E|C

Index

Editorial Board — 2024-10-14

Semiotics life. A vivre ensemble of a scientific collective

Michele Dentico — 2024-10-14

Participant Observation. On the Problem of Observables in Ethnosemiotics

Francesco Galofaro — 2024-10-14

Ethnosemiotics does not aim to write ethnographies using methods which were developed for different purposes, but to question the conditions of possibility of ethnographic practices from a semiotic point of view: participant observation is not a method; rather, it is a problem. In what way and within what limits does participation in a given practice allow the researcher to grasp the emerging effects of meaning? If the observed practice belongs to a culture unfamiliar to the observer, how can the discrepancies between the respective codes be overcome? To what extent do the interpretations provided by the Other with whom we interact help the observer’s understanding? When should the observer detach from them, to provide a structural explanation? These questions, recurring in ethnological literature, will be addressed starting from two case studies: participant observation of the Orthodox liturgy of the Little Vespers and of the Akathist in the Cathedral of Saint Mary Magdalene in Warsaw. The article proposes the notion of observable to account for the structure of constraints that the world imposes on the observers and the indeterminacy related to their observations.

Collective and Individuality in the Workplace. The Case of Tutta la vita davanti

Maria Doina Mareggini — 2024-10-14

This contribution aims to investigate the encounter and clash between the private and working lives of female characters in the film Tutta la vita davanti (Virzì, 2008). In the first 2000s-decade, Italian cinema brings to the big screen social phenomena such as overqualification of young recent graduates, precariousness and unemployment. Tutta la vita davanti, inspired by a real-life story, tells about a company in which employment is divided according to gender categories: the work task creates social subgroups that endows with specific sense effects such as the abandonment of individuality in the name of a gender homogeneity spread among offices through controversially purifying rituals. Thus, not only can we discuss processes of team working construction and conflicts between gender-segregated groups, but also the duality rupture-maintenance of one’s intra- and extra-work life.

The Anthropocene Effect. Controversies, collective identities, and some notes on the Turin-Lyon High-Speed Train

Carlo Andrea Tassinari — 2024-10-14

The hypothesis of entering the Anthropocene, a geological epoch shaped by human activity, has generated extensive literature on the “new place” of human collectives on Earth. From the metadescriptive perspective of semiotics, this debate suggests that the ecological crises should be reinterpreted as a crisis of forms of belonging. Here, we propose a preliminary analysis protocol for this reinterpretation. To illustrate this approach, we will examine the Turin-Lyon high-speed railroad controversy. We propose segmenting this case based on three analytical dimensions: the collective values driving the project’s supporters and opponents, the mereological recomposition of subjectivities and territories, and the cohabitation of heterogeneous semiotic regimes.

Models of Future Societies Between the Non-fiction of the Pandemic Years and Contemporary Science Fiction

Antonio Santangelo — 2024-10-14

Here, I report on two researches conducted between 2020 and 2023 with some colleagues from the University of Turin. The first was on the essays about the future of our own societies written in the years that just preceded the Cov-2 Sars pandemic and during the pandemic itself. The second, on behalf of ForwardTo, a think tank founded to build scenarios of the future, was on the contents of films and TV series in the science fiction genre produced from 2000 to the present day, in order to understand what types of societies they prefigured. What I discovered is that the narratives used by the authors of such factual and fictional texts are very similar, so that it seems that there is the same cultural model behind them. This leads me to assume that such cultural model plays an important role in enabling us to imagine the future of our life together. Hence, I try to describe its structural principles, recurring to the instrument of the semiotic mapping and using some examples taken from Haraway (2016), Fagan (2017), Berardi (2020), Giaccardi and Magatti (2020), Padoan (2020), Pozzi and Dusi (2021), Salvati and Dilmore (2021) and from Mad Max: Fury Road (USA, 2005) and Foundation (USA, 2021-ongoing). This allows me to show that the types of societies that are criticised or promoted in my corpus of analysis – the individualistic, tribal, responsible and inclusive ones – are inter-defined and that their meaning depends, at the same time, on the differences from the others and on the connections that they have with all of them. I also show that one of such societies, the inclusive one, which I define as complex, multi-perspective, responsible and based on the logics of the non-unlimited desire, is the most recurrent and appreciated, giving a hint of the kind of world that the authors of the texts I analysed would prefer to create in the future.

Fandom Practices, Collective Construction of Meaning, Identity and Forms of Spirituality: the Case of Jedism

Paolo Bertetti — 2024-10-14

Semiotics has always paid little attention to the phenomenon of Fandom. Yet, the different fandom activities are examples of highly significant collective construction of meaning, through which fans organize their personal identity, construct axiologies and can even give rise to new forms of spirituality, as in the case of Jediism, analysed here. Jediism is an “invented religion”: a real cult born within some fringes of the Star Wars fandom who aspire to follow the spiritual path of the Jedi Knights. In an apparently paradoxical form of belief, the different Jediist communities consider George Lucas’ creation – which syncretically mixes philosophical and spiritual materials, from Catholicism to Eastern religions – as a catalyst of pre-existing spiritual and philosophical traditions, from which it draws its value and its own significance.

