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This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the widespread issue of fake news and misinformation. Using real-life examples and semiotic theory, the author demonstrates how language, images, and symbols are being utilized in media production and distribution with the intention of altering the perception of individuals and shaping their beliefs. The book also addresses how social and cultural factors influence the spread of information and emphasizes the importance of understanding the context in which information is being received and shared. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the impact of fake news and misinformation on society, especially academics, researchers, journalists, policymakers, and media professionals at all levels. The author provides contemporary theories and practical strategies to navigate the complex and ever-changing media landscape.

This book reveals the core features of digital culture, examined by means of semiotic models and theories. It positions commercial and market principles in the center of the digital semiosphere, avoiding the need to force the new cultural reality into the established textualist or pragmatist paradigms. The theoretic insights and case studies presented here argue for new semiotic models of inquiry that include working with big data, user experience and nethnography, along with conventional approaches.The book develops a new concept of identity in the digital age, analyzing the digital flows of recognition and value, which led to the tremendous success of Social Media and the Web 2.0 era. Self-expression, entertainment and consumerism are seen as the major drivers of identity formation in the post-truth era, where the self can no longer be considered independently of a given person's communication devices, where a substantial part of it is stored and actualized. It will be of interest to semioticians and researchers working on digital culture.

This fourth edition of the bestselling textbook, now available in print, eBook, and audiobook, has been fully updated, continuing to provide a concise introduction to the key concepts of semiotics in accessible and jargon-free language.Demystifying what is a complex, highly interdisciplinary field, key questions covered include: what are signs and codes? What can semiotics teach us about representation and reality? What tools does it offer for analysing texts and cultural practices? The fourth edition of Semiotics: The Basics focuses in particular on its application to communication and cultural studies. It has been extensively revised and extended, with an entirely new section on cognitive semiotics, many more illustrations, and a new glossary. With updates to theory, further examples, and suggestions for review and further reading, this must-have resource is both the ideal introductory text and an essential reference guide for students at all levels of language and communication, media, and cultural studies.

This introductory textbook familiarizes students with ideas of key thinkers and perspectives related to postmodern thought and everyday life. The book is unique in that it offers selections from key passages of works of important thinkers as well as from some of the author's own publications that serve as examples of how to interpret various aspects of culture. The book draws in readers with its engaging and conversational style and use of cases, illustrations and photographs, including fun discussions on everyday life under pandemic restrictions. This is a must read for students taking courses in sociology, cultural anthropology, culture and media studies, linguistics, social philosophy, and for specific courses on postmodernism.

Frank Herbert's »Dune« (1965) is considered to be one of the most successful Science Fiction novels of the 20th century. It introduces its readers to a future universe, in which the production of the most valuable resource of the universe – ›spice‹ – is only possible on one vast desert planet called Arrakis. »Dune« offers many different motifs, including a hero that eventually turns into a superhuman being. However, the novel is also rich of orientalist semiotics and relates to a sign system existent when Herbert wrote his book. Frank Jacob discusses these semiotics in detail and shows how much of »Lawrence of Arabia« is present in the story's plot.

This book traces the origins and evolution of cybersemiotics, beginning with the integration of semiotics into the theoretical framework of cybernetics and information theory. The book opens with chapters that situate the roots of cybersemiotics in Peircean semiotics, describe the advent of the Information Age and cybernetics, and lay out the proposition that notions of system, communication, self-reference, information, meaning, form, autopoiesis, and self-control are of equal topical interest to semiotics and systems theory. Subsequent chapters introduce a cybersemiotic viewpoint on the capacity of arts and other practices for knowing. This suggests pathways for developing Practice as Research and practice-led research, and prompts the reader to view this new configuration in cybersemiotic terms. Other contributors discuss cultural and perceptual shifts that lead to interaction with hybrid environments such as Alexa. The relationship of storytelling and cybersemiotics is covered at chapter length, and another chapter describes an individual-collectivity dialectics, in which the latter (Commind) constrains the former (interactants), but the former fuels the latter. The concluding chapter begins with the observation that digital technologies have infiltrated every corner of the metropolis - homes, workplaces, and places of leisure - to the extent that cities and bodies have transformed into interconnected interfaces. The book challenges the reader to participate in a broader discussion of the potential, limitations, alternatives, and criticisms of cybersemiotics.

