Indexicality

Research on the subjunctive in Australian English has typically relied on corpus interrogation to ascertain frequency of occurrence of the target forms across text types (e.g., Collins and Peters 2004, Peters 2009). Such work has been valuable in confirming trends in usage, such as the increasing use of the mandative subjunctive and the decline of the were subjunctive, but has yet to explore in detail motivations behind the continued survival of what had widely been described as a moribund variant.
Based on syntactic evidence, we distinguish the plain form subjunctive, which includes the traditional mandative subjunctive, from the were subjunctive. Using existing corpus-based results as well as data from additional corpus searches, we suggest that there are two primary factors in the subjunctive’s continued existence in Australian English; firstly, the presence of a growing set of ossifying subjunctive frames within which the subjunctive is marked, and secondly, the role of the subjunctive in indexing formal-prestigious-standard English style, with the were subjunctive indexing literariness and the plain form subjunctive indexing a stance of power and epistemic authority.

In this talk, Picado addresses the problem of pictorial systems underlying representation of historical eventfulness in photojournalism, in the context of debated claims about “indexicality” as hallmark of photographic general meaningfulness. while positioning against vindications of “pure” kinds of indexicality that typifies traditional theories of photography. He also questions the arguing strategies of new theories of photography that are mainly sustained by claims about the “artistic agency” of photographic practices. The depiction of actualities is an issue that requires a pragmatic account of visual meaningfulness, thus dependent on the interactions between images and the “beholder’s share”. In so considering, he analyses photographic depiction by means of the stylistic constraints of straightforwardness in visual presentation and two-dimensional composition, as requirements for the virtual immersive involvement of viewers, and also as operators of a narrative sense of indexicality.

Keywords: Eastern Europe, non-fiction film, photography, Anca Damian, Vladislava Plančíková, Radu Jude.
There is a tendency in recent non-fiction film to re-contextualise archival photographs in highly mediated environments. In films like Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011) photographs are
embedded in highly abstract, animated worlds, while in Felvidék. Caught in Between (Vladislava Plančíková, 2014) photos appear in an avantgarde montage. At the other extreme is Radu Jude’s
Dead Nation (2017) which presents a series of photographs in a cinematic context to paradoxically demonstrate the lack of images of the Romanian Holocaust. The selected Eastern European nonfiction works build ‘remembrance environments’ around photographs, they compile, juxtapose, structure photographs within the medium of film: they carry out this sequentially through montage, or form a multimedia collage within the confines of a single frame. The paper carries out the analysis from the perspective of intermediality, as these films open up new possibilities for the medium of photography, redefining through cinema (or the cinematic) the complex relationship between photography and history, or the indexical trace and history in general. In this analysis intermedial relations are addressed using the phenomenological approach to images developed by George Didi-Hubermann and László Tarnay.

When style seems to have been an unobservable feature in images before the era of art, it became the normative and qualitative property during Early Modern times, and thus copying became the most prominent activity in the teaching and progress of art. What was aimed at was not so much the copy of the image, but rather to master the stylistic qualities of, say, a Rembrandt or a Raphael. Not so anymore. During Modernism, imitation of another artist's style is regarded as plagiarism, that is, issuing another's work as your own and is generally regarded as the most embarrasing an artist can do, and as such stands in contradiction to our very concept of art. Still, plagiarism has been, and is a prominent unrecognized feature in the artistic production for more than a century. This is, I believe, because our concept of art entails an antinomy: on the one hand: plagiarism is forbidden (you are not an artist and you do not produce art); on the other hand: if an artistic style is not copyied, it ceases to exist, and hence the antinomy: art has to embrace precisely that which it has to reject.

