Anders Marner, Ph.D.student at the Department of Art History, Umeå University, Sweden
The article is published in Marner, A., "Transsexuality, Metasemioticity and Photographic Surrealism" in Visio. La Revue de l´association internationale de sémiotique visuelle vol. 2, nr 3 Automne 1997 Hiver 1998
Abstract
Transsexuality, metasemioticity and photographic surrealism is a discussion with a departure in the concept of the swedish semiotician Göran Sonesson, secondary iconicity. Contrary to pictures it is an identitysign, where the signrelation precedes the likeness and is a condition upon its emergence. A special case of secondary iconical signs is the pseudoidentity. Transsexuals may be seen as pseudoidentities, men as signs of women. The article discusses the picture of the transsexual in relation to metasemioticity, pictorial rhetoric, Lakoff´s and Turner´s conceptual metaphor and the concepts of the lifeworld and the artworld. Rhetoric in relation to the lifeworld may be either a familiarization or an estrangement, either upwardgoing or downwardgoing on the Great Chain of Being, the hierarchy discussed by Lakoff and Turner. Also discussed are the notions of linguistic imperialism and photographic imperialism.
Résumé
Les notions de transsexualité, métasémioticité et surréalism photographique entrent dans la discussion qui a son origine dans le concept d'iconicité secondaire développé par le sémioticien suédois Göran Sonesson. A l'opposé des images, l'iconicité secondaire est un signe d'identité où la relation entre signes précède la ressemblance et conditionne son émergence. Un cas particulier d'icônicité secondaire est la pseudo-identité. Les transsexuels, des hommes portant le signe de femmes, peuvent servir d'illustration à cette notion de pseudo-identité. L'article traite l'image du transexuel par rapport à la métasémioticité, la rhétorique picturale, la métaphore conceptuelle de Lakoff et Turner, ainsi que par rapport aux concepts de monde de la vie et monde de l'art. Par rapport au monde de la vie, la rhétorique peut constituer une familiarisation ou une étrangeté, ascension ou descente dans la Great Chain of Being, la hiérarchie discutée par Lakoff et Turner. Nous discutons aussi les notions d'impérialisme linguistique et photographique.
Secondary iconicity and pseudoidentity
According to Göran Sonesson there are two fundamental types of iconicity. 1/ The first is the primary iconicity in which the experience of likeness appears before the sign-relation and conditions its emergence. The ordinary picture is a typical primary iconic sign. But it is also characterized by the fact that expression and content have no properties in common. Only proportions are in common, which is not necessarily true of other cases of primary iconicity, if they turn out to exist. In the primary iconicity there is a great diffrence between expression and content; they belong to different categories. Only what is less prominent, for instance paper or canvas, can be expression to a more prominent content, for instance a human being.
However, in the case of the secondary iconic sign the sign-relation must precede the likeness and be a condition upon its emergence. It may therefore relate two objects that share some properties, or in the extreme case share all properties, as an identity-sign. In the case of primary iconicity there is no need for conventions to interpret the sign. All you need to be able to interpret the picture is to be familiar with the depicted object. In the case of the secondary iconicity you have to be aware of the signrelation, and then you can see the likeness. Thus, a certain amount of convention is needed to make the sign work, which is contra-intuitive because you expect for instance a twin to be a perfect icon of the other twin. However, a twin is not necessarily a sign of the other twin. In most cases they are just two different individuals. Only in certain situations they enter into a signrelation, for instance when one of the twins act as the other twin.
Examples of the secondary iconicity is the tailors´ swatch which has some properties in common with the cloth it stands for, but not all, for instance not its size. A cake in the bakers´ shopwindow is a sign of the cake the customer will order for the next day.
More specifically the secondary iconicity is a signrelation between an object to some of its properties that the object also has, from token to type, and furthermore to a class of objects or an object having these properties. The swatch can therefore also stand for an ordered tailormade suit. Convention is important to the secondary iconic sign because in a way everything has at least some properties in common.
The pseudoidentity is a special case of secondary iconicity. A mannequin which stands for a human being is a pseudoidentity. In this case two different categories come together in the signrelation; the mannequin and what it stands for, the human being. The differing categories have common properties, three-dimensionality, head, arms and legs, which is the ground of the sign. But there also are some properties which they don't share, those are in fact the most important ones. While a human being is alive the mannequin is a non-living thing made of plastic, wood or wax. This means that also the difference between expression and content creates the signrelation, not only the properties they have in common.
