27 Bacchini (1995) has written an ingenious essay in which, starting from my texts, he intends to demonstrate that the mirror image is a sign. After what I have been reiterating up to now, it ought to be clear that various theses can be upheld as long as my premise is not accepted: I am talking about the experience of a person when he looks at himself in a mirror, knowing that it is a mirror. Bacchini’s view is that this premise is «ideological» and deems it to be on «too low a level» (he prefers complex mises-en-scene like the one staged by Orson Welles). But in my view this low level is fundamental, and if this premise is ideological, it is so just like any other premise. Once this low level has been overcome, all Bacchini’s examples concern cases of lies, error, trickery, and catoptric theaters, which I had already considered in Eco 1985. Bacchini says that we need to create a pragmatics of mirrors (and I agree, if only because this was the title of a paragraph of my essay) and that we need to consider various «epistemic modalities.» Agreed, and I think that this discourse can be linked to the proposal made by Fabbri that I quoted previously, whereby a theory of enunciation also becomes central to a visual semiotics, and to a semiotics of perception in general. However, in this discourse I am considering only one epistemic modality (that of the person aware he is standing in front of a mirror); I am not interested in the others. I believe it is legitimate to make choices and to select obvious cases to show that they are not obvious at all. And then I did not deal with the discourse on imprints, which I have taken up again in these pages. Bacchini says that the imprint is temporally but not spatially separate from the imprinter, because it is «contiguous» to the imprinter, to which it corresponds point by point. Here I think there is some confusion between temporal copresence, spatial contiguity, and congruence (purely formal, which also subsists with regard to the death mask of a person long dead).
28 «Probably we shall never succeed in knowing the phylogenetic itinerary that has allowed us to pass from the perception of the reflected image to the development of technologies aimed at the artificial production of images » (Maldonado 1992: 40).
29 I cannot but agree with Maldonado (1992: 59 ff.): a new typology of iconic constructs, all the way to virtual reality—and therefore not static but dynamic and interactive iconic constructs—sets new problems that require new conceptual instruments. Except for the fact that the growth of these instruments now finds itself at a vague crossroads somewhere between the various cognitive sciences. I think that a general semiotics must explain the fact that these phenomena exist (and question us), and not how they work in a cognitive sense.
30 One argument in favor of the power of surrogate stimuli could be that in general we have a (genuine) sexual reaction when confronted with images of human bodies, as happens with actors or with models for pornographic magazines. It is not valid to argue that should those who have fallen victim to the appeal of such images happen to meet the original, they often realize that he or she is far less seductive in the flesh: the photo was simply preceded by a mise-en-scene (makeup, cunning camera angles and lighting) or even skillfully retouched. This would simply prove that hypoicons can lead us, through surrogate stimuli, to perceive something that does not exist in nature. Nor is it valid to object that, over the centuries, various persons have excited themselves sexually by looking at images that we do not consider realistic at all, such as African Venuses, or poor-quality woodcuts depicting Eve in some Biblia Pauperum. It would be facile to say that the image plays a secondary role in such processes of excitement, while the primary role is reserved for the imagination and the strength of desire. If things were exclusively like this, it would still not explain why the hypoicon has always been used as an erotic stimulus—or why, even when desire is very strong, some might not find the image of a right triangle sufficient to their purposes. Therefore, despite the low definition of surrogate stimuli, in different ages and cultures hypoicons have provided erotic excitement. This leads us to think that the notion of «vicariousness» of a stimulus cannot be fixed on the basis of strict criteria but depends on the culture and disposition of the subjects.
31 From the point of view of the present discourse, it is irrelevant whether these procedures concern those processes of the further pertinentization of the substance of the content on which many artistic operations are based (see A Theory of Semiotics, 3.7.1).
32 Given that Sonesson (1989) says some things on what follows that I am in agreement with, I should like to specify that I dealt with precisely this problem in my speech to the annual conference of the Italian Association for Semiotic Studies, held at Vicenza in 1987 (Eco 1987).
