The handmade mark is privileged in non-fiction comics studies, the reproduced hand offering embodied, subjective immediacy. In Good Talk, Mira Jacob digitally collages vector-drawn 'paper dolls' with various media, presenting an authorial subject unaccounted for by such scholarship. What is at stake in this article, then, is the relationship of the hand to the subject. Considering this relationship through a departure from a too facile semiotic distinction of indexical as opposed to merely iconic and symbolic signs, this article reconsiders indexicalities beyond the ostentatiously handcrafted aesthetics of some graphic memoirs to examine the effects of digital lettering, of re-contextualized photographs, and of other interventions to examine and move beyond some media- specific associations of immediacy and authenticity with the individualized gesture. Examining Jacob's decontextualization and repudiation of such forms on the terms of her refusal to perform a subjectivity expected from a racialized subject, it explores instead the possibilities of re-contextualizations of 'paper-dolls' in the conversations opened by her 'scrapbook' aesthetics. Shifting much of the intersubjective emotional work from the autobiographer to the reader, Jacob's innovative digital mode presents a risky but ethically productive formal invitation to read off and see the other's experience without the illusion of subjective equivalence. Hence, this article reinterprets non-fiction comics' representation of reality beginning with the underappreciated material mark, not as a semantically conventionalized unit but as the material grounds of any such signification. In this perspective, it addresses the materialist discourses implicit in the handmade mark by entering into a conversation with Hillary Chute, Aaron Kashtan, and Hannah Miodrag's discussions of comics marks as media indexing process and instantiating meaning as well as Ariella Azoulay, Friedrich Kittler, and John Berger's writings on the subjective presence and Susan Kirtley's discussion of scrapbooking in comics.
{"title":"The Repeatable Hand and the Mediated Self in Mira Jacob’s Good Talk","authors":"Nicholas Wirtz","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0017","url":null,"abstract":"The handmade mark is privileged in non-fiction comics studies, the reproduced hand offering embodied, subjective immediacy. In Good Talk, Mira Jacob digitally collages vector-drawn 'paper dolls' with various media, presenting an authorial subject unaccounted for by such scholarship. What is at stake in this article, then, is the relationship of the hand to the subject. Considering this relationship through a departure from a too facile semiotic distinction of indexical as opposed to merely iconic and symbolic signs, this article reconsiders indexicalities beyond the ostentatiously handcrafted aesthetics of some graphic memoirs to examine the effects of digital lettering, of re-contextualized photographs, and of other interventions to examine and move beyond some media- specific associations of immediacy and authenticity with the individualized gesture. Examining Jacob's decontextualization and repudiation of such forms on the terms of her refusal to perform a subjectivity expected from a racialized subject, it explores instead the possibilities of re-contextualizations of 'paper-dolls' in the conversations opened by her 'scrapbook' aesthetics. Shifting much of the intersubjective emotional work from the autobiographer to the reader, Jacob's innovative digital mode presents a risky but ethically productive formal invitation to read off and see the other's experience without the illusion of subjective equivalence. Hence, this article reinterprets non-fiction comics' representation of reality beginning with the underappreciated material mark, not as a semantically conventionalized unit but as the material grounds of any such signification. In this perspective, it addresses the materialist discourses implicit in the handmade mark by entering into a conversation with Hillary Chute, Aaron Kashtan, and Hannah Miodrag's discussions of comics marks as media indexing process and instantiating meaning as well as Ariella Azoulay, Friedrich Kittler, and John Berger's writings on the subjective presence and Susan Kirtley's discussion of scrapbooking in comics.","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73040375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 signaled a definite shift in the global spread of a new nationalist, populist, racist, political Right. This sweeping trend was fuelled and is sustained by social media’s vast networks that disseminate (mis)information and efface the subject’s body by mediating reality through digital interfaces. Intensified right-wing news media and politics mutate the socio-semiotics of digital networks, rendering affective slogans that destabilize language and inform user subjectivity. Facebook re-posts and 4chan memes re-articulate refrains chanted at rallies, such as “Stop the steal,” intensifying their affective resonance and causing them to speak in and through subjects, rather than being spoken by them, engendering incorporeal transformations on bodies in the sociopolitical field. Stripped of semantic meaning and referential reality, these slogans operate through affect to produce collective phantasies that channel users’ unchecked desires. These slogans affectively interpellate users by pulling apart their individuation, weaving them into endless threads, sites, and networks that amplify and spread fascistic imaginaries of a Great America under Trump, the God-Emperor. Slogans’ affects and their resulting phantasies function as coefficients of digital networks’ innumerable connections, exponentially proliferating and catalyzing microfascisms via ever-multiplying rhizomatic connections – a sociopolitical recalibration of the Ro formula models these affective transmissions, a calculation otherwise used to measure a disease’s potential transmission among a vulnerable population. The affective intensification and spread of right-wing discourses were a prelude to the Covid-19 pandemic and function in tandem. As economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders augment financial precarity and digitize quotidian life, media networks intensify the spread of (mis)information among susceptible users, leading to anti-mask protests, political rallies, and unsafe work environments that, in turn, increase Covid-19 cases. Right-wing media’s affective, digital contagion and the Covid-19 pandemic produce a feedback loop of transmission, mutually amplifying their Ro values as both mutate and spread.
