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201. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1/4
Richard Henry Critifiction: Postmodern Essays
202. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1/4
John Corner Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics
203. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1/4
C. W. Spinks Literary Semiotics: A Critical Approach
204. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Klaus Krippendorff The Dialogic Reality of Meaning
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This paper offers a non-representational alternative to semiotic notions of meaning as the designatum of signs, the content of messages, or what a text is about. It derives from considerations of how things—artifacts and objects of nature—could mean something to somebody. Rather than treating things as signs of themselves and thereby undermining the two-world ontology of semiotics, it explores the cultural roles that artifacts acquire in the lives of their users and when questions of their meanings arise and how they are answered in conversation. The paper presents a dialogical conception of meaning, which relies on Bateson’s recognition of the importance of multiple descriptions, Wittgenstein’s “seeing as”, theories of embodied narratives, and bricolages involving technology.
205. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
James A. Anderson An Ecology of Communication: An Acknowledgement of Gregory Bateson
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Written from a post-modern perspective, this article makes use of the concepts of obligation, subject position, line of action, discursive form, sentient agent, exchange, mediating technology, intentionality, improvisational performance, and communicative routines to produce an overarching theory of communication and its processes. The work of the article is to develop the linkages among these concepts and founds this analysis in ethnographic research. It concludes that the process of communication occurs inside a nexus of obligation from relational subject positions within some line of action regularly involving a discursive form. It is enacted by two or more sentient agents performing an exchange often utilizing a mediating technology under the intentionality of an improvisationalperformance of a pre-existing communicative routine.
206. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Peter Harries-Jones Consciousness, Embodiment, and Critique of Phenomenology in the Thought of Gregory Bateson
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The initiators of information theory had deliberately tried to expunge ‘meaning’ from aspects of their theory. Bateson’s ecology of mind was consistent with physical definitions of information as feedback and constraint yet tied these cybernetic mechanisms into context of messages, meta-messages, and their meaning. Thus Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology was of a most unusual type: a theory of informational constraint with no located mind, a theory of agency in which conscious purpose was no longer the guiding executor of mental activity. At the same time Bateson rejected many premises of phenomenology: self-hood or body-hood could not be arbitrarily cut off from the reflexive and recursive system of communication in which human beings were always involved. Embodiment, the interactions that evoke the ‘fabric’ (Merleau-Ponty) of life, involve communicative interactions both as persons within a system of social relations and also as living organisms within a system of ecological relations.
207. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Mary Catherine Bateson Daddy, Can a Scientist Be Wise?
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My thinking in this essay, written in 1977, reflects the 1968 Wenner-Gren Conference on Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation, organized by Gregory, about which I wrote Our Own Metaphor, as well as later conversations, but I had not yet worked with Gregory on Mind and Nature. Here, I explore Gregory’s idiosyncratic definitions of evocative terms like “love”, “mind”, and “wisdom” in terms of a cybernetically-based epistemology. The style and context are reflective of his Father-Daughter “metalogues”, composed to explore concepts he was not yet ready to define fully, one of which is quoted as an introduction. Most of the sub-headings have been added.
208. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Deborah Eicher-Catt The Logic of the Sacred in Bateson and Peirce
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By performing an abduction of Bateson and Peirce, we come to understand the logic of the sacred as a semiotic and phenomenological communicative phenomenon. First, I compare and contrast their ideas concerning ontology, epistemology, and logic. Next, I articulate how both theorists construct their epistemologies within a triadic frame of relations that successfully accounts for a communicative logic that activates the integration of body and Mind. Finally, I bring Bateson’s triadic relations of aesthetics,consciousness (mental process), and the sacred in line with Peirce’s existential semiotic categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. We discover the sacred is constituted within a communicative logic that is abductive. As such, I argue that Bateson’s epistemology of the sacred becomes more accessible as a postmodern philosophy when viewed as a condition of phenomenological semiosis.
209. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Corey Anton Playing with Bateson: Denotation, Logical Types, and Analog and Digital Communication
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Gregory Bateson’s work on play led him to conclude that paradox is the ground of propositions and denotation. Working through the concepts of analog and digital communication, logical typing problems, and various dimensions of “framing” and meta-discourse, I broadly illustrate how what Bateson came to call “the paradoxes of abstraction” inevitably arise within denotative utterances. In addressing the root paradoxes of framing and denotation which Bateson’s work on play identified and sought to elucidate, this manuscript outlines and advances some of Bateson’s main contributions to communication theory.
210. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Isaac E. Catt Gregory Bateson’s ‘New Science’ in the Context of Communicology
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Jakobson’s well-known model of communication includes implicit time and space message-to-code and contact-to-context relations. The symbolic displacement of humans from nature and the possible discovery of human nature occur in the embodied reversibility of these relations. Bateson’s view of the meta function in communication supports this postmodern turn, as does Peirce’s phenomenological conception of semiosis. In this abductive context, Bateson’s ideas are used to augment Peirce specifically onembodiment in semiosis. Communicology is nominated the “new science” and semiotic phenomenology the “new paradigm” envisioned by Bateson.
211. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Paul Ryan Bateson, Peirce, and the Three Person Solution
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Gregory Bateson identified an array of difficulties in human relationships including double binds, confusion between complimentary and symmetrical relations, and the ‘sliding triad’. This essay presents a solution to these and other difficulties in the form of a ‘yoga’ of relationships in which participants take turns playing three different roles keyed to the three phenomenological categories of Charles Sanders Peirce.
212. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Marian Zielinski A Semiotic Phenomenology of Aesthetic Systems: Reflections on Ornament, Patterns, and Habits in Creative Expression
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This article investigates the significance of Bateson’s concept of metapattern and the intrinsic correlation of his distinctions between the conscious, the aesthetic, and the sacred as they apply to theatre and the visual arts. It entails a series of phenomenologicalreflections on ornament and visual patterns as they relate to explorations of character (as habit) and environment (as habitat). As well, I explore the implications of the traces we leave as individuals (i.e., as expressive embodiments of culture), traces that mark the patterns of our individuality and our communion with others. I conclude that these eloquent visible marks we inscribe in space and time do not simply seek a type of immortality, but rather also embrace our humanity and the small but poetic role we play in the cycle of the semiotic cosmos.
213. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Yair Neuman The Logic of Meaning-in-context
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The idea that a sign has meaning only in context invites serious inquiry into the meaning of meaning, context, and meaning-in-context. In this paper, and following Bateson’s ecological approach to the mind, I suggest that meaning is a form of coordination between interacting agents, and that this form of coordination is orchestrated through context markers, the variability of the sign, and symmetric transformation of the agents. This suggestion is examined by using signaling processes across various animal species and by drawing specific attention to current conceptions of context and mind.
214. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
Alexander Kozin The Sign of Love: Gregory Bateson and the Family Therapy Paradigm
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In this essay, I argue for the continuous influence of Gregory Bateson’s Communicology on the field of family therapy. My argument is based on a re-examination of Bateson’s Palo Alto research period. More specifically, I suggest that family therapy saw its genesis in Bateson’s work on the double bind paradox, which has become the matrix for the family’s communication system approach. In this essay I closely examine the paradox’s structure from two perspectives: systemic and semiotic. I show how several main elements of the problem posed by Bateson translated into various approaches to family therapy thus constituting it as a self-sustaining paradigm.
215. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1/4
About the Authors
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Max H. Fisch Just How General Is Peirce's General Theory of Signs?
217. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1/2
Wolfgang M. Ueding A German Supplement to the Peirce Bibliographies, 1877-1981
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Roberta Kevelson Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign and Its Masters
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
220. The American Journal of Semiotics: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1/2
Henryk Baran BOOKS RECEIVED