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Semiotics in Italy. From the
origins to the recent sociosemiotic wave
by Gianfranco Marrone and Dario
Mangano
1. Italy has probably been one of the first countries in the world
where the idea of Ferdinand De Saussure of extending to systems of signs
some of the results of the linguistic research has been taken seriously.
This approach has deeply linked the history of Semiotics in Italy to
Linguistics, which has always been an epistemic horizon for it; and has
linked Italian research to French research (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland
Barthes, Emile Benveniste, Algirdas J. Greimas and many others). At the
same time, in Italy there always was present, during the XXth century, a
philosophical tradition studying together languages and arts, both in an
idealistic (Croce) and pragmatist (Vailati) perspectives. And this
approach has linked the Italian semiotic research to the United States,
where this kind of study has been intensely present (Peirce, Morris,
Ogden-Richards etc.).
Despite this precocious attitude, as Umberto Eco uses to say, up to
fifteen years ago, Semiotics was considered in Italy more than a
discipline: a "problematic field" crossing a lot of other disciplines.
Although, as early as 1960, it has been possible to recognize in Italy a
semiotic perspective in Aesthetics (Emilio Garroni, Cesare Brandi),
Literature and Philology (D'Arco S. Avalle, Maria Corti, Cesare Segre),
Cinema studies (Gianfranco Bettetini), Architecture (Renato De Fusco), and
Design (Thomas Maldonado), for a long time those interests didn't define a
precise field of knowledge or a specific method of analysis. More than
creating a new perspective over different disciplines, the first semiotic
theories in Italy created an original perspective inside the existing
ones. These are the times of "semiology" more than "semiotics", in which,
as Cesare Segre said, only structuralism was considered a method, while
semiology was only a "group of procedures". Therefore the first
experiments of semiotic analysis were performed by traditional disciplines
such as Literature and Philology. A reference book in this sense is
"Strutturalismo e critica" which was published in 1965, although it had
already been edited by Cesare Segre in 1962. We have to wait the
mid-Sixties, and the work of Barthes in France and of Eco in Italy, to see
the real specificity of semiology, with the first applications of
semiologic concepts to fashion, newspaper, mass media, television,
advertising and so on, according to an idea of what should be considered
as a text. Although this new conception of text is one of the key concept
of semiology, to comprehend the importance of this passage you should
consider how this new perspective enlightened the whole conception of
society involving in the first semiologic experiments of analysis a new
critical approach to society. In Italy, Umberto Eco and Paolo Fabbri
worked on these topics by applying the theories of Jakobson about codes
and communication to the problems of encoding and decoding of television
programmes, suggesting that the codes of senders may be different from
those of receivers. A few years later, in 1968, Eco wrote his book "La
struttura assente" [The missing structure] in which the notion of text was
extended to space and objects. This step in such a new direction of
research interested architects and designer who soon started to theorize
using semiologic instruments.
One of the most relevant events for the history of semiotics should be
considered the institution of the International Association of Semiotic
Studies, which from the very beginning of his history had important
relations with Italy. Although at the moment of his creation in 1969, the
president was Greimas, soon he had to leave his charge and in 1972 Cesare
Segre became President with Eco as Secretary General. 1974 is the year of
the first congress of the International Association that was held in Italy
(Milan). The early Seventies are also the years of another important event
for Italian semiotics, the foundation in 1971 of the Italian Association
of Semiotic Studies (AISS) whose first President was Giacomo Devoto and
Secretary Umberto Eco.
As we said before, notwithstanding this relevant history, semiotics has
not been considered a self-standing discipline until 1975 when the first
university degrees in "Disciplines of Arts, Music, and Performance" (DAMS)
were created in Bologna; and until 1990, when the degree in "Media
studies" was created in many Italian universities (Turin, Bologna, Rome,
Siena, Salerno, Palermo). The institution of specific courses in semiotics
offered by the most relevant figures of Italian cultural panorama such as
Umberto Eco and Paolo Fabbri (who in the meanwhile had returned from
France where he was the first assistant of Greimas) gave a great impulse
to research and contributed to the diffusion of semiotic studies in all
other universities. These are also the times of the institution of the
first Ph.D.s in Semiotics in Bologna, Bari and Siena where the most
important Italian scholars of semiotics were conducting their studies.
