Chronillogicalities : Déjà vus and hallucinations in the digital semiosphere
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Massimo Leone
Massimo Leone is a full tenured professor (“professore ordinario”) of cultural semiotics, visual semiotics, and philosophy of communication at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy as well as a permanent part-time visiting full professor of semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, China. He is a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant recipient, the most important and competitive research grant in Europe.
Abstract
The semiotics of phenomena like déjà vus and hallucinations constitute a limit-field of a theory of the sign, but one that offers opportunities to question the fundamental principles of the discipline while at the same time offering the opportunity to address their underlying cognitive processes. The article describes the cognitive nature of déjà vus and hallucinations, briefly reviews the literature about them, and reads them as cognitive perturbations in the light of a semiotics of mental simulacra related to perception, apperception, awareness, memory, and imagination. The article then uses such cognitive and semiotic modeling in order to develop a critique of present-day digital culture, in which the uncritical adoption of a mnemonic ideal based on digital memory jeopardizes one of the key features of embodied memory: imperfection and, as a consequence, the possibility to access aesthetic and temporal singularity. A collective memory prone to déjà vus and hallucinations ensues.
About the author
Massimo Leone is a full tenured professor (“professore ordinario”) of cultural semiotics, visual semiotics, and philosophy of communication at the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences, University of Turin, Italy as well as a permanent part-time visiting full professor of semiotics in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Shanghai, China. He is a 2018 ERC Consolidator Grant recipient, the most important and competitive research grant in Europe.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Articles
- What is up and down in embodied language processing? An experimental study on semantic priming of visual perception
- Chronillogicalities : Déjà vus and hallucinations in the digital semiosphere
- For a new semiotics in Construction Grammar: A statistical analysis of the relationship between transitive syntax and semantics
- “You know it, how I feel, I mean you just did it:” The emergence of we-ness through re-enactment in psychotherapy
- From subjectivity to subjunctivity in children’s performatives: Peirce’s endoporeutic principle
- Book Review
- Browse, Sam. 2018. Cognitive Rhetoric: The Cognitive Poetics of Political Discourse
Articles in the same Issue
- Articles
- What is up and down in embodied language processing? An experimental study on semantic priming of visual perception
- Chronillogicalities : Déjà vus and hallucinations in the digital semiosphere
- For a new semiotics in Construction Grammar: A statistical analysis of the relationship between transitive syntax and semantics
- “You know it, how I feel, I mean you just did it:” The emergence of we-ness through re-enactment in psychotherapy
- From subjectivity to subjunctivity in children’s performatives: Peirce’s endoporeutic principle
- Book Review
- Browse, Sam. 2018. Cognitive Rhetoric: The Cognitive Poetics of Political Discourse
