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Time for another speculative post on how we know. The last one of these looked at how words mean and considered the limits language puts communication and meaning [click for link]. This one is a sequel that takes up another way of sharing ideas - pictures. This is relevant to the Postmodern delusions that underpin the modern world and ties into the art posts in another of the Band's threads. There are similarities between how words and pictures mean, but there are important differences. Differences that will eventually make it clear why art was attacked so aggressively by Modernism's globalist lies.
Jasper Francis Cropsey, The Old Home, 1886, oil on canvas, private collection
Art replicates the way we see the real world. This gives it a unique connection to our cultural history. A painting like this shows American life in the 19th century. It also lets us look at something that 19th-century Americans looked at. A shared experience. Then there is the beauty - the glorious colors of a sunset captured to be enjoyed any time.
Preservation of identity, meaning, and beauty across time. No wonder the globalists hate it.
To start, we have to lay out a few things explaining what we're doing and not doing. Call it a prelude tying this to reflections from the Band's early posts on Postmodernism and secular transcendence. The meaning of words and pictures is an age-old topic of great importance, so you'd think it would have been done to death. It has in a way - tons of pages but from within the hollow discourse of the modern academy. So there's no need for literature reviews or critical bibliographies - we're interested in reality, not a huge pile of nonsense. And if that seems provocative, it's easy to explain.
Start with an example. These are results from the highlighted search keywords {words pictures} and {words and pictures meaning} in the Stanford University library - a big name school with a user-friendly search. The catalog is public, the results aren't. Which is fine. We just need numbers and no one's reading all these anyway.
We chose an academic library to make a point. Not the almost unimaginable volume of verbose busywork produced by academia, though that is a strange allocation of societal resources when you think about it. But that serious consideration of how things mean has come through an exclusively academic lens. The lens that gave us climate justice, Postmodernism, the whole critical theory family, etc. So why trust it with something as fundamental to everything we do as how meaning is made?
The university focus reflects 20th century mythology - in particular, the fable that these were centers of pure intellectual inquiry into the human condition. They weren't, but the myth was widely believed and had vast socio-cultural impact. Sadly for conjurers and marks alike, reality can only be denied for so long.
Interesting trends on this graph. Apparently you can lower entrance standards over time, but grades rise.
Looking at tuition, academic performance seems more of an economic transaction than an intellectual one. On one level, you get what you pay for.
The Western university came out of the Middle Ages as a place to study the Liberal Arts - the theory-based trivium and quadrivium with theology the queen - and a few practical ones like medicine. That's a gross oversimplification, but this isn't the place for the history of the Western university. Let's just say that up to the 20th century, you can make a legitimate argument that university was a reasonable concept. Advanced thought guided by logos is important to civilization. It makes sense to allocate a portion of society's resources to supporting it. Having a place that supports a small group of cognitive outliers in exchange for grounding the elite in the fundamentals of civilization isn't a crazy bargain. Especially when there's no burden on the vast majority who aren't involved.
University was never imagined as a public financial millstone. Then again, it wasn't imagined as adult daycare, a way to massage unemployment stats, or a globalist indoctrination camp either.
Palazzo Bo, medieval building enlarged and redesigned by Andrea Moroni around 1550, University of Padua, Italy
The University of Padua was founded in 1222 as a school of law, making it one of Europe's oldest universities. The campus took some time to form - The Palazzo Bo is the historic centerpiece and dates to the mid-16th century. Note the scale compared to the modern holding pens. These students weren't here for globalist brainwashing or to ease pressure on the labor market.
There was no fiction that pre-modern universities were for everyone. Medieval schools required some means of support and exceptional scholarly ability. Over time, they came to support themselves as elite finishing schools. The premise is sound - the smart and learned teaching the leadership - but from the beginning there was an abstract dimension to university studies that separated it from reality. And elite finishing bound the intellectual credibility of university to political power. It was manageable as long as the university footprint was modest and the teachers were actually smart and learned. But the seeds were planted.
John Leverett and Benjamin Wadsworth, Massachusetts Hall, 1718-1720, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
The oldest campus building in America's oldest university. It was built as a dorm and now is mostly admin offices with some freshman rooms. It's a popular place for LARPing idiots to play anarchist. The bottom photo is from an article that turned up in an image search on students dealing with access to their rooms during a protest. Keep in mind that room rent for the 2015 school year just over nine grand.
Prioritizing a-hole coddling over contracted obligations. Another day in a
What we found looking up these numbers is worth a quick aside. The Band has hammered the fraudulent university system before, but it's something else to see the raw numbers. The cost of the Harvard undergraduate "package" more than doubled between 1999 and 2017. But the numbers tell more. We selected charges in two categories - things that depend directly on external cost factors and things under the control of Harvard's operations. The increase in the second group is significant, but way less than when the cost doesn't depend so clearly on outside variables. Check out the numbers.
But there's more to it. The majority of Harvard students don't pay these prices, and a good number don't pay at all. Harvard promotes a financial aid program that allows their students to all graduate without debt. Awards appear based on family income - the posted stats tell a very different story from the table above.
Basically, rich families pay the 65k and the university doles out spots to whoever they want at whatever price. You know... "algorithms".
Given how opaque and politicized university admissions are, does anyone really think that these dollars are being reserved for the cognitive elite?
Don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole. It's just that these universities were once sources of American pride, and now they literally radiate atavistic lies and slavering anti-intellectualism. This suggests that the corruption is deeply baked into the institutional DNA. Anyone even attempting level competition or meritocracy welcomes transparency as proof of process integrity. The demented secrecy around university admissions suggests the purpose is quite different.
