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The duality of understanding and the understanding of duality in semiotics

Author(s): Andres Luure / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

In the view of the author, the main problem of semiotics is the understanding and advancing of understanding. To contribute to the solution of this problem, a distinction is suggested between two types of understanding: enlogy and empathy. The subject of enlogy reduces what he understands to himself as a code: he hears only what he is himself. The subject of empathy reduces what she understands to herself as a text: she sees only what she is striving to become. Enlogy is possible due to the identity of the communicants as a present unified code. Empathy is possible due to the identity of the communicants as a future common text. Mastering the code is a by-product of empathy; the texts rests on the enlogy that already is possible. Enlogy and empathy do not pereceive each other as understanding. Therefore their mutual understanding remains the hardest problem of understanding. To fulfil its task, semiotics has to address this problem.

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The semiotic construction of solitude: Processes of internalization and externalization

Author(s): Jaan Valsiner / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

Human beings create their private worlds of feelings and thoughts through immersion in the semiosphere created through situated activity contexts. Processes of internalization/externalization are at the center of development of human beings through the whole of their life courses. We consider the contexts of schooling as organized through Semiotic Demand Settings (SDS) for development of intrinsic motivation of the students. Intrinsic motivation is a process mechanism that operates as internalized and hyper-generalized feeling at the most central layer of internalization. It is a result of integration of social suggestions, hyper-generalized as an affective field, and turned into a value that directs future actions.

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From materiality to system

Author(s): Louis Armand / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

This paper seeks to address the relation of materiality to structure and phenomena of signification or semiosis. It examines the logical consequences of several major lines of argument concerning the status of semiosis with regards to the human or broadly “organic” life-world and to the “zero degree” of base materiality — from Peirce to Lotman and Sebeok — and questions the classificatory rationale that delimits semiosis to the exclusion of a general treatment of dynamic systems. Recent investigations into neurosemiotics have provided salient arguments for the need to treat semiosis as a characteristic of systems in general, and to establish a more transverse understanding of signifiability upon the basis of what makes dynamic structures, as such, possible.

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Disaster semiotics: An alternative ‘global semiotics’?

Author(s): Han-liang Chang / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

Thomas A. Sebeok’s global semiotics has inspired quite a few followers, noticeably Marcel Danesi, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio. However, for all the trendiness of the word, the very concept of global should be subject to more rigorous examination, especially within today’s ecological and politico-economic contexts. With human and natural disasters precipitating on a global and almost quotidian basis, it is only appropriate for global semioticians to pay more attention to such phenomena and to contemplate, even when confined to their attics, the semiotic consequences of disasters. The paper probes into the semiotic implications of the tsunami disaster that claimed quarter of a million lives in South and Southeast Asia during the Christmas holidays in 2004, and proposes a semiotics of disaster, developed from the discussions of the eighteenth-century British Empiricist philosopher Thomas Reid and the contemporary semiotician David S. Clarke, Jr. As the word’s etymology indicates, disaster originally referred to a natural phenomenon, i.e., ‘an obnoxious planet’, and only by extension was it later used to cover man-made calamities, be it political or economic. Although the dichotomy of nature versus culture no longer holds good, the author uses the word disaster in the traditional sense by referring to ‘natural’ disasters only.

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Semiosis and pragmatism: Toward a dynamic concept of meaning

Author(s): João Queiroz,Floyd Merrell / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

Philosophers and social scientists of diverse orientations have suggested that the pragmatics of semiosis is germane to a dynamic account of meaning as process. Semiosis, the central focus of C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic philosophy, may hold a key to perennial problems regarding meaning. Indeed, Peirce’s thought should be deemed seminal when placed within the cognitive sciences, especially with respect to his concept of the sign. According to Peirce’s pragmatic model, semiosis is a triadic, time-bound, context-sensitive, interpreter-dependent, materially extended dynamic process. Semiosis involves inter-relatedness and inter-action between signs, their objects, acts and events in the world, and the semiotic agents who are in the process of making and taking them.