Upcycling as a Collective Practice of Revalorisation

Camilla Robuschi — 2024-10-14

The aim of this paper is to read upcycling not only as a virtuous ecological practice, but also as a social and collective phenomenon. The focus is therefore not on the ecological implications of such practice, but on the ways it manifests itself as a cultural reorganization of value within a society. Indeed, upcycling, as the valorization of something that has exhausted or lost its value (waste), enables the reintroduction of re-valued waste into a new life cycle as a useful object and thus the creation of continuity between the old and the new, the past and the future. Specifically, upcycling is analyzed as a process that has to do with the attribution – or denial – of value to objects in the context of complex and articulated social networks. Similarities between the process of upcycling and that of bricolage are also highlighted, emphasizing its creative aspect.

Covid-19, Between Coexistence and Convenience. Managing Meaning and Articulating the Pandemic Landscape

Flavio Valerio Alessi — 2024-10-14

The Covid-19 emergency has represented an emblematic case of the articulation of that expanding collective which is society, whose dynamics and modalities took shape following the advent of an actant capable of disrupting systemic equilibria: SARS-CoV-2. This paper offers some semiotic considerations regarding the management of knowledge during the pandemic in Italy, focusing on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and the public communication provided by scientific experts. By examining an episode that exemplifies the complex logics governing the articulation of the pandemic landscape, we will consider the epistemic-management uncertainty that characterized the pandemic as an emergent condition arising from the web of relationships among the domains involved in understanding and controlling the health emergency.

Semantic Variations and Communicative Ambiguities During the COVID-19 Pandemic. An Empirical Investigation

Giorgio Lo Feudo — 2024-10-14

Semiotics and other sciences related to communication are called into question by the Covid-19 pandemic to understand and interpret the individual and collective changes brought about by it in the aforementioned areas. The pandemic has made some social relationships problematic, underlining, if not distorting, their characteristics and conformations. This work of repair and recovery cannot fail to start from language which, as we well know, can outline interpretative contexts capable of cognitively and operationally orienting individuals. In fact, there are some terms that have accompanied the narrative of the pandemic and which have undergone a clear semantic repositioning. Just think of the word “war” and the expression “social distancing”. But that is not all. Alongside the terminological issue, on which we will focus much of our reflection, there is also another consideration to make: the attenuation if not the loss, for reasons due to the fear of contagion, of the local dimension, of proximity and its practices of face-to-face interaction to which, as we well know, has been added a strong increase in remote communication. The forced isolation that we all experienced in 2020, combined with the explosion of online work, has attenuated if not eliminated communication methods based on proxemics and kinesics from our daily habits. This article intends to take stock of the aforementioned semantic variations and the risk of dialogic impoverishment that the loss of physical contact can cause in interpersonal communication.

Furry Children. Similarities and Differences in Baby and Pet Food Advertising

Beatrice Vanacore — 2024-10-14

In recent years, the relationship between humans and pets has undergone a significant transformation, approaching parity with that between parents and children. This transformation can be understood in the context of animist ontology, as outlined by Descola (2005). The phenomenon under discussion is the “complex articulation of social and affective relations that generates an unprecedented form of kinship, a kinship in which the animal also has its own roles, depending on the subject with which it enters into a parental relationship” (Marrone 2024, p. 187). This shift is evident, at least in part, in the discourse of pet food advertising. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comparative analysis of a corpus of Italian and foreign commercials aimed at child and pet food sponsorship. The aim is to trace the transformation of the human-animal relationship over time.

Deepfake or True Love? False Love between Reality and Game Shows

Francesco Piluso — 2024-10-14

Falso Amor is a Spanish reality/game show in which five couples, divided into two separate villages, weekly watch three videos depicting their partner's behavior. These videos serve to test the truth of their love, threatened by the presence of attractive singles who tempt the participants. The novelty of the format lies in the fact that some of the videos shown may be altered using deepfake technology. The contestants, unable to judge the truth of their love, are instead asked to judge the authenticity of the videos. This contribution aims to highlight how, in response to the strategic void caused by the deepfake variable, the participants are required to implement a gameplay tactic rooted in what we have defined as a common “form of life”, in which deepfake videos could be understood as interfaces: means or even actors of ethic communication and connection far beyond their mere referential function and ideal moral value.

Of Mirrors, Masks and Concentric Worlds. A Semiotic Analysis of Narratives of bullying and Cyberbullying for Teenagers

Jenny Ponzo — 2024-10-14

This article focuses on the discourses and narratives about bullying and cyberbullying, in particular on the literature proposed to young people to explain and evaluate these phenomena and thus to guide their actions. The study of a representative sample of texts published in Italy (a country where public opinion and institutions seem to pay particular attention to these phenomena) reveals recurring narrative structures and figures (masks, mirrors, isolation and concentricity, martyrdom and redemption). These figures are analyzed through the lens of relevant semiotic concepts and theories, such as Foucault’s on the mirror, Bakhtin’s on the mask, Eco’s on possible worlds, and Lotman’s on the semiosphere. In particular, the analysis shows how the narratives of bullying and cyberbullying tend to present a kind of closed and self-referential bubble, isolated from the wider semiosphere and functioning similarly to a deforming mirror or a dysphoric possible world in which the actors involved seem to be trapped.