To substantiate this claim I will look at the time when style ceased to be a normative and qualitative concept to evolve into an "author function" during the 1860s with three coincident cases, i.e. the Musée des copies, the Bastianini-case and the succès de scandale of Courbet and Manet, all of which exemplary demonstrates a clash between two different concepts of art and the birth of our modern system of visual art. The key feature in this victorious system, I argue, is that it replaces the (first order) representational image with an iconoclasm of the first order image together with an introduction of an "image of a second order." The image of a second order is the hypostasization of traces and indices to icons. An image of the second order is essentially treating style as image. It functions exactly as images before the era of art, that is: an authoritative reproducendum without any original, contradicting the same modern system of visual art from which it stems.

The consequences of this contradiction or antinomy was blatantly exposed in the heated discussions following the Guggenheim Museum's acquisition of the Count Panza collection of Minimal and Conceptual art in 1991, and this case story is used in the final part of the paper to propose a definition of style as "an enactment of meaning".

Charles S. Peirce's semeiotic-his theory about signs, reference, interpretation, meaning, and communication-is applicable with illuminating results to innumerable processes of semeiosis or sign-interpretation. Robert C. Neville is the first deep student of Peirce's semeiotic to systematically apply that theory to the analysis and theory of theological signs, interpretation, and truth-hereafter, theological semeiotic. In my opinion, Neville's theological semeiotic is easily the deepest and richest available. This also makes it worthiest of critique. In this essay, I argue that Neville misinterprets Peirce's concept of an index, conceiving an index in terms of the interpreter-object rather than sign-object relation. Among other unfortunate consequences for Neville's theological semeiotic, this error vitiates his account of theological truth, especially his claim that theological signs can be "iconically false and yet indexically true" (2001a, 15). After making this critique in section 2, I offer an alternative account based on the hypothesis that the creation itself as a genuine index, a sign representing the Creator both indexically and iconically (section 3). This thesis, when combined with the thesis that the idea of God arises via a logical process Peirce termed "hypostatic abstraction" (section 4), provides the logical backbone needed for developing a realistic theory of theological reference and truth.

In screen studies and photography studies, the name of the acclaimed film theorist and critic André Bazin is frequently invoked by scholars seeking to defend the import of analogue media on ontological grounds by citing photography's privileged connection to the real. This article seeks to unsettle Bazin's reputation as the patron saint of analogue recording by exploring the ontological implications of the concept of sense in Bazin's writings on neorealism. Placing Bazin's writings into dialogue with a selection of critiques that find the digital image to be lacking in historicity, negativity, and presence, and flag its potentially authoritarian impulses, this essay seeks to reframe Bazin's ontological project as a question of cinema's sense (rather than its essence) to mobilize a different set of conclusions that may in fact prove to restore faith in the digital image and its rapport with the real. By maintaining that what is often treated as a purely technological problem also harbors aesthetics implications, this article confronts the manifest skepticism that has pervaded the discourse around the digital since the 1990s, seeking an alternative outlook in Jean-Luc Nancy's work on sense, an ontological concept that evidences the political potentials (or potential politics) of Bazin's predilection for images, which are said to ameliorate our love for reality by transmitting the excessive sense of the world in its ambiguity, creativity, and unpredictability.

The Knowledge Argument is an argument for dualism that claims that there are both physical and non-physical facts, something we can know by reflecting on ‘Mary’ who is aware of all scientific data about colours but has yet to see any. I reject the dualist conclusion and instead provide a new physicalist response that I call ‘bifactualism’. Bifactualism is a novel physicalist account comprising two elements. First, like dualism, it distinguishes between two kinds of facts: general and particular facts. Second, unlike dualism, it claims that the general/particular distinction (and not any physical/non-physical distinction) may explain facts about experience. There are certain facts that go undocumented in what is expressible in the language of the physical sciences because the language of physical sciences concerns only general facts, whereas experience, I argue, essentially involves learning particular facts.  Thus I argue that the case of Mary does not support mind/body dualism, and instead provides at least equal reason to support bifactualism. Since the general/particular distinction is one we are stuck with regardless of the status of mind, bifactualism emerges as a more parsimonious and hence preferable account of experience.

