John Law notes that — by the early 1990s — Latour’s approach contained the entirety of the principles of actor-network theory: attention to heterogeneous relations, use of semiotic tools, adherence to symmetry in describing the truth or false statements, performativity of practices, focus on circulations, predisposition to case studies. Expanding the list of approaches and tools used in the ANT, Law turns to material semiotics. He aspires to show it as a set of themes that stimulate the researcher’s (...) sensitivity to the problem of polysemanticity in a particular field. At the same time, his version of material semiotics implicitly contains a critique of the of Greimas’ semiotics developed by Latour. Law’s vision describes practices of producing multiple realities, maintaining uncertainties and the polysemantic. In contrast, Latour’s semiotics are more instrumental, showing how particular actors eliminate multiplicity by creating common rules. The article shows that the contradiction between Latour’s semiotics and Law’s material semiotics is related to the question of tracing the networks’ length created by heterogenous actors. However, this question is empirical. The article explores a particular case of interaction from the practices of a center for the development and socialization of children and adults with mental disabilities. It is shown that the problem of polysemanticity and uncertainties has two solutions: limiting the network through a “shifting in” of the “enunciator” and maintaining polysemanticity through “partial connections”. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to develop the concept of a material semiotics’ rhetoric as a way to highlight a rhetoric that is not reducible to the symbolic and communicational domains, and which helps to shed light on the construction of features for mobile technologies such as cell phones. To reach this goal, this research makes an articulation between some main notions defining rhetoric as a knowledge and practice—being persuasive, seeking to reach an audience, the use of (...) arguments, in a context of ambiguity and problematization—and the construction of technological artefacts according to Science, Technology, and Society studies. (shrink)

During the past decade, several governmental reports have discussed how information technology can transform Danish society. Most important among these reports is Digital Denmark from 1999.In this article, the authors examine how to analyze Digital Denmark by considering two strategies for engaging reports. The first aims at uncovering and making explicit hidden assumptions or ideologies in the text. This approach is called “reading against the text.” The second approach—inspired by science, technology, and society studies—considers where a text goes and what (...) it does rather than how to critically interpret it. Texts may be read as material-semiotic actors, having effects on their environment that exceed or bypass discussions of content or motivation. This approach is called “reading with the text,” and the authors argue that traveling with Digital Denmark makes visible the limitations of critical analyses, while adding agency to the report as it moves in between practices. (shrink)

This clear and concise book investigates the relation between materiality and the subject in Marxism, (post-)structuralism, and material semiotics. It introduces the three approaches in an accessible way and serves as an introduction to different kinds of materialism and theories of the subject. For each approach, the modalities of materiality of the respective materialism are defined and the relationship between these multiple materialities and the subject are presented as specific to the theoretical approaches discussed. Beetz argues for a (...) non-reductionist materialism, which conceives of materiality as more than matter or matter in motion. In such a materialism the subject is seen as an effect of material conditions, relations, processes, and practices. He shows how the constitution and decentering of the subject is conceptualized in the approaches presented and highlights the role of material instances in these processes. (shrink)

Unlike sonographic examinations, sonic fetal heartbeat monitoring has received relatively little attention from scholars in the social sciences. Using the case of fetal heartbeat monitoring as part of midwifery prenatal care in Germany, this contribution introduces music as an analytical tool for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of obstetrical surveillance practices. Based on ethnographic stories, three orchestrations are compared in which three different instruments help audiences to listen to what becomes fetal heartbeat music and to qualify fetal and pregnant lives in (...) relation to each other. In the Doppler-based orchestration, audible heartbeat music is taken as a sign of a child in need of parental love and care cultivated to listen. The Pinard horn makes esoteric fetal music that can be appreciated by the midwife as a skilled instrumentalist alone and helps to enact a child hidden in the belly. The cardiotocograph brings about soothing music and a reassuring relationship with a child but also durable scripts of juridical beauty. This material-semiotic analysis amplifies how well-being is shaped in midwifery prenatal care practices. (shrink)

Neste artigo faz-se uma descrição do Sistema Global de Posicionamento e dos dispositivos de navegação de uso rodoviário que o constituem, enquanto artefatos, com vista a uma leitura semiótica destes últimos em articulação com a sistematicidade. De uma semiótica tradicional dos objetos passa-se a uma que se centra na sua materialidade, a partir da qual é possível detecar sentidos performativos na tecnologia. Esta abordagem permite uma compreensão mais detalhada do caráter global das tecnologias móveis em articulação com a sua individualização. (...) A tese que se defende é a de que é possível dar conta do que é próprio da materialidade deste fenómeno, explorando, a par dos elementos tradicionalmente simbólicos, aspectos não redutíveis a estes. Não obstante, destaca-se como o material e o simbólico permanecem numa relação que permite identificar mais claramente a complexidade dos sistemas e artefatos técnicos, bem como os elementos que, neste domínio, estabelecem uma interação entre produção e consumo. Deste modo, chega-se a uma semiótica material que permite uma interpretação mais fiel do que é específico da componente funcional da tecnologia, em particular de um sistema e artefatos que se instalam cada vez mais no quotidiano, evitando a redução a uma valoração utilitária. This paper makes a depiction of the Global Positioning System and the navigation devices that are part of it, as artifacts. It aims to develop a semiotic reading of these artifacts in articulation with systematicity. From a traditional semiotics of objects, it goes to a material one, in which it is possible to find performative trends on technology. This approach is an opportunity to understand in a detailed way the global character of mobile technologies in articulation with individualization. The thesis held here is that this is a better way to handle with the specificities of materiality, exploring, besides the traditionally symbolic elements, aspects not reducible to the latter. Nevertheless, both the material and the symbolic layers are in permanent relation. The observation of this helps to understand systems and artifacts' complexity, as well as some of the elements that are involved in the interactions between production and consumption. By doing this, the paper tries to achieve a material semiotics frame that allows an interpretation more faithful to the specificities of the functional aspects of technology, particularly those that are part of a system and artifacts so present in daily life, avoiding a reduction to a utilitarian valuation. (shrink)

Despite obvious advantages, no generalised ideographic codes have evolved through cultural evolution to rely on iconicity. Morin suggests that this is because of missing means of standardisation, which glottographic codes get from natural languages. Although we agree, we also point to the important role of the available media, which might support some forms of reference more effectively than others.

