Journal articles on the topic 'Jacques Saussure'

Une analyse de l’apport de JeanJacques Rousseau à la théorie de l’écriture et à la grammatologie. Cette analyse contient une comparaison systématique des idées rousseauniennes sur le langage et l’écriture rapportées d’autres théories du XVIIe siècle (Arnauld et Lancelot), du XVIIIe siècle (Condillac, Paillasson, Jaucourt) et du XXe siècle (Saussure). La contraposition des idées de Rousseau et de Saussure en ce qui concerne l’écriture nous permet, en plus, d’expliciter la grande valeur des idées grammatologiques de Rousseau et son rapport à la grammatologie actuelle (Gelb, Derrida, Harris), en dépassant avant la lettre le phonocentrisme de la linguistique moderne.

O artigo parte das fontes lingüísticas da teoria de Jacques de Lacan, dando destaque aos conceitos de estrutura, sujeito, signo (Ferdinand de Saussure), metáfora e metonímia (Roman Jakobson), visando demonstrar que as transformações operadas nesses conceitos por Lacan separam de forma irreconciliável a psicanálise da lingüística.

Este trabajo pretende mostrar parte del estudio realizado por el Grupo de psicoanálisis lacaniano de San Marcos, el cual toma como eje el postulado de Lacan el inconsciente se estructura como un lenguaje. Buscamos aquí realizar una primera aproximación a los argumentos que hicieron posible semejante enunciado, así como mostrar las consecuencias que produjo en el psicoanálisis su puesta en práctica. Para ello se hace un recorrido que inicia con una pequeña explicación sobre el lugar que ocupa Jacques Lacan en el psicoanálisis, luego se lleva a cabo un desarrollo sobre la estructura de lenguaje que hay en el inconsciente, para lo cual se hace referencia a Ferdinand de Saussure y a Roman Jakobson. Ya al final se introducen algunos conceptos como otro e intersubjetividad con el fin de mostrar el modo de abordaje clínico que se deduce de los postulados de Lacan.

Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004) là người khởi xướng giải cấu trúc. Ông là triết gia có gốc gác Do Thái. Một khái niệm then chốt trong tư tưởng của Derrida là “Trì biệt”. Ông lấy “chữ” làm đối tượng nghiên cứu cho lí thuyết “trì biệt”. Với Derrida, “chữ” có vai trò quan trọng hơn “lời”, vốn là đối tượng nghiên cứu của ngôn ngữ học từ Saussure đến Bakhtin. Trong sự “trì biệt”, nghĩa của chữ sẽ tạo sinh liên tục và vô hạn.

A influência da teoria saussuriana na letra de Jacques Lacan e suas consequências para a psicanálise ainda hoje é tema de grande debate tanto entre psicanalistas como entre linguistas. A presente pesquisa visa reintroduzir tal discussão à luz dos manuscritos de Ferdinand de Saussure conhecidos como De la double essence du langage que se tornaram públicos somente em 1996 e por consequência ignorados por Jacques Lacan. Para isso, partimos da seguinte questão: em tais manuscritos de Saussure, quais são os elementos teóricos – distintos aos do Cours de linguistique générale – que podem justificar uma reintrodução do diálogo entre a sua semiologia e a teoria lacaniana do significante no que concerne à concepção de “barreira resistente à significação”? Com o objetivo de respondê-la, procuramos conduzir um fio interpretativo a partir de três coordenadas interdependentes: (1) a concepção de resistência desenvolvida por Freud e sua relação com o conceito de recalque; (2) a leitura feita por Lacan da resistência freudiana a partir dos avanços oriundos da teoria do signo de Saussure; (3) a ideia de significação como efeito da relação entre significantes presente no modelo de signo encontrado nos manuscritos saussurianos e sua importância à concepção de estrutura. Desenvolvemos, neste estudo, uma pesquisa em psicanálise de cunho teórico que se guia basicamente pelas letras freudiana, lacaniana e saussuriana. Focamos nossa tese na questão da resistência à significação revelada por Lacan em sua interpretação do signo proposto por Saussure. Este estudo nos levou ao entendimento de que a ideia de resistência à significação é uma chave de leitura do modelo de signo linguístico descrito no manuscrito, uma vez que ele se mostra um componente negativo, efêmero e que somente possui existência na relação com outros signos em um sistema em constante movimento. Com isso, encontramos na ideia de “barreira resistente à significação” de Lacan uma chave de leitura para a noção de significação como se mostra em De la double essence du langage.

Jacques Lacan, in questa intervista concessa a Paolo Caruso nel novembre 1966 subito dopo la pubblicazione degli Écrits, presenta gli aspetti principali del suo pensiero. Tra le altre cose, Lacan discute i seguenti temi: il senso del "ritorno a Freud", la questione del principio di realtŕ, le ragioni della complessitŕ del suo stile linguistico, l'intersoggettivitŕ, la fenomenologia di Sartre, le sue opinioni su altre scuole psicoanalitiche (Melanie Klein, i neofreudiani, la Psicologia dell'Io nordamericana di Hartmann, Kris e Loewenstein) e su autori come Herbert Marcuse e Norman Brown, il problema del "tempo logico", i rapporti con l'International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), la linguistica di de Saussure, la concezione di Trieb (pulsione), la filosofia di Husserl, l'etica, ecc. Questa intervista č uscita originariamente a pp. 1-10 del n. 6/1968 di Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane, ed č la prima esposizione relativamente completa delle idee di Lacan pubblicata in Italia.

AbstractOne of the less obvious contributions of Saussure is his role in establishing modern communications theory. The sender-message-receiver (SMR) model of communication was developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949, The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). Within the humanities, it is Roman Jakobson’s version of the SMR model that is most influential. Jakobson’s model creates a methodology for considering such complexities as the sender’s intentions, the context of transmission, metalinguistic codes, the transmission medium, and the relation to the referent. Despite the complexity of Jakobson’s model, it is still bound by the assumption that perfect communication can be achieved through the full recovery of contexts. The most thorough and powerful critique of what’s often called the “transmission model” of communication is found in Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.” Derrida’s critique begins by demonstrating “why a context is never absolutely determinable” (1988a: 3, Signature event context. In Gerald Graff (ed.), Limited inc., Samuel Weber (trans.), 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). In place of context, Derrida proposes the notion of “dissemination” in which a text is radically adrift of the conditions of its utterance or reception. At face value, Saussure’s “speech circuit” model represents an early and underdeveloped model of communication. As if often the case, however, a closer reading of the Cours reveals something far more radical and profound. Closer attention to Saussure’s speech circuit model re-opens many questions in communication theory, and in associated fields such as literary theory, cultural studies, and semiotics.

Este artículo examina los argumentos de Jacques Derrida contra la fenomenología de Husserl y a favor de la tesis principal del giro lingüístico: la tesis de que no hay pensamiento sin lenguaje. A continuación se defiende que la disolución derridiana de la subjetividad en el lenguaje no es la consecuencia de afirmar el giro lingüístico como tal, sino del modelo de lenguaje que adopta y radicaliza Derrida: el modelo estructuralista de Ferdinand de Saussure. Finalmente, partiendo de las objeciones de Ricoeur se argumenta que la omisión de la dimensión pragmática del lenguaje (el habla) es la raíz de las principales paradojas de la filosofía postestructuralista de Derrida en la teoría del significado, la referencia y la subjetividad.

