“Déshabillon-les!”. The semiotician among the experts

Abstract

Drawing on the experience of ten years of expertise in the television world, we seek here to define the theoretical and operational location of the semiotician's intervention: he is both naive and competent, amateur and scholar, specialist and without qualities. The expertise is that of "decryption", which is carried out here in two different genres: on the one hand, the writing and recording of a weekly disc - "Denis decodes" - on a contemporary political event; on the other, regular participation in the program "Déshabillons-les" of the French political channel Public Senate, a program which analyzes the political world in the light of the human and social sciences. In this multi-disciplinary context, the semiotician focuses on the implementation of languages, in their various forms of expression. This specificity can be credited to its expertise, but also, as we will see, to its debit. The reflection therefore bears on the ambiguous situation of semiotics in the typology of expertise, and on the status of metalanguage within this practice.