The pencils of nature and culture. New light in — and on — the Lifeworld

Göran Sonesson

In Signs and Light. Special Issue of Semiotica, 136-1/4, Ponzio, Augusto, & Petrilli, Susan, (eds), 27-53.

There is the light which we see. And there is the light which makes us see. That the two are of different orders should have been clear, at least since Goethe’s Farbenlehre. But then, again, there is the light which we see as making us see. In this essay, I will be concerned with these different strands of lightning and how they contribute to the phenomena we call pictures and other visual signs. I will be concerned, more precisely, with how light becomes an instrument of writing, with the advent of photography, and then, with computer pictures, is reduced again to being simply a part of what is seen.

A. J. Greimas (1970:49) once suggested that there could be a cultural science of nature, a semiotics of the natural world - i.e. of that world which is natural to us, just as a particular language is our ‘natural language’ (Swedish, English, Spanish, German, etc.). This amounts to an attempt to consider the traditional domain of the natural sciences from an human point of view. One of the cases Greimas mentions but does not dwell on is fire, which would normally be considered the subject matter of physics and chemistry. However, if it is reduced to the meaning it has for us, then, depending on the particular culture and context involved it may stand for the ancestral gesture thought to mark the beginnings of civilisation, for the operating force of steel furnaces, for one of the four elements, the universal converter of the alchemists, the conflagration of the neighbour’s house, the infernal flames, the cosy fire place in the country house, the log-fire of the barbecue party, the cowboy’s watch-fire, and so on (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.1.4). When fire appears in a particular culture, in a ritual, a film, or a picture, its presence its probably motivated rather by one of the aforementioned meanings or similar ones than by the chemical formula. In some of these cases, fire is a sign, in the others it is a functional object.

Historically, meanings of this kind have constituted ‘epistemological obstacles’, as Bachelard called it, for the quantitative reduction, which is a prerequisite of all research in the natural sciences. The result of Bachelard’s ‘psychoanalyse du feu’, which is really a social psychology of early attempts at explaining fire, strangely echoes Arnheim’s (1966:63) observation, that it takes a very peculiar attitude to see in fire a collection of shapes and colours rather than ‘the exciting violence of the flames’, though of course the chemists have to go beyond the shapes and colours too. There seems to be room for a study of the meaning of fire, quite apart from what natural science tells us about it. In this sense, fire is a category, like the phoneme, which introduces discontinuities in the perceived world, and which subsumes many, somewhat differing instances. Quite independently of the presumed identity of the chemical formula, the fire of Hell and of the cosy fireplace may or may not have semantic features in common.

Fire is, among other things, light: it is the kind of light which we see. It may also make us see, in the sense of throwing light on the objects around it. Then it is a tool rather than a sign. It may even by depicted (as is in most of the time ‘the great fire’, the sun) as throwing light on the objects, in which case it is a sign of a tool. But there are also more subtle uses of light (and sometimes fire), both as sign and as tool.

Availing themselves of the Saussurean phrase ‘c’est le point de vue qui crée l’objet’, structural linguists have argued that their own concepts have been arbitrarily imposed on a chaotic or at least much richer reality (according to Hjelmslev and Martinet, respectively). Ironically, when it is replaced in its original context, the phrase, as Prieto (1975a:144; 1975b:225f) has convincingly shown, turns out to mean just the opposite: the linguistic object (as well as the object of any semiotic system, according to Saussure 1974:47) only exists as a point of view adopted on another, ‘material’ object, which is why this point of view cannot be altered without the result being the disappearance of the linguistic object as such:: ‘En d’autres domaines, on peut parler de choses ‘à tel ou tel point de vue’, certain qu’on est de retrouver un terrain ferme dans l’objet même. / --- / Il nous est interdit en linguistique / .. / de parler d’une chose’ à differents points de vue, parce que c’est le point de vue qui fait la chose’ (Saussure 1968:26). The object of semiotics therefore is the points of view adopted on other objects. Indeed, the sound, as a material object, may have innumerable properties, but the phoneme, which is defined by its functional relations to the other plane of the sign, has a limited number of clearly defined features (Prieto 1975a:140ff; 1975 b:215). In this sense, it is possible to conceive of Nature, as we ordinarily see it, without taking the physical sciences into account, as a semiotical system, i.e. a particular point of view which introduces its own limits and sets up its own categories. Light, as a semiotical object, does not have the same limits and relationships as in physics.

