Part VII

Innovation, gainful learning, and habits in the aesthetics of
media1
RolfKloepfer
"Rabbit's clever" said Pooh thoughtfully.

"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.
"I suppose," said Pooh,
"that's why he never understands anything."
(Milne, House at Pooh Corner VIII)
1. The power of habit reduces hard-won skills to simple routines
As a rule, the contribution of semiotics to media studies has been in the ex-
amination of key sets of problems which make it possible to describe and
come closer to understanding the complexity of sign processes. As we do
this, it becomes clear — sometimes shockingly so — how much we do not
know about something so everyday as a news program on ARD, the largest
German network. Martin Krampen's contribution in this volume is in several
respects a model, timely and perceptive. Semiosis appears as a system of
stages which must be passed through inside and outside the organism, and
which for their part are all active through complex intercommunication. The
institution is more than the supplementation of a particular human image —
Copyright © 1997. De Gruyter, Inc.. All rights reserved.
but also less. "Face to face" communication makes use at least of an acous-
tic and an optical channel, which can themselves use a variety of sign sys-
tems (language, prosody, etc., and fecial expression, gesture, posture,
proxemics, etc.). This fundamental multisensory and multicodal situation
can be extended through a mass of technical equipment: the "media" in the
popular sense. Krampen shows how much goes into a television newscast,
and how it goes in: from the initial film from correspondents and agencies
through acquisition of information, planning, processing, cutting, and elabo-
ration with extra texts or pictures to the final composition of the audiovisual
material for broadcast. Behind its fifteen minutes, a whole complex system
extends. A single element, such as a filmed (!) report on a film festival
brought in as "information", implies a whole world. The transmitter is an in-
stitution with hundreds or thousands of people in a hierarchical structure
Semiotics of the Media : State of the Art, Projects, and Perspectives, edited by Winfried Nöth, De Gruyter, Inc., 1997. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cityuhk/detail.action?docID=5157452.
Created from cityuhk on 2021-03-01 11:05:34.
656 RolfKloepfer
which takes information in from the outside, processes it with its own means,
and sends some product out again.
It has been established that the viewer remembers more about the news-
reader and her clothes than about the hard-won mass of information from all
over the world. The elaborate input turns out to be merely throughput — in
one ear and out the other. And viewers are even switching off. Public broad-
casters are driven to advertise in the cinema. What Paul Ricoeur said in re-
spect of a complex piece of common sense is true to the point of crisis of the
whole social body: "Je ne sais comment je fais ce que je sais faire." There is
in this distinction between "knowing how" and "knowing that" — knowledge
as capacity and as possession of information — a central problem that only
an interdisciplinary approach can handle. Knowing (connaître) through the
senses, behaviour and habit is different form knowing (savoir) in the mind.
"That which we know through the senses can become knowledge in the
mind." Decades ago, Gregory Bateson stated this, in contrast to what had
been assumed since Freud: "What we know best, we are least conscious o f '
(Bateson 1973: 107-111). That "the sum of what goes without saying in a
social system is called its culture" (Hofstaetter 1973: 93) is true also of
communication.
An example will explain. The complexity shown by Krampen which is al-
ready getting unmanageable will continue to develop. Soon we will not be
getting news of a certain form at the press of a button at a particular time
from the TV set and the station we choose, but will be calling it up as hy-
pertext from the Web on our computer, which has access via the modem to
the media world. In the last few years, while some of us exercised all our
concentration and a long chain of commands to call up a text from the Inter-
net, others — skilled, practiced, accustomed to dealing with technical media

— had long ago automatized these routines "off pat"; they carried out the
procedures almost instinctively while chatting with us, and some of them
have since then written the routines as macros, so that by now or very soon
we will just have to click on an icon without the slightest intellectual or other
effort. A couple of strokes, and there we have mediated, in sound and vision,
perhaps sometime as spatial and tactile experience, thanks to cyberspace, a
piece of the world.
Habit replaces learnt knowledge and complex schemata of actions. In the
process consciousness, especially reflective consciousness, appears only as
an epiphenomenon (Baltzer and Pape 1994: 356-381). It would however be
fatal to ignore our relation to these issues: we do not normally have the sign
process (reflexively), because in practice we are semioses. In this form,
Innovation, gainful learning, and habits in the aesthetics of media 657
memory is "frozen movement", as Rabelais calls it in his Pantagruel (IV,

55). Collective memory is in fact (1) in things, tools, machines; (2) in the
actions associated with them; and (3) in the communicative praxis we expe-
rience. It is on this basis that "cultural memory" is constituted by semiosis,
which is especially to be grasped and taught through speech and writing and
has found in the storage metaphor its most effective representation. Even the
natural sciences involve practical procedures and so rely largely on the first
three forms of memory, and hence on preconscious operations, for their
maintenance and progress.2 Culture, as "a kind of immune or identity system
for a group", as "public spirit" which maintains "common values, experi-
ences, expectations, and interpretations",3 can thus be understood a great
deal less immediately than is often imagined in the humanities.
Communication through the media is on a first level like any other interac-
tion with and in the world: we have, for example, the wish "Off to Paris!"
and in the end we have no idea whether we got there by car or train or plane.
If it happens often enough and if we make it "as usual" — that is according
to our habits — it is no burden to us. The trip becomes automatized and an-
aesthetic. "Knowledge" goes from learnt information to conscious skill to
ability to something taken for granted like riding a bike and as deep habitua-
tion to a kind of quasi-instinct. What sinks into the automatic relieves the
burden on consciousness. This is in some respects a gain, but at the same
time on an automatized trip to Paris we miss much, such as a particular ex-
ertion and the pleasure of travel. Semiosis is like these trips. The human ca-
pacity to reduce the most complex neuronal switching to the single point
where consciousness intervenes can be seen as astonishing, unpredictable,
uncanny, or marvelous, depending on one's perspective. The same ambiva-
lence of simplification by habituation is to be found in the outer and in the

inner world.
Consider for a moment the contrary process that has to do with surprise,
doubt, and amazement. If one looks at what is still the dominant medium,
television, it is striking that people use it quite differently from the way that
the "educated classes" imagine: instead of perceiving news of political events
as such, relating it to other information, and perhaps even processing it via
memory and anticipation into personal reactions, or at least retaining it for a
while, many get no further than the news reader or anchorman. This leads
some progressive thinkers to dismiss television as an "empty medium" that
transmits nothing. Such people are accustomed to thinking of sign processes
exclusively in terms of reference and representation. But in fact the airwaves
are full of games and sport, where participation is all. Light programs on the
658 RolfKloepfer
worlds of animals, science, law, or business subserve or at least make use of

the "art of entertainment". Can the aestheticisation of the media only be in-
terpreted in negative terms as "collective anaesthesia"?4
There are two ways of getting round the complementary intellectual fash-
ions of demonization and fetish worship. One is a critical awareness of the
history of, for example, censorship of pictures and books. Consider the hor-
ror the Bible aroused when printed, hence purchasable, and translated, hence
readable by all, or the "plagues" of theatrical production or narrative genres
from the novel to the strip cartoon or film. Thus, insightful observers have
always seen the ambivalence or polyvalence of a technically improved use of
signs.5 Another way of looking at this starts from communicative practices.
It asks, for example, what really changes when the apparently phatic use of
symbols in eye-to-eye contact ("maintenance of contact") starts to become
possible worldwide by means of increasingly complex media — telephone,
interactive radio, or television, and group connection on the Internet. In some
respects, the answer is nothing; it is still the case that chats about the
weather and computers, scandal and gossip, fixation on details, often serve
only to develop relationships, keep things going, feel good. And it could be
that contacting San Francisco from Heidelberg does not have to cost more
than shouting across the street — which could ruin your voice anyway. A
closer look at the genres in the high tech media also reveals this functional
continuity. It is getting more and more popular to use radios as reference
free music media, as a background, a frame, the musique d'ameublement
demanded by Eric Satie's program. Similarly, computers often become mere
status symbols, even in the academic institutions that have dedicated them-
selves to communication — they are like the "great contemporaries" that
used to be invited to ornament drawing rooms. Broadcasting companies too

— as media, as institutions, as companies — pay attention to their corporate
identities like the old society lions. They are all self-presentation ("emotive")
and invitation ("conative").6
This second, increasingly semiotic, way of looking at the issue can be
taken a few steps further. It is significant that it was Roman Jakobson who,
under the influence of Malinowski, added to the Prague School's functions
of the sign (emotive and conative function) a third — the phatic function. All
three of them define the relation between the partners, orient them in the
communicative space, and shape the communicative time. And this is done
— as is often overlooked — primarily by visual and gestural means, along
with proxemic use of space. It would be attractive to show that, as the media
develop technically, there is a parallel development of these functions of the
sign. Broadcasters put a lot of effort into being perceived, received, not con-
fused with each other, and above all, not being switched off. The content of
the communication, — we have finally come to the referential function — is
often only a means to these ends. In this way too, the sophisticated
"transmitters" resemble people in daily life, who will take up any topic to
keep in contact, to present themselves, or to be able to appeal to someone. A
theory of the media which is directed exclusively or even just predominantly
at referentiality inevitably fails to grasp most of the communicative effect.
Here too, then, doubt must be cast on the conventional assumptions.
2. The opposite of habit is doubt and tension between two possibilities
What has been said so far is not new. Ancient rhetoric and poetics estab-
lished that communication is most effective when signs are employed in
varying proportions in different sections of the discourse to inform or teach
(docere/prodesse), to move {moveré), and to delight (delectare)? Similarly,
in the early days of structuralism, Jakobson contradicted de Saussure on
three points, using indeed arguments from Peirce, the "pioneer of linguis-
tics". On a fourth point, which is important, for our topic of multimedia
communication, he made use of Herder against Lessing. His objections were
to a reductionist semiotics which suppressed the "energy" of the gaps and
tensions in semiosis, as follows:
(1) It is not simple, purely arbitrary, conventional "symbolic" signs which
best realize semiosis. The "most perfect signs" are the mixed, those that
use as equally as possible the symbolic, iconic, and indexical functions
(Jakobson, vol 2: 345-359) As a consequence of this, Jakobson recom-
mended investigation of the high proportion of iconic and indexical sign

use in verbal language, and correspondingly of conventionality, those
features which must be learnt to be understood, in pictures.
(2) "Rich signs" are characterized not by monofunctionality, but by a poly-
functionality in which the hierarchy of functions can vary continually
(Jakobson, vol. 3: 7-17; 18-51). A message might begin, for example,
in a predominantly metacommunicative way (by indicating the genre),
being only to a lesser degree emotive (with references to the sender) and
conative (to arouse interest). Then it may become predominantly
referential and only secondarily poetic, finally concluding phatically, as
the addressee longs for further contact with the author and tries to get
more, so that the communication can continue.
660 Rolf Kloepfer
(3) Sign systems do not function optimally when our actions are either
wholly conscious or wholly unconscious of them. Optimal semiosis re-
quires a rhythmic alternation in which "intuitive" contact in the area of
human relations is reversed by change of roles, and instinctive
immersion in poetic structures by metalinguistic reflection (Jakobson,
vol. 7: 148-162).
(4) No exclusive borderline in terms of signtypes can be drawn between
verbal texts and the linguistic arts on one side and pictures and the fine
arts on the other. Even though the former as an art of time are
dominantly based on a succession of signs, a synthetic simultaneity is
immanent in them, even during the process. Conversely, simultaneous
pictures, as works of spatial art, conceal analytic successivity. The
tension in each case creates the energeia which makes art as a form of
communication so successful in all ages (Jakobson, vol. 2: 334-337,
338-344).
This energy is the cause of the development of the semiotic capacity. Com-
munication, like perception, is in origin and in principle multisensory and
thus based on tensions. The reason is, it may be supposed, that tension filled
gaps are the causes of new syntheses and in this way of all aesthetic pleasure
and learning. This can be demonstrated more easily by examining the basic
communication situation than in highly developed multimedia forms, where
we are blind because what is familiar is naturalized. Here, where just two
individuals face to face form a dyad, a duality of active tension, the dyadic
principle develops with extraordinary diversity.
Latin medium originally referred to anything that can become a signifier
between two individuals. Since Aristotle, the question has been asked how
common sense (sensus communis) can unite our various sense perceptions.
The same problem arises with the semiotic tension between two sense do-
mains, that is two channels with two different codes and two different types
of message. Relationships are characterized predominantly through the vis-
ual channel and through indexical or iconic signs, in two dimensions: (a) for
orientation as to the concrete communication situation with the speaker
("emotive"), the hearer ("conative/appellative") and the contact ("phatic"),
and (b) for orientation as to the semiotic conditions ('metacommunicative'
and 'aesthetic' as occasional reference of the sign to itself).
It is significant that everything that manages the relationship in this wide
sense operates primarily through the eyes. Eyes are receivers and at the same
time signs signifying by means of movement, direction of gaze, variation of
form and of moisture of the eye, pupil size, etc. They receive but also show,
like facial expression, gesture, proxemics, or the way things are handled. But
dyadism is also to be found in the auditory domain. The spoken language
(mouth and ear) is inherently dual, for sentences are linked with intonation,
of which it is rightly said, "C'est le ton qui fait la musique". Thus, signs of
an arbitrarily and symbolic type are bound to others which are both indexi-
cal and iconic. Why should there be this dyadic principle, why this "double-
bodiedness" of language (Weinrich 1988: 81) with its twofold redoubling? A
first answer comes very early on, from Peirce: because otherwise, it would
be impossible to demonstrate that we are relating an utterance to the real
world.8
What has been said so far can be summarized by a fragment from Hera-
clitus (1957: n° 56): "In the beginning was confrontation, bipolar tension,
uncertainty, resistance."
So when the critics of the media sound the alarm and warn of loss of
reality or loss of memory, it has to be asked whether there is any evidence
for these claims, or whether it is just a consequence of their narrow view of
things. And to me, it is such a consequence. The media, in their technical and
institutional aspects, are developments of our bodies and minds (Leib und
Gemut). What happens if no notice is taken of the corresponding complex
development in the basic dyadic principle? To answer with biblical simplic-
ity: we cannot even see the communicative element. Does this mean that
communication, and especially that using media, is completely psycholo-
gized? Only in so far as signs only exist as relations in a modifiable con-
sciousness, the interpretant in Peirce's terminology. Changes herein caused
by a sign vehicle and with reference to a third element, which Peirce calls the
object, and Jakobson, significantly, the context, create signs. We can clarify
the issue with reference to a particular subdomain.
3. The net of indexical signs as guidance of the other's consciousness in

actu et motu
Weinrich follows Biihler (1934) in assuming that orientation in the dyadic

sign space takes place visually and physically by means of demonstratio ad
oculos. He shows that, as the gap is enlarged, a dynamic of "between"
arises. The enter-tainment ("holding between" from entre-tenir) of duality is
the prerequisite of everything else. This is especially true of the transition
from spoken to written language. Here it is in particular the deictics (Latin
662 RolfKloepfer
demonstratio "show") that maintain the real world contact of the communi-
cating partners. Deictics are in a way a means of contact preserved and de-
veloped in speech and writing or reading. Just as the eyes can touch others
analogously to the hands, so the system of deictics ensures that there is no
serious doubt in orientation, local, temporal, personal, or otherwise. Again,
there is in the Romance languages and from them in English and German, a
reference to indecision in words related to the concept of duality (cf. F
douter and E doubt from L dubitare = duo habere "have two", and G
Zweifel = zwei+fel "twofold"). Pointing in terms of posture and eye contact
of two bodies remains so present in the written language that a regular text
constitutive deictic chain (above all in pronominalization) is essential to
maintain the communicative pact between the partners (Weinrich 1988: 86-
89). This contact is more than a mere substitute for embodied eye-to-eye
contact. It can be just like body movement. And if only things that have once
been imprinted on the body stay in memory, the question as to the
'embodiment' of the text, especially for deixis adphantasma, pointing inside
the shared imagined world, becomes of crucial importance. It moves the con-
sciousness of the other this or that way, and makes an exclamation like
"What an incredible blaze!" relatively referential as part of a context re-
ferred to by the speaker, looking out of the window at the city, or moved by
a page of today's newspaper, or even a romantic novel. But whether the fire
really exists in the situation, happened the day before, or is burning meta-
phorically in the hero's heart, if the listeners go along with it, they are really
moved, sometimes more so by fiction than in "life".
Instead of detailed argumentation, I should like to relate an episode that
Peirce often mentions in this context. His mother spilled some highly in-
flammable fluid over her crinoline, and his brother avoided disaster by
means of a lightning series of highly complex actions. When he was asked
how he had learned to do that, he said that after reading of the death of
Longfellow in similar circumstances, he had often imagined the event and
mentally practiced what he would do. Psychotherapists and trainers in sport
and management have known for a decade how to make use of this phe-
nomenon (Peirce 1968: 258). So the physicality of communication depends
not on being together in time and place but only on sign mediation, "moving"
— emotionally or physically — the whole embodied self. It becomes obvious
that this involvement can be deliberate when we compare our use of space,
time or motion, or our way of dealing with food, age, or death, with that of
other cultures.
In short, the dubious resistance offered us by the outer world — the Other
and the others — gives rise to our behavior, knowledge, communication, and
learning. From the beginning it is extremely complex — physiologically,
neurologically, psychologically — and it is the prerequisite of the Self,
which makes possible continuity amidst change. And this explains the obser-
vation mentioned above that even multimedia complexes can so easily be-
come embodied habits. Thus, anthropologists, physiologists, neurologists,
psychologists, and psychiatrists all agree that real, and hence embodied, con-
stitution of reality is based on differences and syntheses between the senses.
Synthesis of sense impressions and of media is equally the origin of percep-
tion, communication, and learning (Peirce CP 1.390).
Peirce (1990: 277) described deictics as especially typical indices and as
such "mind forcers", because, in whatever form they influence conscious-
ness, they are most suggestively, energetically, and dynamically conative,
and immediately, directively, challengingly, and in fact almost violently im-
perative (Peirce 1986: 208; 1990: 282; 1993: 224-225). They force the pro-
vision of definite correspondences and the concrete recreation of appropriate
contexts. Such responses are "dynamic interprétants"; they present a chal-
lenge because of their "betweenness" and in this way strengthen the semiotic
will through the way they resists, through noncontact or nondissolution into
the habitual. This specific potential to provoke responses like attention, in-
tensity, and concentration, and in this way to make, on the basis of indexical
use, actuality (and action) available for further semiosis is said by Peirce to
be "a challenge to the inner world" (1993: 283). It awakens latent need, de-
sire (including hope and fear, pleasure and pain), all sorts of expectation and
interest as excited participation. In the ancient moralistic tradition, coming
from Greece finally to Kant, Peirce shares with Husserl, who did not influ-
ence him, an interest in attention, intention, retention, and other phenomena
of transition between the inner and the outer world. He makes numerous ob-
servations which would today be called psychophysiological or psychoso-
matic in a broad sense:
There are definite connections between feelings, which are particularly in-
teresting, that is they stimulate thought strongly. Which connections are
interesting? Answer: those which come closest to a reaction between soul
and body — a reaction which may take place sensorily, in the operation of
the glands, in involuntary muscle contractions, or voluntary outward activ-
ity or inward processes, in which some of the nerves react to others in an
unusual way. An interesting connection of ideas, when it first appears,
gives a rapid and short-lived increase in subjective intensity. After a while,
664 RolfKloepfer
when habit has become established, it is, though still interesting, less acute.
(Peirce 1986: 225)9
Deictics and other similar indexical elements have the structure of gestures.
Their primary function is to lead the recipient to move as they direct, or
complementarily, to agree, to perceive correspondences.10 In so far as semi-
otics thinks pragmatically, it must say "the meaning of any sign for anybody
consists in that he reacts to the sign" (Peirce CP 8.315), but it is only in dy-
namic interpretants that this reaction is activity in the present moment. This
accounts for the importance of "the bodily substrate of mental life" (Peirce
CP 8.294) and "the agitations of passion and surprise" (Peirce CP 8.315).
This does not only sound like Aristotle and the aesthetics of effect but it also
conforms to Peirce's pragmatism — semiosis is merely mediated effect. The
special role played by the shared gap between the participants often led
Peirce to use the metaphor of the inner theatre, with the interpretant on the
stage. Semiosis is not transfer of information, but the presentation of move-
ment in the other's or in one's own consciousness, and this can have either
value in itself like music or additionally realize contexts.
4. Concretization is the beginning and end of pragmatic semiotics
As an illustration, I shall here introduce one fundamental area beyond lan-

