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Critique of ideology or/and analysis of culture? Barthes and Lotman on secondary semiotic systems

Author(s): Daniele Monticelli / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2016

The article compares Roland Barthes’s and Juri Lotman’s notions of ‘second-order semiological systems’ [systemes sémiologique seconds] and ‘secondary modelling systems’ [вторичные моделирующие системы]. It investigates the shared presuppositions of the two theories and their important divergences from each other, explaining them in terms of the opposite strategic roles that the notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘culture’ play in the work of Barthes and Lotman, respectively. The immersion of secondary modelling systems in culture as a “system of systems” characterized by internal heterogeneity, allows Lotman to evidence their positive creative potential: the result of the tensions arising from cultural systemic plurality and heterogeneity may coincide with the emergence of new, unpredictable meanings in translation. The context of Barthes’s second-order semiological systems is instead provided by highly homogeneous ideological frames that appropriate the signs of the first-order system and make them into forms for significations which confirm, reproduce and transmit previously existing information generated by hegemonic social and cultural discourses. The article shows how these differences resurface and, partially, fade away in the theories of the text that Barthes and Lotman elaborated in the 1970s. The discussion is concluded by some remarks on the possible topicality of Barthes’s and Lotman’s approaches for contemporary semiotics and the humanities in general.

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Theses on semiotic concepts

Author(s): Kalevi Kull,Mihhail Lotman / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

We formulate here some statements on semiotic concepts in a minimalistic form. This should be taken as a preliminary sketch that can be used as a project for further analysis and elaboration.

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Reduced pictorial architecture: On droodles and simplified images

Author(s): Gleb Netchvolodov / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

In info-graphics and related fields images of reduced form are commonly used. Those types of images, with rare exceptions, usually called simple or simplified. Such widely disseminated reduction of the term often brings confusion to the research and misunderstanding in materials, related to pictorial and visual theme. Below we will try to improve the situation with the terminology, examined the specificity of such visual phenomenon as droodles and offering yet another term, seems to be more suitable for the images, noted above.

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Mythologemes and mythemes: Semiotic markers of myth in contemporary mass culture

Author(s): Lyudmyla Zaporozhtseva / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

This paper focuses on the scrutiny of structural units of myth within mass cultural discourse. The author reviews studies of the mytho logeme and mytheme in semiotics and also relevant research in other fields concerning the announced research object. The main aim of the paper is to distinguish inner semiotic markers of myth and to examine their application to mass cultural narratives. Drawing on the analysis of previous theoretical research and case studies, the author compares the two structural units and makes an attempt to formulate specifi cations towards existing definitions. Particular examples of mythemes and mythologemes in mass culture discourse are regarded within this paper. The author points out the mytheme of Transformation, the mytheme of Backtracking, the mythologeme of Childhood (Golden Age), the mythologeme of Arma geddon (Flood), and the mythologeme of World Tree.

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Auto-communication: Rethinking its relation to the artistic text

Author(s): Tatjana Pilipoveca / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

The concept of auto-communication has a relatively short history. The most common semiotic idea of auto-communication created in 1973 belongs to Juri Lotman. According to Lotman, auto-communication is the communication of a subject (culture or living being) with it/him/herself. Auto-communication has mnemonic and meaning generation functions. The concept under study is gradually analyzed and developed in the context of the semiotics of the artistic text. Auto-communication that has a meaning generation function is considered, firstly, as a mode of text processing; secondly, as an amplifying factor for the general possibility of a text to be interpreted and turned into the basis for the creation of new texts, hence, to survive in the culture.

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Anticipation

Author(s): Andres Kurismaa / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

This paper provides a short overview of anticipation as a field of enquiry that is closely related to semiotic biology. Anticipation can be seen as addressing both empirically and conceptually certain key features of (bio)semiotic processes, including their open-ended and non-deterministic structure, (self-)referential and relational features, contingency and constructiveness. Outlines are given of some main theoretical frameworks and sources informing current anticipation research. The parallel (and complementarity) between independently developed foundational traditions is highlighted, and seen as a relevant fi eld of future analysis.

