Introduction

The entries published here were created for Paul Bouissac’s Encyclopaedia of Semiotics
(Oxford University Press 1999), but were only made available in reduced and revised
versions; indeed, some of them were not published at all. I therefore decided several
years ago to make the original versions available on the net. Most of the entries are
about visual semiotics, but some of them also concern more general concepts and
other semiotic domains. Recently, I have discovered that the printed versions of the
entries are available here: http://psychology.jrank.org/collection/52/Semiotics---
Signs-Symbols-Communication.html
Göran Sonesson

Aniconic visual signs

There are signs that are conveyed visually without being iconic as well as iconic signs that are
nonvisual, since the sign function known as iconicity simply means that the thing serving as
expression shares at least some properties with the thing corresponding to the content. The concept of
aniconicity was first introduced by T. A. Sebeok (1979) as the “complementary obverse” of iconicity. It
is formed by prefixing the ancient Greek a/an (“without”) to the term to be negated, as in amoral or
anaesthesia.

Among aniconic visual signs, some are strongly codified, such as punctuation signs, syllabic and
phonetic writing systems, ideograms, Morse, Braille, and the modern signs for numbers. Other
examples of true aniconic signs are some of the signs for chemical substances and compounds used by
the alchemists, some hobo signs, and many traffic signs (Aicher and Krampen, 1977; Liungman, 1991).

Decorative patterns and so-called abstract painting represent instances of aniconic visual signs that are
less codified. Flags often function as aniconic visual signs. For example, the maritime flag code
consists of different combinations of a round ball, a triangular pennant, and a square flag. It is also
true of national flags, even though their colors may be iconic with respect to some aspects of the
environment characterizing the country they represent (Weitman, 1973). Aniconic visual signs are
usually purely conventional signs. In the same way, garments may become aniconic visual signs of
different ethnic groups, of different degrees of adherence to fashion, and even of political convictions
(Sonesson, 1993).

Even when movement is added, some visual configurations are aniconic. This is normally not the case
in the theater, where persons represent persons and objects objects. Even in the “poor theater,” which
uses minimal means of representation, objects normally have some abstract properties in common
with what they represent (e.g., a chair representing a person has a dominant vertical extension).

Mime is, of course, largely iconic, although, as Ferdinand de Saussure observed, it has a “rudiment of
convention.” Gestures of the kind accompanying natural conversation are often iconic, even when
they are not pictorial, representing abstract spaces, positions, and movements. The latter probably
applies to a lesser degree to more formalized gesture systems, such as that used by the North
American Indians and the different varieties of sign language employed by the deaf, in particular, of
course, those corresponding to the alphabet. The coded gestures used by policemen to regulate traffic
are mostly noniconic, as are very codified systems of dancing, such as the classical dance of India. On
the other hand, to the extent that they do carry meaning, other visually prominent kinds of behavior,
such as classical ballet, sports, and acrobatics, seem to be predominantly iconic.

It therefore appears that there are rather few aniconic signs conveyed by the visual mode. Although
visuality and iconicity do not mutually imply each other, they certainly seem to be intrinsically
related. Perhaps the predominance of visual perception in the human world makes iconicity a more
convenient way of creating visual signs. Indeed, the study of aniconic visual signs often leads to
discovering the limits or relativeness to their aniconicity, thus making the investigation of this kind of
signs particularly challenging.
In the course of history, iconic signs tend to become more or less aniconic. This process, known as
“deiconization” or “conventionalisation” (Wallis, 1975), has been observed often in the case of Chinese
and Egyptian glyphs and other forms of “picture writing,” as well as in many gesture systems. What
is usually meant, however, is that signs that start out as detailed pictures, reproducing very closely the
visual properties of the content object, are transformed into more distant renderings of a few
important details of the content, sometimes ending up as mere mnemonic devices. This is better
termed schematization (Krampen, 1988). The opposite process, pleromatization, is observed in
children's drawings and to some extent in petroglyphs. In the latter case, however, a modification
from a nonpictorial to a pictorial kind of iconicity might be more common (Sonesson, 1994).

Carl G. Liungman and Göran Sonesson

Bibliography
Aicher, O., and M. Krampen. Zeichensysteme der visuellen Kommunikation. Stuttgart: Verlagsanstalt
Alexander Koch, 1977.

Krampen, M. Geschichte der Strassenverkehrzeichen. Tübingen: Narr, 1988.

Liungman, C. G. Dictionary of Symbols. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1991. Revised as Thought Signs: The
Semiotics of Symbols—Western Ideograms (Amsterdam and Tokyo: IOS Press, 1995).

Mallery, G. Sign Language among North American Indians Compared to That among Other Peoples and Deaf-
Mutes (1881). The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1972.

Sebeok, T. A. “Iconicity.” In The Sign and Its Masters, pp. 107–127. Austin and London: University of
Texas Press, 1979.

Sonesson, G. “The Multiple Bodies of Man: Project for a Semiotics of the Body.” Degrés 21. 74 (1993):
d1–42.

Sonesson, G. “Prolegomena to the Semiotic Analysis of Prehistoric Visual Displays.” In Semiotica

100.3–4 (1994): 267–331.

Studnick, F. “Traffic Signs.” In Semiotica 2.2 (1970): 151–172.

Wallis, M. Arts and Signs. Lisse and Bloomington: Peter de Ridder Press and Indiana University Press,
1975.

Weitman, S. R. “National Flags.” In Semiotica 8.4 (1973): 328–367.

Blissymbolics
Although it is now commonly known as Blissymbolics, the inventor of this artificially constructed,
visual, sign system, the Austrian Charles Bliss, originally named Karl Blitz (1897-1985), himself used
the term Semantography (Bliss 1965). And in spite of the fact that it is nowadays mainly, or even
exclusively, used as a communication aid in the rehabilitation of aphasics and other persons whose
speech function is severely impaired, Bliss actually conceived the system as a kind of visually
conveyed Esperanto, which should permit communication between speakers of different languages,
and thus further international understanding and world peace (cf. McDonald 1980). In its origins,
then, Blissymbolics was not very different from the kind of universal language projects proliferating
in the 17th century. In his later years, however, Bliss himself co-operated with the Blissymbolics
Communication Institute, in Toronto, founded in 1975, which has developed and disseminated the
system for more practical, limited, purposes.

There has been no serious semiotic study of Blissymbolics thus far. It appears, however, that
Blissymbolics resembles, not so much Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphics, as the popular
understanding of these writing systems. Thus, signs refer to concepts, rather than to words, to the
extent that no phonetic elements, and thus no rebus constructions, are employed (which is not to deny
that the choice of concepts may have been influenced by the Indo-Europeans background of Bliss and
later contributors to the system). However, if the sign "||=2" which means "similar sound" (e.g.
"flour" written as "similar sound to flower") is abundantly used, Blissymbolics is really more like
actual Chinese and Egyptian writing.

This impression is also born out by the fact that the system contains determinatives or classifiers, just
like all historically evolved visual sign systems connected with language (i.e. ^ transforms something
into an "action"). Compound signs are formed either by superimposition (a chair on a wave form
means "toilet"; the line of the sky with a nose below means "air", and when an arrow for direction is
added, the total meaning becomes "wind") or as sequences, which can take the form of something
resembling a possessive construction ("house" + "to" + "knowledge" means school) or simple
concatenations (radio is "thing" followed by "ear" and "electricity"). Syntax seems to by largely
parasitic on the English language.

The fact that many aphasics, who cannot at all, or only to a limited extent, make use of spoken or
ordinary written language, do actually manage to learn Blissymbolics, is not only humanely
gratifying, but is also theoretically enlightening. In the first place, it means that severely language-
impaired persons still retain some general semiotic competence, although they are unable to convey it
by directly or indirectly verbal means (cf. Sonesson 1992). On the other hand, the same fact
undoubtedly points to some semiotically relevant differences between the two systems.

The fact that Blissymbolics actually works has sometimes been explained by the putative iconicity of
the system (for which Muter 1986 furnishes some experimental support). Other experts in the field
(e.g. Linda Sawyer-Woods 1987; 1988), on the contrary, claim that the system fails to be iconic to any
appreciable degree. Both parties, however, clearly base their arguments on a misunderstanding of the
concept of iconicity, identifying it with a similarity of perceptual appearance between the expression
and the content of the sign, i.e. with the pictorial sign function (cf. iconicity and aniconic visual signs).

There certainly are some real, aniconic signs among those employed in Blissymbolics: thus, for
instance, ^ for action, Ú for evaluation and 5 for plural seems rather arbitrary. It is true that, to Bliss,
the first sign suggested the forming of volcanic cones, but this can hardly be counted as anything
more than as an idiosyncratic association, and even so, would only account some sub-class of the
meaning of the sign, which would then have to be indexically derived, with the indexical view-point
being rather arbitrarily picked out.

Many signs of Blissymbolics are iconic of other, more commonly known, signs, some of which are in
themselves arbitrary, e.g. the Arab digits, musical notes, the equivalence sign, and the questions mark.
Other signs re-employed by Bliss are the familiar shapes of a heart and a star which may have some
rudiment of pictorality although in their received form they are essentially conventional.

Other signs are iconic, and indeed pictorial, in the same way in which this may be said of verbal
metaphors and compound word, respectively. In the first case, the sign may be said to be iconic of a
real-world object, although it is used to signify something different. The sign for "time", for instance, is
iconic of a clock (indeed, of an analogue clock, a sub-class of clocks used in our civilisation today), but
it means "time". The relationship between time and a clock is of course indexical, but it is also
arbitrary, first because clocks are not recognised in all human civilisations, and, second, because other
indexical relationships could have been singled out.

The second case is found more clearly in compound signs. Thus, the combination of a mouth and a
note meaning song is relatively arbitrary, because other combinations are conceivable. This is also true
of compound words in verbal language, which Saussure said were "relatively motivated", although
the elements entering into the combination were not, in the case of language, themselves iconic.
Those signs in Blissymbolics which do depict objects of the perceptual world are clearly what
Mieczyslaw Wallis (1975) would have called "schemata" rather than "pleromata", i.e. they depict
relatively few perceptual properties of the objects in questions. Martin Krampen (1988) rightly
observes that there is a continuous scale from highly schematic to highly pleromatic pictures, and that
this scale is independent of the one going from high degrees of iconicity to total conventionality, as are
the corresponding processes of historical change. He fails to note, however, the decreasing pictorality
does not necessarily mean decreasing iconicity.

Blissymbolics contains at least two types of iconicity apart from mere depictions. It is possible, for
instance, that the figures signifying a man and a woman, like similar figures employed to indicate
men’s and woman’s washrooms, do not so much depict trousers and skirts, just as some petroglyphs
may not show a penis and a vagina, respectively, but exemplify general properties of masculinity and
femininity. Indeed, rounded, closed shapes as well as triangles pointing upwards have been shown
universally to indicate femininity, whereas the opposite shapes stand for masculinity (cf. Sonesson
1994)

It also seems certain than many signs of Blissymbolics are iconical of the general terrestrial
surroundings in which human beings live, e.g. of what Greimas has called the "natural world" and
Gibson "the world of ecological physics". This is true of the signs for the earth (a line below) and the
sky (a line above), and for different other positions and directions (a point inside or outside a square,
etc.). The same observation applies to the square as a signifier for a thing (although a circle would
perhaps had been even more adequate; cf. Sonesson 1994).

The presence of these different kinds of more or less pleromatic and otherwise abstract iconicity may
account for the relative success of Blissymbolics as a communication tool for the language-impaired.
However, it also suggests some grounds for the claim increasingly made today that other signs
systems may succeed where Blissymbolics fails, e.g. the computer-implemented card-system C-VIC
(cf. Steele al. 1989), which is not only overwhelmingly pictorial (like Neurath’s ISOTYPE) but also
pleromatic and geared to context-bound communication.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography
Bliss, Charles, Semantography, Sidney, Semantography Publications 1965

Krampen, Martin, Geschichte der Straßenverkehrzeichen. Tübingen: Narr 1988.

McDonald, E.T. Teaching and using Blissymbolics. Toronto: Blissymbolics Communication Institute 1980.

Muter, P., Blissymbolics, cognition and the handicapped. In Communication and Handicap. Hjelmquist,
E., & Nilsson, L.G., eds., 233-252.Amsterdam; North Holland 1986;

Neurath, Otto, BASIC by ISOTYPE. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. 1937.

Sawyer-Woods, Linda, (1987): Symbolic function in a severe non-verbal aphasic. Aphasiology, 1:3, 287-
290.

Sonesson, Göran, The semiotic function and the genesis of pictorial meaning. In "Center/Periphery in
representations and institution. Proceedings of the Conference of The International Semiotics Insitute, Imatra,
Finland, July 16-21, 1990. E. Tarasti (ed.), 156-211. Imatra: Acta Semiotica Fennica 1992.

–, Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays. In Semiotica 100-2/4, 1994, 267-
331.

Steele, Richard, et al., Computer-Based Visual Communication in Aphasia, Neuropsychologia, 27:4,

1989, 409-426.
Wallis, Mieczyslaw, Arts and signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1975.

See also: icon, iconicity, index, indexicality, ideogram, aniconical visual signs

Chirography
While contemplating the prospects of a "science of depiction", in some ways analogous to linguistics,
the psychologist James Gibson proposed a primary distinction between two large categories of picture
signs, or, more generally, between those signs which constitute markings on surfaces: between
photographic and chirographic pictures, that is, literally, pictures produced by the workings of
luminosity on a surface, and pictures the markings of which are assembled by hand. According to
Gibson (1978:228f; 1980) a picture is "a surface so treated that it makes available a limited optic array
/---/ of persisting invariants of structure" at some point of observation. But he also speculates that to
prehistoric man, just as to the child, the picture make up "a progressive record of movement", a layout
receptive to traces, long before it is discovered also to "delineate something". If the record is of a stylus,
brush, pen, pencil, crayon, marker or another hand-held tool, the result will be a chirographic picture;
and if the traces have been produced by a camera, including its accessory equipment, we will have a
photographic picture.

Considered in this way, chirographic pictures, just like photographic ones, are largely indexical: they
are indexicalities (which, in some cases may becomes indices) of all forces contributing to produce
them. It has been suggested that, to the toddler, the marks left on the paper are accidental traces of a
motor activity which is at first experienced as rewarding in itself; only at about 18 months, with the
emergence of the semiotic function, will the child react with disappointment when no strokes and dots
result form the contact of the marker with the paper, and only at 3 years will he refuse to draw in the
air (Cf. Gardner 1973:215ff; 1980ff). What was, in Hjelmslevean terms, at first accidental substance now
becomes the very form of the act, defined by the principle or relevance known to us as the making of a
drawing. Put in another way, chirographic pictures are indexical in origin: only later will iconicity
come to the fore.

What little can be said about chirography so far derives from its contrast to photography. Whereas
one of the indexicalities contained in an photograph is a (fairly indirect) imprint of the object which is
also the content of the iconic sign relation, so that part of the properties of the iconic ground is also
contained in the indexical ground, and vice versa, chirographic indexicality is distinct from the iconic
relation. The "photograms" and "Rayograms" made by avant-garde photographers such as Moholy-
Nagy, Man Ray, and Schaad, as well as preceding the invention of the common photograph in the
experimental work of Niepce and Talbot, could be considered limiting-cases: they are actually
comparable to the foot-prints left on the ground, light being the operating agent instead of mechanical
pressure. When placed directly upon the photographic paper, without a camera obscura as an
intermediary, two-dimensional objects will give rise to silhouettes, which can be easily identified; but
when three-dimensional objects are used and the source of light is moved, the configurations which
result are due to complex interactions, not only between the contiguous part of the object and the
emulsion, but between the position of the light source and the non-directly contiguous parts of the
object. Paradoxically, it is the camera obscura, which diminishes the contiguity between the object and
the expression plane of the pictorial sign, which brings about the illusion of seeing a configuration,
and which thus make it possible to trace the configuration unambiguously back to its real-world
source (Sonesson 1989a:64).

To grasp the nature of chirography, it may be necessary to oppose it to something which is vaster and
less specific than photography. "Hard icons" is a term coined by Tomas Maldonado (1974) to describe
signs which, in addition to bearing resemblance to that which they depict, are related to them as traces
to that which produced them. Examples would be X-ray pictures, hand impressions on cave walls,
"acoustic pictures" made with the aid of ultrasound, silhouettes, configurations left on the ground by
people who were out walking in Hiroshima at the moment of the explosion of the nuclear bomb,
thermograms, pictures made with "invisible light" to discover persons hiding in the woods — and
ordinary photographs. The real contiguity between the picture and its referent is here taken to
guarantee the cognitive value of the picture. It is important to note that "hard icons" cannot simply be
signs which are both indexical and iconic, for that is true also of chirographs: there must be coincidence
between their respective indexical and iconic grounds.
If photography is defined by the double relation of contiguity and similarity between its expression
and its content or referent, a few surprising cases of photography, or perhaps rather some curious
intermediary cases between photography and chirography, will turn out to exist. During the 18th
century a device for producing drawings from silhouettes was in use: it consisted of a chair having a
source of light on one side and a screen on which the shadow of the person sitting in the chair was
cast on the other. The contours were conveyed by contiguity to the screen, but were not by themselves
retained there, because of the lack of a photographic emulsion, but had to be filled in by hand. In the
case of the curious device known as a physionotrace, a view-finder was moved along the contours of
the object, producing a contiguity between these contours and the gaze; thanks to another contiguity,
this time between the view-finder and a stylus, the corresponding figure was concurrently traced onto
a paper.

According to another classification, proposed by Roman Gubern (1987b:46f), chirographic pictures,

such as drawings, are distinguished from technographic pictures, which is a group comprising
photographs as well as pictures produced by the cinematographic camera and the video. Among the
technographic pictures, we might perhaps also locate those produced by the physionotrace and
similar devices. At the other extreme, technography would probably also include what Gubern
(1987a:73ff) elsewhere terms synthetic pictures, that is, pictures produced by means of a computer.
The disturbing fact about such synthetic pictures, is however, as Moles (1981) notes, that they may
look exactly like photographs, although they do not regulate themselves on anything like contiguity,
but are rather (indirectly) mediated by similarity. Traditionally all hand-produced pictures regulate
themselves on similarity, as they depend on what Gibson calls the hand-eye-system, whereas all
machine-made pictures are indexically derived – until this simple organisation is destroyed by
computergraphics.

Espe (1983) has suggested a threefold division of graphics, which comprises all kinds of
manipulations of two-dimensional surfaces: photographics, chirographics, and typographics. Like the term
photographics, typographics here retains is ordinary sense, but it could perhaps also be conceived to
mean, more broadly, the production of markings on surfaces by means of standardised implements.
Although they are not hand-produced, neither photographic nor cinematographic pictures, nor some
synthetic pictures, are created using standardised elements, contrary to the case of typography;
indeed, it is one of the remarkable feats of desktop publishing that it de-standardises type-fonts,
permitting them to the varied along a number of dimensions (size, obliqueness, etc.), thus bringing
them closer to being pictures (Sonesson 1989b.34ff). On the other hand, already the hand-prints found
on many cave walls are standardised, contiguity based, and yet not machine-produced.

Contrary to photography, chirography has not been studied as such: if anything, it dissolves into the
traditional categories of drawing and painting. As can be seen, even the adequate classification of
chirography in relation to other picture signs, or other tracings on surfaces, remains a task for the
future.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography:
Espe, Hartmut, "Realism and some semiotic functions of photographs", in Semiotics unfolding.
Proceedings of the second congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies., Vienna 1979. Borbé,
Tasso (ed.). Berlin, New York, & Amsterdam: Mouton, 1983, volume III: 1435-1442.

Gardner, Howard, The arts and human development. New York: Wiley & Sons 1973

Gardner, Howard, Artful Scribbles, New York: Basic Books 1980

Gibson, James, "The ecological approach to visual perception in pictures, in Leonardo 11:3, 1978, pp.
227-235 Also in Gibson, James, Reasons for Realism. Reed, E. & Jones, R. (eds), New Jersey & London:
Lawrence Erlbaum Ass., 1982.

Gibson, James, "A prefatory essay on the perception of surfaces versus the perception of markings on
a surface", in The perception of pictures: Volume I: Alberti’s Window. Hagen, M., (ed.), New York,
Academic Press 1980; pp xi-xvii.
Gubern, Roman, El simio informatizado. Barcelona: Ediciones Penínsulo 1987 (a).

Gubern, Roman, La mirada opulenta. Exploración de la iconosfera contemporánea. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili
1987 (b).

Maldonado, Tomás, Vanguardia e razionalità. Turin: Einaudi Editore 1974.

Moles, Abraham, L’image – communication fonctionelle. Bruxelles: Casterman 1981.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Aris/Lund University Press 1989 (a).

Sonesson, Göran, Semiotics of photography. On tracing the index. Report 4 from the Semiotics project.
Lund: Institute of Art History 1989 (b).

See also:
Iconicity, Indexicality, Index, Photography

Denotation/Connotation
As used in semiotics and in neighbouring disciplines, the terms denotation and connotation really
cover at least four main conceptual distinctions, some of which have several varieties: yet, ignoring a
few marginal cases, all may be seen as different ways of carving up a particular semantic domain,
made up of the two obligatory relata of the sign function, expression and content, and of a portion of
the experimental world corresponding to the content, viz. the referent. Consistent with the views of
Saussure and Hjelmslev, the content is here considered to be a mental, or more precisely, an
intersubjective, entity, whereas the referent is taken to be something which may be encountered in the
experimental world, that is, at least potentially, in direct perception. Given these preliminaries, the
four different distinctions can be adequately derived, but unlike the terms, the resulting concepts do
not exclude each other, and in fact are often confused in the literature.

In the case of the logical distinction, the connotation is identical with the content, or with a particular
feature analysis of the content, and the denotation is another name for the referent, or for the relation
connecting the content to the referent or, in some conceptions, starting out directly from the
expression.

In what we shall henceforth call the stylistic distinction, denotation is considered to be a part of the
content that is taken to be in one-to-one correspondence with the referent, and connotation is
identified with what remains of the content when denotation is deducted; at the same time, however,
connotation and denotation are ordinarily supposed to be different kinds of content, where the
possible content categories are defined by psychological predicates. Moreover, in some versions of the
distinction, the semantic domain subject to segmentation is extended on the side termed connotation,
so as to include also the subjective mental content of the sender and/or receiver of the sign, without
the latter being clearly distinguished from the marginal content domain of the sign.

The semiotical distinction, so called because it is proper to semiotics, viz. to the Hjelmslev tradition,
concerns a denotation which is a relation between the expression and the content, and a connotation
which relates two signs (i.e. two units of expression and content) in a particular way.

Finally, what Eco calls connotation, when he is not simply thinking about the stylistic notion, is really
what is elsewhere termed a (contextual) implication, i.e. the distinction is this time concerned with the
differing degrees of indirectness with which the content is given, denotation being merely the less
indirect one.

The logical distinction:

In logic and philosophy, denotation means the same thing as extension, i.e. the object or class of objects
subsumed by a concept, and connotation is another term for what is also termed intension or
comprehension, i.e. the list of all properties characterising the concept, or only those properties
conceived to be the necessary and sufficient criteria for ascribing some objet to the concept; and/or the
properties permitting us to pick out the objects falling under the concept. Employing the latter terms,
the Logic of Port Royal first (in 1662) introduced this distinction, whereas the usage involving the
terms denotation and connotation probably derives from John Stuart Mill (cf. Garza Cuarón 1987; 57ff,
69ff).