Actually it is the assymetric difference between these two types of properties that makes the sign work. If all properties were the same it would not be a sign of a human being, it would rather be a human being. There are difficult cases, for instance the replicants in the film Blade Runner of Ridley Scott (1982), where Harrison Ford has to use a special optical equipment to look into the replicants´ eyes to decide whether they are humans or replicants. The replicants look like humans, they act, have names and even a memory of their own. They may appear in front of us without being percieved as signs. In that case they are humans, but if we know that they are replicants they become signs. The only difference is that our knowledge is incomplete.
A "real" human has no likeness to a mannequin, but a mannequin resembles a human. The relation is assymetrical and the mannequin is constructed to be like a human and has almost no identity of its own. The sign is instrumental and its expressionplane will be wiped out in the signrelation. We know that a mannequin is not human, but in a certain situation, for instance in a shopwindow, it stands for a human. What is non-living becomes humanized.
In theater or film actors often are pseudoidentities. At least in some kind of plays we are not supposed to bother about the actor, only the characters are important. The actor and character share a lot of properties, although not the important property of personal identity. There are other cases as well, in which humans become signs, for instance in the case of the transsexual. A male becomes a pseudoidentity and a secondary iconical sign of a woman. He shares properties with a woman, most of all that of being human, although he also wears female clothes and acts as a female. Still the transsexual lacks the most important property, that of having a female sex, just as the mannequin lacks life and the actor lacks the the personal identity of the character. The male properties are hidden, but not unimportant. If there were no male properties there would be no pseudoidentity, no transsexual, just a woman. As Sonesson has shown, in a mannequin seen as a pseudoidentity, the properties of the mannequin are wiped out. The transsexual himself would probably in a preferred reading consider himself as a pseudoidentity where the male properties are wiped out. 2/ The male part of the pseudoidentity is placed in the substance of the expression. It is only an instrument, a vehicle for a femininity that completely dominates. The body is concieved as less important than the image of the transsexual, the gender. The transsexual wants to be a woman all over and dreams of an operation. Until then s/he has to be satisfied with the pseudoidentity, female clothes, behaviour and maybe oestrogen. In a way a transsexual, just like a replicant or an artforgery is a special kind of sign that works as intended only when you are not aware of the signrelation. This type of sign can only be a secondary iconicity, and that goes for the false painting too, since it is not only the content of the picture which is supposed to be false, but the canvas and type of paint, and in fact the 'personal identity' of the painting must be false, and that means that it is a matter of identity, not likeness.
The rhetoric of transsexuality
The Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm has, since the beginning of the 1960s, documented transsexuals living around Place Blanche in Paris. The pictures are circulated in books, magazines and exhibitions. These pictures has been recieved as documentary pictures and have been placed in a social-realist genre. It has been said that the pictures show a supressed and marginalized group of people that fight for their sexual freedom and that the pictures support the transsexuals view of themselves; which is that they actually are women.
A paratext is a text indexically accompanying another text expression to expression. It may be rhetorical to the text next to it. The paratext of the photobook Vännerna från Place Blanche (The Friends from Place Blanche) (Strömholm 1983) contains written information about Place Blanche and a historical overview of this part of Montmartre where transexuals has been living for a long time. This means that the paratext is anchoring the pictures in Barthes sense to a referential space and time. It also contains an interview with Jacky, a transsexual with strong selfconfidence, who does not doubt transsexuality as a third gender and who feels safe in the transsexual identity. The paratext is thus an argument for an individual right to ones own life and to sexual rights.
As head of a famous photographic school (Kursverksamhetens fotoskola in Stockholm) Strömholm also has advocated a photographic method based on close contact between model and photographer. The photographer should preferably live with the models to get to know them well and in this way being able to avoid using telephotolenses to get close. A relationship would develop so that the photographer would be allowed to take pictures even in intimate situations. The model was also to be shown the pictures after printing to approve of them.
Sonesson has developed a model for pictorial rhetoric in four dimensions based on deviations from expectations of the lifeworld or the artworld (Sonesson 1996/7:49ff and Sonesson 1996). The lifeworld is according to Alfred Schütz "the world taken for granted", a world in which we live, with regularities, indexicalities and schemes given in a subjective-relative manner and from a certain point of view, the I-here-nowposition. Originally a concept of Husserl, it has been somewhat elaborated by Schütz, Göran Sonesson and others. The lifeworld is the preferred world and the privileged interpretation of our terrestial environment determining what is above and below etc. It is a reality without an innocent eye; an automatically interpreted and natural intersubjective, socio-cultural world. It is the position from which other worlds such as art, media and natural science can be observed, but also a position that is exposed to rhetoric (Sonesson 1996/7:55ff). The artworld consists of works of art, interpretations of them and actors such as artists, critics, curators, collectors and beholders.
