Simon Grennan A Theory of Narrative Drawing PDF

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Simon Grennan
A Theory
of Narrative Drawing
Simon Grennan
University of Chester
Chester, United Kingdom
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

ISBN 978-1-137-52165-1 ISBN 978-1-137-51844-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51844-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936958
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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CONTENTS
1 Drawing, Depicting and Imagining 1

1.1 Drawing’s Devices 1
1.1.1 Causes and Consequences: An Aetiological
Characterisation of Drawing 1
1.1.2 Generalising Some Potential Resources of the Human
Body 14
1.1.3 Generalising the Role of Environmental and Social
Modulations 24
1.2 Drawing’s Affordances 28
1.2.1 Graphiotactic Realisation of the General Potential
Resources of the Body 28
1.2.2 Visual Language 37
1.2.3 Depiction 48
1.3 Drawing’s Institution 61
1.3.1 An Institutional Description of the General Potential
Resources of the Body 62
1.3.2 Affect 64
1.3.3 The Body as Cause and Consequence 66
1.3.4 Propositional Realisations of Non-propositional
Structures 70
1.3.5 Examples of the Visible Representations of Emotional
Sensations 74
1.4 Imagining 88
1.4.1 Theorising Perception and Visualisation 88
1.4.2 Properties and Categories 94
v
vi CONTENTS
1.4.3 Fiction 98
1.5 Conventional Imagining 102
Notes 106
2 Narrative 121
2.1 The Intersubjective Basis of Discourse 121
2.2 Narrative Realisation of Intersubjects 135
2.2.1 Further Implications of an Aetiological
Characterisation of Representations 142
2.3 An Epistemological System of Discourse Characterised as
Narrative 146
Notes 156
3 Drawing Demonstration One: Expounding Another’s

Thought in the Style of That Thought 161
3.1 ‘Mediagenius’ and the Comic Strip Register 162
3.1.1 The Comic Strip Register’s ‘Mediagenius’ and
Intersubjectivity 166
3.2 Self and Self-perception 172
3.3 The Theoretically Neutral Subject 173
3.4 Terms of Drawing Demonstration One 174
3.4.1 Drawing Demonstration One 178
3.4.2 Drawing Demonstration One (a) Method 180
3.4.3 Drawing Demonstration One (a) Analysis 189
3.4.4 Drawing Demonstration One (b) Method and
Analysis 193
3.4.5 Demonstration One (c) Method and Analysis 200
3.4.6 Drawing Demonstration One Conclusion 212
Notes 215
4 Drawing Demonstration Two: Time and Self-Observation 217

4.1 Pierre Menard’s Project 218
4.2 Seth, Arno and Brown 222
4.3 Appropriation 224
4.3.1 Levine and Evans 226
4.4 Self-Observation and Social Consensus 229
4.5 Madden’s Exercises with Drawing Style 230
4.6 Drawing Demonstration Two 239
CONTENTS vii
4.6.1 Drawing Demonstration Two Method 240

4.6.2 Drawing Demonstration Two Analysis 243
Notes 248
Bibliography 251
Index 263
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1.1 Henri Gaudier-Bzresca. Eagle. Pen and ink on paper

(1911–14) 26
Fig. 2.1 An epistemological system of discourse characterised as
narrative 148
Fig. 3.1 Jim Medway, Teen Witch (2007), 6–7 181
Fig. 3.2 Mike Mignola. ‘Box Full of Evil’ in Mike Mignola, The Right
Hand of Doom (2000), 144 184
Fig. 3.3 Simon Grennan, Drawing Demonstration One (a) Medway/
Mignola layout (2009) 186
Mignola text layout (2009) 187
Mignola storyboard (2009) 188
Fig. 3.6 Simon Grennan, Drawing Demonstration One (a) Medway
as Mignola (2009) 190
Fig. 3.7 Mike Mignola ‘Almost Colossus,’ in Mike Mignola, The
Chained Coffin and Others (1998), 144–45 195
Fig. 3.8 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
(2000), 320–21 199
Fig. 3.9 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (b) Mignola/Ware
panel layout (2009) 201
Fig. 3.10 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (b) Mignola/Ware scene
layout (2009) 202
Fig. 3.11 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (b) Mignola as Ware
(2009) 204
Fig. 3.12 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (1996), 1445–45 206
ix
x LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 3.13 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (c) Spiegelman as

Medway storyboard (2009) 209
Fig. 3.14 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (c) Spiegelman as
Medway (2009) 210
Fig. 4.1 Matt Madden, ‘Template,’ in Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell
a Story: Exercises in Style (2006), 3 233
Fig. 4.2 Matt Madden, ‘Fantasy,’ in Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a
Story: Exercises in Style (2006), 31 234
Fig. 4.3 Harold Sayer De Lay, ‘Red Nails’ in Weird Tales Vol 28/2
(1936), 205 236
Fig. 4.4 Matt Madden, ‘Exercises in Love,’ in Matt Madden, 99 Ways
to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2006), 47 237
Fig. 4.5 Simon Grennan, Drawing Demonstration Two (1950s),
(2009) 244
(2009) 245
(2009) 246
INTRODUCTION
The architecture of this book derives from a single motive. The topics and
methods of the sections that constitute the book are produced and arranged
in order to explain experiences of drawing and narrative. The measure by
which I have decided to include or exclude any topic or method is its
saliency in helping me to achieving this explanation. This is also the basis
upon which I have decided its place or use in the architecture of the book.
Hence, A Theory of Narrative Drawing is interdisciplinary. The book
applies concepts and methods from one discipline to questions arising in
another. Adopting the approach of selecting topics and methods in order to
make an explanation sounds like a commonplace process. Of itself, the ratio-
nale for using particular topics, concepts and methods to explain one type of
experience leads to the rationales for explaining other types of experience, until
both the architecture of the book and the task of explaining are complete.
In fact, this process appears to be commonplace only within the conven-
tions of the selection of topics and methods that constitute scholarly dis-
ciplines, and less so without them. Much like genres, scholarly disciplines
only affirm or contradict themselves by habits of use. These habits validate
the salience and status of their topics and methods, providing a grounding
consensus among scholars in a particular field of knowledge. They also
constitute a normative authority, under the aegis of which an elementary
foundational concept that is utterly habituated in one scholarly field can
appear to be incomprehensible, unnecessary or even bizarre in another.
For the scholar taking an interdisciplinary approach, the application of
dis-habituating topics and methods from one discipline to another (in the
practical form of concepts, ways of proceeding and terminology, for
xi
xii INTRODUCTION
example), inevitably begs the question of expertise. Where no consensus

exists as to the status and identity of a topic or method from another
discipline, and no expertise can be expected of scholars in one discipline, of
the current state of knowledge in another discipline, frustrations in asses-
sing the value of an explanation, or even following an explanation, are
probably inevitable.
In pursuing topics and utilising methods solely in order to explain, this
book frequently makes the demand that a reader must also join me in
applying concepts and methods from one discipline to questions arising
from descriptions and characterisations made in other disciplines.
Adjudicating the possible risks of my approach, I urge readers always to
keep in mind my motivation to explain experiences of drawing and narra-
tive, wherever they are directed to proceed by unfamiliar rationales.
The title of the book, A Theory of Narrative Drawing, announces my
objective of arriving at descriptions that explain experiences of drawing and
narrative. A theory explains salient features of experience by identifying,
describing and substantiating relationships between them. To self-evidence
as a theoretical description of an activity or phenomenon, a description must
take into account all of the conditions that influence its occurrence and the
ways in which it occurs. It is systematic, in that the substantiation of these
relationships must identify items and relative functions, applicable in every
case, in which every one of these is interdependent and in which it is not
possible to omit any element without breaking the system.
To use the term ‘narrative drawing’ is to propose an identity for features
related to each other and, in making this proposal, to identify, describe
and substantiate the saliency of these relationships. Hence, the term
narrative drawing realises evidenced explanations of the relationships
between these salient features, and the title of the book is verifiable as
A Theory of Narrative Drawing.
Finally, in recognising that explanation is not the same as justification,
the final two chapters of the book include two practical Drawing
Demonstrations designed to display sufficient evidence, within a proposed
set of rules of inference, to justify the ways in which they are posited and
explained. These two Drawing Demonstrations are formed as answers to
specific short questions, and the questions themselves establish the status
and identify of the rules of inference by which both the Drawing
Demonstrations and the explanations that are offered for them are to be
adjudicated and justified.
CHAPTER 1
Drawing, Depicting and Imagining
1.1 DRAWING’S DEVICES

1.1.1 Causes and Consequences: An Aetiological Characterisation
of Drawing
It is a commonplace of studies of drawing,1 from practical manuals
instructing in particular drawing traditions, through scholarly analyses,
to identify early the focus of study—what drawing is—with types of
technical activities and their histories. Even those studies that take an
overwhelmingly theoretical approach, to undertake a ‘philosophical criti-
cism of drawing,’ as Patrick Maynard describes his own study, largely
concern themselves with the investigation of various types of technical
production, or the ways in which different arrays of perceived effects, and
the environmental and cognitive systems that support their production
and perception, are evidenced in the material technologies of existing
drawings.2
Consider, for example, the following sentence from Rudy de Reyna’s
How to Draw What You See (which must count as one of the most utilised
drawing manuals, not having been out of print since 1970), on drawing
curved lines:
Again, hold the pencil (still the ordinary ‘office’ kind) in whichever position
you prefer: the usual writing one, or ‘under the palm.’ Swing your arm from
the elbow, and even from the shoulder, . . . If you hamper your rendering
© The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Grennan, A Theory of Narrative Drawing, Palgrave Studies
in Comics and Graphic Novels, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51844-6_1
2 1 DRAWING, DEPICTING AND IMAGINING
now by working from the wrist ( . . . ) the beautiful sweep of a fluid line will
never be yours.3
Similarly, consider the following instruction from another drawing

manual, Clare Watson Garcia’s Drawing for the Absolute and Utter
Beginner:
To get the best results when applying your contour-drawing technique to

three-dimensional objects ( . . . ) sustain long lines whenever possible ( . . . )
Project the shape of the line from start to finish on your paper so you get a
brief feel for starting point and destination.4
Although quite different in intent, these instructions share an assumption

about drawing with a theoretical comment by Maynard that he ‘will always
consider appearances as various assemblages of effects, largely derived
from environmental ones.’5 The assumption is this—that the draughtsper-
son selects from a number of possible technological actions productive of
marks qualifying as drawn and that these possibilities are produced in two
ways: as a selection from a range of devices—that is, technical activities—
with particular properties in combination (as if from items on a menu,
syntactically) or on the basis of the production of effects themselves, in
which case, syntactics occurs in the relative array of the perceptual effects
produced in each drawing, rather than in the relative array of properties
that are chosen in combination.
Although they do not seek to emphatically define drawing, both
Maynard’s, de Renya’s and Watson Garcia’s statements approach drawing
as a group of activities technologically productive of perceptual effects, in
which effects these activities—the activities of drawing––can be inferred.
In this view, drawing reveals a fundamentally technical history from which
it is possible for teachers and scholars alike to extrapolate and theorise the
functions of similarities between drawings produced in many different
circumstances and for many different reasons, generating a descriptive
approach to thinking about drawing, in the majority as distinctions
between forms and, in the minority, as types of actions intended to
produce these distinctions.
Hence, the objects of these studies of drawing are the technical ele-
ments of formal arrays, identified through instances of repetition and
considered as components, from the appearances of existing drawings,
on the basis of the perceptual effects that they afford. For example, both
1.1 DRAWING’S DEVICES 3
instruction manuals and theoretical study identify ‘point,’ ‘line,’ ‘shape’

and ‘surface,’ among other, more complex topological combinations, as
significant components in the array of effects perceived in existing draw-
ings, on the basis of their comparative properties and the repeated appear-
ances of their general topologies in a variety of circumstances.6
I think that the consideration of drawing as a technical activity, produ-
cing effects, following my examples from Maynard, de Renya and Watson
Garcia, benefits from a little further analysis in its own terms. It suggests an
aetiological characterisation in which the drawing studies of scholars who
take an overall technical-activity approach overlook, such as Maynard,
Philip Rawson and John Willats, for example.7 I use the word ‘aetiological’
here to encompass both the concept of ‘cause,’ which only concerns the
relationship between an action and its antecedents, and the concept ‘tele-
ology,’ which identifies actions by their observable tendencies, including
both causes and consequences, following Wright.8
What has an aetiological characterisation of the activities of drawing to
offer? It can simply:
a) describe technical activity relative to purpose and the inference of

purpose, thus proposing that it is always oriented towards a future;
b) account for the occurrence of novel activities, which a model pro-
posing a brute interdependence of technical activity and perceptual
effect cannot;
c) offer a generative concept of failure as a definitive aspect of drawing
activities;
d) offer a way of distinguishing phenomena from their antecedents and
consequences, by explaining the relationships between them.
First, if I see a woman draw a mark across a piece of paper in order to

make a drawing, I also see the reason for her drawing the mark. Since
describing her activity as drawing suggests that she is making a mark in
order to make a drawing, the description itself can be thought of as
offering an explanation for her action—in order to make a drawing. If she
is not drawing a mark, she cannot be trying to make a drawing. This
relationship, in which a woman is undertaking an activity in order to try
and achieve a goal, is central to aetiological characterisation. The rela-
tionship between goal and activity itself offers an explanation of both
behaviour and phenomena. This relationship is not only causal, however.
Trying to make a drawing has consequences as well as causes. In fact, the
marking activities undertaken by a woman with the goal of making a

drawing are undertaken precisely because they have consequences.
The woman’s activity of drawing a mark across a piece of paper can also
be described non-aetiologically and, as such, can encompass a wide variety
of types of technical action and topographical types of mark. Her actions
can be seen as describing a particular type of gesticulation or creating and
marking a particular type of pattern, group of paths or other set of
topologies, body movements or groups of movements, or she might
pause, motionless, mid-mark, tracing motionlessness.
Included in this type of non-aetiological description, I broadly recog-
nise the approach to drawing taken by Maynard ‘et al.’ in which particular
types of technical activity are understood to produce particular perceived
effects. To summarise this non-aetiological description: commencing from
an origin (a surface contacted with a marking tool), this type of description
outlines a causal chain of events, which produce a result (a shape, a line or
arrays of these) in any number of circumstances or, at least, in as many
different circumstances as make it more likely an occurrence than not. In
generalising and then categorising the types of marks that produce specific
effects, the numerical instances of failure relative to the numerical
instances of success are significant, in the sense that ‘in most cases’ a
particular activity achieves a particular goal, if it is made in trying to
reach that goal.9
It is easy to see from both the aetiological and non-aetiological char-
acterisations of trying to make a drawing that identifying the precise
function of an activity does not, itself, constitute an aetiological character-
isation of an activity, or offer methods of analysis beyond the purely
topological and formal in terms of the possible effectiveness of identified
forms. On the other hand, describing activities aetiologically encompasses
but is not restricted to, particular types of phenomena as end results. It is
not a question of a woman utilising a specific pattern of activities (pro-
ductive of a particular type of mark, for instance) in order to make a
drawing that has a particular effect, because there are an infinite number
of types of activities that can be directed towards a particular goal.
Theoretically, the distinction between descriptive and nominal character-
isations is also helpful here. Rather than descriptively deducing the roles of
identified generalised components in causal chains, or possible ranges of
activity (e.g. the goal of producing ‘this’ perceived contour is reached
most frequently through the activity of drawing ‘that’ type of mark),
aetiological characterisations are truly nominal in the sense that even
very complicated activities, including drawing activities, are intersubjec-

tively self-evidencing—immediately, I can see both the struggle towards a
goal, trying to make a particular drawing, and the achievement or failure
to achieve that goal, and this range of activities includes, but it not
reducible to generalised topographical types of mark, for instance.
Second, because activities undertaken in order to make a drawing encom-
pass a very broad range, including the range of types of topology of marks, an
aetiological characterisation of a woman making a mark in order to make a
drawing allows the spontaneous appearance of novel activities/objects
(which I define as both unrecognised activities and marks and combinations
of unrecognised activities and marks—those activities/marks that constitute
new ways of trying to make a drawing). Novel objects are produced in trying
to make a drawing. It is not a categorical requirement that they conform in
any way to types of activities/marks made previously in other contexts,
although, of course, they might. This is not to say that it is not possible or
useful, in theory, to describe topographical types of marks that might be
identified within categorical parameters in existing drawings in many
instances, as Rawson does so comprehensively across a wide range of circum-
stances and historic periods. It is simply to establish that I cannot account for
the appearance of novel activities/objects if I am approaching drawing
activities, theoretically, as the task of recognising and combining compo-
nents that institute specific perceptual effects.
The appearance of novel activities/objects, in this aetiological sense, also
demonstrates how the products of goal-directed activities can immediately be
ascribed the capacities for which they are produced. For example, a woman
makes a new mark in order to (or trying to, or in the struggle to . . . ) achieve a
particular drawing. If the particular drawing is produced and her goal is
reached, the new activity/mark immediately evidences the capacities for
which it was made, even though the activity/mark is novel, and doesn’t
belong to any category of activity previously seen to produce this effect.10
Third, mutually supporting the two theoretical possibilities above, an
aetiological characterisation of goal-oriented activity encompasses rather
than excludes activities that fail to achieve their goal. There are many ways
in which an activity can fail to reach its goal, whilst still being goal-
directed. A theoretical non-aetiological description of the activity of trying
to make a drawing, on the other hand, seeks instances of congruence
between types of marks identified in existing drawings. That is, it seeks
to identify in drawings the shared properties of successful instances of goal
reaching in the form of achieved perceptual effects. On this basis, marks
that appear outside these topological-affective parameters are theoretically

overlooked. They exist, on the page, but they are without status. Think of
any drawing that you have seen and consider the role of every constitutive
mark. A non-aetiological description of the drawing, including a descrip-
tion of the activity of making it, is unable to describe, let alone account for,
the role of every mark. Only those marks that are identified as conforming
in some degree to types of mark producing specific perceptual effects are
susceptible to description.
In an aetiological categorisation, on the other hand, activities that fail
are the majority of activities, and this includes drawing activities. Failure to
make a drawing by marking a piece of paper structures both past and
future activities, particularly past and future activities undertaken in order
to make a drawing. Evidence for this is found everywhere. Failure to
achieve a goal of a particular drawing through trying is often visible—
think of the visible revisions made as over-drawn marks in, for example,
Adam’s left leg, in the famous red chalk drawing by Michelangelo in the
British Museum—and also embedded in the English word ‘draft,’ from
the same etymological root as ‘draw.’11 The word ‘draft,’ both verb and
noun, now means a provisional activity in a series of activities, relative to
the achievement of a final goal. The concept of revision itself evidences the
aetiologically productive role of failure in goal-oriented activities. Failure
produces revision as a constitutive type of goal-oriented activity.
But failure is not only of a ‘wrong move’ kind, either—the kind of mis-
directed or unsuccessful activity requiring revision in order to achieve its
goal. It is rare to undertake a mark-making activity that produces the
desired goal as the result of a single goal-directed action, such as a drawing
completed by making a single mark. Drawings made with a single success-
ful action exist, but they only evidence one type of drawing and one type
of goal. Every other type of drawing is achieved in an accumulation of
activities/marks, in which alone, a single mark fails, but in which an
accumulation of marks succeeds.
Finally, an aetiological characterisation offers a way of distinguishing
phenomena from their antecedents and consequences, by explaining the
relationships between them. In looking at a drawing, I might sponta-
neously think that I am seeing the causes and consequences of the activ-
ities/marks themselves. As I have commented already, if I see a woman
draw a mark across a piece of paper in order to make a drawing, I also
comprehend the cause for her drawing the mark—the cause being: in
order to make a drawing. But my seeing the activity and my seeing the
drawing are not the same. So, looking at a drawing, this is only to say that
I can infer the goal-directedness from the marking and the marking from
the intended goal, the drawing, and this inference of a cause is meaningful
to me, rather than the cause itself.
Although this might seem like an obvious point to make, in a non-
aetiological description of drawing, distinctions between phenomena,
causes and consequences are theoretically unimportant and are often
elided as a consequence. Such an elision is not an oversight in non-
aetiological descriptions of activities but rather is symptomatic of a gen-
eral theoretical approach to phenomena. In the case of drawing activities,
perceptual effects are completely elided with their means, according to
this approach: a woman makes a particular type of mark because that type
of mark produces a particular perceptual effect. Distinctions between
mark and effect are considered unimportant because the activity of trying
to make a drawing constitutes selecting technical elements constituting
formal arrays, identified through instances of repetition and considered
as components, on the basis of their comparative properties and the
repeated appearances of their general topologies in a variety of
circumstances.
On the basis of these four brief explanations of some of the possibilities
proffered by making an aetiological characterisation of drawing, in com-
parison with technical-activity descriptions, I can offer a general summary
of an aetiological approach to drawing: activities are undertaken because
they have a tendency to produce a particular result, when ‘tendency’
indicates the appropriateness of the activity to the achievement of that
goal in a specific environment.12
Three broad objections can be made to this summary as a theorisation
of the conditions of goal-oriented activity in general. It is worth discussing
them here because responses to them further enlarge on the possibilities of
an aetiological characterisation of drawing. In particular, discussion of
these objections will add detail to a conception of activity relative to
purpose, will explain how aetiological characterisations of this sort are
systematic and will take forward an aetiological approach to drawing by
outlining a concept of inference.
The first objection concerns the simple observation that similar activ-
ities might be directed towards one goal on one occasion but towards
another at another, thus potentially undermining the idea that particular
types of activities can be characterised by their achieved goals. The same
activity can be directed towards the achievement of many different results.
A second objection observes that a number of different activities can

achieve the same goal, raising the same question in a different form, by
undermining the idea that particular types of achieved goals can be char-
acterised by types of activities that try to achieve them.
The questions raised by these two observations are very germane to mark-
making activities that are directed towards making a particular drawing.
I must remember that my aetiological characterisation of trying to make a
drawing focuses on very small degrees of difference between similar complex
actions: making such distinctions between types of action/mark and types of
achieved drawing is crucial, due to the fact that I must always be able to
identify exemplary differences between distinct activities and distinct goals.
To direct activities towards the goal of trying to make a drawing of a sad
cat, for pinning on a fridge door, is quite different to the activity of trying
to make a drawing of the inside of a component of a jet engine, to be used
in the construction of an airliner. The narrower the range of activities
appropriate to the specific environment in which they will tend to achieve
specific goals, the more precise the distinctions between types of goals and
types of activities will be. Hence, in trying to make a drawing of a sad cat,
for pinning to a fridge, differentiations between types of activity/mark
employed in order to produce a particular type of drawing are made on the
basis of very small degrees of differences between very similar actions. Such
small degrees of difference do not necessarily need to be identified in
characterising other types of goal-oriented activities such as reaching for
a ball in order to catch it, for example. Because drawing activities, in
particular, require making distinctions between types of action and types
of mark to this acute degree, I can intuit the possibilities of theorising
topics that have become central to studies of drawing, such as autho-
graphic inference, subjectivity and style, from a foundation in an aetiolo-
gical characterisation of drawing. These will be explored in Sections 3.1
and 4.6 and through Chapters 3 and 4.
Fortunately, there is a single possible response to these first simple
objections—that the same activity can be directed towards the achieve-
ment of many different results and that a number of different activities can
achieve the same goal. Goals themselves define the activities needed to
achieve them, in that any activity that is required to achieve a specific goal
is an activity directed towards that goal. Hence, goal-directedness within
the parameters of the aetiological summary that I have given is sufficient to
generate the relationship between activities and goals. As I have sum-
marised, there is no ‘a priori’ relationship between types of activities and
the achievement of types of goals, only a tendency to produce particular

results within given circumstances.
The history of drawing activities here provides another good example, in
the case of the response to the first objection. Consider two ink drawings by
Pisanello from the period 1415–55, Four unrelated figures and Two men
standing.13 Even within the small degrees of difference that identify activ-
ities/marks with the goal of producing a specific type of drawing, such as
these drawings by Pisanello, a number of types of activity/mark are evi-
denced in trying to achieve virtually identical goals in each drawing, such as
drawing the weight of two adult men, for example.
Similarly, in the case of the response to the second objection, I can find
examples of the same types of activity/mark employed in trying to achieve
very different goals (such as the same single diagonal mark establishing a
shadow in Pisanello’s Four unrelated figures and the visible edge of a man’s
tunic in his drawing Two men standing).
A third objection observes that goal-directed activities that are either inter-
rupted or postponed, endanger aetiological characterisations by upsetting any
evidential relationships between causes and consequences. I have already dis-
cussed an aetiological concept of failure that is quite different from this objec-
tion. This objection rather undermines the theoretical importance of goal
orientation in general. If activities are undertaken because they have a tendency
to produce a particular result, given circumstances, how can I infer anything
from activities that are not completed, and that do not achieve their goal?
Again, the history of drawing provides me with good examples of such
interrupted goal-directed activities, particularly among depictive drawings, in
which the object of depiction is ‘seen-in,’ to use Richard Wollheim’s term or
his earlier term ‘seen-as’ subsequently also used by Nigel Thomas.14 Depiction
is a unique type of visual representation defined by both seeing the activities/
marks that constitute the depiction whilst also seeing the object of the depic-
tion. Trying to achieve ‘seeing in’ constitutes a specific type of drawing as a
goal, towards which a range of drawing activities can be directed. Depiction
evidences a wide range of types of ‘seeing-in,’ within a set of variable para-
meters, beyond which ‘seeing-in’ is not achieved. This variable set of para-
meters can be described quite accurately in quotidian English in the question
‘Can you see it?’ when faced with a depictive drawing. A positive or negative
answer to this question establishes the degree to which the object of depiction
is ‘seen-in.’ It is easy to find examples of depictive drawings that appear on the
very border of these variable parameters: the marks that constitute them only
barely achieve the depiction of their objects.
Consider Rembrandt’s ink drawing A studio with an artist painting a

double portrait made between 1645 and 1650.15 The descriptive title of
the drawing, which was not attached by Rembrandt, but by collectors for
purposes of identification, directs me verbally towards the object of depic-
tion. Even without this verbal description, I can see Rembrandt’s goal in
trying to make this drawing, because I can ‘see-in’ with some degree of
success. However, there are large areas of indeterminacy in the depiction:
areas in which ‘seeing-in’ is more difficult. Both the depiction and the
activity/marks appear incomplete because depiction is not sustained in
those areas. I see marks, but I do not see an object of depiction in them.
The drawing exemplifies an interrupted goal-directed activity. I infer
that Rembrandt was trying to make a particular type of depictive
drawing, but in some areas of the drawing, his activity was interrupted
and another result was achieved. Rembrandt’s drawing suggests two
responses to the objection that aetiological characterisation is unable to
account for interruptions. First, there is a logical refutation that,
although revealing, does not necessarily satisfy as a response to the
objection in aetiological terms. If a goal-directed activity is interrupted,
then interruption itself must categorise the activity as goal-directed.
Rather than undermine the general theory of types of tendencies that
relate causes and consequences, the notion of interruption supports it.
A second response is more useful: there is no reason why goals cannot
change within the scope of a particular directed activity, in which case
the activities undertaken in order to achieve those new goals also
change. Rembrandt set out to try and make a depictive drawing, but
in some areas of the drawing, depiction was no longer the goal of his
drawing activity, and so his activity/marks changed.
Again, these issues and examples can be described non-aetiologically by
approaching drawing as an activity in which technical activities are con-
stituted in choosing topological combinations productive of perceptual
effects. In responding to a first possible objection to an aetiological
characterisation of drawing, I used Pisanello’s drawings to exemplify the
use of different types of marked lines in trying to make two drawings of the
same thing (the weight of two men). Rawson also describes the range of
effects available in the production of a marked line. He considers that a
marked line is always directional, always a boundary and always a trace of
the movement of the draughtsperson who made it—note here that
Rawson comes close to requiring an aetiological explanation for his
statement.16
In Rawson’s approach to drawing, the line has a range of properties

that define its phenomenal identity as a line. Chosen alone or used in
combination, these properties add up to the array of effects in a draw-
ing. Often, Rawson notes, one or other of these properties needs to be
more or less suppressed and another enhanced, to calibrate the percep-
tual effect. Hence, quite in accord with his theoretical approach to
drawing, he claims that the directional property of a line is employed
more in the technical activities of making drawings in the histories of
drawing in China and Japan than in the histories of Europe.17 On a
similar basis, he notes that line’s property of always being a boundary is
suppressed in depictive drawings in which the object is ‘seen-in’ 3D
space.18 The idea that a particular employment of properties, in com-
binations of marks, suppresses or enhances one type of perceptual effect
or another, also explains how it is possible that different types of
marked lines draw the same thing.
Similarly, a non-aetiological description of drawing can account for the
same type of marked line appearing to produce different effects. The idea
of the technical enhancement or suppression of properties employed in
combinations also offers an explanation here.
Of the three objections to aetiological characterisation that I am dis-
cussing, the idea of interruption is the least difficult to tackle with a
technological–activity approach. Because goal-directedness is not a feature
of this approach, interruptions of activities undertaken in order to reach a
particular goal are insignificant. Rather, choices made by a draughtsperson
are simply more or less effective, because the production of perceptual
effects arbitrates any inference that I might make about a drawing: if I can
determine the weight of two men in a drawing by Pisanello, then the
technical activities undertaken in making the drawing have been correctly
chosen and undertaken. On this basis, the idea of failure in a technologi-
cal–activity description is quite different to failure in an aetiological char-
acterisation. As I have explained, only those marks that are identified as
conforming in some degree to types of mark producing specific perceptual
effects are susceptible to description. Marks that appear outside a range of
topological-affective parameters are theoretically overlooked.
As interruptions, shifts between degrees of ‘seeing-in,’ or between
‘seeing-in’ and not ‘seeing-in,’ as in my Rembrandt example, are less
easy to describe in terms of technical activity. Although all drawings are
not depictions, depictive drawings always involve both objects that are
‘seen-in’ and the activities/marks that constitute them. Depiction, as
‘seeing-in,’ is a unique phenomenon, requiring a great deal of theorising

to explain. It is not at all certain that a technical-activity approach to
describing drawing can accommodate depiction. I will undertake an expla-
nation in the next section of this chapter.
A final objection to an aetiological description of drawing observes that
arguing for a mutually affecting system of causes and consequences runs
the risk of self-referentiality, for all that it might provide a nominal and
intersubjective explanation of both phenomena, inference and history (it
looks forward towards consequences and back towards causes). This is a
particularly significant objection to a theory in which an action in under-
taken in order to achieve a goal and that action is explained by its goal-
directedness. How can goal-directedness explain an activity when that
activity is defined by its goal-directedness?
The objection of self-referentiality can also be raised to a technical-
activity theorisation of drawing, albeit in a different way. How can types of
perceptual effect explain the appearance of topological types of marks,
when these marks are identified by their instantiation of particular percep-
tual effects? Unfortunately, there is no response that can be made to this
objection along technical-activity lines, apart from an appeal to the
mechanisms of human perception itself, so that a response runs: types of
marks produce perceptual effects because these effects are perceived in
these types of marks. This is an unsatisfactory response because it simply
subsumes perception itself into the self-referring system. The only expla-
nation then lies in a study of human perception that proceeds along similar
lines to a technical-activity theorisation, and I arrive quickly at a model of
perception that attempts to categorise types of phenomena as types of
response, with all of the problems that that entails.
More fortunately, the response to the objection of self-referentiality is easier
to make in the case of aetiological characterisations. Recall that I described
that when I see a woman draw a mark across a piece of paper in order to make a
drawing, I also infer the cause of her drawing the mark. Since describing her
activity as drawing suggests that she is making a mark in order to make a
drawing, the description itself can be a thought of as offering an explanation
for her action. The relationship between goal and activity itself offers an
explanation of both behaviour and phenomena. As outlined earlier, this
relationship requires no fixed activities/marks in order to occur: it is a relation-
ship between causes and consequences that subsumes and underwrites the
identification of forms and effects. Because of this, goal-directedness can
explain an activity when that activity is defined by its goal-directedness for
two reasons: the appearance of novel objects and the immediate ascription of
capacities to novel objects. These possibilities support a response to the
objection of self-referentiality by evidencing that aetiological characterisations
are not closed systems. Unlike the production of perceptual effects by a choice
of technical means, goal-directedness can be ascribed to any activity (and in
the case of drawing, to any activity/mark) that has a goal, or a changing
number of goals, or a changing number of activities directed towards a goal.
In particular, in an aetiological characterisation of drawing, the
immediate ascription of capacities to novel objects not only answers the
objection of self-referentiality but is also worth pursuing as a way to
discuss assessments of technical utility, or the reasons a particular type of
drawing might be produced, for example. Technical-activity descriptions,
as I have discussed, are not well suited to the teleological ascription of
capacities, although there are currently a number of theories, particularly
in thinking about the design of artefacts, which focus upon ontology, on
epistemology or on technical function.19 Unlike technical-activity descrip-
tions, theoretically normative characterisations of the ascription of capa-
cities, particularly to novel objects, include consideration of both the use
to which the object is put and its plan for use, that is, its design.
I have been discussing two approaches to characterising a woman
making a mark in order to make a drawing, which might be summarised
again as two types of description of the woman’s activities. Description 1
proposes that the drawing was made because a woman believed that her
activities/marks could perform the particular capacity of making a draw-
ing. Description 2 proposes that the drawing was made because a woman
ascribed the capacity of producing particular perceptual effects to her
activities/marks as a function of those marks.20
Consider Descriptions 1 and 2 in terms of the ascription of capacities to
novel objects that appear when the woman makes a series of actions/
marks in order to draw the weight of two men, for example. Description 1
begs a number of questions that the Description 2 need not, in accordance
with taking an aetiological approach to thinking about drawing in
Description 1, and then a non-aetiological approach in Description 2.
Who was the woman making the mark? What was her plan of action and
goal? Who then looked at her drawing?
To justify itself as a description of an activity or phenomenon, a descrip-
tion aims to take into account all of the conditions that influence its occur-
rence and the ways in which it occurs. Description 2 is unclear as to the
woman’s plan of action or goal, whereas Description 1 omits information
about the ascribed function of particular actions/marks. Both descriptions

omit some possible elements of a comprehensive description and not others.
In fact, they systematise their particular types of descriptive focus by drawing
theoretical conclusions on the basis of their own descriptive limitations.
However, in Description 1, which demonstrates an aetiological approach
to characterising the woman’s drawing activities, causes and consequences
are definitive, rather than the ascription of functions. As a result, Description
1 requires a discursive reading that Description 2 does not. In an aetiological
characterisation, to infer the goal of the woman’s drawing activities/marks,
I am required to define the woman’s mark-making activities by their goal-
directedness and, in order to do that, I must understand these activities as
potentially novel and appropriate to the range of opportunities and inhibi-
tions that constitute the environment in which her goal-directed activities
occur. Understanding activities by their goal-directedness focuses attention
away from the functions that define technical-activity descriptions.
In conclusion, the aetiological identification of goal-directedness acts as
a plausible and flexible ‘attentional engine,’ in the phrase that Carroll and
Seeley use to describe the ways in which the activities of watching a movie
are directed towards focussing attention upon salient features.21 It is a
diagnostic tool that offers both a dialogic and systematic way to explain
technical activity relative to purpose and the inference of purpose, without
limiting explanation to elisions of functions and perceptual effects theore-
tically identified ‘in most cases.’
As a result, I further suggest that an aetiological approach to theorising
drawing offers at least two other possible ways of thinking about drawing
that are largely unavailable to a technical-activity approach: first, as an
activity that can be explained by deducing the teleological role played by
generalising some potential resources of the human body and second, as
an activity that can be explained by deductions made on the basis of
environmental and social modulations.
1.1.2 Generalising Some Potential Resources of the Human Body

As I have described, in struggling to achieve a result, goal-directed activ-
ities are produced from a range of available resources that facilitate, inhibit
and contextualise the activity as it occurs. These resources only gain
identity, status and definition by their current utility in trying to achieve
a particular goal. The activities undertaken in order to make a drawing are
only distinct in this sense from other types of activities undertaken in order
to achieve other goals, such as the making of a photograph or the baking

of a cake, for example. As Michael Newman writes: ‘the meaning ( . . . ) of
drawing is determined by the other technologies of representation that co-
exist with it at any given moment.’22
But there is also another sense in which any of the potential activities
undertaken to make a drawing are contingent upon comparisons.
Newman’s observation focuses less on goal-directedness (the explanation
for making a drawing) than on the meaning of technical comparisons. In
generalising potential resources of the body in goal-directed activities,
however, comparison creates the scope of these activities themselves. I
must keep in mind the fact that those activities undertaken in trying to
make a drawing only gain identity, status and definition in their current
utilisation towards achieving a goal. This utility only emerges within the
range of environmental possibilities focused by the body within a home-
orhetic system.
Although it might seem obvious, here I must remind myself that the
potential resources of the body, in trying to make a drawing, are not another
series of technical activities that are ‘quod erat demonstrandum’ in the way
in which a technical–activity conception of drawing theorises the produc-
tion of general perceptual effects in the identification of particular visual
tools. Rather, the potential of the body is defined by the role it plays in an
attempt to reach a goal. This distinction precisely follows my previous
discussion of aetiological characterisation, in which goal-directedness deter-
mines the status of activities relative to causes and consequences, in com-
parison to a technical activity approach, which describes elements of a ‘tool
kit’ for drawing, and the perceptual effects produced ‘in most cases’ by each
element in the kit.23
In trying to make a drawing, the visible mark is two things: a trace of
the activity of producing the mark and an indexical sign of the activity of
producing the mark. It is important not to confuse these ways of describ-
ing the mark, particularly relative to descriptions of different activities and
descriptions of different technical processes. Digital imaging technologies,
for example, can index activities of the body without tracing them,
whereas an activity/mark made on a wall with a piece of charcoal is always
both index and trace.
However, the trace of an activity is often theoretically conflated with
the indexical sign for the activity, despite the fact that the two are com-
pletely distinct.24 The distinction is significant, if I am theoretically dedu-
cing the teleological role played by capacities of the body in activities
whose aim is to make a particular drawing. The activity of typing on a

keyboard or moving a computer mouse, in order to make a drawing, is
teleologically distinct from the activity of making an activity/mark with a
digital pen or a finger on the surface of a digital drawing tablet.
Because I am focussing on teleological descriptions generalising poten-
tial resources of the body, this type of distinction is as fundamental to the
description as the distinction between types of drawing technology. It
provides a way of explaining differences that are literally invisible in the
forms of drawn marks that have been produced in very different ways, such
as those made with a pencil and paper and those made with a digital stylus
within computed parameters that have been created to mimic the appear-
ance in print of a pencil mark on paper.
Our current habits of use militate against this rationale in deed if not in
fact. I understand drawing activities as a group of current concepts and
practices that define and redefine themselves by use, although these con-
cepts and practices can support no other definition and are continually
open to contradiction and change, as the goals of making particular
drawings change and the activities directed towards them change.
Hence, I also consider technologies designed to reproduce hand mark-
ing to be ‘drawings’: a mechanical reproduction of a drawn cartoon in a
newspaper retains the definitive visible properties of the drawing even
whilst it is accumulating others, such as multiple iterations, serialisation,
simultaneous reading and all of the other affordances of the newspaper in
which it appears. That it is a reproduction of a drawing does not under-
mine our understanding of it as a drawing. Similarly, we consider the
properties of the drawing to be significant, based on our habitual concepts
and practices of drawing, although the technology facilitating reproduc-
tion might occlude this group of concepts and practices to a great extent,
without undermining the status of the reproduction as a drawing.
As a further example, digital 2D edge recognition technology extra-
polates vector-defined areas (point, line and, with encompassing con-
nected lines, shape) from specific patterns of photographic digital pixels,
relying on the depictive functions of the photographic image to organise
these shapes as depictions themselves. This technological function is itself
explicitly purposed to transform photographic images into images that we
categorise as drawn, despite the relative remoteness of any marking capa-
cities indexed in the process, these capacities being positioned in the
extensive teleological network of indexed actions in which marking takes
little or no part. Alternatively, the technologies facilitating the appearance
of marks made digitally by hand, are as direct as those made with any other
marking technology. Indexically, they are closer to marks made with a
stick in the sand than to those made by pressing the shutter button of a
camera in order to facilitate the touching of a surface with light. Trying to
make a digital hand drawing produces activities that have indexical simila-
rities with all hand marking, despite the categorical differences between
them as traces.
Hence, an assessment of the potential resources of the body for draw-
ing, from an aetiological foundation, commences via very fundamental
generalisations, which subsume descriptions of technical activities whilst
also generating analyses at the level of detail at which I have been describ-
ing trace and index.
Among these generalisations of the potential resources of the body are
ontological conceptions of mass, size and motion. These generalisations
are not theorisations of perception as ‘the senses,’ of which homeorhetic
theorisations remain relatively rare.25 They are characterisations of types of
potential across the entire homeorhetic system as an arbiter and producer
of experience, encompassing perception, cognition and imagination. Both
homeorhesis and aetiology have an indivisible basis in conceptions of
motion and concomitant conceptions of mass and size, as I touched
upon briefly in my description of goal-directedness as being oriented
towards a ‘future.’
In part, this focus on conceptions of mass, size and motion ignores
important elementary categorisations of types of perception, in particular,
such as ‘interoceptive’ and ‘exteroceptive,’ for example, and overlooks
exteroceptive perceptual systems that appear to have only subsidiary
engagement with them, including audioception, olfacception, thermio-
ception and nociception, for example. The focus on these three general-
isations (mass, size and motion) is in this sense spatio-temporal. Hence,
their selection on the basis of their relationship to activities undertaken in
order to make a drawing, including vision, touch and kinaesthesia (and
their synesthetic correspondences) but not, say, a capacity to perceive
changes in temperature, unless one is trying to make a drawing with a
hot iron—not that unusual an undertaking, in fact. But a homeorhetic and
aetiological conception of spatio-temporality is quite distinct from one
derived itself from any isolated conception of vision and is distinct from a
conception of vision deriving from a conception of the property of being
visible. As Ian Hague argues, the distinction here is between conceptions
of ‘seeing’ rather than a concept of ‘seen.’26
Considered homeorhetically, mass, size and motion are spatio-temporal

categories that must be considered strictly as force dynamics. Aetiologically,
mass, motion and size are properties in which utility is produced by sponta-
neous comparisons, defined by trying to achieve a goal. The character of
these comparisons enables generalisation of the potential resources of the
goal-directed body. When a force is applied, mass is a property of compara-
tive resistance to changes in motion. Motion is a change in location in
comparison to a frame of reference. Size is abstracted from comparative
adjudications of magnitude. In contrast, Patrick Maynard’s technical activity
definition of ‘dynamics’ in drawing is entirely consistent with this approach.
He writes that dynamics constitutes opposing ‘the working of one spatial
device with another.’27
In the case of the goal-directed body, comparative resistances to
changes in motion are made with the body. Motion references the body.
Size is adjudicated in comparison to the body. The activities of the goal-
directed body are identified, given status and defined by their specific
employment of these resources, which make possible and facilitate some
types of actions and not others, to be directed towards a goal.
As conceived here, this type of characterisation of the general potential
resources of the body is not to be confined to representations. For example,
theorisation of visual force dynamics, in the work of gestalt psychologist
Rudolf Arnheim, is encompassed by a homeorhetic characterisation but
focuses exclusively on vision from the point of view of the effects elicited
by the ‘seen.’28
I will briefly consider mass, size and motion in turn, as general-
isations of the potential ontological resources of the body, characterised
relative to the achievement of the goal of making a drawing. In order
to make this a far simpler task than it might seem, I will take as my
starting points one or other of the formal drawn arrays identified and
described by Philip Rawson and John Willats, the technical activity
theorists of drawing.
Remember that for Rawson and Willats, the formal properties of a
drawing elicit particular perceptual responses in most cases. This means
that these properties are perceived by a receptive bodily system as that
type of response. An intentioned accumulation (or, more correctly, a cura-
tion) of these responses makes the drawing, according to this approach, so
there is no further need to explain the relationship between mark and
response, because the relationship explains itself in the idea that the mark
is effective. Discussion of my generalisations will aim to reveal the internal
contradictions of this approach whilst exemplifying some of the ways in

which these particular drawing activities produce potential body capacities
on the basis of their utility in goal-directedness.
Rawson identifies three types of arrays of drawn marks, which he calls the
‘facet,’ the ‘depth slice’ and the ‘plan-section,’ which are related to each
other by their effect upon binocular vision. Facet marks are lines drawn
within encompassing contours to draw the viewer’s attention towards faces
rather than contour edges, hence ‘driving the eye away from the outline,’
Rawson writes.29 Depth slices are accumulations of marked lines in which
‘each linear edge thus stays in its own two-dimensional plane,’ creating ‘an
accumulation of suggested slices depicted by elevation-sections of the
object.’30 Plan-sections are silhouette contours marked by continuous
drawn lines avoiding occlusions, in which ‘the three-dimensional effects
such lines achieve depend upon the angles or curves at their corners.’31
Rawson understands these three types of array to be effective because they
elicit stereoscopy and hence produce glimpses of the illusion of 3D space in
the wider context of the total array of marks in a drawing. Within a system,
they share the formal property of combining fragments of two or more
points of view in contradiction, and this combination of one or more
systemic contradictions produces the glimpse of an area of illusory 3D
space, as an element of the whole drawing. Developed as a discursive method
of depiction, these three types of arrays form a large part of the formal
production methods of Cubism, a part of the story of which is the attempt
by artists to combine multiple points of view in a single 2D image.32
Alternatively, utilising a generalisation of the capacity to resist move-
ment (that is, mass), as a potential resource of the body, these three types
of arrays of marks can be characterised quite differently.
First, there is no need to doubt the perceived effect of a particular array
of marks utilised in trying to make a drawing, even if that array of marks
has the illusory appearance of an area of 3D space. That these arrays of
marks can be, and have been, perceived as fragments of illusions of three
dimensions is without doubt. It is only the theorisation (that is, explana-
tion) of their effectiveness that requires scrutiny.
The alternative theorisation argues that my sense of the force of gravity
determines my relationship with these types of arrays of marks. Specifically,
what determines by relationship with them is my sense of my own mass as
a product of my own movement relative to gravity. The marks themselves
are subsumed in this relationship, on the page. More important, in the
case of these arrays producing little fragments of illusory 3D space in an
overall scheme, the illusory space is also determined by my sense of my

gravity-determined mass. This goes for the artist making the drawing and
anybody viewing it. In this characterisation, mass (as defined as restrained
motion) cannot be overlooked. It is not a ‘goes-without-saying’ or brute
condition of making and looking at a drawing. It is a resource utilised to
particular ends with the goal of making and looking at drawings.
Both Rawson and John Willats veer more closely towards this way of
theorising drawing when it comes to concepts of size and motion. First,
their definitions of 2D shape as an area bounded by a contour liable to
occlusion by other contour-bounded areas, derives at base from ratios
produced by comparison with the size of the body.33 The arrangement
and perception of arrays of marks as shapes relies on degrees of proximity
to the body. Hence, even theoretically disembodied concepts that struc-
ture formal descriptions of the elements of drawing, such as point, line and
plane, are descriptions of relative proximities for which the body is arbiter.
For example, it is quite rational to state that a point has no dimension,
whereas a line has a single dimension, non-adjacent points describe
volume because they are coordinate, only constituting location and there
are three dimensions of shortest distance (plus the dimension produced by
the time that it takes to move from one to another). These statements
make sense because they are structured by degrees of haptic, visual, motive
and temporal proximity to the body. According to this structure, changes
in proximity transform an encompassing volume into a receding (and
finally vanishing) point and vice versa. This provides a perfect example of
the way in which the formal definition of so-called elements (of drawing, if
not of mathematics), are liable to be completely transformed relative to a
general potential resource of the body—in this case, size.
The structure of proximity relationships that underpins size, as a poten-
tial resource of the body, is directly implicit in Rawson’s and Willats’s
conception of the formal properties of shapes and occlusions. In particular,
Rawson utilises arbitrating proximity to describe both significant (i.e.
neither iconic nor indexical) and depictive representations of the ‘floor’
of a drawing as defining ratio relationships that can systematise a drawing’s
whole array of marks.34 Similarly, he discusses the extrapolation of the
definitive ‘floor’ into schematic types, representing recessions in space,
which he calls ‘depth bands.’35 Of course, it is not the represented ‘floor’
or floors that establish these ratios of scale, but the proximate size of the
draughtsperson’s and viewer’s bodies. As John Krčma points out: ‘this is
very different way of conceiving the surface from the “pictorial” mode
( . . . ) the surface of drawing is less a delimited shape to which marks are set
in self-conscious relation, but rather a space which is an open receptor, and
which is potentially extendable.’36
Finally, Rawson’s claim that marked lines are ‘directional,’ both in the
sense of the sequence of their facture (marking a surface and then ceasing)
and in their phenomenal force dynamics also touches upon motion as a
general potential resource of the goal-directed body.37 Direction is more
technically described as displacement, or movement between one point
and another, and displacement has as much potential to transform similar
formal properties as proximity.
Both traces and indexical signs are produced when motion is utilised
as a body resource. Motion is defined as displacement considering the
following—which are considered as resources of the body: velocity,
acceleration, duration, speed, distance or relative proximity, rhythm
and (considering arrays), sequence. Arrays of marks produce indexical
evidence for these in every drawing. There is no problem in saying that
a drawing is always an indexical sign of the body, even if it is not always
a trace of the body. Hence, degrees of velocity, acceleration and the
rest are always present as scalar indexical qualities, relative to the
velocity, acceleration and the rest, of the specific actions towards
which they are directed. It is a platitude in teaching drawing, for
example, to say that a mark made from the shoulder is phenomenally
different to a mark made from the wrist, both as an indexical sign of
the action of making it and as a trace of that action. The qualities of
each (shoulder and wrist activity/marks), and the limits of their possi-
bilities, derive entirely from the specific affordances of motion as
potential resources of the body. Here, the Sanskrit etymology of the
English word ‘draw’ is telling, meaning drag or pull, as opposed to the
meaning ‘to arrange’ found in French, for example.
As discussed earlier, generalising the body’s possible resources in trying
to make a drawing is distinct from generalising any isolated conception of
vision and also distinct from a conception of vision deriving from a con-
ception of the property of being visible, substantiated by the different
implications of the concepts ‘seeing’ and ‘seen.’
In trying to make a drawing, this distinction also justifies the inclusion
of epistemological, and ontological categories in this list of generalisations
of the potential capacities of the body. The activity of seeing is also goal-
directed in this context, in as much as a woman trying to make a drawing
both makes an activity/mark and sees her activity/mark and herself
making it. Seeing the mark and oneself making it are two of the activities
directed towards making a drawing. Any generalisation of the relationships
between activities/marks, vision and goal-directedness, as an explanation
for the ways and means of drawings, also involves a theorisation of under-
standing, or the ways in which the activity is significant in the first place.
Hence, semiosis and its subset language are also among the potential
resources of the body that need to be generalised relative to the activities
of trying to make a drawing.
Suffice here to say that, as a potential resource of the body, an aetiological
characterisation of semiosis requires detailed analysis of the operations of
perception, mind, imagination, emotion, ideology and subjectivity, as char-
acterised by goal-directedness. Goal-directed activities, as all activities, will be
subsumed in the most profound of these. For example, although it is not
necessarily difficult to conceive how much light would be cast upon the study
of perception or subjectivity by taking an aetiological approach, other theore-
tical approaches quickly apply more traction in their function as explanations.
When any theorisation of qualia reaches the ‘hard problem,’ in David
Chalmers’s phrase (or the theoretical problem of making a general explana-
tion of the relationship between consciousness and phenomena), then the
theoretical application of goal-directedness is itself underwritten by other
models.38 In pursuit of a theory of narrative drawing, in the following
chapters, I discuss imagination (Sections 1.4 and 1.5), emotion
(Section 1.3), ideology (Section 1.5) and subjectivity (Sections 2.3 and 4.6).
However, to indicate in one instance the potential of aetiological
characterisations, applied to specific semiotic problems, I return to the
problem of polysemy in drawing, or the same drawn mark having the
capacity to represent a range of things. Polysemy notoriously evidences
problems in the spatial projection systems sometimes utilised to depict 3D
space in two dimensions. Willats defines these as ‘systems that map the
spatial relations between features of the scene into corresponding relations
on the picture surface.’39 Albertian geometric perspective is one such
system.40 Spatial projection systems are not exclusively employed in mak-
ing depictive drawings. They are geometric systems that create systemic
correspondences between notional points in space in three and two
dimensions.41
Consider any drawing of the famous Necker Cube—that is, a 2D
depictive line drawing of a 3D transparent cube (in which every edge
connecting every plane is visible).42 The Necker Cube utilises an oblique
projection system to structure the drawn array of lines—that is, to govern
where the marked lines are made on the surface of the drawing. The
drawing is famous because of its deft demonstration of polysemy.
Accepting the projection system, it is possible to perceive the depicted
cube as first oriented in one direction and then in the other, so that its
foremost corner becomes the corner furthest away. It is not possible to
perceive the two orientations of the depicted cube simultaneously. Hence,
the same array of marked lines on the 2D surface of the drawing are
polysemic: they can depict a transparent cube with different coordinate
points in space within a projection system, without contradicting the
system. Willats proposes that there are two possible ways of describing
polysemy in the context of drawings such as the Necker Cube: as ambi-
guity or as a failure of a system, being the use of unsystematic elements
within a system.43 The second of these possibilities does not apply to the
Necker Cube drawing. So the Cube drawing’s array of marks is ambig-
uous, despite it conforming to the rules of a system intended to locate
spatial coordinates unambiguously according to 2D correspondences. As
such, polysemy identifies the system in cases where the system cannot itself
account for perceptual ambiguity.
However, an aetiological characterisation of the Necker Cube drawing
allows a third interpretation, in which ambiguity is not a systemic flaw.
Aetiology attempts to characterise activities according to the goals that
they are undertaken to achieve. A response given to a ‘same activity, different
goal’ objection that can possibly be made to this type of characterisation,
eradicates the systemic ambiguity of the Necker Cube drawing. There is no
reason at all why drawings of different diegetic scenes might not be made
utilising the same arrays of marks. The Necker Cube drawing achieves exactly
this. It can be a drawing of a cube front-to-back (in one diegesis) and a
drawing of a cube back-to-front (in another diegesis). Goal-directedness
explains the appearance of one, the other or both of these phenomena.
Recall that goals themselves define the activities needed to achieve them,
in that any activity that is required to achieve a specific goal is an activity
directed towards that goal. Goal-directedness is sufficient to generate this
relationship between activities and goals. There is no ‘a priori’ relationship
between types of activities and the achievement of types of goals, only a
tendency to produce particular results within given circumstances.
At last, as a subset of semiosis, language is considerably easier to characterise
aetiologically, as a potential resource of somebody attempting to make a
drawing, because the study of language has already developed a tradition of
the study of pragmatics, or language use, within which characterisations
according to goal-directedness find comfortable lodgings. Also of interest is

the relationship between verbal language, gesture and metaphor, between
metaphor and those experiences of force dynamics which structure represen-
tations as ‘image schemata’ and between nouns and visual representations of
contour bounded objects, noticed by Rawson.44 I will discuss these in
Section 1.3. But the study of visual images (even visual images that show
stories), according to a categorisation as ‘language’ is a less easy undertaking.
This is largely because the differences between showing and telling, between
visual image and verbal text, constitute different types of resources (both
affordance and knowledge), which might be argued to disallow any direct
mapping of theorisations of verbal structures onto theorisations of visual
phenomena. I will discuss this in Section 1.2.
In the above brief characterisation of drawing as an activity that can be
explained by deducing the teleological role played by generalising some
potential resources of the human body, the avoidance of the theoretical
elision of mark and response is key. An objection might be made that this
characterisation is tautological, stating (for example), that my sense of my
own mass, as a product of my own movement relative to gravity, determines
my sense of mass in a fragment of an illusion of three dimensions in an array
of marks, as a product of my own movement relative to gravity. Or, for
example, I understand the topological arrangement of spatial projection
systems because special projection systems are topologically comprehensible.
However, recall that an aetiological characterisation of drawing, deriving
from potential capacities of the body (including the broad category of
representations), explains relative effectiveness relative to the achievement
of a particular result. Hence, in focussing on an exemplary generalisation of
the potential resources of the body, a simple formulation is finally possible.
This formulation follows and adapts the aetiological Description 1, men-
tioned earlier: generalised by the potential resources of the body, a drawing
was made because a woman believed that her activities/marks could per-
form the particular capacity of making a drawing.
1.1.3 Generalising the Role of Environmental

and Social Modulations
Aetiological characterisations explain technical activities and the forms
that they produce strictly according to purpose and the inference of
purpose. Hence, the field of study for theorisations of causes and con-
sequences is as much environmental and social as formal. In fact, the aim
of aetiology, applied to the production of material culture including

media, is to explain the appearance and impact of forms in ways that are
theoretically unavailable to technical activity approaches, for example.
If goal-directedness is considered as a general arbiter of the production of
specific drawings, then analysis of the role of environmental and social
modulations in inhibiting, facilitating and producing the activities of making
a drawing becomes key. Potential resources are only identified, given status
and realised, from the range of available environmental and social possibi-
lities, according to their utility in achieving a specific goal. ‘Realisation,’ then,
is the process of adjudicating and integrating goal-directed activities in their
environmental and social contexts. Hence, (a) teleological orientation
towards future consequences (‘in order to achieve’), as much as away from
retrospective causes (‘achieved by’) and (b) the central role of environmental
and social modulations in the realisation of specific resources utilised to
achieve a goal, rather than the selection of formal properties identified as
producing perceptual effects in most cases.45
In this sense, realisation is both the production of activities undertaken
in order to achieve a goal, plus the inference of goal-directedness in
comprehending the action. In an aetiological characterisation of drawing,
realisation can then be systematised as a mutually affecting operation in
which (a) environmental and social modulations are realised in (b) the
identities, structures and status accorded to activities undertaken to
achieve a goal, and these activities are realised in (c) the production of
marks or directed graphology. In this system, semiosis is not intrinsic to
any types of graphic mark but occurs as a realisation of (a) and (b). Hence,
semiosis does not only belong to the internal organisation of an array of
marks itself, but also to the system realising the specific activity from
possible social and environmental resources.46
For example, consider the pen and ink drawing on paper Eagle (1911–
14) by Henri Gaudier-Bzresca (see Fig. 1.1).47 In viewing Eagle, I can
make the following observations:
i) the realisation of the relationship between paper, physical location,

graphic marks, the activities of Gaudier-Bzresca and viewers of the
drawing is essential to an understanding of it.
ii) Prior knowledge of pen and ink drawings is so habitual that its identity
and purpose are nominally elided (it is a drawing of an eagle with the
purpose of being a drawing of an eagle), including viewing it repro-
duced in this book.
Fig. 1.1 Henri Gaudier-Bzresca. Eagle. Pen and ink on paper (1911–14)
iii) According to this system, the phenomenal realisation of environ-

mental and social inhibitions and possibilities, the emergence of
particular actions and the production of specific graphic marks,
integrate the potential activities of viewers with the drawing’s uses.
That is, these potential activities also circumscribe the aetiology of
the graphic marks.
iv) The presence of the graphic marks themselves realises and inte-
grates the paper, its physical location, the activities of Gaudier-
Bzresca and the activities of the viewers of the drawing.48
v) The purpose of the viewer’s actions in using the drawing, and the
physical topology of viewing the drawing, also contribute to the
significance of the array of marks.49
vi) These purposes and topologies themselves define the level of
appropriateness of the marks, measured as a realisation of environ-
mental and social possibilities and the status of the activity pro-
ductive of the array of marks.
vii) The task of determining how the potential uses of the drawing can
be integrated with the drawing itself is made on the bases of
system described earlier. Affordances realised in the drawing
enable cognition of the drawing, where cognition is only one of
the number of homeorhetic possibilities or resources of the body
utilised in perceiving and using the drawing.
viii) In particular, long-term memory substantiates or contradicts cur-
rent aetiological, functional and semiotic possibilities, as part of
the process of realisation.
Realisation of one aspect of this model by another is always realisation of

the whole situation. As such, each aspect of the model is defined in terms of
its relationship to the whole situation. For example, material artefacts, in this
case the paper and ink of Gaudier-Bzresca’s drawing (or the ink and paper
of the book in which the drawing is reproduced), physically realise the array
of graphic marks as having semiotic significance.50
However, this does not contradict the appearance of hypotactic rela-
tionships between elements within the array—that is, a relationship
between elements across different parts of the structure. Constituents of
the array can be accorded status within a hierarchy of significance and
types of significance, and the inference of relative status describes a net-
work of dependency relationships. Consider the ink mark depicting the
inner edge of the eagle’s lower beak in Eagle, for example. Restricting a
description to the tactic relationships within the graphic array, it is easy to
understand how the mark’s significance derives from the topological
relationships of which it is part, rather than its properties ‘per se,’ and it
is a close step from understanding this to understanding that realisation—
by the mark and the array of marks (of which it is a part)—of environment,
general resources of the body, social modulations, artefacts and the iden-
tity and status of actions, is an aetiological accomplishment.
However, it is the mutually integrative activity of realisation within the
model—‘(a) realises (b) realises (c)’—that is fundamental, rather than the
tactic relationships within the graphic array. As I have described, in aetiolo-

gical characterisations of drawing, the relative status of elements in the
graphic array is only derived from the ways in which they are produced and
used. Hence, an array of graphic marks also realises the relationship between
the goal-directedness of the draughtsperson and the goal-directedness of the
viewer, according to this model.
In this description of Eagle, environment, general resources of the
body, social modulations, artefacts and the identity and status of actions
are mutually affecting and hence mutually significant. Hence, discourse
realises content, which spontaneously identifies and stratifies the relative
significance of environment, general resources of the body, social modula-
tions, artefacts and the identity and status of actions.
Semiosis of the array of graphic marks in Eagle is entirely dependent
upon the marks’ relation to material object (paper and ink), perceptual
activities and the actions of makers and users. In addition, graphic produc-
tion of the array is contextually integrated to specific activities, through
which it becomes meaningful.
Hence, types of organisation are realised by graphic production itself.
Relationships within the graphic array and between the graphic array and
the other organisational principles of environment, resources, actions and
semiosis are recognised as having an aetiological scope that is unique to each
drawing. Environmental and social modulations, in addition to actions
accorded identity and status, together realise this graphology, because they
functionally relate the selection, distribution, proximity and overall organisa-
tion of inhibitions and opportunities in one domain to those in another, even
though the realisation relationships that occur between domains are quite
distinct from the tactic relationships occurring within the graphic array.51
1.2 DRAWING’S AFFORDANCES

