In “Body Parts and their Names in Russian: the Biological and Semiotic Pairs of Body Parts”, Grigory Kreydlin and Sveltlana Pereverzeva conveys a disciplined exercise in the articulation of terminological and semiotic pairing and oppositions pertaining to body parts. Layering systematised organisation of terms of biological knowledge and physiological symmetry, the paper has a neo-structuralist method and elegance that echoes the penetrating analysis of patterns in indigenous cultures by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The work contributes to gestural study in a salient, focused manner, showing a patient attention to example, method and concept that is essential for gestural semiotics to develop further.
“Coming out of Culture” by Eduardo Chávez Herrera is a most welcome and impressive contribution to this volume. Eduardo elucidates the experience of migration using key references to the semiotics of Lotman. Using an extensive case study of Moroccan youth, he traces transcultural acculturation in terms of hybridisation, readjustment and reorganization within particular contexts of interaction. Once again, signs of interaction are understood as diverse and dynamic. Semiotics itself is understood as the study of change and diversity. The reference to migratory experience is immediate for many readers, such as in Australia, America and parts of Europe, where migration and refugee intakes is present at the start of the 21st century as it has ever been. This paper is welcomed as an introduction to major directions for this review. The perpetuity and immediacy of its subject matter does not diminish but accentuates the need for a theoretical framework. This is cultural experience that needs to become the object of research: it provides a pleasing and contemporary re-examination of long standing theorisation of the self, understood as auto-communication, self-description and self-identification, and the other. Herrera delves into the manifold emergent complexities of contemporary cultural and political change, in a committed and assured, sustained inquiry.
Christina Spiesel (“The Fate of the Iconic Sign”) shows the opportunity to define and respond to digital media forms, and opens up an inquiry into how semiotics can enlighten the nature of processes of media embedded into our interpersonal and social practices. The presumption that media can be understood as an essentially passive and realist tool in recording its subject is immediately questioned in the case of cam video that proliferates in our society. We need a new analytic language to help understand the range and function of video in areas such as video-conference, webcam and POV (point of view) portable recording, and Christina Spiesel probes and applies the concepts of iconicity to provide a commentary on numerous behavioural, legal, technical and communicative issues.
Spiesel’s taser example shows how discernment is required in any form of video composition. There is a fundamental error in regarding video as a passive or realistic medium. The apparently fixed and close up framing of the video-conference interview restricts gestures and body movement, and can focus on the face in a way that is not natural or realistic in everyday interactions. Fixed video shots are framed and controlled as much as they are truthful. With the prevalence of video as evidence, professionals such as legal practitioners, she argues, need to be literate in the language of media.
A simple naïve presumption of truthfulness inherent in the video medium will not go far in evaluating the merit and meaning of security or hand held amateur shots tendered as essential evidence during hearings. The journey of inquiry into the nature of images and visual representation is very much along the lines of Peirce’s inquiry into visual semiotics and icons. An uncanny idealism about the transformative effects of new digital media to reform traditional practices can prevent close attention being given to the effects of new media, and Spiesel invites us to employ semiotic concepts and methods as part of contemporary inquiry.