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From environment to culture: Aspects of continuity

Author(s): Guido Ipsen / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

The conceptualization of the lifeworld of any species includes a reformation of the matter found in the environment into concepts which make up the species-specific Umwelt. This paper argues that the human agency in conceptualising the Umwelt necessarily transforms what we usually call “nature” into so-called “culture”. Ultimatively, this human activity has two consequences which we cannot escape, but which have an influence not only on our perception of the environment, but also on our theorising about what has been called the “nature-culture divide”, the “semiotic threshold” respectively: First, any environmental perception is at once conceived of in cultural terms. Second, whatever “nature” may be, our including it into the cultural discourse removes it from our immediate cognition.

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The meaning of meaning in biology and cognitive science: A semiotic reconstruction

Author(s): Göran Sonesson / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

The present essay aims at integrating different concepts of meaning developed in semiotics, biology, and cognitive science, in a way that permits the formulation of issues involving evolution and development. The concept of sign in semiotics, just like the notion of representation in cognitive science, have either been used too broadly, or outright rejected. My earlier work on the notions of iconicity and pictoriality has forced me to spell out the taken-forgranted meaning of the sign concept, both in the Saussurean and the Peircean tradition. My work with the evolution and development of semiotic resources such as language, gesture, and pictures has proved the need of having recourse to a more specified concept of sign. To define the sign, I take as point of departure the notion of semiotic function (by Piaget), and the notion of appresentation (by Husserl). In the first part of this essay, I compare cognitive science and semiotics, in particular as far as the parallel concepts of representation and sign are concerned. The second part is concerned with what is probably the most important attempt to integrate cognitive science and semiotics that has been presented so far, The Symbolic Species, by Terrence Deacon. I criticize Deacon’s use of notions such as iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity. I choose to separate the sign concept from the notions of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, which only in combination with the sign give rise to icons, indices, and symbols, but which, beyond that, have other, more elemental, uses in the world of perception. In the third part, I discuss some ideas about meaning in biosemiotics, which I show not to involve signs in the sense characterised earlier in the essay. Instead, they use meaning in the general sense of selection and organisation, which is a more elementary sense of meaning. Although I admit that there is a possible interpretation of Peirce, which could be taken to correspond to Uexküll’s idea of functional circle, and to meaning as function described by Emmeche and Hoffmeyer, I claim that this is a different sense of meaning than the one embodied in the sign concept. Finally, I suggest that more thresholds of meaning than proposed, for instance by Kull, are necessary to accommodate the differences between meaning (in the broad sense) and sign (as specified in the Piaget–Husserl tradition).

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Semiotics of natural disaster discourse in post-tsunami world: A theoretical framework

Author(s): Sungdo Kim / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

The study of natural disaster and its discursive dimensions from a semiotic perspective can provide a theoretical frame for the scientific communication of global catastrophes. In this paper I will suggest two models; one is a semiotic model on the natural catastrophic events and the other is a hexagon model composed of semiotic dimensions of natural disaster discourse. The six main modules include narration, description, explication, visualization, prevention, and recovery action.

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Critical events of the 1940s in Estonian life histories

Author(s): Tiiu Jaago / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

The article observes how critical times, conditioned by events concurrent with Soviet power and World War II, are currently reflected in life histories of newly independent Estonia. Oral history analysis comprises texts from southern Läänemaa: oral life history interview (2005), written responses to the Estonian National Museum’s questionnaire “The 1949 Deportation, Life as a Deportee” (1999) and a written life history sent to the Estonian Literary Museum’s relevant competition “One Hundred Lives of a Century” (1999). Aiming at historic context, materials from the Estonian Historical Archives and Läänemaa County Archives have been used. The treatment focuses on two issues. First, whether oral and written narratives only differ by the form of presentation or do they also convey different messages (ideologies). Secondly, whether memories and history documents solely complement each other or do they more essentially alter the imaginations obtained from the events. The public is presented with experience narratives on coping under difficult circumstances, both at practical and mental levels. Narratives are presented from a certain standpoint, pursuant to narrators’ convictions, with the main message remaining the same in different presentations. The addition of history sources enables to better observe the evolving of narrative tradition (narration rules) and highlight new questions (hidden in the narrative).

