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______________________________________________________________________ The "Zeitschrift für
Semiotik": Abstracts ______________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________ Horst Dölvers Gunter Gebauer Klaus W. Hempfer Georgij Pocheptsov Roland Posner Adelhard Scheffczyk Competing discourses in text and image Horst Dölvers, Technical University Berlin Summary. Literary interpretation is still widely based on the Coleridgean concepts of
unity and organic form, and strives to rewrite its texts as embodying a pervading truth
that emanates from an author’s ethos through a hierarchy of discourses. In
opposition, the present study develops a vocabulary to describe difference, discontinuity
and contradictions on various levels within texts and between texts and their
illustrations. On the basis of work by Foucault, Pêcheux, Rorty, and J. Hillis Miller,
what can be seen as a usurpation of texts through the attribution of one univocal meaning
is countered by the concept of the exchangeability of discourses, a term made specific and
operational as a tool of practical text analysis on the levels of word semantics,
character, plot, and text-and-image interaction. In accordance with suggestions by J.
Hillis Miller, illustrations themselves are seen as oscillating between a multitude of
mutually annihilating forms of reference. Finally, the terms developed so far in close
application to one narrative text are reconstructed within a reading of Peircean
semiotics. Concepts of mimesis between Plato and Derrida Gunter Gebauer, Free University Berlin Summary. As early as in classical Greece, the term mimesis ('imitation') not only
referred to the imitation of human and animal utterances, but also to the imitation of
persons and things themselves. With this meaning, the concept of mimesis played a central
role in the history of Western ideas. Plato denounced the deceptive nature of the
beautiful appearance produced through the imitation of ideas. Aristotle emphasized the
possibility of departing from the imitated subject matter by universalizing its individual
traits and by organizing them in a cathartic way. The Middle Ages saw the social aspects
of mimesis develop in the form of the imitation of Christ. In the Renaissance, mimesis was
utilized as an instrument for the representation of political power through pictorial
elevation and historical contextualization of the acts of political leaders. In the Age of
the Bourgeoisie, mimesis served to give increasing access to reality through the imitation
of nature. Since the radical changes in modern art, mimesis in the sense of artful
imitation of reality has become obsolete, and was transformed into an anthropological
concept denoting a body-oriented mode of worldmaking. In this new sense mimesis today
refers to the multiplication of images, sounds, words, and thoughts in a general movement
which transcends the barriers between literature, the arts and science. The present
contribution attempts to set all these variants of the idea of mimesis in relation to the
historical evolution of mankind’s media of presentation: the transition from oral
thinking to the fixation of thoughts in writing, from the production of sounds within
one’s body to the playing of musical instruments, from loud articulation in reading
to the silent scanning of pictures, scores and scripts. Throgh the evolution of the media,
the act of mimesis has developed from repetition, modification and reinterpretation of
given reality to the simulation of self-referring worlds. Discourse maxims of poststructuralism Klaus W. Hempfer, Free University Berlin Summary. This article aims to show that certain forms of discourse explicitly claiming
to overcome the insufficiencies of structuralism – or of what they believe
structuralism to be – make use of particular strategies of argumentation that
differentiate a specific type of discourse which may be described as
"poststructuralist", "postmodern" or generally
"posttheoretical". These strategies are presented in the form of maxims of
discourse in order to demonstrate that they are phenomena of argumentation which may, it
is true, occur in non-post-theoretical discourse as violations of accepted norms, but now
form the essential conventions of the new theoretical discourse. For the most part, early
texts of fundamental importance in poststructuralist theory are drawn upon to make clear
that, even at this stage and not only in the simplified form evolved by some epigones,
post-structuralist discourse was built on the maxims analyzed in this article. Lotman's new considerations on sign dynamics Georgij Pocheptsov, University of Kiev Summary. The article discusses two central topics of the book published in 1992 by Yuri
Lotman, Kultura y vsryv, ’Culture and Outbreak’, namely the dynamism of
signification and communication systems, and the opposition of predictability and
unpredictability in cultural change. Culture is described as a holistic mechanism which
produces both predictable innovations and the unpredictably new. In contemporary cultures
the generation of the unpredictable is expected to take place within fashion and the arts.
