Where is semiotics now? As the promised science of the social life of signs in general, semiotics has not been good to its word. Although well-established institutionally today--through specialist journals, research centres, international conferences, professional associations and the like--semiotics now seems quaintly out of place in a world where text, culture and technology defy metadisciplinary, if not metaphysical, explanation. When the semiotician has finished explaining the music of Primal Scream, the textuality of an email message or the culture of the internet, most would believe there was still lots to be said. A generation ago, the radical humanities scholar turned to semiotics for the last word on news production, cinematic desire or the meaning of youth style. Today that last word (which is always the latest word too) is more likely to go to cultural studies, literary theory or postmodernism--all of which are in several senses 'beyond' semiotics even while remaining indebted to it. In addition, we can't so easily presume to separate notions of production and desire, say, or news and cinema, precisely because we can no longer say for sure where the differences lie between notions of text, culture and technology. Beyond Semiotics provides an approach to these three interdependent concepts of text, culture and technology, in order to show what semiotics had always had to marginalize, forget, or not see in the quest to professionalize itself. Meanwhile, outside the limitation of any discipline, the secular mysteries of text, culture and technology today continue to call for a response--not with the aim of laying bare the truth, but of opening up the sign.

This book invites readers to embark on a journey into the world of agency encompassing humans, other organisms, cells, intracellular molecular agents, colonies, populations, ecological systems, and artificial autonomous systems. We combine mechanistic and non-mechanistic approaches in the analysis of the function and evolution of organisms, their subagents, and multi-organism systems, and in this way offer a theoretical platform for integrating biosemiotics with both natural science and the humanities/social sciences. Agents are autonomous systems that incorporate knowledge on how to make sense of their environment and use it to achieve their goals. The functions of all agents are supported by mechanisms at the lowest level; however, the explanatory power of mechanistic analysis is not sufficient for complex agents. Non-mechanistic methods rely on the goal-directedness of agents whose dynamics follow self-stabilized dynamic attractors. The properties of attractors depend on stable or slowly changing factors, and such dependencies can be interpreted as sign relations if they are adaptive in nature. Agents can replace or redirect mechanisms on demand in order to preserve their functions; for performing higher-level semiotic functions, mechanisms are thus only means. We assume that mechanism and semiosis are not mutually exclusive, and that simple agents can interpret signs mechanistically. This assumption allows us to extend semiotic analysis to all agents, including ribosomes in cells, computers, and robots. This book challenges established traditions in natural science and the humanities/social sciences: semiotics no longer appears as restricted to humans and rational thinking, and biology is no longer limited to rely exclusively on mechanistic reasoning.

Critical Semiotics provides long overdue answers to questions at the junction of information, meaning and 'affect'. The affective turn in cultural studies has received much attention: a focus on the pre-individual bodily forces, linked to automatic responses, which augment or diminish the body's capacity to act or engage with others. In a world dominated by information, how do things that seem to have diminished meaning or even no meaning still have so much power to affect us, or to carry on our ability to affect the world? Linguistics and semiotics have been accused of being adrift from the affective turn and not accounting for these visceral forces beneath or generally other from conscious knowing. In this book, Gary Genosko delivers a detailed refutation, with analyses of specific contributions to critical semiotic approaches to meaning and signification. People want to understand how other people are moved and to understand embodied social actions, feelings and passions at the same time as understanding how this takes place. Semiotics must make the affective turn.

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A theory of human origins that is one-half Charles Darwin and one-half Cain and Abel is bound to entail a lot of rethinking of traditional themes. Rene Girard's thesis of original human violence and the Bible's power to reveal it has been around for more than a generation, but its consequences for Christian theology are still only slowly being unpacked. Anthony Bartlett's book makes a signal contribution, representing an astonishing leap forward in understanding what a biblical disclosure of founding violence means for Christian thought and life. If human language arose directly out of the primal experience of murder, then semiotics becomes a core area for theological examination. Tracing the discipline of semiotics through postmodern thinkers, then back through its birth in the Latin era, Bartlett shows how Girard's thought is itself a semiotic emergence, beyond standard Christian metaphysics. Above all, Girardian theory of human signs demands we see the generative impact of violence in our language and thought, and then, conversely, that the Word of God, crucified without retaliation and risen in the same identity, brings a totally new sign and relation into history, offering a thoroughgoing transformation of human life and meaning.

Approx.394 pages

This interdisciplinary conversation discusses the nature of language.