H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RIPA

 G.: Ripa, then, or rather 1593 pretending to be a picture book. S.: Not pretending very hard, I hope. G.: No. Iconologia in 1593 is honest enough to tell one that abstraction must dress for dinner before it can be understood. S.: That is already a thesis. G.: A thesis in costume, which is the only kind Italy really trusts. S.: And Oxford pretends not to. G.: Oxford trusts costume too, but prefers to call it “example.” S.: So 1593 matters. G.: Immensely. Rome, 1593, printed by the heirs of Giovanni Gigliotti, dedicated to Salviati, and meant to be necessary to poets, painters, and sculptors who have not the leisure to wait for philosophers. S.: Which is why you like it. G.: Exactly. Philosophy usually arrives after the image has already done the work and asks to be thanked for the explanation. S.: You were meant to be preparing “Meaning.” G.: I was. Instead I found myself thinking that Strawson was right about Peirce in a way one resents being right about anything. S.: The icon. G.: The icon, yes, though Peirce is not the beginning of it for my purposes. The beginning, or at least a much earlier and more civilised beginning, is Ripa. S.: Because Ripa makes iconicity practical. G.: Precisely. Not a grand metaphysical category first, but a utensil. A lion for strength, a snake for prudence, a balance for justice, a colour for a passion, a posture for a vice. S.: So Iconologia is an encyclopedia of visible inferability. G.: Splendid. Keep that. It is exactly what it is: a manual of how to make concepts legible before anyone has defined them. S.: Which sounds suspiciously like your own eventual point about non-natural meaning depending on more primitive correlations. G.: There you have it. One can devise a Deutero-Esperanto all one likes, clean, abstract, and non-iconic, but the moment one must teach it to anyone, one smuggles in a gesture, a shape, a likeness, a physical demonstration. S.: So even the anti-iconic depends upon the iconic. G.: Exactly. Every non-iconic system of representation leans, somewhere in its cellar, on an iconic, causal, natural, or at any rate perceptual one. S.: Peirce would approve. G.: He would, though I should still prefer him slightly less portentous. S.: And Ripa more useful. G.: Very much more useful for a room of human beings. Peirce classifies. Ripa furnishes. S.: That is dry and unjust. G.: Only half unjust. Ripa tells you what Liberty wears, what Prudence holds, what Envy’s complexion ought to be, what Peace must carry if the painter is not to embarrass himself. S.: So iconicity here is not merely resemblance, but culturally managed resemblance. G.: Exactly. An icon is never merely a picture. It is likeness under a regime of recognisable attributes. S.: Then Ripa is already beyond naive naturalism. G.: Entirely. He knows perfectly well that the image must be readable by convention. Yet the convention works because it exploits forms of visual uptake more primitive than language. S.: The eye understands before the sentence finishes. G.: That was exactly the point. Allegory, attribute, colour: the reader understands before the clause has had time to become grammatical. S.: So what Oxford does under the name of “example” Ripa does under the name of image. G.: Yes. The English pretend that an example is neutral. Italians know it is a small theatre. S.: You never took Peirce’s icons entirely seriously in the early seminars. G.: Because one is apt, in Oxford, to distrust any triad that arrives with too much self-respect. Symbol, index, icon sound a little too tidy when one is trying to keep one’s footing among actual uses. S.: And later? G.: Later one realises that among the modes of correlation the iconic figures very large indeed. Even natural meaning is often iconically entangled. S.: “Mary has measles”: the spots mean measles. G.: Exactly. The spots do not merely accompany the condition. They present, in visible pattern, something of what is going on. One may insist on causation, but likeness still does work. S.: Dark clouds mean rain. G.: Yes, and no treaty has been signed in advance. One looks, infers, and there is the old natural sign. Aquinas says signum naturale. Italians say segno naturale. I say natural meaning and then pretend the naming was the achievement. S.: Which it was not. G.: Certainly not. The world had already been managing very well without my terminology. S.: So the postman sees the pillar box and has an icon of it. G.: Precisely. Light, surface, retina, stored recognitional pattern, all operating before the sentence “That pillar box is red” comes to the rescue. S.: Unless London has painted one green. G.: Ah yes, the commemorative oddity in the City. Then the postman may say, “That pillar box does not look red to me,” which is a non-iconic report built upon a failure inside an iconic system. S.: So the utterance is non-iconic, but what supports it is iconic. G.: Exactly. Everything behind the report is likeness doing work: the remembered red, the present green, the perceived difference, the failure of match, and only then the sentence. S.: Then Ripa helps because he shows that this whole business need not begin with modern semiotics. G.: Yes. It begins with making abstracta manageable by image, which is what humans do before they write treatises. S.: Yet Ripa is not innocent convention either. G.: No, and that is why he is better than a nursery picture-book. His allegories are highly codified. Italy Turrita is not merely a woman; she is a woman with towers and stars, a whole political physiognomy of nationhood. S.: So the icon here can be national as well as moral. G.: Of course. Iconicity scales beautifully, which is one reason it is dangerous. S.: Dangerous? G.: Once one has learnt to make prudence visible, one may also make nation visible, authority visible, sanctity visible, empire visible, and later call the result obvious. S.: So iconicity can naturalise ideology. G.: Exactly. Nothing becomes more persuasive than a convention that has learnt to look like sight. S.: That is very good. G.: Keep it. One must occasionally say something nearly true. S.: Then why “iconologia” rather than merely “iconica” or “imagini”? G.: Because Ripa is not only giving images; he is giving a discourse of them, a logos of icons. The images require verbal discipline to become reusable. S.: So the book is half lexicon and half wardrobe. G.: Splendid. Entirely so. It is a dictionary for those who think in colour and attribute. S.: Necessary to poets, painters, sculptors. G.: