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Introduction 1 the Structuralist Perspective Notes Introduction 1 . In this regard, about action-network theory and distributed cognition, see Latour, 2005; Hutchins, 1995 and 2001; Fusaroli, Granelli, and Paolucci, 2011. 1 The Structuralist Perspective 1 . The Prague School was founded by several major Russian and Czech lin- guists and was active between 1926 and 1939. The most important figure was the Russian prince Nicolaj Trubetzkoy, who was joined, among oth- ers, by linguist Roman Jakobson, the literary critic Rene Wellek and the aesthetician Jan Mukarovsky. Linguists of other nationalities also collabo- rated with the Prague School, such as Martinet, from France. After presenting their thesis to the Congress of Slavists in Prague (1929), the Prague School were active throughout Europe and published the Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague . The School’s most signifi- cant work was Fundamentals of Phonology , which Trubetzkoy finished in 1938. The activities of the Prague Linguistic Circle (as the School was also known) ceased after Trubetzkoy’s death in 1938 and the outbreak of World War II. The School developed the concept of function in language, with language defined as “a system of means of expression adequate for a partic- ular purpose.” Notably, it does not adopt the category of “function” taken by the Copenhagen linguistic circle (which also includes another key figure in semiotics, Louis Hjelmslev), which is derived from mathematics. Given that the language is not substance but form, it is specified within a network of functions (understood in the mathematical sense as devices that connect one or more logical objects), which indicate the relationship between the linguistic elements, both when they are alternative (aut-aut functions ) and when they are present together in the chain (et-et functions). 2 . “Glocal” (a word created by sociologist Roland Robertson in 1995; see Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, 1995) refers to the “condition” in the contemporary world in which globalization coexists with localization, in a series of experiences in which the space–time limits (particularly those 194 ● Notes dealing with space) are no longer a constraint, thus making these expe- riences repeatable and translatable in countless other new “elsewheres.” Identities are therefore so deeply immersed in a cultural environment in which forms hailing from the past and from faraway places coexist (see, e.g., the so-called ethnic shops in many Italian cities, which bring objects from faraway places into our daily life), as they are readapted to local requirements. On this issue see also Sedda, 2008 and 2010. 3 . Saussure (who is arguably Barthes’s main reference point) would prefer to speak in terms of semiology, but, as we have already said in the introduc- tion, we consider it quite useless to distinguish between /semiotics/ and / semiology/, as nowadays there is (and it is our aim to strengthen) a unique semiotic paradigm. 4 . The phases that Irvine and Gal (2000) indicate as basis of the ideological process (iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure) are, e.g., very close to the semiotic approach. 5 . Barthes started discussing connotation in his reflection on ideology in Myth, Today (Barthes, 1957a); he then thoroughly analyzed the same cat- egory from a theoretical point of view in Elements of Semiology (1964a), and through the individual case of the advertisement of Panzani pasta in “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964b). He then returned to the subject using a systematic approach in The Fashion System (1967). 6 . “Textualist” here indicates the last stage of Barthes’s work in which he was less interested in the “scientific” (i.e., linguistic-semiologic) analysis of the contemporary society, and instead focused on writing, plurality of sense, and, finally, autobiographical tales. I personally do not agree with the idea that there is a clear-cut separation in the different stages of Barthes’s work, however, he himself, at the very beginning of Semiotic Challenge (Barthes, 1985) identifies three moments of his work: the moment of wonder , which spanned Writing Degree Zero to Myth, Today , and whose topic is discourse; the subsequent stage, science , from 1957 to 1963 (including fashion stud- ies) focused on the research of a systematic understanding of society, lin- guistic in nature; and last, the moment of text , spanning his “Introduction à l’analyse structurale” to S/Z , in which Barthes reflects on the significant practices and the structuring of sense, rather than structures, and on the activity of writing rather than its analysis. 