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Eric Wolf: A semiotic exploration of power

Author(s): Irene Portis-Winner / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

This paper discusses Eric Wolf’s (1923–1999) analysis of power in his last monograph, Anthropology (Wolf 1964) and last book Envisioning Power (Wolf 1999). In Anthropology, Wolf (1964: 96) wrote that the “anthropological point of vantage is that of a world culture, struggling to be born.” What is worth studying is human experience in all its variability and complexity. His aim was to set the framework bridging the humanities with anthropology. He never gave up this quest, only expanding it. In the new introduction to his 1964 monograph, thirty years later, he commented that such a synthesis had not occurred. Rather there were growing schisms in the field. In the preface to Envisioning Power, he held that human sciences were unable or unwilling to come to grips with how cultural configurations intertwine with considerations of power. In 1990 he had addressed the American Anthropological Society, holding that anthropologists favored a view of culture without power, while other social sciences have advanced a concept of ideology without culture. He wrote that his aim in his last book was to explore the connection of ideas and power observed in streams of behavior and recorded texts. Since minds interpose a selective screen between the organism and environment, ideas have content and functions that help bring people together or divide them. While ideas compose the entire range of mental constructs, Wolf understands ideology as configurations or unified schemes to underwrite or manifest power. Power is, according to Wolf, an aspect of all relations among people. Within this framework Wolf analyzes three cases, the Kwakiutl, the Aztecs, and Nazi Germany. The comparisons are very revealing, both the wide differences and similarities in power configurations and in the role of imagination.

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The ethnographer as a trader: On some metaphors in the Komi fieldwork diaries

Author(s): Piret Koosa,Art Leete / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

Collecting ethnographic items for the Estonian National Museum has been linked to the practice of buying objects during fieldwork. Often we can find metaphors or expressions connected with trading in the Komi fieldwork diaries. Comparing ethnographers with merchants is a stereotypical way of describing the activities of Estonian researchers in the field. If ethnographers use, in their diaries, metaphors and expressions connected to trading, it may be just a spontaneous phrasing or inter-textual play of words. Inside the community of Estonian ethnologists there exists some kind of discourse style, which is followed in the fieldwork diaries, more or less consciously. This style of narration is also connected to the specific social and historical context in which ethnographers act. At the same time, even satiric inter-textual quotations do not exclude the possibility that some of this discourse is related to a deeper level of human consciousness.

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The case of Robert Antelme

Author(s): Luba Jurgenson / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

An analysis of the mnemonic mechanisms at work in the narrative of the concentration camp experience, based on the case of Robert Antelme. This survivor of the Buchenwald camp gave a first spoken version of what was to become his major work, l’Espèce humaine (The Human Species), to his friend Dionys Mascolo. Mascolo’s testimony concerning the narrative that was told to him and his reception, some time later, of the written narrative (with the transition between the two versions marked by forgetting), question the notion of loss — in particular, the loss of a “0” text which is the text of death. This postulate allows us to explore the notion of the ineffable and to reveal its cultural implications; in other words, to approach the concept of survival as a narrative category.

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Semiotics, anthropology and the analysability of culture

Author(s): Peeter Torop / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

For each culture-studying discipline, the problem of culture’s analysability stems from disciplinary identity. One half of analysability consists of the culture's attitude and the ability of the discipline's methods of description and analysis to render the culture analysable. The other half of analysability is shaped by the discipline’s own adaptation to the characteristics of culture as the object of study and the development of a suitable descriptive language. The ontologisation and epistemologisation of culture as the subject of analysis is present in each culture-studying discipline or discipline complex. Culture analysts are therefore scholars with double responsibilities. Their professionalism is measured on the basis of their analytical capability and the ability to construct (imagine, define) the object of study. The analytical capability and the ability to construct the object of study also determine the parameters of analysability. Be the analyst an anthropologist or a culture semiotician, the analysability of culture depends on how the analyst chooses to conduct the dialogue between him/herself and his/her object of study.