A brief aside - enough to show why leaving 'how meaning is made' to academics made sense and was disastrous. In a nutshell, what "university" has become... ... wait for it... bears little resemblance to what it was for most of its existence.
Paul Revere, Westerly view of the Colledges in Cambridge, New England, 1767, engraving; more coddled nonsense from a different Massachusetts Hall role play.
That Paul Revere. The Band's high valuation of the place of these institutions in American culture and history is not an exaggeration. It's true that they were always plagued by a degree of post-Enlightenment secular transcendent stoogery, but there was a sincerity to the dedication to a life of the mind. Now it's a sick joke. That's a net loss.
And don't feel bad for the fool in the hat that seems so inconvenienced. It was the generations of poseurs and liars among the "affected" senior administration and faculty that oversaw this degradation and inversion. Consider the financial aid stats - they're paying the "students" to do this.
And yes, it is true that universities have always changed. Renaissance Padua doesn't look like Colonial Harvard.
17th century engraving of the Palazzo Bo in Padua
But the differences are reflections of the differences in the societies - life in the Renaissance city of Padua and the Colonial city of Cambridge didn't look the same. What was the same was the underlying ideal - small, exclusive group of scholars educating social elites and a handful of cognitive outliers. The sizes are comparably small scale too. This makes them manageable - they aren't a drain, and the socio-cultural benefit is worth it.
The modern university is conceptually different. Only the nomenclature and trappings carry over. The vast, bloated size of the sprawling campuses and their insatiable appetite for debt-loaded "customers" makes any notion of elite - cognitive or otherwise - absurd.
The University of Colorado at Boulder has a breathtaking location. Imagine having this site and putting up these buildings. The modernist-globalist hatred of beauty is so obvious when your eyes are open to it.
Not picking on them in particular - the photo turned up in a search.
Here's what's new at the University of Padua.
The same questions apply all over - what is the value-add? In terms of real value? How is society being enriched?
There is some worthwhile technical training, but whole swaths have been taken over by luciferian globalist lies. Making it worse than useless. Actually socio-psychically corrosive. And the sheer numbers of bodies crowding the system dumbs it down to the point where the cognitive outliers become uncomfortable and unwelcome. It's a parallel universe - it even has its own language that some call jargon. Others call it...
For newer readers: that's Foucault, not Prof. X, though any confusion is understandable. Both are cartoon bald gurus with fictional contributions.
The arrogance of the modern academy comes through in the claim that this discourse "constructs" knowledge - as in what we know is comprised of discourse - and thus constructs reality. Not in the sense that roads and bridges are made out of text blocks, although you'd be excused for thinking otherwise after watching globalists destroy their own means of survival. What they're claiming is that because our sign systems are how we think, communicate, and know, so there's no meaningful concept of reality outside of them.
But correspondence with reality is how we judge the truth and ethos of representations. Without that, it's Postmodern word salad. Discourse maintains a form of consistency by replacing reality with one of the Band's older concepts - the Philosopher's Name.
This is when an eminent "thinker" is cited to pretend an inane statement "correct".
Like this one.
On the surface, the inane statement is easy to see through.
But the invocation pf the Philosopher's Name can change anything...
And now you have one of the foundation stones of discourse.
It's like a form of alchemy, through which outright lies are transmuted into Wisdom!
This is one reason why the Band stresses not to worship heuristics. It is always tempting when encountering a new insight to want to make more of it than it is. Assess what works, add it to you larger understanding, then move on. The Philosopher's Name is the opposite. If we are strict in our classification, it is a subset of the argument from authority, a common logical fallacy.
Discourse is build on a lattice of Philosopher's Names. It's like the spray of symbols in the occult posts - something made up out of shifting interactions between elements so it can never be neatly and clearly defined.
This is how discourse - and sprays of symbols - become legitimized over time.
If you are only dealing with one thinker, the outlines of their thought are easy to see. When there is a group - like a school of thought - the strengths and weaknesses of the individual thinkers are subsumed into a larger collective.
Discourse is a huge interconnected web of references that is impossible to unravel on its own terms because of its size.
Discourse seems legitimate because it is such a huge mass of "learned" interrelations. So many names citing so many names. And academic bloat has been pumping out enough of them for long enough that there really is no inquiry - certainly not in the humanities or social sciences - outside of it.
There is this popular misconception that the huge sprawling adult daycares and degree factories are filled with interesting, eccentrics and far-out thought. They aren't. To become an academic, you are steeped in discourse from freshman year. Eventually you become a doctor of it. And if you can publish more of it in special journals of discourse, you may get hired to teach it. And keep writing more of it. There is no place to operate "outside" of discourse - not because there isn't really, but because it isn't allowed.
In academic nonsense world, discourse replaces reality. Every project is assessed on how it fits with the discipline - that is, participates in the discourse. It's why academic publication seems so removed from actual life. It is removed from actual life. It's a stilted, self-referential hermetic dialect like the Renaissance alchemists' - a way of showing that you belong in a stilted, self-referential hermetic land of make-believe.
At which point the astute reader notes we've just said discourse is fake. To which we answer, "exactly". It is. But academia pretends it's reality, because as Foucault tells us, whoever controls discourse has power. And because it really is fake, there are no constraints on what can it can choose to permit or exclude. See the problem? (click for picture source)
Discourse bakes fake globalist toxins into the language - the source code - of the institutions. There is no way for logos-based reality to even find a starting point. This means the way we are rethinking what passes for Western culture with all the obvious lies and inanities we've already blown up couldn't begin to happen in an institution of higher learning.
