Cultural Semiotics - For A Cultural Perspective in Semiotics (PDFDrive)

S E M I O T I C S A N D P O P U L A R C U LT U R E
Cultural Semiotics
For a Cultural Perspective in Semiotics
ANNA MARIA LORUSSO

Cultural Semiotics
Semiotics and Popular Culture
Series Editor: Marcel Danesi
Written by leading figures in the interconnected fields of popular
culture, media, and semiotic studies, the book in this series aim to
show the contemporary relevance of cultural theory. Individual vol-
umes offer an exercise in unraveling the socio-psychological reasons
why certain cultural trends become popular. The series engages with
theory and technical trends to expose the subject matter clearly,
openly, and meaningfully.
Marcel Danesi is Professor of Semiotics and Anthropology at the
University of Toronto. Among his major publications are X-Rated! ; Of
Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things; Vico, Metaphor,
and The Origins of Language ; Cool: The Signs and Meanings of
Adolescence ; The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human
Life ; and Brands. He is Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica , the leading
journal in semiotics.
Titles:
The Objects of Affection: Semiotics and Consumer Culture,
by Arthur Asa Berger
Media Literacy and Semiotics,
by Elliot Gaines
The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s
Semiotic Theory,
by Aleksei Semenenko
Semiotics of Exile in Contemporary Chinese Film,
by Hong Zeng
The History of the Kiss! The Birth of Popular Culture,
by Marcel Danesi
Cultural Semiotics: For a Cultural Perspective in Semiotics,
by Anna Maria Lorusso
Cultural Semiotics
For a Cultural Perspective in
Semiotics
Anna Maria Lorusso
Palgrave
macmillan
CULTURAL SEMIOTICS
Copyright © Anna Maria Lorusso 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-54941-9
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ISBN 978-1-349-55775-2
E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–54699–9
DOI: 10.1057/9781137546999
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lorusso, Anna Maria.
Cultural semiotics : for a cultural perspective in semiotics / Anna Maria
Lorusso.
pages cm.—(Semiotics and popular culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Semiotics. 2. Culture. I. Title.

P99.L6418 2015
302.2—dc23 2015016211
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Contents
List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
Series Preface xi
Introduction 1
1 The Structuralist Perspective 21
2 Unity and Pluralism: The Theory of Jurij Lotman 67
3 Interpretation and Culture: Umberto Eco’s Theory 117
4 Ideas for an Archeological Semiotics 159
Notes 193
Bibliography 201
Index 213
This page intentionally left blank
Figures
1.1 The structural units of Oedipus’s myth 28

1.2 Barthes’s schema for connotation 35
1.3 The semiotic square of freedom in Madame Bovary 53
1.4 Young girl from HIV support group from Bulawayo.
Operational Center of Brussels. 59
1.5 Philomène and her daughter 59
1.6 Rubaya displaced camp in Masisi, North Kivu 60
1.7 MDR TB patient taking his Direct Observation Treatment
Short Course medication at the Nhlangano TB Ward
supported by MSF 61
1.8 Dressing of a Buruli ulcer plague 63
2.1 The spatial dynamics of cultural universes 77
3.1 Semantic componential analysis of some animals 122
3.2 The triadic structure of Peircian sign 128
3.3 A typology of modes of sign production 142
3.4 Guy Fawkes mask 148
3.5 The headless suit 154
Acknowledgments
I
would like to thank all the people who have made this work pos-
sible and have accompanied me in its writing. First Marcel Danesi
for the trust he gave me from the start. And then Cristina Demaria,
Stefano Traini, and Patrizia Violi who read the draft versions of this
book with great patience.
Series Preface
P
opular forms of entertainment have always existed. As he trav-
eled the world, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote
about earthy, amusing performances and songs that seemed odd
to him, but which were certainly very popular with common folk. He
saw these, however, as the exception to the rule of true culture. One
wonders what Herodotus would think in today’s media culture, where
his “exception” has become the rule. Why is popular culture so “pop-
ular”? What is psychologically behind it? What is it? Why do we hate
to love it and love to hate it? What has happened to so-called high cul-
ture? What are the “meanings” and “social functions” of current pop
culture forms such as sitcoms, reality TV programs, YouTube sites, and
the like?
These are the kinds of questions that this series of books, written by
experts and researchers in both popular culture studies and semiotics,
will broach and discuss critically. Overall, they will attempt to decode
the meanings inherent in spectacles, popular songs, coffee, video games,
cars, fads, and other “objects” of contemporary pop culture. They will
also take comprehensive glances at the relationship between culture and
the human condition. Although written by scholars and intellectuals,
each book will look beyond the many abstruse theories that have been
put forward to explain popular culture, so as to penetrate its origins,
evolution, and overall raison d’ ê tre human life, exploring the psychic
structures that it expresses and which make it so profoundly appeal-
ing, even to those who claim to hate it. Pop culture has been the driv-
ing force in guiding, or at leashing shaping, social evolution since the
Roaring Twenties, triggering a broad debate about art, sex, and “true
culture” that is still ongoing. This debate is a crucial one in today’s
global village where traditional canons of art and aesthetics are being
challenged as never before in human history.
xii ● Series Preface
The books are written in clear language and style so that readers of
all backgrounds can understand what is going in pop culture theory and
semiotics, and, thus ref lect upon current cultural trends. They have the
dual function of introducing various disciplinary attitudes and research
findings in a user-friendly fashion so that they can be used as texts
in colleges and universities, while still appeal to the interested general
reader. Ultimately, the goal of each book is to provide a part of a generic
semiotic framework for understanding the world we live in and proba-
bly will live in for the foreseeable future.
Marcel Danesi
University of Toronto
Introduction
A New Semiotics, or a Return to a Authentic Semiotics?

The idea of writing a book devoted to a cultural perspective in semiot-
ics may seem generic, overly ambitious, and perhaps even imperialistic.
Generic because you could well ask, what does “cultural” mean if not
everything we encompass as human beings: ambitious and imperialistic
because there are other disciplines that deal with the cultural aspects of
life using a programmatic approach, such as sociology, anthropology,
ethnography, and so forth.
In order to explain the project that is at the base of this book I would
like to make reference to one of the most traditional voices of linguistic
and semiotic knowledge: Saussure, who more than a century ago invited
everyone to study “the life of signs in the framework of social life.” I
propose, therefore, to outline a theoretical semiotic paradigm for an
effective study of the life of sense within the framework of social and
cultural life.
There have been many disciplines that have dealt with the life of
signs since Saussure’s times; many different types of linguistics—from
structuralist linguistics with its European origins, to Chomsky’s gen-
erative linguistics, to psycholinguistics, ethnolinguistics, linguistic
anthropology, and so on—and many theories and forms of knowledge
other than the verbal (kinesics, proxemics).
In the meantime, many different forms of research on social life
have been refined and differentiated: there are not just the Anglo-Saxon
sociological, anthropological, ethnographic schools, which are now true
institutions in their own right, but also, more recently, research cen-
ters and disciplines such as cultural studies, visual studies, and memory
studies. In other words, there is a rich and diverse universe of studies
that does not refer directly to semiotics, but yet analyzes some of the
same objects, or at the very least, the object that lies at the heart of this
book: culture.
2 ● Cultural Semiotics
Given this picture, the book aims at illustrating how a semiotic