Nowadays, semiotic research is present in most Italian
universities.
The Italian Association (AISS, Associazione Italiana di Studi
Semiotici,) organizes every year an international conference with invited
speakers from all over the world. The topic of the recent conferences are:
"Il discorso della salute [The Discourse of Health]" (2004), "Semiofood.
Comunicazione e cultura del cibo [Communication and Food culture]" (2003),
"Guerre di segni. Semiotica delle situazioni conflittuali [Wars of Signs.
Semiotics of Conflictual Situations" (2002), "Testi esemplari. Teoria,
pratica, didattica [Exemplar texts. Theory, Practice, Didactics]" (2001),
"Forme della testualità. Teoria, modelli, forme e prospettive [Textuality
Forms. Theory, Models, Forms, Perspectives]" (2000). The Proceedings of
this conferences have been published by Testo & Immagine (Turin) and
Meltemi (Rome).
The AISS has also a web site (www.associazionesemiotica.it) to inform
members of its activities and of all those information concerning the
discipline. In addition it publishes its own e-journal, E/C
(www.associazionesemiotica.it/ec), in which every month a variable number
of new articles (usually from 10 to 20) are put on line.
Other revues on Semiotics are Versus, edited by Umberto Eco since 1971
(published by Bompiani, Milan), Carte semiotiche, edited by Omar Calabrese
(published by Protagon, Siena), and Ocula. Occhio semiotico sui media,
edited on line by Gianpaolo Proni. There are a lot of series of books
specialized in Semiotics: "Il campo semiotico" and "Strumenti" (edited by
Eco, Bompiani), "Segnature" (edited by Fabbri and Marrone, Meltemi),
"Scritture" (edited by Pino Paioni, Quattroventi), and many
others.
Other important institutions which organize conferences and symposia
every year are the "Center for Semiotic and Cognitive studies of the
University of San Marino", directed by Patriza Violi (which has its
headquarters in the State of San Marino but scientifically should be
considered part of the University of Bologna), and the "Center for
semiotic and linguistic studies of the University of Urbino", directed by
Pino Paioni.
2. For what concerns the actual direction of semiotic research, we can
say that having gradually emancipated itself from both linguistics (which
gave it pre-established models) and philosophy of language (which used to
consider it as one of the theories of knowledge and/or communication),
semiotics in Italy has also recently gone beyond its so-called semiologic
phase (represented by the first works of Umberto Eco). By reconsidering
the concepts of sign and code, Eco and other scholars (as well as Antonino
Buttitta, Omar Calabrese, Gianpaolo Caprettini, Francesco Casetti, Paolo
Fabbri, Augusto Ponzio, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Patrizia Violi, Ugo Volli)
have proposed more dynamic notions, such as signification, text, narration
and so on.
During the last decades, Italian semioticians have been working on many
diverse semiotic configurations, in order to reconstruct and compare their
articulations on the planes of both expression and content. The
consequence of this kind of work has been the construction of some models
of analysis, which allow scholars to study many cultural and social
phenomena from a semiotic point of view. Themes that have been so far
excluded from semiotic research - such as intersubjective relations,
passions, microsocial situations, political life, and so on - are now
being included in this field of studies. If analyzed through semiotic
models, these themes reveal aspects and problems that other disciplines
cannot find. Thus, the notion of text has been applied to every
communicative event with a semiotic value, whatever its substance of
expression (sounds, gestures, images) and conventional boundaries might
be. From a semiotic point of view, a text might be a novel, a poem, a
picture, an advertisement, a ballet, but also an inhabited space, a piece
of conversation, or an election campaign. In the same way, the notion of
narration has been extended to the deep structures of any kind of
text.
In communication and media research, semiotics has also built effective
models which have recently spread in Italy as well as in many other
countries. Semiotic methods are now very useful for the analysis of
journalism, advertising, fashion, television, politics and so on,
supporting, or even replacing, psychological and sociological ones.
