Selections of the Sign: Unity Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis: the Organization of the Living begins with a sentence indebted to George Spencer-Brown and his form of distinction where ‘distinction is perfect continence’. In their version, this becomes ‘A universe comes into being when a space is severed into two. A…
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They can remove a monument, but they can’t erase the sign
2021 has been a year for removing and reassessing monuments around the world, from statues of slave traders to memorials for an uprising. One of the aims of state sponsored removals has been to eliminate a physical memento in order to obliterate the events it stood for. That aim can…
Continue ReadingSemiology of Autopoiesis (I)
What is the difference between conceptual analysis and semiology? An idea like autopoiesis can be analysed as a concept. We can study its description of self-making and autonomous organisations and life-forms for consistency, contradictions, meaning, references, through its cases and examples, its history, its implications and assumptions, and its values.…
Continue ReadingThe Danger of Group Signs: Philosophy and Covid-19
In the first year of the pandemic, there were many types of sign associated with Covid-19: warning signs; names; national symbols; new indicators for numbers and trends; orders; images; and instructions. However, when I wrote about Covid-19 and signs in 2020, I failed to predict the dominance of a particular…
Continue ReadingThe Everyday Sublime
I hesitated calling this post ‘the everyday sublime’. The sublime I want to recommend doesn’t occur every day in the same way. On the contrary, it is an event interrupting daily repetition. It pulls new values into the everyday. Nonetheless, this sublime is everyday in the sense of within our…
Continue ReadingRisky Signs: Philosophy and Covid-19
In an earlier post, I discussed the politics of the restrictions of freedom during the Covid-19 pandemic in Tom Sorell’s new interpretation of Hobbes. Here, I consider the risks involved in the use of signs during the pandemic. Communication about Covid-19 and political responses to the pandemic have been dominated…
Continue ReadingDemocracy and Emergencies: Philosophy and Covid-19
Seven years before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Tom Sorell considered the conditions under which freedom might be restricted in a state of emergency, from the point of view of a ‘sober Hobbesian approach‘: The neo-Hobbesian framework I am outlining gives people legal latitude to become very attached to costume, literature,…
Continue ReadingSigns and Democracy
In this post I argue that signs are necessarily democratic. My reasoning depends on the definition of process signs from A Process Philosophy of Signs. It expands the meaning of democratic beyond a narrow political sense, before returning to the interdependence of two types of democracy: democracy of intervention and…
Continue ReadingRevisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies
My chapter ‘Do Signs have Styles?’ is now published in the collection Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies edited by Jasmin Herrmann, Moritz Ingwersen, Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank and Olga Ludmila Tarapata. Their volume is a fascinating selection of recent academic work on style. You can find a draft of my…
Continue ReadingThe Nostalgic Sublime
There is a strong argument against the idea of the nostalgic sublime. If the sublime leads to a drive to act in new ways, due to the enthusiasm released by simultaneous feelings of terror and attraction to a strange and inexplicable event, then the backward looking and stultifying qualities of…
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