approach to culture can differ from a cultural, sociological, or anthropo-
logical one, how it can open a dialogue with these viewpoints, and how
it can contribute to the creation of a new one. In certain cases, I may
highlight that there are no substantial differences between a semiotic
approach and, for example, some anthropological approaches, but rather
convergences. I could not carry out a critical review of all the sociolog-
ical and anthropological theories that can contribute to the semiotic
knowledge’s advance, in the space of these 200 pages. Moreover, I am
neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist! I know these disciplines
only as an “external” scholar. But I would like to dialogue with them
from a semiotic point of view (one that I will explain over the following
pages), with the hope to prove both how semiotics can “match” with
other scientific paradigms (and what semiotics has to offer them) and
how, in certain cases, it shares with other scientific paradigms assump-
tions, practices, and authors of reference.
I must make it clear that the reflections I propose here do not point
to a fracture or tension with the traditional semiotic paradigm (osten-
sibly more focused on signs, texts, codes, and so on). On the contrary,
this book aims to develop these subjects in a direction that has always
been present, even if not truly thematized. It is for this very reason that
I will be referring to some “classics” of the discipline, such as those pro-
duced by Saussure, Peirce, Eco, Lotman, and Barthes. In a nutshell, the
semiotics of culture that I will outline here is not a new kind of semiot-
ics, but rather an attempt to restore this branch of study to its authentic
form, in terms of both critical and social content (which, as we have
already seen, dates back to Saussure). Too often we are forced to look
at or hear “versions” of semiotics that, to me, seem to be pure parodies:
a pseudo-scientific discipline, objectifying by nature, that is focused
entirely on codes and verbal language and restricted to its “linguistic
turn,” and concentrating solely on grammar and systems (according to
an old idea of structuralism) rather than the processes and practices
within which meaning, in its multiplicity of languages, exists. A dis-
cipline, in other words, that is abstract and removed from the way the
world actually works. On the contrary, in this book I would like to out-
line a semiotics that—even moving from a textual perspective—has the
tools (theoretical and methodological) to capture “meaning in action,”
the social practices used for managing meaning. This will also be the
reason why “my” semiotics will turn to be very close and often tangent
to anthropology: the idea of “meaning in action” is probably the core of
both these scientific fields.
Introduction ● 3
As such, I will not choose between the two apparently alternative

models of “semiotics” and “semiology,” with the term “semiotics” refer-
ring to the logical-philosophical discipline (as per C. S. Peirce) studying
semiosis, and “semiology” as the linguistic-structural discipline study-
ing signs as a part of social life (as per Saussure).
As I have already mentioned, this book will tackle semiosis as a social
institution, continuing Saussure’s work, taking into account the social
life of the signs, but I will also be questioning– as Peirce suggests—the
logic of meaning, that is, the dynamics of interpretation, the interpreta-
tive habits, and the regularization through which semiosis lives.
From my point of view, there is no advantage in setting out semiotics
and semiology as two opposing factions, and I will use the term “semi-
otics” simply because it is now more commonly utilized than “semiol-
ogy” (which is prevalent only in the French tradition). I must, instead,
recognize the compatibility between the two, and their potential for
mutual enhancement, just as Umberto Eco has aimed to do with his
theory of semiotics (as we will see in chapter 3).
A cultural perspective in semiotics is not, in any case, a new one,
even in the Anglo-Saxon world.
In 1977, Thomas Sebeok used the expression “Semiotics of Culture”
in an article that summarizes the research in which he found that the
anthropological circles of the United Kingdom and United States had
taken on a “semiotic sensitivity.” Sebeok, at that time, believed firmly
in this convergence of anthropology and semiotics, and viewed J. L.
Peacock’s embrace of symbolic anthropology and Clifford Geertz’s
interpretative anthropology in the same light. He quoted Turner and
his “comparative symbology,” and Singer, who makes explicit reference
to “semiotic anthropology.” However, it is clear that Sebeok’s main the-
oretical reference is the Tartu school (I will go into more detail on this
in chapter 2).
In the view of this group [the Tartu school], culture is a universe cre-
ated by a plurality of mutually interacting and mutually supportive sign
systems which may be studied from the point of view of the definition
and structuring of different types of cultural texts, the latter term being
given a broad interpretation similar to Geertz’s use in his discussion of
“deep play.” (Sebeok, 1977, p. 122)
As early as 1977, Sebeok already believed that the semiotics of cul-

ture should not favor language because all sign systems are of equal
importance. So the point is not whether one should choose between the
structural-linguistic approach and the pragmatic-philosophical one, but

that both these legacies should be taken into account:
[There is] the necessity of creating a semiotic theory of culture born of

the marriage between the francophonic semiological tradition of first-
order analysis of semiotic codification, stemming from the work of F.
de Saussure, and the anglo-phonic semiotic tradition, following Locke
and Peirce, of second-order analysis of the interweaving of semiosis and
the fabric of social order [see Jakobson’s fascinating account (p. 36) of
general lines of development in semiotics]. The Moscow-Tartu school has
shown itself to be a leader in this respect. (p. 123)
According to Sebeok, semiotics is essential if we wish to achieve what

he calls first-order analysis: the analysis of codes and structures that
lie at the root of all meaningful exchanges. In the first-order analysis,
the strength of the semiotic method is insuperable. But we can’t stop at
this level; we should have only an abstract and partial knowledge. After
the first-order analysis, it is essential to continue in the direction of
meaning in action. As Anglo-Saxon anthropology has, rightly, shown,
a knowledge that is detached from reality, too heavily focused on codes
and too little on actual semiotic performances, is insufficient. The
contributions made by linguistic anthropologists such as Alessandro
Duranti or Elinor Ochs have largely bridged and overcome the abstrac-
tion of certain linguistic and vetero-semiotic positions. According to
Sebeok (who, e.g., is very fond of Geertz’s proposal to always read texts
in context, as opposed to viewing them as abstract codes), from a very
strict semiotic point of view, the way to avoid the abstraction is to com-
bine Peirce and structuralism.
This combination—of structuralism and Peirce’s teachings, along
with the work by the Tartu school—is the inspiration for this book, and
it marks the continuity between my work and the semiotics of Umberto
Eco (the most significant inf luence here). With a semiotics of culture of
this kind, I think we can look to anthropology and study together the
meaning in action.
The expression “Semiotics of Culture” was rediscovered in the late
1970s and early 1980s, and used by Irene Portis-Winner (1982), who,
in a central consideration of the relationships between semiotics and
culture, proposes what she called a comparison between Western and
Eastern semiotics, offering a major bibliographical review of what the
phrase “semiotics of culture” has meant since the early 1980s. In doing
so she draws a great many parallels with anthropology.
Introduction ● 5
Her work also showed a particular interest in the Tartu school.