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On the concept of “ostension”: a survey of contemporary semiotics

Author(s): Remo Gramigna / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

This paper dwells on the concept of ostension and it seeks to provide a critical overview of the main perspectives on this notion developed within semiotics. Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco and Ivo Osolsobě are among those leading figures that drew attention to semiosis by ostension. Yet, this concept has deeper roots in western thought as shown, for instance, by St. Augustine’s treatise De Magistro where ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ are thought of as two ways of acquiring knowledge. This work is an attempt to disentangle what the previously mentioned authors thought about ostension and to pinpoint its relevance for semiotics.

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Self-description

Author(s): Mari-Liis Madisson / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

Self-description is an autocommunicative process which takes place on different levels of the semiosphere. Self-description provides rigid and hierarchical organization to semisospherical units. Self-description is one of the key-concepts of cultural semiotics and is essential in the context of understanding the frameworks of semiosphere and culture and explosion. Lotman sees the need for self-description as an important universal which can be treated as a basis of the typologization of culture. Following article outlines how the concept is used in the field of cultural semiotics and also briefly points out how it is understood in closely related disciplines. The main emphasis is put on introducing how Juri Lotman has elaborated different aspects of self-description. I predominantly concentrate on 3 focuses: 1) the importance of self-description in core-periphery relations; 2) what kind of self models can be the result of the process of self-description; and 3) how self-descriptions can be used as a basis of cultural typologies. I also outline some contemporary usages and further developments of the concept in Estonian cultural semiotics.

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On the semiotic concept of ground

Author(s): Tyler James Bennett / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

In Peircean terminology the ground of the sign has something to do with the way that sign’s representamen relates to its object. So called arbitrary signs lack ground in that there is no motivated relation between the sign vehicle and what it represents or refers to, but then are all symbols groundless? Are signs that totally lack ground actually signs? Should the ground of the sign be described in terms of the features of the representamen or those of the object, or both? How do we preserve the necessary pre-conceptuality of ground while still being able to classifyits core features? Answering these questions requires a comparison of semiotic definitions of ground with definitions of ground from other fi elds, such as Aristotelian metaphysics. The central dilemma of arguing for the explanatory value of ground is that its definition remains heterogeneous, its application ambiguous. Semioticians have failed to see that this heterogeneity is an inevitable aspect of ground. The singularity that would give ground a static defi nition and concrete application would involve types of sign which themselves have no ground. This paradoxicality of the use and application of ground is ironically best explained not by the semiotician, but by the logician, whose traditional interest has little to do with ground.

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Minimal models and minimal objects

Author(s): Claudio Julio Rodríguez Higuera / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2016

The concept to be treated in this paper will be twofold. On the one hand, the concept of a minimal model will play a role in how we describe the objects of our theories, while on the other hand, the concept of minimal object will provide a description of a type of reduction of the core objects we treat in our theories. Interestingly, despite the apparent relation between both concepts, they play out in different arenas. First, a minimal model is set as the epistemological ground through which theories can be developed. However, a minimal object will have an ontological bearing in that the constitutive elements of a theory constrain what can or cannot be included in our models by virtue of their elementary aspect. Despite the fact that both concepts, when applied, can present important changes in the development of our theories, I will argue that there is a conceptual core that retains a degree of coherence in both sides. That is, in no case will any of either possible conceptualizations become fixed and deterministic, for each change produced in our conceptualizations will entail changes to itself and to the other aspect of the conceptual duality that is treated here. Taking into account both concepts, we can think about the particular case of general semiotics and to what degree these can be applied to it across its many branches. It will be argued in this paper that the core concepts of semiotics – namely semiosis and the sign relation – cannot be entailed by a singular mode of analysis and that judgements in semiotics always entail both conceptualizations.

