Imatra Conf Tx

GÖRAN SONESSON: Bodily semiotics and the extensions of man 1

Bodily semiotics and the extensions of man

Göran Sonesson

In Tarasti, Eero, ed., Center/Periphery in representations and institutions. Proceedings from the 3rd Annual Meetingand Congress of The International Semiotics Insitute, Imatra, Finland, July 16-21, 1990.: International Semiotics Insti-tute, Imatra 1992; ss 185-210.

The centre and the periphery together form the elements of a simple spatial configuration. As such,they may be put to a number of, literal as well as figurative, uses. It is easy to think of numerousfigurative projections, some of which have been epitomized by other participants in this congress:political centralization and provincial marginality, Occidental culture versus the rest of the world,topical and peripheral elements of musical composition, the place of the circus in relation to urbanspace, and so on. These examples give many hints on how the centre/periphery opposition could betransposed into the visual domain.

Instead of proceeding to inquire into the manifestations of the centre and its periphery in pictorial or,more broadly, visual semiotics, I will be concerned with understanding why there are – as I believe wehave reasons to suppose – a small set of spatial configurations which are somehow particularly apt tobe called upon each time someone wishes to bring about a metaphorical transposition of some or otherstate of affairs. It is, I believe, the business of visual semiotics to address this issue of foundations,because, being spatial in nature, the configuration which is the topic of our investigations, is accessibleto use largely through the visual modality of the sensory system.

Indeed, I shall be defending the age-old theory according to which man and, more in particular, hisbody, is the measure of all things. In so doing, I shall inquire into Lévi-Strauss’ idea of there being apeculiar “logic of qualities”, and I shall discuss the interpretation is has received in cognitive psychol-ogy. Although I will be referring to my own attempt (in Sonesson 1989a,I.4.) to reduce qualitativelogic to topology, I shall also suggest that something more is needed. Rather than giving you any sureanswers, I am out to pose a set of questions and to voice a number of perplexities. To invoke Lévi-Strauss immediately, mine will not be a Grail type, nor an Oedipus type of myth, for I do not proposeto offer answers to questions never asked, nor to resolve any riddles.

Apart from the centre and the periphery, I will mainly be referring to another, closely similar spatialconfiguration: the body (in the general sense) and its extensions (or, perhaps we should say the core and itsappendages). Geometrically speaking, the centre and its periphery may easily be generated, when theextension is allowed to spin around the core, pursuing a regular, continuous, path. There are, of course,differences between the typical core/appendage and the centre/periphery to which I will not attend here.

Gesture and the American Indian worldview

According to Ferdinand de Saussure, arbitrary or conventional signs best realize the ideal of the perfectsign, and thus form the principal subject matter of semiotics, or, as he termed it, semiology, which was

Bodily semiotics and the extensions of man: GÖRAN SONESSON2

to study the life of signs in society. This conception must have spurred those prominent semioticians,most notably Umberto Eco and René Lindekens, who, during the sixties and seventies, tried so hardto demonstrate the conventional character even of those signs which, on the face of it, appear to bemost completely grounded in nature: pictures and other iconic signs, whose resemblance with whatthey stand for would seem to account for their semiotic function. Ray Birdwhistell may rather havetaken his inspiration from the relativistic ideology of cultural anthropology when he asserted thearbitrariness of gesture and non-verbal communication generally. Joining these two traditions to-gether, A.J. Greimas claimed that the “natural world”, the world of our everyday experience, whichis the Lifeworld of phenomenology, is structured as a sign,. the expression and content of which arearbitrarily connected.

Saussure was much less radical: in the unpublished notes, he observes that no matter how naturallymotivated the mime is, it must possess at least a rudiment of convention, and this is sufficient to makeit an issue for semiotics.

In fact, even a sign grounded in resemblance must pick up some of the infinite number of propertiesof the object which it takes as its signified, and reject all the others, in order to constitute its ownsignifier. Only some of the properties of the content are pertinent, or relevant, within the domaindefined by the sign function. Garrick Mallery may have been the first to conduct what he alreadytermed a semiotic study of iconical signs, notably of American Indian rock paintings and manualgestures. It was in the case of the latter that he pondered the arbitrary nature of the signs, concludingthat many of the manual gestures were “reasonable”, because the similarity between the sign relatacould be observed by a person acquainted with the culture, or once the sign had been explained tohim (Cf. Mallery 1881:94f and Kroeber’s introduction, p xxiv). Thus, for instance, in Mallery’s(1880-81) dictionary of manual gestures we discover a great number of different signs bearing themeaning “woman” or “female”: imitations of the breasts; of the female sex organ; of the undulatingcontours of the female body; of small size; of long hair; and of the peculiar hairdo of the Indianwoman, with braids to the sides. This is really the story of the blind men and the elephant once again:the elements are all similar, but the way they are selected and divided up into segments must beseparately justified (cf. Sonesson 1989a: 43ff, 223ff).

