Crushing Animals and Crashing Funerals: The Semiotics of Free Expression

With insights from philosophy of language and semiotics, this article addresses judicial choices and semantic errors involved in United States v. Stevens, 130 S.Ct. 1577 (2010) (refusing to read “killing” and “wounding” to include cruelty and thus striking down a federal statute outlawing videos of animal cruelty), and Snyder v. Phelps, 131 S.Ct. 1207 (2011) (finding a First Amendment right to picket military funerals and verbally attack parents of dead soldiers as part of purportedly-public expression). This article maintains that a better understanding of semiotics (the theory of signs) exposes the flaws in both decisions and bolsters the arguments of the lone dissenter in both cases, Justice Alito. Such a better understanding of semiotics involves grasping (a) how expression involves signs, (b) how signs work in general, and (c) the differences between three basic kinds of signs (indexes, icons and symbols). This article maintains that the expression involved in Stevens and in Phelps was a type of indexical or quasi-indexical expression that, for reasons similar to those involved in child pornography cases, should have no First Amendment protection. This article also notes shifting interpretive positions in the Court that cry out for reform. Although Chief Justice Roberts uses a textualist approach in his majority opinion striking down the animal cruelty statute in Stevens, his majority opinion in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 132 S.Ct. 2566 (2012), has no trouble finding a “penalty” a “tax,” upholding the Affordable Care Act, and chastising the dissent for voting to strike down a statute simply because “. . . Congress used the wrong labels.” Id. at 2597. This article attempts to expose such gamesmanship in “textualism” and attempts to lay out a better semiotic path for the Court. It calls for more forthright judicial decision-making in constitutional and statutory interpretation; calls for rejecting mechanical notions of law that conceal judicial choice involved in constitutional and statutory interpretation; and calls for rejecting claims that dictionaries can settle constitutional or statutory interpretation issues without reference to constitutional and statutory goals. Keywords: interpretation, construction, meaning, plain meaning, originalism, original intent, canon, semiotics, signs, signals, symbol, icon, index, signifier, signified, ordinary meaning, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, animal cruelty, first amendment, statute

Intermedial Studies

Intermedial Studies provides a concise, hands-on introduction to the analysis of a broad array of texts from a variety of media – including literature, film, music, performance, news and videogames, addressing fiction and non-fiction, mass media and social media. The detailed introduction offers a short history of the field and outlines the main theoretical approaches to the field. Part I explains the approach, examining and exemplifying the dimensions that construct every media product. The following sections offer practical examples and case studies using many examples, which will be familiar to students, from Sherlock Holmes and football, to news, vlogs and videogames. This book is the only textbook taking both a theoretical and practical approach to intermedial studies. The book will be of use to students from a variety of disciplines looking at any form of adaptation, from comparative literature to film adaptations, fan fictions and spoken performances. The book equips students with the language and understanding to confidently and competently apply their own intermedial analysis to any text

The social life of ideophones : exploring linguistic landscaping in Basque publics

In this paper, I focus on the analyzing the processes of production, emplacement, and uptake of ideophonic signage in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain (Blommaert 2013). I place this focus within an ethnographically situated linguistic landscape, by which I refer to a set of literacy forms that can provide insight into language ideological frameworks that surround such linguistic practices. Specifically, I analyze the potential uptakes of visual-written ideophonic signage in public spaces and their relation to language ideologies about Basque identities, revitalization and speakerhood that circulate in the BAC. I argue that this use of Basque ideophony evokes a local kind of intimacy through processes of rhematization, creating an iconic relationship between sound and sense that comes to link Basque people and tourists to the language through ‘qualia’ mapped onto these linguistic forms (Gal 2005, 2013). This mode of iconization (Irvine and Gal 2000) enacts an oppositional stance toward Standard Basque, as either taken up by Basque speakers who are insecure about their fluency or by tourists who are in need of a branded cultural experience. That is, these ideophones are able to publicly stage this intimate connection between sound, sense, and place by presupposing and opposing the authoritative place of Standard Basque, which marginalizes ideophones and other nonnormative modes of speaking. Furthermore, the same ideophones that index and iconicize linguistic intimacy for some (and in some cases the same) Basque natives also simultaneously do the metacultural work of displaying Basqueness—and of selling “localness” to the tourist (Urban 2001, Coupland 2012). These Basque ideophones work to interpellate a Basque public (Warner 2002, Webster 2017b) that responds to the intimacy of Basque orality and finds in it a marker of authenticity and belonging. As written forms of intimately oral language use devalued in Standard Basque then, these signs push back against the Basque standardization—and ideologies of anonymity implicated therein—in its own terms. Instead, they foreground ideologies of authenticity (Woolard 2016) to exploit their “localness” as uniquely Basque sounds that are untranslatable and that one must learn through various modes of socialization and acquisition within local Basque communities. Analyzing the use of ideophony in signage brings to the fore the ways that verbal art can become a crucial site for making social critique via aesthetic (and poetic) resistance. Furthermore, this study reinforces the importance for scholars of language minority movements to verbally artistic language use and literacy practices in everyday, non-normative contexts more broadly, which often reveal vastly heterogeneous assemblages of ideologies surrounding concepts of publics and language.Anthropolog