7 . The Empirics code is that which identifies proairetisms , that is, behavior. The Person code is the one that identifies the semes, with which the players of a text are represented. The Science code identifies the cultural citations of a science or a wisdom; the Truth code identifies the hermeneuticisms , or rather, “the terms through which an enigma is centred, positioned, formu- lated, suspended and then solved” and, last, the Symbol code deals most directly with plurivalence and reversibility of terms (see Barthes, 1970a). 8 . For more on this, please see Voloshinov, 1973 9 . Here we use “interpretant” in the way intended by Peirce; i.e., any sign (verbal, visual, behavioral) that interprets and speaks about other signs. Notes ● 195 The interpretant is not, therefore, a person or an interpreter, but a semiotic entity. We will return to this in chapter 3 . 10 . Deferral is what Derrida associates with the idea of trace and grammar . Every deferral leaves traces of its operation, building an archistructure, a genealogy of meaning, and is such that any spoken discourse compared to it is merely a secondary repetition. However, we do not wish to review Derrida’s grammatology theory in its entirety here (though almost all of this chapter is based on Of Grammatology ); rather, we are interested in developing a comparison between Derrida’s approach and the semiotic approach to themes and categories found in both fields. 11 . On this point, see also Culler, 1982, Chapter 5. 12 . Eco (1990) proposes a distinction between intentio operis, intentio aucto- ris , and intentio lectoris . While intentio auctoris and lectoris indicate two empirical properties ( intentio auctoris being the intention of the empirical author, as such, not necessarily realized in the text, with the intentio lecto- ris expressing the will of the reader’s interpretation, which does not always respect the text), the intentio operis is the intention of the text, its intrinsic property, the strategy constructed by the text, which requires a range of skills in order to be correctly interpreted. 1 3 . A s e x p l a i n e d a b o v e , t h e t e x t Glas (a word whose French pronunciation is homophonous with glace ) is built like a mirror (glace , in French). 14 . We are referring here to Greimas’s actantial model (see Greimas, 1966). 15 . For a short but good description in English of the narrative theory of Greimas, see Luis H é bert, “The Canonical Narrative Schema,” available online at http://www.signosemio.com/greimas/canonical-narrative-schema.asp . 16 . We believe that this idea of “attestation” is in close proximity to Silverstein’s concept of “entextualization,” as we will see in chapter 4 . 17 . Here the legacy of Saussure and of his concept of meaning based on differ- ence is particularly apparent. 18 . The first two will hereafter be indicated by the acronyms HRW and MSF respectively. 19 . In the case of the MSF website (at the moment I am writing, April 2015), there are no photoblogs or visual essays, as in the HRW or Unicef websites. Thus the reader is free to build his/her own path, following eventually (as we did) a thematic thread. 2 0 . h t t p : / / w w w . h r w . o r g / f e a t u r e s / b u r m a - u n t o l d - m i s e r i e s . 21 . http://www.unicef.org/photography/photo_essays_all.php?pid=2AM 4082OMTP4 . 22. I got these words in italics from the section “Photoblog,” available on the MSF website until the end of 2014. 2 Unity and Pluralism: The Theory of Jurij Lotman 1 . For a overview of Lotman’s work in English, see Kull, 2011. 196 ● Notes 2 . By “Jakobson model” I mean a theory based on the idea that, in com- munication, the point is the passage of information (as a small “pack- age” of content) from a sender to a receiver. In this process, Jakobson distinguishes six functions: referential (related to context), aesthetic/ poetic (related to the language itself), emotive (related to the self- expression of the sender), conative (related to the addressing of receiver), phatic (related to the channel working) and metalingistic (related to the code). Jakobson’s view is that in each act of communication one of these functions is dominant, defining a “prevalent” genre of text (poetic, metatextual, etc.). Jakobson’s theory of communicative functions was first published in “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics” (Sebeok, 1960, pp. 350–377). 3 . D e S a u s s u r e ’ s Course in General Linguistics (1916) contains sections on both synchronic and diachronic linguistics. However, the theory of sign and its value, on which semiotics is based, are included solely in the syn- chronic section. 4 . We have been unable to find an English translation of this essay and the other two from this anthology that we will refer to over the following pages. 5. A. Greimas and J. Fontanille in 1991 wrote a book whose title was The Semiotics of Passions. From States of Affairs to States of Feelings , where they read the problem of perception, sensibility, feeling, and culturalization of passions from a semiotic perspective.
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