Intension and extension are sometimes identified with what Frege termed "Sinn" and "Bedeutung",
which means that various intensions may correspond to a single extension: for instance, "the Morning
Star" and "the Evening Star", "equilateral triangle" and "equiangular triangle", "the vanquisher of
Austerlitz" and "the vanquished of Waterloo", etc., have the same extensions but different intensions.
If the intension is taken to contain all properties common to the objects in the extension, then, as
Kubczak (1975:73) rightly observes, all terms having the same extension will also have the same
intension. For instance, both the Morning Star and the Evening Star could be described as "a particular
star, which can be seen shortly before the rising and shortly before the setting of the sun". If this is
indeed the content of both terms, it is difficult to explain the fact that, in many contexts, one of the
terms cannot be exchanged for the other. Kubczak concludes that, in linguistic signs, intensions do not
contain full information about the objects referred to.

An alternative explanation was long ago suggested by Edmund Husserl, and spelled out in further
detail by Aron Gurwitsch (1957: 145ff): according to this analysis, the conceptual noema, i.e. the
intension, does in fact contain all elements found in the object, but each time organised into a
particular thematic hierarchy. If this is so, then it might be argued that terms lacking substitutability in
"opaque contexts" contain the same features, but differently arranged (Sonesson 1978). Thus, to use
Humboldt’s classical example, quoted by Kubzcak (p140), the Elephant may be conceived of as "der
zweimal Trinkende", "der Zweizahnige", or "der mit einer Hand Versehene", each time giving pre-
eminence to one of the proper parts or attributes of the whole.

The stylistic distinction

The stylistic distinction also takes it origin in the Port Royal Logic, where connotation, in this sense, is
termed "idées accessoires"; it was, however, the German grammarian Karl Otto Erdmann, who in 1900
distinguished between "Hauptbedeutung", "Nebensinn", and "Gefühlswert", and Urban, Firth, and
Ogden & Richards, seem to be among those principally responsible for circulating these notions in the
English-speaking world, translating the first term by "denotation", and conflating the latter two terms
under the denomination "connotation" (cf. Garza Cuarón 1978: 62ff; Rössler 1979:1f). Erdmann
apparently thought that the core meaning, which he believed to be conceptual in nature, could be
distinguished from subsidiary meaning aspects, on one hand, and from emotional values and
ambience, on the other, but as the distinction is nowadays stated, the latter two notions are
amalgamated.

According to this conception, a demarcated portion of the content domain corresponds point by point
to an object in the perceptual world, such as it would appear in a completely "objective" account;
whereas the other part, the residue, has no equivalent in the real-world object, but is added to the
content by the sign and/or the sign user. The features of the first part are supposed to be cognitive or
conceptual, thus permitting the identification of the real-world object; the features of the other part are
said to be emotive, or emotional, and it is never made clear whether they are part of the intersubjective
content of the sign, are contributed by the sign producer, or result form the reaction of the sign
receiver. Moreover, the cognitive meaning is taken to be more important than the rest, perhaps
because cognition is postulated to carry more importance than emotion.

It is not obvious that all these properties must necessarily co-occur. For instance, the most important
features of the meaning of such as word as "darling", and those which permit an identification, are
emotional, in the sense that they describe the emotional relationship between the speaker and the
object referred to, the emotion being codified as a part of the intersubjective content of the language
sign (Cf. Sonesson 1978). Although this variety of the terminological distinction is thus the most
difficult to uphold, it remains the most popular one, and is often confused with the other ones, even in
semiotical texts (thus for instance by Barthes).
Hjelmslev’s distinction.

According to Hjelmslev (1943:101ff), connotation is a particular configuration of languages, opposed,

in this respect, not only to denotation, but also to metalanguage. According to his definitions, a
connotational language is a language, i.e. a system of signs, the expression plane of which is another
language, which means it is the inversion of a metalanguage, the content plane of which is another
language. Contrary to both of the latter, denotational language is a language, none of whose planes
form another language. Thus, denotation is a relation which serves to connect the expression and the
content of a sign, whereas connotation and metalanguage both relate two separate signs, each with its
own expression and content.

Apart from the definitions, Hjelmslev also gives various examples of connotations, such as different
styles, genres, dialects, national languages, voices, etc. As a particularly pregnant example, he
suggests that, all the while that he is speaking Danish, denoting different contents, he goes on
connoting the Danish language. In a parallel fashion, a person speaking in a foreign tongue will all the
time be connoting "I am a foreigner". In many languages, the use of an /r/ produced with the tip of
the tongue, or with the uvula, indicates, and thus connotes, different geographical origin. When
analysing these and other examples, we will realise that it is in the choice of a particular expression to
stand for a given content, chosen among a set of alternatives, or of a particular variant to realise the expression
invariant, that the semiotic connotations reside (Cf. Sonesson 1989, 122ff, 179ff).

Hjelmslev’s connotations have often been compared to some of those mentioned by Bloomfield, which
depend on the social and geographical origin of the speaker, or are associated with improper or
intensified versions of more normal signs (Cf. Rössler 1979:31, 39ff; Garza Cuarón 1978, 168ff, 180).
There is certainly a similarity in the kind of contents invoked, but it should be noted that what is
important to connotation, according to Hjelmslev himself, is not the particular contents, or kinds of
contents, conveyed, but the formal relationships which they presuppose (p.105). The study of the
"social and sacral" values usually conveyed by the languages of connotation are assigned by
Hjelmslev (p.105) to the theory of "substance". This explains why Hjelmslev’s list form "un inventaire,
approximatif et allusif", as Greimas (1970:96) observes, which means Greimas’ own essay would have
to be a contribution to this theory of "substance".

Even if some particular kinds of content are really associated with connotational language, there is
certainly nothing in Hjelmslev’s text to suggest that these should have something to do with emotion,
contrary to what has been taken for granted by those who identify Hjelmslev’s connotation with the
stylistic one. Spang-Hansen (1954:61), himself a close collaborator of Hjelmslev, observes that neither
do only emotive signs contain connotations, nor do all emotive signs contain them. Indeed, four-letter
words certainly connote their being "four-letter words", but this effect is produced quite
independently of the reactions of the auditory, and of the degree of emotion with which the words are
used.

As a close scrutiny of the few pages in which Hjelmslev introduces the notion of connotation will
show, the formal theory of connotation is much more complex than most commentators have realised.
Thus it can be demonstrated, for instance, that Hjelmslev (1943: 103) distinguished connotations
stemming from the form of denotational language, in which the units of connotation and denotation
are identical, and those derived from its substance, where the matter serving as the vehicle of the two
signs is differently segmented. As soon as we delve deeper into the text, we will also discover that
Hjelmslev’s examples embody a theory which is narrower, if not simply different, from the one
conveyed by his definitions, and we will encounter reasons to doubt that connotational language,
interpreted in this way, can really be considered a mirror image of metalanguage, as ordinarily
understood (Cf. Sonesson 1989,179ff).

Eco’s distinction

Although Umberto Eco (1976:111; 1984: 32) claims to take over his notion of connotation from
Hjelmslev, he has turned it into something rather different. The first time he employs the term, Eco
(1968: 98ff) produces are very heterogeneous list of phenomena, which would seem to include logical
connotation, stylistic connotation, and much else, which he then describes as the sum total of cultural
entities brought up before the receiver’s mind. In a later text, however, Eco (1976: 111) defines
connotation as "a signification conveyed by a precedent signification", which would rather suggest
something similar to what logicians call a contextual implication – the context being offered by some or
other "meaning postulate" defined in a particular sign system. More recently, Eco (1984:33) himself
observes that what he calls the second level of the connotational system is based on "inference".

To illustrate his idea of connotation, Eco asks us to imagine a dike provided with an alarm system in
which, for instance, the sign AB denotes danger, the sign AD insufficiency, etc. In the context of the
dike, danger is known to result from the rise of the water above a determinate level, whereas
insufficiency means that the water-level is too low. We are also acquainted with the fact that, in the
first case, it will be necessary to let some portion of the water out, and that in the latter case, some
amount of water must be allowed to enter the system. Eco would say that the sign AB denotes danger
and connotes evacuation (and then no doubt also high water-level), and that the sign AD denotes
insufficiency while connoting the entering of the water into the system (and low water-level). Given
the stock of knowledge accessible to the guardian, all these facts could be said to imply each other, in
the context of the dike.

In spite of its multiple meaning layers, this case does not confirm Hjelmslev’s model, as Kerbrat-
Orecchioni (1977: 81f) rightly observes, since it is only the content of denotation, not the whole sign,
which is transformed into the expression of connotation. But there is really no reason at all to expect
that Eco’s example should confirm Hjelmslev’s model, since, in spite of using the same term, they are
concerned with different phenomena. Indeed, as a close reading of Hjelmslev’s text will show
(Hjelmslev 1943:105; Sonesson 1989: 185f), Eco’s connotations would be "symbols" to Hjelmslev, and
could, in some cases, be indirectly conveyed by connotational languages.

No doubt, we could look upon Hjelmslevian connotation as a particular case of implication, viz. an
implication resulting from the peculiar relation between the expression and content of a sign. It is,
however, an implication involving signs, not mere content parts, and that is what is essential to
Hjelmslev.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography:
Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente. Milan. Bompiani 1968.

Eco, Umberto, A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1976.

Eco, Umberto, Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1984

Garza Cuarón, Beatriz, La connotación: problemas del significado. México D.F.: El Colegio de México 1978.

Greimas, A.J. Du sens. Pairs: Seuil 1970.

Gurwitsch, Aron, Théorie du champ de la conscience. Bruges: Desclée de Brouver 1957. English version:
The Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh. Duquesne Univesity Press 1964.

Hjelmslev, Louis, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse. Copenhagen. Akademisk forlag 1943.

Kebrat-Orecchioni, Catherine, La connotation. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon 1977.

Kubczak, Hartmut, Das Verhältnis von Intention und Extension. Tübingen: Narr 1975.

Rössler, Gerda, Konnotationen – Untersuchungen zum Problem der Mit- und Nebenbedeutung. Wiesbaden:
Steiner Verlag 1979.

Sonesson, Göran, Tecken och handling. Lund: Doxa 1978.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.
Spang-Hanssen, Henning, Recent theories on the nature of the language sign. Copenhagen: Nordisk
Sprog- och Kulturforlag 1954.

See also: "La rhétorique de l’image", Pictorial semiotics

Icon
Within semiotics, the term icon in rarely used in its most common religious and art historical sense, to
refer to a pictorial representation of persons or events derived from the sacred history of Christianity,
particularly as used as an aid to devotion, although the only extant semiotic monograph concerned
with a single pictorial genre is in fact about icons in this sense (Uspenskij 1976). Nor is the term
normally used to refer to all things visible, or everything they elements of which are graphically
disposed, as in the jargon of computer programming, or in cognitive psychology (e.g. Kolers 1977). In
semiotical parlance, which is derived from Peirce, an icon is a sign in which the "thing" serving as
expression is, in one or other respect, similar to, or shares properties with, another "thing", which
serves as its content. In fact, if we follow Peirce, there are two further requirements: Not only should
the relation connecting the two "things" exist independently of the sign relation, just as is the case with
the index, but, in addition, the properties of the two "things" should inhere in them independently.

Thus, icons in the religious sense are not particularly good instances of icons in the semiotical sense,
for they are, as Uspenskij has shown, subject to several conventions determining the kind of
perspective which may be employed, and the kind of things and persons which may be represented in
different parts of the picture. Contrary to the icons of computer programs and those of cognitive
psychology, iconic signs may occur in any sense modality, e.g. in audition, notably in verbal language
(not only onomatopoetic words, but also in the form of such regularities and symmetries which
Jakobson 1965a,b terms "the poetry of grammar") and music (cf. Osmond-Smith 1972), and not all
visual signs are iconic in the semiotic sense; indeed many icons found in computer programs are
actually aniconic visual signs.

Many semioticians, in particular those who deny the existence of iconic signs, apparently believes
pictures to be typical instances of this category. There are several reasons to think that this was not
Peirce’s view. Pure icons, he states (1.157), only appear in thinking, if ever. According to Peirce’s
conception, a painting is in fact largely conventional, or "symbolic". Indeed, it is only for a floating
instant, "when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the
copy", that a painting may appear to be a pure icon (3.362; cf. iconicity and Sonesson 1989;III.1.).

It will be noted then that a pure icon is thus not a sign, as the latter term is commonly understood
(although Peirce will sometimes state the contrary). At first, it may seem that, although the icon is not
a socially instituted sign, i.e. not something which is accepted by a community of sign uses, it could at
least, for a short time span, become a sign to a single observer. But even this is contrary to the very
conditions described by Peirce: he specifically refers to the case in which the sign loses its sign
character, when it is not seen as a sign but is confused with reality itself (which could actually happen
when looking at a picture through an key-hole with a single eye), when, as Piaget would have said,
there is no differentiation between expression and content (cf. index).

Indeed, if would seem that, at least sometimes, the pure icon is taken to be something even less
substantial: an impression of reality, which does not necessarily correspond to anything in the real
world, for "it affords no assurance that there is any such thing in nature" (4.447). Thus, it seems to be
very close to the "phaneron", the unit of Peircean phenomenology (itself close to the Husserlean
"noema"), which is anything appearing to the mind, irrespective of its reality status (cf. Johansen
1993:94ff). In this sense, the Peircean icon is somewhat similar to that of cognitive psychology, for it
involves "sensible objects" (4.447), not signs in any precise sense: however, it still comprises all sense
modalities.

In most cases, when reference is made to icons in semiotics, what is actually meant is what Peirce
termed hypo-icons, that is, signs which involve iconicity but also, to a great extent, indexical and/or
"symbolic" (that is, conventional, or perhaps more generally, rule-like) properties. There are supposed
to be three kinds of hypo-icons: images, in which case the similarity between expression and content is
one of "simple qualities"; diagrams, where the similarity is one of "analogous relations in their parts";
and metaphors, in which the relations of similarity are brought to an even further degree of mediation.
Diagrams in the sense of ordinary language are also diagrams in the Peircean sense, e.g. the
population curve which rises to the extent that the population does so. The Peircean concept is
however much broader, as is the notion of metaphor, which would, for instance, also include the
thermometer. Moreover, no matter how we choose to understand the simplicity of "simple qualities",
the Peircean category of images will not include ordinary pictures (which would be metaphors of
metaphors; cf. picture perception), although Peirce sometimes seems to say so: if anything, an
Peircean image might be a colour sample used when picking out the paint to employ in repainting the
kitchen wall.

Contrary to the way in which icons have been conceived in the later semiotic tradition, diagrams,
rather than pictures, are at the core of Peircean iconicity: at least, they are of most interest to Peirce
himself. Indeed, mathematical formulae and deductive schemes, which are based on conventional
signs, are those most often discussed in his work.

There is still another sense in which pictures are far from being central instances of icons. As was
noted above, the fact that an object serving as the expression of an icon, and another object serving as
its content, possess, in some respects, the same properties, should not be a result of one of them
having an influence on the other. In the case of an icon (contrary to the case of an index), "it simply
happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind
for which it is a likeness" (2.299). Since both Franklin and Rumford are Americans, Peirce claims, one
of them may serve as a sign of the other; but the fact that Franklin is an American is quite unrelated to
Rumford’s being one. But there is at least one sense in which this is not true, not only of a photograph
(which Peirce often pronounces to be an index), but also in the case of a painting or the image on a
computer screen: in each case, the "thing" serving as the expression is expressly constructed in order
to resemble the "thing" serving as the content, although a direct physical connection only exists in the
first instance. Leonardo painted the canvas known as Mona Lisa in order to create a resemblance to
the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and, although the resemblance is of a much more abstract kind,
the same is true of Picasso painting Gertrude Stein or Kahnweiler. And it is as true of a synthetic
computer picture showing a lamp as of a photograph with the same subject.

Peirce’s claim that the properties of expression and content pertain to them independently seems
more relevant to identity signs (like Franklin representing Rumford) than to pictures. In another
sense, on the other hand, pictures are far more iconic than, for instance, objects representing
themselves: they can do with far less indexicality and convention. From this point of view, and
contrary to what has been suggested by Morris (1946:98ff), and often is repeated in theatre semiotics,
an object is not its own best icon.

When used to stand for themselves, objects are clearly iconical: they are signs consisting of an
expression which stands for a content because of properties which each of them possess intrinsically.
And yet, without having access to a set of conventions and/or an array of stock situations, we have no
possibility of knowing, neither that something is a sign, nor what it as sign of: of itself as an individual
object, of a particular category (among several possible ones) of which it is a member, or of one or
other of its properties. A car, which is not a sign on the street, becomes one at a car exhibition, as does
Man Ray’s iron in the museum. We have to know the show-case convention to understand that the tin
can in the shop-window stands for many other objects of the same category; we need to be familiar
with the art exhibition convention to realise that each object merely signifies itself; and we are able to
understand that the tailor’s swatch is a sign of its pattern and colour, but not of its shape, only if we
have learnt the convention associated with the swatch (cf. Sonesson 1989,II.2.2. and 1994).

Convention is thus needed, not only to establish the sign character, but also the very iconicity of these
icons. Since iconicity can be perceived only once the sign function, and a particular variety of it, is
known to obtain, the resulting icons may be termed secondary (Sonesson 1994). This also applies to
"droodles", a kind of limiting-case of a picture exemplified by Carraci’s key, in which a triangle above
a horizontal line is discovered to represent a mason behind a stone wall, once we are told so; as well as
the manual signs of the North American Indians, which, according to Mallery (1881:94f), seem
reasonable when we are informed about their meaning.

In these cases, knowledge about the sign function already obtaining between the two "things"
involved is clearly a prerequisite to the discovery of their iconicity. The opposite case, in which it is
the perception of iconicity which functions as one of the reasons for postulating a sign relation, would
seem to be more germane to Peirce’s conception of the icon. Such a primary icon is actually realised by
the picture sign. Indeed, we know from child psychology and anthropology that no particular training
is needed for a human being to perceive a surface as a picture (cf. picture perception). The possibility
of this feat remains a mystery: they properties possessed in common by the picture and that which it
represents are extremely abstract. It has been suggested that picture perception is only possible
because there is a taken-for-granted hierarchy of things in the world of everyday life which makes
certain objects and materials more probable sign-vehicles than others (Sonesson 1989a; 1994).

Bibliography:
Kolers, Paul, "Reading pictures and reading text", in The arts and cognition, Perkins, David & Leondard,
Barbara, (eds.), pp. 136-164. London & Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1977;

Jakobson, Roman, "À la recherche de l’essence du langage". In Diogène 51, 1965: 22-38 (a)

Jakobson, Roman, "Poesie der Grammatik und Grammatik der Poesie". In Mathematik und Dichtung,
Gunzenhäuser, R, & Kreuzer, H, (eds.), 21-32. München: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung (b).

Johansen, Jørgen Dines, Dialogic semiosis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993

Mallery, Garrick. Sign language among North American Indians. 1881. Reprinted: The Hague & Paris:
Mouton 1972.

Morris, Charles, Signs, Language, and Behavior. 1946. Reprinted in Morris, Charles, Writings on the
General Theory of Signs, The Hague: Mouton 1971; pp. 73-398.

Osmond-Smith, David, "The iconic process in musical communication", In Versus 3, 1972: 31-42.

Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Papers I-VIII. Hartshorne, C, Weiss, P, & Burks, A, (eds.). Cambridge,
Mass. Harvard University Press 1931-58

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.

Sonesson, Göran, "Sémiotique visuelle et écologie sémiotique", in RSSI, 14, 1-2, printemps 1994, pp. 31-
48.

Uspenskij, Boris, Semiotics of the Russian Icon. Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press 1976

See also:
Iconicity, Image/picture, Indexicality, Index, Picture (perception of)

Iconicity
Conceived in strictly Peircean terms, iconicity is one of the three relationships in which a
representamen (expression) may stand to its object (content or referent) and which may be taken as
the "ground" for their forming a sign: more precisely, it is the first kind of these relationships, termed
Firstness, "the idea of that which is such at it is regardless of anything else" (5.66), as it applies to the
relation in question. At the other extreme, iconicity has been variously conceived as a similarity, or
identity, between the expression and the content of a sign, or as a particular variety of conventional
coding.

To many semioticians, the study of iconicity amounts to an inquiry into what Peirce "really said" on
the matter. Semioticians taking a more empirical stance will argue that, whatever Peirce wanted to tell
us, more recent experiences and analyses may force us to conceive of iconicity differently. Yet it could
be suggested that some of the usages to which iconicity are nowadays put, are fairly different form the
one intended by Peirce, and that something has got lost on the way. In particular, since large parts of
recent semiotics has been concerned to reject the very notion of iconicity, it seems unfortunate that this
critique has often started out from a very shallow understanding of Peirce’s theory, and that the
authors of this critique has hardly bothered to inquiry into the possibility of adapting this notion to
the present state of semiotic theory.

Considerations of iconicity must start out from the iconic "ground", or what has been described as the
"potential iconic sign" (cf. indexicality). The ground is a part of the sign having the function to pick out
the relevant elements of expression and content. It would appear that, in Peirce’s view, two items
share an iconic ground, being thus apt to enter, in the capacity of being its expression and content, into
a semiotic function forming an iconic sign, to the extent that there are some or other set of properties
which these items possess independently of each other, which are identical or similar when
considered from a particular point of view, or which may be perceived or, more broadly, experienced
as being identical or similar, where similarity is taken to be an identity perceived on the background
of fundamental difference (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.1-3.).

Contrary to the indexical ground, which is a relation, the iconic ground thus consists of a set of two
classes of properties ascribed to two different "things", which are taken to possess the properties in
question independently, not only of the sign relation, but of each other. Indexicality as such involves
two "things", and may therefore be conceived independently of the sign function (cf. indexicality).
Since iconicity is Firstness, however, it only concerns one "thing". Indeed, as Peirce (3.1.; 3.362; 4.447)
never tires of repeating, a pure icon cannot even exist: it is a disembodied quality which we may
experience for a floating instant when contemplating a painting out of awareness. Perhaps, then, to
use some of Peirce’s own examples, the blackness of a blackbird, or the fact of Franklin being
American, can be considered iconicities; when we compare two black things or Franklin and Rumford
from the point of view of their being Americans, we establish a iconic ground; but only when one of the
black things is taken to stand for the other, or when Rumford is made to represent Franklin, do they
become iconic signs (or hypo-icons, as Peirce sometimes said). Just as indexicality is conceivable, but is
not a sign, until it enters the sign relation, iconicity has some kind of being, but does not exist, until a
comparison takes place. In this sense, if indexicality is a potential sign, iconicity is only a potential
ground.

Since the iconic ground is established on the basis of properties the two items possess only because of
being what they are, the standard of comparison must be something like similarity or identity. Signs
based on similarity have been distinguished before in semiotic theory, by Degérando, for instance, in
terms of analogy. Indeed, Peirce also says that an icon (more exactly, an hypo-icon) is "a sign which
stands for something merely because it resembles it" (3.362) or "partak/es/ in the characters of the
object" (4.531). This point of view was pursued by Charles Morris (1946:98ff), who considered that a
sign was iconic to the extent that it had the same properties as it referent. According to this
conception, iconicity becomes a question of degrees: a film is more iconic of a person than a painted
portrait, but less so than the person itself. Abraham Moles (1981) has elaborated on this proposal,
constructing a scale which comprises 13 degrees of iconicity going from the object itself to the zero
degree epitomised by a verbal description. Such a conception of iconicity is problematic, not only
because distinctions of different nature appear to be involved, but also because it takes for granted
that identity is the highest degree of iconicity, and that the illusion of perceptual resemblance typically
produced, in different ways, by the scale model and the picture sign, are as close as we can come to
iconicity short of identity. Although Peirce does mention paintings and photographs as instances of
iconic signs, he much more often refers to abstract properties.

