Abstract
The publication of Wolfgang Wildgen’s Morphogenesis of Symbolic Forms: Meaning in Music, Art, Religion and Language is an opportune moment to reflect on the author’s extensive contributions to a dynamic semiotics, founded on catastrophe theory. Bringing together a number of investigations on a number of Cassirer-like “symbolic forms” like music, visual art, myth/religion and language, Wildgen provides an overarching system to weigh the semiotic resources of each of these bodies of knowledge as they contribute to the semiogenesis of the species. By comparing sensorial capacities, Wildgen helps us understand how and when a symbolic form can grow at all. Chapters devoted to each form explore their unique way of organizing knowledge. Using catastrophe primitives, Wildgen both bonds symbolic forms together while at the same time preserving Cassirer’s Enlightenment interest in evolution and the way in which new semiotic capacities grow and others can be discarded. The review ends with a consideration of the humanist’s misunderstanding of mathematical and natural science insights like Wildgen’s and explains how its rich results are to be utilized.
About the author
Ian Verstegen is Associate Director of Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained in art history, he researches early modern and modern art history, theory and historiography. In his theoretical work, he works with Gestalt theory and has been exploring the semiotic resources available to a Gestalt framework, through dynamic semiotics and phenomenology. He is the author most recently of Arnheim, Gestalt and Media: An Ontological Theory (2019) and The New Vienna School of Art History: Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism (2023).
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