Rv AGestalt V2

Göran Sonesson:

1

Pictorial semiotics, Gestalttheory, and the ecology ofperception *

In at least one important respect, pictorial semiotics differs from most other fields and

sub-domains included in the study of signification: it is not only a new discipline; it does

not merely establish different limits and an altered focus for age-old preoccupations; it

inhabits a field which has almost never been laboured before. For, if we take pictorial

semiotics to be involved with the study of pictorial signs per se, of some general property,

more peculiar to pictures than iconicity, which may be termed pictorality, or picturehood,

and if we suppose it to apply empirical methods to this study, then it is certainly a novel

endeavour, far more so than linguistics and literary theory, more, in fact, than film

semiotics and the semiotics of architecture. For the only other domain properly devoted to

pictures, art history, always has been, and mostly continues to be, fascinated by the

singularity of the individual work of art.

For the purpose of the present essay, pictorial semiotics may be described as that

part of the science of signification which is particularly concerned to understand the nature

and specificity of such meanings (or vehicles of meaning) which are colloquially identified

by the term ’picture’. Thus, the purview of such a speciality must involve, at the very

least, a demonstration of the semiotic character of pictures, a study of the peculiarities

which differentiate pictorial meanings from other kinds of signification (particularly from

other visual meanings, and/or other meanings based on iconicity, or intrinsic motivation),

and a assessment of the ways (from some or other point of view) in which the several

species of pictorial meaning may differ without ceasing to inhere in the category of

picture.

To insist that pictorial semiotics, in its particular enterprise, has no precedents, is

not to deny that the knowledge compiled by other scientific endeavours could still be

capable of enriching our domain. Pictorial semiotics may indeed have something to learn

from, for instance, perceptual psychology in general, and Gestalt theory in particular. But,

in assessing the claim, made in Fernande Saint-Martin's (1990) latest book, that Gestalt

psychology should constitute at least part of the foundational layer of contemporary

pictorial semiotics, we have to undertake the arduous task of determining the relevance of

* Review of Saint-Martin, Fernande, La théorie de la Gestalt et l'art visual. Québec:

Presse de l'Université du Québec 1990.

Sonesson, Pictorial semiotics, Gestalt theory, and the ecology of perception

2

this branch of learning to the study of pictorial meaning. This, in turn, requires us to

investigate, not only the bearings which Gestalt psychology may have upon the peculiar

domain of problems that has evolved within the contemporary discipline of pictorial

semiotics , but also the position occupied by Gestalt theory inside present-day perceptual

psychology.

Whatever we may think about the present-day value of Gestalt psychology, there

remains a much more fundamental claim, which is at the basis of Saint-Martin's book, and

so must be addressed first: the assumption that pictorial meanings are, in some way of

other, of an intrinsically perceptual nature. This is indeed a second way in which pictorial

semiotics may turn out to be peculiar: for, no matter what may be the particular character

of pictorial meanings, there is no denying the fact that they are conveyed to us by means

of visual perception. If this is taken to mean that we must rely for our information on the

knowledge base assembled by perceptual psychology, then we shall have to abandon the

autonomy postulate, so dear to many of the exponents of present-day semiotics. As a

consequence, however, we are also faced with the task of picking out one among several

available perceptual psychologies.

Rather than offering a regular review of Saint-Martin's most recent book, what we

would like to bring here are some reflections on pictorial semiotics generally, highlighting

some sectors of the domain as they present themselves posterior to the publication of

Saint-Martin's work, until, and including, her Gestalt theory book. In the process, we will

note the challenges posed by Saint-Martin's contribution to earlier versions of pictorial

semiotics, while pinpointing such questions of our domain, which, in the light of these

confrontations, stand out as being the central issues destined to dominate all further

research. As matter of fact, we will, on one hand, agree with Saint-Martin as far as the

necessity of breaking out of semiotic autonomy is concerned, as well as on the

fundamental importance of perception to pictorial signs, yet we will, on the other hand,

propose an appreciably different view of the relationship between semiotics and the other

sciences, and we will sketch a much more comprehensive approach to perceptual

psychology.

After determining the place occupied by Saint-Martin's work within the

contemporary domain of pictorial semiotics, we will turn first to the issue opposing

semiotic autonomy to mere interdisciplinary. This will permit us to broach the more

general problems pertaining to the specific character of semiotics as a science. Then we

will review a set of questions brought into view by pictorial semiotics, which turn out to

be better elucidated by schools of perceptual psychology other than Gestalt theory; and

finally, we will relate the discoveries of Gestalt psychology to some further intrinsic

concerns of pictorial semiotics.


3

Elements of a history of pictorial semioticsWhereas linguistics derives from the ancient practice of grammar and philology, and while

literary theory figured, though less prominently, as an ingredient of the study of literature,

well before semiotics came to its own, the inquiry into the nature of pictorial meanings has

had few real precedents, before it was initiated in the sixties as part of the structuralist

project. Even though the inception of art history and art criticism dates back to Antiquity,

or at least to the Renaissance, this enduring tradition has contributed surprisingly little, if

anything, to the investigation of pictorial signification. Moreover, in the pioneering works

of early semiotics, from Leibniz and Degerando to Peirce and Saussure, and from Russian

formalism to the Prague school, pictures are rarely discussed on their own terms.

In the early sixties, the art historian E.H. Gombrich declared the creation of a

’linguistics of the visual image’, paralleling art history, to be an urgent task; and yet, in the

late seventies, the psychologist J.J. Gibson was still complaining over the fact that nothing

even approximating a ’science of depiction’, comparable to the science of language, had

been developed. In the meantime, it is true, Gibson and his disciples and colleagues had

been making important contributions towards a psychosemiotics of picture perception.

More explicitly semiotic work on pictorial meaning had been accomplished, with some

influence from Gombrich but without any connection to Gibson, by Barthes and the

French Structuralists. Goodman, Eco, and a few others had discussed the semiotic nature

of the pictorial sign. The Greimas school, the Belgian Groupe µ, and Fernande Saint-

Martin were just beginning their work.

Since then, we have perhaps not resolved any of the issues. But we have begun to

see which might be the questions.

Structuralist beginnings and the pseudo-linguistic turnA few members of the Prague school, most notably Mukar &ovsky ! and Veltrusky !, early on

concerned themselves with the sign character of the pictorial work of art, but to them, on

the main, the latter only served to exemplify the same properties that they had so

abundantly discussed elsewhere in the case of poetry, literature, and drama. The real origin

of pictorial semiotics is to be found in a small article by Roland Barthes, written in 1964,

in which an analysis of a publicity picture boosting the delights of Panzani spaghetti is

attempted, using a few ill-understood linguistic terms taken over from Saussure and

Hjelmslev (cf. Sonesson 1989a,II.1). Beginning with a few general observations, the article

then turns into a regular text analysis concerned with one particular photograph, defined

both as to its means/ends category (publicity) and, somewhat more loosely, its channel

division (magazine picture). In spite of the confusion to which Barthes testifies in his

employment of Saussurean and Hjelmslevian terms, and although the usage to which he

puts these terms is in itself incoherent, the article marks a real breakthrough, both


4

intrinsically, because of its attempt to use a simple model permitting to fix the recurring

elements of pictorial signification, and, in particular, because of the influence it was to

exercise on almost all later analyses.

In the Panzani article, as well as in an earlier text (1961), Barthes proclaims his

famous paradox, according to which the picture is a message deprived of a code. The term

’image’ in fact alternates in the same paragraph of the article with the more particular term

’photographie’, as if this were the same thing, but later on the photograph is opposed in

this respect to the drawing. Yet many followers of Barthes retain the wider interpretation,

using it to defend the inanalyzability, or ineffability, of paintings and other works of art.

Actually, neither Barthes, nor his followers make any real effort to analyze the picture:

they are really discoursing all the time on the referent, that is, on the depicted scene.

Another parti pris of Barthes's, which becomes clear already in the Panzani article,

and which has had devastating consequences for pictorial semiotics, is the idea that no

picture is capable of conveying information by itself or, alternatively, that it contains so

much contradictory information that a verbal message is needed to fix its meaning. Pictorial

meaning must, in either case, be supposed to depend on linguistic meaning. No doubt

pictures offers us much less linguistic information than verbal texts, except in those cases

in which the picture itself contains the reproduction of written messages (as is in part the

case in the Panzani picture); but the picture much better conveys another kind of

information that resembles the one present in the perceptual world. It is clear, however,

that to Barthes and to many of his followers, information itself is erroneously conceived

to be something that is verbal in nature (cf. Sonesson 1989a,II.1. and 1989d).

Barthes's Panzani article stands at the origin of two diverging developments inside

semiotics, one of which is the semiotics of publicity, which, in addition to the pictorial

aspects, attends to verbal and other components of advertisements, but which has in fact

been to an appreciable degree concerned with pictures (for an excellent critical survey, cf.

Pérez Tornero 1982). Until recently, this speciality has continued to be largely derivative

on Barthes's achievement, continuing to thrive on his fairly fragile theoretical contribution.

This constitutes a problem, for what is confused in Barthes's works tends to become even

more so in that of his followers, who, moreover, inherit his exclusive attention to the

content side of the pictorial sign, or more exactly, to the extra-signic referent and its

ideological implications in the real world, even to the point of ignoring the way in which

the latter are modulated in the picture sign.

The other current to which Barthes's work has given rise is more properly at part of

pictorial semiotics, mainly preoccupied with the study of art works, and notably

paintings. Its pioneers were, among others, Louis Marin, Hubert Damisch, Jean-Louis

Schefer, etc. However, in actual fact, the Panzani model, as applied to paintings,

immediately tends to become indistinguishable from an ordinary art historical approach.

Damisch (1979) also rapidly improvised a critique (which Saint-Martin 1987a:xi approves


5

of) of semiotics as applied to the study of pictorial art, simply identifying the former with

the linguistic model. Such a limited view of semiotics may have been partly justified at the

time; yet Damisch is subject to a much more serious confusion in comparing the merely

intuitive, pre-theoretical notion of the picture with the concept of language as

reconstructed in linguistic theory (just as Metz did in the case of the notion of film; cf.

Sonesson 1989a,I.1.2.).

Although Umberto Eco was not, on the whole, a contributor to the study of

pictures, he must certainly be mentioned here, because of the extensive discussions of

iconical signs (which he tends to identify with pictures), occupying an appreciable portion

of his central works during the sixties and seventies. Just like Bierman and Goodman

before him, Eco was intent on showing that there could be no iconical signs (signs

motivated by some kind of similarity between expression and content), since all signs

must be conventional. There is now every reason to think that Eco, as well as Bierman and

Goodman, was basically wrong in his conclusions; but his work remains of seminal

importance.

Less influential than Barthes, but certainly at least as important for the development

of pictorial semiotics, is René Lindekens (1971, 1973, 1976, 1979), whose early death, a

few years ago, was an irreparable loss for pictorial semiotics. Although his first book

(1971) is explicitly concerned with photography, whereas the second one (1976) claims to

treat of visual semiotics generally, both really discuss questions pertaining to the basic

structure of the pictorial sign per se (e.g., conventionality and double articulation), and

both use photography as their privileged example. It is in order to demonstrate the

conventionality of pictures, and to show the way in which they are structured into binary

features, that Lindekens (1971; 1973) suggests, on the basis of experimental facts (and

common sense experience), the existence of a primary photographic opposition between

the shaded-off and the contrasted; but the same publication (1971) also turns to

experiments involving geometric drawings which have the function of brand marks, in

order to discover the different plastic meanings (which Lindekens calls ’intra-iconic’) of

elementary shapes. In fact, Lindekens would seem to argue for the same conventionalist

and structuralist thesis as applied to pictures as the early Eco (1968), but while the latter

tends to ignore the photograph as the most embarrassing apparent counter-example,

Lindekens attacks its frontally from the beginning.

In at least two respects Lindekens is exemplary. He has employed an array of

different methods: system analysis and experimental tests, which enter a fruitful

symbiosis in his two books, but also text analysis (which will be defined below). In the

second place, he theoretical baggage is complex: Hjelmslevian semiotics, of which he has a

much more solid knowledge than Barthes, with just an inkling of the Greimas school

approach, in spite of the fact that he wrote his thesis for Greimas; phenomenology, which

unfortunately affected him in the subjectivist misinterpretation due to Sartre and the


6

existentialists generally; and experimental psychology of perception, most notably on the

side of the Gestalt school. Yet, the different theoretical elements of Lindekens' approach

remain badly integrated, much knowledge present in these perspectives is insufficiently

exploited, and most of Lindekens' basic tenets may well turn out to be unjustified (cf.

Sonesson 1989d).

Three contemporary approachesIn the late seventies and in the eighties, pictorial semiotics has made something of a new

start, or, rather, it has offered us three fairly different, new beginnings. Although these

three approaches are largely incompatible, there can be no doubt that, in future, any

serious theory of pictorial semiotics must take account of them all, starting out from a

synthetic and critical analysis of their divergent contributions.

The first of these approaches is that of the Greimas school, as it has been applied to

pictures, in particular in the works of Jean-Marie Floch and Felix Thürlemann. These

scholars and their followers accept the basic tenets of the Greimas school, and make use of

its abundant paraphernalia, albeit with unusual restraint. Thus, like all contributions from

the Greimasian camp, their articles employ an array of terms taken over from the linguistic

theories of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Chomsky, and others, but given quite different meanings.

The real problem resulting from this approach, therefore, it not, as it is often claimed (by,

among others, Saint-Martin), that it deforms pictures and other types of non-linguistic

meanings by treating them as being on a par with language, but that, in attributing quite

different significations to terms having their origin in linguistic theory, it renders any

serious comparison between linguistic and nonlinguistic meanings impossible. Greimasians

will obviously not accept this piece of criticism; they claim to be studying meaning located

so deep down, that it is all of a kind. This arbitrary postulate never receives any

justification (cf. Sonesson 1989a).

It should be obvious, then, that, from the point of view of the Greimas school, the

specificity of pictorial meaning is of no account. This is also what Floch (1986b) affirms

(though Thürlemann 1990 would seem to take a somewhat different stand, as we will see

shortly). Yet, the interest of this approach derives not only from the fact that, unlike

those of earlier scholars mentioned above, it involves the application of a model having

fairly well-defined terms, which, at least to some extent, recur in an array of text analyses,

but also is due to the capacity of this model to account for at least some of the

peculiarities of pictorial discourse. Thus, for example, Floch and Thürlemann have noted

the presence of a double layer of signification in the picture, termed its iconic and plastic

levels. On the iconic level the picture is supposed to stand for some object recognizable

from the ordinary perceptual Lifeworld; while concurrently, on the plastic level, simple

qualities of the pictorial expression serve to convey abstract concepts. Floch, it is true, has

tried to generalize these notions to other domains, most notably to literature, but they are


7

clearly much better adapted to pictorial discourse (cf. the critical observations of Sonesson

1989e).

The second approach to pictorial semiotics that is of seminal importance is that of

the Groupe µ, or Liege group, the most constant members of which are the linguists Jean-

Marie Klinkenberg and Jacques Dubois, the chemist Francis Edeline and the aesthetician

Philippe Minguet. Starting in the late sixties, this Belgian group produced a book of

’general’ rhetoric (1970), in which they analyzed in a novel way the ’figures’ appearing in

the elaborate taxonomies of classical rhetoric, using linguistic feature analysis inspired in

the work of Hjelmslev, as well as the mathematical theory of amounts. A rhetorical figure

only exists to the extent that there is a deviation from a norm. The latter is understood as

redundancy, and thus identified with the Greimasian concept of isotopy, which henceforth

becomes one of the essential building-blocks of the theory (cf. Groupe µ 1977). At this

stage, Groupe µ seems heavily dependent on a set of Hjelmslevian concepts (which they

may not interpret quite correctly; cf. Sonesson 1988,II.1.3.7., and 1989a,II.3-4.), as well

as on the notion of isotopy as conceived by Greimas (which in itself may be incoherent,

cf. Sonesson 1988,II.1.3.5).

In spite of being general in import, the theory is to begin with mostly concerned with

figures of rhetoric as they appear in verbal language. In a short study of a coffee pot

disguised as a cat, Groupe µ (1976) tries to implement its theory also in the pictorial

domain. Over the years, the theory has been continuously remodelled, so as to account

better for the peculiarities of pictorial meaning. Recently, Groupe µ rhetoric appears to

leave behind at least part of the linguistic strait-jacket inherited from Hjelmslev, in order to

incorporate ’a certain amount of cognitivism’ (Klinkenberg, personal communication). Yet,

the theory still seems far from integrating the perceptual and sociocultural conditions that

constitute the foundations of all rhetorical modulations.

The third conception of importance brought forward in the domain of pictorial

semiotics is the one propounded by Fernande Saint-Martin. Her early collection of essays

(1968) on the structure of pictorial space already attends to the perceptual process as

applied to the work of art (understood à la manière de Rorschach), and contains a forceful

plea for the creation of an experimental branch of aesthetics. On the other hand, no explicit

concern with semiotics is visible here. In a number of later publications (1985, 1987a),

however, Saint-Martin starts elaborating a theory of visual semiotics which is based on the

conviction that a picture, before being anything else, is an object offered to the sense of

visual perception. Visual meaning, according to this conception, is analyzable into six

variables, equivalent to a set of dimensions on which every surface point must evince a

value: colour/tonality, texture, dimension/quantity, implantation into the plane,

orientation/vectorality, and frontiers/contours generating shapes. The surface points,

specified for all these values, combine with each other, according to certain principles,

notably those of topology, and those of Gestalt theory. The nature and use of topology,


8

and its employment in children's drawings and art, were studied by Saint-Martin (1980) in

an earlier work. Her recent book, on the other hand, is given over to an inquiry into the

nature and employment of Gestalt relations.

The importance of Saint-Martin's contribution consists in her radical rejection of the

linguistic model, and her insistence on perception's being the basis on which pictorial

signification must repose. Members of the Prague school already pointed to the essentially

perceptual nature of the sign, and insisted on the necessity of its being transformed into a

perceptual object, requiring the active collaboration of the addressee involved in the

signifying act, but the consequences of these insights for the character of the picture sign

were never spelled out. As compared to the binary opposition, which is the regulatory

principle of the Greimas school approach, as well as to the norm and its deviations, which

determines the conceptual economy of Groupe µ rhetoric, Saint-Martin's theory offers a

much richer tool-kit of conceptual paraphernalia, more obviously adapted to the analysis

of visual phenomena. Yet this very richness may also, in the end, turn out to constitute

the basic defect of the theory, as we shall suggest below.

In our own extensive, critical review of pictorial semiotics (Sonesson 1989a),

devoted to an analysis of the linguistic heritage preserved by this science, as it appears in

the conceptions of, most notably, Barthes, Floch, Thürlemann, and Groupe µ, we have

emphasized, just as did Saint-Martin, but quite independently of her work, the basically

perceptual nature of the picture sign, and we have tried to expound some of the

consequences of this observation, invoking the testimony of contemporary perceptual

psychology, as represented by, among others, James Gibson, Julian Hochberg, John

Kennedy, and Margaret Hagen, as well as that of a few philosophical theories of

perception, exemplified by the work of, for instance, Edmund Husserl, Ludwig

Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Wollheim. It remains for us, then, to compare

our conception of perception, and of its conditions and consequences, to the one defended

by Saint-Martin, and to determine, in the process, what may be learnt from this

confrontation.

The relation of pictorial semiotics to other semiotic and non-semioticsciencesFernande Saint-Martin quite rightly rejects (mostly by implication) the postulate of

autonomy so popular with semioticians, notably those of the Greimas school. And yet,

when it is at last explicitly articulated, in the Gestalt theory book, this rejection

apparently has the effect of placing semiotics in a position quite impossible to defend

crowded in by the other sciences occupying the same field. Although she employs a few

metaphorical terms like ’visual language’, ’visual syntax’, and so on, Saint-Martin most of

the time marks her distance to the so-called linguistic model, perhaps more so than would

be justified. Moreover, when it comes to the question of what sort of science pictorial


9

semiotics is, she passes over the issue all too rapidly. Finally, some queries concerning the

relation of pictorial to visual and iconic semiotics stand in urgent need of being ventilated.

The peculiar character of the semiotic approachThe first question that must be elucidated is whether pictorial semiotics is a particular

discipline, having its own goals, objects of study, models and methods, or if it is simply

just another, perhaps better, way of accomplishing the goals, and studying the objects of,

art history. In particular, we must examine whether that which is studied by pictorial

semiotics is a series of unique works of arts, or the class of all pictures, that is, pictures in

general, or pictorality.

Fernande Saint-Martin certainly appears to take the latter position, although she is

never very explicit about it. Her thorough theoretical studies of the notions of topology

and of Gestalt relations (Saint-Martin 1980; 1990) would seem to suggest a generic

approach, as would the abstract character of her book on visual language (Saint-Martin

1987a). In fact, the very idea of studying ’the elements of visual language’, of searching for

its grammar and its ultimate constituents, formulated in the first chapter of the latter book,

as well as the references made in this context to Saussure and Chomsky, indicate that the

object of study envisioned must be pictorality per se. On the other hand, most of Saint-

Martin's books contain elaborate analyses of works of art (never of any other kinds of

pictures, with the exception of some children's drawings in the topology book), the status

of which is never discussed. Thus, for instance, it never becomes clear whether these

analyses are to be taken as the ultimate result of the theoretical elucidation, or merely as a

partial illustration of some of the main points.

In contrast, Floch directly tackles this problem, but his stance seems contradictory,

and, on at least one interpretation, is seriously flawed. On one hand, he sees it as his task

to account for the minute particularities of a given photograph (1986b:11); and on the

other hand, he argues that semiotics should define categories which cross-cut those which

are socially accepted, like ’picture’, ’art’, and ’photography’ (1984a:11; 1986b:12f). Both

these opposed alternatives to a study of photography and other socially accepted pictorial

kinds are explicitly present in Floch's concrete analyses, but it is not at all clear how they

could be reconciled. And while the first interpretation seems to make nonsense of

semiotics as a science, the second appears to opt for a positivistic approach of the most

gratuitous kind.

We will take care of the first part of this conundrum here, keeping the remainder for

the next sub-section. According to Floch (1984a:11), semiotics cannot tell us anything

about sociocultural categories such as ’photography’. Instead it should attend to the

particular properties of a given photograph. This is a legitimate claim if it is construed as

an argument tending to favour a text analytic approach over other conceivable methods.

But if it implies that a particular picture must constitute, not only the objected studied,


10

but the object of study, of a semiotic investigation, it would seem to deprive the semiotic

approach of its peculiarity, making it just another method which may be used within art

history, communication studies, and so on. That is, if the object of study characteristic of

semiotics is not specificity (of pictorality, of pictorial kinds, or whatever), then semiotics

itself will lose its specificity. We may still argue for semiotics on the grounds that it builds

models, that it uses certain constellation of methods, etc., but in any case, its originality

certainly comes out diminished.