Tout dispositif médiatique, bien qu'il serve d'accès à l'échange social, gagne à s'effacer devant sa fonction de médiation. Comment les dispositifs contemporains, cernés par des enjeux culturels, politiques et commerciaux, négocient-ils cet équilibre entre visibilité et invisibilité? Les contributions de cet ouvrage mettent à la question quelques pratiques sociales, culturelles et journalistiques actuelles particulièrement révélatrices de ce tiraillement.

Im Zeitalter einer komplexen Wechselwirkung von Medieninnovationen, gesellschaftlichen Transformationsprozessen und technologischer Kulturentwicklung ist es heute ein besonders dringendes Anliegen, dass Theoriemodelle aufgestellt sowie analytische Methoden entwickelt werden, um das dynamische Feld der Medienwirkung produktiv und systematisch lokalisieren und kennzeichnen zu können. Die Analytische Phänosemiose versteht sich hier bewusst als eine analytische und systematische Methodologie, die in der Lage ist, die strukturelle, technische und wahrnehmungsbezogene Erscheinungswirklichkeit von medialen Artefakten und Prozessen im Kontext ihrer materiellen Präsenz zu erfassen. Die von Lars C. Grabbe durchgeführten Analysen haben das Ziel, die Phänosemiotische Zeichenrelation von zehn verschiedenen medialen Konstellationen offenzulegen (z.B. Bewegtbild, Holografische Felder, Avatarial Body etc.). Dabei wird ebenso auf die methodisch geprägten Ansätze der Semiotik, Phänomenologie und Kommunikationstheorie wie auch auf Ansätze der Medientheorie, Wahrnehmungstheorie und der informationstheoretischen Ästhetik zurückgegriffen. Grabbes Studie ist primär methodisch ausgerichtet und versteht sich als konkretes Werkzeug. Mit der Analytischen Phänosemiose soll ein Beitrag für das dynamische Verstehen von Medien im Kontext von Wahrnehmung, Technologie und Zeichen geleistet werden.

This book develops Gregory Bateson's ideas regarding “communication about relationship” in animals and human beings, and even nations. It bases itself on Bateson's theory of relational communication, as he described it in the zoosemiotics of octopus, mammals, birds, and human beings. This theory includes, for example, the roles of metaphor, play, analog and digital communication, metacommunication, and Laws of Form. It is organized around a letter from Gregory Bateson to his fellow cybernetic thinker Warren McCulloch at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this letter Bateson argued that what we would today call zoosemiotics, including Bateson's own (previously unpublished) octopus research, should be made a basis for understanding the relationship between the two blocs of the Cold War. Accordingly the book shows how Bateson understood interactive processes in the biosemiotics of conflict and peacemaking, which are analyzed usingexamples from recent animal studies, from primate studies, and from cultural anthropology. The Missile Crisis itself is described in terms of Bateson's critique of game theory which he felt should be modified by an understanding of the zoosemiotics of relational communication. The book also includes a previously unpublished piece by Gregory Bateson on wolf behavior and metaphor/ abduction.

Dating back to antiquity, semiotics is both a'technique'and a'science'that aims to understand the nature of meaning. An academic discipline in its own right, semiotics uses signs, such as words and symbols, to think, communicate, reflect, transmit, and preserve knowledge. Since the initial publication of The Quest for Meaning in 2007, the world has changed dramatically with the advent of online culture, new technologies, and new ways of making signs and symbols. Updated to reflect these many changes, the second edition includes a comprehensive chapter on the use of semiotics in the Internet age. Written in a student-friendly style, featuring examples from everyday life, the book explains what semiotics is all about and why it is so important for gaining insights into our elusive and mysterious human nature.