The paper presented here is an attempt at casting human development as a semiotic-material phenomenon which reflects power relations and includes uncertainty. On the ground of post-structuralist approaches, development is considered here as a performative concept, which does not represent but creates realities. Emphasis is put on the notions of ‘mediation’, ‘translation’ and ‘materiality’ in everyday practices of students and teachers in a concrete school setting, where I conducted ethnographical research for one school year. The analysis of discursive research (...) material of teachers’ discussions and interviews with students proves the developmental discourse to be interrelated to teachers’ and students’ positioning in the school; the developmental discourse orders ongoing interaction and enables students and teachers to perform the past and witness the future in a way which corresponds with dominant values and state social/educational policies. By translating a variety of events into a line moving from the past to the future as well as by materializing this line as diagrams and other semiotic-material objects, development becomes a technology of the self of (late) modernity which implies power relations and supports the maintenance of the modern order. On these grounds, a relational approach to development is suggested, which raises methodological and political issues. (shrink)

The workpractices associaied with the use of an information system can be described using semiotic theories in terms of patterns of human communication. A model of workpractices has been created called the systemic semiotic workpractice framework that employs two compatible but distinct semiotic theories in order to explain the complexity of information systems use in organisational contexts. One of these theories called social semiotics can be used to describe atypical workpractice realisations, where a user renegotiates one or more canonical (...) sequences of activities typically associated with a specific system feature. In doing so the user may alter the staging of the workpractice, redefine the goal of the workpractice, or renegotiate the usual role they adopt within the workpractice. Central concepts in social semiotics are explained and applied to an actual atypical renegotiated workpractice associated with the loan of materials to students in a smalloperational level information system called ALABS. (shrink)

This article compares the material pollution of life's elementary resources, i.e., water, soil, and air, with the semiotic pollution of the elementary resources of sign-processes, i.e., channel, sign-matter, and message; code, signifier, and signified; as well as context, sender, and recipient. It is claimed that semiotic pollution interferes with sign-processes as much as material pollution interferes with the fundamental processes of life; both types of pollution are similar in that they produce stress for human beings in current societies. (...) It is argued that semiotics is able to provide the conceptual tools necessary to develop policies that can reduce semiotic pollution. As is shown, however, additional research is required to operationalize and metricize generalized concepts of semiotic pollutionsuch as "channel-related", "semiosis-related", and "situation-related noise". (shrink)

While participation in social media has become everyday practice among young people, there have been few studies examining how youth as social media users are represented in the media discourse. Focusing on the promotional materials of an award-winning and widely-viewed documentary film, The Social Dilemma, this paper examines the media depictions of youth that attract the public’s attention. Through a social semiotic analysis, we analyzed the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings in the poster and trailer to identify how young people (...) have been represented in the media discourse. Our findings show that they are constructed as vulnerable social media users who are manipulated by social media companies. We argue that such depictions of youth not only negate their sense of agency but also ignore their active engagement in the participatory culture afforded by social media. The implications of such depictions propagate a protectionist perspective of youth. This can undermine efforts towards the development of an empowerment approach in digital literacy education. (shrink)

This book analyses various examples of the imaginative semiotisation of the Fall of Man and the Church's semiotic perception of the Divine plan for Redemption. Based on a close reading of primary sources, it analyses the meaning-making inherent in these ideas, which are filtered through and given material representation by the semiotic paradigms of various cultural fields, including philology, verbal arts and science.

Material Engagement Theory is currently driving a conceptual change in the archaeology of mind. Drawing upon the dictates of enactivism and active externalism, it specifically calls for a radical reconceptualization of mind and material culture. Unpersuaded by the common assumption that cognition is brain-bound, Malafouris argues in favour of a process ontology that situates thinking in action. In granting ontological primacy to material engagement, MET seeks to illuminate the emergence of human ways of thinking through the practical (...) effects of the material world. Considering that this is a characteristic example of a pragmatic take on cognition, this contemporary theoretical platform appears to share a lot with pragmatism. As of late, scholars working at the intersection of philosophy, semiotics, and cognitive science have made important steps towards the rapprochement between pragmatism and externalism. Looking to contribute to this growing corpus of work, the present paper focuses on MET’s relation to the pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Mead. Having elsewhere recognized the overlap and complementarity between Malafouris’ and Peirce’s theories in particular, I developed a pragmatic and enactive theory of cognitive semiotics that is suitably geared to trace the nature, emergence, and evolution of material signs. Therefore, besides noting some obvious historical connections, I hereby aim to establish the theoretical backdrop upon which this composite theory is supposed to function, while also exploring new potential avenues. Given that this cognitive semiotic framework can be seen as a pragmatic extension of Malafouris’ enactivist approach to archaeology, the current paper delves into MET’s theoretical underpinnings, seeking to complement its working hypotheses and concepts with philosophical notions and ideas advanced long ago. This synthesis ultimately concludes with a call for the reconceptualization of ‘representation’ as a heuristic concept. (shrink)

