| 1. |
- Cabak Rédei, Anna
(författare)
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Germaine de Staël’s Réflexions sur le procès de la reine : An act of compassion?
- 2020
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; 2020:232, s. 41-52
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the foreword to the Mercure de France edition of de Staël. (1996 [1793]. Réflexions sur le procès de la reine. Paris: Mercure de France), Chantal Thomas, French historian and writer, writes that this apology in favor of Marie-Antoinette did not help the queen nor the author herself; on the contrary it only made the latter more unpopular. So why did Germaine de Staël write it? Mme de Staël and Marie-Antoinette did not share many interests; however, at the moment of The Women’s March on Versailles in October 1789, the situation had changed. It was at this moment, when Mme de Staël witnessed people’s hatred for the Queen, that she for the first time felt that she was on her side. She had the feeling that the Queen would be a victim to a public opinion that had been “manipulated” (Thomas. 1996. Preface. In Réflexions sur le procès de la reine, 7–14. Paris: Mercure de France: 12) in a systematic way, and to which she herself had been a victim. Pursuing some ideas formulated by Reddy (2000, 2001) and (Nussbaum, Martha C. 2001. Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) in their work on emotion and empathy in history and philosophy respectively, I hope to offer some suggestions, with the aid of cultural semiotics. More specifically I hope to be able to provide some answers to the question whether Mme de Staël’s apology might be regarded as an act of compassion.
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| 2. |
- Dunér, David
(författare)
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The Cultural Semiotics of African Encounters : Eighteenth-Century Images of the Other
- 2020
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; 2020:232, s. 103-146
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This a contribution to the cultural semiotics of African cultural encounters seen through the eyes of Swedish naturalists at the end of the eighteenth century. European travellers faced severe problems in understanding the alien African cultures they encountered; they even had difficulty understanding the other culture as a culture. They were not just other cultures that they could relate to, but often something completely different, belonging to the natural history of the human species. The Khoikhoi and other groups were believed by Europeans to be, from their perspective, the most distant culture. The Linnaean disciple Anders Sparrman and others, however, tried to transcend this cultural gap, and used their cognitive resources, such as empathy and intersubjectivity, in order to understand the alien culture they encountered.The aim of this paper is to unearth the cultural semiosis of African encounters and the intersubjective challenges that human interactions provoke. These encounters not only changed the view the travellers had of the Other, but also changed themselves and their self-perception. The encounter between the Ego and the Other is, however, not static, something predestined by the differences in their cultures, but dynamic, changing according to individual encounters and the actual intersubjective interplay that transform and change the perception of the Other. There are in particular four meaning-making processes and challenges within cultural encounters that are in focus: recognizing cultural complexity; invoking intersubjectivity; determining similarities and dissimilarities; and identifying the Other as a mirror of oneself.The triad of cultures – Ego, Alter, and Alius – can be understood as gradual and changing aspects depending on the actual situation of the encounter and the personal perspectives, interpretations, and behaviour of the thinking subjects involved. Using concrete examples from Southern and Western Africa in the 1770s and 1780s, this study aims to explore this dynamic semiosis. One of the conclusions is that the relation between the Ego and the Alter/Alius is not something only predetermined by the cultures involved and their ideologies, but also depends on the individual thinking subjects and how they use their specific cognitive and semiotic resources, not least their intersubjective abilities, within specific temporal and spatial contexts.
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| 3. |
- Elleström, Lars, 1960-
(författare)
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Symbolicity, language, and mediality
- 2022
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; 2022:247, s. 1-32
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article demonstrates the broad applicability of the concept of symbol in human communication, beyond but including verbal language. The starting point is Charles Sanders Peirce's understanding of symbolicity as signification grounded on habits. The goal is to be able to conceptualize mediality in general and media interrelations, particularly in relation to symbolicity. Informed by a multimodal view on media, the author provides a systematic overview of symbolicity within the context of communication among human minds structured around two crossing parameters: symbols being limited or widespread among people and symbols not being part of or being part of systems - languages. Based on this overview, I clarify the role of culture in language notions and conceptualize language in relation to mediality. I also suggest a way of more precisely describing similarities and differences between languages and media types, without either conflating or totally separating the two concepts. Finally, I investigate how the dependence of language and media type conceptions on culture affects the idea of intermediality. Together, these investigations and conceptualizations promote a more comprehensive understanding of symbolicity in general and a deeper knowledge of the role of symbolicity in human communication, including verbal language, and intermedial relations involving all kinds of different media types.
