Image Studies

Theory and Practice

Sunil Manghani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136483196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Image Studies offers an engaging introduction to visual and image studies.

In order to better understand images and visual culture the book seeks to bridge between theory and practice; asking the reader to think critically about images and image practices, but also simultaneously to make images and engage with image-makers and image-making processes. Looking across a range of domains and disciplines, we find the image is never a single, static thing. Rather, the image can be a concept, an object, a picture, or medium – and all these things combined. At the heart of this book is the idea of an 'ecology of images', through which we can examine the full 'life' of an image – to understand how an image resonates within a complex set of contexts, processes and uses.

• Part 1 covers theoretical perspectives on the image, supplemented with practical entries on making, researching and writing with images.
• Part 2 explores specific image practices and cultures, with chapters on drawing and painting; photography; visual culture; scientific imaging; and informational images.

A wide range of illustrations complement the text throughout and each chapter includes creative tasks, keywords (linked to an online resource), summaries and suggested further reading. In addition, each of the main chapters include selected readings by notable authors across a range of subject areas, including: Art History, Business, Cognitive Science, Communication Studies, Infographics, Neuroscience, Photography, Physics, Science Studies, Social Semiotics, Statistics, and Visual Culture.

PART 1
Defining images

■ CHAPTER 1: BEYOND SEMIOTICS

SUPPLEMENT I: Just what is it that makes images so different?

■ CHAPTER 2: UNDERSTANDING IMAGES

SUPPLEMENT II: Image Research

■ CHAPTER 3: IMAGE AND TEXT

SUPPLEMENT III: Writing with images

The opening three chapters of this book examine a range of theoretical, philosophical and historical accounts of the image and image debates. A key approach to image analysis is provided through the consideration of an ‘ecology of images’ (in Chapter 2). A series of three ‘supplements’ also prompt creative and practical engagement with making, researching and writing with images.

1 Beyond semiotics

One of the most prevalent analytical approaches to the image has been the so-called ‘science of signs’, semiotics (also referred to as semiology). If this book can hope to provide anything new by way of approaches to the image, it is doubtless necessary to acknowledge the importance of semiotics, yet importantly to go beyond it, for reasons that will be explained.

In providing a method in the study of a wide array of cultural phenomena, including images, semiotics has been perhaps the most thoroughly discussed and theorized of approaches, so further cementing its perceived significance. It came to prominence — notably with the work of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and a dedicated journal Communications — in the 1950s and 1960s, with its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. It represented a whole new subject or area of interest, which — combining the concerns of anthropology, sociology, art history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, politics, history and psychology — quickly embedded itself as a scholarly pursuit and a force behind the establishment of new subject areas such as communications, media and cultural studies. Yet, by the turn of the millennium, semiotics had come under a sustained period of criticism and not least as a tool in the analysis of the image. It has long been criticized — though not always fairly — for being a-historical and overly formalist in purview (in that it provides a means to analyze everything and anything as a hermetic ‘text’). More specifically, in relation to the image and visual culture, semiotics is criticized for being a linguistic-based theory. It is argued, then, the word (or verbal reasoning) comes to dominant the image; to colonize whatever is otherwise significant about that which is not articulated in linguistic terms. In other words, by explaining the image semiotically (which often involves complex language and neologisms), one effectively looks away from all that is specific to the experience of looking at an image.

Semiotics: a brief history

Semiotics offers a critical method of cultural and literary analysis, and has been applied to countless ‘objects’ of interest, from popular and classic literature to theatre, painting, television, film, advertising and fashion. Its initial development is attributed to the work of a Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). He is considered the founder of modern linguistics following his systematic view of how language works using a dualistic concept of the ‘sign’, which in turn gave rise to the prospect of a whole new ‘science’ or discipline to come: ‘It is … possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. […] We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeîon, “sign”). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them’ (Saussure 1983, pp. 15–16).

NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGN

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE

Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist, dyadic model of semiotics focuses on the linguistic sign, which he argues does not correspond to its object or referent. Rather, there is an arbitrary relation between the signifier (meaning a sign that is the acoustic image of a sound) and the signified (meaning the concept corresponding to the signifier). The meaning of language comes from the differential relations between signs, or the place of a sign in a whole structure of interrelated signifying units.

