Semiotic Review (ISSN: 3066-8107) is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing original scholarship bearing upon symbolic behavior, meaning, and signification in all its forms. It is online and open-access.
This dialogue between Webb Keane and Massimo Leone, moderated and with a preface by Constantine V. Nakassis, explores convergences and divergences between continental semiotics and North American linguistic anthropology on the topic of “semiotic ideology.” The discussion ranges over questions of intellectual genealogy, the status of interpretation, the epistemology of analysis, and methodology. It is an edited transcription of the opening session of the “Summer Symposium 2025: Ideologies of Conservation and Transformation,” organized by Massimo Leone at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy, 23 June 2025).
Copyright (c) 2025 Massimo Leone, Webb Keane, Constantine Nakassis (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In this introduction, we elaborate on the theme of this issue and its aim: to provide a bridge between the semiotic traditions of North American linguistic anthropology and European continental semiotics. We provide a brief overview of these different, heterogeneous traditions, noting their points of convergence and divergence. While each shares a sustained critical engagement with and movement beyond linguistic structuralism, and thus a number of common bases dating to the mid-century, the two traditions have been in little to no contact for the last half-century, each independently developing its own unique theoretical discourse and approach to semiosis and signification. Despite their differences, however, linguistic anthropology and continental semiotics are built on shared foundations. They continue to be concerned with similar issues, and, in various areas, have developed convergent solutions. To demonstrate this, we identify a cluster of points of contact (among many others, to be sure): enunciation and entextualization; enunciative praxis and enregisterment; embodiment, qualia, and affect/passions; semiosphere, cultures of circulation, and emanation; and the semiotics of practice, interaction, and actantial theory. We conclude with discussion of the larger project from which this issue arose.
Copyright (c) 2025 Constantine Nakassis, Tatsuma Padoan (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article uses the concept of enunciative praxis from Paris School semiotics, showing its possible intersections with Michael Silverstein’s idea of ritualization as “dynamic figuration,” and with other anthropological theories of ritual. I explore these intersections through an analysis of ritual action in a community of ascetic practice involved in the revival of the pilgrimage to the “Sutra Mounds of the Twenty-Eight Lodges of Katsuragi” (Katsuragi no nijūhasshuku kyōzuka), a mountain area in central Japan. Following these pilgrims, we ‘walk’ through different forms of ritualization, from an informal “interaction ritual” to a highly metricalized “full-tilt ritual,” passing through examples of ritual apprenticeship involving missteps and adjustment. I argue that the concepts of enunciation and enunciative praxis offer an accurate framework to describe the metapragmatic dynamics through which social roles are performatively redefined via verbal and nonverbal semiotic acts. Finally, by looking at the way notions of personhood, subjectivity, sacred language, and the cosmos are conceptualized by members of this ascetic group, I show how an impersonal and diagrammatic conception of enunciation—what I would like to call, after Marshall Sahlins, metapersonal enunciation—best fits the world-remaking rituals enacted by these ascetic practitioners.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tatsuma Padoan (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Enunciative Praxis and Enregisterment in the Domain of Generative Artificial Intelligence
This article focuses on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the area of text-to-image translation. I address the question of stereotyped visual styles using the theory of enunciative praxis formulated in continental semiotics (and, more specifically, in so-called Paris School Semiotics). I relate this theory with the concept of enregisterment in linguistic anthropology in order to describe the way in which visual forms undergo a process of sedimentation and typification and then are transposed to feed into other forms. The first section of the article presents the way in which a painting (as a stratified form of other forms), as well as a corpus of interrelated paintings, may be studied through the methodology of enunciative praxis and enregisterment; the second section develops the study of databases and algorithms as tools for a renewed approach to semiotic theory of enunciation and visual language.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Giulia Dondero (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
On December 17, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi, a 27-year-old street vendor set himself on fire on the public square facing the Sidi Bouzid town hall in Tunisia. This social event became an irreversible turn in the history of the Arab World. What remains of his immolated body? Drawing from two concepts, entextualization and enunciative praxis, this article explores the semiotics of self-immolation as a critical enunciation and counter- interpellation of state biopolitical discourses. Can death, silence, martyrdom, or the burning body enunciate? The entextualization of thanatopolitics (or the politics of death) thus appears as the production of memorial traces that organize a performance of popular resistance. This also entails a process of the reverse de-/re-contextualization of infrapolitical enunciation, as exerted by institutional power in order to claim and deform emancipatory discourses for the profit of an imposed truth. Understanding the dialectics between subaltern and institutional/official modes of entextualization and perspective leads us to a better understanding of the complexity of enunciative praxis of the immolated body, of which this paper offers a fourfold analysis: enunciation, image, truth, and (artistic) trace.