A Semiotic Profile: Augusto
Ponzio
Portrait of the Semiotician and Philosopher of Language
on the Occasion of his 40th year of teaching
By Susan Petrilli
Augusto Ponzio is a pivotal figure in semiotics
and philosophy of language which he has shown to be closely
interconnected, indeed inseparable. The expression "philosophy
of language" conveys the scope and orientation of his research
as he addresses problems of semiotics from the perspective of
philosophy of language, updated with references to the latest
developments in the sign sciences, from linguistics to biosemiotics.
As such his approach may be more properly described as pertaining
to general semiotics. Nonetheless, Ponzio practices general
semiotics in terms of critique and the search for foundations,
which derives from his work in philosophy of language. As critique
of semiotics Ponzio's general semiotics overcomes the delusory
separation between the humanities, on the one hand, and the
logico-mathematical and the natural sciences, on the other.
His semiotic research relates to different disciplines proposing
an approach that is transversal and interdisciplinary, or better,
as he prefers to say, an approach that is 'undisciplined'. Moreover,
general semiotics as conceived by Ponzio against such a background
continues its philosophical search for sense. This perspective
evidences the interconnectedness of the sciences. And most significantly
the problem of their sense for the human being is also addressed.
Augusto Ponzio was born on February 17, 1942. He is Full Professor
of Philosophy of Language and member of the Department of Linguistic
Practices and Text Analysis, at Bari University, Italy. His
principal research areas include philosophy of language, general
linguistics, semiotics, and theory of literature. At Bari University
Ponzio has been teaching Theoretical and Moral Philosophy since
1966, Philosophy of Language since 1970, he has also taught
Semiotics from 1995 to 1997, Text Semiotics from 1997 to 2001,
Communication Theory from 1995 to 1998, and now since 1998 in
addition to Philosophy of Language he teaches courses in General
Linguistics and Semiotics of mass media. From 1981 to 1999 Ponzio
directed the Institute of Philosophy of Language, which he founded
at the Faculty of Foreign Literature and Languages, in 1981.
From 1999 to 2005 he acted as Head of the Department of Linguistic
Practices and Text Analysis, which he founded in 1999. Also,
he directs the Doctoral Program in Language Theory and Sign
Sciences, which he inaugurated in 1988. With Claude Gandelman
(University of Haifa), in 1989 he founded the annual book series
Athanor. Arte, Letteratura, Semiotica, Filosofia of which now
he directs the new series inaugurated with Meltemi publishers
in Rome, in 1998. Athanor: this Arabic word evokes the alchemist
in the laboratory mixing and transforming the elements.
In addition to Italian publishers such as Bompiani (Milan),
La Nuova Italia (Florence), Laterza (Bari-Rome), publishers
who have presented Ponzio's works (in various languages) include
Mouton De Gruyter (Berlin), John Benjamins (Amsterdam), l'Harmattan
(Paris), Catedra and Corazon (Madrid), Toronto University Press,
Nueva Vision (Buenos Aires), Editions Balzac (Candiac, Canada),
Skolska Kniga (Zagabria), Legas (Ottawa), and Icon Books (London)
(cf. Augusto Ponzio 2002, bibliografia e letture critiche, Edizioni
dal Sud, Bari).
Ponzio also has made a significant contribution as editor and
translator to the dissemination of the ideas of Levinas, Bakhtin
and Adam Schaff in Italy and abroad. He has also authored the
first monographs ever at a world level on each of these thinkers:
respectively, La relazione interpersonale, 1967, dedicated to
Levinas, Michail Bachtin. Alle origini della semiotica sovietica,
1980, and Persona umana, linguaggio e conoscenza in Adam Schaff,
1977. Each of these monographs has been reworked over the years
and presented in new enlarged editions, such as the recent volume,
Individuo umano, linguaggio e globalizzazione nella filosofia
di Adam Schaff, 2002, which includes an interview with Schaff
held in Bari in 2000, specifically for this volume.
