When studying the work of Émile Durkheim, scholars must consider how his intellectual development in a traditional Jewish environment contributed to and informed his ideas. This article details how Durkheim’s upbringing endowed him with a traditional rabbinic thought-model. The author analyzes five of Durkheim’s major works to argue that the system of classification, language, and style of argument Durkheim used to define concepts in his scholarship mirror streams of rabbinic thought. The article builds off the sociology of knowledge to illuminate (...) how Durkheim employed his codified knowledge of biblical texts and modern Jews to bolster his arguments, and reveals the subtler ways he demonstrates his tacit knowledge of the texts and argument styles. The article ends with an exploration of how conceptual frameworks from the sociology of knowledge may be applied to other leading sociological thinkers—how the modes of thinking instilled during formative years may orient scholarship and the benefits and limitations of this approach. (shrink)

Pencak Silat is a martial art, performance practice and system of body cultivation prevalent throughout much of Indonesia and the Malay-speaking world. This article compares different modalities of the practice and pedagogy of Sundanese Pencak Silat in West Java with more recent attempts to standardize practice at a national level under the auspices of the Indonesian Pencak Silat Association. Drawing on David Sudnow’s seminal account of learning how to play jazz piano, it is suggested that learning how to improvise is (...) a highly structured process that proceeds from the mastery of certain generic principles from which are generated potentially unbounded repertoires of habitual response. In the institutionalized instruction that is propagated by IPSI generative potential is subjugated to the desire to achieve homogeneity in practice. Aspects of Pencak Silat as it is taught nationally under the auspices of IPSI are examined in relation to the notion of spectacle. In conclusion, it is argued that the limits of the Nationalist project become self-evident as the dynamic potential of the body in Sundanese Pencak Silat is subsumed in an attempt to achieve fixity of the symbolic order. (shrink)

This paper locates its genesis in a small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia which experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917–1921. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall’s Academy, Bakhtin’s Circle, and Malevich’s experiments, artistic group UNOVIS—all in fierce dialogue with one another—made the town of Vitebsk into an (...) artistic crucible in the early twentieth century. We argue that this creative collective transformed creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism, structuralism and formalism that contributed richly to the social understanding of creativity itself that is so evident across Mikhail Bakhtin’s subsequent body of work, and elsewhere across the world. This paper argues that a consideration of such interplay has much potential for twenty-first century educational philosophy. (shrink)

This article explores two central notions of ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialogics’ based on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin respectively, as well their varying interanimations within Stalin-Marxist Russian societyIt is proposed that these two positions are incommensurably located alongside one another in contemporary education. I argue that Bakhtin offers diametrically oppositional educational provocations to those of Vygotsky.The implications of these interpretations will be explored with consideration of their underlying philosophical incompatibilities and contradictions, as well as the opportunities such a consideration pose (...) for educational practice today. (shrink)

Renewed interest in collective memory has raised the need for conceptual elaboration of the topic and how it can be studied. In an attempt to clarify how it fits into interdisciplinary discussion the following conceptual oppositions are laid out: memory versus remembering, collective versus individual remembering, history versus collective memory, and strong versus distributed versions of collective remembering. Collective memory is then analyzed from the perspective of M. M. Bakhtin's understanding of ‘text’ in which a ‘language system’ is contrasted with (...) an ‘individual, unique, and unrepeatable’ pole of textual analysis. These ideas are harnessed to examine forms of dialogicality that shape collective memory, especially in politically contested cases such as Estonian and Russian accounts of conflict over the past century. (shrink)

