Peirce’s entire philosophical system. For the more philosophically inclined there is a Peirce Companion in the Cambridge Companions to Philosophy series (Misak, 2004). Finally, Deledalle (2000) is a collection of essays in English on Peirce’s semiotics by a renowned French specialist. Part three of Deledalle’s study, for example, compares Peirce with Saussure, with Lady Welby’s theory of Significs, with Roman Jakobson and even with Marshall McLuhan. There are a number of very useful internet resources. The University of Helsinki hosts a Virtual Center for Peirce Studies site, Commens, which offers an excellent collection of Peirce definitions: www.helsinki.fi/science/ commens/. Retrieved March 2012. There is also a very thorough Wikipedia article devoted to his life and work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce. Retrieved March 2012. Similarly, to obtain a good idea of the vitality of Peirce studies, the interested reader should consult Jon Awbrey’s exhaustive bibliography presented on a Wikipedia page with links to many of the original texts in electronic form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce_ bibliography. Retrieved March 2012. Finally, a good number of Peirce’s manuscripts, including his important but unsuccessful application for a grant to the Carnegie Foundation in 1902 (MS L75), have been transcribed by the late Joseph Ransdell, and are available on the Arisbe site he founded and maintained so diligently: www. cspeirce.com/. Retrieved March 2012.

Chapter One

Signs and things1 This chapter throws the reader in at the deep end, so to speak and, like the one to follow, presents him with the basic constituents of Peirce’s semiotics without receiving any prior explanation of the general philosophical background. That will come in Chapter Three, by which time the reader will have worked out some of its principal features for himself. The material presented in the chapter has been divided into two main parts. The first, which introduces Peirce’s assimilation of semiotics to logic, is based on a manuscript dated circa 1903 and constitutes Peirce’s first fully worked out theory of signs, criteria for their classification and a description of ten classes of signs. This is easily the best known of his systems. The second part, entitled ‘The mature system’, describes the final, expanded version of these basic constituents that he had elaborated by 1904. Intervening sections offer an extended pictorial illustration and deal with the whole process of determination, signification and interpretation in the form of a number of complementary diagrams which are intended to bring out some of the most important and original aspects of Peirce’s conception of the way a sign functions.

1.1  Semiotics as logic It was mentioned in the Introduction that Peirce equated semiotics with logic and that for him logic was composed of three branches. This chapter therefore begins by asking what, in an introduction to the analysis of signs, pictorial or otherwise, are we to understand by ‘logic’? To answer this we adopt the following simple definition provided by the American logician Stephen Kleene: ‘Logic has the important function of saying what follows from what’ (1967, p. 3). The idea that a subsequent idea should follow from a previous one leads us immediately to a dynamic conception of logic and interpretation, and introduces the importance

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of number in the discussion of the way signs function. For, seen from a logical standpoint, such a function cannot be considered as a sequence of dyadic, that is two-term, associations of signifiers and signifieds, but as the dynamic movement of reasoning which, for Peirce, following Hegel, involved three terms or stages, one of which in Peirce’s case being the sign. Moreover, the sign itself cannot be understood independently of the process in which it occurs, namely ‘sign-action’. Acknowledging a debt to Thomas Aquinas, Peirce defines this cognitive process – ratiocination – as ‘the operation by which reason proceeds from the known to the unknown’ (CP 4.45). By ‘ratiocination’, Peirce simply means ‘reasoning’, that is, the way in which, by a mixture of guess, gumption and our experience of the world, we manage to make sense of what may initially appear obscure or unfathomable. Since for Peirce reasoning can only be accomplished by means of signs, it follows that the only way we can acquire new knowledge is also by means of signs. This has important implications for the sort of things a sign can be, and requires that we examine, in the chapters to come, the three ways in which Peirce classified them in 1903.

1.1.1  The core elements By the expression ‘core elements’ is meant the three constant constituents of Peirce’s semiotics and indeed of his whole philosophy of representation. Although the terminology varied on occasions and the basic ideas were expanded as his understanding of them increased, the same three concepts formed the core of his semiotic theory throughout a period of almost 50 years of intense intellectual activity. In the course of this period Peirce developed over 70 different definitions and descriptions of what he understood by ‘sign’, and these all established a three-way relation between the sign, the ‘absent’ entity which it represents, termed its object and, finally, the effect the sign produces, its interpretant. These are the three correlates of the dynamic relation involved in signification. Within the Peircean scheme, then, signification is not a binary relation between a sign and what it represents, but the three-way relation between the three core elements mentioned above: it is not possible to have one without the other two, and a theory of visual semiotics and rhetoric must take all three into account, though for reasons explained below the only correlate to be physically ‘available’ for inspection is the sign.

1.1.2  The action of the sign Returning then to the process of ratiocination, the way Peirce conceives it transmutes into any of the numerous definitions of signs he never ceased to

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elaborate all his working life, and these were all triadic, that is, composed of the three correlates occurring in a strict relation: the first term represents the second term to a third term or, more concretely, the sign represents the object to the interpretant. We see, then, that all his definitions involve the same three elements, they all lead to the more or less conscious accretion of knowledge, and they all involve the basic dynamism of ratiocination, namely, the ‘action’ of the sign, or what Peirce referred to technically as ‘semiosis’, and they permeate the entire philosophy of representation. The following three definitions are variant descriptions of the nature of the action of a sign: (1) [A sign] is a vehicle conveying into the mind something from without. (CP 1.339) (2) A sign is something by knowing which we know something more. (SS 31–2) (3) A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. (PWP 99) Like that of Kant, Peirce’s major philosophical concern was with the explanation of how we acquire scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge of the world we live in which can be proved to be valid. Following a whole line of thinkers, he was concerned to rebut the doctrine of scepticism, that is the notion that our knowledge of the world can never be certain. His contribution to the debate was to claim that our knowledge is acquired and shared with others in the form of signs. Indeed, the theory for which he is perhaps best known, his pragmatism, is, among other things, an elaborate theory of how inference, a complex class of sign, contributes to a greater understanding of scientific concepts and, consequently, the growth of knowledge. Semiotics thus provides his theory of pragmatism with some of its prerequisite basic definitions. 2 The relatively informal definitions given in (1) and (2) suggest how signs contribute to the acquisition of knowledge and, at the same time, illustrate the triadic nature of the relation into which signs enter. The first makes the important point that, whatever the nature of ‘mind’, signs have at some stage to transit through a perceivable world. The second affirms the thesis that it is through signs that we acquire knowledge. Definition (3), on the other hand, introduces both an alternative name for the sign to be discussed in a later section of the chapter and the ‘human element’ in semiosis by stipulating that the sign creates an equivalent or more developed sign in a person’s mind and, furthermore, suggests that signs can represent their objects in a variety of ways: ‘in some respect or capacity’. Finally, we have

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an even more explicit definition dating from 1908. We note that it involves the customary three core elements: (4) I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. My insertion of “upon a person” is a sop to Cerberus, because I despair of making my own broader conception understood. (SS 80–1) By this initially intimidating formulation Peirce simply means that the sign mediates between what it represents, its object, and the interpretant, which is the effect the sign produces upon the person interpreting it. Note, too, that the interpretant is the effect produced by the sign, it is not the interpreter: definition (4), therefore, is more precise than (3), while the ‘sop to Cerberus’ is the expression of Peirce’s exasperation at having to abandon logic temporarily and refer to psychological constructs such as a ‘person’ in order to put his idea across. This was because he was convinced that the development of thought and knowledge was a collective, interpersonal process which transcended individuals, uninhibited by personal variation. Some simple examples will show how the process of semiosis works. One well-known case is Robinson Crusoe’s reaction to finding ‘the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore’. This was a most unexpected sign, made by an absent ‘object’ – immediately recognized as a man – and left Crusoe ‘like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition’, the immediate effect the print had upon him. Another example is how in many western films cowboys at some point notice smoke signals on hilltops, and generally interpret them in films of this genre as evidence of the presence of potentially hostile Indians. The smoke signals are the signs in this example, their object being in some way the content of the message carried by the signals for the other Indians, while for the cowboys the object is obviously the presence of the Indians. Although the cowboys are the interpreters of the signals, they do not constitute the sign’s interpretant, for this is the effect the sign has on them. One might reach for his rifle, another may take his hat off and wave it as a form of greeting, while another might turn his horse round and hightail it to ranch and safety: in the case of the cowboys these are all possible interpretants of the smoke signals, and as such would be proof that some object has been communicated to the interpreters by means of the sign. The differential reactions of the cowboys and the Indians to the same smoke signals are simply evidence of the way our experience of the world determines our interpretations of signs and the way we react to them.

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Two of Peirce’s own militaristic illustrations of the principle follow, both from unpublished papers, the first dated 1906, the second 1907: If a colonel hands a paper to an orderly and says “You will go immediately and deliver this to Captain Hanno” and if the orderly does so, we do not say the colonel told the truth; we say the orderly was obedient, since it was not the orderly’s conduct which determined the colonel to say what he did, but the colonel’s speech which determined the orderly’s action. (CP 5.554) and Suppose, for example, an officer of a squad or company of infantry gives the word of command, “Ground arms!” This order is, of course, a sign. That thing which causes a sign as such is called the object (according to the usage of speech, the “real”, but more accurately, the existent object) represented by the sign: the sign is determined to some species of correspondence with that object. In the present case the object the command represents is the will of the officer that the butts of the muskets be brought down to the ground. (CP 5.473) Once more we note the three-term structure of the actions in which orders are given to the orderly and the soldiers. The first insists on the order of determination holding between the object, sign and interpretant, while the second makes the important point that in the course of semiosis, the sign is in some way ‘determined to some species of correspondence’ with its object: this is related to the ‘some respect or capacity’ from definition (3) above. In other words, Peirce is saying, the structure of the object determines a similarity of structure within the sign. Alternatively, we could say that whatever structure a sign has, it inherits it in some way from the object it represents. This raises an interesting theoretical question. The instances of semiosis above contain commands, and their distinctly injunctive mood conditions the structure of the sign. If, however, in the first case, the colonel had wanted information rather than obedience, he would no doubt have asked a question. In English this would generally be either a yes-no question or an open question employing, typically, an interrogative pronoun: for example ‘Have you delivered the letter?’ or ‘What have you done with the letter?’ In either case, the structure of the sign would have been determined by the nature of the request. If, on the other hand, the colonel had wanted to communicate information to the orderly it is likely that the syntax of the sentence would have been declarative. 3 In short, the nominal elements of these sentences – representing the orderly, the letter and the good captain in the first example – remain constant, but the syntactical organization of these elements varies with the change of mood (injunction, interrogation,

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declaration, etc.). The way we account for such modal variation and its relation to Peirce’s object is a problem we return to in detail in Chapter Four, which describes the relations holding specifically between the sign and the object. At this point we note, simply, that Peirce was to refine the initial definition of semiosis in 1904 in a letter to his correspondent in England, Lady Welby (SS 32). In this he alludes to two objects and three interpretants to be discussed later in the chapter. In the meantime, we examine a diagram of semiosis and two of its implications.

1.1.3  The structure of semiosis and the medium The dynamics of semiosis examined above can now be illustrated schematically by means of the ‘ellipses’ on Figure 1.1, where the arrows indicate the direction of determination – the semiotic ‘determination flow’, so to speak – from the object to the interpretant via the sign. The broken line between the object and the interpretant indicates an impermissible immediate relation between object and interpretant (i.e. a relation not mediated by the sign), the sort of relation which might hold in some outlandish theory of telepathy. We note, too, that in the course of the determination process indicated by the direction of the arrows on Figure 1.1, the object determines the sign to a ‘species of correspondence’: it determines the structure of the sign by imparting to it aspects of its own structure. For this reason, within Peircean semiotics signs are said to be ‘motivated’: at some level of analysis not always immediately apparent their structure can be shown not to be random, arbitrary or indeterminate. On the other hand, the solid horizontal line separating the sign from both object and interpretant illustrates the fact that the sign has, at some point, to transit through the existential world as the troughs and peaks of the air waves of speech, for example, while the object and interpretant belong to the altogether more complex and general world of thought and desire. This latter feature of semiosis, namely, differences of complexity

Object

Interpretant

Sign

Figure 1.1  The determination ‘flow’ in semiosis.

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concerning the object and the interpretant on the one hand and the sign as it presents itself in an act of communication on the other, is more properly seen as a function of the ecology of signs, that is a function of the relation holding between signs and the medium or environment through which they are transmitted, and will be dealt with in greater detail in Chapter Five. This is an important feature of semiosis: to be perceived at all signs have to be conveyed through a material (aural and/or visual) medium. One example is the command given by the officer to ground arms. According to Peirce, the object in this case originates in the officer’s will that the butts of the muskets be grounded. The sign itself is the order ‘Ground arms!’ This, to be heard, has to pass through the existential medium of air as a series of waves of varying amplitude – a colour-sergeant might be more vociferous than a captain, for example. The effect, or interpretant, of the sign is the sight and sound of the butts touching the ground, testimony to the obedience of the soldiers and the habit-forming power of military drills and discipline (CP 8.315). Another example specifically exploits the visual medium, namely the circular sign with a diagonal bar through a smoking cigarette, the purpose of which being to communicate the Government’s ban on smoking in public places. Variations on this image are to be found on plurimodal no-smoking posters on which such pictorial material and text complement each other and are located in or at the entrance to public buildings. When a smoker approaches with a cigarette between his lips and sees such a sign the course of action he subsequently takes is the effect the sign has on him. Among various alternative scenarios he can stub the cigarette out and enter the building, make a rude gesture in the direction of the sign and leave the building altogether or even, in the worst case, carry on regardless and continue smoking once inside the building. Clearly, signs have to be communicated through a perceivable medium if they are to be interpreted. However, we need to address another aspect of interpretation: since no two persons occupy the same space, and since therefore no two persons can have exactly the same experience of the world, it follows that different interpreters will interpret signs differentially. This was the case of the cowboys mentioned earlier, each reacting according to his personal experience of potentially hostile Native Americans, or, like the smoker, according to personal whim or sense of social responsibility. In this way, Peircean semiotics is said to be non-deterministic: there can be no strictly predetermined effect of a sign upon an interpreter, in spite of the wishes of the sign’s utterer or creator (who generally, like the officers in the examples above, produces signs with a view to determining some specific effect upon a person), and until the sign has produced its effect there is no way of knowing in advance just what that effect will be. In other words, although in our communications with others we usually seek to convince them of something, an idea or a future course of action on their part, say, we can never

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be sure, except perhaps in the constraining, habit-forming circumstances of military discipline, of what the interpretant effect will be.

1.1.4  An illustration Figure 1.2 is a complete comic-strip or image-cycle, entitled The Cranton Crowd and composed of eleven vignettes from which all the verbal material has been removed with the exception of the strip-internal commercial signs ‘Buffet’ and ‘Coiffeur’.4 Each vignette or frame composing the strip is a flat surface, the archetypal format of the still image, whose fundamental property as an image is to host

Figure 1.2  A wordless comic-strip.

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lines, forms and colours, although in the present instance the chromatic range is obviously limited. These combinations of lines, forms and colours represent a specific human drama. In sequence, they enable the reader to follow successive causes and effects  – a plot  – and to understand the subsequent modifications to protagonists and situations. The removal of the verbal material serves two purposes. On the one hand it exercises, albeit artificially, the reader’s inferential capabilities, since in a normal document of this sort image and text are generally complementary. Here, though, with neither dialogue nor authorial indications to guide him, the reader is invited to draw on his experience of posture, facial expression, appearance, and, additionally, his knowledge of various types of boy–girl relations, etc., in order to make some sense of the sequence of frames. On the other hand, the absence of verbal material draws attention by default to the communication channels by means of which information can be obtained from a mass media document of this sort. In its original form the comic-strip is multimodal, composed of images and textual material fulfilling various communicative functions. The dominant mode of representation is, of course, pictorial, or, more technically, iconic, and this would be the case even if the dialogue had been included. On the other hand, the information we derive from the strip as we interpret it is conveyed, not by two, but by at least three distinct communication channels. 5 The first channel, then, as the strip is presented above, is the pictorial, non-verbal channel. Composed simply of lines, forms and (usually) colours, this channel occupies the surface of each image in the series, and the entire comic-strip illustrates the manner in which the events in successive images constitute the determinations of those preceding them. The second channel, conspicuous by its absence, is, of course, the verbal. This is the information source and channel with which we are most familiar, if not in its written form at least through conversation and oral discourse generally; it is the channel without which we could barely survive. This verbal channel obviously has an ancillary role to play in the understanding of the strip in that the original sequence of images contains dialogue but in no way does this verbal material constitute the dominant mode that it assumes in a poem, a letter or a work of fiction, for example. A third, circumstantial, source of information is supplied by the communication channel conveying well-known mass media conventions, such as the placing of authorial intrusion in oblong boxes in the top left corner of selected frames, a position from which the Western eye has been accustomed to scan any two-dimensional document. There are, in addition, pictorial conventions – varieties of ‘balloons’ – to indicate speech, thoughts, telephone conversations, etc., a jagged halo to suggest surprise, a general left-to-right orientation of characters indicating which character initiates dialogue and action, while the orientation of the face in the end frame reverses this general tendency and brings the entire sequence to a close. Were this a

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comic-strip drawn by an Arab graphic artist, or a frame from a traditional Japanese manga, this top–left to bottom–right orientation would, like the verbal material it contained, be oriented in the opposite direction. We are now in a position to see how sign-action works, as far as the sign and the interpretant are concerned, by means of an image sequence with dialogue and authorial cues included. In the case of the second frame on Figure 1.3, it should be obvious that the effect, or interpretant, of the sign, is the reaction of the character called Terry: a reaction which our experience of the world has taught us to recognize and which is communicated here in complementary manner by means of each of the three communication channels identified earlier. These are the recognizable graphic expression of surprise on his face, the verbal exclamation of the proper noun ‘Pat’, and the cartoon artist’s ‘surprise’ signal effected by the jagged halo round his head and shoulders suggesting a recoiling movement. Since he registers surprise when the young woman removes the wig and glasses, it follows that these actions in conjunction with her angry outburst correspond to the ‘compound’ sign which triggers his reaction. What caused her to remove her wig and spectacles originates in the first of the two frames: the disappointment and anger she feels as she realizes that her boyfriend has let her down and betrayed her trust, since he has just claimed not to have a regular girlfriend. Taken together, the boy’s expression, verbal outburst and recoiling movement in frame two constitute pictorial examples of the interpretants of a sign, the consequences or effects of a complex action which is but one episode in a chain of determinations. From another point of view, however, as we see from the misquotation from Numbers 32, the rhetorical purpose of the strip must somehow depend upon the relation holding between the protagonists of this teenage world – the visible objects of this complex sign – and the author’s moralizing

Figure 1.3  At the restaurant.

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outlook: like the modal variation noted in the syntax of the postulated alternative versions of the Colonel’s utterance to the orderly examined above, the relation between the artist and the objects represented seems to be the major determinant of the intended meaning of the sequence. We return to this problem later.

1.2 The mature system It is in the following words in a letter to Lady Welby dated 12 October 1904 that Peirce introduced his extension of the original three correlates to six prior to announcing the new division this development enabled him to construct for the classification of signs: (5) I am now prepared to give my division of signs, as soon as I have pointed out that a sign has two objects, its object as represented and its object in itself. It has also three interpretants, its interpretant as represented or meant to be understood, its interpretant as it is produced, and its interpretant in itself. Now signs may be divided as to their own material nature, as to their relations to their objects, and as to their relations to their interpretants. (SS 32) Just why Peirce should have needed to extend his system in this way is probably the result of a number of factors, and we examine some of them in what follows. In doing so we take up the core elements introduced above and clarify certain problems associated with them.

1.2.1  Sign or representamen? Although Peirce never of course envisaged more than one sign there is nevertheless a terminological problem that merits clarification. Anyone familiar with Peircean theory will probably have noticed that some Peirce scholars prefer the term ‘representamen’ to that of ‘sign’, and Peirce’s own practice was not always consistent with regard to the issue: although the definitions are always of the sign, as in definition (3) above, he sometimes talks of the representamen as though it were the sign. The term ‘representamen’ originates in his theory of triadic relations, that is necessary and irreducible relations holding between three separate and distinct correlates, for example, the triadic valency of a common English verb such as tell. Compare the two transitive verbs kick and kiss with ditransitive tell: while it is possible to kick someone or to kiss someone it is not possible simply to tell someone or to tell something  – one tells

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someone else some piece of information. This may seem at first sight a rather trivial problem, but Peirce was anxious to apply his theory of triadic relations to diverse problems in logic and physics. One concrete example he gives concerns the way we determine non-intuitively, that is logically, which of the two is our right hand or, more generally, the way we distinguish between right and left.6 To do so is to appeal to a relation associating three different correlates, which Peirce describes in the following manner: Take any fact in physics of the triadic kind, by which I mean a fact which can only be defined by simultaneous reference to three things, and you will find there is ample evidence that it never was produced by the action of forces on mere dyadic conditions. Thus, your right hand is that hand which is toward the east, when you face the north with your head toward the zenith. Three things, east, west, and up, are required to define the difference between right and left. (CP 1.345) Similarly, in the same paragraph Peirce offers the example of the trivalent relation of ‘giving’: ‘A gives B to C. This does not consist in A’s throwing B away and its accidentally hitting C. . . . If that were all, it would not be a genuine triadic relation, but merely one dyadic relation followed by another. There need be no motion of the thing given. Giving is a transfer of the right of property’ (ibid.). The difference between velocity and acceleration is another example from physics. Velocity is the expression of the simple dyadic relation of the rate of change of a body between two positions. On the other hand, acceleration, as readers will recall from the complicated formula of their schooldays, is a far more complex phenomenon, and involves three correlates, since it is the measure of the rate of change not of position but of velocity. This is how Peirce describes the nature of acceleration: ‘Position is first, velocity or the relation of two successive positions second, acceleration or the relation of three successive positions third’ (CP 1.337). In other words, position enjoys a totally independent status, the dyadic nature of velocity is to involve two positions, but no more than two, while acceleration is triadic and involves a complex relation between three positions simultaneously. Sign-action  – semiosis  – Peirce claims, being similarly triadic, is like acceleration and the definition of the difference between right and left in that it involves three correlates simultaneously – not simply in order to function correctly but in order to function at all.7 It is simply not possible for the sign to be determined by the object in one relation and the interpretant to be determined by the sign in another or the interpretant to be immediately determined by the object. The three correlates necessarily combine simultaneously in the processes of signification and interpretation. Since the three correlates involved in semiosis are separate and distinct, they require definition and a name, and Peirce offers a disarmingly simple

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means of distinguishing between them based on the notion of complexity. In any triadic relation, he suggests, if any correlate is less complex than the other two, then that correlate is the representamen, the first term in any triadic relation. In similar vein he defines the interpretant as the most complex correlate of the relation  – the third term, therefore  – if any one term is more complex than the other two (CP 2.235–42). Within this context, a sign is defined as a representamen with a mental interpretant – ‘a cognition of a mind’ is Peirce’s term (CP 2.242). Simplifying, we can say that the sign is the special case where the representamen produces an effect on an animate, and most interestingly, on a human, interpreter. It follows, then, that signs are but one highly specific class of representamens: not all representamens are signs, but all signs are representamens.8 This leads us logically to an uncompromising definition of the sign from 1902 which integrates the principles examined above: (6) A Sign, or Representamen, is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object. The triadic relation is genuine, that is its three members are bound together by it in a way that does not consist in any complexus of dyadic relations. (PWP 99–100) Being the least complex correlate in the triadic relation, the sign is a first element that represents the second, the ‘middling complex’ element, namely the object, to the third and most complex element, namely the interpretant. Such a relation, he claims, cannot be decomposed into three separate dyadic relations: all three participate simultaneously in the action of the sign. This is what Peirce understands by semiosis. This brings us to a final consideration of the difference between sign and representamen: in some general accounts of Peirce’s semiotics, the sign itself is confused with the very process in which it participates – semiosis – as though it were the sign that was composed of representamen, object and interpretant. This is not the case, as the definitions given above clearly show: the disjunction indicated by or in definition (6) above is inclusive, and simply means that either term, sign or representamen, is valid for the definition – we are invited simply to take our choice. To conclude, then, a sign is a representamen, that is the first element in the triadic relation, but owing to the fact that it has an animate interpreter and therefore a mental interpretant, it is but one of many different species of representamens.9 Nevertheless, the reader should bear in mind that Peirce adopts the term ‘representamen’ in many of the quotations to come and should substitute the term ‘sign’ for the sake of simplicity.

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1.2.2  Two objects We turn now to an examination of the sign’s two objects, with discussion of a more complex aspect of the problem held over until a later chapter. Peirce’s ‘object’ is possibly the concept most removed from, and most alien to, contemporary poststructuralist, neo-Saussurean theories of the sign. Moreover, owing to the variety of meanings the term has10 and to the necessity for Peirce to adapt a complex theory to the differing levels of philosophical and logical sophistication of his sundry correspondents, readers and audiences, he defines and illustrates it in a number of ways; opinions consequently diverge even among Peirce scholars as to what he meant by the term, and so this section seeks to clarify this important concept by introducing a distinction made by Peirce using a number of simple examples. We begin, however, with two relevant definitions. The following is an extract from a letter of 1908 to Lady Welby: (7) It is usual and proper to distinguish two Objects of a sign, the Mediate without, and the Immediate within the Sign. Its Interpretant is all that the Sign conveys: acquaintance with its Object must be gained by collateral experience. The Mediate Object is the Object outside of the Sign; I call it the Dynamoid Object. The Sign must indicate it by a hint; and this hint, or its substance, is the Immediate Object. (SS 83) Similarly, he states in a letter to the psychologist William James: (8) We must distinguish between the Immediate Object,—i.e. the Object as represented in the Sign,—and the Real (no, because perhaps the Object is altogether fictive, I must choose a different term, therefore), say rather the Dynamical Object, which, from the nature of things, the sign cannot express, which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience. (EP2 498) As mentioned above, by 1904 Peirce had already come to the conclusion that semiosis involved in fact not one but two distinct types of object. As the two definitions show, the first type of object he termed the ‘dynamic’ object (‘dynamoid’ in definition (7) above), which is the ‘active’ or ‘efficient’ object outside the sign; in short, the object which structures the sign in the first place and determines it to be what and as it is. The second he called the ‘immediate’ object, the object within the sign, the ‘hint’, as he calls it, of the first object as it appears in the sign. These statements call for two remarks. First, whatever the sign’s object may be the sign cannot express it directly: the interpreter can only identify it by virtue of his collateral experience of that object that is he has already acquired of the object. One example examined earlier was the trivial case

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of the smoke signals and the cowboys. The cowboys’ legendary collateral experience of smoke signals is such that they can readily distinguish between potentially hostile Indians and a random forest fire from the shapes taken by the rising smoke. Second, the definition from the letter to Lady Welby makes the important point that the sign can only suggest this ‘absent’ dynamic object by a hint or trace, the regular puffs or rings of smoke being the manifestations of this hint – the immediate object – in the case of the cowboys. In other words, the experience of the cowboys is such that they are able to interpret the human origin or source of signs not intended for them simply by recognizing the hint given by the shape of rising smoke. To approach the problem of the two objects as it concerns images we compare Figure 1.4, the final frame from the comic-strip, with Figure 1.5, a photographic portrait of a child. Obviously, at one level the particular arrangement of lines, shapes and shading on Figure 1.4 composes a sign representing the heroine’s pensive features: we recognize the purely graphic elements of the image as signifying as its object an expression of uncertainty or puzzlement on the face of a young woman. In other words, these states of mind are among the determinants of this particular configuration of lines and forms, etc. However, it is obvious that if these particular facial features are there it is somehow a consequence, as we saw earlier, of the attitude towards the particular set of events they represent of the authorartist who chose to put them there in the first place. Now if we compare these pensive features with the exultant expression on the face of the child on Figure 1.5 we see that there is a further dimension to the problem, for while the photograph patently has a jubilant child’s face as its existent object, the image of the pensive face on Figure 1.4 affords no

Figure 1.4  Doubt and uncertainty.

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Figure 1.5  Exuberance.

such certainty: it is possible that somewhere there is or was a real person who looked vaguely like the young woman on the image, but unlike the photograph, the sketch can offer no proof of this. The object, in this case, is only a ‘possible’ object, not a real, existent one: the sign on Figure 1.4 is a ‘resemblance’ but has no real object. This distinction between the possible and the existent is a theme we return to in three later chapters, since it relates to the way the sign represents its object and, even more importantly, to the information that two such signs can or cannot convey. By now the reader is probably wondering just why Peirce found it theoretically necessary to distinguish between the two objects. We know that as early as 1902 he had already begun to differentiate between the ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’ meanings of a sign in a review of a book by one of his contemporaries, and that the extrinsic meaning corresponded to what logicians call a sign’s ‘extension’ (CP 8.119). However, there is a more pressing theoretical reason. The photograph provides us with an exemplary case. Even as early as Peirce’s time, there must have been millions of photographs extant in widely differing formats, all functioning as photographic signs, and, to reformulate a remark by Nelson Goodman, as a sign one photograph resembles nothing so much as another photograph.11 However, what enables us to distinguish the unique dynamic object in each case – the extrinsic object, the object ‘outside’ the sign – is the ‘hint’ of it left by the rays of light reflected from the model onto the film inside the camera: by 1904 Peirce had clearly reasoned that since all photographs, flat bits of photographic paper, are more or less identical as signs with respect to their format, in order to distinguish one photograph from another this hint must be another sort of object. This is the object ‘within’ the sign as it were, and is consequently immediate, while the model remains inescapably outside

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the sign and, as the sign’s absent dynamic object, can only be mediated by the sign. Similarly, a sketch such as that of the pensive face on Figure 1.4 is much the same as any other sketch  – a two-dimensional ‘flat’. However, even though it has no real, ‘existent’ dynamic object we can still recognize the various indications of doubt and uncertainty which distinguish it from other sketches, from the thumb between the lips, the expression of the eyes, the head bent forward to the ‘thought’ conventions provided by the author-artist. These features, in spite of being simple lines on a sheet of paper, are such that we can identify a common human attitude to which our experience of the world and its inhabitants has habituated us. Thus, although sketches and paintings don’t necessarily have real dynamic objects  – human and architectural portraits excepted, perhaps  – they nevertheless have an immediate object: lines, shapes and colours combining to resemble more or less faithfully entities from our common experience of the world, lines, shapes and colours without which we should be unable to interpret such signs. Thus the two teenagers, wigs and glasses, etc., on Figure 1.3b above are the frame’s immediate objects although they were not identified as such at the time as we hadn’t yet distinguished between the two types.

1.2.3  Three interpretants Just as Peirce was led to distinguish between different types of object in his mature system, so too did he further analyse the interpretant into its ‘constituent’ phases or components; three in this case to the object’s two. In this section, we identify and describe these interpretants and attempt to determine just why they should be three in number. Peirce named the three interpretants ‘immediate’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘final’ in order of increasing complexity: the immediate, as its name suggests is the interpretant within the sign. The dynamic is the mediated interpretant, the only one which is the perceivable effect of the sign upon a person. The final interpretant, which is general in character unlike the individuality of the dynamic interpretant, is both the guarantee of any future interpretative development and, he claims in a letter to Lady Welby in 1909, the way everybody would react to a given sign, not just an individual or group of individuals: My Immediate Interpretant is implied in the fact that each Sign must have its peculiar Interpretability before it gets any Interpreter. My Dynamical Interpretant is that which is experienced in each act of Interpretation and is different in each from that of any other; and the Final Interpretant is the one Interpretative result to which every Interpreter is destined to come if the Sign is sufficiently considered. The Immediate Interpretant is

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an abstraction, consisting in a Possibility. The Dynamical Interpretant is a single actual event. The Final Interpretant is that towards which the actual tends. (SS 111) The ‘Ground arms!’ command discussed above provides us with a simple example of this principle. Peirce identifies the dynamic interpretant of the ‘Ground arms!’ command as the thud of the muskets as they are brought to the ground. However, in order to obey the command, the soldiers had to have understood it first. Whereas the immediate object of this particular sign must combine an indication of injunction plus the peculiar phonetic shapes of the verb ‘to ground’ and the noun ‘arms’, the immediate interpretant must be the meaning of the lexical and grammatical elements of the command: in other words, its interpretability. This interpretability is, of course, a prerequisite for the dynamic interpretant, which is not a potentiality but an existent, perceivable fact and itself a sign for any observer to interpret, as the reader no doubt did on examining the two frames on Figure 1.3. In the second frame Terry’s surprised reaction is clearly the dynamic effect of Pat’s compound exhibition of anger and disgust. However, at some stage he must have understood from the available evidence that the person before him was not the compliant Swedish girl he thought he was dating but his regular girlfriend and reacted accordingly. This understanding we can only conjecture as immediate, whereas his surprise, on the other hand is, within the world or space of the protagonists, dynamic, factual and, indeed, visible. That there should be three interpretants is a more complex issue, one related to Peirce’s general philosophy. Nevertheless, we understand the reason for defining three interpretants to be a consequence of the distinction made earlier: the horizontal bar on Figure 1.1 separated two worlds, the world of thought and desire associated with object and interpretant on the one hand and the physical world of the medium through which every sign has to be communicated on the other. The world of thought is continuous, and so if the immediate interpretant is a sign’s intrinsic interpretability, and the dynamic interpretant an existent, factual and perceivable reaction to the sign, then the final interpretant is somehow endowed with a potential for continuity and generality being, as the definition above states, ‘the one Interpretative result to which every Interpreter is destined to come if the Sign is sufficiently considered’; in other words, interpretation develops and matures over time. He writes elsewhere: ‘It is not necessary that the Interpretant should actually exist. A being in futuro will suffice’ (CP 2.92). This in futuro sufficiency is the systemic guarantee of the possibility of the future development of the interpretant, and requires that the series should not stop with the actuality of a given dynamic interpretant. It is to the consequences of this principle that we turn in the final section of the chapter.

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1.3  Continuous semiosis Returning once more to the comic-strip, we note that it illustrates two further important aspects of semiosis: signs simply do not appear out of context, nor does the interpretative process ever really cease. The image of the meditative heroine in the end frame on Figure 1.2 is but the final stage in this particular interpretative chain, a chain of signs and interpretants which began on the railway station platform in the lead frame where the ‘heroine’ takes leave of her forlorn boyfriend. From frame to frame until the final one, what constitutes the major sign in one frame determines the interpretant in the following frame, which in its turn becomes the sign and determines another interpretant, and so on, in a sequence which, as we read it, only terminates in the final frame. On the other hand, while the strip and its moral purpose were first interpreted and discussed in a class for 11-year-olds back in the late sixties, the process is continuing some 50 years later on the page of an introduction to semiotics! And this interpretative process is not, of course, limited to pictorial signs.

1.3.1  Continuity and the interpretant Consider the following extract from a well-known novel: With the Gardiners they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them. These, the final sentences of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, are nothing more than the last in a chain of written sign/interpretants coming 61 chapters after the novel’s portentous opening stricture: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Each successive interpretant sentence in the chain integrates in a logical manner the material from those preceding it, including the revisions the story was subjected to during its protracted period of composition, becoming in turn the sign for the sentence to follow, while the object of this complex series of signs and interpretants is a fictional world which obviously bears some relation to Jane Austen’s purpose or purposes in writing the novel in the first place. And since its publication nearly 200 years ago the story has not ceased to stimulate interpretation and discussion in home, classroom

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and learned text. Moreover, this first sentence, which for the reader is the beginning of the story, is in fact barely the tip of an inverted ‘iceberg’ that has grown exponentially since the idea of the story first germinated in the author’s mind. This principle – sometimes referred to as ‘unlimited semiosis’, but not an expression ever used by Peirce, and better described as ‘continuous’ semiosis – is neatly captured by a further definition of the sign dating from 1902:12 (9) Genuine mediation is the character of a Sign. A Sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality, in such a way as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a Fourth into relation to that Object in the same form, ad infinitum. (CP 2.92) This means that in order to represent the dynamic continuity of semiosis the diagram on Figure 1.1 can be complemented provisionally by Figure 1.6, where O, S and I indicate, respectively, object, sign and interpretant, each subsequent interpretant becoming a sign for a new interpretant, for example (I1=S2), and so on ad infinitum,13 as Peirce suggests. We see that this formula neatly captures both the movement from image to image in the comic-strip examined above and the successive sentences composing Pride and Prejudice.14 However, as we shall see below, there are two remarks to be made concerning the formula: first, the subsequent amplification of the three core elements from three to six in 1904 simplified the process; second, it is an idealization, and when we tackle real data, we find that objects can follow one another in quick succession in informal circumstances. An interesting instance of continuous semiosis within a micro-context is provided by the following extract from the British National Corpus (BNC).15 It comes from oral demographic text KCE and features two teenage girls talking about a third, absent from the scene and identified as Hannah.16 The punctuation is minimal and the original mark-up conventions have been simplified: and , for example, identify the two speakers, numbers in parentheses identify successive utterances, while text between the delimiters represents some particular paralinguistic feature accompanying the spoken utterances – laughter, for example, in the extract below. Note, too, that indications of where portions of speech coincide or overlap and sometimes appear out of phase have been omitted.

O > S > (I1 = S2) > (I 2 = S3) > (I3 = S 4) . . . (I N = SN+1) Figure 1.6  The continuous nature of semiosis.

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(163) I sa, I said, I just went, I just said to her look Hannah you don’t have to come in the car! (164)  And like, I said it jokingly but wi with (165)  Mm. (166)  like a sort of you know (167)  Sort of with a sort of I’m dying to stick this knife in your back! (168)  Yes. (169)  Oh! (170)  Oh, did you see Inspector Morse last night? (171)  No I saw the very end bit. (172) Did you see the where’s she where that girl stabbed er her what was that girl in? (173) I was sat there, me and my dad were going, what has she been in? (174)  She was in erm (175)  Got a really irritating voice hasn’t she? (176) You know where there was that there was the young girl and there was the old wo, oldish woman who was supposed to be a film star or something? (177)  Oh yeah! (178)  That thing where erm she, she worked for him so that (179)  Yeah. (180)  She lived in that hotel. (181)  Mm. (182)  Oh yes, I know that! (183)  Oh that thing that was supposed to be funny! (184)  It was crap wasn’t it! Text KCE: ll. 163–84 This passage is a striking instance of the continuity of semiosis in discourse and illustrates the ways in which natural, spontaneous conversation with its hesitations and corrections  – a far cry from the polished dialogue of Pride and Prejudice – progresses albeit in an apparently sporadic fashion. Semiotically, it is interesting for two reasons. First, the extract seems to invalidate the principle of continuous semiosis with respect to a single object as represented on Figure 1.6 since we can divide it into at least three parts identified with respect to three distinct objects (less important ‘ancillary’ objects such as the car, the knife, ’s dad, the oldish woman, the hotel, etc., are only mentioned in passing). The object of the short first part is, of

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course, the absent Hannah who was invited to leave the car; the second, beginning with the interjection on line 169, is an unidentified television actress, while the sequence ends with the unidentified television series as the newly introduced object on line 178. Second, it illustrates the manner in which the two girls seek to identify these various dynamic objects by invoking their shared collateral knowledge of them. Linguistically, the sequence from line 170 to the end is held together by the use of the adnominal demonstrative that (that girl, that girl, that thing, that hotel, etc.) and by the anaphoric personal pronouns (she, him, it), the former illustrating this important aspect of Peirce’s empiricist theory of signification. For while the personal pronouns refer back to participants already mentioned in the discourse, the examples of this particular demonstrative here all have a ‘bonding’ value which provides continuity to the developing interpretative process: they are ‘recognitional’ in function, that is, they are employed where ‘the intended referent is to be identified via specific, shared knowledge rather than through situational clues or reference to preceding segments of the on-going discourse’ (Himmelmann, 1996). In other words, the identification of the object(s) of an utterance, for example, is achieved by appealing to common collateral knowledge of the object (not entirely successfully in the present instance as neither girl can remember the names of the actress or the hotel), an appeal signalled in the extract by extensive recourse to this particular value of the demonstrative that. The adnominal demonstratives employed at this point presume knowledge shared with the other speaker and refer to each new object as it is introduced, even when is trying to identify the actress in the company of her father. The sequence enables us to see that the formula on Figure 1.2 should be interpreted to represent the structure of a potential uninterrupted series, not a necessary one: in most practical circumstances, as in the extract from the BNC, any interpretant series can be interrupted as new objects and new topics occur naturally in the discourse according to the communicative purposes of the speakers: the objects structure the discourse, but their appearance in it is determined rhetorically. In a letter to Lady Welby dated 23 December 1908, Peirce simplified the process of unlimited semiosis in the following manner, using the six correlates established in 1904 (EP2 478–83).17 Although this scheme seems to bring the process to a close with the final interpretant, we have to remember that this correlate is now defined as a ‘being in futuro’, that is, the result which the sign would provoke in every one of the interpreters perceiving the sign. This means that the continuity is not in successive interpretants which become signs as on Figure 1.6 but Od  >  Oi  >  S  >  li  >  ld  >  lf Figure 1.7  The determination flow defined in 1908.

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is inscribed within the semiotic status of the final interpretant. This is a refinement on an earlier description of the interpretant where he stated that unlike the first and second correlates – the first is perceivable as the sign and the second exists as the object –, the third had no absolute value, it is a relation (CP 1.362). We see this in the case of the smoker who makes a rude gesture when he encounters a no-smoking sign in a building. The gesture is a sign, but an interpretant sign. At this time (1890) Peirce had not fully developed his conception of the interpretant, and so considered that there was only one. Since the gesture shows that the smoker has made the connection between the sign and the prohibition, this means that the interpretant has established a relation between the two. The third is therefore a relation and not an ‘entity’ in the same way as the other two. Figure 1.7, then is a far more economical representation of this principle than the schema on Figure 1.6, and has the advantage of showing that the final interpretant is dependent upon the nature of the dynamic before it, and the dynamic upon the interpretability of the immediate interpretant and so on in a chain of determinations reaching back to the origin of the whole process, namely the dynamic object.

1.3.2  Concluding remarks The reasons for Peirce’s insistence upon the continuous nature of semiosis should by now be obvious. First, as the utterances from the BNC extract show, no speech act functions in a purely dyadic stimulus-response mode since the discourse would terminate after the first utterance: in order to account for any form of development there must be a third correlate, namely the interpretant, to ‘be itself’ so to speak, an effect, and also to function as a sign to yet a further interpretant. Second, the continuity principle is also the basis of any form of learning and of the development of meaning and knowledge. Gallie (1952, pp. 127– 8) cites as an example of this principle the alternative meanings that the word ‘apple’ has for a child, a housekeeper, a fruit-farmer and a botanist: each interprets the word according to his experience and the way he has systematized the information concerning the word. Independently of the experience of the user, the meaning of the word ‘apple’, Gallie remarks, remains ‘something essentially developable’, thereby echoing Peirce’s claim that symbols such as nouns and verbs, for example, grow in meaning: Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from likenesses or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of likenesses and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use

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and in experience, its meaning grows. Such words as force, law, wealth, marriage, bear for us very different meanings from those they bore to our barbarous ancestors. (EP2 10) Third, although the schema on Figure 1.6, by positing an infinite process of interpretation, apparently does not account for the sort of change of topic and object characteristic of informal speech, the principle according to which successive signs become the interpretants of those occurring before is nevertheless clearly visible even in such a short series of spontaneous and unpolished exchanges as those to be found in the BNC: were this not the case there could be no continuous ‘forward movement’ in any form of discourse. This would be the case, too, in film, where the rapidly changing sequence of actions introduces and discards new dynamic objects (namely the actors and props involved in the plot and visible on the screen) thereby integrating any and every action occurring earlier. Still images like those on Figures 1.4 and 1.5, on the other hand, except when they participate in a comic-strip or a manga, in caricatures or in postmodern ‘appropriations’, etc., do not generally elicit subsequent pictorial interpretation. Any interpretant signs they call forth come generally in verbal form from the people observing them: ‘Not a good likeness’, ‘Unusual palette!’, ‘What a good thing the Gallery acquired it’ or ‘Doesn’t go with the wallpaper’, for example . . . Finally, Peirce, as both logician and experimental scientist, was concerned to establish the validity of scientific knowledge and held that the ultimate value of a piece of scientific information was that it should become the object of general consensus, a state obtained over a long period of time and after due consideration by the community of researchers investigating the problem. An exemplary case is to be seen in the ‘collaboratory’ instituted by Michael Ventris in his quest to decipher the Aegean script Linear B. He shared his developing findings in a series of Work-Notes which were communicated to a growing number of correspondents in different countries. Using the feedback these provided and working on material already provided by the American researcher Alice Kober, he was finally able to hypothesize that the script represented an early form of Ancient Greek.18 While there remains some doubt concerning the conclusion he and his collaborator Chadwick finally drew in 1952, the whole enterprise offers an illuminating example of how Peirce’s formula captures the continuity made possible by the ‘interpretant chain’ within a given scientific community.

1.4  Summary This first chapter introduced the three essential elements of Peirce’s semiotics defined by two complementary versions of the theory of sign-action which

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he developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. These were the sign itself, followed by the sign’s ‘formal cause’, the entity which determines the sign’s internal structure namely the dynamic object, and, finally, the effect that the sign produces, namely the interpretant (which is not to be confused with the person interpreting the sign, that is the interpreter). The nature of sign-action, technically known as semiosis, was defined and illustrated by means of diagrams indicating the ‘determination flow’ from the object to the interpretant through the mediation of the sign. The first, Figure 1.1, illustrates the important principle by virtue of which the sign, in order to be perceived and therefore to function at all, has to be communicated through an existential medium  – transmitted through the air as speech, for example, or communicated on a written page or a computer screen  – while the object and the interpretant are somehow located in, or related to, the phenomenologically more complex minds of the sign users involved in semiosis. The second, Figure 1.6, illustrated the dynamic, continuous and virtually never-ending nature of this signifying process: once it has been determined formally by its object, the sign determines in its turn an interpretant which then becomes a new sign for a new interpretant, and so on. This principle of continuity was also illustrated by the chain of actions and reactions informing the example of a comic-strip. The third, a refinement of Figure 1.6, represented Peirce’s conception of semiosis from his mature period and modelled the continuity principle more economically. Examination of a comic-strip showed the tenor of the strip and its distinctive moral inflection to be a determination of the relation between the participants and plot  – the strip’s objects  – on the one hand and the moralizing attitude of the author artist on the other: this relation between objects represented and the sign user (speaker or artist) opens a ‘space’ for the analysis of the rhetorical purpose of signs in a later chapter. The empiricist nature of Peirce’s conception of semiotics is such that although the sign represents the object, in order for it to produce the desired effect upon the interpreter the latter has to have prior ‘collateral’ experience of that object. It was also maintained in the course of the chapter that the interpretation of signs is a differential process, and can vary considerably from person to person, according to each person’s unique experience of the world: Peirce’s conception of sign-action is thus non-deterministic. Peirce’s mature theory discussed in the second part of the chapter expanded on the initial three correlates by identifying two distinct types of object and three interpretants. One object is the visible object represented within a particular sign, the other the absent object which determined it in the first place. The former is the sign’s immediate object, the latter its dynamic object. In the case of a photograph the dynamic object was shown to be the model, while a sketch or captionless still image may not have an existent dynamic object at all: at least, if it has one it can offer no proof of the object’s existence. Similarly the original interpretant was expanded

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to three, the immediate, the dynamic and the final, each contributing in sequence to the continuity of the semiotic process. The final part of the chapter examined a number of examples illustrating the principle of continuous semiosis underwritten by the three types of interpretant. It follows from what we have seen so far that since the sign is the only element in the semiotic process of which we can be sure – being the only element that is necessarily perceivable by the senses  – it is the only correlate of the three that can be studied, interpreted and classified with any certainty. And it is to the twin problems of the description and classification of some of the various species of signs that we turn in the five chapters to follow.

Chapter Two

How shall a sign be called? Having defined sign-action and established the role a sign plays in it, we begin in this chapter our examination of the way signs can be classified, which is a powerful way of determining what they are and how they function. This is the aspect of Peircean semiotics which critics find most disconcerting, and as we saw in the Introduction, has prompted at least one critic to classify the theory as a form of masochism. And yet, despite the unusual terminology, the reasoning behind the classifications is really very simple. Now when Barthes began to write the newspaper and magazine articles which were subsequently published as Mythologies, he was employing the core concepts of Saussurean linguistic theory to perform ‘semioclasm’, a semiological demolition of the signs symptomatic of what he saw as French post-war bourgeois culture – wrestling matches, the Citroën DS, psychologism in the Dominici murder trial, etc.1 For the generation of semiologists following Barthes at least, these articles were considered a model of semiological analysis, and offered a relatively simple methodology for the investigation of a whole host of cultural artefacts: one uncovered the hidden signifieds by isolating and analysing the signifiers on display. Peircean sign theory, on the other hand, is not like this; it turns out to be in essence a relatively simple semiotic metric. In the tripartite classification of signs he set up in 1903, Peirce was not interested in determining what a given sign meant, which is very much a private, individual concern, but rather in investigating three general aspects of signs and sign-action, that is, aspects of signs which are universally valid and enable us to classify them. It is to the first of these aspects that we turn now.

2.1 Two preliminary distinctions We begin by examining two pictorial signs, since by comparing them it is possible to make two very important distinctions. Which, of Figures 2.1 and 2.2, is the more complex? Figure 2.1, the photograph of a typical Venetian

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Figure 2.1  Photograph of a Venetian street scene.