This book examines the problem of relationships between culture and space. Highlighting the use of semiotics of culture as a basic concept of research, it describes the power of the cultural landscape in the context of culture philosophical research. Opening with a discussion of the existence of culture in space, it establishes basic concepts such as noosphere and pneumatosphere. The author acknowledges the early contributions of thinkers like Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who first observed that human activity has become a geological force.Introducing time and space to the discussion, the author then describes the nature of mythological time, eternity versus timelessness, and the semantics of sacred landscapes, space and ritual. These concepts are further developed in discussions of the metaphorical nature of cultural landscape, and the city as metaphor.The book explores semiotics in the cultural landscape, examining the genesis of concepts from geographical images to signs and the axiological dimension of geographical images. In her approach to the idea of cultural landscape as text, she provides detailed examples, including the Russian landscape as agent provocateur of the text, and the culture philosophical aspects and semantics of travel.It establishes the cultural landscape as a phenomenon of culture that is fixed in geographical space with the help of semiotic mechanisms—a specific area of culture of life possessing functional and ontological self-sufficiency.This book appeals readers and researchers interested in the philosophy of culture, semiotics of space, and the philosophical dimensions of culture and geography.

The Semiotics of Love brings together work on early symbolism, literary practices, and contemporary communication on the theme of romance and the idea of love to forge an understanding of the semiotic-cultural side of romance. Moving beyond psychological and neuroscientific scholarly analyses of love, Marcel Danesi works to interrogate the cultural constructions of love across societies. This book analyzes romantic love from the general perspective of semiotics—that is, from its more generic interpretive angle, rather than its more technical one. The specific analytical lens used is based on the notion that we convert our feeling structures into sign structures (words, symbols) and sign-based constructions (texts, rituals, etc.), which then allow us to reflect upon something cognitively, rather than just experience it physically and emotionally.

This book draws on visual data, ranging from advertisements to postage stamps to digital personal photography, to offer a complex interpretation of the different social functions realised by these texts as semiotic artefacts. Framed within the media environment of the city of Hong Kong, the study demonstrates the importance of social context to meaning making and social semiotic multimodal analysis. This book will be of interest to readers in the arts, humanities and social sciences, particularly within the fields of semiotics, visual studies, design studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

This book explores the interdisciplinarity of semiotics and communication studies, comprising both theoretical explorations and semiotic applications to communication with theoretical bearings. These disciplines have generally been understood as mutually implicit, but there still are many unexplored research avenues in this area, particularly on a conceptual level. The book offers broad insights into the epistemological relations between semiotics and other approaches to communication from perspectives such as sociology, philosophy of language and communication theory. As such, it sheds light on the communication of knowledge.Semiotics is currently enjoying increasing popularity within the humanities and social sciences. Understood as relational logic (Charles Peirce) or hermeneutics (structuralism and poststructuralism), semiotics fundamentally implies certain positions with regard to communication. Because of the generality and conceptual vagueness of semiosis and communication, how one elucidates the other is still an underexplored theme. With some pioneering studies of this relation, the books examines various fields, such as language, code, learning, embodiment, political communication, media, cinema, cuisine, multimodality and intertextuality.

This book deals with one the most interesting aspects of human life—the search for meaning. It discusses how the science of semiotics is equipped to provide insight on what meaning is and how we produce it. Why is it that certain people routinely put their survival at risk by smoking? Why is it that some women make locomotion difficult for themselves by donning high-heel footwear? Are there unconscious forces at work behind such strange behaviors? This book will attempt to answer such questions by claiming that these behaviors are meaningful in culture-specific ways. The discipline that studies such behaviors and their relation to meanings is called semiotics. Semiotics probes the human condition in its own peculiar way, by unraveling the meanings of signs, which motivate not only the wearing of high heel shoes, but also the construction of words and art forms. Now in its third edition, this landmark introduction to semiotics has been updated with a wealthof new content, focusing on the many developments in digital culture since the previous edition. With the addition of topics such as memes, Selfies, social media profiles, and even Mafia discourse, the new edition comprehensively covers new trends in culture while streamlining treatments of basic semiotics contents.

Perspectives on Everyday Life: A Cross Disciplinary Cultural Analysis makes the argument for studying everyday life through a combination of introductory theoretical approaches and a grouping of applications to specific aspects of American culture. The first part of the book addresses the idea of everyday life as considered by distinguished thinkers who have written books about everyday life, such as Sigmund Freud, Fernand Braudel, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and others. The second part of the book uses theories dealt with in the first part of the book to explore objects—such as suitcases, alarm clocks, milk, pacifiers, pressure cookers, smart speakers, and super-glue—and their part in the various rituals of everyday life in America, revealing their hidden meanings.