Este trabalho investiga as marcas de uma hetero-dimensão presente e fundante da epistemologia saussureana. Para tanto, analisaremos de que forma, no Curso de Linguística Geral e nos manuscritos de Ferdinand de Saussure, essa hetero-dimensão é constitutiva do próprio funcionamento lingüístico e os efeitos que ela promove no curso teórico do lingüista genebrino. Nosso trabalho segue de perto as leituras sobre a obra de Saussure trilhada por Milner (1987; 1989), Bouquet (1999), Normand (2000) e, até mesmo, o próprio psicanalista Jacques Lacan (1998). Nossos estudos se concentram em dois pontos fulcrais que dizem da estrutura e do funcionamento da língua: as características do signo lingüístico e as relações sintagmáticas e paradigmáticas. Será, portanto, no seio da teorização sobre o signo e dos dois eixos que comandam o funcionamento lingüístico que demarcaremos como a hetero-dimensão tem sido considerada e os efeitos discursivos que tem produzido.

Trata-se de examinar em que medida a descoberta de um “outro Saussure” permite também reatualizar a recepção/circulação dos conceitos fundamentais da linguística moderna, focando-se na noção flutuante e enigmática de signo de Jacques Lacan no início dos anos 1970. Enquanto Lacan, nesse período, parece romper tanto com os paradigmas tradicionais da linguística estruturalista, quanto com o conceito (pós-)saussuriano de signo, a hipótese proposta nesse trabalho é que a psicanálise nunca se encontrou tão íntima da conceituação (proto-)saussuriana do signo. Entre rabiscos, riscas e risco teórico, propõe-se ler o Lacan da ‘‘Linguisteria’’ junto com o Saussure dos Manuscritos. Deste modo, e para além dos comentários já realizados sobre a retomada-subversão lacaniana da dupla significante/significado, tenta-se destacar uma noção de signo dividida e viva, resistente aos binarismos congelados por uma leitura do Curso de Linguística Geral ignorante da sua gênese inquieta.

My essay focuses on the ontological crisis articulated in the film Blade Runner 2049, the sequel for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This film is based on the conflict between humans and androids called replicants who would like to live equally to humans. In my opinion the root of their opposition lies on the inability to give a proper definition of what we normally call ‘human’. In this writing I present and analyse the nature of this conflict and also the philosophical questions (representation, freedom, self-identity etc.) arising from it based on the ideas of philosophers like Michel Foucault. Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and Ferdinand de Saussure.

This paper is a reflection on the semiological tradition after Saussure. The focus here is cartographic. In 1967 Jacques Bertin presented the semiology of graphics, which has had an extensive influence on cartography. Bertin claimed graphics (diagrams, networks and maps) to be a monosemic sign system because graphics transcribe relationships that are previously defined in a data table. This premise is critically revisited regarding maps, resulting in the conclusion that diagrams and networks might be monosemic representations while statistical maps cannot. Polysemy is introduced in statistical mapping because the plan possesses influencing properties on the transcribed meaning, which are not a priori defined in the data table.

Resumo: O presente trabalho objetiva mostrar como, para elaborar uma lógica pautada na não relação e independente de uma ontologia, Jacques Lacan procedeu a uma leitura do Parmênides de Platão. Partimos de duas referências fundamentais ao diálogo platônico no ensino do psicanalista e, com recurso aos textos do linguista Ferdinand de Saussure e de psicanalistas, pensadores e estudiosos do tema, passamos ao operador Há d'Um forjado por Lacan. Serão discutidas a função de nomeação na cadeia borromeana e a não relação sexual. Duas hipóteses do diálogo platônico acerca da unidade do múltiplo serão examinadas a fim de que tanto a relação quanto a não relação entre Ser e Um sejam tratadas em termos de sujeito barrado, significante e gozo.

WILLYS DE CASTRO desenvolveu os Objetos ativos (1959-1962) durante o período neoconcreto. A partir da lingüística de Ferdinand de Saussure e do conceito de "desconstrução" de Jacques Derrida, este artigo defende que a originalidade dessa série de objetos encontra-se na inscrição de "signos". Assim, a análise visual e semântica da descoberta do artista - tais como o "motivo positivo-negativo" e a ênfase na tridimensionalidade do suporte, realizadas em Soma entre planos I (1959), Objeto ativo de 1959, Objeto ativo de 1960 e Objeto ativo de 1962 - demonstra que esses signos representam mudanças sucessivas de registros pictóricos e escultóricos. Concluímos que a unidade desses trabalhos reside na convergência para o "paradigma da perspectiva", para declinarem as versões correlativas de pintura e escultura.

Este estudo consiste na análise de um livro ilustrado que apresenta e sugere ao leitor divertidos e espirituosos jogos verbais, brincadeiras com as palavras, bem como uma mistura entre línguas. Esses jogos funcionam como uma espécie de convite à criação, por parte do leitor, à medida em que este aprecia e se diverte com a obra. A análise apresenta os modos como se estabelecem a criação e o funcionamento linguístico desses jogos de linguagem, que constituem um adorável exercício de alteridade linguística e de inovação. Argumenta-se que esse exercício pode contribuir significativamente para a competência literária do leitor, bem como para o ensino dessa competência. A análise é feita considerando-se a noção de significante, conforme inicialmente descrito por Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 1995), e posteriormente redefinido por Jacques Lacan ([1955-56] 1998a, [1956-57] 1988b, [1964] 1988c, 1998).

Résumé (Ré)écriture du discours psychanalytique lacanien en traduction — Cette étude se veut une réflexion sur l'apport de la réécriture des textes psychanalytiques de Jacques Lacan à la réception de sa pensée. Jean-René Ladmiral est d'avis que les textes psychanalytiques « difficiles », de même que les textes philosophiques « profonds » et « obscurs », se prêtent mal à une seule interprétation, invitant ainsi « plusieurs traductions ». Ces traductions différentes découlent inévitablement des lectures multiples résultant d'une riche intertextualité qui s'inspire de plusieurs disciplines : la médecine, la psychiatrie, la psychologie, la psychanalyse, la philosophie. Les influences germaniques (Freud, Husserl, Hegel) ainsi que françaises (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre) contribuent également à tisser l'intertexte lacanien, rendu davantage complexe par les manifestations de l'inconscient dans le discours. Au lieu de condamner la multiplication de lectures et de traductions, nous proposons que ces lectures et traductions différentes enrichissent et approfondissent notre compréhension de la pensée complexe de Lacan.

A pesquisa em psicanálise é um tema recorrentemente debatido e possui um já extenso histórico no contexto brasileiro. Este texto parte de uma discussão a respeito desse tema, mais especificamente, de uma discussão suscitada pelo texto Pesquisa de tipo teórico, de Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, acerca da utilização do significante como modalidade própria de pesquisa psicanalítica. Para trabalhar tal questão, foram abordados os fundamentos do conceito de significante de Ferdinand de Saussure, bem como a sua passagem para a psicanálise, com o trabalho de Jacques Lacan. Com a elaboração da teoria do significante lacaniano, foi identificado que o significante não funciona como um conceito, mas como um método de abordagem, o que justifica compreendê-lo como uma lógica em detrimento de tratá-lo como um termo ordinário. Posteriormente, foram explorados o alcance e as implicações desse método de pesquisa, tendo como chaves de leitura importantes textos de Roland Barthes e Michel Foucault.

ABSTRACT The Absent City (2000), by Ricardo Piglia, is a detective novel that narrates the transition of Argentina from an authoritarian regime to a democracy. Piglia employs language as a major point of contention in the novel between the governing elite and a group of anarchists. The battle over cultural production and the creation of one Master Narrative versus multiple truths hinges upon “the Eva machine,” a device that transmits memories and re-produced texts to the Argentine masses telepathically. This paper studies language with aid from some of the major founding fathers of linguistics. It discusses theories put forth by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, among others. Through a linguistic study of Piglia's dystopian novel, this paper seeks to underscore how cultural agency determines what narrative(s) exists in the new Argentine democracy. This paper includes a discussion on relevant Nation-state and cultural studies theorists to underline how the life or death of the Eva machine shapes the national hegemonic discourse of past and present Argentina. The paper also studies the use of multiple genres and how they contribute to a linguistic reading of The Absent City.

