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ON SEMIOTIC DETERMINISM AND THE VISUAL SIGN

Barry King. The American Journal of Semiotics. Kent: Fall 2001. Vol. 17, Iss. 3; pg. 47, 22 pgs

Full Text (7559 words)

Copyright Semiotic Society of America Fall 2001

1. Introduction

One of the central, not to say chic, features of contemporary cultural studies is its claim that semiosis is an open,
interminable process which is inherently democratic. Efforts to exercise ideological control through the ownership of the
means of sign production are intrinsically futile, ι Against those who argue that the culture industries dominate the terrain of
public meaning through their control of the means of semiotic production, it is pointed out that the people exercise
"semiotic power" in the sphere of consumption. Let the source, as argued by Stuart Hall and his associates, strive to
encode popular texts so that readers will gravitate towards a preferred reading. Encouragement does not guarantee a
result -the lonely hour of ideological integration never strikes.2

What lies behind the semiotic democracy thesis is semiotic indeterminism: the claim that sign forms, especially visual
signs, have no capacity to resist the will of the reader, because they have no materiality outside the reader's act of
interpretation^ Paradoxically this kind of argument mostly emerges from works in which a great deal of effort has been
given to expounding the "mechanics of the text" or its "semiotic functioning"-a redundant exercise for sure if texts are
skeletal structures that only acquire meaning through the process of reading (Sholle 1991: 81-89)4

Although "the semiotic democracy" approach has good intentions-namely the populist desire, rooted within British Cultural
Studies, to rescue the consumers of popular culture from the condescension implied by the "ideology of mass culture"-it
is far from clear how effective a rescue it offers (Ang, 1985). It is true that the evocation of a singular entity-the audience-
invites reification. Audiences should not be treated as durable, homogeneous social entities even when, as is rarely the
case, there is remarkable social and cultural uniformity amongst those momentarily attending to a mass event (Anderson
1996: 75-93). Yet the assertion of the radical heterogeneity of audiences in itself threatens to undermine the underlying
collectivist thrust of Cultural Studies. If media texts do not construct, for better or worse, something more durable than a
momentary, transient, "common" focus, then it is difficult to see how a collective politics of the "subaltern" could be
publicly articulated. The notion that individual readings somehow constitute a latent culture of resistance, is, to say the
least, optimistic. A thousand idiosyn-crasies do not make a movement.

If it is true that ideological control under contemporary capitalism is no longer a matter of standardization, but of divide and
rule, then the "active reader" thesis might be regarded as ideological in itself since it aids the project of mass
immobilization. Might not the claim of textual indeterminacy substitute a celebration of the "resistive" powers of the
individual in solitary confinement for a sustained analysis of the problems of building coalitions and alliances? In these
circumstances the high hopes of semiotic democrats to restore agency to the ordinary consumer become another
casualty to individualism (Tetzlaff 1991). It seems much more likely that individual persons, if they care about an issue, are
already positioned within a publicly mediated discourse that orients their responses away from the idiosyncratic towards
the collective (Condit 1989).5

Pragmatic adequacy aside, there are logical problems with the argument for semiotic democracy. In the first place, the
claim for semiotic democracy is evidenced by the detection of "resistive" readings. But adding up resistive readings may
fall foul of the fallacy of aggregation supposing what is true of a particular individual will be true of the collective-a fallacy
perhaps not coincidentally central to political liberalism. Again, if texts do not constitute some kind of meaning prior to the
process of reading, it is difficult to see how theorists of reader activity can avoid circularity in labeling actual readings as
"resistive" or ironic. How can readings be labeled "resistive" if the reader has not perceived a structure against which he or
she resists? It might not be too inaccurate to refer to such readings as indeterminate or irrelevant, even though this risks
condescension. Finally, what does the term textual polysemy mean if readings only reside in reader activity? (Corner
1996: 288-293).

Rather than pursue these points, I want to ask a slightly different (and it seems to me more fundamental) question: Is there
a case for semiotic democracy this side of the language of Eden? Or is it based, as I believe, on a misunderstanding of
the process of semiosis. To elaborate this contention requires a brief detour down Ia rue Derrida. I will then return to the
key issue-what is the nature of semiotic determinism, especially as this applies to the kind of sign most dear to semiotic
democrats-the visual sign.

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2. Did Derrida Issue a Warrant for Semiotic Democracy?