The same confusion is found in other semiotic theories involved with iconicity. Umberto Eco’s (1968:
1976) critique of iconicity is almost exclusively concerned with pictures. In pictorial semiotics, both as
conceived by the Greimas school, and in the version of Groupe µ, iconicity is supposed to account for
one of the two semiotic functions of the picture sign, the one giving the illusion of seeing something
depicted in the sign, opposed to the plastic function, which is concerned with the abstract properties
of the pictorial surface. However,if a circle, as in one of Groupe µ:s (1979) examples, is taken to stand
for the sun on the iconic level, and on the plastic level for roundness, which, in turn, as we know from
psychological tests, may signify softness, etc., then, what is called here the plastic language is as least
as iconic, in Peirce’s sense, as the iconic layer: for roundness is certainly a property possessed both by
the circle representing the sun in this hypothetical drawing, and by the circle prototype; and, beyond
that, there must be some abstract, synaesthetically experienced property which is common to the
visual mode of roundness and the tactile mode of softness (Cf. Sonesson 1994).

When conceiving iconicity as engendering a "referential illusion" and as forming a stage in the
generation of "figurative" meaning out of the abstract base structure, Greimas & Courtés (1979: 148,
177) similarly identify iconicity with perceptual appearance. In fact, however, not only is iconicity not
particularly concerned with "optical illusion" or "realistic rendering", but it does not necessarily
involve perceptual predicates: many of Peirce’s examples, like those of Degérando beforehand (cf.
Sonesson 1989: 204ff), have to do with mathematical formulae, and even the fact of being American is
not really perceptual, even though some of its manifestations may be.

During the renewal of semiotic theory in the sixties and seventies, most semioticians were eager to
abolish the notion of iconicity, again taking pictures as their favoured example, while claiming that
pictures were, in some curious way, as conventional as linguistic signs. Bierman, Goodman,
Lindekens, and Eco, have all argued against using similarity as a criterion in the definition of iconical
signs and/or pictures; and even Burks and Greenlee have introduced some qualifications on Peirce’s
view which serve to emphasise conventionality. Some of these thinkers, such as Bierman and
Goodman, were mainly inspired by logical considerations, together with a set of proto-ethnological
anecdotes, according to which so-called primitive tribes were incapable of interpreting pictures; Eco
and Lindekens, in addition, wanted to show that pictures, conforming to the ideal of the perfect sign,
as announced by Saussure, were as arbitrary or conventional as the sign studied by the most
advanced of the semiotic sciences, general linguistics. Saussure himself never went to such extremes:
in his unpublished notes he recognises the motivated character of both pictures and miming, but at
least in the latter case, he argues that the rudiment of convention found in it is sufficient to make it an
issue for semiotics.

The most interesting arguments against iconicity were adduced by Arthur Bierman (1963), and were
later repeated in another form, by, notably, Nelson Goodman (1970). According to one of these
arguments, which may be called the argument of regression (cf. Sebeok 1976: 128), all things in the
world can be classified into a number of very general categories, such as "thing", "animal", "human
being", etc., and therefore everything in the universe can refer to, and be referred to, everything else.
Thus, if iconicity is a the origin of signs, everything in the world will be signs. This may not be so far
from what Peirce thought: at least Franklin and Rumford are, as we know, potential signs of each
other. It is certainly a conception of the world common in the Renaissance, and among Romantics and
Symbolists. In the case of more common iconical signs, however, like pictures and models, a
conventional sign function must either be superimposed on the iconic ground, or the iconic ground
must itself be characterised by further properties. Even in the former case, however, iconicity is still
needed, not to define the sign, but to characterise iconic signs (cf. Sonesson 1989: 220ff).

Differently put, if Peirce meant to suggest that there are three properties, iconicity, indexicality, and
symbolicity, which, by themselves and without any further requirement, trigger of the recognition of
something as a sign, then the argument of regression will create trouble for his conception. On the
other hand, if he merely wanted to suggest that something that was already recognized as being a
sign, could be discovered to be an iconical sign, rather than an indexical or symbolic one, by means of
tracing it back to the iconic ground, then the argument of regression will have no bearing on it.

According to another argument, which has been termed the symmetry argument (Sebeok 1976:128),
iconicity cannot motivate a sign, for while similarity is symmetrical and reflexive, the sign is not.
Pigments on paper, or carvings in a rock, could stand for a man, but not the reverse; nor will they, in
their picture function, stand for themselves. This argument is based on an identification of the
common sense notion of similarity with the equivalence relation of logic. No doubt, the equivalence
relation, as defined in logic, is symmetric and reflexive, and thus cannot define any type of sign, since
the sign, by definition, must be asymmetric and irreflexive. But to identify similarity with the
equivalence relation it to suppose man to live in the world of the natural sciences, when in fact he
inhabits a particular sociocultural Lifeworld. Similarity, as experienced is this Lifeworld, is actually
asymmetric and irreflexive. Indeed, this fact is not only intuitively obvious, but has now been
experimentally demonstrated (notably by Rosch 1975; and Tversky 1977; cf. also Sonesson 1989,220ff,
327ff). Contrary to the argument of regression, the symmetry argument may thus be warded off,
without introducing a supplementary sign function, and without amending the definition of the iconic
ground.
Goodman also argues that a painting is actually more similar to another painting than to that which it
depicts. However, similarity should not be confused with identity: indeed, between two pictures (two
canvases, etc.) there is identity, according to a principle of pertinence, and on the basis of this property
a picture, just as any other object, may be used as a identity sign or an exemplification (as, for instance, in
an art exhibition, or in front of the artist’s workshop; cf. Goodman 1968). There is similarity, on the
other hand, only on the basis of a fundamental dissimilarity. It is certainly not in their "important"
properties, if that means the attributes defining them as "selves", that the picture and its referent (or
content) are similar. In fact, the hierarchically dominant categories of the picture and its referent must
be different; for a picture which is just a picture of the picture-of-X, is indistinguishable from a picture
of X (cf. Sonesson 1989:226ff).

Although the sign relation is thus not needed in order to render similarity asymmetric and irreflexive,
it is required in order to distinguish similarities which are signs from those which are not. At this
stage, then, it would seem that the picture could be defined by the sign relation, together with
similarity; but Eco rightly observes that, on closer inspection, there is really no similarity between the
painted nose, and the nose of a real person. The same observation is even more obviously valid in the
case of the stick-man, whether it is drawn on paper, or carved in the rock. However, is has no bearing
whatsoever on iconic signs which are not picture signs, and the argument really shows the confusion
between pictures and iconic sign in general: indeed, the American-ness of Franklin and Rumford is
identical, as far as it goes, as is the roundness of circles and other round things, and the pattern and
colour of a tailor’s swatch and the cloth is exemplifies. In the case of the picture sign, it may really be
necessary to construe similarity as a result, rather than a condition, upon the emergence of iconicity,
but that is an issue which will concern the analysis of a specific variety of iconic signs, the picture, not
iconicity generally.

The alternative analysis in terms of convention suggested by Goodman, Eco, and others, is conceived
to take care of the case of pictures, but paradoxically, it seems that is would really be needed, not for
pictures, but for some other iconical signs, which rely on identity. Goodman’s and Greenlee’s
contention that the referent of each picture is appointed individually, and Eco’s proposal that the
relations of the picture are so correlated with those of the referent, are incompatible with what
psychology tells us about the child’s capacity for interpreting pictures when first confronted with
them at 19 months of age (as demonstrated in a famous experiment by Hochberg). In the other hand,
we do have to learn that, in certain situations, and according to particular conventions, objects which
are normally used for what they are become signs of themselves, of some of their properties, or of the
class of which they form part: a car at a car exhibition, the stone axe in the museum show-case or the
tin cane in the shop window, the emperor’s impersonator when the emperor is away, and an urinal (if
it happens to be Duchamp’s "Fountain") at an art exhibition. There is never any doubt about their pure
iconicity, or about their capacity for entering into an iconic ground – but a convention is needed to tell
us they are signs.

Bibliography:
Bierman, Arthur K., "That there are no iconic signs", in Philosophy and phenomenological research,
XXIII:2: 1963, pp. 243-249.

Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente. Milan. Bompiani 1968.

Eco, Umberto, A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1976

Greimas, A.J. & Courtés, Joseph, Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette
1979.

Goodman, Nelson, "Seven strictures on similarity", in Experience and Theory, Foster, L., & Swanson,
J.W., (eds.), Cambridge. Mass., University of Massachussets Press 1970; pp. 19-29.

Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art. London: Oxford University Press , 1968.

Moles, Abraham, L’image – communication fonctionelle. Bruxelles: Casterman 1981.

Morris, Charles, Signs, Language, and Behavior. 1946. Reprinted in Morris, Charles, Writings on the
General Theory of Signs, The Hague: Mouton 1971; pp. 73-398.

Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Papers I-VIII. Hartshorne, C, Weiss, P, & Burks, A, (eds.).
Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press 1931-58

Rosch, Eleanor, "Cognitive reference points", in Cognitive Psychology, 7:4, 1975, pp. 532-547.

Sebeok, Thomas A., Contributions to the doctrine of signs. Bloomington & Lisse: Indiana University
Press/Peter de Ridder Press 1976.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.

Sonesson, Göran, "Iconicité de l’image – Imaginaire de l’iconicité. De la resemblance à la

vraisemblance". In Les États généraux de l’image. Actes du Premier Congrès de l’Association internationale de
sémiologie de l’image, Blois, Novembre de 1990. Constantini, Michel, (ed.). Tours: Université Framçois-
Rabelais 1994.

Tversky, Amos, "Features of similarity", in Psychological Review, 84:4, 1977, pp. 327-352.

See also:
Degérando, Icon, Image/picture, Indexicality,

Image/picture
The commonplace notion of picture, or image, considered in terms of the constructs of semiotic
theory, involves a sign directed to the visual senses, and which is (in part, or in some respects) iconic in
nature, at least in the sense of producing an illusion of there being a (partial or aspectual) similarity
between the signifier and the intended signified (or referent). The image which will concern us here
has to be distinguished from the mirror image, the memory image, the afterimage, the camera image
(formed inside a box with a pinhole), the solid image (e.g. a sculpture), and from about five other
everyday or more specialist usages of the term (as noted by James Gibson): the notion of image or
picture sign relevant here consists of markings on a two-dimensional (or nearly two-dimensional)
surface which are, as a mater of course, taken to delineate scenes of the ordinary perceptual world.

Although this description is not adequate to characterise numerous would-be pictures produced in
the domain of fine art since the advent of Modernism, it certainly accounts for the central notion of
picture which immediately suggests itself to most people, and thus may be used as a prototype for the
picture category, in relation to which there may be many approximations and deviations, some of
which were intentionally produced by Modernists, but which continue to be minoritarian in the
present-day mass-media world.

Not all signs that are visual and iconic would ordinary be described as pictures. Something more
would seem to be needed in order to characterise picturehood. Most semioticians, even those who
have used the picture as the principal whipping boy of their critique of iconicity, have simply ignored
the need for further characterisation. In other cases, the peculiarities of the picture sign have been
addressed in oblique ways only: by Peirce in terms of qualities and exhibit import, and by Saussure
with reference to spatial dimensions. Husserl, however, describes pictorial consciousness as
something which is "perceptually imagined". The most radical stance has been taken by Nelson
Goodman, who simply rejects the ordinary sense of picture, in order to introduce his own. It might be
argued, however, that, as he becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive, Goodman ceases to be of
interest to semiotics, whatever may be the value of his theory to philosophy.
The image is one of the three subtypes of iconical signs (or "hypo-icons") mentioned by Peirce: the one
in which the iconical relation is assured, not by relations, as in the diagram, nor by relations between
relations, as in the metaphor, but by "simple qualities". The opposition between image and diagram, in
this sense, echoes Degérando’s (1800:I,153ff, 262ff, II:302ff) distinction between "sensuous" and "logical
analogy". It must be noted that the image so defined, is not necessarily a picture in the ordinary sense:
it may be addressed to other senses than the visual one (onomatopoetic words might thus be
described as "acoustic images").

More importantly, however, there are a number of reasons (cf. the entries on iconicity and picture
perception), stemming from semiotics and psychology alike (notably the work of Gibson), to think
that pictures, in the ordinary sense, are not based on "simple qualities", whatever that may mean; in
fact, they must rather be Peircean diagrams or metaphors (although Peirce must have though
otherwise). Indeed, Degérando claimed that pictures combining "sensuous" and "logical analogy"
would produce most effect. Pictures do, however, convey an illusion of there being a similarity of
"qualities", which is not true of diagrams. Therefore, the difference between qualities and relations
may have less to do with the difference of iconic "ground" joining expression and content together
than with the effect produced by the two types of iconic signs.

Saussure (1974:39) simply observes that, whereas language is unidimensional, painting depends on a
semiotic system deployed in multiple dimensions. This does not appear to be something peculiar to
pictures: clothing certainly supposes at least two combinatory dimensions (or syntagmatic axes) the
slots of which are defined by the body parts and the layers of closeness to the body, respectively; and,
if suprasegmatic features are taken into account, even verbal language will have to be considered
multi-dimensional (as claimed by Jakobson). Nevertheless, spatial dimensions may turn out to be
important to the picture sign in more supple ways: the projection of the, ordinarily three-dimensional,
content plane onto the twodimensionality of the expression plane is one of the spatial characteristics
of picturehood.

Although Goodman would deny the relevance of the common-sense notion of picture, prototypical
cases of pictures in the latter sense are among those signs he would qualify as being "analogous", or
"semantically and syntactically dense and replete". Density is a property of sign systems implying that
no matter how close a division is made of the signs into smaller parts, it will always be possible to
proceed with the division, introducing a third unit between each earlier couple of items, and so on
indefinitely. Density is semantic when it applies to content units (to referents, in Goodman’s
nominalist terms), and syntactic as far at it involves the varieties of expression (Goodman’s "marks").
A dense system is replete when its signs can be divided from many different, perhaps an infinite
number, of viewpoints.

One may doubt that "semantic and syntactic density and repleteness" is really an adequate
reconstruction of analogy as ordinarily understood: it seems to reduce "sensuous analogy" to
something which is not even necessarily a "logical" one. Construed to bring out the contrasts between
pictures and verbal language, the definition is at fault for conceiving of the latter in a logically
reconstructed form, failing to note that ordinary language, as it is actually used, is, on many counts,
dense and replete as well (cf. Sonesson 1989:230ff). Even according to Goodman himself, his definition
applies to thermometers and many other objects in addition to ordinary pictures, and it fails to apply
to pictograms, ignoring the fact that there are all sorts of intermediate cases between the latter and
full-blown pictures.

The term exhibitive import was introduced by Greenlee as a label for a peculiar property of iconical
signs observed by Peirce which is most convincingly illustrated in pictures: that truths concerning
their object not determining the construction of the sign can be discovered by direct observation of the
sign vehicle. Thus, for instance, a map can be drawn by means of two photographs. Greenlee
erroneously proceeds to dispute the specificity of this "great distinguishing property" claiming that it
is found also in novels, in respect to human situations, and this "entirely independent of the
perceptual qualities of the vehicle, in contrast to the imports of a lyric poem" (1973: 80). If we attend to
Peirce’s examples (which include algebraic formulae), we will realise that exhibitive import does
depend on the perceptual properties of the vehicle: it is that which is shown, in addition to being
signified. This, in turn, may have something to do with the fact that pictures simulate perceptual
experience, and thus are able to build on the interpretative schemes used in the on-going practice of
everyday life.
According to the philosopher Richard Wollheim, pictures are instance of what he terms "seeing-in":
they involves a peculiar visual experience in which "a state of affairs can be seen in a particular", with
attention being distributed evenly between the particular, i.e. the expression, and the state of affairs,
i.e. the content or referent. Edmund Husserl described in very similar terms what he called "pictorial
consciousness", arguing that the content of the picture was "perceptually imagined". Very similar
expressions recur in the work of the psychologist James Gibson, when opposing the indirect
perception involved in the seeing of pictures to the direct perception of the world. In this sense, the
picture sign would be a particular kind of iconic sign, which conveys the illusion of literally seeing the
projection of a scene extracted from the real (or potential) world of three-dimensional existence into
the two-dimensional lines and surfaces of the expression plane.

Little has been done so far to derive concrete, operational criteria for characterising the peculiarities of
the picture sign. These might be phrased, however, in terms of a specifically pictorial exhibitive
content. First, exhibitive import permits us to "see in" a drawing of a human face those facial traits,
such as the forehead, the cheeks, etc., which are rendered by blank spaces between the lines and
surfaces. In the second place, those traits which have no expression proper may be at least roughly
located in relation to the rest of the facial traits: that is, the ears which are not drawn can be shown to
be lacking at a particular place.

Such properties depend on the way pictures are constructed. For a long time, semioticians tried to
demonstrate the existence of some kind of minimal unit of pictorial meaning, sometimes termed
iconeme, which was supposed to have no meaning of its own, but to discriminate the meanings of
larger wholes, just a phonemes do in relation to words or morphemes. Umberto Eco (1968), who was
an early proponent of this conception, later retracted himself completely, arguing that there could be
no distinctive features in pictures (1976); even more recently, he has claimed that the very question
lacks pertinence to semiotics.

At the earlier stage, Eco claimed that pictures had a double articulation, with figurae, equivalent to
phonemes, adding up to signs, at the level of words, which then were combined to form pictures or
iconic statements. Although he later rejected this conception when denying the existence of pictorial
features, it is still presupposed in his theory of there being a triple articulation in the cinema, which
was upheld much later (at least as late as in 1976), and it is still employed by many of his followers. A
semiotics of pictures based on the psychology of perception must reject this theory, not because no
features can be distinguished, but because they have to be different from the units of the first as well
as the second articulation of linguistics. Considered in themselves, the lines and surfaces making up a
picture are indeed deprived of meaning, just as phonemes are; but whereas the phonemes, once they
have been put together to form a word, continue to lack separate meaning, pictorial traits take on, and
distribute among them, the global meaning of the whole configuration. Thus, in the world "face", the
first letter is not the carrier of the meaning "hair", the second of the meaning "forehead", etc., but that
is precisely the case with the lines making up the a drawing of a face.

As can be seen from the proceeding overview, we still know very little about the peculiarities of the
picture sign, in part because the description of picturehood has too often been confused with the
broader issues pertaining to iconicity, and we still may not possess constructs which are adequate to
account for the little we know. Not only must we delve deeper into the peculiarities of the picture
sign, but we will have to attend closer to the different sign types from which it differs more or less. If
we admit that what has been discussed so far is a kind of prototype picture, a core meaning of
present-day picturehood, then our first task will be to characterise those increasingly deviant notions
of picture that have evolved historically, inside the particular semiotic province of Modern Art, but
also those created in the variegated workings of contemporary society, such as pictograms,
Blissymbolics and other quasi-pictures, or discovered in the treasures of earlier civilisations, such as
petroglyphs and other prehistoric visual displays.

But over and above that, we can only become properly acquainted with the nature of the picture sign,
when we have discovered and characterised a number of neighbouring sign types, those, for instance,
which are conveyed visually, like pictures, but differ in other respects; and those which are iconically
grounded, as pictures most certainly are, but which are different in the peculiar character of their
iconicity, or in other ways, from the picture sign. The analysis of picturehood, inside semiotics, has
suffered from the latter being confused with iconicity tout court.

Göran Sonesson
Bibliography:
Degérando, J.M. Des signes et de l’art de penser considérés dans leurs rapports mutuels. Paris: Goujon fils
1800.

Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente. Milan. Bompiani 1968.

Eco, Umberto, A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Gibson, James, Reasons for Realism. Reed, E. & Jones, R. (eds), New Jersey & London: Lawrence
Erlbaum Ass., 1982.

Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art. London: Oxford University Press , 1968.

Greenlee, Douglas, Peirce’s Concept of Sign. The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1973.

Husserl, Edmund, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. The Hague, Boston & London: Nijhoff 1980.

Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique générale I-II. Edition critique par Rudolf Engler.
Wiesbaden: Harrosowitz, 1968-1974.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.

Wollheim, Richard, Art and its Objects. Second revised edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1980.

See also: Abstraction/Nonfigurativity, Aniconic visual signs, Icon, Iconicity, Goodman, Pictorial
semiotics, Picture (perception of), Visual semiotics

Index
Together with the icon and the symbol, the index constitutes the three kinds of signs distinguished by
Peirce according to the relation contracted by the expression (Peirce’s "representamen") and the
content and/or referent (Peirce’s "object", i.e. "immediate" or "dynamic object"). According to one
possible paraphrase, which seems sufficiently broad to account for most of Peirce’s examples and a
fair amount of his definitions, an index is a sign in which the ‘thing’ which serves as the expression is, in
one or other way, which is independent of the sign relation, connected with another ‘thing’, which serves as its
content (cf. indexicality). The term, if not the concept, has, however, a number of other sources, some
of which are not necessarily compatible with Peirce’s conception, and not all uses of the term, neither
by Peirce, nor by later semioticians, may really concern the same concept.

The term chosen by Peirce certainly suggests that all indices, like the pointing index finger, or an
arrow, serve to pinpoint a particular object, to isolate it and bring it out of the, typically spatial,
context into which it is ordinarily enmeshed; and this is indeed what Peirce affirms (3.361; 4.56).
However, if we introduce the term indicator to describe signs which are employed to single out an
object or a portion of space for our particular attention, it may be argued that they are not necessarily
indices in Peirce’s sense, and that they are not, in any event, sufficiently characterised by being so
classified (cf. Sonesson 1989b:50ff, 60f, Goudge 1965: 65ff). Thus, certain indicators, such as pointing
fingers and arrows, do suppose a relation of contiguity with that which they point to; but this is not
necessary, or even possible, in the case of many verbal indicators, most maps, and the photographic
options depending on film, lighting, and frame described as indexical in the semiotics of photography;
for, in these cases, the indicative gesture is merely recreated at the level of content. At least some of
these examples would also be described by Peirce as not being "genuine" indices.
On the other hand, real indicators, such as fingers and arrows, are equally contiguous to a number of
objects which they do not indicate, for instance to the things which are at the opposite side of the
arrow-head, in the direction to which it does not point. Therefore, something beyond mere
indexicality is required, in the case of the arrow, for instance, the forward thrust of the arrow-head as
imagined in water, or the sentiment of its slipping from our hands, as Thom (1973) has suggested. To
term certain signs "indicators" is, obviously, to make a categorisation of signs on the basis of their
functions, as seen in relationship to the over-all scenes in which signs are produced. We should not
expect this categorisation to coincide with the one stemming from Peirce’s classification, which
depends on the nature of the relationship between the expression and the referent or content of the
sign. Of course, from this point of view, the term "index" is a misnomer, for although the finger so
termed may function as an index, its specific function goes beyond that.

