Volume 2009, Issue 173

This article focuses on ‘resistance’ and the role that semiotics has to play in it. It posits resistance through the lens of ‘existential semiotics’ (Tarasti, Existential Semiotics, Indiana University Press, 2000), based on Greimas but also including a lineage comprising Bergson, Aron, von Wright, Ricoeur and Elias, and ultimately back to Hegel in mapping the logics of ‘transcendence’. As illustrative cases, the essay analyses the aesthetics of resistance in painting, print fiction and music. It also seeks to shed light on the theoretical co-ordinates of the phenomenon of globalization.

The current article is a problem-oriented look at (the image of) political semiotics from the sphere of the inquiry into the political. It first looks at the relevant features of the political and semiotics, and then addresses political semiotics, both contents-wise and as the two elements relate to each other. A sketch of how political semiotics exists today follows — first concerning the context of political science, and then as far as the actual output is concerned, which is then systematically evaluated. The final chapter presents three thinkers who represent different paths to possible political semiotics: Cassirer, Jung, and Uexküll.

The concept of habit has an established place in the conceptual arsenal of philosophy and social theory. However, it has not been noticed clearly enough, that there are two di¤erent variants of this concept around. The older notion, which might be called the classic ‘Humean’ variant, treats habit as a routine-like behavior pattern where the acting subject's consciousness, rationality, and intentionality are not involved. Its alternative stems from the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, and understands ‘habit’ as open for the acting subject's reflection, during the course of action. Accordingly, as the philosopher Stephen Turner (The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions, Polity Press, 1994) asserts that various theories of action in modern social theory in fact tacitly rest on the notion of habit, he makes a strong case. However, the prospects of social theory are not necessarily as gloomy as he sees them, because it is possible to reinterpret habit in the above, more advanced pragmatist sense. In that case, human reflection can be in charge of habitual behavior patterns, and this gives us a more advanced action-theoretic conceptual tool to be used in social theory.

Not only verbal signs, but any situation or semiosis is a relational process that presents different degrees of dialogism. In fact, the sign calls for a response from another sign, that is, the interpretant. Semiosis is an open dialogue among various interpreted and interpretant signs. In this sense, the sign is a dialectic unit of self-identity and otherness. All communication processes are based not only on modeling (Sebeok), but also on dialogism. Modeling and dialogism are pivotal concepts in the study of semiosis. The dialogic relation between sign and interpretant has semiotic consequences from the perspective of the typology of signs, and logical consequences from the perspective of the typology of inference and argument. Logic is dia-logic. A new critique of reason is a critique of dialogic reason.

This article is concerned with perception. It presents a complex theoretical schema of sign actions as work. Work, of course, is a central concept in the semiotic investigations of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. The essay shows how ‘work’ can be translated into ‘sign work’ to elucidate the idea of ‘perception’ (which is so often defined in a vague way, inside and outside psychology). It expands on the matter be utilizing the Rossi-Landian perspective on ‘internal’ and ‘external’ signs, the relation of which is the key factor in social reproduction. The essay pursues this distinction with further reference to the work of Wittgenstein as a ‘crypto-semiotician.’ Through Bezzel's inflection of Wittgenstein, the essay draws out the ‘game’ relations in the ‘work’ of looking and seeing.

The aim of the present article is the study of the connotative meaning of space, but special theoretical attention is given to the wider theoretical context of such an enterprise. I argue that the whole domain of spatial studies is split between two major and conflicting epistemological paradigms: ‘objectivism,’ which studies ‘space’ as an external object, and ‘subjectivism,’ which approaches space as ‘place,’ that is, as a meaningful, semiotic entity. The existence of these two parallel orientations, both legitimate, points to the need for a holistic approach, allowing the articulation of semiotic phenomena with social structures. The holistic approach helps to clarify three different semiotic approaches: the immanent, the Greimasian sociosemiotic, and the holistic social semiotic approach. The relationship between space and meaning is a metaphorical one, and metaphor belongs to the semantics of connotation. The whole connotative field of a society constitutes its world view or ideology, which is structured by a classification system. The study of the metaphorical meanings of space is set in this article against three different social backgrounds. The first are precapitalist societies. As a case study, I use the example of the Sudanese Dogon of southern Mali and show that cosmogony and cosmology, inextricably linked to an anthropomorphic code, constitute the nucleus of their world view and preside over the organization and morphology of space. The second is western modernism. I conclude that the major ideological urban models of modernism are ruled by an organicist code. The last context studied is western postmodernism. I argue that the postmodern approach to space (which is not a radically new phenomenon) adopts a pseudo-historical stance and uses the overarching metaphor of genius loci. In the context of postmodernism, the ‘metaphorization’ of built space goes hand in hand with its ‘Las Vegasization’ and ‘Disneylandization,’ and meaning, spatial experience, and the search for identity are integrated into the circuit of capitalist profit.

