Empire Of Signs Research Articles

Matthew C. Augustine. Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89.

Matthew C. Augustine. <i>Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89</i>.

Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs

This article explores transformations in Peter Wilson’s work by reading his Japanese projects of the late 1980s in relation to Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs. The specific account it develops is constructed around the entries Wilson produced for the 1978 and 1988 Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competitions. What makes this a comparison of particular interest is that the competitions, a decade apart, were run under nearly — but not quite — the same brief. The first was set by Peter Cook, who called for projects for a ‘Comfortable House in the Metropolis’. This idea was then taken up for the second by Toyo Ito, although he inflected it with an emphasis on the ephemerality of the physical under the effects of new electronic communication technologies. Drawing on Barthes’s observations, the article argues that — across these years — Wilson’s work moves from an approach grounded in metaphor to a mode that is increasingly ideogrammic, and that this is supported by, and reflected in, the way that his drawings change. Here, I claim, the submarine — allusions to which become prominent in Wilson’s work in the period — comes into focus as the key transitional device. Importantly, Wilson’s submarine is not a tool for plumbing depth conditions; rather, it is quite the opposite, insofar as it acts as a figurative cipher, an ideogram in its own right, for the act of screening out relations and drying up metaphoric fluidity. In its conclusion, the article brings the 1988 project into contact with earlier ideogrammic experiments within modernity, including the drawings of Henri Michaux and the reflections of Sergei Eisenstein on cinematic montage and compound ideograms.

Earth, Technology, Language: A Contribution to Holistic and Transcendental Revisions After the Artifactual Turn

The empirical turn, understood as a turn to the artifact in the work of Ihde, has been a fruitful one, which has rightly abandoned what Serres and Latour call “the empire of signs” of the postmoderns. However, this has unfortunately implied too little attention for language and its relation to technology. The same can be said about the social dimension of technology use, which is largely neglected in postphenomenology. This talk critically responds to Ihde (mainly) and Stiegler, and sketches a Wittgensteinian inroad to a more holistic and transcendental revision of postphenomenology which does not turn away from the artifact but places it in a wider social context and asks the question regarding the relation between language and technology. Finally, since the earth may be the ultimate condition of possibility, it is asked what this language-sensitive and transcendental approach may imply for rethinking our human position and agency in the Anthropocene. The paper ends with pointing to the role of language as transcendental condition that shapes the very project of thinking the “Anthropocene.”

Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

The 1990s was a strange time to be alive: a saxophone playing U.S. president waltzed into a Cold War vacuum left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, while Gulf War 1.0 was the first mediated war, yet one lacking any meaningful optics - Baudrillard's so-called weak event. Meanwhile, technology, culture and information was rapidly beginning to coalesce in unexpected ways. The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing, there was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a century of acceleration and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspective of the machine's lens and big data's gathering torrents. We were only just beginning to stockpile our algorithmic future. There is of course a strong human element to all of this as well, as domesticity was about to be transformed in ways not seen since the automation of white goods in the 1950s. Installing a telephone line in a new rental was a priority as this was not just a communication device but a gateway to a new digital epoch (chat rooms, conspiracy theories, gaming mods and a seemingly limitless archive of music). Australians, who would become the new suitors of the boom in computer peripherals and digital gadgetry, turned the latent ability to send short text messages from their mobile phones into a new form of digital dialectics. Meanwhile, the cinema was signalling a grave warning of what all of this might mean if we could indeed become virtual, if the machine was in fact alive and information networks consciousness itself. From James Bond confronting a Rupert Murdock/Conrad Black-type media demigod in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the digital psychedelics of the millennial rush in Strange Days (1995) to Henry Rollins raging against reality in the William Gibson penned Johnny Mnemonic (1995). These mid-nineties films tapped a rich vein of paranoia around the new vanguard of networked information and computer-generated image making while also expressing - in often garish terms - a deep anxiety about a not-to-distant future crackling into view beyond the millennial divide.

Cultural literacy in the empire of emoji signs: Who is crying with joy?

