Toward a Meta-Rhetoric of Pictorial Media Specificity, Pictorality and Compound Signs

What does specificity of visual media mean as concerns semiotic theory of signification today? Not much, apparently. Whereas in the text analytic semiotics of the Sixties and Seventies, media specificity was seen as a dominant “code” 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. Hence today it makes little sense as well to maintain the traditional separation in semiotic studies between general and so-called special semiotics. I shall not venture into an exhaustive explanation of why this is so, but it prob-ably has to do with profound cultural reasons. As far as critical art is concerned, nobody would probably challenge the assertion that today, what matters is not the mast-ery of a specific art form but of art as concept, that is of conceptual art as such. Accordingly, artists are now giving up the “slavery of the technique” to be able to contribute more freely with ideas to the societies and traditions of which they form part. As concerns the study of media, we are experiencing a similar degradation of especially those media that used to belong to the muses of the Fine Arts. What is important is no longer the medium in its ideality but their actual use in societies and by individuals. So, for the student of media it seems now less relevant to focus on specific media as isolated phenomena in this sense than to identify and analyze media cultures.