How we think national standard languages came to dominate the world depends on how we conceptualize the way languages are linked to the people that use them. Weberian theory posits the arbitrariness and constructedness of a community based on language. People who speak the same language do not necessarily think of themselves as a community, and so such a community is an intentional, political, and inclusive production. Bourdieusian theory treats language as a form of unequally distributed cultural capital, thus highlighting (...) language’s classed nature. The rise of standard languages thus reflects a change in the class structure of a nationalizing society. In contrast, I move beyond the familiar Western cases on which these theories are based to reveal the shortcomings of both these theoretical approaches. China, with an exceptionally artificial national standard language that was promulgated by the state in an extremely top-down process, highlights the importance of intentionality in both the design of the language and the social function it was supposed to play. Building on Weber and Bourdieu, I argue that even egalitarian language standardization projects, such as the Chinese case, can result in unintended new hierarchies of privilege and power, outrunning the best intentions of their designers. (shrink)

This paper explores alternative approaches to the conception of scientific literacy, drawing on cultural studies and emerging practices in language arts as its framework. The paper reviews historic tensions in the understanding of scientific literacy and then draws on the multiliteracies movement in language arts to suggest a scientific multiliteracy. This is explored through analyzing the writing practices of groups other than scientists who for a variety of reasons must engage science. Specifically the paper examines zine writers who are ‘professional’ (...) human research subjects, i.e. derive a part of their annual income by signing up for psychological and medical experiments, and science fiction fans, who produce their own texts in response to the narratives they love. The paper argues that these literacy practices add to traditional notions of scientific literacy possibilities of history, fiction, critique, as well as more traditional empiricism embraced by national standards. The paper concludes by considering the ambivalence towards science in both of these popular scientific literacy communities’ writings, arguing that what multiliteracies offers is a possibility of a more nuanced, more appropriately ambivalent, and more politically and ethically engaged subject of science than offered by the current version of literacy dominating science educational discourse. (shrink)

: The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: (1) that of the logician Gottlob Frege and (2) that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning (analytic philosophy and poststructuralism), (...) to show how philosophy of language can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning , to show how philosophy of language (...) can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

The present paper aims to shed light on some post-oedipal moments of the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Going beyond the stereotypical opposition between the oedipal psychoanalysis and the anti-oedipal schizoanalysis, it endeavors to reinvestigate the semiotic nature of theknotenpunktand thesinthomeby applying some Deleuzian and Bakhtinian concepts. Thus, theknotenpunktis described as a grotesque knot bringing together some heterogeneous elements. The involved disparate components establish a rhizomatic multiplicity irreducible to a common determiner. As far as thesinthomeis concerned, it is also illustrated as a grotesque (...) knot quilting the disseminated heterogeneous orders. In contrast to the dominant conception of the symptom with a complex mode of signifying (that is mainly bound to the oedipal topography), theknotenpunktand thesinthomehold a kind of hyper-formative mode of signifying. As a result, the latter may be regarded as pure formators irreducible to a meaning or a certain interpretation. Finally, the paper sets out to analyze and evaluate the relationship between thesinthomeand the foreclosure from a semiotic perspective. Accordingly, thesinthomeis explained as a reply to foreclosure which is specifically a perceptive-imperative (retroactive) contemplation (in the light of law according to the Peircean phaneroscopy) on the rhizomatic multiplicity of psychosis (the case of schizophrenia). (shrink)

We offer a critical reading of televised weather reporting and forecasting discourse. We analyze text obtained from a US affiliate station of The Weather Channel over three days when a winter front advanced through the United States. Our critical analysis reveals the underlying ideological character of weather representation. We interpret the practice of weather representation within the context of the hegemonic discursive orders of leisure, consumption, capital accumulation, and risk management through the technologization of discourse. Through an analysis of the (...) interpretive practices of a small viewer community, we demonstrate that while alternative readings of weather discourse are possible, they are nevertheless shaped by the technologization of weather discourse. We conclude by promoting socio-semiotics and critical discourse analysis as promising theoretically-guided methodologies for analyzing discourse on the environment. (shrink)

