The Predicament of Semiotics

In James Clifford's (1988) book The Predicament of Culture, various essays on critical practice, focusing on all sorts of cultural texts (exhibition catalogues, postcards, art collections, scholarly texts, and the very concepts we use to discuss all of these things), demonstrate the difficulty of talking about meanings. Meanings shift constantly according to social and historical pressures. The predicament of culture, it appears, is the instability of the categories used to address it, to analyze it, even to live in it. It seems that the attempts made in various domains of cultural studies-notably, ethnography and anthropological theory-to reflect on the meaning of the language of domination out of which these domains emerged only lead to deeper dilemmas, to more troubling instances of self-doubt (see, e.g., Fabian 1983). If anywhere, it is in anthropology that the importance of meaning as a tool of power has been recognized and, subsequently, theorized and analyzed. The objects of Clifford's analysis constitute an ideal case for the importance of semiotics as a trans-, super-, or interdisciplinary theory. Although semiotics has largely been developed in conjunction with linguistics and literary analysis, thus almost inevitably giving language a position of theoretical privilege while simultaneously supporting the accusation that this very privileging is undue, in Clifford's work, semiotics confronts objects that are emphatically not linguistic-despite

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Linguistics · Semiotics · Semiotics of culture · Social semiotics · Sociology · Symbolic power · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Public Spaces through Art

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  Open Access•Dar'ya Aleksandrovna Gainutdinova•Филология научные исследования•2024

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