Thought I'd try to use the blog as a research tool to float some dissertation ideas. What follows is a rough patch of dissertation writing, something I wrote a couple of weeks ago as part of the semiotic chapter of my dissertation. The material presented here is preliminary--alpha release--and subject to several further rounds of revision.
I won't try to contextualize the passage--it's actually vey peripheral to my main line of thought, and I think it works pretty well as a stand-alone blog piece (although it cuts off here in medias res).
Indexical Relations
"In the graphic arts," Philip Gilbert Hamerton emphatically states, "you cannot get rid of matter. Every drawing is in a substance and on a substance. Every substance used in drawing has its own special and peculiar relations both to nature and to the human mind."[1] The ineluctable fact of the autographic work is that its ontology resides with its materiality. A painting, for example, is not something that can be bootstrapped out of its substrate into a higher-level, abstract realm for the purposes of analysis or transmission. The problem, then, for reproduction appears on the face of it almost insurmountable: theoretically, a painting, drawing, or other autographic work demands lossless transmission: perfect iterability with zero degradation, addition, loss, or other change. Nelson Goodman, in his formidable Languages of Art, formulates what has become a canonical definition: "Let us speak of a work of art as autographic," he writes, "if and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine" (my emphasis). [2]
If genuineness by Goodman's account is a fool's errand, it is at the same time the holy grail of autographic reproduction. Rather than search for a workaround to the materiality conundrum, the more daring or romantic or benighted (according to one's point of view) have embraced it as the road, not the roadblock, to genuineness. Ramified to its logical ends, this means that a reproduction of an autographic work must strive to achieve not only a consummate iconic relation to its original, but also, to use Charles Peirce's terminology, an indexical, i.e., physical, relation. The desire for a representation and, by extension, reproduction that is an effluence of the real runs deep. It is a desire that finds poetic expression in John Ashbery's seascape painter, who importunes the waves in all their grandeur to usurp his canvas, and dips his brush in their foamy pigment, as if the sea itself were his palette. [3] Susan Sontag has argued that photography as a reproductive and artistic medium actualizes this indexical relation:
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. [4]
But what the photomechanical processes finally give us are technologically enhanced iconic relations that Sontag here romanticizes as indexical relations. Unlike the seascape painting in Ashbery's poem, a photograph of the sea is not a metonymic extension of it. Film and half-tone screen dots are self-evidently different from two hydrogen atoms combined with an oxygen atom. To live up to Sontag's boasts, our hypothetical photograph would paradoxically need to harness the light-sensitive properties of the waves themselves to act as an emulsion on which to permanently affix the sea's image.
Technically speaking digital media are allographic not autographic in nature, composed of discontinuous bits of information that can be manipulated in a variety of ways. But the density of the code in some instances is such that phenomenologically we experience them as autographic, making it appropriate in select cases to study these digital objects as hybrid autographic/allographic works. If the icon crossed a technological line in the sand in the photographic age, the index promises to take the same fateful step in our own electronic milieu. Iconic mimesis stakes out its ground in imitation: the subliminal codes of photography, for example, excel at impersonating the codes of other media (paintings or engravings, tapestries or woodcuts). [5] Indexical mimesis, because it seeks to close the material gap between original and copy, represents the next frontier in autographic representation. Today's virtual environments--for all their immersiveness and three-dimensional animation; their special effects, interactivity, and intuitive input/output devices--still relate to the physical world as moving icons--icons pushed to extremes--but icons nonetheless. We are, however, phase-shifting into a new indexical order: the announcement of the first bionic chip by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley in 2000 is a straw in the wind. Assuming scientists continue down this path, we can look ahead to a time when our computer-generated simulacra will run on hardware whose complex circuitry is part machine, part living tissue; our avatars spun from organic matter, more real, somehow, than their progenitors. Galateas, all of them, and we their Pygmalions--or they ours.