By following a fil rouge that starts with the Prague circle and leads to
Lotman, Portis-Winner recognizes the primacy of textuality, though
she does criticize what she saw as Ricoeur’s and Geertz’s generic exten-
sion of the word “text.”
Lotman’s way of conceiving the text as a “cultural” one makes it pos-
sible, according to Portis-Winner, to overcome some of the quicksand
that has blocked semiotic research:
- the langue /parole dichotomy, because no text is the pure expression of

a system, or purely static
- linguistic dominance, because the texts are generated by various semi-
otic systems
- the dichotomy between the proximity of the text and the inf luence it
has on context. (Portis-Winner, 1982, p. 55)
The specific features (which I approve of almost entirely) that the semi-
otics of culture as presented by Portis-Winner, taking as their starting
point the lessons of the Tartu school, should have, are:
1. a focus on the correlation between sign systems as opposed to

individual signs
2. a focus on the text-context relationship
3. the presumption that there are constants within a given culture
4. the assumption that it is necessary to take into account the struc-
tural relationships of a text (a myth, for example) with other texts
that are part of a similar group (for example, other myths of the
same type). (pp. 60, 61)
It is evident that, according to these premises, a semiotics of cul-

ture derives its identity not from the substantial, specific features of
its objects, but rather from the choices of pertinentization (that which
we make relevant in any given field) made by this analytic approach.
The pivotal point, for the semiotician, is the correlation (as we will see)
between expressive elements and contents—a link that is not fixed but
submitted to evolutions, changes, interpretations. Therefore, as sug-
gested by this book’s title, what I would like to focus on is a certain,
particular “cultural” perspective: a specific, semiotic take on culture. In
this context, culture is not, of course, a given object, a concrete entity
with a defined ontological nature, the sum of various types of knowl-
edge (uses, traditions, language, memory) or a given set of particular
defining traits. I rather think that culture is a profoundly malleable and

relative entity, whose meaning changes depending on the subject that
observes and inter-defines it; it is something that is differential (I will
return to this term in chapter 1).
Semiosis, in fact, lives through relationships and differences, and
the specificity of the semiotic point of view lies in its capacity to cap-
ture and analyze the network of relationships and differences in which
meaning is given. A cultural semiotic perspective therefore requires a
specific focus on the systemic and contextual relationships through which
meaning is bestowed.
A direction not entirely unlike this one has been suggested in recent
years by Arjun Appadurai. In Modernity at Large (1996) he separates a nom-
inal usage of the word “culture” and an adjectival usage of the same word,
displaying unease when faced with a substantialist approach to culture.
I find myself frequently troubled by the word culture as a noun but

centrally attached to the adjectival form of the word, that is, cultural.
When I ref lect on why this is so, I realize that much of the problem
with the noun form has to do with its implication that culture is some
kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysi-
cal. . . . Implying a mental substance, the noun culture appears to priv-
ilege the sort of sharing, agreeing, and bounding that f ly in the face of
the facts of unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles,
and to discourage attention to the worldviews and agency of those who
are marginalized or dominated. Viewed as a physical substance, culture
begins to smack of any variety of biologisms, including race, which we
have certainly outgrown as scientific categories. . . .
If culture as a noun seems to carry associations with some sort of sub-
stance in ways that appear to conceal more than they reveal, cultural the
adjective moves one into a realm of differences, contrasts, and compari-
sons that is more helpful. This adjectival sense of culture, which builds
on the context-sensitive, contrast-centered heart of Saussurean linguis-
tics, seems to me one of the virtues of structuralism that we have tended
to forget in our haste to attack it for its ahistorical, formal, binary, men-
talist, and textualist associations.” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 12)
Like Appadurai, I believe that viewing culture as a substantial activ-

ity may be misleading, as it causes us to lose sight of the fact that the
world is made up of cultural differences.
Instead, I will try to be even more radical than the aforementioned
anthropologist and choose to view “culture” in a strictly adverbial sense:
that is, we will study a number of texts culturally. The impression I
Introduction ● 7
have, an impression that acts as a leitmotiv for the book, is that a cul-
tural point of view is the only one worth talking about. Culture is not
an essence, and cultural differences are not such because they share a
certain, specific nature. All reality is also cultural. What counts is the
way in which we look at reality, and I think that it is crucial to look at
the world from a cultural perspective.
This approach aims to perceive the objects it studies (be they verbal,
iconic, multimedia texts) in terms of their cultural function and their
systemic correlations. The main, most relevant question at the beginning
of such a book is not what does cultural semiotics study, but how can
we observe culture from the semiotic point of view, or semiosis from a
cultural point of view.
This implies a problem of methodology, which, for me, is crucial. It
is, in my opinion, methodology that sets semiotics apart from other,
“adjacent” approaches.
That which differentiates the semiotic approach from that of cul-
tural studies is clearly illustrated in the following ref lection by Mieke
Bal. That which Bal presents as being specific to cultural analysis is the
perfect description of that which semiotics has to avoid; the opposite
of what semiotics should be. In order to separate cultural analysis from
anthropology, Bal, in the introduction to Travelling Concepts, says:
The field of cultural analysis is not delimited, because the traditional

delimitations must be suspended; by selecting an object, you question a
field. Nor are its methods sitting in a toolbox, waiting to be applied; they
too are part of exploration. You don’t apply one method; you conduct a
meeting between several, a meeting in which the object participates, so
that, together, object and methods can become a new, not firmly delin-
eated, field. (2002, p. 4)
This is the point: the semiotics of culture, like the cultural studies
invoked by Bal, does not function within a clearly delineated field.
However, unlike cultural analysis, it does have a method, a toolbox,
of which it has full command. These tools are not restrictive, they are
chief ly instruments that the analyst knows how and when to use accord-
ing to that which he/she encounters. It is therefore correct to view anal-
ysis as a meeting, but in order to make the meeting even more fruitful,
we need the right tools to help us find a direction and facilitate the
pertinentization.
Precisely because I believe that semiotics is characterized by an
essential methodological component (it is not a mere theory or a pure
philosophy, but rather a theory-for-analysis), many sections of this

volume conclude with an analytical example. When I define a the-
oretical paradigm, I also suggest a possible analytical application of
the same.
During these analyses, I aim to highlight what each theoretical par-
adigm, on an analytical level, allows us to see better: if the structuralist
paradigm allows us to analyze some aspects of the texts, the theories
of Umberto Eco will allow you to understand other features, while the
approach taken by the Tartu School reveals yet more analytical possi-
bilities, and so on.
The result should be a multifaceted framework, whose meaning lies
in correlation: the “semiotic lessons” that are presented in this book are
not alternatives to one another but are related, and they must be if we
are to gain a deeper understanding of semiosis’ cultural dimension.
In any case, before we start, I would like to clarify a number of more
specific goals and the epistemological assumptions of the research I will
be conducting.
Epistemological Assumptions
Let me now take a closer look at the directions this book’s research will
take, along with some of the main assumptions and implications upon
which it will be based. My path is essentially based on the European
“masters” of semiotics—therefore the lesson of structural linguistics,
Prague phonology, French structuralism, Umberto Eco’s semiotics, the
school of Tartu—a ref lection crossed and enlivened, however, by con-
frontation with the American philosophy of C. S. Peirce.
First, in this book the category of relationship will play a central role,
as a tribute to the structuralist heritage to which I will pay particular
attention in chapter 1. In order to take a semiotic approach to culture, I
believe it is crucial to focus on the relationships the texts have with the
system to which they belong.
We know that, initially, semiotics (at least in its textual structural-
ism) defined itself through its refusal of context, its urge to study texts
in and of themselves, in their self-consistency, and with the firm belief
that they already “contained” everything that was needed to under-
stand them. It is, however, evident that this statement of principle at
the time was a justified reaction to the historicism and psychologism
that was dominating European literary studies. Today, many decades
later, we can once again reflect on the relational, as opposed to the self-
sufficient, nature of signs and texts.
Introduction ● 9
I will, in a nutshell, try to rethink the old text/context dichotomy and

