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Abstract:
Two recently translated monographs by J.-M. Floch provide English-language scholars with a substantial sample of this original and prolific visual semiotician's work. The articles making up the two volumes present and illustrate the methods and concepts that Floch developed: "figurative semiotics", "plastic semiotics", and "visual identities". Privileging the close description of particular images, Jean-Marie Floch's work systematically brings to bear a complex and explicit semiotic theory to the exploration of visual images. The books raise crucial questions for research in the visual arts, in marketing, in perception and cognition, and in intercultural communication. This essay describes the main procedures Floch proposes for analyzing visual images, examines his concept of a visual identity, and evaluates the two English editions and translations.
What draws semioticians to visual studies? Films and photographs, sitcoms and historical paintings teem with solicitations and manipulations that seem tailor-made for research focused on signs, communication, and meaning. The dynamics of moving through the visual field and its relation to stimuli channeled through other senses have kindled some of the most critical semiotic musings, and the nature and function of visual percepts, designs, icons, and symbols have long represented central questions for formal semiotic theories. With its oversized billboards, glossy full-page magazine ads, and big-budget thirty-second television spots, advertising in particular has attracted semioticians as effectively as it has buyers. Its peculiar synergy of exciting surfaces and focused messages, cultural ubiquity and scheming tactics provides a paradigmatic and indeed parodistic forum for analyzing the production, distribution, interpretation, and social function of signs. Some of these studies intersect with the broad-based critique of ocularcentrism: advertising's conjunction of capital and images epitomizes the convergence of vision, power, and knowledge in Western epistemology. Fields studying new media such as film, television, the Internet, and digital media have proven particularly open to contemporary semiotic approaches. Visual semioticians also maintain a dialogue with recognized traditions in visual studies, including the aesthetics and art history developed by such figures as Heinrich WolfHin, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, Henri Focillon, and Nelson Goodman.
What does semiotics offer visual studies? Its interest in an image's sensible qualities, cognitive content, and communicative trajectories, suggested by Peirce's definition of the sign as the dynamic among representamen, object, and interprétant, fosters investigations of the...