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MEDIA STUDIES 121

The televisual sign is a complex one. It is itself constituted by the combination
of two types of discourse, visual and aural. Moreover, it is an iconic sign, in
Peirce’s terminology, because ‘it possesses some of the properties of the thing
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represented’. This is a point which has led to a great deal of confusion and has
provided the site of intense controversy in the study of visual language. Since the
visual discourse translates a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional
planes, it cannot, of course, be the referent or concept it signifies. The dog in the
film can bark but it cannot bite! Reality exists outside language, but it is
constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say
has to be produced in and through discourse. Discursive ‘knowledge’ is the
product not of the transparent representation of the ‘real’ in language but of the
articulation of language on real relations and conditions. Thus there is no
intelligible discourse without the operation of a code. Iconic signs are therefore
coded signs too—even if the codes here work differently from those of other
signs. There is no degree zero in language. Naturalism and ‘realism’— the
apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or concept represented—is the
result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the ‘real’. It is
the result of a discursive practice.
Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language
community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to
be constructed—the effect of an articulation between sign and referent—but to
be ‘naturally’ given. Simple visual signs appear to have achieved a ‘near-
universality’ in this sense: though evidence remains that even apparently
‘natural’ visual codes are culture-specific. However, this does not mean that no
codes have intervened; rather, that the codes have been profoundly naturalized.
The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and ‘naturalness’
of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes
in use. They produce apparently ‘natural’ recognitions. This has the (ideological)
effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present. But we must not be
fooled by appearances. Actually, what naturalized codes demonstrate is the
degree of habituation produced when there is a fundamental alignment and
reciprocity—an achieved equivalence— between the encoding and decoding
sides of an exchange of meanings. The functioning of the codes on the decoding
side will frequently assume the status of naturalized perceptions. This leads us to
think that the visual sign for ‘cow’ actually is (rather than represents) the animal,
cow. But if we think of the visual representation of a cow in a manual on animal
husbandry—and, even more, of the linguistic sign ‘cow’—we can see that both,
in different degrees, are arbitrary with respect to the concept of the animal they
represent. The articulation of an arbitrary sign— whether visual or verbal—with
the concept of a referent is the product not of nature but of convention, and the
conventionalism of discourses requires the intervention, the support, of codes.
Thus Eco has argued that iconic signs ‘look like objects in the real world because
they reproduce the conditions (that is, the codes) of perception in the viewer’. 5
These ‘conditions of perception’ are, however, the result of a highly coded, even