Some people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a naming-process only — a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names. […] This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that ready-made ideas exist before words [… and] it lets us assume that the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation. […] The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. […] The sound-image is sensory, and if I happen to call it ‘material’, it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract. […] I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current usage the term generally designates only a sound-image… Ambiguity would disappear if the three notions involved here were designated by three names, each suggesting and opposing the others. I propose to retain the word sign to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively by signified and signifier. […] The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. [… In] language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea [signified] or phonic substance [signifier] that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. […] But the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if the signified and signifier are considered separately; when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in it own class. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values… (Saussure, 1983, pp.65–68, 120)

Another important founding figure in the development of semiotics is the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), known for his complex (and at times quite opaque) contributions to debates on logic and pragmatism. Writing concurrently, but quite separately to Saussure, Peirce's semiotics expressly engages with visual as well as linguistic signs. His work has grown in importance with recent debates about the prospect of a visual semiotics, particularly as Peirce's formulation foregrounds a sense of process and the ‘event’ of signification as it relates to individual observers or readers. In both cases, what makes semiotics so powerful a tool of analysis is its definition of a constituent element: the sign. The art theorists Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson (1991, p.174) note: ‘human culture is made up of signs, each of which stands for something other than itself, and the people inhabiting culture busy themselves making sense of signs’. From this perspective, one of the real strengths of semiotics (despite having been initially proposed within the terms of linguistics) has been its general applicability, particularly its usefulness in the analysis of popular culture, the media and visual culture; i.e. areas of cultural life that developed substantially in scope and importance at the time semiotics properly came to prominence, during the 1950s and 1960s.

There are debates over the relative merits of Sassurean and Peircean semiotics. Bal and Bryson, for example, along with fellow art historian, Margaret Iversen (1986), tend to favour the work of the latter, arguing that ‘Peirce's richer typology of signs enables us to consider how different modes of signification work, while Saussure‘s model can only tell us how systems of arbitrary signs operate’ (Iversen, 1986, p. 85). Sturken and Cartwright (2009), in their book Practices of Looking, choose to concentrate on Saussure‘s model precisely because of its ‘system of arbitrary signs’, which they argue ‘offers a clear and direct way to understand the relationship between visual representation and meaning’ (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, p.29).

SIGN, ICON AND INDEX

CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE

Charles Peirce's semiotics, which expressly engages with visual as well as linguistic signs, involves a triadic model along with a series of layered taxonomies. Similar to Saussure's signifier and signified respectively, Peirce describes the interaction between a representamen (the form the sign takes) and an interpretant (the sense made of the sign), but also includes an object (to which the sign refers). Peirce argues all experience is mediated by signs. Overall, his notion of ‘semiosis’ — in contrast to Saussure's synchronic emphasis upon structure — describes a semiotic process. His much adopted classification of iconic, indexical and symbolic signs depends primarily upon the use of the sign, thereby emphasising the role of the ‘reader’ in semiotic analysis.

A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. ‘Idea’ is here to be understood in a sort of Platonic sense, very familiar in everyday talk; I mean in that sense in which we say that one man catches another man's idea, in which we say that when a man recalls what he was thinking of at some previous time, he recalls the same idea, and in which when a man continues to think anything, say for a tenth of a second, in so far as the thought continues to agree with itself during that time, that is to have a like content, it is the same idea, and is not at each instant of the interval a new idea.

A sign is either an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line. An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. Such is any utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification. (Peirce, 1932, pp.135, 143–144, 169–173)

Saussure presented a ‘structuralist’ account of language. The sign as a unit of meaning only makes sense in relation to a wider system or structure of meanings. A sign does not have any intrinsic, essential meaning; instead there is an arbitrary relation between the sign and the thing it represents. The fact that there are many languages in the world, each of which can have its own word for everything in the world, is one way of highlighting the arbitrary nature of the sign, in this case of words themselves:

‘Language, according to Saussure, is like a game of chess. It depends on conventions and codes for its meanings. [… T]he relationship between a word … and things in the world is arbitrary and relative, not fixed. For example, the words dog in English, chien in French, and hund in German all refer to the same kind of animal; hence the relationship between the words and the animal itself is dictated by the conventions of language rather than some natural connection. It was central to Saussure's theory that meanings change according to context and to the rules of language.’

(Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, p.28)

The impact of Saussure's work goes very deep, influencing a whole intellectual movement referred to as structuralism, giving rise not only to semiotics, but also to semioticians, as those who practiced this ‘art’ of analysis and who, in turn, influenced a whole generation of post-war scholars, critics, write...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• Introduction
• Part 1 Defining images
• Part 2 Image practices
• References
• Index