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This article has been published in: Ocula 15, Commemorating Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914): Interpretive Semiotics and Mass Media

author: María de los Angeles Montes (Conicet Argentina (AR))

Tango, senses and sensuality

language: english

abstract: One of the most important contributions of the Peircean paradigm to semiotics consists in its opening the sign to development and modification. Sense, meaning, is no longer a static and fixed property. The Peircean paradigm allows us to wonder about how signs are interpreted, how they make sense in actual reception practices.
The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of the relationship between appropriation practices (Montes, 2011) and significance processes from the analysis of an empirical case, observing how signs of sensuality are produced in the ballroom tango dance.
Tango has earned international reputation mainly as a sensuality dance thanks to its spectacularization and subsequent mediatization. However, as I expect to demonstrate, at the moment of reception, people put those discourses in interaction with specific appropriation practices that shape very special interpretive habits.
I will address the issue from an empirical investigation, especially focused on the production of interpretants (emotional, energetic, and logical), that is to say, looking back to the sign reception from the body to the mind.
From a corpus of 25 focused interviews with people who got to know tango through mass media but that afterwards learnt to dance it as a social dance, it is my intention to show what sensuality means to them today, and how that current practice interacts with other external and previous discourses to produce interpretive habits. Finally, I wish to offer a theoretical reflection about the relationship between these three types of interpretants, their interaction with the discourse of the mass media and the place corporality has in the reception processes.

citation information: María de los Angeles Montes, Tango, senses and sensuality, "Ocula", vol.15, n.15, November 2014. DOI: 10.12977/ocula36

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