The four dimensions of visual rhetoric according to Sonesson are a/ Integration. If two objects, who are not expected to be seen together, are united, the closer they are integrated the more the rhetorical effect will increase. b/ Identity/ opposition. The more unexpected identity or opposition between the two parts involved the more rhetorical effect. A union of parts that cannot unite were in the rhetoric of antiquity called an oxymoron. c/ Degree of fictionality. Different parts of the rhetoric can be either in præsentia or only suggested in absentia. d/ Relationships between mode of construction, function and channel of circulation. For instance if a work of art (a function) is a photograph (mode of construction) and is circulated in the same channels as advertising, than it is rhetorical, since a work of art is expected to be a painting and to be seen in an artgallery or a museum.
If we consider the transsexuals in relation to the rhetorical dimensions we discover that they may be highly rhetorical in the dimension of integration, since masculinity and femininity are united in the same body. This integration might lead to likeness. But there is also a strong rhetoric in the dimension of opposition, since male and female are anthropological oppositions. This means that the transsexuals can be regarded as oxymorons. Also in the degree of fictionality there is a retoric because what is seen are the female properties and what most often is only suggested are the male properties. The claim from Sonesson is that if two of the dimensions are rhetorically active then it is a rhetoric. The transsexuals are thus potentially rhetorical signs.
We also find a rhetoric between paratext and pictures in the book Vännerna från Place Blanche. Integrated close to the pictures the paratext transfers values from paratext to pictures. The paratext is according to Barthes anchoring the pictures and thereby making them more referential and social-realistic. This anchoring can be discussed in terms of "linguistic imperialism" if we consider that the values of "human interest" transferred from written language to pictures deform the rhetoric implicit in the pictures themselves. We came to the conclusion that the transsexuals were potentially rhetorical, yet the paratext says that they're not. In the paratext they are treated as almost ordinary women fighting for their rights. This means that the paratext supports the transsexuals as pseudoidentities with their male properties diminished, and their female properties projected on to the male. This is just like a mannequin in a shopwindow showing clothes for a customer or a doll in the role of a little baby for a little girl playing at mothers and fathers. The human properties are projected on to the mannequin and the doll and the mannequin- and dollproperties are of no interest.
The analysis of the rhetoric showed the possibility of the oxymoron in relation to the anthropological opposition between male and female. This suggests that the male properties can't be ignored in a rhetorical relation. Instead they might become fundamental. The pseudoidentity and the oxymoron seem to be two different signrelations at work within the same substance.
If a transsexual is a sign, then a picture of a transsexual can semiotically be thought of as a sign within a sign. A primary iconical sign is comprising a secondary iconical sign. This can be considered as a rhetorical relation in itself with a high degree of integration. However, it may also be an example of the metasemiotical function.
The metasemiotic function
As is well known Roman Jakobson (1974) has divided signs according to their different emphasis in different parts of the communicationmodel. Concerning photographs probably the referential function is the most common. In that case a picture refers to a reality beyond the sign. The sign itself is not stressed, the expression of the sign is just an instrumental vehicle for content and referent. There is also an emotive function accentuating the sender, a conative function highlighting the reciever and a phatic function highlighting the channel. Especially well known is the pragueschoolnotion of the æstetic function. It means that the artistic effect is the emphasizing of the sign itself, especially its expressionplane. In a work of art the æstetic function is at work when you move the interest from content to expresson, to colour, texture or form. The metasemiotic function is highlighting the code.
What kind of functions are the most active ones in the pictures of the transsexuals? At first there is a referential function active since we know that these pictures have been recieved in a social-realist genre as a documentary of a marginalized group of people. Furthermore the emotive/conative (interpersonal) functions are activated since most often the transsexuals visually are addressing the photographer or reciever. In addition to that the æsthetic function is activated at least in some receptions of these pictures since they also are integrated in an artworld. Yet it is my belief that the most important function may be the metasemiotical function.
However, there seem to be some problems with the range of the metasemiotical phenomenon in semiotics. Jakobson, who originally defined the metasemiotical phenomenon, defines it in the following way: "Whenever the sender and/or the reciever needs to controle that they use the same code, the speech is focused on the CODE: it gets a METALINGUISTIC (that is a commenting) function" 3/ According to Göran Sonesson the phrase Jakobson puts forward as a metalinguistic example, "Do you understand what I mean?", is not enough to be qualified as a metalinguistic utterance since the language which is a content for the metalinguistic comment is only referential. Nothing new is said on the metalinguistic level (Sonesson 1989:196).
The Russian semiotician Yuri M. Lotman claims that if a picture is placed within another picture the picture will be semiotized. It will become more picture than what it is a picture of. The referential function will seize to work and the metasemiotical function will increase its importance (Lotman 1990:55). Still in some of his examples, for instance inVenus and Cupid by Velasquez, which contains a mirror within the picture, the metasemiotic effect is quite small. The mirror seems to function referential, showing the face of Venus, rather than accentuating its own semioticity. This would support Sonessons criticism of the blurred notion of metasemioticity.