reevaluate (after “extradition” of the context from the semiotic field) the
contextual pole, in which a text is inserted, from which it takes its iden-
tity and with which it forms a system. In doing that, I will propose a
general perspective on culture, in the way Foucault uses “general” in the
early pages of Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), to distinguish totalizing
types of knowledge (which claim to explain everything, often through a
sum of elements) from general ones (that do not fool themselves in being
able to explain everything, but only sets of comparable phenomena,
series as Foucault calls them; see chapter 4). This assumption goes hand
in hand with one of the most important consequences of this study: by
having a general vocation and not restricting itself to a few single texts
(isolating them from the whole, as a scientist would do with a phenome-
non under observation), a cultural approach in semiotics implies a focus
on the correlation logic connecting texts and codes inside a system. My
focus will be on the relationships that make it possible for a text to build
a cultural context for itself and move within it; the logic that, in other
words, makes a certain type of text compatible with a certain culture,
while excluding others. Cultures are complex systems of compatibility
and incompatibility, sets of series that every now and then collect and
combine some elements because they also exclude and remove others.
Suddenly, something that was unthinkable becomes possible; some-
thing that was normal becomes intolerable. How and why does this
happen? Why, for example, are some words suddenly deemed politically
incorrect and are therefore rendered “unspeakable”? Why was classical
music kept so entirely separate from jazz for so many years before, all of
a sudden, the two languages became compatible? Why are clothes for
dogs now considered to be entirely normal and it is not thought strange
that there are dog sitters, dog clinics, and specialized veterinary clinics?
There are many more examples.
Semiotics can and has to ref lect on social phenomena of this kind,
asking itself what makes them comparable and compatible in a given
cultural universe, and what, instead, makes other semiotic expressions
incompatible with them.
From this semio-cultural point of view, the problems of ideologies
and memories become central. Both ideologies and memories are sys-
tems that create or ref lect compatibilities/incompatibilities, or rather,
they are systems that by reflecting incompatibilities and exclusions
open or pave the way for certain possible paths or particular combina-
tions. Rather than immediately considering how these selections occur,
we will return to both issues (what an ideology is from a semiotic point
of view and what a theorist of semiotics may find interesting about

cultural memory) later on in the book. At this point I would like only
to highlight how memories and ideologies are among the most signifi-
cant mirrors of the composite and relational nature of cultures. Just as
in a puzzle, some pieces of memories and some sets of values may go
together, while others may not, and it is crucial for us to understand
why this occurs. Let us consider, just as an example, the ongoing debate
over the exclusion of certain religious symbols or signs from contexts in
which they had not been problematic a short time before. The European
Parliament prohibits the presence of the crucifix in Italian schools, the
Swiss court prohibits the building of minarets in the national land-
scape. What at a certain point makes Christian and European culture
clash and no longer overlap? Why are they no longer considered coex-
tensive? In the case of minarets: Is the architectural incompatibility a
general one, or is it limited to the landscape? Is there any systematic
relationship between these episodes and other “series” in our contem-
porary world?
From my point of view, these are authentically semiotic issues, since
they deal with the translatability of meanings, the negotiability of common
symbols, and the development of networks of shared knowledge, and I
believe that they may represent a broad field of action for our researches.
Semiotics, thus, recovers all the explicit critical , anti- ideological and
unmasking significance of a certain tradition (Marxian first, and then
Barthesian), which then merged (for the most part) with other theoreti-
cal paradigms, such as the aforementioned cultural studies.
In order to assess such affinities, incompatibilities, or complemen-
tarities between cultures, I will analyze and identify the series of forms
recurring in a number of given cultures, the languages they use, and the
mutual translations that occur between these languages in each culture.
I have highlighted the term forms because the semiotic approach cannot
be reduced to a simple analysis of content. According to semiotics, the
main point is always the identification of relationships (my key term,
as I have already stated) between expressive forms and content forms.
In other words, it is not about looking at purely formal features, nor
detecting simple thematic units (the recurring of a certain subject or
value), but about finding a real semiotic system, which, as such, has
features of both form and content .
These relationships are, of course, changeable, historical, and relative.
Cultures are, by definition, not stable systems but dynamic and evolu-
tionary ones. This semiotics of culture will try to take into account the
evolutionary logic of systems (as we will see in chapter 4), by considering
Introduction ● 11
diachrony as an internal dimension of synchronic states, both in terms

of memory and of trends and possibilities for future development. To
this effect, the semiotics of culture is also a study of the possible devel-
opmental trends of a system, that is, futures prepared and made prob-
able by its internal logic. Of course, I do not believe semiotics to be in
any way prophetic, but I do believe that it may provide us with a certain
(higher or lower) probability of particular developments, taking into
account the scope, systematic nature, and modelling strength of cer-
tain typologies. It is for this reason, then, that I choose to avoid tying
myself to a rigidly synchronic approach and a view focused entirely on
the logic of the system. From my point of view, systems are the result
of processes, and the most interesting challenge for a semiotician is to
try to understand the systematization of ongoing processes, the regular-
ization of some of them (the most dominant ones), and “the fixation of
beliefs”—to quote C. S. Peirce.
By trying to do all the above (researching the correlation logic that
abounds in different cultures, the dynamics of compatibility/incompati-
bility that characterize them, and the evolutionary and transformative
logic that moves them), I will assume a position that I would like to sum
up as a structuralist, externalist, and textualist .
First, as we will see in several points of this book, I believe that
culture has a systematic form. Culture—understood as that indefin-
able and changeable mass of practices, customs, texts, individual and
social expressions, habits, and so on—lives on and creates dependencies,
structuring locally consistent amalgams that, as already stated, create
inclusions and exclusions. Systematicity, then, is a self-organizational
tendency of cultural life. Despite heterogeneity, dispersion, contradic-
tory aspects, and general entropy, culture—at a local level, so divided
by zone, area, and definite selection—tends to find consistency, check
dispersion, and structure itself. Regardless of how and where cultures
emerge, they acquire identity and autonomy precisely by establishing
internal relationships, producing redundancies and creating interdepen-
dencies. Cultural units aggregate to form cultural systems ; they live in a
state of redundancy and continuous differentiation that creates, on the
one hand, relationships of homogeneity and, on the other hand, relation-
ships of distinction . We can talk about culture when a series of features
“creates a system” among them, that is, when a series of cultural units,
stylistic elements, and morphological features recurs (also in different,
distant spaces and times) and displays aspects of homogeneity while, at
the same time, highlighting differences with other combinations. There
is no culture in the chaotic and schizophrenic emergence of pure vital
energies: in order to become and be perceived as such, cultures must

