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.