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariem Guellouz (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This paper starts off from ethnographic data collected in the still diglossic rural hinterlands known as the Bourbon Mountains (Montagne bourbonnaise) in Central France. Looking at what goes on interactionally during a seemingly liminal and marginal sequence when an elderly speaker misreads a reminder note for our next informal meeting, it shows how through interactionally identifying some signs as being irrelevant (mere noise) and others as deserving attention (more than noise), speakers also define what is going on in the broader social context, i.e., interactional text-in-context. To do so I draw from Paris School semiotics’ concepts of “modes of existence” and particularly potentialization (Greimas and Fontanille 1991), as well as analytics from semiotically informed linguistic anthropology, particularly entextualization (Silverstein and Urban 1996).
Copyright (c) 2025 Felix Danos (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In this article, I discuss the question of the performative act(ness) of filmic enunciation. Drawing on linguistic anthropological discussions of indexicality, entextualization and contextualization, and metapragmatics, I revisit the discussion of Christian Metz and others of “impersonal enunciation” in light of my own ethnographic studies of the Tamil cinema of South India. Doing so, I show, draws out the way that an ethnographic attention to enunciation, rather than lead “into” the text, spills outwards into events of cinematic semiosis. Such a shift in orientation demonstrates how the (im)personal nature of cinematic enunciation is not a medium feature of cinema but a situated, semiotic achievement; it is an empirical question and thus deeply political in nature. I conclude with methodological reflections for the semiotic study of cinema.
Copyright (c) 2025 Constantine Nakassis (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Starting from the perspective of continental semiotics, this article seeks to establish a dialogue with linguistic anthropology through an analysis of the video game saga The Last of Us. Not only allowing the user to adopt different styles of play, this game also push him or her to take an ideological stance, forcing the player to step into the shoes of characters that are in narrative and existential opposition to each other. Related to this, The Last of Us has led to a polemical polarization among players, many of whom have taken sides in opposing communities. Starting from, on the one hand, linguistic anthropological concepts of register and enregisterment and, on the other hand, from the theory of enunciation and enunciative praxis in continental semiotics, I propose the concept of co-indexical identification: the process through which the semiotic work of an identity emerges by means of linguistic enunciations—in particular, through the critical condensation of competing identities already inhabiting one or more social domains—and by an ideological and axiological positioning in relation to them. The article then discusses the opposition between enunciative subjectivity and identity-related activity pertaining to the video game semiosis produced by The Last of Us. Here, I elaborate on the way in which, within any semiotic activity, it is necessary to manage the relationship between experiential and linguistic semiosis. The signs of this management reveal the semiotic work of an emerging individual identity (what I call an identification process) and open onto practices of observation or self-observation, while the temporal sedimentation of multiple identification processes leads to the emergence of social identities (or co-indexical identification). Overall, this article aims to establish the theoretical premises of a semiotics of identity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Enzo D'Armenio (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
For a Semiotic Approach to Generative Image AI
This article analyzes the semiotic functioning of Midjourney and DALL•E, two generative AI models capable of producing images out of natural language prompts. The theoretical assumption of this article is that the images produced by these AIs are the results of a particular intersemiotic translation, realized through the collaboration of human and computational operators. Our research will show the specificity of the intersemiotic translation realized by AIs vis-à-vis more classical kinds of translation (e.g., from a novel to a movie) and will also analyze the different kinds of “visual reasoning” characterizing Midjourney and DALL•E. Our article has two goals: first, to study how these models perform intersemiotic translations; namely, what choices they make in order to translate the generality of the symbolic (and indexical) signs of verbal languages into the specificity of the visual composition. Second, we intend to verify the degree of control that one can have over the visual composition. Following this, we present the results of the tests carried out on Midjourney and DALL•E pertaining to two semiotic macro-criteria: plastic categories (eidetic, chromatic, and topological) and visual enunciation (gaze relations, visual translation of verbalized actions, temporality, and aspectuality). These criteria were developed by Paris School semiotics in order to analyze artistic images. Here, they will be used as principles of composition and parameters for controlling the results. At the end, we demonstrate that through this experimentation with elementary parameters of visual composition, semiotics can provide an epistemological and analytical framework for understanding and assessing the intersemiotic translations realized through generative AIs. Reciprocally, these tests on AIs aid our understanding of the two semiotic macro-criteria used, notably leading to a multiplication of enunciative instances in image production. Databases, algorithms, prompts, and aleatoric elements act as discursive agents.