show and disclose redundancies and lines of consistency. They must
weave networks and forge paths, as we will see in detail in chapter 2 ,
where we will look at the legacy of the Tartu school.
Made up of threads (paths of consistency, recurring themes and
forms, isotopic redundancies) of differing lengths, both in temporal-
diachronic terms (there are more or less long-lasting cultural features,
e.g. Catholicism has been around for about 2,000 years, whereas pau-
perism lasted two centuries) and extensive-geographical terms (to give
another religious example, Protestants are geographically much more
numerous than the Amish), cultures cross, combine with other paths,
and, then, create different patterns from time to time. Thus, the “image”
of a culture and the pattern that it shows, depends on the interests and
the pertinencies of the observer. We can examine the cultures present in
New York city today and see the city’s multiculturalism, its spreading
localisms, the fear of its people deviating from an accepted standard,
and so on, or choose to carry out a closer examination of one of the
several cultural groups living there, such as the Mexican community,
and consider its various components (those that are radically foreign
and deaf to US culture, and those that, on the contrary, are perfectly
functionalized and integrated within it). Alternatively we can focus on
a New York family and see the different cultures found within it (differ-
ent generational, religious, political, and professional cultures). In each
of these cases, by focusing in increasingly greater detail (from the whole
city through to a given community or a specific family), we detect dif-
ferent networks with various threads and knots, which provide different
general views. Using one case, we could develop a general ref lection on
new urban ways of life, while with another, we could provide a general
ref lection on the Mexican culture in the context of immigration, while
the last case could provide the basis for a ref lection on the pluralism of
our society. There would be common features, but between different
series of cultural phenomena.
Culture as such does not exist. We talk about forms of culture, which
are local networks of interpretations, habits, and values, which are not
necessarily conscious choices for those who adopt them. Even if cultural
choices and cultural habits are often not deliberate choices, they are
nevertheless “visible,” tangible, in the sense that they are not abstract,
like an interior set of values or ideals. Cultures represent a system of
common and implicit beliefs that, somehow, have a social circulation
and therefore a manifestation . As I will say several times in this book,
semiosis and culture are characterized by a constitutive externalism .
Introduction ● 13
By using this term I mean that the culture I consider from a semiotic
point of view is not limited to a system of values, ideals, and knowledge
expressing the “spirit of the times,” but rather it expresses itself and
can be seen in a series of processes that give substance to culture, consti-
tute it. These processes—social and not mental, intersubjective and not
individual—can be observed, and are, therefore, semiotic, finding an
expressive substance in which they are made manifest. This way, through
this manifestation in expressive substances, culture has a social circula-
tion and communicates —values, identities, knowledge, passions—and
for this reason it is not “pure spirit.” It “externalizes” itself and assumes
sharable forms.
I will come back to this point, but I would like to clarify it from the
outset. By talking about externalism, I do not want to reduce culture
to a tangible asset, particularly as all culture is by no means material.
Even UNESCO had to admit, in 2006, that the Cultural Heritage of
Humanity also includes intangible assets, such as dialects and all dying
languages. What I would like to emphasize is that culture is always
intersubjective and mediated, and even when it is intangible (as with
a language or a folkloric tradition) it is, nevertheless, externalized
(communicable, socially shared, and observable). It is something that
emerges from the minds of people (hence the term “externalism”) to
circulate socially and stabilize.
Umberto Eco (see chapter 3) had already gone down this route by
introducing the idea that semiosis works not actually on the basis of
signs but rather on cultural units, which circulate and are continuously
available for new interpretations. This availability to reuse makes cul-
tural units tangible and “handy.” Writes Eco:
In fact we can “touch” interpretants (i.e. we can empirically test a cul-

tural unit), for culture continuously translates signs into other signs, and
definitions into other definitions, words into icons, icons into ostensive
signs, and ostensive signs into new definition, new definitions into prop-
ositional functions, propositional functions into exemplifying sentences
and so on; in this way it proposes to its members an uninterrupted chain
of cultural units composing other cultural units, and thus translating
and explaining them. (1975, Eng. transl., p. 71)
Conceived in this way—as the ever renegotiable and revisable result

of processes of manifestation, communication, translation of social
circulation—culture neutralizes any presumed separability between
subjects and actions, actions and representations, texts and practices.
Texts, indeed, are not given objects, but the outcome of a complex cul-
tural negotiation, while practices are not “pure” experiences but are
instead conditioned and formed by complex textual and cognitive mod-
els. As many studies, including anthropological and cognitive ones,
continue to maintain (see Bruno Latour, Edwin Hutchins, and others),
the world structure is much more relational than the description given
by a dualistic view that separates texts and practices, with the dynam-
ics of meaning absolutely distributed. The action does not belong only
to the subject acting on the object, but occurs within a network where
the different actantial functions of subject, object, opponent, and so on
may be played by different entities, with hybrid results that challenge
the rigid boundary between the world of nature and the world of cul-
ture, the objective world and the subjective one, the internal world and
the external one.1
Within this externalist and continuist paradigm shared with other
disciplines, semiotics has a methodological specificity, which, in my
opinion, is its textual nature. Of course, it is necessary here to clarify
what I understand as “texts.”
In this book, I will adopt a rather broad concept of text and, more
importantly, a dynamic notion of what a text is. First, I do not believe
that texts are something that exist as such in the world, but rather that
they are something the world, culture, recognizes as such and defines
in a specific way, depending on its adopted values. A text is something
that is perceived and defined by a culture and/or a given society as a
meaningful unit, which provides a particular, accessible expression and
a particular, correlate meaning, with a particular intention of meaning.
In this sense, we can describe a novel, a work of art, an advert, an object,
an architectural project, a museum, a ceremony, a piece of furniture,
and so on, as “texts.” The attribution of meaning, implicit in the recog-
nition of something as a text, is the most variable: a few centuries ago
one would never have considered that a still life could be a text, nor was
it possible to think that a handicraft tradition could represent a cultural
asset to be protected.
Second, as already stated earlier, I believe that there is a radical net-
work linking texts and practices, behaviors and actions (in chapter 4, I
will also consider Michael Silverstein position on this very matter); not
only in the sense that texts, inadvertently or otherwise, strongly con-
dition practices (offering patterns, models, and stereotypes), but also
insofar as practices, when they assume a social value (thus, sharing, reg-
ularity, and persistence), create texts: functional messages, self-descrip-
tions, regulations, spaces, tools, discussions, records, and so forth.
Introduction ● 15
Social life produces traces, and these textual traces are what I would
call the occasions of semiotics of culture—the object and the resource
for which semiotics has an attested, mature, and epistemologically con-
sistent methodology.
Starting from these textual objects, semiotics can study the way in
which they create systems, the series they belong to, the combinations
they create, the relationships connecting them, and the way they pro-
vide those that use them with an identity. From a cultural perspective,
semiotics is not so much interested in the analysis of single texts, as
interested in the dynamics of the system in which they function.
In short, to give an example, if we study a phenomenon like nation-
alism or populism, the object of our analysis is a system of correlations
between languages, and not simply the individual speeches made by
politicians, or the institutional communications, or reports on these
phenomena by the media, or the video records of certain collective
ceremonies, or the new symbols developed by leaders. What I am
interested in is how all these elements (often textual elements) corre-
late, how they come together to form a coherent system. These single
elements represent the starting point of the semiotic analysis, which
allows me to develop an overview of what I am really interested in:
the system of culture. Here we see a point of difference and confron-
tation with other “humanist” paradigms. Anthropology, for exam-
ple (I am thinking about different anthropological schools, in some
respects very far apart: linguistic anthropology, with such scholars as
Alessandro Duranti, John Gumperz, or Elinor Ochs; cognitive anthro-
pology with such scholars as A. Kimball Romney, Benjamin Colby,
Edwin Hutchins; but also interpretive anthropology, with Clifford
Geertz and James Clifford), has developed a strong competence in
microanalysis and, with its detailed descriptions and its “local” and
close analysis of interaction, gives a crucial contribution to semiot-
ics. These scholars share many theoretical assumptions with semiot-
ics (the central role of language, the importance of context, the idea
of language as activity, the centrality of the category of “network,”
etc.), but they do not seem to me to be always focused on the correla-
tions between the different forms of culture—forms of expression and
forms of content , patterns of behaviors and patterns of textual narra-
tives, visual models and emotional models, and so on. The semiotic
approach, from its part, looks at the portion of reality in question as a
text field , with narrative structures, enunciation, figurative redundan-
cies. Through this “textual gaze” it aims to identify general systems
of correlations, focusing more on coherent structures that cross the
different languages included there than on the microdynamics inter-