Cerami, the Home of the Confraternities: Types of Communitas, Passionate Paths and Festive Customs

Maurilio Ginex — 2024-10-14

Cerami is a town of the Nebrodi chain in Sicily and represents the country of the brotherhoods, as every aspect of its festive calendar revolves around the roles that the latter play. A brotherhood is a clear example of ritual communitas and to enter into it a rite of passage takes place. The brotherhoods are opposed during the profane time but in a sacred time, therefore during the religious holidays, they collaborate.

Turbulences in the Walls. Discipline and Save

Tiziana Migliore — 2024-10-14

This article reflects on the state of health of collectives, i.e. on the question ‘when one feels good or bad in a collective?’, which underlies the question ‘how to live (or not live) in a collective with whom?’. A first theoretical part, dedicated to observing the crisis of certain fixed and morally accepted social ensembles within which to stay, is followed by a theoretical, methodological and analytical part, which explores attempts at ‘union’ capable of breaking these rules and finding oneself with those who, according to political power and the law, one should not. A corpus of anonymous writings and artistic interventions on prison and territorial walls scouts the physical and semantic ways of uniting despite prohibitions.

Eating Together. The Table as a Convivial Device

Alice Giannitrapani — 2024-10-14

If it is not necessarily the case that sharing the table (being diners) necessarily means sharing social relationships, it is also true that one of the ways of consolidating interpersonal ties is to confirm them around a table. This centre of aggregation continually rearranges itself, revealing itself sometimes as a centripetal pivot around which predefined groups converge, and sometimes as a centrifugal point, a support from which to draw and then move away in search of relationships that take place in the immediate surroundings (and which therefore make the encompassing space pertinent as a place of sociality), until it disappears in its materiality but not in its function (as when one eats on a sofa, on a desk, in a car or on a bench in the street). The table works thanks to a plurality of dimensions both internal to it (shape, size, materials of which it is composed) and external (mise en place, actors who sit at it, types of food that complete it, spaces that arise around it), which prefigure relationships and ways of being together. From those that are hyper-codified and disciplined by ceremonial and etiquette to those that are more informal and yet no less regulated by practices and habits. The paper aims to identify some characteristics of this complex device in relation to the convivial dynamics associated with it.

Household Hygiene Idiorhythmias

Giorgia Costanzo — 2024-10-14

How does the sense of dirty and clean change as the sociality of the home changes? What kind of dirt do pets and children produce? What processes of discoursivisation are involved? How is it narrated and what value is invested in it? In the name of hygiene, we create strict household rules that try to bring order: the dog is not allowed in the bed, we mustn't enter the house with our shoes on, children are not allowed to eat on the floor, but they can lie on the sofa where the cat is not supposed to sleep. Hygiene is not just a contemporary obsession, but an ongoing superficial work that underlies deep values and mechanisms that regulate human and non-human relationships. Cleaning is one of the forms of expression that shape a social content: being together. The comparative analysis of the advertising of domestic cleaning products will allow us to examine how contemporary society organises cohabitation and sociality through the management of cleaning practices.

On the Sofa. Forms of Being Together

Elisa Sanzeri — 2024-10-14

This essay offers a socio-semiotic analysis of the sofa’s transformations over time, aiming to identify the various forms of sociality it suggests and prefigures. The sofa is first examined in relation to domestic space and the transformations that take place within it. Given the key role of vision in shaping intersubjective spatiality, the arrangement of gazes generated by the sofa’s placement within the domestic setting is reconstructed. This analysis enables the identification of various formal structures of intersubjective spatiality and different configurations of the sofa. The next phase of the analysis considers the sofa as a space that contains bodies in relation to each other. It highlights how the sofa, depending on certain transformations in its shape, anticipates different ways of sitting and, consequently, different modes of relating to others. By analyzing the sensible qualities of the object, the various functions of the sofa are revealed, along with the different images of the body – both individual and relational – that it implies.

The Double Bedroom of the Out-of-town Student. Idiorhythmias of a Shared Space?

Valentina Gandini — 2024-10-14

The following article aims to analyse the spatial configuration of the bedroom of out-of-town individuals, particularly a shared bedroom within an apartment rented to young adults, in relation to a bedroom shared by two siblings. The purpose will be to highlight isotopies but above all differences in how different individuals, linked by different relationships, experience a space that is configured similarly. The fundamental question to be addressed will focus on whether or not it is possible to speak of idiorhythmia, in Barthesian terms, within an environment such as the bedroom and in a dual relationship, both situations where Barthes does not conceive the concept of idiorhythmia but which, when revisited today as places of mediation between two often unknown figures such as two roommates sharing the same bedroom, could find conformity. To do this, we will analyze spaces, practices, but also passions that arise in this place, keeping in mind the type of contract established between different subjectivities and what values are at stake.

