This article draws upon two concepts deployed by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his semiotic writings that have so far received little attention in studies of materiality and agency in archaeology, those of the “Interpretant” and “habit.” The emphasis of both of these concepts on the interpretive side of semiotic functioning suggests that some of the problems with current theories of material agency may be due to their focus on the production of meaning rather than the recursive nature of meaning-making that requires consideration of the consumption side of meaningful communication acts as well. Using an example of pottery-making practices from the Early Bronze Age Black Sea region, this article argues that we should instead rethink agency as an “archaeology of self” in which identity and meaning of signs—whether words, people, or things—are distributed across and emergent from social networks and communities of interpreters.

Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States and France to develop computerized systems that, with the aid of specific algorithms, can abstract and enact the styles of different past jazz masters, as well as the styles of players who interactively improvise with such systems in real time. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the article offers an analysis of these media technologies, their present application in the field of online consumption, and the cultural specificity of the Third that plays a key role in their development and reception, namely, style.

Theories of culture based on signs and systems are found across the interdisciplinary spectrum. There seems to be a growing consensus across disciplines that the forms of culture (linguistic, material, aesthetic, ritualistic, etc.) are connected to each other in some way. With the advent of conceptual metaphor theory, this article claims that the cognitive mechanism (metaphor) connecting the forms can be found in this theoretical framework. It also puts forward the notion of metaform as a nonverbal counterpart to a conceptual metaphor. In this way, it is possible to link signs and systems to each other into a network of distributed meanings that constitute a culture.

Criminal justice is the area of law where we are closest to an overview of the semiotic processes through a succession of organizational contexts. We start with the first call to the police and conclude with the criminal trial or appeal. The main stages in the process may be characterized as (police) investigation, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion by public officials, and the trial. The attention of legal philosophers and semioticians alike has been directed primarily toward the last. However, it is important to draw attention also to the earlier stages, and to the possibilities that exist of fitting them within a single semiotic framework of analysis.

This essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, signification, and performative power. This essay investigates the citational underpinnings of the Fregean sense, Austinian performativity, and Derridean deconstruction. I give particular attention to Derrida's reading of Austin, and his development of the concept of citationality. As I argue, Derrida's insistence on the necessary possibility of citationality elides the fact that citations are always already achievements in context, and thus empirical facts about particular (types of) acts in the world. Not all acts are reflexive about their citationality, and this has consequences for their material form and their pragmatics. Finally, the essay turns to the recalcitrance of events of semiosis to being cited, in particular, to taboo speech. Taboo speech presents a case of speech that seemingly cannot be bracketed, where performative effect necessarily and always attains. As such cases show, citation brackets and suspends, but perhaps never totally.

Perceptions of boundaries between communicative codes and the modalities through which they are produced and perceived are mediated by social actors’ particular communicative repertoires and histories. I focus in particular on how the affordances of SignWriting (SW), a writing system for sign languages that has been adapted in Germany to additionally inscribe the physical movements by which spoken languages are produced, reveal and affect users’ diverse interpretations of the relationship between German Sign Language (DGS) and German. I examine the production and interpretation of DGS SW texts on two different scales: a classroom in Germany and a transnational, multilingual online network of SignWriters with whom classroom participants engage.

This article examines the semiotic and rhetorical mechanisms by which Obama’s “race speech” builds a mutual identification between Blacks and Whites; it emphasizes the importance of locus communis commonplace and “equivalential links” (Laclau 2005, 94). It also looks at how Obama himself constructs his identity in order to appeal to a racially and politically heterogeneous audience. In addition, it attempts to identify and explain some elements of the speech that may carry heightened emotional content and that may induce a distancing or identification reaction in an audience. From the theoretical standpoint, the article brings to bear the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics understanding of metaphor and meaning-generation mechanisms on the Laclauian post-Marxist poststructural concept of the “people,” in order to explain how metaphors participate in the construction of a “people” during a presidential campaign. In terms of cognitive theory, it draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s understanding of metaphorical thinking ([1980] 2003) and Castells’s elaboration on emotions in relation to political cognition (2009). The sociological perspective on emotions aids in the analysis of emotions in social interaction (Turner and Stets 2009). The contribution of this article lies in the semiotic analysis of the role of emotion-evoking elements of the race speech that may indicate a constitutive role in the formation of a “people.”

The missionary encounter between the London Missionary Society and Sotho-Tswana communities of southern Africa has been explored by Jean and John Comaroff as work that took place at the level of both signs and practices. In this article, I consider what a Peircean semeiotic might offer to this narrative. I argue that it provides ways to disrupt the sometimes binary relationship of signs and practices while also providing opportunities for productive interdisciplinary conversations about the affective, material, and processual nature of changes in belief and practice.

In the present essay the author sets out to reflect on the notions of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, pursuing the research beyond what is directly given in Peirce’s writings. For the purpose, Peircean phenomenology is considered to be a special variety of the Husserlian kind, because it restricts possible phenomena to threesomes and also attributes special contents to the three categories. The first restriction means that Peirce’s theory is a kind of structuralism, although a triadic one, whereas the second restriction implies that it is not merely formal. In the present essay, specific, primitive meanings are assigned to each of the categories, and they are seen to be similar in form to the dyads and triads of social psychology. At the end, signs are considered to be special kinds of Thirds, and an attempt is made to elucidate what hypo-icons owe to Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

Taking as a point of departure the description and depiction of the anima ragionevole e beata (sensible and blessed soul) in Ripa’s Iconologia, this essay inquires, from a semiotic point of view, into the labyrinthine development of the Christian imaginary of the soul, considered one of the sources of the cultural semiotics of modern and contemporary subjectivities. Placed between the Greek model of visual representations of psyché, incarnated by countless fleeting but visible beings (sirens, birds, butterflies, snakes, etc.), and the Jewish model of a vital breath that, having to resemble the divine one, must shun any iconic rendering, the Christian imaginary of the soul develops—in parallel with the Christian theology of the soul—paradoxically, seeking to combine its depiction and, simultaneously, the denial of it.

Where can we find “culture” in relation to humans’ experience of it in by-degrees normatively appropriate and socially effective semiotic interactions? By analyzing several examples of such semiotic material, we can develop the idea that “culture” is a socio-historically contingent wave phenomenon immanent in social practice dimensionalized by semiotic characteristics I here term signification—circulation—emanation.

Many living history reenactors speak of “touching the past” in their performances. In nearly all instances, these profound experiences of intimate traffic with previous epochs and persons are brought about not through physical contact with historical artifacts but through deployments of replicas and props, including recently produced adornment, weaponry, vehicles, and tools. This essay explores the roles and functions of material reproductions or substitutes of historic artifacts in reenactment performances, and how these object-oriented practices often bring about powerful sensations of historic authenticity on the part of reenactors and their audiences. I give particular attention to the use of physical objects by those who seek to reenact traumatic events and experiences related to American histories of racial injustice, including experiences of slavery and Jim Crow racial violence.