The Vault of the Sages
Think about it. The things that the Band does - jumping between and blending disciplines, recognizing the intellectual constipation and fundamental dishonesty of post-Enlightenment secular transcendence, working from logic and observation, demanding ontological consistency of metaphysical claims, and thinking about art in historically and culturally specific terms - have no place in the modern academy.
Perhaps this will change at some point. The bizarre luxury of squandering vast resources on giant, dyscivilizational fiction generators is a product of the unprecedented wealth of modern society. It seems unlikely that the world to come will be as profligate. But for now, it means that the thousands of books and articles we looked up at the start aren't going to be of much use. We aren't interested in discourse, other than to explain or mock it. It's distantly based on reality but has journeyed so far that it's not connected to reality anymore.
Along with being fake, this scow suffers from at least two other fatal breaches.
1. Discourse is such a Frankenstein monster of theory on top of theory that it's an incoherent mess at heart.
Postmodern discourse is rooted in feelings, not logical or empirical rigor so precision doesn't matter. If the texts kind of feel the same, then they can be discourse. But any serious effort to tie them together collapses because each is its own shade of tortured rhetorical blather.
Its incoherence is a defensive mechanism. Discourse can be twisted into whatever is wanted. So intellectual authority becomes less about intellect and more who is twisting the discourse into the preferred form.
No one cares if it's hypocritical, or makes more sense read this way, or actually means x, y, and z. Logic isn't part of discourse. Think how retarded Hegelian dialectic is as anything more than a situational metaphor. He's logical bedrock in Postmodern discourse. Because Marx.
Discourse works as a nonsense cant that allow the narrative engineers to determine what can be thought. At least thought in a way that will accrue prestige within the discourse-based academic system. In some ways, even the most advanced schoolman never gets past coveting those gold stars. This means discourse functionally is reality in the only place where pictures are thought about speculatively.
2. Discourse huffers pretend the ideas in this vague mess can be assigned precise meaning when they need them to.
Theoreticians selectively impose fake precision to hide their own deceptions. It's actually something you see it with servants of the lie all over. Ignoring distinctions between similar things, then claiming that their highly skewed reading is the pure literal truth regardless of circumstances. You've all seen it - it's this progression and it's utterly moronic:
All four are different, but each is treated as the previous until the last is reached. Then that becomes non-negotiable. There's no inquiry in a place or a language that predetermines your conclusions. So the Band ignores discourse and starts with what we know and how we know it. It's why these posts all interlink and build - we're piecing together a coherent look and culture and reality from basic observations and logical conclusions.
René Magritte, The Legend of the Centuries, 1950, oil on canvas, private collection
We do drop philosophers' names, but not as substitutes for empiricism and rational inquiry. We do it to give credit to an idea or set of ideas that we find rings true or is useful to us in some way. This is because we benefit from the wisdom of our cultural heritage.
It's also a way of sorting those with legitimate wisdom from the luciferian materialist fakes that discourse is built on.
We've returned to 19th century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in these symbolism posts because he describes semiotic operations in a useful way. Based on real human experience instead of discourse huffers gushing about linguistic turns. He's a point of departure for a couple of clear reasons.
The first is his process map - Peirce reminds us that we have to consider individual subjectivity when thinking about how signs mean. There is structure in the relationship, but it isn't rigid. The sender and receiver influence the message.
Peirce's process from an earlier post - a sign only means something if there is an "interpretant" - the person who recognizes it.
This fits with our reality as finite, time-bound subjectivities observing a changing, entropic world as through a glass darkly. We don't see things in themselves and we can't read minds. We have to make sense of meaningful things where the meaning is never clear. Don't put Peirce on a pedestal - that would make him a Philosopher's Name and he deserves better. Just take the idea and we can rub it up against other ones to build a better "picture" of our own.
Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ, A Eunuch’s Dream, 1874, oil on canvas, Cleveland Museum of Art
How discourse was supposed to work - a way of speaking and thinking that could bring ideas together into an ever-deepening understanding of reality. Somehow the reality part got cut off... Education experts will blather on about "relevance" and "impact" but they're illusions. Cruel lies.
Let's try it. Kant is a major Philosopher's Name in the world of discourse and someone else we've looked at before. His recognition that there is a level of reality beyond the material appearance isn't particularly original, but the way he framed it made him the central figure in modern philosophy. Consider the gist of that idea:
Kant matters for discourse because he finds a way to show ultimate reality is beyond us in non-Christian Enlightenment terms. The split between noumenal and phenomenal is patient zero for all the 'what you think is reality is really meaningless' hokum that globalism, Postmodernity, and all the satanic inversions of reality depend on. Their premise is that the ontological limits of the finite material creatures that Kant's writing about is interchangeable with the subjective limits of semiotics. But are they?
Recurring jargon and selective quotations can twist and bend these in whatever direction discourse wants. The underlying thought structures show how they actually relate. So let's put Peirce's semiotics against Kant's ontology and see how they really line up.
Peirce isn't concerned about ontological distinctions beyond the sign system - the things the signs refer to. What he does is systematize the process of transforming something phenomenal into mental concepts, whatever it is. Kant on the other hand is concerned with what the signs are describing, not how they do it.
If you turn Kant's ontology vertical and superimpose it over Pierce's limited treatment of the world, the pictures line up like this.
