Semiotic Relations Research Articles

Aesthetics of recession: Urban space and identity in Attenberg and Beautiful Youth

Abstract The contemporary cinemas of the European countries directly involved with the current socio-economic crisis, such as Greece and Spain, have become key cultural areas in which urban space and social identity is imagined. Films such as Attenberg (Tsangari, 2010) and Hermosa Juventud/Beautiful Youth (Rosales, 2014) come from different cultural backgrounds and are examples of films that establish a powerful semiotic relationship between aesthetics and politics to give cinematic space a new meaning by tapping into a nexus of ideas about time and subjectivity. The films bear striking similarities in their articulation of the latest economic crisis through images of urban recession and their manifestation of social identity. Commonalities can be detected in stylistic and narrational strategies, thematic motifs, characterization and plot construction, and the use of film technology. This article explores the ways in which these images are related and articulate the current social reality in South European cities narratively, stylistically and formally. Bringing Walter Benjamin’s ‘aestheticizing politics’ of urban space in dialogue with Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘desubjectification’, this article is interested in investigating the links between subjective experience and urban space in South European cities hit by the recession.

The Political Significance of the Face: Deleuze's Critique of Levinas

While Levinas famously claims that ethics precedes ontology and emanates from the concrete experience of the other's face, it is often forgotten that Deleuze also discusses the face in numerous writings. The purpose of this paper is to briefly outline Levinas's arguments regarding the constitution of the face to chart its ethical importance, before engaging with Deleuze's critique of Levinas's position. I show that, by distinguishing between two systems of signification – the head-body system and the face system – Deleuze agrees with Levinas that the face is an important signifier delineating the other, but destructs the notion of face to show that it: (1) is more complex and multi-dimensional than Levinas realizes; (2) emanates from a specific semiotic relationship; and (3) emanates from specific socio-historical circumstances. Showing the face is a semiotic construct based in and emanating from a specific socio-historical configuration allows Deleuze not only to conclude that the face is related to politics not ethics as Levinas claims, but also to claim that it entails the inhuman in the human. This clarifies the nature of the face in Deleuze, offers a critique of Levinas's influential thinking on ethics, brings us to a discussion of the relationship between ethics and politics and reveals what Deleuze takes the political to entail.

Storytelling variants based on semiotic relations

An intriguing phenomenon in human storytelling – inexhaustible source of inspiration for digital storytelling – is our ability to still recognize a story that the narrator has felt free to change to a considerable extent. However, observing how folktales have appeared and disseminated through different countries along the centuries, we may notice that our favorite stories have evolved no less dramatically in the course of the oral storytelling tradition. In this paper, taking Little Red Riding Hood as example, we review a small number of variants of this universally cherished story, in an attempt to understand how variants emerge. Our study is founded on the classification of types and motifs contained in the Index of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, and examines the hypothesis that variants are often the consequence of type interactions, which we propose to characterize in terms of semiotic relations associated with the so-called four master tropes. The paper presents our analysis of the variant-formation phenomenon and describes the implementation of a computational system capable of generating new variants by applying the proposed semiotic relations.

The circle and the maze: Two images of ecosemiotics

This article compares the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Charles S. Peirce to elucidate two contrasting yet connected images of ecosemiotics. The intent is not simply to oppose their work, but to explore a tension which has implications for the ethical dimension of this emerging discipline. Uexküll’s functional cycle is associated with the image of a circle, which, while emphasizing the integration of organism and environment, is shown to invoke solipsism, and an overly deterministic depiction of ecological relations. Peirce’s drawing of a labyrinth is taken to represent a maze, which, while exemplifying the evolutionary play of ecosystems, may entail a level of unpredictability that is catastrophically chaotic. The root of these diverging depictions is identified with the role of subjectivity in engendering semiotic relations in the work of both Uexküll and Peirce. Where the more regressive aspects of Uexküll’s theoretical biology are mitigated by a teleological interpretation of life’s underlying causality, orientating agency within Peirce’s work depends upon attention to the idea of the self in his philosophy of signs. In conclusion, Eduardo Kohn’s conception of an ‘ecology of selves’ is cited, and the status of the organism as a living symbol of its environment is reaffirmed.

