Volume 19, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Championing Global Semiotics: In Honor of Paul Cobley; Guest Editor: Hongbing Yu

Within the discipline of semiotics, written text remains the primary mode of communication and analysis, despite the fact that, as all good semioticians know, signs occur in all modalities – which is why we think of artists and musicians, no less than novelists and poets, as applied semioticians par excellence. In 1997, Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz combined the semiotic tools of words and drawings to produce what is undoubtedly one of the most successful and influential texts for the dissemination of semiotic theory: the illustrated graphic guide called Semiotics for beginners (later published as Introducing semiotics ) . On the occasion of this well-deserved festschrift honoring Paul’s life of work in semiotics, the authors felt it most appropriate to pay homage to Paul – and to the graphic guide with which he has inspired countless readers across the world to better understand the fundamentals of semiotics – by once again combining the semiotic tools of words and drawings to illustrate the ideas and history of this master semiotician.

We briefly review the impact of Paul Cobley (born 1963) on biosemiotics and list his works on the topic. These have links to communication studies and integrationism. After Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, and several others, Cobley has been a leader of the general semiotics movement, according to which “semiotics’ project is most fully realized on a biosemiotic basis.”

In the past, I have published papers on the use of language within the realm of fictional narratives, how the structure of postmodern films and novels operates to affect the reader or viewer, and on the purely objective worlds constructed within the confines of literature. Most recently, I submitted a newly written paper to my friend Paul Cobley for his casual feedback. He got back promptly, saying only that the paper did not have enough references. I pressed Paul: Was it not possible to write a philosophy paper where one just philosophized, without alluding to things written on the subject matter in the past, and wasn’t it ok not to cite references if you came up with the idea independent of any outside reading? His reply was: “No.” Time passed, and I was asked to write this article celebrating Paul’s 60th birthday. Looking for something I hadn’t read already, I discovered his book, Narrative (2014). This paper addresses one of the reference entries most definitely missing from my prior investigations on literature and cinema, one which should have informed – and now does my own thoughts on fiction and film.

Paul Cobley stated that the semiotics of narrative should not be conflated with narratology. This statement becomes a starting point for an inquiry into the semiotics of narrative by looking at the concept of narrative signs and its future as a new theory of narrative. Narrative signs embedding semiotic processes convey the meaning of narrative in the areas of the prelinguistic, the linguistic, and the extralinguistic by way of signs, models, and semiosis. What is more, the concept of narrative modeling for Cobley enables further inquiry into cultural activity through the act of narration for transvaluation. In this regard, a new theory of narrative involves time, emotion, abduction, and the dialogic self, leading to the narrative-related ideas of cognition, identity, and human subjectivity. Based on Peirce’s semiotics and a biosemiotic approach, narrative modeling makes human beings participate in sign activity, that is, cultural activity through dialogic interaction between culture and nature. Consequently, this paper proposes that the study of the mysterious narrative through narrative modeling is geared to seeing how it affects humans and also how they see and make a world through various cultural practices.

Building up on Paul Cobley’s work on narrativity in film and literature, the present article aims at exploring how pop songs convey narrative elements via their own structure (or “format,” as it shall be called here), and their single components (intro, outro, bridge, refrain, etc.). Some of the most recurrent formats (particularly Strophe–Refrain and Chorus–Bridge) as well as some of the most unusual ones (e.g. the suite) are discussed within the framework of the three main narrative movements analyzed by Cobley (realism, modernism, and postmodernism), and additional parallels with literature and cinema will be proposed in the area of what here will be called “conceptual space” (diegesis, non-diegesis, fourth wall, etc.).

Having been intimately aligned with the research agenda of biosemiotics since his colleague Thomas Sebeok first started using the term in 1992, Paul Cobley has consistently argued against the idea that the primary aim of biosemiotics is to make an intervention in the discourse and epistemology of the life sciences. Instead, he argues for the potential of a biosemiotically informed humanities for refashioning the ways in which we humans come to understand our situation within a world of signs and other organisms – as well as our existential duty of care for preserving the diversity and flourishing of both through the development of an anti-volunteerist ethics. Paul Cobley’s 2016 Cultural implications of biosemiotics fills a much-needed lacuna in the literature of biosemiotics in focusing with laser-like precision on those aspects of our human being – politics and aesthetics, education and ideology – that, Cobley rightly claims, have gone disproportionately under-analyzed and even under-appreciated in biosemiotics, due to its competing emphasis on reformulating biology. As one of the justly accused, I would like to take the occasion of this Festschrift to show the extent to which I now believe that Paul’s more expansive understanding of the purview of biosemiotics is, indeed, the proper one.

