Bodily Sem

GÖRAN SONESSON: The Multiple Bodies of Man

The Multiple Bodies of Man

Project for a Semiotics of the Body

Göran Sonesson

in Degrés, Bryssel, XXI: 74, été 1993: d1-d42.

“To semiotize is (fi rst) to segmentize”Francis Edeline (Groupe μ), at the Congress of the Nordic Association for Semiotics Studies,

Lund, Sweden, July 1992

According to one of its principal cultural heroes, Ferdinand de Saussure (1968:168), semio-tics should not be concerned with sign systems that are naturally motivated, or, as latter-day semioticians would say, iconic, joining a signifi er to a signifi ed with which it shares some or, as in this case, many properties. And he goes on to quote clothing as being a particularly neat case of such a motivated sign system, in which the limits and conformations of the units, that is, the garments, are entirely determined by the naturally evolved anatomy of the body. If so, the body itself may seem even less of a candidate for semiotic study. Indeed, one of Saussure’ most direct heirs, Louis Hjelmslev (1943), would even claim that signifi cations the expression and content of which are organised in a strictly parallel fashion should not even be treated as having an expression plane separate from the content plane; they are mere “symbol systems”, and as such their study should not be the business of semiotics.

To better the prospects for a semiotics of the body, then, we would have to show, fi rst, either that the body is really made up of signs, or that semiotics should take upon itself the task of studying meanings that are not signs; and, in the second place, that those signs or other mea-nings making up, not only the garments covering the body, but also the body itself, are not really as readily explainable from anatomical facts as suggested by Saussure. In so doing, we will look upon the semiotics of the body as a part of a larger domain, visual semiotics, which will permit us to profi t from work done in the semiotics of pictures (for instance, Sonesson 1989a). As we will see, pictorial semiotics may even be one of the possible operators for segmenting the body, thus making it, as we will suggest, into an object for semiotics. But fi rst, something will have to be said about semiotics itself.

Semiotics as the science of signifi cation It may be impossible to establish a consensus among all semioticians on what semiotics is all about; and many semioticians will not even care to defi ne their discipline. However, if we attend less to defi nitions than to real research practice, and if we leave out those would-be semioticians who simply do not seem to be doing anything very new (those who merely go in doing art history, literary history, philosophy, logic, or whatever), it seems possible to isolate the smallest common denominators of the discipline (cf. Sonesson 1989a, 1992a).

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In the following, semiotics will be taken to be a science, the point of view of which may be applied to any phenomenon produced by the human race. This point of view consists, in Saussurean terms, in an investigation of the point of view itself, which is equivalent, in Peircean terms, to the study of mediation (cf. Parmentier 1985). In other words, semiotics is concerned with the different forms and conformations given to the means through which humankind believe itself to have access to ’the world‘. In studying these phenomena, semio-tics should occupy the standpoint of humankind itself (and of its different fractions). Indeed, as Saussure argues, semiotic objects exist merely as those points of view which are adopted on other, ’material’ objects, which is why these points of view cannot be altered without the result being the disappearance of the semiotic objects as such.

Moreover, semiotics is devoted to these phenomena considered in their qualitative aspects rather than the quantitative ones, and it is geared to rules and regularities, instead of unique objects. That is, semiotics, including linguistics, is a nomothetic science, a science which is concerned with generalities, not an idiographic science, comparable to art history or the history of literature and most other human sciences, which take as their object an array of singular phenomena, the common nature and connectedness of which they take for granted. Just like linguistics, but contrary to the natural sciences and the social sciences (according to most conceptions), bodily semiotics will thus have to be concerned with qualities, rather than quantities – that is, it should take account of categories more than numbers. Thus, se-miotics shares with the social and natural sciences the character of being a law-seeking, or nomothetic, rather than an idiographic, science, while retaining the emphasis on categories, to the detriment of amounts, which is peculiar to the human sciences. Being nomothetic and qualitative, bodily semiotics has as its principal theme a category that may be termed body-hood – the nature of which seems so far fairly undetermined.

Semiotics is not restricted to any single method, but is known to have used analysis of concrete texts as well as classical experimental technique and imaginary variation reminiscent of the one found in philosophy. Moreover, semiotics is not necessarily dependent on a model taken over from linguistics, as is often believed, although the construction of models remains one of its peculiar features, if it is compared to most of the human sciences. Indeed, semiotics differs from traditional approaches to humanitas in employing a model which guide its practitioners in their effort to bring about adequate analyses, instead of simply relying on the power of the ‘innocent eye’. After having borrowed its models from linguistics, philosophy, medicine, and mathematics, semiotics is now well on its way to the elaboration of its proper models.

Beyond the doctrine of signs

According to this view of semiotics, the sign is not necessarily its central concept, although it may still retain its importance. No doubt, both the Greimas school and Umberto Eco have rejected the sign as a pertinent unit, apparently because they believe it to be too static, or to because they associate it to much with the linguistic model. It may be better, however, to oppose signs to other meanings, starting out from a more explicit defi nition of the sign. In-deed, many semiotic studies (those of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, the Greimas school, etc.), will recover part of their validity, once it is realised that they are concerned with meanings, in a much wider sense than that of the sign, better paraphrased perhaps in terms of wholes and connections.

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Building their models of the sign, both Peirce and Saussure made a set of fundamental con-ceptual distinctions, which are in part complementary, yet both of them took if for granted that we would all understand the import of such terms as ’signifi er’ and ’signifi ed’, or the equivalent. A basic understanding of the sign function may however be gained from an in-terpretation of Piaget’s important attempt to defi ne the semiotic function (which, in the early writings, was less adequately termed the symbolic function), and from Husserl’s defi nition of the notion of appresentation. The semiotic function is a capacity acquired by the child at an age of around 18 to 24 months, which enables him to imitate something or somebody out-side 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 signifi er which is distinct from the signifi ed (see, for instance, Piaget 1967).

In several of the passages in which he makes use of this notion of semiotic function, Piaget goes on to point out that ’indices’ and ’signals’ are possible long before the age of 18 months, but only because they do not suppose any differentiation between expression and content. The signifi er of the index, such as the visible extremity of an object being almost entirely hidden from view is, Piaget says, ’an objective aspect of the signifi ed’; but when the child uses a pebble to signify candy, he is well aware of the difference between them, which imp-lies, as Piaget tells us, ’a differentiation, from the subject’s own point of view, between the signifi er and the signifi ed’. It may be objected, however, that the child may just as well use a feather in order to represent a bird, without therefore confusing the part and the whole, thus employing a feature, which is objectively a part of the bird, while differentiating the former form the latter from his point of view. (Cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5.

