Specialization, semiosis, semiotics: the 33rd annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America

The 33rd annual meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, ‘Specialization, semiosis, semiotics’, took place, this year, entirely in a hotel. The Renaissance Hotel, Houston is set on its own lot and, like Houston itself, is car-friendly but forbidding for pedestrians who might wish to gain access to any signs of life beyond its edifice. The 20th floor, where the proceedings took place, looks out across the endless suburbs of Houston and further, into the pancake flatness of Texas. Although the conference was this year run under the auspices of the University of St. Thomas, whose open, welcoming, campus was just a mile or so up the road, delegates found themselves thrown together for the duration, braving the sessions at the conference or the individually wrapped soaps in the air-conditioned atmosphere of their rooms. The disadvantage of having a conference in a hotel that I am pointing out here, of course, is that there is no escape. In that respect, the Renaissance was a bit like the Valtionhotelli in Imatra, Finland, where annual meetings of the ISI have forced conference — goers to either stay indoors and engage with each other or face a legion of mosquitoes and profound ennui. Like the Imatra meetings, however, this SSA conference made the disadvantage into a virtue and any perception of that disadvantage a lost figment of memory. It is a measure of the conference’s success that the main complaint I heard and, indeed, voiced myself, was that there was too little time and that the conference was too short.