The digital moving image: Revising indexicality and transparency

Cinema as the projected filmic image has been the focus of moving image theory for over a century. Television and video have taken a back seat for several reasons; in particular that they are often considered as inferior moving image mediums in some aspects, both conveying a lesser degree of transparency and, more recently in digital form, being devoid of indexicality as theorised by Charles Sanders Pierce. That is, they supposedly possess a weaker connection to the real or, what Jay David Bolter calls, “the authentic”. This paper, via Tom Gunning’s work on digital media and the claim to photographic truth, will explore and problematise these notions with the aim of challenging the longstanding primacy of the cinematic moving image as well as softening the analog/digital divide

THE PROMISE OF THE INDEX IN CONTEMPORARY DOCUMENTARY PERFORMANCE

This essay investigates the troubled status of the concept of the index and its concomitant notion of evidence within the context of a global, visual culture. Specifically, the essay centres on the notion of the index in an era, where the use of digital images claiming to truthfully represent war and conflict has become an increasingly important part of warfare. Focusing on two documentary works by respectively performance artist Rabih Mroué and visual artist Abu Lawrence Hamdan (Forensic Architecture), the article shows that whilst both artists rely on material documents, which in each their way index back to conflictual events, the crucial point is not so much the status of the evidentiary material per se. Instead, enabled by fictitious strategies, the artists invite us to pay attention to the differing statuses and meanings assigned to documents depending on the particular knowledge systems and spaces of appearance within which they are perceived. In this way, the essay argues, the works of Mroué and Hamdan help us move beyond the discourses within documentary theory, which tend to conform to either a postmodernist relativist position or a realist epistemology

Sound design for the opera composer: concepts and methods

Sound design has become an important part of theatre, film and contemporary opera, and a creative discipline in its own right. A pattern of convergence between music and sound has emerged during the last two decades across these disciplines. My project investigates this convergence, reviewing the literature and recent sound practice in opera, theatre (particularly Composed Theatre) and film (both live action and animation). This review explores concepts including soundscape, immersion, acousmêtre, the sonic Umwelt and phenomenologies and semiotics of sound through the writings of Michel Chion, Nicholas Cook, R Murray Shafer, Theo Van Leeuwen and others. It also examines the role of sound in the work of practitioners such as composers Steve Reich, John Adams, Heiner Goebbels and Anthony Davis and their collaborators, and sound designers such as Gary Rydstrom, Nicolas Becker and Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen in film, and Ross Brown and Complicité in theatre. From this review I draw out features, or modalities, of existing sound practice with the potential to be integrated into opera composition. I define these modalities as: sound as environment, sound as music, sound as action, sound as inner voice, and sound as sign. These modalities form a theoretical basis upon which to develop a method of opera composition in which sound design is integral. This forms the focus of this project, in particular the objective of moving beyond current practice to create opera with integrated sound design that exemplifies a dynamic and transactional relationship between sound, music and other elements. My three chamber operas Her face was of flowers, Vicky and Albert and The Trilobite, Or The Fall of Mr Williams are the result. I discuss the compositional process and performance history of these three pieces in relation to my five modalities of sound, and the models of sound practice that inspired them. Finally, I draw conclusions from the processes of composing, rehearsing and performing these operas that point the way to further development and exploration of opera with integrated sound design, both in my practice and elsewhere, offering the opera composer a new perspective on working with sound

