Communication

Theory
Nine:
One
Eduardo Neiva February
1999
Pages
75-9 1
Redefining the Image: Mimesis,
Convention, and Semiotics

Studies and the interpretation of images have relied on two intellectual

solutions. lmages have been traditionally judged as imitation (mimesis)
of the outside world. After Kant, however, images were understood as
the outcome of rules of the mind that constitute the images and provide
the key to visuality. Both interpretations are dualist: Mimesis presumes
the mental mediation will provide the match between visual patterns
and the natural world, whereas the conventionalist tradition stemming
from Kant presumes that the system of a prior rule will ensure the match
with reality. This paper presents Peircean semiotics as an alternative to
what may be considered two sides of the same coin. The option is a
triadic conceptual scheme program that redefines image making and
what was considered imitation of reality.

Interpreting images is at the core of daily experience. We just have to

look around to recognize the action of images. They circulate plebeian,
but nimble, throughout the social environment. Images simulate situa-
tions that help us reach decisions, whether political or scientific. Per-
sonal identities spring from pictures that certify and authorize us. Im-
ages help to build us up. The intensive action of representations in daily
life is reason enough to discuss the prevailing assumptions in reading
images. The purpose of this paper is to criticize the two dominant pre-
sumptions a bout images-one, mimetic; the other, conventionalist-as
well as to unveil an alternative.
Toward Mimesis
Recently it has been presumed, and with little dispute, that to under-
stand what images do we must go beyond notions of mimetic corre-
spondence. Not surprisingly, mimetism, the cardinal conception in the
Western tradition of evaluating images, could not hold its ground. The
mimetic criterion for the production of images is tied to outdated his-
toricist expectations: It indicates that representations have the exacting
goal of securing a perfectly realist rendering of nature.
Nowhere is this as clear as in a tale from Pliny’s (A.D. 23-79) ency-
clopedic Naturalis Historia. The tale may be apocryphal, but it can also
be deemed the expression of an extreme fascination with mimesis as
criterion of skill and principle of judgment in the production of images.

Copyright 0 1999 International Communication Association

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To win a competition of dexterity in painting, Zeuxis finishes a bunch of

grapes so perfect that birds come to peck them. Responding to the chal-
lenge, Parrhasius paints a curtain so perfect that Zeuxis himself asks to
have the curtain drawn so that the picture could be displayed. The painter
of curtains won: He had duped more than just birds; he had deceived a
fellow artist. The story reveals that mimetic image making is essentially
a technical affair, whose objective is to replicate reality. Norman Bryson
(1983) considers this story the central anecdote summing up “the essence
of working assumptions in Western Painting” (p. 1).
It is important to realize that, in the anecdote, the major reference
was not to an error of observation in the case of birds or even a skilled
painter. Pliny simply chose to express wonder for the technical compe-
tence of painters. Their efforts were to satisfy our desire of illusion to
the point of confusing image and reality.
What led us to believe that images should aspire to replicate their
objects? Surely, it is not difficult to recognize that mimesis is necessarily
an aftereffect of the disposition of nonmimetic shapes and forms in a
given visual field.
In its immediacy, an image is a visual configuration resulting from the
placement of its material elements. A brush touches a white surface; the
point left on the paper disturbs and changes the extending surface. The
modernist and nonfigurative painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1 944)
would say that the point is perfect concision, the frontier hedging silence
and words. Thus, in the visual record of language, at the end of a writ-
ten line, and after the point signifying a stop, we plunge into silence.
The dead light of a star, bells ringing, the drip-drop coming from a
roof, the splintering of a fallen glass, the insolence of a clock ticking the
night away could be represented by points. These natural events are
then made into a visual form. The point captures the events that shed
behind so many of their physical properties, such as noise and rhythm,
or else a ghostly shadow in the case of the dead star. The point rules-in
it, nature finds a niche.
Also writing from outside of the mimetic tradition, Paul Klee (1879-
1940) would claim that images do not reproduce what is visible; images
“render something visible” (Klee, 1973 p. 34).
Kandinsky ( 1970) wondered whether a point can produce a complete
image and be a work in itself. It can, if we relate the point to another
visual element, thus harmonizing point and plane. Kandinsky (1970, p.
45) presented the following example (Figure 1) made of the two most
basic and simple forms, the point and the plane, as “the first image of
any pictorial expression,” and from which other images can derive.
Klee (1973) sees the matter in a very similar way. For him also, the
point demands a plane: “Before reaching the paper, the drop of ink was
a point. After hitting the paper, the point expands in a spot, reveal-

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 Interpreting Images

Flgure 1

ing what was hidden in the point-a field of forces just expressed
through lines.