The article considers Corneliu Porumboiu's 2008 Police, Adjective (one of the most important films of the New Romanian Cinema) as a dramatization of Peter Wollen's influential 1969 adaptation of Charles Sanders Peirce's trichotomy of signs -iconic, indexical and symbolic signs -to the field of film theory.

This paper focuses on two enduring features of Gareth Evans’s work. The first is his rethinking of standard ways of understanding the Fregean notion of sense and the second his sustained attempt to undercut the standard opposition between Russellian and Fregean approaches to understanding thought and language. I explore the peculiar difficulties that ‘I’ poses for a Fregean theory and show how Evans’s account of the sense of the first person pronoun can be modified to meet those difficulties.

According to the communication desideratum (CD), a notion of semantic content must be adequately related to communication. In the recent debate on indexical reference, (CD) has been invoked in arguments against the view that intentions determine the semantic content of indexicals and demonstratives (intentionalism). In this paper, I argue that the interpretations of (CD) that these arguments rely on are questionable, and suggest an alternative interpretation, which is compatible with (strong) intentionalism. Moreover, I suggest an approach that combines elements of intentionalism with other subjectivist approaches, and discuss the role of intuitions in developing and evaluating theories of indexical reference.

This article deals with the symbolic and material formation of an authenticated register of Övdalsk – a Scandinavian local language – unfolding in a situated engagement with grammatical artefacts. Seeking to refine the often underspecified category of the indexically ‘pre-shift,’ ‘traditional,’ ‘old’ or, in some other way, temporally authenticated register, it intercalates an analysis of linguistic exchanges with histories of production of authoritative discourse. Through a stepwise analysis of the production of metapragmatic discourse, it explores the indexically presupposing and entailing relationship between artefactual objectivation and novel registers of language. Thus examining the enregistering interpretation of genred regimentations of language-as-form, it argues that such focus is apt for creating a reflexive and less essentializing understanding of linguistic authenticity.

Keywords: authenticity; indexicality; enregisterment; metapragmatics; descriptivism; engagement

The annexed city of Sevastopol as a part of the Crimean peninsula remains de jure a Ukrainian territory for the most of the European countries and beyond. De facto this city is a new subject of the Russian Federation. A case study conducted in November 2017 demonstrates that in spite of its politically contested status, the linguistic landscape of Sevastopol indexes the Russian power. Through the foundational principles of indexicality and emplacement, the study shows how Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar refer to Sevastopol's past, and Russian represents its present and its future.

The ambivalent status of circumstantial evidence has been intensively discussed since the 18th century, in both fiction and forensics. (Forensic) Evidence is both hermeneutic and material -- a phenomenon of ambiguity: the conclusions to be drawn from clues are generated by an amalgam of enlightened promises of objectivity and the opaque materiality of the surface. According to the forensic and juridical hope associated with circumstantial evidence, neutral things do not lie, but show (evidentia) as pars pro toto the actual facts in nuce. Yet every fact, every thing remains tied back to a closing instance , to the investigative and hermeneutic conclusions of thought: this opens the operational field of literature. Poetic dynamics enable literature to simultaneously cope with indexed ambiguity and indeterminacy, both by producing them, and by reflecting on them by means of investigative self-observation.

Artigo publicado sobre o simpósio online em homenagem ao lançamento do "Indexicalism: Realism and the Metaphysics of Paradox", do professor HIlan Bensusan. O volume completo pode ser encontrado aqui: https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/42

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present my take on Professor Hilan Bensusan's Indexicalism project. I begin by showing how we might see indexicals emerging from the kenotypes, at least as how they are presented by Quentin Meillassoux, which places them inside a broader Categoreal Matrix. Then, I endeavour to show how a complex take on Realism benefits greatly from kenotypes-indexicals, which are the very root of the possibility of an ontology of communication. I then present a few positive remarks and some critical observations regarding the construction of the Indexicalism project and its limits, while showing how we might create further alliances towards a new kind of formal ontology.