Manusia adalah makhluk yang selalumencari makna dari berbagai hal yang ada disekitarnya. Oleh karena itu, manusia dapatdisebut sebagai homo signans (Danesi danPerron 1999 dalam Hoed 2014). Dalam hal inimanusia dipandang memiliki kemampuan untukmemberikan makna pada berbagai gejala sosialbudaya dan gejala alamiah. Dengan demikian,dapat disimpulkan bahwa tanda adalah bagiandari kebudayaan manusia (Hoed, 2014).

<p>An American philosopher, Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) in his books, The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962) and The Essential Tension; Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (1977) poses a paradigm of a universal foundation of science which uses a common fact, method, language and criteria. He does not think that even in the realm of the natural sciences, there are differences, more so that there is a paradigm in the humanities including the arts and literature. Kuhn, however, has established a new paradigm for the philosophy of science which he called “the sociology of science” or a social construction, which now is popular as a constructive paradigm. It is developed in the Critical Theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas, and in the Postmodern Theory of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard. The paradigm of the social-political and cultural discourses of the seventies, has developed from structuralism of Saussure and Levi Strauss to post-structuralism or deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Mann referring to contemporary or postmodern era. It rejects stable understanding, logocentrism, antibinary, and gives readers ways to understand a text. The methods used is interpretative paradigm, such as philology, Marxist, new historicism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, theory of acceptance, semiotics, deconstruction, and discourse analysis.</p>

Naturally, said Gadamer, word belongs to and is taken from reality. Human being looks for appropriate words as form of expression for reality. Ontologically, language created by human being is not only as a means of communication and thinking, but rather it is seen as the manifestation of reality, while they are articulating that language. Therefore, the meaning of a word is in the concept of thought. In the linguistic theory of Saussure, a word is a sign related to signifiant (which gives meaning) and signifie (which is given meaning). The signifiant gives form or expression while signifie concept or meaning. The relationship between the signifiant and the signifie based on the social convention is called signification, or "maghza" in Nasr Hamid's term. In other words, the signification is the effort of giving the meaning to the sign (language). Among the language philosophers, Jacques Derrida, for instance, the last signifie is not always admitted. Derrida said, meaning appears due to metaphor exchange and meaning changes when the speakers change. Or, as what Nasr Hamid had expressed, the meaning of the religious texts are not established when the text was made, but rather it is dynamic, relational, and changing depending on the socio-historical background of the readers.

I am engaged in a practice led thesis, which has been challenged and shaped by thinkers in the fields of critical theory and philosophy. Although I work in dialogue with these theorists, I am principally a visual practitioner who is most at home with traditional, wet process photography.I began with a general concern regarding my own resistance to landscape photography as the depiction of the view, which has led me to question the persistence of the (illusion of) the unified photographic moment. My visual process, which began quite simply as a reaction against the pervasiveness of the view in photography, has, in dialogue with writers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Rosalind Krauss, enabled me to theorise my own photographic practice as a form of writing. Central to this has been the investigation of different theoretical configurations of the semiotic sign.I contend that Rosalind Krauss’ conception of Surrealist photography as a practice of écriture, in fact accounts for photographic practice more broadly speaking. The spacing of the photographic sign, which Krauss describes as an ‘invagination of presence,’ defers the confluence of the signified and the signifier thus rupturing the illusion of presence in the photographic moment: the shutter differences the image from the world and the practice of photography reconfigures the world as a form of writing. However, not simply in the sense of a surface inscribed by light, but writing as a space in which the possibility for meaning is realised.

Foucault was the first philosopher after World War II who spoke of Nietzscheas a serious political philosopher. For him all kinds of truth claims are interpretations ofa world, which do not really exist as something ahistorical. Three important factors thatinfluence Foucault’s young thinking are, First, the history and philosophy of the Frenchschool of knowledge which was then influenced by the thoughts of Georges Canguilhemwho had many thoughts about the history and philosophy of biology. Second, the linguisticstells Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralist psychology developed by Jacques Lacan,and Georges Dumezil’s (a proto-structuralist in the comparison of religion) had a majorinfluence on Foucault. Third, namely Foucault was infatuated with French avant-gardeliterature, especially the works of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. In general,the definition of power according to Foucault is divided into two types, namely negativedefinition and positive definition. In the negative definition it is stated that power isnot through violence or the results of an agreement. In the positive definition of powerthat power is the whole structure of actions that suppress and encourage other actionsthrough persuasion, stimulation, seduction, coercion and prohibition. For Foucault poweris productive and cannot be separated from knowledge. Knowledge gives birth to power,power gives birth to knowledge. Knowledge is institutionalized and becomes the authority of power that determines this to be true and that which is wrong. The peculiarity ofthe concept of power from Foucault is that power is carried out more than possessed, notinherent in actors or interests, but united in various forms of practice. Foucault’s thoughtopened up the possibility to dismantle all domination and power relations, such as powerin knowledge between discourse creators, bureaucrats, academics, and “uncivilized”common people who had to be disciplined, regulated and “nurtured”. From the study offoucault’s works, it seems that the metaphysical truth of power relations lies in its historicalstatement, which is actually nothing but to perpetuate the power itself.

Structure was a key signifier, and a logical quilting point, informing Jacques Lacan’s return to Freud, which amounted to his reinvention of the unconscious as structured like a language. Lacan read, and reinvigorated, Sigmund Freud’s classic texts primarily through the lenses of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology—not mentioning Hegelianism (via Kojève), surrealism, and mathematics as other equally important lenses. The structure of subjectivity was the central question for both Freud and Lacan. While the former understood psychic structure in terms of topography, the latter explicated it through topology. What then of the structure of Ian Parker’s recently published book?

There are two lines of ascent to understanding the essence of the word and language. One line is gnoseological, it can be represented as a line that goes from the sensual perception to the representation, from the representation to the concept, from the concept to the idea. It has been brilliantly designed by the outstanding Russian linguist A. A. Potebnya. The second line leads from top to bottom, the beginning of it is to be just Platonic idea. This line could now be called an ontological line, taking into account its explication by Martin Heidegger΄s fundamental ontology. The article shows how the synthesis of these two lines allows to confront the postmodern doctrine of arbitrariness (F. Saussur, Jacques Derrida) in the solution of the question of relationship between the signifier and signified, the sign (word) and thing (object).

Synthesizing important research traditions in information theory, structuralist semiotics, and generative linguistics, at least three main types of semiotic indeterminacy must be distinguished: Kolmogorov’s notion of randomness defined as sequential incompressibility, de Saussure’s principle of contingency of sign which ensures the possibility of translation between different sign systems, and Chomsky’s idea of indefiniteness in generative mechanisms as a requirement for the explanation of semiotic creativity. These types of semiotic indeterminacy form an abstract system useful for the description of concrete sign processes in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimension. In his philosophical reflections on modern biology, Jacques Monod used the conceptual opposition chance versus necessity to analyse several phenomena of indeterminacy (especially in molecular biology). The biosemiotic approach to life permits to apply the suggested system of semiotic indeterminacy on these phenomena.

À la veille d’un voyage en Chine qu’il devait entreprendre en 1974, et qu’il ne fera pas, Jacques Lacan aurait, selon plusieurs témoignages, dit qu’il voulait étudier l’inconscient chinois qui serait structuré comme une écriture. À partir de cette formule on présentera d’abord les rapports entretenus par le psychanalyste avec le signe saussurien, les énantiosèmes et les anagrammes. D’autre part, Lacan avait étudié le chinois et il avait en outre travaillé au début des années 1970 avec François Cheng sur des textes classiques (Laozi, Mencius, Shitao). Il était donc parfaitement placé pour s’interroger sur la linéarité de la langue et sur les rapports entre graphie et phonie, différents dans les systèmes alphabétiques et dans le système chinois. Sa connaissance de la langue semble l’avoir mené à postuler que si la matière centrale de la psychanalyse était le signifiant phonique, le problème se posait peut-être différemment pour le chinois, d’où l’hypothèse que, pour Lacan, les Chinois rêvaient peut-être en caractères.

