The semiotic limbo of the pacific

Deleuze's study of his friend Michel Toumier's first novel Vendredi has widely been seen as a pivotal point in the development of his thought; Alphonso Lingis even sees it as the final articulation of the concept of the ‘elemental sign’. Contrary to this view, this paper argues that Deleuze's postface anticipates in important ways the semiotics of Mille Plateaux, but that Deleuze's reading has been so influential as to obscure Tournier's own? which may be shown to be much more concerned with the immediate politics of the French presence in the Pacific.     

Re-Semiotizing the South African Democratic Project: The African Renaissance

This article reviews the relationship between the semiotic implications of the emerging concept of the African Renaissance, and the historical trajectory of semiotic studies in South Africa. Linked with the residual ideological territories occupied under the rubrics of ‘semiotics’ and/or ‘semiology’ are the ways these discourses have been re-articulated or re-presented within the politics of the post-apartheid era. As a concept of the ‘post’, therefore, the semiotic implications of a projective strategy like the African Renaissance require more than the mindless dyadism of linguistic semiology. The article sketches the outline of the case for a radical appropriation of the semiotics embedded in C.S. Peirce's pragmatism as a way of constituting the reality of ‘Renaissance’ concepts in terms of a Task. The place of semiotics within the broader philosophical and analytical programme is illustrated by means of a table that links semiotics, pragmatism, and radical theory. The table indicates how the issues discussed in this article can be seen to fall under a schema that foregrounds Peirce's realization that aesthetic and ethical concepts are prior to those based purely on logic. As such, therefore, the article suggests that topics in social or cultural semiotics are more readily amenable to semiotic interpretation and analysis under a pragmatic rather than a linguistic methodological regime.     

“David Byrne really does love PowerPoint”: art as research on semiotics and semiotic technology

This article presents a reading of David Byrne's Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, an art work created with MicroSoft's presentation software PowerPoint, as an instance of creative research on semiotics and semiotic technology. It reveals commonalities and differences between Byrne's ideas about PowerPoint and related ideas from linguistics and semiotics, and is intended as a contribution to research on PowerPoint, and on semiotic technologies generally, as well as to efforts aimed at developing criteria for evaluating art as research on semiotics.     

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.     

Bodies,Materials, Practice: Habiting Space and the Representational Limits of Latour's Semiotics of Assemblies

This article identifies an emerging interest in actor-network theory (ANT) within spatial studies and its significance to social semiotics. It questions the usefulness of borrowing ANT for spatial analyses, arguing that ANT is a representational theory of knowledge rooted in a Chomskyan theory of competence and that this produces an impoverished conception of practice within spatial production. To illustrate this contention, a letter describing the Elliott household in 1860s Adelaide is examined as a programme for visiting the Elliott home. A comparison is then made between Latour's programme and Lefebvre's dialectic of spatial production. It is noted that the constituent elements of the programme, association and substitution, are analogous to Lefebvre's concepts of representations of space and representational spaces, respectively. However, since the programme does not offer any corresponding third element to match spatial practice, an ANT-informed interpretation of spatiality is criticised for bifurcating competence from performance and universalising a particular competence.     

Beyond religious affinity: Malaysia's relations with countries in the Arab Gulf

Abstract

Economic and political changes at the global level have simultaneously shifted Malaysia's interests in the Arab Gulf countries. The economic liberalisation and transformation agenda that emerged in these economies are argued to be contributing factors to Malaysia's interest in expanding its economic relationships with the countries. Although the current cooperation between Malaysia and the Arab Gulf countries is aimed at reaping economic benefits, religious values also constitute an important foundation for these relationships. This article seeks to understand why politics, economics and religion remain the key drivers in determining Malaysia's relations with the Arab Gulf countries. The paper also suggests a future direction for engagement between Malaysia and Gulf Cooperation Council countries.     

Ground zero – the semiotics of the boundary line

This paper explores the ambiguous nature of the graphic boundary line as a key element in the carto-realist conception of spatiality. Using examples (specifically the Line of Tordesillas and the UK border at Stansted Airport), the paper explores the complex and ambiguous nature of boundary lines as cartographic representations and concrete spatial practices. Drawing on Rotman's analysis of the significance of “zero” to modern semiotics and Wilden's theorization of digital and analogue communications systems, I argue that the graphic line is the spatial equivalent of a numeric zero – a meta-symbolic entity that is empty (the cartographic line, by definition, has no magnitude).     