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Intimate Skin-To-Skin Touch in Social Encounters: Lamination of Embodied Intertwinings

Author(s): Asta Cekaite / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2018

Recent work on intercorporeality in social interaction has clear and unmistakable origins in Chuck and Candy Goodwin’s early, bold and explorative work. Inspired by the mentorship of Gail Jefferson, the Goodwins laid the ground for an analytical approach that takes into account the simultaneity of actions and the inherently embodied character of sociality (see Goodwin, Cekaite In press). This approach gives concrete shape to the theoretical perspective that discusses human sense-making between corporeal subjects, that is, intercorporeality as a primordial feature of the physicality and materiality of bodily existence (Merleau- Ponty 1964: 175). Thus, language is crucial for meaning making (Linell 2009), but it is embedded and choreographed within evolving contextual configurations (Goodwin, C. 2000). It is the juxtaposition and lamination of multiple resources that mutually enrich each other and constitute ground for meaning making between humans. This thought provoking conceptualization has not only allowed us to tread new paths in research on social interaction, but has also contributed to our understanding and theorizing of human sociality, and provided rich empirical work demonstrating that human intersubjectivity is embodied, i.e., intercorporeal.

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Life in the Co-operative Transformation Zone

Author(s): Donald Favareau / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2018

There’s not much strange about the friendship that Chuck Goodwin and I share – we are not that far apart in age, he was my advisor when I was a graduate student at UCLA, we both come from East Coast, at least quasi-Irish Catholic beginnings, and we share a broad interest in animal behaviour and the workings of nature more generally. What appears to remain puzzling to many of our colleagues though, is the intense fascination that each of us has with the other’s work – work that could not be more different, under most conventional accountings.

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Celebrating Joyful Connection

Author(s): Cecilia E. Ford / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2018

Dear Chuck: From the time I first read “The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation” (Goodwin, C. 1979) and soon thereafter worked with the “Auto Discussion” video in Manny’s data sessions, my fascination with human interaction has been co-constructed through encounters with you and your work. Your presence in my community of friends and scholars has influenced all my work. As just two examples, when Barbara Fox, Sandy Th ompson and I wrote “Practices in the construction of turns: The ‘TCU’ Revisited” (1996), based a clip from the very start of “Auto Discussion,” we aspired to engage a Goodwinian perspective on the notion of a linguistic unit. Likewise, my paper “Contingency and units in interaction” was inspired by what I was learning from you about “the simultaneous production of multiple trajectories, including sound, bodily gesture, lexico-grammar, and recurrent structures of collaborative action” (Ford 2004: 31).

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Managing the Multiplicity of Meaning

Author(s): Jacob G. Foster,Erica A. Cartmill / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2018

Meanings multiply in Chuck Goodwin’s lab. If anything characterizes his inimitable professional vision (Goodwin 1994), it is this: under Chuck’s gaze, the possibilities pregnant in a piece of data multiply gloriously and generatively. Start with a video of a young girl cooking with her mother, and you may end up talking about the role of play in human evolution. Chuck’s brain is without disciplinary borders; his lab is a social manifestation of that stimulating mental world. Through his special alchemy, diverse ideas and traditions join together in surprising transmutations. Although Chuck is far too modest to say so, the great work we do together in his lab plumbs deep questions in philosophical anthropology (Goodwin 2018).

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Giorgio Prodi and the lower threshold of semiotics

Author(s): Umberto Eco / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2018

Publication of a translation of the text of Umberto Eco’s talk given in honour of Giorgio Prodi in 1988.

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Umberto Eco on the biosemiotics of Giorgio Prodi

Author(s): Kalevi Kull / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2018

The article provides a commentary on Umberto Eco’s text “Giorgio Prodi and the lower threshold of semiotics”. An annotated list of Prodi’s English-language publications on semiotics is included.

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Animal language before Sebeok

Author(s): Umberto Eco / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2018

Publication of the text of Umberto Eco’s talk given at a symposium held in honour of Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001) in San Marino in 2002.