Another sense of index current in semiotical literature, which has no obvious relation to that of Peirce,
is the one employed by Prieto (1966:15ff; in French "indication"). In order to describe how signs come
into being, he imagines an elementary situation in which a set of hoof-prints made by a horse may be
observed. Something which Prieto calls the "significative indication" tells us that there is a horse
around. There is not, in this case, as there would be in a linguistic sign, any "notificative indication",
which would convey to us the idea corresponding to the phrase "attention! this is intended to contain
a message". In this particular case, the hoof-prints would be indices also in Peirce’s sense, but not for
the same reason: not because they are non-intentional, but because of being markings on a surface. In
the case of a linguistic sign, however, the significative indication, which corresponds to the perception
of the sound, would not ordinarily be indexical.

There is another usage of the term "index" which Piaget (1967) employs when introducing his idea of
the semiotic function (which, in the early writings, was less adequately termed the symbolic function),
which is a capacity acquired by the child at around 18 to 24 months of age, enabling him to imitate
something outside the direct presence of the model, to use language, make drawings, play
"symbolically", and have access to mental imagery and memory. The common factor underlying all
these phenomena, according to Piaget, is the ability to represent reality by means of a signifier which
is distinct, or differentiated, from the signified. Even before that age, however, Piaget believes that the
child is able to "connect significations" by means of "indices" and "signals", which do not suppose any
such differentiation between expression and content. The signifier of the index is, Piaget says, "an
objective aspect of the signified"; thus, for instance, the visible butt of an almost entirely hidden object
is the signifier of the object for the baby; and the tracks in the snow stand for the prey to the hunter,
just as any effect stands for its cause. But when the child uses a pebble to signify candy, he is well
aware of the difference between the two, which implies, as Piaget tells us, "a differentiation, from the
subject’s own point of view, between the signifier and the signified".

It is important to note that, while the signifier of the index is said to be an objective aspect of the
signifier, we are told that in the sign, expression and content are differentiated form the point of view of
the subject. We could actually imagine this same child that in Piaget’s example uses a pebble to stand
for a piece of candy having recourse instead to a feather in order to represent a bird, without therefore
confusing the feather and the bird: then the child would be using the feature, which is objectively a part
of the bird, while differentiating the former from the latter from his point of view. Only then would he
be using an index, not in the sense of Piaget, but in that of Peirce and most semioticians, rather than a
mere indexicality; and obviously the hunter, who uses the tracks to identify the animal, and to find
out which direction is has followed, and who does this in order to catch the animal, does not, in his
construal of the sign, confuse the tracks with the animal itself, in which case he would be satisfied
with the former (Sonesson 1989:50f).

As the term is employed by Piaget, the index is thus not a sign: it may therefore better be termed an
indexicality, or an indexical ground, which as yet has not attained the status of sign. When suitably
defined, however, Piaget’s notion of differentiation may be used, together with other criteria, to
distinguish signs from other meanings, and thus to tell indices and other indexicalities apart.

Apart from being a sign, an index, in the Peircean sense, must contain an indexical ground (cf.
indexicality). The fact that such a ground could exist independently of the sign relation should not be
taken to mean that the indexical relation necessarily has to precede the sign relation in real time.
Indeed, some indexical relations must come into being at the same time as the sign is produced, as is
the case, for instance, of verbal "shifters": the person indexically related to the sign "I" is the one which
at a particular moment pronounces the sound /ai/, which is to say that the indexical ground is
produced at the very same moment in which the sign is put to use. Similarily, there are no class of
"pointed-out objects" known to exists, but a member of such a class is created each time an act of
pointing takes place (see Sonesson 1989,I.2.5.).

Many of Peirce’s own examples of indexical signs are of the kind which acquire their meaning thanks
to a regularity which is known to obtain between different facts. Since a kind of reasoning which
connects two facts by means of supposed regularity is called an abduction by Peirce, we might
perhaps call this group of signs abductive indices. They can involve contiguity, as in the case of
footprints, fingerprints, the cross as a sign of the crucified, the weather-cock (contiguity to the
direction of the wind); or factorality, when an anchor is used to stand for navigation, the clock to
designate the watch-maker's (as part of the sum total of clocks), or a painting to indicate the painter’s
workshop.

Some of Peirce’s examples, and many of those suggested later, are however of another kind, for,
instead of presupposing a regularity known to obtain between the "thing" which serves as expression
of the sign, and another "thing" which is taken to be its content, they transform something which is
contiguous, or in a relation of factorality, to the expression, into its content. These signs may therefore
be termed performative indices. With contiguity, they give rise to such phenomena as the pronoun
"you", the finger pointing to an object, the weathercock (as marking the here-and-now of the wind),
the clock of the watch-maker's (as marking the emplacement of the shop); and with factorality, they
may produce the pronouns "I", "here", "now", the finger pointing out a direction, etc.

Finally, many secondary signs, or signs standing for other signs, are often said to be indexical.
Secondary indexical signs are signs, the dominant sign relation of which is pictorial or otherwise
iconical, conventional, or whatever, but which involve a secondary sign function, which is a relation
between several signs, or parts of several signs, which is indexical. The most obvious case of such
signs are the rhetorical figures of metonymy and synecdoche, in which the entire primary sign is
related to another sign by means of the respective contents. More trivial are such examples in which
the primary sign content is related to a secondary content outside the sign (implication, "connotation"
in Eco's sense, metonymy and synecdoche in a loose sense, etc.), some examples of which are dead
rhetorical figures such as the sword for the army, a picture of a cross for the crucified, the traditional
"symbols" of iconography (all with contiguity); dead rhetorical figures such as the sail for the ship, a
picture of a clock for the watch-maker's, iconography generally (all with factorality).

Another variety, which is often parasitic on pictorial signs, is when the entire primary sign, which is
related to another sign via their respective expressions, form an actual perceptual context. This type is
often found in publicity and in surrealist painting (cf. Nöth 1975; 1977; Williamson 1978). Some
examples, with contiguity, would be two figures seen against a common ground, for instance an
advertisement for a brand of whisky with a glass and a bottle; a bottle of gin and a crown; a jetty and a
tyre; or pictures placed side by side as in collages, montages, etc. With factorality, examples would be
a pile of fruits forming a crown; Magritte’s drawing of a face which is also a female trunk; slices of
orange forming a jam bottle; Arcimboldo’s portraits, etc. Other varieties may also be distinguished (cf.
Sonesson 1989,49ff).

Peirce himslef introduces one distinction between different kinds of indexical signs, but in terms
which are not easy to interpret: thus, there are designations, which stand for "things or quasi-things
with which the interpreting mind is already acquainted", and reagents, which serve "to ascertain
certain facts", based on our knowledge of the "connection with the phenomena it indicates" (8.368n).
Examples of the first kind are personal, demonstrative and relative pronouns, as well as proper
names; an instance of the second kind, however, is when "water placed in a vessel with a shaving of
camphor thrown upon it will show whether the vessel is clean or not.". Goudge (1965:55f) and
Greenlee (1973:86f) interpret this as a distinction between genuine, causal indices and degenerates
cases, but there could also be a suggestion of the distinction, formulated above, between abductive
and performative indices. If so, however, Peirce’s wordings are somewhat unfortunate: for while we
may have to be acquainted beforehand with the person to which we apply the term "you", as a
perceptual object, we do not need to know anything about his "youness": it is produced in the act of
talking about him (Sonesson 1989:54).

Bibliography:
Goudge, Thomas A. "Peirce’s Index", in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Amherst, Mass.;
1965, 1, pp. 52-70.
Greenlee, Douglas, Peirce’s Concept of Sign. The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1973.

Nöth, Winfried, Semiotik. Tübinger: Niemeyer Verlag 1975.

Nöth, Winfried, Dynamik semiotischer Systeme. Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandling 1977.

Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Papers I-VIII. Hartshorne, C, Weiss, P, & Burks, A, (eds.). Cambridge,
Mass. Harvard University Press 1931-58

Piaget, Jean, La psychologie de l’intelligence. Paris: Gallimard 1967.

Prieto, Luis, Messages et signaux. Paris: PUF 1966.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989 (a)

Thom, René, "De l’icône au symbole", in Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme, 22/23, 1973; pp. 85-106.

Williamson, Judith, Decoding Advertisments. London: Marion Boyars 1978.

See also:
Advertisment, Collage, Connotation, Icon, Iconicity, Indexicality, Metonymy, Photography,

Indexicality
From an orthodox Peircean point of view, indexicality is simply that property which makes something
which is a sign into an index. However, by a slight shift of emphasis, which has at least some
justification in Peirce’s work, it could be conceived as a property which, when added to the sign
function, creates an index, but which, in addition, may have other parts to play in the constitution of
meaning. That might account for the ambiguities of the Peircean notion, as well as for some of the uses
to which it has been put subsequently.

Given the long period through which Peirce’s thinking evolved, and the state in which it came down
to the public, it is not surprising that indexicality, like so many Peircean notions, should be so
variously, and probably inconsistently, defined, and that many of the examples given hardly fit in
with the definitions (cf. Goudge 1965). Indexicality, in any case, pertains to the general category of
Secondness, which means it concerns two items and/or the relation between them. The sign being a
Third, there is every reason to think that it cannot be constituted by indexicality alone. Perhaps Peirce
is really considering "potential sign-vehicles" in order to investigate their "capacity to serve as signs"
(Bruss 1978:87). More substantial arguments for this may be derived from a consideration of the
Peircean concept of "ground", which will perhaps be useful for understanding the nature of
indexicality, although it seems to disappear in later texts.

In one of his well-known definitions of the sign, or rather the sign-vehicle, Peirce (2:228) describes it as
something which "stands for that object not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I
sometimes called the ground of the representation". According to one of his commentators, Greenlee
(1975:64), the ground is that aspect of the referent which is referred to by the expression, for instance,
the direction of the wind, which is the only property of the referential object "the wind" of which the
weathercock informs us. On the other hand, Savan (1976:10) considers the ground to consist of the
features picked out from the thing serving as expression, which, to extend Greenlee’s example, would
include those properties of the weathercock permitting it to react to the wind, not, for instance, its
having the characteristic shape of a cock made out of iron and being placed on a church steeple. In one
passage, however, Peirce himself identifies "ground" with "abstraction" exemplifying it with the
blackness of two black things (1.293). That, of course, would be an iconical ground; an indexical
ground, in a parallel fashion, would then be whatever it is that connects the properties of the
weathercock as a physical thing to the direction in which the wind is blowing. If so, the ground is
really a principle of relevance, or, as a Saussurean would say, the "form", connecting expression and
content (cf. Sonesson 1989a:205ff).

Generally put, an indexical ground, or indexicality, would then involve two "things" that are apt to
enter, in the capacity of being its expression and content ("representamen" and "object" in Peircean
parlance), into a semiotic relation forming an indexical sign, due to a set of properties which are
intrinsic to the relationship between them, such as it is independently of the sign relation. This kind of
ground, which is a relation, is best conceived in opposition to an iconic ground, which consists of a set
of two classes of properties ascribed to two different "things", which are taken to possess the
properties in question independently, not only of the sign relation, but of each other, although, when
considered from a particular point of view, these two sets of properties will appear to be identical or
similar to each other. This is the sense in which indexicality is Secondness, and iconicity Firstness.

Such a view of indexicality as the one reconstructed above best fits in with the most general
formulations given by Peirce, according to which it depends on there being a "real connection", an
"existential relation", a "dynamical (including spatial) connection" and even, in one of its many
conceivable senses, a "physical connection" between the items involved (Peirce 1.558; 1.196; 2:305;
3.361; 8.335). From this point, it seem natural to go on to argue that indexicality is involved with
"spatiotemporal location" (Burks 1949:683ff), which underlies the "indices" of such logicians as Bar-
Hillel and Montague, the "egocentric particulars" of Russell and the "shifters" of Jespersen and
Jakobson (cf. index). In fact, however, as Savan (1976:25ff) observes, location in time and space will
only result, to the extent that some system of co-ordinates has been conveyed by other types of signs –
or, as we would add, can be presupposed by the ongoing practice of the ordinary world of our
experience.

More generally, many of the examples adduced by Peirce would justify us in going along with
Jakobson (1979), when he claims that indexicality is based on "real contiguity", and is connected with
the syntagmatic axis of language, and the rhetorical figures of metonymy. To Jakobson, however,
metonymy actually involves, not only the relation of contiguity of traditional rhetoric, but also that of
part to whole, known in rhetoric as synecdoche. This distinction may be reestablished inside the
category of indexicality (cf. Nöth 1975:20f), and could be described more generally in terms of
contiguity and factorality (cf. Sonesson 1989a:40ff).

There is, however, another series of definitions which suggest that indexicality is, is some way,
dependant on there being a relation of causality between the expression and content of the potential
sign: that is, the index supposedly "denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object" (2.248).
Apart from this, Peirce also makes a number of other claims about indices, many of which are
repeated by Dubois (1983: 48f, 60ff) when trying to demonstrate that photographs are indices: that
they refer to unique, singular objects (2.283); that they testify to the existence of its object (2.316); and
that they show up the object without asserting anything about it (3.361); and that they point, by "blind
compulsion" to the object of reference (2.306).

Although the definition by causality is probably the most commonly quoted of all the definitions
Peirce offers of indexicality, it has come in for serious criticism. Some commentators would reject the
relation between causality and indexicality altogether, while others would see it as merely
coincidental. Burks (1949:649ff) takes Peirce to task for confusing the semiotical relation with mere
causality, when treating, for instance, the weathercock, which is causally affected by the wind, as an
instance of indexical signs: it is not clear, however, why causality should preclude indexicality, since
the fact of the wind causing the weathercock to turn must be seen be the observer to be a contiguity in
order for it to receive an interpretation.

More to the point, Goudge (1965:55) claims that not all examples of indexical signs given be Peirce are
susceptible of receiving a causal explanation: the Pole Star, for instance, may be an index of the north
celestial pole, but it is in no way caused by that astronomical location. Nor is a personal pronoun, or
even a pointing finger, actually caused by the person or thing for which it stands; and if they may be
said to motivate it, then this is also true of all other signs. Moreover, if could be added that even some
cases which are often taken to confirm the causal explanation are actually doubtful: the causal agent
may not be that which is signified, or may not signify in the same respect in which it is the cause. Of
all the innumerable causes that have to concur in order for a rap on the door to occur at a particular
moment, the door and the material of which it is made, and a particular person and his moving hand
may seem to be the most important. However, if, at this moment, no person in particular is expected,
the sign will only carry some very general meaning such as "there is somebody (probably a human
being) outside the door who wants me to open it and let him in". Nor the particular person, nor his
hand or the door, which are the causal agencies, are here parts of the meaning of the sign (Sonesson
1989a:39).

The idea that indices must point to their object by "blind compulsion" could be taken as a special case
of causality, this time applied to the interpreter, and thus more properly described as motivation.
Greenlee (1973:86) believes this to constitute a contradiction on the part of Peirce, since the
interpreting mind is on the level of Thirdness, and thus lies outside the definition of indices, which
derives from Secondness. It seems, however, that the contradiction, if there is one, should be located at
another point, for already the "immediate object" must (perhaps contrary to the "dynamical object") be
a mental unit. There is certainly an extremely Pickwickian sense in which all indices force us to attend
to their objects, but in that sense the observation applies to all signs, and even to other kinds of
meaning (cf. index).

According to Peirce (2.306), all indices refer to an singular instance, not to some general category. There
are objections to this generalisation, however. From the size of an imprint left on the ground it may be
possible for the interpreter to determine that the animal which has passed by is a horse, rather than a
donkey, but normally there would be nothing in the expression of this index itself permitting him to
determine the identity of the horse in question, although, if he knows that there is only one horse and
one donkey inside the fence, he can draw a plausible conclusion as to which individual animal is
involved. It might be argued, of course, that in any case, only one, particular, animal left the imprint;
but the case is quite similar to the knock at the door, where, although a particular person must be
doing the knocking, the knock itself merely means "there is someone on the door", unless we possess
some additional information. The same argument may be applied to the photograph, in particular to
the photogram, in which the referent would not normally be recognisable (cf. Sonesson 1989b:59ff).

Goudge (1965: 60f) also argues against this generalisation, quoting the case in which a demonstrative
pronoun ("that") refers to Newton’s First Law, which as such, is not a singularity. Outside the
linguistic domain, other interesting examples can be found. According to Peirce, the rolling gait of a
man is an index of his being a sailor: but being a sailor is a social role, not a singularity. More
importantly, however, the gait is part of a social habitus defining this role, which makes it into a part
of a whole (a factorality). But if the relationship of a property to that of which it is a part is indexical,
then it is reasonable to think that indexicality will also account for the relation between an item and
the class of which it is a member. Such examples are apparently not among those mentioned by Peirce,
but they are often cited by later semioticians: thus, for instance, if a pretzel is an index of a bakery,
than that must be in virtue of its being a member of the class of products sold in the bakery. A class is
of course not a singular object, but it may be considered a collection of objects. Often, however, such a
class is itself determined by abstract properties. A tailor’s swatch, for instance, is a sign of a class of
cloth having the same quality and pattern, but not the same shape or size. Some samples, for instance
colour samples, may even be indices of abstract properties themselves (Sonesson 1989a:43ff, 137ff;
1989b: 60f).

In order to consider whether indices demonstrates the existence of their object, it might be necessary
first to discuss the meaning of existence (cf. Goudge 1965:58ff). However, if existence is taken to imply
the physical occurrence in the ordinary world of our experience, it does not seem to apply to all
indices, not, for instance, to the cases considered above, in connection with singularity. A person
having the rolling gait of a sailor may, in fact, not be a sailor; and the pretzel hang out above the
bakery (admittedly an icon of an index) is still to be seen when the bakery is closed, and no bakery
products are for sale. Plausible indices of a unicorn may be produced using a set of horseshoes and a
bull’s horn, and do not testify to the existence of unicorns. A faked photograph of a unicorn, or
whatever, may be assembled, using pieces of real photographs, processing them in a computer, or
even creating them entirely by means of a computer program. Of course, the latter pictures are no
photographs, and so no indices, but there is no way we can discover that from looking at them (cf.
Sonesson 1989b:61f). For all practical purposes, then, indices cannot testify to the existence of their
objects.

As discussed above, indexicality emerges as a potential sign, or, better, as a particular kind of ground
characterising indexical signs, but which may also be found outside signs. Perception would seem to
be profused with indexicality. Indeed, proximity is a basic factor of perception according to Gestalt
psychology, and is also one of the relationships included in topological space perception. The relation
of part to whole is fundamental to Gestalt relations themselves. All indexical relations involve either
contiguity or factorality. Those indexicalities which are not as yet signs, being based on items which are
not situated on different levels of directness or thematisation, or not clearly differentiated, may be
described as contexts (or ‘pairings’, in Husserl’s sense). Any experience of two elements being related
by proximity, conceived as a primordial perceptual fact, may be considered an actual perceptual context
involving contiguity. A actual perceptual context involving factorality is any experience of something
as being a part of a whole, or as being a whole having parts (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5).

When only one of the items is directly given, and the other precedes it in time, or follows it, we may
speak of an abductive context (protention and retention, respectively). The term abduction is employed
here in Peirce's sense, to signify a general rule or regularity which is taken for granted and which links
one singular fact with another. All experience taking place in time is of this kind, for instance our
expectancy, when seeing the wood-cutter with the axe raised over his head, that on the following
moment, he is going to hit the piece of wood (contiguity protention), and on the moment just
preceding, he lifted the axe to its present position (contiguity retention). Abductive contexts involving
factorality would be, using some Peircean examples, the gait of the sailor, the symptom as part of the
disease, part and whole in a picture, the partly destroyed Minoan fresco, a jig-saw puzzle, a piece of
torn paper (the last three examples combine factorality and contiguity). We may use the term proto-
index for an indexicality which is only momentarily a sign, as would be the "tableau vivant" of the
wood-cutter, the photographic pose (which is a limitation in time), that what is seen in the view-finder
(with spatial limits), and indeed many of the examples given above, to the extent that the flow of
indexicalities is momentarily halted. The archaeologist’s art, from this point of view, would consist in
transforming indexicalities of decayed cultures into proto-indices accessible to us.

Bibliography:
Bruss, Elisabeth, "Peirce and Jakobson on the nature of the sign", in The sign – Semiotics around the
world. Bailey, R.W., Matejka, L., & Steiner, P., (eds.), Michigan Slavic Contributions: Ann Arbor; pp.
81-98;

Burks, Arthur, "Icon, index, symbol", in Philosophy and phenomenological research, IX:4, 1949, pp. 673-
689.

Dubois, Philippe, L’acte photographique. Paris & Bruxelles: Nathan/Labor 1983.

Goudge, Thomas A. "Peirce’s Index", in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Socieity, Amherst, Mass.;
1965, 1, pp. 52-70.

Greenlee, Douglas, Peirce’s Concept of Sign. The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1973.

Husserl, Edmund, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins Halle 1928: The Hague: Nijhoff 1966.

Jakobson, Roman, "Coup d’œil sur le développment de la sémiotique", in A semiotic landscape/Panorama

sémiotique. Actes du premier congrés de l’Association internationale de sémiotique, Milan, juin 1974.
Chatman, S, Eco, U., & Klinkenberg, J.M., (eds.); The Hague, Paris & New York Mouton 1979; pp 3-18.

Nöth, Winfried, Semiotik. Tübinger: Niemeyer Verlag 1975.

Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Papers I-VIII. Hartshorne, C, Weiss, P, & Burks, A, (eds.).
Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press 1931-58

Savan, David, An introduction to C.S. Peirce’s semiotics. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle 1976.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989 (a)

Sonesson, Göran, Semiotics of photography. On tracing the index. Report 4 from the Semiotics project.
Lund: Institute of Art History 1989 (b).
See also:
Icon, Iconicity, Index, Metonymy, Photography,

Isotopy
First introduced in an early work by A.J. Greimas (1966:96), the notion of isotopy is now a key term of
the Paris school approach, was included in Eco’s (1979; 1984) taxonomy of interpretation strategies,
and was given an antonym, termed allotopy, by Groupe µ (1977; 1992). Isotopy was originally said to
consist in the permanence of contextual features ("classemes"), whose variations, instead of destroying
the unity of the "text", serve to confirm it. The features in question are thus redundant, in the sense of
information theory, i.e. they are repeated all through the "text", assuring its coherence, and, more in
particular, a single interpretation (cf. Greimas 1970:10, 188; 1972:8; also Groupe µ 1977:30ff, 39, 41;
1992: 262). Later, however, it was suggested that one "text" may contain multiple isotopies, each one
giving rise to a different coherent reading.

Operationally, the result of an isotopy analysis simply is a list of terms ("lexemes") having some
contextual features ("classemes") in common. Greimas (1966:50ff) tried, at the beginning, to solve the
problem taken care of by "selectional restrictions" within generative grammar, but generalising it to
larger stretches of discourse. In the sentence "the dog barks", subject and verb are semantically
coherent, which they are not in "the dog cackles". Following Hjelmslev, Greimas argues for the
reduction of infinite classes of meaning to finite and preferentially small ones. But since we clearly
need more specific features than "animalhood", and at least as particular as "caninity" (and probably,
in other cases, "poodleness"), it is not clear that any reduction will result (Sonesson 1978:50ff;
1988:19ff).

