Frances to Chris and others... Here is my tentative take on this topic of marks, for what it may be worth, therefore corrections are welcome. The ideas as usual for me are framed in pragmatist and semiotic thought.
Marks intrinsically refer to immediate semantic objects, and are mainly iconic subsigns called qualisign tones, such as for example lingual phones in the form of spoken oral sounds and written literal strokes, therefore they will not adequately nor appropriately reveal personal signers or individual styles or communal schools, because they are not sufficient nor efficient nor necessary at performing this subsequent task. If marks do go on energetically in intermediate acts of semiosis to causally reveal or expose such stuff it would subsequently or consequently be as indexic designators like signals or as indexic indicators like pointers or as indexic expressors like symptoms. Marks as with any object or any sign can of course go on to conventionally endure use as arbitrary mediate symbols, be it a symbolic abstractor like a mythic artifice or a symbolic singulor like a branded emblem or a symbolic ascriptor like a lingual mediator. If pure intrinsic marks are found or held or deemed mainly to further bear or yield or endure a referent signing other than as iconic subsigns, then they are no longer called marks, any more than words or terms or texts are continued to be called mere phones. The visible marks found in graphic pictorial depictions like drawn illustrations for example are nothing more than colored spots and blots and strokes and shapes. These marks are not the whole of pictures, nor should such marks be held in any way as settled or completed or finished works in their own right. Such formal and even aesthetic devices as drafted marks are not figures in grounds or contents in fields or themes in frames, but are at best the preliminary fundamental foundations of fully formed and framed icons or indexes or symbols. If graphic marks are held to be significant as autographic signatures and styles and schools in either private or public venues, or if selected portions of whole pictures are microscopically abstracted to enlarge their bare crude marks, then such graphic marks are no longer sensed as mainly static marks, but are rather interpreted as some other kind of dynamic sign. To impose upon subiconic referent marks more than they can reasonably bear as such marks, for say aesthetic or artistic purposes, is to burden them beyond being meaningful or useful in semiosis. In other words, there is simply no logical point in making more of marks than is semiotically warranted and justified.
