Semiology Theory Research Articles

Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience

other has proceeded side by side with research on the conception and function of music and language in particular historical contexts. How (and, of course, by whom and for whom) was music actually talked about and described in the past? Reception history and the history of music theory too rarely have sought to unravel carefully the interior logic of the discourse about music even from a putatively ahistorical philosophical perspective, let alone from the point of view of the past. What might a historically contingent set of assumptions, buried in the use of particular language to talk about music, look like? What influence on musical life might specific language use about music itself have exerted on the course of music history? Structuralist and semiological theories have been utilized in an effort to differentiate theoretical notions about meaning and communication in music from empirical usages. JeanJacques Nattiez's tripartite distinction of the poetic, neutral, and aesthetic levels in musical situations provides a useful theory about how one might distinguish between a composer's intent, a musical text, its realization in time directly (performance) or indirectly (acoustic realization through the playing of recordings)and the reactions of varying types of listeners.'

Sociology as a Discursive Space - The Coming Age of a New Orthodoxy?

The field of sociology can be described as a triangle, the apexes of which are represented by the structure of social organisation (Spencer's theory of the division of labour), the structure of cultural codes (Saussure's theory of lan guage and semiology) and social action (Weber's methodological individu alism) This becomes a three-dimensional discursive space when underneath it we place, as the fourth apex, nature Consequently we have a triangular pyramid standing on its head (nature) its four plans are represented by the field of sociology (the structure of social organisation. the structure of cultural codes, action), structuralist social anthropology (the structure of social organ isation, the structure of cultural codes, nature), cultural anthropology (the structure of cultural codes, action, nature) and historical materialism (the structure of social organisation, action, nature). This turned-over tetrahedron is described in the paper as the discursive space of sociology, a space that has taken shape with the attempts at a theoretical synthesis of sociology during the 1980s (Alexander, Bourdieu. Collms, Giddens, Habermas). As in the case of the discursive condition; for all forms of knowledge, the discursive space of sociology is a rhetorical closure which determines who are classical wnters and how these classical writers are to be read and understood. At the same time it serves as the basis for the positivity of sociological knowledge. It is suggested that this space will emerge to reorganise the uncertainty produced by the collapse of the Parsonian orthodoxy which was primarily concerned to examine society from the perspective of the structure of social organisation.

THE SEMIOLOGY OF LAW

There is an implicit claim in Professor Jackson's Semiotics and Legal Theoty. It is that through French semiotics he has discovered the legal philosopher's stone: semiotics will turn the law's rhetoric, image and ideology into the law's truth. The book is an important achievement and as a pioneering work raises more questions than it answers. The structure of the book outwardly follows a straightforward plan: first, revealing the magic of semiology; second, applying it earnestly to bring out the deficiencies in the work of HIlart, MacCormick, Kelsen and Dworkin; and, finally, in a preliminary way, revealing the true metal of a semiological theory of law. Some of the book's serious deficiencies are the effects of undertaking so much within 310 pages of text. For within this plan things go somewhat wrong, partly through the lack of clarity of exposition, partly through the absence of a cogent inner argument. Semiology (or semiotics) was defined by the founder of the modern semiotic movement, Saussure, as 'the science that studies the life of signs within society'. Semiology, he believed, would show what constitutes signs and what laws govern them.2 Linguistics was only a part of this general science. Semiology would discover the laws applicable to the signs employed in language and to the signs in social life more generally. He expected that the semiotic study of social life, including myths, rituals and customs, would shed new light on social facts and demonstrate their controlling semiotic laws. The subsequent fate of semiology is extremely complex.3 Essentially, Saussure's analysis of language in terms of interacting structures which generate meaning has become the model for an explication of social and cultural phenomena as kinds of communication. In other words, the linguistic model became a general social model. In addition, a Marxist tendency, the critique of ideology, has incorporated semiological ideas in uncovering the working of social power in distorting communication.4

Thematization in Everyday Life: A Critical Approach

This paper presents an examination of some of the ways in which social criticism can be developed on the basis of the analysis of everyday life in modern societies. An attempt is made to combine the results of phenomenological (Schutz), ethnomethodological (Garfinkel), and dialectical (Kosik) approaches to the everyday world as the world-taken-for-granted, with the study, founded on semiological theory, of social images and the ideological elements implicit in them. At the centre of the discussion lies the mechanism of thematization by which the subjects assign predicates to persons, objects and events in a given social context.