If we take the isotopy to be unordered set, with no inner structure (as suggested by Rastier 1972:82), it
will be impossible to explain why the sentence "the dog of the superintendent barks" is not incoherent.
The classemic features must be placed inside a syntactic frame (cf. Sonesson 1978:50ff; Groupe µ
1977:41f). However, yet another, more fundamental, kind of organisation is present in Greimas’
intuitive characterisation, as opposed to their operationalisation: temporality. Redundance stands, in
information theory, for total predictability, which refers to the relative certainty of the expectancies
entertained by the receiver. When Greimas talks about the isotopy being confirmed, this is reminiscent
of the constructionist approach to perception (cf. Sonesson 1989,III.3.3.). It could be argued, then, that
the central concept here should not be redundancy, but rather expectancy, considered in relation to its
possible fulfilment in time.

Consider what happens when expectancies are not fulfilled. Greimas (1966:70) recounts a funny story
to illustrate the case of a "rupture of isotopy". During a party, two men meet on the terrace, and one of
them remarks that the evening has been perfect, the food excellent, and the toilettes beautiful. The
other answers that he is ignorant about the latter fact, and when the first, with some surprise, wonders
why, he says that he still hasn’t been there.

The joke depends on the ambiguity of the term "toilette" in French (as in English): lavatory or a
particularly elegant dress. The example is curious, for the two meanings of the signifier "toilette" do
not possess any semantic feature in common: rather, two contents are successively attributed to a
single signifier. Concretely, the shift to the second interpretation of the signifier "toilet" occurs,
because on its fifth anaphoric occurrence, the it enters into a syntactico-semantic frame, which only
admits of the latter reading: it is possible to go to the lavatory, but not an elegant dress.

This is quite different from Rastier’s elegant analysis of Mallarmé’s poem "Salut", where a number of
isotopies are distinguished, two of which, "banquet" and "sailing", have a few unique signifiers while
sharing many others. In Mallarmé’s poem, a whole series of lexemes form part of the same semantic
fields, as for instance "sailing", "toasting", etc. Also, some lexemes pertaining to one isotopy may,
thanks to a metaphorical suppression of traits, be read on other isotopies. Thus, in the toast isotopy,
the term "poupe" (that is, literally, "stern") from the sailing isotopy, retains its abstract features
[+extremity] and [+posteriority], becoming a metaphor for the end of the table. In Greimas’ funny
story, some, very abstract, common features of the nuclear figures of the lexemes present in the first
isotopy may be posited, but nothing of the sort is possible, for the second isotopy, which has no
lexemes of its own. And between the nuclear figures of the central lexemes of the two isotopies, no
single traits could, be any feat of imagination, be taken to be identical. The strange fact, however, is
that, while no real isotopies are to be discovered in Greimas’ joke, there is no doubt that it is organised
around a rupture!

We are reminded, at this point, of another analysis of jokes, due to Arthur Koestler, which takes them
to involve "the perceiving of a situation in two self-consistent but mutually incompatible frames of
reference", in which expectations are built up, but climax is never reached (Koestler 1978:113ff). David
Perkins (1981:91ff) points out that there is no way of falsifying this theory, since two "frames of
references" can always plausibly be set up, whenever their supposed product is considered creative,
while counter-examples may simply be declared uncreative. Therefore, it must be possible to define
the respective identities of both the frames (or isotopies) involved precedent to their clash at the
moment of creation.

In his above-mentioned analysis, Rastier (1972:86) refers somewhat obliquely to "the ritual of the
banquet", without giving it any theoretical status. Yet there seems to be independent evidence for the
existence of a such ritual, which could perhaps be ascribed to a more general frame or scheme for
festive occasions, some other aspects of which are manifested in Greimas’ joke. An analysis of
Greimas’ joke in terms of schemes was first suggested by Sonesson (1978) and, quite independently,
by Umberto Eco (1979: 136; 1984:195). However, Eco continues to consider this to be a kind of isotopy,
which he understands (1984:201), much more broadly than Greimas, as a "constancy in going in a
direction that a texts exhibits when submitted to rules of interpretative coherence".

The scheme for going to the toilet is no doubt widely attested, not only because it corresponds to a
frequent practice of social life, but because it figures prominently in jokes. However, it could be
argued that what is needed here is something much more general, two super-schemes, or perhaps
better, two categories organising classes of schemes. Indeed, in Greimas’ story, there is not only a shift
of isotopies, or rather, schemes, but an opposition between them: if the word "toilet" were exchanged
for another ambiguous term, no joke would ensue (cf. Sonesson 1996).

This exchange of schemes could perhaps be construed as an opposition between that which is public,
in the sense of being given as a spectacle for everybody to see, instead of being private; social, in the
sense of supposing an set of interactions, rather than being the act of a single individual; cultural, in the
sense of not being natural, where the latter pertains to man as member of the animal kingdom; and
ceremonial, in the sense of being above the level of ordinary life, as opposed to that which is not only
part of everyday life, but is considered to be below it, to be "indecent", or "dirty". We now see that the
opposition around which Greimas’ story turns is largely the same as the one organising Duchamp’s
act when he placed the urinal in the art gallery. In fact, Duchamp’s works, like those of the other
dadaists, were often structured as jokes, though their humorous character has since then worn off.

The problem with Koestler’s frames, as well as Greimas’ isotopies, is not only that they are set up ad
hoc, lacking independent justification, but they also lack internal organisation. Our knowledge of
otherwise attested schemes actually may permit us to make rather concrete predictions, which are
then sometimes deceived. After the first scheme is explicitly introduced in the first phrase of the story,
the expectancies which are thereby built up are confirmed and amplified by the mention of the terrace,
as well as by the content of the first speaker’s discourse. Then the second, implicit occurrence of the
signifier "toilette", in the second speaker’s first rejoinder, begins, without really succeeding, to call into
question the first, already well-established scheme. At the same time, however, other, more general
expectancies are beginning to crystallise: as we have seen, the festive scheme is one among a number
of public schemes, and what happens at the party, or at least all the symptoms of its refinement and
distinction, are supposed to be there for everybody to see. When the second speaker discovers to us
his ignorance of all these publicly apparent symptoms of elegance, a new scheme is already prepared
for. At this point, we know that a new element is going to be introduced, and the oppositional
organisation suggests what it might be: either a scheme whose theme is this very ignorance on the
part of the second speaker; or one which highlights some secret, hidden, element taking the place of
the public one. It takes a syntactical frame, not an isotopy, in Greimas’ sense, to destroy completely
the first scheme, and to establish an alternative one: the one concerned with the semi-secret practice of
using the lavatories.
Since it is a joke, Greimas’ story also has another level of organisation. Indeed, as soon as we realise
that the story in question is a joke, we expect the non-expected to occur – in a particular case, we may,
in Greimasean terms, expect a rupture of isotopy, that is, a non-recurrence of the same units, an
allotopy. It may therefore be suggested that an isotopy, in the more restricted sense of a set of
redundant semic categories, is only one of several means of which a scheme disposes when it goes
about its business of producing meaning. It is of course possible to retort that, as the joke reaches its
point of rupture, it continues conveying the meaning "joke". In some respects, this way of putting it
may actually be informative; but it does not tell us anything about the specific predictions which are
fulfilled or deceived (Sonesson 1996).

When applying the concept to visual semiotics, the norm and the isotopy seems to be more or less
identified in Groupe µ:s (1992:262ff) usage, which gives the impression that recurrence and
redundance are always expected, when in many cases it is change and modification which is really the
normal course of events. In the second place, even if recurrence is expected on a certain level of
abstraction ("human being"), the interesting thing may be precisely which part of it is expected ("head"
rather than "feet"), etc.

The term allotopy, introduced by Groupe µ (1977:36), must, in one way or another, designate
something which is the opposite of isotopy): it could thus be the expectancy that no units, or some
particular set of units, are not going to recur in the future; or it could be the fact that the expectancy of
recurrence embodied in the isotopy has been deceived. In most cases, the second sense of the term is
certainly the one intended. However, when discussing verbal language, Groupe µ (1977:35)
judiciously observes that, contrary the content plane, where recurrence is expected, the expression
plane would normally offer a variety of sounds or letters. In their discussion of the collage, Groupe µ
(1978:17ff) seems to use the term allotopy in our first sense, to stand for a norm opposed to that of
isotopy, when claiming that some pictures are "isotopical" on the plastic level, i.e. have only one kind
of shape, contrary to normal pictures, which must mean that the latter have allotopy as their norm.

But if this is so, some more generic instance is needed, in order to lay down that, in a given case,
recurrence or non-recurrence is to be expected, and what particular form the one or the other will
take. Thus, while a picture joining together the bosom of Mae West, the face of a general, and a
football player’s hairy legs is undoubtedly deviant (1978:18), the same holds true of another picture
displaying multiple copies of Mae West’s bosom where other body parts are should occur. In Max
Ernst’s collage "Rencontre de deux sourires", a bird’s head is placed on a human body, thus
subverting, according to Groupe µ (p.256,261), the isotopy of the human body. Actually, something
more complex would seem to happen: the bird’s head constitutes a deviation in relation to the human
body scheme, but it also serves to confirm some more general body scheme valid for all "higher"
animals, for a head actually appears where a head is expected. Thus, something like the scheme is
necessary, in order correctly to distribute expected recurrences and non-recurrences.

Another case is point is the so-called "projected" or "pre-textual isotopy", (1992; 267, 271, 275, 278, 313,
356; 1977:56, 59; 1980: 266ff), which is certainly no isotopy, for it does not involve any recurrences and
redundances, but perhaps a projection and certainly a pretext or, better, a presupposition. This notion
is used to take care of cases in which a meaning is transferred onto a picture from some other place,
based on our knowledge that the picture in question belong to a series of other pictures, or to a
particular pictorial genre, or because of its title, the communicative situation, or even a phantasm on
the part of the beholder.

Transformations are rhetorical, according to Groupe µ (1992:295), only to the extent that the apply
heterogeneously; if so, transformative rhetoric would indeed depend on a rupture of isotopy. But
when discussing concrete cases, Groupe µ (p.307ff) also attends to some homogeneous
transformations, and this is also the reasonable choice, if historical circumstances are taken into
account. But there is no rupture of isotopy in homogeneous transformations: they simply may
constitute an infraction of the historical norm stipulating the way in which objects are to be rendered
in pictures.

The concept of scheme has a long history in cognitive psychology from the work of Bartlett, Janet, and
Halbwachs, to contemporary artificial intelligence and text grammars. We can see it as a lattice of pegs
on which individual facts may be hooked up. In relation to such as scheme, real instances may by
assimilated or accommodated, in Piaget’s sense, or they may constitute idealtypes, prototypes, or
deviant instances (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.3.1.; 1996). This leaves the isotopy as a very particular, and very
limited, means, among many others, for realising the schemes of the everyday world.
 Göran Sonesson

Bibliography
Eco, Umberto, Lector in fabula. Milan: Bompiani 1979.

- Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Bloomington, Indiana Univesity Press 1984.

Greimas, A.J., Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse 1966..

- Du sens. Paris: Seuil 1970.

- "Pour une théorie du discours poétique", in Essais de sémiotique poétique. Greimas, A.J. (ed.), 5-24.
Paris: Larousse 1972.

Groupe µ (Dubois, J., Edeline, Fr., Klinkenberg, J.M., Minguet, Ph, , etc.). Rhétorique de la poésie.
Bruxelles: Editions Complexe 1977.

— "Douce bribes pour décoller en 40 000 signes", Revue d'ésthétique, 3-4, 11-41, 1978.

— "Plan d'un rhétorique de l'image", Kodikas/Code, 3, 249-268, 1980.

— Traité du signe visuel. Pour une rhétorique de l’image. Paris: Seuil 1992.

Koestler, Arthur, Janus. A summing up. London: Hutchinson 1978.

Perkins, David, The mind’s best work. Cambridge. Mass., Harvard University Press 1981.

Sonesson, Göran Une machine a signifier: L’homme. EEHSS, Paris 1978.

–Methods and models in pictorial semiotics. Report 3 from the Semiotics project. Lund: Semiotics Seminar,
1988.

– Pictorial concepts. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.

– "An essay concerning images. From rhetoric to semiotics by way of ecological physics", To appear in
Semiotica, 1995.

Rastier, François, "Systematique des isotopies", in Essais de sémiotique poétique, A.J. Greimas (ed.), pp
80-106. Paris: Larousse 1972.

"La rhétorique de l’image"

In spite of the confusion to which Barthes testifies in his employment of linguistic terms, and although
the usage to which he puts these terms is in itself incoherent, "La rhétorique de l’image", first
published in 1964, marks a real breakthrough in pictorial semiotics. There are some intrinsic reasons
for this, for the article may well constitute the first attempt to employ a simple model permitting to fix
the recurring elements of pictorial signification. Yet the importance of the work is mainly due to the
influence it was to exercise on almost all later analyses, either directly, the Barthesian terms being
applied as a matter of course, or by way of reaction, when the authors take pains to dissociate their
approach from that of Barthes.

Since the article is concerned with a publicity picture boosting the delights of a particular brand of
spaghetti, called "Panzani", it is not surprising that Barthes should have acquired a substantial
following among specialist in advertising, both those intent on helping the agencies of publicity to
amplify their resources of persuasion, and those devoted to a Marxist kind of ideological analysis. The
socio-critical strand of the Panzani analysis gave rise to several national traditions, differently
integrated with other scholarly conceptions, which have seemed to be fairly immune to later
developments in semiotics, such as, in the sixties and seventies, the work of Hermann Ehmer and
others in Germany, and that of Gert Z. Nordström in Sweden, as well as, much more recently, the
publications by Gunthert Kress and David Hodge in Britain. However, some analysts interested in
fine art, such as Louis Marin, rapidly tried to adapt the approach to the analysis of 17th century
painting, and those who set out to deny the feasibility of a semiotical approach to pictorial art, such as
Hubert Damisch, clearly identified the Barthesian approach with semiotics tout court.

Starting out from a few general observations, the article rapidly turns into a regular text analysis
concerned with one particular photograph, defined both as to its means/ends category (publicity)
and, somewhat more loosely, its channel division (magazine picture). The photograph under analysis
shows samples of Panzani products, i.e. spaghetti, Italian tomato sauce and grated cheese, together
with a selection of vegetables presented in a string bag, which is held up by an invisible hand outside
the picture. The brand name is to be read on the Panzani products, and there is also a short text below
the depiction of the string bag. Barthes first comments on the importance of the linguistic part of the
message, and then, in the main part of the essay, goes on to specify a series of "connotations"
supposedly appearing partly in the verbal text and partly in the picture.

It is here that Barthes (as well as in Barthes 1961) proclaims his famous paradox, according to which
the picture is a message deprived of a code. The term "image" in fact alternates in the same paragraph
with the more particular term "photograph", as if this were the same thing, but later on the
photograph is opposed in this respect to the drawing. Yet many followers of Barthes retain the wider
interpretation, using it to defend the inanalysability, or ineffability, of paintings and other works of
art. Actually, neither Barthes, nor his followers makes any real attempt to analyse the picture: they are
discoursing all the time on the referent, that is, on the depicted scene. Lindekens (1971) already
recognised that a "rhetoric of the referent", not of the picture sign, was at stake in the Panzani article.

Another fundamental parti pris of the Panzani essay, which has left its imprint on pictorial semiotics, is
the idea of no picture being able to convey information by itself or, alternatively, containing so much
contradictory information that a verbal message is needed to fix (or "anchor") its meaning. No matter
which interpretation we choose (and the latter one may have more support in the text), pictorial
meaning is supposed to depend on linguistic meaning. Pictures certainly offer much less linguistic
information than verbal texts, except in those cases in which the picture itself contains the
reproduction of written messages, as is the case of the Panzani publicity; but it could be argued that
the picture much better conveys another kind of information that resembles the one present in the
perceptual world. Indeed, the brand name "Panzani", which Barthes discusses, is in fact, as Prieto
(1975) notes, a visual-iconic sign, a part of the scene depicted. Curiously, Barthes has nothing to say
about that portion of the verbal text which is not part of the scene, the slogan "Pâtes — Sauces —
Parmesan à l’italienne de luxe"; and even when discussing the brand name, he in no way considers in
what way it serves to "anchor" the pictorial message (cf. Sonesson 1989: 114ff).

In both the verbal part and the pictorial one, Barthes distinguishes what he calls the denoted and the
connoted message. The brand name "Panzani" is said to connote "Italianity"; the picture, however,
supposedly conveys the same connotation, in addition to "still-life", "abundance" (analysed into
"complete meal" and "identity of commodities in their natural state and the corresponding industrial
products") and "return from the market place" (implying "freshness" and "domestic preparation").
Although Barthes refers to Hjelmslev, it should be clear that these contents, with the exception of the
linguistic one (see Kerbrat-Orecchini 1977:16), and "advertisement" which Barthes curiously rejects,
cannot be connotations in the semiotical sense: rather they hover between stylistic connotation and
implication (cf. Sonesson 1989:125ff). As Floch (1978) observes, Barthes identifies the opposition
denoted vs connoted with three others: coded vs non-coded, perceptual vs cultural, literal vs
symbolic. This is not quite true however: he actually takes the linguistic connotation to be less coded
than its denotation, while the reverse is supposed to be the case in the picture (cf. Sonesson 1989:117f).

It has often been suggested that, when applying the categories connotation and denotation to pictures,
Barthes is simply repeating Panofsky’s iconological model using other terms (cf. Floch 1978; Larsen
1976; Eco 1968). A closer comparison, however, will show the differences: since iconographical
symbols are composite signs, Panofsky’s second, iconographical level remains on Barthes’ first,
denotational level; and since the history of styles is located by Panofsky on the first, pre-
iconographical level, it must contain Barthes’ "rhetoric", i.e. the expression plane of connotational
language. Moreover, whereas the relation between the second and the third level of Barthes’ model is
intrinsic and semantic, it is a relation of causality to Panofsky, serving to rely the sign to outer reality
or thought (cf. Sonesson 1989,123ff). Yet, if we ignore the fact that the subject matter of iconography is
formed by stories and allegories, and that the sources of interpretation should be literary (cf.
Kaemmerling 1979:485ff), we might want to argue that many of Barthes’ examples fit much better in
with Panofsky’s model than with the concepts which Barthes takes over from Hjelmslev.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland, "Le message photographique", in Communications, 1, 1961, pp. . Also in Barthes,
Roland, L´obvie et l´obtus. Paris: Seuil 1982, pp. 9-24.

Barthes, Roland, "Rhétorique de l´image", in Communications, 4, 1964, pp. 40-51. Also in Barthes,
Roland, L´obvie et l´obtus. Paris: Seuil 1982, pp. 25-42

Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente. Milan. Bompiani 1968.

Floch, Jean-Marie, "Roland Barthes. Sémiotique de l’image", in Bulletin du Groupe de recherches sémio-
linguistiques, no 4/5, 1978, pp. 27-32.

Kaemmerling, Ekkat, (ed.), Bildende Kunst as Zeichensystem I: Ikonographie und Ikonologie. Köln: Dumont
1979.

Kebrat-Orecchioni, Catherine, La connotation. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon 1977.

Larsen, Peter, "Billedanalyse", in Massekommunikation, Olivarius, P., Rasmussen, O., & Rugholm, P.,
(eds.), Copenhagen: Dansklærerføreningen 1976; pp. 71-118.

Lindekens, René, 1971: Eléments pour une sémiotique de la photographie. Paris & Bruxelles: Didier/Aimav
1971.

Marin, Louis, Etudes sémiologiques. Paris: Klincksieck. 1971

Prieto, Luis, Essais de linguistique et sémiologie générales. Genève, Droz 1975.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.

See also:
Adverstising, Connotation/Denotation, Icon, Iconicity, Iconology, Image/picture, Picture (perception
of), Visual semiotics

Linguistic model fallacy

There is a simplistic conception of semiotics, according to which it consists of two traditions, the
Peircean one, which starts out from a general, philosophically grounded, theory; and the Saussurean
one, which tend to conceive all semiotic phenomena on the model of verbal language, particularly, as
the latter was conceived by the Structuralist schools in linguistics. In fact, many followers of Saussure,
such as the Prague school or the tradition from Buyssens to Prieto, make very few and only very
abstract analogies to verbal language. And those who explicitly claimed to apply the Saussurean
language model to all phenomena, the so-called French structuralists, were very rapidly disenchanted
with the linguistic model, and repudiated it as rashly as they had once embraced it.

Indeed, it is seldom appreciated that the outright rejection of the linguistic model must be at least as
naive, and as epistemologically unsound, as its unqualified acceptance; for, the use of one science as a
metaphor for another involves such a long series of choices and comparisons, on different levels of
abstraction and analysis, that there can be no rational way of undoing them all at one stroke (cf.
Sonesson 1989a,I.1.2. and 1989c). The validity of the linguistic analogy must be appreciated separately
for different levels of abstraction pertaining to the object of study, and when it comes to the nature of
semiotics as a science we are faced with a quite different question.

If we take semiotics to be something more than a cover term for a series of traditional endeavours, like
art history, the history of literature, and so on, we can reasonably claim that, like linguistics, it must be
a nomothetic science, which, just like linguistics, but contrary to the natural sciences and the social
sciences, is concerned with qualities, rather than quantities. Thus, semiotics should be concerned to
ascertain general laws and regularities, but it should do so in terms of meaningful social categories,
not in statistical form (e.g. what is true of all pictures, or all kinds of music, etc., and of some particular
sub-categories of these, not of individual objects). Criticism of the linguistic models which are directed
to this view of science, or which concerns the even more general issue of rationalism, really involves
the proposal that we should concern ourselves with something more important than semiotics, or
science generally. It may therefore be individually, and even socially, justified, but can never be so
from an internally scientific point of view.

To admit this parallel to linguistics is properly speaking to embrace the linguistic model, which
consists in transposing concepts and terms derived form the (structural) study of language to the
analysis of other phenomena. In fact, for the last 15-20 years, numerous exponents of other semiotic
domains have marked their distance to the linguistic model, but this has often meant a return to a
prestructuralist (paradoxically called poststructuralist), and even pretheoretical, stage of reflection, as
is the case of the late Barthes, and in part of the work of Damisch, Marin, Schefer, and Lyotard. On an
early stage, Hubert Damisch (1979) quoted numerous reasons for thinking that the picture was quite
differently organized than verbal language, and Christian Metz (1968) argued against positing
something like a language system behind the meaning production of the cinema.

In this "feud of language", as Pavel (1989) has called it, both structuralists and their critics may well be
accused of ignoring the stakes involved; but it should be important to distinguish, more clearly than
Pavel does, their separate responsibilities. In the case of most one-time structuralists, the linguistic
model was abandoned like a whim of fashion, just as it had once been taken up: the exact way in
which the linguistic analogy did not fit in with the nature of music, pictures, or whatever, was never
spelled out. It is true that Metz and Damisch tried to do exactly that: however, it is clearly the
intuitive, pre-theoretical notions of film and picture, respectively, which are here compared to the
concept of language, as reconstructed by linguistic theory, in fact, by a particular linguistic theory,
that of the Saussure/Hjelmslev tradition. But the comparison of a folk notion and a concept forming
part of a scientific theory can never yield any valid result (cf. Sonesson 1989,I.1.2.). This state of the
case explains that, more recently, postmodernist critics like Boit (1992) and Krauss (1992) have had no
difficulty in resurrecting the linguistic analogy, albeit only in the particular case of Cubist painting.

No matter which may be the deformations which the linguistic model imposes on other kinds of
signification, they stem less from the linguistic terms as such, than from the distortions which the
latter have suffered in the hands of non-linguistics. With few exceptions, linguists cannot legitimately
be accused of having imposed their model on other brands of meaning. On the contrary, they should
be held responsible for having treated the analysis of all non-linguistic significations as something
spurious, either denying the interest of their study altogether, or citing these meaning types only in
the guise of simplistic examples at the beginning of introductory courses to linguistics.

