The rhetoric of love and self-narrativesin the cinema image: A Peircean approach

1 A prospect for semiotics in the twenty-first century

Current semiotics tends to focus on the role of interpreter, particularly the process of interpretation. Cognitive semiotics deals with this matter quasi-objectively, focusing on how the mind works in relation to matter. Interpretation is thus a mental activity, ranging from perception to conception. Ketner argued that Peirce’s concept of interpretation was to be understood through the concept of “choice” in Sartre’s existentialism, expressed as “We are condemned to interpret” (Ketner 1995: 294). Just as we can have a good guess instead of a bad guess, we are able to have a good interpretation over a bad interpretation. This is the point where we depend upon logic for clear thinking. In sum, interpretative activity entails a cognitive approach.

The Peircean semiotic approach benefits us with objective idealism, so that cognitive processes, from passion to reason, are explained by way of sign actions, especially when dealing with visual perception: how a viewer perceives image through sensation, perception, thinking, conceptualization with reference to interpreter’s background, allowing collateral observation and experience for interpretation. For this reason, recent interest in visual semiotics, coupled with a cognitive approach, entails interpretive semiotics, stressing the logical interpretant in a triadic relation.

Let us now turn to environment. From the interpreter’s point of view, the interpreter him or herself is part of environment, influencing and being influenced through meaning-making activity. In this sense, biosemiotics with a Peircean approach provides the framework for the emerging interest in environmental humanities and semiotics. What we suggest is that environmental humanities or aesthetics applies where a process-relational approach is emphasized. For this reason, according to Adrian Ivakhiv (2013), not only anthropomorphic but also biomorphic and geomorphic are to be considered in making signs within an eco-ontological perspective.

Ivakhiv is an environmental humanist, focusing on eco-humanities and eco-culture based on Peircean semiotics. He regards cinema in terms of three ecologies: material, social, and perceptual, which correspond to the film-world: that is, geomorphic, biomorphic, and anthropomorphic. Then the viewer’s experience is acquired in three stages: spectacles, narrative, and signness (or exoreferentiality). In a similar vein, we will investigate cinema, highlighting the anthropomorphic film-world which is associated with a perceptual domain within the viewer’s experience signness or exoreferentiality. Thus, we will focus on the logical interpretant which, through symbolic mediation of love and the self as dealing with collateral experience, leads to self-interpretation and self-control. The paper reveals the process and relational approach, in order to analyze the cinema image, especially by virtue of the triadic relation of image, sign, interpreter.

2 Collateral experience

The idea of communication in Peirce’s semiotic perspective requires us to have a different view of the text – not semantically but rhetorically – focusing on how sign use affects the mind. The appropriate use of signs for communication is the main concern in Peirce’s third branch of semiotics. The purpose of communication is not transmission of information, content or message; rather, it is an idea which needs a proper interpretation to reach effective communication on common ground, a place where there will be no room for interpretation between two minds. In other words, two minds are fused, based on a common ground as the communication interpretant. ^[1]

Speculative rhetoric involves how the text is designed to connect one mind to another. As a result, it is a prerequisite that attention is given to indexical seeing, leading to iconic seeing. Such seeing is related to collateral observation and experience ^[2] as the conditions of communication. In this sense, speculative rhetoric entails a design providing collateral experience for the interpreter in general. To use signs for the communication of ideas, a text is considered as the embodied mind, inviting the interpreter to furnish her/himself with interpersonal, social, and textual knowledge so as to interpret the message. Thus, the interpreter responds to the text with indexical competence and is thus involved with inferring processes through iconic interpretation. In this way, collateral experience allows the interpreter to engage in interpreting activity to infer the meaning of the message, that is, the idea in the utterer’s mind.