The British linguist Michael Halliday has discussed the clause in language as being built up by a relation between theme and rheme where theme means what is talked about and rheme means what is said about this (Halliday 1985:39ff). In the case of metasemioticity this pair can be used to identify the difference between a picture that simply show another picture, for instance in the case of reproductions of photographies in magazines, and a metasemiotical picture. A reproduction is supposed to stand for an original photograph with no comments added and the comprising picture is transparent emphasizing the secondary picture. The theme and rhemerelation will not appear between the picture and the pictured picture.
In the case of the pictures of the transsexuals I have shown that there is a primary sign, a picture, and a secondary sign, a transsexual. To be metasemiotical a sign must be a sign about a sign. There must be a theme and rhemerelationship and the primary sign must comment on the secondary sign. In what way may the photographs of Strömholm comment on the transsexual sign? If the transsexual sees himself as a woman it is a pseudoidentity and furthermore an expression and contentrelation where the male expression is instrumental to the content just as a torso dressed in bra and underpants in a shopwindow showing womens´ underwear. A female customer doesn't bother about the torso being mutilated, without head, arms and legs. She doesn't bother about the expressionplane of the sign since it is wiped out in the signrelation. She can easily see herself in the torso, dressed in the shown underwear. Following the function of the invisible torso the expressionpart of the transsexual, which are the male properties, is not taken into account in the pseudoidentity. Although in the case of the picture of the transsexual it is rather different. The expression and contentrelation is transformed into a theme and rhemerelationship where both parts are important for the organization of the rhetoric. The metasemioticity of the picture shows the retoric rather than the pseudoidentity.
The double discourse of surrealism
To understand this better we have to relocate the picture from social-realist and documentary genre to the artworld. The problem with the referential function, documentary and social-realistic genre is that the social, geographical and temporal specification prevent rhetoric to appear. But in another context, in the artworld, and especially in surrealism, the retoric is more probable to occur.
Breton argues as follows in Communicating Wessels:
What must be undone is the formal opposition of these two terms, which resides in the imperfect, infantile idea we have of nature, of the exteriority of time and of space. The stronger the element of immediate unlikeness appears, the more strongly it should be surmounted and denied. The whole meaning of the object is at stake. So two different bodies, rubbed against the other, attain through that spark their unity in fire, thus iron and water reach their common, admirable resolution in blood, and so on. 4/
The main thought in Breton´s thinking is unity between differences. The difference between dream and reality is supposed to dissolve into a "surréalité" (Breton 1973:20f). His retoric is reached by uniting objects as opposed to each other as possible ending in transparence. Another part of this theory of metaphor concerns the direction of the metaphor. It is supposed to move upwards from the lifeworld or a material lower level to a more spiritual world.
In his article Signe ascendant (Breton 1988:39) Breton is discussing surrealism as a non-reversible process where the development is directed to what is put in the place of the other. The metaphor moves between the two realities in a certain direction and is never reversible, and it is aimed at health, pleasure, tranquility and concordant purposes. The opposition of this positive metaphor is the depressing and as an example of the depressing metaphor he mentions Jean Coqteaus simile of a guitar with a bidet. While what is thematized in traditional metaphorics is the vehicle and the tenor stands for the vehicle, things tend to be the opposite in Breton´s ascendant sign: the vehicle will be the tenor in the irreversible process. The tenor then is not referring unambigiously to the vehicle, but replaces it. This means that also the tenor can be thematized. But if the tenor will be thematized the effect of the metaphor ceases and Bretons theory of metaphor becomes an ascendant spiral of a successive spiritualization.
But the intention is to change the world, and that is why some of the surrealists want the lifeworld itself to be carrier of the content of fantasy and not just art and dream. The objectivization of fantasy means that mans desire will be something real and not just imprisoned in the artworld. A closer look at the the Bretonian view reveals a connection between his view and the argumentation of the social-realistic paratext of Vännerna från Place Blanche. What can be a more perfect surréalité than a third gender, the transsexual identity? By uniting masculinity and femininity in one and the same body the transsexual can make the aim of Bretonian surrealism come true.
In surrealism there is however a double discourse. Georges Bataille, the surrealist "enemy from within", developed a parallell theory in which separation and mutilation supplemented union and instead of spiritualization "base materialism" were biased. Downwardgoing rhetoric in relation to the lifeworld and spirituality supplements the upward going rhetoric of Breton. He called the Bretonian surrealism an "icarian naivité" and instead talked about transgression to a lower level. His main conceptual metaphors are "man is an animal" or "man is a thing". Bataille rejects the Hegelian and Bretonian utopia, the final harmony and spiritualization. He maintains the demand of a frequent transgression, and it is only the transgression that can give an experience of wholeness. Bataille has got a dynamical model that consists of the opposition prohibition, interdit, and a transgression of the prohibition.
