Showing papers on "Sign (semiotics) published in 1990"

How to compare nations : strategies in comparative politics

Abstract: "In "How to Compare Nations", Dogan and Pelassy have constructed a succinct and unconventional guide to the conduct of comparative analysis and the construction of social science theory. It should be required reading for all first-year graduate students; its use at the undergraduate level would be a sign of educational professionalism." ("American Political Science Review").

The semiotics of French gestures

Abstract: FOREWORD BY IVAN FONAGY PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTATION I. Determining the Relevant Features of a Gestural Expression: An Intracultural Experimental Study II. The Iconic and Cultural Nature of Gesture: An Intercultural Experimental Study III. Physical Components of the Gestural Sign IV. Semantic Fields of the Gestural Sign V. Mimic Representation VI. The Relationship between Signifier and Signified: Motivation VII. An Application: The Motivation of Refusal VIII. Gesture and Speech CONCLUSION APPENDIXES REFERENCES INDEX

Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting

Abstract: One of the persistent problems in acting, and one that seems to grow steadily in importance, comes from the public identity of the actor. This study suggests that a semiotic approach to the acting sign can help to distinguish the function of celebrity in acting, the threats to authority that celebrity imposes, and the results of celebrity acting both on stage and in the efforts of the actor to achieve an identity. This essay is related to earlier discussions of the stage figure by its author, Michael Quinn, in Modem Drama and Gestus . applying the Prague School model of analysis that also supported his article on reading and directing in NTQ11 (1987). Michael Quinn, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, is currently working on a critical study of Vaclav Havel, as well as a longer study of the stage figure in different theatrical contexts.

Social representations and the development of knowledge: A semiotic analysis of the development of social representations of gender

Abstract: In this chapter gender is analysed as a semiotic system in which particular values, ideas and practices are associated with the designations ‘female’ and ‘male’. These categories provide the framework for marking a range of material elements, personal dispositions and behavioural styles. These elements, dispositions and styles are in turn comprehended as signifiers of gender and provide the resources which individuals employ to express a social gender identity. Sign systems function as a means of communication for social groups, and their operation is dependent on the intersubjectively shared representations of group members. In this sense sign systems can be seen as an expression of social representations. We have used the concept of social representations to explore social psychological aspects of gender (Lloyd, 1987; Lloyd and Duveen, 1989). In this chapter a detailed consideration of the nature of semiotic relations provides the framework for a discussion of developmental changes in the construction of social gender identities through a reexamination of material from studies of young children's gender knowledge. Developmental semiotics When someone describes a doll as a toy for girls, or a gun as a toy for boys, they are not describing characteristics which are physically inscribed in these toys, but the social markings of these objects. Mugny, De Paolis and Carugati have observed that social marking ‘connects relations of a cognitive order with those of a social order’ (1984, p. 137). This connection arises through the use of the same social representation to mark objects as well as to structure the cognitive processes required to comprehend the markings.

Semiotics, information science, documents and computers

Abstract: Semiotics studies systems of signs. It regards all sign systems as the product of a single human faculty for creating order. The distinction it provides, of signifier, sign and signified, can give a more sophisticated and incisive way of differentiating aspects of the sign than can be derived from any other known source. Information science would seem to have some unnoticed affinities with semiotics in its concerns with the retrieval and transmission of material products of the semiotic faculty and with meaning to concept relations. The alignment of information science with the physical sciences and technology has been criticised and its disciplinary identity questioned. Information science would seem to derive what identity it has from a widely shared concern with computer based retrieval of documentary information. However, a unifying principle for the document and the computer has not been enunciated. For semiotics, written language, and computer programs can be comprehended within the analytical category of the signifier. Automata theory regards the computer as a universal information machine and replaces ideas of energy and motion by logical operations. At the level of discourse of logical operations, there is no distinction between a written expression, or program, and the particular information machine specified by that written expression. Elements in linguistics, not registered in the literature of information science, have departed from the received position that written language is simply a representation of speech and have preferred to regard it as an autonomous system of signs. A specific unifying principle for the document and the computer is then the presence of writing. Revealing such a unifying principle indicates that semiotics can clarify significant issues within the established domains of information science.

