Iconicity : essays on the nature of culture : Festschrift for Thomas A. Sebeok on his 65th birthday [1 ed.] 9783923721849, 3923721846

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ICONICITY Essays on the Nature of Culture Festschrift for

Thomas A. Sebeok on his 65 th birthday edited by

Paul Bouissac Michael Herzfeld Roland Posner

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CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek Iconicity : essays on the nature of culture ; Festschr. for Thomas A. Sebeok on his 65th birthday / ed. by Paul Bouissac...-Tubingen : Stauffenburg-Verlag, 1986. (Problems in semiotics ; Bd. 4) ISBN 3-923721-84-6 NE: Bouissac, Paul [Hrsg.]; Sebeok, Thomas A.: Festschrift; Probleme der Semiotik

© 1986 • Stauffenburg Verlag Brigitte Narr GmbH, Postfach 2567, D 7400 Tubingen Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Nachdruck oder Vervielfaltigung, auch auszugsweise, in alien Formen wie Mikrofilm, Xerographie, Mikrofiche, Mikrocard, Offset verboten. Satz und Druck: Laupp&Gobel, Kilchberg Buchbinderei: Braun + Lamparter, Reutlingen Printed in Germany ISBN 3-923721-84-6

Contents Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, Roland Posner Editors' Presentation .........................................................

IX

Tabula Gratulatoria..................................................

XI

Claude Levi-Strauss Avant-Propos.....................................................................

1

Section A: Theoretical Issues Part I: The Notion of Iconicity: Philosophical and Historical Per­ spectives Jerzy Pelc Iconicity. Iconic Signs or Iconic Uses of Signs?

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7

Alain Rey Mimesis, Poetique et Iconisme. Pour une relecture d’Aristote ....

17

John Deely Idolum. Archeology and Ontology of the Iconic Sign......................

29

Joseph Ransdell On Peirce’s Conception of the Iconic Sign.........................................

51

Kenneth Laine Ketner Semiotic is an Observational Science. See for yourself: Developing Skills with Part of Peirce’s Beta Existential Graphs..........................

75

Ivo OSOLSOBfe Two Extremes of Iconicity..................................................................

95

Part II: Iconicity: Philogeny and Ontogeny. The Empirical Paradigm Thure von UexkOll From Index to Icon. A Semiotic Attempt at Interpreting Piaget’s Developmental Theory......................................................................

119

Martin Krampen The Development of Children’s Drawings as a Phase in the On­ togeny of Iconicity ...............................................................................

141

Paul Bouissac Iconicity and Pertinence......................................................................

193 V

Part III: Reflections and Speculations: The Challenge of the Icon Umberto Eco Mirrors .............................................................................................

215

Eugen Baer The Unconscious Icon. Topology and Tropology............................

239

Anthony Wilden Ideology and the Icon: Oscillation Contradiction and Paradox: An Essay in Context Theory....................................................................

251

Section B: The Icon in Culture Part IV: Iconicity in Language and Literature Roland Posner Iconicity in Syntax: The Natural Order of Attributes

305

ITAMAR EVEN-ZOHAR

Depletion and Shift. The Process of De-Iconization

339

Pierre Maranda De-Textualization, Semiotics, and Hermeneutics .

353

Part V: Icons in Social Life Eric Schwimmer Icons of Identity..............................................

359

Vilmos Voigt Early Forms of Iconicity in Ethnic and Folk Art

385

Michael Herzfeld On Some Rhetorical Uses of Iconicity in Cultural Ideologies ....

401

Dean MacCannell Sights and Spectacles

421

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Part VI: Bodily Icons Adam Kendon Iconicity in Warlpiri Sign Language ....

437

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Monica Rector Emblems in Brazilian Culture...................

447

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Pierre Maranda Physiosemiotics. The Iconicity of Blinking .

463

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Fernando Poyatos Nonverbal Categories as Personal and Sociocultural Identifiers. A Model for Social Interaction Research .........................................

469

Jean Umiker-Sebeok Growing Signs. From Firstness to Thirdness in Life and Art.............

527

Appendix: Thomas A. Sebeok A Bibliography of his Writings 1942-1985

575

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Index of Names .

623

Biographical Notes

631

VII

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Editors’ Presentation The project of presenting Thomas A. Sebeok with a Festschrift volume for his sixty-fifth birthday was first discussed in September 1979 in Berlin, when a few of his friends, including Paul Bouissac, Itamar Even-Zohar, Martin Krampen, and Roland Posner, had an informal meeting during the International Workshop on “The Systematics, History, and Terminology of Semiotics”. The project immediately met with enthusiasm and it was decided that, rather than aiming at a disparate collection of short and mostly unrelated articles, a problem common to many Festschriften, the book should have a focus, preferably one that was directly relevant to Sebeok’s contributions to the field of semiotics. After some hesitation, caused by the vast range of topics that Sebeok had dealt with at this point of his career, it was decided that the book’s theme would be “Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Cul­ ture”. A tentative list of potential contributors included scholars whose careers and thinking had been significantly influenced by Sebeok and whose research was considered relevant to the projected focus. At a later stage of the project, Professors Thure von Uexkiill and Claude LeviStrauss agreed to make contributions to this volume as a sign of their profound esteem for Sebeok’s intellectual distinction, academic dedica­ tion, and scientific achievements. With the usual delays in such a venture, the manuscript grew to its present dimensions under the joint editorship of Paul Bouissac and Roland Posner who, in 1982, invited Michael Herzfeld to join the editorial team. Iconicity was the topic of the opening address Thomas A. Sebeok gave at the Charles Sanders Peirce Symposium on “Semiotics and the Arts” with which Johns Hopkins University celebrated its 100th anniversary in Sep­ tember 1975. In this influential paper, Sebeok deals with the age-old de­ bate about the relation between signs and what they are signs of, and he relates the approaches taken by Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics as well as by Renaissance, British Empiricist and German Idealist philosophy to central issues in modern mathematics and logic, psychology, and biology. The concept of the icon has been discussed under very different headings in an enormous range of historical and systematic contexts: “mimesis” in litera­ ture and the arts; “similarity” in psychology and the sciences; “resembl­ ance” in biology and ethology; “identity” in the social sciences; “model­ ling” in the technological disciplines; and “likeness” in everyday discourse. The present volume is an attempt to overcome the academic compartmentalization of the semiotic disciplines by including all these aspects of iconicity in a common framework. In it, time-honored semiotic doctrines are not passed on in their petrified form but are discussed in the light of the IX

results of modem empirical research. The sign processes studied in each of the humanities and social sciences are not taken as independent entities but are investigated in comparison and in opposition to those studied by the other humanities. The sign phenomena of human culture are not seen in isolation from those of animal culture but are systematically compared and contrasted with them in the same overarching semiotic frame of reference. As the debates of the last two decades have shown, the precise characteri­ zation of the various iconic relations between the sign and what it stands for still is an open theoretical problem. Section A of this volume presents a continuation of these debates. In Part I the various possible definitions of iconicity are discussed in their historical and systematic contexts. Part II analyzes the ways in which the empirical paradigm can contribute to the clarification of iconic sign relations; observational and experimental studies in the ontogeny of sign behavior and in the phylogeny of perception are the points of departure for the argument. In Part III evidence from less rigidly controlled cultural experience is taken into account as a basis for reflection on the nature of iconic sign relations. The contributions in Section B all focus on iconic signs in special areas of cultural life. Although language is commonly regarded as a non-iconic sign system, there is ample evidence that grammatical rules have an iconic basis and that even those verbal phrases that sound most arbitrary can have iconic uses; Part IV analyzes these two aspects of language and literature on the levels of word and phrase meaning (and its depletion) and of utterance structure (and its detextualization). Part V investigates the iconic founda­ tions of social activity and experience, and describes the modelling of natural phenomena, historical events and monuments, and everyday in­ teraction as icons of personal and group identity and of social structure. In Part VI a central area of non-verbal social behavior is singled out to allow for a more detailed study of the mechanisms of iconic meaning production; human body movements and postures are analyzed on the basis of research done in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and the United States, and a ramified typology of their functions in social interaction is given. The Section closes with an analysis of products of the Western advertisement industry that shows how the culture-dependent appearance of the body in its develop­ ment from infancy to old age can be used iconically to induce a specific social attitude towards each stage of life. This introduction would not be complete if it did not mention the late Harley C. Shands, Director of Psychiatry in St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center, who had wished to join in honoring Thomas A. Sebeok with an interpretation of “The Modern Self within the Dialectic of Icon and Sym­ bol”, but who died before he could finish his contribution. On behalf of all the contributors and the many other friends and admir­ ers of Thomas A. Sebeok, we offer this volume with gratitude, affection, and respect. Paul Bouissac

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Michael Herzfeld

Roland Posner

Tabula Gratulatoria Myrdene Anderson, West Lafayette Gian Franco Arlandi, Como Philip M. Arnold, Bartlesville Eugen Baer, Geneva Naomi S. Baron, Providence Simon P. X. Battestini, Washington Richard Bauman, Austin Thomas Bautz, Basel Helene Blais. Lasalle (Quebec) Lisa Block de Behar, Montevideo Paul Bouissac, Toronto Luis Perez Botero, Saskatoon Gerard J. van den Broek, Leiden Gian Paolo Caprettini, Torino T. Craig Christy, Los Angeles Vincent M. Colapietro, Winona Rebecca Comay, Toronto Nicolaos Cosmas, Bucharest Donald J. Cunningham, Bloomington David K. Danow, Columbia John Davies, Bundoora Gyula D£csy, Bloomington John Deely, Bloomington Eleanor Donnelly, Indianapolis Franz Dotter, Klagenfurt Umberto Eco, Milano Susumu Emoto, Tokyo Leopold-K. Engels, Leuven Itamar Even-Zohar, Tel Aviv Sergio Finzi, Milano Patricia Forner, San Francisco Marco Frascari, Philadelphia Margaret Freeman, Old Westbury Kunio Fukushima, Tokyo Michael J. Giordano, Detroit Helmut Gipper, Munster Cristina Gonzalez, West Lafayette Michel Grimaud, Wellesley Ioan Gutia, Roma Albert W. Halsall, Ottawa Haimo Leopold Handl, Wien Michael Herzfeld, Bloomington Wendy B. Holmes, Kingston James M. Holquist, Bloomington Silja Ihkaheimonen-Lindgren, Toronto

J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN, Odense Roger and Terri Joseph, Santa Ana Hartwig KalverkAmper, Freiburg Kenji Kanno, Koofu, Japan Adam Kendon, New London Kenneth Laine Ketner, Lubbock Christian J. W. Kloesel, Indianapolis Silvia Koch, Osnabriick Walter A. Koch, Bochum Tadeusz Kowzan, Caen Martin Krampen, Ulm Ben Kroup, Waterford Felicia E. Kruse, University Park, Pennsylvania Tim-hung KU, Taipei, Taiwan A.-PH. and Karin B. Lagopoulos, Thessaloniki Richard L. Lanigan, Carbondale Svend Erik Larsen, Odense Claude Levi-Strauss, Paris Charlotte Linde, Palo Alto Shelagh Lindsey, Vancouver Dean MacCannell, Davis Juliet Flower MacCannell, Irvine Pierre Maranda, Quebec William C. McCormack, Calgary Edward John McMahon, Fort Worth JACOB Mey, Odense Rune G. Mono, Taby John P. Muller, Stockbridge Klaus Oehler, Hamburg Aatos Ojala, Jyvaskyla LUZIAN Okon, Bienne Ivo Osolsb£, Brno Pino Paioni, Urbino Leo Pap, New Paltz Helmut Pape, Montjoi Richard J. Parmentier, Northampton Charls Pearson. Atlanta Jerzy Pelc, Warsaw Edgar C. Polom£, Austin Roland Posner, Berlin Fernando POYATOS, New Brunswick Andrea Preusche, Frankfurt Piero Raffa, Garlasco Joseph Ransdell, Lubbock XI

IRMENGARD RAUCH CARR, Berkeley Monica Rector, Rio de Janeiro Claudia Reeder, Bryn Mawr Henry H. H. Remak, Bloomington Alain Rey, Paris Robert Rogers, SUNY/Buffalo Anthony F. Russell, Dubuque Eric Schwimmer, Quebec CESARE SEGRE, Pavia Jaspal Singh, Chandigarh Peter van Stapele, Leyden Beverly Stoeltje, Austin H£l£ne et Roger Thibeaux, GrandMere Chizuko Ueno, Kyoto THURE VON UEXKULL, Freiburg Jean Umiker-Sebeok, Bloomington Stephen M. Verba, Cleveland William D. Virtue, Joliet Vilmos Voigt, Budapest Karl-Georg Waldinger, Wuppertal W. C. Watt, Irvine Linda R. Waugh, Ithaca William Widdowson, Cincinnati Anthony Wilden, Burnaby Brooke Williams, Santa Barbara George M. Wilson, Bloomington Gloria Withalm, Wien Gerd Wolandt, Aachen Shea Zellweger, Alliance Yoriko Yamada-Bochynek, Bochum

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Archabbey Library, St. Meinrad College, St. Meinrad Birmingham University Library, England Bishop’s University Library, Lennoxville Centre de Recherches Archdologiques, Paris Fitzgerald Library, St. Mary’s College, Winona Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton Institut fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Universitat Munster Institut fiir Linguistik, Abt. Germanistik, Universitat Stuttgart Institut fiir Philosophic, Universitat Inns­ bruck Institut fiir Slawistik, Universitat Salzburg Institut fiir Sprachwissenschaft, Univer­ sitat Wien Prima Cattedra di Glottologie, Universita “La Sapienza", Roma Seminar fur bildende Kunst und ihre Didaktik, Universitat Koln Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa The Royal Library, Copenhagen University Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Brescia University of London Library, England Wahlert Memorial Library, Loras Col­ lege, Dubuque

Avant-Propos Claude L6vi-Strauss, Paris

Je connaissais un peu Tom Sebeok, jeune specialiste des langues finnoougriennes, qui, vers 1942-1943 a New York, frequenta pour un temps l’Ecole libre des hautes etudes. Mais c’est en 1952, a l’Universit6 d’lndiana, lors de la Conference des anthropologues et des linguistes (dont il fut d'ailleurs le maitre d’oeuvre), que je le vis pour la premiere fois installe dans le role qu’il allait desormais remplir avec eclat: celui d’explorateur et de pionnier, defricheur des territories herisses d’obstacles qui genaient la communication entre nos disciplines. Cette deuxieme rencontre, prelude a beaucoup d’autres, reste liee dans ma memoire a un souvenir tres futile. On me permettra pourtant de l’evoquer ici, car il a, a mes yeux, valeur de symbole, et rien ne peut etre mieux a sa place qu’un symbole, en tete d’un volume d’hommages rendus & un maitre qui, dans toute son oeuvre, n’a cesse de decrire et d’analyser la pensee symbolique sous ses multiples aspects. A Bloomington, l’ete de 1952 fut torride. Fuyant la chaleur etouffante des ‘dormitories’ ou nous logions, de nombreux participants preferaient deviser sous les fenetres de nos chambres jusqu’aux petites heures du matin. J’ai moi-meme toujours eu besoin de sommeil; incapable de fermer l’oeil tant ces conversations etaient bruyantes, je demandai a Sebeok qu’on priat les discoureurs de tenir leurs assises un peu plus loin. Il parut fort 6mu de cette requete innocente, et m’objecta qu’il ne pouvait attenter a la liberte d’autrui. Apres maintes tergiversations, il resolut le probleme en me faisant demenager a l’autre bout du campus. Considere retrospectivement, l’incident eclaire d’un jour rev61ateur la personnalite de Sebeok. Deux droits legitimes etaient en cause; mais, bien evidemment, rechange des idees et la trepidation intellectuelle qui - en grande partie grace a lui - regna tout au long de cette semaine memorable, au jugement de Sebeok, pesaient plus lourd dans la balance que le desir de repos. Apres tout, on n’etait pas la pour dormir, mais pour parler. Sans conceder a Sebeok cette primaute absolue due au travail de reflex­ ion et d’expression, sans y voir une constante de son temperament et de sa vie, comment concevrait-on qu’en trente et quelques annees il ait pu pro­ duce une oeuvre bouillonnante, publie des centaines de livres et d’articles, inspire et anim6 des entreprises collectives dont d’autres que lui se fussent trouve encombres pendant une bonne partie de leur existence? 1

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Ces r^sultats ne s’expliqueraient pas non plus si, k leur origine, on ne discernait un grand dessein, un maitre plan d6ja en germe dans Fidee d’ou sortit la conference de 1952, et qui se developpe, s’amplifie et s’epanouit dans son oeuvre. Une de ces intuitions revelatrices comme, au cours de l’histoire, quelques savants seulement en eurent le profit, lui devoila la presence d’un immense domaine aux confins de la linguistique, de Fanthropologie et de la biologie: non pas inconnu, certes, mais qui, depuis des si&cles, etait reste a Fabandon, livr6 a la confusion et au desordre. Ce domaine auquel, des 1963, Sebeok allait donner le nom de zoosemiotique aujourd’hui accept6 par tous, ne se reduit pas, comme le mot pourrait le faire croire, k la communication animale. II englobe tous les sous-systemes de communication presents aussi bien chez Fhomme que dans les diverses families animales (peut-etre, a la lumiere de travaux r6cents, dira-t-on un jour aussi veg6tales?). En ce sens, il constitue le point d’intersection ou, plus exactement, la plage de recouvrement ou nature et culture se melent, et ou viennent se confondre leurs eaux. Sans le travail de prospection et d’analyse entrepris par Sebeok, nous serions incapables de mesurer F6tendue du domaine ainsi ouvert a l’etude scientifique, d’en apprecier la richesse et la variete. Chez Fhomme, il comprend toute la gamme des messages non verbaux, depuis les formes de communication spontan6es et qu’on pourrait croire instinctives - bien qu’en fait, deja model6es par chaque culture - telle Fexpression des emo­ tions, jusqu’aux langages gestuels et, a un plus haut degre de complexity, ces modes de communication non verbaux que constituent la danse, les arts plastiques et la musique (par Fintermediaire de laquelle, bouclant le cycle, on rejoint peut-etre la nature, s’il est vrai - probleme aussi aborde par Sebeok - que la musique est un mode de communication commun aux hommes et aux oiseaux). Chez Fanimal, le domaine comprend tous les messages a fonctions inter- ou intra-specifiques, de nature gestuelle, visuelle, auditive, olfactive, enfin chimique; ce qui, fermant une autre boucle, renvoie k la communication cellulaire consid£ree comme le mode de com­ munication universel, commun a tous les etres vivants. Progressant simultanement sur ces deux axes, s’elargissant d’oeuvre en oeuvre pour integrer des connaissances nouvelles, cette recherche conduit a deux demonstrations. En premier lieu, la semiotique - science qui donne son nom k la revue internationale fondee et dirigee par Sebeok - ne derive pas de la linguistique, comme le croyait encore Saussure. Le langage articule constitue seulement la modalite la plus complexe, ou, si Fon peut dire, la pointe aceree d’un dispositif multiforme ancre par le code genetique au trefonds de la matidre vivante, et grace auquel s’etablit la communi­ cation dans toutes les especes animales, a tous les niveaux de Factivite humaine, et a tous les etages de la vie. Demarche inverse, mais en fait compl6mentaire de la pr6c6dente: Sebeok demontre la frivolity des pretendues experiences, repet6es au cours de Fhistoire, par le moyen desquelles on a voulu preter a des sujets animaux des faculty humaines, comme si des formes rudimentaires de 2

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communication, dont Sebeok lui-meme a puissamment contribue a dresser 1’inventaire et a faire la theorie, egalaient une pensee symbolique de plein exercice, laquelle demeure un privilege de notre espece. Demonstration salutaire, tant ont la vie dure de tres vieilles illusions, aujourd’hui renaissantes chez ceux qui attribuent une capacite linguistique aux chimpanzes et aux gorilles ... Comme Sebeok Pecrivait en 1976: “The lesson Hans tap­ ped out as his legacy for science has not been mastered even to-day.” Et Pouvrage collectif qu’il a congu et publie en 1980 avec la collaboration de Jean Umiker Sebeok - dont le nom apparait de plus en plus souvent uni au sien dans ce genre d’entreprise - sous le titre plaisamment polysemique: ‘Speaking of Apes', constitue a cet egard une mise au point qu’on peut considerer decisive. Un aussi formidable programme serait impossible a remplir, si Sebeok ne possedait au plus haut point ce que Malebranche appelait “Pesprit de polymathie”. Dans tout le secteur des sciences de l’homme, personne, sans doute, ne peut se targuer de connaissances si vastes et d’une riche diversite. A lire les ouvrages de Sebeok, on est confondu par sa familiarite avec les langues et les cultures du monde, par Paisance avec laquelle il se meut a travers les travaux des psychologues, des specialistes de neuro-physiologie cerebrale, de biologie cellulaire, ou ceux des ethologues portant sur des centaines d’especes zoologiques allant des organismes unicellulaires aux mammiferes superieurs, en passant par les insectes, les poissons et les oiseaux. Ce savoir plus qu’encyclopedique se mesure aussi aux milliers de noms d’auteurs, de langues, de peuples et d’especes composant les index des ouvrages ecrits ou diriges par lui, et & leurs 6normes bibliographies. J'ai dit que les recherches de Sebeok avancent simultanement sur deux fronts en ouvrant toujours plus grand Peventail. Son erudition est, elle aussi, a double face. Prompte a exploiter les dernieres decouvertes, a utiliser ou a discuter les theories les plus r6centes, elle se tient constamment a Pecoute de Pavant-garde. Mais Sebeok seduit aussi par ce que j’appelerais une curiosite d’antiquaire, en donnant son sens le plus releve au terme. II possede un don incomparable pour decouvrir et exhumer de vieux ouvrages, en tirer des observations rares ou piquantes qu’il sauve de l’oubli et enchasse dans son texte comme autant de gemmes, pour mieux faire ressortir leur pertinence, leur originalite et leur fraicheur. A ses lecteurs, a ses collegues, a ses amis et a ses admirateurs, Sebeok apparait ainsi comme la vivante image d’un de ces esprits puissants et singuliers que compterent la Renaissance et le XVIHe siecle. Dans un tout autre etat de la science et sur des sujets differents, ils surent, comme luimeme aujourd’hui, ressusciter des mondes perdus ou oublies, maitriser des secteurs entiers du savoir, jeter les bases et dresser le programme de re­ cherches qui, des siecles apr6s eux, guident toujours leurs successeurs. Nul doute qu’a leur exemple, l’oeuvre de Sebeok continuera pour longtemps a porter des fruits.

