Jakobson and Visuality

Abstract

Roman Jakobson’s works on visual semiotics are characterized by a complex variability of method. The problems of visuality cannot be explored in a purely structuralist way, so Jakobson operates sometimes as a “formalist”, attentive to the conflictual interactions of forces in the work of art, and sometimes as a spontaneous phenomenologist,researching man’s perception of his own body and its projection onto external images. The constant element in these works is their dynamic approach to visual images, and that is not a diachronic dynamic of evolution but a static dynamic of the conflict and tension of forces which shape an esthetical object.