Jacques Derrida believed that metaphysics in the West has involved installing hierarchies, orders, and binaries in which one party enjoys the presence of a feature that the other party wants. Every succession relies on the idea of originariness, and thus the identity of the latter depends upon the former, for the presence of one element takes priority to its absence. This is how a binary opposition comes to being. Although basing his ideas on Saussure’s philosophy of language, Derrida objected to the latter’s “binary opposition” on the grounds that the interpretations predicated on this thought were called into question because there is no true opposition between a pair of notions. This protest led him to create binary pairs. This article reveals the problems accompanying the conception of the binary pair and offer alternatives. The researcher does not mean to reject the binary pair itself; however, underlining this idea in a way that obstructs other paths will be questioned and some supplementary notions for the binary opposition and binary pair will be proposed.

AbstractThis article provides a critical account of the appropriation of semiotics in Anglo-American musicology, its theoretical and discursive foundations, and its impact on the discipline in the period from the mid-1970s to the present. Starting out from the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Philip Tagg in the 1970s, it traces two principal approaches in music semiotics, here termed the ‘structural–analytical’ and the ‘semantic–interpretative’, which draw in significant measure on, respectively, the Saussurean and Peircean legacies. Both differences of musicological tradition and the wider state of the discipline have a part to play in explaining why semiotics never established itself as a discrete and distinctive subfield in the English-speaking world in the way that it did in continental Europe. But with the increasing currency of, among other concerns, topic theory, theories of emotion and affect, and studies of musical gesture and metaphor, it might be argued that semiotics – or, rather, an interdisciplinary aggregation of approaches that might be termed ‘post-semiotic’ – has never had a stronger presence in anglophone musicology than at the present time.

Jacques Derrida believed that metaphysics in the West has involved installing hierarchies, orders, and binaries in which one party enjoys the presence of a feature that the other party wants. Every succession relies on the idea of originariness, and thus the identity of the latter depends upon the former, for the presence of one element takes priority to its absence. This is how a binary opposition comes to being. Although basing his ideas on Saussure’s philosophy of language, Derrida objected to the latter’s “binary opposition” on the grounds that the interpretations predicated on this thought were called into question because there is no true opposition between a pair of notions. This protest led him to create binary pairs. This article reveals the problems accompanying the conception of the binary pair and offer alternatives. The researcher does not mean to reject the binary pair itself; however, underlining this idea in a way that obstructs other paths will be questioned and some supplementary notions for the binary opposition and binary pair will be proposed.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Maps are a means of communication with their own language. This contribution makes a methodological proposal for a tool for to analyse the cartographic language of thematic maps and atlases. Based on the work of Jacques Bertin and on approaches of the Visual Studies, this methodology works on decoding maps in terms of their basic elements, the signs and graphic objects that compose them. As a tool it should allow comparative research on cartographic productions, both, synchronically and diachronically. It suggests two analytical schemes, one for maps and the other for complex map-editions, e.g. atlases.</p><p> On the example of spatial entities (state territories, natural areas etc.), the first part of this contribution introduces the semiotic analysis-scheme for thematic maps. It shows how to deal systematically with signs, signatures and graphic objects on maps. Such analyses should produce the fundament for comparative approaches, which allow to detect typical patterns in cartography and to identify elements of cartographic languages.</p><p> We are interested in the cartographic languages of maps used in atlases. To do this we have chosen a quantitative analysis of the visual content, maps, diagrams and images. The quantitative method makes it possible to analyse a large corpus of maps and atlases, thus making it possible to make comparisons between contents both diachronically and synchronically, i.e. comparisons in time and space. This is an approach relatively rarely used in cartography. There are few studies that produce a quantitative analysis of cartographic content. Among the existing ones, that of Alexandre Kent and especially that of Muelhenhaus on the Goode atlas series. We are following in the footsteps of these studies. To do this, we decided to adopt a semiological approach to the study of maps. Of course, we cannot talk about maps and semiology without mentioning Jacques Bertin and his book: graphic semiology: diagrams, networks, maps (1963) in which he tried to define a “grammar” by establishing rules of good cartographic practice, even if the book is not exclusively reduced to the map.</p><p> The book itself does not contain any reference, but it can be said that graphic semiology is itself derived from linguistic semiology, developed in particular by Ferdinand Saussure. However, although Bertin's work has influenced many cartographers in the design of maps, the method has been little used in the cartographic analysis itself. Semiology is an approach that has been used mainly in the analysis of images and diagrams rather than in cartography. Although it is true that iconographic analysis studies in semiology claim more Barthes and Saussure than Bertin.</p><p> The map can also be considered as an image. Several iconographic analysis studies have thus integrated the map as an object of study. This is the case, for example, of engelhardt who, in his <i>thesis</i> “<i>the language of graphics: a framework for the analysis of syntax and meaning in maps, charts and diagram</i>” (2002), focuses on several types of iconography, even if the map remains a central element of his analysis. Another example is the work of André Lavarde, who in his article “<i>la flèche : le signe qui anime les schémas</i>” (1996) focuses on the history of the use of the arrow in diagrams, while evoking its use in geographical maps. There are therefore bridges between iconographic and cartographic analysis.</p><p> This research is therefore a continuation of the work of Bertin, Mulhenhaus and to a certain extent Engelhardt. The coding system we have developed for our cartographic analysis is divided into three parts and divided tehemselves into several categories. Each category corresponds to a column in the table. From there, there are two ways to fill in the columns. In the first case by filling in the field with the requested information such as the title of a map. Or in a second case to enter 0; 1; or 2 depending on whether the information that corresponds to the absence, presence or uncertainty of the requested information. So if the map coded uses the Mercator projection then it will be entered 1 in the column “map projection: cylindrical projection” and 0 in the column “map projection: compromise”.</p><p> The table is composed of three parts. The first part concerns the general information of the coded map (image 1). This is for example the name of the atlas, the page, the chapter in which the map is located. Then more general information about the map itself is coded like for example its title, theme, scale, type of projection used, etc. This makes it possible to collect a set of basic data. It should be noted that, as mentioned above, we do not only code maps but also other forms of visual representations of space that can be found in atlases. For example, there are images, satellite photos or diagrams that can represent different geographical areas. If the coded object is not a map, this is specified. There is a category provided for this purpose. When coding, cartography-specific elements, such as map projection, are therefore not taken into account. Not all the columns in our table are intended to be filled by each map or coded image. The codification process is therefore flexible. Although the code does not focus only on maps, they represent the vast majority of the content of the atlases studied. This is why we refer more to the “map” rather than to the “visual representation of space”. However, even if they are in the minority, it is important in the analysis to take into account representations of space other than cartography.</p><p> The second part of the table focuses on the signs used by the maps. First of all, we have chosen to divide them into three categories: symbols that are related to the point of the line and the surface. These are the three elementary figures of geometry that Bertin calls implantations. It is from these three types of locations that the different symbols are created. We have distinguished them between the thematic symbols, which are there to illustrate the theme of the map, to convey its message and the Background symbol present to help the reader to orientate himself in space. This is the case, for example, of the equator's path, which is rarely thematic, but rather serves as a geographical point of reference. Of course, the thematic symbols vary according to the theme of the map. Thus, territorial borders can be considered thematic if it is a political map, but will be considered Background information if it is present on a map representing global forest cover. The purpose of this part is to have as much content as possible on the elements that make a map.</p><p> The third and last part of the table refers to visual variables. To be interested in visual variables is to be interested in the interactions between symbols. It is on this part that we rely most on Bertin's work. We have thus taken 5 of the 7 variables he defined. The orientation and the two dimensions of the plan were excluded from our study because they are constant in the cartographic production. It would therefore be irrelevant to record them each time. This is not the case for the remaining components: size, value, texture, shape, and colour. These are elements that may be present in cartography but are not individually necessary. These visual variables form the basic grammar of the “cartographic language”. Studying the visual variables is a way for us to observe how the different signs interact with each other and to see how an information is convey. These visual rules have been established in the 1960s, therefore it the relevance of using this framework to study historical map can be questioned. But Bertin did not design his rules from scratch, he relied on previous mapping practices. It is therefore interesting to observe how often they have been used.</p><p> The second part deals with map themes and regional structures of atlases. Using principles of Visual Studies, it suggests to observe atlases as a whole as cultural products, each subject to a visual programme that determines the frameworks of its expressions and its claim for representativeness. By comparing elements like projection, scale, maps-themes, regional sequences etc. systematically, one may unveil the specific interpretations of world views which are contained in the atlas’ concepts. As some atlases are published in a long series of editions, they become interesting research objects in an evolutionary perspective.</p><p> In a diachronic perspective the coding scheme suggested here, focussing themes and regional subdivisions of atlases, builds the fundament for longitudinal studies. Both methodological parts should make cartographic and atlas-studies more compatible to cultural and historical research approaches.</p><p> Taking the example of a few maps from French atlases from nineteen centuries to the early 2000s the second part of this contribution wants to give an idea, how this methodology can be used to study the evolution of cartographic language over time under the influence of the global condition and how French cartographers faced the challenge of representing a growing interconnected world and which graphical tools they developed.</p>

