E|C n. 44, 2025

The Ill-Mannered and the Art of Being Ill-Mannered

Edited by Alice Giannitrapani e Gianfranco Marrone (Università di Palermo)  

Bad manners are often lamented today, as though incivility were more pervasive than ever. We frequently find ourselves irritated by certain unbearable behaviors – on trains, at the dinner table, in the classroom, even in bed. Just as often, we hear critics, willingly or not, denouncing a decline in civility compared to times past. Once we spoke of the "civilization of the image"; now, it seems, we must contend with the "incivility of bad manners." But is this truly a contemporary phenomenon, easily blamed on the usual "new" communication technologies? And what, if anything, can the science of meaning offer to our understanding of it?
Manners, good or bad, involve evaluative judgments about behavior. Such judgments are not only aesthetic – assessing the appropriateness of an act – but also ethical, measuring its alignment with a shared or contested system of values (hence the distinction between "good" and "bad" manners). Incivility is therefore a political matter as much as an interpersonal one: it presupposes a recognized standard, a norm from which the ill-mannered individual deviates. Identifying with certain codes of conduct fosters a sense of belonging and collective identity; breaking away from them, conversely, can generate alternative ways of living, following the classic principle of internal conformity and external differentiation. The ill-mannered individual is, by definition, eccentric – a-normative in statistical terms, diverging from the behavior of the majority. They stand out, either by excess – speaking too loudly, dressing for an informal meeting as if attending a wedding, giving gifts so extravagant as to cause embarrassment – or by deficiency – whispering when clarity is needed, arriving at a wedding dressed for work, failing to offer thanks when courtesy demands it. Sometimes, the ill-mannered are unaware of their missteps and thus become objects of ridicule – or, in their spontaneous lack of self-consciousness, may even elicit empathy. Other times, incivility is deliberate: flouting conventions to assert oneself as an outsider, a rebellious nonconformist, or as a sign of emancipation from outdated moral standards. Public figures, particularly in popular culture, often cultivate their image through acts, clothing, or language that intentionally violate social norms.
This produces a varied landscape of roles associated with breaches of decorum: the cafone – the coarse individual unaware of the norms of civility; the parvenu – the new money whose ostentation betrays a lack of refinement; the social climber; desperate to seem "naturally" elegant but constantly at risk of exposing their insecurity. Such figures are defined through contrast: the wrong behavior stands out against the right one; outdated behavior against progressive; vulgarity against refinement.
Bad manners can thus arise from different causes – ignorance, deliberate provocation against the mainstream, or popular identity, where incivility is embraced and celebrated, as in certain criminal subcultures. From the perspective of others, responses to ill-mannered behavior can vary: at times judged aesthetically, at others ethically or politically. Interactions may shift accordingly: an act of deference might be met with rudeness, expressing disdain for a form of politeness seen as excessive or insincere; a vulgar gesture by a singer on stage might be read as an emblem of coolness.
Studying these dynamics around incivility can thus reveal the strategic rationalities underpinning individual and collective behaviors.
Ultimately, disputes over manners reflect deeper conflicts between value systems, showing that standards of politeness are always relative to time and place. What is considered polite in one culture or era may be deemed improper or even offensive in another: eating with one's hands, for instance; displays of gallantry, which today may risk being perceived as sexist; or the recent trend of "shoes-free" households.
Manners – good or bad – are always co-textual: shaped by the cultural reference, but also by the specific place and situation. In the 1990s, an advertising campaign in Italy – and similarly in France – famously proclaimed “It only happens at McDonald's”, legitimizing a momentary suspension of decorum, tolerated – and even encouraged – precisely because it was framed as spatially and temporally contained: a kind of cathartic carnival that, ultimately, reaffirmed the value of everyday civility. Similarly, prohibitions against singing at the table, wearing gemstones in the morning, or men wearing hats indoors illustrate how the rules of decorum are deeply context-dependent – mandatory in some settings, irrelevant in others.
This issue of E/C (No. 44) is dedicated to exploring these themes, offering manners as a crucial lens through which to understand social life.

