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From mimicry to mime by way of mimesis: Reflections on a general theory of iconicity

Author(s): Göran Sonesson / Language(s): English Issue: 1-4/2010

Practically all theories of iconicity are denunciations of its subject matter (for example, those of Goodman, Bierman and the early Eco). My own theory of iconicity was developed in order to save a particular kind of iconicity, pictoriality, from such criticism. In this interest, I distinguished pure iconicity, iconic ground, and iconic sign, on one hand, and primary and secondary iconic signs, on the other hand. Since then, however, several things have happened. The conceptual tools that I created to explain pictoriality have been shown by others to be relevant to linguistic iconicity. On the other hand, semioticians with points of departure different from mine have identified mimicry as it is commonly found in the animal world as a species of iconicity. In the evolutionary semiotics of Deacon, iconicity is referred to in such a general way that it seems to be emptied of all content, while in the variety invented by Donald the term mimesis is used for a particular phase in the evolution of iconic meaning. The aim of this article is to consider to what extent the extension of iconicity theory to new domains will necessitate the development of new models.

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Resemblance: From a complementarity point of view?

Author(s): Floyd Merrell / Language(s): English Issue: 1-4/2010

Three premises set the stage for a Peirce based notion of resemblance, which, as Firstness, cannot be more than vaguely distinguished from Secondness and Thirdness. Inclusion of Firstness with, and within, Secondness and Thirdness, calls for a nonbivalent, nonlinear, context dependent mode of thinking characteristic of semiosis — that is, the process by which everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming — and at the same time it includes linear, bivalent classical logic as a subset. Certain aspects of the Dao, Buddhist philosophy, and Donald Davidson’s ‘radical interpretation’ afford additional, and perhaps unexpected, support for the initial set of three premises.

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Mutual mimesis of nature and culture: A representational perspective for eco-cultural metamorphosis

Author(s): Farouk Y. Seif / Language(s): English Issue: 1-4/2010

Since the beginning of history humans have attempted to represent nature and culture through mimesis. This article focuses on the teleological aspects of mimesis and offers a different perspective that transcends the notion of sustainability into an eco-humanistic metamorphosis of culture and nature. Drawing from semiotics, phenomenology and architectural design the article challenges the polarization of mimetic representations of nature and culture, which are inclusive and homomorphic phenomena, and offers insight into the mutual mimesis of nature and culture. Two different empirical observations substantiate the theoretical perspective: 1) a tradition advanced by the Egyptians’ stylization of visual representations of the mimicry of nature and culture; and 2) a current architectural design activity that integrates the mimesis of nature and culture. The article makes the case for a theoretical approach that integrates mimetic principles in creating a sustainable environment and an authentic ecoliving. The article concludes with ethical implications on the way we perceive the mutual resemblances in nature and culture, and on our semiotic understanding of the teleological aspects of mimesis.

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Semiotics of mimesis and communicative relationship among texts: Ekphrasis and replication between Hesiod and Homer

Author(s): Paola Ghione / Language(s): English Issue: 1-4/2010

The Shield of Heracles by Hesiod and Homer’s Iliad, XVIII show how mimesis should be considered: it is a process that should be seen different according to the levels that it refers to. There is one object constructed by a craftsman (first level of representation), after that a poet may write about this object and its construction (second level of representation). Then yet another poet could write, on the model of the previous text, his poem with his personal idea. Explaining first, the meaning of representation, arts and mimesis in Plato (Ion, Phaedrus, Cratylus, Sophist, Laws, Republic-Book X) and in Aristotle (Poetics, Nichomachean Ethics), I would like to explain how mimesis was considered according to the terms of form and representation. After that I would carry out a textual analysis of The Shield of Heracles and Iliad, to demonstrate that even if Hesiod’s text is quite similar to Homer’s, the context, the meaning, the background of the authors and the narrative structures are different. The different levels of pertinence and the different points of view demonstrate that mimesis is not a process that produces hierarchy in retrospect, but it is something heading to the direction of what “it is not created yet”.

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Dynamic instances of interaction: The performative function of iconicity in literary texts

Author(s): Christina Ljungberg / Language(s): English Issue: 1-4/2010

According to C. S. Peirce, resemblance or similarity is the basis for the relationship of iconic signs to their dynamical objects. But what is the basis of resemblance or similarity itself and how is the phenomenon of iconicity generated? How does it function in cultural practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated (say, for example, the cartographical procedures by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented)? To what extent are they themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings and the impetus for re-mappings)? With examples from texts by Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald and Reif Larsen, I will argue that literary texts provide us with unique resources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimension of iconicity in the complex interaction among icon, index and metaphor as a prerequisite for semiosis, the generation of signs.