Our own definition of pictorial semiotics derives from the view we have taken

elsewhere on general semiotics, because we believe that the former should share the goals,

models and procedures which the latter applies to the wider domain of signification, which

includes, among other things, the objects studied by pictorial semiotics (cf. Sonesson

1989a,I.1.). It is impossible to establish a consensus among all semioticians on what

semiotics is all about; and many semioticians will not even care to define their discipline.

However, if we attend less to definitions 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.

In the following, then, 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‘.

The very term ’point of view’ is, as Saint-Martin (1988:202) notes, a visual

metaphor. Yet the point, which is a standpoint, matters more than the sense modality.

For, in studying these phenomena, semiotics should occupy the standpoint of humankind

itself (and of its different fractions). Indeed, as Saussure argues, semiotic objects only exist

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 disappareance of the semiotic

objects as such.

Taking the point of view of the users, and trying the explain their particular use, we

cannot, like the philosopher Nelson Goodman, reject the folk notion of picture because of

its incoherence, but must discover its peculiar systematicity. But it does not follow, as

Prieto would claim, that we must restrict our study to the knowledge shared by all users

of the system, for it is necessary to descend at least one level of analysis below the

ultimate level of which the user is aware, in order to take account of the presuppostions

underlying the use of the system. Semiotics must go beyond the standpoint of the user, to

explain the workings of such operative, albeit tacit, knowledge which underlies the


11

behaviour constitutive of any system of signification (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.1.4).

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. It is not restricted to any single method, and it is certainly not

dependant on a model taken over from linguistics, but it is a peculiarity of the approach

that it tends construct models which are then applied to the objects analyzed.

Pictorial semiotics, in turn, is that part of the science of signification which is

particularly concerned to understand the nature and specificity of such meanings (or

vehicles of meaning) which are colloquially identified by the term ’picture’. Thus, the

purview of such a speciality must involve, at the very least, a demonstration of the

semiotic character of pictures, as well as a study of the peculiarities which differentiate

pictorial meanings from other kinds of signification, and a assessment of the ways (from

some or other point of view) in which pictorial meanings are apt to differ from each other

while still remaining pictorial.

In the present context, we will insist on the fact that pictorial semiotics, like all

semiotic sciences, including linguistics, is a nomothetic science, a science which is

concerned with generalities, not an idiographic science, comparable to art history 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),

pictorial semiotics is concerned with qualities, rather than quantities — that is, it is

concerned with categories more than numbers. Being nomothetic and qualitative, pictorial

semiotics has as its principal theme a category that may be termed pictorality, or

picturehood — which is not, as we shall see, simply the same thing as iconicity.

Unlike those other semioticians which we have mentioned above, who do not start

out from art history, or at least do not seem to carry with them any essential pieces of its

intellectual heritage, Saint-Martin often merely seems to summarize the inspirations and

preoccupations which have beset this discipline during the last century. Moreover, she

does not, as we noted above, present us we any real definition of semiotics as a science.

Yet we must accept her claims to be doing semiotics, for she does certainly not form part

of those ’who simply do not seem to be doing anything very new’. One of her merits

undoubtedly is to have made the multifarious theoretical heritage of art history available to

semiotics. It is, however, because of the nomothetic format in which it is presented in

Saint-Martin's work that this heritage now appears transfigured into a tool-kit for

semiotics.

Thus, what Saint-Martin tells us about Gestalt forms and topological relations, and

about pictorial units and visual syntax, must be taken as claims about the nature of

pictorality, and should be evaluated as such.


12

The domain of pictorial semioticsAccording to Ferdinand de Saussure, semiotics (or semiology as he called it) was to study

’the life of signs in society’; and the second mythical founding-father, Charles Sanders

Peirce, as well as his forerunner John Locke, conceived of semiotics as being the ’doctrine

of signs’. Later in life, however, Peirce came to prefer the wider term ’mediation’ as a

description of the subject matter of semiotics (cf. Parmentier 1985). And Saussure not

only argued that in the semiotic sciences, there is no object to be studied except for the

point of view that we adopt on other objects (see Sonesson 1989a,I.1.4. and above), but

also claimed the sign to the ’a relatively superficial phenomena’ resulting from the

interplay of values. More recently, Greimas has rejected the notion of sign, and his

followers Floch (1984a) and Thürlemann (1982: 1990) have argued the case in the domain

of pictorial semiotics. In a similar fashion, Umberto Eco (1976), at the end of his tortuous

critique of iconicity, substituted the notion of sign process for the traditional sign concept.

Whatever we may think of this critique, the sign certainly does not appear to be

comprehensive enough to delimit the field of semiotics: rather, the domain of semiotics is

meaning (or ’mediation’), in some wider, yet to be specified sense. Given a suitable

definition of the sign (to which we will turn below), we may ask if the picture, which

certainly conveys meaning, is also, more in particular, a sign. If so, we may continue

inquiring into the possibility that the picture is made up of units which are meanings

themselves, but not signs (which is not simply the old issue of double articulation; cf.

Sonesson 1989a,III.4.2. and 1989c, 1990f). Furthermore, we may want to ask the same

questions about perception per se, which is undoubtedly endowed with meaning, but

which does perhaps not, as we will suggest, take on the character of a sign. On these

issues, Saint-Martin takes a stand that appears unacceptable to us, which is why we will

return to this discussion below.

Since semiotics is not merely concerned with signs, but more generally with

meanings, pictorial semiotics, as a subdivision of the former, will be involved with

pictorial signs, but also with all other kinds of pictorial meanings, to the extent that there

are any such things.

Not only should pictorial semiotics study all kinds of pictorial meaning, but it

should also be concerned to determine which are, so to speak, the pictorial kinds existing

in a particular society, being part of that study of ’the life of signs in society’, advocated

by Saussure. And this brings us back to the second reading of what Floch says on the

nature of semiotics, discussed in the last section.

According to this view, semiotics is indeed devoted to the study of general facts, but

these facts or not of the kind designated by terms like ’picture’, ’photography’, ’painting’,

’publicity’, ’art’, etc. These latter terms serve to label categorizations of semiotic

resources which are ’merely’ sociocultural, that is, historical and relative (’le découpage


13

socio-culturel donc relatif et historique des moyens d'expression’; 1986b:13); but if we are

going to understand how, in a particular picture, meaning comes into being, Floch affirms,

we must instead develop a general theory of discourse, which includes all kinds of

discourses, architectural ones, linguistic ones, and so on, apart from the pictorial ones

(ibid.).

It is difficult to understand why such ’merely’ sociocultural division blocks should

be despised, for in all their historical relativity, they are probably the only ones we have.

Indeed, as we pointed out (in Sonesson 1989a,I.4. and above) following Prieto, who

himself quoted Saussure, semiotic objects only exist for their users, that is, they have only

the kind of existence that they are accorded by their use in a given social group; and thus,

once we pretend to go beyond sociality, there is nothing left to study. It is true that

Floch's master Greimas, following his master Hjelmslev, has argued that a semiotic theory

should be arbitrary — but also adequate; and we have already (ibid.) noted the paradoxes

of this pronouncement. We seem to be faced, once again, with that kind of gratuitous

thinking that makes Goodman substitute a picture concept of his own making for the one

commonly employed – when the real task is to account for the hidden systematicity of the

common Lifeworld notion of a picture (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.3.). But, as we shall see,

there may actually be a somewhat more interesting sense to Floch's argument.

Floch (1986b:12) actually rejects the doctrine of signs in favour of another study,

that of ’les formes signifiantes, les systèmes de relations qui font d'une photographie,

comme de toute image ou de tout texte, un objet de sens. La sémiotique structurale qui est

nôtre ne vise pas à élaborer une classification des signes, ni selon les conditions de leur

production, ni selon les rapports qu'ils entretiennent avec la ”réalité”.’ We will not enter

once again into the quarrel over the nature of signs, but a few points must be made before

we go on. In the first place, it is curious that Floch should claim the old epithet ’structural’

for his (and Greimas') conception of semiotics, for nothing could really be more contrary

to the spirit of structuralism (that of Saussure and Hjelmslev, notably), than the idea,

presupposed here and vindicated by Greimas elsewhere, that content and expression may

be freely combined, so that, in the present case, the same sense may be produced, not only

in different pictorial genres, but in a picture and in a piece of literature. Indeed, in a

structure, (as we noted in Sonesson 1989a,I.3.4.) the parts interact and so mutually

modify each other, or even constitute each other, as is the case of the phonological

oppositions. Thus, if the sign function is structural, as it certainly was to Hjelmslev,

content and expression cannot be freely exchanged and recombined, as the Greimasians

think.

In the second place, there may nevertheless be a place in semiotics for a study of

’significant forms’ which cut across the divisions of photography and painting, and even

of visual and other discourses. The case for the latter, however, is not very convincing.

Thus, for instance, if we define iconicity as ’un effet de sense de ”réalité” ’ (Floch


14

1984a:12), we may be able to find instances of it even in verbal discourses; but by

admitting this definition, we have already given up the specificity of iconicity, and we

have deprived ourselves of the possibility of discovering that which is peculiar to

pictorality, within the limits set by iconicity generally (Cf. Sonesson 1989a,III. ).

Furthermore, although it remains uncertain whether there are properties shared by a set of

verbal and a set of pictorial discourses, which do not also belong to all verbal and pictorial

discourses, there certainly are categories of pictures, which have no name in our language,

as suggested by that fact that some pictures are informatively analyzed by Floch's model,

others, which do not conform to this model, by that of Groupe µ, while a third group,

which do not lend themselves to either kind of analysis, may be elucidated using Saint-

Martin's approach (for example, cf. Sonesson 1989g, 1990d; 1992a,IV).

However, even though there may actually exist other pictorial categories than those

which are explicitly recognized in our culture, it is not to be understood why we should

study these at the expense of the former categories, which are certainly the primary ones

on a social scale. The exceptional existence of such similarities as obtain between

photographs and certain hand-made pictures does in no way diminish the importance of

characterizing the socially received categories.

In this respect, the standpoint of Felix Thürlemann (1990:9) seems much less radical:

he makes a plea for a ’semiotic science of art’, conceived as a praxis of artistic

interpretation taking Greimasian semiotics as its fundamental methodological basis; and

this certainly must imply an acceptance of ’art’ as a category. Unlike Floch, he does not

apply his analytical tools indifferently to art works, advertisement pictures, and comic

strips. Yet he does not explicitly discuss the nature of pictorial art (although there is some

suggestions about it in his discussion of synaesthesia and semi-symbolicity, as in Floch's

corresponding passages).

Just like Thürlemann, Saint-Martin is only concerned with pictorial works of art, to

the exclusion of all other kinds of pictures (with the exception of a few analyses of

children's drawings, in Saint-Martin 1980). This is curious, for she does not discuss this

preference: indeed, since she conceives of pictorial semiotics as being a part of visual

semiotics, comprising, in addition, the semiotics of sculpture and of architecture, the

neglect of all ’non-artistic’ pictures appears to be particularly unjustified. Perhaps she

would argue that artistic pictures exemplify pictorial visuality in better and/or more

interesting ways than other pictures, but there is no reason to accept such a claim a priori.

Most advertisement pictures are in fact visually much more complex than, for instance,

the art works produced by minimalists. Of course, knowing the latter to be works of art,

we will probably be much more prone to project our personal feelings and experiences

onto them than to the former. What this shows, however, is that the notion of artistic

picture is basically a sociosemiotical category (as was already the case of the aestheticfunction according to Mukar &ovsky ! ), and thus artistry is a point of view which may in


15

principle by adopted on any picture.

Alternatively, Saint-Martin may be taken to conceive of pictorial semiotics as being

merely an ancillary science, that is, a servant of art history, as Thürlemann clearly does.

That would be a pity. In present-day information society, large quantities of the

information which reaches us is in fact pictorially conveyed, and it is becoming more

important every day to investigate all the different modes of pictorial meaning employed

in the process. Not only must pictorial semiotics, like the one of Floch and of Groupe µ,

attend to examples of the several pictorial kinds, but it should also be concerned to

determine their specificity. It should determine the different rules of construction

separating, for instance, paintings from photographs (on the latter, cf. Vanlier 1983;

Dubois 1983; Schaeffer 1987; Sonesson 1989d); it should recognize the different categories

separated by the effects they are socially expected to produce, such as advertisement

pictures, pornography, or caricature (cf. Sonesson 1988, 1990a); and it should differentiate

pictures on the basis of the channels through which they circulate, such as the poster, the

wall painting, the post card, and so on.

Beyond autonomy and interdisciplinarityIn semiotics, those who followed Saussure and Hjelmslev (and some of those who

followed Peirce) have transferred the Saussurean postulate of ’autonomy’ or ’purity’ from

linguistics to the wider of domain of signification studies. Such a conception is today

particularly characteristic of the Greimas school approach, as exemplified in the work of

Floch and Thürlemann (for a defence, see ’Hors du texte, point de salut’, in Floch

1990:3ff). In linguistics, the study of ’purely linguistic’ phenomena was undoubtedly

productive for a time, but have long since been played out. Today, linguistics is a very

’impure’ science indeed, tending to fuse with cognitive psychology, philosophy, and

computer science. To retain such a restriction in semiotics, which has to span many more

and much more complex phenomena, certainly seems absurd.

Two opposite, but complementary, requirements could therefore be imposed on a

semiotic approach. First, when analyzing an object which has been studied by other

disciplines, it should take full account of what has been learnt so far. But in the second

place, in so doing, it should retain its proper point of view, and not simply merge with one

or another of the other disciplines studying the object in question. It is a great merit of

Saint-Martin's work generally, and of the Gestalt theory book in particular (1990:3ff), that

it speaks out clearly against the autonomy postulate, showing in addition the profit which

is to be gained from an interplay with other sciences, notably in the case of Gestalt theory

and the genetic psychology of Piaget. Yet, we can only regret that, on one hand, Saint-

Martin neglects a lot of information on perception which is readily at hand and which

should have important consequences for a theory of picture perception, and that, on the

other hand, her sense of the peculiarity of the semiotic approach seems to get lost on the


16

way.

If there is one thing which is particularly characteristic of semiotics, then it is the

determination to take the point of view of the sign user himself, that is, to describe the

expression merely to the extent that it conveys a content, an vice-versa. Prieto, repeatedly

quoted by Saint-Martin, has often insisted on this point. But if Saint-Martin had taken

this requirement seriously, we could have been spared the long and tortuous discussion

(23 pages in Saint-Martin 1987a) of what kind of colour analysis is relevant to semiotics

(and we could have had a little more an all the other variables instead, now treated together

on another 20 pages). More importantly, she should not have come up with a list of visual

variables, in the definition of which perceptual, physical and physiological criteria are used

indiscriminately. It is true that Jakobson has often been accused of an equivalent confusion

in his famous definition of phonological features, but (to put it in the terms of a classical

doctrine of art) even the faults of giants are faults, and should not be imitated.1

As for the other requirement, Saint-Martin turns out to be remarkably unfamiliar

with at least some aspects of recent psychology which would seem to be of importance to

her theme. She fails to mention the important inquiries into the psychology of picture

perception accomplished recently by Gibson, Hochberg, Hagen, Kennedy, and others; for

although the names of the first two do appear in the Gestalt theory book (1990), they are,

as we shall see later, treated in an altogether inadequate fashion. She never attends to

recent advances in cognitive psychology, some of which tend to put the work of Piaget, on

which she relies heavily, into critical perspective. Nor does she stoop to consider the

critique directed to Gestalt theory, by, among others, Gibson and Hochberg.

The consequences of this omission are not always serious: thus, for instance, in

suggesting that colours must be conceived as ’chromatic poles’, Saint-Martin (1987a)

seems to rediscover for herself the important concept of the prototype, introduced by

Eleanor Rosch (1975; 1978), which could be described as the use, for the determination of

category membership, of approximations to the best instances, taking the place of

sufficient and necessary criteria (cf. also Sonesson 1989a,I.3.1.). It is unfortunate, in any

case, that lacking a clear notion of prototype, she fails to make any real use of it in the

sequel, in particular in the Gestalt theory book. Indeed, it is regrettable that Saint-Martin

should ignore Rosch’s (1973) demonstration that ’good forms’ are kinds of prototypes

Rosch's interpretation has actually the advantage of saving some Gestaltist intuitions from

the antiquated epistemology of the Gestalt school. The prototype concept also serves to

elucidate some of the properties of ’good forms’ mentioned in Saint-Martin's (1990)

recent book, such as their function as reference points, epitomized in the tendency to

1 This it not far from Gibson's (for instance 1982:67) denial of the ecological relevance of

such measures as wavelength, intensity, and purity of wavelength, supposedly

corresponding to hue, brightness, and saturation.


17

render good forms better (’la boniformisation’; pp. 74ff), as well as the deviations from

the good form (pp. 104ff).

Much more damaging is her neglect of recent psychology of perception. At one

point this neglect even becomes somewhat embarrassing: Bishop Berkeley’s old

conception, according to which depth is not seen, but somehow cognitively reconstructed

using clues derived from touch, is quoted with approval from the art historians Riegl,

Wölfflin, and Worringer, who still propounded this theory around the turn of the century.

However, if the idea of depth being a merely tactile sensation has by now been

unacceptable in psychology for almost a century, even the more general notion that is has

to be constructed, instead of being directly perceived, at present seems incompatible with

the facts. The late James Gibson rediscovered the old insight of Husserlean

phenomenology, according to which it is the thing itself, not some two-dimensional

perceptual field which is directly seen. Yet the opposite, erroneous, conception turns out

to be fundamental to much of Saint-Martin’s (1987a) reasoning, in particular in her

discussion of perspective and in the analysis which she performs of the potential cube

supposedly defining sculpture; as well as, at numerous points in the Gestalt theory book

(1990), where it serves to justify her recourse to Gestalt psychology

More will be said about these issues as we go on to ponder the way in which to

choose a perceptual theory which is apt to constitute a basis for pictorial semiotics. It

remains for us to consider, in the present context, the problematical character which Saint-

Martin's rejection of the semiotic autonomy postulate acquires in the Gestalt theory book

(1990:3ff).

She starts out very well, rightly taking a number of earlier semioticians to task for

not paying any attention to relevant psychological knowledge, notably that of Gestalt

psychology, and for refusing all serious discussion of this knowledge, even when it is

invoked in passing, as in the work of Thürlemann. But, in opposing a requirement of

universal interdisciplinarity to the Greimasian autonomy postulate, she is naturally

frightened by the immensity of the task set before the semioticians, who would have to

have a perfect command of numerous other sciences, and in particular of their most recent

developments. In order to reduce the requirement of interdisciplinarity to manageable

proportions, Saint-Martin imposes a double limitation, pertaining to time and to the

nature of competence called for. First of all, a set of propositions stemming form other

sciences is claimed to go into the constitution of any new science, but as soon as the

problem domain of this particular science has been clearly delineated, no further recourse

to these sciences is supposedly necessary. Once we think we know what pictorial

semiotics is all about, we are free to close it off again to all influences from psychology

and the other sciences. The autonomy lost at the beginning is rapidly regained as we

proceed.

In the second place, the semiotician is not required to accomplish for himself the


18

operations of verification which are presumed to ascertain the hypotheses on which he

builds his theory. Nor should he intervene in the debates opposing the representatives of

the sciences from which he takes over his fundamental hypotheses. He is simply

supposed to pick out a set of propositions established by these sciences, on the basis of

which he goes on to develop more specific assumptions pertaining to his particular

domain.

Saint-Martin's problem is a real one, and her reaction to it is quite understandable,

but this should not keep us from noting the inadequacy of her solution, or the

inappropriate consequences it is likely to have. The idea of letting interdisciplinary have

its way in semiotics only until the proper problem domain of the latter has been

constituted seems ill-advised. In the first place, it is not at all obvious that we could agree

on when the constitution of the domain has been accomplished. In fact, Floch could argue

that the relevant domain has already been delimited, so that, on her own terms, Saint-

Martin's work is superfluous. Secondly, it seems to us that a scientific endeavour will

only remain vital, as long as its interchange of facts and theories with other sciences

continues. It might in fact be argued that linguistic structuralism at its beginning

incorporated a set of hypotheses taken over from psychology and sociology, but was then

closed off to all further influences, just as Saint-Martin advocates. When later

structuralism appeared to be inadequate, it was therefore rejected cavalierly, and primitive

reactions, such as post-structuralism and post-modernism, followed. Had structuralism

remained open to the interdisciplinary dialogue, it would have been much more easy to

move on to a position, from which the knowledge which it produced could be retained, and

in the context of which its accomplishments could still be given their (limited) due (cf.

Sonesson 1989a,I.).

It is, however, the restriction imposed on the semiotician's competence in the

interdisciplinary domain which is the most disquieting aspect of Saint-Martin's argument.

Although she does mention the problem of choosing the set of propositions needed from

those propounded by other sciences, Saint-Martin seems unaware of the difficulty of this

task. In the case of perceptual psychology, for example, which is the domain with which

Saint-Martin is particularly concerned, there are at present at least three completely

incompatible theories purporting to explain more or less the same facts (and we will

consider some of their differences below). Interestingly, Saint-Martin herself turns out to

be unable to follow the imposition, not to intervene in the internal quarrel of the other

sciences, even to the point of polemizing violently with James Gibson in numerous

passages of her book.

To the extent that we are willing to learn from perceptual psychology, therefore, we

will be in need of criteria for choosing the ’best’ theory. To do this, we may even have to

accomplish some operations of verification ourselves. If this is taken to imply the use of

the experimental method, then we can point to the fact (to which we will return in the next


19

subsection) that is has already been employed by a number of semioticians, and that, in

the future, as the particular problem domain of pictorial semiotics begins to emerge, we

will anyway be forced to formulate our own experiments, in order to obtain the results

adequate to the questions we stand in need of asking. But this is not all. If semiotics is a

science, it must be in possession of its own operations of verification, and thus it should

be possible to apply semiotic methods to the results of psychology and the other

sciences, and so to verify them, from the point of view of semiotics.

The prize of interdisciplinary, to Saint-Martin, is passivity. Just as, when it comes

to the chosen domain of semiotics, Saint-Martin tends to think of it as a mere servant of

art history, so, in the interdisciplinary interplay of sciences, she would seem to reduce it

to playing a purely receptive part. In contradistinction to this conception, we think, as we

indicated above, that semiotics should stake out its own domain, much larger than that of

art history, and that when, starting out from this independent position, it goes

interdisciplinary, it should have something to teach, as well as something to learn.

The dialectics of semiotic methodologySemiotics is often thought to be a method that may be employed in a number of sciences.

Yet this conception is untenable, because there is an array of methods which have been

used in semiotics so far, and no single one of them is properly speaking peculiar to

semiotics. There may be a more general methodological strain, of course, which

characterizes semiotics, a particular way of viewing things, perhaps the point of view

geared to meaning, as indicated above. In the more strict sense of a series of operations

applied to a set of phenomena, yielding a number of general conclusions, there are three or

four methods in semiotics: text analysis, system analysis, experiment, and text

classification (cf. Fig.1.).

