Cultural Semiotics Research Articles

Cultural semiotics, translatability, and informational loss in visual texts of the biotech industry

The paper examines a specific advertising campaign of a biotech company characteristic of the whole biotech industry and discusses how the evocation of universal values, such as the protection and correct management of the planet’s resources, the struggle against poverty and against the shortage of raw materials, the support of farmers and their families, distorts information about nature, global agriculture and the biotech industry’s products. This distortion is a necessary and vital part of this industry’s existence. The rhetorical techniques of conscious informational repression and distortion, which are often discussed only in terms of informational loss, are expressly evident and even taken to their extremes in the case of biotechnology. Yet on the other hand they are characteristic of a translation process that takes place in the rhetoric of advertisement in general, as is evident in the use of Göran Sonesson’s translation model which we suggest is appropriate for the definition and study of advertising codes.

SEMANTICS OF THE DEPICTION OF DAUGAVPILS IN ANITA LIEPA’S DOCUMENTARY PROSE AND FICTION

<p>Anita Liepa (born 1928) is a contemporary Latvian prose writer whose creative work was closely related to the post-soviet period in Latvia in the late 20th – and the beginning of the 21st century. In her works she depicted significant evidence of complex and contradictory processes in the history of Latvia in the 20th century, especially those related to World War II and its consequences for Latvia. Her works are divided into two distinct groups: documentary prose and fiction. The writer was born in Daugavpils, a town on the south-eastern border of Latvia, that had a significant role in the history of Latvia, especially in relation to World War II, as the town, was the place of dislocation of the major cavalry corps regiment in Daugavpils fortress. A. Liepa’s uncle Anatolijs Sondors was the fortress commandant, who faced the entrance of the Red Army and along with other Latvian army officers was deported to the Far North of the Soviet Union and died there.</p><p>The present paper regards the depiction of the cultural space of Daugavpils in Liepa’s works, searching for parallels with the writer’s biography and views expressed in different media, that attribute specific connotations to the semantic of the topos of Daugavpils with border as its major dominant. The paper follows up the depiction of Daugavpils both in Liepa’s documentary prose (“Exhumation”, “Colt Years”, “Silenced Pages”) and fiction (“Windfall”). The paper is methodologically based on the notions of cultural geography, semiotics and feminist autobiography studies. It makes use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s term “topos” to denote a model of spatial construction. Border is singled out as the central element of the semantic of the topos of Daugavpils in Liepa’s works, focusing on its spatial, temporal aspects, as well as the depiction of culture environment.</p><p>The topos of Daugavpils is most precisely and extensively depicted in the memory novel “Colt Years” („Kumeļa gadi”). Though published in 1993, the novel had actually been completed before any other of Liepa’s documentary works; this may partially be the reason, why she made depictions of Daugavpils in her following works more laconic. However, the major difference is determined by the genre of her works. In documentary prose the topos of Daugavpils reveals the information about the epoch or what may be called “signs of the time”, activating the culture code (according to Roland Barthes’ division of codes into hermeneutic, semic, proairetic, symbolic, culture codes), yet also developing a bond with the depiction of action and manifestations of the narrator’s subjective emotional states and the system of values. In works of fiction, space is a poetic category closely related to other poetic elements of the text, foregrounding the hermeneutic, semic, proairetic and symbolic codes. Hence, in “Colt Years” the topos of Daugavpils depicts not only the historical and cultural realia and landmarks of the town in the period of the 1930–1940s, but also spatial opposites of two homes the homodiegetic narrator lived in (her deceased father’s house, where she spent the happiest time of her childhood, and her uncle’s hous, where she lived during her school years), accentuating the bond between space and the narrator’s psycho-symbolic reality (referring to the semic and symbolic codes). The link between the topos of Daugavpils and the plot in all documentary works regarded is implied by the locus of Daugavpils railway station as a point of departure or arrival of characters involved in central plot lines. Scenery seen through the train window is realistically described in detail, providing place names, geographical names, referring to earlier episodes of characters’ lives. Thus, the proairetic code is activated along with the culture and other codes. The hermeneutic code is activated in the novel “Windfall” in a very interesting way. On the one hand, the author realistically describes the town of Daugavpils referring to historical events of the time of Awakening there; on the other, the toponym “Daugavpils” is replaced by an imagined name “Rūdunava”. Thus, the analysis of the depiction of Daugavpils in A. Liepa’s works leads to conclusions about the close connection between the category of space and the genre.</p>