Semiotics embraces linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies, as well as linking to anthropology, art, psychology, and biology. This new Routledge collection helps to make sense of the subject’s huge interdisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature and brings together the best and most influential materials from ‘the first phase’, neo-classics from the institutionalization of semiotics in the 1960s, and contemporary works illustrating the ongoing development of semiotics and its widening applications. Volume I collects pre-modern material showing the genesis (...) of semiotics from Locke to Peirce, along with a range of work from the last thirty years. Volume II includes key work from recent developments in cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics, while Volume III focuses on ‘Text and Image’. Finally, Volume IV gathers the best offerings from other disciplines, and from emerging fields such as ‘biosemiotics’. Fully indexed, and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, this is an essential work destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital one-stop reference resource. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to adapt Peirce’s semiotics to the study of media and arts. While some Peircean notions are criticized and rejected, constructive ways of understanding Peirce’s ideas are suggested, and a number of new notions, which are intended to highlight crucial aspects of semiosis, are then introduced. All these ideas and notions are systematically related to one another within the frames of a consistent terminology. The article starts with an investigation of Peirce’s three sign constituents (...) and their interrelations: the representamen, the object, and the interpretant. A new approach to the interrelations of these three sign constituents is then suggested and manifested in a distinction between representation and neopresentation. This is followed by a critical discussion of Peirce’s three types of representation—iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity—and their interrelations, which sets the stage for a presentation of what is referred to as the material and mental representation model. This model aims to illuminate the problematic relation between material and mental facets of signification triggered by media and art products, and other material things and phenomena. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

This article demonstrates how a new reading of Rilke’s poetry can provide a basis for comparing and contrasting the aesthetic approach to art and the language-based approach that foregrounds the role of metaphor and materiality in literary production. Lessing’s Laocoön is discussed in terms of an implied dialogue between painting and poetry, which, however, acquires a different valence when the Fifth of Rilke’s 'Duino Elegies' suggests that poetry itself functions as a ‘metaphorical hypoicon’ allowing for shared meanings. My concluding remarks (...) emphasize the importance of the performing self to a complete understanding of Rilke’s semiotic potential. (shrink)

Innovating new experiences is an innovation strategy that increases product differentiation and the perceived value of offers for future autonomous cars. Young Chinese customers are a relevant target group of lead users to co-create those experiences. We address the co-creation of memorable and engaging experiences with targeted potential users and the building of the meaning of experiential imaginary that results from innovations (based on digital media) echoing the need for sensory atmospherics while strolling in the city. We aim at understanding (...) how customers can co-create meaningful experiences. We analyze the narrative structures of the experiential imaginaries, considering the narratives as a major component of ambiance experiences and imaginary. With an empirical approach that associates projective techniques to semiotic analysis of the corresponding narratives, we describe the structural system of the experiential imaginary of young Chinese customers when imagining driving in the city in tomorrow’s cars. Semiotics offers a novel contribution to innovation marketing and idea generation of experiential innovations. This theoretical stance valorizes the outside-in paradigm of future lead-users as co-creators of innovative experiences, whose imaginary narratives are raw materials for creativity. This approach is an alternative to brainstorming and its limits for creating disruptive innovations. (shrink)

This comprehensive Research Handbook explores the wide variety of work conducted in legal semiotics, providing a thorough understanding of how the law works through signs and symbols. Demonstrating that the law is a strategical system of fluctuating signs, contributors critically analyse the ever-evolving conceptualisations of law and legal discourse. Bringing together leading international experts, this Research Handbook focuses on the material, everyday forms of law comprised by non-verbal legal semiotics. Contributors conduct culturally nuanced semiotic analyses of the (...) modern world, covering topics from COVID-19, religion, and human rights, to comic books and music. Chapters consider the foundations of semiotics, as well as the philosophy of law, identifying the cross-cultural similarities in how legal semiotics and visual legal semiotics intersect. Ultimately, the Research Handbook demonstrates that the law is in a state of perpetual flux, with many unique dimensions only made visible by semiotic analysis. The Research Handbook on Legal Semiotics will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of law, jurisprudence, legal culture, linguistics, and semiotics. It will also be an important guide for legal practitioners seeking to better understand the nuances of the legal system. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore the various verbal (linguistic) interactions within the intersemiotic environment of the museum exhibition space. Drawing on notions of intertextuality in the social semiotic tradition such as those developed by Lemke, it begins with a theoretical account of intertextuality in the bilingual museum, before focusing more specifically on two case studies from museums in the PRC and Hong Kong in which Chinese language Source Texts are accompanied by corresponding English language Target Texts. In each case the (...) paper considers the particular relations that obtain between these co-spatially situated Source Texts, the strategies through which such intertextual usage is mediated in translation, and how the intertextual relationships of the Source Text cluster are reconfigured in the correspondent Target Text cluster. A number of factors are identified in the translation process, including discoursal shifts, re-prioritization and redistribution of Source Text material across different Target Texts, and the use of alternative types of lexicogrammatical repetition that seek to create a different form of recapitulation in translation, whether to correct perceived shortcomings in the original ST relationships, or for reasons of cultural or museological convention. (shrink)