This book examines how identities associated with cycling are evoked, narrated and negotiated in a media context dominated by digital environments. Arguing that the nature of identity is being impacted by the changing nature of the material and semiotic resources available for making meaning, the author introduces an approach to exploring such identity positioning through the interrelated frameworks of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis, and illustrates how this happens in practice. The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on a different aspect of identity and media environment. Part I considers celebrity identities in the conventional media of print and television. Part II investigates community and leisure / sporting identity through an online cycling forum, while Part III examines corporate identity realised through corporate websites, consumer reviews and Youtube channels. This unique volume will appeal to students and scholars of discourse analysis, applied linguistics and the world of cycling.

En remettant ses pas dans ceux d'Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917-1992), Herman Parret s'emploie dans cet ouvrage à baliser les chemins qui ont conduit le projet sémiotique vers l'épistémologie puis l'ont ouvert à la pensée esthétique. Il montre comment le concept de structure, comme celui-ci témoigne des progrès que la sémiotique a accomplis à l'égard de ces modèles éminents, a permis de poser des repères, dégager des problèmes et prospecter de nouveaux domaines d'investigation.

Qu'y a-t-il de commun entre le street art, les mooc ou les forums médicaux en ligne? Il s'agit, dans tous les cas, de pratiques culturelles qui dépendent fortement des techniques qui en soutiennent l'émergence dans l'espace public. Le projet du présent volume est d'interroger ces pratiques émergentes pour la pensée médiatique qu'elles délivrent. La perspective d'analyse est sémiotique et se décline à travers une série d'études de cas qui cartographient notre imaginaire culturel contemporain.

This book offers a cultural studies approach to marketing and advertising and shows readers how scholars from different academic disciplines make sense of marketing's role in American culture and society. It is written in an accessible style and has numerous drawings by the author to give it more visual interest.

Written especially for undergraduate students, Representation synthesises and updates our understandings of representation - and the tools for its analysis - for use in the new mediascape. Jenny Kidd uses an engaging range of current examples and a lively style to explore a number of key questions reflecting existing and contemporary debates about representation. These key questions include: Who ‘owns'and manages representations? Whose realities are foregrounded, and whose are consigned to invisibility? To what extent are increased opportunities for self-representation altering the landscape? And what happens to representation within the noisy, playful and often subversive communications of the Internet? Kidd considers the political, social and cultural importance of representation across a broad spectrum of cultural and creative industries. This examination of the relationship between media/cultural representations and the construction of reality, identity and society makes it an ideal text for students that need to get to grips with this core thematic of media and cultural studies.

Der Band'Sprache und Denken'versammelt erstmalig alle denkpsychologischen Frühschriften von Karl Bühler. Dieser Teil seines Werks leistete einen bedeutenden Beitrag zur Würzburger Schule - von Franz Brentano über Oswald Külpe bis zu all deren herausragenden Schülern wie etwa Anton Marty, Edmund Husserl, Christian von Ehrenfels oder Carl Stumpf. Karl Bühlers denkpsychologische Arbeiten führten nicht nur zu der sogenannten ›Wundt-Kontroverse‹, die den jungen Privatdozenten quasi über Nacht berühmt machte. Sie bildeten ebenso die Grundlagen der kognitiven Wissenschaften und damit auch für Bühlers Meisterwerk'Sprachtheorie'. Die Kommunikationswissenschaft wäre ohne ihre denkpsychologischen Fundamente kaum vorstellbar.

Transferential Poetics presents a method for bringing theories of affect to the study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics of four major American artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Andy Warhol. The author emphasizes the close, reflexive attention each of these artists pays to the transfer of feeling between text and reader, or composition and audience— their transferential poetics. The book's historical route from Poe to Warhol culminates in television, a technology and cultural form that makes affect distinctly available to perception. The peculiar theatricality of these four artists, Frank argues, can best be understood as a reciprocal framing relation between the bodily means of communicating affect (by face and voice) and technologies of graphic reproduction.

