John Law notes that — by the early 1990s — Latour’s approach contained the entirety of the principles of actor-network theory: attention to heterogeneous relations, use of semiotic tools, adherence to symmetry in describing the truth or false statements, performativity of practices, focus on circulations, predisposition to case studies. Expanding the list of approaches and tools used in the ANT, Law turns to material semiotics. He aspires to show it as a set of themes that stimulate the researcher’s sensitivity to the problem of polysemanticity in a particular field. At the same time, his version of material semiotics implicitly contains a critique of the of Greimas’ semiotics developed by Latour. Law’s vision describes practices of producing multiple realities, maintaining uncertainties and the polysemantic. In contrast, Latour’s semiotics are more instrumental, showing how particular actors eliminate multiplicity by creating common rules. The article shows that the contradiction between Latour’s semiotics and Law’s material semiotics is related to the question of tracing the networks’ length created by heterogenous actors. However, this question is empirical. The article explores a particular case of interaction from the practices of a center for the development and socialization of children and adults with mental disabilities. It is shown that the problem of polysemanticity and uncertainties has two solutions: limiting the network through a “shifting in” of the “enunciator” and maintaining polysemanticity through “partial connections”.

The article is devoted to the problem of relevance in post-actor network theory. In the context of the turn to the material in sociological theory, one of the key tasks is to determine the relevance of non-humans in social interactions or in broader social processes. This article critically examines various solutions to the problem of relevance in actor-network theory. Latourian solution focuses on the disciplinary power of objects and leaves out other types of object agency. We demonstrate that the re-conceptualization of the object in post-actor-network theory (Law, Mol, Singleton) opens up new aspects of the relevance problem. Although researchers manage to solve the so-called problem of network isolationism, a new problem arises related to the identification of object boundaries. Since post-actor network theory conceptualizes the object as multiple and enacted in practices, the question of relevance of the material object shifts to the question of relevant practices in which different versions of the object are enacted. Within the framework of post-ANT, a topological model of object enactments has been developed — researchers show that an object can exist in region, network, fluid and fire space. As a consequence, the key task of the analyst becomes the identification of the multiple spaces within which the object is enacted. However, the topological model used by post-ANT researchers focuses only on the spaces of the object, leaving out the temporal dimension of enactments. In this paper, we problematize the status of fluid and fire spaces and suggest that they should be considered as temporal rather than spatial concepts. We conclude by outlining prospects for developing a temporal conceptualization of multiple objects.

Based on self-reports of people with magnet implants, I investigate a pair of correlational questions: “How do technologically modified humans signify their new experience?” and “How do we, non-modified readers, become able to conceive it?”. In answering the first question I start with biosemiotics. It considers signs being embedded in the morphology of an organism. On the one side, a magnet becomes a part of a human morphology and bodily schema; on the other — unlike most living organisms, humans can vary signs arbitrarily. I switch the theoretical exposition of the relation between signs, the human body, and technology to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, based on whose work Ihde conducted a phenomenological analysis of 4 regimes of technological mediations within the “I — World” correlation. His scheme was extended by Verbeek, who adds “cyborg relation” to the list. In the second part of the paper, I apply a vocabulary of material semiotics to the analysis of the “I/magnet” association. I separate quotes of MI-agents into several stages of existence of the association in question: emergence; interactions with constant magnets; interactions with electromagnetic devices; learning through others; actual non-expected associations; sense-formation; new risks of disruption of associations; normalization. I conclude with an attempt to answer 2nd initial question, about our (readers) conceivability by appealing to Barsalou’s “perceptual symbol systems” approach, with the help of which I correlate synesthesia of MI-agents and semiosis — which transforms the field of meaning for a non-modified person.

The paper considers some intellectual roots of the contemporary multimodal analysis. The prehistory of microanalysis of social interaction includes semiotics of nonverbal communication and the anthropological study of patterns of expressive and communicative behavior as it was performed by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the pioneering research on Balinese character. The Batesonian approach to interaction was influenced by cybernetic ideas—particularly the notion of feedback— which led to theoretical advances on communication in general and, particularly, in the study of family interaction in a psychiatric perspective. The interdisciplinary research project that became known as “The Natural History of an Interview” was the first example of a broad interdisciplinary collaboration involving anthropologists, linguists and psychiatrists. It has brought about a detailed analysis of a filmed interaction that correlated data about talk, paralanguage, and body language (kinesics). The results of this project, as well as of the other attempts at kinesic microanalysis, allowed one to question the goals of research and the adequacy of research methods employed. However, the input from kinesics and, broader, semiotics of non-verbal communication was instrumental for including data about participants’ attention traced as gaze-direction into analysis of talk-in-interaction, as it was put in practice by Charles Goodwin.

This article critically examines sociology’s anthropocentricity and its current limitations in research on nonhuman beings, using animal communication and interspecies interaction as examples. The paper demonstrates, drawing on several key theoretical strands, how the focus of traditional sociology on human sociality can be extended to include nonhuman beings. To understand the state of such sociology, the notion of anthropomorphocentrism is introduced as an explanation of the field’s current position, reflecting a desire to go beyond the study of humans, but a reluctance to explore non-human entities without human-like attributes. The author describes existing limitations, proposes methodological steps, and explicates the epistemological and ontological features to be considered when including animals as objects of study in sociology. It is proposed, following the example of convergence analysis as a rigorous empirical method, to replace the transfer of existing human taxonomies with the creation of new taxonomies based on data on each interaction, be it between humans and animals, between animals of the same species or between species. The author thus stresses the need for an empirical approach to research on species and interspecies taxonomies. The article concludes that a move away from anthropocentrism and anthropomorphocentrism towards an expansive study of living creature communication is necessary to generate valid data, formulate conclusions, and construct theories in sociology. However, in making this move, one must be mindful of the limitations of borrowed human concepts and mechanisms in interpreting non-human interactions, which also impinge on the process and outcome of non-human interaction research.

Within the semiotic approach to explaining human behavior, individual actions can be understood as signs expressing senses of other actions. Such an understanding makes it possible to combine the description of actions in the individual and systemic societal perspective. The individual sense of an action refers to a finite number of other actions given to a person both in consciousness and in bodily experience as a whole. Social senses link actions into a single chain and are extracted from the senses of previous actions. This model, while generally correct, is too abstract and requires a more detailed explanation of exactly how senses are extracted. The suggested possible explanation is that actions are mediated by situations in accordance with the formula of K. Lewin: the actual form of behavior is a function of the situation, understood as a set of properties of the acting person and her circumstances. The idea being expressed in the form of rules, according to which a typical form of behavior is performed by a person with a typical social status, being in a typical psychophysiological state and typical circumstances, gets a variant of the so-called “grammar of behavior”, explicating innate predispositions and implicit rules of culture. The question of how to understand the forms of behavior and situations typical for a particular culture can be solved on the basis of the biosemantics of R.G. Millikan. They can be understood as natural conventions — such that two conditions are sufficient for their existence: that they reproduce, and that this reproduction be based on the weight of precedents. Conventional language constructs are understood in biosemantics as lineages of tokens that were copied from each other and copies of which were used for repeated solutions to the same problem. They may have appeared by accident, but they survive and proliferate due to the performance of a vital function. At the same time, it is not at all necessary that the absolute majority of people conform to these conventions, just as the conventions do not have to be explicit prescriptions. Ideas about what forms of behavior are most appropriate in a given situation cannot be the same for different people, but this does not prevent the proliferation of conventional behavior.