Powerful Inscriptions: On the Semiotic Phenomenology of BDSM

BDSM encompasses a range of practices—bondage and discipline (BD), dominance and submission (DS), sadism and masochism (SM)—involving the consensual exchange of power in erotic contexts. This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on BDSM, drawing on the history of academic studies of the phenomenon, ranging from the psychology of perversion, the sociology of deviance, and the feminist “sex wars” to more recent ethnographic and phenomenological turns. The chapter focuses on the importance of discourse and affect for making sense of BDSM, both for those who seek to analyze the phenomenon and for practitioners themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research and other data, the chapter shows how language and discourse are key to answering interconnected questions about the semiotics and phenomenology of BDSM (what these practices mean and how practitioners experience these practices affectively). Thus, a potential “linguistic turn” in BDSM studies is essential for future research on this erotic minority.

Moving Signs

The chapter explains the theoretical framework that guides the analysis in subsequent chapters and introduces a model for understanding emotional experience rooted in the semiotic phenomenology of C. S Peirce. This model allows for the explication of diverse modes of experience and explains the impact of habits and values in the interpretation of signs during ceremonial performance. As selves and interpersonal relationships are implicated in semiosis, experience becomes affective, linking perceptual, physiological, cultural, and public judgments in ongoing processes and projects of future-oriented flourishing. This four-step sequence---affect, emotion-appraisal, feeling, emotive is grounded in the self and its place in the world.

Umwelt, Lebenswelt and Dasein seen through the lens of a subjective experience of reality

Depar ting from estimations of existential universes of animals (umwelt) and humans (Lebenswelt and Dasein), this paper observes a number of views on the subjective experience, or modelling systems of reality, developed in the philosophy of nature and culture. The first part examines how the semantic relationships of nonhuman and human organisms with their environments are outlined in phenomenology as a study of individual experience from a subject-oriented perspective. Respectively, animals are admitted to have meaningful relations with actual things in observable reality through an outward extension of their bodies, but they are stated to lack direct access to things in themselves and to their various forms of being, because they cannot transcend the imprisonment in their surroundings. In the second part, exposing the mundane background of semiotic phenomenology, the existence modes of animal and human subjects are considered in terms of being-in-the-world as immanence and being-for-the-world as transcendence. Immanent subjects are seen as existing in their environments and transcendent subjects as being able to go beyond their Lebenswelten. In keeping with positively marked or unmarked interpretations of existence and life in the subjective universes of humans and animals, made by other philosophers and psychologists, the author arrives at a conclusion that the extension of the study of reality and the world might enrich the framework of existential semiotics if the organisms’ relations to the world they dwell in were considered from the viewpoint of their becoming in the world and the becoming of the world as a result of their interactions.

Spiritual Transcendence in Psychotherapy: A Relational, Pragmatic, and Semiotic Approach

The last several decades have ushered in an abundance of creative activity and wisdom with regard to spiritually and/or religiously informed psychotherapy. Most of these pursuits have led to significant and positive changes, both in thought and practice, in the way that human psychology is seen as intersecting (and interacting) with religious, theological, and spiritual dimensions of experience. At the same time much has been neglected amidst these advances. In the present paper, we submit that one vital area of neglect may be found in an implicit retreat from sacred encounter in favor of instrumentalized approaches to psychotherapy. We argue for a spiritually transcendent psychotherapy that implicitly attends to relational and semiotic phenomenology while retaining pragmatic gain.

Communicology and human conduct: An essay dedicated to Max

This paper examines habits, and particularly habitus as the locus of semiotic constraints and artful practices comprising human conduct. The disciplinary contexts of communication in semiotics and semiotics in communication are contrasted. Winfried Nöth's recent take on C. S. Peirce and habits is interpreted from the perspective of semiotic phenomenology. Culture is argued to be the threshold of the human world, and habits are a key to understanding human conduct in that distinctive Umwelt. John Dewey's rendering of Peirce on habits is further extended with Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical construction of the habitus. Habitus accounts for the mediation of culture and person in the communication matrix. The argument is for a new disciplinary habit in communicology, the science of embodied discourse, which bridges semiotics and communication with focus on the experience of communication.