guage — one that characterizes film culture: significant eye movement and
attention. In recent decades, almost all research into film, its syntax, and
transitions between the dimensions of content has shown that the main vehi-
cles for these elements are the filmed eyes and their movement. Their funda-
mental orientation, turning to their object, their focusing limitation or blur-

ring delimitation, their withdrawal as a transition to another level of con-
sciousness, etc., are all even quantitatively comparable to linguistic deictics,
especially when one takes into account their intensification by reflecting
"media" like polished surfaces, glasses, mirrors, and of course the eyes of
others, in many direct and mediated forms (a photo or film within the film).
The "look in one's eyes" cannot be assigned a referent and so it gives back
to even the most automatized sign vehicle an autonomous aesthetic value,
and so allows new semioses. Emotively and metacommunicatively it allows
adjustments and discursive status. Conatively, it invites us to action and
especially to anticipation. Above all, however, it realizes complicity between
the communicators (phatically), which can be the main source of enjoyment.
So when Hegel puts forward representation, and especially concepts as the

overall aim of semiosis, it has to be said that, "Hegel [. . . ] blunders mon-
strously [. . . ]; to my mind the one fatal disease of his philosophy is that,
seeing that the Begriff in a sense implies Secondness (i.e., relation) and
Firstness (i.e., feeling), he failed to see that they are elements of the phe-
nomenon not to be aufgehoben, but as real and able to stand their ground as
the Begriff itself' (CP 8.268). This means that any investigation of com-
munication — whether everyday or mass mediated — which is based on
"content analysis" neglects two autonomous thirds of semiosis and so two
thirds of the possible effects: feeling and experience (CP 8.281).
To put this claim on rather firmer foundations, let us take a few steps back
to take a run at it. We need to show the semiotic relevance of the human
ability to use apparent deficits as enrichment. After all, this is the key prin-
ciple of semiosis. A sign is more than a mere substitute of an object one has
not got. Seeing is more than a substitute of holding, just as grasping an idea
is more than having taken possession of it. Seeing is interpretation, and in-
terpretation is based on gaps, perspectives, adjustments. Such a chain of en-
richments can hardly end on the elementary level of image and text.
The psychophysiology of vision shows that the difference between the im-
ages in the left and the right eye is used by the visual processing system in
the brain to construct knowledge about, for example, distance and the sense
of depth. This is learnt in childhood, as we know from research into brain
damage in young children. Learning itself is also based on twofold informa-
tion — on the correlation of touch and sight (and hearing and sight, etc.).
Thus, we can state the principle that difference and doubt, in the sense of a
tug of war between two sets of data, lead to a higher quality, which even at
this basic level clearly derives from interpretation. Without such processing
optical impressions could not make up a perceived object. Difference, gaps,
processing as counter-action, repetition and habituation as a learning process
lead in the end to belief — Überzeugung — in which -zeug "thing, stuff"
suggests the solidity, the reification of what we finally arrive at. Having
reached this point, we forget all about the process, and this has a particular
functional importance to which I will come back.
Gaps and the principle of twofold processing work in progressively more
complex ways: within a single level like vision, between sensory spaces,
between dimensions of time, between semiotic systems, between forms of
memory. The "sense of the senses"11 derives from difference and synthesis in
motion. The principle of dyadic leaps of quality based on "shortcomings"
applies to much that is fundamental even at this simple level. Higher up, it is
666 RolfKloepfer
not only not abandoned, but further developed. Consider, as a further exam-
ple, conservation of size: however far away something is, wherever it moves
to, our processing power still interprets its size as constant. The same is true
of many processes involving supplementation and contrast, which produce,
by means of learning through experience, the greater complexity of process-
ing investigated by gestalt psychology in the first quarter of this century. The
differences between seeing as external optical reception, "looking" as move-
ment which significantly increases the quality of processing, and perception
are particularly clear if we consider the way the eyes move when we look at
a portrait. They concentrate on the most important points — that is, those
which we have learnt from experience to be rich in information (the eyes and
the mouth). By now we are well into the semiotic dimension. Furthermore,
the eyes investigate the right half of a portrait with more attention than the
left. Painters have — unconsciously, yet practically — made use of this just
as of the possibilities of supplementation and contrast mentioned above.
They apply them to structure the mass of what is offered to the eye rhythmi-
cally through abundance and incompleteness, clarity and blurring, potential
for recognition and potential for completion. Rembrandt is an example. The
idea can be taken further to make things clear: the physical-optical qualities
of the eye are poor compared to those of some animals or to a camera, but
our capacity to learn makes utilization of this deficient, dubious, two-sided,
information extremely fruitful. Our processing power can thus make a
strength out of the weaknesses of the processing system. A final example of
this process is well-known, but not sufficiently appreciated: it is our inability
to recognize a change of pictures at 30 per second that makes it possible to
make what is motionless move, make pictures into film.
5. Communication ias direction of the capacity for desire: An extract

from an apology for the energetic interpretant
In the widest sense of the word, a thought is the interaction of the inner and
the outer world. Hence, it is always bounded by practicality.12 The inner
world, for example, that of imagination, can have an effect on habit in eve-
ryday practice, if it is often enough reiterated as an inner movement and "if
well-intensified by direct effort".13 If we accept with Peirce that the mind
(Kant's Gemiit) has three parts — Feeling/Emotion, Volition/Will, and Cog-
nition/Knowledge — it is evident that semiosis as the sign process must nec-
essarily involve all of them. This has always been known in the traditions of
rhetoric and poetics, as noted above (see 2.). The author had to create states
of feeling, to inflame them into action of volition, and to produce cognition
(cf. Peirce CP 7.511). We must not reduce feeling, as Kant does, to the
feelings of pleasure and pain, but must reincorporate qualities as different as
the consciousness of life, the sensation of our clothes on our skin, sympathy
with another person, as well as light, warmth, a global sense of possible be-
havior, and hundreds of other things we sense in a moment, though they take
a long time to enumerate.
It is worth giving particular justification to the anthropological and semi-
otic dimensions to which we have now turned because they have been so
generally overlooked. Peirce himself supplied the reason. About 1905-6, he
dealt with the question which was the theme of this conference in the context
of the classification of signs: "Should I say medium instead of 'sign'?" (CP
3.221). As a "correspondence", something physical produces, with reference
to a third element, a change of consciousness (an interprétant). But many in-
vestigators have overlooked the aspects of semiosis which are not final, ha-
bitual, possessable, but immediate or dynamic, emotive or energetic, sponta-
neous and current, and hence only present in the process. This is the old
theme expressed by Valéry as "L'œuvre de l'esprit n'existe qu'en acte"
(1962, vol. 1: 1349). To put it theoretically: "Firstness" — existence as pure
quality as in the wonderful play of colors in a film — and "Secondness" —
existence as connection, as in the dreaded actions of evil — are real and
therefore more difficult to grasp than Thirdness — the product in the mind.
This is as true in the brief moments of art as in the long periods of socializa-
tion into the framework of the taken-for-granted of a culture. Apparently
these fleeting aspects have to become possessable before they can be studied.
But they are all the more effective as they are more deeply drowned as
'natural' in the individual and collective unconscious. They correspond to
true motivations. And precisely because of this they are the theme of art
(Bateson 1973: 102-4). If consciousness is not storage but potential for
movement, it is not surprising that we have difficulties. It is like determining
the ultimate constituents of matter.
The attempt has here been made to clarify this complex of problems by
examining questions of deixis. To repeat: Peirce defined deictics (and as one
form of them, pronouns) as signs which "may indicate anything to which the
first and second persons have suitable real connections, by calling the atten-
tion of the second person to it" (Peirce CP 2.288). They are directions with a
certain degree of freedom which orient the persons in their real or imagined
situation. Jakobson has shown in several places that increasing degrees of
668 RolfKloepfer
freedom do not diminish the effectiveness of the sign. Otherwise, why should
rhetoric for thousands of years have sought to move our consciousness with
metaphors, supplementations with ellipsis, implicit irony, etc. Why complex
narrative procedures with tension between narrated time and narrator's time?
This point of view illuminates the saying, existing in many variants, that art
consists in a special way of handling contexts.
Among mammals ("and indeed ants"), the sensory organs are the main
means of transferring information, on the lines of "which way is the Other
looking?" or "are his ears directed this way or that?" (Bateson 1973: 484).
Weinrich's thesis of physico-spatial orientation as foundation is relevant
here: orientation of special intention, concentration, and thought shows ex-
actly the same phenomenon on a higher level. Why should a fragment have
such power other than because it gives extreme stimulation to the "sense of
supplementation"? Are our minds still so medieval that we will not accept
that in will, in perception, and in evaluation we have the same vital struc-
tures as other forms of life yet have at the same time developed them more or
less "humanly" and given ourselves freedom through them. The semiotics of
managing relationships and interaction is not "secondary". "Naturally" the
final aim is the possession — real or semiotic — of the object. But commu-
nication reverses the relations, as Jan Mukarovsky showed on a large scale.
The point could be reduced to the formula that the referential target of
semiosis is not eliminated by obstacles on the route of semiosis, but funda-
mentally altered by the nature of the route. Referential hunger, to put it figu-
ratively, is diverted to modifying the consciousness of the Self or the Other
for quite different purposes, like playful "pleasure in function", learning in-
teraction with "models of connection", as modeled by music for thousands of
years, or trying out the "depths of the heart" a recurring theme, related to the
corresponding Pens&es of Pascal in Bateson's work.
We have now more or less come back where we started from. The hundred
years' war in psychobiological memory research between behaviorists and
cognitivists is over: both procedural habit-memory ("heart") and declarative
knowledge-memory ("head") exist (Bembaumer & Schmidt 1991: 533, 538-
40, 556). The former is included in the processing system (seeing, managing,
handling), phylogenetically old, and hard to get at through conscious re-
membering. Here we are as signs of our memory, in relationships, attitudes,
approaches, and of course inner movement and feelings. This corresponds to
"knowing how" and so to skills. The latter is artificially constructed, above
all by the use of words, is new, and is "possessable". It corresponds to
"knowing that". Procedural knowledge receives the results of declarative
knowledge as if they were a global gestalt, works analogically, and has as its
basic metaphor movement and process. Declarative knowledge is "digital"
or analytic and is based on the metaphor of storage or effect. The semiotic
— and linguistic — characterization of iconic and indexical signs as
"motivated" is appropriate in a number of ways. These are signs which need
or make use of larger or smaller relics of actual bodily participation. In lan-
guage and reflection on it, it is these aspects which rhetoric and poetics em-
phasize. But the warnings of Jakobson and many others — I have cited H.
Weinrich as the most important scholar of the present day — against de-
priving verbal language of this dimension have been in vain. We are now in
the paradoxical situation of using an extremely impoverished conception of
language to evaluate, criticize, and investigate audiovisual communication.
It is no wonder that communication researchers seem so miserable, have
no status (at least at German universities), and in the process of cultivation
and education, have no official role to play.
Notes
1. This article has been translated from the German by Philip Shaw.
2. Cf. Pestre's (1995) summaiy article and Foucault (1994: 22).
3. The quotations are from Assmann (1992: 140), although he does not seem to
give any particular space to the collective unconscious, whose Jungian inter-
pretation he correctly rejects and which he otherwise only thematizes occa-
sionally. Cf. Berabauer & Schmidt (1991: 538-556).
4. Cf. Kloepfer & Landbeck (1991: chapter 5). The prognoses made there on the
basis of hypotheses published in 1986 have been confirmed for the area of
mass communication chosen for study: the audiovisual commercial. Insofar as

the aesthetics of the media follow this area, the criteria developed there are
still also applicable to, for example, feature films. But at the same time
counter-models are developing, which aim not at acceleration, but at a new
leisureliness.
5. It is significant that Plato's Phaidros (274 a) is quoted for his refusal of the
medium, but not the following theses two pages later (276d-277a) defining the
conditions of a profitable use. If signs are preserved by the medium as grains
of seed, i.e., as elements of a necessary dialogic act in the later times, then the
invention of Theut is a grace. I have developed this principle in many articles,
some of the earlier ones are quoted in Kloepfer & Landbeck (1991).
6. Of course, it is only 'in some respects' that nothing changes, and there is con-
tinuity of function. The consumption (i.e. death) of millions of animals and
thousands of people in the Roman circus is only on a very high level of ab-
670 RolfKloepfer
straction, and only by ignoring a large number of very relevant features can it
be compared with today's consumption of stars and victims in the media.
7. Lausberg (1960) has many entries under these headings. If one looks up the
references, it appears, not indeed from the summarizing passages, but from the
individual analyses, that the four principles correspond to the ancient knowl-
edge going back to Aristotle's Rhetoric, for example, in the treatment of
"ornatus. . . in pluribus (verbis) positus", that is, the figures and composition
(§§ 599-1054).
8. "The fact is that (as far as I know) no language has a special linguistic form to
indicate that the topic is the real world. But this is not necessary, for stress and
gaze are enough to show when the speaker really means it. Stress and gaze
have a dynamic effect on the listener and cause him to turn towards reality. In
this way, they are indices of the real world" (back-translated from the German
edition of unpublished papers: Peirce (1986: 246), see also Peirce (CP 3.363).
9. Peirce's text is translated back from the German edition of the unpublished
papers. Husserl's and Bergson's works in the area have been taken up by
Merleau-Ponty (1941, 1945), Plessner (1980), Buytendijk (1958: 170-188),
von Uexkull (1963).
10. Merleau-Ponty: "I read anger in the gesture; it is not that the gesture makes
me think of anger, it is anger." — "The meaning of gestures is not given, but
understood, that is grasped by an act of the spectator." "Everything goes on as
if the other's intention were in my body, or as if my intentions were in his"
(1945: 215).
11. This is the title of a work by the anthropologist Plessner which draws attention
to one of the many currents of thought springing from Peirce and Husserl's
"phenomenology" (different as their approaches may have been in some ways)
and originating from the confrontation with Kant. At present, the most influ-
ential and useful are probably Cassirer (1923), Buhler (1934), G. H. Mead
(1934), and Merleau-Ponty (1945). Bateson (1978: 111, 113), quoting Pascal,
observes: '"The heart has its reasons which the reason does not at all per-
ceive'. Among Anglo-Saxons, it is rather common to think of the 'reasons' of
the heart or of the unconscious as inchoate forces or pushes of heavings —
what Freud called Triebe. To Pascal, a Frenchman, the matter was rather dif-
ferent, and he no doubt thought of the reasons of the heart as a body of logic of
computation as precise and complex as the reasons of consciousness. [. . .]
These algorithms of the heart, or, as they say, of the unconscious, are, how-
ever, coded and organized in a manner totally different from the algorithms of
language. And since a great deal of conscious thought is structured in terms of
the logics of language, the algorithms of the unconscious are doubly inaccessi-
ble. It is not only that the conscious mind has poor access to this material, but
also the fact that when such access is achieved, e.g., in dreams, art, poetry, re-
ligion, intoxication, and the like, there is still a formidable problem of transla-
tion. [. . .] Anglo-Saxons who are uncomfortable with the idea that feelings
and emotions are the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms usually
have to be told that these matters, the relationship between self and other, and
the relationship between self and environment, are, in fact, the subject matter
of what are called "feelings"— love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility,
etc. It is unfortunate that theses abstractions referring to patterns of relation-
ship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that
the "feelings" are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pat-
tern. This is one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a distorted
epistemology". The different branches developing intensely since 1900 have
one common stem: Kant's (1798) Anthropology. He knew perfectly well the
tradition coming from Plato (Republic IV: 439 d, 6ff.) or Aristotle (Politics,
Poetics, Rhetoric, Ethics) with their psychosomatic view of humans.
12. As a historian of science, Foucault (1994: 22) established that the decisive is-
sue in the investigation of history is not the "institutions", not the "theories",
not the "ideologies", but the practices. Practical activity is the central point of
connection between what we say and what we do, the rules we impose on our-
selves and the reasons we think up, the intention and the evidence of what is
really happening. By analyzing the "régimes de pratiques" one can grasp the
way that behavior is programmed and so the "structure structurans", which in-
cludes the prescriptive effects on the members of a given culture.
13. See effort and Anstrengung as a fundamental concept according to the Index of
the different editions.
References
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1992 Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrifi, Erinnerung und poli-
tische Identität infrühenHochkulturen. München: Beck.

Baltzer, Ulrich
1994 "Selbstbewußtsein ist ein Epiphänomen des Zeichenpro-
zesses: Die Landkartenparabel von Ch. S. Peirce", Zeitschrift
förSemiotik 16: 357-373.
Bateson, Gregory
1973 Steps to an ecology of mind. London: Granada.
Bernbaumer, Niels & Robert F. Schmid,
1991 Biologische Psychologie. 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer.
Bühler, Karl
1934 [1965] Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsftinktion der Sprache. Stutt-
gart: G. Fischer.
Buytendijk, Frederik J. J.
1958 Das Menschliche: Wege zu seinem Verständnis. Stuttgart:
Koehler.
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1959 La motivation. París: Presses Universitaires de France.

1967 Prolegomena einer anthropologischen Physiologie. Salz-
burg: Otto Müller.
Cassirer, Ernst
1924 [1964] Philosophie der symbolischen Formen 1: Die Sprache.
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Foucault, Michel
1994 Dits et écrits, vol IV. Paris: Gallimard.
Heraclitus
1957 "Fragmente", in: Diels, Hermann (ed.), Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker, 27, (n° 52). Reinbek: Rowohlt.
Hofstetten Paul R.
1973 Einßihrung in die Sozialpsychologie. 5th ed. Stuttgart: Koeh-
ler.
Kant, Immanuel
1798 [1983] Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik
und Pädagogik, 2. Teil. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft.
Kloepfer, Rolf & Hanne Landbeck
1991 Ästhetik der Werbung: Der Fernsehspot in Europa als
Symptom neuer Macht. Frankfurt / M.: Fischer.
Jakobson, Roman
1962-1988 Selected Writings, 8 vols. The Hague and Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Lausberg, Heinrich
1960 Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. München: Hueber.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
1941 La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
1945 Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: NRF.