Also, Ponzio has promoted the Italian translation of numerous
works by Bakhtin and members of the Bakhtin Circle, including
Valentin N. Voloshinov and Pavel N. Medvedev, but also the biologist
I. I. Kanaev. Ponzio has also contributed to Marx studies in
Italy and in 1975 published the Italian edition of his Mathematical
Manuscripts (new revised and enlarged edition 2005).
Moreover Ponzio has contributed significantly to the dissemination
of Sebeok's work in Italy and of his global semiotics in particular.
In addition to Tom Sebeok's numerous visits to Bari University
for encounters with our graduate and postgraduate students sponsored
by his Department, Ponzio has promoted the Italian translation
of most of his books and has authored (with S. Petrilli) two
monographs dedicated to his thought: Sebeok and the Signs of
Life, published in 2001, and I segni e la vita. La semiotica
globale di Thomas A. Sebeok, 2002. Moreover, he is co-author
with Sebeok (and Petrilli) of the volume, Semiotica dell'io,
2001.
Among Italian scholars Ponzio has focused particularly on the
work of his master Giuseppe Semerari, on the semiotician Ferruccio
Rossi-Landi and philosopher of language Giovanni Vailati. In
1988 he published the monograph Ferruccio Rossi-Landi e la filosofia
del linguaggio, and since then has promoted various reeditions
of his works with Bompiani, Marsilio and John Benjamins.
In a brief biobibliographical note entitled 'Sidelights' (see
his bibliography of 2002), Ponzio explains his interest for
the various scholars mentioned in this presentation - Bakhtin
and his Circle, Levinas, Marx, Schaff, and Rossi-Landi - in
the following terms: 'from these authors I have developed what
they share in spite of their differences, that is, the idea
that the life of the human individual in his/her concrete singularity,
whatever the object of study, and however specialized the analysis,
cannot prescind from involvement without alibis in the destiny
of others' (p. 6).
Ponzio's particular interpretation of the general science of
signs derives from his phenomenological formation, with special
reference to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. In fact, Ponzio's search for the sense for the
human being of scientific research in general and of the general
science of signs in particular, is subtended and oriented by
the Husserlian distinction between 'exact science' and 'rigorous
science', theorized in 'Philosophy as a Rigorous Science' and
in The Crisis of the European Sciences: the latter interrogates
the sense for human beings of scientific knowledge, avoiding
all forms of scientism and technicalism which lead to separating
the production of means from effective awareness of ends (as
distinct from alienated and false consciousness). In this sense
semiotics also presents itself in the form of 'telo-' or 'teleosemiotics'
(cf. Ponzio and Petrilli 1994).
On the other hand, the fact that Ponzio, following Thomas A.
Sebeok, identifies the genesis of semiotics in medical semeiotics
or sympomatology, placing the general science of signs in a
tradition that leads from Hippocrates to Galen, is not only
a question of agnition, that is, of knowledge about the origins.
More than this, to relate semiotics to the medical sciences,
that is, to the study of symptoms, also means to recover the
ethical instance of semiotic studies. In other words, it means
to recover the ancient vocation of 'semeiotics' for the health
of life, an immediate concern for the study of the science of
signs given that semiosis and life coincide (Sebeok) - life
globally, that is, over the entire planet Earth. In this sense
semiotics also presents itself as semioethics (cf. Ponzio and
Petrilli 2003). The ethical instance of Ponzio's approach to
semiotics has also been developed in connection with another
two authors who have been at the centre of his interests from
the very beginning of his studies: Emmanuel Levinas and Michail
A. Bakhtin. Semioethics as conceived by Ponzio and Petrilli
is not a discipline standing in its own right, but rather a
perspective in the study of signs.
We may characterise and classify Augusto Ponzio's production
by saying that it addresses the problems of logic, ideology,
dialogism from a semioethical perspective. In fact, the title
of the Special Issue of Semiotica, which presents the papers
occasioned by the International Colloquium organized at Bari
University in February 2002 under the auspices of the International
Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) to celebrate Ponzio
on his sixtieth birthday is entitled Ideology, Logic and Dialogue
in Semioethical Perspective. A title intended to evidence just
this propositional and projectual orientation of Ponzio's research.
