Riding and reading the Shanghai metro: signs,subjectivities and subversions on and around line # 8

This article explores the diverse semiotic landscapes which may be experienced as a consequence of apparently mundane rides taken upon the Shanghai metro. I first present, and then untangle, the ideological discourses that form, clash and, at times, collapse during these journeys. In order to elaborate upon the composition of these signs, they are viewed from multiple perspectives, although significant reference is made to Roland Barthes’ punctum/studium dialectic. These signs are not only read as manifestations of robust ideology but also as indeterminate, and fragile. This article is also concerned with pragmatics on the Shanghai metro, or the relationships between people and signs, and illustrates how passengers perform within this semiotically charged environment in ways which, sometimes, undo, or subvert, urban rationality. Although this article specifically focuses upon the Shanghai metro, and one particular route in its parliament of lines, it is intended these observations not only inform but also are informed by accounts of social spaces beyond these limits.     

Interdependence,interaction and metaphor in multisemiotic texts

Systemic frameworks for discourse analysis of visual/verbal and mathematics texts are used to examine the functionality of language? visual display and mathematical symbolism, and the meaning arising from interaction and interdependence between these semiotic codes in joint constructions. The nature of the interaction between options, classified as unmarked or marked, determines the meaning made in that instance and, more generally, provides an impetus for the expansion of the meaning potential of each semiotic. The phenomenon where semantic shifts occur when functional elements are reconstrued in another semiotic is called semiotic metaphor. Rather than the notion of an overlay of meaning typically associated with grammatical metaphor, the potential exists here for more dramatic forms of semantic shift. Examples of semiotic metaphor categorised as ‘parallel semiotic metaphor’ and ‘divergent semiotic metaphor’ are given in the text analysis.     

Styling the self online: semiotic technologization in weblog publishing

ABSTRACT

Testing on digital semiotic production the concepts of (self-)styling and technologization of discourse, developed for offline linguistic phenomena, the article investigates the role of digital platforms in shaping the relation between self-expression online, semiotic regulation and the social construction of taste. By focusing on the use of semiotic resources of webdesign for identity expression, the study analyses the semiotic regimes emerging from regulatory practices and webdesign styles on WordPress, and their influence on the changes in the projected identity of a personal blogger. In spite of the participatory character of WordPress, results show the role of the platform in objectifying/technologizing hegemonic semiotic preferences, with consequent normalising effects in bloggers’ self-styling practices. The conclusions relate the findings to broader power dynamics in the social construction of taste and their implications for both online and offline forms of self-expression.     

Social conflict and alternative mass communications: public art and politics in the service of Spanish-Basque nationalism

Abstract. Mass communication is multi-dimensional. One often overlooked alternative medium of mass communication, when it is systematic and not random, is public art - murals, graffiti, wall painting and posters. The linking of art and politics has precedents in Basque culture. It is the thesis of this article that public art is an important factor in the political communication process in the Basque region, that Basque nationalists, especially radical Basques revolving around the ETA movement, have used public art as one source for increasing visibility, raising consciousness, and building a mass based movement. What is particular about Basque nationalism is that it is a cultural-political movement, a reawakening from a 'culture of silence' induced by the Franco regime. Today, public art is an accepted channel for communicating the gamut of socio-political issues relevant to the social conflict in the Basque homeland.     

Analysing multimodality in an interactive digital environment: software as a meta-semiotic tool

The present paper discusses issues arising from the use of an interactive digital software tool to analyse multimodal communication. The focus is on the ways in which such technical resources and associated techniques enable the analyst of social semiosis to apply different types of analysis, and provide the site for critical reflection upon the results of such analyses. The aim is to present an argument for the use of an interactive digital software application as a meta-semiotic tool. Three major challenges for scholars engaged in multimodal social semiotics are addressed in pursuing this aim, specifically with reference to the development of digital interactive analytical resources. Firstly, scholars are faced with the task of not only accounting for an increasing range of semiotic resources, but also for the way different semiotic phenomena interact to produce meaning. Secondly, the multimodal semiotician has a broad range of analytical approaches potentially relevant to any task to draw upon. Thirdly, the nature of contemporary media forms offer challenges themselves in terms of access, analysis and presentation of analysis.     

From gold to futurity: a semiotic overview on trust,legal tender and fiat money

ABSTRACT

In the first part of the paper, I am summarizing the most relevant findings of the semiotic study of the money sign. It starts with a tripartition of the major types, namely commodity money, representative money, and fiat money. I then use this approach in order to position the most important contributions of other authors from semiotics and surrounding disciplines. In the second part, I develop a semiotic reading of the notion of legal tender where the latter is seen as a semiotic mechanism that provides particular conditions for the formation of the value of money. I combine a historical review with stress on important theoretic reflections during the development and implementation of pure legal tender money. The last part is dedicated to a proposal for a semiotic model of the fiat money sign. The model is developed and implemented as a reflection on some critical readings of the world financial crisis from 2008 to 2009, where the “semiotization of money” was used for explication. My model is based on one of the most insightful definitions of money, which sees them as “trust inscribed”.     