Yes, because these people cannot stop to ask philosophers how to represent Dignity or Peace every time they need them. S.: So Ripa economises on metaphysics by overinvesting in visible signs. G.: Very well put. He says, in effect: if you want Prudence, give her a mirror and a snake; if you want Time, give him the proper decrepitude; if you want Virtue, make sure she is not dressed like Vanity. S.: You sound as if you have been enjoying this too much. G.: One must enjoy something when one is meant to be preparing a seminar. S.: Strawson would say the enjoyment is the implicature. G.: He would say something dry and then quote Quine as if it were a weather report. S.: Yet he was right to insist on Peirce. G.: In a way that annoys me, yes. Ogden mentions Peirce in correspondence with Lady Welby; therefore the icon had to be faced. But once faced, I found it had ancestors with better table manners. S.: Ripa having once been trinciante at Salviati’s table. G.: Exactly. The analogy is almost indecently neat. The man who cut and served food later cuts and serves concepts. S.: In digestible portions. G.: Yes. Allegory as carving. Oxford ought to admire that and will instead call it rhetorical. S.: As if “example” were not rhetoric in tweed. G.: Quite. Oxford despises visible allegory and then smuggles it in by anecdote, analogy, and underlined chalk. S.: So when you stand up tomorrow and mention Peirce, you will really be thinking of Ripa. G.: That is the whole embarrassment. S.: And 1593. G.: Yes, because 1593 reminds one that iconic intelligence is not a late accidental chapter in semeiotic sophistication but an old practical art for getting minds to move. S.: Before logos, then, eikon. G.: Not before, exactly, but beneath and around. One sees before one classifies, and one classifies by leaning on things first seen. S.: Then even the philosopher’s logos depends on an iconic basement. G.: Precisely. And that is what my Deutero-Esperanto fantasy kept overlooking. One may build symbols in the clouds, but one teaches them on earth. S.: Could one say that Ripa is “righter” than Peirce? G.: One could, and then immediately deny having meant it. Which is exactly why it is a useful thing to say. S.: Very Gricean. G.: I do what I can with the materials to hand. S.: Let us be a little more exact. In what sense is likeness doing work in Ripa? G.: In several senses. First, direct visual resemblance where possible. A lion resembles what one associates with strength; a mirror visually suits self-knowledge; scales suit balance. Second, analogical propriety: the relation between attribute and concept is not arbitrary even where it is conventional. Third, mnemonic economy: the image stores and retrieves the abstract by a manageable form. S.: So Ripa is near the old ars memoriae. G.: Very much so. The memory arts and iconology are cousins. Both rely on visible stations, attributes, spatial distribution, recognisable signs. S.: Rosselli in one room, Ripa in another. G.: Yes, and both furnish the mind because the mind cannot live on pure definitions. S.: Which is bad news for certain analysts. G.: Only the ones who think concept-possession begins in paraphrase. S.: You are in a savage mood today. G.: It is 1946, and the world has given one permission. S.: Then is an icon always visual? G.: For Ripa chiefly, yes, but for my larger purposes no. One may speak of an internal image, a perceptual configuration, a likeness in role, function, or structure. The cricket team representing England is not iconically English by colour or geography, but by licensed likeness of office. S.: An icon dressed in blazers. G.: Exactly. Role-likeness still counts as likeness. S.: So there are grades of iconicity. G.: Of course. Direct pictorial resemblance, structural analogy, role correspondence, perceptual similarity, bodily gesture, demonstrative staging. Human communication is filthy with them. S.: “Filthy” is perhaps ungenerous. G.: “Rich” would sound approving. I prefer “filthy” because it prevents premature piety. S.: Then what is the relation between icon and convention? G.: Not opposition, but interdependence. Convention selects, stabilises, and distributes what iconicity first makes manageable. Ripa’s figures are not natural inevitabilities; they are conventional codifications of visible aptness. S.: So the icon is never naked likeness. G.: Precisely. The likeness must be institutionally taught to remain shareable. S.: Which means Ripa is not anti-conventional but pre-linguistically assistive. G.: Very good. He stands at the point where convention borrows the force of perception. S.: That would look well in the seminar. G.: It might, though I suspect I shall say it in a less fatal way. S.: Does Cicero really hover here too? G.: Inevitably. Eikon as image is not foreign to the Roman world, and Cicero, who knew more Greek than some people know themselves, would have understood perfectly well that translation here is never merely lexical. S.: Because “image” does not exhaust “eikon.” G.: Exactly. Eikon carries representation by likeness with philosophical dignity attached. One cannot flatten it into picture without loss. S.: As one cannot flatten Iconologia into a picture-book. G.: Precisely. The title itself refuses such flattening. S.: Then perhaps the real joke is that Oxford pretends to despise precisely the thing on which its own pedagogy depends. G.: That is not a joke; it is a sociology of the place. S.: Examples, models, diagrams, blackboards, maps, little cases, all doing iconic work while everyone says “let us be quite abstract.” G.: Exactly. Philosophy despises the ladder while climbing it. S.: And Ripa simply sells ladders with decent handles. G.: Very nice. Keep that too. S.: You are distributing goods recklessly. G.: That is because I have been with a trinciante. S.: One last question. Why does 1593 matter beyond date? G.: Because it fixes a moment before later philosophies of sign and symbol had made themselves solemn. Ripa belongs to a world in which iconic intelligence is practical, artisanal, courtly, mnemonic, civic, and not yet overburdened by theory. That makes him a cleaner witness to the necessity of likeness. S.: Cleaner than Peirce? G.: Different. Peirce theorises the icon magnificently. Ripa assumes it as a social necessity and organises it for use. S.: Which is perhaps why you trust him more. G.: I trust artisans where I merely admire system-builders. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Umbrian, with Roman printing and Oxford irritation.