STREET SCHEMA (1)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 3, 2024

One in a miniseries of posts — within SCHEMATIZING — via which Josh Glenn will share photos of manhole covers, the diagrammatic design of which he sometimes finds useful to his thinking — in his role as a consulting semiotician — about how to diagram a “semiosphere.” (Here’s an example of Josh’s proprietary “G-schema”; it appeared in his 2021 book The Adventurer’s Glossary, from McGill-Queen’s University Press). Josh is grateful to Rob Walker’s Art of Noticing provocations.

When I’m out walking the dog, I’ll sometimes stop and gaze at a manhole cover — transfixed by its design. Within the object’s circular form, what manner of grid, latticework, reticulation, plexus, graticule, or decussation does its design suggest? Of the myriad ways to suggest a totality, does this one speak to me — would it work as a diagram of meaning-relation within a semiosphere?

I’m kicking off the STREET SCHEMA series with the manhole cover shown above, because it resembles my own G-schema — as it has eight sections created by a “cross” and an “x.” FWIW, this manhole sparked the idea for the series….

I’m intrigued by the fact that some parts of this schema have been filled in by asphalt (i.e., from outside the schema’s borders), while other parts are relatively asphalt free. What might this mean? Do semiospheres work this way? That is, are some sections more “porous” (vis-a-vis the wider universe of meaning of which the semiosphere is but one aspect) than others? A fascinating notion, and one that wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t contemplated this diagram.

PS: The concentric rings of this schema look nice, but they wouldn’t serve a purpose in my G-schema… I don’t think. Unless one wanted perhaps to distinguish between residual, dominant, and emergent codes perhaps? Something to consider….

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STREET SCHEMA (1)

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