Работа посвящена анализу спектаклей в непредназначенных для театральной игры местах. В качестве материала были выбраны спектакли «Радио Таганка» Группы юбилейного года в Театре на Таганке (реж. Семен Александровский, 2014) и «Вперед, Москвич!», созданный по инициативе Культурного центра «Москвич» (реж. Валерия и Георгий Сурковы, 2015).  Исследован характер взаимодействия спектакля с принимающим его пространством и выявлены средства трансформации внутренних практик с опорой на методологию М. де Серто и А. Лефевра. В диссертации предложены три понятия, которые объясняют принцип функционирования пространства во время спектакля in situ: это гетеротопия М. Фуко, индексальность Ч. Пирса и Р. Краусс, призрачность в понимании Ж. Деррида. К основному тексту прилагаются тексты интервью с создателями спектаклей, в которых прослеживается переход в языке описания театра от семиотического к аффективному.

The thesis analyzes documentary performances created in non-theatrical spaces. The cases selected are the «Radio Taganka» at the Taganka Theatre directed by Semen Alexandrovsky (2014) and «Next, Moskvich!» directed by Georgiy and Valeria Surkov at the rooms of the former factory «Moskvich» employees (2015). The object of the research is the character of interaction between the performance and the host space. The means of transformation of internal tactics and rules are revealed according to the methodology of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. We propose three concepts that can explain the functioning of the space during a site-specific performance:  a Foucault’s heterotopia, Charles Pierce’s and Rosalind Krauss’s indexicality, a Jacques Derrida’s figure of the ghost. The text is followed by interviews with the creators of the performances, which reflect the transition from the semiotic to the affective paradigm in the theatrical discourse.

This essay takes the work of Samuel Fosso as
the starting point of my reflections—not in
an attempt to reveal the genuine features of
African self-portraiture but to examine a work
that is exclusively self-photographic with regard
to subject theory and the logics of representation
that are at work in a self-photographic situation.

Abstract
Through a critical review of existing literature on hipsters, and an analysis of online
data, this article provides a description of ‘hipster culture’. To this end, we examine
the reoccurring markers of hipster identity and, crucially, the accompanying identity
discourses on hipsters. As a result, a picture of hipster culture emerges as a translocal
and layered phenomenon with contextually specific claims to authenticity, and
certain material infrastructures and effects emerge with the culture. Finally, we will
propose the concept of ‘micro-population’ as a tool for making sense not only of
hipsters, but identity in general in times of superdiversity.
Keywords
Authenticity, commodification, hipsters, identity, micro-population, superdiversity

Theories of reference to person are generally considered to name their target in some way. With few exceptions, a proper name is assumed to refer to the entity that bears the name, and a deictic form to the entity it points to. A problem arises, however, when we take into account examples such as Example 1 below, taken from transcriptions of natural speech:

Example 1:
Phil: Okay so after Sean was Jacob. Jacob did you do anything?
Jake: I’m moving thirty feet
Jake: Cause I’m gonna turn- oh, actually
Jake: Actually, with my tumble I have to beat its bloody base attack don’t I?
Sam: I’m going there, I’m gonna xxx like thirty feet closer

In this example, although the speaker does not change, the entity referred to by “I” in the bold are not the same entity, and not the person speaking. The first two instances refer to a fictional character that Jake portrays, the “my” refers to the game-rule-based stats of that character, and the final two “I’s” refer to Jake as himself playing the game in combination with those stats. A similar problem arises in other referring expressions, such as the proper names in Example 2. In this example, “Gaz” refers to the fictional character portrayed by Gaz, and “Pete” refers to either Pete himself (being addressed by other participants) or his character (flame striking in the final utterance):

Example 2:
Pete: and I'll cast flame strike on him, and yes I know he doesn't cop fire damage
Phil: [[he's not immune to fire Pete
Sean: so you're gonna hit one of these guys @[[@
Gaz: I'll do it Pete
Sean: I'm sure Gaz'll dodge
Jake: do it on Gaz
Pete: No I'll just move up
Jake: No Pete don't go through there
Jake: not there either, ah. [Pete, Pete's flame striking

