Contemporary semiotics: research in five languages. Five books in five languages
Contemporary semiotics: research in five languages. Five books in five languages
The Early Career Researchers (ECRs) program
This program was conceived and implemented at the initiative of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS-AIS), during the presidency of Paul Cobley, and supervised by the previous Board of the Association. The Vice-President for the Americas, Neyla Pardo, conceived and oversaw all aspects of phase one of the program with logistical and financial support from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Early Career Researchers are identified on the basis of international criteria: they are investigators less than 40 years old, and they are not professors or tenured investigators, they are students of postdoctoral training, who defend their studies for less than 6 years or students of doctoral studies.
The thematic framework of the program is as broad as possible, and concerns the social, political, economic, artistic and educational phenomena of contemporary societies throughout the world. The aim is to show what contribution semiotics can make and what impetus it can give to fields of knowledge that deal with social, cultural, political and ecological challenges. Semiotics contributes its explanatory models and methods to all the major contemporary issues.
In addition, the program aims to strengthen and diversify international links between member countries, as well as with other nations that could become part of the IASS-AIS community, without any exclusivity. In accordance with this principle, the actions of the “Early Career Researchers”, who represent the future of semiotics in the world, must contribute to creating and strengthening links with universities and research entities throughout the world, in an approach that is intended to be inclusive.
Finally, from the point of view of the IASS-AIS, the program also has a pragmatic objective, which is to enable researchers at the start of their careers to confront academic and scientific situations at the highest level — seminars, conferences and congresses, publications — subject to international standards of excellence.
The five books in five languages
Thanks to the efforts of Colombian institutions, the ECRs program organized a considerable number of conferences, courses, ‘conversations’ and scientific papers. Here, we present only the most visible and lasting part of these operations, entitled “Contemporary semiotics: research in five languages and five books. Editorial series project”.
The main objective of this editorial series is the conception, production and dissemination of current research and epistemic discussions carried out by the ECRs network as members of the IASS-AIS. The languages chosen are not the official IASS-AIS languages, but those selected by the editorial committee: Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Italian and English. For the editorial committee, “it is a priority to disseminate knowledge in each of the languages in which this semiotic research is conducted as a way of questioning the production of knowledge in the traditional hegemonic languages”.
Jorge Eduardo Urueña Lopez is the wise pilot and efficient coordinator of this series of books and of its editorial committee.
The five books in five languages are:
• Pluriversos en la semiótica Latinoamericana
• Semiótica da Comunicação: novas perspectivas sobre mídia e linguagens
• 艺术产业符号学：在技术、政治与感知之间
• Semiotica, vita, ecologia e sostenibilità: Critici biosemiotici
• Remodelling narrative spaces: Semiotic insights
The titles proposed, as well as the works, clearly show that it is not possible to encompass, even in five books, all the relevant semiotic research at the international level, and that it is already essential to propose a framework for a more effective project that will be able to promote the most promising research throughout the world. The objective, defined as “questioning the production of knowledge in traditional hegemonic languages”, is in fact limited to excluding Korean, German, Arabic, French and Russian, among others. But it is not only the languages that are excluded from the five books, because the young researchers whose mother or working language is excluded are themselves almost all absent from these five books, even though they could have expressed themselves or been translated into one of the five languages selected.
The five books cover a very wide range of semiotic issues: marginalized cultures, communication with the future, the industrial arts, biosemiotics and ecology, and new narrative spaces of meaning, each adopting a specific strategy.
1. The book in Spanish, entitled *Pluriversos en la semiótica latinoamericana*, deals with identities and social groups that are victims of discrimination and the multifaceted resistance they put up against them; the field of study is limited to Latin America, and the majority of the authors are based in Colombian universities, with others in Mexico. The issues of discrimination, domination and resistance encourage the adoption of identity-based and militant positions. The underlying semiotic processes, nourished by contemporary anthropological research, imply perspectivist and even multi-perspectivist approaches.
2. The book in Portuguese presents a body of research in the field of communication, characterized as new perspectives on media and languages. It is intended as a panorama of current work by young Brazilian researchers, the vast majority of whom being based in Sao Paulo. It is hoped that readers from the rest of the world will be able to transpose these new perspectives into their own cultural fields.
3. The book in Chinese, devoted to the “Industrial Arts”, is particularly homogeneous and innovative, in its subjects and in its approaches, because the industrialization of the arts questions the very foundations of creation. In addition, an effort has been made to diversify the authors: not all are Chinese, and those who are not have been translated into Chinese, and they are located in several countries around the world: this is proof that all young researchers, whatever their mother or working language, could participate in each of the books in the series.
4. The book in Italian covers an already well-established scientific trend in the field of biosemiotics: the extension to everything to do with the living world. Approaches already developed elsewhere, in other theoretical frameworks, such as enaction, distributed cognition, the actor-network, internaturality, theories and methods that advocate the embodiment of instances, actants and enunciations, long taken into account by semiotics of all theoretical horizons, are here reconfigured and well-integrated into biosemiotics. Most of the authors are Italian, while others are from Latin America, particularly Venezuela and Argentina. Here too, authors whose mother tongue or working language is not Italian have been able to contribute to this work in Italian.
5. The book in English is the only one to have chosen a theme that is not already institutionalized, fixed in a well-identified field, or emanating from a regional socio-cultural situation: it is devoted to a contemporary semiotic problem, that of the reconfiguration of spaces of presentation and representation in today’s cultures and technologies. The result is a challenge that has necessitated a great deal of reorganization to provide authors with new points of reference. But it is also a great success: each chapter poses at least one of the semiotic problems raised by the reconfiguration of contemporary spaces. This book does not indicate the institutions or countries to which the authors belong.
The series is multi-faceted in many ways: multidisciplinary, multi-theoretical, multicultural and multilingual. After analyzing each of the books, we feel that the multi-theoretical and multilingual aspects give the series its strongest structure. The plurality of theories would lead us to propose hybrid models. Young researchers are recognized as having the virtue of bringing together and homogenizing different conceptions. The methodological challenge is considerable, as the juxtaposition of theories must give rise to new coherent methods adapted to the object of analysis. Semiotic analysis achieves its primary objective — the intelligibility of phenomena, the dimension of discovery through heuristic results — when it uses coherent models and descriptive tools.
For an International Association of Semiotic Studies, multilingualism is a solution that is perfectly consistent with its purpose, in a field of research where translation between languages occupies a central place, whatever the theoretical and methodological point of view adopted. But there are two ways of practicing multilingualism:
1) all the authors of a book write in a single language, including in translation, and it is the series of works, not each book, that is multilingual: the reader of each book may know only one language, that of each book; and
2) all the authors write their contribution in their mother language or the working language of their choice, chosen from a list drawn up collectively, and it is each book that becomes multilingual; in this case, everyone is expected to read and understand the languages of the others.
Clearly, the first solution is not conducive to multilingualism and intercultural dialogue, and leads to exclusions that are difficult to justify. The second solution also has its disadvantages, of course, but these are those of the Babel myth, which eminent semioticians, Lotman and Fabbri in particular, have shown can be turned into advantages in terms of the production of new meanings.
Phase 2 of the ECRs project will build on the very encouraging results of phase 1. In order to reinforce the ECRs project’s stated aim of creating a vast global network of exchanges, it will aim, as an extension of this editorial series, to promote dynamic, inclusive and meaning-making multilingualism, and will endeavour to address not only semioticians, but researchers and professionals from other disciplines and fields of investigation.
Jacques Fontanille
President of the IASS-AIS, University of Limoges, France
Tiziana Migliore
Segretario Generale IASS-AIS, Università di Urbino Carlo Bo, Italia