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Cultural codes in the iconography of St Nicholas (Santa Claus)

Author(s): Małgorzata Haładewicz-Grzelak / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

This paper examines some aspects of the cultural codes implied in the iconography of St Nicholas (Santa Claus). The argument posits the iconography of St Nicholas as a vessel for capturing meanings and accumulating them in the construction of public culture. The discussion begins from the earliest developments of the Christian era and proceeds to contemporary depictions (imagology). The study is conducted on the basis of a representative selection of renditions of Saint Nicholas, including 350 pictures of medieval representations (Western and Eastern Christianity), folk extensions and secular representations and it is theoretically grounded in the Tartu School of semiotics.

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Lotman’s scientific investigatory boldness: The semiosphere as a critical theory of communication in culture

Author(s): Irene Machado / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

The main focus of this article is the analysis of the concept of semiosphere as it has emerged from the conception of culture as information — instead of describing the transmission of messages from A to B, it is based on the general process of meaning generation. Following Lotman’s criticism on the paradoxes in communication and its theoretical domain, the article confronts the paradoxical concepts on: (1) the concept of message transmission from the addresser to addressee; (2) the notion of isolated processing systems; (3) the idea that culture speaks a unique language. From the standpoint of the semiosphere, the new object for studying such controversies could be found in the concept of text. When text is taken at the centre of the analysis of culture, nothing appears in an isolated fashion. Lotman’s thinking does not fear the new hypothesis in proposing the conceptual domain of semiosphere to the scientific study of culture.

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Designing a semiotic-based approach to intercultural training

Author(s): Roger Parent,Stanley Varnhagen / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

This exploratory enquiry seeks to examine the largely unexplored potential of semiotics for intercultural training and education. The proposed threepart discussion describes the process by which semiotic theoretical principles were selected and progressively refined into an applied model which was then piloted through a 2007 research initiative entitled Tools for Cultural Development. The case study involved six groups of French and Australian trainees from both the academic and professional sectors, in collaboration with university, government and community partners. The first part of the article summarizes a review of the literature on approaches to cultural competence training. The study then outlines the transcoding process by which the stated objectives of intercultural education were reformulated in semiotic terms, particularly in reference to cultural semiotics on which the theoretical core of the applied model was subsequently based. Relevant principles from other semiotic schools as well as similar theoretical and methodological stances in the social sciences reinforced the established body of theory for the training design. The third part of the study discusses the process by which semiotic principles were further defined as skill-based outcomes and goals for workshop implementation. This pragmatic defining process facilitated development of questionnaires and surveys, thereby allowing participants to evaluate the training experience by examining their perceptions about the workshop outcomes at the beginning and end of the sessions. This article presents the quantitative results of the evaluation and, in discussing the gains and limits of data obtained, provides the context for a follow-up article on the qualitative findings of the study.

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A semiotic alternative to communication in the processes in management accounting and control systems

Author(s): Ülle Pärl / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

This conceptual paper addresses Management Accounting and Control Systems (MACS) from a communication process perspective as opposed to a functional design perspective. Its arguments originate from a social-constructionist perspective on the organization. Its line of argument is that building a social theory of a social phenomenon such as MACS, demands that attention be paid to the characteristics of the communication process. An existing theoretical framework that does the same is Giddens’ structuration theory, but it is only partly satisfactory because it refuses to consider communication-as-interaction from a dynamic contextual perspective, instead falling back on an argument related to the behavioural aspects of agency. An alternative is a semiotic-based communication perspective that includes context as well as addresses the epistemological level of a MACS theory based on communication. The semiotic model of Jakobson is provided and developed as a specific alternative.

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The significance-effect is a communicational effect: Introducing the DynaCom

Author(s): Bent Sørensen,Martin Thellefsen,Torkild Thellefsen / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

The paper presents the concept significance-effect outlined in a Peircean inspired communication model, named DynaCom. The significance effect is a communicational effect; the formal conditions for the release of the significanceeffect are the following: (1) Communication has to take place within a universe of discourse; (2) Utterer and interpreter must share collateral experience; and (3) The cominterpretant must occur. If these conditions are met the meaning of the communicated sign is likely to be correctly interpreted by the interpreter. Here, correctly means in accordance with the intentions of the utterer. The scope of the significance-effect has changed from knowledge effects caused by technical terms to emotional effects caused by lifestyle values in brands, for example.