Textual analysis consists in treating any meaningful phenomenon occurring in a

culture, e.g. a sentence, a work of art, a piece of behaviour, and so on, as being the ’text’ of

a given ’system’, i.e. as being exhaustively (at least from a certain point of view) reducible

to a series of repeatable elements and the rules for their combination. The issue here is not

whether pictures are made up of fixed, detachable units (as denied, in one or other form,

by Benveniste, Goodman, Eco, and Thürlemann) or whether the rules are really concerned

with transformation and/or construction rather than combination (as Eco may be taken to

say, and as Sonesson 1989a certainly argues). We may put the basic assumption of textual

analysis more succinctly by stating that behind all phenomena there is a categorical

framework the instantiations of which are seen (from one or other point of view) to recur

all through a series, which, as such, is characterized by a constellation of categories. It

does not follow, of course, that that which is repeated is in any way comparable to a

phoneme, a word, or even a rule of syntax. Indeed, Saint-Martin will argue that what

recurs in the pictorial text is something else which she terms a set of coloremes (as well as


20

their several constellations).

D o m a i n o f a n a l y s i s

O p e r a t i o n a p p l i e d

O p e r a t o r ( s ) i n v o l v e d

E x p o n e n t s i n p i c t o r i a l s e m i o t i c s

T e x t a n a l y s i s s e v e r a l t e x t s

m o d e l i n g , g e n e r a l i z a - t i o n

t h e r e s e a r c h e r

f r a g m e n t a r y a t t e m p t s

a s i n g l e t e x t

m o d e l i n g , h e u r i s t i c c o n s t r u c t i o n o f m o d e l s


m o s t c o m m o n e . g . , S a i n t - M a r t i n

S y s t e m a n a l y s i s i n t u i t i o n , s o c i a l l y d e r i v e d k n o w l e d g e

v a r i a t i o n , c o m b i n a t i o n


P e i r c e , E c o , c o m m o n i n s e m i o t i c s o f p h o t o g r a p h y

E x p e r i m e n t a r t i f i c i a l c o n s t r u c t i o n o f t e x t s

e v a l u a t i o n o r s u p p l e - m e n t a r y c o n s t r u c t i o n o f t e x t s

t h e r e s e a r c h e r + e x p e r i m e n t a l s u b j e c t s

L i n d e k e n s , T a r d y , E s p e , K r a m p e n , e t c .

T e x t c l a s s i f i c a t i o n

i n t u i t i o n a n d t e x t s

i n s e r t i o n i n t o c o n c e p t u a l f r a m e s


G r o u p e µ , D e l e d a l l e , m y o w n m o d e l o f i n d e x i c a l i t y

Fig.1. Semiotic methods and their application to pictorial semiotics

In this sense, textual analysis is certainly not peculiar to the semiotic approach; it

has been employed in many other disciplines, such as sociology (’natural history

approach’) and cognitive psychology (’protocol analysis’). Structuralism, in the primary,

linguistic sense, requires, in addition, that the ’system’ should be studied, and the

categories derived, by means of the application of operations to a set of ’texts’; and that

the identity of the elements in the ’texts’ should be determined through recourse to the

relations which the elements contract with each other in the ’system’. This supposes a

complex dialectic between the ’system’ and its ’texts’ which is not explicitly present in

other textual approaches.

Given these assumptions, it becomes necessary, not only to study a sizable set of

texts pertaining to the same system, but to adjust all earlier analysis of a phenomenon each

time a new analysis of other phenomena of the same general type is made, for instance as

far as the limits between units, or the identification of variants for an invariant, are

concerned. But neither Barthes nor any other exponent of structuralism have ever


21

analyzed more than one picture ’of the same type’ (of course, the notion of ’type’ here is

problematical); and if we take all pictures to be in some sense of type-identical, it is easy

to ascertain that no researcher has ever cared to revise earlier analyses in the light of later

ones.

Most of the work accomplished in pictorial semiotics relies on the textual method.

This is true of the work of Barthes, Marin, Schefer, Gauthier, Floch, Thürlemann, etc., as

well as of many of the analyses performed by Lindekens and Tardy. Most of these

investigators identify themselves with the structuralist movement, or once did so; but it

seems clear from what has been said above that, if text analysis retains any heuristic value,

this must be for reasons foreign to structuralism.

Saint-Martin's text-analytical method is not structural in this sense; yet it is, as we

shall see, based on a set of potentially recurrent elements or variables. Most of her

analyses are only sketched out, without there being any rigourous application of the model

to the text. This is understandable, for the list of variables introduced by her model is too

vast for the analytical operations to be exhausted in a reasonable amount of time. In fact,

only two full analyses would seem to have been carried through by Saint-Martin (1986;

1990) so far: one pertaining to Pellan's ’Mascarade’, and another one concerned with

Leduc's ’Masses’. They are reasonably similar, although the emphases are, as is natural,

differently placed. In addition, there are a series of, published and unpublished, analyses

executed by her disciples (for instance, Carani 1986a).

Groupe µ denies all value whatsoever to textual analysis (Francis Edeline, personal

communication). In the opinion of these scholars, text analysis tends to get lost in

idiosyncratic detail. Contrary to text classification which is, as we will see, the method

favoured by Groupe µ, it requires an exhaustive account, from one or other point of view,

of the entire text. It seems to us that such a requirement of exhaustiveness imposes a

constraint on the analysis, which may at least have some heuristic value. To the extent

that semiotics is really a nomothetic science, however, we should be wary of taking

individual text analyses to constitute its end results, contrary to what is suggested by the

placement of a text analyses on the final pages of Saint-Martin's Gestalt theory book.

For our purpose, the experimental method may be described as an approach in which

a fragmentary ’text’ is constructed by the investigator and completed (or, alternatively,

evaluated) under strictly limited and controlled conditions by the experimental subjects,

the ’system’ being deduced on the basis of majority reactions. In this way, Tardy with

collaborations studied the procedures of picture perception. Lindekens investigated what

different values where attributed to shapes such as triangles and circles, as well as the way

in which the relative degree of contrast and nuance of a photograph modified the manner in

which its referent was interpreted. Espe, apparently independently, approached the same

problem, and later went on to study the effects of photographic angle on interpretation.

The latter theme was independently addressed by Bengtsson, Bondesson, & Sonesson, in


22

the particular case in which the subject matter of the photographs were facial expressions

of emotion. The linguistic commutation test, in which one expression feature is exchanged

for another in order to study the effect on the content plane (or the reverse), was

transferred to pictorial semiotics, and transformed into a psychological procedure by

Porcher and Gauthier. Krampen, Espe, and other collaborators obtained experimental

information on the degree to which different signs where judged to be iconical.

Both the experimental and the semiotical sophistication of these studies is extremely

varied. Experiments of this kind, whether performed by psychologists or semioticians, are

important for our understanding of the pictorial sign. They have, however, the

disadvantages found in all experimental studies: either they are based on artificial, instead

of actual ’texts’; or, when they involve real texts, they expose them to experimental

subjects in situations which are in some or other way artificial. In pictorial semiotics, very

few problems have been treated experimentally (as listed above). Instead, questions

bearing on the semiotic nature of pictures or concerning the existence of iconical signs, the

possibility of dividing up the picture into units having or not having independent meaning,

the layers into which the picture sign may be dissolved, the presence of indexicality in

pictures, the question as to what makes up the specificity of particular picture types, and

the paradox connected with pictures lacking depiction, have all been analyzed (to the

degree that they have not simply been the object of pronouncements) by means of

system analysis.

In a weak sense, we shall take system analysis to mean an attempt to account for,

and systematize, the researcher’s own intuitions pertaining to a semiotic system, of which

he is also a user in his everyday life. But we shall also introduce a stronger sense of the

term system analysis, in which it means a systematic variation of features contained in the

system, to detect the limits of their variability, and their possibilities of combination. Both

Husserlean ’ideation’ and Hjelmslevean ’commutation’ are varieties of this general kind, in

spite of their differences, as is the Chomskyan judgment of grammaticality and

synonymity. In its ideal form, then, system analysis gives rise to a table having (at least)

double entries, and permitting the cross-classification of a number of categories according

to the possibility of putting certain features together. The Peircean apparatus for

classifying signs, which, in its most simple version, involves three times three categories,

is a good illustration of this type of analysis. Eco's work could be ranked with system

analysis in the weaker sense. What we find most of the time in Saint-Martin's books is

also a kind of system analysis, largely informed by psychological studies.

There is, however, yet another method of pictorial semiotics (cf Sonesson

1989b,d,g), which is a kind of hybrid between system analysis and text analysis, and

which might well be the second most common approach to our domain. Text classification,

as it will be called in the following, is similar to system analysis in its developed form in

that it is based on a intersection of two or more conceptual series, the compatibilities of


23

which are tried out in the analysis. But these compatibilities are not tested on a purely

conceptual basis, but by means of spotting actual examples of pictures, answering to that

particular constellation of features defining each single case. The result of a text

classification is thus a series of analyses of pictorial texts, but unlike what occurs in real

text analysis, there is no attempt to account completely for the given picture; indeed, it is

characterized only to the extent that it realises that particular constellation of features

which is contained in the conceptual series defining the cross-classification. It is clear that,

should we be able to inscribe a given text in a sufficient number of such categorical

frameworks, we will have ended up with a text analysis, but this prospect is not only

utopian; it also goes beyond the intentions of those who have recourse to this method.

The most significant contribution of this kind inside pictorial semiotics is now doubt

the one given us by Groupe µ (1979; 1980; 1989b,c); but also Sonesson (1989a,I.2.5.)

constructed a skeleton for the analysis of indexicality, in which an array of pictorial

examples are similarly inscribed. In these cases, each picture is treated as the

representative of a class, but there is no claim that the category classified is the dominant

one in the definitional hierarchy of the picture. Normally, we would also expect one

picture to appear in just one square of the table, and this seems true of all the

implementations mentioned above. However, when the present author tried out the most

recent version of the Groupe µ (1989b,c) model on new examples, he managed to place a

single picture in a number of squares (see Sonesson 1989g). This, too, would of course be

a way of approaching text analysis.

System analysis claims to have direct access to the system, whereas the latter is

attained indirectly by the experimental method making a detour over artificial texts. In the

case of text analysis, on the other hand, the object studied is the text(s), while the object of

study, in which we are interested, remains the system. Since it is impossible to start from

zero, the researcher will have to construct a model before he embarks on the analysis, and

since this model cannot be completely arbitrary (in spite of Hjelmslev and Greimas), he

must rely on his intuitions as a user of pictures and, ideally, on his system analysis of

these intuitions; he will then modify the model as he goes along. If the analysis is to be a

test of the model, we must retain the requirement of exhaustivity (as far as the parameters

defined by the model are concerned).

As we noted above, most studies of pictorial semiotics are of the general type of text

analysis, and many of them have, in one or other form, the additional presumption of

being structural. There is, however, a certain dialectical relationship between the three

approaches: we need to have some notion of the system, before we can set the procedures

of text analysis to work; system analysis need to be elucidated using real texts, and the

artificial texts of the experimental approach must be constructed by comparison with texts

which can really be observed ’out there’ in culture. It is a curious fact that, so far, even

those exponents of pictorial semiotics, who have employed all three methods, as for


24

instance Lindekens, or at least two of them (as Tardy, in the case of experiment and text

analysis)2, have never brought the results of one of these methods to bear on the other

ones. Thus, for instance, Lindekens did not have recourse to the results of his experimental

analysis of triangles and rectangles in order to build a model for realising a text analysis of

a more complex picture (but using Lindekens’ results, Sonesson 1988 and 1989d did just

that).

This sets the scene for Saint-Martin's attempt: denying herself the possibility of

having recourse to experimental evidence, she would have to show, using the system

analytical or the text analytical method, that Gestalt theory is somehow better equipped

to explain the nature of pictorial meaning than any of the other available doctrines

pertaining to the nature of perceptual processes.

Ontological and epistemological pan-linguisticismLike all semiotical sciences, including linguistics, pictorial semiotics is a nomothetic

science, which, just like linguistics, but contrary to the natural sciences and the social

sciences, is concerned with qualities, rather than quantities. To admit this parallel to

linguistics is not the same thing as embracing the so-called linguistic model, which consists

in transposing concepts and terms derived form the (structural) study of language to the

analysis of pictures. In fact, for the last 15-20 years, numerous exponents of pictorial

semiotics have marked their distance to the linguistic model, but this has often meant a

return to a prestructuralist (paradoxically called poststructuralist), and even pretheoretical,

stage of reflexion, as is the case of the late Barthes, and in part of the work of Damisch,

Marin, Schefer, and Lyotard. Fortunately, it can also result in a more relevant critique of

the linguistic model, and an attempt to establish new kinds of models, as in the case of

Saint-Martin's work (cf. also Carani 1986b, 1988).

Indeed, it is seldom appreciated that the outright rejection of the linguistic model

must be at least as naive, and as epistemologically unsound, as its unqualified acceptance;

for, the use of one science as a metaphor for another involves such a long series of choices

and comparisons, on different levels of abstraction and analysis, that there can be no

rational way of undoing them all at one stroke (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.1.2. and 1989c). This

is not, however, the kind of criticism which could be addressed to Saint-Martin's work.

Although she often seems to deny all relevance to linguistic comparisons, she actually

retains some of the more current metaphors ("syntax", and so on), without ever inquiring

into the value of such parallels. Thus, she does accept some of the comparisons, but she

fails to justify her particular choice.

We may well doubt that, in a deeper sense, there has even been a linguistic model in

pictorial semiotics. Barthes, Marin, and many of their followers in different countries did

2 In its weak sense, system analysis is of course always involved in the other two.


25

certainly have recourse, in their attempts to analyze pictures, to a number of terms taken

over from Saussure, Hjelmslev, and Jakobson. When closely scrutinized, these analyses

generally turns out to be concerned with very abstract notions like connectedness (in the

guise of syntagms, syntax, and metonymies) and categorical identity (epitomized as

paradigms and metaphors). Even connotational language, as it is misinterpreted by

Barthes, is introduced as a means of establishing complex networks of meaning (see

Sonesson 1989a,II.1.). The notion of sign is never highlighted, although the terms

’expression’ and ’content’ appear abundantly. Structure is certainly essential to Lévi-

Strauss' analysis of, among other things, the Northwest Coast masks, but it is actually

easy to show (as we did in Sonesson 1989a,I.1.3/5.; 1990d, 1991b, 1992a) that

methodologically, Lévi-Strauss is really putting the structure concept of linguistic

structuralism on its head. In fact, it is only when the ultimate constituents of pictures are

compared to those of verbal language that linguisticism looms large, and this happens, in

particular, in the approach of Umberto Eco (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.2. and 1989c).

Of course, Barthes, Marin, and others, did think they were making use of the

linguistic model. They failed, however, both because they did not manage to construct

anything sufficiently explicit to qualify as a model, and because their linguisticism had

essentially the derived form characteristic of literary critics and other non-specialists. The

latter remains basically true about the current approach of the Greimas school. No matter

which may be the deformations which the linguistic model imposes on pictorial

significations, they stem less from the linguistic terms as such, than from the distortions

which the latter have suffered in the hands of non-linguistics. With few exceptions,

linguists cannot legitimately be accused of having imposed their model on other brands of

meaning. On the contrary, they should be held responsible for having treated the analysis

of all non-linguistic significations as something spurious, either denying the interest of

their study altogether, or citing these meaning types only in the guise of simplistic

examples at the beginning of introductory courses to linguistics.

As we have noted elsewhere (in Sonesson 1989a,II.1.1), the pan-linguisticism

characteristic of French structuralism seems to be of at least two kinds. While the Greimas

school would seem to adopt, to some extent, the linguistic model, because all meaning is

considered to be similar to the linguistic kind, or to admit of the same treatment, that is,

for ontological reasons, the justifications Barthes appears to have for the same choice are

rather epistemological, and basically opposed to those of the Greimas school. Actually,

Barthes seems to think that semiotical systems other than verbal language are inaccessible

to analysis, and thus can only be attained indirectly, through the way language refers to

them and describes them. To reject ontological pan-linguisticism, we will have to show

that pictures or other meanings are, in some essential respects, fundamentally different

from verbal language. To reject epistemological pan-linguisticism, on the other hand, it is

necessary to demonstrate that there are meanings which are accessible to us independently


26

of verbal language, for instance before it is even acquired.

Curiously, Saint-Martin at numerous places seems to attribute such an

epistemological panlinguisticism to representatives of the Greimas school, notably to

Floch. She takes it to be responsible for the tendency to study merely what the picture

represents, without caring for other meanings which less easily lend themselves to

linguistic expression. Actually, even Floch (1978) attacks this tendency in the work of

Barthes, for the very same reason (which is not to say that he may not also be guilty of

the same error on other occasions). But even Saint-Martin (1987a,b; 1990) accepts, to

some extent, epistemological pan-linguisticism: the iconic function of the picture is

repeatedly treated not only as being conventional, along the lines suggested by Eco's

argument, but as deriving essentially from a verbal act of nomination. Yet there is really no

reason, as we shall see when turning to perceptual theory, to accept this brand of

epistemological pan-linguisticism.

Models in pictorial semioticsAs pointed out above, pictorial analyses must, in order to be semiotical, make explicit use

of a model. A model will be understood to be a scheme made up of interconnected,

recurrent categories which are sufficiently explicit to permit its coherent application to a

series of ’texts’ (that is, in our case, pictures), thereby engendering a description of the

’texts’, in the process of which the model is further enriched.

Barthes seems to be using a kind of model in his Panzani analysis, at least when

positing the existence of pictorial denotations and connotations. Unfortunately, no clear

meaning can be attached to these terms, since Barthes only rarely have recourse to

Hjelmslev’s understanding of this terminological couple, and since very different

phenomena are subsumed under the term connotation (cf. Sonesson 1989a,II.1.). What is

transposed from Barthes’ famous article into a disturbing number of analyses conducted in

several languages is therefore not a model, but a family of expressions.

In the following, we will distinguish three models: the Greimas school model, the

Groupe µ model, and Saint-Martin’s model. Henceforth, they will be called the G model,

the µ model, and the SM model, respectively.

According to the earlier version of the µ model, the picture contains a number of

layers, each having its particular norm: roughly, the matter, substance, and form of both

expression and content and of both the plastic and the iconic level, (cf Groupe µ

1979:178ff)3. On the iconic level, the picture stands for some object recognizable in the

3 These terms are taken over from Hjelmslev, though “graduality” has been substituted for

“form” in order to insist on the less systematic character. of the organization For a full

critique of this model, including some doubts on the Hjelmslevean orthodoxy, cf. Sonesson

1988.


27

ordinary perceptual world; whereas, on the plastic level, expression appears to be

conveyed by simple qualities of the picture thing itself, which tend to have abstract

concepts as their content. In the case of plastic discourse , the norm is said to be

isotopicality, or more precisely, isomateriality of the expression matter, and allotopicality,

which is to say, allograduality of the expression graduality — more simply put, the norm

requires there to be a single type of material employed in the composition of the picture,

while at the same time distinctions are expressed between the intervening signs so as to

make it possible to hold them apart (cf. Groupe µ 1978:17ff). The purpose of the analysis

is to establish a repertory of different rhetorical figures, or deviations from the norms, and

there are two standards from which the figures may diverge: the so-called generic and local

degree zero. While the first is defined already in the system, the second is separately

produced in each particular ’text’ (cf. Groupe µ 1980:252).

In its more recent version, the µ model apparently dispenses with all the different

layers, retaining only the distinction between iconic and plastic language, as well as the

two kinds of norms. Rhetorical figures may now be purely iconic, or purely plastic; or

they may be iconico-plastic, in which case a divergence from what is expected in one layer

of the sign is reduced to normality with the aid of information contained in the other layer.

Both plastic and iconic figures are divided according as they are in absentia or in

praesentia, and conjoint or disjoint; whereas they iconico-plastic figures can be disjoint or

conjoint, and either plastic with iconic redundance, or the reverse. The possibility of

distinguishing separately such units as have present or absent, as well as conjoint or

disjoint, elements, results from the multidimensionality of pictures not found in verbal

language: two entities are susceptible of appearing together, without occupying the same

place.4 Here, the norm is supposed to prescribe the coincidence of plastic units with

iconic ones, a well as the concurrence of the three kinds of elements pertaining to shape,

colour, and texture (see Groupe µ 1989b; for a systematization and examples, also cf.

Sonesson 1989g).

In both its variants, the µ model is a text classification. Although it equally starts out

from a separation of the iconic and plastic layers, the G model has been designed to guide

text analysis. The second operation of this model thus involves the partition of the entire

4 It is difficult to explain these notions without entering very complex discussions, or

recurring to elaborate pictorial examples. One may wonder if this cross-classification of

rhetorical devices into those the elements of which are present or absent, as well as

disjoint or conjoint, is really adequate, for only the four resulting categories really seems

intelligible. Actually, Groupe µ here touches questions which we have treated under the

general heading of indexicality, in Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5., which is not to say that our

analysis is preferable, and it would in any case have to be integrated with wider rhetorical

issues.


28

pictorial field into two parts, according to some or other criteria (In some cases, an

immediate separation into more than two fields is later reduced to the twofold division).

One of the parts, or both of them, will then be further divided into smaller division blocks,

and the procedure may sometimes continue on still further levels. All these segmentations

are then justified by means of listing bundles of binary oppositions, the relata of which are

manifested in different fields resulting from the earlier division. At some point of the

analysis, a proportionality of the kind familiar from Lévi-Strauss’ myth studies tends to

appear, and it is shown that, inside the plastic layer, or between the iconic and plastic

layers, or elsewhere, there is some A which relate to some B, in the same way as some C

is related to some D (for further discussion, cf. Sonesson 1989a,II.3.).

This description corresponds mainly to the Greimas model as used by Floch. The

fundamental difference between Floch and Thürlemann is really one of method: although

both the approaches differ from one article to another, Floch generally tends to begin from

global configurations and work his way down to features and feature oppositions, whereas

Thürlemann, in particular in the Klee analyses, takes his point of departure in supposedly

minimal elements, using them to build up larger configurations. Moreover, binary divisions

appear to play a much less preponderant part in Thürlemann's work.

The SM model, too, would seem to be intended to function text analytically, but its

coverage is much more extensive. From the very start, Saint-Martin imposes on the

picture a grid containing five times five division blocks, to which is added, inside each of

the resulting squares, a fivefold segmentation separating the four sides and the central part.

