Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
Modes of Address
McLuhanite theorists have argued that the codes of dominant media may
have a subtle but profound influence on the perceptual processes or 'world
views' of their users. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan himself,
following Ivins (1953), emphasized the 'impact' of print (McLuhan 1962). A
different technical invention of the early Renaissance which was
contemporaneous with Gutenberg's invention of movable type is often
cited as having played a role in a profound shift in the Western cultural
worldview. The mathematically-based technique of linear perspective was
invented in 1425 by Filippo Brunelleschi and codified as perspectiva
artificialis (artificial perspective) by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise,
Della pittura (On Painting), published in 1435-6 (Alberti 1966). For the
artist it is a rational geometrical technique for the systematic
representation of objects in space which mimics the everyday visual
illusion that the parallel edges of rectilinear objects converge at what we
now call a 'vanishing point' on the horizon.
We need reminding that this 'style of vision' is a historical invention: 'nothing like it appears earlier in
medieval painting, suggesting that men and women of earlier ages simply did not see in this fashion'
(Romanyshyn 1989, 40). Linear perspective thus constituted a new way of seeing which Samuel
Edgerton characterizes as 'the most appropriate convention for the pictorial representation of "truth"'
within 'the Renaissance paradigm' (a view of the world which reflected our understanding until the
advent of Einstein's theory of relativity) (Edgerton 1975, 162). We have become so accustomed to
reading pictures in terms of this illusionistic pictorial code that it now appears 'natural' to us to do so:
we are rarely conscious of it as a code at all. In an essay on 'Perspective as Symbolic Form'
published in German in the 1920s, the great art historian Erwin Panofsky generated considerable
controversy by making the claim that linear perspective was a 'symbolic form' - a historically-situated
system of conventions for representing pictorial space which reflected the dominant cultural
worldview of the Italian Renaissance (Edgerton 1975, 153ff). Similarly, Herbert Read noted that 'we
do not always realize that the theory of perspective developed in the fifteenth century is a scientific
convention; it is merely one way of describing space and has no absolute validity' (cited in Wright
1983, 2-3). Critics retorted that strict geometrical perspective is scientifically 'accurate' and accused
Panofsky and other heretics of 'relativism' (see Kubovy 1986, 162ff). Certainly, if we discount
phenomenal reality, what William Ivins calls 'the grammar of perspective' can be seen as having an
indexical character (Ivins 1975, 10). However, it can hardly be doubted that 'to close one eye and
hold the head still at a single predetermined point in space is not the normal way of looking at things'
(White 1967, 274).