Archives

Ostension

Guest editors: Jeffrey Tolbert and Remo Gramigna
Understood as the simplest form of unmediated communication, ostension is a primary way of expressing meaning through co-presence. Ostension functions as a form of indexicality, pointing to the thing about which one wishes to communicate. While relatively new to semiotics, philosophers from Augustine to Wittgenstein have developed ostension’s theoretical meanings in several directions. It is typically framed as the most basic form of non- or pre-linguistic communication, relying on the directing of one interlocutor’s attention to a physically present object or action. Through this direction of attention, ostension can be used in the teaching of language. A substantial, but widely divergent, literature on ostension has also grown up over the last forty years within the discipline of folkloristics. Introduced into the field by Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi, the term was rapidly assimilated to two seemingly unrelated folkloric practices: “acting out” the content of a legend; and legend-tripping, the well-attested process of visiting places associated with legend narratives in order to experience some part of the legend (usually a supernatural phenomenon) for oneself. In folkloristic treatments, ostension emerged as a way of interacting with the truth-claims made by the legend genre. Despite these divergences, there remain important points of contact between semiotic/linguistic/philosophical and folkloristic models of ostension. This special issue seeks to set folkloristic and semiotic understandings of ostension in productive dialogue. Like all thematic issues, Ostension will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Animation

Editor: Paul Manning
The animated drawing is the most direct manifestation of Animism. That which is known to be lifeless, a graphic drawing, is animated. Drawing as such outside an object of representation is brought to life. The very idea, if you will, of the animated cartoon is like a direct embodiment of the method of animism. What is animation? What does it mean to animate things in various media, to invest them with their own life and agency? And what is it like to live among such animated things? This special issue presents papers from any discipline that look at animation semiotically, not only as a specific medium or art form (viz. cel animation, stop motion, and so on) but also as a broader category of semiotic action, the projection of humanity into the nonhuman world. Inspired especially by Alan Cholodenko's (1991, 2007, 2016, this issue) and Teri Silvio's (2010, 2019) wide-ranging syntheses, we see the term animation as encompassing a series of related approaches, ranging from new reconceptualizations of what has been called "animism", including the recognition of "other-than-human persons" (Hallowell 1960) and Sergei Eisenstein's conception of the "plasmaticness" of animation as a kind of animism (1986), to the animated "life" of nonhuman characters in Japanese media and everyday life (Nozawa, this issue), to the agency of heterogeneous assemblages in the "Vital Materialism" of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter (2010). We invite papers that approach the proliferation of animated beings (resulting either from narrower or broader definitions of animation) populating our "more than human" world. In the spirit of the epigraph by Soviet film pioneer Eisenstein, we invite theorizations of animation in broad relation to animism and vitalism, bringing together cartoon characters and stop motion animated objects with ghosts, dolls, puppets, ancestors, gods, brands, automatons, robots, cyborgs, voice chips, vocaloids, avatars, virtual idols, and so on. Like all thematic issues, Animation will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Images

Editors: Meghanne Barker and Constantine V. Nakassis
One persistent ideological ambivalence in Western academic thought is the differentiation and slippage between language and image. As historians of philosophy have pointed out, Western philosophy has often construed language as a species of vision and imaging. Just as frequently, however, it is asserted that there is a radical caesura between language and image (and representation and our sensory modalities), the latter being a space of non-representability and thus the boundary of language. This special issue confronts these two persistent problematics by critically asking, how are we to rethink the relationship between language and image, text and the sensorial, representation and presence through a holistic semiotic framework, one which refuses, on the one hand, refuses to reduce one side of these seeming antinomies to the other and, on the other hand, to instate their radical difference? Providing a space for emergent conversations between distinct disciplines that are too often not in conversation with each other—linguistic anthropology, media and visual anthropology, visual studies, film studies, art history, semiotic theory, among others—we present papers concerned with the semiotic mediation of social life by images, in any and every modality and medium, beyond the canonical divides, definitions, and ideologies that have long defined, and blinkered, theories of the image. Like all thematic issues, Images will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Place

