ECO, PEIRCE, AND ICONISM: A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
I. INTRODUCTION
The theme of the icon has interested Umberto Eco since his earliest writings and his study of it has led him to important conceptual shifts and has further underlined the philosophical significance of his exploration of semiotics. Starting from this assumption it is possible to demonstrate that Eco’s most original theoretical proposition can be found within the debate on iconism. Clearly of no little significance in this respect is the fact that the philosophical tradition to which Eco most often refers is that of Peirce. Indeed, it is on his reassessment of Peirce and his cognitive semiotics that Eco’s “general” semiotics depends, in opposition to various instances of “regional” or banally empirical semiotics. It was an ambitious goal—as I shall try to demonstrate—and achieved by embracing the question of what Being and representation, infinity and threshold are, and how perception and cognition are to be understood in a post-Kantian and poststructuralist context.1 Instead of focusing primarily on the objects of technical investigation, Eco boldly goes further than this, setting his own discipline in between ontology, hermeneutics, and rationalism in his search for an autonomous theoretical space. This is, moreover, what Peirce himself did in his revision of Kantian philosophy when he laid down the need to develop a science of signs that would rise above the sole alternative of empiricism or rationalism.
So if we assume that what we have is a semiotic triangle, such as that attributed to Peirce several times but never actually identified, with sign, icon, and dynamical object (using Peirce’s own terminology) at its vertices, we can discern that area at the heart of which lies the most important philosophical kernel of Eco’s work.2 This applies not only to the theme of similarity and representation but also to what he himself defines as the “lower threshold” of semiotics, which can for now be roughly expressed thus: how is it that “something” offers itself for interpretation?3 If we create signs it is because “something” compels us to do so, literally “kicking” us and challenging us to translate the pain into words or figures.4 How is the threshold set where feeling pain turns into knowing you have been kicked?
Looking at it from a synthetic perspective, which I attempt to develop in this essay, it can therefore be asserted that the theme of iconism prompts Eco to deal with two essentially philosophical questions. What does it mean to recognize something as (similar to) something? And what is—or at what level of understanding is given—this first something, out there, which summons the sign and demands an interpretant response? As can be inferred, what is at stake here is no small matter, namely, the theme of the moment at which interpretation begins—the source of cognitive experience—and the limits of interpretation.
I shall thus proceed on the basis of certain assumptions. At the center of Peirce’s philosophical semiotics stands the towering idea of the icon, the key to interpreting the idea of reference to the object and figuration of what exists. Likewise, at the heart of Eco’s general semiotics there is a similar investigation that leads him to point his propositions in a precise direction and to reconfigure them in an original ontological format. So while iconism is the test bed for the writer’s first semiotic reflections, it certainly must be said that iconism also runs as a common thread through his later period and concurs in the forging of a highly rigorous philosophy of semiotics. What is more, I would go so far as to maintain that if Eco had not looked again at the question of the icon, neither Kant and the Platypus nor some of his other important writings in the first years of the twenty-first century would ever have been written. These works undoubtedly mark an important turning point in the Italian semiologist’s scientific work.
I shall then go on to consider three phases in Eco’s contemplation of this theme: the first from the earliest writings, from La struttura assente (The absent structure) to A Theory of Semiotics, and the second starting with Kant and the Platypus and continuing for ten years, up to the most recent phase initiated by “La soglia e l’infinito” (“The Threshold and the Infinite”), a short work of 2007 in which the whole question is clearly defined and partially reformulated. In each of these phases—as is his generous custom, but one that is not very common in the Italian academic world—Eco has taken into consideration the criticisms and observations of his readers (not only of his fellow academics) and patiently reshaped the space inside the triangle mentioned above.
Before proceeding with my analysis of Eco’s ideas, however, I would like to outline my own perspective on what is at stake in this particular complex semiotic theme. It has been manifest from the outset, even in narrowly semiotic circles, that to discuss iconism does not only involve investigating images, diagrams, metaphors, and the like. Also addressed is the question, closely interwoven with philosophical matters, of what the sign refers to and the legitimacy of representation. It is sufficient to recall that Peirce was very precise in defining the icon as the first sign in the relation with the object, and he talked of it as a first not only in the sense of category but also hierarchically speaking. In doing so, he wanted the discussion of semiotics first of all to clarify the aspect of how a “something” gives itself as a representamen of an other. Put more precisely, the problem of iconism is first and foremost the problem for thought of the relation between an object and its substitute, the problem of the assimilation between a datum and a significatum (or an event and its meaning). How is it that if I scald myself with coffee both one morning and then the next, I say it’s the “same” painful experience? How is it that when I look at the depiction of a cup, even a highly stylized one, I see the real china cup? How does it happen that I see the coffee cup I’m using as a cup for coffee? Finally, and even more starkly, how does any sign-figure offer itself to the mind or to the interpretant (sticking with the not very mentalist Peirce)? How does an event stand out against a background of what is senseless and impermanent, allowing me to exclaim, along with Whitehead, “Here it is again!” and thus initiate a sensible response to its occurrence? How, in short, is it that the world presents itself every morning in the figure of a coffee cup?5
It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that these various questions frame the different ways in which iconicity appears. The first entails a comparison of the similarities between different perceptual experiences. The second introduces references to the mechanism for the conventional production of similarities. The third, more broadly, presents the theme (also addressed with concern by Wittgenstein) of knowing as seeing as, as well as the theme of the universals of thought. The last question, even more general, seeks an explanation of cognition tout court and points towards an answer—again, perhaps, inevitably Platonic—that refers to cognition as re-cognition and repetition of what has already been seen. All the questions, however, imply that there is a question mark over what Eco defines as the lower threshold of primary iconism. This can be outlined by speaking of “protosemiotic disposition” towards encounter, or even, in a new sense of adaequatio, of aptitude for adapting to what is peculiar to us (what is our own),6 of the flow of perception along the nerves of Being, of near coercion into making the congruent response.7 We shall see how Eco tries out the various solutions and negotiates the most suitable terms. What is important here is that exactly the right question is being addressed, especially keeping Peirce’s work in mind. A radical approach to the theme of the icon entails maintaining a constructivist heuristics, though without demeaning the motivational hypothesis; or, in more theoretical terms, avoiding the drift of endless interpretation without yielding to the strong “ontological” hypothesis.8