Indeed, we may use this example to illustrate all the secondary conventional traits which were else-where shown to occur in pictorial signs although these are basically iconical (cf. Sonesson 1990b,III.1.5.).First, manual gestures, like pictures, carry with them the conventional traits of the Lifeworld in whichthey are first used. Even when referring the the white man’s woman, the user of the American Indianmanual signs will make the sign depicting the two braids typical of the Indian woman’s hairdo. Sec-ond, like all thinking, pictures and manual signs designate categories of things by describing theirprototypes, that is, the best instances of the category, Thus, although not all women have a markedlycurvaceous body, the manual sign involving undulating movements may be employed to designatethem. Economizing their expressive resources, pictures and gestures, like all other manual signs may,thirdly, be content to use only those traits in which the designated object differs from other, similarobjects: women’s small size, for instance, is relevant, in opposition to the (relative) tallness of men. Inthe fourth place, pictures and gesture are necessarily conventional because they are themselves objectsof different categories from most of the object which they represent. For instance, since the expressiveresources of manual signs are essentially the hands and their movement, the (limited) vertical exten-sion of the female body can only be described as far as one of its properties is concerned, its highestpoint; and the curvaceousness of the female body cannot be rendered in its totality, but only transposedin time, as an undulating movement.


Fifth, and most fundamentally, the iconical sign, like any perception, is unable to grasp its object inmore than one or a small number of its aspects at the same time. Thus, for instance, a thing must beperceived from a particular point of view, and must likewise by so rendered in a picture, or by meansof an iconic gesture; even Cubism is unable to integrated more than a few perspectives at a time. Thisis true not only of the perceptual parts of a thing, but also of its proper parts, and of its attributes: anobject appears as a division block of a more extended perceptual world (the face as part of the body, thebody of the room, the room of the apartment, the apartment of the city, and so on); and one or other ofits properties is highlighted by the way it is presented (as a human being, a horseman, a general, ahusband, and so on). The manual sign for woman obviously represents a woman from a particularperceptual perspective (the braids or the curves are seen from the front), selecting some proper part tothe exclusion of others (hairdo, sex, or more global properties like size and nature of border lines), andinsisting on particular attributes (secondary or even culturally defined sexual characteristics).

Clothing and other arbitrary wrappings

In another one of his notes, Saussure (1968:168) cites clothing as a particularly clear case of a natu-rally motived sign system: the shape and limits of the garments are, in his view, entirely determined bythe naturally evolved anatomy of the body.

This may not be as obvious as he maintains, however. It is important to realize, as Malmberg (forinstance 1977:93ff) always insists, that the Saussurean thesis on the arbitrariness of the linguistic signis twofold. It does not simply amount to a denial of the Cratylian conception, according to which theexpression must be similar to the content (as far as simple qualities are concerned, that is, as an “im-age”, in the Peircean sense). It also means the rejection of all similarity between the sign as a whole andthe “real” world, this time, it appears, in a sense that Peirce would call “diagrammatic”, that is, asimilarity of relations: different languages establish limits between different objects and occurrences atdifferent places (cf. Sonesson 1989,III.1.). Thus, for example, the general idea of a tree, a wood, andwood as a kind of material, is split up differently in French, German, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Span-ish, English, and no doubt even more so in numerous other languages (fig.1.). This is why translationis so difficult to accomplish.

Fig. 1. The semantic field of the tree


This arbitrariness certainly does not go as far as was once believed. Such lexical fields as colours,living beings, and kinship terminology, often quoted to illustrate the thesis, now turns out to be largelyuniversal, at least in their basic structure (cf. Holenstein 1985). More importantly in the present con-text, an objects is fundamentally conceived, according to the experiments of Eleanor Rosch, not fromthe point of view of an arbitrary attribute, but on a basic level, as a chair, rather than as a piece offurniture or a kitchen chair. Its is is not grasped from any perceptual perspective, but from certainpreferred angles of vision – which may explain that, in all the manual signs listed by Mallery, thewoman is seen from the front (cf.discussion in Sonesson 1989a,I.3.2.).