Figure 2

“Time becomes a factor at the moment when a point moves and is

made into a line. The same thing happens when a line engenders a sur-
face, deploying itself” (p. 37).
In this image (Figure 2 ) ,the line travels through the surface of a page;
it is the track left by the point, thus expressing time. New elements are
introduced in image making. Slowly, the complexity required to imitate
the outside world is put together. The conditions for mimetic represen-
tation spring from the interplay of nonrepresentative forms. From the
modernist consciousness, we can discern the action of material and
nonmimetic elements in the construction of mimetic representations;
Renaissance mimetic images are perceived now in a different way.
As Meyer Schapiro (1969) mentioned, historically, imitation had to
come later, only after the initial visual and irregular fields of cave paint-
ings were transformed into a continuous and neutral plane. In a flat and
blank surface, imitation of the natural world becomes a possibility. An
autonomous support, like a window from which we gaze at what is
happening outside, is an indispensable condition for representation in
three-dimensional depth. The visual field must be empty. Nothing should
interfere with the aim of displaying perfection in depicting nature. The

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flat and blank surface means more than an absolutely empty and ideal-
ized space. It is as though the spectator is left facing a window frame or
a wall where images can arise. Images are certainly more than mere colors,
shapes, and volumes. Colors, shapes, and volumes represent reality.
Representation of reality is not the first feature in image making. Im-
ages representing tangible events require consciousness. To see an image
as a positive representation is to judge it. What are we doing when we
judge images as accurate representations of their objects? At this point,
we leave mimesis as a visual problem and transform it into a philosophi-
cal question-the question of truth in representations.
Mimesis and Knowledge
As in many footnotes to what constitutes Western tradition, Plato (c.
429-347 B.C.) is the starting point. For Plato, image making must be
understood as a part of the process of cognition. In this process, we find
a perceived thing, its name, its definition, its representation, and finally,
on a higher plane, understanding and true knowledge. There are mul-
tiple objects named by the word circle that can be drawn with a compass
and understood or known to fit the concept circle. The different stages
in the process relate to one another by mimesis. The object, the name,
the definition, and the image represent mimetically the concept circle, in
itself the full, the prior, the true, the immutable, the objective, the per-
fect, the timeless form (eidos).
Seen that way, mimesis is everywhere. Events in the natural world,
such as trees, tables, chairs, organisms, human beings and their behav-
ior, just to name a few, are no more than pictures of a true order.
Thus, in the universe, there are three distinct hierarchical levels: ( 1 ) a
peerless world of intellectual and perfect forms; (2) the world reached
through the senses and that in its multiplicity copies and deforms the
ideal world of forms; and (3) copies of copies, a world three times re-
moved from the universe of forms. For Plato, copies of copies are mu-
tant and false, as incorporeal as the glitter of sunlight dancing in the crest of
waves or in the surface of mirrors, both being simulacra of existence.
In Plato's argument, presented in Book X of The Republic, the car-
penter builds multiple chairs through copying a unitary conceptual
model-chairs have a common form. On the other hand, the painter
representing a chair in a painting does it from the viewpoint of a specta-
tor gazing at the object. The painter copies a copy, produces a simulacrum,
that is three times removed from the truth emanating from the ideal
model. The painter is below the carpenter' since he is hopelessly tied to
the world of appearances. The painter could never depict truth; the paint-
ing is a phantasm of the essential reality.
Only the form, the perfect and unchanging essence, can be free from
mimesis. The world of the senses is surely an imitation of the ideal world.
All arts tend to be imitations of imitations. Even music is imitation.

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With the exception of ancient Egyptian painting, Plato argues that

representative arts are too close to deception. These arts imitate imita-
tions. Image makers thrive in the mastery of illusion and always pro-
duce contradictory images. Therefore, mimetic artists must be praised
for their skills and banished from social life.
After PIato
As a direct consequence of his moral posture concerning images, Plato
recognized the social import of art making. Society should control its
images. Images ought to be judged in terms of unambiguous ethical prin-
ciples and never be left solely in the hands of their makers and consumers.
Illusionary representations are definitely corrupting. The goal of hav-
ing a stable and perfect society-in Plato’s conception, the ultimate goal
of any society-demands a similar mode of image making. Greek art
during Plato’s time did not aspire to this goal, but Egyptian art followed
rigid pictorial standards. In Egypt, “painters and practitioners of other
arts of design were forbidden to innovate on these models or entertain
any but the traditional standards” (Plato, 1989, p. 1255; Laws I1 656e).
Concerning painting, Plato stated that what painters using perspec-
tive did was immoral. They distorted the proportions of reality, adjust-
ing real properties of represented things to the demands of a gazing eye.
How things truly were, how they corresponded to timeless models, re-
ceded in detriment of the task of representing the conditions of vision.
Plato abhorred perspective. He preferred the modes of essence (objectiv-
ity, stability, permanence, eternity, and truth) to the subjectivity of the
point of view, from which representations in perspective were built. Plato
recognized an exact parallel between the techniques of the painter, pro-
ducing from afar the impression of reality, and the rhetorical tricks of
the sophists (Schuhl, 1952, p. 52). Painters and sophists were content
with imparting a partial and deceitful impression of reality. Truth was
never their concern.
After Plato’s arguments, it became impossible to deny that image
making had a definite social impact. State censorship of the arts seemed
justifiable. Yet no matter what he had to say about the pernicious social
effects of perspective, later on, Renaissance painters chose to employ
perspective as a dominant pictorial technique. To be an illusion, to be a
copy, did not bother Paolo Ucello (1396-1475). Ucello would stay up
late at night, exploring the mysteries and congeries of foreshortening,
muttering to himself what a marvel perspective was (Vasari, 1991).
Plato’s critique of perspective had no lasting impact over painting
because his use of moral arguments to assess images is really a departure
from the main issue of representation. For an image maker, the question
is whether we should represent things and their properties as they actu-
ally are linked to each other or in the manner by which we perceive
them.