The concept of semiotic democracy relies, however allusively, on a conception of semiosis derived from
post-structuralism, particularly the ur-text, Of Grammatology, which is then applied to the analysis of mass mediated audio
visual texts. The implicit line of reasoning seems to be a sort of worst case scenario: If verbal sign forms are referentially
unstable then visual signs are really unstable, given their relative semantic complexity and their implication' in figurai
effects issuing from the larger systems of narrative and spectacle. Such is the argument of John Fiske:

Images are clearer, more impressive than the reality they claim to represent, but they are also fragmented and
contradictory and exhibit a vast variety that questions the unity of the world of experience. Images are made and read in
relation to other images and the real is read as an image. Television commercials are not "about" products, but are
images of desire and pleasure that overwhelm the product that they are attached to. TV news is a mosaic of images of
elite persons, horrific nature and human violence. TV sport is a kaleidoscope of images of muscle, of skill, of pain. The
images are what matter, they exist in their own flickering domain and never come to rest in a firm anchorage in the real.
Postmodernism posits the rejection of meaning in its affirmation of the image as signifier with no final signified; images
exist in an infinite chain of intertextuality. The denial of a final meaning for images has similarities with the
deconstructionists' reading of Derrida: the infinitely receding signified reduces language to a free play of signifiers that
denies the possibility of any fixed or final meaning (1978: 116-117).

Yet it is far from clear that the notion of the semantic complexity of the visual sign and Derrida's notion of unlimited
semiosis can be so facilely assimilated. In order to gauge whether Derrida can be used to support the notion of semiotic
democracy it is necessary to summarize his argument in more detail.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida advances the argument that every written text constitutes itself as a self-sufficient system of
meaning production which is comprehensible even if the present reader has no knowledge of the intentions if its
author/scriptor. Moreover, every sign or sign complex is citable. That is to say, it can be removed from its original context
and set into another context without losing the quality of meaningfulness. Citability means that the context in which the text
originated, including the authors' intentions, presents no limit to the potential of the text to generate new meanings. The
reader is not required to stay within the boundaries of origin or respect the markers of intention and reference constructed
by the author, as she or he engages in the "playful" production of his or her own meaning.

In making this argument, Derrida points to Saussure's failure to recognize the consequences of his own definition of the
sign as a positivity determined by its place in a conventionally defined system of oppositions. Signs only exist in an
immanent condition of difference-they are formed, so to speak, through an impulse to be different, to differ, on the basis
of a system that permanently erodes or defers the possibility of identity. Each sign in an order to realize its own positivity
must draw in to itself the resonances or "traces" of other semiotic elements in the chain of meaning, not merely in
syntagmatic contrast but also through paradigmatic opposition. As a consequence each sign (or each utterance) is a
presence in absence -pregnant with an erosive and subtract!ve semantic force that threatens and indefinitely postpones
the moment of self-identity, of being at one with the self and its object.

Finally, the institution of signification per se which precedes speech, what Derrida terms, Writing, is fundamentally
self-referential and autotelic. The "outside" of the sign -whether this is a concrete object, event, person or some
transcendental signified-is in itself only another sign subject to the same infirmities or opportunities of difference. Indeed
the very notion of an "outside" to the language is a product of the process of differentiation that the presence of Writing,
the instituted trace, inaugurated (Derrida 1997: 45-46).

As far as this phase of his argument goes, Derrida would seem to issue a warrant for semiotic democracy. But at the
same time he recognizes a problem. If all readings are incomplete then it follows that all readings are equally valid or
invalid. At some level it is necessary to establish a literal reading or more exactly it is necessary to distinguish between the
sense and the meaning of a text. A positive science of signification cannot reject the moment of sense if it is to mount a
critique of a metaphysics of presence (Derrida 1997: 62-63). The protocols of traditional criticism that produce a literal
reading, positing a unitary subject, the author, who speaks through the text or a socio-historical context that "speaks", is
the determinant Other of deconstructionism. Without the guardrail of a literal reading "critical production would risk
developing in any direction and at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has
always only protected, it has never opened, a reading" (Derrida 1997: 158).

It has to be said that it is not part of Derrida's intention to address what actual readers do with signs, however much others
may use his arguments for this purpose. But it is also clear that he cannot be read as authorizing that the notion that there
is no literal meaning or sense outside of connotation, however problematic this is to specify. Indeed a literal reading is a
precondition for deconstructive criticism.6 Rather he wants to suggest that literal readings are inadequate or partial
because they are subject to a peremptory finalization. But this is not the same as claiming that meaning only resides in a
reading. At first sight it would seem Fiske addresses this issue when he writes critically of postmodern theories of
meaning production:

What is welcome in these views is their emphasis upon the instability of symbolic systems and the absence of a final
authoritative "meaning" against which the "correctness" or "truth" of specific readings can be judged. What is
unproductive, however, is the belief in the impossibility of meaning, because meaning is necessarily elusive and thus the
search for it is misdirected. To counteract this we need to shift our focus from the text to its moments of reading: points of

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stability and anchored meanings (however temporary) are to be found not in the text itself, but in its reading by a socially
and historically situated viewer. Such a meaning is, of course, not fixed in a universal, empirical "reality", but in the social
situation of the viewer. Different readings may stabilize texts differently and momentarily, but they do achieve moments of
stability, moments of meaning (Fiske 1978: 116-117).