In this thesis, I investigate person reference across multiple worlds such as those in these examples using collected data from table-top roleplaying games. These games present an interesting challenge to traditional reference theories due to their constant shift in referred entities with little or no shift in reference terms. During the course of this study, I test several theories of reference, both general and specific, by applying them to the collected data. The tested theories include cognitive theories such as mental spaces, theories of reference such as Rauh’s seven types of deixis (Rauh, 1983), and theories of specific types of reference such as anaphoric accessibility and Jackendoff’s (1992) statue rule. Complex theories such as Rauh’s, in which deixis is split into various forms including allegorical, egocentric but non-present and other-centric types, are often less useful in explaining multiple world reference than more simple theories. The tests are a way to find and overcome the shortcomings of existing theories, and to take their useful elements for incorporation into the final model.
Overall, the shortcomings of these theories fit into three main themes. First, as mentioned above, theories of referring expressions assume they refer only to one entity in any given situation. A name will refer only to its bearer and only the bearer that is contextually appropriate, such as the bearer that is salient or present at the discourse event. Further, these theories place references only within their self-contained space, such as the real world, or a fictional world in a novel, without shift in or out. This also causes a run-on issue that elements of context from one world are not used to aid interpretation of reference to another. Finally, these theories may explain only a single part of reference, for example, why certain forms can be used, or how certain interpretations are possible, but not always both.
The shortcomings are overcome by way of adapting some of the more successful elements of several theories to create a new model of reference for multiple-world contexts. This new model, heavily based on mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1981), conceptual blends (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998), cognitive domains (Sweetser & Fauconnier, 1996) and Bühler’s deixis (1934), introduces a fourth element to the immediate deictic context- that of the active mental space. This is a somewhat minor adjustment to the basic idea of deixis, that deictic reference is determined by the place, time and person of an utterance that takes activity and intent into account. This adjustment allows for a shift in world focus without losing the immediate context used to determine a referent.
The new model is presented in two parts. First, a process of interpretation of reference forms is provided as a step by step process. The second part concerns later stages of interpretation and focuses on the worlds available for reference themselves. The available worlds from the data are established and their use described in relation to the theories that make up the final model. Cognitive domains, for example, are found to restrict the worlds that are available for reference during the course of a game event, as well as what worlds may require more distinct discourse marking when a world change is required. The spaces available for reference are a combination of distinct mental spaces, such as the fictional world, non-diegetic spaces such as joke spaces and rules, or combinations of spaces and entities in the form of conceptual blends, including character/player blends or joke “versions” of a character. These blends allow the creation of entities that exists outside the baseline worlds found in the data, and for reference to several entities across multiple worlds and spaces within a single discourse event. The final form of the model is tested and discussed based on a sample of data.
In consolidating several previous theories, the new model not only adds to the coverage of previous theories, but also to the explanation of reference’s pragmatic function in any situation that requires several active mental spaces in a discourse event including pretend play, sports commentary, recounting narrative and direction giving. The model may also provide insight into the way that imagination and language interact within the mind.

Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the "limits of representation." Nevertheless there are many photographs "showing" the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that bespeak the photographers' gaze and the circumstances of the photographs' production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as "evil." Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography (Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag, Barthes) to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may-despite their abstract meaning-be able to depict historical truth.

"Occurrence and use of phonaesthetic lexemes in Swedish: a diachronic corpus analysis"

The present work is specifically dedicated to the realization of lexemes that are formed with the swedish phonesthemes /sm-/, /gl-/, /spj-/, /sn-/, /sl-/ and /kn-/ and are sound symbolic . In contrast to many previous investigations, not the synchronic status of phonesthemes is in the foreground, but above all the diachronic comparison of the use of this sound symbolic phenomenon in Swedish.
The aim of the following investigation is to determine the extent to which phonesthemes are present in the context of the realized linguistic utterance in swedish and whether there are quantitative differences at different times.