Linguistic exogamy and language shift in the northwest Amazon

Abstract The sociocultural complex of the northwest Amazon is remarkable for its system of linguistic exogamy in which individuals marry outside their language groups. This article illustrates how linguistic exogamy crucially relies upon the alignment of descent and post-marital residence. Native ideologies apprehend languages as the inalienable possessions of patrilineally reckoned descent groups. At the same time, post-marital residence is traditionally patrilocal. This alignment between descent and post-marital residence means that the language which children are normatively expected to produce – the language of their patrilineal descent group – is also the language most widely spoken in the local community, easing acquisition of the target language. Indigenous migration to Catholic mission centers in the twentieth century and ongoing migration to urban areas along the Rio Negro in Brazil are reconfiguring the relationship between multilingualism and marriage. With out-migration from patrilineally-based villages, descent and post-marital residence are no longer aligned. Multilingualism is being rapidly eroded, with language shift from minority Eastern Tukanoan languages to Tukano being widespread. Continued practice of descent group exogamy even under such conditions of widespread language shift reflects how the semiotic relationship between language and descent group membership is conceptualized within the system of linguistic exogamy.

Germ Cells are Made Semiotically Competent During Evolution

Germ cells are cross-roads of development and evolution. They define the origin of every new generation and, at the same time, represent the biological end-product of any mature organism. Germ cells are endowed with the following capacities: (1) to store a self-descriptive program, (2) to accumulate a protein-synthesizing machinery (ribosomes), and (3) to incorporate enough nourishment to sustain embryonic development (yolk). To accomplish this goal, germ cells do not simply unfold a pre-determined program or realize a sole instructive role. On the contrary, due to the complexity of their cytoarchitecture and the nature of the soma-to-germ interactions, they are heavily involved in processes of sign recognition and meaningful tissue exploration. At each stage of their inward migration, germ plasma membranes act as semiotic interfaces allowing cells to interact with the surrounding extracellular milieu and experience the compatibility of selected developmental sequences. The question of which signaling pathways are activated at each developmental stage does not result from a strictly predetermined program instructing germ cell stemness. Rather, each developmental sequence is an open-ended semiotic relationship explored and gradually defined during evolution by the context-dependency of specific cell-to-cell interactions. In this way, any structural and functional novelty that has emerged in the course of germ cell interactions may be interpreted as an exaptation fixed in the species genome in response to specific environmental constraints.

The Semiotic Relationship between Liu-shu and Hunminjeongeum

The purpose of this study was to explore the semiotic relationship between Liu-shu and Hunminjeongeum. To accomplish this purpose, first, this study made an attempt to define and classify the Korean alphabet based on Liu-shu. The findings of this study showed that the Korean alphabet has the close relationship with Chinese characters in regard to principles of making graphemes. In other words, both pictographic and simple ideographic letters are basic graphemes. Furthermore, both ideographic and semantic-phonetic compound characters are combinations of basic graphemes. Second, this study conducted the semiotic interpretation of Liu-shu to explore the principles of creating the Korean alphabet. The semiotic interpretation obtained some interesting findings as follows: 1) Both pictographic and simple ideographic letters revealed the basic relation between the sign vehicle and its meaning. 2) The semantic-phonetic compound characters displayed the relation between denotation and connotation. 3) The ideographic compound character seemed to support the relation between object language and metalanguage. Although this study did not fully explain the principles of creating Korean alphabets, this study probably helps to find the principles in terms of semiotics.

