Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 8

© 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue VIII Version I 11 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 A Locating Media in Cultural Theories conceptual basis for the adoption of practice perspective? In social science, attention to localized practices has been an established methodological procedure. Nevertheless, the fluidity of media practices in the latest phase of transnationality forces us to rethink the validity of the overture to the object of analysis. A question is the status of the practice perspective. Is it still a viable tool to conceptualize processes of contemporary transmutation? If there is a hiatus between the micro-level modus vivendi of media and the macro-level implications, what constitutes an analytic procedure capable of coping with the ethicopolitical dimension of this mediatized state? Is the practice perspective a remnant of the historic past now superseded? I argue that media practice locates semiotically organized originals in new indexical relationships with their potential receivers and generates a system of mediatization. The significance o f what one may refer to as indexical relocation is fundamentally beyond semiotic interpretation because signs in this case do not undergo significant change. Hepp rightly captures this repetitive reproduction as the fundamental basis for the cultural mutation, but I hold that media practices exhibit processes which escape the attention of analysts. To substantiate the point I begin with a brief discussion about the location of media in the topology of cultural analysis. I propose to map media practice in this topology by reference to the components, or axioms of analytic logic, endowed with instrumentalities linking data with respective perspectives. In doing so, I find it relevant to focus on two major perspectives on signs, i.e., Saussure’s semiology and the Peircean theory of sign. I. S ign T heories and M edia The term topology predicates uses of premeditated plans, based on some calculus, often for the sake of certain predictions. 5 By locating theories in media research, the task of my discussion does not include disclosing their shortcomings for the sake of criticism. As we will see, the topology of a theory misfits the location where the premeditated scheme tendentiously loses its target and encounters unthought. The task here is to illuminate the nature of theories, not put them on the periphery by means of better theories. Then, what if semiotics, as a type of explanatory 5 Referring to “the complementarity of causal and quasi-causal forms of analysis”, DeLanda claims that the aspects that characterize the topological structure of social theories are “not actual but virtual mechanisms ”, supposedly operating with given empirical phenomena. The term topological is used to remind ourselves of this virtuality. For further comments on the virtual character of social theories, see M. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity , Bloomsbury, 2006, p. 31. framework, comes under this subalternist scrutiny, and what type of problematics hitherto invisible come to the forefront? In the case of theories on sign, the topology consists of several spheres organized by components for the definition of semantic value. In the classical structuralist perspective, signs are endowed with materiality, but primarily for the realization of referential meaning. The meaning, or the signified, of the signifier is conceptualized as a function of the difference between signs, primarily at the level of the signifiers. In the Peircean model, the semantic components also consist of the sign, but those are divided into three components, i.e., sign, sign data (or object), and interpretant or deduced signified. In contrast to the dyadic Saussurean model, Peirce’s triadic model has an advantage because of its capacity of showing how certain semantic components obtain significance in particular use. However, despite the difference in approach to the question of meaning, i.e., the way in which information is conveyed by cultural device, sign theories exhibit weaknesses in capturing certain aspects of media. What causes the problematic relation between media and cultural theories? The answer lies in the inherent ideology of sign theories as sciences of meaning built on the premise that meaning can be predicated as a positive substance subject to objectification based on methodically determined rules. I argue that one way to tackle the question of how this premise generates a problematic relation with the media is to focus on the formulated mechanism of signification; whether in structuralism or the Peircean model, how to handle the materiality of the sign is the lynch-pin in determining the correlation of the semiotic function with the given immediacy of a sign. In the Peircean version, the correlation is determined according to the way in which the three components referred to are conjoined w ith each other. The validity of a sign as a carrier of meaning is assessed by multiple criteria, and the subsequent multivalence is not explicated by reference to materiality, as in the case of the Saussurean dyadic model. In Peirce’s triadic scheme, the materiality likewise denotes potentially problematic spheres of autonomy, but this component is analytically domesticated to play the instrumental role of signifying. This is shown in the alternative solution prepared by Peirce. Peirce introduces the “object” to show how an arbitrary sign (or signifier) obtains the status of a sign vis-à-vis the objectivity of its referent. Signs are endowed with power to signify via verification against the concrete evidentiality of the real (object). The three types of sign accrue respective instrumentality according to the difference in the way in which the judgment of verification is made. Short claims that Peirce’s approach to the sign is an ingenious solution to the philosophical exploration