On the one hand is work, order, history, taboo and culture. On the other transgression of the prohibition that can be done in sacrificial rituals, perversions, excesses and feasting. It is important here to point out that Bataille doesn't want the prohibition to be cancelled, instead the transgression works just because of the prohibition. He does not think, as Breton does, of a successive process of liberation (Bataille 1986:67f). However, the aim is, just like in the Hegelian dialectics, to reach the wholeness by cancelling the individual isolation - what is discontinous. This can't be done through the Hegelian reason and Bretonian spiritualization, but only momentarily, for instance in the excess and in perversion, through contact with the animal in man.
Another important opposition for Bataille, and what is connected to prohibition and transgression, is homogeneity and heterogeneity. Homogeneity means when human relations are governed by rules and when they are characterized by interchangability. An example of the homogeneity is a closed-circuit system of communication or an economy where debit and credit go together. Other examples are work and science. An activity in the homogenous is useful and productive. For example an employee is in the homogeneity, since he doesn't have any value in himself, but only in relation to what he produces. The homogenous repells the heterogenous and works consequently as censorship. Bataille compares with the way the unconcious is repelled by the ego (Bataille 1985:141). The heterogenous on the other hand is the measureless and uncomparable, the radical other, what is its own meaning and is caracterized by wastefulness - expenditure.
To the heterogenous belong what the homogenous has rejected, for instance tabooed behaviours and excretions from the human body or society; blood of menstruation, throw-ups, urine, faeces, garbage, dead corpses but also a mob, aristocrats, lumpenproletariat, criminals of violence, mentally deranged, leaders and poets. Furthermore bodyparts, people, words and acts that suggests erotics; dreams, neuroses and what is holy (Bataille 1985:142). It is only by the rejected part that you can obtain wholeness.
According to the Swedish arthistorian Jan-Gunnar Sjölin the first operation in surrealism is isolation, to separate the object from the regularities, rules and habits of the lifeworld. One of the main reasons for the surrealistic interest in collage is that ( the picture of ) the objects is separated from their respective contexts. Isolation is usually the first operation that by relocation leads to a release of the object and to its disposability to surrealist values (Sjölin 1994:225 and 1981). The following moment is the rearrangement (dépaysement) which according to Breton is the main device in surrealism and in which the object is placed in præsentia next to another object. Dépaysement leads ideally for Breton to a unification of the two objects placed together according to the indexical rule "closeness leads to likeness". Thus alienation will successively fade away in the surrealist mainstream. Therefore isolation is a negative act and dépaysement is a positive.
Photography has been discussed within surrealism with both positive and negative assessments but it is interesting to observe how ideal photography is to surrealism since it isolates an object in both space and time. The photograph has the same decontextualizing effect in time as the frame has in space.
In the photographic æstetics which developed around Bataille in the magazine Documents in the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 30s dépaysement seldom appears. Bataille wants to separate objects rater than unite, that's why he is content with the first operation of the surrealist method. He prefers mutilation, selfmutilation and sacrificial rites and in photographs published next to his articles in Documents extreme close-ups are common. Since he is mostly interested in parts, the rest is in absentia.
A picture is most often interpreted with the help of lifworld-schemas while rhetoric sometimes demands further information to direct the transfer. It can be the context or an ideology in the artworld, the artists´ intentions or the title of the work. If there isn't a convention directing the rhetoric it can work in both directions or in different ways, the participating units can blend or separate (Sonesson 1989a:334). That is why a retoric often is optional when an interpretation of a sign leaves the lifeworld and enters the artworld. This may suggest that there is no relation between lifeworld and artworld.
The rhetoric of the lifeworld
According to Husserl the whole is seen through its parts in the spatial organization of the lifeworld. Yet what we actually see is not the perspective, the noema, but the whole object. We know that we can always from a certain point of view, the I-here-nowsituation, apply "the etc. principle" and look at an object from another point of view. From what is thematized the lifeworld is given with both inner and outer open horizons. By change of theme we can always expand the view. In a similar way the temporal organization connects the consciousness to retentions and protentions making a coherent flow of time. In the lifeworld we also use typification and schemes as means of interpretation. By assigning an object to a type or assigning a behaviour to a scheme we know what is to be expected (Sonesson 1989a:30ff). Since the main task of the lifeworld is to indexically connect space and time it becomes familiar to us as participants. 5/
Now, George Lakoff and Mark Turner have been discussing metaphor as a cognitive process, not only taking active part in poetry, but rather as a way of thinking. Metaphors are used automatically by the members of a culture. They are intersubjective and yet unconscious. The hierarchy of values all humans encompasse, the Great Chain of Being, creates possibilites to unite different domains that we are acquainted with or strange to us. It might be difficult to evaluate what is close to or strange to a person but the natural point of departure is the hierarchy of the Great Chain connected to the notion the lifeworld. In the Great Chain man is more important than animals and animals are more important than plants or non-living matter. Non-living matter can be separated in complex objects and in a lower level of natural physical matter (Lakoff & Turner 1989:170ff). Seen in relation to the lifeworld the Great Chain is an extension of the lifeworld upwards and downwards.