The problem of iconism resides in the very dispositional nucleus mentioned above: the “primary” likeness is between the that of the something that is and the what this something is.9 The place (locus) of the image is that of the infinite translation of the world into gesture, sign, and figure: a figure that is and at the same time is not the world; that is both adequateness and distance within an identity-alterity also reintroduced an infinite number of times. Iconism is therefore more a transcendental and constitutive place than a particular aspect of the working of the sign. To use Eco’s words: “The icon is a phenomenon that founds all possible judgment of likeness, but it cannot be founded on likeness itself.”10
His reference to the themes opened up by Kantian schematism is still impressive, though Eco frequently points out with justification that Kant failed to grasp the radical nature of his own doubts. While the schema is “a hidden art in the depth of the human soul”—the art of manipulating monograms of pure a priori imagination, which makes images possible without being reduced to them—it has to be conceded that without opening out an iconic ground there would be no understanding of things. If, furthermore, as Wittgenstein believed, summing up centuries of philosophical reflection, logic depicts reality by proposing a picture-model of the facts, and the possibility of all similitude in expression lies within a logic of depiction, then the problem of the icon is the problem of logic (that is, of semiotics) par excellence.11 As we shall see below, this had been very clearly understood by Peirce—and Eco, on the basis thereof, presents us with a new map of this territory and brings into play a philosophy of iconism that is most probably unique.
II. THE DEBATE ON ICONISM IN THE 1970S
In the mid-1960s semiotics in Italy was a new discipline trying to make its own way in a context still dominated by idealist philosophies and their materialist-Marxist opponents. Its main theoretical point of reference was structuralism, given that Saussure had been the founder of the contemporary science of signs and had provided very effective tools for interpreting cultural phenomena.
An intense debate with widespread participation was sparked off by Christian Metz.12 Starting from a discussion on the specific nature of the cinematographic sign and the possibility or impossibility of its structural assimilation into linguistics, the debate involved many well-known figures in cultural life at that time—to mention just three, there was an inspired proposal from Pier Paolo Pasolini, the always very perceptive criticism of Ugo Volli, and the proud resistance to the idealistic drift by the artist and designer Tomás Maldonado. Arising out of the understandable need to apply signs in their multiple forms to classify and give discreet form to the “vague” world of images, the project of a semiological science worthy of the name staked its claim at the level of visual phenomena for almost a decade.
The “semiological battle”—as Eco calls it in La struttura assente, his most important work during those years—had to be conducted on the front of iconic phenomena because to single out, equally in this field, the modalities (though weak) of codification meant to become emancipated from the strictly linguistic context and to dominate an increasingly important area of cultural activity: think of the interest during that period in the research on media and images by McLuhan or, from another angle, by Baudrillard. The attempt was, unfortunately, only partially successful. Although a precise and working typology of sign production modalities was formulated and incorporated in the work that concluded this cultural period, A Theory of Semiotics, the dispute over iconism came into collision with the “older” but perhaps also unresolvable philosophical question concerning the relation between representation and reality. At this level one ended up expatiating on whether such representation could be viewed as mediated, perspectival, or even arbitrary, or whether it still contained traces of motivation, that is, of a natural link between expression and content. As Calabrese notes, the old clash between idealism and materialism was thus reenacted in the field of semiotics.13
Let us start, however, at the beginning. The semiological challenge was played out initially in terms of whether it was possible to employ the double linguistic articulation in relation to continuity in film narration, too. This is undoubtedly an arduous task and one that was quickly brought to an end by Eco in one of the most intensely semiotic chapters in La struttura assente. He singles out the obstinate insistence on reproposing the articulation shaped by the phoneme-moneme alternation as one of the elements that had made the debate sterile, and points a finger at the idea of motivation, even where phenomena seem to appeal to an evident analogy with their originals. His aim became that of going beyond these two dead ends at an earlier stage by stating that the first is characterized by relativity and, above all, that the second is not relevant within a semiotic perspective. What’s more, the problem of the icon soon turned into a test bed for semiology due to the fact that it does not lend itself to codification in structural terms since at first glance it appears to be naturally motivated, analogic, and spontaneous.14 Subjected to epistemic examination, the icon turns out to be organized by codes, but codes that are sui generis and not necessarily based on an articulation like that of linguistics.
Eco endeavored in the first place to debunk the myth of analogy: if the iconic sign has something in common with something else, this other thing is not the object but the “perceptual model” of this same object.15 An image can be constructed and recognized on the basis of the same mental operations that we carry out to elaborate a corresponding percept and, on closer inspection, we see that a graphic schema reproduces the relational properties of a mental schema (Kant would say of the pure imagination) and not of the object as it is “out there.” In fact Eco proceeded once and for all to clear up a misunderstanding that, in his view, caused confusion over the young science of signs and needed to be overcome. In semiotics the problem of the referent is irrelevant and to talk of things in themselves may be of interest to the metaphysician but not to the semiologist, who is interested in meanings and in the modes of sign production.16 So it is not a question of trying to be true to what is real in recording a visual experience, but, rather, of aiming for a true reconstruction of the same relational and “schematic” model that is activated in the mind in the presence of a real event. It is a model that therefore has to be reconstructed according to very sophisticated and conventional codes in order to give the impression of maximum adherence to the object.