Some of the possible lines of research to be explored are as follows:

- Pop culture, media figures, literary characters, and advertising narratives: from Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman to Mowgli in The Jungle Book, from the Blues Brothers to the recent Barilla commercial celebrating the "scarpetta" (sopping up sauce with bread), the media offers a wide range of portraits of the ill-mannered—as well as narratives of conversion, where the ill-mannered become well-mannered, and vice versa.
- Politicians: Whether carefully crafted public personas or unintentional breaches of protocol leading to potential diplomatic incidents – or even poorly worded posts by political movements – the contemporary public sphere appears increasingly shaped by the phenomenon of political incorrectness.
- Animals and children: Often likened to one another due to their proximity to a state of nature, both are seen as requiring "training" through pedagogical models that vary – and sometimes contradict one another: from strict discipline to permissiveness, from behaviorist approaches to Montessori-inspired ones, shifting notions of education inevitably reshape conceptions of ill-mannered behavior as well.
- Spaces of incivility – or spaces that encourage incivility: McDonald's, as previously mentioned, but also more generally any informal venue where behaviors normally deemed unacceptable are, at least ostensibly, tolerated (stadiums, nightclubs…), only to give rise to new forms of behavioral codification (the Isle of Wight Festival?). This also includes spatially specific forms of incivility: in theaters, gyms, beaches, and so on.
- Objects and accessories: From large crucifixes worn as jewelry, to chewing gum, sunglasses perched on one's head even at night, men wearing hats indoors, and, of course, smartphones used in cinemas or at the dinner table—how objects are used can reveal degrees of (mis)education. Certain objects or technologies, when first introduced, are themselves often marked as impolite or inappropriate (such as mobile phones in the late 1990s).
- Comparisons across time and space: Exploring how forms of incivility have transformed, persisted, or even developed paradoxical meanings across different historical and cultural contexts.
- Modes of expressing incivility: Analyzing the verbal, gestural, somatic, and acoustic registers through which inappropriate behavior is communicated.

Bibliographic References

Bassano, G., Lancioni, T., eds., 2024, "Scostumato. Considerazioni semiotiche sulle varianti del concetto di decoro”, Versus. Quaderni di studi semiotici, 2/2024.
Bertelli, S., Crifò, G., eds., 1985, Rituale, cerimoniale, etichetta, Milano, Bompiani.
Barthes, R., 1957, Mythologies, Paris, Seuil.
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1979, La distinction: critique sociale du jugement, Paris, Minuit.
Civ'jan, T.V., 1973, "The semiotics of human behaviour in fixed situations (beginning and end of the label situation)", J.M. Lotman et B.A. Uspenskij, Ricerche semiotiche : nuove tendenze delle scienze umane nell'URSS, Torino, Einaudi, pp. 64-86.
Dhoquois-Cohen, R., ed., 1991, La politesse, Parigi, Autrement.
Elias, N., 1969, Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation. I. Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den Weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes, Francfort, Suhrkamp; trad. it. La civiltà delle buone maniere. La trasformazione dei costumi nel mondo aristocratico occidentale, Bologna, Il Mulino.
Fabbri, P., 2021, Biglietti di invito, Milano, Bompiani.
Goffman, E., 1971, Modelli di interazione, Bologna, Il Mulino.
Goody, E.N., ed., 1978, Questions and politeness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Greimas, A.J., 1983, Du Sens II, Paris, Minuit.
Greimas, A.J., 1993, “Le beau geste”, RS/SI 13, pp. 21-35.
Hamon, Ph., 1984, Texte et idéologie, Paris, PUF.
Landowski, É., 2005, Les interactions risquées, Limoges, Pulim.
Lorusso, A.M., 2022, L’utilità del senso comune, Bologna, Il Mulino.
Lotman, J.M., 2006, "Il decabrista nella vita", Tesi per una semiotica delle culture, a cura di F. Sedda, Roma, Meltemi.
Marrone, G., 2021, "Aventures de la serviette. Pour une sémiotique des manières de table", Actes Sémiotiques, n. 124.
Marrone, G., ed., 2021, Formes de la commensalité : dispositifs rituels autour du manger, Actes Sémiotiques, n, 124.
Maresca, S., ed., 2024, La civiltà delle cattive maniere, Roma, Armando.
Montadon, A., ed., 1992, Etiquette et politesse, Clermont Ferrand, Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines.
Raynaud, Ph., 2013, La politesse des lumières, Paris, Gallimard.
Saccone, E., 1992, Le buone e le cattive maniere, Bologna, Il Mulino.
Turnaturi, G., 1988, Gente per bene, Milano, Sugarco.
Turnaturi, G., 2010, Signore e signori d'Italia. Una storia delle buone maniere, Milano, Feltrinelli.
Weil, S., 1983, Trésors de la politesse française, Paris, Belin.
Zilberberg, C., Fontanille, J., 1998, Tension et signification, Liège, Mardaga.

