Abstract
There exist visual signs that have stood their ground throughout the ages for the simple reason that they fit the bill. They are evident or evidently true representations. The bill they fit are life, sentience, and sapience. Which is saying that it comes down to instinctive recognition, i.e., unexplainable, but unmistakably evident. They are true because we feel they are true. This paper attempts to counter the adage that “the obvious can only be explained to those that already understand it” by visually transforming the ancient sign best known as the “yin-yang sign” or Taijitu. The goal is to demonstrate that diagrammatical transformations reveal knowledge inherently present in the visual. In other words, an attempt to reinstate the status of diagram that the Taijitu originally had instead of an image, a visual, an emblem … labels that point more to what it demonstrates than to what it is, i.e., an actionable tool. To do so C. S. Peirce’s triadic sign will be juxtaposed to the sign under analysis, and his work on Existential Graphs will be used to orchestrate transformations, thus tapping into the diagrammatic nature of the sign. Following which, the similarities with Henri Lefebvre’s trialectics will be shown in the resulting diagrammatic transformations.
References
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Intrasemiotic translation in the emulations of ancient art: On the example of the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum
- Groupuscular identity-creation in online-communication of the Estonian extreme right
- Bilingual representation of distance in visual-verbal sign systems: A case study of Guo Xi’s Early Spring
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- A conversation analytic study of error correction outside of the second language classroom
- Sensory representation in literature
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- Narcoculture? Narco-trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture
- Interpretant, pure rhetoric, and semiotics of poetry
- Spatial composition as intersemiotic translation: The journey of a pattern through time from a translation semiotics theory perspective
- The dichotomy of society and urban space configuration in producing the semiotic structure of the modernism urban fabric
- Finite cognition and finite semiosis: A new perspective on semiotics for the information age
- Necrosemiosis: The CSI effect
- Semiotic resources for navigation: A video ethnographic study of blind people’s uses of the white cane and a guide dog for navigating in urban areas
- Borges, Pierre Menard, rhizomaticity, and the simulation of palimpsestic writing
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Intrasemiotic translation in the emulations of ancient art: On the example of the collections of the University of Tartu Art Museum
- Groupuscular identity-creation in online-communication of the Estonian extreme right
- Bilingual representation of distance in visual-verbal sign systems: A case study of Guo Xi’s Early Spring
- Semeiotic logic or, deduction, induction, and semeiotic
- A conversation analytic study of error correction outside of the second language classroom
- Sensory representation in literature
- Differentiated non-differentiation: A diagrammatical approach to the trialectics of difference – from mono-dialectics to mono-trialectics
- Narcoculture? Narco-trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture
- Interpretant, pure rhetoric, and semiotics of poetry
- Spatial composition as intersemiotic translation: The journey of a pattern through time from a translation semiotics theory perspective
- The dichotomy of society and urban space configuration in producing the semiotic structure of the modernism urban fabric
- Finite cognition and finite semiosis: A new perspective on semiotics for the information age
- Necrosemiosis: The CSI effect
- Semiotic resources for navigation: A video ethnographic study of blind people’s uses of the white cane and a guide dog for navigating in urban areas
- Borges, Pierre Menard, rhizomaticity, and the simulation of palimpsestic writing
- Shaken and stirred: Social representations, social media, and community empowerment in emergency contexts
- A Peircean epistemology of metaphor