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ICONICITY AND PERTINENCE Paul Bouissac, Toronto

It seems that from its very beginnings semiotic reflection has persistently addressed the problem of iconicity; first, in a direct manner, through the concept of mimesis, and secondly, in an implicit way, through the philosophical debate concerning conventional signs, inasmuch as concepts such as “conventionally” or “arbitrariness” are primarily defined by a lack of mimesis. Platonic thought, mainly in the Cratylus, gravitates around the issue of iconicity, and Aristotle confronts the same problem, not only in his Poetics, but also in the Politics (Rey, see pages 17-27). Since then, the concept of iconic signs has permeated semiotic literature both in its most abstract elaborations and its most pragmatic endeavours. With C.S. Peirce, the philosophical issue concerning the relationship of iconic signs with other signs reached a high level of systematic formulation (Savan, 1976:23); iconicity, first called likeness in the earlier Peirce writings, becomes a particular case of semiosis and, as such, is a part of a complex set of relations. It is dealt with in numerous places, but always in the context of sign taxonomies; however, confronted by the confusing meanderings of thought constantly in the making, superficial or casual readers have tended to isolate from its context the trichotomy formed by index, icon and symbol, undoubtedly because of its appeal to common sense, or because of its relative conformity to tradition, once it is cut off from its complex philosophical background, as Peircean specialists have often pointed out (e.g., Morier, 1980, 1982). Thus, a “Peircean” concept of “iconic sign” has been presented in a simple-minded manner which does not do justice to Peirce’s theoretical sophistication, and carries with it its load of unsolved problems1 (e. g., Greimas and Courtis, 1982:147). On the Saussurean side, the crucial opposition that is posited between motivated and arbitrary signs always generates renewed controversies concerning the criteria of “motivation”, thus perpetuating this commonplace of semiotic thought. A review of the current literature on the subject of iconicity seems to indicate that a majority of contemporary semioticians tend to consider 1 This is particularly true of the references to Peirce found in the French semiotic literature, as there does not exist any comprehensive study accurately presenting his system of thought, and as the translations available are fragmentary and often ques­ tionable. For a sound assessment of the situation see Bouchard (1980). 193

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iconic signs as more “simple”, “primitive” or “elementary” than any other kinds, and most methodological enterprises take for granted trivial, or trivialized, definitions of such signs that are used as classificatory princi­ ples2. The fact that these signs are supposed to exhibit a “natural” relationship of resemblance with their referents, or that they have common properties with the object they stand for, makes them appear unproblematic. Moreover, although lip service is usually paid to their generality across the range of the human senses, ad hoc examples are constantly taken from the visual field, in which most human beings feel particularly at ease. There is an implicit naive argument that goes as follows: What is questioned here? Do we not see that the photograph resembles the person or that the various arrangement of lines painted on a restroom door “reproduces” the outline of a dressed-up male and, consequently, mean men as opposed to women? Actually it is this self-evident character itself, this apparent transparency of the iconic signs, paradoxically combined with a patent lack of satisfactory definition, that makes iconicity one of the most frustrating problems in semiotics. Considering that semiotics itself may have arisen from the puzzle­ ment caused by the fact that not all signs are iconic, it could be expected that most problems in theoretical semiotics would take for granted that the intuitive knowledge of what makes an iconic sign, is correct. So-called applied semiotics sometimes consists in only little more than identifying such “iconic signs” in various cultural phenomena. However, as U.Eco pointed out in one of his many attempts at clarifying the issue (1972:114-185), the concept of iconicity remains very vague and ill-de­ fined. This state of affairs was cogently expressed by Sebeok in his Con­ tribution to the Doctrine of Signs (1976): The notion of the icon - that is ultimately related to the platonic process of mimesis which Aristotle then broadened from a chiefly visual representation to embrace all cognitive and epistemological experiences - has been subjected to much analysis in its several . varieties and manifestations, yet some seemingly untractable theoretical question re­ mains (1976: 128). Among those difficulties, Sebeok emphasizes two that are of utmost im­ portance: symmetry and regression. The former casts a doubt on the un­ idirectionality of the likeness by asking, “what resembles what?”; the latter raises the thorny issue of the definition of the concept of likeness, that nothing can prevent from dissolving into a vast analogical network accord­ ing to which everything resembles everything else. This paper will attempt to outline a possible answer to these questions by approaching the problem from a different angle, and by disentangling the

2 This is notably the case in the abundant literature concerning the semiotic of the theatre and of the cinema, or more generally in symbolic anthropology. 194

iconicity issue from the inconclusive philosophical debate that has obvious­ ly led to a theoretical dead end3. I Before trying a new path, a brief review of some recent works dealing with the general issue of iconic signs and resemblance, or similarity, will sub­ stantiate this last remark. About a decade ago, R. Lindekens had already raised some important problems in his “Elements pour une theories generate des objets iconises” (1971). This essay, mainly concerned with photographic images, introduces the idea that a code, i. e. a conventional law, has to be taken into consideration, if we want to account for iconic signs. This amounts to a sort of Copernican revolution in the small world of semiotic taxonomies, inasmuch as it attacks the secure feeling that at least some signs are, so to speak, solidly related to their referent or their object, that the immediacy of the relations forms a safe starting point for the phenomenon of semiosis, and that, whatever abstract calculus has to be produced in order to describe various languages, culture remains firmly enclosed in nature, thanks to those signs which are signs by virtue of resemblance, i. e. a certain degree of identity that bridges nature and cul­ ture4. About the same time, a brief essay by M. Wallis, “On iconic signs”, written in 1968 and first published in Greimas (1973), also insists on the conventionality that governs the use of iconie signs; their polyvalence de­ pends on the quantity of information they contain. Wallis distinguishes two categories of iconic signs: the schemata and the pleromata, the latter con­ taining more information than the former, an interesting distinction that can be made operational by the concept of scale of iconicity proposed by 3 This article is part of a systematic attempt at criticizing the tendency of contemporary semiotics to develop a discourse of its own, based upon implicit assumptions, and disconnected from the empirical sciences. See Bouissac (1981, 1983). 4 “C’est dire qu’avant meme de parler l’image - entendez: de faire un discours, plus ou moins explicite, plus ou moins coherent, sur elle - et de la rendre ainsi faussement homologue au reel ptesente, d’identifier faussement le ddcoupage iconique du rdel au decoupage linguistico-notionel (meme imageant), il est probable qu’au terme d’un decodage - dont la combinatoire nous est encore presque totalement inconnue - dans Iequel le lecteur naif est, k son insu, soumis par le percept immediat qu’il en a, k la ‘langue’ proprement iconique, il aboutit, dans son for interieur, a une ‘parole’ strictement iconique, elle aussi - une ‘parole’ proprement incommunicable et dont nous croyons, precisement, qu’elle n’affleure qu’au niveau d’axes sdmantiques, dans un discours linguistico-notionel, concert^ par l’analyste, qui enregistre les effets de sens, qui ne trouveraient a s’exprimer ailleurs qu’au niveau des codes secondaires de Pirnage, dont la fonction sociale est telle, qu’y domine toujours une ‘langue’ - la ‘langue’ de la globalite non iconique de 1’image elle-meme. Loin d’etre universel, dans sa sp6cificit6, le langage de l’image nous semble au contraire le catalyseur incomparable des idiolectes personnels et sociaux. Mais de telles certitudes ont besoins de beaucoup de preuves; nous n’en disposons pas, h61as.” (Lindekens, 1971, p. 202)

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A. Moles (1971:215). Wallis’s point is that the schemata are subject to a higher degree of conventionality than the pleromata, thus shattering the feeling of necessity and univocity that the concept of iconism usually con­ veys. In his most recent article on the topic, U. Eco (1978) takes the issue a step further, and develops a systematic and radical criticism of the very notion of iconic sign. This important essay, “Pour une reformulation du concept de signe iconique”, is based on chapter III of his earlier A Theory of Semiotics (1976). It is part of a more general questioning of the notion of sign, which he wants to replace with the notion of sign function. His ar­ gumentation is primarily rooted in Hjelmslev’s theory, which seems to be uncritically taken for granted, and accessorily relies on some aspects of Peirce’s system. Within the limits set by the purpose and the inspiration, it is a remarkable synthesis that, in a way, spells out the bankruptcy of the “iconic corporation” as a safe epistemological value. Because of his com­ mitment to the principle that “everything can be understood as a sign if and only if there exists a convention that allows it to stand for something else”, he undertakes to show the fragility of the various definitions of iconism based on similarity, the sharing of some properties, analogy and motiva­ tion, and that iconic signs are, in some respect, dependent upon cultural convention. As he puts it: “One could thus assume that so-called iconic signs are culturally coded without necessarily implying that they are arbit­ rarily correlated to their content and that their expression is discretely analysable” (1976:192). By showing that the borderlines set by sign tax­ onomists are blurred and fuzzy, and do not stand the test of counterexam­ ples, he contends that the concept of resemblance has no criterial value. For him therefore, the category of iconism is useless: “it is not a single phenomenon, nor indeed a uniquely semiotic one”; it tends to confuse, in a vague all-purpose category, many instances of semiosis that a theory of semiotics should, on the contrary, distinguish from one another, something that Eco attempts to do with his usual scholarly brilliance. The ingenuity one would almost be tempted to say the industriousness - of this develop­ ment should not mask the fact that the evidence on which his thesis rests is based on intuition, i. e. inner individual evidence, reasoning, and illustra­ tive fictitious examples brought in from time to time in order to give an empirical coloration to the taxonomy he proposes. However, in the last section, he, as most sign taxonomists do at one point or another, states with great honesty that any given sign instance can belong at the same time to several of the categories he has set forth. It appears that all semioticians who have seriously reflected upon the concept of “iconic sign” during this last decade have come to the same conclusion, namely that “resemblance”, or “common properties”, cannot form, as such, a criterial basis for a categorization of signs. It is interesting to note that their arguments are usually identical at least to some of those developed by Nelson Goodman in a brief essay entitled “Seven Strictures on Similarity” (1972), in which he summarizes the reasons for which he 196

\t considers the concept of similarity often called upon by philosophers in order to solve some problems “a pretender, an impostor, a quack”. In this essay Goodman criticizes the explanatory power that philosophers usually grant to the concept of similarity, and shows in seven different kinds of examples that, under analysis, this concept tends “either to vanish entirely or to require for its explanation just what it purports to explain” (446). It is too relative, variable and culture-dependent for being of any value as a criterial concept. “Clear enough when closely confined by context and circumstance in ordinary discourse, it is hopelessly ambiguous when torn loose” (444); .. to say that two things are similar in having a specified property in common is to say nothing more than that they have that property in common. Similarity is not definitionally eliminated here; we have neither a definiens serving as an appropriate replacement for every occurrence of ‘is similar to’, nor a definitional schema that will provide an appropriate replacement for each occurr­ ence. Rather we must search for the appropriate replacement in each case; and ‘is similar to' functions little more than as a blank to be filled (445)5. II The “seemingly untractable theoretical question” (Sebeok, 1976:128) con­ cerning the concept of iconicity could very well stem from the fact that the critical approaches which have so far been developed remained within an epistemological domain defined by a set of mistaken assumptions. It is contended in this paper that the problem arises from these assumptions, and that it is possible to reformulate a more acceptable concept of iconici­ ty, once some of these accepted views are discarded. In other words, the uneasiness felt by most of those who reflected upon “iconic signs” was misinterpreted as the result of a faulty local definition, whereas its source should have been looked for on the more general level of what was taken for granted as a starting point from which the questioning was developed. It is all too often forgotten that signs are not natural kinds, i. e. objects that can be described and classified, but models devised in order to account for observables. The concept of sign and, by the same token, the concepts of system of signs and signification, are abstract constructs built up by speculative thought as possible explanations for typical behaviours. The most commonly accepted description of this sort of behaviour is that some­ thing causes a change that is disproportionate in respect of its quantitative characteristics and has therefore to be endowed with a certain particular quality able to account for its effect. The trite formula that has been rehashed from generation to generation as the corner stone of semiotic reflection: Aliquid stat pro aliquo, may adequately define an exchange value, be it technical, economical or symbolical (in the sense that more than one such thing which is called a sign may produce the same effect like in translation for instance) but overlooks a crucial feature of the phenome-

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na observed. Moreover, because all observables construed as signs have necessarily involved perception, all semiotic speculations take for granted a theory of perception, sometimes explicitly, but most of the time implicit­ ly. It seems safe to assert that all semioticians have articulated their con­ cept of the “sign” as a model which is derived from their model of percep­ tion. The fact that most contemporary semioticians relate so easily to the so-called semiotic tradition, and perfunctorily celebrate, as a sort of ritual, the perspicacity of the Stoics, or other ancient fountainheads, indicates that their conception of perception is, if not identical, at least congruent with theirs. To cut the argument short, the point made in this paper is, that our knowledge of perceptual processes has dramatically evolved over the last decades, and that the observables from which the concept of sign was constructed have been so enriched and modified, that the concept of sign (naturally including the concept of iconic sign) has to be adjusted, possibly discarded, and that new models have to be constructed, in order to take account of new observables as they are introduced into scientific know­ ledge. This should be a relatively easy step to make providing that one realizes that the epistemological nature of the concept of sign is a hypotheti­ cal model. But those for whom the existing semiotic definitions and categories are unquestionable dogmas will undoubtedly try to make the present state of the scientific apprehension of reality fit their model, rather than the reverse. Three fallacies seem to be particularly responsible for the inconclusive­ ness of the critiques of the traditional “definitions” of iconicity. First, the assertion that there is some evidence of cultural relativism regarding para­ digmatic examples of similarity has led to the further uncautious assertion that similarity is a purely relative concept; therefore, what was considered as pertaining to biological universal, is transformed by a sleight of hand (i. e. a few strokes of the pen) into an instance of social convention. The notion of “arbitrariness” bears not only upon the selection of features, but also upon the ascription of a particular meaning to each particular set of selected features. Thus, the biological nature of those iconic signs which were supposed to be phylogenetically, and possibly ontogenetically, an­ terior to arbitrary signs, becomes dissolved into the realms of social con­ tracts, arbitrary convention, and self-generated motivations, and can henceforth be accounted for in terms of Historicism or Idealism. This fallacy derives from another one, which claims that there are de­ grees of iconicity, and that the signs which exhibit the greatest number of details are more iconic than the ones whose perceptual features are re­ duced to a minimum (e. g. a colour photograph is more iconic than a blackand-white photograph, and a photograph is more iconic than an ink draw­ ing); in Wallis’s terminology, pleromata are more iconic than schemata. This variability is indeed the ground on which relativism can develop, because, if iconic signs are classified according to a hierarchy that starts at the lower extremity of the scale, with a mere replication of the greatest number of perceptual features (e. g. wax museum figures) and can progress 198

from then on towards more abstracted representations such as graphs, it is easy to construe the successive choices that delete some informative ele­ ments, and emphasize some others, as an effect of cultural relativism. But those two related fallacies are grounded in a more general one which concerns the notion of perception itself, a notion that pervades a wide array of philosophical speculations. This notion surfaces now and then in all sorts of writings, in the form of remarks that are presented as being obvious: newborns are immersed in a perceptual chaos; our senses provide us with an infinite (undefinable) quantity of information; our perceptual channels pour indiscriminate sensations into us which we have to organize and sort out; primitive man is immersed in a world of sensations. It is taken for granted that “the mind” is confronted with a huge quantity of informa­ tion which is progressively and selectively ordered and purified. This underlying notion is rendered in Eco (1976), for instance, when he draws three circles representing the unidirectional movement from “mapping by abstraction” to “mapping by similitude”; the first circle contains several points (x, ... x5), and symbolizes a perceptual model; the second one contains only three points (“x,”, “x2”, “x3”), which are the result of map­ ping by abstraction and form the semantic model itself mapped by similitude into the third circle as “expression” (/X|/, /x2/, /xJ). The com­ ment clearly illustrates the notion of perception that is taken for granted:

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... given a perceptual model as a ‘dense’ representation of a given experience, assigning to the perceived object x the properties x,, x2, x3, x4... xn, that perceptual model gives rise 4o a semantic model which preserves only, let us say, three of the properties of the dense representation (248). A second diagram, also involving three circles, provides a full representa­ tion of the semiotic process. From stimuli to the semantic model, the successive steps are the same as in the previous diagram, exhibiting a loss, or a selection, of properties; then the arrows diverge: in one direction, the semantic model is arbitrarily coded into an “independent set of expressive units” (in Hjelmslev’s sense), in the other direction, the semantic model is transformed through a further selection of properties. The successive steps are labelled: (1) perception; (2) abstraction; (3) arbitrary coding; (4) similitude. The comment to the diagrams reads: Here (1) relevant elements are picked up from an unshaped perceptual field and or­ ganized in order to build a perception; (2) by means of abstractive procedures very similar to the rules that govern cases of stylization ... the percept is mapped onto a semantic representation, the latter being the cultural simplification of the former; (3) this semantic representation is either arbitrarily associated with a set of expressive devices, as in the case of systematically combinational elements and other kinds of replicas, or (4) mapped into a transformation according to conventional rules of similitude. These procedures explain every kind of sign production ... (252). Here Eco refers the reader to a table showing his typology of sign produc­ tion (218), and notes that the above diagram does not apply to any one of his categories, to which he, however, refers in the next paragraph. 199

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This powerful machinery, conceived as a sign functions generator, im­ plies a psychological model of perception, according to which “more” precedes “less”, and the selecting principles which determine these opera­ tions are governed by cultural constraints. The model of perceptual processes that underlies such notions of iconicity has its roots in various philosophical psychologies, i.e. models of the mind/body or man/world relations that were designed to fit particular metaphysical beliefs. For instance, the concept of abstraction used by Eco is a centerpiece of neo-thomism, inasmuch as it is supposed to dispose both of Anglo-Saxon empiricism and German Idealism. The question raised here is: can semiotic inquiry keep drawing its psychological inspiration from models that have now only little more than historical value? Should not an investigation of the kind of phenomena traditionally labelled “iconic signs” take into consideration contemporary research into visual percep­ tion? This paper will now attempt to focus on such research, and to point out the relevance of some recent discoveries for a theory of iconicity. There are, of course, some great risks to be taken by someone venturing from a mostly speculative field into highly specialized domains, in which whole teams of scientists are well accustomed to dealing with local and well-defined problems. Their arduous and patient efforts, spread over many years of meticulous experiments, often yield tentative or inconclu­ sive results. When some progress is achieved, they usually insist upon the limits of the achievement, emphaszing the vast field of what is still un­ known, inasmuch as each discovery triggers the emergence of a host of new questions. One should be careful, of course, not to idealize the other side of the fence. However, the “other side of the fence” does produce irrevers­ ible results, such as a theory of the genetic code that makes possible genetic manipulation, or correct predictions regarding the characteristics of a still unknown particle (e.g. particle W), or the location of a planet (e.g. Uranus). Indeed philosopher-semioticians all too often justify the vague­ ness and inconclusiveness of their speculations by pointing to the uncer­ tainties and gaps that exist in the natural sciences, while overlooking the many pieces of the puzzle that have already been put together. They also are inclined to “accuse” such an approach of being “reductionist”, a re­ proach that would make sense only if the realm of the natural sciences was less complex than these philosophers’ speculative constructions. This might have been the case centuries ago. However the extremely high level of complexity that has been revealed by a century of scientific research on an organ such as the brain, makes even the most sophisticated semiotic specu­ lations appear naive, simpleminded and maladaptive6.

6 This argument is addressed to semioticians who seem to believe that the brain is “only a physiological organ” that cannot fully account for the complexity of human thought; but those who entertain implicit or explicit dualistic convictions regarding human nature, will naturally remain unconcerned by this monistic approach. 200

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I III The psycho-physiology of vision forms one of the most productive fields of scientific inquiry in the second half of the XXth century. Many aspects of the theory of vision which had developed since Descartes and Berkeley have been questioned by recent unexpected discoveries. Naturally it is not claimed in this paper that present knowledge in this domain makes it possible to offer a completely new theory of iconic signs. However it seems possible to show that some of the assumptions underlying the generally accepted views on such signs, as well as the implicit theoretical models upon which some philosophical criticisms of these views are based, cannot be entertained any longer. Therefore, the much debated issue of iconic signs must be reassessed in the light of new evidence concerning percep­ tion, and more particularly, visual perception. Admittedly there are always serious risks involved in approaching specialized knowledge from the out­ side, at least as long as such knowledge does not form a stable epistemolog­ ical ground, but is instead a constant process, through which “scientific evidence” is permanently subjected to reinterpretation and reevaluation in view of the continuous possibility of new discoveries. Moreover, there exists a real danger of perceiving “scientific evidence” apprehended out­ side of its true context through the biases of preconceived ideas, and to construe data whose status in the scientific discourse may be of limited or even problematic significance as proofs of speculative assertions, by ex­ tracting tentative conclusions from their context and generalizing rules of restricted validity. A good example of this phenomenon is provided by the parasitic literature that proliferates around split-brain research. But in spite of the risks involved, it is obviously preferable to attempt to take into account updated scientific knowledge, rather than to indiscriminately take for granted some notions which have long been proved to be useless or even mistaken. This paper’s aim is limited to claiming that the following directions of research and some of their findings are relevant to a theory of iconicity, at least on a long-term basis, given the relative permissiveness that charac­ terizes current semiotic reflection. Indeed, rather than outlining a theory of iconicity based on a still wanting theory of vision, this paper attempts to show the necessity of formulating the problem of iconicity in novel terms, in view of the discoveries that have recently shattered long-held notions. One of the most dramatic break-throughs in the neuro-physiology of vision undoubtedly is the discovery, by D. H. Hubei and T. N. Wiesel, of the selectivity of the responses of particular cells in the visual cortex.

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Their first major discovery was that cortical visual cells are excited by bars, light or dark, or by single edges, and that each cell responds optimally to a particular orientation of the stimulus (Whitteridge, 1981). This was unexpected, and Hubei has recounted in his Nobel Prize lecture (1982) how this finding came about as a complete surprise in the late 50’s, 201

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thanks to the accidental projection on a cat’s retina of a sharp shadow, in the form of “a straight dark line on a light background”. The experiment was based on a technique using tungsten microelectrodes that were im­ planted in animals’s brains and which made it possible to record and com­ pare the firings of cells. Earlier experiments by Hubei had shown that many cells could be activated by moving spots on a screen; he had “found that some cells were very selective in that they responded to movement when a spot moved in one direction across the screen ... but not when it moved in the opposite direction” (1982:515). Moreover, it appeared that many cells could not be influenced at all. When, after his association with T. Wiesel, a method was found for recording “single cells for many hours with the eyes immobilized”, the first attempts consisted in projecting black dots upon a screen facing the retina and identifying the cortical cells that had the same receptive-field orientation. One day, when they were not obtaining the results they were anticipating in a particular cell, something quite unexpected occurred. As Hubei reported: We were inserting the glass slide with its black spot into the slot of the ophthalmoscope when suddenly over the audiometer the cell went off like a machine gun. After some fussing and fiddling we found out what was happening. The response had nothing to do with the black dot. As the glass slide was inserted its edge was casting onto the retina a faint but sharp shadow, a straight dark line on a light background. That was what the cell wanted, and it wanted it, moreover, in just one narrow range of orientations (1982:517). What made this discovery surprising was that although it was known that “the retinas mapped onto the visual cortex in a systematic way”, it seemed “inconceivable that the information would enter the cortex and leave it unmodified”. Further on, several cells were recorded exhibiting several different optimal orientations. Perhaps most remarkable was the precision of the spatial distribution of excitatory and inhibiting effects: not only did diffuse light produce no response ..., but any line oriented 90° to the optimal was also without effect, regardless of its position along the field ... (517). These “simple” cells were later distinguished from “complex” ones, which responded to optimally oriented lines regardless of their position in the receptive field. The selective receptivity was found to apply not only to orientations, but also to directions of movement, lengths of lines, colours, etc. For example, Many cat or monkey cells, perhaps 10 to 20 % in area 17, respond best to a line ... of limited length; when the line is prolonged in one direction or both, the response falls off (518); in the monkey, complex cells “may be not truly highly orientation selective but also fussy about wavelength, perhaps responding to red lines but not white” (518). However it should be noted that Hubei emphasized that “the exact way in which the properties of complex cells are built up” is not yet known (519). But the knowledge of the selectivity of cortical cells enables one to predict “how a cell will react to any given visual scene”. 202

Further experimentations showed that cells are organized in functional columns, each working like “a little machine that takes care of contours in a certain orientation in a certain part of the visual field” (522); with the concept of ‘‘hypercolumns” a new step was made toward a model of the visual cortex as a set of “modules” each “looking after” everything it is responsible for, “in a certain small part of the visual world”. These findings made it possible to investigate the postnatal development of the visual cortex and the influence of the environment on this develop­ ment. Various forms of experimental ocular deprivation yielded evidence concerning the existence of innate mechanisms and the assessment of “the relative importance of the genetic programme and the visual environment” (Wiesel, 1982:589). It was shown that some cells in the cat’s visual cortex develop normally without visual experience, suggesting that the selective sensitivity described above develops through innate mechanisms, at least to a certain extent (589); there is indeed, for each species studied, a critical period during which the system shows some degree of plasticity and de­ mands an environmental input for fully developing, or, in WieseFs words: Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development (591). In which respect can such discoveries be considered relevant for a theory of iconicity? First, it is relevant inasmuch as any advance in the understanding of perception is ipso facto relevant to the study of “objects” that are defined as being “similar to percepts”. Second, it enables one to formulate the problem in different terms, as it puts a definite constraint upon the conceptualization of feature selection in the production of iconic signs. If indeed, visual cortex cells exhibit discrete selectivity, the visual perception process deals at its most basic level with a finite, albeit very large, number of well-defined features. It thus can be hypothesized that more constraints are built in at further levels of brain organizations, as the next section of this paper will attempt to show; as a consequence, it is possible to conceive iconic signs not as free constructs made of features selected and abstracted from an indefinite stock of perceptual material, but, on the contrary, as genetically programmed selectors. But before going further in this hy­ pothesis, a word of caution should be voiced. The faint light that has been shed by Hubei and Wiesel’s discoveries on what is going on in a small sector of the “black box” should not be construed as a theory of percep­ tion. Their investigations bear upon the selective sensibility of individual cells to some feature of the environment, the architecture and functional organization of these cells, and their ontogenetic evolution. The appeal, and the limits, of their discoveries are summarized by Hubei in unambigu­ ous terms: Knowing how cortical cells respond to some visual stimuli and ignore others allows us to predict how a cell will react to any given visual scene. Most cortical cells respond poorly to diffuse light, so that when I gaze at a white object, say an egg, on a dark background I know that those cells in my area 17 whose receptive fields fall entirely within the bound203