33 See Simone 1995. For the recognition of phonemes, see also Innis (1994: 5), who takes up and develops the ideas of Biihler («Phonetik und Phonologie,» 1931): identifying a sound as a form (Klanggestalt) and recognizing an object (Dinggestalt) are said to be the same type of learning. In reference to the typology of types of abduction (Eco 1983 and Bonfantini 1980, 1983, 1987), I could say that phonematic recognition represents an abduction of the first type, where the rule is already known, and is in fact a matter of recognizing the token—the result—as a case of that rule. But the fact that the abduction is almost automatic does not mean that it is not abduction 562 but hypothesis.
34 Cryptographers maintain that every coded message can be decoded, as long as one knows that it is a message.
35 «What these sorts of iconic signs do have in common, though, is that the use of them as iconic signs supposes that they have themselves immediately been perceived as sensory objects in their own right prior to their use as representative of something else» (Ransdell 1979: 58). After almost forty years of discussion, it is now necessary once more to give the rights of the matter to Barthes (1964a), when apropos of photography (not paintings) he spoke of a message without a code. What he was talking about was none other than what I call alpha mode. In this sense he said that the image simply denoted. For him, the shift to beta mode occurred in the moment of connotation, when the image is seen as a text and interpreted (above and beyond that which may be called perceptual interpretation).
36 Beyond this threshold we move on to conceptual similarity. A relation of perceptual similarity can be established between a man and a woman, but the similarity between husband and wife, or between in-laws, is purely conceptual.
37 At a certain point Peirce says: «Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them … So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when 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—not any particular existence and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon» (CP 3.362). Shall we grant that at a certain point our great and venerated master was merely using a metaphor?
Works Cited
Translator’s Note: As a general rule, even where English-language translations of foreign-language books already exist, I usually translated from the original with the help of the author.
ALAC, MORANA
1997 Gli schemi concettuali nel pensiero di Donald Davidson. Degree thesis in semiotics. University of Bologna. Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. A. Y. 1995–96.
ALBRECHT, ERHARD
1975 Sprache und Philosophie. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wis-senschaften.
APEL, KARL-OTTO
1972 «From Kant to Peirce: The Semiotical Transformation of Transcendental Logic.» In Beck, L. W., ed. Proceedings of the Third Kant Congress. Dordrecht: Reidel: 90–105.
1975 Der Denkweg von Charles’S. Peirce. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
1995 «Transcendental Semiotics and Hypothetical Metaphysics of Evolution: A Peircean or quasi-Peircean Answer to a Recurrent Problem of post-Kantian Philosophy.» In Ketner 1995: 366–97.
ARNHEIM, RUDOLF
1969 Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press.
AUBENQUE, PIERRE
1962 Le problème de l’être chez Aristote. Paris: PUF.
BACCHINI, FABIO
1995 «Sugli specchi.» Il cannocchiale 3: 211–24.
BARLOW, HORACE, COLIN BLAKEMORE, AND MIRANDA WESTON-SMITH, EDS.
1990 Images and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
BARTHES, ROLAND
1964a «Rhétorique de l’image.» Communications 4: 40–51.
1964b «Eléments de’sémiologie.» Communications 4 (Eng. trans. Elements of Semiology. Noonday Press 1977).
BENELLI, BEATRICE
1991 «Categorizzazione, rappresentazione e linguaggio: Aspetti e ten-denze dello sviluppo del pensiero concettuale.» In Cacciari, ed. 1991: 5–46.
BERSELLI BERSANI, GABRIELE
1995 Riferimento ed interpretazione nominale. Milano: Angeli.
BERTUCCELLI PAPI, MARCELLA
1993 Che cos’è la pragmatica. Milano: Bompiani.
BETTETINI, GIANFRANCO
1971 L’indice del realismo. Milano: Bompiani.
1975 Produzione del senso e messa in scena. Milano: Bompiani.
1991 La simulazione