According to Edmund Husserl, two or more items may enter into different kinds of ’pairings’, from the ’paired association’ of two co-present items (which we will call perceptual context), over the ’appresentative pairing’ in which one item is present and the other indirectly given through the fi rst, to the real sign relation, where again one item is directly present and the other only indirectly so, but where the indirectly presented member of the pair is the theme, i.e. the centre of attention for consciousness. This property serves to distinguish the sign from the abductive context, which is the way in which the unseen side of the dice at which we are looking at this moment is present to consciousness, because in the latter attention is focused on the directly presented part or spans the whole context. However, there seems to be many intermediate cases between a perfect sign and an abductive context (the poetic fun-ction, ostensive defi nitions, proto-indices, etc.; cf. Figure 1 and Sonesson 1989a,I.2.).

Considered in itself, as an object not standing for some other meaning, the body is certainly not a sign, for whatever the meaning it may possess, there is not differentiation between it and its vehicle; thus, the questions of which item is foregrounded and which is most directly given does not even arise at this point.

The term “semiotics of the body” was probably fi rst used by the ethnolinguist Roy Ellen (1977) to describe a study concerned with the different ways in which the bodily continuum is segmented and organised into parts by the different languages of the world. In this sense, the semiotics of the body would be interested in the fact that some languages use only one term to designate both what Indoeuropean languages call the leg and that prominent part of the leg which we call the foot; and that other language prefer to distinguish, on one hand, the

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leg in its entirety, and on the other what is for us the leg, including the foot, up to the knee. These are linguistics signs: their expression planes are made up of sounds, and their contents or, perhaps more precisely, their referents, consist of portions delimited on the bodily sur-face; at the same time the sounds are clearly differentiated from the body parts, and while they are directly given, they are not thematic.

However, semiotics of the body as conceived by Ellen is exclusively concerned with ling-uistic meanings, segmentations of the body realised by one or other extant verbal language. Yet, cultures making use of languages which do not dispose of any terms for distinguishing the arm and the hand, may well possess dances or other bodily techniques, the execution of which requires them to construct models of the body which establish demarcations between these corporal segments. In our view, the semiotics of the body should be devoted to the investigation of all those rivalling models resulting form the multifarious practices current in a culture, as well as to the determination of such universals which may be found in these models, in a given community and across cultures.

Fig.1. The prototypical sign and other meanings

directly present thematic diffentiated

continuous same nature

pired association(perceptual context)

both items both items yes yes

appresented pairing one item directly presenteditem or both

yes yes

prototypical sign one item indirectly presented item

no no

protoindex one item mostly directly presented item

provisionallydiscontonuous

yes

pictured protoindex one item

mostly directly presented item

(of index, not pic-ture)

in the referent, yesin the sign, no

in index relata,yes

aesthetic function/connotation

one itemmostly directly presented item(of fi rst sign)

no no

ostensive defi nitionboth items,

one also indirectly one of the relata yes, as contextaccording to

circumstances

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The arbitrary wrappings of the body

There is certainly a wider sense of meaning, which may be related, as Lévi-Strauss once put it, to order, that is, organisation, relatedness, indexicality. What is involved is the idea of con-necting things together, and of selecting elements to connect from a wider fi eld of possibili-ties. It is interesting to observe that it is not the sign function but the paradigm, the feature, and the phoneme, as metaphors for selection, and the syntagm and the index, as metaphors for connection, which have had an important role to play in the adoption of the linguistic mo-del in semiotics, notably in the work of Barthes, Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, and many Peirceans. When Lévi-Strauss presents the myth as a sign function, this interpretation is contradicted by his own detailed description, which really manifests a second-order texture. And when Greimas claims that even the phoneme carries meaning, this can only be understood in the sense of its forming a whole, a category having its own limits. This kind of meaning of meaning is also present in Hjelmslev’s (1943) idea that a “form” projected onto a “substance” (or, as he would later (1959) put it, onto some kind of “mat-ter”, thereby creating a “substance”) is really a much more general phenomenon than the sign: it is concerned with the establishment of limits in reality, with the selection of some features, to the determent of others, which are taken account of and then organised. The same phenomenon is also familiar from Gestalt psychology. In spite of Saussure’ quoted opinion to the contrary, clothing will actually furnish us with an excellent way of studying such an organisation.

Garments were discussed in early semiotics, together with the meal, by Barthes (1964), in terms of syntagms and paradigms. These terms may be used to stand for “chain and choice” (Douglas 1972:62 ), for “assemblage in praesentia” and “in absentia” (Saussure 1968:278ff ), for logical conjunction and disjunction (Jakobson 1942); but we should not assume (as Barthes certainly does) that a syntagm must imply an “enchaînement”, a linear order (Saus-sure ibid.). For clothing, just as the meal and the picture, is, as Saussure (1974:39) says about the latter, a multi-spatial, or perhaps better, a multi-dimensional semiotic object. We cannot obtain all the relevant categories of the system, if we restrict our search to what is worn “sur un même point du corps” (Barthes 1964:135), since the different paradigms of pants, long underpants, trousers, sweater, jacket, and overcoat all entirely or partly occupy the same body spot. But the three dimensions of the body, even as seen in egocentric space, are not directly relevant (clothing details, not garments, are found back or front, to the left or to the right); instead, it is distance from the body which counts. The several layers of clo-thing may indeed be compared to protective shells, not dissimilar to those of proxemics, but located inside the latter (for which cf. Hall 1966; Spiegel & Machotka 1974; Watson 1970 ); they may be distinguished, on a fi rst approximation, as follows:

O: the skin, nudity; Oa: body decorations, including make-up, tattoo, and hair-do; 1: underwear; 1a: secondary, optional underwear, such as long underpants; 2: ordinary indoor clothing; 2a: optional extra indoor clothing or supplemental outdoor clo-thing, such as sweaters; 3: outdoor clothing, e.g. coats, jackets (the latter may even be 2a and perhaps should be assigned to a category 2b; but we will ignore this and other complications here).

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Fig 2a. Occidental clothing system

Fig 2b. Messoamerican clothing system

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one of the

following must be chosen

all preceding features are

conditions of the following

choices should made from both sets

one of the proce-ding features are conditions of the

following or

Entering such a double segmentation into body parts and clothing layers on a grid, we can now proceed to describe the common Occidental clothing system, or at least one its variants (fi g.2a). In order for such an abstract study to be illuminating, the system will be compared to a variety of the traditional Mesoamerican pattern (fi g.2b). A few things must be explained, before we proceed. Both a quechquémitl and a huipil are basically folded pieces of cloth, but they are folded and sewn together in different manners. Thus, the huipil is made of a number of stripes sewn up, so as to form rectilinear pieces in front and on the back, which are open on the sides, and have a hole cut out in the middle for the head. The quechquémitl, on the other hand, consists a two pieces of squares and two pieces of rectangles, sewn together, so as to leave a space open for the head, and it is worn with one apex pointing down and the others to the sides (see Fig.3.). Moreover, the huipil may have any length, and so sometimes covers the whole body; it is even used folded on the head, as a headgear. There are also two types of skirts: the enredo, which is wrapped around the body, and the falda de pretina, which is suspended from a ribbon around the waist. The faja serves to hold up the skirt, and the rebozo is a large shawl.