Yet it seems that the remaining arbitrariness may well be one of experience rather than of words.Consider the case of garments. It was discussed in early semiotics, together with the meal, by Barthes(1964b), 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 ), forlogical conjunction and disjunction (Jakobson 1942 ); but we should not assume (as Barthes certainlydoes) that a syntagm must imply an “enchaînement”, a linear order (Saussure ibid.). For clothing, justas the meal and the picture, is, as Saussure (1974:39) says about the latter, a multi-spatial, or perhapsbetter, 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 1964b:135), since the different paradigms of pants, longunderpants, 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 isdistance from the body which counts. The several layers of clothing may indeed be compared toprotective shells, not dissimilar to those of proxemics, but located inside the latter (for which cf. Hall1966; Spiegel & Machotka 1974; Watson 1970 ); they may be distinguished, on a first approxima-tion, 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: optionalextra indoor clothing or supplemental outdoor clothing, 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 willignore this and other complications here).

In the following, the common Occidental clothing system (fig.2a) will be compared to the traditionalMesoamerican pattern (fig.2b; ). A few things must be explained, before we proceed. Both a quechquémitland a huipil are basically folded pieces of cloth, but they are folded and sewn together in differentmanners. Thus, the huipil is made of a number of stripes sewn up, so as to form rectilinear pieces infront 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 andthe others to the sides (see fig.3.).

Traditionally, the quechquémitl was worn over the huipil, and thus they occupied different syntagmaticpositions; but nowadays, they form part of the same paradigm, as “dialectal” variants, for while theformer is predominantly used in Northern Mexico, the latter is most commonly found in the South. Onthe other hand, one quechquémitl may be worn over another one, and this is also sometimes the casewith huipiles, which can, when they are sufficiently 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


Fig.2a. Occidental clothing system

Fig.2b Mesoamerican clothing system


quechquémitl, in those regions where the latter is used; however, it may also be used on its own. In thecase of some Indian groups, huipil and falda, where the former is long, form a single paradigm, thelatter being donned only on festive occasion.l

It thus appears that both the dif-ference between the clothinglayers one, two and three, andthe difference between the slotsupper trunk and lower trunkmay sometimes by neutralized.In the Mesoamerican clothingsystem, as compared to theWestern one, both the body partsyntagm and the clothing layersyntagm remain pertinent, al-though the first is segmented insomewhat different ways andthe second does not require asmuch levels in the former sys-tem. (for more details, cf.Sonesson 1988a).

The arbitrariness of the clothingsystem could in fact have beenshown using a more familiar ex-ample: not only are the tradi-tional differences of woman’sand man’s clothing much greaterthan the anatomical distinction,but from the 11th century on-wards, the distinctiveness of ap-parel has been ever more in-creased (cf. Laurent 1980). Butat this point, we will take a fur-ther step, and proceed to inquireinto the status of the body itself,considered as a semiotic object.

all preceding features areconditions of the following

one of the proceding fea-tures are conditions of thefollowing

choices should made fromboth sets

orone of the followingmust be chosen

Fig. 2c. Explanations to the figures above.

Fig.3. Huipil and quechquémit


The semiotics of the body

The phrase “semiotics of the body” was introduced by the ethnolinguist Roy Ellen (1977) to describea study concerned with the different ways in which the bodily continuum is segmented and organizedinto parts by the different languages of the world. In fact, what Ellen has accomplished, I contend, isreally a mere “semantics of the body”, and that in a double sense. First, he is exclusively concernedwith linguistic meanings, segmentations of the body realized by one or other extant verbal language. Inthe second place, and using the terms in Morris’ sense this time, he seems to be neglecting all extra-semantic, that is, most notably, pragmatic concerns.

As for the first point, cultures making use of languages which do not dispose of any terms for distin-guishing the arm and the hand, may well possess dances or other bodily techniques, the execution ofwhich requires them to construct models of the body which establish demarcations between thesecorporal segments. We should expect the semiotics of the body to be devoted, then, to the investigationof all those rivalling models resulting form the multifarious practices current in a culture, as well asbeing concerned with the determination of such universals which may be found in these models, in agiven community and across cultures.

My second point is that this semiotics of the body should be required to explain the uses to whichbodily meanings are put in other domains, that is, the constraints,. if any, on the ways in which bodilymeanings are metaphorically transposed. This is the issue which will occupy us in the following.

