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.

How to do things with silence: Rethinking the centrality of speech to the securitization framework

Abstract: This contribution offers the first steps in a novel conceptualization of how international relations and security studies can provide an analytics of silence. Starting with an analysis of a paradigmatic use of silence in the field, Lene Hansen's 'Little Mermaid', the contribution shows the limitations and issues with an analytics that concentrates on the meaning behind silences. Silence as meaning is problematic because analytically what is offered solely is the overinvestment of the analyst's 'horizon of expectation' upon a sign that is not generally meant to be one. Mobilizing a feminist reading of pornography as speech act, the contribution shows how silence may also be performative, in the sense that it does something to a specific logocentric order at the heart of our analysis of the international or security. The contribution finally offers a possible way of thinking about silence as doing rather than meaning and shows how this can be a possible analytical path to invert our analytics of the international and security from the perspective of the state/the powerful to that of the subaltern.

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

Narration and Discourse in the Book of Genesis

Abstract: Preface Part I. A Functional Theory of Narrative: 1. Toward a functional theory of narrative 2. The functions of the sign 3. A functional definition of narrative 4. A typology of narrative functions and modes 5. The three functional narrative types Part II. The Structure of the Genesis Narrative: 6. The divine Voice and the narrative functions 7. The micro-dialogue as the matrix of the Genesis narrative Part III. Analysis of Genesis Narratives: 8. 'Who told you that you were naked?' 9. 'Where is your brother?' Excursus on sacrifice in religion and literature 10. The central micro-dialogue 11. 'Why did you say, 'She is my sister'?' 12. 'Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?' 13. 'Who then is he who was hunting game ... before you came?' 14. 'Where do you come from?' Notes Bibliography Index - authors and topics Index - Biblical references.

Childhood, Education and Philosophy: Notes on Deterritorialisation

Abstract: This paper aims to argue how education might be considered and practised if not under the logic of the formation of childhood. As such, it puts into question the traditional way of considering children as representing adults' opportunity to impose their own ideals, and considering education to be an appropriate instrument for such an end. More specifically, it considers how the purposes of practising philosophy with children might be affirmed as other than in the service of the social and political education of childhood. This complex issue calls for a redefinition, not only of philosophy and education, but also of childhood itself. Several ancient (Heraclitus) and contemporary (Deleuze, Lyotard) philosophical contributions are offered in order to reflect on new concepts and vocabularies for childhood. What they have in common is a non-chronological concept of childhood—one that considers the child under the sign of aion rather than chronos, and therefore as something inherently constitutive of human life, which therefore could never be abandoned, forgotten or overcome. As an example of this deterritorialisation of the relation between childhood and education, a practical project undertaken in a couple of public schools in the environs of Rio de Janeiro and its environs is presented, in which a strong emphasis is placed on the concept of the ‘experience of philosophical thinking’. The paper unpacks each of these three terms—experience, philosophy, and thinking—appealing to Foucault, Deleuze and Hadot for conceptual reconstruction. In addition, some basic pedagogical assumptions that informed this project are presented in the context of two philosophers who inspired it—Socrates and Jacques Ranciere. The last section of the paper reflects on how the practice of mainstream schooling seems actually hostile to the experience of philosophical thinking, thus challenging the practitioners to encounter the pedagogical space of the mainstream as if it were possible to establish a new educational relationship to childhood there, and to work fully expecting what cannot be predicted.

The Audience: Subjectivity, Community and the Ethics of Listening

Abstract: In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the Player King accosts the uncertain duo "joyously," with the words, "an audience! Don't move" (21-22). In his monumental book on the audience, Herbert Blau begins with a quotation from Virginia Woolf, "No audience. No echo. That's part of one's death" (1). In his play, Offending the Audience, Peter Handke announces, "You are the topic. . . . You are the center. You are the occasion. You are the reasons why" (21). And in certain historical accounts, audiences are identified by dominant cultural ideas by such statements as Tillyard's: "orthodox doctrines of rebellion and of the monarch were shared by every section of the community" (64). If these uses of the word are at all indicative of the range of how "audience" is conventionally understood, they suggest how an audience is projected as a fixed point ("Don't move"), a dimension of self-reflection ("No echo. That's part of one's death"), a teleology ("the reasons why") and an orthodoxy. In semiotic terms, the audience is a sign for purpose (telos), a point of reception, an echo, an orthodoxy. One of the first problems in trying to understand the word "audience" comes with the assumption that it signifies a collective version of a single consciousness rather than just the desire for such unity. The word "audience" often appears to function as an image of unity created out of diversity, as a kind of e pluribus unum: an aggregate of individuals that together constitute a larger yet still singular individuality, as though "the" audience has a collective consciousness that is analogous to a unified individual subject. Such an assumption disintegrates rather quickly under the pressure of both historical and deconstructive questions. The sign obviously, perhaps necessarily, conceals the differences that make each individual member unique not only by various classifications of race, nation, class or gender, familial, social, educational, linguistic and experiential histories but also by the particular position (literally and figuratively where one sits) in the configuration of an event. Neither can the word account for the temporal aspects of history: that audiences change over