But for all its promiscuous shuffle between sense and meaning, this qualification still asserts that the text offers no
constraint in itself. In one sense, Fiske's use of "post-structuralism" is more extreme than Derrida's, since the latter
acknowledges that users of signs are not entirely free to make signs mean what they wish them to mean. Fiske's
argument is, of course, meant to be more sociological, but this in itself leads to the paradoxical result that textuality has
vanished as though texts were not, as Derrida implicitly recognizes, already saturated with structures of closure, some
relevant to sense and some to meaning. It is through the penetration of the sign with what Peirce referred to as habits that
the process of semiosis or "drift" encounters sociological or cultural limits. To spell this out it is useful to return to Derrida.

3. The Limits of Drift

In Of Grammatology, Derrida's for argument of unlimited semiosis or "drift" is concerned solely with the nature of the
linguistic sign. His argument is driven by two exigencies:

1. The need to suppress the role of motivation in the production of sense. He, therefore, endorses Saussure's view that
the integrity of the semiotic process rests on the arbitrary character of the sign.

2. The need to expand the notion of sign autonomy beyond the limits of the language system as proposed by Saussure.

As pointed out, for Saussure each sign or semiotic element makes sense by virtue of its occupancy of a position of
difference in a system of fixed contrasts and contrarieties. So in criticizing Saussure, Derrida does not merely wish to
negate the role of reference, he intends to open out sense to drift as well.

In this effort to establish that meaning, in its extensive and intensive aspects, is a labile, infinitely revisable process,
Derrida seizes on Peirce's notion of unlimited semiosis-the fact that the representamen of any sign becomes the
interpretant under another sign and so on ad infinitum. Importantly for Derrida's argument is the view that Peirce can be
construed as arguing for an evolutionary tendency embodied in the category "sign" that pushes away from the sway of
motivation and reference. In effect, Derrida reads Peirce as saying that icons and indices are signes-manqués whose
"aspiration" is to enter the domain of semiosis proper through an insistent process of "becoming-unmotivated". On
entering the realm of the symbolic, iconic and indexical signs become subject to what is inherent in their formation, their
arbitrariness and disposition to "drift". In other words, semiosis proper is a symbolic process.

But if Derrida uses Peirce to "deconstruct" Saussure, is this reading warranted? But does Peirce's concept of unlimited
semiosis actually correspond to Derrida's notion of drift? In Eco's view, the Derridean concept of drift is actually closer to
what can be termed hermetic drift (Eco 1992).

For Peirce, semiosis is the process whereby we know something more about a particular sign and its immediate object by
a procession of signs (interprétants) each more finely tuned to represent its essential ground and dynamical object. To
know something more about a sign is to approach the final interprétant, or "the reality which by some means contrives to
determine the sign to be its Representation or that which from the nature of things, the sign cannot express, what it can
only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience" (Pierce 1933-53: 8.3.4).7

By contrast, in hermetic drift, semiosis becomes a process whereby, instead of knowing more about an object through the
refinement of interpretants, we know more and more about the possible relationships of the immediate interpretant to
other things. The familiar dynamic of running around the rhizome in search of plausible similarities, by which everything
may be related to everything else, captures the interminable logic of hermetic drift.

Derrida and Peirce agree that semiosis is unlimited because the final reality (the transcendental signified) can never be
reached. But what Derrida tends to treat as an absolute condition of all signification, Peirce views as a logical possibility. In
practice, semiosis is limited by the existence of a socially shared definition of the real which Peirce terms habit (4.536).

In Peircean terms, Derrida's concept of drift is logical rather than substantive. The unraveling of the metaphysics of
presence in a text would occur if the meaning productivity of the text were to run its course. But the process of semiosis if
emphatically undermining the notion of a set meaning is nonetheless constrained by the fact that given an origin, only a
certain number of "destinations" are possible. Pragmatically, in any given socio-cultural context, actors will only be aware
of a finite subset of "destinations" and, within that subset, will only accord a few with existential or moral importance.

At the same time the social limits on drift are not merely external to the sign but also present inside its constitution as an
intelligible entity. This is particularly true in respect of indexicality or the physical inherence of some aspects of the
immediate object in the sign.8 While Derrida concentrates his arguments on the verbal sign where the phenomenon of
indexicality has limited applicability, in the case of visual signs relations of resemblance and contiguity are much more
central to the process of sign formation.

In sum, whether viewed from the perspective of the Dynamical Object as constrained under the rule of habit or from the
Immediate Object constrained by the materials of signification, Peirce's conception of drift is a much more grounded

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process. Conversely, Derrida's argument by postulating the symbol as the prototypical sign rules out many of the
determinants that infiltrate into nonverbal sign forms. But his argument is logocentric because that is what he intends it to
be. Fiske's take on Derridean concepts is logocentric by default.

4. Semiotic Determinism and the Visual Sign

To argue for semiotic determinism is to claim that under certain conditions sign "resist" appropriation by a user for any
purpose, unless that purpose can be accommodated by the materiality of the sign (Petrilli 1996: 280).9 But to speak of
"resistive" signs is no more illuminating than speaking of "resistive" readings, unless one specifies the terms and grounds
for the adjective.