1.2.1 Graphiotactic Realisation of the General Potential
Resources of the Body
To reiterate, among these generalisations of the potential resources of the
body are ontological conceptions of mass, size and motion. They are
characterisations of types of potential across the entire homeorhetic system
as an arbiter and producer of experience, encompassing perception, cogni-
tion and imagination. Both homeorhesis and aetiology have an indivisible
basis in conceptions of motion and concomitant conceptions of mass and
1.2 DRAWING’S AFFORDANCES 29
size. But a homeorhetic and aetiological conception of spatio-temporality

is quite distinct from one derived itself from any isolated conception of
vision and is distinct from a conception of vision deriving from a concep-
tion of the property of being visible. Hence, graphiotactic saliency is only
inhibited by the general potential resources of the body, which are pro-
duced ‘in order to’ try and make a particular drawing.
Mutual realisation offers only scalar and self-similar organising princi-
ples on this basis—in which principles maintain their integrity only accord-
ing to their relative magnitude—because these principles transcend purely
tactic applications. In particular, the prior description of the importance of
the effect of changes in proximity in a spatio-temporal system (by which an
encompassing volume is transformed into a vanishing point and vice
versa), illustrates this.
Drawing activities are formalised in inscribing visual marks onto a sur-
face, by whatever technological means, so that these marks can be realised
and integrated into some context by a viewer. However, of themselves,
specific graphic marks and systems are independent of their semiotic func-
tion, because semiotic values and functions are assigned to these graphic
marks according to their location within the visual system and not because
of any perceived inherent quality. Hence, there is an aetiological relation-
ship between graphic mark and meaning, so that the mark is functionally
motivated rather than arbitrary—the mark or array of marks takes its place in
the system because it is utilised in order to fulfil a specific purpose.
Semiotic distinctions between marks or arrays of marks in a drawing can
only be made on the basis of relative location. Tactic relationships are
those that occur syntagmatically, rather than hierarchically, within a gra-
phic array. They function in parallel with each other to create meaning. So
it is possible to think of these arrays as functioning graphiotactically, where
graphiotactics is the topology of marks within the graphic system—on the
page, as it were—itself realised aetiologically.
The graphic array is also not comprised of the perceived phenomenal
qualities of its constituent marks, in the sense of lines, shapes or dots, or
degrees of light. Rather, as with potential environmental and social
resources and actions accorded identity and status, the graphic array is
realised relative to these within a set of possible parameters. It depends
upon the tactic position of a particular graphic mark or array of marks, as
to whether they are understood to be instances of the achievement of a
particular topological effect. Pertinent iterations of graphiotactic organisa-
tion emerge within the possible parameters of technical production—the
location of lines, shapes, dots and degrees of light, but these are them-
selves underwritten by more fundamental aetiological resources of the
body, directed towards trying to make a drawing. John Willats’s discussion
of drawing ‘primitives,’ or identified elementary forms that are accumu-
lated to make visual representations, hints at an aetiological characterisa-
tion of activities/marks, without realising either the salience of relative
location or the productive function of the realisation of potential bodily
resources.52
In theorising the making and viewing of Gaudier-Bzresca’s Eagle, there-
fore, it is imperative to consider potential topological parameters that both
appear and are meaningful due to their realisation of environmental and
social modulations, and actions accorded identity and status, within the
general parameters established by the potential resources of the body.
To clarify graphiotactic realisations of the general potential resources of
the body, it is useful here to briefly compare aetiological descriptions of
the marks produced in trying to make a drawing and systematic descrip-
tions of the marks of written text. Recall that in the aetiological description
‘(a) mutually realises (b) mutually realises (c),’ a range of opportunities
and inhibitions prohibit and facilitate the activities/marks that are made in
trying to make a drawing. A similar structure of realisation relationships
also describes the visual production of written texts, with the clarification
that a modality-independent cognitive system (in this case, a language
system), predicates the realisation of both visual graphology in writing and
phonology in speech.
This clarification achieves two things. First, it identifies the cognitive
system of language itself as realising general possible resources of the body,
as distinct from its own realisation in the graphic arrays of written text.
I have already discussed language as a subset of semiosis and semiosis as a
bodily resource produced in goal-directed activities. Second, according to
this simple model, a comparable modality-independent cognitive system
does not seem to exist for drawing. That is not to say that the significance
of trying to make, failing to make or achieving a particular type of drawing
is either randomly instantaneous or environmentally and discursively
vague. Goal-directedness itself explains the actual activities of drawing by
realising some of the possible activities of drawing.
However, following the first distinction (between a language system, as
a realisation of the semiotic potential of the body, and a language system as
realised by the graphic arrays of writing), it is tempting to theorise an
equivalent of a cognitive language system that is realised in other types of
visual representations to writing, such as drawing. An underlying task for a

project attempting this theorisation is a comprehensive conception of both
cognition (including visualisation) and vision, relative to the general
potential resources of the body. The affect in which theorisations of
cognition and vision find most substantiation (and controversy) is visual
depiction, although little has yet been said about depiction relative to the
visual realisation of cognitive language structures.53 I will discuss a pro-
minent current approach to this project in Section 1.2.2.
A great deal can also be said about the structure of language as a
realisation of the general potential resources of the body, but this is not
my focus here. Suffice to say that language systems realise principles of
graphic organisation that are directly analogous to the structures of lin-
guistic cognitive systems in some ways but not in others. Therefore, these
systems are not to be confused with the modal iterations in which they are
realised. The graphic arrays of written texts (and the phonetic array of
spoken words, for that matter) are not simply structured by the linguistic
systems that they realise, as Roy Harris points out, for reasons that are
revealed in making some comparisons between writing and drawing.54
The graphic arrays of written text have been characterised by linguists as
part/part relationships, part/whole relationships and scopal relationships
(in which the meanings of graphic elements are modified by others from
outside the system), among others.55
It is worth reminding myself of some of the terminology used to
describe items in the graphiotactic array of writing. A ‘grapheme’ is a
graphic item in a writing system that is inaccessible to further division.
This characteristic is definitive, relative to its location in any written
graphic array, and for no other reason.56 As such, graphemes are visual
realisations of letters in the alphabet of a language system. Their graphic
morphology appears within the very broadest of parameters because they
rely upon their topological character (their location in the graphic array)
to graphically realise their functions as letters within the cognitive lexico-
grammar. For example, consider the many graphic forms that have realised
the letter ‘m’ in your experience. It is impossible to define them as a shared
class of ‘m’ morphologically, without recourse to their topological loca-
tion in an array that realises the language structure. Even any single letter
‘m’ conforms to this stricture. Similarly, any graphic form that appears to
be ‘m,’ but which appears independent of a realisation of the language
structure cannot be ‘m,’ even if it has some of the possible morphological
characteristics of ‘m.’
Graphic ‘syntagms’ are numbers of graphemes that group to create mean-

ing, by realising other aspects of the cognitive structures of a language. They
can visually represent parts of words, such as suffixes, prefixes and plurals
(‘ly,’ ‘pre,’ ‘s’), as well as nouns, verbs and other lexical items (‘cat,’ ‘go,’
‘that’). ‘Logograms’ are visual representations of words comprising groups
of graphemes and/or syntagms. There are others, but they can all be
described as hierarchies of topological groups in the graphic array (items,
groups of items and groups of groups of items), that both conform to and
exceed a simple realisation of a cognitive lexicogrammar. The topological
location of items in the graphic array visually supports this tactic hierarchy
and fully predominates over the identification of any putative morphological
class, in the array’s realisation of the structure of language.
Part/part relationships between items in written texts (such as gra-
phemes, syntagms, logograms, etc.), visually realise patterns analogous
with part/part relationships in the language system. When it comes to
visually realising the language structure, these are overwhelmingly
sequence relationships. Visual sequential repetitions also derive from lan-
guage structure. Visualise ‘again and again and again,’ for example. So,
lexicogrammar is realised in the appearance of repetitions of adjacent
ordering in visual graphemes, syntagms and logograms. Groups of marks
as well as individual graphemes, are located adjacent to each other in
visually repeated patterns analogous with the repetition of sequences of
phonemes, for example, in the language system. Those graphemes and
visual syntagms, visually representing parts of words as groups of letters,
appear and reappear in the same spatial relationship with each other.
Other principles of graphic organisation also appear as part/part rela-
tionships. Visual similarities between marks establish paratactic relation-
ships between visual elements that are not organised in the including
colour, relative position, size or material. For example, a handwritten
text in which two different ‘hands’ appear, establishes a part/part relation-
ship between one authographic style of facture and the other. A similar
part/part relationship appears in the use of different sizes of typographic
font in the same graphic array. In each part/part relationship, the identity
and status of the mark is realised in these part/part relationships beyond
the realised lexical system. For example, consider the use of capital letters
centring the title of a written text.
Halliday discusses three part/part relationships in which graphiotactic
realisations do not belong to lexicogrammatical structures. Part/part exten-
sion relationships organise the graphic array by addition, re-statement or
substitution. For example, consider the anthropomorphic addition of

depicted eyes or arms to written letters, or the use of drop-shadows on text
as re-statement, or the substitution of a drawn outline of the State of Texas
for the capital letter ‘T’ in the written group ‘The State of Texas.’ Part/part
elaboration relationships reformulate their constituent parts by providing
additional information. For example, consider a notice pinned up in an office
before a business meeting: the logogram ‘Coffee’ immediately followed by a
typographic ‘dingbat’ of an arrow (icon) pointing in a particular direction,
meaning ‘this way.’ Finally, consider the relationship between the graphic
items on the first page of a novel, arranged according to genre or habitual
expectation: title, chapter one, body text and page number. These items have
a part/part enhancement relationship. Each item is realised through location
and morphology as part of a teleological relationship that mutually realises
the array as goal-directed.57
Part/whole relationships between items in written texts (such as gra-
phemes, syntagms, logograms, etc.), also visually realise patterns analo-
gous with part/whole sequential relationships in the language system,
although there are differences between phonetic and graphic realisation
of the lexicogrammatic structure: think of words that sound identical but
are graphically represented by different logograms, for example. Also, as
with part/part relationships between graphemes and syntagms, relative
location determines the meaning of items in constituency relationships
within and between logograms. Not only the sequential relationships that
structure the cognitive language realise the graphic part/whole relation-
ships of logograms, but also divisions in sequence, creating unambiguous
‘beginning and end’ groups in accordance with which incomplete struc-
tures are clearly identifiable.
These relationships can be summed-up in a single guiding principle,
which can be simply stated: in every case, the temporal proximity relation-
ships in the modality-independent cognitive system of a language deter-
mine the visual proximity relationships in the written graphic array that
represents that language, but not their morphologies.
However, graphiotactic semiosis is not limited to this rule, due to two
things: (a) the infinite potential for morphological variation and (b) the
influence of pragmatics, or discursive factors that cannot be accounted for
in the systematic realisation of the temporal lexicogrammatical structure in
topological graphic structure—the proximity of marks constituting the
graphiotactic array of a drawing can be viewed as a whole, or in any
order, for example.
Discursive relationships affecting the meaning of written marks appear

when a cognitive lexicogrammar is realised with modification from ele-
ments outside the system. In effect, such modifications take place in every
case, due to the realisation of semiotic possibilities in the graphic array that
do not derive from realisation of structural relationships in the lexico-
grammar. In this sense, these relationships are wholly discursive and their
systems can only be described and analysed in detail in terms of goal-
directedness, habits of use and expectation, the creation of subjects and
institutions and the relationships between these and the realisations of
language in a variety of visual, haptic and aural media.
In trying to make a drawing, in comparison with trying to write a
sentence, these organisational principles (part/part, part/whole and sco-
pal) cannot be characterised according to degrees of applicability across a
range of instances. They are not limited to tactic relationships, nor do they
constitute lexical or grammatical functions or the perceived effects of
particular types of mark as properties of the mark. Drawings differ from
written texts in this way. Both the morphology and the topology of
syntagms and graphemes are realised through spatio-temporal organisa-
tion, according to the temporal lexicogrammar of the verbal languages
that they represent topographically, even whilst producing semiotic sig-
nificance quite independently of the lexicogrammar, in discursive
relationships.
This does not contradict an aetiological characterisation of writing,
because lexicogrammar, as a set of organising principles, does not encom-
pass the possible range of relative types or locations of marks that can be
used to produce graphemes, syntagms and logograms. In the case of the
Necker Cube example, it is a visual projection system that determines the
location of marks, although not their type.
With syntagms and graphemes, it is a structure of cognitive lexicogram-
mar that overwhelmingly determines the meaningful location of marks. As
with the example of the Necker Cube, systematic ambiguities such as
polysemy (that appear in the realisation of the system in the array of
marks), point to the fact that the system does not encompass its graphic
realisation, as much as a graphic realisation produces meaning superfluous
to the system that it realises. With a visual projection system, the Necker
ambiguity results from the realisation in two dimensions of a system
mapping three dimensions. With graphic visualisation of the lexicogram-
matical systems of a verbal language, ambiguity results from the realisation
of a modality-independent cognitive system as graphic visualisations,
which carry superfluous meanings and exceed automatic realisation of the

system alone.
Then this is the question, arising out of a description of written marks
in anticipation of a comparison with drawing: what are the possible
systems of drawings, that guide production of activities and placement of
marks, realised but semiotically superseded in the iteration of their graphic
arrays? My aetiological characterisation of trying to make a drawing
focuses on general possible resources, the characteristics of which are
defined quite specifically as ‘being-produced-in-order-to.’ The advantages
of theorising drawing as goal-directed activities have been discussed and
evidenced.
To re-state: with written marks, the temporal proximity relationships in
the modality-independent cognitive system of a language determine the
visual proximity relationships in the written graphic array that represents
that language, but not their morphologies. This system of language rea-
lisation, in which relative proximity relationships (temporal–topological)
determine the placement and proximity of graphic marks, is not realised as
a prerequisite of drawings.
I have so far discussed drawings schematically, as activities/marks that
derive their status and identity from goal-directedness. Although I have
used three examples of depictive drawings in my discussion, introduced a
brief definition of depiction and referred to a projection system used to
locate marks on a page in the Necker Cube example, I have been careful to
maintain that drawings (nominally, aetiologically and homeorhetically
characterised as activity/marks), encompass and exceed formal descrip-
tions of any type of drawing. The activities of trying to make a drawing
themselves cannot be characterised as depictive, for example, nor do all
drawings utilise systems that produce relative proximities of 3D coordi-
nates in two dimensions, as guides to the location of marks on a surface.58
Given my experience of drawings, I can claim with some confidence that
many more drawings do not employ depiction or spatial projection than
employ them. Alongside my comprehension of the limitation of technical
activity theorisations of drawing as perceptual effects, this is one of my
reasons for beginning by characterising drawing aetiologically, in terms of
resources and inferences.
However, in describing graphiotactic realisation of the general poten-
tial resources of the body, by comparing drawing and writing, the struc-
tural relationship between proximities in the temporal lexicogrammar and
topological graphic array of writing find an easy theoretical parallel with
spatial projection systems that realise 3D coordinates systematically in a

drawing, as the proximity of marks on a surface.
Consider any simple to-scale planning drawing that combines a plan view
and an elevation view of a garden shed, for example. The locations of marks on
the page are guided by a system whereby identified coordinates in 3D space
are automatically located in relative proximities in two dimensions. In plan, the
four corners of the 2D floor of the shed are represented by the four intersec-
tions at the corners of a rectangle drawn on the page. In elevation, the side of
the shed touching the ground is represented as a line of the same length as the
corresponding line of the floor in plan. The relative position of these two lines
guides the to-scale marking of the rest of the drawn elevation, and so on.
Systematic equivalence of the location of 2D marks and 3D coordinates
governs all such spatial projection systems, including those that calculate
and create the location of horizons and horizon lines, vanishing points and
points of view.59 I must be careful here not to confuse those types of
spatial projection systems that attempt to formalise some aspects of the
experience of visual perception (though not others), with depiction.
Although such systems have a historic place as technical methods support-
ing depiction as a phenomenon, they are discursively contingent and not
at all necessary to the function of depiction itself.
The simple system of the to-scale planning drawing (and any other that
systematises the proximal location of 2D marks according to the proximal
location of 3D coordinates), has a striking similarity to the realisation of
temporal lexicogrammatical structures in the topological graphic arrays of
writing. In both, relative proximity, not morphology, overwhelmingly
determines the realisation, the meaning of which is not, however, solely
derived from relative proximity.
For quite different reasons, the phenomenon of ‘seeing-in,’ defining
depiction as a unique type of visual representation, also suggests the
possibility of theorisations of realisation through systematic correspon-
dence due, in a sense, to a thoughtless conceptualisation of ‘likeness.’
I have only to think of portrait drawings for this conceptualisation to
give the appearance of sustaining itself: if depictions bear visual ‘likeness’
to their objects, then this ‘likeness’ is itself proof of the realisation of the
structures of visual perception (of the object of depiction) in the visual
perception of depictions. However, even if understood as structural rather
than brute, this concept of depiction is disallowed in Wollheim’s and
Thomas’s definitions—which are largely uncontroversial as shorthand for
the phenomenon itself. ‘Seeing-in’ in fact requires that I see both the
object of depiction (the sitter in a portrait drawing, say) and the depiction
(the portrait drawing) at the same time, which is not the case in simply
seeing something (the sitter herself).
This phenomenon, of simultaneously seeing both depictions and their
objects, does not provide much ground for application of the writing
model—that is, of systematic correspondences between the temporal
proximities of items in a cognitive lexicogrammar to the topographic
proximities of marks in the graphic arrays of writing—to depictive draw-
ings in terms of those graphic items that visually realise the positions of
letters, syntagms and words in a written array. Graphemes, syntagms and
logograms have no ‘likeness’ but their own. Moreover, this ‘likeness’ is
morphological and hence largely unimportant in the realisation of the
visual representation of a language system, as I have discussed. Not so
depictions, in which the realisation of structural correspondences is only
part of the story, as I will describe in Section 1.2.3.
On the other hand, it is quite possible to describe a drawing made using
a spatial projection system as structurally analogous with a logogram,
because systematic correspondence of proximities in one system realise
those in another, in both drawings using spatial projection systems and in
the graphic realisation of lexicogrammar.
Finally, graphiotactic comparisons between drawing and writing are not
simply illuminating at the level of the logogram. Grapheme, syntagm and
logogram are themselves items in the larger logographic system—they are
obviously not confined to the visual representation of a word, but to the visual
representation of sentences and, although not syntactically essential, para-
graphs and other groupings of groupings whose meaning within the graphic
array is realised in the correspondence of relative proximities and further, by
habits of use (as in the title, chapter heading, etc. of a novel, mentioned
previously). Because of the problem posed by ‘seeing-in,’ for the application
to depictive drawing of a theorisation of the realisation of lexicogrammar in
logographics, it is as difficult to describe a depictive image as analogous to a
logographic array as it is to describe it as analogous to a single logogram.
Neither written page of text nor written word requires any ‘seeing-in.’
1.2.2 Visual Language

This observation introduces a discussion of a current theoretical project,
which focuses on the application of the role of structures of cognitive
language systems to types of visual representations other than writing. Neil
Cohn writes that he has ‘introduced a new notion of “permeability,”’ by

which he means a new conception of the influence of one modality upon
another. But he understates this particular claim. Rather, in the way in
which he uses it, the term permeability describes Cohn’s entire project of
the theoretical application of a language structure of lexicogrammar to
experiences of images.60 He writes: ‘visual language theory argues that all
expressive modalities are tied to a common conceptual structure ( . . . ).’61
An underlying task for a project attempting this theorisation is a com-
prehensive conception of both cognition (including visualisation), and
vision, relative to the general potential resources of the body. But there
are other possible ways to scope the range of the project. Part of the appeal
of Cohn’s theory of ‘visual language’ resides in its plea for a systematic
approach to theorising the experience of visual word and image sequences.
But he only makes this plea in contrast to a single historic tradition of
drawing theory that he appears to have chosen in order to provide an
example of a lack of systematisation. In addition to this example, there are
numerous systematic theorisations of the activities and media of drawing,
of spatial projection systems and of depiction that Cohn’s theory
ignores.62 Rather, systematisation is a prerequisite of theorisation itself,
given that the function of theorisations is to explain aspects of experience
beyond perception by proposing self-evidencing proofs. Following this
imperative, I expect a systematic theory to identify distinct relationships
between constituent items that are applicable in every case, in which every
item is constitutive and dependent and in which it is not possible to omit
any item or relationship without breaking the system. A system is then
rationally self-evidencing. As such, it explains and describes the relation-
ships between its constituent items and functions.
As an alternative to theorising a comprehensive conception of both
cognition (including visualisation) and vision, relative to the general
potential resources of the body, the comparison I have already made
between the realisation of lexicogrammatical temporal proximities in the
graphic arrays of writing and different types of drawing adopts another
possible way to scope the range of the theoretical application of a structure
of lexicogrammar to experiences of images.
Recall that I identified the functional relationship between a cognitive
language structure and the structure of its visual representation in writing
and then attempted to apply a similar correspondence to the appearance of
types of drawings. Rather than commence my analysis from theorisations
of the structures of cognition realised in vision, visualisation and drawing,
I commenced with the structure of lexicogrammar relative to the struc-

tures of writing and attempted, however briefly, to utilise this theorisation
to analyse other types of visual representation.
Broadly, this is also Cohn’s approach to substantiating the permeability
of writing and drawing media, on the basis of similarities of the systematic
realisation of a lexicogrammatical structure in both writing and visual
representations, of which drawing is a subset. It is important to bear in
mind that Cohn’s underlying theorisation is not a theory of the comic strip
register, but an encompassing claim about the similarity of the structures
that are realised in writing and visual representation, including drawing.
He states: ‘My argument is not that “comics are a language” or “comics
are like a language.” Rather, it is that comics are written using two
processes, writing and drawing, and that the structures of both of these
are similar ( . . . ).’63
I have discussed the idea that (a) the temporal proximities structur-
ing language are realised systematically in the topological proximities of
the graphic array of writing and that (b) the morphology of items and
groups of items in the array of written marks is structurally, though not
semantically, insignificant. Comparing this formulation with the experi-
ence of (i) what I called schematic drawings, (ii) drawings made using
spatial projection systems and (iii) depictive drawings, I proposed that
this systematic correspondence of types of realisation of one structure
in another (temporal to topological in the case of lexicogrammar and
writing, 3D to 2D topographical in the case of projection systems), is
unavailable to depictive drawings. This is due to fact that the experi-
ence of ‘seeing-in’ appears both to confound these types of structural
proximity correspondences and to rely upon morphology as an organis-
ing principle, not yet discussed, in ways that set the experience outside
the model.
Beyond his curious definition of the grapheme, noted earlier, Cohn
doesn’t analyse the structural relationship between cognitive lexicogram-
mar and the visual arrays of writing. However, a theorisation of this
relationship forms the basis for his theorisation of both constitutive
items and proximity in his visual system. Arguing for the realisation of
the structure of a modality-independent cognitive system (in this case, a
language system) in the structure of graphiotactic arrays of drawn and
written sequences is the point of his project.
Cohn also glosses the structural problems that depiction poses for the
application of this model, including, in his own terms, both the syntactic
functions of resemblance and style, or their lack of syntactic significance,

within the system of realisation. The problem is compounded by the fact
that he only defines an image according to its referential function within
his system, according to the root theorisation of the significance of topo-
logical proximity relationships in the realisation of lexicogrammar. In part,
he utilises a broad Piercian generalisation of different types of referential
sign: icons are signs that refer by resemblance to their object, symbols refer
by systematic conventions of use and indexical signs refer to their objects
causally.
Unfortunately, the structure of depiction constitutes a type of iconic
image that resists both the realisation of a system of lexicogrammar by visual
topology and hence, in order to be theoretically useful, requires another
systematic explanation of ways in which it achieves semiosis by referring to
its objects through resemblance. Because Cohn uses his system itself to
define images as functions within his system, he ignores the fact that the
structure of depictions cannot be accounted for, explained or described as
systematic realisations of lexicogrammar, beyond the most general, unsyste-
matic and largely unspecified concept of iconic resemblance.64
As a result, he doesn’t define any topological or morphological char-
acteristics of a visual item in his system, unless these are symbolic (such as
comic strip speech balloons or Aboriginal action/visual directional marks),
in which case they can be correlated easily with the definition of gra-
phemes, syntagms and logograms according to types of proximity (and
to a much lesser extent, types of use), for example. But Cohn offers no
explanatory definition of a depiction within his system. There is no more
than an implicit conceptualisation of iconic images as correlating to both
syntagms and logograms and sentences, in the systematic visual realisation
of lexicogrammatical structure. According to this theorisation, the icon
realises part of a word, a word or a sentence, because it appears in a relative
proximity relationship that is similar to the proximity relationship in a
lexicogrammar. Depictions are hence considered by Cohn as meaningful,
or even units of meaning, because they are iconic, but distinctions
between what these types of unit might be, and even a definition of their
semiotic significance based on these distinctions is absent—and this even
includes the absence of a definition that is derived entirely from a realised
lexicogrammatical structure.
Immediately, I am to understand two things by Cohn’s elisions and
omissions. First, although very far from a theoretically considered
definition, by any means, Cohn approaches icons, including depictions,
as ‘likeness.’ Images ‘generally look like objects in the world,’ he

writes, and ‘we understand that these representations have meanings
because they look like what they represent.’65 He is not entirely con-
vinced by this approach himself, when later faced with the question of
different styles of depiction. In the absence of any theory but a theory
of the realisation of a system of proximal correspondences, depictions
must either ‘look like’ their objects or not. They cannot function in
the system of correspondences if they only ‘look like’ their objects a
little bit or, in fact deviate in their appearance from their objects at all,
in this model. Under what circumstances is a depiction more ‘like’
than ‘unlike?’ He does not say. Compared with the grapheme’s insig-
nificant morphology, the depiction’s morphology must be ‘like,’ and
not unlike, if it is not to break the system. This is a problem for a
system that relies upon temporal/topological correspondences to pro-
vide meaning in every level of systemic function.
But Cohn cannot quite commit to the idea of ‘likeness.’ It becomes
clear that different styles of depiction cannot all accommodate ‘likeness,’
even within the most fluid morphological parameters. If a depiction drawn
in one style ‘looks like,’ its object, then how can another in a completely
different style also ‘look like’ the same object?’ Both depictions and hence
their objects will be unalike. His solution is to locate stylistic modulations
outside the system of correspondences, in the realm of pragmatics, or
language use. ‘The idea that drawing is simply a reflection of perception
( . . . ) cannot account for conventional patterns,’ he writes, and ‘“styles”
are built from conventional patterns by people of a culture.’66 But these
‘conventions’ play no part in the systematic realisation of the structure of
lexicogrammar in the graphiotactic structure of the visual word and image
array, and he provides no systematic account for them.
Second, in terms of Cohn’s theory, the advantage of defining depic-
tions as ‘likeness,’ despite the problems that this entails, lies in defining
them as indivisible items. If I accept that a depiction is simply an icon that
‘looks like’ its object, then depictions are self-evidencing. In this sense, in
terms of Cohn’s theory, they are even more amenable to semiosis than any
of their equivalent items in writing systems, solely on the basis of topolo-
gical proximity. This is the approach that he adopts.
These two realisations are crucial to understanding the system of
Cohn’s theory, as an explanation of the experience of sequential visual
images, of whatever type. Once they are understood, his theory of visual
language then appears as a system of corresponding parts in which
depictions (along with other types of image), are theorised as indivisible

items, the status of which relies on the systematically realised topological
proximities between them. The system accords status and identity to the
items that realise it in much the same way as cognitive lexicogrammar is
visibly realised in writing. As a result, a depiction has meaning in his system
in exactly the same way as a word or a part of a word or a sentence has
meaning (although Cohn is not sure where the analogy correctly falls or
does not fall, as I have said). Hence, within his realisation system of
correspondences, when he sees a depiction of a chair, he thinks of the
ways in which the word ‘chair’ is meaningful. When he sees a depiction of
a man running down the street, he thinks of the ways in which the
sentence ‘a man running down the street’ is meaningful.
When Cohn refers to visual images, he is often not clear if he regards
them as diegetic, whatever category of sign he accords them. Although
I think that I deduce the distinctions, he is not clear as to the significance
of the difference between a diegetic image depicting a situation within the
bounds of the edge of a comic panel (in which the diegesis is ‘seen-in’), for
example, the diegetic, symbolic images that are accumulated in the plots
shown in central Australian sand drawings or the metadiegetic lines con-
stituting panels, although this constitutes a distinct structural difference
that might possibly be accounted for in a topological realisation of
lexicogrammar.
This problem is further shaped by consideration of the role of panels as
potential lexical items in the specific iteration of the theorised ‘visual
language’ in comic strips. Cohn discusses the objection that ‘there is not
a “visual language dictionary” for panels.’67 In other words, a topological
visual lexicogrammar should be evidenced in a formal group of lexical
items. Following this rationale, in the comic strip register, the panel
(defined functionally as a topological area, the boundary of which encloses
representations of diegetic space), offers itself as an invariant, that is, lexical
item. The objection arises in the fact that whilst the function of the panel
does not vary, its morphology is always unique. Neither does it derive
meaning from its systematic proximity to other items, as do the visual
items of written language. The appearance of panels is neither morpholo-
gically nor proximally systematic. Hence, the panel cannot be a lexical
item.68
Cohn’s agrees that ‘panels are most often not systematic’ and appeals to
the systemic interaction of ‘various levels of structure’ to explain this.69 It
is a commonplace of structural/functional theories to explain systemic
contradictions by appeal either to the existence elsewhere of increasingly

divisible units or to the sovereignty of other encompassing functions. That
is the response here. However, there is another way to explain the unavail-
ability to a lexicon of so promising a constituent of comic strips as the
panel, rather than pointing to either further indivisible lexical items or to
other encompassing lexicogrammatical functions. Thibault describes this
approach as considering a ‘visual unit as a unit of action and interaction,
rather than something which is analytically divided into its constituent
parts,’ in the scopal relationships (which I call ‘discursive,’ above), that
constitute part of the metafunctional diversity of graphic items in the
visual arrays of writing.70
Taking this approach, the status and systematic function of the panel in
the comic strip register converges with the problem that ‘seeing-in’ gen-
erates for Cohn’s theory. To briefly reiterate this problem: in ‘seeing-in,’
I am not simply looking at the depiction, but at the object of the depiction
and at the depiction at the same time. This phenomenon is both central to
the experience of depictions and is entirely incompatible with the system
of proximal correspondences that is the basis for theorising ‘visual lan-
guage.’ ‘Seeing-in’ does not occur because of any topological proximal
correspondence with the temporal proximities in a lexicogrammatical
structure. One of the ineluctable criteria of ‘seeing-in’ is the establishment
of two distinct but simultaneous points of view (relative to both the object
of depiction and the marked surface itself). Along similar lines, the func-
tion of comic strip panels and gutters is to establish non-diegetic spatial
relationships that structure the diegesis. In other words, the panel is a
syncretic item, the main function of which is to spatio-temporally orient
the comic strip reader relative to both (i) the marked surface and (ii) the
depicted diegesis.
Hence, the morphologies and proximities of panels literally position the
reader in proximity to page(s) and depicted scene(s). For example, in
terms of proximity to the depicted diegesis, the panel is an elementary
boundary underwriting the establishment of ‘further away,’ ‘above,’ etc.
In terms of proximity to the marked surface of the page, the panel provides
thresholds for duration relationships between the reader and the whole
graphiotactic array of the page(s). Both of these relationships, between the
reader and page(s) and the reader and the diegeses, generate specific
points of view. I must remember that points of view themselves alone
specify the diegesis. Neither diegesis, nor graphiotactic array, is indepen-
dent of the points of view by which it is specified.
Two further examples that Cohn provides, in order to demonstrate the

realisation of modality-independent lexicogrammatical structures in visual
word/image sequences, are also susceptible to alternative analysis, that
evidences the incompatibility of the application of lexicogrammatical
structures to depictions and word/depictive image sequences. Following
an idea of Leonard Talmy, that ‘Sentences ( . . . ) provide a “window of
attention” for what information they highlight on a scene,’ Cohn com-
pares five sentences that describe five situations, the descriptions having a
number of similar objects to each other (bicycle, house, store) and a
number of differences (sometimes the bicycle leans, sometimes there is
no store).71 He claims that the sentence with the greatest number of
objects is replete, that it ‘provides the “full” view of the overall scene,’
whilst each of the others ‘omits particular portions of the overall scene,’
thus ‘de-emphasising’ different information.
He then theorises that the relative ‘de-emphasis’ is visible in ‘framing
the visual information of a graphic scene, ( . . . ) acting like a “window” for
a reader on whatever is happening in the full fictitious environment of a
visual narrative,’ so that ‘panels have several ways to depict the same scene,
solely by modulating the amount of information that they show. This
selection ( . . . ) demonstrates panel’s roles as attention units.’72 On this
basis, he categorises different types of ‘attentional framing of panels based
on how much information they contain.’73
The error lies in the entire theorisation in the assumption that there
exists a brute situation that can be enumerated independent of either
perceptual capacities or representational structures. It is not that Cohn
cannot assume such a brute environment exists, independent of percep-
tion and representation (that is another discussion), but that he assumes
that any perception and representations of such a situation can be replete
in any terms other than their own.
It might be that Cohn expresses himself badly, in allowing this confu-
sion between brute environment and a sentence with a greater number of
objects that describes that environment, in this example. He says that the
sentence with the greater number of objects is replete, rather then the
situation that the sentence describes. Nonetheless, this confusion of
replete situation and replete sentence facilitates a compound error: any
sentence is always replete, in the sense that it describes what it describes,
no more and no less.
In comparison with other sentences describing what I assume to be the
same situation, in different ways (with fewer or different objects), I might
assume that a greater number of objects/greater complexity in the repre-

sentation equals increased repleteness and, of course, this is true in com-
parisons I might make between different sentences, in which the
accumulation or decrease in lexical items does indeed equal more informa-
tion or less.
But this is not the case with depictions and hence neither is it the case
with depictions organised systematically in order to show a story. It is
impossible to allocate with any surety a fixed number of objects depicted in
a depiction. There is a simple reason for this. When I see a depictive
drawing of an apple, for example, it is impossible to identify anything
except the properties of the depicted situation: the ‘redness,’ ‘darkness,’
‘freshness,’ ‘age,’ ‘time of day’ or even style of depiction—the discursive
associations made with the graphiotactic organisation and use of the
depiction—of the depicted apple. All of the ‘seen-in’ properties, other
than the depictive style, are the objects of the depiction. They are essential
to the identity and status of the depiction as a depiction of an apple. The
word ‘apple,’ on the other hand, requires no such accumulation of proper-
ties in order to refer to an apple. As a principle of organisation of the
depiction, these properties can accumulate ‘ad infinitum’ with each viewer.
Unfortunately—particularly for a theory of ‘visual language’—there is
nothing so simple as a lexicogrammar that I can use as a tool to begin to
theorise a system that accounts for the experience of depictions as proper-
ties. I will return to this in Section 1.2.3.
It is not that there is no ‘repleteness’ in depictions, in the sense of a
gauge of the relative number of lexical items in a sentence. There is of
course only the depiction and its objects and nothing else, and so every
depiction is a replete depiction. But what I might see these objects as
being, depends on the attention that I am able to pay to properties, the
counting of which in greater or fewer numbers is structurally insignificant
to the types of information offered by the experience of depictive images.
To summarise Cohn’s error, I suspect that he flirts, at least, with conflat-
ing a concept of a brute situation with a verbal representation of a situation,
establishing a hierarchy of relative repleteness on the basis of the number of
lexical items/level of complexity of different sentences. Then, he applies this
model to word/depictive image sequences in order to claim to identify, as it
were, ‘lexical’ objects in depictions, and hence theorise a series of categories
of visual ‘attentional framing.’ On this basis, he proposes categories for the
levels of ‘attention’ realised as greater of fewer numbers of visual objects in a
depicted diegesis. These categories are ‘Macro’ or ‘Multiple interacting
entities,’ ‘Mono’ or ‘Single entity,’ ‘Micro’ or ‘Less than a single entity’ and
‘Amorphic,’ or ‘No active entities.’74
My description of the structure and function of depictions renders these
categories wildly incoherent. Considering them, I see the impact of this
error everywhere. Two examples: in the depiction used as an example of
the ‘Mono’ category of attention, which he describes as containing a
‘Single entity,’ we see a depiction of a boxer raising his fist. It is impossible
to identify if the ‘entity’ by which Cohn defines this category of ‘attention’
is the boxer, his fist, a raised eyebrow, the space behind the boxer, the
boxer’s muscular arm, the greyness of the diegetic light or the boxer’s age,
etc. I could make an endless list of plausible ‘entities’ in this depiction.
They are all objects of the depiction and, according to the structure of
depictions, there is no ‘Mono,’ in fact nothing that can be identified
hierarchically as the single object of the depiction at all, according to the
accumulated properties that constitute the information that the depiction
offers. The same analysis can be made of Cohn’s ‘Amorphic’ category,
which he states ‘has no entities at all, it only shows elements of the
background.’ In the ‘Amorphic’ visual example, I see a great deal: boxing
gloves with a particular range of textures, a label, the edge of a boxing
ring, that same grey diegetic light, etc., all of which are the objects of the
depiction.
It is possible that a second example that Cohn provides, as evidence for
his theory, is susceptible to alternative analysis with even more decisive
results than the first, in order to further evidence the incompatibility of the
application of lexicogrammatical structures to depictions and word/depic-
tive image sequences. He develops an idea of the relative semiotic coher-
ence or incoherence of a given depictive image sequence, according to a
theorisation of the lexicogrammatical structures that are realised in the
relative coherence and incoherence of two sentences: ‘George walked to
the kitchen’ and ‘George to walked the kitchen.’
As I have discussed, with written visual arrays, graphiotactic topo-
graphical proximities concur with the temporal proximities of items in
the cognitive lexicogrammar. Hence, a lexicogrammatical system lit-
erally locates lexical items both cognitively and graphically. It is ele-
mentary to identify errors defined by the system and ‘George to walked
the kitchen’ exemplifies such an error. Cohn proposes that a lexico-
grammatical system also structures sequential depictive images. He
provides an example in which he compares two depictive image
sequences. As with the first sentence ‘George walked to the kitchen,’
I recognise and am able to read a coherent plot in the six panels of his
first depictive image sequence. He then provides the depictive image
sequence again, with the locations of panels four and five reversed. He
writes, ‘Fig. 1.1(a) shows a coherent sequence of a man swinging from
vine to vine in the jungle, but the reversal of two panels in Fig. 1.1 (b)
renders it less coherent.’75
This is untrue. Both sequences of images are coherent. The switch in
the location of panels in the sequence of depictive images does not have
the same effect as the switch in the location of words in the sentence to
which it is compared. The plot in depictive sequence (a) and depictive
sequence (b) is different because the sequence of depicted situations is
different. Depictions do not rely upon correspondence between the prox-
imal structure of items in a temporal lexicogrammar being realised in the
proximal structure of items in the topological visual array, so changes in
the proximities of depictions in sequences of depictive images cannot
render a sequence incoherent.76
I have offered an explanation as to why this type of system does not
structure depictions and the relationships between them, sufficient to the
issues raised in this Section of the Chapter. On the basis of this explana-
tion, changes in the relative location of depictions in a sequence that
contradict the system are completely without systematic significance.
They cannot constitute errors in a system of correspondences to which
they do not belong. Cohn’s comparison between the sentence and the
depictive image sequence is phenomenally compelling. I know that the
jumbled sentence is in error, and that this error is due to the fact that it
does not correctly topographically realise the structure of a cognitive
lexicogrammar. I then read both the initial and the jumbled sequences
of depictive images, in Cohn’s example, and they spontaneously show me
two different, but coherent, plots.
Can depiction be systematically incorporated into a model that pro-
poses the realisation of the temporal structures of a lexicogrammar in the
variety of types of graphiotactic experience? According to Jackendoff,
language is structured by syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Syntax con-
stitutes a set of principles in a system. Semantics constitutes the appearance
of meaning in terms of (a) sense and reference and (b) lexical relationships.
Pragmatics constitutes the ways in which contexts of utterance and use
contribute to meaning.77 Identifying lexicogrammatical systems that rea-
lise visual depictions means positioning the answer to this question in
descriptions of a particular relationship between syntax and semantics.
This might be possible, but I can see no way to achieve it within a

system of lexicogrammatical syntactical/semantic realisation. Hence, an
attempt must be made systematically to include pragmatics in the mutual
realisation. Jackendoff proposes that, although the study of pragmatics is
relevant to linguistics, it does not preclude his focus on the study of the
systems of language alone.78 Quite so. But I must be careful not to
misunderstand his statement as proposing that pragmatics is unsystematic,
because it does not conform to theorisations of the systems of lexicogram-
mar. Quite the opposite: it is because specific experiences of representa-
tions are intractable to theorisations of lexicogrammar that other types of
system need to be theorised. These might be more or less complex
systems, in which theories of lexicogrammar can be encompassed or
incorporated, or they might not.
As a system, Cohn’s theory does not explain depiction, despite the fact
that the function of depiction is structurally essential to it. Recall that
I expect a systematic theory to identify distinct relationships between
constituent items that are applicable in every case. Because (a) it is intract-
able to Cohn’s theory of ‘visual language,’ and (b) the lack of a theorisa-
tion of the depiction is a major structural omission that challenges the
theory’s coherence, the limited description of the structure of ‘seeing-in’
that I have given requires a return to theorisations of the systems, func-
tions and experience of cognition, visualisation and vision, themselves
encompassing the realisation potential of systems of lexicogrammar alone.
1.2.3 Depiction
As previously described, depiction is a unique type of visual representation
defined by both seeing the activities/marks that constitute the depiction
whilst also seeing the object of the depiction.79 The experience of this
phenomenon differs from both vision and visualising (as I will call visual
imagining from now on), in that it involves both an idea of the visual
appearance of an absent object and awareness of a particularly organised
set of marks on a surface as essential and indivisible simultaneous aspects of
the experience.
The experience of vision, on the other hand, does not require these
constituent aspects. Phenomenal copresence and the general potential
resources of the body structure the sensory experience of seeing, as all
other perceptual faculties. The experience of vision’s object cannot be
theoretically bifurcated in the way that the experience of depiction’s object
must be. The experience of visualisation, or visual imagining, is also

singular (although it might take different forms, of which more later).
Visualisation does not require exteroceptive experience, although experi-
ences of exteroception might or might not contribute to structure an
experience of it.
Depiction always involves an experience of simultaneously seeing (a
graphiotactic array, the surface on which it is inscribed, the situation of
vision, etc.), and visualising (the absent object of the depiction). As Robert
Hopkins writes: ‘That the phenomenology of seeing-in differs from that of
other types of experience is due both to the thought of an absent object
and to the awareness of the marked surface ( . . . ).’80
Hence, the experience of depiction has both a definitive structure,
which distinguishes it from the structure of other types of visual represen-
tation, and a unique phenomenology, in that the essential dual experience
of vision (seeing marks) and visualisation (‘seeing-in’ the object of depic-
tion) is unlike any other experience of visual representation.
The experience of depiction also differs from the visual experience of any
other types of objects that are not depictions, in the sense that I am aware
that the graphiotactic array of a depiction is structurally unlike any other
type of object, for the very reason that it realises the object of depiction.
I must not confuse this recognition with any type of intentioned activity:
I can spontaneously ‘see-in’ a depicted object in a random array of clouds or
cracks in a wall as in a depictive drawing made for that purpose. Nor does
the phenomenon exclude aetiological characterisation, as I have discussed.
As a result, the visual idea of the object of depiction is an indivisible
aspect of the experience of seeing the marked surface of the depiction.
Similarly, experience of the marked surface is indivisible from the experi-
ence of the object of depiction and the relationship between the two
constitutes a definition of depiction itself.
Objects of depiction are also experienced in particular, in that they are
constituted by properties rather than categories. A depiction of a cow in a
field is always visibly distinct: it is a depiction of a visibly particular cow in a
visibly particular field. This is the case even if the object of depiction is
ambiguous or fictional. In the case of ambiguous objects of depiction, it is
not the depiction that is ambiguous or fictional, but rather its object.
There is no structural incoherence in this.
In summary, depiction can be defined by these three aspects, in all cases:
(a) the indivisible simultaneous experience of vision and visualisation, (b)
the identification of the affordance that they provide as a function of
depiction, as a structural relationship between vision and visualisation and

(c) the visual representation of particular objects defined as properties.
Although this description of depiction identifies its consistent functional
characteristics, describing the phenomenal experience of depiction, it does not
offer an explanation as to depictive function. How do I visualise a depicted
object when I see a depiction? Wollheim calls the phenomenon ‘incommen-
surate,’ which, although accurate as a description, offers no explanation.81
In order to explain the experience of depiction, four specific character-
istics need to be discussed. These characteristics need to be accomodated in
any theorisation of a general depictive system:
First: the impossibility of visually depicting categorical generalities, evi-

denced by the functional necessity of depicting visual properties.
Second: the structural necessity of the depiction of visual properties.
The properties of depicted objects must be visible properties.
Third: the structural function of generating points of view, locating a
viewer relative to both the array of marks and the depicted
object, seen from that specific point of view.
Finally: the possibility of the presentation of visual fictions. Depictions
do not have to depict anything seen elsewhere in the world,
although this does not contradict the characteristic that they
have of only depicting visible properties.
A theoretical approach encompassing these four characteristics must also not

overlook the fact that they are structured by other experiences of vision and
visualisation in particular, both inhibited and facilitated by the general potential
resources of the body. This might seem obvious, but Hopkins states that such
knowledge must be both ‘sufficient’ to the experience of the viewer (in which
case, depictions are habitually recognised as depictions), and ‘necessary,’ for
the viewer to have the experience, in that depiction cannot function without
such knowedge.82
There is no obvious ground for theorising depiction as visual illusion,
defined as identical phenomenology, because the defining characteristic of
depiction is the simultaneity of both vision and visualisation. Objects of depic-
tion are not experienced visually in the way that the objects of vision are
experienced visually. The two types of experience are phenomenally different
and distinct.
It might be possible to argue a case for depiction as visual illusion, by

proposing that what is seen in a depiction (its graphic array, etc.), is in
some way fully eclipsed by what is visualised (the visual idea of the object
of depiction). Unfortunately, this is phenomenally untrue. I always both
see the marks and visualise the object. Depictive images can certainly
provided illusions of their objects, but in these cases, they provided an
identical phenomenology in contradiction to any but the perceived view.
The viewer perceived the object of the depiction to be the object itself,
rather than a depiction of the object. A successful visual illusion is false, in
this sense only, in that a viewer does not visualise something that is not
there, but sees something that is not there (the object of the depiction).
Even considering the possibility that this type of visual illusion might be
rhetorical—that is, produced and perceived knowingly in contexts where
illusion might be comprehended as a visual effect—this theorisation of
depiction cannot account for any epistemological contradictions that
reveal the relative level of skill of the artist or style of facture, genre,
movement, change, supposition or memory, for example. In this sense,
an illusion of the appearance of the object of depiction is either complete
or it is not really an illusion.83 As a consequence of the fundamental
contradiction between the structure of depiction and the structure of
visual illusion, there is no need to discuss the four characteristics of
depiction in light of a theorisation of illusion.
Alternatively, a theoretical attempt to sidestep the phenomena of ‘see-
ing-in’ altogether has focused on conceiving of depiction as a symbol
system. In other words, in something like Jackedoff’s tripartite system of
language (in which pragmatics structures realise semiotic structures and
syntactic structures), it is systemic opportunity and inhibition itself that is
considered most significant, ‘depending on conventions, deriving its
power to represent entirely from our decisions and practices,’ as
Hopkins writes.84
Nelson Goodman’s theorisation of such a symbol system has been
widely considered to represent a ‘conventional’ model of the structure of
depiction, in the sense that it is discussed in terms of systemic conventions
of use, by Walton, Schier, Peacocke and others.85 In other words,
Goodman’s theory is considered by them to be a shorthand for the
principal of relative habituation, in which pragmatics does not only mod-
erate and influence, but in fact generates systematic semiotic and syntactic
relationships. According to this idea, Walton, in particular, tests
Goodman’s proposal against the problem of visual resemblance relative
to different historic and culturally located styles of facture. He concludes

that in Goodman’s symbol system ‘Pictures judged realistic are merely
ones belonging to systems we have learned to “read” fluently.’86
It is difficult to adjudicate the relative cogency of either the ‘systemic
habitual practices’ concept or its possible benefits and shortcomings, due
to the fact that Goodman’s theory is not a theory of depiction at all, but
rather an extended commentary on the ways in which lexicogrammatical
systems can be differentiated from visual representation. The visual symbol
system that Goodman proposes is designed to demonstrate this difference,
and nothing else. He is particularly interested in the idea of denotation
and notices that the ways in which lexicogrammars ‘refer’ and visual
representations ‘denote’ are distinct and unalike.87
He theorises a visual system in which variations of the morphology and
the proximity of symbolic items, at the level of the indivisible item, bring
about changes in semiosis across the entire graphiotactic array. It is a
constitutive system, in which part/whole relationships dominate. He
does not discuss the possibilities of systematic temporal–topographic cor-
respondence on which written representations of cognitive lexicogrammar
depend. His demonstration is also unlike Cohn’s proposal of a ‘visual
language,’ in every respect, apart from a sharing vagueness about the status
of different types of mark and the status of depiction. Neither Goodman’s
system and Cohn’s system can explain the phenomenon of ‘seeing-in,’
although in Goodman’s case, this is a result of his considering every type of
sign as a sign generated by habitual uses and changes of use, in which all
types of referring relationship between sign and signified are therefore
either self-evident or non-existent. For Goodman, ‘seeing-in’ need not be
and is not a function of his system.
Both a theoretical approach to depiction as illusion and the unfulfilled
project of theorising a visual system of habitual practices can hence be set
aside. More cogently, for a discussion of the four characteristics of depic-
tion, the idea that depictions visually resemble their objects appears to
have more traction. As a concept, ‘resemblance’ already reveals a particular
theoretical inclination, the most significant aspects of which assume that
the function is perceptual/visual rather than lexicogrammatical, for exam-
ple, and hence significantly iconic rather than symbolic or indexical. The
idea of resemblance finds its self-evidencing expression in Cohn’s words
‘look like,’ and these feel comfortable enough as a description of a broad
theoretical approach, simply because it is a commonplace description of
depiction as resemblance.
More specifically, theorising depiction as resemblance proposes that

the visually perceived array of marks constituting a depiction corre-
sponds to either visual perception of the object of depiction, or a
visualisation of the object of depiction, or a remediation of another
type of concept (for example, derived from the content stratum of a
modality-independent language system). In other words, depictions
visually resemble either the situations that they depict, or cognitive
visualisations, or descriptions made using other, non-visual, expressive
media. In this sense, theorisations of depiction as resemblance are
founded upon assumptions that are akin to technical activity theorisa-
tions drawing, of the selection and combination of formal means
eliciting specific perceptual effects, in more cases than not. According
to this approach, visual resemblance is explained by the effective para-
digmatic similarity of the perception of the visual depiction to the
perceptual experience of vision or visioning.
However, a number of objections to this model question the support-
ing idea that resemblance is the effective paradigmatic similarity of the
perception of the visual depiction to the perceptual experience of vision or
visioning. These objects open discussion of the four characteristics of
depiction under discussion.
There is a distinction to be made between depictions that present visual
properties of objects but no particular objects, and those that present the
visual properties of particular objects. A depiction might depict its object
without depicting any object in particular, because it presents the visual
appearance of significant properties held in common within a paradigmatic
threshold of object properties, defining similarity.
Consider the explanatory paradigmatic correlation between two things
in a visual resemblance relationship: A resembles B because both A and B
share visual properties C. In terms of explaining depiction, a first objection
to resemblance concerns the impossibility of the visual appearance of
things that do not exist. Hopkins writes that ‘only what exists has proper-
ties and thus can share them ( . . . ).’88 There are no visible objects that are
not particular visible objects, so there are no visible properties exhibited by
some but no particular visible object. Hence, visual resemblance cannot
occur between a particular depiction and anything but a particular object
with particular visible properties. However, my experience of depictions
contradicts this statement. I have seen depictions of both general and
unreal objects. Because of this, a visual resemblance theory proposing
‘A is like B because of shared C’ must explain ‘C’ in all instances.
A response to this objection can be found in a more precise description

of visual properties (‘C’) themselves. I must be careful not to elide visible
properties and the objects to which they belong. In a straightforward
sense, an experience of an object can be described as an organising
principle of its properties. Therefore, the presentation of the visual appear-
ance of properties is a rather more than less flexible, allowing for any
accumulation of properties towards a paradigmatic threshold. This also
allows amply for depictions to present visual properties that are visualised,
recalled or otherwise cognitive, rather than elsewhere perceived. A good
example is provided by depictions of unreal objects, in which perception of
particular visual properties in a depiction achieves depiction of an object
never previously seen or contradicted by other types of knowledge.
A second objection arises from the lack of the comparative quantitative
accumulation of similar properties (‘C’), between ‘A’ and ‘B,’ in a visual
resemblance. In the majority of instances, depictions share fewer rather
than more visible properties with their objects. For example, it is very
difficult indeed to identify the visual appearance of properties shared by
both a depictive drawing of a view of a pine forest in winter and an actual
view of a pine forest in winter. Even given the essential two-element
structure of ‘seeing-in,’ on one hand (a) the material and marks of the
drawing do not share any visual properties with the object at all whilst, on
the other (b) with the depicted object that is ‘seen-in’ the depiction, the
number of properties shared with the actual scene are far outnumbered by
the properties that are not shared. Although there is a logical problem with
this, due to the fact that numbering visual properties is always an infinite
sum task (as I have discussed), in fact, the significance lies in the compar-
ison between depicted object and a visual experience of another object in
the world.
The problem lies in describing systematically some way in which the
salient similar visual properties of a depiction and its object are identified
and adjudicated. This is not simply a matter of identifying types of sig-
nificant reference under the too-general umbrella of iconic function. It is a
generic characteristic of referring that referent and referee are phenomen-
ologically distinct, but also that the referent diminishes the referee in terms
of the referee’s phenomenology. For a theory of depiction as resemblance,
an acceptance of this general relationship between referent and referee also
tends towards an adjudication of dissimilarity rather than similarity,
according to shared visible properties. In fact, a referral system requires a
phenomenally distinct referee and referent, whereas a visual resemblance
theory instead requires the appearance of shared qualities. The property of

‘redness’ of a depicted apple does not ‘refer’ to the property of ‘redness’ of
an actual apple—in the resemblance model, it is the same property exhib-
ited by both depiction and object.
I have discussed how the marks in the graphiotactic arrays of writing are
given identity, status and definition by their systematic topological corre-
spondence to the temporal structure of a lexicogrammar. Following this
model, I discussed how the structures of spatial projection systems also
perform the task of structurally realising 3D proximities in the proximities
of the topological arrays of 2D marks. Depiction, I claimed, could not be
systematised in these ways, due to the absence of any system that could be
functionally realised in two dimensions in the phenomenon of ‘seeing-in.’
However, Hopkins proposes exactly such a system, on the basis of an
identified category of shared visual properties. He proposes that this
category is constitutive and perceptually irreducible, whilst also encom-
passing drastic variations in facture. Fortunately, for his theorisation, this
category can also be described as a correspondence system, in which a
series of systemic proximity relationships in three dimensions are realised
in corresponding topological proximity relationships between marks on a
surface. He calls this category of visual properties outline shape. It is a
simple idea, sharing much with the correspondence relationships that
constitute spatial projection systems.89
Hopkins recognises that a physical geometry exists in the visual percep-
tion of light (which I might also claim without fear of contradiction to be
facilitated and inhibited by the possible general resources of the body).
This physical geometry is no more or less than a realisation of the structure
of the capacity for visual perception: light, lenses, retinas, optic nerve—
homeorhetic system, discourse and mind. He focuses on the first three of
these for good reason: because they provide him with a phenomenal basis
for the extrapolation of a category of similar properties that he can argue
constitutes a literal 3D geometry. With this geometry in hand, it is a small
step to identifying a category of visual properties in a 2D depiction that
can also be identified in the 3D geometry itself.
Relative to the object of depiction and the location of a point of view, this
geometry establishes visually perceived contours, or series of visible boundaries
and horizons, in three dimensions. These are Hopkins’s outline shapes.90 He
provides a good example of such an outline shape in the 2D triangle shape
perceived in a depictive realisation of a view of the road running away from a
viewer. No epistemological contradictions or distinctions emerge between
types of object, according to this geometry of perceived light, because it is an

aspect of the physical geometry created by the relationships of light, lenses and
retinas that creates the visible property. The intersection of this geometry and a
picture plane (the marked surface of the depiction), directly extrapolates the
topologies of these visible boundaries and horizons in two dimensions, as
visible properties that the object of depiction shares with visual perceptions of
objects in the world, cognitive visualisations, or descriptions made using other,
non-visual, expressive media.91
This model is profoundly Albertian in conception, with a number of
significant rational improvements: the physical geometry of the visual
perception of light is a nominal rather than a mathematical geometry, in
which vanishing points and horizons are calculated as locations in order to
correspond to degrees of proximity to a viewpoint. There is no claim to
the mapping of a unified conception of 3D space in 2D topological
correspondences. Rather, the structure of the capacity for visual percep-
tion generates a category of visual properties that are systematically iden-
tified and directly shared, on the interpolation into the geometric structure
of a 2D picture plane. This, however, is still a topological signification
system, in which locations and proximities rather than morphologies are
meaningful. Hopkins summarises: ‘seeing-in involves experiencing marks
on a surface as resembling something else, in respect of a property, outline
shape, which both things posess.’92
A final objection (to the idea that resemblance is the effective
paradigmatic similarity of the perception of a visual depiction to the
perceptual experience of vision or visioning), exemplifies differences of
facture encompassing generic habits and styles of production. These
different depictive iterations must be accommodated and explained.
How can an object with particular visible properties paradigmatically
share those visible properties with so wide a range of types of facture,
the visible properties of which are so different and distinct from each
other?93
The example of visual caricature focuses part of the objection made on
the grounds of style. The significant visual properties of caricatures might
be described as exaggerations of the visual properties of the object they
depict, so that accumulation, intensification or diminution of a property
itself indexes the property in a causal relationship: property ‘C+’ is shared
because it is indexed in the depiction as an intensification of ‘C.’
Structurally, this can only be a paradigmatic relationship, in which levels
of exaggeration are modulated within the parameter of remaining shared
property ‘C.’ Hence, Hopkins’s outline shape, determined as a depictive

