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Global, Visual and Violent: Semiotics as an Analysis of the Logic of Visual Extremist Culture

Publication |
2019

Abstract

It is an evident fact that the contemporary mass production and agency of technical extremist images shape the conditions in which political discourses take place. I argue that social semiotics is an important toolbox for the analysis of cultural, anthroposemiosic logic that determines these conditions.

This paper draws an attention to the a critique of a proposal presented by Ronald Bleiker (2014), who has presented a comprehensive methodology for examining images (cf. Friis 2015; Kraidy 2018) based on the idea of assemblage thinking (Deleuze and Guattari 1992; DeLanda 2006; Latour 2005).

Bleiker understood semiotics as a special science whose domain is only to explore "symbolism" of the images (Bleiker 2014: 76). In my point of view, the problematic aspect of this proposal is the vagueness through which is the semiotic framework approached.

The aim of my paper is to show why semiotics offers much more fruitful theoretical and analytical outlines.