Each one of these 125 portions of the picture, called coloremes, must be assigned a value

on six different dimensions: colour/tonality, texture, dimension/quantity, implantation into

the plane, orientation/vectorality, and frontiers/contours generating shapes. Moreover, the

coloremes are connected with each other by means of three kinds of rules determining

visual syntax: the interaction of colours; topological relations, such as proximity,

separation, encasing, envelopment, and orders of succession; and finally Gestaltian

relations, such as figure/ground, contiguity, similarity, closure, good forms, vectorality and

familiarity.

The visual variables, when appearing in a picture, are further constrained by the

energetic potentialities of the basic plane , which is supposed to contain four formative

angles, two diagonals, which give rise to two pairs of partly overlapping triangles, a

cruciform, and a lozenge. In addition, the model attends to the variable denominated

implantation into the plane, distinguishing around two dozen different perspective and

distance effects. This description concerns the syntactic part of the model; a projected

book on visual semantics is still to be published (for a full critical review, cf. Sonesson

1992a)

It should be clear from our description that Saint-Martin’s model offers a much more

exhaustive analysis than the models suggested by Floch, Thürlemann, and Groupe µ: it


29

actually scrutinizes every single point of the pictorial surface. From one point of view,

this is certainly an advantage of the model: such a procedure may constitute a good check

on many an overly adventurous hypothesis Yet, it also constitutes a problem: the model

seems to engage us in a procedure which has no natural stopping point, and it does very

little to guide us in the selection of relevant traits, presupposed not only be every picture

analysis, but even by the plain perception of a picture. What is lacking, then, a a principle

of pertinence, determining what to attend to in the picture under analysis (No doubt Saint-

Martin may be reserving this surprise for us in her forthcoming semantics book). Such

principles of pertinence may well turn out to be too restricted, and too ambiguous, as we

have shown to be the case of the binary divisions favoured by Floch (Cf. Sonesson 1990d;

1992a). Or they may be geared merely to react to exceptional pictures, and only to

isolated properties of the picture, as could be true of the norm and deviation model

propounded by Groupe µ. Yet, a model which leaves us such a freedom as the SM

variety is very close to being pointless.

Although the idea is nowhere clearly stated, some kind of principle of pertinence

may well be embodied in Saint-Martin's description of the pictorial base plane. Moreover,

we may take the very fact that she has cared to write an entire book about topological

relations, and another one about Gestalt theory, to mean that she would consider topology

and Gestalt relations to occupy a particularly important position among the configurations

of visual meaning. These are possibilities which we will have to explore in the following.

The semiotics of iconicity and visualitySo far, we have been supposing that Saint-Martin's work is concerned with pictorial

semiotics; and it is, in actual fact, mostly devoted to the study of pictures. Yet, as the

titles of some of her books suggest, Saint-Martin is actually intent on studying a much

wider domain, that of visual semiotics, which, in her view, should comprise architecture

and sculpture, in addition to pictures. In one of her books (1987a:98), she claims that they

are all characterized by the same visual variables, which are then differently constrained,

according as they are inserted into the basic planes of pictures, the virtual cube of

sculpture, or the environmental cube singularizing architecture.

Unfortunately, Saint-Martin does not further discuss architecture. She has, however,

the merit of having studied almost for the first time the essential coordinates determining

sculptural meaning. Even earlier, Dora Vallier compared sculpture, painting, and

architecture in a series of articles, but her approach is based on badly understood linguistic

analogies, in addition to being entirely aprioristic in character. In contrast, Saint-Martin's

approach seems much closer to the subject matter. We must however address a much more

fundamental issue: is there, or could there be, such a domain as visual semiotics?

Even Preziosi (1983) conceives of architecture as being a kind of visual semiosis,

which he then opposes to linguistic meanings, identified with auditive semiosis. Roman


30

Jakobson has treated of the differences between visual and auditive signs, and Thomas

Sebeok has divided up semiotics according to the sense modalities. On the other hand,

from the point of view of Hjelmslevean semiotics, we would normally not expect

visuality, being a mere ’substance’ or even ’matter’, to determine any relevant

categorisations of semiotic means.

Although this type of argument is often made, it is based on a confusion of the terms

’substance’ and ’matière’, as employed by Hjelmslev, and in their ordinary usage. Thus,

the term ’matière’, to Hjelmslev, is simply that which is unknowable, and, as a

consequence, not susceptible of being analyzed; that is, it is the residue of the analysis;

and ’substance’, which, in the earlier texts, is the term used for ’matière’ in the above-

mentioned sense, stands, in the later works, for the combination of ’matière’ and ’form’.

Thus, ’substance’, in the early works, and ’matter’ later, simply means ’that which is not

pertinent relative to the other plane of the sign’ (see discussion in Sonesson 1989a,II.4.

and 1988); it does not necessarily stand for matter in the sense of ordinary language, the

material of which something is made, the sense modality (as Groupe µ, for instance, must

supposes when making ’allomateriality’ into one of the possible characterizing traits of

the collage). If the material or the sense modality turns out to be relevant in relation to the

other plane of signification, it becomes form.

More importantly, the psychology of perception certainly seems to suggest the

existence of some common organization which puts all or most visually conveyed

meanings on the same level.. If, as we have argued, all signs must also be objects of

perception, there is every reason to believe that the modality according to which they are

perceived determine at least part of their nature. There may, of course, be other, perhaps

more fundamental division blocks of semiosis, of which pictures form a part (that of

iconicity, for instance). If we accept the legitimacy of the domain of visual semiotics,

another problem is brought into view: why should such a domain merely comprehend

pictures, buildings, and sculptures? No doubt, in suggesting such a list, Saint-Martin is

influenced by the traditional divisions of fine art. From a semiotical standpoint, visual

semiotics should have to comprise much more. Some significations are only partly visual,

as those of theatre communication. Others might be considered not to have an intrinsically

visual organization, such as writing, the conformation of which depends in part on spoken

language. But all kinds of gestures and bodily postures, objects, dummies, logotypes,

clothing, and many other phenomena must be counted as visual signs and significations. In

fact, even visual perception per se supposes a pick-up of meaning of sorts. We therefore

have to face the arduous task of determining the ways in which the various kinds of visual

semiosis differ.

Even though pictures may form part of the division of visual signs, they are no

doubt also members of the category of iconic signs — and yet they are not the only kind

of iconic signs there is. Iconicity is often wrongly taken to be that which is peculiar to


31

pictures. Indeed, Eco’s plaidoyer against the existence of iconical signs most of the time

reads like an argument against the specificity of pictures. To Peirce, an icon is a sign which

is based on similarity; or, more strictly, a sign consisting of an expression which stands for

a content because of properties which each of them possess intrinsically.5 ; This means

that, not only do iconic signs abound in sense modalities other than vision, but there may

also be visual, iconic signs which are not pictures.

Peirce only distinguished three subtypes: the image, the diagram, and the metaphor.

Without any claim to exhaustivity, we have opposed the picture to a set of other

iconically motived signs, including the metaphor, the dummy, other self-identifications and

exemplifications; and the symbol, in the traditional European sense, that is, as preserved in

the name for the artistic movement ’symbolism’ (see Sonesson 1989a,II.2.2. and III.6.).

A primary requirement which should be imposed on pictorial semiotics is to

determine the categories of which pictorial signs are subcategories, and to show that the

latter are in fact so related to the former. In the second place, we need to specify the

differences between pictorial signs and other members of the same superior categories.

Thus, although it may be evident that pictures are indeed visual signs, we need to show

that they are intrinsically visual, that is, that visuality is part and parcel of their

Hjelmslevian form, that which could not be exchanged without the sign becoming another

sign having a different meaning. And we have to determine in which way pictures differ

from other, intrinsically visual signs, not only (if that is really another, intrinsically visual,

sign) from sculpture. Also, we have to show (against Eco, Goodman, and others), that

pictures are, in one or another sense, iconical signs, and that pictorality is a peculiar

modification of iconicity (see, in particular, Sonesson 1989a,III.3.).

From psychologies of perception to theories of signs and iconicityFernande Saint-Martin is right, we believe, in claiming that pictorial signs are inherently

perceptual, that is, visual, in nature. The model of the sign as an object of perception

deployed by the Prague school seems much more obviously relevant in the analysis of

pictures than in that of literature, for which it was essentially developed. Not only must

such a claim be justified from a discussion of perceptual theory, but some criteria must

also be proposed for choosing as a foundation one among the several conflicting theories

occupying the contemporary scene of perceptual psychology. In selecting this perceptual

theory, we will not be able to share entirely the convictions of Saint-Martin. Moreover, if

5 We must dispense here with Peirce’s idiosyncratic terminology. For reasons explained in

Sonesson 1989a,III.1., we will take “representamen” to be roughly equivalent to

“expression”, whereas “object” corresponds to both “content” and “referent”. The

Peircean “interpretant”, on the other hand, appears to be a determination of the relation

between the former two.


32

all perception turns out to carry meaning, we are faced with the further task of determining

in what way visual signs, such as pictures, differ from mere meanings conveyed be visual

means. In working out such a distinction, we will again have to part company with Saint-

Martin.

On the choice of a perceptual theoryEven granted that the pictorial sign is an object of perception, it remains to be determined

whether it is a Gibsonian object of perception, a Gestaltist one, a constructivist one, or

perhaps even something else. The choice of a perceptual theory which is to serve as a

foundation to pictorial semiotics is by no means as easy to accomplish as Saint-Martin

would like to think.

There are, in present-day psychology, basically three ways of conceiving the

relationship between that which is perceived and the cause of the perception: and the three

corresponding theories are those of constructivism, Gestalt psychology, and direct

registration theory, or Gibsonianism (Hagen 1980:4ff; 1979; Winner 1982:84ff; Sonesson

1989a,III.3.3.). It is the contention of the latter theory, that all information needed is

available directly in the light coming from the environment, and is determined by this light,

although only if we take into account all the higher-order variables of the environment and

their invariants over time. According to Hagen, constructivists like Gregory and Gombrich

claim that reality lacks all intrinsic organization, and so must be set in order by a

hypothesis on the part of the perceiving subject; but the resulting arrangement is only

given with a certain degree of probability, and may have to be further revised. Again

according to Hagen, Gestaltists such as Arnheim and Hochberg (sic!) would agree with the

constructivists in affirming that reality is fundamentally ambiguous, and so must be

supplemented by the beholder's share, but, in their view, the perceived organization

results deterministically from the Gestalt laws, built into the human mind. Also, while the

Gestalt laws, or at least the simplicity principle on which they are based, are supposedly

innate, constructivists rather tend to suppose that the hypotheses employed in perception

are either explicitly posited as conventions, or derive in a more tacit fashion from earlier

experience of the world (cf. Winner 1982:108). Surprisingly, Saint-Martin (1990:86 )

affirms, on unclear evidence, that no such innateness is required by Gestalt theory.

Hagen maintains that all three theories are descriptively inadequate: constructivism

because no criteria have been proposed for when a hypothesis is confirmed; Gestalt

psychology, because its laws are mysterious; and Gibsonianism, because no list of the

invariants picked up from the environment can at present be given (p.21ff). In spite of

these observations, however, Hagen herself clearly remains within the bounds of direct

registration theory. This is precisely the theory which Winner (1982:98ff) declares to be

descriptively inadequate. On the other hand, she argues that there are cases in pictorial

perception, in which simplicity may be shown to override familiarity, thus favouring


33

Gestalt psychology, as well as other cases in which familiarity gains the upper hand,

which is a result favouring constructionism. Contrary to Hagen, Winner thus concludes

that reality is ambiguous, but may be supplemented in various ways.

It is natural that, in her book on Gestalt theory, Saint-Martin should neglect

constructionism and direct registrations theory in favour of the Gestalt school. However,

it is as pity that these movements are never ever mentioned as such, and thus are never

presented as the alternative conceptions which in fact they are. Gibson is even introduced

as a continuator of Gestalt theory (1990:58), only to be later attacked as the apostate he

must thus appear to be. Having never tired, in his numerous publications, of criticizing

Gestalt psychology, Gibson would have been surprised and shocked by this suggestion.

On the other hand, it is true that he has always recognized in Koffka one of the most

important influences on his thinking.

In fact, there seems to be no real Gestalt psychologists left, except for those who are

rather to be counted among the students of pictorial art, as, for instance, Arnheim. There is

undoubtedly an array of phenomena, discovered by the Gestalt psychologists, which are

still with us, but which now are in need of new explanations. The theoretical stance taken

by Hochberg, who Hagen treats as a Gestaltist, is, in actual fact, that of constructivism, as

he himself affirms. He has, on the other hand, undertaken a critical appraisal of the Gestalt

tradition. Sometimes, he claims, the most natural three-dimensional interpretation of a

picture is not the simplest one, as Gestalt theory would make us expect (Hochberg

1972:59f). Gestalt phenomena are really peculiar cases of Helmholtz' law, according to

which we perceive that which is most probable, given the pattern of stimulation

(Hochberg 1980:58f; cf. 1974;196ff). The ’minimum principle’ cannot be due to a built-in

perceptual mechanism that makes us perceive always the simplest object fitting the overall

stimulus pattern, Hochberg (1978a) claims, and goes on to suggest that, instead, it may be

an effect of putting together fragmentary sensory data, in a manner corresponding to the

most likely object, or that it may result from the arrangement that has the best chance of

being seen and remembered from one momentary glance to another.

Indeed, Hochberg (1972:60) even claims that the very fact that perceptual objects

must be grasped in a long series of momentary glances imposes limitations on the validity

of Gestalt organization, since different parts of the whole will fall on the fovea at different

moments. Saint-Martin (1990:28f), who notes this last points, takes Hochberg to task for

neglecting the coherence which Gestalt psychology takes to persist from one glance to

another, and for supposing only that portion which is reflected in the fovea to be actually

perceived. In other writings of his, not quoted by Saint-Martin, Hochberg certainly gives

due attention to peripheral seeing. Yet it may be true, as we have argued in discussing

pictures of impossible objects (in Sonesson 1989a,III.3.4.), that Hochberg exaggerates the

importance of foveal perception. The same could be said, however, about the notion of

coloreme, defined by Saint-Martin (to which we will turn below).


34

In perceptual psychology, the really interesting discussion nowadays takes place

between constructionism and direct registration theory. But why should Gregory,

Hochberg, and others think that ’inferences’ are necessary to explain what is actually

perceived, when Gibson, Kennedy, and Hagen feel they can dispense with them

altogether? Among the facts to be explained by perceptual psychology, figure

prominently, in Gregory's view (1966:1974), such things as the pick-up of non-optical

properties, gaps in the stimuli, visual illusions, ambiguities, illusory contours, and the

perception of logically impossible objects. To Gibson, on the other hand, most of these

phenomena are simply curiosities, of very little weight to everyday perception, and

therefore to perceptual psychology. Thus, one of the differences between the theories lies

in the choice of facts which they consider worth-while explaining. Yet, it is perhaps not

beside the point to argue about which facts we should care to explain.

One of the most celebrated pioneers of constructionism, Ulric Neisser, has lately

recognized the necessity of accounting for the fact that ordinary perception usually proves

right. Just like Gibson claims, information is picked up from light, Neisser (1976: 16, 20ff)

grants, but this pick-up only serves to start a perceptual cycle taking place in time:

anticipatory schemes generate generic, rather than specific, hypothesis which are modified

by the information available, engendering subsequently more detailed schemes, which

guide the further exploration of the optic array. In his latest publications, Neisser (1987)

seems even more convinced of the fact that, as Gibson affirms, information for that which

is perceived is present in the array of light available to the eye, as soon as we attend to

higher-order variables, and their modification over time. Even categorisation is now said to

be ecologically grounded, though somewhat ’less direct’. A theory which has made a

convert, a rare occurrence in any scientific community, is not so easily refuted as Saint-

Martin (1990:58ff) appears to believe.

There thus seems to be a fourth alternative in perceptual psychology, not recognized

neither by Hagen nor by Winner, which amounts to a blend of direct registration theory

with some facets of constructionism. This is Hochberg's position, as it was that of Neisser

at least as late as in 1976. Although Saint-Martin often quotes Piaget to help buttressing

the common bias of constructivism and Gestalt theory, the latter's general conception,

according to which both assimilation and accommodation are involved in our ordinary

experience of reality, certainly seems to suggest that he, too, would favour a mixed

approach. In the next subsection will will suggest some reasons for taking this alternative

seriously.

Thus far, it will be noted, we have been mainly concerned with the perception of the

world, and with the relation between the assumed physical cause and the resulting

percept, not with picture perception. No doubt, the whole issue appears to be roughly

analogous to that of pictorial iconicity, the relation between the picture and ordinary

perceptual reality reproducing, in that order, that between the ordinary percept and its


35

physical cause. We should therefore expect constructionists and Gestaltists to favour a

version of a conventionalist theory of picture perception, and Gibson to defend a

similarity theory, but the opposite turns out to be closer to the truth.

Not only do Gestaltists and constructivists (with the exception of Hochberg) treat

pictures and reality as being of a kind, but most of their reasoning is based on pictorial

examples, although their conclusions concern the perception of the real, three-dimensional

world. Gibson actually argues that their theories are artefacts of their having studied

pictures rather than reality. And he goes on to claim that pictures are not at all based on

similarity. Yet he certainly does not want to maintain that they are conventional, in the

way semioticians would use that term: instead, because of being so different from the

perceptual environment, they must render the invariants of perception, and convey them

to us, in a very different way from that in which they become manifest in the real world. It

is thus misleadingly that Saint-Martin (1990:15) quotes Gibson as saying, like Piaget, that

depicted objects are not perceived: they are indirectly perceived, as he continues the

phrase elsewhere.

No doubt, Saint-Martin is not interested in the analogy between physical cause and

percept, on one hand, and picture and reality, on the other: her concern with perceptual

psychology has nothing to do with pictorial iconicity. We will later discuss Gestalt theory

from the point of view which preoccupies Saint-Martin. Yet, it is important to pursue the

discussion also according to the facets neglected in her argument.

From the Gibsonian environment to the Husserlean LifeworldOne peculiar thing about the so-called ecological psychology devised by James Gibson is

that it is, on so many counts, remarkably similar to the phenomenological philosophy

conceived around the turn of the last century by Edmund Husserl. Gibson, is has been

reported, was very interested in philosophy; he was even accused of trying to resolve

philosophical puzzles empirically (cf. Lombardo 1987; Reed 1988:45). Apparently,

Gibson had some knowledge of Husserl's work. Yet, from reading Lombardo and Reed,

one gets the impression that neither they nor Gibson have any idea of the degree to which

their conceptions coincide. No doubt, apart form being a good psychologist, Gibson was

also an excellent phenomenologist.

Scientists organize experiments and execute analyses, which establish the limits of

what may be reasonably thought about a particular subject, but no amount of facts will

ever engender a theory on its own. Facts are like indices of reality; but they have to be

bound together by abductions, in Peirce's sense: general rules and regularities which are

taken for granted and which link one singular fact with another. The Ancient Greeks and

the Chinese may have observed at least in part the same stars; yet each group put the

starts together according to the fashion of their particular sociocultural Lifeworld, the first

forging 48 constellations, and the second 283. In the same way, given the same facts, there


36

may be Greek abductions, and there may be Chinese abductions.

Peirce wondered how it was possible that so many abductions prove right,

postulating a natural instinct as an explanation. Actually, there is an infinite number of

ways to relate starts, and facts, but most of them would seem to be humanly

inconceivable. It is difficult to say if they are therefore right, in an absolute sense. The

limited number of alternative abductions being really proposed may be due, not to a

natural instinct, but to the commonality of the most general organizational framework of

the Lifeworld, in Husserl's sense, that is, of the ’world taken for granted’, as Husserl's

discipline Alfred Schütz also called it. And psychologists, like philosophers, inhabit the

common Lifeworld; sometimes, they ar even more or less aware of it.

There are differences between the constructivists, the Gestaltists, and the

Gibsonians, which have to do with which experiments they consider relevant, and to

which properties of the experimental results they attribute most importance, but this in

turn must be due to the way they, as laymen, inhabit our common Lifeworld, and how

consciously they relate to it. This does not necessarily mean that the differences between

these psychologists are mere disparities of taste and personal predispositions; for they

could as well be explained by their different aptness for the difficult task of doing

phenomenology.

This is not the place to describe in details the organizational framework of the

Lifeworld (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.1.), or the similarities between Husserl's Lifeworld and

the Gibsonian environment (cf. op.cit.,III.3.2.). Suffice-it to point to a single, importance

coincidence. When Gibson (1978:228) observes that, when we are confronted with the-

cat-from-one-side, the-cat-from-above, the-cat-from-the-front, etc., what we see is all the

time the same invariant cat, he actually recovers the central theme of Husserlean

phenomenology, according to which the object is entirely, and directly, given in each one

of its noemata (see Husserl 1939, etc.). Husserl's cube and Gibson's cat exemplify the

same phenomenal fact — for it remains a phenomenal fact, and not an experimental one,

also in Gibson's work.

Whereas Husserl called into question the conception of his contemporary

Helmholtz, according to which consciousness is like a box, in which the world is

represented by signs and pictures, from the fragmentary pieces of which we must

construct our percepts, Gibson's strawmen are the followers of this same Helmholz, who

claim that hypotheses are needed to build up perceptions from the scattered pieces offered

us by the sensations (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.3.). The two arguments appear to proceed

along different lines, but converge at the end. Husserl rejects what has been termed ’the

picture metaphor of consciousness’, showing Brentano and Helmholz to have an

erroneous conception of the very pictures and other signs to which they compare

consciousness, when they ignore the transparency of their expression to the content.

Gibson (1971; 1978), on the other hand, emphasizes the dissimilarity between the picture


37

and the real-world scene, to show that conclusions dealing with the real world which are

based on experiments with picture perception are seriously misguided. Yet, to both

Husserl and Gibson, normal perception gives direct access to reality, and while Gibson

thinks pictures represent a kind of indirect perception, Husserl tells us that they are

’perceptually imagined’. Indeed, this is the sense in which Gibson's phrase, quoted by

Saint-Martin, according to which depicted objects are not perceived, should be taken.

It is precisely this phenomenal observation, to the effect that perceptual objects,

rather than piecemeal perceptions, are that which is perceived, which Saint-Martin

(1990:58ff) finds unacceptable. Not surprisingly, she finds the same faults (p. 27) with a

disciple of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, who also claims that perception is of the object, not

of its appearances. In a way, she is right in affirming that this proposition cannot be

verified in a laboratory; but it is verified by each and every instance of human perception.

Children's drawings at first render ’things’ (and abstract properties) instead of their

appearances, because the capacity to see appearances must be laboriously acquired (cf.

Sonesson 1989a,III.3.2.). In the ’naive attitude’, Gibson (1971:31f) affirms, we look

through a series of perspectives in movement to the invariant features of the object, while

in the ’perspectival attitude’, we fix a single perspectival view in order to consider it in its

own right. Roughly the same opposition exists between the ’natural attitude’ and

’phenomenological reflection’ in Husserl's work.6 Moreover, Husserl would argue, just

like Gibson (quoted by Lombardo 1987: 350), that what is ’seen-now’ and ’seen-from-

here’ specify the self rather than the environment.