2D realisation of the geometry of perceived visible light, can be modulated
in this way, within paradigmatic boundaries. It could be argued that those
symbols in which there is a topographic relationship to an object, however
exaggerated or distorted, realise correspondence in the same way.
Consider a ‘stick person,’ drawing, which can be described as either icon
or symbol, in which the topological proximity relationships of a human
body are maintained to the exclusion of everything else, and within the
broadest paradigmatic parameters. It can hardly be said that the drawing
signifies through iconic resemblance, except in sharing a paradigmatic
property—the proximity relationships within the graphic topology realise,
as object, a topological concept (‘human body’) that realises a similar
visual topology as a property.
This type of paradigmatic correspondence does not offer a systematic
explanation for the experience of the variety of morphologies of depictive
images. Although, in a depiction of a blue pineapple, for example, I could
argue that outline shape provided a 2D systematic realisation of the
geometry of a visual experience of a pineapple, overriding the phenomenal
and epistemological contradiction of the depicted property of being blue
(when pineapples are yellow), it is more difficult to argue for the sharing of
the visual properties of a pine tree in both a drawing by Ma Lin, made in
the thirteenth century, and a tree depicted in a drawing by Paul Cezanne,
made in the nineteenth century. The dissimilarity of the visual properties
of these two depictions of pine trees verges on the categorical, despite all
that might be said about each depiction’s correlative exhibition of the
properties of the particular pine trees or ideas of pine trees that they depict,
including the properties of outline shapes.
However, theorisations of the experience of depiction, as resemblance,
find firm foundation in the idea that there is a correlation between the
structure of depictions and aspects of the structure of vision, in which one
systematically realises the other. Hopkins’s concept of the realisation of
the geometry of visual perceptive biology and light is one such theorisa-
tion. Still, however systematic such a conception can be demonstrated to
be, it is (a) only a description of the experience in part, which (b) relies on
a concept of paradigmatic occurrence. These two problems are connected.
As conceived by Hopkins, for example, the system is not incomplete
(otherwise it would not be a system), but its universal and general applic-
ability is difficult to exemplify. Unlike the 2D realisation of both lexico-
grammar and the 3D topology of spatial projection systems, outline shape
nominally realises a hideously complex system of correspondences, with-

out breaking the system. For example, the perceived visible contours of
objects move as a viewer moves, so that the spatial correspondences
between what a viewer has seen and any depiction are infinite, in realising
this experience in two dimensions as a shared property.
These properties might most easily be considered as groups of visual
experiences that are continually overwritten in long-term memory, as
constituents of spatial orientation, according to the general potential
resources of the body. Evidencing the mapping of them against their
correlative properties in two dimensions, in an experience of depiction, is
a daunting task. In comparison, describing the realisation of a lexicogram-
mar in writing is elementary. On the other hand, evidence for outline
shape as a shared visual property is plentiful in particular examples.
Consider the activity of making a depictive drawing of a ‘still life’ of fruit
and flowers. In this case, at least, movements in the draughtsperson’s point
of view, viewer’s point of view and scene are minimised, and I might easily
perceive the visible property of a contour of the edge of a petal as the same
visible property of the shape of a line on the page.
As a result of the challenges facing the evidencing of the system,
demonstrating the realisation of an instantiation of the geometry of visual
perceptive biology and light, as the structure of a depiction in every case,
relies upon the idea of thresholds of tolerance in the system, or paradigms,
to exemplify the system in the widest range of instances.
Describing the types and function of these paradigmatic thresholds
might not be possible within the terms of a correspondence system of
the geometry of visual perceptive biology and light. However, in order to
explain the experience of depiction, a focus on a systematic correlative
realisation of the structure of visual perception has the theoretical advan-
tage of introducing descriptions of phenomenal experiences to the discus-
sion, as distinct from descriptions of phenomena.
Hopkins’s theorisation of depictive resemblance—as a correlative rea-
lisation of a perceptual system of relationships (the graphiotactic produc-
tion of a visual geometry of human biology and light)—incorporates a
description of specific aspects of perceptual experience as essential to the
system. In his theorisation, visual depictions do not structure perceived
effects. Rather, phenomenal aspects of visual perception themselves struc-
ture the experience of depiction. He writes, ‘what limits the possible
experiences of resemblance is quite simply what limits possible experiences
in general.’94
Consequently, depiction is a type of visual experience significantly

structured by the phenomenology of seeing. If I am in danger of thinking
that this statement applies to anything that is seen, the example of writing
contradicts me: as I have discussed, writing is a visual register, certainly,
but it does not derive its significance from the structure of visual percep-
tion itself, rather from the structure of a cognitive lexicogrammar. Vision,
in the capacity of being vision, accommodates writing (because writing is
visible), but does not itself structure the system of correspondences by
which it is realised and in which it becomes significant. I could object
further, claiming that anything that is seen is structured by visual percep-
tion: the locations and proximities that are meaningful in writing are
purely visual relationships. But this is not to make a distinction, where
one so obviously exists. The systems of vision, including Hopkins’s geo-
metries of biology and light, do not structure writing, although writing is
seen. The systems of writing are hence encompassed by systems of vision,
but their significance is not derived simply from being seen, but from a
system that is distinct from vision’s systems themselves.
Two new ideas arise from the theorisation that the structure of phe-
nomenal aspects of visual perception themselves structure the experience
of depiction, according to the most general conception of a resemblance
model of the realisation of shared visual properties.
First: when I see, I also experience myself seeing. This is a central phenom-
enological conception of experience. As Hopkins writes ‘We need to explore
the view on which what matters is not that pictures resemble their objects,
but that they are experienced as resembling them.’95 Aspects of the physical
and social environment provide the matter of experience, whereas the form
of that experience constitutes subjectivity, or a conscious sense of existence
in the world. This experience is solely inhibited and facilitated by perceptual
and cognitive capacities.96 Consciousness of interoceptive cognitive phe-
nomena constitutes consciousness of consciousness, so that when I see (or
perceive in any other way), I also experience myself seeing. Hence, the role of
visualisation relative to vision requires theorisation of the relationships
between exteroceptive and interoceptive phenomena, functions and systems.
In visualising, for example, there is no present exteroceptive stimulus.
Experiences of visual fictions and depictions and visualisations might be
structurally distinct from both the structures of perception and the structure
of other types of cognition. For example, imagination differs from percep-
tion in correlating one subjective experience with another. A function of
depiction is this type of correlation, in the structure of which perceptual

experience is mediated by memory of another, absent percept, idea or affect.
I will discuss this in Sections 1.4 and 1.5.
Second: our entire experience of vision is predicated upon realisation of
aspects of those systems and structures upon which a theorisation of a visual
topological correspondence system is also based: the mind, discourse and
homeorhesis.97 The activities by which consciousness brings to consciousness
an absent object are homeorhetic, in that they can only realise both the general
potential resources of the body and contribute to the maintenance of the
progress of subjective equilibrium. As such, resemblance (i.e. the perception of
a visual property shared by depiction and object memories), is an affective
experience, which conforms to a paradigm of recalled affective visual experi-
ences of a similar property in the world. This experience of depiction is a
present-time affect of memories of seeing, made on the basis of the perception
of a visual property or properties shared by depiction and memory. As a
consequence, depictions and the objects of depiction are corresponding affects
in a future-oriented homeorhetic relationship. Correspondence of affect,
rather than form, explains both how the same visual image can be described
as having different meanings for different viewers, and the possibility of the
appearance of different depictions of similar objects, such as the pine trees
drawn by Ma Lin and Paul Cezanne.
It also explains the appearance, significance and organisation of visual
properties in depictions, other than those corresponding to the recalled
properties of situations in the geometry of perceptive biology and light.
For example, in the comic strip register, these include symbols that visually
represent non-visual properties whilst still appearing in the diegesis, such
as emanata.98 In fact, because all experiences and memories of experiences
are affective, then visual depictions that realise properties shared with them
are similarly affective. The phenomenology of visual perception must be
described as both a systemic correspondence of properties of the object of
depiction, with properties of the geometry of biology/light, plus the
affective correspondence of object and depiction.
Finally, affective correspondence explains emotional involvement with
fictional objects of imagination, including visualisations. Fictional objects
of imagination have the capacity to elicit emotional responses despite the
fact that they are known to be fictional. The apparent contradiction is
between knowing that a fiction is imaginary, yet at the same time perceiv-
ing it emotionally. However, I do not engage with fictional objects as if
1.3 DRAWING’S INSTITUTION 61
they were real. I know that they are imaginary: I cannot intervene in a
course of fictional events, for example. Rather, I imagine fictional affects,
in the impacts that events have on characters in a plot, for example, and
these objects of imagination themselves are mediated by memory, idea or
affect. My actual feeling corresponds with fictional feeling.
1.3 DRAWING’S INSTITUTION

Homeorhesis is the maintenance of dynamic equilibrium in a human
ecology. Dynamism here describes orientation to the maintenance of
trajectory, conceiving of this ecology as indivisibly temporal as well as
spatial. The conception is not limited to physiology, but admits both
ontological and epistemological analyses. Hence, homeorhesis is a con-
ception of the human ecological function of the general potential
resources of the body, including not only physiological processes and
phenomena, but also experiences of cognition. This conception of home-
orhesis constitutes a distinct theoretical approach to perception, affect,
emotion and consciousness. As I have said, my entire experience of vision,
to take but one example, is predicated upon realisation of homeorhesis as a
recurring organising principle of behaviour.
In other words, this conception of homeorhesis is institutional, in that it
describes an identifiable recurrent structure of principles relative to the inhibi-
tion of some types of behaviour and the facilitation of other types of beha-
viour, on the part of both socially organised groups and individuals.
Institutional principles are structurally self-organising and self-substantiating,
in the sense that they constitute continuously developing relationships
between nominal behaviour and individual intention. This relationship con-
stitutes the spatio-temporal trajectory towards which human ecology conti-
nually orients itself: that is, dynamic equilibrium.
The governing relationships between nominal behaviour and intention
are complex, evidencing both so-called objective and so-called subjective
aspects, which often manifest as structurally distinct phenomena. For
example, two ideas might structure behaviour relative to experience of a
drawing by Rembrandt, for example. The first idea is nominal, in that it
conceives of the drawing as canonical—the drawing is assigned unassail-
able status in an objectivised history of culture. The second idea is sub-
jective—for example, I think that the drawing is valueless as document,
commodity or cultural product. These two ideas are significant because
they modulate my behaviour relative to the drawing, not only my
conception of the drawing. As part of the maintenance of homeorhetic

equilibrium, these two ideas are affective or, more accurately, the relation-
ship between them is affective.
As a second example, an activity in which the performance of a labour
task has monetary exchange value is structured both according to a prin-
ciple of the time in which that task might be accomplished and the amount
of money given in exchange and also according to a principle of the status
and self-status derived through fulfilling this principle by the labourer.
Both aspects indivisibly constitute the institution of ‘work’ but are dis-
tinct. There is no structural difference between the example of behaviour
relative to the Rembrandt drawing and behaviour relative to ‘work.’
More simply, institutionally, the function of this relationship between
nominal behaviour and individual intention constitutes the fulfillment of
those activities which institutional principles facilitate and the suppression
or negation of those activities that institutional principles inhibit, as both
objective and subjective phenomena.99
1.3.1 An Institutional Description of the General Potential

Resources of the Body
A theoretical application of this brief characterisation of the institution, to
the general potential resources of the body, produces two possible advan-
tages in the context of a more profound aetiological characterisation of
drawing and an explanation of the phenomenon of depiction as ‘seeing-in’:
Advantage one—the concept of a structuring relationship between nom-
inal behaviour and individual intent imposes no necessary distinction
between functions of homeorhesis, discourse and mind. The general
potential resources of the body are perfectly distinctive and identifiable,
but they are in no way bifurcated by other distinctions made on the
grounds of physiological and cognitive capacities. As I have said, these
resources are realised in both the structure of the ‘senses’ and in semiosis,
for example.
Advantage two—this concept of the institution itself directs a theoretical
approach to a number of related ideas:
i) the environment relative to perception and cognition, as a theorisa-

tion of affect,
ii) the propositional function of representation,
iii) further aspects of the homeorhetic functions of the body,

iv) the distinctions between affect, feeling and emotion,
v) further aetiological characterisations of intention and inference,
vi) emerging definitions of subjectivity and the functions of imagination.
In applying this theorisation of the institution to the general potential

resources of the body (in order to further characterise relationships between
homeorhesis, discourse and mind), I must be careful not to consider body
resources as either monolithic, or reducible to either objective or subjective
phenomena themselves. Although ineluctable, the potential general
resources of the body realise the phenomenal conditions of human home-
orhesis. They are not phenomena themselves. Hence, this institutional con-
ception of the resources of the body in part follows Lévi-Strauss concept of
institutional ‘zero values,’ in which ‘institutions have no intrinsic property
other than that of establishing the necessary preconditions for the existence
of the social system to which they belong; their presence—itself devoid of
significance—enables the social system to exist as a whole.’100
I very loosely follow Mooney in modifying Lévi–Strauss’s conception of
the institution as a function, the characteristics of which are themselves
structurally insignificant. Mooney takes an aetiological approach to the
resources of the body as institution. This approach concurs with my use of
aetiology to characterise the making of a drawing in Section 1.1. It allows
a key adaptation of the idea of ‘zero value.’ Extrapolating Lévi–Strauss’s
institutional function, she proposes that the resources of the body are both
‘zero value’ institutions and also replete, because the resources of the body
are indexical in the strictest aetiological sense of the word: that is, the
resources of the body are prerequisites for every human cause and con-
sequence, although they do not have determinate phenomenal character-
istics themselves. For Mooney, this repleteness locates body capacity as the
‘sine qua non’ of shared experience, both phenomenal and cognitive. But
I need not go so far. Mooney makes a case for the capacities of the body as
a shared benchmark for the development of a system of human rights in
law, making sense of her insistence on body capacity as a theoretically
replete, a-temporal and pan-cultural inalienable.101
However, in the context of this discussion, it is the aetiological char-
acterisation that is significant. Here, there is no need to claim that ‘zero
value’ is ‘every value,’ in recognising the institution’s function of ‘estab-
lishing ( . . . ) necessary preconditions.’ Rather, the resources of the body,
whilst fulfilling Lévi-Strauss’s ‘zero value’ function of an institution, are
simply realised in homeorhetic, discursive and cognitive functions accord-

ing to the terms of goal-directedness, discussed earlier—first, in describing
drawing as an activity that is explained by deducing the teleological role
played by generalising some potential resources of the human body and,
second, as an activity that can be explained by deductions made on the
basis of environmental and social modulations.
Recall that generalisations of the potential resources of the body include
ontological conceptions of mass, size and motion. These generalisations are
characterisations of types of potential across the entire homeorhetic system,
as an arbiter and producer of experience, encompassing perception, cogni-
tion and imagination. Homeorhesis has an indivisible basis in conceptions
of motion and concomitant conceptions of mass and size. A homeorhetic
conception of spatio-temporality is quite distinct from generalising any
isolated conception of vision and also distinct from a conception of vision
deriving from a conception of the property of being visible substantiated by
the different implications of the concepts ‘seeing’ and ‘seen.’
Hence, mass, size and motion are spatio-temporal categories of force
dynamics. Mass, motion and size are properties in which utility is produced
by spontaneous comparisons. The character of these comparisons enables
generalisation of the potential resources of the goal-directed body. When a
force is applied, mass is a property of comparative resistance to changes in
motion. Motion is a change in location in comparison to a frame of
reference. Size is abstracted from comparative adjudications of magnitude.
Further recall, for example, that it is quite rational to state that a point
has no dimension, whereas a line has a single dimension, non-adjacent
points describe volume because they are coordinate, and there are three
dimensions of shortest distance (plus the dimension produced by the time
that it takes to move from one to another). These concepts are structured
solely by haptic, visual, motive and temporal proximity to the body. To
repeat, this formulation follows and adapts the aetiological Description 1,
made in Section 1.1.2: generalised by the potential resources of the body,
a drawing was made because a woman believed that her activities/marks
could perform the particular capacity of making a drawing, for example.
1.3.2 Affect
A theorisation of affect describes the environment relative to perception
and cognition. I define it as a change from one phenomenal experience to
another, invariably incorporating a degree of inhibition or facilitation of
the capacities of the body. It is structured by the institutional function of

homeorhesis in realising the general potential resources of the body. It is
preneotic and consequently inhibits and facilitates neotic behaviour.102 It
is dynamic and comparative, due to its identification of phenomenal
change pegged to changes in homeorhetic potential. An affect is a dynamic
encounter. In every instance, a body is affected (changed in condition and
potential capacity), and affects (changes the condition and potential capa-
cities of the ecology).
The dynamic/comparative character of affect suggests a consolidated
concept of motion in homeorhesis. Johnson’s categories of ‘four recurring
qualitative dimensions of all bodily movements: tension, linearity, ampli-
tude and projection’ are theoretically demarcated by the capacity of the
body to be an automotive centre of gravity, as distinct from the general
potential resources of the body that I theorise, which are categories of
degrees of inhibition and facilitation in an institutional ecology.103
Despite this fundamental difference in characterisation, some structural
parities exist between my conception of mass, scale and motion and
Johnson’s four ‘dimensions.’
For Johnson, tension describes levels of resistance to body motion,
both environmentally and interoceptively. This dimension equates exactly
with my theorisation of mass as a general potential resource of the body.
Linearity constitutes the definition of ‘motion paths’ that are produced by,
anticipated, perceived and interrupted by the body as both phenomena
and ideas. The motion path is certainly a phenomenon, rather than a
dimension, in Johnson’s terms. It is the realisation of a possible resource
rather than a resource itself. The motion path is a simple vector realising,
but not itself structuring, velocity, acceleration, duration, speed, relative
proximity, rhythm and sequence. As a vector, the motion path appears to
structure space and time, but this is not the case. It is simply a repeated
identifiable realisation of degrees of velocity, acceleration, duration, speed
and relative proximity, occurring and also being recalled in memory, in the
institutional ecology of homeorhesis.
Johnson describes the relative volume of the body in spatial perception
and conceptions of space, including imagined capacities for action,
growth, acceleration and diminution, as ‘amplitude.’ Finally, he describes
the capacity of the body to ‘penetrate’ space as ‘projection.’ These two
dimensions approximate my theorisation of scale as a general potential
resource of the body. However, ‘projection’ proves to be a phenomenon
rather than a resource. Its occurrence relies entirely on relative proximity,
itself determined by location and changes in location within an ecosystem.

In this conception by Johnson, space runs the risk of appearing to be an
absence of affect (itself a logical impossibility), rather than a realisation of a
structuring proximity relationship that generates experiences and concepts
of space.
Johnson’s interest in explaining the function of embodied metaphor in
language and visual representation leads him to conclude that these cate-
gories encompass ranges of properties relative to the body, so that resistance
might be represented or experienced or conceived, as ‘overwhelming,’ or the
body’s relative volume might ‘shrink.’104 Johnson cautions: ‘It would be a
mistake to subjectivise these experiences of qualities of motion ( . . . ). On the
contrary, they are qualities of organism–environment interactions.’105
On the other hand, according to Sheets-Johnstone, the way in which
each of us moves is not only a perceptibly obvious aspect of the way in
which we maintain homeorhetic equilibrium, but one of the ways in which
we recognise and communicate our particular subjectivity. Whilst we share
a broad range of physiological possibilities for movement with other
human beings, according to the institution of the body, our own move-
ments are always uniquely our own. They are a set of physical habits,
competencies and possibilities that contributes to our own and others’
subjective and intersubjective sense. She writes, ‘a phenomenology of the
qualitative dynamics of originary self-movement leads us to the origin of
concepts fundamental to your lives and to our knowledge of ourselves.’106
But I must recall that the relationship between both nominal experi-
ence and intention are required to model an institution. A question
that refigures a theorisation of the general potential resources of the
body introduced by a concept of homeorhesis as an institution lies
here: is the body a cause or a consequence of the realisation of these
resources?
1.3.3 The Body as Cause and Consequence

It appears that both Johnson and Sheets-Johnstone are describing the
body itself rather than describing the body as a realisation of possible
resources, structured by the realisation of those resources. Johnson is less
emphatic in claiming that the characteristics of motion, for example,
belong to the body. But he also conceives of types of capacities, rather
than realisations of possible resources. He writes that the body is only
distinguished by ‘artefacts of our interests and forms of enquiry.’107 If I
take this approach further, homeorhesis might then be analogised in a

description of the process of a ship making its way at sea, around which
environmental properties coalesce and in which general resources are
realised, rather than in a description of the experience of a participant in
a set-dance, for whom particular rules facilitate and inhibit types of inter-
dependence, with the production of these different types of interdepen-
dence themselves realising potential resources.
I have to continually remind myself that I am discussing ways in which
the functions of the body are institutionally structured, rather than the
ways in which those functions are realised in types of representations.
A discussion of homeorhesis relative to representations is reserved for a
following discussion of emotion, which itself introduces possible examples
that I provide in drawing, depiction and story telling.
To the question: is the body a cause or a consequence of the realisation
of general possible resources? The answer is: the body is both a cause and a
consequence. All that is required to substantiate this answer, in institu-
tional terms, is the theorisation of a system of aetiologically functional
relationships that describes the nominal aspect of homeorhesis as an
institution. Such a theorisation has been made by von Uexküll.108
Von Uexküll’s theory aims to explain how the physiological perceptual
and cognitive capacities of organisms relate to affordances in a total
ecology. The theory centres on the relationship between physiological
capacities (which are nominal, in institutional terms) and the modulation
of these in instantial behaviour (which is intentional, in institutional
terms). It is simple. He states, ‘a stimulus has to be noticed [gemerkt] by
the subject and does not appear at all in objects’ and ‘All our human
sensations ( . . . ) join together to form the qualities of the external things
which serve us a perception marks for our actions.’109 Hence, the envir-
onment is affective only in being perceived and recalled as affective,
according to the particular nominal physiological and cognitive systems
of an organism, relative to the organism’s instantial progress.
Hence, nominal physiological responses made according to groups of
stimuli constitute properties (which von Uexküll calls ‘perception marks’)
because they afford groups of actions and the recollection of groups of
actions (which von Uexküll calls ‘effect marks’). This functional relation-
ship creates the only distinction between object and subject.110
On this basis, both experiences of time and space depend on the
relationship between nominal capacity and instantial action. He writes,
‘we see that the subject controls the time of its environment,’ because time
is simply affective, in that it is only experienced through changes in

condition and the potential for changes in condition. Von Uexküll notes
that in the experience of the wood tick, the shortest time in which the
‘world exhibits no changes’ is 18 years, whereas in the experience of the
human, this shortest time is one-eighteenth of a second.111 Likewise,
experiences of space are structured by ‘effect marks’ relative to ‘perception
marks,’ of which von Uexküll only describes general haptic and visual
capacities in terms of possible perceptual horizons. Here, there are cor-
ollaries with the general potential resources of the body: motion, mass and
scale, and with Johnson’s ‘linearity.’ The dragonfly’s nominal capacity for
speed renders immobile those objects that, given the nominal speed of a
tortoise, are relatively fast moving. For the dragonfly, this immobility is
also a nominal spatial horizon, as relative speed is for the tortoise.
Von Uexküll exemplifies his theory by inviting consideration of an oak
tree, which he describes according to the homeorhetic functions of seven
different organisms: a forester, a girl, a fox, an owl, an ant, a beetle and a
wasp. In the experience of each organism, the properties of the oak tree are
quite different and admit no indeterminacy. They are absolute properties.
Hence, von Uexküll concludes, ecology constitutes the systematic realisa-
tion of the general potential capacities of an organism according to the
instantial behaviour of that organism. The oak tree (although, of course,
realising it’s own ecological properties as an organism), has no objective
properties, only those properties that it affords the seven organisms, for
those seven organisms.112
This provides a convincing description of the nominal aspect of home-
orhesis as an institutional structure, but von Uexküll is aware that inten-
tion, relative to this nominal aspect, is not fully explained by the function
of groups of actions or ‘effect marks,’ as realisations of perceived stimuli.
Implicit in an institutional model, including my description of von
Uexküll’s theory, is the idea of the constancy of unrealised resources,
that is, those resources that constitute the nominal aspect of institutional
structures. Alternatively, the realisation of resources in types of instantial
action is always present-time.
How is von Uexküll to account for a relationship between a nominal
constant and every always-present-time instance? The problem itself
describes a structure for action, according to the orientation of the organ-
ism towards the maintenance of equilibrium in its trajectory. Each instance
of a realisation of the capacities of the organism, as ecology, also has
history and immanence in memory as a present-time experience. Then,
action is recalled action, present-time action and immanent action, the

experiences of all of which are organised according to the realisation of the
general potential resources of the organism—that is, relative to the nom-
inal aspect of the organism’s ecology.113 Von Uexküll is not explicit as to
the structure of recall, either as history (learning) or as immanence,
although I must remind myself that neither are representations. They are
types of action realising percepts in different ways.
He provides a startling example that goes some way towards clarifying
what he means. He describes the life cycle of the pea-weevil, the larva of
which ‘bores itself a channel up to the surface in the still-tender flesh of the
young pea, a channel that it uses only after its transformation into an adult
weevil to slip out of the pea, which has become hard by that time.’ The
larva prepares a means of escape for the organism it will become, despite
the fact that ‘no perception sign announces to the larva the path which it
has never been down and must follow nonetheless.’114 The larva cannot
adjudicate the action of preparing an escape for its future self, except
through an experience of immanence that, in itself, realises specific past
percepts, themselves realisations of the general potential resources of the
pea-weevil. This is not to say that this experience of immanence is yet (or
ever) an experience of a concept. In fact, there are grounds for arguing (as
Johnson does), that concepts play no structural role in this type of inten-
tional experience, as I shall discuss.115
This is an explanation of the structure of three types of action (present
time, learned and immanent) in realising the general potential resources of
the body, according to an institutional model. Von Uexküll states:
Since every action begins with the production of a perception mark and ends
with the impression of an effect mark on the same carrier of meaning, one
can speak of a functional cycle, which connects the carrier of meaning with
the subject.116
Hence, to summarise my description of von Uexküll’s theory as the

institution of homeorhesis, applied to human experience: the body is a
cause and a consequence of the realisation of its general potential
resources, as percepts and concepts, in which these resources are nominal
and the activities that produce them, including recall and imagination,
intentional.
I can see that this theory fruitfully adds the concepts of recall and
imagination (that is, history and immanence), to my aetiological
characterisation of the activities of trying to make a drawing, in which

goal-directedness alone provides the action/mark with identity and status.
As such, goal-directedness is not only the realisation of resources in pre-
sent time, but also in experiencing the recall of past goal-directed activities
and imagining immanent goal-directed activities.
1.3.4 Propositional Realisations of Non-propositional Structures

In the constitutional relationship between nominal and intentional aspects
of institutions, intention is the function of individual progress, action and
semiosis relative to nominal paradigms of progress, action and semiosis. In
an institutional structure, goal-directedness is only one type of action that
fulfils the function of intention. Institutionally, intentional actions and
nominal paradigms are both preneotic and neotic.
In describing homeorhesis as an institution, theorising a distinction
between preneotic and neotic experience helps to establish structural rela-
tionships between the general potential resources of the body and the
production and experience of representations of all types, including lexico-
grammatical representations, every type of visual sign and depictions.
On this distinction, Johnson founds his theory of the correlation of
types of body resources and types of representational denotation. The
theory argues from a base in linguistics that makes a content distinction
between propositional and non-propositional items, according to subject/
predicate structures in lexicogrammar.117
A proposition is a statement (in Johnson’s sense, any representation,
including but not limited to representations in language), that can either
(a) be adjudicated true or false, (b) ascribe properties to entities or (c)
ascribe values as true (i.e. facts), or any or all of these produced in a system
that ensures that these conditions are met in all instances.118 These
descriptions of propositional representation can convincingly be argued
to be global, that is, to account for all types of representation.
However, Johnson notices that neither these descriptions, nor the struc-
tures of lexicogrammars, themselves account for recurring patterns of content
or, rather, recurring types of rhetorical production. He notices repetitions in
the use of metaphors in language, which cannot be explained by recourse to
the realisation of lexicogrammatical structures in speech or writing, and which
cannot be systematised by generalising relationships between syntax, seman-
tics and pragmatics. Further, he intuits that these types of rhetorical use also
organise visual representations other than writing.119
Building on acknowledged earlier intuitions of Neisser, Thorndyke and

Rumelhart, he proposes a structure of preneotic capacities of the body and
memory of experiences of these capacities,120 These are repeated organis-
ing principles that realise representations, which he calls ‘image sche-
mata.’121 The use of the word ‘image’ in the term reveals Johnson’s
process of theorising, in which he identifies underlying structures by
grouping together and naming the metaphorical application of the experi-
ences of a range of physical forces to abstract ideas, in producing a
representation. Hence, the word ‘image’ is a convenient way to describe
such a use of the experience of a bundle of physical forces, by using its own
identified metaphorical function as an ‘image.’122
However, as Johnson elaborates, image schemata are not limited to
experiences of vision, as the word ‘image’ might incorrectly suggest, and
they are certainly not images. It is one of their defining characteristics that
they are preneotic and hence non-propositional. Hence, they are not
representations, nor the underlying structures of representations, but
rather the conventions and constraints of the ecology of the body, which
have a systematic role in structuring the realisation of neotic representa-
tions and, by inference, cognition, understanding and reasoning. He
writes, ‘propositional content is possible only by virtue of a complex web
of non-propositional schematic structures that emerge from our bodily
experience.’123
As I have said, Johnson’s description of image schemata relies on
identifying repetitions in the metaphoric use of force dynamics in repre-
sentations. On the basis of these repetitions, he is able to reverse engineer
their general structural functions, from repetitions in iteration to structure
realised, constituting a definition.
First, he describes image schemata as patterns, as recurring patterns
and as dynamic patterns. In his sense, this is the rationale for calling them
schemata, or groups of elements given identity and status by their
structural relationship within the group.124 In identifying the same
patterns in diverse iterations, he is able to describe them as recurring.
On less firm foundations, their realisation in diverse media and through
the origin/target structure of metaphor allow him to describe them as
dynamic, although it is not clear if it is the process of realisation itself that
is dynamic, rather than change being a structural principle of the sche-
mata themselves. In summary, he describes image schemata as ‘patterns
that obtain in our physical experience to organise our more abstract
understanding.’125
Second, according to this definition, image schemata are not represen-

tations themselves, as I have described. An image schema is neither ‘a
concrete rich image or mental picture.’ Rather, using the example of visual
perception, Johnson writes ‘visual perception ( . . . ) involves a metaphori-
cal projection of schematic structures from a realm of physical and gravita-
tional forces and weights to a domain of visual forces and weights in
“visual space.”’126 This function holds true for both the production and
the reception of representations in all senses and modalities. As such,
image schemata are nonpropositional, in that they cannot be adjudicated
true or false, nor do they ascribe properties to entities, although Johnson
proposes that their structures are realised in representations because their
structures are utilised to ascribe properties to entities metaphorically.
Third, this non-propositional structure has three characteristics. (A)
Each schema brings into a specific relationship elements accorded identity
and status by their function in the group: vector, force and entity
(although Johnson also swaps the term ‘encumbrance’ for ‘entity,’
which I describe as ‘mass’).127 I have discussed how these elements have
some similarity to the general potential resources of the body, which I
describe. (B) The structural relationship between the elements in each
schema determines its realisation in representations and cognition through
a metaphoric function described by Johnson as origin/target. The target
(that is a representation) is conceived as describing particular properties of
the origin (an image schematic structure—I might say, of the general
potential resources of the body)—even if the target and origin do not
share any of these properties, so that a structural correlation is made
between these properties and the content of the representation.128 For
example, the metaphor in language ‘the road to success,’ realises the
structure of a path image schema, comprising a starting point, an end
point, the vector joining them and the time taken to move from one point
to the other. The target, or the description of activities resulting in success,
is described as having properties of the origin (in this case, a road), and the
metaphor (i.e. the relationship between target and origin) is meaningfully
structured by the path schema.129 Hence, Johnson writes ‘abstract con-
cepts, events, states, institutions and principles (such as psychological
states, arguments, moral rights and mathematical operations) are meta-
phorically structured as entities or physical events.’130 (C) The final com-
ponent is point of view, which is established as a constituent of target/
origin. The establishing of point of view is both complex and spontaneous,
comprising an implicit description of the relationship created in each
enunciation between enunciator and the production and reception of the

enunciation. Johnson writes, ‘There can be no orientation (either spatial,
temporal or metaphorical) that does not involve a perspective ( . . . ).’131
Finally, because they are characteristics of the ecology of the body,
image schemata are functions that are only identifiable in their realisations
in thoughts and representations. Johnson’s empirical approach provides
numerous examples to support the existence of image schemata, particu-
larly, but not only, in the metaphorical use of language. As such, he
considers the central task required to explain their existence is ‘to identify
the structure of the source-domain that constructs the metaphorical map-
ping onto a target domain.’132 However, he also intuits two larger ques-
tions as to the realisation and potential realisation of particular schemata
and not others: why are those schemata that can be identified realised in
representations and not others? If the realisation of schemata in cognition,
understanding and representation can be theorised as evidencing the
structure of the ecology of the body, how can this theorisation explain
the appearance of schemata in terms of the ecology of the body itself?
Johnson conceives of schemata as explaining the role of body ecology in
cognition and representation, but he does not explain why schemata have
the structures that they have. Rather, he conceives of them ‘vice versa,’ as
themselves providing evidence for the structure of the ecology of the
body. He writes ‘to say that image schemata ‘constrain’ our meaning
and understanding and that metaphorical systems ‘constrain’ our reason-
ing is to say that they establish a range of possible patterns of under-
standing and reasoning.’133 This idea results in Johnson’s inability to
locate image schemata in any encompassing conception of the structure
of the ecology of the body, including mind, unless they ‘operate at a level
of mental organisation that falls between abstract propositional structures,
on one side, and particular concrete images, on the other.’134
I have undertaken other theorisations in order to begin to explain this
structure relative to drawing, in particular, by (a) taking an aetiological
approach to the production and reception of representations as goal-
directed activities, (b) in describing realisation relationships functioning
through structural correlation, (c) in identifying the general potential
resources of the body as inhibition and opportunity and (d) in considering
homeorhesis as an institution, comprising a relationship between the
nominal and the intentional. Johnson’s theory of image schemata is not
contradicted by these approaches. Goal-directedness and the function of
realisation relationships together explain the appearance of schemata
according to the inhibitions and opportunities of the general potential

resources of the body, without recourse to either taxonomy or any other
general conditions derived from the formal structures of the representa-
tions in which they are realised, for example. The theoretical consideration
of homeorhesis as an institution explains the repeated appearance of sche-
matic structures in multiple iterations made in an infinite number of
circumstances for an infinite number of purposes.
I can conceive of no other way of systematising realisations of the
general potential resources of the body, other than in identifying repeated
iterations in propositional representations, as Johnson does. However,
beyond the set of paradigmatic characteristics of image schemata that he
theorises, there is no reason to limit their organisational function to the
metaphorical. In fact, it seems possible to identify one or another schema,
or identify new schemata, in considering any and all representation accord-
ing to the theorisation. Within paradigm, image schemata accumulate ‘ad
infinitum.’ Johnson identifies the relative ecological forces that are realised
in various representations as follows: container, balance, compulsion,
blockage, counterforce, restraint, removal, enablement, attraction, mass-
count, near-far, part-whole, merging, splitting, full-empty, matching,
superimposition, iteration, contact, process, surface, collection. He writes
‘this brief list is highly selective.’135 This presents no problem. Once I have
understood the theory of a structurally correlative realisation of a preneo-
tic, nonpropositional schemata in propositional representations, this para-
digm does not require further explanation in the identification of a
taxonomy of instantiations. In fact, such a taxonomy would simply identify
a correlative structure of ecological forces realised in every representation,
providing no further explanation of the role of schemata in the aetiological
realisation of the general potential resources of the body.
1.3.5 Examples of the Visible Representations of Emotional Sensations

If I recall, the environment is affective only in being perceived and recalled
as affective, according to the particular nominal physiological and cogni-
tive systems of an organism, relative to the organism’s instantial progress
in trying to maintain equilibrium on its trajectory. However, according to
its definition as a change from one phenomenal experience to another,
invariably incorporating a degree of inhibition or facilitation of the capa-
cities of the body, affect does not necessarily imply consciousness, and
hence, this ecology is both preneotic and neotic. It encompasses both
unconscious physiological opportunities and inhibitions and conscious

cognitive opportunities and inhibitions. The opportunities and inhibitions
of the general potential resources of the body—to which structures of
image schemata belong, but not cognitive lexicogrammar—are preneotic,
for example.
Realisation of these in cognition, understanding and representation is
neotic. As Jackendoff conceives of what he calls the ‘f-mind’ or ‘functional
mind,’ in order to avoid the ‘philosophical problem of intentionality,’ he
writes: ‘It might be characterised as the functional organisation and functional
activity of the brain, some small part of which emerges in consciousness and
most of which does not.’136 The brain, in Jackendoff’s sense, is synonymous
with the preneotic ‘functional organisation and functional activity’ of the
entire body ecology. I have discussed the idea that the relationship between
the two can be described as an institutional relationship.
An aspect of this distinction also divides propositional representation
from nonpropositional opportunity and inhibition, as it were, the former
being neotic and the latter preneotic. It is a definitive ascription that image
schemata are both preneotic and nonpropositional. But this division is not
as constitutive as it might appear. For example, theorisations of the
experience of emotion have become significant to explaining the relation-
ship between neotic and preneotic activity, due to the identified repeated
production of representations of sensations of emotion (that are represen-
tations, and hence propositions), that are preneotic, or unconscious.137
Here, a discussion of the representation of emotional sensation, in parti-
cular, provides phenomenal examples of the realisation of image schemata
in visual images.
Emotions represent themselves (i.e. they are preneotic and proposi-
tional) by teleologically realising correlative relationships between the
structure of these representations and the general potential resources of
the body (e.g. in the realisation of image schemata). This process produces
affective transformations of the body ecology, particularly in the activities
of producing visual representations with the body itself, or gesturing. The
need to transform the body ecology in order to represent emotional
sensations is itself goal-directed, creating no contradiction between the
preneotic and teleological character of these activities. Goal-directedness,
in the sense of ‘in order to’ is not necessarily neotic.
Whereas Johnson focuses on the realisation of image schemata in the
metaphoric content of language, and in simple visual gestalts, my focus
here is drawing. So far, I have theorised aspects of aetiological, correlative
relationships, realising the general potential resources of the body, in order

to be able to explain how a drawing comes to be the type of image that it
is, and to describe a broad outline of this type of image’s ontology and
epistemology.
Hence, it is worth considering how emotional sensations are repre-
sented in gesture, as visual images, because such a consideration (i)
describes a specifically visual characterisation of the realisation of image
schematic paradigms, (ii) substantiates a further discussion of trace and
index in drawing and (iii) introduces concepts of understanding, cultural
contingency and imagination to an institutional description of homeorh-
esis, relative to the representation of a subjective condition as a visual
image.
The visual representation of emotional sensations in body gesture can
be discussed empirically—following Johnson’s method—as a repertoire, in
that repeated instantiation identifies types of relationship between visible
transformation of the body ecology and theorised structural correlations
facilitating the production of the body’s general potential resources. For
the sake of brevity, here I will discuss four key aspects of this repertoire: (1)
an aetiological characterisation of the process by which a need for visual
representations of emotional sensations arises, (2) the role of propriocep-
tive function in producing these visual representations, (3) the importance
of point of view, or the visualisation—visual imagining—of relative loca-
tion, in structuring these visual representations and (4) the way in which
the structure of these visual representations, and in particular point of
view, evidences intersubjects.
1) In making an aetiological characterisation of the process by which a
need for visual representations of emotional sensations arises, I must be
careful to first distinguish between affect, feeling and emotion. Although
my prior definition of affect obviates the distinction in this context, affect
has been defined, quite incorrectly, as a preconscious intensity of physio-
logical stimulation.138 Rather, affect is a change from one phenomenal
experience to another.
Beyond the involuntary physiological systems of the body that produce all
of the types of proprioceptive sensations—’feel ill,’ or ‘feel cold,’ for example,
it is difficult to theorise feeling as distinct from emotion. There is a difference
between representations of emotional sensations and representations that are
the direct product of physiological states such as pain, drowsiness or exertion.
Whilst never emotionally neutral, such representations do not describe emo-
tions in themselves. For example, it is quite possible to feel joy and pain, anger
and pain or sadness and pain simultaneously. The emotion does not necessarily
have an aetiological relationship with any physiological condition. In this
precise sense, physiological states such as these are not subjective. However,
feeling has elsewhere been described as biographical, because it derives from
memories of accumulations of unique experiences, which appear not to be
shared.139 But this description requires the conception of the existence of a
purely private self, distinct and unstructured by either perceptual capacities,
potential body resources or discourse. The conception of such a private self is
simply contradicted by a general rationale for self-consciousness, in which it is
not possible to locate consciousness except within a self-reflexive structure that
cannot be private. Consciousness requires consciousness of consciousness, and
this appears to be a foundational explanation, whatever model of conscious-
ness is theorised. Hence, I can set feeling aside.
Emotions are responses to crises in homeorhetic equilibrium. They are
radical attempts to remedy disequilibrium in experiences of the world by
transforming the conditions of the body. Emotions are not social in the
sense that they are public (i.e. displays which ‘make public’ or ‘transmit’
subjective meanings), but in the fact that they aim to bring about this
transformation exteroceptively and interoceptively. As such, they define an
experience of subjective crisis in which propositional representations are
unconsciously produced.
Representations of emotional sensations are attempts to transform the
ecology of the body and hence conform to an institutional characterisation
of homeorhesis, in that they emerge as a relationship between nominal and
intentional, that is, instantive action. Hence, emotional sensations them-
selves can be described as paradigmatic. Fagin, after Darwin, writes ‘there
are certain universal expressions ( . . . ) the same six categories of expres-
sion: sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, surprise.’140 The experience of
these paradigms substantiates von Uexküll’s theory that the physiological,
perceptual and cognitive capacities of organisms relate to affordances in a
total ecology, by evidencing the relationship between physiological capa-
cities (which are nominal, in institutional terms: I am ‘overcome’ by
emotion) and the modulation of these in instantial behaviour (which is
intentional, in institutional terms: I ‘am emotional’).
The physical transformations that visually represent emotional sensa-
tions are immersive, multidimensional and cross-modal. McNeill writes
that gestures are ‘global, in that the whole is not composed out of
separately meaningful parts. Rather the parts gain meaning because of
the whole,’141 In this sense, the word immersive describes no semiotic
difference between action and representation in making visible gestures to

represent emotional sensations. Rather, semiosis is synonymous with the
change affected in the ecology of the body.
Neither do these ecological changes constitute a single mode of repre-
sentation among others, in the way that audible words constitute a mode
of language. However, the transformations that affect the ecology of the
body can be described as indexical signs creating a relationship between
signified and signifier, although it might appear nominal that the trans-
formation affected in order to represent an emotional sensation is the
sensation itself.142 This claim can only be substantiated in an aetiological
description of representations of emotional sensations. Visible transforma-
tions of the ecology of the body, made in order to represent emotional
sensations, are caused by those sensations and are a consequence of those
sensations. In discussing representation in changes made to the ecology of
the body, I must continually keep in mind that that the physiological,
perceptual and cognitive capacities of organisms relate to affordances in a
total ecology.
Similarly, there is no syntactic structure realised in the visible transfor-
mations affected by body gestures, although there are realisations of the
structures of schematic paradigms conforming to the general potential
resources of the body. For example, McNeill writes that representations
of emotional sensations made by different people ‘can present the same
meaning, but do so in quite different forms. Moreover, the gestures of
people speaking different languages are no more different than the ges-
tures of people speaking the same language.’143 For example, in trying to
transform my body ecology in representing an emotional sensation, my
body could make an image of someone else’s body or part of a body, or a
specific object, or a relationship in space, a directional force, a temporal
change or a particular point of view in relation to others. Often, within the
course of making this type of transformation, I might represent a number
of different things consecutively.
Hence, representation in language is not a phenomenal prerequisite
of producing representations of emotional sensations. Both cognitive
lexicogrammar and verbalisations of language are neotic. The physical
transformations that represent emotional sensations are preneotic. In as
much as emotions create representative forms by physically transforming
the ecology of the body, these forms represent experiences that are
incommunicable in the physical form of verbal language. Neither do
we require verbal language in order to interpret them. Expressions of
emotion, according to Fagin, ‘need no label.’144 The shout and the

whisper are verbalisations, but they owe their capacity to signify to
processes of ecological transformation, rather than to the significant
structure of verbalisation itself. Verbalisation is also embodied in this
sense, but its potential to affect emotional transformations lies outside
the structure by which it signifies: correspondence between the tem-
poral proximity structure of lexicogrammar and the temporal proximity
structure of verbalisation. A verbalised sentence might have emotional
content, or might be part of a physical transformation that represents
emotional sensations (such as shouting words), but it is not itself a
constituent of the structure of emotional representation.
Verbal language is only one mode of possible representation in a much
broader range of the physical/environmental possibilities for the repre-
sentation of emotional sensations. According to Katz, verbal language
‘might ( . . . ) be seen as a particular application of a broader aesthetic
knowledge, an application of a more general technology of the commu-
nicative, socially-interactive body that lies behind both talking and non-
talking ( . . . ) conduct.’145 This ‘broader aesthetic knowledge’ is exempli-
fied in the physical transformations brought about by crying. Crying, as a
physical representation of sadness, joy, anger or fear, emerges when other
types of representation (including verbalisation in language) is unable to
transform the ecology of the body in order to represent the emotional
sensation. Hence, verbalised language is limited as a resource for emo-
tional representation, not because of what it cannot say about emotional
experience, but because the resources needed to produce emotional repre-
sentation exceeds its afforded limits.
Significantly, for a discussion of the relationship between neotic and
preneotic experience relative to representation, however, when I cry, I
am not selecting one communicative method over another in order to
communicate a discrete, independent message about my emotional
self. This is not how representations of emotional sensations are pro-
duced. Such an idea constitutes what Abbate calls ‘miming mode.’ It is
the idea that representations are conduits for communicating indepen-
dent concepts or eliciting perceptual effects. She writes of the compo-
sition of music ‘the composer invents a musical work that acts out or
expresses psychological or physical events in a sonic miming. But in
this model, music is nothing but the pro-musical objects that it echoes
in sound.’146 I am making the same error if this model is applied to
any form of representation.
In fact, ‘miming mode’ is also a common type of representation, in

which the disjuncture between semantic content and form signifies the
opposite of the semantic content alone. When I listen to someone repre-
senting emotion through verbal language, unaccompanied by a represen-
tative transformation of their body ecology, I often understand the
opposite of what they are saying. I hear what is said verbally, but I under-
stand the whole communication as either untrue or ironic, due to the
disjuncture between verbal and physical representations that are produced.
Consider a simple vocal-only laugh, ‘Ha, ha,’ made without physical
laughter’s transformation of the ecology of the body. This voice-only
‘Ha, ha’ communicates not joy but cynicism. Unsubstantiated by a phy-
sical representation, vocal-only laughter seems false. Such a vocal-only
laugh is commonly known as hollow laughter exactly because of this
disjuncture: it has no meaningful body.147 Of course, I can consciously
mismatch the content of verbal language with types of physical transfor-
mation that contradict what is being said. Such disjuncture is also repre-
sentative, but even in the case of conscious mis-matching, verbal language
requires a degree and type of transformation of the ecology of the body in
order to signify.
Routinely, we do not pay attention to our emotional selves because we
take them for granted as part of the habitual course of our lives. We rely
implicitly upon the physiological and social functioning of our bodies
moment by moment, involuntarily blinking and breathing and unself-con-
sciously speaking and moving so as to physically orient us to other people,
activities and things. It is only when particular episodes, such as emotional
sensations, disrupt this routine that this is overridden. However, the overall
course of our emotional lives is not bifurcated when we make these physical
transformations. We do not step outside ourselves when we represent
emotional sensations by transforming our body ecology.
According to these characterisations, Gibbs describes those image
schemata that are realised in gestural representations as a ‘repertoire,’
although they are only structural paradigms without existence outside
their realisation in each iteration.148 It is the identification of similar
structures in repeated representational iterations that enable the theo-
rising of the correlation between schema and representation.
How do these transformations realise image schematic structures, in
trying to represent emotional sensations? Emotional sensations are
responses to crises in homeorhetic equilibrium. They are attempts to
remedy disequilibrium in experiencing the ecology of the body, by
transforming the ecology of the body. It is for this reason that emotional
sensations, in particular, offer insight into homeorhesis as an institution,
because emotional sensations are crises in the maintenance of the tra-
jectory of the body ecology, that affect remedial transformations as
representations.
Representations of these sensations are remedial, in that they are
attempts to represent the crisis and return this ecology to equilibrium.
The part that proprioceptive perception plays in these attempts to remedy
disequilibrium, explains the production of representations in this process. In
trying to return to a balanced progress, changes to the ecology of the body
always make representations of the crisis that are perceived by the self.
Hence, the emotional crisis is defined as a condition where no adequate
representative form exists to transform the ecology of the body, and image
schematic structures are realised in remedial representations, according to
the general potential resources of the body. For example, I might splay my
fingers around and away from my head to represent a sense of exasperation
(anger), the representation being a visual image of an emanation of energy
realising the structure of a simple centre-periphery schema.
I can describe the process (of having emotional sensations and attempt-
ing to remedy disequilibrium by making representations) as catechretic,
the word describing the rhetorical use in language of an existing word in a
new way, to describe something for which no other word exists.
Catechresis uses words to break lexical rules so as to communicate some-
thing beyond the lexicon and, although I have noted that gesture realises
schematic paradigms, rather than lexicogrammar, the word correctly iden-
tifies this process of crisis and resolution, particularly in the production of
novel representative forms149 As such, catechresis is a teleological process
that justifies the production of instantial forms on the basis of causes and
consequences alone. This is exactly what Luzar means when he writes that
the body ‘interrupts’ the process of drawing:
( . . . ) the role of the body in performance-drawing can be understood not as

material ( . . . ) and original entity, privileged in kinetically engaging an inner
capacity to move, think and create: but rather as a body that interrupts the
mark-making process ( . . . ) without having an original ontological state of
presence.150
Interruption, in Luzar’s sense, is a conception of the role of the body

in trying to make drawing activities/marks, as the location of both crisis
(it has no ‘original ontological state of presence’) and the restoration of

equilibrium in the form of a representation (the activity/mark).
Through a process of catechretic transformation, image schemata
realise structural homologies between sensations, ideas and visual repre-
sentations. Certain types of representative gesture appear more readily to
realise some cognitive or emotional senses than others. Beattie notices
that dramatically mobile bodies visibly represent abstract knowledge
about direction and speed more clearly than bodies visibly at rest.151 In
particular, these realisations produce catechretic representations as direct
manifestations of our perceptual and cognitive selves, in an ecology of
represented spaces, times, people and things. Katz writes, ‘Emotions in
everyday social interaction live and die in contextually-situated meta-
phors. By changing the metaphor that describes the course of his or
her relations with others, a person can transform the very body of his or
her experience.’152 For example, he notes that when angry, I might
position and re-position myself in imagined, enacted roles in a develop-
ing drama. He argues that this is a process by which a representation of
anger transforms the ecology of the body. Feeing the particular type of
anger known as ‘road rage,’ I might imagine and enact a number of roles
in the course of my transformation. First, I might enact the role of
specific victim, representing a sense of loss; then I might adopt the
attitude of a general victim in a stereotypical drama, representing trans-
cendence; then I might take the posture of an avenging hero, represent-
ing equilibrium regained. When I am angry, I represent the crisis to
myself, and others, in an attempt to regain equilibrium through physical
transformation. Katz argues that in this way, I try to regain what I feel
that I have lost.153
2) In producing representations of emotional sensations, propriocep-
tive function encompasses both motor functions and perception. It com-
prises the interoceptive senses, such as pain and cold, exteroceptive senses,
such as balance, hearing, touch, smell, taste and sight, plus cognition. It is
the capacity for perceiving changes that affect the whole ecology of the
body. In this sense, proprioception is the process by which representations
of affective emotional sensations are themselves affecting. For example,
when I contract the muscles around my eyes as part of the process of
representing a sensation of anger, I perceive the contraction itself to be a
response to an exertion of external force. But when I contract these
muscles in the same way because I am laughing, then I perceive the
contraction as generative.154 Proprioception is the process by which the
emotional sensation signified is indexed in the significant representation.

As Gibbs writes, ‘We do not feel subjective experiences to be specific brain
states but sensations of our bodies in action.’155
Hence, Shannon is able to describe the function of proprioception as
‘enactment,’ or the capacity to perceive changes in the ecology of the body
as though they were changes in others: to correlate interoceptive and
exteroceptive perceptions.156 For example, Beardsworth and Buckner
argue that I can recognise a light display derived directly from the move-
ments of my own body more accurately than I can identify similar displays
derived from the movements of others, despite the fact that I see my own
complete body in motion only rarely.157
In Shannon’s sense, enactment is a mimicking representation of the
actions of others, or of representations of ourselves, in which ‘imagistic
abilities are dependent on their subjective modelling of the tasks that
mediate motor action and the environmental consequences of that action,
and how they can transfer that understanding to new situations.’158
Polanyi describes this process when he claims that a writer becomes the
pen when she writes, perceiving the action of the motivated nib as the
course of communication. According to Polanyi, this is the dominant
sensation of writing, rather than a cognitive sense of forming of each letter
according to a topological realisation of lexicogrammar. Motor sense and
cognitive sense modify and accumulate each other in an intermodal
exchange. Hence, proprioceptive enactment is also catechretic in the
process of generating representative body images.159
Further, Botvinik and Cohen’s enquiries into correlations between
vision and the sense of touch indicate the same intermodal correlation.
In a 1998 experiment, they had participants:
( . . . ) seated with the left arm resting on a small table. A study screen was
positioned beside the arm to hide it from the subject’s view and a life-size
rubber model of the left hand and arm was placed on the table directly in
front of the subject. The participants sat with eyes fixed on the artificial hand
while we used two small paintbrushes to stroke the rubber hand and the
subject’s hidden hand, synchronising the timing of the brushing.
Participants quickly developed the feeling that they perceive the stroking
in the rubber hand in view and not their own hand, out of view.160
A visually perceived touch is still a direct physiological touch, according
to the function of proprioception.
The ecological base for cross-modal, enactment has been theorised as

belonging to a neurological process occurring in a particular brain location.
The theorisation proposes that those neurons that are activated in the
processes of exteroceptive perception are also activated in the process of
interoceptive perception, explaining the relationship between intero- and
exteroceptive aspects. This process is called ‘mirroring’ and its significance is
the topic of debate.161 Theoretically, it has a precedent in the work of Mead,
who avoids the ‘hard problem’ that bedevils cognitive neurology by simply
proposing that gestures ‘implicitly arouse in an individual making them the
same response which they explicitly arouse in other individuals.’162
3) The process of creating the boundaries of the body within its ecology
is also a function of proprioception. These boundaries are deftly encom-
passed by describing point of view, or the visualisation—visual imagining—
of relative location, in structuring visible representations of emotional sen-
sations. Points of view describe positions we imagine and adopt within the
ecology of the body, in the process of producing representations of emo-
tional sensations. They are temporally and topologically precise. A point of
view can be as straightforward as the creation of a representation in which
the body boundaries either a centre or a periphery, imagining looking out,
say, from a centre of action in order to perceive that ecology, or imagining
perceiving the body from elsewhere in the ecology. McNeill describes
transformations that boundary the body as the centre of a representation
as ‘C-VPT,’ or character viewpoint.163 He describes transformations that
boundary the body as peripheral to the representation as ‘O-VPT,’ or
observer viewpoint.164 The boundaries of the body within the ecology are
created in different places depending on the image. C-VPT representations
are structured to imagine the inclusion of the body in the substance of the
representation, such that the representation itself creates a boundary of the
body. In O-VPT representations, the body is imagined to be perceived from
outside the body. The network of different points of view explicitly struc-
tured in the production of each representation also describes a network of
relationships with other people and items in the whole ecology of the body.
These two structures modify the type of transformations affected by
each representation. Beattie notes ‘gestures, which were generated from a
character viewpoint, were significantly more communicative than those
generated from an observer viewpoint.’ Although he does not establish a
necessary hierarchy of communicative significance, it is plausible that a
representation by which the body itself is bound by is simpler that one in
which there is a tripart structure, and hence possibly less equivocal.165 He
also notes that, when produced with speech, these viewpoints have strong
correlations with different types of verb. C-VPT representations are asso-
ciated with transitive clauses (those that require a direct subject and an
object or objects, ‘You stole the money!’ for example), whilst O-VPT
representations are associated with intransitive clauses (those that do not
require an object, for example, ‘You weep’).166
The structuring modulation of representations of emotional sensation
by these distinct emic and etic positions changes with each iteration,
according to the particular equilibrium of the ecology of the particular
body. Bateson cites the example of a blind man who imagines that the tip
of his white cane is the somatic outer reach of his body, for example.167
This is also what occurs in those situations where amputees still feel the
removed parts of their bodies as sensate, even though ‘there is nothing in
the physiology of an amputated leg that gives some patients the feel of
their real legs before they were amputated. Instead, the missing limb
remains part of ( . . . ) the body that continues shape how that person
moves and feels.’168
By the same process, transformations made in the attempt to produce
representations of emotional sensations themselves both create the bound-
aries of the body within the ecology and represent the boundaries of he
body. Meeting the blind man, I perceive his cane as the furthest reach of
his touch, as I assume he does. This continual redefinition of the body’s
boundaries is achieved through the same process of catechresis that realises
image schemata in representative gestures. In very iteration, attempts to
regain the equilibrium of the ecology of the body, by changing it in order
to produce representations of emotional sensations, also index the attempt
and the change. Consequently, when I see a representation of emotional
sensation, we see someone feeling, not as I feel, but as I see.
Such substitutions are habitual in perceptions of representations as
changes in the body ecology. For example, as Cole observes, visual sense
often substitutes directly for muscle sense, so that weight is inferred from
representations of imaginary items being lifted or carried and movement can
be inferred when perceiving static items.169 These are not examples of
misperception. Rather, they exemplify the catechretic substitution of one
set of exteroceptions for another in order to stabilise knowledge of the total
ecology of the body. Similarly, Sobchack describes a man with increasingly
severe Parkinsonism who makes his own furniture. Finding his personal
world changed by the disease, he re-designs and makes items that objectify
his physical relationships with others. He ‘designs and makes furniture in the
“Parkinsonian mode”—but this description subtends both (him) and his

furniture. That is, it describes the specific and embodied materiality of both
subjectivity and objectivity and their complex relationship.’170
4) The structure of these visual representations—and in particular the
establishment of emic and etic points of view—indexes interoceptive
emotional sensations exteroceptively, as propositional realisations of pre-
neotic experience, creating the ecology of the body as an intersubject.
My emotions are my own, as a perpetual subjective condition, but their
representation is not cognitively directed. When I represent emotion in
trying to communicate my emotional experience, my body changes so as
to transform the world in which I live, even as cognition acts to under-
stand it. Scherer describes these physical changes as a way in which we
make subjective sense of our place in the world by transforming its
ecology, unconsciously embodying ourselves.171
This process of propositionally representing preneotic experience exem-
plifies an opportunity for the hypotactic realisation of unconscious experi-
ence in propositional representations. My kinaesthetic singularity, in
making these transformations, is one of the ways in which my subjectivity
is defined and understood by others as well as myself.172 My emotions do
not make these ecological transformations in subjective isolation. Lazarus
describes the transformations that represent emotions as ‘not only embo-
died, but also essentially social in character.’ He continues: ‘ . . . emotion is
best regarded not as an ‘inner being’ but as a ‘relational process.’173
I assume that how a person behaves emotionally contributes greatly to
who they are. Both Erikson and Goffman make this a definitive aspect of
subjectivity.174 According to this idea, subjectivity comprises my own
sense of my emotional conduct with others (the ‘self’) and the identity I
understand by other people’s behaviour in respect to me. Katz also states
‘one is always in society in a active manner, anticipating how one’s actions
will be seen by another; and one is also always already in society in a tacitly
embodied manner in one respect or another unreflectively assuming the
external stance from which on will view one’s own conduct.’175
I derive as much understanding as others do, about a personal loss,
from the process and phenomenal changes I make in representing the
sensation of that loss by crying. My hands, representing a specific
sensation by affecting phenomenal changes in my body ecology—in
the creation of a visible relative point of view, for example—represent
that sensation to me and others. The repertoire of ecological changes
that I make, in representing emotional sensations exteroceptively, are
phenomenal to other people in my body ecology. This repertoire of

transformations makes the same representation in my own phenomenal
experience of the ecology of the body.176 Because consciousness of
consciousness is a prerequisite of these transformations, I am also
conscious that they are both phenomenal and representative for others.
I become conscious of the way in which my body ecology transforms
itself and also become conscious that others are experiencing this
transformation phenomenally.177 Because I perceive others to be
experiencing in the way that I experience, this process produces an
experience of the intersubject. ‘In emotional behavior, the metaphoric
vehicle of the self itself changes. It is not just that the message the
person tries to convey becomes different. And it is not the responses of
others, realised or anticipated in that change. It is the locus of the
grounding of action that changes,’ writes Katz.178
In terms of this brief discussion of the representation of emotional
sensations, changes made in order to remedy disequilibrium are pro-
duced spontaneously, such that visible gestures and movements are
both present-time indices of the sensation and traces or residues of
the restoration of equilibrium. Because they are remedial, physical
representations do not only index or trace, but rather collapse these
functions as remedial action itself. Disequilibrium causes both sensa-
tions of emotion and attempts to remedy them in actions that happen
to be exteroceptive and visible. Representation of emotional sensations
is not passive, in the sense that a signifier is only motivated by what is
signified. It is cause and consequence precisely because it is remedial, or
self-affecting.
Finally, because representations of emotional sensations are self-
affecting, they demonstrate the role of imagination in producing these
proprioceptive and representative remedial affects. This derives from a
theorisation of the distinction between perception and the objects of
perception, constituting point of view. Objects of perception are both
perceived and understood as perceived, due to consciousness of con-
sciousness. Of course, it is also important to keep in mind that imagin-
ing, as every other body capacity, is inhibited and facilitated by exactly
those general potential resources of the body that are realised in the
function of perception, by the same means. Hence, a constituent of the
object of perception is a type of knowledge about it which is also
phenomenal, or perceived, and this can only be accounted for by dis-
cussing and explaining imagining.
1.4 IMAGINING
1.4.1 Theorising Perception and Visualisation
Is the visual representation of emotional sensations, through changes in
the ecology of the body, only perceived, or also imagined? In other words,
does the production, self-perception and perception of these body changes
involve processes of visualisation, or mental imaging and processes of
perception? The above theorisations of the body ecology itself, in terms
of aetiology, the general potential resources of the body and homeorhesis,
themselves indicate the role of perceptual processes in visualisation.
‘Seeing-in’ is such an example. As I have described so far, ‘seeing-in’
is the capacity to visualise the object of a depiction at the same time as
the array of marks that constitute it. This capacity appears within the
terms of encompassing body ecology, in which the structures of image
schemata are realised, and in which affects/perceptual responses occur
according to the capacities of the organism itself, motivated by causes
and consequences.
This approach to visualisation is contentious, despite the fact that there
is a body of empirical evidence, also employed in substantiating other
approaches to theorising visualising, that does not contradict it.179 This
approach proposes that the affects that inhibit and facilitate the home-
orhetic progress of the body inhibit and facilitate both perception and
visualisation. If so, empirically determined phenomena must be expected
to substantiate this.
Again, the visual polysemy of the Necker Cube provides an example.
It is possible to perceive a drawing of the Necker Cube as oriented
‘backwards’ or ‘forwards,’ but not both simultaneously. Once seen, in
visualising a Necker Cube without the presence of a drawing, it is extra-
ordinarily difficult to make a visualisation that changes the perceived
orientation of the object.180 The shift of attention that takes place in
perceiving a drawing of a Necker Cube, either as ‘backwards’ or for-
wards,’ is difficult to make in a visualisation of a Necker Cube, providing
an example of an experiential disparity between perception and visualisa-
tion. However, this disparity rather supports a theoretical approach to
visualisation, encompassed by the ecology of the body, than otherwise.
According to this approach, visualisation is structured according to point
of view, so that it is the orientation of the subject, relative to the
perception, that organises the subsequent mental image. This claim is
1.4 IMAGINING 89
supported by the constitutional role of point of view in the structural

