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261. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Isaac E. Catt Pierre Bourdieu’s Semiotic Legacy: A Theory of Communicative Agency
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Against the many critics who have argued that Pierre Bourdieu favored a deterministic view of human experience and conduct, I argue that his social praxeology is, indeed, a theory of agency. I describe his work as a semiotic phenomenology of habitual discourse. My analysis extends this thinking, converging Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and C. S. Peirce on field, habitus and body. A theory of agency emerges that is a unique interpretation of the process of semiosis and embodied event of communication. My central theme is a critique of the concept of clarity in discourse.
262. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Rolf-Dieter Hepp The Relational Thinking of Pierre Bourdieu
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The thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, even in its most subtle aspects, is characterized by a distrust of the “high” theory. He does not totally reject it, but it is questioned by his critical reflection upon it. By a resort to the functions of the social and the French epistemology, which examines and analyzes the scientific terms in connection to their constitution, Bourdieu’s theory aims to develop a “sociological thinking” in relations which integrates motives of the “social” into the theoretical reflection and works out their interaction in the form of significant chains. The range and the precision of this methodical reflection is illustrated and specified in this article also on the basis of examples.
263. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Pia C. Kontos Habitus: An Incomplete Account of Human Agency
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Bourdieu, in his theory of practice, assumes the pragmatic and epistemological primacy of objective structure/culture. This leads Bourdieu to conceptualize the body as a cultural product formed solely by structural conditions, thus denying the physical body any origination. In making this assumption Bourdieu is unable to explain how dispositions are incorporated and sustained within one’s bodily schema. It is my argument that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the primordial source of agency is crucial to Bourdieu’s theory of practice. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primordial body makes possible the embodiment of the dispositions of habitus,and sustains this open system of dispositions.
264. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Floyd Merrell Chewing Gum, Ambulating, and Signing, all at the Same Time: Or, The Magical Number Three
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The nature of the Peircean sign is considered in light of a nonlinear, complemented, context dependent lattice, with particular focus on how the lattice: (1) reveals the function of distinctions between signs, (2) supports Peirce’s triadic notion of semiosis, (3) models the notion of signs incessantly becoming other signs, (4) takes its leave of classical logical principles, and (5) accounts for the emergenceof novelty — spontaneous, fresh, unique signs.
265. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Dean Hammer Bourdieu, Ideology, and the Ancient World
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In this essay, I look at the growing interest by classicists in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. My focus is on a less developed aspect of Bourdieu’s work; namely, ideology. Where Bourdieu’s project was, at least in part, to understand how ideas both generate and are generated in practice, his notion of ideology seems to be more an artifact of his earlier structural sympathies. My interest here is not to posit a wholly new conception of ideology, but to ask how one might use Bourdieu to clarify Bourdieu. The focus on the ancient world is instructive, not only because it draws on Bourdieu’s ongoing interest in pre-capitalist societies, but because it provides an historical and empirical stance by which we can critically engage Bourdieu’s conception of ideology beyond its specifically French — and contemporary — context.
266. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
James Albright Literacy Education after Bourdieu
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Adopting a Bourdieusian perspective, this paper addresses literacy education as a sociological field and attempts to evaluate and re-inscribe aesthetic, literary, historical, economic, philosophical and other positions within it as a means for framing a new research and pedagogical agenda. Literacy education as a social field is conceptualized as a structure of provisional balances within which various forms of power and capital circulate. Position, distinction, and contest, within sites in fields like literacy education, structure social space and enable reproduction and change. A heuristic that weds Fairclough’s (1989) work on textual production and consumption with Bourdieu’s model of social space as relational, structured, and contested fields is proposed.
267. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
J. S. Sutton Intersections: Woman, Rhetoric, and Domination
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Rhetoric and domination generally are considered to be exclusionary phenomena. In the case of women and the suffrage movement in the USA for example, rhetoric is regarded as a neutral art that women used to overcome masculine domination. There is another less considered phenomenon however. Drawing upon phenomenological insights of M. Merleau-Ponty and M. M. Bakhtin’s chronotope, this essay constructs a theoretical apparatus out of classical rhetoric and P. Bourdieu’s writings, particularly Masculine Domination. It displays the relation between domination and rhetoric and explores the question of authority as it pertains to the female/feminine body in concrete terms.
268. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Roland A. Champagne Levin’s ‘Disobedient Tears’: Applying the Literary Semiotics of Pierre Bourdieu in Anna Karenina
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The literary semiotics of Pierre Bourdieu incorporates the principles of habitus and hexis to reveal hidden codes in some literary texts. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) is such a literary text. A Bourdieu-guided semiotic reading of Levin’s weeping locates marriage as the nexus enabling the interpretation of his “disobedient tears” on the eve of his wedding to Kitty. The habitus and hexis of marriage reveal the imbedded mythological, psychoanalytic, physiological, cultural, and socio-cultural codes that intersect in Levin’s crying. Bourdieu’s method thus allows us to read Levin’s “disobedient tears” as commentaries on the semiotic codes imbedded in this literary event.
269. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Jean M. Grow Stories of Community: The First Ten Years of Nike Women’s Advertising
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This semiotic analysis of early Nike women’s advertising explores the evolution of the women’s brand from its launch in 1990 through 2000, and includes twenty-seven print campaigns. The semiotic analysis is enhanced by in-depth interviews of the creative team. The study is framed by a single research question. What symbolically ties these ten years of advertising into a cohesive whole and how? ultimately, three distinct mediated communities emerge. The story behind these communities, expressed semiotically and orally, suggests that the power of this advertising lies in its mediated construction of community life. The resonance of these ads is rooted in the creatives’ ability to construct signifiers that reflect the cultural and social experiences of women, with storytelling as the single most binding force across this ten-year period.
270. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Grzegorz A. Kleparski, Waldemar Janusz Drążek John Durham Peters’s History of the Idea of Communication
271. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Karen J. Greenberg The Architecture of Social Stratification
272. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
About the Authors
273. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 22 > Issue: 1/4
Floyd Merrell The 2005 Thomas A. Sebeok Fellow Address: Chewing Gum, Ambulating, and Signing, all at the Same Time: Or, The Magical Number Three
274. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1/4
Jie Zhang, Haihong Ji Three Cornerstones of the Former Soviet Semiotics: A Comparative Study of the Semiotic Theories of Bakhtin, Lotman, and Uspenskij
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Bakhtin’s social semiotics, Lotman’s structural literary semiotics, and Uspenskij’s linguistic cultural semiotics are the three important theoretical cornerstones of the mansion of semiotics in the former Soviet Union, whose influences have long gone beyond the territory of the former Soviet Union, and have attracted widespread attention of the literary and semiotic circle from China and the rest of the world as well. However, researches so far have been mainly separate studies of their distinct theories, while a comparative study of the characteristics of Bakhtin, Lotman, and Uspenskij’s theories and methodologies has not been initiated. This paper attempts to compare the Russian troika’s conceptions and research methodologies of semiotics, and explores how they reach the same goal of the study of social-cultural system from different approaches — linguistics and trans-linguistics. This paper further reveals how they break the thinking mode of dualism and construct a pluralistic critical mode, and finally points out the contribution they have made to semiotics and the overall studies of humanities and social sciences.
275. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1/4
Dennis C. H. Cheng East Asian Semiotics: Graphic Interpretations of Body, Mind and the Universe
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In East Asia, there has been a long tradition of using graphs and diagrams to express abstract ideas. This paper is to give an account of the East Asian methodsfor representing body, mind and the universe. The fundamental ideas of East Asian graphic interpretation mostly originated from the Yijing (I Ching, Zhouyi), and were later developed by Confucian and Daoist thinkers to describe the universe, the mind, and the body as an organic totality. By comparing different approaches to portraying the universe, this paper offers a critical analysis of East Asian semiotics.
276. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1/4
Hsiu-chih Tsai The Semiotic Structuration of Home and Identity in A Song of the Sad Coffee Shop
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This paper deals with the function of metonymy in A Song of the Sad Coffee Shop (1996), a novel by Taiwan’s woman writer Shao-lin Chu (b. 1966). For my reading of the novel’s narrative, I should like to appropriate a Jakobsonian understanding of metaphoric and metonymic functions. This approach will hopefully help in analyzing the significance of the protagonist’s quest for identification in her trip to Madagascar, in which the juxtaposition of places of similar geographical features works to construct a contiguity between them, and goes on to achieve a rapprochement of mind and body in the practice and process of philosophical cultivation. The protagonist’s trip, as a quest for home and identity, through the metonymic power of identification and localization, finally calls into question the fixity of the concept of home and homeland, the expedition itself turning into a mysterious journey of self-cultivation and home-coming.
277. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1/4
Hsiu-chih Tsai Preface: Semiotics in the Chinese Umwelt
278. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1/4
Hans-Georg Moeller Presence, Representation, and Significance: An Analysis of Semiotic Structures and Corresponding Conceptions of Nature and Culture
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This article introduces a semiotic methodology that can be applied in Comparative Philosophy as an alternative to still dominating content-based methods. Isuggest distinguishing between three semiotic structures that operate on the basis of different relations between the signifier and the signified. These are the structures of “presence”, “representation”, and “significance”. I argue that ancient Chinese philosophy tends to employ the first structure whereas traditional Western philosophy tends toward the second. Postmodern philosophy, however, gives preference to the third one. In accordance with these different semiotic structures, culturally and historically different conceptions of nature and culture have emerged.
279. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1/4
Hsiu-chih Tsai Female Sexuality: Its Allurement and Repression in Geling Yan’s “White Snake”
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This paper aims at addressing how the question of Chinese female sexuality is questioned and challenged by the Chinese woman writer Geling Yan’s novella“White Snake” (1999). By adopting a similar title to the famous traditional Chinese monster story that narrates a white serpent transformed herself into a pretty lady to pursue and experience human love, Geling Yan’s novella carries the mimicry of the theme by portraying her protagonist as a serpent-embodying woman whose sexual power was deemed abnormal and monstrous. This imprisoned woman as a monstrous other, though sinuously gazed, desired and mocked, her monstrous sexuality, not as the un-human, but as the conflation where the social and cultural anxiety encounters the fear of desire and the difference, is given the chance to be re-initiated, re-directed and unleashed into another heterogeneous state and territory of the unsaid and unnamed behind the traditional cultural prison house.
280. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 23 > Issue: 1/4
Hsien-hao Sebastian Liao A Chinese Sinthome: Chan, Modern Subject and Politico-Semioticizing Dream of the Red Chamber
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Aiming at the long repressed politico-semiotic dimension of Dream of the Red Chamber, this essay employs Lacanian theories of discourse and subjectivity inconjunction with the Chan Buddhist idea of enlightenment to analyze the coming into being of the what Zizek defines as a “modern subject” at the historical juncture of the Manchu conquest of China. Attempting to come to terms with the historical trauma caused by the Manchu conquest, the novel re-examines the fate of the emerging Chinese modernity founded in the discourse of qing or “feeling” by re-visiting the last forty years or so of the Ming resistance against the invasion. The examination, however, reveals that the subject involved in this nationalist struggle unwittingly becomes a “modern subject” because of what Zizek describes as a “redoubled renunciation”: he who sacrifices his particular attachment for the purpose of bolstering the universal Cause ends up losing both. Also unprecedented in classical Chinese literature is that this “modern subject” eventually is able somehow doubly to “identify with the symptom/ sinthome” as his only consistency: “man” on the level of the “framed story” in the metafictional structure of the novel, and “contingency” on the level of the framing story.