STREET SCHEMA (5)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 7, 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.

Although the design here is a concentric one, and we’ve already established that I mistrust “centered” circular schemas, one thing that attracts me greatly here is the suggestion — made by the cog-like shape surrounding the center circle — that this diagram might be divided evenly into sections. We can imagine radii emanating from each point on the cog… though they’re not actually there.

But if we imagine the radii there, then we gain the useful insight that even though a circular schema’s sections are walled off from one another, in fact there is always continuity between a schema’s contiguous sections. The undulating flow traversing the inner edge of this schema’s circumference gives lie to the mistaken notion that a schema’s sections are isolated islands; “energy” or “matter” flows from one (imaginary) section into the next, ceaselessly.

That’s the reality of a semiosphere: The dividing sections we impose upon it are useful illusions… which we too easily confuse for reality.

Not that I’d want to try to explain that to a client.

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STREET SCHEMA (5)

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