Search

Producing and understanding signs means participating in communicative processes. The sign is the field of ambivalence, similarity, deviation, creativity, in which everything is decided by social relations and practices (I-for-me, the other-for-me and I-for-the-other, as Bakhtin says).The artistic text provides the possibility to better grasp the dialogical structure of utterance. Bakhtin shows how the sense of the text does not connected with the repeatable elements of the system of signs of which it is composed (interpretants of identification). The sense of the text is rather connected with the constitution of text and not only in its manifestation. The sense of text is situated in the relations of postponement, of deferment (interpretants of responsive comprehension) which produce a chain of texts preceding and following it. In unfolding its plot, while respecting its rules, forms and structures, the literary utterance of free indirect speech is capable of transgressing them in a dense intertextual dialogue and, diachronically, between different authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a well-known course he gave in 1904-1905, Edmund Husserl developed a ‘threefold’ notion of image revolving around the notion of depiction [Abbildung]. More specifically, the phenomenological description allows a seeing-in to emerge as an essential characteristic of the image consciousness, in which an image object assumes the role of a representant [Repräsentant] in order to allow us to see the image subject in the image itself (thanks to “moments of resemblance” shared by image object and image subject). Nevertheless, our paper – focusing particularly on what might be called the depictive art par excellence, that is the portrait – aims to show that it would be erroneous to read the Husserlian notion of image exclusively on the basis of this earlier course: things seem to change significantly when Husserl develops a different notion of phantasy, and artistic images, in particular, are not to be thought of as resembling something else, but rather as expressive images producing their own model.

Screaming and singing mouths are often amusing, and wide-open mouths in paintings are often the outcome of a lack of skill or pieces of evidence of a risky attempt to depict in a too simple way something elusive like sounds and voices. According to Schopenhauer, paintings representing screams and cries, choirs and concerts create in the spectator a strong feeling of stillness, which seems to be at least disappointing and unexpected. The paper aims to show that Schopenhauer is wrong because he doesn't take into account the role of imagination in our pictorial experience. On the other hand, pictorial narrativity depends on its nature on pictorial medium - a subject on which I try to cast a glance in the concluding remarks of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kendall Walton has defined pictorial experience as a visual game of make-believe, which consists in imagining our actual seeing the representational prop to be a fictional face to face seeing the represented subject. To maintain a twofold awareness of these two visual aspects while avoiding a phenomenal clash between them, Walton needs to characterise visual make-believe as involving a propositional imagining. Unfortunately, the strategy does not seem to be successful. Whether propositional imagination is taken as a simple descriptive report or as conceptually penetrating our perception, Walton’s account is not able to secure the visual and the twofold character of pictorial recognition.

I rely on Frascolla's interpretation of the Tractatus ontology to develop an account of depiction in which a picture is conceived of as a visual structure constituted by pixels that are conceived of, in their turn, as elementary propositions. Then I argue that such an account is complementary to the considerations about «noticing aspects» in the Philosophical Investigations, to the extent that the visual structure constituted by pixels provides a design allowing the picture’s viewer to notice aspects. Finally I argue that a joint reading of the considerations about pictures in the Tractatus and in the Philosophical Investigations allows us to address some important issues in the contemporary philosophical debate about depiction.

Wittgenstein’s remarks on “seeing-as” have influenced several scholars working on depiction. They have especially inspired those who think that in order to understand depiction we should understand the specific kind of visual experience depictions arouse in the viewer (e.g. Gombrich [1960], Wollheim [1968; 1987]). In this paper I would like to go a different way. My hypothesis is that certain of Wittgenstein’s claims both in the Tractatus and in his later writings resonate well within the context of an objective resemblance account of depiction (Hyman, 2006).