Unicode emoji, originating in Japan but expanded through worldwide usage, is a means to assess how the globalization of Japanese popular culture promotes cultural literacy and awareness of multiculturalism. Emoji reveal discrimination and diversity within cultures, but emoji alone are “unreadable.” They need to be used together with established modes of expression to avoid misunderstandings. Literature, as one of the most intentional and nuanced forms of language, provides insight into this lesson. I propose a semiotic reading of emoji inspired by Roland Barthes and posit his Empire of signs (L’Empire des signes) as an analogy for the incorporation of Japanese emoji into world languages and literatures. To test this theoretical application of emoji, I analyze the findings of “Emoji Literature Translation Contests” held in my university courses.

Performing Korea by Patrice Pavis

Reviewed by: Performing Korea by Patrice Pavis J. Hwang Yuh PERFORMING KOREA. By Patrice Pavis. London and New York: Palgrave, 2017. 276 pp. Hardcover, $109.00. Patrice Pavis' current book, entitled Performing Korea, is a record of contemporary Korean performances, examining what the author "perceived" as Korean performance from the viewpoint of a foreign spectator. This experience resulted from "seeing Korean dance and theatre almost every day" (p. 249) during the author's stay in South Korea between 2011 and 2012. This book's greatest asset is how it provides insight into the contemporary landscape of Korean theatre. In this book, Pavis explores and analyzes "everyday practices drawn from his own experience of wandering" Korea (p. xi), of which his viewpoint is also partly inspired by Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs. With a diversity of artistic practices from Korean performances and dances to K-pop and Pansori adaptations the author shows and (re)arranges contemporary theatre practices by writing about emerging and "unknown" directors' works into the very contemporary context of Korean theatre. This approach thus offers a new understanding of Korean theatre, which can be replicated outside of Korea in the global context of contemporary theatre. Performing Korea has five parts consisting of 16 chapters. In part, titled "Introduction to the Examples and to the Method," the author looks at "theatre and theatre research in Korea and elsewhere" (chapter 1), "Globalization in a few Korean performances" (chapter 2), and "Mise en Scène made in Korea" (chapter 3). By delineating the feature of Korean practitioners that "they place themselves, without regrets or hang-ups, in a multipolar, globalized world" (p. 11), Pavis states that [End Page 506] "[m]y examples will not be Korean traditional forms, but practices involving Euro-American texts, performances, and forms, performed by Korean artists and best explained from their point of view, with their understanding of interculturalism, of Koreanization" (p. 30). Korean stage productions are understood "in no way standardized, which should prompt the critic to analyze with more care what kind of Koreanization is taking place in each specific case" (p. 53). The author defines the opaque and complex term Koreanization as one which "means adapting the play to the special needs of a new audience" (pp. 63–64). From this point of view, Pavis argues, Korean theatre practitioners' "styles and methods of showing Koreanness do not differ radically from the Koreanization of a foreign play" (p. 65) as a product of "an idealized and stereotypical view of the past . . . and . . . a self- and state-induced way of staging accessible and exportable texts and performances" (p. 65). Part 2, titled "On a Few Theatre Productions," describes contemporary practices on Korean stage, ranging from well-known theatre directors' works to emerging directors' such as Lee Young-Seok's Coming Up Air and Kim Minseung's I, Na Hyeseok, the Undesirable. This second part of the book also includes a comparison of French and Korean playwrights' use of dramaturgical structure and theme. What makes part 2 interesting is that the author analyzes, in a very meticulous way, which performances embody "telling style and technique," as a new attempt to aestheticize contemporary Korean theatre. In this regard, this book challenges a dominant narrative of contemporary Korean theatre that focuses more on famous directors' productions in terms of popularity in favor of highlighting some emergent artists. In my view, part 3, "On a Few Theatre-Dance and Dance Performances" and part 4 "On a Few Cultural Performances" are the most interesting sections of the book. These two parts contain work on K-pop and installation art, thereby broadening this book's exploration of Korean culture and theatre. By bringing up margins of contemporary Korean theatre narrative into one of symptomatic phenomena, this book articulates how the diversity of Korean practices can be understood without "the risk of ethnocentrism and cultural prejudice or appropriation" (p. 31). This is best highlighted by the fact that the author "had ample access to the empirical and naïve dimension of everyday existence" of Korean people (p. 258). In part 5, titled "Epilogue," the author writes, "[m]y only ambition in Korea was to attend a few shows, to do micro-analyses...

