The paper approximates Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of meaning and the process-thought in Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy. As the main idea, the paper points at the compatibility of meaning and process according to the perspectives of Uexküll and Whitehead. It suggests that Uexküll’s common meaning rule can describe the processes of novelty in the world as does Whitehead’s principle of creativity. It is also suggested that Uexküll and Whitehead abandon a substantialist view of the organism – the organism means much more (...) process, activity and creation than anything thing-like. In approaching Uexküll’s theory of meaning, a semiotic interpretation of Whitehead’s principle of creativity is proposed in which the concept of the threshold is fundamental to defining the boundary between the semiotic and the non-semiotic areas corresponding to the living and the non-living. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the activity of meaning distinguishes animate entities from inanimate ones in the sense that meaning and life overlap – meaning could not have existed prior to life. (shrink)

This paper explores digital culture with the tools of cultural semiotics in general, and then employing the semiosphere model in particular. Web 2.0 platforms are taken as the major cultural dispositive of our time, as the most representative way in which the internet shapes digital culture. Most of the global population is currently immersed in digital culture. In the first part of the paper the striking similarities between Web 2.0 platforms and the semiosphere are explored and equivalences between the elements (...) of the classic semiotic model and these platforms, or platfospheres, are identified. The second part explores the fundamental difference between the “genetic code” at the centre of the semiosphere, and the computer code and commercial algorithms at the core of the platfospheres that are responsible for their cultural operation. Then the parallels are examined that arise between the past cultural reality, in which the intellectual elite and academics were the driving force of culture, and the contemporary proactive core of the platfospheres, in which secret and patent-protected algorithms shape a cultural reality exclusively motivated by the logic of commercial success. (shrink)

Engaging with the methods of studying contemporary digital audiovisual art is a dominant topic in contemporary theories of art. Against this background, the article offers a view onto some aspects of Juri Lotman’s and Gilles Deleuze’s studies on the cinema. As a rule, contemporary studies of digital audiovisual art take place in the context of interdisciplinary studies. One of the methodological principles of such studies consists in adopting a structural and semiotic approach. As of today, this methodological approach to studying (...) audio-visual art is most developed in semiotics of the cinema, which is why in this article visual semiotics in general is viewed through semiotics of the cinema. Also, the philosophical understanding of the nature of the cinema offered by Gilles Deleuze has proven fundamental for the study of contemporary audio-visual art. The two authors were contemporaries, but represented different scholarly paradigms: while Juri Lotman was an adherent of structuralism, Gilles Deleuze was a poststructuralist who criticized the structuralist approach. Yet despite this principal difference, both scholars still arrived at similar conclusions as concerns several questions regarding the understanding of the cinema and its very nature. In the present paper I focus on the features of these authors’ approach to spatial and temporal relations in the cinema, audiovisual relations in film as a heterogeneous form of the work of art, virtuality and mythologism in the viewer’s perception of cinema. The differences and similarities in academic approaches to cinema, developed by Lotman and Deleuze, indicate a common direction in the development of the cinema and visual arts theory, which seems relevant for the study of contemporary audio-visual arts. (shrink)

The main objective of this article is to combine Juri Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere – including its concepts of boundary, core, and periphery – with Erving Goffman’s theory of the total institution. The purpose is to develop a framework conducive to examining the prison as an object of study, equally emphasizing both its internal as well as external relations. This work positions itself within the contexts of the relative decline of the field of prison ethnography, few or no studies (...) done applying semiotic metalanguage to the prison or the total institution, and none applying the theory of the semiosphere to either. This work is oriented according to an analytical or neutral mode; its point is not to offer a normative programme, but to offer a new description of the research object and a new language of description in which to speak of this object. The secondary objectives of this article include demonstrating that Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere and Goffman’s theory of the total institution are compatible, that Lotman’s theory actually refines Goffman’s original, that Lotman’s theory taken independently and Goffman’s theory as refined by Lotman’s are both compatible with the direction of contemporary prison ethnography, and that the framework presented in this work has the potential to reinvigorate the field of prison ethnography. (shrink)

If religion is a socio-cultural meaning system as part of the socio-cultural sphere, then how does it relate to mental, organic, and physical processes that belong to the environment of religion? The article contributes to answering this question by referring to semiotics, systems theory, and theoretical biology. The starting point is understanding religious evolution as a co-evolution to societal evolution, namely, as one of the latter’s internal differentiations. In turn, societal evolution is a co-evolution to mental, organic, and physical evolution. (...) These evolutionary spheres mutually constitute one another’s environments. The eigenstate of the socio-cultural sphere consists of language activated via communication. Language is the replicator of socio-cultural processes corresponding to the function of the genome in organic processes. The differentiation of spheres in general evolution concerns respective organic, mental, and socio-cultural substrates, while the substrate-neutral structure of the two evolutionary dimensions of organic and societal processes, including religion, is revealed as semiotic patterns that organic and societal processes have in common. Organic and religious processes of generating information are isomorphic. Thus, semiosis mediates between religious communication and its environment. (shrink)