Through its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality's implications for the study of semiosis—and more particularly, language in culture—has and continues to produce a vital and dynamic theoretical field of scholarly activity. This vitality, I argue, emerges from a foundational ambivalence within the category of indexicality: between, on the one hand, immediacy and presence and, on the other hand, mediation and representation. Productively unresolved, this ambivalence is less a problem than an opportunity and invitation for further ethnographic and analytic refinement of our accounts of (meta)semiosis and social life. A reflexive and deconstructive turn to indexicality's ambivalent ground, then, is implied and necessitated by the category itself, though this in no way obviates its utility for semiotic and ethnographic theory and analysis; indeed, as I argue, such a turn is critical to indexicality's ongoing utility to both.

The main aim of this brief and purposely radical essay is to investigate further possibilities for empirical research in natural classification of semiosis (signs as wholes). Before introducing emon – a missing term in the taxonomy of signs – we make a distinction between the natural and artificial, and between the taxonomic and meronomic classifications of signs. Natural classifications or typologies are empirically based, while artificial classifications do not require empirical test. Meronomy describes the relational or functional structure of the whole (for instance triadic, circular, etc. composition of sign), while taxonomy categorizes individuals (individual signs). We argue that a natural taxonomy of signs can be based on the existence of different complexity of operations during semiosis, which implies different mechanisms of learning. We add into the taxonomy a particular type of signs – emonic signs, which are at work in imitation and social learning, while being more complex than indexes and less complex than symbols. Icons are related to imprinting, indexes to conditioning, emons to imitating, and symbols to conventions or naming. We also argue that the semiotic typologies could undergo large changes after the discovery of the proper mechanisms or workings of semiosis.

Sign Systems Studies 47(1/2), 2019, 88–104

This master's thesis explores the relationship between voice and identity, by investigating language strategies used by transgender speakers in conveying gender identity. The qualitative analysis reveals that very specific gender expectations are at play when it comes to voice and gender and that these expectations are informed by concepts such as dialect, masculinity and class. Participants who do not live up to societal expectations of normatively gendered voices, and/or do not wish to do so, face constant misgendering on account of their voice, while participants who pass, both voice- and body-wise, seize to experience misgendering and violence, as many did before transition.

"This thesis brings together discourses concerning indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language to bear upon the photographic image in an attempt to open the parameters of current photographic discourse and carve a place for nontraditional photographic practices. Each of these facets – indexicality, touch, theatricality, and language – links photography to the body and solicits an embodied response from the viewer by placing the viewer’s body at the center of the experience of beholding images. Mes vœux (My Wishes/My Vows, 1988-1991) is a photographic installation by multimedia French artist Annette Messager comprised of layers of black and white photographs depicting intimate close-ups of body parts, each framed under glass and hung from the wall by twine in a circular formation. Scraps of paper framed in the same manner overlay the photographs and contain handwritten, repeated words. The photographs and text exist as both images and elements of sculpture.

Mes vœux rejects the metaphor of photography as an illusionistic window giving view to another place and time, and thereby draws attention to the material surface of its photographs, and by way of analogy, the surface of the bodies it depicts. Accumulated layers of metaphoric skin and indexed bodies together construct hybrid photographic bodies the beholder may imaginatively touch, and which, in turn, may affectively touch the beholder to engage a visceral and embodied response. The emotionally suggestive text employs double entendres, puns, and homonyms to condense meaning in an oscillating wordplay that simultaneously causes a collapse and excess of signification.

Mes vœux’s nontraditional format provides contrast to the trend of the “tableau form” of photography discussed at length by Michael Fried in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), in which Fried applies his theory of theatricality, first articulated in his controversial essay challenging minimalism, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), to contemporary art photography. Photographic practices such as Messager’s that may be considered theatrical and that do not conform to the “tableau form” are notably absent in contemporary art photography theory as exemplified by Fried, narrowing the discourse and the field of possibility for the medium in art practice. Mes vœux links concepts of touch in visual art with concepts of embodied viewership and theatricality as traced through art history – including the advent of minimalism and the “tableau form” of photography – since the 1960s and binds them together through the medium of photography and the representation of bodies."

