Welcome, dear reader, to Issue 9 of Applied
Semiotics. It is my privilege, on behalf of both
of us, The Editors, for the first time since our
launch in March 1996, to introduce an issue personally. This
gives me the opportunity to make comment — not only on the
fine articles featured this season — but also on the
direction and evolution of semiotics today, and where I
believe it might best continue to grow in the future.
Indeed, among the reasons we decided, five years ago, to
create a purely electronic refereed journal in
applied semiotics — besides finding the notion
ideally suited to the new medium — was, not to put too fine
a point on it, that we felt semiotics theory was
rather in a bad way. To us, although both young scholars,
its practitioners appeared hazardously divided, in a way
reminiscent of the myth of Babel, by differing standards.
(Consider Peirce's modern followers, Greimas's
mainly-francophone survivors, Sebeok's broad scientific
view, Eco's school, philosophical approaches based on Apel,
modern mathematical interpretations, etc.)
Semiotics seemed, we thought, to be refracted into a
kaleidoscope of differing theoretical views on what its very
foundations were, and consequently what form its purpose and
methods ought to take. I sometimes felt, unfairly perhaps,
that the field was much like alchemy during the Renaissance
— a methodologically disparate, motley, almost mysterious
lore, but one with great promise. We still share this view
— there are obstacles that still hamper our progress — and
yet, we feel a distinct sense of optimism that semiotics,
aided perhaps in a small way by a highly democratic, fast,
ubiquitious medium and an ever-more "wired" scholarly
community, is nearing the age of its maturity.
A significant difficulty, in my opinion (if such things
exist in our area!) is that so many schools of thought in
the field adopt a cognitive interest (cf. Apel) too
precisely resembling that of a purely natural science, and
tend therefore to focus on the syntagmatic at the expense of
the paradigmatic, on denotation rather than
(much-denigrated) connotation, on signs' extensions rather
than their (anthropomorphic) intensions. Is the study of
communication not, in a human context, primarily a social
science, a Geisteswissenschaft? Must we await some
kind of interdisciplinary watershed from the Frankfurt
School's Critical Theorists, or from Eugene Gendlin's
philosopher-linguists, in order to arrive at a more complete
sense of well-foundedness, in order to be able to
apply our knowledge more successfully, and
convincingly, to a wider variety of communicative forms?
With this hopeful quest in mind, we offer the present
issue of our modest journal, an issue which we hope explores
a balanced approach to communication in the context of
both its concrete structures and in terms of
that great enigma, the Ayer's rock of semioticians' enigmas,
culture. We feel an investigation of methodologies
dealing with cultural icons is another step in the
right direction for our field. A semiotics of culture,
certainly, must overcome what I see as the main theoretical
problem of our time: why does language denote
material states of affairs in a way completely distinct from
the manner in which it signifies the contents of
thought — the aims and values we invest, for our own
anthropomorphic reasons, and according to a fuzzy cultural
logic, in social states of affairs? Is this pair of
mismatched, asymmetrical, utterly unlike functions the
reason why it is so tricky to pin down a unified model of
communication, without entering into anthropological,
psychological and cultural questions? And yet the two
processes, as the Stoics and, later, as Augustine explained,
occur simultaneously, and inseparably. (It is a shame that this
ternary model — sign, extension, intension — is so
frequently attributed to American autodidact Charles S.
Peirce. Have we lost our collective memory of the true
origins of Western semiotics theory?) Thus we arrive at an
issue of AS/SA devoted to methodologies for
communication in terms of culture, an issue on Cultural
Icons.
*
The first article is an analysis of the way collective
ethnic identity, and nationalism — pure anthropomorphic
values, or intensions, if I ever saw one — are
expressed in images inscribed upon bank notes and minted
coins — currency — in Central America and its North
American cultural cousin, Mexico. Its author, Joseph
M. Galloy, an anthropologist at Harvard, shows that
images on currencies can portray, like Greek Myths which
once justified and explained conquests and unions between
peoples, "powerful messages regarding national sovereignty
and ethnic or class relations" (see Abstract).
Like Itamar Even-Zohar (AS/SA,
First Issue), Galloy establishes principles according to
which Nation-Building ("cohesion" in Even-Zohar's system) is
accomplished, at least in part, by the propagation of shared
symbols, by the mythical promotion of selected values. His article is not only very timely on the scholarly front, but has a
serendipitous sychronicity with the introduction, in the European Union, of
the notes and coins of the Euro. So we will be able to see the principles he
abstracts from history as they (perhaps) increase cohesion and mutual
collective affection in the Euro-area.
The next article, "The Becoming of a Saint" ("Le devenir
d'un saint", Abstract)
is an exploration by Ekaterina Averianova (University of
Tumen, Siberia) of the way a collectively-accepted status
(again an intension, as the status applies in a purely
immaterial sense to one having no living body) is conferred,
through well-defined social rites, upon a person's identity
in an Indo-European Christian societies. The reader might
wish to consult her previous article on this subject, which
appeared in Issue
no 5, on the semiotic functions of
priesthood. Her current article expands her clever
use of Georges Dumézil's "trifunctional system"
(Dumézil, Mythe et Épopée,
1995), arriving at a new synthesis with previously
unseen implications.
Our third article passes from one sort of cultural icon
(the holy) to another (the impure); specifically, to the
nearly-universal cultural intension of the "physical and
sexual ideal" of woman-as-object. Bahaa-Eddin Mazid (South
Valley University, Egypt), in his pragmalinguistic and
semiotic analysis of a cartoon from a well-known Egyptian
newspaper, featured in March 2000, shows how values and
associations are culturally-imbedded in the reader's
interpretative processes. In this way, through connotative
action in the pictoral and accompanying verbal text, the
caricature propagates a comical "annihilation" of the
intension "woman" which corresponds to an act of degradation
of the social value of women in Western society. Thus
semiotics bridges the structures of both culture and
communication in an analysis of one of the most common icons
seen today, that of the ideal female body. (Abstract).
The fourth article, on the hybridisation of communication
media in the Internet age, at first appears unrelated to
those that precede it; yet this is perhaps a function of the
exteriority of approach in the first articles, which deal
(rather from an Anthropologist's point of view) with a
cultural process seen as separate from those who study it,
and the third, in which there is a clear ideological
differentiation. In his article, Denis Bachand explores
processes we are perhaps unaware of within our own current
culture, namely the way in which a communication medium
(being the message of course, in McLuhan's sense)
viz. multimedia, shapes the way in which we think of
the communicative process. The various icons of
current computer-culture, with its disparate meanings (text
files, images, sounds, music, etc.) reflect a hybridisation
of communicative processes never before possible. How does
this affect social interaction, learning, and the way we
regard the community around us? (Abstract).
Finally, we wrap up the iconographic, hybrid, ephemeral
whole that is our electronic issue with a much-awaited
book review of Translating by
Factors by Guktnecht and Rölle, a clever work in
which modals are analyzed as factors in translation,
primarily using examples from German to English and
vice-versa, which also ends up touching on cultural
investitures of meaning.
We hope you enjoy this latest installment of our effort
at a democratic, open-minded and useful forum for the
sharing of new research in communication. If you have
comments or feedback on any of the featured articles, you
may of course e-mail its authors, but why not also send the
message to AS/SA, where we can share it with the
wider semiotics community?
Peter Marteinson, June 2000
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Introductory Editorial
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