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| 4. |
- Ledin, Per, 1962-, et al.
(författare)
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The misleading nature of flow charts and diagrams in organizational communication : The case of performance management of preschools in Sweden
- 2020
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : De Gruyter Mouton. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; 2020:236-237, s. 405-425
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It has become common to find diagrams and flow-charts used in our organizations to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, or to show how parts of the organization interrelate to each other and work together. Such diagrams are used as they are thought to help visualization and simplify things in order to represent the essence of a particular situation, the core features. In this paper, using a social semiotic approach, we show that we need to develop a much more critical sense of how these diagrams and flowcharts can easily abstract, conceal and substitute actual causalities, work roles and relationships. We demonstrate this using the example of a series of interrelated flows-charts used to implement a new system of target-based learning in preschool/kindergartens in Sweden – a system which works highly in favor of a rapidly privatizing education sector. Here, the flow charts shape how school processes and learning are presented to devalue the former system and value the new.
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| 5. |
- Machin, David, 1966-, et al.
(författare)
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Ethical food packaging and designed encounters with distant and exotic others
- 2020
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; :232, s. 251-271
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There has been criticism of how Fair-Trade products represent workers in remote parts of the world where packaging offers an encounter with distant others which romanticizes and homogenizes them as a pre-modern form of ethnicity. Such workers are shown as always engaged in authentic, simple, honest decontextualized manual labor. And they are depicted as highly appreciative of, and empowered by, the act of ethical shopping. This paper shows that a close social semiotic analysis of Fair-Trade packaging reveals a different set of meanings which sit alongside the decontextualized ones. Designs integrate these workers into more contemporary kinds of modernist, rational, design chic, which communicates its own kind of honesty and authenticity. We consider how this, too, shapes how such consumers encounter distant others and its consequence for the meaning of the act of ethical shopping, where consumers can buy into moral alignment offered by products.
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| 6. |
- Ranta, Michael
(författare)
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Mao’s Homeworld(s) : A Comment on the Use of Propaganda Posters in Post-War China
- 2020
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; 2020:232, s. 53-78
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Within cognitive science, narratives are regarded as crucial and fundamental cognitive instruments or tools. As Roger Schank suggests, the identity of (sub-)cultures is to a considerable extent based upon the sharing of narrative structures (Schank. 1995. Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.). According to Schank, culturally shared stories, as do many other stories, occur frequently in highly abbreviated form, as “skeleton stories” or “gists.” Collective identities are conveyed in and between cultures not only through verbal discourse, but also by pictorial means. Many pictures and visual artworks have indeed been produced in order to establish and to consolidate a home-culture and to demarcate it from conceived extra-cultural counterparts.Some of my previous work on these lines has been concerned with demarcation efforts in visual media of “Jews” as extra-cultural, since the Middle Ages onwards, in the Third Reich’s iconography, as well as in modern, radicalized forms of anti-Semitic picturing in Arab media (Ranta. 2016. The (pictorial) construction of collective identities in the Third Reich. Language and Semiotic Studies 2(3). 107–124, Ranta. 2017. Master narratives and the (pictorial) construction of otherness: Anti-semitic images in the Third Reich and beyond. Contemporary Aesthetics 15. https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=765 (accessed 17 November 2019.). In building upon and extending this work, I shall focus in the current paper upon attempts of creating cultural and political cohesion by means of pictorial propaganda in post-war China from the early 1950’s onwards, as promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership by Mao Zedong. Some concrete pictorial examples indicating these attempts will be discussed from a narratological and cultural semiotic perspective.
