CFP: "Representing Transcendence," a supplementary issue of Signs and Society

[Kyung-Nan (Linda) Koh]

Dear list members,


Signs and Society is a new open-access journal focusing on the study of
sign processes (or semiosis) in the realms of social action, cognition, and
cultural form.

“Representing Transcendence”
Call for Papers for Supplementary Issue (Winter 2014)
(
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/dms/ucp/journals/generaldocs/SAS_CFP_Transcendence.pdf
)

Students of semiosis have long realized that signs and symbols, in their
“standing for” function, are normally more “evident” (perceptible,
experiential) than what they represent (or re-present). In fact, one of the
classic definitions of the sign stresses that they need to “reveal”
something that was, at some previous time, less known or even unknown. More
recently, Carlo Ginzburg has looked at a set of signs, including clues,
evidence, and traces, that, taken together form a deeply rooted tradition
of semiotic reasoning. But what happens if this foundational semiotic
relationship between the evident and the non-evidence is modified to meet
particular cultural circumstances in which various expressive forms
(sculpted objects, painted images, verbal forms, musical compositions) are
designed *not* to reveal their objects or to reveal the *non*-knowability
of their objects. A comparatively widespread instance of this modification
would be where religious traditions establish conventions governing the
representation of transcendence, that is, some power, being, or object
that, being “beyond knowing,” cannot possibly be represented. Indeed, the
successful representation of the non-representable is one way to positively
demonstrate the potency, agency, or eternity of these sacred powers,
beings, or objects, since being “beyond knowledge” implies a corresponding
limitation of mere human knowers.

This Supplementary Issue of *Signs and Society* (published by the
University of Chicago Press) will address this paradox of “representing
transcendence” across time and across disciplines. Considerable scholarship
in this area has already identified a number of cultural strategies for
confronting this paradox. An image of a footprint (or an empty altar) can
index the past presence but present absence of deity. Depictions of ritual
acts of veiling and unveiling or wrapping and unwrapping can suggest a
transformational process of becoming non-evident. Similarly, a number of
cultural traditions permit the representation of deities on the condition
that part of the representation states or implies that the image was itself
“not made by human hands.” And complex images can present the differential
between the evident and the non-evident as a visual hierarchy, such as a
heavenly ladder or as the movement from light to darkness. To these three
examples many more could be added. But rather than merely generating an
inventory of these kinds of representational devices, we hope, through
comparative examples, to be able to ask a number of more interesting
questions. First, what are the particular sociocultural or historical
conditions that seem to support or require these paradoxical semiotic
processes? Second, do the conventions regarding material images extend to
other semiotic registers in a given society? Third, in what specifiable
range of societies do these devices occur, perhaps in typological contrast
to societies where non-human forces are immanent rather than transcendent?
Fourth, what do different “imaginaries” governing the representation of
transcendence tell us more generally about a culture’s concept of
materiality itself, especially ideas about the relation or separation of
the tangible and the non-tangible.

This Supplementary Issue will be co-edited by Massimo Leone at the
University of Turin (massimo.leone at unito.it) and Richard J. Parmentier at
Brandeis University (rparmentier at brandeis.edu). We encourage scholars from
various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to contact either
of us to discuss a possible contribution. The deadline for submitting
completed manuscripts is August 15, 2013, though we hope to begin the
peer-review process much before that date.


For more information, please visit our website:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/sas.html

--
Kyung-Nan (Linda) Koh
Managing Editor, Signs and Society
Email: sas at hufs.ac.kr
Website: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/sas.html
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