Pape, Helmut
1994 "Zeichenbewußtsein ist kein Epiphänomen des Zeichenpro-
zesses: Ch. S. Peirce über se miotische Form und teleo-
logische Struktur des Selbst", Zeitschrift flr Semiotik 16:
373-382.
Peirce, Charles Sanders
1931-58 Collected papers. Vols. 1-6, ed. Hartshorne, Charles and
Paul Weiss; vols. 7-8, ed. Burks, Arthur W. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
1986/90/93 Semiotische Schriften, 3 vols. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.
Pestre, Dominique
1995 "Pour une historie sociale et culturelle des sciences", Annales
50: 487-522.
Innovation, gainful Iearning, and habits in the aesthetics of media 673
Plessner, Helmut
1980 Gesammelte Schriften III: Anthropologie der Sinne. Frank-
furt/M.: Suhrkamp.
Uexküll, Thure von
1963 Grundfragen der psychosomatischen Medizin. Hamburg:
Rowohlt.
Valéry, Paul
1962 Œuvres, 2 vols. Paris: NRF.
Weinrich, Harald
1988 "Über Sprache, Leib und Gedächtnis", in: Gumbrecht, Hans
Ulrich and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (eds.), Materialität der
Kommunikation, 80-93. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.
Deep structure and design configurations in paintings
Claudio Federico Guerri
1. Introduction
The study of significative production in painting, one of the individual me-

dia, will be approached, in this paper, from the point of view of form. Form
is difficult to define. Are images forms? What is the difference between form
and image? Form is a relation or a set of relations that can be kept constant
in spite of variations which may occur. The semiotics of space attempts to
give an account of such relations constituting the form, that is to say, of
those relations that structure that which can be seen, underlying what is
seen.
My point of departure is to consider that the visual sign has four matters
of expression, form, color, texture (Jannello 1963; Groupe |i 1993: 189),
and what Jannello (1988: 484) has called cesia} The union and materializa-
tion of these four conceptual matters under human perceptual conditions
shall account for the constitution of the image.
The pictorial image is among other things2 the manifestation of an under-
lying formal structure. The "abstract form" or "pure design" (Jannello 1980:
S) consists of the relations structuring that which apppears below the surface
at a deep level of the image. In this sense, I introduce an approach to the
"deep syntax" of the work of art and, as shall be seen in the examples,
investigate the relation between syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.
This is the Theory of Spatial Delimitation — TSD — (Jannello 1988:
483-496; Guerri 1988: 389-419) constituted as an alternative graphic sys-
tem capable of manifesting the underlying structure hidden below the pri-
mary perceptual manifestations. TSD shows "design configurations" in the
most analytic aspects and therefore allows for an organization of a comple-
mentary reading made from what is manifest. Indeed, "the structure of
space" of a painting becomes visible through TSD. Its importance for the
analysis of paintings and design is that of a tool to be applied to any spatial
situation. It is not an ad hoc concept forged for the analysis of any one work
in particular.3
Thus, it is obvious that Velazquez and the "Meninas" or Malevich and his
676 Claudio Federico Guerri
"Squares", however privileged these examples may be, are only the pretexts
to develop a more general theory on the contribution of semiotics to the un-
derstanding of the work of art as a significative form.4 "Meninas" is proba-
bly one of the paintings most examined by critical and philosophical thought
concerned with the development of ideas on the structure of
"representation", and it is probably one of the most beautiful works ever
produced within the genre of so-called "iconic" painting. Beautiful on ac-
count of its composition, luminosity, and contrast between lights and shades,
and in particular on account of the enigmatic interrelation of the represented
characters.
2. "Las Meninas"
Foucault's reading of the painting in his Les mots et les choses is well
known, and indeed the work helps as an illustration of the very principle of
representation in the 18th century.
The glance at the court given by this painting brings us into royal privacy,
a fragment of everyday life at court. The scene represents the moment when
the Infanta Margarita, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting and buffoons,
enters the hall to greet her parents which are posing for the painting, and
whose canvas is shown at the left of the picture,3 where also the painter is
shown to paint the models that are being greeted by the Infanta.
Even at the risk of reiterating something too well known, I will briefly de-
scribe the organization of characters. As in any court ceremonial, princess
Margarita has advanced and stopped, attended by two ladies-in-waiting
Maria Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco, the dwarf Mari Bárbola, a
buffoon named Nicolasito Pertusato, and almost at the back, Doña Marcela
de Ulloa, owner of the dames, and the lady-guard Diego Ruiz de Ascona. In
the background of the painting, a gentleman, the palace butler, José Nieto
Velázquez, watches the scene, while in a reflection on the mirror, King
Philip IV and the Queen Mariana of Austria, only seen by the spectator, are
present outside the scene shown in the painting.
In spite of the number of characters, the critics agree that "space is the
protagonist" of the painting. Space is being created by means of an actual
superposition of technical devices which allow to create a depth, quite apart
from the elements that are present. The hierarchical importance of the
figures depends on their alignment in the composition in their relation with
the protagonist — the Infanta — and also on the pictorial treatment. Thus,
Deep structure and design configurations in paintings 677
the figure of José Nieto Velázquez at the back is more compact — due to the
attire and the light that surrounds him — than that of Marcela de Ulloa and
her companion.
Finally, the mirror and the images it reflects are almost ethereal. Camón
Aznar (1964: 836) has described them as a "fugue towards a fantasmagorie
world". However, we will see how those figures have an enormous
gravitation on the organization of the painting. In general, the technical
treatment of figures and light is described as "perfect". Such treatment with
short and energetic brush strokes to compose the image objectivizes volume.
Light then appears as a struggle between chromatic points. Fading towards
the sides with a total explosion at the back, in the illuminated corridor
opening towards other halls of the palace, the light softly diffuses towards
the back against the walls, to be retrieved only as a reflection on the mirror
that captures the king and queen under the same light.
Camón Aznar's reading underlines the fact that this is not a "passive"
space, as with the painters of the 15th century. It is rather the depth
determined by "reciprocal relations between things", by "interdistances", by
the light and attitudes of characters capable of "creating a spatial complexity
which is thick and tangible".6
"Where is the painting?" asked Théophile Gautier, confused by the cubic
depth of its perspective. Foucault and Lacan have likewise wondered at the
semantic depth of the glances, the depth of the point of view. It is from this
approach that both Foucault and Lacan have analyzed the "Meninas". But
even though Lacan's reading has been influenced by Foucault's, Lacan
creates a conceptualization that is different.
Foucault reads the painting from the direction of the character's glances.
What makes this painting intelligible is indeed the glances and relations
between their targets within the pictorial space. In his intelligent and lucid
reading, Foucault has privileged the analysis of the painting in order to make
it a metaphor of his own argumentation.
For Lacan, the center of the painting is the princess and her "invitation to
look", duplicated by the character at the back completing the princess's
invitation, since he is the only one that can see the totality of the scene, with
the exception of the monarchs who see as from their specular representation.
As far as this character is concerned, both Lacan and Foucault point out the
feet that the butler can see what is invisible to the spectator: the monarchs
that are out of the visual scope and the backs of all those characters we see
from the front. This character is also called Velázquez, and he is the courtier
who helped the painter to come nearer to the king. One might think it is a
duplication of the painter himself. Thus, both characters by the name

Velázquez are the "only ones" capable of dominating the vision of
everything represented.
Lacan points out that this painting is defined as an interrelation of
characters. It is in fact a painting in which all the glances except the one of
the lady-in-waiting María Agustina Sarmiento who looks at the infanta are
suspended ad infinitum in space. This observation has the virtue of creating
perplexity. Indeed, what is the interrelation when all the glances are lost in
an unattainable place beyond the canvas? The interrelation is obviously not
semantic, but syntactic. The glances are not enough to explain the relation
between the characters. The figures are combined in groups of a higher or
lower compositional relevance, and as we shall see later, three of those
groups are considered to support the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic
axes.
According to my reading, the syntactic distribution is that which
establishes the dominating lines in each axis. The glances are not the
relational organizers. This organization is formal. However, in the semantic
order, the question remains as to what they behold. Thus, Lacan questions
the interpretation that places the monarchs in the stead of the spectator. And
he wonders where the painter has placed himself, not the represented one,
but the one who is and who was painting.
One of the hypothetical answers to that question "is that the painter is
already there, and since this is what he painted, he must have been looking at
it all in a mirror, a mirror which is in our place; therefore we become the
mirror" (Lacan 1966: 21).7 But finally, as an argument, Lacan remarks on
the absence of information on a possible left-handedness of Velázquez. This
lack of extrapictorial information, this lack of knowledge of facts that should

be known, if existent, makes Lacan eliminate Velázquez from the mirror and
place him, as an absence, by the window's side.
The analysis is much more complex and helps Lacan, in his trickster game
of changing the painter's place from one side to the other, taking him out and
putting him in again, setting it as an example of the relation with the "object
of psychoanalysis", an issue I can not elaborate here.
What is the emphasis given to each of these readings? In all three cases,
there is a privilege of semantics even when the approach is different. Camón
Aznar interprets the semantic relation as originating from composition
techniques in their mere manifestation. His approach is a pictorial analysis
that considers light, texture, and cesia (which is not mentioned as such) as a
treatment of form. But'he does not insist sufficiently on the formal structure,
and overlooks the founding relations of images, considering them as existent

data to be analyzed. Unlike both Foucault and Lacan, Camón Aznar argues
that the axis of reading falls on the semantic interpretation of the glances.
The starting point is therefore a semantic field external to the painting and of
which the painting is an example.
TSD proposes a "syntactic reading", starting with the description of the
operations of "pure design", i.e., of those formal operations which underly
the pictorial manifestation. This reading ignores other matters of art and
design: color, texture, and cesia, not because they are considered
unnecessary, but because this is a "reading of form", understood in the sense
of relation, i.e., meaning a reading of formal configurations, the
groundworks of composition. This "complex configuration" (Guerri 1988:
410) clearly denotes the work's structure of "pure design".
i
Figures 1-2: "Las Meninas", 1656, oil on canvas, 276 x 318cm, Museum of El
Prado, Madrid. — Figure 1 (left): The syntactic axis passes through the
head of the Infanta Margarita and a secondary axis passes through her
body. — Figure 2 (right): The semantic axis passes through the center of
the mirror were the monarch's image is reflected
It is through "tracings" (Guerri 1988: 410) in "Meninas"8 that we see the
existence of three vertical axes of symmetry holding the tension within the
work:
(i) the "formal" or "syntactic axis" which fells on the center of the canvas
and on the head of the Infanta, and has a horizontal conjugated axis (Figure
i);
(ii) the "existential" or "semantic axis" falls on the center of the mirror and
holds the king and queen at the left of the syntactic axis (Figure 2), and
(iii) the axis of "value", of perceptual law, or the "pragmatic axis" falls on
the center of the illuminated rectangle holding the other Velazquez, at the
right of the syntactic axis (Figure 3).
The first vertical axis of symmetry, a conceptual support of the represen-
tation, is the syntactic axis and divides the painting into two equal vertical
parts with respect to the width of the canvas (Figure 1). For a clear under-
standing of the dimensions of the canvas, just as a modern plotter controls
the size of the paper, this vertical axis has a horizontal conjugated axis that
passes over the forehead of Velazquez, the mirror, and the frame of the door.
The painting is thus divided into four equal parts, an iconic operation to ac-
knowledge the formal possibility of being a painting.
Figure 3 (left): The pragmatic axis passes through the center of the back wall
door. — Figure 4: Tracings allow for a syntactic analysis, a complex
design configuration.
Therefore, as regards the vertical axis, the mirror that reflects the monarchs
and the illuminated corridor with the figure of the courtier-spectator is or-
ganized in specular symmetry. We must point out that the two rectangles,
mirror and door, have the same "saturation"9 or proportion (Figure 2), even
when having different size. Furthermore, they have the same saturation as
the back wall section that remains within the limits of the picture (Figure 2).
This syntactic axis divides the actual size of the canvas into two equal
parts and passes through the head of the Infanta Margarita, who, however,
marks a secondary axis with her body (Figure 1), confirming her central
place in the composition. This central position is reinforced from the per-
spective of color: she is the figure of maximum clarity in the painting.
Moreover, to reinforce this first static and formal axis, we can draw a series
of isosceles triangles and circles in symmetry of dilatation, organizing all the
figures in the composition in a stable balance and emphasizing the center of
the topic round the face of the Infanta. The two other meninas are likewise
organized by a triangular structure, two "configurations" in a different
"attitude" as regards the princess but in a specular symmetry among them.
As regards criticism, the practical and recurrent concepts of "static" and
"dynamic" must be considered. An analysis of the syntactic axis shows two
small fringes located at both sides of the canvas that goes beyond that which
is significative, the left part of the leg of the stool and to the right of Nicola-
sito Pertusato's ear (Figure 1 and 4). The most important design operation
which is static at the same time, is carried out by two penetrating rectangles,
root of two, which appear in the central area. This "penetration"10 creates a
golden section rectangle (Figure 4). If a square is subtracted from this area
at the top, we can detect another smaller root of two rectangle containing the
Infanta Margarita.
The dynamic design operation lies in the fact that the Infanta Margarita
belongs to three rectangles. There is specular static symmetry as regards the
total size and the central golden section rectangle, where indeed all the tran-
scendent action takes place. Furthermore, there is static symmetry of dilata-
tion and translation of the rectangle of the infanta in relation to the other two
larger root of two rectangles. The dynamic operation is then created and
technologically described by an algebraic operation of static relations.
There is a second vertical axis of symmetry that can be traced across the
center of the mirror with the monarch's reflected image: it is the "semantic
axis". Once again in static symmetry, this semantic axis contains the char-
acters that give sense to the whole composition: Philip IV, Mariana of Aus-
tria and around the mirror in specular symmetry both characters by the name
of Velazquez. If we consider the two great paintings by Rubens, copied by
Mazo, we can verify that the saturation of the rectangle of Mazo's painting
is equal to the saturation of the back wall rectangle, considering what is
shown as back wall in Velazquez's painting. Both, Mazo's paintings and the
back wall rectangle are centered in specular symmetry with the semantic
axis.
We can consider the semantic axis dynamically displaced to the left as the
central one. This operation is counterbalanced with the existence of a verti-
cal line — limit of the root of two rectangle — which passes across the cen-
ter of the dwarfs face and constitutes a "static symmetry".
The third axis of symmetry, the "pragmatic axis", can be traced to the
right of the formal axis and at a distance equal to the semantic one (Figure
3). It is the axis that sets the relation with the symbolic context. It is along
this axis and on the center of the illuminated door frame that we find the
point of fugue for the perspective that holds the spectators^ eye giving the
painting a sense and value from a cultural perceptual interpretative point of
view. It is the axis of symmetry of the painter who paints and the spectator
that is looking. The pragmatic axis, just as the semantic one, is displaced,
but in this case towards the right. Here, too, the dynamic design operation of
displacement is counterbalanced: there is the same distance, again a specular
symmetry, both from the real border of the painting towards the pragmatic
axis as from this axis towards the border of the back of the painted picture.
Finally, the tracings allow us to find a complex configuration of a size far
larger than the painting itself. From this configuration an operation of design
related to the pragmatic axis and to the point of fuge will be described.
Taking the leg of the stool and the right top angle of the painting as a start-
ing point, we can trace a square (Figure 3). The medians of this square have
their intersection in the point of fugue. As we shall see, the square organizes
the values of that social practice as described by Foucault. Once again, we
have a static figure, the square, in a dynamic design operation, but in this
case due to a change of "attitude".
In the upper section of the square, we can see the monarchs with the two
Velazquez at either side, an operation of symmetry beginning and ending

with the same character. Furthermore, tracing a parallel line to the horizontal
median, the heads of the monarchs are aligned with the head of the butler
Velazquez and with the heart and /or the Cross of Santiago de Compostela
of the painter. This median is also strongly linked to the bottom section of
the square, since it passes over Isabel de Velasco's head and aligns Marcela
de Ulloa's and Diego Ruiz de Ascona's eyes. Thus, the lower section pres-
ents all the remaining characters, with an emphasis on the infanta. In this
section, we can see that one of the diagonals crosses through the cup of wa-
ter of the princess, while the other organizes the shoulder and elbow of Isa-
bel de Velasco, Man Barbola's arm, and Nicolasito Pertusato's hands.
The design operation "penetrating" two squares in "different attitudes"
shall have a bearing on the 20th century, of which Malevich can be consid-
ered a paradigmatic example. At the same time, this configuration is to be-

come a characteristic design operation with many modern and postmodern
artists and architects.
The "pure design" is clear as compared with the ambiguity of the
"representation". Complexity of design, yet clarity in the explanation. The
approach allows for some operative conclusions. The usage of static figures
and combinations does not necessarily imply a "static image". When the de-
sign operations do not overlap in order to generate the same signification,
but interact, they enable the creation of a new signification.
This description seems abstract at large and probably less attractive than
the semantic one. However, I think it is important to highlight its value be-
yond a simple formal game. To begin with, let us point out that the
"tracings" have not been casual operations, but are included within a system
of visual signs: the Theory of Spatial Delimitation — TSD —.
Ever since Peirce and Morris, we have known that the syntactic, semantic,
and pragmatic processes interpenetrate and interflow one into the other. This
syntactic description accounts for the formal operations that give harmony to
the painting. In "Meninas", in particular, we can observe a "dynamic con-
struction" originating in "static design operations". The sum of the three
axes allows for a dynamic effect within the painting. Had there been but one
central axis, this would not have been possible.
However, this first axis is not the one that holds the reference. The second,
the semantic axis, passing across the mirror, and its reflections, is the one
conferring meaning to the glances that look forward. Whether the monarchs
are posing or not is irrelevant. But what we must consider — and this is in
the painting — is the fact that they are there on account of the glance of the
characters, outside the painting, but reflected on the mirror. Whether real or
imaginary, the exterior figures are the king and queen of the mirror, who by
their form contribute to the semantics of the painting.
Finally, the point of fugue of perspective converges in the figure of
Velazquez, the butler. It is the pragmatic axis since it is the one that guides
the vision of the eye and allows for the painting to be seen as what it is. I
must insist this is not an interpretation about the importance of the gentle-
man, but a reading about the importance of the position of the point of
fugue. This is the formal reason why the painting has been consider»! within
the aesthetics of the Renaissance, a tradition that is subject to the present
paradigms of representation, paradigms that imply a depth of field, a way of
granting verisimilitude.
So far our study has not only been an analysis of the relationship between
form and content, as described in outmoded words, but of the way in which
the "deep formal structure" is completely related to it.
3. Malevich's squares
The analysis of Malevich's work is another example of the contributions to

the aesthetic comprehension of a semiotic reading of deep structuring forms.
Malevich dates the creation of white suprematism in 1917. His work "White
on White" (Figure 6) was exhibited in 1918. It is the opposing pole to the
"Black Square" (Figure 5) and the culmination of the pictorial period of su-
prematism, the beginning of the volumetric period called "Architectons".
Once Malevich gets to zero, to "nothingness" with his black square, he ex-
plores this space from that condition. Malevich says: "In the squares, the
perceptual sensation remains constant; against the white background, there
is constancy of nothing". Since suprematism embraces "the only true real-
ity", the nonobjectual world, Malevich calls it "a new realism". So far with
semantics.
Figure 5 (left): "Black Square", circa 1913, oil on canvas, 116x116cm, Tretiakov
Gallery, Moscow. — Figure 6 (center): "White on White", 1917, oil on
canvas, 79,4x79,4cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. — Figure 7
(right): "Black and Red Square", oil on canvas, 1915, 71,1x44,4cm,
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Let us analyze then the role of syntactics in relation to "design". This con-
cept of design is "a technological knowledge intervening in the visual per-
ceptive experience to give a structure to the sense of objects" (Jannello 1980:
2). Thus, the intralinguistic significance of "pure design" as language must
be considered from the morphosyntactic proposal of the Theory of Spatial
Delimitation.
Surprisingly, Malevich says: "Suprematism is not about painting", and he
adds, "modem art is neither pictorial nor imitative, it is mainly architec-

tural". We can understand the apparent contradiction of Malevich's phrase
since the word "painting" is forced to undergo a process of resemantization.
The word "painting" is not related to the painting itself but to the effect of
differential signification, an effect attained by that new morphosyntactic
structure, both in form and color.
Figure 8: Tracings on Malevich's squares. The first tracing corresponds to "Black

Square" and the second, to "White on White". The following four de-
scribe the tracings of "Black and Red Square". The sequence shows the
combination of the two previous design operations.
The analysis of paintings through "tracings" leads us to find a coherent se-
quence of design operations among the three pictures: "Black Square",
"White on White", and "Black and Red Square" (Figures 5, 6, and 7).
In "Black Square" we find a simple "interiority" (Figure 8). In "White on
White", we find an interiority, but also a rotation, a change of "attitude" in
relation to that first simple interiority of "Black Square" (Figure 8). In
"Black and Red Square", the original simple interiority becomes a dilatation
symmetry along the square's diagonal. The red square reproduces the change
of attitude of the white one, again with dilatation symmetry but this time
along the other diagonal of the square (Figure 8). Indeed it is about painting
considered as design, as "pure design". The configuration of design, the hid-
den web or deep structure of the work of art, the structure of the préfigura-
tion shall come out by means of the "tracings".
4. Conclusion
From the examples given, we can see these "tracings" become another per-
ceptual and concrete object. Without TSD as framework, tracings become
another artistic operation, seen as an artistic object by means of a transfor-
mation of certain concrete aspects of the work as from the operator's intui-
tion. These "object tracings" would be added to the work of art in the ob-
server's experience at an equal semiotic level of signification.
'Tracings" drawn according to a graphic system of differential notation
like TSD allows for a coherent syntactic analysis of paintings in general.