Molecular imprints of organisms serving as both the agents and the products of the underlying sign activities are quantum mechanical in their origins. In particular, molecules in any reaction networks constituting a biological organism are semiotic or context-dependent in the sense that their activities reside within the proper coordination of the entire networks. The origin of life could have been related to a specific aspect of molecular semiotics, especially in the transition from molecules as the physical symbols of (...) class='Hi'>material units to molecules as the semiotic signs having the capacity of pointing to something else other than the molecules themselves. Quantum mechanical underpinning of the molecular imprints leading to the emergence of life is in the appraisal of the material capacities of both coherent assimilation and decoherent dissociation already latent in the imprints. One empirical evidence suggesting the likelihood of both coherent assimilation and decoherent dissociation in prebiotic settings could have been found in synthetic chemical reactions running in hydrothermal circulation of seawater through hot vents in the Haedean ocean on the primitive Earth. (shrink)

Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse argues that deconstruction can be employed in conjunction with the historically-oriented approach to cultural experience that is favored by Critical Theory. The two discourses that inform this comparative study situate Modernism between evolving traditions that begin with Hegel and Nietzsche, leading on to Adorno's commitment to philosophical aesthetics and Derrida's concern for writing (écriture). Interrelated discussions of eight major authors, working in four different languages, are presented to show how allegorical Modernism (...) foreshadows the possibility of cultural history. Joyce, Kafka, Malraux, Rilke, and Stevens are among the authors discussed in this book. The notion of material difference allows literature to be redefined in semiotic terms and demonstrates how the allegorical imagination mediates between art and time. (shrink)

Principles of constructivism are used here to explore how organisms develop tools, subagents, scaffolds, signs, and adaptations. Here I discuss reasons why organisms have composite nature and include diverse subagents that interact in partially cooperating and partially conflicting ways. Such modularity is necessary for efficient and robust functionality, including mutual construction and adaptability at various time scales. Subagents interact via material and semiotic relations, some of which force or prescribe actions of partners. Other interactions, which I call “guiding”, do (...) not have immediate effects and do not disrupt the evolution and learning capacity of partner agents. However, they modify the extent of learning and evolutionary possibilities of partners via establishment of scaffolds and constraints. As a result, subagents construct reciprocal scaffolding for each other to rebalance their communal evolution and learning. As an example, I discuss guiding interactions between the body and mind of animals, where the pain system adjusts mind-based learning to the physical and physiological constraints of the body. Reciprocal effects of mind and behaviors on the development and evolution of the body includes the effects of Lamarck and Baldwin. (shrink)

This is a copy of the Proceedings version of a paper presented at the Workshop on Computational Intelligence and Semiotics, organized by João Queiroz and Ricardo Gudwin, held at Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil, on 8-9 October, 2002. (This version contains material not actually delivered at the conference.) Queiroz and Gudwin will be releasing the Proceedings volume on a..

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to (...) meaning is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

Poetry is an important challenge for semiotics, and a special area of study for the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school, since the first volume of Sign Systems Studies was Juri Lotman’s monograph Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964). From then on the concept of poetry as one of the secondary modelling systems has evolved, since in relation to poetry, the primary modelling system is natural language. In this paper, the concept of semiotic system has been re-examined and the treatment of primary and (...) secondary semiotic systems has been significantly revised. A semiotic system can be characterized not only by its internal structure and other systems to which it is related, but also by the field upon what it is realized. The latter aspect has gained almost no attention in any treatment of semiotics; the execution of a sign is understood in the spirit of Saussure and Hjelmslev as a material realization of an abstract element (for instance, a chess piece knight can be realized with wood or plastic, but it can also remain purely virtual). At first, distinction is made between language and sign system. Every sign system consists of language and field. There are three different kinds of fields: 1) just a background – footprints on sand are a sign on the background of sand; 2) a material structured field (a football ground or a chess board in the game called Chapayev) and 3) an abstract structured field, which in its turn consists of other fields (for instance, the chess board which consists of 64 fields). Differently from a football ground, a chess board can be a purely virtual one on which virtual pieces are moved (for instance, in case of blindfold or correspondence chess). The field in its turn can be language and one language can use another language as its field. In this case we speak of primary and secondary sign systems. For instance, the prosodic system of language is a field for a verse metre, while the semantic system of language is a field for a narrative. (shrink)

This article deals with the material presence of the past and the recent call in the human sciences for a " things." This renewed interest in things signals a rejection of constructivism and textualism and the longing for what is "real," where "regaining" the object is conceived as a means for re-establishing contact with reality. In the context of this turn, we might wish to reconsider the status of relics of the past and their function in mediating relations between (...) the organic and the inorganic, between people and things, and among various kinds of things themselves for reconceptualizing the study of the past. I argue that the future will depend on whether and how various scholars interested in the past manage to modify their understanding of the material remnants of the past, that is, things as well as human, animal, and plant remains. In discussing this problem I will refer to Martin Heidegger's distinction between an object and a thing, to Bruno Latour's idea of the agency of things and object-oriented democracy, and to Don Ihde's material hermeneutics. To illustrate my argument I will focus on some examples of the ambivalent status of the disappeared person in Argentina, which resists the oppositional structure of present versus absent. In this context, the disappeared body is a paradigm of the past itself, which is both continuous with the present and discontinuous from it, which simultaneously is and is not. Since there are no adequate terms to analyze the "contradictory" or anomalous status of the present-absent dichotomy, I look for them outside the binary oppositions conventionally used to conceptualize the present-absent relationship in our thinking about the past. for this purpose I employ Algirdas Julien Greimas's semiotic square. (shrink)

