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Структурные парадоксы русской литературы и поэтика псевдооборванного текста

Author(s): Oleg B. Zaslavskii / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2006

Traditionally, the Pushkin’s work “My provodili vecher na dache…” is considered to be uncompleted. However, on the basis of structural arguments, we show that, in fact, it is completed as an artistic whole. Taking also into account the results of previous analysis of works by Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol’, we introduce a new notion of “pseudobroken texts”. Their distinctive feature consists in the structural correspondence between the break of a plot and a break as the theme of the text — such, that it is the break of a text which confirms that the text is finished. From the general viewpoint, such a paradoxical phenomenon can be viewed as modeling the impossibility to destroy art and culture.

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From semiosis to social policy: The less trodden path

Author(s): Andrew Stables / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

The argument moves through three stages. In the first, the case is made for accepting ‘living is semiotic engagement’ as ‘a foundational statement for a postfoundational age’. This requires a thoroughgoing rejection of mind-body substance dualism, and a problematisation of humanism. In the second, the hazardous endeavour of applying the above perspective to social policy begins with a consideration of the sine qua non(s) underpinning such an application. These are posited as unpredictability of outcomes and blurring of the human/non-human boundary. In the third stage, the case is developed for a policy orientation that is both liberal-pragmatic (with some caveats relating to ‘liberal’) and post-humanist, and the paper concludes with some speculation concerning the precise policy outcomes of such an orientation.

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Impact or explosion? Technological culture and the ballistic metaphor

Author(s): Irene Machado / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2006

The term ‘impact’ has become the kind of word which, when it relates to the evaluation of technological advances in contemporary culture, suggests signs of erosion, debilitation and evasion. The misinformed and indiscriminate use of the term in the most varied of contexts has created an impasse in the cultural semiotic approach, where sign systems are viewed in terms of borders and relations. The objective of this article is to examine the trivialisation of the use of the ballistic metaphor in this explosive moment of the culture. For this, we will refer to the formulations presented by the semiotician, Juri Lotman, in his book, appropriately entitled Culture and Explosion. To what degree is the concept of explosion presented as a counterpart to the notion of impact? The desire to find answers to this question is what motivated this inquiry.

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How do histories of survival begin? The incipit as a strategic place of the inexpressible

Author(s): Licia Taverna / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

I analyse here some histories of people who lived in concentration camps and told their experiences: De Gaulle Anthonioz (La Traversée de la nuit), Geoffroy (Au temps des crématoires…), Semprun (L’Écriture ou la vie). These histories represent the lives of survivors, but they are also a form of literary expression with a narrative structure that codifies a genre. More particularly, I focus the attention on the incipit, a strategic place in which some of the specific features of the global meaning and structural organization of the whole text can be seized. My hypothesis is that in histories of survival, already in the incipit, the authors strive to convey the emblematic value of their history: an extreme and traumatic experience which is difficult to express. The analysis of these incipit shows that experiences related to concentration camps, to be expressed, need an elaborated message and that an artistic aim can contribute to the representation of these experiences. From the structural viewpoint, histories of survival amplify a dichotomy existing in several literary genres and currents: ‘external reference’ and ‘internal organization’, mimetic ‘truth’ and narrative ‘structure’, ‘reality’ and ‘convention’, ‘experience’ and ‘narration’. In my opinion, histories of survival solve these oppositions by reconciling some contraries through the use of oxymora. Even narratives structures or key figures such as the author, the narrator, the observer, the witness and so on, tend to become oxymora. The study of these features (and combination) is pertinent for anthropology (by seizing facts thanks to elaborated ‘ways of uttering’ authors often redefine forms of humanity) and for semiotics (any form of expression, even if original, has to be collectively shared and based on a system of signs). In my opinion, a joint semiotic and anthropological approach can help analysing histories of survival as a ‘literary genre’ and as a ‘historical tragic phenomenon’.

