Homonyms

A photograph seems to match C.S. Peirce’s definition of a sign perfectly: “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (C.P. 2:228, emphasis mine). If it stands for something (whether an optical reality, or an artistic conception) in what respect or capacity does it operate? A photograph seems to operate simultaneously on the metaphoric and metonymic poles. It alludes to a contiguity with a subject which once existed before the camera. It also represents a discontinuity, an artificial representation of a subject outside our immediate view. If a photograph (as a thing) always has a relationship with another thing, how might we describe it?

Aristotle proposes in Categories that things that have only a name in common with a different definition of being corresponding to each are called homonymous. The example he uses is confusing when translated into English:

Thus, for example, both a man and a picture are animals. These have only a name in common and the definition of being which corresponds to the name is different; for to say what being an animal is for each of them, one will give two distinct definitions.

J.L. Ackrill, like most translators, has translated the Greek zôion as animal. The term, in Greek, is applied to pictures or illustrations in the same sense we use the word figure in English—a picture is a figure, and a man has a figure. Another translation in the public domain by EM Edghill avoids the confusion by saying “a figure in a picture” in place of “picture,” which does not really express the same concept.

The concept of homonymy applied to things is different from the concept applied to words. Two words which sound the same but mean different things are called homonyms. In the case of an object and its photograph, one might say that they look the same but they mean different things. The major evidentiary fallacy regarding photographs might be that they are regarded as synonymous rather than homonymous.

One of the primary failings of homonyms is that they seldom remain homonyms after translation. If descriptive language is attached to a photograph, it amounts to a translation of the visual evidence apparent in the photograph. A good description can be synonymous with a photograph, but it complicates the homonymous relation that a photograph has with its subject. The primary relationship between photograph and subject is perhaps untranslatable. However, if this is the case then the photograph violates a primary condition of linguistic signs—that they be translatable.

Problematic Predication

*Disclaimer: more theoretical wank I’m thinking about.

The most well traveled path of pragmatic inquiry into the use of photographs is the attempt to elucidate (or repudiate) the photograph’s evidentiary function. At the core of this function is the ability of photographs to record a phenomenological reality— a reality either “given” by an optical event or “created” through the conscious motives of a camera operator. To either make or select a photograph implies a motive force; its quality of evidence is suspect by the very presence of this motive. A photograph can be used to assert a proposition.

The basic components of a proposition are a subject and a predicate. At the most fundamental level, making a photograph of something asserts that something is. At this level of a proposition, the arrangement of things selected and presented by the photograph posits a subject with a minimal predicate: it declares its subject to be. The attachment of this weak verb causes the evidentiary ambiguity.

At the level of a straight recording of a scene, to photograph something equivocally states that it was (it might have changed or dissapeared after the photographer left). At the creative level, a photograph presents an object which the photographer has brought into being—it is. In both of these cases the “truth” of a photograph’s nature as evidence is contained in its own existence. The real ambiguity concerning this truth claim is caused by the transitive power of the verb to be. The aesthetically motivated photographer selects a subject, framing and composing it to present an implied predicate: this something is beautiful. A historical or documentary photographer presents another sort of predicate: this something is significant. In the existential sense of the verb to be, the photograph as evidence cannot be assaulted (it obviously was, or was imagined). However, interpreting a photograph in the light of an implied predicate it can be judged as true or false as a proposition. A photograph may be credible or incredible.

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Words and Propositions

*Disclaimer:this is only a sketch of something ill-formed in my head.

There is a prevalent assumption among critics, particularly those of a Marxist bent, that photography is, in itself, meaningless. Accepting that a photograph is arbitrary (in that it is not a necessary condition of being) and that the number of things to be photographed far outstrips the number of photographs of those things, this makes a certain amount of sense— a photograph is a sign, and in and of themselves signs don’t have to mean. To photograph something, in some respects, is to name it by fashioning a sign (analogous to a word) which corresponds to the thing photographed.

Following an Aristotelian model, a photograph behaves like a word in the construction of meaning. Words inside photographs are liberated from syntactic function by becoming elements of the more complex hybrid word picture, or pictorial word. For Aristotle and Plato, only an articulated sentence can be true or false. A word, although it may mean, cannot be true or false. Truth or falsehood may only be applied to a proposition. This distinction seems absent in most contemporary assertions that photographs lie.

But there are deeper issues. What is at stake in the work of critics like Mary Price and John Tagg is the fundamental ability of photography (as a signifying activity) to mean. Even if photography is taken as a purely word-level signifying activity, I believe it can create meaning. Not so, according to Tagg:

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Eyes don’t have it.

In A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco claims that “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used to lie” (7). Perhaps the most deeply entrenched lie of all is that the camera is analogous to the eye. The diagram above presents the concept in its weakened form—as simile. What seems far more treacherous to me is the persistence of the metaphor that to photograph something is to conserve the experience of the thing presented for assimilation later. Perhaps it is only a lie of oversimplification—eyes come in pairs, and feed different data streams which are selectively interpreted and these data streams present only quanta, segregated by the peculiarities of sensitivity and the wandering nature of attention which guides them.

