THE COMMUNICATIVE FORM OF SYMBOLS
What do I mean by a sign as different from a symbol?
By a sign-at the risk of contradicting scholarly understanding of this concept I mean a visual form that demonstrates an uncomplicated relationship with its referent. By "uncomplicated" I refer to a point in a scale in a sequence of denotation and connotation. At the most literal end of the scale, we find visual forms that correspond, in a literal sense, to what they refer to. Eg,a picture, as understood from one perspective a an effort at direct representation. Although, at other levels of analysis, a picture can be understood to demonstrate levels of signfication that go well beyond the basic direct signification I am describing here.
At another level, we have road signs, which represent basic instructions, using abstract visual language which at times involves representational drawings, of cars, pedestrians, etc or just a simple diagram that indicates a particular traffic instruction. In all these examples basic, simple, linearly described range of ideas are evoked.
Then we have those images that may or may not encompass such linearly realised correspondences. but they are meant or used to convey much more than that. The range of ideas they suggest might be spelt out, but they involve a complex of significations, which may be be centred around or in relation to a central idea but which are meant to evoke a cluster of associations in relation to that idea.
An example of this could be the Christian use of the cross, amongst other religious symbols. The cross represents first the manner of death of the founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ, who is understood to have been was crucified. It does in relation to what is understood to be the significance of that death as a salvific act, an act symbolised by the exposure of body represented by a crucifixion. Then beyond the fundamental nexus of what is understood to be a historical account and its attendant immediate symbolism of surrender to a mission and sacrifice of self, it evokes the relationship of this basic complex of iconographic form and its symbolic values to the significance of the conceptions of sacrifice and surrender to a self transcending vision preached by Jesus, where the kind of radical love of God and human beings he advocated is intimately related to self sacrifice, surrender and crucifixion, smbolically understood, whether at the hands of one's own self mortifying discipline or at the hands of others who are threatened by that style of living..
In sum, a universe of ideas is evoked from one image. One can describe this example as describing a significant number of symbols or to a significant degree the character of a symbol. Its levels of interweaving possibilities of signification. Not included here is the capacity of the symbol to evoke meanings not included in its original brief, as it were.
The cross, for example, could signify sacrifice and crucifixion in non religious contexts. In relationships with others. in terms of commitment to a mission. See the way it is used in the neo-religious context of the matrix, for example, where the light that penetrates Neo's body at the salvific self sacrificial conclusion is shaped as a cross-?
Or it could even evoke ideas of repugnance to such ideas of self sacrifice as an elevation of weakness etc as Nietzsche and saw Christianity.
Other symbols could be even more multivalent, less fixed to a particular complex of ideations, of associations and their related emotional topography. But the heart of the matter is the issue of evocative range, of the moving outward from a specific ideational, verbal or visual centre. or even centred in a particular action, as in ritual, or an commonplace action that evokes particular associations.-see zen on commonplace actions and enlightenment.-the movement of a stranger that reminds one profoundly of the actions of someone else who has affected us deeply and the relationship of that to large areas of meaning in our lives-see proust. or even aural/auditory, olfactory, kinetic symbols, symbols can emerge in relation to any of the five senses.see Keats ode to a nightingale-see basho-frog poem-see Soyinka on egrets sailing into the sun-see Brutus and Solzhenitsyn and van gogh -on the stars-see akan drum poem on the river and the path etc
By a sign-at the risk of contradicting scholarly understanding of this concept I mean a visual form that demonstrates an uncomplicated relationship with its referent. By "uncomplicated" I refer to a point in a scale in a sequence of denotation and connotation. At the most literal end of the scale, we find visual forms that correspond, in a literal sense, to what they refer to. Eg,a picture, as understood from one perspective a an effort at direct representation. Although, at other levels of analysis, a picture can be understood to demonstrate levels of signfication that go well beyond the basic direct signification I am describing here.
At another level, we have road signs, which represent basic instructions, using abstract visual language which at times involves representational drawings, of cars, pedestrians, etc or just a simple diagram that indicates a particular traffic instruction. In all these examples basic, simple, linearly described range of ideas are evoked.
Then we have those images that may or may not encompass such linearly realised correspondences. but they are meant or used to convey much more than that. The range of ideas they suggest might be spelt out, but they involve a complex of significations, which may be be centred around or in relation to a central idea but which are meant to evoke a cluster of associations in relation to that idea.
An example of this could be the Christian use of the cross, amongst other religious symbols. The cross represents first the manner of death of the founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ, who is understood to have been was crucified. It does in relation to what is understood to be the significance of that death as a salvific act, an act symbolised by the exposure of body represented by a crucifixion. Then beyond the fundamental nexus of what is understood to be a historical account and its attendant immediate symbolism of surrender to a mission and sacrifice of self, it evokes the relationship of this basic complex of iconographic form and its symbolic values to the significance of the conceptions of sacrifice and surrender to a self transcending vision preached by Jesus, where the kind of radical love of God and human beings he advocated is intimately related to self sacrifice, surrender and crucifixion, smbolically understood, whether at the hands of one's own self mortifying discipline or at the hands of others who are threatened by that style of living..
In sum, a universe of ideas is evoked from one image. One can describe this example as describing a significant number of symbols or to a significant degree the character of a symbol. Its levels of interweaving possibilities of signification. Not included here is the capacity of the symbol to evoke meanings not included in its original brief, as it were.
The cross, for example, could signify sacrifice and crucifixion in non religious contexts. In relationships with others. in terms of commitment to a mission. See the way it is used in the neo-religious context of the matrix, for example, where the light that penetrates Neo's body at the salvific self sacrificial conclusion is shaped as a cross-?
Or it could even evoke ideas of repugnance to such ideas of self sacrifice as an elevation of weakness etc as Nietzsche and saw Christianity.
Other symbols could be even more multivalent, less fixed to a particular complex of ideations, of associations and their related emotional topography. But the heart of the matter is the issue of evocative range, of the moving outward from a specific ideational, verbal or visual centre. or even centred in a particular action, as in ritual, or an commonplace action that evokes particular associations.-see zen on commonplace actions and enlightenment.-the movement of a stranger that reminds one profoundly of the actions of someone else who has affected us deeply and the relationship of that to large areas of meaning in our lives-see proust. or even aural/auditory, olfactory, kinetic symbols, symbols can emerge in relation to any of the five senses.see Keats ode to a nightingale-see basho-frog poem-see Soyinka on egrets sailing into the sun-see Brutus and Solzhenitsyn and van gogh -on the stars-see akan drum poem on the river and the path etc
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