Gender system can be understood as a cultural system rooted in biological differences. Semiotically speaking, it is a binary sign system (male/female) with some variation involved (transsexuals, homosexuals, etc.). In the process of modernity, the biological motivation of the gender system is being loosened by technological innovations such as contraception and mother's milk substitute. At the same time, the state has replaced family and kin as the organizing structure of society and the cultural ideal of equality has gained a strong position. These and similar changes together have made gender flow in ‘post-traditional’ societies. The paper deals with this process in paying attention to the three theoretically possible constellations in the determination of semiotic identities in social process: functional order in Parsonian sense, formation of struggling parties in the sense of Weber and Bourdieu, and anomie in the sense of Durkheim and Berger and Luckmann. It turns out that elements of all of these three theoretical constellations are present in the current transformation of the gender system. This is elaborated with empirical material drawn from the change of the Finnish gender system from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Renewed interest in collective memory has raised the need for conceptual elaboration of the topic and how it can be studied. In an attempt to clarify how it fits into interdisciplinary discussion the following conceptual oppositions are laid out: memory versus remembering, collective versus individual remembering, history versus collective memory, and strong versus distributed versions of collective remembering. Collective memory is then analyzed from the perspective of M. M. Bakhtin's understanding of ‘text’ in which a ‘language system’ is contrasted with an ‘individual, unique, and unrepeatable’ pole of textual analysis. These ideas are harnessed to examine forms of dialogicality that shape collective memory, especially in politically contested cases such as Estonian and Russian accounts of conflict over the past century.

The article starts from the premise known since antiquity that speech indicates something of the speaker. Language as action is regarded not only as a medium to convey lexical or semantic information but also of social meaning. This raises the question: How can we get access to the social meaning of linguistic structures? This is the main question dealt with throughout the paper, which sets out with carefully defining the notion of symbolic meaning on the grounds of social semiotics. It then develops the sociological concept of group (or community) as a cultural sub-system of society, in order to understand better the relationship between language variation as options of linguistic choice and ‘sociolect’ as a group specific linguistic variety. Within this conceptual framework, the contours of a socio-grammar are outlined, which describes the socio-symbolic functions of phonetic, prosodic, morphological, lexical, syntactical, textual, and pragmatic elements of linguistic structure. The perspective then broadens to the level of discourse on which the relationship of language and prestige or language and power is dealt with, notabene with a side view on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the symbolic order of significant difference (in his opus magnum La distinction ).

This article considers the issue of routinization in communication. It argues that, like institutions, genres are a universal element in human communication and a part of communicative practice in all human societies, although it stresses that not every process of human communication is determined by genre. Furthermore, genres are shown to be indispensable because they eliminate the need for laborious planning. This is the case in a number of codes: linguistic, paralinguistic, mimetic, gestural, etc. The essay emphasizes that genres are socially distributed — some people within certain classifications and identities will have access to some genres; other people, from different classifications and identities will not have access to these genres. But it also argues that it should not be forgotten that there are a huge number of genres and that these have specific social functions. Thus, each society will have genres relating to collective memory, didactic genres, and moral(izing) genres with similarities in historical forms.

Multimodal media make meaning by intersecting the semiotic resources of language, visual display, sound and music, cinematic movement, material artifacts, and abstract animation. As meaning-makers, we live across institutions and media and we make meanings that no single medium or institution can control. Transmedia franchises pursue us, colonizing the chronotopes of postmodern life to array the branded content of their media products everywhere we look and go. Social semiotics provides a foundation for critical multimedia analysis that can reach beyond the internal multimodality of individual works to grasp the social meanings of transmedia franchises and trans-institutional lives. In doing so, I argue that it must re-engage with the larger intellectual project of formulating a political economy of the sign.

This article looks at toys for very small children, an object of study that has been pursued in psychoanalysis (by Freud and Erikson, for example), but all too infrequently in semiotics. Specifically, it analyzes the social roles and identities called into play by the highly successful Playmobil figurines. In the Hallidayan tradition, the investigation foregrounds the importance of roles and actors in semiosis, paying close attention to roles/actors that are excluded as well as those that are included. As the essay argues, semiotic systems are always a mixture of affordance and constraint. Playmobil (in contrast to Lego, for example) is shown to be stronger on constraints than affordances, however. As a global brand and genre, the figures of Playmobil have the potential to influence nascent perceptions of the way that social actors operate.

