At first sight Diderot’s praise expresses the delight of a spectator who, believing that there cannot be absolutely realistic painting, finds himself in the presence of a masterpiece of realism, in which there is no gap between the stimulus that may come from the real object and the «surrogate» stimulus. But Diderot is not so naïve. The first effect having worn off, and well aware that what he can see is not real fruit and biscuits, he seems to get closer to the painting, where he finds out he is longsighted:
One cannot understand this magic. The color is applied in thick layers, one on top of the other, whose effect transpires to the surface from below. Sometimes one would say that it is a vapor that has been puffed onto the canvas, sometimes it seems that it has been smeared with a light froth … You get closer, all is confused, flattens and disappears. Move further away, all is recreated and reproduced.
That is the point. The stimuli aroused by real objects, with variations that are negligible from the point of view of perceptual recognition, act at different distances. Surrogate stimuli, when examined from too close up, betray their illusory nature, their substance of the expression, which is not that of the objects they suggest; and to obtain their iconic effect they require a calculated distance. This is the principle behind the trompe l’oeil, the epiphany of the surrogate stimulus. Chardin’s magic is due to the fact that the stimuli he provides for the spectator are not the ones that would be provided by the object. Diderot confesses he cannot understand how the painter manages to do this, but he has to admit that he does it. In his own way, in celebrating the miracles of iconism, Diderot is stating the nonnatural nature of hypoicons.
I should like to elaborate upon an observation made by Merleau-Ponty with regard to a die (1945: 2, III). The die is there, visible from different points of view. It may be that those beside me do not see it, and therefore it is part of my personal history. As I look at it, it loses its materiality and reduces itself to visual structure, form and color, light and shade. I note that not all aspects of the die can fall within my perceptual field, the Thing-in-Itself can be seen only from my personal point of view. I grasp not the thing but my experience oriented by the thing, my way of experiencing the thing (the rest, we might say, is inference, a hypothesis as to how the thing might be if others could see it too).
I perceive the die with my body, including the point of view from which I look at it. If my body (or my point of view) were to move, I would see something else. Thanks to long perceptual experience, I know all this. But in the presence of the surrogate stimulus (the representation of a die, regarding which, were I to shift my point of view, I could not perceive anything that might be behind it), I have already accepted that someone has seen for me.
Therefore a good rule for detecting surrogate stimuli would seem to be the following: if I change my point of view, do I see something new? If the answer is no, the stimulus is surrogate. 17 The surrogate stimulus tries to impose upon me the sensation I would have were I to observe matters from the point of view of the Surrogator. In front of me there is the outline of a house (and we have seen that outlines are founded in nature); if I move, can I see the tree behind the house? If I cannot see it, the stimulus is surrogate. Only by usurping the point of view of someone who has seen before me can I define if a stimulus is surrogate or not. The surrogate stimulus prevents me from seeing (or hearing) from the point of view of my subjectivity, understood as my corporeality; it gives me only one profile of things, not the multiplicity of profiles that real perception would offer me. In order to decide whether a stimulus is surrogate or not, all you have to do is move your head.
6.8 Back to the Discourse
My review of the historical reasons for the debate on iconism has perhaps already suggested some of the reasons why it can now be resumed sine ira et studio. The idea of a semiotics that has to study the workings of signs in social and cultural life no longer requires the polemic energies of apologist fathers: it is a matter of fact. Semiotic studies have been developed at a subcultural level (from zoosemiotics to the problems in cellular communication that I mentioned in 2.8.2), where concepts such as primary iconism reemerge on the scene without their being dissolved in a broth of cultural stipulations. Many have gradually been converting from the semiostructuralist paradigm to the Peircean one (at least with attempts to blend the most interesting aspects of both).
Faith in what interpretation posits and constructs with respect to any datum has led (certainly in the field of texts, with Derrida, but also with regard to the world, at least in the case of the latest Rorty) to the triumph of deconstructionist drift. For those who thought that we needed to regulate this in some way, it was necessary to tackle the problem of the limits of interpretation. This was precisely the expression I used for Eco 1990, apropos of textual interpretation, but already on that occasion the essay on drift and unlimited semiosis posed the problem of the limits of the interpretation of the world; and, as far as the world is concerned, I have dealt with this with greater resolution in 1.8–11.
And so we can now return to the discourse of hypoicons. By so doing, I do not think I have succumbed to the temptation of having my own personal Kehre. More modestly, all I think I am doing is bringing to the forefront what, without rejecting it, I had previously left in the background, but in such a way that both the «figures» remain legible.
6.9 Seeing and Drawing Saturn
My discussion with Maldonado sprang from an objection he made in favor of iconism: that the image of the Moon that Galileo saw in his telescope was an icon and as such possessed an innate likeness with the Moon itself. I objected that the image in the eyepiece of the telescope was not an icon—at least not in the sense of an iconic sign. The iconic sign, or hypoicon of the Moon, emerged when, after having looked in the telescope, Galileo drew the Moon. And since Galileo already knew a lot about the Moon, as a result of his having observed it like everybody else with the naked eye, I chose to discuss a more original and more «unheard-of» situation: that of Galileo looking at Saturn through his telescope for the first time and then—as can be seen, for example, in Sidereus Nuncius, making drawings of it.
In such a case there are four elements in play: (i) Saturn as Thing-in-Itself, as Dynamical Object (even when not an object, it would be a set of stimuli); (ii) the luminous stimuli that Galileo received when he put his eye to the telescope (and it’s up to optics to study what happens when the rays reflected by the planet travel through space, through the concave eyepiece, and through the double-convex lens); (iii) the conceptual type that Galileo reconstructed of Saturn, the Immediate Object (which will in some way be different from the one he had when struggling to observe it with the naked eye); (iv) the drawing (hypoicon) that Galileo made of Saturn.
Apparently the four stages come in this order:
Saturn-in-itself → Saturn on the lens → Cognitive type → Drawing
This is what I would do today if I wished to draw what I see in a telescope. But Galileo was looking for the first time. And, on looking, he saw something never seen before. There are various letters in which Galileo communicated his discoveries as they came along, and you can see the effort he made (as he looked) to see. For example, in three letters (to Benedetto Castelli, 1610; to Belisario Giunti, 1610; and to Giuliano de’ Medici, 1611), he says he saw not one star but three joined together in a straight line parallel to the equinoctial, and he represented what he saw like this (fig. 6.2):
But in other letters (e.g., to Giuliano de’ Medici, 1610; and to
Figure 6.2
Marco Velseri, 1612) he admits that owing to the «imperfection of the instrument and the eye of the observer,» Saturn might also appear like this («in the shape of an olive,» fig. 6.3):
Figure 6.3
The figure clearly reveals that, since it is wholly unexpected for a planet to be surrounded by a ring (which apart from anything else clashed with every notion held at the time with regard to heavenly bodies), Galileo was trying to understand what he could see, in other words, he was laboriously trying to construct a (new) cognitive type of Saturn.
After looking and looking again (see his letter to Federigo Borromeo in 1610), Galileo finally decided that it was a matter no longer of two small round bodies but of larger bodies «and of a shape no longer round, but as can be seen in the enclosed figure, two semi-ellipses with two very obscure little triangles in the middle of the said figures, and contiguous
