Specificity, Pictorality and Compound Signs in Visual Communication: Toward a Meta-Rhetoric of Pictorial Media

This paper discusses the question of specificity with special reference to the two most important issues in pictorial semiotics of the late 1990ies, namely the new apologies for the Peircean concept of iconicity and the Belgian research team, Groupe ’s notion of a visual rhetoric in Traité du signe visuel (1992). Whereas in the text analytic semiotics of the Sixties and Seventies, media specificity was seen as a dominant “code ” (i.e. an overarching organizational principle of meaning) which therefore was to be given primary focus and which gave rise to specialised semiotics of “Cinema”, “Theatre”, “Architecture”, etc., this seems later to have been given up and replaced with a general semiotics of culture, that is of culture as a semiotic system. When one is to account for signification facts in pictures which are produced digitally by means of geographical data, say, by rendering of imagery from CAD-models, should one then approach such images as a specific medium, or are we better off studying their organization of signification in more general terms? What does specificity of visual media mean at all as concerns semiotic theory of signification today