Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route
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Javier Toscano
Abstract
The way we perform identity in everyday situations nowadays is affected in very concrete ways by our interactions with technology. However, our conceptual understanding of such exchanges has been limited to a handful of concepts or narrative devices (i.e. a cyborg), which have proved their limits when facing extreme complexity. This paper develops a proposal to reexamine various possible assemblages between man and machine – at the level of the self-awareness and self-signifying of an individual vis à vis technological-based entities – by revisiting Greimas’s semiotic square, a tool from classical structural semiotics that could be readjusted to unfold what is at stake in that relationship, and under the semantic category of identity. The paper explains the constituent terms of Greimas’s elementary structure of meaning, unfolds the logic of his semiotic square, and develops some of its key underlying notions. Moreover, the limitations of the semiotic square are also surveyed. Instead of trying to pose a new paradigm, this paper wants to explore its heuristic possibilities and resist any claims of the underlying theory to produce fix typologies, semantic determinisms or stable discursive forms. In that sense, the scope of this essay is not to identify the whole array of cases in which identity is formed out of the contact between man and his machinical other, but to deliver a working scheme that may function as an initial, navigational map, a tool by which we can further explore the idea of how identity is affected by technology as a dynamic, performative process, therefore informing a semantic know-how and granting further access to yet unfamiliar fields of a post-human condition.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- L’énonciation et l’avènement de Gaston Lagaffe
- Stereotyping in representing the “Chinese Dream” in news reports by CNN and BBC
- Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route
- Semiotic interpretation of a city soundscape
- “Presentation” and “representation” of contents as principles of media convergence: A model of rhetorical narrativity of interactive multimedia design in mass communication with a case study of the digital edition of the New York Times
- “Authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese” and faintly American: The emotional branding of Disneyland in Shanghai
- Branding and communities: The normative dimension
- Form and non-linear continuity:The development of the idea of clusterin Peirce’s thought
- “Atmos-fear”: A psycho-semiotic analysis of messages in New York everyday life
- Semiotic space invasion: The case of Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign
- The ontology of Yentl: Umberto Eco, semiosis, mimesis, closets and existence, and how to read “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”
- The semiotics of common sense: Patterns of meaning-sharing in the semiosphere
- Sémiotique de la /lumière/ et de l’/obscurité/ de L’Ile de la fée d’Edgar Poe, et Pierre et Jean de Guy de Maupassant, à La Route d’Altamont de Gabrielle Roy, et L’Assassinat de la Via Belpoggio d’Italo Svevo
- A Lonerganian-Bakhtinian novelization of inculturation
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- L’énonciation et l’avènement de Gaston Lagaffe
- Stereotyping in representing the “Chinese Dream” in news reports by CNN and BBC
- Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route
- Semiotic interpretation of a city soundscape
- “Presentation” and “representation” of contents as principles of media convergence: A model of rhetorical narrativity of interactive multimedia design in mass communication with a case study of the digital edition of the New York Times
- “Authentically Disney, distinctly Chinese” and faintly American: The emotional branding of Disneyland in Shanghai
- Branding and communities: The normative dimension
- Form and non-linear continuity:The development of the idea of clusterin Peirce’s thought
- “Atmos-fear”: A psycho-semiotic analysis of messages in New York everyday life
- Semiotic space invasion: The case of Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign
- The ontology of Yentl: Umberto Eco, semiosis, mimesis, closets and existence, and how to read “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”
- The semiotics of common sense: Patterns of meaning-sharing in the semiosphere
- Sémiotique de la /lumière/ et de l’/obscurité/ de L’Ile de la fée d’Edgar Poe, et Pierre et Jean de Guy de Maupassant, à La Route d’Altamont de Gabrielle Roy, et L’Assassinat de la Via Belpoggio d’Italo Svevo
- A Lonerganian-Bakhtinian novelization of inculturation
