What is the semiotic self?

In its last issue, TECCOGS presented a dialogue on issues of Cognitive Semiotics, which Professor Vincent Colapietro, University of Rhode Island (Kingston, RI, USA), contributed to this journal in dialogue with Winfried Nöth. Under the title “Cognitive Semiotics – Minds, and Machines”, he outlined the foundations of Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy of mind and its relevance to the study of human and artificial intelligence. TECCOGSs now brings a new dialogue with Colapietro as the first of a series of three “Reflections”, first presented in dialogue with Winfried Nöth on tidd’s YouTube channel under Lucia Santaella’s curatorship. “What is the semiotic self?”, “How can we change habits”, and “Why sentiments can be logical” are the titles of the three Reflections. In this series, Colapietro adds new chapters to extend his introduction to cognitive semiotics. Among the topics of these Reflections are the self as a cognitive agent, the philosophy of intelligence, and the role of emotion in cognition and reasoning.

Consumerism

The article investigates how consumerism is perceived as an unremarkable part of quotidian existence, as a patriotic duty at various moments, as an indicator of social class, and as a means of semiotic self-fashioning. In consumerism, the tension between the sumptuary restraint on conspicuous consumption, which characterized the early Protestant ethic, and the dependence of capitalism itself on boundless commodity circulation, emerges again and again. I investigate how certain forms of consumerism, relating to excess and improper storage, are reclassified in medical terms. I also investigate modes of strategic consumerism, which try to bridge the gap between producer and consumer, and how certain forms of performative labor are themselves consumed. I close with a few reflections on sites for future study: shopping as a form of underrecognized labor, and an auto-ethnographic turn for academics, inspecting the reach of consumerism into academic practices and universities themselves.

Challenging identity: Lotman's "translation of the untranslatable" and Derrida's différance

The concept of "cultural identity" has gradually replaced such discredited concepts as "race", "ethnicity", even "nationality" in the conservative political discourse of recent decades which conceives, represents and performs culture as a closed system with clear-cut boundaries which must be defended from contamination.The article employs the theories of Derrida and Lotman as useful tools for deconstructing this understanding of cultural identity, which has recently become an ideological justification for socio-political conflicts. In fact, their theories spring from a thorough critique of the kind of internalizing self-enclosure which allowed Saussure to delimit and describe langue as the object of linguistics. The article identifies and compares the elements of this critique, focusing on Derrida's and Lotman's concepts of "mirror structure", "binarism", "numerousness", "textuality" and "semiosphere". An understanding of mediation emerges which is not reducible to any kind of definitive acquisition, thereby frustrating the pretences of identity, constantly dislocating and deferring any attempt at semiotic self-enclosure. My comparison suggests that Lotman's "translation of the untranslatable" (or "dialogue") and Derrida's différance can be considered analogous descriptions of this problematic kind of mediation. The (de)constructive nature of culture, as described by Lotman and Derrida, challenges any attempt to view cultural formations as sources of rigid and irreducible identities or differences.