Cinematic Images and Hermeneutic Imagination from Peirce’s Semiotic-pragmatic Perspective: Multisemiosis of Cinematic Experience

Lee, Yunhee (2024) “Cinematic Images and Hermeneutic Imagination from Peirce’s Semiotic-pragmatic Perspective: Multisemiosis of Cinematic Experience”

https://doi.org/10.21299/jovc.2024.45.8

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ABSTRACT

This paper aims to inquire into cinematic images from Peirce’s semiotic- pragmatic perspective by way of Rancière’s theory of images and Deleuze’s theory of cinematic images. Thus, I look at cinematic images through the lens of a telescope and a microscope in relation to Rancière’s relation of images and Deleuze’s ‘thinking-image’. From a macroscopic viewpoint, cinematic images are investigated in relation to their object by way of icon-index-symbol so as to discover meaning in cinema. From a microscopic viewpoint, qualities of cinematic images are explored by way of relation of image-diagram-metaphor with respect to their material and phenomenological aspects. Consequently, based on the two viewpoints, Ranciere’s relation of images coupled with ‘discursive production’ is connected with the function of interpreting agent and Deleuze’s thinking-image is explained in terms of Peirce’s diagrammatic reasoning. I thus argue that these viewpoints in reading cinematic images form the multisemiosic experience of cinema which is characterized by a concept of ‘play’. The significance of this study lies in demonstrating that multisemiosis of cinematic experience, through which three dimensions of perception, conception, and meaning are interconnected, is a precondition for iconic communication. Further, this study is meaningful in showing that multisemiosis has educational implications through reading and writing of cinematic images as diagram-icon based on hermeneutic imagination.