Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics

241 Pages·2013·4.11 MB·English

by  Tony Jappy

Introduction
to Peircean
Visual Semiotics
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BLOOMSBURY ADVANCES IN SEMIOTICS
Semiotics has complemented linguistics by expanding its scope beyond
the phoneme and the sentence to include texts and discourse, and their
rhetorical, performative, and ideological functions. It has brought into
focus the multimodality of human communication. Bloomsbury Advances
in Semiotics publishes original works in the fi eld demonstrating robust
scholarship, intellectual creativity, and clarity of exposition. These works
apply semiotic approaches to linguistics and nonverbal productions, social
institutions and discourses, embodied cognition and communication, and
the new virtual realities that have been ushered in by the Internet. It also
is inclusive of publications in relevant domains such as socio-semiotics,
evolutionary semiotics, game theory, cultural and literary studies, human–
computer interactions, and the challenging new dimensions of human
networking afforded by social websites.
Series Editor: Paul Bouissac is Professor Emeritus at the University of
Toronto (Victoria College), Canada. He is a world renowned fi gure in
semiotics and a pioneer of circus studies. He runs the SemiotiX Bulletin
[www.semioticon. com/semiotix] which has a global readership.
Titles in the Series:
Buddhist Theory of Semiotics, Fabio Rambelli
Semiotics of Drink and Drinking, Paul Manning
Semiotics of Religion, Robert A. Yelle
The Structure of Visual Narrative, Neil Cohn
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BLOOMSBURY ADVANCES IN SEMIOTICS
Introduction
to Peircean
Visual Semiotics
TONY JAPPY
LONDON (cid:129) NEW DELHI (cid:129) NEW YORK (cid:129) SYDNEY
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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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www.bloomsbury.com
First published 2013
© Tony Jappy, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Tony Jappy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting
on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
E ISBN: 978-1-4411-5626-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in India
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In memoriam Gérard Deledalle, Ficino of the twentieth century

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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction i x
1 Signs and things 1
2 How shall a sign be called? 27
3 Peirce 53
4 Modes of representation 7 9
5 Medium matters 107
6 The mute poem 137
7 Rhetoric of the image 1 67
8 Conclusion 1 95
Notes 1 98
Bibliography 2 09
Index 215

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

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INTRODUCTION
Ours, we are frequently told, is a visual culture, a culture which has
witnessed enormous growth in the devising and deployment of vision-based
technology; a culture in which, increasingly, information is deserting the
traditional print media and is coming more and more to be framed in screens
of various sorts. It is at the same time a culture fraught with anxieties over
the passage from analogue to digital imaging technology which, it has been
claimed, is threatening to transform our everyday reality into a fl ood of
simulations, 1 while the CCTV camera impinges on and violates our privacy
and civil liberties. It is a culture, fi nally, in which ancient suspicions of
analogy, reality and the image are fostered and reinforced by a very modern
theory of the sign. 2
It is almost a paradox, then, that although the visual embodiment of this
culture is all around us, entrenched, as it were, in our communal experience,
we seem unable to assimilate it without careful thought and instruction,
and a quick search through the online bookstores nets literally hundreds
of more or less academically oriented studies in theory and methodology –
textbooks, guides, anthologies, surveys, readers – devoted to the complex
interplay of vision, images and culture. Now the interesting feature of
this twenty-fi rst-century abundance is that the theoretical bases of these
texts are to be found in two theories of the sign which were developed
contemporaneously at the beginning of the last century. And they are
entirely incompatible.
The zoologists and the hunters
Writing in 1981, the literary critic Jonathan Culler offered the following
perception of the two major contemporary semiotic research activities
associated with Peirce’s American ‘semeiotic’, 3 on the one hand, and with
the European semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure, on the other:
Semiotics, which defi nes itself as the science of signs, posits a zoological
pursuit: the semiotician wants to discover what are the species of signs,
how they differ from one another, how they function in their native
habitat, how they interact with other species. Confronted with the
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