By the same token, self-narratives which are understood as primordial narratives of the internal world expressed in the external world in a form of text suggest intercommunication between the two minds of self and other, leading to internal dialogue between the old self and the new self. ^[3] That is, concerning inquiries on the semiosis of the self or mind, ^[4] it is a prerequisite to examine a text as intertextual space of mind, mediating one mind with another mind, which is a key concern in any communication. ^[5] For this reason, we attempt to present the concept of love as communication media (EP 1: Ch. 25; cf. Luhmann 2014) connecting two minds in a process establishing personal identity. This process requires the provisional condition of collateral experience with iconic-indexical representation of narratives to facilitate a process of inference. In this respect, two minds as self-other are represented by three types of love: creative love, intimate love, and agapistic love. Among them, intimate love, represented in the form of the ‘I-and-You’ relation by way of the first-person perspective, constitutes a critical point inasmuch as the character representing the human person of the mind is observed, experienced, and evaluated with the ideas of synechism. ^[6]

In terms of communication, the process of self-narratives is two-fold: self and other acting in the external world based on contiguity, and the old and the new self acting on the internal world based on similarity. This external and, in turn, internal dialogue indicates that human beings are dialogic and communicative in nature, allowing one to discover or form a self by way of other: that is, one’s alter ego for the purpose of self-interpretation. In that sense, two minds perform a dialogue with exchange of position, spatio-temporally connected, producing a significant effect on themselves with self-love by which the old self is interpreted by the new self. According to Peirce, matter is a modification of the human mind whose idea is understood as objective idealism (de Waal 2013: 151). Consequently, we can build a hypothesis on personal identity from what I am doing and where I am. In this sense, narratives of the self have characteristics in three ways: the self is basically social and is represented in and through sign systems and, finally, it has a paradigmatic sign system like histories, sustaining consistency (cf. Gergen and Gergen 2001: 163).

Our argument is that love conceived as communication media mediating two minds for signs of possibility embeds a model of metaphor at the discourse. From here, symbol-using agents are situated in dialogic structure by virtue of symbolic mediation of the work of love, which would lead to collateral experience in the process of discovering self-identity. Thus, the rhetoric of love as communication media connecting one mind to another produces a two-fold dialogical relation between the self and other externally and between the different phases of ego internally. But two minds are fused in love intersubjectively, so that the love of signs itself represents the united and seamless mind of the self and other with the first-person perspective as a possibility.

Based on collateral experience with the rhetoric of love, narratives of the self operate by going through three stages: from “where I am” to “what I am” and “who I am.” Specifically, the self is positioned contextually, as in time and space, where the self’s action is represented to reveal the self’s identity as dispositional properties: that is, internal qualities of a person. The journey of discovering who I am relies on what I am, and in turn where I am, being temporally and spatially determined. In this paper, what is under discussion is the rhetorical view of love in the task of knowing the self from the internal world and, at the same time, the self through the external world of the other. Specifically, we will look into the function of an intimate relationship between two minds as a form of passionate love for the other, that is, a metaphor of the alter ego.

A work of art putatively represents the creator’s feelings, emotions, and thoughts. Therefore, a work of art allows someone to gain experience in a particular way by virtue of collateral observation and experience in three phases. The first phase is an ontological phase of the self which is confined by time and space with a blurred demarcation between the self and other. It is the second phase through which one can have an intimate first-hand experience, eliciting emotional feelings and thus leading to purpose-driven imagination. The third is the logical phase of the self by which self-formation occurs. The three phases establish a continuum on the path to love, comprising objective love of a thing as a condition, intimate love of friendship which is embodied, and self-love as self-controlled behavior to see oneself as another. We will investigate a narrative process of self-formation employing the three phases of love, illustrating these points from the film The Great Beauty (2013) and basing our analysis on Peirce’s semiotic perspective on the self and love: love as feeling-ideas, love as action, and love as a law.

