The Art World: A Seventy-Five-Year Treasury of ARTnews ed. by Barbaralee Diamonstein (review)

336 Books semiotics, whereas the real emphasis is on serniorics, with the visual term being added more as a foil for verbal semiotics of a somewhat ‘traditional’ kind. With a Table of Contents at the back of the book and no index (asisstilltoo often the case in French books), one is first offered a fairly long list of the books and articles Lindekens has written, in preparation orto be published. Only thrbugh them does one get a vague, indirect inkling of who he is and what his credentials are. The book is divided into four large chapters: The Image as Modality of the Visual-Visible: Basis for a Theory; The ImageAnalogon ; Iconicity and the Problems of the Semiotic Stratification of the Image and The Verbalization Code. The subsections in each chapter are numbered, which suggests that the book is meant to be read by some sort of captive audience, one that is expected to refer to the arguments of each numbered subsection for study purposes. This impression is strengthened by the fact that the author makes several references to his previous works for a better undertaking of the present one. Furthermore, in several cases he coins his own terms, adding to hisalready heavy useof specialsemioticterms. Unfortunately,he offers readers no glossary to help them understand them. One point that aroused my immediate ire was that Lindekens speaks at the start of the ‘photographic-filmic image’. This is a dubious ‘marriage’ of terms, since, though one may historically have been derived from the other, each has very distinct properties, though some may overlap. To bring them together like this and treat them as one, already casts some suspicions on the author’s qualifications to deal with the visual aspects of the subject. Although I feel that Lindekens attempts to be as rigorous as possible, while adhering to the Hjelmslevian and Greimasian principles of semiotics. I find that he is not at all at ease with visual displays. His strength, if any, liesin the linguisticaspects of semiotics. But his attempts to ‘extrapolate’, as he puts it, visual semiotics from its verbal basis is an extremely precarious exercise whose outcomecan virtually be guessed from very early on in the book. The author is sufficiently well-meaning to admit at several points in the text that the attempt is hardly ever really a success. In the meantime, one is treated to somewhat abstruse ‘operations’ intended to prove the rigor of steps in sequences, which remind one of‘operations’ in logic and mathematics. The images (especially the photographs) are badly reproduced, and, in many cases, even with the text they are supposed to illustrate (or vice versa), it is difficult to comprehend their point. It is my impression that Lindekens is much more at ease in dealing with analyses of verbal signs and that he is not familiar enough, by far, with visual ones. To attempt to make such an extrapolation takes one into some fascinating intellectual acrobatics for which one must be well-prepared by a thorough knowledge of the works ofde Saussure, Hjelmslev and Greimas, at the very least. From a practical point of view, even a most careful study of this book will help but little a photographer, a cinema producer or a graphic artist, or, for that matter, help them to better understand the works of others. Computational Semantics: An Introduct/on to Artiflcial Intelligence and Natural Language Comprehension. Eugene Charniak and Yorick Wilks, eds. North-Holland, Amsterdam and New York, 1976. 294 pp. illus. Dfl. 55.00; $19.00 Reviewed by Michael Thompson* This book introduces the fieldofcomputational semantics. In the words of the editors: ‘Computational Semantics is not so much a new subject, as a new way of looking at old questions-those concerning meaning, language, and understanding. It is based on the assumption that a good way to explicate such difficult notions is to work toward the programming of an automaton or digital computer sothat it could be said to understand language.’ The text has been developed from lecture notes given in a course at the Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies in Switzerland in 1975. It is unconventional as a textbook because the 7 authors do not...