To relate theories of affordance and frame with the tradition of formal aesthetics, philosophical iconology and the life sciences (keyword Vitality Semiotics) is the starting point of the paper. According to this approach, the structural preconditions of images, as determined by materials, techniques and the composition of the design means, become essential. Through these structures, the producers are able to set impulses that become decisive for the interpretation of space and time or the "scene" as a dynamic event. Against (...) the social and cultural background of the recipients the "scene" gains a meaning to their life. This means to understand the productʼs conception and composition as an affordance which determines the framework of the reception conditions. The benefit of this approach lies in the identification of changes in the self-understanding and thus of trends in to new standards of societies. This is to be illustrated by Exekiasʼ drinking bowl around 540/30 BC in Munich. (shrink)

By comparing chemistry to art, chemists have recently made claims to the aesthetic value, even beauty, of some of their products. This paper takes these claims seriously and turns them into a systematic investigation of the aesthetics of chemical products. I distinguish three types of chemical products - materials, molecules, and molecular models - and use a wide variety of aesthetic theories suitable for an investigation of the corresponding sorts of objects. These include aesthetics of materials, idealistic aesthetics from Plato (...) to Kant and Schopenhauer, psychological approaches of Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim, and semiotic aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and Umberto Eco. Although the investigation does not support recent claims, I point out where aesthetics does and can play an import role in chemistry. Particularly, Eco's approach helps us understand that and how aesthetic experience can be a driving force in chemical research. (shrink)

Taking the semiotic landscaping of the Occupy Movement in Hong Kong in 2014 as an example, the article explores the semiotic relation between the materialization of signs and the constitution of a collectivity. Juxtaposing the concepts of ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’, ‘landscaping’ and ‘autoglottic space’, the article argues that collective enunciations are not autonomous from human agency. Instead, collective enunciations can be created by deliberate de-subjectification and de-personification in the materialization of signs.

The paper compares John Dewey's pragmatism and cultural-historical activity theory as epistemologies and theories of transformative material activity. For both of the theories, the concept of activity, the prototype of which is work, constitutes a basis for understanding the nature of knowledge and reality. This concept also implies for both theories a methodological approach of studying human behavior in which social experimentation and intervention play a central role. They also suggest that reflection and thought, mediated by language and semiotic (...) artifacts, serve the reorientation of activity and is vital in the development of new, alternative ways of action. That is why Dewyan pragmatism and activity theory supply means of understanding organizational behavior and change in human activities better than the concepts of practice based on rule following, routines or embodied skills. (shrink)

This article applies some conceptual tools from semiotics to better understand the disastrous impacts of the world economy on global ecology. It traces the accelerating production of material disorder and waste to the logic of the money sign, as economic production processes simultaneously increase exchange-values and entropy. The exchange of indexical and iconic signs is essential to the dynamics of ecological systems and the proliferation of biological diversity. The human species has added a third kind of sign, the (...) symbol, and more recently a fourth: all-purpose money. Money does not refer to any referent either through contiguity, similarity, or convention. It is an empty sign, capable of assuming any significance that its owner attributes to it. The article argues that the concept of symbolic reference should be restricted to cultural and linguistic phenomena. Money qualifies as a new species of sign based on its exceedingly open mode of reference. It does not refer to any object by social convention but owes its specific properties precisely to the absence of such conventions. The logic of money pivots on decontextualisation: it presupposes and encourages the detachment of exchange values, people, and concepts from the particular and the local. Selective advantage is no longer primarily about calibration within local contexts, but increasingly a matter of transcending or emancipating oneself from the specific. This drift toward decontextualisation reverses the evolution of complexity and diversity throughout the planetary biosphere. (shrink)

A teacher’s use of classroom space via embodied movement enacts a specific spatial pedagogy and has a significant impact on the nature of teaching and learning that can take place. The ubiquity and large expenditure in renovating university learning environments have not been accompanied by well-informed research due to a tendency to background embodied movement in pedagogic investigations. This paper explores the semiotic potentials and pedagogic functions of one teacher’s embodied movement in an Active Learning Classroom in a tertiary setting. (...) It maps out the interrelationship of embodied movement and space as an entanglement of materiality and practice, which complements existing research that relates movement to space only in terms of layout and composition. By conducting a nuanced multimodal analysis of one teacher’s co-patterns of movement and speech in a tertiary lesson, this paper finds that co-patterns of embodied movement and speech in the classroom can segment phases of pedagogic discourse into five secondary phases and that these phases congruently enact different types of space to modulate the teacher-student relationship and enact different pedagogic roles. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of embodied movement on classroom design and pedagogic practice. (shrink)

This article sheds new light on Bruno Latour’s sociology of science and technology by looking at his early study of the French writer, philosopher and editor Charles Péguy (1873–1914). In the early 1970s, Latour engaged in a comparative study of Péguy’s Clio and the four gospels of the New Testament. His 1973 contribution to a Péguy colloquium (published in 1977) offers rich insights into his interest in questions of time, history, tradition and translation. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, (...) Latour reads Clio as spelling out and illustrating the following argument: ‘Repetition is a machine to produce differences with identity’. However, in contrast to Deleuze’s work (together with Félix Guattari) on the materiality of machines, or assemblages [agencements], Latour emphasizes the semiotic aspects of the repetition/difference process. As in Péguy, the main model for this process is the Roman Catholic tradition of religious events. The article argues that it is this reading of Péguy and Latour’s early interest in biblical exegesis that inspired much of Latour’s later work. In Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979) and The Pasteurization of France (1988) in particular, problems of exegesis and tradition provide important stimuli for the analysis of scientific texts. In this context, Latour gradually transforms the question of tradition into the problem of reference. In a first step, he shifts the event that is transmitted and translated from the temporal dimension (i.e. the past) to the spatial (i.e. from one part of the laboratory to another). It is only in a second step that Latour resituates scientific events in time. As facts they are ‘constructed’ but nevertheless ‘irreducible’. They result, according to Latour, from the tradition of the future. As a consequence, the Latourian approach to science distances itself from the materialism of Deleuze and other innovative theoreticians. (shrink)