{"title":"Right-wing media’s rendering of Ro: Media, misinformation, and affective contagion","authors":"Benjamin Bandosz","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The election of Donald Trump in 2016 signaled a definite shift in the global spread of a new nationalist, populist, racist, political Right. This sweeping trend was fuelled and is sustained by social media’s vast networks that disseminate (mis)information and efface the subject’s body by mediating reality through digital interfaces. Intensified right-wing news media and politics mutate the socio-semiotics of digital networks, rendering affective slogans that destabilize language and inform user subjectivity. Facebook re-posts and 4chan memes re-articulate refrains chanted at rallies, such as “Stop the steal,” intensifying their affective resonance and causing them to speak in and through subjects, rather than being spoken by them, engendering incorporeal transformations on bodies in the sociopolitical field. Stripped of semantic meaning and referential reality, these slogans operate through affect to produce collective phantasies that channel users’ unchecked desires. These slogans affectively interpellate users by pulling apart their individuation, weaving them into endless threads, sites, and networks that amplify and spread fascistic imaginaries of a Great America under Trump, the God-Emperor. Slogans’ affects and their resulting phantasies function as coefficients of digital networks’ innumerable connections, exponentially proliferating and catalyzing microfascisms via ever-multiplying rhizomatic connections – a sociopolitical recalibration of the Ro formula models these affective transmissions, a calculation otherwise used to measure a disease’s potential transmission among a vulnerable population. The affective intensification and spread of right-wing discourses were a prelude to the Covid-19 pandemic and function in tandem. As economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders augment financial precarity and digitize quotidian life, media networks intensify the spread of (mis)information among susceptible users, leading to anti-mask protests, political rallies, and unsafe work environments that, in turn, increase Covid-19 cases. Right-wing media’s affective, digital contagion and the Covid-19 pandemic produce a feedback loop of transmission, mutually amplifying their Ro values as both mutate and spread.","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82104193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Today, most models are computer-generated simulations of some kind. However, there is a vast world of living models that serve the biomedical industries. Mouse models are discussed here, but in the context of the questions they raise about agency. Living models, it is maintained, can have abundant relations with their laboratory worlds, that is, they have a capaciousness that may be enhanced by processes of dirtying and wilding. The controlled introduction of contagions allows for living models to get messy in a productive way, expanding their lifeworlds as well as those of their handlers. Configurational enunciations of lively assemblages are detailed in terms of more robust microbial encounters, as well as the affective attunements and attachments of the dirty mice initiative in biomedical laboratories.
{"title":"Contagion and capaciousness: The Shifting Worlds of Living Models","authors":"G. Genosko","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Today, most models are computer-generated simulations of some kind. However, there is a vast world of living models that serve the biomedical industries. Mouse models are discussed here, but in the context of the questions they raise about agency. Living models, it is maintained, can have abundant relations with their laboratory worlds, that is, they have a capaciousness that may be enhanced by processes of dirtying and wilding. The controlled introduction of contagions allows for living models to get messy in a productive way, expanding their lifeworlds as well as those of their handlers. Configurational enunciations of lively assemblages are detailed in terms of more robust microbial encounters, as well as the affective attunements and attachments of the dirty mice initiative in biomedical laboratories.","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84199947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
o say that reading Maria Giulia Dondero’s book The Language of Images. The Forms and the Forces is a journey through the fascinating world of images is not enough. To say that it is another of the many books devoted to visual semiotics is to say nothing. The book I am reflecting on here is a proposal for an innovative gaze (sic!) at a single image, an image in relation to other images, and, finally, at big visual data in semiotic optics.
{"title":"Renewed semiotics, revisited concepts, new proposals. A few gazes at Maria Giulia Dondero’s approach to the image","authors":"Katarzyna Machtyl","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"o say that reading Maria Giulia Dondero’s book The Language of Images. The Forms and the Forces is a journey through the fascinating world of images is not enough. To say that it is another of the many books devoted to visual semiotics is to say nothing. The book I am reflecting on here is a proposal for an innovative gaze (sic!) at a single image, an image in relation to other images, and, finally, at big visual data in semiotic optics.","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80367468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The semiotics of the pandemic","authors":"A. Lagopoulos, Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87474117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since late 2019, Covid-19 has spread worldwide, and many people are obliged to stay at home for public health reasons. Confined to their homes, people worldwide flooded the internet by posting photos and images online with funny captions, attracting an abundance of comments, and proving that humor is a vital need even in the most challenging times. This paper focuses on original Greek internet memes (not those translated into Greek) through selected examples. The study aims to investigate fifteen representations about Covid-19 and the Greek experience of lockdown, focused on quarantine lifestyle issues in Greek social media groups (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). Memes are explored as humorous and composite visual communication works that highlight how Covid-19 and quarantine have affected our everyday lives.