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Paradoxically, Plato had dispensed-with a pejorative purpose that

would be easily lost-the idea that the ruling principle in nature is imita-
tion. Then, why not imitate what the eyes see? Moreover, there is always
the feeling that the objective representation supported by Plato is rather
incomplete. If the image maker decides to represent things respecting
the objective properties of things, the spectator is inevitably purged from
the depicted scene. Is that fair? Certainly not, if we agree that images are
always perceived by spectators: Truth requires witnesses. Could we call
perspective an illusion, or is perspective an alternative mode of truth? If
perspective representations were in any form a valid and truthful depic-
tion, imitation would not qualify as necessarily inferior to objective truth.
The ideal of perspective may not be to cheat the viewer, but rather to
present a careful strategy of representation, simultaneously checking gaze
against the understanding of the spectator, throwing vision against knowl-
edge, thus conveying pleasure and awe to the viewer.
Furthermore, if we look at the history of painting, we realize that
perspective became a ruling principle for image making. Plato’s judg-
ment of perspective was never taken seriously. To Renaissance painters,
perspective was more than a common and technical figurative option.
The intellectual importance of perspective is evident if we remember
that, during the Renaissance, painters also wrote texts explaining the
new pictorial procedure: Leon Battista Alberti ( 1404-1472) wrote Della
pittura, Piero della Francesca (1410/20-1492) drafted De prospectiva
pingendi, and Leonard0 da Vinci (1452-1519) put together a Trattuto
de la pittura. So what is the meaning of such concerted effort?
In the footsteps of Cassirer’s (1955a, 1955b) suggestions, Panofsky
(1975) would claim that perspective is a symbolic form convening an
intellectual content, central for a specific historical period, to a sensible
mode of representation. Perspective cannot be reduced to the transposi-
tion of eternal conditions of gazing. Being a convention, perspective does
not represent vision, it presents one of the possible representations of
seeing. Through perspective, Western culture would provide a way of
interpreting the world. Nature is figured as in a picture, where the gaz-
ing subject faces the object,and contemplates the world as if standing
before a window. Made into an image, the world’s traits are persistence,
immutability, and permanence. It is the same conception of nature and
knowledge that led Ren6 Descartes (1596-1650) and other post-Renais-
sance thinkers, all being part of what Martin Heidegger (1962)calls the
Age of Representation.
The arrangement of pictorial elements on a canvas is parallel to a
distinctive conception of the world. In perspective, the depicted scene
unfolds according to the idea that “all appears in proportion; nothing
seems out of place; all of the parts fit nobly, over one to the other”
(Holly, 1996, p. 41). This principle defines how the world can be seen: It

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goes beyond optics. It is a figurative principle, and through it, reality

will be recognized as a unified scene. We are one step closer to the mod-
ern idea of space stated in the mathematical physics of Galileo Galilei
( 1564-1 6 3 2 ) .
Galileo (1953) pronounced that the book of the physical world is
written in the alphabet of geometry, with circles, triangles, and squares.
The idea of a common geometric language underlining the universe im-
plies an infinite cosmos, ruled by universal and homogeneous laws. So,
natural science conceives the world in a fashion analogous to what per-
spective had done before. The center from which the physical world is
ordered is not the one from which a god-like entity looks at the world.
The world is represented always from the point of view of an spectator.
Movement, for instance, is not a property in itself. It is not like Aristote-
lian physics would say, that is, a moving body searches for its natural
place in the hierarchy of the world. In the new image of the world put
forward by Galilean physics, there is no hierarchy in the universe. Move-
ment is shown in relation to a precise point of view; a body moves if it
changes position in relation to a state of rest. Movement can also be
reduced to a mathematical expression. There is no difference between
this idea of space and the conception of spatial order that perspective
puts forward. In both, as a direct consequence of the precedence given
to the viewpoint, we find the idea of a homogeneous and infinite space,
represented through mathematical, geometrical, and linear means. Ho-
mogeneity of space reached from a spectator’s unique point of view-
the beholder’s gaze-is the stipulation for a mimetic depiction of the
natural world.
From Renaissance paintings to contemporary photographs, the pre-
cepts of images remain the same. Images aim at being mimetic. Mimesis
is an ideal representation putting the spectator at the center of image
making, whose goal is to render as faithfully as possible what the viewer
is seeing. Perspective is a fair equation: The image is directed toward the
object that in its turn is made into a picture. Gombrich (1993) would
then say that perhaps the world may never look like an image, but an
image may be made to look like the world.
Triumph and Crisis of the Mimetic Tradition
The mimetic ideal, grounded by the immense success of perspective as
the main representational technique after the Renaissance, found its peak
in the invention of photography. The historical debt is unquestionable;
photography would not be feasible without the pictorial developments
of the Renaissance, most specifically Leonardo’s camera obscura. This
statement can be regarded as almost a commonplace, but how could we
forget that the principles of photography are akin to what guides repre-
sentation in perspective? The point of view is fixed, and the representing
image is registered according to what is seen as coming from out there.