Guest editors: Jeffrey A. Tolbert and Bryan Rupert
This special issue examines how people in an array of cultural contexts interpret the experience of place to furnish the conceptual language that structures collective narratives of the world and the cosmos. The issue presents articles that illuminate the forces that hold our realities together and render them intelligible. As editors, we have elected to label this complex of cultural practices and expressions "local cosmology," but we also acknowledge that the discourses produced therein have ramifications that extend into the regional, the national, the global, and the universal. A semiotics of place implies the use of perceived local realities as representative modes. A place is not just a place, but a metaphor for the group, the family, the nation, and by extension all the other places against which it is defined. Our hope in grounding the focus of this special issue in the local is to operate from a particular vantage that showcases the grand scale of diverse strategies and techniques for making worlds knowable. Neighborhoods, institutions, roads, sacred spaces all become linked in an experiential logic predicated on individual perception. Like all thematic issues, Place will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Blank Faces

Guest editors: Meghanne Barker and Perry Sherouse
You gaze at a face. Something is missing "the eyes are closed, the mouth is covered, the nose has ended up in the barber's bread". This issue of Semiotic Review works to uncover semiotic ideologies of the face by analyzing what happens when people obscure, strip away, omit or overlook features. Our contributors interrogate what happens when a face or part of it goes absent, whether through masks or screens, erasure or enclosure. We examine faces as ideas and as technologies, as sites of sociality and of self-fashioning. Like all thematic issues, Blank Faces will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Vegetal Ontologies

Guest editors: Kane X. Faucher and Joshua O. Reno
With the recent animal and multispecies turns in critical theory and philosophy, everything from cats and dogs to microbes and mycorrhizal fungi have become vital allies against anthropocentrism, yet plants have been largely ignored. This issue considers the importance of plants as contributing thinkers and actors within multispecies interactions, landscapes, and worlds. We begin with the path breaking insight of Martin Krampen (1928-2015): that the study of plant life cannot be reduced simply to mechanical descriptions of efficient cause, but must account for phytosemiotics, or sign use and interpretation by plants. Like other life forms, plants are autonomous subjects with their own, meaning- laden life worlds, from which those of human and nonhuman animals emerge. The role of plant cultivation in human civilization, from the rise of the state to the green revolution, is well known. But recent botanical research shows that plants also respond to and communicate about their surroundings, not only by exchanging chemical signals through the air, but also by sharing and stealing nutrients via symbiotic networks underground. In climate change policy and practice, furthermore, plants are leading indicators of, and countermeasures deployed against, the dawning Anthropocene. In this issue, we consider: How do we know plants as organisms and subjects? How we care for them as aesthetic objects, as sustenance, as biocapital as well as the lives they lead for themselves, indifferent to us? For whom plant thinking matters, or for whom should it matter, and why? What stands in the way of plants thinking their own thoughts, of our thinking their thoughts, of their ability to think ours? How we might become better for and with plants? Like all thematic issues, Vegetal Ontologies will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Semiotics of Food-and-Language

Guest editors: Jillian Cavanaugh and Kathleen Riley

"There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk." (M.F.K Fisher)

This issue looks at food as a signifying medium through which humans negotiate their material and spiritual existence. We complicate the well-established tradition of using language as a semiotic analog of food from Levi-Strauss and Douglas to beyond by presenting works that look at how food and language are semiotically interconnected in new ways. While such interconnections may appear to develop naturally out of the shared orality of food and language or their spatial-temporal contiguity, it is clear that these interpolations take various forms across diverse social and cultural contexts. Numerous studies suggest the fruitfulness of considering food and language as embedded within the same semiotic frame: research on language in use often incidentally includes data about the production, distribution, preparation, representation, and consumption of food, while many studies of food depend on linguistic data such as, for instance, words for food, utterances organizing its production, genres surrounding its preparation, and pragmatic routines for accessing and sharing it. However, the intrinsic simultaneities of food and language have rarely been explicitly theorized nor their interdependencies made into specific objects of analysis. The papers in this issue explore the semiotics of food from any new vantage point that considers food and language as mutually constitutive semiotic media, interrelated in sometimes coherent and sometimes contradictory ways. Like all thematic issues, Semiotics of Food-and-Language will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Im/materialities