Put graphically, it's easy to see that the semiotic process takes place between reality and the subjective mental worlds of the humans existing within it.
Now it gets more interesting. If you take this diagram and swap in our better accounting of the nature of reality and you get pretty much the model we visualized in the last speculative post.
And this makes it really clear where and how Postmodern jacks the system. It misapplies ontological distinctions to semiotic processes. One is an inherent limit of being a finite consciousness - things are beyond us. The other is the inherent inexactitude of translation - it isn't that the meaning of a sign is necessarily beyond us, its that the sign and whatever its meaning are are not the same. One's vertical and one's horizontal.
But discourse lives in Flatland. There is no "vertical". There's no real "you" either. Just discourse.
But that also means there's no beyond. It's another trademark secular transcendent self-detonation - something can't be outside your ontological scope without there being ontological gradients to exceed. That is, the things discourse is defined as not having. So either you oscillate endlessly between "meaning is beyond me" and "there is no beyond" or note that signs are imprecise and move on.
The pattern of this dishonesty is familiar. It's like a gamma academic looked at Kant's noumenal with that same retarded argument pattern where "as if" becomes "the same"...
We've already addressed the stupidity of Postmodern theory countless times. The only real question is whether the associative meaning of signs is a form of meaning. That's a settled issue in reality, but the nature of academia is that discourse huffers can spin their retarded "arguments" with meaningless vagaries for ever. Because discourse is cut off from anything real. We don't need to pit the hollow graphemes of "phenomenology" against "deconstruction". We simply need to use empirical objection and basic logic to answer this question. In material reality - the only lived human experience we can know directly - can we observe evidence of raw sense data without semiotic meaning?
Yes.
Kevin Hill, Roses over the Fence, 2015
This is crazy easy. Just picture a pre-linguistic child touching something thorny.
There is no prior sense of danger - just a fascination with the shapes and flowers. There is a sort of meaning-making - the child sees the visual appearance as appealing. This conclusion proves dead wrong, and teaches two lessons. Reality has meaning external to our desires, and we can learn this through experience. The rose now communicates something more in line with the world. Which means we learn to interpret real things in the world the same way as signs. Read that again. It explains the rhetorical power of images completely.
John William Waterhouse, The Soul of the Rose, 1908, oil on canvas, private collection
We're thinking about sight, but smells and sounds trigger associative meanings too.
It can be personal memories, popular associations, things from stories - anything that hangs some sort of associative meaning on things in the world. Anything that adds a semiotic component to something not made for representational purposes.
Ian McGregor, Under Heavy Skies, photograph
Looking at it that way makes us aware how much learned information is coded into our sense data. Knowing what all the things we see are, and what their present condition means. Heavy skies look like rain. It's associative. Just like a sign.
This is why we juggle ideas together - to shake out observations that are not as clear individually. Kant was writing about being in the world and Peirce about the use of signs - ontology and semiotics are different branches of discourse. But both are considering human perception and cognition. They comment on the same reality, just different facets. If there are insightful things in them, they'll be compatible because they'll be mapping onto the same underlying truth. In those cases, the differences are mutually expanding. They fill in or flesh out each other.
It's also why dogmatically following worldly heuristics is intellectually self-gelding. This isn't the moronic, sharing-circle, everyone-has-a-voice appeal to the lowest common denominator that the globalist left uses to attack competence. It's hopping into a box defined by one facet and closing yourself off from the rest of reality. And missing that signs are just a subset of things we see. Conversely,
When it comes to associative meaning-making, it doesn't matter if something is a prickly flower, an uplifting view, the house you grew up in, a painting, a photo - they're all things that form sensory impressions that carry other significance. That call to mind thoughts, feelings, impressions other than the appearance of the thing you're looking at. And another massive inversion becomes apparent.
Signs only make up reality in discourse. In reality, they're how belated humans make meaning of a world that precedes and exceeds us. It starts with the metaphorical baby and ends with the symbolism of the tombstone. What we do with signs is what we do with everything.
It's not that discourse isn't a form of "knowledge" - it just isn't based in anything real. It's more akin to the minutia of a role-playing game or the Star Trek universe. So while it is true that words and pictures have consumed millions of pages, it's all within the publication-citation career building nonsense factory of discourse.
The exact same nonsense behind Postmodernism in everything else. There is no place for it here.
This isn't to say that there are no differences between pictures and the natural world. Of course there are. One is pictures and the other is the natural world. One is a man made representation of something else, the other connotations of something just there. Call them intended vs. natural signs. But we take this into account when making sense of what we are seeing. All we are saying here is that semiosis - the meaning-making process - is something we apply to both. Remember this - it's fundamental to the rhetoric of pictures.
So it isn't that "signs" are some special category that carry meaning. Nor is everything made up of signs. But everything we see carries meaning. Signs are the things that are purpose-built to do so. What we are really looking at is how they do it. Like a landscape that conveys the glory of Creation...
Albert Bierstadt, After Glow, The Glory of the Heavens, 1889, oil on canvas, private collection
Pictures
Let's start with some observations. We aren't interested in discourses or disciplines - just the differences between pictures and words. Or to be more technical, the differences between linguistic and pictorial representation.