기호의 제국에서 살아남기

기호의 제국에서 살아남기

Autoexotic Literary Encounters between Meiji Japan and the West: Sōseki Natsume's “The Tower of London” (1905) and Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan (1904)

As Roland Barthes's epoch-making essay Empire of Signs suggests, in a slightly orientalist tone itself, modern japanese culture is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Eastern and Western cultures, but at the same time a strong purism is inherent in its aestheticized nationalism. In this essay, I offer a comparative literary analysis of select travel writings that emerge out of Japanese-European encounters in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to show the cultural dynamism of the time, after the Edo period (1603–1852), when Japan first opened its borders to the West. My analysis of Japan of that time as an Eastern-Western contact zone is based on Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt's understanding of a cultural encounter in an asymmetrical power constellation. Japan has never been a colony, escaping Western imperialism through the (sakoku; “closed country”) policy of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned all Christian missionaries and Western foreigners from the insular empire. In the Meiji modernization in 1868, the old samurai elites imported select reforms from Western Europe, notably from England, France, and Germany, to Japan. This is why Yōichi Komori claimed that Japan is a “self-colonized” () culture (Posutokoroniaru 8). Through the Meiji elite's adoption of certain modern ways from Germany, France, England, and the United States, an “imitative modernity” came into being.

High Teas, High Collars and High Rise Buildings in a ‘High-Context’ Culture: The Semiotics of Japan’s Project of Modernity

&lt;p&gt;This article addresses a paradigm shift in Japanese society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – focusing on the encounters with Western culinary, sartorial and architectural practice experienced by a ‘high-context’ culture (Hall, 1976). The main discussion documents the differentiated reception of these changes – valorised by reformers for whom engaging with the outside world was key to their project of modernity, but treated with suspicion by members of the proletariat who feared for the purity of traditional Japanese values. The manner in which the resulting tensions were mediated through the print media and imagery of domestic visual culture is interrogated using a prism of semiotic analysis and the findings located within a contemporary context to suggest that Roland Barthes’ analytical approach to the country as an ‘empire of signs’ (Barthes, 1982) retains its original traction.&lt;/p&gt;

Felicity D. Scott, Disorientation: Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs

Felicity D. Scott, Disorientation: Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016 (Critical Spatial Practice, 7). Markus Miessen, PhD, is a Berlin-based architect, spatial designer, editor and writer working on the themes of critical spatial practice, participation, institution building and spatial politics. He shares most of these interests with Nikolaus Hirsch, architect (Frankfurt), writer and former director of the Stadelschule (Frankfurt), with whom Miessen edits ...

Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Fictions of the Enlightenment

This essay argues the chaotic, violent, and truly Lucretian implications of Michel Serres’s attack on the Empire of Signs is moderated and localized by Bruno Latour—figured more as a digital field or network than as the meteorology of “deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps” that Serres associates with the unpredictable drift of modernity. Latour tries to stabilize the non-metrical energy of Epicurean clinamina as cross-references arranged on a grid. The confidence of his tabulation stands in contrast to the effects of exigent powers escaping human self-mastery in Serres’s account of invariances such as the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. Similarly the ecstatic isolation of early experimentalists amidst the pressure and traction of pure sensation is a far cry from the mute Parliament of Things Latour spotted in Robert Boyle’s laboratory, whose vocalization he superintends under the aegis of representation, a word with a strange career in the history of civil society.

SEM A FOME DA DEFINIÇÃO: O PUNCTUM E O HAICAI

O presente texto é dedicado a uma reflexão sobre as possíveis intersecções entre fotografia e haikai encontradas na obra de Roland Barthes, abarcando aquelas obras do autor suscetíveis de ilustrá-las a saber: Império dos Signos (1970), O Neutro (1977-1978), A Preparação do Romance (1978-1979) e A Câmara Clara (1980). Nosso foco é sobre o possível emaranhamento do conceito de "punctum" e "neutro", respectivamente, referindo-se à imagem fotográfica e à escrita, e igualmente supondo um escape do paradigma do significado.