There are six sections in this article. In section 1, I summarize views on discourse as a facet of globalization in the academic literature, and then introduce an approach based upon a version of ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA) and ‘cultural political economy.’ In section 2, I discuss different strategies of globalization (and regionalization) emanating from governmental and non-governmental agencies, and the different discourses that constitute elements of these strategies. In section 3, I discuss how processes of globalization impact upon specific spatial ‘entities’ (nation-states, cities, regions, etc.) in terms of the idea of ‘re-scaling,’ i.e., changing relations in processes, relationships, practices, and so forth between local, national, and international (including ‘global’) scales. I focus here upon the national scale in its relation to the global scale and the scale of international regions (in particular, the process of ‘European integration’). In section 4, I deal with the media and mediation. In section 5, I discuss people's ordinary experience of globalization, and its implications for and effects upon their lives. Section 6 deals with war and terrorism.

Semiotics has the merit of demonstrating that whatever is human involves signs. Indeed, it implies more than this: viewed from a global semiotic perspective we now know that whatever is simply alive involves signs. And this is as far as cognitive semiotics and global semiotics reach. But semioethics pushes this awareness even further by relating semiosis to values and by focusing on the question of responsibility, of radical, inescapable responsibility inscribed in our bodies insofar as we are ‘semiotic animals,’ on the human capacity for responsibility for life over the entire planet. Semioethics develops our awareness of the extension of the semiosic network in the direction of ethics; from a semioethic perspective the question of responsibility cannot be escaped at the most radical level (that of defining commitments and values).

This article offers a reading of the effect of exchange on subjectivity. Two modes of exchange are discussed: commodity-exchange and gift-exchange. Following Marx, Simmel, Lukács, and Bewes, commodity exchange is argued to be detrimental to subjectivity insofar as it leads to abstract, mediated social relationships, and reifies the subject. Debates around the notion and application of reification are investigated. The anthropological insight of Mauss on gift-exchange is introduced and used to challenge elements of the thesis of reification and process of on-going commodification. Gift-exchange is argued to perpetuate concrete, immediate social relations. Critical attention is drawn to the gift as critique of the commodity. My interrogation suggests that there is a problem because the gift is often over-idealized in much gift discourse and figures as a binary opposite to the commodity. This is especially the case with one of the leading contemporary theorists on the gift, Jacques Godbout. Themes that support the notion of the gift, such as family and community bonds, reciprocity, and ‘face to face’ relations, are often taken for granted as being fully enabling. On the other hand commodity exchange is perceived as being exclusively disabling. The article begins to challenge this thinking.

Subjectivity plays an important role in how meaning is created and construed. It concerns the expression of self and the representation of a speaker's perspective or point of view in the interaction with somebody else. The subjectivity explored in this article concerns mainly one special form of self-awareness insofar as it is related to irony. The argument of this article will be carried out in three steps: We first will deal with the main linguistic theories regarding irony. This will lead us to the conclusion that irony — at least in some cases — involves a form of non-propositional knowledge that needs to be identified and captured for irony. In a second step, we will describe this type of non-propositional knowledge, in particular distinguishing it from propositional knowledge. The discussion of non-propositional knowledge as one marker of subjectivity will then lead us to discuss irony — beyond its semantic utterances — as a personal disposition. When we call utterances ironic we are referring to them as linguistic constructs and we deal with the respective content of their declarative statements, technically speaking, the proposition. In this contribution we are interested in showing how ironic utterances lead back to a personal disposition.

POSSESSION embodies two correlative institutional principles, one called EGO-subjectivity, the other called WORLD-objectivity. EGO-subjectivity means an institution that is ideally represented by EGO. It gradually acquires and eventually possesses control over objects of the outside world. WORLD-objectivity means an institution ideally represented by objects. Its principle ensures warranty for possessive control. Its onset is at a point where control by EGO is strongest and tapers off where control is weaker. The dynamic emanating from the two institutional principles is thus converse: From EGO toward WORLD and from WORLD toward EGO. This fundamental schema of POSSESSION underlies our three levels of analysis: one, the cognitive-conceptual, is above grammar but not outside language. We exemplify it by pointing out two correlative basic notions in legal thinking. The intermediate level of General Comparative Grammar features the typological range of variation corresponding to the invariant POSSESSION. The variation represented in the form of a continuum spans between a possessive relation inherent in relational nouns like ‘father’ and a relation established and warranted (EGO has x; x belongs to EGO: converses!). The ‘bottom’ level of individual languages exhibits evidence for the more abstract contentions on the levels above.

This article investigates issues in psychosomatic medicine that could broadly be seen as concerned with the status of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ realms. Initially, it considers two seemingly opposing perspectives, the biomedical model and the constructivist/semiotic model. The bio-medical model has all the set-backs of a positivistic and deterministic model: there is an unambiguous reality that can be ascertained given a detailed enough analysis. It furthermore assumes that observations can be explained by the application of linear causal relationships between the single components of reality. The constructivist perspective and the semiotic way of thinking view life and individuals moving through their life as dealing with particular signs; by applying semiotic thinking we understand why certain elements were selected out of the environment and why they were given a specific meaning. It suggests that some of the difficulties arising from these models can be ameliorated with reference to the neo-phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz. In particular, the concept of the lived body (Leib) assists in understanding the relationship between a patient and his environment.

