Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • Consumer Culture and Naming the Animals, by Alan N. Shapiro

    In his famous essay “Myth Today,” published in 1957, Roland Barthes added a second dimension to the semiotic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, to the insight of the Swiss linguist that language is a social institution. Barthes added a social theory of culture to the social theory of language.

  • Garry Winogrand’s “Park Avenue, New York”

    In a 1959 black-and-white photograph by Garry Winogrand entitled Park Avenue, New York, our camera line of vision starts from an image-producing apparatus in the car behind or mounted on the back of a Chevy convertible with folding top down in the muggy summer.

  • The Klingon Language

    At the same time that many of the world’s languages are either out- right disappearing or imploding into deeper uncertainty and complexity, there is one new language which is currently experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the object of widespread fascination.

  • The Fate of Languages

    There are about six thousand living human languages spoken in the world today. Estimates by language catalogers of the number of existing languages vary by about 10%, since it depends upon how one defines what distinguishes a language from a dialect. The vast majority of Earth languages are in danger of imminent disappearance.

  • Richard Rorty on Radicalism, Liberalism, and Poetic Language

    I was very impressed reading something that Richard Rorty wrote about revolutionaries in his essay “The Contingency of Community” ( in the book “Contingency, irony, and solidarity”). Rorty argues very cogently for a kind of “impossible” deconstructive synthesis of radicalism and liberalism.

  • The Revolution will not be Televised, it will be led by Radical Software

    Laura Mitchell interviews Alan N. Shapiro Do you play video games? A little, not so much. There’s a blackjack machine that I play a lot, in an offtrack betting parlor where a bunch of semi-addicted male gamblers hang out. I never lose more than 5 Euros at a time, and sometimes I win.