Cultural
semiotics — Visual semiotics — Semiotic theory
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Department
of Semiotics
Cultural
semiotics — Visual semiotics — Semiotic theory
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Visiting address: Biskopsgatan 5,
Lund, Sweden
Postal address: Box 117, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
Telephone: (+46)-(0)46/2229531 or (+46)-(0)40/293923
FAX: (+46)-(0)46/2224204 or (+46)-(0)46/2223392
E-mail:
For all issues concerning administation, contact Institute of Art History & Musicology.
Official address of Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies and of Nordic Network of Semiotic Research
Staff:
| Name | Function | E-mail address | Telephone |
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| Göran Sonesson | professor |
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046-2229531 |
| Sara Lenninger | doctorate student |
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046-2228430 |
| Anna Cabak Redei | Dr. Ph. |
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046-2228430 |
| Ximena Narea | doctorate student |
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Semiotics, translated as the science of signification,
is often said to derive from two sources, the American philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
It is, in particular, the latter tradition which has gone through a rich development
in our century, beginning in Russia and in Czechoslovakia during the first decades,
then encountering a new vigour in France and Italy in the fifties and the sixties,
and finally diffusing over the whole world, notably to Germany, Belgium, Denmark,
Poland, and Spain, in Europe, and to USA and Latin America. With the single
exception of Denmark, the Nordic countries have been newcomers to this game.
At present, in the best work, the philosophical rigour of Peirce has been intimately
united to the empirical approach found in Saussure.
Above all, semiotics is a peculiar point of view: a perspective which consists
in asking ourselves how things become carriers of meaning. Thus, the
task of semiotics involves the determination of criteria which may help separate
different sign types and other kinds of signification. Well-known instances
of such typologies are Peirces trichotonomy icon/index/symbol and the opposition
between the analogue and the digital. Both these distinctions turns out to be
insufficient, if not inadequate, when they are confronted with actually existing
system of signification.
One reasons for this is that one and the same sign instance may play several
different parts at the same time: a picture may represent something, express
something, refer to its own material character, allude to something, be a metaphor
or constitue some other type of indirect sign for something. Since semiotics
is interesting in finding general rules and regularities, it tries to describe
these phenomena as generic functions in some kind of system.
But it must be admitted that these generic functions are modified by the contexts
in which they appear. Therefore, semiotics is not only called upon to describe
similarities and dissimilarities between different ways of conveying signification,
but equally the different ways in which several systems of signification collaborate
at the transmission of meaning (spoken and written language, gestures and facial
expression during a chat or as part of a theatre representation or a film; that
which may be conveyed by new media such as the computer, etc.). In contrast
to the abstract approach characterising earlier semiotics, semiotics of culture
looks at similarities and convergences between different systems of signification
in historically existing cultures.
See also
We take our point of departure in a critical reception of the so-called semiotics of culture, initiated by the Tartu school in the early seventies, mostly with a view of interpreting Russian history, and which was then developed by mostly German and North American semioticians. Our aim, however, is to apply this point of view to the differences between pre-modern and modern forms of communication in the widest sense of the term, and to their modification in recent times. We are particularly interested in the spatial expression of these forms of communication, for instance the shape of the city. Another focus of our interest is the influence of new media, such as television and computers, and the increasing importance of some old sign types, such as pictures.
Another line of reasoning which we are pursuing has to do with the position of the art sphere within culture, as a specific, but ever-changing, part of the wider domain of picture production. We have also taken an ever more acute interest in the difficulties of contact between Swedish culture and other cultures, those outside its domain of spatial extension, naturally, but also those which nowadays occupy the same space, that is the immigrant cultures.
And on the other hand the development of a model for pictorial semiotics, which
is based on visual rhetoric, itself founded on concepts of indexicality
and opposition:
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This work started out long ago as an attempt to
study linguistic problems in an integrated semiotic framework, meant
as a substitute for the “pragmatic waste-basket”. This attempt was
extended, during my Paris years, into a semiotics of gestuality. Since
I have recently taken up this line of study again, I reproduce here some of
my earliest articles, together with the newer ones.
An even more recent line of development, within the framework of the project "Language, gesture, and pictures from the point of view of semiotic development", concerns developmental semiotics:
Some of the reports “published” by the Semiotics Projects, during the late eighties, but never widely accessible, will here be made available in PDF format. The first report is in Swedish, but they others are in English. Viewing and/or printing the PDF files requires the Acrobat PDFViewer plugin, distributed free of charge by Adobe.
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Semiotic bibliographyMy bibliography of visual semiotics, elaborated in 1990, has now been made available on the net, courtesy of Visio, and it will soon be actualised |
Current issues in pictorial semioticsLectures at the Semiotics Institute Online by Göran Sonesson
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Course available each term (Information only in Swedish)
Course given during Autumn term 2004 and 2005. Information on literature and lectures
below (in Swedish)
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The Departement of semiotics initiated during the Autumn term of 2002 a new project in collaboration with the Department of cognitive sciences and the Institute of linguistics, with the theme Language, gesture and pictures from the point of view of semiotic development (SGB).Within this framework, seminars are organised in collaboration, and there is a series of conferences by prominent invited researchers in the field. A doctorate position in semiotics and another one in cognitive sciencs have been created |
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The project publishes workings-papers on the internet. The Department of semiotics has so far published the following:
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Since April 1, 2005, the Department of semiotics participates, in collaboration with the Department of cognitive science and the Institute of linguistics, in a project financed by the EU commission which has as its main theme the study of "Stages in the Evolution and Development of Sign Use". The three departments in Lund work together with research groups in London, Portsmouth, Leipzig, Rome and Marseille. The principal goal of the project is to uncover the origins of human cognitive uniqueness, and for that purpose a number of cross-species comparative studies are to be performed involving human beings and great apes. Sub-themes of the project are as follows: 1) perception and categorization; 2) iconicity and pictures; 3) spatial conceptialization and metaphor; 4) imitation and mimesis; 5) intersubjectivity and convention. The over-arching goal is to develop an new, empirically founded, theory about human development.
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Google Semiotics Search Engine
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Maintained by Göran Sonesson |
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Last updated 2008-09-03
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Institutionen
för konst & musikvetenskap |
Avd.
för semiotik Avd.
för konstvetenskap
Avd för musikvetenskap |
Lunds
universitet Lund University |