But Greimas was not the first to conceive of a cultural science of nature. His semiotics of the natural world, together with Husserl’s science of the Lifeworld, and ‘ecological physics’ as invented by the perceptual psychologist James Gibson are all sciences of normality, of that which is so much taken for granted that it is ordinarily not considered worthy of study (cf. Sonesson 1989a, 1994b,c; 1996; 1997a). It may seem strange to put together ideas and observations made by a philosopher, a psychologist, and a semioticians; yet these proposals are largely the same; indeed, there are indications that both Greimas and Gibson took there cue from Husserl.

Greimas, Gibson, and Husserl all felt the need for such a science because they realised that the ‘natural world’, as we experience it, is not identical to the one known to physics but is culturally constructed. Husserl’s Lifeworld as well as Gibson’s ecological physics, but not Greimas’ natural world, takes this level to be a privileged version of the world, ‘the world taken for granted’, in Schütz’s phrase, from the standpoint of which other worlds, such as those of the natural sciences, may be invented and observed (cf. Sonesson 1989a,I.1.4, I.2.1, and passim). Moreover, while Greimas semiotics of the natural world largely seems to be a kind of lexicon of the meaning of things, Husserl and Gibson tried to formulate a set of general principles which underlay all our doings in the everyday world.

It is a basic property of the Lifeworld that everything in it is given in a subjective-relative manner. This means, for example, that a thing of any kind will always be perceived from a certain point of view, in a perspective that lets a part of the object form the centre of attention. Gibson observes that when we are confronted with the-cat-from-one-side, the-cat-from-above, the-cat-from-the-front, etc., what we see is all the time the same invariant cat. To Husserl, this seeing of the whole in one of its parts is related to the etc. principle, our knowledge of being able, at any one point, to turn the dice over, or go round the house, to look at the other sides. This principle applies to the temporal and the spatial organisation of the world alike. In time, it accounts for our expectancy, at every moment, that life will go on, or that something will change, or something more definite, such as that the dice will turn out to have a certain number of eyes on the hidden sides.

Every particular thing encountered in the Lifeworld is referred to a general type. According to Schütz, other people, apart from family members and close friends, are almost exclusively defined by the type to which they are ascribed, and we expect them to behave accordingly. Closely related to the typifications are the regularities which obtain in the Lifeworld, or, as Husserl’s says, ‘the typical which in which things tend to behave’. This is the kind of principles tentatively set up which are at the foundation of Peircean abductions. Many of the ‘laws of ecological physics’, formulated by Gibson (1982:217ff), and which are defied by magic, are also such ‘regularities /that/ are implicitly known’: that substantial objects tend to persist, that major surfaces are nearly permanent with respect to layout, but that animate objects change as they grow or move; that some objects, like the bud and the pupa transform, but that no object is converted into an object that we would call entirely different, as a frog into a prince; that no substantial object can come into existence except from another substance; that a substantial detached object must come to rest on a horizontal surface of support; that a solid object cannot penetrate another solid surface without breaking it, etc. Some of the presuppositions of these ‘laws’, such as the distinction between ‘objects that we would call entirely different’, are also at the basis of what we have called the Lifeworld hierarchy, and the definition of the sign function

One of the most forceful augments against the possibility of iconic signs, formulated by Bierman and Goodman, is the symmetry argument, according to which iconicity cannot motivate a sign, for while similarity is symmetrical and reflexive, the sign is not. Pigments on paper, or carvings in a rock, could stand for a man, but not the reverse; nor will they, in their picture function, stand for themselves. No doubt, the equivalence relation, as defined in logic, is symmetric and reflexive, and thus cannot define any type of sign, since the sign, by definition, must be asymmetric and irreflexive. But to identify similarity with the equivalence relation is to suppose man to live in the world of the natural sciences, when in fact he inhabits a particular sociocultural Lifeworld. Similarity, as experienced in this Lifeworld, is actually asymmetric and irreflexive. That this is true of ordinary comparisons in verbal language and in metaphorical visual displays has now been experimentally demonstrated (notably by Rosch 1975; cf. also Sonesson 1989a,220ff, 327ff): indeed, according to common opinion, Korea is much more similar to China than the reverse – simply because China makes more sense (is more well-known, more important, more powerful, etc.) as a standard of comparison.

If we generalise this finding to the case of signs, there is every reason to suppose that a three-dimensional object, rather than some lines on a surface, would count as a natural standard of comparison. When Man Ray makes a picture of a billiard table, we need no convention to recognise what it depicts. However, if Sherrie Levine’s (real, three-dimensional) billiard table is to represent Man Ray’s picture, there must be a label inverting the hierarchy of prominence of the Lifeworld. This shows that among the properties determining the probability of an object functioning as the expression of an iconic sign is to be found three-dimensionality rather than the opposite. Surfaces are simply lower on the scale of prominence in the Lifeworld than solid, perdurable, three-dimensional objects (cf. Sonesson 1989a: 251ff; 1997a; 1998b).