Produciendo Chérrepe: reducción, etnia y performance en los valles de Zaña y Chamán, siglos XVI y XVII

Since the early 20th century, Andeanist archaeologists have made frequent use of ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources to add narrative, structural, and processual detail to our descriptions of past worlds. However, we have paid insufficient attention to the semiotic relationships between texts and archaeological sites – i.e., how both of these sets of media reflect and construct reality in distinct ways. In this essay, I examine sites and landscapes that emerged through forced resettlement in the lower Zana and Chaman valleys, in Peru’s north coast region, during the late 16th century AD. In doing so, I present several ideas about how we might rethink the comparison and synthesis of textual and archaeological evidence in the study of the Andean past. Specifically, I call attention to the performative dimensions of both reduccion sites and visita documents and underscore their role in colonial ethnogenesis.

Language and other artifacts: socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction.

Niche construction theory is a relatively new approach in evolutionary biology that seeks to integrate an ecological dimension into the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. It is regarded by many evolutionary biologists as providing a significant revision of the Neo-Darwinian modern synthesis that unified Darwin’s theory of natural and sexual selection with 20th century population genetics. Niche construction theory has been invoked as a processual mediator of social cognitive evolution and of the emergence and evolution of language. I argue that language itself can be considered as a biocultural niche and evolutionary artifact. I provide both a general analysis of the cognitive and semiotic status of artifacts, and a formal analysis of language as a social and semiotic institution, based upon a distinction between the fundamental semiotic relations of “counting as” and “standing for.” I explore the consequences for theories of language and language learning of viewing language as a biocultural niche. I suggest that not only do niches mediate organism-organism interactions, but also that organisms mediate niche-niche interactions in ways that affect evolutionary processes, with the evolution of human infancy and childhood as a key example. I argue that language as a social and semiotic system is not only grounded in embodied engagements with the material and social-interactional world, but also grounds a sub-class of artifacts of particular significance in the cultural history of human cognition. Symbolic cognitive artifacts materially and semiotically mediate human cognition, and are not merely informational repositories, but co-agentively constitutive of culturally and historically emergent cognitive domains. I provide examples of the constitutive cognitive role of symbolic cognitive artifacts drawn from my research with my colleagues on cultural and linguistic conceptualizations of time, and their cultural variability. I conclude by reflecting on the philosophical and social implications of understanding artifacts co-agentively.

La lonza svelata. Fonti classiche, cristiane e ‘interne’ dell’allegoria della frode

Using the so-called ‘cord enigma’ at the end of Inferno XVI as a springboard, this essay aims to demonstrate that the key to understanding the apparition of the beasts in the first canto of the Comedia lies here, in the close semiotic relationship between Geryon and the leopard. Evidence to support the theory that the leopard is indeed an allegory for fraud emerges through a careful analysis of the meanings attached this beast (both as pardus and lynx) in the Graeco-Latin, biblical and patristic traditions familiar to Dante.

“For Us It Is Otherwise”

In this paper I seek to attend to the paradox of Palestinian refugee poverty in Lebanon, a poverty engineered and deliberately perpetuated through the play of recent state sovereignties, and incorporated in the material and bodily lifeworlds of a majority of Lebanon’s Palestinians. This poverty is not effectuated in the recognizable form of a “political subject of poverty”—a “I, poor”—who would emerge in the interpretative act of establishing a semiotic relationship of some kind between her malnourishment, ill health, or exposure to dampness and dust on the one hand and on the other a field of social belonging in which she would claim inclusion. In order to do so, through three brief ethnographic sketches I draw attention to processes of disclosure of self and world strung together from the everyday run-ins with the world that the lives of the refugee poor entail. If there is a politics of refugee poverty, I argue, its distinctiveness lies in shunning the category of citizenship and the manner in which th...

Social distance and the multimodal construction of the Other in sectarian song

This paper introduces the concept of “tonal gravity” through a multimodal analysis of a YouTube video to demonstrate how multimodality is key to the construction of “Rule Britannia” as a sectarian song. The analysis focuses upon the multimodal semiotics of social distance which has been a key concept in sociological and anthropological traditions in recent times. This concept offers a means to understand the social semiotic relationship between Self and Other in multimodal discourse. Following previous work in social semiotics and music studies which examine how visual composition, music and the voice have constructed social distance or expressions of intimacy, I introduce the concept of tonal gravity which extends the metaphors of semiotic space in previous work in the musical mode, to account for a fuller understanding of how music helps narrate the multimodal Self and Other. This is introduced via a close multimodal analysis of “Rule Britannia” as a Rangers Football fan video which is only transformed into a sectarian text through multimodal collocation where different semiotic resources in various modes act in combination to produce a dominant Self actively prejudiced against a low Other.

