Göran Sonesson

Lund University, Semiotics, Centre for language and literature, Faculty Member

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Göran Sonesson, who is Secretary General of the International Association for Visual Semiotics, is Professor of semiotics and Director of the Department of Semiotics at Lund University and Director of Centre for cognitive semiotics. Starting out from general linguistics, he has been working through the years on the semiotics of gestures, visual semiotics, cultural semiotics, and general semiotic theory, in which he bases himself on Husserlean phenomenology but also on empirical research into cognitive and perceptual psychology. His recent work, notably within the EU-project “Stages in the Development and Evolution of Sign Use”, and in the Centre for cognitive semiotics, concerns the phylogenetic and ontogenetic background of language, gesture, and pictures. He has published a fundamental work on visual semiotics, Pictorial concepts (LUP 1989), and a text book introduction to the same domain. He has also published numerous articles in well-known semiotic reviews and in many anthologies.
Phone: (+46)-(0)46/2229531
Address: Avd. för semiotik & Centrum för kognitiv semiotik/Department of semiotics & Centre for cognitive semiotics (CCS)/Département de sémiotique & Centre de sémiotique cognitive/Instituto de semiótica & Centro de semiótica cognocitiva
Lunds Universitet/Lund University/Université de Lund/Universidad de Lund,
Box 201
221 00 Lund
Sweden/Suède/Suecia

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THE MEANINGS OF STRUCTURALISM. CONSIDERATIONS ON STRUCTURES AND GESTALTEN, WITH PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO THE MASKS OF LÉVI-STRAUSS

Structuralism was once the fashion in semiotics, and then it was abandoned without its advantages... more Structuralism was once the fashion in semiotics, and then it was abandoned without its advantages and disadvantages having been properly assessed. Poststructuralism, imperceptibly merging with postmodernism, perpetuated many of the latter, but spurned most of the former. In this sense, it never went beyond structuralism. In my book Pictorial concepts (1989), I have evaluated the contributions and the drawbacks of structuralism pertaining to the domain of pictorial semiotics. Here I want to make a more general point. Structure, as first defined in structural linguistics, and generalized by the Prague school, is a very particular kind of whole, which for instance is not simply identified with the whole as defined by Gestalt psychology. Therefore, structure has to be studied within a more complete mereological framework, that is, within the science of parts and their relation to the whole, first defined by Tardowski and Husserl. As a case in point, we will consider use of the notion of structure in the work of Lévi-Strauss, which was an exemplary work in the transition from linguistics to other semiotic domains, but which already constitutes a deviation with respect to its meaning in linguistics.

Göran Sonesson

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