This issue of Semiotica and the theme of the Colloquium, 'Logic,
Dialogic, Ideologic. Signs between Functionality and Excess'
connected to it are intended to signal the centrality of problems
relating to 'ideology', 'logic' and 'dialogue' in Ponzio's research.
Research which now spans a period of approximately fourty years,
with an intense commitment to teaching activities, personal
publications and numerous editorial enterprises of various sorts.
Logic, dialogic and ideologic indicate the triple dimension
of sign life which has been evidenced by the natural sciences
and the human sciences, and assumed as irrevocable by general
semiotics. Logic, dialogue and modeling of the world by signs
also involve the human sign capacity for excess with respect
to function. Excess renders signs autonomous from need and necessity,
opening them to desire, inventiveness, creativity, nonfunctional
planning, in light of which the human being emerges as an end
in itself, as a value that cannot be reduced to the status of
means.
Concerning logic, Ponzio has dedicated numerous essays to the
problem of the relation between formal logic and dialectic logic
and to relations between dialectics and semiotics. He has translated
from Latin, edited and amply commented the Italian edition of
Petrus Hispanus's Summule logicales (2003). Recently he has
collected a series of papers on logic and semiotics in his volume
Semiotica e dialettica (2004).
In relation to ideology, Ponzio's research begins from his
book of 1970 (new enlarged edition 2005), Linguaggio e relazioni
sociali. In his 1973 book Produzione linguistica e ideologia
sociale (amplified in a French edition of 1992), he promptly
takes a clear stance against Noam Chomsky's approach to language
analysis. Some aspects of this study are subsequently developed
in a volume of 1991, Filosofia del linguaggio 2. In 1973 Ponzio's
attitude involved critiquing dominant trends in the linguistic
sciences given Chomsky's widespread influence over the intellectual
globe. Ponzio's main contention is that Chomsky mistakes linguistic
use in a specific language-English (his sentence examples are
often untranslatable)-for the essential or universal in language-in
general. Furthermore, according to Ponzio, Chomsky confuses
levels of analysis, mistaking the description of the objects
of analysis for the construction of the models of analysis.
Ponzio's critique is in line with Sebastian K. Shaumjan's research
and his bigradual theory of generative grammar articulated at
two levels (the genotypical and the phenotypical ), as against
what he describes as Chomsky's unigradual linguistic theory.
As regards dialogism Ponzio's research method promotes philosophical
and semiotic investigation into the sciences of verbal and nonverbal
languages in terms of heteroglossia, polylogism, reciprocal
otherness and dialogism, by contrast with the tendency toward
prevarication, unquestioning authority, and monologism. This
approach is coherent with the orientation inherent in language
toward "dialogic plurilingualism", "multi-voicedness", "heteroglossia" and
otherness interrelating different languages, cultures and ideologies.
In this sense the expression "philosophy of language" implies
philosophizing by language and not just about language. Even
when research conducted in the sciences of language, is oriented
monologically and regulated by the centripetal and unifying
forces of linguistic life, the original philosophizing immanent
in language, its constitutional dialogic heteroglossia, is often
betrayed. Philosophy in general (and not just that immediately
concerned with language) and general semiotics works within
the framework of dialogic heteroglossia inherent in language.
This acts as a sort of a priori and transcendental condition
in philosophical reflection as in all forms of critical consciousness.
The main books specifically focused on dialogism are Dialogo
sui dialoghi (in collab. with Massimo A. Bonfantini), 1986;
Dialogo e narrazione, 1991; Signs, Dialogue and Ideology, 1993;
Scrittura, dialogo e alterità tra Bachtin e Lévinas, 1994; Sujet
et altérité. Sur Emmanuel Lévinas, 1995, I tre dialoghi della
menzogna e della verità , with M. A. Bonfantini and S. Petrilli,
1997; La revolución bajtiniana. El pensamiento de Bajtin y la
ideologia contemporanea, 1998; Basi, Significare, inventare,
interpretare (in collab.), 1998; Philosophy of language, Art
and Responsibility in M. Bakhtin (in collab. with S. Petrilli),
2004.