The development of semiotics described above is known as sociosemiotics
. Many scholars - Guido Ferraro, Gianfranco Marrone, Francesco Marsciani,
Isabella Pezzini, Maria Pia Pozzato, Alessandro Zinna and many others -
are now discussing its theoretical relevance. In particular, the debate
has questioned whether sociosemiotics should be considered a special
branch of semiotics (devoted only to the study of social phenomena) or, on
the contrary, a general framework in which to reconsider semiotics (which
would imply studying all semiotic facts as social phenomena). The results
of this discussion went beyond this alternative. In fact, sociosemiotics
has come to be considered a study of the "conditions of possibility of the
social" (Landowski), i.e. a theory studying society as a discursive
effect. In this sense, sociosemiotics is neither one of the many social
sciences nor a useless alias of general semiotics, but something like a
"meta-sociology", which uses semiotic models (narrativity, discursive
strategies, enunciation, etc.) to explain what is "social" and what is not
"social" in a historical period, in a geographical place, and in a
specific culture.
3. In a seminal article for the theoretical construction of
sociosemiotics, Fabbri (1973) opposed a semiotic analysis of mass cultural
texts to the "content analysis" used by sociologists for their description
of mass-media. The content analysis, he said, reveals a pre-Saussurian
epistemology, as it considers the message a set of lexical entities with
individual meanings. The semiotic analysis of the text, on the other hand,
regards it as a "configuration of sense" supported by deep semantic
structures.
During the following years, many scholars in Italy demonstrated that
the use of the notion of text for media studies may have a lot of
advantages. In fact, the notion of text borrowed from linguistic studies,
may be extended to different types of language; it connects the planes of
content and expression; it goes beyond analysis of isolated signs; it
problematizes the idea of messages as simple entities; it multiplies and
distributes the interpretative competences of the audience. Rethinking
messages as texts leads also to a reduction of the importance of codes,
i.e. of the idea that they are at the beginning and at the end of any
communicative process. If a text is a consistent and cohesive
configuration of sense in which "everything holds together" (Saussure), it
must also be quite independent from the codes from which it derives.
Moreover, a text includes the codes necessary to transfer its messages. It
takes them from the external social reality, translates them, and then
offers them back to the social reality, which it eventually contributes to
transform. It is a continuous process, where emission and reception work
as translations between different languages and different systems of
signification - be they verbal or not verbal.
Moving from the semiotics of codes to a semiotic of texts implies an
image of culture as an organic set of texts, a "semiosphere" (Lotman), in
which intertextual chains cross and overlap, and in which even metatexts
(poetics, taxonomies of signs, theories of genres, discourses about
culture etc.) may be considered forms of textuality. From this
perspective, the traditional distinction between "texts" (which are
rigidly structured but restricted) and "social contexts" (indetermined but
broad), within which texts are produced and interpreted, becomes
irrelevant. From a semiotic point of view, texts are not artificial
objects that consumate themselves during communicative processes; they
are, on the contrary, models for the explication of these communicative
processes. Any cultural construction which can be articulated in terms of
expression and content produces a form of signification, as much as a
social sense, and therefore should be regarded as a text.
This notion of text might appear generic and somehow pretentious: in
fact, if we define every social phenomenon as a text, then the notion of
text itself might run the risk of losing its explicatory value. Moreover,
distinguishing between text and context would become a difficult task. If
the major concern of semiotics is text analysis, then it also needs a
sociological support which deals with the analysis of social contexts.
Against this kind of criticism, a new notion has been introduced in
semiotics: that of discourse, which, far from denying the notion of text,
can be more properly applied to social processes.
If a text is first and foremost a product, a discourse is above all a
production. In order to define the notion of discourse in semiotic terms,
one must connect it with that of enunciation. According to Benveniste
(1974), enunciation is "putting language into discourse". By practically
encountering the speaking subject, language looses its abstract quality,
and becomes discourse. Thus, discourse is both a linguistic entity and a
social process. On the one hand, it is a set of linguistic rules at work
in a conversation, in an intersubjective situation, in a dialogue, and
indeed in any other communicative process. On the other hand, it is also a
set of social and cultural constraints that act on language, by powerfully
re-forming (and transforming) it through usages, habits, and stereotypes,
which mark the bounds of subjective freedom of expression (the so-called
'creativity').
