The Quadrature of the Hermeneutic Circle

The picture as "text"

Göran Sonesson,

Department of Cultural Semiotics,

Lund University, Sweden

There are numerous ways in which language and pictures, verbal and pictorial texts, may be related. One question which may be posed concerns their modes of co-existence: the ways in which a linguistic item may be contiguous too, or form part of, a pictorial representation, or the reverse, giving rise to particular forms of semiotic interaction, which involve indexicality. The issue of verbal/visual interactions can also, and in fact frequently has been, formulated, in terms of rules and principles rather the singular token: whether our interpretation of pictures is always mediated by our linguistic competence, or the reverse. The first thesis was defended by the French structuralist; the opposite conception, which is actually somewhat more reasonable, has so far, I believe, never been formulated.

It is quite another issue to determine whether language and pictures are in some ways similar to each other, i.e. whether their respective sign structures mirror one other. Paradoxically, Umberto Eco’s well-known refutation of the existence of iconic signs (signs based on similarity) itself was based on a postulated iconicity of language and pictures: just like verbal signs, pictorial signs were, in Eco’s original view, conventional and based on features which had no meaning in themselves.

By adding a historical twist, it is possible to connect the two levels of the comparison. In our time, verbal and pictorial signs intermingle more than ever before, in publicity, television, and multimedia, and this may tend to make them more alike. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, television and pictorial data bases transform the transmission of images into spatially and temporally delimited occurrences, just like verbal exchange; and clip art makes its possible to create pictures by combining pre-existing (though not in themselves meaningless) elements.

In practical terms, both relationships concern the kind of translation which Roman Jakobson termed intersemiotic, the translation between different semiotic systems. The other two kinds of translation considered by Jakobson are the intralinguistic translation, within one single language (e.g. finding a synonym in English), and interlinguistic (and thus intrasemiotic) translation (e.g. to substitute a French word for an English one). In the same way, we will have to take into the account the possibility of intrapictorial translation (e.g. exchanging one drawing for another) and interpictorial translation (substituting a photograph for a drawing).

The translation of a verbal text accompanied by a picture involves all these types of comparisons, and perhaps several more. If the verbal text is determined by, and/or determines, the pictorial one, then it is natural that the translator should feel the need to have access to the latter one, in order to translate the former. In most cases, the linguistic transposition at the same time involves a cultural transposition. Usually, the problem posed by the picture, from the translator’s point of view, is cultural, rather than intrinsic to the pictorial medium, that is, it concerns the way in which the perceptual and/or socio-cultural world is rendered in the picture. It is possible, no doubt, to imagine cases in which the picture type itself is involved: thus, highly codified picture types, like the Russian icon, or a Cubist painting, may have to be translated into some other pictorial style before being useful in other cultures. But these are certainly marginal cases.

Just as in the case of deviant picture types, pictures containing culturally loaded content may be exchanged for others or simply modified. This would involve the work of a professional not ordinarily called a translator. On the other hand, the translator may try to make up for the cultural deviance of the picture by adding elements to his verbal text not found in the verbal part of the source text. At this point, the question whether verbal and pictorial signs system are similarly organised, and thus are able to package the same kind of information, becomes practically relevant.

The translation from one culture to another still is, in Jakobson’s terms, an intersemiotic translation. However, since it involves the transposition, not of one single semiotic system, but of elements stemming from the whole of culture, it may be better to have recourse to the terms of the semiotics of culture, initiated by the Tartu school (Fig.1.), which would call this a case of cultural – or perhaps better intercultural – translation. Typically, the Tartu school would argue, intercultural translation gives rise to deformations, which will only be remedied when the familiarity with foreign texts has made it possible for the receiving culture to set up its own version of the cultural production system first generating the texts.

Fig.1. Culture as seen by the Moscow/Tartu school (as reconstructed in Sonesson 1992c)

In the following, however, I will be mainly concerned with one aspect of intersemiotic translations: the possibilities of incorporating the same information into pictorial and visual texts. And I will use one of the resources familiar from linguistics, the opposition, as a testing case.