The Struggle for Woman’s Place and Voice in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Sand’s Indiana

The aim of my article is to uncover the deep semiotic relation existing between Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Sand’s Indiana (1832), highlighting the proto-feminist elements that characterize both novels and drawing a comparative analysis of the two plots centered on the difficult journey of initiation of two young women physically and emotionally imprisoned by the laws of patriarchal society. Both novels follow a track of self-discovery through a progressive and circular development that shows below the surface plot, affirming social conventions, a submerged plot encoding rebellion. Through a semiotic analysis of the deep structure of the two novels my article intends to reveal a three-stage development of the protagonists, strictly connected to their progressive awakening to romantic and physical love. Moreover an analysis of the isotopic structure of the two texts will show how the dichotomy Nature vs. Culture undermines the two plots, from the micro to the macro levels of the texts. The conflict between Nature and Culture is at the origin of other thematic and figurative isotopies: love vs. marriage, physical vs. spiritual love, freedom vs. slavery, faith vs. religion, Creole vs. English, dark vs. light etc. These isotopies underline and support in both novels a distortion of the formalized conventions of love, highlighting the thematic conflict between woman’s individual desire and the limits set to her within a patriarchal society.

The Manufacture of Chance: Firstness as a Fixture of Life

Whereas Peirce’s logic (and belief therein) drove him to postulate a primitive sentiency of physical matter, this essay argues that life exhibits behavior that is radically discontinuous from its preconditions; e.g., life manufactures chance by semiotic means. A sign being something that stands for another thing to a mind, signs are brought into existence only by acts of ‘reading.’ Peirce argued that this action is an element of physics, and thus the entire universe ‘lives.’ This essay postulates a degenerate form of Firstness that is contingent upon ‘caused’ forms of apparent but not actual chance, and which consists of possibility sans sentiency. This argument limits the range of Peirce’s semiotics to biology; chance remains radical, though its roots now lie in the coextension of semiotics and life. As living things live only by incorporating extant phenomena, continuation depends on the ability to enter into successful semiotic relationships. This results in the ‘minding’ behavior that is both biological sentiency and genuine Firstness, and which expresses radically discontinuous behavior. Thus chance becomes something akin to truth: neither exists ‘metaphysically’ (as with James’ mythic Jack of Spades), both are quite distinct from being, and both happen only as a consequence of interpretation as it is generated by and re-generates sign-wielding beings as they seek what they need to go on living. While quite distinct from Peirce, this notion of chance may well result in a more productive use of his semiotics.

What Does Greimas’s Semiotic Square Really Do?

Semiotician A.J. Greimas introduced the semiotic square to consider semiotic relationships (and constraints) between binary terms. Literary, art, and music critics have seized upon the procedure to analyze actants, narrative structures, and discursive paradigms. This essay argues that current literature ignores the visual aspects of the square.

