Intratextual symbolicity
While indexical relationships between words and images have received much attention in the study of word-image relationships and the iconic type of relationship can hardly be questioned, the possibility of intratextual symbolicity between words and images seems to be a paradox at first sight. After all, an essential feature of symbols is their arbitrariness, and arbitrariness is certainly not an efficient way of connecting a text with an image. However, arbitrariness is not actually Peirce's first criterion of symbolicity. In contrast to the icon, which represents its object because of its own sign quality, and the index, which is a sign because of a hic et nunc relationship between sign and object at a given locus in time and space, the symbol, according to Peirce, is associated to its object because of a habit of sign interpretation. To be symbolic, word-image relationships would therefore have to depend on habitual associations.
Habits of relating images to words and words to images exist indeed. We acquire the habit of associating a verbal and a visual message because of seeing both repeatedly in juxtaposition, because of an instruction to associate both, and after learning to associate one message with the other. Such processes of creating and learning habitual associations between verbal and pictorial messages are quite frequent in the media. We recognize by habit the pictures of prominent politicians and film stars in the media not because we discover any similarity between the photos and the real persons which they represent (but which we have never seen in real life), but because of having learnt to associate the pictures of these people with their names in previous messages conveyed by the media. The average newspaper reader, for example, does not recognize a picture of President Clinton because of the similarity which the photo has with the politician as a living person (and hence with the referential object of the picture), but because of having been told previously by the media that the man shown in the picture is President Clinton.
In advertising, the Camel or the Marlboro campaigns make use of pictures that we associate habitually with brand names. Habitual association means that we no longer need not to be reminded of the name at all, when we see the picture. The pictorial message, in the end, does not need the verbal message any more. Camel and Marlboro advertisements, in fact, have been so long around that the campaigns now begin to present the pictures alone, omitting the words completely. Notice, however, that a habitual association between word and image cannot be created intratextually, i.e., within one text. Only as a result of a process of learning from earlier messages in which the word first appeared indexically connected with the picture did we acquire the habit of associating the brand name with the pictures, 'Marlboro' with the pictorial myth of the Wild West. In other words, symbolic word-image connections arise from intertextual habits of interpretation. Their origin is always an indexical sign relation.
more