It is an misunderstanding to believe, as Saint-Martin (1990:11) does, that Gibson

supposes there to by any kind of ’pre-established similarity’ between human knowledge

and the objects of this knowledge. This description is based the idea, defended by

constructivism and Gestalt theory alike, that the communication between the world and

the mind is somehow interrupted. Constructivists and Gestaltists assumed that something

must be added to the information given, because it seemed to them that only impoverished

information could be available. It is the merit of Gibson (and here he goes well beyond

phenomenology) to have shown that all the information needed is actually there to be

picked up, once we realize that the perceptual system is able to attend to higher-order

properties of the array of light, in particular as they change over time. In terms more

familiar to semioticians, it is a question of determining what kinds of units form the

pertinent input to the perceptual system.

After some hundred odd years of discussion about what must be add to the stimuli,

6 Saint-Martin (1990:60ff) criticizes an earlier variant of this distinction, in terms of "the

visual world" and "the visual field", because it seems to suppose that "sensations" persist

to no purpose whatsoever in the human organism, but she fails to note that Gibson

himself rejected the distinction in this form in his later work.


38

in order for perception to occur, the claim that reality is perceived directly may appear

much too Gordian a solution. Also, Husserl's position is, on the face of it, more

sophisticated, since what is directly perceived in his view is some kind of object internal

to consciousness (although the difference is ’reduced’ away), in fact a Lifeworld object,

not a physical one. Indeed, Gibson (1982:106) observes that he is concerned with

properties noticed by phenomenologists, but that he assumes them also to be real. On the

other hand, although he was certainly committed to some kind of psychophysical

parallelism in the earlier versions of his theory, he later (1982:217) argued that ’ecological

physics’ must be distinct from the ordinary one, and that its invariants were of a quite

different order. Indeed, the kind of ’implicitly known regularities’ prevailing in the world

of Gibsonian ecology are not very different from the ’customary ways things have of

behaving’ in Husserl's Lifeworld.

The similarities between Husserlean phenomenology and Gibson's ecological

psychology are not merely of anecdotal interest. For, whatever we may think of its

ultimate philosophical postulates, phenomenology constitute a exceptionally careful

description of reality as it appears to us, when closely scrutinized. As a consequence, the

coincidence between this description, and that offered by Gibson, guaranties that

ecological psychology is really concerned to explain perceptual reality as it is, and not

some artifact of the historically evolved theories of perception.

The real problem with Gibson's and Husserl's conceptions, is that they do not take

the argument far enough. Not only do we not see sensations, but real objects, but we do

not perceive geometrical volume as such, but a cultural-laden object, not a cube but a dice,

not the tea cup formula but the tea cup itself, not the cat as a geometrical shape in

movement, but that peculiar domestic animal of the Occidental Lifeworld (cf. Sonesson

1989a,I.2.2. and III.3.2.). In an interesting discussion of the changing meaning given by

Gibson to the notion of direct perception through the years, Costall (1989:10ff) makes a

similar observation, concluding that no example of human perception could ever count as

direct on Gibson's terms. Yet, the only world we could ever directly perceive is the world

of our own culture. Just as some disciples of Husserl, as for instance Schütz, discovered

the sociocultural character of the Lifeworld, Costall thus points to the cultural overlay of

the Gibsonian environment. In a way, therefore, constructions and unconscious inferences

are really there: they are only much more deeply embedded.

Plastic and iconic layers of the picture.There is presently a kind of consensus for distinguishing the plastic and iconic layers of

the picture. Earlier made in other terms by Lindekens, the distinction is now incorporated

into two of the leading models of pictorial semiotics, that of the Greimas school and of

Groupe µ. Only Saint-Martin would ignores the distinction. It is indeed problematical, in

a number of ways, only one of which will be discussed here, and yet it should no doubt be


39

made, in one way or another.7.

According to this conception, roughly, the picture stands, on the iconic level, for

some object recognizable from the ordinary perceptual Lifeworld; whereas, on the plastic

level, the expression is conveyed by simple qualities of the picture thing itself, which tend

to correspond to increasingly abstract concepts. As used in semiotics, on the other hand,

iconicity is unavoidably connected, in some way of other, with Peirce’s concept of icon,

even when, as in the Greimas school approach, is has been redefined to mean something

like ’the illusion of reality’, or to correspond to ’verisimilitude’, as it is also found in

literature. But the iconicity of the iconic layer is not the same at that of the general sign

theory formulated by Peirce: notably, plastic features, in the sense of the µ and G models,

may well be iconic in Peirce’s sense!

In order to avoid some of the problems posed by Peirce’s definition, it will be

suggested here that two items may share an iconic ground, being thus apt to enter, in the

capacity of being its expression and content, into a semiotic function forming an iconic

sign, to the extent that there are some or other set of properties which they possess

independently of each other, which are identical or similar when considered from a

particular point of view, or which may be perceived or, more broadly, experienced as being

identical or similar, where similarity is taken to be an identity perceived on the background

of fundamental difference (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.1-3. and below).

There are many varieties of iconic grounds, however. If a particular iconic sign gives

us an illusion of literally seeing in the twodimensional surface of the expression plane the

projection of a scene extracted from real world of threedimensional existence (with or

without a suggestion of lineal perspective), then it is more particularly a pictorial sign. The

symbol, in the sense in which this term is ordinarily used, not by Peirce, but in the

European tradition, is also a kind of iconic sign, having in addition certain indexical traits: it

reposes on the isolation of an abstract, not necessarily perceivable, property, connected

with a generalization from the object serving as an expression, and a particularization from

the object serving as a content (a dove standing for peace, scales signifying justice, etc.).

There are other types of iconical signs as well (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.6.).

A pictorial sign is a sign the primary allofunctional relation of which is pictorial, in

the sense defined above. Pictures also tend to manifest a secondary function, which,

following Floch and Groupe µ, we will call plastic, in the case of which meanings are

derived from the properties which the expression plane of the picture really possesses,

when considered as made up of mere twodimensional shapes on a surface. In this sense,

however, the plastic layer may well function iconically. Thus, for instance, if the circle is

seen to convey softness, and the rectangle signifies hardness, to pick up some of the

7 For a discussion of another problematical facet, connected with the use of the

Hjelmslevean term “matter”, cf. Sonesson 1988,1.3.7.


40

results obtained by Lindekens (1971) in one of his experiments, then there must be some

properties mediating synaesthetically between the visual and tactile sense modalities.

When the circle is declared to be feminine, on the other hand, and when the triangle is said

to be calculating, and the rectangle mathematical, much more conventional elements would

seem to enter the semiotic function.

This certainly suggests that the meanings conveyed by pictures are much more

varied and complex than what present-day models admit: for the moment, however, we

would be well-advised to distinguish, not the plastic and the iconic layers, but perhaps the

plastic and pictorial ones, both of which may have an iconic function (for the full

argument, cf. Sonesson 1990e). In this sense, the problem of iconicity, as customarily

discussed in semiotics, is mainly concerned with the pictorial function. There could be a

problem of iconicity also in the case of the plastic function, yet other issues may have to

be resolved before it comes into view. In the rest of this section, we will attend to some

problems of pictorial iconicity, and in the next we will turn to the questions involved with

plastic language. The latter are central to Saint-Martin's concern, whereas the former

appears to be largely neglected.

The critique of pictorial iconicitySince we have discussed pictorial iconicity extensively in other contexts (in particular in

Sonesson 1989a,III; 1990e,f, 1992a), we will only summarize relevant aspects of the

argument here. Saint-Martin (1987a: xvi; 1990: 2ff) always passes over the question

rapidly, apparently subscribing to some version of Eco's conception, but insisting that

pictorial iconicity is linguistically determined (cf. Saint-Martin 1987b).8 She is thus

subject, like Barthes, to some variant of epistemological linguisticism, although she is eager

to demonstrate that what we (following the Greimasians and Groupe µ) have termed

plastic meanings, are differently conveyed. If it can be shown that Eco's conventionalist

theory is mistaken, Saint-Martin's linguisticism will also appear to be dispensable.

Bierman, Goodman, and Eco, have all argued against using similarity as a criterion in

the definition of iconical signs and/or pictures; and even Burks and Greenlee have

introduced some qualifications on Peirce’s view which serve to emphasize

conventionality. To an important extent, these arguments are erroneous, among other

things because they are based on an identification of the common sense notion of

similarity with the equivalence relation of logic. Differently put, they are inadequate

because they suppose man to live in the world of the natural sciences when in fact he

always inhabits a particular sociocultural Lifeworld. The most immediate consequence of

this fact is that many of the conventionalities attributed to pictures turn out to be inherent

8 In fact, Saint-Martin has written an article in the title of which she declares her intention

of formulating Eco's model anew, but I have unfortunately been unable to see it.


41

in the particular Lifeworld. This means that, whenever some peculiarities of an individual

or a thing, some traits of the woman or the zebra, are locally given importance, they also

make up the features given primary importance in a picture (cf, Sonesson 1989,III.2.2/6.).

But some more general principles will also follow. Pictures, being a kind of visual

thinking, are required to follow the phenomenological rule of all thinking, according to

which an object can only be seized each time from a particular point of view, and not in its

entirety, which means a choice has to be made among the proper parts, the perceptual

parts, and the attributes of the object. Moreover, much thinking, also that which occurs in

pictures, occurs in terms of prototypes, that is to say, by means of construing an object as

an approximation to a more characteristic instance of the same class; and even abductions

and simple structures often intervene in the constitution of pictorial sings (ibid.,III.2.2.

and III.2.7.).

Similarity, then, is really asymmetric and irreflexive. Indeed, this fact is not only

intuitively obvious, but has now been experimentally demonstrated (notably by Rosch &

Tversky; cf. also Sonesson 1989a,III.2.1. and III.6.2.). It should not be confused with

identity: indeed, between two pictures 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 self-identification or an exemplification (as, for instance, in an art exhibition, or in

front of the artist’s workshop; see ibid.,III.2.3.). There is similarity, on the other hand,

only on the basis of a fundamental dissimilarity. It is certainly not in their ’important’

properties, if that means the attributes defining them as ’selves’, that the picture and its

referent (or content) are similar. In fact, the hierarchically dominant categories of the

picture and its referent must be different; for a picture which is just a picture of the

picture-of-X, is indistinguishable from a picture of X.

Although the sign relation is thus not needed in order to render similarity asymmetric

and irreflexive, it is required in order to distinguish similarities which are signs from those

which are not. At this stage, then, it would seem that the picture could be defined by the

sign relation, together with similarity; but Eco rightly observes that, on closer inspection.,

there is really no similarity between the painted nose, and the nose of a real person.

Yet we must account in some way for the impression of similarity, which is

immediately given, and which persists as long as we do no choose to scrutinize the details

of the composition. If similarity is a perceptual effect, then the impression of similarity

simply is similarity. But similarity then appears to be a result of the sign relation, instead

of its motivation (cf. ibid.,III.1.4.). This is possible only if there is some other property

held in common by all pictures, and by no other objects, which somehow precedes the

sign relation. Gibson (1971:33), who also rejects the similarity theory of pictures,

apparently thinks there is some kind of identity between the picture and the real-world

scene, rightly insisting that identity is not the maximum of similarity. To Gibson, this

identity relies on higher-order properties, recurring in different fashions in the picture and


42

in the world. Similar conceptions are present in the work of other psychologists, such as

Kennedy and Hochberg (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.3.2.). Such a conception must suppose our

perceptual systems to be capable of picking up isolated features of the environment (not

necessarily identical to linguistic features; cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.4.1.). Contrary to Eco’s

contention, therefore, the pictorial sign (as well as the real-world scene) must be, not

conventional and unanalyzable into features, but essentially feature-based and

motivated.

Iconicity and the ecology of semiosisThe impression of similarity found in pictures is not in doubt, as long as we do no choose

to scrutinize the details. Similarity appears to be, not the motivation for the sign relation,

but a result of it, or perhaps rather of some other property equally preceding the sign-

relation. We have therefore yet to discover a property which is common to all pictures,

and which characterizes no other objects. For not only is there a coherent Lifeworld notion

of pictures, but there is no other way of explaining that pictures have meaning.

Goodman’s and Greenlee’s contention that the referent of each picture is appointed

individually (if that is indeed what they want to suggest), and Eco’s proposal that the

relations of the picture are so correlated with those of the referent, are utterly

unconvincing, and besides, incompatible with what psychology tells us about the child’s

capacity for interpreting pictures when first confronted with them at 19 months of age (as

demonstrated in a famous experiment by Hochberg). But it does not follow that this

common property must be similarity.

Goodman may be taken to suggest that this property is ’analogy’ or perhaps

’syntactic and semantic density’. Density here means roughly that, no matter how close a

division we have made of a picture into units, it is always possible to proceed, introducing

a third unit between each of the earlier pairs, and so on indefinitely. Unfortunately, there

are many problems with this proposal. To begin with, it is strange that the difference

between verbal language and pictures is supposed to reside in the ways in which types

relate to tokens, and not in the relations between expression, content, and referent.

Another problem is that ’analogy’, in the common and required sense, does not seem to

follow from double density, as Goodman supposes. In any case, there are reasons to

doubt that pictures are dense, in the strict sense, for while Goodman’s definition excludes

pictograms, any partition of actual pictures and pictograms is bound to be arbitrary. On

the other hand, the definition includes, among the objects which it qualifies as pictures,

diagrams and thermometers, and no doubt many other signs which are not ordinary

thought to be such. Repleteness, which is Goodman’s term for density resulting from

divisions made from many different points of view, cannot, contrary to Goodman’s

opinion, make the difference between pictures and diagrams, for it can actually be shown

to exist in some instances of the latter (for details, see Sonesson 1989a,III.2.3-5.).


43

Goodman is right in claiming that the sign function and similarity are not jointly

sufficient to define the pictorial sign; but substituting analogy for similarity, or adding

them together is not enough either. However, we can make sense of Goodman’s counter-

example if we require similarity, or the impression of similarity, to be at least a partial

reason for the sign function. This requires there to be a kind of taken-for-granted hierarchy

of prominence between the things in the Lifeworld. Some ’things’ are more apt to serve as

expressions of a sign relation than others, in fact, those which are relatively less

prominent. Interestingly, the only verified case in which a so-called primitive tribe failed

to recognize pictures as such, concerned a group which had never seen paper, and was

therefore led to emphasize the material per se. When pictures where instead printed on

cloth, they immediately recognized their function (se Sonesson 1989a,III.3.1.).

In the case of a droodle, similarity is only discovered once we have been informed

about the precise sign function, or when we have guessed at it; but in an ordinary picture

the impression of similarity precedes the sign function. On the other hand, the probability

of there being a sign function, would seem to be a prerequisite for our hitting upon the

similarity. For something to be a sign of something else, it must, as we just observed, be

relatively low-ranked on the scale of prototypicality applying to the ’things’ of the

Lifeworld. No doubt signs can also be made out of high-ranked Lifeworld ’things’, but

then the sign function must be introduced explicitly as a convention or be expected in the

situation. In fact, the painting at the art exhibition, the tin can in the shop window, and the

objects exposed in the museum are all signs of themselves, some of their properties, or the

class of which they are members; but the sign function only emerges in given situations.

In a recent collection of essays, Neisser (1987) considerably broadens the notion of

ecological psychology, incorporating Rosch's theory of prototypicality, as well as

Gibson's work on perception, in order to account for the conceptual negotiations going on

in the everyday environment. In his contribution to Neisser's anthology, George Lakoff

(1987) argues for the reconstruction of Roschian prototypicality using different kinds of

cognitive models. Elsewhere, in their study of the basic metaphors which underlie both

poetry and ordinary language, Lakoff & Turner (1989:160ff) describe a ’cultural model’

which they call ’The great chain of being’. This model, which ’places beings and their

properties on a vertical scale with 'higher' beings and properties above 'lower' beings and

properties’ (p.167), has been studied by historians of ideas since the time of Lovejoy, but

Lakoff & Turner shows it to be still current and active in a lot of everyday thinking, as for

instance in ordinary adages. This ’commonplace theory about the nature of things’ (p.170)

would only stand in need of being slightly amended to also account for the naturalness

with which surfaces stand for scenes, rather than the reverse.

Such regularities of the Lifeworld, together with the laws of environmental physics,

and other commonplace theories of the world, stand at the origin of an even broader

domain of study, which we could call the ecology of semiosis. This discipline should,


44

among other things, lay the groundwork for all future conceptions of cultural semiotics.

But it will also be needed to explain the varieties of iconicity. It will begin by teaching us

that some meanings are deeper than signs.

The semiotic function according to PiagetTwo facets should be distinguished, according to Saint-Martin (1985:6ff; 1990:9ff), within

the perceptual act: the objective aspect, linked to external stimulation, and the subjective

aspect, which derives from the perceptual instrumentation of man, that is, the

psychological and psychological structures at work in perception. In Saint-Martin's

opinion, this is what Saussure was thinking of when he compared the signifier and the

signified of the linguistic sign to the two faces of a piece of paper. Just as the linguistic

sign has its sensorial signifier and its conceptual signified, the ordinary percept, Saint-

Martin claims, possesses its dual face.

No doubt this is a serious misrepresentation of Saussure's intention: for he never

tires of repeating that both the signifier and the signified are mental entities, and thus

pertain to the conceptual, not the external, aspect, in Saint-Martin's sense. If he had been

interested in making a distinction of the kind which Saint-Martin suggests here, he could

perhaps have made it in terms of ’form’ and ’substance’ — which really amounts to

saying that he would have put Saint-Martin's external stimulation in his version of the

pragmatic waste-basket, la parole. More importantly, however, Saussure certainly

conceives of the sign function as being something very different from the act of

perception, although it may stand in need of a perceptual act to become manifest. It might

be argued, of course, following Saint-Martin (1990:10), that the signified must be inferred

from the signifier, just as the object must be discovered in the percept: but if the signified

is hidden behind the signifier, the signifier is in itself an object hidden behind its

appearances.

In discussing the perceptual act, Saint-Martin (1988; 1990:9ff) relies abundantly on

the work of Piaget. Yet, curiously, she ignores Piaget's important attempt to define the

semiotic function (which, in the early writings, was less adequately termed the symbolic

function). In his model of the sign, Saussure made a set of important conceptual

distinctions (which we have discussed elsewhere), yet he supposed us (and himself) to

understand the basic meaning of such terms as ’signifier’ and ’signified’. The discussion of

Piaget's semiotic function will help us to discover that which is taken for granted in this

model.

The semiotic function is a capacity acquired by the child at around 18 to 24 months

of age, which enables him to imitate something outside the direct presence of the model, to

use language, make drawings, play ’symbolically’, and have access to mental imagery and

memory..The common factor underlying all these phenomena, according to Piaget, is the

ability to represent reality by means of a signifier which is distinct from the signified.


45

Indeed, Piaget argues that the child’s experience of meaning antedates the semiotic

function, but that is does not then suppose a differentiation of signifier and signified in the

sign (see Piaget 1945; 1967; 1970. Also cf. Bentele 1984. and Sonesson 1990f).

In the numerous passages in which he introduces this notion of semiotic function,

Piaget goes on to point out that ’indices’ and ’signals’ obviously are possible long before

the age of 18 months, but then they do not really suppose any differentiation between

expression and content. The signifier of the index is, Piaget says, ’an objective aspect of

the signified’; thus, for instance, the visible butt of an almost entirely hidden object is the

signifier of the object for the baby; and the tracks in the snow stand for the prey to the

hunter, just as any effect stands for its cause. But when the child uses a pebble to signify

candy, he is well aware of the difference between them, which implies, as Piaget tells us, ’a

differentiation, from the subject’s own point of view, between the signifier and the

signified’.

Piaget is, I believe, quite right in distinguishing the manifestation of the semiotic

function from other ways of ’connecting significations’, to employ his own terms.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that while the signifier of the index is said to be an

objective aspect of the signifier, we are told that in the sign and the symbol (i.e. in Piaget’s

terminology, the conventional and the motivated variant of the semiotic function,

respectively) expression and content are differentiated form the point of view of the subject.

We could actually imagine this same child that in Piaget’s example uses a pebble to stand

for a piece of candy have recourse instead to a feather in order to represent a bird, without

therefore confusing the feather and the bird: then the child would be using the feature,

which is objectively a part of the bird, while differentiating the former form the latter from

his point of view. Only then would he be using an index, in the sense in which this term is

employed (our should be employed) in semiotics (that is, in Peirce's sense). And

obviously the hunter, who has recourse to the tracks to identify the animal, and to find out

which direction is has followed, and who does this in order to catch the animal, does not,

in his construal of the sign, confuse the tracks with the animal itself, in which case he

would be satisfied with the former.

Both the child in our example and the hunter are using indices, or indexical signs. On

the other hand, the child and the adult will fail to differentiate the perceptual adumbration

in which he has access to the object from the object itself; indeed, they will identify them,

as least until they decide to change their perspective and approach the object from another

vantage point. And at least the adult will consider a branch jutting out behind a wall as

something which is non-differentiated from the tree, to use Piaget’s example, in the rather

different sense of being a proper part of it.9 In the Peircean sense an index is a sign, the

9 About proper parts, perceptual perspectives, and attributes as different ways of

dividing an object and thus different indexicalities, cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.2.


46

relata of which are connected, independently of the sign function, by contiguity or by that

kind of relation which obtains between a part and the whole (henceforth termed

factorality). But of course contiguity and factorality are present everywhere in the

perceptual world without as yet forming signs: we will say, in that case, that they are

mere indexicalities. Perception is profused with indexicality.

The concept of appresentation in phenomenologyEach time we perceive two objects together in space, there is contiguity; and each time

something is seen to be a part of something else, or to be a whole made up of many parts,

there is factorality. Not all instances of these are signs, however. In the case of an actual

perceptual context, two items must be present together in consciousness, whereas in a

sign, one item is actually present while the other only appears indirectly through the first.

Yet the latter is also true of what may have termed an abductive context, which is the way

in which the side of the dice at which we are not looking at this moment is present to

consciousness, and the way into which we retain the preceding moment in time, or

anticipate the one to follow (retention, protention).10

The phenomenological tradition stemming form Edmund Husserl and later amply

developed by Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckman has contributed some useful

distinctions here. According to these thinkers, two or more items may enter into different

kinds of ’pairings’, from the ’paired association’ of two co-present items, over the

’appresentative pairing’ with one item present and the other indirectly given through the

first, 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 will be enough to distinguish the abductive

context from the sign, if we suppose the former to always carry the theme in the directly

presented part or to have it span the whole context. But this is by no means certain, and

there seems to be many intermediate cases between a perfect sign and an abductive context

(the poetic function, ostensive definitions, proto-indices, etc.; cf. Fig. 2.).