Some observations on the diagram itself are also in order. We have not cared to distinguished levels one and two here, for the simple reason that there is, obviously, no Mesoamerican underwear, this layer constituting a relatively recent innovation also in the Western world; and if this whole layer, in addition to many individual garments, is nowadays incorporated into the Indian woman’s apparel, there is at least no information about this in our sources. It is – or at least, it was – common for the woman to walk around nude, sometimes only to the waist, inside the dwelling , and even in the close neighbourhood.

Traditionally, the quechquémitl was worn over the huipil, and thus they occupied different syntagmatic positions; but nowadays, they form part of the same paradigm, as “dialectal” variants, for while the former is predominantly used in Northern Mexico, the latter is most commonly found in the South. On the other hand, one quechquémitl may be worn over another one, and this is also sometimes the case with huipiles, which can, when they are suffi ciently long, substitute also for the skirt. The blouse, which has of course been taken oven from the Europeans, is often worn instead of a huipil under the quechquémitl, in those regions where the latter is used; however, it may also be used on its own. In the case of some Indian groups, huipil and falda, where the former is long, form a single paradigm, the lat-ter being donned only on festive occasions. The skirt is often a piece of cloth of enormous length, 5-10 meters in the case of the purépechas , and thus must be wrapped around the body several times, three rounds, for instance, among the Nahuas of Ceutzalan; thus, the skirt oc-

Fig. 2c. Explanations to the fi gures above

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cupies several physical layers, but, as long as only one garment is involved, there is only one layer which is relevant from the point of view of the clothing scheme. If also several faldas de pretina may be put on at the same time, which is not clear from the sources, it will be necessary to assign them to different layers, only if the use of a single such skirt is also a signifi cant possibility.

It thus appears that both the difference between the clothing layers one, two and three, and the distinction between the slots upper trunk and lower trunk may sometimes by neutralised. In the Mesoamerican clothing system, as compared to the Western one, both the body part syntagm and the clothing layer syntagm remain pertinent, although the fi rst is segmented in somewhat different ways and the second does not require as much levels in the former sys-tem (for more details, cf. Sonesson 1988).

The Occidental and Mesoamerican clothing systems may be looked upon as rival segmen-tations of the body – although they were real alternatives only at some point in the distant

Fig.3. Huilpil and quechquémitl

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past, before the Western system began to penetrate the Mesoamerican one, while it was still necessary to change completely from using the paradigms and syntagms of the second to that of implying the fi rst. Although they offer options and ways of combining them, these systems are no sign systems, for they do not differentiate any signifi ers from any signifi eds. Originally, of course, there were different systems for each one of the Indian groups in Me-soamerica, and thus each of on these sets of syntagms and paradigms taken together were, at the same time, global signs for the identity of that particular group of people. In the seventies and eighties, the wearing of quechquémitles and huipiles acquired the force of a sign again, when used by the young girls studying at the Mexico City School of Anthropology: it come to stand for a Marxist world-view, and more particularly, for a radical stance of the question of integrating the Indian groups.

The iconic ground as potential sign

The differences of syntagmatic slots and paradigmatic alternatives illustrate the sense in which the different clothing systems are arbitrary, and also project a relatively arbitrary segmentation onto the body. It is important to realise, as Malmberg (for instance 1977:93ff) always insists, that the Saussurean thesis on the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is twofold. It does not simply amount to a denial of the Cratylian conception, according to which the expression must be similar to the content (as far as simple qualities are concerned, that is, as an “image”, in the Peircean sense). It also means the rejection of all similarity between the sign as a whole and the “real” world, this time, it appears, in a sense that Peirce would call “diagrammatic”, that is, a similarity of relations: different languages establish limits bet-ween different objects and occurrences at different places (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.1.). Thus, for example, the general idea of a tree, a wood, and wood as a kind of material, is carved up differently in French, German, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, English, and no doubt even more so in numerous other languages (Fig.4.). The distinctions between different terms for body parts in different languages invoked by Ellen are also of this general kind.

Linguistic arbitrariness certainly does not go as far as was once believed. Such lexical fi elds as colours, living beings, and kinship terminology, often quoted to illustrate the thesis, now turns out to be largely universal, at least as far as their basic structure is concerned (cf. Ho-lenstein 1985; and discussion in Sonesson 1989a,I.3.2.). On the other hand, the motivated character of iconic signs does not go as far as was once believed either, although the critique of iconicity so fashionable in the sixties and seventies certainly went astray. Instead of pursu-ing further the example of clothing, however, we will now turn to a discussion of iconicity as distinct from iconic signs.

Conceived in strictly Peircean terms, iconicity is one of the three relationships in which an expression (Peirce’s representamen) may stand to its content or referent (his object) and which may be taken as the “ground” for their forming a sign: more precisely, it is the fi rst one 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. Here, however, we will only be interested in establishing what Peirce “really said” to the extent that is of some help in conceiving of iconicity a something separate from the sign function.

The ground is a part of the sign having the function to pick out the relevant elements of expression and content. It has been described as the “potential iconic sign”. As a working

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hypothesis, it might be suggested, 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 is a 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 back-ground 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. Indexi-cality as such involves two “things”, and may therefore be conceived independently of the sign function (see Fig. 5). 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 fl oating instant when contempla-ting 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 iconici-ties; 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 hypoicons, as Peirce sometimes says). 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, ico-nicity is only a potential ground.

Since the iconic ground is established on the basis of properties which the two items possess only because of being what they are, the standard of comparison must be something like si-milarity or identity. Indeed, Peirce also says that an icon (i.e. 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). However, iconicity is often confused with similarity of perceptual appearances, as testifi ed by the scale of iconicity established by Moles (1981); by Umberto

Fig. 4. The semantic fi eld of the tree

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Eco’s (1968: 1976) critique of iconicity which is almost exclusively concerned with pictu-res; and by the conception of the Greimas school according to which iconicity is identifi ed with “referential illusion” and opposed to “plastic language” (cf. Greimas & Courtés 1979: 148, 177;). 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 (cf. Sonesson 1989a: 204ff) have to do with mathematical for-mulae, 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, however, most semioti-cians 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 ling-uistic signs. The most interesting arguments against iconicity were adduced by Arthur Bier-man (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 classifi ed 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 defi ne the sign, but to characterise iconic signs (cf. Sonesson 1989a: 220ff).

