Redefining the Image: Mimesis, Convention, and Semiotics

Abstract

Pages 75-9 1 Redefining the Image: Mimesis, Convention, and SemioticsStudies and the interpretation of images have relied on two intellectual solutions. lmages have been traditionally judged as imitation (mimesis) of the outside world. After Kant, however, images were understood as the outcome of rules of the mind that constitute the images and provide the key to visuality. Both interpretations are dualist: Mimesis presumes the mental mediation will provide the match between visual patterns and the natural world, whereas the conventionalist tradition stemming from Kant presumes that the system of a prior rule will ensure the match with reality. This paper presents Peircean semiotics as an alternative to what may be considered two sides of the same coin. The option is a triadic conceptual scheme program that redefines image making and what was considered imitation of reality.

Mapping Visual Studies in Communication

“…Another approach, drawing on semantics, usually stands alone, although the occasional study may combine visual semantics and rhetoric or visual semantics and pragmatics (Stein, 2001;Lowrey, 2003). One philosophical article, by Neiva (1999), stands outside the three subsets we identified and instead attempt a redefinition of semiotics. Finally, the journal literature contains studies that are only nominally visual, examining a medium, activity, or phenomenon that is inherently visual without observing its visual aspects with consistency or rigor.…”

Imitation (In)Security: Cultivating Mimetic Theory to Critique the Media/Security Nexus

“…Among media historians, for example, mimesis conceptualizes the didactic modeling between speakers, traditions, and audiences which was required for the human achievement of communal integration in preliterate cultures (Chesebro & Bertelsen, ). Within the study of visual communication, mimesis is cited as the “conservative” tradition in Western culture requiring artists to establish correspondence between images and their presumed objective referents—for example, through the deployment of perspective (Neiva, ). Mimesis has also been used to study the distinctive articulations of presence and absence achieved by virtual reality and gaming platforms, and their impacts on social and political identifications held by users (Sherman, ).…”