3 Signs as a medium of communication

Vygotsky’s developmental psychology shows how mediated activity is used for a child’s cultural development, such as a medium of sign and tool. He distinguished two types of medium: sign-mediated activity is oriented internally, whereas tool-mediated activity is oriented externally. In this respect, he calls signs a psychological tool for internalization. According to Vygotsky, a process of internalization illustrates a series of transformations: firstly, a transformation from external activity to internal sign-using activity; secondly, from interpersonal (between people) to intrapersonal (inside the child), that is, from a social level to an individual level, and thirdly, the transformation that is historically developed (Vygotsky 1978: 56–57).

This illustration of sign-using mediated activity as a psychological tool offers some insightful ideas regarding those self-narratives employing a method of love ^[7] in sign systems representing relationships between human individuals. Thus, love as a medium for communication functions from a social to an individual level, discovering the self by internalizing external activity. In this sense, although a text is represented by an utterer without a specific audience in mind, the text as sign system for communication is designed to appeal to the interpreting mind. Thus, communication is not characterized by linear transmission but rather by mediation between individual persons at a social level and then between the selves on an individual level by means of interpreting activity.

In terms of communication, Bergman (2009) remarks that Peirce’s study of signs was not aimed at representation, where the sign-and-object relation is dominant; rather, it was more concerned with mediation, focusing on the relation between interpretant and object. This idea indicates that mediation between two interpreting minds is an essential condition for communicating ideas of the Dynamical Object which is discovered in a given sign system, derived from experiential knowledge. Thus, communication media as signs is not a vehicle for carrying information but requires interpreting minds for explanation and evaluation of ideas represented in a medium of communication.

We are now ready to focus on signs as a medium for interpreting activity leading to internalization. In so doing, we will take as an example to illustrate these points communication as mediation by means of a specific sign system of love. We will see how the concept of love as communication media is represented in a film. By analyzing some relevant parts, we will see how the inner world of the self as an instance of semiosis is formed through three levels of love and self. While the movie depicts an inner world odyssey in quest of ‘the great beauty’ with just one simple question, “Why am I not writing?,” self-interpretation is attained in the end through a resolution of the initial question, saying “I will write (a novel).”

The internal journey to the self is completed by finding out what ‘I’ can do now by knowing myself as an effect of the act of loving “you.” Self-interpretation comes by way of mediation between two seemingly conflicting forces, such as sacred and secular images, love and loss, art and life, spirit and body. In the following sections, we will discuss some points on narratives of the self with reference to the movie.

4 Anthropomorphic not anthropocentric:The first-person perspective

Now that we are concerned with narratives of the self in terms of love as communication media, it is necessary to deal with the way we think of ourselves in relation to a feeling of love. This means, as we have seen above, that the self as a species of mind is a sign itself; as a result, we are compelled to interpret the self in connection with love. In this sense, the concept of love representing the different stages of self reveals the character of the self.

We suppose that there is a feeling in us, making us think of ourselves as an organism who feels that way about who we are as personal identity. Especially, when we meet somebody who uses our language or provides us with instant and familiar connections and so on, feelings come instantly and spontaneously. This gives us a feeling of the extension of ourselves based on similarity. This emotional state of the mind comes from unified feelings with an object and others. It is a feeling of being equivalent with somebody with a sympathetic mind through the feeling-ideas “I think, therefore I am” in a Cartesian sense. Love as a law of attraction tends to unify with the other externally. This is a process of externalization of the self by means of the language of love.

We now express the form “I am falling in love.” With this expression of linguistic structure with the small but significant meaning of “I” as index, “I” am positioned in the narrative world, indicating “I” as a representation of my ego. Moreover, as a subject of activity, “I” am telling my drama, for instance, “I am falling in love with Rome.” At this point, I draw my attention to the relation of fact and appearance (CP 5.233). According to Peirce, there is no demarcation between dream and reality, with the remark that a dream is also real to see the effect on your body as a trace. What makes a dream different, though, is that reality is more evidential which is related to fact, while dream is experiential, which is related to appearance. Using this as an analogy to the self and linguistic expression “I,” in connection with the self as a dream state, “I” experience the self as organism, substance, individual, and mind (see Colapietro 1989: 87) as I express myself using a language as a fact. In this sense, both are incorporated in the process of self-formation, as waking and dreaming are not separated.