TSD renders the possibility of keeping the "work of art" as the object that
produces the aesthetic emotion, and the "tracings" itself as an object that
produces knowledge about the artist's conscious or unconscious préfigura-
tion operations. Consequently, we can say that, an "effect of signification" is
obtained from the work of art, and an "effect of sense", by the "complex
configuration" of design.
Thus, TSD becomes an explicit "Weltanschauung" of the analyst or pro-
ducer, it substitutes the work of art as an object, its images, composition and
brush strokes by a graphic organization with geometric basis that although
hidden in the painting, nevertheless, holds the "formal relation system" that
gives existence to the artist's work.
Notes
1. Neologism coined by Cesar Jannello to indicate superficial features of visual

phenomena such as brightness, transparency, translucency, opacity, opales-
cence, specularity, and others.
2. This analysis does not intend to exhaust the subject of the image, some deriva-
tions of which have already been mentioned, and others would require another
kind of approach.
3. See the comment on the work of Jean Paris in the Traité du signe visuel, by
the Groupe ji (1992: 27).
4. This paper is based on "Málevich: diseño y obra", ARTINF 58/59: 22-24
(Buenos Aires, 1986); "Apuntes a Las Meninas", ARTINF 76/77: 12-13
(Buenos Aires, 1989); a lecture given at the School of Arts of the National
University of Rosario and, more recently, on an article published in D 'ART 20:

155-166 (Barcelona, 1994).
5. Left refers to the sinister. In this case, the left side is the back side, the side
that should not be seen. Did the painter think about it? Was Velázquez aware
of this rhetorical operation? I believe he was not. The different interpretations
of works of art belong to the critic, and not to the poet. Let us remember Eco's
idea in Opera aperta: the poet is in any case the one that on account of his or
her knowlege of the milieu enables the reader's acknowledgement of different
recurrences, isotopies, rhetorical figures, etc.
6. Camón Aznar 1964: 841. The translation is a free version from Spanish.
7. The translation is a free version from a Spanish translation from French.
8. The "tracings" were drawn in collaboration with Rubén Gramón.
9. According to TSD, the correct terminology is: two "figures" of "constant for-
matrix" and "saturation" and of different "size" with respect to their "morphic
selection"; the "tactic selection" maintains a top "alignment", equal "attitude"
and equal "horizontal separation" to the axis of symmetry. For the same
"rectangular formatrix" and "attitude", parallel diagonals imply equal "satura-
tion" or proportion; with a 90° variation in the "attitude" of rectangles,
diagonals indicating equal "saturation" shall be perpendicular. According to
TSD, "figures" are defined by its "morphic dimensions": "formatrix", "satura-
tion", and "size"; the "tactic dimensions" are: "tactrix", "attitude", "horizon-
tal", and "vertical separation". "Simple configurations" are defined by its
"morphic relations" and its "tactic dimensions"; "complex configurations" are
described by means of a "tree-hierarchical structure" of "simple configura-
tions" (Guerri 1988: 396-410).
10. According to TSD, the variations of the combinatory "ensolving" of figures of
a "simple configuration" may vary from "superposition", "interiority", "pene-
tration", "juxtaposition" to "vicinity". The determination of a concrete "en-
solving" implies the definition of a "morphic selection", the "horizontal" and
"vertical separation", and the relative "attitude" of the two figures (Guerri
1988: 401, 410).
References
Camon Aznar, José

1964 Velázquez. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
Foucault, Michel
1966 Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard.
Groupe ji
1992 Traité du signe visuel. Paris: Seuil.
Guerri, Claudio Federico
1988 "Architectural design, and space semiotic in Argentina", in:

Sebeok, T. A. and J. Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), The Semiotic
Web 1987, 389-419. Berlin: Mouton de Gniyter.
Jannello, César
1963 "Texture as a visual phenomenon", Architectural Design
(London) 33: 394-396.
1980 Diseño, lenguaje y arquitectura. Buenos Aires: Textos de
Cátedra, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo; Univ. de
Buenos Aires (mimeo).
1988 "Fondements pour une semiotique de la conformation de-
limitante des objets du monde naturel", in: Herzfeld, M. and
L. Melazzo (eds.), Semiotic Theory and Practice: Proceed-
ings of the Illrd International Congress of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies, 483-496. Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Lacan, Jacques
1966 "El objeto del psicoanálisis", in Seminario XIII, conferences
of the 17th and 18th May 1966. Buenos Aires: Escuela Freu-
diana de Buenos Aires (mimeo).
Morris, Charles W.
1938 Foundations of the theory of signs. Chicago: Univ. Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders
1931-58 Collected papers. Vols. 1-6, ed. Hartshorne, Charles and
Paul Weiss; vols. 7-8, ed. Burks, Arthur W. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Architecture as a mass medium?
Claus Dreyer
1. Architecture as a medium of communication
During the 1960s, there have been various attempts at defining architecture
as a "language" and describing cities as "texts". Especially in Italy and
France, many studies and papers were published along this line under the in-
fluence of structuralism (cf. Barthes 1967; Choay 1967; Eco 1968; Koenig
1964). Very soon, the question arose, whether architecture should not rather
be considered as a "medium of mass communication". In the context of the
flourishing pop-culture of the sixties and the writings of Marshall McLuhan
(1967), which had much influence in all areas of mass communication, a
new definition of architecture as a medium of social communication became
to be adopted. On the basis of the well-known model of information theory
by Shannon and Weaver (1949), this definition was elaborated by Koenig
(1970). According to Krampen's account of the relevant literature, we can
summarize these ideas on architecture as a medium of communication as
follows:
(1) Sender: the architect or the architectural team;
(2) Codes and lexicons: the functional, legal, structural, and economic rules
in accordance with which a building is designed;
(3) Signal: the sum of drawings, models, and written specifications of an

architectural design;
(4) Channel: the construction site;
(5) Physical signal: the material building resulting from the design signal;
(6) Noise: environmental obstacles impeding perception and the physical
disintegration of the architectural sign complex;
(7) Receiver: the human being, by means of his sense organs;
(8) Significant aspect of the message: architectural space including the
specifying objects within it;
(9) Codes and lexicons of the receiver: functional, legal, structural, and
economic expectations;
690 ClausDreyer
(10) Semantic noise: the prejudice of the receiver;
(11) Receiver as a collective: the city as a system of communication;
(12) Semantic aspect of the message (meaning): the original function which
the architectural object denotes and the second function which it con-
notes (Krampen 1979: 23).
This Shannon-Weaver model of architecture as communication is represen-
tative of several similar attempts of that time (e.g., Broadbent 1973). It gives
first of all a formal description of the process of architectural communica-
tion, but, in addition, the models of this kind were also influential in the
practical and the substantial conception of architecture.
Figure 1: Archigram (Ron Herrón): Tuned Suburb. Collage 1968.
Architecture as a mass medium 691
For example, the drawings and projects of the British group "Archigram"
(Figure 1) show very clearly this understanding of a communicative archi-
tecture which mediates between individuals, society, and environment.
In his programmatical book Architecture as a Mass Medium, Renato De
Fusco (1967) tried to give a positive interpretation of the role of architecture
in mass culture although he looks critically at all phenomena of mass culture
because of its permanent pressure for new stimuli and fast consumption, its
loss of tradition and history, its assimilation of all differences, its replace-
ment of craft and trade by industrial production and big business, its level-
ling of taste, and its preference for comfort, convenience, and entertainment.
But by responding to these phenomena and by integrating them in the same
way as the movies, TV, magazines, and pop-music do, architecture has a
creative chance to connect elements of mass culture and to find new solu-
tions for functions expressing the spirit of mass culture.
Figure 2: Piano and Rogers: Centre Pompidou. Paris 1978.

By means of examples from exhibition architecture, shopping centers, mu-
seum buildings, and leisure-time architecture, De Fusco shows what these
new architectural statements look like and gives interpretations of them. One
example is the Centre Pompidou at Paris by Piano and Rogers (Figure 2),
which is a mixture of elements of industrial design, classical modern archi-
tecture, and Pop Art.
692 Claus Dreyer
De Fusco hopes that, in the process of social communication by means of
architecture, a common architectural code for engineers and the mass society
will emerge which will make it possible to discuss the value and meaning of
the new mass medium of architecture together with ideas of the "true life"
(De Fusco 1967: 86). Unfortunately, one must realize, that the process of
communication by means of architecture is only unilateral and quite ponder-
ous: the language of stones, metal, and glass is very inflexible. On the basis
of such considerations, Eco (1968: 331) came to the conclusion that archi-
tecture is rather a rhetoric or even a pure propaganda.
Figure 3: Robert Venturi: Recommendation for a monument. Sketch 1972.
2. Robert Venturi: Learning from Las Vegas
The American architect Robert Venturi has advanced in his writings and
buildings most consistently the conception of architecture as a mass medium
(Venturi 1972). He declares that the "formal language" of classical modern
architecture has decayed to an empty schematism and can only be read by
insiders. Therefore he prefers the sign language of the everyday world,
which he observes at numerous advertising displays along the main streets
and boulevards of the large cities, especially in Las Vegas (Figure 3): they
seem to be understandable everywhere and, if required, easy to change and
to replace. For Venturi, the myths and ideals of our times find their expres-
sion rather in such signs than in the products and creations of high culture.
Therefore, he pleads for an "aesthetics of the ugly and ordinary", which
might teach us the new possibilities for aesthetic communication in our
times.
Figure 4: Robert Venturi: Decorated shed (unknown author). 1972.

Venturi makes a fundamental distinction between architectonic objects which
"are" signs by sculptural or physiognomic embodiment and those which
"apply" signs and present them without relation to their basic form or
construction. This second variant, the "decorated shed" (Figure 4), is his
preferred example of his conception of architecture as a medium. Here, the
694 Claus Dreyer
building is reduced to a pure functional and technical structure which can
carry and convey any kind of message by its decoration.
Venturi finds examples of this kind of conspicuous sign application em-
bedded in mass culture and representative of architecture as a mass medium
especially in commercial architecture for business, service, leisure time, and
entertainment. In his view, the application of pictorial, conventional, ordi-
nary, popular, and often "ugly" signs could lead to a cheerful architecture
for everyday use, avoiding the elitist pretension and the impersonal coldness
of classical modern architecture, but gaining instead a high informational
content and communicative power.
Figure 5: Michael Graves: Portland-Building. Portland (Oregon) 1980.
3. Postmodern architecture as a mass medium
As a result of this discussion, one can take the worldwide rise of postmodern
architecture during the eighties. By ample quotations from architectural his-
tory, estrangement from the acquainted forms and mixing of contradictory
elements, the formal vocabulary regained architectural competence for nar-
ration and conversation (Figure 5). By the simultaneous articulation of the
message on different levels, especially on the popular and on the elitist level,
postmodern architecture has become a globally understandable medium
which can respond to various expectations and give something to each one of
its "readers" (Jencks 1977; Klotz 1984).
In spite of all criticism of arbitrariness, talkativeness, insincerity, and illu-
sory appearance (Müller 1987), one must accept that the status as a mass
medium has contributed to accepting the metaphor of architectural language
and discourse and thus to regain an important use value for architecture
(Wellmer 1985).
Especially in connection with town planning, this new architecture has
contributed to a sociocultural process of understanding which focuses on
common values, dreams, and goals. Since the last decade, a "new urbanity"
has greatly changed and improved the image of cities where representative
and significant architecture has been realized such as in Frankfurt
(Museumsufer, Römerberg, Messegelände), Paris ("Grands Projects",
Figure 6), and Berlin (IBA 1987, Kulturforum, Spreeinsel, Alexanderplatz).
All this takes advantage of the ability of postmodern architecture to func-
tion as a mass medium in the process of identification and reconciliation of
the citizens with their city (Häußermann and Siebel 1987; Hoffmann-
Axthelm 1993).
4. The mediatization and disappearance of architecture
For some years, the discussion about architecture as a medium or a mass

medium has had a new accent due to the advance of the electronic media in
architectural design and construction. The physical form of a building or a
town is disappearing more and more as compared with the ubiquitous media
which allow the view, or sometimes the virtual entry into, reproduced or
simulated rooms. In this sense, architecture can withdraw from the exterior
to the interior and take on a virtual character which is changeable and re-
placeable at any time (Figure 7).
696 Claus Dreyer
Figure 7: Jean Nouvel: Institut du Monde Arabe: Diaphragms. Paris 1987.
One can therefore say that architecture is on the way from hardware to
software (Rotzer 1993). Hence the experience of place, space, time, and
form, has become a question of the program and its possibilities for interac-
tivity. The old dream of architecture as a perfect medium for communication
seems now to have become true.
Toyo Ito's 'Tower of Winds" at Yokohama is a "mediated" building
(Figure 8), which shows on its interactive surface environmental parameters
like the force and the direction of winds as well as the noise and the density
of traffic. The interior life and the true functions of the tower remain
concealed and live their own life. The intelligent cover is an autonomous
structure, which mediates as an informational medium between environment
and the inhabitants of the town.
Figure 8: Toyo Ito: Tower of Winds. Yokohama 1986.
One can therefore say that architecture is on the way from hardware to
software (Rotzer 1993). Hence the experience of place, space, time, and
form, has become a question of the program and its possibilities for interac-
tivity. The old dream of architecture as a perfect medium for communication
seems now to have become true.
Toyo Ito's 'Tower of Winds" at Yokohama is a "mediated" building
698 Claus Dreyer
(Figure 8), which shows on its interactive surface environmental parameters

like the force and the direction of winds as well as the noise and the density
of traffic. The interior life and the true functions of the tower remain
concealed and live their own life. The intelligent cover is an autonomous
structure, which mediates as an informational medium between environment
and the inhabitants of the town.
Figure 9: Rem Koolhaas: Center of Art and Media Technology (Project). Karls-
ruhe 1990.
This communicative character appears even stronger in the project of Rem
Koolhaas for the "Center of Art and Media Technology" at Karlsruhe
(Figure 9). All four facades of the cube shaped main building are designed
as huge oversized "monitors", which operate altogether independently from
each other, and all kinds of electronic pictures and messages can be shown
on them.
The media facades cap interact with the internal life and work of the build-
ing, but they do not have to do so: like a monitor, they show on their surface
what the program wants and not the technical and electronical equipment be-
hind the screen. In this case, the genuine architectural language has been re-
placed by the specific language of the electronic visual media, which have
their own regularities. Architecture would thus become a simple, but highly
"technified" container for the electronic supply and a shelter for the rooms of
the users, whereas the cover on the exterior appears to function as an
"interface" for public communication. Thus, the prevailing architecture
seems to have disappeared more and more, and the realm of "virtual space"
and "simultaneous worlds" could be opened (Flusser 1992).
5. "Virtual reality" and "cyberspace"
Today, the technological development of the electronic media has advanced

so much that it has become possible to simulate architectural space in such a
perfect way that it looks more realistic than the real world. Experiences from
the use of TV reinforce this impression: only what is shown by electronic
media is real. Only the artificial presentation produces "real reality".
The electronically simulated virtual space, the "cyberspace", has a special
appeal to the user by offering the opportunity of virtual movement and inter-
action with other individuals or objects. Thereby, one can interact in a way
which is impossible in reality. It allows the transformation of objects, the in-
carnation of things and other persons, the deconstruction and reconstruction
of facilities, the mixture of perspectives, the suspension of space and time in
favor of the here and now and the increase of the complexity of forms and
structures to the extreme (Flusser 1992).
All these possibilities which we owe to the electronic media will lead to an
explosion of fantasy and creativity and produce completely new spaces and
architectural installations. These spaces do not have to be constructed and
physically built, but they have to be designed as a program for intelligent
machines into which one can plunge by using the right equipment, like data
glove, data helmet, and data suit. Only the human body as the basis of per-
ceptions and experiences can set the boundaries for possible adventures in
the virtual world, but it seems that the old dream of a trip to the "artificial
paradise" (Baudelaire) will soon become true. Thus, the prophetic vision of
architecture as a medium may have come true, and architecture, in a narrow
sense, may now have become superfluous.
700 Claus Dreyer
Figure 10: Frank Horlitz: Virtual space 7.0.3. Detmold 1995.
References
Barthes, Roland
[1967] 1971 "Semiotik und Urbanismus". Translated from the French, in:
Carlini, A. andB. Schneider 1971: 33-42.
Broadbent, Geoffrey
1973 Design in architecture: Architecture and the human sci-

ences. London: Wiley.
Carlini, Alessandro & Bernhard Schneider (eds.)
1971 Architektur als Zeichensystem. Tübingen: Wasmuth.
Choay, Françoise
1967 "Semiotik und Urbanismus". Translated from the French, in:
Carlini, A. andB. Schneider (eds.) 1971: 43-60.
De Fusco, Renato
[1967] 1972 [Architettura come mass medium: Note per una semiologia
architettonica.] German translation: Architektur als Mas-
senmedium. Anmerkungen zu einer Semiotik der gebauten
Form. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann.
Dreyer, Claus, Harald Ortlieb & Andreas Strunk
1975 "Architektur und Kommunikation: Demokratisierung der
Stadtplanung durch operablen Medieneinsatz", Bauwelt 33:
931-933.
Eco, Umberto
[1968] 1972 [La struttura assente.] German translation by Jürgen Tra-
bant: Einführung in die Semiotik. München: Fink.
Flusser, Vil&n
1992 "Virtuelle Räume — Simultane Welten", ARCH+ 111: 20-
81.
Häussermann, Hartmut & Walter Siebel
1987 Neue Urbanität. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hoffmann-Axthelm, Dieter
1993 Die dritte Stadt: Bausteine eines neuen Gründungsvertrages.
Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp.
Jencks, Charles
[1977] 1979 The language of post-modern architecture. London: Acad-
emy Editions. German translation: Die Sprache der Post-
modernen Architektur. Stuttgart: Deutsche-Verlags-Anstalt.
Klotz, Heinrich
1984 Moderne und Postmoderne: Architektur der Gegenwart
1960-1980. Braunschweig: Vieweg.
Koenig, Giovanni Klaus
1964 Analisi del linguaggio architettonico. Firenze: Fiorentina.
1970 Architettura e communicatione. Firenze: Fiorentina.
Krampen, Martin
1979 Meaning in the urban environment. London: Pion.
McLuhan, Marshall
[1967] 1969 [The medium is the massage.] German translation by Max