As everyone who has looked into almost any philosophical journal within the last year is aware, Charles Morris has written a book on signs. More precisely, he has elaborated a strain of thought found in his very earliest writings. A first, partial culmination of these ideas is his monograph Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Since the publication of FTS, Morris has conducted experiments relative to human sign behavior. SLB, I believe, is a revision and expansion of FTS to take (...) into account new material supplied by these experiments and increased insight into the nature of behavior psychology. For Morris now asserts explicitly, what before he only hinted: that “Semiotic thus becomes a part of the empirical science of behavior, and can utilize whatever principles and predictions the general theory of behavior has attained or can attain.”. (shrink)

The present paper will summarise the methodology, the scientific outcomes, and the potential for generalisation of the model of a project that studied cohabitation between human inhabitants and liminal species (in the present case, corvids) in Tartu, Estonia, from October 2021 to July 2023, with a comparative field study in Paris, France. It will present the context and goals of using a semiotic model to map interspecific cohabitation, expose what kind of data can be used to feed the model in (...) a relevant way and how it was done in the case of this project. This paper will present how the model diagnosed issues in cohabitation, both from material nuisances and cultural aspects, insisting on the concept of “hostile minority” that emerged from the study. It will discuss the importance of problem-solving in interspecific cohabitation, what the model suggested regarding this aspect, how this tool can be generalised to a large variety of cases and why it should be used this way. (shrink)

Autopoietic theory is increasingly seen as a candidate for a radical theory of law, both in relation to its theoretical credentials and its relevance in terms of new and emerging forms of law. An aspect of the theory that has remained less developed, however, is its material side, and more concretely the theory’s accommodation of bodies, space, objects and their claim to legal agency. The present article reads Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems in a radical and material manner, (...) linking it on the one hand to current post-structural theorisations of law and society, and on the other hand extending its ambit to accommodate the influx of material considerations that have been working their way through various other disciplines. The latter comprises both a materialisation of the theory itself and ways of conceptualising the legal system as material through and through. This I do by further developing what I have called Critical Autopoiesis, namely an acentric, topological, post-ecological and posthuman understanding of Luhmann’s theory, that draws on Deleuzian thought, feminist theory, geography, non-representational theory, and new material and object-oriented ontologies. These are combined with some well-rehearsed autopoietic concepts, such as distinction, environment and boundaries; Luhmann’s earlier work on materiality continuum; more recent work on bodies and space; as well as his work on form and medium in relation to art. The article concludes with five suggestions for an understanding of what critical autopoietic materiality might mean for law. (shrink)

Taking the manuscript On the Dual Essence of Language as a starting point, the article follows the scholarly tradition of reexamining the position of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics regarding twentieth-century semiotics and structuralism. After half a century of research on Saussure’s manuscript legacy, the manuscript discovered in 1996 and published for the first time in 2002 develops aspects of Saussure’s linguistic thought that cannot be inferred on the basis of previously known texts. One of these aspects concerns the crucial (...) question of the nature of the linguistic sign and the process of signification, as well as the role of linguistic science in understanding such problems. The current text aims at reconstructing Saussure’s ideas on these points through an analysis of the notion of final quaternion, claiming that this notion presents an alternative concept of the linguistic sign and signification process that hasn’t been explored so far. It involves a five-sided relationship of non-pregiven elements in one signifying complex that is neither signifier, nor signified, and in the end, brings to the fore the material dimension of verbal language. (shrink)

Glitches pose expressive challenges for digital motion pictures. These problematics reveal a “material function” that determines their identification and prescribes their semantics on-screen. These issues of materiality are familiar from the ideological critiques of avant-garde film in the 1970s, but have not been explored in relation to the semiotics of digital cinema. Developing an understanding of these problematics shows the complex problematics of using glitches for critical and expressive purposes in motion pictures.

Language and Materiality integrates linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship on a range of topics: semiotic approaches to language, language commodification, sound, embodiment, mediatization, and aesthetics. Empirically rigorous, the volume engages scholars and students interested in language, its use, and meanings. It consists of three sections - 'Texts, Objects, Mediality', 'Sound, Aesthetics, Embodiment', and 'Time, Place, Circulation' - containing chapters and short commentaries, framed by a curated conversation about semiotics and materiality in anthropology. Each section theorizes intersections, connections, and relationships (...) between language and materiality across diverse topics and ethnographic contexts. The volume shows that materiality may be approached as a feature of political economy, sensual experience, aesthetics, and affective relationships in its relation to language as talk, register, genre, ideology, and acoustic object. It consists of new perspectives on materiality as a vital dimension of social life and signification in global capitalism, connecting inquiries on subjects as diverse as food, media, fonts, and music. (shrink)