Fig. 4. The canonical body scheme

Pragmatics, I trust, is concerned, among other things, with what Jakobson called intersemiotic trans-lation, that is, with the way in which meaning is transferred from one semiotic system to another.One obvious way in which pictures are involved with bodily meanings is of course when they con-vey to us the illusion of perceiving a human body. The scheme reproduced in fig. 4. (from Sonesson1989a,305) accounts for what must be one of the models of the body current in our culture Twodifferent kinds of relationship have been rendered here: those between wholes and their parts, orconstituency; and those of dominance, or dependency. These relationships correspond to two com-mon types of grammar. However, they are described on a quite general and abstract level in that partof mathematics known as the theory of graphs. Many of my graphs would have to be transformedinto sets of graphs in graph theory.


From Matisse’s Blue Nude to Charlie Brown

Looking at the well-known cut-out “Nu bleu IV” by Henri Matisse (reproduced in Sonesson 1989a),you will have no trouble recognizing the depiction of a human body, and, more in particular, afemale one. You see that she is sitting down, and you would even be able to specify the details of hersitting position, perhaps attribute to her a particular state of mind, and so on. On the other hand, assoon as we try to establish the relations obtaining between the parts of the composition, and to mountthem onto a graph, we realize that neither constituency nor dependency will parallel that of thecanonical body scheme (cf. fig.5.) The procedure is entirely straightforward for the subparts of theelements which are separated by intervening spaces. In order to relate the elements themselves,however, it is necessary to define a set of principles determining which part should be taken todominate which other, that is, principles separating the core and its appendages. I am afraid theseprinciples are more subject to doubt. But no matter how we formulate our principles, there will beno coincidence with the canonical body scheme.

Fig. 5. “Nu bleu IV”

Some of these principles, used in my study of “Nu bleu”, were as follows: there is increasing integra-tion of parts (more direct dependence) beginning form contiguity in a vague sense and proceeding tothe crossing of lines extended from the border lines of two surfaces, the inclusion of one surfacewithin the lines extended from the borders of another surface, the parallelism of border lines definingtwo surfaces, the closeness of several surfaces together to an elementary perceptual prototype (Ge-stalt). Dominance is ascribed to the element which has the comparatively largest surface overall,whose main axes (horizontality/verticality) are more or less equivalent in extension, which pos-sesses the greatest number of appendages, and which in itself comes closest to form a perceptualprototype (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.5.2.).

These principles were posited to account for perceptual intuitions about the hierarchical structure ofthe picture. They have since then been modified and rendered more precise, in the analyses of furtherpictures accomplished by a working group at the Lund Semiotics Seminar. In both their versions,however, this set of analytical principles are largely concerned with the relations between the centreand the periphery or, more precisely, with the core and its extensions.


The point here is not to suggest that Matisse had a deviant model of the body, let alone that his relation-ship to the body was somehow disturbed. From our point of view, there are two interesting issuesinvolved. First of all, how is is that we manage (with no apparent difficulty) to recognize a humanbody, in spite of the fact that diagrammatic iconicity, in Peirce’s sense, is severely impaired? And, inthe second place, what additional meanings accrue to the picture because of the difference between theconstituency and dependency of the pictorial expression plane and that of the cultural body scheme?The first question concerns that which, in pictorial semiotics, is commonly termed iconic language; thesecond question pertains to plastic language, as this phrase is used inside the same speciality, that is, tothose meanings which emerge from the expression plane of the picture considered as an array of two-dimensional fields distributed on a plane surface. As for the little I am able to say about the first issue,I must refer you to my book “Pictorial concepts”. (Sonesson 1989a,III.5.) The second issue is centralto my concern here: since dependency really amounts to an ordered set of core and appendages, youwill appreciate that we have already arrived at the heart of the matter.

Fig. 6. The Charlie Brown hierarchy

There is nothing peculiar about Matisse’s cut-out, “Nu bleu IV”. The same questions may be posedabout, for instance, Charlie Brown as drawn by Schulz (fig.6) The Charlie Brown formula does notrely on as radical a resegmentation of perceptual reality as Matisse’s cut-out. It does not require anycompounding of independent elements, but presents the body as an unity from the start. However, itcertainly modifies the relative importance of body parts, notably in the case of the head, the feet, andthe upper trunk (cf. Sonesson 1989a:315).