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aries of the object will be unaffected. Only the fields that are cut by the borders of the egg will be influenced, and then only if the local orientation of a border is about the same as the orientation of the receptive field. Slightly changing the position of the egg without changing its orientation will produce a dramatic change in the population of activated simple cells, but a much smaller change in the activated complex cells. Orientation-specific simple or complex cells are specific for the direction of a short line segment. The cells are thus best not thought of as line detectors: they are no more line detectors than they are curve detectors. If our perception of a certain line or curve depends on simple or complex cells it presumably depends on a whole set of them, and how the information from such sets of cells is assembled at subsequent stages in the path to build up what we call percepts of lines or curves (if indeed anything like that happens at all) is still a complete mystery. (1982:519) The second set of research that will be mentioned here as potentially relevant to a better understanding of iconicity bears upon the perception of topological structures. As in the previous section, it points to the fact that the “visual machinery of the brain” seems to identify morphological characteristics through a selective sensitivity, that provides the discriminat­ ing process on the outset (rather than as the result of) a progressive sorting out of features, involving reductive operations effectuated on an initially compact perception. In an article published in Science, L. Chen (1982) reports three experiments on tachistoscopic perception of visual stimuli that may indicate that “the visual system is sensitive to global topological properties” and that “the extraction of glocal topological properties is a basic factor in perceptual organisation”. The topological properties con­ cerned in the first experiment are those which differentiate on the one hand full shapes, such as circles, triangles or squares, and on the other hand, connected shapes, such as rings. Subjects were presented with pairs of stimuli for a very short time (5-msec), and were asked to report whether the two stimuli were similar or different. Results tended to indicate that circles, triangles and squares were considered to be more similar than circles and rings. In view of these results, some of the configural superiority effects reported in the relevant literature (e. g. Weisstein and Harris, 1974; Schendel and Show, 1976; McClelland and Miller, 1979) “may be due to topological properties, such as connectedness or closedness. Indeed, con­ nectedness and closedness have been considered important structural com­ ponents of perceptual representation” (Chen, 699). The second and third experiments were inspired by other topological properties; the second one compared “the sensitivity of visual systems to a single line segment with that to a line segment that was a part of a con­ nected and simple closed figure” (699); and the third one tested the distinc­ tion made in topology between a line that is contained in a closed curve on a plane, and one that is not. According to Chen, the data in these three experiments can be explained in terms of “early detection of global to­ pological properties, defined in terms of the invariant properties under topological transformations” (700). These results, which seem to be incom­ patible with the computational account of perception, are consistent with Gibson’s views, quoted by Chen, that “The perceptual system simply ex204

i tracts the invariants from the flowing array; it resonates to the invariant structure or is attuned to it” (Gibson, 1979). This is not the place to bring up the controversies that have developed over the last two decades con­ cerning Gibson’s views on perception. It will suffice to recall that theoricians of perception can be broadly divided into two camps, those who hold the view that perception is the result of a psychological construction from a variety of elements (e. g. early European Associationism, R. Gregory’s perception theories, computational theories) and those who consider that a relatively immediate sensibility to some forms is at the core of the percep­ tual process (e. g. Gestalt theory, J. J. Gibson’s theory). Semioticians who have been exposed to the first brand of psychology (sometimes in their early school days) tend to insist on what they see as the cultural relativity of iconic signs; those who have been brought up in a gestaltist Zeitgeist tend to consider iconic signs as being based upon some sort of primal patterns that are of particular relevance to the organism considered. The former (e.g. Eco, 1978) dissolve the concept of iconic signs into an indefinite number of free elemental features that can be abstracted and combined, in principle, ad libitum (a view that is congruent with the cultural relativism which permeated early semiotic attempts to construe cultures as codes); the latter (e.g. Thom, 1980) attempt to build a theory of iconic signs upon mor­ phological constraints, “pregnant” patterns, or “higher order stimuli”, which are pertinent to the relation of an organism to its ecological milieu. As far as human culture is concerned, their approach is more congruent to the human ethology perspective than a cultural relativism. The title of this article, “Iconicity and pertinence”, indicates clearly enough that, in our opinion, there seems to be more supporting evidence for the latter view than for the former. Of course the concept of selectivity of neuronal cell response can he construed as evidence for both sides, in the absence of more data concerning the perceptual processes that deal with such local information. However the second set of experiments that was reported above may be considered as being consistent with the concept of selective response, which locates selection at a much earlier stage of the perceptual process than constructivist or computational theories do. The research that will be reported in the next section seems to bring further support to this view.

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I The empirical study of the relation between perception and behavior forms a rich domain of inquiry that seems particularly relevant to the understand­ ing of iconicity. However the type of relationship which it is referred to here is not the one known as “conditioned response”, but rather the phenomenon called by K. Lorenz and his followers “innate releasing mechanism”, i.e. the fact that some specific perceptual patterns trigger adaptive behaviors in animals. The discovery, through deprivation experi­ ments, that specific pattern sensitivity must be encoded in the genome,

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seems to be congruent with some aspects of Hubei and Wiesel’s findings, although such rapprochements should only be suggested with extreme cau­ tion, because of the present empirical gap existing between the two sets of data and the absence of an integrative theory. In any case, the morphologi­ cal constraints that are at work in the perception of socio-biologically relevant patterns (this may be visual, acoustic, chemical, etc.) shed some light on the nature of iconic signs, inasmuch as these constraints provide a firm ground for the concept of similarity. Similarity should indeed be rede­ fined, not as the sharing of some property, but the sharing of relevant properties, it being understood that “relevant” here means that a specific sensitivity to these properties is encoded in the genome. Numerous experiments have provided evidence regarding inborn cues in animals. N. Tinbergen’s research on sticklebacks for instance is sufficiently well known for it being necessary to explain it in detail here ( Tinbergen, 1951, Gombrich, 1960). It will suffice to underline the fact that the dum­ mies and images which have been made in order to test the reactions of the male fish often cause more aggressive reactions than real male stick­ lebacks. If the relevant features are correctly noted and emphasized, they provide the wanted information in relatively noise-free conditions. A. Bubenik’s work on the visual releasers in antlered species has shown that it is sufficient for the ethologist to exhibit very large plastic imitations of moose antlers to cause the withdrawal of a less well endowed male, and to suddenly become very attractive to a passing female (Bubenik, 1968, 1973). The face, in primates, but also to a certain extent in other social species, such as canines and felines, has a very special semiotic status, because it can display the most relevant signs that regulate social interactions. Sackett’s experiments (1966,1970,1973) with young rhesus monkeys indicate that the recognition of species-specific facial patterns may be encoded in the genome. Animals raised in total social deprivation and in an environ­ ment lacking reflecting surfaces, showed a preference for conspecifics when given the opportunity of controling the projection of slides, including pictures of rhesus monkeys, on a screen. Moreover, until about two months and a half, even the picture of a conspecific threatening male was “enjoyed”, but after this age the young monkeys exhibited fear and sub­ mission when confronted with such a picture, thus suggesting that a mat­ uration process had taken place, making the subjects sensitive to typical visual patterns that are particularly significant for the species’ survival. Naturally no hasty conclusion regarding the human primate should be drawn from such findings. However the wealth of data yielded by the Lorenz school has inspired much research in human ethology, which the student of signs should definitely not ignore. In particular, the investiga­ tions bearing upon the decoding of the human face must be scrutinized in the light of the general issue of iconicity, if only because the most frequent example of iconic sign that is given in semiotic literature is precisely the picture, or the photograph, of a conspecific. 206

V. It is also interesting to note that pathological data suggest that some crucial aspects of facial information processing, notably the ascription of identities to faces, take place in a particular area of the brain, or at least, that this particular area is the locus of an important step in the face recogni­ tion process. The fact that clinical neuropsychologists labelled its impair­ ment “prosopagnosia”, or facial agnosia, thus acknowledging its criterial characteristic with respect to the more general deficiency called “agnosia”, is congruent to the claim that face recognition is a prime feature of a species in which socialization is highly developed7. Experimental lesions in monkeys have indeed the same effect. It would therefore be tempting to speculate that, through genetic programming, a specialized subsystem of the brain is pre-wired for the task of identifying, classifying and decoding facial patterns. It is indeed usually a lesion in the posterior regions of the right hemisphere that is involved in this deficiency, in which faces can be described but not identified. However it should be noted that the issue of the exact localization and specificity of this impairment is still being de­ bated among neuropsychologists (for a summary of the discussion, see Walsh, 1978:236-338). On the other hand, the systematic study of responses to faces, both in non-human and human primates, indicates that visual imputs and motor responses are matched in a way which is consistent with Lorenz’s ideas regarding the part played by innate releasing mechanisms in the shaping of human attitudes and behaviors. These ideas with respect to face were discussed three decades ago by N.Tinbergen (1951) and J.J. Gibson (1950). Since then, experiments have proliferated, and the results seem to converge and to substantiate the special status that the (human) face holds in the visual environment. In his celebrated Art and Illusion (1960) E. H. Gombrich acknowledged the perceptual and semantic powers of the face: “Whenever anything remotely facelike enters our field of vision, we are alerted and respond” (103). Nobody could deny our propensity “to read faces into things” (ibid.) But this does not go without some qualifications, bringing up the uniqueness and free will of humans, a quasi-automatic topos of modern humanism, through which a mostly irrelevant anxiety at being assimilated with “slot machines” is expressed. However, it has been known for some time that neonates smile at very coarse imitations of a human face, as if they were endowed with a neurological structure that is sensitive to a general facial configuration defined by a certain contour including two contrasting dots symmetrically situated on a horizontal line in the upper area of the surface (e. g. Bower, 1971); although other innate motor patterns related to specific kinds of visual stimuli have been shown beyond doubt to exist (e. g. Bower, 1971), a great deal of developmental research has confirmed the neuropsychologi­ cal specificity of face encoding. Recent reviews of these empirical studies

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7 See for example the role of the facial patterns in Panthera tigris (C. McDougal, 1977).

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are found notably in Hinde (1974), Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1979), and Carey and Diamond (1980), who state that evidence from a number of sources supports the intuition that the encoding of faces (the making of a previously unfamiliar face familiar) has psychological properties not shared by the encoding of items from other perceptual classes. Encoding faces seems special in three ways: with respect to certain psychological effect, with respect to neural substrate, and with respect to developmental history (61). Among the wealth of empirical results summarized in their article, let us point out those which show that “face encoding ... is more impaired by stimulus inversion than is the encoding of members of any other visual stimulus class examined so far” (63). This seems to be particularly relevant to the point that the present article attempts to make, namely that iconicity cannot be defined independently from biological constraints, which can be very specific, and differentiate classes of iconic signs in terms of neurologi­ cal structures and processes. As Carey remarks, “... encoding of faces is special [in] that there is a component of right-hemisphere specialization for encoding upright instances. This is not the case for any of the other classes of stimuli so far examined” (65). She eventually raises a question of utmost importance for semiotics: In sum, we are suggesting that when a class of stimuli shares a single configuration for which there is an encoding schema that uses relational properties to individuate class members, the encoding of individuals of that class will share the psychological properties of face encoding. It is an open question whether there are stimulus domains, other than faces, that are so characterized (73). Intuitively, the first reaction to this remark is that the hand would be a good candidate, given its importance not only from the practical and social point of view, but also in terms of the abundant pictural signs it has gener­ ated. It is indeed second only to the face on these various grounds. But research in that direction seems to be scant, except for the controversial discovery of Cross, Rocha-Miranda and Bender (1972), according to which there are cells in the macaque’s cortex that are exclusively sensitive to the visual shape of a monkey’s hand, and not of a human hand. Naturally, one should keep in mind that the various data mentioned in this, as well as in the previous, section should not be construed as a rigid mechanistic system, since to do so would not do justice to the tentativeness of some of the interpretations, to the caution with which those who are engaged in empirical research propose some limited generalization, and to the rarely denied evidence of the role of both the environment and indi­ vidual experience in the maturation process. However there are so many converging indications to the effect that the brain is equipped to identify some specific visual patterns related to highly significant classes of “ob­ jects” of the world - including obviously the class of “objects” itself (see Bower, 1971) - that semioticians cannot fail to perceive, sooner or later, the semiotic implications of these discoveries and the consequences they entail for the definition of iconic signs. It should be clear also that it would 208

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be extremely unwise to construe these discoveries as supporting evidence for the existence of the Jungian archetypes (whose culture-bound character is all too obvious) because of their thematic determinations. The view of the brain as a complex set of selective systems is both more modest and more powerful. As G. Edelman (1978) writes:

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Although the meaning of “selective” is best made clear by considering the detailed requirements of such a system, it may be useful to start off with a preliminary definition. “Selection” implies that after ontogeny and early development, the brain contains cellu­ lar configurations that can already respond discriminately to outside signals because of their genetically determined structures, or because of epigenetic alterations that have occurred independently of the structure of outside signals. These signals serve merely to select among preexisting configurations of cells or cell groups in order to create an appropriate response (1978:54).

v The converging directions that can be perceived in the various experiments briefly reported in the last two sections suggest a different perceptual system from the one that is presupposed by most theoretical reflections on iconic signs. As we have seen earlier, the assumption that is at the root of many semioticians’ approach is that our environment initially is an amorphous continuum that each culture segments in its own idiosyncratic way. In his criticism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, whose strong version represents an extreme case of this attitude, R. Brown (1976) notes that “There is a recurrent metaphor in Whorf’s papers: Nature is a formless mass or expanse (etherized upon a table?) which each language with its grammatical categories and lexicon ‘cuts up’ or ‘dissects’ in some arbitrary way” (128). This approach is germane to the view that perception of our environment first gives us innumerable riches if not an infinity of perceptu­ al features among which we select, in a developmental process, stable sets which form our schematic representation of the world objects. The concept of an iconic sign is, according to this perspective, a further impoverishment of initial perception, as current definitions of such signs are based on selective likeness, i. e. on some features that the sign and its referent have in common. In spite of the fact that a few ad hoc examples can indeed exemplify this theory, and that it is often introduced as a self-evident axiom of semiotics, we have seen that some devastating criticisms have been put forward, coming from various epistemological horizons. In this respect, the opposition set forth by Eco between “strong” codes such as natural languages or even “stronger” ones like the Morse code, and codes he calls “weak codes, which are barely defined and continuously changing, and in which the free variants prevail over the pertinent fea­ tures” (1976:214), among which he situates iconicity, reflects the fact that semioticians in general still derive their information, when they engage in theorizing, from philosophy and linguistics rather than from the natural sciences. But except in the dream world of some philosophers and logi-

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cians, it seems inconceivable that “signs” could be conceived as free from biological constraints (Bouissac, 1981, 1983). The direction in which it would make sense to orient research on iconicity could be to investigate, on an experimental basis, the neurological prog­ rams, thanks to which some particular “forms” are not only selectively identified, but which also trigger complex programs of actions. The mean­ ing of these forms is their socio-biological pertinence, and should be indeed considered as the prime semiotic process from which other traditionally distinguished sign categories can easily be derived along a continuum. Indeed, so-called arbitrary signs are in fact established through the availa­ bility of sets of forms that are, by necessity, perceptually relevant, i. e. belong to the repertoire of neuro-biologically pertinent forms, and as such, are endowed with stability and, therefore are remarkable (or criterial) structures. These views seem to be congruent with the theory of signs that has been outlined by Rene Thom in recent years (e. g. 1981) and, incidentally, this is the place to remind oneself that one of the many crucial contributions made by Sebeok to the advancement of semiotics may be to have called the attention of his students and fellow semioticians at an early date to the relevance of Rene Thom’s work for the understanding of the semiotic process (1976). But Thom’s general approach to semiotics has so far been inspired more by the semiotic doxa of Saussure and Peirce, and by the principles and experiments of Gestalt psychology, than by the more recent developments that have taken place in the neuro-physiology of perception. There seems to be little doubt that these advances will eventually engage his attention and that, as a response to their challenge, he will formulate the long awaited powerful semiotic theory that Sebeok has perceptively prophesized, in ovo so to speak, in his earlier writings. In the meantime, it seems reasonable to reconsider the concept of iconicity in the light of some of the data available. Basically, this could lead to the view that not all perceptual features are equally pertinent, as it is implicitly claimed by those who tend to conceive iconic signs as arbitrary constructs. If there is indeed a hierarchy of pertinence in regard to the organism’s “pre-wired” response, both in biological and social terms, iconic signs would not be based upon an open-ended, indefinite set of “properties”, but on a finite, and even, possibly, on a relatively limited number of pertinent feature configurations. The assumed initial richness and chaos from which simpler forms are supposed to be abstracted, would then be revealed as largely a philosophical fantasy, that should be ac­ counted for, rather than being considered as primary evidence. This would answer the problem of symmetry or unidirectionality which is one of the most puzzling difficulties offered by the concept of likeness emphasized by Sebeok (1976:129-30), by anchoring iconicity in a socio-biologically relev­ ant repertory of schematic percepts that would constitute an absolute con­ straint upon the combinatory power of perceptual features or properties, and would reverse one of the basic concepts of contemporary semiotics, 210

namely that the “iconic sign” stands for something else. But only a sys­ tematic inventory of sign forms - an enterprise which would have been totally utopian before the computer era - would be able to provide empiri­ cal evidence concerning the hypothetically bounded nature of iconic con­ structs; and only further advances in the neurophysiology and neuro­ psychology of perception would be able to confirm the existence of the prewired mechanisms that alone could reveal grounds for accepting the biological pertinence of these constructs.

References Bouchard, G. 1980 “L’A, B, C. de la sdmiologie. A propos de Silence, on parle: introduction a la semiotique par Jurgen Pcsot. Montreal, Gudrin, 1979.” Philosophiques VII-3. Bouissac, P. “The concept of semiotic operation” in The Neurological Basis of Signs in 1981 Communication Processes, P. Perron, ed., Publications of the Toronto Semio­ tic Circle, 1981, numbers 2/3 (pp. 1-6). “Figurative versus objective semiotics: an epistemological crossroads” in 1983 Semiotics 1981, J.N.Dccly and M.D.Lenhart (eds.), Plenum: New York (pp. 3-12). Bower, T. G. R. “The Visual World of Infants.” Scientific American 215:80-97. 1966 1971 “The Object in the World of the Infant.” Scientific American 255:30-38. 1972 “Object Perception in Infants.” Perception 1:15-30. Brown, R. “Reference, in Memorial Tribute to Eric Lenneberg.” Cognition 4:125-153. 1976 Bubenik, A. B. 1968 “The Significance of the Antlers in the Social Life of the Cervidae.” Deer (Southampton) 1 (6):208—214. “Antlers as a releaser and Gestalt in the Social Life of Animals.” Abstract of 1973 the 13th International Ethological Conference, Washington D.C. (DF40519). Carey, S. and R. Diamond 1980 “Face Encoding” in D.Caplan (ed.) Biological Studies of Mental Processes. MIT Press: Cambridge (60-93) Chen, L. 1982 “Topological Structure in Visual Perception.” Science vol. 218, No. 4573 (699-700). Cross, C. G., C. E. Rocha-Miranda and D. B. Bender 1972 “Visual Properties of Neurons in Inferotemporal Cortex of the Macaque.” Journal of Neurophysiology 33:96-111.

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La Structure absente. Mercure de France: Paris. 1976 A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. 1978 “Pour une reformulation du concept de signe iconique.” Communications 29. Seuil: Paris (141-191). Edelmann, G. 1978 “Group Selection and Phasic Reentrant Signaling: A Theory of Higher Brain Function” in The Mindful Brain, G.Edelman and V. Mountcastle. MIT Press: Cambridge.

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Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. 1979 “Human Ethology: Concepts and Implications for the Science of Man.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences II, 1:1-26. Gibson, J. J. The Perception of the Visual World. Houghton Mifflin: Boston. 1950 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin: Boston. 1979 Gombrich, E. H. 1960 Art and Illusion. Princeton University Press: Princeton. Goodman, N. 1972 Problems and Projects. Bobbs-Merrill: New York (437-447). Greimas, A. J. et al (eds.) Recherches sur les systemes signifiants. Mouton: The Hague-Paris. 1973 Greimas, A. J. and J. Courts Semiotics and Language, An Analytical Dictionary, trans. by L. Crist, D. Pat1982 te, and others. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Hinde, R. A. Biological Bases of Human Social Behavior. Mc-Graw-Hill: New York. 1974 Hubei, D. H. “Exploration of the Primary Visual Cortex, 1955-78 (a review).” Nature vol. 1982 299, No. 5883 (515-524). Lindekens, R. “Elements pour une th6orie g6n£rale des objets iconises.” Semiotica IV.3 1971 (197-214) McClelland, L. and J. Miller 1979 Percept, psychophys. 26 (221). McDougal, C. The Face of the Tiger Rivington Books: London. 1977 Moles, A. La communication (Les dictionnaires du savoir moderne). Centre d'etude et 1971 de promotion de la lecture: Paris. Morier, C. 1980 “L’apport de Leibniz a la s6miotique.” Semiotica 32-3/4 (339-355). “Le pfcre oublie de la s6miotique moderne: C. S. Peirce.” Semiotica 39-3/4 1982 (343-351). Rey, A. “Mimesis, po£tique et iconisme: pour une relecture d’Aristote” in P. Bouis1985 sac, M. Herzfeld and R. Posner, eds. Iconicity, Essays on the Nature of Cul­ ture. Stauffenburg: Tubingen. Sackett, G. P. 1966 “Monkeys reared in isolation with pictures as visual input: Evidence for an Innate Releasing Mechanism.” Science 154:1768—73. 1970 “Unlearned Responses, Differential Rearing Experiences and the develop­ ment of Social Attachments by Rhesus Monkeys” in L. A. Rosenblum (ed.) Primate Behavior: Development in Field and Laboratory Research vol. I (111-140). 1973 “Innate Mechanisms in Primate Social Behavior” in R. C. Carpenter (ed.) Behavioral Regulators of Behavior in Primates. Bucknell University Press: Lewisburg.

Savan,D. 1976 An Introduction to C. S. Peirce’s Semiotics, Part I. Toronto Semiotic Circle Monographs 1976, Number 1. Victoria University, Toronto. Schendel, J. D. and P. A. Show 1976 Percept. Psychophys. 19 (383). 212

Sebeok, T. A. 1976 Contribution to the Doctrine of Signs. Peter de Ridder Press: Lisse. Thom. R. 1980 Modules mathematiques de la morphogenese. Christian Bourgois: Paris. 1981 “Morphologie du semiotique.” Recherches Semiotiques!Semiotic Inquiry 1.4 (301-309). Tinbergen, N. 1951 The Study of Instinct. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Tversky. A. 1911 “Features of Similarity” Psychological Review, 84, (327-352). Wallis, M. “On Iconic Signs” in Greimas, ed. Recherches sur les systemes signifiants. 1973 Mouton: The Hague-Paris (481-98). Walsh. K. W. Neuropsychology, A Clinical Approach. Churchill Livingstone: New York. 1978 Weisstein, N. and C. S. Harris 1974 Science vol. 186 (752). Whitteridge, D. 1981 “Visual Machinery of the Brain.” Nature vol. 294, no. 5837 (113-114). Wiese!, T. N. “Postnatal Development of the Visual Cortex and the Influence of Environ­ 1982 ment.” Nature vol. 299, no. 5884 (583-591).

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1. Is the mirror image a sign? Is the mirror a semiotic phenomenon? Or, in other words, is the image reflected from the mirror surface a sign? These questions may well be nonsense - in the sense that common sense would suggest, that mirrors are just mirrors. In any case, asking such questions is not without purpose: for it might be somewhat meaningless to discover that the mirror image is a sign; it would be more interesting to discover that the mirror image is not a sign, and why. Even though we assume we know everything about the mirror, excluding mirrors from the class of signs might help us to define the sign better (or at least to define what a sign is not). Of course we should first establish what we mean by both sign and mirror. But we are immediately faced with the question of whether the two definitions may somehow be linked to one another, in a circle, so to speak, so that we would not be able to decide whether we should begin from the mirror to define what a sign is, or vice versa. How can we know, if we begin from a definition of sign, that it is not constructed so as to exclude the mirror? It would seem easier to begin from the mirror (which is assumed to be thoroughly, objectively and unquestionably described by optics); but defining what a mirror is, and what it is not, may depend on certain previous assumptions - although not explicitly articulated - about the na­ ture of semiotic phenomena as being different from mirror phenomena. No phylogenetic argument can be of any use in establishing a priority. Man is a semiotic animal: this is a matter of fact. But saying so does not exclude the possibility that man is so, thanks to an ancestral experience with mirrors. The myth of Narcissus doubtless seems to refer to an already verbal animal, but how far can we trust myths? From a phylogenetic view­ point, the question sounds like that of the chicken and the egg, or the origin of language. Since we lack any good document on the ‘dawn’ of our species, we had better keep silent. From an ontogenetic viewpoint, too, we have very poor certainties. We are not sure whether semiosis is at the basis of perception, or vice versa (and therefore, whether semiosis is at the basis of thought, or vice versa).