The self as organism to be expressed externally is transformed into an internal reconstruction, as we have seen above. Thus, the semiotic device with the first-person perspective is a prerequisite for interpreting activity with respect to a text. In this sense, to objectify the self is to identify with a hero (protagonist) as character. Then one’s experience is expressed by way of a protagonist in a text with an empathy with the hero. ^[8]

Seen from the first-person perspective, this does not mean that I see the world in a self-centered fashion or, more specifically, with an anthropocentric perspective; rather, following Peirce’s objective idealism, matter is regarded as a modification of the human mind; thus, a text as a representation of mind is a space of multi-voices and also love represents humans with the character of feelings, action, and reason. In this regard, in the form “I am falling in love with something and somebody,” the self is characterized by the innovative self with creative love in that the self constitutes sensation and feelings through corporeal consciousness. This leads to perceptual judgement which forms a hypothesis based on collateral observation and experience. In this case, the self is a more passive state of the mind, with a tendency to be unified with the loved object.

The innovative self ^[9] is formed at this stage by creative love in that the self is preoccupied with the quality of object based on similarity which is attractive to the self without any particular reason. This state can be explained as creative love for feeling-ideas (Murphey 1993), so that reason as a form of love gives birth to a sensibility that is operative through feelings combined with a form of intelligibility by way of metaphor. This is considered as the rudimentary stage of the mind (see Colapietro 1989: 110).

Let us illustrate this stage of love and the self from a movie. The movie, The Great Beauty, starts with contrasting images between the secular and the sacred, depicting the Catholic Church with Gregorian styles of music in contrast with tourists followed by secular music in a club. A hero, characterized as a socialite with whom we will identify as a semiotic device for the first-person perspective, appears in the secular music background dancing; he is a 65-year-old one-time novelist with passion, sensibility, and a sarcastic or skeptical tone towards life. What is the problem with him, preventing him from writing a novel since his first book? The movie is an internal journey of the writer, whose name is Jep Gambardella, directed by Paolo Sorrentino in 2013.

As we described, interpreting activity is focused on the movie text, especially identifying Jep with oneself, so that the director’s mind and the audience’s mind are to be mingled, since the text is regarded as the representation of mind, which will lead to mediation of the two minds as a medium of communication. To interpret the meaning of Dynamical Object, which we can find only through collateral experience, there will be a series of transformations such as incorporation with one’s experiential knowledge in order to mediate the interpreter’s mind with that of the director.

There is an image of Jep strolling in the city of Rome, through an observational look; verbal expression about the character as a man of sensibility; two images of art performances observed by the hero: one is a naked woman’s performance, running and hitting a stone wall in the open square, and the other shows a young girl who appears to be a genius in splash painting, although she actually did it out of anger but it then became a work of art. Both performances are not regarded as good art through the eyes of Jep; there can be no explanation of what they really feel about it, lacking love or passion for it. Therefore, there is no intelligible sensibility. This seems to show amalgams of emotional states, that is, chaotic emotional swings, as it were. The hero seems to be disappointed in the performances. Put together, these images display the character of the hero as the innovative self, which acts against and challenges convention and habits of thinking in art and life, cherishing a new idea with sensibility that he was born with. More interestingly, he has a desire for something and is seeking for something in depth without knowing what it is.

5 Dialogue as intercommunication

In the text representation as intertextuality implying struggles with other voices, the dialogic situation is a culminating point where we can observe and experience the two minds as ego and alter ego, or the mind of the director and that of the audience, or dialogues within ourselves. This dialogic structure is designed with a rhetorical approach to signs facilitating mediation between contrasting images. This allows the audience to interpret narrative, explaining the motives for the desires of the hero with analogy to the mind. For this to happen, an intimate, close, direct relationship is required in a form of love as friendship. This is a type of love connected with the other mind in a close relationship physically and mentally, resulting in living the experience of others through intercommunication based on contiguity. Dialogue between self and other as external activity transforms to inner activity of the innovative self and the critical self, defined as habits of a person to resist the innovative self for reconstruction of the self as the remediated self.