Plastic language and the feature hierarchy

Two of the currently most influential models of pictorial semiotics, the one devised by the Groupe µ,and the one developed by the Greimas school, recognize the distinction just referred to between theiconic and the plastic layers of the picture. The differences between these schools need not concern ushere. According to this conception, roughly, the picture stands, on the iconic level, for some objectrecognizable from the ordinary perceptual Lifeworld; whereas, on the plastic level, the meaning mustbe derived from the properties which the expression plane of the picture really possesses, when consid-ered as made up of mere twodimensional shapes on a surface (see Groupe µ 1978; 1979; 1985; Floch1985: 15; 1986a, passim; 1986b. 126ff, and passim; and critique in Sonesson 1991b).


This poses the question how we are to determine the plastic meanings of a picture. Twodimensionalshapes on a surface simply are too ambiguous in themselves. Groupe µ so far has proposed nothing toanswer this query; the Greimasian Jean-Marie Floch, however, even tries to interpret “abstract art”,that is, pictures having only plastic language. Nevertheless, I have shown elsewhere (in Sonesson1987a; 1989a,II.3.) that, in his analytical practice, Floch actually presupposes plastic language to beredundant in relation to the iconic one, that is, that it may contain less, and more abstract, informationthan iconic language, but that it cannot introduce anything new. Apart from rendering the distinctionbetween the two layers trivial, this assumption is nowhere justified. I therefore suggested that therecould be independent sources for plastic meaning. Experimental psychology, the Gestalt school, and ofcourse mathematical topology give us some hints. As I later discovered, Fernande Saint-Martin hasexploited the latter two. But there is nothing to justify the particular choice of forms in her work either.

One way of approaching the intrinsic meanings of visual elements could be to establish a featurehierarchy, similar to the one found by Jakobson (1942), according to which there is a parallelismbetween the stages of phonetic development in child language, the stages of phonetic reduction in theaphasic, and the relative complexity of the world’s languages, as far as the phoneme repertory is con-cerned. Indeed, Lotte Hoffmann (1943) asked children between 2,2 and 9,7 years of age to imitate a setof simple geometrical configurations using ready-made material, like sticks, plates, and rings. All theconfigurations lacked all directly iconic content. By combining the ready-made implements, it waspossible to reproduce all the geometrical configurations faithfully. Instead, however, children between3-4 years would use any object whatsoever to stand for all of the different configurations; but moreoften than not, a perfectly round, compact object would be preferred. Older children would pick uponly one, global, property present in the configuration and imitate it with a single implement, forinstance, such properties as being closed, angular, pointed, having holes, and so on. Later severalpieces would be used, rendering more often the number of parts of the imitated object than its shape(more details in Sonesson 1989a,II.3.6.).

Fig. 7. Different limits between prototypical categories

It becomes clear from these example that a prototypical shape is used by the child to represent a wholeclass of geometrical configurations. A round, compact object seems to function like a prototype, a “bestform”, to which more deviant cases are assimilated. This is seen most clearly is cases in which differentchildren impose differently placed limits between the classes subsumed by the prototypes (fig.7). Giventhese facts, we are able to set up the rudiments of a tentative hierarchy: it will start out from the circle,the only shape the centre and periphery of which are perceptually salient; and it will continue with anelementary division into circles and straight lines, the latter being the first element in which extensionbecomes salient (fig.8).


The idea of a logic of qualities

Comparing the two “great structuralists” Piaget and Lévi-Strauss, the cognitive psychologist HowardGardner (1973) argues that, whereas the first is a pure formalist, the second is really more concernedwith the peculiar qualities connected by the relations. In the conception of Lévi-Strauss, it is as impor-tant that the mind tends to focus on specific qualities such as the raw and the cooked as it is that it willconceive of them in binary opposition to each other. The negation as such is not important, but what isnegating what. Piaget, on the other hand, is content to reduce all reasonings of his experimental sub-jects to a group of four operations and 16 binary propositions or some approximation to these, and it istherefore of no avail to know whether this mathematical form was manifested in a particular case as areasoning about chemical substances, billiard.balls, or a pendulum.

According to Gardner, Piaget will be of more help to us if we want to understand scientific thinking,but Lévi-Strauss has more to tell us about artistic cognition and figurative thinking in general.