About Rhetorical “Gestures” of Estonian Culture

The paper focuses on the analysis of certain phrases of literary origin currently used in Estonian culture. The theoretical-methodological starting point is the paradigm of cultural semiotics. According to the theory the production, exchange, processing and retention of signs (resp information) is by its nature communication. In such communication socio-cultural (having an impact on social relations) and rhetorical (having an impact on the social and cultural discourse) aspects are distinguished. The phrases of literary or other origin (e.g. political texts) used in the language generally differ from the phraseologisms originating from the folklore and idioms in that they are not used for beautifying the language so to say (as a figure of speech) but to refer to the fundamental (meta-communicative) associations and act as passwords of collective identity. Therefore, they can be identified as rhetorical gestures. The article takes a closer look at phrases, which have become rhetorical gestures taken from the masterpieces of Estonian literary culture such as Henrik’s Livonian Chronicles, Fr. R. Kreutzwald’s epic Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s Son), poetry by Juhan Liiv, Kevade (Spring) by Oskar Luts, and Tõde ja õigus (Truth and Justice) by A. H. Tammsaare.

The Han of the Sinned-Against: A Global Sensus Fidei in the Pope Francis Era

The problem of the barbarous excess of human suffering is becoming the main question of global Christianity. This has been highlighted by Pope Francis—the first pontiff from the Global South—due to his sensitivity to the experiences of the women, men, and the ecological context that are “sinned-against.” With this in mind, an important question arises: in an intercultural, globalizing world, how does the global sensus fidei assist in envisioning the wounds of sin and God’s saving work of healing, liberation, and redemption? My essay addresses this question by engaging with the Korean anthropology of han (ruptured heart/frustrated hope/black hole in the soul) . I will argue that han is an anthropology with a constellation of signifiers “thick” enough to account for one aspect of the global sensus fidei : the shared experiences of unwarranted human suffering and ecological degradation that seek God’s salvation, albeit fragmentary, in this world. To do so, I discuss intercultural hermeneutics and the semiotics of culture, a constellation of some meanings associated with the Korean anthropology of han, and the terms sensus fidei and consensus fidelium as clarified by the recent document from the International Theological Commission. I suggest that han anthropology should be considered a global “flow” within the sensus fidei that can lead to a consensus fidelium : assessing and interpreting doctrine, faith, and practice based upon the experiences of the sinned-against.

Entre tecnicidades e ritualidades: formas contemporâneas de performatização da notícia na televisão

Com o objetivo de contribuir para o refinamento metodológico da análise de programas televisivos, o artigo propõe uma abordagem dos telejornais que leve em conta sua dimensão comunicacional, privilegiando a interpretação de suas formas materiais, culturais e simbólicas. Analisa as performances do repórter que virtualizam posições para o espectador, constituindo espaços de subjetividade que contrastam com o discurso normativo sobre as práticas do campo. O artigo sugere um caminho para a análise televisiva que leve em conta o diálogo entre os estudos culturais e a semiótica e, pela demonstração do trabalho empírico, identifica articulações possíveis entre marcas formais instituídas e novas formas de performatização da notícia no telejornal de rede brasileiro.

