33.3525, Calls: Discourse Analysis / Punctum (Jrnl)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3525. Sun Nov 13 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3525, Calls:  Discourse Analysis / Punctum (Jrnl)

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Editor for this issue: Sarah Goldfinch <sgoldfinch at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2022 21:20:06
From: Evangelos Kourdis [ekourdis at frl.auth.gr]
Subject: Discourse Analysis / Punctum (Jrnl)

 
Full Title: Punctum 


Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis 

Call Deadline: 31-May-2023 

Call for Papers:

The Meaning of Collections between Media and Practices
Special issue of Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics  9:1 (2023)
Guest Editors: Gabriele Marino & Bruno Surace

In 2009, in an essay that was to become famous, Umberto Eco associated the
list with a kind of dizzying, vertigo-like semiotic mode of accumulation and
categorization. The list, the catalog, the register, the inventory, are indeed
quasi-synonyms, all united by their belonging to a specific semantic area:
they refer to a set of things, whose being together is governed by some kind
of pertinence and relevance. This is, de facto, the very same principle that
guides the semiotic researcher in the act of carving up the text to be
studied, in the act of constructing the corpus of analysis, which to be
meaningful must show an isotopic coherence, at least – as Peirce puts it – in
some respects. There is, therefore, a sort of elective affinity between the
procedure that the semiotician puts in place in building their own field of
action and the subject who draws up their lists and, even more generically,
collects and sorts things. 

But this is not all, because sets are also capable not only of signifying as
semiotic objects, but also of profoundly resemanticizing the elements that
compose them. This is precisely the principle of the collection. For instance,
a beer cap is, in itself, an object whose significance is rapidly exhausted
and, basically, strictly limited to its primary function (that of preventing
the liquid from escaping from a bottle). However, that same stopper takes on
another, higher value when it is associated with others in a syntagma defined
by the collector. The collection is therefore a primary whole, which by
semiotic statute precisely defines its boundaries and their value, what they
contain and what they exclude. Collecting is a practice already codified in
antiquity, as demonstrated by the medieval and then Renaissance Wunderkammer,
an exercise in orderly accumulation that ennobles both the contained object
and the container context. From here arises the iconographic flow that makes
the “chamber of wonders” a spectacle for the eyes not only on account of the
objects it contains, but also because of how they are contained. Collecting is
not simply gathering, since the term takes on specific semantic values, which
recall the grafting around the practice of identity communities, forms of
life, market sectors. The collection also pushes us to reconsider an
assumption shared by semiotics: the collecting market is in fact a market
dominated by tokens, rather than by types (essential for the expert in
establishing, however, the authenticity of the token). The sense of the whole
is capable, à la Aby Warburg, of illuminating the sense of the single
component.

The market – economic and symbolic – of collections is now so in vogue that it
represents in itself an area of great importance. If earlier collections were
based on the semantic remodeling of an object whose value transliterated, in
an astonishing way, from the condition of a simple object to that of a
treasure, today it is increasingly common that collectibles are already born
as such. If, previously, bottle caps, stamps, comics, butterflies, etc. were
devices that were “recovered” in the act of the collector, nowadays industries
produce items that can be collected “in the matrix”.

It still makes sense to reflect, in this era of alleged “dematerialization”,
on the semiotics of collections, including digital ones.

See the rest of the CfP, including suggested topics for this monographic issue
of “Punctum," here:
https://punctum.gr/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Punctum_CfP_COLLECTIONS.pdf




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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3525	
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