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| 7. |
- Ranta, Michael
(författare)
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The Role of Schemas and Scripts in Pictorial Narration
- 2021
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; :241, s. 1-27
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The theoretical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity have been somewhat neglected. In this paper, however, I shall discuss narrativity specifically with regard to pictorial objects in order to clarify how pictorial storytelling may be based on the activation of mentally stored action and scene schemas. Approaches from cognitive psychology, such as the work of Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Mandler, Jean Matter. 1984. Stories, scripts, and scenes: Aspects of schema theory. London/Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Schank, Roger C. 1995. Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, suggest that cognition crucially depends on the storage and retrieval of action scripts or schemata, that is, narrative structures, which may occur at various levels of abstraction. These schemas incorporate generalized knowledge about event sequences, such as the order in which specific events will take place; causal, enabling, or conventionalized relations between these events, and what kind of events occur in certain action sequences. There also are scene schemas that are characterized by spatial rather than temporal relations. Further kinds of schemas seem also to play a decisive role. Drawing upon considerations from schema and script theory, I will focus on some concrete examples of pictorial narration, more specifically depictions of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, where narrative schema structures become involved and, indeed, the comprehensibility of the pictures as such presuppose mental script representations.
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| 8. |
- Sandin, Gunnar
(författare)
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Construing Scandinavia : A semiotic account of intercultural exchange in theme park design
- 2020
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; 2020:232, s. 79-102
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Evaluation of other cultures is a strong force in a culture's definition of itself. Cultures are formed in encounters that include domination, conflict, and dismissal as much as appreciation and smooth exchange. In this paper, the construction of cultural identity is discussed, with reference to a Scandinavian Theme Park proposal made in cooperation between American design consultants and a local Swedish team of planners and visionaries. The image production in this design proposal, which never came to be realised in architectural production, shows that "Scandinavia" appears as a two-some dialogic construction that adopts stereotyped cultural identities, and that it was not brought to any wider public dialogue. In a semiotic account of this architectural decision-making, models of culture (Lotman. 1990. Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. London: Tauris.) are discussed in terms of the tripartition of culture into Ego-culture, Alter-culture and Alius-culture (Sonesson. 2000. Ego meets alter: The meaning of otherness in cultural semiotics. Semiotica 128(3/4). 537-559.; Cabak Rédei, Anna. 2007. An inquiry into cultural semiotics: Germaine de Staël's autobiographical travel accounts. Lund: Lund University Press.), considered as a basic abstracted backdrop of what is meant by cultural difference. In this paper it is suggested that this tripartite view on culture, can be further discussed in reflection of post-colonial studies, notably through terms such as "mimicry" (Bhabha. 1984. Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. October 28. 125-133.) and "subalterity" (Spivak. 1988. Can the subaltern speak?. In Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture, 271-313. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.). The model of culture can furthermore be discussed through Peirce's distinction between different stages and carriers of representation, adding to the cultural model an understanding of what it means, over time, for a culture to relate to an admired as well as to a neglected other cultural actor.
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| 9. |
- Sonesson, Göran
(författare)
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Dancing all the way to the stage by way of the stadium : on the iconicity and plasticity of actions
- 2022
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Ingår i: Semiotica. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 0037-1998 .- 1613-3692. ; 2022:248, s. 321-349
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the sense of phenomenology, actions are special cases of acts of consciousness. Within semiotics, first Jan Mukařovský and then A. J. Greimas have established, in different terms, a distinction between instrumental actions and actions which carry their meaning in themselves. But this is insufficient to account for the variety of actions which comprises everything from the creation of artefacts, dance, sporting events, theatre, rituals, and much else. Already those actions mentioned relate in different ways to instrumentality and intrinsic meaning, as well as to (depictive) iconicity and plasticity. In this paper, I will be particularly concerned with dancing, especially classical ballet, trying to delimit it from sporting events and theatre. Apart from the sign function and the spectacular function, I will notably have recourse to what I have elsewhere term secondary (depictive) iconicity as well as to plasticity. In the process, I hope to be able to throw some light also on the nature of sport, by comparing and contrasting it to dance, as well as to the theatre as well as, more incidentally, to some other types of action. In a wider perspective, my ambition is to contribute to a general inquiry into the semiosis of actions.
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| 10. |
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