Meaning and Expression: Marty and Grice on Intentional Semantics

Abstract: Paul Grice’s essay ‘Meaning’ — one of the fundamental works for semantics — was published in 1957 Almost fifty years before — in 1908 — Anton Marty’s book ‘Investigations into the foundation of general grammar and the philosophy of language’1 was published Reading the chapters ‘Preliminaries on meaning in general’2 and ‘Supplementary Remarks on meaning in general’,3 one notices the strong similarities with the theory and terminology of Grice In these chapters Marty is concerned with the question of the significance of so-called language devices (Sprachmittel) At first he deals with the problem of intentional and unintentional utterances of the inner life of the speaker An instinctive cry of a person is a sign of his feeling pain and accordingly a statement signifies that the speaker holds a conviction Consequently the meaning of linguistic expressions is related to the expression of the speaker’s psychological experiences However, this is not the only relevant aspect of the meaning of the language device Marty writes: However, it is not just this way of ‘being a sign’, the expression of one’s psychological life, which is the exclusive and primary aim of intentional speech What is rather intended is to influence or to control the unknown inner life of the hearer Intentional speech is a special kind of action, which is essentially aimed at evoking certain psychological phenomena in the other person (U 284)4

Peirce's Interpretant

Abstract: Although undoubtedly Peirce has contributed more to the theory of signs than any thinker, if there is one contribution that remains singular it is that of the interpretant. Fundamentally it exemplifies the insight that signification and representation are not exhausted by a simple duet of sign and object, but involve the intervention of a third factor in its most comprehensive form, a rule-bound process which creates a grid through which any one sign belonging to its system will refer and signify. Peirce did not see a strict separation between a theory of reference and a theory of signification, but saw denotation (breadth) and connotation (depth) as fundamentally interrelated in terms of what he called, in his early writings, information, or the quantity of the interpretant:

Ethical Problems in the Management of Some Severely Handicapped Children

Abstract: This paper examines some of the arguments advanced and acted upon by doctors concerned in decisions about whether severely handicapped patients should live or die. It criticises the view that 'selective treatment' is morally preferable to infanticide and shows how the standard arguments advanced for this preference fail to sustain it. It argues that the self-deception, which is sometimes cited as a sign of humanity in these cases, and which is implicit in the term 'selective treatment' is more dangerous than is the remote chance of brutalisation which is often cited as the danger of active euthanasia.

Iconicity and sign vocabulary acquisition.

Abstract: This study was designed to investigate learning and retention of isolated sign vocabulary as a function of sign classification (iconic, opaque, or abstract). The subjects were 28 hearing college students naive to sign vocabulary. They were drilled with 30 signs from American Sign Language that had been classified as iconic, opaque, or abstract. Training was conducted using two different media: computer-assisted instruction and videotaped presentation. Performance scores for the three types of signs were significantly different. Scores were consistently higher for iconic signs, regardless of the training mode. The videotaped presentation mode produced the greatest consistency in scores. The results of this study support the notion that it is easier for beginning students of sign language to learn and retain iconic signs.

Collecting and Analyzing Data: Doing and Thinking

Abstract: It is important to note the differences in doing and thinking when considering the issue of collecting and analyzing data Doing refers to asking questions during the history, performing both general and specific maneuvers in the physical examination, and performing appropriate laboratory procedures Thinking strategies reflect the intellectual tasks required throughout the encounter The clinician continually generates and reformulates hypotheses, grapples with concepts of choosing appropriate labels or manifestations, and assembles each symptom and sign elicited in the history, physical, and laboratory into problem lists and diagnostic impressions Thus, thinking forms the basis for all the action-oriented (doing) strategies

Phonological Processes and Sign Language Development

Abstract: Over the last ten years or so there has been a steady increase in studies of sign language development in deaf children: the majority of these being concerned with the development of American Sign Language (ASL; see Newport and Meier, 1985; Meier and Newport, 1990, for useful reviews). The recognition of sign languages such as ASL and British Sign Language (BSL) as full natural languages has led to an interest in the ways in which language development in the visual/gestural modality resembles the development of spoken language, and the ways in which it differs. The study of such similarities and differences may help to distinguish those factors and processes which are essential to the child’s development, regardless of modality, from those which are modality specific.