New Domestic Communities. For a Semiotic Analysis of the Movie The Spanish Apartment

Maria Giulia Franco — 2024-10-14

My proposal is to semiotically analyze the logics regarding the formation of a collective actor, a living community, formed starting from the sharing of the same action programme, the adhesion to a new experience of coexistence in a new house. The space and its re-semantization will in fact be the main recipient in establishing a renewed form of life, in which each individuality will recognize itself relationally.
I will address this question through the semiotic study of a film: L’appartamento spagnolo. One story of coexistence that act as effective text in bringing out the process of establishing a community; investigating the redefinition of meanings regarding the semantic categories of public/private, individual/collective or even intimate/foreign. I will thus explore the role of new policy of cohabitation, prerequisite for a form of living together. The final result will lead to the creation of a new collective, in a new dimension in which space and subjects define each other mutually.

Spaces of Collective Creation. The House-Museums of Giacomo Balla and Lina Bo Bardi

Marc Barreto Bogo — 2024-10-14

This work investigates two historic house museums dedicated to multidisciplinary creators: Casa Balla, Giacomo Balla’s residence in Rome, and the Glass House, Lina Bo Bardi’s home in São Paulo. Both individuals integrated their creative studios into their domestic spaces, sharing them with other enthusiasts of creativity and art. In both locations, two dimensions intertwine: living and creating, resting and working, family space and social space. Our research explores how these museums’ spatial configurations embody the distinct creative visions of their former inhabitants. Methodologically, we have identified various plastic and spatial oppositions, as well as esthesic and rhythmic categories, that constitute the sensitive organization of the exhibition spaces. While the spatiality of Casa Balla reflects a mode of creation that is characteristic of an aesthetics of experimentation, the Glass House embodies a way of creating characteristic of a rational-functionalist aesthetic.

Edusemiotics of Spaces. Interpretive Practices for Digital Competences: the case of Salaborsa Lab

Giacomo Vincenzi — 2024-10-14

In this article, I propose an analysis of the relationship between human subjects and physical environment during a robotics workshop for 10-year-old students held in a public library in Bologna. The aim is to underline the positive impact that space can have on the process of meaning-making. First, I describe the space and introduce the need for a contextual analysis referring to the semiotics of practices. Then, I present in detail the robotics workshop observed. In the third paragraph, I describe how space intervenes in the actions that characterize the development of competence. The fourth paragraph highlights the spatial features of Salaborsa Lab, both from a morphological and an interpretative point of view. Finally, what has been found is summarized from a sociosemiotic perspective.

Comment vivre ensemble Inside a Prison Ridden with Irreconcilable Contradictions

Filippo Silvestri — 2024-10-14

Prison is not a happy Babel because the many languages spoken within its walls do not blend and translate into a shared dimension of common life. Each individual confined in prison lives their own life, coming from a unique history that is different from that of their fellow inmates. There is no utopian project that can restore a carceral space to a possible redemption or conversion. Prison is the realm of the submerged and of the few ones who may one day save themselves. This essay’s analysis of the prison institution combines architectural and semiotic perspectives to demonstrate that within prison, there is no possible idiorrhythmia for those compelled to inhabit cells not meant for monks, although these cells, in certain respects, resemble those of a convent. The carceral space molds the lives of its inhabitants through paths, corridors, room, cells that operate like a mechanism that does not turn, but rather rotates around a central Panopticon axis, which is like a beacon illuminating all, yet shedding light on none.

Being and Doing Together Online: from Memes to Challenges

Gabriele Marino — 2024-10-14

The article provides a concise overview of Internet memes as prominent sociosemiotic phenomena, highlighting their importance for cultural dynamics in the last two decades. The text then focuses on some fundamental characteristics in relation to their nature as collective and serial practices, both from an aesthetic standpoint and in terms of the logic that drives them and their evolution through various Internet paradigms. Hence, the text discusses memes as ugliness, beauty, momentum, fragmentation, comparison, retrieval and agonism (with specific reference to Internet challenges from YouTube to TikTok).

Semiotics, AI, Advertising. Open Questions and Perspectives

Marianna Boero — 2024-10-14

The increasing spread of generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) technologies in advertising is significantly changing how we approach tasks, objectives, and projects, as well as how we work, communicate, and ultimately live together. This shift opens new avenues for research from a semiotic perspective, particularly regarding the relationship dynamics between the human and non-human world. The emergence of Gen-AI in advertising text production necessitates a reconsideration of classic definitions such as attribution, generativity, authorship models, text, and enunciation. Moreover, it requires an exploration of the characteristics and analytical possibilities of new emerging textual forms and narratives, with profound implications for semiotic theory. This contribution aims to delve deeper into these dimensions. Firstly, it proposes a reflection on the theoretical aspects of leveraging AI within advertising for semiotics. Secondly, it aims to classify and describe AI-driven advertising narratives, highlighting how these narratives contribute to the cultural construction of a world where intersubjective interaction and consumption models are increasingly shaped by the proliferation of new technologies.

