Indexical Signs Research Articles

Death and the Evolution of Language

My hypothesis is that the cognitive challenge posed by death might have had a co-evolutionary role in the development of linguistic faculties. First, I claim that mirror neurons, which enable us to understand others’ actions and emotions, not only activate when we directly observe someone, but can also be triggered by language: words make us feel bodily sensations. Second, I argue that the death of another individual cannot be understood by virtue of the mirror neuron mechanism, since the dead provide no neural pattern for mirroring: this cognitive task requires symbolic thought, which in turn involves emotions. Third, I describe the symbolic leap of the human species as a cognitive detachment from the here and now, allowing displaced reference: through symbols the human mind can refer to what is absent, possible, or even impossible (like the presence of a dead person). Such a detachment has had a huge adaptive impact: adopting a coevolutionary standpoint can help explain why language is as effective as environmental inputs in order to stimulate our bodily experience. In the end I suggest a further coevolutionary “reversal”: if language is necessary to understand the death of the other, it might also be true that the peculiar cognitive problem posed by the death of the other (the corpse is present, but the other is absent) has contributed to the crucial transition from an indexical sign system to the symbolic level, i.e., the “cognitive detachment”. Death and language, as Heidegger claimed, have an essential relation for humans, both from an evolutionary and a phenomenological perspective: they have shaped the symbolic consciousness that make us conceive of them.

A multi-layered approach to speech events: The case of Spanish justificational conjunctions

I will describe the structural and semantic characteristics of the Spanish causal conjunctions como ( as, since), ya que ( as, since), and pues ( for). I will argue that, unlike predicative causal conjunctions like porque ( because), they function as speech event markers. This difference will be related to Peirce's semiotic distinction between symbolic and indexical signs. A speech event will be defined as a three-dimensional event, including a modal, interpersonal and sequential dimension. The three justificational conjunctions give the same indication at the sequential dimension: they identify the speech event as an act of justification. I will show that what further distinguishes the three conjunctions from each other can be analyzed in terms of the other two dimensions. I will argue that pues activates both the modal and the interpersonal dimension, that ya que activates the modal dimension but de-activates the interpersonal dimension, and that como de-activates both the modal and the interpersonal dimension. I will show that this analysis can explain certain typical pragmatic effects, for instance why pues marks the information that follows as new, why ya que allows special uses like irony or is frequently used to introduce quotations, and why como presents the information as taken for granted. In the concluding section, I will argue that the framework is not only suited to describe Spanish causal conjunctions, but has a broader theoretical and descriptive scope.

The Depictions of Fathers and Children in Best-Selling Picture Books in the United States: A Hybrid Semiotic Analysis

This research examines the presence and depictions of fathers in best-selling picture books in the U.S. using a hybrid semiotic approach. In 200 best-selling picture books for children, among those featuring only a father or only a mother, fathers are featured as prominent as a parent in fewer books (n = 4) than mothers (n = 10). The semiotic analysis of the images and text in two selected picture books reveals connotations related to the roles of fathers as masculine, protective, nurturing, and playful, and the conceptualization of children as naive, vulnerable, and playful. Further illuminations from the texts are of indexical signs and second-order symbols related to the father’s association with night and in particular the moon.

Symbols in dialogical structure of semiotics

This article examines how a semiotic model can show symbolic mediation between sign-event and life-event through symbol-mediated interpreting activity, introduces the Vygotskyan concept of symbol, and thus contributes to overcoming the demarcation between dyadic and triadic conception of symbol Three types of semiotic model are introduced: a representational semiotics, an indicative semiotics, and an activity-semiotics. The three systems are correlated in a triad and, in particular, activity semiotics is positioned as Peircean symbol in a Third, mediating representational structure with indicative structure. In relation to mediation and interpretation, a dialogic process of sign relations is discussed: icon, index, and symbol, through which indexical signs are emphasized, enabling the symbolic structure to be dynamic.

Ex Post Facto: Peirce and the Living Signs of the Dead

The hypothesis of this paper is that we maintain a relationship with the dead precisely in their death, and this relationship is best understood in terms of Peirce's semiotics and its influence on the work of Jacques Derrida. Roland Barthes' theory of photography illustrates this semiotics of death. The subsistent and continuous reality of the non-extant, absent and silent being of the dead individual is manifested—and continues to communicate—through indexical signs, i.e., any traces left behind by the dead individual (such as photos, clothes, glasses, writings, recordings).