В настоящей статье повесть Ф. М. Достоевского Записки из подполья рассматривается через концептуализацию литературной традиции в семиотическом контексте, в трех взаимосвязанных аспектах: дискурсивные формы отрицания и его смысловые перспективы ; семантизация идеи полноты и ориентированность художественного текста на осмысление семиотической природы изображаемого мира и изображающего поэтического языка. Если апофатизм в семиотическом плане проблематизирует парадоксальность попытки уловить невыражаемое в интенсивных формах языковой динамики, и познавать перспективы существования личности в описании форм несуществования или амбивалентного / непродуктивного существования, то придавая семиотическую установку изложению (...) характерологии, с ее личностным центром, стремлением к завоеванию опыта полного существования / полноты, в повести Достоевского происходит богатая семантизация семиотического явления беспризнаковости / лишения признаковости в определении познаваемого объекта. В статье прослеживается семантическое моделирование полноты и ее дискредитация в направлениях причинно-следственной мотивации; временной сегментации; детализации в форме исчерпывающего деления объекта описания. Семиотическая динамика в Записках из подполья связана с проблематизацией маркированных противоречий и с разработкой – в качестве форм их совместного сохранения – семантического образования инклюзивности. Оно восходит к монодуалистической антиномии, имеющей глубокие корни в религиозно-философской традиции русской культуры. В итоге текстовая динамика произведения Достоевского в статье интерпретируется в рамках модели трансформации: одно то же, что другое → или–или → и то, и другое. В такой трансформационной модели заложено толкование семиотической креативности, в свете которой Достоевский определяет понятие культурной традиции. Ее динамику характеризует процессуальность и открытость. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in the light of literary tradition: A semiotic approach. In the paper, Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground is interpreted through the conceptualization of literary tradition within a semiotic framework, from three interconnected angles: the interpretation of the discursive forms of negation ; the semantization of the idea of ‘plenitude’ ; the text’s concentrated reflection on the semiotic nature of the modelled world and its poetic language. Apophatic poetics calls attention to the conflictual relationship between the signifier and the signified, including the paradoxical situation in which intensive sign articulation/expression is given to some substance considered to be unexpressable. Signification here strives to gain epistemological knowledge about the potentials of the existence of personality through its definition in terms of non-existence or ambivalent, unproductive existence. Тhe character definition, putting in centre stage – within the problematics of personhood and personality – the protagonist’s desire to achieve the state of plenitude, also gains a semiotic orientation through the conflict between being endowed with vs. being deprived of individual semantic attributes accorded to the object of cognition. The paper examines the semantic modelling of ‘plenitude’ and explains the various means that this model is discredited by the object’s lack of individual semantic attributes in causality; temporal segmentation; the forms of exhaustive detailing. Individual object identification is also interpreted as preserving oppositions at the levels of literary character and abstract notions in which conflicting elements constitute an organic whole. This can be traced back to monodualistic antinomies deeply rooted in the Russian philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Jakob von Uexküll’s work was influential at the time of the biosemiotic turn in semiotics in the 1990s and, together with the hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches, laid the basis for a semiotic turn in biology without losing a connection to the morphology and physiology of organisms. His work appears to be attractive and promising in transforming the culture–nature divide into an understanding of the difference between the living and the non-living. The biological study of subjectivity makes the Uexküllian approach pertinent (...) to the 21st-century changes both in the humanities and in biology, as the acceptance of his theoretical biology marks the start of a post-Darwinian era after the long period of neo-Darwinism that dominated the 20th-century biological thought. A review and bibliography of 20th-century Uexküll studies was published in 2001; the following provides a bibliography of Uexküll studies in the two decades after 2001. (shrink)

Attempts have been made to examine how speakers frame linguistic varieties by employing social semiotic models. Using ethnographic data collected over many years, this article applies such a model to Iceland, once described as the ‘e-coli of linguistics’ – its size, historical isolation and relative linguistic homogeneity create conditions akin to a sociolinguistic laboratory. This semiotic model of language ideologies problematizes the prevailing discourse of linguistic purism at a time of sociolinguistic upheaval. The analysis shows how an essentializing scheme at (...) the heart of Icelandic language policy ensured that linguistic “anomalies” such as “dative disease” and “genitive phobia” indexed essential differences. “Impure” language was indicative of un-Icelandicness. Once monolingual, the Icelandic speech community is increasingly characterized by innovative linguistic transgressions which thus far have not been instrumentalized by language policy makers. It is shown how a semiotic model can help us analyse the function of language ideologies more generally. (shrink)

Review of Observing Wildlife in Tropical Forests. 1: A Geosemeiotic Approach by Nils Lindahl Elliot. Bristol: Delome Publications, 2019, 480 pp.