This is where Piaget’s idea of the semiotic function supposing a differentiation turns

out to be useful. Whereas the items forming the sign are conceived to be clearly

differentiated entities and indeed as pertaining to different ’realms’ of reality, the ’mental’

and the ’physical’ in terms of naive consciousness, the items of the context continuously

flow into each other, and are not felt to be different in nature. Before we go on to illustrate

this, two things should be noted: First, both content and expression of the sign are actually

’mental’ or, perhaps better, ’intersubjective’, as most linguists would insist; but we are

interested in the respect in which the sign user conceive them to be different. In the second

10 For a more thorough analysis, concerned with the problems addressed in this and the

following paragraphs, cf., in particular, Sonesson 1989a,I.2.5., I.4.2, and 1990b.


47

place, Piaget’s notion of differentiation is vague, and in fact multiply ambiguous, but, on

the basis of his examples, I have introduced two interpretations for it: first, the sign user's

idea of the items pertaining to different basic categories of the common sense Lifeworld;

and, in the second place, the impossibility of one of them going over into the other,

following the flow of time or an extension in space.

d i r e c t l y - t h e m a t i c d i f f e r e n t i a t e d p r e s e n t c o n t i n u o u s s a m e n a t u r e

p a i r e d a s s o c i a - t i o n ( p e r c e p - t u a l c o n t e x t )

b o t h i t e m s b o t h i t e m s y e s y e s

a p p r e s e n t e d p a i r i n g

o n e i t e m d i r e c t l y p r e s e n t e d i t e m o r b o t h

y e s y e s

p r o t o t y p i c a l s i g n

o n e i t e m i n d i r e c t l y p r e s e n t e d i t e m

n o n o

p r o t o i n d e x o n e i t e m m o s t l y d i r e c t l y p r e s e n t e d i t e m

p r o v i s i o n a l - l y d i s c o n - t i n u o u s

y e s

p i c t u r e d p r o t o - i n d e x

o n e i t e m m o s t l y d i r e c t l y p r e s e n t e d i t e m ( o f i n d e x , n o t o f p i c t u r e )

i n t h e r e f e r e n t , y e s ; i n s i g n , n o

i n i n d e x r e l a t a , y e s

a e s t h e t i c f u n c t i o n / c o n n o t a t i o n

o n e i t e m m o s t l y d i r e c t l y p r e s e n t e d i t e m ( o f f i r s t s i g n )

n o n o

o s t e n s i v e d e f i n i t i o n

b o t h i t e m s , o n e a l s o i n d i r e c t l y

o n e o f t h e r e l a t a

y e s , a s c o n t e x t

a c c o r d i n g t o c i r c u m s t a n c e s

Fig. 2. The prototypical sign and other meanings

Suppose that, turning around a corner of the forest path, we suddenly catch a

glimpse of the wood-cutter lifting his axe other his shoulder and head. This experience

perfectly illustrates the flow of indexicalities which do not stop to become signs: it is

sufficient to observe the wood-cutter in one phase of his action to know what has gone


48

before and what is to come: that he has just raised his tool from some base level, and that

at the next moment, he is going to hit the trunk of the tree. If we take a snap-shot of one of

the phases of the wood-cutter's work, we could use it, like the well-known traffic sign

meaning ’roadworks ahead’, as a part for the whole or, more oddly perhaps, as a phase

signifying contiguous phases. There has been a radical change from the flow of

indexicalities occurring in reality, for not only is there now a separation of expression and

content ’from the point of view of the subject’, but this separation has been objectified in

the picture. Not even a series of pictures will reconstitute the perceptual continuum, but a

film may of course do so. However, when we ask the wood-cutter to stand still for a

moment (like in a ’tableau vivant’), his position as such, before it is transformed into the

motive of a picture, is already a sign for the whole of the action, although the directly

presented position does not seem to be non-thematized, continuity is only provisionally

interrupted, and expression and content are felt to be of the same nature. We are

somewhere in between the abductive context and the sign: this may be termed a proto-

index.

Figure 3. Quadrangular face

The picture is undoubtedly a sign, in the sense of it having a signifier which is doubly

differentiated from its signified, and which is non-thematic and directly given, while the

signified is thematic and only indirectly present. Yet none of these properties applies as

unequivocally to the picture as to, for instance, the verbal sign. As noted by philosophers

from Husserl to Wittgenstein and Wollheim, we seem to ’see’ the content of the pictorial

sign directly ’into’ its expression. This is true is a quite concrete sense. For instance,

although no real faces are quadrangular, we have no trouble identifying figure 3 as a face;

and, more to the point, we can even indicate the precise place of the expression plane

where the ears are lacking. This certainly has something to do with that peculiar property

of iconic signs, observed by Peirce, and called exhibitive import by Greenlee, which makes

it possible for icons to convey more information than goes into their construction (cf.

Sonesson 1989a,III.3.6. and III.5.1.)

In spite of his intention to distinguish signs from other ways of connecting meanings,

Piaget in fact confounds meanings of very different kinds, and is therefore unable to


49

discover the stages which have to be reached in order to attain the semiotic function. Yet it

is precisely because we have taken the Piagetian notion of semiotic function seriously that

we have been able to isolate the sign as a peculiar brand of meaning. And this will permit

us to evaluate the unique contribution to the study of meaning made by Gestalt

psychology.

The varieties of pictorial meaning — Configurations and other holisticpropertiesDeveloping some ideas of Piaget's and Husserl's, we have imposed a set of constraints on

meanings which are signs. We have thus also rejected the parallel between the strata of the

sign, expression and content, and the perceptual act, suggested by Saint-Martin. In the

following, we will offer some general remarks on meanings which are not signs. In the

process, we will discover, with Saint-Martin and Gestalt psychology, that all perception

is imbued with meaning. Yet is remain for us to investigate what kind of meaning this is, if

it does not answer to the requirements imposed on the semiotic function. Perhaps

perceptual meanings, which are not signs, but appear in pictures, can be constrained in

some other way, permitting us to characterize, if not all kinds of meaning manifested in

pictures, then at least those types which tend to loom large on the pictorial surface. It is

conceivable, for instance, that topological and/or Gestalt relations may dominate pictorial

meaning in this way. Indeed, Saint-Martin could perhaps by taken to make precisely this

claim.

Signs among other meaningsSome employments of the term ’sign’ and similar expressions are not congruent with the

semiotic function, but may yet correspond to some kind of meaning. In cognitive science,

terms like ’sign’, ’symbol’, and ’representation’ are used in a vastly more comprehensive

sense than the one favoured here. The contents of consciousness are said to be ’symbols’,

and so on, of things in the ’real’ world (see Johnson-Laird 1988). Interestingly, that is an

employment of the term found also in John Locke, one of the first explicit semioticians, at

the beginning of the 18th century. Even before that, however, Pedro Fonseca, in his

treatise on signs from 1564, distinguished two types of signs: formal signs, by means of

which we know the outside world, and instrumental signs, which lead to the cognition of

something else, like the track of an animal, smoke, a statue, and the like (cf. Deely 1982).

However, as recognized in philosophical phenomenology, and more recently in the

ecological psychology of James Gibson, we do not ordinarily perceive signs of the world,

but the world itself; and thus, if indeed meaning is involved, its relata cannot be

differentiated, and there can be no semiotic function.

Not all of Piaget's examples of the semiotic function may really be of that kind, even

applying his own criteria. Günter Bentele (1984), who quotes Piaget's definition according


50

to which the content of the sign must be differentiated from its expression, rightly

observes that imitation does not manifest the semiotic function in this sense, but is a

prerequisite for it: indeed, it will function as a sign only on rare occasions when the act of

imitation is taken to refer back to the imitated act, instead of just being another instance of

the same kind (Moreover, Trevarthen & Logotheti 1989 shows the child's ability to

imitate something outside the presence of the corresponding model to antedate the

acquisition of the semiotic function). The same remark should apply to ’symbolic’ play,

and is in fact made by Bentele in another context: the toy is a sign, only to the extent that

the child takes it to represent the real thing, which cannot be true, for instance, in the case

of a toy lion if the child has no experience of the real animal11. Nor is is clear that imagery

and memory (not discussed by Bentele) requires any real differentiation of expression and

content (see Sonesson 1990f and 1989a,III.3.5-6.). On the other hand, the semiotic

function is not only embodied in verbal language and drawing ability, together with some

instances of play and imitation, but also appears, for instance, in gesture, music, etc.

Trevarthen’s critique is in fact more general. He argues that the child is attuned to

meaning from the first, that is, not only from birth, but in fact already at the end of the

fetal stage: co-operation, and the capacity to pick-up other people's meanings, is somehow

built into the organism from the start. Yet, as far as I have been able to determine, the term

’meaning’ is here employed in a more general sense than the one characteristic of the

semiotic function, as we have tried to develop this notion taking our hints from Piaget and

Husserl: it includes perception, particularly of an interpersonal kind.12

Ever since the time of Gestalt psychology, there has been another meaning of

meaning around, quite distinct from the sign: the whole which is perceived to be something

more than the elements out of which it is observed to be constituted. Although no

psychologist would nowadays accept the Gestalt psychological explanation for the

emergence of the whole, the phenomena are still there to be accounted for, and are

described in contemporary cognitive psychology as being some kind of perceptual

prototypes. Meaning according to Gestalt psychology amounts to something being more

than its parts; but the sign, according to Roman Jakobson’s formula, which we tried to

explicate earlier, supposes there to be something standing for something quite distinct

11 Cf. the discussion of the asymmetric nature of similarity, relying on experimental

evidence from cognitive psychology, conducted in Sonesson 1989a,III.6.2.12 Gardner & Wolf (1984) also criticise the Piagetian semiotic function, yet their criticism

does not seem to attain the features which interest us here, for there seems to be no

contradiction between the existence an unitary semiotic function, in the sense of

differentiation between expression and content, and the existence of unequal rates of

development within different semiotic domains. For a complete discussion, see Sonesson

1991d. Also cf. Tamm 1990.


51

from itself.

There is certainly a wider sense of meaning, which may be related, as Lévi-Strauss

once put it, to order, that is, organization, relatedness, indexicality. What is important here

is the connecting of things together, and the selection of elements to connect from a wider

field of possibilities. 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 model in semiotics, notably in the work of Barthes, Greimas,

Lévi-Strauss, and the 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.13

As we have already observed, the picture is certainly a sign, in the sense of it having

a signifier which is doubly differentiated from its signified, and which is non-thematic and

directly given, while the signified is thematic and only indirectly present. On the other

hand, the picture is made up of, and presupposes, a number of meanings which are more

elementary than signs. We shall see the importance of this observation later. For the time

being, let us simply note that these meanings are of two kinds, those which, in Piagetian

terms, pertains to operativity (logic, classification, etc.), and those which have to do with

figurativity (which, in Piaget, is a residue concept). According to serious brain research

(which should not be confused with the dubious lore pertaining to brain hemispheres

nowadays found in the weeklies), operativity and figurativity may be very roughly

distributed into the left and the right half, respectively, of the brain. Adding together the

information contained in the writings of Gardner (1977; 1982; 1984) and Coffman (1980),

we can construct a table in which the importance of both operativity and figurativity to

drawing ability is made clear (Fig. 4): contours and global properties are on the side of

figurativity, while details, inner elements, and richness of details are on the side of

operativity. Put more generally, operativity seems to account for structure, in which the

whole works on the parts to make them stand out more prominently, whereas figurativity

explains the configuration, in which many elements are fused into a new whole (cf.

Sonesson 1989a,I.3.4. and I.4.3.).

13 For another interesting argument concerned with the difference between direct

perception of the world, and the indirect apprehension typical of pictures and other signs,

see Pérez Carreño 1988:63ff.


52

Figure 4. Figurativity and operativity (in Piaget’s sense) and the brainhemispheres (from Sonesson 1989a)

All wholes are imbued with meaning. But not all meanings are wholes, nor are all

wholes configurations. These are some insights stemming from the holistic psychologies

being active in Germany during the first half of this century, but not perpetuated by that

most famous of its branches, Gestalt psychology, and therefore lost for Saint-Martin.

Gestalt theory and the other holistic psychologiesAt least three different versions of holistic psychology developed in the German speaking

world around the turn of the century: the Graz school, the Berlin school, and the Leipizig

school. Christian von Ehrenfels is reputed to have been the first to discuss, in his 1890

article (reprinted in Weinhandl 1960:11ff), the nature of ’Gestaltqualitäten’, in particular

as manifested in music. A melody may by transposed, he observes, without any of its

elements remaining constant. To von Ehrenfels and his immediate followers in the Graz


53

school, such as Meinong, Bernussi, and Witasek, these configurational qualities are

supposed to be added to elementary sensations, which serve as their foundation (see

Weinhandl 1960; Gurwitsch 1957:54ff). Husserl's discussion of ’figural moments’ (treated

by Saint-Martin 1990:21ff) would also seem to tend to this conclusion. About a century

earlier, however, some of the ideologues, close precursors of semiotics, observed that there

was one kind of whole which must be apprehended prior to the perception of its parts (cf.

Sonesson 1989a,I.3.4.). Moreover, on a closer reading, von Ehrenfels actually seems to

maintain that there are two kinds of wholes, those, like the melody and the square, which

are directly perceived, and those which depend on our initiative for their existence, as the

similarities which might be discovered between two notes.

According to Koffka, Köhler, Wertheimer, and other members of the Berlin school,

and later to Arnheim, Gurwitsch, and Merleau-Ponty, the configuration is immediately

given, whereas the putative elementary sensations must be abstracted out of the whole.

The criteria by which a phenomena is recognized as being a configuration are, according to

Köhler, demarcation, closure, and over-summativity (cf. Weinhandl 1960:334ff, 384ff). A

whole is said to be a sum if, when one part is detached from the whole, no modification

occurs in the part, nor in the remaining whole; otherwise, it is over-summative, that is, aGestalt. Writing in 1947, Mukar &ovsky ! (1974:7ff, 20ff) protested that all wholes were not

like this: while structural wholes result from the mutual relations between its components,

including negative ones, a holistic whole, that is, the Gestalt, is primarily a demarcation

made in the field, from which an inner differentiation may later ensue. Piaget (1972a: 137f;

1972b:47) distinguishes two kinds of wholes, schemes and Gestalts, along similar lines.

As early as 1906, Krueger (quoted in Weinhandl 1960:385) criticizes the all too

general use of the term ’Gestalt’ to designate all kinds of wholes, proposing a distinction

between wholes distinctly moulded to a particular shape, and wholes in a more general

sense. According to Krueger, emotions and the experience of small children generally are

non-configurational wholes. Such properties, he maintains, cannot be transposed, unlike

von Ehrenfels' melodies. Other criteria are proposed by Volkelt (in Sander & Volkelt

1962.43ff, passim), another member of the Leipzig school, according to whom a typical

configuration stands out from a background and is internally articulated, whereas other

holistic properties may be externally and internally diffuse. In his studies of children's

drawings, Volkelt encountered holistic properties, such as the closure and angularity of the

cube, transposed, though undoubtedly modified, from the child's perception (see the cube

drawing in the left column of Fig.4.). Volkelt and Sander later recognized many degrees of

demarcation and articulation of wholes, bridging the distance between the typical

configuration and the merely holistic properties (see further discussion in Sonesson 1989a,

I.3.4.).

Saint-Martin's (1990) book is exclusively concerned with the Berlin school, more

commonly known as Gestalt psychology, no doubt because, in comparison to the other


54

schools, it showed a greater predilection for the Gestalts. Refuting popular belief, Saint-

Martin (1990:65ff) sets out to demonstrate that the opposition between figure and ground

was less central to the Berlin school than is usually claimed, and was understood in a much

more dynamical way. In a similar vein, she argues that Gestalt psychology did not reduce

all phenomena to simple configurations, as the circle and the square, but diagnoses a

tendency in perception to make any shape as similar as possible to a regular Gestalt, or at

least to conceive it as a deformation of such a configuration (p.,8, p.17, p.73ff, p.78). As

against a common misunderstanding, she insists that Gestalt theory, instead of assimilating

all perception to a small set of static shapes, looked upon it as a dynamic process in which

contrary forces could, in some cases, give rise to perfect configurations (p.40ff, p.71). In

this view, perception is a field of tensions, of forces and counter-forces, striving to

establish an equilibrium of forms, imposing the configurational properties on

comparatively ’bad’ forms, and accepting, in the last analysis, the ’badness’ of certain

shapes. Although a picture containing no trace of configurations rapidly appears

uninteresting, this is also true of a composition made up a completely regular Gestalts

(p.107). Some amount of ’badness’ is needed in order to retain our interest in the picture,

requiring ever greater deformations, as we grow accustomed to the extravagances

perpetuated by the different waves of modernism.

Some of the other affirmations which Saint-Martin makes in defense of Gestalt

psychology are more surprising. For instance, she believes it is still possible to entertain

the theory according to which there is an isomorphism between the tensions intrinsic to

the perceptual field and some kind of electromagnetic field in the brain (p.34ff). This

conception may not have been refuted; indeed it may not be susceptible of being refuted; it

simply is not the kind of theory any psychologist would take seriously today. This is not

to deny that something very similar to a interplay of tensions takes place in perception,

only that it will translate directly into magnetic brain fields (some of those effects could

even be reinterpreted in terms of Gibsonian ’affordances’). As far is I understand, Saint-

Martin also wants to claim (p.86) that the Gestalt theorists did not necessarily believe the

Gestalts, or the forces responsible for their emergence, to be innate. Such a controversial

claim, to say the least, stands in need of a proof which is never produced.

Instead, Saint-Martin (p.85) quotes Chomsky as defending such an innateness

hypothesis. She seems much more favourable, however, to Ehrensweig's idea, according to

which ’good forms’ should result from some kind of censure accomplished by forces

emerging from the unconscious. Whatever its source, it might be argued, however, that

there is a general tendency to organize different shapes, as well as other phenomena,

around a central case which is the best realization of the category (cf. Rosch 1973). Such a

tendency to prototypicality could be innate, or may result from some very early

experience in the common human Lifeworld. The particular ’good forms’ would then be

superficial phenomena derived from this general tendency. Indeed, prototypicality itself


55

could be a relatively superficial effect, which is based on different kinds of modelling (cf.

Lakoff 1987; Rosch 1987).

Saint-Martin clearly considers iconicity to be an phenomenon which is comparable,

in this respect, to that of the good form (p.83ff,107f). Like Eco and many other

semioticians, she takes iconicity to imply the recognizability of real-world objects on the

pictorial surface (which is a much to limited meaning, as we have seen). Curiously, this is

quite the opposite of Gibson's and Kennedy's conception, according to which Gestalt

effects simply result from the recognition of real-world objects on the pictorial surface (cf.

Gibson 1982: 57f; and Sonesson 1989a,III3.). Yet, Saint-Martin (p.83ff) may possibly

furnish refutations of both hypotheses, as she quotes the observations of Boas and Leroi-

Gourhan, to the effect that there is an opposition between real-world objects, and the

simple, regular, symmetric and rhythmically repeated, shapes appearing in the pictures

created by ’primitive’ tribes. Even if Gestalt effects exclusively turn up on the pictorial

surface, and even if they are derivative effects of pictorial representation, as Gibson

claims, a prototypicality principle is needed in order to explain this tendency to discover

’good forms’.

Interestingly, Saint-Martin considers ’good forms’ to be a comparatively late

development in perception, being preceded by aggregates organized according to simple

topological relations, which may be observed in children's drawings (p.89). Had she been

aware of the non-configurational, holistic, properties discovered by the Leipizig school, it

seems to us that she could have gone much further.

The features of perception and languageWhen pictorial semiotics was first initiated, some kind of minimal unit of pictorial meaning

was commonly believed to exist, for instance by Eco, Koch, Floch, Gauthier, Thürlemann,

Lindekens, Groupe µ, Gubern, Tardy, Vilchez, Paromio, etc., though most of these

authors only assumed the existence of such features only on the pictorial level. According

to Eco, conic codes (which should really be called pictorial codes) possess their figurae,

signs, and statements, just like verbal language. Although Eco was later to reject, ever more

emphatically, the existence of pictorial features, he retains, at least as late as in 1976, his

idea to the effect that films are organized into three articulations, which supposes the

double articulation model for pictures, according to which pictures are built up of

distinctive traits having no independent meaning and forming together autonomous signs

(see critique in Sonesson 1989a,III.4.2. and 1989c).

Eco’s contention that the cinema possesses three articulations, which is based on the

double articulation of static pictures, clearly derives from an at least threefold confusion

about the import of the notion of articulation in linguistics. Most importantly, Eco con-

founds levels of configuration, where a whole contains meaning going beyond that of its

parts, and levels of appresentation, where there is a passage to a quite different realm of


56

reality (that is, there is more than one layer of sign functions).. In fact, although linguistics

have never offered us any clear definition of articulation, it is apparent from linguistic

practice that it is supposed to involve a concurrent shift in the levels of appresentation

and configuration. Thus, there cannot be any triple articulation in the cinema (cf. Sonesson

1989a,III.4.2. and 1989c).

Nor can Eco’s three stratum model of pictorial meaning be sustained, for, as soon as

we attend to the definitions given, the figurae level merges with the sign level, and the

sign level with the semata level. Although pictorial features really lack meaning in

isolation, each one of them acquires a specific signification as a part of a signifying

configuration, and thus there is nothing comparable to the second linguistic articulation. If

there is something like the first linguistic articulation in pictures, then it appears on

different configurational and extensional levels of the picture, in different kinds of picture.

A nose is a nose is a nose — but it may appear as a feature or a sign, depending on the

pictorial style selected (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.4.3.).

In spite of the arguments of Barthes, Metz, and the second Eco, there is every

reason to accept, along with such psychologists of perception as Gibson, Kennedy, and

Hochberg, the existence of pictorial features. But these features differ in important

respects from those of linguistics. Like all features that pertain to signs, pictorial features

must be allo-functionally defined, that is, they derive their identity from the relation

which they contract with the other plane of the sign; and although there is probably not

just a small number of them, they could scarcely be infinite. On the other hand, pictorial

features are not deprived of meaning, at least not in the way phonemes are. Indeed,

according to Gibson and Kennedy, they are not simple, physiological correlates of vision,

but ’higher-order properties’. These may, or may not, be identical to what we above,

following the Leipzig school, termed holistic, non-configurational properties. In fact, both

terms really stand in needing of being better defined.

While pictorial features do seem to be categorical in themselves, their relation to the

other plane of the sign is merely probabilistic. Indeed, the pictorial sign contains many

redundant expressions for one content, but also a cumulation of contents conveyed by a

single expression. In this way, they are similar to the features present in the perceptual

Lifeworld, but, for the same reason, they allow for rhetorical modifications of our

Lifeworld experience (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III,4.1.).

