Sign (semiotics)

About: Sign (semiotics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4080 publications have been published within this topic receiving 70333 citations. The topic is also known as: semiotic sign.

Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior

Abstract: Explanation and Power was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The meaning of any utterance or any sign is the response to that utterance or sign: this is the fundamental proposition behind Morse Peckham's Explanation and Power. Published in 1979 and now available in paperback for the first time, Explanation and Power grew out of Peckham's efforts, as a scholar of Victorian literature, to understand the nature of Romanticism. His search ultimately led back to-and built upon-the tradition of signs developed by the American Pragmatists. Since, in Peckham's view, meaning is not inherent in word or sign, only in response, human behavior itself must depend upon interaction, which in turn relies upon the stability of verbal and nonverbal signs. In the end, meaning can be stabilized only by explanation, and when explanation fails, by force. Peckham's semiotic account of human behavior, radical in its time, contends with the same issues that animate today's debates in critical theory - how culture is produced, how meaning is arrived at, the relation of knowledge to power and of society to its institutions. Readers across a wide range of disciplines, in the humanities and social sciences, will welcome its reappearance.

Selling the suburbs: Nature, , landscape, adverts, community

Abstract: This essay discusses how the real-and-imagined spaces of 'nature' are used to promote the burgeoning master planned communities or enclave estates. On one hand it focuses on the actual sites of the estates and discusses how nature, as a construct, plays a prominent role in presenting the estate as a place of 'wholesome community values'. It then goes on to discuss how 'nature' as a concept is used in various advertisements to promote these community values as a sales tool. Key terms: Community, enclave estates, firstspace and secondspace, imagineering, nature. Perth, Western Australia has overwhelmingly taken to the concept of the master planned community or as they are commonly called enclave estates. Walled, and sometimes gated, communities are spreading throughout the suburbs eating into and digesting virgin scrub, consuming wetlands by in-filling, and butchering forests by felling. The irony here is that this destruction of the 'natural' goes against one of the major factors which the builders utilise to sell their 'estates': that of the close connection of the estate with 'nature'. Of course this is not a new marketing ploy. Gottdeiner (1995) has discussed the semiotics of the real estate sign and what he calls the 'English gentrification code' of the suburban estate. In this discussion he notes how the roadside signage, and specifically the names for the new suburbs displayed thereon, draw upon images of class and status with these being associated with upper class English estates or bourgeois suburbs. He also points out that the naming of the suburb is more often than not linked to 'nature' with terms such as 'grove', 'forest', 'lakes' or 'springs' being an addition which is seen to enhance the notion of status and class that the appellation suggests. It should be pointed out at this stage that the term 'nature' used throughout this discussion refers to the notion of a constructed or 'worked' nature not that of the wilderness or the natural. What I would like to propose in this essay is that the application of the notion of 'nature' as a connotation of class and status is not the only expression in operation here. 'Nature' is also being used to insinuate that the 'community' residing in the enclave is upright, well-disposed and, more importantly, wholesome. Representations of this notion can be found in the advertisements for the master planned estates in any real estate section of the weekend newspapers. Between the pages of these extended advertorials Gottdeiner's observations are displayed in the texts with the accompanying images suggesting the close link between 'nature' and wholesome community and the written copy explicitly acknowledging the connection. In the latter attention is drawn to the physical

Communication as Relationality

Abstract: Communication is a process of relating. This means it is not primarily or essentially a process of transferring information or of disseminating or circulating signs (though these things can be identified as happening within the process of relating). Instead, communication is the weaving and reweaving of visible and invisible four-dimensional webs, which constitute and reconstitute matter and ideation as humans, discourse, and other beings within a dynamic field of many forces. Such a conceptualization helps us out of the now stale debates of Western philosophy about the nature of communication. Western philosophy from Plato through Derrida has repeatedly made the mistake of focusing studies of communication on the status of the word, sign, or symbol. The stream of conversation participated in by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, and many others asked what and how signs mean, by asking how a particular sign or sentence “referred” to the “reality” for which it presumably stood. This line of inquiry assumed that communication was about referring to things, and it therefore focused attention on how isolated signs or propositions were related to real (i.e., nonlinguistic) things. This idea that signs represented some naturally ordered reality was challenged first by the structuralists and then by the poststructuralist intellectual revolution. These critiques have been substantive, so that no one should any longer hold to a simplistic theory that words just refer to things. But the dominant strain of poststructuralism has, by its obsessive attention to negating the referential character of signs, reinforced the primacy of the sign and

The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity

Abstract: The Possessed Individual: Technology and New French Theory - Bodies without Wills: Paul Virilio's War-Machine - The Despotic Sign: Barthes' Rhetoric of Technology - Why Should We Talk When We Communicate So Well: Baudrillard Natural Cyborgs - Becoming Virtual (Technology): The Confessions of Deleuze and Guattari - Libidinal Technology: Lyotard in the New World - Cynical Aesthetics: The Games of Foucault - Epilogue: The Paris Simulacrum