Social mobility and the demand for public consumption expenditures

The collective choice of public consumption expenditure is reconsidered when voters are socially mobile. In accordance with previous work on social mobility and political economics, the analysis concerns a class of mobility processes that induce mappings from initial income to expected future income that are monotonically increasing and concave. The paper abstracts from the explicitly redistributive role of government and concentrates on public consumption which is modeled as a classical public good. In equilibrium, provision is sensitive to the degree of social mobility, theoretically linking social mobility to public consumption. Further, empirical puzzles about the impact of voting franchise extensions on the growth of government spending are addressed within the context of social mobility.     

Mobile Capital, Democratic Institutions, and the Public Economy in Advanced Industrial Societies

This article addresses the following questions. Is international capital mobility systematically related to reductions in the size of the public economy, as globalization theory suggests? Alternatively, do democratic institutions and processes shape the ways in which internationalization affects national policies? Specifically, I argue that the effects of capital mobility on the scope of the public economy should be conditioned by the institutional forms of societal interest representation and the formal organization of decision-making authority within the polity. Utilizing econometric analysis of 1964–1993 data from 16 nations, I find that international capital mobility has few direct effects on the scope of the public economy. However, configurations of democratic institutions fundamentally shape the domestic policy impacts of capital mobility. Where social corporatism and inclusive electoral institutions are strong and where decision-making authority within the polity is concentrated, international capital mobility is either unrelated to the scope of the public economy or positively associated with total public spending, social transfers, and public consumption. In institutional contexts of pluralist interest and exclusive electoral representation, and in polities where decision-making is dispersed, rises in capital mobility are systematically associated with rollbacks of the public sector.     

Brands as semiotic molecular entities

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how brands are a phenomenon endowed with signs and meanings. From the background of Peirce's process of representation a model is developed that characterises brands as a network with three semiotic dimensions. Signs of brands spread out in the markets and establish relations of dependence between different elements. Brands can be defined through the wholeness of these semiotic elements and their relations, resembling a molecule. Thus, it is proposed that brands can be regarded as tridimensional molecule-shaped networks of semiotic elements that evolve through continuous processes of representation. The implications of the model are discussed and the article ends with suggestions for future research.     

Border work: surveillant assemblages,virtual fences,and tactical counter-media

The new technologies of bio-informatic border security and remote surveillance that have emerged as key infrastructures of reconfigured mobility regimes depend on various kinds of labor to produce the effect of bordering. The current retrofitting and technological remediation of borders suggests their transformation away from static demarcators of hard territorial boundaries toward much more sophisticated, flexible, and mobile devices of tracking, filtration, and exclusion. Borders require the labor of software developers, designers, engineers, infrastructure builders, border guards, systems experts, and many others who produce the “smart border”; but they also depend on the labor of “data-ready” travelers who produce themselves at the border, as well as the underground labor of those who traffic in informal and illegalized economies across such borders. Bordering increasingly relies on technological forms of mediation that are embedded within hi-tech, military and private corporate logics, but are also resisted by electronic and physical “hacks” or bypassing of informational and infrastructural architectures. In this paper we consider three socio-technological assemblages of the border, and the labor which makes and unmakes them: (1) the interlocking “cyber-mobilities” of contemporary airports including visual technologies for baggage, cargo, and passenger inspection, as well as information technologies for passenger dataveillance, air traffic control, and human resource systems; (2) the development of the Schengen Information System database of the EU, and its implications for wider migrant rights and internal mobility within the EU, as well as radical border media that have attempted to intervene in that border space; and (3) elements of the US–Mexico “smart border” regime known as the Secure Border Initiative Network (2006–2011), and those who have tried to tactically evade, disrupt, or undermine the working of this border.     

Signs of Anthropomorphism: The Case of Natural History Television Documentaries

This article employs Peirce's triadic concept of the sign, and Deleuze's theory of the image-movement to propose a social semiotic account of the ways in which visual signs in British and US natural history anthropomorphicise 'nature'. Peirce's semiotic is employed to critique both realist and relativist accounts of anthropomorphism. Although there may be a causally indexical relation between photographic signs and object, the fact that all signs are constituted by a three-way relationship between sign, object, and interpretant means that natural history documentaries, like the scientific texts that purportedly inform them, are ineluctably anthropomorphic. Deleuze's account of the image-movement is employed to explain why, far from being a dispassionate capturing of 'any-instants-whatsoevers', natural history image-movements organise movement in ways that are mediated by the semiotics of the natural history genre. As such, image-movements also constitute a form of anthropomorphism.     

Exploring construction project design as multimodal social semiotic practice

ABSTRACT

The semiotic nature of design and engineering communications has often evaded direct interrogation; specifically the representation of requirements using multiple semiotic modes. This paper explores the semiotic character of requirement representation in the construction project design and engineering process by mobilising a social semiotic analytic framework to reveal how project artefacts (e.g. drawings; digital imagery; physical objects) are multimodal resources that critically affect stakeholder engagement and interpretation. The focused empirical study from a hospital construction project reveals the motivations and effects of multimodal and semiotic communicative choices of different parties (e.g. client; architect; engineer; design consultant) engaged on the same project; the representation (or not) of requirements via various semiotic modes being a social and political process. The contribution of the paper is in revealing the semiotic character of requirement representation and the relevance of semiotic-informed enquiry for an industry continuing to develop new technologies (e.g. virtual reality; BIM – building information modelling) for design and construction work.     