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With one momentous difference, the painter would trace over the image
projected from the camera obscura, whereas, in the case of photographs,
a paper coated with a chemical emulsion sensitive to light fixes the pro-
jection coming from the outside.
With photography, the mimetic accomplishment seems unsurpassa ble.
No hand-made drawing can aspire to what photographic images attain.
Strangely enough, though, if photography with extreme realism simu-
lates reality, it is never reality itself. The lesson to be drawn is lucid-not
even a mechanical device can achieve the mimetic ideal. Photographs
make reality eerie. Photographs are the negative of a presence. The pho-
tograph results from formal decisions concerning the use of a certain
lens, the aperture of the camera’s diaphragm, and the time required for
exposing the film. These decisions are what establish the appearance of
the photographed object: They are the image. Photography reminds us
that the plain reproduction of the conditions of vision does not suffice.
A picture is rendered when it borrows from other visual solutions. The
first photographic portraits had to be extensions of poses codified by
traditional paintings.
Suddenly, we discern how images depend upon other images. Nude
pictures echo the poses of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867).
Che Guevara dead on a table, surrounded by his captors, reflects
Rembrandt’s (1606-1669) Anatomy Lesson. In these cases, and in many others,
the reference of an image is not its referent, but other representations.
It is difficult to believe that nowadays anyone would seriously uphold
the mimetic ideal. The experience of being surrounded by proliferating
images clearly hints that representations refer to representations, not to
the outside world. The obsessive growth of images drove us away from
referents. Actual experience was purified to the brink of hallucination.
How can we accept the idea that images should match reality, and so
be dependent upon a correspondence with the natural world, when im-
ages have become more realistic than reality? Nature is now just the
appearance of appearances, and the represented object matures into a
pretext that we are urged to forget. In contrast with the traditional mi-
metic premise that images have primarily something to do with either
fidelity or truth, we are immersed in a world of images that could not
care less for the loss of referents2
Images do not aspire to capture reality. They have become the norma-
tive pattern bestowing reality to events in the world out there. A bride
enters the church to be married. The nuptial march is performed. The
guests oversee an event unfolding primarily to flashes and cameras. The
event that will be later resurrected as the photograph album is handed
from person to person, or when the videotape is projected onto a screen.
The resulting impression is that we do not live, we pose. What matters is

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the transmutation of the event into images. Experience is turned into

representations. Living experience is pale in comparison to the simula-
tion that images offer.
Concerning images, the natural world does not rule completely any-
more. Presently, images are forceful, autonomous, and unquestioned
representations. Images are turned into enchantment and enigma.
It is also surprising that mimetism can be found almost everywhere in
daily experience, in holograms, in computerized simulation, in machines
of virtual reality, while almost absent from several authors interpreting
contemporary image making (Bryson, 1983; Moxey, 1994; Bryson, Holly,
& Moxey, 1994). Images can act as surrogates of reality, without being
reality itself; instead they are signs.
In such intellectual landscape dawns the idea that semiotics, the gen-
eral theory of signs, can furnish the interpretative tools to deal with
images. Even if we accept without challenge this argument, there is an
important question to be asked: What kind of theory of signs is needed
to deal with interpretation of images in an age where theory refuses
mimetic explanations in all its forms? A specific brand of semiotics, the
conventionalist interpretation, becomes an alternative to the mimetic
paradigm. This approach itself has been entangled in what appears to be
a hopeless predicament. I will present and critically examine the conven-
tionalist hypothesis3 and will then argue in favor of another semiotic
approach to the interpretation of images free from the strictures of rigid
conventionalism.
Roots of Conventionalism
Rigid conventionalism asserts that the communicative power and imme-
diacy of images come from the fact that their program ofproduction is
shared by makers and consumers of visual creations. The plain implica-
tion of this assumption is the belief in the existence of a productive force
in visuality, generating and determining its possibilities. From that view,
strict conventionalism fosters a deterministic conception of history and
creation. That would appear to be enough to discard it as a productive
theoretical option in interpreting images.
How, though, could we argue against conventionalist interpretations?
Conventionalism presides over a distinguished intellectual legacy, cut-
ting across several fields of the h ~ m a n i t i e sFurthermore,
.~ conventional-
ist theories present a plausible answer to why images have a communi-
cative dimension. The result is that there seems to be no other account
for the social import of images as messages.
We have gotten so used to conventionalist theories that they are sup-
posed to be immune to criticism. However, conventionalism deploys a
theoretical strategy that naturalizes a distorted and fragmentary theory
of signs, in its claim that images are just composed of two distinct ele-