realisation of image schemata in representations.181
This explanation also accounts for the experience of visualising the
rotation of an object in visualised space and the experience of scanning
across a visualised space.182 In these experiences, point of view also struc-
tures visualisation, and because of this there is no disparity between the
experience of visually perceiving a rotation or scanning a scene, and the
experience of visualising such a scene according to similar relationships.
For example, experiences of the speed of a visualised rotation or scan (i.e.
the time in which the visualisation occurs), changes according to the
relative size of the object or angle of the scan, as it does in perceived
rotations and scans. It is the location, size, mass and velocity of the subject
relative to the object of the visualisation that determines this speed, as it
does with perception.183
According to a theorisation of visualisation in which the opportu-
nities and inhibitions of body ecology are realised, these two explana-
tions offer a way to describe visualisation as a perceptual experience
that is produced according to the structures that these inhibitions and
opportunities provide, but without exteroceptive stimuli.184 This
description accounts for the difference between the experience of visual
polysemy and the experience of rotating and scanning, because
together these experiences exemplify a paradigm of this ecology: the
structure of point of view. Neither is there any sense in which the
functional production of visualisations need be differentiated as either
preneotic or neotic: spontaneous visualisations arising as emotional
(self-) representations, as catechretic responses to disequilibrium, can
conform to this theorisation as plausibly as neotic visualisations realised
self-consciously.
Three theoretical approaches broadly create existing descriptions of
visualisation relative to perception. An embodied approach, such as that
above, to some extent follows Clancey’s ‘situated cognition,’ from which
Thomas takes cues for his ‘perceptual activity’ theory.185 I shall use the
latter term. There are two other established approaches, which can be
identified by share principles, if not in the details of their elaboration:
‘pictorial’ and ‘propositional.’186
Pictorial theories share a principal explanation of visualisation as recalled
visual perception, in particular (although ‘vision’ must be understood pro-
prioceptively, in this sense). Visualisation is then the generation of cognitive
copies of visual perceptions—or the interoceptive re-presentation of visual
images—and the activity of visualising is the function of generating these

items according to functions of visual perception.187
These theories propose that this interoceptive perception is a functional
realisation of preneotic long-term memories of visual perceptions, creating
a structural relationship between the (proprioceptive) eye, preneotic mem-
ories providing a hierarchy of visual properties and the cognitive function
adjudicating these as a visualisation according to the prescriptions of a
present-time situation, in what Kosslyn calls a ‘surface representation,’ or
the experience of perceiving the visualisation itself.188
The general objection to a pictorial model of visualisation lies with the
proposal of a cognitive function of adjudicating the visualisation, that is, a
proposal that visualisations realise a present-time experience from the
structure of long-term memory by differentiating between the experience
and cognition. But what constitutes an experience of cognition if not
cognition itself? It is a difficult question, and one that a pictorial model
of visualisation does not answer. I must remind myself that this is not
consciousness of consciousness, the prerequisite of the subject, but cogni-
tion. The pictorial model proposes that I experience cognition in a regress,
which requires that cognition becomes its own object. Even in the pictor-
ial model’s own terms, this is not possible.189
Alternatively, propositional models of visualisation require no cognitive
regress, no ‘mind’s eye’ cognition of a distinct experience of interoceptive
perception. If I recall my description of a proposition, made in comparison
to Johnson’s theory of nonpropositional image schemata, a proposition is
a representation, that can either (a) be adjudicated true or false, (b) ascribe
properties to entities or (c) ascribe values as true (that is, facts), or any or
all of these produced in a system that ensures that these conditions are met
in all instances. These descriptions of propositional representation can
convincingly be argued to be global, that is, to account for all types of
representation.
This description founds propositional models of perception and visua-
lisation. In these models, perceptions are propositional in themselves—
they are structures of cognition and types of knowledge. In this sense,
affects are objects of perception, where perception is the activity of making
propositions about those objects, as a cognitive function. Following this
model, visualisation is the cognitive function of making propositions
about recalled visual experiences, rather than making propositions about
current percepts.190 In further contrast to the pictorial model of visualisa-
tion, a propositional model does not propose any structural similarity
1.4 IMAGINING 91
between perception and visualisation. The function of making proposi-

tions itself structures both perception and visualisation, with experientially
distinct cognitive results.
This has prompted the idea that a propositional model is a language
model. Thomas summarises the model such that ‘In effect, the data
structures are sentences in an inner language ( . . . ).’191 This is highly
misleading in two senses: first, propositional models only theorise that
propositions structure experiences as types of cognition. In no way does
this theorisation evidence lexicogrammatical structures, although it might
evidence lexicogrammatical functions. The ‘grammar’ of propositions is an
organisation of types of knowledge, not a semiotic proximity system.
Second, propositional models are general models of cognition, designed
to explain the relationship between cognition and perception. They do not
privilege functions of representation, despite the fact that propositions are
always representations. Visualisation, in this sense, is not the function of
making a representation, as it is in pictorial models. Rather, it is the
function of producing a new experience by making propositions about
recalled visual experiences.
However, the experience of the realisation of nonpropositional struc-
tures in visualisations raises an objection. As I have discussed, relative to
image schemata, Johnson notices that the organisation of types of knowl-
edge as propositions, does not account for recurring patterns of content
or, rather, recurring types of rhetorical production in making representa-
tions, of which visualisations are a type. Hence, Johnson’s theory of image
schemata seeks to explain the appearances of cognitive structures as rea-
lisations of the structures of the inhibitions and opportunities of the
ecology of the body, in my terms. So this is the problem: propositional
models of visualisation do not adequately describe my experience of either
perceiving or visualising. This failure is not a result of a theorised resem-
blance of these models to language structures, but because these models
do not accommodate either the occurrence of nonpropositional, cross-
modal or proprioceptive experiences based on general accounts of embo-
died experience. With Johnson, it is very easy to substantiate the observa-
tion that cognition is not simply propositional.
Finally, using Thomas’s term, ‘perceptual activity’ approaches to theo-
rising visualisation are broadly in accord with my approach to theorising
drawing and depiction. This theorisation proposes that the same relation-
ships between the general potential resources of the body realised aetio-
logically, in order to try and make representations, also structure
visualisation. As with my discussion of drawing and depiction, trajectory is

an indivisible aspect of this theorisation. Although visualisation is a type of
discrete perceived experience, it has no discrete ontology: visualisations are
not ‘images,’ but cognitive processes, the structures of which themselves
continuously realise the structures of recalled schemata as present-time
cognitive experiences. This is a homeorhetic process because, in continu-
ously realising these structures in visualisations, cognitive experience
revises cognitive experience, as a process of paying more or less attention,
in bringing a visualisation ‘to mind.’192
This process of revision also modulates the range of inhibitions and
opportunities that constitute the ecology of the body, as it attempts to
maintain the equilibrium of its trajectory. In this sense only, schemata are
hypothetical, in that they are realised or remain unrealised according to
their appropriateness for a present-time task of visualisation. According to
present-time experience, the process of revision accumulates experiences
of visualisations as realisations of some types of schematic structures and
not others, contributing to an ongoing proprioceptive experience of the
body ecology as memory, progress and possibility.
Thomas uses the word ‘imagery’ for visualisation, and suggests that
‘during imagery, the schema is active in much the same way that it is
during perception ( . . . ) but [it is] not subject to testing against reality.’193
That is, the activity of visualising realises the structures that perception
realises, with the difference that the object of visualisation is the activity of
visualising itself, rather than the realisation of the experience of percepts
according to the same structures.194
Unlike pictorial theorisations of visualisation, this process does not
require another cognitive object—the visualisation viewed—because the
object of the activity is the activity. It is that the realisation relationship is
similar to the realisation relationship in perception, not that there is
resemblance (even a structural resemblance) between a perceived object
and a visualised object. Hence, there is no discrete ontology of visualisa-
tion, outside the process of visualisation.
Similarly, ‘perceptual activity’ theorisations differs from ‘propositional’
theories that propose the function of producing a new experience by
making propositions about recalled visual experiences. As I have
described, visualisations, as all representations, have a propensity to realise
types of experience, as content, that cannot be explained propositionally.
As representations, they realise structures that exceed, circumvent and
encompass the structure of a proposition.
1.4 IMAGINING 93
Hence, visualisations are neither the object visualised, nor proposi-

tions about a potential visualised object. They are a cognitive activity
that is its own object, according to the aetiological realisation of
schemata structured by the inhibitions and opportunities of the ecology
of the body.
This theoretical model requires both proprioception and continual
changes in the hierarchy of perceptual modes, according the aetiology of
a present-time task of visualisation. Thomas writes ‘We do not so much
have five, general purpose senses, as a large array of anatomically over-
lapping instruments ( . . . ).’195 These ‘instruments,’ or the general poten-
tial resources of the body, are continuously more or less produced, relative
to each other, motivated only by the activity of trying to visualise. I must
recall that activities occurring ‘in order to’ are not necessarily self-con-
sciously produced. The spontaneous occurrence of visualisations (in rev-
erie, for example), exemplifies the appearance of representative realisations
as homeorhetic. As I have discussed, in relation to visible representations
of emotion, much as I am able to make a visualisation and then put from
my mind, spontaneous visualisation conforms to a process of maintaining
or regaining the progressing equilibrium of my body ecology.
To summarise, a ‘perceptual activity’ theorisation of visualisation pro-
poses that the same relationships between the general potential resources
of the body, realised aetiologically, in order to try and make representa-
tions, also structure visualisation. This is a process of cognitive revisions
based on schemata, realised proprioceptively, in which the process is
object. According to this model, describing aspects of this process as
interoceptive ‘perception’ is not a problem: the experienced object (a
visualisation), is the experience of the activity of visualising.196
Thomas tests this theorisation on Ryle’s example of a child looking at the
face of doll and visualising the doll smiling.197 It is an interesting example,
in that both perception (of the doll as object) and visualisation (of the smile)
are involved. Walton has much to say about the relationship between
percepts and visualisations, in that he considers objects of perception that
are identified by the process of visualisation to constitute special classes of
‘props,’ ‘objects’ and ‘prompts’ for imagination.198 Thomas applies the
example to the more fundamental distinction between visual perception
and visualisation itself, according to the ‘perceptual activity’ theory.
On the basis that both capacities are realisations of the same inhibitions
and opportunities of the general potential resources of the body, modula-
tions in the child’s experience of the doll as object and of the activity of
visualising, as object, are the results of the testing of ‘hypotheses,’ in which

the results of perceptual tests structures stimulus and the results of similar
tests, made against the process of visualising as object, structure visualisa-
tion. Hence, it is possible for the doll to be perceived and its smile to be
visualised, simultaneously, in the degrees to which schemata are realised or
remain unrealised according to their appropriateness for the present-time
tasks of perceiving and visualising.
Ryle’s smiling doll neatly exemplifies Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in,’ which I
recall as a definition of the experience of depiction, being a unique type of
visual representation, defined by both seeing the activities/marks that
constitute a depiction whilst also seeing the object of the depiction. In
Ryle’s example, the smile is ‘seen-in’ the doll’s face, in the same way as the
object of a depiction is ‘seen-in’ a depiction. A ‘perceptual activity’ theory
of visualisation introduces a broad theorisation of depiction, in this sense,
and accords with my own.
Thomas calls visualisation ‘seeing-as.’ He proposes that ‘seeing-as’ can be
developed as a general theorisation of creativity, by eliding this concept of
imagination (visual or otherwise) and an idea of creativity (‘to see fresh
[ . . . ] meanings’).199 I must not confuse such an idea with the system which
‘perceptual activity’ theory presents, which accounts for the relationship
between visualisation and perception. The description of the experience of
‘seeing-as,’ which the theorisation provides, requires a much more incisive
theorisation of semiosis, relative to the general potential resources of the
body, than a concept of creativity as ‘fresh meanings’ provides.
1.4.2 Properties and Categories

As a constituent part of a ‘perceptual activity’ theory of visualisation,
‘seeing-as’ provides a broad explanation for the experience of depiction,
defined as Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in.’ At the conclusion of Section 1.2.3, two
observations about the function of depiction require further explanation.
Thomas’s ‘perceptual activity’ theory of visualisation does not encompass
these observations, although the application of the theory to them is
potentially productive.
First, I noted that consciousness of interoceptive cognitive phenomena
constitutes consciousness of consciousness, so that when I see (or perceive
in any other way), I also experience myself seeing (or perceive myself
perceiving).
1.4 IMAGINING 95
Second, as a corollary of this structure—of self-consciousness—I noted,

in the experience of depictions, that resemblance (that is, the perception of
a visual property shared by depiction and object memories), is a present-
time affect of memories of seeing, made on the basis of the perception of a
visual property or properties shared by depiction and memory. As a con-
sequence, depictions and the objects of depiction are corresponding
affects in a future-oriented homeorhetic relationship, where there is cor-
respondence of affect, rather than form. In terms of a ‘perceptual activity’
theory of visualisation, this affect is the experience of the process of
visualisation, or the taking of that process as the object of visualisation.
In explaining these two observations, my previous descriptions of an
aetiological, homeorhetic realisation of general potential resources of the
body (e.g. in making and experiencing drawings and depictions) must
progress to incorporate a description of the subject. How can I describe
consciousness of consciousness and the experience of my own cognitive
processes as affect? How can a description be made that plausibly explains
the structures that realise the subject relative to both a ‘perceptual activity’
theory of visualisation and a broader theorisation of imagining?
Of the three paradigms of depiction I have discussed, the visual repre-
sentation of particular objects, defined as properties, introduces the pos-
sibility of a theorisation of the subject. Explaining how properties are
perceived and understood as properties requires a discussion of both
judgement and types of knowledge. In itself, a discussion of both judge-
ment and knowledge requires a description of the subject commensurate
with the theorisation of the structures and functions of an aetiological,
homeorhetic body ecology pursued so far.200
There is a distinction between vision and the objects of vision. This
constitutes a point of view, which in part structures the whole ecology of
the body. There is also a distinction between perception and understand-
ing. The object of visual perception is both perceived and understood as
perceived, due to consciousness of consciousness.
This description might lead to another propositional theorisation, this
time of understanding relative to perception. In this case, such a proposi-
tional theorisation results in a straightforward conception of belief, such
that there is a seen object (the object of perception) about which there is a
belief (‘there is the object of perception’).
Hence, essential to this structure is the adjudication of perception in a
relationship between perception and belief about what is perceived.
However, in establishing this structure, this type of categorisation
(‘there’) already groups those properties by which the object is perceived,

and which in fact have a quite different relationship to belief. Recall the
way in which the object of depictions has ‘seen-in’ properties that subtend
any categorical adjudication of its identity. Recall also that the perception
of these properties is a prerequisite for identifying the object of depiction
at all.
An example of a situation in which a categorical (that is, propositional,
‘there’) identification of a seen object is made, on the basis of a partial
view, provides a clue to a more accurate description of the adjudication of
perception: if I see a building, I do not also see inside it or around it.
However, I believe that it has both an interior and other sides. In fact,
I perceive it as having the properties of ‘an interior’ and ‘other sides.’
If this is the case, by what means am I to explain a perception of unseen
properties? This is an occasion to call upon a ‘perceptual activity’ theory of
visualisation, plus consciousness of consciousness. According to the com-
mitments made by these two proposals, I perceive the building and
perceive myself imagining the properties of ‘an interior’ and ‘other
sides.’ The object of perception, the building, requires consciousness of
a perceiving subject in order for it to be perceived. This is not to say that I
perceive the building as imaginary. Rather, it is to say that a constituent of
the perception of the building is a type of knowledge about it, and that this
knowledge is phenomenal, or perceived.
It is important to recall that imagining, according to a ‘perceptual
activity’ theory of visualisation, is inhibited and facilitated by exactly
those general potential resources of the body that are realised in the
function of perception, by the same means. When I view the front of the
building, in imagining the inside and back of a building, my phenomenal
experience of imagining is not random, let alone wilful. Although I can
wilfully visualise almost anything, as it were, self-consciously, this is not
what I do in the phenomenal imagining of a building that I see. Those
preneotic revisions, tests and checks and balances against both perceptual
stimuli and nemonic schemata determine my phenomenal perception and
imagining of the whole building.
This model then locates the subject as a structural aspect of a process of
adjudicating, that is, imagining, aspects of the phenomenal world as a
constituent part of homeorhetic progress. Schemata structure the realisa-
tion of this imagining, because they structure the production of represen-
tations—even those that are self-perceived. This adjudication makes a
description of perception and imagining much more complex, by
1.4 IMAGINING 97
introducing types of knowledge, the role of which is to modulate, revise

and reconstitute perception according to the creation of a subject. This
constitutes intersubjective, social and cultural knowledge.
Hence, when I note that schematic structures, producing the general
potential resources of the body, are correlatively realised in representations,
by means that are phenomenally embodied, I am also describing the creation
of a subject. If I follow the model in which perceptual and cognitive capacities
determine the ecology of the body, according to its general potential
resources, then the subject is also always paradigmatically embodied. In the
contemporary scholarly fields of cognitive psychology and philosophy, it goes
without saying that the subject cannot be defined as cognition alone. Rather, a
definition of the experience of the world is a definition of the subject, an aspect
of which is the appearance of a point of view.
The structure of the relationship between schemata and imagination
is simple. Imagination is the cognitive capacity to produce present-time
self-representations according to the structures of schemata, and these
schemata are modulated and revised according to the homeorhetic
progress of the body, according to a point of view, constituting the
subject.
Again recall the way in which the object of depictions has ‘seen-in’
properties that subtend any categorical adjudication of its identity. Recall
also that the perception of these properties is a prerequisite for identifying
the object of depiction at all. This distinction between categories and
properties broadly describes the final part of the model describing the
adjudication of perception and imagination. I perceive the visual proper-
ties of a building that I see, but I also adjudicate the experience of these
properties, according to categories that inhibit and facilitate my imagining
of the unseen inside and back of the building. My experience of imagining
is categorical (including the structuring of a subjective point of view),
whereas I perceive properties. Both of these capacities realise schematic
structures in present-time, through hypothesis and revision.201 Imagining
realises the structures that perception realises, with the difference that the
object of imagining is the activity of imagining itself. This difference also
describes the difference between an experience of adjudication (which is
categorical) and the perception of properties.202
In what ways do categories modulate the realisation of schemata in the
activity of imagining? Categories are representations. Properties are not.
Categories realise subjective point of view by constituting beliefs. That is,
categories adjudicate experience as a type of realisation of schematic
inhibitions and facilitations, according to a subjective point of view. They

are representations of beliefs in that they are perceived adjudications of
properties. Beliefs create categories by adjudicating the present-time rea-
lisations of schemata in imagining ‘there,’ concurrent with the perception
of properties. Hence, beliefs are also phenomenally perceived, in the
structural, schematic correlation of a subjective point of view with the
perception of phenomenal properties.
1.4.3 Fiction
As I have discussed, categories are propositional (‘there’), because they
always involve judgement, or the occurrence of belief. Hence, categories
adjudicate truth or otherwise, ascribe properties (not perceive them), and
ascribe value.
I have been discussing ways in which the activity of imagining is
structured relative to perception, rather than the ways in which those
functions are realised in types of changes in the body ecology in order to
make extroceptive representations. Here is an example of an ecological
characterisation of imagination in which, as with the exteroceptive repre-
sentation of interoceptive emotional sensations, the capacity for imagining
is not only an interoceptive perception of the activity itself, but also the
capacity for producing and understanding exteroceptive representations.
Again, the concept of ‘seeing-in’ is useful. When I look at an extros-
pective visual representation, such as the Gaudier-Brzeska drawing, men-
tioned previously, I understand that (a) it was made in order to be looked
at as a drawing, (b) it fixes a point of view relative to it being an index of an
attempt to make a drawing, the material with which it was made and the
object of depiction, (c) I see both material and the object of depiction
simultaneously, (d) the depiction only resembles its object because I
imagine that it does, and (e) the object of my imagination is categorically
produced, although I only perceive the properties of the depiction.
Without the adjudication of my imagination, the depiction in no way
resembles its object, rather as the building that I see from the front has
properties, but is not at all a building without my belief about its having an
interior and other sides, which is a categorical adjudication realised as
imagining, concurrent with perceiving. The process of producing and
understanding exteroceptive representations realises the same structures as
the activity of imagining: point of view, self-perceiving and the experience of
the adjudication of percepts by beliefs, concurrent with perception.
1.4 IMAGINING 99
Note that this characterisation of representations does not make dis-

tinctions between media. It applies as plausibly to a description of the
visual representation of emotional sensations in gesture and facial expres-
sion as it does to a shopping list written in English, or a sad piece of music.
However, there is a constitutive relationship between imagination and
one of the paradigms of proposition—the ascription of truth. I must recall
that every type of representation is propositional, including representa-
tions made by categorical imagining. Propositions about truth made in
imagining constitute a type of belief that enables the representation of
fictional worlds. By ‘fictional worlds,’ I mean proposed categories of
entities, items and activities that only self-substantiate the truth of their
existence as representations, relative to concurrent beliefs about the truth
of other propositional imagining. Walton deftly summarises: ‘To call a
proposition fictional amounts to saying that it is “true” in some fictional
world or other.’203 It is not the truth or otherwise of a proposition that
makes it fictional, it is the relationship between truth and falsehood.
I can see immediately the parallel between this structure of fiction and
point of view, as a constituent of the structure of imagining. Proposition
creates falsehood relative to truth, and vice versa. The ascription of one
and not the other is categorical. What is true is true because it is not false.
Falsehood is not erased by the ascription of truth. Rather, it is located
relative to truth. This substantiates my observation that there is a parallel
between ascriptions of truth and falsehood and the structuring of point of
view. Proposition creates a coherent structure of relative conditions of
truth/falsehood, in which Walton’s claim that a fiction is somewhere true
is perfectly rational. This is a definition of fiction: falsehood about which
every ascription can be true.
Three functions can then be said to structure fiction: (a) point of view,
(b) the distinction between the adjudication of truth in the world of the
subject (the real world, as it were) and the adjudication of truth in the
fictional world and (c) the relationship between the inhibitions and oppor-
tunities constituting the general potential resources of the body, and the
inhibitions and opportunities constituting the ontological horizon of the
imagination.
First, in generating point of view, the activity of imagining structures
the subject by locating a self relative to the object imagined—the fictional
world. In a more complex theorisation, still consistent with one that
identifies representations (including interoceptive representations), as pro-
positions and properties as non-propositional perceptions, the generation
of point of view can be characterised such that the propositional ascription

of properties to oneself, plus the non-propositional perception of proper-
ties, equals a complete description of the subject, consistent with a com-
plete description of the ecology of the body.204
Walton writes ‘To imagine being Napoleon, it is not even necessary that
one imagines having experiences that one believes Napoleon to have
had.’205 If I make it fictional, in my imagination, that I am Napoleon,
then there is no other qualification required, except that I know that I am
not in fact Napoleon. Here is a function of the creation of subjective point
of view, and it provides the reason why fictions are self-substantiating.
Their verisimilitude, or the adjudication of items as true in the fictional
world, does not require substantiation in the real world (i.e. the world of
the subject). The means by which I am able to imagine that I am
Napoleon derive from the world of the subject, in that what is known of
Napoleon is only known by the subject, but this knowledge does not
impede my imagining that it is true that I am Napoleon in a fictional
world, it only impedes what I might imagine to be true of myself as
Napoleon in that fictional world.
It also reveals that emic and etic positions constitute quite different
affordances, in the creation of the subject in establishing point of view. For
example, in imagining Napoleon (taking an etic position relative to the
object of imagination), I experience both self and object quite differently
than if I imagine that I am Napoleon (taking an emic position, relative to
the object of imagination—in emic imagining, I am always also the object
of my imagining). The imagined ontology of Napoleon is different and
distinct from the imagined ontology of being Napoleon.
Further, the potential for adjudicating truth is also quite different,
depending on etic or emic imagining. This difference is key in theorising
the relationship between fictional and non-fictional worlds. For example,
as Walton points out, to imagine being Napoleon is not an activity that
requires that I act, think, know or feel as Napoleon acted, thought, knew
or felt. Imagining is not ‘method acting.’ To imagine that I am Napoleon,
I simply need to propose that it is true that I am Napoleon in the fictional
world that I imagine and, in doing this, generate a particular ontology for
the subject in the establishment of a point of view.
Second, the distinction between the adjudication of truth in the world
of the subject and the adjudication of truth in the fictional world, might be
described very broadly as the structure of ‘discourse’ and ‘story’ in narra-
tive theory.206 Walton writes, ‘The appreciator’s perspective is a dual one.
1.4 IMAGINING 101
He observes fictional worlds as well as living in them (...)’207 Although it is

unorthodox to categorise ‘story’ in this way, a description of ‘story’ as the
adjudication of degrees of truth (but not the establishment of truth) in a
fictional world has the advantage of including the widest range of types of
representation, whilst maintaining a foundational structuring relationship
between a fictional world and the world of the subject. I propose that this
relationship remains as functional for a string sonata and a spoken sentence
as for the logo of Apple Incorporated. I will discuss story and discourse in
Sections 2.1–2.4.
Third—given the theorisation, as structuring principles, of (a) the
creation of point of view and (b) the distinction between a story world
and the world of the subject—what is the relationship between the inhibi-
tions and opportunities constituting the general potential resources of the
body, and the inhibitions and opportunities constituting the ontological
horizon of the imagination? There is no reason not to consider this
question as a question of what it might and might not be possible to
imagine. In doing so, I need not take any other theoretical path than that
outlined in the characterisation of the aetiological, homeorhetic realisa-
tions of the ecology of the body, in representations and the subject.
It has already been argued that the activity of imagining is neither
private nor uniquely cognitive, particularly if I consider homeorhesis as
an institution, that is, as constituting normative and iterative aspects.
Hence, Walton writes, ‘Stephen’s tendency to imagine himself seeing
ships when he looks at this picture [of ships] is grounds for attributing
to him acceptance of the principle whereby his seeing the picture makes it
fictional that he sees ships.’208 It is exactly this ‘principle whereby’ the
fictional world is facilitated that constitutes the inhibitions and opportu-
nities that afford imagining. In Willat’s example, if Stephen cannot activate
this principle, then he will not be able to ‘see-in’ the ships as the objects of
depiction.
This third aspect of fiction —the relationship between the inhibitions
and opportunities constituting the general potential resources of the body,
and the inhibitions and opportunities constituting the ontological horizon
of the imagination—requires further explanation. Walton writes:
Representations ( . . . ) are things possessing the social function of serving as

props in games of make-believe, although they also prompt imagining and
are sometimes objects of them as well. A prop is something which, by virtue
of conditional principles of generation, mandates imaginings. Propositions
whose imaginings are mandated are fictional, and the fact that a given
proposition is fictional is a fictional truth. Fictional worlds are associated
with collections of fictional truths; ( . . . ) the world of a game of make believe
( . . . ) or that of a representational work of art.209
For Walton, representations have ‘the social function of serving as props,’

and, although the degree to which the inhibitions and opportunities that
afford imagining are social is not beyond debate, in fact such ‘social’
inhibitions and opportunities constitute the horizon of fictional possibi-
lities: what it is possible and impossible to imagine as adjudicating as true.
He writes ‘Imaginings are constrained also; some are appropriate in
certain contexts and others not. Herein lies the key ( . . . ) Fictional pro-
positions are propositions that are to be imagined,’210 Jackendoff concurs
Not only is our conceptualised world our own reality, we constantly check
whether it converges with everyone else’s. To the degree that we sense it
converges we take the common view as flowing from the ‘objective character
of the world.’ On the other hand, to the degree that we sense conflict, we
are forced to acknowledge subjectivity, and the sense of what is ‘objective’
becomes less stable.211
Hence, the question remains: what is the relationship between the inhibi-
tions and opportunities constituting the general potential resources of the
body, and the inhibitions and opportunities constituting the ontological
horizon of the imagination? ‘If abstract concepts have indexical features
and descriptive features, in principle then they should have ontological
category features and valuations as well,’ writes Jackendoff.212
1.5 CONVENTIONAL IMAGINING

Recall my example of perceiving a building and also perceiving aspects of
the building that are not immanent, in which I adjudicate perception in a
relationship between perception and belief about what is perceived. Not
only is there a distinction between my perception and the object of my
perception, there is also a distinction between my perception and my
understanding of what I perceive. There is the building (the object of
perception) about which this understanding constitutes a belief (‘there is
the object of perception’).
1.5 CONVENTIONAL IMAGINING 103
As I perceive the building, I do not perceive the interior of the building

or the sides of the building that I cannot see. I perceive the building and
perceive myself imagining the properties of ‘an interior’ and ‘other sides.’
The object of perception requires consciousness of a perceiving subject in
order for it to be perceived. Consequently, a constituent of my perception
of the building is a type of belief about it, and this belief is phenomenal, or
perceived.
This model then locates the subject as a structural aspect of a process
of adjudicating, that is, imagining, aspects of the phenomenal world as a
constituent part of homeorhetic progress. This adjudication introduces
belief to an explanation of perception and imagining, the role of which is
to modulate, revise and reconstitute perception according to the crea-
tion of a subject. This constitutes intersubjective, social and cultural
knowledge.
In this modulation of perception according to imagination, belief
functions according to the inhibitions and opportunities that constitute
the general potential resources of the body. It is part of my perceptual
capacity, structured according to the same perceptual systems.
However, my belief that the building that I perceive has an interior
and other sides is also axiological, in that, in my consciousness of
consciousness, the object of my perception includes my point of view,
or my self-perceiving. My belief in those properties of the building that I
cannot perceive also involves a functional ascription of value, both in
Broad’s sense of ‘obligation,’ or ‘deontology,’ but also in the widest
sense of adjudications of preference, approbation and disapprobation
relative to what is both perceived and imagined.213 There is no neutral-
value ontology in a structure of relative point of view. Hence, imagining
ascribes value. This is the axiomatic characteristic of the perceived belief
in the existence of unperceived properties, relative to perception: in
including itself as an object of perception, my point of view ascribes
value.
There is nothing in this theorisation that disallows the ascription of
value, by any means, to adjudications of perception and self-perception.
Although the ascription of value requires consciousness of conscious-
ness, I must not confuse it with the capacity to make choices. The
capacity to make choices realises self-consciousness in attitudes and
actions (as changes made to the ecology of the body), which also
ascribe value, but these do not themselves constitute consciousness of
consciousness.
How are these values adjudicated? In perceiving a building and believ-

ing that it has properties that I don’t perceive, I imagine myself in my
relationship with the building. The value that I ascribe to this imagined
relationship, including my part in it, can be described according to the
degree of promotion of, or resistance to, this imagined relationship. Recall
that my imagined beliefs about my relationship with the building are
categorical and propositional. They are representations of the subject
made by adjudicating the value of the imagined relationship between the
building and the subject. Hence, the subject describes either the coadu-
natory or inimical interrelation between systems of beliefs, ideas or
ascribed meanings, and phenomenal and social experiences of the world,
which these systems either affirm or belie. It realises the promotion or
resistance of different types of imagining on the basis that they either
reproduce or contradict a dominant structure of belief.
Struggle, resistance and compliance are then as important in mapping
the possibilities and limitations of imagining as they are in theorising the
emergence of institutional structures and, in particular, in discussing a
significant manifestation of his struggle: the adoption of the practices and
beliefs, as instantiations, relative to the nominal aspects of institutions, for
whom the adoption constitutes subjective compliance, termed cultural
hegemony. Hegemony, in this sense, is an operation in the field of a
struggle to imagine, in which adopted meanings embody the perceived
world and all of its changing possibilities and impossibilities.
These structures of belief are neither exteroceptive nor interoceptive:
they are realised as much in self-representations, representations to the self
and changes made to the ecology of the body in order to maintain home-
orhesis. They are phenomenal and affective, because they are representa-
tions that are produced and perceived. This is what Vološinov means when
he insists that the structures of ideas that are realised in representations
cannot be described except according to ‘the material basis’ of the repre-
sentation itself, even if this representation is cognitive and interocep-
tive.214 Further, this ‘material basis’ can be nothing other than
institutional—it is instantially produced relative to nominal behaviour—
and therefore productive of degrees of resistance and compliance, creating
society, as Destutt de Tracy proposed.215
The structures of these beliefs share with Johnson’s image schemata the
fact that they are not representations, but structures derived from the
semiotic instantiation in present-time of the general potential resources
of the body. As with the realisation of representations of emotional
1.5 CONVENTIONAL IMAGINING 105
sensations, structures of belief do not represent themselves. Rather they

are only perceptible in realisations of their coadunatory or inimical func-
tions in representations. In this sense, representations are simply actions
and the products of actions. My behaving in a particular way and not in
another realises the system of ideas that structure my actions, in making
changes to the ecology of the body.
On this basis, it is possible to describe the way in which imagining itself
is inhibited and facilitated. Imagining is inhibited and facilitated by
degrees of resistance to or promotion of those values ascribed to unper-
ceived properties in which there is a belief, where imagining is instantial
relative to an institutional norm.216
Then, the question remains as to the function by which resistance or
promotion of one type of imagining or another occur. How is the nominal
aspect of an institutional structure realised in representations? What makes the
nominal? Simply, the nominal is believed to be what is true, and what is true is
determined by the subject’s capacity to influence, that is, to make representa-
tions that are believed to be true. Hence, where nominal structure and
individual iteration fully coincide, then what can be imagined can both be
imagined and be imagined to be true, and where they least coincide, either
nothing can be imagined (imagination fails), or what is imagined is false.
This theorisation of imagining completes a model in which embodied
discourse, in the form of institutions, generates and perpetuates systems of
ideas, by proposing both that imagined relationships reciprocally motivate
practice and that what is imagined is always encompassed and charac-
terised by the dynamics of this struggle.
The capacity to imagine oneself perceiving then allows ‘misrecognition,’
or an internalised submission to the status of the object of perception,
including self-perception, that also insists on its own truth. This hegemonic
function, within which the subject continually struggles and by which it is
subsumed, inculcates an imaginative and cognitive consensus, characterised
by solipsism, identifying particular situations and behaviour as pan-historic,
a-temporal and pan-social. Concepts such as ‘true,’ ‘woman’ or ‘nature’ fall
into this category, for example. As a result, different propositions about the
world insist on their truth in opposition to others as a prerequisite of
struggle itself, so that both ideas and imagining become instruments in
social struggles between different types of misrecognition. It is not only a
matter of the relative absence or presence of perceived and expected cues
that inhibit imagining, but also of the similarity in the stance that the subject
adopts towards perception in self-perceiving.
Finally, we must not omit bodily practices and every type of social
manifestation and institution from this model. The promotion or
resistance to ideas constitutes the capacity to imagine within conven-
tions of inhibition and facilitation. Thus, the constitutive generation of
the subject, as a function of imagination, occurs in a dynamic relation-
ship with the production of material practices through habituation, not
only through cognition or acts of imagination, but though the perpe-
tuation and reproduction of types of actions and responses, even at
the most microlevel and certainly in producing and understanding
representations.
NOTES
1. In homage, I modify ‘Drawings Own Devices’, the title of Chapter 12 of
Patrick Maynard’s general overview of theorisations of drawing: ‘Drawing
Distinctions:The Varieties of Graphic Expression.’ Maynard’s Chapter 12
seeks to describe a number of theorist’s medium-specific descriptions of
drawing, in order to tease out ‘ . . . a conception of drawing that separates
it from other media, and a theory of drawing’s deepest sources of ( . . . )
meaning.’ As such, the Chapter enlarges and to some extent departs from
what I here call a technical-activity foundation, established in most of his
book, although without reviewing or adopting approaches grounded in
other theorizations of systems of signification. Maynard, Drawing
Distinctions, 184.
2. Ibid. 3. See Baetens’ and Frey’s discussion of grammatext, in which the
locations and forms of marks and groups of marks constituting written text
(also known as graphemes and syntagms), have semiotic salience indepen-
dent of both phonetic and lexical uses. The term grammatext, although used
precisely to indicate the semiotic significance of the forms of written letters
and numbers, words and groups of words, here parallels my ‘array’ of marks
and groups of marks in drawings. Beatens and Frey, The Graphic Novel: An
Introduction. 152–53.
3. de Renya, How to Draw What You See, 27.
4. Watson Garcia, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, 24.
5. Maynard, Drawing Distinctions, 96.
6. A large and detailed list of topological distinctions can be found in Rawson,
Seeing Through Drawing. The names of these topological categories of mark
are for the shape of a drawn mark (84, 92), direction (84), relationships
between lines (92), contour, visible evidence of production (81–83), dimen-
sion, enclosure, temporal index (15), depth-slices (105), bracelet shading
(107, 109–110), facelets (160–161), ovoids (160), shading and modeling
NOTES 107
tone (109–110), plan-sections (37) and shading (39–40). Also see

Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression for
untouched surface areas (165) and the ‘oval’ (39). For a detailed summary
of John Willats’ descriptions of regions, enclosures, axis, extendedness,
connectedness and continuity, symmetry, contour qualities, occlusion and
superimposition and rhythm, see Maynard, op cit, 73–82.
7. Ibid. See also Rawson, Seeing Through Drawing and Willats, Art and
Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures.
8. Wright, ‘The Case Against Teleological Reductionism’ 211–23.
9. For this general approach applied to teleological characterisation, see
Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation: A Study of the Function of Theory,
Probability and Law in Science.
10. Houkes and Vermass, Technical Functions: On the Uses and Designs of
Artefacts, 93.
11. British Museum Registration Number 1926,1009.1.
12. This very general summary is derived in part from Charles Taylor’s The
Explanation of Behaviour and in part from Wright, op cit.
13. Pisanello, Four Unrelated Figures (British Museum Reference Number
pp.1.10) and Two Men Standing (British Museum Registration Number
1895,0915.793).
14. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 21, 46 and Wollheim, Art and Its Objects,
11–14, 205–226 and Thomas, ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of
Imagination?’ 227.
15. British Museum Reference Number 1860,0616.128.
16. Rawson, Drawing, 95, 97, 15.
17. Rawson, Drawing, 91–2.
18. Rawson, Drawing, 105. He writes: ‘( . . . ) those styles of drawing which are
interested in an independent three-dimensional plastic presence have tended
to play down both the immediately expressive and the decorative quality of
their lines ( . . . ).’
19. For ontological descriptions, see Houkes and Meijers, ‘The Ontology of
Artefacts: The Hard Problem.’ For epistemological descriptions, see
Houkes, ‘Knowledge of artefact functions.’ For descriptions on the basis
of technical functions, see Vermaas, ‘The Physical Connection: Engineering
Function Ascriptions to Technical Artefacts and Their Components.’
20. I am here following and adapting van Eck and Webber’s ‘Function
Ascription and Explanation: Elaborating an Explanatory Utility
Desideratum for Ascriptions of Technical Functions.’ 1371. They provide
a comprehensive teleological discussion of the explanatory role of function
ascription in design.
21. Carroll and Seeley. ‘Cognitivism, Psychology and Neuroscience: Movies as
Attentional Engines.’
22. Newman. ‘The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing,’ 105.

23. Maynard frequently uses the term to describe bundles of topological marks
associated with types of perceptual effects in a range of studies of drawing,
without considering the theoretical basis on which the term is apt. See
Maynard. Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression, 41,
49, 78, 81, 84, 95, 101, 103, 120, 138–39, 170, 174, 183, 186–88, 209,
227, 230, 243n.
24. This conflation has caused a number of problems, not least in ‘post hoc’
comprehension of Philippe Marion’s germinal neologism ‘graphiation,’ a
remediation of the linguistic concept of enunciation (Baetens, ‘Revealing
Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation’). For example, Gardner
states that ‘with the line, we come face to face with the graphiateur,’ The
‘narrative meaning’ of the mark then derives from a direct relationship
between mark and indexed activity, allowing for the theorization of the
function of unique visual enunciation in a narrative structure. An objection
to this particular conception of ‘graphiation’ can be made on the grounds
that some drawing technologies index activities of the body without tracing
them, in which cases, trace and index do not have mutually substantive roles
in the production of enunciative style or, more comprehensibly, ‘voice.’
Gardner, ‘Storylines.’ 64.
25. See Allen. ‘Compelled by the Diagram: Thinking Through C. H.
Waddington’s Epigenetic Landscape,’ and Mayer. ‘Gut Feelings: The
Emerging Biology of Gut-Brain Communication.’
26. Hague. Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics, 35.
27. Maynard. Drawing Distinctions. 187.
28. Arnheim. The Power of the Centre: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts.
29. Rawson. Drawing. 161.
30. Ibid. 105.
31. Ibid. 107.
32. Antliffe and Leighten. Cubism and Culture.
33. See Rawson. Drawing. 94 and Willats. Art and Representation. 316.
35. Ibid. 210.
36. Krčma. Trace, Materiality and the Body in Drawing After 1940. 92.
37. Rawson. Drawing. 84, 92.
38. Chalmers. ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.’
39. Willats ‘Ambiguity in Drawing.’
40. Jarombek. ‘The Structural Problematic of Leon Battista Alberti’s De
pictura.’
41. See Booker. A History of Engineering Drawing, and Dubery and Willats.
Perspective and Other Drawing Systems.
NOTES 109
42. Necker. ‘Observations on Some Remarkable Optical Phenomena Seen in

Switzerland; and on an Optical Phenomenon Which Occurs on Viewing a
Figure of a Crystal or Geometrical Solid.’
43. Willats. ‘Ambiguity in Drawing.’ 2.
44. Rawson notes that ‘many art styles ( . . . ) make their units of enclosure
correspond exactly with those units of the notional world for which there
are spoken names ( . . . )’Drawing. 151.
45. van Eck and Webber ‘Function Ascription and Explanation: Elaborating an
Explanatory Utility Desideratum fro Ascriptions of Technical Functions.’
1371.
46. This system of realisation, in which environmental and social modulations
inhibit or facilitate particular goal-directed activities, resulting in the pro-
duction of particular arrays of marks in the case of both drawing and writing,
is derived in part from James Martin’s and Paul Thibault’s functional theo-
risations of language. See Martin. English Text: System and Structure, and
Thibault. Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body: An Ecosocial Semiotic
Theory.
47. New Gallery Walsall, Accession Number 1973.123.GR.
48. Jaques Derrida makes a similar etiological characterisation of the relation-
ship between a trace and its origin, writing ‘the origin did not even dis-
appear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the
trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.’ Derrida. Of
Grammatology. 61.
49. For a specific example of this type of realisation of social practices on the
activity of reading, see Joe Sutliffe Sanders’ deft analysis of differences
between comic strips and children’s picture books. Sanders. ‘Chaperoning
Words: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books.’
50. Harris. Rethinking Writing. 85–88.
51. See Halliday. ‘Towards a language-based theory of learning,’ and Martin.
English Text: System and Structure.
52. Willats. ‘Representation of Extendedness in Children’s Drawings of Stick
and Discs.’ 697.
53. Cohn is explicit in writing that he considers depiction to be a prerequisite for
theorising the visual equivalent of a cognitive language structure realised in visual
representations other than writing. Discussing what he calls ‘abstract’ images,
meaning non-depictive images (those in which Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in’ does not
take place), he writes: ‘these images play with modality alone, and have neither
grammar nor meaning.’ Unfortunately, he does not make a theorisation of
depiction part of his proposal of a system of ‘visual language.’ It is a serious
omission, given the unresolved theoretical controversy about the function of
depiction and the fact that he places this function, whatever he thinks it might be,
at the heart of his theory. Further, Cohn seems unaware that in defining
‘abstraction’ in this way, he runs the risk of stating that language encompasses
semiosis, rather than the other way around. Cohn, The Visual Language of
Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images. 6.
54. Harris. Rethinking Writing. 96–97.
55. Part/part relationships describe what are known in linguistics as dependency
structures. For discussions of dependency structures, see Melčuk,
Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice, and Ninio, Language and the
Learning Curve: A New Theory of Syntactic Development. Part/whole rela-
tionships describe what are known in linguistics as constituency structures.
For discussions of both constituency and scopal structures, see Matthews,
Syntactic Relations: A Critical Survey.
56. Note that Cohn does not define the grapheme as an indivisible item that
derives its indivisible status purely from its location in a graphic realisation of
cognitive lexicogrammatical structures. Rather (concurring with the theori-
sations of types of marks undertaken by technical activity theorists of draw-
ing, for example), he confuses the possible forms that a grapheme might
employ with its function in realising the system. He describes graphemes as
‘basic graphical shapes like lines, dots, and shapes.’ Cohn. The Visual
Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of
Sequential Images. 28. His definition is difficult to understand, because it
is fundamentally at odds with the systemic and functional linguistic models
he adopts elsewhere, such as those in Jackendoff, Foundations of Language:
Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution.
57. Halliday. Spoken and Written Language. 225–41.
58. Maynard discusses spatial projection systems in detail, although without
noticing that temporal organisation systems (whether modality-indepen-
dent, such as languages, or modality-dependent, such as music) can also
produce systematic visual topographic equivalences. He does note, however,
the distinction between spatial projection systems as guides to the location
of marks as independent from the morphology of marks themselves.
Maynard, Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic Expression. 19–52.
59. Andersen, The Geometry of an Art: The History of the Mathematical Theory of
Perspective from Alberti to Monge.
60. Cohn, The Visual Narrative Reader. 336.
61. Ibid. 316.
62. I find it difficult to recognise or understand Cohn’s description of unnamed
existing theories of drawing as a monolithic, unsystematic ‘Art Frame’ of think-
ing that he claims constitute ‘cultural’ approaches, as opposed to cognitive/
linguistic approaches. He writes ‘cultural notions about the nature of drawing
( . . . ) hold that drawings reflect a person’s unique and individualistic creative
nature, and each individual draws differently because it (sic) depicts their own
NOTES 111
perception on (sic) the world,’ and ‘drawing is looked at as a ‘skill.’ Conditioned

only by the expressive aims of the artist and their abilities.’ Cohn. The Visual
Language of Comics. 145, 197 and 4. He cites the work of Franz Cižek, the
founder of the Austrian Child Art Movement, and other art educationalists
associated with his ideas, as examples of unsystematic theorists of ‘free expres-
sion’ (op cit. 144). Whether an accurate summation of Cižek’s work or not,
Cohn utterly ignores both the serious and complex problems facing current
theorists of drawing, narrative drawing and depiction as well as the existing
range of systematic approaches taken by theorists of drawing (Gombrich,
Willats, Rawson, Maynard, de Preester, et al.), of narrative drawing (Peeters,
Groensteen, Baetens, Marion, Barker, et al.), of depiction (Podro, Hopkins,
Walton, Goodman, Sartre, et al.), and even theorists in fields more closely allied
with his own, who undertake some type of ‘cultural’ analysis (Jackendoff,
Thibault, Bakhtin, Vološinov, Johnson, Lakoff and Johnson, Kress, Kress and
Van Leeuwen, et al.). Cohn’s proposal that the approaches of these theorists,
ranging wide in their evaluation and application of ideas to complex problems
also faced by Cohn’s own theory (including ‘cultural’ problems), are unsyste-
matic in comparison with cognitive/linguistic approaches is nonsense. I do not
understand it.
63. Cohn. ‘Review: Comics and Language by Hannah Moidrag.’ np. Italics in
original.
64. See Note 53.
65. Cohn. The Visual Language of Comics. 8 and 11.
66. Ibid. 25
67. Ibid. 17.
68. Ibid. 21.
69. Ibid. 22.
70. Thibault. ‘Writing, Graphology and Visual Semiosis.’ 134.
71. Cohn. The Visual Narrative Reader. 330. See also Talmy. Towards a
Cognitive Semantics.
72. Op cit. 330 and Cohn. The Visual Narrative Reader. 58.
73. Ibid. 330.
74. Ibid. 331.
75. Ibid. 2 and 3.
76. This is true in every case. Even in sequences of depictive images that conform
to Scott McCloud’s category of ‘non-sequitur,’ in which sequences contain-
ing unexpected diegeses constitute the plot, the function of depiction itself
structures semiosis. Plot exists because the diegesis in each part of the
sequence is ‘seen-in,’ and the relationship between what is ‘seen-in’ in one
depictive image and what is ‘seen-in’ in the next itself constitutes plot.
Structurally, there is no such thing as an incoherent depictive image sequence,
as a result. On the other hand, the temporal/topological correspondence

structure of a written lexicogrammar demarcates a strict boundary between
coherence and incoherence, on the basis of the systematically correct or
incorrect proximity of the items that constitute it, both cognitively and
graphiotactically. McCloud. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 72–3.
77. Jackendoff. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar,
Evolution. 276.
78. He writes ‘many aspects of communicative competence are subsumed under
a larger theory of how people manage to carry out any sort of cooperative
activity ( . . . ) But ( . . . ) a theory of communicative competence and/or
performance doesn’t eliminate the need for a theory of grammatical struc-
ture.’ Op cit. 35. See also 280 and 332.
79. See Note 14.
80. Hopkins. Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Enquiry. 16.
81. Wollheim. Painting as an Art. 47.
83. Gombrich. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation. It is also illuminating here to consider what Hugo Frey
calls ‘tactics for illusion,’ an exemplar of the idea that illusions are always
rhetorical, in the sense that they constitute the contradiction of perceptual
knowledge with other types of knowledge, so that they ‘push for a particular
vision of thing, while simultaneously offering knowledge that contradicts it.’
The tactics that Frey discusses are perceptual/cognitive paradoxes that
disrupt viewing whilst cuing the viewer to expect, or even scrutinise, per-
ceptual/epistemological contradictions themselves. The handful of tactics
that Frey mentions are all interpretative instances of cognition interposing
perception whilst perception is maintained: disorienting changes in scale,
unexpected shifts in story-time, the retrospective signification of coded
images, story paradoxes and radical changes in the style of facture. Frey.
‘The Tactic for Illusion in Simon Grennan’s Dispossession,’ 55–68.
85. See Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the
Representational Arts. 122–23 and Schier. Deeper into Pictures: An Essay
on Pictorial Representation. Chapter 1, Section 6 and Peacocke. ‘Depiction.’
86. Walton. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational
Arts. 299.
87. Goodman. Languages of Art.
89. Ibid. 52.
90. Hopkins writes ‘we must not restrict unduly what counts as the outline
shape of an object. The notion is not just that of the object’s silhouette ( . . . )
Quite generally, the outline shape of an object may include the nested
NOTES 113
outline shapes of its parts.’ Ibid. 57. Correctly, he also dismisses an objection
to a syncretic geometry made on the basis of binocular vision: the visual
perceptual system itself generates a single visual experience in which geo-
metry is retained. Ibid. 62.
91. Ibid. 57 and 52. See also Note 40.
92. Ibid. 89.
93. Hopkins writes ‘There can be little difficulty with the claim that some
pictures are seen to resemble their objects in outline shape. The problem
is convincing oneself that all pictures do so, given the wide variety of
pictorial techniques and traditions.’ Ibid. 147.
94. Ibid. 109.
95. Ibid. 48. Italics in original.
96. Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology.
97. Hopkins acknowledges the possibility of a modulation of his theory by (a)
historic contingency and (b) differences in individual experiences of the
world. He writes ‘Nothing precludes different subjects seeing the same
marks as different things. All that is needed is some suitable variation in
the empirical determinants of the experience of resemblance. Given that,
and appropriate differences in histories of production, similar marks can
carry different pictorial meanings,’ and ‘Thus, the three-dimensional shapes
one sees marks on a surface as resembling will no doubt be determined in
key part by the shapes of things in one’s environment, with which one has
had perceptual contact in the past.’ Ibid. 151. However, he cannot commit
to exploring the impact of these paradigms on his theory, due to his belief in
the global significance of a human biology shared in all places and times—a
logical and a philosophical nonsense. He writes ‘it is not possible for a
difference in belief to constitute a difference in the character of an experi-
ence.’ Ibid. 117. Italics in original.
98. Walker. The Lexicon of Comicana. 28.
99. Schotter. The Economic Theory of Social Institutions.
100. Lévi-Strauss. Structural Anthropology. 159.
101. Mooney. The Body, the Index and the Other. 90–105.
102. Damasio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.
201–22.
103. Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 22.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid. 25.
106. Sheets-Johnstone. The Primacy of Movement. 155.
107. Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 276.
108. von Uexküll. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory
of Meaning.
109. Ibid. 46 and 48. Italics and German in original.
110. Ibid. 48–51. This structure is not similar to the stimulus /response model of
technical activity that I have discussed in relation to the theories of drawing
of Maynard, Rawson and Willats. Von Uexküll proposes that actions (‘effect
marks’) create properties, relative to perception as a realisation of physiolo-
gical capacities, not that these properties belong to the object.
111. Ibid. 52.
112. Ibid. 126.
113. Ibid. 94.
114. Ibid. 122
115. Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination
and Reason.
116. von Uexküll. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory
of Meaning. 145.
and Reason. 2–5.
118. Ibid. 3.
119. Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 225
and 228.
and Reason. xiv.
121. Johnson. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. 19–20.
122. In a personal email from Johnson, received by me on 15 January 2016, he
explains the creation of the term: ‘Thirty years ago we were, and still are, very
concerned about intellectualist and objectivist views of concepts, meaning and
reasoning that leave the body out of the story. ( . . . ) Putting ‘image’ before
‘schema’ was our way of trying to say that (image)schemas are embodied and
body-based. So the ‘image’ part was supposed to emphasise the imaginative
and embodied character of meaning, reasoning and knowing. When ‘image’ is
used in this way, it is obviously not just a VISUAL image, but includes patterns
of organism-environment interaction ( . . . ).’ More accurately, ‘image sche-
mata’ might be considered ‘force schemata,’ describing cross-modal capacity
and avoiding possible confusion between non-propositional structures and
their propositional realisations, were it not for the fact that the term ‘image
schemata’ has now been in general use in the field of cognitive linguistics, and
elsewhere, for thirty years.
and Reason. 5.
124. He also describes an image schema as ‘a recurring dynamic pattern of our
perceptual interactions and motor programmes that gives coherence and
structure to our experience,’ and as ‘a dynamic pattern that functions some-
what like the abstract structure of an image, and thereby connects up a vast
NOTES 115
range of different experiences that manifest this same recurring structure.’

Ibid. xiv and 2.
125. Ibid. 15. Of interest here is one of Jackendoff’s various descriptions of
‘spatial structure’ relative to semantic/cognitive structure in lexicogrammar,
as ‘the physical (or nonpropositional) structure of the model in which the
truth conditions of ( . . . ) conceptual structure are applied.’ Jackendoff.
Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. 12.
and Reason. 2 and 99.
127. Ibid. 4 and 28.
128. Ibid. 43 and 34.
129. Ibid. 114.
130. Ibid. 98.
131. Ibid. 36.
132. Ibid. 113.
133. Ibid. 137
134. Ibid. 29.
135. Ibid. 105 and 126.
Evolution. 21. Italics in original.
137. For example, see Gibbs. Embodiment and Cognitive Science and Gallese,
Ferari, and Umilta. ‘The Mirror Matching System: A Shared Manifold for
Intersubjectivity.’ and Katz. How Emotions Work and Sheets-Johnstone. The
Primacy of Movement and McNeill. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal
About Thought and Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
138. Massumi. Parables for the Virtual. 30.
139. Massumi. ‘Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.’
140. Fagin. The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expressions. 126.
141. McNeill. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. 20.
142. Ibid. 22 and 105.
143. Ibid. 105.
145. Katz. How Emotions Work. 178.
146. Abbate. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth
Century. 27.
148. Gibbs. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. 90.
149. Smyth. Greek Grammar. 677.
150. Luzar. Drawing upon Multiplicity: Mark, Body and Trace of Thought. 21.
151. Beattie. Visible Thought: The New Psychology of Body Language. 117.
153. Ibid. 186 and 190.

156. Shannon. ‘What Are the Functions of Consciousness?’
157. Beardsworth and Buckner. ‘The Ability to Recognize Oneself from a Video
Recording of One’s Own Movement Without Seeing One’s Body.’
159. Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension.
160. Botvinik and Cohen. ‘Rubber Hands “feel” Touch That Eyes See.’
161. Hutchinson, Davis, Lozano, Tasker, and Dostrovsky. ‘Pain-Related
Neurons in the Human Cingulated Cortex.’
162. Mead. Mind, Self, Society. 46.
163. McNeill. Hand and Mind:What Gestures Reveal About Thought. 92.
164. Ibid. 191.
165. Beattie. Visible Thought: The New Psychology of Body Language. 129.
166. Ibid.
167. Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
168. Gallagher. ‘Body Schema and Intentionality.’ 69.
169. See Cole. Pride and the Daily Marathon, and Valentini and Costall. ‘Visual
Perception of Lifted Weight from Kinematic and Static (photographic) dis-
plays.’ and Babcock and Freyd. ‘Perception of the Dynamic Information in
Static Hand-Written Forms.’
170. Sobchack. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. 291.
171. Scherer. On the Nature and Function of Emotion: A Component Process
Approach. 296.
172. Sheets-Johnstone. The Primacy of Movement.
173. Lazarus. Emotions and Adaptation. 230.
174. Erikson. ‘Patient Role and Social Uncertainty: Dilemma of the Mentally Ill.’
and Goffman. Stigma. 340.
176. Ibid. 6
177. For example, Gallagher notes the ‘two aspects of gesture, its inter-subjective
(communicative) and intra-subjective (cognitive) functions.’ Gallagher.
How the Body Shapes the Mind, 117. Italics in original.
178. Katz. How Emotions Work. 299. Italics in original.
179. In particular, the work of Stephen Kosslyn, who develops a ‘pictorial’ theory
and Zenon Pylyshyn, who develops a ‘proposition’ theory of visualisation.
See Kosslyn. Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate and
Pylyshyn. Computation and Cognition.
180. See Slezak. ‘The “Philosophical” Case Against Visual Imagery,’ and
Reisberg and Chambers. ‘Neither Pictures nor Propositions: What Can
We Learn from a Mental Image?’
NOTES 117
181. For a theorisation of the function of attention in perception and visualisa-

tion, see Tsal and Kolbert. ‘Disambiguating Ambiguous Figures by Selective
Attention.’
182. Both capacities have been demonstrated in Shepard and Cooper. Mental
Images and Their Transformations, and Kosslyn.Image and the Brain: The
Resolution of the Imagery Debate.
183. These explanations of visualisation also constitute an approach to memory.
Although memory is not my focus here, it is important for me to remind
myself that a theory of embodied visualisation must also suggest a theory of
embodied memory, rather than one based on the realisation of other struc-
tures, such as a ‘proposition’ model.
184. Thomas. ‘Mental Imagery.’
185. See Clancy. Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer
Representations, and Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of
Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental
Content.’ Thomas also notes embodied theorisations of visualisation in
Ramachandran and Hirstein. ‘Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology
Tells Us About the Biological Functions of Consciousness.’; Ellis.
Questioning Consciousness: The Interplay of Imagery, Consciousness and
Emotion in the Human Brain; Neisser. Cognition and Reality and
‘Anticipations, Images and Introspection.’ and Morgan. ‘The Two
Spaces.’ and Janssen. On the Nature of Mental Imagery; Sarbin and
Juhasz. ‘Towards a Theory of Imagination.’; Hochberg. ‘In the Mind’s
Eye.’; and Hebb. ‘Concerning Imagery.’
186. See Note 179.
187. Kosslyn.Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate, and Image
and Mind, and ‘Information Representation in Visual Images.’ Kosslyn and
Shwartz. ‘A Simulation of Visual Imagery.’ Tye. The Imagery Debate.
188. Kosslyn. Image and Mind. 6.
189. Slezak. ‘The “Philosophical” Case Against Visual Imagery.’
190. Pylyshyn. ‘The Role of Cognitive Architecture in Theories of Cognition.’
Fodor. The Language of Thought.
191. Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active
Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.’ 216.
192. Thomas writes ‘We imagine, say, a cat, by going through (some of) the
motions of examining something and finding that it is a cat, even though
there is no cat (and perhaps nothing relevant at all) there to be examined.
Imagining a cat is seeing nothing-in-particular as a cat ( . . . ).’Ibid. 218.
193. Ibid. 222.
194. Swain and Stricker. ‘Promising Directions in Active Vision.’
195. Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of Imagination? An Active
Perception Approach to Conscious Mental Content.’ 219.
196. Ibid. 220.

