Semiotics / Pragmatics of images

Teacher : Fleur Courtois

Through the turn towards a pragmatics of images, this course conducts "semiotic investigations". While contemporary art has understood and played with the idea of language as performative rather than signifying (cf. Austin: "When saying is doing"), it is the linguistic model itself, performative or not, that is increasingly giving up the ghost. Language games give rise to incompressible image games.

In concrete terms, these semiotic investigations articulate an approach (in contemporary art or experimental cinema) to a semiotic problem situated by an artistic and political commitment, drawing on targeted textual references touching on the pragmatics of images. While the course will follow a continuous line of study aimed at grasping as closely as possible the pragmatic relationship to images, the problematics will each propose a semiotic arrangement specific to the artistic approach: what pragmatic power is at stake in this image? Or, more simply: What can this image do, given that it is embodied in what it reveals or conceals, in what it renders formidable or novel, in what it implies or (de-)connects, in what it engages, situates or extracts? The image will therefore be considered here not as a support, representation, mediation or mirror, but as the cry that an artistic production or approach utters, and what it gives us to feel as this cry, here and now.

Compulsory course for all 4 Masters.