Topic
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.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose that audience acceptance consists not in persuasion so much as in joining the securitising actors in a ritualised chanting of ambiguous phrases (WMD, rogue states, ethnic cleansing) and demonstrate that the audience participates in the performance in the manner in which a crowd at a rock concert sings along with the artists.
Abstract: We seek to reinvigorate and clarify the Copenhagen School's insight that ‘security’ is not ‘a sign that refers to something more real; the utterance [‘security’] itself is the act’. We conceptualise the utterances of securitising actors as consisting not in arguments so much as in repetitive spouting of ambiguous phrases (WMD, rogue states, ethnic cleansing). We further propose that audience acceptance consists not in persuasion so much as in joining the securitising actors in a ritualised chanting of the securitising phrase. Rather than being performed to, the audience participates in the performance in the manner in which a crowd at a rock concert sings along with the artists. We illustrate our argument with a discussion of how the ritualised chanting of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ during the run-up to the Iraq War ultimately produced the grave Iraqi threat that it purportedly described.
43 citations
TL;DR: Art is seen as a secondary modelling system, more precisely as a play-type model, which is characterised simultaneously by practical and conventional behaviour and constant awareness of the possibility of alternate meanings to the one that is currently being perceived as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This article by Juri Lotman from the third volume of Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Sign Systems Studies) in 1967, deals with the problem of artistic modelling. The general working questions are whether art displays any characteristic traits that are common for all modelling systems and which could be the specific traits that can distinguish art from other modelling systems. Art is seen as a secondary modelling system, more precisely, as a play-type model, which is characterised simultaneously by practical and conventional behaviour and constant awareness of the possibility of alternate meanings to the one that is currently being perceived. At the same time art has play-like elements but is not the same as play, since play is inherently rule-bound, whereas art is a more flexible model the purpose of which is truth. Art is a special type of modelling system, since it is on one hand suitable for storing very large amount of complex information, but on the other hand it can increase the stored information and transform the consumer.
43 citations
TL;DR: The authors consider the implications of Derrida's argument for the area of language testing in order to see what his interpretation of the shibboleth might mean for understanding its practices, typically framed as they are within a modernist paradigm.
Abstract: The biblical story of the shibboleth is widely cited in language testing as emblematic of the social and political function of language tests. But the meaning of the shibboleth has also been explored within poststructuralism, specifically within Derrida’s discussion of the dilemmas of identity in the work of the German Jewish poet Paul Celan. Derrida discusses language itself as shibboleth, and emphasizes the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the linguistic sign, its ‘undecidability’. This article considers the implications of Derrida’s argument for the area of language testing in order to see what his interpretation of the shibboleth might mean for understanding its practices, typically framed as they are within a modernist paradigm. Examples are drawn from various areas of language assessment, including the use of language analysis in the determination of the claims of asylum seekers. What implications for understanding such assessment practices does a poststructuralist perspective offer?
43 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: The authors argue that dominant discourses, as ways of seeing and talking about youths, are constructed and managed by adults and offer young people a limited set of roles to play and options for engaging with society.
Abstract: Young people today are frequently demonized by media images as well as by classroom reports. Dominant discourses, as ways of seeing and talking about youths, are constructed and managed by adults and offer young people a limited set of roles to play and options for engaging with society. Contributors to
43 citations
43 citations