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Everything seems so settled here: The conceivability of post-Peircean biosemiotics

Author(s): Claudio Julio Rodríguez Higuera / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2019

Theory change is a slow, tortuous process. Problems associated with how we communicate ideas and how these ideas are received by our peers become catalysts for change in how we ourselves perceive and sanction what the discipline is capable of doing. Some parts of semiotics, and particularly biosemiotics, have come under critical scrutiny because of their heavy commitment to Peircean philosophy, but at the same time, the contributions of Peircean philosophy are almost impossible to discount. The ripples of this situation are quite visible in the emergence of code biology as a post-semiotic research programme. Yet there is a general balance between those who do not put that much stock in Peircean concepts and those who cannot conceive semiotics without these. This paper will ask whether a biosemiotics after Peirce is possible at all in the sense of acknowledging Peirce’s contributions to the field while also taking to heart the criticisms raised by those skeptical of the implications of Peircean semiotics. While the answer is most likely positive, it depends on what background our concept of meaning relies on and how it may bleed into the other areas of semiotics that biosemiotics may claim a stake on. Being able to discuss potential theoretical distinctions across semiotics while also allowing communication between the areas caught in this differentiation will be crucial for the health of the discipline as the gap between theories becomes more profound.

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Trajectories of anticipation: Preconceptuality and the task of reading habit

Author(s): Sebastian Feil / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2021

The article characterizes Peirce’s concept of habit as a major contribution to a Peircean concept of preconceptuality, first, in relation to its function in the sign process, and second, in relation to other concepts of preconceptuality in cultural studies. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of prejudice, Michel Foucault’s notions of the preconceptual and the dispositif, and Hans Blumenberg’s conception of metaphor all share certain key characteristics with Peirce’s notion of habit. The same comparison also highlights the fact that certain elements are missing from the current discourse on Peirce’s notion of habit: although any rendition of the concept of habit itself implicitly relies on a theory of historicity and of rule-association, these aspects only emerge explicitly in comparison with theories that more explicitly focus on such aspects. Another question raised in the context of such a comparison is the relevance of habit for theories of conceptuality. Peirce claims that descriptions of concepts are best realized through the description of the habits involved in them. A major part of a concept’s coordinative power lies with the habits associated with the concept. However, no systematic inquiry into the possibility of rendering actual habits more definitive in comprehension has been undertaken. An attempt is therefore made to remedy that situation by elaborating on those aspects of Peirce’s theory of habit relevant to a theory of “reading” habit, and to sketch an outline of such a theory.

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The dialogic nature of double consciousness and double stimulation: Implications from Peirce and Vygotsky

Author(s): Donna E. West / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2021

The objective in this paper is to demonstrate the indispensability of Peirce’s double consciousness to foster abductive reasoning, so that internal/external dialogue inform the worthiness of hunches. These forms of dialogue establish a mental give-and-take forum in which novel meanings/effects are particularly highlighted and noticed. Such attentional shifts are compelled by surprising states of affairs within the beholder’s internal, interpretive competencies, or from external factors (pictures, gestural or linguistic performatives). The dialogic nature of these signs pre-forms operations not possible non-dialogically; they command, interrogate, or suggest alterations to established conduct/beliefs in contexts in which propositional/argumentative conflicts are obviated. This inquiry proposes experimental methodologies to measure when double consciousness (via private/inner speech) mediates hypothesis-making. Vygotsky’s conflict of motive at four distinct developmental stages constitutes the foundation for the proposed experiments. Designs draw upon Vygotsky’s ‘double stimulation’ paradigms that force decision-making processes when conflicts of motive surface. Paradigms include forced imitation of one model while ignoring another (imitating bear, not dragon), and altering a visual array to depict logical sequencing accurately (the “Cycles Test”; “The Odd One Out”). These conflicts require children to change their conduct/beliefs to accommodate to atypical states of affairs.

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