Contemporary Dilemmas of Visuality, 10th Congress, International Association of Visual Semiotics (AISV-IAVS), University of Buenos Aires, September 4-8, 2012.

A dilemma (from the Greek, dis = two, lemma = topic or premise) is a problem whose solution allows for two possibilities, but none of them is completely satisfactory, so that a difficult choice comes out, upon which ethical and moral issues oſten impact. When a dilemma appears it is not possible to choose from a correct or an incorrect issue, but between two options that may be correct at the same time, but contrary to each other in a certain sense; between two equally appreciated values which, however, come into a conflict. In the field of visuality the dilemmas appear frequently, and seem to have multiplied themselves in the contemporary world, where images and their implications have acquired new strength in the infinite web of global connectivity.

It is perhaps in the field of photography –and particularly in press photography, traditionally linked to the greater effects of reality– where the most dilemmatic situations arise today: to make visible –or not– the oſten terrifying image of the present conflictive scenario, with its wars, attacks, famine, forced migrations, that put us “regarding the pain of others”, as Susan Sontag pointed out, and that may elicit undecidable political dilemmas that involve power factors in a worldwide level. In this extreme visibility, which expands the limits of the knowable, where the many forms of art also are displayed, images seem to recover the symbolic power that worried the ancient people, putting them at the risk of new idolatries. Visibility is assumed as a condition of democracy, as an imaginary of transparency, but also as an erasure of the uncertain threshold between public and private domains, another of the dilemmatic zones.

The dilemmatic visual situations are not limited, however, to moral or cultural questions; they appear equally in the more primary context of visual perception. In this sense, visual ambiguities, paradoxes and antinomies have also a place in the theme we are concerned with. The identification of the referents may suffer from the hesitations coming both from the perceptual organism and from the organization of the object. Even images that are generated and used in the context of scientific practices (diagnosis, experimentation, demonstration, explanation, etc.), which are oſten endorsed with a pretension of objectivity and unambiguity, do not escape from these situations.

Thus, visual contemporary dilemmas concern both ethics and aesthetics, politics, human and social sciences in general, as well as natural sciences, perhaps with special emphasis on biology. Since all knowledge relies on signs, the semiotic perspective allows precisely for an interdisciplinary and integrating view. Is in this vast territory that we want to pose the semiotic reflection on the dilemmas of visuality, calling to questioning, thinking and criticism.

http://iassais.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/1170/

Global Semiotics: Bridging Semiotic Traditions, 11th World Congress, International Association for Semiotic Studies, Nanjing, October 5–9, 2012.

Modern semiotic theories can be traced back to four theoretical sources originating in the beginning of the 20^th century: Saussurean structural linguistics, Peircean pragmatism, Husserlian phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Since then a variety of semiotic theories in various fields of European and American human and social sciences have developed in addition to philosophical ways of reasoning. Semiotic theorization is typically interdisciplinary in nature, indicating a pluralization of scientific thinking about mankind. This pluralized theoretical tendency has been further strengthened by the unprecedented progress of current semiotic sciences since the end of the Second World War. Current semiotics has become a major impetus for structural reform efforts in the human sciences.

After its hundred years of modernization contemporary semiotics has arrived at another turning point at the beginning of the 21^st century: the globalization of semiotics, or cross-cultural semiotic expansion. Cross-cultural semiotics is the natural development and extension of the interdisciplinary humanities of the West in our times. Unlike the natural and social sciences, human sciences, including their semiotic epistemology and methodology, deal with both horizontal and diachronic phenomena in human history. That means semiotics, as a constitutive part of human sciences, is fated to be confronted with the most difficult as well as the most significant challenges arising from human conditions.