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Psychoanalytic enquiries on the “mirror stage” (Lacan, 1966) would sug­ gest that perception (or at least the perception of one’s own body as an unfragmented unit) and the experience with mirrors go hand in hand. Perception - thought - self-consciousness - experience with mirrors - semiosis: These therefore seem to be positions within a rather inextricable knot, points in a circle where it would be difficult to spot a starting point. 2. The imaginary and the symbolic Lacan’s pages on the “mirror stage” would seem to solve our problem from the very beginning. The mirror is a threshold phenomenon marking the boundaries between the imaginary and the symbolic. When a child is be­ tween six and eight months old, he at first mistakes the image for reality, then he realizes that it is just an image, and later still he understands that it is his image. In this “jubilant” acceptance of the image the child recon­ structs the still scattered fragments of his body as things outside himself-in terms of inverse symmetry, so to speak (a notion we shall take up again later). The experience with mirrors still belongs to the imaginary, just like the experience of the deceptive image of a bunch of flowers created in a spherical mirror, as described in the “Topics of the imaginary” (Lacan, 1953). The imaginary mastery of one’s own body, which the experience with mirrors induces, is earlier than actual mastery: the final development “is achieved insofar as the subject is integrated into the symbolic system and asserts itself there, through the exercise of a true word” (Lacan, 1953). (Let us note in passing that what Lacan defines as the symbolic, is actually the semiotic, although he identifies it with verbal language.) In the accept­ ance of the mirror image there is a symbolic matrix into which the ego plunges as a primeval form; only language can give it back its function as a subject “in the universal” (Lacan, 1966). As we shall see, this restitution “to the universal” should pertain to any semiotic process, not only verbal ones. The mirror as the moment when the reflected ego changes to social ego is a “structural crossroad” or, as we have already said, a threshold phenomenon. 3. Getting in through the mirror If these conclusions are valid, however, they only tell us what the mirror is (or better what it is for) at a single moment in the subject’s ontogenesis. On the whole, these considerations in the mirror stage do not exclude the possibility that, at any further stage in the development of symbolic life, the mirror may be used as a semiotic phenomenon. This is why it is worth­ while considering a different approach, that of questioning ourselves about the use of mirrors by human adults who produce signs, perceive themselves 216

as subjects and, above all, are already familiar with mirror images, rather than considering an auroral or primary moment (be it phylo- or ontogene­ tic). If we consider the problem in this stage, we can avail ourselves of our everyday experience, pegging it down to specific phenomena, instead of searching in our ancestors’ experience (which cannot be verified), or that of our infant children (which we define conjecturally, and is based on guesswork and external data). But once again the problem is whether to begin from mirrors or from signs. If there is a circle, we might as well enter from any point whatsoever. Let us, then, get in through the mirror (without getting stuck inside it, as we shall see later), since optics seems to know a lot about mirrors, whilst it is questionable whether semiotics knows anything about signs. On the whole, optics is an ‘exact’ science, and so-called exact sciences are supposedly more accurate than so-called non-exact sciences. When questioning our­ selves on our experience with mirrors (from now on we are entitled to speak ‘scientifically’ of catoptric experience), we might, at the most, won­ der to what extent catoptrics is actually exact.

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4. A phenomenology of the mirror: the mirror does not invert We initially define a mirror as any polished surface reflecting incidental rays of light (therefore excluding so-called ‘mirrors’ reflecting other kind of waves, such as repeater systems). These surfaces are either flat or curved. By plane mirror, we mean a surface reflecting a virtual image, which is straight, inverted (or symmetrical), specular (the same size of the reflected object), free of so-called chromatic aberrations. By convex mirror, we mean a surface reflecting virtual, straight, inverted and reduced images. By concave mirror, we mean a surface, (a) reflecting virtual, straight, and magnified images, when the object stands between the focus and the ob­ server, and (b) reflecting real, upside-down, magnified or reduced images (depending on the position of the object, anywhere in space between infin­ ity and the focal point), which can both be observed by human eyes and projected on a screen. We shall not consider parabolic, ellipsoid, spherical or cylindrical mir­ rors, because they are not in common use; they do not belong to our everyday experience. Their results could possibly be considered under the general heading of distorting mirrors, and catoptric theatres. When working out these definitions, we should immediately question ourselves on the meaning of terms like virtual and real. The real image in concave mirrors is actually unreal in terms of common sense, and is called real, not only because the subject perceiving it may mistake it for a physical object, but also because it may be projected on a screen, something which is impossible with virtual images. As for the virtual image, it is so called because the observer perceives it as if it were inside the mirror, while the mirror, of course, has no ‘inside’.

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On the other hand, the definition, by which a mirror image - as it is commonly said - would have an inverted symmetry, is even more whimsi­ cal. This belief (that the mirror shows the left in the place of the right) is so deeply rooted that some have gone so far as to suggest that the mirror has this odd quality of exchanging the right with the left, but not the top with the bottom. Catoptrics, of course, does not allow for this conclusion: if instead of being used to vertical mirrors, we were more generally used to mirrors horizontally fixed to the ceiling, as libertines are, we would come to believe that mirrors also tip top with bottom, and show us the world upside-down. But the point is that vertical mirrors themselves neither reverse nor invert. A mirror reflects the right side exactly where the right side is, and the same with the left side. It is the observer (so ingenious even when he is a scientist) who, by self identification, imagines that he is the man inside te mirror and, looking at himself, realizes he is wearing his watch on his right wrist. But it would, in fact, be so, only if he, the observer, were the one inside the mirror (‘moi’ c’est un autre!). On the contrary, those who avoid behaving like Alice, and getting into the mirror, do not so deceive them­ selves. And in fact, every morning, in the bathroom, each of us does use a mirror without behaving like a spastic, while we are clumsy when we use lateral opposite mirrors to cut our sideburns, and see an image (the reflec­ tion of a reflection) having its right side where we feel we have it, and vice versa. It means that our brain has got used to using mirrors for what they are, faithfully reflecting what is in front of them, in the same way as it has got used to turning the retinal image - which we actually do reverse upside-down. But while our brain had millions of years (including the very many before the appearance of Homo sapiens) to get used to retinal im­ ages, so that for quite a long period man did not even think of this phenomenon, man’s brain has had only a few thousand years to get used to mirror images. And while, at a perceptive and motor level, it interprets them correctly, at the level of conceptual consideration, it cannot quite clearly differentiate between the physical phenomenon and the deceptive illusion it encourages in a sort of spread between perception and judge­ ment. So we use the mirror image correctly, but speak of it wrongly, as if it did what we ourselves are doing with it (i.e. as if it reversed it). If we reduce the phenomenon of mirror reflection to a purely abstract scheme, we realize that it does not imply any phenomena of the darkchamber kind -

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■ It is only when we anthropomorphize the virtual image that we are puzzled by right and left - that is, only at this point do we start wondering what right and left would be, if the virtual image were the real object. In front of a mirror we ought not to speak of inversion, but rather of absolute congruence - the same congruence we observe when we press blotting paper on a page written with fresh ink. If, then, 1 cannot read what is printed on the blotting paper, this results from my reading habits rather than from the relation of congruence (and in fact I can read it by using a mirror, i.e. by reversing to a second congru­ ence, as happens with laterally opposed mirrors in the bathroom). This again means that mankind, with the exception of Leonardo, had more time to learn how to ‘read’ mirrors than to read blotting paper. On blotting paper, writing appears reversed with respect to grammatological rules, but if we consider it as an actual imprint, ink signs are exactly where they were on the paper. Men can use mirrors just because they know that there is no man in the mirror, and that the man to whom right and left are to refer, is the observer, and not the (virtual) individual who seems to be looking at the observer. All this shows us how difficult it would be to speak of mirrors, as if we spoke of them before knowing and experiencing them (and we can easily imagine how dismayed the baby is at the fatal stage when he/she does not yet know his/her body). When grown up, we are the way we are, just because we are (also) catoptric animals, and have developed a double ability to look at ourselves (insofar as it is possible) and others in both our, and their, perceptual reality and catoptric virtuality. Of course, we do use mirrors more easily with respect to our body than to someone else’s. Just now, while writing, I am facing a mirror reflecting a door with a handle, behind me. Before deciding whether the door handle is on the right or on the left (whose right and left?), or how I should move my arm (backwards), in the event that I wanted to throw my lighter in order to hit the handle, I first check with and on my body. I should move my right hand backwards, towards my left shoulder, behind which I see the handle. Done! I almost hit it. Now I know (but I also knew before trying) that if I turned round, the handle would be on my right. But I had to reckon with an inverted 219

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image, because I was actually aiming (with my eyes) at the door’s virtual image in the mirror. It was my problem. Between the mirror and the door (both lacking organs of perception) there was no relation of inversion.

5. A pragmatics of the mirror We usually know how to use mirrors correctly. This means that we have introjected the rules of catoptric interaction. It means also that we need to speak of the pragmatics of the mirror. It is no use arguing that, since pragmatics is a branch of semiotics, we cannot speak of it before defining semiotic phenomena. We have said already that we must get into the circle from somewhere. On the other hand, we may as well use in this connection the term ‘pragmatics’ in a rather broad sense, to cover also perceptual interaction. The problem is that, in order to use a mirror, correctly, we should first know that we are facing a mirror (which is an essential condi­ tion in Lacan’s study also, for the mirror not to be a sheer illusion, or a hallucinatory experience). Once we have acknowledged that what we perceive is a mirror image, we always begin from the principle that the mirror ‘tells the truth’. And it is so true, that it does not even bother to reverse the image (as a printed photo­ graph does in order to give us an illusion of reality). The mirror does not even allow us this tiny advantage, which would make our perception or our judgement easier. A mirror does not “translate”, it records what strikes it just at the moment that it strikes it. It tells the truth to an inhuman extent, as is well known by those who - facing a mirror - cannot any longer deceive themselves about their freshness. Our brain interprets retinal data, but a mirror does not interpret an object. But it is just this Olympian, animal, inhuman nature of mirrors that allows us to trust them. We trust mirrors just as, under normal conditions, we trust our organs of perception. Now it becomes clear why we spoke of pragmatics: with mirrors, we can apply some of the rules which, by social convention, and very relatively, are applied to conversational interactions, although in conversation lies are reckoned as breaches. It is not so with mirrors.

6. The mirror as a prosthesis and a channel We trust mirrors just as we trust spectacles and binoculars, since, like spectacles and binoculars, mirrors are prostheses. In a strict sense, a pros­ thesis is an apparatus replacing a missing organ (an artificial limb, a den­ ture); but, in a broader sense, it is any apparatus extending the range of action of an organ. This is why we can also consider hearing aids, megaphones, stilts, magnifying lenses, and periscopes as being prostheses. 220

\l A prosthesis extends the organ’s range of action, according to the or­ gan’s mode of action, but it may have either a magnifying function (like a lens), or a reducing function (pliers extend our fingers’ grip, but eliminate thermic and tactile sensations). In this sense, a mirror is an absolutely neutral prosthesis, and it allows us to catch visual stimuli from where our eye could not reach (in front of our own body, around the corner, in a hole), and with the eye’s same efficacity and force. A mirror may at times work as a reducing prosthesis; with curved mirrors or smoked mirrors, the perception of intensity ratios is privileged over the perception of wave lengths. Prostheses may be merely extensive (like a lens), or intrusive (like, a periscope or certain specula used by physicians); mirrors may serve both functions (i.e., a mirror may be used to extend the eye’s reach, as if we had a visual organ on our forefingers). Even barbers’ en abime mirrors have an intrusive function. The magic of the mirror lies in the fact that its extensiveness-intrusiveness allows us, both to have a better look at the world, and to look at ourselves as anybody else might: it is a unique experience, and mankind knows of no other similar one. Since mirrors are prostheses, they are channels too. A channel is any material medium for the passage of information (the notion of information is here a physical one, i.e. information, as a passage of stimuli-signals which can be quantitatively measured, but which are not yet connected with semiotic phenomena). Not all channels are prostheses, because they do not all necessarily extend an organ’s range of action (e.g. air is the channel through which sound waves travel), while all prostheses are chan­ nels or media. There may also be a channel of a channel. For instance, if you use a mirror to reflect the rays by which somebody is modulating Morse signals, the mirror is a primary channel conveying light. (It may act as a prosthesis if it magnifies the ray-power or if, in a system of mirrors reflecting one another, it allows you to catch the rays reflected in an original mirror beyond your eye’s reach.) But reflected light rays, in their turn, become a secondary channel, conveying the features pertaining to the Morse code. In any case, this phenomenon of the reflection and channeling of light rays has nothing to do with mirror images. If we identify mirrors as channels, we can easily dispose of the cases when a mirror image is used as the symptom of a presence. For instance, if I look at a mirror located vertically in front of me, and diagonally to the plane of observation, I can see human shapes moving in the adjacent room. In this case too, the mirror acts as a prosthesis; but we might think that, since mirror images are the symptoms of someone’s presence elsewhere, it could have semiotic functions. However, any channel, when working, is a symptom of the existence of a source issuing signals. If this is so, when someone is talking to me, independently of what he is telling me, I can see his act of speaking as a double symptom: that he is not dumb, and that he wants to say something, i.e. to express an inner state. These cases, when the channel state of activity is a symptom of both the channel efficiency and

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the existence of a source, are connected to the symptomatic use of the channel, rather than to the messages it conveys. When used as a symptom, the mirror tells us something about mirrors and the use we can make of them, but nothing about mirror images. As a channel-prosthesis, the mirror can be a source of perceptive decep­ tion, just like any other prosthesis. 1 enter a room and seem to see a man coming towards me, and then I realize it is my image reflected in a mirror. This image, ‘standing for something else’, albeit temporarily, might induce us to perceive the shadow of a semiotic phenomenon, but it is a perceptual deception, such as I can easily have without mirrors - as when 1 confuse dross with gold, or see things that are not there. Similarly, deceptions can be created by presenting things which are not mirrors, as being mirrors. In a film by the Marx brothers, there is a scene in which Groucho is looking at himself in a mirror, but the mirror is not a mirror, it is an empty frame, behind which Harpo is awkwardly (and with funny effects) trying to imitate Groucho’s gestures. This phenomenon of lying about mirrors has. of course, nothing to do with mirror images. No doubt the deceiver's per­ formance has something to do with fiction, with signification, with lying through signs, but all this does not concern the nature of the mirror image. This will come up again when we deal with a semiotics of the mise-en-scene, which might apply to the use of mirrors as channels. 7. Absolute icons We have said that a catoptric prosthesis extends an organ’s range of action, and supplies the organ with the same stimuli as it would receive if it could function where the prosthesis extends its range. In this sense, the mirror provides me with an absolute double of the stimulating field. We might quite naively say that the mirror provides me with an icon of the object - if we define the icon as an image having all the properties of its denotatum. But catoptric experience tells me that (if any sign, called icon and endowed with these properties, exists) a catoptric absolute icon is not an icon, but a double (see Eco, 1976, 3.4.7.). At the macroscopic level of my perceptive experience, and for the practical purpose it must serve, the sheet of paper I am writing on is the double of the sheet I have just filled. But this is not a good reason for considering the former as a sign of the latter. You may argue that the mirror-image is not to its object as the former sheet is to the latter. But you should not forget that the mirror image is not a double of its object, but rather a double of the stimulating field one could have access to, if one looked at the object, instead of looking at its mirrored image. The fact that the mirror image is a most peculiar case of double, and has the traits of a unique case, explains why mirrors inspired so much litera­ ture: this virtual duplication of stimuli (which sometimes works as if there were a duplication of both my body as an object, and my body as a subject, splitting and facing itself), this theft of an image, the unceasing temptation 222

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to believe I am someone else, makes a man’s experience with mirrors an absolutely unique one, on the threshold between perception and significa­ tion. And it is precisely from this experience of absolute iconism that the dream of a sign having the same characteristics arises. This is why men draw (and produce) the signs which are precisely defined as iconic: they draw to achieve without mirrors, what mirrors allow them to achieve. But the most realistic drawing does not show all the characteristics of absolute duplication, a mirror does (besides having a different relation of depend­ ence to its object). Man’s experience with mirrors may then explain the emergence of a notion like the (semiotic) one of iconism, but is not explained by it. However, the mirror, as a threshold phenomenon, may lend istself to a number of operations making it even more ‘threshold’. I can, in fact, reduce the absolute iconism of mirror images, and smoked mirrors are an excellent example of this technique. The mirror becomes almost a reducing prosthesis. Let us imagine a mirror made of horizontal strips of reflecting material, with thin opaque strips in between. The virtual image I see is obviously incomplete. At the level of perceptual reconstruction, the result may nevertheless be excellent, with varying degrees of efficiency, depending on the thickness of the opaque strips. If we imagine opaque strips of a reason­ able thickness, even though the reflected image is not mine (because, of course, I know a lot about my image, and the reconstruction of the perceptum may in this case be affected by previous information), I can statisfactorily perceive the reflected object. This, of course, does not exclude that some elements of interpretation, albeit very slight ones, do come into play. Such interpretation, however, also effects the perception of objects in the world around us. Darkness, the presence of opaque obstacles, fog, are all ‘noises’ in the channel, diminishing sensory data, and requiring interpreta­ tive efforts in order to achieve the (often conjectural) formation of a perceptum. If these conjectural and interpretative efforts are to be taken as semiosic, then semiosis creeps into any aspect of our relation to the sur­ rounding world. But even if we take this for granted, we should not con­ clude that any aurorally semiosic process is productive and interpretative of signs. If mirrors also impose semiosis processes, one thing remains to be defined, i.e. in what sense these processes do not lead to the production, interpretation and use of signs.

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8. Mirrors as rigid designators The mirror has a peculiar characteristic. As long as I look at it, it gives me back my facial features, but if I mailed a mirror, which I have looked at, to my beloved, so that she might remember my looks, she could not see me (and would instead see herself). The self-evident datum I have just highlighted deserves some thought. If

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we compared mirror images to words, they would be like personal pro­ nouns, like the pronoun /I/ meaning Umberto Eco, if I pronounce it, and someone else, if someone else does so. I may, however, happen to find a message in a bottle reading “I was shipwrecked on the Juan Fernandez islands”; it would be clear to me that someone other than myself was shipwrecked. But if I find a mirror in a bottle, after taking it out with considerable effort, I would always see myself in it, whoever may have sent it as a message. If the mirror “names” (and this is clearly a metaphor), it only names a concrete object, it names one at a time, and then only the object standing on front of it. In other words, whatever a mirror image may be, it is determined in its origins, and in its physical existence, by an object we shall call the image referent. In an extreme attempt to find one more relation between mirror images and words, we might compare mirror images to proper names. If I shouted “John!” in a crowded station, I would probably see a great many people turn around. This has allowed many to assert that proper names have a direct relation to their bearers. Yet if someone looking out of the window said “Look, here comes John!” from inside the room, without knowing John, I would know that the other person had seen (or said he had seen) a male human being (provided he had made appropriate use of language). If this is so, then even proper names do not refer directly to an object whose presence determines the proper name utterance. Not only could my com­ rade lie, and mention John, when John is not there, but the linguistic expression John first and foremost refers me to a general content. So much so, that if someone eventually decided to christen his newborn daughter John, I would tell him that he was making an inappropriate use of current onomastics, since John usually names males. Therefore, there is a difference between a mirror image and a proper name, in that a mirror image is an absolute proper name, just as it is an absolute icon. In other words, the semiotic dream of proper names being immediately linked to their referents (just like the semiotic dream of an image having all the properties of the objects they refer to) arises from a sort of catoptric nostalgia. There is actually a theory of proper names as rigid designators (Kripke, 1972), by which proper names could neither be mediated by definite descriptions (like John is the fellow who...), nor undergo counterfactual exercises (like would John still be John, were he not the fellow who...?). An unbroken chain of designations, called a ‘causal’ chain, links them to an original object which they were allocated to by a sort of initial ‘baptism’. Now, it is mirrors which allow us to imagine this kind of situation. Let us assume that along a certain distance, between point A, where the reflected object is located, and point B, where the observer stands (who under normal conditions cannot see point A), we fit an unbroken series of mir­ rors at regular intervals, and at a suitable inclination, so that by chain reflection, the observer in B may see the object image from A in the nearest mirror. We would be in the situation of a prosthesis-channel. 224

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Of course, we must necessarily assume that there is an odd number of mirrors. Only in this event would the mirror nearer to the observer give him an image of the original object, as if it were reflected in the first mirror. With an even number of mirrors, in fact, the image would be ‘reversed’ twice, and we would not be in the presence of a simple pros­ thesis, but instead, experiencing the effect of a more complex catoptric apparatus with translation functions. In any case - for the problem we are concerned with here - the observer need only know that there is an odd or even number of mirrors, and he will then behave as he does when facing his bathroom mirror or at the barber’s. Now, on the basis of the principles enunciated in our previous pragmatics of the mirror, the observer knows that (a) the final mirror is a mirror, and (b) that it is telling the truth; therefore he also knows that (c) at that very moment, the reflected object exists in point A. Through this causal chain, the final mirror, image be­ comes a rigid designator of the object which is the source of stimuli; better still, we know that it is at that very moment that the final image ‘christens’, so to speak, the initial object. Such a catoptric apparatus would be a rigid-designation apparatus. There is no linguistic contrivance which would provide the same guarantee, not even a proper name, because in that event two conditions of absolutely rigid designation would be missing: (i) the original object might well not exist at the same moment, and might also never have existed; (ii) there would be no guarantee that the name corresponded to that object alone, and not to some other having similar general characteristics. We therefore come to discover that the semantics of rigid designation is, in the end, a (pseudo-)semantics of the mirror image, and that no linguistic term can be a rigid designator (just as there is no% absolute icon). If it cannot be absolute, any rigid designator other than mirror images, any rigid designator whose rigidity may be undermined in different ways and under different conditions, becomes a soft or slack designator. As absolute­ ly rigid designators, mirror images alone cannot be questioned by counterfactuals. In fact, I would never be able to ask myself (without violating the pragmatic principles regulating any relation with mirrors): if the object whose image I was perceiving had properties other than those of the image I perceived, it would still be the same object?. But this guarantee is pro­ vided precisely by the threshold-phenomenon a mirror is. The theory of rigid designators falls a victim to the magic of mirrors.

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9. On signs If the mirror has nothing to do with proper names, it has nothing to do with common nouns either, which always refer (except with regard to their indexical use) to general concepts. But this does not mean that the mirror image is not a sign, because semiotic tradition, from Hellenism to the 225

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present day, has developed a sign concept which goes beyond the mere concept of verbal sign. According to the earliest definitions, a sign is aliquid which stat pro aliquo. The most elementary type of recollectable sign, according to the theories of the Stoics, is smoke, which stands for fire. At this point we should establish whether the mirror image stands for the body emanating it, as a reflection, just as smoke stands for the fire which produces it. A correct understanding of the Stoics’ sign theory, the first and most thorough theory ever produced, will inevitably lead us to assume that anything may be taken as a sign of anything else, provided that it is an antecedent revealing a consequent (where antecedent and consequent have the value they assume, according to the logical ratio of implication p =3 q). Thus the consequent might well be the more or less chronologically remote cause of the antecedent - as it is in the case of fire and smoke. This definition, however, is npt sufficient to characterize a sign as such. The semiotic requirements are the following: 1. In order that the antecedent might become a sign of the consequent, the antecedent must be potentially present and perceptible, while the con­ sequent is usually absent. For the Stoic simeion, the absence of the conse­ quent seems to be absolutely necessary: if one sees smoke billowing out of flames, there is no need to consider it as a sign of fire. Words, and many nonverbal indexical devices, can be produced, while their referents are present, but their condition for being signs is that they must be understand­ able as signs, even though their supposed referents are not there. The consequent may be absent, whether because it is out of reach of my actual perception, or because it does not subsist any longer at the very moment in which I interpret the sign (think, for example, of the tracks of prehistoric animals). As Abelard said, the power of language is demonstrated by the fact that the expression nulla rosa est (translatable either as there is no rose or such a thing like a rose has never existed) is fully comprehensible even though there are no roses. 2. As a result, the antecedent may be produced, even though the conse­ quent does not exist, or never has. One can produce smoke by means of chemical substances, thus pretending that there is (somewhere) fire. Signs can be used to lie about the world’s states of affairs. 3. Signs can be used to lie, because the antecedent (expression) does not require the consequent as either its necessary or efficient cause. The an­ tecedent is only presumed to be caused by the consequent. 4. This happens because the antecedent is not primarily related to an actual state of affairs, but to a more or less general content. In every signification system, the consequent conveyed by the antecedent is only a class of possible consequents. Signs can be referred to referents, because they are primarily correlated to a content (extensions are functions of the intensions). Even a gestural index, like a finger pointing at something, before being characterized by its contiguity to the object indicated, is 226

characterized by the fact that in a given system of gestural conventions, it signifies: “focus your attention on the possible object in the radius of the digital apex”; in fact, I might indicate something which does not exist, and my (deceived) interlocutor will at first be led into thinking that something must be there. This something is the consequent content of the antecedentexpression /finger pointed at something/. 5. But Stoic semiotics tells us something more. It does not tell us that smoke as sign is smoke as a material occurrence. The Stoics’ sign is incor­ poreal-, it is the relationship of implication between two propositions (“if there is smoke, there must be fire”, which could also be translated in terms of a law: “each time there is smoke, there must be fire”). The semiotic relationship is therefore a law correlating a type- antece­ dent to a fype-consequent. The sign is not given by the fact that this smoke automatically leads me to that fire, but that a general class of occurrences recognizable as smoke automatically leads me to the general class of occurr­ ences definable as fire. The relationship exists between types, rather than tokens. In other words, the interpreter of certain semiotic situations makes them occur as relations between tokens, owing to the fact that he knows (while the barbarian does not) that - first of all - the same relation holds between types. 6. The fact that the semiotic relationship occurs between types, makes it independent of the actual channel or medium in which, and by which, its corresponding occurrences are produced and conveyed. The smoke-to-fire sign relationship does not change, whether or not the smoke is chemically produced, or spoken about, or portrayed by images. The relationship link­ ing dots and lines to the letters of the alphabet according to the Morse Code does not change according to whether the dots and lines are convey­ ed by electric signals, or tapped out by a prisoner against the wall of his cell. 7. Finally (and here the original stoic concept is partially developed), the content of an expression may be interpreted. If, after seeing smoke, some­ body tells me there is fire, I might ask him what he means by fire, and he might explain by showing me some fire, or with the image of a flame, or by giving a verbal definition, or by causing me to recollect a sensation of heat, or by reminding me of a past event when I had experienced the presence of fire. In the same way, when hearing the name John, I might ask for the meaning of this name, and the speaker need not necessarily show me John, he need only define him in one way or another (Lucy’s husband, the man you met yesterday, the one portrayed in this miniature, the man who walks moving his head like this, or like that, and so on...). Each interpretation does not only define the content of the expression, but in its own way provides me with more information (Peirce, C. P., 8.332).

