Peircean visual semiotics: Potentials to be explored

Abstract

Visual semiotics is a lively branch of semiotics.A quarter of a century ago, the International Association of Visual Semiotics was founded to bring together scholars in this field of semiotic studies and soon after, the visionary Thomas A. Sebeok, with Jean Umiker-Sebeok, already identified Advances in Visual Semiotics (1995).Meanwhile, the research field has gained profile.The year 2013 saw the publication of two monographs under the title "visual semiotics," which testify to a considerable diversification and expansion of the research field.One is Tony Jappy's Introduction to Peircean Visual Semiotics and the other Wolfgang Wildgen's Visuelle Semiotik.What is the scope of visual semiotics?The two authors present the outlines of a huge but fuzzy research field, whose boundaries are neither clearly delimitated nor fully explored by either of them.Jappy sets out by suggesting that visual semiotics is concerned with the study of "visual culture, a culture that has witnessed enormous growth in the devising and deployment of vision-based technology" and in which "information is deserting the traditional print media and is coming more and more to be framed in screens of various sorts" (p.ix).However, in contrast to this immense research field, the field of study presented in Jappy's introduction is much narrower and more traditional in its scope.Among the examples by means of which the author introduces visual semiotics to his readers are drawings, engravings, block prints, frescoes, paintings, photographs, posters, diagrams, maps, and emoticons.He also includes nonverbal communication within his range of topics (cf.p. 217) and incorporates thus within visual semiotics a field of study that established itself as an independent field of semiotic research many decades ago.

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