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ments, form and matter, made into one by the powerful action of rules
shared socially.s Conventionalism relies upon a sort of linguistic and an-
thropological imperialism, bonded as the idea of culture, excluding such
a plethora of signs that it may qualify as unsatisfactory reductionism.
Conventions are a belated and precarious force in sign production,
being no more than unfulfilled conditionality. As unfulfilled condition-
alities, conventions cannot be deemed the exclusive, the central, or the
ruling element in the construction and the interpretation of images. So
why is this tenet so omnipresent in contemporary humanities?
With any paradigm, a theoretical frame conducts knowledge and in-
terpretation at a certain historical moment. The mimetic paradigm was
left behind and displaced by conventionalism. Therefore, conventional-
ism has to be assessed as the height of a revolutionary conscience that
subverts a previous disciplinary matrix dominating the tradition of in-
terpreting images (cf. Kuhn, 1970). There is no doubt that one impor-
tant moment in this theoretical revolution is Gombrich’s (1961) redefi-
nition of mimesis, in Art and Illusion. Gombrich transformed mimesis
into the historical unfolding of conventions, generated to match nature.6
At this moment, it is evident that, in ideas about images, nature is trans-
formed into a secondary element. Conventions are regarded as what
predominantly defines image making.
However, the origin of conventionalism is not in Gombrich. It goes
back to Kantian aesthetics, and certainly, in its debt to German tradition
in art history, Gombrich’s analysis of mimetic illusion is only possible if
mimesis is denoted as a normative criterion. This is the working of
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for Kant buried the dominance of nature
in aesthetic considerations, displacing nature in favor of genius.
Since Kant, we observe a progressive retraction from the idea that
visual creation is caged in the normative precept and that the imitation
of nature is the task of image making. There is a distinction between
image making (a product of a different nature, namely human nature)
and “ordinary nature” per se (Kamal, 1986, p. 18). Images convey the
impression of being nature, but they are a supreme and unobtrusive
creation. Rules include nature and the tendency to regard them as self-
contained.
In the same way that Kantian ethics and its categorical imperative are
an ecumenical obligation, or, in other words, a universal law ruling indi-
vidual purposes, genius is not an absolute free agency. Genius is more
than the action of an individual. In Critique ofJudgement, Kant (1952,
p. 169) asserts that the genius does not know how the ideas for creation
“have entered his head, nor has he it in his power to invent the like at
pleasure.” Guided by gifts bequeathed personally, genius creates rules
“to be followed by another genius” (Kant, 1952, p. 181). A rule is cre-
ated and matures into a collective triumph.

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Now, beauty obviously does not descend from nature; it comes from
its value as representation. Representations ascend to the foreground
and nature recedes to a status of an unprovable conjecture. Useful conjec-
ture, but unprovable, as Kant (1966) argued in Critique of Pure Reason.
The things-in-themselves (noumena)cannot be known, except as phe-
nomena, which means representations. We can think about noumena,
however, even if it leads us to antinomies, in other words, unresolvable
contradictions. Being outside the reach of the human mind, the things-
in-themselves are beyond rational knowledge. Kant (1966, pp. 292-293)
states that it is impossible to “positively extend the sphere of the objects
of our thought beyond the conditions of our sensibility, and assume be-
sides appearances objects of pure knowledge, that is noumena, since
such objects have no assignable positive meaning.”
With Kant, we are led into an intellectual system in which the domi-
nance of rules is unquestioned. The utmost creation, the achievements
of aesthetic genius, begins with the breaking of rules and ends up with
the constitution of rules. The grounds for conventionalism are begin-
ning to be paved.
Slowly, the idea of culture ultimately emerges, and representations in
given surroundings will be conceived as part of an organic whole. It is
with Ernest Cassirer (1955a, b) that the Kantian idea of an a priori
conducting experience is redefined as a set of collective representations
known as symbolic forms that comprise culture. Now culture is the domi-
nant factor in human experience; it precedes possible experience. Na-
ture is entirely omitted from this theoretical viewpoint. An image is seen
as determined by the totality of its culture. A condition to interpret a
message circulating in a society becomes the unveiling of its generative
rules, conventionally shared.
Culture functions as an a priori, molding individuals’ actions. The
system of cultural institutions becomes similar to a unitary subject, om-
nipresent in historical phenomena. Culture creates a symbolic net, a fil-
ter, allowing us to move among other human beings, as well as our natu-
ral environment.
The symbiotic nature of culture, codes, and symbols is nowadays al-
most a platitude. Cultural codes are deemed vital for filtering and repo-
sitioning sensorial stimulus. To sustain this view, Roman Jakobson (1971,
pp. 339-340) quotes the observations of M. Aronson, who, in a radio
broadcast, tried to transfer natural noises of a train arriving to a station.
The effect was disastrous. The informational value of natural noises was
next to zero. There was no way of discriminating them clearly without
conventions. Even to copy reality we must use a mediating schema. The
schema organizes our perceptual experiences and vindicates the neces-
sity of considering codes that are operative in a cultural milieu. It is the
same idea presented by structural linguistics. For post-Saussurian lin-