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> This presentation presents a dialectical approach for the analysis and synthesis of geovisual communication systems using the graphic variables of Jacques Bertin as the primary analytical structure. This approach to studying geovisual communication accounts for its dynamics and interaction. It builds primarily on semiotic concepts advanced by Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco that emphasize the interactions between author and reader and the cultural circulation of knowledge. It relies on a Kantian critical epistemology to move beyond an instrumental description of a graphics-based system of communication. The visual system of affordances made and understood with a geovisualization produces situative meaning involving signification and interpretation, which is neither static nor discrete, but transforms what is known and what can be known. These conclusions lead to theoretical insights related to prior discursive concepts of visual communication and raise some questions for future research about the socio-cognitive affordances of cartographic visualization. A practical example shows the empirical approach and initial validation.</p><p>Visual Variables Structure Communication</p><p>The seminal contributions of Roland Barthes point to the process of embedding visual meaning regarding sign, signifier, signified, sign and concept as an extension to Saussure's dyadic approach as two semiological systems, which accounts for the importance of Saussure's bar in the communication of meaning. The two systems code the knowledge of communication, accounting for the situatedness of meaning and its discursive making that connects a sign to a cultural context. Umberto Eco goes beyond Pierce’s icon, index, and symbol trichotomy of a sign through an ongoing chain of interpretative referrals. This approach starts with an active collaboration between creator and reader. It can involve multiple circumstances, cultural aspects and evolve. Visual variables structure communication in an ongoing process.</p><p>The signification of a visual variable is analogous to an atom in a communication process. The analysis of the visual variables of a graphic element in a communication systems sense commences with an analysis of these visual variables related to individual elements and complex symbols. Barthes’ functions, actions, and narrative offer a valuable framework. A synthesis follows that considers the epistemological aspects of a partial system and what its functions purport to do and what they actually do. The analytically determined relationships can be synthesized into webs of explicit and implicit meanings associated with Barthes' structure. This combination and visual intermingling of graphic representations in a geovisualization broaden then to consider their interactions and associations with creator and reader. The visual encompasses the semiotic communication of meaning. The dialectical and critical consideration of the relations and the structure of the communication leads to an improved comprehension of the affordances manifest in the graphical communication system. It also begins to account for mental aspects of perception.</p><p>A model of geovisual communication?</p><p>The theory and methods of this semiotic approach involve considering Bertin’s graphical variables as elements of a model that corresponds to the communication system. Further, the structure of the geovisualization can be modeled symbolically to take up the questions how coding and decoding take place and made reliable given the dynamics of communication and the reliance on conventions in most cartography. This presentation closes with a summary of the benefits of a semiotic approach to the analysis and teaching of geovisual communication.</p>

Este artigo apresenta uma síntese da crítica a de Jacques Derrida a Ferdinand Saussure (1857-1913) e Claude Levi-Strauss (nascido em 1908) com a formulação do método desconstrutivista e da noção de differance. O trabalho está dividido em três partes. Na primeira faz-se uma introdução ao pensamento estruturalista. Em seguida enfoca-se a formação da "escola" pós-estruturalista. Por fim, demonstra­se a vinculação de Derrida a esta última linha de pensamento e suas críticas ao estruturalismo.

ResumenEn los textos escritos durante la década del ochenta para los amigos y maestrosmuertos, Derrida vincula voz y alteridad de una manera inédita en su #losofía.En trabajos como De la gramatología y La voz y el fenómeno, la voz es entendida como phoné, como voz de la voz, índice inequívoco de alogocentrismo y perteneciente a la historia de la metafísica de la presencia. Con Memorias para Paul de Man y Psyché esto cambia. Derrida comienza a pensar la voz en términos de voix y a vincularla con la tanatoheterografía y la retórica, entendiendo a esta última como posibilidad de un pensamiento del otro, como un modo de pensar la alteridad.La voz como phoné, vinculada con la #losofía de Edmund Husserl y la teoría lingüística de Ferdinand de Saussure, cede su lugar a la idea de voz como voix, deudora por un lado, de la teoría de la autobiografía y del modo de pensar la deconstrucción de Paul de Man y por otro del § 34 de Ser y Tiempo, en dondeHeidegger habla de la posibilidad de escuchar la voz del amigo que todo Daseinlleva consigo.

Este artigo analisa o modelo semiolingüístico, enfocando especificamente o conceito de valor. O conceito semiolingüístico de valor é aqui definido como um sintagma composto por três paradigmas: lingüístico, antropológico e tímico-tensivo. Para desenvolver esta análise do conceito de valor, assumimos um percurso diacrônico pontuado por autores cujas obras marcam decisivamente a construção do modelo aqui utilizado. Assim, partimos de Saussure e Hjelmslev, chegamos a Greimas e incorporamos valiosas contribuições de Denis Bertrand, Jacques Fontanille e Claude Zilberberg. Descrevemos também algumas relações intertextuais e interdiscursivas no campo das Ciências Humanas e Sociais, tendo como base a discussão da questão do mercado, sob esse olhar construído a partir do modelo semiolingüístico. Palavras-chave: Modelo Semiolingüístico. Conceito de Valor. Percurso Diacrônico. Relações Intertextuais e Interdiscursivas.

In this article, we delineate the relationship between nonsense, opposition and paradox in selected excerpts of the works of Edward Lear (1812-1888) and Qorpo Santo (1829-1883), considering nonsense and paradox in the light of the theories proposed mainly by Gilles Deleuze and Charles Ogden and secondarily by Jean Jacques Lecercle, Wim Tigges and Ferdinand Saussure. This article seeks to understand the relationship between sense and nonsense in relation to the way these theorists articulate the productive tension that exists between other kinds of binary relationships. Research carried out about the relationship between nonsense theories and the binary opposites delineated by pairs and more precisely about Edward Lear and Qorpo Santo has been extremely scarce, and this article seeks to contribute to the related literary scholarship.

