Seeing Signs

I agree with Sally that this reading was very dense. While it took a long time to absorb, I found that every section of this article was hilled with a sort of meaty flushing out of information we picked up from the reading last week.

Bal describes a division of semiotics broken into three categories:
Pragmatics would be the dimension where the affective efficacy of a work is examined
Semantics includes any hypothesis about the meaning of the work
Syntactics studies the relations between elements of the work to codes or ways of producing meaning. I appreciated the mention of specularity and subjectivity in the interpretation of the icon and the convention of the symbol. Our recognition of the symbol isn’t the point of the symbol; it is interpretation and reading of the symbol, and back to the idea of thinking about the symbol, in which the strength and power of the symbol are evolved.

The five “Barthesian” narritive codes create a “satisfying interpretation of the image in which every detail receives a place . . . it produces the story through the processing of a strange image into a familiar one.” The codes take seemingly unrelated and dissimilar objects in a work and through creating a semiotic scaffolding to hang themselves on they give the viewer of the work a new understanding and familiarity.

I fully appreciated Bals’ addressing of the embedding and dynamism of viewing narrative. When we begin to breakdown the interaction of the protagonist of a work and how their view (pointing?) both interacts with others in a work AND with the viewer we see how integrated and embedded the positions of all characters work together without “monolithic readings” of the work. Furthering this idea, Bal describes how this works with each subject’s agency. The viewer is then totally involved and invited to participate in the representation (setting up the controversy of Manet’s Olympia).

In closing, I just have to point out how great this statement is: “cacophony of incongruous strands of cultural discourses”