Differently put, if Peirce meant to suggest that there are three properties, iconicity, indexica-lity, and symbolicity, which, by themselves and without any further requirement, triggers 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

Fig. 5. Signs and their grounds

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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 refl exive, the sign is not. Pigments on paper 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 identifi cation of the common sense notion of simi-larity with the equivalence relation of logic. No doubt, the equivalence relation, as defi ned in logic, is symmetric and refl exive, and thus cannot defi ne any type of sign, since the sign, by defi nition, must be asymmetric and irrefl exive. But to identify similarity with the equi-valence 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 experience is this Lifeworld, is actually asymmetric and irrefl exive. Indeed, this fact is not only intuitively obvious, but has now been experimentally demonstrated (notably by Rosch 1975; and Tversky 1977; cf. also Sonesson 1989a,220ff, 327ff). Contrary to the argument of regression, the symmetry argument may thus be warded off, without introducing a supplementary sign function, and without the amending the defi nition of the iconic ground.

There are a number of different varieties of iconic grounds. Peirce only mentions the dia-gram, the image, and the metaphor, but, as soon as we give up Peirce’s propensity for seeing everything in terms of threes, there really seems to be no reason for stopping at that number, or even for including that series. According to Peirce, the iconic ground of images is made up of simple qualities; diagrams render relations of the parts of the content by analogous re-lations of the parts of the expression (which would include, but not be restricted to, diagrams in the ordinary language sense); whereas metaphors ‘represent the representative character of a representation by representing a parallelism in something else’. Surprisingly, when dis-cussing evidence from perceptual psychology, we shall see that pictures. There is a very particular kind of iconic sign which produces the illusion of literally seeing in the two-dimensional surface of its expression plane the projection of a scene extracted from real world three-dimensional existence (with or without a suggestion of lineal perspec-tive). Ordinarily, we would term such a sign a picture or an image, but, paradoxically, we know from both psychological and semiotic investigations (Gibson 1982; Sonesson 1989a), that these signs cannot be images in Peirce’s sense, but must rather be counted as a kind of diagrams. However, since they do seem to give rise to the illusion of perceiving the “simple qualities” of the things of which they are pictures, they are different from diagrams which are perceived as such. The relation of clothing to the body is of course diagrammatic in this latter, double sense, to the extent that this relationship really conforms to the one imagined by Saussure — which is certainly does to an appreciable degree, for human cloths are certainly more adapted to human being than to horses or mice, woman’s clothing is to some extent an icon of to the female body shape, and differently sized cloths are iconic for the conceivable body sizes of human beings. The body and the garments, considered independently, are thus icons of each other; together they form an iconic ground; but the garments are no signs of the body parts, nor are the body parts signs of the garments.

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The iconicity of gestures and pictures

Contrary to garments and pictures, gestures are often signs, according to the defi nition we have considered above: they involve an expression which is clearly differentiated from its content, the fi rst being some pose, posture, or movement of the body, while the second is usually some concept or mood, some thing or being. Unlike pictures then, and in a more fun-damental way than cloths, gestures are parasitic on the human body, while still being distinct from it. In the following, we will consider some gesture signs which may be said to be bodily representations and compare them to depictions of the body.

In his unpublished notes, Saussure did consider one, very special variety of gestures, the mime, observing that no matter how naturally motivated it is, it must possess at least a ru-diment of convention, and this is suffi cient to make it an issue for semiotics. Indeed, even a sign grounded in resemblance must pick up some of the infi nite number of properties of the object which it takes as its signifi ed, and suppress all the others, in order to constitute its own signifi er. Moreover, only some of the properties of the content are pertinent, or relevant, within the domain defi ned by the sign function. In other worlds, iconic signs must apply some principle of relevance to determine its own peculiar iconic ground . In his early study of manual gestures, Garrick Mallery concluded that many of these signs seem ‘reasonable’, because the similarity between the sign relata could be observed by a person acquainted with the culture, or once the sign had been explained to him (Cf. Mallery 1881:94f and Kroeber’s introduction, p xxiv). Thus, for instance, in Mallery’s (1880-81) dictionary of manual gestu-res we discover a great number of different signs bearing the meaning ‘woman’ or ‘female’: imitations of the breasts; of the female sex organ; of the undulating contours of the female body; of small size; of long hair; and of the peculiar hairdo of the Indian woman, with braids to the sides. This is really the story of the blind men and the elephant all over again: the elements are all similar, but the way they are selected and divided up into segments must be separately justifi ed (cf. Sonesson 1989a: 43ff, 223ff).

We may use this example taken from Mallery to illustrate all the secondary conventional traits which were elsewhere shown to occur in pictorial signs although these are basically iconical (cf. Sonesson 1992a,3.1.5.; 1993). As we hinted above, the iconical sign, like any perception, cannot grasp its object in more than one or a small number of its aspects at the same time. Thus, for instance, a thing must be perceived from a particular point of view, and must likewise by so rendered in a picture, or by means of an iconic gesture; even Cubism is unable to integrated more than a few perspectives at a time. This is true not only of the per-ceptual parts of a thing, but also of its proper parts, and of its attributes: an object appears as a division block of a more extended perceptual world (the face as part of the body, the body of the room, the room of the apartment, the apartment of the city, and so on); and one or other of its properties is highlighted by the way it is presented (as a human being, a horseman, a general, a husband, and so on).

The manual sign for “woman” obviously represents a woman from a particular perceptual perspective (the braids or the curves are seen from the front), selecting some proper part to the exclusion of others (hairdo, sex, or more global properties like size and nature of bodily contours), and insisting on particular attributes (secondary or even culturally defi ned sexual characteristics). More fundamentally, all these signs attend to the woman considered as a particular bodily shape, ignoring all other properties which might be specifi cally female.