It thus becomes necessary to posit a kind of taken-for-granted hierarchy of prominence among the things of the Lifeworld. For something to be a sign of something else, it must be ranked relatively low on the scale of prototypicality applying to the ‘things’ of the Lifeworld. In their study of the basic metaphors which underlie both poetry and ordinary language, Lakoff & Turner (1989:160ff) describe a ’cultural model’ which they call ’The great chain of being’. This model, which ’places beings and their properties on a vertical scale with ‘higher’ beings and properties above ‘lower’ beings and properties’(p.167), has been studied by historians of ideas since the time of Lovejoy, but Lakoff & Turner show it to be still current and active in a lot of everyday thinking, as for instance in ordinary adages. This ’commonplace theory about the Nature of things’(p.170) would only stand in need of being slightly amended in order to account for the naturalness with which surfaces stand for scenes, rather than the reverse. It is simply an imaginative extension of our subjective-relative position in the middle of the lifeworld, from which the directions go up and down, and times goes on and back.

The child discovers the elementary graphic act (cf. Gibson 1978; 1980; Lurçat 1974) when its interest changes from the movement of the hand to the tracks that these movements leave on a paper or on another support when the hand maintains a pencil and the pencil leans against the paper. To the toddler, the marks left on the paper are accidental traces of a motor activity rewarding in itself, i.e. the function indexically. It is only at 18 months approximately that the child will react when no strokes and dots result from the contact of the marker with the paper, and only at 3 years will he refuse to draw in the air (Cf. Gardner 1973 b:215 ff; 1980:43 ff; Gibson 1978:230). What was at first accidental substance now becomes the very form of the act, defined by the principle of relevance known as the making of a drawing.

Later the graphic act is split following two completely different lines of development: a part of the acquisition is disciplined by and for the representation of that limited amount of lines and curves that we call letters; another part still enjoys a relative freedom, at least until the stage of realism so much decried by the pedagogues makes its appearance. With one of the oldest metaphors of the world of computation one often says that writing is digital (and also — although this is less evident for the layman — the spoken language) whereas the picture is analogous. By that one does not generally mean that the picture is iconic, that is to say, similar to that which it represents, but that it is continuous, as reality itself —as is a traditional watch-face, unlike the indicator of numbers of the quartz clock.

The perception of surfaces is important for the possibilities of survival of all animals; only by means of determining their mutual relations are the animals capable of orienting themselves in the world of experience. However, according to James Gibson (1980), it is only to man that the marks made on surfaces attract attention. Such marks may be of different types, for example, colour spots, lines or projected shadows; and they can be produced in different ways: by the fingers, with a pencil, a brush, some engraving instrument, with a rule, a compass, or with a more complex instrument such as a printing-press, a camera or a projector. The marks on the surface can disorderly and then may perhaps be dirt spots. If they are symmetrical or regular in some way, they make up some kind of ornament; but if the marks have a form that can be interpreted as referring to a possible perceptual scene, we have to do with a picture.

A picture, or a pictorial image – to be distinguished from a solid image like a sculpture, a mirror image, a camera image, a photographic camera image, a retinal image, an after image, a mental image, and so on (Gibson 1978 228; 1980:xvif) – is ‘a surface so treated that it makes available a limited optic array /- - -/ of persisting invariants of structure’ at some point of observation. Such a conception of what a picture is is obviously strange to the historian of the art, from many points of view. He would conceive even a sculpture as a picture. Here I would like to insist on the fact that a picture is something whose plane of expression is, materially, a surface which is (relatively) flat (as Man Ray’s billiard table, but not that of Sherrie Levine). For semiotics as well as for the psychology of perception the possibility of three-dimensional iconic signs (sculptures, dummies, scarecrows, etc.) does not present the same problem as the representation of a perceptual scene on a surface. Moreover, it is evident that many of the most famous pictures of the last century would be categorised as ornaments or even as spots of dirt in Gibson’s model. Malevitch’s white triangle on a white bottom would be a simple ornament; Yves Klein’s blue canvases would be less than ornaments, they would simply be painted boards; and Pollock’s works would be dirt spots. What in fact differentiates these paintings from ornaments and dirt is that in our contemporary artistic world, at the same time that they are marks which are regularly or chaotically scattered on a surface, they are considered to have what Gibson calls a ‘referential meaning’ — although this meaning generally cannot be identified with an ordinary perceptual scene (cf. Sonesson 1989a, III.3.2.).