Philosophical thinking is interrupted by the finitude of what cannot be named, on the one hand, and that within which it is subsumed as one of multiple modes of sense-making, on the other. Sense and Singularity elaborates Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical project as an inquiry into the limits or finitude of philosophy itself, where it is interrupted, and as a practice of critical intervention where philosophy serves to interrupt otherwise unquestioned ways of thinking. Nancy’s interruption of philosophy, Van Den Abbeele argues, (...) reveals the limits of what philosophy is and what it can do, its apocalyptic end and its endless renewal, its Sisyphean interruption between the bounds of infinitely replicating sense and the conceptual vanishing point that is singularity. In examinations of Nancy’s foundational rereading of Descartes's cogito as iterative, his formal experimentations with the genres of philosophical writing, the account of “retreat” in understanding the political, and the interruptive play of sense and singularity in writings on the body, sexuality, and aesthetics, Van Den Abbeele offers a fresh account of one of our major thinkers as well as a provocative inquiry into what philosophy can do. (shrink)

This study applies the concept of reported speech advanced by the renowned Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin to compare the argumentative styles of Mainland China and Taiwan. These societies in question are considered by many scholars as sharing the same argumentative style. The study reports that the Mainland debaters more frequently than the Taiwanese debaters maintained the authenticity of the quotations cited from ancient Confucian sources, whereas Taiwanese debaters paraphrased more frequently. On the other hand, this difference cannot be found (...) when debaters quoted from sources other than Ancient Confucians. The findings, according to Bakhtin, imply a contrast of monologic and dialogic tendencies toward authority, which results in a style difference between Mainland and Taiwan argumentation. (shrink)

The paper analyzes if it is possible to grow an I–Thou relation in the sense of Martin Buber with an artificial, conversational agent developed with Natural Language Processing techniques. The requirements for such an agent, the possible approaches for the implementation, and their limitations are discussed. The relation of the achievement of this goal with the Turing test is emphasized. Novel perspectives on the I–Thou and I–It relations are introduced according to the sociocultural paradigm and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, polyphony inter-animation, (...) and carnavalesque. The polyphonic model, the associated analysis method, and the support tools are introduced. Some ideas on how the polyphonic model may be used for the implementation of a computer application able to analyze some features of the existence of an I–Thou relation are included. (shrink)

There are now countless social scientific disciplines—listed either as the science of … X … or as an -ology of one kind or another—each with their own internal controversies as to what are their “proper objects of their study.” This profusion of separate sciences has emerged, and is still emerging, tainted by the classical Cartesian-Newtonian assumption of a mechanistic world. We still seem to assume that we can begin our inquiries simply by reflecting on the world around us, and by (...) allowing our conceptualizations to guide our actions in our inquiries. Beginning our inquiries in this retrospective manner, however, means that our concepts and conceptualizations are both after-the-fact and beside the point, for ‘something else’ altogether is guiding us in the performance of our situation-sensitive actions than merely our conceptualizations. We need before-the-fact, hermeneutically-structured inquiries that can ‘set out’ inner ‘landscapes of possibilities’, to think-with and to provide guidance, as we try in our more scientifically organized efforts to achieve socially desired outcomes in particular socially shared situations. Conducting such preliminary inquiries is thus an art, requiring not only judgment, but also imagination and poetic forms of expression aimed at creating such shared, inner landscapes among all concerned. (shrink)

Currently, our official rationality is still of a Cartesian kind; we are still embedded in a mechanistic order that takes it that separate, countable entities (spatial forms), related logically to each other, are the only ‘things’ that matter to us—an order clearly suited to advances in robotics. Unfortunately, it is an order that renders invisible ‘relational things’, non-objective things that exist in time, in the transitions from one state of affairs to another, things that ‘point’ toward possibilities in the future, (...) which mean something to us. I have called such things, hermeneutical–dialogical ‘things’ as they gradually emerge in our back-and-forth, step-by-step relations to the others and otherneses in our surroundings; they consist in the ‘promissory’ things sustaining our trust in each other and in our authorities, in our social organizations and social institutions, and in our culture. Clearly, we need to understand better, not only what robots can, and cannot do, but also the long-term ethical and political implications of inserting robotic activities into our everyday ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings if we are to avoid the dystopian futures envisaged by some. Descartes’ aim of “making ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature,” forgets our larger task of our making ourselves into human beings—of doing together in dialog what we cannot do apart. (shrink)