Just like the later Eco, Goodman believes pictures to be similar to verbal language in

being conventional, while differing from it in allowing for no division into units. His idea of

inanalyzability, or ’density’, supposes, as we noted above, that no matter how close a

division has been made of a picture, it always remains possible to continue the division,

introducing a third unit between each of the earlier pairs, and so on indefinitely. This

theory is untenable, at least in the case of pictorial (Goodman's referential) meaning, for it

is unable to account for the fact that real-world objects can be recognized in pictures. If the


57

referents of pictures were simply appointed in each particular case, as Goodman suggests,

the theory might possibly be right, but we have seen, when discussing iconicity, that such

as conception is entirely unfeasible (cf. Sonesson 1989a,III.2.4-5. and III.6.1.).

According to Saint-Martin (1987a), the students of visual language have failed to

discover so far an elementary unit equivalent to the phoneme, because they have expected

to find too great a similarity between the units of the diverging systems. In the case of

visual language, this unit is the ’coloreme’, which may perhaps roughly be described as a

minimally perceptible surface point, or as that amount of information which is picked up

by the viewer in one glance as it is organized around a single point of fixation. Having

introduced this intriguing notion, our author proceeds to explore the nature of six visual

variables, which turn out to be dimensions on each one of which every surface point must

evince a value: these are termed colour/tonality, texture, dimension/quantity, implantation

into the plane, orientation/vectorality, and frontiers/contours generating shapes. Clearly, to

the extent that the coloreme is made up of visual variables, it will encounter at least some

of the same problems facing earlier feature analysis. Besides, according to its definition,

the coloreme is a segment, not of the object perceived, but of the very process of

perception, and this, as we shall see below, in not quite the same thing.

Perceptual features, as recognized by psychologists of perception, are in no sense

meaningless, contrary to the linguistic ones. For instance, Kennedy would show, using a

familiar landscape scene, that certain constellations of lines meeting at particular angles,

stand for bounds, edges, surfaces, corners and cracks of the three-dimensional perceptual

world. Although it is the constellation which triggers the meaning, its parts are then

distributed onto the constituent parts of the constellation. Features like those discussed

by Kennedy have been implemented in computer programs, and works out quite nicely.

It does not follow, however, that this is really the essence of human perception.

Gregory, who emphasizes the constructive character of perception, points out that the

presence of a simple tangent line may transform what looks like a tree into the semblance

of a woman’s head profile having a cigarette in her mouth. And Hochberg observes that

there are, in addition to the spatial layout features, so-called canonical features, which

account for the minimal opposition between Hitler and Chaplin in some caricatures. I

would suggest, however, that canonical features are much less marginal than Kennedy and

Hochberg imply. Indeed, even in Kennedy’s favourite landscape picture, the sea and the

clouds are not seen because of any layout features, but are clearly conveyed simply by

means of prototypical forms. In fact, even the drawing of the house, with the same spatial

configuration, could represent any number of other cubic objects, if it were not for its

prototypical house features.

It may be suggested, then, that canonical features are really pervasive in pictorial

perception. Just as the meaning of a sentence may be grasped directly, independently of

the details of syntax, there may be a direct perception of gist in the picture, in some cases


58

eventually supplemented by the registration of spatial layout. Actually, there is (in spite

of Hochberg’s attempt) no way of accounting for the phenomenon of impossible pictures,

like the devil’s turning fork, or many of Escher’s and Reutersvärd’s compositions, without

recognizing an opposition between what may, rather metaphorically, be termed the

’syntax’ and the ’semantics’ of pictures (see Sonesson 1989a,III.3.4.).

In spite of the existence of pictorial features, Goodman’s observations on density are

not entirely off the mark. Indeed, once we have decided between the category of a tree or a

woman’s profile, the drawing will tell us a lot about the particular conformation of the

crown, or the nose, the hair-cut, and so on. But not indefinitely: only up to a point set by

the principle of pertinence embodied in the pictorial medium.

Thus far, our discussion has been mainly concerned with pictorial features (the

’iconic’ features of most semioticians). The problem posed by plastic features, which are

what interests Saint-Martin, could well turn out to be quite different. Before inquiring

further into this issue, however, it will be necessary to scrutinize the notion of the

coloreme.

The coloreme as sensation and noemaThe coloreme is characterized by Saint-Martin (1987a, 1988) as an aggregate of visual

variables perceived in the visual world owing to a centration or fixation of the eye, which

gives rise to a macular, and then a peripheral, field surrounding the foveal area of clear

perception. In its primary sense, the coloreme is thus a segment, not of the object

perceived, but of the very process of perception, and in that respect, as well as in its being

structured as an array of adumbrational variants organized around a thematic centre, it is

clearly comparable to what is known in Husserlean phenomenology as the perceptual

noema, and to what the psychologist of perception Julian Hochberg terms, more

colloquially, a ’glance’.

There can be no one-to-one mapping of the units of the perceptual process onto the

units of the object, however. Joining together the kindred traditions of Gestalt psychology

and phenomenology, Aron Gurwitsch (1957), in a classical work (quoted in other contexts

by Saint-Martin 1990) made a particularly thorough analysis of perception showing that

the object is entirely contained, differently adumbrated, in each one of the corresponding

noemata; his result still seems compatible with what we know from perceptual

psychology, in particular, as we noted above, with the ecological conception of Gibson

and his followers. Indeed, that Saint-Martin should ignore this fundamental distinction

between the object and the different adumbrations in which it appears to us is less

surprising after reading her Gestalt theory book, in which she explicitly rejects the parallel

distinction made by Gibson, and considers ’metaphysical’ the idea that the object is

present through its appearances.

There is nothing ’metaphysical’ about such a description. What it amounts to is,


59

primarily, that we have the impression of seeing the whole object in each one of its

appearances. This conception is not incompatible with Gurwitsch analysis according to

which the object is nothing but an ’internoematic system’, but such a system must be

made up of an infinite number of different adumbrations, which overlap one another more

or less, permitting the constitution of Gestalt-coherence (on which Saint-Martin insists in

her polemics with Hochberg referred to above). Any selection of elements from the

internoematic system, corresponding to the coloremes of Saint-Martin, must therefore be

arbitrary, and is thus unfit to serve as the basis for an analysis of the object, that is, in this

case, the picture.

In the case of picture perception, however, investigations, ever since the time of

Boswell, have tended to demonstrate the existence, if not of a order of reading, then at

least of certain points of fixation where the glances tend to cluster. In this sense, the

noemata would seem to offer a kind of indirect access to the thematic centres of the

picture, to the extent that those points attracting recurrent glances could be taken to define

a small set of privileged noemata extracted from the internoematic system. But since

noemata have no clear limits, but tend to shade into each other, and encompass one

another, they could not, even in this case, delimit the real building blocks of the picture.

Furthermore, the topological relations of the noemata are not at all those of the parts of

the object contained in them. In any case, Saint-Martin denies every relevance to these

results, without even attending to the difference between the hierarchies defined by the

order of glances, and by their recurrence.

Actually, the coloreme, on closer inspection, appears to be a much less sophisticated

notion than the noema. Its division into the foveal, macular, and peripheral, areas already

suggests that it is to be interpreted as a portion of the retinal image. Like all contemporary

psychologists, indeed, like Descartes, Saint-Martin observes that the retinal image is

actually never seen as such, but like Descartes, and like most present-day psychologists,

she keeps forgetting all the time the irrelevance of the static retinal pattern, clearly

recognized by Gibson (cf. Lombardo 1987). Indeed, at least in the Gestalt theory book,

the coloreme appears to be simply a sensation, in the sense of classical psychology.

Moreover, in Saint-Martin’s (1987a) earlier book, the coloreme also figures in the

guise of a unit defined ad hoc by the analytical scheme resulting from her analytical

model. In order to analyze a picture, an arbitrarily divided grid is imposed on it. Such a

grid, according to Saint-Martin, may well possess 15, 20, 25, or any other number of

squares, although she arbitrarily decides to employ the latter number, resulting from five

horizontal, and five vertical, divisions. Moreover, each square, designated by a letter of the

alphabet, may be further divided by the numbers 1-5, corresponding to each of the sides of

the square, in addition to its central point. And here comes the surprise: these 125 points

are identical to the coloremes! Thus, the points of fixation defining the coloremes are

simply imposed ad hoc by the model!


60

Curiously, Saint-Martin then proceeds to suggest that each of the squares are

comparable to the basic plane as a whole, in containing a differential distribution of

energies corresponding to the cruciform structure. But this is an absurd suggestion, if we

remember that the number of squares of the grid, and thus the localization of the limits

between the squares, was arbitrarily determined. Saint-Martin herself here seems to forget

the conventional character of the framework imposed by her model.

One cannot but feel sympathetic to Saint-Martin's suggestion (largely derived from

Piaget, cf. 1988; 1990:14ff) that perception is an activity, and that the pictorial work of

art, in order to be adequately perceived, requires a long series of perceptual acts. It is a

pity, however, that she should identify these acts with retinal fixations, for the latter are

modified all the time, and never become conscious as such (cf. Gibson 1982:96, 180ff). Is

is also curious that she should oppose her own view of perception as an active search to

the static character of phenomenology, when Husserl actually insisted on the explorative

nature of perception ("Ich kann immer weiter"), and that she should associate this

conception with Gestalt psychology, when it is much better represented by Gibson's

ecological psychology ("the permanent possibilities of perception"). Indeed, according to

the common bias of constructivism and Gestalt theory, reality is not there for us to see, no

matter how much we try, which means that no series of perceptual acts, however

extensive, will ever be able to grasp the object itself. Only if we admit that there are ways

of having access to reality, is it possible to claim that we can close in on it, while also

allowing for the fact that no actual search is fully adequate, because it will never exhaust

its object. Yet, all perceptual acts contribute, as much as possible, to the construction of

the picture as an object, to the picture thing, which is given in its entirety, but

incompletely known, in each one of its adumbrations.

Plastic language reconstructed from the feature hierarchyIn our further discussion of pictorial perception, it will be possible to dispense with the

notion of coloreme, shown to be contradictory and confused, and thus to concentrate on

the visual variables, or features, of which it is made up. In the following, we will focus on

the features of the plastic level, that is, those properties really possessed by the picture

considered as a thing in itself, made up of mere twodimensional shapes on a surface (see

Groupe µ 1978; 1979; 1985; Floch 1985: 15; 1986a, passim; 1986b: 126ff, and passim;

and critique in Sonesson 1991b). In Gibson's terms, then, we will not consider the objects

referred to by the markings on the surface taken to be a picture, but those meanings which

are, in some other, further to be elucidated way, conveyed by the markings considered in

themselves.

It is not easy to see how we are to determine the plastic meanings of a picture.

Twodimensional shapes on a surface simply are too ambiguous in themselves. Groupe µ

so far has proposed nothing to answer this query; Jean-Marie Floch, however, even tries


61

to discover the meaning of ’abstract art’, that is, pictures having only plastic language. In

order to make such pictures accessible to semiotic analysis, Floch attempted the

interpretation of one of Kandinsky’s non-figurative paintings, ’Composition IV’, by

means of a comparison with other, more nearly figurative works by the same painter. In

spite of Floch’s perspicacity, this procedure is unsatisfactory, because it is only possible

if we assume there to be a redundance of plastic language in relation to the plastic one

(Floch's ’iconic’ language): that is to say, if it is always true that plastic language only

repeats (though perhaps on a more abstract, and thus partial, level) that which is already

contained in pictorial language. But this is certainly not a presupposition that can be made

a priori (cf. Sonesson 1987; 1989a,II.3.2.). Apart from rendering the distinction between

the two layers trivial, this assumption is nowhere justified.

If, instead, we suppose there to be an autonomous plastic language, then we are con-

fronted with two problems. First, we need to discover what kinds of meanings could be

contained in the configurations, shapes and colours themselves. But in the second place,

since any visual configuration has a potentially infinite number of properties, we need to

know which of these properties are most likely to be relevant to our experience. Sonesson

(1989a,I.4.3-7. and II.3.6.; 1990g, 1991a) speculates on the possibility of there being a

small number of topological, bodily anchored properties, which predominates in such

plastic interpretations. Saint-Martin (1980; 1987a) broaches the problem of topology in a

more comprehensive fashion. Relying on Piaget's studies of children's drawings, she lists

such topological properties as proximity, separation, inclusion or interiority/exteriority

(that is, encasing and envelopment), succession, and continuity. In fact, different variants

of inclusion also intervene, without any reference to topology, in numerous text analyses

by Floch (cf. Sonesson 1992a). But there is nothing to justify the particular choice of

properties in these works either.

One way of approaching the intrinsic meanings of visual elements could be to

establish a feature hierarchy, similar to the one found by Jakobson (1942), according to

which there is a parallelism between the stages of phonetic development in child language,

the stages of phonetic reduction in the aphasic, and the relative complexity of the world’s

languages, as far as the phoneme repertory is concerned. Indeed, one exponent of the

Leipzig school, Lotte Hoffmann (1943) asked children between 2,2 and 9,7 years of age to

imitate a set of simple geometrical configurations using ready-made material, like sticks,

plates, and rings. All the configurations lacked all directly iconic content. By combining

the ready-made implements, it was possible to reproduce all the geometrical configurations

faithfully. Instead, however, children between 3-4 years would use any object whatsoever

to stand for all of the different configurations; but more often than not, a perfectly round,

compact object would be preferred. Older children would pick up only one, global,

property present in the configuration and imitate it with a single implement, for instance,

such properties as being closed, angular, pointed, having holes, and so on. Later several


62

pieces would be used, corresponding more often to the number of parts of the imitated

object than its shape (more details in Sonesson 1989a,II.3.6.).

Fig.5. Different limits between prototype categories in children’s

drawings. (adapted from Hoffman’s tex t in Sonesson 1989a)

It becomes clear from these example that a prototypical shape is used by the child to

represent a whole class of geometrical configurations. A round, compact object seems to

function like a prototype, a ’best form’, to which more deviant cases are assimilated. This

is seen most clearly is cases in which different children impose differently placed limits

between the classes subsumed by the prototypes (cf. Fig. 5.). Given these 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 an elementary division into circles and straight lines, the latter being the first element

in which extension becomes salient (see Fig.6.).

The properties common to the child's drawing and the object imitated, in these

examples, are often non-configurational holistic properties; often enough, these properties

are represented in the drawing by the corresponding perfect configurations or "good

forms". Many of the properties transposed from the object to the drawing are clearly

topological. The task set before the child is admittedly to produce as close a resemblance

as possible of the object. Yet, some other instance is clearly looms large in the child's mind

making him predominantly pick up, among all the numerous properties of the object,

those which are holistic and/or topological in character. There is thus a second principle of

pertinence holding sway, and commanding that of pictorial representation. Topological

and holistic properties may indeed be basic meanings of plastic language.

The logic of qualities and the bodily modesComparing the two ’great structuralists’ Piaget and Lévi-Strauss, the cognitive

psychologist Howard Gardner (1973) argues that, whereas the first is a pure formalist, the


63

second is really more concerned with the peculiar qualities connected by the relations. In

the conception of Lévi-Strauss, it is as important that the mind tends to focus on specific

qualities such as the raw and the cooked as it is that it will conceive of them in binary

opposition to each other. The negation as such is not important, but what is negating

what. Piaget, on the other hand, merely reduces all reasonings of his experimental subjects

to a group of four operations and 16 binary propositions or some approximation to these,

and it is therefore of no avail to know whether this mathematical form was manifested in a

particular case as a reasoning about chemical substances, billiard.balls, or a pendulum.

prototype:something (present)

prototype:

? discontinuous continuous

straight round

compact contoured

Fig 6.. A hierarchy of shapes, derived form children’s drawings (adapted

from Hoffman’s text in Sonesson 1989a)

This interpretation does not seem to be entirely justified. In fact, according to Lévi-

Strauss’ own interpretation of his ’logic of qualities’, it is not the qualities, but the logic

which matters. Although there is a small set of qualities which tend to occur over and over

again in his analyses, Lévi-Strauss is most explicit about their arbitrary nature. Like the

phonemes, they have only positional or differential value, he claims. Just as the phonemes

in the word ’sun’ are meaningless separately and may be 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 be easy to

adduce numerous instance in which Lévi-Strauss rejects the idea of qualities having a

meaning of their own (see examples and discussion in Sonesson 1989a,I.4.); he even

censors Jung and Levy-Bruhl for embracing that idea.


64

Yet Gardner’s interpretation of Lévi-Strauss' work is not without all foundation.

There are passages which go in Gardner’s sense. But, more to the point, Lévi-Strauss' own

analyses certainly suppose that qualities have meaning, even if the myths then determine

these meanings in peculiar ways. Lévi-Strauss (1983) 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, because they have in common the property of being ’des

organes qu’on retranche de l’animal avant de le comsommer, ou dont on retranche une

partie avant de les consommer’ (p.185). There is separation, not just 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. It least in this case, Lévi-Strauss has discovered a common denominator

which can only be justified as a holistic, non-configurational properties, and which

appears to have some topological facets, pertaining to inclusion, as well as mere proximity

and separation.

Although there are certain recurring terms in Lévi-Strauss' work, he does not propose

any list of fundamental qualities, nor does he try to show why certain qualities should be

more important than others. In an experimental study, however, Gardner (1970) found

that children were particularly sensitive to what he calls 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 modalities, and even

in the motoric realm. There are reasons to suppose that they continue to be registered by

the 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 particular import from first being experienced in the relationship between

one’s own body and the field of objects outside 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.

Eriksson and Gradner refer these properties to different erotic zones, in the wide

Freudian sense of the term (As far as I understand, also Saint-Martin is pondering some

Freudian interpretation of pictorial meaning, which she will however present to us in some

forthcoming book). This is, to my mind, the problematical aspect of the scheme. It

certainly seems probable that the little girl will learn inception from enclosing a cherry in

her hand, and that the little boy will stick his hand into a hole in the tree, well before any

of them get the opportunity of having sexual intercourse. Should they have to await the

sexual experience, the boy would only acquire the notion of intrusion, and the girl could

only know of inception. However, a more general interpretation seems possible.

According to Piaget, schemes of thinking are abstracted from actions through the

several stages of intellectual development. What is, from the beginning, taking place as an


65

exchange between one’s own body and the objects outside, is projected onto the object

pole, and transformed into an object in its own right. In a parallel, but inverse fashion,

modal properties seem to evolve from the body’s confrontation with the world, but to be

projected back to the subject pole. Thus, they are experienced as bodily, and perhaps

more generally, spatial, relations. Indeed, in a study of the bodily continuum underlying

gestures,we discovered long ago, and quite independently of Gardner’s scheme, that

gestural meaning is largely a question of creating and dissolving bodily spaces, and of

entering into and deserting bodily constructed enclosures. (Cf. Sonesson 1981a,b,c; 1990g;

1991a).14

Figure 7. Topological-dynamical interpretation of Gardner’s modal-vectorial

properties (from Sonesson 1989a)

The dynamics of topology and semiotic integrationThese modal properties are readily reduced into a set of notions taken over from

mathematical topology (Cf. fig. 7. Two more properties, which may be similarly reduced,

were added in Sonesson 1989a,I.4.3-5.: the refusal to let something else in, and the

resistance to be enveloped). This reduction should be interesting for a number of reasons.

14 This analysis, which involved the analysis of a number of documentary films produced

by French television, was accomplished by a working group under the direction of the

present author, and was realized in collaboration between the Groupe de recherches

sémio-linguistiques, and the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, in Paris, from 1979 to 1981.


66

Piaget and his collaborators have demonstrated that the geometry of the child’s first

experiential space is topological, i.e. it contains the kind of relations that would be

preserved in a figure drawn on a piece of rubber when the rubber is distended or

compressed. Topology has also been invoked numerous times in semiotics: in the

morphology of René Thom, in Pierre Boudon’s semiotics of architecture, and, of course, in

Fernande Saint-Martin’s visual semiotics. But beyond the fact that topological space,

according to Piaget, is the first space of child experience, the importance of topology has

never been justified, nor its categories clearly determined.

Strictly speaking, this analysis introduces two elements which are not found in

topology, in the mathematical sense: movement, that is, dynamics; and emphasis, that is,

the locus of the ego. But we know from other of Piaget’s investigations that primordial

space is heavily egocentric, also in the literal sense; and actions are at the origin of all

structures. Thus, also when considering plastic features, we are forced to return to the

world taken for granted, this time on the side of the subjective pole.

The reduction scheme merely involves a single species of topological qualities,

inclusion. Since there are a few other notions in topology, and since the body partakes of

other elementary spatial relationships, we should expect there to be other modal

properties. If movement is taken away , most of the relations would reduce to contiguity

and factorality, which are basic to indexicality. Thus, there is not only a need to extend the

reduction scheme, but pursue the reduction further, in order to discover such properties as

relate topology, indexicality, Gestalt relations, and so on. These observations should bring

us to observe another shortcoming of Saint-Martin's approach: her neglect to clarify the

relationship between the topological notions and the Gestaltian ones, which constitute her

second class of syntactical relations. Some of these notions are clearly related, as is the

case of proximity and contiguity. Furthermore, it would be important to elucidate the

relationship of these latter notions to indexicality and to the syntagmatic axis, both of

which involve contiguity. Conceivably, we may be able to derive all the basic notions of

visual semiosis, starting out from the elementary idea of indexicality, which (as we hinted

above) is the basic meaning relation in perception.

Perhaps we could take the elementary notion, in this context, to be the topological

relation of proximity. Two units in proximity which remain separate already constitute an

indexicality; in terms of Husserlean phenomenology, they form a pairing; in Gestalt

psychology, the same phenomena give rise to a contiguity; in the rhetorics of Groupe µ,

they could, under certain circumstances, appear as a disjoint figure in praesentia, and in

ordinary rhetorics as a metonymy. If the two units are visibly different in some relevant

respect, they are said, in structural linguistics, to form a contrast. If, however, one of the

separate units is not present in perception, but only in the mind of the perceiver, the units

together create an opposition, more exactly, a binary opposition, in terms of structural

linguistics. Many oppositions together will form a paradigm and, eventually, a structure.


67

In the rhetorics of Groupe µ, the relation is one of disjunction in absentia. Depending on

the temporal modification of the absent member, the pair will constitute a retention or a

protention, from the point of view of phenomenology. Under certain circumstances, the

member which is directly given to perception becomes the expression, and the absent

member the content, of an appresentation, semiotic function, or sign. If the constituents of

such a sign relation remain in contiguity, or if the are retained or protained as entering such

a relation, they form, more in particular, an indexical sign, or index.

Gestalts, or perfect configurations, repose on some kind of inclusion. They are thus

related to the semiotic concept of factorality, the classical rhetoric notion of synecdoche,

and the the Groupe µ notion of conjunction in praesentia. Inclusion is also involved in

figure/ground, centre/periphery, body/appendages, and similar phenomena. Adding

movement, all the modal/vectorial properties may equally be derived. In a similar way, we

can derive syntagms and syntax from the topological property of order, the notion of

isotopy, as well as Goodman's density, from the notion of continuity, and the

corresponding notion of allotopy from discontinuity. And many other parallels remain to

spelled out.

