Against the backdrop of a long research tradition in linguistic and semiotic anthropology that has focused almost exclusively on media technologies that reproduce Seconds, that is, specific texts in modalities such as sound and the visual image, this article focuses on media technologies that reproduce Thirds, that is, generative dispositions responsible for the production of such Seconds. It explores contemporary attempts in the United States and France to develop computerized systems that, with the aid of specific algorithms, can abstract and enact the styles of different past jazz masters, as well as the styles of players who interactively improvise with such systems in real time. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the article offers an analysis of these media technologies, their present application in the field of online consumption, and the cultural specificity of the Third that plays a key role in their development and reception, namely, style.

Criminal justice is the area of law where we are closest to an overview of the semiotic processes through a succession of organizational contexts. We start with the first call to the police and conclude with the criminal trial or appeal. The main stages in the process may be characterized as (police) investigation, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion by public officials, and the trial. The attention of legal philosophers and semioticians alike has been directed primarily toward the last. However, it is important to draw attention also to the earlier stages, and to the possibilities that exist of fitting them within a single semiotic framework of analysis.

Perceptions of boundaries between communicative codes and the modalities through which they are produced and perceived are mediated by social actors’ particular communicative repertoires and histories. I focus in particular on how the affordances of SignWriting (SW), a writing system for sign languages that has been adapted in Germany to additionally inscribe the physical movements by which spoken languages are produced, reveal and affect users’ diverse interpretations of the relationship between German Sign Language (DGS) and German. I examine the production and interpretation of DGS SW texts on two different scales: a classroom in Germany and a transnational, multilingual online network of SignWriters with whom classroom participants engage.

This article examines the semiotic and rhetorical mechanisms by which Obama’s “race speech” builds a mutual identification between Blacks and Whites; it emphasizes the importance of locus communis commonplace and “equivalential links” (Laclau 2005, 94). It also looks at how Obama himself constructs his identity in order to appeal to a racially and politically heterogeneous audience. In addition, it attempts to identify and explain some elements of the speech that may carry heightened emotional content and that may induce a distancing or identification reaction in an audience. From the theoretical standpoint, the article brings to bear the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics understanding of metaphor and meaning-generation mechanisms on the Laclauian post-Marxist poststructural concept of the “people,” in order to explain how metaphors participate in the construction of a “people” during a presidential campaign. In terms of cognitive theory, it draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s understanding of metaphorical thinking ([1980] 2003) and Castells’s elaboration on emotions in relation to political cognition (2009). The sociological perspective on emotions aids in the analysis of emotions in social interaction (Turner and Stets 2009). The contribution of this article lies in the semiotic analysis of the role of emotion-evoking elements of the race speech that may indicate a constitutive role in the formation of a “people.”

In the present essay the author sets out to reflect on the notions of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, pursuing the research beyond what is directly given in Peirce’s writings. For the purpose, Peircean phenomenology is considered to be a special variety of the Husserlian kind, because it restricts possible phenomena to threesomes and also attributes special contents to the three categories. The first restriction means that Peirce’s theory is a kind of structuralism, although a triadic one, whereas the second restriction implies that it is not merely formal. In the present essay, specific, primitive meanings are assigned to each of the categories, and they are seen to be similar in form to the dyads and triads of social psychology. At the end, signs are considered to be special kinds of Thirds, and an attempt is made to elucidate what hypo-icons owe to Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

Where can we find “culture” in relation to humans’ experience of it in by-degrees normatively appropriate and socially effective semiotic interactions? By analyzing several examples of such semiotic material, we can develop the idea that “culture” is a socio-historically contingent wave phenomenon immanent in social practice dimensionalized by semiotic characteristics I here term signification—circulation—emanation.