Meaning Making in Text presents new insights into forms of communication in a range of contexts: cultural, linguistic, multimodal and educational. The thirteen chapters are all linked theoretically by advances in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

Through a reevaluation of the work of some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, this book details how semiotics, social sense, and social communication can function together to analyze how culture works in the contemporary era.

This volume develops a new multimodal semiotic approach to the study of communication, examining how multimodal discourse is construed transmedially and interculturally and how new technologies and cultural stances inform communicative contexts across the world. It contributes to current theoretical debates in the disciplines of semiotics, linguistics, multimodality, and pragmatics, as well as those aspects of pedagogy and film studies that engage with the notions of text and narrative by addressing questions such as: How do we study multimedia communication? How do we incorporate the impact of new media technologies into the study of Linguistics and Semiotics? How do we construe culture in modern communication? How useful are the current multidisciplinary approaches to multimodal communication?Through the analysis of specific case studies that are developed within diverse academic disciplines and which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks, the goal of this book is to provide a basis for an overarching framework that can be applied by scholars and students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.

This volume provides a critical roadmap through the major historical sources of legal semiotics as we know them today. The history of legal semiotics, now at least a century old, has never been written (a non-event itself pregnant with semiotic possibility). As a consequence, its sources are seldom clearly exposed and, as word, object and meaning change, are sometimes lost. They reach from an English translation of the 1916 inaugural lecture of the first Chair in Legal Significs at the Amsterdam University, via mid 20th century studies on “property” or “contract,” to equally fascinating essays on contemporary semiotic problems produced by former students of the Roberta Kevelson Semiotics Roundtable Seminar at Penn State University 2012 and 2013. Together, the materials in this book weave the fabric of semiotics and significs, two names for the unfolding of semiotics in law and legal discourse at least until the second half of the 20th century, and both of which covered a lawyer's focus on sign and meaning in law. The latter is embedded within the cultural imperatives of the civilization that gave these terms meaning and made them an effective tool for the dissection of law, its reconstitution as an instrument to be used by the lawyer to advance the interests of her clients, and for judges as a means to restructure language as a narrative of law whose power could bend behavior to its strictures. Legal semiotics has become an indispensible part of the elite lawyer's toolkit and a fundamental approach to analysis of legal texts. Two previous volumes published in 2011 and 2012 explored the conceptual, methodological and epistemological progress in the field of legal semiotics, the modern forms of semiotics study, and the mechanics of meaning making processes by lawyers. Yet the great lessons of semiotics requires a focus on the origins of the concepts and frameworks that would become contemporary legal semiotics, its origins as an object of the consciousness of meaning making—one whose roots, as lessons for the oracular conversations of law, are expanded in this volume.

Cet ouvrage s'adresse à ceux qui pratiquent l'expression écrite et orale, mais également aux professionnels de la communication, voire aux politiciens qui ont besoin de construire des discours ou de mettre en place des stratégies, quand ils doivent argumenter dans les débats ou préparer des interventions télévisées. Il renseigne sur l'organisation et la démonstration, ainsi que sur les stratégies argumentatives, organisationnelles et relationnelles.

In this introduction to the semiotic theory of one of the most innovative theorists of the twentieth century, the Russian literary scholar and semiotician Yuri Lotman, offers a new look at Lotman's profound legacy by conceptualizing his ideas in modern context and presenting them as a useful tool of cultural analysis.

This collection of critical essays, originally published in Pragmatics and Society 1:2 (2010), discusses how normative biases that shape our relation to the world are constructed through discursive practice in media discourse. The intertextual perspective it adopts is crucial for our understanding of how media representations of speakers and languages shape many of our preconceptions of others. Mediatization is inherently intertextual; the very nature of this process involves extracting the speech behavior of particular speakers or groups from a highly specific context and refracting and reshaping it to be inserted in another stream of representation. The notion of intertextuality becomes a useful concept for the linguistic anthropological study of media discourse in the context of modernity, as it provides us with a tool for exploring the semiotic processes that underlie the way in which the media negotiate and reinscribe the complex relationships of identity that characterize late modern subjecthood.