Mirror, A Hollow1In The Wall. Your Portrait, A Hollow In The Wall. Ana Cristina Cesar: Poetry And Photography

Mirror, A Hollow1In The Wall. Your Portrait, A Hollow In The Wall. Ana Cristina Cesar: Poetry And Photography

What is Documentation? English Translation of the Classic French Text (review)

Reviewed by: What is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text Jonathan Furner What is Documentation?: English Translation of the Classic French Text. By Suzanne Briet . Translated and edited by Ronald E. Day and Laurent Martinet with Hermina G. B. Anghelescu . Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2006. xi, 71 pp. $25.00. ISBN 0-8108-5109-1. The name of the French librarian and documentalist Suzanne Briet (1894–1989) is well known to the contemporary Anglophone information studies community, primarily thanks to those scholars such as Michael Buckland, Ronald E. Day, Birger Hjørland, Mary Niles Maack, and W. Boyd Rayward who have engaged with Briet's writings in the two decades following her death. Buckland, in particular, has caught the imagination of many readers with his analysis of Briet's invocation of an antelope in a zoo as an example of the kind of thing that, in the extended sense in which documentalists use the term, can usefully be considered as a document. Briet's major work—a forty-eight-page pamphlet called Qu'est-ce que la documentation? (Paris: Éditions Documentaires Industrielles et Techniques, 1951) that serves as the manifesto for a second generation (following Paul Otlet's first) of participants in the European documentation movement—was published by an arm of the Union française des organismes de documentation (UFOD), an organization that Briet cofounded three years before she took early retirement from the Bibliothèque nationale at the age of sixty. A Spanish translation appeared in Argentina in 1960, but English speakers have had to wait until now for this thoughtful translation by Day and Laurent Martinet (with the assistance of Hermina Anghelescu). Briet trained as a historian, and her writing has remarkable aesthetic qualities. Translation is never an exact science, of course, but translators of technical works are seldom required to exercise as much literary skill and cultural sensitivity as Day and Martinet demonstrate with What Is Documentation? One of Briet's most important insights was that individual documents may be interpreted in different ways by different people wishing to put them to different uses for different purposes. This variability of interpretation is characteristic of documents even at the level of individual words, and the different decisions made by different translators at the word level can have significant consequences. For instance, the pivotal definition of "document" on which Briet settles in short order—"tout indice concret ou symbolique, conservé ou enregistré, aux fins de représenter, de reconstituer ou de prouver un phénomène ou physique ou intellectuel" (Qu'est-ce que la documentation? 7)—is rendered in Buckland's 1991 paper "Information as Thing" (Journal of the American Society of Information Science [JASIS] 42, no. 5:351–60) as "any concrete or symbolic indication, preserved or recorded, for reconstructing or for proving a phenomenon, whether physical or mental" (355); in Buckland's 1997 paper "What Is a 'Document'?" (JASIS 48, no. 9:804–9) as "any [End Page 107] physical or symbolic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon" (806); and in Day and Martinet's 2006 edition as "any concrete or symbolic indexical sign, preserved or recorded toward the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical or intellectual phenomenon" (10) (all emphases added). Buckland's latter choice of "sign" as a translation of the French indice reminds us that the anonymous "linguists and philosophers" whom Briet identifies as sources (10) are usually presumed to be of the structuralist persuasion; interestingly, however, the use of the French indice in a semiotic context derives not from Saussure (who spoke of signes) but from Peirce. In that light, it might be argued that Day and Martinet's addition of "indexical" as a qualifier of "sign" does not wholly deliver on the precision it promises, since the Peircean taxonomy distinguishes clearly between indexical signs (such as photographs) and symbolic signs (such as ordinary words). In Day and Martinet's edition, Briet continues: "Is a star a document? Is a pebble rolled by a torrent a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones...

The Secondness of the Fourth Gospel

This article presents a reading of the Fourth Gospel based on the principles of C. S. Peirce's semiotics. The Johannine Jesus functions as a sign of God. On the basis of an interpretation of the Peircean sign definition and its phenomenological, semiotic and pragmatic aspects, the sign of Jesus can be defined more precisely as a dicent indexical sin sign, i.e. a sign with secondness in all relations. It is fundamental to Peirce's sign theory that a sign has genuine triadic relations to the object and the interpretant. This leads to a new understanding of the coherence of Johannine theology, Christology, eschatology, ecclesiology and ethics. Jesus initiates a semiotic process which includes the believing community in his relation to God. As a consequence, the believers assume a conduct that corresponds to the crucified one.