Character as Linguistic Sign

Abstract: HARACTER in Greek signifies a mark or token made by a writing or marking instrument. Only secondarily does it come to signify the human personality, its psychological essence or moral tendency. In this it is like type-formed from another Greek word meaning to write or incise. Characters, we may say, are types. The original nature of the term remains when we speak of "characters" in the sense of alphabetical signs or hieroglyphs, as in John Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character (1668).' In such usage we return to the notion of "character" as something belonging essentially to 6criture, to a linguistic ordering of reality. As a matter of fact, character as verbal sign remains with us in spite of the term having been applied to psychology or moral behavior, as in discussions of Shakespeare's characters by Hazlitt or A. C. Bradley. To take but one example of this, we could consider the use of the term in Measure for Measure. This play is centrally concerned with determining what sort of a man Angelo is. It is Angelo's own question: "What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?"2 The test arranged by the Duke at the beginning of the play when he appoints Angelo as his deputy seems to be aimed at answering Angelo's question. The term "character" becomes important. In his first words to Angelo, the Duke pointedly speaks of "a kind of character in thy life / That to th' observer doth thy history / Fully unfold" (1.1.2729): here he is talking about reading the inwardness of Angelo through outward signs. But this proves no easy task either, for the Duke or for Angelo himself: the "character" of Angelo in this sense remains a puzzle to the end. Elsewhere the term is used without the psychological referent. We hear in the next scene of character as a mere outward sign or mark when Claudio admits that his relations with Juliet have resulted in her pregnancy: "The stealth of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ

Acquiring a communication system by sign and speech in a child with Down syndrome: a longitudinal investigation:

Abstract: This article reports on a longitudinal investigation of a child with Down syndrome who was taught to communicate initially by sign but who later became an entirely oral communicator. The article reports the rate and frequency of his first 50 signs and first 43 oral words along with a follow-up of his oral communication. The data suggest that early sign training enhanced the child's later speech production.

Understanding sign semiosis as cognition and as self-conscious process: A reconstruction of some basic conceptions in Peirce’s semiotics

Abstract: In this paper I will deal with some basic conceptions of semiotics — mainly with the nature, the structure, and the evolution of Semiosis. Thus the nature of Sign and its function in the structure of the Semiotic process is the hero of this story. In the framework of this paper I will discuss semiotics in its widest sense: namely, not only as a theory of signs and philosophy of language, but also as a philosophy of cognition and mind. This extension of the conception of Semiosis comes, upon my interpretation, as a natural conclusion of the reconstruction of Peirce's pragmaticist philosophy. There is a strong inclination among some semioticians, philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and others (including physicists) to understand every natural phenomenon, either physical or psychical, as a Sign process, and therefore as a Semiosis. In doing so they seem to be identifying the structures of the physical processes they study with the structure of their own cognition, in which they interpret in Signs those former processes. Such enterprises follow the path of cybernetics, information theory, and computer science in understanding physical processes in terms of 'sign', 'code', and 'information' (e.g., Sebeok 1976; John 1976: 3-4; Dretske 1981; Heelan 1983; Johnson-Laird 1983: Chapters 15, 16. Cf. Radner 1970: 424ff. in his discussion about Wiener's Cybernetics; see also Wiener 1948: 42ff 132). It seems that the proponents of this approach understand meaning units as elements of the physical domain, and hence, they should

Bakhtinian Double Voicing in Dickens and Eliot

Abstract: M. M. Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the implicit or explicit dialogue of differently situated voices that is both generated by and is the condition of all discourse, easily lures one into labyrinthine theoretical constructs. It would seem that the reader's understanding of a discourse results from a dialogical relationship with the author that is also in dialogical tension with other persons' dialogical understandings of that discourse, which are in themselves internally dialogical as well as externally dialogically related to an indeterminate number of other internally and externally dialogical discourses. Simple linear post-structuralist indeterminacy in which the meaning of each sign is determined by the meaning of other signs seems humdrum beside such a fractal structure. However, to rush too rapidly from generating insights to theoretical pleasure domes of vast dimensions is frequently to lose sight of the difference between analytical and ideological application. While Bakhtin's preoccupation with the universality of the dialogical in human experience and especially human communication has led him to recognize and name a set of specific narrative devices, it is not the case that these devices necessarily reproduce the ultimate dialogicality to which he is philosophically committed. While Dostoevsky may create polyphonic novels that are truly dialogic in the sense that the author in no way presents a final resolution to conflicts between the dominant ideas ("ideologies" in Bakhtin's sense) of the characters, the irreducible mental structures he gives them are nevertheless creations of the author-minds and interrelations so constructed as to be irreducible and beyond final external evaluation. Moreover, even Dostoevsky's celebration of dialogism is ideological in the Bakhtinian sense and thus ultimately monological. To make this argument does not deny Bakhtin's ultimately Platonic principle that human experience is so complex that no novel, no philosophy can sum it up: it simply means that that very principle denies the possibility of achieving a final dialogicality through any possible text. The necessary dialogicality can, in any case, be represented, its effects achieved, in the novel, and Bakh-