 

Deadline for submission of final essays: 20 August 2025

Publication: November 2025

Papers should have a maximum length of 40000 characters and may be submitted together with an abstract in English of a maximum of 1000 characters.

Send proposals to:

alice.giannitrapani@unipa.it
gianfranco.marrone@unipa.it

Download the Call for Papers 44 (.PDF)

 

E|C n. 45, 2025

In the Sign of Deleuze: For a Semiotics in Becoming 

 

edited by Giuditta Bassano (Università LUMSA, Roma), Federico Montanari (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia), and Tatsuma Padoan (University College Cork)

“The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed” (Deleuze, Guattari 1980, Eng. tr. p. 66). On the centenary of the birth of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), we would like to trace some of the philosophical paths and concepts through which we can rethink his dialogue with semiotics, casting light on specific problems and frontiers in the study of signification that emerged from his thought. During the last decades, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, mostly in collaboration with Félix Guattari, has had a relevant but uneven impact on semiotic research. On the one hand, many Deleuzian notions – like rhizome, agencement, machinic assemblage, deterritorialisation, mechanism, diagram, smooth and striated space, apparatus of capture, molar/molecular, order-words, refrain, etc. – have entered the vocabulary of semiotics, humanities and social sciences. On the other hand, semiotics and the other disciplines seem to have included these concepts in fragmentary, sometimes episodic ways, perhaps also a bit naively. This project intends to reopen a dialogue between semiotics and Deleuzian philosophy, not in order to overlap logically incommensurable theoretical systems, but to test the conditions of possibility for a semiotics in becoming – a semiotics that might be able to deal with the multiplicity and processuality of meaning, and with the possibility of mapping these phenomena. We propose to articulate this work along three thematic axes as outlined below. 

 

Concepts like collective assemblage of enunciation, multiplicity, apparatus of capture etc. have circulated widely in semiotics, as well as in social and philosophical sciences, although often only superficially used as fashionable jargon. In contrast to this tendency, we would like to evaluate and fully explore the scope of these ideas. The main aim of this first thematic axis, consisting of an experimental incorporation of Deleuzian concepts, is not about imposing a philosophical framework on a specific theory of signs, but rather exploring the relations between the two, including contiguities and possible lines of flight, in search of new forms of semiotic thinking. There is in fact another, perhaps less fashionable, series of linguistic notions and categories used by Deleuze that had also been incorporated and further developed within semiotic circles. Consider for example the tensive categories (the idea of intensity, extension, or tension). These certainly emerged from a semiotic epistemology starting with Hjelmslev and crossing through the work of Zilberberg, then Fontanille and others, including early theorisations by Paolo Fabbri. However, we suggest that the rich potential of tensive categories could come to its full realisation thanks to cross-fertilisation with Deleuzian thought. “Tensive” should not be considered as merely the name of a semantic category (intense-extensive), or a term related to a problem concerning the so-called “values of values” (valences). On the contrary, “tensive” incorporates the notion of intensity – as a qualitative transformation that may lead to ruptures – and a whole intrinsic dynamism. But we can also think about other concepts and categories that, as in the previous case, are of both semio-linguistic and philosophical origin: for instance, the notions of expression and stratification. Thanks to Deleuze and Guattari’s intervention, these two categories offer a rigorous intellectual framework through which semioticians could rethink the articulation of meaning, understood as a reciprocal presupposition and stratification of expression and content. Starting from the famous chapter of Mille Plateaux dedicated to the philosophical personage of “Professor Challenger” (a Spinozian version of Hjelmslev), Deleuze and Guattari in fact proposed a renewed Spinozian idea of expression, and a more dynamic understanding of the strata that constitute meaning, based on new concepts like territorialisation and refrain. 