Welcome to the Jungle of the Real: Simulation, Commoditization, and Survivor

Commodities are ubiquitous in contemporary society. As many have written-Karl Marx most prominently among early thinkers on the subject-these of material and/or symbolic are often socially constructed and central to everyday life, be they perceived as needs or wants. Attaching additional meaning to commodities through history (an heirloom), nostalgia (vintage clothing), image (Michael Jordan-endorsed sneakers), branding (A shirt with the word GAP stitched in the collar), or other means can inflate their value, often artificially (Peterson). Indeed today, even television shows are not immune to being commoditized. This article will examine how the television program Survivor has undergone commoditization since its debut in May 2000 and is now approaching what Jean Baudrillard called simulacra-a copy without an original, endlessly reproducible images that reference nothing. The article will first describe Survivor and the reality TV genre, then demonstrate why the show is not real, but rather a contrived construction. It will then describe how Survivor is used intertextually in parody, fan fiction, and among various seasons of the series, as well as detail the program's development as a commodity through both official and unofficial, viewer-driven means. Finally, the article will question where Survivor stands among Baudrillard's four stages leading to simulacra. Theoretical Context This article will rely on several theoretical concepts from cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and critical theory; this section provides a brief overview of some of them. First, there is the idea of commodities and commoditization. Arjun Appadurai defines the former provisionally as simply objects of economic value determined through an of sacrifices (3), be it trading money for a toothbrush, bartering a barrel of oranges for a bushel of peppers, or sending your star shortshop to a rival baseball team in exchange for that team's catcher and a player to be named later. Indeed, these days even people can be commodities. As such, commodities take on countless forms, and one of these is the commodity sign. Here refers to semiotics, or the science of signs, a field deriving from the lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure. A sign consists of a signifier and the signified it conjures. In a famous example, the signifier t-r-e-e evokes the signified, an image of what we call a tree (Chandler). The signifier and signified an indissociable unity, like two sides of the same piece of paper (McNeill). This is the sign (the word tree). Among others, C. S. Peirce further developed Saussure's concepts. Some signs, such as tree, are arbitrary or symbolic, according to Peirce-but there are two other types as well. First, indexical signs refer to a relationship of contiguity, or pointing, such as causal or part-to-whole. They also can be based on point of view (Peterson). One use of indexical signs is in intertextuality, or how one text cites and refers to another (Goldman and Papson, Sign Wars 68). second, iconic signs are the most primordial and refer by resemblance, such as a painting featuring a red stop sign. The red does not arbitrarily represent the red of a real stop sign; rather, it is the same red as the actual sign (Peterson). The aforementioned commodity signs most visibly take the form of corporate logos, such as the swoosh. Our consumer-based society has reached the point where a blank shoe is meaningless. That's right, meaningless-the white shoe is a blank if it is not marked by a sign .... In fact, the market of these products is produced by Nike's design and marketing specialists (Goldman and Papson, Nike 12). In other words, the commodity sign's is mainly symbolic, rather than derived from actual use value. Commodity signs can be iconic-for instance, the sign above a Hallmark card store resembles the sign above every other one, even though each has a different name (Leslie's Hallmark, Amy's Hallmark, etc. …

Runa realism: Upper Amazonian attitudes to nature knowing

Stories about the forest recounted in a Quichua-speaking Runa village in Ecuador's Upper Amazon point to an element of ecological understandings that is rarely studied; these are primarily about capturing and sharing the experience of the process of knowing rather than trafficking in stabilized tokens of ecological knowledge. Runa understanding of nature is achieved through a poetic language rich in what philosopher Charles S. Peirce terms iconic and indexical signs. This way of talking about forest experience is advantageous because these forms of representation can capture qualities and events in the world in ways that what Peirce terms symbols cannot. Iconic and indexical signs mediate the world in distinctive ways. Accordingly, this article suggests some implications that iconically and indexically rich modes of communicating experience have for engaging with the nonhuman realm, acquiring knowledge of the world, and establishing a certain kind of interpersonal social intimacy.