The same sign model proposed by interpretation semiotics is
the heterogeneous product of dialogically related results achieved
in different contexts. These include: theory of knowledge (Peirce),
literature (Bakhtin), and axiology (Morris). Furthermore, research
on the relation between semiotics and ideology (Rossi-Landi,
Schaff) also led to greater attention during the 1980s on the
relation between signs and (socio-ethical) values. In this connection,
an important contribution is represented by Charles Morris who
explicitly theorized the necesssary relation between signs and
values in his book of 1964, Signification and Significance.
By contrast with a view of semiotics as a solely cognitive,
descriptive and ideologically neutral science, a major trend
in semiotics today aims to recover the orientation toward problems
of an axiological order and to achieve, therefore, a global
reconnaissance of man and his signs.
Since his critical groundwork of the 1970s covered in such
books as Produzione linguistica e ideologia sociale (1973),
Filosofia del linguaggio e prassi sociale (1974), Dialettica
e verità (1975), and Marxismo, scienza e problema dell'uomo
(1977), Ponzio demonstrates the inadequacy of trends which reduce
the (verbal and nonverbal) sign and the human subject to exchange
value, viewed separately from the historico-social relations
of production processes. With reference to the various human
sciences-philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, philosophy of language,
political economy, anthropology, esthetic creation, and especially
literature -, Ponzio conducts a series of studies which might
be defined as explorations and exercises along the boundaries
of such sciences where they interact and contaminate each other
and, therefore, along the boundaries of discourse.
In Ponzio's opinion, what Chomsky calls "linguistic creativity" in
reality refers to a situation characterized by the use of rules,
codes, and programs, which the speaker does not control. This
is true not only at the phonologic, syntactic and semantic levels
of language, as believes Chomsky, but also at the ideological
level. Chomsky dedicates a great part of his attention to questions
of ideology both on a theoretical level and on a pragmatic level
without hesitating to commit himself publicly (think of his
critique of U.S.A. politics). Nonetheless, he keeps his theoretical
work on linguistics completely separate from his critique of
ideology and political commitment. A central category used by
Ponzio in his critique of Chomsky is "linguistic work" which
the former develops from Rossi-Landi's important book entitled
Language as Work and Trade (Rossi-Landi 2003 [1968]; English
trans. 1983). Rossi-Landi ideates the concept of "linguistic
work" by relating different human sciences (political economy
and linguistics), in other words, by identifying a homological
relationship between sign production and the production of artifacts.
Contrary to Chomskyian categories of competence and performance
which repropose traditional problems, terminologies and mechanistic
oppositions (e.g., consciousness vs. experience, behaviorism
vs. mentalism, physical vs. psychic, internal vs. external,
empiricism vs. rationalism), Ponzio following Rossi-Landi and
dialectic materialism, calls attention to the dialectic relation
between the subject and the social and natural environment,
to language conceived as work and to the different languages
viewed as the product of work, as the result of linguistic production
processes, to the principle of the "methodics of common speech" or
of "common semiosis" (cf. Rossi-Landi 1998 [1961]).
For a linguistic theory to be functional, it must be explicative
and critical, it must go beyond the limits of a simply descriptive
and taxonomic approach to language analysis, and to achieve
this it must reckon with the social processes of linguistic
production in relation to a critical theory of ideology. As
stated above, a weak point in Chomsky's research is represented
by his failure to theorize the relation between language and
ideology. This leads him to ignore the problem of the ideological
structures that determine linguistic production processes. According
to Ponzio, his separation stops his theory from becoming a critique
of language and his critique of ideology from being grounded,
on a theoretical level, in the study of language (Ponzio 1991a:
7). Using categories developed from Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Marx,
Schaff, Rossi-Landi and Prieto-such categories as language as
work, language as historico-socio-ideological reality-Ponzio
criticizes the reduction of linguistic use to mere behavior
or activity, and works on the human's potential for truly creative
(abductive) and critical intervention on language and on one's
surroundings at large.