„Ten kraj, który nazywam Japonią”. O filmowej adaptacji Jak wam się podoba w reżyserii Kennetha Branagha

Olga Katafiasz analyses As You Like It (2006), the fifth adaptation of Shakespeare by Kenneth Branagh, which is set in Japan – or a place resembling it. Branagh’s Japan is viewed as a strange simulacrum, a reference specific and distant at the same time. From the very beginning of the film Branagh builds the impression that he is creating the reality or an illusion of reality. That is why Roland Barthes’s famous essay L’empire des signes (Empire of Signs) is crucial to the author’s interpretation. The key character is Jaques (Kevin Kline): he plays an extremely important part in Shakespeare’s comedy, and in Branagh’s film he seems to be the director’s alter ego . Jaques is melancholy, but his melancholy is not regarded as an illness, but more as a defense strategy against the world. The director’s world (strange, foreign Japan and unreal Ardennes Forest) is dominated by Melancholy experience, and its inhabitants have abandoned their dreams of Utopia. The country which Branagh named Japan is in fact a world of loss.

The Cambridge companion to Heidegger's Being and time

1. An overview of Being and Time Mark A. Wrathall and Max Murphey 2. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time: a carefully planned accident? Alfred Denker 3. The question of being Taylor Carman 4. The semantics of dasein and the modality of Being and Time Wayne Martin 5. Heidegger on space and spatiality David R. Cerbone 6. Being-with-others Hubert L. Dreyfus 7. Why mood matters Matthew Ratcliffe 8. Heidegger on human understanding Mark A. Wrathall 9. Heidegger's pragmatic-existential theory of language and assertion Barbara Fultner 10. The empire of signs: Heidegger's critique of idealism in Being and Time Peter E. Gordon 11. Heidegger on scepticism, truth and falsehood Denis McManus 12. Death and demise in Being and Time Iain Thomson 13. Freedom and the choice to choose oneself in Being and Time Beatrice Han-Pile 14. Authenticity and resoluteness William Blattner 15. Temporality as the ontological sense of care Stephan Kaufer 16. Historical finitude Joseph K. Schear 17. What if Heidegger were a phenomenologist? Thomas Sheehan.

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship by Karen Fang

Karen Fang. Romantic Writing and Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Pp. 236. $35. In last sentence of her rich, intricately textured book, Karen Fang remarks on irony of how, in empire that arose in post-Napoleonic Britain, the entity that benefited most was individual author, very person usually thought to be lost in corporate and collective nature of periodical format, but whose upward mobility through affiliation with that format actually legitimated era's pervasive imperial metaphor (190). Indeed, while Fang characterizes her book's most significant methodological innovation as an emphasis upon dimension of space rather than time as periodical form's defining attribute, others may be even more struck by her unapologetic recuperation of idealist concerns of traditional Romantic studies. For while much of excellent earlier work on Romantic-era periodical writing--by Jon Klancher, Mark Parker, Mark Schoenfield, Kim Wheatley, and others--focused on how materiality of periodical format elicits effects in excess of, or even contrary to, text considered as an isolated phenomenon, Fang's equally careful attention to context and intertext produces, instead, a figure of author as supremely intentional: capable of reinscribing material conditions of his or her into ornate, layered, even devious strategies. Fang takes for her subject late Romantic period which Virgil Nemoianu once influentially described as Biedermeier, but which she--with a different set of geographical referents and an outlook informed by postcolonial theory--re-characterizes as a moment in which consolidation of print capitalism felicitously collaborated with post-Napoleonic consolidation of Britain's imperial identity. Yet while new geopolitical realities brought about by Napoleonic wars (and Britain's everexpanding imperial ambitions) loom large throughout this book, Fang is not primarily interested in demonstrating how authors she studies advance imperial ideology or apologize for orientalism. Instead, she treats their engagements with Napoleonic history and iconography as stuff of authorial self-fashioning--which happens, in various cases she examines, sometimes to coincide with, sometimes to critique or even subvert, more straightforwardly capitalist and expansionist ambitions of periodical industry's literary lower empire. The geographical reach of periodicals, and the prominence of imperial and geographic metaphors throughout [the] writing that populated them (28), account for Fang's insistence upon space as primary axis of periodical text; and indeed, her analysis takes in a remarkable array of phenomena closely or loosely affiliated with vicissitudes of Britain's contemporary global engagements. Extending from British trade with China to Napoleonic Italy, post-Napoleonic Egyptology, and colonization of Tahiti, Fang's interpolated histories are vivid, absorbing, and thoroughly researched, showing a nicely calibrated sense for telling detail. The structure of book, on other hand, recapitulates formalist allegiances of Fang's interpretive method. Following an introductory discussion of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and Elgin marbles sonnets, which she relates to ongoing discussion about meaning of Greek antiquities in Annals of Fine Arts, Fang divides her study into four long chapters, divided between two exemplary cases of what she calls collaboration (Chapters One and Two), and two exceptional cases (Three and Four). Each of two sections, in turn, is divided between a happier, or less ideologically fraught, instance of periodical authorship and a more problematic or critical one. Thus, in Chapters One and Two, Fang juxtaposes Charles Lamb and James Hogg, while in second section she contrasts Letitia Landon and Lord Byron. …