197. Ibid. 230. See Ryle. The Concept of the Mind. 248
Arts. 21–24.
199. He writes ‘‘imagination,’ in one important sense at least, just is our name for
the faculty of seeing as ( . . . ).’ Thomas. ‘Are Theories of Imagery Theories of
Imagination? An Active Perception Approach to Conscious Mental
Content.’ 232.
200. Here, a model of the function of the correlative realisation of schematic
structures in the adjudication of percepts, that is, in the production of
cognitive self-representation, very broadly follows Johnson’s discussion of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. See Johnson. The Body in the Mind: The
Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. 141, 147–53 and Kant.
Critique of Pure Reason.
201. De Preester writes that, in imagining, ‘hypotheses about what there is to see
or hear are still being put forward, giving rise to (potentially) conscious
experiences, but these hypotheses are not tested against reality.’ De Preester,
‘The sensory component of imagination: The motor theory of imagination
a203s a present-day solution to Sartre’s critique.’
202. De Preester’s ‘Motor Theory of Imagination’ extrapolates Thomas’s ‘per-
ceptual activity’ theory by introducing the concept of imagining as the
realisation of anticipated, but unfulfilled, motor commands, in which ‘The
distinction between anticipation and actual fulmovieent is ( . . . ) crucial to be
able to distinguish imagination from perception.’ De Preester. ‘The Sensory
Component of Imagination: The Motor Theory of Imagination as a
Present-Day Solution to Sartre’s Critique.’ 13.
Arts. 35.
204. Walton writes, ‘I find especially attractive the suggestion ( . . . ) that proposi-
tional attitudes be understood in terms of the ascription of properties to
oneself.’ Ibid. 36.
206. For example, see Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics and Chatman.
Story and Discourse and Genette. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method
and Genette. Narrative Discourse Revisited.
Arts. 273.
208. Ibid. 17.
Evolution, 330. Further, he considers that ‘Conceptualisation based on
NOTES 119
one’s own observations of imagination may conflict with the ‘received’

conceptualisation with which one desires to tune oneself.’ Ibid. 331.
212. Ibid. 323.
213. Broad. Five Types of Ethical Theory.
214. Vološinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. 21.
215. He writes ‘Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges.’
Destutt de Tracy. A Treatise on Political Economy. 6.
216. The use of the concept of the resistance to or promotion of types of imagining—
of ideas—in explaining how the subject is created and institutions reproduce
themselves, is first found in Marx and Engels.The German Ideology, in
Mannheim. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge
and in Gramsci. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 12, 259, 260.
CHAPTER 2
Narrative
2.1 THE INTERSUBJECTIVE BASIS OF DISCOURSE

Recall the two descriptions that I made of a woman trying to make a
drawing in Section 1.1.1. Description 1 proposed that the drawing was
made because a woman believed that her activities/marks could perform
the particular capacity of making a drawing. This description is aetiologi-
cal, in that it conceives of drawing such that goals define the activities
needed in order to achieve them. This aetiological conception of the
activity of trying to make a drawing creates a distinction between the
activity and its goal, establishing an idea of purpose. It encompasses a
generative idea of the failure of activities to achieve their goal, such as
making a drawing, by establishing this concept of purpose. It allows for
the activity to generate novel forms according to the pursuit of the
achievement of a goal alone, and it provides a way to conceive of phenom-
ena on the basis of distinctions between them and their antecedents and
consequences, according to goal-directedness.
Hence, representations, including drawings, are conceived as the con-
sequences of activities that are given status and identity solely in trying-to,
in failure-to and in success-in achieving the goal of making them. Recall
also that this description is only modified according to the realisation of
the general potential resources of the body, so that possible activities
undertaken in order to make a drawing occur spontaneously: any activity
can constitute a drawing activity if it is directed towards the goal of making
a drawing. Further, these activities can be interrupted or change during

122 2 NARRATIVE
the course of trying to achieve the goal of making a drawing, simply

according to the attempt to achieve that goal.
Two further ideas following this aetiological characterisation of a
woman trying to make a drawing, in Description 1. First, the identification
of purpose realises a conception of both utility—the use to which a
drawing is put, as a cause and a consequence of the activities that achieve
it—and the existence of a plan for its use. Second, the attempt to make a
drawing is further modulated by the woman’s own perception of both her
activities in trying to make the drawing and the drawing itself. She is
perceives her own activities and their results according to the purpose of
the drawing. Both of these ideas more than tacitly require a dialogic
conception of a complete ecology, in terms of which she attempts to
make a drawing. As I wrote: who was the woman making the mark?
What was her plan of action and goal? Who then looked at her drawing?
This requirement can be simply explained as a series of comparisons: the
status and identity of her activities is derived from their utility in reaching
the goal of making a drawing, for which there is a concept of utility and a
plan for use, made in comparison with all of the other possible activities
and uses that might be causes and/or consequences, within the body
ecology. The activity of trying to make a drawing is defined in comparison
with all of the possible activities that might be made in attempting to reach
other goals. They are only distinct from other types of activities under-
taken in order to achieve other goals.
The woman making the drawing defines these activities spontaneously,
as ‘not other activities.’ As she makes this comparison of possible and
produced activities, she also perceives that she makes this comparison. In
doing this, she perceives other paradigms of activities that are aetiologi-
cally subjective, as the recognised compared indices of activities realising
the general potential resources of the body in the pursuit of goals.
On the basis of these comparisons alone, she is able to perceive the
identities of activities according to their goal-directedness, mandated by
the ecology of the body. Their identity and status is constituted in the fact
that they are produced, and hence, their utility and plans for use are
spontaneously comprehensible, according to the aim of reaching a goal.
This is true for her self-perception and for perception generally. Goal-
directedness is not only a self-perceived cause. It is perceived in every
interoceptive and exteroceptive activity, according to this theorisation—
even in the growth of a tree or the pull of the tide. It is crucial here that I
recall that the environment is affective only in being perceived and recalled
2.1 THE INTERSUBJECTIVE BASIS OF DISCOURSE 123
as affective, according to the particular nominal physiological and cogni-

tive systems of an organism, relative to the organism’s instantial progress.
The tree is not intent upon growing nor is the tide intent upon raising or
lowering the level of the sea or, rather, it is of no significance if this is true
or not.
Hence, there is no reason why this explanation cannot encompass the
structural role of imagining relative to perception. On this basis, any per-
ceived activity is explained by deducing the teleological role played by
generalising the potential resources of the human body, as an activity that
can be deduced on the basis of environmental and social modulations.
Perception, including imagining, is then such an adjudication of the pro-
duction of the status of activities which, in turn, makes them comprehen-
sible in comparison to my own activities, my perception and understanding
of my own activities and my perception and understanding of the world.
This theorisation proposes an intersubjective basis for discourse,
according to a broad aetiological foundation in which comparisons
between actions and potential actions structure the creation of the subject
and perceptions, including imaginings, of other subjects as goal-directed,
in exactly the way that they structure perceptions and affective ideas
generally. The activities of the tree, undertaken in order to grow, of the
tide, pulling water higher or lower, and the woman, marking paper in
order to make a drawing, are all adjudicated—that is, given status and
identity— according to aetiological comparisons.
Historically, the definition and interrogation of these concepts has
resulted in a number of detailed descriptions of human experience, in
which theories of the human subject, society and environment are pre-
sented and debated. These descriptions constitute a group of theories that
crosses boundaries between the disciplines of philosophy, cultural theory,
sociology and science and share a focus on these concepts rather than any
methodology, tradition or point of view.1
The relationship between concepts of self-consciousness and percep-
tion is itself historically determined. Some philosophical descriptions of
self-consciousness have required descriptions of perception, whilst some
sociological and scientific descriptions of perception have required
descriptions of self-consciousness. As a result, a group of theorisations,
comprising the interrogation of self-consciousness and perception as
descriptions of human experience, has generated a broader field of
related topics and approaches, which are not reducible to the disciplines
in which they appear.
124 2 NARRATIVE
Rather, the field of topics and approaches displays a tendency for

theorists working in one discipline to utilise aspects of another.
Interrogating self-consciousness has led theorists of knowledge to
become social theorists, for example, and led cognitive scientists to
become theorists of embodiment.2 The definition of this broader field
is also the shared pursuit of concepts of self-consciousness and perception
across disciplines. The work of theorists sharing this pursuit is a self-
selecting set. Consequently, a set of existing theories of self-consciousness
and perception inform theorisations of intersubjectivity, and there is
justification in considering these theorists of self-consciousness and per-
ception to be also theorists of intersubjectivity. As constituents of this set,
I consider the work of Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Schütz, Mead and
Crossley.3
The work of these theorists broadly considers human consciousness as
mutually relative to the creation of a cognizant and perceiving subject
among subjects, constituting a general ecology. Taking this approach, it
connects psyche to society, self to institution and phenomena to semiosis.
Describing self-consciousness, the work of these theorists tends towards
conceptions of the subject as dual, reciprocal or shared. Describing per-
ception, their work tends towards concepts that are cross-modal, mobile,
aetiological and reciprocal. These tendencies often result in a further
heuristic tendency to identify self-consciousness with social signification
and perception with physical embodiment.
Other theorists take contradictory approaches in conceiving
self-consciousness and perception, particularly identifying knowledge
with archetypes and experience with systems of signification.4
Although these approaches might appear to be antithetical to theoretical
conceptions based in mutual reciprocity, one tendency does not cancel
out the other. Rather, the identification of archetypes and systems are
ways of describing other levels of experience underwritten by self-con-
sciousness and perception. Schütz describes this as a level on which the
self is mediated in social relationships, in which he includes typifications
and symbols, for example.5 Although the distinction is open to criticism,
according to Schütz, it is a semiotic level rather than an ontological one.
These approaches have a bearing on the current theorisation in so much
as they extrapolate theories of knowledge and communication from
conceptions of self-consciousness and perception, but they are parallel
to the field of study in which these conceptions are theorised in
themselves.
Theorisations of consciousness of consciousness, or self-consciousness,

develop from theorisations of consciousness. Self-consciousness implies a
relationship with conscious experience that exists as a distinct type of
phenomenal experience itself. The possible implications for conceptions
of consciousness that constitute this relationship are central to theories of
intersubjectivity.
Hegel describes consciousness as a series of types of sensate condi-
tion, each encompassed by the next.6 In all conscious species, he
argues, consciousness is constituted by sensation, perception and cog-
nition. However, these aggregate a type of consciousness that is unable
to make any distinction between itself and the objects of experience.
Brute consciousness is not conscious of modulating either a subject or a
world.
Hegel goes on to describe two further levels of consciousness, the last
of which defines self-consciousness for him. Beyond sensation, perception
and cognition, consciousness is constituted by desire. He identifies desire
as a type of consciousness encompassing the other types, in that it is
defined by experiences of lack. Lack of food produces the experience of
hunger, which is the desire for food, for example. The experience of lack
constitutes a type of self-consciousness in that it is a dual consciousness.
Through desire, a distinction emerges between consciousness as sensation,
perception and cognition and consciousness itself, or the experience of
lack. An easy comparison can be made with this theorisation and the
homeorhetic function of the body, in seeking to maintain equilibrium of
trajectory.
Superseding sensation, perception, cognition and desire, however,
Hegel defines a uniquely human capacity in a particular experience of
lack: the desire for the desire of others. This type of desire arises from
the distinction between consciousness (sensation, perception and cogni-
tion) and self-consciousness (consciousness of consciousness or the experi-
ence of lack) and subsumes them. Hegel describes this capacity as the
desire for recognition, or the capacity for being conscious of self-through
consciousness of others. He identifies the desire for recognition as a
mutual human capacity. Being self-conscious in our desire for recognition,
he argues, we experience our own consciousness as an object in the
experience of others. In doing this, he describes human consciousness as
a discursive relationship. The self is experienced as consciousness of con-
sciousness, motivated by the desire for recognition, which requires that we
experience ourselves as others experience us.
126 2 NARRATIVE
This model of human consciousness and perception seeks to explain

and generalise the development of human relationships from co-presence
to society. As such, human consciousness has an ethical dimension and a
historical dimension. It is also necessarily embodied. The desire for recog-
nition transforms sensation, perception, cognition and desire into the
society itself, whilst also making actions spontaneously meaningful.
This shift from subject to institution, in describing human conscious-
ness, is a cause for debate among commentators because of the ambiguity
of his language.7 The desire for recognition is conceived as both discursive
and antagonistic, in an ecology in which struggle is described as violently
coercive. Hegel describes the ways in which his model of human con-
sciousness is the basis for society as a ‘fight to the death’ resulting in
‘master/slave’ relationships, or the emergence of a binary coercive rela-
tionship in which degrees of capacity to influence always produce dom-
inance. Hegel’s fight to the death is an extrapolation of the ethical
dimension of the desire for recognition. Only by embodying the desire
for recognition in ethical relationships with others do human subjects
emerge, he argues.
He outlines three conditions for the creation of the subject. First,
individual desire for recognition is made pre-eminent among all other
desires and this pre-eminence is represented to others through mutual
display. Second, he argues that the individual must be prepared to risk the
loss of the subject in order for this to occur, even to the point of dying,
establishing the ethical value that the individual places upon this pre-
eminence. Third, this process, creating relative value judgements, repre-
sents a struggle for recognition, motivated by the desire for recognition.
This struggle, which is continual, dynamic and often combative, produces
every social relationships.
Having described the relationship between human self-consciousness
and the social realm as a definition of the human subject, Hegel describes
its historic aspect. Motivated by self-consciousness (the desire for recogni-
tion), the struggle for recognition generates both subjectivity and social
relationships through degrees of relative domination of other people or
submission to them. He discusses this relationship in detail, discussing
classes of people relative to each other in terms of domination and the
capacity to influence. His discussion is essentially a social theory seeking to
describe the ways in which society is structured, evolves and manages
relationships with resources. As such, the relationship only has bearing
upon his description of self-consciousness in so much as it establishes its
historical aspect. I am born with the desire for recognition and I join the
struggle for recognition immediately, as part of a human history of strug-
gle. In this relationship, however, Hegel also argues that any meanings
that we ascribe to phenomena, including the consciousness of others, is
mediated by the struggle for recognition. This idea emerges in the work of
other theorists of self-consciousness and perception: the idea that the
world is the ecology in which this instrumental struggle takes place.
However, Husserl argues that because consciousness entirely mediates
an experience of the world, it is not possible to conjecture an objective
world beyond it. Further, he defines consciousness as self-consciousness.
Consciousness is always phenomenal, even if this phenomenon is unavail-
able to experience except in consciousness—and apparent solipsism.8
Husserl is not interested in proving or disproving the existence of phe-
nomenal objects of consciousness. He does not conceive of experiences of
a phenomenal world other than consciousness. To avoid simple solipsism,
he describes a relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness
in which self-consciousness ascribes meaning to consciousness. It does not
signify that the objects of consciousness may or may not exist because self-
consciousness can only ascribe meaning to consciousness. He argues that
the only consciousness that we are aware of is a consciousness of the
phenomenal presence of consciousness.
The ways in which self-consciousness ascribes significance to percep-
tions of consciousness, in effect constituting the objects of consciousness,
also creates subjectivity as an object of consciousness. The self is consti-
tuted through the meaningful relationship of self-consciousness to the
objects of consciousness that it generates. Husserl still recognises solipsism
in his description. Although self-consciousness is a reflective conscious-
ness, reflection alone allows a single type of epistemological relationship
with other people. Whilst self is relative to consciousness or its objects,
creating agency, other people remain a type of object.9
This is an ethical problem, as objects have no agency, making indepen-
dent action and social collaboration impossible. Neither do objects have
ethical value. In answer to this problem, Husserl joins Hegel in proposing
mutual consciousness of other people as having self-consciousness. Even if
it is not verifiable outside consciousness, the experience of other people is
a type of consciousness in which we assume mutual self-consciousness.
Husserl describes this type of consciousness as being constituted by three
types of experience. First, he argues that other people are experienced as a
unique type of object. Second, as a category of object, other people are
128 2 NARRATIVE
experienced as having reciprocal experiences: I assume that they are con-

scious of me, as I am conscious of them. Third, my experience of every
other object of consciousness is determined by consciousness that others
are also conscious, so that I experience the world as a world also experi-
enced by others.
Husserl further proposes that I must perceive consciousness of others as
self-conscious, that is, as a particular type of object of consciousness. He
argues that this function occurs in two ways, (a) by recall of past experi-
ence— my self-consciousness allows me consciousness of objects as other
self-conscious subjects, implying that I am conscious of others as con-
scious because I am self-conscious—and (b) by imagining that phenom-
enal properties are assumed to be always alike, and hence, through the
attribution of like properties to phenomena that we imagine are alike.
Being conscious of my own agency and subjectivity, I imagine similar
agency and subjectivity as properties of others as types of objects of
consciousness. He argues that we are conscious of others both as types
of objects and as self-conscious subjects and describes this identification as
consciousness of relative points of view or, in my terms, the production of
discourse on the basis of the realisation of a structure of relative identities,
based on a model of consciousness of consciousness. The function of recall
and the function of imagined ascribed properties then become functions
of subjectivity and consciousness of others becomes a constituent of self-
consciousness.
However, the problem of solipsism remains. Husserl focuses exclusively
on the constitution of the consciousness of a subject, even as he describes
processes of mutual and reciprocal consciousness. Others remain creations
of the subject, empathy notwithstanding. This isolation of the subject in
relation to objects of consciousness is underwritten by an emphasis on
observation rather than interaction with others. It describes a private
rather than a shared consciousness Further, Husserl’s description of self-
consciousness does not identify a role for individual distinctiveness or
alterity. There is no discussion of subjective demarcation in the functions
of recall and the imagined ascription of properties, despite the fact that
subjects can be as meaningfully un-alike as they can be meaningfully alike.
Therefore, the isolation of subjective consciousness also has implica-
tions for perception and communication. Husserl does not describe how
individual consciousness and self-consciousness affect semiosis. The
description of the function of the imagined ascription of properties, in
particular, is not detailed enough to account for the fact that cognition,
perception, action and sensation are quite different types of objects of

consciousness: my experience of pain is utterly different to the sight of
another person in pain, for example. To touch is quite a different type of
object of consciousness than to be touched. These phenomena might
realise a shared structure that itself makes them comprehensible, but
Husserl does not describe how this occurs.
Hegel’s description of self-consciousness also raises the issue of solip-
sism. He argues that self-consciousness is only achieved relative to others
(in the desire for recognition), implying the existence of the world and
others in the world as independent agents as well as objects of conscious-
ness. As an object of consciousness, this world is an instrumental arena.
However, the desire for recognition itself is a process of individual con-
sciousness, only emerging as subjectivity in the struggle for recognition
that ensues with others. Although the struggle for recognition defines
both individual consciousness and the social realm, contradicting solip-
sism, this relationship is always antagonistic. As a type of interaction,
struggle, rather than cooperation, communication or any other of the
numerous ways in which subjects are mutually affective, characterises
self-consciousness as a consciousness of others.
The ways in which both Hegel and Husserl discuss solipsism are pro-
ductive of further theorisations of perception, applied in particular to
explaining the functions of recall and the imagined ascription of proper-
ties. Merleau-Ponty, Schütz and Mead describe these processes in detail.
Together, these developments constitute a description of intersubjectivity.
According to Merleau-Ponty, consciousness (following Hegel in
describing consciousness as sensation, perception and cognition) is an
engagement with its objects, rather than an awareness of them. He argues
that engagement is the particular type of human involvement that creates
both self-consciousness and consciousness of the consciousness of others.
Engagement replaces struggle in Hegel’s instrumental arena, whilst retain-
ing its phenomenal aspect. It allows Merleau-Ponty to extrapolate a role
for the perception in consciousness by conflating perception and cogni-
tion. The phenomenal body then provides the basis for the relationships
between consciousness and self-consciousness, promoting consciousness
as perspective, or the distinction between self and other/object.
This concept of engagement also reframes the problem of solipsism in
perceptual terms. Rather than approaching self-consciousness epistemolo-
gically, arriving at the problem of solipsism facing Hegel and Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty approaches self-consciousness by describing perception as
130 2 NARRATIVE
an engagement with objects of consciousness that is mutually affecting, in

the strict sense of affect as change.10 He discusses concepts of perception
as a stimulus to consciousness and perception as the adjudication of
stimulus. He argues against the idea of perception as stimulus on the
grounds that it is atemporal and general: there is no place for meaningful
discrimination between stimuli on the grounds of either prior experience
or relative significance and, as a result, self-consciousness is impossible. He
also argues against the idea of perception as a ‘post hoc’ judgement of
stimulus. This concept of perception, he argues, relies upon a definition of
conscious judgement that neither accounts for perceptual error, nor
describes the relationship between physical stimulus and an adjudicating
mind.
Neither stimulus nor judgement account for perception. Rather, he
describes perception as the search for an engagement with a phenomenal
experience of subjective otherness itself.11 Consequently, percepts
becomes meaningful because the function of perception provides mutual
perspective as a physical engagement with other subjects. Engagement
does not allow for private representations of either these subjects or other
objects of consciousness.12 Merleau-Ponty argues that this definition of
engagement, as the function of perception, provides the basis on which
properties can be ascribed to the self-consciousness of others. Phenomenal
engagement itself repudiates Schütz’s objection to the imagined ascription
of properties. Affects—that is, phenomenal changes in an ecology ascribed
to the agency of another—generate responsive actions, so that action and
response constitute a matrix of mutual phenomenal experience. Seeing is
not being seen, but the experiencing of both in an engagement with
others is the basis of self-consciousness as mutual differentiation.
Merleau-Ponty points out that this mutual action and response does
not itself realise any ethical aspect. An ethical aspect arises out of mutual
engagement, but this ethical aspect does not structure self-consciousness.
He describes this model as encompassing both ethical and unethical
actions, individuals, institutions and society.
Finally, he highlights the significance of motion to his description of
perception as engagement. Motion introduces a temporal aspect to the
description, which reflects Hegel’s inclusion of history in the creation of
the societies arising from the struggle for recognition. Merleau-Ponty’s
description of perception constitutes a system of human actions made
relative to each other, without objectification. In this system, human
subjects are not reducible to individuals and actions are mutually
affecting.13 Accordingly, cognition is always-already phenomenal and self-

consciousness is perceived through the perception of phenomenal changes
in mutual, that is, social action. This description refines and extends
descriptions made by Husserl and Hegel. It describes intersubjectivity in
so much as its processes define human subjects as both irreducible to
individual consciousness and mutually embodied.
Schütz makes a distinction between two aspects of engagement, in
which the motives and possibilities of action are circumscribed in different
ways.14 Actions index subjective self-consciousness because they make
representations of the motives of the subject to itself. However, the
same actions might represent quite different motives to other subjects, as
they engage with them. The same phenomenal representation has differ-
ent meanings for the acting and responding subjects. For example,
whereas an observer might imagine that an activity constitutes ‘drawing
a comic strip,’ the person drawing might imagine that it constitutes
‘relaxing after a hard day at the office.’ Therefore, engagement has two
aspects, representing at least two states of consciousness and at least two
subjects.
Schütz is careful to point out that this distinction is not the same as
intention and interpretation, because the person acting in each case might
be acting unintentionally. Rather, the distinction lies in the different ways
in which actions phenomenally perceived make representations of them-
selves to consciousness, and in the possibility of the ascription of different
meanings to them. Further, he argues that affecting action is only aetio-
logically meaningful, in that it represents others’ motivation. However,
those motives are not themselves perceived in the action by respondents.
For them, meaning lies in an interpretation of the action according to their
own motives. The person acting and the person responding cannot share
meaning. Rather, their engagement with each other constitutes an inter-
world in which physical action is made meaningful by engagement itself.
Because each person engages with different motives underwritten by self-
consciousness, this interworld is generated as relative perception. Subjects’
motives are irreducible to any individual consciousness, like subjectivity
itself.
Engagement is then underwritten by a shared assumption that action is
meaningful, even if perception of motives cannot itself be shared. It is
achieved through the perception of phenomenal actions as an embodi-
ment of an agreement that actions are motivated by an intention ‘to
affect.’ Schütz defines this shared assumption as a social relationship,
132 2 NARRATIVE
arguing that it is applicable to every type of social structure. As in Merleau-

Ponty’s description, Schütz connects the processes of self-consciousness
and perception with the structure of society. Schütz proposes that four
types of social relationship emerge from engagement and the shared
assumption of intention to affect. These are co-present relationships,
relationships with contemporaries beyond co-presence, relationships with
predecessors and relationships with successors. Every subject perpetually
acts within all of these relationships.
Copresence is of greatest interest to Schütz. He describes the ways in
which copresent engagement occurs as the foundation for all other social
relationships. It occurs between intersubjects whose lives continually gen-
erate mutual perception through close proximity, who are self-conscious
and ‘other-affecting.’ In copresence, subjective differences, such as per-
ceived motive and individual history are agreed to be irrelevant to social
collaborations (such as communication) if they do not adversely affect
them. Even if actions are antagonistic, copresent engagement involves
these types of mutual agreement. In cases of conflict, for example, subjects
are not only acting to inflict or avoid harm, they are undertaking social
roles that represent these motives differently. Conflict, the task in hand, is
unaffected.
Schütz describes the operation of copresence as typification. This
results from the copresent agreement to accept the other’s perspective as
a self-conscious subject, whilst simultaneously making subjective interpre-
tations of their actions. Typification is a practical corollary of the process of
copresent engagement, allowing each subject institutional participation, in
which iterations are made relative to norms, or typifications. Then, copre-
sent engagement is self-consciousness framed as an instrumental objecti-
fication of other subjects and self, through typification, alongside a mutual
recognition of consciousness.
As an intersubjective model of self-consciousness, Schütz’s typification
reflects Mead’s description of two aspects of consciousness that produce
subjectivity: ‘I’ and ‘Me.’15 ‘I’ equates to consciousness alone, whereas
‘Me’ describes consciousness’s image of itself. However, Mead does not
follow Husserl in an epistemological description of self-consciousness.
Rather, he agrees with Schütz and Merleau-Ponty in according engaged
perception a modulating role in our consciousness of the world. ‘I’ and
‘Me’ are only phenomenally perceptible. Mead’s ‘Me’ resembles Schütz’s
typification. It results from a process of engagement with a differentiated
other (initially ‘I’) on the basis of an agreement of ‘intention to affect’. In
this way, Mead argues, the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘Me’ accounts for
reflection and social collaboration, reproducing the structure of self-
consciousness.16
Finally, Schütz argues, symbolic representations of these conditions of
copresence constitute descriptions of group identity and social status
derived from participants’ agreement to the completeness of each typifica-
tion. The three other types of social relationship that Schütz describes are
modifications and derivations of copresence. Relationships with contem-
poraries beyond copresence are mediated by technology. Schütz describes
technology as types of agent other than copresent human agents, encom-
passing every type of semiosis and physical trace. He argues that these
technologies are reducible to the subjects and subject histories from which
they derive. They are only meaningful relative to the subjects they repre-
sent. This function can again be described as a realisation relationship.
Relationships with predecessors and successors occur through physical
traces of copresent and contemporary engagement, either generated in
current action and oriented towards some future perception or modified
from the past.
Schütz’s descriptions of relationships with contemporaries beyond
copresence, relationships with predecessors and with successors, take
Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the significance of embodiment further.
Schütz argues that every form of technology represents the particular
remote engagement between individuals and social groups. Not only
does the embodiment of intersubjective relationships include ‘the
body,’ following Merleau-Ponty, but also the transformation of its
whole ecology, through technological modulation, the objects of that
modulation and their traces. Schütz argues that these traces are signifi-
cant only in so much as they are reducible to the co-present subjects that
generate them.
Considered together, descriptions of self-consciousness and percep-
tion by Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Schütz and Mead construct a
nuanced and sometimes contradictory definition of intersubjectivity.
They share points of insight, arrived at by quite different methods
and different points of origin. Crossley refers to many of these insights
in order to arrive at a characterisation of intersubjectivity.17 First, he
writes, ‘human subjectivity is not ( . . . ) a private inner world; which is
divorced from the outer (material) world; ( . . . ) it consists in the
worldly praxes of sensuous, embodied beings and . . . is therefore pub-
lic . . . ’ Second, ‘subjectivity consists in a pre-reflexive . . . engagement
134 2 NARRATIVE
with alterity, rather than in an ( . . . ) objectification of it ( . . . ).’ Third,

‘human action ( . . . ) necessarily assumes a socially instituted form and
that this form is essential to its meaningfulness ( . . . ).’ Finally, ‘human
action ( . . . ) arises out of dialogical situations ( . . . ) that are irreduci-
ble to individual human subjects.’18
These conditions of intersubjectivity reflect a group of underlying
principles: the processes of engaged perception mitigate against solipsism;
consciousness of the ecology of the body is the basis for consensual
misapprehension; perception is embodied and realises the general poten-
tial resources of the body; human subjects are irreducible to individual
consciousness and the physical traces of human actions are only mean-
ingful in so much as they reflect relationships between subjects.
There are many possible objections to these conditions and the princi-
ples underlying them, as an approach to describing self-consciousness and
perception and, consequently, as an approach to the production of sub-
jects, understanding and semiosis. In particular, the idea that forms of
communication embody intersubjective relationships from which they
derive meaning, described by Schütz, can be contradicted by the idea
that these forms are neutral vehicles—a technical-activity theorisation, I
might say—and by the idea that they are objects that mediate meaning in
themselves.
However, these contradictions are not irreconcilable. It is possible to
designate and analyse structures of objective forms, and their develop-
ment, without deducing either that these forms mediate meaning inde-
pendently of self-consciousness or that self-consciousness requires a
monadic ego. For example, in seeking to describe the relationship
between consciousness and the objects of experience, Husserl’s logical
scepticism leads him to conflate the two. For Husserl, consciousness of
consciousness constitutes our total experience. Consequently, the desig-
nation and analysis of the structures of objective forms is also the desig-
nation and analysis of the processes of self-consciousness. Schütz’s
theories develop this idea in detail, identifying different structures of
objective form with different intersubjective processes and different
levels of social interaction.
Following Schütz, Crossley’s collated conditions of intersubjectivity
constitute a set of instrumental terms for analysing social production,
relative to the processes of self-consciousness. They turn intersubjective
descriptions of self-consciousness and perception towards an analysis of
specific situations, including representations.
2.2 NARRATIVE REALISATION OF INTERSUBJECTS 135
2.2 NARRATIVE REALISATION OF INTERSUBJECTS

Because Schütz describes technologies as types of agent other than copre-
sent human agents, these technologies are productive of representations
that realise the subjects and subject histories from which they derive.
Hence, I can theoretically propose that utility, utility plans and the pro-
duction of the status and identity of representations, described in an
aetiological characterisation of activities, are determined by the specific
relationships between subjects and subject histories in which they are
realised.
If perceived or imagined properties are only perceived or imagined as
indexical realisations of subjects and subject histories, produced ‘in order
to,’ then representations first realise the structures of relationships
between subjects and subject histories, whatever other structures they
might realise according to definitions of register and the histories of
registers, inhibited and facilitated by the general potential resources of
the body.
This constitutes a general theorisation of discourse that founds and
encompasses differences in register and, in fact, accords the status of
representation to every intersubjective affect. In this model, there is no
structural differentiation between types of affect, because affects are solely
perceived and adjudicated according to their production through such
relationships. On this basis, I can claim that any object first represents the
relationship between the subjects for which it is an object of conscious-
ness, due to the fact that the status and identity—and production—of
these objects realises this relationship.
This proposal is deeply antithetical to technical-activity theorisations of
perception, cognition and communication but is implicit or even self-
evident, if not necessarily explicitly described, in theorisations of semiosis
that incorporate conceptions of alterity as structuring principles: for exam-
ple, theorisations of linguistic pragmatics, discursive analysis of narrative
and ‘social semiotics.’19 In particular, Schütz’s conception of the consti-
tutive function of representations, as realisations of intersubjective rela-
tionships, plus Crossley’s description of the intersubject, broadly
substantiate existing conceptions of the structure of narrative.
In identifying this broad mutual substantiation, I claim no major
insight.20 A comprehensive comparative study of Schütz’s theory (or
Crossley’s principles) and existing theories of narrative is not my purpose
here, and the degree of significance of such studies will derive from the
136 2 NARRATIVE
level of scrutiny that these comparisons require. That is another task.

Rather, my idea that these theoretical structures can also be conceived as
the structure of narrative will be an attempt to characterise narrative as
discourse according to Schütz/Crossley principles. If I recall Crossley’s
principles, I notice that the last two, in particular, suggest that a systematic
extrapolation is possible, which will explain experiences of narrative. To
recall, these two last principles are: (a) human subjects are irreducible to
individual consciousness and (b) the physical traces of human actions are
only meaningful in so much as they reflect relationships between subjects.
In vernacular speech, when I speak of any form of narrative representa-
tion, I invariably mean ‘plot,’ or the object of representation. When I speak
in this way, I mean that narrative sense is derived entirely from what is being
told or shown, rather than from the situation or form of the telling or
showing. Consequently, I make an habitual proposal that conflates the
structure of plot with the structure of narrative. Using this sense of words, I
propose a sequential and linear structure of plot as the organising principle
of narrative. When I do this, I describe narrative erroneously as ‘just a
sequence that starts and moves inexorably to its end,’ for example.21 In
fact, in speaking in this way, the property of being linear–sequential that I
propose in telling or showing a plot, is only one of the possible temporal
properties contributing to the way in which narrative organises itself.
Prince writes ‘narrative ( . . . ) underlines the contract between narrator
and narratee; that contract on which the very existence of narrative
depends.’22 This ‘contract’ is definitive, in that it organises a series of
structural relationships between the activities of telling/showing, what is
told/shown and the activities of perceiving both telling/showing and
what is told/shown, so that narrative is ‘the representation (as product
and process, object and act, structure and structuration) of one or more
real or fictive events communicated by one (...), or several [people] . . . (...)
to one (...), or several [other people].’23 There are also possible definitors
that typify narrative content, such as sequence and continuity, as well as
habitually narrative registers but, in Prince’s opinion, definitions of narra-
tive made through content and register are contingent upon the single
definitive relationship between someone making a representative action,
the action/trace itself and someone perceiving them both.
This is a very broad definition. For Prince, whose task is not the
comparison of narrative with principles of intersubjectivity, this creates a
problem because it does not distinguish narrative from ‘representations of
a random series of situations and events,’24 But Prince also sees the
possibilities of an aetiological description of narrative, in the sense that

narrative can be any type of representative action made ‘in order to’ tell/
show a plot (whatever that might be). Aetiology neatly makes a distinction
between the organising principles of a plot of a register and the structure
of narrative itself. In Prince’s definition, neither registers nor the objects of
representation constitute narrative structure. All representations exhibit
narrative structure, because this structure theoretically encompasses both
the representation and the intersubjects that it realises—that is, the sub-
jective relationship between people who communicate with each other,
represented in the physical form in which this relationship is realised.
This model of the structure of narrative, which constitutes someone
making a representative action, the action/trace itself and someone per-
ceiving them both, is foundational, although it is not necessarily described
in this way by narratologists. For example, the key distinction producing
theorisations of narrative is often made between what is told/shown and
the activity of telling/showing. In a strict description according to
Crossley’s principles of intersubjectivity, this bifurcation unhelpfully elides
those distinct subjects that emerge in the activities of telling/showing: the
subject making and perceiving the representation and the subject perceiv-
ing the representation. For my purpose, such a bifurcation represents
nothing more than a historically contingent theoretical regrouping of a
similar range of affects.
For example, Benveniste places what is told/shown in a distinct realm
of time which he called ‘story’ and the other emerged subjects in relation-
ship, such as a ‘narrator,’ ‘author’ and ‘reader’ in another realm of time,
which he called ‘discourse.’ But he does not systematise these discursive
relationships.25 Seymour Chatman developed his structure further, with
the addition of what he describes as ‘background information’ to the
structure of discourse, in the present. Chatman describes this background
information as a fully realised subject relative to the representation, with
particular emphasis on the epistemological status of this subject as recalled
experience.26 These analysts argue that causal distinctions between types
of embodied time are the structuring principle of narrative. They also
define narrative as a relationship between discourse and story in which
both are dependently significant. Unlike Prince, they do not make explicit
the network of causal events that lead from these positions to the creation
of different subjects.
On this basis, the theorisation of narrative historically falls very broadly
into two areas of study that are identified by their placing of emphasis in
138 2 NARRATIVE
the study of the relationship between discourse and story. Although these
areas of study both consider the relationship between discourse and story,
they constitute different approaches to defining narrative itself. Because
the word ‘narrative’ means both the activity of telling and the content of
what is told it is important to bear this distinction in mind.
Narratology with a theoretical emphasis on story has the longer history.
It focuses on the relationship between representation and story: on the
form of enunciative acts themselves. Genette early proposed that the study
of narrative be focussed upon verbal language alone, although this is by no
means a majority view.27 Alternatively, narratology with an emphasis on
discourse attempts to explain the relationships between someone making a
representative action, the action/trace itself and someone perceiving them
both, in which all of these phenomena have representative significance.
Consequently, theorists with a focus on discourse often characterise nar-
rative as these relationships themselves.28 Hence, this approach to narra-
tive seeks to establish and develop the structural principles of discourse.
For example, Freytag identifies the discursive structure necessary for the
representation of types of emotional intensity, such as suspense, in dra-
matic narrative through an analysis of fictional tragedy.29
Highly complex descriptions of the structure of story have developed
according to this approach. Shklovski proposes categorical distinctions
between types of time in the emergence of story, describing a chronological
sequence of events (‘fabula’) that provide the information constituting a
plot, but which remain unknown except in the organisation of the story
through which they appear (‘sjuzet’) Fabula and sjuzet are not analogous to
a Chatman-like story and discourse nor is any relationship outside story
described as significant to the production of story itself. Fabula is a struc-
tural function of the story only, and the question as to where and how it
constitutes knowledge remains unanswered.30 Developing the idea of an
untold sequence of events that is realised in story, White’s identification of
‘anticipation’ as a structural function of history narratives alludes to a
relationship between telling/showing and what is told/shown, without
breaking its theoretical bounds. In the case of the telling of ‘history,’ it is
simply the case that the fabula is constituted of experiences that actually
occurred, according to White.31
Bakhtin ascribes the structural potential for multiple voices to story.
These voices, he argues, particularly in the genre of the literary novel, are
the products of many possible sequences of events, which are only partially
represented through the sjuzet. Bakhtin describes how the entire narrative
voice, as well as the sequence and time of the story, is structured by the
relationships between these fictional voices.32 Genette also ascribes multi-
ple relative voices to story in the concept of focalisation. These voices
establish points of view relative to each other, but only considering repre-
sentation as brute—Genette in no way suggests that focalisation itself
realises other discursive structures. For example, an omniscient narrator
is described as representing ‘zero’ focalisation, remaining unconstrained
by the verisimilitude of the narrative itself. ‘Internal’ and ‘external’ foca-
lisations represent types of constraints derived from the position of voices
relative to others, but exclusively within the story.33
Considering the comic strip register only, Groensteen describes differ-
ent types of voice in the story as epistemological categories rather than
relative points of view. Comics’ polymodalism constitutes a unique type of
story structure, he argues, comprising three voices as three epistemological
categories: narrator, monstrator and recitant. Because he identifies narra-
tive voice with the physical characteristics of the comics strip register itself,
Groensteen’s description of the structure of what is told in comics edges
towards the broader field of the analysis of telling.34
The identification of explicit and implicit time, points of view and
multiple voices in descriptions of the structure of story have allowed
theorists whose emphasis is upon discourse, in the relationship between
discourse and story, to also provide descriptions that imply the realisation
of intersubjects in the structure of narrative. In particular, Barthes and
Todorov describe types of story structure that exist in relation to types of
reception, in which story is only comprehensible it its terms. In literary
novels, for example, Barthes’s identifies ‘codes,’ or a system of social
norms, in terms of which story appears. These include linear sequence,
character traits, disclosure and equivocation, delay and binary oppositions.
These codes realise aspects of discourse, but they aim to describe the
structure of story and do not in themselves represent an analysis of
discourse, or a description of the wider relationships implicit in telling
relative to what is told. There is no system of codes, for example, nor an
explanation of their appearance relative to each other or to perception,
experience, imagination and memory in general.35
Similarly, Todorov’s description of verisimilitude outlines a relationship
between enunciator and enunciatee as the way in which genres are struc-
tured, but this relationship is an instrument for textual comprehension
rather than a description of the structure of a relationship between dis-
course and story. Narrative verisimilitude is an effect of discourse, but only
140 2 NARRATIVE
as a principle of coherence in story, rather than a relationship between the

intersubjects and representations.36
Another tradition in the study of story overlaps heavily with social
anthropology. Propp describes an invariable number of motifs that struc-
ture every story. These motifs can have different relative functions in
specific uses, but they retain paradigmatic identities. The combination of
these motifs, Propp argues, constitutes a ‘deep’ or invariable structure of
story consistent across cultures and historical periods.37 Similarly, Lévi-
Strauss, Bremond and Greimas describe structural homologies among
stories from different cultures and historical times. Lévi-Strauss describes
a small and unchanging number of relationships between structural com-
ponents such as phenomes,’ ‘mythemes’ (repeated situations, events,
actions and relationships) and cognitive ‘principles’ represented by verbal
language, such as antonyms. They argue that this structure of story
provides a general definition the human condition, in a sense defining
discourse absolutely in story.38
The identification of distinct levels of structure in what is told describes
a relationship between story and discourse proposed by de Saussure. For
de Saussure, the structure of story derives from the possibilities of realising
a lexicogrammar in representations and inhibits or facilitates every iterative
representation in discourse. In this sense, de Saussure describes an institu-
tional structure of story. His description is analogous with the ‘deep’ and
‘surface’ structures described by Greimas and Lévi-Strauss, turning the
relationship between the two into a matter of a type of performance
according to constraints of production and giving it a historical aspect.
De Saussure’s ‘deep’ verbal language structure has the characteristic of
being changed over time by the accumulation of habits and innovations
made at the level of ‘surface’ structures, in each present-time iteration.
Over time, present discourse significantly changes the ‘deep’ structure of
story.39
Approaches to discourse analysis utilise concepts of dialogue to explain
the relationships between discourse and story. Indicative is Ricoeur’s
description of narrative as a hermeneutic process of understanding action,
through the interpretative functions of anticipation and memory. For
Ricoeur, narrative makes representations of time, constituted by ‘objective
time,’ which is a theoretical universal time, and ‘subjective time,’ which is
constituted by subjective experience. Narrative mediates past experience,
through memory and anticipation of future events, by providing a struc-
ture for referring to both. In this theorisation, there is no also distinction
between experience and representation in the structure of narrative—

someone making a representative action and someone perceiving both
the representation and the action agree to treat representation as a type
of present-time experience that modulates memory. Hence, Ricoeur
defines narrative as a transformation of intention (or orientation towards
the future) to action, creating the axis around which memory of past
events and anticipation of this transformation take place. Therefore, nar-
rative is not reducible to component parts (such as story and discourse, or
discrete elements that structure either) but is the process by which one
mutually transforms the other. Neither what is told, nor telling to, can be
categorised as fact or fiction in this sense. What is told about is not a
fictional realm but is a method of interpreting action in both real and
fictive worlds.40
Because Ricoeur describes narrative as a process of transformation, for
him it is a function of self-consciousness that allows human beings to
experience representations of time—one’s own and others’ past and antici-
pated actions—as socially and historically coherent.41 Similarly, a concep-
tion of narrative as an irreducibly reciprocal, iterative relationship between
types of time, represented as types of knowledge, informs descriptions by
Jakobson, Iser, Rimmon-Kenan, Fish and Vološinov. These theorisations
of narrative parallel with much greater explicitness the principles of
Schütz/Crossley intersubjectivity.
Jakobson describes the structure of the relationship between story and
discourse as having six components, none of which are reducible to either
story of discourse, and in which the differences in the relationships
between components constitutes a meaningful function. For example,
his ‘referent’ (or the object of representation) cannot appear without the
modulation of a ‘code’ (by which he means the socially agreed form of
expression, unsaid in the plot (i.e. fabula) but explicit in the ‘message’ (i.e.
sjuzet) and the ‘contact’ or the form of enunciation. At the same time,
these aspects have an effect on someone making a representative action,
and someone perceiving both the action and the representation (which he
calls an ‘emotive function’ and a ‘conative function’). All of these aspects
are required to function simultaneously for narrative to exist, encompass-
ing real and fictive worlds.42
Iser structures narrative around the type of relationships that are socially
possible between someone making a representative action and someone
perceiving both the action and the representation. He describes the roles
of unseen and unvoiced subjects, which he calls the ‘implied reader’ and
142 2 NARRATIVE
the ‘implied author,’ the existence of which represent an mutual aetiolo-

gical expectation of or the changes wrought by story and discourse as types
of affect. Someone making a representative action expects someone
perceiving both the action and the representation to understand it and
someone perceiving both the action and the representation expects to
find meaning. Following one of Schütz’s descriptions of communication,
Iser argues that what is told is constituted in the form of an agreed
mutual misunderstanding.43 This relationship between ‘enunciator,’
‘implied author,’ ‘enunciatee’ and ‘implied reader’ is further developed
by Rimmon-Kenan, according to whom there is no functional boundary
between story and discourse: they are mutually affecting.44 Fish and
Vološinov also reflect this idea. Fish argues that the reception activities
of someone perceiving both the action and the representation transform
what is told into affordances.45 Vološinov describes the reciprocal relation-
ship between telling to and what is told as a mutual mediation of the
experience of someone making a representative action expects someone
perceiving both the action and the representation, realised in the form of
representations. What is told mediates telling to, and telling to mediates
what is told. For Vološinov, distinguishing between fact and fiction is not
a structural aspect of narrative in this sense, because narrative is defined as
discourse encompassing story.46
Descriptions of narrative as a structural relationship between discourse
and story suggest whole-ecological interpretations that bring alterity to
bear on the analysis of semiosis. This way of approaching narrative sug-
gests an intersubjective description of the relationships required to tell/
show a story, which might conform to Shültz/Crossley principles of
intersubjectivity. Approaching stories in this way, non-verbal, multimodal
registers, fictions, representations, social milieus and any of the forms in
which representations are made can be considered relative to each other,
bringing descriptions of embodiment, intermodality and relative intersub-
jectivity into view.
2.2.1 Further Implications of an Aetiological Characterisation

of Representations
In all circumstances, subjects and subject histories structure and are hence
indexed by, the technological production of representations: subjects are
realised by these representations. Utility, utility plans and the production
of the status and identity of representations, described in an aetiological
characterisation of activities, are determined by the specific relationships

between subjects and subject histories in which they are realised.
The objects of representations, in so much as their production, appear-
ance and meaning is derived from the structure of intersubjective relation-
ships, are also distinguished by the possibility of having the function of
referral, within the affective possibilities realised in every instance accord-
ing to pragmatic definitions of register and the histories of registers. I have
theorised in some detail the function of referral according to aetiological
characterisations, in Chapter 1. I have also discussed the ways in which
types of representation are systematised by conventional and institutional
realisations of the general potential resources of the body, as propositions
and the role of imagination in these realisations.
The function of referral explicitly produces a relationship between
propositions and the whole homeorhetic ecology in which a representa-
tion is made. The function of referral locates two things: (a) the repre-
sentation relative to the ecology in which it is produced and (b) the object
of representation relative to the form of representation, relative to the
ecology in which it is produced. The first of these functions directly
realises the structure of intersubjective relationships: the appearance of a
form of representation made ‘in order to.’ The second of these functions
nests inside the first, as a consequence of referring to some other experi-
ence of the ecology, not simply in making a proposition, true or false. In
this sense, referral indexes aspects of the ecology, establishing both the
coherence of the representation and the coherence of the ecology, by
creating implication and inference.47 For example, in hearing someone
say ‘There’s our team, coming into view..,’ in verbal language, simulta-
neous with my seeing both speaker and team, referral produces the mean-
ing of the utterance relative to my experience of the speaker and my view
of unfolding events. The function of referral, then, not only realises a
general structure of intersubjects in every instance, in making a proposi-
tional representation, but explicitly indexes aspects of other types of
experience of the ecology by making a report upon them the object of
representation.48
Although I am here broadly following particular theorisations of speech
acts, this is not limited to verbal language representations. As I have
described, the objects of depictive images make propositions about shared
qualities. Visual referring makes a type of proposition about qualities
shared with other specific types of experience: not simply a proposition
of an imagined shared visual experience of the quality ‘red,’ for example,
144 2 NARRATIVE
but an imagined shared visual experience of the quality ‘that red.’ In every
case, the function of referring, as reporting, constitutes both a summary
and an assessment of the object of representation, relative to the whole
ecology in which the depiction appears and memories of experiences of
other depictions, objects of depiction and their ecologies. Multiple refer-
ences to recalled representations and previous discourse are possible and
indeed accumulate within the inhibitions and opportunities of the ecology
previously discussed.49
An advantage of considering the function of referral in this way—as a
type of proposition that reports upon other aspects of an experience of the
whole ecology in which a representation is made—lies in the allocation of
significance to specific temporal relations between those experiences that
are referred to and the production and experience of the representation
itself. To understand a referral requires (a) a knowledge of those other
aspects of the ecology to which it refers and (b) an implicit prior knowl-
edge of the experience of a previous discursive ecology—that is, of other
referring propositions and the ways in which they related to the form and
object of representation. Then, the function of referral, in the sense of
being a report on past and present experiences, becomes a series of
revisions in which each prior report also constitutes commentary on
both the form of representation, the use of the referral and the whole
ecology of the representation, which shapes understanding of referrals in
future representations.50
As such, the function of referral requires the comprehension of the
causes and consequences in which the representation and its object
appears—that is, the place of the referral in a trajectory of past, current
and future exchanges and their ecologies. Thus, comprehension is always
the inference of the progress of a representative instance among many, in a
plan for communication, in which a representation plays a part, but in
which proposition, and especially the function of referral, not only realises
the relationships between intersubjects, but serves to create the general
temporal characteristics of the ecology.51
Following this rationale, it is possible to propose a general mechanism
by which the function of referral allows the inference of intentions other
than those directly produced in propositional representations or, indeed,
intentions other than those directly inferred by any form and object of
representation themselves. As discussed in terms of the experience of the
Eagle drawing in Chapter 1, a representation and its referring object offer
opportunities for the inference of meanings that remain untold or
unshown. According to this rationale, there is a structural similarity

between the activity of saying/experiencing the words ‘There is a ham-
mer,’ in an encompassing ecology in which these words mean (but do not
say) ‘Pick it up,’ and the activity of seeing the cover of a comic album for
children and understanding that, as an adult, I am being urged not to
read, which exceeds the concept that hammers are for picking up and that
children’s comic strips are not for adults. The use-plan of the words ‘There
is a hammer,’ and the use-plan of the cover of a children’s comic album are
inferred relative to the propositions and referrals that they make as repre-
sentations, according to the inference of such plans within the whole
ecology in which they appear.
Then, rather than a referring representation providing a refining report
of the other experience(s) to which it refers, multiple references constitute
the meaning of the referring (i.e. reporting) representation, gaining status
and identity across patterns of activities, references and properties, includ-
ing those ascribed by participants in imagination, in accordance with an
inferred use-plan.52
As Bunt and Romary note, for the sake of convenience this broad
aetiological conception of the function of referring has been termed
‘dialogue act,’ or the effects that an enunciator/producer is inferred as
intending to achieve within the context of dominant conventions of
representation.53 It is a useful term, in that it enables conceptions of
iterations in any register and across registers, and of the simultaneous
appearance of registers, according to a series of discursive paradigms,
without which each referral is incomprehensible. The term allows the
application of Bakhtin’s concept of utterance to any register, as an orga-
nising principle rather than as a linguistic definition of enunciation.
Bakhtin’s theorises utterance according broadly to this combination of
an aetiological conception of the form of representations and the temporal
ecology in which the representation appears. Although he is theorising
speech acts, his identification of utterance does not have a linguistic basis,
Rather, he identifies utterances by four functions—generic form, finalisa-
tion, responsiveness and change as distinction—all of which terms can be
applied across registers, with very minor modifications or extensions. For
example, the ‘boundaries’ and ‘finalisation’ of the utterance are deter-
mined by a change in the object to which it refers; the utterance is mean-
ingful only in referring to recalled prior utterances; and hence, the
utterance appears in an ecology of other utterances and derives status
and identity in relation to the fulfilment of expectations or otherwise.54
146 2 NARRATIVE
Hence, according to Bunt, the ‘dialogue act’ easily borrows concep-

tions of its formal enunciative structure (as distinct from the realisation
that representations achieve of the structure of a relationship between
intersubjects) from conceptions of speech acts. There are two compo-
nents: the proposition, within which nests the function of referral, and
the ‘function,’ which describes the discursive temporal relationships
between past and current utterances according to conventions and infer-
ence. In speech act theory, these two components are often referred to as
propositional content and illocutionary force, but I must be careful not to
distinguish them except in terms that refer each of them continuously to
each other.55
2.3 AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF DISCOURSE

CHARACTERISED AS NARRATIVE
Given the above-mentioned overview of existing theoretical descriptions
of the structure of narrative, and the brief characterisation of referral as
pragmatic reporting in the context of an encompassing ecology, is a
narrative characterisation of intersubjectivity possible, which conforms
to Shültz/Crossley principles? The proprioceptive connection between
saying and hearing, showing and being shown, seeing and being seen, is
maintained; however, it might be mediated by technology or by dis-
tances of place and time. Narrative is structured as the realisation of a
relationship between a number of different, coexisting subjects, the
realisation of which in representations in particular ways creates a system
of intersubjective relationships.56 Prince’s definition of narrative does
not proscribe any form of representation. It focuses instead upon sub-
jective positions relative to each other and upon transformation as pre-
requisites. He argues, ‘narrative is not only a product but a process, not
merely an object but also an act (...)’57 Therefore, the physical traces left
by the actions of others can also represent the realisation of an inter-
subjective relationship, even when they are no longer present, even in
memory. I enter into relationships with others by means of every affor-
dance that retains their slightest phenomenal trace, including imagined
properties, in ecologies that Schütz and Crossley argue are shared on the
basis of the mutual production of the intersubject.
Existing analyses of our experience of representations appear so mired
in the wealth of data that constitute each specific iteration of say, reading,
2.3 AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF DISCOURSE CHARACTERISED . . . 147
for example, as to militate against systematisation. On one hand, this

surfeit implies that each situation is ecologically unique and that only
paradigmatic generalisations and particular iterations can be theorised.
On the other hand, this wealth of data is often approached according to
verbal language principals, perceptual and cognitive principals or even
neurological principals, but this is only possible if representations are
theoretically categorised as some type of object.
Alternatively, is it possible to model a system of discourse characterised
as narrative, which realises a structured relationship between intersubjects,
making explicit that each relative component in this model can be
described as a distinct temporal component, a distinct subjective identity
and the general structure of applicable in every instance, following
Schütz/Crossley principles?
To recall my description of systems, a system of discourse characterised
as narrative will constitute terms of analysis, that is, items and relative
functions, applicable in every case, in which every one of these is episte-
mologically interdependent and in which it is not possible to omit any
element without breaking the system. Although the systemic terms of
analysis of the relationships between all phenomena is possibly infinite,
given the general potential resources of the body, I have limited my terms
of analysis to a single corollary of every phenomenon: time.
Here, the word ‘time’ only represents a concept of the tactic group of
phenomena that it indexes. The identification of a group of phenomena
only by an indexical sign for a concept of this group (‘time’) is a useful
elision, in so much as it allows me to consider the relationships between a
‘time’ indexed by one group of phenomena distinct from a ‘time’ indexed
by another, as a shorthand for the relationships between the phenomena
themselves. This elision reveals a relatively simple system.
Hence, I will speak of the ‘time’ of a group of phenomena, as an index
of that group, without recourse to further descriptions of the phenomena
themselves. Because I will utilise narratological terms for the ‘time’ of each
of these groups of phenomena (such as ‘story’ and ‘narrator’),’ this elision
of the word ‘time’ with concepts of these groups allows me to avoid
discussion of the grounds on which I group phenomena together. My
aim is only to describe these groups of phenomena by means of their
relative roles in a system, rather than by any other means. As a result, I also
run the risk of creating tautological descriptions that might be considered
paradigmatic, at best. However, I can insist that the focus of my descrip-
tion is the systematic relationship between phenomena that are indeed
148 2 NARRATIVE
rendered paradigmatic by the system. It is only in terms of the proposed

system that these paradigms are precise and descriptive.
On this basis, I can describe narrative as an experience of a number of
different, coexisting and interdependent times, which act in specific ways
to create a network of intersubjective relationships between subjects and
their actions, according to musicologist Abbate, following Schütz/
Crossley principles.58
To identify these different times requires that I keep the general poten-
tial resources of the body, homeorhesis, an aetiological characterisation of
action and imagination always in view. I must resist the tendency in
everyday speech to simply conflate narrative with types of object of repre-
sentation and thus fall into the error of objectifying the system. Rather, I
must follow Schütz/Crossley principles and agree with Prince’s definition
of narrative as a situation in which subjective relationships bring meaning
to representations. These subjective relationships are themselves indexed
as a number of different times, plus an aetiology that is necessary for these
relationships to be realised or, as Forster claims, ‘the imputation of caus-
ality.’59 Figure 2.1 represents the relationships between these different
times as a Venn diagram.60
Someone or group
making and Someone perceiving
perceiving themselves a representative
making a representative action. action or trace and perceiving
(Author) themselves perceiving it.
(Reader/view/listener)
Representative action/trace.
(Narrator)
Causes of the Consequences of the

object of representation. Object of representation. object of representation.
(Pre-story) (Story) (Post-story)
Fig. 2.1 An epistemological system of discourse characterised as narrative

