Semiotics of Visual Language by Fernande Saint-Martin (review)

REVIEW Semiotics of Visual Language, by Fernande Saint-Martin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (Advances in Semiotics, Thomas A.Sebeok, ed.). 1990. [Original French edition, 1987. Quebec] 272 pgs. 37 illus., $35 cloth. ISBN 0-253-35057-3. Despite its title, Semiotics of Visual Language (SVL)-and despite inclusion of this review in Sign Language Studies-Professor Fernande Saint-Martin's book has nothing at all to do with any of the world's primary sign languages; i.e. those visual languages in everyday use by deaf populations. SVL is being reviewed here, nevertheless, because it can be a guide to making clearer distinctions between languages and systems that are not languages, between linguistics and semiotics, between grammar and other systems for ordering the elements of a system, and, above all, between spatial systems of representing and spatial languages-to which latter class ASL of course belongs. S-M attributes to Saussure, "'a semiology' in which verbal linguistics would constitute one element among many others" (p. ix). She later identifies one of these others as "'visual semiology' or 'visual semiotics' (both terms interchangeable for the purpose of this discussion)" (p. x). But in the very next paragraph she renames the topic of her discussion (reviewer's emphasis): These first attempts [by Panofsky and a half dozen followers] to formulate a theory of visual language established a dependence of its basic elements, as well as its syntax and semantics, on the constituitive categories of verbal language. (p.x) As the discussion has already brought in semiotics and language, with its syntax and semantics, not to mention a welter of verbal and visual elements, perhaps as reviewer I should make clear at once my own preference for categorizing these various domains: I hold the belief that (in awareness or not) we signify (what we mean or think or feel) with many kinds of signs and that these signs communicate information to others. I also believe that the scope of semiotics embraces all this. I further believe that languages constitute a subset of these sign systems (each one of them a semiotic, in the singular). And so I believe that a @1991 by Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 WCS "language" of flowers, of the Cambodian Court Dancers, or of the bees, etc., etc., is not properly a language at all but is a semiotic-with it its user can signify and communicate, but differences in logical typing and in biology separate it from language. Lest these beliefs suggest that I am suffering from "hardening of the categories," I reiterate that in Sign Language Structure thirty years ago I protested vigorously against all categorizations that would separate the primary languages of deaf people from languages proper. I continue to protest just as vigorously that primary sign languages are languages. I hold equally strongly the belief that it is essential to separate languages from non-languages, if we are ever to make sense of modern sciences of language, life, mind, and culture. SVL, by treating painting and sculpture as "visual language" reveals some interesting and possibly important ways in which the visual arts may be contemplated-the expected word here might be "viewed," but although there are a few diagrams in SVL, no illustrations of works of painting or sculpture are included, and in fact the book, published in the "Advances in Semiotics" series, is a work of philosophy, subcategories : epistemology and esthetics. (I would further classify it as semiotics had its author more clearly distinguished between a semiotic of painting and sculpture and "a visual language.") Throughout SVL, Saint-Martin treats the terms and categories linguistics and semiotics as if there were no distinction; yet half way through the preface she almost concedes a difference: . . . . Toward the end of the 1970s, many investigators no longer believed in the possibility of constituting a semiology of visual language on relatively1 scientific grounds. The main reason for this epistemological failure is tied to the refusal to recognize the inability of verbal language2-through its links with Aristotelian metaphysics and logic as well as by its mode of production and of two-dimensional, discrete signs-to conceive of spatial experiences and to account...