Archeology and Anthropology of the plastic dimension of Visual Semiotics. In tribute to Jean-Marie Floch

Abstract

The expression “plastic semiotics”, put forward by Jean-Marie Floch, following Greimas, is already in itself a critical choice. It allowed us to avoid the trap of previous semiotic typologies, based on sensory channels, because the plastic dimension is not reserved for the visual domain! “Plastic semiotics” implies in fact from the outset a type of semiosis, endowed with its specific planes of expression and content: the identification of a specific plane of expression does not seem to be difficult, but that of the plane of content is more problematic. The Group μ has devoted a good part of its Treatise on the Visual Sign to what it calls the “plastic sign”, but as much as its systematic description of the plastic expression seems exhaustive, coherent and therefore convincing, its proposals concerning the plastic contents, in default with respect to the principle of heterotopia (but isomorphism) between expression and content, seem a little too redundant (or dependent) with respect to the expression, and weakly heuristic. Precisely, the underlying problem is the status of the plastic dimension, which has much to lose by being specialized in the visual, and much to gain by being considered as a particular but transversal type of semiosis (with respect to object types, sensory channels, and even domains of knowledge). This is why the question of the specificity of its contents is decisive, but only if it is approached
from a general anthropological and cultural perspective. It happens that in this respect, Greimas,
Floch, but also Thürlemann, already put in evidence, in their analyses, plastic contents which took on narrativo-mythic and anthropological allures clearly heterotopic with regard to the plastic expressions. To specify the plastic dimension, Jean-Marie Floch had perfectly identified part of the difficulty, and the possibility of a solution, with the semi-symbolic systems: the relations proper to the plastic semiosis would be characterized by the correlation between oppositions of the plastic expression and oppositions of the plastic contents. But, if the semi-symbolic systems guarantee the independence and the heteronomy between plastic expressions and contents, they say nothing about the nature of the contents in question. This is why our investigation, qualified of “archaeology of the plastic dimension”, endeavors here to go through the main typologies
where the possibilities of plastic contents take birth, which are, in fact, different proposals as
regards types of signification: those proposed by medieval scholasticism (four types of meaning),
those reformulated by iconology (three types), those advanced, finally, by Barthes (two or three types, according to the versions) and Greimas (two types): it emerges precisely from this that the particularity of the plastic contents can be apprehended only by an approach of anthropological and comparative mode.