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10. The reason why mirrors do not produce signs In the light of what has been said above, the mirror image does not meet the requirements for a sign. One cannot say, when discovering through a mirror that someone is standing behind me, that one infers a consequent by means of an antecedent. Since, as we have seen, mirrors are prostheses, this inference is not so different from the many pseudo-inferences one can draw from the use of periscopes or binoculars: if I see something through them, then there must be something. But this inference is not dissimilar from the fundamental inference that rules our relationship with our own senses: if I see something, then it means that there is something there. la. The mirror image (even when it is taken as an antecedent) is present in the presence of a referent which cannot be absent. It never refers to remote consequents. The relationship between object and image is the relationship between two presences, without any possible mediations. The consequent (by virtue of the prosthesis action of the mirror) comes into the radius of the interpreter’s perceptibility. 2a. The image is causally produced by the object and cannot be produced in the absence of the object itself. 3a. Thus, as we have already seen, the mirror image cannot be used to lie. We can lie about mirror images (making phenomena which are not mirror images pass as such); but we cannot lie with, and through a mirror image. 4a. The mirror image cannot be correlated to a content, or rather it might well be (I look at my image in the mirror to reflect on the generic charac­ teristics of the human body), by virtue of its necessary relationship to the referent only. The signs can refer to a referent, because they automatically refer us to a content, while the mirror image refers only to one content, as it has a primary relationship with the referent. 5a. Thus the mirror image never establishes a relationship between ty­ pes, but only between tokens, which is another way of distinguishing the imaginary from the symbolic - where the symbolic implies a “universal” mediation, which is in fact the relationship between types. 6a. It goes without saying that the mirror image is not independent of the medium or channel in which it is formed, and by which it is conveyed. It is embodied by one and only one channel, the mirror. 7a. In the end, the mirror image cannot be interpreted. At most, the object to which it refers can be interpreted (in terms of different types of inferences, definitions and descriptions, which are increasingly analytical) - or, rather, the stimulating field from which the double is produced. The image as such can only be reflected, as such, by a second (third, fourth,...) mirror. On the other hand, if the interpretability is an inherent feature of the content, an image without content cannot by definition be interpreted (at least in the sense which we have given to the concept of interpretability). 228

f 11. Freaks: distorting mirrors Mirror images are not signs and signs are not mirror images. And yet there are cases when mirrors are used to produce processes which can be defined as semiotic. The first peculiar case is that of distorting mirrors, whose amazing effects were already observed by Arab physicists and in Le Roman de la Rose. The strange prosthesis, the distorting mirror, amplifies, but also distorts the organ’s function, like a hearing aid which transforms all conversation into a pop song. Therefore, it is a prosthesis with hallucinatory functions. If we take hallucinatory substances, we continue to perceive shapes, colours, sounds and smells, but in an altered form. The sensory organs function abnormally. And yet we know that these are our sensory organs, which we usually trust. If we are not aware that we are drugged, we trust them, with the most unforeseeable effects; if, on the other hand, we are aware, in that we are still able to control our reactions, we force ourselves to interpret and translate the sensorial data to reconstruct ‘correct’ perceptions (or, rather, perceptions analogous to those of most human beings). The same thing occurs with the distorting mirror. If we know neither, that it is a mirror, nor, that it is distorting, we will find ourselves in a situation of normal perceptual deceit. It is just a question of noise in the channel. At times, this noise is not perceived as such, and if, while speaking to someone on the telephone, the line is disturbed, we are bound to assume that the noises are the mutterings, coughing, or hoarseness of the person we are talking to. But in this case, we are wrongly interpreting sensations, and once again, we are mistaking dross for gold. The case where we know that we are in front of a distorting mirror, as for instance at a fun-fair, tends to be more interesting. Our attitude is thus a double one. We find the hallucinatory characteristics of the medium amus­ ing, and, therefore, playfully decide to accept that we have three eyes, or an enormous stomach, or very short legs, just as we accept a fairy tale. In reality, we give ourselves a sort of pragmatic holiday: we accept that the mirror, which usually tells the truth, is lying. But the fact that our disbelief is suspended, does not concern the image as much as the distorting pros­ thesis. The game is a complex one: on the one hand, I behave as if I were standing in front of a plane mirror that should tell the truth, yet I find that it gives back an ‘unreal’ image (that which I am not). If I accept this image, one could say that I am helping the mirror to lie. The pleasure that this game gives me is not of a totally semiotic, but also, of an aesthetic nature. I do the same with other prostheses - if, for example, I observe the world through coloured lenses. But this game is not so different from the one which I play when, in the midst of an incredible hum of voices, I place the palms of my hands over my ears, lifting them off and replacing them rhythmically, in order to hear an ‘unreal’ noise. Under these circumstances I interpret the data given back to me by the mirror in the same way in which, with regard to refractory phenomena,

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even if I continue to see a stick broken in half “in” water, I nonetheless interpret these data, by continuing to accept the stick as unbroken. In­ terpretive rules to decode the optical illusions exist (if not at a perceptual level, at least a level of intellectual judgement). In front of the distorting mirror I put a few projective rules to the test, so that a given length, or width, of the virtual image must proportionally correspond to different lengths, or widths, of the reflected object. I proceed as if I had to interpret one type of cartographic projection in terms of another. These projective rules are not different from the ones I apply in order to recognize, in a stylized or grotesque drawing, the characteristics of the object of the class of type-objects to which it refers. In this sense, the experience of the distorted image constitutes a further threshold-phenomenon which shifts the boundaries between catoptrics and semiosis. If the distorted image were not also parasitic, with respect to its referent, we would have to admit that it had many semiotic characteristics, even if rather vague, imprecise and erratic ones. For example, in this relationship (which is always a tokento-token one), I am forced to see myself as another (a dwarf, a giant, a monster): it is like the beginning of a generalization process, the negligence of the referent to fantasize on the content - even if in terms of a continually repressed temptation controlled by a consciousness of the singularity of the phenomenon, a cold reasoning about a hallucinatory situation. There is that extra knowledge concerning what I am or could be, the dawn of a counterfactual exercise - the beginning of semiosis. Perhaps, theoretically equipped with this possibility, we relegate distort­ ing mirrors to enchanted castles, so as not to question the frontier between catoptrics and semiosis, which we have instinctively demarcated so well. Finally, the image reflected by the distorting mirror is undoubtedly an indication of the fact that the mirror, as a channel, is, in fact, a distorting one. It is in just this way that the image of the broken stick tells me (as if I didn’t already know) that the stick is immersed in water. We have already described these symptomatic uses of the image, where the image does not give us information about the object, but about the nature of the channel. In these cases, it is my perceptual surprise which becomes the sympton of the channel anomalies (how can I see a broken stick and my face with three eyes, when I know that ‘it’s not the case’?), so that the semiosic effort actually lies between the perceptual surprise (equivalent in this case to an anomalous thermic sensation) and the channel, not between the image and the object. 12. Procatoptric staging Let us consider a more disquieting event. I am in a room, in front of me is a vertical mirror, located slantwise with respect to the rays emanating from my body. Actually, I do not see myself, but somebody in the adjoining room, who acts without knowing someone is looking at him. The case is 230

\\ similar to that of the sheriff in Westerns who sees the bandit entering behind him in the mirror over the counter in front of him. These cases are not perplexing, since we have already said that the mirror is a prosthesis, and at times has the same intrusive action as a periscope. But let us now imagine that in the adjoining room there is a subject, SI, who knows that S2 (myself) is spying on him in the mirror, but assuming (correctly) that S2 thinks that SI does not know S2 is observing him do so. Now, SI, thinking he is unseen, wishes to make S2 believe that he is doing something commendable, and behaves in a way S2 is to consider as spon­ taneous, while in fact behaving so only, and exclusively, for (or against) S2. SI is therefore staging an almost theatrical performance, the difference being that the audience is meant to mistake theatre for reality. SI is here using the mirror image to lie. Is there anything semiosic in such a situation? Everything is semiosic in it, yet not in any way that concerns the mirror image as such. Even in verbal language, I can utter a true statement with the aim of making my listener believe something else (about my ideas, my feelings and so on). The same happens in this case. The mirror image still retains each and every characteristic of dull faithfullness it would have in the event of SI behaving earnestly; it reflects exactly what SI is doing. It is what SI is doing which is a mise-en-scene, and, therefore, a semiotic contri­ / vance. There is also a pro-filmic staging (Bettetini, 1975). Our beliefs about the faithfulness of the camera usually have nothing to do with our beliefs about the ‘truth’ of the scene that the camera is going to shoot. When a movie shows a fairy with seven dwarfs in a flying coach, one knows that such a situation is fictional, even though one trusts the faithfulness of the record­ ing apparatuses shooting it. Only children take the mise-en-scene as well for reality; but this lack of maturity concerns their competence about a semiotic of mise-en-scene, quite apart from their possible lack of compe­ tence about a semiotics of filming. Similarly, there is a pro-catoptric staging which can create deceptive situations. But in this case, any semiotic consideration should shift from mirror images to staging, the mirror images being mere channels of procatoptric messages. These considerations also suggest that, besides procatoptric staging, there may also be a grammar of the shot, and a specific syntax of catoptric editing. SI may incline the mirror, so that S2 can only see some aspects of the scene taking place in the adjoining room (indepen­ dently of whether it is real or staged). Mirrors are always ‘framing’ devices, and inclining them in a certain way is a way to exploit this specific quality of theirs. Once again, however, this semiotic contrivance does not concern mirror images, which, as usual, depict things just as the mirror ‘sees’ them, but a manipulation of the channel. Let us now imagine that S2 has a remote control, to incline the mirror as he likes, so as to show SI different corners of the adjoining room, at intervals of a few seconds. If, at one angle the mirror shows a certain object and, at another, someone staring blankly, S2 might create catoptric images

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similar to what, in film editing, is called the Kuleshov effect. According to the ‘editing’ he works out, S2 may make SI believe that the man sitting in the adjoining room is looking at various objects in anger, lust or surprise. A swift play of inclination and mirror might make SI lose the sense of actual space relations between objects. In this case, moving mirrors might create a true semiotic situation, a tale, a fiction, a doxastic concoction. If we use mirrors as channels, staging, shot and editing are made poss­ ible. They are all semiotic contrivances which yield most, when used in connection with non-mirror-images. What would remain unchanged, what­ ever the hallucinatory experienced by SI may have been, is the asemiotic nature of mirror images, which are always causally related to their refe­ rent. SI might be inclined towards universalizing processes, almost forget­ ting he is observing mirror images, thus living a type-story rather than a token-story. But the very nature of this story’s connection to the mirror would make it forever related -to its causative referent, would still keep it half way between semiosis and catoptrics, between the symbolic and the imaginary. 13. Rainbows and Fata Morganas Rainbows are phenomena of partial reflection, though combined with re­ fraction and dispersion of sunlight passing through tiny drops of water in the lower layers of the atmosphere. However, their image is never per­ ceived as a mirror image. A rainbow can be employed semiotically in two cases only. It can be seen as a wonder, a sign given by the gods, to the same extent as storms, tidal waves, eclipses and the flight of birds. From time immemorial, mankind has rendered a number of physical phenomena semiotically, though not because of their specific catoptric nature. However, a rainbow can be read, and used, as a symptom (of the end of a storm). Under this aspect, it may even work without its conjectured referent, since rainbows occur in waterfall gorges, too. In any case, even when correctly used as a symptom of the presence of water drops sus­ pended in the atmosphere, it indicates an anomalous condition of the channel, rather than an actual object. As to Fata Morganas and the like, they are never perceived by a naive observer as mirror phenomena: they are in fact instances of perceptual deceptions. In contrast, to a critical eye, they may appear as the symptom of either a given condition of the atmospheric channel, or the presence of a distant object. On the£e grounds, they may even be used as mirror images of that object, and thus, as prostheses. 14. Catoptric Theatres Precisely through phenomena like Fata Morganas, we are led to deal with other plays of mirrors known across the centuries as Theatrum catoptricum, 232

h Theatron polydicticum, Theatrum Protei, Speculum heterodictum, Multividium, Speculum multiplex, Tabula scalata, etc. (see Baltrusaitis, 1978). All such contrivances can be grouped into three main classes. A. Mirrors multiply and alter the virtual images of objects, which, some­ how staged, are recognized by the observer as being reflected in a mirror. B. Starting from a staged object, a combined play of different curved mirrors creates real images which, however, the observer is supposed to ascribe to a wonder. C. Suitably arranged plane mirrors produce, on a mirror surface, the image of several superimposed, juxtaposed and amalgamated objects, so that the observer, unaware of the catoptric play, gets the impression of prodigious apparitions. Now. in the first case, the observer is aware of the catoptric nature of the play, so he is in no different position from one who personally controls a set of mirrors facing one another at different angles. He may enjoy the manipulation of the channels from an aesthetic point of view. When he watches the staging of a play with a pair of binoculars, the latter are meant to improve his perception of such a staging. By contrast, in this case, the staging itself is meant to improve the aesthetic perception of the pos­ sibilities offered by the prosthesis/channel. Any event that is aesthetically enjoyed, involves self-reflectiveness: one’s attention focuses, not only on the form of the messages, but also on the way the various channels are used. Likewise, the performance of an orchestra is appreciated not only by way of the melody (which, as such, is independent of the channel), but also because of the way the resources of an instrument are exploited. In cases B and C, we are back to situations similar to Fata Morganas, and optical illusions in general. Mirrors are once again used as channels, but the observer cannot focus his attention on them, being unaware of their presence. At the most, he aesthetically enjoys a staging, whose nature he ignores. And if he thinks he is facing a wonder, his position is the same as that of an observer who, seeing himself in a mirror, believes he is in fron of an actual intruder. This is sheer perceptual deception, rather than mirror image experienced as such. In the light of the typology of the mode, of sign production (see Eco, 1976, 3.6.6.), such perceptual deceptions can be described as the result of programmed stimuli. As a matter of fact, they are based on a staging which is a semiotic phenomenon (so much so, that it could be channeled otherwise; besides, mirror theatres are no longer used, since different methods of projecting images have become available). The mirror images employed, however, are true and asemiosic in themselves.

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15. Mirrors that “freeze” images Let us continue with our phenomenological experiment, imagining magic mirrors (i.e. really magic, and not simply used to give an impression of magic). 233

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Assume that we have a freezing mirror: the reflected image freezes on its surface, even when the object disappears. Possibly, we have established a relationship of absence, between antecedent and consequent. However, we have not eliminated the causal connection between original referent and image. We have moved further, but not much. A photographic plate is in fact a freezing mirror. Needless to say, we assume the existence of a plate capable of reproducing an image with very high definiton (wave-length, intensity relation and outlines); after all, we have decided to accept even those images reflected in mirrors, that are either broken, or crossed by opaque strips. What makes a picture similar to a mirror image? The answer is a prag­ matic assumption, whereby a darkroom should be as truthful as a mirror, and, at any rate, should testify to the presence of an imprinter (present, in the case of mirrors - past, in that of photography). The difference lies in the fact that the exposed plate is indeed an imprint or a trace. A trace differs under certain respects from a mirror image, even disre­ garding image reversal on the plate, its further reversal on the printed picture, and the recovery of its inverse symmetry (i.e., the actual inversion of the congruence characterizing mirror images). The main point is that imprints are but motivated heteromaterial (Eco, 1976, 3.6.): the plate turns light rays into different matter. We no longer perceive light rays, but pure intensity relations, as well as pigmentation relations. Thus, there has been a projection from matter to matter. The channel tends to lose its importance, the picture can be transferred to different materials, while relations remain unchanged. The imgage is not independent of its channel, as is the Morse Code of the material employed for its standard signals. However, some kind of liberation is foreshadowed. Probably because of the above phenomenon, the ‘photograph stage’ comes much later than the ‘mirror stage’ in the subject’s ontogenesis. A baby has no problems in recognizing his image reflected in a mirror, where­ as a child up to five years of age finds it very difficult (and requires some sort of training) to identify photographed objects. Indeed, he will perceive images as expressions referring to a generic content, and, through this connection with the universal, he will refer to the improper subject. He sees the picture of a woman X, considers it as the picture of a type-woman, applies it to a token-woman Y, and finally states that it is a picture of his mother. He actually fails to refer that proper-improper name, the slack designator represented by a photographic image. We are witnessing a semiosic phenomenon. Our pragmatics of photography reflect the effects of those early mis­ takes. While testifying that the plate has been exposed to something (which allows photographic images to be used as evidence), it nevertheless arouses the suspicion that something has not been there at all. We know that, through staging, optical tricks, emulsion, solarization and the like, some­ one could have produced the image of something that did not exist, never had existed and never would exist. A photograph can lie. We realize that, 234

iv even when we naively assume (unless under the influence of a fideistic attitude) that it does not. The objective referent is conjectured and yet, at every moment, it risks dissolving in its pure content. Is a photograph the photograph of a man, or the photograph of that man? It depends on how we use it (see Goodman’s remarks, 1968). Occasionally, on the basis of a surreptitious reference to general (universal) content, we take the photo­ graph of X to be that of Y. It is not just an error of perception, that is, as if we saw in a mirror the image of X coming in, and thought it was Y. In fact, there is more to it: in any imprint, such as that of an exposed plate, however well defined that imprint may be, generic characters ultimately prevail over specific ones. Except for catoptric theatres, the choice of the shot in the mirror is left to me, even when I am spying on someone: I need only employ motion. Incidentally, if I see a half-length image of myself in a mirror, I need only to get closer and look inside, downwards, to see, within limits that portion of my body the previous image did not show. The object is there, able to produce the image, even where I did not see it at first. In contrast, with photographs, the shot is strictly set. I will never get the chance of seeing those legs, if they are not in the image from the start: I just have to assume their existence (and still, it could be the photograph of a cul-de-jatte). Again, the legs I presuppose are not one’s legs, but just one’s two-footed­ ness. The impression of actual reference immediately fades into clusters of content. A photograph is already a semiotic phenomenon. Second magic experiment: the frozen image moves. These are motion pictures, obviously, to which all the remarks made on photography also apply, plus the actual grammar of editing, with all the deceptive and generalizing effects this involves. Imprints, but moving ones. Third experiment: The imprint has a very low definition, the mirror looks like an image-freezer and, on top of that, there is no longer a guaran­ tee of the existence of a mirror, or of a referent for the image. What I see, is not only staging, shot, a selected visual angle, but also the result of the work done on the surface, so that the latter seems to reflect the rays coming from an object: it is in fact a painting. In this case, all the require­ ments of semiosic phenomena are met, the physics of production combines with the pragmatics of interpretation in an utterly different way from that of the mirror image. Our three imaginary experiments have led us to imagine phenomena no longer related to mirrors. Nevertheless, when dealing with such phenome­ na, we can never totally abandon the memory of the mirror images, of which they are monkeys (in the same way as art is always simia naturae). However, it is worth reconsidering for a moment our experiments in­ volving a sequence of mirrors placed at regular intervals along a row of hills. Let us assume that we replace the sequence of mirrors with other devices turning the light rays that come from the initial object into electric signals, which are then transformed into optical signals by a final device. The resulting image would have the same characteristics as imprints, like

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photographs and motion pictures: in other words, they would enjoy a lower definition than the mirror image (we decided in any case to consider such an inconvenience as only temporary), would be heteromaterial, and retranslated (re-inverted). And yet, like the chain of mirrors, such a system would seem to involve a rigid designation: the image would be determined by the present referent which causes it, and the relation would be from occurrence to occurrence. Obviously, such a system, where a schematic model of TV transmission can be detected, would only have this characteristic in the case of live emission. As for as the pragmatic attitude is concerned, a recorded TV broadcast does not differ from a film show, except for image definition and the type of sensory stimulus. Only live TV broadcasts would share with mirrors their absolute relation with the referent. The point is (and this may also apply to the set of mirrors reflecting a distant image) that the space interval between referent and image alone, more or less consciously, arouses a suspicion of potential absence. The object should be there, but it may even not be. In addition, a further basic element should be taken into account: recorded broadcasts give rise to mistrust in their audiences as to the truthfulness of live ones. From a pragmatic point of view, TV images share the advantages of mirror images, as well as the disadvantages of the other photographic and motion picture imprints. They are occurrences, acting as parasites on their referents - but not necessarily. Who can be sure? How many, and what manipulations may have taken place along the channel? And what is the role played not only by the shot, but also by the editing? Editing influences live broadcasts also; through it, the camera decides what aspects of the real referent to explore; and thus, the mixing may produce Kuleshov effects at any given moment. However, such comparisons between photosensitive imprints and mirror images at least tell us something which is highly important for the semiotics of photographic, motion picture and television images. The latter lie within the boundaries of semiotics, but certainly not within those of linguistics. Each imprint is a projection working as a toposensitive whole, not as a sequence of discrete elements replicable by ratio facilis (Eco, 1976, 3.4.9.). The way all imprints (which are actual signs) can be interpreted is similar to the way we interpret a distorted, or weakly defined, mirror image (which, on the contrary, is not a sign). The process develops by projective rela­ tions; a given dimension must correspond to the same dimension in the image; if not in the object-occurrence (referent), at least in the object-type (content) the image ‘tells’ me about. The actual grammatical categories come into play only in connection with shooting and editing. Imprints are not mirror images, but we read them almost as if they were. At a certain level of analysis - when for instance one is concerned only with inconographic conventions - one is entitled to look at photographic imprints as if they were real mirror images, i.e. the immediate result of a reflection tout court, and their semiotic 236

strategies will be investigated only at the highest manipulatory levels (stag­ ing, framing, and so on). In other cases, on the contrary, it would be indispensable to cast doubt on their presumed ‘innocence’, to discuss their cultural origin, the non-naturality of their supposed causal relation with the referent.