We may well doubt that, in a deeper sense, there has even been a linguistic model in semiotics.
Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Greimas, and many of their followers did certainly have recourse, in their
attempts to analyze non-linguistic objects, to a number of terms taken over from Saussure, Hjelmslev,
and Jakobson. When closely scrutinised, these analyses generally turns out to be concerned with very
abstract notions like connectedness (in the guise of syntagms, syntax, and metonymies) and
categorical identity (epitomized as paradigms and metaphors). Thus the same thing could have been
said without referring to linguistic terms.

In the second place, most semioticians are really too ignorant of the concepts of linguistics to by able
to apply its model (cf. Pavel 1989). Even connotational language, as it is misinterpreted by Barthes, is
introduced as a means of establishing complex networks of meaning, not to do the business intended
by Hjelmslev (see Sonesson 1989,II.1.). The notion of sign itself is never highlighted, although the
terms "expression" and "content" appear abundantly. The term, if not the concept, of structure is
essential to Lévi-Strauss' analysis of, among other things, the Northwest Coast masks, but the actual
procedure really involves putting the concept of structure defined by linguistic structuralism on its
head. Applying Lévi-Strauss’ reasoning to language, we would be able to demonstrate, much to the
surprise of all Japanese, that there is a distinction between the sounds "r" and "l" in their language. The
real interests of many structuralist analyses may actually be discovered once we realise they are not at
all talking about the same phenomena as in linguistics, which is for instance true of the notion of
opposition (cf. Sonesson 1989,I.1.3/5).

In fact, it is only when the ultimate constituents of pictures are compared to those of verbal language
that linguisticism looms large, and this happens, in particular, in the approach of Umberto Eco (1968:
1976). Eco clearly intended to demonstrate that pictures, apparently recalcitrant to such an analyses,
corresponded to Saussure ideal sign, in being both conventional and apt to be decomposed into
features having no meaning of their own. In later publications, Eco has been retreating ever further
from this untenable position; but it was only recently demonstrated why it was untenable (cf.
Sonesson 1989,III.2.).

The pan-linguisticism characteristic of French structuralism seems to be of at least two kinds. While
the Greimas school would seem to adopt, to some extent, the linguistic model, because all meaning is
considered to be similar to the linguistic kind, or to admit of the same treatment, that is, for
ontological reasons, the justifications Barthes appears to have for the same choice are rather
epistemological, and basically opposed to those of the Greimas school. Barthes seems to think that
semiotical systems other than verbal language are inaccessible to analysis, and thus can only be
attained indirectly, through the way language refers to them and describes them. Probably, Barthes
really holds both positions, in different articles, and the same could be true of the Tartu school.

To reject ontological pan-linguisticism, we will have to show that other sign types or other meanings
are, in some essential respects, fundamentally different from verbal language. To reject
epistemological pan-linguisticism, on the other hand, it is necessary to demonstrate that there are
meanings which are accessible to us independently of verbal language, for instance before it is even
acquired (cf. Sonesson 1994).

There are, however, some levels on which the linguistic model may actually be adequate. It may apply
on very high levels of generality. For instance, if, following Halliday, we distinguish four functions of
communication, the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual, it is reasonable to claim that they
will also be found in visual semiotics (cf. O’Toole 1994). Also, it could be argued that, for historical
reasons, other semiotical systems are beginning to resemble verbal language: thus, for instance, thanks
to computer programs and clip art archives, pictures production nowadays could be conceived as a
recombination of fixed elements given beforehand. And at the moment when pictures are either sent
from a television studio, and fetched from a data base over a modem link, pictorial communication,
like that of verbal dialogue, may be said to involve a sender transferring a message to a receiver at a
particular moment in time.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography
Bois, Yves-Alain, "The Semiology of Cubism", in Picasso and Braque. A symposium. Zelevansky, Lynn
(ed.). 169-208. The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1992.
Damisch, Hubert (1979). "Sur la sémiologie de la peinture". In A semiotic landscape/Panorama sémiotique.
Actes du premier congrés de l'Association internationale de sémiotique, Milan 1974., S. Chatman, U. Eco, U.,
& J.M. Klinkenberg, (eds.), 128-136. The Hague, Paris, & New York: Mouton.
Eco, Umberto (1968). La struttura assente. Milan: Bompiani.
— (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Krauss, Rosalind, "The Motivation of the Sign", in Picasso and Braque. A symposium. Zelevansky, Lynn
(ed.). 262-288. The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1992.
Metz, Christian, Essais sur la signification au cinéma /I/. Paris: Klincksieck 1968.
O’Toole, Michael, The language of displayed art. London: Leicester University Press 1994.
Pavel, Thomas, The Feud of language, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989
Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial Concepts, Lund: Lund University Press 1989
– "Pictorial semiotics, Gestalt theory, and the ecology of perception", in Semiotica 99-3/4, 1994, 319-399.

See also: opposition, metonymy, iconicity

Metonymy
Together with metaphor and synecdoche, metonymy is the most familiar of the ancient figures of
rhetoric originating in Greek antiquity, and later included in the more comprehensive taxonomies
elaborated in French 17th and 18th century treatises. In the complex classifications of the latter works,
metonymy, like the two other figures, is a trope (applying to words, or single signs, rather than to
sentences, or sign complexes) and a substitution (involving the exchange of one elements for another,
rather than the suppression or addition of an element, or the permutation of the order of several
elements). What differentiates metonymy from metaphor and synecdoche is the nature of the
relationship between the two elements entering into the substitutions. Whereas the tenor and its
vehicle are joined by similarity in metaphor, metonymy connects them by means of a contiguity, and
they are related as part to whole in the synecdoche.

In semiotics, however, these figures are interesting for the relationship they seem to entertain to more
basic theoretical concepts, such as the distinction between syntagm and paradigm, and the notion of
indexicality, and for the part they have played in the renewal of rhetoric inside semiotics.

The two most basic relationships of verbal language recognised by Saussure, the paradigmatic (or
"associative") relations, and the syntagmatic relations, also known as the axes of substitution and
selection, were identified by Jakobson (1942) with metaphor and metonymy, respectively, assimilating
the synecdoche to the latter. Not only did Jakobson apply these terms to non-verbal discourses,
claiming that metaphor characterized lyrical poetry, Romanticism, Chaplin’s films, and the Freudian
dream symbols, while metonymy was embodied in Epic poetry, realististic novels, Griffith’s films, and
the Freudian dream projections; but he also distinguished two kinds of aphasia, according as they
resulted from an impairment of metaphoric or metonymic aspects of the language capacity.
Jakobson’s identification of substitution, paradigm, and metaphor, on the one hand, and of
combination, syntagm, and metonymy, on the other, has inspired many followers, the most famous of
which is the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

The idea of narrative prose and film being essentially metonymic has encountered a large following,
among literary scholars, and film semioticians, respectively. The classical Hollywood clichés are often
described as metonymic (e.g. the falling calendar pages, the driving wheels of the railroad engine) or
synecdochic (e.g. close shots of marching feet to represent an army). Ever since Barthes, in his famous
Panzani analysis, described the tomato as a metonymy for Italy, students of advertisements have
claimed to discover numerous visual incarnations of this figure in their domain. In most
advertisements, the contiguity, e.g. between a crown and a bottle of gin, is not referred to as
something known, as in Barthes’ example, but is created in the picture, and yet such instances, too,
have often been termed metonymies.

Jakobson’s analogy is problematic on several counts. First, and least seriously, it reposes on an
identification of metonymy and synecdoche. This amalgamation has sometimes been justified by
saying that it may be difficult to tell the two figures apart: for example, the crown will be considered a
metonymy for the king, if the latter is considered to be a physical person, with whom the crown is in
spatial contiguity, but a synecdoche for the king, if royalty is seen to be primarily an office, of which
the crown may be considered a significant part. But this really shows that the functions, in the two
cases, are distinct: it is the object which is ambiguously defined (Sonesson 1989,I.2.).
By identifying the two figures, however, Jakobson rightly highlights what they have in common: they
are both founded on what we, following Peirce, will call indexical grounds. There are, however, two
principles of relevance defining indexicality: contiguity, and the relation between a whole and its
parts, which could be called factorality. According to Groupe µ (1970: 97ff), objects may be
decomposed in two ways: materially (a tree divided into stem, branches, leaves, etc.) and conceptually
(the same tree replaced in the hierarchy from living things to cork-oaks). This distinction is identified
with the one in logic between extension and intension, and the former is also referred to as a
perceptual division. In fact, however, this ignores the real perceptual decomposition, which depends
on the position of the subject, which is fundamental in all visual semiosis, i.e. the division into
perspectives. Factorality must therefore be of three kinds: proper parts, properties, and perspectives
(Sonesson 1989,I.2.4.).

In the second place, to equate syntagm and paradigm with metonymy and metaphor, respectively, is
to confuse relationships inside sign systems with relationships between particular sign tokens, or
secondary relationships between signs. Indeed, metonymies, like metaphors, are either created in a
particular given text, or they are stock images, which relates signs, or at least sign contents, in stable
relations.

It has been pointed out that the similarity present in a paradigm is often simply the position in the
syntagm, whereas some more pregnant similarity relation in required in the case of metaphors. At
least, both types of similarity are relations in absentia. However, the contiguity of syntagms is a
relation in praesentia, whereas that of metonymies, like all true figures, is a relation in absentia.

True metonymies (as well as true synecdoches) really are secondary indexical signs: they relate two
pre-existing signs by means of their respective contents, which means that a sign present in the
syntagmatic chain serves to invoke another sign which is absent from it. A more common case,
however, which is often what is meant, is when no particular absent expression plane is brought to
mind, but only a secondary content is implied by the content plane of the sign which is present: here
we have what we, by analogy, could call "dead metonymies" like the cross for Christ and the sword
for the army, or "dead synecdoches", like the sail for the ship and the clock for the watchmaker’s (both
as words and as visual signs).

Barthes’ tomato standing for Italy is probably, to a Frenchman (both not, for instance, to a Mexican) a
metonymy, or perhaps better a synecdoche, in the latter sense. Most so-called metonymies found in
publicity, however, actually correspond to the inversion of the true metonymy, two signs connected
by means of their respective expressions (the crown beside the gin bottle, the naked girl in the car).
This would not ordinarily be called a metonymy, but it better corresponds to the Jakobsonean analogy
with the syntagmatic relationships, since both items connected are in praesentia (cf. Sonesson
1989,I.2.).

In the original design for the project of a general rhetoric by Groupe µ (1970), metonymy had a part to
play. The synecdoche (which to Jakobson is already a metonymy) may go from the whole to the part,
i.e. the general to the particular, or the reverse: thus, we get generalizing and particularizing
synecdoches. According to this scheme, combinations of synecdoches give rise to two kinds of
metaphors, and two kinds of metonymies, the other combinations being impossible: a generalizing
conceptual synecdoche, followed by a particularizing one, is a metaphor (flexible connecting girl and
birch); and a particularizing material synecdoche followed by a generalizing one (the French word
"voile" connecting a boat and a widow) is also a metaphor. However, a generalizing material
synecdoche followed by a particularizing one (Caesar standing for "De Bello Gallico" as different parts
of Caesar’s life) is a metonymy, and so is the combination of conceptual particularizing and
generalizing synecdoches (no example given).

Here the foundations of general rhetoric in the theory of conjuncts shows through. Structure is not
taken into account. The theory cannot explain, for instance, why "Caesar", but not just any odd part of
"the life of Caesar", may serve as a secondary sign for "De Bello Gallico". Salience of features is no
doubt fundamental in the explanation of metonymies (Sonesson 1989,I.2.4.)

It is not surprising that, when later turning to visual rhetoric, Groupe µ (1992) abandons this system.
Now, instead, figures are cross-classified as being in absentia or in praesentia, and conjoint or disjoint.
The figure is in absentia conjoint, if the two units occupy the same place in the statement, one being
totally substituted for the other (the bottles taking the place of the pupils in Haddock’s eyes). It is in
praesentia conjoint, to the extent that the units appear in the same place, with only partial substitution
of one for the other (a figure which is partially coffee pot and partially cat).

There will be a figure which is in praesentia disjoint, if the two entities occupy different places, without
any substitution taking place (the same geometrical form for a roof and a road in perspective). Finally,
the figure will be in absentia disjoint, when only one unit is manifested, while the other is exterior to
the statement, but is projected onto it (a title contradicting what is shown in the picture). In fact, the
first two cases are involved with factorality, and the second two with contiguity.

But it is easy to see that there are more cases than the system of classification allows for: different
degrees of integration of the part into the whole (feature or proper part of an object, coalescence of
different objects, objets in a set, object in its proper environment, etc.) and different degrees of
unexpectedness of the combination (pure alterity, contrariness, cultural and anthropological
universals, and logical contradictions). The rhetoric of what is often confounded in the single term
metonymy may turn out to be even more complex than suggested by Groupe µ’s latest contribution
(cf. Sonesson 1995; 1996).

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography
Jakobson, Roman, Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Uppsala: Uppsala University 1942.

Groupe µ (Dubois, J., Edeline, Fr., Klinkenberg, J.M., Minguet, Ph, , etc.), Rhétorique générale. Paris:
Larousse 1970.

— Traité du signe visuel, Pour une rhétorique de l’image. Paris: Seuil 1992.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Aris/Lund University Press 1989.

– "An essay concerning images. From rhetoric to semiotics by way of ecological physics", to appear in
Semiotica 1995.

– "Le silence parlant des images", to appear in Protée 1996.

See also: indexicality, syntagm, paradigm, opposition, connotation/denotation, "Le rhétorique de

l’image"

Opposition
The notion of opposition has a double origin in semiotics, from philosophy, and logic in particular,
where is has been current at least since the inception of Plato’s famous method for defining terms by
binary division (starting from an inclusive class and dividing it into two sub-classes, and so on), and
from Saussurean linguistics, particularly as this heritage was developed in the phonology of the
Prague school.

Logically, the important distinction is that between contradictory ("white" vs "non-white") and
contrary terms ("white" vs "black", which allows for all the intermediaries of gray-scale), to which
might perhaps by added reverse terms ("give" vs "receive" which could be described as the same act
from the point of view of different actors).

In linguistics, the opposition in closely wedded to the notion of structure. Saussure famously argued
that in the language system, there are only differences without positive terms. Every element derives
its identity from its distinction to other elements in the same system. The phonemes, in particular,
Saussure said, are units which are purely oppositive, relative, and negative. This conception was
brought to its extreme by the Copenhagen school, when Hjelmslev claimed that language could be
analysed independently of its "substance", i.e. whether conveyed by speech, writing, or some kind of
flags or manual signs.

The Prague school took a less radical stance on this issue. In his pioneering study of phonology,
however, Trubetzkoy (1939:59ff) distinguished different types of oppositions from several points of
view. These distinctions are based on his important insight, often forgotten in later semiotics, that an
opposition between several terms must suppose some kind of similarity, a base of comparison, as well
as properties which are different. Thus, an opposition is one-dimensional, if the base of comparison is
only found in two items, but otherwise multi-dimensional (e.g. the common factor in the Latin letters
"E" vs "F" is not found elsewhere, but the one present in "P" vs "R" also appears in "B"). On the other
hand, an opposition is proportional if the distinction between the terms is found in other pairs of
elements, or else isolated (some irregular plurals, like "goose/geese" and "tooth/teeth" are
proportional, as are even more obviously the regular ones).

In privative oppositions, one of the terms simply consists in the absence of the trait found in the other
term (in phonetics, unvoiced sounds as opposed to voiced ones, in semantics the plural "s" opposed to
the lack of it). An equipolent opposition, on the other hand, means that both terms are something in
themselves (irregular singular/plural modification like "foot" vs "feet", where the singular in not just
the absence of plurality marking). In gradual oppositions, finally, some feature is present in different
degrees in several terms (a example is the traditional phonetic description of the degree of aperture in
vowels). This latter distinction would seem to correspond to the logical one between contradictory
and contrary terms, adding the case in which some points between the extremes are singled out for
consideration. In the final case, the opposition in not binary: it has more than two terms.

Cantineau and, in particular, Barthes (1964), have transferred these distinctions to the domain of
semantics and general semiotics. It will be noted, however, that even in this case, there is no place for
purely quantitative oppositions, of the kind found for instance in the semantic differential, where the
distance between two extreme instances is ascribed some numeral value. Even the gradual
oppositions are categorical, not continuous.
Roman Jakobson’s (1942) heritage is, in this domain, extremely ambiguous: he was the first one to
show that, at least in phonology, all oppositions may be reduced to the binary, privative kind. This
supposes the resolution of one non-binary, equipolent opposition into a set of binary, privative ones,
itself based on a redefinition of the categories entering the opposition. In the case of phonological
features, Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952) have shown that these categories may be justified from an
acoustic point of view; whether they are also perceptually relevant is an open question. In any case, it
does not follow that the reduction to binary, privative oppositions in adequate outside the domain of
linguistic expression.

Paradoxically, it was Jakobson (1976) himself who, in his 1942 lectures at the New School of Social
Research in New York, countered Saussure’s idea that also semantic oppositions were purely
negative: contrary to the Saussurean claim, not the whole meaning of the words "night" and "day" is
derived from their opposition. Yet, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who listened to these lectures, later brought
the idea of oppositions being purely negative, binary and privative to what would seem to be an even
more saturated domain, myths, and also, in his mask analyses, to visual semiotics. Jakobson and Lévi-
Strauss together heavily influenced what in known as French structuralism into conceiving all
oppositions as being purely privative, and this idea still lingers on in the work of the Greimas school.
In fact, the kind of oppositions discovered by Structuralism in myths, literary works, pictures, and
cultures, are, on many counts, very different from those present in the expression system of verbal
language. Even Trubetzkoy’s classifications turns out to be of little help when trying to understand
these differences.

First of all, oppositions may be constitutive of the identity of signs and/or their parts, as the features of
phonology, or they may be merely regulative in relation to an already constituted identity, which
would seem to be true of many other cases, such as two pictures, or two objects in a picture, already
identified as representing something. Thus, Lévi-Strauss (1975) is certainly wrong in arguing that the
meaning of the Swaihwé and Dzonokwa masks derives entirely from their mutual opposition: this
opposition, if opposition there is, is only secondary to our recognition of both as (aberrant) faces (cf.
Sonesson 1989,I.1.3.,I.3.3.,I.3.5.; 1992).

Oppositions may of course be in absentia, or true oppositions, or in praesentia, or contrasts. Thus, in

pictures there is no obvious equivalent to the system of (constitutive) oppositions present in the
phonological and semantic organisations of verbal language. Rather than deriving from the system,
oppositions are created on the spot, i.e. in a given "text". Most oppositions found by Structuralists in
poetry, visual art, advertisements, myths, and so on, are really of this kind. However, it should be
noted that oppositions in absentia are not necessarily systemic: they may refer to another "text". An
advertisement, or a "postmodern" artwork, may make use of the fact that there is a large stock of
pictures which we, as members of Western culture, tend to recognise, and position itself as a set of
oppositions and identities in relations to one such picture. Using a familiar but vague term, this kind
of oppositions in absentia could be called intertextual (cf. Sonesson 1989;I.3.3.;1992).

Finally, most non-phonological oppositions are abductive, rather than structural. In the latter case,
meaning results simply from the set of relations existing in a system; in the former, some knowledge
of the regularities obtaining in the common sense world must be supposed for the meaning to ensue.
For instance, phonemes may be entirely defined by their interrelations: but to discover any meaning in
Swaihwé and Dzonokwa masks, we must classify them not only as faces, but as going beyond
possible real life faces at opposite extremes (cf. Sonesson 1989,I.1.3.,I.3.3.,I.3.5.; 1992).

That which most clearly shows that the kind of oppositions distinguished by Lévi-Strauss and
Greimas are not similar to those of phonology is the presence, in the former, of intermediary or
neutral and complex terms. There can be nothing in-between the opposite terms of phonology.
Intermediary terms are in no way comparable to the distinction between the marked and unmarked
member of the opposition, important to the Prague school, but largely forgotten in later semiotics,
though not in linguistics: the idea is here that one of the items, the unmarked one, may represent both
terms, when the distinction is unnecessary, impossible to mark, or, in the case of children, still not
developed. A semantic example would be the masculine form serving to represent also the feminine
one, a practice which is still current in most language, though in English we nowadays must make do
with the cumbersome term "he/she".

What is normally meant by an intermediary term is that some properties which we are accustomed to
ascribe to one super-ordinate term (e.g. Nature), is ascribed to an object which also contains properties
normally associated with the opposite super-ordinate term (e.g. Culture). Here we find the "deviant
animals", "taboos", and "monsters" recognized by many anthropologists. Thus, the intermediary terms
are best seen as the inversion of what is known in cognitive psychology as prototypes, i.e. as the least
probable conjunction of attributes (cf. Rosch & Mervis 1975; Sonesson 1989,I.3.1; I.4.1.).
Relevant semiotical oppositions are never contradictions, in the logical sense, even if they are phrased
in that way. The relative "deviance" of intermediary terms will depend on the exact nature of the
terms: if they are mere differences or real contraries, and, if the latter, or anthropological universals
(found in all cultures, like "nature" vs "culture", "life" vs "death", man" vs "woman"), cultural constants
in a particular social context (e.g. "hot" vs "cold" in Mayan culture), or mere contraries without any
further semiotic load (cf. Sonesson 1996).

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, "Eléments de sémiologie", in Communications 4, 1964, 91-135.
Jakobson, Roman, Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Uppsala: Uppsala University 1942.
– Six leçons sur le son et le sens. Paris: Minuit 1976.
–, Fant, Gunnar, & Halle, Morris, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press
1952.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, La voie de masques. Genève: Skira 1975.
Rosch, Eleanor, & Mervis, C. B., "Family Ressemblances: studies in the structure of categories", in
Cognitive Psychology 7:4, 1975, pp 382-439
Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Aris/Lund University Press 1989.
– "Comment le sens vient aux images", in De l’histoire de l’art à la sémiotique visuelle, Carani, Marie,
(ed.), pp. 29-84. Sillery: Septentrion/Célat 1992.
– "Le silence parlant des images", to appear in Protée 1996.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolas, Grundzüge der Phonologie. TCLP VII: Prague 1939 (Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht:
Göttingen 1958/1967).

See also: linguistic model fallacy, metonymy,

Photography
Like many other terms employed in pictorial semiotics, photography is a common-sense notion,
which it is the task of semiotic theory to reconstruct. As such it designates a particular way of
producing such marking on the surface which give rise the illusion of seeing a scene of the
experimental world projected onto the surface, as well as that peculiar character of granularity which
was (until the recent advent of the computer image) immediately recognized as the expression plane
of a photographic sign. Although leading authorities of pictorial semiotics as Floch (1986) and Groupe
µ (1992) have denied the semiotic relevance of such putatively "socio-cultural" categories as
photography, this particular picture category has already, unlike most others, engendered a small
body of literature concerned to lay bare the specificity of its sign function.

According to Philippe Dubois (1983:20ff), the first semiotical theories of photography tended to look
upon the photograph as a mirror of reality, or, in Peircean terms, as an icon; then came that most
celebrated generation of iconoclasts who tried to demonstrate the conventionality of all signs,
supposing even the photograph to present a "coded" version of reality, or, as Peirce (according to
Dubois, at least) would have said, a symbol; and finally the photograph was seen for what, according
to Dubois, it really is: an index, more specifically, a trace left behind by the referent itself. Without
subscribing to Dubois’ uni-linear story of progress, we will use his distinctions as a handy
classification of the relevant epistemological attitudes.

