Semiotics in the Wild [FULL OPEN ACCESS] (original) (raw)
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Gatherings in Biosemiotics XX., 2020
Biosemiotics is the study of semiosis in the biological realm. Or, as it was written in the introduction to the 17th Gatherings in Biosemiotics in Lausanne, “biosemiotics is [...] the study of meaning-making and its consequences in living systems, and much of its focus is on investigating and understanding pre-linguistic sign processes in both humans and other organisms”. Biology, on the one hand, has an important and impressive history of studying the systematicity of nature, as it is exhibited in the analyses of the genetic, physiological and morphogenetic processes of living systems. Yet biology, at the same time, must also certainly recognize that it is likewise the study of the systematicity of freedom, in as much as its object of study is the phenomenon of life itself. And so biology, understood as biosemiotics, studies life’s capacity for aboutness, for establishing mediated and arbitrary relationships that result in the creation of novelty, for making choices, and for the ongoing exploration of possibility. The world meetings on biosemiotics – Gatherings in Biosemiotics – have been taking place annually since 2001. The first twelve years of these conferences was described in a volume of 2012, while the current volume covers the meetings from 2012 to 2020. In addition to the accounts and programs of these events, and including over sixty contributions to the twentieth meeting, the current volume includes review articles, evaluating the work done thus far, and predicting future developments. The history and philosophy of Czech biosemiotics, in particular, receives a detailed account, and many other new ideas in biosemiotics are also discussed in this book.
15th World Congress of Semiotics. Semiotics in the Lifeworld Thessaloniki_Book_of_abstracts
2022
Semiotics, collective and politics. The case of people Applied semiotics have been practicing the analysis of political discourse for a very long time, and more recently the analysis of political practices and interactions, but without the political dimension being considered as a structuring element of the theoretical and methodological organon of semiotics. Politics, in this case, would be just one object of study among others, such as advertising, photography, literature or electronic social networks. Yet another approach is possible, which targets politics as a semiotic problematic, and not just as an object of study; in other words: a political dimension integrated into the global architecture of semiotics. Therefore, we must choose an epistemological horizon and an entry point that allows such integration. This horizon will be that of anthropology, a semiotic anthropology that teaches us and insists that the political dimension of our societies, our civilizations, our daily worlds begin with the choice of a collective reference actant. This collective reference actant will be our entry point: what is it made up of? how is it constituted? how and why is it maintained? what are the possibilities and limits of its metamorphosis? what repositories is it on the initiative of and is it carrying? what is the nature of its interactions with the individual actants that compose it? with other collective actants? Etc. Today, for example, it seems to go without saying in intellectual and academic circles (cf. the popularity of the actor-network theory) that the relevant collective actants, those who can refer to, facing the challenges of our common future, must necessarily be heterogeneous, and include non-humans as well as humans, machines as living beings, natural elements (a river, a mountain) as much as technical or cultural artefacts. But no one can ignore that this perspective is both fundamentally political because it because it challenges the hierarchical and sectoral organization of our societies and our daily lives, and semiotic, because it deeply reconfigures the way in which we conceive our categories of analysis, in particular that of actant or that of values systems, or even the global hierarchy of our conceptual system. The main part of this conference will be devoted, first, to gradually laying down the theoretical and methodological elements which thus make it possible to integrate a political dimension into the semiotic organon, and then to examine the consequences for a type of collective actant which today constitutes a particularly problematic type of collective actant, namely the "people." Bionote Jacques FONTANILLE, born in 1948, is emeritus professor of semiotics at the University of Limoges, and honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is also Honorary President of the International Association of Visual Semiotics, and Honorary President of the French Association of Semiotics. Jacques FONTANILLE was President of the University of Limoges from 2005 to 2012. From 2012 to 2014, he was Advisor and Chief of Staff of the French Minister of Higher Education and Research. He is the author of over two hundred and seventy scholarly publications, in the fields of theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, visual semiotics, rhetoric and general linguistics, semiotics of practices and biosemiotics. Most of his books have been translated in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Korean, Arabic, etc. He was visiting professor or guest lecturer in eighty American, European, Asian, and African universities. Most of his former PhD students now hold faculty positions at universities in Europe
The disunity of semiotics: Bridging gaps through biosemiotics
(Presentation given at IcON 2015, Kaunas, Lithuania. The written version was originally intended for the Proceedings, but nothing came out of it and so here it is.) This presentation will deal with the idea that the different varieties of semiotics have essentially a general proposal of unity within the context of the so-called general semiotics, but that this core of ideas has not developed into a set of actual propositions arguing for the unity of semiotics as a whole. This remarkable disunity resembles the problems first found in the major and well-documented opposition between semiology and semiotics, but the nuances of its articulation may well be overcome through the effort of providing a biosemiotic account of semiotic phenomena. Yet, a general biosemiotic paradigm requires "tweaking" some more commonplace assumptions on how sign-systems work, creating a series of new problems, such as the possibility of referring to the same signification mechanisms throughout wildly dissimilar types of organisms. Bridging the gap inside the different branches of semiotics can prove to be a daunting task, but it is one that can be undertaken with the objective of a more cohesive discipline. Is cohesion, however, a value worth pursuing in semiotics? While a negative answer can be satisfactorily given, this presentation will argue for the positive approach.