The article examines the use of semiotics in media theory, advancing a critique of Saussurian approaches to media and harnessing Peirce's sign theory as a way to analyze media, with reference to the sign “terrorist.” The tiered model of media representation based on Saussure's sign relation is found to under-theorize the materiality of the sign, the indeterminacy of meaning, the significance of the speaking subject, and the ideological and institutional forces that work on the sign. The interpretant in Peirce's (...) model allows an alternate approach to media analysis in which media can be considered a kind of material culture, produced by people in regulated settings and encountered by interpreting minds in various contexts. Metasemiotic frameworks are found to operate on the sign “terrorist,” but the ongoing process of semiosis also allows for the possibility of change. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 22-25. The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Ensino Superior), Brazil. From the multifarious subdivisions of semiotics, be they naturalistic or culturalistic, the realm of semiotics of value is a ?eld that is getting more and more attention these days. Our entire political and economic systems are based upon structures of symbolic representation that many times seem not only to embody monetary value but also to determine it. The connection (...) between monetary and linguistic exchanges is self-evident: the former requires the latter and develops in direct relation to it. Creative experimentation and design of digital systems of value exchange are blossoming on the web. Dr. Gilson Schwartz, an economist turned media theorist and professor at the University of São Paulo, adopted the concept of Iconomics, originally created by Michael Kaplan, an author concerned with the linguistics of economic value. Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of value creation and representation via digital technologies are the main goals of Dr. Schwartz’s projects, aiming at the re-designing of our relationship to the economic value of imagination and the social control of property. Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, a former Chief Economist at BankBoston, Brazil and Advisor to the President of the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). FURTHER READING: Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture . 15.3 (2003): 477-493. Renata Lemos-Morais: You have recently produced and directed a short documentary about Creative Currencies in Latin America. Could you tell us a bit about its process and its findings? Gilson Schwartz: The “Creative Currencies” project is a work-in-progress platform which unfolds as an action research agenda connected both to the production of audiovisual content and the development of social currency software. The initiative dates back to 2003 when I led an experimental project supported by the Presidency of Brazil. At that time, we issued paper currency in a small, touristic village in the Northeast Region which stimulated local cultural projects. But it was only in 2009 that the Central Bank of Brazil acknowledged “social currencies” as a legitimate economic agenda, calling for more debate at the I Financial Inclusion Forum. This year, the monetary authorities organized a second forum that also opened the room to discussions on mobile payment systems and new perspectives on poverty alleviation via State subsidies. The Ministry of Culture funded the “Creative Currencies” project in 2009-2010 and our next stage in this discovery process is to be supported by the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). In short, there is genuine interest among public officials in different areas and public funding for social currencies is on the rise in Brazil. However, after all these years we are still at a very early stage of research and practice. Some of the most successful initiatives (such as Banco Palmas) actually evolved out of local monetary creation to become correspondent banking operations for commercial banks and other financial groups. After eight years of price stability and social inclusion, Brazil stands out as a major opportunity for social experimentation, even the Grameen Bank is now entering the Brazilian market and many NGOs are geared towards different forms of entrepreneurialism in the base of the pyramid, riding solidarity economic models, microfinance and microcredit for local development. It is yet to be seen, however, whether these developments are just one more stage of “bankarization”, that is to say, an extension of regular banking services or actually a new form of social and symbolic self-determination at the local level. So far, the Central Bank of Brazil is open to new forms of credit and local finance as long as they are strictly territorial and very close to barter among the poor. In other words, whether the process of monetary creation could be made to fit an open source paradigm is yet to be seen. Community banking and social currencies might as well end up as just another channel for access to and use of banking services. The “Creative Currencies” project aims at promoting the discussion of more fundamental issues, such as the limits of central banking, the prospects for local financial development and the possibility of creating and managing financial icons as cultural assets. The purpose of this project is to produce short documentaries that will bear testimony to this evolving regulatory framework while inducing more discussion about the fundamental iconomic issues concealed in the process of money and wealth creation. RLM: What new potential is there in applying digital technologies to currency creation? GS: Globalization is a result of the virtualization of money, that is, the overcoming of illusions such as the “gold standard”. Money is an icon created by institutions, not on supposedly natural or material foundations but out of political and financial interests. The “dollar standard” is an outstanding evidence of this phenomenon and Kaplan´s paper, the first to use the expression “iconomics”, insists on the rhetoric and semiotic effects associated to a supposedly scientific model of money creation and management. This is a fundamental change that was perceived and discussed much before the digitalization of the world by unorthodox economists such as John Maynard Keynes since the early 20th century. The digitalization of global financial flows accelerated this immateriality and the creation of the Euro was yet another evidence of the political foundations of currencies. The banking establishment, however, is keen on the idea that scientific formulae hold the key to sound money creation. Keynesianism has been repeatedly associated to “inflationism” while the supposedly sound monetary policies of the Orthodoxy serve well the political and financial interests of a technocratic elite. Corporate media also serve this fictitious depiction of the monetary process despite the cyclical bust of monetary rules and financial regulations. The internet, however, has created numerous opportunities for the disintermediation in industries such as film, music and commodities. There is no reason to doubt that the financial industry can also be transformed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Money is media as well. Credit is but confidence. Once people realize that the distributed computing power of networks can also be the platform to weave new monetary and credit operations, there is room for grassroots emancipation out of the established owners of monetary institutions. So far, however, there has been a privatization of monetary management and there is not a clear path or model for the emergent (P2P) property democratization that is inherent to the internet. Digital assets, however, clearly have an inherent potential to escape central control and proprietary regulatory frameworks. RLM: How are social networks transforming the ways in which we exchange value? Do you believe that online influence and reputation might be translated into a new kind of currency? GS: The foundation for social currencies as envisaged by solidarity economics is the territory. Authorities are willing to concede local monetary creation as long as it is restricted to poor neighborhoods, as a proxy to barter. In this