Besides its characteristic features the higher levels of the chain also have all the lower. That is why a cognitive metaphoric is understood in a relation between two parts, through mutual properties. The idea of the comparisions between for instance human properties and non-human properties may be to understand the human by the non human, e.g. with the metaphor "man is a plant" and on the contrary, that we can understand nature with the help of well known human properties and behaviours (Lakoff & Turner 1989:172). This means that the relationship between the different parts of the Great Chain of Being consists of secondary iconicities and thus demands a convention to work iconically. This convention might be a conception of the world which might be rhethoric in relation to the lifeworld and might affect it in parts, even though the lifeworld is tardy in changing.
If we place Breton´s theory of metaphor next to Lakoff´s and Turner´s model we find that it is ascending in the Great Chain of Being, in opposition to the metaphor "man is a plant" which is descendant. Another aspect of Breton´s theory is that it can be seen as a familiarization when he talks about the spiritual world moving into the lifeworld. One can also argue that the aestetics of Bataille is descendant, downwardgoing and a rhetorics of estrangement. This means that man, which has reason, language, culture and society as characteristic features, instead is seen in terms of characteristic features of a lower level. Man is seen as bestial and monstrous and the material world is transferred onto the cultural.
As is well known the formalist Viktor Shklovsky discusses estrangement as the main device in modernism and in art in general (Sklovskij 1971:50f). The estrangement is the desautomatization and aggravation of perception since in art the process of perception is an aim in itself and is supposed to last for the duration. To make strange is to relocate something in itself well-known into a sphere of strangeness. As an opposition and a reversed operation to estrangement familiarization may be seen as a very important device in advertising, in political propaganda and in Western entertainment in general. To make familiar is to relocate something in itself strange to the well-known lifeworld. We can combine the formalist notion of estrangement and the notion of familiarization with the Lakoff´s and Turner´s Great Chain of Being in a model (fig. 1) in the form of a cross. An array of rhetorical possibilities become visible in this model. The vertical axis is the Great Chain and the origo is the I-here-nowdeparture of the lifeworld core. Rhetorical movements on this axis can be ascending like Bretons and they can be either estranging or familiarizing depending on the direction to or from the I-here-nowposition. Further they can be descending like the rhetoric of Bataille. In the case of the rhetoric of Batailles only estrangement will occur.
An example of familiarization on the lower part of the axis is when a dog is treated as a part of the family. The horizontal axis stand for rhetorical movements on the same level of the chain. Also these movements can be either estranging or familiarizing. A case of familiarization on the same human level is for instance a TV-documentary showing an African tribe in their domestic work, in childrens caretaking etc. emphasizing human lifeworldvalues and the tribe being "just like us". Another example is in advertising where ordinary lifeworldvalues are projected onto the "strange" commodity making it necessary in everyday living. An example of estrangement on the horizontal axis is another TV-documentary about the same tribe emphasizing their seemingly strange rituals and tribaldances. Estrangement and familiarization are very important devices in todays ideology. In fascism estranging of etnical groups is common and the multicultural tool is the familiarization ending in the concept of the "global village".
Photographic imperialism
It is obvious that a transsexual is a union, but a union might result in at least two effects. On the one hand the two parts may be united according to the principle of "closeness leads to likeness". On the other hand differences may be singled out. By uniting what can't be united the oxymoron instead of likeness highlights the difference between two objects. They are united by force like two united negative magnetic poles and if they could they would immidiately repel.
This suggests that Bretonian rhetoric may be compatible with the non-rhetoric of social-realism if we suppose that the utopian union of Breton is the end of his "great narrative" when everything is transparent, when perception and representation is the same thing and when man and woman are united in one body. It also means that in Bataille´s surrealist narrative union is impossible outside momentary rhetorical transgressions. That is why the transsexual according to the Bataillean conceptual metaphor should be a compulsive union and grotesque rather than human.