Former Soviet Cultural Semiotics in China

Abstract Since China adopted the reform and open-up policy in the late 1970s, cultural semiotics from the former Soviet Union has been introduced into China, and has exerted substantial influence on Chinese academia. This essay starts from the perspective of research discourse to review the influence of Soviet literary theories among Chinese scholars over the past half century, and to demonstrate the positive role played by Soviet cultural semiotics in the evolution process of the Chinese literary community from revolution through aesthetic discourse to dialogue and polyphony. The essay then proceeds to the discussion of the revolutionary shift in the critical mindset caused by the changes in research discourses, namely the shift from the scientific way of thinking, featuring scientific induction, to the artistic way of thinking, featuring pluralism and the co-existence of various elements. The last part of the essay provides an in-depth discussion of the Chinese adaptation of Soviet cultural semiotics, i.e. the rediscovery of the nature of cultural semiotics by Chinese semioticians.

The Tartu Summer School in Semiotics 2013

Abstract This article provides an overview of the 8th Tartu Semiotics Summer School (in the series of summer schools established in 1964 by Juri Lotman). The event took place at Kääriku, Estonia, August 18-23, 2013, and was dedicated to the publication of the collective manifesto (titled Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures) that in 1973 established the field of the semiotics of culture. The scientific focus of the discussions and presentations concerned, from a semiotic point of view, the processes of autocommunication

Journalism, social networks and global occupation movements: a systemic crisis in the contemporary semiosphere

his article ponders the tension created in journalism by the emergence of social networks in the processes of the social construction of reality. The focuses are the events kindled by the Indignados movement in Spain in 2012, during the “25S” protests, which called for a new constituent assembly. Waiter Alberto Casillas stole the scene by facing police truculence, and that had a great repercussion in the networks, attracting the attention of international journalism. There are two points of view which, when compared, lead to a possible synthesis about this moment of crisis: 1) the way journalism presents the events; 2) the possibilities and implications offered by the networks to the more ample dynamics of journalism. C. S. Peirce’s concept of semiosis is the basis of the reflective effort, along with a systemic view inspired by the Semiotics of Culture – especially as in Yuri Lotman. It is postulated that in the contemporary semiosphere, in which complex processes of semiosis set off by events from the chaotic reality are unfolded, journalism has to review its practices, under pain of losing the legitimacy it has acquired throughout history as a mediator of a certain kind of knowledge.

Semiotics and the Possibilities of Cultural Analysis

Abstract The article describes the role of the Tartu semiotics school in the formation of the new academic field called semiotics of culture, particularly in the context of writing the Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures in 1973. Special attention is paid to the typology of languages of culture, and to the concept of culture as an object for semiotics.

The Manifesto of Tartu-Moscow Semiotics since 1973

Abstract In 1973, a collectively written manifesto titled Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures was penned under the leadership of Tartu scholar Juri Lotman together with his Moscow colleagues Vjacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Aleksandr Pjatigorskij, and Boris Uspenskij. The appearance of this work marked the birth of a new scholarly field of research called the semiotics of culture. In the present contribution we provide a bibliographic list of republications and translations of this seminal text.

Remembering and reinventing Juri Lotman for the digital age

This article introduces a special issue that is dedicated to the renowned Russian-Estonian scholar of semiotics and cultural theory – Juri Lotman (1922–93). The aim of the issue is not only to re-introduce Lotman’s work and his approach – the semiotics of culture – for the international community of cultural studies’ scholars, but also to demonstrate its ‘explosive’ potential and its contemporary momentum – its applicability and unique analytic affordances for interpreting the most modern phenomena of global digital cultures. In this introductory article we discuss Lotman’s original contribution regarding his conceptualizations of the evolutionary dynamics of culture and how his work could be potentially advancing the contemporary cultural studies.