The problem of ideology is strictly connected not only to language
theory but also to logic ad knowledge theory (see Dialettica
e verità, 1976, and Individuo umano, linguaggio e globalizzazione
nella filosofia di Adam Schaff (1st ed, 1974), 2002). Contrary
to Chomskyan dualism between experience and competence, experience
in modern conceptions after Kant, as interpreted by Ponzio,
is described as a series of interpretive operations, including
inferential processes of the abductive type (Charles S. Peirce)
through which the subject completes, organizes, and associates
data which is always more or less fragmentary, partial, and
discrete. Experience as such is innovative and qualitatively
superior by comparison with the limited nature of eventual input.
In Ponzio's view, experience coincides with competence which
thus conceived does not need to be integrated with an innate
supplement, a piece of natural equipment supposedly inherent
in the human infant.
In two more recent book (1l linguaggio e le lingue, 2003, and
Linguistica generale, scrittura letteraria e traduzione, 2004).
Ponzio returns to the question of the development of linguistic
competence and knowledge generally, to what Chomsky in 1985
baptized as "Plato's problem". This expression refers to how
a finite number of entities generates knowledge extending beyond
such entities both qualitatively and quantitatively. According
to Ponzio, that we recognize, know how to use, and understand
a previously unexperienced linguistic expression (constructed,
however, according to the rules of the language the speaker
knows) is no more surprising than the fact that we recognize
and use something as a hammer, though never having seen this
object before (but which is constructed according to the rules
and functions that model a hammer). On the basis of the connection
between language acquisition and performance of inferential-abductive
operations, the relation between abduction and language learning
(which is never finished and complete) appears as a relation
of reciprocal support: language learning - Ponzio says - makes
use of abductive processes, while abductive processes in their
turn benefit from language learning because they are necessarily
grounded in linguistic interpretive work as accomplished by
the generations that have preceded us historically leaving us
the linguistic materials and instruments which go to form the
language we experience. (Ponzio 1991a: 97)
For a linguistic theory that goes beyond the dualism of competence
and experience and of deep structures and surface structures,
Ponzio draws on suggestions from Peirce and his particular sign
theory. In this framework, and taking his distances from the
Chomskyian concept of deep structures, Ponzio proposes what
he calls an "interpretive linguistic theory" in the light of
which the theory of different levels, of antecedents and derivations,
no longer holds. The "interpretive linguistic theory" (ideated
for application to both verbal and nonverbal signs) explains
one's ability to comprehend the utterance or verbal sign in
general in terms of its relation to another utterance that interprets
it, an utterance acting as interpretant in Peirce's sense. All
utterances are produced, characterized, identified, and developed
by their interpretants. According to this approach, the interpretant
of a sentence (or, rather, utterance) is not a deep structure
grounded in underlying elementary sequences, but another verbal
sign. An interpretant, identifying an utterance or any verbal
sign whatever is simply 'unexpressed', until the conditions
are realized for its expression, explicitation.
In Ponzio's terminology, an interpretant is either an "identifying
interpretant" with the function of recognizing the sign at the
level of its phonemic or graphic configuration, semantic content,
morphological syntactic structure, or an "answering comprehension
interpretant" focusing on the pragmatic dimension of signs.
Viewed in such terms, and this is a particularly significant
aspect of Ponzio's approach, the relationship between "interpretant
signs" and "interpreted signs" is characterized by dialogism,
active participation, and otherness. This level of sign interpretation
is closely related to the ideological level of discourse (see
Ponzio, Man as Signs, 1990, Signs, Dialogue and Ideologie, 1993,
and Fondamenti di Filosofia del linguaggio, 1999).
Working in such a theoretical perspective, Ponzio was only
too glad to welcome the transition from decodification to interpretation
semiotics as it began taking place in Italy in the early 1970s
(cf. his pioneer book La semiotica in Italia, 1976). The Peircean-Morrisian
sign model at the basis of interpretation semiotics is a dynamic
sign model, rooted in the concept of infinite semiosis in an
open chain of deferrals from one interpretant sign to another.