Znanstveni pristup prirodi u XVIII stoljeću iz temelja je promijenio stil i kompoziciju putopisa u evropskoj književnosti. Među najvažnija djela koja su odredila putopis XVIII st. spadaju djela Georgia Louisa Leclerca de Buffon (1707—-1788) Histoire naturelle i Epoques de la nature (1749—1789), koja se danas smatraju poče- cima geologije. Samu geologiju uzdigao je do samostalne znanstve- ne discipline frajburški profesor A. G. Werner (1750—1817), Sva ta djela plod su raspoloženja stoljeća koje se oduševljavalo pri- rodom. Godine 1729. švicarski učeni wunderkind, liječnik i bota- ničar Albrecht von Haller (1708—1777) napisao je u poletnim al eksandr incima odu Alpama (Die Alpen), koja je uskoro postala jedna od najčitanijih pjesama stoljeća. Njegova oda bila je prvi opis djevičanske prirode, koja je spas čovjeku pokvarenu uljuđe- nim gradskim životom. Potaknut tim i sličnim raspoloženjima, švicarski filozof Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778) nastanio se 12. rujna 1765. poput modernog pustinjaka na otoku Saint-Pierre, usred jezera Bienne, gdje je ostao do 21. listopada, a nije otišao svojom voljom.’ Horace Bénédicte de Saussure (1740—1799) fi- zičar i meteorolog napisao je brojne prirodoslovne putopise po Alpama. Godine 1768. austrijski botaničar barun Joseph von Seenus putuje Istrom, Kvarnerskim otocima i obalnim područjem Velebita.

Anlamın ne olduğu farklı disiplinlerde çalışan araştırmacıların cevabını aradığı en önemli sorulardan biri olmuştur. Anlamın ne olduğu ve nasıl inşa edilebileceği sorusunu soran Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida ve Friederich Nietzsche gibi Batılı kimi dilbilimciler ve felsefeciler göstergeden başlayarak varlık, metin ve okuyucuya kadar uzanan konularda önemli tartışmalar yapmışlardır. Neticede bu uzun serüven nihilizme kadar uzanmıştır. İşte bir makalenin sınırlı kapsamında, bu serüven bazı boyutlarıyla ortaya konulmakta; dili oluşturan göstergelerin nasıl çağrışım gücünü yitirdiği, metnin öz bir metin olmaktan çıktığı, yazarın devre dışı kaldığı gibi hususlar üzerinde durulmaktadır. Göstergenin kendinden başka bir şeye işaret edememesi varlık anlamında da önemli sorunlara yol açmıştır. Çünkü kendisinden başka bir şeyi gösteremeyen göstergelerle inşa edilen ve başka metinlerle metinlerarası ilişkiye sahip olan bir metin ne müellifine, ne de yaratıcı gücüne göndermede bulunabilir. Derrida da her bir gösterileninin aynı zamanda başka bir şeyin göstergesi olabileceğine, kökenin yokluğundan dolayı her şeyin söyleme dönüşebileceğine ve anlam alanının sonsuz genişleyebileceğine vurgu yaparak, kâinatta ilanihaye göstergeler arası bir dönüşün ve devinimin süregittiğine, dilin doğası üzerinden varlığın kendikendiliğine ve sonsuzluğuna işaret etmiştir. Bu ebedi yeniden doğuş ya da ayni olanın yeniden doğması, “kendikendinelik”, varoluşun gayesini, ‘yaratıcı’ ile şeyler arasındaki ilişkiyi, boşa çıkarmakta ve hiçlik düşüncesini daha da pekiştirmektedir. Üzerinde durulması gereken diğer bir husus ise kendine özgü bir dili olan ve bu dilsel mantık üzerinden işleyen televizyonun nihilizm ile olan ilişkisidir. Bu anlamda cevabının aranması gereken en önemli soru televizyon ve nihilizme nasıl yol açtığıdır.