Visual Semiotics of the Spaces We Inhabit: Preface

In our everyday lives, we occupy a variety of places that, upon first consideration, do not seem either legal or political. Upon closer examination, the spaces where we live may reveal a uniquely visual semiotics of place, a semiotic system that generates meaning and contestation through structure, signage, and symbolism. As sites of power. these places can be urban, rural, or simply in between. The ways in which power manifests itself here is as law, legality, governance. Visual representations of meaning in our quotidian terrain of habitation constitute our relationships and they govern who we are and how we understand our place in the world. The visual engagement with the semiotic construction of who we are as individuals, as a collective, and the presence of both within different communities is visibly marked by the banal as well as by the overtly distinctive. In the routine places of our lives, identities fostered by rules and structures challenge us to reconsider how we conceptualize ourselves, each other, the state, and the spectrum of community therein. In this volume, cultural themes of consumption, normativity, deviance, identity, and governmentality contribute to this visually semiotic relationship shaping our understandings of law, power, and place. An impressive array of images, spaces, and notions of law lays the backdrop to this collection of scholarship critically engaged with everyday objects, uses, and understandings. Our world comes alive through images. What we see and how we see semiotically constructs our reality and contributes to a constitutive approach to law in which representation and image signify power, resistance, and the mundane. Images, spaces, and law work in conjunction with one another to sculpt our everyday lives. Through images, semiotic representations signify our world. Constructions of spatiality give meaning to how and where we live and spatiality constitutes our notions of what is public, what is less so, and what is not. Landscapes can be outside, in our homes, in the air, on our bodies. A constitutive

Baudrillard's simulated ecology

Jean Baudrillard, the scholar and critic of postmodernity, struggled with questions of postmodern ontology: representation of the real through the semiotic process of signification is threatened with the rise of simulacra, the simulated real. With this rise, seductive semiotic relationships between signs replace any traditional ontological representamen. This struggle has implications for environmentalism since the problems of contemporary environmental philosophy are rooted in problems with ontology. Hence the question of postmodern ecology: can the natural survive postmodern simulation? Baudrillard's communicative analysis of semiotic postmodernity can both support and extend ecosemiotic theses in response to these questions, questions that must be answered in order to explore our paradoxical understandings of the natural and confirm an understanding of environmentalism for postmodernity. In this paper I will argue for the merit of a semiotic understanding of postmodernity, develop the idea of ecology in this context, and then compare Baudrillard's approach to the contemporary development of ecosemiotics.

A semiotic framework to understand how signs in construction process simulations convey information

Planning the production sequence for a construction project requires the combination and transfer of information and knowledge from a large variety of areas. To support this knowledge combination and transfer, construction process visualizations, also referred to as 4D CAD, have proven to be valuable tools. Within these visualizations, signs, such as icons, indexes, or symbols, are often used to visualize contextual information related to the different construction activities. To understand the mechanisms of how these signs meaningfully convey such contextual information, this paper introduces a semiotic framework consisting of semiotic concepts, their definitions and relations. This paper also illustrates the power of the framework by applying it for analyzing the signs used in two construction process visualizations.

Tastes of Talk: Qualia and the moral flavor of signs

This essay explores the semiotic processes by which speakers attribute sensuous qualities – e.g. lightness, dryness, straightness and others – to speech registers. Language ideologies create indexical relations linking linguistic forms to typical personae, activities and values in social life; they also construct other semiotic relations that enable speakers to attribute taste, texture, smell, sound, or shape to speech. Such extended, cross-modal, sensuous metaphors are taken up as lived experience, as part of larger frameworks of cultural value. By extending several Peircean concepts, the essay shows how speakers become persuaded that such sensuous properties of speech are existentially real. Two pedagogical genres from 19th and 20th century Hungary illustrate how properties of speech are reproduced, either via explicit instruction or as displayed in the parallelism of narrative. Both genres construct speech qualia as constitutive moves in moral and political projects that become more persuasive through the display of valued qualia.

The Human Being as Sign in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana

This article offers an interpretation of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana I-II.5.6, which brings contemporary semiotic theory into dialogue with Augustinian theology in order to flesh out Augustine’s incipient semiotic theological anthropology. The argument focuses on the interrelation between Augustine’s two seminal distinctions, between signum and res, and between uti and frui, reading the first (semiotic) distinction in the light of the second (theological) distinction, and vice versa. The principal claim is that human beings are signs of God; but this is qualified in the course of the argument, resulting in the revised claim that the difference between God and creation becomes manifest in the transformation of human semiotic relations. Specifically, I argue, God’s redemptive transformation of human beings consists in their liberation from mutually reductive (dyadic) interpretation, freeing them for new signification in new contexts. The article ends with the bold conjecture that a genuinely triadic semiotics implies and requires a doctrine of creation.