Figure 2.2  Hand-drawn frame from a comic-strip.

street scene and firm evidence of human activity, is technologically the more complex, for, if we temporarily ignore the verbal elements in the image on Figure 2.2, we find that this is little more than a line drawing and, in a way yet to be defined, a far simpler sign. However, it is not sufficient to judge a pictorial sign on the immediate evidence, since pictorial signs, far more clearly than language signs, constitute the representations of two ‘spaces’: ours and that of the objects and the protagonists depicted in the represented world of the photograph and the comic-strip. For if the two-dimensional structure of the image

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makes available a flat surface on which to inscribe various types of objects and protagonists, it also offers the possibility of closure by means of a frame – not simply a frame in the traditional sense, but a frame as described by Meyer Schapiro (1994). This, a remarkable discussion of field and vehicle in pictorial signs in one of the founding texts of a general visual semiotics, describes the frame round a painting, for example, as offering a window on the world: ‘[I]t is like a window frame through which is seen a space behind the glass. The frame belongs then to the space of the observer rather than  the illusory, three-dimensional world disclosed within and behind’ (1994, p. 7). We can formulate the principle differently: it is physically possible to pick up the original photograph shown on Figure 2.1, but not the object it represents; similarly, we can tear up the image on Figure 2.2, but we have no possible access to the fictive world of the two teenagers. More importantly, in order to understand fully the semiotic structure of the latter sign we enter unconsciously into the 3D world of the protagonists, and when we do this, we find that Figure 2.2 turns out to be far more complex than we might originally have thought. If we consider the represented world in each case, we see that all that we have in Figure 2.1 is a hydrant and a plastic bucket, whereas in Figure 2.2 we witness a social interaction with information communicated in two distinct ways between the protagonists: verbal and non-verbal signs (note that the mass media conventions of the third communication channel are located in our space, not in the world of the protagonists – who would, of course, be totally unaware of them – and therefore don’t enter the analysis). Unlike the singularity of the gushing hydrant, these two distinct types of sign – the verbal and the non-verbal – are both general and systematic, that is they both literally belong to distinct systems. The more complex is, of course, the verbal. Restricting ourselves to oral verbal signs, we note that the double articulation of speech ensures that an open set of words is formed from a small closed set of phonemes; these words can in turn be combined to produce an immeasurable and limitless number of information units such as sentences. For example, the following simple sequence of words, rap, tap, sap, strap, trap, sprat, part, parts, past, rasp, is formed from various combinations of the six phonemes /æ, α, p, r, s, t/. Similarly, but on a larger scale, the CD version of the OED contains just over 290,000 main entries, all formed from combinations of the 47 different vowels and consonants of British English. Now the sort of non-verbal signs represented pictorially in the comic-strip are not doubly articulated in this way; in addition, they are limited to each new situation and can only afford information concerning the participants in each social encounter in which they are found. Unlike the verbal signs of language, which can be employed indefinitely to refer to people, things and events which are displaced with respect to the situation of utterance – they can be used, for example, to speculate about the Ancient Britons or signs of life on Mars – non-verbal signs of the type illustrated by

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Figure 2.2 – expression, gesture, proximity, orientation, etc. – are anchored in their immediate context, and the various shapes and lines composing them in the image are not interchangeable (except possibly in the cases of caricature, Cubist paintings or Identi-Kit style digital facial recognition systems, for example). They are nevertheless systematic, visually prominent and fundamental to the recognition and interpretation of human, and indeed, non-human, behaviour, and, of course, to the pictorial representation thereof. We thus make two preliminary simple, but important, semiotic distinctions. First, it is methodologically useful to distinguish between the ‘container’ and the contents in pictorial signs, where the container, so to speak, is generally accessible, disposable, but not the contents. In a novel such as Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, composed essentially of verbal signs, such a distinction is more complex as verbal signs involve yet another level: in this particular case, any copy of the book itself can be held, thrown about and even destroyed. The words it contains, however, cannot. And ‘behind’ these, at yet another level, the represented world is untouchable except, possibly, in prequel or sequel form or in film adaptations. Second, we distinguish between verbal and non-verbal signs. These, as we shall see in Chapter Four, differ considerably in their mode of representation, that is, in the distinct ways in which the two types of sign represent their particular objects. In the section to follow, however, we examine the semiotic properties they share. The first distinction was never envisaged by Peirce and is a methodological convenience with theoretical implications. The second is implicit in many of the examples he offered as simple illustrations of his theory.

2.2 Peirce’s first division 2.2.1  Three subclasses of signs Turning to the problem of the classification of such signs, it follows that qua signs, ‘containers’ like the photograph of the Venice scene in Figure 2.1 and the line drawing in Figure 2.2 are in themselves ‘singular’ signs in the sense that they are singular events – one-off signs – never to be repeated in exactly the same way anywhere else or at any other time; they are in no way systematic and can generally be disposed of at will. This is because as physical, tangible representations they belong to the existential world of the photographer and graphic artist, and to ours, too. Such signs are what Peirce originally called ‘sinsigns’, a short form of ‘singular signs’: photographs and line drawings are sinsigns. On the other hand, verbal signs like those exhibited within the protagonists’ world in Figure 2.2, are general, systematic and clearly more

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complex in that their interpretation is governed by a general rule or law, and as such transcend the singularity of the photograph and the sketch. Peirce termed such complex signs ‘legisigns’, from the Latin lex, legis, a law. They are, therefore, signs which are general in nature and in a certain manner are laws. Moreover, repeated over and over again on separate occasions, mass media conventions and the various systems of non-verbal communication signs are all, like verbal signs, classes of legisign, and merit no less careful consideration. We note, in this description of the various subclasses of sign, that in addition to sinsigns and legisigns there remains one which has not been discussed yet, one that is such that it cannot be illustrated in isolation as a sign, and is the least complex within the current division – Peirce would have said it was not complex at all. These signs are the qualitative components to be found in the material signs ‘higher up the scale’, and as such are, in themselves, pure potentialities. For example, think of the problems of representing the various constituent properties of the felt pen I use to write with: it is green, hollow and cylindrical. Its greenness is intuitively easy to imagine, but should it appear as a green smear on some hard surface as a result of the pen being dropped or scratched the greenness would immediately assume existence and singularity; similar problems obtain for cylindricality and hollowness. Simplifying considerably, we might say that these qualities or properties constitute the lines, forms and colours of which all pictorial signs are composed, and we only perceive them to the extent that they inhere in these pictorial signs. This is no less the case, of course, with the oral sounds or written characters of verbal signs. Since they are simply abstract qualities, Peirce called them, with disarming and possibly disconcerting simplicity, ‘qualisigns’, that is qualities in limitless diversity which function as signs, the very stuff of, for example, wine tasting, perfume confection and piano-tuning. Qualisigns are not, however, necessarily randomly distributed qualities, since the semiotic identity of a given sign is only recognizable from the qualisigns composing it, and these are governed by the legisign it contributes to. This is the case, for example, with the following sequence of English verbs: gleam, glint, glimmer, glitter, glister and glare. These all begin with the same consonant cluster gl- and share the same semantic component, namely the action of shining. 2 This shared semantic component is guaranteed by this particular initial cluster, which distinguishes the series from, say, seam, slant, slimmer, slit, etc. In other words, the qualisigns they share identify the members of the gleam series, while the remainder of the phonetic qualities composing each term in the series separates it semantically from the others. In this way qualisigns and legisigns cooperate to form the particular semiotic identity of the verbal signs of any given language. The American linguist, Dwight Bolinger, who, like Otto Jespersen before him, studied such ‘submorphemic differentials’  – what from a Peircean point of view might be seen as the systematic and significant distribution

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of phonemic qualisigns  – suggested felicitously that they are to be found ‘at the floor of language where phonologists and morphemicists have made their stand’ (1965, p. 234): qualisigns are located at the floor of language, but their specific distribution in verbal signs is prescribed by the legisigns located in the roof. This is how Peirce defined the three subclasses forming the first of the three divisions of signs he set out in 1903: According to the first division, a Sign may be termed a Qualisign, a Sinsign, or a Legisign. A Qualisign is a quality which is a Sign. It cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied; but the embodiment has nothing to do with its character as a sign. (PWP 101) Thus qualisigns are qualities such as colours, feelings, qualities of sound, etc., that are embodied in physical objects and function as signs (red for revolution, blood or danger, for example, on a flag, a rag or a road sign). They have no independent existence and are only to be perceived inhering in some existent object. A Sinsign (where the syllable sin is taken as meaning ‘being only once,’ as in single, simple, Latin semel, etc.) is an actual existent thing or event which is a sign. It can only be so through its qualities; so that it involves a qualisign, or rather, several qualisigns. But these qualisigns are of a peculiar kind and only form a sign through being actually embodied. (Ibid.) Sinsigns are thus singular, existent occurrences, ‘one-off’ signs, as we saw above: a sketch is a sinsign, a photograph is a sinsign, as is any spontaneous cry such as Ouch! or Ooh!, which are clearly not systematic in the way that the decomposable warning Look out! is. Sinsigns are random occurrences and are to this extent a less interesting subclass, although this was not Robinson Crusoe’s opinion when he discovered the footprint in the sand: although it represented the presence of another human on the island it was not a legisign: as an existent trace it was not part of a system of legisigns as it might have been on a signpost indicating a footpath along a beach, for example. For all the implications it had for Robinson Crusoe, it was nevertheless simply a sinsign. Finally, most important of all, the legisign, by far the most pervasive subclass of signs in our sophisticated contemporary cultures, is defined very carefully in the following manner: A Legisign is a law that is a Sign. This law is usually established by men. Every conventional sign is a legisign [but not conversely]. It is not a single object, but a general type which, it has been agreed, shall be significant. Every legisign signifies through an instance of its application, which may be termed a Replica of it. Thus, the word “the” will usually occur from

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fifteen to twenty-five times on a page. It is, in all these occurrences, one and the same word, the same legisign. Each single instance of it is a Replica. The Replica is a Sinsign. Thus, every Legisign requires Sinsigns. But these are not ordinary Sinsigns, such as are peculiar occurrences that are regarded as significant. Nor would the Replica be significant if it were not for the law which renders it so. (PWP 102)

2.2.1.1  Legisigns and replicas In this definition Peirce is making a very important remark. Offering the example of the English definite article the, he explains just how it is that we encounter general signs in everyday life. If anything is general, then it transcends everyday existence and thus cannot be experienced or is not perceivable in the way existing sinsigns such as photographs, sketches and cries of Ouch! are. All language signs are general. If they were not our communication with others would require us to create different words each time, or, as the language professor in Gulliver’s Academy of Lagado urged, express ourselves not by means of the generality of words but by the singularity of the things the words would have named. The point Peirce is making in the definition is that the multitude of different language signs we encounter in everyday communication with others – nouns, prepositions, verbal forms, etc.  – are repeated instances of these general signs. In the case of the novel Pride and Prejudice, for example, the definite article occurs 4,331 times, although there is only one definite article in English, a component of an ‘enduring pattern’ in that it precedes nouns and adjectives in order to form referring expressions such as noun phrases. In the novel the ‘replicas’ are a special type of perceivable and therefore existent sinsign, in that their constitution is determined not by some potentially random act as might be the case with a photograph or a cry of pain, but by the legisign ‘governing’ it: were there no replicas, that is material realizations of the legisigns of natural languages, we should be unable to perceive one another’s utterances, for they would be inaudible. It follows, too, that the semiotic identity of the replica is displayed by the qualisigns composing it, which themselves are determined by the legisign of which each replica is an occurrence. The legisign, the reader will have noticed, is like an entry in a standard dictionary, for there is usually only one entry per word, even when the latter is polysemous.

2.2.1.2  Sinsign or replica? What, then, the reader might ask, is the difference between an ordinary sinsign  – what Peirce refers to in the definition above as a ‘peculiar occurrence’ (i.e. a particular, individual, singly occurring sign)  – and the perceivable replicas or instances of a legisign? Peirce anticipated the

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problem and offered not only the photograph as an example, but also (among a host of others) the weather vane and the fact of its veering as the wind changes direction. The object in this latter case is the change of direction of the wind, while the sign, a sinsign, is the new position of the weather vane (CP 2.265). In contradistinction to the singular Ouch!, one example of the replica of a verbal legisign would be a street cry, much more prevalent among the hawkers in Peirce’s late nineteenth century than today, but traces of which are to be found, for example, in the Dublin ‘anthem’, Sweet Molly Malone, whose eponymous heroine went through the streets of Dublin crying ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh’. With increased literacy today street cries such as ‘Cockles and mussels’ are more or less restricted to the markets, having competition on the High Street from the shop signs displayed above such stores as chemists, opticians, grocers, bakers and fishmongers, etc., although these, too, are in most cases replicas of legisigns. Another example is to be found in the semiotic evolution of the ubiquitous pair of jeans worn by the young the world over. Should we see someone with a pair of jeans torn at the knee, our immediate impression might be that the jeans are old and worn through or that the tear, a sinsign, was the result of an accident which has impaired what the cultural analyst John Fiske has called their ‘efficiency’ value: they would be less efficient as a protective garment. However, irrespective of how it was originally perceived the torn jeans first became a legisign among a rebellious section of American and European youths, an emblem signifying shared ‘alternative’ social values. The power of this symbolism was later to be recognized and put to merchandizing good in the form of designer jeans sold at high prices with holes not only in the knees, but on the thighs and beneath the buttocks, thereby robbing the torn jeans of their symbolic oppositional value and turning them into conspicuous indices of wealth (Fiske, 1989, chapter one). In short, the pair of torn jeans was no doubt originally an ‘accidental’ sinsign, but was transformed first by the youth culture of the 1960s and later by a vigilant market economy into the replicas of at least two divergent legisigns. Within a general semiotics the study of verbal signs falls within the province of linguistics, while the non-verbal signs form a more heterogeneous and diffuse group. Since there is no dearth of descriptions of verbal signs, the following sections deal principally with the many types of non-verbal legisigns occurring in real-life social encounters and also displayed in various types of image. For convenience, in describing such non-verbal legisign systems in this study we adopt the classifications proposed by certain social psychologists, whose research bears upon the ways in which human verbal communication is embodied in, and often abetted by, precisely these various non-verbal sign systems. It follows, then, that a visual semiotics concerns itself principally with what is left in a pictorial document once all the verbal material has been removed either mentally or physically as

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in the case of the comic-strip. What follows is a non-exhaustive review of such non-verbal signs.

2.2.2  Non-verbal communication The exact typology of non-verbal communication (NVC) systems varies from author to author. Noted early research in the field was conducted by the American anthropologist, Edward Hall (1959), whose work on the ‘silent language’ and ‘proxemics’, that is the study of the signification of distances between humans as they interact, was taken up and systematized as a form of ‘body language’ by the French lexicologist and semiologist, Pierre Guiraud (e.g. 1980). We adopt here the typology of the social psychologist, Michael Argyle (1972, 1988). In his work, Argyle postulates a certain number of more or less universal non-verbal signals, which we can now see as behavioural legisign systems, and several of these figured prominently in the comic-strip examined in Chapter One. Below are listed some of the more visually salient of these signals, the sort likely to be reproduced as signs in pictorial media such as comic-strips, paintings hanging in museums and galleries or in motion pictures. They fall into two major (often scalar) categories: those which we are not always conscious of and which are therefore more difficult to control, as opposed to those that are intentional. In this respect Collett (2004) distinguishes at one point ‘genuine’ (unintentional) from ‘false’ (intentional) ‘tells’ in an entertaining but highly informative study of poker ‘tells’. These are the NVC signals to be observed among poker addicts which enable the experienced player to obtain information concerning other players’ hands. 3 Such signals are obviously very different from the verbal signs discussed above, but are nevertheless important and systematic sources of information not only in games of poker but also in our everyday communication with others. Remember that social psychologists, ethnologists and anthropologists and, indeed, many semioticians, study such legisign systems in real-life human interactions, whereas the semiotics of pictorial documents tends to examine and classify such signs as they are represented pictorially at one remove from reality, as the complex contents of various types of pictorial ‘containers’.4 The following constitute a non-exhaustive sample of NVC legisigns to be found in two of the communication channels identified in Chapter One. Bodily contact: this is culturally variable and determines who touches whom, where and in what circumstances. In his 1988 monograph, Argyle suggests that certain cultures, for example Arab-speaking nations and certain southern Europeans such as the Greeks and Turks are ‘contact cultures’, while others, for example the British, are not. At one point, for example, he cites research into the number of times couples touch in cafés: in San Juan (Puerto Rico) they were found to touch 180 times in an hour, in

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Paris 110, but in London not once! (1988, p. 60). Furthermore, when men greet one another in the first type of culture they tend to kiss, in Britain the handshake is more common. Proximity or interpersonal spacing: this again is culturally variable  – research cited by Argyle suggests that in the south people tend to approach closer than in the north, hence perhaps, the kiss rather than the handshake. This was the system of signs first studied by Edward Hall as proxemics. It is often associated with Orientation, namely the angle at which people sit or stand in relation to others. A formal type of orientation is head-on, as in confrontation, bargaining, etc., or side-by-side, which is a sign of cooperative relations and the orientation of friends together. However, friends eating together apparently tend to sit opposite each other, presumably because it promotes eye contact and ensures efficient communication. Argyle also includes head-nods in his lists: these function as reinforcers, encouraging the other to continue speaking, for example, and to continue his or her current activity or, on the contrary, to signal refusal or disapproval. They are obviously difficult to detect in pictorial representations of such behaviour in a photograph, though they can be indicated pictorially by various mass media conventions in a comic-strip. Facial expression: this, as was seen in the illustration in Chapter One, is usually an accompaniment to speech, and, like posture, is a reliable indication of someone’s emotional state, though it is not always intentional. Such signs are clearly visible on the features of the two protagonists in the second frame on Figure 2.1: a mixture of amazement and guilt on the face of the boy and anger on that of the young woman. The well-known and easily recognizable basic traits of facial expressions are also the basis of the various emoticons appended to e-mail messages, for example. As an initial illustration of how diverse, pervasive and yet surprisingly simple these legisign systems are, consider Figure 2.3. The term ‘emoticon’ is a blend or portmanteau word formed from the nouns ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’. The emoticons on Figure 2.3, although produced by means of the characters on a computer keyboard – some word processors produce an image automatically when the characters are keyed in – represent easily recognizable facial expressions, respectively a smile, a broad smile, perplexity or scepticism and, finally, disapproval. Although the ‘smiley’ itself is a recent creation, the idea of using typographical characters to represent the facial expression of human emotions dates back at least to the 1880s when the American satirical magazine Puck published the ‘typographical art’ series shown on Figure 2.4.5

☺ :-)

:-D

Figure 2.3  Keyboard emoticons and ‘smileys’.

:-/

� :-(

HOW SHALL A SIGN BE CALLED?

Joy.

Melancholy.

Indifference.

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Astonishment.

Figure 2.4  Late-nineteenth-century (1881) emoticons from Puck magazine.

Both series show just how easy it is to stylize the features of an expression, and, by the same token, just how recognizable such expressive features are. This is how Peirce describes the importance of expression and gesture, employing a terminology to be described in Chapter Four: It is true that no language (so far as I know) has any particular form of speech to show that the real world is spoken of. But that is not necessary, since tones and looks are sufficient to show when the speaker is in earnest. These tones and looks act dynamically upon the listener, and cause him to attend to realities. They are, therefore, the indices of the real world (CP 2.337). [. . .] Often, too, the index is not of the nature of a noun. It may be, as we have seen, a mere look or gesture. (CP 2.338) For these ‘tones and looks’ to function repeatedly as indices in communicative acts, they have to be semiotically regular, however simple. They are thus examples of replicas of very simple but familiar paralinguistic legisigns, that is replicas of regular non-verbal features of communication used to express various shades of meaning. At this point we can conclude that not all legisigns are necessarily verbal, and we examine a number of other classes below. Gestures: these are usually produced with the hands and have a wide range of meanings, from the ominous thumbs up or down signs of the Roman amphitheatres, the disrespectful extended index and little finger ‘cuckold’ gesture imitating horns and much employed the world over to vilify rivals and football referees, to the more positive raised hand greetings signs originally intended to reveal the absence of a weapon, and the welcoming and goodbye hand waves exchanged by friends. Many such gestures are culturally distributed: Collett (2004, p. 319) notes, for example, in a discussion of ‘foreign tells’, that Italians tend to use hand gestures in order to retain the speaker role during conversations. Posture: this is an interpersonal attitude, and can be an indication of one’s emotional state along a tense  – relaxed dimension. The state of mind or degree of attention of an audience, of students, say, can easily be recognized from the posture of its members: slouching indicates disappointment, boredom or lack of interest, whereas an upright posture suggests attention and even adhesion to the speaker’s remarks. Anyone familiar with academic committees will no doubt have noticed how often

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someone who is in charge of the meeting, or is going to take charge, will also sit in an upright position. Appearance: this is very much a catch-all category the main purpose of which, suggests Argyle, is self-presentation, that is sending out signals about the self such as, among other things, one’s personality, mood, social status, occupation or the social group one belongs to: as Argyle drily remarks, ‘bank managers do not dress up as hippies’ (1972, p. 248). He similarly suggests that young women probably use such signals to maximize their attractiveness as sexual objects, an argument which underscores the importance such legisigns have for a semiotics of marketing. In frame five of the comic-strip in Chapter One, the ‘heroine’ tries on a blonde wig and realizes that she can test her boyfriend’s faithfulness by passing herself off as a Swedish girl with a limited command of English. In structuralist-inspired semiological studies, such signals are often referred to as ‘commodity codes’, since they involve the purchase and conspicuous display of commodities – Rolex watches, BMWs, for example and, of course, the pair of factory-faded and pre-torn jeans – and as such are visibly prominent if expensive means of advertising oneself. To these we can add the sort of legisigns mentioned briefly in Chapter One, namely mass media conventions. This is another catch-all category and includes photographic, cinema, newspaper, magazine and a growing host of internet conventions of various sorts. For convenience we include in this category the attribute and symbol systems that art historians identify in their analyses of religious imagery, and examine two examples below. In the meantime, the famous portrait of Abraham Lincoln by Mathew Brady (Figure 2.5) will serve as an excellent illustration of such NVC signs. ‘Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president’6 On 27 February 1860, the day he pronounced one of the most important speeches in his campaign for the Republican investiture before the 1860 presidential elections, Abraham Lincoln entered the studio of New York photographer Mathew Brady. Why he chose Brady’s studio is very much of a mystery, but it is not impossible that Brady, who as a successful and famous photographer had a reputation for ‘collecting’ as many celebrity portraits as possible, should have plotted the session. This is how the historian Robert Zeller describes the result: Lincoln was often described as homely, sometimes downright ugly, but Brady sought to make the gangly, Western lawyer as dignified and statesmanlike as possible. Brady saw promise in Lincoln’s rugged dignity, and he was capable of creating a muted elegance from the roughest of forms. (Zeller, 2005, p. 18) How did Brady do it? He produced a complex image composed of NVC legisigns of at least three different categories: appearance and expression,

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Figure 2.5  Mathew Brady’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

the choice and staging of certain props and, finally, the choice of a particular media convention involving the relation between the model and the camera. ‘In advertising’, wrote Barthes, ‘the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional’,7 and this is certainly the case on Figure 2.5, for, with the exception of the clothes Lincoln happened to be wearing that day, all the elements visible on the photograph are the result of Brady’s carefully conceived staging. Lincoln’s clothes are obviously sober and express the rather staid tastes of a lawyer and politician about to make an important political address. His expression, on the other hand, was no doubt the work of Brady: a straight, resolute expression on his face as he looks unflinchingly at the camera  – quite the opposite of someone looking furtively away, which would have given the impression of a weak character or a lack of conviction: this is honest Abe. However, as though to soften any impression of severity or intolerance, Lincoln’s arms are bent slightly at the elbows, a ploy which also alleviates any harshness in the pose. If Brady paid attention to such details it was because he knew that whoever looked at the portrait would understand these very conventional, but eminently familiar signs. But there is more. In addition to Lincoln’s personal dignity Brady added the dignity of the backdrop: a cropped, slightly out of focus neo-classical column in the background is the first thing our Western eye sees as it scans from top left to bottom right, and its verticality gives height not only to the scene but also to the subject of the portrait, offering at the same time a subtle hint of the famous colonnade in front of the White House. The eye then moves conventionally down and across Lincoln’s body to bottom right and finishes on the candidate’s left hand which has

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been carefully placed on a pile of books, as though he were taking the oath on the Bible. Finally, and this is where the framing conventions enter the picture  – literally – not only does Brady define the posture and position of the model, but his framing choice also works on whoever looks at the photo: he positions us, the observers, with respect to his subject. Lincoln is photographed looking three-quarter face at the camera and at three-quarter height (we don’t see his knees or the bottom of his coat), with a slightly low-angled shot obtained by lowering the ‘frame’, to use Schapiro’s terminology, on our side of the image. These framing and positioning choices are no less legisigns than the others and have the effect first, of accentuating both the physical and moral loftiness of the candidate for the investiture, and second of placing the observer beneath him, as if at his feet, for while the low-angled shot has the hyperbolic effect of dramatizing and exaggerating features of the model, it places the viewer in the opposite position. This is how Brady transformed a reputedly very ugly Lincoln into an authoritative presidential candidate whose portrait was to feature on literally thousands of cartes de visite.8 In conclusion, then, we note that the foregoing samples of NVC legisigns were presented individually, but it is clear that they occur in our social encounters in clusters rather than in isolation. For example, bodily contact and proximity tend to form a cluster, together with orientation, as in a boxing match or a romantic tryst. Similarly, posture, proximity and appearance co-occur significantly in the sort of situation where an applicant for a job appears before a recruiting board, while facial expression and variation in posture are potent indications of affect and emotion. Finally, complex clusters of NVC signals are guides to social class and regional distinctions still in evidence in our contemporary societies, and constitute a complex system that complements and often accompanies the speech inflexions, accents and syntactical variation of verbal indication.

2.3  Illustrations 2.3.1  Iconography The term has at least four different but related meanings. For a start, although a discipline of long standing in the history of art, it has now come to be seen as the study of the way a culture represents important concepts and events through images. In this case, the images often reveal an unintended stereotypical vision of the culture in question: the plaque placed by NASA on the side of the Pioneer F space probe in 1972 shows life on earth, in the guise of a naked human male and female, to be typically Caucasian, the man having short blond hair, the woman long. More striking are the gestures, posture and orientation of the couple, with the woman standing

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more or less behind the man’s left shoulder – leaving his right arm free and raised in a goodwill greeting – and placed slightly lower in the image; the man is thus represented as the active partner and the woman as his passive but attractive companion, an excellent example of what Barthes (1970a) identified as a ‘cultural myth’.9 Second, the term concerns the actual painting of icons in the Byzantine tradition: Saint Luke, the closest in time to the events of the Gospel, often has an artist’s easel as an attribute, since he was thought to be the first person to paint an icon of the Virgin Mary. It also refers to the study of the thematic choices artists include in their images: Picasso and Matisse, for example, painted numerous images displaying the typical contents of the artist’s studio. Finally, iconography is traditionally the study and interpretation of the symbols and attributes in art, usually religious: Hall (1983) is a good example of this approach. Even earlier, the Greek hero Heracles, for example, was identified on statues by means of an enormous mace and a lion’s skin draped over his shoulders. Such symbols are often enigmatic and difficult to understand today, and are often to be found in allegorical images such as the one on Figure 2.8. One of the origins of this type of signification comes from the medieval custom of representing holy personages (saints, etc.) by means of identifying attributes. The iconography of Saint Jerome on Figure 2.6, an engraving by Albrecht Dürer (1514) is an interesting example. The calm of this image contrasts sharply with an earlier painting of the saint in the National Gallery in London, in which Jerome is depicted as lost in the wilderness and beating his chest with a piece of rock in atonement for the death of Christ. In the engraving, Jerome is portrayed working on the Vulgate, his translation of the Hebrew and Greek Bible into Latin. His halo shows him to be a saint. On the wall behind him is one of his identifying attributes, namely the broad-brimmed red hat of the Cardinal, although this is historically inaccurate, as Jerome lived in the fourth century, long before the rank of cardinal was created. On the table before him is the crucifix and, on the window sill, a skull, two more objects found in images of Jerome. Finally, on the floor in front of the table lie a sleeping dog and a lion. The dog is not one of Jerome’s recognized attributes, and Dürer may have been influenced by a similar study of Saint Augustine by Vittore Carpaccio in which a little dog looks hopefully up at his master as though wanting to go for a walk. The lion, on the other hand, is, like the cardinal’s hat, one of this saint’s two ‘necessary’ attributes visible on the engraving since, legend has it, Jerome once removed a thorn from its paw, after which the lion accompanied him everywhere. The image on Figure 2.6 is thus a beautifully executed but traditional representation of the saint, making use of the attributes forged by a long tradition: just as there is only one legisign of the no-smoking poster mentioned in Chapter One but many replicas of it in public buildings throughout the country, there is only one cardinal’s hat – again a legisign – but many replicas of it in many different forms in the numerous depictions of the saint. The lion is a slightly different case: here it functions as one

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Figure 2.6  Saint Jerome in his study, Albrecht Dürer (1514), © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

of Jerome’s defining attributes, but it was considered traditionally to be a symbol of watchfulness, as lions were thought, like Jerome’s in the image, to be able to sleep with their eyes open, an ability not attributed to dogs. As a symbol it represents something more general than itself, and is also in this case a legisign.

2.3.2  ‘Body language’ 10 Concrete, real-life examples of such NVC features, the sort extensively studied by social psychologists, social anthropologists and political commentators, are to be found in the following Associated Press photograph illustrating the formal context of the April 2008 Black Sea summit meeting between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin (Figure 2.7). It appeared in the International Herald Tribune of 16 April 2008. Clearly, the legisigns displayed in the images were felt by the sub-editors to be appropriate to the

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Figure 2.7  The Black Sea summit (2008) ©Associated Press.

tenor of the article they were chosen to illustrate, which makes examination of this information an interesting semiotic exercise.11 The slightly forced sylvan bonhomie of an earlier image (featured in the 7 April 2008 edition of the Independent) presents the two together in woodland, smiling, maintaining a self-conscious eye-contact, and striding harmoniously along in step for the benefit of the journalists, and contrasts sharply with the very spontaneous ennui displayed in the formality of the conference room on Figure 2.7. Here we find the two symbolically separated by the little table as heads of different states, but no less symbolically united in their common diplomatic enterprise. Most literate observers of these images will know immediately who the two are, but the point is that even without a text or caption to guide them, they are nevertheless able to obtain information and interpret the content of these photographs thanks to their experience of the sort of non-verbal communication signals mentioned above. If we establish a short inventory of such signs we obtain the following (non-exhaustive) list. Appearance is prominent in the guise of the formal, but differently cut, dark suits and the ties which confirm both their status as politicians and the formality of the summit. The facial expressions are significant: George W. Bush has a distinctly fazed, glassy-eyed expression while Vladimir Putin’s eyes are focused not on the speaker, but on the patterned carpet. The different positions on the proximity scale, side-by-side head-of-state orientation, and the marked differences in posture, etc., also enable us to form an interpretation of the images and to see how they complement the

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text they are intended to illustrate. Note, in this latter case, that Vladimir Putin’s open-legged posture could hardly be considered the same sort of aggressive crotch display as that identified by Pease (1993, p. 93), a theoretical predicament which illustrates the essentially vague informative status of NVC legisigns and the difficulty of treating all non-verbal communication signals as coded.12 This is a problem to which we return in Chapter Six, when we reconsider the informative potential of the major types of pictorial signs. For the time being we conclude that to call a sign a legisign is to say what it is, whereas in Chapter Six we shall be examining the ways in which the various classes of legisign provide information.

2.3.3  Personification Having seen how Dürer recycles two attributes from the traditional iconography of Saint Jerome, we turn to the way he not only adopts traditional attributes, but invents new ones to suit his purpose in his personification of the concept of melancholy on Figure 2.8. To understand Dürer’s image, it is important to bear in mind that in the medieval period and even later a person’s personality, or ‘temperament’ was held to be determined by the blend (‘temperament’ or mixture) of four ‘humours’, or fluids, circulating in the body: blood, yellow bile, phlegm and black bile related respectively to the four elements (air, fire, water and earth). If the natural balance between these fluids was disrupted in any way and one dominated the others, then illness was thought to result. Yellow bile, for example, was associated with fire, a hot and dry element, and a person dominated by such a humour was classified as ‘choleric’ and considered violent and vengeful. Black bile, secreted by the spleen, was associated with the earth, a cold, dry element, and a person dominated by such a humour was classified as ‘melancholic’, and considered gluttonous, lazy and sentimental. Eighty years after Dürer produced his image Cesare Ripa, in his Iconologia, described the melancholic negatively as a man in a long robe with a gag over his mouth. He is frowning, holds a book in one hand and a closed purse in the other. He has a small bird beside him. The attribute of the gag represents the taciturn temperament of the melancholic, the open book represents study and scholarship and the closed purse selfishness, while the bird, traditionally a sparrow, symbolizes the melancholic’s desire for solitude.13 Dürer’s engraving is infinitely more complex than the traditional representation, as an iconographic analysis of the attributes of his version reveals. Dürer personifies melancholy as a sombre, brooding angel with a laurel wreath in her hair and surrounded by a collection of instruments that constitute the attributes of intellectual and creative pursuits. He achieves this by metonymy, that is, he represents such pursuits by the instruments and objects associated with them. Thus geometry (the Platonic study of ‘pure’ forms) is represented in the image by the perfect sphere, the polyhedron and

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Figure 2.8  Melencolia 1, Albrecht Dürer, (1514), © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

the dividers which Melancholy holds in her hands; silver- and goldsmithing are represented by the crucible and the scales, woodworking and cabinetmaking by the plane, set-square, saw, nails and hammer. From the angel’s waist hang a purse and the keys to power; there is an hourglass to symbolize the passing of time, a ladder leads to the higher life and, in the distance, the promise of success in the sun bursting through the rainbow. There is a magic square behind her left shoulder, and this, according to Walter Benjamin, is the planetary sign of Jupiter, whose positive influence tempers the ‘dismal forces of Saturn’ (Benjamin, 2003, p. 151). More interesting is Benjamin’s interpretation of the dog. Traditionally, the dog was a symbol either of madness (or of fidelity, as in the case of Saint Jerome in his Study on Figure 2.6), but for Benjamin the association of the dog with the spleen is significant since according to legend the spleen was held to be dominant in the organism of the dog. Moreover, the dog is depicted sleeping, and ‘bad dreams come from the spleen, but prophetic dreams are also the prerogative of the melancholic’ (2003, p. 152). Thus, together the dog and the bat are symbols of the madness of creation, and the whole image can be interpreted

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not as Ripa’s aloof, selfish misanthropist, but as a personification of the divinely inspired saturnine genius, a person considered at the time as endowed with the highest creative ability, but here given the brooding and defeated posture of the creative artist who is given to bouts of depression and indolence. This complex image has been seen as a symbolic self-portrait of Dürer himself and also as an anticipation of psychoanalysis (Clark, 1969, p. 155). The final word goes to the art historian, Patricia Emison: Going beyond the adroit use of iconography, Dürer has finessed the traditional language of symbols and references, enlarging their scope, and integrating the old with the novel. What could be an odder (and yet so somber) sight than this hulking Hausfrau, winged, her hair disordered, and her location unintelligible except allegorically? (Emison, 1986, p. 76) Obviously, in our age of the internet, television, cameras and camcorders, attributes are not needed to identify people or craft guilds, but in the past, when the representation of a holy story or events from the lives of the saints enacted centuries earlier to a largely illiterate congregation was an important part of their religious instruction, pictorial attributes and symbols were an important means of identification. Later, Renaissance artists like Botticelli and Dürer were quick to exploit the potential of such associations, and began to develop symbolic images which we today have difficulty in interpreting. Thus, together with written verbal signs, the non-verbal signals and mass media conventions examined in the illustrative pictorial documents above contribute to the three communication channels mentioned in Chapter One, and are characteristic of multimodal documents such as cartoons, photographs with captions, the attribute and symbol systems in religious imagery, webpages, advertising hype, product packages, and, of course, comic-strips. Such familiar sign-systems are the stuff of national stereotypes and cultural variety, the staple of brand-marketing and the multitude of consent-engineering campaigns directed at us every day of our lives, as well as the basic communicative material we marshal in our day-to-day intercourse with our entourage. Such are the legisigns, the general signs of everyday life and the basic constituents of our conscious and unconscious mythopoeia.

2.4  Issues 2.4.1  Code or legisign? At this point the reader might well ask: why the term ‘legisign’ and not the more familiar notion of the code as in ‘commodity code’? After all, the

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concept of the code has figured prominently in many previous introductions to sign analysis and interpretation. The Collins English Dictionary offers the following concise definition: ‘Code: A system of letters or symbols, and rules for their association by means of which information can be represented or communicated for reasons of secrecy, brevity, etc.’14 However, in addition to notions of secrecy and brevity, the term has many other meanings which range from complex civil codes like the Napoleonic or Justinian Codes, through ‘codes of conduct’ such as the British Highway Code and the Italian Galateo, to relatively simple codes like the Morse, ASCII and hexadecimal machine codes, and there are, consequently, a number of reasons for preferring Peirce’s term to the other. To begin with, the notion of the code considered as an interpretative semiotic system of one to one correspondences between a code unit and its value first gained credence with Barthes’s work on myth and pictorial rhetoric (1964a, 1970a, 1977), and therefore belongs to a Saussure-inspired, structuralist approach to pictorial data. The present study, on the other hand, is neither structuralist nor poststructuralist but Peircean in its approach, and thus naturally adopts Peirce’s terminology. However, there are less parochial reasons for preferring Peirce’s term. For example, the types of NVC data presented above tend to be scalar in nature, and in this way frustrate a search for exact term to term correspondences between the legisigns and what they represent. More importantly, the very notion of a code smacks of atomism; that is, the term suggests that ultimately the basic code units can be associated with corresponding basic meaning units within some term to term relation. Such a suggestion is plausible in the case of the Morse code, for example, but is problematic when we consider verbal and pictorial signs: in the first case, this would mean that natural languages are varieties of code and, in the second that the vagueness encountered in images such as the comic-strip in Chapter One is an illusion. A further reason for abandoning the concept of the code in semiotic analysis is that there is something ideologically unwholesome and vaguely deterministic in the idea that there should be a pre-existent set of ‘interpretations’ valid for the totality of signs we encounter in our daily intercourse with the world, interpretations out there waiting to be discovered or uncovered, so to speak. This is the method of analysis championed by Culler in The Pursuit of Signs and adopted by Barthes, for example, in his Mythologies: the essay ‘The Romans in Films’, with its various interpretations of hairstyles, is an excellent example of the code approach, and of its limitations  – the analyses proposed are sufficient, amusing, but idiosyncratic and in no way necessary. Moreover, and this is perhaps the most compelling reason of all for abandoning the notion of the code, it was shown in Chapter One that what determines the way a person interprets a given sign is a function of that person’s experience of the world, meaning that interpretation is differential

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and not uniform from person to person. Thus to equate a normal person’s semiotic activity  – interpretation, deliberate and self-controlled ratiocination – with some sort of code-breaking, cipher-cracking process is to play down or neglect entirely the familiar and customary properties of signs and the habitual nature of much of our interpretation of the world: during most of our waking moments and in most of our encounters with others the vast majority of the innumerable signs that we have to assimilate and act in accordance with are signs we have already dealt with on prior occasions, albeit in different contexts. They are signs we are usually familiar with, a fact which makes it hard to imagine that publicists and advertisers would fill their copy with specialized codings requiring painstaking investigation as this would surely defeat their object. Thus while it would be both unwise and contentious to argue that we don’t encounter signs with a predetermined conventional meaning  – codes, in other words  – or that we don’t ever encounter enigmatic signs that require careful and deliberate consideration, it cannot be the case that all familiar systematic signs function in this way. In this introduction to Peircean semiotics, therefore, the original Peircean term ‘legisign’, which has no atomistic implications and whose interpretation depends largely upon personal experience of the world and ‘collateral’, that is independent, knowledge of the object determining the sign, is preferred to that of ‘code’, which, in many semiotic contexts is a misnomer as we shall see in Chapter Five. This is no denial of the existence or importance of codes: a set of regulatory signs such as the Highway Code is clearly a code, and a necessary one, as are the Morse and the ASCII codes mentioned above. The point is that codes are special types of legisigns, so that we can summarize the position adopted in this book by stating that while all codes are legisigns, not all legisigns are codes: a legisign is simply a type of complex and most often familiar sign; and the vagueness encountered in images in particular has more to do with their relatively constrained informative capacity, to be examined in Chapter Six, than with secrecy, huggermugger or encryption.

2.4.2  Type, token/instance, mark Peirce returned to the problem of the description and classification of signs some four years after setting out his 1903 set of divisions, treating them, as Jonathan Culler remarks, as a zoologist might describe a species of animal in the text entitled ‘Pragmatism’ (EP2 402–3). He suggests that the reader should think through the problem and imagine in how many ways a sign can be classified much as a zoologist might classify a fish or a chemist some fatty body. As an experimentalist he is suggesting that like the zoologist and the chemist, the logician must if not conduct experiments on the sign at least examine its ‘essential nature’, or what he calls elsewhere the sign’s

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various possible ‘modes of being’, from a number of different perspectives; these being the various three-way divisions that are logically valid, including the one described in the present chapter. The sign in this particular case, he says, is essentially a significant quality – the qualisign described above – or something that ‘once uttered is gone forever’, namely, the sinsign – a cry of pain or a rap on the door, for example – or, third, what he calls an ‘enduring pattern’ – and once more offers the example of the English definite article. This for Peirce is the archetypal legisign, and can only be perceived in the replicas or instances that it governs, these being in turn identified by their specific qualisigns /ðə/ and /ði:/ regulated by the enduring pattern involving the nature of the initial sound of the following noun, as in the cat and the ant, respectively a consonant and a vowel. Other cases in this fascinating inventory concern the sign’s standing for some possibility of an object, as in the case of the comic-strip examined in Chapter One, or an existent object or event, as in the case of a photograph (Peirce doesn’t supply these examples in the text in question) or else some general type of object, as in the noun ‘marriage’. He then goes on to suggest a criterion that involves the way a sign represents its object, be this by resemblance or imitation or by being modified existentially by its object, as is a footprint in the sand or, finally, by some species of social or linguistic convention. Another criterion concerns the appeal of the sign: by feeling, as in the tone of the utterer’s voice, or by some form of action – throwing an egg at a politician, for example – or by some change of thought after due reflection (we examine this sort of sign in Chapter Six). Another criterion, also to be examined in Chapter Six, concerns the syntax of the sign, whether it is a single word or a proposition or, he suggests, Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall. Yet another would classify the sign as interrogatory, injunctive or declarative, the trichotomy or division which would examine the syntax of the military commands discussed in Chapter One, for example. This list of potential criteria, Peirce is anxious to emphasize, is in no way exhaustive. There are two remarkable aspects to this inventory. First, to the initial three criteria of 1903 he added a number of others, noting that there were many that he had not mentioned. Second, we see that they all occur in threes and are identified in order of increasing complexity which ranges from qualitative signs through existent, factual signs to signs of generalities, noting that there is possibly no limit to the criteria the semiotician might adopt in his study of signs. Indeed, Peirce went on to posit two classifications involving six divisions and a hypothetical classification employing ten divisions with the potential to yield sixty-six different classes of signs. In this introduction to Peirce we limit ourselves to just four criteria – the three of the 1903 classification plus one other – as these will offer a sufficiently broad conspectus of the basic principles governing the first branch of his philosophy of representation. In view of the importance of the organizational principle involved in these criteria,

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before turning to the second division established in 1903 the chapter to come reviews some of the philosophical and epistemological choices which led Peirce to envisage signs in this way. Beforehand, however, it is important to note that by 1907 Peirce had modified the names of the subclasses of his first division: not only had he identified two objects and three interpretants, but he had renamed the identifiers ‘qualisign’, ‘sinsign’ and ‘legisign’. The following extract from a letter to Lady Welby summarizes a later version of the first trichotomy with the legisign and replica here designated respectively as ‘type’ and ‘token’: A Sign may itself have a “possible” Mode of Being . . . Its Mode of Being may be Actuality: as with any barometer. Or Necessitant: as the word “the” or any other in the dictionary. For a “possible” Sign I have no better designation than a Tone, though I am considering replacing this by “Mark.” Can you suggest a really good name? An Actual sign I call a Token; a Necessitant sign, a Type. (SS 83) Thus the appellations ‘qualisign’, ‘sinsign’ and ‘legisign’ of the original 1903 classification have been replaced respectively by ‘tone’ or ‘mark’, the ‘token’ and the ‘type’. The latter two terms are well known in corpus linguistics, where the type-token ratio serves as a rough guide to the lexical density of a given text: the total of different forms in a text, its types, is divided by the total of forms, its tokens, the lexical density increasing as the difference between the two totals diminishes. Peirce also refers to this final subclass as ‘famisigns’, familiar signs, the regular, law-governed signs of everyday life, both the verbal and the non-verbal. In this book, however, we retain the original three.

2.5  Summary After having distinguished between verbal and non-verbal signs on the one hand, and between the ‘container’ and the ‘contents’ of signs on the other, the present chapter began the process of describing the first of three ways in which signs can be classified. Without attempting to determine just what a given sign signifies, we simply established the sign’s mode of being, that is the sort of thing it is as a sign. Methodologically, this involved locating types of non-verbal and verbal signs along a scale of three degrees of complexity, and produced a division of signs from the simplest, namely, the qualisign, the singular sign (or sinsign) to, finally, the most complex and by far the most interesting from the point of view of cultural and media research, the familiar, ‘every-day’ signs Peirce named legisigns, famisigns and, later, types. As the reader will have observed, the

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vocabulary employed is in many respects novel but far from cumbersome and masochistic. From a theoretical point of view, the chapter established the following points. First, the visible, non-verbal communication signs studied by social psychologists form a system of complex signs quite unlike those of language. Second, it was argued that such signs, and indeed language signs, too, are best seen not as species of codes but as legisigns, signs whose interpretation is governed by various types of regularity. Third, there are two important aspects of the classification outlined above that must be borne in mind. On the one hand, implicit in this first division, but explicitly stated in the chapter to follow, is the idea that the subclass lower down the scale is involved in the subclass above: every sinsign has its particular semiotic identity guaranteed by the specific set of qualisigns inhering in it. On the other, legisigns are general and immaterial, and so cannot be perceived as such, whence the horizontal line separating the sign from its object and interpretant on Figure 1.1 in Chapter One: verbal and non-verbal legisigns are materialized and appear to us through the existent nature of the medium (the air, the written page, a computer screen, etc.) as a special class of sinsign which Peirce named replicas. Legisigns, both verbal and non-verbal, govern innumerable instances; these, the replicas, are characterized by their specific clusters of qualisigns enabling us to identify them when we encounter them both in texts and images and in the infinite variety of encounters we make in real life. Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, when we interpret signs in the course of our everyday intercourse with others our interest in such signs does not stop at the level of the container, so to speak. In a later chapter we shall see how Peirce classified various types of sign: images, photographs, words, sentences, etc., according to the manner in which they convey information. These types are broad categories of signs, but when we are confronted by them the process of interpretation is not halted at the boundary of the type. Just as we enter the world of the protagonists when we read a novel or watch a film, so too do we enter the worlds represented by images of all kinds. In this case, we encounter pictorially represented signs which are far more complex than the images ‘containing’ them. This is the case, too, when we follow the plot of a film at the cinema: the film sequence projected onto the screen is a sinsign, were it not there would be nothing for us to see and we should be unable to watch it. The complex events it represents, on the other hand, are infused with the legisigns not only of a natural language such as English but also with multiple clusters of NVC legisigns without which there would be nothing to follow. One of the important lessons of Peirce’s first division or trichotomy is that it enables us to distinguish clearly between the two types of signs, which I have referred to less technically as the ‘container’ (a sinsign) and the ‘contents’ (clusters of diverse legisigns).

Chapter Three

Peirce By now the reader will have formed a rough idea of at least one of the governing principles of Peirce’s semiotics  – it seems to function in threes: three major correlates, three interpretants and three subclasses of sign. Consequently, the sections that follow offer a series of insights into Peirce’s general philosophy intended to prepare him for the chapters to come and to contextualize the material that has already been presented. We begin with a general presentation of Peirce the man and his thought: a short biography, his realism, idealism and empiricism and the role experience plays in his philosophy, after which we examine some of the principal ideas that formed his conception of semiotics as a form of logic. The final sections deal with conceptualizations of the sign and the exact structure of his three-way divisions or trichotomies, illustrating their implications for the heuristic used in this particular presentation of pictorial semiotics. The chapter thus attempts to justify and explain how an empty formalism such as logic might apply to the analysis and interpretation of pictorial data. Although the scope of the study precludes much contextualization of Peirce’s thought, comparison will on occasion be made in this chapter with the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure, with which the reader is probably more familiar.

3.1 The philosopher 3.1.1  Select biography Portrait, by William James: As for Charles Peirce, it is the most curious instance of talents not making a career. He dished himself at Harvard by inspiring dislike in Eliot.  .  . . He is now so mature in character, with rather fixed halfBohemian habits, and no habit of teaching, that it would be risky to

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appoint him. I yield to no one in admiration of his genius, but he is paradoxical and unsociable of intellect, and hates to make connection with anyone he is with.1 Self-portrait (Peirce to Lady Welby): Know that from the day when at the age of 12 or 13 I took up, in my elder brother’s room a copy of Whately’s “Logic,” and asked him what Logic was, and getting some simple answer, flung myself on the floor and buried myself in it, it has never been in my power to study anything,— mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economic [sic], the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic. (SS 85–6) [M]y habits of thinking are so different from the generality of ordinary people. Besides I am left-handed (in the literal sense) which implies a cerebral development and connexions of parts of the brain so different from those of right-handed people that the sinister is almost sure to be misunderstood and live a stranger to his kind, if not a misanthrope. This has, I doubt not, had a good deal to do with my devotion to the science of logic. (SS 96) Peirce was born in 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family of academics, his father, Benjamin Peirce, being the foremost mathematician of his age. Although primarily interested in logic he graduated summa cum laude with a BSc in Chemistry in 1863. He had already joined two years earlier what was known as the United States Coast Survey, a federal agency which funded research into such diverse fields as astronomy, geodesy, cartography and weights and measures. Peirce held several posts with the Survey over a period of 30 years, which permitted him to represent the agency at various scientific gatherings in Europe on 5 occasions during his time in office and also to nourish his enthusiasm for experimentation – his work on relative gravity involved the use of pendulums and he designed several himself. From 1879 to 1884 he held a lectureship in logic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, during which time he divorced his first wife Melusina and married Juliette Froissy, a Frenchwoman, two days later. Owing to an allegedly difficult character  – see the William James letter quoted above – the scandal of his remarriage and the nefarious intriguing of a jealous colleague, he was obliged to resign his lectureship in 1884. On inheriting from his parents in 1887 he bought a large but unprofitable farm in Milford, Pennsylvania, where he lived until the end of his life, with the exception of a bleak period in New York City from 1895 to 1898 when, according to his biographer, Joseph Brent, he almost died of malnutrition and neglect. 2 Barely making ends meet with donations from friends such as

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William James and his brother James Mills Peirce, and payments for articles and dictionary contributions – he had apparently prepared approximately 15,000 definitions for the Century Dictionary between 1883 and 1891 –, 3 he was obliged to take morphine during the last days of his life to allay the pain from cancer of the throat, to which he eventually succumbed, in abject poverty, in 1914. Such was the life of Charles Sanders Peirce, logician and polymath (Figure 3.1). His ‘career’ as a philosopher spanned almost 50 years during which Peirce specialists posit several developmental periods. One of his commentators, Murray Murphey, made the unsympathetic remark that although Peirce’s philosophical concepts evolved over four different stages the names that he gave them did not, to the consternation of his readers (1993, pp. 88–9). This is not entirely true, however, for Peirce expanded and renamed the logically vital concepts of ‘likeness’, ‘term’ and ‘proposition’ of 1867, to name but these three, by the more familiar icon (in the eighties), rheme and dicisign (early in the twentieth century), respectively. Moreover, Murphey seemed unable to appreciate first, that a theory developed painstakingly over such a period of time would necessarily undergo modifications; second, that the sources of Peirce’s work available at the time (1962) was in fact a remarkable but fallible reconstruction from literally thousands of manuscripts, namely the eight volumes of the Collected Papers; finally, that Peirce had to adapt his very complex theory to a variety of correspondents, a variety of readers (e.g. The Monist as opposed to the Popular Science

Figure 3.1  Peirce in 1859, courtesy of the Peirce Edition Project.