Classically, we have treated talk of such things as meaning, understanding, and thinking, etc., as raising problems about mental states assumed to exist inside people's heads. And in our philosophical inquiries, we have sought determinate in-principle solutions to these problems. In the dialogical, relational-responsive view of language use presented here — influenced by Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov — a very different view of such talk is presented. Our 'inner lives' are not hidden 'inside' us, but are 'displayed' out 'in' the (...) unfolding, living encounters spontaneously occurring between us and the others around us as we live out our lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I critically analyze the work of Shepard Fairey, the street artist better known as OBEY, as a multimodal discourse. After introducing the notion of street art, I analyze Fairey’s aesthetics, inspired in Pop Art and Soviet Constructivism, as well as his accounts on his own art, in order to unveil his ideology. I then discuss a particular case, concerning the pastiche of the Che Guevara’s image. I will show that the seemingly subversive nature of OBEY’s work, is (...) nothing more than marketing. Consequently, by industrially producing and commodifiying dissent, OBEY banalizes and deactivates it. According to the dichotomy between oppositional and emergent discourses, I conclude that OBEY enacts only an oppositional behavior. Moreover, by ‘manufacturing propaganda dissent’, OBEY performs protest, but in doing so he contributes to perpetuating the system he says he fights against. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyze, as an example of political discourse, the songs used by Spain's two main political parties in the 2008 general elections. Just like other texts used in political electoral discourse, these songs form a part of a public and ideological discourse aimed at the election of a candidate. The whole of the candidate's discourse is aimed at convincing the electorate that she/he and his/her party are the best choice, while the opposing candidate is the worst. (...) In this paper, I will analyze how this strategy, quite typical in political ideological electoral discourse, is put into practice in the two songs. (shrink)

A central finding in experimental research identified with Embodied Cognition (EC) is that understanding actions involves their embodied simulation, i.e. executing some processes involved in performing these actions. Extending these findings, I argue that reenactment – the overt embodied simulation of actions and practices, including especially communicative actions and practices, within utterances – makes it possible to forge an integrated EC-based account of linguistic meaning. In particular, I argue: (a) that remote entities can be referred to by reenacting actions performed (...) with them; (b) that the use of grammatical constructions can be conceived of as the reenactment of linguistic action routines; (c) that complex enunciational structures (reported speech, irony, etc.) involve a separate level of reenactment, on which characters are presented as interacting with one another within the utterance; (d) that the segmentation of long utterances into shorter units involves the reenactment of brief audience interventions between units; and (e) that the overall meaning of an utterance can be stated in reenactment terms. The notion of reenactment provides a conceptual framework for accounting for aspects of language that are usually thought to be outside the reach of EC in an EC framework, thus supporting a view of meaning and linguistic content as thoroughly grounded in action and interaction. (shrink)

This paper looks at the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin had appropriated the ideas of Kant and of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. While Bakhtin was greatly indebted to Kantian philosophy, and is known to have referred to himself as a neo-Kantian, he rejects the main tenets of neo-Kantianism. Instead, Bakhtin offers a substantial re-interpretation of Kantian thought. His frequent borrowings from neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and others) also follow a distinctive pattern of appropriation, whereby blocks of interconnected ideas (...) are removed from their original context, and made to serve Bakhtin’s own—substantially different—philosophical purposes in the context of his own thought. Bakhtin’s thought thus remains original even as he is borrowing ideas from others. (shrink)

Dialogue is a seminal concept within the work of the Brazilian adult education theorist, Paulo Freire, and the Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. While there are commonalities in their understanding of dialogue, they differ in their treatment of dialectic. This paper addresses commonalities and dissonances within a Bakhtin-Freire dialogue on the notions of dialogue and dialectic. It then teases out some of the implications for education theory and practice in relation to two South African contexts of learning that (...) facilitate the access to education of disadvantaged groups, one in higher education and the other in early childhood education. (shrink)