In the sign of homaging Paul Cobley as part of this Festschrift for him, we will consider two of his edited volumes: the first The Routledge companion to semiotics , 2010, to which we contributed a text titled “Semioethics,” and the second (co-edited with Kristian Bankov), Semiotics and its masters , 2017, to which we contributed the text “Semioethics as a vocation of semiotics.” Particular reference is made to Paul’s observations in his “Introduction” to Part I, “Understanding semiotics,” in the 2010 book, and in his opening essay, “What the humanities are for – a semiotic perspective,” in Section 1: “Semiotics in the world and academia,” in the 2017 book. What follows is an ideal discussion with Paul regarding “Semioethics” and possible developments today. In line with critical semiotics, our focus is on communication in globalization and the need for education to dialogism, plurilingualism, and critique for a new humanism, a primary task for the humanities today.

New hope can draw on anti-humanist duty of care. Turning from debate about how one ought to act in discursively produced “realities,” Paul Cobley advocates a bioethics of living in semiotic fields. Thanks to observership, humans can make good use of both the known and how things appear as signs . For Cobley, the latter are “mind independent.” Once deemed real , semiosis can unite the lawful, the perceivable and, at least, some of the unknown. However, skeptical as I am about metaphysics and mind, I shift the focus to languaging in semiotic fields: human perceiving, doing, and saying entangle languaging with nature’s simplex tricks (Berthoz, Alain. 2012. Simplexity: Simplifying principles for a complex world . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). An ethical dimension runs through how we feel, speak and, thus, actualize practices. The duty of care, the known, the knowable, and the unknowable unite in thingishness . What appear to us as signs ensure that perceiving-acting can draw, at times, on fictions and, at others, precision tools. Humans tether sense to wordings as, without end, we actualize practices. Stories bring ethical awareness to attitudes, action, and the due care that shapes understanding and response to institutions. In offering a distributed perspective on language, one makes possible an ecolinguistics that works for life-sustaining relations between humans, nonhumans and what we call “things.”

This paper explores how short web videos uploaded to the Truth Commission’s TikTok official profile are formulated. The Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad) is a Colombian state entity created to clarify patterns and causes of Colombia’s internal armed conflict and recognize victims’ and society’s right to the truth. The Commission’s aim is to avoid repetition of violence through an ample and plural participation process to construct a stable and lasting peace. To explore the debate and the importance of recognizing crimes against humanity committed in the context of the armed conflict in Colombia – specifically, sexual violations against ethnically and territorially defined women – two videos were selected under thematic, territorial, ethnic, and gender-unity criteria from among 60 short videos published on TikTok between February 2020 and March 2021. The nuclear axis of the videos corresponds to the semiotic theory at the core of the multimodal and multimedia critical discourse analysis (MMCDA). The digital discourse is multimodal, as its design, production, and distribution process draws from various and coexisting sign systems: visual-graphic (image-color), visual-verbal-graphic, verbal-sound, and sound-musical. These devices are proposed as “memory devices” that allow viewers to witness human rights violation events in the context of Colombia’s current armed conflict.

The postdigital condition is discussed from the perspective of Paul Cobley’s biosemiotic approach to culture. While semiotics is often concerned with cultural criticism, there has been no explicit biosemiotic approach to culture, until only recently with Cobley unfurling such a research program. The key to this is the biosemiotic notion of modeling , which accounts for co-evolutionary processes encompassing biology and culture. This approach responds to recent calls in the humanities and social sciences to understand culture as constituted through technology, but also as something not strictly human (more-than-human). By undermining both vitalism and reductionism, biosemiotics avoids biologism and culturalism, which is of much importance for theorizing culture and learning in light of evolution. This has consequences for construing cultural pluralism. Mainstream notions of multiculturalism rely on cultural holism and, hence, advocate the separation of communities and languages for the pretense of maintaining diversity. Cobley’s theory avoids this pitfall, offering a view of cultures as intrinsically heterogeneous and open systems. This suggests further implications for how we understand the aims of literacy and state-run education. We present an account of biocultural learning that accommodates contemporary posthumanist and postdigital orientations. Construing learning as ecologically contextual is necessary for addressing ongoing technological transformations.

An interesting article by Hongbing Yu (Yu, Hongbing. 2019. Meaning generation. Chinese Semiotic Studies 15(3). 429–447) “Meaning generation” led me to reconsider an unpublished paper from 15 years ago on Roman Jakobson’s much-criticized basic communication model, and the functions of language published in the Closing Statement of Style in language (Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and poetics. In Thomas Sebeok (ed.), Style in language , 350–377. New York: MIT Press). In this article it is about using the semiotic nonagon operative model, derived from the three Peircean categories, to review Jakobson’s model, and in turn, think about the limits of agency for the production of meaning in relation to three other authors like Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Charles S. Peirce himself.