The phenomenon of multimodality has, as Jewitt observes, generated interest'across many disciplines...against the backdrop of considerable social change.'Contemporary societies are grappling with the social implications of the rapid increase in sophistication and range of multimodal practices, particularly within interactive digital media, so that the study of multimodality also becomes essential within an increasing range of practical domains. As a result of this increasing interest in multimodality, scholars, teachers and practitioners are on the one hand uncovering many different issues arising from its study, such as those of theory and methodology, while also exploring multimodality within an increasing range of domains.Such an increase and range of interest in multimodality heralds the emergence of a distinct multimodal studies field: as both the mapping of a domain of enquiry, and as the site of the development of theories, descriptions and methodologies specific to and adapted for the study of multimodality. The present volume presents a range of works by an impressive international roster of contributors who both explore issues arising from the study of multimodality and explore the scope of this emerging field within specific domains of multimodal phenomena. Contributors aim to show that each individual work and works in general within multimodal studies represent a dialectic or complementarity between the exploration of issues of general significance to multimodal studies and the exploration of specific domains of multimodality; while characterizing specific works as tending to some degree towards one or other of these main areas of focus. Such a characterization is seen as part of a move towards the identification and thus development of a distinct field of multimodal studies.

L'analyse comparative de la presse en ligne et de la presse écrite montre de nombreuses divergences entre ces deux types de médias. Elle permet également de mettre au jour des métamorphoses, des emprunts, voire des croisements. La matérialité de l'objet journal se rappelle ainsi en permanence à l'attention du lecteur par le biais des représentations graphiques, des icônes et des symboles. Cet ouvrage étudie les évolutions croisées des différentes formes rencontrées sur les sites web de presse, mais également les modèles traditionnels des formes journalistiques (sommaire, rubrique, Une, encadré, etc.). Basé sur une approche techno-sémiotique, il décrypte l'impact des outils techniques de fabrication (html, web dynamique, outils de gestion de contenu, etc.) sur l'évolution de la mise en forme des contenus médiatiques. Au-delà du domaine du journal proprement dit, il évoque les migrations des formes médiatiques dans d'autres environnements comme les systèmes d'information d'entreprise.

This revised edition of a now classic text includes a new introduction by Henry Jenkins, explaining ‘Why Fiske Still Matters'for today's students, followed by a discussion between former Fiske students Ron Becker, Elana Levine, Darrell Newton and Pamela Wilson on the theme of ‘Structuralism and Semiotics, Fiske-Style'. Both underline the continuing relevance of this foundational text in communication studies.How can we study communication? What are the main theories and methods of approach?This classic text provides a lucid, accessible introduction to the main authorities in the field of communication studies, aimed at students coming to the subject for the first time. It outlines a range of methods of analysing examples of communication, and describes the theories underpinning them. Thus armed, the reader will be able to tease out the latent cultural meanings in such apparently simple communications as news photos or popular TV programmes, and to see them with new eyes.

Media Literacy and Semiotics provides helpful tools to help readers think critically about the meaning of the media images they are exposed to on a daily basis. In this comprehensive book, a basic model of semiotic logic is applied to a variety of media studies to promote critical thinking and media literacy. Elliot Gaines systematically analyzes the hidden meanings in mass-mediated products and texts, and shows how basic meaning structures underlie everything from The Daily Show to television documentaries to infotainment.

Through theoretical and methodological frameworks, researchers from writing studies, communication disorders, communication studies, applied linguistics, anthropology, and education, argue for a new dialogic approach to multimodality as a question of semiotic practices as well as multimodal artifacts.

Positioned within the field of linguistics and multisemiotic discourse analysis, the theme of this book is the multifaceted interaction between text and image in different discourse genres, and it offers critical views on how we talk and show our experience of the world around us.

In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.

Alors que les expositions ont connu un essor sans précédent, que connaissons-nous au juste de leur nature et de leur fonctionnement? commet permettent-elles non seulement de présenter des objets mais encore de faire comprendre des savoirs? D'où tiennent-elles leur opérativité symbolique? Quelle place occupent-elles dans la vie de notre société?