On the feasibility of pictorial statements

Signata

关键词: cognition;    iconicity;    image;    metaphor;    perception;    phenomenology;   

DOI  :  10.4000/signata.2281

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

It is often claimed as a matter of course, even in widely different intellectual currents, that there can be no pictorial or, more generally, no visual statements. The Greimas School, and French structuralism in general, use such terms, but without inquiring into what is meant. The psychologist Rudolf Arnheim makes a plea for visual thinking, and even visual concepts, but he says nothing about statements; and the whole point of recognizing an “iconic code” in memory seems to be to deny this code any function as a statement. On the other hand, from the Peircean point of view, vigorously defended and extended by Frederik Stjernfelt, the whole world of our experience is perfused with statements and, beyond that, arguments. Here we intend to take a more judicious stand. Pictures contain statements/judgements, in the formal sense of ascribing a property to an object, but they do so by emphasizing the property in the totality of the object, not by adding this property to the object. Pictures can do this because they feature a point of view and a frame. The act of attention may be said to imply such a judgement, though only a transitory one. Shop windows and installations, in the artistic sense, come closer to being visual statements. Pictures, however, have at least two additional advantages: 1) they are necessarily both similar and different to what they depict, and this difference implies a kind of statement about the object depicted (this is the homogeneous transformation according to Groupe µ); and 2) unlike perceptual reality, they can be reduced to what is essential at this point, though the reduction must be realized in much bigger chunks than in verbal language (this involves some of the heterogeneous transformations according to Groupe µ). Scientific images, traffic signs, and other pictures used mainly to convey information are of the latter type. It would seem to be much harder, however, to find an equivalent for the argument’s structure in pictures, let alone in visual reality.

【 授权许可】

Unknown