The virtual observing agent in music: a theory of agential perspective as implied by indexical gesture

The human body is inseparable from our understanding of music. Through embodied cognition, listeners conceptualize music as performed action. We find evidence of this in our most fundamental musical language. “High” pitches resonate high in a singer’s head, while “fast” rhythms resemble fast bodily movement. Scholars have followed the entailments of these metaphors in recent decades, developing theories of bodily gesture (Hatten 2004, Lidov 2005) and physical mimesis (Cox 2011). These hold that the bodily movement that we hear in music can imitate the physical gestures that we use in everyday communication (e.g., waving, nodding, bowing, or sighing). This has its own entailments; most fundamentally, it implies the presence of a virtual, human-like agent within music that is similar to the “virtual persona” theorized by Edward T. Cone (1974). In other words, in perceiving musical sounds as imitative of physical movement and gesture, we infer the presence of a virtual agent who enacts them. This dissertation extends these theories, demonstrating that musical gestures can be mimetic of indexical somatic movements—that is, bodily movements of pointing, looking, striving, and reaching. These indexical gestures suggest the presence of a virtual observing agent. The virtual observing agent acts a lens through which we, the listener, can experience the interior world (diegesis) of a work. This leads us to embody a single and more individualized perspective on the musical representation. I explore the implications of indexical gesture and perspective with an examination of music from the common practice period. Moreover, I bring the theory of virtual observing agency together with theories of musical narrative and emotion.Musi

The end has no end: framing death and the phenomenology of dying in documentary cinema

In a world denying and deconstructing mortality, the intersection between the phenomenology of image and death and the phenomenology of time consciousness seems to call for new attention in contemporary media culture. The recurrent motif of death in fictive film narratives is opposed to its far more complex and controversial counterpart in documentary cinema.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Automatic Environmental Sound Recognition: Performance versus Computational Cost

In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), sound sensing applications are required to run on embedded platforms where notions of product pricing and form factor impose hard constraints on the available computing power. Whereas Automatic Environmental Sound Recognition (AESR) algorithms are most often developed with limited consideration for computational cost, this article seeks which AESR algorithm can make the most of a limited amount of computing power by comparing the sound classification performance em as a function of its computational cost. Results suggest that Deep Neural Networks yield the best ratio of sound classification accuracy across a range of computational costs, while Gaussian Mixture Models offer a reasonable accuracy at a consistently small cost, and Support Vector Machines stand between both in terms of compromise between accuracy and computational cost