Copyright (c) 2025 Enzo D'Armenio, Maria Giulia Dondero, Adrien Deliège, Alessandro Sarti (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran, Algeria’s second- largest city, I argue that some cemeteries serve as semiotic landscapes of ambivalence— places that people cannot or refuse to classify within a culturally recognized, hegemonic symbolic category of meaning. Ambivalence emphasizes the irreducible complexity and undecidability of meaning-making and identity, connecting people, places, and language in complex, uneasy, and non-unilinear temporal relations. The contradictory semiotics of colonial-era cemeteries in postcolonial Algeria—sites that are often abandoned but left in place—lay bare the sentimental, political, and poetic potential of spatiotemporal disorder for social imaginaries in transformation. This stems from how people sometimes fail or choose not to create coherent, unified narratives of what this place means to who we are. Rather, semiotic landscapes often mark the unstable boundaries between self and other, potentially allowing for alternative interpretations or even creating a space for the outright rejection of interpretation, along with the complex sentiments such contradictions evoke.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stephanie Love (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
During the last forty years, a parallel yet separate reflection has unfolded across the Atlantic. While European semioticians have developed the concept of enunciation to tackle the relationship between the linguistic system and its concrete instantiations, North American linguistic anthropologists have explored discursive processes and their sedimentation as texts through the lens of entextualization. A key and partially overlooked aspect within both intellectual traditions concerns the materiality of the actual production, through gestural acts of inscription, of text-artifacts. In this paper, I focus on the enunciative-cum-artistic practice of a renowned sculptor, Arnaldo Pomodoro, to explore the process of turning discourse (and gestures) into text(-artifact)s. I draw on the artist’s archive, on the critical literature about his work and combine these findings with direct observations and interviews conducted in the sculptor’s atelier to describe Pomodoro’s intermedial practice of negative inscription into a variety of substrates (e.g., cuttlebone, clay) and its positive transduction by casting molten metals into gypsum plaster or fiberglass molds. I argue that analyzing non-verbal forms of enunciation and entextualization may shed light onto our professional semiotic ideologies, furthering our understanding of crucial aspects of textuality and enunciation, such as the tension between structure and event, durable and ephemeral, and figurative and plastic.
Copyright (c) 2025 Aurora Donzelli (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The twentieth century saw a tremendous change in modes of mass communication. The circuits of social exchange were predominantly enhanced and amplified through the new circuitry that electrical engineering provided. From that point on, the hegemonies of communication shifted from writing and aurality to the ether of electromagnetic transmission, where messages did not only become transmittable over vast distances, but where they also could be modified and amplified. The key technology that should even increase the dominance of electromagnetic transmission, the vacuum tube, did not only improve the transmission and reception technologies of the radio, but also enabled the construction of unique sonic events as well as the amplification through feedback, where a signal became repeatedly fed back into the circuit that it produced in the first place. In the age of feedback, messages do not have to be an original product, but they have to resonate infinitely through the echo chambers of discourse. This nature of modern means of communication brings us directly to the topic of the parasite. The French theorist and historian of science Michel Serres identified feedback as a parasitical structure; it does not create an own performance but takes its own mirror image as a place of departure. In this article I discuss two examples from the twentieth century avant-garde to show how feedback was employed as an aesthetic strategy for social manipulation. I first outline the parasitical strategies of Dada performances in the early twentieth century and then, second, I focus on the project of a subversive media tactics as suggested by the famous experimental writer William S. Burroughs in his text The Electronic Revolution.