Note that the diagram labels each of its component groups of phenom-
ena, or times, in two ways. First, each component is labelled with a
description of the group. Then, in parenthesis, each group is also labelled
with a transliteration of this description as a narratological term. I have
provided these two different descriptions of each group so as to (i) make
explicit that the model is not register-specific—there is no structural
significance to differences in register—but also to (ii) make explicit that
the system is a characterisation that extrapolates existing narratological
concepts: this is a system of discourse characterised as narrative. Hence,
the time of (the group of phenomena constituting) the ‘object of repre-
sentation’ is transliterated as ‘(story),’ being distinct from the time of the
‘representative action/trace,’ which is transliterated as ‘(narrator)’ and so
on. For the sake of brevity, below I will use the following narratological
neologisms in describing the relationships that constitute the system: I will
write (a) ‘story,’ for the ‘object of representation,’ (b) ‘pre-story’ and
‘post-story,’ for the ‘aetiology of this object of representation,’ (c) ‘narra-
tor,’ for the ‘object of representation,’ (d) ‘author,’ for ‘someone or some
group making and perceiving (their own) representative action’ and (e)
‘reader/viewer/listener’ for someone perceiving a representative action/
trace.’
When I make a representation, the object of the representation appears
in a distinct time. This time is brought into being by everything that is
explicitly represented, that is, told or shown. In verbal language, this
content is everything that I am explicitly told. In depictions, it is the
time of the story, according to Lacey.61 This time exists in a wider diegetic
frame of other temporal events, because what is told/shown as the time of
the plot is inescapably aetiological: what is told/shown has causes and
consequences, even though these remain untold or unrepresented. As
Goodman writes, ‘A picture of a forest tells implicitly of trees growing
from seedlings and shedding leaves.’62
As much as the depictions in the comic strip register are depictions,
they create coherent positions in the time of the story that we understand
to require past and future actions. Although this past and future are not
represented, they are as specific as what is told/shown. These necessary
aetiologies exist in a different time from the time of the story. Although
untold, this time constitutes the complete worlds, past and future, that
must exist in order for the story to occur.
I can call these untold/shown worlds the pre-story and post-story, also
occurring in distinct times, if I am careful not to confuse either ‘story,’
150 2 NARRATIVE
‘pre-story’ and ‘post-story; with Benveniste’s ‘story,’ which describes a

unified time, in terms of my model.63 Further, the unrepresented pre-story
and post-story required by the story are not another story. Whereas the
world of the story is absolutely fixed through the process of being told/
shown, the worlds of the pre-story and post-story are multidimensional,
motive and unconstrained. Because they arise in the necessary aetiological
characterisation of story, the pre-story and post-story are determined by
the story alone: the story realises them. An inexact parallel exists in the
linguistic terms ‘anaphora’ and ‘cataphora,’ the former being an expres-
sion that relies on past expressions in order to make sense, and the latter
being an expression that co-refers with a postcedent expression. The
worlds of the post- and pre-story are conjured alone by the epistemologi-
cal demands of the story.
I also understand that characters in comic strips, for example, do not
see the world in which they act as a world made of ink and paper, but as a
complete afforded world. In the same way, characters in an opera do not
hear the music through which they communicate to an audience, or even
their own singing, because ‘music is not produced by or within the stage-
world, but emanates from other loci ( . . . ) for our ears alone.’64 This
comprehension of coherence constitutes the verisimilitude of the object
of representation, according to Cobley. ‘[It] ( . . . ) is a principle of textual
coherence rather than ( . . . ) an area in which there exists some relation
between the fictional and the real world.’65 Though not told or shown, on
this basis the times of the post- and pre-story are also not random. They
have verisimilitude as the story has verisimilitude, for which the specific
affordances of the story act as anchor. Todorov claims that the post- and
pre-stories’ temporal worlds are implied and so always generates untold
possibilities, but these possibilities are always aetiologically related to the
story.66
This is even the case with meta-narratives, where the story refers to
either the register in which the representation is made, or to situations
outside the story itself, pulling these situations into the story. Story
remains story relative to the other positions that constitute narrative in
my model, even when the story explicitly refers to these other positions.
According to this emerging system, I understand that the times of the
story and the post- and pre-story (being the object of representation and
their causes and consequences), take place in the past, relative to the time
in which they are represented in an action/trace. The activities of making a
representation and the object of representation cannot exist as the same
time. Although we know that the post-story holds a future for the story,
the very telling of the story makes it a world of the past, not within the
time of the events that occur within it (which might be set at any time),
but in relation to the act of telling itself. The story and its post- and pre-
story are always ‘recently told or shown.’
A problem arises here in my conception of telling/showing. This
problem is founded in the ancient theoretical distinction between diegesis
and mimesis and has particular relevance for my proposal of a narrative
exposition of Schütz/Crossley principles, relative to depiction. How can
my narrative model apply to mimetic representations, when mimesis
defines depictions as a story-less simulation aspiring to an illusion of
immanence, that is, as simulations that are untold and unshown?
Diegesis is now frequently used as a neologism for the world of the
story (that is, only what is told about and its aetiological environment).
For example, Lefèvre describes diegesis as ‘the fictive space in which the
characters live and act ( . . . ) versus the extradiegetic space, visualized
versus non-visualized space.’67 This is a typical contemporary use, which
departs entirely from its original conception, and against which there is
now no practical argument. However, Plato defines diegesis as a mode of
representation that includes both ‘narrator’ and story, so that the act of
telling itself is a prerequisite of the definition, relative to what is told.68
Nothing can be told that is not narrated. On the other hand, mimesis is
described as a mode where representations are made through simulation
rather than story, taking place entirely in the present, without a narrator
and, I might add, without a theoretical role for someone to show the
object of representation at all. As a result, mimesis theoretically obscures
its origin as the realisation of a relationship between representation and the
object of representation.69
Such a theoretical distinction arises from Plato’s topic—a theorisation
of the difference between the genres of poetry and painting approached,
not necessarily usefully, as indicative of differences in register. Mimesis has
become a term for what is shown and diegesis for what is told— a
theoretically indefensible state of affairs that is also, as I said, practically
indomitable. Genette’s discussion of conceptions of both diegesis and
mimesis describes the range of different inflections that the words have
taken on and the contradictions that they represent. He writes that for
Plato, ‘Diégésis is pure narrative (without dialogue), in contrast to the
mimésis of dramatic representation and to everything that creeps into
narrative along with dialogue ( . . . ) the French and Greek words
152 2 NARRATIVE
unfortunately neutralise each other in the single English term diegesis,’ so

that ‘(t)he pair diégésis/mimesis is therefore unbalanced, unless we decide
as Plato did, to read mimesis as an equivalent to dialogue, with the sense
not of imitation, but of transcription, or ( . . . ) quotation. This is
obviously not what the Greek word (mimesis) connotes for us ( . . . ). In
narrative, there are only rhesis and diegesis—or ( . . . ) the characters’
discourse and the narrator’s discourse.’ He concludes: ‘ . . . the only
acceptable equivalence for diégésis/mimesis is narrative/dialogue, ( . . . )
which absolutely cannot be translated as telling/showing, for “showing”
can hardly be applied to legitimately to a quotation.’70
Hence, the problem reveals itself as a non-problem, which I can clarify
by insisting that in the model that I am proposing, every type of repre-
sentation is shown or told without a need for a theoretical distinction
between showing and telling, because they perform the same function in
the system of representation as a realisation of intersubjects. It is not that
there are no distinctions to be made between registers as affordances, as
proposed by Kukkonen, for example, but such distinctions do not describe
the system, because both showing and telling fulfil the function of realis-
ing a distinct ‘time’ whatever register they might be.71 This rationale
produces a radical example: considered this way, a depiction of a single
scene (say, Constable’s painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows)
always has both a story time, a post-story time and a pre-story time,
whereas a mimetic characterisation theoretically denudes it of any time
but the present-time of being seen. The example is radical because of my
historic propensity to consider single images as being without event,
according to the vaguest folk conception of events as sequence. But, as
with the conception of mimesis as simulation, this idea is spontaneously
contradicted by my experience of both seeing, imagining I see and under-
standing that what I see is a representation. What is the story in
Constable’s depiction? It is the object of representation, relative to its
aetiology.
As important, this aetiological object of representation has been pro-
duced, in a time that cannot be that of the story or its causes and
consequences. Identifying that the story and its aetiology are temporally
distinct from the time in which each representation is made, creates one of
the central relationships in my emerging system. Making this distinction
allows the identification of a time indexed by the representations action/
trace itself, or a subjective narrator, relative to the aetiological object of
representation. This conception of a narrator also conforms to Prince’s
definition of narrative. It does not imply any definitive type of object or

register in particular. Instead, the narrator is entirely brought to knowl-
edge in our experience of the representation, distinct from the object of
representation. Abbate describes this relationship between the time in
which a representation is made and the times of the aetiological object
of representation as a relationship between subjects. She writes ‘the notion
of a subject’s distancing reformulation, the “voice” is the basic criteria for
narrative—as the ordering and re-ordering discourse of a subject-voice.’72
In relation to the past times of the story, pre-story and post-story,
narrator time always exists in the present, in the immediate time in
which the representation is made. It is characterised by the specific enun-
ciative techniques used to make the representation. These techniques
constitute register. Here, I must not confuse an experience of the repre-
sentation with the representation itself. Although I can only experience
the representation in present-time (including in memory), I must remind
myself that, according to the necessity of point of view, I understand that
my experience of the representation is ontologically distinct from the
ontology of the representation itself.
Narrator subjectivity hence comprises the technological characteristics
of the register in which the representation is made. Other than making
representations directly with the body, in co-presence with another or
others, traces of the body’s past actions constitute the representation.
Still occupying a single temporal position in the system, the trace consti-
tuting the narrator/representation can be made by individuals or coop-
eratives, humans and any technology. The narrator is no longer identified
with a single body elsewhere, nor with the subjective identity of any
conception of a ‘person.’ The narrator/representation can be the traces
of many bodies made through a combination of traces of technology
productive of any register. All of these possible actions, possibly producing
the representation, realise a single narrator existing in a distinct time,
emerged as a subject in the form of the representation.
For this realisation to occur, someone must perceive the action/trace of
the representation that constitutes the narrator. The perception of action/
trace is reading/viewing/listening. This perception also occupies a dis-
tinct temporal position in the system, which I transliterate as ‘reader/
viewer/listener.’ Specific physical resources characterise the reader and the
narrator, realising this distinct time. The reader’s resource is the represen-
tation/narrator: the technological trace left by the body or bodies of those
making the representation. This trace provides the only way in which the
154 2 NARRATIVE
reader/viewer/listener can know the narrator as a subject. In the case of

comic strips, this is the comic strip itself. The subject reader/viewer/
listener is realised in present time by the infinite techniques of reading/
viewing/listening, just as the subject narrator is realised in the form of the
representation. The time of reading/viewing/listening constitutes knowl-
edge of all of the other times in the system.73 According to Ricoeur, both
the representation and the aetiological object of representation become
affordances in the experience of the reader/viewer/listener.74
Although narrator time, only realised in the form in which the represen-
tation is made, encompasses the entire representation, I also understand
that the representation has been produced. As much as there is a distinction
between the time of the representation (narrator time) and the times of the
aetiological object of representation, there is a also a distinction between the
time of production and the time of representation. Narrator time does not
obscure or elide a final subject necessary to the system—someone or some
group making and perceiving a representative action, which I can translite-
rate as ‘author’—because the author and the narrator cannot exist in the
same time, unless their distinct identities are entirely synchronised in a direct
act of embodied representation, in co-presence with a reader/viewer/listener.
Author and narrator have different epistemological relationships to the other
temporal positions in the system, and these appear clearly in types of repre-
sentation made through technological trace, rather that in copresent trans-
formations of the ecology of the body.
With comic strips, I know that an author exists because I have in my
hands a comic where someone, or a cooperative group, is explicitly named
as causing the production: they have done something ‘in order to’ pro-
duce the comic strip. Habitually, such commercial statements of author-
ship are made regardless of all of the other cooperative contributions to
the production of the representation and to getting it into my hands,
including paper manufacturers, printers, distributors, booksellers and
advertising agents. Authors are still frequently identified as sole motivators
of the production of representations as the traces of their own and others’
bodies. They are announced as ‘creative minds whom we assume to have
made the work as a whole ( . . . ) all it’s utterances are heard as emanating
from a single ( . . . ) subject.’75
When I make a representation directly by utilising my body as a
technology of representation, the times in which the author and nar-
rator exist are indeed the same, according to Katz, because I am using
the resources of my own body as a technology of representation.76 But
this cannot be the case with representations constituted of the traces of

actions no longer present. The relationship between the representation
and the object of representation realises a subject narrator, in a time
that is quite distinct from the time of the production of the representa-
tion, or author time.
In every case except copresent representation through body transforma-
tions alone, the time of the subject author can only be known relative to the
time of the narrator and the time of the aetiological object of representation
(the story, post- and pre-story). It is impossible to know anything about the
subject author other than other than it exists distinct from the representa-
tion and the aetiological object of representation. As Genette writes:
‘behind the explicit image of that narrator I construct, as well as I can,
( . . . ) the author.’77 Attempting to identify the author according to bio-
graphical principles is not possible, according to the system. To do so would
be to assume that ‘the identity of a text’s producer is to be found ( . . . )
unmediated within the text itself and that the text’s production therefore
takes place within a transmission model.’78 The existence of a subject author
is only known to readers/viewers/listeners in another aetiological relation-
ship—between the subject author and the subject narrator/representation.
In this system of discourse characterised as narrative, five groups of
phenomena are brought into a relationship: (a) ‘story,’ or the ‘object of
representation,’ (b) ‘pre-story’ and ‘post-story,’ for the ‘aetiology of this
object of representation,’ (c) ‘narrator,’ or the ‘object of representation,’
(d) ‘author,’ or ‘someone or some group making and perceiving (their
own) representative action’ and (e) ‘reader/viewer/listener’ or someone
perceiving a representative action/trace.’
Consider Fig. 2.1. In the diagram, the use of Venn’s system of visua-
lisation determines precise topological relationships between items. These
topological relationships correspond exactly to similar epistemological
relationships between groups of phenomena. Hence, in the diagram,
visual enclosures are bounded items corresponding to my indexical gen-
eralisation of groups of phenomena as ‘times.’ Visual overlaps and enclo-
sure of one bounded item by another of these bounded items correspond
to affects, defined as changes in the general ecology. Hence, a precise
system of relationships is described visually in the diagram by correspon-
dence. Each bounded item can be considered as a group of phenomena, a
‘time’ and a subject, and it is in this sense that the model constitutes a
systematic narrative characterization of Schütz/Crossley principles of
intersubjectivity.
156 2 NARRATIVE
In summary, story is determined by its aetiology. The time of the story

cannot appear without the times of the pre- and post-stories, and vice
versa, although they represent distinct phenomena, and the latter are
untold or unshown. The time of the narrator is constituted in the form
of the representation. The time in which the narrator exists encompasses
story, but not the untold or unshown aetiologies of story, exactly because
they are untold or unshown. Both the time of the author and the time of
the reader/viewer/listener are structured by the time of the narrator/
representation. They are only related to each because they are both relative
to narrator time, but quite distinctly: they have no other relationship.
Of course, questions remain about the ways in which the system might (or
cannot) explain differences in the types of changes to the general ecology,
afforded by groups of phenomena that are very different from each other.
For example, how is a subject reader/viewer/listener to be characterised as
distinct from a subject pre-story, for example, when the former can be
conceived, as having agency and the latter has none? In this model, what is
the significance of the fact that the subject narrator/representation cannot
have knowledge, despite constituting knowledge, whereas a subject author
and subject reader/viewer/listener can? These questions and many others
are subsumed in the elision of groups of phenomena with a conception of
indexical time that allows the correspondence of each of these indices with
bounded items in a Venn diagram, as a plausible way of making a narrative
characterisation of Schütz/Crossley principles of intersubjectivity.
NOTES
1. For the former, see for example Merleau-Ponty. The Primacy of Perception
and other Essays and Schütz. The Phenomenology of the Social World. For the
latter, see for example Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,
Mead. Mind, Self, Society, Katz. How Emotions Work.
2. Schütz. The Phenomenology of the Social World and Gibbs. Embodiment and
Cognitive Science.
3. Crossley. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming.
4. For the former, see for example Chomsky. Language and Mind, Lévi-
Strauss. Myth and Meaning. For the latter, see for example Peirce.
Collected Papers: Volume V. Pragmatism and Pragmaticism and De
Saussure. Course in General Linguistics.
5. Schütz. Collected Papers 3: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. 90.
6. Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit. 11.
NOTES 157
7. Kojève. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel and Honneth. The Struggle for
Recognition.
8. Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology.
9. Ibid. 89.
10. Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. 142.
11. Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. 53.
12. Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. 269.
13. Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception. 354.
14. Schutz. Collected Papers 3: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy.
15. Mead. Mind, Self, Society.
16. Ibid. 196.
17. In fact, Crossley describes two aspects, one arising from the other. He
distinguishes between ‘radical’ and ‘egological’ levels. ‘Egological’ intersub-
jectivity includes the capacity for reflection as a type of perceptual engage-
ment. Crossley bases his ‘radical’ level in descriptions made by Hegel and
Husserl. He utilizes insights made by Merleau-Ponty and Schütz to reconcile
these descriptions. The ‘egological’ level subsumes the ‘radical’ level’.
However, his description of the ‘radical’ level, also relies upon his cross-
reading of these theorists and others. In particular, the ideas of Schütz are
more clearly discernible in his ‘radical’ description than the ideas of Husserl.
The terms in quotation here are terms of Crossley’s ‘radical’ intersubjectivity.
Crossley. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming.
18. Ibid. 26.
19. For example, see Bühler. Theory of Language: The Representational Function
of Language, Jakobson. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, Ricoeur.
Time and Narrative, Meister. Narratology beyond Literary Criticism:
Mediality–Disciplinarity, Halliday. Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse
and Kress. Multimodality: A Social Semiotics Approach to Contemporary
Communication.
20. Cobley claims that the capacity for perceiving our own actions as though
they were the actions of other people is a primary condition of narrative,
enabling us to establish a subjective identity in relation to others. Cobley.
Narrative.
21. Ibid. 9.
22. Prince. Dictionary of Narratology. 60.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid. 58.
25. Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics.
26. Chatman. Story and Discourse.
27. Genette. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method and Prince. Dictionary of
Narratology. 66.
28. Todorov. The Poetics of Prose and Todorov. The Fantastic.
158 2 NARRATIVE
29. Freytag. Techniques of the Drama.

30. Shklovski. Theory of Prose.
31. White. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 122.
32. Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
33. Genette. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method and Genette. Narrative
Discourse Revisited.
34. Groensteen. ‘The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the
Narrator.’
35. Barthes. S/Z.
36. Todorov. The Poetics of Prose. 87.
37. Propp. Morphology of the Russian Folktale.
38. Lévi-Strauss. Myth and Meaning, Bremond. ‘A Critique of the Motif’ and
Greimas. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method.
39. de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics.
40. Ricoeur. ‘Narrative Time.’
41. Ibid. 181.
42. Jakobson. ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.’
43. Iser. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. 31.
44. Rimmon-Kenan. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
45. Fish. Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
and Cobley. Narrative.
46. Vološinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
47. Asher and Lascarides. Logics of Conversation.
48. That is, as a consequence of referring to some other experience of the
ecology, not simply in making a proposition, true or false.
49. Lascarides and Stone. ‘Discourse Coherence and Gesture Interpretation.’
50. Kehler. Coherence, Reference and the Theory of Grammar.
51. Carberry. Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dialogue.
52. Cohen and Perrault. ‘Elements of a Plan-Based Theory of Speech Acts.’
53. Bunt and Romary. ‘Towards Multimodal Content Representation.’
54. Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. 91, 76 and 78.
55. Bunt. ‘Dialogue Pragmatics and Context Specification.’
Century. 14.
57. Prince. Dictionary of Narratology. 59.
Century. 14.
59. Forster. Aspects of the Novel. 86.
60. Venn. ‘On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of
Propositions and Reasonings.’
61. Lacey. Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies. 16.
62. Mitchell. On Narrative. 111.
NOTES 159
63. Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics. 208.

Century. 199.
65. Cobley. Narrative. 219.
66. See Todorov. The Poetics of Prose and Abbate. Unsung Voices: Opera and
Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century.
67. Lefèvre. ‘The Construction of Space in Comics.’ 157.
68. Plato. The Republic.
Century. 54.
70. Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, 18, 43, 45.
71. Kukkonen, ‘Comics as a Test Case for Transmedial Narratology.’
Century. 27.
73. Ibid. 123.
74. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative.
Century. 11.
76. Katz. How Emotions Work.
77. Genette. Narrative Discourse Revisited. 141.
78. Cobley. Narrative. 118.
CHAPTER 3
Drawing Demonstration One: Expounding

Another’s Thought in the Style
of That Thought
Under the proposed systematic narrative characterisation of the realisation

of intersubjective relationships, it is theoretically impossible to reify, isolate
or objectify representations or, indeed, analyse representations without
analysing the relationships between the intersubjects that they realise.
Bakhtin writes that each representation is ‘a single but complex event
that we might call the work in the totality of all its events, including the
external material givenness of the work, and its texts, and the world
represented in the text, and the author-creator and the listener or reader.’1
This ‘material givenness,’ Bakhtin continues, is ‘the world that creates the
text, for all its aspects—the reality reflected in the text, the authors creat-
ing the text, the performers of the text ( . . . ) and finally the listeners or
readers who ( . . . ) review the text—participate equally in the creation of
the represented world.’2
The impossibility of a reification of the times of the subjects constitut-
ing the model, is in accord with my theorisation of those structures
realising the general potential resources of the body, homeorhesis, imagi-
nation and aetiology, discussed in Chapter 1. The relative positions that
constitute the narrative model are revealed in the motive character of the
object of representation, relative to its causes and consequences, for
example: they are both homeorhetic and realised representations of home-
orhesis. As much as the object of representation might be sequentially
motivated or otherwise, of itself, it is always motivated in the making of
the representation itself. The forms of representations, as well as the

162 3 DRAWING DEMONSTRATION ONE: EXPOUNDING ANOTHER’S . . .
objects of representations, are homeorhetic. Bakhtin writes, ‘Those things

that are static in space cannot be statically described, but must rather be
incorporated into the temporal sequence of represented events and into
the story’s own representational field.’3
3.1 ‘MEDIAGENIUS’ AND THE COMIC STRIP REGISTER

The intersubject is realised in this model by index and/or trace. All repre-
sentative forms realising the relationship between intersubjects constitute
either an index but not a trace or an index and a trace. In Chapter 1,
I described how index and trace differ from each other. To recall, for
example, digital imaging technologies can index activities of the body with-
out producing a trace of them, whereas an activity/mark made on a wall with
a piece of charcoal is always both index and trace. The activity of typing on a
keyboard or moving a computer mouse, in order to make a drawing, is
teleologically distinct from the activity of making an activity/mark with a
digital pen or a finger on the surface of a digital drawing tablet.
This difference allows Marion to make a theorisation of the way in
which trace, rather than index, realises the subject, pulling a conception of
the narrator/representation into the view of an analysis of discourse. He
describes trace as a property of the discourse structure that realises both
the subject narrator, the story, and the pre- and post-stories, arguing that,
considering registers as defined by differences in affordance, trace realises a
specific type of narrator/representation in drawn registers.4
Baetens presents and comments upon Marion’s theory, describing the
types of trace specific to the comic strip register as realisations of a series of
embodied relationships.5 It is possible to compare the theory to Schütz/
Crossley principles of intersubjectivity. These comparisons both support a
narrative characterisation of intersubjectivity and introduce the possibility
of making practical demonstrations in response to specific questions raised
by the comparisons, by drawing new comic strips, for example.
According to Baetens, Marion accepts all of the specifically visual ele-
ments of comics as indivisible. These visual elements constitute the comic
strip as representational register, rather than the whole ecology in which a
comic strip is produced and read. These specifically visual elements are
described as a ‘“trace”, that is, a reflection, a symptom, an index, of the
subjectivity of a narrator,’ which can only be known as a subject relative to
a reader, through the representative trace itself.6
3.1 ‘MEDIAGENIUS’ AND THE COMIC STRIP REGISTER 163
This group of comic strip specific visual elements is underwritten by

features that are shared with other registers, but which realise a subject
that is uniquely represented in the specific trace comprising comic strips.
These realise the possible ways in which story is structured. They also
structure the object of representation in other registers, although the
comic strip register is not reducible to them. The neologism ‘mediagenius’
is used to describe this combination of register-specific and shared ele-
ments. ‘Mediagenius’ constitutes the way in which any type of narrative is
made specific though the interaction of trace and reader by means of what
Marion calls ‘style’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘medium’. Therefore, comic strips
have a specific ‘mediagenius’, which is quite distinct from the ‘mediagen-
ius’ (the ‘style’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘medium’) of other narrative registers,
such as movie or literature, he claims.
Comic strips are drawings. As such, Marion proposes that aspects of
drawing activity/trace constitute a unique form of representation which
structures the ‘mediagenius’ of comic strips, involving a technical mix of
those traces organised as drawing and writing. Marion conjectures that
trace, which is the realisation of a conception of a particular type of subject
narrator, is not only a conventional representation-made, but is also a
‘draughtsperson’ and a ‘calligrapher,’ that is, identified in the form of
the representation specific to the comic strip register: this narrator is
always the trace of drawing activities.
Consistent with the function of ‘mediagenius’, a second neologism
created by Marion describes comics’ polymodal form. ‘Graphiation’ con-
stitutes comic strip register’s specific form of representation, including
word and image, and its narrator is, therefore, a ‘graphiateur.’ The ‘gra-
phiateur’ isn’t directly observable in the form of representation, reasons
Marion, but is rather an aetiological pre-requisite of the ‘mediagenius’ of
the comic strip register: the idea that a subject is constituted by the trace.
According to this description, the style of facture of a comic strip
represents not only subjectivity but intentionality. Although the ‘graphia-
teur’ is not directly observable in the drawn trace of the comic strip
register, Marion claims that a range of causes and consequences can be
intuited from the types of trace that constitute the representation, such
that drawings that are immediate, spontaneous, and unrevised provide a
less-mediated realisation of the subject narrator (the ‘graphiateur’) that
type of drawn traces that are the opposite.
Thus, ‘graphiation’ represents a relationships between story and discourse
that is unique to the comic strip register: the realisation of a subject
represented in drawn trace with more rather than less perceived spontaneity
in the performance of drawing, in the making of the representation, being
theorised as equal to less mediation between reader and the subject
‘graphiateur.’
For Marion, readers are also instrumental in the relationship that con-
stitutes ‘graphiation’, although their role is relative to ‘mediagenius’ rather
then constitutive. Reflecting the traced action of the ‘graphiateur’, the
reader’s perception of the subject in the trace mirrors the representation’s
index of the act of its making. He theorises that readers are only engaged
in the discursive ecology according to an intentionality perceived as the
‘graphiateur’, whose performance is traced in the comic strip as a form of
representation. Marion does not describe readers as themselves inten-
tioned. Rather, the reader is defined in an innate ‘identification’ with the
productive moves of the ‘graphiateur’, achieved by recalling memories of
childhood experiences shared by social convention with a subject ‘author,’
which might or might not be realised in either the subject narrator, and
embedded in the reader’s psyche.7
Although this description of the structure of narrative in comic strips
centres on the relationship between story and discourse, there is a danger
of confusing the subjective ‘graphiateur’ and the author of the work,
Baetens argues. This confusion runs the risk of conflating authorial bio-
graphy with both intentionality and with the form of the representation,
whereas the ‘graphiateur’ can only possibly be conceived as a theoretical
subject whose appearance represents the relationship between perfor-
mance and trace.
There is also the possibility of wrongly considering the ‘graphiateur’
to be a ‘complete author’ or a single motivating subject responsible
for the whole trace. As a conception of drawing style, this would
erroneously identify the activity/mark with a specific author, whereas
Baetens considers ‘graphiation’ to be a ‘socialised act involving many
codes and constraints.’8
Baetens identifies no contradiction between Marion’s introduction of a
psychic—in fact psychoanalytic—theorisation of the relationship between
‘graphiateur’ and reader in order to explain the structure of the comic strip
register’s ‘mediagenius’. However, the Schütz/Crossley principles of
intersubjectivity contradict this theorisation. As Vološinov writes: ‘Every
ideological product bears the imprint of the individuality of its creator or
creators, but even this imprint is just as social as are all other properties and
attributes of ideological phenomena.’9
Baetens also highlights a problem with the concept of identification,

which requires the reader to subsume their subjectivity in that of the
‘graphiateur’ with the necessary erasure of self and loss of control that
that entails. In this, Baetens is in accord with Barker, who has been critical
of the idea of identification for exactly these reasons. Barker considers that
identification implies vulnerability to messages, and loss of identity to the
identity identified with. For Baetens, as Barker, ‘identification’ erro-
neously implies a passive subject reader, for whom reading is a psychic
recall of forgotten shared experiences under the direction of a dominant or
even dominating subject (the ‘graphiateur’), whereas, he argues, ‘we don’t
read to remember or express ourselves, but to transform ourselves.’10
These two issues reveal Marion’s objectification of both the reader and
the ‘graphiateur’ in the context of ‘mediagenius’. First, the possibility of
confusion between the ‘graphiateur’ and author biography leads towards a
conception of complete intentionality. Second, a psychic description of
the process of communication as ‘identification’ places the reader beyond
the relationship between story and discourse that constitutes ‘mediagen-
ius’, effectively objectifying it.11
The idea is a re-statement of a theoretical dualism that structures
discursive subjects according to a relationship between representation
and the object of representation. But Barker refutes this when he writes
‘a narrative is never made of anything other than functions: in varying
degrees, everything in it signifies ( . . . ) everything has a meaning or
nothing has.’12 Rather, the concept of ‘mediagenius’ itself ought to
suggest what Baetens calls the ‘socialised’ act of reading. This ‘socialised’
act requires a reader whose subjectivity is relative to the expressive traces
realising relationships between intersubjects, including the whole ecology
in which reading takes place.
Similarly, the conflating of relative degrees of spontaneity or mediation
in facture with degrees of ‘expressiveness’ (meaning an more or less
complete realisation of a subject), is a result of an objectification of the
‘graphiateur’. Groensteen makes a similar erroneous objectification of
authors and readers when he writes: ‘With a drawn image, ( . . . ) it is the
particular style of the illustrator that determines the image’s degree of
precision.’13 By ‘degree of precision’ Groensteen means the quantity of
information provided in a depiction (although he does not trouble to
distinguish between drawings and depictive drawings), relative to the
object of depiction, thus falling into Cohn’s error, of conceiving the object
of depiction relative to a theoretically brute ‘reality’ that it is impossible to
substantiate. As I have described in my discussion of Cohn’s theorisation

of ‘visual language,’ depiction does not function in this way. The informa-
tion provided in any depictive drawing is always complete and precise in
every case. Marion’s conflation of particular types of drawing with degrees
of mediation of the realisation of a subject falls into the same error.
This misreading cannot be traced back entirely the objectification of
biographical authors in ‘mediagenius’ and readers who achieve psychic
‘identification’. Both the concepts of ‘mediagenius’ and ‘graphiation’ are
attempts to explain how the comic strip register’s dominant form of
representation (‘trace’) realises subjective relationships. These attempts
point to Marion’s dialogic conception of subjects who participate in com-
municative situations. The theory is a partial description of a network of
relationships that embody relative subjectivity in the form of representa-
tions. As such, it approaches an intersubjective characterisation. However,
It fails to fully describe or systematise the aetiological relationships
between embodied subjects and representations, instead proposing a psy-
chic relationship between objectified agents such as a biographical author
and reader, who are ‘activated’ by the particular ‘stimulus’ which consti-
tutes comics’ ‘mediagenius’.
3.1.1 The Comic Strip Register’s ‘Mediagenius’ and Intersubjectivity

Baetens discusses ‘mediagenius’ as a complete description of representa-
tion and objects of representation in the comic strip register. This descrip-
tion has two aspects that do not characteristically contribute to definitions
of representations: a subject narrator (the ‘graphiateur’) and the non-
media-specific conditions of storytelling (which Baetens calls ‘external’
conditions).14 ‘Mediagenius’ describes an indivisible relationship between
the form of representation and the realisation of subjects. The creation of
the new word fulfils this function. However, if I apply Schütz/Crossley
principles of intersubjectivity to ‘mediagenius’, the relationship between
discourse and story that it describes lacks a structurally integral constitu-
ent: the reader. ‘Mediagenius’ dictates that the history of a representation
makes the form of representation meaningful as a trace realising a parti-
cular subject. If this is the case, here is no rationale in placing the reader
beyond this relationship, as a retrospective ‘activator’ of meaning, as
Marion does in his conception of ‘mediagenius.’
Having moved towards an intersubjective description of discourse,
‘mediagenius’ falls short by making a distinction between forms of
representation which are perceived as intentioned (through ‘graphiation’)

and a reader that is only intentioned through ‘identification’. Because
‘mediagenius’ does not include an intentioned reader, except through
the process of ‘identification’, psychoanalytic theory is utilised in order
to describe the relationship between ‘mediagenius’ and reading. This is a
self-contradictory model that causally connects the historic time of pro-
duction with the form of representation on one hand and then describes
psychic relationships between these forms and the reader on the other.
Homeorhetically, this contradiction has several corollaries. Marion’s
theory cannot describe the function of different indexical times that
structure narrative, and which play a necessary part in establishing inter-
subjects. For example, it describes the time of the reading subject as both
all encompassing (‘activating’ the material) and directed by the time of the
subject author (identified-with). Rather, the time of the subject reader is
continually revised as a series of new temporal relationships in the act of
reading, as Baetens point out. Evidence of this is found in Marion’s
description of trace, which is defined as an objectified record of past
actions fixing the subject ‘graphiateur’, rather than as the realisation of a
subject relative to a structure of subjects in an ecology in which in which
reading takes place.
The theorisation that spontaneous drawings are more ‘expressive’
than drawings mediated by revision further evidences this objectification
of subjects. It reinforces the idea of an unmediated psychic connection,
or ‘transmission’, between subject reader and subject ‘graphiateur’ that
also results from the contradictory shift from ‘mediagenius’ to psycho-
analytic function. This objectification re-establishes the bifurcation in the
ecology in which reading takes place, ‘mediagenius’ seems intentioned to
repudiate.
However, considered without the psychic description of realisation of
the subject reader, ‘mediagenius’ makes its central conceit the generation
of subjectivity through a production history unique to the form of the
comic strip register. Setting aside the utilisation of psychic functions, as
types of relationship beyond ‘mediagenius’, the concept alone can be
considered as a description of relative subjectivity to be compared with
other descriptions.
The descriptions of intersubjectivity I am utilising are grounded in
theorisations of embodiment, self-consciousness, imagination and percep-
tion, as described in the preceding chapters and chapter sections.
Psychoanalytical conceptions of subjectivity, on the other hand, describe
my relationships with others and with my ecological experience as moti-

vated in part by cognitive process not fully revealed to me. Although these
approaches might appear to be contradictory, one approach does not
cancel out the other. Rather, the identification of subconscious functions
of subjectivity is a way of describing other levels of experience under-
written by self-consciousness and perception.
Following this, justification for setting aside these functions in order to
compare ‘mediagenius’ to other descriptions of intersubjectivity, extrapo-
lated from conceptions of embodiment, self-consciousness, imagination
and perception themselves, is provided by Vološinov. He writes: ‘What is
the reality that pertains to the subjective psyche? The reality of the inner
psyche is the same reality as that of the sign. Outside the material of signs,
there is no psyche: there are psychological processes, processes in the
nervous system, but no subjective psyche as a special existential quality’
and ‘psychology in fact is not located anywhere within, ( . . . ) but entirely
and completely without—in the word, the gesture, the act. There is
nothing left unexpressed in it, nothing “inner” about it—it is wholly on
the outside, wholly brought out in exchanges, wholly taken up in material,
above all in the material of the world.’15
Focussing exclusively on ‘mediagenius’, we can consider the relation-
ships between physical traces and subjects that it describes in light of a
number of other descriptions of intersubjectivity. Again, recalling Schütz/
Crossley principles of intersubjectivity, I can see that the ‘mediagenius’
corresponds to them in particular ways. Describing these particularities
illuminates ‘mediagenius’ as a partial model of relative subjectivity and
substantiates its central conceit.
To recall, with Schütz’s proposal that traces are significant only in so
much as they are reducible to the co-present subjects that generate them,
Crossley’s principles of intersubjectivity state that ‘human subjectivity is
not ( . . . ) a private inner world; which is divorced from the outer (mate-
rial) world; ( . . . ) it consists in the worldly praxes of sensuous, embodied
beings and . . . is therefore public . . . ’ Second, ‘subjectivity consists in a
pre-reflexive . . . engagement with alterity, rather than in an ( . . . ) objecti-
fication of it ( . . . ).’ Third, ‘human action ( . . . ) necessarily assumes a
socially instituted form and that this form is essential to its meaningfulness
( . . . ).’ Finally, ‘human action ( . . . ) arises out of dialogical situations ( . . . )
that are irreducible to individual human subjects.’16
In these terms, ‘mediagenius’ does not fully describe the relative
subjective relationships that are realised in representations. The
objectification of trace, which also places the reader outside ‘mediagen-

ius’, reveals an objectification of realised subjects, rather than a system
of engagements between them. Similarly, the possible conflation of
biography and trace conjures an objectified subject author out of a
situation of relative subjects. However, ‘mediagenius’ does describe
the forms of representation as realising a relationship between a subject
reader and a subject author, coinciding with Crossley’s ‘worldly praxes.’
Also, the media-specificity of the ‘external’ elements of the comic strip
register, described by Baetens, is synonymous with the ‘socially insti-
tuted form ( . . . ) essential to meaningfulness’ that Crossley proposes.17
In Schütz/Crossley terms, ‘mediagenius’ is an incomplete description
of the relationship between intersubjects. Even setting aside the loca-
tion of the reader in a purely private realm, the subjects in ‘mediagen-
ius’ are not fully subjects in Crossley’s terms, because their relative
status lies in an imposed series of subject/object dualisms which embo-
diment disallows.
Alongside Schütz/Crossley principles of intersubjectivity, there is para-
digmatic use in comparing three further descriptions that reflect upon the
subjectivities theorised in ‘mediagenius’. These are Vološinov’s analytical
method for ‘tracing the social life of the ( . . . ) sign,’ Barker’s principles for
the ‘application of the dialogical approach to cultural forms,’ and Biber
and Conrad’s method of ‘register analysis.’18
Vološinov’s method has three prerequisites, which can be used to
discuss ‘mediagenius’. He writes: ‘1. Ideology may not be divorced from
the material reality of the sign (i.e. by locating it in the ‘consciousness’ or
other vague and elusive region); 2. The sign may not be divorced from the
concrete forms of social intercourse (seeing that the sign is part of orga-
nised social intercourse and cannot exist, as such, outside it, reverting to a
mere physical artefact); 3. Communication and the forms of communica-
tion may not be divorced from the material basis.’19 In this context I must
be careful to define Vološinov’s word ‘sign’ as ‘representation’. He
doesn’t explain his use of the word and his sense may be tautological,
particularly as he insists that meaning is solely generated discursively, in
social interactions.
Vološinov’s method frames the types of subjective relationships in
‘mediagenius’ in ways that are very similar to Crossley’s, with broadly
similar points of dissimilarity. They are congruent in terms of identifying
the forms of representation alone as significant. ‘Mediagenius’ connects
trace to the history of production in the creation of a subject ‘graphiateur.’
Crossley lists ‘material praxes’ and Vološinov insists that the ‘material
basis’ is a prerequisite for any analysis of communication.
However, ‘Mediagenius’ is incongruent with Vološinov’s analytical
method in the following ways. Although trace is defined in ‘mediagenius’
as the whole representation, including the object of representation, this
does not include a reading subject and hence is ‘divorced from the con-
crete forms of social intercourse.’20 According to Vološinov, the subject
reader is a constituent part of the representation. In this sense, Vološinov’s
subjects are intersubjects, whereas those required by ‘mediagenius’ are
not. Vološinov’s subjects are formed only in relation to others, even as
they are formed in the situation in which reading takes place, so that the
subject ‘taken from within, so to speak, turns out to be wholly a product of
social interrelations. Not only its outward expression but also its inner
experience are social territory.’21
Alongside both Schütz/Crossley principles of intersubjectivity and
Vološinov’s method, Barker’s principles for the ‘application of the dialo-
gical approach to cultural forms,’ provide an opportunity to consider the
aspects of ‘mediagenius’ that generate a subject reader. Barker outlines his
principles: ‘1. Form in a cultural object is understood as a proposal to a
typical kind of imaginative projection. 2. Any such form sediments within
itself some typified social experience ( . . . ). 3. All forms are produced out
of determinate production histories ( . . . ). 4. In investigating form (..) we
need to investigate ( . . . ) regularities of transformation; and the ways in
which such regularities constrain what actual characters, settings problems
etc can appear ( . . . ). 5. To study readers ( . . . ) (we) have to discover both
who are likely to be willing and able to orient themselves to the dialogue
proposed, and what transformations they are thereby involved in. 6.
Responses other than those of the “natural” readers themselves represent
socially-typified orientations.’22
Again, ‘mediagenius’ formulates the subjectivity of the ‘graphiateur’
along similar lines to Barker’s principles, in relation to forms of represen-
tation. Again ‘mediagenius’ differs from Barker as it differs from Vološinov
and Crossley, in excluding a subject reader from any relationship with
trace except as an object.
However, Barker is more forthcoming about the particular relationship
between reading subjects, producers and forms of representation, than
either Crossley or Vološinov. Barker’s principles number five and six add
detail to Crossley’s ‘socially instituted form’ and Vološinov’s ‘forms of
social intercourse.’ Barker proposes that a reader orients towards the forms
of representation through the function of one or other set of social

conventions. These could be said to equate to, but are not included in
the trace described in ‘mediagenius,’ although they do contribute to the
‘external’ elements identified by Baetens. According to Barker, the affor-
dance that forms of representation provide to a reader, is one in which the
reader finds meaning through self-transformation. For Barker, readers
might or might not be the habitual audience for a type of representation
but they can understand it nonetheless, and hence are transformed. They
may or may not respond to a particular form of representation in a single
typical way, but instead might reform their subjectivity through dissent,
rejection or avoidance. All of these positions constitute reading for Barker.
Intentionality on the part of readers constitutes both willingness and a
capacity to orient themselves to the dialogue proposed.
A similar description of reading is found in the work of Biber and
Conrad, as part of their methodology for studying language genres.
Biber and Conrad distinguish between ‘register’ which ‘characterises the
typical linguistic features of text varieties and connects those features
functionally to the situation context,’ genre and style in the pragmatic
uses of representations made in the form of language.23 They provide a
summary of a method for analysing register that contains a similar for-
mulation of reading as an intersubjective activity, particularly in terms of
social conventions. As with Barker, Conrad and Biber identify the ‘three
major components of register analysis: (1) describing the situational char-
acteristics of the register; (2) analysing the typical linguistic characteristics
of the register and (3) identifying the functional forces that help to explain
why those linguistic features tend to be associated with those situational
characteristics.’24
They argue that the whole ecology in which the activity of reading takes
place comprises ‘functional forces’ that make the forms of representations
meaningful, rather than the other way around. Their method of register
analysis requires the identification of these’ forces’ in order to identify and
understand the object of representation. These ‘forces’ are described as
subjects and the subject reader is transformed through types of interaction
with them, much as the trace generates the ‘graphiateur’ in the case of
‘mediagenius’. This transformation is brought about as the reader comes
into a dynamic relationship with all of the other subjects in a system of
representation. According to Biber and Conrad, Barker, Vološinov and
Crossley, the reader is a constituent part of a whole ecology realising
relationships in the form of representation. Contrary to ‘mediagenius’,
the form of representation is not an emanation of the situation in which

expression was produced, distinct from reading. It is only an aspect of the
reader’s participation in the intersubjective situation in which the reading
subject is also transformed.
3.2 SELF AND SELF-PERCEPTION

Let me recapitulate Crossley’s proposal that I experience the world inter-
subjectively, in the sense that I experience it as a world experienced by
others. He writes, ‘we experience others as subjects who experience and
know the world and who experience and know us as part of that world.’25
Crossley considers ‘how the different positions of our body, relative to the
other ( . . . ) facilitates a sense of otherness, (in that) we perceive the other
as “there” in relation to our “here”; ( . . . ) and thus recognize both that
they have a distinct point of view in the world and that the world can be
seen from different points of view and under different perspectives,’ so
that, following Schütz ‘each agent recognizes (and assumes that their
other recognizes) that their “here” is the other’s “there” and vice
versa.’26 These relative subjective positions, the ‘here’ and ‘there’, are a
metonym of Mead’s ‘Loop’ ‘In reflecting upon himself, the agent is both a
reflecting subject (I) and an object of reflection (me).’27 In this reciprocal
perception, ‘here’ is ‘I’ and ‘there’ is not only other people, but the
perception that other people perceive. This is self and self-consciousness,
or the ‘me’ that Mead describes. Connor writes: ‘giving voice is the
process which simultaneously produces articulate sound and produces
self, as a self-producing being,’ so that ‘What a voice, ( . . . ) always says is
this: this, here, this voice, is not merely a ( . . . ) particular aggregation of
tones and timbres; it is voice, or voicing itself. Listen, says a voice; some
being is giving voice.’28
This reciprocal self-consciousness (perceived as the point of view of
another person), I recall, is one of the principles of intersubjectivity.
Crossley writes, ‘For Mead, self is a socially instituted and temporally
mediated reflexive process. It involves the subject turning back upon
themselves (through time) to view themselves ( . . . ) as another would
view them.’29 Dennett writes, ‘That is what it is for there to be an observer
in the world, a something it is like something to be.’30
Mead’s inclusion of a conception of time in the structure of
self-consciousness concurs with the realisation of the general
potential resources of the body in making and perceiving representations.
3.3 THE THEORETICALLY NEUTRAL SUBJECT 173
It insists on the ecological grounding of representation, making

self-consciousness an intersubjective faculty through the generation of sub-
jective positions relative to each other: the ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Nothing is represented outside the forms of representation. As I have
described, this also includes self-representations and representations of the
self. Hence, ‘telling/showing’, ‘told/shown’ and ‘being told/shown’ are
relative subjective conditions that are indexed as different times, even in the
creation of a single subject. This principle describes discourse and story,
because ‘the space and time of the representing is one frame of reference; the
space and time of what [is] represented is another.’31
On this basis, there is no problem conflating representations and subjects
in the context of the self because self (I) and self-perception (me) are
embodied conditions occupying different times. The consciousness of self,
achieved by the self, can never be produced as a representation of the body
known to other people: the other in the case of self-consciousness is the self.
Mitchell writes: ‘we are forever telling stories about ourselves. In telling these
self-stories to others we may ( . . . ) be said to be performing narrative actions.
In saying that we also tell them to ourselves, however, we are enclosing one
story within another ( . . . ) On this view, the self is a telling, (...)’32
3.3 THE THEORETICALLY NEUTRAL SUBJECT

The relationship between temporally and spatially distinct, embodied
self-representations is described by Dennett. Intersubjectivity poses a
number of methodological barriers to directly analysing other people’s
consciousness, he argues. The problem is that I cannot stand outside the
reciprocal subjective relationships that generate my own subjectivity. To
theorise a direct (that is, ‘neutral’) position from which to make an
analysis of consciousness, he describes self-consciousness as a theoretical
fiction, drawing upon the structure of narrative in exactly the way that I
have done. On this basis he proposes the conception of a theoretical tool
that allows consciousness to be approached as though it was fiction,
that is, the conception of consciousness as a heterophenomenon, or a
neutral, generalised, hypothetical self-consciousness. Because it is fiction,
Dennett theorises that he can place it in its own ontological domain
and approach it directly, whilst at the same time theorising it as a subject.
In fact, Dennett has created a subject theoretically independent of
intersubjectivity.33
Dennett writes that this theoretical self-consciousness offers a ‘method

for investigating and describing phenomenology, ( . . . ) extracting and
purifying texts and using those texts to generate a theorists fiction, the
subject’s heterophenomenological world,’ which is ‘a world determined by
fiat of the text ( . . . ); our experimenter, the heterophenomenologist, lets
the subject’s text constitute that subject’s heterophenomenological world.’
He concludes: ‘the subject’s heterophenomenological world will be a
stable, intersubjectively confirmable theoretical posit, having the same
status as, say, Sherlock Holmes’ London,’ so that ‘maximally extended,
it is a ( . . . ) portrayal of exactly what it is like to be that subject—in the
subject’s own terms.’34
Dennett creates his theoretical fiction for purposes far outside the scope
of this book. However, he describes subjectivity as a relationship between
self and self-consciousness, structured as narrative. The physical and tem-
poral aspects of this narrative allow him to position the subject as both a
self and a self-representation. They allow him to make use of a theoretical
position himself. This position is his relationship to a ‘neutral’ subject. It is
not the theoretical subject that is rendered neutral in his model, but the
analyst’s relationship to it.
Dennett’s fiction, however, also provides an actual description of
self-consciousness. It represents a functional description of the narrative
structure of intersubjectivity. Walton utilises a similar description of
self-consciousness in his explanation of the relationship between repre-
sentations and their object in depictive ‘seeing-in,’ such that, viewing a
depiction, I am ‘not only imagining something and imagining seeing it,
but also imagining something about our own perceptual actions.’35
3.4 TERMS OF DRAWING DEMONSTRATION ONE

Hampl writes, ‘Every story has a story, ( . . . )’ although she contradicts
herself by adding: ‘This secret story which has little chance of getting told
is the history of its creation. Maybe the “story of the story” can never be told,
for a finished work consumes its own history, renders it obsolete, a husk.’36
Every story has a story, in the sense that everything that is told also affords
the story of its telling/showing, but Hampl is wrong in her qualification. In
fact, in her own sense, what is told/shown, telling/showing and being told/
shown all constitute what she calls the ‘story.’ Because I have argued that this
is the case, then I should admit of some practical demonstration. For
instance, what changes in meaning will occur if I select a representation
3.4 TERMS OF DRAWING DEMONSTRATION ONE 175
and change one or other of the subjective conditions under which it is made?
To use Hempl’s words, if we change the story of the story, then the story
itself should change. If ‘meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker
and listener produced via the material . . . ’ as Vološinov argues, then making
a change in these conditions should produce an entirely new form of
expression as part of an entirely new intersubjective relationship.37
The general terms of a demonstration that aims to interrogate inter-
subjective relationships in story telling are provided by Bakhtin. He writes,
‘variants on the theme of another’s discourse are widespread in all areas of
creative, ideological activity, ( . . . ) such an exposition is always a free
stylistic variation on an another’s discourse, it expounds another’s thought
in the style of that thought, even while applying it to new material, to
another way of posing the problem; it conducts experiments and gets
solutions in the language of another’s discourse.’38 These terms are met
every time I make a representation. Each representation is a realisation of
the subjective relationships that make it meaningful. Of course, Bakhtin
was not writing the general terms of a demonstration, but describing the
way in which representations are structured. However, if I decide to
understand these terms in just that way—as the terms on which I can
make a demonstration—then an outline of a practical demonstration in
intersubjectivity begins to take shape. Bakhtin continues, ‘there is no
external imitation, no simple act of reproduction, but rather a further,
creative development of another’s ( . . . ) discourse in a new context and
under new conditions.’39 Such a demonstration would interrogate what
happens if I ‘expound another’s thought in the style of that thought, even
as applying it to new material’,’ so that ‘a further creative development of
another’s discourse’ occurs.
In such a demonstration, I cannot simply act in order to reproduce the
form of an existing representation and the subjective relationships it
realises. Such an exercise would be retrospective and hence, retrospec-
tively, it would confirm the relative subjectivity embodied in its constitu-
ent narrative subjects. It would only produce another reading. To copy the
form of representation is to place oneself in a characteristic relationship
with it. Although this might be interesting in itself, it does not fulfil
Bakhtin’s terms. These terms require that the demonstration produce a
new representation in the form of another’s representation. This is to be
achieved by substituting one subject for another in the narrative model, in
order to gauge the effect this change might have on the object of repre-
sentation itself.
The aim of such a demonstration will be to attempt to self-consciously

adopt the form of another’s representation in order to communicate
something new. This will bring about new subjective relationships
focussed entirely on representing, and observing myself represent, another
subjectivity. The demonstration will require the adoption of another’s self-
consciousness by the only means possible: in the production of a new form
of representation that appears to make their trace rather than my own.
This is a complex and perhaps impossible aim. It is simply not possible
to be someone else. Fortunately, being someone else isn’t the aim. The
aim is to attempt to adopt another’s forms of representation in order to
communicate something new. It’s complexity and ultimate plausibility lie
in the subjective relationships that I have with others, which are realised in
the form of representation. If I adopt Bakhtin again and take the ‘intern-
ally persuasive word’ for another’s form of representation, then ‘[a] few
changes in orientation and the internally persuasive word easily becomes
an object of representation.’40 Of course, I can no more produce another’s
forms of representation than I can become someone else. But I can
familiarise myself with the form of another’s representation and perceive
completely the whole of my own relationship with it. Because it is our own
perception, it does not require external verification of any kind. As a
reader, I can rely upon my own subjectivity and self-consciousness as a
complete guide to another subject. Then I can make representations that
allow me to scrutinise and self-consciously analyse the particular represen-
tation itself, including the object of representation. In doing this, I will
index ‘the variety of alien voices [that] enter into the struggle for influence
within an individual’s consciousness (just as they struggle with one
another in surrounding social reality). All this creat[es] fertile soil for
experimentally objectifying another’s discourse.’41
There is an immediate problem. There is no theoretically constructed
neutral position with which to benchmark results. Such a demonstration
has no control. If I adopt another’s forms of representation in order to
represent something new, I am in danger of a procedural elision. As soon
as I select them, I am in a reading, listening and viewing relationship with
the other’s forms of representation. These forms are the only way in which
I perceive them as subjects.
The other’s self-representation and my reading are in danger of appear-
ing to be the same. As I have explained in characterising discourse as
narrative, his cannot be the case, but it might appear to be the case. This
results from the fact that everything I can know about the subject whose
forms representation I aim to adopt is derived from my reading alone. This

problem is a version of Dennett’s problem of solipsism: how do I examine
a network of relationships of which I am already a constituent part?
Dennett responds by creating a fictional self-consciousness. In the case
of my proposed demonstration of Bakhtin’s terms, the trace provides an
answer. The form of every representation has multiple aspects, some of
which I can conceive of and retain as control, by designating them
theoretically neutral.
For this demonstration, I have in mind comics as a particular form of
representation. I intend to select other’s whose form of representation I
will attempt to adopt, from the ranks of contemporary Anglophone comic
artists. Rawson writes, ‘Implicit in every drawing style is a visual ontology
(...)’42 It is this ontology that the demonstration will seek to change. This
choice is not register-specific. The aim and general terms of the demon-
stration could be applied to any form of representation.
The choice of comic artists’ forms of representation, as the practical
focus for the demonstration is specific only to their works in relation to
me, subjectively. The demonstration could be conducted with poetry,
casual conversation at a bus stop, newspaper journalism or a National
Constitution. It would produce results both specific to those forms of
representation and theoretically admissible to comparison across the range
of every form of representation. Connor writes, ‘To say that we produce
ourselves in voice is to say that we stage ( . . . ) the setting in which the
voice can resound.’43
However, there are practical considerations that frame the method of
my demonstration that belong uniquely to the comic strip register. The
written language/depiction combination unique to the register provides
the source of a neutral control. The demonstration will aim to make new
representations in the form of the pages of comics. It will take as control a
script that directs the final form of expression but is only an oblique part of
the form of expression itself.
A comic script is an abstract plan of a comic. It is utilised in the process
of producing the final representation. It bears no other relation to the
representation itself. Such a script could exist for the purpose of the
demonstration for any form of representation where a degree of planning
anticipates the representation itself, such as musical scores, choreography,
architects plans and movie scripts, for example.
As particular forms of representation, comic strips are usually the work
of multiple authors including printers, ink and paper manufacturers and
distributors, as well as comic artists. We must not confuse the attempt to

adopt another’s forms of representation with an objectified or biographi-
cally verifiable author. The script for a comic is already a form of repre-
sentation. It is already an embodied, representative form realising its own
unique intersubjects. It is utterly distinguishable from the comic that it
prefigures. This demonstration will designate it theoretically neutral. The
script will be an objective function of the demonstration itself.
A script will be used as a control for the new representations that I intend
to produce. The choice of script lies within the frame of the demonstration,
even if its own representative form, designated neutral, does not. The
demonstration begins with the choice of script, and with the theoretical
designation of the script as neutral. The field of comic strip production and
consumption is characterised by the institutionalised reformation of proper-
ties across many different productions. Characters, plots and stories are
reworked in very different situations, producing very different forms of
representation. For example, it is usual for a script-writer or artist to adopt
an existing character, set of paradigms, place or publication history.
As a result, there is no contradiction between a new representation and the
choice of aspects of existing material with which to direct it. To begin the
demonstration it is simply a question of selecting material: a script from which
to take direction and a subject whose forms of representation I will aim to
adopt. I could make this choice from any script, plot or extrapolated fragment
and choose any subject comic artist. Considering the field of comics, this
seems both historically justifiable and theoretically appropriate. It has the
advantage of rendering the control provided by a script infinitely richer as
information, in terms of comparative analyses. As part of a final analysis of each
new representation, it admits the possibility of comparisons with the existing
representation from which the script is derived. The theoretically neutral script
will have both its own representative form, discounted in order to allow the
demonstration to function, and will bring with it other representations made
by others in the times related to it, even as they are placed outside, it for the
purpose of the demonstration with which to compare it as control with the
demonstration’s results.
3.4.1 Drawing Demonstration One

Drawing Demonstration One comprises three distinct strands.
Methodologically, these strands are identical in that they repeat the same
process, but they are distinct in that this process is undertaken with three
different sets of material. I will call these three strands One (a), One (b)
and One (c). I undertook three methodological repetitions with different
material in order to intentionally regulate both my production and my
reading of what I produced. Working on three drawings focussed my
attention on the process rather than on a specific form of representation,
which might have been the case if I had undertaken the production of only
one new representation. It also allowed me to compare the final represen-
tations I produced with each other.
Demonstration One followed this method: in each, I selected a double page
spread from an existing comic strip and extrapolated a written script from it,
within the constraints of the form of Anglophone comic strip scripts.44
I discarded the double page spread from which the script was derived, only
returning to it as part of a comparative analysis. I then selected another artist
whose forms of representation I would adopt. In each case, this was another
Anglophone comic artist known to me only through their comic strips.
My reading of the selected artists’ comic strips was comprehensive. It
aimed to provide me with a subjective sense of the other’s characteristic
forms of representation, in as much detail and depth as possible.
Fortunately, in terms of time, comic strips have characteristic forms shared
by different artists. As a result, I was able to arrange my reading according
to these forms. These forms included the page size, structure of page
layouts, colour palette, types of line, calligraphy, drawing technology
and distribution of text. They also included narrative and depictive char-
acteristics such as story, plot and narrator, including characterisation,
point of view, focalisation, pace and dramaturgy.
Having undertaken this comprehensive reading, I attempted in each
case to draw a new series of pages based on the script, such that the new set
of pages appeared to me to conform utterly to the characteristic forms of
representation of the selected artist. To do this, I followed a practical
studio process that I share with many other comic strip artists. This follows
a process from script to page layout, to storyboard, to rough drawing, to
final drawing, lettering and colouring. When a drawing technology visible
in the artists’ works was available to me, I used it. When it was either not
visible, incomprehensible to me or outside my technical capacity, I sub-
stituted it for another, which I understood or could master. Finally, I read
the new pages I had made and compared them with the pages from which
their script had been extrapolated as a theoretically neutral control.
To provide a vernacular summary of my method in Demonstration
One [One (a), One (b) and One (c)], I attempted to draw a double
page spread by one comic strip artist in the style of another. This
description has the advantage of being short and carrying with it an
immediate sense of the technical difficulty of the activity, but it is not
accurate. It admits the possibility of a definition of style that discon-
nects the meaning of physical trace from the intersubjective relation-
ships that it realises. Then, style becomes a quality distinct from its
physical form, implying either some ineffable cause or a biographical
one, both equally in error.
3.4.2 Drawing Demonstration One (a) Method

To begin Demonstration One (a) I chose pages six and seven from Teen
Witch, produced by Jim Medway in 2007.45
Consider Fig. 3.1. From these two pages, I extrapolated the following
script:
Demonstration One (a) Script: ‘Teen Witch Pages 06 and 07. Jim
Medway.
Panel 1:
ZOE, PERLA, PERLA’S MOTHER AND FATHER.
PRESENT DAY. INTERIOR. MARIO’S RESTAURANT.
ZOE IS SERVING A DISH OF LOBSTER TO PERLA AND HER
PARENTS.
Narrative: Five minutes later –
Zoe (to Perla): Your lobster, Madam.
Perla (loudly): LOOK OUT! It’s the world’s clumsiest waitress!
Perla’s Mother: HA HA!
Panel 2:
PERLA.
PRESENT DAY. INTERIOR. MARIO’S RESTAURANT.
Perla (to Zoe): I don’t want it any more. Bring me the dessert menu
instead—carefully! HA HA!
Panel 3:
ZOE.
PRESENT DAY.
INTERIOR. MARIO’S RESTAURANT.
ZOE IS HOLDING THE DISH OF LOBSTER.
Zoe (to Perla): Right away madam.
181
Fig. 3.1 Jim Medway, Teen Witch (2007), 6–7

Panel 4:
ZOE.
PRESENT DAY.
Zoe (to herself): GRR! THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD ENOUGH! . . . and I
know just the thing . . .
Panel 5:
ZOE.
PRESENT DAY.
ZOE IS WRITING ON THE PORTABLE DESSERT MENU
BOARD.
Zoe (to herself): . . . now what was that spell?
Page 7
Panel 1:
ZOE.
PRESENT DAY.
ZOE IS WRITING ON THE PORTABLE DESSERT MENU
BOARD.
Zoe (to herself): This will be a REAL special dessert!
Panel 2:
ZOE, PERLA, PERLA’S MOTHER.
PRESENT DAY.
ZOE IS SHOWING PERLA AND PERLA’S MOTHER THE
PORTABLE DESSERT MENU BOARD.
Zoe (to Perla): Anything take your fancy Madam?
Perla: Let me see—ice cream NO. Cake NO.
Panel 3:
PERLA.
PRESENT DAY.
PERLA IS CHOOSING FROM THE PORTABLE DESSERT
MENU BOARD.
Perla: Ooh! Now what’s this very expensive one? . . .
Panel 4:
PERLA
PRESENT DAY.
AS PERLA READS THE NAME OF THE DESSERT (A SPELL),
SHE CHANGES INTO A SEALION.
Perla: ‘Praline Truffle Triple Cho Chic—By the Sword of the Cyclops,
Zing, Zing, Zip!’
Sound Effect: KA ZAM!
Panel 5:
ZOE, PERLA, PERLA’S MOTHER AND FATHER.
PRESENT DAY.
THE SEALION PERLA (STILL RECOGNISABLE) BOUNCES ON
THE TABLE TO THE HORROR OF HER MOTHER AND
FATHER. ZOE LOOKS ON, SMILING.
Perla’s mother (to Perla): Ooh Princess! You’ve turned into a—a—
SEALION!
Perla: YELP Yelp!
Perla’s father: How embarrassing!
Zoe (thinks): Hee Hee! My spell worked!
End Page 7 End Script.
Having extrapolated this script, I set aside Medway’s work and attempted to
make a drawing from the script, adopting comic artist Mike Mignola’s form
of representation. I read the comics that Mignola had created, written and
drawn to date as complete works or collections of works.46 The drawings
Mignola makes for other authors, his writing for other artists, his novels and
movie productions are aspects of the forms of representation in these
albums, but they are not practically relevant to this Demonstration.
Figure 3.2 is an indicative example of a page by Mignola from, ‘Box
Full of Evil,’ a story in the compilation The Right Hand of Doom.47
Reading it, I compiled a list of technical specifications that typify
Mignola’s story telling across all of this albums. His pages are always
167 mm × 257 mm. The layout of panels on each page (of which there
is a wide variety of sizes and densities) is anchored by an invariable
template grid of nine panels of 47 mm × 74 mm with internal gutters of
2 mm. Page margins change according to whether the page is on the right
or the left (so that the right hand page margins are 10 mm inside, 17 mm
Fig. 3.2 Mike Mignola. ‘Box Full of Evil’ in Mike Mignola, The Right Hand of
Doom (2000), 144
outside and 12 mm top and bottom. The left hand pages reverse the
outside and inside margins of the right hand pages).
The line Mignola uses is invariably 5 pixels wide, including the line that
outlines panels, speech balloons, thought bubbles and narration, when it is
seen. The colour palette comprises a long list of print Pantones and
process colours that changes very little across all six albums. In the 1996
album, the background to panels is black. In the other albums, it is white.
Speech balloons and thought bubbles contain black calligraphy on white.
Narration contains black calligraphy on cream (C:0, M:0, Y:20, K:0). The
calligraphy is hand-drawn.
So much for a list of specifications understood from close reading.
There are many, many others, all of which contribute to typify Mignola’s
forms of representation. To borrow Baetens’s words again, these specifica-
tions are both ‘external’ (such as paper and print details, distribution,
consensually recognised genre and type of reader) and internal (such as
the story and narrator and ways of depicting through drawing).
These technical specifications informed my division of the script into
scenes depicted in each panel. This was the start of a transition from
written to visual story telling. Each specification provided an underlying
condition of the others. Taken as a group, the specifications were mutually
conditioning, with the effect of constraining my actions in visualising the
narrative at every stage.
By conforming to formal specifications, I was able to create a visual
drama characteristic of Mignola’s forms of representation, including char-
acterisation and story, through scene division, panel layout on the page
and final drawing, calligraphy and colour. My division of the script into
scenes depicted in panels was produced as a planned layout of the plot on
two pages In conforming to ‘Mignola’ specifications, this division into
scenes did not follow the division of scenes in the script, which belong to
Medway. See Fig. 3.3.
The layout of pages was almost the conclusion of my new visual
structuring of the plot and was also the moment for me to visualise the
possible relationship between speech balloons and scenes (see Fig. 3.4).
Mignola has been vocal about his work on this point, commenting:
‘You’re manipulating the background to put in these word balloons,
rather than just pretend that these things are not there.’48
From the layout of pages I was able to create a storyboard (see
Fig. 3.5). The development of the storyboard was much more complex
than either the extrapolation of a script or the creation of the visual
Fig. 3.3 Simon Grennan, Drawing Demonstration One (a) Medway/Mignola

layout (2009)
structure of the story in the layout. Although I was able to specify such
constants as line width, colour, calligraphy and types of balloon and
narration box, the plot and story and the characters, places, times and
things that comprise them were much more difficult to quantify.
However, according to the general terms of the Demonstration, my
own perception was a compete guide to adopting Mignola’s forms of
representation, because everything I know about him I perceive in the
form of representation. In visualising the world of the story in these two
new pages in the way that Mignola might, I had only to decide ‘for myself’
if my choices, actions and expressive traces were like the choices, and
actions communicated ‘to me’ in Mignola’s physical traces.
Rather than compiling technical specifications in order to achieve the
types of places and people who might be active in the whole story,
I looked for models derived from Mignola’s own comic strips and
made use of them to visualise the story in detail. In doing this, I also
looked for ways in which light, gravity, temperature, time of day, point of
view, smell, sound and movement appear as aspects of character as well as
aspects of narrative, including more distant genre conventions and
echoes of other expressions.

text layout (2009)
For example, throughout his work, Mignola uses a verbal language for
magic that is derived directly from the work of H. P. Lovecraft.49 It made
sense to use this language for the spell that Zoe tricks Perla into reciting,
rather than replicating the spell in the script, the language of which is
uniquely Medway’s. The use of this language informs Perla as a character
as well as contributing to the plot.
For Zoe, the teenage waitress witch, I imagined a character in appearance,
age and temperament like Mignola’s Kate Corrigan. For Perla, the snobbish
and petulant daughter, I imagined a character like Mignola’s Annie Hatch;
for Perla’s mother (an older version of Perla), Ilona Kakosy; for her father
(a long-suffering and hence silent family man), Adam Frost.50
I based the overall scene where the action takes place on the interiors of
nineteenth-century buildings that appear in all but the most recent of
Mignola’s albums, and specifically on the interiors in the story ‘Christmas
Underground,’ which appears in the album The Chained Coffin And Others.51

storyboard (2009)
This identification of models represented almost entirely my visualisa-

tion of the story in the two new pages, by which I mean the adoption of a
specific type of world inhabited by specific types of people, where some
things are possible and some impossible. This is a coherent fictional world
of causes and consequences, with a past and hence an associated pre-story,
and a plausible number of possible futures.
After completing the detailed storyboard, my only criteria in deciding
that the final drawings, calligraphy and colouring of the two pages were
complete was on the basis of degrees of similarity with other forms of
self-expression made by Mignola (see Fig. 3.6). I made this adjudication
of degrees of similarity as a reader. I stopped work as soon as I considered
myself able to read the two new pages in the way I read any pages by
Mignola, and able to access Mignola’s fictional world in the two new
pages as I feel I access Mignola’s worlds in his other work.
This was the most difficult phase of the work. In order to feel that the
pages had successfully adopted Mignola’s forms of representation rather than
remaining my own, I had to become a habitual reader again, feeling that I was
reading pages by Mignola, rather than a reader with the production of a
demonstration in mind, which is an entirely different sensation altogether.
3.4.3 Drawing Demonstration One (a) Analysis

