Jorge Flores and Israel Chávez: Beyond the lines of resistance

Semiosalong is the afterhours Tartu semiotic salon, active since 2011

"Beyond the lines of resistance: selfhood and otherness from a semiotic point of view"

Jorge Luis Flores is a Mexican writer, translator and semiotician currently living in Barcelona where he is doing a PhD in Spanish Philology. He has published short stories and essays in the anthologies Vampiro y otros cuentos, Poquito porque es bendito, and Para leerlos todos, as well as in the magazines AGNI, from Boston University, Alternativas and Dédalo. Last December, his first story collection, Xólotl, was published.

Israel Chávez holds a PhD in semiotics from Tartu University and is currently associate professor of History of Linguistics and Phonology at the Dept. of General Linguistics of Palacký University, Olomouc. His main research interests are change and variation of sign systems, the history of ideas, and the history and epistemology of language sciences.

Here is the series theme description for Alter-Semiotics:

As a starting point we may take the phenomenological definition of alterity, which is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed, and it implies the ability (or inability) to distinguish between self and not-self. One can see from the outset how alterity is a useful concept for critical digital humanities. Talking about why mirrors are not signs, Umberto Eco explained back in the 1980s how even a normal mirror appears to make the left-hand the right and the right-hand the left, but that this is already mistake. The mirror in fact reflects everything exactly where it should be, point-by-point. It is only when we confuse the reflection for the perceiving subject themselves, that we ask misguided questions about whether the hand on the left side of the image is that image’s ‘right hand’ or not. That is, the perception of reversal is the quintessential illusion; so, consider how the digital projection on the computer screen may also be considered as a kind of very sophisticated mirror. Some of these metaphors about mirrors and the online experience are also well serviced by the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, whose theory of the mirror stage depicts an example of alterity in early childhood development that transforms the screen into a surface of reflection. For Lacan, the act of imagining one’s self-image as seen by the other (captured so well by the Zoom selfie camera) is the primary onanistic fantasy. Deleuze and Guattari developed this idea toward their own concept of subject-as-recording surface in Anti-Oedipus. This may be understood as the sort of ‘digital turn’ in second-generation semiology, that boiled over into the short-lived Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick. Alterity theories of the divided subejct deriving from this tradition tend to still espouse a constructivist and subjectivist position towards a mostly observer-dependent reality, but this does not preclude the ambition to distinguish self from non-self. Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and Luis Prieto pointed out that ideological knowledge disguises itself by reflecting reality while simultaneously building illusion. It can surely be recognized by most semioticians that signs create a reality that does not always correspond to material reality, and thus it is to some extent illusory. Illusions and signs are tightly related, but if signs are first and foremost a matter of agents that engage in interpretative processes, is the agency behind sign-functions also illusory? We organizers of this Semiosalong series ask our participants to take an equally critical stance toward their own certainty about the boundary between self and other, to trouble the border between inside and outside – fluid identity construction on online, and mobilizing tools of semiology/semiotics for combatting the worst depredations of the digital, is the most obvious domain of application here, but this task includes by default the analog preoccupations of poststructuralism as well: the pre-digital problems of alterity in questions of race, class and gender, which are so so magnified and distorted in the online discourse. The online format of the semiosalong – the omnipresent selfie camera hovering there in the corner – should comprise some object of reflection for all participants on the meta-textual question.