Copyright (c) 2013 Arndt Niebisch (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article explores photography as a colonial state technology during the early years of American empire in the Philippines. It centers on the image sequence, its enregisterment across the second half of the nineteenth century, and its use at the turn of the twentieth century to depict Filipino evolution as the result of American imperial intervention. The analysis reveals how the image sequence advanced the temporal conception of a one-type racial logic of the “wild” Filipino, while Philippine elites asserted the spatial conception of a two-type racial logic, which distinguished “civilized” Filipinos in the lowlands from “wild” Filipinos in the highlands. This article argues that the enregistered image sequence placed into sequence not only images of ontogenetic evolution but also conceptualizations of destitution, blackness, and indigeneity that provided frames of reference for U.S. expansionism in the Philippines.
Copyright (c) 2021 Angela Reyes (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
What if performance is no longer the primary dominant trope for exploring the relationship between selves and capitalism? What if animation is now the trope in ascendance – spread by the cartoon figures gracing lunch boxes, patched onto people’s backpacks, filling people’s informal digital conversations as emoticons? Animation theory brings a new set of questions for understanding how people experience the labor of crafting self-representations and social unities, which we explore through an analysis of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. We frame the Hunger Games as a pedagogical text, one that instructs readers to use animation to explore the ways in which social and labor relations are mystified under contemporary capitalism, mystified along with the political forces that may constrain people’s free will.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ilana Gershon, John J. McGlothlin (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“Bugs Bunny? Why Are You Hanging around with these Guys?”
Although animated shorts released to theatres by Warner Brothers from the 1930s through the 1960s ransacked contemporary pop culture and show business for references, catchphrases and jokes, the upper echelon of film stars was a relatively underutilized source of graphic and vocal caricature in what came to be known as the "house style" for Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Instead, Warner animation staff drew inspiration for their characters from lesser-known performers, in the process creating a number of enduring pop culture icons whose importance as signifiers in the film and entertainment worlds has not only obscured their original referents, but has also outlasted the cultural significance of much of "classic" cinema’s Hollywood royalty.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rick Cousins (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay explores the critical affordances of animated citationality through ethnographic engagement with independent animation filmmakers and analysis of a scene in the animated short film Have a Nice Dog! (2020), by Damascus-born, Berlin-based filmmaker Jalal Maghout. I develop the notions of animated citationality and displaced agency to underscore how animated relays of agency (Manning & Gershon 2013; Gell 1998) and the semiotic dimensions of “liveliness” (Silvio 2010; Cholodenko 2014) entwine with practices of citation that reflexively displace discursive events from their contexts of emergence (Nakassis 2013; Derrida 1988; Butler 1997). Here, I argue that Maghout uses animation’s citational affordances to illuminate the tension between experiences of mediated freedom and geopolitical constraint. His film confronts us with a troubling chiasm: in the context of ramifying border regimes, the mobility of signs and their citations becomes inversely proportionate to the mobility of (some) persons.
Copyright (c) 2024 Robyn Holly Taylor-Neu (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article attempts to reconcile the semiotic model of ostension with the markedly different folkloristic use of the term. In semiotics, as well as linguistics and philosophy, ostension may be glossed as showing, rather than telling. Yet in the field of folkloristics, most invocations of ostension have regarded it as a kind of interaction with traditional narratives. Despite the significant differences between these types of ostension, we suggest that both have at their heart a concern with res ipsa, the thing itself. We first discuss the historical breadth of the concept of ostension, before presenting a simple set of ostensive types, and one “ostensive context,” building on existing scholarship on ostension. The categorical reorientation we propose here is important for several reasons. The concept of ostension in all its inflected forms pushes scholars to consider communication beyond the limits of language and into an ontological consideration of how communication and meaning can operate in the network of “things” and “objects” (rather than signs). For this reason, it also stretches the limits of semiotics, which generally deals with signs and semiosis (the action of signs). Reimagining the relationship of semiotic and folkloric ostension along these lines refocuses our attention on the communicative process that is at the heart of the earliest formulations of ostension itself. More broadly, ostension impacts cultural norms surrounding appropriate modes of communication (e.g., speaking aloud versus silently gesturing); verbal storytelling and its relationship to embodied experience; and perhaps most significantly in the 21st century, belief formation and the notion of evidentiary weight.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Remo Gramigna (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“I Showed Him an Open Hand, He Showed me a Fist”
This essay offers a multimodal performance analysis of a widely documented international folktale. The emergent unfolding of the tale plot, which turns on constrasting interpretations of a series of thematized gestures, illuminates the dynamic tension between iconicity and ostension in performance.