The impression of likeness thus began to take shape as a sensation, by no means natural, but one that is heuristic and selective and tied to perception as a “process regulated by a code.” In those years Eco believed that this process should be taken as being entirely conventional: when I see an image that shows me a glass of chilled beer, I perceive beer, glass, and cold but I certainly do not feel them directly. The experience of the image communicates to me only visual, spatial, and color stimuli that I coordinate to the point of elaborating a complex perceptual structure that turns out to be exactly like the one perceived when the real glass is in front of me. Iconic signs, he concluded in marked contrast to the contemporary debate,17 reproduce some of the conditions for perceiving the object, “but after having selected them on the basis of codes of recognition and recorded them according to graphic conventions.”18 Later on, in his short but invaluable work Il segno (The sign), Eco expressed his thinking more clearly. The iconic sign does not resemble denoted reality because it offers itself as a gift to our perception; rather, it is a sign that is conventionally codified and produced so as to generate that appearance we call likeness: “the sense of causal dependence on the object is not an effect of the object but of the sign’s productive convention.”19 Hence the need, in order to work on the icon semiotically, to establish some features for recognizing the object that can be found at the cultural level, to decide that some graphic features correspond to these properties, and, lastly, to elaborate “the modalities of producing the perceptible correspondence between recognition features and graphic features.”20 The idea of iconic sign embraces a wide range of productive operations based on precise conventions and procedures, and the task of carrying out these operations is assigned to a more developed science of signs.
As rapidly occurred in other fields as well, Eco’s position became predominant among scholars and gradually led to the interpretation of likeness in terms of analogy, the natural reference to the “external” world being abandoned almost unanimously. It came to be believed that this approach is inevitably encrusted with metaphysics and that one should analyze the varied production of likenesses and study the conventional modalities by which similarity is constituted. The revision of the theme of the icon reached its peak with A Theory of Semiotics, in which it is established with great clarity that a typology of signs will have to give way to a typology of modalities of sign production, just as the notion of sign will need to be replaced by that of sign-function. This approach is thought to have resolved the “all-purpose” notion of iconism by referring to the “procedure instituting the basic conditions for a transformation.”21 The challenging “Critique of Iconism,” which takes up a long chapter, ends by getting rid of the overly vague and awkward notion of icon: “it is the very notion of sign which is untenable and which makes the derived notion of ‘iconic sign’ so puzzling.”22 It should be taken as an “umbrella term” so that, in the end, the traditional notion of sign is also unusable.23 It is better to refine and analyze it in its minimal elements, to try to subject it to tests of transformations and separate codifications and subtle operational testing, all of which eventually reveals that iconic signs “are strung out along a sort of gradated continuum from minimal convention ([as in] congruences. . .) to a maximal convention as in stylization.”24 They should be gotten “rid of” as such: indeed, rather than depending on a code, visual texts appear themselves to institute a code. The crisis of iconism thus leads to a profounder failure, and the old modi significandi (which mirrored the modi essendi) gives way to the more modern (and materialist) modi faciendi signa.
This phase in Eco’s research is explained very clearly in the sixth chapter of Kant and the Platypus.25 He says that in defense of a rigorous and antimetaphysical epistemic vision, opposition was put up against too uninhibited a use of the notion of likeness that dispensed with thinking about the rules for constructing similarity. But this meant embracing a perhaps worse form of metaphysics permeated with empiricism and scientism, rigidly conventionalist and blind to the modalities in which like appears as like, as the exact congruence of the response. In short, what was avoided was going beyond “the edge of semiosis” towards those phenomena that seemed to display an unchangeable likeness between percept and stimulus. Stated with great frankness many years later, the real nub of the misunderstanding lay “in the immediate passage from the primary iconism of perception (that is, from the evidence that relations of likeness exist perceptually) to an established theory of similarity, in other words, of the creation of the effect of likeness.”26 Moreover, even in these early writings there was a suggestion that iconic recognition might lie concealed in the very creases of sensible perception and perhaps find there a point of resistance beyond culture’s codified conventions. But what in the 1970s were just hints, put into circulation with some hesitation, would later become a solid foundation on which to present the theme of the icon in a different way. This does not of course detract from the value of the theoretical formulation of those years, which was audacious and very rewarding, as the long-lasting success of A Theory of Semiotics shows. Directed at a realism that had had its day, the fight against “ingenuous naturalism” in respect of iconism would achieve a definitive victory.
The fact that the theme of likeness was permeated by metaphysics, and unfortunately often bad metaphysics, is shown by the last diatribe to close this decade of debate. It consisted of a heated exchange of views between Eco and Maldonado on the relation between images and reality.27 From an entrenched Marxist position influenced by neopositivism, Maldonado maintained that similarity has a very high cognitive value and confronts us with “true” reality since it is tied naturaliter to that from which it emanates. To deny this means to take sides with Galileo’s opponents, who vehemently asserted that what the scientist saw through his telescope was not real. It therefore means falling back into the great idealist current that, especially in Italy, has never died out. Here is not the place to go over the entire debate, now only of documentary interest. Eco replied sharply to the attacks, distinguishing between the “technical” work of the semiologist and philosophical speculation (and between images seen directly and those reproduced). What in my opinion is noteworthy, however, is that Maldonado forced Eco to deal with the wide and unresolved background of questions behind any reflection on images. This background refers explicitly to the great ontological and epistemological questions in philosophy: what is reality and how can it be given representation? How does one reach the maximum possible adequateness between sign and object? Is cognition a mirroring of reality? And so on. In his attempt to tackle these huge questions, Maldonado quotes Wittgenstein: “we picture facts to ourselves.”28 But this is precisely the point. What does making a picture of a fact for oneself mean? How are we to understand these terms? The conflict between the two semiologists soon abated, overwhelmed by the enormity of the questions raised. However, once freed from any reference to them, which was considered too broad and so ineffective in practice, the technical investigation also lost momentum and tailed off into sterility. After 1975 the debate on iconism gradually faded out, now of interest only to a few specialists, as if there was nothing left to say about iconism once the philosophical research had been seen to be inconclusive.
