Reviews 344 (anstelle von “Reinbek”). Die im Text befindlichen Verweise auf Tabellen und Abbildungen enthalten keine Seitenanzahlen (was bei der Produktion eines solchen Manuskripts mit ständig wechselnden Umbrüchen ja verständlich ist), aber bisweilen muss die LeserIn etwas suchen, um die entsprechende Bezugsstelle zu finden. (So schreibt Stöckl etwa im Abschnitt 2.6.3., S. 123f.: “Meiner Ansicht nach lässt sich eine [sic! ] solches Modell auf der Basis der in 2.5. zusammengetragenen Beobachtungen […] entwerfen.”, wo man zunächst nicht weiß, ob sich dieser Hinweis auf den vorangegangenen “Abschnitt 2.5.” oder auf eine - tatsächlich auf den nächsten Seiten auftauchende - “Tab. 2.5.” bezieht.) Alle diese kleinen Einwände schmälern nicht die bereits weiter oben erwähnten Vorzüge dieses Werks, das sicher einen Meilenstein in der Bild- und Sprach-Bild-Forschung darstellt. Stöckls Stärke liegt sicherlich nicht so sehr in der Schaffung völlig eigenständiger und originärer Theorien als in der kreativen Synthese bestehender Ansätze (obwohl in diesem Werk bestimmt viel mehr Persönliches enthalten ist als in früheren Arbeiten). Die Lektüre des Buchs erspart einem sozusagen die Lektüre vieler anderer Bücher und Artikel - auf Grund seiner umfassenden und auch, wie erwähnt, undogmatischen Ausrichtung -, und ist daher - im besten Sinn des Wortes - ein “Einführungsbuch” in die Gesamtproblematik. Darüber hinaus gibt es sowohl der KommunikationspraktikerIn als auch der TheoretikerIn (TextlinguistIn, SemiotikerIn, PhraseologIn, BildwissenschaftlerIn, MedienwissenschaftlerIn …) genügend Anstöße für weiterführende Überlegungen. Was soll und kann man sich denn noch mehr wünschen? Literatur Barthes, Roland (1964) : “Rhétorique de l´image”. In Communications 4, 1964, 40-51 (Auch in: Barthes, Roland [1982]: L’obvie et l’obtus. Paris: Seuil 1982, 25-42) Eco, Umberto (1987): Semiotik. Entwurf einer Theorie der Zeichen. München: Fink Scholz, Oliver R. (1991): Bild, Darstellung, Zeichen: philosophische Theorien bildhafter Darstellung. Freiburg: Alber Sperber, Dan / Wilson, Deirdre (1986): Relevance. Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell Spillner, Bernd (1982): “Stilanalyse semiotisch komplexer Texte. Zum Verhältnis von sprachlicher und bildlicher Information in Werbeanzeigen.” In: Kodikas/ Code 4/ 5 (1982) 1, 91-106 Stegu, Martin (1988): “Text und Bild im Wirtschaftsjournalismus (dargestellt anhand der österreichischen Tageszeitung Kurier).” In: Bungarten, Theo (Hg.): Sprache und Information in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Vorträge eines Internationalen Kongresses, zugleich der XI. Jahrestagung der Internationalen Vereinigung “Sprache und Wirtschaft”. Hamburg: Attikon 1988, 399-407 Stegu, Martin (1993): Texte, Bilder, Bildtexte. Möglichkeiten postmoderner Semiotik und Linguistik. Wien: (unveröffentlichte) Habilitationsschrift Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Stegu, Martin (2000): “Text oder Kontext: zur Rolle von Fotos in Tageszeitungen.” In: Fix, Ulla / Wellmann, Hans (Hrsg.): Bild im Text - Text und Bild. Heidelberg: Winter, 307-321 Stöckl, Hartmut (1992): Werbung in Wort und Bild. Textstil und Semiotik englischsprachiger Anzeigenwerbung. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Martin Stegu (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) Tarasti, Eero: Existential Semiotics. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press (= Advances in Semiotics) 2000, 218 pp, ISBN 0-253-21373-8. Is it possible to model “the dynamically changing, temporal, flowing world? ” (p. 3) Tarasti follows this question through the three sections of his new book entitled Existential Semiotics. In the first part, Philosophical Reflections, he circumscribes his new approach to semiotics. In the second part, he leads the reader through the Forest of Symbols by exploring the relationships between ethics and esthetics, arguing about the style of 20 th -century art, or dwelling over the question of authenticity of musical and culinary styles. In the third part, The Social and Cultural Fields of Signs, Tarasti leaves the ‘high’ arts and plunges into popula r cultur e a nd sociology: Postcolonialism, Walt Disney, and advertising are some of the themes he picks up. Tarasti’s methods seem to be known by anybody who has been tracking his career as the Reviews 345 leading figure of musical semiotics. But this publication is different. Tarasti claims to have abandoned structuralist analysis. Neither would he use the methods developed by Charles Sanders Peirce. Nor would he stick to theories of secondgeneration semiotics, poststructuralist