This interpretation does not seem to be entirely justified. In fact, according to Lévi-Strauss’ owninterpretation of his “logic of qualities”, it is not the qualities, but the logic which matters. Althoughthere is a small set of qualities which tend to occur over and over again in his analyses, Lévi-Straussis most explicit about their arbitrary nature. They have only positional or differential value, like thephonemes, he tells us. Just as the phonemes in the word “sun” are meaningless separately and maybe used in other words with quite different meanings, so, according to Lévi-Strauss, the content“sun” in its turn is meaningless relative to mythology, outside a particular “mytheme”. It would beeasy to adduce numerous instance in which Lévi-Strauss rejects the idea of qualities having a mean-ing of their own (see examples and discussion in Sonesson 1989a,I.4.); he even censors Jung andLevy-Bruhl for embracing that idea.

Yet Gardner’s interpretation of Lévi-Strauss’ work is not without all foundation. There are passageswhich go in Gardner’s sense. But, more to the point, Lévi-Strauss’ own analyses certainly suppose thatqualities have meaning, even if the myths then determine these meanings in peculiar ways. In “Leregard éloigné” (1983), for instance, Lévi-Strauss tells us that things as different as the sheep’s horn,the eagle’s claw, and certain parts of different kinds of mollusc, may occupy the same place in a myth,

Fig. 8. A prototype hierarchy of visual shapes

But why, then, should everything start out from the centre and its periphery?


because they have in common the property of being “des organes qu’on retranche de l’animal avant de lecomsommer, ou dont on retranche une partie avant de les consommer” (p.185). There is separation, notjust of a part from a whole, but of a part which is in some sense supplementary to the core, an appendage,a protuberant part. What the myth treats as being the same is either the (edible) core separated from the(inedible) appendage, or the (edible) appendage cut lose from the (inedible) core.

Although there are certain recurring terms in Lévi-Strauss’ work, he does not propose any list of funda-mental qualities, nor does he try to show why certain qualities should be more important than others.And, as was already noted, as soon as he becomes explicit about what he is doing, Lévi-Strauss tendsto deny the values of the particular qualities present in his analyses.

Reduction to bodily modes

In an experimental study, Gardner (1970) found that children were particularly sensitive to what hecalls modal/vectorial qualities, such as the opening or closing of the hand or mouth, direction, balance,rhythm., penetration, and so on. These properties may manifest themselves in different sensory modali-ties, and even in the motoric realm. There are reasons to suppose that they continue to be registered bythe adult, and that he attends to them, in particular, when experiencing works of art. These modal/vectorial properties, Gardner suggests, elaborating on an idea of Erik Eriksson, receive their particularimport from first being experienced in the relationship between one’s own body and the field of objectsoutside the body, sometimes in relation to the keeping of portions of the environment inside the body,and sometimes in relation to the release of what was once part of the body (see fig.9).

Fig. 9. Modal/vectorial properties (according to Gardner)

You will all easily recognize in this table the different erotic zones, in the wide Freudian sense of the term.This is, to my mind, the problematical aspect of Gardner’s scheme. It certainly seems probable that thelittle girl will learn inception from enclosing a cherry in her hand, and that the little boy will stick his handinto a hole in the tree, well before any of them get the opportunity of having sexual intercourse. Shouldthey have to await the sexual experience, the boy would only acquire the notion of intrusion, and the girlcould only know of inception. Therefore, I will propose a more general interpretation.

According to Piaget, schemes of thinking are abstracted from actions through the several stages ofintellectual development. What is, from the beginning, taking place as an exchange between one’s ownbody and the objects outside, is projected onto the object pole, and transformed into an object in its ownright. In a parallel, but inverse fashion, modal properties seem to evolve from the body’s confrontationwith the world, but to be projected back to the subject pole. Thus, they are experienced as bodily, and


Fig. 10a. Importance of opening/closing in gestural semiotics

Fig. 10b. Importance of extension gestural semiotics


perhaps more generally, spatial, relations. Indeed, in a study of the bodily continuum underlying ges-tures, I discovered long ago, and quite independently of Gardner’s scheme, that gestural meaning islargely a question of creating and dissolving bodily spaces, and of entering into and deserting bodilyconstructed enclosures. (fig.10. Cf. Sonesson 1981a,b,c; 1991d).

Reduction to topology

As shown in “Pictorial concepts”, the modal properties may be reduced to a set of notions taken overfrom mathematical topology (fig.11). In fact, I have also added two more properties, which werehowever conceived in the same spirit: the refusal to let something else in, and the resistance to beenveloped. Note, however, that while you can retain something in yourself, you cannot apply the sameoperation to the other.