Lavascape: legal spectacle at Kīlauea

ABSTRACT

In considering the theme “Exploring Legal Discourse: A Sociosemiotic (Re)Construction,” this paper examines the symbolic relationship between law and chaos in the changing landscape of Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai’i Island. The socio-legal dimensions of this relationship provide insight into law’s project of governance in the dynamic natural environment. Most recently, in the summer of 2018, lava spouted and then flowed from Kīlauea in over twenty-four fissures which opened up within two heavily populated residential subdivisions. Law's response to the ensuing chaos provides keen insight into the epistemological positionality of law toward nature. In an attempt to tame this enlivened lavascape of persons and lava, law asserts authority over the spectacle in the areas of sightseeing, access, and mapping. In other words, the legal spectacle of lava eruption is an attempt to jurisdictionally frame the legal imagination of human risk in this dynamic landscape through legal semiotics, legal materiality, and legal topology. However, as this paper will explore, the source of chaos is actually law itself. Attempts to manage chaos are actually attempts to manage human nature as visitation to the erupting volcanic environment is ultimately beyond law's complete control. In a larger sense, this study of Kīlauea's lavascape as a constructed legal spectacle illustrates the phenomenological framing of law's incomplete jurisdiction over kinetic environments.     

Listening to melancholia: Alice Walker's Meridian

ABSTRACT

Alice Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), explores both the ways in which racist societies initiate and exacerbate melancholia and how this psychological dynamic can and must be overcome. The novel posits not a simple ‘cure’ but rather a process of questioning and learning from the past and one's painful attachments to it. In this way it negotiates scholarly concerns about psychoanalytic theory, as manifest particularly in literary criticism and critical race studies. Far from normalizing a form of identity focused on the past, this experimental novel depicts psychological transformation as an effort that requires the willingness to untangle the relationships involved in one's present, one's past and broader systems of social injustice.     

“When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin

This paper investigates the semiotics of Bitcoin, an electronic cash system that uses decentralized networking to enable irreversible payments. For enthusiasts, Bitcoin provides an alternative to currencies and payment systems that are seen to threaten users' privacy, limit personal liberty, and undermine the value of money through state and corporate oversight. Bitcoin's promise lies in its apparent capacity to resolve these concerns not through regulatory institutions or interpersonal trust, but through its cryptographic protocols. We characterize this semiotics as a “practical materialism” and suggest it replays debates about privacy, labor, and value.     

The Hermeneutics of Work: On Richard Sennett

Abstract

The paper attempts to situate Sennett philosophically by placing him in the tradition of ontological hermeneutics. This way of reading Sennett is justified not only by the core principles that govern Sennett's social anthropology, but is also useful for tracing the trajectory of Sennett's philosophically informed diagnoses of the times. These diagnoses focus on the role of work in shaping subjectivity. After reconstructing the basic conceptual shape of Sennett's diagnoses of the work-related maladies of the "old" and the "new" capitalism, the paper presents some broader reflections on the philosophical presuppositions of social criticism that takes its departure from the centrality of work.     

Deleuze and literature: Metaphor and indirect discourse

This paper deals primarily with Deleuze's work on literature? but also looks briefly at related ideas in the books on cinema. Deleuze has often concentrated on what he calls ‘American‘ literature, particularly in Critique and clinlque. The first part of the paper seeks to outline some of the main elements of this particular literary field for Deleuze. The paper then goes on to show how the general rejection of metaphor that informs Deleuze's work on literature can be more precisely defined as a theory of free indirect discourse. The concept of free indirect discourse is? as Frangois Zourabichvili has shown, at the heart of Deleuze's work? aesthetic or otherwise. For example, the idea of the percept functions as an aesthetic application of free indirect discourse, and Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 suggest that this form of enunciation represents a new aesthetic cogito to which cinema is ideally suited.     

Governance by Proxy: A Comparative Policy Analysis of the Mainstreaming of Immigrant Integration Governance

Abstract

This paper assesses mainstreaming as a governance strategy that potentially addresses the call for a more integral governance response to wicked policy problems. Our comparative qualitative policy analysis of the mainstreaming of immigrant integration governance contributes to the governance and mainstreaming literature by emphasizing the importance of strong horizontal and vertical coordination mechanisms and the distinction between universal and proxy targeting in mainstreaming. Although policy programmes indeed seem to broaden to a universal mainstreamed approach, in practice they often operate by “proxy”. Furthermore, horizontal coordination structures tend to be weak or not in place at all, again obstructing the embedding of immigrant integration as a mainstreamed cross-cutting governance issue.     

Longing for the past: a semiotic reading of the role of nostalgia in present-day consumption trends

Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to designate a pathological longing for distant homeland, the word “nostalgia” was soon rearticulated temporally, to refer to a lost epoch one yearns for as one's home. Nostalgia is not a new topic for semiotics. Emotion essentially stemming from absence, it epitomizes the semiotic mechanism: semiosis is the ontological result of something staying for something else, but nostalgia is the emotional result of it. Nostalgia – an essential figure in Greimas's structural outlook on passion, an umbrella concept in Baudrillard's mourning of reality behind the simulacra, and a key notion in Culler's and Frow's dissection of the semiotics of tourism – has become a buzz word in both critical and marketing studies, the former trying to unveil beneath it the foundations of ontology or the contradictions of postmodern society and the latter, seeking to exploit nostalgia as what critical theory could deem the last Trojan horse into the agency of the consumer. On the basis of a copious and manifold literature on nostalgia, the article hints at an unexplored direction: can one talk, today, of nostalgic trends of consumption in Europe? Where hipsters, vintage furniture, and retro TV channels are nothing but symptoms of an emerging mentality?     