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Monthly), and a variety of audiences in his public lectures, with their widely differing degrees of philosophical and logical sophistication, whence the references to ‘sops to Cerberus’, simplifications which Peirce obviously deemed necessary in order to make himself understood. His career as a logician really took shape towards the end of the 1860s when he published an article in which he reworked Kant’s categories (CP 1.545–59), reducing the original twelve to three. He would continue to work on philosophical problems all his life, with logic to the fore, but, unfortunately for posterity and in spite of the encouragement of his friends, he was never able to convince a publisher to commission what might have been a clear, logically organized conspectus of his complex philosophical innovations. Moreover, if many of his manuscripts and the articles published in his lifetime were made available in the Collected Papers over the period 1935 to1958, the various stages of his thought and the chronology of the manuscripts, as mentioned earlier, were not always respected. This means that until recently it has not been possible to offer a definitive and entirely coherent description of his work. There is now, however, a chronological edition of his writings in the course of publication which will enable scholars to obtain a much clearer appreciation of the multifaceted nature of Peirce’s philosophical enterprise.4

3.1.2  The epistemological background As we saw in Chapter One, Peirce based his semiotics on logical as opposed to linguistic principles, and just why this should be so becomes a little clearer when we examine his philosophical credentials, which were founded on three basic philosophical positions: his adherence to a singular form of idealism, his realism and, finally, his empiricism and the way this determined his conception of the sign.

3.1.2.1  Idealism First, and this aspect of his intellectual background is vital for full understanding of his theory of how signs function and of the various types of signs it is possible to identify, he was, in a special sense of the term, an idealist. That is, he belonged to a philosophical tradition reaching back to Pythagoras via Newton, Descartes and Leibnitz, to name but these; that is, a tradition which holds that number is the key to our understanding of the world around us. In Peirce’s thought, this takes the form of a system of ‘categories’, three in all. He was aware of the embarrassment attendant upon the choice of the number three – its inevitable association with the Trinity and thence with theology and religion – but declared himself innocent of ‘triadomany’, that is, of attaching ‘a superstitious or fanciful importance to the number three’ (CP 1.568).

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3.1.2.2 Realism Second, under the influence of his father and as a consequence of his training in the laboratory and his researches on gravity, Peirce maintained throughout his life an experimentalist’s conception of science and he considered that the laws of physics, for example, are ‘real’ in the sense that behind the innumerable physical, chemical and biological ‘events’ there are laws which determine them, and that to affirm the contrary was to limit oneself to the slavish observation of raw data and to trust in a sort of blind positivism. He was thus a thorough-going realist: ‘I am myself a scholastic realist of a somewhat extreme stripe’, he claimed (CP 5.470). That is, he held that there was a reality ‘out there’ that was independent of minds, signs and, above all, language: reality is such as it is, independently of what anyone thinks it to be, and irrespective of the language they speak: Objects are divided into figments, dreams, etc., on the one hand, and realities on the other. The former are those which exist only inasmuch as you or I or some man imagines them; the latter are those which have an existence independent of your mind or mine or that of any number of persons. The real is that which is not whatever we happen to think it, but is unaffected by what we may think of it. (SW 80) The real is what he came to call the ‘Outward Clash’ – that unavoidable ‘other’ which, often unexpected and often unwanted, thrusts itself on our lives and about which we can do little or nothing in advance, like the footprint that Robinson Crusoe stumbled upon. From a semiotic point of view, this means that there is something ‘outside’ the sign which the sign does not determine, something which, in fact, determines the sign to be what it is and the way it is. There is, by this token, something outside language: rewriting a famous poststructuralist slogan, we might say: Il y a bien un hors-texte – there is indeed something outside the text.

3.1.2.3 Empiricism Finally, in addition to being a realist, Peirce was an empiricist, and while he disagreed with Locke, for example, on the way the mind obtains and processes the information it receives, like Locke he based the distinctions he made concerning what is thinkable upon experience, which he defined as the ‘cognitive resultant of our past lives’ (CP 2.84). 5 In other words, as we go through life each ‘portion’ of experience leaves its mark on our cognitive make-up, and contributes to our ability to adapt to each new situation: given his cognitive conception of the sign, our developing experience of the world is nothing less than a semiotic enrichment of our minds, and

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our ability to interpret the world around us is a function of our knowledge stored up from experience. This is Locke’s formulation: Let us then suppose the mind to be . . . white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected upon by ourselves, is that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have or can naturally have, do spring. (Locke, 1964, II, i, 2) In 1906, two centuries after the publication of The Essay Concerning Human Understanding and in the mature period of his semiotics and his pragmatism, Peirce was to return to this particular extract in the course of a contribution to the journal The Monist in which he was proposing definitions of the term ‘experience’, and saw fit to acclaim ‘Dr John Locke’s’ statement as a landmark in the history of philosophy: ‘This definition so formally stated, by such an authority, quite peerless for our present purpose, should be accepted as definite and as a landmark that it would be a crime to displace or disturb’ (CP 5.611).6

3.1.3  Mind, language and classification At this point it is interesting to compare Peirce and Saussure from an epistemological point of view, for each developed a theory of the sign on fundamentally contradictory principles. ‘Being a convinced Pragmatist in Semeiotic, naturally and necessarily nothing can appear sillier to me than rationalism’, wrote Peirce in a letter to Lady Welby in 1908 (SS 78). An empiricist and a career-long castigator of Cartesian doubt as a philosophical prime, Peirce would no doubt have been fundamentally suspicious of Saussure’s semiology, founded as it was on a modern version of rationalism. We can see this at work in the way Descartes in the second Meditation has concluded that the change of state of the piece of wax in front of his fire has brought him not only clearer knowledge of the wax but also clearer selfknowledge of the mind: No considerations can help towards my perception of the wax or any other body, without at the same time all going towards establishing the

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nature of my mind. And the mind has such further resources within itself from which its self-knowledge may be made more distinct, that the information thus derived from the body appears negligible. I have thus got back to where I wanted; I now know that even bodies [e.g. the wax] are not really perceived by the senses or the imaginative faculty, but only by intellect; that they are perceived not by being touched or seen, but by being understood. (Descartes, 1970, p. 75) Almost as a by-product of this reasoning, Descartes is suggesting that if we know the world, it is not from the evidence of the senses or from our imagination, but because the mind itself is already a system of classification – ‘bodies’ are known by the intellect – enabling us to understand the diversity of the extra-mental world of extension and matter. Through contact with the experiential world it is possible to clarify our ideas concerning it, but the ideas were there in the mind prior to any contact with that world. Now something of the same type of reasoning can be found in Saussure’s remarks concerning his distinction between langue, langage and parole. For Saussure, the exclusive object of a general linguistics is la langue (‘language’), which, he notes, is ‘a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural order into a mass that lends itself to no other classification’ (Saussure, 1974, p. 9, emphasis added).7 What Saussure has done is replace Descartes’ conception of mind as a system of classification by his own object of study, namely language: it is through language, not experience, that we have knowledge of the world. Language is thus an underlying, ‘subtle’ system of units, each associating an acoustic image with a concept (later referred to by Saussure in the last of his three courses respectively as signifier and signified); a system completely isolated from the interactive world of speech, a system from the description of which the notions of reference and referent are totally absent.8 Saussure further states that the nature of the relation between language and thought can be likened to a sheet of paper, with the signifier on one side and the signified on the other: ‘Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound’.9 In short, Saussure, too, is concerned with the relation between language, thought and knowledge, and his theory of the sign turns out to be no less a twentieth-century avatar of rationalism than Chomsky’s conception of ‘Cartesian’ generative grammar. Furthermore, in a highly influential move, Saussure suggested that, since the linguistic sign was arbitrary, and in this respect realized better than any other type of sign the ideal of the semiological process, linguistics should be taken as the ‘master-pattern’ for

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semiology.10 Nothing, of course, could be further from Peirce’s empiricist conception of the sign. Turning to the semiotics in this scheme of things, we find that it is directly founded upon Peirce’s conception of phenomenology, by which he understood the study of whatever can be thinkable, or, as he put it, the study of whatever can be ‘present to the mind’. Phenomenology, and this is where Peirce’s Pythagorean-type idealism enters the picture, depends for its theoretical foundations upon mathematics: this was realized most spectacularly in his system of three categories which he named ‘cenopythagorean’ – that is the ‘common’ categories – for they were based upon the concept of number after the manner of Pythagoras. This means that not only the way signs are classified, but also the way they are seen to function is largely dependent upon number, and in particular, as the reader will have noticed, upon the number three. And it is mainly these three aspects of his intellectual background – his realism, his empiricism and his idealism – which determined his semiotics to be the particular type of logic illustrated in the description of semiosis in Chapter One, a logic whose constituents required painstaking and, for the reader, sometimes surprising definitions.11

3.2  Inference and perception Given their importance as the fundamental qualitative constituents of still imagery, we turn, now, to the Peircean explanation of just how it is that we interpret the ‘lines, forms and colours’ which constitute the basis of a visual semiotics. The expression was Barthes’s, introduced in the course of his discussion of a rhetoric of the image. For Barthes the non-coded denoted image is what is left of an advertisement or a piece of pictorial propaganda, for example, when the meaning  – the image’s cultural, symbolic or ideologically coded message – has been mentally expunged or ‘evicted’: [The literal message] is first of all, so to speak, a message by eviction, constituted by what is left in the image when the signs of connotation are mentally deleted . . . This evictive state naturally corresponds to a plenitude of virtualities .  .  . [T]he letter of the image corresponds in short to the first degree of intelligibility (below which the reader would perceive only lines, forms, and colours). (Barthes, 1977, 42) According to this view lines, forms and colours are a semiotic bedrock layered beneath ‘the first degree of intelligibility’. The Peircean view is very different, but before dealing with the specifics, a little background information is in order. This is not semiotics, but, rather, the theory for which Peirce is perhaps best known, his pragmatism. Peirce took over

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Kant’s contention that the purpose of the many conceptions we acquire of the world was to reduce the multitude of external stimuli to the unity of a proposition, since, like Locke before him, and indeed Aristotle, he held the proposition – in its simplest form composed of a subject followed by a predicate, for example Peirce will overcome – to be the minimal complete unit of knowledge. Just how the proposition is derived from sense data is a complex affair which involves at least two forms of reasoning, hence of logic. One of these Peirce considers a-critical, that is beyond our conscious control, the other he holds to be conscious and therefore open to control and correction. As far as the first case is concerned, the intellect directly integrates the disparate mass of external stimuli in the form of sense data, over which, quite naturally, it has no control, since these are never known directly, that is immediately. The construct that is known, however, is the percept, that is what Peirce calls the ‘evidence of the senses’ (CP 2.140–3), which the intellect records a-critically as positive, fallible but incorrigible and irreversible perceptual facts. Take, for example, my impression of having heard someone coughing in the next room: this is a perceptual judgement on my part. The perceptual fact involved here is positive in that the belief actually occurred;12 it is fallible to the extent that the sound I thought I heard may have been the noise of a car, a chair squeaking or some other cause; it is incorrigible in that I cannot change the original perceptual judgement, though I may subsequently learn that it was in fact a distant thunder-clap; similarly, the fact that I heard what I thought was a cough is irreversible, and can in no way be excised from my experience, even though I may later learn or come to realize that the sound I heard had a completely different origin. And even if the whole thing was nothing but my imagination playing tricks on me, it nevertheless is the case that I cannot reverse the original perceptual fact: it does not depend in the slightest upon what I may think of it – it was and is real. As Peirce says, ‘The perceptual facts are a very imperfect record of the percepts; but I cannot go behind that record. As for going back to the first impressions of sense, as some logicians [e.g. Locke] recommend me to do, that would be the most chimerical of undertakings’ (CP 2.141). Avoiding the vacuous psychologism of attempting to scrutinize the original sense data, Peirce holds that in some unfathomable way we experience the percept and that we think of it in the form of a positive proposition which we cannot help thinking to be true: the best we can do is unconsciously test the evidence of our senses by means of inferences. Such inferences form the basis of our future actions  – in the case of the coughing I might have judged there to be an intruder in my house and called the police – and constitute a class of no less unconscious judicative inferences which Peirce calls ‘perceptual judgments’, since the process involves what amounts to an inference concerning the nature of the percept.

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It is, in other words, the non-conscious framing of a hypothesis.13 This triadic reasoning scheme explains his persistent anti-Cartesianism: since perceptual judgements are such as they are, positively and irreversibly, they are not open to the questions of truth and falsehood that are a feature of epistemological doubt: ‘It follows, then, that the perceptual judgments are the first premisses of all our reasonings and that they cannot be called in question’ (CP 5.116), to which we might add the following laconic comment: ‘There are mental operations that are as completely beyond our control as the growth of our hair’ (CP 5.130). The upshot of this is that a perceptual judgement is a form of reasoning, and thus a basic type of interpretation, and we make sense of the necessarily qualitative constituents of the variety of imagery with which we are confronted thousands of times daily through this particular form of inferential activity which he calls abduction (to be discussed in Chapter Six), that is the framing of hypotheses. But not only are we continually hypothesizing as we attentively examine a painting on the wall of a museum or gallery, or when we listen to a piece of music in the concert hall, for example, but this ‘perceptual’ hypothesizing is no less active at the earlier stage in the process when we begin to integrate the various lines, forms and colours of the painting or attend carefully to the various strands of the mass of sound produced by the orchestra. And the passage from perceptual judgement to complete aesthetic or ideological interpretation is continuous; thus the passage to intelligibility is continuous, too. To illustrate the way even perceptual judgements constitute a form of interpretation Peirce sometimes cited examples of optical illusions. One such case is the Schroeder stair (Figure 3.2). In a public lecture Peirce described to the audience a serpentine line drawing used by his father in a mathematical demonstration, but which can also be perceived as a stone wall; that is, he claimed, there are two ways of interpreting the percepts stimulated by the drawing: ‘But the very decided preference of our perception for one mode of classing the percept shows

Figure 3.2  The Schroeder stair.

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that this classification is contained in the perceptual judgment’ (EP2 228). He went on to add a similar remark concerning the Schroeder stair: So it is with that well-known unshaded outline figure of a pair of steps seen in perspective. We seem at first to be looking at the steps from above; but some unconscious part of the mind seems to tire of putting that construction upon it and suddenly we seem to see the steps from below, and so the perspective judgement and the precept itself seem to keep shifting from one general aspect to the other and back again. In all such visual illusions, of which two or three dozen are well known, the most striking thing is that a certain theory of interpretation of the figure has all the appearance of being given in perception. The first time it is shown to us, it seems as completely beyond the control of rational criticism as any percept is; but after many repetitions of the now familiar experiment, the illusion wears off, becoming first less decided, and ultimately ceasing completely. This shows that these phenomena are true connecting links between abductions and perceptions. (Ibid.) Humans naturally tend to strive after knowledge and understanding, and we never stop at the semiotic bedrock of a pictorial document composed of lines, forms and colours  – on the contrary, as in any Rorschach test, we see, for example, faces and expressions in a multitude of visual media; some are able to divine the outline of a horse in a line drawing, while others recognize the heads of Red Indians in clouds. These are all examples of how our experience of the world makes it possible for our perceptual judgements to involve some form of interpretation. Thus, returning once more to the strip cartoon discussed in Chapter One, we find that we don’t just see lines, forms and colours as perceptions in a picture, but abductively construe or interpret them as faces, expressions, gestures, varieties of clothing, or, in other frames, chairs and tables in a restaurant.

3.3  Complexity and the categories It remains, now, to familiarize the reader with the Peircean concept of the category, and to examine the influence of the three he identified on his conception of the sign. As was stated above, Peirce founded his semiotics upon his theory of phenomenology, which in turn was based upon number: Having thus by observation satisfied ourselves that there are these three categories of elements of phenomena, let us endeavour to analyze the nature of each, and try to find out why there should be these three categories and no others. This reason, when we find it, ought to be

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interesting to mathematicians; for it will be found to coincide with the most fundamental characteristic of the most universal of the mathematical hypotheses, I mean that of number. (CP 1.421, emphasis added) This raises a number of questions of theoretical interest. For example, why should one branch of philosophy be based upon another, and how might phenomenology and its categories contribute to our understanding of what constitutes a sign? The answers to these questions constitute an important approach to the general philosophy in which Peirce’s semiotics is nested.

3.3.1  Architectonic Briefly, like Locke and Kant before him, one of Peirce’s principal philosophical concerns was to rebut the doctrine of scepticism that had exercised European thought since the publication in Paris of the Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, in 1562.14 In this respect, Peirce was initially a self-confessed Kantian, but eventually came to repudiate much of what he had learned from his mentor. One notable exception, however, concerns Kant’s ‘architectonic’ theory of the sciences, the idea that the various branches of philosophy had to be organized and interrelated in a rational manner. In the penultimate chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes: By the term Architectonic I mean the art of constructing a system. Without systematic unity, our knowledge cannot become a science; it will be an aggregate, not a system. . . . Reason cannot permit our knowledge to remain in an unconnected and rhapsodistic state, but requires that the sum of our cognitions should constitute a system. (A831/B859)15 This same architectonic principle  – a rather unfashionable concept in our age of the rhizome  – guided Peirce throughout his working life: he organized the various domains of valid scientific enquiry into a hierarchical structure in which the more general sciences ‘nourish’ the more specialized by providing them with their scientific bases. This, for example, is how he saw the relation between semiotics, which as we saw earlier is simply a form of logic, and phenomenology: ‘Logic is the theory of self-controlled, or deliberate, thought; and as such, must appeal to ethics for its principles. It also depends upon phenomenology and mathematics’ (CP 1.191). Similarly, he saw the internal relations holding between the three branches of his philosophy of representation which govern the organization of this book in the same manner, where the later branches  – Critic and Speculative Rhetoric  – are more specialized than the earlier Speculative Grammar (ibid.).

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In this way, Peirce is describing what amounts to a ‘dependency’ principle governing relations between the various types of science. With typical nineteenth-century enthusiasm, he divided the extant sciences into various categories. Following Bentham he named the basic sciences, to which mathematics and philosophy belong, the ‘cenoscopic sciences’, since they establish the scientific principles common to all types of research; these are followed by the ‘idioscopic’, or special sciences, such as linguistics, physics, astronomy and art history, for example: ‘that is, the special sciences, depending upon special observation, which travel or other exploration, or some assistance to the senses, either instrumental or given by training, together with unusual diligence, has put within the power of its students’ (PWP 66). Thus Peirce defines logic in two senses, a broad and a narrow: ‘[Logic] is in short The Philosophy of Representation’ (CP 1.539): this is logic in the broad sense. The first six chapters of this book deal with the basic concepts defined within the speculative grammar, which corresponds to the conventional view of Peirce’s semiotics. There will be a brief excursion into the critic branch – logic in the narrow sense – in Chapter Six, while Chapter Seven examines certain aspects of his speculative rhetoric in their relation to what is, in fact, one of the special sciences, a rhetoric of the image. In each case, the more specialized branches depend upon, ‘inherit’ or ‘borrow’ principles defined earlier in the hierarchy. The categories he identified were derived from those of Kant, which were a set of properties that could be predicated of, or said to be the attributes of, all the objects of experience as they are present to the mind, irrespective of whether they exist or not. My green felt pen will serve as an example once more. As we saw in Chapter Two, the simplest properties that can be ‘predicated’ of it, in the Kantian sense, are: it is hollow, it is cylindrical, it is green, etc. Working from a table of judgements, Kant had established a framework of 12 such ‘universal’ and immutable cognitive categories to whose structure he thought that the objects of experience must conform. Following Hegel’s dialectic conception of the thought process, Peirce rejected this immutability, and introduced dynamism into the thought process by means of the role he attributed to the sign in the acquisition of knowledge. He nevertheless retained throughout his philosophical enterprise Kant’s concept of the category, the number of which he reduced to three: I essay an analysis of what appears in the world. It is not metaphysics that we are dealing with: only logic. Therefore, we do not ask what really is, but only what appears to everyone of us in every minute of our lives. I analyze experience, which is the cognitive resultant of our past lives, and find in it three elements. I call them Categories. Would I could render them to the reader as vivid, as undeniable, as rational as they are to me. (CP 2.84)

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This, for the novice Peircean, is probably the most difficult part of the theory to grasp, as, unfortunately, Peirce’s categories are initially anything but vivid. Adding the Anglo-Saxon suffix –ness, meaning ‘the state, or condition, of’, to the ordinals first, second and third, he called them Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.16 With their distinctive initial capitals these appellations are proper nouns, one of several members of a subclass to be examined in the next chapter, namely the index. They represent collectively Peirce’s way of indexing ‘what appears in the world’, that is what can be present to the mind; in other words, they represent his way of bringing order to the immeasurable variety of the thinkable. Thus while his concept of sign furnished the means of acquiring knowledge, the categories were an attempt to isolate the nature of what could be known. Since by definition knowledge can only be acquired by semiosis, it follows that the categories represent the three types of elements that can be present to the mind, that is those that can appear ‘to everyone of us in every minute of our lives’.17 To simplify, the category of Firstness, which he likened to freedom and independence, covers qualities, properties, feelings; Secondness, which he likened to effort and resistance, covers the phenomena of individuality, fact, existence and brute action; Thirdness, which he assimilated to generality, mediation and continuity, covers the complex phenomena of system, intelligence, thought, and, of course, signs. These distinctions can be summarized on Table 3.1, the penultimate column of which exhibits the different states of my felt pen while the last contains examples from an exhaustive description given by Peirce in a letter to Lady Welby (SS 23–32):

Table 3.1  A table of the categories Category

Examples

Thirdness

law

Secondness fact Firstness

general

necessity

pen as sign

purpose

individual

existence

individual pen

effort/resistance

possibility

greenness, etc. feeling

quality characteristic

3.3.2  Quality, existence, generality There remain two fundamental aspects of the semiotics to explore, neither of which would have been comprehensible without an acquaintance with the theory of the categories. The first is the process of replication examined briefly in Chapter Two, while the second amounts to a principle of implication which sees the three trichotomies on Table 3.2 below more like sets of Russian dolls than discrete compartments. As the reader will

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Table 3.2  The three subclasses of signs Criteria Category

S

Thirdness

Legisign

Secondness

Sinsign

Firstness

Qualisign

O–S

S–I

have understood, while the implication principle determines the relations between the categories, a dependency principle governs those holding between all forms of scientific activity.

3.3.2.1  Legisign and replica As we saw at the end of Chapter Two, in his 1907 paper ‘Pragmatism’, Peirce described the members of the first trichotomy thus: ‘[They are] of the nature of a significant quality, or something that is once uttered and is gone forever, or an enduring pattern, like our sole definite article’ (EP2  403). We understand now that each subclass of sign corresponds to one or other of the three categories: a qualisign, the ‘significant quality’ is a case of Firstness, the sinsign – a sign produced and then gone forever, like Friday’s footprint – is a case of Secondness, while language signs, which necessarily partake of an enduring pattern, are cases of Thirdness. Why should Peirce wish to include in this scheme the subclass of ‘replicas’ or ‘instances’? It is at this point that we take up his virtually career-long assault on nominalism, which was first presented in a fully developed form in the 1871 review of Fraser’s The Works of George Berkeley,18 and recurred frequently in his discussions of logic. He suggests, in a short intellectual biography, for example, that ‘everybody ought to be a nominalist at first, and to continue in that opinion until he is driven out of it by the force majeure of irreconcilable facts’ (CP 4.1), and in one of the Lowell lectures delivered in 1903, he takes up the problem of scepticism and the attempts by Descartes, Locke and others to refute it, and makes the following sweeping statement: Of course, therefore, as far as they believed in anything at all, the Sceptics were nominalists .  .  . In short there was a tidal wave of nominalism. Descartes was a nominalist. Locke and all his following, Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, and even Reid, were nominalists. Leibnitz was an extreme nominalist . . . Kant was a nominalist . . . Thus, in one word, all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic. (CP 1.18–19)

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It should be noted, to begin with, that the term ‘nominalism’ has both a restricted and a broad meaning. In the narrow sense, emanating from a dispute that much exercised the Scholastics, it referred to the doctrine which holds that things, objects etc., in the world are particulars, whereas the properties that are predicable of them are universals. The ‘great controversy’, as Peirce puts it, arose over the status of the universals themselves, with the nominalists stating that they were simply names, whence the term ‘nominalism’, and had no existence independently of being thought, and the realists of the opposing faction claiming that universals had a reality outside the mind, both in the particulars of which they were predicated and in themselves. Thus for the nominalists, early exponents of the ‘linguistic turn’, the relation between particular and universal was simply the specification of the subject-predicate, or thing-property relation, which, once established, produces a proposition. Since there are no propositions ‘out in the world’, it is the perceiving mind that establishes the subject-predicate relation, hence the nominalist claim that the universal-predicate-property was a mind-dependent and, therefore, linguistic, convenience. The second, related, meaning of the term holds that the general terms by means of which objects in the world, that is particulars, are named, are once again nothing but a linguistic convenience whereby the objects in question are sorted into classes according to the similarities they are perceived to exhibit. Now, since similarity is not a property of the objects themselves but a construction of the mind, the perceived similarities are held not to exist outside the mind and therefore to have no independent reality.19 Thus either the universal properties have no independent existence at all, or else only exist in the beholding mind. The first case is ‘true’ nominalism, the second an allied form, conceptualism (cf. Haack, 1977). In Peirce’s anti-nominalist conception of semiotics we would say that all real, general legisigns ‘govern’ innumerable perceivable instances of it (there are at least 14,984 occurrences of the definite article in the particular oral component of the BNC discussed in Chapter One). These, as we saw earlier, Peirce called ‘replicas’, while the type/token ratios of texts studied by corpus linguists translate into Peircean theory as legisign/ replica ratios. This is what Peirce means by Thirdness: the definite article, like every linguistic form, is perfectly general, whereas we apprehend the existent occurrences of the, its replicas, in the tangible perceivable world of Secondness. Similarly, the NVC legisigns described in Chapter Two govern the actual instances seen, for example, in the comic-strip from Chapter One and in Mathew Brady’s photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln discussed in Chapter Two. It is important to realize, then, that these replicas, or instances, are a special class of sinsign, but as sinsigns they would have no significance if there were no legisign ‘above’ them to govern them, and thus to guarantee the way they signify. 20 Similarly, for us to be able to recognize each distinct replica it has to embody its specific set of qualisigns specified by the legisign.

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We can therefore distinguish between the sign and its occurrences in terms of ‘mode of being’: since the legisign is perfectly general, its mode of being is that of Thirdness and generality. On the other hand, the mode of being of the medium or channel through which the sign is necessarily communicated if it is to function at all is unavoidably existential, material, and, as a consequence, is firmly anchored in the universe of Secondness. This is why Peirce clearly distinguishes between such sinsigns as a sketch, a cry of pain, a cough and Friday’s footprint on the one hand, and replicas, tokens or instances of ‘patterning’ legisigns on the other: in the first case the meaning of the sign is restricted to the here and now, in the second the meaning comes from ‘above’, from the ‘roof’, to repeat a metaphor from Chapter Two, that is, from the legisign which governs it.

3.3.2.2 The implication principle It was stated above that Peirce derived the bases of logic from his conception of phenomenology. Now the fundamental operation involved in Peirce’s phenomenology was a form of mental separation which enabled him to identify the three categories to be identified. The principle involved was established as early as 1867 in the article entitled ‘On a New List of Categories’, and figured prominently in Peirce’s methodology in his ensuing research in logic. 21 At the time, Peirce had conceived a system of five categories, of which two were subsequently discarded. The three remaining, identified at the time as quality, relation and representation, and ultimately destined to form the basis of his entire phenomenology, were shown by this process of mental separation or abstraction which he called ‘precision’ to be organized hierarchically in such a way that quality could be abstracted, or prescinded, from relation, but not relation from quality; similarly, relation could be abstracted from representation, but not representation from relation. In other words, Peirce suggested in 1867, we can think of quality independently of relation, but the conception of relation necessarily presupposes quality (which of course includes form, or shape); similarly, we can conceive of relation independently of representation, but representation necessarily involves, or presupposes relation and, by extension, quality. For example, I can abstract or prescind the colour red from the circle in a warning sign from the Highway Code, but I cannot abstract a warning sign from the colour red. It follows from this that the entire logic as it subsequently evolved functions on a presuppositional basis imposed by the phenomenology, in which elements corresponding to Firstness (e.g. qualisigns) are prescindable from, and, conversely, presupposed by those corresponding to Secondness (e.g. sinsigns and replicas), and in which the latter are themselves similarly prescindable from, and presupposed by, those corresponding to Thirdness (e.g. legisigns). It is by virtue of this principle, with its three discrete but interlocking categorial divisions, first mooted explicitly in the mid-1860s,

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that within each trichotomy each ‘level’ presupposes, or implies, the one(s) below: thus a legisign presupposes a certain type of sinsign, which we now know to be a replica of that legisign, while no sinsign would be perceivable without its identifying qualisigns, qualisigns which have no independent existence. This principle, which resembles the nesting of the well-known Russian dolls, has far-reaching implications for the chapters that follow, and is illustrated with a concrete example in the final section below.

3.3.3  Two conceptualizations of the sign 3.3.3.1  Saussure Initially, Saussure defined the sign as the arbitrary, that is unmotivated, association of a concept and an acoustic image (Figure 3.3), but in the final course in Geneva he replaced these terms respectively by the more abstract ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. As we saw above, this particular conceptualization of the sign is fundamentally rationalist in outlook: he compared the sign to a sheet of paper with thought on one side and ‘sound’ on the other. This is the scheme represented on Figure 3.3. The importance of such a remark is obvious: the Saussurean sign enters the real world as a unity of sound and sense, from which nothing can be removed and to which nothing can be added. As is to be expected from a rationalist conception of the sign, it arrives with its meaning in a given communicative situation, as if in a capsule: complete, inviolable and, theoretically if not practically, inaccessible to elements of the context, including the sign user. And language (la langue) being an institution and a social convention, one supposes that in any given communicative situation both signifier and signified have the same value for speaker and addressee. In terms of Peirce’s categories described above, Saussure’s sign is locked in the universe of Thirdness, of generality and of convention, remote from the untidy and irrepressible world of ‘speech’ (la parole) and Secondness. It was on the basis of this association that the first attempts to extend Saussure’s linguistic system to the analysis of pictorial signs were founded,

Concept Image acoustique

Figure 3.3  Saussure’s sign.

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most notably by Roland Barthes: he had established his corpus of signifiers in ‘Rhetoric of the image’, for example, and went on to identify their associated signifieds. As we saw in the Introduction, it was Jacques Derrida who called a halt to this structuralist ‘pursuit of the signified’ when he enjoined semiologists to abandon their search for the signified, a gloomy methodology founded upon the ‘nostalgia for an origin’, and to engage instead in a more joyful form of interpretation which posited a certain conception of ‘free play’. 22

3.3.3.2 Peirce Peircean semiosis is quite different with its single sign, two objects and three interpretants – less economical at first sight, perhaps, but anything but static. Figure 3.4, already encountered in Chapter One, has been simplified to represent simply the dynamic object, the sign and the dynamic interpretant. The way a sign functions and its meaning as illustrated in this schema, are the products of a dynamic process beginning in the mind of an initial ‘agent’ that Peirce refers to as the ‘utterer’ located outside the sign and terminating (temporarily, as the final interpretant is a being in futuro, remember, and the chain of interpretation is theoretically, if not practically, continuous) in the effect it produces on a second agent outside the sign, in this case the interpreter. Unlike what we find in the Saussurean sign, in Peirce’s case the meaning originates outside the sign both in the mind of the speaker and in the dynamic object structuring the sign, and Peircean semiosis being anything but deterministic, the meaning of the sign is not necessarily the same for both protagonists of the speech act: although he believed that there was a form of communion between the utterer and the ‘auditor’ in any case of signification, he never implied that they would necessarily share the same experience. Recall two of the ‘naïve’ definitions of the sign discussed in Chapter One, namely that the sign is a vehicle conveying information into the mind (CP 1.339) and is something by knowing which we know something more (SS 31–2). Meaning begins

Object

Interpretant

Sign

Figure 3.4  Peircean semiosis.

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outside the sign, which conveys it into the mind as a surplus of knowledge, and to function at all, it has to transit through the universe of Secondness. Moreover, although Peirce considered language as the highest form of signification, he never saw it, as Saussure seemed to have done, as the visible ‘face’ of thought. For Peirce, thought is independent of its diverse perceivable realizations, that is, independent of its linguistic, pictorial, tactile and olfactory modalities of mediation. On the other hand, to be communicated, as we have seen, it requires an existential medium. There is, thus, yet another difference between the two conceptions of the sign and this, too, is a function of Peirce’s category of Secondness. Clearly, in the passage from the object to the interpretant there is much room for discrepancy and ‘play’: as mentioned above, the two agents involved in a semiosis will possibly have vastly different experiences of life and language, even if they both speak the same one. And this difference in linguistic experience is a potential source of mistakes and misunderstandings, and of what linguists interested in language evolution identify as a process of reanalysis. For example, at some stage in English, and not necessarily recently, the semi-auxiliary be going to was reanalysed or reinterpreted over a number of stages as having a temporal meaning in parallel with its spatial meaning. Compare utterances (1) and (2) in which the locatives to London and there are present, with (3), which has no locative, and in which the preposition to can be interpreted as a sign of purpose: (1) I’m going to London [to visit the Queen] (2) I’m going there [to visit the Queen] (3) Stage 1: I’m going [to visit the Queen] Subsequently, the full verb go (which originally meant to walk) was reanalysed as a semi-auxiliary, as indicated by the placement of the brackets, with the preposition to ‘demoted’ as an enclitic with going as its host: (4) Stage 2: [I’m going to] visit the Queen This evolution was complete when the purpose involved not only dynamic processes such as ‘visit the Queen’, but also stative processes not involving directionality, such as ‘like the Queen’: (5) Stage 3: [I’m going to] like the Queen Over generations, and in any communicative activity which, by the nature of things, has to pass through an existential medium, this type of reinterpretation becomes a natural product both of the potential for ‘play’ and discrepant understanding, and of the disparity in speakers’ personal experience of language and the world. Secondness is the defining characteristic of a medium in which error is possible, and without the

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possibility of error, misinterpretation, such reanalysis and evolution – as evidenced by such a simple lexical process as folk etymology, for example, and the case of be going to examined above – would be impossible. Each speaker brings to the speech act his unique experience of the world and tries as best he can to make sense of what the other is saying. The Peircean conceptualization of the sign suggests, then, that language is an aggregate, indeed a quite ragged aggregate, not an inviolable, perfect system waiting to be discovered by the diligent linguist, even less a pre-existent, universally shared whole that speakers carry around in their heads. It is surely an aggregate, rather, which each of us infers differentially from the imperfect data – as the extract from the BNC in Chapter One shows – to which we are perforce exposed. In a universe other than the existential, reanalysis and language change would be impossible. Thus this non-deterministic play which is ‘written into’ Peircean semiosis encourages development and evolution, for within his theory of the three categories Peirce has conceptualized the dynamic nature of knowledge acquisition by anchoring sign and semiosis in the real, that is existential, world of Secondness; a dynamic, ever-changing world, and most often not accessible in its totality.

3.4  Methodology and the 1903 classification of signs In Chapter One we determined the ‘position’ and function of the three essential correlates involved in sign-action and established the definition of the sign with respect to these other two correlates, namely the object and the interpretant. However, it is not sufficient to define the way a sign functions in the process of sign-action, and, therefore, remembering that the Peircean system precludes establishing in advance what the interpretant of a given sign may be, it remains for the analyst to be able to identify the sort of things that can function as signs. We need to be able to classify all signs, in other words. As in any classification, we need a set of criteria and a scale of values along which to place the various items entering into the classification. For example, if we wished to buy a car we might select, as criteria, the make (Rolls-Royce, Renault, Fiat, Ford, etc.), the car-type (4WD, coupé, saloon, etc.), colour, cost, engine size and type, and, possibly, consumption in town and on the road. In similar fashion, Peirce, in 1903, set out a typology by means of which to identify and classify the immense variety of signs that we encounter daily. The criteria he set up were as follows in this order: first, the nature of the sign itself, that is the complexity of the sign qua sign – what Peirce called the sign’s ‘mode of being’, this being the division examined in Chapter Two; second, the nature of the relation holding between the sign

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and the object that it represents, that is the sign’s mode of representation; and, finally, the information value of the sign, that is the extent to which various types of sign  – pictorial signs in particular  – afford information about the world we live in. The scales along which a given sign is placed with respect to these criteria, unlike those involved in the choice of a car, of course, are identical for all three criteria, are also three in number, and represent the increasing degrees of complexity we introduced in a non-theoretical manner in Chapter Two but which we now know to be governed by the categories. This provides us with a simple semiotic ‘metric’, namely a three by three table of nine cells, and a simple methodology with considerable heuristic value: we examine the various types of pictorial (and verbal) sign encountered and see just how they relate to each of these three criteria. In Table 3.2 the labels S, O–S, S–I represent, respectively, the sign considered in its own right, the nature of the relation holding between the sign and its object, that is the way it represents its object, and, finally, the nature of a sign’s informative potential. The order in which these criteria appear on the table is a theoretical necessity which will shortly become obvious. The scale of increasing complexity is represented in the column on the left by the references to the three categories, the most complex, Thirdness, being located at the top of the table. To summarize, then, Firstness covers potentialities such as properties, qualities, etc., that is entities which have no independent existence; Secondness corresponds to individuals and the individual facts concerning them, whereas Thirdness corresponds to generalities, that is entities which transcend the individual and his existential world. Consider, one final time, the example of the felt pen. It is composed of a number of qualities: it is green, cylindrical, reasonably resistant to pressure, hollow, etc. These qualities, which don’t exist in their own right, are examples of Firstness: for example, I can’t ‘separate’ or abstract the green from the pen, that is, I can’t hold greenness in my hand or even touch it. A greater degree of complexity is involved in the fact that I cannot give the felt pen to more than one person at a given time: I can break it in half and give a piece to two different people, but in its singularity it can only be given whole to a singular receiver: this ‘individual’ pen qua entity thus belongs to the category of Secondness, and unlike the qualities inhering in it, the pen possesses an independent existence. However, imagine that students who know I use this type of pen arrive in the seminar room and see one lying on a table: one might possibly say ‘Ah, I see a certain semiotics teacher has been in here’ or some such interpretant remark. This means that the pen no longer functions simply as an individual instrument to write with, but as a sign, something altogether more complex, and available not just to one person but to many people at the same time: the student might repeat his remark to family or friend over the telephone, and even, to the

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immense pleasure of internauts the world over, post it on Facebook. In this case the pen would belong in the category of Thirdness, where it loses its individuality and singularity: it transcends its particular existence and becomes a member of a general class, the class of signs. When the felt pen functions as a sign the qualities we recognize in it are qualisigns while the pen in its individuality is a sinsign, like Friday’s footprint. If, on the other hand, it were a conventional part of some simple purposive code, combinable with other such ‘signs’, this singular felt pen would become the replica of a (very simple) legisign. The semiotic methodology, then, in short, is as follows: we proceed through the three columns, these are the ‘trichotomies’  – the vertically organized three-way divisions on Table 3.2 – identifying the characteristics to be found in all our examples and then filling in the cells. Note, however, that more important than identifying the appropriate cell is the heuristic reasoning that enables us to do so in the first place.

3.4.2  Putting it all together We conclude this methodological discussion by examining a concrete example of how the various levels in the table above ‘cooperate’ to produce a compound sign. Figure 3.5 is a traffic signal from the Highway Code indicating part of the thoroughfare reserved for buses, pedal cycles and taxis moving in the same direction as the rest of the traffic. The upper part of the panel indicates a with-flow bus, cycle and taxi lane; underneath another part of the panel indicates the times and days of application. An

Figure 3.5  A road traffic sign.

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inventory of the semiotic components of this familiar road sign yields the following set. To begin with, two obvious pictorial signs, the stylized representations of bus and pedal cycle. However, in spite of being composed of lines, forms and colours they represent in a way that a non-literate child would understand classes of vehicles, not single exemplars: their characteristic shapes are thus determined by the generality of a legisign. Note that they could also function as verbal legisigns in some modern – but highly improbable  – system of hieroglyphs, as the ‘pictorial’ representations of the initial phonemes /b/ in /bʌs/ and /s/ in /saIkl/, for example. The spatial organization of the panel is also significant: the less immediately obvious partition of the top panel into left and right. To the left we have the lane reserved for the vehicles indicated; to the right the remaining single lane available to other traffic (double or triple arrows pointing in the same direction would indicate the number of lanes available if there were more than one, while these would point in the opposite direction if the reserved lane were contra-flow). The organization of the panel, its shape and its component colours are all characteristic qualities or properties of such a sign which is identifiable precisely by virtue of these specific properties. Like the submorphemic differentials examined briefly in Chapter Two, these properties are determined by the legisign they identify. Finally there are the familiar legisigns of the English language: the common noun ‘taxi’, the abbreviated forms of the proper nouns Monday and Friday and the simplified ante meridiem abbreviation (minus the usual punctuation). Other legisigns, recognizable by their distinctive shapes, are the numbers ‘7’ and ‘10’ – these are logograms, that is single non-verbal signs representing the words ‘seven’ and ‘ten’ respectively –, and the hyphen indicating spatially – that is placed diagrammatically between the two sets of limits  – the period within which the provisions specified by the sign are in operation. Finally, the unusual rectangular shape of the sign (most positive instructions to motorists are round) and its blue background (blue with white markings on the original, obviously) indicating that this is a positive directive, not a prohibitive one. As a compound legisign it blends qualities with verbal and non-verbal legisigns, and is a perfect illustration of the principle outlined above and already advanced in Chapter Two: if we can recognize legisigns of every conceivable form it is because they ‘govern’ not only the instances in which they are materialized but also the qualisigns ‘beneath’ them in the table. This particular example governs thousands of such signs throughout Britain, these being its replicas. The identifying properties of this special sort of sinsign (a replica) are thus its shape and colouring, plus the various signs indicating the instruction to other drivers to leave this lane free at the specified times. Leaving aside these indications of units, we find that the rectangular face, the blue colour of its surface, the white colour of the border and the upper and lower internal black rectangles

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are all qualisigns enabling us to identify the sign and the specific highway regulation it represents. Moreover, two of the vehicles to which the reserved lane applies are represented not by a common noun naming the class of vehicle targeted, but by images restricted to the peculiar shape and characteristics which enable drivers to recognize the general class of vehicles they represent. A sign such as the one on Figure 3.5 is more complex than, for example, Friday’s footprint. When Crusoe happened upon it he was, he claimed, thunderstruck: he had identified the particular shape of the footprint as that of a fellow human. This was because the print had the specific qualities enabling Crusoe to distinguish the print from that of a bird or a dog. In other words, he had an idea of the human footprint in his mind, acquired from his experience of the world: the print conjured up a mental image of a man or a woman, the mental image being an immediate interpretant, while the fear and panic he felt were its dynamic equivalent. The print itself was simply a sinsign, unlike the legisign on Figure 3.5, but in the case of the footprint, too, the various qualities – shape, size, depth, etc. – all cooperate to produce a more complex sign, a sinsign. However, we note that, in spite of its semiotic complexity, the panel on Figure 3.5 is, in itself, nothing more than an image, a pictorial sinsign, and just how the replicas of the legisign it represents actually function in situ, that is the way they represent in reality its specific regulation, is one of the topics to be dealt with in the chapter to follow. Here these legisigns are represented pictorially – or, more technically, iconically – whereas the sign’s mode of representation when in place on a road is semiotically more complex.

3.5  Summary The material introduced in this chapter is intended to provide the necessary theoretical background to Peirce’s conception of logic. It examined certain of his philosophical positions – his extreme form of realism, his number-based idealism and his empiricism – and, above all, his conception of ‘categories’. This material should enable the novice to understand the following points. First that the universe of Firstness is a category like the other two even though it is intangible and has no existence, and it justifies the principle advanced above that qualisigns are the identifying features of sinsigns and, by transitivity, legisigns. Second, that the various sciences, logic conceived as semiotics included, depend upon those preceding them in the hierarchy, although whether this dependency is unidirectional is, at the moment, a matter of debate among Peirce scholars. Third, that the perception and, ultimately, the interpretation of the lines and shapes in an image, for example, is a continuous inferential process and that our experience, that

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cognitive resultant of our past lives, enables us to identify the protagonists and behaviour in an image just as we learn to identify the lines and shapes of the words on the written page. Finally, the chapter has sought to explain a feature of the logic discussed in Chapter Two, namely why the passage from the general to the particular/existent should determine the realization of a special category of sinsigns, namely the replicas or instances of legisigns. These are all aspects of his semiotics which will contribute to the theoretical discussions in the chapters to come.

Chapter Four

Modes of representation ‘A sign’, wrote Peirce in 1911, ‘is either an icon, an index or a symbol’ (PWP 104). This means that whatever else a sign is, it must also belong to one of these three subclasses which are defined according to their specific mode of representation. These three modes of representation constitute the second criterion for the classification of signs, a criterion, indicated as O–S on Table 3.2 in Chapter Three. It establishes the three principal ways in which a sign can represent its object, or, what amounts to the same thing from a different point of view, defines the nature of the relation holding between the sign and the object which determines its form or structure. In the list of possible trichotomies described in the final section of Chapter Two Peirce suggested that a sign should be analysed according to ‘whether it is connected with the thing, be it truth or fiction, that it represents by imitating it, or by being an effect of its object, or by a convention or habit’, yet another formulation of the relation holding between the sign and its object. First established by Peirce in 1867, the three-way distinction between icon, index and symbol is by far the best known and most widely canvassed, even figuring paradoxically in the theoretical arsenal of competing semiotic theories and in most accounts of visual culture. Within it, the concept of the icon, based as it is on the relation of resemblance (‘imitation’), is probably the single most contentious subclass of signs ever established by Peirce (which perhaps is not surprising, given that most of the critics are writing from within the theoretical framework of verbocentrist semiology). This division thus constitutes the second in the three-way system of 1903, following the distinction between qualisigns, sinsigns and legisigns examined in Chapter Two, and preceding the ‘informational’ division to be examined in Chapter Six. It is a measure of the importance that Peirce attributed to the icon-index-symbol trichotomy that it figured in three of his four major classifications. Given the controversial nature of this particular division, and in view of the importance the concept of the icon has in the

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way we understand our allegedly visual culture, the exposition will be heavily biased towards pictorial signs. Whereas in the first division Peirce created neologisms in order to underscore the specificity of his three subclasses, for example qualisign, sinsign and legisign, in the second he adopted terms already in common use. The meanings of the three terms have been extended since Peirce’s days: we read in the newspapers and magazines, for example, how such and such a person owns racehorses as a status symbol or wears an expensive watch as an index of conspicuous consumption. In this chapter we return to Peirce’s painstaking formulations of these terms in order to pick our way through this semantic tangle. In the sections to follow, then, we deal with the three types in order of increasing complexity from icon to symbol, introducing many of his definitions as the argument develops. In view of the structure of this particular division and the dominant role the object plays in it the chapter closes with a review of the distinction established in Chapter One between the dynamic object, that is, the object outside the sign, and the perceivable immediate object within the sign.

4.1 Three orders of complexity To begin with, the following succinct but characteristic description of the three subclasses illustrates the principles examined in Chapter Three, and will serve as a defining framework for the notions to be developed in this one. Once again we find the numerical basis of the categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness underwriting the description of the three ‘orders’ of signs: A regular progression of one, two, three may be remarked in the three orders of signs, Icon, Index, Symbol. The Icon has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected to them. The index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair, but the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection, except remarking it, after it is established. The symbol is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of the symbol-using mind, without which no such connection would exist. (CP 2.299) These distinctions, together with the ‘nesting’ implication principle introduced in Chapter Three, form the basis of what follows, not only in the definitions, but also in the illustrations and the subsequent discussion. They provide us, above all, with a clear indication of the semiotic ‘constitution’

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Object

Interpretant

Sign

Figure 4.1  The determination process of semiosis.

of the three types of relation holding between the sign and its object, a relation we can best understand by referring to the diagram introduced earlier in Chapter One (Figure 4.1). The constitution of the icon depends simply upon the characters it exhibits, independently of any object or interpretant: while it requires an object and an interpretant to function as a sign, the internal constitution of the icon is independent of the other two correlates. We saw, for example, in Chapter One, that the dynamic object of the frame displaying the perplexed young woman (Figure 1.4) was entirely fictitious, a figment of the artist’s imagination, a simple creature composed of qualities. However, the fact that the object was a figment didn’t stop the sign from being qualitatively like the idea of young women we have in our minds. The constitution of the index, on the other hand, necessarily associates sign and object in a dynamic relation, represented by the arrow from object to sign to the left of the diagram. Returning to the discussion of the object in Chapter One, we saw that the child on the photograph (Figure  1.5) was clearly no fiction, but an existent child in flesh and blood: in this case sign and object form a necessary, indivisible pair, independently of what any interpretant reaction or reactions might be. Finally, in the case of the symbol, paragraph 2.299 states that for the sign to function as such the interpretant (the thought or ‘idea’ in the symbol-using mind) is a necessary participant in the whole process. For example anyone who had no ‘idea’ of what the noun phrases ‘young woman’, ‘child’ or ‘teenager’ mean would be unable to understand and interpret a sentence containing them. These distinctions will be illustrated and developed in the course of the chapter.