The practice-led art research project 'Gathering Shadows' investigates the ‘tragic’ visual poetics of a speculative ‘ecological gaze’ at a time of ecological crisis. The work replaces the distancing objectification of lens-based capture with a unique indexical methodology focussed upon the cameraless outdoor nocturnal photography of live invertebrates and human artifacts. The work presents a symbolic order of dark and intimate x-ray like shadows in which insect umwelten operates as an index of nonhuman selfhood and place and insect abjection alludes to the multiple ‘tragedies’ of the human and non-human ecological predicament. The subjects of these works are drawn from two sites. The first, semi-arid Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee once informed a sacred reciprocity of sky with country in indigenous culture. The loss of this reciprocity is memorialized by using starlight falling on the lakebed to contact print films with the imagery of insects gathered from the lakeshore, imaging one species en masse on paper and digitally reiterating another. The second site, sub-alpine Mount Buffalo in the Australian Alps is a region already in decline due to climate change. Here, cameraless images of the keystone species Bogong Moth (Agrotis infusa) were gathered from a summit cave and digitally reiterated as detailed inkjet enlargements. A summary piece comprising cameraless imagery from both locations links the two sites. The project confirms the auratic power of the site-specific indexical analogic methods, establishes the unique revelatory potential of digital reiteration of cameraless imagery and contributes to the biosemiotic reimagining and anti-anthropocentric repositioning of invertebrates and ‘landscape’ within photography in ways that aim to legitimize the tragic form as an appropriate aesthetic frame through which to apprehend our ecological predicament.

What distinguishes photography from other visual mediums? This deceptively simple but fundamental question has been at the centre of both past and current debates on the aesthetics of photography for quite some time. In this article, I will first address the premise that this question is intrinsically ontological and unfolded in pioneering debates as a sequence of implications about photographic indexicality. I will then argue that the ontological implications of photographic indexicality have been largely overlooked in subsequent research due to scholars’ concerns with how photography appears to us rather than what photography is in itself. To this end, I will specifically examine Kendall Walton’s highly contested transparency thesis and some of its rebuttals, which have exerted a sprawling influence on debates on the aesthetics of photography. I will also argue that, having been exceedingly implicit in his account, what appears as indexicality to Walton and the implications thereof with respect to the transparency argument has operated on a phenomenological level; thus, the thesis itself has failed in instances in which the problem of representation and the very existence of the medium come into play. Finally, I will suggest that indexicality can be regarded as a distinctive feature of photography only when it is considered a predicate of transparency as an interstice of ‘unconcealment’ in the Heideggerian sense that would call into question the very existence of the representation and the photographic medium.

Aller Kunstfertigkeit des Photographen und aller Planmäßigkeit in der Haltung seines Modells zum Trotz fühlt der Beschauer unwiderstehlich den Zwang, in solchem Bild das winzige Fünkchen Zufall, Hier und Jetzt, zu suchen, mit dem die Wirklichkeit den Bildcharakter gleichsam durchsengt hat, die unscheinbare Stelle zu finden, in welcher, im Sosein jener längstvergangenen Minute das Künftige noch heut und so beredt nistet, daß wir, rückblickend, es entdecken können.Auch jene Fotografie, die Walter Benjamin in seiner Kleinen Geschichte der Photographie zur vorangestellten Äußerung bewegt hat, macht nicht den Anschein des Zufälligen. Es handelt sich dabei um ein sorgfältig gestelltes Selbstporträt, auf dem sich der Fotopionier Max Dauthendey mit seiner Braut präsentiert (Abb. 1). Und doch fühlt sich Benjamin bemüßigt, ja gezwungen, in der inszenierten Atelieraufnahme ein Jenseits der Pose, eine Spur des vergangenen "Soseins" zu entdecken, das ihn in den Augen der Frau das zukünftige Schicksal lesen läßt: den Suizid der Frau nach der Geburt des sechsten Kindes. Daß es sich bei der abgebildeten Braut nicht um diese, Max Dauthendeys erste Frau handelt, sondern um jene, die er 1857 -zwei Jahre nach dem Tod der ersten Frau -heiratete, 3 scheint auf den ersten Blick lediglich Benjamins Lesart des Bildes als lächerliches Fantasma zu entlarven, das er Dauthendeys Biographie entnommen und sodann leichtfertig auf die Fotografie projiziert hat. Tatsächlich verdeutlicht dieser Lapsus, der aus dem Begehren herrührt, dem vergangenen Geschehen Materialität zu verleihen, besser als jede weniger leicht von der Hand zu weisende