 

The second thematic axis we would like to propose, consists of a critical engagement with some strands of new materialism, affect theory, and object-oriented ontology in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and STS. These fields draw on Deleuze’s work often overlooking its linguistic, discursive, and enunciative reflections (Massumi 1995, 2002; Ingold 2022), with the exception of a few authors that acknowledge instead its semiotic dimension (Newell 2018; Jensen, Rödje 2010; Viveiros de Castro 2009). In line with these latter scholars, we advocate for a semiotic rereading of Deleuze’s corpus – against attempts to neutralise its discursive dimension – by reinstating the centrality of language and regimes of signification as articulations immanent to matter and meaning. As already pointed out by more careful readers of Deleuze (Fabbri 1997; Montanari 2016; Viveiros de Castro 2010), in his works the French philosopher developed his own semiotic conceptual vocabulary, through an innovative reconfiguration of traditional semiotic categories, by recombining them with notions coming from fields as far as anthropology, natural sciences, comparative mythology, literature, and philosophy. Even just taking a look at the authors mentioned in Mille plateaux – a book that certainly marked a new turn within the work of Deleuze and Guattari – we may find a multitude of semioticians and linguists:  Benveniste, Saussure, Peirce, Ducrot, Greimas, Rastier, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, von Uexkull, Barthes, Guillaume, Martinet, Weinrich, Bachtin, Kristeva. Among them, as mentioned above, Hjelmslev plays a key role, but other important contributions for Deleuze’s ideas come from scholars close to Greimassian semiotics, such as mathematicians Thom, Petitot, and Rosenstiehl. Also, we have a multiplicity of original semiotic concepts developed by Deleuze, including a perceptual semiotics, a semiotics of corporeality, of faciality, a pictorial semiotics, a transsemiotics, a pre-/post-/counter-signifying semiotics, semiotic chains and semiotic machines, scalar signs, vectorial signs, affective signs, and many others. A serious discussion of what a “Deleuzian semiotics” might look like, and how such a wealth of concepts might help us reconsider the problem of production, circulation and transformation of meaning, is still to be undertaken. Therefore, while philosophers as Massumi or Braidotti look at Deleuze as a thinker who separates between affect and discursivity, materiality and langage (Massumi 1995; Dolphijn, van der Tuin 2012: 19-37), by reading Mille plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari’s substantial engagement with linguistic and semiotic theoretical concepts appears clear, starting precisely from the work of Hjelmslev. This second line of inquiry, regarding the reception of Deleuzian thought in other disciplines, thus leads us to critically engage with some of the “antisemiotic” (Newell 2018) readings of Deleuze. But it also invites us to rediscover a prolific ‘semiotic grove’ situated in most of his corpus, a real forest of semiotic ideas, certainly intricate, but articulated in precise ways. This special issue thus aims to pursue a more systematic reflection on the semiotic substratum of Deleuzian thinking, seriously engaging with some of the semiotic concepts developed by Deleuze e Guattari, so as to explore their possible translation and integration into the methodological paradigm of semiotics. 