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Orokaiva hae is only partially a totem, and that it is partially something else. Such a view is, in fact, close to what some academically educated Orokaiva themselves think about these emblems. A particularly illuminat­ ing discussion of them appears in an unpublished manuscript (a ‘bachelor of Arts Honours thesis’, according to the title page, but it shows signs of considerable intellectual maturity) by Willington Jojoga Opeba, entitled Taro or cargo (1978). In an extended discussion of the heratu or hae (kerapu in his dialect), Jojoga argues that the essential feature which gives identity to an Orokaiva clan is a distinctive (clan)name. Beyond this it has a further mark of identity in the form of a specific plant or animal, (ibid. p. 10). After imputing to Williams the notion that the Orokaiva regard these emblems as ancestors, Jojoga insists that they are (not objects of religion, but) used mainly for identification purposes (p. 11). He then proceeds to outline some of the social and economic functions of the emblems dis­ cussed in the present paper. He concludes: In most cases, therefore, the ancestors are not the same as the kerapu, because the former were all men and not plants; and the significant point worth mentioning is that the ancestors could have been the founders of the clans and could have adopted certain kerapu for their clan identification (ibid). This view is perhaps closer than Jojoga would admit to Williams’s assess­ ment that Orokaiva regard the ‘totemic’ ancestor as a man with a tree name. As against this, Sivepe people to whom I talked about these ances­ tors told me various examples of the way each was remembered: the ances­ tor was born next to the emblem, or he had lived under it, or he had his house in it, or he used to sit in the shade of it, or he wrapped a human victim’s flesh with its leaves or vines; or again he ate its fruit (a fruit normally regarded as inedible to humans); or he (or she) died by falling off it. It is true that all this merely explains how tree name became attached to the ancestor, but at the end of every story I was told that the ancestor turned into the tree, thus transforming what seemed a straightforward metonymic relation into a metaphoric one. It is this shifting back between the iconic and the indexical that arouses our interest. A more complete analysis of the data would require not just two series, as in the structuralist model of totemism, but three: the natural series, the cultural one and - in between the two - a cadastral series of land areas to which each hae is attached. Conceptual scheme of Orokaiva totemic system15 1 hae (natural series) - signifiers a lands (cadastral series) - objects hA nuclei (cultural series) - interpretants A

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In order to eludicate this diagram, let us say a person four emblems (a, b, c, d) but that a is his hae be. He will then be a primary member of nucleus A which implies that he free access to the products of land area hA. In addition he will be a secondary member of nuclei B, C, D with whom he shares respectively emblems b, c and d. He may therefore, after asking permission, go to land are hB (for instance), look for a specimen of emblem b, pick it up, leave it by a coconut tree and take coconuts. Now this scheme gives rise, in the first instance, to rather simple rela­ tionships between a/hA; b/hB etc., that is between the series of hae and the series of land areas. For one may simply say that there is a primary attach­ ment of the ancestor who lived in each land area, the plant that grew there, the metamorphosis of the ancestor into the plant. We may often still see the tree where the story happened. The series a/bA; b/aB etc. seems to us straightforwardly metonymic. Nor is there any question of plural al­ legiance: the land (cadastral series) has a one to one relationship to the plants (natural series). Each plant belongs to one piece of land. Even so, one ambiguity arises even here: associated with the plant a, attached (by popular belief) to land area hA, there are many other speci­ mens of the same plant species growing in other places. Any of these are potentially useable as hae by persons who own emblem a. For, as we have seen, no plant can become a hae unless it is ubiquitous. Secondly, nucleus A probably has primary rights to many blocks of land other than the one to which hae a is historically attached. The attachment of a hae to land is not systematic, but results from specific event sequences located in some but not all blocks. The relationship between the nuclei and their lands is more complex than one might suppose, as A has primary rights in hA, but is apt to have various secondary rights in hB, hC, etc., which he will exercise periodically so they will not fade away. The hae b, c etc. are pathways that connect A to these rights. One may think of these pathways philosophically as connect­ ing social spaces, or very concretely as bush tracks along which one finds specimens of the plant in question. The relation between the natural and cultural series may thus be viewed as an indirect one, passing through the cadastral series as intermediary. One may speak here of intermediary because if one did not visit the lands belonging to the other nuclei (B, C, D) one would have no occasion of using whatever hae one shared with them; it is an empirical fact that such hae are only used when visiting such lands. Now, in rightfully visiting these lands in virtue of a hae connection, and thus, of close social relations, one signified. In view of what I pointed out in note 9, this difference is smaller than it appears. It is, however, the land areas rather than the nuclei that are the objects of the signs, as the former stand conceptually in a strict one-to-one relationship to the signifier, whereas the nuclei form in principle an infinite series of social units that may set up a relationship with the land areas and with the emblem. This point is important, as I can see no other way of expressing totemic relationships in a non-unilineal society. 374

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becomes necessarily aware of the various spiritual entities attached to those lands. Undoubtedly, the hae ancestor is one of these. Jojoga was right, however, in stressing the special position of that ances­ tor, identified with the hae, as no substantive powers are usually ascribed to them, contrary to other spirit entities who may figure in various ways in, what Durkheim called, transformative rites, in other words, who can have good or bad effects on the situation of the social group and who may be influenced by religious practices. The hae is only for identification; it is not good to eat but only good to think. And it is not even good to think of semiotically, as it is semantically empty. It identifies in the manner of a social security number, which serves merely to connect a citizen to a file in a government department. In that same sense, it connects spaces, except of course that such symbols of social identity, carry a much heavier weight of sentiment among Orokaiva. In other words, the hae is basically a tool in information management. It is from that quality that it may derive some semiotic interest. It is, how­ ever, important that such information management tools often do imply entitlement to certain benefits and that they could not exist without such benefits. It may be worth recalling in this connection that the hae is not the only information management tool used by the Orokaiva, but that they are also apt to carry with them what is called an otohu, an ornament given to them after initiation, to show that they had been properly instructed and that they had made pledges of moral behaviour. A person carrying such an otohu, given by a relative of high repute, was more easily acceptable as a transactor outside his own village. These otohu have, in fact, as I have demonstrated in detail (Schwimmer 1973, Ch IX), information manage­ ment qualities comparable to credit cards. If the above analysis of the hae is correct, one would still need to explain why information management was so important in a society that was fairly small-scale and that, by the account we have given of it so far, appears to be rather static and traditional. It is for this reason that we shall, in the following sections of this essay, shift over to the kind of morphogenetic approach foreshadowed in our opening pages. Orokaiva society is very adept at creating new forms, new social units, new symbolic constructions that may well be explicable in terms of catastrophes of bifurcation, and perhaps also of catastrophes of conflict.

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data that might explain the myths; for the second kind, historical data could be obtained, and these help to clarify how the hae originate. As an example of the first kind, let us consider the rudimentary myth attached to the sign esege, as told by Kingsford Egembari of Sivepe. In the beginning of time, when people did not yet have clothes to wear or houses to live in, our ancestors used to gather esege leaves to cover themselves and to live in huts made of the same leaves, or else they lived in the open, protected by the shade of the esege tree. Nowadays, the leaves are used as hae and may be eaten as vegetables, but no axe or knife may be used on the tree by those who respect esege as an ancestor. It would seem that here the ancestor after living in very close association with esege, fused with esege (the tree) when he died. The narrator tried to convey that the man was also a tree, or that the tree was also a man. He did this by superimposing the two images, so to speak. Many Orokaiva myths likewise present an image of primordial man, living in what appears to be a pre-cultural period. The esege story is set in that era. The antiquity of the lineage is thus emphasised. Most stories that evoke this precultural period are, however, ‘transformer myths’. They tell of the origin of war, of death, of marriage, of pig domestication, of tar cultivation and the like (Schwimmer 1973, 1974 b, 1979 a). Though the beginning of these stories are set in the precultural era, its events introduce elements of culture by the agency of the ‘transformer’ hero. Such transfor­ mation is, however, lacking in the hae stories. All they do is link a human group to the time of creation and to a distinctive primeval ancestor. There are insufficient data in this story to enable us to conclude that it represents a ‘catastrophe of bifurcation’. We can only argue, on very gen­ eral grounds, that the genesis of any new hae must be a catastrophe of bifurcation, because the hae identifies a new nucleus, distinct from other nuclei. This implies that there has been fission in an existing nucleus, or fusion between existing nuclei. The former would result from a quarrel or from the arrival of migrants, whereas the latter might be the consequence of war and the killing off of most of the members of one or more nuclei. Nonetheless, such comment is based not on the text of the myth but on general knowledge of the society. We obtain a little more information from the myth of the tandere girl, told by the same informant. According to this, all the people went hunting in the bush. A small girl (about five years old) who accompanied them collected all the tandere seeds she saw in the bush, believing them to be areca nuts. She believed this because, if tandere seeds are squeezed, a red fluid comes out that has the appearance of a betelnut mixture. She col­ lected these seeds and stored them on the branch of a tree. When people returned from hunting they saw these seeds. They said: we have to give this girl the name Tandere. The girl then changed into a coconut palm. This myth becomes intelligible only if read alongside another one, from the same village, where a girl is likewise changed into a coconut palm. In that myth (cf Schwimmer 1973, 1974b) all the coconut girl’s lovers died impaled on her breasts, which were like the pointed sheaths on the 376

stem of the coconut palm. When she finally slept with her brother’s wife’s brother (preferred marriage category)17, and he also came to grief on the sheaths, she was killed by her brother, who buried the couple side by side. It was then that she turned into a coconut palm, and her lover into an areca palm. The fruit that fall from these palms are gifts from the one to the other (mortuary gifts). This provides a clue to the logic of the metamorphosis of the tandere girl. She had used tandere seeds to create a kind of icon of an areca palm, first by claiming they were areca nuts and then by heaping them on a tree branch, thus making them resemble fruit growing on an areca palm. When the people, returned from hunting, decided to call this girl Tandere, they placed her before a choice between two possibilities, neither of which was wholly suitable. If she agreed to identify with the ‘signifier’ tandere, she would be unable to express her own identity as she believed it to be, which was somehow associated with the notion of betelnut. On the other hand, it was not possible for her, either, to identify with areca, as the areca palm is a male tree yielding fruit as gifts for a female. We have here a situation that has the makings of a Thom-like catas­ trophe. Petitot (1977) describes it well by the analogy of ‘porte-manteau’ words such as Lewis Carroll’s ‘frumious’, fusing ‘fuming’ and ‘furious’, because the speaker cannot decide which word he wants to say first. Portemanteau words become necessary, says Petitot (p. Ill), ‘des lors qu’ils articulent une serie signifiante marquee d’un exc&s et une serie signifiee marquee d’un manque’. Their structure is ‘a strict disjunctive synthesis’. This means that there is, properly speaking, no relation between the portemanteau words and the signifiers of which it is made up. There is discon­ tinuity. The discontinuities that Thom calls catastrophes are of this type. It is because she wanted, simultaneously, to be tandere and areca, and because this excess in the series of signifiers was accompanied by a defi­ ciency in the series of significata that she created a new word, a new thing perhaps, to fill the gap. That new thing was a coconut palm. For what we have here is a myth to explain the origin of coconut. There is, however, a further twist to the story. The myth is not primarily designed to explain the origin of coconut, but rather the origin of the clan whose emblem is tandere, and to describe the ‘ancestor’ of that clan. The coconut is not suitable as a plant emblem and I have never heard of its being used as such. Nor do members of the clan whose emblem is tandere show any particular respect either for areca or coconuts. The tandere myth is therefore interesting not for what it tells us about this particular plant emblem group. Indeed the relation between the tan­ dere girl and the tree of that name is the simple metonymic one we have met several times before. The myth is interesting, rather, because it has a 17 The marital exchange of sisters was idealised among Orokaiva, but was fairly rare in practice. The argument appears to be that if this kind of marriage fails, no other kind has any chance of succeeding. 377

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form that might be called ‘chreodic’. In order to show this graphically we have reproduced here a generic flat section of the type of ‘catastrophe of bifurcation’ that Thom calls a ‘butterfly’, and we have shown that this provides an exact representation of the myth18. One detail in the myth remains to be eludicated: the fact that the tandere girl is explicitly described as pre-pubescent. Tandere is, one might say, a false icon of areca. Many emblem plants are, in this sense, false icons, i. e. they resemble a product in current use but lacking the qualities that make that product useful. Thus we have seen that the primeval ancestors are represented as using esege for a building material (which it is not though it resembles one), and as treating topu as an edible fig (which it is not). Similarly tandere was treated as areca, although it would never be used for betelnut. In all these cases the primeval ancestors, having a correct general image of the world, but still ignorant of the true qualities of objects, were attracted by false icons19. It is only the advent of culture that permits man, by this view, to distinguish useful objects from useless ones that resemble them. As both coconut and areca nut have (sexual) life-giving qualities that are truly revealed only during the initiation of adolescent boys and girls, the tandere girl, being pre-pubescent, could not have true knowledge of these products. It is for that reason that she did not know the difference between the red fluid yielded by tandere seeds and true areca. It appears that the pre-pubescent girl is here represented as ignorant in the same way as primeval ancestors, but also, if the girl had been nubile, she could only have been represented as wife to areca, after the pattern of the coconutgirl. For we have here not only an ignorance of products but even more, an ignorance of sexuality. It is precisely ignorance of significata of this order that lead to a catas­ trophe of bifurcation during which tendere is engendered as a kind of immature offshort of the coconut. The reaction of coconut and areca nut was the work of transformer deities represented as sexually mature. The creation of the inert tandere seed is the work of the sexually immature coconut girl. Yet, this inertness does not at all trouble those who identify 18 All this is offered rather tentatively and is in need of careful technical study. This catastrophe appears to be of the ‘butterfly’ type, as the spatial interpretation of this cusp (Thom 1981: 93, 188—9, 202-3) is ‘pocket, seed’, which applies well enough to the tandere seed. Its temporal interpretation is either ‘to peel off, ‘exfoliate’, ‘fill a pocket’ (destructive modality), or ‘to give’, ‘to receive’, ‘to empty a pocket’ (construc­ tive modality). The general morphology of this cusp is ‘the gift’. The key elements interpreted by the model are: the taking of the tandere seeds, the constitution of the plant emblem group and the heroine’s role as giver of coconuts. The three points at which the pathway shown on the diagram turns back may also, as Thom remarks, represent the scheme: source - message - destination. Here Tandere is the source, areca is the message and the outcome, or destination, is the coconut palm. 19 The presentation of false icons is a device for hiding initiatory secrets from the noninitiated. For discussion of these devices see Barth 1975, Schwimmer 1981 a. The initiate is subsequently told that the object which appeared to be a is in reality b. 378

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The creation of new hae cannot have been rare, as Williams, without looking for them, found several examples, and so did Jojoga. They seem to have originated especially in the context of migration, war and inter-clan politics. Both the cases I found in Sivepe have to do with the migration of men into the area and their problems in fully integrating with their new community. The men in both cases were of the Jegase clan (from other villages). They both married women of the Seho clan, after settling in Sivepe. The land they farmed largely belonged to the Seho clan. In such cases, migrants do not actually lose the land they owned in their villages of birth, but they leave it to others to look after. After their death, their sons have considerable trouble to receive it back, should they wish to return to

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their father’s village; their grandsons find it more difficult still, unless very good contact has been kept up. On the other hand, the normal rules for transmission of hae stipulate that the maternal hae cannot be passed on to the third generations20. Hence, the grand-children of the immigrant could not use the hae (belonging to a nucleus in Seho clan) which had belonged to their grandmother and which was attached to land on which the family was still farming. The only kind of hae they could inherit (as hae be) would attached to land in the village their grandfather had left. This problem is essentially not an economic one, as these third genera­ tion migrants (in the cases studied) had sufficient access to gardening land. It is rather a problem of identity such as occurs in all societies, including our own, as part of the process of migration. Among the Orokaiva, how­ ever, this problem is conceptualised in terms of emblems of identification, plant emblems. The third generation may identify by means of his hae be, but this provides only feeble status as his nucleus and the land areas of that nucleus are far away. If good contacts were kept up, a man might go and farm on those land areas, but then his family has intermarried with Sivepe people for some generations. On the other hand, the man can always use his maternal hae which belongs to Sivepe. The hae of his national grand­ mother, on the other hand, aren’t really his. He certainly cannot attain to any high status in his village of adoption with so marginal a set of identity tokens. Let us consider how the two migrant families in question coped with this problem. In one case the name of the original male migrant was Orovo (clan: Jegase) who married a Sivepe woman called Sigoga. They had a daughter called Heindu, who married Evari, again a Seho man from Sivepe. Their children were still alive and were my informants. When I asked them to tell me their hae they;

Kelly, R.

1977 Etoro Social Structure, Ann Arbor, Michigan University Press. Leeden, A. C. van der 1960 ‘Social Structure in New Guinea’, Bijdragen tot de Taal - Land- en Volkenkunde, 116: 119-49. L6vi-Strauss, Claude 1962 a Le totemisme aujourd’hui, Paris, PUF. 1962 b La pensee sauvage, Paris, Plon. 1979 La voie des masques, 2~ Edition, Paris, Plon. Morris, Charles 1971 Writings on the General Theory of Signs, Mouton, The Hague. Needham, Rodney 1972 Belief, Language and Experience, Oxford, Blackwell. Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1912 Fourth edition, London, Routledge. 1929 Fifth edition, London, Routledge.

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Petitot, Jean 1977 ‘Remarques sur le verbe “croire”, La fonction symbolique, essais r6unis par Michel Izard et Pierre Smith, Paris* Gallimard, pages 43-51. Pouwer, Jan 1966 a ‘Towards a Configurational Approach to Society and Culture in New Guinea, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 75: 267-286. 1966 b ‘Structure and Flexibility in a New Guinea Society’, Bijdragen tot de Taal Land- en Volkenkunde, 122: 158-170. Translation at sight, Wellington, Victoria University. (New Zealand). 1968 ‘The Structural-Configurational Approach’, in Ino Rossi, ed.. The Uncon­ 1974 scious in Culture, New York, Dutton, pages 238-255. Rimoldi, Max 1966 ‘Land Tenure and Land Use among the Mount Lamington Orokaiva’, New Guinea Research Bulletin 11. Rivers, W. H. R. 1914 The History of Melanesian Society, Cambridge. Rosman A. and Rubel P. 1977 Your Own Pigs You May Not Eat, Chicago University Press. Schwimmer, Eric 1973 Exchange in the Social Structure of the Orokaiva, London, Hurst. 1974a ‘Friendship and Kinship’, E. Leyton ed.. The Compact, ISER, Memorial University of Newfoundland, pages 49-70. 1974b ‘Objects of Mediation: Myth and Praxis’. Ino Rossi ed., The Unconscious in Culture, New York, Dutton, pages 209-237. 1977 ‘What did the Eruption Mean?’, Michael D. Lieber ed., Exiles and Migrants in Oceania, Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii. 1978 ‘L6vi-Strauss and Maori Social Structure’, Anthropologica XX (1-2), pages 201-222. 1979 a ‘Reciprocity and Structure’, Man 14: 271-285. 1979b ‘Aesthetics of the Aika’, S. M. Mead ed.. Exploring the Visual Arts of Oceania, Hawaii University Press, pages 287-292. 1981 a ‘Power and Secrecy’, RSSI 1: 214-243. 1981b ‘Les freres-ennemis’, Quebec, University Laval, D6partement d’anthropologie. 1982 Mythic Realities in Oro Province, paper read at AAA, Washington, 81* Annual Meeting. Sebeok, Thomas 1979 The Sign and Its Masters, University of Texas Press. Serres, Michel 1977 ‘Discours et parcours’, L’identiti, Paris, Grasset, pages 25-49. Strathern, Andrew 1972 One Father, One Blood, Tavistock Publications. Thom, Rene 1981 Modules mathimatiques de la morphogenise, nouvelle 6dition revue et aug­ ment^, Paris, Bourgois. Watson, J. B. 1970 ‘Society as Organised Flow’, SWJA, 26: 2. Weiner, Annette B. 1980 ‘Reproduction: a Replacement for Reciprocity’* American Ethnologist 7: 71-85. Williams, F. E. 1925 ‘Plant Emblems among the Orokaiva’, Journal RAI 53: 361-387. 1930 Orokaiva Society, London, Oxford University Press.

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My paper on iconicity is only the first part of three seminars, where the others deal with index and symbol. It would be ridiculous to separate one from another. (T. A. Sebeok 1981)

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When examining the literature on icons and iconicity, summarized by Sebeok (1976) in an elegant and promising but also critical manner, one cannot help but realize that tradition in the study of iconicity is as much a handicap as a privilege. As Wells stated some years ago (1971: 96), the Peircean icon is actually a concept as old as Plato’s. Philosophers and historians of philosophy have pointed out that similarity, likeness, or, to be more sophisticated, “isomorphism”, are labels derived from a very old tradition of thinking, in which something which exists in the mind is com­ bined with something which simply exists. If we may paraphrase Peirce’s almost slogan-like nutshell definition of sign (aliquid stat pro aliquo), we may also add that in symbols the aliquid is arbitrary and secondary to the aliquo\ thus, we should not study the cultural background of those types of signs separately. In icons the case is different. In May 1867, Peirce attemp­ ted to express his emergent theory of representations (1935: 558): A reference to a ground may also be such that it cannot be prescinded from a reference to an interpretant. ... First. Those whose relation to their objects is a mere community in some quality, and these representations may be termed likenesses. It is well known that he later changed the term likeness into icon, which by origin and use is similarly a cultural nomination, as is the other term, symbol. In Peirce’s view “sign” is a common English word, whereas both icon and symbol refer to the history of culture, namely the Greek terminol­ ogy. Since then all experts and examiners of the term “icon” or “iconicity” have been involved in a discussion about the historical origin and develop­ ment of the icon concept. Even those semioticians who are most hypercriti­ cal or cautious in their use of terminology, such as Eco or Sebeok, feel compelled to deal with the historical background of the icon. When Sebeok circumscribes the lessons of iconicity studies, he refers to the home-raised chimpanzees Washoe and Lucy (1976: 1438), to the philosophical tradition

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from Plato to Peirce (1976: 1445), or even to the “ontogenetic ladder of life” (1976: 1450). There is, however, no need to list here all the pertinent publications, since a separate bibliography (Huggins and Entwisle 1974) gives the necessary details. What are icons, according to semiotics? If we merely follow the classificatory tradition from Peirce to Eco, we may be genuinely content with saying that icons are a kind of sign representing a special kind of represen­ tation. Nevertheless even in a strictly formal classification of signs, the icon concept carries a vivid, moving, historical character. The mathematician Rene Thom (1973) and his follower, the semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok (1976: 1149), describe the origin of the iconic signs as if it were a summary of the meeting between Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, in a very hu­ man, historical, cultural, or one might even say, novelistic way: “a man’s shadow cast the ground, his shape reflected in water, his foot imprinted in sand”. It is not mere coincidence that the scholars who have devoted their attention to icons, as types of signs, have regularly referred to cave art, shadow theatre, magic, masques, verbal metaphors, all of them being pro­ ducts of the history and elements of the culture. When we speak about early forms of icons, we are talking about early forms of human culture, where the word “early” is used in the sense usual in the history and semi­ otics of culture. There are various possible ways of descending to the darkness of the “early icon age”. One of the most popular methods, fascinating and pain­ staking at the same time, is to decipher rock paintings, as the earliest forms of visual art, in terms of images, i.e. of iconic signs. But even a convinced believer in the possibilities of understanding paleolithic art (Kuhn 1967) has been forced by facts to realize that the interpretations of the earliest paintings vary from expert to expert indefinitely. Thanks to the latest anpproaches, we realize that figurative and nonfigurative art dates back further than we have previously supposed; Soviet semioticians, with some chance of success, have attempted to date symmetrical, rhythmical and iconic phenomena back to an astonishingly early period (Nekludov 1972). This does not mean, however, that the beginnings of icons can be traced only by looking back ten thousand years ago. Icons appear in everyday life, accompany artistic experiences, fulfil behaviour patterns, and emerge spontaneously from written and oral texts. The examples in this paper were chosen from traditional, religious, eth­ nic and folk art, but similar results can be drawn from other investigations (with the necessary modifications in regard to different channels of com­ munication, social background and the various forms of meaning). But before we enter into details, it is necessary to make some radical simplifica­ tion in the use of the terms icon (iconicity) versus index, symbol, and sign in general. The simplification is necessary for the purpose of this paper. Still, I am not very convinced that it would be impossible to continue and elaborate it in order to create terminological foundations for a social semi­ otics or a semiotics of culture in the strict sense of these terms. 386

If signs are representations, semiosis is the sign process in wich, by which, or during which signs appear, exist, and disappear1. According to the classification of signs, in the index we meet the pres­ ence of both aliquid and aliquo, while in the icon we recognize distance of one from another, and in the symbol we actually find the absence of the aliquo. On the other hand, semiosis can be characterized in the index as immediate, in the icon as close, and finally in the symbol as mediate. This schematization has been made for the sake of understanding the early forms of icons. We should also add a communication theory framework. In order not to confuse the terminology, in the following parts I shall use the terms encoding and decoding, and encoder and decoder, for describing semiosis in a communication theory context. For social semiotics, how­ ever, it is necessary to return later to the terms “social communication” or “community”. The difference between index, icon, and symbol is on the one hand classificatory; on the other hand, it originates in the development of signs. Let us take a very simple case: day/night signs belong equally to all the three categories mentioned above, according to their actual development within social use. The sun for the day and the moon for the night, as far as their actual presence is concerned, are indices: they represent an immediate semiosis, inasmuch as we can physically see the heavenly bodies. In a newspaper weather forecast column, or for hotel reservation tickets, they are icons, because there exists a distance between the aliquid and the aliquo; but, since the connection is clear, the semiosis is close. On medieval church paintings of Christ on the cross, above the cross there typically appear images of the sun and the moon. In this case, the images are symbols, since they do not represent the original day/night or sun/moon phenomena, but refer instead to the New Testament narrative of the Crucifixion and to the entire universe; they can be therefore labeled as cases of mediated semi­ osis. They appear as symbols at the end of a long development, in two senses. First, the image of the sun/moon on the religious painting is a simple imitation of the sun/moon drawings everywhere; thus, on a pictorial level there is a connection between index, icon and symbol of the sun/ moon: the later ones are not understandable without knowledge of the earlier. Secondly, the ideology or story behind them also represents a development from index to symbol. In the New Testament texts there is no word about the moon in the chapters on the death of Jesus Christ. They speak (with some differences) about the darkness between the sixth hour and the ninth hour, and only Luke mentions the sun explicitly. (Fie does not mention the moon, because, of course, sun and moon could not usually 1 About the social character and the “life” of signs very many preliminary remarks have been made, but there is no systematic survey of this problem. In my introduction to semiotics (Voigt 1977), I was not able to deal with the problem adequately because of lack of space. 387