The supporting logic is not the logic of equal exchange, but
rather of non correspondence, excess and otherness in the relation
among interpretants forming the sign network. The interpretant
sign says something more with respect to the interpreted sign,
which in turn has its own semiotic consistency by virtue of
which the latter resists any single interpretation, or "interpretive
route", to use Ponzio's terminology (cf. 1990). In the framework
of interpretation semiotics the sign is always part of a sign
situation in which all the components of semiosis-the sign vehicle
(signifiant), meaning (signifié), referent, interpreter, interpretant
and codes regulating sign systems-are considered as different
aspects of complex and articulate semiosic processes, and not
separately from one another.
The modalities of logical inference, the dialogical dimension
of semiosis, and the critique of ideology inevitably call for
analysis in a semiotical key. Indeed, for analysis with any
claim to adequacy the sign nature of such phenomena must be
fully recognized as the very point of departure. No doubt, we
must necessarily distinguish between the different functions
carried out by the sign. However, if we are not to lose sight
of the constitutively innovative, inventive and creative dimension
of inferential processes, of dialogue and ideology, a description
of signs in terms of functionality will not suffice: the life
of signs also foresees a broad margin of nonfunctionality.
In "Logic, Dialogic, Ideologic. Signs between Functionality
and Excess", theme of the International Colloquium of 2002 to
celebrate Ponzio on his sixtieth birthday, the subtitle was
intended to evidence another complex of interests in Ponzio's
research. The interests we are now referring to are represented
by such books as Spostamenti. Percorsi e discorsi sul segno
(1982), Lo spreco dei significanti. L'eros, la morte, la scrittura
(1983), Tra linguaggio e letteratura (1983), Filosofia del linguaggio
(1985), Interpretazione e scrittura (1986), Il filosofo e la
tartaruga (1990), Tra semiotica e letteratura. Induzione a Michail
Bachtin (1992), Signs to talk about signs (1995), El juego del
comunicar. Entre literature y filosofia (1995); I segni dell'altro
Eccedenza letteraria e prossimità (1995), Che cos'è la letetratura
(1997), Semiotica della musica (in collab. with Michele Lomuto,
1997), La coda dell'occhio: letture del linguaggio letterario
(1998); Fuori campo (in collab. con S. Petrilli, 1999), Enunciazione
e testo letterario (2001); Views in Literary Semiotics (in collab.
con S. Petrilli, 2003).
Ponzio's interlocutors in these book at the philosophical level
include: Plato, Kierkegaard Nietzesche, Lévinas, Blanchot, Bakhtin,
Bataille, Derrida; at the literaary level: Leopardi, Manzoni,
Foscolo, Sterne, Orwell, Poe, and Proust. Ponzio's books just
listed especially the sections dedicated to literary writing,
are written essentially from the viewpoint of literature. Here
the expression "of literature" is not only intended in the restricted
sense of applying given models and categories to the study of
literary texts, but more broadly in the sense that literature,
the "excess" and "otherness" of literary writing, the dialogic,
digressive, and indirect word of literature provide the perspective
according to which the sign is described. As averred by Levinas
and Bakhtin, literary writing is the place par excellence for
the full realization of "extralocality", whose guiding value
is not "egocentric identity", but "absolute otherness", where
time and space do not belong to the order of productive accumulation,
but of dispersion, digression, expenditure, and dialogic heteroglossia.
The main values theorized are represented by such terms as "ephemeral", "otherness", "discontinuity", "discretion", "passion", "expenditure", "waste", "transience", "drift", "shift".
Similarly to the expressions the "logic of expenditure", "dispersion" and "waste,"the
word "passion" indicates that which escapes the logic of equal exchange.
As such it constitutes a critique of bourgeois economy, of the logic
of accumulation, functionality, efficiency and productivity. The subject
affected by passion is a "passive subject"; as such, it is considered
negatively in relation to those conceptions of the human being that exalt
such values as the Subject's authority, initiative, activity and consciousness.
