Beyond Signification: The Co-Evolution of Subject and Semiosis 45sort of ̳imprint‘ one may ask is made by semiotic objects, including linguistic objects, that
one may want to refer to, and what sort of medium is it that is suited to receiving such an
imprint? As Thom explains the iconic principle, ―the image becomes memory‖ and ―the
receiver system has to possess very special dynamic properties‖ (1983, p. 263).
In the literature on cognitive architecture we have become used to the terms ̳episodic
memory‘ and ̳semantic memory‘, and these may be apt in this context. Let us take the
activity of reading as a paradigm case.
2.3. Texts and Semiosis
We know that texts are processed in such a way that the mind retains certain features of a
text for spans of time and that these timespans can vary greatly, from a fraction of a second to
a number of decades. When reading for comprehension one performs certain operations that
are not aimed at retaining verbatim text, but rather aimed at retaining summative
representations of the text. This will also vary greatly according to the intention of the reader
and his or her competence, but if a text is processed and retained at all we would expect some
cognitive modeling of its referent to be retained in episodic memory, together with some
knowledge about its own organisation or macrostructure. We would also expect that the
reading of texts would have a bearing on the network of related meanings that make up
semantic memory, although these meanings may be entirely abstracted from the memories of
any specific text.
What may be included under the iconic here? Any representation must have an iconic
aspect, and in this case we would say that any of these memories of a text, or derived from a
text, are iconic insofar as they are directly motivated by the form of the text itself. But just as
with any iconic representation they can be deformed to a point where they no longer bear an
isomorphic relation to the original, for example in memory impairment. The purest iconic
representation of a text would no doubt be a verbatim recall of the entire text, since this does
not involve the variation implicit in the work of interpretation. This would be the mind‘s
equivalent of a camera shot of the text, so to speak, almost pure iconicity. The indexical
aspect in such a case would be shrunken virtually to vanishing point, consisting perhaps only
in the association of these contents of the mind with an original source outside itself.
But when a text has been processed in the more usual way, for comprehension, the role of
the indexical aspect naturally becomes greatly expanded, and with this comes variation in
understanding and interpretation by different readers. Whereas the iconic within the symbolic
order consists simply in the fact of retention of semiotic material in the mind, the indexical is
more complex and analytical than this, in that diverse aspects of this semiotic object are
associated with various other mental contents. In the case of a text these associations are
quasi-infinite in number as we enter the domain of ̳unlimited semiosis‘. It will not be
possible or desirable here to try to provide a taxonomy of the various possibilities and a few
examples will have to suffice. A word used by an author, for example, may have connotations
due to certain associations in the mind of a reader. A text being processed will inevitably be
generic in some of its features, in which case it may be associated in the mind with other texts
of a similar type. A text may allude to another text known to the reader, or refer to some
object or state of affairs known to the reader. The text may recapitulate propositions that are
known to be characteristic of certain types of argument. The author may be familiar to the