Discussion of the qualities or specificity of visual signs-plastic, graphic, photographic, televisual-must initially address an
old debate on the conventional and iconic basis of the visual sign. For those who place the emphasis on iconicity, visual
signs are seen as intensively motivated by the relationship of resemblance to their object/referent. For conventionalists,
visual signs are, no less than verbal signs, conventionally linked to their referents in the sense that the similarities that tie
the sign and its referent are always a selection from those possible or, conversely, rest on the suppression of features
that are dissimilar.

A strong proponent of the conventionalist view, Nelson Goodman, for example, argues that even the photograph, which is
regarded as epitomizing iconicity, conveys rather than copies a scene. The iconic basis of the photographic signifier
should be rejected because of evidence of pervasive manipulation -the framing, angle of shot etc.-which is not different in
kind from what occurs in pictorial representation in general (Goodman 1969: 1516). For others the enumeration of
aniconic or conventional factors in the photograph fails to address the special nature of photographic resemblance. After
all even if the selection of similarities is a factor that applies to visual signs in general, no one is relieved of the necessity
for making a distinction between kinds of signs on the basis of the nature of the sharing of factors of resemblance. The
specific quality of the photograph (and the illusion of transparency it inspires) rests on the unique principle of geometrical
invariance. When light from a three dimensional object is projected onto a two dimensional surface, a substantial number
of the attributes of the object survive unchanged-for example relative proportionality and spatial location, notwith-standing
a change in scale. The mechanical transfer via light rays of selected properties of the object, ensures that a substantial
manifestation of the pro-filmic object is preserved in the signifier (Eco 1986: 223).10

In other words, the photographic sign is not exhaustively defined by the matter of resemblance, after all a painting can be
iconic, but by the fact that the photograph is an embodied resemblance.11 Given preservation in this sense, it has been
argued that more of the features of the object survive in the photograph, bestowing on it the characteristic quality of being
an emanation of a past reality (Barthes 1993). 12

Relatedly, a tradition of argument that received its codification in Kant's distinction between schema and image, points to
the fact that visual images are, in effect, concrete images rather than abstract signs. The photographic sign, whether still
or motion, is articulated through the material properties or particulars of its object and for that reason has a high degree of
concreteness and resembles a fuzzy statement rather than a specifying word or concept. It is possible to say in words
with a high degree of precision and condensation what cannot be economically (or some would say actually) depicted in a
image or, even, motion photography. Obversely what can be said verbally is experientially impoverished compared to the
semantic richness of a picture and, especially, a photograph (Metz 1981).13

But there is another sense in which the photographic sign must be regarded as primarily indexical, even if one accepts
that all pictorial signs, including photographs are based on convention. The photographic sign is a realized instance or
token that existent-ially connects the spectator to what it stands for-even if what is seen does not exist in the same material
or form in the real world.14

Part of the problem with the conventionality versus iconicity debate is the assumption that signs are either motivated or
unmotivated with respect to their objects. Pierce not only pointed out that the relationship between a sign and its object
was threefold-the well known schema of iconic, indexical and symbolic-but that these relationships did not refer to three
different types of signs but three discrete phenomenological categories that could be found in some pattern of
dominance and subordination in any given sign (Peirce 2. 243-246, 275, 298, 449).is

Depending on its particular articulation, a given sign might be more intensively perfused with

1. Firstness-the state of quality without reference to anything else. The domain of the icon or qualisign.

2. Secondness-the state of embodiment and mediation, the implication of a first in a determinative dyadic relationship.
The domain of the index or sinsign (token).

3. Thirdness-the subsumption of a second as a token under a general class or law. The domain of the symbol or legisign
(Peirce 2.85, 92, 276).

So it is not accurate, strictly speaking, to refer to an iconic sign because as an example of a first, an icon is merely a
quality that is connected to or embodied by some entity. Since qualities are only manifested in a state of embodiment,
they are always indexical to greater or lesser degree. Conversely, there is no such thing as a pure indexical sign since the
existence of such a sign is always given as a mediation of qualities. In the case of the symbol, which might be regarded

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as with Saussure as the epitome of the dominance of the plane of expression over the plane of content, it is obvious that
there cannot be a class of signs if such a class does not contain examples or tokens. Such tokens in turn are necessarily
indexical collocations of qualities which are only found within the materiality of a particular existent.

For my purposes, the first key point is that iconic qualities do enter into a process of semiosis in a pure state, but only as
embodied particulars. If semiosis is a "promiscuous" process, this promiscuity does not derive from the absence of the
constraints of motivation but rather because such constraints are operative in a large number of combinations, all of which
are embodied in particular instances (Santaella-Braga 1988).