Copyright (c) 2024 Richard Bauman (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Mediatized Image Politics of an ICE Raid, Staged in a Midwestern Idyll
This article shows how constitutive news media displays of contrasting chronotopes (i.e., peopled time-space imageries), both major and small, engendered an interpellative politics to channel white virtue while also flipping the script of U.S. imaginaries constructing who belongs within small-town Midwestern America. It examines the mediatized image politics of internal immigration border enforcement back when the Bush Administration was scaling up militarized tactics and experimenting with expedited legal procedures that sought to erase the lines dividing immigration from criminal law. It weighs in on cross-disciplinary debates of visual cultural practices depicting migrant (in)visibility in so-called new immigrant destinations, located in rural places across the Midwestern United States. The analysis unpacks heterogeneous cooccurring indexical signs in a mainstream AP broadcast news feature and a subsequent documentary film that compose image-texts of a raid on a purported idyllic town. Both mediatized image-texts of continuing coverage were oriented to multiple publics and made an example of a large-scale Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on an industrial meat processing and packing facility in 2008. News agents along with the active participation of migrant laborers and members of a humanitarian coalition co-operatively fashioned these productions to achieve different and multiple ends.
Copyright (c) 2023 Jennifer F. Reynolds (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Experimental Space of the Diagram According to Peirce, Deleuze and Goodman
In this article I examine the perspectives of Charles Sanders Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Nelson Goodman on diagrams in order to assess the variety of meanings of diagrammatic reasoning, form, and manipulation. I argue that diagrammatic reasoning may not only guide the understanding of the functioning of schemas, graphs, and chains of equations, but also—as I show in this article—the functioning of scientific images, photographs, and artistic paintings. More precisely, I focus on the relationship between the concept of diagram, the composite photographs by Francis Galton studied by Charles Sanders Peirce, works of art such as the paintings by Francis Bacon studied by Gilles Deleuze, and scientific images (especially aggregate images such as those of black holes), while taking account of the distinction between autographic and allographic semiotic systems.
Copyright (c) 2023 Maria Giulia Dondero (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Semiotics and the Grotesque in Political Cartoons
Through cartoonish distortion, grotesquery, and comedy, the art of caricature signals a lack of seriousness. Despite such appearances, I argue that editorial caricature is a valuable source of historical evidence that gestures toward the intersubjectivity of audience, production, and text. This dynamic interface presupposes complex cultural literacies required to “read” these cartoons. To the historian, editorial caricature presents unique insight into an artist’s imaginative appeal to a contemporaneous audience. In this article, I survey the features and expressions of the art of the caricature from sixteenth century Italy through the late Antebellum United States. I pair this brief historiography with interdisciplinary theory and an analysis of an 1856 editorial caricature by Philadelphia lithographer John L. Magee. I triangulate my analysis with inquiry in the arts and media of the period. My investigation yields evidence of patterns in this hybrid, verbal-visual discourse that recapitulate regional, national, and transnational themes. I argue that Magee’s meaning-making process in his graphic political satire titled “Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler” mobilizes complex cultural matrices to identify prominent Northern Democrats as a grievous threat to the free-soil ideals adopted by an emergent Republican party. Magee’s complex, narrative and semiotic elaborations offer historical evidence of editorial caricature’s interactivity with ideology, politics, and rhetoric across both verbal and visual fields.