According to one simplistic view, semiotics really consists of two traditions, which run parallel to each other: the Peircean school, which starts out from a general, philosophically grounded, theory; and the Saussurean one, which tends to construe all semiotic phenomena according to the model of verbal language, particularly, as the latter was conceived by the Structuralist schools in linguistics. In fact, many followers of Saussure, such as the Prague school, and the tradition from Buyssens to Prieto, make very few and only very abstract analogies to verbal language. And those who explicitly claimed to apply the Saussurean language model to all phenomena, the French structuralists, were very rapidly disenchanted with the linguistic model, and repudiated it as rashly as they had once embraced it.

Indeed, it is seldom appreciated that the outright rejection of the linguistic model must be at least as naive, and as epistemologically unsound, as its unqualified acceptance; for, the use of one science as a metaphor for another involves such a long series of choices and comparisons, on different levels of abstraction and analysis, that there can be no rational way of undoing them all at one stroke (cf. Sonesson 1989,I.1.2. and 1992b). The validity of the linguistic analogy must be appreciated separately for different levels of abstraction pertaining to the object of study, and when it comes to the nature of semiotics as a science we are faced with a quite different question.

If we take semiotics to be something more than just a cover term for a series of traditional endeavours, such as art history and the history of literature, we can reasonably claim that, like linguistics, it must be a nomothetic science, which, just like linguistics, but contrary to the natural sciences and the social sciences, is concerned with qualities, rather than quantities. Thus, semiotics should be concerned to ascertain general laws and regularities, but it should do so in terms of meaningful categories, not in statistical form (e.g. what is true of all pictures, or all kinds of music, etc., and of some particular sub-categories of these, not of individual objects).

It is in this sense that we may claim that, even in the study of pictures, there is a possibility of quadrating the hermeneutic circle: of finding regularities, categories which are repeated from one instance to another, rules, usually not of combination, as in the case of linguistic syntax, but often of transformation, and of abstraction, which may serve to reconstruct the individual task of interpretation. Only in this way does it make sense to talk about pictorial texts (gestural texts, spatial texts, and so on), alongside the familiar verbal ones.

To admit such a parallel to linguistics is not properly speaking to embrace the linguistic model, which consists in transposing concepts and terms derived form the (structural) study of language to the analysis of other phenomena. For the last 15-20 years, numerous students of other semiotic domains have marked their distance to the linguistic model, but this has often meant a return to a pre-structuralist (sometimes, paradoxically, termed poststructuralist), and even pre-theoretical, stage of reflection, as is the case of the late Barthes, and in part of the work of Damisch, Marin, Schefer, and Lyotard. On an early stage, Hubert Damisch (1979) quoted numerous reasons for thinking that the picture was quite differently organised from verbal language, and Christian Metz (1968) argued against positing something like a language system behind the meaning production of the cinema.

In this "feud of language", as Pavel (1989) has called it, both structuralists and their critics may well be accused of ignoring the stakes involved; but it should be important to distinguish, more clearly than Pavel does, their separate responsibilities. Most one-time structuralists abandoned the linguistic model like a whim of fashion, just as naively as they had once adopted it: the exact way in which the linguistic analogy did not fit in with the nature of music, pictures, or whatever, was never spelled out. It is true that Metz and Damisch tried to reasons for rejecting the model: however, it is clearly the intuitive, pre-theoretical notions of film and picture, respectively, which are here compared to the concept of language, as reconstructed by linguistic theory, in fact, by a particular linguistic theory, that of the Saussure/Hjelmslev tradition. But the comparison of a folk notions and a concept forming part of a scientific theory can never yield any valid result (cf. Sonesson 1989,I.1.2.). This state of the case explains that, more recently, postmodernist critics like Boit (1992) and Krauss (1992) have had no difficulty in resurrecting the linguistic analogy, albeit only in the particular case of Cubist painting.