or deconstructivist ones. Tarasti develops a rather amazing new approach. And this approach is called Existential Semiotics. It aims at renewing, or, more precisely, remodeling semiotics without giving up some valuable insights produced over the last thirty years. But Existential Semiotics digs deeper, or reaches higher. It draws its inspirations from existential philosophy, includes ideas of German idealism, and blends them with a variety of semiotic, sociological and other philosophical ideas (p. 18). What is the result? Tarasti discloses the theoretical foundation of Existential Semiotics in the first part of the book and explains what existential signs are, the object of investigation of this branch of semiotics. According to Tarasti, existential signs can only be created by a subject with a certain, call it existential, experience. Tarasti analyzes this experience with the help of a transcendental-existential reinterpretation of the Greimasian square. It can be described as a Hegelian-Kierkegaardian-Sartrean path through transcendental negations and affirmations, which, in fact, can be traveled by every one, for “every subject living in this world glimpses and strives for transcendence.” (p. 19) The path leads first into a Sartrean experience of emptiness - Negation. After negation, there is affirmation, and the traveler will meet the world soul, the universe as plenitude. This existential experience becomes for the subject the condition of possibility to transcend ordinary communication, to create existential signs: “When a subject for a second time returns to his/ her world of Dasein and creates signs, these are existential, in the sense that they reflect the subject’s journey through transcendence”. (p. 19; cf. pp. 76-83). Tarasti makes use of this quite amazing foundation of the creation of existential signs to categorize signs from a new, existential-semiotic perspective. This categorization tries to specify the different modes of signs in the process of creating existential signs. Existential Semiotics distinguish six species of signs: “pre-signs, signs in the process of becoming and shaping themselves; ” “transsigns, which are signs in transcendence; ” “actsigns, those signs actualized in the world of Dasein; ” “endoand exo-signs, which are signs in the dialectics of presence/ absence; ” “internal/ external signs; ” and “as-if-signs,” “signs that should be read as if they were true.” (p. 19). This categorization can be concretized by explaining in what state they emerge. When a subject feels a dissatisfaction with his existential, unstable and every changing world (p. 31), it strives for the transcendental (cf. above), searches its soul, and finds one of three possible transcendental ideas - either the True, the Good, or the Beautiful. These ideas will serve as pre-signs. They will be enacted in the act of creating something in an act-sign. And they will be interpreted in a post-sign (p. 33). Tarasti also analyzes re-enactments of signs in the framework of Existential Semiotics, and he tries to find out more about the special circumstances making a sign appear again. A sign can be detached from its original use, its Dasein no. 1, and travel through transcendence to Dasein no. 2; but this is only possible if the sending and receiving modalities are strong enough. Tarasti illustrates his idea by referring to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and its various phases of reception. In 1729, its Dasein no. 1, it was sent on its transcendental journey by strong sending modalities, pushing to its “surrounding infinity.” It was then attracted back to its Dasein no. 2 in 1829, when Mendelssohn put Bach’s masterpiece back on the map. Mendelssohn’s interpretation must have been so overwhelming as to send it into the transcendental sphere, again. It could resume its journey to Dasein no. 3 in 1989, when Nikolaus Harnoncourt called it back to the world by staging it authentically (pp. 25-26). According to Tarasti, signs rest in transcendental peace until an artist will re-enact them. The essays of the second part are dealing mainly with music and art; interesting is Tarasti’s analysis of 20 th -century-art. Tarasti is picking up two philosophical paradigms, structuralism and existentialism, and transforms them into two general esthetic categories: ‘the existential’ and ‘the structural’. He shows that in modernism, “the categories of structural/ existential appear in many variations and combinations.” (p. 102) Under the structural view he subsumes quite heterogeneous currents: cubism, surrealism, Dadaism. According to Tarasti, the structuralist style