When I had completed these tasks, I opened Jim Medway’s Teen Witch
again. Recall that the aim of the Drawing Demonstration One was to adopt
another subject form of representation in order to represent something
new. Also recall that the script extrapolated from Medway’s script acts as a
neutral control in the Demonstration, allowing me to produce a new
subjectivity through the use of another subject form of representation
without falling into tautology. The script in Medway’s drawing and my
new ‘Mignola’ drawing is very similar. Described simply as a series of
actions undertaken by named characters in a unified time and place, the
two plots are identical. In the script, only differences of language and in the
grouping of actions appear. But my ‘Mignola’ pages and Medway’s pages
depict entirely different fictional worlds, despite the identical plot. They
communicate entirely different things involving different authors, produ-
cers and reading milieu.
There is a great deal of difference between the two new pages drawn in
Demonstration One (a) and pages six and seven of Teen Witch from which
they are derived. In Medway’s fictional world, human beings are always
anthropomorphised cats. Curiously, this signature trait becomes less and
less significant in reading Medway, until it becomes completely insignif-
icant. Medway’s anthropomorphism is general, so that I understand that
this is simply the way that Medway always depicts human beings of all
types. In general, it might render his characters innocent, simple or
infantilised, but in fact, it is a device which enables him to depict a wide
variety of human emotions and actions very simply, even if these are always
in some way finally benign.
Medway’s plot develops in the very recent past. It is set in the north
west of England. Both of these facts are evidenced, to my knowledge, by
the dress of the characters, among other things: the hairstyles and clothes
are information rich and completely specific to this time and place and no
other. There is a coincidence that has an effect on the outcome of
Demonstration One (a): I chose Medway’s pages without thinking them
Fig. 3.6 Simon Grennan, Drawing Demonstration One (a) Medway as Mignola
(2009)
Fig. 3.6 (continued)

typical or untypical of Medway’s work. It was Mignola’s forms of repre-

sentation that I aimed to typify. In utilising a script derived from these
pages as the basis for drawing new pages in the manner of Mignola, I
hadn’t realised how untypical of Medway these pages are, for the simple
reason that their plot contains magic. This inclusion of magic is unique in
Medway’s output. So Teen Witch pages six and seven are uncharacteristic
Medway pages in this way. Magic is one of the things that does not occur
in the contemporary north west of England as depicted by Medway, even
in a community of people who look like cats.
The overall social tone of Medway’s pages is gentle and comedic, so
there doesn’t feel like there will be lasting harm in the spell that Zoe has
tricked Perla into reciting. This concurs with all of the actions in Medway’s
drawings. On the other hand, magic is a staple ingredient of Mignola’s
fictional world, as is the possibility of harm.
My new ‘Mignola’ pages also take place in the recent past, but the part
of the world in which the action takes place is difficult to establish with
certainty. It could be taking place in an eastern European castle or a long-
established restaurant in New York. These differences between Medway
and Mignola are partly differences of genre. They are consensually agreed
forms of representation that are pervasive even as they allow specific
examples of work within them to have their own individual characteris-
tics. The traditions of supernatural storytelling across media are contrib-
uted to by Mignola’s fictional world, represented by Lovecraft’s magic
language and visual hints of ancestral lineages, wealth and tenebrous
histories as much as the actual magic transformation itself.
On the other hand, Medway contributes to the tradition of comedic
visual anthropomorphism by bringing it into specific social currency in the
present day, with hairstyles and clothes. Both a possible setting of a castle
and an ‘old New York’ restaurant are plausible Mignola locations, as a high
street restaurant in Greater Manchester in the north west of England is
not, and vice versa in the work of Medway.
These generic differences are reflected in the ways in which each world
is depicted. Medway’s three-colourway and ‘moiré’ dot half tones estab-
lish a codified way of depicting the atmosphere, light and shade of his
world which refers overtly to old (and hence now demeaned) print tech-
nology and its past use in cheap production. This technology is now a
focus for sentimentalism and commoditisation as nostalgia.
Alternatively, Mignola’s world is built of high contrasts of light and
shade, representing drama, heightened emotion and psychological
extremes. These are represented on the page as graphic patterns of silhou-

ette and flashes of acid colour, arranged one on top of the other in layers of
tightly managed space, dense with ink. My Mignola pages in Drawing
Demonstration One (a) follow these prescriptions completely.
In describing the different characteristics of trace that I have high-
lighted in Medway’s pages and my new pages, I have freely mixed aspects
of depiction, production technology and the social consensus that con-
tribute to Mignola’s form of representation (with terms such as ‘silhou-
ette’, ‘flashes of acid colour’, ‘moire’, ‘dense with ink’ ‘north west of
England’ and ‘Lovecraft’). I have utilised aspects of both the ‘story’ and
‘the story of the story’ to describe the ‘story’, without contradiction or
inadmissible change of mode.
The narrative in both Medway’s pages and my new ‘Mignola’ pages,
although the same in terms of a script, is different as a whole because it
comprised all of its accumulated forms of representation. Individual
aspects of trace are identifiable within this accumulation of forms, but
they are not divisible. There is a single good example of this in the possible
different readings of Perla’s mother’s exclamation, which is the same in
both drawings ‘Oh princess, you’ve turned into a sealion!’ In Medway’s
drawing, the word ‘princess’ is a term of familial endearment in a mother/
daughter relationship, similar in use to the word ‘darling’. It is impossible
to read the word’princess’ literally, as the Greater Manchester that
Medway depicts does not contain princesses.
However, in my new ‘Mignola’ pages, the word ‘princess’ could easily
be taken literally, because the whole form of Mignola’s typical self-expres-
sion includes the possibility of such a reading. Princesses are to be found
therein, as are ‘old New York’ restaurants and eastern European castles,
black shadows and Lovecraft’s magic words. As Vološinov writes: ‘The
speaker’s subjective consciousness does not ( . . . ) operate with language as
a system of normatively identical forms [but is] ( . . . ) brought about in line
with the particular, concrete utterance,.. the centre of gravity lies not in
the identity of the form but in that new and concrete meaning it acquires
in the particular context.’52
3.4.4 Drawing Demonstration One (b) Method and Analysis

Demonstration One (b) and Demonstration One (c) followed exactly the
same method as Demonstration One (a): I chose a double page spread by a
comic strip artist. I extrapolated a script and chose another comic strip
artist, whose form of representation was to adopt. I undertook a compre-

hensive reading of that artist’s work in order to compile a detailed list of
specifications describing the typical formal characteristics of their expres-
sion. I drew a new set of pages based on the script utilising these char-
acteristics and undertook a comparative reading with the pages from
which the script was derived.
I shall not duplicate my descriptions of method in the case of each of
the strands of the Drawing Demonstration One. Some details of specifica-
tion, such as page sizes, grid structures and colour palettes, I will omit here
altogether. They can be read directly in the illustrations provided. Others,
such as the extrapolated scripts in each case and lists of characteristic
works, I will include.
To begin Demonstration One (b) I chose pages 144 and 145 from the
story ‘Almost Colossus’ included in the anthology The Chained Coffin and
Others, produced by Mike Mignola in 1998 (see Fig. 3.7).53 From these
two pages, I extrapolated the following script:
Demonstration One (b) Script: ‘Almost Colossus’ Pages 144 and
145. Mike Mignola.
Panel 1:
HOMUNCULUS, HOMUNCULUS’ BROTHER, KATE, SLAVE.
RECENT PAST. INTERIOR. LABORATORY IN THE TOWER OF
THE CAPATINENI MONASTERY, ROMANIA.
THE SLAVE IS PRESENTING THE ROPE-TIED KATE
CORRIGAN TO HOMUNCULUS’ BROTHER AND
HOMUNCULUS.
Slave (to Homunculus’ brother): Master . . . ?
Homunculus’ brother (to slave): What have you got there, slave? A
living human? Shall we use her to christen the work?
Homunculus: You cannot!
Homunculus’ brother: Quiet brother.
Panel 2:
HOMUNCULUS
HOMUNCULUS HEAD AND TORSO ONLY.
Homunculous’ brother (voice off, to Homunculus): Remember what
I told you. WE are the greater. These humans should be ours to do with
as we please . . .
195
Fig. 3.7 Mike Mignola ‘Almost Colossus,’ in Mike Mignola, The Chained Coffin and Others (1998), 144–45
Panel 3:
ZOE.
KATE
KATE HEAD ONLY.
Homunculous’ borther (voice off, to Homunculus): . . . raw
materials . . .
Panel 4:
LIZ.
AT THE SAME MOMENT AS PANEL 3. INTERIOR. HOSPITAL
ISOLATION WARD, THE WAUER INSTITUTE, TIRGOVISTE,
ROMANIA.
LIZ CLOSE UP, EYES FULL OF ENERGY.
Homunculous’ borther (voice off, to Homunculus): . . . ours to
use . . .
Panel 5:
HOMUNCULUS’ BROTHER.
Homunculous’ brother: . . . and to DESTROY. Remember that
brother.
Homunculous’ brother (to the slave, off): put her in the hole.
Panel 6:
HOMUNCULUS, SLAVE, KATE CORRIGAN, HOMUNCULUS’
BROTHER.
THE SLAVE IS LIFTING KATE CORRIGAN TOWARDS A
BOILING VAT OF FAT.
Kate: Hey! Stop it!
Slave: Another onion for the soup.
Homunculus’ brother (to slave): DO IT NOW!
Panel 7:
HOMUNCULUS.
CLOSE UP OF HOMUNCULOUS’ EYES, FILLED WITH

ENERGY.
Panel 8:
KATE
KATE EMITS A SMALL CHARGE OF ENERGY FROM HER
HAND.
Kate: No.
Panel 9:
HOMUNCULUS.
Homunculus: No.
End Page 144
Page 145
Panel 1:
HOMUNCULUS.
HOMUNCULUS STRIKES THE SLAVE AWAY FROM KATE
CORRIGAN WITH A BUST OF ENERGY.
Homunculus: NO!
Sound effect: WOK
Panel 2:
HOMUNCULUS, KATE
HOMUNCULUS IS STEADYING KATE.
Homunculus (to Kate): Are you unharmed?
Kate (to Homunculus):I . . . I’m okay.
Homunculus (to Kate): I will not let him harm you.
Panel 3:
HOMUNCULUS, KATE
A THROWN ROCK HITS HOMUNCULUS ON THE HEAD.

Kate: !
Panel 4:
KATE, HELLBOY.
HELLBOY APPEARS THROUGH A HOLE IN THE
LABORATORY WALL. KATE IS STILL TIED. HOMUNCULUS
LIES KNOCKED OUT.
Kate: HELLBOY! I don’t think you had to do that—and what took
you so long?
Hellboy: The stairs were a tight fit, and some smart-ass bricked up the
door at this end. You okay? Is that our guy?
Panel 5:
HOMUNCULUS’ BROTHER.
SHOUTING.
Homunculus’ brother: WHAT IS THIS!? My brother turns against
me and now my laboratory is INVADED?! YOU FOOLS!
End Page 145
Setting aside Mignola’s pages, I chose comic artist Chris Ware as the
subject I would attempt to represent in the adoption of Ware’s forms of
representation. In this case, I read the following works by Ware: The
ACME Novelty Library No. 1–15, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on
Earth (see Fig. 3.8) and Quimby the Mouse.54
As guides, I modelled the visual appearance of characters in the script
on characters in Jimmy Corrigan. For Kate, us adapted Jimmy’s grand-
father’s boyhood girl friend; for the homunculus and his brother, Jimmy’s
great grandfather; for Hellboy, the Italian toymaker and for the Slave, the
toymaker’s son. The page layout and storyboard are indicative rather than
illustrative. They are taxonomy rather than visualisation. This was due to
my realisation of Ware’s characteristic use of single points of view cropped
and repeated. I only had to visualise two changes of scene (one axono-
metric view and one elevation), within which only changes of scale and
frame needed to be made. I constrained the actions of characters within
scenes in the same way through scale and cropping, producing Ware’s
199
Fig. 3.8 Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), 320–21
characteristic repetition, evenness of pace and particular sense of space as a

result (Fig 3.9 and 3.10).
My final two pages are shown as Fig. 3.11. Mignola’s pages are set in
the present, but are grounded in a tradition of supernatural story telling
that is so well understood that it appears timeless. This genre admits
generational changes, but the actions of the characters within it are both
eternal and ever-present. In the genre, a spooky house in a novel of 1900 is
the same as a spooky house in a novel of 2010. The story could be set in
any ‘present day,’ past or present, with only changes in technology to
indicate which generation the protagonists represent, and these details are
unimportant.
I have set my new ‘Ware’ pages in the early twentieth century. This
setting refers some of the depicted actions in the plot to real horrors
and real psychoses that are utterly impossible in Mignola’s narratives.
These include remediated images of serial killing, terrorism and exter-
mination camps. Ware’s fictional world is full of banality and violence,
both casual and purposeful, made part of that world through recogni-
tion on a reader’s part of other specific places and times in the real
world. As such, Ware’s work conforms to a kind of contemporary
‘Realism,’ in which the characters and places have the status of subjects
in a documentary. Not so Mignola’s fictional world. There are no
supernatural constants in Ware’s work, only dreams and fantasies of
the supernatural, bearing the same relationship to their subjects as do
dreams and fantasies in everyday life.
In my new ‘Ware’ pages, Hellboy (the red demon/hero in
Mignola’s work) is a man of strange appearance. He’s coloured red
all over, including his face, clothes and hair, with horns and a pointed
moustache. Nonetheless, he is a man. Perhaps his adventures prior to
his appearance in the plot have required him to dress like that, as a
showman or a devil. Has he been to a fancy-dress party? Is his
appearance a disguise put on in order to gain entry to the building
and rescue Kate? Whatever makes him appear like that, it is definitely
not the fact that he is a demon.
3.4.5 Demonstration One (c) Method and Analysis

For Demonstration One (c), I chose pages 144 and 145 from The
Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman, compiled after appearing as a
series (see Fig. 3.12).55
Fig. 3.9 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (b) Mignola/Ware panel layout
(2009)
Fig. 3.10 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (b) Mignola/Ware scene layout
(2009)
From these two pages, I extrapolated the following script:

Panel 1:
VLADEK, ANJA, MRS MOTONOWA, MRS MOTONOWA’S
SON
1940S. IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE. ANJA PLAYS ‘CAT’S
CRADLE’ WITH STRING WITH MRS MOTONOWA’S SON.
Vladek (voice over): We had here a little comfortable . . . we had where
to sit.
Anja (to Mrs Motonowa’s son): Remember, little one—never tell any-
body (bold) there are Jews here. They’ll shoot us all!
Mrs Motonowa’s son (to Anja): Yes, Aunt Anja.
Vladek (voice over): the little boy was very smart and he loved very
much Anja.
Panel 2:
ART, VLADEK
1980S. IN THE GARDEN AT VLADEK’S HOME.
Art (to Vladek): You had to pay (bold) Mrs Motonova to keep you,
right?
Vladek (out of Panel, hand-only visible. To Art): Of course I
paid . . . and well (bold) I paid.
Panel 3:
VLADEK
Vladek: . . . what you think? Someone will risk their life for nothing?
Panel 4:
ART, VLADEK
Vladek (to Art): . . . I paid also for the food what she gave us from her
smuggling business.
Panel 5:
ART, VLADEK
Vladek: But one time I missed a few coins to the bread . . .
Panel 6:
VLADEK, MRS MOTONOWA
1940S. IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE
Fig. 3.11 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (b) Mignola as Ware (2009)
Vladek (to Mrs Motonowa): I’ll pay you the rest tomorrow, after I go
out and cash some valuables.
Panel 7:
VLADEK, MRS MOTONOWA
1940S. A MOMENT LATER, SAME SCENE AS PANEL 6.
Mrs Motonowa (to Vladek): Sorry, I wasn’t able to find (bold) any
bread today.
Vladek (voice over): Always (bold) she got bread, so I didn’t
believe . . . But, still, she was a good woman.
Panel 8:
ANJA, MRS MOTONOWA’S SON
1940S. IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE. ANJA AND MRS
MOTONOWA’S SON SHARE A BOOK.
Vladek (voice over): In his school the boy was very bad a German. So
Anja tutored to him.
Mrs Motonowa’s son (reading): Ich bin . . . Du bist . . . Er ist . . .
Vladek (voice over): She knew German like an expert.
Panel 9:
VLADEK, ANJA, MRS MOTONOWA, MRS MOTONOWA’S SON.
1940S. IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE. THE ADULTS ARE
DISMAYED.
Mrs Motonowa’s son (to Anja, Vladek and Mrs Motonowa): My
teacher asked me how I improved so much . . .
Panel 10:
VLADEK, ANJA, MRS MOTONOWA, MRS MOTONOWA’S SON.
1940S. A MOMENT LATER. SAME SCENE AS PANEL 9. THE
ADULTS ARE RELIEVED.
206
3 DRAWING DEMONSTRATION ONE: EXPOUNDING ANOTHER’S . . .
Fig. 3.12 Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (1996), 1445–45

Mrs Motonowa’s son (to Anja, Vladek and Mrs Motonowa): So I told
him my mother (bold) was helping me.
Anja (exhales): Whew
Vladek (voice over): He was really a clever boy.
End Page 144
Page 145
Panel 1:
MRS MOTONOWA, ANJA, VLADEK.
1940S. GROUND FLOOR IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE,
WITH A VIEW OUT OF THE WINDOW.
Vladek (voice over): But it was a few small things here not so
good . . . Her home was very small and it was on the ground floor . . .
Mrs Monotowa (to Anja and Vladek, indicating the window): Be sure
to keep away from the window—you might be seen!
Panel 2:
MRS MOTONOWA, ANJA, VLADEK.
INSIDE THE FRONT DOOR.
Sound effect: Nok nok (bold)
Mrs Motonowa (to the door): One Minute! (bold)/(to Anja and
Vladek): (Quick—get in the closet!)
Panel 3:
POSTMAN, MRS MOTONOWA, ANJA, VLADEK.
POSTMAN AND MRS MOTONOWA ARE INSIDE THE OPEN
FRONT DOOR. ANJA AND VLADEK ARE IN THE CLOSET,
SEEN CUT-AWAY.
Postman (to Mrs Motonowa): A letter from your husband, Mrs
Motonowa.
Mrs Motonowa (to the Postman): Thanks.
Panel 4:
ANJA, VLADEK.
1940’S. INSIDE THE CLOSET IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE,
A MOMENT AFTER PANEL 3.
Vladek (voice over): But I had something allergic in the closet . . .
Vladek (starts to sneeze): Aah (bold)
Panel 5:
ANJA, VLADEK.
1940’S. INSIDE THE CLOSET IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE,
A MOMENT AFTER PANEL 4.
Vladek (voice over): Or maybe it was a cold—I can’t remember . . .
Vladek (stifles the sneeze): —chmf
Vladek (voice over): But always I had to sneeze.
Panel 6:
MRS MOTONOWA, VLADEK, ANJA.
1940S. IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE. MRS MOTONOWA
HAS JUST COME IN.
Vladek (voice over): Still, everything here was fine, until one Saturday
Motonowa ran very early back from her black market work . . .
Mrs Motonowa (to Anja and Vladek): This is terrible! (bold) The
Gestapo just searched me—they took all my goods!
Panel 7:
1940S. IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE. A MOMENT AFTER
PANEL 6.
Mrs Motonowa (to Anja and Vladek): They may come search here any
minute! You’ve got to leave! (bold)
Vladek (to Mrs Motonowa): What! (bold)
Anja (to Mrs Motonowa): But where can we go?
Panel 8:
1940S. IN MRS MOTONOWA’S HOUSE. A MOMENT AFTER
PANEL 7.
Mrs Motonowa (to Anja and Vladek): I don’t know. But you must get
out now! (bold)
Anja (to Vladek): Oh my God . . . This is the end! (bold)
Vladek (voice over): Anja started to cry . . . But we had not a choice.
End Page 145
I decided to use the script extrapolated from the work of Spiegelman to
draw new pages as Medway might characteristically draw them (see
Fig. 3.1). The storyboard and final pages can be seen in Figs. 3.13 and
3.14. Spiegelman’s Maus is one of the most celebrated contemporary
comic strips in English. The series of cross-generational relationships and
Fig. 3.13 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (c) Spiegelman as Medway storyboard (2009)
209
Fig. 3.14 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (c) Spiegelman as Medway

(2009)
the narratives of reminiscence, confession and compassion through which

it describes the continuing experiences of the Nazi genocide make it a
deeply serious and emotive work. Its central depictive device is an
extended visual metaphor in which race and nationality are correlated to
people anthropomorphised as different animals. German nationals appear
as cats, Polish nationals as pigs, Jewish people as mice. Jewish people
disguised as Polish nationals appear as anthropomorphised mice wearing
pig masks and so on.
The donning of masks is a key rhetorical trope in the visual drama,
which unfolds with the inevitability of tragedy. It is a story of human
suffering in which the conclusion is seen in the beginning, through
reversals of fortune, and it is the turns in the course of events that are
important, as the outcomes are already familiar. Spiegelman’s anthropo-
morphism is strongly directed towards this sense. Medway’s anthropo-
morphism and Spiegelman’s couldn’t be more different. In my new
‘Medway’ drawing, the characters feel as though they are in greater con-
trol of their personal destinies than in Spiegelman’s. This entirely changes
the narrative.

Spiegelman’s characters appear to be driven by events, even as they

contribute to them, and this is an aspect of their (and our) tragedy.
Personal happiness, health and life itself are at the whim of history, abstracted
and annihilating, against which they have no choice but to struggle to live,
or die in the effort. The animal features that they wear contribute to this
sense. My new ‘Medway’ pages are less monumental than Spiegelman’s and
the characters in them are more open to opportunity. There is no sense of
unfolding tragedy, only of deadly peril, difficulty and struggle. Survival
seems, possible, at least, and the story’s end is not yet known.
3.4.6 Drawing Demonstration One Conclusion

In Drawing Demonstration One, to what extent have I managed to
manipulate the forms of representation of another subject in order to
change ‘the story of the story’ and hence change the ‘story’? To what
extent have I simply made my own trace and hence failed in some degree?
The Demonstration will have been successful if it produced a unique, self-
consciously-made visualisation of another’s forms of representation in
each case. This will have occurred if I have created a visual narrative
from each script that appears to have been made by the three comic artists
in view (Mignola, Ware and Medway). This would involve perceiving each
drawing as realisations of them as subjects. Crucially, success depends on
the degree to which I also understand each of these physical traces as
manipulations of the situation of reading, made by someone other than
the artists.
The Demonstration’s relative success will derive from the degree of
my re-subjectivisation in each case. Although I have made each drawing,
each drawing must appear as though the artist has made it. In the
Demonstration, I have made the physical trace of another person and
seen how convincingly that trace realises their subjectivity. The point at
which the drawings become convincing is the point at which the story of
the story is changed, revealing the way in which relative subjectivity comes
about. The three strands of the Demonstration appear to create distinct
subject voices, not just disembodied emblems of objects already recog-
nised. These pages by ‘Mignola’, ‘Ware’ and ‘Medway’ are new.
I selected the particular comic artists’ work for the Demonstration
based on the possibility of this distinctiveness, in the sense that the
comics from which the scripts were derived and the forms of representa-
tion I attempted to adopt are very different from each other in emotional
tone, production techniques and genre. They each have longstanding,

deep and wide-reaching networks of associations invested in their forms
of self-expression.
Conversely, the degree to which I might have failed is expressed in
the reverse. In each case it would be revealed in the appearance of my
own forms of representation, establishing and entrenching my own
subjectivity outside the characteristic traces of the other artists. If this
is the case, we will be more or less able to identify the particularities of
trace that index subject me, rather then indexing subject others.
Finally, I am able to position myself as a reader in relation to the
new drawings, making my own perception of them their entire affect.
Reading, I can take my ‘Ware’ drawing and my ‘Medway’ drawing as
plausibly by Ware and Medway. I don’t think that is quite the case
with my Mignola drawing. Mignola’s unerring mastery over the spaces
he depicts is achieved by manipulating contrast. In his fictional world
no one is ever unsure as to where everyone and everything is. My new
‘Mignola’ drawing contains areas of spatial vagueness that, whilst not
entirely expressing my subjective presence over Mignola’s, makes the
drawing not by Mignola.
I am dis-habituated by these drawings, whereas reading actual Ware,
Mignola or Medway drawings, I feel habituated to them. The subjec-
tive tropes of drawings made by these artists are invisible to me,
whereas my own remain visible to me, as hard as I have tried to
destabilise and conceal them according to the adoption of a theoreti-
cally neutral subject as control.
This dis-habituation occurs on the level of a comparison between the
experience that I have when reading a drawing by Ware, Mignola or
Medway and my experience of these new drawings. This difference
might be simply a result of the experimental frame, which requires me to
know both what I have done and to read it as the form of representation of
a subject other. I know more about the production and reading of these
drawings than either a producer or a reader alone usually can. If this dis-
habituation is caused by knowledge, it is the result of theoretically dou-
bling my subjectivity in order to undertake the Demonstration. It is inter-
subjective jetlag.
However, I think that there is more to my dis-habituation. I have only
compared existing and new sets of drawings very briefly, highlighting
some aspects of the changed ‘story’ in each case. I read a doubling of
motives in the drawings themselves, compared with the existing bodies
of work to which they contribute. It is not possible for me to be someone

else, to make someone else’s trace or to be in someone else’s situation.
The series of subjective relationships embodied in the new drawings in
the Demonstration are specific to me, communicated through the physi-
cal form of this expression, the situation of which I’m a part. When
Mignola, Ware or Medway express themselves, it is always their self-
expression and always their physical trace.
My dis-habituation is a result of this difference. It is an effect of the
deep social empathy that readers are capable of developing for the other
participants in diegesis. This empathy is represented literally in the physical
forms of expression themselves, in the specific traces of story telling,
drawing and production.
I am particularly dis-habituated to my new ‘Ware’ and new ‘Medway’
drawings. In the case of the ‘Ware’ drawing because Ware’s trace is so
strongly identified with the presumed biography of the author. In the
case of the new ‘Medway’ drawing, this unease derives from the fact
that Spiegelman’s work (from which I derived the script for the
Medway drawings) now carries the social distinction of high literature.
Commentary on the subject of Spiegelman’s work by extrapolating a script
for a drawing demonstration in intersubjectivity feels constrained by social
taboo. This also contributed to dis-habituation.
Testing the relative subjectivity of others by adopting their forms of
representation is an activity that risks the imputation of either rheto-
rical or unscrupulous motives (as in the case of deceptions by forgery,
for example). It institutionalises the scrutinising of intersubjective
equilibrium. Such scrutiny can feel both personally and socially invasive
and aggressive. It reveals the status relationships between people and
also exposes to view the mutable subjectivity of the social institutions
by which we exist.
In Chapter 4, I shall discuss the self-conscious manipulation of this
equilibrium in relation to a number of cultural strategies that have aimed
to utilise subjectivity radically. In terms of Drawing Demonstration One,
however, I claim a rhetorical motive for self-consciously adopting others’
forms of representation. Some justification for this is provided by the
terms of the Demonstration itself. I also lay claim to Demonstration One
being more than less successful. This is evidenced both by the plausibility
of the physical traces it produced and the dis-habituation with which I
finally read them.
NOTES 215
NOTES
1. Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 255.
2. Ibid. 253.
3. Ibid. 251.
4. Baetens, ‘Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation.’
5. Ibid. and see Groensteen. ‘The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of
the Narrator.’ 04.
6. Baetens. ‘Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation.’ 146.
7. Ibid. 150.
8. Ibid. 152.
11. Varnum and Gibbons also objectify narrators and readers in their commen-
tary on the concept of ‘mediagenius’, misunderstanding the physical form of
expression as a direct index of an author. They write ‘A proximity to the
absent artist is triggered through the graphic trace.’ Varnum and Gibbons.
The Language of Comics: Word and Image. xvi.
12. Barker. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. 124.
13. Groensteen. The System of Comics. 123.
15. Vološinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. 26, 19.
16. Crossley. Intersubjectivity: the Fabric of Social Becoming. 26.
18. Vološinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. 21 and Barker. Comics:
Ideology, Power and the Critics. 275 and Biber and Conrad. Register, Genre
and Style. 47.
20. Ibid. 86.
21. Ibid.
22. Barker. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. 275.
23. Biber and Conrad. Register, Genre and Style. 16.
24. Ibid. 47.
25. Crossley. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. 4.
26. Ibid. 06 and 85.
27. Mead. Mind, Self, Society. 174.
28. Connor. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. 03–04.
30. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. 137.
31. Ibid.
32. Mitchell. On Narrative. 31.
34. Ibid. 80–81, 98.

Arts. 224.
36. Hampl. ‘The Lax Habits of Free Imagination.’
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid
41. Ibid. 348.
43. Connor. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. 06.
44. Talon. Panel Discussions. 13.
45. Medway. Teen Witch. 06–07.
46. Mignola. Seed of Destruction, and Wake the Devil and The Chained Coffin
and Others and The Right Hand of Doom, and The Conqueror Worm.
47. Mignola. The Right Hand of Doom. 144.
48. Talon. Panel Discussions. 82.
49. Airaksinen. The Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror.
50. Mignola. The Chained Coffin and Others and The Right Hand of Doom.
51. Mignola. The Chained Coffin and Others. 41–61.
53. Mignola. The Chained Coffin and Others. 144–45.
54. Ware. Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Quimby the Mouse
and The Acme Novelty Library.
55. Spiegelman. The Complete Maus. 144–45.
CHAPTER 4
Drawing Demonstration Two: Time

and Self-Observation
Characterising representations in terms of intersubjective relationships has

implications for the way in which I conceive of time. To recall, representa-
tions are only significant in as much as they realise the structures of
intersubjective relationships. Hence, a representation is not ultimately
susceptible through technical-activity analysis to any of its component
parts. As Bakhtin writes: ‘When we select a particular type of [representa-
tion], we do so not for the [representation)] itself, but out of considera-
tion for what we wish to express ( . . . ) We select ( . . . ) from the standpoint
of the whole utterance.’1 According to the narrative model, understanding
is a co-production, structured by relationships between intersubjects, so
that ‘ . . . experience exists even for the people undergoing it, only in the
material of signs. Outside that material there is no experience as such. In
this sense, any experience is expressible, i.e. potential personal expression
( . . . ).’2
Because we perceive these relationships between different subjects
through representations, each represented subject in the structure occu-
pies a distinct historical time. As discussed, the time in which a form of
representation is made distinct from the time of the object of representa-
tion. These distinct times are not abstractions, but highly specific proper-
ties of the situation in which representation takes place. The particular
production traces of each form of representation index the historic
moments in which they occurred, fixing the representation in a precise
temporal relationship with acts of comprehension. Hence, the relative

218 4 DRAWING DEMONSTRATION TWO: TIME AND SELF-OBSERVATION
temporal positions of subject ‘addresser’ and subject ‘addressee’ in relation

to each other and the form of representation are historically determined.
The time in which a subject addressee comprehends the representation is
characterised by their subjectivity relative to the past production of forms of
representation and the time of what is represented. I comprehend these
times as affordances within the inhibitions and opportunities of the general
potential resources of the body, etiologically and homeorhetically. The
narrative model requires not only those who tell/show, are told/shown
about and listen or read, but also their own times of action as subjects. This
identification of relative times as aspects of the relative subjective positions is
an intersubjective historicising of the ‘story of the story’.
4.1 PIERRE MENARD’S PROJECT

The generation of relative times is the focus of Borges short story Pierre
Menard, author of the ‘Quixote.’ The story is framed as an obituary, written
around 1900. The fictional protagonist Pierre Menard attempts to write
his own texts so that they match word for word fragments of the text of de
Cervantes’s seventeenth-century novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don
Quixote of La Mancha. Borges’s narrator tells us that ‘To compose Don
Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable,
necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the
twentieth century it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that 300 years
have passed, charged with the most complex happenings ( . . . )’3
When Menard succeeds in writing sentences of his own that match word
for word sentences in Don Quixote, the narrator says that ‘The text of de
Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost
infinitely richer.’4 He critiques the two identical fragments as historical docu-
ments whose meaning is entirely relative to the time of their production:
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with de Cervantes’. The

latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine): ‘truth, whose mother is
history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and
adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.’ Written in the seventeenth
century, written by the ‘lay genius’ de Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere
rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: ‘truth, whose
mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past,
exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.’ History, the
mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William
4.1 PIERRE MENARD’S PROJECT 219
James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin.
Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to
have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the
future’s counselor—are brazenly pragmatic. The contrast in style is also vivid.
The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain
affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current
Spanish of his time.5
To make sense of Borges’s story, it is possible to imaginatively substitute the

activity of reading for Menard’s activity of writing. In this case, the story
establishes reading as a function of writing. As a consequence, the story
becomes a parable of reading. This is imprecise. The idea ignores the wider
implications of Menard’s project, which is not to re-write de Cervantes’s
text, but to write a new text that is identical. Menard wants to change the
situation in which the form of expression is produced and thus change the
meaning of words, even if they appear to sit identically on a page made
yesterday and a page made 300 years previously by someone else.
Menard’s project is not a way of reading. It is not even an analogy of
reading. Rather it is a practical demonstration of the aeteological effects
of time. Borges locates Menard precisely in time. Without doing so, he
wouldn’t be able to have the narrator conduct such a precise analysis of
Menard’s text. Only in relation to Menard’s moment in historic time
can the narrator arrive at a time in which he forms his representation to
be part of a network of etiological relationships with others. In analys-
ing Menard’s text, Borges’s narrator reflects Vološinov’s analytical
method: ‘Should we miss ( . . . ) situational factors, we would be as little
able to understand an utterance as if we were to miss its most impor-
tant words.’6 Menard’s project is not re-writing. This would be to
adopt the subjectivity of de Cervantes—a method Menard considers
and rejects. Nor is Menard’s project simply a reading. This would find
meaning in the text from his own point of view, and hence affirm his
own subjectivity.
Dennett also describes a method of adopting the historic time of
another. It is very close to the method Menard rejects. Dennett outlines
the possibility of trying to listening to a Bach chorale in the way that a
seventeenth-century Leipziger might have listened:
If we want to imagine what it was like to be a Leipzig Bach-hearer, it is not

enough for us to hear the same tones on the same instruments in the same
order: we must also prepare ourselves somehow to respond to those tones

with the same heartaches, thrills and waves of nostalgia ( . . . ) A music
scholar who carefully avoided all contact with post 1725 music and famil-
iarised himself intensively with the traditional music of that period would be
a good approximation.7
Rather, Menard’s project aims to demonstrate that forms of representation

are only meaningful if their whole ecology is analysed. This makes the
recognition of relative historical times a constituent of representation.
Without this recognition, semiosis is not possible. This temporal specificity
is a prerequisite of intersubjectivity. It is not possible to separate the
subjective historical moment and the form of representation. The sense
of subjective displacement produced by Borges’s story derives from just
this indivisibility of subjects, historic times and traces.
The story feels like a parlour game of misattribution or misappellation.
Is it a trick involving a hidden agenda or motivating intent? Is it a joke,
clashing together different social modes of language or behaviour?
Menard’s project is impossible and so the solemnity with which his project
is described and his extreme effort are ridiculous. He wants to write his
own words in his own historic time and have them attest to the perfor-
mance of a miracle—that they are exactly the same words as another
writer’s, dead 300 years.
Motivating my own sense of displacement in the story is a realisation
that words themselves are incomprehensible beyond the forms that realise
my relative subjectivity. As Vološinov argues, ‘[any] current curse word
can become a word of praise, and any current truth must inevitably sound
to many other people as the greatest lie ( . . . ) accentuating yesterday’s
truth as to make it appear today’s.’8
The duck/rabbit drawing discussed by Wittgenstein and many others is
a parlour game in the same way as Menard’s project. Looked at in one way,
it is a depiction of the head of a rabbit. Looked at in another, it is the head
of a duck, pointing in the opposite direction. Ears become beak. My own
orientation to the image reveals either a depiction of a duck or a depiction
of a rabbit to me, but never both at the same time. Similarly, Menard’s text
is either Menard’s or de Cervantes’s, but never both at the same time.
Even though I fully understand that the drawing is a trick built upon the
tipping point in the biological re-visioning process of visual perception,
our historic time-of-the-rabbit and our historic time-of-the-duck remain
entirely distinct. Crossley writes, ‘Such phenomena strongly challenge the
4.1 PIERRE MENARD’S PROJECT 221
idea that the object is determinate ( . . . ) The visual meaning (..) changes
without a change in what empiricists would identify as the stimulus.’9 In
the duck/rabbit drawing, the sense of displacement is generated in the
sensation of moving from one meaning to another, which is to say, whilst
recognising that the ‘stimulus’ remains the same. We do not expect our
subjectivity to be so easily exposed as contingent, nor the relative nature of
our own sense of historic time so self-consciously embodied by such a
simple visual trick.
Dennett proposes that the form of representation is revised by each new
ecology of which it is a part. Its meaning is perpetually contingent upon
the realisation of structures that appear anew in each ecology.10 The
uniqueness of each ecology in which the forms of representation appear
substantiates the fact that these forms are only meaningful as a whole
ecology. Bakhtin writes ‘dialogical relations are profoundly unique and
can only be [represented by] complete utterances ( . . . ) behind which
stand (and in which are expressed) real . . . subjects, authors of the given
utterances.’11
Each representation is a unique bundle of relative times. My indivi-
dual sense of time is built upon an accumulation of these relationships,
in which I have an etiological part and in which I find meaning.
Vološinov writes ‘Every stage in the development of a society has its
own special and restricted circle of items, which alone have access to
that society’s attention and which are endowed with evaluative accent-
uation by that attention. In order for any for any item ( . . . ) to enter
the social purview of the group (..) it must be associated with the vital
socioeconomic prerequisites of the particular group’s existence ( . . . ) all
ideological accents ( . . . ) are social accents, ones with claim to social
recognition and only thanks to that recognition are made outward use
of ( . . . ).’12
Identical forms take on different meanings as the ecology in which they
are made changes. These changes explicitly reveal the historic temporal
conditions that constitute the ecology. My relationship to any temporal
measure is my comprehension of the traces of the historic times in which
representations are made. Bakhtin writes, ‘two externally similar forms
may appear at different stages ( . . . ) endowed with different meanings—
like a pair of homonyms.’13 Opaki writes that ever representation ‘has
underlying it certain defined socio-historic factors, which ( . . . ) bring with
them the creation of ( . . . ) an ensemble of means of expression, which
( . . . ) carry in them historically-specific meanings and functions.’14
4.2 SETH, ARNO AND BROWN

A visible example of this can be found by comparing works by two
contemporary comic strip artists: Clyde Fans Book One, by Seth (Gregory
Gallant) and Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography by Chester
Brown.15Clyde Fans Book One is a comic strip strongly influenced by the
work of American magazine cartoonists and illustrators of the post-War
period, particularly those associated with The New Yorker Magazine, such
as Peter Arno. It centres on the reminiscence of an electric fan salesman.
Its production style is an overt attempt to give the impression that the
historical time of the plot and the time in which the book was made are
similar (that is, post-War), even though it is obvious that this is not the
case.
Louis Riel tells the story of the struggle for self-determination of a
group of settlers on Canada’s northwest frontier in the late nineteenth
century, framed by the life of their charismatic leader, Louis Riel. Its
methods of production are entirely twenty-first century in appearance.
Although Brown has discussed the influence of the drawings of Harold
Gray (creator of the Little Orphan Annie strips, which began in 1924) on
the drawing of Louis Riel, the book is utterly contemporary.16 Drawings
by Gray, made in the twentieth century, do not constrain the drawings
made by Brown of the twenty-first.
Seth’s relationship with the past is more complex. Seth never includes
anything in Clyde Fans that either derives from the past post-1955 or that
is not Canadian. This visibly self-conscious self-positioning is managed so
well by Seth that, like Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit, Seth’s form of repre-
sentation is made both in the present and also appears to have been made
before 1955.
As a reader of Clyde Fans, my own position in relation to Seth is also
defined by my knowledge of both forms of representation that imply
‘Canada, pre-1955’ and forms of representation made by comic strip
artists and their collaborative producers in the present. Tynyanov writes,
‘each period selects the material it needs, but the way in which this
material is used characterises only the period itself.’17 The historic time
period he describes is the contemporaneous social relations of any group
of people and the theorised times of their interaction.
In the case of Clyde Fans, the time in which the story takes place and the
time in which the book is read all take positions relative to types of past
representation (‘Canada, pre-1955’). This takes place in terms of their
4.2 SETH, ARNO AND BROWN 223
form—the rich and clearly defined network of intersubjective experiences

and representations that they trace, that I know from that period and
place. At the same time, it takes place in terms of my contemporary
relationship with them, reading Clyde Fans in the present. I know that
Clyde Fans was drawn and produced by Seth only a few years ago, but the
form of representation that structures my relationship with subject Seth
and his fictional characters has the appearance of a specific type of past
representative form with which we still have that relationship (‘Canada,
pre-1955’).
Seth uses a history of specific past forms of representation to self-
consciously form his own. My own reading of Seth’s book parallels this
adoption of past forms. I participate alongside Seth in taking a position to
orient myself to a specific past. In taking that position, I place myself in
relation to the people whose forms of representation I experience in Seth’s
historic time and their own. This characteristic use of past forms lies in
making a group of past actions an occasion for self-consciousness. Seth’s
project in Clyde Fans Book One is unlike Menard’s fictional project or my
attempt to draw new comic strip spreads by adopting the forms of Ware,
Mignola and Medway. Menard wanted to write 300-year-old words in his
own historic time. Seth wants to self-consciously ignore his own experi-
ence of any situation that has occurred outside of a definitive group of
American situations pre-1955. He aims to represent a subject removed
from the effects of any experience of living after 1955. My Drawing
Demonstration One aimed to self-consciously adopt another’s forms of
representation in order to represent something new.
These three projects in intersubjectivity all constitute specific forms of
representation in which different historic times reveal themselves within
the relative subjective positions of the participants constituting the ecol-
ogy in each case. The projects demonstrate two general principles. First,
Debord echoes Bakhtin, Vološinov and Dennett when he argues ‘ulti-
mately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something
else, even into it’s opposite.’18 Second, the intersubjective relationships
represented in such semiotic changes reveal what Schütz calls the ‘idealisa-
tion of the interchangeability of standpoints’. Crossley defines this as ‘the
presupposition ( . . . ) that it is only their different positions in the world
that might lead them to experience it differently.’19
Both of these principles only make sense with their corollaries in historic
time. In light of them, I can consider two further practical projects that self-
consciously aim to reveal other types of intersubjective relationships. The
first project is loosely termed ‘appropriation.’ It was used with radical

purpose in the context of American fine art practice, the art market and
civic culture in the late 1970s and 1980s.20 The second project is my
Drawing Demonstration Two, which I undertook in order to scrutinise a
question about genre as a form of intersubjective relationship.
4.3 APPROPRIATION
Appropriation cannot be described as a project ‘per se.’ Unlike Seth’s
project, Menard’s project or my Drawing Demonstration One, it has no
agreed beginning or end, or definitive forms of expression, only forms that
are members of a still-disputed set. Examples are found in the work of a
number of artists, in a body of theory and criticism, which continues in the
present, and in a putative historical frame. This is not the place to sum-
marise a history of appropriation theory or practice. Instead, I can make
use of a number of the appropriation project’s aims listed by Buchloh.
These will limit analysis to a small number of artworks, theories and
criticism made by an even smaller number of appropriation’s practitioners
and observers.
These aims comprise fragments of the theory and criticism of Buchloh,
Debord, Burton, Kruger and others.21 Alongside this theoretical writing,
I will include a single visual work by artist Sherrie Levine made in 1979 in
relation to an artwork by Walker Evans, made in 1936. This selection is
necessary in order to focus directly upon those aspects of the appropriation
project that provide further insight into intersubjectivity. These works
represent three of appropriations aims. First, the self-conscious attempt
to re-embody a range of reciprocally antagonistic subjects; second, self-
transformation and third, the radical representation of intersubjective
relationships created through an objectified history.
Buchloh outlines two theoretical aims that he considers underpin the
approach to practice of visual artists Levine and Kruger: ‘appropriation
( . . . ) may result from an authentic desire to questioning the historic
validity of a local, contemporary code by linking it to a different set of
codes ( . . . )’ This adopted code might derive from other historical models
and ‘may be motivated by a desire to establish ( . . . ) tradition ( . . . ) and a
fiction of identity.’ For Buchloh, these two aims also involve ‘appropria-
tion as a strategy of commodity innovation ( . . . ) to grant a semblance of
historical identity through ritualised consumption. Each act of appropria-
tion is a promise of transformation ( . . . ).’22
4.3 APPROPRIATION 225
According to Buchloh’s list, appropriation’s theoretical aims are achieved

in some measure in both Seth’s Clyde Fans Book One, the fictional project of
Pierre Menard and my own Drawing Experiment One. These projects bring
about changes in the meaning of various forms of representation by chan-
ging the ecology in which the representation occurs. In Buchloh’s terms,
these changes act to question historical validity. They substitute one set of
contemporary codes for another. In these three projects, this comes about
through a revision of the subjectivity, historic times and relative positions
that each form of representation realises. Each project either establishes a
new self-identity or creates the possibility of one.
In Buchloh’s terms, to question the validity of a contemporary code is to
reform the intersubjective relationships it realises, revising the subject, shift-
ing all of the temporal indices and changing the semiosis according to a new
ecology. This is achieved in Drawing Demonstration One and in Pierre
Menard’s project. To ‘adopt historical models’ is to revise one’s self accord-
ing to a fixed definition of other times, people and situations, as a way of
revising one’s relationship to them. This is what Seth achieves in Clyde Fans.
These descriptions of the aims of appropriation reflect Debord’s use of
the term ‘détournement’ (‘hijacking’) to describe the possibilities of shifts
in relative subjectivity. His descriptions of methods of hijack fulfil Buchloh’s
aims. He describes three methods: hijacking by re-contextualisation,
hijacking by addition and hijacking by radical re-naming. Hijacking by
re-contextualisation involves ‘the détournement of an intrinsically signi-
ficant element which derives a different scope from a new context.’23 He
provides an example of hijacking by addition:
‘Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is one of the most important movies in the

history of cinema ( . . . ) On the one hand it is a racist movie and therefore
does not merit being shown in the present form ( . . . ) It would be better to
détourn it as a whole.., by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful
denunciation of ( . . . ) the activities of the Ku Klux Klan ( . . . ) Such a
détournement is in the final analysis nothing more than the moral equivalent
of the restoration of old paintings in museums.’24
He also provides an example of hijacking by radical re-naming:
‘In music a title always exerts a great influence, yet the choice of one is quite
arbitrary. Thus it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make a final correction to the
title of the Eroica Symphony by changing it, for example, to the Lenin
Symphony.’25
Hijacking also achieves exactly the aim ascribed by Kruger to her own
visual work. She argues that ‘In most work, received images and words are
arranged and aligned to produce assigned meanings. I am engaged in re-
arranging and re-aligning these dominant assignments’ and that ‘in order
to take part in a systematic critique rather than a merely substitutional one,
one should work to foreground the relations and hierarchies that consti-
tute power ( . . . ).’26 Kruger’s theoretical strategy of bringing about a shift
in subjectivity through a radical change in ecology provides the particular
flavour of overt struggle and social antagonism that underlies Buchloh’s
descriptions of the aims of appropriation. ‘In the 1980s, appropriation
came to be seen as one particularly effective means to reveal the working
mechanisms of various cultural, social and psychic institutions—and thus
considerations of subjectivity and identity necessarily surfaced ( . . . ).’27
4.3.1 Levine and Evans

The appropriationists’ critical antagonism represents a particular approach
to intersubjective relationships evidenced in Levine’s photograph
Untitled: After Walker Evans, made in 1979. Levine photographed a
lithographic reproduction in a book of a photograph made by Walker
Evans. Evans’s photograph depicts Alabama sharecropper Allie Mae
Burroughs. Levine’s photograph appears to be identical to Evans’s photo-
graph. Marzolati writes: ‘By literally taking the pictures she did, and then
showing them as hers, [Levine] wanted it understood that she was flatly
questioning ( . . . ) those most hallowed principles of art in the modern era:
originality, intention, expression.’28 The principles of art that Marzolati
lists: originality, intention and expression, require socially stable relation-
ships between subjects. In making Untitled: After Walker Evans, Levine’s
project aimed to bring about a change in relative subjectivity in order to
reveal that subjectivity through the change itself. The project takes
Debord’s methods of hijack at face value, as re-attribution, although this
isn’t precisely what occurs in Levine’s image.
Levine does not take the subjective position of subject Evans, although
she ‘takes’ Evans’s image (to use Marzolati’s word). The title of her work
itself describes a relationship to Evans’s photograph. This alone distin-
guishes it from Evans’s photograph, although the image appears to be the
same. When I see Levine’s photograph, Levine has already seen Evan’s
photograph. It forms part of the canon of twentieth-century American
photography. It is already a form of representation. Because of this,
4.3 APPROPRIATION 227
Levine’s photograph is an image of a photograph by Evans, made by

Levine. I don’t mistake it for the photograph by Evans itself. If I do, the
meaning of Levine’s image disappears, Levine’s subjectivity disappears and
I am simply back with Evans’s photograph.
However, I don’t have the choice of not having seen Evans’s photo-
graph. Seeing either representation, I don’t decide between subject
authors. There are always two representations and two subject authors in
Levine’s photograph. Evan’s photograph exists as a representation.
Levine’s photograph makes that representation an object of representa-
tion. It is a representation by Levine of a representation by Evans.
Levine doesn’t adopt Evans’s subjectivity in relation to his own photo-
graph. Her re-attribution is not really a re-attribution at all, because she
doesn’t do what Evans did. Evans made a new Evans. Levine does not re-
constitute Evans’s subjectivity, she simply uses Evans’s image to embody
and reify her own. I know this because I know Evans’s image already, It is
part of the story of Levine’s representation, the past of that representa-
tion’s creation and the series of subjective relationships it represents.
Levine’s representation only relates Evans’s subjective position as com-
mentary. Levine’s photograph is one artwork commenting on another
artwork. It comments on Evan’s social position, as a critique of one
subjective position from another, categorically dissimilar one. Levine’s
work entrenches rather than shifts her position within the intersubjective
relationship of which Evans’s representation is a part. Her photograph
realises her specific subjectivity rather than transforming it. Although it
makes visible the structure of the relations that position both her subjec-
tivity and Evans’s subjectivity, the project does not fulfil Kruger’s aim of
systematic, reforming critique. Levine’s photograph reveals the relation-
ship between her and Evans, but they both remain as they were.
The approach to subjectivity expressed in Levine’s work is characteristic
of the small number of writers and artists’ work that I have drawn upon. It
contrasts with the reformations of the subject attempted in Seth’s work, in
Borges’s story or my Drawing Experiment One. Buchloh characterises
appropriation as a posture of radical subjectivity rather than an effective
project. For him, appropriation reveals the subjective relationships that
exist between people whilst leaving them unchanged.29
The language used by appropriation artists and writers to describe what
they were doing makes this clear. Appropriation is a process of consolidat-
ing rather than changing established subjective positions. Marzolati and
Debord describe the subject as a property to be stolen, confiscated,
dispossessed or hijacked.30 Buchloh describes the subject as a capacity

(authority) to be usurped. Kruger and Richard Prince aim to silence the
subject and speak on its behalf through ventriloquism and play-acting.31
The use of these words requires that the protagonists remain who they are
in each case. Each word represents an assault on one subject by another.
The identity of these subjects does not change as a result of this assault.
This is what occurs in the case of Levine’s ‘taking’ of Evan’s image. In this
sense, all of these words describe types of commentary. A thief does not
gain ownership of a property through the act of stealing. Neither does an
actor become the fictional character whose part they play. Nor does a
ventriloquist become a god. Rather, one subjective position is reinforced
in relation to the other through the adoption of the appearance of that
through which it aims to transform itself. A thief remains a thief through
the act of stealing.
Alternatively, Seth seeks to transform himself as himself by self-consciously
delimiting the possibilities of his reading. Menard seeks self-transformation
through writing, himself, another’s text. Levine’s photograph comments on
Evans’s photograph and she remains who she is. This is what Bakhtin means
when he writes ‘stylising discourse by attributing it to another person often
becomes parodic ( . . . ) as another’s word, having been at an earlier stage
internally persuasive ( . . . ) frequently begins to sound with no parodic over-
tones at all.’32
Bakhtin’s commentary anticipates Buchloh’s ultimate criticism of the
appropriation project:
Parodistic appropriation reveals the divided situation of the individual in

contemporary artistic practice. The individual must claim the constitution of
the self in original primary utterances, while being painfully aware of the
degree of determination necessary to inscribe the utterance into dominant
conventions and rules of codification ( . . . ) Parodistic appropriation antici-
pates the failure of any attempt to subvert the ruling codification and allies
itself, in advance, with the powers that will ultimately turn its deconstructive
efforts into cultural success.33
The ‘double bind’ that Buchloh describes is an unequal struggle that

creates the sense of social antagonism in appropriation. It ultimately
entrenches the subject in relation to the stolen, hijacked and ventrilo-
quised subjectivity of others.
4.4 SELF-OBSERVATION AND SOCIAL CONSENSUS 229
4.4 SELF-OBSERVATION AND SOCIAL CONSENSUS

Levine’s Untitled: After Walker Evans can be described as a commentary
because it remains within a stable structure of relative intersubjects, even if
it seeks to destabilise that structure. The photograph does not change
what Jauss calls the ‘horizon of expectations,’ but appears entirely within
them.34 For Jauss, these horizons of expectation are the socially agreed
functions of any form of expression. Vološinov writes that these consen-
sually agreed horizons of expectation are not ‘defined by the components
of a work ( . . . ) but by sets of ( . . . ) works which, in effect define them.’35
Jauss writes: ‘each ( . . . ) genre within an epoch or trend, is typified by its
own special sense and understanding of the reader, listener, public or
people ( . . . ) In addition to those real meanings and ideas of one’s addres-
see ( . . . ) there are also conventional ( . . . ) images of substitute authors,
editors and various kinds of narrators (included in each genre),’ which are
views of others constrained by convention, so that ‘genres cannot be
deduced or defined but only historically determined, delimited and
described.’36
In this sense, every subject exists within specific intersubjective con-
straints that appear as social conventions. Jauss continues: ‘If one follows
the fundamental rule of the historicisation of the concept of form, and sees
the history of ( . . . ) genres as a temporal process of the continual founding
and altering of horizons, then the metaphorics of the courses of develop-
ment, function and decay can be replaced by the nonteleological concept
of the playing out of a limited number of possibilities.’37 Therefore, social
conventions derive from self-observation as a way of defining myself in
relation to others. The horizon of expectation in any situation describes
both a self-constraint and a social mandate.
I should understand that self-observation is distinct from self-
consciousness. Self-consciousness is my capacity both to be a subject and
to perceive that I am a subject. Self-observation is my capacity to scrutinise
and constrain my subjectivity by adopting a socially agreed point of view,
in the production of representations. This distinction is the basis for
Buchloh’s criticism of appropriation. Appropriation fails to change the
intersubjective relationships that make the forms of representation sig-
nificant. As a result, it re-enforces those relationships, even if it reveals
what they are. The horizon of expectation remains the same in each
case. Although Levine and Kruger aimed to change the social milieu
in which Evans’s photograph is a valuable masterpiece, their activities
simply conformed to the social constraints upon which that milieu is

based, turning their works into valuable masterpieces also.
Crossley writes that self-observation is ‘achieved by way of the media-
tion of practices which are ( . . . ) diffused within and derived from a
collective ( . . . ) Viewing ourselves from the perspective of others is part
of a process whereby certain impulses and actions are inhibited or con-
trolled.’ He continues ‘much of what seems personal and natural, because
it has become part of us, derives from the social world.’38
I do not habitually recognise the social constraints that constitute self-
observation. They manifest social equilibrium, only becoming visible
when that equilibrium is disturbed in some type of social crisis or when I
depart from socially agreed ways of acting. Kruger describes this invisible
equilibrium as ‘power’s self-effacement,’ meaning the social relationships
that locate power.39 As Wolk writes that social conventions ‘operate at a
level so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to notice or can be taken
for granted.’40 For Mead, this intersubjective equilibrium constitutes
society, the genre of genres.41 It is the mediation of self in relation to
others, through the constraining function of self-observation. Crossley
also describes self-observation as a definition of citizenship. It is the faculty
for recognising one’s subjectivity in relation to others as part of a group.
Society is the body of consensus represented by constrained forms of
expression, as a ‘generalised other’ as Mead puts it.42
Elaborating upon my discussion of conventional imagining, the rela-
tionships between members of a group are predicated upon the relative
authority of the participants within the constraints generated by self-
observation. Mead argues that each subject seeks recognition and valida-
tion from others through self-observation. This subjective search for dis-
tinction is socialised in the relative capacity to influence, which carries
relative moral weights, good and bad. According to Goffman, every self-
observation is constrained by convention, so that ‘our intersubjective
situations are governed by rules of interaction ( . . . ) a sustainable sense
of self is intimately bound to these rules. We must abide by . . . such rules
( . . . ) if a (socially normative) sense of self is to be preserved.’43
4.5 MADDEN’S EXERCISES WITH DRAWING STYLE

