Henry:

I think yours is an apt point.  The notion of iconicity is problematic
because it treats diverse phenomena systematically; and we skip past the
uniqueness of things in the rush to subsume them under one system of
thought.  Seeing and hearing are diverse sensory tools, and learning
about them, and through them, demands that we attend to them
cautiously.  Facile analogies like the 'look' of sound and the 'noise'
of sight serve only to misuse the very works of art we are trying to
understand.  Of course, artists in one discipline learn from artists in
another--but not because their material concerns are comparable.
Rather, that the process of creating itself is a binding, and therefore
mutually supporting, force in all the arts.  Schoenberg may have thought
in terms of tone colours, but he never mistook this for more than a
simple way of describing his theory of composition (and as any musician
knows, it's nearly impossible to convey, in language, what one hears
through music; colour analogies are often used, but composers, unlike
many musicologists and philosophers, rarely take their analogies
literally).

Iconicity may be suffering the same fate that once befell Shannon's
information theory and Heisenberg's indeterminancy principle.  These two
highly theoretical ideas were developed to account for very specific
phenomena in very specific fields of study, but misapplication by
thinkers in other disciplines was so widespread that the original
impetus behind these ideas has been lost.  As a result, both information
theory and the notion of indeterminancy have become unwieldy systems of
thought, much like the grand historical narratives of Toynbee and
Spengler.  And systems are useless precisely because they are
explanatory, rather than learning, tools.  A professor of mine has put
it this way: systems of thought are like long shots in a film; they give
you a quick overview of the surroundings, but they teach you very
little.  A film made entirely of long shots will lack specificity.
Contrast this with the closeup; and as Kracauer has noted, we learn
about things by taking closeup views, which encourage us to scrutinize
and study.  How different, visually speaking, the worlds of Bergman's
films are from the worlds of Capra's--the former built out of closeups,
the latter out of long shots and medium shots.

-Anthony Banks
York University



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