Meaning does not have to remain in words.
A relation that matters can become a gesture.
A value can become a ritual.
A story can become an image.
A concept can become a diagram.
A musical pattern can become associated with a character.
The possibility of giving meaning a material form is one of the great expansions of human semiosis.
But we should be careful about what this means.
An image is not automatically a sign.
A sign is not automatically a representation.
And representation is not simply the same thing as copying.
The question is more interesting:
What happens when a relation of meaning becomes materially available in another mode?
A mark is not yet an image
Consider a mark on stone.
It is physically present.
It may have been produced deliberately.
It may record an action.
It may attract attention.
But none of this tells us that it represents something.
A footprint, for example, can matter because it is evidence of an animal's presence. Its relation to the animal is causal.
A handprint can similarly function as a trace of the person who made it.
A repeated line can organise a surface.
A pattern can be part of a ritual.
A form can therefore be significant without yet functioning as a representation.
We need to distinguish the physical mark from the semiotic relations in which it participates.
Resemblance changes the possibilities
An image can introduce another relation: resemblance.
A painted animal resembles an animal.
A portrait resembles a person.
A drawing of a landscape resembles a landscape.
This resemblance matters because it allows a perceiver to recognise a relation between the visible form and something encountered elsewhere.
But resemblance alone does not produce symbolic meaning.
Clouds can resemble animals.
A stain can resemble a face.
A photograph can resemble a person without being a symbolic statement about that person.
Iconicity therefore provides a resource for semiosis.
It does not, by itself, constitute semiosis.
The image can participate in several relations
A single visual form can therefore occupy several positions at once.
It can be:
a physical mark;
a trace of an action;
an iconic likeness;
a ritual object;
a socially significant form;
a symbol.
These possibilities need not replace one another.
An image can remain materially and socially significant while acquiring symbolic meaning.
This is important because representation should not be imagined as a clean break with everything that came before it.
Meaning can accumulate.
A new relation can be added to existing ones.
Representation creates distance
Something changes, however, when an image can function as a representation.
The image can now be encountered as something that refers beyond itself.
The animal depicted on a wall need not be physically present.
The person in a portrait need not be in the room.
The landscape on a map need not surround us.
The event depicted in a scene need not be happening now.
Representation therefore creates a new relation between presence and absence.
Something present in one form can make something absent available to experience.
This is one of the great powers of the sign.
But representation is not simple copying
It is tempting to tell a familiar story:
humans first saw the world,then learned to draw what they saw,and eventually became better at representing it.
But this assumes that representation is essentially imitation.
Our investigation suggests something richer.
To represent is not merely to reproduce appearance.
It is to construe something through a particular form.
A picture selects.
It frames.
It emphasises.
It excludes.
It combines.
It places things in relation.
Even the most apparently realistic image is an organisation of possibilities.
The image does not simply reproduce the world.
It offers a way of construing it.
Meaning takes spatial form
This becomes particularly interesting because different modes make different kinds of construal possible.
Language unfolds in time.
An image can organise many relations simultaneously in space.
Language can say that one event preceded another.
An image can place two figures side by side.
A line can connect them.
A boundary can separate them.
A central position can distinguish one element from another.
Representation therefore does not merely transport meaning from one medium to another.
It reorganises the meaning according to the affordances of the new mode.
A temporal relation can become spatial.
A narrative sequence can become a composition.
A complex relation can become a visible pattern.
The image as an instance of meaning potential
We can now bring back the idea of potential.
A visual semiotic system contains possibilities for organising shape, colour, position, scale, orientation and composition.
A particular image is an instance of those possibilities.
But once the image participates in a cultural semiotic system, it can also become an instance of a wider meaning potential.
Its significance depends upon the possibilities made available by the system.
A circle can be a geometric form.
In another context it can become a symbol.
A particular colour can be perceptually salient.
It can also become culturally conventional.
A figure can be recognisable as an animal.
It can also participate in a myth.
The same form can therefore belong to several potentials simultaneously.
The prehistoric image
This is where the earliest surviving images become especially difficult — and interesting.
A painted animal in a cave may have been significant in ways we can no longer reconstruct.
It may have been part of ritual activity.
It may have been connected with hunting.
It may have participated in a story.
It may have had a conventional symbolic role.
It may have been valued for its appearance or form.
It may have done several of these things simultaneously.
We should therefore resist asking prematurely:
What did this image mean?
A better first question is:
What kinds of relations might this image have been participating in?
Only then can we begin asking which of those relations might have become symbolic.
Lascaux and the problem of context
The paintings of Lascaux illustrate the problem particularly well.
The images do not survive as isolated pictures in a modern gallery.
They exist within a cave.
The cave has darkness, depth, acoustics, passages and spatial organisation.
The images occupy particular surfaces and locations.
People had to move through the space.
Light had to be brought into it.
Whatever the original significance of the paintings, it is unlikely to have been exhausted by the visual forms considered independently of this environment.
The image may have been one element in a larger semiotic ecology.
We should therefore be cautious about treating prehistoric art as an early version of the modern picture hanging on a wall.
Newgrange and meaning across modes
Newgrange makes the same point differently.
The carvings are inseparable from stone, architecture, orientation, movement and the changing light of the year.
Whatever the precise historical interpretations of the monument, its significance cannot plausibly be reduced to the visual appearance of individual carvings alone.
Meaning can be distributed.
Stone contributes.
Space contributes.