Madden aims to explore the constraining function of self-observation
in 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Madden’s book follows
Queneau’s literary experiment Exercises in Style, in which Queneau tells
4.5 MADDEN’S EXERCISES WITH DRAWING STYLE 231
the same short story 99 times, each in a different literary style, mode or
genre. Maddon visually extrapolates this model as, providing a ‘template’
or originating narrative drawing of one page in length and then 99
versions of that story in different visual narrative styles, modes or genres.
Madden’s exercises reveal how completely dominant, subtle and compre-
hensive the effects of self-observation are.44
Madden’s 99 narrative drawings are more or less successful for a wide range
of practical reasons particular to each. Wolk identifies the underlying reason
for the degrees of success of Madden’s exercises, writing ‘Almost all the book’s
examples look like Matt Madden drawings, with his characteristic line and
visual tone.’45 This reason covers a great deal of ground very succinctly.
Madden aims to tell a single story in a number of visual production styles.
All of these re-tellings look like narrative drawings by Matt Maddon. Rather
than manipulate the agreed forms of representation that realises subjective self-
observation, Madden remains unselfconsciously in their sway. Wolk only sees
Madden’s subjectivity in each drawing, even though the aim of each exercise is
to draw each page within a different generic constraint.
Madden’s aim in each exercise is similar to my aim in Drawing
Demonstration One. He aims to make a new representation by adopting
another subject’s forms of representation. However, Madden’s exercises
differ from Drawing Demonstration One in a number of ways. In some of
his exercises, he aims to adopt the forms of expression of a named subject
author, as I did in Drawing Demonstration One with Medway, Mignola
and Ware. In other exercises, he aims to adopt forms of representation that
belong to a socially agreed horizon of expectation. These exercises aim to
adopt socially agreed forms belonging to subject genres rather than parti-
cular subject artists—that is, in each case, these socially agreed forms
represent a ‘generalised other’. In these exercises, Madden draws pages
according to self-observation, aiming to submit to generic constraints and
draw in generic styles as a result.
We can take three of Madden’s drawings as examples. I will not under-
take the kind of comparative formal analysis of examples of the genres in
which Madden aims to draw, as I did with the work of the artists I
included in Drawing Demonstration One. It is relatively easy to catalogue
a long list of comparative dissimilarities between Madden’s drawings and
existing examples from each genre. It is enough to identify one or two
formal phenomena that visually realise Madden’s subjectivity very clearly,
making his drawings uncharacteristic of the genres in which they are
supposed to appear.
First, consider the template story (see Fig. 4.1).46 Then consider the
story titled Ligne Claire.47 The term ‘clear line’ describes a whole school
of largely Belgian comic production in the post-War period, exemplified
by Jacobs and Hergé (Georges Remi). However, Madden’s Ligne Claire
page specifically refers to the times, situations and characteristics of
Hergé’s most famous character, Tintin. This drawing can be considered
to be in the style of Hergé, rather than simply as a ‘clear line’ drawing.
Madden’s character even wears plus-four trousers and straight-laced
Oxford shoes, imitating Tintin’s appearance and acting in part to establish
a historical time for the plot. Madden’s character could be in fancy dress,
of course, but no-one works at their desk at home in fancy dress, particu-
larly not in the context of a drawing exercise like this.
Two physical aspects of the Ligne Claire drawing mitigate against
reading it as a new drawing by Hergé, instead telling us that it is a drawing
by Madden. First, the palette of colours used in the drawing is contem-
porary, although the local colours of things in the plot refer to the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, the colours above
and below the dado rail follow a recognisably pre-War institutional form,
even as the colours themselves do not. These colours appear to be
Madden’s rather than Hergé’s because of the specific light and air depicted
in the plot. I only derive this information from the palette in this case.
One of the major signifiers of ‘clear line’ is the distinct quality of light
and air, which always belongs to the time of the plot, which is always
contemporaneous with the time of production, and which is now entirely
understood as belonging to the post-War. This is not the light or air in
Madden’s drawing, because his colours are not ‘clear line’ colours.
Instead, they appear to be chosen in the present. This is not a judgement
of value, but a result of a comparison between a below-the-dado colour of
the late 1940s as depicted by Hergé and the colour chosen by Madden. If
we look at an example of a page drawn by Hergé, the comparison between
different types of light and air in the two drawings is very clear.48
Consider two further exercises by Madden: Fantasy (see Fig. 4.2) and
Exercises in Love.49Fantasy and Exercises in Love are drawings in identifi-
able genres of comic strip production rather than in a form associated with
a particular subject author. The subjectivity they embody is no less pro-
foundly specific for that—it is simply that this subject is ‘generalised.’ Both
of these drawings aim to embody a generalised other as a constraint on the
form in which they are represented.
Fig. 4.1 Matt Madden, ‘Template,’ in Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story:
Exercises in Style (2006), 3
Fig. 4.2 Matt Madden, ‘Fantasy,’ in Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story:
Exercises in Style (2006), 31
In the case of ‘Fantasy,’ the degree of lack of coherence in the pre- and
post-stories is enough to realise Madden’s subjectivity, contradicting the
genre. In my narrative model, the pre- and post-stories are identified as
everything etiologically required by the story, but not told/shown in the
story itself. For example, when I meet Madden’s character in the template
story for the first time, he is a young man. But I know that to be a young
man when I first encounter him, he needs to have been a younger man, a
child and a baby, to have a mother and father, to have grown up, and so
forth to the point at which I met him, even though none of this informa-
tion appears in the story. This is a commonplace of narrative. However,
the fantasy genre relies particularly on the presence of as complete pre- and
post-stories as possible, due to the fact that the fictional worlds it creates
are very distinct from our own. We cannot necessarily apply any of the
rules of our world to the Fantasy genre’s fictional worlds.
Within fantasy stories, physical laws as well as cultural conventions have
to be imagined entirely from scratch. However, Madden’s ‘Fantasy’ exer-
cise does not take this prescription seriously, even though it is a central
characteristic of the genre. As a result, despite the appearance of swords,
false runes and specific visual references to other accomplished works of
the genre, Madden’s drawing has little verisimilitude.
If I compare it to an actual fantasy page, the importance of the pre-story
and post-story to the plausibility of the story, and to the genre itself, is
identifiable in the way that fictional place names, locations and relative
historical times are used. In Madden’s drawing, character names Ma’at
Madiin, Rolgan and Silverchime and place names Astar Ga’al, Oun-Al and
Necrothania have no causal function in the plot. Neither do the false runes,
swords and ash trees. Although they occupy the functional positions of
names that should represent a coherent, complex past, they do not in fact
refer to anything, except the moment on the page in which they appear. As a
consequence, they have only a tenuous relationship to the plot and its future.
In contrast, if we consider any aspects of Sayer De Lay’s drawing
(Fig. 4.3), they are immediately part of an imagined larger history, inter-
related in clear and specific ways, even when the plot only provides an
obvious fragment of a much larger whole. In a single panel of Sayer De
Lay, the history of this world is made particular. In Madden’s drawing, the
name Ma’at Madiin is a joke outside the plot. It has no history, no story, no
world of cause and effect. It derives from Madden’s world as a metatextual
pun on Matt Madden. Requiring pre-existing knowledge of the genre, with
which to compare the name, the joke is parodic.
Fig. 4.3 Harold Sayer De Lay, ‘Red Nails’ in Weird Tales Vol 28/2 (1936), 205
‘Exercises in Love’ (Fig. 4.4) attempts to show the template story as it

might have been shown by any of the (usually anonymous, male) comic
strip artists working on comics for teenagers and young people in the
American 1940s and 1950s:
Their protagonists were almost always working women, and their problems
were often quite realistic. Workplace power struggles between the sexes,
out-of-wedlock children, marital infidelity, and divorce were tackled
between stories of pure escapist fantasy. In this manner, romance comics
Fig. 4.4 Matt Madden, ‘Exercises in Love,’ in Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a
Story: Exercises in Style (2006), 47
responded to needs that were historically significant: young, working

women saw representations of themselves as intelligent, modern people—
people who valued love and dreamt of romance, but who also negotiated life
in the real world.50
In this exercise, Madden’s diegetic character, male throughout the rest

of his exercises, is a woman. Similarly with Madden’s ‘Fantasy’ drawing,
this change in gender appears to have no story. There appears to be no
reason why Madden’s character is a woman and the protagonist a man.
There is no emotional relationship with the other protagonist in the plot.
This is obvious if I compare ‘Exercises in Love’ to the template story, in
which Madden’s relationship with the woman upstairs appears specific. In
‘Exercises in Love,’ Madden adopts the slightest generic forms, possibly in
the expectation that they will constitute the genre.
Formally, ‘Exercises in Love,’ with its lack of contrast in particular,
depicts environmental and emotional conditions that are unlike those of
the Romance genre. Romance of this historic period is formally typified
through the depiction of strong shadows, tenebrous light and polished
and glossy surfaces. These contribute to the appearance of the air as thick,
plastic and luminous. The underlying emotional tone of the plot is dra-
matic, passionate, barely controlled and holding the possibility of violence.
In contrast, the light in ‘Exercises in Love’’ appears even. The emo-
tional tone is one of ambivalence and detachment. These differences are
the result of Madden’s depictive techniques, compared to the depictive
techniques typical of the genre. They contribute to the sense that the
drawing is not an expression formed under the constraint of self-observa-
tion, within a genre, so much as it realises subject Madden. The difference
in light is entirely the result of how the drawing is made. It defines the
types of materials, physical bodies and gravitational pull in the depicted
world. The bodies are thinner than they generically appear. The clothes
the characters wear are less weighty and layered, the spaces are shallower,
the objects lighter, the colours are less precisely defined by period and less
dark in tone. This is communicated specifically as trace.
Reading 99 Ways to Tell a Story, as a whole, I gain a sense of a unified
narrative voice. The exercises accumulate and the differences between them
become increasingly inconsequential. Inversely, the sense of an accumula-
tion of different narrative subjects in the book decreases. These subjects
reach a point of relative implausibility as the characters and situations that
represent them become less specific, as an effect of being objectified.
4.6 DRAWING DEMONSTRATION TWO 239
4.6 DRAWING DEMONSTRATION TWO

Appropriation and constraining self-observation provides an introduction
to Drawing Demonstration Two. This Demonstration is designed to
explore further some of the ways in which social consensus and self-
observation constrain subjectivity. The general terms that framed
Drawing Demonstration One can also be applied to this experiment.
To reiterate these terms, Bakhtin writes ‘variants on the theme of
another’s discourse are widespread in all areas of creative, ideological
activity ( . . . ) such an exposition is always a free stylistic variation on an
another’s discourse, it expounds another’s thought in the style of that
thought, even while applying it to new material, to another way of posing
the problem; it conducts experiments and gets solutions in the language of
another’s discourse ( . . . ) there is no external imitation, no simple act of
reproduction, but rather a further, creative development of another’s
( . . . ) discourse in a new context and under new conditions.’51
Drawing Demonstration Two presents the same problems as Drawing
Demonstration One. These problems submit to the same solutions. These
problems are: the self-conscious recognition of my own subjectivity and
the unique ecology in which I make representations; the adoption of
another’s written script as control in the production of new visual narrative
representations and the recognition of that choice of script as part of the
form of representation. Accepting these terms, Drawing Demonstration
Two aims to focus on the consensual aspect of self-observation, the social
constraint that functions to mediate the self.
In Drawing Demonstration One I adopted another person’s forms of
representation in order to make a new representation. In Drawing
Demonstration Two I will aim to make a series of new drawings under
the constraints of a recognised horizon of expectation, by scrutinising my
own actions. In effect, this theoretical self-positioning views both social
constraint and subjectivity in a contradictory situation based upon an
impossible premise—as with Drawing Demonstration One, however, the
unavoidable nature of this self-conscious subjectivity is one of the accepted
terms of the Demonstration. From the position of a reader, I can employ
my subjectivity as a complete guide to making a new drawing.
In Drawing Demonstration Two, I will not attempt to adopt the forms
of others’ representation, as I did with Ware, Mignola and Medway. The
generalised others of social consensus are only typified. That is the defini-
tion of the horizon of expectation. For example, the work of the most
typical superhero comic strip artist is never entirely representative of the

superhero genre, nor does the genre ever entirely describe the work of the
artist, although the typical features of the genre itself can be described in
very great detail.
In Drawing Demonstration Two, I will adopt the form of representation
of a group of people constrained by social consensus and whose forms of
expression I read through that constraint. These people are the formal
exponents of genres. I perceive the constraint under which they have
expressed themselves as typification. They constitute a generalised other.
It is these constraints that Drawing Demonstration Two will seek to
visualise. I can only approach the form of representation that creates a
genre as a typified form of representation.
There is also a distinction between the aim of Drawing Demonstration
Two and Seth’s aim to draw as though the experiences of America post-
1955 did not exist. Seth’s project is not to submit to the social constraints
dictated by a generalised other, but rather to constrain his own forms of
representation as a tool of that representation. Seth’s work never actually
appears as though it was made before 1955 (when a comic strip like Clyde
Fans Book One did not exist). Seth’s work utilises and presents typification
as a resource, but this utilisation never contradicts or overrides the con-
straints under which Seth himself works as a contemporary subject. Seth’s
adoption of a particular constraint is never anything but a characteristic of
the time and place of Seth’s own self-observation and Seth’s own form of
representation.
4.6.1 Drawing Demonstration Two Method

For Drawing Demonstration Two, I took a script from a source album and
made use of it to guide the making of three new drawings. I used the same
script and source as control for each drawing. The three drawings all aimed
to be constrained by generalisations relative to each other. They are three
examples of the same type of form of representation. All three are generic.
I used the script from Medway’s Teen Witch, extrapolated, discussed and
illustrated in the last chapter. I aimed to use as much of the script as
possible to draw a page that might have been drawn by a Romance or
Romance/Action genre comic artist in (a) the 1950s, (b) the 1960s and
(c) the 1970s. I shall call these Demonstration Two (1950s), Two (1960s)
and Two (1970s). Rather than focus on the work of a single comic strip
artist, my reading of works from each decade in the genre sought to
establish different types of specification than those used in Demonstration

One. These were generalisations. In attempting to make drawings within
formal generic constraints, I attempted to place myself in a characteristic
relationship with the material and to visualise that relationship.
To begin Demonstration Two (1950s), I read works by comic artists
Johnny Craig, Will Eisner, Milton Caniff, Harvey Kurtzman, Wallace
Wood and Frank Hampson. For Demonstration Two (1960s), I read
works by Kurt Schaffenburger, Luis Garcia, Curt Swan and the anon-
ymous artists of pages in 1960s editions of Jackie, the British weekly
paper for teenage girls. For Demonstration Two (1970s), I read works by
Martin Ashbury, Purita Campos, Frank Langford and also the anonymous
artists of pages in 1970s editions of Jackie. These artists’ works are highly
distinctive, but they share characteristics that I identified as specifications
in each historic period. These were similarities in their form of representa-
tion. I identified similarities of structure in each period, such as the layout
of pages, grid templates, fonts and drawing technology. I also identified
general similarities of production, in methods of depiction, similarities of
plot (the types of actions and the types of people undertaking them, as well
as the light, smell and material of the depicted worlds) and of pre- and
post-story (the social, environmental and economic histories of the prota-
gonists in the plots).
In compiling these specifications, I was guided by my reading alone.
The specifications provided a general description of the historic period in
each case. I used my own perception as a complete guide, in that distinc-
tions that I made about the form of representation could only be made
according to their relation to me. This was much more difficult in this
Demonstration, as the field of possibilities is vast. It constitutes every form
of representation of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Any distinction that I made I was able to contradict immediately. For
example, for every comic page made in the 1950s in the Romance or
Adventure/Romance genre with a 9-panel grid template, there is one with
a 12-panel grid template. Both forms are characteristic of the decade.
Fortunately, this difficulty concurs with the method of Drawing
Demonstration Two: making subjective distinctions about types of form
and submitting to these distinctions as constraints.
As an aid to doing this, with comic strip pages in each period, I
attempted briefly to identify similar typical forms in movie, literature,
fashion and—why not?—alcoholic drinks in the 1950s, 1960s and
1970s. Taking my own indirect experience of these things as a complete
taxonomy, I noted simply what came to mind. Although frivolous, this

exercise was not methodologically flawed. It was useful in affirming that
the list of specifications that I was aiming to compile in order to make
generic drawings in each case were less a matter of historical record and
more a subjective sense of relative possibilities and impossibilities. The
criteria for selection rested entirely with me. In this exercise with movie,
literature, fashion and drinks, I spontaneously produced names with which
to identify generalities. Typification was embodied immediately as a parti-
cular author, auteur or brand. I used the name to indicate not only these
people’s own forms of expression, but typify whole cultural sectors in each
decade.
Returning to my preparatory reading for Drawing Demonstration Two,
I identified general formal differences between each of the three periods of
production. Individual differences in page sizes over 30 years in the genre
were insignificant, around a general size of 25 cm high × 21 cm wide. Grid
templates in the 1950s were more likely to be made of 9 panels, changing
in the 1960s and 1970s, to much more dense grids of up to 30 panels.
Page layout became more complex over 30 years. From scenes in the
1950s being viewed comprehensively through the frame of each panel,
by the 1970s, panels and gutters no longer appeared as elements in
themselves and the boundaries of each scene were created by elements in
each scene itself, relative to other scenes on the page.
Use of points of view in each scene also changed, with greater use of
extreme juxtapositions in scale in the 1970s, allied to the disappearance
of panels and gutters. Text in speech balloons, thought bubbles and
narration spaces became increasingly small and in the 1960s and 1970s
was mechanically produced, as opposed to the hand-inked text of the
1950s.
Pages were still black and white. They were still produced by teams of
people with the penciller and inker increasingly becoming the same artist
in the 1960s and 1970s. The production of drawings was very different in
the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The use of ink and brush in the 1950s
depicts glossy and dense materials viewed in a thick and luminous atmo-
sphere. Ink and brush built high contrasts and deep modelling.
Subsequent variations in the physical attack of a nib as well as a brush in
the 1960s created a depictive protocol where thick lines define silhouettes
and thin lines define interior details, almost without other contrasts. This
creates a world of bright, even light and plain material surfaces. In the
1970s, there is an increased range of types of attack with nib and brush,
utilising much more rapidly made marks to depict varied textures, patterns
and details in a fretwork of different lights and material conditions.
Alongside these technical specifications were others, equally important.
I chose the script extrapolated from Medway’s work because its main
protagonists are women. The Romance/Adventure Romance genre in
the period in view differs from pre-War Romance in that it was increasingly
made for young women only and not for young women and young men:
stories about young women for young women to read. In the 1970s in
particular, this trend towards young women-centred stories for young
women found another, perhaps coincidental, corollary in the increased
number of women artists drawing these comics who emerged from the
business of fashion illustration.52 The appearance of a waitress with a
secret identity as a witch (and the magic itself) in the script supports
more than it contradicts specifications for the genre across all three
periods.
The types of women who appear in each period also change. The
activities of dining and waitressing appear to be more adult in the 1950s
than in the other two periods. In the 1950s there is no distinction made in
terms of appearance and behaviour between a woman of 18 years of age
and one of 40. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the women seem
younger, their behaviour less formal and the distinction between them
and older people more definite and between themselves less definite. The
social distinction between Zoe (as waitress) and Perla (as diner) is less
pronounced in the 1960s ad 1970s. Distinction is a matter of personality
rather than status. Perla’s behaviour is entirely personally bad in the 1970s
particularly, rather than belonging in some way to the incompetence of
the restaurant itself, as it is in the 1950s. With these specifications in mind,
I established grid templates for each drawing. These comprised a 9-panel
grid for the 1950s (three by three), and a 30 panel for the 1960s and
1970s (five across and six down). I made page layouts and storyboards for
each drawing from the script and completed the three final drawings
(Figs. 4.5–4.7).
4.6.2 Drawing Demonstration Two Analysis

Looking at these drawings, I feel none of the unease that I felt looking at
the final drawings in Drawing Demonstration One. I think this is due to
the fact that there is no doubling of the subject in the case of these
drawings or, rather, the doubled subject is a generalised subject. There is
Fig. 4.5 Simon Grennan, Drawing Demonstration Two (1950s), (2009)



no theoretical pretension to the form of representation of a unique sub-

ject. That was not the aim of this Demonstration. Rather, I have subjec-
tively embodied three types of social constraint, and attempted to visualise
that constraint in the form of a generic drawing. To some degree, I do this
every time I make a representation. I realise the effects of the constraint of
self-observation, dictated by knowledge of generalised others. In Drawing
Demonstration Two, here is no doubling of a unique subject. I embodied
my own subjectivity in making these drawings, albeit in a self-conscious
way and with a specific aim. The degree to which Drawing Demonstration
Two succeeds or fails is indicated by the degree to which I have recognised
and submitted to specific constraints, allowing my self-observation to
dominate my drawings.
If I recall Buchloh’s description of the dominance of self-observation in
relation to Drawing Demonstration Two, it is possible to see how consensus
not only accrues a capacity to influence, but how the functioning of that
consensus in self-observation is authoritarian. Bakhtin describes the rela-
tionship of the subject to consensus, achieved through self-observation, as
‘the tendency to assimilate other’s discourse [which] takes on a deeper and
more basic significance in an individual’s ideological becoming ( . . . )
Another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions,
rules, models and do forth—but strives rather to determine the very bases
of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our
behaviour: ( . . . ) it performs here as authoritarian discourse and an intern-
ally persuasive discourse ( . . . ).’53
He concludes that every form of expression constitutes a relationship of
relative constraints. Every relationship reflects the relative capacity of its
participants to influence the others, derived from the intersubjective effect
of self-observation in relation to the generalised other. He writes, ‘the
degree to which [representation] may be conjoined with authority ( . . . ) is
what determines its specific demarcation and individuation ( . . . ).’54 The
production of consensual forms of others’ representation, in a situation
that is both self-observed and socially recognised, realises the authority of
the generalised other in the relationship to each subject.
In classical rhetoric, this identification with the authority of a consen-
sually created ‘other’ was used as a device for accruing that authority as
one’s own. This was called ‘prosopopoeia’ or the formalised act of speak-
ing as another subject. It is not a simple device. It requires the manipula-
tion of the relative subjective positions that generate the complex
intersubjectivity of any form of expression. Quintillian writes that it is
utilised to ‘display the thoughts of our opponents, as they themselves

would do in soliloquy ( . . . ).’ It is not imitation, in which the speaker
remains fully an embodied subject recognisably adopting another’s sub-
jective position. It is self-conscious identification, with its consequent loss
of identity. The plausibility of the adoption is part of the authority of the
rhetorical act. Quintillian continues ‘our inventions of that sort will meet
with credit only so far as we represent people saying what it is not
unreasonable to suppose that they may have meditated.’55 This plausibility
is founded in self-scrutiny and social convention.
Utilising prosopopoeia, any authoritative position can be identified-
with and spoken from, as long as it is a generic position, ‘to bring down
the gods from heaven, evoke the dead and give voices to cities and
states.’56 Connor notes the authoritarian character of ventriloquism,
which is a type of prosopopoeia, in which the self-observed-self dominates
as a violence towards the one that is ventriloquised or reduced to the
condition of a dummy, so that protagonists generously blend their lives
into the lives they have borrowed.57 This generosity is the capacity to
subsume subjectivity in genre and submit to self-observation without a
struggle.
NOTES
1. Bakhtin. ‘The Problem of Speech Genres.’ 92.
3. Borges. ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.’ 68.
4. Ibid. 69.
5. Ibid.
8. Vološinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. 23
11. Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. 124.
13. Opaki. ‘Royal Genres.’ 119.
14. Ibid.
15. Seth. Clyde Fans Book One and Brown. Luis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.
16. Arnold. ‘A Graphic Literature Library.’
17. Tynyanov. ‘The Literary Fact.’ 35.
NOTES 249
18. Debord. Directives for the Use of Détournment.

20. Evans. Appropriation.
21. Buchloh. ‘Parody and Appropriation in Francis Picabia, Pop and Sigmar
Polke.’ and Debord. Directives for the Use of Détournment and Keiser. Louise
Lawler and Others and Warren. ‘Brilliant Color.’ and Stephanson. ‘Interview
with Barbara Kruger.’
Polke.’ 30.
23. Debord. Directives for the Use of Détournment. np.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Stephanson. ‘Interview with Barbara Kruger.’ 58.
27. Burton. ‘Subject to Revision.’ 258.
28. Marzolati. ‘Art in the (Re)Making.’
Polke.’ 35.
30. Marzolati. ‘Art in the (Re)Making.’
31. Stephanson. ‘Interview with Barbara Kruger.
32. Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 348.
Polke.’ 32.
34. Jauss. ‘Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.’ 131.
36. Jauss. ‘Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature.’ 131.
37. Ibid. 132.
38. Crossley. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. 10 and 03.
39. Stephanson. ‘Interview with Barbara Kruger.’
40. Wolk. Reading Comics. How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. 21.
41. Mead. Mind, Self, Society.
42. Crossley. Intersubjectivity: The Fabric of Social Becoming. 65–6.
43. Goffman, Stigma.
44. Madden. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style and Queneau. Exercises in
Style.
45. Wolk. Reading Comics. How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. 49.
46. Madden. 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. 03.
47. Ibid. 91.
48. Hergé. The Crab with the Golden Claws. 07.
49. Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, 49 and 47.
50. Millar. ‘The Golden Age Romance Comics Archive.’
52. Gibson. ‘Reading as Rebellion: The Case of the Girls’ Comic in Britain.’
54. Ibid. 343.
55. Quintillian. Institutio Oratoria.
56. Ibid.
57. Connor. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. 404.
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INDEX
A Author, 137, 141, 149, 154, 155,

Abbate, Carolyn, 79, 115, 148, 153, 156, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167,
158 169, 178, 214, 215, 218, 231,
Aboriginal drawing, 40 232, 242
Acceleration, 21, 65
Affect, 31, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 74,
76, 79, 81, 82, 95, 128, 131, B
132, 133, 135, 142, 213 Bach, Johann, 219
Affordance, 24, 50, 146, 162, 171 Baetens, Jan, 106, 108, 111, 162, 164,
Alberti, 22, 56 165, 166, 167, 169, 171, 185,
Allen, Matthew, 108 215
Ambiguity, 23, 126 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 111, 138, 139, 145,
Amplitude, 65 158, 161, 162, 175, 176, 177,
Anaphora, 150 215, 216, 217, 221, 223, 228,
Andersen, Kirsti, 110 239, 247, 249, 250
Anthropomorphism, 33, 191, 192, Balance, 74, 82
210 Barker, Martin, 111, 165, 169, 170,
Antliffe, Mark, 108 171, 215
Appropriateness, 7, 27, 92, 94 Barthes, Roland, 139, 158
Appropriation, 224, 225, 226, 227, Bateson, Gregory, 85, 116
228 Beardsworth, T., 83, 116
Arnheim, Rudolph, 18, 108 Beattie, Geoffrey, 82, 84, 116
Arno, Peter, 222 Belief, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105,
Ashbury, Martin, 241 113
Attention, 14, 19, 44, 45, 80, 88, 92, Benveniste, Émile, 137, 150,
117, 179, 221 157, 159
Attentional framing, 44 Biber, Douglas, 169, 171, 215
Audioception, 17 Biology, 57, 58, 59, 60, 108, 113

in Comics and Graphic Novels, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51844-6
264 INDEX
Body, 4, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, Cause, 3, 6, 12, 63, 66, 67, 69, 87,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 122, 126, 180, 235
29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 38, 48, 50, 55, Cezanne, Paul, 57, 60
57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, Chalmers, David, 22, 108
67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, Chambers, D., 116
76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, Character viewpoint, 84
85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, Chatman, Seymore, 118, 137, 138,
95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 157
102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, China, 11
113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 122, Chomsky, Noam, 156
123, 125, 126, 129, 133, 134, Clancey, William, 89
143, 147, 148, 153, 154, 155, Cobley, Paul, 150, 157,
161, 162, 166, 172, 173, 218, 158, 159
224, 230 Codes, 139, 164, 224, 225
Booker, Peter, 108 Cognition, 1, 17, 27, 28, 31, 38, 48,
Borges, Jorge, 218, 219, 220, 227, 59, 61, 62, 64, 71, 72, 73, 75, 82,
248 86, 89, 90, 91, 97, 106, 110,
Botvinik, Matthew, 83, 116 112, 117, 125, 126, 128, 129,
Braithwaite, Richard, 107 131, 135
Bremond, Claude, 140, 158 Cohen, Jonathan, 83, 116, 158
Broad, Charles, 103, 119 Cohn, Neil, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43,
Brown, Chester, 222, 248 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52, 109, 110,
Buchloh, Benjamin, 224, 225, 226, 111, 165, 166
227, 228, 229, 247, 249 Cole, Jonathan, 85, 116
Buckner, T., 83, 116 Coloring, 179, 188
Bühler, Karl, 157 Comic strip register, 39, 42, 43, 60,
Bunt, Harry, 145, 146, 158 139, 149, 162, 163, 164, 166,
Burton, Johanna, 224, 249 167, 169, 177, 178, 179, 180,
194, 222, 223, 232, 236, 239,
240, 241
C Commodity, 61, 224
Calligraphy, 179, 185, 186, 188 Comparison, 39, 42, 43, 60, 139,
Campos, Purita, 241 149, 162, 163, 166, 167,
Caniff, Milton, 241 169, 177
Carberry, Sandra, 158 Concept, v, 3, 6, 7, 9, 17, 36, 40,
Caricature, 56 45, 52, 53, 57, 62, 63, 65, 66,
Carroll, Noël, 14, 107 69, 94, 98, 108, 118, 119, 121,
Cataphora, 150 122, 129, 130, 139, 145, 147,
Catechresis, 81, 82, 83, 85, 89 165, 167, 215, 229
Categories, 18, 21, 45, 46, 49, Connor, Steven, 172, 177, 215, 216,
64, 65, 66, 77, 94, 97, 98, 248, 250
99, 106, 139 Conrad, Susan, 169, 171, 215
INDEX 265
Consciousness, 22, 59, 60, 61, 75, 77, Davis, K., 116
87, 90, 95, 96, 103, 108, 116, Debord, Guy, 223, 224, 225, 226,
117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 227, 249
128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, De Cervantes, Miguel, 218, 219, 220
134, 135, 136, 167, 168, 169, Dennett, Daniel, 172, 173, 174, 177,
172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 193, 215, 219, 221, 223, 248
215, 223, 229, 248 Denotation, 52, 70
Consensus, v, vi, 105, 193, 229, 230, Deontology, 103
239, 240, 247 Dependency relationship, 27
Consequences, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, Depiction, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 31, 35,
14, 15, 24, 25, 81, 83, 88, 121, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46,
122, 144, 149, 150, 152, 161, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55,
163, 188 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 67, 70, 88,
Constable, John, 152 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 109,
Constraint, 71, 139, 140, 164, 179, 111, 112, 144, 151, 152, 165,
229, 230, 231, 232, 238, 239, 174, 177, 193, 220, 238, 241
240, 241, 247 De Preester, Helena, 118
Content, 28, 53, 70, 72, 75, 79, 80, Depth bands, 20
91, 92, 136, 138, 146, 149 Depth slice, 19
Contour, 2, 4, 19, 20, 24, 58, 107 De Renya, Rudy, 2, 3, 106
Convention, 40, 41, 51, 71, 106, 143, Derrida, Jaques, 109
145, 146, 163, 171, 186, 228, De Saussure, Ferdinand, 140
229, 230, 235 Design, 13, 107
Conventionalism, 41, 51, 143, 163, Desire, 125, 126, 129
229, 230 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 104, 119
Cooper, Lynn, 117 Détournement, 225
Coordinates, 20, 23, 35, 36, 64 Dialogue, 140, 145, 146, 151, 158,
Co-presence, 126, 132, 133, 153, 154 170, 171
Costall, Alan, 116 Dialogue act, 145, 146
Craig, Johnny, 241 Diegesis, 23, 42, 43, 45, 46, 60, 111,
Crossley, Nick, 124, 133, 134, 135, 149, 151, 214, 238
136, 137, 141, 142, 146, 147, Digital, 15, 16, 162
148, 151, 155, 156, 157, 162, Dimension, 20, 64, 65, 126
164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, Discourse, 28, 55, 60, 62, 63, 77, 101,
172, 215, 220, 223, 230, 248, 249 105, 121, 123, 128, 135, 136,
Cubism, 19, 108, 242 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142,
Cultural product, 61 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 155,
162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 173,
175, 176, 228, 239, 247
D Distance, 20, 21, 64
Damasio, Antonio, 113 Dostrovsky, J., 116
Darwin, Charles, 77 Dramaturgy, 179
266 INDEX
Drawing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Enunciation, 73, 108, 141, 145

11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, Environment, 7, 8, 14, 27, 28, 44, 59,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 62, 64, 66, 67, 74, 113, 114,
29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 122, 123, 151
41, 45, 49, 53, 54, 57, 58, 61, 62, Epistemology, 21, 55, 57, 107, 112,
63, 64, 67, 69, 73, 76, 81, 88, 92, 127, 132, 137, 139, 146, 148,
98, 121, 122, 123, 144, 162, 150, 154, 155
163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 173, Equilibrium, 60–62, 66, 69, 74, 77,
174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 81, 82, 85, 87, 92, 93, 125, 214,
185, 191, 192, 193, 194, 210, 230
212, 213, 214, 216, 220, 221, Erikson, Kai, 86, 116
222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 230, Etic position, 85, 100
231, 232, 235, 238, 239, 240, Etiology, 1, 3–15, 17, 22–25, 27–30,
241, 242, 243, 247 34, 35, 49, 62–64, 69, 73, 74,
Duration, 21, 43, 65 76–78, 93, 95, 101, 109,
121–124, 135, 137, 142, 143,
145, 148–155, 163, 166, 219,
E 221
Ecology, 61, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, Europe, 11
75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, Evans, Walker, 224, 226–229, 249
84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, Exteroception, 17, 49, 59, 82–87, 89,
95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 98, 104, 122
116, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130,
133, 134, 143, 144, 145, 146,
154, 156, 162, 164, 165, 167, F
171, 220, 221, 223, 225, Fabula, 138, 141
226, 239 Facet, 19
Edge recognition technology, 16 Facture, 21, 32, 51, 52, 55, 56, 112,
Ego, 134 163, 165
Eisner, Will, 241 Fagin, Gary, 77, 79, 115, 116
Ellis, Ralph, 117 Failure, 3–6, 9, 11, 23, 91, 121, 228
Emanata, 60 Falsehood, 99
Emic position, 100 Fantasy, 232, 234, 235, 238
Emotion, 22, 60, 61, 63, 67, 74, 75, Fashion, 241
76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, Feeling, 61, 63, 76, 83, 85, 189
85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 98, 99, Ferari, Pier, 115
104, 113, 115, 116, 117, 138, Fiction, 49, 60–61, 98–102, 138, 139,
156, 159, 191, 192, 212, 238 141, 142, 150, 158, 173, 174,
Enactment, 83, 84 177, 188, 191, 192, 200, 213,
Engagement, 17, 129–134, 157 218, 223, 224, 225, 228, 235
Engels, Fredrich, 119 Fish, Stanley, 141, 142, 158
Enhancement relationship, 33 Focalization, 139, 179
INDEX 267
Fodor, Jerry, 117 Graphic, 25–39, 43, 44, 51, 57, 107,
Font, 32, 241 110, 193, 215
Force, 18, 19, 21, 24, 64, 71, 72, 78, Graphiotactics, 29–33, 35, 37, 39, 41,
82, 114, 146 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 55, 58
Forgery, 214 Graphology, 25, 28, 30
Forster, E. M., 148, 158 Gravity, 19, 24, 65, 186, 193
Framing, 44, 45 Gray, Harold, 222
Freytag, Gustav, 138, 158 Greimas, Algirdas, 140, 158
Functional mind, 75 Grennan, Simon, 112, 186–188, 189,
201, 202, 204, 209, 210,
244–246
G Groensteen, Thierry, 111, 139, 158,
Gallagher, Shaun, 116 165, 215
Gallese, Vittorio, 115 Gutter, 43, 183, 242
Garcia, Luis, 241
Gardner, Jared, 108
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 98 H
Gaudier-Bzresca, Henri, 25–27, 30 Habituation, v, 51, 106, 213, 214
Generalised other, 230–232, 240, 247 Hague, Ian, 17, 108
Genette, Gérard, 118, 138, 139, 151, Halliday, MIchael, 32, 109, 110, 157
155, 157–159 Hampl, Patricia, 174, 216
Genre, 33, 51, 138, 171, 185, 186, Hampson, Frank, 241
192, 200, 213, 224, 229–231, Hard problem, 22, 84, 107
235, 238, 240–243, 248 Harris, Roy, 31, 109, 110
Geometry, 55–58, 60, 113 Hearing, 82, 143, 146
Gesture, 24, 76, 81, 82, 99, 116, Hebb, Donald, 117
158, 168 Hegel, Georg, 124–127, 129–131,
Gibbons, Christina, 215 133, 156, 157
Gibbs, Raymond, 80, 83, 115, Hegemony, 104
116, 156 Hergé, 232, 249
Gibson, Mel, 250 Heterophenomenon, 173
Goal, 3–15, 17, 18, 20–25, 28, 30, Hirstein, William, 117
33–35, 64, 70, 73, 75, 109, History, 2, 9, 12, 61, 68, 69, 127,
121–123 130, 132, 138, 166, 167, 169,
Goffman, Erving, 86, 115, 116, 156, 174, 178, 212, 218, 223–225,
230, 249 229, 235
Gombrich, Ernst, 111, 112 Hochberg, Julian, 117
Goodman, Nelson, 51–52, 111, 149 Homeorhesis, 15, 17, 18, 27–29, 55,
Gramsci, Antonio, 119 60–70, 73, 76, 77, 81, 88, 92, 93,
Grapheme, 31, 39, 41, 110 95, 97, 101, 103, 104, 125, 143,
Graphiateur, 108, 163–167, 169–171 148, 161, 162
Graphiation, 108, 163, 164, 166, 167 Honneth, Axel, 157
268 INDEX
Hopkins, Robert, 49–51, 53, 55–59, Inference, vi, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 24,
111–113 25, 27, 63, 71, 143, 144, 146
Horizon, 36, 68, 99–102, 229, Inhibition, 14, 26, 28, 30, 74, 75, 89,
231, 239 91–93, 98–103, 144, 218
Houkes, Wybo, 107 Institution, 61–63, 65–70, 73, 75–77,
Husserl, Edmund, 113, 124, 81, 101, 104–106, 124, 126,
127–129, 132–134, 157 132, 140, 143, 232
Hutchinson, W, 116 Intention, 61, 62, 66, 68, 70, 131,
Hypotactics, 27, 86 132, 141, 226
Inter-disciplinary, v
Interoception, 17, 59, 82–84, 86, 90,
I 93, 94, 98, 99, 104, 122
Icon, 20, 33, 40, 41, 52, 54, 57 Intersubject, 5, 12, 66, 76, 86, 87, 97,
Identification, 10, 12, 14, 15, 32, 49, 103, 121, 123, 132–135, 137, 139,
65, 74, 80, 96, 122, 124, 128, 140, 142–144, 146–148, 152, 161,
138–140, 145, 147, 152, 162, 165, 166, 167, 169–173, 175,
164–168, 171, 188, 218, 247 178, 180, 213, 214, 217, 218,
Identity, vi, 11, 14, 15, 25, 27–30, 223–227, 229, 230, 247
32, 35, 42, 45, 55, 70–72, 86, Intransitive clauses, 85
96, 97, 121–123, 133, 135, Iser, Wolfgang, 141, 142, 158
142, 145, 147, 153, 155, 157,
165, 193, 224–226, 228,
243, 248 J
Ideology, 22, 215 Jackendoff, Ray, 47, 48, 75, 102,
Illusion, 19, 24, 50–52, 112, 151 110–112, 115, 118
Image, 16, 19, 24, 37, 38, 40–42, Jacobs, Edgar, 232
44–47, 60, 71–76, 78, 80–82, 84, Jakobson, Roman, 141, 157, 158
85, 88–94, 96–98, 105, 112, James, William, 109, 218
114, 116, 117, 132, 155, 163, Janssen, Weil, 117
165, 220, 226, 228 Japan, 11
Image schemata, 24, 71–75, 80, 82, Jarombek, Mark, 108
85, 88–94, 96–98, 104, 114 Jauss, Hans, 229, 249
Imagination, 17, 22, 28, 59, 60, 63, Johnson, Mark, 65, 66, 68–74, 76, 90,
64, 69, 76, 93, 94, 97–103, 105, 91, 104, 111, 113–115, 118
106, 117–119, 139, 143, 145, Judgement, 95, 98, 130, 232
148, 161, 167, 168 Juhsz, Joseph, 259
Immanence, 69, 151
Implied author, 142
Implied reader, 142 K
Index, 15, 17, 76, 85, 87, 98, 106, Kant, Immanuel, 118
108, 131, 147, 162, 164, 176, Katz, Jack, 79, 82, 86, 87, 115, 116,
213, 215, 217 154, 156, 159
INDEX 269
Kehler, Andrew, 158 Lexicogrammar, 31, 32, 34, 35,

Keiser, Phiipp, 249 37–42, 45–48, 52, 55, 57, 58, 59,
Kinaesthesia, 17, 86 70, 75, 78, 80, 81, 112, 115, 140
Knowledge, v, vi, 24, 25, 50, Lexicon, 32, 34, 42–43, 45–47, 81,
54, 66, 79, 82, 85, 87, 90, 106
91, 95–97, 100, 103, 112, Light, 17, 22, 29, 46, 51, 55–60, 83,
117, 124, 138, 141, 144, 168, 186, 192, 223, 232, 238,
153, 154, 156, 191, 213, 241, 242
222, 235, 247 Ligne claire, 232
Kojève, Alexandre, 157 Likeness, 36, 37, 40, 41
Kolbert, L., 117 Line, 2–4, 10, 11, 16, 20, 22, 36, 58,
Kosslyn, Stephen, 90, 117 64, 65, 68, 108, 179, 185, 186,
Krčma, John, 20, 108 193, 231, 232
Kress, Gunther, 111, 157 Linearity, 65, 68
Kruger, Barbara, 224, 226, Linguistics, 31, 108, 110, 111, 135,
227–230, 249 145, 150, 171
Kukkonen, Karin, 152, 159 Literature, 241
Kurtzman, Harvey, 241 Location, 18, 20, 25, 26, 29, 30,
32–36, 47, 55, 56, 59, 64, 66, 76,
81, 84, 89, 106, 110, 169, 192,
L 235
Lacey, Nick, 149, 158 Logogram, 32, 33, 37
Langford, Frank, 241 Long-term memory, 27, 58, 90
Language, 22, 23, 30–35, 37–39, Lovecraft, H. P., 187, 192, 193, 216
41–43, 45, 47, 48, 51–53, 66, Luzar, Robert, 81, 115
70, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79–81, 91,
109, 110, 126, 138, 140, 143,
147, 149, 166, 171, 175, 177, M
187, 189, 192, 193, 220, Madden, Matt, 230, 231, 232, 233,
227, 239 235, 237, 238, 249
Lascarides, Alex, 158 Magic, 187, 192, 193, 243
Laughter, 80 Ma Lin, 57, 60
Layout, 179, 183, 185–187, 198, 201, Marion, Philippe, 108, 111, 162, 163,
202, 241–243 164, 165, 166, 167
Lazarus, Richard, 86, 116 Mark, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
Lefèvre, Pascal, 151, 159 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
Leighten, Patricia, 108 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30,
Lense, 55, 56 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 48,
Lettering, 179 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 64,
Levine, Sherrie, 224, 226–229 67, 68, 69, 70, 81, 82, 88, 94,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 63, 113, 140, 106, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114,
156, 158 115, 121, 122, 162, 164, 243
270 INDEX
Martin, John, 109, 241 Mind, 15, 22, 39, 55, 60, 63, 73, 75,
Marx, Karl, 119 78, 87, 90, 92, 93, 115, 116,
Marzolati, G., 227 130, 137, 138, 177, 191, 242,
Mass, 17, 18, 19, 24, 28, 64, 65, 68, 243
72, 74, 89 Mirroring, 84
Massumi, Brian, 115, 257 Misrecognition, 105
Material basis, 104, 169, 170 Mitchell, William, 158, 215
Material culture, 25 Mode, 31, 77, 83, 91, 114, 124
Matthews, Peter, 110 Moiré, 192
Mayer, Emeran, 108 Mooney, Annabelle, 63, 113
Maynard, Patrick, 1, 2, 3, 4, 18, 106, Morgan, Michael, 117
107, 108, 110, 111, 114 Morphology, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37,
McCloud, Scott, 111, 112 39, 40, 41, 42, 52, 110
McNeill, David, 77, 78, 84, 115 Motion, 17, 18, 20, 21, 28, 64, 65,
Mead, George, 84, 124, 129, 132, 66, 68, 83, 130
133, 172, 230 Motion path, 65
Media, 25, 30, 38, 39, 53, 56, 71, 99, Movie, 14, 163, 177, 183, 225, 241
106, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, Music, 79, 99, 150, 220, 225
168, 169, 170, 171, 192, 215 Mytheme, 140
Mediagenius, 163, 164, 165, 166,
167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 215
Medway, Jim, 180, 183, 185, 186, N
187, 188, 189, 192, 193, 208, Narrative, 22, 44, 100, 108, 110, 111,
209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 216, 115, 118, 121, 135, 136, 137,
223, 231, 239, 240, 243 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146,
Meijers, Anthonie, 107, 225 147, 148, 148, 149, 150, 151,
Meister, Christoph, 157 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159,
Memory, 24, 64, 66, 69, 70, 74, 90, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167,
93, 94, 96, 99, 123, 128, 129, 173, 174, 175, 176, 179, 180,
136, 147, 162, 165, 168, 172, 185, 186, 193, 210, 212, 215,
191, 217, 247 217, 218, 231, 235, 238, 239
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 124, 129, Narrator, 136, 137, 139, 147, 149,
130, 132, 133, 156, 157 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156,
Meta-narrative, 150 162, 163, 164, 166, 179, 185,
Metaphor, 24, 66, 71, 72, 82, 210 218, 219
Michell, William, 173 Necker Cube, 22, 23, 34, 35, 88
Mignola, Mike, 180, 183, 184, 185, Necker, Louis, 22, 23, 34, 35, 88, 109
186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, Neisser, Ulric, 71, 117
193, 194, 195, 198 Neotic, 65, 70, 71, 75, 78, 79, 89
Millar, Jenny, 249, 258 Newman, Michael, 15, 108
Mimesis, 151, 152 Ninio, Anat, 110
Miming, 79 Nociception, 17
INDEX 271
Nominal, 4, 12, 56, 61, 62, 66, 67, Percept, 69, 91, 92, 93, 99, 118, 130
68, 69, 70, 74, 77, 78, 104, Perception, 1, 12, 17, 20, 22, 28, 36,
105, 123 38, 41, 44, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59,
Nouns, 24, 32 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 72,
Novel activities, 3, 5 81, 82, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92,
93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100,
102, 103, 105, 111, 112, 114,
O 116, 117, 118, 122, 123, 124,
Observer viewpoint, 84 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130,
Olfacception, 17 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139,
Ontology, 17, 18, 21, 28, 61, 64, 153, 164, 167, 168, 172, 173,
81, 82, 100, 101, 102, 107, 176, 186, 213, 220, 241
124, 173 Performance, 62, 81, 112, 140, 164,
Opaki, Ireneusz, 221, 248 220
Opportunity, 14, 28, 30, 74, 75, 89, Permeability, 38, 39
91, 92, 93, 99, 101, 102, 103, Phenomenology, 49, 50, 51, 54, 59,
144, 218 60, 66, 174
Optic nerve, 55 Pictorial, 20, 90, 91, 92, 113, 116
Origin/target, 71, 72 Pierce, Charles, 40
Outline shape, 55, 56, 57, 58, Pisanello, 9, 10, 11, 107
112, 113 Plan, 13, 19, 36, 122, 144, 145, 177
Plane, 19, 20, 22, 56
Plan-section, 19
Plato, 151, 159
P Play-acting, 228
Pace, 179, 200 Plot, 47, 61, 111, 136, 137, 138, 141,
Page, 6, 19, 29, 33, 35, 36, 37, 43, 58, 149, 178, 179, 185, 186, 187,
179, 180, 183, 185, 192, 193, 191, 200, 222, 232, 235, 238,
194, 198, 219, 231, 232, 235, 241
240, 241, 242, 243 Point, 2, 3, 7, 16, 18, 19, 20,
Palette, 179, 185, 232 21, 29, 34, 36, 39, 43, 50, 55,
Panel, 42, 43, 44, 185, 201, 241, 58, 64, 72, 76, 78, 84, 86, 87, 89,
242, 243 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103,
Pantone, 185 123, 126, 128, 131, 139, 153,
Parody, 228 166, 167, 172, 179, 185, 186,
Part/Part relationships, 31, 110 198, 212, 219, 220, 229, 235,
Part/Whole relationship, 31, 33, 238, 242
52, 110 Point of view, 19, 36, 43, 50, 58, 72,
Pattern, 16, 32, 33, 41, 70, 71, 73, 91, 76, 84, 86, 89, 98, 99, 100, 103,
114, 145, 193, 243 128, 139, 172, 198, 242
Peacocke, Christopher, 51, 112 Polanyi, Michael, 83, 116
Peirce, Charles, 156 Polysemy, 22, 23, 34, 88, 89
272 INDEX
Potential resources of the body, 14, 15, Q

16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 28, 29, 30, Queneau, Raymond, 230, 249
31, 35, 38, 48, 50, 58, 60, 61, 62, Quintillian, 247, 250
63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72,
73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81, 88, 91, 93,
94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, R
104, 121, 122, 123, 134, 135, Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 117
143, 147, 148, 161, 172, 218 Rawson, Phillip, 3, 5, 10, 11, 18, 19,
Pragmatics (linguistics), 23, 33, 41, 20, 21, 24, 107, 108, 109, 111,
47, 48, 51, 70, 135, 158 114, 177, 216
Preneotic, 65, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, Reader, 43, 44, 137, 142, 149,
86, 89, 90, 96 153, 154, 155, 156, 161,
Primitives (picture), 30 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,
Prince, Gerald, 136, 137, 146, 167, 169, 170, 171, 176, 185,
148, 152 188, 191, 200, 213, 214, 215,
Prince, Richard, 228 222, 229, 239
Process color, 185 Realism, 200
Projection, 22, 24, 34–39, 55, 57, 65, Realisation, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30,
72, 110, 170 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
Promotion, 104–106, 119 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47,
Property, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 16–21, 25, 27, 48, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62,
29, 34, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53–60, 63, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72,
64, 66–68, 70, 72, 90, 95–100, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83,
103, 104, 105, 114, 118, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94,
128–130, 135, 136, 145, 146, 95, 96, 97, 98, 104, 105, 110,
162, 164, 178, 217, 227 121, 125, 129, 130, 133, 135,
Proposition, 62, 70, 71, 73–75, 77, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 146,
86, 90–92, 95–96, 98–100, 104, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 161,
143, 144, 146 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167,
Propp, Vladimir, 140, 158 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 192,
Proprioception, 76, 81–83, 87, 198, 217, 220, 221, 231,
90–92, 146 235, 247
Prosopopoeia, 247, 248 Reception, 72, 73, 139, 142
Proximity, 20, 21, 28, 29, 33, 35, 36, Referent, 54, 141
39, 40–43, 52, 55–57, 64, 65, 79, Referral, 54, 143–146
91, 112, 132, 215 Register, 39, 42, 43, 59, 60, 135–139,
Psyche, 124, 164, 168 143, 145, 149–153, 162–163,
Psychoanalysis, 167 169, 171, 177, 215
Purpose, 3, 7, 14, 24, 25, 27, 29, 49, Reification, 161
93, 121, 122, 135, 137, 177, Reisberg, Daniel, 116
178, 224 Remediation, 53, 108
Pylyshyn, Zenon, 117 Repleteness, 45, 63
INDEX 273
Representation, 9, 15, 18, Script, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 185,
20, 24, 30–32, 36–39, 41–42, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198,
44, 45, 48–50, 52, 62, 66–67, 203, 208, 212, 214, 239, 240, 243
69, 70–95, 97–102, 104–109, Seeing, 6, 9, 10, 11, 17, 21, 36, 37,
112, 117–118, 130–131, 133, 39, 43, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55,
135–156, 161–179, 183, 56, 59, 60, 62, 64, 88, 94, 95, 98,
185–186, 191, 192–194, 198, 101, 109, 113, 117, 143, 145,
212–214, 217–227, 229, 231, 146, 152, 169, 174
238–241, 247 Seeing-in, 9, 10, 11, 36, 37, 39, 43,
Resemblance, 40, 51, 52, 53, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 62, 88,
54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 91, 94, 98, 109, 174
92, 95, 109 Seeley, William, 14
Resistance, 18, 65, 66, 104, Seen, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 17, 18, 21, 42, 45,
105, 106, 119 50, 51, 53, 54, 58, 59, 64, 79, 86,
Retina, 55, 56 88, 94, 96, 97, 113, 130, 146,
Rhetoric, 51, 70, 81, 91, 112, 210, 152, 172, 185, 207, 208, 210,
214, 218, 248 212, 226, 227
Rhythm, 21, 65, 107 Self, 5, 12, 13, 21, 29, 38, 41, 52, 61,
Ricoeur, Paul, 140, 141, 154, 157, 62, 66, 69, 77, 79, 81, 86, 87, 88,
158, 159 89, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103,
Rimmon-Kenan, Scholmith, 141, 142 104, 105, 122, 123, 124, 125,
Romance, 238, 240, 241, 243, 249 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131,
Romary, Laurent, 145 132, 133, 134, 135, 141, 165,
Rumelhart, David, 71 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174,
Ryle, Gilbert, 93, 94 176, 188, 193, 212, 213, 214,
221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 228,
229, 230, 231, 238, 239, 240,
S 247, 248
Sanskrit, 21 Semantics, 47, 70
Sarbin, Theodore, 117 Semiosis, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30,
Sayer De Lay, Harold, 235, 236 33, 34, 40, 41, 46, 51, 52, 62, 70,
Schaffenburger, Kurt, 241 78, 91, 94, 104, 106, 110, 111,
Scherer, Klaus, 86, 116 124, 128, 133, 134, 135, 142,
Schier, Flint, 51 220, 223, 225
Schotter, Andrew, 113 Sentence, 1, 34, 40, 44, 45, 46, 47,
Schütz, Alfred, 124, 129, 130, 79, 101
131, 132, 133, 134, 135, Sequence, 21, 32, 33, 46, 47, 65, 111,
136, 141, 142, 146, 147, 136, 138, 139, 152, 162
148, 151, 155, 156, 157, Serialisation, 16
162, 164, 166, 168, 169, Seth, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227, 228,
170, 172, 223 248
Scopal relationship, 31, 34, 43, 110 Shannon, Benny, 83
274 INDEX
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 66, 115 Story, 19, 37, 45, 67, 101, 112, 114,
Shepard, Roger, 117 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142,
Shklovski, Viktor, 138, 158 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153,
Showing, 24, 136, 137, 138, 146, 155, 156, 162, 163, 164, 165,
151, 152, 173, 174, 226 166, 173, 174, 175, 179, 183,
Shültz, Alfred, 142, 146 185, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193,
Shwartz, Stephen, 117 194, 200, 210, 212, 213, 218,
Sign, 15, 21, 40, 42, 52, 69, 70, 147, 219, 220, 222, 227, 231, 232,
168, 169, 223 235, 236, 238, 241
Size, 17, 18, 20, 28, 32, 64, 83, 89, Storyboard, 179, 185, 188, 198, 208,
179, 242 209
Sjuzet, 138, 141 Stricker, Marcus, 117
Slezak, Peter, 117 Structure, 20, 22, 24, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33,
Smell, 82, 186, 241 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47,
Smyth, Herbert, 115 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59,
Sobchack, Vivian, 85 61, 62, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74,
Social modulations, 14, 24, 25, 27, 28, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 89,
29, 30, 64 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99,
Society, 86, 104, 123, 124, 126, 130, 100, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112,
132, 221, 230 114, 115, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131,
Solipsism, 105, 127, 128, 129, 134, 177 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140,
Sound, 33, 79, 172, 186, 220, 228 141, 142, 143, 146, 147, 162, 163,
Source-domain, 73 164, 167, 172, 173, 174, 179, 186,
Space, 11, 19, 20, 22, 23, 36, 42, 46, 217, 227, 229, 241
56, 65, 67, 72, 78, 89, 151, 162, Struggle, 5, 104, 105, 126, 129, 130,
173, 193, 200 176, 212, 222, 226, 228, 248
Speech act, 143, 145, 146 Style, 8, 32, 40, 41, 45, 51, 52, 56,
Speech balloons, 40, 185, 242 107, 108, 109, 112, 161, 163,
Speed, 21, 65, 68, 82, 89 164, 165, 171, 175, 177, 180,
Spiegelman, Art, 200, 206, 208, 209, 219, 222, 230, 231, 232, 239
210, 212, 214, 216 Subject, 8, 22, 59, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70,
Status, 6, 14, 15, 16, 18, 25, 27, 28, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 97,
29, 30, 32, 35, 42, 43, 45, 52, 55, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104,
61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 105, 110, 105, 106, 124, 125, 126, 128,
121, 122, 123, 133, 135, 137, 131, 132, 133, 137, 142, 153,
142, 145, 169, 174, 200, 214, 154, 155, 156, 162, 163, 164,
243 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171,
Stealing, 228 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178,
Stephanson, Anders, 249 191, 198, 212, 213, 214, 217,
Stereoscopy, 19 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229,
Stimulus, 59, 67, 94, 114, 130, 166, 221 230, 231, 232, 238, 240, 243,
Stone, Matthew, 158 247
INDEX 275
Subjectivity, 8, 22, 59, 63, 66, 86, Teleology, 3

102, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, Telling, 21, 24, 67, 136, 137,
132, 133, 153, 162, 163, 165, 138, 139, 141, 142, 151,
166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 152, 163, 166, 173, 174,
174, 175, 176, 191, 212, 213, 175, 183, 185, 192, 200,
214, 218, 219, 220, 221, 225, 214, 231, 232
226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, Temperature, 17, 186
232, 235, 239, 247, 248 Text, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 37, 106, 155,
Surface, 3, 4, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 161, 171, 174, 179, 218, 219,
29, 35, 36, 43, 48, 49, 55, 56, 69, 220, 228, 242
74, 90, 107, 113, 140, 162 Thermioception, 17
Sutliff Sanders, Joe, 249 Thibault, Paul, 43, 109, 111
Swain, Michael, 117 Thomas, Nigel, 9, 36, 89, 91, 92, 93,
Swan, Curt, 241 94, 107, 117, 118
Symbol, 51, 52, 57 Thorndyke, Perry, 71
Syntagm, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40, 106 Time, 17, 18, 20, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36,
Syntax, 39, 47, 51, 70, 78, 110 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 52,
System, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68,
27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 79, 88, 89, 90,
36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 104, 113,
47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 130, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140,
57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 70, 91, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149,
94, 105, 109, 110, 113, 115, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156,
130, 139, 146, 147, 148, 149, 162, 167, 172, 173, 174, 175,
150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 179, 186, 191, 203, 217, 218,
168, 169, 171, 193 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225,
229, 232, 235, 240, 247
Todorov, Tzvetan, 139, 150, 158, 159
T Topology, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 24, 27,
Tactics, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 112, 147 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40,
Talmy, Leonard, 44, 111 41, 42, 43, 47, 55, 56, 57, 60, 83,
Talon, Durwin, 216 84, 106, 108, 112, 155
Tasker, R., 116 Touch, 17, 21, 36, 82, 83, 85, 129
Taste, 82 Trace, 10, 15, 17, 21, 76, 87, 108,
Taxonomy, 74, 198, 242 109, 133, 136, 137, 138, 146,
Taylor, Charles, 107 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155,
Technical, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169,
14, 17, 18, 21, 24, 25, 29, 35, 36, 170, 171, 176, 177, 180, 193,
53, 106, 107, 110, 114, 134, 212, 213, 214, 215, 223, 238
135, 163, 179, 180, 183, 185, Trajectory, 61, 68, 74, 81, 92, 125,
186, 217, 243 144
Technical production, 1, 29 Transitive clauses, 85
276 INDEX
Truth, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, Visual image, 24, 41, 42,
115, 218, 219, 220 75, 76, 90
Tsal, Yehoshua, 117 Visualisation, 31, 34, 38, 48, 49, 50,
Tye, Michael, 117 51, 53, 59, 76, 84, 88, 89–96,
Tynyanov, Yuri, 222, 248 155, 188, 198, 212
Typification, 132, 133, 240, 242 Visual language, 38, 42, 109
Vološinov, Valentin, 104, 111,
119, 141, 142, 158, 164,
168, 170, 171, 175, 193,
U 215, 216, 220, 221, 223,
Umilta, Maria, 115 229, 248, 249
Understanding, 16, 22, 25, 27, Volume, 20, 29, 64, 65, 66
41, 71, 73, 75, 76, 83, 86, 95, 98, Von Uexküll, Jakob, 67–69, 77, 114
102, 106, 123, 134, 140, 142,
144, 145, 152, 215, 217, 229
Unreal objects, 53, 54
Utterance, 47, 143, 145, 193, 217, W
219, 228 Walker, Mort, 113, 224,
226, 229
Walton, Kendon, 51, 93, 99,
100–102, 111, 112, 118,
V 174, 216
Valentini, Salvatore, 116 Ware, Chris, 198, 200, 212–214, 216,
Value, vi, 62, 63, 98, 103, 104, 126, 223, 231, 239
127, 226, 232 Warren, Ron, 249
Van Eck, Dingmar, 107, 109 Watson Garcia, Clare, 2, 3, 106
Van Rijn, Rembrandt, 10, 11, 61, 62 Webber, Erik, 107, 109
Varnum, Robin, 215 White, Haydon, 138, 158
Vector, 16, 65, 72 Willats, John, 3, 18, 20, 22, 23, 30,
Velocity, 21, 65, 89 107, 108, 109, 111, 114
Venn, John, 148, 155, 156 Window, 44, 207
Ventriloquism, 228, 248 Windsor-Smith, Barry, 235
Verb, 32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 220, 222
Verbalisation, 79 Wolk, Douglas, 230, 231, 249
Verbal language, 24, 79, 80 Wollheim, Richard, 9, 36, 50, 94, 107,
Verisimilitude, 100, 139, 150, 235 109, 112
Vermaas, Peter, 107, 261 Wood, Wallace, 241
Vision, 9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, Word, 3, 6, 21, 37–38, 40–42,
29, 30–71, 75–76, 83, 89, 92, 93, 44–46, 63, 71, 78, 81, 92,
95, 97–99, 112, 113, 143, 155, 138, 147, 152, 163, 166,
163, 165, 185, 192, 198, 210, 168–169, 176, 185, 193,
212, 220, 221, 224, 226, 231, 215, 218, 220, 223, 226,
235, 239 228
INDEX 277
Work, 18, 62, 79, 84, 102, 111, 115, Writing, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34–39,
116, 117, 124, 127, 154, 156, 41–43, 55, 58–59, 70–71, 83, 99,
161, 164, 171, 174, 177, 183, 106, 109, 163, 175, 218, 219,
185, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194, 224, 228, 231, 239
200, 208, 213–214, 222, 224,
226, 227, 229, 231, 239, 240,
243, 249 Z
Wright, Larry, 3, 107 Zero values, 63

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1 Drawing, Depicting and Imagining 1

3 Drawing Demonstration One: Expounding Another’s

4 Drawing Demonstration Two: Time and Self-Observation 217

4.6.1 Drawing Demonstration Two Method 240

Fig. 1.1 Henri Gaudier-Bzresca. Eagle. Pen and ink on paper

Fig. 3.13 Simon Grennan, Demonstration One (c) Spiegelman as

example), inevitably begs the question of expertise. Where no consensus

Drawing, Depicting and Imagining

1.1 DRAWING’S DEVICES

© The Author(s) 2017 1

Similarly, consider the following instruction from another drawing

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instruction manuals and theoretical study identify ‘point,’ ‘line,’ ‘shape’

a) describe technical activity relative to purpose and the inference of

First, if I see a woman draw a mark across a piece of paper in order to

marking activities undertaken by a woman with the goal of making a

very complicated activities, including drawing activities, are intersubjec-

that appear outside these topological-affective parameters are theoretically

A second objection observes that a number of different activities can

the achievement of types of goals, only a tendency to produce particular

Consider Rembrandt’s ink drawing A studio with an artist painting a

In Rawson’s approach to drawing, the line has a range of properties

‘seeing-in,’ is a unique phenomenon, requiring a great deal of theorising

about the ascribed function of particular actions/marks. Both descriptions

1.1.2 Generalising Some Potential Resources of the Human Body

to achieve other goals, such as the making of a photograph or the baking

whose aim is to make a particular drawing. The activity of typing on a

Considered homeorhetically, mass, size and motion are spatio-temporal

contradictions of this approach whilst exemplifying some of the ways in

overall scheme, the illusory space is also determined by my sense of my

according to goal-directedness ﬁnd comfortable lodgings. Also of interest is

1.1.3 Generalising the Role of Environmental

of aetiology, applied to the production of material culture including

i) the realisation of the relationship between paper, physical location,

iii) According to this system, the phenomenal realisation of environ-

Realisation of one aspect of this model by another is always realisation of

tactic relationships within the graphic array. As I have described, in aetiolo-

1.2 DRAWING’S AFFORDANCES

size. But a homeorhetic and aetiological conception of spatio-temporality

visual representations to writing, such as drawing. An underlying task for a

Graphic ‘syntagms’ are numbers of graphemes that group to create mean-

substitution. For example, consider the anthropomorphic addition of

Discursive relationships affecting the meaning of written marks appear

which carry superﬂuous meanings and exceed automatic realisation of the

spatial projection systems that realise 3D coordinates systematically in a

1.2.2 Visual Language

Cohn writes that he has ‘introduced a new notion of “permeability,”’ by

I commenced with the structure of lexicogrammar relative to the struc-

functions of resemblance and style, or their lack of syntactic signiﬁcance,

as ‘likeness.’ Images ‘generally look like objects in the world,’ he

depictions (along with other types of image), are theorised as indivisible

contradictions by appeal either to the existence elsewhere of increasingly

Two further examples that Cohn provides, in order to demonstrate the