A survey of a wide range of social?scientific disciplines reveals a definite convergence of theoretical interest in human cognition and communication as situated, concerned, and embedded in social commitment. Recent contributions within situation semantics and cognitive science explicitly reject some of the constraints inherent in their shared philosophical heritage and prepare novel ground for dialogues between fields as far apart as formal semantics and ?dialogical? text theory. Issues such as purely cognitive versus motivational aspects of human situatedness, and the relationship (...) between models of individual information processing, on the one hand, and hermeneutic?dialectic assumptions about social and collective features of meaning and mind, on the other, are thus made topics of cross?disciplinary discussions. These are some of the many problems in need of further clarification if we want to explore the possibility of bridging and/or transcending the gulf between analytic?rationalist and hermeneutic?dialectic contributions to our insight into human cognition and communication. (shrink)

This article argues that the Bakhtin Circle presents a more realistic theory of concrete dialogue than the theory of discourse elaborated by Habermas. The Bakhtin Circle places speech within the “concrete whole utterance” and by this phrase they mean that the study of everyday language should be analyzed through the mediations of historical social systems such as capitalism. These mediations are also characterized by a determinate set of contradictions—the capital-labor contradiction in capitalism, for example—that are reproduced in unique ways in (...) more concrete forms of life (the state, education, religion, culture, and so on). Utterances always dialectically refract these processes and as such are internal concrete moments, or concrete social forms, of them. Moreover, new and unrepeatable dialogic events arise in these concrete social forms in order to overcome and understand the constant dialectical flux of social life. But this theory of dialogue is different from that expounded by Habermas, who tends to explore speech acts by reproducing a dualism between repeatable and universal “abstract” discursive processes (commonly known as the ideal speech situation) and empirical uses of discourse. These critical points against Habermas are developed by focusing on six main areas: sentences and utterances; the lifeworld and background language; active versus passive understandings of language; validity claims; obligation and relevance in language; and dialectical universalism. (shrink)

I propose that the ‘post-truth condition’, i.e., the vulnerability of our institutions for establishing and negotiating what is true and worth knowing, is not primarily a pathology, a susceptibility to external manipulation or coercion, as tends to be stressed in the literature, but has first and foremost to do with the unraveling of certain epistemic assumptions. In analogy with T.S. Eliot’s modernist notion that the attempt to capture and concretize an experience or a state of mind requires ‘objective correlatives’ which (...) it conveys, I argue that the trope of post-truth to express the embattled status of expertise can be understood in terms of failed symbolization. In the second section, I spell out what this means in terms of Donald Davidson’s discussion of the problem of defining truth. In the last section, I propose a ‘poetics of political theory’ for understanding the post-truth condition. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the development of tools to support an analysis of Big Data as manifestations of social processes and human behaviour. Such a task demands both an understanding of the epistemological challenge posed by the Big Data phenomenon and a critical assessment of the offers and promises coming from the area of Big Data analytics. This paper draws upon the critical social and data scientists’ view on Big Data as an epistemological challenge that stems not only (...) from the sheer volume of digital data but, predominantly, from the proliferation of the narrow-technological and the positivist views on data. Adoption of the social-scientific epistemological stance presupposes that digital data was conceptualised as manifestations of the social. In order to answer the epistemological challenge, social scientists need to extend the repertoire of social scientific theories and conceptual frameworks that may inform the analysis of the social in the age of Big Data. However, an ‘epistemological revolution’ discourse on Big Data may hinder the integration of the social scientific knowledge into the Big Data analytics. (shrink)