When a culture is structured as a binary system, the appearance of the unpredictably new
annihilates all its constituents, whereas cultures structured as ternary systems are
capable of integrating the new into their existing structures. Contemporary change in the
cultures of the former Soviet Union can be understood as a transition from binary to
ternary systems. Semiotics this side and the other side of structuralism: the connection between modern and postmodern, structuralism and poststructuralism Roland Posner, Technical University Berlin Summary. This introductory contribution describes the differences between modernism and
postmodernism as historical periods of the 20th century and establishes comparable
differences in the approaches to semiotics known as structuralism and post-structuralism.
Like modernism, the structuralist approach is characterized by the rejection of
traditional modes of thought, the willingness to reconstruct academic disciplines on the
basis of a few fundamental principles, and the readiness to do without established
terminologies and axioms until they have been thus reconstructed. Like postmodernism, the
poststructuralist approach is characterized by the necessity of finding ways to continue
research on the basis of the fragmentary results of half-completed projects left by
structuralist science. In the beginning of the 20th century, structuralism has responded
to the materialism, atomism, historicism, and naturalism of acedemic research by
introducing a theory of its own, built around the dichotomies of signified and signifier,
paradigm and syntagm, diachrony and synchrony, langue and parole. Poststructuralism did
not reject this theoretical apparatus in favor of a new one, but explicated the paradoxes
behind the structuralist dichotomies and tried to overcome them by undermining the first
concept of each pair and emphasizing the second concept. This change of perspective has
strengthened the interest in the material, processual, and intertextual character of signs
as well as in the sense-producing function of interpretation. Rejecting rigidly fixed
methods as well as general theories, and waiving the distinction between object signs and
meta-signs in favor of their joint reflection, post-structuralist semiotics has become an
alternative to traditional practices of acedemic sign analysis and is approaching the
status of an art. The (non)interpretability of literary texts Peter Rusterholz, University of Bern Summary. The traditional claim that texts can be objectively interpreted by
reconstructing the author’s intention and the opposing poststructuralist position
which negates the possibility of scientific hermeneutics are here confronted with the
following thesis: interpretation can be objectivized when reasons are given for the
adequacy of the applied notion of meaning, the interpretation concept chosen and the
contexts of cultural knowledge taken into account by the interpreter. Semiotic analysis of
meaning constitution shows how much the latter depends on the varying competences for
perceiving aesthetic form. Literary texts are discussed to illustrate the problem (Thomas
Bernhard), to elucidate the conditions of interpretability and non-interpretability (Franz
Kafka) and to specify the solution offered here (Ingeborg Bachmann). Deconstruction of experience, I and history: the past history of poststructuralism in the 19th century Adelhard Scheffczyk, University of Osnabrück Summary. The philosophical debates of the 19th century do not contain terms such as
deconstructionism. Nevertheless it may be profitably asked whether the topics and methods
favored in these debates do not, despite all their differences, exhibit significant
similarities with the ideas of Derrida. The present paper singles out deconstructionist
aspects in the positions of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Mach, Dilthey and Burckhardt,
concerning the status of experience, history and the subject. The common point focused on
is the concept of contextualization. Contextualization and deconstruction turn out to be
complementary procedures in a movement of thought that deserves both more systematic and
historical study. Poetics according to structuralism: Derrida, de Man, Szondi Thomas Sparr, Frankfurt am Main Summary. Neo- or poststructuralism does not exist in the form of a coherent edifice of
ideas. These two terms characterize rather an historical change in the approach to
language and culture that began in the 1960’s. "After structuralism",
verbal signs are no longer described as elements of the language system, but are instead
analyzed as elements of literary works. Poetics takes the place of semiotics. This
aestheticizing of verbal signs is due, above all, to Jacques Derrida and his method of
deconstruction. His book Grammatology is a critique of Sausurre’s sign concept. With
his method of différance, Derrida does not specify verbal signs, but the very process of
signification. The fact that Derrida’s thinking has profoundly influenced literary
studies, can be seen in the revision of leading poetological concepts by Paul de Man as
well as in the work of Peter Szondi, which illustrate the difference between sign
conceptions before and after structuralism. However, "poetics after
structuralism" has itself run into difficulties which have yet to be overcome. |
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