{"title":"A semiotic approach to Greek internet memes during the Covid-19 pandemic","authors":"Thomas Bardakis","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Since late 2019, Covid-19 has spread worldwide, and many people are obliged to stay at home for public health reasons. Confined to their homes, people worldwide flooded the internet by posting photos and images online with funny captions, attracting an abundance of comments, and proving that humor is a vital need even in the most challenging times. This paper focuses on original Greek internet memes (not those translated into Greek) through selected examples. The study aims to investigate fifteen representations about Covid-19 and the Greek experience of lockdown, focused on quarantine lifestyle issues in Greek social media groups (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). Memes are explored as humorous and composite visual communication works that highlight how Covid-19 and quarantine have affected our everyday lives.","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75403024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Frightening conflictual identities and reassuring affective ties in our contemporary conspiracy theories","authors":"A. Lorusso","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"A Semiotic","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78711014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Perceiving the 'refugee crisis' as a construct shaped, among others, by contemporary political cartooning, we examine how cartoonists have represented European attitudes towards refugees by focusing on the metaphorical representation of 'Europe' and the 'refugee.' Specifically, we identify the conceptual metaphors used to depict Europe and refugees, and how political cartoons framed the 'refugee crisis by applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory – CMT (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980) – and Critical Metaphor Analysis – CMA (cf. Charteris-Black 2004, Musolff 2012). Our analysis reveals that cartoonists re-frame the migration phenomenon according to the emphasis they put on: (a) Europe's role in the Syrian conflict; (b) Europe's policies concerning the reception of refugees in Europe; (c) the implications of Europe's policies for refugees; (d) implications of receiving refugees for Europe; and (e) refugees' expectations from Europe. Political cartoons thus serve as "perspectivisation devices" (Silaški 2012:216) that construct the 'refugee crisis' as 'the Syrian refugee crisis,' a 'humanitarian crisis,' a 'crisis of European governance,' and a 'European identity crisis,' reproducing dominant narratives around migration.
{"title":"Mapping Europe’s Attitudes Towards Refugees in Political Cartoons through CMT and CMA","authors":"Roula Kitsiou, Maria Papadopoulou","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Perceiving the 'refugee crisis' as a construct shaped, among others, by contemporary political cartooning, we examine how cartoonists have represented European attitudes towards refugees by focusing on the metaphorical representation of 'Europe' and the 'refugee.' Specifically, we identify the conceptual metaphors used to depict Europe and refugees, and how political cartoons framed the 'refugee crisis by applying Conceptual Metaphor Theory – CMT (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980) – and Critical Metaphor Analysis – CMA (cf. Charteris-Black 2004, Musolff 2012). Our analysis reveals that cartoonists re-frame the migration phenomenon according to the emphasis they put on: (a) Europe's role in the Syrian conflict; (b) Europe's policies concerning the reception of refugees in Europe; (c) the implications of Europe's policies for refugees; (d) implications of receiving refugees for Europe; and (e) refugees' expectations from Europe. Political cartoons thus serve as \"perspectivisation devices\" (Silaški 2012:216) that construct the 'refugee crisis' as 'the Syrian refugee crisis,' a 'humanitarian crisis,' a 'crisis of European governance,' and a 'European identity crisis,' reproducing dominant narratives around migration.","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84212428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
s early as the 1960s and through to the first decades of the 21st century, comics studies have attracted a large and perhaps disproportionate amount of attention from analytical semiotic approaches that foreground description and theory building. Many of them, culminating in McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993), have been accused of treating their subject with arbitrary abstraction and an overload of theory and of engaging in a semiotic metaphysics that posits the reality of the sign apart from the social reality of each reading. But such opposition of content-oriented criticism and formally abstract semiotics, the accusation of social myopia, does not hold under closer inspection. This introduction to the present Punctum special issue on The Social, Political and Ideological Semiotics of Comics and Cartoons traces some of the overlooked and often oversimplified concerns within semiotic traditions to comic book scholarship that can and often did investigate the historical setting of each sign used in comics in various ways. From this point of view, the social condition of communication is always already in its signs.
{"title":"What More Can Semiotics do for Comics? Looking at Their Social, Political, and Ideological Significations","authors":"S. Packard, Lukas R. A. Wilde","doi":"10.18680/hss.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"s early as the 1960s and through to the first decades of the 21st century, comics studies have attracted a large and perhaps disproportionate amount of attention from analytical semiotic approaches that foreground description and theory building. Many of them, culminating in McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993), have been accused of treating their subject with arbitrary abstraction and an overload of theory and of engaging in a semiotic metaphysics that posits the reality of the sign apart from the social reality of each reading. But such opposition of content-oriented criticism and formally abstract semiotics, the accusation of social myopia, does not hold under closer inspection. This introduction to the present Punctum special issue on The Social, Political and Ideological Semiotics of Comics and Cartoons traces some of the overlooked and often oversimplified concerns within semiotic traditions to comic book scholarship that can and often did investigate the historical setting of each sign used in comics in various ways. From this point of view, the social condition of communication is always already in its signs.","PeriodicalId":36248,"journal":{"name":"Punctum International Journal of Semiotics","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87705989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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