nal to the single discursive practices.
The general system of correlations that each culture represents and
enacts, and which arises from a regard on reality as a complex multi-
medial text , made of many speeches and languages, seems to me to be
something quite specific to the semiotic focus in studying culture.
I want to clarify this point right now because I want to avoid two
extreme positions, which do not correspond to my thought: a position
that perhaps belongs more to continental Europe, which sees in semi-
otics a strong specificity that differs from other disciplines, however
similar, and a perhaps more Anglo-Saxon position that somehow “neu-
tralizes” the specificity of semiotics finding in certain forms of anthro-
pological and sociological analysis similar practices of research. As far
as I am concerned, I believe that the overlap between semiotics and
many anthropological researches is very significant (I return to men-
tion authors—even they are very different from one another—who are
all essential interlocutors for semiotics today: Clifford Geertz, Edwin
Hutchins, Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, Robin Wagner Pacifici,
Michael Silverstein, to name a few), but I also believe that the history
of the two different disciplines has produced different practices, which
we can’t ignore and we have to identify, compare, and put in dialogue.
Semiotics, especially European semiotics, has developed a very strong
competence in textual analysis, which I believe may be useful for other
disciplines. Anthropology, for its part, has developed a strong exper-
tise in observational practices, of contexts and interactions, from which
semiotics has yet to learn. Semiotics of culture, which is the heart of this
book, has structured his program around the study of systematic cor-
relations and mutual translations between different languages, focusing
first of all on cultural texts. Moreover, as a form of semiotic, it treats the
portion of reality in exam as a textual whole, modelling it through cat-
egories that derive from textual analysis (we will see at the end of chap-
ter 1 the narrative level, the enunciative level, the figurative level, and
so on). The role of “textual legacy” is thus very strong in our approach
to culture, because it works at two levels: it pushes us to consider first
of all the texts of a given culture and it pushes us to consider culture as
a text, focusing on the correlations that give coherence to culture.
Anthropology—it seems to me—gives less importance to both these
aspects: the forms of cultural textualization and the problem of transla-
tions and correlations internal to the systems of cultures, working more
in depth than in extension, and it is less focused on texts than on prac-
tices compared to semiotics.
Introduction ● 17
This way of considering semiosis as something systemic and made

by correlations, besides going beyond any principle of atomism and
self-sufficiency of texts (since the cultural dimension derives from
the mutual relationships of texts), also invalidates the equation texts-
representations. Indeed, I am not interested in texts because of what
they represent (genre stereotypes, narrative and social roles, expec-
tations), but rather for what they “do.” By looking at them from a
cultural point of view, I believe that texts shape practices : they offer
models of intelligibility and action, strengthen or weaken values,
normalize or stigmatize behaviors, represent or summarize complex
reasoning, make it possible to memorize some things and gradually
forget others, condemn or consent to ways of life, legislate and give
instructions, translate and mediate conf licts. In short, they enter the
world of social life as protagonists, acting on reality and interacting
with it.
For this reason, a study of texts in terms of representations and the
analysis of content is not sufficient. What I propose is a study of the
“cultural effects” of texts, which is not a study of their fruition, but
rather an observation of the systemic and long-term conditioning they
produce within a certain system by interacting with one another. A text
does not remain static, surrounded by the wealth of its contents, instead
it circulates and interferes with the surrounding world.
The Book’s Path

In order to discuss all these issues, I have divided this book into
four chapters. The first three have a similar structure: a theoretical-
methodological question at their heart, a “tutelary father” as a semi-
otic historical reference, and a more applied final section that aims to
test out the developed theoretical perspective on actual texts. The final
chapter is a conclusion of sorts. It poses a theoretical-methodological
question, with a “tutelary father,” but does not conclude with an applied
analyses; instead, it contains a number of conclusive remarks regarding
the relationship between semiotics, text, practices, culture.
With all this, I do not claim to deal with each central issue of semi-
otics, nor prematurely build a small pantheon of references to the semi-
otics of culture. However, I would like to focus on those schools of
semiotics and semiotics references that are crucial to understanding
culture, as well as providing a number of theoretical priorities. I will
call these priorities “vocations,” by which I mean natural tendencies.
Indeed, I believe that the semiotics of culture has
● a structural vocation (chapter 1),

● a systemic and translational vocation (chapter 2),
● an encyclopedic vocation (chapter 3),
● an archeological and normative vocation (chapter 4).
Structural vocation refers to the aforementioned idea that culture

tends to organize itself through oppositions and differences. In chap-
ter 1, I will start with L é vi-Strauss, moving rapidly onto the structur-
alist narrative theories of the 1970s. At the heart of my reflection is
the idea that culture and meaning tend to organize themselves in a
structural, differential, contrastive, and stratified way. From this point
of view, the lesson of structuralism is, therefore, relieved of its meta-
physical burden and freed from the schematizing rigidities into which it
has been translated. This newly empowered form renders it obligatory,
thanks mainly to its heuristic effectiveness, and its range of critical and
revelatory tools. The category of code, often stiffened and simplified,
is recovered in all its productivity as a tool with which to detect the
regularities, normalizations, and conventionalizations to which social
meaning is subjected.
Systemic and translational vocation refers to the tendency of culture
toward self-organization. It is clearly a consequence of, and almost a
variation on, the theme of structurality. It is no accident that L é vi-
Strauss already saw system and structure as going hand in hand.
However, thanks to the lesson of the aforementioned Tartu schools, we
can see how this systemic nature displays a number of features that sim-
ple structurality did not detect, such as the mutual functionalization
of cultural bodies. Culture is like a living system and this demands a
functional logic: the cultural parts have been understood as “organs” of
a system. The observation of cultural processes makes this functional
logic very clear: cultures are systems characterized by the continuous
functionalization and refunctionalization of texts, objects, and places.
The refunctionalization practices are predominantly those of real trans-
lation , through which something that was outside a system is brought
into it and given a meaning and a role.
The encyclopaedic vocation is that of a kind of semiotics that does not
consider meaning as a closed system, a grammar, and a dictionary, but
rather as an open, mobile, and net-like system, in which meanings are
always given locally and are always open to interpretation. In this net
of meanings, the terms text and context are not proper, they cannot be
distinguished since that which can be viewed as a text from one stand-
point (e.g., a handbook for a certain period in history) can be regarded
Introduction ● 19
from another point of view as the context or intertext, for instance, of