Finally, we would like to address the relation between Paolo Fabbri (1939-2020) and Deleuzian thought. This avenue of inquiry certainly intersects with a biographical aspect, due to Fabbri’s friendship with Guattari, known as the “expert” of semiotics (Dosse 2007). Five years after Fabbri’s death, we might need to trace the homologies and extractions that made Deleuze one of the main pillars of his research. His reflections and work, in fact, lay on conceptual strategies akin to Deleuze, practising a rhizomatic form of knowledge, anti-systemic, oriented towards modulation rather than foundation. Fabbri was thus able to become, in Italy, an important interlocutor and effective advocate of Deleuzian thinking in semiotics (Fabbri 1997, 1998, 2015). But we also argue that Fabbri looked at the “Spinozian” dimension of Deleuze for the foundation of his own semiotic theory of passions. Moreover, the Italian semiotician drew on the idea of enunciative deformation – see Deleuze on Bacon (Deleuze [1981]2002) – to reconceptualise a radical immanence of the narrative notion of transformation. By retrieving the idea of “fold” (Deleuze 1988, p. 320; Fabbri 2015) – le pli – connecting it to Fabbri’s reinterpretation of Deleuze, we think we might get a better understanding of the multiple layers linking together semiotics and Deleuzian thinking. For these reasons, following this third axis, we invite the submission of contributions related to an archaeology of concepts. In this way, we aim at reconstructing the broader picture of this implicit ‘collaboration of thought’ between Fabbri and Deleuze, and rediscovering Hjelmslev’s idea of immanence into the works of both scholars in mutual comparison. Finally, we welcome papers that intend to take up and relaunch the most radical elements of the Deleuzian legacy in the study of signification, from a structural and generative perspective. We think this intellectual exploration needs to be undertaken, not only because Paolo Fabbri prefigured a possible Deleuzian future for semiotics, but also because he had already practised a Deleuzian variation of it in its becoming. 

 

We thus invite scholars to submit papers with analytical, methodological, or epistemological scope, following one of the three thematic axes related to: 

– a conceptual experimentation with the semiotics of Deleuze; 

– a critical engagement with its reception, together with a semiotic rereading of the Deleuzian corpus; 

– an archaeology and relaunch of the interconnections between Fabbri and Deleuze’s semiotic thinking. 

 

 

Main references 

 

Bassano, G., “Spiagge. Cinque discorsi tra sostanze e forme della soglia terra/mare”, E|C, n. 36, 2022a, pp. 19-35. 

Bassano, G., La balestra di Pierre, Museo Pasqualino, Palermo, 2022b. 

Basso Fossali, P., Vissuti di significazione, Edizioni ETS, Pisa, 2008. 

Caramelli, E., Poetiche del testo filosofico, Carocci, Rome, 2024. 

Deleuze, G., Logique du sens, Minuit, Paris, 1969. 

Deleuze, G., Critique et clinique, Minuit, Paris, 1993. 

Deleuze, G., Foucault, Minuit, Paris, 1996. 

Deleuze, G., Le Pli.: Leibniz et le Baroque, Minuit, Paris, 1988. 

Deleuze, G., Pourparler, Minuit, Paris, 1990. 

Deleuze, G., Francis Bacon, Logique de la sensation, Seuil, Paris, [1981]2002. 

Deleuze, G., Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, Minuit, Paris, [1981]2003. 

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, Minuit, Paris, 1975. 

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., Mille plateaux : Capitalisme et schizophrénie, tome 2, Minuit, Paris, 1980; Eng. tr. A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. 

Dolphijn, R., van der Tuin, I., New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor, 2012. 

Dosse, F., Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari. Biographie croisée, La Découverte, Paris, 2007. 

Fabbri, P., “Come Deleuze ci fa segno. Da Hjelsmlsev a Peirce”, in S. Vaccaro, ed., Il secolo deleuziano, Mimesis, Milan, 1997. 

Fabbri, P., “L’oscuro principe spinozista: Deleuze, Hjelsmlev, Bacon”, Discipline filosofiche, n. 1., 1998a. 

Fabbri, P., La svolta semiotica, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1998b. 

Fabbri, P., “Diagrammi in filosofia: Deleuze e la semiotica ‘pura’”, Carte semiotiche, n. 9, 2015. Now in Biglietti d’invito per una semiotica marcata, ed. by G. Marrone, Bompiani, 2021. 

Fabbri, P., “I monumenti sono ritornelli”, aut aut, n. 378, 2018. 