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4.2  Modes of representation 4.2.1  The icon Initially Peirce chose the term ‘likeness’ but by 1885 he had come to refer to this subclass as what we now know as the ‘icon’. If the reader googled the term, or looked it up in the OED, the chances are that he or she would find references to desktop icons – little images which indicate some function or other on a computer1 – or to some person or thing held communally to be representative of a culture, a subculture or a movement: Such and such a person is a fashion/pop/TV icon, etc. However, the term derived originally from an Ancient Greek word for ‘likeness’, ‘portrait’, ‘image’, formed from a verb meaning ‘to be like’, ‘to resemble’, and was traditionally associated with Byzantine representations of holy personages, often images of Christ or the Virgin Mary small enough to be carried around as an assurance of the presence of the deity. By adopting ‘icon’ as a technical term Peirce was drawing on the full range of meanings yielded by its etymology, and is possibly responsible for the more profane usage to be found today in culture and society. Figure 4.2 is some talented artist’s line drawing of the head of a man wearing a beret. Leaving the identification of the sign’s potential dynamic object to the reader, we note that as this is not a detailed portrait, simply a sketch, the legisign NVC signals it displays amount to the hairstyle, the beret with the star and a certain (hopefully) recognizable distant look on the face. We classify the image itself as a sinsign – an iconic sinsign, to be

Figure 4.2  Man and beret.

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precise: it is an existent entity, but composed simply of lines and shapes – at one point Peirce states that an icon can represent ‘nothing but Forms and Feelings’ (CP 4.544). Its sinsign status means that it is an existent one-off sign, not part of a system, and logically  – and visibly  – incorporates a number of qualisigns. The relation between the sign and what it represents is necessarily qualitative, since it is composed simply of black lines and shapes: for us to be able to identify the person represented, both object and sign must have at least these qualities in common, and the nature of the relation between the two is one of resemblance. Such a sign can offer no proof of the existence of its object. It simply looks like something or somebody: in a word, it is essentially ‘vague’. 2 The icon, then, is a sign which is neither true nor false for it ‘affords no ground for an interpretation of it as referring to actual existence’ (CP 2.251). The fact that we recognize the object as a famous revolutionary, and an icon in more senses than one, 3 is simply a matter of experience and has nothing to do with the sign itself: a child or a young teenager would no doubt recognize the sign as representing a man with a beret for the simple reason that this is what it looks like, pace the veritable host of critics who have taken issue with the notion of resemblance. Figure 4.2, then, is an example of an icon, a sign which is said to be ‘motivated’, that is, determined in its very shape by the ‘form’ of the object that it represents.4 It is, of course, the mode of representation characteristic of comic-strips like the one presented earlier. The following is Peirce’s painstakingly formulated definition: An Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not. It is true that unless there really is such an Object, the Icon does not act as a sign; but this has nothing to do with its character as a sign. Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it. (PWP 102) By definition, then, an icon is a sign that signifies by virtue of the fact that it shares at least one ‘character’ or quality with the object it represents, whether that object exists or not. Peirce justifies this initially surprising rider with the example of the statue of a centaur: ‘. . . if [the statue] represents a centaur, it is by virtue of its shape; and this shape it will have, just as much, whether there be a centaur or not’ (CP 5.73). As we saw in Chapter One, the object of the comic-strip was a world of possibility peopled by figments of the artist’s imagination, unlike the very real world of the photograph of the little girl: there may even have been a young woman like the pensive protagonist of Figure 1.4 but, unlike the photograph, the line drawing cannot offer any proof of this. To the extent, then, that an entity has at least one quality it is fit to function as an icon, though it cannot do so until it conforms to an object and

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has determined in turn an interpretant. Peirce often offered the geometrical diagram as an example of an icon, but we have already come across other types of icons in the representations of the quarrelling teenagers from the  comic-strip and the assorted protagonists, ‘props’ and accessories in the two Dürer engravings examined in Chapter Two: in all these images the mode of representation is inescapably pictorial, iconic.

4.2.2  The index Figure 4.3 is a photograph of a group of youths in a bar. Peirce frequently proposed the photograph as an excellent illustration of the index, and this one, like that of the hydrant and the sketch of the teenage lovers in Chapter Two (Figures 2.1 and 2.2) is, of course, a sinsign, a singular event, the material making of which, like Peirce’s ‘once-uttered’ sign, is over and gone forever. All three signs are infinitely reproducible but can never be produced or repeated in exactly the same way anywhere else or at any other time, and are in no way part of a system or an ‘enduring pattern’. The term ‘index’ comes from an Indo-European root deik- meaning ‘to show’, ‘to pronounce’ or to direct attention to words or objects (including humans). The root gives us, among other things, the verbs teach, dictate, preach and indicate, and the nouns token, digit, deixis – vendetta, even – and, of course, index (Watkins, 2000, p. 14). The word index itself has various meanings: the fore-finger, used among other things for pointing at objects, a list of books Roman Catholics are not supposed to read, a list at

Figure 4.3  Youths in a bar.

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the end of a book indicating where the subjects of the list are to be found in the book and, of course, a type of sign. What all these meanings have in common is the idea of pointing, of indicating where to find some object, and this is the basis of the way Peirce uses the sign: The index asserts nothing; it only says “There!” It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops. Demonstrative and relative pronouns are nearly pure indices, because they denote things without describing them; so are the letters on a geometrical diagram, and the subscript numbers which in algebra distinguish one value from another without saying what those values are. (CP 3.361) Although initially Peirce hesitated between the terms ‘index’ and ‘sign’, he ultimately retained the first since the act of pointing is subordinated to the existential relation holding between sign and object  – our attention can only be drawn to objects and humans who exist or whom we know to exist or to have existed. This is how he defined the index in 1903, in a paragraph following the definition of the icon given above: An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object. It cannot, therefore, be a Qualisign, because qualities are whatever they are independently of anything else. In so far as the Index is affected by the Object, it necessarily has some Quality in common with the Object, and it is in respect to these that it refers to the Object. It does, therefore, involve a sort of Icon, although an Icon of a peculiar kind; and it is not the mere resemblance of its Object, even in these respects which makes it a sign, but it is the actual modification of it by the Object. (PWP 102, emphasis added) The definition is important for three reasons. First, it states that since the index is really, physically affected by its object an existential relation is established between them. Therefore it is not possible, or wasn’t in the days of argentic photography, to take a photograph of a non-existent object, a condition which clearly shows the relation between sign and object to be existential: no object, no index. This means that an index can only relate to an individual event, object or person, or, in the case of a group portrait like a school photograph or to a group of individuals; in short, to a ‘particular’ or to a group of ‘particulars’ (‘Single units, single collections of units’ is Peirce’s formulation (CP 2.306)). This is the case with Figure 4.3. Second, the ‘pointing’ function which the term inherits from the meaning of its Indo-European root is established by this existential relation and by the fact that an index incorporates, to a visibly greater or lesser degree, some sort of icon: by inheriting some of the object’s qualities or properties when physically affected by it the index draws

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attention precisely to that object since it has been moulded to some sort of identifying correspondence to it. In other words, just as any Secondness requires the qualities of Firstness to give it its specific identity (remember that we identify the replicas of verbal legisigns such as the verbs gleam and glow by the law-governed qualisigns they embody), so too the index has an icon ‘nested’ within it, an icon without which we should be unable to identify the perceptible immediate object of the sign or the external object it represents. 5 Finally, by virtue of the principle according to which indices involve a form of icon, a principle underwritten by the relations holding between his three categories, Peirce is able to justify theoretically just why it is that an index such as a photograph like Figure 4.3 is interpretable at all. The physical contact between object and film is, in itself, only temporarily observable if at all. Obviously, in movies the actors and technicians, etc., all witness the indexical nature of the filming process; nevertheless the actual moment of ‘impact’ of the object on the film is invisible and momentary but, in spite of this, it is such that it leaves a complex but visible mark or trace which contains information of a sort concerning the ‘model’ that brought it into being: it is, says Peirce, known to be the effect of the radiations from the object: ‘The mere print does not, in itself, convey any information. But the fact that it is virtually a section of rays projected from an object otherwise known renders it an [informational sign]’ (CP 2.320). Returning to Figure 4.3, we note as far as the contents of the image are concerned that while the photograph as a whole can be classified as a sinsign, what we see on the print depends upon whether we ‘enter’ in imagination the represented world of the protagonists or whether we simply make an inventory of the signs on the print. In both cases the NVC signs are obviously the replicas of various types of legisigns. In the first case as far as the protagonists of the confrontation were concerned these signs actually existed and are thus indexical; in the second, what we observe is simply a complex arrangement of lines, shades and shapes forming the iconic traces of the confrontation. (This is the case too in movies: with the exception of animation, the material production of the film is indexical since cameras record the movements, etc., of the actors, but what we see on the screen is purely iconic.) In both cases the signs we interpret are general and systematic to the extent that they can be used with the same ‘meaning’ in diverse combinations in an infinite variety of situations, and are clearly complex in that their interpretation is governed by general rules which we learn to interpret from childhood, and as such transcend individuality, unlike the photographic print on which they appear. Thus the photograph on Figure 4.3 is an excellent illustration of how the index incorporates an icon albeit ‘of a peculiar kind’. For example, the protagonists of the confrontation have moulded the lines, shapes and

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shades on the print to a sort of conformity, thereby communicating to the print their collective form: elsewhere Peirce states that ‘a sign is any medium for the communication of a form’.6 Putting this implication principle in a slightly different order, Peirce remarks that ‘A photograph, for example, not only excites an image, has an appearance, but, owing to its optical connection with the object, is evidence that that appearance corresponds to a reality’ (CP 4.447). In the present case, this ‘image’ or ‘appearance’, namely the iconic material in the photograph, is a very much more detailed composition of lines, shapes and colours than the sketch on Figure 4.2, but is nothing more, nevertheless, than the set of iconic traces of the shapes and colours reflected by the jubilant fans and their hapless rival. In short, the image is formed by the iconic elements participating in the photograph, while the physical connexion is the truly existential determination of a sign whose complex dynamic object is a striking event associated with some photographer’s desire to record it for posterity. In similar fashion, a footprint in the sand, another index, will indicate that some animal or other has walked in the area, but it is the actual shape of the footprint, its iconic content, that will enable us to determine whether it was made by a turtle, a bird or, as Robinson Crusoe discovered, a human being. It thus follows that an index, too, is a motivated sign. We can formulate the principle differently, drawing on concepts discussed in Chapter Three. Whereas nothing can be abstracted (prescinded) from an icon – in its pure form it is a simple Firstness, an assemblage of qualities – the icon can be prescinded from an index, as in the case of Figure 4.2, which has been prescinded from the famous photograph of Che Guevara by Alberto Korda. Moreover, whereas in the case of the icon the existence of the object was not a prerequisite for its own particular representative quality  – an icon is simply required to possess qualities of its own  – the index is defined precisely by the fact that the object is necessarily involved in its specific semiotic ‘constitution’: the interpretant does not contribute to this constitution, though indices obviously do not function as such until they actually determine an interpretant. Take, for example, the footage of the buildings damaged in the fighting in Tunisia or Libya shown recently on television. What remains of the buildings often seems to be peppered with bullet-holes, recognizable by their (iconic) circular shape and their depth of penetration. But these bullet-holes existed in this state before the camera crews turned up, not yet signs, but potentially so: once the crews and journalists were there to record them they stimulated interpretant reactions and in doing so functioned as signs. Similarly, Friday’s footprint only became an index when Robinson Crusoe first saw it. We now examine a second photographic example, Figure 4.4, a traffic sign on a London road. What we examined at the end of Chapter Three was the image of an informational ‘with-flow’ bus, cycle and taxi lane traffic sign. As it appears on the written page in Chapter Three and in the Highway

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Figure 4.4  An informational traffic sign.

Code, this is a legisign governing innumerable replicas throughout Britain. Within the second trichotomy that image can be identified as an icon – it is composed of white lines delimiting various shapes (the icons of a bus and a bicycle, and a vertical white line) set against a rectangular blue background (two additional legisigns: the colour blue on a rectangular sign provides information while blue in a circle gives an order): it was an illustration of an iconic legisign. Now one such sign appears ‘in real life’ on Figure 4.4. If we enter the represented world on Figure 4.4 – that is, if we forget that it is an illustration on the page of a book – we find that the traffic sign has changed its mode of representation: it is no longer a simple icon on a page but, set upon a pole at a specific location along a road in London, it has become an index, indicating to the knowledgeable driver that at this location (as an index it is necessarily deictic) at this particular period the lane here is reserved for buses, pedal cycles and taxis. Unlike the image on the page, this traffic sign actually exists in a particular spot in London where buses, taxis and cycles have this lane to themselves at certain times of the day, whence its indexical status: the sign is really (i.e. existentially, physically)

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‘affected by its object’, namely buses, taxis and cycles, exclusively, in this particular lane. Figures 4.3 and 4.4 are both contemporary examples of the index. However, throughout his career Peirce offered many examples of the index drawn from his own experience: the pointing finger, the rolling gait of the sailor, the bandy legs of the jockey, a rap at the door, the veering of a weather vane, a thunderclap, a barometer, and as a verbal example, a street cry such as ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh!’ What they all have in common is their existential nature, plus the fact that there is a direct existential relation holding between these and the object that caused or produced them. The list given above is in no way exhaustive, for indexical signs perfuse our universe. Nevertheless, as a logician Peirce was also as interested in natural languages as he was in the familiar signs of everyday life, and the various classes of signs composing them. We terminate this introduction to the index by examining some of the language signs he identified as indices. The first point to note is that Peirce draws a distinction within the subclass of indices between those which denote particulars, that is individual events, etc., and those which establish a reference. This is important since any individual that constitutes the object of a sign can only be an existent. He even includes the linguistic situation of utterance, which he calls ‘the common environment of the interlocutors’ (CP 2.318, 2.330), in this subclass. What the first group has in common is the fact that there is a direct existential relation holding between the sign and the object that it represents: just as something specific caused the thunderclap, something or some individual caused the rap on the door and some individual hawked his wares on the street, so too the object of a genuine linguistic index must be an existent individual. What distinguishes this group from the linguistic indices which simply establish a reference, Peirce suggests, is that whereas the former are themselves particular existent linguistic ‘events’, the latter, in spite of the fact that when employed they enter a real, existent relation (‘actual connection’) with their objects, are not. However, although they have no connection with an existent object and simply draw attention or refer to a verbal entity already mentioned (anaphora) or to come (cataphora) within a piece of discourse, they have in common with a class of existentially determined indices like the symptoms of diseases, as the reader will remember from Chapter Two, the semiotic status of legisigns. Thus linguistic indexical legisigns establish either a direct link with some existent entity, as in the case of a proper noun or some other expression referring to a particular (the definite article plus a common noun, for example), or else a reference to another linguistic expression. The examples Peirce gives of verbal indices are various types of pronouns  – personal, demonstrative, relative  –, proper nouns, time and space adverbials and prepositional phrases which, in spite of their distinct referencing functions, have in common the fact that they are all deictic, that is they can only

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be understood in relation to the situation of utterance, as in the case of the personal pronouns I, you and we.7 Demonstrative pronouns are typical examples, and the extract from the British National Corpus in Chapter One provides excellent examples of the way the ‘distal’ demonstrative that functions by presupposing that the interlocutor has prior knowledge of some person or event mentioned in the discourse, for example ‘what was that girl in?’ Returning to proper nouns at this point, it might be objected that, like the thunderclap or the rap on the door, they are existentially related to a single individual or event. However, as legisigns they govern countless replicas which occur in equally countless situations. For example, although the proper noun Kate in the utterance Kate waited for her father clearly denotes an individual, the name is not restricted to this one person alone, for there are countless individuals past and present to whom it would equally apply; nor is it restricted to this one occurrence as a rap on the door would be, for the same person could be referred to by the name on countless other occasions. The important point to note is that in normal circumstances a proper noun functions as an index by virtue of an existential relation holding between the name and the designated person. As a consequence, when we read them in a newspaper or a novel or hear them mentioned on TV or in a film, proper nouns automatically create worlds of existence to which we become ontologically committed, however briefly. Finally, to this group of deictics, which has been studied by various linguists and logicians as ‘token reflexives’ (Hans Reichenbach), ‘egocentric particulars’ (Bertrand Russell), shifters (Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson) we can add tense and aspect markers, modal auxiliaries etc., and, in fact, most linguistic items, in Indo-European languages at least, other than ‘content’ words such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. This brings us to the symbol.

4.2.3  The symbol ‘Thirdly, there are symbols, or general signs, which have become associated with their meanings by usage. Such are most words, and phrases, and speeches, and books, and libraries’ (EP2 5).8 It is in these words that Peirce introduces the concept of the symbol in a general description of signs that pre-dates the 1903 classification by almost ten years, and although he was later to give a more precise definition we can see already that there is a verbal bias in his selection of examples. However, not all symbols are verbal, as we shall see once we have examined his conception of this subclass in detail. The term covers the most complex relation of all holding between a sign and its object, one that transcends individuality, represents a very general object and necessarily integrates the interpretant. In this case, since no individuals are involved, only classes, the sign has to be learned

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(its object isn’t perceivable in the way that the object of an index is, and has to be inferred or else already known by habit): it functions, therefore, by convention or by ‘agreement’ among the sign users. This means that such signs call for the active participation of the experience of the user/ interpreter  – anyone who doesn’t already know what the word legisign means is not likely to understand it when they first come across it, unless the meaning can be inferred from the context. Common nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are all linguistic examples of symbols. This is how Peirce defines the symbol: A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object. It is thus itself a general type or law, that is, is a Legisign. As such it acts through a Replica. Not only is it general itself, but the Object to which it refers is of a general nature. Now, that which is general has its being in the instances which it will determine. There must, therefore, be existent instances of what the Symbol denotes, although we must here understand by “existent,” existent in the possibly imaginary universe to which the Symbol refers. The Symbol will indirectly, through the association or other law, be affected by those instances; and thus the Symbol will involve a sort of Index, although an Index of a peculiar kind . . . (PWP 102–3; emphasis added) As mentioned before, the semiotic constitution, or structure, of the symbol, unlike that of the index, necessarily involves the ‘participation’ of the interpretant  – it is genuinely triadic: in practical terms this means that we have to know in advance what the object of the sign is in order to interpret it, and this knowledge is what Peirce means by the immediate interpretant – the sign’s interpretability. When this is not the case, we have to learn it, whereas we are normally able to recognize the elements in a photograph or a painting more or less immediately. However, applying the implication principle by which the more complex subclasses involve the less complex, Peirce is explaining in the definition above that a symbol contains a sort of index, albeit of a ‘peculiar kind’. We already know that an index incorporates an icon, which means that by transitivity a symbol contains some form of iconic material (were this not so, remember, we should be unable to perceive it – the symbol itself is perfectly general, while an index is instantaneous, and only the iconic traces in the sign are perceivable). This is how Peirce continues his description of the symbol in the text from 1894 quoted earlier: The word symbol has so many meanings that it would be an injury to the language to add a new one. I do not think that the signification I attach to it, that of a conventional sign, or one depending upon habit (acquired

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or inborn), is so much a new meaning as a return to the original meaning [. . .] Any ordinary word, as “give,” “bird,” “marriage,” is an example of a symbol. It is applicable to whatever may be found to realize the idea connected with the word; it does not, in itself, identify those things. It does not show us a bird, nor enact before our eyes a giving or a marriage, but supposes that we are able to imagine those things, and have associated the word with them. (EP2 9) We note that these ‘ordinary words’ differ considerably from the indices examined above: they don’t refer; they have a general meaning or ‘connotation’ and thus name classes of objects or processes instead of denoting or designating individuals. Interesting as they are, however, in what follows we examine instead symbolhood in pictorial signs. One obvious source is to be found in religious symbolism. Religious art abounds with such signs, as evidenced by the numerous studies explaining the ‘hidden’, that is symbolic, meanings of objects to be found in religious imagery: Hall (1983) already mentioned in Chapter Two is a good source. Consider, as an initial example of a non-verbal symbol, the peacocks which figure in much early religious imagery and on the iconostases of Byzantine churches. They were placed there not for their aesthetic value, but because their flesh was held by legend not to be subject to decomposition or putrefaction whence their status as symbols of eternal life. Figures 4.5 and 4.6 are the photographs of part of the interior of the Church of Saint Barbara (Barbara Kilise), an eleventh-century Byzantine church set in tuff, the soft volcanic rock characteristic of the Göreme Valley in Eastern Turkey. The figures represented on the photographs appear in red ochre on the naturally white walls of the church, and show the influence of the iconoclastic movements of the eighth and ninth centuries, even though the church was hollowed out of the tuff two centuries later. Figure 4.5 shows two crosses pattée with a beetle-cum-locust figure between them. Since the prohibition concerning the representation of holy personages in human guise seems to have endured in this area, it is thought that the crosses represent Christ and the Crucifixion, while the locust stands for the Devil.9 This influence can also be seen in the abstract, geometric red ochre lines painted on the wall which bring out the architectural structure of the church: to the right of Figure 4.5 can be seen a stylized scorpion, an animal held in Turkey and in the Middle East to have apotropaic powers. The image in 4.5 is thought to represent the Romans as a cockerel or hen, and the nascent Christian religion as a plant that the Romans were trying to destroy. Obviously, irrespective of whether the hypothesized explanation is true or not, we in the twenty-first century have to learn it, while for the monks and congregation of the church back in the eleventh century the problem was slightly different: in their everyday world the cross was unquestionably Christ and the locust Evil or the Devil. Nevertheless even the monks had to learn this at some point.

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Figure 4.5  Saint Barbara (1).

Figure 4.6  Saint Barbara (2).

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How does the implication principle operate in these concrete cases of pictorial symbols, and what are the indices and icons they incorporate? The crosses, the locust, the cockerel and the plant all function pictorially like proper nouns, which are, as mentioned above, a subclass of indexical legisigns; and just as a legisign is instantiated in its specific replicas, so the symbols here are instantiated in these indices. Moreover, what distinguishes each ‘protagonist’ is its specific configuration of red lines and shapes, in other words the iconic material painted on the walls, in one case clearly harking back to the Crucifixion. However, there are less conventional cases of the symbolization of basically iconic material. One such case is what might be termed ‘dysfunctional symbolization’, the attribution to a painting, work of art or religious artefact of values not necessarily to be found in the elements in the representation itself. This is the case with many forms of iconoclasm, the often deliberate physical desecration of paintings and sculptures by psyches disturbed by folly or fanaticism. There are numerous examples of art works which have suffered from attacks by knife or hammer: Ad Reinhardt’s giant black paintings, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s Pietà are but three well-known examples.10 Yet another form of iconoclastic re-symbolization occurs in the way certain artists appropriate paintings, etc. from earlier traditions in order to rework them by investing them with new values, satirical, ideological or otherwise, Duchamp’s treatment of the Mona Lisa, for example, or Dany Leriche’s haunting photographic allegory to be discussed in Chapter Seven. Moreover, the simplest iconic signs of all  – pieces of coloured cloth  – can also achieve a powerful symbolic status: think of the yellow ribbons attached to American houses during the First Gulf War, a sign with a complex history, but which, at the time signified not a pretty colour but a mixture of loyalty to the nation and anxiety for the soldiers at the front. Similarly, many houses in Italy are decorated with a rainbow ‘peace’ flag, and these do not always have the Italian common noun pace inscribed on them. Think, finally, of the humble British poppy celebrating Remembrance Day in November. Each of these pieces of cloth is a potent symbol whose instances are existentially displayed, as Peirce’s definition states, on the individual houses or garments of those adhering to the ideals they represent. By transitivity, then, such symbols involve not only these particular indices but also their characteristic iconic material which enables us to recognize the causes they represent. Finally, there are two points to bear in mind concerning the nature of these subclasses, as they are not simply closed classes in which to place signs but rather parts of a general heuristic enabling us to understand them. First, returning to two illustrations discussed in Chapter Two, we find that entities that function as signs don’t necessarily belong in a single subclass. It was seen there that the engravings of the personification of melancholy and of Saint Jerome in his study contained images of a lion and two dogs.

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Since the dog lying beside the lion in Saint Jerome’s study was not part of this saint’s legend, and is not, therefore, one of his identifying attributes, it is likely to have been added as a symbol. It looks like and is a dog, but in addition to its pictorial representation it stands for something more general: like the little dog in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, hanging in the National Gallery, London, it is a symbol of fidelity. Second, not only can signs belong to two different subclasses, but the same sign can change from one to another. Symbols grow in meaning, Peirce notes in the text from 1894 (EP2 10). He based this assertion on his theory of information, a topic to which we turn in Chapter Six. For now we note that, contradicting the unidirectional hypothesis that founds certain theories of grammaticalization – for example the production of new grammatical units from symbols such as nouns and already examined in Chapter Three in the evolution of (be) going to – Peirce holds instead that many symbols can be shown to have evolved from indexical expressions such as proper nouns, that is, from linguistics material less complex than themselves.11 ‘A simple symbol is interpreted to signify what it does from some accidental circumstance or series of circumstances, which the history of any word illustrates’ (EP2 317). This process of accidental generalization, one by which symbols emerge, in origin and development of the English common noun ‘coach’ derived by metonymic association from the Magyar Kocsi: For example, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, a certain model of vehicle came into use in the town of Kots (pronounced, kotch) in Hungary. It was copied in other towns, doubtless with some modifications, and was called a kotsi szeker, or Kots cart. Copied in still other towns, and always more or less modified, it came to be called, for short, a cotch. It thus came about that coach was used . . . [for] any large vehicle for conveying passengers at a fare by the seat from one town to another. (Ibid.) The reader will have noticed an example closer to home. This motivating metonymic association is the case, too, with the proprietary name Google which functioned as a verb earlier in the chapter. Thus a lexeme which began life as a proper noun, and therefore an index designating an individual entity, has been ‘elevated’ in the hierarchy through usage – the name of the entity having been used to identify the function it performs – acquiring in the process the general status of the symbol.

4.3 The object revisited Since the present division defines and illustrates Peirce’s three modes of representation and thus deals in detail with the way the sign represents its

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object, it is paramount that we understand just what it is that Peirce means by the term ‘object’, and it is to this problem that we turn once more. The following extract comes from Peirce’s review of the publication in 1902–3 of a series of lectures given by his contemporary, Josiah Royce. The passage refers to Royce’s discussion of the internal and external meaning of ‘ideas’, which Peirce characteristically assimilates to signs, and it is not inconceivable that Peirce’s investigation and review of Royce’s theory of ideas and his twin concepts of internal and external meaning may have moved him to review his own conception of the object and ultimately to distinguish between the sign’s dynamic and immediate objects. As the reader will readily understand, Peirce’s ‘radically different signs’ are none other than, respectively, the icon, index and symbol studied above: But in analysing the general nature of a sign, it will be needful, to distinguish radically different kinds of signs. A sign may serve as a sign simply because it happens to resemble its object. This resemblance will, then, constitute its internal meaning. But it cannot be said to have any external meaning, since it does not profess to represent anything; for if it did, that would be a manner of signifying its object, not consisting in merely resembling it. There are other signs which become such by virtue of being really connected with their objects. Such is a symptom of disease, or the letters attached to parts of a diagram. The external meaning of such a sign is its most prominent feature. Its internal meaning may be vanishingly small, as in the case of the letters on the diagram, without ever utterly disappearing. There is, however, a third totally different order of signs, which become such, not by virtue of any character of their own as things, nor by virtue of any real connection with their objects, but simply by virtue of being represented to be signs. (CP 8.119) As we saw in the discussion of the face of the pensive teenager and that of the exultant child in Chapter One, the first type of sign, an icon, can offer no proof of any real, that is existent, object. In Peirce’s wording from the quotation above such a sign has no external meaning: this is another way of saying that its dynamic object is simply a possibility, since the sign doesn’t profess to represent an existent entity. In other words, an icon is not a referring sign, and its object is thus simply whatever happens to correspond to the elements in the sign, a puzzled teenage girl, any puzzled teenage girl, for example. The external meaning of the photograph of the child, on the other hand, is simply that – the ‘singular’, existential, exultant child.

4.3.1  The dynamic object There are certain difficulties that might obscure the reader’s understanding of Peirce’s conception of the object. To begin with, Peirce’s own examples

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are generally verbal, with the sign’s creator identified as the ‘utterer’ (e.g. EP2 403). Moreover, they tend to be assertory, that is declarative sentences (though we do sometimes find him discussing injunctions and commands, etc.), while their mood or modality is most often that of actuality. For example, in 1910, in a manuscript entitled ‘Meaning’, Peirce analyses the sentence ‘Cain killed Abel’, in which reference is made to the Biblical brothers. These, he notes, constitute this particular sign’s ‘partial’ objects which collectively constitute its dynamic object (Peirce includes a third partial object in this example, ‘a killing’, but this needn’t concern us), while the peculiar relation holding between the two protagonists of the drama conditions, by a ‘species of correspondence’, its dyadic structure (CP 2.230). In this case, then, Peirce clearly identifies the objects with what we would now call the sign’s referents. While this is a sufficient description, such a position nevertheless requires further discussion for the reader might be wondering, since the sign is moulded to some sort of correspondence with its object, just what it is that determines the final visible form of such signs as images and utterances. Initially it was Ogden and Richards who, barely ten years after the death of Peirce, suggested in a footnote that the term ‘referent’ – a concept not found in the Peirce canon or, for that matter, in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics  – be adopted in philosophical discussions of signification in preference to ‘thing’, noting at the same time that the term ‘object’ had had an unfortunate history (1972, p. 9n). However, simply adopting the referent as Peirce’s dynamic object without further investigation is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons and neglects certain determinations of the form or shape many signs display, as will be seen in the following discussion of three verbal examples. 1 [On Tuesday Mary texted her friends, inviting them to dinner on Saturday night. She texted them again on Thursday to remind them.] And yet nobody came. Leaving aside the problem of what the referent or referents of the pronoun nobody might be (this can be resolved contextually), a no less interesting theoretical question concerns the origin of the expression And yet. By definition the object is what determined the sign and its specific structure in first place, so the introduction of an unexpected or adversative position by the conjunction yet might suggest that we are dealing with a case of determination by an object which is more complex than that of a simple referent. This is perhaps even clearer in the following examples: 2 Kate Croy waited for her father to come in. We can safely identify Kate Croy and her father as the referents of the two nominals to be found in sentence (2). These, as in Peirce’s ‘Cain killed Abel’

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example, certainly determine the dyadic structure of the sentence, and in this case, the dynamic object can be equated with the referent. Compare, however, sentence (3), which happens to be the first sentence in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove. 3 She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in. Although we can assume the nominal expressions She and Kate Croy to be co-referential and her father to be the second referent, the dynamic-object-as-referent theory fails to explain the right dislocation which gives the sentence its striking structure and its communicative, rhetorical force.12 Clearly, if the dynamic object is to be the determinant of this sign then the two referents must somehow and at some stage of our analysis of the sign be related to the speaker/writer/narrator, since he conceived the sign in the first place, and this relation must somehow have contributed to the utterance’s distinctive syntactical form. We have, therefore, to account for the adversative And yet, the right dislocation in utterance (3) and, returning to Chapter One, the particular moral bias attaching to the comic-strip. How then do we account for the full range of dynamic objects in this book? Peirce offers some clues in a letter to the psychologist, William James, brother of the author of The Wings of the Dove. Assuming that by ‘object’ in the first of the two extracts (these are not easy reading for the novice, but are important) Peirce means the dynamic object, he is making four important points. In the sentence [‘Napoleon is lethargic’] Napoleon is not the only Object. Another Partial Object is Lethargy; and the sentence cannot convey its meaning unless collateral experience has taught its Interpreter what Lethargy is, or what that is that ‘lethargy’ means in this sentence [. . .] For the Object of “Napoleon” is the Universe of Existence so far as it is determined by the fact of Napoleon being a Member of it. The Object of the sentence “Hamlet was insane” is the Universe of Shakespeare’s Creation so far as it is determined by Hamlet being a part of it. (CP 8.178) First, as we saw earlier, the use of proper nouns  – indices  – such as ‘Napoleon’, ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Cain’ logically creates a ‘universe of existence’ or, as we should say today, an ontology. Thus, as in any novel, Henry James’s celebrated opening sentence effectively creates for the reader an ontology determined initially by Kate Croy and her father which is developed throughout the narrative: if we are convinced by the novel it functions as a chronicle of fact, not as fiction. Second, the Napoleon example illustrates yet again the importance of Peirce’s empiricist approach to signification and interpretation, for

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we cannot understand a sign unless we have what he often refers to as ‘collateral knowledge’ (given by experience, observation, ratiocination and, presumably, fantasy and imagination) of that object: if we have never heard of Napoleon, there is little chance that the reference will function completely and we can only surmise that there is such a person linking him here to, precisely, the sort of ontology discussed above, and that this person is afflicted by the condition mentioned. When we don’t understand the sign at all, on the other hand, we have to reason about it from whatever knowledge we do possess. Third, lethargy is also an object, but is neither an individual nor a collection but a condition or set of qualities without individual existence: thus in addition to individuals and classes Peirce distinguishes a third type of ‘referent’, one that is purely qualitative: possible objects constitute a universe, which we know from Chapter Three to be the universe of Firstness. Finally, Peirce informs his reader that the object is not Napoleon himself, the referent Napoleon, but rather the ontology determined by Napoleon’s being a member of it: in other words, he is telling us not so much what the object is as where to find it, in a certain type of universe, for example. He explains in similar vein in the same letter the military example discussed in Chapter One: The Object of the Command “Ground arms!” is the immediately subsequent action of the soldiers so far as it is affected by the molition expressed in the command. It cannot be understood unless collateral observation shows the speaker’s relation to the rank of soldiers. You may say, if you like, that the Object is in the Universe of things desired by the Commanding Captain at that moment. Or since the obedience is fully expected, it is in the Universe of his expectation. At any rate, it determines the Sign although it is to be created by the Sign by the circumstance that its Universe is relative to the momentary state of mind of the officer. (Ibid., emphasis added) We note that he has enlarged upon the ‘will’ of the officer in the extract from CP 5.473 quoted in Chapter One and, no doubt anxious to exclude potentially fallible psychological factors from the discussion of a logical concept, he is suggesting at this point that the dynamic object doesn’t necessarily have the same logical value in every case of semiosis, but is, rather, in conjunction with the relation holding between it and the sign’s creator, a modal entity – ‘modality’ being a logical concept derived from the terms ‘mood’, or ‘mode’, meaning ‘a way of being’. The sign’s dynamic object can thus be located in worlds of possibility, actuality or necessity, for example. Such modal entities make it possible, among other things, to express what a linguist would call ‘stance’ whereby various grammatical and paralinguistic devices – gesture, expression, voice texture, etc., in other words, what we identified as NVC signs in an earlier chapter – communicate

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the speaker’s attitude to what he is saying. In this way, the dynamic object obviously takes its value in conjunction with the sign’s speaker or creator by constituting a universe or ontology related to their respective states of mind – ‘things desired’ or ‘expected’ or judged by the utterer or creator – and will assume a value according to circumstances. Just such a relation is what determines the injunctive, interrogative and declarative variants of the ‘Take this letter’ example discussed in Chapter One. Were this modal relation holding between the sign’s dynamic object and its creator not a contributing factor to the sign’s final structure  – if the referents alone determined the form of a sign, in other words – every single utterance in the English language would have the same declarative, assertory form of a statement of fact. In the case of the comic-strip, on the other hand, this type of modality is a function of the moral perspective or set of moral values of the artist at the time the strip was created and, of course, it also determined his rhetorical intent. The rhetorical character of the sign creator’s relation to the dynamic object is an important topic and we return to it in Chapter Seven, noting for now that neither utterer nor artist is visible in the structure of the respective signs they produce. In other words, unlike the sign’s referents they are not partial objects of its dynamic object. We conclude, then, that the basic constituent structure of a verbal sign – of any sign, in fact – is determined by the sign’s dynamic object composed of its specific referents or ‘partial objects’. This structure is what from now on will be referred to as the sign’s, any sign’s, ‘logical form’, the form determined by the partial objects and the internal organization of the event represented. In this case Figure 4.1 can be modified to show the identical referential structure of examples (2) and (3) as Figure 4.7. On it the ‘dots’ in the object – limited to two on the schema for the sake of simplicity  – represent the referents, for example Kate Croy and her father, and the line represents the ‘wait’ relation holding between them. The two dots and the line in the sign, on the other hand, stand for the nominal expressions Kate

Object

Interpretant

Sign

Figure 4.7  A generic representation of the internal structure of the correlates.

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Croy, her father and the line the verbal form waited.13 However, whereas (2) could be said to be structured by the ‘default’ or neutral Subject – Verb – Object order of the English sentence (which is also the structure informing the sentence ‘Cain killed Abel’), the right dislocation in (3) is determined by Henry James’s aesthetic and rhetorical purpose in writing the sentence: the dynamic object is no different from that of (2), but by ‘holding back’ the identity of the subject he modifies rhetorically the way it is represented and causes the reader to share the waiting process and his heroine’s impatience. As the verbal sign’s referent the dynamic object structures it rather like a skeleton, but the final shape of the sign depends upon which of the three universes – possibility, actuality or necessity – the object is located in and upon the ‘momentary state of mind’ of the utterer. This latter is, of course, a psychological factor, and as such has no place in the semiotics. Just how we account for such psychological factors is one of the topics discussed in Chapter Seven. In future all diagrams like Figures 4.1 and 4.2 representing the three correlates in the action of the sign will by convention have similar configurations of dots and lines within each correlate, where the dots represent entities of various sorts and the lines the relations holding between those entities. In the case of the object, the dots represent the ‘real’ referents or partial objects of the dynamic object; in the case of the sign these dots are, to simplify, its immediate objects. Note, finally, that in the cases examined above the fact that the interpretant has the same dot and line structure as the object and the sign is a way of showing that the sentence has been interpreted correctly – were this not the case the structure of the interpretant would be different from that of the object. In Chapter Five, however, we shall come across examples where certain dot and line configurations are common to object and interpretant, but not to the sign.

4.3.2  The immediate object In the case of the immediate object, the problem is simpler, if only because, unlike its dynamic counterpart, it is open to inspection: it is to be found within the sign as the realization of the dot and line structure inside the sign on Figure 4.7. Returning briefly to the first of the two militaristic examples of semiosis discussed in Chapter One, we note that for Peirce the object of this command is located in the universe, world or ontology of things desired or required by the colonel, and that this determined the sign ‘You will go immediately and deliver this [letter] to Captain Hanno’. However, as we have just seen, there is more to it than this. For a start, the orderly, the letter and the good captain himself are also ‘objects’, respectively the subject and the direct and indirect objects of the second clause, and the orderly has to have understood these references in order to be able to obey. In a verbal sign such as this the various ‘partial objects’ composing the

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dynamic object are, of course, located in the world outside the sign, and are related to the colonel’s desire for the letter to be delivered, while among the immediate objects of this particular sign we have their trace in the nominal expressions You, this letter and Captain Hanno. What of the immediate objects in pictorial documents such as the comic-strip on Figure 1.2 or the photograph of the jubilant child on Figure  1.5? We saw above that the proper nouns Kate Croy, Cain, Abel and the nominal her father purport to denote existent individuals who thus find their traces in the nominal expressions instantiated in their respective utterances. As we have seen, they establish an ontology, a universe of existence, whereas, in spite of the dialogue, the images of teenagers, etc., in the comic-strip do not: these belong to a purely fictitious world, the figments of the artist’s imagination. This is made possible by the comic-strip’s dominant mode of representation, which is pictorial, iconic, whereas the mode of representation of examples (1)–(3) above is verbal and thus symbolic. In the case of the photograph, the traces of the child’s features are to be found in the patterns of light and shade on the photograph. It was suggested in Chapter One that while the photograph is in this way evidence of a real child, this is clearly not the case for the images of teenagers in the comic-strip, and what we see in the frames are really only the immediate objects of possible dynamic objects. Another way of saying this is that in the case of icons the immediate object and the dynamic object appear to us to be the same.14 Thus, to simplify, we can say that in sentences nominal expressions, simple or complex, are generally the verbal analogues of the pictures of faces, objects and events, etc., to be found in a pictorial document like the comic-strip, for example, noting, however, that the universes in which the dynamic object is located in the two cases are very different. In short, the series of immediate objects introduced in the course of the sequence of episodes – images of teenagers, railway stations, hairdressing salons and Indian restaurants, for example  – denotes pictorially a set of objects belonging to the possible world of the protagonists defined by the imagination of the artist. When we read the strip we enter this denoted world and the lines, forms and colours therein take on a different existence. And it is from the collective ‘hints’ supplied by the comic-strip, namely its set of immediate objects, that we interpret the strip as representing the author-artist’s moralizing purpose, which, as we saw above, complements in our interpretation the strip’s not necessarily existent dynamic object.

4.4  Summary This chapter has enabled us to examine an important feature of Peirce’s embryonic logic of icons, that is, a logic which he never fully developed

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but was based essentially upon the specific characteristics of the diagram – Peirce’s logical graphs; it nevertheless includes the types of pictorial representation examined above. The definitions and the implication principle encountered in Chapter Three enabled us to establish the following points. First, the three modes of representation, founded upon Peirce’s theory of the categories, are respectively resemblance in the case of the icon, spatio-temporal contiguity (i.e. physical contact) in the case of the index, and habit and convention in the case of the symbol. We also saw that the semiotic constitution of each of the three modes corresponds to Peirce’s categories of the forms of experience (CP 1.452), the monad (icon), the dyad (index) and triad (symbol). The constitution of an icon is monadic, since it has characters or qualities independently of whether it has an object or an interpretant; but in order to function as a sign, as in the case of a painting, it requires both, of course. The index is dyadic in that its characteristic structure is determined by an existent object independently of the interpretant. Finally, by virtue of the convention associating object, sign and interpretant the symbol is triadic. This explains why the cock and the seedling on Figure 4.6 are not a child’s impression of a farmyard but the graphic representation of something altogether more general. This requires the interpreter’s experience and knowledge to be interpreted successfully, being of the nature of a symbol. Second, the icon is the mode of representation of the comic-strip, paintings figurative or otherwise and the often headache-inducing pictorial instructions which accompany furniture in assembly-kit form and household appliances that have to be installed. The index constitutes the mode of representation of photographs, movies, traffic signs and traffic lights in situ, instruments such as thermometers and barometers, reality shows on TV and weather reports, etc. Symbols are altogether more general and less easy to circumscribe. Peirce suggests verbs like give and nouns such as bird and marriage as examples, adding that symbols are in no way invariant: they ‘grow’ according to usage and the experience of the user. In an image such as the one on Figure 4.6 the cock and seedling obviously represent themselves, otherwise we should be unable to recognize them for what they are. On another level they represent something more general than themselves, which makes them instances of symbols. Third, it was seen, too, that independently of their mode of representation each of the three subclasses can imply or ‘contain’ the other two. The mode of representation of the map of a town, since it refers to existent objects, indicates the cardinal points and has a scale of distances, is therefore indexical, and yet as a map it contains necessary iconic elements  – the shapes of the streets, for one thing – plus symbolic elements in the form of instructions, etc. Assembly-kit instructions are essentially iconic but they also contain indexical elements indicating position and what goes with what, plus symbols if only in the form of numbers associated with such

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components as screws, etc. More importantly, the implication of an icon in an index and the implication of an index in a symbol, and by transitivity, the implication of an icon in a symbol have proved to be of considerable interest to linguists studying the syntax of sentences and the formal arrangement of the items composing them. Fourth, returning once more to Robinson Crusoe and the footprint, this is how Peirce writes of the implication principle: ‘The footprint that Robinson Crusoe found in the sand, and which has been stamped in the granite of fame, was an Index to him that some creature was on his island, and at the same time, as a Symbol, called up the idea of a man’ (CP 4.531). Crusoe realized he had a fellow human being on the island when he spotted the indexical footprint, recognized the iconic shape of the footprint as human, but in order to do this he had to have in mind the idea of a man for otherwise he would have been unable to distinguish the trace from that of a bird or some other animal. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the discussion of the dynamic object leads us naturally to distinguish between, on the one hand, the logical form of the sign as this is determined by the partial objects and the internal organization of the event the sign represents and, on the other, any departures from that form, as in the case of the opening sentence of The Wings of the Dove. Such departures are characteristic of many if not most of the signs we encounter. However, since the semiotics as defined by Peirce is too general to deal with them and since we have to consider them temporarily as irrelevant, we take up the problem in a later chapter. Turning now to some of the examples studied earlier we see that the photograph of the Venetian campo and the line drawing of the quarrelling teenagers on Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are, respectively, an indexical sinsign and an iconic sinsign. However, in the latter case, within the represented world of the protagonists, we find a number of iconized replicas of NVC legisigns, and even though they are iconic we are able to interpret them as representing the troubled relations between the two. These same NVC legisigns occurring in a real-life confrontation such as that on Figure 4.3 above would be replicas of indexical legisigns. We are thus now in a position to establish the differences between the two principal classes of legisigns studied in this book, namely those involved in verbal and non-verbal communication. Those of the verbal class are either symbols, as in the case of common nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, for example, or indexical, as in the case of proper nouns, adnominal and pronominal demonstratives, personal pronouns, relatives, etc. In an utterance such as These fans are going to fight, for example, the noun fans and the verb fight are general in that their range of application is theoretically unbounded, for they are not restricted to the situation represented in the utterance: they represent classes and are thus general. The adnominal demonstrative These, on the other hand, is not in this way general, even though it is a linguistic unit: its range of application

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is restricted to this one situation; this is true, too, of the semi-auxiliary are going to, which uniquely links the action to come with a reference point which in this case is the moment the utterance is pronounced. Unlike their symbolic verbal counterparts, NVC legisigns are, like proper nouns, all tied to the context in which they appear: they are indexical. Although, again like proper nouns, they belong to a general register, the gestures and appearance of the football supporters on Figure 4.3 only signify within the context represented on the photograph, and the relation they hold with their objects – jubilation, scorn, group identity, etc. – is purely existential. In other words, while a sentence such as These fans are going to fight can be asserted of a limitless number of similar confrontations, the NVC signs visible on the photograph, like the photograph itself, and like the proper nouns used by the fans to address one another, are only valid for that occasion. On Figure 2.2 elements from this same stock of legisigns are represented graphically as a lovers’ tiff and are iconic. Similarly, we can now distinguish between the two possible values of the lion in the Saint Jerome engraving from Chapter Two. As the attribute of Saint Jerome, like the red cardinal’s hat, the lion is tied to the saint in a necessary dyadic relation, and functions rather like such verbal indices as relative pronouns, which establish a real connection with their referent without having the ‘full’ status as indices like a proper noun, for example. Attributes are indexical. Seen as the symbol of watchfulness, on the other hand, the lion becomes more general and its relation to its object is general, too. While both attributes and symbols are legisigns, symbols are the more complex mode of representation. With this we add to Table 4.1 the three subclasses identified by the second division in the following manner.

Table 4.1  The three modes of representation Criteria Category

S

O–S

Thirdness

Legisign

Symbol

Secondness

Sinsign

Index

Firstness

Qualisign

Icon

S–I

Chapter Five

Medium matters Chapter One advanced a number of definitions of the sign which introduced the reader to the three correlates involved in the action of the sign. However, within a more specialized logic of the icon, which Peirce envisaged in embryonic form in 1906, there are three developments which all presuppose the definitions from Chapter One but emphasize more clearly the specific nature of this particular type of sign. Below is yet another definition of the sign, dating from 1906, extracted from a letter to Lady Welby. Here Peirce is clarifying an important aspect of the nature of the relations holding between the sign and the object, and in particular, on the formal consequences of the determination of the sign by the object (a problem we have already encountered in one of Peirce’s militaristic illustrations of semiosis discussed in Chapter One): I use the word ‘Sign’ in the widest sense for any medium for the communication or extension of a Form (or feature). Being medium, it is determined by something, called its Object, and determines something, called its Interpretant [.  .  .] In order that a Form may be extended or communicated, it is necessary that it should have been really embodied in a Subject independently of the communication; and it is necessary that there should be another subject in which the same form is embodied only as a consequence of the communication. (SS 196) The interesting point, for it constitutes a major principle of what is known within linguistics as iconicity theory, is that in determining the sign, the object imparts or communicates part of its form to that sign: in an older sense of the term, we might say that what the sign represents informs the sign, whence the concept of ‘information’: the process of forming or moulding the mind when supplying it with new facts. For obvious reasons this principle is particularly evident in the case of the least complex of the signs defined according to their mode of representation, namely the icon.

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Following the Scholastics, Peirce is suggesting that what is communicated by the object to the sign is pure form.1 That this should be the case follows from the principle that the only stable, indivisible category capable of ‘inhering’ in all three correlates is Firstness, a situation made clear by the following remark: ‘Thoughts are neither qualities nor facts. They are not qualities because they can be produced and grow, while a quality is eternal, independent of time and of any realization’ (CP 1.420). Several paragraphs later Peirce adds: ‘Quality is the monadic element of the world’ (CP 1.426). This means, then, that Firstness is the only category from which nothing further can be prescinded. As such it constitutes a sort of phenomenological bedrock exemplified by such properties as quality and form, or the sensations of bitter taste, grainy texture, the blackness of pitch and the quality of tone of a fine violin. It follows, furthermore, that qualities alone can be common to object, sign and interpretant. With this in mind, we examine in this chapter the implications for a visual semiotics of Peirce’s more complete definition of the icon.

