The Edusemiotics of Images Essays On The
The Edusemiotics of Images Essays On The
The Edusemiotics
of Images
Essays on the Art~Science of Tarot
Inna Semetsky
THE EDUSEMIOTICS OF IMAGES: ESSAYS ON THE ART∼SCIENCE OF TAROT
EDUCATIONAL FUTURES
RETHINKING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Volume 55
Series Editor
Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Editorial Board
Scope
This series maps the emergent field of educational futures. It will commission
books on the futures of education in relation to the question of globalisation and
knowledge economy. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of
discourses of the knowledge and learning economies. It aspires to build a
consistent approach to educational futures in terms of traditional methods,
including scenario planning and foresight, as well as imaginative narratives, and it
will examine examples of futures research in education, pedagogical experiments,
new utopian thinking, and educational policy futures with a strong accent on actual
policies and examples.
The Edusemiotics of Images
Essays on the Art∼Science of Tarot
By
Inna Semetsky
University of Waikato, New Zealand
SENSE PUBLISHERS
ROTTERDAM / BOSTON / TAIPEI
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Cover: Detail of The Star, Arcanum XVII, by artist Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite Tarot
Deck. © 1971 US Games Systems, Inc.
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written
permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose
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In the beginning is the relation
vii
PROLOGUE
The word edusemiotics was coined by Marcel Danesi (2010) to indicate a new
interdisciplinary field of inquiry that has emerged as a result of the last decade of
my research in the intersection of educational philosophy and semiotics – or the
science of signs. Edusemiotics transcends the long-standing disciplinary
boundaries between humanities and sciences. According to the American
pragmatic philosopher and founder of modern semiotics Charles Sanders Peirce,
the whole universe is perfused with signs whose action in nature, culture and the
human psyche constitutes the dynamical process of semiosis. Semiosis – from the
Greek ıȘµİȓȦıȚȢ, sƝmeíǀsis, a derivation of the verb sƝmeiô meaning “to mark” –
is the name given by Peirce to the process of the evolution of signs.
Briefly, semiotics is the study of signs and their signification; as such, it is
considered to be of eminent importance to interdisciplinary research. In ancient
times semiotics was a specific branch of medicine, with signs describing
symptoms. Later semiotics became a branch of philosophy, with signs, verbal or
nonverbal, describing the nature of things. The Scholastic tradition, for example,
posited a sign to be something that we can not only directly perceive but also
connect with something else, its other, by virtue of our or somebody’s else
experience. A sign not only represents but also causes other signs to come to mind
as a consequence of itself: this relation is expressed in the medieval formula
aliquid stat pro aliquo, which is translated as something standing for something
else.
The word symbol is derived from Greek symbolon, that is, a token composed of
two halves used to verify identity by matching one part to the other. Symbol is
usually a concrete sign or image that stands for some other, more abstract, entity or
idea by virtue of either convention, analogy, or metaphor. But signs can be
polysemic, that is, they may connote more than one meaning. Therefore meanings
may be characterized by their surplus. A symbolic connotation may demonstrate a
deeper layer of meanings, sometimes with complex emotional associations, or
having a cryptic character as pointing to something beyond itself.
Semiotics exceeds the science of linguistics, the latter limited to verbal signs of
words and sentences, and encompasses both natural and invented signs, such as
culturally specific artifacts. Human beings are sign-users, and semiotics can also
serve as a meta-language, the function of which is to describe human action.
Semiotics both constructs models, or sign-systems, and considers them to be its
own object of research. Among semiotic systems there is such language substitute
as Morse code. In contrast to the immediate sense data of the surrounding world,
the human mind uses mediation and interpretation when, within experience, it
crosses what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called the semiotic threshold.
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PROLOGUE
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EDUCATING FOR THREE IS
2004b, 2010a). This common theoretical platform will support the arguments
developed in the chapters of the present book.
A substantial development was a recent cooperative research project with
international participants across the disciplinary fields of education, philosophy
and semiotics in the form of the edited volume Semiotics Education Experience
(Semetsky, 2010d), for which Marcel Danesi wrote a Foreword indeed subtitled
Edusemiotics. The edited volume Jung and Educational Theory (Semetsky, 2012a)
and a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory devoted to
Jungian currents in education (Semetsky, 2012b) partake of edusemiotics in terms
of the significance of images and symbols for educational experience.
The present book further develops edusemiotics – and, specifically, the
edusemiotics of images – by completing a trilogy comprising Semiotics Education
Experience and the other important precursor: my latest monograph Re-
Symbolization of the Self: Human Development and Tarot Hermeneutic (Semetsky,
2011a), which summarized both empirical and theoretical research that I have been
conducting in the area of education, counseling and human development since
1992. It has laid down a necessary foundation so as to further detail the
philosophical dimension to be specifically addressed in the present book in the
context of education and the construction of novel theory-practice nexus centered
on learning from signs comprising a semiotic system of Tarot images and symbols.