If all this sounds hopelessly pie in the sky, we can turn our attention back to the present for more sublunary examples. Indexical relations, as a conceptual corollary of autographic reproduction, often play a token role in more run-of-the-mill reproductions of a predominantly iconic nature. The resulting hybrid can be curious: in January of 2003, Heather Cleary, a librarian, posted a query to the Visual Resources Association listserv requesting feedback on how to shelve a new acquisition. The item in question was a catalogue published in concert with a European exhibition of the work of Czech-born artist Jiri-Georg Dokoupil held in Summer 2002. The catalogue contains two foldouts and eighty-four photographic illustrations of some fifty or more paintings executed in a range of unconventional media, including soot, car tire prints, fruit juice, and inky soap suds.
What makes the so called "bubble book" a potential thorn in the side of librarians everywhere, and what prompted the query from this particular librarian, is the striking binding, which boasts a green liquid precariously sealed inside a clear acetate cover that, were it to leak, could threaten other items in a collection. As Cleary notes, the liquid is "evocative of the soapy fluid the artist uses to create his soap suds paintings." The indexical component is faux, not genuine (the green liquid wasn't spirited away in buckets from Dokoupil's studio, and more than likely its chemical properties differ markedly from those of the artist's own concoction.) But the pure hit of materiality preserved in that binding gives the impression of having been drawn off directly from the source. The invocation of the index is unmistakable.
[ (c) Copyright Kari Kraus 2003]
1. The Graphic Arts (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1882), p. 1.
2. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1976, p. 113.
3. Ashbery's poem, "The Painter," is reproduced in Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1997) p. 319.
4. New York Review of Books, 23 June 1977.
5. See Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts (New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1974) passim.
Lots to think about here, but I'm super glad you have the (what I consider) necessary "but" that follows this assertion:
/quote beginning of 2nd paragraph after [4]/
Technically speaking digital media are allographic not autographic in nature, composed of discontinuous bits of information that can be manipulated in a variety of ways.
/end quote/
I think the "but" following this is essential - while everything digital necessarily breaks down into 1s and 0s, that does not mean that most users can properly manipulate those 1s and 0s. I'm thinking, for example, of a gif, composed entirely of text, saved as a gif - photoshop file erased. Sure, I can recreate it; I can erase it and manipulate the gif in photoshop, but I'm not really *changing* the gif. I'm creating a new file.
Not sure I'm articulating myself very well, but I think it's a crucial distinction (I’m at work, so brain power on empty). Then again, I'm not a huge fan of Goodman's allographic/autographic distinctions, which I find fairly problematic...
Thanks for sharing the diss. snippet – really lots to think about. You said you this was a “rough” patch – were there particular issues here that you are struggling with (and wanted feedback on)? Or did you just mean “rough draft” (if so, it’s pretty damn good for “rough” – makes my writing look downright sandpapery).
Very interesting, Jason. I want to make sure I've understood your comment:
As I understand it, the Zoom feature in Photoshop (to take one example) works by simple pixel duplication. Are you saying that if I zoom, say, a jpeg from the Blake Archive (which I've dragged into my image processing window), I'm not really interpolating pixels into the original jpeg file but rather _into a copy of that file_?
That's a good piece of information to have, but I'm not sure it suggests the image is something other than allographic. If, for example, I were George's seventeenth-century reader transcribing a Donne poem into my commnonplace book, and I transcribed "letter" as "lettter," I've duplicated the "t", but I've duplicated it into my _copy_ and not into the exemplar. Analogous situation to the image file, but the process is still unambiguously allographic.
Have I convinced you? ;-)
Thanks for the feedback. Very useful. I'll continue to wrestle with the allographic/autographic hybrid stuff.
Hmm. I think I might be screwing up Goodman's distinction b/w allographic and autographic, so you might have to clarify for me. And I'm not sure I understand my own comment, so let me approach it from a different direction.
Ok, *as I recall* we have Goodman's distinction between allographic (systems of writing, for example, such as the alphabet) and autographic (a painting, which can not be duplicated without loss). Is this right? A variant introduced (such as the prayer book example) does not alter the system from allographic to autographic - that is granted. It's simply a variant of an allographic system.