Dialogic control: Power in media evolution

This article discusses the phenomenon of power in the process of media evolution. It argues that Juri Lotman’s ‘semiotics of culture’ is not only useful for interpreting this complex process and the role societal power might have in this, but it might have a potential to innovate the mainstream of western media and cultural studies. The article demonstrates the way to apply Lotman’s framework to interpret the evolutionary dynamics of media and proposes how the textual dynamics of cultural change can be interpreted to contribute to the social dynamic – to the dynamics of social organisation and power relations among social agents. Lotman’s framework is put also into dialogue with the western path-breakers in de-ontologising societal power: Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann. The article puts a focus on Lotman’s core concepts such as auto-communication and dialogic communication, and demonstrates how these can be seen to facilitate the heterogeneity (divergence) of systems as well as their striving for homogeneity (convergence).

Don Quixote, intermediality and remix: Translational shifts in the semiotics of culture

In Yuri Lotman’s terms intertextual relationships as active dialogues among texts and cultures should be the starting point for an analysis of the concepts of intermediality, cross-mediality and transmediality. This article considers adaptations and remakes as intermedial processes and remix practices as transmedial ones. The article demonstrates how the processes of transposition, remake and remix may sometimes be only partial, or in other instances they may shift towards entirely different textual systems/levels. At metasemiotic levels, the strategies that build the narrative worlds may either conceal or emphasize the interdependent relations between source and target texts, as well as between their cultural semiotic systems and their emergent ‘metatexts’ of self-description. In the second half of the article brief semiotic analyses will be presented in order to investigate mechanisms of the intermedial and transmedial networks that start from a literary text, Don Quixote by Cervantes, and continue to cinema and new digital media.

Transmediality of cultural autocommunication

In his studies of culture, Juri Lotman implicitly expressed several ideas that have been rendered explicit by the contemporary mediasphere. The aim of the current article is to explicate a link between Lotmanian cultural semiotics and transmediality as one of today’s more innovative communicative practices. Transmediality is hereby located in the context of cultural autocommunication as a mechanism serving both creative and mnemonic functions. Thus, the notion is related not only to the questions of textual construction but, even more importantly, to text’s processual existence in culture in diverse media languages and discourses over time. By explaining the roots and developments of Lotman’s concept of autocommunicativity, which is central to his understanding of culture as a whole, the article simultaneously indicates the areas of his cultural semiotic studies that we consider relevant and fruitful for contemporary research into transmediality.

Uspenskii and Zhivov on Tsar, God, and Pretenders: Semiotics and the Sacralization of the Monarch

