Paul Bouissac

Encyclopedia of semiotics

The Encyclopedia of Semiotics is the first comprehensive guide to the topics, theories, and thinkers of this rapidly expanding field of knowledge. Drawing on classic and current work in linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, cognitive science, anthropology, and other disciplines, the Encyclopedia of Semiotics provides an unprecedented point of entry for students, teachers, and to a diverse, influential and rapidly growing body of knowledge. Semiotics informs an extraordinary number of areas in the humanities and social sciences, from literary and film criticism to design studies, computers, psychology, and linguistics. The Encyclopedia of Semiotics is an ideal tood for understanding across disciplines - mapping the history of the field, presenting its key terms and theorists, and illustrating the scope of semiotic analysis in many cultural domains. The Encyclopedia of Semiotics is valuable as a single-stop reference source of essential knowledge, including: The life and work of important authors and theorists: Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Christian Metz, Julia Kristeva, Alan Turing among many others. The impact of various centres and schools of thought: the Vienna Circle and the Copenhagen, Prague, Moscow-Tartu, and Paris Schools. The meaning of key concepts and terms: deconstruction, denotation, metonymy, markedness, meme, umwelt. The scope of semiotic analysis in social and cultural domains: advertising, gossip, electronic mail, postage stamps, cinema, photography, and more. The comtemporary debates and critiques in a remarkable arrange of related fields: cultural theory, narratology, nonverbal communication, biosemiotics, computer modeling of representation and interaction. This alphabetically arranged encyclopedia is packed with helpful features to speed students and scholars to the information they need. The articles are supported by up-to-date bibliographies and are readily accessible via the detailed index and system of cross-references.

Bounded Semiotics: From Utopian to Evolutionary Models of Communication

In this chapter a frontal attack on classical semiotic approaches is formulated. Contemporary semiotics can be defined as a speculative and descriptive discourse based on a tradition of argumentation and intuitive evidence. It relies only indirectly on experimentation through the occasional use of meta-analysis to support its arguments. This semiotic endeavor is called “semiotics as utopia”. Part of this approach is its fundamental trust in ultimate or optimal rationality. In this chapter a plea is given for rethinking rationality along evolutionary lines. This seems to be a relatively recent epistemological endeavor. Herbert Simon coined the term “bounded rationality” in the mid-1950s. This notion of bounded rationality is used to formulate what I call “bounded semiotics”. This should be concerned with the adaptive shortcuts, which evolved with respect to efficient (that is, fast and accurate) sorting out of relevant information and adaptive decision-making, rather than with the complex logical architectures, which purport to theorize (i.e., make intelligibly visible) an assumed universal semiotic competence. Examples of shortcuts are a) innate releasing mechanisms, b) imitation or copying, c) stereotyping and d) emotions. The notion of “boundedness” can also be applied to organizational theory, resulting in what I like to call “bounded organizations”.

Figurative Versus Objective Semiotics: An Epistemological Crossroads

The forthcoming Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics will soon, for the first time, provide the semiotic community with a comprehensive reference book covering, in an ecumenical manner, all the various aspects of what a significant portion of the academic population more or less agrees to call “semiotics” However, it would be a mistake to nurture the illusion that semiotics has come of age and that this voluminous book, with its several hundred entries, will offer at last a systematic and consistant body of knowledge, as for instance a treatise of mechanics or a textbook of histology could do.

Introduction: The circus — a semiotic spectroscopy

What and how does the circus mean? Are the emotional and cognitive gratifications that mass audiences derive from circus spectacles explainable in analytical terms? If so, which method is most appropriate for reaching an accurate description and a satisfactory explanation of these phenomena? These three questions, which seem to follow naturally and logically one from another so as to initiate a legitimate program of research, actually combine to create a fallacy if they are taken for granted. The last in particular suggests that, on the one hand, the circus — its institution and productions — stands as an object and that, on the other hand, methods are commodities among which a discriminating researcher can select the one best suited to the task at hand, given the assumed nature of the object. But naive positivism tends to ignore the extent to which methods and objects are intimately associated, almost indistinguishable from each other, like mutually definable correlates. They are in fact aspects of one and the same process. Indeed, any method presupposes a model of its object, conceived in terms of the sort of information the method is conceptually equipped to detect, if not to construct. Methodological strategies necessarily imply the elaboration of their object of inquiry within a more general conceptual scheme, and endeavor to determine the range of variables set forth by the model that is thus elaborated. For instance, analyzing circus performances in general as acts of communication presupposes a predetermined range of variables and their relations combined in a model. The model is the hypothesis, which constrains the method as much as the method sets limits on the set of admissible models. The circus-as-communication model already contains the heuristic categories of commutable elementary units, syntactic structures, and discursive strategies that the method will specify in accordance with the principles of functionalist and structural linguistics and its theoretical extrapolations. In other words, the method makes the implied model of its object explicit and determinate, a process which may create the illusion that an autonomous domain of inquiry has been fully explored