Ever since I tripped over Tiddles while I was carrying a pile of discs into the studio, I’ve known it was possible to get a laugh out of gramophone records!Max Bygraves In 1978 the music critic Lester Bangs published a typically pugnacious essay with the fighting title, “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies.” Before deliciously launching into his execution of Uri Geller’s self-titled album or Rick Dees’ The Original Disco Duck, Bangs asserts that because that decade was history’s silliest, it stands to reason “that ridiculous records should become the norm instead of anomalies,” that abominations should be the best of our time (Bangs, 1978). This absurd pretzel logic sounds uncannily like Jacques Derrida’s definition of the “post” condition, since for it to arrive it begins by not arriving (Derrida 1987, 29). Lester is thinking like a poststructuralist. The oddness of the most singularly odd album out in Bangs’ greatest misses of the seventies had nothing to do with how ridiculous it was, but the fact that it even existed at all. (Bangs 1978) The album was entitled The Best of Marcel Marceao. Produced by Michael Viner the album contained four tracks, with two identical on both sides: “Silence,” which is nineteen minutes long and “Applause,” one minute. To underline how extraordinary this gramophone record is, John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing (1959) is cacophonous by comparison. While Bangs agrees with popular opinion that The Best of Marcel Marceao the “ultimate concept album,” he concluded that this is “one of those rare records that never dates” (Bangs, 1978). This tacet album is a good way to start thinking about the Classical Gas project, and the ironic semiotics at work in it (Tofts & Gye 2011). It too is about records that are silent and that never date. First, the album’s cover art, featuring a theatrically posed Marceau, implies the invitation to speak in the absence of speech; or, in our terms, it is asking to be re-written. Secondly, the French mime’s surname is spelled incorrectly, with an “o” rather than “u” as the final letter. As well as the caprice of an actual album by Marcel Marceau, the implicit presence and absence of the letters o and u is appropriately in excess of expectations, weird and unexpected like an early title in the Classical Gas catalogue, Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (classical-gas.com) Like a zootrope animation, it is impossible not to see the o and u flickering at one at the same time on the cover. In this duplicity it performs the conventional and logical permutation of English grammar. Silence invites difference, variation within a finite lexical set and the opportunity to choose individual items from it. Here is album cover art that speaks of presence and absence, of that which is anticipated and unexpected: a gramophone recoding without sound. In this the Marceau cover is one of Roland Barthes’ mythologies, something larger than life, structured like a language and structured out of language (Barthes 1982). This ambiguity is the perfidious grammar that underwrites Classical Gas. Images, we learned from structuralism, are codified, or rather, are code. Visual remix is a rhetorical gesture of recoding that interferes with the semiotic DNA of an image. The juxtaposition of text and image is interchangeable and requires our imagination of what we are looking at and what it might sound like. This persistent interplay of metaphor and metonymy has enabled us to take more than forty easy listening albums and republish them as mild-mannered recordings from the maverick history of ideas, from Marxism and psychoanalysis, to reception theory, poststructuralism and the writings of critical auteurs. Foucault à gogo, for instance, takes a 1965 James Last dance album and recodes it as the second volume of The History of Sexuality. In saying this, we are mindful of the ambivalence of the very possibility of this connection, to how and when the eureka moment of remix recognition occurs, if at all. Mix and remix are, after Jean Baudrillard, both precession and procession of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1983). The nature of remix is that it is always already elusive and anachronistic. Not everyone can be guaranteed to see the shadow of one text in dialogue with another, like a hi-fi palimpsest. Or another way of saying this, such an epiphany of déjà vu, of having seen this before, may happen after the fact of encounter. This anachrony is central to remix practices, from the films of Quentin Tarrantino and the “séance fictions” of Soda_Jerk, to obscure Flintstones/Goodfellas mashups on YouTube. It is also implicit in critical understandings of an improbable familiarity with the superabundance of cultural archives, the dizzying excess of an infinite record library straight out of Jorge Luis Borges’ ever-expanding imagination. Drifting through the stacks of such a repository over an entire lifetime any title found, for librarian and reader alike, is either original and remix, sometime. Metalanguages that seek to counter this ambivalence are forms of bad faith, like film spoilers Brodie’s Notes. Accordingly, this essay sets out to explain some of the generic conventions of Classical Gas, as a remix project in which an image’s semiotic DNA is rewired and recontextualised. While a fake, it is also completely real (Faith in fakes, as it happens, may well be a forthcoming Umberto Eco title in the series). While these album covers are hyperreal, realistic in excess of being real, the project does take some inspiration from an actual, rather than imaginary archive of album covers. In 2005, Jewish artist Dani Gal happened upon a 1968 LP that documented the events surrounding the Six Day War in Israel in 1967. To his surprise, he found a considerable number of similar LPs to do with significant twentieth century historical events, speeches and political debates. In the artist’s own words, the LPs collected in his Historical Record Archive (2005-ongoing) are in fact silent, since it is only their covers that are exhibited in installations of this work, signifying a potential sound that visitors must try to audition. As Gal has observed, the interactive contract of the work is derived from the audience’s instinct to “try to imagine the sounds” even though they cannot listen to them (Gal 2011, 182). Classical Gas deliberately plays with this potential yearning that Gal astutely instils in his viewer and aspiring auditor. While they can never be listened to, they can entice, after Gilles Deleuze, a “virtual co-existence” of imaginary sound that manifests itself as a contract between viewer and LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). The writer Jeffrey Sconce condensed this embrace of the virtual as something plausibly real when he pithily observed of the Classical Gas project that it is “the thrift-bin in my fantasy world. I want to play S/Z at 78 rpm” (Sconce 2011). In terms of Sconce’s spectral media interests the LPs are haunted by the trace of potential “other” sounds that have taken possession of and appropriated the covers for another use (Sconce 2000).Mimetic While most albums are elusive and metaphoric (such as Freud’s Totem and Taboo, or Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference), some titles do make a concession to a tantalizing, mimetic literalness (such as Das Institut fur Sozialforschung). They display a trace of the haunting subject in terms of a tantalizing echo of fact or suggestion of verifiable biography. The motivation here is the recognition of a potential similarity, since most Classical Gas titles work by contrast. As with Roland Barthes’ analysis of the erotics of the fashion system, so with Gilles Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty: it is “where the garment gapes” that the tease begins. (Barthes 1994, 9) Or, in this instance, where the cigarette smokes. (classical-gas.com) A casual Max Bygraves, paused in mid-thought, looks askance while lighting up. Despite the temptation to read even more into this, a smoking related illness did not contribute to Bygraves’ death in 2012. However, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, his dementia is suggestive of the album’s intrinsic capacity to be a palimpsest of the co-presence of different memories, of confused identities, obscure realities that are virtual and real. Beginning with the album cover itself, it has to become an LP (Deleuze 1991, 63). First, it is a cardboard, planar sleeve measuring 310mm squared, that can be imprinted with a myriad of different images. Secondly, it is conventionally identified in terms of a title, such as Organ Highlights or Classics Up to Date. Thirdly it is inscribed by genre, which may be song, drama, spoken word, or novelty albums of industrial or instrumental sounds, such as Memories of Steam and Accelerated Accordians. A case in point is John Woodhouse And His Magic Accordion from 1969. (classical-gas.com) All aspects of its generic attributes as benign and wholesome accordion tunes are warped and re-interpreted in Classical Gas. Springtime for Kittler appeared not long after the death of its eponymous philosopher in 2011. Directed by Richard D. James, also known as Aphex Twin, it is a homage album to Friedrich Kittler by the PostProducers, a fictitious remix collective inspired by Mel Brooks whose personnel include Mark Amerika and Darren Tofts. The single from this album, yet to be released, is a paean to Kittler’s last words, “Alle Apparate auschalten.” Foucault à gogo (vol. 2), the first album remixed for this series, is also typical of this archaeological approach to the found object. (classical-gas.com) The erasure and replacement of pre-existing text in a similar font re-writes an iconic image of wooing that is indicative of romantic album covers of this period. This album is reflective of the overall project in that the actual James Last album (1968) preceded the publication of the Foucault text (1976) that haunts it. This is suggestive of how coding and recoding are in the eye of the beholder and the specific time in which the remixed album is encountered. It doesn’t take James Last, Michel Foucault or Theodor Holm Nelson to tell you that there is no such thing as a collective memory with linear recall. As the record producer Milt Gabler observes in the liner notes to this album, “whatever the title with this artist, the tune remains the same, that distinct and unique Foucault à gogo.” “This artist” in this instance is Last or Foucault, as well as Last and Foucault. Similarly Milt Gabler is an actual author of liner notes (though not on the James Last album) whose words from another album, another context and another time, are appropriated and deftly re-written with Last’s Hammond à gogo volume 2 and The History of Sexuality in mind as a palimpsest (this approach to sampling liner notes and re-writing them as if they speak for the new album is a trope at work in all the titles in the series). And after all is said and done with the real or remixed title, both artists, after Umberto Eco, will have spoken once more of love (Eco 1985, 68). Ambivalence Foucault à gogo is suggestive of the semiotic rewiring that underwrites Classical Gas as a whole. What is at stake in this is something that poststructuralism learned from its predecessor. Taking the tenuous conventionality of Ferdinand de Saussure’s signifier and signified as a starting point, Lacan, Derrida and others embraced the freedom of this arbitrariness as the convention or social contract that brings together a thing and a word that denotes it. This insight of liberation, or what Hélène Cixous and others, after Jacques Lacan, called jouissance (Lacan 1992), meant that texts were bristling with ambiguity and ambivalence, free play, promiscuity and, with a nod to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival (Bakhtin 1984). A picture of a pipe was, after Foucault after Magritte, not a pipe (Foucault 1983). This po-faced sophistry is expressed in René Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” of 1948, which screamed out that the word pipe could mean anything. Foucault’s reprise of Magritte in “This is Not a Pipe” also speaks of Classical Gas’ embrace of the elasticity of sign and signifier, his “plastic