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Foreword from the editors of this volume: On crossing perspectives

Author(s): Stefano Montes,Licia Taverna / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

If the reader slowly takes his pleasure on the process of reading by stopping, relaxed and nonchalant, on every single contribution to appreciate its specificity, he may be pleasantly confused by the richness and variety of figures and issues, themes and questions approached in this collective volume: Paul Rabinow, Eric Wolf, Clifford Geertz, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Antelme, Victor Klemperer, Geneviève De Gaulle Anthonioz, Jorge Semprun, Jean Geoffroy, Juri Vella, anthropologists’ diaries, survivors’ diaries, the nature/culture distinction, colonial memory, Estonian events in the 40s, theatre representation, and so on. Studies on less known figures of camp survivors stand side by side with studies on renowned anthropologists, anthropologic reflections on cultural matters alternate with semiotic analyses of literary texts. What is the leading thread bringing into a unitary path such variety and abundance, such apparent diversity?

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La construction de la mémoire coloniale en Érythrée: les Erythréens, les Métis, les Italiens

Author(s): Gabriella D’Agostino / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2006

Focusing on some passages of life histories collected in Asmara and based on the ‘memory of Italy’, I study the representation of the past in order to reveal the shaping of the subjective experience by the colonial discourse in Eritrea. If the main aim of my essay is the understanding of the play of interactions between individuals and collectivity, one more important element I take into account is ‘memory’ seen as a “social selection of remembering” (Halbwachs). I try to connect the social position and narrative role of single members (of the Eritrean society) to the meaning it takes the ‘going back to the past’ for them as individuals belonging to a group (an Eritrean, a Mestizo, an Italian) in relation to the past and the present. The consequence is that the logic dominant/dominated is inadequate to explain the internal articulations of the colonial context and that the focus must be shifted on individual and collective systems of expectations and on the negotiations of meaning resulting from a “past always to be recovered” and a “present always to be rebuilt”.

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Parler de soi pour changer le monde

Author(s): Liivo Niglas,Eva Toulouze / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2006

Juri Vella is a Forest Nenets reindeer herder, writer and fighter for his people’s rights. In his private life, he enjoys silence, as it is a rule in his culture. But the public man, who is graduated from the Literature Institute in Moscow, is aware of the power of speech, and knows how to use it for his goals, to support his vision. He had to realise that the native peoples in Western Siberia have lost much of their skills and acquired none during the Soviet period, in which they were compelled to integrate in the society and to attend Soviet institutions as school or the army. This process has been intensified in the latest fifty years, with the invasion of their traditional territories by oil industry. But Juri Vella expects the oil reserves to finish one day, and then the aborigines will lack the goods bestowed upon them by “Western” society and will have to survive with the help of the traditional skills. He tries to promote his vision of the natives able to live in both worlds and able to recover their dignity. This article analyses his public speech in this behalf and the way Juri Vella speaks about himself, enlarging his “ego” both to his clan and the native peoples in general and connecting it very directly with the space around him. The main sources are Eva Toulouze’s fieldwork at Juri Vella’s taiga camp, living with the family five months, and the film Liivo Niglas has shot about him in 2003.

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Just a foreword? Malinowski, Geertz and the anthropologist as native

Author(s): Stefano Montes / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

Read through semiotic analysis, the narrative intrigue of (the evenemential and cognitive dimension of) the anthropologist’s work reveals the epistemological configuration encasing some central and interrelated questions in anthropology: the communication-interaction between anthropologists and other inter-actants, their invention-application of some metalanguages and the subsequent intercultural translations of concepts and processes. To explore this configuration, I compare a foreword written by Malinowski and another one written by Geertz. In these forewords, they resort to refined stories to frame complex argumentations. In Malinowski’s foreword, two superposing stories are told: (1) a tale of a subject’s performance newly endowed with professional competences (the ethnologist) and a discipline possessing a more modern and positive knowledge (Functionalist ethnology) and (2) a symmetric tale of exchanged messages (with relative sanction and counter-sanction) between an enunciator (who has to lay the foundations of this science) and an addressee (who has to confirm the validity of messages). To lay these foundations, the enunciator implicitly proposes an epistemology based on some values (such as ‘penetration’, ‘progression’, and the ‘overcoming of limits’) privileging the metaphor of space and the cumulative aspect of process. As far as Geertz’s foreword is concerned, the enunciator has recourse to two different stories: (1) one concerning the interaction between Geertz and his editor (rather than with natives) to justify his hermeneutic position and (2) another one, larger and including, concerning the reversal of causality relationships to reaffirm the value of coincidence. If in Malinowski’s foreword, stories are used to redefine some programmatic principles (‘discontinuity’ and the combination of ‘three different oxymora’) through which ethnology can be given a scientific nature and a new foundation, in Geertz’s foreword, on the contrary, value is given to ‘coincidence’ and ‘writing’ in its multiple forms and (paradoxically, for an interpretativist) a binary discursive epistemology and a style of thought privileging the nonterminative and imperfective process have been combined.