Tradition, Speculation and Cognition: A Prospective Investigation of Semiotic Terminology

In the epistemological landscape of the second half of the XXth century, semiotics can be tentatively defined as an emerging paradigm or a science in its preparadigmatic staged.1 The fact that there exist several competing schools of semiotics, each one having developed its own conceptual framework and “claiming competence for the same subject matter but approaching it in quite different ways” (Kuhn, 1977:460 ftn. 4) fits indeed rather well Kuhn’s famous description. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is that anyone who is not familiar with the sort of questions raised within these schools is confronted by forbidding and often conflicting terminologies that have been created to handle the problems posed by these schools. These terminologies are a mixture of redefined traditional concepts and neologisms, but some of their basic terms also belong to the common vocabulary in which they have meanings that are sometimes more specific and sometimes more general than in their semiotic uses (e.g., sign, message, information, noise, icon, symbol). Semiotics is associated, in the mind of many, with a gratuitous and prolific jargon, which they tend to consider as a protective dialect devised by the members of an academic minority struggling for disciplinary recognition. Such a contemptuous attitude on the part of established disciplines is not without precedents in the history of sciences, and it is in this case all the more understandable as semiotics tends, even in its most modest endeavours, to claim a domain of scientific inquiry which intersects with several disciplines and, in some instances, makes strong claims, in principle, of universal competence.

Behavior in Context: In What Sense Is a Circus Animal Performing?

I N A C E L E B R A T E D ESSAY Roman Jakobson’ says that a Russian actor with whom he was acquainted could utter the phrase “this evening” in fifty different ways with respect to intonation, i.e., intensity, pitch, rhythm, and juncture. He was thus able to create fifty different messages that evoked in the mind of the listeners fifty different situations. The emotive cues combined with the semantic, morphologic, and syntactic components of the linguistic message could easily be related by native speakers to culturally congruent social settings and psychological moods. This was later experimentally verified under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation. Advances in the pragmatics of human communication (e.g., ArgyleP2 Hinde,3 Watson4) have shown that social interaction in all its forms can be construed as a model whose parameters can be experimentally controlled. Such an analytical approach enables the observer to shift the focus from the message to its context and its situation and to study the covariations that may occur. “Context” should be understood here as not only whatever immediately precedes and follows the linguistic message itself but also whatever is emitted simultaneously through all the other available channels; “situation” refers to the type of social interaction that is identified by the observer within a specified cultural domain, such as conversation between peers, confrontation between rivals, ritualized testing of the affective bond between lovers, and so forth. The spontaneous identification of the various categories of situations is an on-going business in everyday life and an important aspect of the cultural competence of any individual. Obviously these various situations are construed from some minimal cues that can be manipulated once they have been isolated (e.g., respective class of age, sex, natural posture, role expectation, distance, place, and degree of normality or abnormality of the interaction.) It would be possible to design an experiment inspired by the one recounted by Roman Jakobson, in which the utterance of the linguistic message would remain invariant and the context or the situation would vary, the hypothesis being that a

Semiotics in Canada

It is generally acknowledged among today’s semioticians that Canada has become over the last decade one of the main centers of semiotic research in the world. The existence of a definite interest in the study of signs in several Canadian universities was officially recognized in the early seventies: In 1969, when the International Association for Semiotic Studies was created in Paris, only seventeen countries were represented on its executive committee; two years later, Canada was added to the list at the same time as Israel, Japan and the Netherlands, where in the meantime active centers of semiotic research had emerged. However, this relatively early international recognition preceded by several years the admission of a specifically semiotic group to the learned societies of Canada.