But there is another important consequence. If red has no existence outside of embodied instances of redness then it is a
feature of the photographic image to fix the features of the object into a general frame of reference or, more exactly, to
present in the single action of the shot both a particular and general version of the object. A photographic image of an
individual is both a private and particular token and a public embodiment of a category or type. This is not merely because
the photograph is a quasi-public record which in principle can be viewed by anyone and is thus the staging of range of
viewpoints in relation to an individual's own act of perception. It is also because the act of photographic inscription (angle
of shot, framing, etc.) necessarily typifies its object by subtracting it from the scene in which it was implicated. The
photograph of Uncle George, shall we say, is a contextually suspended amalgam of token and type. It is the latter,
categorical, referent that will become dominant with the passage of time as George himself changes or dies. This
ontological equivocation is inherent in the act of photographing (Eco 1986; Barthes 1981).

This also leads to another important consequence. Because of the depth of indexical furnishing of the photograph
compared to, say, a painting it follows that even the most public photographs are likely to contain details or sign residues
that do not serve or exceed the purposes that brought it into being. The meaning given to the sign and, indeed, the kind of
relationship-iconic, indexical, symbolic-that guides interpretation, depends on the route taken through the assembly of sign
residues and what these residues actually are (Rossi-Landi 1979; Ponzio 1990: 17-61). «6 So it is not merely that the
favorite sign of semiotic democrats-the photographic sign-is an embodied semantic complexity. It is also that the status of
the various elements of the array must be resolved before a reading can begin.

In interpreting a photograph, naive and sophisticated spectators confront a concrete particular that has been exempted
from the universe of possible objects and events. Although such a taking is clearly intentional since, barring the case of
accidental exposure, it involves selection. It is not clear which of the cues of resemblance are in support of the originating
intention and which are not-the latter merely providing information. Whatever the status of the object world, whether we are
dealing with possible (staged) scenes, actual scenes or impossible scenes (tricks), that portion of the object is rendered
as a collocation of indices or "facts". The photographic act manifestly refers to something within its body, but it is by no
means transparent, especially in the absence of an anchoring caption, what this act of reference is and what the modality
of the reference is. The greater the semantic richness of the image, the greater the necessity for the labor of interpretation
to work on the assignment of modality.

What is usually understood by modal status is the epistemic modality of the sign or semiotic element-of truth, falsity,
impossibility, possibility. But it would be necessary to add in further dimensions concerning the modal status of an
expression. These may be summarized:

1. Subjective Certainty: Is the photograph to be treated as evidence, interpretation or expression, how representative is it?

2. lntentionality: Why was the photograph taken, selected from those taken at the same time, what did the photographer or
the subject intend?

3. Authority or Social Status: Is the photograph a public or private statement, is it exemplary, normative or "deviant", is it
official or "unofficial".

4. Causality: What happened just before and just after the photograph, what are its links with photographic genres and
styles, who took it? (Givon 1989: 130).

Now it is clear that the pertinence of various modes will depend upon the nature of the photograph in question-a fashion
photograph poses relatively few problems in determining its social status and, its underlying intention. But it will be likely to
raise other questions. Is it faked? Is the appearance of the model in the photograph close to his or her real appearance?
What is the causative chain underlying its furnishing, and what questions does this raise about its epistemic status?

Specific photographic images will contain different combinations and different hierarchical orderings of modes and hence
prompt different modality questions. But because the photograph has the semantic complexity of a particular and renders
that complexity as a form of mediated experience or deeply furnished fact, the reader's activity in reading it can only be
"free" if the photograph is not read but merely noticed.

Any reading that begins as an attempt to understand the production of sense photographically will, I suggest, be drawn
into a discussion of the evidential for of its own interpretation on the basis of what is in the picture. In other words, the
reading of the photographic text will inevitably become entangled in the process of determining what is a first order "literal"
reading and a second order "connotational" gloss.17 What is the case for a still image is only compounded by the
introduction of motion, sound and other cinematic signifiers.

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In sum, the problem of resolving the modality status of a photographic image means that the image must be defined
referentially prior to the play of "interpretation". Of course, readings can also be given that do not resolve the modality
issue, but they would lack a visible warrant. A reading which did not attend to these dimensions would certainly be a "bad"
reading even though we could not say with complete certainty what a good reading would be (Eco 1991: 60). The effort to
certify the meaning of the photographic sign is inextricably constrained by a pragmatics of reference.

5. The Drift from Limits

To reject a mechanical causal relation between a text and its referential ground is a good thing, but not at the price of
accepting that texts have no structure or have a structure only by courtesy of a reading. If Post-Structuralism is taken to
mean that no literal meaning is possible, or that no meanings function literally, this accords to the realm of semiosis a
greater degree of indeterminacy than even Derrida, supposedly the arch-priest of indeterminacy, allows.