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Naming the body of nobody: The topic of truth in Victor Klemperer’s diaries

Author(s): Michael Rinn / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2006

Victor Klemperer, German philologist and Professor at the University of Dresden, bears testimony to his survival during the Nazi years in his Diaries (1933–1945). Progressively excluded from all social life because of his Jewish religion, Klemperer is forced to recognize himself as a non-subject by the end of the war, calling himself “Nobody” in reference to Ulysses with Polyphemus, the Cyclops. Our article aims to show the mental — cognitive and corporal — process underlying this recognition. Our study will explore the two-pronged thrust of this process: faced with the inexorable destruction of his self, Klemperer has to acknowledge the limits of his analytical capacities. But this extreme experience will enable him to create somatic knowledge destined to recognize what he calls “thought of extinction”. To conclude, we show how this reasoning is based upon action language which consists in naming the body.

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De la sémiotique de la représentation théâtrale à l’anthropologie culturelle: Pourquoi le théâtre (résiste)?

Author(s): Eleni Mouratidou / Language(s): French Issue: 2/2006

In this paper I propose an epistemological approach to the field of theatre semiotics from the beginning of the 20th century to our days. Firstly, I point out two different periods that have influenced theatre semiotics. The first one centres on reflections and studies by the Prague School of Structuralism. More precisely, I address Jan Mukařovsky’s essays about art and society as well as Jindrich Honzl’s contributions to the study of sign and system in theatre. The second period presented here is that of theatre semiotics in the early 70s and late 80s in France. My goal here is to expose the main reasons that led theatre semiotics to a deadlock in the early 90s. Theatre semiotic research has been rich and fruitful in the beginning of last century. However, in our days it is generally deemed unadvisable to describe theatre representation in terms of sign and system. Although theatre semiotics used to be presented in French university classes, it is no longer possible to do so. Even though general semiotics has progressed by denying the importance of structure and by refusing to search for the minimal sign and its code, theatre semiotics has remained faithful to old communicational semiotics research. Throughout my contribution, I would like to examine the kind of semiotic field best fit to approaching an artistic domain such as theatre. In other words, I would like to show that Western theatre, granted it can be seen as a semiotic object, is first and foremost an artistic and cultural one. In order to do so, I propose a theoretical and methodological framework based on a specific semiotic model: the “indicial semiology” proposed by Anne-Marie Houdebine. Inspired by Juri Lotman’s essays about culture and art, I will try to set “indicial semiology” in the general field of a cultural anthropology.

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Semiotics of the 20th century

Author(s): Vyacheslav V. Ivanov / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2008

Semiotic and linguistic studies of the 20th century have been important mostly in two senses — (1) they have opened a road for comparative research on the origin and development of language and other systems of signs adding a new dimension to the history of culture; (2) they have shown a possibility of uniting different fields of humanities around semiotics suggesting a way to trespass separation and atomisation of different trends in investigating culture. In the 21st century one may hope for closer integration of semiotics and exact and natural sciences. The points of intersection with the mathematical logic, computer science and information theory that already exist might lead to restructuring theoretical semiotics making it a coherent and methodologically rigid discipline. At the same time, the continuation of neurosemiotic studies promises a breakthrough in understanding those parts of the work of the brain that are most intimately connected to culture. From this point of view semiotics may play an outstanding role in the synthesis of biological science and humanities. In my mind that makes it a particularly important field of future research.

