Switching Semiotic Styles by Simon Smith

Switching Semiotic Styles by Simon Smith

This book argues that a reflexive awareness of our semiotic style, our grasp on the world as it rolls over, can be empowering when our normal ways of going on come unstuck, opening up choices that are more event shaping than we realise. Stylistic orientations enact metachoices: choices that set the criteria for subsequent ones, setting up a cascade of conditioned, but not wholly determined, choices.

Switching Semiotic Styles constitutes an appeal to broaden our usual repertoire of semiotic practice, channelling a common multimodal listening competence into a perspective interplay which changes the parameters of what can be known. Smith develops a research style constructively opposing the narrative and sonic turns in the social sciences, which he then uses to analyse three examples of communication from the Covid-19 pandemic: advice-giving by the WHO, legal disputes about public health restrictions and vaccine promotion videos. The work shows how individuals and societies arrange ongoingness oriented by both the motivational affordances of transformational goals and the modulating push of music-like patterns of becoming.

This book will appeal to scholars interested in semiotics, communication theory, sound studies, organisational communication, health communication, sociology of health and illness, and language in social interaction.

"Witty, daring, and profoundly original, Switching Semiotic Styles invites readers to rethink how metachoices are made in times of crisisIts modular chapters, each with a distinctive voice, compose a vibrant counterpoint where narratives and music intertwine, reorienting our understanding of communication, choice and style amid uncertainty."

- François Cooren, Professor in communication studies, Université de Montréal

"Simon Smith is the first English-speaking scholar I’ve ever met who understands French semiotics, its philosophical background and cultural potentialities. Switching Semiotic Styles should be read by any anglophone social scientist in search of intellectual renewal."

- Eric Landowski, Senior researcher in semiotics, CNRS Paris, editor-in-chief of Acta

"Switching Semiotic Styles proposes a theoretically innovative framework that integrates musical concepts into the analysis of multimodal media discourse. Smith's bold and imaginative approach provides a captivating investigation of temporality, musicality, textuality, and narrativity, revealing how subtle yet powerful phenomena that escape traditional discourse analysis resonate deeply in daily interactions."

- Petr Kaderka, Czech Language Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences

Simon Smith works at the Institute of Sociological Studies, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is also attached to the Systemic Risk Institute (https://www.syri.institute). His work straddles communication studies, semiotics and sociology.