Qualia—sensory experiences of abstract qualities such as heat, texture, color, sound, stink, hardness, and so on—focus attention on prototypically “material” entities. But how is the ontological category of materiality constituted by conventional qualities, or qualisigns? For instance, how does the sound made by knuckles knocking on a table come to be an exemplary experience of, and a conventional sign for, “materiality”? What ontologies might undermine the seeming naturalness of this category, and to what effect? This issue contributes to the growing literature on semiotic approaches to materiality by arguing that attention to qualia, as sensorial and somatic experiences mediated by cultural qualisigns of value (Munn 1986), offers a useful analytic approach to the dialectics of matter (substrate, affordance) and nonmatter (idea, concept, category). The articles in this issue describe how modes of being and becoming are represented in and organized by discourses on qualia and demonstrate the crucial role of qualia and qualisigns in “ontological politics” (Mol 1999).

This article develops a Peircean conceptualization of qualia as “facts of firstness” by examining the pedagogical pragmatics of a voice lesson in which an intersubjective orientation to vocal sound via listening becomes a subjective orientation to voice production via bodily feeling. I focus specifically on various attempts by a teacher and a student collaboratively to repair and cultivate the student’s voice by generating and isolating qualia across proprioceptive and introspective dimensions. By tracing the sensuous semiotic modes through which qualia become crucial pragmatic signals in the process of “opening” the student’s throat, I demonstrate how these facts of firstness function as cultural emergents that are produced by and accessible through communicative, interactional, intersubjective conduct.

Perched at the edge of California, Tijuana occupies a strategic location for capitalist mobilities of all sorts. This essay examines how the violence of drug trafficking and the speed of the transnational assembly plants came into resonance during a period often known locally as the racha, or streak, of violence, when Mexico’s so-called war on drug trafficking was perceived by many to be at its worst. The semiotic underpinnings of the racha, I argue, lie in the qualia of speed and slowness as these are valorized in supply-chain provisioning of the assembly plants and then calqued onto automotive traffic in the city. Speed and slowness here, though, are bound up with a highly equivocal sense of individual agency. By tracking these qualia across spheres of practice and, finally, into narratives of violence, I show how the racha took shape as a public crisis in the ability to assign individual agency securely.

On July 4, 2012, experimental physicists on the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, in Switzerland, announced the historic discovery of the Higgs boson. After analyzing trillions of proton-to-proton collisions, two teams of physicists concluded that signatures of diphotons in the final state were evidence of the long-sought-after Higgs particle. The answerability of a particle search to polysemic signals raises a deeply provocative question: In what ways does a sign facilitate the discovery of a thing? Drawing on fieldwork at the Large Hadron Collider complex, this article attempts to probe the semiosis of signatures as a palimpsest of inherent possibilities spanning the width of the universe, which is neither a contingent ordering of the Saussurean kind nor a brick-by-brick Peircean construct. What it eloquently foregrounds is the capacity of a class of signs to reflect the presence of objects, even those that are materially nonexistent, which resolves many a metaphysical perplexity involving language, thought, and reality. In the process, this article makes a case for the role of meaningful, qualitative evaluations, which lie at the root of experimental searches, and explains how these qualitative evaluations are a more trustworthy source of discoveries in particle physics than metrics or magnitudes.

Hilary Putnam (1975) proposes that a “natural kind” term relies on a division of linguistic labor in which experts discern what is or is not a member of a kind. Centering on a Philippine-elite social kind term, this essay examines how self-appointed experts develop and share “scientific” instruments, or tests, that discern whether someone is a “real” or “fake” elite. These tests report about signs of realness and fakeness by assigning “gentle” and “rough” qualities to speech and body of differentiated social types. This essay demonstrates that such qualia are central to shaping ontologies of social types; that the discerning subject, who speaks from an elevated social position as reflexive expert, is critical to this process; and that the discerner shares expertise by developing tests that rest on different ontologies of emblem. The essay argues that discerning Philippine elite types and their aspiring subtypes and countertypes presupposes an overarching ontology of fake that already renders real elites as fakes.

Porcelain is, today, a familiar material of dishes, figurines, vases, and tiles. As commodities, they are enregistered social indexicals, so that the aphorism fits: you are what you drink, eat, or in this case eat on—or know how to admire as collector or connoisseur. This does not yet tell us, however, what qualities are picked out as shared by object and user, on what axis of social distinction. I argue that this everyday material, exactly because of the varied qualities it has been presumed to embody, has been swept up in changing regimes of knowledge, in economic strategies, and in making political and ethical discourses persuasive. In European history over the last few centuries, it has been embedded in diverse axes of differentiation, enlisted and changed not only as sign but also as material in strikingly different ontological projects.

In the eras of both film-based and digital photography, and to differing degrees and with differing consequences in documentary and art photography, the role of indexicality in establishing the veracity of the image has been paramount in photo theory. There is a need, however, for expanding the ways we think about indexicality in photography. In addition to the familiar concepts of the trace, citation, reference, social diacritics, interactional cues, and artists’ intentions, the indexicality of photography may be better understood through appeal to less direct, or more densely mediated, modalities of indexicality. These include qualia (hypostatically abstracted -nesses), dicentization (the upshifting of icons into indexes of contiguity), and propositionality (the assertion of messages subject to truth claims).