STREET SCHEMA (7)
By:
April 9, 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.
Not an exciting or attractive pattern, to be sure — but for a semiotic schema-designer, there’s much here to appreciate.
The fact that there’s no center to this circle, for example, is a plus — this pattern automatically deflects away one’s natural inclination to seek out the circle’s center (and to feel instinctively that it’s the “best” part of the semiosphere).
I like how the grid isn’t even — a “squared” grid with right angles can’t be perfectly even within a circle — which suggests that we’re just catching a glimpse of a much larger grid. A semiosphere, from this perspective, is like an aperture, a peephole into one discrete portion of the wider semiotic “universe.” Which I think is true. Semiospheres are contiguous with other semiosopheres, themes and codes flow from one to another… and we can sort of catch a glimpse of that ever-flowing, uncontainable process here.
The problem with this “peephole” design, however, is that it feels arbitrary. Why this section of the universal meaning-matrix, and not some other section? In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson seems dismissive of diagrammatic, systematizing, structuring efforts: Any system developed by scientists, he points out, is merely a system of material points artificially isolated in the continuity of nature; it’s a spatial move of isolating or exsecting certain areas of matter in order to focus on them alone. True! Which is what I mean when I say that the “diagram” shown here feels arbitrary,
And yet, Bergson speaks with cautious approval of “relatively closed systems” — he uses our solar system, as an example of a system that’s obviously part of something much vaster, yet which is recognizably also a discrete-ish system. We don’t isolate / exsect this sort of system merely for convenience; we are invited to regard this system as a (relatively closed) system — it’s natural. Bergson isn’t anti-structuralist — like a post-structuralist, he merely seeks to ensure that structuralists don’t confuse their tidy models with reality.
Back to the semiosphere diagram suggested by this manhole cover…. I appreciate the fact that it insists upon reminding us that this system is only relatively closed; that it is porous, continuous with a larger reality. However, I don’t think it successfully invites us to recognize what it’s depicting as a “naturally” — obviously, organically, self-evidently — discrete system. It goes too far in the direction of corrosive skepticism towards schematizing.
PS: I’m overlooking the border pattern(s), and the cobblestones around the manhole too — all of which, together, add up to an attractive effect.
MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY JOSH GLENN: SCHEMATIZING | IN CAHOOTS | JOSH’S MIDJOURNEY | POPSZTÁR SAMIZDAT | VIRUS VIGILANTE | TAKING THE MICKEY | WE ARE IRON MAN | AND WE LIVED BENEATH THE WAVES | IS IT A CHAMBER POT? | I’D LIKE TO FORCE THE WORLD TO SING | THE ARGONAUT FOLLY | THE PERFECT FLANEUR | THE TWENTIETH DAY OF JANUARY | THE REAL THING | THE YHWH VIRUS | THE SWEETEST HANGOVER | THE ORIGINAL STOOGE | BACK TO UTOPIA | FAKE AUTHENTICITY | CAMP, KITSCH & CHEESE | THE UNCLE HYPOTHESIS | MEET THE SEMIONAUTS | THE ABDUCTIVE METHOD | ORIGIN OF THE POGO | THE BLACK IRON PRISON | BLUE KRISHMA | BIG MAL LIVES | SCHMOOZITSU | YOU DOWN WITH VCP? | CALVIN PEEING MEME | DANIEL CLOWES: AGAINST GROOVY | DEBATING IN A VACUUM | PLUPERFECT PDA | SHOCKING BLOCKING.