A strawberry, an animal cry and a human subject: Where existential semiotics, biosemiotics and relational metaphysics seem to meet one another (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 semiotic self at the crossroads of culture and nature
This paper is aiming at the extension of the research domain including the semiotic self initially referred to an organism which subsumes the signals from its environment and emits them to its environment as significant by the no-tion of the signifying and communicating self who sends and receives the sensorially perceivable meaning bearers and who processes and interprets these mentally apprehensible meaning bearers for the sake of collective understand-ing. This aim will be fulfilled by putting together the anthropological-cultural and biological-philosophical conceptions of subjective universe in the realm of living systems. In such a viewpoint, the interpersonal life-world of an outer self who produces and receives concrete signs as meaning bearers is postulated to be seen as a counterpart of subjective universe of an inner self formed by the sensual knowledge coming from individual experiences and consensual knowledge of the meaning being derived from the contents of collective com-munication.
Abstract: From Biosemiotics to Semiotics
2002
Biosemiotics and Semiotics have similarities and differences. Both deal with signal and meaning. One difference is that Biosemiotics covers a domain (life) that is less complex that the one addressed by Semiotics (human). We believe that this difference can be used to have Biosemiotics bringing added value to Semiotics. This belief is based on the fact that a theory of meaning is easier to build up for living elements than for humans, and that the results obtained for life can make available some tools for a higher level of complexity. Semiotic has been encountering some difficulties to deliver a scientific theory of meaning that can be efficient at the level of human mind. The obstacles come from our ignorance on the nature of human. As it is true that we do not understand the nature of human mind on a scientific basis. On the other hand, the nature and properties of life are better understood. And we can propose a modelization for a generation of meaningful information in the fiel...
Semiotics of Culture(s): Basic Questions and Concepts
The article introduces some basic questions and concepts related to the semiotic study of culture and cultures. The first question “Is Semiotics necessary to life?” lead to analyze the very role of Semiotics and semioticness for human beings. The article suggests a double necessity of semiotics, intended at the same time as a quality proper to humankind and as a scientific knowledge necessary to reflect and become aware of our unperceived “cultural nature”. The second question is related to a basic yet forgotten claim of Semiotics. That is to say the idea of considering semiotic analysis not only as a form of intellectual knowledge but also as an action that aims to transform reality. This lead to define semiotician as a political subject and to reflect to the general status of subject and subjectivity from a semiotic point of view. The third question aims to face the paradox of a cultural space that is always singular and plural at the same time. The article propose some theoretical and methodological tools – e.g. the circular intellectual movement represented by analysis and catalisys – in order to manage the complex relations between parts and whole, micro and macro, order and chaos, sense and nonsense. The second part of the article propose three key concept for contemporary and future semiotics of culture(s): semiosphere, formation, translation. Starting from the structural paradoxes of the idea of semiosphere, developed in the '80s by Juri Lotman, the article proposes a dynamic and glocal idea of culture(s) based on a relationalist approach. The idea of formation allow to map the different types of semiotic relation involved in the study of culture. At the same time the concept of formation encapsulates the one of sign, text, discourse, language. The latter will be central to describe the various modes of translation and to understand the implications of translation on the constitution or transformation of common sense and reality. The article propose to consider translation as key concept that allows to articulate different semiotic visions and schools as well as to describe some of the most interesting and thorny dynamics and devices of actual cultural life. Index 1. Is Semiotics necessary to life? 2. Which Subject? 3. Culture or Cultures? 4. Semiosphere(s) 5. Formation(s) 6. Translation(s) Published in Peter P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2015.
Linguistic Frontiers, 2022
In the first part of the article, biosemiotics will be presented in its historical and theoretical dynamics. New areas of research that have emerged in the speculative field of biosemiotics, such as ecosemiotics, will be explored. In all its developments, biosemiotics, which identifies semiosis with life, excludes inorganic matter from any semiotics processes. However, the inorganic world is a fundamental part of the biosphere, especially if we consider the emergence of life. In order to include inorganic matter within semiotic processes of the biosphere we will use James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis reinterpreted in the light of semiotics. If we use the hypothesis of planet Earth as a living system in its complexity and if we consider that every living system is intrinsically semiotic, then inorganic matter must also participate in semiotics processes. In this sense, the semiotics of the inorganic world reveals that it participates in a sort of non-human agency. This type of speculative semiotics engages semiotics processes that are constitutive of matter and that can be read as the story of the planet itself. In conclusion, I will propose a physiosemiotics as semiotics of matter.
Some Short and Important Explications about Semiotics
Jornal Internacional de Estudos em Educação Matemática, 2020
That language is essential to the human nature has never been doubted. However, nowadays it becomes more and more obvious that language is not enough to characterize our destinations, because the relationship between nature and society seem essential when reflecting on the development or destination of humanity. Starting from the belief that semiotics provides the basis of a new conceptualization and understanding of humanity in its relations to nature as well as within the context of social history this paper tries to introduce some related semiotic concepts and provide basic orientations for further research in the philosophy of science as well as cognitive theory. Keywords: Saussure. Peirce. Semiotics. Complementarity of intension and extension. Resumo Que a linguagem é essencial para a natureza humana jamais foi posta em dúvida. No entanto, atualmente torna-se cada vez mais evidente que a linguagem não é suficiente para caracterizar nossos destinos, pois a relação entre natu...