Sign Systems Studies, 2020
The article discus ses some semiotic approaches to the relation between nature and culture. Starting with outlining the structuralistic approach to this issue, especially the ideas of Juri Lotman and Algirdas Julien Greimas, the author finds parallels between different views on the relation between the natural world and human beings. First, the juxtaposition of Eero Tarasti's existential semiotics with selected concepts of biosemiotics is discussed. The following part of the paper is dedicated to Bruno Latour's ideas on nature-culture relation, hybrids and mediations. Then the author refers to Lotman's notion of the semiosphere as the common space for all living and inanimate elements. Closing the paper with a return to biosemiotics, the author comes back to Tarasti's ideas and compares these with some ideas in biosemiotics, paying special attention to the concepts of unpredictability, choice and dynamics. The comparison shows that some intuitions, assumptions and theses of these different scholars turn out to be surprisingly convergent. The author believes that the outlined parallels between Tarasti's view, Latour's and Lotman's concepts, and biosemiotics may be promising for further research, inviting detailed study.
A ‘Semiotic-Medical’ Inheritance: Cesare Lombroso and Paolo Marzolo
15th World Congress of Semiotics IASS-AIS “Semiotics in the Lifeworld” (University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, 30th August - 3rd September 2022), 2022
Semiotics, collective and politics. The case of people Applied semiotics have been practicing the analysis of political discourse for a very long time, and more recently the analysis of political practices and interactions, but without the political dimension being considered as a structuring element of the theoretical and methodological organon of semiotics. Politics, in this case, would be just one object of study among others, such as advertising, photography, literature or electronic social networks. Yet another approach is possible, which targets politics as a semiotic problematic, and not just as an object of study; in other words: a political dimension integrated into the global architecture of semiotics. Therefore, we must choose an epistemological horizon and an entry point that allows such integration. This horizon will be that of anthropology, a semiotic anthropology that teaches us and insists that the political dimension of our societies, our civilizations, our daily worlds begin with the choice of a collective reference actant. This collective reference actant will be our entry point: what is it made up of? how is it constituted? how and why is it maintained? what are the possibilities and limits of its metamorphosis? what repositories is it on the initiative of and is it carrying? what is the nature of its interactions with the individual actants that compose it? with other collective actants? Etc. Today, for example, it seems to go without saying in intellectual and academic circles (cf. the popularity of the actor-network theory) that the relevant collective actants, those who can refer to, facing the challenges of our common future, must necessarily be heterogeneous, and include non-humans as well as humans, machines as living beings, natural elements (a river, a mountain) as much as technical or cultural artefacts. But no one can ignore that this perspective is both fundamentally political because it because it challenges the hierarchical and sectoral organization of our societies and our daily lives, and semiotic, because it deeply reconfigures the way in which we conceive our categories of analysis, in particular that of actant or that of values systems, or even the global hierarchy of our conceptual system. The main part of this conference will be devoted, first, to gradually laying down the theoretical and methodological elements which thus make it possible to integrate a political dimension into the semiotic organon, and then to examine the consequences for a type of collective actant which today constitutes a particularly problematic type of collective actant, namely the "people." Bionote Jacques FONTANILLE, born in 1948, is emeritus professor of semiotics at the University of Limoges, and honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is also Honorary President of the International Association of Visual Semiotics, and Honorary President of the French Association of Semiotics. Jacques FONTANILLE was President of the University of Limoges from 2005 to 2012. From 2012 to 2014, he was Advisor and Chief of Staff of the French Minister of Higher Education and Research. He is the author of over two hundred and seventy scholarly publications, in the fields of theoretical semiotics, literary semiotics, visual semiotics, rhetoric and general linguistics, semiotics of practices and biosemiotics. Most of his books have been translated in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Korean, Arabic, etc. He was visiting professor or guest lecturer in eighty American, European, Asian, and African universities. Most of his former PhD students now hold faculty positions at universities in Europe