Thus, if texts are never identical to each other, it is not only
because they don't transmit identical messages, but also because they
assume different social values in space and time. Texts have different
sociological status. They are embedded in different genres of discourse,
and they might end up conveying different meanings. One content might have
several different values and meanings, depending on the type of discourse
(religious, political, journalistic etc.) that conveys it.
Although from a theoretical point of view we can distinguish between
texts and discourses, they overlap in the semiosphere: a text displays a
discursive genre, either by conforming to it or by transforming it; a
genre, in turn, does not depend on strict social taxonomies, but on
textual models, which continuously change and translate each other. In
this sense, social discourses are not closed structures that cannot
entertain any relationships with other discourses; rather, they are open
systems that own the rules to translate themselves into other discourses -
rules that produce misunderstanding and misinterpretation, which are
phenomena constitutive of the semiosphere. Then, if on the one hand any
discursive translation carries within itself a form of infidelity, on the
other hand this infidelity enriches not only the final discourse, but also
the initial one.
Bibliography
For some elements of an history of Semiotics in Italy, see: Augusto
Ponzio, La semiotica in Italia, Bari, Dedalo, 1976; Gianpaolo Caprettini,
Letteratura e semiologia in Italia, Turin, Rosemberg & Sellier 1979;
Cesare Segre, "Semiotica", in Dieci anni di linguistica italiana
(1965-1975), D. Gambarara and P. Ramat eds., Rome, Bulzoni 1977;
Gianfranco Marrone and M. Caterina Ruta, "Semiotica", in La linguistica
italiana degli anni 1976-1986, A. Mioni and A. Cortelazzo eds., Rome,
Bulzoni 1992; La semiotica: venticinque anni dopo, P. Bertetti ed.,
Alessandria, Edizioni dell'Orso.
The principal semiotic books of Umberto Eco are: Opera aperta (Milan,
Bompiani 1962); Apocalittici e integrati (Milan, Bompiani 1964); La
struttura assente (Milan, Bompiani 1968); Le forme del contenuto (Milan,
Bompiani 1971); Trattato di semiotica generale (Milan, Bompiani 1975);
Lector in fabula (Milan, Bompiani 1979), Semiotica e filosofia del
linguaggio (Turin, Einaudi 1984), I limiti dell'interpretazione (Milan,
Bompiani 1990), Kant e l'ornitorinco (Milan, Bompiani 1997).
Others important semiotic works in Italy are:
Antonino Buttitta, Semiotica e antropologia, Palermo, Sellerio 1979;
Dei segni e dei miti, Palermo, Sellerio 1998.
Omar Calabrese, La macchina della pittura (Rome, Laterza 1985), Il
linguaggio dell'arte (Milan, Bompiani, 1985), Lezioni di semisimbolico
(Siena, Protagon 1998).
Gianpaolo Caprettini, Aspetti della semiotica, Turin, Einaudi 1980;
Segni testi comunicazione, Turin, Utet 1997; Ordine e disordine, Rome,
Meltemi 1998.
Paolo Fabbri, La svolta semiotica (Rome, Laterza 1998), Elogio di
Babele (Rome, Meltemi 2000), Semiotica in nuce, 2 voll. (with G. Marrone,
Rome, Meltemi 2000-01), Segni del tempo (Rome, Meltemi 2002).
Silvana Miceli, In nome del segno, Palermo, Sellerio 1982.
Ferruccio Rossi-Landi: Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, Milan,
Bompiani, 1968; Semiotica e ideologia, Milan, Bompiani 1972.
Augusto Ponzio, Il linguaggio e le lingue. Introduzione alla
linguistica generale (Bari, Graphis 2002), Tra semiotica e letteratura.
Introduzione a Michail Bachtin (Milan, Bompiani 2003), Semioetica (with S.
Petrilli, Rome, Meltemi, 2003).
Patrizia Violi, L'infinito singolare (Verona, Essedue, 1986),
Significato ed esperienza (Milan, Bompiani 1997).
Ugo Volli, Contro la moda (Milan, Feltrinelli, 1988); Il libro della
comunicazione (Milan, Il Saggiatore, 1995); Manuale di semiotica (Rome,
Laterza 2000); Figure del desiderio (Milan, Cortina 2002); Laboratorio di
semiotica, Rome-Bari, Laterza 2005.
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