How to Create Together. AI-generated Images and Possible Intersections between Human and Artificial

Valentina Manchia — 2024-10-14

For some time now, artificial intelligence has been reappearing in media storytelling with its own agency. Good examples are AI art generators such as Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which are capable of generating original images from text inputs: while some see these technologies as new prostheses for the human creative process, others see the danger of generative images undermining creativity itself, with painters, photographers and illustrators eventually being replaced by new machine subjects.
In addition to reflecting on the nature of creativity, both human and synthetic, a topic on which the debate is still open, it seems interesting to us to look more closely at the different relationships between human and non-human subjects that these new devices enable, along with new forms of intersubjectivity and interobjectivity, as well as idiorrhythm as “mise en commun des distances” (Barthes).
A privileged vantage point for exploring the possible intersections between human and non-human, and between “native” creativity and artificial generativity, is that of contemporary artistic experimentation, already aware of the pervasiveness of digital tools in image-making and increasingly interested in measuring itself against AI. Starting from an overview of media and artistic projects deal with generative technologies in various ways, this contribution aims to analyse AI image-generating devices in terms of the meaning effects they produce and the different regimes of the visible they imply, through the multiple balances between human and artificial they reveal.

Writing the Encyclopaedia. Skills and Negotiating Meaning in Digital Communities

Paolo Martinelli — 2024-10-14

The open policies of participatory culture in the digital information society periodically foster new forms of collective knowledge construction, from which new communities of practice emerge, constituting the primary subject of this analysis. A precise epistemological attitude has distinguished each of these digital communities, exemplified by the creation of large collaborative tools. Consider Wikipedia, fueled by the laborious sense-making of human intelligence, whose accuracy is ensured by a minimum level of regulatory interaction. In a more recent and opposite case, a different epistemological attitude has inaugurated modes of production inaccessible to human cognition, characterized by data scraping and the construction of universal knowledge. This is what Fabbri called “quantophrenia,” a power system that decrees by edict that meaning can be accessed through the laws of large numbers (large language models), bypassing human syntactic capability through self-proclaimed generative artificial intelligence.
The aim of the analysis we propose is therefore to shed light on the epistemological work of digital communities, particularly on the objectification of the encyclopedia, a regulatory hypothesis that takes shape in the set of skills necessary for its members to function within the community.

The Value of Digital Design Ethics in Maintaining Semiotic Visual Message Authority of Signs in an AI Landscape

Cavell Ord-Shrimpton — 2024-10-14

Design encompasses every system from reading to the internet, from wayfinding to a plan or a drawing, to the look and function of a building, a garden, or a citrus squeezer, all processes require a design system to be explicitly defined. The concept of design thinking has formed naturally alongside many complex practices and systems and the rise in digital platforms has expedited the dissemination of design practice. In these rapidly changing times, the inclusion of modern artistic design thinking and practice needs transparent codification for the expert and the layperson.
This study aims to shine light on the global disparity between the design practice of digital novice designers and message disseminators and their professional designer counterparts. The value of a universal digital design ethic to maintain semiotic visual message authority (the prescription of authenticity of the message and meaning by the originating author) has been investigated previously but not in the context of the digital space, including future AI developments, and has not been fully elucidated, or fully supported, and has never been more necessary.
Data was gathered through an observation of perception of digital visual artefacts incorporating a generative AI portrait gallery, reminiscent of National Portrait Gallery portraits and photographic series, where demographic identities were left unassigned, participants were invited to answer a series of questions alluding to semiotic visual message authority. Findings display the ad hoc nature of human perception as it relates to AI portrait recognition to date.

Social Acceptance and Generative AI Brands. The Case of OpenAI

Giorgia Adamo — 2024-10-14

The delicate relationship between humans and non-humans is being challenged by the unstoppable entry of generative platforms in the market, able to deeply transform the meaning of creative production and elicit divided reactions from society. Drawing upon a sociosemiotic approach in dialogue with Bruno Latour, this contribution wants to analyze the discursive strategies deployed by the brand OpenAI to mitigate consumers’ anxieties in adopting these devices, reflecting the intricate and problematic relationship between society and non-humans in today’s world. As a final step of the work, an analysis of user comments was conducted with the aim of evaluating to what extent the brand was able, through its narratives, to effectively communicate a harmonious coexistence between humans and non-humans.

Hologram Interactions and Deadbots. Hydiorhythmia and Digital Technologies

Margaux Cerutti — 2024-10-14

The article explores possible convergences between the technological imaginary and current reality, investigating the phenomenon of digital resurrection through the analysis of new technologies such as interactive holograms and deadbots. Starting from the concept of idiorhythmia introduced by Roland Barthes in his lectures at the Collège de France, it reflects on the future of living with these technologies and on a possible right balance between solitary digital life and collective life through the analysis of some significant case studies.