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be seen at the same time.) We know from church tradition that the death of Christ was considered as a return to chaos, described in a negative way, in opposition to the Genesis story of God’s creation of the sun and the moon. The sun and moon above the Cross of Christ are symbols of the universe, of the integrity of day/night, of Genesis and the Passion at the same time. Encoding and decoding is possible only when one is familiar with the history behind the symbols, when the communication is one which has occurred in society, in a community of communication - in a word, within the framework of social communication2. Everybody knows that there is a long journey from the first sign to the first symbol, or from the index-like childhood of a sign to the symbol-like existence of the same. Still the social, temporal, and communicational character of sign development has not always been stressed in a proper way; I therefore want to quote here a passage from Peirce, emphasizing his “developmental” and “social” terminology. A symbol is defined as a sign which becomes such by virtue of the fact that it is interpreted as such. The signification of a complex symbol is determined by certain rules of syntax which are part of its meaning. A simple symbol is interpreted to signify what it does from some accidental circumstance or series of circumstances, which the history of any word illustrates. For example, in the latter half of the XVth century, a certain model of vehicle came into use in the town of Kots (pronounced, kotch) in Hungary. It was copied in other towns, doubtless with some modifications, and was called a kotsi szeker, or Kots cart. Copied in still other towns, and always more or less modified, it came to be called, for short a cotch. It thus came about that the coach was used, first, for a magnificent vehicle to be drawn by horses for carrying persons in state and in such comfort as that state required; then, for a large and pretentious vehicle to be drawn by four or more horses for conveying passengers from one town to another; and finally, to any large vehicle conveying passengers at a fare by the seat from one town to another. In all ordinary cases, it is, and must be, an accidental circumstance which causes a symbol to signify just the characters that it does; for were there any necessary, or nearly necessary, reason for it, it would be this which would render the sign a sign, and not the mere fact that so it would be interpreted, as the definition of a symbol requires (Peirce 1976: 254-255).3 The history of the English word coach in itself exemplifies the development from index to symbol: kotsi szeker, ‘cart from Kots’, as an analytical com­ pound, is the original index that expresses an immediate presence; coach, ‘any large vehicle’, achieved the position of a symbol, with interlingual mediation (from Hungarian to English) and with absence of the original aliquo, because the present-day coach is neither a horse-cart, nor made in Hungary, and because the whole history of coach-making and coach semantics is in fact unknown for the majority of actual coach-users. To speak of the development of signs in their social context and to point out the transitory characteristics from index to symbol, where the icon is at 2 On Day/Night symbolism, a vast bibliography could be compiled. Instead of dealing with this here, I prefer to just remind readers of the similar problems associated with Right/Left; this topic was well covered by Needham (1973). 3 The new Hungarian etymological dictionaries support the old etymology; this suggests that Peirce probably used a German source for his etymological remarks. 388

the midpoint, is necessary, but makes semiotic description more compli­ cated. Another example can show this. The Greek word icon (‘a special type of painting’), ground and basis for some confusion even among semioticians, is a good candidate for some further clarification in that direction. The most common religious image in the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, according to the art historians, was cre­ ated as early as the first centuries of Oriental Christianity. There are vari­ ous traditions and schools of it, and the icon is highly esteemed as a form of art in Greece, Russia, throughout the Balkans, and elsewhere. Art histo­ rians with or without a semiotic background have studied icons, because this kind of “portrait” represents a special type of artistic transformation (cf. Wallis 1975, Zhegin 1976, and works by Gombrich, Shapiro, the Rus­ sian linguist Uspensky, etc.). Still, a strictly semiotic analysis of icons remains to be done, not least because of the fact that icons are not always icons in a semiotic sense. To make the tautological distinction clearer, we should quote some theoreticians of Eastern Orthodoxy. There have, of course, been various interpretations of icons in different times, lands, church movements, etc., but in the Orthodox church it is a commonly shared opinion that icons do not represent a person. Scholars dealing with icons repeatedly stress the fact that icons are highly sophisticated objects of meditation; they, are in fact, usually regarded as symbols. By looking more closely at the interpre­ tation of icons by Orthodox scholars, we find this solution to be unneces­ sarily easy and quick. As the church historian and Russian scholar Ouspensky said, In depicting the Saviour, we do not depict either His Divine or His human nature, but His Person in which both these natures are incomprehensibly combined. We depict His Person, since the icon can only be a personal, hypostatical image, while being natural, “essence has not independent existence, but is seen in persons”. The icon is connected with the original, not on the strength of an identity between its own nature, but because it depicts his person and bears his name, which connects the icon with the person it repre­ sents and gives the possibility of communion with him and the possibility of knowing him. Owing to this connection “homage paid to the image is transmitted to the original”, say the Holy Fathers and the Ecumenical Council, quoting the words of Basil the Great. Inasmuch as the icon is an image, it cannot be consubstantial with the original; otherwise it would cease to be an image and would become the original, would be of one nature with it. The icon differs from the original precisely by the fact that it has another, different nature, for “the representation is one thing, and that which it represents is another.” In other words, although the two objects are essentially different, there exists between them a known connection, a certain participation of one in the other (Ouspensky and Lossky 1955: 34). Ouspensky’s is a very cautious theological point of view, in which he tries to differentiate the Orthodox understanding of church painting sharply, both from that of the Western church and from that of the Iconoclasts. Despite his theological vocabulary, it is evident that in icons the author sees two components (our aliquid and aliquo, respectively), the similarity and the dissimilarity which, in a sense, form an equilibrium. The picture is 389

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not a portrait (it is not an index in semiotic terminology) either of the divine or of the human nature of God, but on the other hand it depicts “His Person”. The icon is a personal picture which is “connected” with the original, depicts his person and bears his name (it is not a symbol in semiotical terminology): it cannot be consubstantial with the original, it has a different nature, and there still exists between them “a known con­ nection, a certain participation of the one in the other”. The play with the words presence and absence (according to our termiology, immediate and mediate semiosis) suggests, after all, that icons (qua pictures) are icons (qua signs types), and as such are located between the two opposites of index and symbol. The troublesome position of balancing icons between Western religious art and the Iconoclasts’ total rejection of them is not only a religious concern; it also deeply affects the artistic possibilities. When Ouspensky later deals with the historical development of icons, he men­ tions the fact that only by the hard work of icon-interpreters can the original sign-character of the icons be saved. He contrasts the decadence of religious faith and artistic skill with the vigilance of the interpreters: Just as religious thought was not always on the level of theology, so artistic creation was not always on the level of genuine iconography even before then. Therefore one cannot take every image for an indisputable authority, since it may correspond to the teaching of the Church, or may not correspond to it, and thus lead into error. In other words, one can distort the taaching of the Church by image as well as by word (Ouspensky and Lossky 1955: 49, footnote 1). The aesthetic determinism of icons is expressed also by the thematic choice. As one*advocate says, It is worthy of •bservation that our iconography does not deviate into details outside the theme, but rather delimits itself to the characteristic events and to their incidents, which are precisely exalted and emphasized by worship. ... Also the veneration ... dictates iconographic fhemes, related to this worship (Kalokyris 1971: 84). One wonders what occasioned this vehement condemnation of portraits in Western art. Orthodox theologians do not only reject specific cases, as when Titian unhesitantingly presented Eleonora Gonzaga as a completely nude “Redining Aphrodite” (now in the Dresden Museum in Dresden), and later as the “Virgin with the Child Jesus” (now in the Uffizi, Florence) (Kalokyris 1971: 41). The blasphemy of the equivalence suggested between the nude Aphro­ dite and the Holy Virgin Mary is probably not accepted by all Roman Catholic theologians either, but Orthodox clerics argue in general against portraits in Church art. I think the answer can be given semiotically: they do not see the icons (as pictures) to be symbols (as a class of signs), where the absence from the original is great enough to destroy the unnecessary allusions to the depicted person, but they consider the icons (as pictures) to be icons (as a dass of signs), where the distance between aliquid and aliquo exists, but is a close one. Orthodox inconography depicts not only God and the Angels (i.e., otherwise non-existent, nonvisualizable figures) in a highly 390

stylized way, but, by the same method, trees, rocks, lambs, etc. - objects which are visible in everyday life. Icons slowly become artistic symbols, but throughout the history of Orthodox church art they remain caught between the categories of index and symbol. It is necessary to emphasize that church art is differently used in Western and Eastern Christianity, respectively. Orthodox theologians very con­ sciously point out that difference. Still, with a more intimate knowledge of the Orthodox church service, the actual (liturgical) use of the icons appears in a new light. As may be well known, in Orthodox churches, some icons are presented in a special display according to the liturgy of the special day. Thus, they are changed from time to time, so that there exists a very close connection between the actual time of year and the specific icon. On the other hand, however, icons and church services are simply timeless. In Orthodox theology time in worship is not considered under the concept of the natural flow of of events, that is, of the past, the present, and the future; in worship the past and the future are regarded as a direct present (Kalokyris 1971: 85). This is not a vague metaphor, for it is sometimes expressed in an immense statement of faith (e.g. Theodoru: 1958: 83): time ceases to exist in the form of past, present, and future, and is changed into a mystical life-experience in which, while eternity is lived in the present, the things of the past and of the future and even the eschatological things, that is, prehistory and the main stations of the redemptive work of Christ, as well as the salutary gifts extending to the last days which flowed from Him, are condensed and lived mystically as alive and present before

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(It should be noted, that the theological explanation of timelessness fur­ thers the understanding of icons!) It is hardly necessary to say thatjlhe presence in index and the absence in symbol can also be understood from a temporal point of view, so that the “lifting of the concept of time” in worship gives icons a very special semiotic status4. From the above we may conclude that icons as images are also icons as signs. But icons exhibit a curious property in this respect: theology tries to deny the iconic (in the semiotic sense) character of the icons (as pictures). Theology presents icons as sacred and unchangeable, while art history treats icons as belonging to schools, even to particular artists, so that, despite all the similarity of patterns, an expert, or a churchgoer, even finds the differences with ease, The iconic character of icons has to be suspended by special speculative means. It affects the meaning of icons; for the visual image, even theologcal “suspending” could be successful. Similarly a very interesting field of study in semiotics is “iconology”. A historian of European semiotics must study both the original writings of the

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4 On icons the number of books in art history is so numerous that it is impossible to list them all. Nevertheless they differ in various aspects regarding the understanding and interpreting of icons, which fact proves the necessity of an independent iconic (= semi­ otic) analysis of the icons. 391

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early iconologists and the iconological traditions in German, Russian, Eng­ lish and American art theory. The Warburg Institute and the works of Panofsky, Gombrich and others deserve a thorough semiotic investigation, which for practical reasons cannot be done here. Nevertheless, we will try to present here some of the original ideas within the framework of our terminology. There are not very many internal definitions of iconology, but we might quote an iconological representation of iconology. In the famous Viennaiconology of J. B. Boudard (1766: II 98), there is a picture and a descrip­ tion of the term: Iconologie. C’est le nom de la Science contenue dans se livre, elle fait distinguer les attributs, les symboles, & les Hi6roglyphes dont on se sert pour caracteriser les Vertus, les Vices & toutes les Passions que l’on veut personnifier. Les Egyptiens cn ayant les premiers inventeurs, on la represente vetue & coeffee a l’Egypticnne, tenant d’unc main une plume & de l’autre un peinceau d'ob partent des traits qui semblcnt animcr dcs gdnies qui sont pr6s d’elle. Le distinctif de ses genies cst une petite flamme qu ils ont sur la tete, & les attributs qu’ils tiennent dlsignent quels vices ou quelles vertus ils repr^sentent. (Again, one should pay attention to the “semiotic” terminology, including even terms like “passion”.) We understand the implications of the picture and of its explanation, if we know the history of iconologie in Europe.There were previous at­ tempts, but iconology was made popular by the Italian scholar Cesare Ripa, who first published his lconologia book in Rome in 1593 without illustrations. The first illustrated edition appeared in 1603, again in Rome, a five volume polyglot edition was published in Perugia between 1764 to 1767, while amongst the numerous translations we should mention the earliest English ones of 1777-1779 and 1785. Iconology, so extremely popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was an attempt to combine at least three kinds of erudition. The images which it attempted to explain mostly derive from Greek and Roman mythology, astrology, and, to a minimal degree, Christian church art. The survival and even resurrec­ tion of the pagan gods in Renaissance art made possible the shift from religious (i.e. Christian) to mythological (i.e. Ancient World) imagery, thereby gaining a further dimension in time, a necessary “translation” or “explanation” in terms of transcultural evidences. The visual image and the mythology behind them underwent a moralistic interpretation (the third element in iconology), where virtues and vices, albeit named and depicted after Greek art, became understood in a Christian context. In the introductory chapters of the iconological books there is usually a short description of the topic: iconology deals with visual images (and not with poetic images), follows and interprets Greek and Latin representations, deals with gods, allegories of feasts, virtues and vices, calendar customs, emblems, coats of arms, etc. The authors usually stress that hieroglyphs and symbols are also icons in this sense and mention the fact that the original language of these icons has generally been lost. The Egyptians, as 392

inventors of both icons and of iconology, appear as a fixed topos. For semiotics the classification of the depicted phenomena is of great import­ ance, because it covers various fields of human life, including emotions, behavior, etc. In the descriptive parts of this iconology the human body is carefully demonstrated: disposition and quality, profile or en face rep­ resentation of the head, joy, sadness, hate or love as expressed on the face, the positions of arms and feet, the garments in which the figures appear, the kinds of ornament, tokens or symbols they carry, other auxiliary fi­ gures or persons, etc. These things are always very elaborately shown and explained. It would be a simple matter to describe the icons in an iconological handbook by means of descriptive methods of gesture notation5. We should mention that in the first editions of Ripa’s Iconologia there is no detailed definition of the topic: the book simply follows the alphabetical order of the keywords. Only in the later editions do we find an analytical preface, referring to the tasks and the divisions of iconology. The most important source material among them is furnished by the 1644 Paris vol­ ume, titled Iconologie, ov explication nouvvelle de plvsievrs images, emblemes; et avtres figvres Hyerogliphiques des Vertus, des Vices, des Arts, des Sciences, des Causes naturelles, des Humeurs differentes, & des Passions humaines. Oevvre avgmentee d’vne seconde partie; necessaire a tovte sorte d'esprits, et particvlierement a cevx qvi aspirent a estre, ov qvi sont en effet Oratevrs, Poetes, Sculpteurs, Peintres, Ingenieurs, Autheurs de Medailles, de Devises, de Ballets, & de Poemes Dramatiques. Tirte des Recherches et des Figures par Cesar Ripa, moralisees par l. Bavdoin. The long title not only gives us a true table of the contents of the book, but also provides us with pragmatic data as to who the readers of the volume were supposed to be. In every case, when a speaker, a poet, a painter or the producer of a theatrical performance used such an iconology, he would have adapted the data to his actual tasks. The interpreter for whom the explanations were made here plays an important role. Again, too, we encounter in the use of the signs taken from an iconology book the distance between the aliquid and the aliquo, revealing a close, but not immediate form of semiosis. A very similar phenomenon, sometimes even inseparable from iconolo­ gy, is the tradition of emblems and emblem books. Historians of this genre of imagery (the best summary is still the classical work of Mario Praz (1964)) stress the fact that the vogue for emblems started in the sixteenth century, though using some older sources, such as the Hyeroglyphica of Horapollos (the best edition, with rich commentaries, is by Sbordone 1940), Renaissance mythologies, and so forth. The first and most impor­ tant emblem book as such was compiled by Andrea Alciati (Emblematum liber; first edition, Augsburg 1531). In fact, Alciati made a new genre, more a literary than a pictorial one, and used the term emblem in a special meaning. Still, the emblem literature has generally kept the original ter­ minology and taxonomy of emblems. In an emblem book one finds three

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components. There is a picture (called icon), with a proverbial phrase (which is usually called lemma, but sometimes motto, or, erroneously, devise) referring to the picture; the third part is an explanatory epigram. The poetic and scholarly erudition of the emblem books is concentrated in the paradoxical and enigmatic character of both the picture and the prover­ bial phrase, and the solution is given by the specially created epigram. In the original forms the relation between the icon and the lemma is more simple, and at the same time more interesting for semiotic research, be­ cause the interconnection between word and picture is very close and can be described according to the suggested sign typology. But when a connection between image and text is simple, and the sign seems to be too index-like, scholars, or readers with erudition, tend to create more complicated cases. Praz quotes (1964: 34-36) one of the ear­ liest and best known emblem-writers, the Hungarian humanist Zsamboki (known in his Latinized name as Johannes Sambucus), who in the preface to his Emblemata et aliquot Nummi antiqui opens (published by Plantin in Antwerp in 1564) writes against the identification of the text (epigram) with the picture (emblem): Non satis ergo vident, quid Emblema sit, qui quasvis sententias, historias, fabulas vulgo tritas, umbris figurarum, res codem exprimentibus modo, aut quolibet heroum dictum lemmate informatum, emblema existimant. Quis enim hoc pacto non poetarum yvtupag, fabulas, exempla historiarum omnia, proverbia, apophtcgmata non suffigurarit? According to Praz, Sambucus follows this principle only to a limited extent in his own emblems, and the majority of his emblems are no more mysteri­ ous than illustrated proverbs, although, without the help of the lemma or epigram, the illustrations would be incomprehensible. Although a shift of taste and style towards the baroque conceit is evident here, for us the communicative aspect of Sambucus’ argumentation is the most important element. If the illustrated proverbs, fables, maxims, and historical anec­ dotes are not elaborate enough for Sambucus, it means that they share, not a symbolic form, but only a less elaborate mode of expression; they repre­ sent icons (as a type of signs). From the illustration (which in a very special way can be labelled as an index) to a mysterious conceit, there must be a constant transition, created by authors and readers alike. There were also other attempts too to make semiosis via emblems more complicated. When the Jesuits outlined the possibilties of picture analysis, they invented a new field of activity, which they called iconomystics - the science of pictures which teach and interpret the mysteries of the Faith. The name “Iconomystica” was given it by the German Jesuit Jacob Masen, author of Ars nova argutiarum (Cologne, 1649) and of the grandiose Speculum imaginum veritatis occultae, exhibens symbola, emblemata, hieroglyphica, aenigmata (Cologne 1650). Iconomystics describes images according to the actual interest of the interpreter, in this case that of the Jesuits (Praz 1964: 173-174). Historians of cultural curiosities often come back to the seventeenth century, when they want to quote absurd, tantaliz­ ing or witty explanations of images. 394

! Both for the creation (coding) and for the interpretation (decoding) of emblems and similar illustrations, it was necessary that the actual pictures be understood according to different levels of signification. They could serve the purposes of education, as indices by immediate semiosis, or they could be elaborated even as symbols mediated by semiosis, with great distance or none at all between the aliquid and the aliquo. Looking at the different interpretation of the same motifs (e.g. grape, wheel, armors, cross), we also meet a large variety of possibilities in terms of the degree of semiosis. This, too, is a field for future detailed studies in the semiotics of culture. Traditional folk art and popular art in general show iconic properties for three reasons. As scholars have repeatedly pointed out, popular and folk imagery very often took impressions, models, themes and style elements from professional art, most often when the models and modes of imagery are similar. Iconography as a branch of art history has devoted much attention to the contacts between sophisticated and popular art. A second way the connections can be exemplified is by the fact that very many art objects exist for ordinary people as icons (in the art history sense). In peasant houses there is a special room for ornaments, where religious pictures, soldiers’ photos, portraits of political leaders, cattle show awards or educational diplomas are exhibited. From a social semiotic point of view the sign character of all those exponents is the same; and if we describe one kind of them as an icon (e.g. religious portraits or photographs), it leads us automatically to accept the fact that the others are more or less icons too. The third form of iconicity in peasant art is the manner in which human figures are depicted. It is a very complicated problem in itself; therefore, I shall here only stress its importance. It is obvious that since the Stone Age human representations have ex­ isted within the realm of art. Still, in peasant folk art, the predominance of human figures appears quite recently. In Hungarian folk art, it is in the socalled “shepherds’ art”, which dates back no further than the end of the eighteenth century, that we encounter the first illustrations with one or two figures, sometimes with inscriptions, and sometimes without. The scene is usually taken from the highwayman’s (the betyar’s) life: a man and a woman are drinking at an inn, gendarmes are taking away the highway­ man, or he is firing his gun at the gendarmes. The illustration is usually carved with an inlay technique on small wooden or horn boxes, intended as containers for tobacco, a razor, or matches. The name of the main hero, or a short description of the event, usually a part of a robber’s song or high­ wayman ballad, is carved on the box. Because the small boxes were perfect presents, the buyer’s name, and often also the artist’s, usually also appear in the inscription. The whole artistic appearance is idyllic in character, and usually in the classic rococo style. The unfortunate robbers are depicted in what were then up-to-date fashions, with “chimney-hats”. Their gorgeous cloaks are depicted in an ‘Egyptian’ perspective, since the largest possible decorative square has to be displayed; they do indeed look like real dan395

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dies would do. Peasant ideals of both life style and artistry are dominant in this type of folk art. A stylized portrait of a known person, his name on the box, with some words of a folk song - all this should tempt us to see icons (as signs) and iconicity (he artistic methods) as the most important features in the imagery6. However, as the latest studies try to demonstrate (Verebelyi 1981; Voigt 1981), neither from a historical nor from a sociological point of view should we be much convinced of the “folk art” character of these illustrations. As for their “iconicity” in a semiotic sense, the images are far from being symbolic. Despite some attempts to interpret the flowers and rosettes as sexual symbols, the composition of the images is of simple and reflexive character. The names and textual references reinforce the indexical qual­ ities in the imagery; nevertheless, they are not simple illustrations and have achieved the status of an independent artistic quality. We might understand the artistic form better if we compared it with anthropomorphic illustrations. The most well known forms in Hungary are the pottery wine jars in the shape of a man (called Miskakancso Michaeljar’) or, as a later counterpart, a woman (called Boskekancso or Jutkakancso: “‘Elisabeth-jar’ or ‘Judith-jar’”). This type of pottery was very com­ mon at the Upper Tisza area (East-Central Hungary) by the middle of the nineteenth century, and was made by local potters. There are various theories to account for both the origin of the type, and its name, but no convincing solution has yet been found. The female figure seems to be secondary both in time and popularity, and the man represents a hussar with a hat, but with a snake on the front part of his body. Despite some unconvincing Freudian interpretations, it is not known how, and why, this strange idea was elaborated in Hungary. But we do know that an­ thropomorphic pottery is very rare in Hungary, and does not represent any “iconictiy” on the level of consciousness. Formally, the jars can be under­ stood as icons, but, as far as we know, they do not function as icons in terms of intentionality. This is why one should also have doubts concerning the iconicity of the carved box figures. A preliminary comparison between the iconicity of the carved boxes and that of the anthropomorphic jars indicates that in the first case, the figure on the lid (aliquid) is an image of one person (aliquo)\ in Peircean ter­ minology it is a sin-sign. A male jar (“Michael-jar” is a sin-sign too, but here an individual jar is a token of the jar-type. In the first case then the iconicity may exist between the box and the particular highwayman; while in the second case the iconicity (if there is any) is of a different, and more general character. The distance between the two elements in case of the boxes is mainly the following: a wood carving, for instance, may represent one moment in the life of the highwayman, it is a “temporary icon” of his life. In the second case the jar does not have temporary iconicity. In terms 6 The illustrations of Hungarian folk art are to be found in Hofer and F61 1967 and Domanovszky 1981. 396

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of semiosis, the box is close, whereas the jar is much nearer, to a mediated semiosis. If we combine these statements, we arrive at the conclusion that while the boxes exhibit a shift between presence and distance (i.e. between index and icon), the jars exhibit a major shift between close and mediated semiosis (i.e. between the icon and symbol). In both cases the “iconicity” of use is a very important feature. Boxes are decorative presents, their use is of secondary character. Jars too are decorative, but they were used for drinking wine or water. The disconnection between use and imagery in both cases is very striking. The box images have a textural character, the jar represents a plasic form. In a word, both cases illustrate a very complex aspect of iconicity, which ought to be studied in detailed research. Sebeok mentions in his survey (1976: 1436) that magic often uses images and effigies. In Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, in fact, there are innumerable cases of something standing for something else. But a closer look at Frazer’s work can lead to some unexpected results. Although the index to his third edition (in twelve volumes) is a bulky volume in itself, we do not find in it any term like sign, symbol or icon. Frazer seems to be reluctant to use such general terms. Instead, he prefers case study descrip­ tions, and terms like “effigy” or “image”. In his Aftermath: A Supplement to the Golden Bough (which was originally published in 1936, nearly twenty years after he had completed it) he had the opportunity of returning to the general problems of magic, and images included in magic. As is well known, this book contains the minimal definition of his classification of magic. The binary distinction is the following:

