Volume 2004, Issue 152-1-4

‘Semiotic consciousness’ is the awareness we have of the role and action of signs in the world. This essay examines the role of Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274) in the growth of semiotic consciousness among the Latins, as Charles Sanders Peirce will take up the matter in influencing the twentieth-century establishment of semiotics as a global intellectual movement. Although Aquinas never focused on the subject of signs for its own sake, he frequently treats of it in relation to other direct investigations in a great variety of contexts. The result of his treatments is to have left a series of texts which, though not without their inner tensions, contain a series of consequences and connections which can be developed into a unified theory of the being constitutive of signs as a general mode. Precisely this theory was spelled out systematically for the first time in the 1632 Treatise on Signs of John Poinsot, expressly grounded in a pulling together of Aquinas's various texts together with a careful analysis of the role of signs in human experience. The resulting doctrinal perspective proves to have been implicit in Aquinas and to lie at the foundation of Peirce's notion of signs as triadic relations, a notion he took over from the later Latins and developed anew, particularly in shifting the focus from the being to the action proper to signs, or ‘semiosis’. It is this appropriation and shift that marks the boundary between modernity and postmodernism in philosophy, with respect to which the writings of Aquinas are like a taproot.

This article explores some innovations in the concept of identity in contemporary science fiction film. Using a narrative-semiotic method of analysis, the article discusses an emerging trend in science fiction that questions mainstream cultural beliefs regarding motivations for action and definitions of individual agency. Focusing on Alex Proyas's Dark City (1998) and Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), the article traces the ways in which this trend rearranges elements in narrative positioning to bring to light relational possibilities that challenge privileged attitudes toward who we are and why we act the way we do. The selected films deal creatively with questions concerning the causal eects of past events, origins, or heritage, and give innovative answers to complex philosophical issues about the nature of reality. At the same time, they retain a popular aesthetic and a classical narrative structure. Their common characteristic is a narrative program composed of signs of resistance to notions of a fixed identity ‘caused’ by biography or genetic inheritance. These signs, furthermore, form the basis of unconventional interpretations of self and action that serve as catalysts in dismantling outmoded definitions of identity. The article explores these issues following a content-based approach that focuses on how agents and acts are constructed on the story level.

Résumé Comment percevons nous les gestes d'autrui et où se porte l'attention durant l'émission de ces signes? Nous avons enregistré avec un système eye-tracking les trajectoires oculaires de spectateurs d'une situation dialogique diffusée sur un écran 19 pouces. Les durées et fréquences de fixations montrent que le visage de l'actrice est regardé la plupart du temps tandis que les mouvements gestuels sont plutôt aperçus en périphérie. Le basculement de l'attention focale du visage vers les gestes a lieu lorsque ces derniers démontrent une certaine saillance, nous analyserons ces facteurs de visibilité. Les mouvements des yeux montrent que le pointage manuel et l'orientation sagittale du buste et du regard de l'actrice jouent un rôle de guidage oculaire. Sur des interfaces, ces fonctions signalétiques peuvent permettre à un agent virtuel d'orienter l'attention de l'utilisateur vers une cible. Notre analyse souligne enfin le rôle de l'information para-fovéale dans le traitement cognitif des signes visuels.

Dans Franceschi (2002), j'ai présenté une théorie basée sur les matrices de concepts qui se propose de constituer une alternative à la classification proposée par Greimas, dans le domaine de l'analyse paradigmatique. Le problème de la détermination des relations existant entre les concepts d'amour, de haine et d'indifférence, se pose dans cette construction. Je m'attache ainsi à décrire le problème des relations amour-haine-indifférence de manière détaillée, ainsi que plusieurs solutions qui ont été proposées pour le résoudre. Je décris enfin une solution à ce problème, basée sur une extension de la théorie des matrices de concepts.