5.1 An ecology of signs With this section we enter the heart of the Peircean contribution to the semiotics of pictorial documents and, indeed, to the study of signs generally. For it is at this point that the relation between his three categories and the principles of semiotics that they govern is evidenced most spectacularly as the basis of an ecology of signs. No sign occurs in a vacuum. As we saw as early as Chapter One, at some stage in the semiotic process of human communication all signs have to be conveyed through, and by means of, an existential medium. Speech, as we have seen before, carries through the air we breathe as a wave-like succession of peaks and troughs, while writing is a linear sequence of inscriptions on a page or on some other equally visible medium. Were this medium not existential in nature, we should be unable to hear, see, feel or smell signs, nor should we be able to expunge them from audio or video recorders, or more simply, from a blackboard, and, most importantly of all, communication would be the prerogative of the telepath. Furthermore, in Chapter Two we saw how Peirce was led to distinguish between a unique general sign such as the English definite article and its innumerable ‘material’ realizations as special sinsigns in speech and writing, a consequence of the passage from the universe of the general to that of the existential and the particular. It therefore seems not unreasonable to expect that the medium in which the sign is conveyed should have some bearing upon the form it presents, and that an ecology of signs, that is, a study of the relation of signs to their environment, should yield interesting information concerning the

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nature and determinations of that form. 2 It is within the context of this often neglected relation between sign and medium that we take up and extend the theme of sign structure begun in the previous chapter. The main thrust of the present one is, as a consequence, a preoccupation with a sign’s iconicity, that is, its logical form, not simply because the study of the formal characteristics of signs is, as we shall see, determined in crucial ways by the relation between sign and medium, but also because such medium-induced variations in form can be shown to be the major invariant element within the long history of discussions of metaphor, for example, in both image and text.

5.1.1  Degrees of complexity and their implications for the structure of signs To obtain a general idea of the problem of signs and their environment, we need only consider this diagram (Figure 5.1) taken from the Cours de linguistique générale, in which Saussure is describing the speech circuit in his attempt to situate la langue with respect to language facts in general. 3 We see that the act of exchanging or communicating ideas begins uncontroversially with a thought of some sort, represented here by the ‘dot’ in A’s head. Since for Saussure thought and language were assimilated to the two sides of a sheet of paper, A’s thought is conveniently conveyed in the direction of the first arrow which flows towards B’s ear and thence to the dot in his head. This is, of course, a rough generalization, for, as he states in his exposition, Saussure understood the relation between language and thought to be more complex than this illustration. Nevertheless, it can be shown that from a strictly Peircean point of view this conscious oversimplification of the problem leads to what can be termed a category error, engendered by Saussure’s conception of the relation holding between language and thought. Returning to the illustration we see that any thinking done by A necessarily partakes, from a Peircean perspective, of the category of Thirdness, the category of generality and representation. However, in order to be processed by B, A’s message has to pass through a medium, here air, though the message could also have been written on a piece of

A

B

Figure 5.1  Saussure’s talking heads, courtesy of Editions Payot and Rivages.

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paper. Once B hears the message the inferential process of interpretation can begin and appropriate action be taken. Now the medium through which these various utterances are conveyed is necessarily existential, otherwise the messages would abort. Unlike the thoughts involved (Saussure writes of the communication of ‘concepts’), these material characters of the speech act all belong to the category of Secondness  – which means that this particular ‘transmission’ is a oneoff job, so to speak, and if repeated by A because of noise or some other interference, could never be the same as the original utterance, while the thought communicated would not necessarily differ. Just what is meant by the contrast between the generality of the concepts communicated and the particularity of the medium in this case? This can be neatly illustrated by Figure 5.2, which is simply a repetition of Figure 1.1. In the case of any sign used for purposes of expression or communication – in other words, in the case of any legisign – the origin of the sign must be conceptual and therefore general: this is the reasoning behind Peirce’s theory of the replica or instance introduced in Chapter Two. However, in order to be perceived at all, the identifying qualities of the sign must be inscribed or embodied in some existential, and therefore particular, medium. This is the situation illustrated in Figure 5.2, in which the horizontal bar indicates the sign’s passage from the general to the particular, from the cognitive to the existential – the momentary but necessary (because unavoidable) irruption of a Thirdness into the universe of Secondness. In other words, the object and the interpretant are located in a universe more complex than the medium through which the object is communicated by the sign. An ecology of signs requires that we investigate certain of the consequences of this peculiar relation between semiosis and environment.

Object

Interpretant

Sign

Figure 5.2  The representation of Peircean semiosis.

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5.1.2  Medium and structure of the sign We have just seen how, since it mediates between object and interpretant, a sign was defined as being the medium for the communication of a form; in other words, the communication of a configuration of formal properties. This combines with a theoretically important step in Chapter Four in which Peirce advances definitions of the icon, index and symbol division that are clearly governed by his category theory. By virtue of the implication principle discussed in Chapter Three, the more complex signs involve those lower down the scale. In this way it was shown how an index necessarily involves iconic elements to be recognized for what it is, and how symbols such as ordinary language propositions necessarily involve indices such as proper nouns and noun phrases (without these there would be no way of knowing what the proposition is being predicated of) and must also involve, by transitivity, sorts of icons. This principle makes it possible to examine the way language signs, for example, which represent their objects by convention, assume a (not always perceptible) form determined by the specific structure of the objects they represent. Now yet another stage in Peirce’s development of his theory of the icon is the refinement of the iconic elements that participate in the structuring of signs, both linguistic and pictorial. These elements Peirce terms ‘hypoicons’, which, as the prefix hypo- (from Greek hypo-, ‘under’, ‘below’, as in hypodermic, ‘beneath the skin’) suggests, are types of ‘sub-iconic’ structures or configurations. And it is the examination of these that reveals most clearly how the medium determines the structure of signs – in other words, how in semiotic analysis the medium matters.

5.2 The hypoicons As with the icon, index and symbol, with which the respective constitutions of the hypoicons share formal properties, the most convenient startingpoint is the definition. In the definition from paragraph 2.275 below Peirce introduces the concept of ‘representative quality’, by which he means the qualities specific to icon, index and symbol which characterize the manner in which each represents its object – ‘in some respect or capacity’ is the way he describes the concept in a text of 1897 (CP 2.228):4 The most fundamental [division of signs] is into Icons, Indices, and Symbols. Namely, while no Representamen actually functions as such until it actually determines an Interpretant, yet it becomes a Representamen as soon as it is fully capable of doing this; and its Representative Quality is not necessarily dependent upon its ever actually determining an Interpretant, nor even upon its actually having an Object. (CP 2.275, emphasis added)

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Consider now the following general description of the icon, which refers to the representative quality (Peirce again describes it as a representamen, but this is of no consequence here) of this particular subclass: An Icon is a Representamen whose Representative Quality is a Firstness of it as a First. That is, a quality that it has qua thing renders it fit to be a representamen. Thus, anything is fit to be a Substitute for anything that it is like.  .  .  . But a sign may be iconic, that is, may represent its object mainly by its similarity, no matter what its mode of being. If a substantive be wanted, an iconic representamen may be termed a hypoicon. Any material image, as a painting, is largely conventional in its mode of representation; but in itself, without legend or label it may be called a hypoicon. (CP 2.276) This definition commences with the rather forbidding reference to a Firstness of the sign as a First. What he means by this is really very simple, as he is defining the icon from the point of view of the position of the sign within the triadic relation holding between sign, object and interpretant. Within this relation, the sign, being defined as the least complex of the three, is the first correlate; moreover, since the icon is composed of qualities, which are elements of Firstness, its representative quality is precisely this Firstness of the sign as a first correlate. Therefore the representative quality of an icon is the specific configuration of qualities – colour, form, etc. – it shares with its object. In this instance and, indeed, on other occasions, no doubt for pedagogical purposes, and emphasizing the material qualities of the sign, Peirce assimilates the hypoicon to a painting without its caption: a painting of Marlborough Castle, say, minus the caption beneath. After this relatively relaxed start, he returns the reader to the complexities of his logic in the very next paragraph, in which he subjects the Firstness of the icon to the now familiar categorial analysis: Hypoicons may be roughly divided according to the mode of Firstness of which they partake. Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (CP 2.277) It is by means of this terse and uncompromising statement, seemingly the only complete definition of the hypoicons to be found in the canon, that Peirce invites us to investigate their nature and function and, as we shall see, the ecology of sign structure.5 The passage records the deduction of the three possible formal configurations characterizing a sign’s representative quality, and in this way constitutes an important theoretical principle of

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iconicity theory. The icon is thus subdivided into three different degrees of complexity: the image is an icon defined as the first Firstness of the sign in its status as a first correlate, the diagram an icon defined as the second such Firstness, and metaphor an icon structured as the third Firstness of the sign in its status as a first correlate.6 Since at different removes both an index and a symbol involve some form of icon, it is a theorem of Peircean semiotics that both the index and the symbol will involve one or other of the three ‘sub-iconic’ configurations defined in paragraph 2.277.

5.2.1  Hypoiconicity introduced Looking at the problem from the point of view of the communication of the sign through an existential medium, we see that Peirce distinguishes the following three cases: When the inherent structure of the object represented is less complex than the medium. When the inherent structure of the object represented corresponds point by point to that of the medium. When the inherent structure of the object represented is more complex than the medium. In the first case, the sign is an image, in the second a diagram and in the third the sign is a case of metaphor. In the illustration of these three hypoicons, I shall take them in order of increasing complexity, devoting proportionately more space to the more complex forms. What follows is an attempt to show how they correspond to the definition provided by paragraph 2.277. The methodological order is as follows: first, an explanation of the hypoicon, then a schema indicating its particular structure; finally, linguistic examples of the hypoicon. The section will be followed by a separate one devoted to pictorial documents illustrating each sub-iconic structure.

5.2.1.1 Image How are we to understand the representative quality or character of such a form? The key to the problem is in the reference to First Firstness, which can be illustrated by Figure 5.3. Among the hypoicons, the image is a simple, unstructured collection of qualities which are sufficient for the sign formed by the image to function as a sign: qualities are such as they are independently of anything else, a situation which we can illustrate graphically by figuring qualities in the sign as the letter q, the structure of the object and interpretant being represented as identical, even though they are usually far more complex than would appear from Figure 5.3.

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Object

Interpretant q1, q2, q3, . . . qn

q1, q2, q3, . . . qn

q1, q2, q3, . . . qn Sign

Figure 5.3  Structure of the image.

Irrespective of the number of qualities present in the object, one in the sign is sufficient for it to function, though on Figure 5.3 three such qualities have been indicated as q1, q2 and q3; however, to simplify, only one arrow indicating correspondences between qualities appears on the schema. Consider the following examples. 1 The noise of the pigs disturbed their sleep. 2 The grunting and snorting of the pigs disturbed their sleep. 3 The moan of doves in immemorial elms/ And murmuring of innumerable bees. (Tennyson: The Princess) (2) and (3), unlike (1), incorporate cases of  – are ‘informed’ by  – onomatopoeia, in which sounds ‘imitate’ some semantic experience, here the traditional idea of the noise made by pigs (2) and the humming of bees (3). Therefore, to this extent, the sentences can be said to contain or ‘involve’, as Peirce would say, examples of the image mentioned in the definition above. We note, however, that semiotically the sentences themselves are, in fact, more complex than the iconic content just described: they are propositions, a subclass of sign which in Chapter Six will be described as an informational sign composed essentially of symbols  – who would know, without having learned them on some prior occasion, the meanings of pigs, sleep or disturb, etc.? The terms grunting and snorting are nouns formed from verbs denoting the noise made by pigs and as nouns they name a general class of sounds. However, when determined by an article, here the, they become nominals or noun phrases, a linguistic category which denotes individual instances of the general term, and are therefore indexical. As indices they involve iconic elements by means of which we are able to identify them, onomatopoeic iconic elements which in this case resemble the sounds made by pigs and bees. These cases of onomatopoeia are a relatively simple illustration of the implication principle examined

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in Chapter Four by virtue of which symbolic signs such as propositions involve by transitivity certain iconic elements below them in the hierarchy: onomatopoeia being a configuration of sound qualities, these can be communicated without ‘resistance’ through a medium more complex than they are as the qualitative constituents of essentially symbolic propositions. Utterances (2) and (3) are thus instances or replicas of symbolic signs involving readily identifiable sound images.

5.2.1.2  Diagram Consider now the diagram, which most people know as a picture or series of pictures showing us how things work or what their internal workings are: such are the instructions for installing a piece of electronic equipment or for assembling a piece of furniture supplied in kit form or, more spectacularly, the complex screens used by air traffic controllers. Paragraph 2.277 defines diagrams as a subclass of the icon which ‘represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts’. Unlike images in the Peircean sense, diagrams, as we all know from experience, are structured icons: they are systematic to the extent that they not only have parts, entities, but these parts or entities are organized by ‘mainly’ dyadic relations. They are also the category of hypoicons which Peirce seemed to appreciate most, for he used a type of diagrammatic representation to improve on the explanatory power of the traditional symbolic logic of his century. Unlike that of the image, the representative character of the diagram is determined by the fact that relations of a specific type enter into the way it resembles its object. Whereas to qualify as a hypoicon the image simply has to possess qualities which it shares with its object, the representative character of the diagram is its dependence upon relations originating in the object: according to the definition, its constitution requires that at least two elements associated by some relation in the object should be represented by an analogous (dyadic) relation in the sign, though there is no theoretical limit to the number of these dyadic relations. The nature of this dependence is illustrated graphically but much simplified by Figure 5.4, in which the letters a and b are partial objects with some relation holding between them in the object, while the sign is similarly structured with the two elements a and b standing in an analogous relation to the structure of the object. In such cases, there is a categorial ‘harmony’ between the structure of the object, the structure of the sign and the existential nature of the medium (Secondness) through which the sign is conveyed. As a result, the structure of the object is communicated unimpeded to the interpretant via the sign, signifying that the message is communicated complete. 4 The pigs wallowed in the mud. 5 Some children were bathing in the sea.

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Figure 5.4  Structure of the diagram.

This is the case with utterances (4) and (5), in which the nominal expressions the pigs and the mud, some children and the sea are instances of the indices a and b in the sign on Figure 5.4, while the verbal forms wallowed and were bathing stand respectively for the relations holding between a and b and, of course, for the processes in the extralinguistic world represented by the sign. We see that the syntactic structure of the sign is as follows: N1 + Vb + Prep + N2 . Here N stands for nominal or noun phrase, Prep for a preposition, Vb for some conjugated verbal form, while the whole expression simply represents a syntactic structure composed of an initial noun phrase followed by a verb which is followed by a prepositional phrase containing a second nominal. This corresponds to the participant structure of the object, and this would be the case, too, if instead of being declarative, utterances (4) and (5) were interrogative or negative, such a change of mood being a function of the relation between the object and the ‘utterer’s’ state of mind and purpose. When the hypoiconicity of the sign is, as in (4) and (5), diagrammatic, object and sign are said to be homomorphic; that is, they share the same or similar structure, as indicated on Figure 5.4, which is not to say that the structure of the object is always simple – in forming an utterance of this sort only the salient features of the situation can be represented. In other words, the schema on Figure 5.4 represents a very simple (and probably very rare) one-to-one mapping from object to sign. The diagram is, of course, the projection principle behind the various types of histogram, pie-charts and bar-charts, etc., inevitably encountered in the media after general elections, for example, and the disconcerting graphs to be found at the foot of the hospital bed plotting changes in temperature. Returning, once more, to Robinson Crusoe and the footprint, we are now able to identify the iconic element of this indexical sign not as an image, but as a complex diagram: we understand that the size of the footprint and

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its depth in the sand were ‘informed’ by, and were proportional to, the age and weight of the person who left the footprint there, as Crusoe would have realized by comparing the print with his own. We are generally unaware of the way the sign is structured by the object, but it is a fascinating aspect of linguistic signs. A symbol, we saw in Chapter Four, is to be found two removes from the icon, which is why we are not always conscious of the determinants of the form of the utterances we pronounce: we take it for granted that conventional signs are just that, and cannot be motivated. Moreover, the way languages are taught as systems of rules obscures the fact that all utterances are in fact motivated, that is, determined in form to a greater or lesser degree by the structure of what they represent. A simple utterance such as (1) above, for example, shares structure with the object it represents, while (2) and (3) are iconically richer in that in addition to sharing the dyadic structure of their objects they also exhibit some of its qualities in the guise of onomatopoeia: (2) and (3) are both diagrammatic and imagic, while (1) is diagrammatic but not perceptibly imagic. The major implication of hypoiconicity is that what is known as the ‘valency’ of the verbal forms to be found in utterances (1)–(5), that is, the propensity of a verbal predicate to combine with a specific number of arguments, is not determined by some conventional rule involving a subject, a direct and an indirect object, for example, as codified by the grammarians, but rather by the different types of participants involved in the processes a particular verb represents. This is how Peirce frames the problem in a text from 1907: ‘Thus the partial objects of an ordinary transitive verb are an agent and a patient. These distinctive characters have nothing to do with the form of a verb, as a sign, but are derived from the fact signified’ (EP2 408): that is, it is the event represented that determines sentence structure, not some putative grammatical universal.7 In this way, the verb give takes three partial objects, not because this is the grammar of English, but because the event represented each time the verb is used necessarily involves three partial objects: a giver, a gift and a recipient of that gift from that particular giver. Similarly, speak differs from both say and tell in the number of partial objects or ‘arguments’ which determine the valency structure in each case: two for speak and three for both say and tell. The type of determination involved in these verbal forms is diagrammatic and, as with all icons participating by implication in symbols, this argument structure is motivated.

5.2.1.3  Metaphor We now turn to metaphor, the last and by far the most complex, and for this reason the most interesting, of the hypoicons, though one which, with notable exceptions, for example Anderson (1985), Shapiro and Shapiro

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(1988) and Haley (1988), seems to have discouraged comment and exegesis, the problem being to understand what Peirce means when he affirms that ‘[Hypoicons] which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors’. The first, vital, point to be made is that for Peirce, metaphor is form, not a piece of figurative discourse such as a sentence or a whole speech, although as we now know, a sentence may be (hypoiconically) metaphoric, for, being qualitative in nature, there is no theoretical limit to the types of signs in which metaphor can inhere. In what follows I shall attempt to show the importance of the reference to a parallelism in the definition from 2.277 and its relation to the expressive and informational content of linguistic signs informed by metaphor. We can represent the internal structure of metaphorical form and the diagnostic parallelism in the object (‘a parallelism in something else’) by means of the diagram on Figure 5.5. Note, too, at this point, that reasoning from the categories we see that metaphor is a Third Firstness, and therefore the ‘genuine’ hypoicon of the three, requiring, like the symbol, the necessary involvement of the interpretant in its constitution. Whereas in the image the structures respectively of object and interpretant were left unspecified, in the diagram it was the structure of the interpretant that was left unspecified, since whatever structure the sign had it inherited solely from the object. In the case of the metaphor the parallelism to be found in the object, must, if the sign is interpreted correctly, inform the interpretant too. In the ellipse representing the object we find two sets of lines between two points, respectively a and b and a’ and b’ associated by the double slash // convention signalling that the two lines are parallel. This is a much simplified representation of the constituent structure of the object of any sign which is metaphorical. Borrowing the terminology of Lakoff and Johnson (1980),8 we can identify the constituents composing the two ‘lines’ of the parallelism in the object (and, of course, in the interpretant). The top line displaying the relation between a and b will be referred to as the base domain, while the codomain on the lower line will be referred to as the target domain. The relations between corresponding elements from the base and target domains, for example a and a’ on Figure 5.5, are referred to as ‘counterpart mappings’: a and a’ are counterparts in different domains. Consider now utterance (6), a much subscribed example of metaphor from Aristotle’s Rhetoric: ‘Achilles is a lion’. This is the sentence represented by the a’ –– a structure of the sign on Figure 5.5. The sign represents a parallel drawn between Achilles and his prowess in battle (represented by b’) and the lion and its aggressive behaviour towards its quarry in the chase (b). This we can capture by simply representing the structure of the object in this particular case (Figure 5.6), in which, of course, each line of the parallel contains two partial objects unlike the single dyad of partial objects in a diagram. The base domain is composed of the lion and the animals in the chase, a relation that we learn

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Figure 5.5  Structure of metaphor.

of from childhood even if we have no first-hand experience of lions. In the target domain, on the other hand, the courage of Achilles, the counterpart of the lion from the base, is being assessed or judged in relation to other warriors in battle. We note the following points. First, the base domain is conceptual in status and constitutes the known, given, unproblematic area of experience with which the sign’s creator assumes his listener, reader or observer to be familiar with. The relation between Achilles and battle on the lower line, on the other hand, the equally conceptual codomain which the sign’s creator wishes to have his audience understand (e.g. just how brave or how valiant a warrior Achilles is) is the new, problematic target relation to be established: metaphorical signs – utterances, and, as we shall see, pictures – enable the sign’s creator to proceed from what he presumes is known in the base to what he presumes is unknown to his addressee, reader or whatever, and to pass judgement. (If the speaker didn’t suppose this target domain to be new, problematic or unknown to the addressee he probably wouldn’t open his mouth in the first place!) Second, a parallel is by definition a pair of non-intersecting lines, each extending between two points, namely the ‘dots’ on Figure 5.5; both points are realized on Figure 5.6 as the participants in each of two conceptual domains. They constitute, in other words, pairs of partial objects which, however, are located in distinct conceptual domains. Consequently, the sign, which is constrained by the existential medium through which it must pass in order to be perceived, is, in the case of an utterance, unidirectional, vectorial in nature, and is unable to represent the two ‘tiers’ of participants in the parallel domains forming the object. This is the reason for the brackets around (chase) and its counterpart (battle): neither appears in the sign, they’ve been ‘bracketed’. In short, metaphorical signs are underspecified: they cannot represent the total content – that is all the

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Object

lion Achilles

(chase) (battle)

Figure 5.6  Two parallel domains of partial objects.

partial objects – forming the object that determines them. As with every icon, the mode of representation is based upon resemblance, but in this case the constraints of the existential medium inhibit the representational potential of the sign. Third, a consequence of this underspecification is that elements from the two domains are blended or merged in the sign and, since in most cases the two domains are not necessarily alike, the resultant sign is not only underspecified with respect to the participants in the object but also incongruous: incongruity and underspecification are thus two of the diagnostic characteristics of metaphor as defined by Peirce. Fourth, although the signs in Figures 5.5 and 5.6 represent relations between two pairs of partial objects, there is theoretically no limit to the number of potential partial objects. The following verbal example shows how Sir Walter Ralegh’s witty but serious meditation on life exploits the structure of metaphor: On the Life of Man WHAT is our life? a play of passion, Our mirth the music of division, Our mothers’ wombs the tiring houses be, Where we are dressed for this short comedy, Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks who still doth act amiss, Our graves that hide us from the searching sun, Are like drawn curtains when the play is done, Thus march we playing to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest. Sir Walter Ralegh, 1612 The structure of the object, represented as the schema on Figure 5.7, contains in this case at least six counterpart mappings (playing and living would count too, but the point is well enough made with those on the schema).

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base:

play

music

dressing-room

comedy

critic

curtains

target:

life

mirth

mother’s womb

(life)

God

grave

Figure 5.7  The structure of the object in Ralegh’s ‘What is life?’

The base domain in this case is, of course, the dominant art form of the time, namely the theatre, chosen here and in a number of Shakespearian monologues (Macbeth at the end of the play, Jaques in As You Like it, for example) as the seat of illusion: life on earth is an illusion, the after-life is the real thing. There is thus a practical but not a theoretical limit to the number of counterpart mappings in the object of a metaphorical sign. Moreover, it is possible for the predicate term (verb or adjectival phrase) to be the sole element of the base domain to be represented in an utterance. Compare, for example, utterance (7) ‘Mary was wallowing in self-pity’ with (8), the line from Chaucer, which we can simplify for present purposes to ‘Lovers bathe in/are totally immersed in joy’. Unlike the previous example, it is the relation between Mary and self-pity, respectively M and sp on Figure 5.8, that is the target of the metaphor, while all we find of the base is the process wallow, which means that the participants in the base domain (pigs, mud) have been bracketed; this is a case, too, in (8), where the sign’s creator is more interested in comparing processes than in pairs (or more) of counterpart participants. In both cases the metaphor enables the speaker to pass judgement on the subject participant (7) or to define the state of the lovers (8). In (7) a parallel is drawn between Mary and a pig, since she wallows in self-pity; in (8) the intensity of the pleasure felt by the lovers is compared to that of children, for example, disporting themselves in the sea. 7 Mary was wallowing in self-pity. 8 But ye loveres, that bathen in gladnesse. (Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde) We note, finally, that what is represented in the object is what determines, albeit partially, the underspecified structure of the sign, the set of partial objects constituting the sign’s dynamic object. On the other hand, the purposes of the metaphor – simple judgements in the three examples (6)–(8) examined above  – are a function of the peculiar modal relation holding at the time between the dynamic object and the speaker’s disposition or attitude towards it, as described by Peirce in the letter to William James discussed in Chapter Four. There are thus two major ecological consequences of the ‘squeezing’ of Thirdness through an existential medium (paper, airwaves, a blackboard,

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Figure 5.8  The categorial bottleneck.

a computer screen, etc.): the resultant sign is, as seen above, both formally incongruous (it mixes two distinct domains), and underspecified (not all the elements from each domain can be represented in the sign, not even in a two-dimensional one like a painting or a photograph). This is the situation represented by Figure 5.8, where the passage from object to interpretant through the mediation of the sign is represented as a type of phenomenological funnel or bottleneck: it constricts the contents of the message to the point that elements from the object are necessarily absent from the sign and have to be reinstated in the interpretant through inference from experience. In other words, the interpreter of metaphorical signs is obliged to work with impoverished data. Finally, since within Peircean semiotics metaphor is form rather than a trope, it structures pictorial signs, too, although in this case there are two dimensions available in contrast to the single dimension of verbal signs. It is in this respect that Peirce’s conception of metaphor differs from that of more recent theories. Lakoff and Johnson, for example, sought to identify the universal categories of metaphor and advanced two major types: conceptual and ontological metaphors, the first illustrated by the idea that UP IS GOOD, to be found, like its opposite DOWN IS BAD, in a wide range of propositions such as ‘I’m feeling on top of the world’ as opposed to ‘Her spirits sank’, etc. Ontological metaphors on the other hand are based on a perceived resemblance between physical objects, such as containers, and the way we describe our feelings or state of health, for example: ‘He’s brimming with energy’ as opposed to ‘I feel drained’.9 The Peircean insistence on metaphor as a complex form cuts through these categories, is not limited to propositional data and tells us nothing about the way metaphorical signs might be classified; for this Peirce would appeal to our collateral knowledge of the complex object of such signs. However, the ubiquity of this form accounts for the central role of metaphor in much rhetorical theory.

5.2.2  Hypoiconicity in pictorial documents We illustrate the fundamental distinctions captured by Peirce’s definition in paragraph 2.277 as they apply to a single pictorial theme, namely the human head. The first is a deliberately vague icon, the second is a black and white

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version of one of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome; the third is a diagram of the human skull taken from Gray’s Anatomy, while the fourth is a poster that sought to dynamize the traditional image of Christ.

5.2.2.1 Image, diagram, metaphor Looking at Figure 5.9 the reader might recognize, scanning from right to left a nose, a forehead, a chin and what looks perhaps like a wig reminiscent of eighteenth-century fashion. But the picture could quite conceivably be interpreted to represent an island with a lake or lagoon to the west and a promontory to the east. As an image in the Peircean sense the picture looks like whatever it appears to resemble. Figure 5.10 is a stylized block print by Aubrey Beardsley from the suite of images illustrating Wilde’s Salome featuring, among other things, Salome and the head of John the Baptist on a plate: two representations of the human face. It would seem that Beardsley’s principal concern is to organize these features in accordance with his particular aesthetic preoccupations, for example the emphasis on Salome’s clothing and hair, the reduced size of the faces, the deliberate flattening of space and the rejection of perspective, etc. This is a self-consciously extravagant representation of the human head and body, a refusal of the natural in favour of ornamentation and a subversive sensibility promoting artificiality over what Beardsley must have seen as stifling and ugly Victorian realism. Thus the normal relations holding between the eyes, nose and mouth of either ‘protagonist’ are not of any great scientific importance, and physiological accuracy was obviously not the artist’s prime concern. What sort of a dynamic object is represented here? To answer that we would have to locate it not so much in the Bible as in Beardsley’s creative imagination. In both Figures 5.9 and 5.10, the qualities are Firstnesses, and whatever the object represented, its structure is simpler than that of the medium through which the sign is conveyed. Figure 5.10 is the more complex image, an iconic sinsign composed of qualities selected for purely aesthetic and ideological reasons.

Figure 5.9  An image.

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Figure 5.10  Aubrey Beardsley, The Dancer’s Reward © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

This is clearly not the case on Figure 5.11, which targets medical students: the primary purposes of such a representation are to inform and to instruct, and physiological accuracy in such a representation is paramount, with the relations between the various parts of the skull scaled exactly in proportion and meticulously identified and labelled. Although it contains indexical legisigns of various kinds identifying the different parts of the skull (frontal, supraorbital foramen, etc., legisigns which obviously present no problems of comprehension to the experienced specialist), the mode of representation involved is inescapably iconic, in spite of these recognizable language signs. The diagram is composed of lines forming relations within it which are intended to correspond term for term with relations among the parts of a human skull. In other words, as the definition states, for the sign to function correctly the dyadic or compound dyadic relations represented between the components in the diagrammatic representation have to correspond point by point to the relations between the components of the object represented. We don’t know for certain that they do, but the sign represents itself to be representing them faithfully as doing so.

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Figure 5.11  Diagram of a skull from Gray’s Anatomy © Bartleby.com.

As an icon this third representation of the human head, then, is an example of Peirce’s diagram, a sign which he calls elsewhere an ‘icon of relations’ (CP 4.418). As far as the ecology of this subclass of the icon is concerned, the multiple dyadic structures forming the object correspond naturally to the Secondness of the medium. The purpose of Figure 5.12, on the other hand, is of yet a different order, and there is clearly no scientific accuracy in this chimera. We examine, then, as an example of pictorial metaphor a controversial multimodal document entitled ‘(Meek Mild) Jesus: no wimp in a nightie’. This was published in poster form as part of a campaign financed by the Churches Advertising Network in Britain in preparation for Easter 1999, in an attempt to revamp the image of Christ and to revitalize church attendance at the time.10 It is, of course, yet another appropriation of the famous photograph of Che Guevara taken in 1960 by Alberto Korda, the idea being to replace the traditional docile image of a man prepared to turn the other cheek to his enemies and tormentors (whence the term ‘wimp’, the ‘nightie’ in question being an uncomplimentary reference to the ample robe Jesus is always represented as wearing) by a more aggressive and revolutionary one.

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Figure 5.12  Jesus-Che, © Churches Advertising Network.

The title of the poster, which literally brackets the ‘gentle’ epithet from the image, and indeed the text it carries, echoes a verse from a well-known child’s prayer written by Charles Wesley in 1742: Gentle Jesus, meek and mild Look upon a little child; Pity my simplicity, Suffer me to come to Thee The semiotic interest of the poster is the way in which the features of two distinct but parallel ideologies, Marxist and Christian, are metaphorically integrated in a single image. What makes such an incongruous parallelism possible is the fact that both men were considered martyrs, and died for causes involving oppressors from home and abroad (Bolivians and American Army Special Forces on the one hand, and Jews and Romans on the other). The Christ image is being modified in the target domain, while

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the knowledge we are assumed to have of Che Guevara and the photograph in the base domain serves as a basis for the comparison. The counterpart mappings are restricted: the base contains Che Guevara and the distinctive beret and star, corresponding respectively to Christ and the crown of thorns. In addition to these we note that the Che’s hair in the base has been reduced in the sign, while the moustache has been lengthened. The red background (in the original poster) is common to both men  – blood and revolution. Just the two (complex) non-verbal features of expression and appearance – replicas of NVC legisigns – are sufficient for an efficient interpretation of the message. We note, too, that in spite of extending in two dimensions the metaphorical structure of the poster is no less underspecified or incongruous than the vectorial utterances we examined above: the parallelism in the object cannot, even in a two-dimensional sign, be totally reconstructed in the sign it nevertheless determines.

5.2.2.2  Metaphor and simile In the case of the highly frequent diagrammatic structure of sentences, and all other things being equal, the dyadic structure of the sign reflects the similarly dyadic structure of the object (although there may be other parts and relations in the object which do not find their way into the sign). Example (9) illustrates the more complex case of simile, or comparison: (9) Mary indulged in self-pity as a pig wallows in mud. And this we can represent pictorially as Figure 5.13, noting that in this example of simile the conjunction as represents a relation associating two propositions. Here two dyadic relations between, respectively, Mary and self-pity, on the one hand, and pigs and mud on the other, are combined into a ‘higher’ dyadic relation by means of the conjunction as, (represented as a hyphen or dash on the diagram) yielding this complex diagram, which, unlike the metaphor examples above, is common to object, interpretant and sign (note that this schema of the contents of the object also determines another simile: Mary wallowed in self-pity like a pig wallowing in mud). Since the structure of the three correlates is identical in this case there is little point is showing all three, and so Figure 5.13 simply represents the structure and contents of the object alone.

Figure 5.13  The diagrammatic structure of simile.

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Thus, unlike that of metaphor, the structure of simile is doubly diagrammatic and complete in the sense that the sign is not constrained either by the spoken or the written medium to represent only certain parts of the object. Peirce puts the matter thus: ‘[Let]metaphor be taken literally to mean an expression of a similitude when the sign of predication is employed instead of the sign of likeness – as when we say this man is a fox instead of this man is like a fox’ (CP 7.590). Such signs are therefore neither underspecified nor necessarily incongruous.

5.3  Beyond metaphor: The structure of allegory and personification This discussion of hypoiconicity as defined by Peirce in CP 2.277 has described and illustrated image, diagram and metaphor. However, the structure of metaphor offers yet a further example of how a sign can be the vehicle for the communication of a variant of metaphorical form not to be found in the Collected Papers. Consider the following image (Figure 5.14) associating the head of a cockerel with its crest fully extended and the caption identifying it as a certain object of experience (the fact that he is a seventeenth-century Spanish fictional creation makes no ontological difference), Don Juan Tenorio. This incongruous image displays the characteristic blend of elements from two distinct domains, the human and the animal. It is a rather fanciful framed portrait and caricature of the inveterate womanizer, and as a caricature it carries with it a moral judgement which functions by means of its metaphorical structure.

Figure 5.14  A caricature of Don Juan.

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The generic structure of metaphorical signs was introduced on Figure 5.5. This we can adapt to represent the complex organization of the caricature in the manner indicated on Figure 5.15. If we consider first the object, we note that the base domain represents the behaviour of a cockerel that spends its time engaging quite naturally in the frequent and indiscriminate insemination of the hens in the farmyard, an activity which is assumed by the sign-user to be well known and unproblematic. The domain targeted by the metaphor, on the other hand, is characterized by the equally well known and perhaps no less natural relations entertained by the women of Seville and a celebrated libertine, now established almost as a human archetype by the numerous literary and musical versions of the Don Juan ‘myth’ that have appeared since the play was created by Tirso de Molina. The parallelism in the object thus associates by means of the two counterpart mappings the cockerel with Don Juan and the hens in the yard with the young women of Seville. The relation displayed in the sign, however, is far less complex: it simply associates Don Juan with a cockerel by a simple vectorial analogy, thereby offering us a certain way of coming to terms with the behaviour of this compulsive seducer who shows neither discrimination nor remorse and, at the same time, a means of judging him morally. And if the interpreter has understood the caricature, the structure of the object is reproduced intact in the structure of the interpretant. Figure 5.15 brings out this hypoiconic arrangement, in which the (Don Juan – cockerel) structure of the sign corresponds to the Achilles is a lion metaphor examined above. As we saw earlier, such a configuration of elements is inherently underspecified since the totality of the elements in the two domains can only be represented fully in the diagram as defined in paragraph 2.277. Metaphor, however, is a structure which lends itself easily to appropriation or misappropriation for artistic, ideological or other purposes.

Figure 5.15  The metaphorical structure of the Don Juan caricature.

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With this in mind we turn to the hypoiconic structure of allegory and personification. The example here (Figure 5.16), an illustration from an emblem book, is more complex than the various cases of metaphor examined above, although this is not immediately apparent. Emblems were typically composed of a motto, an image or pictura, and a text in verse and/or an epigram. In the present case, the pictura has been extracted from a seventeenth-century edition of Andrea Alciato’s Book of Emblems, and represents the emblem Vigilantia et custodia. Watchfulness and wakefulness

Figure 5.16  Alciato’s Emblem 15, Vigilantia et custodia.

The crowing cock – because it gives signs of the coming Dawn and recalls toiling hands to a new day’s labour; the bronze bell – because it calls the wakeful mind to higher things: each is fashioned on sacred towers. And here’s a lion – but because this guardian sleeps with open eyes, it’s therefore placed before the temple doors.

In appearance this image, generously provided by William Barker,11 seems to be far simpler as a pictorial representation than the skull from Gray’s Anatomy, being composed of easily recognizable facing cockerels perched on bronze bells at the top of twin towers, one in the dark, the other in the light, together with two lions barring the entrance to a temple. We might be tempted to think that even a young child could successfully interpret such an image. However, as the experienced adult knows, following a long tradition of fables and bestiaries from Æsop and Jean de La Fontaine to James Thurber and Art Spiegelman, the animals are intended to represent human qualities, here wakefulness and watchfulness (and if he doesn’t, the epigram is there to help). In other words, this pictura represents yet again an object far more complex than itself, a parallelism in fact, drawn between two pairs of animals and two commendable human qualities. Note that the mode of representation of the sign is iconic: it is an iconic sinsign. The pairs of animals, however, are symbolic: they represent a generality more complex than themselves. In short, whereas the information on diagrams like the skull from Gray’s Anatomy or the instructions for building a self-assembly kit can be read

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off directly, the information to be interpreted in the illustration of the emblem has to be read with respect to a tradition of which we might be entirely ignorant since the entities present in the image stand for others which are absent, and only recoverable from our experience. This is the situation represented by Figure 5.17.

Figure 5.17  The allegorical structure of Emblem 15.

The basic structure of the pictura, then, is that of Peirce’s metaphor, but the contents of the sign are even more underspecified than in the canonical case of metaphor. If we compare this schema with Figure 5.15 we see that instead of being composed of at least one element from each domain the pictura itself contains only elements from the base, namely pairs of lions and cockerels. Without the caption, the two human qualities being targeted (abbreviated on the structure as ‘wake.’ and ‘watch.’, respectively) would have to be inferred from our collateral experience of the genre and of the qualities associated with each pair of animals by a tradition which includes, of course, emblem books. According to the OED ‘allegory’ literally means ‘speaking otherwise than one seems to speak’, and is a compound formed from Greek ‘αλλος’ ‘other’ and  –‘άγορία’ ‘speaking’, or haranguing in the market or public assembly (‘άγορά). How do we account semiotically for what many allegory specialists consider its diagnostic disjunctive character? Its generic structure and the influence of an existential medium on a far more general cognitive activity can best be represented by means of a graphic representation examined above in the case of metaphor, the funnel schema as it is now displayed on Figure 5.18. This (much simplified) schema illustrates, for example, the structure of the graphic novel Maus, where the vector a–b would stand for the well-known relation holding between cats and mice, while a’–b’ would

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Figure 5.18  The hypoiconic structure of generic allegory.

represent their respective counterparts in the target, namely the Nazis and the Polish Jews. However, within the sign on Figure 5.18, as in the graphic novel, the base relation between cats and mice is the only one to be fully represented in the sign, leaving the target to be inferred by the reader (from such ‘hints’ as swastikas and Hitler-style moustaches, etc.). As defined here, then, allegory is an extreme mode of metaphorical representation in which the elements in the target domain of the parallelism structuring a sign’s object have to be inferred from what can often be very elliptical and allusive information. It differs from extended metaphor not only in form but also in scope, for allegory tends to be coextensive with the totality of the text rather than with some salient part, and, in cases of fiction and images, it stages ‘protagonists’ recruited entirely from the base domain. To this extent it characterizes a medium for the communication of a form by ‘proxy’, since the events represented stand in fact at two removes from reality: the pictorial representation itself locates the events depicted at one remove, while allegorical structure places them at two removes, since the events are not represented as themselves, that is directly, in the image (or narrative) but as something else. The reasons why authors and artists should adopt this strategy are no doubt numerous. In the case of metaphor, that is where elements from both base and target domains are blended in the sign, the reasons are often simply pragmatic: for example, extended innuendo of the sort that used to be a staple ingredient of British pantomime shows relied heavily upon metaphorical form, a vulgar ploy to avoid censure and offense by pitching the sexual issues above the heads of the children for whom the shows were intended in the first place. This is the case, too, with many risqué blues lyrics, and in a special allegorical genre: Æsop, for example, was born a slave, but the exploitation of allegorical form in his fables made them a vehicle for satire that avoided punishment and eventually made him a free man. Didacticism, too, often exploits the characteristic minimalism of this mode  – Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress comes to mind, a case, perhaps, in which Aristotle’s διανοια assumes priority over plot and characterization. In this way, fabulists and allegorist the world over, have, through the ages, appropriated and reworked the structure of metaphor as Peirce identifies it in paragraph 2.277. And this structure, of course, is what distinguishes the two Dürer engravings discussed in Chapter Two. While the representation

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of Saint Jerome is clearly an image in the Peircean sense, the personification of Melancholy presents all the characteristics of allegorical structure, as in the case, too, of Alciato’s emblem 15.

5.4 Post scriptum 5.4.1  Metaphor, atomism and the code We conclude this presentation of hypoiconicity by returning to the arguments set out in Chapter Two in favour of the concept of the legisign as opposed to that of the code, where it was suggested that the additive structure of codes was problematic in that it led to an atomistic conception of signs, both verbal and pictorial. To see the import of this in the light of the contents of the present chapter, consider now the philosopher Ernest Gellner’s comments concerning the logical atomism informing Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: As can be seen, Wittgenstein elaborated the idea [of a one-to-one correspondence between the atoms of language and the atoms of the world] into a kind of Mirror theory of meaning and language. In a sense, the idea is valid, and had indeed been one of the bases of communication theory. A code can only communicate information concerning the same number of possible objective alternatives as happens to be the same number of its alternative possible messages . . . (and then it can be said to mirror them). Any greater richness in the world cannot be conveyed by it. On the other hand, any greater richness in the code (i.e. more signs than are necessary for the number of alternative messages liable to be conveyed by it) is redundant. (Gellner, 1959, p. 93, emphasis added) In other words, and simplifying considerably, it is sometimes suggested, as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus, that such complex signs as sentences can be broken up and their ultimate constituents made to enter into a term to term relation with the extralinguistic ‘atoms’ they are held to represent. If all sentences were like this then it might be feasible to talk of natural languages as species of codes. However, this is simply not the case: as we have seen in the sections above, certain types of verbal signs are less ‘rich’, that is less complex, than the objects they represent. In other words, they are underdetermined with respect to those objects. Nor is it the case, either, that in all images there is a one-to-one mapping between the elements inscribed on their surfaces and the objects, protagonists or whatever, being represented. Reformulating Gellner’s argument, we can say that there is, in certain well-defined cases, a certain degree of ‘richness’ in the sign’s object which simply cannot be mapped term for term either in an image

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or in an assertion in any natural language. As we have seen in the case of metaphorical hypoiconicity, the structure of the object is considerably more complex than that of the sign representing it, and constitutes a case where the totality of the ‘richness in the world’, to use Gellner’s expression, cannot be conveyed by the sign: such metaphorical signs are both underspecified and incongruous, owing to the funnel or bottleneck effect illustrated on Figure 5.8, which is an inevitable consequence of the passage from the Thirdness of thought through the Secondness of the medium supporting the sign.

5.4.2  Jakobson and iconicity theory It is probably fair to say that neither this book nor many others on Peircean semiotics would have seen the light of day if it had not been for the perspicacity of the linguist Roman Jakobson. He it was, who, in 1965, after having already published articles on ‘shifters’ – deictic expressions related to the speech act and the situation of utterance – using Peirce’s theory of the index, brought what in this book has been called the ‘implication principle’ to the notice of a far wider audience than Peirce’s semiotic theory had received until then. The long article ‘Quest for the Essence of Language’ (Jakobson [1965] 1971) presented linguists with an alternative conception of language to the Cartesian universal grammar of Noam Chomsky and his collaborators which held sway at the time, a conception of language motivation which insisted on what he had called in an earlier paper the ‘iconic’ aspect of word order: ‘The order of elements in language parallels that in physical experience or the order of knowledge’ (1963, p. 269). Thus of the three subclasses examined above, the icon, in particular, was becoming increasingly important in his view of the relation between syntactic order and the order of experience in extralinguistic reality. In this way, by 1965 he was able to write: ‘Thus Peirce’s graphic and palpable idea that “a symbol may have an icon or . . . an index incorporated into it” opens new, urgent tasks and far-reaching vistas to the science of language. The precepts of this “backwoodsman in semiotic” are fraught with vital consequences for linguistic theory and praxis’ ([1965] 1971, p. 357). However, it must be said that in his discussion of the hypoicons, Jakobson found it necessary to reduce the original three to two, namely the image and the diagram, and neglected to describe the third hypoicon, metaphor, in Peircean terms, no doubt because he felt that it competed with his own view of the metonymical and metaphorical axes of language. This unfortunate intrusion of a long-standing European dualist tradition into his presentation of a distinctly triadic system – his two axes, like Barthes’s twin functions of anchorage and relay, are based upon Saussure’s paradigmatic–syntagmatic distinction – was to have far-reaching consequences for the subsequent turn taken by iconicity theory over the following decades.

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5.5  Summary This chapter developed a number of themes introduced in Chapter Four – most notably the definition of a sign as the medium for the communication of a form. It is this idea that the chapter has exploited by examining the various formal configurations that signs both verbal and pictorial can present and their relation to the medium through which they are communicated. We see how Peirce subjects the icon to the familiar categorial analysis by means of a lapidary formula (CP 2.277) which defines three formal configurations dividing the icon into three subclasses, termed ‘hypoicons’. These are, in order of increasing complexity, the image, the diagram and metaphor, the respective constitutions of which correspond to the monad, dyad and triad. This tripartite analysis of the icon has enabled us to establish the following points. The simplest form, the image, is the form of the icon to be found in most conventional pictorial representations, from children’s drawings to comic-strips to the paintings of the Masters hanging in our museums and galleries, and is used for a wide variety of purposes, aesthetic or otherwise. By virtue of the one-to-one relation holding between the parts of the diagram and the parts of the object represented this hypoicon tends to have a more utilitarian distribution than the image, and as a consequence of its dyadic constitution it corresponds closely to the existential structure of the medium through which any sign thus structured is communicated. For this reason sentences and photographs displaying diagrammatic structure are communicated unimpeded by the constraints of the medium. The third and most complex hypoicon, metaphor, is characterized by a two-tier parallelism in the object which the limitations of an existential medium prevent the sign from representing fully. As a consequence the structure of the object and its contents can only be represented incompletely: only certain elements from each of the two domains, the base and the target, can co-occur in the sign. For this reason any sign structured by metaphor is underspecified (not everything in the object can find its way into the sign) and generally incongruous (the elements co-occurring in the sign are drawn from two distinct and not always congruent areas of experience). Metaphoric iconicity is the structure which underwrites the cognitive movement of ratiocination and inference; it also offers the possibility, of a modified hypoiconic structure – allegory, a totally underspecified sign, with no reference to the target – which artists and authors are able to manipulate for both aesthetic and ideological purposes. Moreover, by virtue of the implication principle examined in Chapter Four, not only can an icon be involved in an index and, by transitivity in a symbol, but it follows that both index and symbol can involve any of the three hypoiconic structures examined above, a principle largely employed in the study of the syntax of natural languages.

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Finally, what the chapter established by means of the categorial analysis explicitly stated in the founding definition of hypoiconicity – the uncompromising paragraph 2.277 – is that the diverging structure of signs informed by diagram and metaphor can be explained within an ecology of signs, that is, within the constraining relation holding between the sign and the medium through which it has of necessity to be communicated. Within Peircean semiotics, then, metaphor is first and foremost a form, not the figurative ornament of the tradition, although the latter is clearly informed by the third hypoicon. Metaphorical structure is the result of the tension induced by the passage through an existent medium of a more complex generality (the parallelism structuring the dynamic object), a tension which, from an ecological point of view, produces a funnel effect which ‘leaches out’ elements from the object and ‘flattens’ the original parallelism. Having thus defined and illustrated the three subclasses of the icon we can add them to the table of sign classes in the manner illustrated on Table 5.1, with the understanding that each of the hypoicons can be involved in the index and the symbol ‘above’ it.

Table 5.1  The degrees of complexity of the hypoicons Criteria Category

S

O–S

Thirdness

Legisign

Symbol

Secondness

Sinsign

Index

Firstness

Qualisign

metaphor diagram image

S–I

Chapter Six

The mute poem We saw in Chapter Four how, aided by a major development in the visual technology of the age and his three-way division between symbol, index and icon, Peirce disrupted a centuries-old distinction between text and image by extending this to include the photograph and, implicitly, the movie. This, however, was not the only innovation which the subclasses identified in the 1903 classification contributed to Peirce’s onslaught on the old binary order. He was also to overhaul an age-old myth of the pictorial sign conceived as being somehow mute, but in doing so he brought to the problem a paradox of his own. This, the last of the chapters which deal with Peirce’s speculative grammar, is also the longest. It brings us to the final division of the 1903 classification and, consequently, to the investigation into the informative specificity of the image as a sign and, in particular, its restricted capacity to inform. Peirce, we discover in the chapter, says in particular of the icon, for example the non-photographic, captionless image, that information can be derived from it, though it is not interpreted as conveying any (CP 2.309). He also asserts that the ‘only way of directly communicating an idea is by means of an icon’ (CP 2.278). Thus an icon has an informative potential, is the ‘only way of directly communicating an idea’ but, strangely enough, is not in itself an informational sign: in other words and according to an ancient tradition, it is ‘mute’. How do we account for such conflicting claims? This is the task of the third trichotomy, which is concerned with the manner in which a sign can convey information. It is also, non-coincidentally, the division in which the interpretant enters the equation, for this final division indexes the three-way relation holding between the sign and the interpretant. We begin with a short excursion into iconology by examining an ancient pronouncement on the informative potential of pictorial signs followed by a presentation of Peirce’s early theory of information and thence to a description of his third trichotomy and the three subclasses of signs composing it. Examples of the two pertinent pictorial sign-types identified by this trichotomy are compared and contrasted from the point of view of

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their informative capacity. Finally, we complete the classification of signs as Peirce conceived this in 1903. Like the first trichotomy, the third has unjustly received less attention from critics and commentators, no doubt owing to the polemical nature of the icon and the notoriety of the principle of resemblance associated with the universally known second division. And yet, as we shall see, it is highly innovative and breaks with at least two traditions, the first of which being an overly simple conception of the informative capacity of images.