Implications of Gregory Bateson's Ideas for a Semiotic of Art Education

Abstract: This article examines how a classroom art lesson can reproduce a Cartesian pattern of thinking where creativity is represented as an autonomous act and the aesthetic is seen as a property of an art object - which also is considered to have an autonomous existence. The ideas of Gregory Bateson, as well as insights from the field of semiotics, are used to illuminate how the individual (as artist) is part of a larger ecology of relationships and how these relationships serve as the information pathways essential to the survival of the larger system. The recent work of Ellen Dissanayake is used to clarify how art, as "making special," can involve giving everyday relationships (sign systems that communicate) an aesthetic dimension-which is a view of art that corresponds more closely to the ideas of Bateson and to an understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of the sign systems that we use to communicate about relationships. The conceptual categories that underlie the epistemology of the dominant culture influence the most taken for granted and seemingly straightforward patterns of thought and expression. Witness, for example, the explanations in the teacher's manual forArt Works (1989), which is part of a discipline-based art education instructional materials series: As students create their crayon etchings, comments such as the following may be helpful: You (the student) are pressing down hard onyour crayons, which will help you as you etch. Your sense of humor is being reflected in your art. (p. 47, italics added) This representation of the person as an autonomous source of agency and of art as an entity with an independent existence, which, if "good" enough, may be displayed for the purpose of viewing by others, carries over to the explanations that are to guide how the student thinks about the art of traditional cultures. The students are to be told that Kenojuak Ashevak is a contemporary Canadian Eskimo artist whose artwork reflects the traditions of her cultural heritage, the hunting and gathering Inuit, or "real people," of Northern Canada. Her stonecut print, Enchanted Owl, was included in a collection of Eskimo art in 1960, and in 1970, it was selected for use on a postage stamp. (p. 31) The cultural epistemology that frames the student's artistic expression as autonomous and art as an entity also reframes the wide range of aesthetic expression that characterizes traditional cultures into a reductionist and modern point of view where art is an object- this time to be displayed on a postage

Narratological perspectives on John 13:1-38

Abstract: The text of John 13 as a literary phenomenon is taken as narrative communication. Emphasis is laid on the pragmatic dimension, in which the relation between the sign and the recipient is highlighted. This article describes John 13 as a structured narrative in which a specific ideological perspective is reflected. Retrospectively viewed, John 13 provides an interpretative framework for meaningful discipleship. The modem reader is challenged to seek for deeper significance in the narration of the footwashing.