20th century philosophy and theory are obsessed with language to the point where the Postmodern accusation of logocentrism is understandable. This fixation is known as the "linguistic turn" - and like much nonsense theory, isn't cleanly defined. It was definitely a thing though
The most literal sense refers to the early 20th-century shift from focusing on philosophical concepts and ideas to how they're expressed. Here's a short definition that sticks to Wittgenstein, and here's a longer one that folds in other 20th-century developments. Throw in all the deconstructivist stuff coming out of France beginning in the 70's, and it's fair to say that 20th-century academic nonsense-discourse was language-centric. So pictures get a lot less attention, and when they do get the semiotic treatment, get treated a lot like words.
To be fair, some of this is historical. When the visual arts got boosted to Liberal Arts status in the Renaissance it was based on two big arguments - first, that art was based in mathematics. Perspective in painting and proportion in sculpture and architecture let art claim to be more "intellectual" than manual. Then ancient literary analogies were revived, and the whole academic tradition of painting as "mute poetry" followed until modernity.
Vincenzo Camuccini, Cupid and Psyche are Blessed by the Gods, early 18th century, oil on canvas, private collection
A scene from Ovid with clearly defined figures, each with symbolic elements to identify them. There's old friend Hermes-Mercury with his winged helmet right behind Cupid. This is pretty close to the ideal of the classical treatment of a picture as a visual poem. But what about all the ways that seeing this picture isn't like reading?
Bringing us to the second appealing thing about Peirce - his recognition of different sign types.
This shouldn't seem like a big deal, except discourse is so language-centric. Words become the default model for talking about signs when the reality is that different types of representation present information differently.
These are Pierce's three categories - the symbol is purely arbitrary, the icon based on visual resemblance, and the index a trace or mark left behind.
Earlier posts have raised this from time to time. We've considered differences between mathematical notations and textual language [click for link]. Schematics are a form of information relay based on corresponding visual relations. Pictograms are similar in some ways.
The occupy the same place in the process map, but don't work the same way.
To develop past this idea, expand on his three basic sign types. Or consider sub-distinctions within them. What matters is the recognition that there are different types of sign, and that these communicate different types of things in different ways. What we want to lay out today are some basic considerations for how pictures mean.
This is very important. And not just because discourse in the 21st century is more visually focused.
This bit of blather came from Science.org. The bold red font and exclamation point are implied. We excerpted it and started marking it up to find it's pure discourse 101.
You can see how discourse makes little pretense of applying to reality. You can also see the structural similarity with occult symbolism when fake categories are piled up in hope that quantity will make up for hollowness. It's the old multiplication by zero problem though.
The Postmodern world is in many ways post-literate. Visual rhetoric is a huge part of the beast system, and being aware of how pictures communicate is a step towards seeing through that. And closer to home, these ideas support the Band's posts on art by digging into why art is so important to Western culture and heritage.
All signs work associatively, referencing something that isn't present. The difference is in HOW the association works. If we use Peirce's distinctions, words and pictures - symbol and icon - signify by convention and by resemblance respectively. Words are arbitrarily designated, while pictures "look like" their subjects in some way. This is where Peirce's limits become apparent - resemblance vs. convention may make sense on paper, but distinctions aren't so clear through the darkling glass of material reality. The idea of conventional signs like words - Peirce's symbols - are easy enough in a general sense. They're arbitrarily-designated graphics with rules laid down for their combination.
Arbitrary signs like words are easy. Anyone can see that they don't look physically like the things they represent.
The problems are with resemblance. Think of how many things it can mean to say something resembles something. It's a vague and qualitative descriptor with tremendous variance. In the last art post we looked at the huge difference in degree of realism between things that convey information by resemblance.
Both "look like" what they depict, but anyone can see the degree of difference.
Realism is the degree to which the picture resembles its subject.
Then there's the fact that all resemblance-based signs are conventionalized in some way. Because of the artificiality of art, there are no "natural depictions". Something beautiful in nature - say a mountain may work like a sign - meaning it may mean different things to different people - but it wasn't made to resemble something. It's presence, not representation, nature not artifice. There are purely symbolic signs, but there are no perfect resemblances.
Even Bouguereau, as smooth a technician as the Western tradition ever produced, shows his brushstrokes if you look close enough.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, À la fontaine, 1897, oil on canvas, private collection
All visual representations are what Tolkien would call sub-creations - man-made reproductions of the world in some way that are never the same as it. This is close to what Aristotle would call mimesis - Greek for “imitation” if we understand that as "re-presentation" and not copying. Copying would be duplicating something exactly, while re-presentation is recreates the experience of the original in some way.
Plato saw mimesis as negative. If we're stuck in a material world that's already a pale imitation of truth, imitations of that pull us further in the wrong ontological direction. Aristotle - a more subtle thinker -realized that imitations or re-presentations can serve truth. Sub-creation is mimesis where imitation clarifies reality to reveal some truth that isn't clear otherwise.
Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, Alexander Consulting the Oracle of Apollo, 1789, oil on canvas
If this scene isn't just apocryphal, it's 100% certain it didn't look like this. The story is that when Alexander was told he couldn't consult the Oracle he compelled a reading. He took her "Ah, my son, we can't resist you!" as predicting future conquest.
Lagrenée arranges the scene to read a certain way - Alexander defines a clear line through the god who will ordain his victories. A god he claimed descent from. Here mimesis makes Alexander's destiny clear and teaches a moral about boldness.
Any picture consists of lines and colors on some surface organized by some creator in a configuration that simulates some place or thing. Not the conventional association of a word, but activation of the same visio-spatial senses that we use to make our way in the real world. When a sign resembles something else, it calls it to mind with the same sort of mental picture as the sight of a real object. It's a two-way street...
Just as we can treat natural objects like signs, we process
resemblance-based signs like natural objects.