6.1 The paradox of the still image 6.1.1  The mute poem When Peirce claimed that icons assert nothing (CP 2.291) he was simply reiterating possibly one of the earliest statements on the relation between images and texts: poema loquens pictura, pictura poema silens – ‘a poem is a painting that speaks, and a painting is a mute poem’.1 The epigram is of interest to a discussion of the informative capacity of pictorial signs for the simple reason that if the attribution is correct, by defining paintings (and, to simplify, images or, more generally, pictorial signs, icons)2 in terms of poems, Simonides’ epigram is probably one of the earliest descriptions of pictorial representation to have taken language, spoken language – the epithets loquens and silens belong to the lexical field of speech  – as the defining criterion, thereby initiating what, from a Peircean perspective, is a fallacious tendency that has persisted for nearly 27 centuries down to the present day.3 But at the same time, by means of his rather surprising characterization of painting as being mute, silent, uncommunicative  – qualities which in his way Peirce attributes to icons – Simonides has drawn attention to a fundamental property of images which concerns a putative incapacity to furnish information. In a culture reputedly flooded with images, such a property surely compels investigation, and Peirce’s third division contributes to the task. Simonides’ epigram has thus reached down through the ages in various formulations and now, in the twenty-first century, makes a convenient starting-point for the discussion of the informative potential of signs in general and pictorial documents in particular. While there is no doubt that linguistics can provide the means of identifying the informational structure and content of the utterances of natural languages, one of the purposes of the present chapter is to show how the conceptual battery of Peircean semiotics is better armed to address the problem as it relates to all types of sign, pictorial documents included. We saw in Chapter Four how the implication principle introduces a necessary motivation in even the least likely of cases: both word order and onomatopoeia were seen, after appropriate examination, to inform such highly conventional signs as

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natural language utterances, thereby scotching Saussure’s principle of the arbitrariness of signification. Simonides’ pithy epigram, on the other hand, provides semiotics with a problem of a different order, the complexity of which is evident in the seemingly contradictory statements made by Peirce concerning images and their informative capacity. So before investigating the two major conceptions of information adopted at various times by Peirce, we first identify a fundamental realization of the informative capacity of two different types of still image.

6.1.2  Informative potential We note to begin with that from a semiotic point of view, the large ‘bandwidth’ characteristic of the image  – in the days of the modem it took a great deal longer to download an image than a piece of text  – corresponds to its informative potential: unlike the verbal ‘line’, the image is a ‘flat’, a two-dimensional surface composed of lines, forms and colours, whose informative potential is in some way dependent upon the number of such lines, forms and colours that can be inscribed on it. A highly saturated painting such as the well-known Tower of Babel (1563) by Pieter Brueghel in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Figure 6.1) provides an excellent example of a pictorial representation

Figure 6.1  Pieter Brueghel: The Tower of Babel (1563), courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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replete with detail. It clearly has a greater number of different signs, and presumably a correspondingly greater informative potential than, for example, the woodcut on Figure 6.2, and given that the number of propositions required to describe Brueghel’s image is virtually unlimited, we can conclude that such an image has, from a practical point of view, a virtually unlimited informative potential: there is no theoretical limit to the number of statements with which to describe the painting: The ziggurat is badly built, The tower is wonky, There are lots of ships in the harbour, etc.

Figure 6.2  Woodcut of chapter six, Aër.

However, as Simonides suggested, this informative potential of pictorial representations is problematic. If we had Brueghel’s painting before us for the first time without having collateral experience of its relation to the Bible, Nimrod and the confounding of a universal language, etc., and if, furthermore, it had neither caption nor artist’s signature, we would no doubt have a problem interpreting it, if only because we could not be sure of its hypoiconic structure. Is it an example of the image as Peirce defined it in CP 2.277, or does the apparent incongruity of the ziggurat or medieval fortress and the group of armed guards and citizens constitute the structure of metaphor that we examined in the previous chapter? And would we understand the significance of the crumbling walls of the central building and the fact that it almost touches the sky? Probably not. And pace W. J. T. Mitchell, the image doesn’t ‘tell’ us, for example, that a group of stonemasons is being confronted by citizens and guards or that there are many ships in the port. The second example of an image’s informative potential, Figure 6.2, is an illustration from Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus.4 This work, an innovative seventeenth-century pedagogical aid composed of chapters of images and associated ‘nomenclatures’, is constructed on the well-known Aristotelian principle, explicitly stated in the work’s Introduction, that

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there can be nothing in the understanding that isn’t first in the senses, the idea being that the visible world is either there before the child’s eyes, or recognizable from past experience in the form of a mental image already in his mind – an icon, in Peircean terms – and that associating the known image-content with the as yet unlearned word can lead to the extension of a child’s knowledge of Latin. Each chapter is composed of a woodcut illustrating one of the 150 themes, with, on the facing page a list of terms in Latin. Numbers beside objects in the image on Figure 6.1 enable the child to identify the word naming it: in the example, 1 maps, in the nomenclature provided, to the word ‘aura’, 2 to ‘ventus’ 3 to ‘procella’, etc. However, even making allowances for the very primitive imaging technology of the woodcut, full interpretation of this relatively simple image is virtually impossible without the nomenclature on the facing page. For example, the reader would be entirely justified in thinking that numbers 5 and 6 just about visible at the bottom right of the image correspond to damage wreaked by the storm (3), but the reader would be wrong, for the text in the English edition (1727) reads: (5) ‘A wind under ground causeth an earthquake (Ventus subterraneus, excitat Terræ motum). (6) An earthquake causeth gapings of the Earth, (and falls of houses) (Terræ motus facit Labes (& ruinas).’ Thus while the Orbis pictus represented a significant advance in language teaching, and took full advantage of the still image’s informative potential, the signification of the lines and forms inscribed on the image remains inescapably vague, and owing to its simplicity the image does not actually tell us anything. Paradoxically, then, the sign-type with possibly the greatest informative potential is, as both Peirce and Simonides affirm, in reality a relatively poor informational sign  – unlike the statements The tower is wonky or The wind blew the tree down, a captionless image cannot tell us anything; it is somehow ‘mute’, as Simonides’ epigram suggests. We know that the informative potential of images is realized as lines, forms and colours, and that the information afforded is describable by means of any number of such statements. But this raises a serious theoretical problem: a descriptive statement such as The tower is wonky, while it enables us to describe part of the painting, is simply one of any number of dynamic interpretants the picture inspires in us, the linguistic realizations of certain effects or reactions that the picture has on us as we contemplate it, completely on a par with The Museum has sited it well, It’s difficult to get close enough to see it properly and even Is it Bruegel or Brueghel? These are all remarks which have nothing to do with the events depicted on the canvas but are no less interpretants of the image than those which refer specifically to the depiction itself. In other words, this ‘information’ comes from the observer, not the canvas or the woodcut. It is for this reason that, in spite of the greater informative potential of the densely covered canvas, the information value of Brueghel’s painting is

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no greater than that of the woodcut, a much simpler image: neither, when viewed as captionless icons, has an existent dynamic object, and their information value is, in a word, nil. However, this does not mean that there is no way of obtaining information from an icon, as a comparison of Figures 6.2 and 6.10 below will show.

6.2 Peirce and information As with most of Peirce’s logical concepts, his approach to the notion of information developed in stages, here two, of which the second significantly modified the first. The first can be dated from around 1867 when he presented a paper before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences entitled ‘Upon Logical Comprehension and Extension’ (CP 2.391–426) and in it he set out a theory of information which is interesting for the light it sheds on the information value of the icon – obviously the leitmotiv of this particular chapter – and for the way it expanded upon an important principle of nineteenth-century logic. In what follows we examine some of its more relevant ideas. The following extract from the draft of a lecture tentatively dated 1865–6 is representative of Peirce’s thinking on information at the time and will give the flavour of the first stage in his approach to the concept: ‘How much more the word electricity means now than it did in the days of Franklin; how much more the term planet means now than it did in the time [of] Hipparchus. These words have acquired information’ (CP 7.587). The 1867 paper is primarily of interest for the way Peirce derived a formal definition of information from the traditional logical distinction between the extension, or denotation, of a term, that is, the set of entities to which the term applies, and its comprehension, or intension, that is, the qualities or characters signified by the term. In doing so, instead of adopting the traditional terminology he followed the Scottish logician Sir William Hamilton in renaming extension and comprehension respectively as the breadth and depth of a given term. At the time his definition of information applied only to terms, that is, to the least complex logical class in the traditional term-proposition-argument division, 5 but in a revision of 1893 he extended the concepts of breadth, depth and information to propositions and arguments (CP 2.407n) and although Peirce came to give less importance to this particular conception of information at the time of his mature systems of semiotics, the paper is worth examining as it gives us one of the keys as to why he insists that images cannot convey information. His redefinitions of extension and comprehension, which Kant had defined as ‘quantities’, run as follows: by what he calls the ‘informed breadth’ of a term he means all existent objects (‘real things’) covered by the predicate in a ‘supposed state of information’ (CP 2.407), and by the term’s ‘informed depth’ he means all the properties, qualities, characters

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which can be predicated of it without duplication, again in a ‘supposed state of information’ (CP 2.408). What he means by ‘in a supposed state of information’ is illustrated by the quotation concerning electricity and planets given above: by the time Peirce wrote this the two terms had obviously acquired a more complex meaning than at any given previous time: any state of information within this conception is thus relative, never absolute. In other words, as we develop a clearer idea of the concept ‘planet’, for example, and as we discover more objects to which it applies, the state of information as defined in 1867 concerning that concept necessarily evolves: this is why he refers to ‘informed’ breadth and depth in this paper. Furthermore, Peirce described this ‘supposed state of information’ as lying somewhere between two imaginary extremes: in the first case, the ‘essential’ state, in which the meaning of the concept would be known, but a state in which we would have no knowledge of an entity to which it might apply – the terms ‘basilisk’ and ‘unicorn’ would, presumably, be examples  –, while in the second, the ‘substantial’ state, the information would be total, with knowledge of all the entities to which the concept applied and all the characters defining them (CP 2.409). In this way, any ‘supposed state of information’ would lie somewhere between these two extremes at a given time. The notion of ‘possible states of information’ figures prominently in his treatment of modal propositions in the gamma section of his Existential Graphs, which are discussed briefly below (see, too, CP 4.517ff.). Kant’s inverse proportionality principle6 offers Peirce the opportunity to suggest a third logical ‘quantity’ to be added to breadth and depth, namely information; he posits an ‘equation’ for the measurement of information; and, finally, deduces three relations concerning these three quantities, one of which bears directly upon the incapacity of icons (captionless nonphotographic images, for example) to convey information. This is how he reformulates Kant’s principle to include information: It is plain that the breadth and depth of a symbol, so far as they are not essential, measure the information concerning it, that is, the synthetical propositions of which it is subject or predicate. This follows directly from the definitions of breadth, depth, and information. Hence it follows: First, That, as long as the information remains constant, the greater the breadth, the less the depth; Second, That every increase of information is accompanied by an increase in depth or breadth, independent of the other quantity; Third, That, when there is no information, there is either no depth or no breadth, and conversely. These are the true and obvious relations of breadth and depth. They will be naturally suggested if we term the information the area, and write—Breadth X Depth = Area. (CP 2.419)

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We can summarize this early position as follows. First, by associating information with synthetic propositions, that is, propositions whose meaning is given by experience rather than the meaning of the terms themselves as in the case of their analytic counterparts, Peirce is stressing the importance of existence in the discussion of information.7 Synthetic propositions are determined by experience, pertain to ‘real objects’ and in this way imply the existence of these objects. Second, information becomes an added value of terms in the formal definition provided by the product of breadth X depth. In this way Peirce’s third ‘quantity’ establishes the unity of matter (breadth) and form (depth) which he was to develop when he later redefined the proposition in broader semiotic terms, as we shall see below. As far as the term was concerned, information at this stage is thus an additional quantity and is realized in the sum of the synthetic propositions of which the term is subject or predicate. Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, the third ‘relation’ given above states that if a term has no depth or no breadth, then it has no information. For example, the term ‘mermaid’ has depth of a sort (a composite mental image of a young woman and a fish) but no breadth (there exists nothing that corresponds to such a word) and consequently has no information as Peirce conceived the concept in 1867. This converse of the third relation, as we shall see, applies not only to words and concepts, but also, when he reformulates this ‘old division’, to icons. The definition of the term-class of 1867 was considerably modified when Peirce established the sophisticated system of signs of 1903, and seemed even to disqualify the common noun as a candidate for the term function in the proposition. Nevertheless, although this theory of information tended to become eclipsed by the later system, he maintained the earlier definition of area = breath times depth relatively late in life, as a letter to Lady Welby dated 31 January 1909, shows (SS 99): while it had the advantage of explaining just how symbols like ‘planet’ and ‘electricity’ actually grow, there was no way to quantify it, its unit being the rather nebulous synthetic proposition concerning real objects. This was to change.

6.3 The third trichotomy This division discriminates between the three distinct relations holding between the sign and the interpretant effect it produces and, concomitantly, between the three ways in which information can be obtained from a sign. In other words, the heading S–I to be found on the various tables examined in the course of the previous chapters signifies that in order to classify a sign completely, we need to take the interpretant into account. More simply, this division establishes how the sign appears to the interpretant.

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This is how Peirce introduces the division in a letter to Lady Welby in 1904: In regard to its relation to its signified interpretant, a sign is either a Rheme, a Dicent, or an Argument. This corresponds to the old division, Term, Proposition, and Argument, modified so as to be applicable to signs generally. A Term is simply a class-name or proper-name. I do not regard the common noun as a necessary part of speech. (SS 33, emphasis added) What is of interest here is the fact that Peirce has deliberately reformulated the ‘old division’ and has redefined the term or name subclass to include ‘signs generally’, that is, signs other than concepts and class-names, which have now relinquished their erstwhile preeminent logical status. Elsewhere, he describes the ‘syntax’ of the subclasses in this division in the following manner: the rheme is a ‘simple or substitutive’ sign; the dicent sign is a double or informational sign, that is, a sign composed of two elements; finally, he says, the argument has a triple syntax, as it is a rationally persuasive sign (CP 2.309): in other words, rhemes, dicent signs and arguments are, respectively, monadic, dyadic and triadic. Here too, then, the three new subclasses are no less determined by Peirce’s categorial imperative than those of the other divisions and, in view of the organic structure of the three divisions and the order in which they appear or are treated, the three subclasses thus obtained not only depend upon the nature of the sign itself but also upon its mode of representation. Clearly, no information is conveyed by a proper noun such as Oxford or by a common noun such as bridge, respectively an index and a symbol according to the division of signs examined in Chapter Four. Since they are defined within the framework of the three possible modes of representation holding between the sign and its dynamic object in their isolate forms their informative value cannot be established. For in order that the informative potential of a sign should be realized the participation of the interpretant is indispensable – in this case the sign will have produced an effect and will necessarily have been interpreted – and the S–I division is there to indicate that the informative potential of a given sign-type depends upon the manner in which it relates to its interpretant which, remember, is not a person but the effect produced upon a person. The following definition gives the full flavour of the sign-types subclasses involved in this division: According to the third trichotomy, a Sign may be termed a Rheme, a Dicisign or Dicent Sign (that is, a proposition or quasi-proposition), or an Argument. A Rheme is a Sign which, for its Interpretant, is a Sign of qualitative Possibility, that is, is understood as representing such and such a kind of possible Object. Any Rheme, perhaps, will afford some information; but it is not interpreted as doing so. (CP 2.250)

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We begin not with the least complex subclass of the three, but with the one which is probably easiest to understand, namely the dicisign. As we shall see, it is the dicisign or dicent sign – a sign that ‘says’ something, from the Latin dicere, the infinitive of a verb meaning to say, speak, affirm, etc. – that is specifically involved in the representation of information. It is a sign which, as its Latinate name suggests, actually ‘tells’ us something.

6.3.1  The dicent sign A Dicent Sign is a Sign, which, for its Interpretant, is a Sign of actual existence. It cannot, therefore, be an Icon, which affords no ground for an interpretation of it as referring to actual existence. A Dicisign necessarily involves, as a part of it, a Rheme, to describe the fact which it is interpreted as indicating. But this is a peculiar kind of Rheme; and while it is essential to the Dicisign, it by no means constitutes it. (CP 2.251) What we see in this definition is Peirce clarifying his earlier concept of information by defining its unit to be the dicent sign, a subclass which includes both the proposition and other signs, for example types of pictorial signs that actually tell us something. Elsewhere Peirce defines the dicent sign as the ‘kind of sign that conveys information, in contradistinction to a sign [such as an icon] from which information may be derived’ (CP 2.309). Now we saw earlier that information is realized as a synthetic proposition: it represents a fact concerning real, that is existent, objects. What Peirce has done is replace the traditional formula defining a proposition (an appellative which, however, he continues to use) as the combination of a subject and predicate (the two ‘terms’ of the tradition) by the more categorially determined association of an index and a rheme. While the rheme – the new subclass which replaces the old term – is a simple sign, the dicent sign is double: it is necessarily formed from the association of two quite different elements. For information to be conveyed there must be something to be spoken about and, of course, something to be said about it: this is the distinction concerning the information structure of sentences made, for example, by the linguists of the Prague School between theme and rheme and by the Arab grammarians between the mubtada, and the khabar of nominal sentences.8 This is how Peirce describes the syntax of an asserted proposition, that is a proposition whose truth a speaker is taking responsibility for in an actual speech act, in his Carnegie application of 1902: Thus, in the assertion, “Mary is red-headed”, “red-headed” is not an icon itself, it is true, but a symbol. But its interpretant is an icon, a sort of composite photograph of all the red-headed persons one has seen.

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“Mary” in like manner, is interpreted by a sort of composite memory of all the occasions which forced my attention upon that girl. The putting of these together makes another index . . . (MS L75 323) For Peirce, then, information is no longer the product of the breadth and depth of a term, but is a unit obtained by the association of an index, which indicates the object otherwise known or presumed to be so that the proposition is about, and an icon which represents some feature of the object identified by the index: in combination index and icon constitute an item of information. We take as an example the sentence Oxford is a city. Traditionally only city would qualify as a term. However, within this later 1903 conception of signs Oxford is an index which draws attention to an object otherwise known while the rheme – is a city is a sign which associates a set of particular spoken or written qualities – qualisigns – with an idea in the mind of the addressee/reader. When thus combined, index plus rheme form the dicisign Oxford is a city, which partly describes, for example, a city in central southern England, and when asserted in a conversation or a written document such a proposition becomes a statement for which the speaker or writer takes responsibility. With this in mind, we turn to an examination of Peirce’s innovative subclass, the rheme.

6.3.2  The rheme Etymologically the term ‘rheme’ comes from the Ancient Greek for ‘a saying’ or ‘something spoken’ and is cognate with English ‘word’. However, by renaming the term of the earlier division, Peirce indicates that he wishes to broaden the scope of the least complex of the subclasses defined within the final division of 1903: a new conception of the old division ‘modified so as to be applicable to signs generally’, according to his letter to Lady Welby. Thus in addition to symbols such as the common noun the following indexical expressions are now defined as rhemes: proper nouns such as Oxford and Socrates, the demonstrative pronouns, interjections such as Ouch! and a whole host of NVC signs of the sorts examined in Chapter Two. Significantly, to these Peirce also added the icon, that is, a non-linguistic, non-indexical sign. As we saw in Chapter Four, an icon is a sign of qualitative possibility and, consequently, bears no existential relation with its dynamic object: such are the rhemes of music (notes, melodies, harmonies, etc.), the aromas associated with wine-tasting (‘wet dogs’, ‘vanilla’, ‘blackcurrants’, etc.  – almost anything but grapes!) and, of course, the sort of captionless non-photographic images we have been analysing in this book. Thus Peirce’s replacement for the term, which in 1867 could be defined as whatever could occupy subject or predicate position in the proposition, now included not only symbols such as bridge which could occupy, as of old,

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subject and predicate positions, but also a category that can normally only occupy the subject position, namely the index, and a category which can only occupy predicate position, namely the icon. Not one of these varieties of the subclass ‘rheme’ – common noun, proper noun and sketch, etc. – is, in its isolate form and rhematic status, an informational sign, since in each case the ‘syntax’ of the sign is single, monadic. They are all substitutive signs and therefore in their isolate forms they cannot be informative: they assert nothing (CP 2.291). Clearly, in the cases of Magdalen Bridge and Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs, such expressions have a greater depth than a singular proper noun like Oxford: the first contains the common noun bridge, while the second contains both bridge and sigh. They are, in spite of this, no less simple, rhematic signs than the proper noun Oxford. By 1903 Peirce had realized that although information could be attributed to it, as in the case of bridge, this was insufficient for a term to qualify as informational, for this requires the unit of information to be a ‘double’ sign, that is, to be anchored at the very least in the universe of Secondness, the universe of individuals and of existence, the universe of real objects and of synthetic judgements, propositions and facts, and the universe in which a sign’s dynamic object is usually to be found. Consider, for example, the proper noun Magdalen Bridge: despite the presence of the common noun ‘bridge’, and with it an extended depth, this has no information value on its own and can only contribute to the information conveyed by a sentence of the type The punt slid under Magdalen Bridge, in which The punt, Magdalen Bridge and the strong past inflexion of the verb (to) slide all constitute indices linking the utterance to the real world. Thus expressions such as Magdalen Bridge or Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs have, as indices, varying depths,9 but from 1903 on their informative potential is subordinated to their being associated with a predicate in order to ‘propose’ some empirical fact: this is a far cry from the product of breadth times depth which authorized the old term to be ‘informative’ in 1867. Consider now, as a final example of a rheme, the case of an image such as Figure 6.3, which represents the so-called Bridge of Sighs in Oxford. Remember that the third relation concerning information, breadth and depth established by Peirce in 1867 states that when the term has no information, as he defined it, either there is no depth or no breadth (CP 2.419). How do we determine the breadth and depth of a sign so unlike the other rhemes, the linguistic expressions such as common and proper nouns, for example? Remember that in his review of Royce discussed in Chapter Four Peirce distinguishes between two sorts of meaning corresponding to the two sorts of object established in 1904. These were the sign’s internal and external meanings. Any sign which functions by virtue of its resemblance to its object has this ‘resemblance’ as its internal meaning  – its set of immediate objects, in other words – but it in no way professes to represent an existent external object (CP 8.119).

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Therefore, while an index such as a (singular) proper noun has no depth an icon such as the collection of lines and shapes on Figure 6.3 has no breadth. Returning briefly to the 1867 paper, and applying the equation breath X depth = area we see that if the icon had been included under the heading ‘term’, its information equation would have given us: Ø times its depth (which is the ‘resemblance’ mentioned in the definition from CP 8.119). The information value would thus have been nil within that system. In the present one it is considered as a ‘simple’ sign but, unlike the common noun determined by a definite article as in The cat sat on the mat or like any proper noun employed in an utterance, it has no existential link to whatever entity it may happen to represent, cannot thus be an index and cannot occupy the subject position in a proposition. While it is possible for us to identify a bridge, a street, buildings, walls and windows in the image on Figure 6.3, this is nothing more than an inventory of the sign’s immediate objects: the image doesn’t actually tell us anything, and whatever propositions we derive from it, such as The perspective is wrong, This bridge spans a street, not a canal or The bridge is too high, etc., are interpretants, not information conveyed by the sign. In short, then, icons such as the sketch on Figure 6.3 are, irrespective of their dynamic objects, constitutionally incapable of conveying information, as Peirce affirms time and time again. This is as true of the sketch as it is of The Tower of Babel, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon or a Suprematist painting by Kasimir Malevich.

Figure 6.3  Sketch of Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs.

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Just why Peirce should have stated that icons convey no information while still having an informative potential has now been justified. The question revolves around the relation between three different but interrelated sets of concepts: dynamic and immediate object, breadth and depth and what he initially saw as the external as opposed to the internal meaning of a sign. But all is not lost for the icon. We turn once more to Simonides’ epigram and examine a number of ways in which the informative potential of ‘pictorial systems’ may be realized as truly informational signs.

6.3.3  Pictura loquens Consider the sentence Oxford has a bridge of sighs. This is a standard, unexceptional and unproblematic proposition in a natural language. Composed of replicas of legisigns, it is understandable by anyone with sufficient exposure to the language and is composed of the index Oxford and the rheme (icon) — has a bridge of sighs, and consequently may or may not be true, but cannot be both at the same time.10 As a piece of information, it makes a statement describing part of the ‘system’ named by the index in subject position. Figure 6.4, the photograph of the bridge in the same university town, is an index since it stands in an existential relation to this part of the town (someone took the photograph at a particular time). It is also visibly iconic since we can, from the lines, forms (and colours, in the original) composing it, recognize it as something like a bridge, even if we’ve never seen the entity in question (although this is not its mode of representation it is also iconic by virtue of the implication principle associating all indices with some form of incorporated icon, as we saw in Chapter Four). The syntax of this particular sign is thus no less double than the natural language proposition above: the index is the section of rays from the object captured by the person who took the photograph at a particular date, and the whole image ‘tells’ us that ‘there exists (or existed) something like this’, the ‘like this’ being, of course, the iconic material visible in the photograph.11 Similarly, Figure 6.5, which is a sketch of the said bridge with a caption beneath, is yet another double sign, a sort of proposition  – the ‘quasiproposition’ of a definition given above  – by virtue of its characteristic syntax: the caption is composed of the nominal referring expression The Bridge of Sighs which is an index, plus an icon formed by the sketch (which is identical to that on Figure 6.3). Thus by virtue of the association of the index and the icon it ‘tells’ us that this bridge of sighs somehow conforms to the lines and shapes on the sketch. Finally, another pictorial example of a dicisign: the first full-size double portrait ever to be committed  – Hans Holbein the Younger’s Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, (1533) – hanging in the National Gallery in

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London and reproduced as Figure 7.4 in Chapter Seven. Entitled popularly The Ambassadors – the richly dressed de Dinteville was François Premier’s ambassador to Henry VIII, whereas the more soberly attired de Selve was an emissary from the Pope  – this is yet another example of a pictorial double sign: an image with a caption beneath. For Peirce most captionless paintings were icons, or more precisely hypoicons, but he claimed that we interpret a portrait as an index, since we assume there was an existential relation associating the sitter and the artist, unlike the line drawing of the bridge of sighs, for example.12 Thus, The Ambassadors is also a dicisign: it is both a portrait and a painting with a caption indicating the entities to which it applies. It is interesting to note that in spite of the more recent and more complex technology it involves, the photograph on Figure 6.4 is semiotically less complex than the images on Figure 6.6 and Holbein’s Ambassadors: whereas the photograph simply ‘tells’ us that there exists or existed an entity like the one displayed on the print – the ‘copular’ syntax associating a section of rays with their iconic trace on a print – the sketch on Figure 6.5 and the portrait also involve proper nouns – legisigns – which identify the entities represented pictorially. This is the case, too, notice, with street cries such as the ‘Cockles and mussels’ example examined briefly in Chapters Two and Four: there is a direct existential relation holding between the phonetic qualities of the cry and the legisigns that compose it, the moment it was produced, the person producing it and the mental image associated with the expression. It follows, then, that Simonides’ epigram does not account for the full range of quasi-propositional signs involving images or iconic elements.

Figure 6.4  Photograph of a bridge in Oxford.

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Figure 6.5  Sketch with caption.

6.3.4  The argument Peirce, we saw earlier, describes the argument as the triple, or rationally persuasive, sign. The argument, like the proposition, belonged to the logical tradition that Peirce inherited, and in this case, too, he innovated. To the two well-known classes of reasoning or inference, induction and deduction, he added a third which he called hypothesis or abduction. This was not really an invention, for Peirce claimed simply to have included within the argument a concept introduced by Aristotle (CP 2.776). The study of arguments exceeds the scope of the speculative grammar: it is the domain of the branch of Peirce’s philosophy of representation he called ‘Critic’ and which he considered the very heart of logic, the branch of logic which classifies the various arguments and determines the validity and what he calls the ‘degree of force’ of each sort (CP 1.191). Moreover, being essentially embodied by symbols, the three types of argument in their traditional form have little to do with visual semiotics. Nevertheless, in this part of the section I shall do two things: first, for the sake of completeness, give the flavour of the three-fold distinction Peirce established within the argument, and second, offer a brief view of his diagram-based mode of reasoning which he called his ‘Existential Graphs’.

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6.3.4.1 Abduction, deduction, induction For Peirce all the ideas of science come to it by way of abduction: it is, he says, the only logical operation which introduces any new idea. Induction, on the other hand, does nothing but determine a rule, while deduction simply determines the necessary consequences of some hypothesis (CP 5.171). The following is a longer description of the three types, and will be illustrated by examples: The first starting of a hypothesis and the entertaining of it, whether as a simple interrogation or with any degree of confidence, is an inferential step which I propose to call abduction. This will include a preference for any one hypothesis over others which would equally explain the facts, so long as this preference is not based upon any previous knowledge bearing upon the truth of the hypotheses, nor on any testing of any of the hypotheses, after having admitted them on probation. I call all such inference by the peculiar name, abduction, because its legitimacy depends upon altogether different principles from those of other kinds of inference. (CP 6.525, emphasis added) What Peirce is claiming here is that in abduction there must be completely new data (no previous knowledge of the problem), and in his conception of research and scientific investigation all three types of reasoning have their place. The following simple examples illustrate these principles: Deduction All philosophers are eccentric Greeks are philosophers Therefore Greeks are eccentric Abduction All philosophers are eccentric Socrates is eccentric Therefore Socrates is a philosopher Induction A certain number of human-beings taken at random all prove to be philosophers These same human-beings also prove to be eccentric Therefore any philosopher is probably eccentric In the case of deduction there is no new knowledge since the premise ‘Greeks are philosophers’ is already covered by the general law (all philosophers are eccentric). However, owing to the necessary nature of

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the relation between premises and conclusion, deductive inference has a controlling function in the constitution of knowledge, and enables the researcher to validate or not any hypotheses he obtains abductively. In the case of abduction, on the other hand, there is a general law and a new datum, namely ‘Socrates’, associated by similarity (‘likeness’ is Peirce’s term) with the property  – eccentricity  – covered by the law. There is, therefore, a distinct possibility that Socrates is a man, too, but this is not a necessary conclusion as Socrates might well, after due empirical examination of the problem, turn out to be some Hellenophile’s cat. The conclusion to the piece of inductive reasoning, which for Peirce is based essentially on probabilities, I have much simplified as the sampling and the formulation of the general law take place over time. We see clearly why Peirce calls the argument a triple or rationally persuasive sign, since it is formed of a conclusion and at least one premise (but usually more than one, as in the examples). It is also the sign which includes its own interpretant, the conclusion, and to this extent is rationally persuasive.

6.3.4.2  ‘Moving pictures of thought’ Peirce’s involvement with the laws of inference also extended to the devising of an iconic alternative to the ‘term logic’ examined above based upon the symbols of natural language, and this involved a complex system of diagrams which he considered to be his chef d’œuvre in logical analysis (CP 4.347). There are no doubt innumerable reasons why Peirce should have felt the need to recognize and develop this iconic logic. For example, in view of his opinion that his Existential Graphs were the ‘moving-picture of Thought’ (CP 4.8, 4.11) and of his constant appeal to photographs and photography as an example of indexical representation, one must assume that he had been struck by two of the century’s major advances in visual technology. In a discussion of Marx and the camera obscura W. J. T. Mitchell, for one, suggests that its immediate realism made photography ‘the revolutionary medium of the century’ (1986, p. 179), but by the end of the century for most people Edison’s invention of the Kinetoscope and the rapid increase in moving pictures  – ‘movies’  – was probably even more sensational. And in any case, Peirce was no doubt aware of the earlier photographic researches of Eadweard Muybridge and his representations of animal and human locomotion by means of a multiple camera technique (Figure 6.6). Muybridge had collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania and by 1887 had published a remarkable series of photographic prints on animal locomotion, on which he lectured widely. Whatever the case may have been, Peirce was doubtless acutely aware of the theoretical tensions both media – photography and the movies – created for a theory of signs with claims to completeness and exhaustivity.13 What the image on Figure 6.6 – one of nearly 800 plates from the series Animal Locomotion published by the University of Pennsylvania – shows

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Figure 6.6  Eadweard Muybridge, Bird in flight, 1887, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

is the successive stages of the flight of a heron. At the time, Peirce was developing a complex diagrammatic, that is non-symbolic, representation of the successive stages of human reasoning in a way which we can imagine to correspond to the sequence of wing-beats on Muybridge’s photograph. This is how Peirce envisaged the process: All deductive reasoning, even simple syllogism, involves an element of observation; namely, deduction consists in constructing an icon or diagram the relations of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of the parts of the object of reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the imagination, and of observing the result so as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts. (CP 3.363) The following are a sample of the sort of graphic representations of inferences and natural language expressions that Peirce’s graphs sought to improve upon:

Figure 6.7  Euler diagrams.

The Euler diagrams given on Figure 6.7, on which G stands for ‘Greeks’, P for ‘philosophers’ and E for ‘eccentrics’, represent in (A) the example of

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deduction given above: ‘The Greeks are philosophers and are eccentric’ in the form of the syllogism: All Gs are Ps All Ps are Es Therefore All Gs are Es The diagram in (B), on the other hand, represents the syllogism in another mode: No E is G All P is E Therefore no P is G In other words: ‘No philosophers are Greek’ or ‘There are no Greek philosophers’ (although this is a case of necessary reasoning one might doubt the validity of one of the premises!). These, however, are not the sort of graphs that Peirce was working on, simply a sample of work in the field by one of his predecessors (see CP 4.350, for example). The graphs on Figures 6.8 and 6.9 illustrate very simply some of the ways in which Peirce conducted his logical experiments by means of his Existential Graphs, these ‘rough and generalized diagram[s] of the mind’ (CP 4.582). It should be noted that the conventions in Peirce’s system of diagrams are the reverse of those employed in this book, in which entities are represented by dots and relations by lines. By contrast, in Peirce’s diagrams the thick lines are ‘lines of identity’ representing the existence of some entity, and they correspond roughly to the expression: ‘there is/exists something or someone’ as in ‘—a Greek’, which means ‘There is a Greek’ or ‘Something is a Greek’. Thus (C) asserts that there is something that is Greek and something that is a philosopher and something that is eccentric and that these are three different entities. Since in (D), on the other hand, the thick line joins the same ‘rhemes’, these are all predicated of one and the same entity and the graph can thus be read as ‘There is something that is Greek and a philosopher and eccentric’ or in nearly normal English ‘There exists an eccentric Greek philosopher’. a Greek a Greek a philosopher

a philosopher

eccentric eccentric C

Figure 6.8  Simple Peirce graphs.

D

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This is what Peirce meant by experimenting with diagrams to bring out certain important logical relations. Each graph is to be seen as a proposition, written one per page, on what he calls the ‘sheet of assertion’. Note that the sheet of assertion is simply the diagrammatic equivalent of the speech act, while the act of writing (or ‘scribing’, as Peirce puts it) a graph corresponds to the act of asserting some proposition verbally. In a logical proof the sheets of assertion would follow one another in the proof, each new graph modifying its predecessor, in a movement intended to simulate the progression of thought much like the wing-beats of the heron.14 Graph (E) forms a new proposition by introducing a logical operation called a ‘cut’, a circle around propositions which negates whatever it encloses and also divides a given line of identity into distinct elements. In (E) the enclosure denies the validity of graph (D) by means of this ‘pictorial negation’, with the effect that the whole graph reads as ‘It is not true that there is something that is Greek and a philosopher and eccentric’: in other words, there are no eccentric Greek philosophers, which is the EG equivalent of Euler diagram (B) above. In the case of (F) the cut encloses and therefore negates part of the line of identity, and this graph represents the proposition ‘There exists something that is a Greek, but it is not identical to something that is a philosopher and is not identical to something that is an eccentric’ or, more naturally, ‘There exists a Greek who is neither a philosopher nor an eccentric’. In G, finally, the whole of graph (F) is enclosed in a cut, and this represents the proposition ‘It is false to assert that there is something that is a Greek and that it is not identical to something that is a philosopher and an eccentric’, a tortuous formula much more simply rendered by the graph which is equivalent to ‘There is not a Greek who is not an eccentric philosopher’: in other words ‘Every Greek is an eccentric philosopher’ (see CP 4.445 for one of Peirce’s examples), which is equivalent to the Euler diagram on (A) above.

a Greek a Greek

a Greek

a philosopher

a philosopher

a philosopher eccentric eccentric

E

eccentric

F

G

Figure 6.9  Existential Graphs with an enclosure.

These few examples show some of the innovative aspects of the graphs. First, Peirce has introduced a means of denoting individuals – existents – on the sheet of assertion. Each ‘line of identity’ is like the index of a

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proposition, it posits the existence of some individual entity – which is why Peirce labelled these graphs ‘existential’  – while the predicates constitute the icons, or mental images of the dicisign. In this way the graphs are a sort of dynamic map of the mind, composed of indices and iconic elements rather like the map on Figure 6.12 below. Second, the position of the line of identity with respect to the cut determines whether it is to mean ‘some’ or ‘everything’. The convention by which the cut or enclosure negates whatever proposition is inside it enables Peirce to pass, reading conventionally from the outside inwards, from existential quantification as in (F) to a form of universal quantification as in (G). In (G), given the placing of the cuts, the whole graph corresponds logically to ‘not (Greek and not (philosopher and eccentric))’. What is interesting is the way the reading of (G) offers a case of alternation: ‘Either something is Greek or it is not a philosopher and an eccentric’ which leads naturally to the ‘movement of thought’ involved in material implication ‘If something is Greek then it is a philosopher and an eccentric’, which is equivalent to ‘Every Greek is an eccentric philosopher’. Peirce projected three systems of graphs, named consecutively the alpha, beta and gamma systems. The simple examples above are illustrative of the beta system, which introduced quantification into the graphs. The scope of the final system, gamma, was principally concerned with modality and modal propositions. This system corresponds closely to the sort of modal problems Peirce was explaining in the letter to William James discussed in Chapter Four, in which he saw the universe of existence identified by the relation between the sign user and the sign’s dynamic objet as essentially modal (cf. CP 8.178). Unfortunately he was unable to complete this ambitious project, and in any case he seemed aware of certain theoretical limitations of the system he was devising. The graphs were valid for necessary reasoning, that is deduction, but were inapplicable in cases of abduction and induction, which bear not on ideal states of affairs as in the case of deduction, but on empirical problems in the real world. As he admits in the draft of a letter of 1906 to Lady Welby, he was incapable of producing a graph for a sign such as a piece of concert music, and even the representation of language signs like the command ‘Ground arms!’ was beyond the competence of the graphs: ‘All that existential graphs can represent is [declarative, indicative] propositions, on a single sheet, and arguments on a succession of sheets presented in temporal succession’ (SS 197).

6.3.5  Hypoiconicity again We know that the dynamic object is an existent entity, an object of ‘actual Experience’ (ibid.). This being the case, by virtue of its possible, that is non-actual, mode of being an icon has no breadth and having no breadth it cannot convey information. But, says Peirce, it is a sign from which information may be derived. We terminate this description of the third trichotomy with an examination of one way in which information may be

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derived from a certain class of hypoicons, namely diagrams. Remember briefly that an image, as we saw in Chapter Five, simply shares properties or qualities with its object, while the diagram is the subclass of the icon which represents ‘the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in [its] own parts, (CP 2.277). Figure 6.10 represents a diagram in both the normal and Peircean sense of the term. It is in fact a cutaway diagram, and like the woodcut on Figure 6.2 above, has a series of numbers (more indices) mapping from parts of the device to an accompanying nomenclature. In spite of the photographlike clarity of the representation and the obvious complexity of the device, the ‘syntax’ of the image as presented on Figure 6.10 is no less ‘single’, monadic, than the illustration from the Orbis pictus above, and, for most people, it remains inescapably mute and vague, even though a specialist using this sort of equipment would be able to understand the functions of the different parts. Like the woodcut from the Orbis pictus the diagram on Figure 6.2 is clearly intended to instruct by showing the internal arrangement of the component parts of the device, and as in the case of the woodcut, the numbers map to a lexicon beside the device. However, there the similarity ends, for while it would theoretically be possible to rearrange certain items on Figure 6.2, for example by placing the trees behind the house, without destroying its purpose – we saw above that the elements identified by (5) and (6) are in fact unconnected to the full-cheeked face blowing up the storm 6

7

8

9

10

11 5

12 13

4

14 3

15 16

2

17 18

1 24

23

22

21

20

19

Figure 6.10  Cutaway diagram, reproduced courtesy of Delphi, Inc., Michigan.

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in the air – such a rearrangement would be totally impossible in the case of the device. The explanation is simple: while both illustrations are iconic, Figure 6.2 is an image in the technical Peircean sense, composed simply of relatively unordered qualities (the wind must be directed at the trees, of course), Figure 6.10 is structured as a diagram, in the Peircean sense here too, in that relations between parts in the object, namely the device represented, strictly determine analogous relations visible in the sign. This is, of course, the principle behind geometrical diagrams and the wordless instructions on how to install electrical and other appliances in the home; it is also, of course, the principle illustrated by the diagram from Gray’s Anatomy. In short, the icon on Figure 6.2 is an image, while that on Figure 6.10 is a diagram: they belong to two different orders of hypoicons. While such signs don’t actually tell us anything as a proposition would, they nevertheless afford valuable, viable information.15 In spite of the almost photographic precision of the representation and the complexity of the device, this sign is simply iconic. As a diagram, however, this ‘icon of relations’ is defined as the exponent of the mode of second Firstness – its internal structure is formed by at least one dyad (as can be seen from the part to number associations there are, in fact, many more) – and for this reason we are able to infer information which is qualitatively superior to that provided by the woodcut. And while it is true that as icons both woodcut and cutaway diagram can only represent possible objects, the internal relation between parts is projected onto the internal relations holding between the parts of any existent object it might represent, enabling us thus to understand the latter’s structure more clearly. Finally, we note that the monadic constitution of the icon on Figure 6.2 is also characteristic of a multitude of paintings hanging in our museums and galleries, and is the reason why, when we contemplate them, we tend to fuse sign and object, painting and what it represents, as in a dream: ‘the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream – not any particular existence, and yet not general’ (CP 3.362). The structure of the device on Figure 6.10, a pump for a diesel engine as it happens, is relatively easy to follow, and we have seen how information might be obtained from it – we understand at least that all the parts have to be assembled as shown on the diagram – other types of diagram require more effort of the observer and yet are no less valuable as sources of information. Below are two further well-known types of diagram whose relation to their objects is at first sight less evident than the diagram of the pump: both represent a famous theorem, but both are equally vague concerning the object whose structure they represent. The first is the geometrical diagram of a right-angled triangle the specific properties of which can be represented by the second diagram, an algebraic equation: BC2 + AC2 = AB2 .

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B

A

C

Figure 6.11  Diagram of a right-angled triangle.

This is how Peirce describes icons of this sort:16 A geometrical diagram is a good example of an icon. A pure icon can convey no positive or factual information; for it affords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature. But it is of the utmost value for enabling its interpreter to study what would be the character of such an object in case any such did exist. Geometry sufficiently illustrates that. (CP 4.447) In other words, ‘imagic’ signs like the one on Figure 6.2 and diagrammatic signs like those on Figure 6.10, Figure 6.11 and the equation, are constitutionally incapable of conveying factual information even though the diagrams enable us to infer certain facts concerning parts and relations. But not all diagrammatic signs are as vague as the examples above. To see this we compare Figure 6.10 above with Figure 6.12, a much simplified map of central southern England showing the English Channel to the south and the Thames Estuary to the east, together with references to the cities of London and Oxford (minus a scale of distances, unfortunately). The two signs share the property of indicating relations between parts  – the components of a diesel pump on the one hand and a crude itinerary between the two cities on the other. How do they differ? The answer lies in Peirce’s empiricist approach to logic and in his frequent reference to the importance of collateral experience in the understanding of signs: the sign cannot describe its object, but simply draws attention to it. We have to have collateral experience of that object in order to complete the interpretation. When such experience is not available we have to infer what the sign means by working towards it abductively from what we do know, as is the case in any form of scientific advance. Peirce constantly refers in discussions of many types of signs to objects ‘otherwise known’, and the names of the cities Oxford and London – proper nouns and therefore indices, signs signalling an existential relation with the object they represent – are assumed by the map-maker to be otherwise known to the map-reader, just like the proper nouns in a proposition. Thus London and Oxford belong to our common cultural experience and are represented really to exist, unlike the numbers on Figures 6.2 and 6.10: the former are ‘genuine’ indices, the

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latter, like relative pronouns, are degenerate, that is, they refer to objects in ideal states, and this experience determines the way we deal with each type of sign. Peirce described the process in 1894 in the following manner: It is true that a map is very useful in designating a place; and a map is a sort of picture. But unless the map carries a mark of a known locality, and the scale of miles, and the points of the compass, it no more shows where a place is than the map in Gulliver’s Travels shows the location of Brobdingnag . . . This experience of the world we live in renders the map something more than a mere icon and confers upon it the added characters of an index. (EP2 8) From what we saw in Chapter Five, we now know that Figure 6.10 presents us with  – and functions semiotically by means of  – a configuration of formal qualities which it shares with its object. The map on Figure 6.12, on the other hand, in spite of its less detailed appearance denotes objects with which we are acquainted even before finding them on the map. The sign relates in this way to the ‘real’ world, the world of our common experience and as a consequence of its dyadic constitution belongs to the universe of Secondness: both signs are diagrammatic in structure but whereas the cutaway diagram of the pump is an icon, the map is indexical. It is this relation to the real, existential world which is paramount in the case of the index and is the basis of an incalculable number of our familiar everyday representations. Take, for instance, the simple process of communicating

N

Oxford London

Figure 6.12  Simplified map of South-East England.

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information to one’s neighbour with an utterance like I came home late last night or His train left two hours ago. In order to locate any event in time we need a reference point, which is usually, if not always visibly so, the situation of utterance composed of the triplet I, here and now. This situation of utterance, as we saw in Chapter Four, Peirce assimilates to a type of index. Once this existential reference point has been set up, and it is more or less explicitly mentioned every time we take our turn to speak, the diagrammatic relation is established between this reference point and the moment of the process to be described or communicated. It was in fact after reading Peirce that Roman Jakobson set out his theory of ‘shifters’, a system of diagrammatic relations holding between aspects of the speech act and the central reference point which the existential situation of utterance establishes. The foregoing analyses were intended to show what sort of information can be obtained from an icon, without its actually conveying any. When the hypoiconic structure of a pictorial sign is diagrammatic then it is possible to infer at least partial information concerning the structure of the object represented, that is the nature of such an object should any such object exist. To take a simple example: it would be far more useful to attempt to trace out the foundations of a house using a simple equation BC2 + AC2 = AB2 and the ratio of 3, 4 and 5 learned in our schooldays than by endlessly contemplating the Tower of Babel. Finally, when the diagrammatic structure is established between two existent correlates, as in the case of the simplified route map between two cities, we move up a step in the hierarchy of the second trichotomy. In this case the sign is far more complex from a phenomenological point of view since it belongs to the subclass of indices, a subclass in which we find besides route maps and GPS systems, barometers, radars, thermometers and other instruments equipped with a scale of values and a known and recognized reference point, whether this is 0°, 32° or –273.15°. We can thus conclude from the foregoing discussion of the mute poem that information can be obtained from icons, but that the ultimate usefulness of any such information depends upon the icon’s specific hypoiconic complexity.

