Volume 2009, Issue 174

Exactly how do the sign/symbol/token systems of endo- and exo-biosemiosis differ from those of cognitive semiosis? Do the biological messages that integrate metabolism have conceptual meaning? Semantic information has two subsets: Descriptive and Prescriptive. Prescriptive information instructs or directly produces nontrivial function. In cognitive semiosis, prescriptive information requires anticipation and “choice with intent” at bona fide decision nodes. Prescriptive information either tells us what choices to make, or it is a recordation of wise choices already made. Symbol systems allow recordation of deliberate choices and the transmission of linear digital prescriptive information. Formal symbol selection can be instantiated into physicality using physical symbol vehicles (tokens). Material symbol systems (MSS) formally assign representational meaning to physical objects. Even verbal semiosis instantiates meaning into physical sound waves using an MSS. Formal function can also be incorporated into physicality through the use of dynamically-inert (dynamically-incoherent or -decoupled) configurable switch-settings in conceptual circuits. This article examines the degree to which biosemiosis conforms to the essential formal criteria of prescriptive semiosis and cybernetic management.

Diesel advertising poses a conundrum for semiotics practitioners. Diesel ads are thought-provoking and seem to interrogate prevailing social mores as well as impugning fashion and consumerism. Each season's Successful Living campaign is semiotically rich with a high connotative index. Teasing out these polysemic meanings is not a straightforward task, however. This article examines in detail six Diesel campaigns from 2000 to 2008. The article focuses on the rhetorical devices and representational tropes that form the grounds for a Diesel approach to advertising. These include both a kitsch aesthetic and a camp sensibility. The author argues that the same brand constructs twin codes — one that positions Diesel as a scurrilous and insightful countercultural observer with key objections to our consumerist culture, and the other a nihilistic and ludic mischief maker that invites smart decoders into a realm of irony and textual bliss. The analysis applies a toolkit approach to semiotics that amalgamates theoretical grounding with pragmatism.

We distinguish between concepts of semiosis in an individual mind and in a community of minds. We show that diagnostic semiosis, as it occurs in Roentgen diagnosis, differs fundamentally from the Peircean concept of semiosis. At all stages of the argument, basic concepts are derived from the Peircean categories of thought.

We present several existential-like graphs and models of the ontological links found along a continuum from physiosemiosis to anthroposemiosis. Our models derive from our rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theories of the symbol and of his notion of the “outness” of mind in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce's “semeiotic,” a rereading by which we introduce an ecocritical and pansemiotic mode of literary ecology called Renewable Historicism and argue for a new, distributed understanding of intentionality, one that connects the self-organization of rocks in the lithosphere to that phenomenon whereby inanimate objects (such as rocks) get themselves transformed into human objectives.

In Xala (1975) of Sembene Ousmane, Wend Kuuni (1982) of Gaston Kaboré, Gombele (1994) of Falaba Issa Traore, Keita (1995) of Dan Koyate, La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (1998) of Djibril Diop Mambeti, and Khorma (la bêtise) (2002) of Saadi Jilaani., we analyze the multiple meanings of “sexual impotence,” “albinism,” “blindness,” “deafness,” and “mobility disabilities.” We analyze how context, stigmatization, and impact on the story invite a reflection. Disability is understood as loss but also the possibility for regeneration (in Xala ), as genuinely “accepting gifts from God” (in Wend Kuuni ), the ordinariness of disabled people and others' misguided perception of them (in Gombele ), “learning your name” and overcoming barriers (in Keita ), enlightening a rather dark world (in La Petite Vendeuse ), and a positive despite people's negative disruptive tendencies (in Khorma ). We argue the potential of disability in explicating tensions between traditional and modern, accumulation and loss of power, human and God, special and ordinary. Disability is a particular site of criticism that confronts isolation, miscommunication, lack of memory, and religious division. The disabled figures in these films emphasize positive intentions, tolerance, insistence, ordinariness and goodness, and the possibility of reversal and transgression.

The writings by and about people with Alzheimer's dementia (PWAD) expose a crisis of indexicality. Specifically deixis, which connects the subject with the referent, breaks down in the absence of a knowable “deictic center.” Linguistic analysis of deixis has classically defined the problem of the subject as beyond the scope of the discipline, but recent work has begun to take it up. The work of linguists, caretakers, and Alzheimer's patients, read together with theories of writing, theatricality, and subjectivity, provides a cross-disciplinary view of deixis — naming, locating, and pointing — in theory and in the care of PWAD. There is a need for greater attention to this problem, especially as discourse on dementia tends to fall back on universal categories of the human.