Getting rid of the iconic sign (in the manner advocated in A Theory of Semiotics) would nevertheless weigh heavily on the development of Eco’s semiotics. Having emerged from philosophical questions and gone aground on the extremely theoretical shores of the conflict between conventionalism and representational naturalism, the concept of likeness needed to be reproposed in fully philosophical terms. The Italian semiologist did not skirt the problem and took up the challenge. His reformulation of the question of the icon would be more than simply a further investigation of the themes of the 1970s, and would induce him to reconstruct, radically in part, his own architecture of semiotics.
III. THE IDEA OF ICON IN PEIRCE
The limitation to the debate in the 1960s and 1970s (on which Eco reflects at length in chapter six of Kant and the Platypus) lay in having equated the level of iconism, in its general extension, with what Peirce defined as “hypoiconism.” The semiologists, in short, had been bad students of Peirce. When he looked again at the theme of the icon, Eco set about carefully rereading Peirce. The accusation that he had put true philosophy to one side and become entangled in bad philosophy was thus taken up with great vigor and reduced to silence after a challenging circumnavigation of the American writer’s voluminous Collected Papers and his more recent Writings of Charles S. Peirce.29
What, then, did Peirce really say about iconic signs?30 Anyone giving even a cursory look at some of the thousands of papers on the theme of iconism left by him will be stunned. Peirce did not concern himself very much with images, photographs, drawings, metaphors, and sensible reproductions, and set the theme within the broader framework of a very sophisticated phenomenology of similarity.31 According to Peirce, the icon names the sign in its first relation to the object: sign for likeness or “mere community in some quality” by virtue of an “internal” relation, where relate and correlate are not as yet distinguished.32 The icon is a categorial first (firstness), a representamen whose representative quality has the characteristics of the categorial firstnesses.33 I will now dwell briefly on these definitions and try to explain them. But let me say first that setting the problem within this framework leads Peirce to distinguish three levels of the (phenomenal) appearance of iconicity. First of all, the icon names the pure possibility that something stands for something else, namely is a sign of an other: “Anything is fit to be a Substitute for anything that it is like.”34 Whenever the talk is of what thought and reality have in common (perhaps the biggest issue in philosophy from Parmenides to the Tractatus) or of the act of substituting by representing the real (that is, in the very broad sense of “figuring in order to understand and understanding by figuring”), icons make their appearance.35 For Peirce, what we have is an internal relation: each agreement or community of characters is given only by virtue of a ground, a pure abstraction that is valid in an interpretive respect for the offering itself of substance, of the present, in general, for the unity of the proposition of Being.36 The ground is, according to a definition as acute as it is intricate, “self-abstracted from the concreteness which implies the possibility of an other.”37 It then changes meaning in Peirce’s philosophy and appears less and less in the semiotic definitions, though I think it is worth noting that iconism is developed first of all from this perspective.38 That is to say, there is not first a field of various events and then the appearance of likeness between two of them. That which is given, primarily, is the relation, the internal relation, namely the iconic relation: the ground that allows an other (a correlate, an object) to emerge, which in a particular respect, order, or quality shows itself to be the same (a sign for likeness). For this reason, Peirce can say that internal relations characterize likenesses whereas external relations, based on comparisons, are attributable to identities, differences, dissimilarities, and the like.
As a pure possibility of reference, iconicity is given as a relation that is neither comparative (namely, secondness) nor interpretational (thirdness); it does not specify concrete objects but paves the way for their individuation and constitution. It is on the basis of this clarification that we have access to the second level at which iconicity appears: the idea. Besides, as pure possibility of relation, every image presents itself as an idea.39 But idea understood in the Platonic sense of vision, opening up to intelligibility; idea more in the sense of resemblance, morphe, or appearance than as the logical content of thought.
Lastly, a sign can be iconic, it can be the representamen of its own object by virtue of a conventionally established similarity. These signs can be called “hypoicons” and Peirce includes among them images, diagrams, metaphors.40 It is, however, obvious that this is not the level he is chiefly interested in.
Hence icons are analyzed by Peirce as first, original signs: in icons the philosopher attempts to trace the source of the process of signification.41 This is why he says that anything can be the icon of anything else if it substitutes for it, if in some respect it has with it a relation of co-respondence and analogy. The icon never refers to precise objects in external reality since the objects of icons—far from being real like Galileo’s moon—are, for Peirce, “pure fiction[s],” mere possibilities, purely imaginary dreams.42 In short, the object of the icon is a pure firstness, “equivalent to ‘something.’”43
Let us put it like this: in its vagueness, the icon is the first figure of something. If the root of Being is unity,44 this unity is grasped from the viewpoint of the interpretant as sameness, as an (internally dual) relation able to activate an “attuned” response in harmony with the sound of the universe. Close examination shows that Eco would unreservedly adopt precisely these final propositions in Peirce’s speculative metaphysics.