The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror

The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable:Word and Image in a Time of Terror W. J. T. Mitchell My teacher at Johns Hopkins, Ronald Paulson, exposed the depths of the so-called "word and image" problem when he drew a fundamental distinction, located in eighteenth-century aesthetics and semiotics, between the "emblematic" image and the "expressive." The emblematic was the image as word, as linked to, determined by, readable in words. The expressive was the obverse—the unreadable, the mute, the indexical—a "regression into primitivism prior to language, or a leap forward to the ineffable beyond language."1 This distinction then was discovered to inform the spaces of the eighteenth-century English garden, in its development from "poetic" and allegorical garden spaces to the wilder, more open and detextualized spaces of the landscape garden and the picturesque. Paulson's lesson still resonates with me, partly because it reminds us of the fundamentally dialectical character of the word/image problem, the way in which each term simultaneously contrasts itself with and incorporates its partner. The word/image problem is "inside" the problem of the image, and vice versa. I think Derrida would call this an "invagination" in discourse, one that is built into ordinary language. The word as image, image as word; the word as a limit for the image, and vice versa. We see this limiting character most clearly when we note the way "words fail" to capture the density of signification in the image, or conversely we find ourselves unable or forbidden to make an image of that which we can nevertheless mention or name—God, the infinite, absolute chaos or the void.2 We see the invagination of word and image when the allegorical or emblematic image dictates a determinate verbal signified, or (perhaps even more dramatically) when the verbal sign itself, as diagrammed by Saussure, reveals the auditory signifier as the bearer of its obverse, a pictorially rendered signified that is embedded within the structure of the verbal sign as a concept or mental image.3 The dialectical character of the word/image relation may be seen most clearly, however, when we note that this difference, or differance/differend, is actually a compound of at least two (perhaps more) [End Page 291] differences, one articulated at the level of signs and symbols, the other at the level of sensory perception and production. That is, "word and image" names two fields of relationship that intersect one another in logical space: 1) semiotic relations such as Peirce's symbol/icon (signs by convention and by resemblance, with the indexical sign by cause and effect forming a third space), and 2) sensory relations between the auditory and the visible. We see the interlacing of these two fields of difference in a common expression such as "verbal and visual media," in which the verbal denotes a certain kind of sign (the linguistic) and the visual indicates a kind of sensory channel. Signs and senses are interarticulated in the relation of words and images, and part of our work as analysts is to remain aware of these distinctions even as we observe the weaving of their distinct strands in the fabric of representation. We could go on, of course, to elaborate these distinctions in terms of other categories—Lessing's modalities of time and space, the structural and systemic distinctions Nelson Goodman drew between digital and analogical codes, the archaeological "strata" that Foucault called "the sayable and the seeable," or the Freudian drives that Lacan dubbed the "vocative" and "scopic"—the desire that animates the speaking/hearing circuit on the one hand, and the optical/tactile construction of the visual field on the other.4 But in this essay I want to explore a limit approached by both sides of the dialectic, namely the frontiers of the unimaginable and the unspeakable, the place where words and images fail, where they are refused, prohibited as obscenities that violate a law of silence and invisibility, muteness and blindness. And I want to take this up in order to bring the ancient topos of word and image to bear on the contemporary issue of terrorism, and the role of words and images in the so...