But the properly human subject, "subjectum", is constitutively passive,
subject to..., dependent on..., interested in..., oriented toward....
Such a subject is characterized by openness to the other, by the capacity
of listening to the other, of tuning in with the other. In this perspective,
alongside the "passive subject" understood as the subject which fails
in its intention of being a controlling subject, in a position to answer
for itself and reach its own personal aims, another modality of being "subject
to..." is delineated. Here being "subject to..." is not measured in terms
of volition and capacity for planning, but, on the contrary, concerns
the subject's availability with respect to dialogism, otherness, listening.
Thus intended, passivity is not alienation, the condition of the unquestioning
subject passively experiencing external constriction. On the contrary,
in Ponzio's description passivity denotes the possibility of surpassing
the limits of identity, private individual interest, and is connected
with a concept of the subject as a totality open to unlimited interrogation
and critique. Among the volumes by Ponzio dedicated to subjectivity and
the problem of "I" should be remembered Sujet et altérité. Sur Emmanuel
Lévinas (1995) and Semiotica dell'io (in collab. with T. A. Sebeok and
S. Petrilli, 2001).
Consumer society today is regulated by the frenetic rhythms
of the production-exchange-consumption cycle. Paradoxically,
a condition for continuity of today's production cycles is production
of the ephemeral, the discontinuous, superfluous, of the private
sphere-the "addomesticated" ephemeral, says Ponzio. Instead,
Ponzio proposes a different kind of "ephemeral" from that programmed
by the logic of accumulation and equal exchange, and that is,
as a value that disrupts the latter, is refractory to it, and
is therefore the place of the nonalienated self, the properly
human, creativity, difference, freedom. Thus conceived, the
ephemeral denotes the body's resistance-with its pulsional economy,
needs, experiences, maladies, even death-to programming, productivity,
efficiency and functionality as established by a plan regulated
by a specific aim. Viewed in relation to the human person, the
ephemeral represents otherness, the right to be other with respect
to identity as it is fixed by roles, contracts and commitments
connected with officialdom. With respect to the bourgeois system
of values in current capitalistic society, the ephemeral represents
excess and loss; with respect to the time of (Hi)story, accumulation,
edification, it is the place of irreducible discontinuity, disgregation,
digression, discretion.
In more recent phases of his research, Ponzio has continued
his work on the critique of the logic of identity and communication-reproduction
developed in such books as La differenza non indifferente. Comunicazione,
migrazione, Guerra (1995), Elogio dell'infunzionale. Critica
dell'ideologia della produttività (1997, new enlarged ed. 2003)
and Metodologia della formazione linguistica (1997). With the
instruments of the language sciences Ponzio proposes a critique
of social programs the aimed at subjecting science, education
and socio-cultural experience generally to market logic and
to the logic of profit.
To lose sight of sign life in its non-functional dimension
means to lose sight of the otherness of signs. Semiosis that
is functional is semiosis of identity, signs that are functional
to identity are signs of difference, in the sense of signs that
differ from other signs, that fix difference, tending to reduce
signs to the status of signals. But semiosis also implies difference
understood as deferral, renvoi, openness to alterity. Semiosic
processes that foresee nonfunctionality are structural to signs,
and impede the reduction of sign processes forming the sign
network to a two way process based on the logic of return, gain,
in the economic sense as well. On the contrary, semiosis is
an irreversible process towards the other that transcends the
logic of equal exchange between the signifier and the signified,
finding its specific expression of signness in expenditure without
a counterpart, without gain, and therefore in excess. As such
the specificity of signs means that they cannot be reduced to
the status of semiosic processes dominated by signality. If,
instead, this were the case, sign interpretation is limited
to the terms of decodification and identification. On the contrary,
to recognize the specificity of signs in their capacity for
nonfunctionality and alterity means to situate signs in a chain
of interpretants that is open and dialogic. Such logic, or better
dia-logic, acknowledges that signs and sign relations are oriented
by the creative logic, or dia-logic, of responsive or answering
comprehension, and not merely by the logic of identification.