The authorities quoted by Dubois from the first period are in fact largely pre-semiotical: Baudelaire,
Taine, Benjamin, Bazin, but also Barthes. Most of the minor classics of semiotics are mustered for the
part of the symbol addicted team: Metz, Eco, Barthes, Lindekens, Groupe µ, and so on. In the part of
the daring moderns, we find, apart from Dubois himself, such writers as Bonitzer, Krauss, Vanlier, but
also already Barthes, Benjamin and Bazin, when considered from another vantage point, and, of
course, Peirce. Barthes here appears as a proponent of the iconic conception, because of having
opposed the conventional, historically relative, and learned character of drawing to the "quasi-
tautological" nature which photographic expression shows in relation to its content. His claim to be a
vindicator of the symbol view probably rests on his listing of photographic "connotations". And he is
considered a pioneer for the index theory for the reason that he has described each photograph as
implying that "this has taken place" ("cela a été"). In fact, also Peirce may be considered as an authority
for all conceptions: he sometimes tells us the photograph is an index, sometimes an icon, and
elsewhere he observes that all real icons are somewhat conventional.

The most outspoken exponent of the conventionalist view is undoubtedly René Lindekens (1971), who
argues for the conventionality of pictures, and their structuring in binary features using the fact that in
a photograph nuance diminishes as contrast is augmented, and vice versa, so that one of these factors
must always be untrue to reality; or, differently put, that the best rendering of contour and details is
not obtained at the same time as the correct contrast. This argument may well show that, under the
present technological conditions, photographs will never be able to reproduce integrally the reality
photographed, but it certainly does not demonstrate an equivalence between linguistic structuring
and that of photographs: a phoneme is either voiced or unvoiced, but a photograph, and in fact any
single point of it, must be shaded-off to some degree and contrasted to some degree. Only the
extremes would seem to exclude each other (cf. Sonesson 1989a,81ff; 1989b: 12ff).

In the process, Lindekens (1971:178ff) also takes his experiment a little further, to demonstrate that the
interpretation of a photograph is influenced by its having been made more or less contrasted or
shaded-off in the process of development. Quite independently, Espe (1983a, 1983b) also showed
experimentally that an identical photograph may carry very different affective import for being
differently contrasted. As a consequence, the evaluation is often projected onto the subject matter, so
that the girl depicted appears more or less beautiful, the landscape more or less melancholic, and so
on.

Actually, Barthes’ (1964) defence for the iconicity view may not be as naive as has been claimed by
Floch and others. It could be interpreted as the theory that drawing, but not photography, requires
there to be a set of rules for mapping perceptual experience onto marks made with a pen on paper;
and these rules imply a particular segmentation of the world as it is given to perception, picking up
some (kinds of?) features for reproduction, while rejecting others, and perhaps emphasising some
properties at the same time as others are underplayed; and all this takes place under given historical
circumstances, which are responsible for varying the emphases and the exclusions. Against this, it
might be argued that Renaissance perspective, and a lot of other principles of rendering, are built into
the camera: but the point is precisely that they are incorporated into the apparatus, and thus not
present to consciousness in the actual process of picture production.

In terms of the factorality between content and referent, however, Barthes may be taken to claim that
photography is able to pick up particular proper parts ("son sujet", "son cadre") and perceptual angles
of vision ("son angle") of the whole motive, but cannot chose to render just a few of its attributes. In
some all too obvious ways this is false: for essential reasons, photography only transmits visual
properties, and it only conveys such features as are present on the sides of the object fronting the
camera. Also, depending on the distance between the camera and the motive, only features contained
in a particular range of sizes may be included.

As long as no trick photography is involved, however, it seems to be true that, without recurring to
later modification of the exposed material, photography is merely able to pick up features, or restrict its
selection of features, on the global level, whereas in drawing, local decisions can be made for each single
feature (cf. Sonesson 1989b:36ff; Dubois 1983:96f). This also applies to all other rules of photographic
transposition listed by Ramírez (1981: 158ff) and Gubern (1974:50ff): abolition of the third dimension,
the delimitation of space through the frame, the exclusion of movement, mono-focal and static vision,
granular, discontinuous structure of the expression plane, abolition or distortion of colour, limitation
to scenes having a certain range of luminosity, and abolition of non-visual stimuli,.

The recent turn to an indexicalist position was taken together by Henri Vanlier (1983), Philippe Dubois
(1983), and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1987), yet the three theorists are very different in many respects.
While Dubois and Schaeffer base their claims on Peirce’s theory, Vanlier’s notion of indexicality (split
into the untranslatable opposition between "indice" and "index") is not really derived from Peirce;
indeed, his "indice" is actually, in the most literal sense, a mere trace, of which he offers some very
usefully descriptions. Schaeffer takes a less extreme stand than Vanlier and Dubois, arguing that the
photograph is an indexical icon, or, in other cases, an iconical index (cf. Sonesson 1989b: 46ff).

When photographs are said to be indexical, contiguity is always meant, and a particular kind of
contiguity at that: abrasion, i.e. the particular indexical relationship resulting from the fact that the
object which it to become the referent has, on some prior moment of time, entered into contact with,
and then detached itself from, what later is to become the expression plane of the sign, leaving on the
surface of the latter some visible trace, however inconspicuous, of the event (cf. Sonesson 1989a,40;
1989b:46ff). In fact, however, as Vanlier (1983:15) notes, the photograph must be taken as a direct and
certain imprint of the photons, and only as an indirect and abstract one of the objects depicted.
Unfortunately, Vanlier (1983:23, 25) himself rapidly seems to forget this distinction, starting to talk of
the scene as being the cause of the picture. In any case, he fails to note that, if the indexicality obtains
between the photons and the plate, it does not occur between the same relata as the semiotic function,
i.e. the objects depicted and the picture. Dubois (1983:66) at least is more consistent with his
conception of the photograph as being an index when he takes the photogram to be its most
characteristic instance; yet, if this is the kind of photograph he is intent on explaining, he will fail to
characterise what most people would consider prototypical photography.

Certain limitations are imposed on the photographic trace by the support on which the it is inscribed.
Some of these are mentioned by Vanlier: the quadrangular shape of the photograph, its digital nature,
the information it leaves out, its inability to record the temporal aspects of the process giving rise to
the trace, etc. This may be restated by saying that the photograph is not only an indexicality of the
objects, or even the photons, but also of the properties of the film, of the lenses, of the photographic
device generally, of the space travelled through by the photons, and so on. This observation is quite
parallel to the one made in the study of animal traces, according to which the same animal will leave
different traces on different ground (see Sonesson 1989a,I.2.6. and 1989d)

The trouble with a purely indexicalist account of photography seems to be that it cannot explain what
the photograph is a picture of. There is no intrinsic reasons for considering the cause producing a trace
(and even so, we have seen than many more causes than the motif may be held responsible for the
trace) to be a more important type of cause than the others. Indeed, we can only explain the
importance of the motif, when we realise that a trace, in the most central sense of the term, contains
not only indexical but also iconical aspects, and if we begin by admitting that a photograph is a kind
of pictorial sign, and that all such signs are first and foremost grounded in the illusion of similarity.
Contrary to Vanlier and Dubois, Schaeffer (1987:101ff) thinks that the photograph may be an indexical
icon in some cases, and, in other cases, an iconical index. It could be argued, however, that the
photograph, contrary, for example, to a hoof-print, is always primarily an icon (Sonesson 1989b:68ff).
While both the photograph and the hoof-print stand for a referent which has vanished from the scene,
the signifier of the former sign continues to occupy the place that was that of the referent, and it stills
remains temporally dated, whereas the photographic signifier, like that of the verbal sign, is omni-
temporal and omni-spatial, tokens of its type being apt to be instantiated at any time and place
(although only after the referential event and the time needed for development). In sum, in the case of
a footstep, a hoof-print, etc., both the expression and the content are located at a particular time and
place; in verbal language, none of them are; and in the case of photography, it is only the content (or,
strictly speaking, the referent) which is bound up with spatio-temporality. Thus, the hoof-prints,
present where before the horse was present, tells us something like "horse here before"; but the
photograph of a horse, which most likely does not occupy the scene where the horse was before, only
tells us "horse", and then we may start reconstructing the time and the place .

At this point, it may seem that we could say that, whereas the hoof-print is first and foremost an
index, the photograph must originally be seen as an icon, before its indexical properties can be
discovered. In fact, however, things may be still more complicated. Schaeffer is of course right in
pointing out, against Peirce, that not all indices involve some iconic aspect, but it so happens that the
hoof-prints, just like all other imprints and traces, in the narrow sense of these terms, also convey a
partial similarity with the objects for which they stand. We have to recognise the hoof-print as such,
that is, differentiate if from the traces of a man’s feet, or of a donkey’s, a well as from fake hoof-prints,
and from accidental formations worked by the wind in the sand. Only then can we interpret the hoof-
prints indexically. It remains true, however, that the essential meanings of the hoof-prints are
embodied in indexicality: they tell us the whereabouts of the animal.

In the case of a photograph, on the other hand, we do not need to conceive of it indexically to be able
to grasp its meaning. It will continue to convey signification to us, whether we are certain that it is a
photograph or not. Indexicality, in photographs, really is a question of second thoughts and peculiar
circumstances. It therefore appears that indexicality cannot be the primary sign relation of
photographs, although it is an open potentiality present in their constitution, which is exploited in
certain cases. First and foremost, the photograph is an iconical sign.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland, "Rhétorique de l´image", in Communications, 4, 1964, pp. 40-51. Also in Barthes,
Roland, L´obvie et l´obtus. Paris: Seuil 1982, pp. 25-42

Barthes, Roland, La chambre claire. Paris: Seuil & Gallimard 1980.

Dubois, Philippe, L’acte photographique. Paris & Bruxelles: Nathan/Labor 1983.

Espe, Hartmut, "Realism and some semiotic functions of photographs", in Borbé, Hrsg. Semiotics
unfolding. Proceedings of the second congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies., Vienna
1979. Berlin, New York, & Amsterdam: Mouton, 1983, volume III: 1435-1442.

Floch, Jean-Marie, Les formes de l´empreinte. Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac 1986.

Groupe µ, Traté du signe visuel. Pour une rhétorique de l’image. Paris: Seuil 1992.

Gubern, Roman, Mensajes icónicos en la cultura de masas. Barcelona: Editorial Lumen 1974

Lindekens, René, 1971: Eléments pour une sémiotique de la photographie. Paris & Bruxelles: Didier/Aimav
1971.

Ramírez, Juan Antonio, Medios de masas e historia del arte. Madrid: Cátedra. Second edition 1981.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, L´image précaire, Paris: Seuil 1987.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Aris/Lund University Press 1989 (a).

Sonesson, Göran, Semiotics of photography. On tracing the index. Report 4 from the Semiotics project.
Lund: Institute of Art History 1989 (b).

Vanlier, Henri, Philosophie de la photographie, Laplume: Les cahiers de la photographie 1983.

See also:
Chirography, Iconicity, Indexicality, Index

Pictorial semiotics
Although pictures are mentioned, and compared to verbal language, already by such precursors of
semiotics as Lessing and Degérando, and in spite of the fact that Saussure, and even more Peirce, refer
to pictorial signs repeatedly, pictorial semiotics must be considered a recent discipline indeed: the
Russian formalists have little to say about pictures, and the Prague school merely uses them to
illustrate general principles of semiosis. Only with the advent of French structuralism did a body of
knowledge particularly geared to the elucidation of general principles underlying the organisation of
the picture sign start to emerge.

Pictorial semiotics is, of course, concerned with the study of pictures as particular vehicles of
signification. To many of its pioneers, however, this speciality has merely been a practical way of
mapping an individual picture onto a verbal description, while retaining a minimum of confidence in
the objectivity of the procedure. It is only recently that the practitioners of pictorial semiotics have
come to realise the importance of determining the nature of their study, which is why the differing
ways in which its tasks has been fixed and its limits circumscribed may be more clearly seen once we
have considered the history of the field and the issues falling within its scope.

First and foremost among the pioneers of pictorial semiotics must be mentioned Roland Barthes,
whose article "La rhétorique de l’image", stands at the origin of two diverging developments inside
semiotics, the semiotics of publicity, and the semiotics of visual art, represented by, among others, Louis
Marin, Hubert Damisch and Jean-Louis Schefer. Not only did Barthes and his followers try to reduce
all meaning to the linguistic kind, employing a model inspired in structuralist linguistics, but in so
doing, they unfortunately misunderstood the import of most linguistic terms. This also applies to
Damisch’s (1979) refutation of the linguistic model, identified with semiotics tout court, which,
moreover, testifies to a much more serious confusion in comparing the merely intuitive, pre-
theoretical notion of the picture with the concept of language as reconstructed in linguistic theory (just
as Metz did in the case of the notion of film; cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.1.2.). What is confused in Barthes’
work tends to become even more so in that of his followers, who, moreover, inherit his exclusive
attention to the content side of the pictorial sign, or more exactly, to the extra-signic referent and its
ideological implications in the real world, even to the point of ignoring the way in which the latter are
modulated in the sign.

The second most influential figure in early pictorial semiotics was no doubt Umberto Eco, who
defined two of the basis issues of the domain, and whose resolution of these issues was hardly
contested until recently. Probably because only conventional signs, according to Saussure, were of
interest to semiotics, Eco set out to show that pictures are as conventional as linguistic signs. Pursuing
even further the analogy with linguistic signs, Eco went on to suggest that pictures could be analysed
into elementary signs, which, in turn, could be dissolved into features having no meaning of their
own. Although Eco himself was to quality this latter idea ever more through the years, one or other
version of his conception continues to be accepted by many scholars in the field.
Less influential than Barthes and Eco, but certainly as important for the development of pictorial
semiotics, René Lindekens in his two early books (1971; 1976) discusses questions pertaining to the
basic structure of the pictorial sign (e.g., conventionality and double articulation), using photography
as a privileged example. His theoretical baggage is complex: Hjelmslevian semiotics, of which he has a
much more solid knowledge than Barthes, combined with an inkling of the Greimas school approach;
phenomenology, which, however, affected him in the subjectivist reinterpretation of the existentialists;
and the experimental psychology of perception, mainly derived from the Gestalt school. Yet, the
different theoretical strands remain badly integrated, and much knowledge present in these
perspectives is insufficiently exploited (cf. Sonesson 1989)

In order to demonstrate the conventionality of pictures, and to show how they are structured into
binary features, Lindekens (1971) suggests, on the basis of experimental facts and common sense, the
existence of a primary photographic opposition between the shaded-off and the contrasted; at the
same time, he also turns to experiments involving geometric drawings which have the function of
brand marks, in order to discover the different plastic meanings (which Lindekens calls "intra-iconic")
of elementary shapes. In fact, Lindekens would seem to argue for the same conventionalist and
structuralist thesis as the early Eco (1968), but while the latter tends to ignore the photograph as the
most embarrassing counter-example, Lindekens attacks its frontally from the beginning.

In the late seventies and in the eighties, pictorial semiotics made something of a new start, or, rather,
produced three fairly different, new beginnings: one, which is associated with the Greimas school, and
whose main representatives are Jean-Marie Floch and Felix Thürlemann; another, which comes out of
the "general rhetoric" defended even earlier by the Liège group known as "Groupe µ"; and, finally, a
development centred around Fernande Saint-Martin and her disciples in Montréal and Québec. To
this could be added an even more recent strand rooted in the "social semiotics" of M.A.K. Halliday.

Jean-Marie Floch, Felix Thürlemann, and their followers accept the basic tenets of the Greimas school,
and make use of its abundant paraphernalia, albeit with unusual restraint. Thus, like all contributions
from the Greimasian camp, their articles employ an array of terms taken over from the linguistic
theories of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Chomsky, and others, but given quite different meanings. The real
problem resulting from this approach, therefore, it not, as it is often claimed, that it deforms pictures
and other types of non-linguistic meanings by treating them as being on a par with language, but that,
in attributing quite different significations to terms having their origin in linguistic theory, it renders
any serious comparison between linguistic and non-linguistic meanings impossible. Moreover, Floch
and Thürlemann agree with other Greimasians in taking all knowledge about the object of study to be
irrelevant to semiotics, so that they must refrain from using the knowledge base of, for instance,
perceptual psychology.

The interest of this approach resides not only in the fact that it involves the application of a model
having fairly well-defined terms, which, at least to some extent, recur in a number of text analyses, but
also is due to the capacity of this model to account for at least some of the peculiarities of pictorial
discourse. Thus, for example, Floch and Thürlemann have noted the presence of a double layer of
signification in the picture, termed the iconic and plastic levels. On the iconic level the picture is
supposed to stand for some object recognisable from the ordinary perceptual Lifeworld (which is of
course a much more restricted notion of iconicity than that found in the Peirce tradition); while
concurrently, on the plastic level, simple qualities of the pictorial expression serve to convey abstract
concepts. Floch, it is true, has tried to generalise these notions to other domains, most notably to
literature, but they seem much better adapted to pictorial discourse.

A second, more controversial aspect of, in particular, the work of Floch, is the idea that pictorial
meaning is organised into contrasts, i.e. binary terms, one member of which is an abstract property and
the other its opposite ("continuity" vs "discontinuity", "dark colours" vs "light colours", etc.), both of
which are present in different parts of the same picture. Indeed, each analysis starts out from an
intuitive division of the picture into two parts, which may then be repeated inside one or both the
division blocks. The remaining task of the analyst is thereafter to justify this segmentation, setting up
long series of oppositional pairs, the members of which are located in the different division blocks
resulting from the segmentation. Although Floch shows considerable ingenuity for discovering a
binary division in all pictures studied, one may wonder whether such an analysis is equally adequate
in all cases, and whether it remains on the same level of abstraction.

Equally of seminal importance to pictorial semiotics, the Groupe µ, or Liege school has consisted of
different members through the years, the most constant of which are the linguists Jean-Marie
Klinkenberg and Jacques Dubois, the chemist Francis Edeline and the aesthetician Philippe Minguet.
Starting in the late sixties, this Belgian group of scholars produced a book of "general" rhetoric, in
which they analysed in a novel way the "figures" appearing in the elaborate taxonomies of classical
rhetoric, using linguistic feature analysis inspired in the work of Hjelmslev, as well as the
mathematical theory of amounts. As in classical rhetoric, a figure is taken to exist only to the extent
that there is a deviation from a norm. The latter is understood as redundancy, and thus identified with
the Greimasian concept of isotopy, which henceforth becomes one of the essential building-blocks of
the theory. At this stage, Groupe µ seems heavily dependent on a set of Hjelmslevian concepts (which
they may not interpret quite correctly; cf. Sonesson 1988,II.1.3.7., and 1989a,II.3-4.), as well as on the
notion of isotopy as conceived by Greimas (which in itself may be incoherent, cf. Sonesson
1988,II.1.3.5).

In spite of being general in import, the theory to begin with was mostly concerned with figures of
rhetoric as they appear in verbal language. In a short study of a coffee pot disguised as a cat, Groupe µ
(1976) tries to implement the theory also in the pictorial domain. Over the years, the theory has been
continuously remodelled, so as to account better for the peculiarities of pictorial meaning. Recently,
Groupe µ rhetoric appears to leave behind at least part of the linguistic strait-jacket inherited from
Hjelmslev, in order to incorporate "a certain amount of cognitivism" (Klinkenberg, personal
communication). Yet, the theory still seems far from integrating the perceptual and sociocultural
conditions that constitute the foundations of all rhetorical modulations.

Like the Greimas school, Groupe µ recognises the difference between the iconic and plastic layers of
the picture sign (again using a notion of iconicity which is much more restricted than that of Peirce).
In this conception, iconic figures can be interpreted because of the redundancy of the iconic layer, and
plastic figures acquires their sense thanks to a corresponding redundancy of the plastic layer (thus, for
instance, we recognise the bottles substituted for the eyes of Captain Haddock as a figure, because of
the context of his body; and we identify the geometrical shape substituted for the circle in one of
Vasarely’s works, because of the environment of repeated circles). More recently, Groupe µ (1992) also
recognises iconico-plastic figures, which are produced in the plastic layers, while the redundancy occurs
in the iconic one, or vice-versa (a comic strip personage which is like a human being but has blue skin
would be of this kind, the bodily shape permitting recognition while the blue colour creates the
deviation). Norms may be either general, valid for all pictures, or local, if they are created in a
particular picture in order to be overturned: thus, the repetition of identical geometrical shapes in
Vasarely’s works is the backdrop on which another geometrical shape stands out as a deviation.

The third conception of importance in the domain of pictorial semiotics is the one propounded by
Fernande Saint-Martin and her collaborators, sometimes termed the Quebec school. In a number of
publications (1985, 1987a), Saint-Martin has been elaborating a theory of visual semiotics which is
based on the conviction that a picture, before being anything else, is an object offered to the sense of
visual perception. Visual meaning, according to this conception, is analysable into six variables,
equivalent to a set of dimensions on which every surface point must evince a value: colour/tonality,
texture, dimension/quantity, implantation into the plane, orientation/vectorality, and
frontiers/contours generating shapes. The surface points, specified for all these values, combine with
each other, according to certain principles, notably those of topology, and those of Gestalt theory (cf.
Saint-Martin 1980 and 1990). The principle merit of this approach is to have systematised a series of
analytical conceptions familiar from earlier art history and Gestalt psychology.

Much of the importance of the Quebec schools resides in its explicit criticism of the Greimasian
approach, most clearly spelled out by Marie Carani, who is also the author of important studies
concerned with pictorial abstraction and perspective, respectively (Carani 1987; 1988). As compared to
the binary opposition, which is the regulatory principle of the Greimas school approach, as well as to
the norm and its deviations, which determines the conceptual economy of Groupe µ rhetoric, the
Quebec school offers a much richer tool-kit of conceptual paraphernalia, more obviously adapted to
the analysis of visual phenomena. Yet this very richness also appears to constitute the basic defect of
the theory: it is not clear whether it furnishes any restrictions on what may be taken as relevant in the
picture sign, which means that no analytical direction have been presented.

The constraints imposed by the grid taken oven from the linguistic theory of M.A.K. Halliday by,
notably, Michael O’Toole (1994), are, in this respect, much more enlightening. According to this
conception, every work realises some alternative from among the ideational, interpersonal and textual
"macro-functions", renamed by O’Toole the representational, modal and compositional functions. The
first function is involved with the relationships between the participants and processes in the real
world, the second concerns the way in which this world is presented by the creator of the sign, and
the third has to do with rules of internal patterning applying to the work as such. It seems
unfortunate, however, that in trying to specify the different options available for the realisation of the
different functions, O´Toole often employs traditional art-historical terms, without giving them any
new definition.

In his extensive, critical review of pictorial semiotics devoted to an analysis of the linguistic heritage
preserved by this science, as it appears in the conceptions of, most notably, Barthes, Floch,
Thürlemann, and Groupe µ, Sonesson (1989) emphasises the basically perceptual nature of the picture
sign, and expounds some of the consequences of this observation, invoking the testimony of
contemporary perceptual psychology, and of philosophical and phenomenological theories of
perception. Contrary to, most notably the Greimas school, he thus shuns the autonomy postulate of
semiotics, admitting that pictorial semiotics has a lot to learn from psychology and other sciences,
while claiming that their results must be inserted into a specifically semiotic problematics evolved
from the history of this science. Critically reviewing the use of many linguistic and otherwise semiotic
concepts, such as sign, feature, connotation, iconicity, and so on, he argues that these are useful only
to the extent that their import are clearly spelled out, so that the specificity of pictorial meaning could
emerge.