The primary sign, the photograph, must comment on the secondary sign, the transsexual, if it is a metasemiotical sign. If we treat the pictures of the transsexuals as metasemiotical we find a sign about another sign. In the ordinary situation, for herself and for those who know her, the transsexual is a pseudoidentity, or when walking in the city no sign at all if the people who meet her just see a woman. Yet in the photograph, seen in relation to rhetoric in surrealism, the reading of the transsexual must be another. If we abstract the properties of the transsexual below the "basic level" of perception we find masculinity and femininity, two anthropological oppositions. A theme and rhemerelationship will appear between these properties. The picture immediately shows a theme, the woman, although in some parts of the picture there are male properties, which is the rheme. In surrealism we know that what is most expected is estranged, so it is the woman that must be estranged.
In som cases the male properties are almost invisible, like in the case of the portraits of Nana, where only the Adam's apple is male. Discovering the apple, the male properties will be washed over the entire face and the rhetorical effect will be "the woman is a man". In other pictures the fundamental male properties is seen in præsentia together with female properties like breasts. In the first picture of a series Cynthia is naked, but in spite of this she is a woman with female breasts. Nothing in the picture contests that she is a woman. Nevertheless he shows his penis in the last picture of the series and that makes it possible to transfer that referential information to the first picture and understand that he is pressing his thighs together with the penis hidden inbetween. The male properties are disguised, but can be imagined in absentia. In the second picture the upper part of the body is female, with female breasts, haircut and face, while the lower part of the body is male. This last case is according to the rhetoric of Sonesson a factorality from part to whole with double abduction.
This means that the male properties become very important in the pictures and the main rhetorical effect in relation to lifeworldexpectancies of the reciever, which very often may be a heterosexual. This effect can't be what the transsexuals themselves really strife for. Instead they want the man to be a woman, which is the reverse.
The picture of the transsexual can be considered metasemiotical and as a discussion of the pseudoidentity that disregards the male properties by placing them in the substance of the sign. Due to the "comment" in the primary sign the "expression" of the secondary sign gains in importance and becomes a content of its own. There is a fight between the two prototypicalities within the picture and the male properties will probably win. In this case Lotman´s semiotization seems to work since special attention to the "expression" of the secondary sign is given, that is the rheme and the masculinity. The femininity of the transsexual then becomes a mask that covers a hidden masculinity. The pictures are in a wider interpretation emphasizing conceptual metaphors as "life is a theater", "the world is a stage" and "man is a mask", well known themes in the grotesque tradition. This rhetoric supports Bataillean rather than Bretonian surrealism.
If we talk about "linguistic imperialism" when language is projected on to pictures, we could also talk about "photographic imperialism" when photography is used selecting properties of transsexuals treated as signs. It is interesting to note that when Strömholm talks about his method in photography to get in close contact with his models the aim seems to be to reach the personal freedom of the photographer rather than to bother about the integrity of the models and their personal freedom. Then the method is used to cross the proxemic borders of the transsexuals to be able to show them also as men.
The metasemiotical and rhetorical content in these pictures are probably a preferred reading since an investigation of the uvre of Strömholm supports a rhetorical and not a referential reading. It contains a lot of metasemiotical pictures commenting other pictures and signs. In his work the main device is isolation from the lifeworld and disguise in relation to what is in disguise. This can be considered in opposition to the expected referential picture in photography with its indexicalities to a further lifeworld, but also to the unifying and upward going rhetoric of Breton. Yet the notion of photographic imperialism must not be interpreted as depreciatory. Instead it emphasizes that his work is a work in its own right.
Artworld or lifeworld?
The social-realistic reading of the pictures is supported by the ascribed referentiality of the photograph which is further supported by the also ascribed original photographic indexicality (Barthes, Sontag, Krauss, Philippe Dubois and others) between objects/ photons and emulsion. In photography referentiality and the original indexicality seem to guarantee the existential autenticity before the content is experienced. One finds what seemingly is already there - reality. Nevertheless, just like paintings also photographs, from the point of view of the reciever, have a content preceding referentiality and it is this content we are prohibited to see thanks to the idea of indexicality creating the picture before it is seen by the reciever. But as Sonesson has shown, this process is reversed (Sonesson 1989b). The original indexicality demands iconicity in photography. We can apprehend the relation between object and emulsion as an important relation only after we have apprehended the elementary pictorial signrelation. This means that there after all is no fundamental difference between photography and other pictures based on pictorality like paintings or drawings. This is an important observation in the field of Visual Studies. Also rhetorical contents are built on top of pictorial content, which is the level on which all other meanings of the picture must relate to.