relevant but limited context, reputation, personal knowledge and informal ties form the matrix of local or “proximity” finance which are expected to keep credit and leverage to a sustainable level. Anything beyond that should and would lead to an integration of local finance into the established banking system. However, inasmuch as the internet promotes virtual territories and reputation is now subject to all sorts of digital manipulation and stardom becomes an everyday cultural process among teenagers and elders alike, the territorial “foundation” is substituted for more complex patterns of solidarity, cooperation and exchange that reach beyond the physical territory and even the “human.” Digital assets embody knowledge, technology, cultural and educational values that are exchanged at a global scale beyond the control of democratic States (Chinese-like intervention is the exception, not the rule). Hacktivism is unstoppable and so is monetary hacktivism. Especially in the Third World, mobile communications fast became conveyors of money transfers and other appropriation strategies. Banking and telecom sectors already battle for the control of these emerging markets and, as a matter of fact, have so far contributed to the containment of these processes. Governments serve these moguls and have usually adopted a wait-and-see attitude. If open source hardware and grassroots social movements combine to challenge these proprietary battles, then social networks may evolve into new forms of social capital and thus form the ground on which to design and implement social currencies. The global financial crisis, as well as the dollar demise, are an event of such a proportion that social networks may open the path for emancipator subjects to seize the opportunity. RLM: What are some of the social experiments that you think are revolutionizing the way in which value is exchanged? GS: There is a broad evolution of economic systems towards the valuation of intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and sustainability. There are many examples of local as well as global events that call the traditional systems of exchange into question, from carbon credits to educational bonuses, digital barter frameworks and locally based solidarity and fair trade networks. These emerging examples, no matter how different in nature or scale, represent a challenge to the traditional value creation schemes and theories which are based on use and exchange value, supply and demand. This is not to say that utility and labour or scarcity are to be totally dismissed, but there is now an emerging perception that value is also a function of behavioral codes, symbolic patterns and the energy of institutional frameworks. The plasticity of digital platforms is relevant insofar as intellectual property becomes the central source of value creation. But when you discuss the property rights of public goods such as the environment or basic social rights (of minorities or localities), then a new paradigm seems to emerge. RLM: Are gaming and online storytelling digital practices that might have an impact on the way new currencies are created and developed? GS: “Play money” has been one of the early and most intriguing phenomena associated to the diffusion of virtual worlds. These virtual currencies have also been prone to “boom and bust” dynamics, speculation and pure theft (Second Life scams were common and led to “intervention” by the owners of the game). Storytelling is a major source of value, that is, the value of attention and the markets for audience. There are plenty of private monies created and managed by corporate entertainment groups, telecom operators (via mobile virtual network operators) and marketing frameworks. The casino economy, as already depicted by Keynes and other unorthodox economists, is always storytelling about future states of the world, confidence building and leverage of animal spirits. The novelty of current events is not the fictitious nature of any form of capital, but the potential for digital democratization of controls over the imaginary nature of value creation. But this is just a potential, a possibility, a figment that more often than not is appropriated by centralized and opaque private powers. The game industry is a testbed for new connections between storytelling and money creation. RLM: Monetary value was originally connected to the scarcity of precious metals, such as gold. Our entire monetary system seems therefore to function according to a logic of scarcity. Do you believe it is possible to reverse this logic into a logic of abundance? GS: The gold standard was a fiction itself, the “scarcity” is always produced by institutions that regulate confidence and access to credit. The key issue is not to fabricate abundance, but to question the institutions which produce scarcity out of any standard, gold or whatever. Central banks are at the service of private banks in the creation and management of scarcity. RLM: The promise that nanotechnology holds for our future is one of radical abundance (or so say transhumanists). The possibility of creating any kind of material substance through nanoengineering seems each day more feasible. What would this possibility entail in terms of systems of value exchange? GS: Nanotechnology, environmental concerns and grassroots appropriation of distributed knowledge are the frontiers of a new horizon of energy creation and management. Social groups in charge of managing scarcity for the sake of wealth and power concentration must be held accountable for the destruction of our future. Once this key political conundrum is accounted for, new systems of value exchange and even a non-mercantile society will come into existence. Revolutionary theorists such as Marx envisaged transformation via the extreme clash of contradictions between capital and labour. This approach has never led to a change in the systemic logic of scarcity for the sake of social control. We are once again facing the threshold of large scale societal change, but the outcome of the current crisis should come from our imagination, not from yet another paradox of abundance and scarcity. As long as we remain attached to the materiality of value, the illusion of freedom will but reinforce the massive manipulation of necessity. RLM: What do you think is the role of crowdfunding in this context? GS: Crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding are examples of the peer to peer opportunities that come along with distributed computer power. However, the power structure behind wealth and scarcity creation may or may not be changed by crowd management. But it should not be taken at face value, so to speak. The stock market of course is an early form of crowdfunding without calling into question the proprietary framework of the companies offering their investment projects to the market. Any market is a form of crowdsourcing, that is to say, of distributed forms of supply and demand matchmaking. The wealth of networks, however, depends on the contractual ecosystem, the institutional framework, the channeling of social imagination, not on the purely quantitative distribution of bids and offers. I see economics as supply, demand and code. Once you have access to the code, once openness becomes part of the game, then there is a chance of crowd behavior becoming collective intelligence and sustainable imagination. RLM: Is the development of digital currencies headed towards a pluralistic ecology in which many micro currency systems co-exist, or is it penetrating the mainstream monetary system? If it is affecting the mainstream financial system, what would be its effect in the long-term? GS: The same issue is at stake both at local and global levels. The global system is, as a matter of fact, an unstable ecosystem of “micro currencies” whereas the dollar has so far exerted an overwhelming influence. Local currencies and private monies coexist with national currencies only to the extent that the Central Bank admits, for instance, that grassroots monetary emissions remain territorial and strictly connected to poverty. However, the question of how new developments in digital technologies and nanotechnologies might alter not only our current monetary systems but also our understanding of value in itself, is still an open question. (shrink)