The second stage of self is thus described as the critical self, which is developed socially and historically as tradition or convention in the form of a cultural code. This is expressed as “I love you,” which leads to cause and effect of a dyadic relation. Often, this love ends with self-love as an effect of the action following “I love you” as my alter ego in you. This is two-sided consciousness. Thus, an intimate love shows a relationship between the internal and the external self. In this sense, as Peirce describes, volition or will does not belong to us as psychological elements but is a mechanical reaction to sensation (EP 2: 268). This phenomenon is represented in an intimate relationship with the other. Consequently, the critical self serves to form volitional judgement developed from perceptual judgement made by the innovative self with creativity.

The rhetorical approach to dialogic images appears in The Great Beauty through intimate relationships between the hero and others close to him mentally and physically, producing contrasting feelings and actions, leading to self-consciousness, recognizing the self as ignorance and error. ^[10] According to Colapietro, this is called an intermediary stage of the mind (1989: 111).

We can observe intimate relationships from the movie in a form of haecceity (thisness) to see how the two selves conflict and struggle. Firstly, Jep’s critical self is responding to a stripper with an attempt to have a true relationship by virtue of a dialogue with her and he sees in her the aspect of sacredness and truthfulness to life. Secondly, Jep’s relationship with a female dwarf magazine editor shows that the critical self is responding to corporeal consciousness as spiritual consciousness connected to his old self. Thirdly, his old self emerges through a woman who was his long-time admirer, and he reacts to the woman with a distant attitude. Thus, his critical self appears to deny the past in a corporeal sense. Alternately, his reaction to her can be interpreted in the way that his present self is not really connected with the old self. She is the one who still remembers, reciting one of the verses from his novel, which reminds him of the time in his twenties when he wrote the novel with a feeling of love, implying that she was his first love. The story of his first love will occur again through an intimate relationship with the stripper.

6 Self-interpretation as self-controlled activity

The third stage of love and self has a feature of inference based on regularity and pattern. The role of agapistic love in this stage is a generalizing process (CP 6.289). The self as a person in Thirdness is characterized as consistency derived from self-controlled action following a law. By narrating activity of the intermediary mind mediating the innovative self with the critical self, the narrative self is expressing (representing) the mind, which is called the expressive self, generalizing one’s feeling in continuation with other feelings to form a mingled mind based on common ground.

In the third stage, the rational mind of the expressive self discovers where a desire comes from and understands what motives of behaviors are for self-interpretation, thus finally attaining personal identity in community. This agapistic love is not for external activity or internal activity, but for self-controlled activity. For instance, the agapistic love is expressed as “I love IT (Community).” The object of love is not your close friend but community, which is regarded as embodied mind as generals, or superaddressee in Bakhtin’s terms (Bakhtin 1986:103–131; Erdinast-Vulcan 2013: 46). The effects of love on community are understood as concrete reasonableness. Thus, the highest level of mind is in self-control through the expressive self, which is associated with logical judgement on life’s events between the possible and the established, the inner and the outer, finitude and freedom. These conflicts enable one to establish a dialectic of narratives of self-formation (Bruner 2002: 13–14).

Let us illustrate these points with some scenes in the movie. Now, as the movie goes toward the end, the internal journey of the hero’s mind seems to be finished, yet the end becomes a new start of a journey for writing a novel on everyday experience through his way of loving the world and people. To reach this state of mind, the expressive self represents the relationship between the innovative self and the critical self.

