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 Liturgical Semiotics: Moses Mendelssohn's “Jerusalem”

Steven Kepnes

in Jewish Liturgical Reasoning

One of the major tasks of Mendelssohn and other Jewish thinkers is to formulate a larger vision of the Enlightenment, in which the Jews would not only participate but also take the lead. In Jerusalem ... More

One of the major tasks of Mendelssohn and other Jewish thinkers is to formulate a larger vision of the Enlightenment, in which the Jews would not only participate but also take the lead. In Jerusalem (Berlin, 1783), Mendelssohn presents Jewish liturgies as particularly sophisticated forms of rational and theological semiosis. The group performance of Jewish liturgies is a signifying event in which the dynamism of God's spirit and the living wisdom and guidance of God's Torah is represented. Thus, liturgical semiosis is especially important to Judaism because it defeats all idolatrous attempts to fix spirit and wisdom in concrete forms. Mendelssohn's view is that all commandments and laws provide scripts for countless behavioral performances. This moves Jewish commandments out of the realm of civil and criminal law into a philosophical, theological, and aesthetic arena that is led by signs.Less

The Poetical and Rhetorical Structure of the Eliadean Text: A Contribution to Critical Theory and Discourses on Religions

Daniel Dubuisson and Andrew Meehan

in Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade

Many critical studies have been devoted to the controversial ideas developed by Mircea Eliade in his works. This chapter will not repeat them. Instead, it focuses on the easily recognizable poetic ... More

Many critical studies have been devoted to the controversial ideas developed by Mircea Eliade in his works. This chapter will not repeat them. Instead, it focuses on the easily recognizable poetic processes used by Eliade, which are inseparable from the pernicious ideology they transmit. In the first place, they define a certain style, identifiable by its grandiloquence and specific lexicon. This style is always closely linked to a series of topics (the “myth,” the homo religiosus, etc.) and topoi (a catalog of general arguments and common ideas). From these, the text develops its own schemata of mimesis and of semiosis. Together they establish the coherence of the Eliadean text. This coherence is the condition sine qua non of Eliade’s ambition to set out his own system of metaphysics.Less

Argentine Afterword

Sarah Muir

in Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion

The afterword revisits what has happened in Argentina in the years since the period of this book (2003-2007). It argues that the dramatic processes of political polarization that have defined those ... More

The afterword revisits what has happened in Argentina in the years since the period of this book (2003-2007). It argues that the dramatic processes of political polarization that have defined those intervening years can only be understood by revisiting the underexamined period of post-crisis Argentina and the widespread sentiment of “the end of the future” that so many in the Buenos Aires middle class then articulated. That sentiment signals that crisis and critique no longer offer the emancipation they once did and amounts to a demand that we—as scholars and intellectuals, activists and citizens—need to rethink both the form and telos of our own critical analysis. How does our globally shared history of repetitive economic crisis transform the nature of the event and of historical time? How can we theorize that historical rhythm and its affordances? How might an appropriate form of critique avoid the threat of paralyzing disillusion and point toward as-yet unrecognized possibilities for the future? The afterword articulates these questions by positioning the middle-class Argentine experience as an especially productive perspective from which to see how the contemporary configuration of crisis and critique forces us to reconsider our own practices and expectations in uncomfortable ways.Less

Mapping The Province: From the Mirror of Nature to Constructive Representation

Kory Spencer Sorrell

in Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism, and Feminist Epistemology

This chapter focuses on the view of representation according to Peirce and the nature of representation itself. This subject requires an extensive discussion of Peirce's semiotic, therefore most of ... More

This chapter focuses on the view of representation according to Peirce and the nature of representation itself. This subject requires an extensive discussion of Peirce's semiotic, therefore most of the chapter focuses on central concepts. Representation must engage in some general way with the semiosis or the science of sign activity. The semiotic proceeds through the development of a general theory of signs with all varieties that are possible in semiosis. A sign of action, or a chain of semiosis development, does not take leave entirely of the reality that gives rise to it. The principal concern in this chapter is with showing how constructive representation can coincide with the real, and providing an argument that the real not only impinges on representation in a relatively external way.Less

