"If we conceptualize badly, we politicize badly" and emptying the concept of "freedom" in visual translations

Abstract

We observe postmodernity dealing with concepts as adversaries to be stripped of contours in pursuit of an ideal of fluidity – the result of this abstraction is vagueness. However, conceptualization finds roots in Peircean pragmatism; that is, in the applicability of ideas to reality. Emptying fundamental concepts in favor of scattered subjectivities complicates communication, which tends to increase depoliticization. Here, we bring the quote from philosopher Celia Amorós that composes the title. We acknowledge that conceptualizing is an important reference for understanding. It's a way to comprehend our environment, and denying it only increases suffering in the process of understanding ourselves in the world. Learning to give contours to terms and continued ideas is also recognizing oneself in language, making possible the sharing of sign systems, something essential for communication to occur; after all, individuals' repertoires must intersect to enable dialogue (Torres, 2006, p. 105). Based on the assumption that this emptying is reflected in visual communication, influencing our repertoire and consequently how we propagate ideas, we turn our attention to images that seek to represent a polysemic, familiar concept subjected to many twists: freedom, around rhetorical patterns, using keyword research on image search platforms. We begin the article addressing the function of concepts as a counterpoint to the ideal of vagueness and, especially, their importance in communication and design, marking one of the initial points of the creative process. We explore some of the senses that the term "freedom" carries: etymologically, in philosophy, politics, sociology. Next, we move to the collection of graphic images, book covers, and iconographies. Finally, we verbalize what each image tends to portray in order to classify them and compare them with the information gathered about the concept of "freedom," organizing the results in tables of rhetorical patterns. Through this screening and subsequent comparison of results, pairing them with some of the senses identified, we indicate how the emptying of the concept can be reflected in its visual translations, influencing our critical capacity, and how Peirce's pragmatic maxim can assist us in the production and interpretation of symbolic visual signs; that is, in the signification of concepts, the object of pragmatic analysis. We compare some senses of freedom and their intersemiotic translation to evaluate the semantic openness that tends to be incorporated. In a deeper sense, we seek to perceive in the subtleties of repetitions the tendencies of emptying and tensioning of language and address crucial conceptual points in an unconcerned and uncritical manner, complicating the development around certain terms and ideas.