The treasures of world semiotics
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Kristian Bankov
Kristian Bankov (b. 1970) is Full Professor in Semiotics and head of the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University. His research interests are in theoretical semiotics, consumer culture and brand research, and the semiotics of new media. Recent publications include
Consumativnoto obshtestvo (‘The consumer society’, 2009), “Udovolstvieto ot hiperteksta” (‘The pleasure of hypertext’, 2015), and “New consumer rituals in Facebook” (2016).
I am very happy and honored to be part of the celebration of the sixtieth birthday of our estimable colleague, Professor Jie Zhang. The celebration of his anniversary is a celebration of semiotic interdisciplinarity. We all are members of a scientific community, officially represented as IASS in eighty-three different countries and the only way of our existence as a community is accepting interdisciplinarity and multiculturality as a standard of collaboration.
Professor Jie Zhang is our treasurer. He is responsible for the money of IASS. Money is also an intercultural phenomenon: there are as many currencies as cultures around the world – a real moneysphere. And we translate them all the time from one currency to another. But money is not only an intercultural phenomenon; it is an interdisciplinary phenomenon, as well. An important part of the economic sciences is the study of money and monetary questions – but not only this. There is the history of money, philosophy of money, sociology of money, anthropology of money, archeology of money, etc. There is also the semiotics of money. But the semiotics of money is an underdeveloped field of research. There are fewer than ten articles on the topic, distributed among various non-semiotic journals.
This celebration of Professor Zhang and interdisciplinarity, then, is a felicitous occasion to think about the semiotics of money. I personally believe that the semiotics of money is one of the unexplored treasures of semiotics. Since its very emergence in ancient history, money has always been a semiotic device – something that represents or stands for something else. The evolution of the money-sign is a semiotic evolution from less arbitrary sign forms such as cattle or grain, via coins and paper money to the contemporary electronic money. This evolution is also an exponential growth of the relevance of the semiotics of money. In the first phases there was almost no independent semiotic level in the monetary economic exchange, whereas with the growth of the levels of arbitrariness the logic of economic exchange has come closer and closer to a pure communicative phenomenon. This level of arbitrariness, besides other collateral effects, has brought a dramatic cleavage between common money owners and monetary institutions. In other words, today we have a growing indignation among huge numbers of people who feel like hostages of monetary speculations carried out by the world financial elite. I think semiotics, with its interdisciplinary vocation, can open a research and education program in the field of monetary exchange that can help common people better understand and resist the tyranny of financial speculations.
This would be something very close to what, in the 1960s, Eco called “guerilla semiotica” and, thanks to his and Roland Barthes’ texts, initiated a critical perspective from mass media and pop culture to understand and resist dominating ideologies. A semiotics of money would be an opportunity to consolidate global prestige for our discipline and to reconfirm the critical tradition, established by our great masters of the past – a real treasure to be explored.
About the author
Kristian Bankov (b. 1970) is Full Professor in Semiotics and head of the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University. His research interests are in theoretical semiotics, consumer culture and brand research, and the semiotics of new media. Recent publications include Consumativnoto obshtestvo (‘The consumer society’, 2009), “Udovolstvieto ot hiperteksta” (‘The pleasure of hypertext’, 2015), and “New consumer rituals in Facebook” (2016).
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to the Festschrift
- A semiotic way of being sixty
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Introduction: semiotics is interdisciplinary: but how can you ensure interdisciplinarity is practiced?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The treasures of world semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- To what extent can it be argued that semiotics is an interdisciplinary methodology?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Westerners taste, arabs get drunk
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The interdisciplinary languages of semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Semiotics as an interdisciplinary methodology
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- On the interdisciplinarity of semiotics
- Contributions
- Semioticians reflecting on the interdisciplinary character of semiotics
- Contributions
- Why life presupposes semiosis
- Contributions
- How to encode and infer linguistic actions
- Contributions
- The Bakhtinian revolution and the i-other relation
- Contributions
- Communication-production and the right to non-functionality
- Contributions
- Metaphors, semiotics, and future studies
- Contributions
- The artist’s self-reflection: A pluralistic interpretation of the artist-characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays
- Contributions
- On anti-identity construction and anti-modeling
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to the Festschrift
- A semiotic way of being sixty
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Introduction: semiotics is interdisciplinary: but how can you ensure interdisciplinarity is practiced?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The treasures of world semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- To what extent can it be argued that semiotics is an interdisciplinary methodology?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Westerners taste, arabs get drunk
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The interdisciplinary languages of semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Semiotics as an interdisciplinary methodology
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- On the interdisciplinarity of semiotics
- Contributions
- Semioticians reflecting on the interdisciplinary character of semiotics
- Contributions
- Why life presupposes semiosis
- Contributions
- How to encode and infer linguistic actions
- Contributions
- The Bakhtinian revolution and the i-other relation
- Contributions
- Communication-production and the right to non-functionality
- Contributions
- Metaphors, semiotics, and future studies
- Contributions
- The artist’s self-reflection: A pluralistic interpretation of the artist-characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays
- Contributions
- On anti-identity construction and anti-modeling