Nänny: Das Medium ist Massage. Frankfurt: Ullstein.
Müller, Michael
1987 Schöner Schein: Eine Architekturkritik. Frankfurt/M.:
Athenäum.
Rötzer, Florian
1993 "Raum und Virtualität", Kunstforum International 121: 56-
62.
Shannon, Claude E. & Warren Weaver
1949 A mathematical theory of communication. Uibana: Univ. of
Illinois Press.
702 Claus Dreyer
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown & Steven Izenour
(1972) 1979 [LearningfromLas Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of ar-
chitectural form. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT-Press. Rev. Ed.:
1978.] German translation: Lernen von Las Vegas.
Braunschweig: Vieweg.
Wellmer, Albrecht
1985 Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne. Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp.
Poems on the bus: Some practical aspects
of the reception of poetry in the mass media
Tania Leonte Christidis
Poetry today is "shaped by the electronic culture that has produced it". "The
poet's arena is the electronic world — the world of the Donahue Show and
MTV, of People's magazine and the National Enquirer, of Internet and
MCI mail" (PerlofF 1991: xiii). From now on, poetry will have to position it-
self not vis-à-vis landscapes or the city, cultural backgrounds or political
events, but in relation to the mass media, and especially to advertising,
which expand uncontrollably and play an increasingly important role in the
whole of our society and, ultimately, in the formation of our cultural recep-
tion, psychology, and behavior.
A poetry competition whose entrants know that the winning poems will be
placed in the public media, namely pasted onto buses, determines the kind of
poems entered according to criteria which ensure the poem's viability in this
particular medium. Each poem must be short in order to give the bus traveler
a chance to comprehend it full-length during one journey. The poem must
develop a theme likely to appeal to the average reader, for instance love,
traveling, social relationships, a theme which should be put into relatively
simple words and syntactical arrangements. All these constraints on the
poem transform it "from a closed poetic to an open rhetoric" (Lanham 1990,
in Perloff 1991: 20), or into a rhetorical dimension integrated in the more

general rhetoric of the mass media.
This paper is an account of such a poetry competition, whose winning po-
ems appeared on a public transport system: the 'Moving Poetry' project, or-
ganized as part of Berkshire's 1994 literature festival 'Writers Live', in the
South of England, was inspired from London's 'Poems on the Underground'.
The publicity leaflet circulated to prospective entrants announced the new
relationship with media, in which poetry was to be placed as an outcome of
the competition: 'Tor the first time ever, the winning poets will see their
work printed on posters and pasted onto Reading buses all over the county"
— a fleet consisting of 150 buses. The major difference between the two
projects is that while the poems on the London underground are familiar
works by published poets, the 'Moving Poetry' poems are by local poets,
704 Tania Leonte Christidis
and they have never appeared in published form before. The recent Reading
project does more than familiarize the average reader with poetry. It exer-
cises the readers' capacity for understanding, while making poetry contem-
porary with itself. Drawing on the results of my sociological investigation of
the readers' response to the appearance of poems on public transport, I will
try to outline some of the strategies and types of reception of poetry in the
mass media.
1. The poem's contextualization in the medium of advertising
Written with yellow letters on a blue background, Jane Draycott's poem (one
of the three winning poems), displays its lines symmetrically, making use of
the poster's space through a game of big and small standard letters or italics.
"We are always looking first AT [the text] and then THROUGH it"
(Lanham 1990, in Perloff 1991: 16), but the importance of the poem's sign
vehicle is emphasized once more with the poem's integration in the visual
campus of advertising. The linguistic body of the poem is objectualized in
order to 'survive' the reception test in the mass media. The use of colors and
their rhythmic disposition in the structure of the poster between letters and
gaps (on a small scale), creating an interplay between sequences of text and
their backgrounds (on a larger scale) build up a reading route by leading the
eye from the big print on the left (also offering introductory information
about the festival and its section on poetry) towards the smaller print of the
poem itself at the centre of the poster. While forming the poster's poetical-
ness, these strategies satisfy the reader's sense of order, symmetry, and ax-
iological integration: next to it, similarly shaped, and making a similar use of
type script, with white and red letters on a red and white background respec-
tively, another poster is announcing more vacant jobs in the British Army.
The poem's objectualization and its subsequent visual aid of poeticalness,
while resembling the communication strategies of commercial advertising
(the latter being also reflected in the poem's informational stock) work as a
rhetorical strategy of captatio benevolentiae meant to trigger the public's
capacity for poetic reception. The ostensive-inferential characteristics of the
mass media communication, to use Dan Sperber's and Deirdre Wilson's
terminology (1986), present the poetic text as public commodity, both rele-
vant (as part of the general guarantee offered by the advertising industry)
and positively ostensive (as the reader knows, either consciously or subcon-
sciously, that a media ostension is enough evidence of one's thoughts rele-
Some practical aspects of the reception ofpoetry in the mass media 705
vance). Having borrowed the visual manifestedness of commercial advertis-
ing, the poem appears in an automatized context and makes use of an auto-
matized language to present itself, i.e., the visual/spatial structure of the
poster and its position on the bus wall. In this way, it offers the reader a
guarantee of not modifying his or her cognitive environment, encouraging
them to enter the 'dialogue' and read the poetic text which, in turn, 'aims at'
de-automatizing the readers's perceptive and cognitive abilities. The context
in which the poster is placed, that is, the bus, is part of the same media strat-
egy. If, in any other circumstances, the everyday language speakers were
able to easily abandon the act of reading a poem, a long journey on a bus,
which displays the poem with an aggressive passivity just on the wall in
front of them, would tempt their eyes into reading the lines of the poem again
and again. It forms a natural part of their visual environment and they read it
in the same way they would passively look at the trees outside the window.
But consciously or not, fragments of the poetic message get through to the
readers's memory and to their involuntary understanding. The mass media
strategy of presenting the poem on the bus functions here as another signifier
vehiculating the poetic signified to the average reader, in an ampler process
of communication in which the public media and the poetry's structures are
intertwined. This is the poem written in small print on the poster:
Call-up
They are flat in the field. They are making a love
out of the past and the hot sun. In their room in the sun
they are parting and meeting again for the first time.
Each is learning by heart, like the intricate parts of a watch,
the face of the other. Clouds swab the sun.

by Jane Draycott. Reading
The strategies I have mentioned above ensure the poem's reception; it is

mainly a passive reception that the poetic text benefits from, as I will subse-
quently try to show.
2. Types of reception: Sociological insight
Using Roland Posner's postulate (1982: 104), namely that "intellectual ac-
tivity of a participant in a conversation can be measured by how closely he
conforms with the formulations of his informant in commenting on them",
according to whom we consider to be the informant/sender of the poem in

our case, my sociological analysis shows that, in their reception of poetry in
the medium of advertising, the readers can be said to make use of either
maximum of intellectual activity or next to none, simultaneously. The reason
for this dual type of reception lies in the poem's decontextualization from its
original literary 'habitat', and recontextualization with the mass media and
their specific strategies of communication. Most likely it is, and the socio-
logical research testifies, that the reception of a poem placed in the mass
media is of the same type as the one required by advertisements, and that is a
passive one. Therefore, if we consider the sender of the poetic text to be an
entity identifiable with the 'mass media group' (the poster designer, the bus
company, Southern Arts and Berkshire County Council), we could then as-
sert that the intellectual activity of the reader in the process of the poster's
reception is exerted almost at its maximum potential because most of the
readers' answers to the questionnaire I conducted were formulated in the
same terms and at the same cognitive degree in which they would receive
commercial advertisements (see Table 1).
Table 1: The percentages of types of answers given by different categories of sub-

jects to the questionnaire regarding the reception of poems pasted on
buses.
— answers read a read a knew saw a read a
poem poem about poem enthu- plain poem and
and had but the but did siastic NO pro-
subjects^- an could event not NO nounced
opinion not refer but did read it against the
about its to its not see event
form and content the po-
content ems
retired 5% 5% 90%
people
middle 30% 48% 2% 17% 3%
aged
women
middle 2.6% 25% 3% 34% 34% 0.4%
aged men
young 80% 10% 7% 3%
women
young 3% 89% 4% 4%
men
For most of the readers, these answers refer to having just read the poem,
(which fulfills the goal for which the mass media strategy is launched: the
readers's benevolentia is captured), but most of the bus travelers could not
refer to the poem's content. At best, the readers could remember the poem's
visual appearance, its shape, and were able to comment on its rhythm and
rhyme, which in itself is making use of the metalinguistic function of lan-
guage. But most importantly, the poem is seen as entertainment and as an
object of commodity; the semantic stress of the poem on contemporary
myths, mainly on love, helps the readers in identifying a meaning-correlative
in their cultural background and, in that way, the poem comes on familiar
ground, a ground developed by popular culture, music, novels, and soap op-
eras. Even so, only the middle aged and young women form the highest per-
centage of people from the categories of subjects interviewed (see Table 2)
who could refer, in any way, to the poem's content.
Table 2: Percentages of the categories of subjects found in the bus stations.

300 subjects
108 90 54 30 18
middle aged retired middle aged young young men
women people men women
36% 30% 18% 10% 6%
When, on the other hand, we consider the sender of the poetic text to be the
poet (or the entity impersonated by the group of poets and judges of the
competition), according to the same definition, the average reader's intellec-
tual activity could be said to reach a level very close to zero. A reason for
this is, to use Michael Riffaterre's (1978: 167) terms, that poetic mimesis
"actually points to a content that would demand a different specialized rep-
resentation in nonliterary language" (my emphasis). Classically, the re-

ception of a poetic text best leads to the poem's understanding when it is
carried out in the language and in the type of linguistic structures used by
the poem's sender, i.e., literary language, as opposed to everyday language.
Unfortunately, not noticing the aspect of degrees in poetic reception and un-
derstanding, Riffaterre assumes that the poem points unconditionally to a
representation, although specialized, in nonliterary language, while this hap-
pens only as an 'anomaly' of reception due to the poem's original decontex-
tualization. Recontextualized in the public media, the poem is indeed re-
ceived in terms different from and inappropriate for its linguistic structures
which are specific to literary language. The poem placed on the bus is thus
simultaneously received and 'translated' into everyday language, by which
the reader can make use of apparently the same linguistic tools, but which
are, in feet, equipped to perform different duties: they shape a cognitive be-
havior unable to reach the noetic core of the poem. Aware of this barrier
between the two linguistic registers, poets and judges of the competition have
placed in the media only poems which do not propose great problems of un-
derstanding, while being just as valid poetically.
By creating a new area of research for cultural sociology, this phenomenon
also poses a challenge to the current theories of reception.
3. Possible theoretical implications
The poem becomes a bicontextual medium in order to accommodate its re-

ception by exponents of both literary and ordinary language. Pursued theo-
retically, this statement would indeed challenge both Wolfgang Iser's and
Norman Holland's opinions about the problem of reception, as they are ex-
pressed in the interview conducted by Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Iser 1989: 43-56).
Holland highlights that "one can only arrive at a theory of response by in-
duction from actual responses", while Iser maintains that "a framework must
precede this induction if one is to draw any inferences from the responses".
Apparently contradictory, the two opinions do not exclude each other. In
fact, they present two faces of the same phenomenon seen from a more gen-
eral perspective, as Iser later summarizes: "Reception is a product that is
initiated in the reader by the text, but it is moulded by the norms and values
that govern the reader's outlook. Reception is therefore an indication of pref-
erences and predilections that reveal the reader's disposition as well as the
social conditions that have shaped his attitudes" (Iser 1989: 50). Bearing in
mind that the poem in the mass media is a bitextual organism, the once sharp
differences between the literary text superimposed over everyday language

are melted into a uniform area in which the literary language of the poem is
itself adjusted to the communication characteristics of the public media and
the public media have accommodated literary forms of communication. The
poem's reception is both conditioned by the response-inviting structure of
the poem (Wirkung) and the operations carried out by the actual reader,
which, in turn, are historically conditioned: they are subtly, but strongly de-
termined by the 'response-inviting structures' of the media of advertising, by
which the poem is physically (and not only physically) accommodated. The
readers cannot select from the potential inherent in the text more than they
are preconditioned to do so by the cognitive 'framework' of their cultural
environment. Saying that the two opinions do not exclude each other does
not mean to say that they are both right in what they initially stood for. In
the case of poetry placed into the public media, we cannot talk about a
framework in the sense Iser uses the term, as the text is not anymore an ex-
clusively literary one. The attempt to reach a theory of response by induction
from actual responses would mean, on the other hand, betraying either cer-
tain categories of people (the elite or the average reader), or the original
scope of introducing poetry in the mass media, which is (ultimately poetic in
itself) 'making strange' in everyday life. The two theories are actually dis-
solved into each other, as are literary and ordinary languages, to function as
perspectives of approach, or as practices of language respectively. An ex-
ample in support of this statement would be James Wright's poem From the
Bus Window (in Perloff 1991: 20):
From the bus window in Central Ohio,

Just Before a Thunder Shower.
Cribs loaded with roughage huddle together
Before the north clouds.
The wind tiptoes between poplars.
The silver maple leaves squint
Toward the ground.
An old farmer, his scarlet face
Apologetic with whiskey, swings back a barn door
And calls a hundred black-and-white Holsteins
From the clover field.
While Jane Draycott's poem is originally composed independent (as far as

the author's intentionality is concerned) of the context formed by everyday
language and the public media, and only afterwards integrated into it, James
Wright's poem 'comes from' the realm of ordinary life, with its multiply
mediated possibilities of reception, to reflect it both thematically, and in the
use of language which seem to construct an accurate poetic historiography.
Although the observer-poet remains outside the picture described, at the bus
window, and seemingly passive, he poses a subsidiary question about the
borders between nature and culture, and about the validity of such conven-
tions. What difference of identity would there be left between the poet of
From the Bus Window and the bus traveller whose eyes slide from the land-
scape outside the bus to the lines of the poem Call-up on the inside wall of
the bus? Apart from the novelty of the phenomenon, the theoretical chal-
lenges it is likely to bring form one reason why poetic communication in the
mass media requires pragmatic (if not empirical) research at this moment in
time.
4. Brief account on some results of my sociological pursuit
Most of the bus travelers have received the poem on the bus in terms of the
ordinary language. The small percentage of people who have referred to the
poem by mentioning aspects which regularly concern the literary use of lan-
guage have still found it easier to relate to the visuality of the poem-object or
to the sound-image of its verses rather than to the poem's cognitive potential.
Linguistic rhythm and rhyme, the readers say, would have helped them fa-
miliarize easier with the semantic areas of the poem. Could this be because
the nonliterary language does not offer the everyday language user the nec-
essary 'tools' for identifying/feeling the inner rhythm and the semantic sym-
metries of the poem? Or could it be an 'end of the century' nostalgic call for
"contrapuntal tension in verse" to match "tension in the action" (Feirstein, in
Perloff 1991: 4)? If that is so, then PerlofFs justified irony towards the New
Formalists would be made to look as "serious fiction", or as another
"constructed truth" (James Clifford: 1988) in the chase for authenticity. I
would argue that, helped, as it is, to be received by the average reader
through strategies of communication initially specific to advertising, the po-
etic text actually never triggers the reader's ability for poetic reception in the
traditional (now idealistic) acception of the terms. The text is recognized and
accepted as being poetic, (in the sense of belonging to high-art poetry), but
this information is obtained through a new type of reception, which although
still poetic, is based on a strong element of passivity, superficiality, self-in-
dulgence, and self-defense against anything that might 'threaten' the
'material ideal' built in the reader's consciousness by the consumers' soci-
ety. Making poetry a natural part of the reader's visual environment joins
the psychological strategy used in advertising for persuading the reader to

accept (and buy) products he or she does not normally need. As in the re-
ception of advertisements, so here, most of the poetic part of the communi-
cation is carried on subtly, in the reader's subconscious. "Just the process of
reading and re-reading the poem must be entertaining to some extent and
some of the images and associated ideas must linger for a while in the minds
of the passengers, however little they think they have 'understood' it", said
Jane Draycott, as I interviewed her, after having noticed that "a good friend
of [hers] sat opposite [her] poem on a bus for 35 minutes and still didn't
'understand' it." Call-up has been first of all recognized as a poem by its
shape, by the visual rhythm of its lines and the poeticalness of its display. It
has further been identified as nonadvertisement because, although it 'makes
use' of the same myths, it does not sell or announce anything. It stands for
itself and it is about love, just love; it is commercially disinterested. This

poem is a poem mainly through its internal semantic metabolism, as com-
pared with any type of text able to perform a poetic function by virtue of in-
tentional stress on the message for its own sake, as demonstrated, in Jakob-
sonian tradition, by Winfried Noth (1978). And it is recognized as a poem,
mainly because it uses signs "referring to no other referent than these signs
themselves" (Noth 1978: 32), as opposed to advertisements, whose use of
language, complex as it may be, is "a mere representation of its referent". It
could not be discussed by the average reader, and this is most likely due to
the quality of cultural life in a consumer society.
Although a sociological survey of the 'Moving Poetry' project, based, as it
is, on synchronic analysis, shows a rather pessimistic side of the poem's re-
ception by the average reader in the public media, a diachronic view of the
relationship poetry — mass media points towards its advantages in the long
run.
Poetry is a new arrival in Great Britain's mass media. Shelley used to
place poems inside sealed bottles and let them float on the sea, but this was a
rather utopic means of popularizing poetry, and it certainly did not stop po-
etry from being an isolated domain of the elite. The London Underground
also has a history of poems on its posters, but never with a theoretical im-
pact on the society's cultural profile. The 1992 London's project "Poems on
the Underground" (inaugurated in 1986 and reiterated in 1995) brought to
the public's attention well known poems by reputed poets, and pasted them
on to the interior walls of the underground trains, thus transforming poetry
from an isolated domain into a 'spectacular' event to which travelers could
take part as spectators. Two years later, the 'Moving Poetry' project placed
on buses contemporary poems by poets not yet published, involving the

public in a more active process of value judging of the poems and, in the
long run, giving the public a chance to participate directly in the historical
promotion of poetry. 'Moving Poetry' transformed contemporary poetry
from an event to which the traveler could be no more than a spectator into an
activity open to be, like sport is, appropriated by everyone as their own ca-
pacity of manifestation.
The investiture of the public in poetry promotion and of poetry in public
life is bound to create a new self-reference system and to stimulate the re-
evaluation of the cognitive environment of society on the basis of cultural
media. The choice of elements selected from the aesthetic code of the works
of art placed in the mass media are adopted by the stylistic code of the time,
to paraphrase Roland Posner (1982: 123), and the accumulation of such
choices leads to a "major stylistic change" which ultimately redetermines the

course of the history of art, culture, and everyday life. In fact, we are now
witnessing the formation of a new type of cognitive perception in which the
style of high art and of the highly specialized domains meet the style of ordi-
nary, everyday life on the ground of the mass media and advertising.
Poems are now riding public transport systems in New York, San Fran-
cisco, Paris, Dublin, London, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Melbourne, Sydney, and
Adelaide among other cities, with new programs starting in autumn 199S in
Oslo and Helsinki.
References
Iser, Wolfgang
1989 Prospecting: From reader response to literary anthropology.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Lanham, Richard A.
1990 "The extraordinary convergence: Democracy, technology,
theory and the university curriculum", South Atlantic Quar-
terly 89.1: 27-50.
Nöth, Winfried
1978 "The semioticframeworkof textlinguistics", Dressier, W. U.
(ed.), Current trends in textlinguistics, 21-34. Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Perloff, Maijorie
1991 Radical artifice: Writing poetry in the age of media. Chi-
cago: Univ. Press.
Posner, Roland
1982 Rational discourse and poetic communication: Methods of

linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis. Berlin:
Mouton.
Riffaterre, Michael
1978 Semiotics ofpoetry. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
Spert>er, Dan & Deirdre Wilson
1986 Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Black-
well.
The form of the media: The intermediality of visual poetry
Friedrich W. Block
Max Bense in memoriam
1. Introduction
The role of medial relations in our individual and social life has been central
in the contemporary discourse on the arts for some time. Presumably, this is
why writers as well as literary scholars have occasionally dealt with the
topic of the media with suspicion or even resentment. However, the question
in which way literature will react to the technicalization of communication
and in particular to the proliferation of the media has recently been raised. In
my opinion, a currently rather neglected peripheral branch of literature is
making an important contribution to this problem, namely experimental lit-
erature. My thesis is that experimental literature develops specific mecha-
nisms in order to reflect on medial prerequisites and possibilities of literary
action. It was Max Bense who developed seminal ideas in this context.
Bense claims that above all cognition and creation must be combined in ra-
tionalist art:
In this context of creative art and science, it also is important to bring to
mind that conceptualizing the creative process as a definite method implies
its conception as work. Method and work are Cartesian links of productive
intelligence, knowledge, and creative design. Nevertheless, they obscure
the old gap between plan and realization: the plan includes the realization
and the realization includes the plan. At least in principle, the idea already
contains the contours of the media and the media contain the traces of the
idea. (Bense 1971: 115)
I am quoting this passage from Bense's reflection on Cartesianische Auf-
klärung über Kunst [Cartesian Enlightenment on the Arts] for two reasons.
First, it is a reference to his person. Together with Elisabeth Walther, Max
Bense has worked as a theoretician, not only of semiotic aesthetics, but also
particularly of concrete poetry. Furthermore, he was not only the editor of
trailblazing journals and anthologies but also a poet, and his work in ex-
perimental literature has deeply influenced the structure and tradition in this
domain. Without these results, the present contribution would never have
been written.
714 Friedrich W. Block
Naturally, the second reason for the choice of the quotation is that it leads
medias in res to our topic. It is the epistemic character of the arts insofar as
they endeavor to convey the difference between idea and medium, concept
and material, method and work, or, to use Aristotle's terminology, between
techni and poiesis. In doing so, the arts participate in the creative produc-
tion of knowledge. Bense's aesthetics is particularly concerned with the con-
ditions of semiosis and disregards aspects of mimesis and interpretation. In
his view, aesthetics is at work as soon as the artist focuses on the material,
on the choice of the means, as well as on the constructively and methodically
directed combination of these into more complex units. Thus, experimental
literature is the model of Bense's concept of the arts. In order to develop the
above stated thesis further, examples of visual poetry will be considered as a
variety of experimental literature. Let us first of all give a description of the
medial aspects of visual poetry and their underlying poetics by means of a
few examples, before we can attempt to explain the results in operative and
functional contexts.
ich
ist
etwas
Figure 1: MaxBense, Cartesian concrete (1966).
2. Visual poetry as a form of the intermedia
Max Bense's text shown in Figure 1, written in 1966 and entitled "Cartesian
concrete" consists of the four words "ich" (T), "denke" ('think'), "ist"
('is'), and "etwas" ('something'), obviously arranged by modification of the
The intermediality of visual poetry 715
famous Cartesian dictum, "I think, therefore I am". The words are graphi-
cally arranged in axial symmetry. The horizontal and vertical extensions of
the spaces between the words are equal. The font is Futura, often used by
the concrete poets because of its clear and strict form. The verbs are conju-
gated, suggesting syntactic relations. In the course of text reception, the
reader can produce various interpretations, about which we will speculate
shortly.
Syntactically, a reading can be motivated by the textual nonlinearity and
by the incompleteness of a text consisting of three succeeding lines. Several
variations are possible, leading to different interpretations, depending on
whether we make associations according to geometrical consideration or
whether we give semantic content to the space between the words. This
space can either be seen as a gap, because of the the possible association
with the 'missing' word "also" ('therefore'), or it can serve as a dummy
element, like the pronouns "etwas" or "ich", testifying to the existence of
something which actually appears not to be there: "ich denke da ist etwas"[I
think there is something], i.e., a square, which may appear to be white and
not black, or the white of the paper in opposition to the black of the printer's
ink, or the form of the signifiers in contrast to the emptiness which surrounds
them, etc. The density of possibilities and the rationality of the process can
be experienced as "concrete" and, having in mind Timm Ulrichs's famous
work1, solid as Cartesian words casted in that very material.
According to Bense's terminology, the elements of this poem may be su-
perized consecutively as well as simultaneously. This brings us to an aspect
most relevant to our topic. Without committing ourselves to some concept of
the media as early as now, we may categorize Bense's work as a specific
contribution to the interrelation of text and image. The specific aspect lies in
the ability of identical elements acting both verbally and iconically (in the
sense of W.J.T. Mitchell's [1986] iconology). Thus, their unity can com-
pletely be interpreted as an image or as a text. In addition, the text is visual-
ized concretely and not as a trope, and the image is verbalized in a nonaddi-
tive way.
Let us consider Michael Titzmann's (1990) theses concerning the semiot-
ics of text-image relations. Titzmann distinguishes between the structures of
iconic and verbal utterances and shows that the coexistence of text and im-
age in a single utterance constitute a historical exception. However, the pe-
culiarity of visual poetry, as outlined above, is ignored in Titzmann's ac-
count. Thus, with reference to his distinctions, visual poetry evinces indiffer-
ence: only by interpretative operations can we decide which medial factor is
actually being used, or how we may determine the relationships between

succession and simultaneity, primary and secondary significance, object and
metareference. This explains the particular relationship between semanticity
and materiality in visual poetry. The verbal signifier binds the cognitive at-
tention as much as it is used iconically. Following Titzmann, the reduction
or loss of representation in iconicity focuses the reader's attention on materi-
ality. This characteristic as well as the reduction of verbal referentiality is
valid for visual poetry in general. It corresponds to a dismantled syntax and
a reduction of textual complexity, which does not stop at the boundaries of
words until the status of language itself becomes questionable (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: HansjOrg Mayer, without title (1963).