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guistics, a prior system of rules is a condition for any utterance. Conven-

tions, fixed as rules, abate the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign.
Conventionalists could then profess a rupture with the mimetic
tradition, and rightly so. I will argue, however, that conventionalists
do not step aside from the fundamental metaphysical tenet of mi-
metic theories.
Mimetism and conventionalism are intellectual solutions to the same
problem; they deal with the same elements. Mimetism and convention-
alism surmise the existence of two distinct natures-form and matter,
mind and matter, or conceptual and corporeal elements-fastened to
one another by a third ingredient, a mode of relation, effective enough
to bridge this gap. Mimetism alleges that similarity is what links matter
and form, whereas conventionalism professes that a rule joins what is
different. They are the extremes of a long-standing tradition.
At the origin of this tradition, we meet, once again, Plato’s contention
that mimesis projects a world of conceptual forms over matter. The stage
is set with three distinct actors, hierarchically related to one another.
There are two worlds, one intelligible (a realm of timeless forms, a do-
main of archetypes) and the always changing, imperfect, and moving
world as revealed by the senses. Thanks to mimesis, mind and matter
grow into a couple that will outlast this long-standing tradition. So,
however critical Aristotle was of so many of Plato’s solutions, he kept
the same basic idea, that the objects are a union of matter and form, and
form is superior to matter. Form is active, whereas the sensible side of a
thing is passive.’ In this tradition stemming from Plato’s essentialism,
form imposes continuity to the natural world. We classify objects of the
natural world because we recognize in them the same active form.
Besides the duality of form and matter, we will find a third element
at work. Again, this third element is a mimetic relationship.
Following the spirit of the mimetic tradition, Cartesian dualism re-
tains the cleavage between mind (res cogitatio) and matter (res extensio),
qualified as corporeal nature expanding in space. Therefore, in terms of
Cartesian philosophy, mind and matter are irreducible limits tied by
adequatio. A representation is adequate, there fulfills the adequatio re-
quirement, when it matches heterogeneities; the form of the representa-
tion is capable of replacing, with varying degrees of faithfulness, what it
addresses, what it intends to represent.
It must not be forgotten that Descartes’s arguments were presented in
his Meditations, whose purpose was to ascertain the existence of God.
God is logically necessary as a bridge to the exclusion of mind and mat-
ter. If there is a steady and structural split of substances, there ought to
be a primal substance where the differences do not exist, and out of
which the cleft was engendered. Being divine, the primal substance is

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 Interpreting Images

prior to all creation. In it, there is no differentiation of mind and matter.

It is prior to the duality perceived in the natural world. Adequatio itself
is possible because an underlying substance accommodates mind and
matter.
The door is opened to Kant’s defense of an a priori. Even if the Kantian
argument does not call for God or any divine substance, in fact, without
an a priori, how is it possible to have adequatio of radically distinct
substances? Conventionalism retains the mind and matter distinction,
introducing, after Kant and as a binding factor, a rule or set or rules
preceding mind and matter. The function of the a priori is to fuse a
concept and a material component as if they were two sides of a sheet of
paper.
Kantian conceptions ripple across many disciplines in the humanities.
Kant is at the core of the linguistics proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure
( 1857-1 91 3)-in itself synchronic, thus concerned with the structural
state of a language rather than its historical evolution. The ties of Kant
and Saussure are more than clear after pondering Claude LCvi-Straws’s
(1964) attempt to apply structural linguistics to nonverbal elements
of the social world like kinship. It is no surprise that Paul Ricoeur
(1969, p. 5 5 ) noticed promptly that Saussurian applications lead to
a distinct philosophical stand, “a Kantianism without transcenden-
tal subject.”
Saussurian linguistics aims at isolating logic and psychological rela-
tions that unite material sounds and concepts, matter and mind, in the
guise of a system. The linguistic system looks like a notation preceding
any actual performance or utterance. The system is an a priori; two
distinct natures, one material, the other conceptual, will be made into
one. So, in linguistics and in all of his semiological project, Ferdinand de
Saussure presumes the existence and the predating of an a priori system
of rules welding szgnzfiunt and signifie‘, signifier and signified (Saussure,
1982).
The ideas held by Saussurian linguistics would be eventually absorbed
in art history, which will give precedence to synchronic analytical meth-
ods in detriment of strictly diachronic approaches. Heinrich Wolfflin
(1950) and Alois Riegl(l931)would then emphasize that art making is
ruled by a system, akin to the linguistic contract, through which conven-
tions are shared in a community of social actors. The ancestry of both
assumptions, either in linguistics or in art history, is clearly Kantian. The
similarity between historical interpretation of images and linguistic analy-
sis is striking.
In Kant’s philosophy, in structural linguistics and in historical inter-
pretation of images, we find the same metaphysical furniture assembled
with new screws.