Avatars of Design: Design before Design

Abstract: 3) Maria Luisa Bonelli Righini and Thomas Settle, The Antique Instruments at the Museum of History of Science at Florence (Florence: Araud, 1978). Inasmuch as the purpose of this article is to draw the reader's attention to "the avatars of design" and particularly to "design before design," an appropriate approach is to isolate the term design temporarily and to consider very generally the fact that every technological object, that is, every object produced by human beings with a certain technical nature, always has two functions: utilitarian and sign. From the consumer's point of view, an object may have great utility and little value as a sign, or the contrary; what was utilitarian can become sign and vice versa. All determinations are possible and include those in which utility as itself is considered a sign (of purity, perfection, completion) and those in which the object serves no purpose: a useless object, a decorative object, an esthetic object. From the viewpoint of production, the discussion can be summed up by two positions: production of a sign is involved and imposed on utilitarian production. For example, effective and light, beautiful and solid, perfectly fulfilling their utilitarian function thus appear the Viking ships, which sailed under certain conditions with so many men on board.1 This is a twentieth-century judgment, marked by some addition to the past. Such a judgment is also found in respect to other old ships, pottery, or tools. But perhaps for the Vikings, that utilitarian function, acquired at the cost of many trials and shipwrecks, was insufficient in the eyes of their contemporaries, so they added a sign function: vivid colors, purple or black sails. All the war ships of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are marked by that doublefunction of utility and sign. The utilitarian function was provided by the shipbuilders and carpenters, who strove to construct seaworthy vessels. The sign function was applied by specialized artists, sculptors, and decorators, whose mission was to make the menacing power and the grandeur of kings manifest.2 Sometimes, they overburdened the structures of the ships to the extent that they forfeited their utility. An example is the warship Wasa, which capsized in Stockholm harbor the day it was launched. Another example of a dual function is that of ancient physical instruments.3 The artisans who produced these knew how to

Gesture, sign, and song : an interdisciplinary approach to Schumann's Liederkreis opus 39

Abstract: Based upon the writings of Mead and Peirce, the gestural-semiotic approach employed in this work explicates the connotative domain of music, the denotative domain of poetry, and their confluence in Schumann's Op. 39. As a work of literary and musical criticism, this study examines the poetics of Eichendorff and the musical aesthetics of Schumann in ways not previously discussed. Most importantly, in this radically interdisciplinary study the phenomenon of song is treated bilaterally - as a hybrid aesthetic expression, not unilaterally - as the domain of either music or poetry.

The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstocking Movement:

Abstract: oppositions themselves, they have a particular immediacy in our time, an immediacy which can be attributed, in dialectical logic, to a reaction against structuralism, politically and intellectually. (Ortner, 1984) The sense that we are presently at the end of something, as expressed in the terms 'postindustrial' and 'postmodern', is a sign of loss of confidence in the structures of the state, the political party, the labour union, and the established ways of doing and thinking. This same loss of confidence is also found in the laws, models, and theories of the social sciences, as expressed in the term 'poststructuralism'. Critiques from the right wing of the political spectrum of all manifestations of state power except those which support capitalism and critiques from the left wing of the state's support of capitalism, all speak of agency, either individual or collective, against structure. The bourgeois critique is essentially coherent. It is, simply stated, that any structure opposed to the orderly accumulation of capital is to be opposed. The left critique of structure is more theoretically problematic. How can one act within the system to oppose it without creating structures which simply negate the structures they oppose, that is, without creating mere antistructures? To escape the endless series of contradictions anti-antistructures one might pose anarchism as a political response or nihilism as an intellectual one. However, to the extent that we still consider ourselves to be social scientists, committed to problem solving, to abandon the project is not a very attractive prospect. Assuming one has not reached the highest state of antistructuralism, one's critique of it must take another form, both intellectually and politically.

Which Idea of Africa? Herskovits's Cultural Relativism

Abstract: Knowledge about Africa is now ordering itself in accordance with a new model. Despite the resiliency of primitivist and evolutionist myths, a new discourse, more exactly, a new type of relation to the African object is taking place. Anthropology, the most compromised of disciplines in the exploitation of Africa, began to rejuvenate itself first through functionalism (during the colonial period) and then, toward the end of the colonial era, in France, through structuralism. In so doing, anthropology, at least theoretically, revised its connection with its own object of study. In any case, in the mid-1950s it merged with other disciplines (economics, geography, history, literature, etc.) to constitute a new but rather vague body of knowledge about Africa or "Africanism." Bound together in the same epistemological space but radically divided in their aims and methods, these disciplines were caught between very concrete demands for the political liberation of Africa and the institutional demands to define their own scientificity, their own philosophical foundation. The figure of the African was taken both as an empirical fact and as the sign of absolute otherness. Michel Foucault remarks this point quite well in the following passage from The Order of Things:

Keats, Polysemy, and Romanticism

Abstract: The sign came into undeniable prominence as both a thematic and methodological preoccupation for the English Romantics to the extent that its traces appear throughout their works in numerous--and not always obvious--manifestations. These writers display an extensive investment in signifying enterprises which in itself draws further attention to the semiotic mechanisms functioning within any exchange of meaning. As Heinrich Bosse suggests, "it was a new orientation in the theory of signs which provided the basis for Romantic literary theory and practice."' Any work designated as Romantic, whether from the heart of the canon or on the periphery of the margin, will illustrate that "the time of the sign" that Dean and Juliet Flower MacCannell associate with contemporary cultural thought found its beginnings during this period.2 Textual supplements (what Gerard Genette calls the "paratexte") such as prefaces, advertisements, introductions, and footnotes, for example, reveal themselves as devices used to buttress works offered by Scott, Byron, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Coleridge as they carefully guide the reader's production of the text.3 Byron and Wordsworth further shape the interpretations of their texts through internal decoding directions as well, suggesting that they view language as eminently unreliable, and more importantly, disclosing their fears that readers cannot be trusted to elicit a proper reading without the author's intervention. And for Blake, a dense scaffolding of reiteration instills a relatively consistent interpretability that his texts so long seemed to resist. Even sign functions themselves become a recurrent theme for the Romantics as their texts explicitly emphasize their own textuality. All of these concerns point to the great importance accorded to signification within this period, highlighting the intense focus on signs that continues to grow in intensity along with modernity. The Romantic desire for a satisfying form of signification initiates the appearance of a long-term project based not on an unrealistic desire to control the sign, but rather, on

Vicissitudes of the visual sign

Abstract: The problem of the relationship between verbal and visual signs is frequently posed as a question of the ways language mediates our reception of the visual image. Yet this would seem to presuppose a certain conception of the image. The image is set over against discourse. It is mute and in need of a voluble interpreter. It drifts and requires a linguistic anchor. The proliferation of discourses accompanying visual art would seem to confirm this view, but literature elicits no less. Before considering the question of the relationship between verbal and visual signs, a number of preliminary questions need to be asked. Are images another register of discourse or are they properly outside discourse? Can the paradigm of language be usefully incorporated into theories of the production and reception of the visual image, or is this precisely to miss the whole point about the visual sign and our relation to it?

The Sign of the Sociologist: Show and Anti-Show in Godard's "Masculin Feminin"

Abstract: In an interview given during the filming of Masculin F6minin, Godard described the film in these terms: "[Pierrot le fou] was a show, there was something of a show about it; this one won't be like that at all, it'll be an anti-show. With Pierrot, people felt things; they didn't understand, but they felt something. They said: 'Well, he's putting on a show.' It was an emotional subject, there was nothing reflective about it. There won't be in Masculin F6minin either, but it will be a film between one reflection and another; it can't interest many people-it's made too fast."' The oppositions Godard sets up here associate "understanding" something with the "anti-show" and "feeling things" --having a purely emotional response to a filmwith the "show." These oppositions suggest a didactic purpose (a film that aids "understanding") requiring some different form. Masculin F6minin (1966) answers this description, but in a very limited way. Unlike Pierrot le fou (1965), it centers on social issues and, accordingly, it also looks and sounds very different. But though conscientiously unspectacular in its subject matter and presentation, it nonetheless shares in, rather than challenges, the conventions of the ordinary narrative film. The title Masculin Feminin presents the two terms of most love stories, like A Man and a Woman.2 But the more clinical categories, masculine, feminine, point up a transformation in tone from that of most love stories, and already give the film a psychological or sociological inflection. The title does not promise to tell us about-in the words of a later intertitle-"nothing but a woman and a man"-but instead about what is characteristic of men and women, about something broader than simply the stories of individual men and women. The title graphics indicate as much, presenting the syllables MA, SCU, LIN separately. In breaking down the French word masculin into its component parts, the film implies that it will subject that idea to analysis and reflection.3 The subtitle of the film also declares its intention to go beyond the "show." Like that of Vivre sa vie ("A Film in 12 Tableaus"), the subtitle of Masculin Feminin relates to the structure of the film. It appears in the same graphic design as the second half of the title: FEMININ/15 FAITS PRECIS. The joining of the two emphasizes the importance of the subtitle to the film's conception. The dichotomy anti-show/show applies to the contrast between this conception and that signified by the subtitle in Vivre sa vie. "A Film in 12 Tableaus" situates

A Forest of Signs : Art in the Crisis of Representation

Abstract: The authors address art production in the 1980s as evidence of a crisis of representation based on the ambiguous distinction between fiction and reality in a society overwhelmed by consumer/media generated images Jacob considers the effects of market forces on art practices Rorimer asserts that the use of photography and language by 80s artists developed the innovations of 60s artists towards a deconstruction of social practice Singerman refers to Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault in a critique of (post-) structuratist theories of the sign Circa 250 bibl ref

A dialogue on the sign: Can Peirce and Jakobson be reconciled?

