Visual Semiotics and Real Events

Inna Semetsky

doi:10.1163/23644583-00401006

Abstract

This article adopts a semiotic (and edusemiotic) perspective that abolishes all binary divisions in favour of the process of semiosis that ensures a continuous translation of signs into other signs via the dynamic relations formed by the human mind, cultural artefacts, and events in real life. The mind, in edusemiotics, partakes of unconscious ideas in the form of mental images. As for culture, the field of communication phenomena calls for, according to Yuri Lotman, the identification of specific semiotic systems representing their ‘languages’, including non-verbal signs such as images, pictures, and other art forms that function as cultural texts. The methodology of bricolage (conceptualized in educational research by Joe Kincheloe) combines hermeneutics with narratology, and ‘reading’ images becomes imperative for advancing critical pedagogy. The article examines and interprets selected images, including those belonging to the low end of popular culture, and connects them with the exemplarily significant event at the level of socio-cultural reality.The paradoxical self-referential ‘logic’ is the prerogative of semiotic reason that constantly reflects on – thus bringing to cognition and transforming – our often unconscious assumptions, beliefs and habits thus contributing to the construction of subjectivity that uses critical reason informed by signs, which include the bricolage of images.

Highlights

Does art imitate life? Or is it life that imitates art? What is the ‘right’ philosophical position: mimesis articulated by Aristotle in his Poetics or its direct opposite, anti-mimesis, famously advocated by Oscar Wilde in his essay The Decay of Lying and compared with the ‘imitative instinct’ of life itself? For Wilde, life – and the whole of nature – strives for self-expression, while art, rather than representing reality, betrays it
Edusemiotics adopts a dynamic, or process, philosophy that intends to come to intellectual terms with the world’s empirical realities by deriving a framework of conceptions and ideas to integrate the products of modern inquiry into a coherent framework of thought linked to a metaphysical tradition reaching from Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle, in antiquity, to Leibniz, at the dawn of the modern age
Bricolage combines hermeneutics with narratology and phenomenology, and reading images becomes imperative for advancing critical pedagogy and creating meaningful learning experiences, even if bricolage originally referred to a savage, primitive way of thinking

Summary

Introduction

Does art imitate life? Or is it life that imitates art? What is the ‘right’ philosophical position: mimesis articulated by Aristotle in his Poetics or its direct opposite, anti-mimesis, famously advocated by Oscar Wilde in his essay The Decay of Lying and compared with the ‘imitative instinct’ of life itself? For Wilde, life – and the whole of nature – strives for self-expression, while art, rather than representing reality, betrays it. 199) with the expressionism of an artist being inseparable from the constructionism of a craftsman Such a tri-relative logic of signs, which problematizes the truefalse dichotomy but necessarily includes interpretants (human and nonhuman), becomes an answer to the persistent problematic of explaining the relation between the self, ‘the social’ The bricolage of images expresses itself in the extra-linguistic mode, and while it is linguistic competence that duly constructs meanings, the concept of language in edusemiotics is broad: language is the only thing that can properly be said to have structure, be it an esoteric or even non-verbal language. Even things possess a structure only in so far as they maintain a silent discourse, which is the language of signs

Visual Communication

PHOTO COURTESY OF FEMA

Cultural Pedagogy