Introduction

Introduction Nancy Felson Deixis 1) bring to light, show forth; 2) show, point out (LSJ) The essential characteristic of deictic expressions is that their semantic values depend on the real-world context in which they are uttered. But this may not be so when the sentence in which the deictic appears is itself embedded in more complex utterances. C. J. Fillmore 1997.61 The function of here is to indicate the "given" position on any dimension of localization that may be relevant at the moment . . . We are, actually, not necessarily located physically within the spaces we refer to as here. Anna Fuchs 1993.18-19 (emphasis in original) That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? Yann Mantel, Life of Pi, p. viii Deictics bridge the tangible world of reality and the abstract world of fantasy. As indexical signs that point to objects or referents with which they are (or pretend to be) contiguous, their sense is not determined by any inherent semantic property and cannot be ascertained by consulting a lexicon. Rather, to decipher their meaning and construe their reference, the [End Page 253] interpreter must, at the least, first calibrate the parameters of the context, optimally by being at the actual utterance as an eye- or ear-witness, or else by imagined presence. The project of investigating the poetics of deixis begins with an exploration of linguistic forms that point in a variety of ways to diverse kinds of objects: extra-textually to realia in the surrounding or implied context (deixis ad oculos); backward (ana-) and forward (cata-) to objects within the text (anaphoric or textual deixis); and imaginatively to objects brought into existence by the very act of pretending to designate them (deixis am Phantasma: fictional deixis). In the act of pointing to or creating such objects, deixis establishes orientation points between which the characters of the textual universe move. The act of tracking the movement of such characters gives even distant readers a vivid sense of involvement and, indeed, of presence at the distant performance event. Self-reflexive deixis points to the enunciation itself (see Calame 1995.3-8 and Benveniste 1974.79-88) and partakes of all the three main types identified by Bühler (1990.137-57). A poet may employ such phrases as "this poem here" or "what I am doing/saying now" or "how you in the audience are right now responding" to refer to the poetic product or the respective acts of making and receiving the poem. When one asks whether the referent "exists" as an object, the answer must be tentative: the very act of naming it and speaking it (i.e., performing it) brings it into existence. But such pointing treats the object as if it already exists and, in this sense, it contains an element of deixis am Phantasma, of pretending to point. It also partakes of ocular deixis insofar as the referent is becoming audible and visible for the audience just at the moment when the poet/performer points at it. Moreover, the pointing backward and forward within the text resembles (though it should be distinguished from) anaphoric deixis. Thus self-reflexive pointing is a hybrid of the other three. Critics who focus on deixis ad oculos aim to recover the original context in which a specific genre of poetry was first performed. Those who focus on anaphora are mainly interested in the cohesion of the text. Finally, investigators of fictional deixis hope to illuminate the poetic effects produced by the practice of deixis both on poetic characters and on external auditors and readers. All three deictic phenomena-ocular, textual, and fictional-have the pragmatic effect of making audiences work. All invite interpreters to draw inferences-fewer when the referent is proximate and visible, more when time and distance have effaced it, and still more when the referent, like [End Page 254] a unicorn, is fictional in the first place. Yet even for those attending a first performance of a poetic text, discrepancies would have elicited interpretation (and hence work), for example, in...

Peut-on sauver un sens de dénomination pour les noms propres ?

This study revisits the classic problem posed by the meaning of proper names, and proposes a procedural approach to this problem, by analysing the meaning of proper names as an instruction to find in long-term memory the referent that carries the proper name in question. This is a revision of my earlier theory of ‘naming predicates’ (Kleiber 1981), which captures the meaning of proper names like Louis in terms of paraphrases of the form “the x who is called Louis”. The concept of ‘naming predicate’ was meant to provide an alternative to the inadequacies of the two classic approaches to the meaning of proper names, viz. theories that analyse proper names as semantically empty (e.g. Mills, Kripke 1972) and theories that analyse proper names in terms of uniquely identifying descriptions (Frege, Russell 1956). An analysis in terms of naming predicates (‘the X called Louis’) gives proper names an abstract type of meaning, thus avoiding the disembodied sign that results from analysing them as semantically empty, and at the same time does not go to the other extreme of incoporating aspects of the referent in the proper name’s meaning, thus avoiding the well-known problems with referential identity (e.g. Tullius = Cicero) and the related puzzles of transparence and opacity. In spite of these descriptive advantages, further research has shown that there are a number of problems with the notion of ‘naming predicate’. One of these problems concerns the status of proper names in ‘naming constructions’ like I am called Louis. Applying a naming predicate analysis to such constructions either leads to infinite regression (Wilmet 1995), or — if Louis in the naming predicate ‘the x called Louis’ is regarded as a phonetic form rather than a proper name — to a denial of proper name status in the very construction that expresses the naming link between proper name and referent (Jonasson 1982). Another problem concerns the cognitive naturalness of an analysis in terms of ‘naming predicates’. While this analysis is quite natural in contexts like There is no Louis in this office, it works less well in contexts like This painting is a real Picasso and, most importantly, in prototypical uses like Louis is a painter and a sculpturer, where a naming predicate analysis solely identifies the referent as the carrier of the proper name. These problems have led me to propose a revision to the theory of naming predicates. The descriptive advantages of using the naming relation between proper name and referent as the basis of the semantic description are obvious, which means that this aspect of the theory needs to be maintained. What causes most of the problems, however, is associating this naming relation with a predicate. As an alternative, I propose to reanalyse it in a procedural sense, not as a predicate describing the referent but as a procedural instruction to look for the referent that carries the proper name. This puts proper names in the domain of indexical signs like deictic elements. Common nouns, on the other hand, are not indexical in this sense but stand for concepts, which means that indexicality only comes into the picture when deictic elements are added.