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 Communication
Theory

Signs and Images Beyond the Separation

of Mind from Matter
I decline the separation of mind and matter. The theory of signs I defend
supposes a continuity of mind and matter and repudiates rigid conven-
tionalism, whose most immediate effect is the domestication of chance
and uncertainty, precisely the most persistent attributes of historical pro-
cesses. The patterns that may be cast as time progresses do not result
from the action of determined regularities. These regularities, so dear to
conventionalist theories of sign, such as Saussurian semiology, are a be-
lated discovery. There is a lasting state of indetermination in the endow-.
ments of nature, arising from the spontaneity of origins. Chance is never
fully controlled: “An element of pure chance survives and will remain
until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetri-
cal system, in which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant
future” (Peirce, 1992, p. 297).
In a semiotics derived from such cosmogony, there is no room for the
notion that an antedating pattern rules signs. We can have nothing but
“approximate regularities” (Peirce, 1992, p. 302). The regularities them-
selves are always precarious. Signs can be conceived only as functions
acting as representations and moved over by endless chance and change.
This is a radical departure that overcomes the duality of mind and mat-
ter embraced by conventionalism. A renewed theory of representation
must start with the admission that representations are manifest through
three classes, three stages, of sign production. Signs should not be envis-
aged as if they were things. Signs are functions of relatives. The logic of
signs is the logic of possibilities.
Any representation is, at first, an hypothesis expressing logical possi-
bilities. Representations are nothing but three modes of possibilities: “a
may-be, a can-be, and a would-be” (Peirce, 1976, p. 868). The three
manners of existence intertwine in a subtle way. The path does not go
from possibility to reality, and finally crowning in necessity. Necessity can
perfectly interpret and mediate the link between possibility and actuality.
The triadic structure of representations is even clearer when we pon-
der the logical procedures involved in the act of knowing. In his writings
on logic, Peirce (1976, 1992) identified three basic modes of reasoning:
abduction (also hypothesis or even retroduction), induction, and deduc-
tion. Abduction invents or puts forward a hypothesis from available
evidence; it is the origin of knowing.* However precario.usly, induction
yields the evaluation and the establishment of the hypothesis conducting
any act of reflection. Deduction explains hypothesis, extracting the nec-
essary consequences through which conjectures would be tested. Ab-
duction, induction, and deduction are logical mechanisms organizing
the diversity of experience and accounting for our cognitive schema.

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Therefore, representations should be patterns structured as a triadic

model. Again, representations are functions, not things-operations in
which if a change is made in one variable, the result is an altogether
different representation.
In a sign-function, we would have a material ground of the represen-
tation, in other words a first representing a second, therefore its object.
Then these two elements suffer the action of a third, in itself an interpre-
tation reducing the arbitrary chasm separating the ground from its ob-
ject. The third element in the triadic schema is called the interpretant.
This model escapes duality. It is completely dissimilar from all con-
ventionalist models that postulate an a priori system of rules fusing two
radically diverse natures, one intelligible, the other sensible. The triadic
model is the condition for refusing the mingling with any kind of a priori
assumptions; the best way to qualify the triadic model is to see it as an
interminable interaction, as a dialogue (Fisch, 1986, p. 318). It is sheer
action, with no hierarchy excluding what is inseparable and continuous.
It is a dialogue between equals, an action of signs granting no privilege
to anything, not even to conventions.
Signs are more than mere actualization of conventions. They are ac-
tivities and processes. In them, conventions do little more than indicate
possibilities.
The resort to a triadic and evolutionary action of signs, installed by
the force of interpretants, is incompatible with the Saussurian semio-
logical conception of signs and its Kantian reliance on both an a priori
and the duality of mind and matter.9 The triadic model implies necessar-
ily acts of endless sign mediation. It is worlds away from correspon-
dence or similarity between distinctively dual constituents.
The principle that applies to all signs, and thus to images, is approxi-
mation. Signs, including images, are hypothetical constructs. In fact, there
is no way that consciousness could have a direct access to the external
world. Images, even the ones we regard mimetic, are a result of signs
acting upon signs. They are an intricate cluster of representations, eman-
cipated from the immediate ideal of corresponding to the outside world.
As is always the case, a sign substitutes another sign, and, mediated by
them, the cognitive mind is led in the direction of whatever exists out of
consciousness. With the external world, images entertain a relation of
clash, not one of correspondence. The possible autonomy of images ac-
counts for the fact that they can act as normative patterns to perceptions
in daily life.
Images are not subservient copies; they are additions succeeding from
a fundamentally creative agency. This redefinition of image is the first
step to produce the insight of a complex theory of sign production, tri-
adic and not dichotomic, and fully qualified to overcome the exclusion