Conflicting, confusing and cohabiting with digital otherness in dystopian hybrid collectives

Massimo Roberto Beato — 2024-10-14

In this contribution one shall investigate how, in the contemporary audiovisual scenario, a few dystopian narratives describe the forms of collective living and hybrid worlds inhabited by human beings and cyborg artificial intelligences. Since our bodies qualify the subjectivity of which we can be protagonists, the aim is to understand whether a singularity of the human condition, as opposed to the machine, survives in these dystopian collectives, and whether it is (still) tied to the organic bodily dimension.
The case studies will focus on some examples in which dystopian proposals for hybrid forms of collectives are put forward: the film The Matrix (1999), the tv series Altered Carbon (2018, 2020), the film I, Robot (2004).
Finally, one shall illustrate how the human condition reveals always and for most a “gap” with respect to the machine, a “defect” – be it empathy, creativity or improvisation – an incalculable variable that one might define in terms of excess and still relate, to some extent, to the bodily dimension.

AI and technology. Use as an Actualisation of Cultural Models and Semiotic Systems

Giuseppe Gabriele Rocca — 2024-10-14

This essay examines the ways in which specific visions of artificial intelligence and technology influence the manner in which AI is de facto used and developed. In order to achieve this, the essay examines the theoretical foundations of the semiotic concepts of cultural models and systems of values. It then employs these concepts to analyse texts in which artificial intelligence and technology are framed and discussed. The concept of use is identified as a central theme in these reflections, as it is made clear that AI is a technology that can be used and developed in certain ways rather than others. The analysis ultimately leads to general conclusions regarding the topics addressed in the essay.

Hydiorhythmia. Tracing the circle

Giulia Ceriani — 2024-10-14

We propose a reflection about the value driven by the concept of idiorhythmy, and on how it questions both the notion of difference and that of uniqueness: we try to probe the paradox of a rejected sociality yet incorporated into its contradictions, where the rhythmic structure itself regenerates the modes of identification and adhesion. More specifically, we deal with the reversal and regeneration of the criteria of “happy” sociality, challenging the conventional folds of meaning. In this sense, idiorhythmy becomes a sort of provocative paradigm of the contemporary and its media dialectics, poised between the solitude of the substitute relationship (via deepfake, avatar, prosthesis or more simply abandonment to remote dialogue/performance) and the need of an audience that configures the recipient as a present/absent figure. It is the theme of the “right” distance, of the circle that asks us to identify the limit, and of the mobile thresholds of the limit itself.

Taking Risks at the Table. From Regime to Valence

Ilaria Ventura Bordenca — 2024-10-14

The essay presented here discusses the semiotic problems about collective cohabitations by addressing a specific issue, that of dietary cohabitations, in particular the way in which restrictive dietary regimes and convivial situations, dietary regulatory principles and the social need to be together. The assumption is that dietary regimes and convivial situations are two different forms of being at the table, two configurations that presuppose different values at play: physical self-care, measure, on the one hand, and pleasure, play, on the other. In both cases, there are systems of rules. The question is how to fit them together by making them compatible. To understand this, we will analyse the communication of slimming diets through the different forms of textuality they usually rely on: in addition to advertisements, websites and blogs, nowadays various protocols make extensive use of social media and smartphone apps.

Socio-aesthetic Engagement between Assemblies and Assemblages

Antonino Bondì — 2024-10-14

In this paper, we aim to address the issue of living together by focusing on two notions of engagement and social assemblage. Engagement describes an important phase in the tension between experience and value construction and sheds light on the ways in which agentivity, identity, and semiotic forms co-emerge. Starting from a pragmatist value formation theory, an ecological niche construction theory, and a material engagement theory, the article aims to show that engagement consists of a movement of perceptual and dialogical attention, oscillating between the pole of “active involvement” and the pole of “decision to participate”. In this sense, it offers a range of participatory options to social actors. We will then show that starting from this result, some forms of social assembly can be observed based on a specific mode of engagement: the assembly. To put our model to the test, we have traced an assembly-type collective formation in the field of “aesthetic communities”. Finally, we will discuss by analyzing the artistic experiment Lumbung, presented at Documenta 15 in 2022 by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa, whose goal is the formation of communities in terms of assembling heterogeneity and engagement, which modulates the modal continuum of individuals’ participation in collectives.

Inertia and Mass. Configurations of the Collective Actant in the Work of Isaac Cordal