Likewise, the discreteness of verbal signs becomes a problem with some ¿co-
nizations, for example, when procedures concerning the handwriting are in-
volved (see Figure 3).
In terms of media theory, these observations mean that elementary distinc-
tions which govern the assignment of medial schemata are dedifferentiated.
This corresponds to the treatment of traditional schemata for literary gen-
res.2 This is, for example, apparent from the specific terms for various gen-
res of experimental poetry. Without further specification, only texts, pieces,
The intermediality ofvisual poetry 111
V.
-•fcV
Figure 3: Carlfriedrich Claus, Beginn eines Briefes an Will Grohmann (1963).

works, etc., tend to be used in this context. New terms with a wide range
have been introduced which correspond to the dedifferentiations, i.e., situa-
tions, actions, events, articulations, or topographies. In addition, reformu-
lated traditional terms have been used anew in order to indicate the new
combinations particularly with sensitive values, such as - in German - Seh-,
Hör-, and Sprechtext, or visual, acoustic, or sound poems, digital, and
holopoetry, etc. Many of these terms have become canonic meanwhile. Oth-
ers have remained valid only in the context of the individual program of an
artist or a group of artists.
It is interesting to see that poetics, in connection with this avant-garde, has
coined a term to integrate the above mentioned genres by their central medial
characteristics, creating a comprehensive program that crosses the tradi-
tional arts. Media studies have been acquainted with this term for some time.
We are talking about intermediality. As far as I can see, the scholarly use of
the term derives from Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality. The term is
used in a broad sense, comprising the various relationships between and the
combination of the media (cf. Eicher and Bleckmann eds. 1994; Priimm
1988). Phenonema such as the influence of film reception on literary pro-
duction or questions concerning code switching and multimediality have
been discussed under this term. In our special context as well as in poetics in
general, the concept of intermediality is valid only for the tendencies of fu-
sion. In this sense, however, it is of Romantic origin. One can find the idea
in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, where the American fluxus artist
and editor Dick Higgins found it and presented it to a broad public as early
as in 1965. Higgins (1984: 23) uses the term intermedia "to define works
which fall conceptually between media that are already known". Hence, the
idea of methodical fusion and innovation is the decisive element. Higgins
distinguishes the term from what in his own works and in the writing of
other authors is called "mixed media". This latter term "covers works exe-
cuted in more than one medium"; the various media remain distinct. With
regard to experimental poetry, Higgins (1984: 24) states that in intermedia
"the visual element [. . .] is fused conceptually with words". Here, it is im-
portant that the intermedia itself is sketched as a new medium with the po-
tential for creating its own specific forms. New aesthetic forms and media as
well as their poetological foundation must be understood as differentiations.
Along with dedifferentiations, they create a dynamics full of tension.
In this sense, apart from visual, concrete, or auditive poetry, a range of
other developments can be called intermedial. All of these are located be-
tween the traditional arts and their manifestations: happening, fluxus, con-
ceptual art, actionism, and earlier phenomena such as futurism, dada, or sur-
realism.
3. The poiesis of mediation
It is about time to interrupt the description of the observed phenomena and

to try integrating them in operative and functional contexts. As far as the op-
erative aspect is concerned, we have to consider the authority of the individ-
ual actor who deals with intermedial texts. For the part of the functional as-
pect, we will have a look at the social system of art in which intermedial ap-
plications are realized. Thus, we take into account that medial, semiotic, and
communicative processes depend on the observer. Furthermore, they must be
considered as being integrated into social and cultural contexts.3
The concept of the observer, now attributed to the actor, incorporates the
elementary act of observing. With reference to George Spencer Brown's
Laws of Form (Spencer Brown 1971), observation has been defined as the
drawing of distinctions. Thus, the first question concerns the correlation of
observation and media, the operation mode of mediation. The history of this
term, whose discussion is beyond this paper (cf. Block 1995), allows con-
necting the term of mediation with concepts from Spencer Brown's logical
theory of difference. This interpretation refurbishes the term with a semantic
nuance that has been lost in the course of time, but which is important to our
argument. I would like to explain this idea by a short digression.
Since Hegel established his polished concept of mediation, this term has
been regarded as a dialectic process of identification. Something which is an
sich identical becomes something yur sich by being realized, that is different
from other things. It is finally considered as something an und fiir sich, in-
corporating its counterparts. I think Peirce's concept of thirdness as media-
tion is pertinent here.4 From Hegel's concept, we understand that "to medi-
ate" does not only mean 'to connect', but also 'to differ' or 'to separate'.
However, Hegel confronts us with a comprehensive framework of identity
that can no longer be accepted for the description of semiotic processes in a
(post)modern age which has discovered the paradox to be a constitutive
principle of reality. Hence, his concept of mediation must be reconsidered
from the perspective of the principle of difference.5
We are not as familiar with the notion of mediation as difference as were,
for example, the mysticists: "Du armer llcham, den ich so swerliche getragen
habe, und mich dicke gehindert hest und vermittelt zwischen mir und gote,
nun vrowe ich mich daz ich din ledig werden sol." ['Thou poor body, that I
have so heavily borne and that has hindered me so much and mediated be-
tween God and me, now I am happy that I shall get rid of thee.'], wrote
Hermann von Fritslar in 1349 (cf. Pfeiffer 1845: 8, my emphasis). When
looking back at this negative notion of mediation, we get the following ex-
planation. Separation and connection are two aspects of the same distinction,
the form of which is mediation. Following Spencer Brown, forms are created
by establishing differences. Each action that brings forth form must there-
fore begin with a distinction which is followed by further ones. To draw dis-
tinctions of significant consequences is an essential concern of constructivist
theory. About its central topic, reality constitution, Spencer Brown (1971:
106) writes: "Any given (or captivated) universe is what is seen as the result
of a making of one turn, and thus is the appearance of any first distinction,
and only a minor aspect of all being, apparent and non-apparent".
It is important to recognize that a distinction, and hence an observation,
cannot be itself observed during performance, otherwise it could not even be
performed. Latency is thus being created. The observer's action carries its
own blind spot with it, making all final reasoning impossible. But latency
can be partially compensated by observing an observation at a later point of
time - by means of a distinction that again remains itself unobservable dur-
ing performance. This possibility has been called second order observation.
It creates the connection of what has previously been differentiated and thus
corresponds to the notion of mediation stated above. Observations of second
order resemble actions of mediation; their differentiality cannot be deceived.
Its semiosis proceeds symbolically in the sense of Luhmann (1988: 889),
where "symbol only means that the coupling of the separated can be pre-
sented in the separated".
Another distinction, derived from this one, concerns the media concept of
social systems theory. In my opinion, this concept is compatible with our
notion of mediation. It is abstract and fundamental and yet far from technical
or systemic specifications though close to semiotic considerations, namely as

far as its division into form and medium is concerned. A medium, then,
means a sphere of relatively disconnected elements in opposition to form,
which means the dense conjunction of these elements. This distinction corre-
sponds to the relation of difference and unity of a differentiation. Accord-
ingly, a medium is subject to the principle of latency mentioned above,
which has frequently been chosen as a central theme in emphatic discussions
on media and reality.
If we continue with the recursive observation we can make mediation an
object of a third order observation. In my view, third order observation takes
place in the scholarly examination of communication, sign, and media proc-
esses. Furthermore, it occurs aesthetically in intermedial art and literature.
Aesthetic intermediality requires the observation of existing or developing
forms by means of a distinction between form and medium, thus compen-

sating latencies. This distinction is therefore used recursively and thus self-
referentially in the aesthetically intermedial process. This recursive process
is made possible by the above mentioned double function or indifference of
verbal and iconic mediality valid for the elements of an utterance and creat-
ing a paradoxical form similar to a picture puzzle.
In the aesthetic process, there is hence an oscillation between various op-
eration modes: between differing and connecting, designating and meaning,
seeing and reading, or self-referentiality and alloreferentiality. In my view,
oscillation is a term more accurate than the one of fusion introduced above,
since oscillation indicates the time consuming crossing of the boundary of
the recursively used distinction between medium and form. By contrast, fu-
sion would mean the disappearance of the difference and thus dissolute the
various operational modes and make them invisible. On a macrological level,
to which we will return soon, the supporters of the avant-garde program of
fusion have often talked about the disappearance of art. The oscillation view,
however, keeps all differentiated items present for the observer's interpreta-
tive game with mediations. Henceforth, aesthetic intermediality makes avail-
able to the observer a self-referential poiesis in the strict sense of the word. It
thus provides an understanding of poetry whose constructivity dominates or
neutralizes the referential or mimetic functions. Whatever may be referred to
is both subjected to the constructive and the deconstructive method which
uses the distinction of form and medium. Following our previous arguments,
the observer, by this method, observes visual poetry primarily by observing
herself or himself in the execution of aesthetical actions. Trying to observe
the unobservable, and driven by oscillation, the observers or actors are en-
abled to experience the mechanics of aesthetic semiosis as the way they draw
their own distinctions. Therefore, the genre of intermedia may serve as a
model for the kind of reality conception explained by contructivist theories
of the media. However, scientific discourse itself must take place in a form
of communication that does not observe its own media. It would otherwise
become mixed up in paradoxes making impossible both alloreferentiality as
well as the form of this contribution. Art, by contrast, is able to separate
otherwise valid rules and. schemes of communication and cognition from
their functional contexts. Such contexts are taken from their powerful shad-
owy existence and illuminated in art both as media and as forms.
4. Self-reflection in the system of art
On a macrolevel of the system of art, of which literature is a domain, poietic

acting can be seen as being associated with the development of aesthetic or
artistic self-reflection. This self-reflection has been going along with the dif-
ferentiation of literature as a self-organizing social system with a specific
organization since the 18th century (cf. note 3). An excessive poetological
debate adopted the difference between literature and its environment as a
central theme. This argument first emphasized the autonomy of bourgeois art
by analogy with the modern individual and thus defended the tautological
formula of "art is art" (cf. Plumpe 1990). Like other social systems, litera-
ture becomes more and more involved with increasing complexity. Literature
reacts by internal differentiation and self-reflection. Several theories of mod-
ernization have argued that, since the mid- 19th century, a general syndrome
of crisis has spread. Individuals as well as social groups have had to deal
with this syndrome until today. In this context, art and literature have devel-
oped a system specific stance with the avant-gardes. From this position, a
sensitive steady reflection on the boundaries of art, its relationship to the en-
vironment, and its inner conditions can be carried out not only within aes-
thetic discourse, but also in aesthetic production and reception. The direct
way to do this is to make existing boundaries, that is, differentiations, the
central topic of aesthetic processes and to draw the observer's attention to
these boundaries. This goal is best achieved by the dedifferentiations men-
tioned above. The description can be extended. Examples which come to
mind are the artistic experiment which makes art merge with life or the par-
tial delimitations between the various arts.
In accordance with these observations, the medial differentiations with

which art or literature are dealing must be considered. When there is talk
about a crisis syndrome, it refers to our coping with the paradoxes of the
modern age, especially the mediation between individualization and mass
phenomena (quite instructively, cf. Loo & van Reijen 1992). Naturally, this
comprises the enormous development of the technical media into a domain
that has meanwhile been characterized as a systemically self-organizing so-
cial domain (cf. Merten, Schmidt, and Weischenberg 1994). Art, for its part,
accompanies and influences this development by the avant-garde's self-re-
flection in the process of observing its own distinctions between medium and
form. The more the dominance of the print media diminishes, the more the
traditional literary medial relations are deconstructed in literature, and the
more experiments with new, different media and corresponding forms are
carried out. From today's view, we find that the literary avant-gardes have
hardly left out a technical medium, the list comprising far more than the
regular range from paper to the new media. Intermedial literature as it has
been introduced by the example of visual poetry has taken hold of the com-
puter and its various applications long ago. This development began in the
1960s with stochastic and aleatorie experiments, in which Max Bense played
an important role. Computer graphics, animation, hypertext, or interactivity
are some elements of contemporary design which I would like to indicate by
two examples.
5. Digital hypermedia and the observer
The first example was created by the Brazilian artist and writer André Val-
lias in 1992. The work consists of two parts. The first part (Figure 4a) gives
the dictionary entry for the term Prthvi (a metrical pattern of Sanscrit epic)
from a well-known German dictionary of literary terms (Wilpert 1979: 638).
The second part (Figure 4b) shows two diagrammatic representations of the
metrical pattern of Prthvi. They visualize the sequence of metrically stressed
and unstressed syllables as a grid pattern by means of a CAD computer pro-
gram. The first representation functions two-dimensionally as a ground plan
of the second representation, which shows the same pattern in a form that
simulates a three-dimensional net extending into space. Vallias has also ex-
panded this procedure in a related work by means of animation and produced
a video in which the camera eye moves through the structure. The interme-
dium is created by the significant mediation of the metric diagram and the
digital net graph commonly used in the domains of design and architecture.
The effect caused by it is most interesting. The tonal, rhythmic, and iconic
(suggesting landscape poetry) characteristics of the traditional genre of po-
etry are examined nonverbally (part two), while language is only used in the
paratext (part one). This example shows that aesthetic intermediality means
also metamediality in the sense discussed above, since metrical diagrams
have always served as metamedia. Hence, we have to doubt the common
view that visual utterances are unable to turn to metalevels. Also the
question of truth in verbal and iconic utterances can only be answered in
specifically pragmatic contexts as well concerning verbal as iconic or visual
utterances, as can be seen from W. Nòth's contribution to this volume. Fur-
thermore, to ascribe object or metareference cannot be explained by the on-
tology of texts or images.
Prthvi
(ind. . Erde), Versmaß der ind. Epik,
bestehend in Strophen von vier Zeilen
zu je 17 Silben in der Form:
Figure 4a: André Vallias, Prthvî (1992), first part.

Figure 4b: André Vallias, Prthvî (1992), second part.
Figure 5: Jeffrey Shaw, The Legible City (1989/90).
Figure 5 shows a very lavish interactive work created in 1989/90 by the

Australian Jeffrey Shaw. This work is well known since it has caused some
sensation. Shaw arranged characters, words, and sentences in large scale on
a part of the ground plan of Manhattan (our example) as well as of Amster-
dam and Karlsruhe. The user of the installation is sitting on a bike and can
move the animation, which is projected on a video screen in front of him or
her by means of real time computer technology. He or she can also drive
through The Legible City (the project's title) by reading it, thus having a
reading-riding experience. The texts are made up as eight separate stories.
Each has an intimate relation to Manhattan and is marked optically by a dif-
ferent color. The reader-biker has a town map in front of him or her in order
to determine his or her position.
We cannot deal with all aspects of the work. However, let us emphasize
that to read and to see is coupled with more intensive body movement in this
work. The movement virtually doubles in the animation. This play on the in-
side and outside makes the observer's corporeality the central theme in a
material and immaterial way (cf. Block 1996). Thus, Shaw's work incorpo-
rates form as a primeval medium that stands at the beginning of all medial
evolution. Only the "human medium", as W. Faulstich (1994: 30) puts it,
makes so-called interactivity possible, since it is the point of view and the
user's activity that define the situation of the simulation. Consequently, the
authority observing the change from medium to form is explicitly reintro-
duced in the aesthetic process. The aestheticalization of the so-called inter-
activity is nothing but a variant of self-observation of the observer by means
of the medium-form distinction. It is analogous to the numerous self-exhibi-
tions performed by artists such as Timm Ulrichs, who claimed for his person
in 1968: "Ich bin ein Gedicht" ['I am a poem'] (cf. Gutenberg Museum
Mainz 1987: 66).
Art and science have just staged the grandiose funeral of the modern sub-
ject, but here it comes again, cloaked as the observer sneaking in through the
back door. However, the subject has changed and now serves as a decentered
interface in the process of separating and connecting. P. Weibel's aesthetics
of the media, which emphatically celebrates techno art, contains an idea
which was mentioned earlier when we discussed techne and poiesis. Follow-
ing Weibel (1991: 232), technology has explicitly indicated that the nature of
art is constructive in principle: "When art was called techne, it was in the
name of the creative production and addition", that is, poiesis, as we may
add.
To summarize, intermediality and metamediality have to be considered
from the perspective of the observer. Perhaps, the term of observer is too
metaphorical, since it comes from cognitive science, and it may be too open
to distortion, when the media or (with Luhmann) communication are consid-
ered to be able to observe. Yet, I do hope that this contribution may have
helped to show that especially intermedial literature and ultimately all com-
binations of media and form are in need of the individual realization by some
active participant. And this participant needs to be able to build and carry on
distinctions and mediations. Humans remain agents of motivated and inten-
tional actions. Hence, we remain responsible for our doing, at least until our
sophisticated instruments have found the lever to turn ourselves off.6
Notes
1. "CONCRETE POETRY", 1972/73. The letters of these two words are made of
concrete.
2. I adopted the terminology concerning the schemata of media genres from the
constructivist theory of the media. Thus, in principle, we do not deal with
features of texts here but with the means of cognitive and communicative or-
ganization and their combination (cf. Schmidt 1994a: 164-201).
3. Although drawing on thoughts that have their origin in the logical theory of
difference, we will argue in the following from the point of view of the con-
structivist theory of culture. Speaking in terms of systems theory, constructivist
culture theory works on the basis of multiple factor models which are not one-
dimensional, as Luhmann demands. The social system of art and literature in
which the observed phenomena are located is thus self-organizing, using sev-
eral components such as actors and their cognitive domains, communicative
processes, social structures, and institutions, media, and symbolic orders (cf.
Schmidt 1994b).
4. "First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Sec-
ond is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with,
something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and a
second are brought into relation" (Peirce CP 6.32, cf. Parmentier 1985: 40).
5. Cf. the critique on "semiotics of unity" in favor of a "second semiotic: the se-
miotic of difference" by Dean and Juliet Flower MacCannell (1982: 146-158).
6. Thanks are due to Winfried Ntith for most helpful suggestions and a thorough
stylistic revision of a former version of this text.
Figures
1. Bense, Max: Cartesian concrete (1966). In: Williams (1968: 31). © by Elisa-
beth Walther, Stuttgart
2. Mayer, Hansjörg: without title (1963). In: Mayer (1963: s. p).
3. Claus, Carlfriedrich: Beginn eines Briefes an Will Grohmann (1963). In:
Claus (1990: 40). © by C. Claus, Annaberg-Buchholz.
4. Vallias, André: Prthvt (1992). In: Ronca (1992: 140). © by André Vallias, Säo
Paulo.
5. Shaw, Jeffrey: The Legible City (1989/90). © by Jeffrey Shaw, Karlsruhe.
References
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Poetic aspects of a multimedia text
Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal
1. Optical and digital images and visual metaphors
Some of today's leading theorists and artists work with the opposition be-
tween optical and digital images.1 Genetically defined, optical images de-
rive from a morphogenesis by projection. They present an indexical value
and a direct commitment to the processes of representation of reality. In
counterpart, digital images are the result of mathematical calculations, ef-
fects of a program whose objective is not exactly that of representing the
world, but rather of producing a simulacrum of it. In any event, when these
two major categories appear in the syntagmatic space of one text,2 they be-
come confused and, due to the support (paper, film, etc.) conveying them,
the differences arising from the opposition mentioned are diluted. In this
sense, the photographic and the digital images communicated by a film, for
instance, weaken the dissimilarities between the features that characterize
the representation on the one hand and the presentation on the other. Today,
this seems to be one of the fundamental characteristics of the material pro-
duced by the integration of the heterogeneity of the various languages of the
multimedia. Moreover, in significant usages of an aesthetic nature, all evi-
dence points to the fact that the weakening of the oppositive tensions3 is a
result of the overdetermination arising from the poetic processes.