Experiential and mediatized, Pentecostal Christianity is one of the most successful cases of contemporary religious globalization. However, it has often grown and expanded transnationally without clear authoritative contours. That is the case in contemporary Ghana, where Pentecostal claims about charismatic empowerment have fed public anxieties concerning the fake and the occult. This article examines how Pentecostalism’s dysfunctional circulation is countered within seminaries, or Bible schools, by specific strategies of pastoral training. First, I revisit recent debates on Protestant language ideology in (...) the anthropology of Christianity, and stress Pentecostalism’s affinity with notions of flow and saturation of speech by divine presence. Second, I move to data collected in the Anagkazo Bible and Ministry Training Center, and investigate this institution’s pedagogical framing of Pentecostalism’s otherwise erratic flow of speech and power according to two normative operations: Biblical figuration and the emic notion of transmission as ‘impartation’. I conclude by stressing how the metapragmatics of figuration and impartation in Anagkazo requires an understanding of religious circulation that exceeds the dominant scholarly focus on religion-as-mediation. (shrink)

Doctor-patient interaction has gained increasing attention among sociologists and linguists during the last few decades. The problem with the studies performed so far, however, has been a lack of a theoretical framework which could bring together the various phenomena observed within medical consultations. Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of language offers us tools for studying medical practice as socio-cultural semiotic phenomenon. Applying Bakhtin's ideas of polyphonic, context-dependent and open-ended nature of human communication opens the possibilities to develop prevailing theoretical and empirical approaches (...) to the study of medical consultations. (shrink)

This paper discusses Eric Wolf’s (1923–1999) analysis of power in his last monograph, Anthropology (Wolf 1964) and last book Envisioning Power (Wolf 1999). In Anthropology, Wolf (1964: 96) wrote that the “anthropological point of vantage is that of a world culture, struggling to be born.” What is worth studying is human experience in all its variability and complexity. His aim was to set the framework bridging the humanities with anthropology. He never gave up this quest, only expanding it. In the (...) new introduction to his 1964 monograph, thirty years later, he commented that such a synthesis had not occurred. Rather there were growing schisms in the field. In the preface to Envisioning Power, he held that human sciences were unable or unwilling to come to grips with how cultural configurationsintertwine with considerations of power. In 1990 he had addressed the American Anthropological Society, holding that anthropologists favored a view of culture without power, while other social sciences have advanced a concept of ideology without culture. He wrote that his aim in his last book was to explore the connection of ideas and power observed in streams of behavior and recorded texts. Since minds interpose a selective screen between the organism and environment, ideas have content and functions that help bring people together or divide them. While ideas compose the entire range of mental constructs, Wolf understands ideology as configurations or unified schemes to underwrite or manifest power. Power is, according to Wolf, an aspect of all relations among people. Within this framework Wolf analyzes three cases, the Kwakiutl, the Aztecs, and Nazi Germany. The comparisons are very revealing, both the wide differences and similarities in power configurations and in the role of imagination. (shrink)

Identity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is (...) the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: Premiss; Justice, uniqueness, and love; Sign and language; Dialogue and alterity; Semiotic materiality; Globalization and the trap of identity; Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; Ethics; The World; Outside the subject; Responsibility and Substitution; The face; Fear of the other; Alterity and justice; Justice and proximity; Literary writing; Unjust justice; Caring for the other. (shrink)