A camera cannot direct its attention and ruthlessly captures whatever optical reality it confronts encoded on a sensitive surface, chemically or electrically, via relatively simple algorithms. We perceive a minute fraction of what our eyes transmit; a camera, while presenting a miniscule amount of data by comparison, gives its data nearly complete to the storage medium which integrates it without consciousness.

However, both apparatuses are proper grounds for semiotic inquiry. It could be argued that the eye does not lie in the same fashion that a camera does. This hypothesis is easily discarded—an eye, as it is guided by consciousness lies by both omission and addition. Anyone with experience proofreading will testify that they both see words that are not there, and miss the presence of superfluous words. Cameras lie when they present anomalies of either sensitivity or optics which distort by the addition of noise, or by the failure to resolve differences which were present in the originary subject. This is not the sort of lying which semiotic theory normally engages. It is the conscious lie, the lie with intent which is much more problematic.

The concept of the camera eye is not an intentional lie, but it is an intentional fallacy. It assumes that the camera represents an extension of the human eye’s intension or that the camera has an intension all its own.

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Parallel Processing

For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Foucault’s On the Order of Things, selections from The Essential Peirce, Hayden White’s Metahistory, and Eco’s Kant and the Platypus in a strange parallel fashion. It helps me to stay busy and avoid being crushed by all the emotional stuff. The strange thing about this particular behavioral quirk is that I tend find myself lost in convergences of the most peculiar sort.

Spending so much time in Ft. Smith Arkansas, I’ve been sightseeing a little too. There was an odd sort of convergence there too. In the upstairs display area of the Ft. Smith Museum there was another sort of “ah-ha” moment. On display were some matchboxes featuring Betty Boop and Popeye poised next to one of the first “flexi-disks” (cardboard coated with plastic to make cheap phonograph records)— Betty Co-ed!. It made me think about the parallel expansion of both audio and visual media across the 1930s. While I was certainly planning to mention the first unmediated access to the public by a U.S. president (FDR’s fireside chats), I had not thought about the proliferation of sound recordings, available to a general public rather than just a well-off elite, which occurred during the same time frame. I can’t remember the name of the process mentioned in the display—first patented in February 1931—which was used to coat the cardboard to produce the records. I need to go back to the display and jot it down. But by August (the month Betty Co-ed was released) it was a popular sensation. I tried looking in The Recording Angel by Evan Eisenberg, the best reference I have on that topic, but it wasn’t listed. However, Eisenberg had an interesting thing to say about parallel processing:

When it was disclosed that Jimmy Carter was in the habit of reading two or three books concurrently while listening to classical music, the vagaries of his administration might have been foretold. Later, Helmut Schmidt complained that his best ideas got lost in the background music of the Oval Office. It is a very subjective thing, but I think most people would agree that analytical work and the assimilation of information are hindered by music, unless the music is either simple or familiar. Creative work, on the other hand, can benefit from music in a number of ways. (80)

I’m not sure about this. I have noticed that I listen to a lot less music now that my work is primarily “analytical” compared to when it was creative. However, I always listened to music while working in the darkroom—an activity that really isn’t what I would call “creative”—it’s actually far more analytical than creative because you have to carefully work to discern fine differences in mood and tone in a print rather than “create” something that wasn’t there before. However, I do agree with Eisenberg’s assertion about Musak:

Musak is a quiet challenge to the sonic order of a free society, which is properly an equilibrium of diversities.

I cannot bring myself to tolerate“background music”—music should be challenging or not at all.

A quick web search for Eisenberg on the web didn’t turn up anything interesting, except earcandy. This site by a Ph.D. student has an interesting essay on sound recording in PDF which reminded me of the simultaneous rise of “High Fidelity” sound recording with the documentary photography tradition. The quest for “realism” in sound recording also lead to the ultimate ideal of disappearance of the equipment and its operators and the sound of itself, just as the presence of “personality” or expressiveness on the part of a documentary practitioner was deemed a liability. The quest for impartiality in sonic landscapes arose at the same time as the call for impartiality in human ones. An impossible ideal, to be sure, but a similar unit of measure—disappearance.

Porny

I’ve been reading several Umberto Eco books lately. Though it might be odd that a person who majored in literature prefers nonfiction, it is indeed true. Thus, when I say I’ve been reading Eco, I mean selections from Kant and the Platypus and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. However, my excellent girlfriend felt it her duty to suggest that I read one of his lighter essays from How to Travel with a Salmon entitled “How to Recognize a Porn Movie” — imagine my surprise to find that my concerns in an earlier post were an echo of Eco.