Eat, Drink and Be Civil: Sociability and the Cafe

The article investigates the ascendency of the cafe in the current period of urbanism. I suggest that “going for a coffee” is less about coffee and more about how we connect with others in a mobile world, when flexible work hours are increasingly the norm and more people are living alone than any other period in history. The cafe also plays a role in the development of civil discourse and civility, and plays an important role in the development of cosmopolitan civil societies.

Empire of Signs: From Japan towards Korea?

Empire of Signs: From Japan towards Korea?

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship (review)

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship (review)

The Robbery of Language? On Roland Barthes and Myth

This article focuses on a text that nearly everyone has read, but has done so a little too quickly – Roland Barthes's ‘Myth Today’ from his Mythologies. My agenda is to read this text carefully and in the same way that Barthes reads other texts, that is, looking for various hints and suggestions that open up other possibilities. In the first part, I trace Barthes's argument quite closely, distinguishing between his careful, dispassionate, and technical description of myth in terms of a basic semiological schema and his passionate condemnation of myth. The former attempts to be a universal description of the workings of myth; the latter is a critique of the mythologies of the French bourgeoisie. Barthes also tries to find modes of resistance to such a dominating collection, but his search ends up being forlorn and futile. At this point, I turn and reread Barthes, tracing hints that the myths with which he deals are not so uniform or so suffocatingly dominant. Picking up the passing suggestion that the best option may be to turn myth against itself, I explore what myth conceals (its process of distortion), how it produces resistance and seeks to close it down, how it preserves such resistance by leaving open the possibility that resistance may twist out from under the hand of oppression and gain a voice of its own once again. At this moment, I bring in some of Barthes's own myths, especially the utopian one of an imaginary Japan in Empire of Signs. Here is an alternative myth of resistance that emerges precisely when it seems as though the semiological foothold for myth has been eliminated.

The Gizmo effect: “Japan Inc.”, American nightmares, and the fissure of the symbolic

This article analyses the phenomenon of 'Japan-bashing' as it emerged in late twentieth-century horror fiction and film. Specifically, the article argues that depictions of 'Japan Inc.' as an object of anxiety shifted from fear of the Other (via a familiar Orientalist discourse) to a fear of the Same. Placing Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984) in direct conversation with Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs (English translation, 1982) and Karel van Wolferen's (in)famous Enigma of Japanese Power (1990), the article seeks to interrogate broadly the dread of an American transition into a 'New World Order'; in short, with the gradual loss of a demonized Soviet Union, capitalism was left with nothing to haunt but itself (artificially posited in 'Japan'). Cultural 'Others' in the horror genre were thus radically challenged as the genre moved into the twenty-first century.