Introduction

Sarah Muir

in Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion

The introduction begins with Argentina’s 2001-2002 financial crisis, an event that seemed to many to reveal the bankrupt nature of neoliberal capitalism. That interpretation was especially prevalent ... More

The introduction begins with Argentina’s 2001-2002 financial crisis, an event that seemed to many to reveal the bankrupt nature of neoliberal capitalism. That interpretation was especially prevalent within the middle class of Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, the hopeful sense that the crisis might enable a revitalized future quickly gave way to a profound sense of disillusion, not only with neoliberalism as such, but also with the promise of crisis to serve as the pivot for historical transformation. As an ethnographic experience of negativity, that sense of disillusion was born of a long-term history of repeated political-economic crises. Its analysis thus requires attending to the role that historical narratives play in shaping social life and political possibilities. Foregrounding the emergence and social life of disillusion, the introduction poses the central question of the book: how do people’s ongoing, often conflictual engagements with the past create futures that are uncanny, discomfiting, or ironic, even as they are also unpredictable and open-ended?Less

Signs, Selves, and Semiosis

Michael L. Raposa

in Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

This chapter explores the potential significance for theology of Peirce’s characterization of the self as a sign. The chapter begins by exploring that idea as Peirce developed it and continues by ... More

This chapter explores the potential significance for theology of Peirce’s characterization of the self as a sign. The chapter begins by exploring that idea as Peirce developed it and continues by comparing his view to those articulated by other thinkers such as Kierkegaard, James, Royce, Mead, and Bhaktin. Extending Peirce’s argument, the claim made here is that the human self is most adequately conceived as a “living legisign,” a bundle of habits giving more or less purpose and shape to the self’s story as it unfolds. The key to understanding the religious significance of the self thus portrayed lies in our recognition of its status both as a text to be read by others and as a reader engaged both in interpreting the world of signs and, meta-cognitively, in continuous acts of self-interpretation.Less

Governance failure, metagovernance and its failure

Bob Jessop

in Putting Civil Society in Its Place: Governance, Metagovernance and Subjectivity

This chapter addresses the discovery of 'governance' as the complex art of steering multiple agencies, institutions, and systems that are both operationally autonomous from one another and ... More

This chapter addresses the discovery of 'governance' as the complex art of steering multiple agencies, institutions, and systems that are both operationally autonomous from one another and structurally coupled through various forms of reciprocal interdependence. This discovery reflects the dramatic intensification of societal complexity that flows from growing functional differentiation of institutional orders within an increasingly global society and what this implies for the widening and deepening of systemic interdependencies across various social, spatial, and temporal horizons of action. The chapter state the general links between contingent necessity, complexity, and governance and explores this in terms of semiosis, structuration, collibration; as elements in the governance of complexity.Less

Ambivalence and Popular Culture

Jennifer Robertson

in Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan

The Takarazuka Revue is simultaneously a popular and mass-cultural formation, a contested icon of modernity, and a site of struggle over the relationship of sex, gender, and sexuality. This chapter ... More

The Takarazuka Revue is simultaneously a popular and mass-cultural formation, a contested icon of modernity, and a site of struggle over the relationship of sex, gender, and sexuality. This chapter juxtaposes current theoretical approaches to popular and mass culture with the terms and definitions developed and used by Japanese scholars and critics. It examines how people have negotiated the interwoven politics of sexuality and modernity. The chapter draws an analogy between the “excessive semiosis” of popular culture and the practice of cross-dressing in an attempt to clarify the ways in which ambiguity and ambivalence have been used strategically both to contain difference and to parody the artifice of containment, as in gender.Less

Backlooping: Life in a Revisionary Enclave

Nina Levine and David Lee Miller

in A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

When Harry Berger was writing The Allegorical Temper in the early 1950s, he meant the pun in the title to refer both to the “temper” or attitude attributed to Edmund Spenser at the time and to the ... More

