Symbolic action

Symbolic action names the process through which knowledge becomes visible as an image by being enacted in bodily movement. In a schematic drawing, the lines alone may be little more than a sparse support; eye movements interpret and organize them, and their projected directions let a figure emerge. Knowledge and movement are not separate stages in which a thought first directs the body and is then represented. They are one activity: knowledge becomes conscious of itself in the form of an image.

Definition and Method

The account begins from a distinction between describing an image and explaining its presumed inner nature. Reflection can identify the consciousness as imaging and describe how its object is given; claims about underlying mechanisms, by contrast, are hypotheses and therefore less certain. This descriptive approach matters for symbolic action because it keeps attention on what happens in the act of seeing: how a viewer’s movements and knowledge organize visible marks into a figure.

A schematic drawing makes that organization especially clear. Its lines need not depict all the qualities attributed to the imagined object. Knowledge can gather those qualities around a rudimentary figure, giving it a depth and fullness that the marks do not contain by themselves. The representational work is carried by symbolic action: knowledge is enacted in movement, and movement gives the sparse visible material an interpretable form.

How a Schematic Figure Takes Shape

A set of simple marks can first appear as unrelated geometrical features: three segments meeting at point O, a separate point below and slightly to the right, and a small sinuous line. In that reading, the white sheet provides an even ground. The segments can organize as a fork, while the point and curved line remain apart from them. The marks have not changed, but their grouping and significance can.

When the same configuration is read as a face, the oblique segment becomes a forehead contour, the right-hand segment an eyebrow, and the descending segment the nose; the isolated point becomes an eye, and the sinuous line suggests mouth and chin. The shift involves more than assigning names to lines. The viewer’s eyes trace them in determinate ways, and the body supplies an attitude that animates the arrangement. The white space to the right is taken as the volume bounded by the supposed face, while the space to the left recedes as ground. To join the separated marks, the gaze moves from N toward D, enacting the absent connection. Retaining the starting point while arriving at the second allows the two parts to be synthesized as one figure.

These descriptions can vary with a reader’s knowledge, so not everyone will interpret every schematic form alike. The argument is not that each viewer discovers an identical picture in identical marks. Rather, across such differences, the same kind of process can be identified: knowledge takes the form of a symbolic mime, and that mime is projected onto the object. What is represented is not simply the line as a physical stroke, but the movement through which the line is read as part of a figure.

Movement, Perception, and the Image

Ordinary perception provides a contrast. When a viewer follows the contour of a solid object or the lips in a portrait by René Descartes, the route taken by the eyes can vary without altering the perceived object. The eye may move in one direction or another; those movements are experienced as possible pathways around an object that remains there as an unaltered whole. Perceptual attention generally distinguishes the form from the movement used to inspect it.

Some perceptual forms, however, constrain movement. In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the closed angles at A' and B' impede the eyes, while the open angles at A and B permit movement to continue. The opposed movements are attributed to the drawn segments: the open-ended segments seem to extend, while the others seem to gather in. Here the movements become perceived properties of the lines, and the result remains an object of perception, not an image. The figure’s structure or habitual associations help impose the movements; they are not simply experienced as spontaneous bodily activity.

Schematic images work differently. They do not themselves prescribe a necessary route for the eyes. Knowledge prompts movements that test what the marks might yield; those movements are then projected onto the lines as hypothetical directions. If an image crystallizes, a figure appears in the marks, but the viewer remains aware that the directions have been freely enacted and that the image is being produced. Thus the same sparse line can support different senses, and a single movement can help realize different aspects of knowledge. The line serves as a substrate; the symbolic movement supplies its representative force.

Knowledge as Enacted Mime

Symbolic action is not a sequence in which an independent body obeys an independent stock of knowledge. The distinction between the two dissolves in the act itself. Just as a person may discover a thought by saying it, knowledge here discovers itself through acting: it becomes conscious in the form of a mime. The image is therefore a degraded consciousness of knowledge, not a container holding a miniature copy of an object.

This account also distinguishes the image from a sign. A perceived object can acquire a direction or force and serve as a sign, as in the pointing quality of arrows, without thereby becoming an image. In schematic imagery, by contrast, the viewer knows that the movements have been projected as imaged properties and participates in sustaining the figure. Symbolic action describes that specific mode of representation, in which movement is not merely a cause of looking but part of what the image presents.

Broader Implications

The analysis of schematic figures belongs to a wider account of how consciousness organizes what it encounters. Work associated with Wolfgang Köhler and other Gestalt psychologists is invoked as a way to investigate the persistence of formal structures across changes in position. Such structures may help explain why perception can give more than the immediately visible sensory detail, without treating an image as an extra object inserted into perception. The distinction remains important: implicit intentions can enrich the perceived object, while imaging consciousness presents an object through a different act.

The account of art extends the distinction between material support and represented object. In a painting, canvas, paint, grain, and varnish are real; the aesthetic object grasped through them is not simply another real thing on the surface. The painter arranges material marks and tones so that an irreal whole can appear to a viewer who adopts an imaging attitude. A red may give real sensual pleasure, yet its aesthetic significance depends on its place in the represented whole, such as the red of a rug set against a wall. The canvas is a material analogon through which the image is apprehended, not a conversion of the imaginary into a real object.

A comparable relation appears in performance and fiction: verbal forms can present imagined objects, while an actor’s body and gestures serve as an analogon for Hamlet. The performer can be fully mobilized in producing the character without positing that the character is real; even actual tears are apprehended as Hamlet’s tears within the performance. These cases broaden the relevance of symbolic action’s central insight: representation depends on an activity that animates a material or bodily support, while keeping the represented object distinct from that support. The image is neither a hidden miniature nor a mere physical mark; it takes shape through the consciousness that enacts it.