The World is the Message

Manfred Clynes showed how emotion may be transmitted in the world of music and touch. We have seen in other chapters how it may also be transmitted by shape, juxtaposition, and palette. We have seen how visual clues may be used to identify into which archetypal box to insert creatures, people, and objects in our constant quest for treasures, and how these boxes have built in emotional characteristics to trigger and direct our instinctual behaviour.

The implication is that all that surrounds us – our ‘umweld’ is a universe of messages, and that we are structured to make sense of this language. Our landscapes, cityscapes, and bodyscapes are messages. The fruit we buy in Sainsbury’s is a message. Everything we see, hear, and touch is a message. And these messages have a structure, partly inherent in them, and partly inherent in us.

How do we structure the meaning in a message? How is it structured for us? All messages, including our habitat, contain a structure ‘designed’ to arouse and sustain our interest – or to hide from us or to bore us – to direct (or misdirect) attention, while unveiling the semantic content, and getting the required response. This is the ‘syntactic’ skeleton on which the sentic, and other semantic codes are hung, and the ‘enigmatic’ skeleton on which they are imagined.

The syntactic skeleton enables us to make sense of the scene as it presents itself. It has a relational function: it identifies what are the separate entities present – what is figure, what is ground – and of what secondary entities each of these entities is composed; how they are related – left/right; up/down; front/back; before/after; towards/away. These correspond roughly with the categories linguists are familiar with in case, aspect, and tense – and the nesting of relative clauses to expand meaning.

It has a deictic function – the ability to direct attention, as Jay Appleton points out, towards the highest point and lowest point of the horizon, or towards a line or cleavage, towards the eyes that are looking at you, or the centre of concentric ellipses, towards diagonals, towards the top right of a field of view (since most humans identify themselves with the lower left).

And this relational and deictic aspect is the machinery which underpins metaphor. It is because of this deep structure that we can see a parallel between the ‘silicone valleys’ mentioned above (the much longed for absence of silicone between two implants!), and what emerges on a sunny day from the back of a builder’s pants when he bends over, and in extreme cases even when he doesn’t. (The humour, of course, comes from the ways these two cleavages are different in terms of invited activity on the part of the viewer, as the wonderful advert for (I think) Pot Noodles suggested.). The possibility of metaphor exists, in short, because of the canyons in one’s mind.

In landscape, though, as Jay Appleton says, there is a tension between revealed vista and deflected vista. What is here in front of us – our ‘revealed prospect’ – and our ‘over the hills and far away’ prospect. Here we are talking not about the syntactic code, but about the ‘enigmatic code’, the code which arouses curiosity, the code that teases. This is the basis for other figures of speech – metonymy and synecdoche. If you are familiar with the work of the French semiotician Roland Barthes, you will recognise this enigmatic code as his ‘hermeneutic’ one, while my ‘syntactic’ code is his ‘proairetic’. If you are familiar with Leonard Bernstein’s Harvard Lectures, you will recognise it in the concept of ambiguity and the delaying of the resolving of tension. Or in the repeated hiding of melodic strains by one another in a fugue. A neurobiologist would perhaps say the function of this code is to provide the release stimuli for our innate mechanisms for exploratory and hunting behaviour. In language, we find it not just in metonymy and synecdoche, but also in the delaying until the very end of the sentence of the vital word. It is in poetry, screenplays, and the flipping back and forth between storylines in novels and soap operas, in wrestling matches, football matches, rites of initiation, and even striptease. The function of the enigmatic code is to fascinate, to sensitise one to the possible outcomes, to stimulate production of adrenaline, to arouse determination in the face of possible opposition, and to sustain interest until the message is done with you.

Fascination is a message achieved by this metaphorical dance of the seven veils. It has to sensitise, rouse expectations, tease, and when all is done – and at least from time to time – satisfy. Before reading Jay Appleton’s work I was aware of this process in paintings, in the contrast between crisp detail, and the vaguer, mistier, more ambiguous shapes used to create mystery and atmosphere. After, I could see it in every deflected vista, in every landscape, and of course, every bodyscape too. And one more reason for the success of the master plate artist, Bob Hersey…

How is a message recognised as being a message? And how does it become memorable? In a nutshell, by reduplication. The umbrella pines and laurels of the Tuscan skyline; the acacias of the Serengeti; the Black Pines of the Arctic. It is the ‘redundant’ information that gives it its character and identity.

And is the process mechanical? Are we just a bunch of wind-up toys? No. It is organic and chreodic. We select from any message what we want to perceive, and reject messages that don’t meet our needs as nasty or boring. Affordance is relative to the phase of life we are passing through, and to gender, and to tribal, and social needs. You can’t sell a collectors plate featuring three little kittens to a young warrior who feels the need to prove his manhood, and you can’t sell Conan the Barbarian to his granny. Unless of course…

Ultimately the purpose of these brain functions is NOT to enable us to understand the world, as all too many intellectuals ethnocentrically assume, but to take appropriate action in dealing with it. The belief expressed here is that every visual, tactile or aural cue drives an activity unless consciously, or through habit, over ridden for a deeper purpose or rather a deeper quest. Artificial life experimenters please note, your creature needs to be able to identify the key players in the quest, communicate with them to satisfy its needs, and be able to read the landscape so its behaviour is appropriate, but above all to act to get the treasure. Allow recursive nesting of quests and your boids* will really fly.

(*See work by Craig Reynolds, and by Ariel Dolan. Sci Amer Nov 2000)