According to Gibson (1978:229), there are two types of pictures: if the record is of a stylus, brush, pen, pencil, crayon, marker or another hand-held tool, the result will be a chirographic picture; and if the traces are made with a camera with its accessory equipment, we will have a photographic picture (Gibson 1978:229 f; 1980:xiiff). The examples given previously seem to show a greater variation and a less clear difference: the pictures really made by hand are only those painted with the fingers; also the camera must be maintained by one or several hands. In spite of this, it is easy to understand the basis idea behind Gibson’s division; even though the action of the hand is mediated by the pencil, the compasses or the engraving instrument, is the hand that creates the marks line by line and point by point, whereas the intervention of the hand in the case of the camera is global, maintaining the camera and pushing the button at a given moment. Each curve of the line which is drawn and also every moment of its continuation depends on a micro-decision which governs the hand. But once the camera is focused and the button has been pushed, then ‘the pencil of nature’, as Fox Talbot called the photographing process, draws the whole figure all at once. Thus it may be that the hand is the main protagonist in all those cases in which the camera is not..

An interesting correlate of Gibson’s distinction is that, while all pictures contain indexical signs of the instruments making the tracing on the surface, only in the photographs these indices are at the same time icons of the things depicted. To grasp the nature of chirography, it may be necessary to oppose it to something which is vaster and less specific than photography. ‘Hard icons’ is a term coined by Tomas Maldonado (1974) to describe signs which, in addition to bearing resemblance to that which they depict, are related to them as traces to that which produced them. Examples would be X-ray pictures, hand impressions on cave walls, ‘acoustic pictures’ made with the aid of ultrasound, silhouettes, configurations left on the ground by people who were out walking in Hiroshima at the moment of the explosion of the nuclear bomb, thermograms, pictures made with ‘invisible light’ to discover persons hiding in the woods — and ordinary photographs. The real contiguity between the picture and its referent is here taken to guarantee the cognitive value of the picture. It is important to note that ‘hard icons’ cannot simply be signs which are both indexical and iconic, for that is true also of chirographs: there must be coincidence between their respective indexical and iconic grounds.

Yet on this account, there seems to be cases which are intermediary between photography and chirography. During the 18th century a device for producing drawings from silhouettes was in use: it consisted of a chair having a source of light on one side and a screen on which the shadow of the person sitting in the chair was cast on the other. The contours were conveyed by contiguity to the screen, but were not by themselves retained there, because of the lack of photographic emulsion, but had to be filled in by hand. In the case of the curious device known as a physionotrace, a view-finder was moved along the contours of the object, producing a contiguity between these contours and the gaze; thanks to another contiguity, this time between the view-finder and a stylus, the corresponding figure was concurrently traced onto a paper. Similarly, in the camera obscure as used by the artists from the Renaissance onwards, there is a series of contiguities between the contours of the object and the pattern of light on the paper, and between the light pattern and the tracings filling in the contours created by the light.

In any case, a binary division of this kind can only be possible if the term photographic is taken in an wide sense, because while the film picture could be seen as an extension of photography, the video picture is something completely different, and yet it is not hand-made. We might therefore want to follow Roman Gubern (1987b: 46f) in introducing the term technography as the true opposite of chirography, and in assigning to the former category all photographic, cinematographic and videographic pictures. It also seems relevant to count into this latter category what the same Gubern (1987a: 73ss) in another book has called ‘the synthetic picture’, which is to say pictures produced with the aid of the computer (cf.. Sonesson 1989b, III.1.2).

Since we categorise the computer picture, as it seems natural, as technographical, we are confronted with a strange contradiction: for even though the technical character of the computer picture is much more advanced that that of the camera, it does not force global resolutions on us. The drawing is directed to a great extent by the hand, mediated by the mouse, although the latter is not as flexible an instrument for it as the pencil or the instrument of engraving (which can possibly be obtained with a digitalisation table). In spite of its highly technographic character, it seemed that computer graphics recovers some of the advantages of chirographics.

If we count all the ways of providing surfaces with marks as graphical, then we can, with Espe (1983), divide these into three types: chirographic, photographic and typographic surfaces Also the typographic ones would be technographic, since at least since the times of Gutenberg, the movable type is a small machine which allows only the reproduction of standardised elements. Only with the photograph there appears a technographic procedure that allows the reproduction of details that vary freely; which was previously something reserved for chirography (cf. Sonesson 1989b, III.1.2.). In this sense it is possible to be in agreement with Barthes (1980:21) when he speaks of photography as a mathesis singularis. But this is only so to the extent that we limit ourselves to reproduce reality in a single block. It is only the computer picture which offers a technographic procedure which retains its sensitivity to chirographic details.