Relatively few works on history published in the Soviet Union in the last years of the old regime were translated into English or other Western languages. An important exception was, however, provided by the publications of members of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, especially Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman (Tartu) and Boris Andreevich Uspenskii (Moscow). (1) From the 1970s onward, many works by these two authors appeared in English, including some that belonged to the disciplines of social and cultural history. Tsar and Pretender, one of the essays by Uspenskii reproduced in the new collection Tsar and God, (2) was first published in English in 1984, in a volume of essays by Lotman and Uspenskii titled The Semiotics of Culture, only two years after its appearance in Russian. (3) The other essay from the 1980s in this collection, however, Tsar and (co-authored by Uspenskii and Viktor Markovich Zhivov), appears in English translation for the first time. (4) Although Tsar and was first published five years later than Tsar and Pretender, the two essays seem to have been written more or less simultaneously. (5) They are in many ways complementary, so that their republication together in an English edition is a very welcome development, which enables us to assess their significance. (6) Do they deserve the status attributed to them by the editor and the publisher of the new collection, which prompted the editors of Kritika to commission this review under the rubric ofclassics in retrospect? (7) Tsar and Pretender It may be appropriate to begin our consideration of this essay by examining the term samozvanchestvo (which Uspenskii uses consistently, in preference to sarnozvanstvo or samozvanshchina, which are preferred by other scholars, some of whom draw distinctions between their usage and significance). (8) David Budgen, whose 1984 translation of the article is reproduced in the Tsar and collection with only stylistic changes to its scholarly apparatus, rendered samozvanets as pretender and samozvanchestvo as royal imposture. (9) Uspenskii, however, uses the term samozvanets very broadly, to include not only impostors such as the First False Dmitrii and Emel'ian Pugachev but also the (perceived) usurpers Boris Godunov, Vasilii Shuiskii, and Catherine the Great, as well as mock tsars like Simeon Bekbulatovich and Fedor Romodanovskii--placed temporarily on the throne by Ivan IV and Peter the Great, respectively. The title Tsar and Pretender might therefore be translated more adequately (albeit more freely) as True and False Tsars. The starting point for Uspenskii's article is the classic study by K. V. Chistov of Russian popular socio-utopian legends, which presented samozvantsy as the realization of popular legends about returning tsardeliverers. (10) Without criticizing Chistov's interpretation, Uspenskii claims that his own approach complements it: where Chistov's explanation had cast light not so much on the appearance of samozvantsy as on the social reaction they provoked, Uspenskii asserts that his own work explains the pretenders' psychology and the complex of notions that underpinned it, and that these notions were primarily religious (114). (11) It is at this point that Uspenskii introduces the concept of the of the monarch in 16th-century Russia. He links this with the adoption of the title of by the Muscovite rulers, noting that the term had sacred connotations in Russia: it was the word used in the Old Testament for kings of Israel such as David and Solomon, and it was also applied to God in liturgical texts, resulting in the paired phrases heavenly and earthly god, and corruptible/incorruptible (tlennyi/netlennyi) (114-15). Other features of the sacralization of the monarch in the 16th century included the addition to the coronation ceremony of the rite of anointing, which equated the tsar with Christ (Greek christos = the anointed one) (114). …

« Signes éternels » : l’image métaphysiqueselon De Chirico et Kiarostami

« Signes éternels » : l’image métaphysiqueselon De Chirico et Kiarostami

Translation and other acts of meaning: In between cognitive semiotics and semiotics of culture

AbstractIf translation is an act of meaning transaction, semiotics should be able to define its specificity in relation to other semiotic acts. Instead, following upon suggestions by Roman Jakobson, the Tartu school, and, more implicitly, Charles Sanders Peirce, the notion of translation has been generalized to cover more or less everything that can be done within and between semiotic resources. In this paper, we start out from a definition of communication elaborated by the author in an earlier text, characterizing translation as a double act of meaning. This characterization takes into account the instances of sending and receiving of both acts involved: the first one at the level of cognition and the second one at the level of communication. Given this definition, we show that Jakobson’s “intralinguistic translation” is, in a sense, the opposite of translation and that his “intersemiotic translation” has important differences and well as similarities to real translation. We also suggest that “cultural translation” has very little to do with translation proper except, in some cases, at the end of its operation. Peirce’s idea of exchanging signs for other signs is better understood as a characterization of tradition.

Vägivaldne surm Aischylose tragöödias „Agamemnon“

Vägivaldne surm Aischylose tragöödias „Agamemnon“

Hegemonic signification from perspective of visual rhetoric

The present paper asks tackles questions that can be briefly formulated as follows: 1) how to visualize power or hegemonic relationship? and 2) does visual rhetoric have anything to offer to research on the visualization processes of hegemony? One of the instruments through which power relations are established in society is photography. The following paper discusses the relationship between the theory of hegemony as elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and the semiotics of culture of Yuri Lotman. The reason for believing that this incorporation will be successful is the very apparent theoretical congeniality between them. They both traverse the Saussurean ontological terrain. Using the photo of the Song Festival (1950) in Soviet Estonia as an example, I attempt to reveal the hegemonic signification process and how the concept of rhetoric may help to clarify this process. The main categories of analysis are tropes, metaphor, and metonymy.

INTERPRETATION OF THE IMAGE OF LATGALE IN THE CULTURE DISCOURSE

INTERPRETATION OF THE IMAGE OF LATGALE IN THE CULTURE DISCOURSE