The Hell of Connotation

Abstract Despite its endless recourse to examples from the Highway Code and from advertising, semiological theory has tended to treat the visual image as an awkward exception, as something which does not quite fit the usual rules. The apparent guilelessness of visual imagery seems to make it harder for commentators to recognize the processes of naturalization at work. Ever since Saussure (despite his grand claims for an all-encompassing science of semiology) mistakenly refused to grant his nonlinguistic examples the arbitrariness he acknowledged in linguistic signs, analysis of the visual image has lagged behind that of the literary text. In recent years this has been particularly evident with regard to the notions of denotation and connotation.

Die kommunikasiekunde van Augustinus

SUMMARY The communicology of Augustine is a discussion of the Christian thinker's contribution to the dialogical theory of communication. Attention is given to his views on education, his persuasive communication, his vertical communication and his concept of man, to show how he connected the classical theory of rhetoric and modern communicology. Augustine extended the dialogical concept of interpersonal communication to mass communication. It is also shown how his theory and practice of communication is based on his concept of man, and how it developed towards the mainstream of hermeneutical, phenomenologal, existential and semiological theories of communication. The question is answered why a thinker out of the past who has not systematically developed a theory of communication, can contribute more to the study of the subject than an academic handbook on communication.

Organizational Socialization as Information Processing Activity: A Life History Analysis

Organizational socialization is most commonly viewed as the process by which individuals internalize the norms and values of the culture surrounding them. Through socialization, external, situational constraints are transformed into subjectively held assumptions that shape the premises behind individual decision making and so condition the individual's response to the situation. However, the way in which individuals learn, or internalize, organizational or cultural values is still uncertain because the cognitive processes that mediate such learning are rarely explicated. The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation of the way in which socialization occurs by analyzing the way in which one individual came to know the social world. Using the life history methodology, the autobiography of Helen Keller is analyzed in order to expose the nature of socialization. This analysis is informed by an information processing perspective based on semiological theory. It suggests that learning takes place through...

Semiology and Critical Theory: From Marx to Baudrillard

In the twentieth century several groups of social theorists have labored to unlock the Marxist paradigm from the grip of economic reductionism in which it was held by the Second International and Stalinism. The Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, the theorists of the Frankfurt School, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, independent critics such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Karl Korsch, Eastern European Communists, Georg Lukacs in Hungary, Adam Schaff in Poland, the Praxis group in Yugoslavia and Karel Kosik in Czechoslavia, and finally the existential, phenomenological and even structuralist Marxists in France and Italy have all argued that the concept of the superstructure must account for the relative autonomy of culture. They have made this argument on both epistemological and historical grounds. The epistemological arguments are by now well known and need not detain us. The reflection theory of consciousness upon which Second International and Leninist Marxism rests is clearly false and was not maintained by Marx. Although the rejection of reflection theory leaves many questions unanswered, the historical arguments are equally important and lead di-

Rapports de propriété, ségrégation et pratiques de l'espace résidentiel

The aim of the authors is the theoretical reformulation of the question of segregation. In order to do this, they examine in turn psycho‐sociological theories, morphological and semiological theories as well as theories of residential location.The authors show how all of these approaches can only define classificatory processes and propose an analysis beginning from those social relations which structure residential consumption; that is, relations of property in housing.Starting from a definition of segregation as a process of exclusive practices of residential space, the authors show how relations of residential property determine two types of segregation: one ‘by antagonism’, based on the valorization of property capital, and one ‘by incongruence’ based on conditions of real appropriation of housing.