Valentina Carrubba — 2024-10-14

This contribution aims to investigate the work of Isaac Cordal, a street artist, sculptor, photographer and video-maker engaged on various thematic fields: from climate change to Euro-parliamentarianism, from education to finance, from biodiversity to palm oil, his work, in a more general framework, is an epochal reflection on the human condition.
The artist’s installations, implemented in urban and exhibition contexts, are displayed under the regime of miniaturization. Sculptures of men about six inches tall, bald and ugly middle-aged, are mass-produced and placed in spaces that, in the change of scale, become the terrain of a scene of contemporary wandering. Mostly in suits and ties, with a more or less leading part of system functionaries, these little men stand together, like insects, in the blind movement of the cluster. Isolated even in groups, without past or future, busy or motionless, we find them immersed in debris or up to their necks in water, in an act that seems to anticipate the epilogue.
In the river-form of Cordal’s work, we face the mass, as a collective actant, and the drama of the most impersonal of enunciations is revealed. The various expressive solutions lead us to reason about different aspects describing forms of the collective: from organisation to the mediation of devices, from the identity of individual actors to the configuration of a shared world, from mereology to narrative horizons. What is on stage, everywhere, is a humanity adrift, as a being-together on the verge of extinction, towards the totally extrinsic and inertial disintegration of the individual. Our analysis turns to the poetic elaboration of this limit case of the collective actant, in consideration of the entire corpus of installations attested in the artist’s official website. Just as in the illness, rather than in the state of health, we become aware of the functioning of an organism, so it is in the crisis of the collective that Cordal shows us the dynamics of its functioning. In his art, on the other hand, there is no catharsis, and what we observe has the appearance of a demonstration, by absurdity, of the forgotten chorus of human comedy.

Communitarian Solitude. Some Reflections on the Writings of Michel Houellebecq

Luigi Lobaccaro — 2024-10-14

This article investigates the concept of living together through the writings of one of the modern bard of loneliness: Michel Houellebecq. The article starts presenting the contemporary social changes related to communities’ fragmentation and re-organization around a collective or mass loneliness. It then argues that Houellebecq’s literature navigates this state of loneliness, both by providing its faithful representation and by attempting its literary solutions. It will be shown that such attempts are impossible and continuously frustrated within the narratives. The true victory over loneliness is achieved through contact with the reader via forms of passive activism and negative empathy, which modulate the readers through a compassionate clash with the protagonists. In conclusion, it will be shown how Houellebecq’s literature acquires a social status capable of reassembling collective loneliness by sharing it. The collective loneliness could become in Houellebecq novels a communal solitude through what Barthes called the sharing of distances.

Common Immunity. Roberto Esposito in Dialogue with Jacques Derrida and Peter Sloterdijk

Salvatore Spina — 2024-10-14

In this paper I will analyze the relationship between immunity and community in the contemporary philosophy. The aim of my work is to show how immunity and community are two faces of a same coin; they express the way through which it is possible to understand the form of the common living in the society.
The first part of my paper analyzes the works of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito and examines in depth the concepts of communitas and immunitas; they are the names through which Esposito elaborates his biopolitics, beyond Michel Foucault’s thought.
The second part proposes a confrontation between Esposito’s philosophy and the works of Jacques Derrida and Peter Sloterdijk. The most important concept, that emerges from their thoughts despite many differences, is co-immunity.

On the Usefulness and Harmfulness of Mathematics for the Understanding of Machinic Semiosis

Flavia Politi — 2024-10-14

In what follows, the role of mathematics in the understanding the semiosis of intelligent machines will be explored. For this purpose, the necessity of overcoming the dual paradigm that divides hard sciences and humanities will be stressed. The focus will then address the internal tension within the mathematical domain between “perverse uses” and strategies to cope reality. Two orders of consequences derive from this: the first encompasses the discourse on the competencies of those who do not adequately manage the literacies implicated in the coexistence of human and non-human actors within digital communities; the second strictly involves the expert competencies and the plural positions across these discoursive formations. In conclusion, an invitation to consider the effects of etherorythmics is presented.

The Estrangement of Personhood as Guidance for the Community

Gabriele Giampieri — 2024-10-14

By comparing analyses from developmental psychology and anthropology studies is possible to detect how cultural interpretations of the infants’ intentions and skills radically influence the modes of attunement by which caregivers co-regulate their interactions with them. In turn, the different modes of attunement expressed in different cultural communities defer and transfer a particular idea of personhood. The following study intends to bring out the high pedagogical degree of cross-cultural analysis of the concept of person, how the resulting estrangement allows for the suspension of the identity relationship between person and selfhood, a necessary preamble to a collective and trans-individual revolution.
The paper highlights how comparative methodology can enlighten a community regarding the structural incompleteness of any interpretation of personhood and guide its future pedagogies by overcoming the identity-alterity dichotomy.

Towards a socialism of distances? Idiorhythmias and Social Planning between Rossi-Landi and Barthes

Giorgio Borrelli — 2024-10-14

In this article, I will propose a dialogue between Ferruccio Rossi-Landi and Roland Barthes. Focusing on the relationship between the individual and society, the Barthesian concept of “diet” – understood as a “life regime” – will be analyzed considering Rossi-Landi’s concept of “programme” – understood as “organized semiosis”. This parallel will be further developed through a comparison between Barthes’ concept of “rhythm” – understood as moving form – and Rossi-Landi’s concept of “social reproduction” – i.e., the developing form of any society.
In his course Comment vivre ensemble (1977-1978), Barthes proposed considering Idiorhythmy as the basis for a utopian socialism of distance. Building on this idea, I will try to read Idiorhythmy as a social form based on a disinterested relationship with the other, i.e., as a social form based on Rossi-Landi’s concept of “excess” [eccedenza], which is the human capacity to transcend social programming by creating new forms of semiosis.