Guest editors: Alexander Bauer and Zoë Crossland
Over the past decade, scholarly interest in the material characteristics and qualities of human worlds has developed apace. Under the heading of 'materiality' scholars have emphasized the effects of the material world on meaning, and the dynamic relationships that exist between people and things. This focus on materiality has been positioned by many writers as a move that goes beyond visions of the material world as a passive constraint on meaning. Rather, materiality has been held out as a means to undercut dualistic divisions into subjects and objects, culture and nature, people and things. It is said to do this through drawing attention to the relationships between humans and nonhumans, and to their mutually entangled and constitutive nature. Related to this is an emphasis on "material agency" and a questioning of the status of objects as non-human actors (here drawing largely on the work of Bruno Latour and Alfred Gell). Most recently this impetus has been associated with a broader questioning of accepted ontological frameworks and a search for alternate ontologies, again often positioned as move that pushes back against questions of representation. Here, we question this recurrent rejection of semiosis as a legitimate subject of inquiry, arguing that the very emphasis on materiality (or ontology in its most recent framing) reveals its limitations as a way to work through or undercut dualist divisions. It amounts to little more than a re-centering of a dualist perspective, which slips between a focus on non-humans and a focus on relations between humans and non-humans. This becomes particularly apparent in the way in which questions of representation, subjectivity and semiosis are often ignored or devalued. Instead, indexical relations are privileged as somehow "beyond" or aside from meaning. The papers in this thematic issue reframe this debate, refusing an opposition between materiality and meaning; not only do we advocate expanding the terrain of semiosis to include the material, but we also search for ways to explore and tease out different im/material semiotic modes. Like all thematic issues, Im/materialities will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Varia

Varia is a non-thematic "open" issue which collects contributions that are not submitted for thematic issues. Like the "thematic" issues, Varia is an ongoing issue that accepts new papers in perpetuity, publishing them on a rolling basis. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Monsters

Editor: Paul Manning
Monsters explores the intersections of the monstrous/grotesque and the semiotic. In a manner similar to the fetish, the monster, a figure of radical alterity or difference, can be viewed as a semiotic figure which collects and foregrounds a series of sign relations at the boundaries of semiosis. The Latin etymology of the term which connects the term to indexicality (monstrare 'to point') already underlines the semioticity of the monster. Monstrosity and the grotesque occupies an aporia in historical, cultural, and semiotic contexts, and the monster therefore serves as a figure of the variousness and heterogeneity of semiosis: As a sign of portent or omen in the ancient world, as an impossible chimerical sign vehicle standing at the limits of licit representation, for the ineffability of God or the impossibility of the Idol, in the form of 'monstrous races', forming a set of inversions of the normal that define the exotic lands of the East as spaces of radical alterity, as a wondrous sign of the absolutely singular, novel or exotic exhibited in curiosities from far-flung voyages and on woodcut images on pages of early newspapers, as a sign of a playful animate Nature which creates preternatural exceptions to its own orderly categories in the Early Modern period, to the scientific and epistemic practices that sought to rationalize monstrosity in its myriad forms into clinical schema in the modern period, to the playful proliferation of monsters in contemporary media mixes. We invite scholarly contributions that make monstrosity and the grotesque the central pivot of sign relations, including papers that explore the semiotic aspect of monsters and monstrosity and other comparable forms of radical alterity, to papers which explore the category of monstrosity and comparable forms of radical alterity as ethnosemiotic categories: is there a universal category of the monster or does it denote a changing semiotic category of specific cultures? Like all thematic issues, Monsters will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
Parasites

Guest Editors: Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Samuel Collins
Parasites looks to multiple sites of parasitic action, considered here both as the study of the parasitic as well as a reflections on parasitic encounters, methods and theories. For example, the recent turn to animal studies has highlighted the interdependence of humans and nonhumans, from dogs to mushrooms, bees to yeast, cheese cultures to intestinal bacteria. But it has also revealed the relationship of humans to their nonhuman world to be one of oscillating internalizations and externalizations. In both cases, the relations of the parasite to its host unsettles our ontological assumptions about whose world is inhabited by whom, of who is the parasite of whom. Focusing upon the parasite helps us to move beyond the anthropocentrism often inherent in our theoretical conceptions of the world: parasitism is vital to life across distinctions of domain "animal, plant, bacteria, alien, machine, and onward. The figure of the parasite provokes ruminations on the external that turn out to be internal after all, or that, at any rate, call into question the identity or the ontology of the host. So: let us ask after the parasite that inserts material into the host, that colonizes the host, that transforms the host, and think thereby about scholarship as a parasitic practice that makes and remakes its worlds through its imbrications in the very capacities of life. This issue of Semiotic Review is unified in its interests in a process, not an object. Parasitism over the parasite. Like all thematic issues, Parasites will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.