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The construction of the ‘we’-category: Political rhetoric in Soviet Estonia from June 1940 to July 1941

Author(s): Andreas Ventsel / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

The article asks, how one of the basic notions of cultural-political identity — we — is constructed in mass media, viz. which kind of semiotic and linguistic facilities are used in constructing a political unity. The approach used in this article is based on Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture and on the analysis of pronouns in political texts, using Emil Benvenist’s theory of deixis. Our case study concentrates on the years 1940–1941 which mark one of the most crucial periods in Estonian nearest history. The source material of the analysis consists of speeches of new political elite in power, all of which were published in major daily newspapers at the time. In outline, first year of soviet power in Estonia can be divided in two periods. First period would be from June 21 to “July elections” in 1940. In political rhetoric, new political elite tried to create a monolithic subject, the unity between themselves and people (people’s will) by emphasizing activity and freedom of selfdetermination. Nevertheless, starting from “elections”, especially from the period after “accepting” Soviet Republic of Estonia as a full member of Soviet Union, a transition of we-concept from an active subject to mere passive recipient can be detected. From that time on, people’s will was envisaged as entirely determined by marxist-leninist ideology and “the Party”.

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On spatiality in Tartu–Moscow cultural semiotics: The semiotic subject

Author(s): Anti Randviir / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

The article views the development of the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school from the analysis of texts to the study of spatial entities (semiosphere being most well known of them). It comes to light that ‘culture’ and ‘space’ have been such notions in Tartu–Moscow School to which, for instance, the ‘semiosphere’ does not add much. There are studied possibilities to join Uexküll’s and Lotman’s basic concepts (as certain grounds of Estonian semiotics) with Tartu–Moscow School’s treatment of culture and space through the notion of ‘semiotic subject’. Such an approach allows to see transdisciplinarity, which has come to issue only during the last decade, already in the first conceptions of Tartu–Moscow School where transdisciplinarity revealed itself in the symbiotic use of ‘culture’ and ‘space’.

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Gathering in Biosemiotics 6, Salzburg 2006

Author(s): Maricela Yip,Günther Witzany / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

The sixth Gathering in Biosemiotics was organized in Salzburg, Austria, by Günther Witzany and Wolfgang Hofkirchner.3 Fifty-eight scientists from various scientific fields like philosophy, systems theory, semiotics, linguistics, semantics, mathematics, statistics, psychology, physics, medicine, biochemistry, embryology, molecular biology, microbiology, cell biology, genetics, epigenetics, evolutionary biology, zoology, mycology and botany participated.

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Towards an integrated methodology of ecosemiotics: The concept of nature-text

Author(s): Timo Maran / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

The aim of the article is to elaborate ecosemiotics towards practical methodology of analysis. For that, the article first discusses the relation between meaning and context seen as a possibility for an ecological view immanent in semiotics. Then various perspectives in ecosemiotics are analyzed by describing biological and cultural ecosemiotics and critically reading the ecosemiotic works of W. Nöth and K. Kull. Emphasizes is laid on the need to integrate these approaches so that the resulting synthesis would both take into account the semioticity of nature itself as well as allow analyzing the depiction of nature in the written texts. To this end, a model of nature-text is introduced. This relates two parties intertwined by meaningrelations — the written text and the natural environment. In support of the concept of nature-text, the article discusses the Tartu–Moscow semioticians’ concepts of text, which are regarded as broad enough to accommodate the semiotic activity and environment creation of other animals besides humans. In the final section the concept of nature-text is used to describe nature writing as an appreciation of an alien semiotic sphere and to elucidate the nature writing’s marginality, explaining it with the need to interpret two different types of texts.

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Space-Time: A mythological geometry

Author(s): Jelena Grigorjeva / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

In the article the fundamental graphic models that are used by the cultural consciousness to bring about the abstract spheres of thought are analyzed. The problem of inter-semiotic, i.e. emblematic, interpretation of the categories of space and time is also considered. The models of the cross and pyramid are analyzed from the point of view of their ideological (transcending) function and of the mechanism of emblematizing the abstract notions of time and space. This approach helps understanding the general laws of cultural mentality and the process of emblematizing any meaning for the structuring and fixation purposes.

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The 7th Gathering in Biosemiotics — a review

Author(s): Yair Neuman / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

In a post-modern era in which the fragmentation of knowledge is evident in every academic field, the attempt to gain a meta-perspective seems like an old anachronistic venture. However, an emerging new field of inquiry seems to challenge this fashionable dogma. Biosemiotics is a field of inquiry that seeks to understand a variety of biological phenomena as sign-mediated processes. For example, to understand biological phenomena, such as immune recognition or genetic coding, as biological processes constituted by signs and their communication.