In the work of the pioneers, pictorial semiotics, even when it concerned itself with advertisement
pictures, tended to make its own the traditional conception of art history and literary history alike,
according to which the object to be studied was the individual, purportedly unique, work of art.
Although some scholars developed models of analysis which embodied hypotheses about wide-
ranging regularities found in pictorial semiosis, there has been little awareness, until recently, that
pictorial semiotics, if it is to be a part of general semiotics, must be concerned with all kinds of
pictures, and formulate principles applicable to all empirically occurring picture kinds, and even to all
objects potentially recognisable as pictures. Such a conception, although extended to the wider
domain of visual semiosis, is implied by Saint-Martin’s (1987) recent work (but is only applied to
artistic pictures). Arguments to the effect that pictorial semiotics should be a general science of
depiction, or of visual images, are only presented in the recent books by Groupe µ (1992: 11ff),
Sonesson (1989:9ff), and O´Toole (1994:169ff).

To elucidate the meaning of pictorial semiosis must mean, among other things, to find out in what
respects pictures are like other signs, and how they differ from them, most notably perhaps how they
are differentiated from other signs of such sign categories to which they undoubtedly belong: the
category of visual signs, and the category of iconic signs. Such as task, and even the very specificity of
pictorial semiotics, obviously dissolves itself if we accept the idea of the Greimas school, according to
which all meaning is of a kind, or is identical in nature as far at it is pertinent to semiotic theory (cf.
Floch 1986b; Thürlemann 1990, on the other hand, conceives of pictorial semiotics as an ancillary of art
history).

Curiously, Floch (1984: 11, 1986a: 12f) who defends this theory, also argues, on the other extreme, that
semiotics should not concern itself with middle-range categories like "photography" and "painting",
described as "socio-cultural", but should instead attend to the minute details of an individual picture.
Groupe µ (1992:12) follows suit in denying the pertinence of these same categories, which the group
conceive of as being "sociological" or "institutionalised". Whatever the sociological status of
photography and painting, however, it seems that they are also, and primarily, particular varieties of
the picture sign, embodying a particular principle of pertinence which serves to rely expression and
content, and as such they should be of interest to semiotic theory.

Pictorial kinds could be differentiated from the point of view of their rules of construction, that is, the
rules specifying which traits of the expression plane are relevant for conveying the content, and vice-
versa. From this point of view, a photograph differs from a painting and a cut-out; and a linear
drawing, to use traditional art historical terms, is different from a painterly one.

Then we may also distinguish categories of pictures according to the effects which they are intended to
produce (not the actual effects, which may vary, and which cannot really be known). Thus, in our
society, publicity pictures are expected (among other things) to sell commodities, pornographic
pictures are thought to stimulate sexual imagination, and caricature supposedly hold the depicted
person up to ridicule. Very much less well-defined is the intended effect of fine art.
In the third place, pictorial categories may be differentiated on the basis of the channels through which
pictures circulate. The picture post card, for instance, follows another trajectory to reach the receiver
than a publicity poster, a wall painting, a television picture, or the illustration of a weekly review.

There is an additional, very different way of distinguishing picture categories, which depends on the
nature of the configuration occupying the expression plane of the picture. Ordinary language does not
possess any terms for differentiating pictures in this way, but the existence of such a classification,
however tacit, is suggested by the fact that some text analytical models which are very productive
when applied to some pictures fail to yield any result when transposed to other pictorial "texts". To
some extent, this appears to be the kind of categories which are addressed in the "rhetorical" analysis
offered by the Groupe µ.

Pictorial semiotics, then, could well be conceived as that particular branch of semiotics which is
concerned to determined in which way the picture sign is similar and different from other signs and
meanings, in particular as far as its relationship to other iconic and/or visual meanings are concerned;
and which is also called upon to analyse the systematic ways in which signs which are pictures may
yet differ form each other, thus, for instance, as to construction, socially intended effects, channels of
circulation, and configurational kinds.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography:
Barthes, Roland, "Rhétorique de l´image", in Communications, 4, 1964, pp. 40-51. Also in Barthes,
Roland, L´obvie et l´obtus. Paris: Seuil 1982, pp. 25-42

Carani, Marie, "Sémiotique de l’abstraction picturale", in Semiotica , 67:12, pp. 1-38.

Carani, Marie, "Sémiotique de la perspective picturale", in Protée, 16:1-2, 1988, pp 171-181.

Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente. Milan. Bompiani 1968.

Floch, Jean-Marie, Petites mythologies de l´œil et l´esprit. Paris: Hadès 1984.

Floch, Jean-Marie, Les formes de l´empreinte. Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac 1986 (a).

Floch, Jean-Marie, /entries in/ Greimas, A.J., & Courtès, J., Hrsg. Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la
théorie du langage. Tome II. Paris: Hachette 1986 (b).

Groupe µ, (Dubois, J., Edeline, Fr., Klinkenberg, J.M., Minguet, and others), "Iconique et plastique: sur
un fondement de la rhétorique visuelle", in Revue d´ésthétique, 1-2, 1979, pp. 173-192.

Groupe µ, Traité du signe visuel. Pour une rhétorique de l’image. Paris: Seuil 1992.

Lindekens, René, 1971: Eléments pour une sémiotique de la photographie. Paris & Bruxelles: Didier/Aimav
1971.

Lindekens, René, Eléments de sémiotique visuelle. Paris: Klincksieck 1976.

Marin, Louis, Etudes sémiologiques. Paris: Klincksieck. 1971.

O’Toole, Michael, The language of displayed art. London: Leicester University Press 1994.

Saint-Martin, Fernande, Les fondements topologiques de la peinture. Montréal: Hurtubise 1980. New
edition 1989.

Saint-Martin, Fernande, Sémiologie du langage visuel. Québec: Presse de l´Université du Québec 1987.
Saint-Martin, Fernande, La théorie de la Gestalt et l’art visuel. Québec: Presse de l´Université du Québec
1990.

Sonesson, Göran, Methods and models in pictorial semiotics. Lund: The Semiotics Project 1988.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the analysis of the
visual world. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.

Thürlemann, Félix, Paul Klee. Analyse sémiotique de trois peintures. Lausanne: L`Age d´Hommes 1982.

Thürlemann, Félix, Vom Bild sum Raum. Beiträge zu einer semiotischen Kunstwissenschaft. Köln. DuMont
1990.

See also:
Advertising, Icon, Iconicity, Image/picture, Isotopy, Picture (perception of), "Rhétorique de l’image",
Visual semiotics

Spectacle
The best idea of what a spectacle is may be gained from Eco’s (1975) example of a drunkard sleeping
on a bench over which members of the Salvation Army have posed a banderole denouncing the
misery occasioned by alcoholism. This case involves both a kind of framing (separating that which
should be the focus of interest from the rest) and a labelling (telling us what to make out of it). In the
spectacle, framing, in this sense, must be primary.

The notion of a spectacular function enters semiotics in the work of the Prague school during the
forties, notably from Mukařovský (1977), who argued that the dominant defining the structure of
theatre, in the specific sense of that which both dominates and organizes all other elements for its own
purpose, is transformed from one historical epoch to another: sometimes it is the dramatic text, at
another time the work of the actor, and at still over moments the relation between the stage and the
audience.

Mukařovský’s model has been employed by Lars Kleberg and Olle Hildebrand to distinguish theatre
from other kinds of spectacles, as well as to differentiate ground-breaking theatrical theories and
practices, notably as they occurred during the heroic times of the Russian avant-garde. In an early
paper on ‘theatre modernism’, Hildebrand (1976) sets out to distinguish sport, ritual, and theatre by
means of a cross-classification involving the dichotomies between stage versus auditorium, and
expression versus content, sport manifesting the first dichotomy, ritual the second, and theatre both of
them. Here, of course, the first opposition derives from Mukařovský’s theory, while the second is
traceable to a superficial understanding of the Saussure/Hjelmslev tradition. In his dissertation,
which is predominantly concerned with Eivrenov’s play "Harlekin the Saviour", Hildebrand (1978)
then goes on to show that the peculiar "theatrical" style invented by this author combines ritual and
theatre, in the senses specified above. It would be fairly easy to show that Hildebrand’s distinctions
between sport, ritual, and theatre are inadequate, and, in particular, that given his definitions, his
fourth category, invented especially for Eivrenov, is incoherent.

Kleberg’s version of the same dichotomous model is more complex, but then it is also supposed to
handle a much greater set of theatrical styles, viz. all those conceptions propounded by the Soviet
avant-garde between 1917 and 1927, including Stanislavsky at one end, and Brecht somewhat
bordering on the other (cf. Kleberg 1977). All relevant directors are now subjected to a classification on
a threefold count: the limits between stage and auditorium may be marked or unmarked; there may or may
not be congruence between stage and auditorium; and the representation itself can be ‘directed’ inwards or
outwards. Unfortunately, these terms turn out to change their meaning as they are applied to different
directors and theatrical styles, which is particularly obvious in the case of the putative ‘directedness’
of the representation.
Ivanov’s conception of the cultic theatre is described by Kleberg (1984:60f)), curiously using
Hildebrand’s more simple distinctions, the sign function and the interrelation between stage and
audience. Expressed in these terms, Ivanov’s conception of the theatre certainly appears
problematical, for, as soon at it is stated, it tends to vanish as such: "In theatre as an art form he was
interested in a shift of emphasis from the "spectacle" towards the cult. /---/ The abolishing of the
dualism between actors and audience became a metaphor for the synthetic elimination of a series of
other contradictions like Poet vs Crowd, individualism vs collectivism, etc.’ (p.60f). Kleberg fails to
realise, or at least to formally acknowledge, that post-theatrical ritual is not just ritual once again.

Thus, Hildebrand’s and Kleberg’s conjoint labour leaves us with two paradoxes, which are far from
being trivial. If ritual involves the dichotomy between expression and content, and theatre compounds
this dichotomy with a further one opposing stage and auditorium, what can it mean that Eivrenov’s
conception of theatre combines ritual and theatre? And, if, under the same circumstances, Ivanov’s
idea of the theatre implied the abolishment of the opposition between stage and audience, in what
way did he think he was proposing something different from a mere return to ritual (cf. Sonesson
1994)?

If we accept Hildebrand’s distinctions, lately adopted also by Kleberg, we still have to find ways to
distinguish theatre, sport, and ritual, from still further types of spectacle, such as, for instance, circus
and ballet and even, perhaps, a concert and a public conference. One may wonder if the latter would
really qualify: perhaps they are excluded because the dominant channel of communication is not
vision, but sounds and, in the second case, more particularly, verbal language.

But this raises a basic issues. Mukařovský, as well as Hildebrand and Kleberg, seem to envision the
spectacular function as the result of a division, among a group of human beings, between those who
are subjects and objects of the act of looking. But it is not obvious that this operation must always
apply to human beings only: perhaps we should include, as objects, other animate beings (the animals
at the circus, which, it is true, normally will interact with human beings; cf. Bouissac 1981); and
perhaps they may still form a spectacle even though they are not putting on any particular act (the
animals at the zoo, but also many example of body art. From animate beings which are not involved
in action, it is not such a long step to admit that the objects of the spectacular function could also
involve inanimate things, like they works of art exhibited in museums and galleries, and the goods
displayed in the show-window. Cloths, and body decorations, which are certainly intended to be seen
by others, should perhaps also be included.

Another requirement often imposed on actions (and, if admitted, inanimate objects) for them to be
transformed into spectacles is that the should be, in some sense, noteworthy. Both Lotman (1976) and
Veltruský (1984) suggests that ordinary behaviour becomes "theatre" when it is distinct, has a certain
consistency of its own, and is meant to be perceived. This may not really be the defining character of a
spectacle, however, for the "happening", which is normally presented in front of an audience, is, in
one of its variants, made up of acts which form part of the routine doings of everyday life, or,
alternatively, of acts which normally do not ordinarily go together, creating combinations which are
indeed noteworthy for their impossibility, but also, as a result, inconsistent.

Then there is the question whether there a cases in which a division between human beings into
subjects and objects of looking has not already taken place. Thus, on the classical scenes of Modernity,
on the boulevards and the cafés, everybody becomes a potential object of observation for the others,
and yet this is neither theatre nor ritual. In this sense, Modernity, it is often claimed, should vanish
with the emergence of the new information technology, but in fact has not done so: public meeting
places, like cafés, seems to augment in number, rather than disappear, as we have been told they
should. The question, then, is whether the contemporary world is really, as the situationist said, and
as the prophets of information technology now repeat with a quite different evaluation, "a society of
spectacles". For both groups, in fact, everything which is a sign tends be considered a spectacle,
something which clashes with the Mukařovský tradition.

The essence of the spectacle, then, is visual ostension, that is, a kind of indexicality; since framing
clearly precedes labelling, it will be an exemplification, in Goodman’s sense, only if we admit ad hoc
labels, like "the object in focus". The question, which remains to be resolved, however, involves the
extant to which the nature of the object focused upon, apart from its predominantly visual nature,
should enter into the definition.
Göran Sonesson
Bibliography
Bouissac, Paul, (1981), "Behavior in context: In what sense is a circus animal performing?", in Annals of
the New York Academy of Sciences, 364, 18-25.
Eco, Umberto, (1975), "Paramètres de la sémiologie théâtrale", in Sémiologie de la représentation. Helbo,
André, (ed.), 33-41. Bruxelles: Edition Complexe.
Hildebrand, Olle, (1976) Teatermodernismen. Borås: School of Library Science (mimeographed).
– (1978) Harlekin frälsaren. Uppsala: Institute of Slavic languages [Dissertation].
Kleberg, Lars, (1980)Teatern som handling. Sovjetisk avantgarde-estetik 1917-27. Norstedts, Stockholm
[Dissertation, Stochholm 1977].
– (1984) "Vjaceslav Ivanov and the idea of theatre”, in Theater and literature in Russia 1900-1930.
Kleberg, Lars, & Nilsson, Nils Åke, (eds.), pp. 57-70. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Lotman, Jurij, (1976), "Theatre and Theatricality in the order of early ninetenth century culture", in
Semiotics and Structuralism, Baran, Henryk, (ed.), 33-63. New York: International Art and Science Press.
Mukařovský, Jan, (1978), "On the current state of the theory of theater", in Structure, sign, and function.
Selected essays by Jan Mukařovský. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Sonesson, Göran, (1994) "The culture of modernism", in Semio-Nordica, II:3-4.
Veltruský , Jiri, (1984), "Acting and behaviour: a study of the signans", in Semiotics of Drama and
Theatre, Schmid, Herta, & van Kesteren, Aloysius, (eds.), 393-444 Amsterdam & Philadelphia:
Benjamins Publ. Co.

See also indexicality, Goodman,

Visual semiotics
The feasibility of such a domain as visual semiotics, a speciality purportedly concerned with the
investigation of all kinds of meaning conveyed by means of the visual senses, may well be doubted:
following one common interpretation, it should be excluded by the structuralist conception according
to which form, not substance, is relevant to meaning. Yet, Saussure’s preoccupation with the linearity
of speech, as against the multidimensionality of pictures, Jakobson’s interest in the differences
between auditory and visual signs, and, more generally, the Prague school model, according to which
the receiver of the work of art is called upon to transform a sign into a concrete perceptual object,
certainly suggest a different conception. Indeed, Lessing already was essentially concerned with the
location of visual signs in space, as opposed to the projection of auditory signs into time. According to
the Greimas school, however, all meaning is of a kind, so not only do pictures and literature manifest
the same organising principles, but, more broadly, visuality and aurality must be taken to be identical
on a deeper level.

In recent semiotics, Kümmel (1969) has written a rather haphazard catalogue of visually conveyed
signs. The first to propound a division of all signs according to the sense modalities which they
address was Thomas Sebeok (1976). Preziosi (1983) then ranged architecture among the several
devices of visual communication, opposing them in some respects to verbal language. According to
Fernande Saint-Martin (1987), visual semiotics comprises the study of pictorial art, sculpture, and
architecture. This means that she ignores all visual signs which are not, in our culture, considered to
be artistic (in spite of some passing remarks on children’s drawings in other publications). In actual
fact, pictures, sculpture and architecture also are the only domains, with an emphasis on the first one,
which are covered by Groupe µ’s (1992) recent book the title of which announces that it is concerned
with visual signs.

Like Preziosi, Saint-Martin opposes visual semiosis to the verbal kind, forgetting that verbal language
may alternatively be conveyed by writing, which can be rudimentary, as in the case of alphabetical
script, or more elaborate, as in the various kinds of ideographic writing, in some varieties of logotypes
and pictograms, and in gestural emblems. The issue is further complicated by the fact that many types
of semiosis are partly visual, and partly conveyed by other senses, as, for instance, theatre, the cinema,
dance, and even food and clothing. Indeed, if the gaze, as has often been suggested, is really
privileged in Occidental (or even pan-human) culture, the wider semiotic domain of the "natural
world" will be largely dissolved into visual semiotics.

To the extent that pictorial semiotics has been well-advised to turn recently to perceptual psychology
in search of its foundations, we must suppose there to be some general organising principles of
pictorial and other visual signs which are relevant to their transmission of meaning. If so, however, it
will be necessary to distinguish those domains which are intrinsically visual in organisation, from
those in which meanings which are differently constituted are merely secondarily conveyed by visual
means.

On the other hand, from the point of view of Hjelmslevean semiotics, we would normally not expect
visuality, being a mere "substance" or even "matter", to determine any relevant categorisations of
semiotic means. In their dictionary, Greimas & Courtés actually claims that sense modalities,
identified with the expression substance, are not pertinent for semiotics, and this is no doubt the
reason for visuality being one of the many layers between the unique picture and signification per se
being left out of consideration in Floch’s analyses.

This type of argument is based on a confusion of the terms "substance" and "matière", as employed by
Hjelmslev, and in their ordinary usage. In fact, the term "matière", to Hjelmslev, is that which is
unknowable, and, as a consequence, not susceptible of being analysed; that is, it is the residue of the
analysis; and "substance", which, in the earlier texts, is the term used for "matière" in the above-
mentioned sense, stands, in the later works, for the combination of "matière" and "form". Thus,
"substance", in the early works, and "matter" later, simply means "that which is not pertinent relative
to the other plane of the sign" (see discussion in Sonesson 1989,II.4. and 1988); it does not necessarily
stand for matter in the sense of ordinary language, that is, the material of which something is made, or
the sense modality. If the material or the sense modality turns out to be relevant in relation to the
other plane of signification, it becomes form (from Hjelmslev’s standpoint, this is what happens in
connotational language).

More importantly, the psychology of perception certainly seems to suggest the existence of some
common organisation which puts all or most visually conveyed meanings on the same level. If all
signs must also be objects of perception, there is every reason to believe that the modality according to
which they are perceived determine at least part of their nature. This is indeed the position taken by
Groupe µ (1992: 58f), who goes on to compare this conception to the one favoured by such linguists as
Saussure, Martinet, and Bloomfield, according to which the vocal character of language is one of its
defining characteristics. More to the point, they observe that the linearity of verbal language is a
constraint imposed on linguistic form by the characteristics of the vocal channel by which it was once
exclusively conveyed. That is, the qualities of the visual sense modality are of interest to semiotics, to
the extent that they specify formal properties embodied in each system addressed to that particular
sense. Although Groupe µ seems unaware of it, Hjelmslev (1953) does not reason differently when he
posits different "forms" for written and spoken language.

If, however, properties imposed by their mode of communication are only some among several traits
defining these signs, as is the case of the linearity of verbal language, one may well wonder whether
we are really justified in making visuality into a subdivision of semiotics. There may, moreover, be
other, perhaps more fundamental division blocks of semiosis, of which pictures and some other visual
signs form a part, such as, for instance, that of iconicity. On the other hand, it is conceivable that some
more decisive argument could be advanced for privileging the domain of visuality over other possible
divisions.

But to the extent that there is a legitimate domain of visual semiotics, it should comprehend much
more the sacred trinity of art history, painting (to which drawing, photography, and so on, have been
assimilated), sculpture, and architecture, of which Groupe µ, just like Saint-Martin (1987) seems to be
the victim, in spite of the promise made in the introduction (p.12ff) to ignore received categories such
as art. As soon as we leave the traditional divisions of art history behind, this analysis has a very
limited value. Thus, sculpture should be compared semiotically similar objects like the tailor’s dummy,
and the like. At one point (p.405f), the authors are suddenly reminded of marionettes, considered as a
kind of sculpture to which movement has been added. But why not also add the ballet dancer, whose
art is certainly visual?

There are also significations which are only partly visual, such as those of theatre communication.
Others might be considered not to have an intrinsically visual organisation, such as writing, the
conformation of which depends in part on spoken language. But all kinds of gestures and bodily
postures, objects, dummies, logotypes, clothing, and many other phenomena must be counted as
visual signs and significations. In fact, even visual perception per se supposes a pick-up of meaning of
sorts. Not only should we therefore have to face the arduous task of determining the ways in which
the various kinds of visual semiosis, beyond those of pictures, architecture, and sculpture differ, but it
also remains to be shown that they all have sufficient properties in common to be considered "visual
signs" And we have to determine in which way pictures differ from other, intrinsically visual signs,
not only from sculpture and architecture. The domain of visual semiotics, to the extent that it exists,
remains to be constituted.

The real issues of visual semiotics may then turn out to be still, or rather again, those characterised by
Lessing (cf. Sonesson 1988): if language is better adapted to the rendering of temporal succession,
while pictures lend themselves more readily to deployment in space, then how is that visuality and
narrativity, as many critics of television and more recent media have suggested, concurrently invade
our culture? The interrelations of visual and auditory signs (which are not simply verbal either)
certainly deserves more serious consideration than has been given them by those propounding the
domain of visual semiotics.

Göran Sonesson

Bibliography:
Kümmel, Peter, Struktur und Funktion sichtbarer Zeichen Quickborn. Schnelle 1969

Greimas, A.J. & Cortés, J., Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raiaonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette 1979.

Groupe µ, Traité du signe visuel. Paris: Seuil 1992.

Hjelmslev, Louis, Introduction à la discusssion générale des problèmes relatifs à la phonologie de

langues mortes. In Acta Congressus Madvigiani: Proceedings of the Second International Congress of
Classical Studies, Copenhagen 1954, Copenhagen 1954, 101-113.

Jakobson, Roman, On the relation between visual and auditory signs. In Selected Writings II, 338-344.
Paris & The Hague: Mouton 1967.

Preziosi, Donald, Advantages and limitations of visual communication, in Krampen, M., ed. Visuelle
Kommunikation und/oder verbale Kommunikation. Berlin: Olms Verlag, Hildesheim/Hochschule der
Künste 1983, 1-34.

Saint-Martin, Fernande, Sémiologie du langage visuel. Québec: Presse de l´Université du Québec 1987.

Sebeok, Thomas A., Contributions to the doctrine of signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sonesson, Göran, Methods and models in pictorial semiotics. Lund: Institute of Art History 1988.

Sonesson, Göran, Pictorial concepts. Lund: Lund University Press 1989.

See also Icon, Iconicity, Image/Picture