Avdelningen för semiotik Kultursemiotik — Visuell semiotik — Semiotisk teori

Overview of some problems addressed by cultural semiotics

(as conceived in Lund):

1. Questions studied by the Tartu school
   
2. Issues introduced by German semioticians and American anthropologists
   
3. The heritage from Husserl's Lifeworld, resurrected as Greimas "natural world" and Gibson's "ecological physics"
   
4. The problems of time geography (Hþgerstrand) encountering those of the semiotics of space
   
5. Questions resulting from the study of modernity
   

Semioticians, inspired by Jakobson and Eco, tend to think of all types of communication along the lines suggested by the model constructed in the mathematical theory of information. In fact, this model is not very adequate for the description of most kinds of communication, and in fact tends to treat all communication as being of a kind (cf. The multimediation of the lifeworld )

The earlier model elaborated by the Prague school has the advantage of emphasizing the active part played by the receiver/perceiver. It can easily be generalized beyond the domain of literature and fine art:

The principal advantage of the Tartu school model is to focus on the difficulties of communication, and to insist on the dialectics of ego and alter at the centre of all forms of communicative interchange.

Putting together ideas from the Prague and Tratu schools, as well as the notion of dialogue, also between social groups and cultures, such as it was developped by Bachtin, and by Peirce before him, we have constructed a much more general model of communicaiton in the widest sens of the word:

The most simple case of that of face-to-face interaction, such as it may occur in the street, where the the source (sender) is also the message, and where the target (receiver) may become a message in turn:

The technological and other mediations of the basic communication model may be of many kinds, some of which are shown below:

Maintained by Göran Sonesson

Last updated 2004-02-04