The contribution that may come from the general science of signs, semiotics, to the planning and development of education and learning at all levels, from early schooling through to university education and learning should not be neglected. As Umberto Eco claims in the “Introduction” to the Italian edition of his book Semiotica and Philosophy of Language (1984: xii, my trans.), “[general semiotics] is philosophical in nature, because it does not study a particular system, but posits the general categories in light (...) of which different systems can be compared. And for general semiotics philosophical discourse is neither advisable nor urgent: it is simply constitutive.” To the title of their book Semiotic Theory of Learning, at the centre of our attention in the present text, Andrew Stables, Winfried Nöth, Alin Olteanu, Sébastien Pesce, and Eetu Pikkarainen, rightly add the subtitle New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education. This multivoiced contribution to research in learning and education in a semiotic framework has a unifying reference in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, but without disregarding an array of other distinguished exponents of the teaching and education sciences from different disciplines, semioticians and philosophers alike. This book, a polyphonic effort, with its appeal to “act otherwise,” and to do so investing in learning and education, no doubt makes a significant contribution in such a direction: education for transformation, for humanizing social change. Beyond evidencing what to us are particularly interesting aspects of the topics under discussion in Semiotic Theory of Learning, we also propose to continue and amplify this multivoiced dialogue. While highlighting still other aspects and contributions made by the same semioticians and philosophers presented by the authors of this book, involving such figures as Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, etc., we have further introduced other voices made to resound throughout, whether directly or indirectly, like that of Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Marcel Danesi, Augusto Ponzio, and Genevieve Vaughan. (shrink)

In light of Perry Anderson's recent re-Iaunch of New Left Review, and the publication of Gregory Elliott's Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History, it is perhaps an opportune moment for Marxists to assess Anderson's contribution to socialist strategic thought. At the heart of Anderson's manifesto is the claim that the principal aspect of the past decade ‘can be defined as the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neoliberalism'. There is, obviously, something in this claim. However, Anderson also briefly (...) notes, amongst other counter-currents, the labour upsurge in France in 1995, but dismisses the significance of these events with the claim that ‘capital has comprehensively beaten back all threats to its rule'. Anderson compares the context of the launch of the first New Left Review with that of the present day. He writes that, back then, a third of the planet had broken with capitalism, the discrediting of Stalinism in 1956 had unleashed a vital process of the rediscovery of authentic Marxism, while, culturally, there had been a qualitative break with the conformism of the 1950s. Today, by contrast, American capitalism has reasserted its international primacy, European social-democratic governments are implementing policies designed to follow the American model, Japan is suffering from a slump, while the Russian catastrophe has produced no popular backlash. Moreover, the Western powers have recently asserted themselves successfully in the Balkans, and, despite upsurges against capital in the 1990s, ‘no collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon’. How are socialists to respond to this diagnosis? In this essay, I want to locate the logic of Anderson's interpretation of the present conjuncture within the context of his previous strategic claims. I will argue that, while socialists will always have much to learn from Anderson, strategically his thought has systematically suffered from a form of political impressionism. This suggests that his interpretation of the present conjuncture may fail the test of history. (shrink)

This article examines the interaction between grammar and multimodal resources by analyzing reported speech in Korean multiparty face-to-face interaction. The operation of two relevancy rules — minimization and recognition in interaction — is examined together with how the absence or presence of grammar is complemented by multimodal resources of various sorts. For the analysis, three categories are posited depending on who the quoted character is in the talk. In quoting oneself or co-participants in the talk, syntactic resources, prosody, sequential organization (...) and embodied participant frameworks collaborate in the interactional management of the quote without overt realization of grammatical resources traditionally proposed for building quotations in Korean. The multimodal character of quoted speech is most weakly realized when quoting a non-present character, not only because of the limitation in body and spatial resources available in the local context to recover various referential terms, but more importantly, because the interactional project that the parties are engaged in makes a distancing device such as the quotative particle -ko relevant. This study provides evidence for the intricate interaction between multimodal resources and grammar through investigation of an important realm of human interaction, that of reported speech. (shrink)