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In memoriam Virginia Valentine

Author(s): Malcolm Evans / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

Virginia Valentine, who died on 30th November 2010, was an influential member of the growing international community of commercial semioticians. Ginny, as she was known to friends and colleagues, pioneered a distinctive application of commercial semiotics in UK in the late 1980s/ early 90s. Inspired by a course on the analysis of folk tales at North London Polytechnic, where she completed an English degree — and by the ferment in critical theory at that time — she put together a mix of techniques adapted from Barthes (cultural meanings and codes), Propp (structure of narrative) and Lévi-Strauss (reconciling cultural contradictions through myth) — the latter inspiring her ‘myth quadrants’, a hallmark of the Valentine approach to analysing brand communications in cultural context. Based, nomenclature n

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From semantics to semiotics: A page of early Soviet intellectual history

Author(s): Ekaterina Velmezova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

The paper focuses on a particular episode in the (pre)history of semiotics in the USSR in the 1920s–1930s. At that time, an attempt to create an “integral” science was made by linguists, among whom N. Ja. Marr was one of the best-known. Several semantic laws formulated by Marr could be either reformulated in order to be applied to other disciplines (literary studies, anthropology, archeology, biology) or “proved” by the facts or discoveries drawn from them. Another “proof” that these linguistic theories were correct consisted in the possibility of transferring the corresponding models and schemes from one field of knowledge to another: at that epoch the refusal to make a clear methodological separation between disciplines which were primarily concerned with “matter” and those that were more “spiritual” was an important tendency for scholars both in the Soviet Union and in other countries.

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What is ‘the subject’ the name for? The conceptual structure of Alain Badiou’s theory of the subject

Author(s): Margus Vihalem / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

The present paper outlines some basic concepts of Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the subject, tracking down its inherent and complex philosophical implications. These implications are made explicit in the criticism directed against the philosophical sophistry which denies the pertinence of the concept of truth. Badiou’s philosophical innovation is based on three nodal concepts, namely truth, event and subject, and it must be revealed how the afore-mentioned concepts are organized and interrelated, eventually leading to reformulating the concept of the subject. In its exercise, philosophy is intimately affiliated to the four adjacent procedures of mathematics, art, love and politics that could be understood as overall conditions on the margins of which philosophical thinking takes place. Separating philosophy from ontology and charging philosophy with what exceeds being, Badiou transforms it to the general theory of the event. Consequently the concept of the subject is disconnected from that of the object, the subject being not an instance of knowledge, but always a part of generic procedures and thus definable simply as a finite fragment or an operative configuration of the traces of the event. Therefore, it could be stated that Badiou’s theory of the subject is formal and refuses all essentialist connotations.

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Axiomatizing umwelt normativity

Author(s): Marc Champagne / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.

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Roman Jakobson and the birth of linguistic structuralism

Author(s): W. Keith Percival / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2011

The term “structuralism” was introduced into linguistics by Roman Jakobson in the early days of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, founded in 1926. The cluster of ideas defended by Jakobson and his colleagues can be specified but differ considerably from the concept of structuralism as it has come to be understood more recently. That took place because from the 1930s on it became customary to equate structuralism with the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, as expounded in his posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (1916). It can be shown, however, that Jakobson’s group rejected Saussure’s theory for ideological reasons. As the term “structuralism” became more widely used it came to be associated with positivist approaches to linguistics rather than with the original phenomenological orientation that had characterized the Linguistic Circle of Prague. The purpose of this paper is to clarify these different approaches and to suggest that because of its extreme porosity the word “structuralism” is an example of a “terminological pandemic”. More research on the varied uses to which the key terms “structure” and “structuralism” were put will undoubtedly further elucidate this important episode in 20th-century intellectual history.