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Carré sémiotique et interprétation des récits mythiques

Author(s): Richard Pottier / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2006

Greimas’ semiotic square is built upon the hypothesis that the concept of elementary structure of signification is operational only if subjected to a logical interpretation and formulation. However, Greimas’ commentaries on that model are questionable. On the one hand, he asserts that logical nature of the connection between any two terms, s1 and s2, is undetermined; on the other hand, he provides the relations s1 – non s1, s2 – non s2, s1 – non s2 and s2 – non s1 with a logical status. Now, since these two statements are inconsistent, a choice must be made: either these four relations have a logical significance, and then the semiotic square is a logical square, so that s1 – s2 has to be interpreted as an incompatibility relation; or s1 – s2 has no logical meaning, and then not only the status of the other relations given in the model is not logical either, but also the simple fact of applying negation to the terms s1 and s2 is meaningless. That dilemma follows from an argument, that Greimas has laid down as a principle, under which linguistic communication depends on the existence of a deep level (or immanent level) of the significance, that is supposed to precede its manifestation in speech. If, conversely, we assume that significance is produced at discursive level, and that consequently the patterning of linguistic codes relies on what could be called a semantic sedimentation process, which comes out from linguistic activity, there is no more dilemma. Such a thesis, which implies that the elementary structure of signification must be seen as the schematization by the describer of speakers’ mental activity, leads to a point of view inversion. Nevertheless, the two conditions which, according to Greimas, are required for catching the meaning are still relevant, except that, contrary to Greimas’ opinion, they now apply at the speech level: two discursive units can be opposed if they simultaneously include a common feature which join them, and a distinguishing feature which disjoin them.

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L’épreuve de l’autre

Author(s): Eric Landowski / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2006

It is nowadays a commonplace of academic discourse on social sciences, especially when it comes to such disciplines as anthropology and semiotics, to oppose the old (and old-fashioned) methods of the “structuralists” to post-modern and post-structural epistemological attitudes. Structuralism, it is said, was based on the idea that it is possible to apprehend the meaning of cultural productions from an exterior and therefore objective standpoint, just by making explicit their immanent principles of organization. Today, on the contrary, a totally distinct approach of cultural productions would stem from the consciousness of a strict interdependence, or even of an identity in nature between subject and object at all levels of the process of knowledge, at least in the area of the humanities. However, such a crude opposition proves insufficient when one observes the effective practices of current research. The example here analysed is the account given by the American anthropologist Paul Rabinow of his first mission abroad: Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. The analysis, based on the use of a semiotic modelling of interaction, consists in exploring the variety of positions respectively adopted by the anthropologist and his informants according to circumstances and contexts. Four regimes are in principle distinguishable: programmation, based on regularity and predictability of the actors’ behaviour, manipulation, based on some kind of contractualization of their relationships, adjustment, based upon reciprocal sensitivity and various strategies permitting to both partners of the interaction to test one another, and a regime of consent to the unexpected or the unforeseeable. The main result of the analysis resides in the possibility of showing that at each of these styles of pragmatic interaction corresponds a specific regime at the cognitive level as well. This leads to stressing the complexity, if not heterogeneity, of the strategies of knowledge involved at various stages of anthropological research, from the collection of data to the cooperative production of new forms of understanding. Taking the risk of generalization, one might also consider the interactional device, which is here tested through the reading of P. Rabinow’s report as a metatheoretical model describing the various epistemological stances at work and at stake in the practices of research in social sciences at large.

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Hints and guesses: Legal modes of semio-logical reasoning

Author(s): Dinda L. Gorlée / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2005

Legal semiotics is an internationally proliferated subfield of general semiotics. The three-step principles of Peirce’s semiotic logic are the three leading categories: firstness, secondness and thirdness, grounded on the reverse principles of logic: deduction, induction and — Peirce’s discovery — abduction. Neither induction nor abduction can provide a weaker truth claim than deduction. Abduction occurs in intuitive conclusions regarding the possibility of backward reasoning, contrary to the system of law. Civil-law cultures possess an abstract deductive orientation, governed by the rigidity of previous written law, whereas the actual fragility of a common-law system with cases and precedents inclines to induction, orienting its habituality (habits) in moral time and space. Customary law gives credit to abductive values: relevant sentiments, beliefs and propositions are upgraded to valid reasoning. The decision-making by U.S. case law and English common-law is characterized as decision law with abductive undertones.

