Article:
What Must Remain Hidden to Picture-Men. Notes on So-Called Semantic Enclaves

Author(s): Kalkofen, Hermann

Abstract

In dealing with a diagrammatical drawing, Wittgenstein noticed in the second part of his philosophical investigations that in some respect he stands to-wards it as he does towards a human face: »I can study its expression, can react to it as to the expression of the human face. A child can talk to the pic-ture-men or picture-animals, can treat them as it treats dolls« (WITTGENSTEIN 1968: 194). It can from a childlike angle, moreover, be known where picture-animals look, what may be gleaned from their glances in principle, and what on the contrary, will always be hidden to them. Wallis thinks of a semantic enclave as »a part of a work of art consist-ing of signs of another kind or from another system then the signs forming the whole work. Some examples: quotations in French in a novel written in English, inscriptions in medieval pictures« (WALLIS 1970: 525). This observa-tion shall be carried on; Wallis’ second example deserves picture-man’s inter-est. The question of how which semantic enclaves—aren’t there iconic ones, too?—are located within pictorial space renders the basis of a taxonomy to be developed. The problem of semantic enclaves is obviously related, though not in a clear fashion, to the one of semantic degrees. For example: The cop-per-etching of Galatea’s yet not statue and the likewise copper-engraved Pygmalion are picture-beings which belong to disparate classes; holding un-equal semantic station they cannot be in communication. Seeing such icon items—though that would be sensible in a way—in terms of semantic de-grees, however, would not account for the grounds, which caused Sta-chowiak to place oral language on the second and written text on a third se-mantic step. These reasons are, however, not cogent in the view of the pre-sent author, who tries to carry out instead the authentic semantic-degree-concept of Russell and Whitehead in the field of iconics.

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BibTex
Kalkofen, Hermann: What Must Remain Hidden to Picture-Men. Notes on So-Called Semantic Enclaves. In: IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, Jg. 13 (2017), Nr. 2, S. 35-59. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16436.
@ARTICLE{Kalkofen2017,
 author = {Kalkofen, Hermann},
 title = {What Must Remain Hidden to Picture-Men. Notes on So-Called Semantic Enclaves},
 year = 2017,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16436}",
 volume = 13,
 address = {Köln},
 journal = {IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft},
 number = 2,
 pages = {35--59},
}
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