We will examine some points from the movie in terms of mediation as interpretation of the self. Firstly, images of the respectful Mother Maria with Stoic attitudes and a priest who shows interest in secular matters such as cooking suggest that there are two aspects in life, the spiritual and the corporeal. As for the Mother, she was another admirer of Jep, and she was found sleeping on Jep’s bedroom floor and she told him the way to live through a “root” metaphor. This connection seems to suggest that corporeal experience is united with spiritual connection; they are not separate. Additionally, there are images of life as practical living to teach how to live. Firstly, Jep’s two friends show the way of living as it is: one is leaving Rome to head home, leaving behind his life as an actor and a play writer, seeking a truth in his own way, while the other friend, still a magician, working for a living, deceiving spectators with some tricks, is feeding their pleasure. Secondly, a young man with unstable identity, living according to books, chooses death instead of life, which brought Jep to tears when he lifted the young man’s coffin. The young man’s way of life demonstrates the relation between reality and fiction. Thirdly, an image of another young man, who displays thousands of pictures of his self-portrait from childhood to the present on the wall, implies the matter of consistency which constitutes personal identity. Lastly, there is an image of a man who is living in the past, surrounded by and among the artwork in a museum.

These collective images are generals in terms of the ideas of community. In this regard, narrative explanation and judgement will allow us to transform from the narrative self to the moral self, insisting on what I am doing here, rather than who I am. The hero finally decided to write a novel after 40 years on an inner journey by self-interpretation. At last, he restores his old self as a novelist for his personal identity, which has remained as a possibility for a long time, while seeking for an objective view of beauty.

Concerning the matter of reconciliation between abstract, pure, untouchable beauty and concrete, embodied, experienced beauty, this does not involve a tradition or abstract or metaphysical quality of beauty but is found in embodied living persons and community in the way in which it appears, so that it is to be attained by virtue of a sensible heart’s judgement which comes from love.

7 Conclusion: From narrative self to moral self

Self-control presupposes a tension between finitude and freedom, that is, inward control and outward expression. Sign-mediated activity is the medium of communication between the inner mind and the outer mind as in a relation of self and other with a requirement for choice as existential demand by way of logical interpretant. Transformation from a narrative self to a moral self has a significant effect on the human mind to develop habit formation in practical living as wisdom. The moral self is associated with interpreting activity in narrative evaluation and judgement through a hero as a living person.

The narrative self in a storyworld with the first-person perspective shares attention with the story-maker by way of a hero, an embodied human mind. Through the hero, the two minds are positioned in a dialogic situation such as hero and antihero. In this sense, the hero endowed with characters functions as index which has reference as a subject of a story to proceed, yet the hero might have two different references representing utterer’s mind and interpreter’s mind. However, the two minds share other features of the hero: firstly, the hero’s feelings and states; secondly, the hero’s action and reaction; thirdly, the hero’s interpretation and evaluation.

Based on the function of the hero within the three categories of love as feeling, action, and generals of agapistic love, the audience is modelled by narrative self in each of the three stages and, particularly, the audience is positioned as an analogical structure with the hero as protagonist. This means that, of the three stages of narratives of self, in the third stage, the expressive self, the audience is allowed to evaluate the hero’s self-evaluation analogically.

By doing so, interpreting activity can transform narrative self to moral self, where habits of change can happen or changes of perception between the old and the new will be possible. This moral self is shown in the movie through the hero, Jep as protagonist, inevitably leading to a habit of change to decide to write again. Therefore, the great beauty the hero is seeking for is not in a pure and abstract object as objective matter but resides in the human person who is spiritual and material at the same time. Thus, love as communication media for examining self-narratives reconciles imagination and reason; each separately indicates emotion and feelings and thought and reason. From the perspective of synechism which is defined as a tendency of the establishment of parts (EP 2: 1–3), “The great beauty” can be found in Peirce’s ideas of summum bonum as the highest ideal, where the expressive self with self-regulation by norm and ideals pays voluntary servitude to the ideals which are associated with the growth of concrete reasonableness of community. ^[11]