The Art of Exhibiting. Artistic Ensembles and the Generativity of Meaning

Mirco Vannoni — 2024-10-14

Since at least the 16th century, every art collection is not only the outcome of processes of undifferentiated accumulation of objects but presupposes operations of selection and montage of images belonging to different times and genres. As a discourse, every artistic ensemble – every ansambl’ – is in fact the result of a massing of heterogeneous elements according to the conditions of taste of a given era. An example of this is the cabinet d’amateur where the intertextual relationships between artworks reveal the conditions of existence and meaning of these cultural collections, immersing viewers in their experience. This contribution focuses on the Condé Museum in Chantilly, the second largest collection of old paintings in France after the Louvre. Starting from the short-circuit between the private space of the collection of works of Henri d’Orléans, Duke of Aumale, and the public dimension of the museum, the aim is to show the shift between the modalities of displaying the artworks as a discourse through images and, on the other hand, the modalities of enunciation of the museum discourse as a discourse on the collection.

Decolonial Culture between Passions, Rituals and Absolutions. An Investigation into the Cognitive Landscape of the Tropenmuseum

Martina Grinello — 2024-10-14

Decolonial culture has a clear semiotic personality, whose identity is evident in the recurrence of themes, narrative tropes and semiotic operations. Analysing a section of the exhibition “Our Colonial Inheritance” on display at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, key aspects of decolonial culture will be highlighted. With a semiotic gaze, I propose a reflection on decolonial culture in a morphogenetic, typological, topological and narrative sense, emphasising the heuristic value of thinking of the decolonial museum text as a “cognitive-passionate landscape”. Decolonial landscapes evoke the need to reorganise the structural coupling that binds us to our world-environment. These are landscapes of guilt, shame and responsibility in relation to situations of social marginalisation and exploitation, which, by pathemically modelling the visitor, offer him the possibility of ritual redemption from the guilt preliminarily denounced.

Perspectives on a Materialist Ecosemiotics. Coexisting with Other Life and Non-life Forms

Nicola Zengiaro — 2024-10-14

The article introduces the field of ecosemiotics, outlining its genealogy and perspectives in relation to ecology, biosemiotics, and cultural semiotics. The paper is structured into three sections: the first section examines the evolution of ecology towards a qualitative and complex investigation of ecosystems and environmental relationships, highlighting the efficacy of semiotic methodology in analyzing ecosystems and the living systems that shape them. The second section provides a brief genealogy of ecosemiotics, distinguishing it from, and drawing parallels with, biosemiotics and cultural semiotics. The third section presents a critique of contemporary ecosemiotics, proposing a materialist approach to analyze the role of both living and non-living entities in the formation of complex ecosystems. The aim of this article is to bring the ecosemiotic debate into the Italian context while demonstrating the value of this perspective in addressing the challenges posed by the current climate and ecological crisis. It seeks to reinterpret non-human semiosis to foster coexistence in increasingly complex environments shaped by the ongoing crisis of the Anthropocene.

Language and Sexism. “Neutral” Communication and Sexism in the Workplace

Alberto Grandi — 2024-10-14

Gender studies has produced various analyses around issues such as social “roles,” coexistence and power relations; seeing language as a central aspect, especially since the development of performativity theory produced by philosopher Judith Butler. In this paper, so, I would like to focus on the existing relationship between language and gender relations, particularly in the workplace; pointing out how some possibilities and structures are dense with unequal and sexist modalities. The analysis will consist of a first theoretical section, in which the specific relationship between the gendered “male” subject and language will be emphasized, and a second in which these considerations will be portrayed in the corporate context. The purpose is to show how specific aspects of masculinity have generated specific power relations, delineating, and defining stereotypes and categorizing views. Attributes that have then flowed into the different social dynamics of our society, establishing different job roles and possibilities. To give more profundity, I adopted a methodology that fuses the logical-linguistic theoretical perspective, to the analysis of empirical data collected through interviews, questionnaires, and training meetings at two partner companies.

Mediating: the margins of the collective

Giuditta Bassano — 2024-10-14

The Malaise

Jacques Fontanille — 2024-10-14

Roland Barthes, Sistema della moda, edited by Bianca Terracciano

Paolo Sorrentino — 2024-10-14

James Clifford, Ritorni. Diventare indigeni nel XXI secolo

Claudia Urzì — 2024-10-14

Lucia Corrain, Una infinita memoria

Anna Varalli — 2024-10-14

Paolo Fabbri, Proposte di adozione, edited by Gianfranco Marrone

Elisa Sanzeri — 2024-10-14

Dario Mangano, Franciscu Sedda, edited by, Simboli d’oggi. Critica dell’inflazione semiotica

Carla Fissardi — 2024-10-14

Gianfranco Marrone, Nel semiocene. Enciclopedia incompleta delle vite terrestri

Beatrice Vanacore — 2024-10-14

Gianfranco Marrone, Tiziana Migliore, edited by, Cura del senso e critica sociale. Ricognizione della semiotica italiana

Giorgia Adamo — 2024-10-14

Andrea Pinotti, Nonumento

Mirco Vannoni — 2024-10-14