Showing papers on "Semiosphere published in 2020"

Signs of trouble: Semiotics, streetscapes, and the Republican struggle in the North of Ireland:

Abstract: Just as the political divisions in the North of Ireland are subject to ongoing critique, so too is its culture that maintains what scholars recognize as contested heritage. Ethno-political symbols,...

Platfospheres and sociocultural explosion of Web 2.0: The commercial centre of the digital semiosphere

Abstract: 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 (Lotman’s) 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 (as conceived by Lotman), 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 (or even aggressive) core of the platfospheres, in which secret and patent-protected algorithms shape a cultural reality exclusively motivated by the logic of commercial success.

Total Umwelten Create Shared Meaning the Emergent Properties of Animal Groups as a Result of Social Signalling

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the concept of ‘shared meaning’, and the relationship between a shared understanding of signs within an animal social group and the Umwelten of individuals within the group. I explore the concept of the ‘Total Umwelt’, as described by Tonnesen, (2003), and use examples from the traditional ethology literature to demonstrate how semiotic principles can not only be applied, but underpin the observations made in animal social biology. Traditionally, neo-Darwinian theories of evolution concentrate on ‘fitness’ or an organism’s capacity to survive and reproduce in its own environmental niche. However, this process also relies on underlying signs and sign processes, which are often over-looked in traditional ethology and behavioural ecology. Biosemiotics, however, places the emphasis on sign process, with signs and signals comprising a semiosphere. Significantly, whilst the semiosphere is formulated as physical phenomena, specifically energetic and material signs which can be detected and transmitted as signals from one individual to another, it is the Umwelten of living organisms which give those signals meaning. Further, two or more Umwelten can merge, giving rise to a ‘Total Umwelt’, which facilitates shared meaning of signs between two or more individuals. Across and within generations, this gives rise to cultural interpretation of signs within populations. I argue this is the fundamental basis for emergent group properties in social species, or indeed in solitary living species where individuals interact to mate, defend territories or resources, or in raising altricial young. I therefore discuss a fusion of traditional behavioural ecology- based theory with semiotics, to examine the phenomenon of ‘shared meaning’ in animal social groups.

Epistemologia semiótica e a questão do observador em Peirce e Lotman

Abstract: This article discusses how the gnosiological subject of knowledge, or the observer, can be understood through two different semiotic perspectives: the one by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and the other by the semiotician of the School of Tartu-Moscow Yuri Lotman, as well as the correlation and the tension between both approaches. Both theorists share the rupture with the Cartesian conception about the dualistic relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge by situating the mediation-exerted action in the process of knowledge construction. Peirce does not favor the observer’s figure in his work; however, according to our reading, an eminently logical understanding of the observer’s idea can be pointed through the relationship among sign, object and interpretant. On the other hand, Lotman makes a set of allusions to the observer’s figure throughout his writings, whose understanding is directly related to the epistemological perspective of studying culture linked to the semiosphere. Through the dialogue between the authors, or yet, through the epistemological complementarity between their ideas, considering the approximations and distances between them, we delimited the following contact points: the sign mediation present in the process of knowledge construction; the constitution of the observer in the midst of semiosis; the validation of knowledge and, finally, the objectivity.

A Framework of Political Semiotics: Political Logic of the Semiosphere

Abstract: In this chapter, the authors demonstrate that the core categories of the Essex school (Laclau, Mouffe, and others) for conceptualizing the political are congenial to the core categories of the Tartu-Moscow School of cultural semiotics (Lotman and others). They argue that despite different theoretical vocabulary, the categories of the Essex school (discourse, logic of difference/equivalence, empty signifiers, articulation, naming, hegemony, constitutive antagonism) and those of the Tartu-Moscow School (semiosphere, discrete/continuous coding, center/periphery, translation, naming, untranslatability, boundary) are pointing to the same underlying conceptual logic. Bringing in the Tartu-Moscow School to complement the Essex framework helps to overcome several limitations of the latter in terms of empirically oriented research methodology. On the other hand: bringing the Essex school’s vocabulary to bear on the Tartu-Moscow cultural semiotics helps to conceptualize sign systems, meaning-making and communication in terms of relations of hegemony that lie at the intersection of power, governance, and democracy.

Intermediale, transmediale, crossmediale in Westworld

Abstract: In this essay we will discuss through the lens of Lotman’s “semiosphere” (1984) the media ecosystem (Pescatore, 2018) of the HBO show "Westworld" (Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, 2016 – ongoing). The replicability thematized in it, between loops, repetitions, memorial overlaps, together with the problem of consciousness and empathy which distinguish a human being from a cyborg since P.K. Dick’s science fiction stories, define a constantly translating and reinterpreting fictional universe. Observing a sequence from the first episode of the first season and the mobile video game linked to the show, we propose a continuum that crosses the "Westworld" semiosphere, intended here as a complex set of relationships – inter-textual and inter-medial, trans-medial and cross-medial – that can be interpreted coherently. In this continuum we see on the one hand the intertextual and intermedial relations that retranslate the fictional universe into an intersemiotic continuity that moves from the 1973 movie “Westworld” (Michael Crichton) and its sequel, continues through the TV show “Beyond Westworld” (Lou Shaw) briefly aired in 1980, and lands in the transmedia continuity on which the HBO show "Westworld" and its promotional paratexts are built. On the other hand we propose to place crossmedia products like video games and fan works on the opposite pole of the continuum, in partial discontinuity with the original fictional world. We intend intermediality not only as a hybridization of thresholds between media (Rajewsky, 2005), but also as a bridge of continuity and a translation invariance (Dusi, 2015). In these terms, also adaptation, remake, repetition, and variation, are to be considered inter-medial products. Intermediality so becomes one of the poles of an interpretative and transformative process based on mechanisms of translation, to be always considered in their sociocultural context and constraints. On the other pole we will instead have all the cross-medial practices allowed by a strong discontinuity from their sources, as mash-ups and creative reworkings produced by the fans. In the tension between these two poles, in the middle of the semiotic continuum, we will find re-elaborations and transmedial expansions that have a continuity with the reference fictional world (like remixes). In our opinion, this idea broadens Jenkins' distinction between "adaptation" and "extension", the former taking the same narrative from one medium and telling it again in another, and the latter trying to add something to the existing story in its passage from one medium to another (2011). We will therefore talk about intermediality in front of adaptations and remakes, and about transmediality when the original fictional world is extended through inventions and new variants (like sequels, prequels, paraquels), also reaching radical transformations as in the case of cross-media products.

Projections of Intermediality in a Literary Text

Abstract: The article is devoted to the study of linguistic manifestations of intermediality in English-language literary texts of the 20th – 21st centuries. Intermediality is understood as a special type of structural interconnections within a work of art, based on the interaction of various types of art-languages in a system of single literary text. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of such figurative structures that enclose information about another type of art. In the course of the analysis, it was established that the implementation of intermedial connections of literary, musical and visual texts interacting in the space of the semiosphere is carried out by borrowing of compositional-structural and plot-shaped means, which leads to the creolization of the transmitted message, providing a pragmatic effect on the recipient with a combination of verbal-iconic elements . The intermedial mechanism of combining codes of different semiotic systems contributes to the transfer of an artistic image in the text at different levels of abstraction.