Semiotic change comes about by way of metaphor and connotation. 27. It also engages motivation in chap 3 27
Van l doesn't mention the nature of change, but it is in part the movement of a mode towards recognizing semiological resources. That is, if the artist doesn't see an element as a semiotic resource, it isn't. By the same token, arrangement is not seen as semiotic by many HS teachers - certainly not by students, who see it as formal and formulaic and prescriptive. But eventually the practitioners come to recognize that their materials are semiotic resources, they see the second level sign. 29
Metaphor on its sense of transport becomes a multimodal concept and can be applied to modes other than language. 30. So van l asserts. This works in part by how he defines metaphor. But he provides some examples 31.
Brings in material grounding of metaphor 33. Important because they will rest a number of concepts on materiality. "New ideas and new practices can be founded on the affordances of direct, concrete experience." 33. This means that some materials are pre-semiotic, they afford w/o entailing meaning. It is the ground on which that stack of turtles finally rests.
One kind of meaning making codes of experiential metaphor. The same goes for metonymy. - experience by which we understand metaphor may be physical. Tense. - may be in physical relation to environment. Heavy - understood on basis of interaction w people in culture. These are culturally mediated experiences. - See Reading Images, intro, to get a better sense of how experience leads to metaphorical transfer. Kress and Van Leeuwen
In all cases, some aspects are highlighted, others obscured or left out. It's a way of directing attention - creating salience. Picture of a cow on milk carton directs attention to naturalness rather than additives and processes. 35-6.
The experiential means we can make sense of some visual marks by way of experience in making them.
Semiotic innovation can be grounded on these experiences. This concrete stuff is extended into metaphor. This concrete stuff is used as a semiotic resource - where the experience is the signified, the signifier the indexical thing, and the pairing the sign.
Typography as multimodal. And as such, it can become part of semiotic change and innovation. By usin typography, van is showing that what appears naturalized, what is used as naturalized, can be used in semiosis.
<b> Connotation</b>
Focus on Barthes's use. Denotation as resembling the thing. Connotation as the second order signification. 37-8 conn are the ideological meanings. They are signified in the way the things are represented. 38
Think of applying instGram filters to selfies. The image of subject is the Denotation. The selfie pose is imported connotation.
Style, framing, ect 39 and poses and objects 38.
This is grounding semiosis in realities - objects - or physical affordances. Similar to way child uses circle to represent wheelness. Van wants to ground semiotics in the concrete. Even if that concrete is not connotatively pure. It is a foundation. Not turtles.
Innovation by importing. 40-1. Imports values, styles - essentially the myths of that sig system.
This is Significant in global culture. But that Suggests that it is less an individual function and more that of the professional. Those in control of the means of spreading the lexicon. But also think punks and New Romantics. Imported and distributed by piggybacking the media. The pop media provides the resources for signifying allegiance to ideas, etc.
Even in innovation, a material sign is called on as a way of bringing in the sign system of the import. Circuits typeface. 41. New romantic use of beauty marks.
But imports are not arbitrary. They are motivated by interest, and the import and target seem to have some affordances in common. Type, it's the function of alphabet. Punk, it's diy of poverty, New Romantics relies on the dress and makeup techniques of the period. We're seeng sort of second order signification by time. The signs of thr earlier period are being repositioned as signifieds of later.
Semiotic work. 43.
Exercise 5 p 46 Consider what we're importing from, and what kind of chimera we've created.