Reforming Visual Semiotics: The Dynamic Approach (original) (raw)

This paper outlines a course for a new visual semiotics based on dynamic versions of semiotics (Thom, Petitot-Cocorda, Wildgen, Brandt). After considering the way in which visual semiotics functions in art history as a sort of privileged form of interpretation, I argue instead for a dynamic, naturalized project in which semiotic meaning emerges through a complex process of stratified semantic processes. After sketching the new approach, I consider the way it adjusts our understanding of the linguistic analogy, our understanding of code, arbitrariness, convention, the Peircean triad of icon, index, and symbol, and finally sketch the new topics that the dynamic outlook allows.