IV. PEIRCE, ECO, AND THE PLATYPUS
Peirce himself considered his investigation to be “high philosophy.” It started out from semiotic and phenomenological reflections and led to a wider vision fed by ontology, cosmology, and phaneroscopy. In his analysis of the icon Peirce maintains, counter to every banal form of semiotics, that in order to be able to talk of similarity there must be a ground that, in manifesting itself, provides the place where the likeness and the object it resembles, the event and its figure, can appear. These are not separately existing entities; they do not have to be adequate to one another from irreducible distances. Instead, they are formed inside the association that names them, the sign relation that at the same time both distinguishes them and binds them closely together, and for which the icon names the first possibility. It is not the sign that resembles the object “out there”; it is the object that announces itself and becomes meaningful in the relations allowed by sign substitution. And it is the latter that makes the object an other by representing it as the limit of the sign’s reference.
In Kant and the Platypus Eco takes very seriously this primary phenomenological level at which Peirce keeps iconism. In addition, to some extent disregarding the ban on stepping beyond the lower threshold of semiotics, expressed in A Theory of Semiotics, he goes even further than the American philosopher in his thinking on the perceptual constitution that enables us to recognize something as something. His thesis is that there is a level of likeness intrinsic in all human understanding, so that when an image, impression, or inference is given, it is motivated in some respect and in some sense by a basic datum, which is “mirrored” in its relational form. This datum may well be a result (of another interpretation) but will, in any case, be a present extra-interpretationem event. “Precisely because one supports a theory of interpretation, it is necessary to admit that something is given to be interpreted.”45 We see, then, that Eco underlines the word given but, from his viewpoint, the word something should also be highlighted. Indeed, the word “something” is the keyword in Kant and the Platypus. When we speak, Eco says, there is something that drives us to speak (terminus a quo) while, at the same time imposing limits on our freedom to speak, it asks to be pinpointed (terminus ad quem). As first, something sets the chain of our inferences in motion and it resembles our entire perception to a reasonable extent. We have, in short, something as an other that calls to us, and the effort at comprehension is that of co-responding to it adequately. This does not mean in any way possible (as long as it works) but solely in those ways that conform to this otherness with some degree of congruence and analogy, which are appropriately in tune with it or, which is one and the same, sufficiently reasonable.46 How do we understand whether our way of proceeding is adequate? Being says a series of “no’s” to us, Eco maintains. It forces us to backtrack and stubbornly resists certain readings while appearing to be well disposed towards others. It “may not be comparable to a one-way street but to a network of multilane freeways along which one can travel in more than one direction; but despite this some roads will nevertheless remain dead ends.”47 The datum, the lower threshold of semiotics, measures only the resistance that the something puts up against our incorrect, that is, poorly resembling, inferences. It is a sort of “aesthetic” disgust at the iconically unshapely propositions. As Peirce expected, then, man is undeniably gifted with a certain “tropism for truth”—what the ancients called lumen naturale (natural illumination)—and it is this that explains the abductive success of much of our reasoning and the confidence that we have in iconic fiction.48
As we have seen, the problem of iconism involves entering into a very profound philosophical investigation that requires addressing the question of the true and the real with maximum ontological commitment. It is an ontology that attempts to maintain a dialogue with phenomenological hermeneutics. “That being places limits on the discourse through which we establish ourselves in its horizon is not the negation of hermeneutic activity: instead it is the condition for it.”49 And how is this horizon delineated ontologically? As a continuum that cannot be crossed at will but only according to the “lines of resistance and possibilities of flow” as if we were dealing with the grain of wood or marble.50 Again drawing on Peirce, Eco insists that the point is not whether we succeed in interpreting the world but whether we are able to interpret it correctly (to give a correct picture of the world in the terms of the Tractatus) and from where we start to do so. According to some recent research, Peirce himself seemed to move away from the radical antiintuitionism of the 1860s, which undoubtedly brought him close to a semiotic-colored form of idealism and led him to pay more attention to the role of the dynamical object, of experience, and of the perceptual datum in the formation of the semiotic process.51 Without going into matters concerning Peircean philology (or “Peirceanology,” as Eco puts it), we can accept this reading while still keeping in mind that in Peirce the semiotic path mediates between empiricism and idealism (or, better, goes beyond both). In fact his last philosophical proposal would adopt the very name of “ideal-realism.”52 Besides this, however, what Eco is interested in is determining how that (intuitive? immediate? natural?) correspondence takes shape by which a certain stimulus is represented in a certain sensation that reproduces it iconically with manifest fidelity.53 The examples given are crystal clear: when the housewife is overcome by the white of her freshly washed sheet and sees it as perfect (before comparing it with other whites); when I scald myself with hot coffee and the pain is the sign of a given heat. What is being referred to when these examples of what Eco calls “primary iconism” are put forward? An attempt is being made to reflect—as seen above—on what Peirce defined as firstness, which he saw as a kind of “auroral moment that starts the perceptual process.”54 It is firstness that is iconic from the moment it emerges because “any feeling must be identical with any exact duplicate of it” and “anything is fit to be a Substitute for anything that it is like.”55 Eco’s aim was precisely that of leading semiotics, which was rigidly conventionalist and constructivist until the publication of Kant and the Platypus, to think about the possibility of formulating schemata for unknown objects—as were, for example, the platypus and the rhinoceros when seen for the first time by Marco Polo; in other words, schemata that are formed by virtue of an unmediated apprehension that arises from an irrepressible repercussion and that Eco, in his search for a plausible definition, holds to be very similar to Kantian intuition or, even better, to the phenomenon of the cognitive scientists’ qualia. But can the quale really be assimilated to the Peircean first? Are there really no cultural a priori when we are exposed to the shock of a pure quality of sensation that invests us and is so like the world as to reproduce its exact coloring?