By discovering the rhetoric of photography an array of photographs can be seen as a part of the artworld instead of being separated in a narrow photographic genre based only on the photographic mode of construction. Yet this perspective may be a dead end. Arthur Danto has argued that an artworld is needed to interpret a work of art and outside of the artworld there is neither art nor interpretation, and I mentioned earlier that rhetoric were more probable to occur in the artworld and in surrealism. 6/ However, if we follow Lakoff and Turner the lifeworld might have a rhetorical potential in itself since conceptual metaphors is unconsciously and automatically used in ordinary cognition. The metaphors in art are just more artfully elaborated. The studies of Rabelais, the carnival and the grotesque by Bakhtin further suggest that rhetoric is embedded in folklore (Bachtin 1968:3ff). This might suggest that the artworld is not needed as a general interpretative domain like Danto argues. A rhetoric might be understood with the conceptual metaphors of lifeworld cognition. This means furthermore that a surrealist work of art or a photograph does not need either Bretons or Batailles rhetorical theories in the understanding of a picture as anchorage in the Barthesian sense since at least Breton's theories often are compulsive to the interpretation of artworks. They are normative and rhetorical in relation to the immanent pictorial rhetoric and therefore they function as linguistic imperialism in relation to surrealist works of art. But in the theory of Lakoff and Turner there is a difference between conceptual metaphors and linguistic metaphors. This means that a metaphor can be realized in photography as well as in language with no linguistic imperialism at hand.
Sonesson has suggested a fourth rhetorical dimension with deviations according to mode of construction, function and channel of circulation. If the photographs of Strömholm are surrealistic works of art and at the same time documentary photography, if they are shown in magazines advocating leftist sexual politics as well as shown in a one-man-show at Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art) in Stockholm, the photographs also fullfil the demands of a centrifugal rhetoric of the fourth dimension. Centrifugality in art means an effort to include objects and properties from outside art, Duchamp's Fountain, an urinal, Warhol's packet of Brillo and for instance his pictures of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. On the contrary an instance of centripetality in art is the highmodernist, mediaspecific art advocated by Clement Greenberg and others searching for the smallest denominator of art, the surface, the work of art as a thing.
More importantly than becoming a part of the artworld the retorical approach to photography will release photography from its imprisonment in the referential function to be a more potent part of the meaning-generating world, the semiosphere, a world that is global as well as rhetorical. A surreal semiosphere?
1/ The discussion of the different types of iconicity is based on Sonesson, G., Bildbetydelser Lund: Studentlitteratur 1992 p. 337f.
2/ Preferred reading is the reading of the reciever that the sender prefers. (Morley, D., Television, Audiences & Cultural Studies London och New York: Routhledge 1992 p. 86)
3/ Närhelst avsändaren och/eller mottagaren behöver kontrollera att de använder samma kod, fokuseras talet på KODEN: den får en METASPRÅKLIG (dvs. kommenterande) funktion.
Translation made by me from swedish: Jakobson. R., "Lingvistik och poetik" in Jakobson, R., Poetik och lingvistik. Stockholm: Norstedts Kontrakurs 1974 p. 147f
4/ Breton, A., Communicating Wessels. Lincoln och London: University of Nebraska Press 1990 p.109.
Ce qu'il s'agit de briser, c'est l'opposition toute formelle de ces deux termes; ce dont il s'agit d'avouir raison, c'est de leur apparente disproportion qui ne tient qu'à l'idée imparfaite, infantile qu'on se fait de la nature, de l'extériorité du temps et de l'espace. Plus l'élément de dissemblance immédite paraît fort, plus il doit être surmonté et nié. C'est toute la signification de l'objet qui est en jeu. Ainsi deux corps différents, frottés l'un contre l'autre, atteignent par l'étincelle, à leur unité suprêmè dans le feu; ainsi le feu et l'eau parvinnient à leur résolution commune, admirable, dans le sang, etc. (Breton, A., Les Vases communicants. Paris: Gallimard 1970 p. 129)
5/ On the notion of the lifeworld see also Sonesson, G, "Approaches of the Lifeworld Core of Pictorial Rhetoric" in Visio vol. 1 no. 3 automne 1996 hiver 1997 pp. 49-75
6/ Danto argues as follows:
...indiscernible objects become quite different and distinct works of art by dint of distinct and diffrent interpretations, so I shall think of interpretations as functions which transform material objects into works of art. Interpretation is in effect the lever with which an object is lifted out of the real world and into the art world, where it becomes vested in often unexpected raiment. Only in relationship to an interpretation is a material object an artwork... (Danto, A. C., The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art New York Columbia University Press 1986 p. 39)
References
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SKLOVSKIJ, V., (1971) "Konsten som grepp" in Aspelin, K. & Lundberg, B. A. (ed.), Form och struktur. Litteraturvetenskapliga texter i urval. Stockholm: PAN/Norstedts förlag.
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Author: Anders Marner
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anders.marner@educ.umu.se