Ugo Volli Some possible developments of the concept of iconism Ugo Volli Some possible developments of the concept of iconism Versus n# 3 – september 1972 In general, semiotics has adopted an attitude towards iconism not unlike that of Aesop's fox faced with the sour, because distant grapes. On the occasions when semiotics has so paid a certain attention to the phenomena of iconism (not that this has happened all that often, when all is said and done), it has done so in order to deny their specificity, to "reduce" them to other arbitrary phenomena lying beneath and/or behind them, and so forth. From the point of view of the strategy of scientific research one must admit that often enough an attitude like the fox's is not without its merits, and that its realism can prove profitable; but it cannot hold out for long. A science that proposes to cover the entire social system of communication must sooner or later get down to an examination of the mass of communicative stimuli that a "native speaker' of our culture — if asked to reflect on them — would say were "similar" to their object, and thus neither arbitrary nor, in his view, organised according to complex structuring from the semantic and syntactic points of view. To give these signs the label of "iconism", to say that they possess the properties of their objects, and to maintain that emergent properties that function as distinctive features may be found in them, is certainly insufficient, although constituting a step in the direction of an analysis. Banal as it may be, what has to be recognised is that iconic signs exist, which is to say that they have a particular relationship with their object, while remaining entirely indifferent to the moods of the semiotician. So one has to work towards an understanding of them, rather than "reduce" them, or think that one has exorcised them by denying their reality, thus falling into the poverty-stricken asceticism of the fox. It is not difficult to pick out the main reasons which have led semiotics to neglect the study of the general and specific characteristics of iconism even within those of its sectors that are primarily concerned with iconic signs (the visual channel, for example). The first motive is that a definition of iconism can hardly fail to involve characteristics of the referents that appear to be objectual and extrasemiotic, thus threatening to break the closed circle that many semiotics have attempted to establish, in idealistic fashion, between texts and texts. Although it is, for example, easy to construct hypotheses about semantic fields that shrink from contact with, and indeed from the very concept of reality, this type of operation turns out to be more difficult with a class of signs that is intuitively defined by means of reality. A second motive of considerable importance is provided by the fact that such signs refer, within their intuitive definition, to concepts such as "resemblance" (which should be distinguished from the "similarity" of elementary geometry), "configuration" and others of the same type, which at any rate cannot be reduced to the simple logical instruments of opposition, exclusion, identity etc. employed by Saussure, the Prague school, or Hjelmslev. The analysis of a possible system of iconic signs, or of their objectual reference, can not be merely rhapsodic and impressionistic; it must make use of notably more complex and subtle intellectual instruments (in particular logical and mathematical ones). This is made necessary by the hypothesis (which is fundamental to this study) that if one is to understand the mechanisms of signification and reference operating in iconic signs, VS #3 – september 1973 1