Semiotics is popularly called the logic or general semantics of culture. So it implicitly includes cultural-academic globalization and cross-civilization communication. In light of comparative scholarship, this new-century semiotics signifies a comprehensive interaction between European-American and non-European-American intellectual sources, characterized by its strength in doing general-semantic analysis in respect to linguistic-expressive, behavior-communicative and institutional-compositional levels. In this sense, semiotic work, necessarily interdisciplinary, must be converged with the modern theoretical practice of all human sciences still partly suffering from its traditional semantically ambiguous composition. The typology of the scientific and the rational practices would thus be more relevantly adjusted to accommodate different historical realities. Semiotics, functioning as a universal semantic denominator, will promote intellectual communication among different civilizations, cultures and disciplines.

http://www.semio2012.com/

Cfp: "Towards Cognitive Semiotics," Seventh Conference, Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies, Centre for Cognitive Semiotics and Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, May 6-8, 2011.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, semiotics and cognitive science have been rival transdiciplinary or interdisciplinary approaches to the human and social sciences, even including some parts of the natural sciences such as, most notably, biology. Apart from everything else they are, both semiotics and cognitive science may be seen as being involved with the central notions common to all of the social sciences and the humanities. From this point of view, the core interest of semiotics is the structuring of meaning and its carriers, while cognitive semiotics focuses on the modes of access to meaning (though it often gives them some other name). It has been observed (notably by Dadessio) that these two aspects can hardly be discussed separately. While generalizing the notion of cognition to make it cover most of mental life (as well as, sometimes, many “subpersonal” aspects), cognitive science has hardly left any specific place to phenomena of meaning. Semiotics, on the other hand, at least in some of its manifestations, those, notably, inspired by Peirce, tends to resolve about everything into constellations of signs. The result, in both cases, is one-sidedness and conceptual confusion. Cognitive semiotics, or semiotic cognitive science, recently proposed in different quarters as a new paradigm for the human and the social sciences, aims to wed cognitive science with semiotics. Epistemologically, the task of cognitive semiotics consists in relating these two instances of single vision, putting mind where mind should be and signs in their proper place.

Presentations should involve research involving the relation between semiotics and cognitive science, or, more broadly, which attends to cognitive issues while taking a semiotic approach, or puts the quest for meaning into focus within a cognitive science approach. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Cognition and meaning
• Cognitive science and semiotics
• Perception and semiotics
• Language within a semiotic framework
• Cognitive linguistics and semiotics
• Semantics and pragmatics within semiotics
• Gesture studies and semiotics
• The psychology of pictures and pictorial semiotics
• Narrativity and the self
• Semiotic artefacts and the mind
• The social and cognitive construction of meaning
• Semiotic resources in child development
• Semiotic resources in evolution
• Semiotics and primatology
• Cultural semiotics and developmental psychology
• Phenomenological analyses
• Husserlean and Peircean phenomenology
• Linguistic and other kinds of semiotic releativity
• Semiotic typology

Visit the conference website here: http://conference.sol.lu.se/en/nass2011/.

"Semiotic's Creativity: Unifying Diversities, Differences, Divides," Romanian Association of Semiotic Studies, University of Iaşi, November 4-7, 2010.