After citizenship: autonomy of migration,organisational ontology and mobile commons

This paper explores the relevance of the autonomy of migration approach for understanding the role of citizenship in the sovereign control of mobility. There is an insurgent configuration of ordinary experiences of mobility emerging against this regime of control. At its core is the sharing of knowledge and infrastructures of connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care among people on the move. The sovereign regime of mobility control is displaced on the level on which it attempts to take hold: the everyday movements of migrants. The frenetic fixation with security is challenged by the creation of common worlds of existence; the obsession with governance is replaced by inhabiting social spaces below the radar of existing political structures. This paper attempts to contribute to a reconstruction of this mundane ontology of transmigration, an ontology which we will describe as the mobile commons of migration.     

mStories: exploring semiotics and praxis of user-generated mobile stories

Innovations in information and communication technologies have allowed people to actively author multimodal content and engage in new meaning-making practices. New Literacies research has gone some way to understanding new meaning-making behaviours. However, this research often derives its understandings from studies undertaken with students enrolled in formal educational settings. Mobile technologies are increasingly situated outside such domains; the informal use of these devices by adults remains on the periphery of scholarly focus. mStories is a creative participatory digital mobile storytelling project. Taking a multidimensional perspective, this article presents the in-depth case analysis of one participant and their mStory. A semiotic analysis found that the user-generated content demonstrated complex and sophisticated multimodal sense relations. However, control over the textual or compositional meta-function of the text was determined largely by the computer interface, with users habituated to relinquishing authorial control over this element. Within this study, mobile literacy praxis was characteristically ad hoc and contextually embedded, and though mobile technology invites such practices, users were neither determined nor limited by this, and happily turned to other devices where necessary.     

Seeing White−Female Whiteness and the Purity of Children in Australian,Chinese and British Visual Culture

In this paper, I interrogate the expression and usage of ‘whiteness’ in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture. My approach is through reading local texts with an eye to transcultural systems of meaning, paying particular attention to the ways in which whiteness is used as a doubled category in sexual politics. The paper is formed through the performance of cross-cultural connectivities within an epistemological emphasis on the travelled theorist. The movement between Chinese, Australian and English ethical positions are constitutive of the perspectives expressed here; the perspectives are themselves concerned to look back and into those ethical positions. The performance works towards a recognition of the semiotic systems of power and identity, and therefore of the conditions of theoretical performance itself.     

Semiotic technologies: a case study of discipline-based practices and pedagogy

This paper examines semiotic technologies, both in terms of the resources they harness and the practices developed around their use. It draws on data collected as part of an ethnographic investigation into the meaning-making practices deployed within civil engineering study. The data is used as a case study for examining semiotic technologies as socially situated resources for disciplinary practices. Using a multimodal social semiotic approach, we argue that technologies are not self-evident, and that their use constitutes specific social practices that require development in the classroom. In order to deploy technologies in pedagogically effective ways, we need to understand the semiotic resources they draw on (including embodied resources). Awareness that technologies are not neutral or value-free, but are socially situated and ideologically laden, may enable meta-level understanding of the discipline, thus creating the possibility for improved pedagogical practices.     

New Region,New Story: Imagining Mobile Subjects in Transnational Space

This paper investigates the changing relations between citizens and Europe's internal borders by seeing these relations as objects of governmentality of mobilities. It focuses on the particular discursive space of one transnational ‘corridor in the making’, studying how, through practices of visioning and strategy-making, governmental actors make new transnational governmental territories by breathing life into the imagined mobile subjects of these future territories. These mobile subjects play a central part in the politics of emergent transnational governmentalities and in legitimising potential border-crossing infrastructures. In a case study of the COINCO project (Corridor of Innovation and Co-operation), linking Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Malmö and Berlin, it is shown how deconstructing imagined mobile subjects reveals the will to power over mobility and sheds light on how governmental practices are remaking European borders.     

Fiction and reality of mobility in Africa

This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and relating to mobile Africans is problematic. Nationals, citizens and locals in communities targeted by African mobility are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off the influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and must be ‘exorcised’ so that ‘insiders’ do not lose out to this particular breed of ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘demons’, perceived to bode little but inconvenience and savagery. If and when allowed in, emphasis is on the needs, priorities and convenience of their reluctant hosts, who tend to go for the wealthy, the highly professionally skilled, the culturally bleached and Hottentot Venuses of the academy, even at the risk of accusations of capital flight and brain drain. The article demonstrates how to marry ethnography and fiction to study African mobility not only as a ‘collection of logical bones and flesh’ but also as ‘emotional beings’. It calls for conceptual flexibility and ethnographic empirical substantiation, and challenges social scientists to look beyond academic sources for ethnographies and accounts of how a deep, flexible and nuanced understanding of mobility and interconnections in Africa play out in different communities, states and regions of a world permanently on the move.