It would be wrong to think of such a series of parallels as a reduction without

residue. There is no point in merely identifying, for instance, as Jakobson did, metaphor

and paradigm, as well as metonymy and syntagm. Instead, one of these terms should be

reconstructed on the basis of the other (if possible). Although structural linguistics,

Husserlean phenomenology, Piagetian topology, Peircean semiotics, Groupe µ rhetorics,

and the psychology of perception all start out, for example, from a kind of two term

relation, they use it to establish different constructs, phenomenology adding time

modification and degree of emphasis, linguistics introducing the idea of distinctness, and so

on. Nor is is certain that all these concepts really merit a place in an integrated framework

of perceptual semiotics.

As always, however, when we conceive of something in terms of reduction, the

ultimate terms must be based on something which is itself more firmly established. And

that is where we are brought back again to the ecology of semiosis.

Conclusion: Towards a semiotic ecologySaint-Martin's Gestalt theory book must be seen as part of a project, including a number

of earlier and forthcoming books, which are intended to lay a firm, perceptual basis for

pictorial semiotics. Like Saint-Martin's earlier book (and no doubt her forthcoming ones),

it makes for illuminating and, in particular, stimulating, reading. Two points, forcefully

made by Saint-Martin in this book, as well as in other contexts, have been retained here:

the idea that pictorial semiotics (and visual semiotics generally) must be based on the fact

that the pictorial sign, before being anything else, is an object of visual perception; and the

requirement, following upon that observation, that pictorial semiotics should assimilate


68

the knowledge on perception assembled by Gestalt psychology and other approaches to

visual perception, thereby abandoning the autonomy postulate so characteristic of many

schools of present-day semiotics.

We have tried to adduce further reasons for giving up the autonomy postulate, but,

at the same time, we have pointed to the weak position of mere passivity and receptivity

in which Saint-Martin's proposal seems to leave semiotics. As against this conception of

semiotics as a mere ancillary, or second hand, science, we have argued for the necessity of

going beyond mere interdisciplinarity, as well as total autonomy, of giving semiotics

access to its proper procedures of verification, including the setting up of properly

semiotic experiments. Indeed, we have suggested that semiotics (in due time) should have

something of its own to offer to the other sciences, not merely take over the knowledge

base contributed by other approaches. Moreover, in order to steer free of interdisciplinary

triviality, we must insert this knowledge base into the problem space developed within

semiotics, as a consequence of the continuing concerns of own research tradition.

While admitting that the picture sign is, first and foremost, an object present in

visual perception, and therefore is dependant on the organization of the visual world, we

have pointed out the difficulty of choosing one among the several extant perceptual

psychologies as a basis for semiotic research, and we have emphasized the importance of

making this selection using criteria intrinsic to the semiotic domain, as well as such which

can be derived from the discussions of the warring factions of psychology. If, however,

semiotics, as we have suggested, is concerned to account for the implicit knowledge

underlying the performance of the users of different signification systems, Gibsonian

ecological psychology stands a much better chance than Gestalt theory of offering an

adequate ground for a theory of pictorial meaning. Inside the domain of perceptual

psychology, moreover, direct registration theory clearly holds the domineering position.

In order to serve the goals of pictorial semiotics, Gibsonian ecology probably needs

to be amended, notably to take account of cultural objects. Psychologists like Neisser,

Rosch, and Costall, and linguistics like Lakoff, have already begun working on this task.

But semioticians can also make a contribution. We will need a semiotic ecology, serving as

intermediary between perceptual psychology and pictorial semiotics. Furthermore, there

is really no reason to let pictorial semiotics be dissolved into the psychology of picture

perception. Just like there is a science of linguistics, which is not identical to

psycholinguistics, we will need a science of pictorial meanings, different from perceptual

psychology. Indeed, there is work to do. We have hinted at some of the great issues here:

the difference between signs and other (perceptual) meanings, pictorality as a sub-category

of iconicity, the nature of plastic meanings. The knowledge base of perceptual psychology

simply serves to bring these questions into view. It is the task of semiotics to resolve

them.

Semiotic ecology could no doubt have a much broader use than the one required in


69

pictorial semiotics. It would certainly be basic to the study of sculpture, architecture, and

many other domains not included by Saint-Martin in her visual semiotics. But over and

beyond that, it would lay the foundations of cultural semiotics.

References

Barthes, Roland (1961). Le message photographique, Communications, 1. Also in Barthes,

Roland, L'obvie et l'obtus., 9-24. Paris: Seuil 1982.

– (1964). Rhétorique de l'image, Communications, 4, 40-51. Also in Barthes, Roland,

L'obvie et l'obtus., 25-42. Paris: Seuil 1982.

Bengtsson, H., Bondesson, L., & Sonesson, G. (1985). Facial expression from different

viewing positions. A study in experimental semiotics. Unpublished experimental study.

Bentele, Günter (1984) Zeichen und Entwicklung. Vorüberlegungen zu einer genetischen

Semiotik. Tübingen: Narr.

Bierman, Arthur K. (1963). That there are no iconic signs, Philosophy and

phenomenological research, XXIII:2: 243-249.

Carani, Marie (1986a). Le corpus Pellan: une relecture sémiotique, Protée 14, no 3, 15-26.

– (1986b). Le logos greimasien et l´œuvre visuelle, in Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic

inquiry , 6:3, 335-344.

– (1988). Re/naissance d'une sémiologie visuelle. Compte rendu de Fernande Saint-Martin,

Sémiologie du langage visuel, Protée, 16, no 1-2, 239-241.

Coffman, Hugh (1980). Pictorial perception: hemispheric specialization and

developmental regression in the neurologically impaired. In The perception of pictures,

Volume II: Dürer's devices, Margaret Hagen, (ed.), 227-261. New York: Academic

Press.

Costall, Alan (1989). A closer look at direct perception. In Cognition and social worlds,

Angus Gellatly, Don Rogers, & John Sloboda, (eds.), 10-21..Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Damisch, Hubert (1979). Sur la sémiologie de la peinture. In A semiotic

landscape/Panorama sémiotique. Actes du premier congrés de l'Association

internationale de sémiotique, Milan 1974., S. Chatman, U. Eco, U., & J.M.

Klinkenberg, (eds.), 128-136. The Hague, Paris, & New York: Mouton.

Deely, John (1982). Introducing semiotic. Its history and doctrine. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

Dubois, Philippe (1983). L'acte photographique. Paris & Bruxelles: Nathan/Labor.

Eco, Umberto (1968). La struttura assente. Milan: Bompiani. Swedish translation: Den

frånvarande strukturen. Lund: Cavefors 1971.

– (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.


70

Floch, Jean-Marie (1978). Quelques positions pour une sémiotique visuelle/Roland

Barthes: Sémiotique de l'image, Bulletin du Groupe de recherches sémio-linguistiques,

4/5, 1-16, 27-32.

– (1985). Petites mythologies de l'œil et l'esprit. Paris: Hadès.

– (1986a). /entries in/ Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Tome II.

A.J. Greimas, & J. Courtès, J., (eds.). Paris: Hachette.

– (1986b). Les formes de l'empreinte. Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac.

– (1990). Sémiotique, marketing et communication. Sous les signes, les stratégies. Paris:

PUF.

Gardner, Howard (1970). From mode to symbol, British Journal of Aesthetics, 10:3, 359-

375.

– (1973) The arts and human development. New York: Wiley & Sons.

– (1977). Senses, symbols, operations. In The arts and cognition, D. Perkins, & B.

Leondar, (eds.), 88-117.. Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press;

– (1982). Art, mind, and brain. New York: Basic books.

– (1984). Frames of mind. The theory of multiple intelligences. London: Heinemann.

Gardner, Howard & Wolf, Dennie (1983). Waves and streams of symbolization: Notes on

the development of symbolic capacities in young children. In The Acquisition of

Symbolic Skills, John Sloboda, & Don Rogers, (eds.), 19-42.

Gibson, James (1971). The information available in pictures, Leonardo, 4:1, 27-35.

– (1978). The ecological approach to visual perception of pictures, Leonardo, 4:2: 227-

235.

– (1980). A prefatory essay on the perception of surfaces versus the perception of

markings on a surface. In The perception of pictures, Volume I: Alberti's window.,

Margaret Hagen, (ed.), xi-xvii. New York: Academic Press.

– (1982). Reasons for realism. Selected essays of James J. Gibson, Edward Reed, &

Rebecca Jones, (eds.). Hillsdale, New Jersey, & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass.

Gombrich, E.H. (1960). Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon Press. Second edition 1962.

Goodman, Nelson (1968). Languages of art. London: Oxford University Press.

Greenlee, Douglas (1973). Peirce's concept of sign. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.

Gregory, R.L. (1966). Visual illusions. In New Horizons in pychology, 1, Brian Foss, (ed.),

68-96. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Second edition 1973;

Groupe µ (Dubois, J., Dubois, Ph., Edeline, Fr., Klinkenberg, J.M., Minguet, Ph, Pire, Fr.,

& Trinon, H.) (1970). Rhétorique générale. Paris: Larousse.

– (1976). La chafetière est sur la table, Communications et langages, 29, 36-49.

– (1977). Rhétorique de la poésie. Bruxelles: Editions Complexe.

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

– (1979) Iconique et plastique: sur un fondement de la rhétorique visuelle, Revue

d'ésthétique, 1-2, 173-192.


71

– (1980). Plan d'un rhétorique de l'image, Kodikas/Code, 3, 249-268

– (1985). Structure et rhétorique du signe iconique. In Exigences et perspective de la

sémiotique. Recueil d'hommages pour A.J. Greimas, H. Parret, & H.G. Ruprecht,

(eds.), Volume I, 449-462. Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing Co.

– (1989a). Sémiotique et rhétorique du cadre, La part de l'œil, 5, 114-131

– (1989b). Rhétorique visuelle fondamentale, to be published in Text,

– (1989c). Das System der plastischen Form, Semiotische Berichte, 2,3, 215-233.

Gurwitsch, Aron (1957). Théorie du champs de la conscience. Bruges: Desclée de

Brouver.

Hagen, Margaret (1979). A new theory of the psychology of representation art. In

Perception and pictorial representation, C. Nodine, & D. Fisher, (eds.), 196-212. New

York: Praeger Publishers.

– (1980). Generative theory: a perceptual theory of pictorial representation. In The

perception of pictures, Volume II: Dürer's devices, Margaret Hagen, (ed.), 3-46. New

York: Academic Press.

Hjelmslev, Louis (1959). Essais linguistiques. Copenhagen. Second edition: Paris, Minuit

1971.

Hochberg, Julian (1972). The representation of things and people. In Art, perception, and

reality, E.H. Gombrich et al., (eds.), 47-94. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins

University Press.

– (1974). Organization and the Gestalt tradition. In Handbook of perception, Volume I, E.

Carterette, & M. Friedman, (eds)., 180-210. New York & London, Academic Press.

– (1978). Perception. Second, revised edition. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, Inc.

– (1980). Pictorial functions and perceptual structures. In The perception of pictures,

Volume II: Dürer's devices, Margaret Hagen, (ed.), 47-93. New York: Academic

Press.

Hoffmann, Lotte (1943). Vom schöpferischen Primitivganzen zur Gestalt. München: C.H.

Beck. New edition 1961.

Husserl, Edmund (1939). Erfahrung und Urteil. Prag: Academia Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Jakobson, Roman (1942). Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine Lautgesetze, Uppsala:

Uppsala University. New edition: Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1968.

Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1988). The computer and the mind. An introduction to cognitive

science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Kennedy, John M. (1974). A psychology of picture perception. San Francisco: Jossey-Bas,

Inc.

Krampen, Martin (ed.) (1983). Visuelle Kommunikation und/oder verbale

Kommunikation. Hildesheim & Berlin: Olms Verlag/Hochschule der Künste.

Lakoff, George (1987). Cognitive models and prototype theory. In Concepts and

conceptual development: ecological and intellectual factors in categorization, Ulric


72

Neisser, (ed.), 63-100. Cambridge & London: Cambridge University Press;

Lakoff, George & Turner, Mark (1989). More than cool reason. A field guide to poetic

metaphor. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1983). Le regard éloigné, Plon, Paris.

Lindekens, René (1971). Eléments pour une sémiotique de la photographie. Paris &

Bruxelles: Didier/Aimav.

– (1973). Eléménts pour une analyse du code de l'image photographique. In Recherches

sur les systèmes significants. Symposium de Varsovie, J. Rey-Debove, (ed.), 505-534.

The Hague & Paris: Mouton.

– (1976). Eléments de sémiotique visuelle. Paris: Klincksieck.

– (1979). Sémiotique de la photographie. In A semiotic landscape/Panorama sémiotique.

Actes du premier congrés de l'Association internationale de sémiotique, Milan 1974., S.

Chatman, U. Eco, U., & J.M. Klinkenberg, (eds.), 139-146. The Hague, Paris, & New

York: Mouton.

Lombardo, Thomas (1987). The reciprocity of perceiver and environment. Hilldale, New

Jersy, & London: Lawrence Erlbaum Ass.

Luckman, Thomas (1980). Lebenswelt und Geschichte. Paderborn: Schöning,Mukar &ovsky !, Jan (1974). Studien zur strukturalistishcne Ästhetik und Poetik. München:

Hanser Verlag.

Neisser, Ulric (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

– (1976). Cognition and reality. San Fransisco, Freeman & Co.

– (1987). From direct perception to conceptual structure. In Concepts and conceptual

development: ecological and intellectual factors in categorization, Ulric Neisser, (ed.),

11-24. Cambridge & London: Cambridge University Press.

Parmentier, Richard J. (1985). Signs' place in Medias Res: Peirce's concept of semiotic

mediation. In Semiotic mediation. Sociocultural and psychological perspectives, R.

Mertz, & R. Parmentier, (eds.), 23-48. New York & London: Academic Press, Inc.

Pérez Carreño, Francisca (1988). Los placeres del parecido. Icono y representación.

Madrid: Visor.

Pérez Tornero, J.M. (1982). La semiótica de la publicidad, Barcelona: Editorial Mitre.

Piaget, Jean (1945). La formation du symbole chez l'enfant. Neuchatel: Delachaux &

Niestlé. Third edition 1967.

– (1967). La psychologie de l’intelligence. Paris: Armand Colin.

– (1970). Epistémologie des sciences de l'homme. Paris: Gallimard.

– (1972a). Problèmes de psychologie génétique. Paris: Gallimard.

– (1972b). The concept of structure, Scientific thought. 35-56. The Hague & Paris:

Mouton/Unesco;

Preziosi, Donald (1983). Advantages and limitations of visual communication. In Visuelle

Kommunikation und/oder verbale Kommunikation, Martin Krampen, (ed.), 1-34.


73

Berlin: Olms Verlag, Hildesheim/Hochschule der Künste.

Reed, Edward S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the psychology of perception. New Haven &

London, Yale University Press.

Rosch, Eleanor (1973). On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In

Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, Thomas E. Moore, (ed.), 111-

144. New York & London: Academic Press.

– (1975). Cognitive reference points, Cognitive psychology, 7,4: 532-547.

– (1978). Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization., E. Rosch, & B.

Lloyd, B., (eds.)., 27-48. Hillsdale: Lawrende Erlbaum Ass.

– (1987). Wittgenstein and categorization research in cognitive psychology. In Meaning

and the growth of understanding., M. Chapman, & R. Dixon, (eds.), 151-166. Berlin,

Heidelberg, & New York, Springer Verlag.

Saint-Martin, Fernande (1968). Structures de l'espace pictural.. Montréal: Hurtubise. New

edition 1989.

– (1980). Les fondements topologique de la peinture. Montréal: Hurtubise. New edition

1989.

– (1985). Introduction to a semiology of visual language. Toronto: Toronto Semiotic

Circle.

– (1986). Sémiologie et syntaxe visuelle. Une analyse de ’Mascade’ de Pellan, Protée 14,

no 3, 27-40.

– (1987a). Sémiologie du langage visuel. Québec: Presse de l'Université du Québec.

– (1987b). L'insertion du verbal dans le discours de Pellan, Canadian Literature, no 112-

114, 28-45.

– (1988). De la fonction perceptive dans la constitution du champ textuel, Protée 16, no 1-

2, 202-213.

– (1990). La théorie de la Gestalt et l'art visual. Québec: Presse de l'Université du

Québec.

Sander, Friedrich & Volkelt, Hans (1962). Granzheitspsychologie. München: Verlag C.H.

Beck.

Schaeffer, Jean-Marie (1987). L'image précaire, Paris: Seuil.

Sonesson, Göran (1981a). Esquisse d´une taxonomie de la spatialité gestuelle. Paris: École

des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (mimeographed).

– (1981b). Du corps propre à la grande route, Bulletin du Groupe de recherches sémio-

linguistiques , 18, 31-42.

– (1981c). Variations autour d´un bras. Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences

Sociales (mimeographed).

– (1987). Notes sur la macchia de Kandinsky; le problème du langage plastique, Actes

Sémiotiques: le Bulletin , X, 44, décembre, 23-28.

– (1988). Methods and models in pictorial semiotics. Report 3 from the Semiotics project.


74

Lund: Institute of Art History (mimeographed).

– (1989a). Pictorial concepts. Inquiries into the semiotic heritage and its relevance for the

analysis of the visual world. Lund: ARIS/Lund University Press.

– (1989b). Bildanalysens plats i semiotiken,. Konstvetenskaplig bulletin, 35, Autumn

1989.

– (1989c). Le mythe de la triple articulation. Modèles linguistiques et perceptifs dans la

sémiotique des images. Contributions to the Fourth congress of the International

Association for Semiotic Studies, Barcelona/Perpignan, Mars-April 1989, to be

published in the acts of that congress.

– (1989d). Semiotics of photography. On tracing the index. Report 4 from the Semiotics

project. Lund: Institute of Art History (mimeographed).

– (1989e). A bibliography of pictorial and other kinds of visual semiotics. Report 1# from

the Semiotics project. Lund: Institute of Art History (mimeographed). Also in EIDOS.

Bulletin international de sémiotique de l'image, 2, 1989, 3-29; and 2, 1990, 5-42.

– (1989g). Tjugofem års soppa på Panzanis pasta. Postbarthesianska betraktelser över

bildsemiotiken. Conference given at the invitation of the Norwegian Association for

Semiotic Studies, November 1989, to be published in the review of that organization,

Livstegn, 1, 1990.

– (1990a). Rudimentos de una retórica de la caricatura. In Investigaciones semióticas III.

Actas del III simposio internacional de la Asociación española de semiótica, Madrid 5-

7 de diciembre de 1988; Volumen II, 389-400. Madrid: UNED.

– (1990b). Vägen bortom bilden. Datorbilden inför bildsemiotiken, Konstvetenskaplig

bulletin, 36: 14-29.

– (1990c). The challenge of visual semiotics. Review of Saint-Martin, Fernande,

Sémiologie du langage visuel, The semiotic review of books, 2 , 6-8.

– (1990d). Cuadraturas del círculo hermenéutico. El caso de la imagen. To be published in

the acts from Jornadas de semiótica visual, Bilbao, octubre de 1990.

– (1990e). Iconicité de l’image — Imaginaire de l’iconicité. De la ressemblance à la

vraisemblance. To be published in the acts of Premier Congrès de l’Association

internationale de sémiologie de l’image, Blois, novembre de 1990.

– (1990f). The semiotic function and the genesis of pictorial meaning. To be published in

the acts of the 3rd Annual Meeting and Congress of The International Semiotics

Insitute, ’Center/Periphery in representations and institutions’, Imatra, Finland, July

16-21, 1990.

– (1990g). Bodily semiotics and the extensions of man. To be published in the acts of the

3rd Annual Meeting and Congress of The International Semiotics Insitute,

’Center/Periphery in representations and institutions’, Imatra, Finland, July 16-21,

1990.

– (1991a). Kroppens byggnad och bruk. Några semiotiska modeller. In Att tala utan ord.


75

Människan icke-verbala uttrycksformer, Göran Hermerén, (ed.), 83-100. Stockholm:

Almqvist & Wiksell International.

– (1991b). Comment le sens vient aux images. Un autre discours de la méthode.

Conference given at the Université Laval, Québéc, Spring 1991, to be published in Les

Nouveaux Cahiers du CÉLAT, , Québéc: Les éditions du Septentrion/CÉLAT.

– (1992a) Bildbetydelser. Inledning till bildsemiotiken som vetenskap. Lund:

Studentlitteratur.

– (1992b). The semiotics of picturehood. The state of the art at the beginning of the

nineties. To be published in The semiotic web 1992, Thomas Sebeok, & Jean Umiker-

Sebeok, (eds.). Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Tamm, Maare (1990). The semiotic function. Studies in children’s representations. Umeå:

University of Umeå.

Tardy, Michel (1964a). Les zones privilégiés de perception de l’image, Terre d’images, 2:

197-199.

– (1964b). Le trosiéme signifiant, Terre d’images, 3: 313-322.

Thürlemann, Félix (1982). Paul Klee. Analyse sémiotique de trois peintures. Lausanne:

L’Age d'Hommes.

– (1990).Vom Bild sum Raum. Beiträge zu einer semiotischen Kunstwissenschaft. Köln.

DuMont.

Trevarthen, Colwyn & Logotheti, Katerina (1989). Child and culture: Genesis of co-

operative knowing. In Cognition and social worlds, Angus Gellatly, Don Rogers, &

John Sloboda, (eds.), 37-56. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tversky, Amos (1977). Features of similarity, Psychological Review, 84,4: 327-352.

Vallier, Dora (1977). Pour une définition de l'espace dans l'art, Critique, 366: 1044-1058

- (1981). Minimal units in architecture. In Image and code., Wendy Steiner, (ed.), 139-

146. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

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

photographie.

Weinhandl, Ferdinand (ed.) (1960). Gestalhaftes Sehen. Zum hundertjährigen Gebutstag

von Christian von Ehrenfels. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliches Buchgesellschaft.

Winner, Ellen (1982). Invented worlds. The psychlogy of art. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard

University Press.

Göran Sonesson obtained his doctoral degree in linguistics from Lund University,

Sweden, in 1978, and was awarded in the same year an equivalent degree in semiotics by

the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. From 1974 to 1981, he

conducted research in general semiotics and the semiotics of gesture in Paris, and was later

involved with general and Mayan linguistics in Mexico. Since 1983, he has been in charge


76

of the Semiotics Project at Lund University, some results of which have been published in

his book Pictorial concepts (1989). President of the Swedish Association for Semiotic

Studies, and a Swedish representative in the executive commission of the IASS, as well as

in the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies, he is also one of the founding-members,

and vice-president, of the International Association for Visual Semiotics, created at Tours

in 1989.

Rv AGestalt V2

Documents

Transcript of Rv AGestalt V2