What semiotic indeterminism promulgates is the alienation of the readers from the right to make meaning in favor of a
fetishism of the sign. In sign fetishism, it is supposed that signification is only determined by immanent relationships
(Petrilli 1996). Such a formulation ignores the communicative function of the sign as mediator of social relationships, even
if the sign "resists" reduction to the functionalities, matters of rhetoric and intention, implied by such relationships. But
more than that it forgets that signs only exist as signs by virtue of a prior act of formation, which may indeed be entirely
opaque to the user, but present nonetheless.

Against sign fetishism it is necessary to suggest that the relative autonomy of the sign, arises from the fact that signs are
multireferential, both in terms of their constitution as embodied representations or metaphorical constructs and in the
purposes that seek mention in any ongoing activation. In respect of any particular set meaning (sense and reference), the
sign contains and resonates with "semiotic" residues. The vocation of the sign is to circulate between these residues and
to acquire new ones as result of usage. But this does not mean that within a given linguistic community of use, the
meaning of the sign is not existentially and practically fixed. It might be said that a characteristic of a community or those
striving for community is to reduce a sign to a signal.18

In formal terms, the semiotic materiality of the sign can be defined as resting on four orders of semiotic determination:

1. Ideological or Historical Materiality: As product of an historical tradition that is antecedent to any current use or inten-
tional selection. In wishing to use the sign the individual confronts in other words an established usage (a habit) with an
established social authority.

2. Extra-intentional Materiality: Signs come to impose themselves on us outside of our intentions, e.g. unconscious
associations, automatisms of speech such as idiomatic expressions, clichés and puns interposed into everyday
discourse by the media's colonization of discursive space.

3. Intersemiotic Materiality: Any given sign as an immediate object does not exhaust the possibilities of meaning
subtended by the Dynamical Object and is accordingly subject to the incursion of alternate readings. It is in this area that
Derrida exclusively builds his argument for drift and by so doing is able to construct the notion of "play" as the Utopia of
the ever-unmotivated.

4. Elaboration Materiality: The modal gearing of the sign or semiotic element in terms of its objects or as a particular kind
of address to these objects as a token or type and the articulations within a discourse that combines modalities into a
hierarchy.

Outside of these determinants, it is possible to point to extrasign or non-semiotic determination:

5. The Physical Materiality of the sign which, since it is an object fashioned within a culture, is already an evidential
embodiment of values with a cultural context. A paradigm case would be the embodied performance.

6. The Instrumental Materiality-the fact that a given quality has acquired a set of functional uses which may be
irreconcilable, e.g., a red flag stands for danger and revolutionary intent as Chaplin's "Little Fellow" discovered to his cost
in Modern Times.

While the referential gearing of verbal signs is far enough up the ladder of abstraction to "pass over" or hold in immediate
suspension the full force of these determinants, in the case of the photographically based sign such determinants are
present in the sign form and saturate the process of interpretation with consciously seen and optically unconscious
determinants. For as Benjamin observed, it is not merely that photographs are semantically complex in themselves-some
photographs are more complex than others. The photographic act of inscription always embodies a universe of
implicature, an array of perspectives, that is forever hovering outside the conscious wishes and desires of the perceiver
(Lury 1998).

6. Conclusion

The argument for semiotic democracy lacks even an intuitive appeal, especially in relation to popular culture. For surely
one of the more remarkable features of the current age is not a dis-interested or open play with images. On the contrary,
there is sociological evidence of a frenzied disposition to seek the true, the optimal and most complete visualization (King

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1992). True, the réfèrent might not exist in the form it takes in visualization, or, indeed, exist outside of the act of
visualization. But in the aftermath of extensive mediation, which is the permanent feature of collective awareness and
perception, the image is a certified fact of existence that one must accept or labor against (Percy 1989: 63).

Diverse practices such as exploiting celebrity likenesses for profit, the relentless documentation of private and public life,
the deep scanning of the family photographic archive to recover ourselves and remote ancestry in order to "know" who we
are , the fad for Reality television and candid celebrity photography, the completist fascination of spotting movie mistakes
or declaring that this (yes, this) is the definitive episode of Seinfeld, testify to a frenzy for photographic (or videographic)
certification. This passion is certainly influenced by the suspicion, given digital convergence, that images can be falsified.
But this merely intensifies the belief that the photographic sign (and its televisual or filmic adjuncts) could in principle
connect us to the collectively real (Fetveit 1999).

Somehow in the celebration of semiotic democracy, the authority of the mass mediated images is set aside. The power of
the mass mediated image is to impose a tangible finality on what is otherwise an open-ended process of collective
definition. Before the public manifestation of the image, the spectator seems less a "player with codes" than a being
under threat of social erasure; one who longs to be part of the action, the publicly ratified route of signification.

