[Bilimsel Haber] Call for articles for "Representing Transcendence, " a supplementary issue of _Signs and Society_

[Gonul Pultar]

CFP:

"Representing Transcendence"
a supplementary issue of Signs and Society

Signs and Society is a new open-access journal focusing on the study of 
sign processes (or semiosis) in the realms of social action, cognition, 
and cultural form.




“Representing Transcendence”

Call for Papers for Supplementary Issue (Publication Date: Winter 2014)
(http://www.press.uchicago.edu/dms/ucp/journals/generaldocs/SAS_CFP_Transcendence.pdf)


Students of semiosis have long realized that signs and symbols, in their 
“standing for” function, are normally more “evident” (perceptible, 
experiential) than what they represent (or re-present). In fact, one of 
the classic definitions of the sign stresses that they need to “reveal” 
something that was, at some previous time, less known or even unknown. 
More recently, Carlo Ginzburg has looked at a set of signs, including 
clues, evidence, and traces, that, taken together form a deeply rooted 
tradition of semiotic reasoning.

But what happens if this foundational semiotic relationship between the 
evident and the non-evidence is modified to meet particular cultural 
circumstances in which various expressive forms (sculpted objects, 
painted images, verbal forms, musical compositions) are designed not to 
reveal their objects, or to reveal the non-knowability of their objects?

A comparatively widespread instance of this modification would be where 
religious traditions establish conventions governing the representation 
of transcendence, that is, some power, being, or object that, being 
“beyond knowing,” cannot possibly be represented. Indeed, the successful 
representation of the non-representable is one way to positively 
demonstrate the potency, agency, or eternity of these sacred powers, 
beings, or objects, since being “beyond knowledge” implies a 
corresponding limitation of mere human knowers.

This Supplementary Issue of Signs and Society (published by the 
University of Chicago Press) will address this paradox of “representing 
transcendence” across time and across disciplines.

Considerable scholarship in this area has already identified a number of 
cultural strategies for confronting this paradox. An image of a 
footprint (or an empty altar) can index the past presence but present 
absence of deity. Depictions of ritual acts of veiling and unveiling or 
wrapping and unwrapping can suggest a transformational process of 
becoming non-evident.

Similarly, a number of cultural traditions permit the representation of 
deities on the condition that part of the representation states or 
implies that the image was itself “not made by human hands.” And complex 
images can present the differential between the evident and the 
non-evident as a visual hierarchy, such as a heavenly ladder or as the 
movement from light to darkness.

To these three examples many more could be added. But rather than merely 
generating an inventory of these kinds of representational devices, we 
hope, through comparative examples, to be able to ask a number of more 
interesting questions. First, what are the particular sociocultural or 
historical conditions that seem to support or require these paradoxical 
semiotic processes? Second, do the conventions regarding material images 
extend to other semiotic registers in a given society? Third, in what 
specifiable range of societies do these devices occur, perhaps in 
typological contrast to societies where non-human forces are immanent 
rather than transcendent? Fourth, what do different “imaginaries” 
governing the representation of transcendence tell us more generally 
about a culture’s concept of materiality itself, especially ideas about 
the relation or separation of the tangible and the non-tangible.


This Supplementary Issue will be co-edited by Massimo Leone at the 
University of Turin (massimo.leone [at] unito.it) and Richard J. 
Parmentier at Brandeis University (rparmentier [at] brandeis.edu).

We encourage scholars from various disciplines in the social sciences 
and humanities to contact either of us to discuss a possible contribution.

The deadline for submitting completed manuscripts is August 15, 2013, 
though we hope to begin the peer-review process much before that date.



For more information, please visit our website: 
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/sas.html

Managing Editor
Signs and Society
Email: sas at hufs.ac.kr

Visit the website at 
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/sas.html