elements” an inadvertent suggestion of vinyl (Foucault 1983, 53). (classical-gas.com) This uncanny association of structuralism and remixed vinyl LPs is intimated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Its original cover art is straight out of a structuralist text-book, with its paired icons and words of love, rain, honey, rose, etc. But this text as performed by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians in New York in 1956 is no less plausible than Saussure’s lectures in Geneva in 1906. Cultural memory and cultural amnesia are one and the same thing. Out of all of the Classical Gas catalogue, this album is arguably the most suggestive of what Jeffrey Sconce would call “haunting” (Sconce, 2000), an ambivalent mixing of the “memory and desire” that T.S. Eliot wrote of in the allusive pages of The Waste Land (Eliot 1975, 27). Here we encounter the memory of a bookish study of signs from the early twentieth century and the desire for its vinyl equivalent on World Record Club in the 1960s. Memory and desire, either or, or both. This ambivalence was deftly articulated by Roland Barthes in his last book, Camera Lucida, as a kind of spectral haunting, a vision or act of double seeing in the perception of the photographic image. This flickering of perception is never static, predictable or repeatable. It is a way of seeing contingent upon who is doing the looking and when. Barthes famously conceptualised this interplay in perception of an between the conventions that culture has mandated, its studium, and the unexpected, idiosyncratic double vision that is unique to the observer, its punctum (Barthes 1982, 26-27). Accordingly, the Cours de linguistique générale is a record by Saussure as well as the posthumous publication in Paris and Lausanne of notes from his lectures in 1916. (Barthes 1982, 51) With the caption “Idiot children in an institution, New Jersey, 1924,” American photographer Lewis Hine’s anthropological study declares that this is a clinical image of pathological notions of monstrosity and aberration at the time. Barthes though, writing in a post-1968 Paris, only sees an outrageous Danton collar and a banal finger bandage (Barthes 1982, 51). With the radical, protestant cries of the fallout of the Paris riots in mind, as well as a nod to music writer Greil Marcus (1989), it is tempting to see Hine’s image as the warped cover of a Dead Kennedys album, perhaps Plastic Surgery Disasters. In terms of the Classical Gas approach to recoding, though, this would be far too predictable; for a start there is neither a pipe, a tan cardigan nor a chenille scarf to be seen. A more heart-warming, suitable title might be Ray Conniff’s 1965 Christmas Album: Here We Come A-Caroling. Irony (secretprehistory.net) Like our Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices project (Tofts & Gye), Classical Gas approaches the idea of recoding and remixing with a relentless irony. The kind of records we collect and the covers which we use for this project are what you would expect to find in the hutch of an old gramophone player, rather than “what’s hot” in iTunes. The process of recoding the album covers seeks to realign expectations of what is being looked at, such that it becomes difficult to see it in any other way. In this an album’s recoded signification implies the recognition of the already seen, of album covers like this, that signal something other than what we are seeing; colours, fonts etc., belonging to a historical period, to its genres and its demographic. One of the more bucolic and duplicitous forms of rhetoric, irony wants it both ways, to be totally lounge and theoretically too-cool-for school, as in Rencontre Terrestre by Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. (classical-gas.com) This image persuades through the subtle alteration of typography that it belongs to a style, a period and a vibe that would seem to be at odds with the title and content of the album, but as a totality of image and text is entirely plausible. The same is true of Roland Barthes’ S/Z. The radical semiologist invites us into his comfortable sitting room for a cup of coffee. A traditional Times font reinforces the image of Barthes as an avuncular, Sunday afternoon story-teller or crooner, more Alistair Cooke/Perry Como than French Marxist. (classical-gas.com) In some instances, like Histoire de Tel Quel, there is no text at all on the cover and the image has to do its signifying work iconographically. (classical-gas.com) Here a sixties collage of French-ness on the original Victor Sylvester album from 1963 precedes and anticipates the re-written album it has been waiting for. That said, the original title In France is rather bland compared to Histoire de Tel Quel. A chic blond, the Eiffel Tower and intellectual obscurity vamp synaesthetically, conjuring the smell of Gauloises, espresso and agitated discussions of Communism on the Boulevard St. Germain. With Marcel Marceao with an “o” in mind, this example of a cover without text ironically demonstrates how Classical Gas, like The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices, is ostensibly a writing project. Just as the images are taken hostage from other contexts, text from the liner notes is sampled from other records and re-written in an act of ghost-writing to complete the remixed album. Without the liner notes, Classical Gas would make a capable Photoshop project, but lacks any force as critical remix. The redesigned and re-titled covers certainly re-code the album, transform it into something else; something else that obviously or obliquely reflects the theme, ideas or content of the title, whether it’s Louis Althusser’s Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon or Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. If you don’t hear the ruggedness of Leslie Fiedler’s essays in No! In Thunder then the writing hasn’t worked. The liner notes are the albums’ conscience, the rubric that speaks the tunes, the words and elusive ideas that are implied but can never be heard. The Histoire de Tel Quel notes illustrate this suggestiveness: You may well think as is. Philippe Forest doesn’t, not in this Éditions du Seuil classic. The titles included on this recording have been chosen with a dual purpose: for those who wish to think and those who wish to listen. What Forest captures in this album is distinctive, fresh and daring. For what country has said it like it is, has produced more robustesse than France? Here is some of that country’s most famous talent swinging from silk stockings, the can-can, to amour, presented with the full spectrum of stereo sound. (classical-gas.com) The writing accurately imitates the inflection and rhythm of liner notes of the period, so on the one hand it sounds plausibly like a toe-tapping dance album. On the other, and at the same time, it gestures knowingly to the written texts upon which it is based, invoking its rigours as a philosophical text. The dithering suggestiveness of both – is it music or text – is like a scrambled moving image always coming into focus, never quite resolving into one or the other. But either is plausible. The Tel Quel theorists were interested in popular culture like the can-can, they were fascinated with the topic of love and if instead of books they produced albums, their thinking would be auditioned in full stereo sound. With irony in mind, then, it’s hardly surprising to know that the implicit title of the project, that is neither seen nor heard but always imminent, is Classical Gasbags. (classical-gas.com) Liner notes elaborate and complete an implicit narrative in the title and image, making something compellingly realistic that is a composite of reality and fabulation. Consider Adrian Martin’s Surrealism (A Quite Special Frivolity): France is the undeniable capital of today’s contemporary sound. For Adrian Martin, this is home ground. His French soul glows and expands in the lovely Mediterranean warmth of this old favourite, released for the first time on Project 3 Total Sound Stereo. But don’t be deceived by the tonal and melodic caprices that carry you along in flutter-free sound. As Martin hits his groove, there will be revolution by night. Watch out for new Adrian Martin releases soon, including La nuit expérimentale and, his first title in English in many years, One more Bullet in the Head (produced by Bucky Pizzarelli). (classical-gas.com) Referring to Martin’s famous essay of the same name, these notes allusively skirt around his actual biography (he regularly spends time in France), his professional writing on surrealism (“revolution by night” was the sub-title of a catalogue for the Surrealism exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993 to which he contributed an essay) (Martin 1993), as well as “One more bullet in the head,” the rejected title of an essay that was published in World Art magazine in New York in the mid-1990s. While the cover evokes the cool vibe of nouvelle vague Paris, it is actually from a 1968 album, Roma Oggi by the American guitarist Tony Mottola (a real person who actually sounds like a fictional character from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, a film on which Martin has written a book for the British Film Institute). Plausibility, in terms of Martin’s Surrealism album, has to be as compellingly real as the sincerity of Sandy Scott’s Here’s Sandy. And it should be no surprise to see the cover art of Scott’s album return as Georges Bataille’s Erotism. Gramophone The history of the gramophone represents the technological desire to write sound. In this the gramophone record is a ligature of sound and text, a form of phonographic writing. With this history in mind it’s hardly surprising that theorists such as Derrida and Kittler included the gramophone under the conceptual framework of a general grammatology (Derrida 1992, 253 & Kittler 1997, 28). (classical-gas.com) Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology is the avatar of Classical Gas in its re-writing of a previous writing. Re-inscribing the picaresque Pal Joey soundtrack as a foundation text of post-structuralism is appropriate in terms of the gramme or literate principle of Western metaphysics as well as the echolalia of remix. As Derrida observes in Of Grammatology, history and knowledge “have always been determined (and not only etymologically or philosophically) as detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (Derrida 1976, 10). A gas way to finish, you might say. But in retrospect the ur-text that drives the poetics of Classical Gas is not Of Grammatology but the errant Marcel Marceau album described previously. Far from being an oddity, an aberration or a “novelty” album, it is a classic gramophone recording, the quintessential writing of an absent speech, offbeat and untimely. References Bahktin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Bangs, Lester. “The Ten Most Ridiculous Albums of the Seventies”. Phonograph Record Magazine, March, 1978. Reproduced at http://rateyourmusic.com/list/dacapo/the_ten_most_ridiculous_records_of_the_seventies__by_lester_bangs. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Flamingo, 1982. ---. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Granada, 1982. ---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ---. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987. ---. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Eco, Umberto. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985. Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Trans. James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ---. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1985. Gal, Dani. Interview with Jens Hoffmann, Istanbul Biennale Companion. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and the Arts, 2011. Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1997. Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989. Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema,” in Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. ---. Online communication with authors, June 2011. Tofts, Darren and Lisa Gye. The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices. 2010-ongoing. http://www.secretprehistory.net/. ---. Classical Gas. 2011-ongoing. http://www.classical-gas.com/.