Sight consists of light passing through the retina and translated into images within the brain. There have been disagreements over how the process works, but it is indisputable that sight in the natural world is correlative. The mental pictures that our minds make out of sense data correlate visio-spatially with the reality that they are "seeing". What we see as a "wall" doesn't have to be the wall-in-itself for us to avoid walking into it. There's even a term for when perception doesn't correlate - we call it visual impairment. And yet decades of academics have chosen to pretend that this doesn't apply to man-made things. It's absurd.
We learn reality and sign systems the same way - trial and error and experience without ever reaching perfect clarity. Why? Because they're all mental pictures that we form from sense data and we're finite creatures in a valley of shadow. Strong correlations are the best we can do.
If the lines and colors are organized so that your brain processes them in a similar manner to things in the real world, they will appear as real world things. That is, representations.
Representations can be imprecise because the brain fills in data so effectively. We are conditioned by existing in the world to "pre-see" real world optical relationships. It's like presuasion. You expect them so hard that you make up for the errors and incompletions. The ability to compensate is why different degrees of realism can all be called resemblance.
This raises the practical question - if all resemblances conventionalized in some way, how do you differentiate resemblance and convention outside of the world of theory? The answer comes from that same place as our to complete imperfect pictures - pattern recognition.
Paleolithic Cave Art, before 12,000 BC, Cave of Altamira, Spain
Take images with no context - like prehistoric painting. We know next to nothing about who made them and why, or even exactly when. It's assumed from the care taken that they were considered important. Probably had a spiritual or supernatural purpose. But we don't know what. Whatever symbolism they had is lost without their cultural norms and beliefs. Conventional symbols - including language - are like codes. If you don't know them you can't read them. We can guess, but at best we are applying situations that we do know that look similar and hope it fits.
But even after all these millennia, we can recognize animal types. Because this isn't reading a code, it's observing resemblance. It is true that even the most realistic representation has conventional aspects, but remember - resemblance is based on organizing lines and colors to call to mind comparable arrangements in reality. If the conventions are too distorting for recognition, then it's not resemblance. And if they aren't, those mental pictures correlate with reality in our minds like they did theirs.
Resemblance is the part that carries over past the end of cultural codes. It's not truly universal, but it's a lot closer. And this helps us understand where the enduring appeal of resemblance and realism come from.
There is clearly rhetorical power in realism or else so many artists wouldn't have worked so hard for so long to make realistic art. From what's been laid out here, it looks connected to the way we process sensory information. Language is a conventionalized filter. A reader fabricates mental pictures by translating abstract textual graphemes into descriptive or narrative meaning. But a picture is taken up in the same unfiltered way as our real-life experience of the world. There is no translation needed because we can see it. The realistic image seems more natural because we process it mentally as we would something that was natural.
Which sign is closer to seeing the real thing?
But realism in a man-made image isn't "natural". It is every bit as constructed as the most flowery sentence and has conventional symbolic associations like any other sign. It just makes itself available to sensory processes like a real material object in the world. This lets it make associations that wouldn't appear in the natural world, and make them feel natural too. This is rhetoric of medium, not content - the content comes after. Even before you've begun to process the message, the realistic image has subconsciously rung truer by virtue of appearing to us in the same manner as reality.
This is the basis of Aristotle's break with Plato on mimesis, Aristotle's insight was that art may be less ontologically real than material reality, but it's perceived in the same way as material reality, and can reveal things material reality can't. This is the idea of the sub-creation and the foundation of classical art theory. In Western art, this involves materializing Beauty and showing the world as it should be. The Band would replace Beauty with the broader Logos, but the idea is the same. Resemblance is ontologically less real than the world, but can show truths and ideals that aren't clear.
Charles Euphrasie Kuwasseg, An Alpine town in Spring, 19th century, oil on canvas, private collection
Like the beauty and harmony of people, culture, and place.
Eugène Girardet, The Flight into Egypt, late 19th century, oil on canvas, private collection
Or the dawn of a new age with the coming of Jesus. The pyramids are in the background - the Holy Family is literally journeying into Egypt but metaphorically moving into the future.
Nice close-up superimposing the halo of the Christ Child and the rising sun. What better way to show harmony of heaven and earth in the Incarnation.
Here's one of modernism's inversions. In a morally-directed universe, beauty and good align, because at the highest ontological level there is no difference between them. Art benefits culture by bringing beauty into the world and offering moral guidance by naturalizing values.
When Modernism demanded art be autonomous, it cut art off from beauty, truth, goodness, or any other epistemic aspect that elevated techne to phronesis. If art means nothing but art, it is no longer a civilizing tool. It can't provide direction, encode values, or create a sense of shared experience with ancestors.
Louis Valtat, Le Taxi (Boulevard a Paris), 1905, oil on canvas, private collection
Some Modern autonomy - just materials - no standards and not even techne.
It can't show a fallen material world a better vision.
Or even a fake one. The most realistic pictures can be as dishonest as any sentence. That's one of the things that makes them so rhetorically effective - they can present falsehoods that we uptake and process like the natural world.
If we were going to separate art off as a special category of images, it would be around the question of honesty and not some fake Modernist essence. The Band's working definition of the art of the West was derived from some ancient Greek terms - here's the revised formula from an earlier post.
Episteme is an absolute abstraction - it refers to the basic beliefs and premises of a culture. Pulling it into the material world makes it subject to the murkiness and uncertainties of this fallen place. Something can be believed true and presented honestly and sincerely, only to turn out wrong. So the question is whether the intent is to deceive. See how messy the subjective material world gets?