Copyright (c) 2023 Timothy David Smith (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article is an exploration of a particular place in two time periods: the period of my doctoral fieldwork in 2012; and, indirectly, the present of early 2022, a full decade after my initial (and so far only) encounters with the place in question. It is an attempt to think about place both in the immediate, embodied way enabled by conventional in-person ethnographic fieldwork, and in the more remote way demanded by physical and temporal separation. (The latter process, the critical work of relating to a place after the fact, is present mostly in the revisions to the original text, as well as in this introductory section and in the brief postscript.) The location in question, Fairy Fort Farm in Tipperary, Ireland, is a personal chronotope, an index of my time in a place and the subsequent years spent writing and thinking about Ireland without being there. It forms a portion of my own local cosmology, my own understanding of how I relate (and have related) to the world and other people via embodied, emplaced experiences. An important question raised by this exploration of place is the ontological status of a very particular set of “ruins”: the eponymous fairy fort located on the farm. The question of their status as ruins, or possibly an imitation of ruins, unsettled my own understanding of fairy places in Ireland’s supernatural landscape. Although I attempt to center my friend Michael’s interpretation, the question of the fairy fort’s nature remains a compelling one for what it reveals about the central role of experience in the construction of local cosmologies.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jeffrey Tolbert (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Deixis and the Linguistic Anthropology of Cinema
As a contribution to what I call a linguistic anthropology of cinema, this article explores the question of deixis in linguistic and cinematic semiosis, detailing some of the semiotic functions and processes common to both. In particular, I focus on what Michael Silverstein has discussed as metapragmatic calibration types and the ways they intersect and play off of each other in South Indian fictional film. Drawing on an analysis of the poetics of a particular scene in the 1997 commercial Tamil film, Arunachalam, the narration of its uptake by one of the film’s actresses, and my own ethnographic work on the Tamil cinema, I show how the multiple, simultaneous calibrations of deixis in the scene work to performative effect. While film semiotics has long taken linguistic models to think about filmic form (viz. “film language”), this analysis suggests the way in which an ethnographic analysis of cinematic discourse, on and off the screen, contributes to a more encompassing linguistic anthropological analysis of linguistic and cinematic semiosis.
Copyright (c) 2020 Constantine V. Nakassis (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Scopic Regimentation of Cuban Popular Religious Altars
Cuban popular religious altars command attention with their elaborate presentations of statues, dolls, figurines, photographs, vessels, and offerings to a host of spirits and saints. The altar is cosmogenic: any given altar in all of its inventive particularity is a diagram that figures a world of relations between the living practitioner and the constellation of spirits who work with that practitioner. The concept of scopic regimentation, adapted from what Christian Metz (1975) and Martin Jay (1988) call the scopic regime, describes how the location, arrangement, and qualities of altars and their objects dynamically figure possibilities and tensions in developing spiritual relationships. Four dimensions of the altar’s work of scopic regimentation are described. First is the altar’s work as a prism, in which the altar’s objects refract general spiritual presence into distinct spirit figures. Second, the altar’s arrangement as a constellation diagrams multiple, complex relationalities among spirits as an image of the evolving spiritual biography of the altar’s owner. Third, the altar’s work as interface shapes multimodal communicative engagements between spirits and religious adherents. And fourth, the altar serves as an aperture in diagramming the limits of knowledge about spirits in its play between revelation and concealment.
Copyright (c) 2021 Kristina Wirtz (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
A Peircean Lens on Cinematic Special Effects
The aim of this paper is to reconsider how Peirce’s conceptions of iconicity and especially indexicality can help us logically account for some of the issues that pertain to representation in the cinema. To this end, the study centers on the practice of special effects as a way to reground the entire area of thinking about indexicality within the study of moving images. The author wishes to show how Peirce’s concepts not only remains viable for thinking about cinema but also offer a powerful tool for critically analyzing images.