Looduskujutuse semiootika: looduskirjanduse näitel

Töö eesmärgiks on avada uusi perspektiive looduskirjanduse uurimisel, kombineerides selleks semiootika ja ökokriitika vahendeid. Tartu-Moskva koolkonna semiootikutelt pärinevad primaarsete ja sekundaarsete modelleerivate süsteemide mõisted. Primaarseks modelleerivaks süsteemiks on nende käsitluses keel kui vahendatud inimsuhtluse põhiline vahend. Sekundaarsed modelleerivad süsteemid nagu kirjandus, film ning paljud teised kunstilise väljenduse liigid põhinevad keelel kui märgisüsteemil, tegeledes meid ümbritseva maailma kunstilise modelleerimisega. Ameerika semiootik Thomas A. Sebeok osutas, et neile, puhtalt inimliigile omastele modelleerivatele süsteemidele, eelneb nii inimeste kui teiste loomade puhul zoosemiootilise modelleerimise tasand, mis põhineb meie tajudel ja kehalisel kogemusel maailmaga suhestumisel. Jakob von Uexkülli mõistet kasutades põhineb zoosemiootiline modelleerimine omailmal (Umwelt) ehk liigispetsiifiliste taju- ja mõjuorganite koostoimel loodaval arusaamal oma keskkonnast ning sellega suhestumise viisidest. Seega võime lähtuda tõdemusest, et modelleerimine on igasuguse mõtestamis- ja kujutamistegevuse alus. Mudel on kommunikatsioonivahend, mis võimaldab nii kunstilist kui teaduslikku infoedastust. Inimliigile omane modelleerimine toimub peaasjalikult loomuliku keele ning selles keeles esitatavate representatsioonide abil. Representatsiooni all mõistan käesolevas töös keskkonna vahendatud esitamist inimkeele kasutamise erijuhu – kirjanduse – vahenditega. Oma töös uurin kirjanduse spestiifilist alaliiki – looduskirjandust. Eesti looduskirjandus kitsamas mõttes on algupäraselt eesti keeles kirjutatud dokumentaalproosa, mis põhineb autori isiklikel looduskogemustel ning loodusteaduslikul informatsioonil ja annab seda edasi kirjanduslikus keeles. Looduskirjandus on tekstuaalse ülesehituse põhimõtetelt sarnane ilukirjandusega, mistõttu teda saab uurida kirjandusteaduslike vahenditega, nagu seda teeb ökokriitika. Erinevalt kirjandustekstist suunab looduskirjandus oma lugejat tekstist läbi, tagasi selle reaalse (loodus)keskkonna juurde, mida tekstis on kujutatud. Iga tekst sisaldab varjatud või vähem varjatud kujul alati ka zoosemiootilise modelleerimise tasandit: tajud, teiste liikide omailmad, liikumis- ja toitumisviisid jm. Biosemiootika aitab seda kihistust nähtavaks teha. Lisaks on töös kasutatud ka teiste distsipliinide abi (botaanika, ajalugu). See ajendab töö viimases osas mõtisklusi distsipliinideülese koostöö võimalustest suunaga keskkonnahumanitaaria poole, et anda oma panus globaalsete keskkonnaprobleemide lahendamisse. Semiootilise mõttevahetuse seisukohalt on oluline töös esitatud mõistete tekst, omailm, mudel ja representatsioon omavaheline suhestamine näitamaks, kuidas looduskirjanduses nende abil tähendusi luuakse. Representatsiooni mõiste lähivaatluse abil jõuame parema arusaamani inimese kui liigi tähendusloomepraktikatest, aga ka nende kasutamisest liikideüleses kommunikatsioonis.The aim of the present thesis is to open up new perspectives in the study of nature writing, combining semiotic and ecocritical approaches. The idea of primary and secondary modelling systems originates from Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics. In their works, human language is considered as primary modelling system – it is the main means of mediated human communication. Secondary modelling systems, such as literature, film, and many others that deal with artistic modelling of the world, are based on language as a sign system. Thomas A. Sebeok, an American semiotician, pointed out that those exclusievly human modelling systems are preceded by a zoosemiotic level of modelling that is based on our sensory and bodily experience in relating to the material world. Using the concept coined by Jakob von Uexküll, we can say that zoosemiotic modelling is based on Umwelt, or the life-world as formed in the combination of the species-specific sensory organs and the repertoire of possible ways of relating to the environment around us. Thus we can proceed from the understanding that modelling is the foundation of all interpretational and representational activities. Model is a means of communication that enables both artistic and scientific propagation of information. Modelling characteristic of human species takes place mainly with the help of human language and by representations created in human language. Representation is understood in the present work in the limits of language-mediated descriptions of environment as they appear in literary texts. The material for my work comes from a specific sub-field of literature, namely nature writing. Estonian nature writing in a narrow sense is understood as documentary prose that is based on the author’s personal experiences in nature, informed by knowledge of natural history and biology in general, and written in literary language. In regard of textual poetics, nature writing is similar to fiction, and can therefore be studied using the means of literary studies, as traditionally done in ecocriticism. What is different in case of nature writing, is that unlike fiction, it invites its reader to move beyond the text, to the natural environment that has been represented in a piece of nature writing. More or less explicitly, each literary text also contains the level of zoosemiotic modelling: senses, Umwelten of other species, their ways of movement, feeding, etc. Biosemiotic analysis helps to bring this layer of modelling to the fore. In addition, the work contains articles written in co-operation with researchers from other disciplines (botanics, history). Stemming from that experience, the last part of the cover article is devoted to questions related to cross-disciplinary co-operation in connection to the notion of environmental humanities, in order to contribute to the search for solutions to our global environmental problems. It is proposed that the original contribution of the present work into the general semiotic discussion lies in relating the concepts of text, Umwelt, model, and representation to each other and demonstrating how meaning is created in in nature writing in their interplay. By analysing the notion of representation, a better understanding of human sign-use practices is achieved, ass well as a bettern understanding of the application possibilities of human signification in inter-species communication