Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2015

This article employs Umberto Eco’s 2004 novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana as an exemplar of the hypertextuality of Eco’s semiotic theory. Eco’s project illustrates existential semiotics, providing a corrective to Euro Tarasti. For Tarasti signs reveal possibilities for transcendence in the lived world with ‘omnipresent’ meaning in an enunciative dialogue between signs and a semiotic subject. Tarasti’s existential signs are communicative alerts that illuminate a semiotic subject’s journey of transcendence, creating meaning via infusion of signs with signification. This article forgoes Tarasti’s insistence on transcendence. The vitality of existential semiotic signs is displayed through Eco’s hypertextual approach to semiotics manifested in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Eco’s insights model an existential semiotic, correcting Tarasti’s pragmatically flawed but theoretically significant undertaking. Our rationale for explicating the scope of Tarasti’s work exemplifies an existential disconnect between information accumulation and signification. We present Tarasti’s project due to its fundamental signification for understanding the importance and vitality for existential semiotics. Existential semiotics illuminates the signifying function of communication in the presence of the ineffable.

In this article I discuss the democratic implications of a journalistic turn towards some of the ideals hosted in the open-source movements. I argue that such a turn would be, from the egalitarian and democratic points of view, of real benefit, since it seems to facilitate a dissolution of several dichotomies. It is, however, also important to notice that in this gesture of overturning ossified norms, new kinds of blind spots in the public awareness are created. Think, for instance, of the exclusion that is encountered by those who are (computer) illiterate or averse to the intrusive atmosphere of the Internet. In addition, think of the perpetually Other – the marginalized subjectivities of those who have no voice, luck or fairness in society anyway. The Internet sphere could turn out to add another dimension to their exclusion or be used as a tool for harassing them in various ways

A major part of our lives is now entangled with new media devices – mobile phones, laptops, iPods, blogs, twitters, SMS, e-mails, TV screens, etc. Our daily life happens in a cultural context where television, video, advertisement and computer images are more real to us than the non-media physical reality that surrounds us. In this article, within an ontological setting marked by Heidegger’s notions of being-inthe- world and Ge-stell, we argue that information and communication technologies (ICT) would only essentially show up as what they are as long as they are experienced in-the-world where they are what they already have been for us. In this light, we submit that new media are essentially and paradoxically linked to instrumentality. On the one hand, within Ge-stell, the essence of ICT is shown to be far removed from its obvious toolness; yet, on the other, we submit that it is this very instrumentality that bounds new media that cannot be stripped out of what they most essentially are. At this point our article brings together earlier and later Heidegger, in a manner not done up to now, and that we claim is epistemologically consistent. The in-the-worldness of ICT, of its many devices but fundamentally of its revealing, that is, of the conditions of possibility for contemporary life for being what it is – is achieved in the decisive entering of Ge-stell into language. Thus, we aim to show that new media essentially unfold as a background of action. We conclude the article by pointing out that this ontologically background is in full swing, letting beings be in accordance to what might be its deepest ontological hallmark, a human being capable of substituting backgrounds.

This article seeks to contribute towards the emergent field of law and emotion by offering a multi-perspectival study that combines legal, philosophical and empirical considerations into an interdisciplinary research on shame in the German courts of lower and middle instance. On the basis of this joint theory, the study proposes the existence of law-relevant emotions, whose relevance could be argued phenomenologically and validated empirically; hence, the main claim of this study: in the courtroom emotions are communicated for specific procedural purposes. The interdisciplinary nature of the study enables us to determine the role and function of shame in an institutional setting, its relation to other emotions and, more importantly, obtain the sense of shame as it acquires a specific institutional relevance.

This article, ostensibly a defence of the lecture, makes claims for the lecture’s educational efficacy against the backdrop of classic hermeneutic insights. Each section, which means to advance the defence of the lecture, is also and at its core creating insights contributing to the philosophy of communication. The concept of conversation so central to a philosophy of communication indebted to hermeneutics is achieved by thinking of the lecture, a seemingly one-sided affair, as an open letter to students. This analogy opens the space for correspondence between teacher and student while making claims about the universality of hermeneutics.

The present essay advances a critical assessment of Hjarvard’s 2013 work The Mediatization of Culture and Society with an emphasis on its valuable contribution to the philosophy of communication and its current debates. The examination focuses on three specific aspects: first, the epistemological advantages of middlerange theorization over micro and macro levels of analysis; second, the usefulness of mediatization as groundwork for a critique of postmodern media theory; third, the ontic features of technology as the spatiotemporal bender of communication and action today.

The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity, James Berger (2014) New York, NY: New York University Press, ix + 301 pp., ISBN: 9780814708460, h/bk, $79, ISBN: 9780814725306, p/bk, $26, ISBN: 0814708463, e-book, $12.75

Interface, Branden Hookway (2014) Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 184 pp., ISBN: 9780262525503, p/bk, $26.95, ISBN: 9780262322614, e-book, $18.95

Cinematic Chronotopes: Here, Now, Me, Pepita Hesselberth (2014) London: Bloomsbury Academic, xii+200 pp., ISBN: 9781623567668, h/bk, £66.60, ISBN: 9781501316104, p/bk, £17.99, ISBN: 9781623566470, e-book, £57.99