Let us suppose, however, that the television has been perfected to the point that we can have three-dimensional images large enough to correspond with the dimensions of my field of vision, and even (as suggested in Ransdell 1979: 58) that the screen has been eliminated and there is some apparatus that transmits the stimuli directly to the optic nerve. In such a case, we would really find ourselves in the same circumstances as someone looking into a telescope or standing in front of a mirror, and this would do away with most of the differences between what Ransdell calls a «self-representing iconic sign» (as happens in the perception of objects or in mirror images) and an «other-representing iconic sign» (as in photographs or hypoicons in general).
The fact is that there are no theoretical limits to high definition. Today it is possible to follow on a screen what is seen by an intestinal probe fitted with a built-in television camera as it travels through our insides (an experience now accessible to anyone, and one that we are the first creatures of our species to be able to have). It is clear that the probe is a magnifying prosthesis par excellence, allowing us to see with a clarity and precision that is certainly greater than we would enjoy if we were lucky enough to be able to wander about inside our own body.
Not only that but, as the probe moves about, we can also see obliquely, as happens when we move our head to look beyond the physical confines of the mirror.29
However the technology of image definition may develop, and even if one day it might be possible to have virtual gastronomic or sexual experiences (which also involve thermic and tactile sensations, taste and odor), all this will not alter the definition of such stimuli as stimuli received through a prosthesis—and therefore, from a semiotic point of view, just as relevant as the normal perception of the real object. If these virtual stimuli then provide us with something less defined than the real stimulus (and I think that this is the present status of virtual reality, which has to be made up for with a surplus of interpretation, albeit unconsciously), then we will have entered the category of surrogate stimuli, which we shall be discussing shortly.
In this sense, television is a very different phenomenon from cinema or photography, even though the television may occasionally transmit filmed images or photographs, just as it is a different phenomenon from the theater, even though the television may occasionally transmit shows performed on a stage (of which it offers the paraspecular image). We can put our trust in cinematographic and photographic images insofar as they are an indication that something, which was there, has left an impression on a film. Even if we know or suspect them to be images of a prophotographic or pro-filmic mise-en-scene, in any case we hold them to be indications of the fact that that mise-en-scene really took place. But we also know that such images are and always have been subject to elaboration, filtering, and photomontage; we are aware that, from the moment of impression to the moment in which the images reach us, some time has passed; we consider the photo and the film as material objects that are not identified with the object portrayed, and therefore we know that the object at hand stands for something else. This is why it is easy for us to treat photographic and cinematographic images as signs.
Things are different with the television image, in which the materiality of the screen functions as a channel in the same way as the layer of glass that serves us as a mirror functions as a channel. Under ideal circumstances, i.e., filming live within a closed circuit, the image is a paraspecular phenomenon that gives us exactly what happens the moment it happens (even if what happens is a pretense), and it vanishes when the event comes to a conclusion. Someone eludes the grasp of the mirror, and vanishes; someone eludes the eye of the television camera, and vanishes.
Therefore, still from a theoretical point of view, what appears on the television screen is not a sign of anything: it is a paraspecular image, which is received by the observer with the same trust accorded to the mirror image.
The fundamental concept of TV that most people have introjected is that of closed-circuit live broadcasting (otherwise the concept of television would not be «thinkable,» insofar as it is opposed to that of the cinema or the theater). And this explains the trusting attitude we have toward television, as well as our tendency to receive most programs as if they were closed-circuit live broadcasts.
In short: we take the television image the same way as we take the telescopic image, with the result that when we look at the Moon through a telescope, we think that those blotches are really there. Even the most credulous among us distrust signs (when someone tells us it is raining, we always think that in reality it may not be raining), but (almost always) we do not distrust our perceptions. We do not distrust TV, because we know that, like all extensive and intrusive prostheses, in the first instance it provides us not with signs but only with perceptual stimuli.
Let us now try another experiment. By means of some procedure (be it technical or magical) we «freeze» a paraspecular image. We can freeze it altogether, by printing it on paper, or we can freeze a sequence of actions on a film that can later be reprojected so we can see the objects move through time again. We have «invented» both photography and the cinema. That is, even though historically they come first, from a theoretical point of view photographic and cinematographic images are an impoverished version of television images, clumsy inventions, so to speak, attempts to reach an optimum that was still technically impossible.
And this is why these observations on mirrors lead us to rethink the semiotic status of photography and the cinema (and even of certain hyperrealistic painting techniques that seek to reproduce the effect of a photograph). We are thus led to redefine hypoicons.
6.13 Rethinking Painting
Although they are frozen on an autonomous material (and without our considering the various possibilities of special effects and staging), photographic representations provide us with surrogates of perceptual stimuli.
Are these the only cases of such a procedure? Certainly not. We have come to photography and cinema by deducing them, so to speak, from mirrors, but all hyperrealistic representation conceals a specular dream.
The absolute maximum of identification between representative stimuli and real stimuli is to be found in the theater, where real human beings must be perceived as such, except for the added conventional fiction, as a result of which they must be seen as Hamlet or Lady Windermere. The example of the theater is an interesting one: to be able to accept (by suspending one’s disbelief) that the woman acting on the stage is Ophelia, one must first of all perceive her as a female human being. Hence the puzzlement, or provocation, that would arise if an avant-garde director were to have Ophelia played by a man, or by a chimpanzee.
Therefore the theater is an extreme example of a semiosic phenomenon in which, even before it is possible to understand the meaning of what is happening and to interpret gestures, words, and events, it is necessary first of all to bring into play the normal mechanisms whereby we perceive real objects. Then, on the basis of interpretations and expectations, on perceiving a human body, we participate in the semiosic process by applying all we know about that body and all we expect from it: hence the sense of wonder (pleasant or irritating, according to our disposition) if, by chance, in a theatrical fiction the human body is raised up into the air by some hidden contraption, or if a mime makes it move as if it were a marionette.
On the first level of partial surrogation of the stimuli, we find the figures in the waxworks, where the faces are made as if they were death masks, perfect congruencies, but the clothes of the characters portrayed, and the objects surrounding the characters (tables, chairs, inkwells) are real objects, and sometimes the hair is real too. These are hypoicons in which we find a balanced blend of surrogate stimuli, very highly defined (but still vicarious and indirect), and of real objects offered directly to the perception, as in the theater.
This means that the concept of the surrogate stimulus is a very hazy one, which can range from a minimum of identification with the real stimulus (in which it obtains an effect vaguely equivalent to that of the real stimulus) to a maximum.
Which leads us to think that a sort of principle of charity holds when we are confronted by surrogate stimuli. The fact that animals too can react to surrogate stimuli ought to make us favor the possibility of a «natural» principle of charity. I do not think I am introducing a new category: at bottom, a principle of charity is at work in normal perceptual processes too, when in circumstances where the stimuli are hard to discern one tends to favor the most obvious interpretation—a rule broken by those who see flying saucers where others would interpret a bright spot that