This meta-study applies a socio-semiotic framework combining five basic communicational aspects, form, content, act, time, and space, developed to help answering the questionCan animals refer?It further operates with four levels, sign, utterance, genre, and lifeworld, studying relations between utterance and genre in particular. Semantic key terms found in an excerpted ‘resource collection’ consisting of three anthologies, two academic journals, and a monography, studying content in animal communication, are inspected, and discussed, especially information, functional reference, and reference. Since a temporary inspection (...) concluded that the field seems unable to give convincing joint answers, the scope of the meta-study was extended to include critical investigations of implicit communicational epistemologies applied in the sources. Two major challenges were brought to surface. Firstly, the problem of conflicting interrelatedness in animal utterances (parts versus whole). Positioning analyses revealed that theories and project-designs were mostly dyadic, prioritising form/content, content/function, or function/form, and rarely form/content/function, as a whole. The second concerned the issue of functional openness of animal communication systems. The meta-study found that more recent studies tend to reduce an essentialist search for ‘clear’ categories in favor of more complex designs, where focus is less on references in utterances as such and more on a species’ communicational system. This shift in turn leads to a problematisation of the role of context, kinds of communication (life-genres) and semantic levels in animal utterances, in other words, on animal communication for particular species as a whole. (shrink)

The introduction claims that there might exist an evolutionary bridge from possible genres in nature to human cultural genres. A sub-hypothesis is that basic life-conditions, partly common for animals and humans, in the long run can generate so-called life-genres. To investigate such hypotheses a framework of interrelated key communicational concepts is outlined in the second, main part. Four levels are suggested. Signs are seen as elements in utterances. Further, sufficiently similar utterances can be perceived as kinds of utterances or genres. (...) Genres are kinds of communication in a species' life-world. Utterance and genre are the framework’s key concepts. Both are seen as products and processes and as constituted by five reciprocal aspects: form, content, act, time, and space, the necessary elements to initiate and interpret communication. A model illustrates this integrative principle. Part three dwells with the idea of life-genres, and part four exemplifies and problematises how a chimpanzee’s ‘begging’ for meat, a fish’s nest-making, and kinds of birdsongs, could be seen as possible life-genres. The last, short part gives a brief summary, highlights challenges, and reflects over the framework’s relevance for biosemiotics. (shrink)

This article considers the process of commodification as a cultural means of the reproduction of subjectivity. The particular aim is to highlight the psychic processes that are tempted by commodification. Thus, at the background of this essay, there is a psychoanalytical notion of the self that has been developed in an examination of subjectivity and play, a notion based especially on the thinking of D.W. Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin. These analysts see an ambivalent self‐destructiveness of the self reformulated in relation (...) to the ‘potential space’ of play. In relation to this analysis, the influence of advanced capitalism on the self is discussed in some of its more competitive scenes of consumptions. The quiz show The Weakest Link, for example, is considered as a pale, commodified form of play. It is argued that the main seduction of the show is the dwindled and distorted potential space offered by its ultimate, destructive, and in the last analysis sado‐masochistic logic of exchange. In addition to The Weakest Link, a couple of relevant thematisations of commodified culture by contemporary Finnish literature are brought out. Moreover, the commodification of subjectivity by the means of play is loosely related to some general characterisations concerning the prevailing cultural situation. (shrink)

While much has been written about relativism, multiculturalism and dialogue the case of education is special as in education the teacher aims to promote a set of values. This role of the teacher as bearing a worldview to be advanced is rarely addressed in the literature and is the focus of this paper. In the first section we explore the concept of polyphony and the vision it presents for education. We then turn to the idea of dialogue as developed by (...) Bakhtin and present a communicative model conducive to a polyphonic educational environment. In the third section we portray the dynamics of polyphony in the classroom suggesting an analysis of the parameters defining the participants in the educational setting and the relations between them. We conclude by drawing the implications of our position to the question set out above: the paradox the teacher is subject to in advancing a set of values in a dialogue with students. (shrink)

Ecofeminist philosophy and literary theory need mutually to enhance each other's critical praxis. Ecofeminism provides the grounding necessary to turn the Bakhtinian dialogic method into a critical theory applicable to all of one's lived experience, while dialogics provides a method for advancing the application of ecofeminist thought in terms of literature, the other as speaking subject, and the interanimation of human and nonhuman aspects of nature. In the first part of this paper the benefits of dialogics to feminism and ecofeminism (...) are explored; in the second part dialogics as method is detailed; in the third part literary examples are discussed from a dialogical ecofeminist perspective. (shrink)