with ethnographic material on a Chinese fate-calculation technique known as ‘eight signs’ ( bazi ). Because they imply computation processes and/or the manipulation of some randomizing device, fate-calculation techniques in China are usually classified
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Chinese Eight Signs Prediction
Ontology, Knowledge, and Computation
Stéphanie Homola
Indigènes into Signs
Incorporating Indigenous Pedestrians on Colonial Roads in 1920s and 1930s French Indochina
Stéphanie Ponsavady
In Colonial Indochina, the introduction of motorized transportation led French authorities to focus their attention on the issue of pedestrian walking. The political and economic imperatives of the colonial state shaped the modern phenomenon of traffic, which isolated the indigenous body as a sign of otherness. The unruly indigenous pedestrian expressed a discursive and experiential crisis that questioned colonialism itself. This article invites us to examine the political potential of walking by considering Henri Lefebvre's notion of dressage and its limitations in a colonial setting through various examples, from French accounts of indigenous walking in daily activities to political disruptions of traffic by pedestrian demonstrators and the incorporation of indigenous bodies in road safety policies. Repeatedly, colonial subjects eluded, criticized, or undermined the rules of the road and the colony by the simple act of walking.
Speaking in Celestial Signs
The Language of Western Astrology and the (Tenuous) Bonds of Occult Sociality
Omri Elisha
, anything that transcends their philosophical and technical differences, it is their confidence in the ultimate validity and accuracy of what they call the ‘symbolic language’ of astrology: an order of non-arbitrary signs and delineations based on the study
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 149–162 (14 total)
The Tacit Logic of Ritual Embodiments
Rappaport and Polanyi between Thick and Thin
Robert E. Innis
Roy Rappaport’s attempted semiotic schematization of the logic of ritual, relying on analytical tools from C. S. Peirce’s philosophical semiotics, is examined in terms of both its conceptual coherence and its relation to other schematizations of ritual, especially Michael Polanyi’s thematization of a ‘tacit logic’ of meaning-making. The Peircean foregrounding of sign types (icons, indices, symbols) is compared to Polanyi’s delineation of an irreducible from-to structure of consciousness, rooted in the distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness, and to his further distinction between indication and symbolization as ways of relating to and effecting symbolic complexes, such as rituals. One of the startling upshots of this comparison is that the distinctions between ‘thick ritual’ and ‘thin ritual,’ and between art and ritual, become extremely labile. Examples from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Philip Larkin, and Simone Weil illustrate this last point.
In Social Analysis
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2004
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 195–212 (18 total)
Les Signes du Politique
Language and Sociability in France from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Century
Jacques Guilhaumou
This article describes the social and linguistic processes underlying the formation of political language in France from the end of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The author emphasizes the close relationship between the evolution of political language, as it can be traced through the many editions of dictionnaires and grammaires, and novel forms of sociability, from the medieval notion of friendship to revolutionary civism. The eighteenth century is considered a crucial moment in this process, given that during that period the thinkers of the Lumières, in their effort to harness civil society through language, forged the notion of a space of universal communication among men as a precondition for the invention of a political language specific to contemporary democracy.
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Oct 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 137–159 (23 total)
Signs of Radical Democracy?
Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière and Tahrir Square, 2011
Bert Olivier
How should one make theoretical sense of what has been called 'the miracle of Tahrir Square' – the fact that the Egyptian people successfully ousted a dictator in a peaceful manner, where militant groups had failed to do so by force? In this article it is argued that Deleuze/Guattari's notion of the subject in terms of desiring-machines, flows, schizophrenic production and the 'body-without-organs', enables one to theorise human subjectivity as being in process, and not 'self-identical', as mainstream thinking would have it. Deleuze's thought on societies of control further suggests the concept of rhizomatic lines of subversion of hegemonic networks from within the latter. Further, Alain Badiou's consonant conception of the subject – as one of multiple 'emplacements' – represents a spatial perspective on individual subjects which similarly eschews the pitfalls of an abstract notion of human subjectivity in favour of one that conceives of the subject as inescapably 'placed' in multiple spatial coordinates, as it were. In addition, Jacques Rancière's radicalisation of 'politics' in terms of 'equality' and 'dissensus' enables one to grasp the fleeting events of Tahrir Square as paradigmatic of 'true' democracy. In this way these theoretical positions provide a model that is commensurate with evidence that the 2011 Egyptian uprising avoided the trap of hierarchical thinking and practice, pursuing the goal of political liberation and (radical) democratisation along non-hierarchical, 'leaderless', complex, rhizomatic communicational networks instead. This avoided the paralysing tendency to think and behave on the basis of oppositionally conceived, mutually exclusive adversarial agencies – the 'us' and 'them' syndrome. The article explores the implications of this complex notion of subjectivity, on the one hand, in relation to the radical democratic practice displayed in Tahrir Square, on the other.
Under the Sign of the Gun
Welcome to the Postmodern Melancholy of Gordimer's Post-Apartheid World
Simon Lewis
Raymond Chandler used to say that whenever he got stuck writing a novel he would get going again by having a character come through the door with a gun in hand. Reading the opening pages of Nadine Gordimer’s new novel with its account of a sensational murder, one might wonder whether South Africa’s 1991 Nobel laureate, faced with the end of apartheid and the consequent lack of a subject, was operating according to Chandler’s principle. The House Gun, however, indicates not so much the lack of a subject as a new way of looking at an old subject facing new circumstances – the old subject being the psychological and material effects of white racism on whites, the new circumstances being those of post-apartheid South Africa. Moreover, the apparent narrowing of focus from the macropolitics of Gordimer’s three most recent preceding novels, None to Accompany Me (1994), My Son’s Story (1990), and A Sport of Nature (1987), to the micro-politics of The House Gun suggests that we can read South Africa’s transition to full democracy as a paradigmatic change from a modern to a postmodern condition. Gordimer’s post- 1994 publications, and The House Gun in particular, lend themselves to being read as illustrative of two of Michel Foucault’s central insights: the ubiquity of power, and the consequent idea that given that ubiquity, care of one’s self (‘souci de soi’) becomes a new kind of political obligation.
The Difficult Conditions Inside Italian Prisons: Signs of Change?
Asher D. Colombo and Luigi La Fauci
In 2013, the European Court of Human Rights found that the conditions inside Italian prisons were so bad, they amounted to inhuman and/or degrading punishment. Since that time, the Italian government has attempted to reduce overcrowding inside prisons. This chapter shows that most of the reduction in overcrowding has not been the result of amnesties, pardons, or other forms of early release, such as electronic tagging. Rather, it is the result of changes that have decreased the number of individuals entering prison, in particular prisoners on remand and those awaiting final sentencing.
In Italian Politics
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 179–197 (19 total)
Arab Spring as a sign of continuity and change
Carmen Maganda and Harlan Koff
In the editorial note of the first issue of Regions & Cohesion, we directly asked ourselves and our readers: What role do people play in regional integration processes? Regions have, indeed, developed in different ways and for different reasons. One of the main questions behind the mission of this journal asks: Are territories serving their citizens, or do citizens serve the needs of expanding territories and interconnected markets?
Reflecting upon Coriolanus as Being-in-and-for-Mother through the Gaze of Existential Semiotics
Maryamossadat Mousavi and Pyeaam Abbasi
brand of semiotics; Tarasti calls his theory ‘neosemiotics’. 2 It exhibits a nature that is porous in its integration of both semiotic and philosophical tradition. Tarasti's existential semiotics aims to explore ‘the life of signs from within’. 3 The