Review of Introducing Relational Political Analysis: Political Semiotics as a Theory and Method [Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology] by Peeter Selg and Andreas Ventsel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 319 pp.

This paper examines how far the model of the trajectory as a path that a moving object follows from a source to a goal is an adequate model of the sign and of semiotic processes. Just like intentions, meanings, and messages, also signs have sources and goals. A study of the terms by which the Ancient Greeks referred to signs reveals that the idea of goal-directedness is inherent in several respects in this early semiotic vocabulary. The paper studies Charles S. (...) Peirce’s model of the sign as a trajectory by which Peirce describes the “agency of the sign”. Peirce’s semiotic trajectories are without beginnings and ends. Guided by final causality towards a semiotic goal, the sign can reach its goal only by asymptotic approximation. The final section of the paper presents brief notes on the trajectories characteristic of sign processes in semiotic models outlined by Algirdas Greimas and Juri Lotman. Greimas distinguishes a plurality of semiotic trajectories, such as the generative, the thematic, and the figurative one, but the prototype of all trajectories is the narrative one. Bifurcations resulting from conflicting tensions interrupt the unilinearity of the goal-directed trajectories. Besides disjunctions, the model foresees conjunctions in which trajectories merge. The dynamic forces that propel the agents along such trajectories are polar tensions and conflicts as well as phases of desire and fulfilment. Lotman proposes a dynamic model of human culture as a semiotic space where sign pro - cesses occur like “rushing torrents” or even take the form of “explosions”, suggesting trajectories whose characteristics are nonlinearity, bifurcation, sudden interruption, and unpredictable reorientation. Concomitant with such trajectories are the bidirectional trajectories that describe the dynamic relations between the centre and the periphery of a cultural semiosphere. (shrink)

Review of Strategic Conspiracy Narratives: A Semiotic Approach [Series Conspiracy Theories; Knight, Peter; Butter, Michael, series eds.] by Mari-Liis Madisson and Andreas Ventsel. London: Routledge, 2020, x+134 pp.

Despite the common knowledge that there is something “Pythagorean” about Charles Peirce’s phenomenology and classification of signs there is a manifest lack of inquiries into the matter. Perhaps there is too little to go on, as Pythagoras himself did not leave us any writings to consult. Nevertheless, much of ancient Greek philosophy bears an unmistakable Pythagorean stamp, and Iamblichus’ bio - graphy of Pythagoras provides us with enough to get such inquiries started. This paper examines the development of triads, beginning (...) with the Pythagorean one and proceeds to those of Immanuel Kant and Peirce’s compatriot and family acquaintance Pliny Earle Chase. The article concludes with an examination of the various triads in Peirce’s early writings, especially around the time of his discovery of Chase’s “Intellectual symbolism”. (shrink)

The author has used the term ‘biocultural semiotics’ in her previous work, but has never defined this field. She presents twelve propositions that describe and motivate a biocultural semiotics. The author draws on thirty years of field work in Belize and her previous research in cultural and bio-semiotics in support of each of the propositions. Propositions include: biology and culture are so bound as to make a discussion of either without inclusion of the other impossible; both umwelt and the sign (...) are central; every sign is an act of communication; every sign has many interpretant; perception is influenced by our physical and cultural umwelt; self is critical to our vision of our place in this umwelt; epigenetic phenomena influence how genes are expressed and effect/affect both phenotype and behaviour; body boundaries are cultural and political creations; the body is a political body and its ownership is always contested; disease and its congeners are cultural constructs; sickness and its signs are created as part of an ongoing personal, social, and political narrative; today we face both uncertainty and opportunity in the natural and cultural sciences. She argues that semiotics possesses the language and methodologies to achieve an understanding of the biological/cultural relationship. (shrink)

Ground – regardless whether it be taken as motivation or abstractness – affords the proposition that some abstract categories of meaning have acquired their qualities via bodily experience. In order to show this to be the case, the concept of ground will be drawn together with the division between the symbolic and the semiotic, the semiotic chora will be shown to function as an axiologizing thymic category as regard reception of perception, and finally it will be proposed that it is (...) this foundation that enables the coherence and inevitability of culture as a whole, being responsible for its stereoscopic quality as well. This procedure will further the haply sacrilegious march towards the emergence of modal semiotics, which allows us to dispense of signs in order to gain an anachronistically novel understanding of our own being. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to expand on the concept of semiocide which, in broad terms, is the destruction of signs and semiosis. Taking its point of departure from Ivar Puura’s article on the concept, this essay attempts to find conceptual parallels and historical examples of the term, expanding its range through a critique of its original conception. Departing from the initial conservatism of Puura’s definition, the article will argue for a more diverse understanding of the term, suggesting a (...) view that positions semiocide not just as a descriptor for lamentable losses, but also as a potential avenue for emancipatory praxis, whereby established, hegemonic and oppressive meanings can be undermined and new possibilities of representation and identity explored. (shrink)