Mutant Enunciations: Feminist Practices and the Anoedipal

Feminist theory and practice, and in particular Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic in language and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's explication of the matrixial, provide a basis from which to extend the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari concerning domains of signification that operate beyond the Oedipal structure. In the first part of this paper, I will discuss some relationships that may be traced between the ideas of these theorists and processes in creative practice that have the potential to constitute an alternative stratum of subjectivity not wholly dependent on Oedipalisation. This will be followed by a brief analysis of two paintings by West Australian artist Linda Banazis incorporating what I have termed the ‘X Function', an additional and transversal system to those outlined in Michael O'Toole's (1994) model of semiotic analysis of visual texts. The X Function provides a means of mapping nomadic or non-Oedipal currents, those ‘non-discursive' or resistant dimensions of texts which deny fixity or closure of interpretation.     

Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative: Jean-Luc Nancy's Reading of Hegel

Abstract

This paper examines Jean-Luc Nancy's interpretation of Hegel, focusing in particular on The Restlessness of the Negative. It is argued that Nancy's reading represents a significant break with other post-structuralist readings of Hegel by taking his thought to be non-metaphysical. The paper focuses in particular on the role Nancy gives to the negative in Hegel's thought. Ultimately Nancy's reading is limited as an interpretation of Hegel, since he gives no sustained explanation of the self-correcting function of reason.     

Radical exclusions,empty signifiers and an anti-war genre

Ernesto Laclau argues that Saussurean structural linguistics is one framework necessary for a post-Marxist understanding of political identities and new social movements. Disrupting the distinction between the discursive and the political, he provides insight into the formal properties of identity, difference, universality and particularity. However, this disruption means that his work is relevant not only to political theory per se but has retroactive value for understanding semiotics and signification. By considering methodological problems encountered during an analysis of an anti-war poster genre, this essay suggests that Laclau's concept of empty signifiers enables a novel understanding of genre. His schema complements approaches that emphasize the analysis of content and the analysis of audience reception, broadly conceived. Between the poles of content and reception, there are structural or relational properties enabling the contingent stability and meaningfulness of genre. These properties include the differential nature of a genre's identity, and a genre's discursive reliance on a radical exclusion.     

Critical Theory of Society or Self-Critical Society

Abstract

This paper presents a critical comparative reading of Ulrich Beck and Herbert Marcuse. Beck's thesis on ‘selfcritical society’ and the concept of ‘sub-politics’ are evaluated within the framework of Marcusian critical theory. We argue for the continued relevance of Marcuse for the project of emancipatory politics. We recognise that a focus upon the imminent and spontaneous possibilities for radical social change within the ‘sub-political’ is a useful provocation to the high abstractionism of much critical theory, but suggest that such possibilities are better captured in a Marcusian theoretical frame than they are in Beck's account.     

A rhetoric of style: Eleanor Rigby and the reordering of popular music

In this paper, we present a synthesis of Kenneth Burke’s rhetoric of identification and Jay Lemke’s social semiotics to frame Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles as a unique point in the phylogenesis of recorded popular music. We emphasise the social semiotic functioning of string arrangements as styles, with style also being understood in the manner of Burke, and style names and definitions being drawn from a corpus analysis of string arrangements for popular music. We argue that, through a rhetoric of style, Eleanor Rigby made canonical claims against rock's cultural counterpart, classical music. We demonstrate the working of the rhetoric and its political implications in the context of the counter-cultural forces active during the mid-1960s.     

Information Handling Challenges in Complex Systems

ABSTRACT:

Even when leaders exhibit desirable leadership styles, the effectiveness of their behaviors on organizational outcomes may be influenced by the structural distance between them and their followers. Nonetheless, previous empirical research on the relationships between leadership styles and outcomes has largely ignored the role of leader distance in public administration. Using panel data drawn from the US federal government, this study explores how transformational and transactional leadership styles affect employee turnover behavior and how span of control as a proxy for leader distance moderates those relationships. The statistical results indicate that transformational leadership is negatively related to turnover behavior, whereas transactional leadership is positively related to turnover behavior. Further analysis shows that span of control significantly moderates the relationships between the two leadership styles and employee turnover behavior such that organizations benefit more from transformational leaders with a broad span of control than from those with a narrow span of control. Conversely, transactional leaders with a narrow span of control are better at reducing turnover than those with a broad span of control. The implications and contributions of these results for public administration are discussed.