3. 2010/11 Semiosis—the Transformation of Objects into Signs

Instead of starting with subjects and objects, the development of theory attempted here assumes a dispersed and recursive agency, which is brought into an ontological hierarchy. This approach does away with the categorial distinction between signs and objects, as it characterized the thinking of the classical episteme from the 17th to the 19th century. Signs and objects are no longer separated by the Cartesian hiatus. In a media theoretical context, the redefinition of the concept of sign is therefore a research desideratum (Krämer following Derrida; Walther; Winkler; cf. also Franz/Schäffner/Siegert/Stockhammer 2007). It can build on Charles S. Peirce’s work, whose types of signs are at the same time ontological categories. A discussion of action theory by dint of positions in semiotic and media aesthetics can make use of the fine differentiations Peirce’s semiotics introduces. Similarly, Latour does not oppose sign and referent but instead introduces a series of hybrid connections of objects, which perform media operations (filtering, ordering, saving, broadcasting, editing, etc.), constituting in turn different types of signs: three-dimensional objects that have significant effects, object-like indicators (Zeigzeugen), two-dimensional diagrammatic and one-dimensional grammatical signs.

In material objects and artifacts, on the one hand, and human agents, on the other hand, signs become effective as agents of social, political, aesthetic and cognitive doing (in short, of cultural praxis) in their own right. Signs are always agents in the agential context of mixed ensembles but also agencies that link heterogeneous agents. Therefore, semiotics has to be addressed as a third operation of media ensembles. Already the founders of actor-network theory conceived this approach as a “semiotics of materiality” (Law). The relationality of the entities is understood as semiotic relationalities. Insofar as being itself is relational (Serres), it is a semiotic being. Also in Gell’s account, signs occupy a central functional place—although from a semiotic point of view, they are only reflected superficially. Signs can represent agents/patients and agencies via relations to the object. During its development, film, for instance, starts to represent and reflect itself as sign. Also the “reality” of “reality TV” always consists of an agency, in which the sign is already recursively entailed and develops effective agency. At the same time, it represents and reflects this efficacy and thereby exerts a media function.

Here, the type of the indexical sign possesses a special function. According to Peirce, only the index as a (causal) nexus establishes a cogent link of signs and extra-semiotic objects; this is the reason why it deserves particular attention in mixed ensembles. It is illuminating that Gell conceives a work of art as an object-reflecting agency within the framework of Peirce’s concept of index; similarly, Bense has tried to introduce the work of art, respectively the aesthetic state of artificial objects, as an indexical category within the Peirceian scheme. Finally, it is not an arbitrary occurrence, and hence noteworthy, that the indexical function has repeatedly been used to characterize the type of analog technical pictures (photography, film; e.g. by Barthes and Bazin; one could also think of the cognition-guiding function of the index in classic cinema). There are indications of a more complex modeling, once one starts to conceive signs as agents in the framework of mixed media ensembles, in which they operate as “knots” or “meshes” of a particular kind—a position assumed here.