These days more than ever before a critique of communication
based on equal exchange logic, on the logic of identity, which
is connected with the defence of one's rights, one's short-sighted
self-interests, calls for an understanding of the concepts of
otherness and excess. The dimension of excess is refractory
to the logic of identity which is always ready to sacrifice
alterity, one's own and that of others. In other words, excess
requires that we recognize the logic of otherness, therefore
the dimension of the nonfunctional, the unproductive, of gift
logic as the irrevocable condition for an adequate critique
of communication.
Communication today is communication-production, that is, communication
that totally adheres to the ideo-logic dominating capitalist
social reproduction in today's globalized world. In fact, communication
in the globalization era is world communication not only in
the sense that it extends over the entire planet, but that it
accommodates the world as it is. Global communication in today's
globalized world is a function of a world without the least
opening to critique. And in this context, by 'world' is understood
the time-space of ontology, individual and collective identity,
being, things as they are, the realism of politics to the very
point of accepting the 'extrema ratio' of war.
The themes proposed in this volume (or simply alluded to) enter
the general orientation of Ponzio's research, which is subtended
by his critique of the logic of identity. Following Lévinas
and his phenomenological analyses, Ponzio theorizes the connection
inscribed in Western culture between World, Narration, History,
Duration, Identity, Subject, Liberty, Work, Donation of Sense
by Intentional Consciousness, Individuality, Difference-Indifference,
Interest, Well-Being, Ontology, Truth, Force, Reason, Power,
Work, Productivity, Politics, and War. This connection has always
been exploited and exasperated by Capitalism, in the present-day
globalisation era more than ever before.
With respect to a World that exploits and functionalizes the
other to its own ends, a world that defends the rights of identity,
self-interest, that is ready to sacrifice alterity for the sake
of identity, a world in which politics is functional to persistence
in being and identity to the very point of acknowledging the
reasons of war - where peace as momentary repose, respite, is
functional to war just as the night, free-time, rest is functional
to returning to work, to the necessities of the day -, Ponzio
interrogates the possibility of establishing relationships that
are not of this world, and all the same are of the material
and earthly order.
The properly human can only be traced outside the space and
time of ontology. It belongs to a dimension where interhuman
relations cannot be reduced to the category of identity, to
relations among predefined subjects and objects, or to relations
of exchange, equality, functionality, productivity, interest.
Ponzio explores the possibility of response in a dimension beyond
being, in what with Levinas he calls otherwise than being. By
contrast with 'being otherwise', the expression 'otherwise than
being' indicates the outside with respect to ontology, to the
world as it is. This is a question of earthly transcendence
with respect to the world, in a dimension of sense that is other
with respect to the sense of the world. By contrast with the
humanism of identity, another form of humanism is possible based
on the logic of otherness, the humanism of alterity, of otherwise
than being (cf. Ponzio, "Introduzione", in Lévinas, Dall'altro
all'io, 2003, p. 50).
Ponzio develops Levinas's concept of otherwise than being in
relation to the Bakhtinian concept of dialogue. Dialogue here
is not understood as formal dialogue, the place of common encounter
and exchange of ideas. Nor is it understood as superseding contradictions
dialectically in synthesis. Rather, dialogue in this context
of discourse is understood as exposition to otherness, intercorporeity,
involvement with the other, where the allusion is to relations
of unindifferent differences rather than of indifference. Working
in this direction, Ponzio formulates his original proposal for
a critique of dialogic reason, and, therefore, his critique
of today's production system of globalized communication-production
also in light of Levinas's existential dimension of otherwise
than being and of the extralocalized dimension of Bakhtin's
great time. I segni tra globalità e infinità. Per la critica
della comunicazione globale (2004) and Semiotics Unbounded.
Interpretive Routes through the Open Network of Signs (in collab.
with Susan 2005) are his most recent works where these aspects
of his research are studied in depth.
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