Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), philosophical giant who changed the course of modern philosophy by asking the revolutionary question: ‘How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?’ Kant answered that we should not presuppose that all knowledge arises from and conforms to objects of thought but, rather, that objects of thought conform to capacities for knowing or conditions of experience. This shift of view is known as Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy. Since, according to Kant, space and time are forms of human sensibility and, therefore, necessary conditions of human experience, it follows a priori that all objects of possible experience will be situated in space and time. This is a transcendental deduction. A consequence of Kant’s metaphysics is that we can only know objects as they appear (phenomena) not as they are in themselves (noumena or Ding an sich). This is Kant’s transcendental idealism.
Kant also argued that human understanding presupposes, as a regulative principle, that nature is purposive. In his moral philosophy, Kant distinguishes between hypothetical imperatives, where action can only be understood in relation to human purposes, and categorical imperatives, where commands to action appeal to duty, not purpose. Kant’s categorical imperative stated generally, ‘Act only on the maxim which you can at the same time will to be a universal law’, brings to mind the ‘golden rule’. Charles S. Peirce, although much influenced by Kant, considered the view that the unity of thought depends on the nature of the human mind rather than on ‘things in themselves’ to be a form of nominalism. (NH)
Kinesics was introduced by Birdwhistell in 1952 to designate the study of body motion as communication in face-to-face interaction in which the actions of the face, head, hands and the whole body are viewed as culturally organized and learned by individuals as they become competent in the use of the unmediated communication systems of their culture. Kinesics was developed as part of an attempt to expand the scope of structural linguistic analytic techniques to cover all aspects of behaviour involved in face-to-face interaction. Birdwhistell proposed a terminology and conceptual framework paralleling that used in linguistics. The least discriminable unit of body motion effecting a contrast in meaning was called a kineme (analogous to phoneme). Kinemes combined into kinemorphs which in turn were proposed as components of kinemorphic constructions. Attempts to analyse body motion in these terms were rarely more than programmatic; however, the concept was highly influential in developing awareness of the importance of the role of visible bodily actions in communication. Today ‘kinesics’ may be found in English language dictionaries where it is defined as the study of how body movements convey meaning. It is also used to refer to those movements a person makes that are regarded as conveying meaning. (AK)
Birdwhistell, R. L. (1970) Kinesics and Context, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gunther Kress (b. 1942) has been central in forging social semiotics as a cutting-edge mode of investigating the diversity of representational production in contemporary reality. Social semiotics is founded on a social theory of the sign and claims that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is not arbitrary, but motivated. Not only this, Kress insists that there is a relationship of motivation between the world of the sign user and the signifier. This theory is based on the recognition that human beings produce signs as a result of their interested action as culturally and historically formed individuals within particular social contexts and relations of power. By placing human social and cultural environments at the centre of semiotic analysis, Kress emphasizes meaning making as unstable, transformative action which produces change both in the object being transformed and in the individual who is the agent of the transformation. Meaning making is a constant process of re-designing available resources for representation; thus the making of signs is not an act of imitation but of creativity and innovation.
Kress’s work on multimodality decentres written language as the dominant mode of representation in a contemporary world which is increasingly privileging multiple modes of communication, particularly the visual mode. Kress has applied many of these ideas to rethinking language and literacy education in a global, plural society in which the representational resources of all people need to be harnessed for productive, social and humane futures. (PS)
See also HALLIDAY and MULTIMODALITY.
Kress, G. R. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age, London: Routledge.
KRESS AND VAN LEEUWEN see KRESS
Julia Kristeva, born in Bulgaria in 1941, has been working in Paris since 1966 as a semiotician, psychoanalyst, writer, literary theorist and critic. She is editor of the famous journal Tel Quel and teaches at Paris University VII as well as at Columbia University in New York. She has authored four novels, Les samouraïs, which mirrors French society, Le vieil homme et les loups, Possessions and Murder in Byzantium, and has written a trilogy, La génie féminine, devoted to Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein and Colette (the first volume of which has already appeared).
In her book Le langage, cet inconnu (1969a), Kristeva outlines the field of linguistics while pointing out its limits. These are traced to the history of linguistics and to its compromise with European culture, with phonocentrism, with the priority or exclusiveness accorded to the alphabetic script, etc. By taking into account the reflections on language offered by philosophy of language and semiotics, linguistics today has broadened its scope. At the same time, however, the epistemological paradigms adopted from the philosophical tradition at the birth of linguistics remain the same. Above all the notion of speaking subject is not called into question.
With her proposal of ‘semanalysis’ as formulated in Semiotiké (1969b), Kristeva had already attempted a sort of short circuit by connecting the linguistic and the semiotic approach to the psychoanalytic. She confronts the Cartesian ego and the transcendental ego of Husserlian phenomenology, the subject of utterance linguistics, with the dual subject as theorized by Freud and his concept of the unconscious. In Kristeva’s perspective the unconscious implies describing signification as a heterogeneous process. This is best manifested in literary writing.
In La révolution du langage poétique (1974) Kristeva establishes a distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic. The symbolic designates language as it is defined by linguistics and its tradition, language in its normative usage. Semiotics refers to primary processes and to the pulsions that enter into contradiction with the symbolic. Literary writing is generated in the contradiction between the symbolic and the semiotic. Its value for semiotics, therefore, consists in its potential for exploring the experience of heterogeneity in signification processes.
Subsequently, Kristeva developed her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic in a psychoanalytical framework. She analyses the heterogeneity of signification, which she also experiences directly in analytical practice, in her books Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essais sur l’abjection (1980), Histoires d’amour (1985) and Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancolie (1987). But the questions of the speaking subject’s identity and of heterogeneity of the signification process emerge just as well in situations of strangeness to language, analysed in Étrangers à nous-mêmes (1988).
The question of strangeness is also dealt with in one of her most recent works, Le temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (1994). Kristeva also analyses the role played by strangeness (racial: the Jew; sexual: the homosexual) in Proust’s Recherche. Literary writing can enrich our understanding of the outsider thanks to its dealings with heterogeneity in signification and with alterity. The more we recognize ourselves as strangers to ourselves, the more we are capable of greeting the strangeness of others. (AP)
Kristeva, J. (1981) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine and L. S. Roudiez, Oxford: Blackwell.
Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1984) The Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller, New York: Columbia University Press.
Kalevi Kull (b. 1952), biosemiotician and Head of the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. He has been the editor since 1998 of Sign Systems Studies, the first ever semiotics journal (founded by Lotman in 1964), and since 1999 a co-editor of Folia Baeriana. He is the author of numerous articles as well as books and edited collections on theoretical biology and biosemiotics in English and Estonian. In addition, he edited the major 2001 special issue on Jakob von Uexküll. Originally a professor in Tartu’s Institute of Zoology and Botany, he has done important work on ecology, such as his analysis of the sustainability features of ‘wooded meadows’ (Kull et al. 2003). Yet, his greatest influence in biosemiotics, supplementing his advocacy of perspectives from von Baer and Uexküll, is probably his institution of a ‘post-Darwinist’ theory of evolution as the backbone of biosemiotic thinking. Through his writings on the ‘Baldwin effect’ he has attempted to ‘widen up evolutionary theory by putting explicit emphasis on the influence of mental processes in the broadest sense possible of this term, in other words as comprising semiotic interactions even at the cellular level’ (Hoffmeyer and Kull 2003: 253). (PC)
See also BIOSEMIOTICS, ECOSEMIOTICS, EMMECHE, HOFFMEYER and NÖTH.