World Report: Semioticians meet in Bari (Italy)
by Winfried Noth

Notes on the International Bari Conference 2006

Communication, Interpretation, Translation
Bari, 16-18 February, 2006
Organized by Susan Petrilli

Under the broad umbrella theme Communication, Interpretation, Translation, Susan Petrilli organized an International Conference at the University of Bari (Italy) from February 16 to 18. Semiotics and more specifically ideas and theories of the indefatigable Semiotic School of Bari with its mentor Augusto Ponzio were at the heart of the all of its three subtopics which were outlined in the Call for Papers as follows:

Communication, an essential process of life, culture and social reproduction; interpretation not only as identification but also as answering comprehension that cannot be separated from listening and opening to the other; translation as an essential practice of sign whose meaning can only subsist in another sign that translates and interprets it: these are the topics of the Conference involving Italian and foreign scholars from multiple and different disciplines, but inseparable on the basis of these very topics.

Translation theory was the topic of the first morning with the pioneer in semiotics Massimo A. Bonfantini (Milano) as its first speaker. The afternoon session was on “Communication, Cognition, and Understanding”. Among others, J. Deely (Houston) contributed a paper on “Semiosis and ‘meaning as use’: Subjectivity and sign action”, V. Colapietro (Pennsylvania State U.) gave a lecture on “Primordial functions of discourse: Invocative, evocative, provocative”, and L. Magnani’s (Pavia) topic was: “Semiotic brains, artificial minds, material cognitive systems”.

The second morning on “The Semiotics of Interpretation and its Masters” included a special section on “Peirce and Bakhtin”. L. Santaella (São Paulo) opened the session with a paper on “Peirce’s and Bakhtin’s anti-Cartesian concept of the self”, followed by W. Nöth (Kassel) who raised the enigmatic question “Bakhtin, a synechist?” and Augusto Ponzio who paid homage to the three masters Bakhtin, Lévinas and Rossi-Landi. Other masters discussed in this section were Hjelmslev (“Semiotics as translation”, C. Caputo, Lecce), Victoria Welby (“Sign translation, interpretation”, S. Petrilli) and implicitly to A. Ponzio and S. Petrilli, since the topic “Semio-ethics”, presented by P. Cobley (London) in conjunction with “anti-humanism”, was first discovered by the two heads of the Bari School. The second afternoon’s topic focused on another genuinely Bari semiotics field of research, “Images, Culture, Ideology”.

International presence and participation continued until the last minute of the conference. During the third and last day, there were lectures in addition to Italian contribution, by M. Mestrovic (Zagreb) on “Wholes and levels: Integrative meaning in transdisciplinarity”, by G. Colaizi (Valencia) on “Symptomatology of the text and interculturality”, by G. Jovanovich (Belgrad) on “Communication and universality” and by C. Ljungberg (Zurich) on “Cognitive and literary interpretation”.

Further evidence of the extraordinary dynamics of Bari semiotics was abundantly available. An impressive number of semiotic publications (in Italian) have had their source in Bari for many years, as the international participants of the conference could find out. During the conference, several most recent results of the Bari semiotics were presented to the participants, an important new publication (in Italian) on Roland Barthes by Ponzio, Calefato, and Petrilli, a new publication in English by Deely, Petrilli and Ponzio entitled “The Semiotic Animal”, and the monumental Toronto University Press publication by Suasn Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio Semiotics Unbounded. The results of the 2006 Bari conference will be published soon with S. Petrilli as its editor.

This conference coincided with the launching of a monumental book celebrating the semiotics of interpretation by Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio: Semiotics Unbounded: Interpretive Routes through the Open Network of Signs, University of Toronto Press, xxv + 630 pages, $95.00

This hefty volume is encyclopedic in scope, ebullient in style, teeming with ideas. It is a postmodern manifesto in defense of semiotics as a universal approach to philosophy, science, society and politics. The metaphor of the title is meant to signal the breaking away from constraints on interpretations and methods. It polemically addresses minds well versed in the arcane and prolix discourse of semiotics as it developed mostly during the second half of the previous century. It also selectively focuses attention on those philosophers of the sign who hold views that “dialogically” inspired the two authors, most prominently among them Thomas A. Sebeok (1920-2001) whose memory and achievements this volume is emphatically meant to celebrate. Sebeok was an influential, albeit controversial, figure who molded and dominated this philosophical school of semiotics through his numerous publications, ubiquitous lecturing and masterful editing of a variety of American and international journals and series.

Although this book is published under the joint authorship of Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio, both from the Department of Linguistic Practices and Text Analysis at the University of Bari (Italy), the former is responsible for the greater portion of the volume. From information provided in the Preface (p.xxv), Petrilli alone is credited for approximately half of the material while Ponzio has authored (in Italian translated by Petrilli) about a quarter of it, the remaining quarter having been the results of their direct collaboration that is variously distributed in the volume. It certainly helped that Petrilli is both a native speaker of English and an expert in translation, a specialty she teaches at the University of Bari.

The preface (8 pages) and the introduction (30 pages) forcefully present the theoretical stands of the authors with respect to the main issues that various semiotic schools have addressed during the 20th century. They squarely position themselves against the tradition that is derived from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) -- a tradition which includes most of the European semiotic schools (or semiology) which primarily but not exclusively focus on language -- and they passionately endorse the theory of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who promoted a pan-semiotic vision of the universe according to which virtually everything is a sign, an approach they define as the “semiotics of interpretation” which they oppose to the “semiotics of decodification.” Sebeok’s authoritative voice is often invoked to comfort their discourse as it meanders “through the open network of signs,” as the subtitle of the book asserts.

Paul Bouissac