According to contemporary cognitive scientist Ray Jackendoff (2001), who
holds an ecological perspective on mind, even verbal utterances should be
understood semiotically rather than strictly linguistically, that is, in terms of their
establishing a relation between a conscious mental representation (an expression)
and an unconscious mental representation (a hidden message). Making the
unconscious conscious is the prerogative of Tarot edusemiotics.
In brief, the Tarot sign-system consists of 78 images called Arcana, the 22
Major Arcana and the remaining 56 Minor. The meaning of the word Arcanum
(singular) is this creative, but often missing or obscured, element in our
experiences, which is necessary to know, to discover in practical life so as to
become fruitful and creative in our approach to multiple life-tasks situated in the
midst of experiential situations, events and our complex relationships with others
when we face decisions and choices or encounter moral dilemmas.
Therefore by its very definition each Arcanum – each Tarot image – implies a
moral dimension pertaining to what John Dewey (1922/1988) called human
conduct. If and when discovered – that is, made available to consciousness – it
becomes a powerful motivational force to facilitate a change for the better at our
emotional, cognitive or behavioral levels and thus to accomplish an important
ethical and educational objective. What is called a Tarot layout or spread is a
particular pattern of pictures that are full of rich symbolism “embodying”
intellectual, moral, and spiritual “lessons” derived from collective human
experiences across times, places and cultures; yet the moral of these symbolic
lessons – the very meanings of Tarot signs – may be “hiding” deep in the midst of
the field conceived by psychologist Carl Gustav Jung as the collective
unconscious. Since the images denote archetypes of the collective unconscious or
3
PROLOGUE
universal memory pool shared by humankind, their messages would have the same
significance cross-culturally, at different times and in different places.
Learning from signs demands their reading and interpretation at the level of
practical action in search for the deepest meanings of experience. This learning is
“marked” by Tarot symbolism. Such is the edusemiotics of Tarot images. As
pictorial artifacts, Tarot images represent meaningful patterns of thoughts, affects,
emotions, feelings and behaviors, thus embodying the very values implicit in
collective experiences that transcend times, places, language barriers, disparate
beliefs and cultures. Learning occurs not only in formal settings such as a
classroom; the concept of learning pertains to real-life human experiences and
cultural events that can embody significant meanings. Cultural artifacts are capable
of semiotic or communicative potential; different objects and events in our life
carry cultural, psychological and social significance and represent symbolic “texts”
to be read and interpreted.
Reading and interpreting diverse cultural “texts” embodied in Tarot images
partakes of semanalysis – a term coined by French cultural theorist and semiotician
Julia Kristeva (cf. Nöth, 1995). Semanalysis is a portmanteau word referring to
both semiotics and psychoanalysis and emphasizing interpretation and becoming
conscious of the unconscious. Kristeva’s concept “subject in process” would have
challenged a self-conscious subject as the fixed product of the traditional
educational system. Human subjectivity is continuously produced in experience:
Tarot edusemiotics is equivalent to constructing and respectively learning “critical
lessons” (Noddings, 2006) that, in their symbolic form, are embedded in the
semiotic process of human experiential growth, both intellectual and ethical.
Nel Noddings, a renowned philosopher of education and founder of the
relational ethics of care, addresses a maternal ability to “read” her children as the
“capacity for ‘empathy’” (Noddings, 2010a, p. 6) and an instinct for survival in the
course of human evolution pertaining specifically to the maternal factor (also, the
title of her latest book). She refers to “the ‘reading’ process” (2010a, p. 53) in
terms of cognitive apprehension motivated by love and accompanied by the
attitude of care and “empathy [as] the constellation of processes” (p. 56) that
connects Self and Other in a relation, which is as such necessarily “ontologically
basic” (Noddings, 2010b, p. 390; also 1984/2003).
A relation, which is ontologically, epistemically and ethically fundamental, is a
province of semiotics and semiosis. A sign, by definition, is essentially a relational
entity that indicates something other than itself which is not immediately apparent.
It needs mediation between itself and its own other in the interpretive process
enabled by the inclusion of the third category of an interpretant, as Peirce called it,
into formal logic. Applying this unorthodox logic to reading and interpreting Tarot
signs permits us to empathically relate to something essentially other but
nevertheless potentially understandable, knowable and, ultimately, known.
The relation thus established between the generic Self and Other in our real
practical life is significant and has both epistemological and ontological
implications. The dimension of foremost importance is however ethical,
considering that we live in a time of globalization and uncertain multiculturalism
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EDUCATING FOR THREE IS
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