The Secrets of Plastic Language Revealed: Multimodality, Polysemiosis, and Iconicity

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

The notion of “plastic language” (or, as we will say in the following, the plastic layer) of the picture goes back to French structuralism, where it was supposed, just like “iconic language”, to be fundamentally based on arbitrary conventions. Nobody nowadays takes seriously the idea of depiction being purely conventional, but we will argue that the same counterclaim should be made with regard to the plastic layer of the picture. The Ganzheitspsychologie of the early 20^th century, notably that of the Leipzig School, offered fruitful ideas on how to analyze plastic meanings, as did their later followers in the United States, such as Rudolf Arnheim, on one hand, and Heinz Wellek and Bernard Warren, on the other. It is, however, the rather anecdotic evidence presented by Wolfgang Köhler, a member of the more well-known Berlin school of Ganzheitspsychologie, customarily known as Gestalt psychology, which was taken up more recently by V. S. Ramachandran, and applied in a more systematic way by Felix Ahlner and Jordan Zlatev, which paves the way for a serious study of plastic meanings. In this paper, I try to show that, in semiotic terms, plastic meanings tend to manifest secondary iconicity, which means that they have a rich, but indeterminate, potential for similarity, the meaning of which can only be fixed using structural oppositions, and more precisely, proportionalities, that is, relations between two pairs of opposed terms. From the point of view of the indeterminacy of iconic meaning, the plastic layer of pictures is similar to droodles, which, however, manifest this indeterminacy on the level of depiction, and their meaning are usually settled by the means of labels. Droodles differ from pictures, in the narrow sense, which rely on primary iconicity, and thus convey a determinate meaning on their own precisely on the level of depiction.