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All pictures, but most obviously those which are somewhat schematic, such as children’s drawings, traffi c signs, or petroglyphs, insist on some particular perceptual angle (a human being from the front, a ship, bus or other vehicle or an animal in side view, a plough and a chariot from above), some proper parts (arms, legs and trunk of a person, sometimes no head, but often sexual organs), and some attributes (often man versus woman). The characteristic stick man conveys some very general traits of bodily shape, arms, legs, trunk, sometimes a head; and it picks out one of a few conceivable bodily position, often one in which legs and arms stand out in ways non commonly seen in ordinary life. We are all familiar with another fairly abstract pictorial signs, the double mirror-symmetrical curve shape often found on the walls of public lavatories, where is designates “woman”, probably as seen in a specifi cally erotic perspective; although it appears to be largely homonymous with one of the varieties of the manual sign, picking out roughly the same properties of the expression part of the iconic ground, it is therefore not synonymous with the manual signs, since there is no reason to believe that the content part of its iconic ground is erotically overdetermined. The choice is often not made in an entirely arbitrary fashion, but some proper parts rather than others, some attributes, and in particular some perceptual parts will be favoured over the others, at least if there is no particular reason for picking out some specifi c part. This choice is determined in multiple fashions. First, manual gestures, like pictures, carry with them the conventional traits of the Lifeworld in which they are fi rst used. Even when refer-ring the white man’s woman, the user of the American Indian manual signs will make the sign depicting the two braids typical of the Indian woman’s hairdo. In the context of the prehistoric Lifeworld, it would seem, the inclusion of a penis, or of some kind of weapon, both serve equally well to designate the male sex of a human fi gure, even though one is a body part, and other a cultural trait; moreover, they may appear even when no sexual act is involved, in one case, and no war scene or hunting party, in the other. Similarly, the manual sign depicting female bodily shape is not necessarily involved with female sexuality, as op-posed to the fact of femaleness, although the case of the similar-looking fi gure of the walls of public lavatories is probably different.

In the second place, pictures and manual signs, like all thinking designate categories of things by describing their prototypes, that is, the best instances of the category. Thus, although not all women have a markedly curvaceous body, the manual sign involving undulating move-ments may be employed to designate them. Indeed, as we have suggested elsewhere (So-nesson 1988; 1989a; 1992a) many visual signs standing for large categories are better seen as idealtypes, that is, signs the expression of which exaggerates certain features to a point not found in real instances of the category. The penis, in many petroglyphs, is not only of a disproportionate size, but it is in erection outside of natural contexts for such as state. Accor-ding to Schuster & Beisl (1978:129), the well-known public lavatory depiction of a woman is really an expression of an innate “partner scheme”, comparable to the Kindchenschema discovered by Konrad Lorenz which involves a “supernormal headform” exaggerating the difference between children and adults (cf. Sonesson 1988:81ff).Most beings and objects clearly possess a point of view from which they are most characteristically seen, and more easily identifi ed: it has been demonstrated that the side-view is prototypical to animals and vehicles, but furniture, shirts, and trousers, as well as human beings, from the front (see Rosch et al. 1976: 400f). What is prototypical in one culture may not be so in another, howe-ver, for old Chinese pictures, and the early stages of their writing, show that they preferred to consider a nose from the front, not in profi le, as we do (cf. Lindqvist 1989:33). All the manual signs obviously take a frontal perspective on the female body.

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In order to economise their expressive resources, the users of pictures and gestures, like all other signs may, thirdly, be content to use only those traits in which the designated object differs from other, similar objects. In the case of manual gestures, for instance, women’s small size is relevant, in opposition to the (relative) tallness of men. According to a well-known example given by Eco (1968:191), the zebra, which in our culture may be contrasted to the horse by means of its stripes, would have to be differentiated in another way in a cul-ture being familiar with a single other animal species, the hyena, which also has stripes. A more extreme example are the petroglyphs of the Bakairi tribe contrasting man with a bird (Figure 6a-b; from Vierkant 1912 and reproduced in Sonesson 1989a): only the upper part of the fi gures differ, so that it might be said, paraphrasing Aristotle, that to this tribe man is a beakless biped.

The signs used for man and woman in Blissymbolics (and also sometimes as logograms to indicate men’s and women’s washing rooms; Figure 6c-d) may be read pictorially, but the traits included are not chosen for the sake of a correct and complete rendering, but to esta-blish the distinction: the trousers’ legs of the male versus the woman’s skirt (Note that, on this interpretation, the pictorial equivalents of the woman’s legs emerging below the skirt are not included; the rendering of the woman’s body is less complete than that of the man). In some respects this is similar to the opposition, often found in petroglyphs, between the stick fi gure with a the straight line appended, which is easily interpreted as the man’s penis, and an identical stick fi gure with a dot or a cup mark, which could be the woman’s vagina (cf. Fig. 6e-f). In a general way, the sexual organs are more natural distinctive features bet-ween the male and the female than trousers and skirts; but, pictorially, the selection of these traits, rather than any of the other bodily differences between men and a women, is quite arbitrary. Taken together, all this means that, although a part of the expression of a sign can be iconical for a part of the content, it may very well be included in the sign for conventional, and even, in a stronger sense, arbitrary reasons. Of course, in some cases this inclusion is far from be-ing arbitrary, but is then motivated by considerations quite foreign to the pictorial rendering, perhaps by the necessities of symbolism.

Fig. 6. Conventional selection of iconic traits: a-b) Bakairi drawings (from Vierkant 1912:352); c-d) Blissymbolics; e-f) prehistoric petroglyphs.

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If the inclusion in a picture of certain, in themselves iconic, traits, is not necessarily iconical-ly, or at least not pictorially, motivated, the exclusion of such traits does not have to be picto-rially, or otherwise iconically, justifi ed. Thus, the presence of ‘asexual fi gures’ is often men-tioned in the discussion of prehistoric petroglyphs, but in fact, the failure to depict any sexual organ, just as the absence of heads, in other cases, may well lack all pictorial signifi cance; the proper parts in question may have been neutralised, simply because their inclusion was not important in that context. Finally, it should be mentioned here that pictures and gestu-res are necessarily conventional because they are themselves objects of different categories from most of the object which they represent. For instance, since the expressive resources of manual signs are essentially the hands and their movement, the (limited) vertical extension of the female body can only be described as far as one of its properties is concerned, its hig-hest point; and the curvaceousness of the female body cannot be rendered in its totality, but only transposed in time, as an undulating movement, which is one of the difference between this variety of the manual sign and the drawing found in public lavatories. The pictures discussed so far are really droodles, or close to being so, but they still give rise to more of a pictorial consciousness than all of the manual signs: there is no illusion, in the gestures, of seeing “simple qualities”, that is, in this case, the real bodily shape of a woman, into the expression plane of the sign. Even the curvaceous fi gure of public lavatories is more of a Peircean image than the corresponding manual sign, perhaps because the latter must transpose persistent bodily shape into temporal succession. Thus not only the designation of woman by means of height, but all the manual signs, take on an abstract, “diagrammatic” character.