Based on these assumptions, I would like to explore the hypothesis that
poetic overdetermination, principally the one produced by metaphors, tends
to nullify the opposing elements and thus enjoys the expressive advantages
engendered by the principle of invariability. In other words, metaphor
searches for what there is in common between different things and in this
way, it favors intrinsically the point of intersection,4 relegating the singu-
larities of the differences to a secondary level. In this perspective, the most
authentic metaphors fix their roots in the meaning of invariables of a natu-
ral world that confers transcendence to them.
In the light of this, and having in mind, on the one hand, a synthetic expo-
sition of the premises guiding the above hypothesis and, on the other hand,
the operative value that such premises might have for an exercise of inter-
732 Eduardo Peñuela Cañizal
pretation, I will focus, initially, my attention on certain particularities of the
models built by semiotic rhetoric, thus trying to emphasize those aspects
related more directly to the principle of invariability. Subsequently, I will
make a brief comment on some of the metaphorical aspects of Teresa La-
barrere's work entitled "Roundabout Brasilia".
2. Photographic indexicality and iconicity
One of the most evident characteristics of the texts in which images are en-
dowed with a solid indexical charge is the bias with which the iconic signs
represent their referent. Even though the iconic analogy between the signifi-
ers and the objects represented produces a strong illusion of reality, the
signs of this kind of discourse suppress necessarily many of the particu-
larities on which the ontological specification of reference depends. In
photographic texts, for instance, in those discussed by Gombrich (1980),
the omission of a considerable set of the specific features of the object
designated produces ambiguities.5
Matters of size, perspective, color, light, not to mention many others,
make the signifiers of the iconic signs carry marks of several types of mu-
tilation. Photographic representation needs "things from the world" and,
undoubtedly, is close to them. On the other hand, it also moves further
away from the reality of the things represented, thus generating polysemes
which grant unexpected openings to the process of semiosis when they im-
pose themselves on the contents of the signs. Hence, a photograph of a
flower as seen by a scientist has a significance that does not coincide with
the one observed by a poet. Certainly, each reader makes use of different
points of reference in his or her own interpretation. However, I do not con-
sider it appropriate to discuss at this point the reasons that determine such
semantic polyphonies. I only which to stress that such facts give rise to
ambiguities and that we are consequently in the presence of a phenomenon
that is of interest to rhetoric. Signs present significant forms that are rela-
tively stable, when considered as being expressive and communicative units
established by the norms of codes and consecrated by society's use. How-
ever, with the passage of time, these forms gradually change, sometimes
because of inevitable diachronic corrosions, sometimes due to parameters
imposed by the constant changes in social customs and by the nature of the
supports conveying them. The deterioration inflicted by the years on a
photo is a good example of such a phenomenon. In spite of the resistance
Poetic aspects of a multimedia text 733
that its signifiers offer to its deterioration, the integrity of the expressive
forms is fatally affected. As a result, the outlines, colors, and textures
acquired by the things designated in the materiality of representation
transform the plastic and iconic characteristics of any photograph. A clear
consequence, in this case, is that the changes at the level of expression
bring about changes at the level of contents. The original characteristics of
brightness and sharpness of a freshly developed photograph lose more and
more of its original transparency, up to the point when, deprived of these
characteristics by the action of time, they reach an opacity in which the
initial informative charge almost disappears to give place to an ambiguity,
a kind of polysemy that finally impregnates the photographic semiosis with
poetic valences.
In this intricate web of mutations, rhetoric should fix its models, for, in
this perspective, these mutations incorporate, besides the stylistic altera-
tions themselves, the changes in signification determined by the semiotics
of the natural world. Thus, the overdetermination of the zero mark of any
message does not depend only on the knowledge related to the codes. The
enunciator's semantic universe, or the historical and cultural contexts form
an even broader semantic field. The signification, as something preceding
the signified, contributes decisively to the creation of tropes and to their
comprehension. In short, I want to say that the signification functions as a
constant in which the deviations that characterize the poetic figures find
their most complete justification.
Thus, it is not a matter of thinking about the rhetorical operations, be
they substantial or relational, as a means whose utility is restricted to iden-
tifying and locating the figurative entities. I believe that they have a more
transcendent purpose if viewed in relation to signification. In this case, the

rhetorical deviations are attempts at modeling semiotic forms that ap-
proximate more and more to the processes of the semiosis of the natural
world. According to these premises, the fascination of a metaphorical con-
figuration is not exclusively due to the aesthetic values that may be attrib-
uted to it. In my view, the beauty of the configuration arises from the de-
gree of closeness that it comes to establish with its signification.
If we consider photography as an essential multimedia component, both
the utility that scientists have always attributed to photographic represen-
tations and the irresistible attraction that artists have felt for this type of
image would be explained. The possibility of getting nearer and nearer to
the elements of the natural world aroused the enthusiasm of the scientists.
The emotion showed by Draper, assistant professor at the University of
New York, is clear in quotations such as the one from 1840: "I have taken
proofs; of microscopic objects magnified six hundred times, by receiving
the image from a solar microscope on the iodized surface. Perfect pictures
of the wings of insects and other objects were thus obtained."6
The poets' emotion seems even stronger. Fascinated by the cosmic range
of the metaphor that scientists could build a "telegraphic system of the uni-
verse" based on the properties of the daguerreotype, Walt Whitman, from
about 1850, started collecting data for a "Poem of Pictures". According to
Rudisills, "Whitman's catalog of the images in his picture gallery
resembles Hitchcock's metaphor of stepping from one star to another to
observe the stages of human history, even to some of the same significant
images."7
3. Rhetorical structures
The aphaereses, apocopes, syncopes, and synereses that were considered by

the authors of Rhé tori que générale in 1970, as figures affecting the level of
expression of the minimal units of a text,8 allow me to define more pre-
cisely the relationship between the principle of invariability and the meta-
phorical processes. Taking the evolution of technological images into con-
sideration, it is apparent that the technological breakthroughs aim, among
other things, at filling the gaps appearing from the moment a signifier rep-
resents or simulates worldly things. The photographic image lacks move-
ment and, in order to fill this particular gap, the cinema emerges. But the
images of a film keep the pictorial perspective, thus displaying a retrogres-
sion that the digital images will endeavour to overcome.9 Therefore, ad-
junction and suppression are operations without which the play of muta-
tions would be impossible. Here is a condition that, added to ambiguity, is
of interest to rhetoric.
In this state of permanent dynamism, changes seem to be created with the
goal of correcting the erosion to which all signs are doomed. If we choose
only one of the many frames that make up a sequence in which a human
smile has been filmed, we will have a photographic signifier in which a
syncope emerges. On the other hand, if we assume that each of those
frames is a minimal unit of the filmic text, the concatenation of frames
during the edition of the film reveals the presence of aphaereses and apo-
copes.
However, in the semiotic heterogeneity of any multimedia work, the iden-
tification of those figures is not as simple as we often think. Aphaeresis

may occur in the speech of a character at the same time when there is also,
let us say, a syneresis at the level of plastic expression of that same char-
acter. Such arrangements endow the semiotic space of multimedia texts
with a complexity that demands the reformulation of the models used by
rhetoric. The condensations and dislocations produced by the new tech-
nologies invest the multimedia tropes with structural properties whose ex-
pressive characteristics are radically different from the literary ones, the
field generally focussed on by poetic studies.
Although simple, these examples are enough to explain the metamorpho-
sis of the signifiers in the course of the rhetorical processes. The expressive
deviations are tangible, but this does not mean that their significance is as
evident. In order to understand the range of those expressive alterations, it
is necessary to work with the idea that, deep down, the connotation built by
such transformations hides the human desire to build expressive networks
able to capture some of the numberless facets of the meaning.
As to the level of the content, metaphor, in the interpretation of general
rhetoric, results from the operation of suppressing some semes in order to
emphasize those which allow the integration of more distant ones. From
this point of view, a poetic configuration of this kind approximates, in a
certain way, to the figures mentioned. It eliminates semantic particularities
and thus emphasizes aspects of meaning that the erosion of the signs cannot
capture. Its renovating role is unquestionable and, perhaps for this reason,
is so common in any kind of discourse. However, I believe that it is in the
multimedia texts that metaphor plays an essential role.
4. The metaphorical structure of "Roundabout Brasilia"
Obstinate pursuer of the intersection, metaphor searches for the zero mark
in the invariabilities. I consider that "Roundabout Brasilia" (Figure 1) is a
multimedia text in which such a procedure becomes evidently overdeter-
mined by the semiotic processes of the natural world. In the architectural
message from Brazil's capital, signifiers are molded, and in these traces of
meaning, coming from the macrosemiotics of the natural world, they are
preserved. The flagpole at the "Praça dos très Poderes" in Brasilia boasts
virility, and the buildings lined up around it evoke the effects of a constel-
lated explosion that is seen by Teresa Labarrère in this manner.
i IIIS®®!
^^frtiMa 1 1
Figure 1: "Roundabout Brasilia" by Teresa Labarrère.

Petrified in the architectural text, this metaphor gains movement in the
comparative term through which the relation between the metaphorical
components is established. The structure of a trope consecrated by tradition
as being an implicit comparison is thus renewed. It is true that the movies
start this adventure, but the digital images manipulate the system of per-
spective more freely and thus broaden the expressive possibilities of the
plastic system. As a result, the representation of the metaphorical process
is transformed into presentation, the form by means of which the techno-
logical images regenerate expressive erosions and become undoubtedly
closer to the invariability overdetermined by the multiple facets of signifi-
cation.
Consequently, I believe that this is what the author of "Roundabout
Brasilia" pursues, when in addition to what the poetics of her multimedia
text tells us, she states: "I intend to refute the model of the 'well-formulated
problem' that rationalistic Utopia proposes and boasts about. From the
element of perception, and based on my experience as an inhabitant moving
around and interacting with this urban environment, I try to deduce not
only the form (gestalt), but also the formation (gestaltung) of this environ-
ment. Considering that the best translation of a work of art is another work
of art", as John Cage pointed out. The quotation continues: "I propose the
supernova as a better metaphor of the paradox of creation. Viewed as a
work of art and paradigm of mankind, Brasilia can be compared to a su-
pernova, the stellar stage of more intense brightness that corresponds to the
exact moment when the star dies, for the star, its apogee, its peak, is its
decadence. Its death gives rise to new celestial bodies. Like a cosmic star,
Brasilia resembles a poorly-formulated problem, or better, a problem that
escapes definitive formulation."
Notes
1. See Couchot (1988) and Popper (1975).

2. Le Texte, au sens moderne, actuel, que nous essayons de donner à ce mot, se
distingue fondamentalement de l'œuvre littéraire: ce n'est pas un produit
esthétique, c'est une pratique signifiante (Barthes 1985: 13).
3. Nous concevons l'opposition élevé vs. réduit comme la discontinuité du con-
tinu, mais pour des raisons, à la fois de commodité et de fond, nous
l'envisagerons sous les termes tension vs. laxité.
Encore ces termes ne sont-ils qu'à moitié satisfaisants: ils conviennent en
ce qu'ils indiquent moins des positions que des translations, des glissements,
des balayages; l'élément de contenu qui y se trouve incorporé devrait en être
mentalement distrait, à moins que [. . .] le monde mental et le monde
physique ne soient moins éloigné l'un de l'autre qu'on ne le croit, mais ceci
est une autre histoire. [ . . . ]

Si bien que nous en venons à poser que le sème n'est pas l'instance ultime
et nous installons en deçà l'opposition tension vs laxité.
Ceci conduit à redessiner, en premier lieu, la configuration de l'opposition.
Un sème apparaît plutôt comme une masse sémique, variant entre deux états
dont l'un serait lâche et l'autre tendu (Zilbeiberg 1981: 6-7).
4. Mais nous pouvons approfondir encore cette première déscription de la méta-
phore. La classe limite dont nous avons parlé peut aussi se décrire comme
une intersection entre les deux termes, partie commune à la mosaïque de
leurs sèmes et de leurs parties [...]. Et si cette partie commune est nécessaire
comme base probante pour fonder l'identité prétendue, la partie non com-
mune n'est pas moins indispensable pour créer l'originalité de l'image et dé-
clencher le mécanisme de réduction. La métaphore extrapole, elle se base sur
une identité réelle manifestée par l'intersection de deux termes pour affirmer
l'identité des termes entiers. Elle étend à la réunion des deux termes une
propriété qui n'appartient qu'à leur intersection (Groupe n 1970: 107).
5. To me, as a layman, this device of "calibration" illuminates the whole proc-
ess of obtaining information from an arrested image, both by its power and
its limitation. We can calibrate for color, but not for depth, for here we come
up against what, in Art and Illusion I have called the ambiguity of the third
dimension. It is in the nature of things that the image, the permanent trace of
the light which entered the lens, can give us no information of the distance
the light travelled before it released the chemical process on the emulsion.
Hence, the picture must always be ambiguous or, to be linguistically more
correct, multivalent, like any other projection of a solid on a plane
(Gombrich 1980: 185).
6. Such scientific use of the daguerreotype relied on the apparent realism of the
images produced. What had seemed a wonderful illusion to the average
viewer was turned to useful advantage in the laboratory and the classroom as
a truthful substitute of reality (Rudisill 1971: 78).
7. This is the fragment of the Whitman's catalog quoted by Rudisill (1971: 93):
There is represented the Day...
And there the Night...
There is a picture of Adam in Paradise...
There is an old Egyptian temple — and
again, a Greek temple, of white marble;
8. It being admitted that a multimedia text integrates many languages, the con-
cept of minimal unit as inherited from linguistics becomes complicated.
From the rhetorical point of view, it will always be extremely difficult to lo-
cate figures such as aphaeresis or synaeresis, since, although there is no diffi-
culty concerning their identification, it will not be easy, on the other hand, to
identify in a pertinent manner either the minimal unit of the system to which
it belongs. By distinguishing the iconic systems from the plastic ones,
Groupe |x made possible considerable advance in a field where the poetic fig-
ures of visual messages have always been analyzed with basis on linguistic
models. But we have to recognize that the systematic studies of this kind of
issue are still being developed. I consider that the integration of ideas from
works such as Traité du signe visuel (1992) and Cinéma et production de
sens (1990) opens new horizons for the rhetorical analysis of the multimedia.
9. Par ailleurs, il faut changer d'attitude de corps et d'esprit pour saisir en quoi
ces images innovent, et, surtout, comment elles sont en train de transformer
fondamentalement notre environnement. D'abord, elles donnent accès sous
une forme sensible à divers univers dont la représentation resterait abstraite
sans la visualisation que permet l'ordinateur. Puis, par l'animation, ces im-
ages peuvent reproduire les mouvements d'objets et de processus, ou la cré-
ation et les métamorphoses de l'image elle-même. Enfin, les destinations
privilégiées, la simulation et ultimement la réalité virtuelle, impliquent les
réaménagement profonds de la sensibilité, des échanges et un monde de cir-
culation des corps et des images dans de nouveaux registres (Poissant 1994:
147).
References
Barthes, Roland
1985 L'aventure sémiologique. Paris: Seuil.
Couchot, Edmond
1988 Images: De l'optique au numérique; Les arts visuels et
l'évolution des technologies. Paris: Hermès.
Gombrich, Ernst H.
1980 "Standard of truth: The arrested image and the moving
eye", in: Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed.), The language of images.

Chicago: Univ. Press.
Groupe ^ [= Dubois, Jaques, et al.]
1970 Rhétorique générale. Paris: Larousse.
Groupe n [= Edeline, Francis, et al.]
1992 Traité du signe visuel. Paris: Seuil.
Odin, Roger
1990 Cinéma et production de sens. Paris: Armand Colin.
Poissant, Louise
1994 "Ces images en quête d'identité", Revue d'esthétique 25:
147-157.
Popper, F.
1975 Le déclin de l'objet. Paris: Chêne.
Rudisill, Richard
1971 Mirror image. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
Zilberberg, Claude
1981 Essai sur les modalités tensives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Graphic notation and musical graphics: The nonnotational
sign systems in new music and its multimedia), intermedial,
extended-medial, and mixed-medial character
NikSa Gligo
Si le compositeur ne désire pas disposer

d'un système de notation universel,
nous ne voyons pas pourquoi on l'y
contraindrait: le problème vis-à-vis de
ses oeuvres se posera seulement pour le
musicologue. (Nattiez 1987: 107)
1. Semiography and new music notations
Musical semiography seldom takes into account the obvious loss of the me-
diating function in some primarily graphic features of contemporary music
notations, which differ greatly from conventional notation, as a standardly
efficient mediator between the composer's idea, its notational fixation in a
set of instructions to the performer, whose playing (i.e., the realization of
these instructions in sound) brings music as a meaningful message to the ear,
and the mind of a listener. I have already dealt with this topic: first po-
lemicizing with Goodman's concept of notationality as applied to new music
notation (Goodman 1968: 187-192; Gligo 1987, 1988), then trying to

explain the reasons of this change in notational functionality in new music
(Gligo 1992).
1.1 Extramusical messages and notation
The purity of the musical message as "the material aspect of the act of
communication taking place between transmitting and receiving end of a
channel" (Moles 1986: 525) is obviously questionable, although conven-
tional notation (if it does not include a verbal text, a poem put to music) only
secondarily manifests its extramusical contents. "Aural expressions" can be
complemented with extramusical or even nonmusical features like a specific
742 NikSa Gligo
kind of tactility or gesturality (Tarasti 1994: 4), and the specific "visibility"
sometimes is or seems to be even more important than the immediately
audible (Stephan 1970: 90).
The unusual sound concepts, which sometimes look after specific
notational instructions for their interpretational realization, presuppose some
extramusical supports or mostly visual complementations. Thus, the
breaking of bottles in Ligeti's Apparitions for orchestra (by the 3rd
percussionist in bar 53) must be seen as such because Ligeti has musically
prepared this event. (The manner of this preparation deserves, however,
special analysis of intrinsic features of the score, which does not mean that
these features are musically pure!) But many other unusual sound sources
used in new music require to be seen, not only heard (Stephan 1970: 97).
According to Kagel (1963: s.p.), the performance of Cage's Concert for
Piano and Orchestra is a clear example of the "instrumental theater",1 the
intention of which is "to hold together extreme disparities much as one finds
them held together in the natural world, as for instance in a forest, or in a
city street" (Cage 1959: s.p.). Here, the musicians become modified into ac-
tors and the listeners into spectators.
2. The transmitters in nonnotational systems as media of nonverbal

messages
The question is whether in music, if it is, generally speaking, "very close to

nonverbal sign systems" (Tarasti 1994: 4), from this specific point of inter-
dependence between its nonnotational fixation and its sounding, the transmit-
ter really becomes the medium of the nonverbal message (Noth 1985: 327).
That is, does the way in which the composer's concept is written down, un-
reliable as it is as the reflection of the composer's idea, suffice in itself?
Doesn't it require any realization at all?
The nuances in the meaning of two terms, graphic notation and musical
graphics, which are usually taken synonymously, prove, however, that even
in this case, the notation, no matter how nonnotational it may be, still pre-
serves its intentional functions (Ingarden 1962: 24), i.e., presupposes and
even requires complementation in the listener's consciousness, but in quite
an extraordinary way.
Graphic notation and musical graphics 743
2.1 The musical conditions of graphical sign systems
It is of course understandable that not just any graphic can be a musical

graphic (Stoianova 1987: 288). Karkoschka (1980: 137) has made an at-
tempt to list the musical elements that make a graphic musically relevant:
(1) Graphic elements: largely determinded signs and processes with a low
margin for individual decisions on the part of the interpreter.
(2) More or less undefined drawing, but the eye is guided, either by means
of lines or linelike structures or by means of graphic or veibal aids.
(3) Undefined signs, neither beginning, nor end; no direction of reading is
indicated or recognizable either, but the picture should be transformed
into music immediately or associatively.
(4) The graphic cannot be played, but influences in some, perhaps not even
describable form, the player during the performance.
(5) The graphic is not at al meant to be transformed into music, but owes
its qualities to a musical or quasi-musical aesthetics.
The distinction between sign and drawing (cf. also Stoianova 1987: 284) has
some obvious reasons: sign implies a concept more or less similar to the
traditional notational symbols, in any way less ambiguous than drawing.
This difference is also present in the various degrees of reliability in the
realization. We could conclude that the graphic notation must operate with
the signs, no matter whether they reinterpret the traditional notational signs
or are based on newly invented sign systems, while musical graphics
primarily operate with drawings.
Two well-known, already classical examples, November 52 and December
52, from Earle Brown's Folio, although very often confused as examples of
graphic notation as well as of musical graphic, may show this distinction.

