A post by Kevin Lande

Images occupy a peculiar position in our understanding of representation—the capacity of one thing to be about another. On the one hand, the image is the paragon of representation. An image of a hand re-presents its subject matter, whereas the linguistic phrase “right hand” bears a more abstract, arbitrary relation to what it signifies. Images can teem with seemingly inexhaustible significance—depicting, for example, not just a hand, but a certain number of figures in a certain arrangement—while symbols of language tend to have a lean, almost brutal semantic economy. 

On the other hand, images are commonly also taken to be rudimentary and lacking for any definite structure or meaning.  Language, by contrast, is the “infinite gift” (Yang, 2006), allowing for unbounded creativity in thought and communication. That gift is fueled by a lexicon of basic words or symbols. The lexicon feeds a grammatical engine, comprising rules for how those words can be combined to generate novel meaningful phrases. Looking beyond language, Roland Barthes (1977) asked: “can analogical representation (the ‘copy’) produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols?” Barthes observed that the image, in contrast to language, “is felt to be weak.” “Pictures… have no grammatical rules,” writes Flint Schier (1986). Even the book Visual Grammar (Leborg, 2006) begins by noting that “Visual language has no formal syntax or semantics.” The grammar of a language explains its expressive power. The object of Leborg’s “grammar” is not to explain, but to describe, to classify, and to recommend (see also Hopkins, 2023). Language has an engine; images have only a dashboard.