6.4  Classifying signs We have now reached the final stage in the classification of signs that began in Chapter Three: the trichotomy examined in this chapter makes it possible to complete Table 6.1. From this table of twenty-seven possible combinations Peirce derived ten distinct classes of signs by proceeding in the following manner. The phenomenological status of the sign is identified on each successive trichotomy or division as these appear on the table. Thus the trichotomies are simply three points of view or criteria from which to observe and

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Table 6.1  The three divisions completed Criteria Category

S

O–S

S–I

Thirdness

Legisign

Symbol

Argument

Secondness

Sinsign

Index

Dicisign

Firstness

Qualisign

Icon

Rheme

classify a given sign. Since the classification involves the same sign for each criterion it is obvious that in order to classify the sign there is one important condition to respect: in no case is it possible to attribute to the sign a higher phenomenological status in the hierarchy than it had in the preceding criterion, irrespective of the status of its object and/or interpretant. For example, if we have determined that a given sign is a sinsign, and thus an existent, it would be totally illogical to classify it as a symbol, which is a sign of generality: in order to qualify for generality both sign and object must be general. On the other hand, it is logically correct for this same sinsign to represent an object less complex than itself, a quality or set of qualities, for example, as is the case with most of the paintings hanging in our museums and art galleries. Imagine another case, in which the sign is a legisign, a general sign, a sign which is a law. This legisign can be a symbol, as in the case of any common noun or verb; it can be an index, as in the case of a proper noun, a traffic sign in situ, any one of a great number of real-life NVC signs on a photograph, for example. This same legisign, if it is a symbol by the second division, can be an argument, a dicent or, as in the case of a common noun, a rheme. Thus it was that in 1903 Peirce derived his first classification, involving in this case ten distinct and increasingly complex classes of signs (he subsequently described two hexadic systems yielding 28 classes and even projected a set of ten trichotomies which, when applying the principles described above, would have yielded sixty-six classes of signs). It seems to me that the heuristic interest in trying to determine where a given sign is to be located within a given division or trichotomy as we did in the course of the previous chapters is far greater than that of the potentially jejune task of placing it in one or other of the ten classes yielded by the 1903 system. Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, we can illustrate these principles by examining a number of cases introduced in earlier chapters and sections. Consider anew the photograph of the football fans discussed in Chapter Four. There are two ways to approach this sign. First, as a photograph, the

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sign is a sinsign; since it represents a real-life confrontation it is also an index; as a photograph it also guarantees the existence of its objects, the group of rival fans, a condition which makes it an informational, dicent, sign. In this respect, then, it belongs to the same class of signs as the photograph of the summit meeting between Bush and Putin and the photograph of Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs: all three can be classified as dicent (indexical) sinsigns.17 If on the other hand we enter the space of the supporters themselves and imagine ourselves to be the witnesses of the confrontation as it happened, then we can identify various gestures and actions characteristic of many NVC signs (which is what we actually do when we examine a photograph). These, as we saw earlier, are the replicas of legisigns. For the protagonists involved in the confrontation they are existent actions and gestures and participate in a real relation to their objects (anger, hostility, jubilation, etc.), but their syntax is simple: they cannot tell us anything for they do not carry a label saying anger, jubilation or hostility, and are thus rhematic. For us, the observers ‘on the other side’ of the photograph, these same actions and gestures are simply traces of white, black and shade on a print: they are thus iconic and rhematic for us, too, but we nevertheless recognize them as representations of NVC legisigns. Similarly, the photographs taken inside the Byzantine church in Chapter Four are also dicent indexical sinsigns. However, if we enter the represented world we are confronted by the generality of representations of crosses and demons, symbols which can in no way guarantee the existence of the objects they represent: they are thus rhematic. If the representation of the insect, for example, had a caption or an accompanying label – The Devil or Lord of the Flies, for example – then the representation would be dicent. Note that for the congregation of the time these strange images really represented the divinity and the devil  – entities which are supernatural and therefore, in principle, invisible. Such images composed of lines, shapes and red ochre couldn’t be anything other than simple, substitutive signs and therefore were and are rhematic: as they appear to us on the walls of the church these signs are instances of rhematic symbols. For similar reasons the footprint discovered by Robinson Crusoe on the shore was a sinsign, but as it had no label saying Friday, its syntax was simple and the sign was an example of the class of rhematic indexical sinsigns. Finally, consider the example of the image of the Bridge of Sighs with its caption (Figure 6.5). Since it contains an index in the form of a referring expression – a legisign – plus a rheme composed of an icon, it is a quasiproposition and therefore a ‘double’ sign. The whole sign is thus the replica of a dicent indexical legisign, while the photograph of the same bridge is a dicent sinsign. The proposition Oxford has a bridge of sighs, on the other hand, containing as it does the symbols ‘bridge’ and ‘sigh’, – signs whose meanings are not immediately visible and obvious and have to be learned – is a replica of a dicent symbol.

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6.5  Summary By now it must be obvious just how important it was for Peirce to distinguish between the dynamic and immediate objects. Had he left the correlates as they were in 1903 it would have been impossible to establish the distinctions examined above concerning the ways in which an image can convey information. Since the dynamic object is defined to be an object of experience, an existent entity, therefore, it follows that no captionless non-photographic still image can convey information, since the signs of this subclass have no way of establishing the existence of such an object. They have, nevertheless, one or more immediate objects which enable us to interpret them. This is the paradox of the images examined in the first section: although the number of lines, forms and colours is theoretically limitless, unlike the propositions we can employ to describe them, they convey no information. If they are diagrammatic in character like a geometrical figure, however, information can be obtained from them. After a discussion of Peirce’s early theory of information the chapter proceeded to describe the various subclasses defined by the third division of the 1903 system, bringing out in particular the conditions under which images can be said to convey information, either by the addition of an existence-establishing index in the caption or as a photograph. For reasons of exhaustivity the chapter also made a short excursion into the second branch of Peirce’s philosophy of representation, namely critic, which deals with the validity of arguments and that part of his logic of the icon which he considered his chef d’oeuvre, the Existential Graphs. Finally, the task of completing the table of trichotomies begun in Chapter Three made it possible to illustrate some of the ten distinct classes of signs which the 1903 divisions/trichotomies identified.

Chapter Seven

Rhetoric of the image In this final chapter we leave speculative grammar, that empty formalism independent of psychology, ethnology and all cultural influence, but we take its lessons with us as we enter the world of human motivation. In doing so, we return to a number of problems left suspended since the very first chapter as they were not strictly relevant to speculative grammar. It is the purpose of the chapter to relate Peirce’s philosophy of representation to the less abstract world of communication and persuasion and in doing so to review some of these early problems. It will also be interesting to assess the extent to which Peirce’s very personal conception of rhetoric compares with research accumulated within the French-language tradition of studies in visual semiotics and pictorial rhetoric initiated by the genius of Roland Barthes and his 1964 essay ‘Rhétorique de l’image’ (1964a) and followed by a team working from within the Belgian rhetorical tradition, Groupe µ (Klinkenberg et al., 1992). These and other specialists who studied with Algirdas Greimas have produced a large body of work on the communicative properties of images;1 they have also formed an active international specialist association, the AISV, Association Internationale de Sémiotique Visuelle. Such a comparison is, however, problematic: consider the following extracts from the call for papers for the 2010 AISV Congress held in Venice with the very promising and seemingly ecumenical theme of ‘Rhetorics of the Visible’: Our reference here is Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s approach which rejected the use of logic and grammar. The latter tended to confine rhetoric within limits related to truth and to the distinction between figurative and literal meaning [. . .] It is impossible to maintain a clear distinction between semiotics and rhetoric because, in pointing out rhetoric’s ‘agonistic heart’, what is at stake is binarism, the main a priori epistemological principle of structural

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semiotics, from Saussure to Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. Binarism is indeed the constituent way in observing phenomena [. . .] To avoid basing oneself on the rhetoric of/in the verbal, one would accept [the] proposal of a moratorium on metaphors [. . .] contemporary tropology is by now reduced solely to this figure of speech. (CfP, AISVIASV 2010) No logic, no grammar, binarism  – Cartesian, Saussurean binarism  –, the assimilation of rhetoric to semiotics, no metaphor for the time being, and, to crown it all, no Charles Sanders Peirce in the list of authorities prospective participants were invited to consult: much of the triadic character of the conceptual battery described in the previous six chapters has simply been bracketed as irrelevant, and the two theories of the sign adopted respectively by hunters and zoologists, as the quotation from Culler has it in the Introduction, are totally incommensurable. What, given this uncomplimentary assessment of Peirce’s relevance to studies of the image, could a specifically Peircean theory of visual rhetoric possibly have to offer against this thriving European background, and what might its specificity be? The challenge might initially appear to be unproblematic: after all, the final branch of Peirce’s grand logic is very encouragingly named ‘Speculative Rhetoric’, where ‘speculative’, as we know, here means ‘theoretical’. However, we must remember that one of the purposes of the grand logic, that is the philosophy of representation, as it was described in 1903, was to establish in the first branch those conditions which must be fulfilled for an entity to qualify as a sign: one of three possible modes of being, the nature of its relation to what it represents and, finally, its information value. 2 Now although signs are principally the product and communicating medium of human intelligence the conditions to be fulfilled are independent of human psychology and physiology. Indeed, in the text entitled ‘Pragmatism’ from 1907 Peirce even goes so far as to suggest that neither an utterer nor, possibly, an interpreter, is an essential constituent of a sign, even though both are involved in any act of communication (EP2 404). It would appear, then, that such a formalism is too abstract a platform on which to build a theoretical basis for the analysis of the communicative and rhetorical functions of material images. Nevertheless, when placed within the principles of Peirce’s general philosophy and his conception of the way the various sciences involved in the quest for knowledge were organized, the picture is not quite as bleak as it seems. Consequently, the sections to come return briefly to the organization of the sciences as Peirce understood this, offer a summary of classical rhetoric together with Peirce’s speculative rhetoric and what we know of it and, finally, examine a series of illustrative case studies, all of which will make it possible to counter the negative implications of the call for papers quoted above.

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7.1 Theoretical considerations 7.1.1  Common science and special science It was seen in Chapter Three that Peirce established a three-way classification of the sciences of ‘discovery’ involved in the quest for knowledge  – the first and most general being mathematics, the second philosophy and the philosophy of representation with it, and the third idioscopy, of which more below – and that within this classification the various sciences are organized according to an architectonic, hierarchical principle. This insistence on hierarchical relations between the sciences might strike the reader as a fastidious whim, but as a scientist Peirce was anxious to cover and render explicit every aspect of scientific investigation, especially its conceptual bases. Such theoretical choices form an important part of every research undertaking: concepts such as ‘category’, ‘icon’, ‘structure’, ‘dicent’ and ‘object’, for example, occur frequently in this book. Moreover, it would have been totally illogical on Peirce’s part to attempt to establish in the critic branch of his philosophy of representation the validity of the various classes of inference such as abduction, deduction and induction, without having first defined sign, dynamic object, interpretant and argument, etc. Peirce simply wants to make sure we know where such concepts come from and, in the case of hypotheses and the conclusions we draw from them, how to be sure they are valid. Within the neo-Saussurean rhetorical tradition mentioned above, to cite another example, the operational concepts adopted originate not in a theory of rhetoric or of images but in linguistics. Peirce’s preoccupation with relations between the various sciences simply makes sure we are aware of this. From an epistemological perspective, then, and contrary to the received AISV-IASV view, it is important to note that within Peirce’s philosophy of representation rhetoric is not a part of, nor on a par with, speculative grammar, but follows on from it as the third common science with its specific objectives.

7.1.2  From semiotics to rhetoric We can see what the priorities of this particular theory of semiotics are and how the dependency principle works in Peirce’s case by examining the way the sentence structure of certain linguistic examples mentioned in the preceding chapters are actually accommodated by the semiotics. Consider the following statement: ‘Speculative grammar . . . must analyse an assertion into its essential elements, independently of the structure of the language in which it may happen to be expressed’ (CP 3.430). It’s not hard to imagine what Peirce might mean here by the ‘essential elements’ of a sign. Given the importance of objects, facts and existence in Peirce’s theory

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of information, the only signs which can establish a link with the real world are the indices, a subclass of signs which indeed realize the ‘essential elements’ mentioned in the definition. These are the representations of the sets of partial objects which determine the logical structure of a sign. Stated differently, these sets are the elements which constitute the sign’s dynamic object and are represented by various types of indexical expressions. It is this relation holding between a sign and its dynamic object which guarantees the validity of the ‘synthetical propositions’ discussed in Chapter Six; the validity, therefore, of the dicent sign, which is both a statement and a unit of information concerning the real world. The identification of the dynamic object is thus one of the principal purposes of Peirce’s speculative grammar, and at this early stage of any semiotic analysis the final structure of the sign in which these essential elements appear is irrelevant, even though Peirce expends much energy in analysing differences in mood, etc., particularly in discussions and demonstrations of his graph systems. One discipline which actually examines that structure is the appropriate ‘special’ science, namely linguistics. This he describes as a classificatory science which deals with ‘products of the mind’ and endeavours to explain them on psychological and ethnological principles (though whether all present-day linguists would agree with this definition is a moot point). Does this mean that the analysis of syntactic structure by a linguist has nothing to gain from logic in the broad sense? Obviously not, as, according to the dependency principle introduced in Chapter Three, whatever concepts are identified and defined within speculative grammar are available to the sciences following them: critic, speculative rhetoric, and, of course, all the special sciences. One example, again related to the sign’s essential elements, is the fact that the structure of any sign is determined at a basic level by the internal organization of the event it represents, and this structure is diagrammatic in most cases – immediate objects in the sign correspond to the partial objects in the event represented. The rider ‘in most cases’ is necessary since not all signs are diagrammatic: as we saw in Chapter Five, the structure of metaphorical signs is significantly more complex. In this way the different moods by means of which an utterance such as You will take this letter to Captain Hanno can be formed – the interrogative, injunctive and declarative moods, the right dislocation of the initial sentence of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove and the adversative structure And yet are logically irrelevant ‘accidents’ within speculative grammar: its real business is with the identification of the dynamic object, while the actual final form of the linguistic expression is determined by its rhetorical function (CP 4.57; EP2 329), the evidence of which can be verified by observation (CP 2.333). Similarly, consider another long-running example, ‘Ground arms!’. We saw in Chapter One that Peirce, as a sop to Cerberus, simply identified the ‘will’ of the officer as the object of this sentence. In Chapter Four the

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dynamic object of this command was shown to be associated by Peirce himself with the temporary and contemporary state of mind of the officer: it was, he suggested, to be found in the universe of the officer’s expectations. We now see in fact that Peirce was simply taking a short cut in his original statement, since the identification of the officer’s will with the object of the utterance is a case where Peirce takes what he calls the ‘rhetorical evidence’ for granted, rhetorical evidence involving the verification of the meaning of utterances by the observation of the effect produced and the context in which it occurs (CP 8.178): in other words, in order to explain a strictly semiotic problem he is invoking, as a normal and natural speaker of English, his experience of linguistic communication and rhetoric. In this case, then, the strict hierarchy between semiotics and linguistics has simply been neutralized, with each combined with the other for purposes of explication. Finally, it is easy to see how the rhetoric complements the semiotics in metaphor as Peirce defines it. The semiotics  – speculative grammar  – specifies the structure of the dynamic object of such metaphorical signs as Achilles is a lion and The lion is the king of the jungle, for example, as the pairing of counterpart partial objects from two distinct domains. Together they determine the parallelism characteristic of such a sign’s logical form, a parallelism which, owing to the constraints of the medium, can only be represented incompletely in the sign. The formal nature of the semiotics is unable to take the analysis any further, for the actual choice of a pair of base and target domains is a determination of the rhetorical, communicative purpose of the ‘symbol-using mind’  – of the utterer or the artist  – and underwrites the Thirdness of metaphor as a hypoiconic structure. It is this Thirdness which is inhibited by the necessary communication of the sign through an unavoidably existential medium. Thus like the right dislocation mentioned earlier, metaphorical signs can only be fully explained by the third branch of the philosophy of representation, namely speculative rhetoric.

7.2 Rhetoric 7.2.1  Rhetoric theory In order to bring out the specificity of Peirce’s speculative rhetoric there follows a brief outline of how the art of the ‘ancient writers on rhetoric’, as Peirce calls them, has been formulated over the years. 3 Initially developed by the Sophists, who were itinerant teachers, ‘sophistry’ was considered at the time a democratic attitude to learning and knowledge and originally meant ‘expertise’ but came, probably as a result of the hostility shown it by Plato in particular, to acquire the meaning of ‘specious but fallacious reasoning;

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employment of arguments which are intentionally deceptive’ (OED). After contributions from Roman theorists and a period of pedagogical importance lasting to the late Middle Ages the art went into a decline until a relatively recent renewal of interest. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of persuasion; logic, on the other hand, being inferential in nature, he defined as the art of reasoning, as in the sort of deductive inference encountered briefly in Chapter Six; finally, poetics, which is imitative, ‘mimetic’ in nature, he defined as the art of ‘making’, that is creation (Chaucer was a ‘maker’, an obsolete term for a poet). The following summary is based largely upon Vickers (1987), Cockcroft and Cockcroft (1992) and Barthes (1970b).

7.2.1.1  Oratory The theory of rhetoric from Aristotle to the Early Middle Ages became rigidly codified  – orators were given a highly conventional framework within which the techniques adopted had to fit or suit the nature of the pleading. The following summary scheme evolved. For Aristotle there were three principal types of public speaking or oratory: deliberative, as in a university council meeting where important collective decisions have to be made; judicial or forensic oratory as in a court of law; finally panegyric or epideictic oratory as when the great of this world are celebrated in speeches at state and other funerals. The five main functions or tasks of the orator developed by later theorists were first, the ‘discovery’ of the arguments (inventio in Latin, heuriskein in Greek, which gives us our word ‘heuristic’, a set of rules or a technique for solving a problem); the organization of the speech (Latin dispositio); choice of wording (Latin elocutio, a more general term than our modern ‘elocution’); memoria, techniques of memorization, as in mnemonic device (Greek mnemé); finally, ‘delivery’ or actio, the Latin for Greek hypόcrisis, a term which gives us our modern ‘hypocrisy’, that is duplicity, meant ‘acting’, since actors are held to be able to feign ideas and simulate feelings that they do not necessarily really experience. The organization of the speech came similarly to be codified with an introduction, the setting out of the facts, the establishment of proofs, the speech ending with an epilogue. The techniques of inventio, which meant the seeking-out of the appropriate arguments or facts (not inventing them or making them up), became codified in the field of argumentation, re-established in the fifties as an important form of persuasion (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969), and involved the following types of ‘argument’: ethos, this is a show of stance, the image the orator wishes to give of himself; pathos: statements relating to the sentiments he wishes to inspire in the audience – pity, fear, revulsion, etc.; finally, logos, namely the more rational arguments the orator assembles to prove his point known as the loci, or topoi. Elocution involved the appropriate adaptation of

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the language of the speech to the subject under discussion by means of linguistic devices used to justify an argument. These were the choice of tropes or schematic figurative language and the choice of structures (the use of sonorous periodic sentences, for example).

7.2.1.2 The loci of classical rhetoric The loci or topoi were the various labels by means of which the arguments of rhetorical discourse were classified. For Aristotle, they were exemplary arguments, ‘commonplaces’ that could be used for specific forms of pleading or oratory. The following are a brief selection and are based upon Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969, pp. 83–95). Loci of quantity. These are commonplaces or stereotypical arguments which are based on the idea that one thing is better than another for quantitative reasons: a greater number of good things is better than a smaller number; a thing useful to a greater number of purposes is more estimable than one less useful; what lasts longer is more desirable than something that lasts less long: in advertisements for cars and tyres, a greater number of miles for a given outlay; conversely, lower petrol consumption, less pollution, etc., is better than greater. In the case of frequency greater frequency represents the norm, whereas the less frequent, the marginal and the abnormal are often rejected; the argument from ‘common sense’: what is accepted by the greater number is somehow perceived as superior to the ideas of the few. Loci of quality. These commonplaces generally appear in argumentation where the loci of quantity have been advanced, and constitute a sort of challenge to or neutralization of appeals to the greater number: the greater value of the unique versus the usual, the ordinary and the vulgar; the value of that which is threatened or fleeting; to be rather than to seem to be  – ideas expressed in certain school mottos, Esse quam videri, for example. The value of the timeless and eternal is another such locus: these are arguments based upon the irreparable as in a court of law when the judge tells a convicted child-murderer that he has blighted a whole family, and in deliberative situations as when pressure-groups plead for the abandonment of projected ‘fracking’ sites because of the damage these will do to the environment. There are various subsets of loci derivable from the above. The locus of order defends the idea that the earlier is better than the later (nostalgia for the lost glories of the past, etc.) and the superiority of principles and laws over facts and individuals. The locus of the existent affirms the superiority of the existent, the actual, the real over the possible, the contingent or the impossible: for example ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, but note, too, the deferred gratification advocated by the Christian religion: lead a good life now, and you will reap your just reward in the Kingdom of

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Heaven. The locus of essence attributes greater value to individuals to the extent that they embody a particular essence or quality in exemplary form; these are the ‘icons’ of sports and media culture, and this locus informs the myth that financial success is proof of personal worth (Andrew Carnegie and the survival of the fittest); this locus also governs our aesthetic canons concerning beauty and the beautiful. The foregoing remarks were a brief introduction to classical rhetoric. However, it should be borne in mind that for centuries rhetoric was paradigmatically verbal; these techniques and loci were therefore intended as an aid to public speaking, before an assembly or a jury, etc. Just how they might prove applicable to pictorial persuasion has yet to be established, although Roland Barthes set a precedent by discussing a pictorial document using structuralist semiological concepts and methodology.

7.2.2  Speculative rhetoric What do we know of Peirce’s speculative rhetoric? This has been the subject of a series of recent studies which have attempted either to place the discipline precisely within the philosophy of representation or, like the present chapter, to relate it to the broader semiotic picture. Santaella Braga (1999), Liszka (2000), Colapietro (2007) are representative of the first group while Bergman (2010) exemplifies the second. Liszka’s contribution is particularly useful at this stage for the exhaustive account he gives of Peirce’s long struggle with the concept. We learn that the rhetoric branch of the grand logic received seven different titles over the years, from speculative/ general/formal/universal/ pure rhetoric, for example, to objective logic and, ultimately, methodeutic. There are also upwards of 30 different definitions (2000, p. 440). Unlike the earlier two – speculative grammar and critic – this branch of the grand logic was clearly left in an inchoate and ill-defined state. Nevertheless, we can find viable constant features in the definitions. Although he considered methodeutic as the ‘study of the theory of inquiry’ (CP 2.106), Peirce referred constantly to the interpretant in the other definitions he gave of this branch, and this is extremely important in the present context. Like this book, speculative grammar, that is semiotics, deals principally with defining sign-action  – semiosis  – and its necessary correlates (i.e. ‘the main conceptions of logic’ (ibid.)). The essential task of critic classifies the arguments defined by the semiotics and establishes the validity of the relations holding between classes of inferences and what they represent, namely their dynamic objects. The province of speculative rhetoric, on the other hand, concerns the relation between sign and interpretant: ‘[speculative rhetoric]’s most essential business is to ascertain by logical analysis, greatly facilitated by the development of the other branches of semeiotics, what are the indispensable conditions of a sign’s

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acting to determine another sign nearly equivalent to itself’ (EP2 328), the other ‘nearly equivalent sign’ being, of course, the interpretant. Theoretical rhetoric is also defined as the enquiry into the general conditions concerning the reference of symbols, indices and icons to the interpretants they ‘aim to determine’ (CP 2.93). This, therefore, is the definition we adopt in this introductory text, and it is the methodology of this enquiry into the effects produced or intended to be produced by signs that the theoretical rhetoric hands down to its more specialized counterpart: Peircean pictorial rhetoric deals with the reference of pictorial signs to the interpretants they aim to determine by means of their ‘power of appealing to a mind’ (CP 1.559). Peirce defined the special, ‘idioscopic’ branch of rhetoric in at least two different but complementary ways. In his Carnegie application of 1902 he considered it to be the study of individual manifestations of the mind, whether these are permanent works, for example paintings, sculptures, buildings, etc., or actions, all falling within the purview of art criticism (CP 1.201). This is an important point as it explains why it is possible to study the rhetoric of artworks, poems and political manifestos, for example, but less easily that of an accidental sign such as Friday’s footprint: like most natural signs, this latter sign simply wasn’t a manifestation of a mind but a random event encountered in a random manner and therefore had no rhetorical purpose. However, in the article ‘Ideas, Stray or Stolen, about Scientific Writing’ published two years later, he refined this scheme following from the more general discipline of speculative rhetoric, the special rhetoric was to be organized: first, according to the special nature of the ideas to be conveyed, a species of rhetoric of fine art, which deals principally with feeling; and second, according to the special nature of the type of signs ‘into which the interpretation is to take place’, this being a rhetoric of practical persuasion, the purpose of which being to produce a resolve or change of habit; and, finally, a rhetoric of scientific enquiry ‘where the matter is knowledge’ (EP2 329). Now the significance of the relation Peirce established between common science and special science is that the special science will not only make use of its ‘inheritance’ from the common sciences but also of what else has been made available by other specialized sciences: psychology, for example, and linguistics. What makes Peirce’s brand of rhetoric specifically Peircean is his insistence upon the deliberate relation between a sign and the interpretants which it is intended to produce: ‘Now, rhetoric ought to be the doctrine of the adaptation of the forms of expression of a [piece of] writing to the accomplishment of its purpose’ (Peirce quoted by Colapietro, 2007, p. 28). It is obvious that the same principle holds for the rhetoric of pictorial documents, too, but it is no less obvious that the success of the enterprise can only realistically be judged by the effects produced by such documents. Finally, we note that in CP 7.541 Peirce describes how the ancient writers on rhetoric would advise the orator to begin his address by creating

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the appropriate state of emotion in the minds of the audience, to follow this by an appeal to their reasoning powers and finally to persuade them to take action: an important category-based rhetorical series involving feeling, cognition and volition in that order, which corresponds closely to certain classes of arguments mentioned in the survey of rhetoric above. Interestingly, too, in ‘Ideas, Stray or Stolen, about Scientific Writing’ he asserts that rhetoric should be ‘generalized’, and suggests removing the traditional restriction of rhetoric studies to speech (EP2 326)– yet another example of how he sought to extend the scope of his philosophy of representation beyond the strict analysis of the symbol – offering at the same time the following heterogeneous sample of the variety of intentional signs susceptible of rhetorical analysis: ‘every picture, diagram, natural cry, pointing finger, wink, knot in one’s handkerchief, memory, dream . . .’ (ibid.).

7.2.3  Intersubjectivity and the field of the interpretant By definition, then, Peirce’s speculative rhetoric concerns the specificity of the relation holding between sign and interpretant. Unfortunately, as James Liszka shows, Peirce was never able to complete his theory of rhetoric other than by suggesting titles and offering many definitions, and had little to say at all of visual rhetoric apart from what we have seen in the section above. However, in a letter to Lady Welby Peirce hints at one relevant concept. In order to understand its importance we need to make a short digression into linguistics to examine the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’, a term first introduced in the late fifties by the French linguist Emile Benveniste in the final paragraph of a paper dealing with subjectivity and the place of the speaker in the communicative process: Many concepts in linguistics, and even perhaps in psychology, will appear in a fresh light if we place them within the framework of discourse, which is language mobilized by man when he speaks, and within the state of intersubjectivity, which alone makes linguistic communication possible. (Benveniste, 1966, p. 266)4 Benveniste’s genial idea was taken up and developed independently by both the cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker and by Elizabeth Closs Traugott, from whom the following definition has been borrowed: Intersubjectivity is the explicit expression of the [speaker/writer]’s attention to the ‘self’ of the addressee/reader in both an epistemic sense (paying attention to their presumed attitudes to the content of what is said), and in a more social sense (paying attention to their ‘face’ or ‘image needs’ associated with social stance and identity). (Traugott, 2003, p. 128)

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In short, the concept of intersubjectivity involves, among other things, the way we as speakers or writers attempt to assess and then attend to addressees’ behavioural intentions and belief systems as we communicate with them. In this way, it exploits the specifically deontic and epistemic features of the ‘I-You’ dimension of the communicative act. One example given by Traugott is the development of the expression let’s: it is the result of a shift in meaning from Let us go, will you? to Let’s go, shall we? and finally to the hospital-speak of Let’s take our pills, Roger, a sequence in which the expression goes from the force of injunction to a ‘care-giver register’ (ibid., p. 130). There was also a simple example of intersubjectivity in the extract from the BNC in Chapter One: in the passage quoted, the ‘bonding’, recognitional function of the demonstrative that is an expression of this epistemic attention to the other speaker’s presumed acquaintance with the referent in question, and illustrates the way successive speakers target presumed shared beliefs and attitudes. The demonstrative this (one token in the extract), on the other hand, can have the opposite intersubjective value since it presumes the addressee’s ignorance of the referent, as in the case of the standard opening line of a joke: ‘There was this Englishman/Irishman/ Scotsman/Vice Chancellor . . .’, etc. And it is through this ‘awareness’ of the other’s beliefs and attitudes that signs can be used to determine specific effects upon the beliefs and behaviour of a target audience or ‘receiver’: they are used, as Peirce suggests, in order to produce a ‘resolve’, that is a new habit in the ‘You’ being addressed. Interestingly, the concept of intersubjectivity, while in no way a rhetorical ‘technique’, is reminiscent of the concept which Peirce hinted at briefly in the letter to Lady Welby. In one of the descriptions of his system of signs he writes: I define a Symbol as a sign which is determined by its dynamic object only in the sense that it will be so interpreted. It thus depends either upon a convention, a habit, or a natural disposition of its interpretant or of the field of its interpretant (that of which the interpretant is a determination). (CP 8.335) Now we know from the many definitions of semiosis adduced in the course of the previous chapters that the interpretant is the determination of, that is the effect provoked by, the sign, but the quotation seems to contradict this since it states that the interpretant is a determination of something other than the sign. However, the fact that a given sign can provoke widely varying effects according to who interprets it is an illustration of the non-deterministic character of Peirce’s conception of the sign. It is proof, too, that the interpretant must also somehow depend for its specific realization upon each interpreter’s personal and unique experience, that ‘cognitive resultant of our past lives’. This second, complementary source of determination of the interpretant is what he calls, in the extract, the ‘field’ of the interpretant. It is an area in

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our accumulated experience of the world in which the sign ‘strikes a chord’ when we interpret it, and it produces a specific reaction – the interpretant; it is an ‘area of experience’ which we more or less implicitly ‘aim’ at or take for granted when we address one another. Thus the epistemic systems of beliefs and attitudes to signs – verbal or otherwise – and the deontic systems of values governing needs, obligations and questions of stance mentioned by Traugott are just two of a wide range of interpretant fields that can be targeted by a sign’s creator, and are, to this extent, of theoretical interest in the discussion of rhetoric even though they can vary widely from person to person. However, although each individual has his unique experience and therefore his own system of fields, much of what he believes and thinks is, owing to our systems of compulsory education and to our exposure to the media, shared to a large extent by families, communities, subcultures and, in many cases, entire nations; and it is in these common interpretant fields that the publicist, for example, seeks to strike a chord in order to secure a purchase. With the concept of the interpretant field, then, psychology quite legitimately enters the theoretical framework: ‘In coming to Speculative Rhetoric, after the main conceptions of logic have been well settled, there can be no serious objection to relaxing the severity of our rule of excluding psychological matter, observations of how we think, and the like’ (CP 2.107). This useful concept raises a number of methodological issues. First, in any analysis of rhetoric in a document, we have to identify the legisigns or, more specifically in the case of images, the non-verbal communication legisigns, which are likely to accord with the target group’s presumed belief system (or at least to be clearly understood by its members in the form of the immediate interpretants which the signs are intended to determine). These legisigns are realized in the immediate objects visible in any ‘figurative’ pictorial sign. They collectively represent the dynamic object, this being determined ultimately by the choices of the ‘agency’ which placed it in the image in the first place. Second, while verbal rhetoric involves the complex form of linguistic pragmatism and manipulation described briefly above as a means of ‘conditioning’ the listener, its visual counterpart can be traced to certain mass media conventions, for example framing techniques, one of the systems of NVC legisigns discussed in Chapter Two, and these, too, are used to target specific interpretant fields. Finally, a communicative act analysed semiotically is the realization of some agent’s will to produce an effect (assent, change of habit, increased knowledge, etc.) upon a person. The sign incorporates visible traces of this volition in the guise of its immediate objects and the possible forms of expression it realizes. In a pictorial sign, as we saw in Chapter Two, these are necessarily the configurations of lines, forms and colours it contains – in other words, all that is left in an image, picture, poster, etc., once any linguistic material it may incorporate has been physically or mentally expunged.

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7.3  Case studies: Ideology and inflection5 Following from what was said earlier we can now suggest a number of fundamental principles and procedures which should characterize a general Peircean pictorial rhetoric. First, such a rhetoric necessarily makes use of the defining principle inherited from the general science, speculative rhetoric. Consequently, any Peirce-inspired study of rhetoric cannot limit itself to an inventory of the elements of the pictorial sign but must take into account the sorts of effect we assume it is intended to determine. The problem in this case, from the analyst’s perspective, is that although the sign is invariably available for inspection we cannot tell in advance how it will be interpreted, and we can only speculate, as we examine any pictorial document, as to what the intended interpretants might be. This situation reflects the fundamental ambivalence of rhetoric theory: it is at one and the same time a set of instructions and a methodology for a course of persuasive action but also a set of techniques for the analysis of such persuasive action, whether in speeches, novels or pictorial documents like the two anti-rape posters, the Banksy composition and the photographic allegory to be examined shortly. To obviate this problem the following case studies have been chosen for their very definite ideological bias. First, they have in common the fact that they challenge people’s preconceptions by targeting belief systems  – their presumed identifiable interpretant fields  – which implicitly or explicitly justify the behaviour and attitudes of entire social groups, and we can assume that such interpretant fields should be readily identifiable when dealing with clearly ideological signs. In short, while the intended interpretants of a piece of pictorial rhetoric are fundamentally a matter of wishful thinking as we can never be sure in advance how the interpreter will react, the interpretant fields of which they are potential determinations provide us with a much more tractable concept. Second, just as most of the theoretical and methodological traditions espoused by the neo-Saussurean exponents of visual semiotics mentioned above have their basic operational concepts – the sign defined as the binary association of a signifier and a signified, for example – so, too, a Peircean visual rhetoric will necessarily have its operational concepts inherited from the general philosophy of representation: qualisign, replica, icon, dicent sign, etc., are just a small sample of those discussed in the first six chapters of this introductory text. Third, and this is perhaps the most important methodological principle of all, as was seen in Chapter Four, Peirce states that the injunctive structure of a sign such as ‘Ground arms!’, like the moral tone of the comic-strip from Chapter One, is a function of the relation between the dynamic object and the momentary states of mind of the officer and the artist: the objects of these signs are to be found respectively in the universe of the officer’s expectations and in the imaginary universe reflecting the artist’s moral

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outlook. Now these universes constitute a ‘space’ in which the rhetorical features of a sign obviously originate and it very importantly enables us to assess the motivations, expectations or ideological preferences of the user, procedures unthinkable in the semiotics. This may seem an unnecessary precision but it would be totally illogical to think that the verbal representations of pairs of partial objects such as Cain and Abel, for example, or the squabbling teenagers from the comic-strip, should be able to find their way into their respective signs of their own accord. The space between the dynamic object and the sign’s creator authorizes us to hypothesize such motivations. With this in mind, we turn to the corpus of pictorial signs.

7.3.1  The 2006 Home Office ‘consent’ campaign In Britain at the beginning of the last decade whole institutions – the Police, the Courts, the Probation Service – seemed to be the vectors of a damaging form of prejudice concerning rape, namely a ‘culture of scepticism’: ‘The Home Office research found that out of 11,766 allegations of rape only 655 ended in a conviction’ (Press Association, the Guardian, 8 March 2006).6 Consequently, as a result of a significant rise in reported rape cases and a disproportionately low rate of conviction, the Government at that time passed the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (implemented in 2004), and in doing so proposed a clearer definition of the term ‘consent’ in relation to rape cases. Consent was now defined as being an ‘active’ yes from the partner, and in no way an assumption of agreement. The new law was primarily intended to enable juries to establish consent or absence thereof in rape cases brought before the courts, but it was also intended to target a specific population’s behaviour towards women. To this end, the Home Office ran a £500,000 six-week anti-rape ‘consent’ campaign early in March 2006, first on radio and subsequently by means of two 30 by 22.5 cm posters which were distributed in pubs, clubs and published in ‘lads’ magazines such as Nuts and, in the second case, both Nuts and the gay magazine AXM. The public targeted was the age-group between 18 and 24, the group in which the increase in rape cases had been most significant. The two posters, the conception and finalization of which were outsourced to an agency, met with a very mixed reception from journalists in newspapers and magazines and, most vociferously, from the middle-class 30-, 40- and 50-somethings writing in to the comment forums of the newspapers’ online versions. The interesting point here is that they reacted rather like the members of an assembly rejecting some proposal or the jury at a trial that a lawyer had failed to move, and were judging a rhetorical enterprise which, in fact, targeted not them but the potential young offenders. Within the perspective outlined here, the questions are: how was the Home Office to target a specific social group’s belief systems – its ideology,

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in other words – and behavioural habits in order to change their perception of rape, and how was it to advocate and gain acceptance of ‘consent’ in order to obtain a change of intentions and habits? In short, how was it to obtain a resolve followed by a desire to act differently? In their brief, the Home Office experts had to select a necessarily limited number of significant familiar but general signs which would correspond to the way young men between 18 and 24 see the world (i.e. their belief systems or, in more Peircean terms, this specific interpretant field). In other words, they had to target those aspects of the problem this population would be familiar with or would readily understand. What they came up with is to be found in the two posters, to which we now turn. The principal elements of the linguistic channel vary from poster to poster, but both emphasize the importance of consent. The first states ‘Have sex with someone who hasn’t said yes to it, and the next place you enter could be prison’, the second ‘If you don’t get a yes before sex, who will be your next sleeping partner?’. Both posters have the same ‘bottom line’, which reads as follows: ‘If you have sex without consent you could end up in prison, for rape’. This is followed by a jingle-type slogan: ‘If you don’t get a yes don’t have sex’. The iconography of the first poster, entitled No Entry (Figure 7.1), could hardly be simpler. It represents a young woman cropped between knees and upper abdomen, and dressed simply in unsophisticated white underwear

Figure 7.1  No Entry, courtesy of photographer Ben Stockley.

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with a no-entry road sign stitched over the pubic region. If we draw up an inventory of the significant items, the forms of expression and the ‘familiar’ legisigns of Peircean theory which make up the set of immediate objects visible in the sign and which are intended to appeal to the presumed belief system common to the age-group, we find the following. Most obvious of all is the metaphor of the no-entry road sign (this was the aspect of the poster that caused the controversy in the online newspapers). Clearly, the Home Office advisors and experts assumed that the targeted population would at least understand a simple message of this sort. It is crude, probably in bad taste for some, but given the public targeted, clearly a reasonable ploy. The cropped body highlights the tension between the space of the observer and that of the ‘protagonist’ behind the window frame, as Schapiro puts it. This media convention obviously focuses the subject, gives the model anonymity while stressing the specificity of the female body. It also places the observer at pubic level, and brings him sharply face to face with the problem. Moreover, the anonymous model is wearing simple white underwear  – white being the traditional Western colour of purity. The underwear is not in any way purposely sexy or alluring, and stands as the antithesis of the typical Nuts girlie photo and the daring garments on offer from Victoria’s Secret or Agent Provocateur. A further sign is the contrapposto stance which is chosen presumably to suggest spontaneity, simplicity, vitality, and the desire for autonomy and, no doubt, the right to give consent or not. Traditionally, argumentation concerned the choice of commonplaces to be used in a speech, but it is possible to discern suggestions of pathos in the posture and appearance of the young woman and an argument of quality in the suggestion of her fragility and vulnerability: her underwear offers little protection from an aggressive 18-year-old thug. Finally, we note the colloquial form of the protasis, an imperative: in this case ‘Have sex with someone who hasn’t said yes to it, and the next place you enter could be prison’. This relatively mild warning and another deliberately crude reference to penetration are both ways of ‘reaching out’ to the belief system of the potential offender. The whole image purports to represent the average young woman wanting to get on with her life without violent interference from a yob. Whether the target age-group would understand or worry about this is another matter. Consider the following bigoted, misogynist nonsense, hopefully an extreme but possibly typical expression of the ideology targeted by the campaign. Nick Eriksen, at the time the right-wing British Nationalist Party’s London organizer was quoted by Andrew Gilligan in the London Evening Standard, 1 April 2008, as having stated on 24 August 2005:7 I’ve never understood why so many men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth machine into believing that rape is such a serious crime . . . Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape

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cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal. To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force-feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence. A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched. The demonisation of rape is all part of the feminazi desire to obtain power and mastery over men. Men who go along with the rape myth are either morons or traitors. One can easily imagine the sort of chord an utterance such as Rape is antisocial would strike in the interpretant field discernible behind this sort of discourse, and the interpretant response it would provoke. Clearly, the iconography of the first poster was an attempt to provide the antithesis of this sort of reasoning, and the interpretant effects targeted are not hard to imagine: a change of perception not only of rape but also of the independence and freedom of young women to choose their sexual partners when and as they wish. The second poster, entitled Prison (Figure 7.2), shows a door opening onto a prison cell containing two bunks: below, an empty one awaiting

Figure 7.2  Prison, courtesy of photographer Ben Stockley.

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the young offender, and above a bunk occupied by an unsavoury-looking, ageing inmate wearing his shoes on his bed and who, presumably, is a convicted rapist and in any case an undesirable and unwanted potential future sleeping partner  – in short, the iconography of the very real and much publicized dangers of imprisonment. This poster, which first appeared as an advertisement in Nuts a week after the first, and concurrently in the gay magazine AMX, targeted both potential homo- and heterosexual offenders and presumably sought to alert them to the sort of unwelcome sexual experiences conviction for rape might lead to. The framing strategy here is such that it places the observer just outside the door leading into the cell in order to make the prison threat more immediate. Moreover, we note here a more formal protasis of the conditional sentence, plus a veiled, threatening pun on ‘sleeping partner’ for both gay and heterosexual targets. Whereas the more homely colloquial conditional of the first poster was no doubt an appeal to the potential offender’s basic decency, the formality of the conditional of the second poster carries the weight of an impersonal authority. Finally, the scheduling of the two posters was significant, for the two appeared in sequence, the second a week after the first, as an asyndetic realization of the conditionals in the message each poster contains. ‘No Entry’ is the warning on the first poster, a pictorial protasis, and, if it goes unheeded, then ‘Prison’ as represented by the second is the pictorial consequence in the apodosis. We note, too that the authority of the warning is reinforced by the ‘ethos’ value of the Home Office logo placed at the bottom right of each poster and the last item the scanning Western eye would encounter. The immediate interpretants of the two posters require no explanation: few members of the target group would be unable to understand the relation between the girl’s body and the no-entry sign, and the dangers of the prison cell: these are the ‘indispensable conditions’ of the two signs’ efficacy. Clearly, the purpose of the posters was to raise awareness both of the menace to women and gays and of the very real danger to the potential perpetrator if rape was committed. The interpretants which the signs aimed to determine were, obviously, a change of perception of the antisocial evil of rape and a raised awareness of the dangers of prison. The initial disparity between Home Office intention and online newspaper readers was due to the age and social class of the vociferous commentators. Research by the Home Office before and after the campaign into its reception by the targeted age group suggests that it was largely successful, though the poster which the youths found more efficient was the one showing the man in jail. However, judging by the tenor of the misogynist remarks quoted above, some members of the target population would no doubt have jeered and thrown darts at the posters, spurious and unsolicited dynamic interpretants of this remarkable pair of signs.

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7.3.2  Spread the word around . . . The second case study, a pictorial composition entitled ‘Can’t Beat The Feeling’ by the graffiti artist Banksy, seems at first sight to be relatively simple in content but turns out in fact to be a multilayered and fiercely inflected piece of iconoclasm. The image, an appropriation, is based upon Nick Ut’s 1972 Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of a 9-year-old South-Vietnamese girl running naked and badly burned from her village after a napalm attack by South-Vietnamese aircraft, and the only verbal material it contains is the letter M. The caption, on the other hand, ironically reproduces the title of a late eighties Coca-Cola advertising campaign jingle. The hypoiconic structure of the composition is metaphorical, blending elements from two basic parallel domains, but unlike the examples examined in Chapter Five, it produces its effect not by comparing counterparts but by contrasting them. It thus presupposes that we know the iconic status not only of the photograph, but, in addition, of two symbols of the American way of life and in particular of those well-known exponents of a well-known fantasy film for children. The structure of the metaphor makes use of conflicting images of the treatment of children, and the very evident stance of the artist suggests that what he is targeting is a hypocritical attitude towards the child: on the one hand the creation of a fantasy world of nonchalant bliss, the other the harsh reality of a nation that supplies highly destructive weapons to allied forces who misuse them. The complex metaphor here works on three distinct levels. The base domain in this case is composed of the children fleeing from the burning village  – in the original photograph the young girl is preceded by an older boy and followed by three younger ones, plus a group of SouthVietnamese soldiers who seem unconcerned by the panic of the children and the destruction taking place behind them. Their original counterparts in the target domain are Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (not shown in the metaphor, of course) accompanied by the Tin Man and Scarecrow. However, on a third level, as a corruption of this genuine American children’s fantasy, Banksy has replaced Dorothy’s two innocent companions by ‘counterparts’ from the world of American capitalism, respectively the figure of Mickey Mouse, emblem of Disneyland, and Ronald McDonald, emblem of the ubiquitous fast-food firm and, irony of ironies, noted for his association with children’s charities. The metaphorical structure of the composition is, according to the Peircean definition, form and not a trope. However, its bipartite ‘tier’ structure supports the truly tropical element in the image: irony. Etymologically, irony means dissimulation or simulated ignorance, but is defined by the OED as a ‘figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation

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Figure 7.3  Banksy’s ‘Can’t Beat The Feeling’, 2004, courtesy of the artist.

or contempt’. Banksy’s image isn’t a figure of speech, but an ironically charged pictorial document made possible by the metaphorical structure which organizes it: the images used here form the background into which the intended meaning irrupts in the guise of a cropped photograph. The irony is thus conveyed by the discordant conjunction of the three worlds in a single composition, and is based upon a series of binary oppositions. At the most basic level, the world of the two American emblems is iconic as opposed to the indexical status of the ‘quotation’ from Ut’s photograph: the background is pure Firstness and therefore pure fiction, but the brutal intrusion of the Secondness of the photograph disrupts the intended jollity of the scene. Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald are the representations of two partial objects the reality of which cannot be proven by the image. On the other hand, the dynamic object of the indexical and dicent photograph is, unfortunately, very real. In this way the irony of the image is emphasized by the disparity between the intrusion of this reality and the supposedly innocent background. This antithetical organization of the image is sustained by a series of contrasting features to be found in the deliberate choice of NVC legisigns: in appearance (elaborate fancy-dress clothes vs nakedness); in the contrasting expressions on the faces of the three protagonists (beaming smiles as opposed to a grimace of fear and pain); in the positions of the three with respect to one another (they approach side-by-side, a position indicative of a friendly, cooperative relation between the three as opposed to the head-on confrontational position); and above all in the contact  – whereas in the original photograph the young girl is running on her own, arms outstretched

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in pain, here Banksy has the two American icons grasping the child as though they were off on a happy jaunt together down the yellow brick road, singing choruses from the Wizard of Oz or the Coca-Cola advertisement. Further contrasts oppose American Dorothy and Vietnamese Kim Phuc8 and male adults versus female child. In this way, the non-verbal communication features of the image, supplied, of course, by its iconic elements, are our principal cues to the interpretation of this metaphorical image, and this depends entirely on our experience of the specificities of American culture, its advertising campaigns and the history of Ut’s photograph. The image is thus an expression of moral outrage, not only at the incident recorded by Ut’s photograph, but also, no doubt, at continuing American and allied forces’ mistreatment of children in the occupation of Eastern countries and the hypocrisy surrounding the purpose and justification of such interventions. The immediate interpretant of the composition is the image which it forms in our minds, its dynamic interpretant is what we as observers feel and do when we first encounter it. Unlike the rhetoric employed in the first case study, the irony of Banksy’s image has no readily identifiable reforming purpose; it is not intended to inflect the military policies of governments but rather to disrupt our cosy perception of two defining emblems of a hypocritical version of American culture threatening to engulf our own. And it does so by provoking aversion and contempt.