This reduction should be interesting for a number of reasons. Piaget and his collaborators have demon-strated that the geometry of the child’s first experiential space is topological, i.e. it contains the kind ofrelations that would be preserved in a figure drawn on a piece of rubber when the rubber is distended orcompressed. Properties of this kind are proximity, separation, succession, inclusion or interiority/exteriority, and continuity. Topology has also been invoked numerous times in semiotics: in the mor-phology of René Thom, in Pierre Boudon’s semiotics of architecture, and in Fernande Saint-Martin’svisual semiotics. Different kinds of inclusion are important to Greimas and, in particular, to his dis-ciple Jean-Marie Floch working in pictorial semiotics. But beyond the fact that topological space,according to Piaget, is the first space of child experience, the importance of topology has never beenjustified, nor its categories clearly determined.

Fig. 11. Topological interpretations of m/v properties


Of course, my table is also curiously reminiscent of the kind of “sublogic of space” that Hjelmslev(1937), as well as many more recent “localists” inside generative semantics, have taken to underlayprepositions and casual endings of all the world’s languages.

Beyond topology

In “Pictorial concepts”, the interest of my table was to reduce the modal properties to topology. Lookedupon from another angle, however, the analysis could also be taken to add something to topology. For,strictly speaking, the analysis introduces two elements which are not found in topology, in the math-ematical sense: movement, that is, dynamics; and emphasis, that is, the locus of the ego. But we knowfrom other of Piaget’s investigations that primordial space is heavily egocentric, also in the literalsense; and actions are at the origin of all structures.

On the other hand, my scheme involves a single species of topological qualities, inclusion. Since thereare a few other notions in topology, and since the body partakes of other elementary spatial relation-ships, we should expect there to be other modal properties. If we take away movement, most of therelations would reduce to contiguity and factorality, which are basic to indexicality. But, for the timebeing, let us proceed in another direction.

There is, in Gardner’s scheme, a clear bias in favour of cavities and orifices, taken over from Freudianpsychoanalysis. But why should we suppose that cavities and orifices are somehow more basic catego-ries of meaning than other bodily relations? The dominance hierarchy of the different bodily partswould naturally also be a primary experience, which could be projected from the body to other do-mains of meaning. This is, of course, the experience of the core and its appendages. The body offers anumber of varieties. There is the trunk with is numerous extensions leaving in many different direc-tions. There are the several extensions of the hand, in a single direction. Then there is the relationshipbetween head and trunk, and between upper and lower trunk, which appear to be each others exten-sions. And there are the more clear-cut, unitary extensions from upper trunk to arm, from arm to hand,from lower trunk to leg, and from leg to foot.

These hints remain to be developed. Once elaborated, a system specifying all the elementary spatialrelationships resulting from the human body as it is put to use, primarily by the child making its firstexperiences, would offer a certainly very large, but still finite, list of relations, which could possibly bepresent, in privileged positions, in the plastic layer of pictures, in gesture, and certainly also elsewhere. Ofcourse, the list would not be the solution of the riddle; nor would it answer questions never asked. It wouldimpose constraints on a possible plastic language. And that would be the beginning of a new riddle.

The extension of the extension

This brings me, in conclusion, to the second part of my title. The phrase “the extensions of man” was usedby, among others, Marshall McLuhan, in the sixties, to describe the way in which mass media allowedmodern man to reach out into dimensions laying beyond the manipulatory sphere covered by his arms,feet, and other more direct means of influence. This phrase uses figuratively the spatial configuration ofcore and appendage mentioned earlier. Moreover, at the same time as it is a metaphorical transposition, itdescribes metaphoricalness. Indeed, although mass media may constitute particularly extensive exten-sions, in one or other sense of that formula, the phrase undoubtedly applies to the whole sphere of culture,to all signs and significations, and thus, to what Peirce, in his late writings, was to describe as mediation.


To Peirce, mediation includes but extends beyond signs. But if there is a meaning which precedessigns, then we may well have to look for it within the logic of qualities. Firstness, Secondness, andThirdness are elusive properties, which could probably only be accounted for, if ever, within the limitsof such a logic of qualities. Secondness, it will be remembered, is existence, reaction, opposition,otherness — which is exactly that with which the modal properties, as interpreted above, are involved.The Third is branching: it reaches out to the extension of the extensions.

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