an ideological lexicon. In this case, the theoretical reference is Umberto
Eco’s theory, which uses the notion of encyclopedia as the pivot of its
semiotic theory.
Finally, the archeological and normative vocation . We use the term
“archeology” in a Foucauldian sense (indeed, Foucault will be the main
theoretical reference of this chapter) to highlight the importance of a
cultural investigation taking into account the transformational dimen-
sion of meaning and the palimpsestual nature of any discursive forma-
tion. Culture is memory, and each discursive formation has inside itself
a memory of what went before. It then creates mobile, partial, and inter-
ested archives, which, from a semiotic point of view, are to be opened,
analyzed and enlightened, not because there is an innocent origin of
sense at the bottom, but because there is always a past, a precedent, for
what is given. Culture is almost never original and, for this reason, it
must be unmasked. Moreover, in this never-ending transformational
dynamic, culture normalizes some of its expressions and marginalizes
others, establishing, therefore, paths of regularization. The logic of this
processes of normalization emerges only by tracking down the more rel-
evant paths, enlightening their inflections, selections, narcotizations,
and thematizations, which, while possibly unintentional, are always
“interested.”
As I mentioned earlier, three of these chapters will end with a case
analysis. By using these concrete examples I aim to identify the value
and the limits of the theoretical paradigms discussed in the preced-
ing pages, demonstrating what the theories outlined teach us about the
texts, while highlighting those aspects that cannot be understood.
I am convinced that only through the critical examination of the
heuristic value of the theories discussed can we develop the theory itself.
In semiotics, theory and analysis are not separate but both fully func-
tional, with the legitimacy of one (the theory) measured solely by the
accuracy of the other (the analysis). Semiotics must be heuristic; other-
wise it is just a bad philosophy.
For this reason, these chapters will be composed of both theoretical
discussion and case analysis, always with the same objective: to give a
critical reading of those theories that have been most influential, in
order to outline a more structured and inclusive semiotic perspective
with which we can aim to fully grasp cultural phenomena.
CHAPTER 1
The Structuralist Perspective
A
n essential prerequisite for embracing a cultural approach to
semiotics is, in our opinion, the adoption of a structuralist
perspective. Semiotics of culture cannot but be structuralist,
though it is necessary here to understand exactly what is meant by struc-
turalism and how it differentiates from classic 1960s structuralism. For
us, a structuralist identity does not necessarily mean total acceptance of
those traits usually attributed to structuralism (an abstract, inf lexible,
or ahistorical manner of viewing meaning), but a concept of meaning
that is radically organized, differential, systematic, and critical.
In order to clarify how this idea developed, we will review key ref-
erence theories in the debate on structuralism (from L é vi-Strauss to
Derrida), and a number of key theoretical knots that are central to
the definition of structuralism. The first of these is the category of
code, which is, of course, one of the founding categories of the semiotic
approach. This category has had varied fortunes. Initially it was exten-
sively employed by linguistics, anthropology, and cybernetics, before
being regarded as obsolete in the 1980s, following the success of textual
analysis. In this book we will reaffirm its value for semiotics in general,
and its particular relevance to a semiotic analysis of culture.
In order to better define the heuristic potential of this category, we
will look at how it has featured in the works of some of the masters of
semiotics, who made recourse to it within a structuralist paradigm.
We would like to start this brief critical review of the category of
code by quoting a 1976 work by Umberto Eco titled “Codice” (code,
which he reelaborates in Eco 1984). In this work, Eco summarizes the
different meanings of the word “code,” defining the three key interpre-
tations: paleographic, institutional, and correlational.
From a paleographic point of view, the code is essentially a book; a

physical object manufactured to store and record certain elements of
knowledge.
From the institutional point of view, the code is essentially a set of
rules.
From the correlational point of view (which, according to Eco, is the
most accurate one), the codes unite the elements of a given series (A)
with the elements of a given series (B) using a substitutive and crypto-
graphic model, dictating that A means B.
Each of these three meanings shares an element that helps us give a

basic definition of the category of code: its conventional and regulated
nature. A code may not have a purely communicative function (e.g., the
code of chivalry was not an actual code of communication), but despite
this, it always guarantees structural consistency by virtue of the regu-
lated correspondence between its elements.
We wanted to start from here in order to quickly correct a mis-
take often made in semiotics: codes are not simply sets of instructions
shared by sender and receiver in order to communicate. Codes are actu-
ally systems of social rules and they are necessary to signify, manage,
and organize meaning socially. And given that codes regulate the social
management of meaning, they also play a crucial role in structuring it.
This is why codes are fundamental: they set limits, but they provide
possibilities as well. As Eco says (1984, Eng. trans., p. 187), “a code is
not only a rule which closes, but also a rule which opens. It not only says
‘you must,’ but it also says ‘you may’ or ‘it would be also possible to do
that.’” From street codes to fashion codes, to slang and lingo, there is no
group culture or identity that does not share codes, and thanks to them,
meaning is organized and structured within a given system. Ultimately,
these codes create structures.
A key reference point for this issue is Claude L é vi-Strauss, who set
the terms of the structuralist approach to culture. According to him, the
concepts of structure, system, and code are strictly correlated as part of
a well-specified linguistic sensitivity and outlook.
The Linguistic Structuralism of Lévi-Strauss

In 1978, in the introduction to the collection of essays by the linguist
Roman Jakobson, Six le çons sur le son et le sens , Claude L é vi-Strauss
fully expresses his own gratitude as a disciple. Were it not for Jakobson’s
revelatory breakthroughs in structural linguistics, L é vi-Strauss’s work
The Structuralist Perspective ● 23
as an anthropologist would have bordered on impressionism. Instead,

thanks to his linguistic methodology, he was able “to crystallize into a
body of coherent ideas, a vision inspired by the contemplation of wild
f lowers somewhere near the border of Luxembourg at the beginning of
May 1940” (in Jakobson, 1978, pp. xi–xii).
The legacy of structuralist linguistics is that, “instead of losing one’s
way among the multitude of different terms, the important thing is to
consider the simpler and more intelligible relations by which they are
interconnected” (pp. xi–xii).
In other words, reconstructing the origins of a phenomenon is not
enough: it is necessary to truly describe it (as L é vi-Strauss himself
insists), and in order to do that one must make a number of mandatory
methodological assumptions: the first being the fact that “explanation
ought always aim at the discovery of the invariants behind all this vari-
ety” ( pp. xi–xii).
Human sciences and the study of culture (including material cul-
ture) therefore owe a large part of their scientific foundations to
Jakobson and the Prague School. We should not forget that it was
the Prague School1 (of which Jakobson was a part, participating in
the drafting of the Theses of 1929) that introduced the concept of
“structure.” While Saussure had highlighted the crucial role of the
category of “system,” it is in the Prague Theses that we first hear of
structure.
L é vi-Strauss quite clearly indicates the features the systematic-struc-
tural environment should have, and semiotic structuralism continues to
be inspired by his work. First, he specifies that a choice to adopt a struc-
turalist approach is not one of field or scope of analysis, but of method .
At the beginning of the essay “Social Structure” (in L é vi-Strauss, Eng.
Trans., 1958), he clearly states: “social structure cannot claim a field of
its own among others in the social studies. It is rather a method to be
applied to any kind of social studies, similar to the structural analysis
current in other disciplines” (p. 279).
Later on in the same essay, he summarizes the features a structure
must have as follows:
First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made

up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without
effecting changes in all the other elements.
Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a
series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same
type.
Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the model
will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to certain
modifications.
Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately
intelligible all the observed facts. (pp. 311–312)
As a premise to this definition of “structure,” while revealing his debt

to linguistics L é vi-Strauss (Structural Anthropology), also refers to
Trubeckoj and his phonological method, which is based on four meth-
odological assumptions:
First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguis-

tic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure; second, it
does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of
analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of
system —“Modern phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes
are always part of a system; it shows concrete phonemic systems and
elucidates their structure”—; finally, structural linguistics aims at dis-
covering general laws , either by induction “or . . . by logical deduction,
which would give them an absolute character. (L é vi-Strauss, Structural
Anthropology, p. 33)
This lesson by L é vi-Strauss remains a must for the semiotic study of