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Rhythm and meaning: “Rhythmical deviations” as italics

Author(s): Marina Tarlinskaja / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2012

English iambic pentameter allows rhythmical deviations that occupy three (seldom four, more often two) adjacent metrical positions. These deviations, though metrical, are noticed by the listener or reader. Starting from the first quarter of the 16th century, poets (Surrey) have used rhythmical deviations to emphasize (“italicize”) semantically important segments in the line. Such rhythmical deviations have become part of the English poetic traditions. It has turned out that rhythmical deviations used to italicize meaning are filled with recurring rhythmical and grammatical structures and repeated lexicon. M. L. Gasparov used a special term to denote the recurring rhythmicalgrammatical structures: “clichés”; while calling clichés incorporating recurrent lexicon “formulas”. I have discovered that formulas are part of the English poetic tradition: the same formulas recur in poetic texts of the 16th–20th cc. They are not plagiarisms, allusions or reminiscences; they are a common basket of goods that belong to all English poets, used by all and owned by none. The recurrent deviations usually occur on metrical positions “weak-strong-weak-strong” and as a rule contain a monosyllabic (rarely – disyllabic) verbpredicate followed by a monosyllabic grammatical word (e.g. an article), an adjectiveattribute and a noun – a direct object to the verb. The recurring lexicon includes verbs of motion, particularly verbs of fast, aggressive motion, an action directed downwards or causing an injury or death, and recurring nouns referring to moving objects or agents (hands, arms, wings; spear, sword). I term such recurring formulas “rhythmical italics”.

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Maximilian Voloshin’s classical metres

Author(s): Igor Karlovsky / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2012

Maximilian Voloshin turned to classical metres after he moved to Crimea that in his consciousness had associations with Hellas. Also, his friendship with Vyacheslav Ivanov became an important stimulus. Initially, Voloshin used the same metres that can be found in Ivanov’s collection of poems Кормчие звезды. However, their form shows that Voloshin was well familiar with classical poetry.

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Metre and meaning in two poems by Ilpo Tiihonen

Author(s): Satu Grünthal / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2012

Metre and meaning intertwine in manifold ways. The aim of this paper is to discuss the interplay between the metric and semantic structures in poetry in the light of the work of a Finnish poet, Ilpo Tiihonen. Throughout his career, which started in the 1970s, he has been one of the few Finnish contemporary poets to make constant use of metric structures and rhyme. The article also aims to shed some light on questions that arise when metrical poetry is translated from one language into another, in this case from Finnish into English.

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Lexicon and rhetoric in Fet’s translation of Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea

Author(s): Emily Klenin / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2012

A. A. Fet’s translation of J. W. Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea is an important early example of Fet’s lifelong practice as a translator and attests to his well-known fidelity to his source texts. His strongest preference is to maintain the versification characteristics of his source, but the degree of his lexical-semantic fidelity is also very strong and far outranks fidelity on other levels (phonetic, grammatical). The poet evidently translated holistically within very small textual domains, within which he sometimes isolated pivots of core semantic information (which he located in translation as they were in the original), around which less important material was fitted, insofar as space permitted. In Fet’s text, versification limitations sometimes led to lexical-semantic mismatches of semantic denotation, and these mismatches are characterized in the paper: they typically involve repetitions, repeated mentions, or known information, and the mismatch may entail full or partial loss or enrichment of the semantics of the original. In addition, conflicts sometimes arise between denotative requirements within the local domain and the cumulative (usually connotative) associations generated across the larger domain of the whole text. When such conflicts arise, Fet resolves them in favour of small-domain accuracy, resulting in semantic changes (‘shifts’) in the domain of the poetic text, which thereby loses some rhetorical or poetic force, relative to the original. Dissonance between large- and smalldomain semantics is often inevitable, because of the language-specific nature of connotation. To the extent that the semantics of Fet’s translation are a consequence of his personal preferences, they may be viewed in the context of, first, his early school training (not far behind him when he translated Hermann und Dorothea) and, second, his status as both professional poet, writing in Russian, and educated native German-Russian bilingual.

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The derivatives of hexameter in Estonian poetry and their link with the traditional hexameter

Author(s): Maria-Kristiina Lotman,Mihhail Lotman / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2012

The sources of the theory of the Estonian hexameter can be traced back to 17thcentury Germany, where the long syllables of ancient hexameter were replaced with stressed ones, and short syllables with unstressed ones. Although such understanding is clearly inadequate, to a great extent it still holds ground in contemporary approaches. Hexameter, like any other verse metre, can be treated from two angles. First, as an abstract scheme which is realized in different texts, while the degree of realization can vary. Second, hexameter can be viewed as a prototype and actual texts create a certain space further from or closer to the prototype. In both cases questions arise, first, about the limits of hexameter, and second, whether a given text has features of a random hexameter or reflects the author’s conscious intent.

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