Rewriting the Body Scheme: From Matisse to Brandt

Pictures do not simply render a reduced version of the human body: they are able to reor-ganise and reinterprete bodily shape as they convey a to us the illusion of perceiving it. The scheme reproduced in fi g. 7 (from Sonesson 1989a,305) accounts for what must be one of the models of the body current in our culture. Two different kinds of relationship have been rendered here: those between wholes and their parts, or constituency; and those of domi-nance, or dependency. These relationships correspond to two common types of grammar.

Fig.7. The ordinary body scheme

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However, they are described on a quite general and abstract level in that part of mathematics known as the theory of graphs. Many of my graphs would have to be transformed into sets of graphs in graph theory.

Looking at the well-known cut-out “Nu bleu IV” by Henri Matisse (reproduced in Sonesson 1989a), you will have no trouble recognising the depiction of a human body, and, more in particular, a female one. You see that she is sitting down, and you would even be able to spe-cify the details of her sitting position, perhaps attribute to her a particular state of mind, and so on. On the other hand, as soon as we try to establish the relations obtaining between the parts of the composition, and to mount them onto a graph (in Fig. 8), we realise that neither constituency nor dependency will parallel that of the canonical body scheme (cf. Fig. 7.) The procedure is entirely straightforward for the subparts of the elements which are separated by intervening spaces. In order to relate the elements themselves, however, it is necessary to defi ne a set of principles determining which part should be taken to dominate which other, No matter how we formulate our principles, there will be no coincidence with the canonical body scheme.Some of these principles, used in my study of “Nu bleu”, and posited to account for per-ceptual intuitions about the hierarchical structure of the picture, were as follows: there is in-creasing integration of parts (more direct dependence) beginning form contiguity in a vague sense and proceeding to the crossing of lines extended from the border lines of two surfaces, the inclusion of one surface within the lines extended from the borders of another surface, the parallelism of border lines defi ning two surfaces, the closeness of several surfaces to-gether to an elementary perceptual prototype (Gestalt). Dominance is ascribed to the element which has the comparatively largest surface overall, whose main axes (horisontality/ver-ticality) are more or less equivalent in extension, which possesses the greatest number of appendages, and which in itself comes closest to form a perceptual prototype (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.5.2.).

The point here is not to suggest that Matisse had a deviant model of the body, let alone that his relationship to the body was somehow disturbed. From our point of view, there are two interesting issues involved. First of all, how is it that we manage (with no apparent diffi culty) to recognise a human body, in spite of the fact that diagrammatic iconicity, in Peirce’s sense, is severely impaired? And, in the second place, what additional meanings accrue to the pic-

Fig.8. The body scheme of “Nu bleu IV”

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ture because of the difference between the constituency and dependency of the pictorial ex-pression plane and that of the cultural body scheme? The fi rst question concerns that which, in pictorial semiotics, is commonly termed iconic, and more precisely pictorial, language (see Sonesson 1989a,III.5.); the second question pertains to plastic language, as this phrase is used inside the same speciality, that is, to those meanings which emerge from the expres-sion plane of the picture considered as an array of two-dimensional fi elds distributed on a plane surface (cf. Sonesson 1992c).

Such a restructuring of the human body is not peculiar to Matisse’s cut-out, “Nu bleu IV”, although it is not found in all pictures. Indeed, we fi nd it in the Charlie Brown formula devi-sed by Schulz, which may imply be such a radical resegmentation, and in many of the pho-tographs by Billy Brandt, in which the deformation of single body parts is taken still further (cf. Sonesson 1989a:315).

Primary and secondary iconicity

When arguing against the possibility of defi ning pictures on the basis of similarity, Good-man claims that a painting is 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 exemplifi ca-tion (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 defi ning 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 1989a:226ff).

Although the sign relation is thus not needed in order to render similarity asymmetric and irrefl exive, 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 defi ned by the sign re-lation, 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 ob-servation 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 ico-nic 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 exemplifi es. 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 specifi c 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 indivi-

18


dually, 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 fi rst 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 the 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 con-vention is needed to tell us they are signs. Then the property referred to is more deeply em-bedded, is and less apparent in the ordinary use of the object, as is the case of the hands and arms used in gesture, convention even has the further task of isolating the iconic features.

In this way, a thing is often explicitly employed to stand for itself, for the class of things to which it belongs, or for some or other of its properties. According to Goodman’s defi ni-tion, exemplifi cation, being the reverse of denotation, i.e. the reference of a word or label to an object, is a reference back from the object to the labels for some of the properties it possesses. Once is has been rescued from this nominalist metaphysics, exemplifi cation is discovered to be a sign function from a particular object to some of the attributes which characterises this object. Still, Goodman’s conception does not allow for the different ways in which exemplifi cation applies to the iconic ground. Thus, a painting may stand for itself at an art exhibition; the wares on display in a show-window, or the car at the car exhibition, stand for objects of the same general class; the tailor’s swatch may stand for more extended stretches of the same cloth having the same colour and pattern; the cupcake shown in the bakery may signify another cupcake, which is otherwise similar, except for being baked on the day of delivery; and the Stone Age axes in the museum may be signs of all Stone Age things, of all Stone Age axes, or of those from a particular site (Goodman 1968, Sonesson 1989a,II.2.2. and 1992a).

The manual gesture picks out very abstract properties of visual appearance, common to whole classes of things and events, often changes scale, and largely transposes spatial exten-sion into a temporal one.When used in this way, to stand for themselves or their properties, 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. We shall call secon-dary iconicity a relation between an expression and a content of the kind described by Peirce, which can however be perceived only once the sign function, and a particular variety of it, is known to obtain (Cf. Sonesson 1992a; 1993). This is in contrast to primary iconicity, cha-racteristic of the picture sign, which is a relation of similarity which is seen to obtain before taking cognisance of the sign relation, and which helps to establish it.

The body may be involved with secondary iconicity, and may be segmentised in the process. Indeed, it may be argued that the social ritual known as strip-tease, as well as lot of the rhe-toric found in pornographic and/or erotic pictures, is precisely an operator of this kind of iconicity.

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The noble art of undressing

Even the mere touching the other’s body might be taken to consist in a series of acts parti-cularly designed to exemplify different bodily parts and properties. One way of discovering a kind of erotic value hierarchy projected onto the body could be to ask persons of different sexes on which parts of the body they are more or less frequently touched by persons of the same or opposite sex. This was done by Jourard (here quoted from Sonesson 1988), whose fi ndings may be reorganised, so that the amount of touch augments from left to right, yiel-ding our Figure 9. Instead of pursuing this line of thinking here (which was done in Sones-son 1988, 1991 and 1992c), we will chose another approach to the problem of establishing a scale of eroticalness, more in the style of a “natural history method”: we will consider the actual workings of the highly meaningful, cultured act called strip-tease (basing ourselves on secondary sources, such as fi lm and literature).