When Harry Berger was writing The Allegorical Temper in the early 1950s, he meant the pun in the title to refer both to the “temper” or attitude attributed to Edmund Spenser at the time and to the way The Faerie Queene tempered or critiqued that temper. Readers encounter turmoil by letting themselves fall through the rabbit hole from the sign/referent surface of discourse into the textual underground, where semiosis is physis and where, within the sign, signifiers and signifieds continuously uncouple, recouple, and proliferate. Once there, the reader shrinks into a tiny figure and the textual underbrush expands to an intemperate tangle of rhizomes. The new organization of life into cyber communities made everything faster and more accessible. It is no substitute for talking and touching face-to-face.Less

Infinite Hospitality and the Redemption of Kitsch

Gavin Hopps

in Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown

This chapter is concerned with popular music and its significance for theology, in the light of David Brown's work on the subject in God and Grace of Body. The chapter begins with a consideration of ... More

This chapter is concerned with popular music and its significance for theology, in the light of David Brown's work on the subject in God and Grace of Body. The chapter begins with a consideration of the general status of pop music as an art-form within academia and challenges the pervasive but unexamined assumption that such music is intrinsically trivial. The chapter then offers an overview of Brown's groundbreaking theological examination of pop, rock and hip-hop, the underlying logic of which is revealed to be consonant with the Derridean principle of dissemination as well as Newman's notion of the illative sense. The second part of the chapter is concerned with possible developments, alternative approaches and potential dangers for theological engagement. In particular, it ponders the relevance for popular music of Jean-Luc Marion's conception of the ‘saturated phenomenon’, the literary-critical notion of ‘mouvance’, and Sontag's seminal account of camp. These different approaches, it is argued, may help to explain how pop music, in the words of Jacques Maritain, can give more than it has.Less

A Brief History of Theosemiotic

Michael L. Raposa

in Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

This chapter supplies a historical survey of theosemiotic, focused less on demonstrating actual lines of causal influence than on exposing the resonance of certain ideas articulated by thinkers ... More

This chapter supplies a historical survey of theosemiotic, focused less on demonstrating actual lines of causal influence than on exposing the resonance of certain ideas articulated by thinkers sometimes far removed from each other in space and time. It links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures (like Augustine, Duns Scotus, John Poinsot, Jonathan Edwards, and Ralph Waldo Emerson), certain contemporaries (especially William James and Josiah Royce), and later thinkers and developments (most notably, H. Richard Niebuhr, Simone Weil, and Gustavo Gutierrez). The chapter begins with an examination of the religious significance of talk about the “book of nature” and concludes with the observation of a certain natural affinity between a theosemiotic inspired by Peirce’s pragmatism and Latin American liberation theology.Less

Eyes Wide Shut

in Loving Yusuf: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past

If words can be signs and signs can be faces shown or withheld, so can elements of paintings. Reading a sura is processing and responding to a “visible sign of a transcendental reality.” Visibility ... More

If words can be signs and signs can be faces shown or withheld, so can elements of paintings. Reading a sura is processing and responding to a “visible sign of a transcendental reality.” Visibility and the sign go hand in hand. A sura that tells the story of Yusuf from point to point shows rather than tells: it is a sign rather than a tale. According to one of the founders of contemporary semiotics, Charles S. Peirce, signs can do their work of signification without having to be split in signifier and signified, as continental semiotics tends to have it. The sign's elements are unstable only temporally. This chapter argues for the temporality of semiosis and for the actuality of its anchoring in philosophy. It brings Peirce, Rembrandt, and Baruch Spinoza together to further elaborate the argument for a literalism that counters fundamentalism.Less

Enclosing and Disclosing Worlds

Paul Kockelman

in Agent, Person, Subject, Self: A Theory of Ontology, Interaction, and Infrastructure

Returning to the notion of semiotic ontologies introduced in chapter 1, this chapter focuses on the relations between three kinds that may be loosely described as material substances (e.g. gold, ... More

Returning to the notion of semiotic ontologies introduced in chapter 1, this chapter focuses on the relations between three kinds that may be loosely described as material substances (e.g. gold, plastic, bacteria, and snowflakes), social statuses (e.g. vagabonds, uncles, sellers, and addressees), and mental states (e.g. beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears). In particular, it treats such kinds as (projected) propensities for being that admit to interpretive reasoning. It analyzes the ways such kinds get indexed and inferred, constructed and naturalized, transformed and stabilized, and more generally enclosed and disclosed in interaction. And it widens the notion of interaction to include not only the relations between people, but also the relations between things, and the relations between people and things (and anything outside or in-between).Less