November 52 uses conventional notational symbols although placed in
unconventional staves: "The page 'November 1992' leaves the choice of the
instrument, key, dynamics, articulation, and sequence(s) to the player(s)"
(Karkoschka 1966: 92). December 52 reminds us of Mondrian's paintings
(however, in black and white only). The first example should therefore rep-
resent a graphic notation, and the second, a musical graphic. But the spatial
proportions among the signs in December 52 set the rules for elaboration of
this purely graphic pattern in such a way that these signs, once chosen as the
representatives for some musical values, could function as notational system
in spite of their graphic ambiguity. Of course, if we take the graphic pattern
itself as the source of "any interpretations" (Karkoschka 1966: 92),
December 52 is still the best known example for the musical graphic, which
744 NikSa Gligo
could sound even through the thematic material of Till Eulenspiegel
(Karkoschka 1966: 93). One could also hang this graphic pattern on the wall
and enjoy it from a purely visual point of view: the transposition of the
experience of time into the experience of space and vice versa is unlimited
here (Stockhausen 1963: 182-183; Stoianova 1978: 82-83). The elaboration
of any graphical pattern, however, is almost a condition for putting it to
sound (Gligo 1987: 149-152). The visually proportional relations among the
elements of this pattern suggest the corresponding relations in time: the
consequent elaboration of this pattern could therefore reduce its ambiguity to
the sign system which could correspond to graphical notation.
The best known and the most elaborated report on the attempts to create
new sign systems is that of Karkoschka (1966). Nicole Moutard (1974) has
investigated the new signs used by Bartok in Ostinato from his Microcosm,
but these signs can only be considered to be extensions of traditional nota-
tion, although they do stress its insufficiency. A special symposium in Rome
in 1972 was dedicated to the attempts to standardize the new notational
systems (Nattiez 1973), obviously with no success. Research on the ne-
cessities of modifying the traditional notation and on introducing new sign
systems (Stoianova 1987: 287-288; Gligo 1992: 4-10; Logothetis 1974: 5 -
6) prove, however, that such standardization cannot be a matter of the com-
posers' decisions. Hence, musicology and musical semiography as its spe-
cialized branch, has to deal with this fact instead of attempting to prescribe
to the composers how to standardize their notations (Nattiez 1987: 107).
2.2 Logothetis's sign system and some other attempts

Anestis Logothetis understands the graphic elements in music in three ways:

"They can symbolize something insofar as they mean what they symbolize.
Then they can arouse associations, and finally they can signalize orders"
(Logothetis 1974: 19). Although these elements are already covered in
Karkoschka's list mentioned above, it should be stressed that Logothetis's
method of notation "is meant to communicate images of sound
characteristics and not to serve as material for improvisation" (Logothetis
1966: s.p., 1974: 27). Therefore, Logothetis is right when he speaks about
his systems in terms of graphic notations, and not in terms of musical
graphics. This could be partly compared with the so-called "draft writing,
which gives the interpreter an idea, instead of an instruction. Signs would be
used which would not describe sound phenomena but the direction which
can be followed by the player" (Stockhausen 1963: 179). Evidently, this

kind of notation cannot represent an unambiguous sign system.
The so-called action notation is only partly included in Logothetis's sys-
tem, although, at least terminologically, as action music, for example
(Griffiths 1986: 15; Slonimsky 1971: 1424-1425), it also pretends to
represent a sign system. But it cannot be a system because of its at least
twofold prescriptive function: it can either (a) prescribe a sound action, i.e.,
the movement of sound to be produced, as in Cage's Aria (Stoianova 1987:
290), or (b) prescribe a physical action, as body movement in Schnebel's
Solo fiir einen Dirigenten (Motte-Haber 1990: 48), or (c) both, as in Cage's
Water Music, where the score has "to be mounted as a large poster" (Cage
1962: 43), so that the audience may compare the prescriptions for the
actions and the actions performed, together with their sound result. The only
common feature of these functions is to stress the visual, i.e., extramusical,
component: even the means of sound production must be visible, listening,
and seeing go together (Stockhausen 1963: 185).
3. Verbal and graphic aids (Some contradictory examples)
The verbal aids mentioned by Karkoschka (1980: 137) as the second of his
elements (see 2.1) are verbal instructions that are an almost indispensable
part of many contemporary scores, even of those which use relatively
unambiguous notation. Yet, they are, of course, obligatory, almost in the
sense of the "rules of games", in many of the nonnotationally notated, i.e.,
graphic scores. For example, the pure graphism of Cage's Variations I (and
of many other of his pieces) is absolutely musically senseless without their

"instructions for use", which precede "the transparent sheets with dots and
lines" and which are the main source for the elaboration of the graphic part
of the score (Gligo 1987: 148-161). Thus, the following examples have the
special function of verbal aids that are in fact not directly bound with the
scores themselves:
(1) The musicality of graphism of Treatise (1963-67) by Cornelius
Cardew (1967) is unquestionable, although it might also prove that this
author was for some time active as a professional graphic designer. The
whole idea originates from Cardew's specific concept of improvisation:
"Any number of musicians using any media are free to participate in a
'reading' of this score [. . .], and each is free to interpret it in his own way
[ . . . ] . What I hope is that in playing this piece each musician will give of his
746 NikSa Gligo
own music — he will give it as his response to my music, which is the score
itself' (quoted from Tilbury 1982: 9). To achieve this hope, Cardew
equipped Treatise with a rather strange verbal aid that highly surpasses any
known kind of "instructions for use". It is accompanied by a true Treatise
Handbook, a collection of his diary remarks about the work on Treatise and
about its performances, of essays, one of which bears the title Towards the
Ethic of Improvisation with instructions "about the virtues that a musician
can develop" (Cardew 1970: xx). This is an extraordinary example of the
burdening of music with tasks which are not proper to its nature. In this
case, the openness of graphism, i.e., the complete nonnotationality of Trea-
tise presupposes the Utopian upbringing of man through music in order to be
able to decipher the music from the signs which only optionally have to do
with it (Gligo 1989: 227-234).
(2) Tom Johnson's (1974) Imaginary Music has no verbal aids at all, but
its graphism is based on the redesign of conventional notation that follows
the meaning suggested by the titles which, functioning as a kind of verbal
aid, explain the meaning of the redesigned, more or less conventional, note
signs. Such verbal aids, however, classify this kind of musical graphics as
private music (see 4.), just from the point of view of its realization in sound
that could not happen at all, at least not publicly, although they nevertheless
define the meaning of the redesigned sign system.
3.1 Emancipated verbal aids as prose music
The verbal part of the score does not need to be related to the rest of the
score, i.e., it can be emancipated from any immediate instructive or pre-

scriptive functions. It then belongs to the category of prose music (Rzewski
1974; Stoianova 1978: 84-90; see 4.), which can presuppose the realization
in sound. An example is Stockhausen's intuitive music Aus den sieben
Tagen, which represents his alternative to the practice of free improvisation
(Stockhausen 1971, 1978: 503) but does not need it at all, at least not pub-
licly, as in La Monte Young's (1963: s.p.) small prose poems, in Pauline 01-
iveros's (1971) Sonic Meditations or in Richard Martin's (1971) Sounds
from the Inside.
3.2 Graphic aids
Among the musically relevant elements in graphics, Karkoschka (1980: 137;

see 2.1 (2)) also mentions graphic aids. Although these should be further
classified and elaborated as instructions for realization (in the sense of
Logothetis's sign system, see 2.2), one should mention at this point a special
kind of graphic aid that is not intended to be realized in sound at all, but
which, as so-called "score for listening" [Horpartitur], is aimed to help the
listener to follow a certain piece of music. An example is Ligeti's Ar-
tikulation (Wehinger 1970). In this inversion of the score functionality, the
sign system strives after simplification in opposition to the problems that
confront the graphical sign systems that have to be put into sound without
any simplification in their performing elaboration. Any "score for listening"
(but especially the one by Wehinger) attributes to its piece a kind of "second
identity". The case with other graphical score systems that are meant as a
basis for sound realization is just the opposite.
4. The complete emancipation of graphisms from the sound realization
Karkoschka's list of musically relevant elements in graphics (1980: 137; see

2.1) contains the case of scores that are not at all meant to be translated into
music (cf. also Stoianova 1987: 288). In this "state of complete imagin-
ability", everything can be taken as music that can be experienced as music,
even on a quite private level without public testing (Gligo 1989: 227-228).
This state of music is expressed through its subdivisions into private music
(see 3.2), visible music, music to read, prose music (see 3.1), music for the
eyes, imaginary music (see 3.2), etc.
Private Music: Piano Pieces for Self-Entertainment by Tom Johnson is
"intended to be read, played, and heard by individuals, in private" (Johnson
1967: 5; Gligo 1988: 96-104). MO-NO: Music to Read by Dieter Schnebel
attempts with the fragments of the verbal text original or redesigned tradi-
tional note signs and different graphisms "to set out to lead the reading
hearer (the hearing reader) to the music of sounds which surrounds us, but
also to bring him into direct contact with that imaginary music which always
arises within us, from sounds both real and unreal" (Schnebel 1969: com-
ment on the inner cover, 1972b; Gligo 1988: 75-95; Stoianova 1987: 291;
cf. also the concept of "read music" in Stockhausen 1963: 183). The short
prose poems by La Monte Young "could be construed as conventional music
748 NikSa Gligo
notation and used by a performer as instructions for realizing a work in
sound and image; their message, however, can also be constructed by the
imagination of the reader without the intervention of media for the excite-
ment of the senses" (Rzewski 1974: 594).
4.1 The melting of the arts or extensions of medial
This kind of neutralization of "media" means in fact their redirection. In-

stead of prolonging their function toward the receiver, they are forced to di-
rect themselves toward the freely chosen interpreter, not knowing in which
way the message they transmit has been interpreted. This also makes pos-
sible the inversion of the "senses" that are to be "excited". The visible be-
comes more important or at least as important as the audible, its obligatory
complementation. In his attempt to classify the different types of musical
visibility (music in space, music in movement, theatralisation of actions, mu-
sical theater immanent to music, musically formed film, drawings,
elaboration of the extramusical and the trivial), D. Schnebel (1972b: 332)
does not consider the result to be the consequence of the melting of various
arts: "While the special, clearly defined form of art is being dissolved, this is
not for the pupose of amalgamating. Instead, its purpose is that the resulting
trickle might enrich art on the whole by a widely branching and highly
differentiated form." Indeed, many of the above-mentioned phenomena that
appear as consequences of the redirection of the message are named with
some prefixes or adjectives added to the basic term media (multimedia, in-
termedia, extended media, mixed media, etc.), obviously trying to avoid the
classification of the "arts" participating in the melting, although they only,

being in practice synonymous,2 stress the clumsy notion of mediality even
more than clarify the problem of redirection of message.
This clumsiness obviously comes from the above-mentioned fact that the
transmitter has actually become the medium of a nonverbal message (Noth
1985: 327; see 2.). If we try to analyze the behavior of any "reading hearer"
of Schnebel's MO-NO or any listener of imaginary music, for example, of
the music in "the state of complete imaginability" (Gligo 1989: 227-228; see
4.), it is obvious that we shall have to do with the explication of a special
process of semiosis which still has to be investigated, taking into account the
fact that (a) the starting point (i.e., the written sign system) does not pre-
suppose any significant message except the one created by the interpreter,
and (b) that the signification created by such an interpreter cannot be exam-
ined in terms of its authenticity because imaginary music of any kind "really
seeks to avoid identification" (Schnebel 1972b: 332). Writing about some of
Cage's multimedial projects, Richard Kostelanetz mentions "environmental
abundance" (Kostelanetz 1970; cf. also Nyman 1976: 235), which is under-
stood as real multimedial "melting". Here, however, the interpreter (i.e.,
listener/spectator) can behave only in such a way that he or she selects from
this abundance the layers that are to be interpreted as significant, which
again goes along with Cage's important concept of "multiplicity of centers"
(Gligo 1978a: 263).
The visitors of an exhibition with such nonnotational exhibits (the famous
one which took place in Stuttgart in 1972, cf. Wynen 1972) are also sup-
posed to create their own imaginary music from the chosen (silent) exhibits.
But it is also possible to imagine the situation in which the whole gallery
space with such exhibits can be taken as the score and therefore literally
played by professional musicians, as we did in Zagreb in 1974, when a pro-
fessional ensemble played twice the gallery in which a collection of Erhard
Karkoschka's musical graphics was exhibited (Gligo 1974). Vice versa, this
can also explain many cases of practically unrestricted possibilities of sound
visualization among which the above-mentioned score for listening of Li-
geti's Artikulation (Wehinger 1970; see 3.2) represents an example with
very restricted functionality (because there might surely exist other graphic
sign equivalences to this piece).
Such practices are also justified by the "book-exhibition" Notations by
Cage, where two media, book and exhibition, are involved. Notice that Nat-
tiez (1987: 107) described this work as an attempt to iconicize music. Cage
himself says about the content of Notations -. "A precedent for the text is the
questionnaire. (The composers were asked to write about notation or

something relevant to it.) A precedent for the absence of information which
characterizes this book is the contemporary aquarium (no longer a dark
hallway with each species in its own illuminated tank separated from the
others and named in Latin): a large glass house with all the fish in it swim-
ming as in an ocean" (Cage 1969: s.p.; cf. also Schnebel 1972c). The in-
formation that is absent is monodirectional, monosignificant, and unambigu-
ous. It cannot function in any concept in which all the elements are equally
(insignificant. The transparency of the aquarium relates to the unlimited
spaciousness of the ocean. Its signs are multimedially interwoven in such a
way that their messages can be recognized only through the individual se-
lection of the interpreters.
750 NikSa Gligo
Notes
1. For Goodman (1968: 187-188) only the figure BB from this piece is an ex-
ample of the sign system that is not notational (cf. also Gligo 1987: 151-152).
2. The attempts to clarify the differences in meaning of these terms are more
confusing than clarifying. Kellein (1985: 438) defines the term "intermedial
art" as an art between music and the fine arts, which is, of course, too re-
stricted. His attempt to differentiate between intermedial art and multimedia
(Kellein 1985: 442) is not convincing at all. Thomas (1989: 157-158) treats
mixed media and multimedia synonymously and relates them to dadaist action
art. Kostelanetz (1968) tries to avoid media and classifies happenings, kinetic
environments, and other mixed-media performances into the "theater of mixed
means". This unique term is again synonymous with total theater, which
again, as explained by Rostand (1970: 228-229), brings to mind the concept of
multimedia. It is enough to look at the fluxus diagram proposed in 1966 by its
founder, George Maciunas (Block and Freybourg 1983: 7), or the schematic
overview of intermedial tendencies proposed in 1980 by René Block (Kellein
1985: 439) in order to be able to conclude that there is no sense in insisting on
the differences in meaning between all these and similar terms.
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PART VIII
Sociosemiotics and today's myths in

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Innovation, gainful learning, and habits in the aesthetics of

"Rabbit's clever" said Pooh thoughtfully.

1. The power of habit reduces hard-won skills to simple routines

net, others — skilled, practiced, accustomed to dealing with technical media

memory is "frozen movement", as Rabelais calls it in his Pantagruel (IV,

lence of simplification by habituation is to be found in the outer and in the

worlds of animals, science, law, or business subserve or at least make use of

used to be invited to ornament drawing rooms. Broadcasting companies too

2. The opposite of habit is doubt and tension between two possibilities

mended investigation of the high proportion of iconic and indexical sign

3. The net of indexical signs as guidance of the other's consciousness in

Weinrich follows Biihler (1934) in assuming that orientation in the dyadic

4. Concretization is the beginning and end of pragmatic semiotics

As an illustration, I shall here introduce one fundamental area beyond lan-

mental orientation, turning to their object, their focusing limitation or blur-

So when Hegel puts forward representation, and especially concepts as the

5. Communication ias direction of the capacity for desire: An extract

mass communication chosen for study: the audiovisual commercial. Insofar as

tische Identität infrühenHochkulturen. München: Beck.

1959 La motivation. París: Presses Universitaires de France.

1945 Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: NRF.

Claudio Federico Guerri

The study of significative production in painting, one of the individual me-

duplication of the painter himself. Thus, both characters by the name

lack of extrapictorial information, this lack of knowledge of facts that should

and overlooks the founding relations of images, considering them as existent

Velazquez at either side, an operation of symmetry beginning and ending

ered a paradigmatic example. At the same time, this configuration is to be-

The analysis of Malevich's work is another example of the contributions to

adds, "modem art is neither pictorial nor imitative, it is mainly architec-

Figure 8: Tracings on Malevich's squares. The first tracing corresponds to "Black

like TSD allows for a coherent syntactic analysis of paintings in general.

1. Neologism coined by Cesar Jannello to indicate superficial features of visual

University of Rosario and, more recently, on an article published in D 'ART 20:

Camon Aznar, José

1988 "Architectural design, and space semiotic in Argentina", in:

1. Architecture as a medium of communication

(3) Signal: the sum of drawings, models, and written specifications of an

Figure 1: Archigram (Ron Herrón): Tuned Suburb. Collage 1968.

Figure 2: Piano and Rogers: Centre Pompidou. Paris 1978.

Figure 3: Robert Venturi: Recommendation for a monument. Sketch 1972.

2. Robert Venturi: Learning from Las Vegas

Figure 4: Robert Venturi: Decorated shed (unknown author). 1972.

Figure 5: Michael Graves: Portland-Building. Portland (Oregon) 1980.

3. Postmodern architecture as a mass medium

4. The mediatization and disappearance of architecture

For some years, the discussion about architecture as a medium or a mass

Figure 7: Jean Nouvel: Institut du Monde Arabe: Diaphragms. Paris 1987.

Figure 8: Toyo Ito: Tower of Winds. Yokohama 1986.

(Figure 8), which shows on its interactive surface environmental parameters

5. "Virtual reality" and "cyberspace"

Today, the technological development of the electronic media has advanced

Figure 10: Frank Horlitz: Virtual space 7.0.3. Detmold 1995.

1973 Design in architecture: Architecture and the human sci-

[1967] 1969 [The medium is the massage.] German translation by Max

Tania Leonte Christidis

in Perloff 1991: 20), or into a rhetorical dimension integrated in the more

1. The poem's contextualization in the medium of advertising

the face of the other. Clouds swab the sun.

The strategies I have mentioned above ensure the poem's reception; it is