[Footnote]
Notes
1. Though there is another assumption implicit here which is highly problematic: that the boundary between public and private
meaning is entirely permeable (Fiske 1989: 326).
2. If Fiske shows a residual nostalgia for textual constraints, other formulations are less cautious and conclude that texts are
mere collocations of semantic potential or cues that only "achieve" structure (if at all) by the grace of the reader (Wren-Lewis
1983).
3. This formulation means there is no desire within the reader to find the most apt embodiment or affordance for what he or she
wishes to say
4. Thus John Fiske's influential Television Culture (1978: 14) combines detailed textual analyses of television programming with
the conclusion that texts are in fact only created at the "moment" of reading.
5. If semiotic democracy operates in situations of indifference it is of course trivial. Texts that matter politically are already
rhetorically positioned as texts of a public debate.
6. By sense I refer (loosely) to denotation and by meaning, connotation. There is no agreement on these terms which present a
problem of Babylonian complexity (Noth 1991: 92-102). It may better to refer to different kinds of connotations since the objects
referred to and the materials of signification are already saturated with meanings present within a specific culture. Pragmatically
any signification is initially a metaphor which if accepted into the life world of a particular group becomes a fact of culture or a
metonym. For a discussion of the "hell of connotation" see Baker 1991.
7. If unlimited semiosis is a reality, it is a reality that is constrained by the universe of discourse subtending the matter of
signification. Such a matter is not identical to the author's intention nor the intention manifested in the text since it is located in a
consequential field beyond any particular expression.
8. For Peirce the immediate object is the object that is present in the sign or the object "as the sign represents it and whose
being is thus dependent on the Representation of the sign" (4.536).
9. Spectators can, of course, read signs in deliberate disregard of the materiality of the sign. But then one would wish to say
they are not reading the sign so much as engaged in an internal process of perception in which the sign is accidental because
immaterial.
10. If geometric invariance is not observed in a particular photograph, then its absence serves to foreground manipulation (or a
botched shot) and marks the photograph as a statement rather than a record.
11. It is not the iconic or conventional nature of the photographic, but its indexicality that is decisive. To be sure, indexicality is a
property of pictorial and plastic signs but here it is not-barring the literal use of the referent as a stamping device-an indexicality
of the object but of the action of he or she who makes the drawing or the sculpture. Deliberate tampering with the negative-
scratches, superimposition of images, etc. -render the photograph as a pictorial sign.
12. The sharing of codes is not the same thing as the sharing of properties and it is in the degree of sharing between these two
orders of the real that the specificity of the photograph is located (Eco 1979:217-218).
13. Verbal representations may be said to free the recipient since the existents implied by a verbal statement are only
concretized imaginatively by the interpreter. As the experience of film adaptations makes clear, photographic signs often confront
the imagination of the interpreter with existentially "banal" realizations.
14. Thus a photograph of a fake monster exists in the material world, but as polystyrene, not flesh and blood. A photograph
guarantees existence if not the modality of the existent (Cf. Eco 1986: 222-226).
15. While it is true that verbal signs are predominantly symbolic, visual signs can become conventionalized as, for example, in
the development of visual clichés in print advertising (Marchand 1991).
16. Even the arch conventionalist Nelson Goodman can be read as offering support for this view. In considering exemplification,
Goodman recognizes the sharing of properties as essential to the process of semiosis. In a subsequent work, Goodman offers
the nominalist view that images cannot be said to mirror the structure of the world because there is no such structure (1979:
31-32). But images can be said to mirror their finite objects, especially when they share properties with their objects (see also
Goodman 1981: 121-132). While it is tempting to read Derrida as arguing for sign residues, in fact his emphasis on the symbol
spares him the need to enter into the referential implications of embodied semantic complexity. Accordingly, Derrida is able to
project a Utopian condition of indeterminacy.
17. One might argue that the photograph contains nothing but connotation. Even so, the skeptical viewer must ratify his or her
reasons for rejecting one connotation in favor of another. Ratification is dependent on the physical body of the image, so it is
only in the image that reasons for proposing a new articulation of denotation and connotation can be found. This is so even
when the viewer knows the circumstances of the production of the image since he or she will still be drawn to use the body of

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the image to prove some linkage, overt or implied, to the context.

18. This is not necessarily a happy result, since clearly signals are one-sided and prejudicial formations when applied to
outsiders. On signality see Voloshinov (1993).

[Reference]
References
ANDERSON, J. A.
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its Landscape (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 75-93.
ANG, I.
1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (London: Methuen).
BAKER, S.
1983. "The Hell of Connotation", Word and Image 1,164-75.
BARTHES, R.
1984. Camera Lucida (London: Flamingo).
CONDIT, C.
1989. "The Rhetorical Limits to Polysemy", Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6.2, 103-122.
CORNER, J.
1996. "Reappraising Reception: Aims, Concepts and Methods" in James Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.), Mass Media and
Society (London: Arnold), 280-304.
DERRIDA, J.
1997. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Corrected edition
of the 1974 edition.
ECO, U.
1979. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
1986. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
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Press), 45-66
1991. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
FETVEIT, A.
1999. "Reality TV in the Digital Era: A Paradox in Visual Culture?", Media Culture and Society 21, 787-804
FISKE, J.
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1969. Languages of Art (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill).
1979. Ways of World Making (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill).
1981. "Routes to Reference", Critical Inquiry 8.1, 121-132.
KING, B.
1993. "Capturing the 'Kodak Moment': Photoconsumerism and Mnemonic Labor", Afterimage 21.2, 9-13.
LURY, C.
1998. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (London: Routledge).
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1931-1958. Collected Papers. Vois. 1-6 ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; Vois. 7-8 ed. Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press). Reference by codex custom is to volume and paragraph number(s).
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[Author Affiliation]
BARRY KING
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