7.3.3  ‘Savoir d’où l’on vient’ When asked, during an interview with the online magazine FILL-IN,9 why she produced life-size nude images of women based upon universally known paintings from the history of Western art, the French photographic artist Dany Leriche replied: ‘Savoir d’où l’on vient’ (In order to understand where we come from). The purpose of this last case study is to examine the forms of expression the artist and her collaborator Jean Michel Fickinger have selected in an image conceived as a pictorial investigation of the place of woman not only in the tradition of Western art but also of the way this tradition has determined the status of woman in contemporary society. To this end in the decade between 1992 and 2003 Leriche and Fickinger produced two series of photographic artworks which paralleled the male worldview inherent in Western art by means of arresting and unsettling celebrations of the female form. In one, Les Filles de Ripa (‘Ripa’s Daughters’), they appropriated the technique of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), an alphabetically ordered collection of allegorical personifications of human vices, virtues and passions which, like Dürer’s Melancholy discussed in Chapter Two, transforms abstract concepts into human types. Initially, Ripa’s personifications were simply textual, but subsequent editions included pictorial elements like the extract from Alciato’s emblem discussed in Chapter Five. In their series, Dany Leriche and Jean Michel Fickinger

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have illustrated contemporary texts written principally by personalities from the art world, opting to represent such essentially male properties as virility, for example, as a woman (in the manner of pictorial editions of the Iconologia, in fact). Their photowork, Virilité, stands as the antithesis of a long tradition of male representations of the female nude going back via Manet’s Olympia, Titian’s Venus of Urbino to Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus: supine female nudes with their hands placed coyly over their pubic area. Not so the Leriche-Fickinger Virilité.10 The series entitled Portraits sous influence (Portraits from the Past)11 from which the image on Figure 7.5 is taken is yet another feminist assault upon the problem of identity and who’s who in a male-dominated world, and its impact comes from the way Dany Leriche disrupts and reverses the values of a number of landmark images from Western art by substituting naked women for the male figures depicted in them. One such is a famous engraving by Albrecht Dürer, ‘Artist and model in the studio’ (1525) which shows an artist drawing a scantily clad female model behind a grid known as a lucinda. The Leriche-Fickinger version is a diptych, the first part of which has a fully dressed female posing as the male artist drawing a naked female model. The second shows the artist’s full-frontal view of the model through the grid. Another landmark image targeted in Portraits sous influence is one of the great works of the northern Renaissance, namely Hans Holbein the Younger’s masterpiece Jean de Dinteville et Georges de Selve (Figure 7.4), that is The Ambassadors (1533, London, National Gallery), and a painting whose informative value was discussed in Chapter Six. Holbein’s 207  ×  210 cm image is a complex synthesis of symbolic allusion and supreme artistic ability. It presents us with two proud, finely dressed dignitaries: the heavily built de Dinteville on the left representing temporal authority – he was ambassador of the French court to Henry VIII – and, representing the Pope and spiritual authority, the slighter, more soberly dressed de Selve on the right, a renowned classical scholar who had been appointed bishop while still in his teens. Both are very young for their positions, evidence of their worth, and they frame a set of objects suggesting intellectual tastes and accomplishments: globes, navigational instruments and instruments for measuring time, a book of arithmetic for merchants and a hymnal, etc., objects which not only display Holbein’s mastery of shape, texture, space and detail, but also collectively symbolize the emblematic status of man in society, the achievements of the emerging humanist natural philosophy and man’s growing terrestrial dominion. They represent, in short, ‘a compendium of the culture of the age’.12 In addition, de Dinteville’s personal tastes are represented by musical instruments: a lute with a significantly metaphorical broken string, and a case of recorders. However, as if to temper the optimism of this commemoration of individual masculine success, breeding and social standing, and to draw attention to the vanity of worldly values, Holbein

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Figure 7.4  Hans Holbein, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (1533), courtesy of the National Gallery, London.

has placed in the foreground between them a memento mori that is only properly recognizable when approaching the image from the right, surely a warning that the very principles of perspective put to such striking use in Holbein’s image are not the only way to picture the world. Moreover, from this particular viewpoint the eye is led past the anamorphosis to the sign of possible redemption, the crucifix barely visible behind the partially drawn curtain in the top left hand corner of the painting. Dany Leriche’s feminist response to this patriarchal opulence was to produce antithetical counter-emblems of her own, structured by the hypoiconicity of allegory. In contrast to Holbein’s Jean de Dinteville et Georges de Selve, then, the photographer has created Isabelle & Dominique (1995): two naked women standing on an ornately tiled floor on either side of a table in front of a set of plush green curtains (Figure 7.5). We realize with a shock that these are real, mature women, not the silicon Eves that smile artlessly from the pages of the magazines. The woman on the left is sturdily built and wears a necklace with a fertility amulet (a phallus combined with a monkey); her companion on the right is slighter and replicates the posture of Georges de Selve. Both stare

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Figure 7.5  Dany Leriche, Isabelle & Dominique, 1995, courtesy of the artist.

fearlessly back at the camera, seemingly unabashed by the vulnerability of their bodies, the paleness of which is set off by the curtains. With the protagonists identified by their Christian names only, the inexperienced observer might be excused for interpreting the image as a composite, but enigmatic representation of feminism, sexuality, or indeed female homosexuality. However, Dany Leriche’s characteristically postmodern antithetical appropriation has established an almost term-for-term parallel between what are ostensibly two conflicting, even diametrically opposed, conceptions of relations between humankind and the world, namely, the patriarchal, male-oriented worldview dominant in the sixteenth century as opposed to that of the twentieth-century feminist. However, owing to the constraints of the medium, her target can be inferred but not seen by the experienced observer. By recycling another artist’s creation – that of a male artist necessarily – and by exploiting the underspecified structure of allegory discussed in Chapter Five, Leriche has established within a single image a contrast between two distinct worldviews. In the artist’s own words in a printed text that accompanies the work: ‘C’est comme s’il y avait deux compositions superposées dans un unique tableau, chacune montrant le contraire de l’autre’ (‘It’s as if there were two works superposed within a single image, each displaying the contrary of the other’). What she omits to mention is that in doing so she has created not only a work of art but a complex

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message concerning the human condition and a postmodern photographic masterpiece to boot. How does this allegorically structured photowork subvert Holbein’s sedate vision of the attributes of the cortegiano? It is not simply that Leriche’s chromatic minimalism contrasts so strikingly with the opulence of her target, or that the men are richly dressed and the women naked, or even the women’s stolid rejection and reversal of the male gaze. Equally to the point is the choice of the metonymical attributes on and beneath the whatnot framed by the two women. Whereas we assume that the objects belong to the men in the Holbein image or to de Dinteville at least, as tokens of their private pursuits and tastes, Leriche’s two women are unrelated to the impersonal emblems of science beside them. For example, at knee-height to the left of the image, atomic energy, a recently proven technological menace to the human race, is exemplified by a chunk of the type of heavily leaded glass used in the windows of nuclear power stations. Similarly, the power of the digital computer is illustrated by the rectangular object in the foreground between the two women. This, a 3D random-dot stereogram of a human skull which is only visible in close-up on the full-size photograph and was produced in one of only two research centres equipped with the appropriate technology at the time, has replaced the anamorphic memento mori of Holbein’s image, and is one of the twentieth century’s ways of cautioning that there are other ways of seeing and representing the human predicament. We are to understand, too, at this point, that the absence of a crucifix draws attention to a world without redemption, forsaken by the deity. To the right of the stereogram, again at knee-height and barely visible on the shelf, are two albums, the only personal effects that could conceivably be associated with the two women. Finally, Leriche has presented us with two banks of foetuses preserved in formalin in square presentation jars: in the front row foetuses of deer and wild boar, behind, in larger jars which are more difficult to distinguish, those of a lamb and a piglet. Together they constitute the attributes of genetics. To see just why these constitute the ultimate antithesis, consider the words of the British geneticist, Steve Jones: Biologists have an adolescent fascination with sex. Like teenagers, they are embarrassed by the subject because of their ignorance. What sex is, why it evolved and how it works were once the biggest unsolved problems in biology. The pastime must be important as it is so expensive. If some creatures can manage with just females, so that every individual produces copies of herself, why do so many bother with males? A female who gave them up might be able to produce twice as many daughters as before and they would carry every one of her genes. Instead, a sexual female wastes time, first in the search for a mate and then in the birth of sons who carry but half of her inheritance. It is still not certain why males exist; and why, if they are unavoidable, nature needs so many.

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Surely, one or two would be enough to impregnate all the females but, with few exceptions, the ratio of one to the other remains stubbornly equal throughout the living world. (Jones, 2000, p. 140) Whence the nudity of the two women, the emblems of whose procreative and maternal functions are so conspicuously and so defiantly in evidence on their pale bodies: these basic biological and genetic capacities are projected as the contraries of the temporal and spiritual authority so confidently embodied in Holbein’s notables. However, by associating them with the foetuses of animals, Leriche is drawing attention to the dehumanizing potential of genetic engineering, for as she herself states in the document mentioned above: ‘la femme est en soi “la porteuse de l’espèce”’ (‘Woman is the bearer of the whole species’) and is the antithesis of Jones’s superfluous male. In short, cloning is a threat to that basic guarantor of the survival of the species, the mother. Thus, although superficially similar in the staging – the Turkish carpet draped over the table, similarly patterned floors and plush green curtains, the studied poses adopted by the two similarly differentially proportioned women – Leriche’s image is not only a parody of a stiffly patriarchal tradition but also a fundamental restatement of the human condition. Holbein’s confident humanism and his celebration of the technology of the age have given way to a stark, post-Auschwitz sensibility, a postmodern vision from which the social and gender hierarchies structuring one of our collective interpretant fields have all been excised. It is an allegory of an allegory conceived by an attributive, metonymical imaginary that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century allegorists would no doubt have commended.

7.4  Summary The chapter has examined the relationship between the first and third branch of Peirce’s philosophy of representation and shown how they relate. The chapter has established how the rhetoric complements the semiotics by admitting psychological factors in the discussion of variations in syntactical structure, that is when the final structure of the sign differs from its logical form. Given the enormous variety of forms that utterances present and the many possible departures from logical form, the implication is that all communication has a rhetorical purpose: whatever we have to say to others, it is always with some type of persuasion in mind and always with its specific verbal forms, from the lowly phatic grunt to the most obscure treatise on, say, thermodynamics. The chapter has also shown that within the philosophy of representation, rhetoric, in theory its most specialized branch, turns out to be the least developed of the three. Nevertheless, it was defined to be the enquiry into

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the general conditions of the way signs target their intended interpretants. At this point, the concept of the interpretant field was introduced as a way of associating the experience of the interpreters with the interpretant produced: these areas of experience are the targets of all forms of communication, those of the publicist, of the politician and of the teacher, too. The analyses of pictorial rhetoric which illustrated the principles discussed in the chapter were logical in inspiration. That is, they made use of concepts inherited from a formal theory of the sign, a field of enquiry quite distinct from rhetoric. They were triadic in structure, that is, they involved the sign’s dynamic object, presupposed the space of the creator and, as befits any analysis of pictorial persuasion, admitted the necessary speculation as to the effects intended or aimed at by the various signs examined. And while it was impossible to identify specific interpretants, in view of their ideological bias, the signs in all three cases clearly targeted readily identifiable interpretant fields and sought to obtain a modification of interpreters’ perceptions of the problems of rape, hypocrisy and ‘masculinism’. What of the moratorium on metaphor mentioned in the call for papers quoted at the beginning of the chapter? The analyses all relied on a logic-based theory of semiotic form, showing how a team of publicists and two artists exploit the tension between the generality of thought and the constraining influence of the plastic medium. Metaphor, from a Peircean perspective, has been removed from the domain of the trope and identified, together with the image and the diagram, as a complex qualitative configuration of a pictorial sign’s lines, forms and colours. This hypoiconic structure was seen to be the partially underspecified structure of ‘canonical’ metaphor in the No Entry poster and Banksy’s composition, but totally unspecified in the allegorical structure informing the Leriche-Fickinger photowork. Its importance in the analysis of these images suggests that it would be scientifically unjustified and highly restrictive from a methodological point of view to discard metaphor from the analysis of pictorial documents, even temporarily. There are, therefore, viable Anglo-Saxon alternatives to the European tradition of visual semiotics mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the chapter. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and Machin (2007), for example, have developed a powerful set of concepts and adopt a multimodal approach to pictorial signs. As they are based largely on a conception of functional linguistics advanced by the British linguist M. A. K. Halliday, I shall have no more to say of them. There is also another Anglo-Saxon alternative, namely the grand logic of one Charles Sanders Peirce, a perspective in which pictorial rhetoric is not simply an ad hoc remodelling of visual semiotics.

Chapter Eight

Conclusion This study has proposed a comprehensive description of Peircean semiotics with particular attention paid to pictorial documents, its main purpose being to demonstrate what looking at such documents involves when approached from a logical as opposed to a linguistic point of view. However, the reader won’t have failed to notice a certain disproportion in the presentation of the various branches of Peirce’s general philosophy of representation. The first six chapters dealt systematically with the semiotics but only the final chapter was devoted to the rhetoric, as though this had been ‘tacked on’ as an afterthought. But this very real discrepancy can be justified on theoretical grounds. The tasks of the strictly semiotic component of the general theory are, as we saw, first, to define the basic constituents of semiosis, which, in its final version identifies the sign, its two objects and three interpretants; second, to provide a way of classifying the various realizations of the sign. In this book we adopted the three criteria defined in 1903, but within five years Peirce had identified ten such criteria. Yet a third important task of the semiotic component is to identify a sign’s logical form which is determined by the partial objects forming the sign’s dynamic object together with the internal structure of the event represented. In this way the utterances and images we all encounter in real life can present a great variety of ‘final’ structures which often depart quite significantly from their logical form: these are structures which the semiotics is not theoretically equipped to deal with. This was the case with the two versions of the Kate Croy and father example, and similar departures from the canonical representation of the dynamic object were observed in pictorial signs: both Mathew Brady’s portrait of Lincoln and the No Entry anti-rape poster exhibit cropping and framing techniques, departures from their logical form which, in their way, are a pictorial equivalent of the right dislocation in the opening sentence of The Wings of the Dove. However, at this point the decision to place this presentation of Peirce’s semiotics squarely within his philosophy of representation is further

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justified as it provides yet another way of distinguishing between linguistic and captionless, non-photographic pictorial signs. While the logical form of an utterance is determined by the structure of the event represented and may be modified by the speaker’s communicative, rhetorical purpose, the logical form of such images necessarily remains constant. With the possible exception of elementary-particle physicists and science-fiction writers, the majority of us never encounter negative events, passive events, modal events or even non-events, and the expression of negation, the passive and modality through various combinations of the morpho-syntax of the English verb-phrase, for example, is the rhetorical decision of the speaker. The simple syntax of purely pictorial signs, unlike the double syntax of the linguistic utterance and the photograph, prevents them from entertaining a real relation with an existent dynamic object and, as a consequence, any rhetorical features they present must be inscribed in their logical form at the moment of inception. Their meaning – a resemblance, Peirce suggests – is in this way constant, and in the comic-strip from Chapter One, for example, the peculiar events of the sequence are determined from the start by the moral stance of the artist: they were not added later for contextual reasons. On the other hand, owing to the double syntax of the photograph, a hybrid category of signs with one foot in propositional structure and the other in the iconic realm of resemblance, so to speak, such rhetorical manipulation is possible. Hence the single final chapter devoted to Peirce’s speculative rhetoric, which is a more specialized science within the general theory, and admits the involvement of psychological factors in the analysis of signs and with them the possibility of identifying the essentially rhetorical causation of any differences between the sign’s logical form and the structure it presents in a document. But this imbalance, which is the consequence of the unfinished state in which Peirce left the rhetorical component of his philosophy of representation, points to an important avenue of research and offers new prospects for the analysis of both non-verbal and verbal signs. Although he never developed his theory of rhetoric to the point that it could be adopted as an immediate theoretical follow-up to semiotic analysis, Peirce nevertheless left us with enough pointers to develop the theory ourselves. In one of the versions of his discussion of the officer’s ‘Ground arms!’ command, for example, he suggested that the ‘universe’ of the object in this – and no doubt in innumerable other cases – relates to the momentary state of mind of the officer. This state of mind is the moment when a sign-user’s rhetorical purposes enter the communicative process and shape the final structure of signs; seen in this light, the concept enables us to build upon the neutral formalism of the semiotics and enquire into the motivations which determine the final form of the signs we encounter. It is also during this momentary state of mind that that highly empiricist concept, the field of the interpretant, enters the picture. We know that it is a co-determinant of the sign. Unlike the sign, unfortunately, it is not

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immediately available for inspection, but this should not dissuade us from pursuing Peirce’s tantalizingly fecund idea. The field of the interpretant, too, offers enormous prospects for future rhetoric research, providing this is conducted in a consistent manner and builds upon the logic. In conclusion, then, Peircean semiotics now seems, in spite of the inevitable differences of opinion among the scholars, in the enviable position of being very well documented and available in a variety of texts. His theory of rhetoric, both the theoretical and the more specialized branch, is still in need of research and explanation. Hopefully, others will follow Santaella, Colapietro, Liszka and Bergman, and develop this branch of the philosophy of representation to the level of understanding it unquestionably deserves. It is to be hoped, too, that in this way the Peircean approach to signs and representations of cultural artefacts in general will free itself from the ‘code-breaking’ European approach pioneered by the semiological genius of Roland Barthes and, integrating whatever is necessary from the appropriate ‘special’ sciences, adopt the more analytical framework set out in the philosophy of representation.

Notes Introduction 1 Debord (1994, p. 12). 2 See, for example, Belsey (2002), for an introduction to this sort of thinking. Note, too, that in this context, the term ‘visual’ is potentially misleading, for vision is as necessary for the reading of a novel or a newspaper as it is for the appreciation of a painting or a photograph, so that although visual our culture is not only pictorial but also textual, and it is a fair bet that the written word, the word produced to be read, still has a future, too. 3 Although ‘semeiotic’ was Peirce’s term, I shall use the more common spelling ‘semiotics’. 4 Derrida’s 1967 paper, translated as ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (1988, pp. 108–23), was the founding text of poststructuralism in which the semiological code-breaking model described above was judged by Derrida to be the joyless side of interpretation. Such an activity corresponds to Barthes’s pre-1967 semiological activity as reported in Mythologies, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, and ‘Éléments de Sémiologie’ (1970a; 1964a, 1977; 1964b), and until quite recently still practised in the field of cultural studies: given a signifier, the semiologist attempts to identify, that is, hunt out, its signified. 5 A position aided and abetted by this statement from one of the best known and most influential of all twentieth-century semioticians: ‘This is a book on philosophy of language for the very simple reason that a general semiotics is nothing else but a philosophy of language and that the “good” philosophies of language, from Cratylus to Philosophical Investigations, are concerned with all the semiotic questions’ (Eco, 1984, p. 4). It is not. 6 Interesting as Mitchell’s study is, by far the most important and exhaustive semiotically inspired iconology is Sonesson (1989). The range of statements on visual semiotics reviewed in this study is simply staggering. 7 Lady Victoria Welby was Maid of Honour to Queen Victoria, and the authoress of a book on meaning: What is meaning? The correspondence between her and Peirce is an extremely useful source of information concerning Peirce’s developing theory of signs. 8 www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm. Retrieved March 2012.

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Chapter One 1 The titles for this and the following chapter have been adapted from the work of the psychologist Roger Brown, 1958, Words and Things, Glencoe: Free Press, and, again in 1958, the article ‘How shall a thing be called?’ Psychological Review, 65, 14–21. 2 See, for example, the chapter entitled ‘Pragmatism’ (EP2 398–433). 3 We examine this question in greater detail in Chapter Four in the presentation of the different modes of representation holding between the sign and its object. 4 The strip was first published in an Open University course book, but, according to the unit’s coordinator, had previously been used as discussion material in an RE class for 11-year-olds, which explains its overtly moral tenor (Harris, 1973, p. 57). The author-artist, Harold Johns (who had collaborated in the graphics of the Dan Dare series in the Eagle comic in the fifties) has consciously exploited our experience of this particular cultural myth in order to achieve his goal. 5 There is, of course, no audio channel in the present case. 6 Obviously, once we have learned to tell left from right, the distinction becomes a habit. What Peirce is trying to show is how the distinction itself is necessarily based logically upon a triadic relation. 7 Whereas, we might say, a dyadic theory of signs – the one-to-one relation associating a signifier with a signified, for example – is like velocity. 8 The relevant discussion of triadic relations is to be found in paragraphs 2.233 to 2.242 of the Collected Papers. Unfortunately, by mistaking purposes of definition with the process of determination in a footnote to paragraph 2.235, the editors have meddled with Peirce’s original definitions. 9 Moreover, no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever suggested creating the neologisms ‘qualirepresentamen’ ‘sinrepresentamen’ and ‘legirepresentamen’, a topic that we turn to in the chapter to follow. 10 The OED, for example, gives ten different but related meanings. 11 Taking issue with the notion of resemblance in the discussion of paintings, Goodman claims that they represent rather than resemble what they depict: ‘A Constable painting of Marlborough Castle is more like any other picture than it is like the Castle, yet it represents the Castle and not another picture – not even the closest copy’ (Goodman, 1976, p. 5). A rather pointless remark. 12 Similarly in CP 2.303. 13 Not all Peirce scholars would agree with my presentation at this point. See, for example, Short (2004). 14 See, too, CP 1.339, an undated and unidentified fragment. 15 First published in 1995, the BNC contains approximately 90 million words of written texts, which are divided into 2 major categories: imaginative prose (e.g. fiction, poetry, etc.), and informative texts (written expository discourse). The 10-million-word oral component comprises two main categories of spoken

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data: context governed and ‘demographic’. The first is made up of scripted speech – news bulletins, documentaries, films for television, etc., written texts intended to be spoken – while the second, the jewel of the corpus and amounting to approximately 4.2 million words, contains the transcriptions of spontaneous conversations recorded by means of the hidden microphone technique; the speakers are classified by age, sex, social class and region where the recordings were made, whence the label ‘demographic’. 16 Data cited herein have been extracted from the British National Corpus, distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the texts cited are reserved. 17 I have ‘standardized’ the naming of the interpretants at this point in order to conform to the terminology introduced elsewhere in the chapter. The names and even the number of series of interpretants are problems which continue to exercise Peirce scholarship. See Bergman (2009) for a discussion. 18 See Pope, 1999, pp. 159–79.

Chapter Two 1 See the long final article in Mythologies (Barthes, 1970a). 2 See, for example, Watkins, 2000, p. 29: the cluster gl- derives from an Indo-European root ghel- associated with the action of shining, and yields, among other things, colours (yellow), bright substances (gold), bile (choler and melancholy), etc. 3 ‘There are several differences between genuine tells and false tells. First of all, unintentional tells tend to be genuine. Blushing, sweating and pupil dilation, for example, operate outside conscious control. This means that there is no opportunity for bluffing – people cannot fake blushing or make themselves sweat or make their pupils dilate to order. Consequently, when someone’s face reddens we can be sure that they’re feeling self-conscious, and when we see someone sweating we can be certain they’re either hot or bothered, or both’ (Collett, 2004, p. 21). 4 An excellent but necessarily dated selection of articles on the semiotic aspects of real-life (i.e. not represented pictorially) non-verbal communication is to be found in Kendon (1981). Of special interest is Kendon’s introductory essay. 5 Puck Magazine, 1881, issue 212, p. 65. 6 Abraham Lincoln, quoted by Zeller, 2005, p. 18. 7 Barthes, 1977, p. 33. 8 Zeller, 2005, p. 20. 9 See Gombrich (1982, pp. 150–1) for an interesting critique of the plaque. 10 ‘Body language’ is, to my mind, like the ‘languages’ of art, etc., a misnomer, as these NVC features occur in clusters but are not organized ‘syntactically’. However, this is the most usual designation of such features and so I have retained it here.

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11 The Independent’s headline ran ‘Warm words end Black Sea summit as leaders vow to bridge differences’, while the International Herald Tribune had the more arcane ‘The misperception trap’. 12 One assumes that the interpretation of this posture would not change if Vladimir Putin were seated beside Angela Merkel or Condoleezza Rice instead of G. W. Bush. 13 This is a summary of the text to be found in the Hertel edition of Ripa’s Iconologia (Ripa, 1971, p. 108). 14 Consider this eminently sensible definition by Colin Cherry: ‘The term code has a strictly technical usage. . . . Messages can be coded after they are already expressed by means of signs (e.g. letters of the English alphabet); then a code is an agreed transformation, usually one to one and reversible, by which messages may be converted from one set of signs to another. . . . In our terminology, then, we distinguish sharply between language, which is developed organically over long periods of time, and codes, which are invented for some specific purpose and follow explicit rules’ (1970, p. 8).

Chapter Three 1 Extract from a letter written by William James, quoted by Gallie (1952, p. 38). 2 See Brent 1993, chapter 4, for details. 3 Peirce Edition Project, ‘Chronology’: www.iupui.edu/~peirce/peirce/chron.htm. Retrieved March 2012. 4 Peirce Edition Project, (1982–). 5 It has been contended, however, that the peculiar stamp of his empiricism owed much to contemporary American thought: ‘If a short formula [concerning the reconception of experience] is needed, no better can be found than to say that the American philosophers all appealed to experience but that they were not “empiricists” because they were developing a new and broader conception of experience based not on what experience “must” be if it is to serve the purpose of founding knowledge, but on what actual experiencing shows itself to be in the course of human life’ (Smith, 1992, p. 17, quoted by Anderson, 1995, p. 25). 6 Which is not to say that Peirce wholeheartedly approved of the ideas expressed in this particular passage: to the possible objection that the definition was vague and that in formulating it Locke might have been misled by an erroneous conception of perception, Peirce replied: ‘The word “experience” is employed by Locke chiefly to enable him to say that human cognitions are inscribed by the individual’s life history upon a tabula rasa, and are not . . . gifts of inborn instinct. His definition is vague for the reason that he never realized how important the innate element of our directest perceptions really is’ (CP 5.612). 7 As Jonathan Culler notes in his introduction to the 1974 English edition of the Cours, Saussure’s three-way distinction between langue, langage and parole poses virtually insurmountable difficulties for the English translator (Culler, 1974, p. xviiin): English simply doesn’t make such distinctions. In the

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1974 edition, the three terms are rendered respectively by ‘language’, ‘speech’ and ‘speaking’. Since I shall have little further use of them I adopt here the translator’s terminology. 8 This is the terminology of the third and final course given in Geneva. The signifier and the signified were identified respectively in the first two series of courses as an acoustic image and a concept. By ‘a subtle’ theory is meant – from the hypothetical etymology of the term ‘subtle’: sub tela, that is ‘(that which passes) beneath the warp’ – a theory which neglects, or dismisses as irrelevant, the existential, irrepressible and often uncontrollable data of real life, and constructs a general theory from the irreproachable, make-believe world of a putative underlying langue. 9 Saussure, 1974, p. 113. 10 Ibid. p. 68. To be fair to Saussure, it should be noted that the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign was presented in the first two of the three courses he gave in Geneva. However, realizing that a fully arbitrary language could never be learned, he introduced the notions of relative arbitrariness and relative motivation in the third course of 1910–11, together with the two terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. 11 The idea of deriving semiotics from logic was not new. Locke had already made the association in the final chapter of Book Four of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, though he was almost exclusively concerned with verbal signs: ‘Thirdly, the third branch may be called Σεμιοτική, or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Λογική, logic; the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For, since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it; and these are ideas’ (Essay, IV, xxi, 4). 12 This is a situation which modern English records by the so-called non-assertorial forms of the verb. Any departure from objective, positive reality is the speaker’s responsibility and involves, typically but not exclusively, the operator do. 13 As Murphey remarks citing CP 2.27: ‘Because it is beyond control and criticism, the percept must be accepted without question as being both real and the given of experience. And because perceptual judgments are indubitable, their testimony as to what the percept is must be accepted as authentic. Thus the perceptual judgment is the first premiss of voluntary inference’ (1993, p. 372). 14 Locke, for example, conceived the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a ‘Cure of Scepticism and Idleness’ (Essay, I, i, 6). 15 By ‘rhapsodistic’ Kant means that our knowledge of the world would be a piecemeal collection of miscellaneous chunks of information thrown together without rhyme or reason. 16 In spite of the unfamiliar nature of such a convention I have opted to retain Peirce’s original spellings. These are, after all, proper names, like ‘Boole’ and ‘Fred’.

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17 Peirce gives many simple examples of his categories, notably in a letter to Lady Welby dated 12 October 1904 (SS 22–32) and in the opening section of his projected chapter ‘What is a Sign?’ (EP2 4–5). 18 CP 8.7–38. 19 Until the late nineties, this was essentially Peirce’s view of resemblance. By the time of the logic of mathematics (c. 1896), his phenomenological theory was approaching its final form, with the introduction of the category of Firstness. Cf. CP 1.365 and CP 1.422 ff. 20 ‘Every legisign signifies through an instance of its application, which may be termed a Replica of it. Thus, the word “the” will usually occur from fifteen to twenty-five times on a page. It is in all these occurrences one and the same word, the same legisign. Each single instance of it is a Replica. The Replica is a Sinsign. Thus, every Legisign requires Sinsigns. But these are not ordinary Sinsigns, such as are peculiar occurrences that are regarded as significant. Nor would the Replica be significant if it were not for the law which renders it so’ (CP 2.246). Note that Peirce also referred to legisigns as ‘types’ or ‘famisigns’, that is familiar signs. 21 ‘Abstraction or precision, therefore, supposes a greater separation than discrimination, but a less separation than dissociation. Thus I can discriminate red from blue, space from color, and color from space, but not red from color. I can prescind red from blue, and space from color (as is manifest from the fact that I actually believe that there is an uncolored space between my face and the wall); but I cannot prescind color from space, nor red from color’ (CP 1.549). 22 Derrida, 1988, pp. 121–2.

Chapter Four 1 In this case the icon has supplanted on the internet the list of symbols on maps and city guides. 2 ‘The value of an icon consists in its exhibiting the features of a state of things regarded as if it were purely imaginary’ (CP 4.448). 3 In CP 2.282 Peirce gives the example of the drunken man ‘exhibited in order to show, by contrast, the excellence of temperance’. This, he suggests, ‘is certainly an icon, but whether it is a likeness or not may be doubted’, thereby anticipating a contrario one of the modern meanings of the term. 4 Compare yet another informal definition of a sign: ‘[A]ny sign, of whatsoever kind, mediates between an Object to some sort of conformity with which it is moulded, and by which it is thus determined, and an effect which the sign is intended to bring about and which it represents to be the outcome of the object’s influence upon it’ (MS 321, p. 15). 5 ‘A genuine Index and its Object must be existent individuals (whether things or facts), and its immediate Interpretant must be of the same character. But since every individual must have characters, it follows that a genuine Index may contain a Firstness, and so an Icon as a constituent part of it’ (CP 2.283).

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6 SS 196. We return to this statement in greater detail in the following chapter. 7 It should perhaps be noted that it is possible but relatively rare in British English for third person personal pronouns to be used deictically as this is held by some to be a sign of disrespect: ‘Who’s she?’ ‘She’s the cat’s aunt!’ 8 Obviously, by the expression ‘most words’, Peirce is excluding verbal indices from his list. 9 Elsewhere in the church there are more conventional representations of Saint Barbara in her tower and, just below the panel in question, Saints George and Theodore killing respectively a dragon and a serpent. 10 And, more recently, the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. 11 See, for example, Hopper and Traugott, 1993, p. 7. 12 The initial proper noun, Kate Croy, has been removed to a position later in the sentence leaving the anticipatory personal pronoun She as place-marker in subject position. 13 The reader will have noticed that in (2) and (3) there is also a subordinate clause, but I omit to represent this for the sake of simplicity. Moreover, in his Existential Graphs Peirce represents existents by lines and properties by dots, reversing the conventions given in this book. These logic diagrams are discussed briefly in Chapter Six. 14 Cf. ‘I call a sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it, an icon. Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them. Such are the diagrams of geometry. A diagram, indeed, so far as it has a general signification, is not a pure icon; but in the middle part of our reasonings we forget that abstractness in great measure, and the diagram is for us the very thing. So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream – not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon’ (CP 3.362).

Chapter Five 1 Cf. ‘The meaning of a word, its “forma” (i.e. what constitutes the word) was described as the relation which holds between the word and the object signified. This relation is caused by the intellect and thus reflects or consignifies the concept which the intellect forms of the object. The meaning contains two components: the significatum and the consignificatum. They are attributed to the word through two consecutive impositions.’ Pinborg, 1976, p. 256. 2 The ecology of signs is not a new topic. Sonesson (see Sonesson, 1999) was a pioneer with respect to this area of semiotics, associating signs with an environment that he terms the Lifeworld. But my understanding of the principle of ecology and the way it affects various iconic signs differs substantially from his. 3 Saussure, 1972, p. 27. Image reproduced courtesy of the publisher from page 27 of the Cours de linguistique générale (©) Editions Payot and Rivages, 1995.

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4 In this 1897 version of his theory Peirce referred to the sign’s representative quality as a ‘ground’, that is, the basis of the relation by means of which the sign represents its object (resemblance, spatio-temporal contiguity and convention in the case, respectively, of the icon, the index and the symbol). Consider, too, this extract from his Carnegie application, in which the representative quality is described in terms of ‘sign-flavor’: ‘The categories show that signs are themselves of three kinds. For a sign may have as its sign-flavor, or significant character, merely the flavor, or quality, which belongs to it just as anything has a flavor or quality; and in this case it will stand for whatever its thing-flavor adapts it to standing for. Such is an icon, or image, which represents any object just so far as it resembles that object. Or, secondly, a sign may have as its significant character the fact that it stands in real relation to its object. It will then serve as a sign of that object to any interpretant that represents it as so reacting with that object. This is an index. Or, finally, a sign may have as its significant character its being represented to be a sign. That is a symbol’ (MS L75, Draft D, pp. 237–44). 5 The theoretical justification of this type of categorial analysis is to be found in one of Peirce’s public lectures of 1903 in which he discusses types of Firstness: ‘There are also three other kinds of Firstness which arise in a somewhat similar way; namely, the idea of a simple original quality, the idea of a quality essentially relative, such as that of being “an inch long”; and the idea of a quality that consists in the way something is thought or represented, such as the quality of being manifest’ (CP 1.534). Metaphor, for example, by this reasoning is the representative quality of the way the comparison of the two domains of thought is made manifest. Since the medium through which the sign is communicated is less complex than the Thirdness such a representative quality involves, the result is an incongruous and underspecified sign that engages the inferential activity of the interpreter. 6 It must be said that while the choice of the term ‘image’ for the first hypoicon is entirely logical it seriously complicates the task of the researcher investigating the rhetoric of pictorial documents. Whenever the term ‘image’ is meant in a more general, less technical sense, this will be signalled in the text. 7 This is how the American linguist Dwight Bolinger formulated the principle: ‘It has never been contended that complex utterances are arbitrary in the same sense in which arbitrary has been applied to morphemes. When I say The fire consumed the house I “might as well” say mabu, an arbitrary sign, to symbolize the entire occurrence. The fact is, however, that in my language experience parts of the utterance correspond to parts of the event – and the whole utterance is to that extent not arbitrary, for it is articulated in some such way (remote as you please to call it) as the event itself. . . . Now there is no reason why this habit of non-arbitrariness, of point-to-point correspondence, should stop at the level of complex utterances. It continues to the level of morphemes and beyond’ (Bolinger, 1965, p. 234). Peirce’s hypoiconicity theory is an explanation of just how this non-arbitrariness functions. 8 As mentioned above, Peirce was never able to expand on the ideas expressed in paragraph 2.277, and consequently has not left us with an operational terminology. That of Lakoff and Johnson is perfectly adequate. 9 See Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, pp. 25–51.

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10 Cf. BBC news online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/249128.stm. Retrieved March 2012. 11 Of the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. See Alciato’s Book of Emblems at www.mun.ca/alciato.

Chapter Six 1 W. J. T. Mitchell, who translates the epigram as ‘painting is a mute poesy’, has an interesting section on Simonides and the senses which are associated with poetry and painting (1986, pp. 116–21). 2 Note that icons are composed of qualities and these are to be found not only in pictorial documents but also in their specific characters in olfactory, gustatory, tactile and aural signs. 3 Even Mitchell falls prey to the fallacy: he offers a second definition of his iconology as a study of ‘“what images say” – that is, the ways in which they seem to speak for themselves by persuading, telling stories, or describing’ (ibid., pp. 1–2). 4 J. A. Komensky (Comenius), 1970, p. 14. 5 That is the class of ‘names’ which traditionally occupied either subject or predicate position in a proposition and joined by the copula be as in ‘A cat is a mammal’. 6 This principle states that if the comprehension of a term increases, then its extension, that is the number of objects to which it applies, will decrease: the term ‘town’ extends to innumerable instances. The term ‘university town’ has a greater comprehension but a smaller extension, while the even greater comprehension of ‘university town in south central England’ reduces the extension radically. 7 The distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions was introduced by Kant who offered ‘All bodies are extended’ as an analytic proposition – extension is part of the definition of body – and ‘All bodies are heavy’ as a synthetic proposition – the weight of bodies can only be determined empirically with objects that exist – (Kant, 1993, A6/B10). Similarly, the proposition ‘A triangle has three sides’ is analytic, whereas the proposition ‘A culture is no better than its woods’ is synthetic. 8 The mubtaba is the starting-point of the piece of information and indicates what the listener’s attention is being drawn to while the khabar is what is said about it. 9 These are what Peirce considers to be purely denotative signs (CP 3.462), and although we can analyse ‘Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs’ into at least three constituents, of which two, ‘bridge’ and ‘sigh’ are class-names, the whole expression functions semiotically as an index without connotative value. The increased depth is an aid to identification. 10 ‘The readiest characteristic test showing whether a sign is a Dicisign or not is that a Dicisign is either true or false, but does not directly furnish reasons

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for its being so. This shows that a Dicisign must profess to refer or relate to something as having a real being independently of the representation of it as such, and further that this reference or relation must not be shown as rational, but must appear as a blind Secondness. But the only kind of sign whose object is necessarily existent is the genuine Index’ (CP 2.310). 11 Cf. the text from CP 2.320 quoted in Chapter Four. 12 ‘A man’s portrait with a man’s name written under it is strictly a proposition, although its syntax is not that of speech, and although the portrait itself not only represents, but is, a Hypoicon’ (CP 2.320). 13 Pietarinen (2003) offers a broader analysis of the cultural background to the Existential Graphs, as well as an excellent overview of the systems themselves. 14 Don Roberts offers one succession of graphs in a proof of the sort of syllogism given for Euler diagram (A) above (Roberts, 1973, pp. 43–5) and Chapter Four of Stjernfelt (2011) deals extensively with the moving pictures of thought. 15 Note, however, that when set beside their nomenclature and lexicon on the pages of their respective manuals, that is with the parts and elements identified by the lines from part to word, both are examples of diagrams in the Peircean sense since there is a unique dyadic relation between each part of the diagram and word to which it maps. 16 See, too, this definition: ‘Many diagrams resemble their objects not at all in looks; it is only in respect to the relations of their parts that their likeness consists . . . Here is an example:





a[1]x + b[1]y = n[1],



a[2]x + b[2]y = n[2]. This is an icon, in that it makes quantities look alike which are in analogous relations to the problem. In fact, every algebraical equation is an icon, in so far as it exhibits, by means of the algebraical signs (which are not themselves icons), the relations of the quantities concerned’ (CP 2.282).

17 Strictly speaking, there is no need to specify ‘indexical’ as this is implicit in the fact that any sign which is both a sinsign and dicent must necessarily be indexical.

Chapter Seven 1 Jean-Marie Floch, for example, and the Swedish cognitive semiotics specialist, Göran Sonesson. 2 ‘[Logic is] the analytical study of the essential conditions to which all signs are subject’ (EP2 327). 3 The interested reader is referred to chapter one of Vickers (1988) for a thorough review of the origins of the art. 4 ‘Bien des notions en linguistique, peut-être même en psychologie, apparaîtront sous un jour différent si on les rétablit dans le cadre du discours, qui est

208

NOTES la langue en tant qu’assumée par l’homme qui parle, et dans la condition d’intersubjectivité, qui seule rend possible la communication linguistique.’

5 Some of the material to follow has been discussed elsewhere: section 7.3.1 is based upon a presentation given at a visual semiotics congress in Venice in 2010; part of section 7.3.2 was presented at a visual semiotics congress in Istanbul in 2007; while section 7.3.3 is a much modified version of Jappy (2010b). 6 Cf. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/mar/07/gender.ukcrime?INTCMP=SRCH. Retrieved March 2012. 7 See, too: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-552692/Sacked-The-BNP-candidat e-said-women-like-gongs – need-struck-regularly.html. Retrieved March 2012. 8 This is the name of the victim in the original photograph. 9 To be found at this address: www.fill-in.fr/2008/12/09/ entretien-avec-dany-leriche/. Retrieved March 2012. 10 This image is discussed at length in chapter eight of Jappy 2010a, and along with many others can be seen on Dany Leriche’s website: www.danyleriche. org/index_start.html. Retrieved March 2012. 11 The French title literally means ‘Portraits under influence’, which is nonsense in English. Alternative titles might be ‘Influenced Portraits’ or ‘Appropriations from the Past’, showing the influence of the Western tradition on the portraits in question. 12 Langmuir, 1994, p. 123. For a detailed description of the objects included in the image, see Foister et al., 1998, pp. 30–57.

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Index

abduction  62, 152–4, 158, 169 abstraction  18, 69 Alciato  130, 133, 187, 206n. 11 allegory  94, 128–35, 179, 189–92 Anderson, D.  xvii, 117, 201n. 5 appearance  9, 38, 40, 105, 127, 182, 186 architectonic  64, 169 argument  142, 145–58, 164–6, 169, 174, 176 in rhetoric  172–3, 182 see also abduction; deduction; induction Argyle, M.  35–8 Banksy  viii, 179, 185–7, 193 Barthes, R.  x, 27, 39, 41, 47, 60, 71, 134, 167, 172, 174, 197, 198n. 4, 200n. 1 Benjamin, W.  45–6 Benveniste, E.  176 Bergman, M.  xvi, 174, 197, 200n. 17 bodily contact  35, 40, 186 body language  35, 43, 200n. 10 Bolinger, D.  31, 205n. 7 Brady, M. (portrait of Lincoln)  38–40, 68, 195 Brent, J.  xvi, 54, 201n. 2 categorial bottleneck  122, 134 see also funnel effect category  63–75, 77–8, 108–11, 203n. 19 see also Firstness; Secondness; Thirdness classes of signs  163–5, 207n. 17 code  x, 38, 46–8, 51, 75, 133, 197, 198n. 3, 201n. 14 Colapietro, V.  174–5, 197

Comenius (Komensky)  140, 206n. 4 comic-strip  8–25, 28–9, 35–6, 38, 46–7, 49, 68, 83–4, 98, 100–3, 135, 179, 180, 196 common noun  76–7, 89 and rheme  144–9, 164 as symbol  91–105 continuous semiosis  19–21, 26 critic (‘narrow’ logic)  ix, xii, 27, 64–5, 152, 166, 169–70, 174 Culler, J.  ix–x, 47–8, 168, 201n. 7 deduction  152–8, 169 definite article  33, 49, 67–8, 89, 108, 149 demonstrative  22, 85, 89–90, 104, 147, 177 Derrida, J.  x, 71, 198n. 4, 203n. 22 Descartes, R.  56–9, 67 diagram (hypoicon)  85, 96, 103, 159–61 defined  112–17, 125, 135, 204n. 14, 207n. 16 Euler diagrams  155–7, 207n. 14 illustrated  124–5, 127–9, 134 dicent sign  145–6, 164–5, 169–70, 179, 186, 207n. 17 see also dicisign dicisign  55, 146–7, 150–1, 158, 164, 206n. 10 Dürer, A.  41–6, 84, 132, 187–8 dynamic interpretant  17–18, 71, 141, 184, 187 dynamic object  14–25, 71, 80–7, 145, 147–9, 158, 166–70, 171–8, 179–80, 186, 193, 195, 196 in hypoiconicity  117–22, 134, 136, 166 and logical form  96–104

216

INDEX

ecology of signs  xiv, 7, 108–12, 125, 136, 204n. 2 emblem  130–3, 187 empiricism  53, 56–60, 77, 196, 201n. 5 Existential Graphs  143, 152, 154–8, 166, 204n. 13, 207n. 13 facial expression  9, 36, 40, 43 familiar signs (famisigns)  xi, 39, 46, 48, 50, 89, 203n. 20 Fickinger, J.  viii, 94, 187–93, 208n. 9 field of the interpretant (interpretant field)  176–83, 192–3, 196–7 final interpretant  17–23, 71 Firstness  66–77, 160, 164, 186 and hypoiconicity  113, 118, 136, 205n. 5 and mode of representation  80–105, 108, 112, 203n. 5 Fiske, J.  34 funnel effect  122, 131–6 Gallie, W.  23, 201n. 1 Gellner, E.  133–4 generality (as category)  18, 33, 66–76, 109–10, 130, 136, 164–5, 193 gesture  7, 23, 30, 37, 99 Goodman, N.  16, 199n. 11 Guevara, Che  87, 125–7 Guiraud, P.  35 Haley, M.  118 Hall, E.  35–6 Hall, J.  41, 92 Holbein, H.  150–1, 188–92 hypoicon, hypoiconicity  112–18, 134–6, 189, 205n. 6, 207n. 12 hypothesis  62, 95, 152–3 see also abduction icon  79–84 defined  83, 112, 203nn. 2, 3, 204n. 14, 205n. 4 icon and information  138–42, 147–50, 160–3 iconicity  107–9, 113, 134–5 iconography  41–6, 181–4 Iconologia  44, 187–8, 201n. 13

iconology  xv, 137, 198n. 6, 206n. 3 idealism  53–6, 60, 77 image (hypoicon)  112–15, 135–6 pictorial image  123–5 immediate interpretant  18, 23, 77, 91, 178, 184, 187 immediate object  14–18, 25, 80, 86, 96, 101–2, 148–50, 166, 170, 178, 182 implication principle  66–70, 80, 87, 91, 94, 103–4, 111–17, 134–8, 150 index  84–90 defined  80, 85 and information  146–51 induction  152–3, 158, 169 inference  3, 60–1, 122, 135, 152–5, 169, 172, 174, 202n.  13 see also argument information (Peirce and information)  142–54, 158–63 informative capacity of images  48, 138–9 instance  32–3, 48–9, 51, 67–9, 76, 78, 91, 94, 103,  110, 114–16, 165, 203n. 20, 206n. 6 see also replica; token interpretant,  in continuous semiosis  19–26, 87 and ideology  179–93 and rhetoric  174–9 in semiosis  2–12, 24–6 and symbol  90–1, 118 three interpretants  11–13, 17–18, 71 in the third trichotomy  144–54 see also immediate interpretant; dynamic interpretant; final interpretant; field of the interpretant interpreter  4, 7, 13–14, 17–18, 22, 25, 71, 91, 98, 103, 122, 129, 161, 168, 177, 179, 193, 205n. 5 Jakobson, R.  xvii, 90, 134, 163, 168 James, H.  98, 101, 170 James, W.  xvi, 14, 53–5, 98, 121, 158, 201n. 1 Johnson, M.  118, 122, 205n. 8 Jones, S.  191–2

INDEX Kant, I.  3, 56, 61, 64–7, 142–3, 202n. 15, 206n. 7 Klinkenberg, J.-M. (Groupe µ)  167 Lakoff, G.  118, 122, 205n. 8 legisign  31, 34–6, 41–51, 67–70, 76–8, 80, 82, 86, 88–91, 94, 104–5, 110, 124, 127, 133–4, 150–1, 164–5, 182, 186, 203n. 20 vs code  46–8 defined  32–3 NVC legisigns  35–44 and replica  33, 67–9, 75 Leriche, D.  viii, 94, 187–93, 208n. 9 Liszka, J.  174, 176, 197 Locke, J.  57–8, 61, 64, 67, 201n. 6, 202n. 11 logic  x–xiv, 1, 4, 12, 53–6, 60–9, 77–8, 112, 115, 142–66, 202n. 11, 203n. 19 vs rhetoric  167–97 mass media conventions  9, 17, 29, 31, 36, 38–40, 46, 179, 182 metaphor (hypoicon)  109, 117–18, 135–6, 140, 168, 171, 182, 185, 193, 205n. 5 and atomism  133–4 defined  112–13 internal structure of  119–22, 129 pictorial  125–30 verbal  120–2 metaphysics  54, 65 methodeutic  174 see also speculative rhetoric Mitchell, W.  xv, 140, 154, 198n. 1, 206n. 1 ‘moving pictures of thought’  154, 207n. 14 Murphey, M.  55, 202n. 13 non-verbal communication (NVC legisigns)  31, 35–51, 68, 82, 86, 99–105, 127, 147, 164–5, 178, 186–7, 200n. 4 see also appearance; bodily contact; body language; facial expression; gesture; mass media conventions; posture; proximity

217

object, collateral experience of 14–15, 22, 25, 98–9, 122, 131, 161 in continuous semiosis  19–23 in semiosis  2–11 two objects  14–17 see also dynamic object; immediate object Ogden, C.  97 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L.  172–3 ontology  98–102 parallelism in metaphor  112, 118–36, 171 partial object  97–104, 180, 186, 195 in metaphor  115–21, 170–1 percept  61–3, 202n. 13 perception  60–3, 77 of rape  181–4, 201n. 6 Perelman, C.  172–3 personification  44, 46, 94, 128, 130, 133 phenomenology  xvi, 60–4, 69 philosophy of representation  xi–xiv, 2–3, 49, 64–5, 152, 166–76, 179, 192, 195–7 see also speculative grammar; critic; speculative rhetoric photograph,  as dicent  150–2, 164–6 as index  84–7 intermediate between text and image  137, 196 as sinsign  32–3 vs sketch  15–16, 27–31, 81–3, 96, 102–5 pictura (in emblems)  130–1, 138 posture  9, 36–46, 182, 189, 201n. 12 pragmatism  xiv, xvi, 3, 48, 58, 60, 68, 168, 178, 199n.  2 proper noun  10, 66, 76, 111, 204n. 12 as index  89–105 as rheme  145–64 proximity  30, 36, 40, 43 qualisign  31–3, 49–51, 67–70, 75–80, 83–6, 105, 147, 179

218

INDEX

ratiocination  2–3, 48, 99, 135 rationalism  58–9 reanalysis (in grammaticalization)  72–3 replica  33–4, 50, 67–70, 75, 76, 110, 165, 179 see also instance; token representamen  3, 11–13, 111–12, 118 rheme  55, 145–50, 164–5 rhetoric (classical)  170–4, 176 Richards, I.  97 Ripa, C.  44, 46, 187, 201n. 13 see also Iconologia Robinson Crusoe  4, 32, 57, 77, 87, 104, 116–17, 165 Santaella, L.  174, 197 Saussure, F. de  ix–xvii, 47, 53, 58–9 theory of the sign  70–2, 97, 109–10, 134, 139, 168, 201n. 7, 202nn. 9–10, 204n. 3 scepticism  3, 64, 67, 180 Schapiro, M.  29, 40, 182 Secondness  66–74, 148, 162, 164, 186, 207n. 10 in hypoiconicity  110–34 and mode of representation 80–105 semiology  ix–xi, 53, 58, 60, 79 semiosis  3–5, 25, 66, 71–3, 81, 99, 174, 177, 195 continuous semiosis  19–23, 26 and the medium  6–8, 110 see also sign-action Shapiro, M.  117 sign,  defined  3–4, 13, 20, 87, 107, 135, 145 vs representamen  11–13 sign-action  2, 10–25, 27, 73, 174 simile (contrasted with metaphor)  127–8 Simonides’ epigram  138–51, 206n. 1 sinsign  30, 34, 49–51, 67–70, 75–84, 86, 104–6, 123, 130, 136, 164–5, 203n. 20, 207n. 5 vs replica  32–3

Sonesson, G.  198n. 6, 204n. 2, 207n. 1 speculative grammar  xii, 65, 137, 152, 167, 169–74 speculative rhetoric  xii, xiv, 64–5, 168–79, 196 submorphemic differentials  31, 76 symbol,  defined  90–2, 103, 177, 205n. 4 growth in meaning  23, 95, 103, 144 in hypoiconicity  112–36 in iconography  38–42, 45–6 pictorial examples  92–5 tell (NVC signal in poker)  35–7, 200n. 3 term (in logic)  142–9, 206n. 6 Thirdness  66–75, 164 in hypoiconicity  109–10, 121, 134, 171, 205n. 5 and mode of representation  80–105 token  37, 48, 50, 57, 69, 84 see also instance; replica tone (as qualisign)  37, 50 Traugott, E.  176–8, 204n. 11 triad  103, 135 triadic relation  11–13, 112, 199n. 6 triadomany  56 trichotomy (division of signs)  49–51, 53, 67, 70, 75, 79, 88, 137–8, 144–5, 158, 163–6 type-token ratio  50, 68 universe of existence  98–102, 158 utterer  7, 49, 71, 97, 100–1, 116, 168, 171 Vickers, B.  172, 207n. 3 Welby, (Lady) V.  xv–xvii, 6, 11, 14–15, 17, 22, 50, 54, 58, 66, 107, 144–5, 147, 158, 176–7, 203n. 7 Wings of the Dove,The  98, 104, 170, 195 Zeller, R.  38, 200n. 6