On Semiocide: an Introduction.to Negative Semiotics

Coined by Estonian palaeontologist Ivan Puura, semiocide was initially defined as “situation where signs and stories significant for someone are destroyed by someone else’s carelessness and malevolence, stealing part of one’s identity.” (Puura 2013). It signifies the erasure, total or partial, sudden or gradual, of meaning making processes pertaining to individuals as well as communities. The concept saw some use in ecosemiotics regarding the dissipation of sign processes when encountered with overwhelming and/or destructive environmental elements (Posner 2000), whereas in terms of cultural and social disciplines, its contents are more often understood in the framework of other analogous ideas. In this presentation, I intend to expand on this concept, provide a historical background and analogous precedents (such as linguicide as defined by Campbell & Muntzel [1989]), and discuss the implications of semiocide not only in the present formulations by Puura and Maran (2013) but speculate on further situations of their use, For this purpose, conceptual frameworks from Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, such Juri Lotman’s semiosphere (2001a) and boundary (2001b) will be employed. Furthermore, perspectives from Raymond Williams’ cultural model - specifically emergent and oppositional cultures (Williams 2005), (Williams 1977) - will be taken up in view of the possibility of an emancipatory mode that would reposition this concept outside its nominal conservatism and find use against discriminatory and oppressive cultural conditions. - Campbell, Lyle; Muntzel, Martha C. 1989. The structural consequences of language death, 181-196. Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death, Cambridge University Press. - Lotman, Juri 2001. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, I. B. Tauris Publishers - Semiotic space, pg. 123-130. - The notion of the boundary, pg. 131-142. - Maran, Timo 2013. Enchantment of the past and semiocide: Remembering Ivar Puura. Sign Systems Studies 41 (1), 146-149 - Posner, Roland 2000. Semiotic pollution: Deliberations to an ecology of signs, Sign System Studies 28, 290-308 - Puura, Ivar 2013. Nature in our memory. Sign Systems Studies 41(1), 150–153. - Williams, Raymond 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York. - Dominant, Residual and Emergent, pg. 121-127. - Williams, Raymond 2005. Culture and Materialism. Verso Books, 2005, London & New York - Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, pg. 30-49