Just as the circus act (cf. Bouissac 1976), strip-tease must retain the suspense until the end, so the acts of undressing must follow an increasing scale of erotic loading: fi rst outdoor clo-thes, if any, that is hat, coat, possibly sweater, then blouse, followed by a shift to the lower body, which means the skirt is removed, then perhaps the stockings, whereupon there may be a shift back to the upper body, the bra falling off, after which the last operation brings us back again to the lower trunk, to the panties, which however, in the classical version, are never taken off, or are at least replaced with darkness. It is the clothing scheme, which is here temporalised: each layer, in the sense of that scheme, is run through separately, following both the syntactical dimensions of the scheme in question, the one inside out, and the one projecting onto body parts. But since the clothing scheme lacks a temporal dimension proper, the direction of undressing must be given by something else, in particular in the relation bet-ween clothing layers; and that which gives the direction, we submit, is the erotic dominance hierarchy. It may be objected, that it is simply impossible for mechanical reasons, to remove fi rst clothes found on the lower layers; but this is untrue, as will be seen from the fact, that there are rhetorical operations on the eroticalness scale, which permits just that to be done.In his classical text on the strip-tease, Barthes (1957:147ff) seems to contradict what we have said so far: in his opinion, the strip-tease, at least in its Parisian variant, is based on a contradiction: “désexualiser la femme dans le moment même où on la dénude”, the result being that “toute une série de couvertures [sont] apposées sur le corps de la femme, au fur et à mesure qu´elle feint de le dénuder”. This is so, according to Barthes, because, at the begin-ning of the act, the woman is disguised as a Chinese woman, a vamp, or what have you, or she is adorned with feathers, furs, and the like, and the effects of these fi ttings remain, even when they are taken off. The supposedly “artistic” dancing is not intended to be erotic, but is there to out-distance the very fact of nudity; which is proven a contrario by what happens in the amateur competitions, where the awkward movements of the participants do make their nakedness apparent, and even embarrassing.

Barthes’ judgement could possibly apply only, as he indicates, to Parisian strip-tease. More importantly, however, his evaluation really supposes an implicit, everyday assumption, which it is designed to deny, according to which the successive uncovering of the female body amounts to an increasing sexualisation; and it is precisely this assumption, which we are out here to formulate in a precise way. It is of no avail to us, if the professionalization of contemporary strip-tease has smoothed out the procedure, to the point of depriving it of all erotic loading. The essence of the strip-tease, for all we know, may well be embodied in amateur competitions — or even in the more secret doings occurring in private bedrooms.

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Fig. 9. The hierarchy of touching. Numerical assignments made by the author, on the basis of Jourard’s experiments, as referred in Argyle 1969: 64, reproduced above as Figure 9a.

See text for further explanations of the precedure employed

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Fig. 9a. The tacticle body scheme(From Aggyle 1969:94)


Now let us, in a way which is parallel to Hall’s proxemic distance, call the 0 layer of clothing the intimate level, layer number one the personal level, layer 2 the social level, and layer 3 the public level. The layers which were designed with the numbers 1a and 2a will now be termed the semi-personal and the semi-social levels, respectively. Given these levels, there is a fi rst rhetorical operation, which consists in introducing incoherences in the clothing syn-tagms, both inside each layer, and between the layers. Thus, for instance, when Klossowski´s wife is depicted, on one of Zuccas´s photographs (reproduced in Orfali 1984:67 ), dressed in a fur cap (public layer) and undergarments (personal layer), this is really a double rhetorical operation applied to the clothing scheme, fi rst because the outermost elements pertain to different layers, and second because the head is on a public level, while the rest of the body remains on the personal level.

In order to see the difference between these two concurrent meaning effects, it is important to realise that the fi rst of them is independent of temporal sequence, while the second de-rives from the assumption of a norm-al order of undressing, which requires the hat, as an object pertaining to the public level, to be removed will before the undergarments, which are contained in the personal level. It may seem that, at least in the case of static photographs, the difference is of no avail: if, for instance, the girl is naked under the blouse, we cannot know, from the photograph alone, if, infringing the norm-al order, she took the bra off before the blouse, or if she never put any bra on. In fact, however, pictures often contain indexical signs, which permit us to reconstruct the preceding happenings from the schemes of expe-rience, and these reconstructions also determine different erotic operations. Such an undressing may go from the hat and gloves, the coat, and the shoes, on the public level, over the sweater on the semi-public level, and the belt, blouse and skirt on the personal level, to the stockings, bra and panties on the intimate level. This scheme renders the diffe-rent layers of clothing involved in a norm-al act of undressing, as well as the shifts from up-per to lower body, and vice-versa. Inside each layer, the rule is, it seems, to expose the most private parts only in the end. One obvious rhetorical operation consists in the permutation of the order between the body parts: taking the panties off before the bra (a state description contained in many pornographic pictures) is undoubtedly to unveil “the best” already at the beginning, but it also creates a tension in relation to the norm-al order of undressing, which in itself seems to carry erotic weight. There is a possibility of permuting hat, gloves, and shoes, also outside the layers to which they pertain, since usually no other clothing layers occupy the same bodily slot (the stockings do just that, to be sure, in relation to the shoes, but the distance of potential layers is appreciable). Gloves are often kept on until the very end of the strip-tease act; what function may then this accomplish? It could be an outcrop of the common tendency in pornography to enmesh its improbable situations in some more probable ones, that is, in some everyday scheme of interpretation (thus, for instance, we get the nude girl busying herself washing up the dishes, riding a bicycle, swinging, sitting in an arm-chair reading a book, or even walking on the street), which may be a technique aiming at making the erotic utopia more easy to assimilate into the everyday reality of the observer. In this case, the gloves, just like Mme Klossowski´s fur cap, stand for the real woman the man may meet every day on the street, while the rest of the body is made to represent the pornographic utopia. Another interpretation, which does not necessarily exclude the fi rst one, is that the experience of all the layers of clothing which norm-ally separate the fur cap or the gloves from the near-nudity of the rest of the body crea-tes an additional tension, as if all the degrees of eroticalness could be run through in a single

22


moment. Something like this would in any case seem to happen in some more subtle cases of permutations between clothes pertaining to different layers. There is no real diffi culty in taking the stockings and the panties off before the skirt, and with a little feat of acrobatics, the bra may be removed before the blouse. The undressing has, as always, the effect of seg-menting the body anew, confi rming its boundaries, but the result only becomes visible after several operations have been accomplished, only some of which we can observe: the erotic loading to all appearance runs through many clothing layers at once.