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... homoeopathic or imitative magic, which is based on the principle of resemblance, on the assumption that like things produce like effects. The other great branch of sympathe­ tic magic, which I have called contagious magic, rests on the assumption that things which have once been conjoined remain ever after, even when disjoined from each other, in sympathetic relation, such that whatever is done to the one affects the other in like manner (1955: 48). It is striking that Frazer here groups things together with things, and does not refer to non-thing-like phenomena. (This may be the reason why he does not treat shadows and souls in the same volume as magical objects.) Frazer’s system is one step away from a semiotic description of representa­ tion. According to him, the kernel of magic (what we might call a sign) is the likeness between things and things, when an aliquid produces an aliquo. Not only in cases of imitative magic, but also in cases of contagious magic, the relation is the same; only the nature of the relation is different. Things produce things in magic. Instead of human beings we may use effigies, and the invisible forces or spirits could also be represented by effigies. Frazer’s positivistic and pragmatic view stresses the importance of the creative action in magic: one makes an effigy and then uses (in fact, mostly abuses, or even destroys) it. An effigy is no longer an index, and it is not yet a symbol, but it exists between them in the form of an icon (as a type of sign). The close connection between the original thing and its effigy is self-evident. The interesting part of Frazer’s assumption is that he does

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not see in this respect any difference between homoeopathic and sym­ pathetic magic. One might think that the second case does not produce images or effigies, because the linkage between the two things in sym­ pathetic magic exists simply inasmuch as they once touched one another. From Frazer’s mostly enumerative catalogue of evidence, it is not entirely clear whether he understood the problem in his classificatory model; on the other hand, it is true that the practice of magic is exactly the same in both cases. If we do not know about the actual connection between the two things in question, there is no way of telling the distinction between them, purely by knowing the form of the actual magical practice. As we know from L6vi-Strauss’ remarks on Marcel Mauss’ theory of magic, practice is the very core of magic. Therefore, if we want to under­ stand the practice of icons, in terms both of the distance between the aliquid and the aliquo and of the close form of semiosis, we should investi­ gate actual magical practise. To quote just one example, let us refer to the description which immediately follows Frazer’s classification as outlined in Frazer’s supplement to The Golden Bough (1955: 48-49): ... among the Kai of Northern New Guinea a magician who desires to injure a person seeks to possess himself of some portion of his victim’s person or of something which has been in contact with him, such as a hair of his body, a drop of his sweat, his spittle, or the remains of his food, or a shaving of wood. All these things must be taken quite fresh, as otherwise it would be uncertain whether the soulstuff of the man still remained in them. In order to ensure that the vital energy of the intended victim is still in the relic, the object is inserted in a small bamboo tube and put by the magician under his arm-pit to keep it warm. Afterwards he wraps the relic in a Gama leaf, in order that, just as Gama leaves are devoured by caterpillars, so will the body of his victim become the food of worms. Afterwards he puts the relic in a bamboo cane, and wraps it again in Gama leaves, and ties them with the leaves of a certain climbing plant. This climbing plant withers and decays very quickly, and so shall the charmed man quickly lose his strength, and die. Frazer himself concludes, in a statement of some importance for any semi­ otic analysis of the case: “Thus in these enchantments the magician em­ ploys both contagious and homoeopathic magic for the destruction of his victim.” In magical practise, we thus encounter the inseparable connection between index, icon, and symbol, and similarly between immediate, close, and mediate ways of semiosis. A “portion” of a victim’s person is clearly an index according to semiotic terminology; on the other end of the scale a certain climbing plant, which withers and decays very quickly, is to be considered more as a symbol than as an icon, because the magician wants the victim to die, not just to wither and then decay. In order to eliminate distance and enforce immediate contact in a spectacular way, the magician inserts the object into a container and puts it under his armpit. It is a well known fact that church icons are used for magical healing, and both in Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches there are the ex-voto figures, otherwise known as offerings, which represent a sick part of the body, in the hope of a magical cure, or in gratitude for one already achieved. Verbal effigies, as in prayers and curses, are very common in 398

iV. traditional cultures all over the world. Texts of magical formulas and charms refer to homoeopathic and sympathetic magic, and one should study this corpus from a semiotic point of view. Because of the limited space of my paper, I am not able to deal with the problems of soul, shadow, ghost, Doppelganger, alter ego, etc. from a similar point of view. It should be mentioned, too, that cloth and its oppo­ site, nakedness, could also serve iconic purposes. Much the same is true for body painting, tattooing, and the like (see Blacking 1977, etc.)7. Masks are not doubt one of the most important phenomena in human culture. They also offer excellent possibilities for semiotic description. But just because of the very complex character of their semantics (as has been masterfully shown by Levi-Strauss (1974)), it is not easy to establish to what extent they are icons. A formal analysis of masks* from those of the cave known as Les Trois Frtres to the mortal masks of pop stars, can show the proportional continuity of masks in human culture, but we should be misled if we did not also find out differences in their actual use. Without exploring the use of masks, and in general without an empirical and prag­ matic study of them, the study of their iconicity will not yield substantive results. To sum up, I now return to two suggestions made above. First, signs do not exist once and for all; they are made, they appear and they disappear. Their existence can be described both through sign classification and by classification of the types of semiosis. Various degrees of distance and closeness are observable among them. We need more thorough description of the facts of the existence of signs. I have tried to show here how the problem might be approached. The second remark is a simple statement. Not only in a theoretical framework, but also in the “life of signs”, there are many connecting paths between different types of signs. Early forms of icons are signs on the way from index to symbol, and this interconnection, oscillation and develop­ ment can occur in every moment of semiosis.

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References Blacking, 1977 Boudard, 1776 Bouissac, 1973

J. ed. The Anthropology of the Body, London. Giovanni Battista (J. B.) Iconologie, I—III. Vienne (French edition of the Italian original). Paul La mesure des gestes. Prolegomfcnes & la s£miotique gestuelle. La Haye Paris. Domanovszky, Endre 1981 A magyar n£pi dfszft6mtiv6szet. Budapest.

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Frazer, Sir James George Aftermath. A Supplement to The Golden Bough. London (reprint). 1955 Hofer, TamSs - F61, Edit Saints, Shepherds, Soldiers. Budapest. 1967 Huggins, W. H. - Entwisle, Doris R. Iconic Communication: An Annotated Bibliography. Baltimore. 1974 Kalokyris, Constantine D. 1971 The Essence of Orthodox Iconography. Brookline, Mass. Kuhn, Herbert 1967 Geschichte der Erforschung der Eiszeitmalerei. Frankfurt. L6vi-Strauss, Claude 1975 La voie des masques. I—II. Geneve. Needham, Rodney ed. 1973 Right and Left. Essays in Dual Symbolic Classification. Chicago Nekludov, S. Yu. red. 1972 Rannye formy iskusstva. Moscow. Ouspensky, Leonid - Lossky, Vladimir 1955 The Meaning of Icons. Boston. Peirce, Charles Sanders 1935-66 Collected Papers. Cambridge, Mass. Praz, Mario 1964 Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery. Rome (2nd ed). Sbordone, Francesco 1940 Hori Apollinis Hieroglyphica. Napoli. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1976 Iconicity, MLN 91, 1427-1456. 1981 Plenary session of the International Summer Institute, 1-26 June 1981. Nash­ ville. Theodorou, Evangelos 1958 H6 morph6tik£ axia tu Iskontos Triodiou, Athens. Thom, Ren6 1973 De l’icone au symbole, Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme. 22-23, 85-106. Vereb61yi, Kincsfl 1981 Historical Styles in Hungarian Folk Art (Manuscript). 1977 Bevezetds a szemiotik^ba, Budapest. Voigt, Vilmos 1981 Lectures on Ethnosemiotics (Manuscript for Semiotic Summer School in Nashville, Tennessee). Wallis, Mieczislaw 1975 Arts and Signs, Bloomington Wells, Rulon 1971 Distinctively Human Semiotic. In: Essays in Semiotics. Ed. Kristeva, JulieRey-Debove, Josette - Umiker, Donna Jean. The Hague, 95-119. Zhegin, L. F. 1976 The Language of a Pictorial Work. The Hague-Paris.

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On Some Rhetorical Uses of Iconicity in Cultural Ideologies1 t i

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Michael Herzfeld, Bloomington

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1. Iconicity and the backgrounding of rhetoric Iconicity, perhaps more than any other semiotic process or property, ‘backgrounds’ (Douglas 1975: 4) its own semiotic character for the human observer. From original to simulacrum is a short, often circular path. Gi­ ven the potentiality for lying as a minimal definiens of all semiosis (Eco 1976: 7), the icon must be the most deviously employed of all signs, since it is often not seen as a sign at all. Indeed, the literalism which can be attacked so effectively in verbal or cultural translation (Beidelman 1980, 1981; Crick 1976; Goldstein 1976, Willis 1980) creeps up on us much more easily when the question of similarity arises, especially - but by no means exclusively - in the visual arena. Since ideological rhetoric often seeks to disguise its own semiotic motivation (Eco 1976: 155), it is likely to be especially well served by judicious applications of the iconicity principle. Nationalistic and other cultural ideologies provide an excellent illustra­ tion of this in their frequent reliance on claims of similarity between mod­ ern and ancient cultures. These claims, which are essentially appeals for legitimacy on the basis of historical priority, are grounded in literalistic ideas about cultural content - that is, about the etymological, archaeologi­ cal, genetic, and ethnological data, out of which historical continuities can be constructed. The reliance of this type of ideological discourse upon the iconicity principle has so far largely eluded detailed analysis, a fact which in itself suggests how effective the backgrounding has been. The enormous range and variety of scholarly materials adduced in this enterprise have enabled politicians, ideologues, and learned writers of many kinds to en­ gage in elaborate forms of bricolage in many different parts of the world. Indeed, the multiplicity of materials is so great that one might object to the sort of broad coverage I propose to initiate here, on the grounds that this approach conflates too many diverse areas of study. Any such objection, 1 In preparing the final manuscript of this essay, I have been greatly helped by the critical commentary of John N. Deely, Ivan Karp, and Greg N. Mahnke. While I have been idiosyncratic in the use I have made of their observations, thereby absolving them of any responsibility for whatever flaws may have resulted in this version, the benefit to me far exceeds whatever may be apparent in the paper itself.

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however, entails yielding to the taxonomic dictates of academe before we have even begun to think. The objection reproduces Eco’s (1976: 190-217) critique of the concept of iconicity, according to which too great a diversity of phenomena is conflated under a single label for analytical utility. In this regard, however, the objection begs the important question: do those whom we study dif­ ferentiate between the various possible kinds of iconicity? If they do not, or if they make parallel uses of these varied semiotic properties, we must respect the conceptual unity of their concerns if we are to understand the latter at all. No other approach would be consistent with the action-theory perspective necessary to the present discussion - a perspective, incidental­ ly, which feeds Eco’s own methodology also. What we need to ask, then, is whether resemblances are used ideologi­ cally, and whether these uses constitute a unitary phenomenon in any sense, or not. If racial and linguistic features are treated as isomorphic in their geographical or historical distribution, for example, our own ideologi­ cal objections to such a methodology as racist should not blind us to its intrinsic interest as a form of discourse. If we were to allow this to happen, we should be no less guilty of literalism ourselves, whatever the moral force of our position. Rather, we should seek to ask critical questions that would aid analysis. Why are such distributions treated as isomorphic by the adherents and apologists of a given ideology? How persuasive did that treatment prove? Did critics of the prevailing order manage to unpack the iconic bundle, and what did they find? Just as those who argued in the early nineteenth century for or against a particular kind of national unity (see, e.g., Herzfeld 1982: 77) conflated racial and ethnographic forms of evi­ dence, no matter which side they were on, thereby all falling into the same conceptual trap (as it appears from our present-day perspective), so today we may likewise be in danger of committing a literalism as gross as that against which we inveigh by dismissing such methodologies as merely ‘wrong’. There is an enormous temptation to take full advantage of our control over the forms of scholarly discourse (cf. Foucault 1966). Equally, there are benefits to be gained by adopting a more detached stance. One of the commonest fallacies about iconicity is that it must be visual (Sebeok 1979: 117). By the same token, classification is frequently as­ sumed to be exclusively verbal. Indeed, this is a major criticism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its more extreme versions, and a strong argu­ ment for rejecting ethnosemantics in favor of something we might provi­ sionally call ethnosemiotics. Animals, lacking language, nevertheless clear­ ly have taxonomic capacities; it would therefore clearly be absurd to insist that humans should be entirely dependent upon language for their classificatory needs, as the complementary dimensions of Sebeok’s researches on these two sets of problems have made very clear. Thus, just as Gombrich (1961: 101-104, 178) writes of ‘visual classification’, so, conversely, we may also recognize the iconicity of visual and other nonverbal corres­ pondences. 402

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The verbal correspondences are usually treated, in their synchronic and diachronic versions respectively, as folk etymology and philological, or academic, etymology. Folk etymology is further differentiated from its scholarly counterpart by being largely dismissed as the manifestation of unconscious error, as in Bolinger’s (1975: 406) characterization of it as ‘a kind of auditory malapropism’. This division, privileging as it does the perspective of the scholar, has been roundly criticized (Ardener 1971: 224). Like the artificial distinction between myth and history (see Levi-Strauss 1962; Feely-Harnik 1978; Drummond 1981), it smacks of the scholarly propensity for distancing academe from the field even while arguing the need for participant observation. The parallel with the myth-history dis­ tinction is a close one, since both discriminations are predicated on a literalistic concept of factual accuracy. In both, moreover, we may discern a scholarly proclivity to see a fundamental similarity between those ob­ served, while simultaneously forging discontinuity between them and the observer. If we want to seek an example of the ideological use of iconicity (and its converse), here is an excellent example in scholarly practice.

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2. Etymology and recognition

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My concern in the present paper is with more distant instances. The pas­ sage of time seems, at least, to make them more readily accessible to critical analysis than are the idiosyncrasies of our own scholarly activity, though the consequences of such analysis for the latter should certainly not be overlooked. The element of reduction, of caricature even, which tem­ poral distancing permits, foregrounds certain aspects of the problem which depend for their semiotic effectiveness on remaining in the background. I have just mentioned etymology. This is the usual term for verbal iconicity viewed historically, and its ideological suggestivity has long been recog­ nized and exploited. Ironically, it was especially the work of Giambattista Vico - surely one of the most trenchant critics of literalism - that spawned a whole generation of ideological etymologists in Italy (Cocchiara 1952: 176-177, 239, 27^-282), Greece (Herzfeld 1981a, 1982) and elsewhere, a generation whose insistence that the literal truth about cultural identity could be gleaned from etymological and other ethnographic evidence con­ trasted strangely with Vico’s own celebrated axiom regarding the con­ structed nature of truth. With the advent of Saussurean linguistics in this century, the study of verbal etymology fell into some measure of disrepute, although there are signs of a resurgence (see Lehmann 1975: 12-13, 18-19). The academic production of etymologies of nonverbal cultural forms, by contrast, never weakened, especially in those countries in which the study of folklore was actively encouraged for political ends. It was not usually called etymology, of course; its dissociation from academically dimode kinds of historical linguistics saved it from their fate, while its association with ruling power groups rendered it comparatively immune to overt criticism. For the student of nationalism, and especially for the historian, such

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269. Zoosemiotics Explained. In Wege zur Universalienforschung, edi Gunter Brettschneider and Christian Lehmann. Tubingen: Nai (Tiibinger Beitrage zur Linguistik; Bd. 145), Pp. 571-576. 1981 270. A Global Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Semiotic Scene 4/3:161-170. 271. A jelek sokretu azonossaga-a jeltudomany nevenek kialakulasa. Kultura es Szemiotika, eds., Imre Grafik and Vilmos Voigt. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Pp. 39-50. 272. Can Animals Lie? Animals 114:6:28-31 (December). 273. Captain Nemo’s Porthole. HaSifrutlLiterature. Nos. 30-31, pp. 1-19 (April). (Hebrew version of #287, in Part I.) 274. Clever Hans and Smart Simians: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Kindred Methodological Pitfalls. Anthropos 76(l-2):89-165. (With Jean Umiker-Sebeok.) 595

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275. The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People, ed. with Robert Rosenthal. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences. (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 364.)viii+ 311 pp. 276. Japanese Monkey Performances: An Ancient Art Revived. The Explorers Journal 59(1):34-37 (March). 277. Karl Biihler. In Die Welt als Zeichen. Klassiker der Modernen Semiotik, eds., Martin Krampen, Klaus Oehler, Roland Posner, and Thure von Uexktill. Berlin: Severin and Siedler. Pp. 205-232. (German version of #258, in Part I.) 277a. Los animales sabios: secretos del oficio. Estudios de Psicologta 5/6:71-76. (Spanish version of #246, in Part I.) (With Jean Umiker-Sebeok.) 278. Naming in Animals, With Reference to Playing: A Hypothesis. Recherches semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry. Vol. 1, pp. 121-135. 279. P. T. Barnum and Clever Hans. In National Humanities Center Newsletter, Vol. 2, No. 3, Spring. Pp. 1-3. 280. Performing Animals: Secrets of the Trade. In Language: Intro­ ductory Readings, 3rd edition, eds., Virginia P. Clark et al. Pp. 265-272. New York: St. Martin’s Press. (With Jean UmikerSebeok.) (Reprint of #246, in Part I.) 281. The Play of Musement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 312 pp. 282. Prefigurements of Art. In Image and Code, ed., Wendy Steiner. Ann Arbor: Rackham Studies in the Humanities. Pp. 43-56. (Truncated version of #247, in Part I.) 283. Prefigurements of Art. In Semiotic Themes (University of Kansas Publications, Humanistic Studies 53), ed., Richard T. De George. Pp. 179-224. (Abridged version of #247, in Part I.) 284. Sherlock Holmes no Kigoron: C.S. Peirce to Holmes no Hikakukenkyn (= Genbal-Shinsho). (Trans. Takao Tomiyama.) Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. (With Jean Umiker-Sebeok.) (Expanded Japa­ nese version of #268, in Part I.) 285. The Ultimate Enigma of “Clever Hans”: The Union of Nature and Culture. In The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People, ed. with Robert Rosenthal. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences. (Annals of the. New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 364, pp. 199-205.) 286. More on Monkey Talk. In Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, ed., Martin Gardner. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. Pp. 404-406. (Reprint of #84, in Part III.) (With Jean Umiker-Sebeok.)

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1983 299. A miiveszet elozmenyei (Volume in the series Korunk tudomanya). Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. (Illustrated Hungarian book version of #247, in Part I.) 300. Animal Anomalies I. Vocal Pregnancy. Animals 116:2:14 (April). II. Merry Tailor. Animals 116:3:31 (June). III. The Bird That Eats Wax. Animals 116:4:33 (August). IV. Tricky Tick .Animals 116:5:19 (October). V. El Toledo: The Song and Dance Bird. Animals 116:6:34 (December) 301. Batir, the “Talking Elephant.” The Skeptical Inquirer 8:2:110. 597

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302. Il segno dei tre: Holmes, Dupin, Peirce, ed. with Umberto Eco. Milano: Bompiani. (Italian version of #308, in Part I.) 314pp. 303. Karl Biihler. In Semiotics Unfolding, Volume I. (Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for Semio­ tic Studies). Berlin: Mouton. (Chapter 5 of #281, in Part I.) Pp. 355-370. 304. On the History of Semiotics. In Semiotics Unfolding, Volume I. (Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Asso­ ciation for Semiotic Studies.) Berlin: Mouton. Pp. 353-354. 305. One, Two. Three Spells UBERTY. (Chapter 1 in #308, in Part I.) Pp. 1-10. 306. One, Two, Three . . . UBERTY (A mo’ di introduzione). (Chap­ ter 1 in #302, in Part I.) Pp. 17-26. 307. Semiotics. In Global Linguistic Connections. Ed. Gyula Decsy. Bloomington: Eurolingua. Pp. 99-100. 308. The Sign of Three: Holmes, Dupin, Peirce, ed. with Umberto Eco. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 236pp. 309. Van-e az illatoknak esztetikai 6rzckiik? Tudomanyos Magazin 16:8-13. (In Hungarian.) 310. “Voi conoscete il mio metodo”: un confronto fra Charles S. Peirce e Sherlock Holmes. (Chapter 2 in #308, in Part 1.) (With Jean Umiker-Sebeok.) Pp. 11-54. 311. “You Know My Method”: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes. (Chapter 2 in #308, in Part I.) (With Jean Umiker-Sebeok.) Pp. 11-54.

1984

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316. Pandora’s Box Ten Millenia from Today: The Semiotics of Communication. In 1984: Responding to Orwell’s Warnings: High-tech Society and Human Freedom. Eds. Sahashi Shigeru and Yoshida Natsuhiko. Tokyo: NHK Publishers. Pp. 30-41. (Japa­ nese version of #293, in Part I.) 317. A Semiotic Perspective of the Sciences: Steps Toward a New Paradigm. Toronto Semiotic Circle Monographs, Working Papers, and Publications, No. 5. (With others.) Toronto: Victoria Uni­ versity. 318. Sign, System and Function, ed. with Jerzy Pelc, Edward Stankiewicz, and Thomas G. Winner. (Papers of the First and Second Polish-American Semiotics Colloquia.) Berlin: Mouton. 503pp. 319. Signs of Life. International Semiotics Spectrum 2:1-2 (June). 320. Sintoma. Droga: Medicina Scientifica e Clinica Psicanalitica (Clinica 5). Milano: Spirali/Vel. Pp. 65-85. (Italian version of #323, in Part I.) 321. Sintoma (Part I). Cruzeiro Semiotico (July). Pp. 39-46. (Portu­ guese version of #323, in Part I.) 322. Stakhanovite (A Poem). American Journal of Semiotics 3:1:69. 323. Symptom. In New Directions in Linguistics and Semiotics, ed. James E. Copeland. Houston: Rice University Studies and Am­ sterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 211-230. 324. Symptome, systematisch und historisch. Zeitschrift fur Semiotik 6:1-2:37-52. (Special issue: “Semiotik und Medizin.”) (German version of #323, in Part I.) 325. Wenn Schimpansen im Regen tanzen. Tier: Die international Illustrierte fur Tier, Mensch und Natur 9:16-19, 54 (September). (German version of #240, in Part I.) 326. Zeichen des Lebens. Semiotische Berichte 8:4:225-228. (German version of #319, in Part I.)

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347. The Doctrine of Signs. In Culture and Semiotics, ed. Walter A. Koch. (In German.) 348. I Think I am a Verb. New York: Plenum. 349. Linguistics and Semiotics. In Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol. 4, ed. Frederick J. Newmeyer. New York: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. 350. Looking in the Destination for What Should Have Been Sought in the Source. In A Primer in Semiotics: Essays from the Major Traditions, eds. John N. Deely, Felicia Kruse, and Brooke Wil­ liams. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (Chapter 5 from #250, in Part I.) 351. The Mind of a Polyp. Festschrift for Jacob Mey on his 60th Birth­ day. Eds. Jorgen Dines Johansen and others. 352. Monastic Sign Languages, ed. with Jean Umiker-Sebeok. New York: Plenum. 353. “Semiotics” and Its Congeners. In A Primer in Semiotics: Essays from the Major Traditions, eds. John N. Deely, Felicia Kruse, and Brooke Williams. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (Chapter 2 from #199, in Part I.) 354. Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, ed. with Roland Posner. (In the series Handbiicher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft.) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 355. A Sign is Just a Sign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 356. Symptom. In A Primer in Semiotics: Essays from the Major Traditions, eds. John N. Deely, Felicia Kruse, and Brooke Wil­ liams. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (Reprint of #323, in Part I.) 357. “Talking” with Animals: Zoosemiotics Explained. In A Primer in Semiotics: Essays from the Major Traditions, eds. John N. Deely, Felicia Kruse, and Brooke Williams. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. (Reprint of #236, in Part I.) 358. What is an Animal? Proceedings of the World Archaeological Congress, ed. Tim Ingold. Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin.

II. REVIEWS 1942 1. T. E. Johnson, Introductory Phonetics. Language 18:252-53. 2. R. Kennedy, The Ageless Indies. Far Eastern Quarterly 2:87-88. 601

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3. W. C. Greet, War Words: Recommended Pronunciations. Quarter­ ly Journal of Speech 29:376-77. 4. J. Lotz, Das Ungarische Sprachsystem. Language 19:55-58. 5. M. Schlauch, The Gift of Tongues. American Speech 18:53-55. 6. W. Steinitz, Ostyakische Chrestomathie. Language 19:58-60. 7. A. B. Terracini,