Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Ever since Saussure proclaimed the “arbitrary nature of the sign,” much has been made of the potential for any signifier to combine with any signified to form a sign. Moving against this trend, my project develops the novel concept of iconic anchoring, a structural constraint on some images’ potential to represent certain concepts. My exemplar of this concept is the representations of Vietnamese “uprisings” during the 20th century. In discourse that is primarily verbal (e.g., books and speeches), the events I analyze are referred to as “uprisings” by the Communist Party of Vietnam; however, their descriptions of these uprisings are quite different before and after the mid-1960s. In other words, what counts as an uprising changes from the earlier to the later events. In discourse that incorporates visual media, there is a distinction between the depictions of those events prior to when the term “uprising” shifts its meaning and those that come afterward. Those that occur before the shift share a stable set of motifs and are identified as depicting uprisings (through their captions). But in the events that come after the term’s shift in meaning, not only does the previous set of motifs disappear, but these visual representations are almost never identified as uprisings. My conclusion is that although these events are referred to as uprisings in textual discourse, iconic anchoring makes it structurally incongruous to apply the same visual motifs used in the early uprisings to the uprisings that occur after the term’s shift in meaning.