We, as human beings living in a postmodern age dominated by paradigms such as web, net, fast, variety, multiplicity, multiculturality, globalisation, change, are aware that we are not only sign-using individuals but also dynamic sign-makers. Our ability of developing a “semiotic sphere” allows and leads us to perceive the hidden knots relating and unifying phenomena in nature and culture despite diversities, differences and divides. If difference is “of two kinds as opposed either to identity or resemblance” – according to David Hume –, mainly denoting the quality or condition of being not the same; if diversity is the condition/form or structure of being different as the result of a process of becoming diversified; if divide sets a boundary between systems, interests, opinions within the process of creating varieties in the world of signs, then it is from the multiplicity of these three 'ds' (diversities, differences, divides) that there arises something like the consciousness of the unifying role played by signs, a role which “has endured” through all the fast changes of life experiences and through the changing dimensions of the world. The circumscribing of the three ds within semiotics’ unifying power of creativity reveals the gradual transformation of the horizontality (two-dimensional) of signification into a multiple-layered verticality (constructed on the three-dimensionality of the sign) of an identity signifying act. Such a change makes visible not only the symbolic action of bringing signs into existence/being, but also the web of relations establishing themselves both temporally and spatially (in a palimpsestic way), as far as unifying presupposes an action of discovering, of identifying and of communicating the existence of multiplicity into O/one coherent whole. Thus, communication does no longer mean an encoding-decoding process of interpersonal messages only; it builds and bridges up a complex process of conveying thoughts, of manipulating opinions, of negotiating feelings etc. between different “(semiotic) animals” belonging to various worlds, to (other possible) spaces and times, all of them conceived in terms of imagining, innovating and creating at multiple transmodern levels. Participants are kindly asked to submit papers for one of the following areas of interest: I. Semiotics creativity: a transdisciplinary bridge between nature and culture 1.The creative language of science and technology 2. The resonant forms of arts 3. The creative power of the W/word(s) in the process of communication 4. Towards the unity of religion and philosophy, science(s) and art(s) II. Creative values of a unifying world, or the “unity within the diversity” of worlds: 1. Spiritual and material worlds 2. The worlds of imagination and reason 3. Virtual and real worlds 4. (Re)creating worlds in a “semiotic sphere” III. Local and global worlds in and out of crisis 1. “World wide world” and “small worlds” 2. The outside and the inside worlds 3. The world of the written, the oral, the pictorial message 4. Unveiling new ways of harmonizing worlds IV. The communicology net: towards an integrated language 1. Bridging up (old and new) worlds through games/ advertising / travelling / marketing 2. Diversity of styles of communication 3. Cultures in dialogue: the “open worlds” of the “zoon semeiotikon” 4. Communicating beyond polyphonic discourses Visit the conference website: http://roass.blogspot.com/.

Cfp: "The Semiotics of Time," 34th Annual Meeting, Semiotic Society of America, University of Cincinnati, October 15-18, 2009.

Further information is available here: http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/2009SSAcallFINAL.htm.

CFP: "Transmodernity: Managing Global Communication," Romanian Association of Semiotic Studies, Bacau and Slanic-Moldovia, October 23-25, 2008.

The time for a great change of paradigm – the shift from postmodernity to transmodernity – has already come. Setting out from existing transformations, diversities (experienced as difference), varieties (perceived as absence of sameness, of routine and monotony), alterities (through a continuous transgressing of borders), transmodernity foregrounds the new phenomenon of the “network world”. The increased cultural complexity of the global(izing/ized) world, which seems to be the raison d’être for “trans-”prefixed domains of action has turned into fertile ground for cross-breeding between several areas of research, such as management, communication studies, marketing and semiotics. How can transborder exchanges come to terms with processes within borders, how do international power relations influence structures mapped within frontiers, how can differences, varieties etc. be decoded and understood, how can communication be conducted in a “networld” where everything is produced and interpreted at a global level? How can the “relational dynamism” of this new (transcultural) “netocracy” be communicated and controlled? What is its new rhetoric like? These are just few questions to be debated upon during the 2nd ROASS international conference “Transmodernity: Managing Global Communication”. The papers can be defended in English, French, or Romanian. Further information is here: http://roass.blogspot.com/.

CFP: "Specialisation, Semiosis, Semiotics," 33rd Annual Meeting, Semiotic Society of America, University of St. Thomas, October 16–19, 2008.

The non-restrictive theme of the meeting is “Specialization, Semiosis, Semiotics”, intended to underscore the fact that semiotics provides the only perspective that is inherently transdisciplinary, resulting from the universal dependence of experience and knowledge upon semiosis — that is, the action of signs. Papers on any aspect of the doctrine of signs, theoretical or applied, are welcome. Explicit tie-in to the theme is not required. Proposals should be made in the form of abstracts of approximately 150 words for evaluation by the Program Committee. Email address & full information concerning institutional affiliation, as applicable, should accompany the abstract submissions. Abstracts, together with index key-words and AV requirements (only if necessary: try to avoid) for individual papers and/or sessions should be submitted directly to both Professor Thomas F. Broden and John Deely . The abstracts are not to have special fonts or graphics, and are to be in the body of the email. Professor Broden will circulate the submissions to the Program Committee members, and communicate acceptance/rejection decisions. His office phone is 765-494-3857 or 765-494-3828. Read the full CFP here: http://www.uwf.edu/tprewitt/1008SSACall.pdf.