Taking as a case study the documentary Unknown White Male (UK, 2005) — a film whose theme and reception problematizes stable notions of what constitutes subjectivity — a corrective is offered to the dominant mode applying Peircean semiotics to the moving image. Cinema and media studies have tended to apply Peirce's triadic division of the sign in a limited, formalist way following the explications of his method offered by Wollen and others. However Wollen ignores Peirce's placement of photograph as indexical within the context of the iconic as well as the distinction Peirce draws between ‘instantaneous’ and ‘composite’ photographs. Moreover, Peirce's more general understanding of the importance of semiotic analysis to the overall mental well-being of the human subject, hitherto largely ignored by media scholars, is also addressed.

Who but a nostalgic reactionary would take an interest today in the version of Blade Runner that was originally released in 1982? With its anchoring voice-over and ‘happy ending,’ the film appeared to retreat from posthumanist subjectivity into a humanist shelter, where the lines between human and inhuman are firm and clear. In the wake of Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1992) and Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), the ‘impostor’ that has been on the loose since 1982 appears to have little hope of survival. The ‘real thing’ is apparently here, unafraid to depict authentic posthumanist subjectivity. To approach the earlier version of the film in this manner is to ignore the flickering of subjectivity running through the text. This essay offers, therefore, a reading of the 1982 version that draws out how, regardless of its yearning for humanism, the film baffles the anthropocentric understanding of subjectivity. I am not seeking to rescue Blade Runner in the name of nostalgia, and my point is not that the version released in 1982 is actually the ‘authentic’ text. My argument, rather, is that Blade Runner frustrates all attempts to limit its depiction of subjectivity to the space of humanism.

This article addresses the representation and mediation of the child-as-subject in British reality-television ‘parenting’ programmes, focusing on the BBC's ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways.’ It suggests that the programme produces a set of discourses — surveillance, exploitation, regulation, and transformation — and that these discourses mirror the current Labour government's initiatives in relation to children and childhood. The article asks whether these discourses have a repressive effect on the more ‘extraordinary’ aspects of childhood and on children's agency. Since the children represented on the programme cry so frequently and so loudly, the article then goes on to interrogate the performance and visibility of tears as way in which we might think about the status and qualities of the child as subject. One important aspect of the programme is a distinctive ‘narrative’ of crying, so that while the child's tears are apparently stopped, the parents or caregivers are then seen crying ‘appropriately’ in line with the programme's enforced transformative and therapeutic discourse. In this narrative trajectory, the child is presented simply as a ‘symptom’ of the parents' or caregivers' pathology and it is suggested that the child's subjectivity and agency is thereby distorted or even ‘faked’ by the programme.

Playing videogames ranks among the most popular activities on the contemporary media menu. However, just what ‘play’ entails remains poorly researched and consequently little is written on the role and subject positions of the player in relation to on-screen characters. This article offers a way of thinking about the player's subject position that moves attention away from identification with on-screen characters and towards the engagement with the videogame as a simulation. In doing so, and drawing on Fuller and Jenkins (Nintendo and new world travel writing: A dialogue, Sage, 1995) and Friedman (Civilization and its discontents: Simulation, subjectivity, and space, New York University Press, 1999) for example, the author suggests that the videogame player engages not with any single element of the system such as a character or ‘avatar,’ but rather apprehends the videogame as a system — a mathematical model. This mode of engagement encourages and requires that the player ‘think like the computer’ in exploring its boundaries, scrutinizing its rules, exploiting its potentialities, and ultimately becoming part of the system itself.

Following the much-vaunted ‘death of the author,’ this article investigates the re-emergence of the author's subjectivity (and the relation of this to readers' strategies) in electronic texts. Specifically, it looks at the design of ‘hypertextual transpositions’ — a particular kind of information-intensive hypermedial application presenting a ‘classic’ literary text by providing an electronic version and a series of multimedial added materials that can be used in reading, enjoying, and/or studying the literary text. By closely analyzing a sample of ‘hypertextual transpositions,’ the article seeks to demonstrate the ways in which design considerations in the creation of these electronic artefacts are tantamount to a re-emergence of the author's subjectivity. The technology of ‘hypertextual transpositions’ facilitates devices and reading strategies that are simply not available to traditional print texts. Nevertheless, it will be shown that hypermedial versions of ‘classic’ texts reinstate customary principles of authorship while also introducing some new facets of authorial subjectivity.