These kinds of questions take us well outside the framework of La struttura assente and other works of the same period. Despite this, Eco would not decide banally to fall back on embracing the realism reminiscent of Maldonado.
V. THRESHOLD AND PRIMARY ICONISM
The central question, then, is whether we have a primum from which each subsequent inferential process originates or whether it is always first in a chain, that is, a first in relation to, for a second, a third, and so on. Do we tend in epistemological analysis to inflate the hard core of Being or the role of the Interpretant, which an advanced semiotics cannot do without?56 It is not easy to give an answer, especially for someone whose reference point is a discipline that has flown the flag of antinaturalism and antireferentialism. In the last few years a young pupil of Eco’s, Claudio Paolucci, has shown his mentor a more thorough examination of Peirce’s thought, thereby forcing Eco to reformulate his own position once again (another example of his great quality of listening carefully to his pupils as well).57 Paolucci points out a basic principle of Peircean phaneroscopy, according to which, while it is true that there are three indecomposable elements of the phaneron, it is also the case that the first two exist only as traces on the background to the codified recursiveness of the third, and thus “the singular always emerges out of the regular from which it is detached by virtue of an instability effect.”58 Looking even more directly at the words used by Peirce, who is always very clear on the matter, we see that firstness is never given as such but always as content of thirdness. It is “so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it”; “the conception of the absolute first eludes every attempt to grasp it . . . but there is no absolute third, for the third is of its own nature relative, and this is what we are always thinking, even when we aim at the first or the second.”59 Can we then speak of a phenomenologically primary experience for Peirce, shining in its own immediateness and perceptible/expressible as such? For Paolucci the answer is no. He refers to the distinction between cognition and pure feeling: Peirce’s semiotics is grounded on an infinite reference from one act of cognition to another, that is, from one sign to another, with no possibility of reaching a primum or final moment (as stated very clearly already in “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man”).60 “What presents itself to consciousness can only do so by representing itself through representamen . . . so the celebrated anti-intuitionism of Peirce consists precisely in this: each presentation is always a re-presentation (or mediated presentation).”61 In front of the white sheet, the housewife would not, in short, see it as white if she had not already seen whiteness and if whiteness, as ground, did not enable her to situate that quale as such. Least of all could she say, “There’s some white here.” The sensation of white is something that undeniably seizes her and that she finds striking. But it does so in an “absolute” way, as Peirce rightly notes—namely, with no relation and connection with an other, totus, teres, atque rotundus: the world in the pure form of white.62 Can we say then that this quale, such as it is, with its brutal irruption into the field of experience, is a precise perception or an icon, that is—let us recall—a sign that refers to its own object for an interpretant? I think not, because if this were the case, we would have a third, that is “something for its own nature relative,” the sensations of which represent only an indecomposable aspect. Here I want to mention a fundamental passage in “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” where Peirce asks himself, following Hume, what kind of red he remembers when, after looking at a red book, he closes it and tries to reactivate the perception he had at the present moment of seeing the book.63 He points out that we see no precise color in the memory. What we bring with us of the image we saw is only the “consciousness that we could recognize it,” namely a precise and completed sign inference.64 He goes on to venture that not only do we not have thoughts as images in the mind, mental pictures à la Locke, but we do not have any even in actual perception since every image is in fact a judgment. I won’t go any further here into Peircean questions, and I acknowledge that the later Peirce has a much more varied position on perception.
As far as Eco’s thinking is concerned, what we need to focus on is how to explain the white (or red) in its sudden and forceful irruption into the field of consciousness. The percept stands only for itself, says Eco, again quoting Peirce: “It obtrudes itself upon my gaze; but not as a deputy for anything else, not ‘as’ anything. It simply knocks at the portal of my soul and stands there in the doorway.”65 In its “silence” and blunt resistance, the percept is insistent. It appeals for, it demands a possible response. But it is only when this response is forthcoming—following Peirce, I would lay greater emphasis on this point—that the space of the icon takes shape, which is a sign and therefore stands for an other.66 It is then only in substituting this other that such an other has the possibility to appear as something and to be perceived as a quale, initiating the sequence of semiotic and interpretive references. Prior to iconic reduplication there is no object and there is no sign; there is no object because there is no sign (which shows that there are objects).
The point, in conclusion, is to understand how to stand “in the doorway,” as Peirce puts it. The case of the sheet or of the scalding coffee-maker, on close scrutiny, confronts us not only with the ontological theme of the existence of something out there and of our original experience of it but also with that of the beginning of cognition. “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back,” says Wittgenstein.67 And, with renewed vigor, Eco also tries to improve his aim.