Eco contrasts a movie “with erotic content” from a “genuine pornoflick” by first offering the traditional definition, a movie “whose true and sole aim is to stimulate the spectator’s desire,” noting that any accessories like story count for less than nothing. The juridical test for pornography, “no redeeming social value,” caused early mass distribution porno films to at least have some story so as to avoid the charge of pornography (my observation, not Eco’s). I was thrilled by the way Eco expands the definition of pornography by inverting it.

The traditional test for pornography is to judge “if it has been produced for the purpose of expressing certain concepts or esthetic ideals.” Thus, if a film makes no sense then it is pornographic—that is the way that I would characterize Eco’s response to this definition, and my own earlier assertion that pornography thrives as a result of its avoidance of meaning. Eco makes a profound leap to suggest that the best criterion for evaluating pornographic content is to calculate the amount of wasted time surrounding the production of whatever meaning the film is meant to convey.

In sex films that by definition have the calculated purpose of arousing desire there is almost no wasted time— therefore, they are not really pornographic. However, in conventional films there is nearly always a circuitous path before the meaning is revealed. The reason for this is that continuously being emotionally moved would be intolerable to the spectator and the actors involved. However, if too much time occurs between the moments of meaning then the spectator is also irritated. Therefore, Eco’s test for pornography is quite simple:

Go to a movie theater. If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic.

Of course, this also made me want to look at the history of the word pornography.

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Dire Consequences for Transgressors

The warning in the parking lot of the campus Methodist Student Union seems an appropriate heading for a post on effective aphorisms. A perfect example of an effective aphorism is this pair written by Lavater:

1. Know, in the first place, that mankind agree in essence, as they do in their limbs and senses.
2. Mankind differ as much in essence as they do in form, limbs, and senses—and only so, and not more.

William Blake dutifully annotated both of these aphorisms thusly:

This is true Christian philosophy far above all abstraction
[written beside both aphorisms, with a line under each]

There is a reason why “Queer Studies” would assault the sensibilities of some people—because it confronts and critiques the idea that there is an “essence” which dictates what a human being is—that provides a limit condition, from which they may not deviate or there will be dire consequences. This also provides the core thought behind “universalist” attitudes.

But I digress. The reason why I chose this aphorism as an example is because of the way it works. This aphorism creates a metaphor for identity based on the transfer of inner states to the body. It is a metaphor, and as such is exempt from interrogation regarding its “truth value.”

I got into a debate with my professor in the Foucault seminar over this—“that can’t be right! A metaphor can be true or false. You can’t say, for example, ‘History is a fish’” My reply was— Yes you can.

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Signs

Doug commented a few days ago, regarding Sebeok, “I’m still trying to understand what he means by signs.” That’s a big container of something. I’ve been trying to figure out how to cogently express what I’ve been thinking about regarding signs. To complicate things, I’ve been reading Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language by Umberto Eco. Eco devotes around forty pages to this very question. What is meant by the designation sign?

The basic definition offered by C.S. Peirce is:

Something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity

Peirce’s definition is open enough to accommodate extension to zoosemiotics—something that stands for something could just as easily be a chemical change, a neural impulse, or other biological response. The problem is that such a broad definition encompasses almost everything. Most discussion of signs center on the linguistic sign, which Saussure mapped in this fashion:

Saussure saw the sign as a two-part entity: the signifier (sound pattern, written code, etc.) and the signifed (actual thought, or real thing). The arrows on the sides of the diagram are meant to show the interaction. Each part is modified by the other. Peirce, on the other hand, saw the sign as a three part entity because without an interpreter, the sign is meaningless.

The binary structure of the linguistic sign posited by Saussure has been incredibly influential. Signs, in Saussure’s view, are signs are tools for communication. However, it sets up a map for communication that has a lot of problems:

The basic idea is that signs are a code, encoded by a sender and then decoded by an addressee. The Shannon-Weaver model of technical communication adds a third factor, noise, which interferes with the communication. This model of signs—that they are constructed implicitly for communication—ignores the fact that signs have other attributes. Not all signs operate that way. We are blinded to the complexity of other possible signs by getting locked into this simplistic communication model.

The earliest type of sign designation was that of the symptom. Cold chills and fever are not essentially communicative attempts, but rather signs that a person has a cold. Dark thunderclouds are a sign— a sign that it might rain. It is this broader context of signs that must be used to understand Sebeok’s extension of a “doctrine of signs.” Eco neatly divides this project into a semiotics which deals with the signs themselves, and a separate semiotics that deals with how semiosis occurs—how we deal with making meaning out of signs. Saussure deals strictly with the latter, whereas Sebeok is more interested in the primary nature of signs.

I’m sure I’ve not really done much here but confuse the issue. But I’m trying to write my way through this, not so much to explain it to other people, but to make sure that I understand it myself. Eco teases out some really interesting characteristics for signs (in general) that I’m still working on. I’m sure I’ll bore the crap out of people for a while as I dwell on it.