Modernists and Postmodernists used to hate "intention" - although that disappeared once grievance politics took over.
Look at the dates on this horseshit. Academic rot is much older than people think.
What possible value is there in the arcane manipulations of texts hermetically cut off from the world? Why was this garbage polluting early 20th century academe? Was it always chronically overrated frauds and hacks? If this was cutting edge almost a century ago...
Judging intention imposes responsibility and structure on the interpreter. You're never going to be 100% certain, but you'll have far more substance than just making things up or playing plug and play with theory. Much harder to pretend things mean whatever you say they do when you have to conform to what they actually meant. And it does seem that any definition of "art" that distinguishes it from other types of image has to take intent into account. Is the purpose to serve truth or some sort of lie?
How do we know?
Moral reasoning. It's messy down here.
So all signs are conventional, but resemblance is something pictorial signs have to varying degrees. The difference between symbolic signs like words and iconic ones like pictures boils down to how they communicate.
Margaretha Roosenboom, Roses, Lilacs and White Blossom Branches, 19th century, oil on canvas, private collection.
Do they depend on visual-spatial correspondences between the picture and real-world experience?
This still-life is very realistic, but even a schematic fits here because you see designated points on the image as corresponding to some points on some object or process.
Or does it rely 100% on convention-based signs with no pretense of resemblance?
The categories are are really no effort at resemblance vs. some effort at resemblance. And this isn't a binary because 'some effort at resemblance' has endless variations depending on the degree of effort. When we ask how pictures mean, it is the 'some effort' category that we're referring to.
So how does processing resemblance differ from reading conventions?
Thinking empirically, the main differences seem to revolve around time and sequencing. The temporal nature of the messaging - meaning how the meaning is experienced in time. Post-Enlightenment-era thinkers love overstating imaginary categorical oppositions, so a lot of the Philosopher's Names liked to bang on about arts of time and space.
It's not completely crazy. Reading is the sequential decoding of symbolic strings in time.
Want to know what happens next? You have to turn the pages and follow the sequence.
Ted Nasmith, The Light of Valinor on the Western Sea, 1998
And pictures do present all their information at once in a single field of vision..
It's easy to see how this view came about - one art unfolds sequentially in time and the other is defined by an area of physical space. The problem is the inane secular transcendence that taints most post-Enlightenment ideas. Because it insists on pretending tendencies and characteristics in the material world conform to the absolute distinctions of abstract logic. They can't.
Oleg Shuplyak, Self-Portrait, 2017
We've mentioned this before - it was the fake abstract certainty that let deconstruction wreck such havoc on discourse in the later 20th century. Works of art that are independent of their creation?
Not only is there no nothing of value in this fantasy exercise, it's actively misleading, it deliberately misrepresents the empirical reality of what a work of art is.
This confuses the abstract notion of sign(s) with the experience of the signs. This isn't legalese. The main value of Peirce is to remind us that the work of interpreting - of people making meaning with material objects - is an integral part of a sign. That there is meaning to read is what makes an object a representation. So when we ask how pictures mean, we have to include the process of... well... making the meaning.
The experience of a picture - that is, how you make meaning from resemblance-based signs - also takes time. It's not instantaneous. Your eyes move around taking in the different parts and how they relate to each other. You piece the scene together incrementally, combining the associations of the different parts into coherent ideas. It is like reading in a sense, only less sequential.
Friedrich Nerly, Piazetta San Marco in the Mondschein, 19th century, oil on canvas, private collection
Not completely non-sequential - there are things artists do to guide your attention.
But you can still move your eyes how you want to take in the details. It isn't like a written text, where you have to follow the sequence to understand at all.
Simple binaries don't work here. Say looking vs. reading - they describe uptake processes, but they aren't "opposites". You can't read without looking at the signs. And attractive scripts turn these signs into things of visual beauty. And looking involves noticing meanings, combining objects - reading processes to make sense of the things looked at. It takes time to absorb pictures too. They just seem more "natural" and less guided and therefore more rhetorically appealing.
In reality, we see real things in their actual contexts. Pictures don't just depict the things, they manufacture the context too. They can establish connections between things that seem completely separate simply by including them in one scene. Not just what you see but how you see it.
Heinrich Weishaupt, Apotheosis of George Washington, 1830–50, colored lithograph after Samuel Moore, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Pictures add connotations and shade meanings by combining and organizing their different elements. This guides how you see something.
Like Washington mourned by classical allegories and ascending into a God-less heaven. Note the light source - he doesn't rise into the light, he' radiates it. It's the hermetic-luciferian be your own god occultism that clings to the Masonic image of the first president.
So what is seen when you look at a picture?
Major 20th century Philosopher's Names have babbled about the ontology of art - what art "is" in an essential, philosophical sense. What is interesting is how they inevitably turn the art into a prop to illustrate their ideas and springboard into meaningless games of associative drivel. We'll deal with them in the next How... Mean post on art. This is gotten long, and we don't want to distract from the main conclusions - the failure of academia and it's discourse to address reality - human and otherwise - and the intertwined relationship between convention and resemblance in signs. So we'll close with the content of pictures.
The content refers to what the work "says". It's the same thing as content in a written medium. The meaning. What is it a picture of?
Eduard Goldkuhle, Apotheosis of St. Paul, 1936, Pauluskirche, Göttingen
In a Christian apotheosis, the saint rises into the light that shines from God. The peak of Trinity here - the symbolic representation of God in Christian terms.