An in-depth study of identity in modern Egyptian public discourse.

Focuses on nationalist discourse before, during and after the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

Based on a broad, and representative selection of data.

Helps us to decode and understand the messages put forward by the competing factions in Egyptian politics.

The thesis of this essay is that linguistic anthropology is not the study of language. Rather, " language " functions as a permanently problematic, if indispensable, object for linguistic anthropological analysis and thought. This is because, as I suggest, the critical intervention of linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the ways that indexical processes undermine language as an autonomous object, entangling it with other semiotic modalities and thereby displacing it beyond its putative borders.

This chapter takes as its point of departure the singular “Slender
Man stabbing” incident in Waukesha, Wisconsin, an incident that defines
one extreme of a continuum of “ostension,” an attempt to act out or show the (legend) narrative in real life. I compare this case, which begins with a set of photographs of paranormal phenomena, to the equally singular case of the Cottingley “fairy photographs.” I will compare these incidents to rethink ostension as a kind of indexicality—a sign that works by real existential contact or contiguity, as a photograph indexes its object. I will also attempt to locate discussions of the ostension of this monster within an explicit consideration of media forms for portraying the monstrous. I will treat monsters as a species of “character” defined by its portability, its ability to move across a series of linked genres or media forms.

This open access book is a methodical treatise on narration in different types of media. A theoretical rather than a historical study, Transmedial Narration is relevant for an understanding of narration in all times, including our own. By reconstructing the theoretical framework of transmedial narration, this book enables the inclusion of all kinds of communicative media forms on their own terms. The treatise is divided into three parts. Part I presents established and newly developed concepts that are vital for formulating a nuanced theoretical model of transmedial narration. Part II investigates the specific transmedial media characteristics that are most central for realizing narratives in a plenitude of different media types. Finally, Part III contains brief studies in which the narrative potentials of painting, instrumental music, mathematical equations, and guided tours are illuminated with the aid of the theoretical framework developed throughout the book. Suitable for advanced students and scholars, this book provides tools to disentangle the narrative potential of any form of communication.

This article draws from scalar theory to examine how textual diversification can engage with linguistic and social structures to both pluralize academic writing and facilitate an alternate structuration of publishing policies and practices. It adopts indexical analysis to demonstrate how non-normative linguistic choices can gain uptake for meanings and status in academic communication, leading to the rescaling of vernacular resources in global publishing contexts. The author illustrates from his own academic publishing to demonstrate how he engaged with the different communicative contexts and changing geopolitical and epistemological conditions to introduce his heritage languages and literacy practices towards decolonizing academic writing. The article demonstrates the possibility of paradoxical outcomes such as the following: it is possible to have norms and also variation at the same time; structure and change can be simultaneous; the diverse spaces between the macro and micro might allow for different representational possibilities; and the rhizomatic and layered social, spatial and temporal scales mediate structures and agency for new alternatives.

This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, to critique photography's truth claim to the real by reading the photographic discourse of ''indexicality'' as a ''symptom,'' as defined in the work of Slavoj Ž ižek. The implications of this symptomatic relationship between photography and the real are analyzed in relation to the question of photographic spectatorship on the one hand, and to the inarticulability of a¤ect on the other. In conclusion this article turns to Kant's notion of subjective universality as it is challenged by Barthes's theory of photography.