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Semiotics as the science of memory

Author(s): Paul Bouissac / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

The notion of culture implies the relative stability of sets of algorithms that become entrenched in human brains as children become socialized, and, to a lesser extent, when immigrants become assimilated into a new society. The semiotics of culture has used the notion of signs and systems of signs to conceptualize this process, which takes for granted memory as a natural affordance of the brain without raising the question of how and why cultural signs impact behaviour in a durable manner. Indeed, under the influence of structuralism, the semiotics of culture has mostly achieved synchronic descriptions. Dynamic models have been proposed to account for the action of signs (e.g., semiosis, dialogism, dialectic) and their resulting cultural changes and cultural diversity. However, these models have remained remarkably abstract, and somewhat disconnected from the actual brain processes, which must be assumed to be involved in the emergence, maintenance, and transformations of cultures. Semiotic terminology has contributed to a systematic representation of cultural objects and processes but the philosophical origin of its basic concepts has made it difficult to construct a productive interface with the cognitive neurosciences as they have developed and achieved notable advances in the understanding of memory over the last few decades. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that further advances in semiotics will require a shift from philosophical and linguistic notions toward biological and evolutionary models.

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The relevance of C. S. Peirce for socio-semiotics

Author(s): Janice Deledalle-Rhodes / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

Neither Peirce’s thought in general nor his semeiotic in particular would appear to be concerned with ‘society’ as it is generally conceived today. Moreover, Peirce rarely mentions ‘society’, preferring the term ‘community’, which his readers have often interpreted restrictively. There are two essential points to be borne in mind. In the first place, the epithet ‘social’ refers here not to the object of thought, but to its production, its mode of action and its transmission and conservation. In the second place, the term ‘community’ is not restricted to the scientific community, as is sometimes supposed. On the contrary, it refers to the ideal form of a society, which he calls ‘the unlimited community’, i. e. a group of people striving towards a common goal. Furthermore, Peirce’s semeiotic has been put in doubt as capable of providing a model for communication, the basis of social, dialogic, thought and action. The aim of the present article is to show that semeiotic, funded as it is on Peirce’s three categories, which define and delimit the ways in which man perceives and represents the phenomena, can provide a comprehensive model for the analysis of all types of communication in all social contexts. Finally, in this domain, as in others, Peirce was a forerunner, with the result that his thought has often been misunderstood or forgotten. In addition, he was pre-eminently a philosopher, thus his work has been neglected in other disciplines. The elaboration of other triadic systems, such as, notably, that of Rossi-Landi, shows that the tendency of semiotics in general is to move away from the former static, dyadic model towards that involving a triadic process. This trend, with which Peircean theory is in harmony, has been sharply accentuated in recent years, but often lacks a philosophical justification for its assumptions, which Peirce provides.

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Semiotic autoregulation: Dynamic sign hierarchies constraining the stream of consciousness

Author(s): Jaan Valsiner / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2007

For all human sciences, understanding of how the mind works requires a new theory that starts from the assumption of potential infinite variability of human symbolic forms. These forms are socially constructed by the person who moves through an endless variety of unique encounters with the world. A theory of symbolic forms needs to capture the essence of hyperdynamic, irreversible nature of the stream of consciousness and activity. The human mind is regulated through a dynamic hierarchy of semiotic mechanisms of increasingly generalized kind, which involves mutual constraining between levels of the hierarchy. It is demonstrated that semiotic mediation leads to a triplet of personal-cultural constructions — a new symbolic form, a metasymbolic form, and a regulatory signal to stop or enable the construction of further semiotic hierarchy. In everyday terms — human beings produce new problems, together with new efforts at solving them, and make decisions when to stop producing the former two. Hence, semiotic mediation guarantees both flexibility and inflexibility of the human psychological system, through the processes of abstracting generalization and contextualizing specification. Context specificity of psychological phenomena is an indication of general mechanisms that generate variability. Scientific investigation of human psychological complexity is necessarily oriented to the study of variability within the individual person’s psychological time-space.

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