Fabbri, P., Marrone, G., “Un Cuore nel cuore. Analisi semiotica del Contributo alla critica di me stesso di Benedetto Croce” in Il testo filosofico. I: Analisi semiotica e ricognizione storiografica, ed. by G. Marrone, L’Epos, Palermo. 

Godani, P., Deleuze, Carocci, Rome, 2016. 

Gualandi, A., Deleuze, Perrin, Paris, 2009. 

Guattari, F., “Ritournelles et affects existentiels”, Versus, nn. 47-48, 1987. 

Ingold, T., Imagining for Real, Routledge, London, 2022. 

Ioffrida, M. et al., ed., Canone Deleuze, Clinamen, Firenze, 2008. 

Jensen, C., Rödje, K., eds., Deleuzian Intersections, Berghahn Books, Oxford, 2010. 

La Mantia, F., Seconda persona, Quodlibet, Macerata, 2020. 

Lancioni, T., “Apparati di cattura. Per una semiotica della cultura”, E/C, 2012. 

Latour, B., Reassembling the Social, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005. 

Marsciani, F., Ricerche semiotiche 1, Esculapio, Bologna, 2012. 

Massumi, B., “The Autonomy of Affect”, Cultural Critique, n. 31, 1995. 

Massumi, B., Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, Durham (NC), 2002. 

Migliore, T., “Diagrams: Images in the Form of Texts”, Metodo, vol. 9, n. 1, 2021. 

Milner, J. C., Le Périple structural, Seuil, Paris, 2002. 

Montanari, F., “Esprimere l’immanenza”, in S. Vaccaro, ed., Il secolo deleuziano, Mimesis, Milan, 1997. 

Montanari, F., “L’immanenza e l’affetto. Il problema della bioetica rivisto in senso spinoziano”, in Galofaro, F., ed., Etica della ricerca medica ed identità culturale europea, Clueb, Bologna, 2009. 

Montanari, F., “La lettura deleuziana di Peirce. Fra presunte distorsioni e nuove interpretazioni: per una teoria delle immagini”, SFL, 2014. 

Montanari, F., “Semiotics, Deleuze (& Guattari) and post-structuralism. Further opening questions?”, Versus, vol. 123, n. 2, 2016. 

Montanari, F., “Essere sensibile ai segni”. Conoscenza e verità nel Proust di Deleuze: ipotesi per un Proust spinozista?, E/C., n. 133, 2021. 

Newell, S., “The Affectiveness of Symbols: Materiality, Magicality, and the Limits of the Antisemiotic Turn”, Current Anthropology, vol. 59, n. 1, 2018. 

Padoan, T., “Recalcitrant Interactions: Semiotic Reflections on Fieldwork among Mountain Ascetics”. Acta Semiotica, vol. 1, n. 2, 2021. 

Padoan, T., “La Conchiglia di San Giacomo”, in D. Mangano, F. Sedda, eds., Simboli d’oggi, Meltemi, Milan, 2023. 

Padoan, T., “Ritual as Enunciative Praxis, Some Reflexions from Katsuragi”, in T. Padoan, C. Nakassis, eds., “Dialogues between Continental Semiotics and Linguistic Anthropology”, Semiotic Review, forthcoming. 

Paolucci, C., Persona, Bompiani, Milan, 2020. 

Ronchi, R., Gilles Deleuze, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2015. 

Spinoza, Etica, Bollati Boringhieri, 1992. 

Viveiros de Castro, E., Métaphysiques cannibales, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2009. 

Viveiros de Castro, E., “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance”, in C. Jensen, K. Rödje, eds., Deleuzian Intersections, Berghahn Books, Oxford, 2010. 

 

Deadline for submission of final essays: 30th September 2025

Publication: December 2025

 

Papers should have a maximum length of 40000 characters and may be submitted together with an abstract in English of a maximum of 1000 characters.

Send proposals to:

g.bassano@lumsa.it
federico.mont@gmail.com
tatsuma.padoan@ucc.ie

Download the Call for Papers 45 (.PDF)