[Author Affiliation]
Biography
BARRY J. KING (b. 26 MARCH 1944) Academic Status: Associate Professor and Head of School, Communication Studies,
Auckland University of Technology. Mail Address: Communication Studies, Private Bag 92006, Auckland 020, New Zealand.
E-mail: <barry.king@aut.ac.nz>; Internet Page: <http:// www.aut. ac.nz/ faculties/arts/research_office>. Personal Office Tel: (64)
9-9179626; Dept. Office Tel: (64)9-917-8411; Fax: (64) 9-917-9987. Educational Background: Ph.D. in the Sociology of Mass
Communications, London School of Economics, 1984. Visiting Professor, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania and
Visiting Professor, Temple University, MA in Communications (1988-89), Programme Director B. A. Communication Studies
Program, Widener University, PA (1988-1998); Principal Lecturer and Director B.A., Media and Popular Culture Program, Leeds
Metropolitan University (1999-2000). Professional Background: Editorial Committee, Screen (1985-1989); Member, Commission
on Semiotics, USA National Communication Association (1982-1989); Consultant and Director of the Acting Project, British
Actors' Equity (1998-ongoing);Founder Member MEDIANZ New Zealand (2002).

[Author Affiliation]
Bibliography
Author selection of six items. Complete list available from the author.
BARRY J. KING
2000. "Being Virtual: Modularity as Condition of Being", Afterimage 9-12
1994. "Capturing the 'Kodak Moment': Photoconsumer ism and Mnemonic Labor", Afterimage 21.2, 9-13.
1992. "The Dawn of The Undead: Property Rights and the Mimetic Image", Afterimage 19.10,4-7.
1992. "TV Stars as Degenerate Symbols: Observations on Television and the Transformation of Celebrity", Semiotica
92.1-2,8-44.
1991. "Articulating Stardom" in Star Texts, ed. Jeremy Butler (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press), 125-154.
1987. "The Star and the Commodity: Notes towards a Performance Theory of Stardom", Cultural Studies 1.2, 145-166.

Indexing (document details)

Author(s): Barry King
Author Affiliation: BARRY KING
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

Biography
BARRY J. KING (b. 26 MARCH 1944) Academic Status: Associate Professor and Head of School,
Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology. Mail Address: Communication Studies,
Private Bag 92006, Auckland 020, New Zealand. E-mail: <barry.king@aut.ac.nz>; Internet Page:
<http:// www.aut. ac.nz/ faculties/arts/research_office>. Personal Office Tel: (64) 9-9179626; Dept.
Office Tel: (64)9-917-8411; Fax: (64) 9-917-9987. Educational Background: Ph.D. in the Sociology of
Mass Communications, London School of Economics, 1984. Visiting Professor, Annenberg School,
University of Pennsylvania and Visiting Professor, Temple University, MA in Communications
(1988-89), Programme Director B. A. Communication Studies Program, Widener University, PA
(1988-1998); Principal Lecturer and Director B.A., Media and Popular Culture Program, Leeds
Metropolitan University (1999-2000). Professional Background: Editorial Committee, Screen
(1985-1989); Member, Commission on Semiotics, USA National Communication Association
(1982-1989); Consultant and Director of the Acting Project, British Actors' Equity (1998-
ongoing);Founder Member MEDIANZ New Zealand (2002).

Bibliography
Author selection of six items. Complete list available from the author.
BARRY J. KING
2000. "Being Virtual: Modularity as Condition of Being", Afterimage 9-12
1994. "Capturing the 'Kodak Moment': Photoconsumer ism and Mnemonic Labor", Afterimage 21.2,
9-13.
1992. "The Dawn of The Undead: Property Rights and the Mimetic Image", Afterimage 19.10,4-7.
1992. "TV Stars as Degenerate Symbols: Observations on Television and the Transformation of
Celebrity", Semiotica 92.1-2,8-44.
1991. "Articulating Stardom" in Star Texts, ed. Jeremy Butler (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press), 125-154.
1987. "The Star and the Commodity: Notes towards a Performance Theory of Stardom", Cultural
Studies 1.2, 145-166.
Document types: General Information

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Publication title: The American Journal of Semiotics. Kent: Fall 2001. Vol. 17, Iss. 3; pg. 47, 22 pgs
Source type: Periodical
ISSN: 02777126
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