can be identified by its replacing the emotive function of commu- Reviews 346 nication in the arts with the poetic function, by its concentration on the form of a message instead of its content. It is characterized by subjectlessness, and the anti-humanistic idea of reducing the parole into a moment of langue. He even makes out a link between this conception of art and certain metaphysical doctrines. Logical positivism, e.g., would lead to a structuralist conception of art (pp. 102-105). The existential style is much harder to characterize. Tarasti compares it with femininity in the arts: It would be almost impossible to define an objective quality of a musical, literary, or visual artistic text or utterance. Such a property would exist only as a particular communicative situation, as a relationship between sender and receiver, in the act of enunciation and being enunciated, in the interaction of coding and decoding. (p. 107) But still, he gives the reader a definition: “the existential style represents subjects without structures”. Applied to literature, “the existential modus is the je, I.” Tarasti claims that paradigmatic for the existential style is, Bernano’s Le journée d’un curé à la campagne; in this story, “everything is seen through the eyes of an anguished Kierkegaardian subject.” (p. 108) But anguish and nothingness is not all existential style is about. As Tarasti already showed in his philosophical essays, after nothingness comes plenitude. So he can distinguish two existential styles in art: The negative one is anguished and rebellious, the affirmative one is “transfigured, blending together with the harmony of the spheres”: “This kind of sign ‘levitation’ is seen in Chagall’s paintings, in which things hover freely in the air. These signs then move into the universe of ‘plethora’ or ‘world soul,’ where they become laden or heavy, as it were, with the meanings of that place.” (p. 110) Tarasti writes in the third part of the book about sociological and pop-cultural sign processes. He even picks up the now trendy discourse of post-colonialism, this subdiscipline of the new humanities which investigates the traces colonialism left in art, literature, and the souls of the colonizer and colonialized. Postcolonial theory and Existential Semiotics are, according to Tarasti, closely connected. Postcolonial theory is aiming at a liberation from the dominant/ dominated relationship, and trying to conceptualize how the subaltern could speak (cf. Gayatri Spivak). Existential Semiotics emphasizes the situation of the individual. It accentuates the abilities of everyone to influence the signifying process, anyone who is able to create new existential signs to break free from the powers of the signified and so will create new meaning. Tarasti realizes that communication can be colonialized, but he also realizes that the subaltern can be given a voice, or even has he voice, because there are always ruptures from which the voice of the subaltern can break through. He insists that this voice should be encouraged to speak (p. 140). Ordinary postcolonial theorists might be stunned by this conclusion, but his analysis might shed new light on the question if an individual is really just spoken by discourse or has, in fact, a voice. Tarasti’s explanations, analyses and comments of sign processes in art and everyday life might seem amazing at first sight. He is not afraid of heavily speculative and heavily metaphysical thinking. But his approach becomes less surprising if it is compared to another semiotic thinker who tried to analyse the condition of the human self, its existential questions and its strive after meaning in an ever changing world. Like the German-American theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich who developed a theological-philosophical explanation for the questions of an individual living in a meaningless world, who referred to the unconditional underlying the questions about being, and who saw the unconditional revealing itself in symbols, Tarasti is trying to explain the appearance of plenitude in signs (cf., e.g., Tillich 1999). Unlike Tillich, he’s not referring to religion, and his aim is not so much to give hope to a frightened subject. But he still wants to show us that there can be more involved in sign processes than pure conventionality, maybe even something that is beyond the grasp of the Semiotician. Reference Tillich, Paul (1999): The essential Tillich . An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich. Ed. F. Forrester Church. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daniel H. Rellstab (Universität Bern)