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 Communication
Theory

of mind and matter present in mimetic and conventionalist doctrines

afflicting the interpretation of images.

Author Eduardo Neiva is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies, The Univer-
sity of Alabama at Birmingham. His research interests are theoretical problems in communication
studies; semiotics of image; biosocial and biosemiotic aspects of communication.

Notes
’ The social superiority of the carpenter in relation to the painter is more than a matter of useful-
ness. Plato’s contention must be understood in relation to Greek society’s evaluation of the me-
chanical arts and craftsmanship. For a largely landowning aristocracy, and like any manual enter-
prise, the activities of craftsmen (bamusoi) were of a very low status. Craftsmen were socially
powerless. Craftsmen had restricted freedom of movement and could not go to the gymnasium,
where not only exercise but learning were practiced. The craftsman was the quintessential igno-
rant, suffering a condescending attitude on the part of the intellectual elite. The ironic tinge of Plato
cannot be forgotten-being below the carpenter, the painter was the lowest of the low.
Simulation, as the essential feature of images, was first argued by Boorstin (1964)and then by
Baudrillard (1981)almost 2 decades later. Boorstin and Baudrillard observe that today representa-
tions refer to representations, thus forsaking attempts to represent reality. For Baudrillard ( 1 981, p.
17), we are at a terminal stage in the history of image making that dispenses assessments centered
around the truth-value of representations. However Baudrillard may seem resigned to what occurs
nowadays, he shares with Boorstin a nostalgic longing for the past. Yet our age incorporates simu-
lation as the trait of images and is indifferent to apocalyptic yearnings.
The critique presented in this paper is strictly theoretical. However, the radical experiment
conducted by Hochberg & Brooks (1962) must be mentioned. The idea of the researchers was to
check if an untrained child could recognize images. Therefore, since birth, a child was systemati-
cally barred from seeing pictures. It is true that the child may have seen some images, but very few.
Even so, after a series of empirical tests, the child was perfectly capable of recognizing images,
without specific training and instruction.
‘ Hirsch (1986) argues that conventionalism is a theoretical option of authors as diverse as
Heidegger, Foucault, Feyerabend, and the post-Saussurian structuralists in France. In art history,
Panofsky’s iconological method is an example of a conventionalist conception, as stated in Mean-
ing in the visual art (Panofsky, 1970).
’ Umberto Eco (1976, p. 197) presented the most evident conventionalist statement, saying that
a sign-function is exclusively “the correlation between an expression and a content based on a
conventionally established code (a system of correlational rules) and that codes provide the rules
that generate sign-functions.’’
The complementary point in Art and IIIusion is that “the message from the visible world must
be coded by the artist” (Gombrich, 1961, p. 181).
’ David Summers (1994)extracted fully the political consequences of the “strongly gendered idea
of form” (p. 405), identified as an active spirit dominating passive matter.
After recognizing that visual configurations cannot be reduced to an interpretation based on a
linguistic model, Moriarty (1996)argues in favor of abductive reasoning as what accounts for the
perceptual trait of visual images. The material surface of a picture offers the evidence and the clues
that will be built up as a hypothesis by the viewers. The reasoning involved is abductive.
This last sentence could be seen as inconsistent with Kant’s undeniable influence over Peirce’s
philosophical system. It is quite true that, from the viewpoint of interpreting Peirce’s monumental
oeuvre, Kant is more than a driving force. As early as 1859, and when still a student, Peirce wrote
a paper named “The Axioms of Intuition; After Kant,” now classified as Ms. 50. He also delivered
a Harvard Lecture on Kant in 1865. Furthermore, Peirce’s (1992, p. 1-10) fundamental text on the
categories, “On a New List on Categories,” published in 1868, is certainly Kantian in scope. Yet,
Peirce’s progressive acknowledgement of the importance of biological thought drives him away
from strict Kantianism.

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