STREET SCHEMA (2)

By: Joshua Glenn
April 4, 2024

One in a miniseries of posts — within SCHEMATIZING — via which Josh Glenn will share photos of manhole covers, the diagrammatic design of which he sometimes finds useful to his thinking — in his role as a consulting semiotician — about how to diagram a “semiosphere.” (Here’s an example of Josh’s proprietary “G-schema”; it appeared in his 2021 book The Adventurer’s Glossary, from McGill-Queen’s University Press). Josh is grateful to Rob Walker’s Art of Noticing provocations.

My G-schema doesn’t have a center. I’m suspicious of circular schemas with centers, because they indicate there’s some singular “right answer” to which all roads eventually lead. When it comes to positioning strategy, however, you don’t want to be all things to all people — what that means is that you stand for nothing. As painful as it is, you need to “plant a flag” somewhere within the semiosphere — which means that some parts of the whole are off-limits.

The same is true when it comes to using the G-schema to diagram conflicting themes and forces within a movie, say. There is not magical point at which Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin, Luke Sykwalker and his Uncle Owen, will ever converge harmoniously. Some conflicts can’t be resolved via compromise.

However, I do see the value of “centered” circle schemas, for mapping — let’s say — the development and evolution of one thing into multiple things, which eventually come to seem quite different from one another… so it’s interesting to trace them all back to a single common origin.

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STREET SCHEMA (2)

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