This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , to critique photography's truth claim to the real by reading the photographic discourse of “indexicality” as a “symptom,” as defined in the work of Slavoj Žižek. The implications of this symptomatic relationship between photography and the real are analyzed in relation to the question of photographic spectatorship on the one hand, and to the inarticulability of affect on the other. In conclusion this article turns to Kant's notion of subjective universality as it is challenged by Barthes's theory of photography.

This article explores some major elements in the human capacity to create meaning, or signify. Motivated by a problematic emerging from artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, the article discusses the specific features of natural language that distinguish it from other forms of communication and underlie the difficulties found in designing electronic forms of language processing. In particular, the article proposes a model of human communication based on a quadripartite model composed of language, emotion, embodiment, and community. It discusses some areas of the representational aspects of language, which have been identified by literary approaches to texts, and which any attempt at emulating human intelligence and communication should take into account. The article supports the claim that the human propensity to create meaning lies largely in representational ambiguity, which underlies most forms of symbolism.

Bateson's theory of the double bind has been mistakenly interpreted as pertaining to a simple communication paradox. This article proposes a semiotic reformulation of the double bind as a manipulated breach in a concerted effort to create thirdness. This proposal is guided by an interdisciplinary perspective that investigates the double bind by drawing on parallel themes from relational psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Bakhtinian linguistics. The reformulation of the double bind is illustrated through the analysis of excerpts from literary works that exemplify how binds might close the potential space of intersubjectivity.

Current conceptions of human language include a gestural component in the communicative event. However, determining how the linguistic and gestural signals are distinguished, how each is structured, and how they interact still poses a challenge for the construction of a comprehensive model of language. This study attempts to advance our understanding of these issues with evidence from sign language. The study adopts McNeill's criteria for distinguishing gestures from the linguistically organized signal, and provides a brief description of the linguistic organization of sign languages. Focusing on the subcategory of iconic gestures, the paper shows that signers create iconic gestures with the mouth, an articulator that acts symbiotically with the hands to complement the linguistic description of objects and events. A new distinction between the mimetic replica and the iconic symbol accounts for the nature and distribution of iconic mouth gestures and distinguishes them from mimetic uses of the mouth. Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth is a salient feature of human language, regardless of whether the primary linguistic modality is oral or manual. Speakers gesture with their hands, and signers gesture with their mouths.

This article summarizes earlier attempts at systematizing the relations between pictorial and verbal representation. The relations between text and pictorial representation were, at first, presented hierarchically or on the basis of the dominant. Second, the explicit and implicit expressions of picture and text were distinguished. Next, different functions of picture and text in the picture-text relations were pointed out. The current article attempts to determine some crucial notions regarding the examined phenomena, to offer certain initial classifications for the analysis of picture-text relations, to point out that there are no simple texts based on just one means of expression, and to find the main functions of the message and its parts revealed in the mutual impact of text and picture.

Being the object of semiotic studies, metonymy demands investigation in the non-verbal domain, i.e., visual sign systems. When analyzing the metonymies of visual artworks, they prove to have different sources: verbal and visual sources refer to codes, languages, contexts, and sign forms of a work (denotations, connotations, and organizing sign structures). Different particular metonymies promote incarnation of a general metonymy of work. In the work structure (or coding), particular metonymies are joined and organized on the basis of this general metonymy. The metonymies interrelated in a complex way on the basis of general metonymy are revealed in the course of semiotic analysis of the paintings by Bruegel the Elder. The sign structures of his works underlie the philosophic generalizations of the great painter and philosopher.

According to C. S. Peirce, aesthetics has nothing to do with the fine arts. Peirce never fully developed an aesthetic theory and he only put forth very sparse remarks concerning the artist and his work. In the following article, however, we will tentatively relate the artist and his activities to a part of Peirce's aesthetics. We will do this by identifying some consequences from Peirce's concept of the aesthetic ideal, the objectively admirable, and throughout the article, we will lean on Peirce's few remarks concerning the artist and the work of art.

The seven short comments presented here investigate branding from a pragmatic semeiotic point of view. Comment 1 touches upon the brand in an extreme scholastic realistic point of view. Comment 2 focuses on how the brand becomes represented through its replica. Comment 3 investigates if a threshold of attraction exists, a level beyond which someone becomes attracted to a given brand. Comment 4 touches upon the relation between the object and its representation. Comment 5 investigates the concept “quality branding,” which is the process whereby something becomes endowed with certain qualities. Comment 6 defines the concept quasi-empathy as the basis for self-identification and attraction to a given brand. Comment 7 defines the fundamental sign as the sense of community.