Abstract: Roman Jakobson made a very important contribution to the American scholarly community when he brought to our attention the semiotic doctrine of Charles Sanders Peirce. Through Jakobson, Peirce became the central figure in the discipline of semiotics, and finally assumed his rightful place as one of the greatest American thinkers of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, as more linguists conduct research within the framework of Peircean sign theory, Jakobson has been criticized for being more Saussurean than Peircean in his theory of language. Elizabeth Bruss, for example, argues that Jakobson is 'a selective reader' of Peirce, 'using Peirce to supply additional support for his own positions, deploying him polemically as the exemplar of an alternative to the Saussurean tradition. His readings of Peirce never seem to demand any serious revisions of his own categories . . . . The Peirce that Jakobson presents is therefore Jakobson's Peirce ...' (1978: 81). This particular point of view is insightful because it is certainly the case that Jakobson mainly discusses two notions of Peirce: the icon/index/symbol trichotomy and the importance of the interpretant (1974, 1975). Jakobson's focusing only on these two aspects of Peirce's work inclines one to conclude either that Peirce's other works are of no relevance to linguistics, or that Jakobson did not agree entirely with Peirce's classification of signs. I believe that it is possible to demonstrate, using Jakobsonian principles and in particular markedness theory, that Peirce and Jakobson have a great deal more in common than even Jakobson himself realized. Specifically, I would argue that the essence of Jakobsonian markedness theory is based on the principle of the Peircean interpretant, and that markedness theory is essentially a theory of interpretants. One of the fundamental differences between the works of Jakobson and Peirce concerns the importance they attribute to binary and ternary oppositions, respectively. For Jakobson, the primary oppositional relationship of all invariants is binary, beginning with the signans/signatum relationship and continuing through the most complex of linguistic oppo-

Interactive fiction: artificial intelligence as a mode of sign production

Abstract: Interactive media need their own idioms that exploit the characteristics of the computer based sign. The fact that the reader can physically influence the course of events in the system changes the author's role, since he no longer creates a linear text but anarrative space that the reader can use to generate stories. Although stories are not simulations of the real world, they must still contain recognizable parts where everyday constraints of time and space hold. AI-techniques can be used to implement these constraints. In fact, we suggest that AI is probably best seen as an aesthetic phenomenon.

The Sign of the Self in the Metropolis

Abstract: What is the relationship between the graphic communication and the individual in the spaces of the metropolis?' What are their common interests and what power does either hold in relation to the other? One widely held (but ultimately unsatisfactory) view asserts that we are overwhelmed by the insidious influence of the advertising messages that crowd in on us from all sides, and that the very profusion, excess and inescapability of advertising contributes to the dissolution of the distinctions between 'reality' and its simulacra, between individual desire and media manipulation, and even between the realms of the public and the private. The adherents of this view present it in persuasive terms. We will undoubtedly be appalled by our own complicity in advertising's project if we believe Mark Crispin Miller's claim that nowadays 'all waking experience, urban and suburban, is a virtual palimpsest of ads', or Jean Baudrillard's assertion that

Come Sign With Us: Sign Language Activities for Children

Abstract: This is an illustrated activities manual featuring more than 300 line drawings of both adults and children signing familiar words, phrases and sentences using American Sign Language (ASL) signs in English word order. This revised edition offers more follow-up activities, including many in context, to teach children sign language. The 20 lessons each introduce ten selected "targe vocabulary" words in a format familiar to children, including holidays, pets, cars and trucks. All signs have equivalent words listed in both English and Spanish. The book shows how to form each sign exactly, and also presents the origins of ASL, facts about deafness and how peopile live in the deaf community. Used with reading and grammar studies, the sign language learned from the book can help children improve their vocabulary, retention and reading comprehension.