The previous post argued that any genuinely systemic-functional account of visual semiosis must begin from what Halliday calls the view from above. Rather than starting with visible forms and attempting to infer meanings from them, we begin with meaning potential and ask how that potential is realised in particular instances.
Before we can investigate visual meaning itself, however, we need to answer a more fundamental question.
Where does visual semiosis sit within the architecture of Systemic Functional Linguistics?
This question is important because visual semiosis is frequently discussed either as though it were simply another language or as though it were an entirely different kind of phenomenon requiring a separate theoretical framework. From a Hallidayan perspective, neither position is satisfactory.
Visual semiosis belongs within the same general theory of semiosis as language. At the same time, it is not merely a variant of language, nor should it be analysed by importing linguistic categories wholesale into the visual domain.
To understand why, we need to begin with Halliday's account of semiotic systems.
Content and Expression
Following Hjelmslev, Halliday treats a semiotic system as involving two planes of symbolic abstraction:
a content plane
an expression plane
The content plane concerns meaning.
The expression plane concerns the forms through which meaning is realised.
Neither plane exists independently of the other. A semiotic system is constituted by their relation.
This immediately places visual semiosis within the same general semiotic architecture as language.
Images are not merely physical artefacts.
Nor are they collections of visual stimuli.
They are semiotic phenomena because they involve the relation of content and expression.
Visual semiosis therefore possesses both a content plane and an expression plane.
This much it shares with language.
Where Language Differs
The crucial difference emerges when we look more closely at the content plane.
Language possesses a highly unusual architecture.
Its content plane is itself stratified into two further levels of symbolic abstraction:
semantics
lexicogrammar
This additional stratification allows language to organise meaning through a complex system of grammatical resources.
Visual semiosis does not appear to possess this additional level.
Its content plane is not further stratified into semantics and grammar.
This distinction is fundamental.
Much work in visual analysis has been driven by the search for visual equivalents of linguistic categories. Analysts have sought visual vocabularies, visual grammars, visual clauses, visual syntax, and visual sentences.
Such analogies may occasionally be suggestive.
But they risk obscuring the very feature that makes visual semiosis theoretically interesting.
Visual semiosis is not language.
The challenge is not to discover a hidden visual grammar.
The challenge is to understand how a semiotic system operates when its content plane is not organised through lexicogrammar.
Context Above Semiosis
The architecture becomes clearer when we look upward rather than downward.
In Halliday's account, semiotic systems do not exist in isolation.
They participate in a higher level of symbolic abstraction: context.
Context is not simply an environment surrounding semiotic activity.
It is itself semiotic.
Language realises context.
Visual semiosis also realises context.
Indeed, this is one of the reasons different semiotic systems can participate in the same social situations. They are related not because they share the same expressive resources, but because they realise the same contextual values.
From the perspective of the view from above, context remains primary.
Language becomes intelligible through the contextual values it realises.
Visual semiosis becomes intelligible through the contextual values it realises.
The explanatory movement remains the same.
Instantiation and Visual Potential
Visual semiosis is also subject to the dimension of instantiation.
Just as there is no language apart from its potential and its instances, there is no visual semiosis apart from its potential and its instances.
Particular images are instances.
The semiotic possibilities available to a visual system constitute its potential.
Between these poles lies the familiar midpoint of the instantiation cline: the region where subpotentials and instance types emerge.
This observation may seem obvious, but it has important consequences.
A photograph, diagram, painting, map, infographic, advertisement, or technical drawing should not be treated simply as an object.
Each is an instance of a meaning potential.
Consequently, the theoretical task is not merely to describe the image itself.
The task is to understand the potential of which it is an actualisation.
Again, the view from above remains decisive.
Metafunction Is Global
There is one further point that will become increasingly important as the series develops.
The metafunctional organisation of meaning is not peculiar to language.
Halliday's metafunctions are principles of semiotic organisation.
Visual semiosis therefore cannot be understood apart from:
ideational meaning
interpersonal meaning
textual meaning
The precise manner in which these meanings are organised visually remains an open question.
But the question itself is unavoidable.
If visual semiosis is a semiotic system, it must participate in the metafunctional organisation of meaning.
This will become a central concern in later posts.
A Semiotic System in Its Own Right
At this point, we can locate visual semiosis within Halliday's architecture.
Like language, it possesses:
content and expression planes
participation in context through realisation
potential and instance through instantiation
metafunctional organisation
Unlike language, however, its content plane is not further stratified into semantics and lexicogrammar.
This difference is not a deficiency.
Nor does it make visual semiosis a primitive form of language.
It simply means that visual semiosis must be understood on its own terms.
The goal of a systemic-functional theory of visual semiosis is therefore not to discover visual equivalents of linguistic structures.
It is to understand how visual meaning operates within the same general semiotic architecture while exhibiting a different internal organisation.
The next post explores the implications of this distinction directly. If images are not languages, what exactly follows from the absence of lexicogrammar?
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