Copyright (c) 2021 Martin Lefebvre (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay (originally published in THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKS VOLUME 18.2 2008, republished here with permission) seeks to resurrect the name, work and extraordinary achievements of the most significant pioneering film animator at best marginalized, at worst effaced, by English language Film Studies and Animation Studies. Even the outstanding animation scholar Donald Crafton, in his canonical text Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928, treats Emile Reynaud as not an animator, situating the advent of animation in 1898, six years after Reynaud began to present his Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grévin in Paris to what would eventually be 500,000 spectators, including arguably the Lumière Bros, as monographs in French on Reynaud propose. The essay continues the author’s work on the theorising of animation begun with his Introduction to and essay “Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or The Framing of Animation” in The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, the world’s first anthology of scholarly essays theorising animation and from “poststructuralist” and “postmodernist” perspectives, published by Power Publications and the Australian Film Commission in 1991 and edited by him. His essay won the 2010 McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Essay from the Society for Animation Studies.
Copyright (c) 2022 Alan Cholodenko (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Images and/as Language in Nepal’s Older and Vulnerable Deaf Person’s Project
Drawing on ethnographic research in Nepal’s Older and Vulnerable Deaf Person’s Project (ODP), this article explores the ways in which engagement with pictorial images in the ODP helped deaf elders cultivate the physical, semiotic, and pragmatic skills that underpin the reception and reproduction of conventionalized Nepali Sign Language (NSL) forms. This pedagogy emerged in part because local understandings of NSL as a named and objectified language have been grounded in pictorial illustrations of signers performing standardized lexical items in sign language dictionaries, posters, and primers. An analysis of an ODP session demonstrates how elders’ image-making practices in some cases worked to center their communicative practices on the standard lexical items in which local deaf sociality was grounded; in others cases it worked to exceed the relatively narrow view of NSL that these texts objectified. Analysis of these dynamics, along with my own use of pictorial images as a mode of generating, reflecting, and circulating analyses of language use, helps us consider the semiotic processes through which ideologies of image and language may be mutually constitutive, as well as how such a relationship can be regimented or unsettled.
Copyright (c) 2021 Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay puts forward the sociological concept of epistemic projects for helping scholars grasp how ontological claims start to circulate and order human life in the digital age. The theory of epistemic projects gives primacy to semiosis and to an understanding of ideas as signs. The essay begins with a declaration of what epistemic projects entail and the use of this concept in the past. I then proceed to discuss how the concept relates to and departs from the sibling concepts of epistemic community, epistemic governance, and epistemic work. In the last chapter I position the epistemic project in view of sociological constructs of systems, assemblages, and dispositifs. I conclude by arguing that the main contribution of the epistemic projects theory is the potency of focusing on idea world setups and leaving aside questions of truth value and actors’ positions.
Copyright (c) 2023 Matilda Hellman (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
I start with a premise that you may disagree with: a lot of the transcripts that discourse analysts publish are bad. I explain that what I mean by this, and then propose a solution: let’s make published transcripts good, in the hopes of devising new possibilities for growing discourse analytic knowledge. I offer four provisional and interrelated principles that I argue are critical for developing a new kind of transcription aesthetics, along with some ideas and examples for how to employ them. The first principle sets the stage for those that follow: treat transcription not as a “word process” that produces written-text artifacts, but a graphic process that produces images. The second is to work compositionally, approaching each aspect of the transcript as worthy of its own specific kinds of attention. The third principle is to think openly about order when designing a transcript; and the fourth principle is to prioritize intelligibility. In the end and along the way, I make some arguments for why reformulating transcribing as a design process can help advance discourse analytic practice and theory.
Copyright (c) 2021 Keith M. Murphy (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
On December 17th, 2018, an adult content ban was enacted on Tumblr, a microblogging and online content-sharing platform. The ban enforced the removal of all so-called adult content through the use of a censorial algorithm designed to flag or remove images. This paper traces the discursive negotiations between Tumblr and its users that emerged after the ban, a process centered on the very terms of what defines obscenity and constituted by competing pragmatics for sorting obscene images. This article outlines the history of obscenity law in the U.S. and its use of both inherentist and performative approaches. It then traces the shift in Tumblr’s content ban, from a legal framework to an automated algorithmic agent for the task of discernment. The paper argues that disputes arising in the aftermath of the ban are the result of clashing sets of (meta)pragmatics—the semiotic processes of category-making, and image categorization more specifically—which, once the ken of juridical experts, are now brought to light by Tumblr’s act of censorship.
Copyright (c) 2021 Esra Soreya Padgett (Author) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0