Introduction

Roi Wagner

in Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense: Histories and Philosophies of Mathematical Practice

This book examines the force of mathematics, what this force builds on, and how it works in practice by discussing mathematics not only from the point of view of applications but also from the point ... More

This book examines the force of mathematics, what this force builds on, and how it works in practice by discussing mathematics not only from the point of view of applications but also from the point of view of its production. It explores the function of mathematical statements, their epistemological position, consensus in mathematics, and mathematical interpretation and semiosis. It also considers the notion of embodied mathematical cognition as well as the limitations of the cognitive theory of mathematical metaphor in accounting for the formation of actual historical mathematical life worlds. This introduction provides an overview of the current state of the philosophy of mathematics and presents a vignette on option pricing to give a concrete example of how mathematics relates to its wider scientific and practical context, with particular emphasis on the Black-Scholes formula.Less

A Constraints-Based Philosophy of Mathematical Practice

Roi Wagner

in Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense: Histories and Philosophies of Mathematical Practice

This chapter describes a constraints-based philosophy of mathematical practice and shows that mathematics can be so many different things, even if we look at a particular branch of mathematics in a ... More

This chapter describes a constraints-based philosophy of mathematical practice and shows that mathematics can be so many different things, even if we look at a particular branch of mathematics in a particular time and place. It introduces a philosophical approach to mathematics that can serve as an integrative framework for the insights of the various philosophies of mathematics and demonstrates what kind of plurality the philosophy of mathematics must embrace, if it is to be faithful to the phenomenon that it seeks to explicate. The chapter reflects on the function of mathematical statements, consensus in mathematics, and mathematical interpretation and semiosis. It also considers various constraints that apply to mathematical practice and how they are negotiated by different mathematical cultures. Finally, it examines more mainstream notions of reality and truth of mathematical entities and statements and suggests how a takeoff on Hilary Putnam's notion of relevance might relativize them.Less

Two Case Studies of Semiosis in Mathematics

Roi Wagner

in Making and Breaking Mathematical Sense: Histories and Philosophies of Mathematical Practice

This chapter presents two case studies that highlight the problems of mathematical semiosis: how mathematical signs obtain and change their senses. The first case study follows the paradigmatic ... More

This chapter presents two case studies that highlight the problems of mathematical semiosis: how mathematical signs obtain and change their senses. The first case study follows the paradigmatic mathematical sign, x, as it is used in applications of powers series to combinatorics via generating functions. The second case study concerns gender role stereotypes involving the so-called “stable marriage problem.” Both case studies open up questions of how meaning is transferred within and across mathematical contexts and try to substantiate the book's claims about interpretation, formalization, and constraints over mathematical objects and statements. The chapter also considers gender-neutral mathematical language in the context of sexuality.Less

“Putting This Mess into a Structure”: Cultural Contradictions and Discursive Resolutions

Eitan Y. Wilf

in Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age

Innovation consultants must not only develop productive innovation strategies but also contend with the macrosociological landscapes in which business innovation is anchored. Set within a modern ... More

Innovation consultants must not only develop productive innovation strategies but also contend with the macrosociological landscapes in which business innovation is anchored. Set within a modern Western normative framework, consultants’ promise to build a stable corporate culture of innovation and organizational creativity embodies a basic cultural contradiction because modern Romantic normative ideals of creative agency connote unpredictability and resistance to formalization and routinization. Against this backdrop, the chapter analyzes the ways in which innovation workshop facilitators attempt to reframe this cultural contradiction and thus encourage workshop participants to inhabit the—on the surface, counter-intuitive—idea that innovation can and should be routinized, formalized, and rationalized. They do so by means of different ritual-semiotic communicative events. They first bring into being the specific macrosociological order that opposes a Romantic ethos (associated with mercurial human creativity) and a professional ethos (associated with rule-governed rationality). During the workshop this macrosociological order then becomes the basis for suggested transformations in the roles that participants inhabit with respect to innovation, namely from associating innovation with a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to accepting at its end that a professional ethos can lead to successful innovation as a permanent feature of the organization.Less