Light contributes.
Time contributes.
Movement contributes.
The image participates in a larger organisation.
This is one of the reasons multimodality matters to the history of representation.
The image may condense a relation
Perhaps the most useful possibility is that an early image can condense a relational pattern into a material form.
A particular animal can condense recurring experiences of animal movement, hunting, danger, abundance or seasonal activity.
A repeated pattern can condense relations of symmetry, recurrence or orientation.
A hybrid figure can condense a relation between categories that would otherwise remain difficult to make perceptible.
We should not leap from this to a claim about what the makers intended.
The point is more modest.
A visual form can make a relation available to perception.
And once such relations become available to perception, they may become available for further semiotic construal.
The hybrid figure
This brings us back to the intriguing figure at Trois Frères that Campbell discussed.
He observed that in the early paintings:
"the animal and human forms are mixed"
and described the painted animals as "animal germs or Platonic ideals of the herd."
We need not adopt Campbell's terminology or assume that we know exactly what the figure meant.
But the mixed form raises an important question.
Perhaps what is being made visible is not simply an unusual creature.
Perhaps a relation between human and animal has been given a particular form.
The figure may therefore be interesting not because it depicts something that existed, but because it materialises a relation that mattered.
Whether that relation was ritual, mythic, metaphorical or something else remains open.
When representation becomes symbolic
At some point, however, an image can do more than make a relation perceptible.
It can become part of a system in which that relation is symbolically construed.
The image may acquire a conventional association.
Its use may become recognisable.
It can be reproduced in different contexts.
It can be interpreted through words or other images.
It can participate in stories.
It can invoke something absent.
The visual form has now entered a semiotic potential.
It has become not simply an image, but a sign.
The image does not stop being an image
This is worth emphasising.
When an image becomes a sign, it does not cease to have visual properties.
Its colour still matters.
Its shape still matters.
Its composition still matters.
Its material realisation still matters.
Its cultural history still matters.
The symbolic relation is added to an already organised form.
This is analogous to what we discovered with music.
Music can become meaningful without ceasing to be music.
An image can become symbolic without ceasing to be an image.
Semiotic recruitment adds possibilities rather than erasing earlier ones.
Representation and participation
This also means that participation and representation need not be opposites.
A ritual image may participate in a ceremony while representing something.
A sacred object may remain materially present while invoking an absent being.
A portrait may preserve the physical presence of a person while standing for their identity.
A musical performance may coordinate people while symbolising a community.
The emergence of representation therefore need not be understood as the replacement of participation by detached observation.
It can be understood as the layering of a new relation onto an existing field of relations.
The sign can eventually become autonomous
Something more happens as symbolic systems mature.
A representation can become detachable from the event that produced it.
An image can travel.
It can be copied.
It can be placed elsewhere.
Its original context can be lost while its symbolic role survives.
This is another step toward the separation of sign and referent.
The image acquires a degree of autonomy.
It can now participate in a symbolic history independent of the particular circumstances of its origin.
That possibility is enormously important for cultural inheritance.
Meaning can be externalised
An image therefore does something language cannot do in exactly the same way.
It externalises a configuration spatially.
A relation can be fixed in a material arrangement.
Someone encountering the image later can return to the same configuration.
The meaning does not have to be reconstructed entirely from memory.
It has acquired a durable material form.
This helps explain the cultural power of images.
They allow meanings to persist beyond the moment of their production.
The visual sign is systemic
But the image does not become meaningful simply by being preserved.
Its symbolic role still depends upon a semiotic system.
A particular form can mean something in one cultural environment and something quite different in another.
A colour, animal, pattern or gesture may acquire different associations in different traditions.
Meaning therefore remains relational.
The material form is one element.
The cultural potential is another.
The participant's repertoire matters.
The context matters.
The history matters.
The sign emerges from their relation.
From metaphor to image
This brings us back to the previous post.
Metaphor allows one meaning to become a resource for another.
Representation allows a relation of meaning to acquire material form.
These are not the same process.
But they are related.
A metaphor can reveal a relation.
A relation can become salient.
A visual form can condense it.
The form can enter a semiotic system.
It can become a sign.
This suggests a possible pathway:
meaning → relational construal → material form → semiotic sign
It is not a universal historical sequence.
But it gives us a way of thinking about how meaning can become visible.
From image to symbolic world
Once images become signs, they can enter relations with other signs.
An image can be interpreted by words.
A story can give an image a history.
A ritual can give it a social function.
A musical pattern can reinforce its significance.
A landscape can locate it.
The image is no longer isolated.
It becomes a node within a larger symbolic ecology.
And this is where representation begins to lead beyond the single image toward stories, myths and multimodal worlds.
The image that means
We can therefore answer the question with which we began.
When does meaning take form?
It takes form when a relation that can be construed within a semiotic system becomes materially instantiated in a particular mode.
The form does not contain meaning.
It participates in it.
The meaning does not cease to be relational because it has become visible.
The image has become another resource through which the semiotic system can organise its potential.
And that creates a new possibility.
Once an image has a symbolic role, it can itself enter into relations with other signs.
It can be interpreted.
Reused.
Combined.
Contradicted.
Placed within a narrative.
It can become part of a world of meaning.
That is where we are heading next.
For the image need not remain a representation of something.
It can become part of a story about something.
And when images, words and practices begin to construe one another, meaning acquires an entirely new scale.
What happens when image and story begin to make a world together?
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