In “La soglia e l’infinito” Eco defines a distinction that will turn out to be effective and address a complex idea in depth: that which differentiates between molecular and molar pertinentization. What are we dealing with here? When in La struttura assente, with reference precisely to the problem of iconism, we find the statement that in a drawing we reproduce exactly that feature of a real horse that it does not have in reality, namely the outline traced in black lines, this still says too little. It is true that we need to reconstruct conventionally the features that help us to perceive the real horse-pictured horse analogy. It is just as true, however, that once the horse is detached from a background made up of other animals and other things (and the problem may lie in this very detaching), from then on it really has an outline for us, in some respect or quality, consisting of a line that differentiates it from the rest of the world.68 Should such a line be considered an objective datum? From a molecular point of view, certainly not—says Eco—from a molar perspective, however, and for the purpose of my interpretation, yes it should. It has therefore to be understood as a nonnegotiable “starting point” and it “cannot be avoided” or eliminated.69 It acts as a sensible shock, a pure and unavoidable visual sensation. It is something different from an act of cognition, and this is why Peirce’s antiintuitionism (cognitive in nature) can exist alongside this idea of firstness, of sensation as a given stimulus, on which inference is then built “upwards.”70
The idea of threshold, of the “edge of semiosis,” below which a quale is perceived as pertinent or not, thus becomes crucial.71 It is not a rigid threshold but it is culturally fringed; it tells us that it is impossible for a given encyclopedic-interpretant subject to go any further in the molecularization of experience. It is itself the effect, the result of an interpretive act even though it has settled into a sediment to such an extent as to appear natural. That is to say, the origin is on close inspection a result; the point of departure is a point of arrival. It is the final stitchwork in the cutting and hemming that we constantly carry out, even inadvertently, on the material of experience for the purpose of governing it. The outline of the horse is pertinent to a rider and much less, presumably, to an ant that starts climbing up its rump. The assumed initial primum outlines, in the end, nothing more than our own incapacity: the incapacity to think without signs and stand before the incognizable (again following Peirce).72 Furthermore, the threshold cannot of course be seen panoramically from above, so as to have a clear view on both sides of this limit. The threshold appears iconically in the rebound of its duplication: a there for a here, a something, certainly, but only for an interpretant; something given (a datum), as repeatedly insisted on, but exactly in the sense of something that offers itself to someone in place of something else.
It is in this very direction, moreover, that it seems to me Eco’s long journey through iconism in both the ontological and even cosmological sense reaches its conclusion. By means of an eloquent quotation from Cusano—“infinite form is received only in a finite mode”—Eco reminds us that the infinite in semiotics is continually de-fined by the figures determined by the given interpretant practices.73 When viewed closely, the inescapable and unrevisable datum, whether initial or final, is nothing other than this, in my opinion. It is not the brute given datum of sensation, and even less so the fact as it is given, but the finite act into which is translated the given practice that we engage in often without knowing why we engage in it; the fact that “This is how we act. This is how we talk about it.”74 What we have is a constitutive practice that delimits thresholds and puts objects with their con-form subjects. What we have, therefore, is the continual production of a widespread iconism. The way I read the Cusano quotation is that it asserts in metaphysical language what the semiotics of Peirce and Eco state in contemporary terms: the infinite form of the world is expressed in the finite practice of every habit of response and is reflected as an icon in the sign of every figure.
ROSSELLA FABBRICHESI
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO
JULY 2011
NOTES
1. Umberto Eco, “La soglia e l’infinito: Peirce e l’iconismo primario,” in Eco, Dall’albero al labirinto: Studi storici sul segno e l’interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2007), 463.
2. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks, 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), 8.343.
3. Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, trans. Alastair McEwen (London: Vintage, 2000), 12.
4. The dynamical object (or Being, ironically paraphrasing Heidegger) is to be understood as “Something-that-sets-to-kicking-us.” Ibid., 14.
5. I draw here on Sini’s interpretation of the concept of image and imagination. In particular, in this case, Carlo Sini, I segni dell’anima (Milan: Laterza, 1989), 247: “The likeness is between the world (as a priori indeterminate possibility, the logical place of all depictive forms) and its occurrence as a cup of coffee” (my translation). See, in general, Carlo Sini, “Transito verità,” in Opere (Milan: Jaca Book, 2012).
6. “Two somethings meet because they correspond to each other as a screw corresponds to the female thread.” Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 108. This is a position that cannot but recall the Stoic oikeiosis. It does not seem such an odd comparison since the Stoics handed down the first semiotics understood as a scientific discipline in its own right.
7. Ibid., 109. For a more general discussion, see ibid., 106–9. Regarding the issue of the congruent response: “And nonetheless right from the start, in order to construct a schema of the platypus, attempts were made to respect the grain possessed by that manifestation of the still unsegmented continuum. Even granting that the schema is a construct, we can never assume that the segmentation of which it is the effect is completely arbitrary, because (in Kant as in Peirce) it tries to make sense of something that is there, of forces that act externally on our sensory apparatus by exhibiting, at the least, some resistances” (ibid., 120–21).
8. As Eco himself remarks, the whole debate on iconism seems to be a “comic-strip” repeat of Plato’s Cratylus with its conflict between the conventionalism of Hermogenes and the naturalism of Cratylus. Ibid., 339.
9. The distinction reassessed here, between “that” and “what,” I owe to William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, in Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 118.
10. Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 103.
11. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), §4.015.
12. For a fuller examination of the history of this debate, see Rossella Fabbrichesi, La polemica sull’iconismo (Naples: Edizieni Scientifiche Italiane, 1983), based on the observations of O. Calabrese, “Nuovi appunti sull’iconicità,” Comunicazione visiva (May 1977). Eco generously discusses my comments in Kant and the Platypus, 425n2. The whole of chapter 6 (“Iconism and Hypoicon”) in this work reconsiders the themes running through the 1960s and 1970s.
13. “The question of iconicity is therefore still the main test bed for this new, but also very old, scientific discipline, whose central problem is one of the disputes that have never been resolved throughout the entire history of western philosophy.” Calabrese, “Nuovi appunti sull’iconicità,” 59 (my translation).
14. Umberto Eco, La struttura assente: La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale (Milan: Bompiani, 1968), 74.
15. Ibid., 121.
16. Umberto Eco, Le forme del contenuto (Milan: Bompiani, 1971), 28.
17. But not with the Gestaltists, who had framed the problem in this way and with whom Eco enters into a dialogue.
18. Eco, La struttura assente, 114 (my translation).
19. Umberto Eco, Il segno (Milan: Isedi, 1973), 123 (my translation).
20. Ibid., 55 (my translation).
21. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 201.