To "read" the content, you assemble recognizable pieces into a conceptual arrangement. Here it's the idea of the Catholic saint as an intercessor between material reality at the bottom and God
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Because language is systematic, it breaks down neatly into words and letters. Pictures don't have the same level of clean symbolic differentiation. You can go all the way down to the simplest components - pixels and brushstrokes - and find meaningful things to say. Artists realize this and will deliberately play with clarity and resolution in order to create different emotional effects or comment on the interconnectedness of things.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Grand Canal, with Santa Maria della Salute, from near the Hotel Europa, 1840
Turner was brilliant at dissolving scenes into light and color. He was an important step towards Modernism, but he hasn't abandoned logos. Plus you can make out the subject, even if the forms are blurry.
The most basic level of content is simple recognition. The 'what is it a picture of?' question. This is the range of physical resemblance that translates across time and culture that we discussed earlier. In Turner's case, there's a canal with buildings, boats, low sun, and people. Understanding on the recognition boils down to being able to tell what is being represented and comment on the aesthetic qualities.
But pictures are also symbolic and conventionalized. Man-made creations are free to ignore the constraints of real life. Smaller details, color schemes, stylistic choices, and other meaningful components of the picture can be chosen for symbolic reasons and not realistic ones. Iconography refers to visual symbols that identify what is happening in a picture.
Bartolomeo Montagna, Saint Paul, 1482, tempera on panel, Museo Poldi Pezzoli
The word iconography comes from religious art. Look at the apotheosis picture from up above, and you can see that St. Paul is identified by features that were standard centuries earlier. The sword represents the instrument of his martyrdom and the long beard is conventional look. Anyone familiar with the iconography can tell it's Paul.
Composition refers to how the elements of a picture are arranged. If it's a narrative, it's how the story is told. If it's a scene, it's how it's set up and framed. A person - how they're posed, what's added, what distance. Then all the other visual choices about setting, light, etc. Think about what it means to compose something. Then think about how different types of pictures are made and staged.
Light contrast stands out - the dark corner gives us a place to stand, but the bright moon seems close. It shrinks the distance to a more intimate feel - like some real moonlit nights. The open sides give the feel that the scene carries on forever.
Thomas Gainsborough, The Baillie Family, 1784, oil on canvas, Tate London
Composition can reveal a lot of information. The father is highest reflecting his place as head of the family. But the focus is on the future. See the diagonal from him through the mother to the baby that blossoms into the other children. The composition centers on the baby - the youngest - and the mother. The column behind them shows the fashionable classical taste of the family and reinforces the idea of children as the backbone of family value.
Composition includes visual relationships between elements that can make extra-narrative connections - indicate conceptual themes outside the story. Pictures come closest to language when they use iconography and composition to describe and explain but the experience is totally different. It's convention and symbolism carried by resemblance-based signs. And there's no limit to the possibilities.
It can be subtle. Sticking with the apotheosis for a moment - note how Paul holds his iconographic identifier so that it resembles Jesus' cross. This visually reinforces the connection between the Son and his disciple by making them look alike.
On larger scale, composition visualizes how concepts fit together - like a diagram, but with a high degree of resemblance. The Apotheisis is a ceiling painting, so it is elevated for real, then Goldkuhle used a technique called foreshortening to make the picture look 3D and not flat. So you see a vertical arrangement of symbolic figures that map spatially how heaven and earth relate and what that means for you.
So the picture is initially intelligible because it is composed of recognizable things. Symbolic details then let you identify what those things mean. Then compositional arrangements relate them to each other - and to you - and deliver a message. There's no way to recap all the possibilities
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Journalist Lecturing on the Orrery, 1766, oil on canvas, Derby Museum and Art Gallery
Like an Enlightenment-era celebration of secular transcendence where the guiding wizard is clear from his placement. Composition sets up the story and the deeper meaning. Note how all the faces are lit - the scientific knowledge "enlightens" their minds.
Here's the same connection between light and thought - the window lights his forehead. You don't see his hands - it's as if his creations flow from him directly. And note the lamp beside the window. Ingenuity makes a new sunlight that can light up the night. Progress!
Composition isn't limited to art - or even still images. One of the ways that media weaves it's spell or glamour [click for a post] is by composing shots to convey relational meanings. To make you think things relate in ways that they actually don't. Like this epic shot...
CNN martinet actively creating a false impression in his dwindling viewership. It's not just overstating flood depth - there's a whole weather narrative around things like this.
Composition allows pictures to bring together symbolic associations and connotations in all kinds of ways. Resemblance-based signs that cloak their symbolism under a veneer of realism that makes is rhetorically very powerful. Here's an International Gothic illumination from one of our recent art posts where the hills suggest a Trinitarian triangle connecting the Madonna and Child and the blazing rising sun.
The Boucicaut Master, Flight into Egypt from the Hours of Maréchal de Boucicaut, 1410-1415, Musée Jacquemart André, Paris
Heaven and earth united in trumpeting the dawn of a new day. The picture masses hills and figures on left and right to create a feeling of stability. Then the axis between Son and sun tying it all together. The composition delivers a theological message and creates a harmonious relation between the parts.
Convention and resemblance in a delicate balance.
You can see why simple binary classifications were pipe dreams.
This is long enough. The last of the How... Mean posts will look at art in particular - style, symbolism, rhetoric, Postmodernism - and try and draw some conclusions.
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| Maxfield Parrish, At Close of Day, 1941, oil on canvas, private collection |
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