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National signs: Estonian identity in performance

Author(s): Janelle Reinert / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2005

Since Estonia is in the midst of a national redefinition and examination of past traditions and future aspirations, it makes an excellent case study for the potentiality of theatre as an arbiter of national identity. The changing value of the institution itself is part of the equation (will Estonians continue to appreciate and attend the theatre in coming years?). In addition, the historical role of Estonian theatre as a repository for national narratives, especially literary ones, makes it a significant site for struggles around print and technology, and between embodied performances and archival performatives. This essay introduces a series of articles that address how Estonia and its theatre might be regarded and understood in light of its history, memories, present experiences, and future possibilities. The idea of pretence that lies at the heart of theatricality itself provides an ideal means for interrogating national identity in a time of great instability and flux. The examples of productions discussed in these three essays share more than a deliberate utilization of the rubrics of theatricality. It seems no coincidence that the reworking of national classics, Estonian national myths, and ethnic folk songs and ceremonies takes place concurrently with the representation of new technologies, commodity capitalism, and diasporic collisions. Embodying precisely the predicament of culture in a country reassessing its past and confronting its future, the theatre is an important institution for national resignification.

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From globality to partiality: Semiotic practices of resistance to the discourse of war

Author(s): Daniele Monticelli / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2005

This paper examines the discourse of war from a semiotic point of view and suggests some ideas for the development of practices of resistance to it. The discourse of war can be considered symptomatic in respect to underlying discourses of totality such as globalisation. By aiming at explanatory simplification, this kind of discourse takes the paradoxical form of an exhaustive paradigm which always engenders a residuum to be eliminated. Semiotics can develop practices of resistance to the discourse of war by operating on the syntagmatic chains generated by its mediatic agencies. These practices are based on the postmodernist critique of totalising discourses. A process in which details are disconnected from the mediatic chains where they vanish might trigger the opening of a space of community that makes the residuum of war discourse presentable through metaphorical substitutions. Semiotic practices of resistance to the discourse of war presuppose a shift in theory from the paradigm of globality to that of partiality. Partiality must be understood both from a political and an epistemological point of view and it could therefore represent an important element in the development of a semioethics.

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Floyd Merrell named sixth Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow of the Semiotic Society of America

Author(s): John Deely / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2005

The combined 29th & 30th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America was held on the campus of the University of West Florida in Pensacola on October 20–22. At this meeting, Professor Floyd Merrell of Indiana University/Purdue University (IUPUI) was inscribed as the sixth Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow. Professor Merrell’s Fellow Address, forthcoming in The American Journal of Semiotics, entitled “The Magical Number Three”, addressed the nature of the Peircean sign in light of a nonlinear, complemented, context-dependent lattice, with particular focus on how the lattice: (1) reveals the function of distinctions between signs; (2) supports Peirce’s triadic notion of semiosis; (3) models the notion of signs incessantly becoming other signs; (4) takes its leave of classical logical principles; and (5) accounts for the emergence of novelty — spontaneous, fresh, unique signs.

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Маленький человек в неевклидовом мире: о художественном пространстве в фильме и пьесе Т. Стоппарда “Розенкранц и Гильденстерн мертвы”

Author(s): Oleg B. Zaslavskii / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2005

It is shown that quite different aspects of Tom Stoppard’s work — spatial organization, relationship between reality and the conditional character of events, causality and narrative links, the problems of choice and personality — are united by the spatial one-sided model like the Möbius strip or Klein bottle. The artistic space turns out to be not orientable, the time being cyclic. This enables us to explain the mutual exchange of names between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and a number of other paradoxical features in the plot and composition. The model like the Möbius strip embodies the absence of a free choice: there is no other side in the world and there is no chance to escape from the fate indicated in the title of Tom Stoppard’s work. The relevance of topology, e.g. the property of a global nature, is connected with the fact that a bearer of danger is the world as a whole. Apart from this, it points to the fact that such a structure of the world is essentially “non-Euclidean” and cannot be understood on the basis of observations from every-day life or “obvious” experiments like those carried out by Rosencrantz.

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