22. Ibid., 216.
23. Ibid., 208.
24. Ibid.
25. See Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 391–92.
26. Ibid., 351–52.
27. See Tomás Maldonado, Appunti sull’iconicità: In Avanguardia e razionalità (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), followed by Umberto Eco, “Chi ha paura del cannocchiale,” Op. Cit., no. 32 (Jan. 1975): 23–31.
28. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §2.1.
29. For the latter, ongoing project, see Charles S. Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed., Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982–).
30. Eco says he has no intention of relying on philology. Rather: “What I shall do is try to say how much I think Peirce should be read (or reconstructed, if you will); in other words, I shall try to make him say what I wish he had said, because only in that case will I manage to understand what he meant to say.” Kant and the Platypus, 99.
31. For this interpretation I refer the reader to Rossella Fabbrichesi, Sulle tracce del segno: Semiotica, faneroscopia e cosmologia nel pensiero di C. S. Peirce (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1986), ch. 1.
32. Charles S. Peirce, “On a New List of Categories,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1–10.
33. Peirce, Collected Papers, 2.276. For more on the categories, see Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 1, bk. III.
34. Peirce, Collected Papers, 2.276.
35. Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 80.
36. Peirce, “On a New List of Categories,” in The Essential Peirce, 1:1–4.
37. Ibid., 6.
38. Ibid., 4. The idea of ground is one of the most complex in Peirce’s thinking. In the above-mentioned work of 1867, ground is assimilated with species, abstraction, qualitative respect, in close connection with the first category or quality: “Such a pure abstraction, reference to which constitutes a quality or general attribute, may be termed a ground” (ibid.). Certainly, as Peirce continued his studies he, on one side, gradually abandoned this idea and, on the other, assimilated it increasingly with the third category or, definitely, with the interpretant (Peirce, Collected Papers, 2.228). In Kant and the Platypus Eco tends to identify the immediate object with the ground, though with the necessary caveats. While it is true, as stated in other interpretations, that the category of meaning can be read as closely associated with that of ground, it is, however, necessary, as I see it, to keep in mind that this category is at first linked with the first and not with the third category, in a productive marriage by which ground and interpretant, qualitative opening and meaning entail one another and neither is resolved in the other.
39. See Peirce, Collected Papers, 2.276–78.
40. Ibid., 277.
41. Ibid., 92.
42. Peirce, Collected Papers, 4.531. As for the icon, the definition appears in a well-known quotation that Eco considers “metaphorical,” whereas it in fact reveals the crux of Peirce’s thought as I understand it. When we look at a painting there is a moment, he says, in which “we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream. . . . At that moment you are contemplating an icon.” Peirce, Collected Papers, 3.362.
43. Ibid., 8.183.
44. Ibid., 1.487.
45. Eco, “La soglia e l’infinito,” in Dall’albero al labirinto, 463 (my translation).
46. “The world as we represent it to ourselves is an effect of interpretation. The problem has more to do with the nature of the guarantees that authorize us to attempt a new paradigm that others must not recognize as delirium, pure imagination of the impossible.” Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 48.
47. Ibid., 53.
48. “Man’s mind must have been attuned to the truth of things,” writes Peirce, referring to an idea of “syntony,” of musical harmony with the world. Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.476. On the notion of tropism for truth, see Nicholas Rescher, Peirce’s Philosophy of Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 47.
49. Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 50.
50. Ibid., 53.
51. Eco refers especially to A. Fumagalli, Il reale nel linguaggio: Indicalità e realismo nella semiotica di Peirce (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1995). But for a similar approach, see also T. L. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
52. See Peirce, Collected Papers, 8.186. On this point, see J. Brent, Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 345–46.
53. See Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 100–106. What is more, it has to be admitted therefore that sometimes we are faced with a phenomenon of a kind that, even though we know it’s a sign, before perceiving it as such “we must first perceive it as a set of stimuli that creates the effect of our being in the presence of the object” (ibid., 377). In this sense, a bit further on the alpha modality is discerned in which a substance is perceived as form before this form is recognized as form of expression, that is, as beta modality. The problem is to single out the “catastrophe point” through which one passes between the alpha and beta modes within oscillations that show why it is so difficult to define hypoiconism. Ibid., 382–86.
54. Eco, “La soglia e l’infinito,” in Dall’albero al labirinto, 466 (my translation).
55. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.307, 2.276.
56. Eco, Kant and the Platypus, 50.
57. Eco, “La soglia e l’infinito,” in Dall’albero al labirinto, 468.
58. Ibid., 469 (my translation).
59. Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.358, 1.362.
60. See Peirce, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” in The Essential Peirce, 1:11–27.
61. Claudio Paolucci, Strutturalismo e interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2011), 194 (my translation). For this reason, Paolucci perceptively notes, it is difficult to liken Peirce’s semiotics to the phenomenological approach.
62. Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.236.
63. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in The Essential Peirce, 1:47.
64. Ibid., 48.
65. Peirce, Collected Papers, 7.619.
66. In that it refers to itself, the percept is by contrast insignificant; that is, it places itself effectively outside the sign relation.
67. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §471.
68. See Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in The Essential Peirce, 1:38.
69. See Eco, “La soglia e l’infinito,” in Dall’albero al labirinto, 476–78.
70. Ibid., 478.
71. Ibid., 479.
72. See Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in The Essential Peirce, 1:30.
73. Cusano, De docta ignorantia, II, ii, cited in Eco, “La soglia e l’infinito,” in Dall’albero al labirinto, 484.
74. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), §309.