On the rhetoric of pornography

When studying the rhetorical operation of pornography, we may seek inspiration in the work of Orfali (1984:129), who recognises different kinds of erotic intensifi ers: “Líntensifi cateur retardant vise la création dún obstacle permettant de retarder la saisie de lóbject imaginé; líntensifi cateur renchérissant vise à promouvoir une surenchère sexuelle dans la représen-tation de lóbjet.” As examples of the former in Klossowski´s pictures, Orfali mentions the veil, the gloves, the stays, the panties, etc., but also an arm-chair or a table standing in the way. An arm-chair is for instance claimed to function in this way, when it forces the wo-man to raise her leg, thereby hiding her sex. But even moral obstacles are included in this category. If the ignore the latter case, however, the important idea here, is that the action which physically conceals the erotic object actually highlights this same object for the mind: “A chaque fois est soigneusement soulignée une zone érogène ou sexuelle particulière que láttribut vestimentaire -- dans notre perspective -- écarte momentanément de la vue du sujet afi n dírriter adéquatement son désir dáppropriation.” (Op.cit.:131).

The other type of intensifi er possesses two subtypes, which both serves to augment the pre-sence of the sexual zone: “soit exhiber directement une zone sexuelle, soit léxhiber indi-rectement en dissimilant une zone annexe moins importante.” (Op.cit.:134f). A necklace may serve the fi rst purpose, whereas the veil functions according to the second subtype, and thus emphasises the nudity of the rest of the body. This second subtype was noted already by Casalis (1975:365f), who referred to a picture of a girl wearing a bathing suit ending ex-actly below her naked bosom, which, together with the text “Examine these two impressive points”, is said to point metonymically to the breasts.

If now we ignore some more curious examples, such as moral obstacles and other vaguely situational impediments for the observer’s excitement, we recognise here some procedures reminiscent of our rhetorical operations. But there is a problem. From the point of view of content, the effect of the intensifi er is all the time to foreground the sexually loaded zone; but on the level of expression, this may be accomplished, either by concealing the zone, or by marking out its limits, or again by hiding some neighbouring, less erotically loaded zone. Put this way, the theory seems void: no matter if the sexual zone is hidden or exhibited, and if the veil is applied to it or displaced laterally, the effect is always the same, that is, there results a sexual excitement on the part of the observer! At this point, we are reminded of the famous negation present in the Freudian unconscious, which has the effect of making A and non-A synonymous, much to the scandal of the logician and (without pun) any conscientious semiotician; for the effect of this effect is to make any arbitrary affi rmation provable.

But, of course, the centrality of sex to pornographic pictures, in contradistinction to the part played by it in the unconscious, does not need to be proven. Rather, sexuality is a given; all

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that is at issue is how it is to be given. Just like Foucault (1976) notes about the verbal dis-course on sexuality, keeping silent about it is just another way of tattling about it. Sex is set from the start, if not by biology, so at least by our civilisation.

This is why we have to start out from the schemes: the body scheme, the clothing scheme, and the scheme of undressing. Let us suppose that, when the body parts most erotically loa-ded are covered up, we have attained the zero degree of the erotic scheme: the erotic effect (some small distance left to sex) is that which is norm-ally expected. The following opera-tions would seem to be included in the rhetoric of pornography (many examples illustrate several operations at once):

a) permutation of the erotics scale (as a whole): less erotically loaded parts are covered up, whereas more erotically loads once are disclosed. Often, there is a possibility of seeing through the layers onto more private ones: nipples (0) through the blouse (2); sexual organ (0) through the panties (1); stays (1) covering the belly but leaving the bosom (0) and/or the sexual organ (0) exposed; pieces of jewellery (2/2a) placed on a naked body (0); etc.

b) permutation of the erotics scale relative to bodily contiguity: covering of body parts which are relatively low in erotic loading, being contiguous to body parts on the apex, or near the apex of the erotics scale. For instance, the lower legs dressed in stockings, or the belly co-vered, whereas the contiguous sexual parts are naked. In a way, this seems to be a contiguity index, as suggested obliquely by Casalis (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5. ).

c) displacement of the borderlines on the body scheme: covering of erotically loaded body parts, but with a slight dephasing of the clothing scheme relative to the body scheme. A clas-sical case is the décolletage, which displaces the clothing equivalent of the breasts down-wards. Also, the hairy coat of the sexual organ extending over the panties, and the like. Here, the parts stands for the whole, much more effectively perhaps than the whole itself; we get an factorial index (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5. ).

d) fi ctifying of the clothing layers: cloths which are transparent or tight-fi tting are rendered “fi ctional”, since they fail to accomplish the function of concealing the body. An extreme case, which however also involves a substitution of the clothing scheme for another one (cf. below), is when the girl is dressed in a fi shing-net, or the like.

e) tension/contradiction between the clothing layers: there is more than the distance of a single layer (a kind of deletion) between cloths present on the body at the same time, that is, a state which does not occur in the norm-al process of undressing is represented. E.g. a hat (3) and undergarments (1). There results a tension between the everyday, public character of the hat, and the erotic, personal loading of the undergarments.

f) permutation of the undressing order within layers: contravenes the norm-al order of und-ressing prescribed by the undressing scheme. Thus, for instance, the panties, which cover a body part relatively high in erotic value, are removed before the bra, which covers a part which is relatively less loaded erotically. Such an inversion can of course only be gathered from indexical signs in a static picture.

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g) permutation of the undressing order between layers: this case is similar to that in e, but the difference is that the effect is not directly visible. Thus, for instance, the panties (1) may be removed before the skirt (2); but this information can only be indexically conveyed in a static picture. We get a kind of build-up of erotic energy, promising a subsequent explosion; so that here we could really talk about a delaying intensifi er.

There are, of course, a large amount of other rhetorical operations at work in pornographic pictures. Some, like those mentioned above, concern the erotic scheme, conceived as a mo-difi cation of the body and clothing schemes. Thus, there could be an addition of clothing lay-ers; and there is sometimes a substitution of the elements of the clothing scheme relative to the body scheme, as, for instance, when the bra is placed under the bosom (which is however also case b above), or covers the sex; but this has perhaps more of a comical, than an erotic effect. More important cases are those in which the entire clothing scheme is substituted for quite different schemes, as when a tyre is made to serve the function of panties, etc. Naturally, much more remains to be said on the subject of a rhetoric of the body based on exemplifi cation, but this may be a convenient point for us to leave the multiple meanings of the body, which, in the end, turned out to be much more that of woman than that of man. But then, again, the female body is, in our culture (as opposed to that of Greek Antiquity), an object much more invested with meaning than its male counterpart, as testifi ed by the very practices to which we have attended.

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