SCHEMATIZING (48)
By:
December 3, 2024
One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.
Wentzel Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva Corporum Regularium is a lavish exploration of perspectival geometry.
The great conceits of structuralism are twofold: immaterial ideas, concepts, values, emotions, and so forth exist in some kind of relationship to one another; this relationship can be depicted diagrammatically. Binary opposition, the semiosphere, structuralism: all metaphors. One becomes a conjurer giving shape to the shapeless, mapping the unmappable, seeing the unseeable. We don’t really admit this sort of thing to ourselves, these days, which is why images like this one — where mathematics and mysticism (literally) intertwine — are helpful to my thinking.
Is the semiosphere… spherical? Or might it be better to depict the semiosphere as one of the five Platonic solids, or “regular bodies” (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron) inscribed within a sphere?
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.