Here's the hypothetical scenario:
I create 3 files that are to be displayed side by side. The first file is an image file created in photoshop that is just the word "unique" typed in 12pt TimesNewRoman, black on white background, saved as the gif. The second is a Flash screen, where I type the word "unique" in TimesNewRoman, black on white background. The third is ASCII text, formatted to TimesNewRoman, black text, white background, the word is also "unique"
On the very basic level, computers recognize each of these items as a collection of 1s and 0s - again, an allographic system. But here are my questions:
1. is the algorithm itself autographic or allographic (esp. in regards to Flash and Photoshop)?
2. the text (in print, an allograph) looks the same in all 3 examples. As I recall, Goodman stresses proper spelling as the measure of a successful copy - are these then successful copies? In other words, if the text looks the same (which we'll assume it does - "unique" in 12pt timesnewroman, black on white background) but the 1s and 0s are different (because they would be), what do we make of that?
3. Or, are we dealing with a mis-spelled "t" in a prayer book, but just on a lower order (in the binary or algorithm)?
It seems like we have at least 3 considerations - the binary, the algorithms, and the display. Which is privileged?
I have no idea - I'm just intrigued by what I see as a complicated issue (mainly, b/c Goodman makes my brain hurt and I’m hoping you can help a bit with that). Am I just too worried that copying something in ketchup is substantially different than copying something in blood?
Whew!! That's a lot to think about, Jason. I need to let it gestate for a while. Some of these issues seem to overlap with the previous discussion of xhtml/css (will the _real_ text please stand up?). A several-layers deep palimpsest of numbers and symbols.
As a note to myself, I want to post a quick addendum to the previous point about manipulating a copy of the jpeg rather than the jpeg itself. Matt reminded me that anytime you, say, open a file sitting on the desktop, whether an image file or something else, what you're actually working with is a copy of it held in RAM. I need to go back and read the relevant sections in _How Computers Work_. (Damn: the humanist has to be such a polymath these days.)
Thanks for putting my synapses through their paces, Jason. I've benefitted enormously from your comments.
Kari,
Could you elaborate on your reading of Sontag? You write/wrote:
"But what the photomechanical processes finally give us are technologically enhanced iconic relations that Sontag here romanticizes as indexical relations."
I think that there is something interesting at work here. In your passage, there is a move from materiality (the distinctions Goodman makes) to logic (the typology of signs that Pierce gives us). I'm not quite sure how the passage from considerations of how a sign is produced (Goodman on forgery and reproduction) to considerations of how a sign is categorized (icon, index, symbol) map onto each other or point to each other. The key to this apparent leap may be in the ascription of romanticization to Sontag's description. Sontag is in some sense a symbol. Of what? perhaps more writing will tell....
You're a subtle reader, Francois. There are certain hazards to mixing one's theorists, and here you've stumbled across one. But while there certainly isn't an isomorphic or one-to-one mapping between Goodman and Peirce, I still think they overlap in interesting ways. Peirce's "symbol" more or less aligns with Goodman's allographic media, his "icon" and "index" with autographic media. Is Goodman really offering any less a typology of signs than Peirce?
I'll continue to develop this section with your and Jason's helpful remarks in mind. Thanks for your input!
Kari
Ah, you flatter me. "Subtle reader" indeed :)
Your question calls up another. Is Goodman offering a typology of "signs" or a typology of "artefacts"? He is dealing with systems or instances? I ask because I recently came across this neat little summary of index/icon relations:
No particular objects are intrinsically icons, indices, or symbols. They are interpreted to be so, depending on what is produced in response. In simple terms, the differences between iconic, indexical, and symbolic relationships derive from regarding things either with respect to their form, their correlations with other things, or their involvement in systems of conventional relationships
That is Terrence W. Deacon summarizing Pierce in _The Symbolic Species_ Although I don't agree with the evolutionary scheme (icon to index to symbol Deacon describes, I think it is well recalling in the context of comparing Goodman and Pierce that the latter has a tripartite understanding of the sign that provides an interesting place to the Interpretant. Goodman might be offering a typology of Interpretants ??