Touch: Sensuous Theory and Muitisensory Media Laura U. Marks:

TOUCH: SENSUOUS THEORY AND MULTISENSORY MEDIA Laura U. Marks Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 259 pp. In academic discourse, a new way of thinking expressed in a unique style of writing is a rare and beautiful thing. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, a collection of essays by scholar, curator, and critic Laura U. Marks, achieves this elusive fusion of scholarly erudition and lyrical expression as it traces her intellectual, erotic, and spiritual journey through the complex artistic and theoretical terrain of the last ten years. Written before, during and after her first book, The Skin of the Film, the essays gathered together in Touch draw upon a wide range of ideas: Walter Benjamin's concept of aura, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of visuality, and Charles Sanders Peirce's understanding of the indexical sign. Marks uses them with elegance and precision to illuminate an equally wide range of texts, from experimental films and videos, to interactive software designed to trigger olfactory memories, to the author's own dreams. What distinguishes Marks' approach throughout is the originality of her synthesis, the fluidity of her writing, and the unabashed love of each critical object, which exudes from virtually every page. Her essays are about works that solicit her uncool, nose-against-the-glass enthusiasm. Rather than objects in line with ready-made principles, she tries to form multiple points of contact with them. For anyone schooled in the dense theoretical mix of structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, feminism, and post-colonial theory that dominated North American graduate programs in the 1980s and '90s, such statements fly boldly in the face of one's training, as bringing objects in line with ready-made principles was exactly what such programs once taught (and arguably still teach) students to do. A product of this training herself, Marks notes in her introduction that the series of essays presented here reflects her own wrestling with, and I would add ultimate relinquishing of, the theories of Lacanian subjectivity and film spectatorship that have attained hegemony in the academy over the last twenty years. Touch, however, is by no means an anti-theoretical book; it simply embraces a theory that has been less popular in film and media studies, that of phenomenology, and throughout her book's pages Marks makes this theory her own. Indebted to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and elaborated for the field of film scholarship by Vivian Sobchack in The Address of the Eye, a phenomenological approach to moving image media understands the act of viewing as a form of sensuous contact rather than a disembodied process of mastery through physical distance. In contrast to the decentered subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology proposes a subject that does have a center, which is continually transformed by its encounters with the world. This embodied subject, material and inescapably mortal, identifies with other material bodies, like those of film and video, and responds to appeals made by these embodied media to all five senses-sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. How this synaesthetic conversion occurs, and how our intercorporeal relationship with moving image media evolves, hinges on the notion of the haptic, the focus of Marks' book. Marks builds her argument with care over the course of thirteen essays, starting with Video Haptics and Erotics. Here we learn the various scholarly applications of the term haptic. Used by Alois Riegl in the late 1920s to distinguish between the tactility of ancient Egyptian art and the figurative tendencies of Roman art (the former he calls haptic, the latter, optical), the concept of haptic has reappeared recently in writings by Deleuze and Guattari (for whom it describes a smooth space that must be navigated at close range, like an expanse of snow or sand); Noel Burch and Antonia Lant (each of whom use it to explain the visual contrast between flatness and depth in early and experimental cinemas) ; and Bill Nichols and Jane Gaines in the context of documentary theory. …

What does Peirce's sign theory have to say to art history?

Art history has lost and rediscovered semiotics several times since the 1950s, and at the moment writers employ an eclectic mixture of theories derived mainly from Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. Of the two, Peirce is possibly the more influential model, on account of his tripartite theory of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. (The Saussurean model is identified more closely with the poststructuralist moment in art history, beginning in the 1970s.) The question of semiotics is once again topical now that visual culture is consolidating as a discipline, because the new field can choose from a wide range of semiotic practices – or it can choose to bypass semiotics altogether. This essay is a contribution to that current state of affairs. My principal point is that Peirce is much stranger than he is taken to be: he is idiosyncratic and demanding, and at times outlandishly hermetic. For most of what art history and visual studies aim to do, Peirce is simply not necessary; and when he is pertinent, he is so mainly as a model for concertedly logical thinking of a sort that is rare in visual studies or art history.

Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology

This article examines Roy Rappaports theory of ritual from the point of view of recent work on linguistic ideology. Rappaports theory, I argue, can best be understood as an attempt to marry the performative approach to ritual to one that regards ritual as a form of communication. Rappaport effects this synthesis through an argument about the indexical qualities of performatively produced signs and goes on to argue that because ritual produces indexical signs, it is a uniquely trustworthy channel of communication. Because language is an untrustworthy channel of communication, prone to carrying misrepresentations and lies, people turn to ritual to make up for languages shortcomings. Here, Rappaports argument requires reformulation. His assumptions about language reflect a particular linguistic ideology. Where that ideology is in force, ritual will likely play the role he suggests, but where it is not, ritual will be evaluated differently. I illustrate this with examples from Melanesia and the history of Christianity in the West. The force of this reformulation is an insistence on the need for any theory of ritual as communication to situate its claims in relation to broader issues of linguistic ideology and cultural constructions of communication.

Carnal Knowledge

Let's begin with a basic proposition: what photography gave to modernity was not vision, but touch (or, more precisely, vision as a form of touch). And let's test it against another: this embodied type of vision is what is at stake in the current shift from photographic to electronic media.As everyone knows, photography has long been privileged within modern culture because, unlike other systems of representation, the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by it. Photographs are primarily designated as indexical signs, as images “really affected” by the objects to which they refer. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes speaks of the “stigmatum” of the “having-been-there” of the thing photographed, as if the photograph has been physically bruised by a subject whose image now offers a kind of braille for the eyes. The peculiarity of its production is, Barthes says, what enables the photograph to fetishistically guarantee something's erstwhile presence in space and time. But it also helps establish a special relationship between photography's subject and ourselves. “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here. … A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”1

Transforming Signs. Iconicity and Indexicality in Russian Healing and Magic

In this article, the ethnography of magic and healing in contemporary Russia is analyzed using the basic concepts of Peircian semiotics. Indigenous terms of affliction used in magical diagnostics of misfortunes, as well as pantomimic gestures in hand healing are regarded as iconic and indexical signs. Their mode of signification is pragmatic presentation rather than textual representation, which underlies their capacity to effect transformations in consciousness. It is shown, however, that it is cultural conventions of their symbolic meanings that form these signs as icons and indexes.

Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and Partial Reformulation of Rappaport's Theory of Ritual

This article examines Roy Rappaports theory of ritual from the point of view of recent work on linguistic ideology. Rappaports theory, I argue, can best be understood as an attempt to marry the performative approach to ritual to one that regards ritual as a form of communication. Rappaport effects this synthesis through an argument about the indexical qualities of performatively produced signs and goes on to argue that because ritual produces indexical signs, it is a uniquely trustworthy channel of communication. Because language is an untrustworthy channel of communication, prone to carrying misrepresentations and lies, people turn to ritual to make up for languages shortcomings. Here, Rappaports argument requires reformulation. His assumptions about language reflect a particular linguistic ideology. Where that ideology is in force, ritual will likely play the role he suggests, but where it is not, ritual will be evaluated differently. I illustrate this with examples from Melanesia and the history of Christianity in the West. The force of this reformulation is an insistence on the need for any theory of ritual as communication to situate its claims in relation to broader issues of linguistic ideology and cultural constructions of communication.

Social context, linguistic ideology, and indexical expressions in Japanese

Honorifics and sentence-final particles as indexical signs have been widely studied in Japanese pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Most previous studies have directly related linguistic forms to aspects of social contexts (e.g. social distance, gender), which tend to represent ‘normative’ usages, or the hegemonic linguistic ideology. Actual language practices of Japanese speakers, however, do not always conform to such ‘normative’ usages. The present study analyzes actual conversational data with regard to honorifics and ‘gendered’ sentence-final forms. The analysis reveals wide variations in their uses, including many ‘deviant’ uses. These variations suggest that social categories, such as social distance and gender, cannot be abstracted from the context as independent variables determining language choice. That is, honorifics and ‘gendered’ sentence-final forms cannot be regarded as direct indexes of contextual features. I argue that the choice of indexical expressions is a strategy that is based on the speaker's consideration of multiple social aspects of the context as well as on his/her linguistic ideology, or beliefs and attitudes concerning language use. Variations in indexical uses are then explained in terms of the complexity of social context and the diversity of linguistic ideologies that mediate indexical processes. The view of indexicality employed in this study enables us to account for variations in the use of indexicals in a coherent manner without marginalizing what may otherwise be considered ‘deviant’ practices.