Embodiment in the Semiotic Matrix

Reviews / Votes

Communication is talked about everywhere, yet it is seldom understood anywhere. Rather than the name of technology, communication is a human experience. Embodiment in the Semiotic Matrix gives us a cutting-edge, factual account of what human communication is, how it is taught and learned, why it is not a main category in the Library of Congress, and when we should be conscious of speaking to others. Culture and Consciousness are the horizon we step over with this must read book! -- Richard L. Lanigan, Laureate Fellow & Director, International Communicology Institute, Washington, DC, Fellow, Polish Academy of Science (Philology), and Senior Fulbright Fellow (China, Canada) Isaac Catt's book is a singularly impressive examination of the cultural framework of human expressive conduct-elucidating points of intersection between theorists that all too many people have comfortably stereotyped as working within their own limited fields (such as Harry Stack Sullivan, Edward Sapir, and Roman Jakobson) or expansive thinkers whose insights were previously thought to have had only limited impact on the development of the human sciences. He puts together a narrative of the human sciences that, chapter by chapter, has simply not been told before. Catt grounds his approach in a highly original conjunction of themes from Cassirer, Peirce, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Bateson, and Bourdieu. It is a masterful compendium of key concepts in the human sciences, and it is the most comprehensive book of theory in the field of human communication that has been written in a very long time. -- Frank J. Macke, Professor of Semiotics, Rhetoric and Communication Theory, Mercer University, Author of <i>The Experience of Human Communication: Body, Flesh, and Relationship</i> Isaac E. Catt thoughtfully and eloquently debunks a message-centered view of communication, emphasizing a semiotic phenomenology attentive to code constraints and perceptual embodiment. Catt emphasizes the contextual and experiential nature of communication that dwells in a signifying world between ineffability and intelligibility. Semiotic phenomenology interrogates consciousness of experience, yielding human meaning. Unlike information and messages, communication resides within embodied ambiguity, resistant to fixation of certainty. Semiotic phenomenology uncovers thought and action synthesized within communicative thought and action. Catt outlines the origin and implications of communicology responsive to semiotic phenomenology, which pursues and interrogates meaning that resides within the social world of practices. Communicology understands communication as central to a lifeworld receptive to the interplay of existential reality and imagination. Embodiment in the Semiotic Matrix is a masterful contribution to communication theory. -- Ronald C. Arnett, Chair and Professor, Duquesne University, The Patricia Doherty Yoder and Ronald Wolfe, Endowed Chair in Communication Ethics, and Author of <i>Levinas's Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics</i>