culture, which has to maintain its focus on unconscious phenomena , on
relations between terms , on systematic traits of culture, and on general
laws. Let us just consider, for example, the study of such social phenom-
ena as youth behavior or present-day nostalgia for the 1960s (from fash-
ion to TV series). Taking a structural and semiotic approach, for Claude
L é vi-Strauss (and I agree) does not mean restricting oneself to the track-
ing of subjects and their intentions, or to simply noting the recurring
elements within them, but rather focusing on the relationships between
various elements belonging to different codes (style, behavior, verbal,
iconographic, memory and remembrance, etc.), on the unconscious fea-
tures and on the constructed (from a semiotic point of view) nature of
meaning, without forgetting that, as for example Hawkes (2003) points
out, a structural approach means assuming first and foremost that real-
ity is not just the way it is, but how we construct it.
So what is the role of codes in this structured organization of social
universes? A code, for the purposes of this work, is a conventional set
of rules that organize a given universe of meaning : the universe of social
group, that of kinship, of cuisine, of fashion, or whatever it might be.
The code guarantees the dialectics of synchronic and diachronic ele-

ments, in the alternation of continuity and change. It creates regulari-
ties and repetition, while at the same time allowing small variations that
gradually lead to change at a diachronic level.
It is known that L é vi-Strauss paid particular attention to the field of
kinship relationships (those that constitute the code of kinship), point-
ing out an analogy between phonemes and kinship terms, as well as
between phonemes and other cultural elements. Both the former and
the latter are elements that only acquire meaning once integrated within
a set. What matters, therefore, is not the atom, the individual element
in the kinship system, but rather the system of relationship in which it
works; that is, the kinship code of a given society. In order to counter
the atomism of the linguistics and sociology of the past, L é vi-Strauss
feels the need for a systematic structuralism . The definition of the sys-
tem requires an abstraction process that identifies a number of repeti-
tions (i.e., homologies) in the folds of the recurrence of any number of
actual, concrete facts; a process that does not look solely at the level of
actual manifestations and terms, but rather at the more hidden level
of attitudes .
This is a point of key importance, in our opinion, in the structuralist
lessons of L é vi-Strauss. He indeed pointed out that we should not just
note recurring terms but rather look at how these terms play a role in the
system to which they belong and consider the role they play in different
systems, using a comparative approach.
The linguistic method explained in the essays mentioned here is
applied by L é vi-Strauss chiefly to the study of myths. His most rele-
vant work on the issue (whose size is further proof of its magnitude) is
Mythologiques —some 2,000 pages devoted to the analysis and descrip-
tion of American myths, divided into four volumes:
The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

From Honey to Ashes (1966)
The Origin of Table Manners (1968)
The Naked Man (1971)
At the heart of this monumental work is the thesis, now well known,
that the myth is the proposal and solution of a contradiction of terms;
that is, the reconciliation between two contrary terms.
If, for example, we think of modern advertising, the power and heu-
ristic force of this view becomes apparent. By way of example, we could
consider those cases in which we find a paradigmatic pairing of nature
and culture: the advertising of beauty products, for example, in which

the anti-aging solutions are presented as both “scientific” (thanks to the
very last chemical and biological discoveries), and “natural” (allowing
us to recover the natural potential that lies within each of us). Very often
we find the co-presence of the pairs man/machine (in scores of car com-
mercials), technology/inner life (see the marketing strategy embraced
by Apple and the late Steve Jobs), local/global (e.g., the phone company
Telecom advertising campaign of some years ago featuring Mahatma
Gandhi speaking Hindi, adopting his famous crosslegged position,
symbol of concentration and meditation but transposed to New York,
in a very chaotic Times Square, projected onto an enormous screen.
This is a rather interesting one due to its link to the phenomenon often
referred to in cultural debates as glocal 2).
In the “Ouverture” to the first volume of Mythologiques, The Raw and
the Cooked (L é vi-Strauss, 1964), L é vi-Strauss strongly reiterates how we
have to proceed from the empirical basis to the definition of structural
laws. This procedure is still, in our opinion, very pertinent to the mod-
ern day. It requires moving in a spiral with increasingly wide, concen-
tric observational centers, starting from one myth, coming from one
society, analyzing the ethnographic context and then the other myths
of the same society, progressively extending the enquiry. In this way,
the apparently arbitrary data will be reduced to an order, clarifying an
“immanent necessity,” and bringing to light “the system of axioms and
postulates that define the best code possible, capable of giving a com-
mon significance to unconscious elaborations” (p. 28, my italics).
By means of a twofold extension of the analysis (looking more deeply
at the culture of origin and broadening it to encompass the borders of
reference culture), a common denominator emerges and makes it pos-
sible to compare different elements and the code they all share. The
homologies between different cultural forms are sought in the belief
of a sort of dissemination of recurrent motives. Intertextuality (i.e., the
recurrence of certain motifs) is considered not just as a kinship among
texts individuated by observers, but rather as the defining feature of the
identity of each text: as any myth exists only as part of an open, wide-
spread intertextual network, as one of the many variants (token) of a
base myth (type) that cannot be observed with actual instruments, but
is rather disseminated in many different forms.
L é vi-Strauss is convinced that through the identification of the
common traits of the different forms of expression (i.e., the redun-
dancy of some elements), it is possible to clarify the meaning of the
matrix myth—the code on which it is based. The matrix text is, of
course, an artificial one, an abstraction, built on all of its tokens, but

for this very reason it is heuristically useful: it is a model text. Through
a comparative-differential analysis it is possible to see recurrences, cor-
respondences, variations, substitutions, and in this way it is possible to
place the elements of the syntagmatic chain of the mythical tale within
a paradigmatic matrix . This matrix expresses the logic of a series of tex-
tual transformations . The point is to discover the logic that regulates the
transformations of sense ; assuming codes as simply sets of combinations
of meanings would be a rather reductive, demeaning view of the poten-
tialities of the category of code and of the structuralist approach.
In order to better understand the L é vi-Strauss perspective, we will
now turn to the myth of Oedipus, probably the best-known example of
L é vi-Strauss’s methodology.
As a first step, L é vi-Strauss defined the most relevant episodes of
the Oedipus myth as shared by all known versions of the same: “Myth,
like the rest of language, is made up of constituent units. . . . each
gross constituent unit will consist of a relation.” (1958, Eng. trans.,
pp. 210–211).
The real construction blocks of the myth, however, are not the single
relationships but rather the bundles of relations. Therefore, L é vi-Strauss
grouped the units he found into four categories, under which he col-
lected different bundles of relations that shared at least one trait (see
figure 1.1). In the first column there are the units characterized by the
“overvaluation” of a kinship relation, such as when one violates a social
rule or ban in doing something for a relative or close family member.
The second column features the units in which said relation is, on the
contrary, “undervalued,” such as when one wounds or kills a family
member. The third column features those units that deal with mon-
strous beings, and the fourth, the most controversial in L é vi-Strauss’s
opinion, contains units that deal with subjects that affirm, sometimes
through their very names, their being not monstrous but human (with a
physical detail so important that it defines identity). The two columns
on the left and those on the right are, therefore, in an analogous logical
relationship; both pairs deal with contradictory terms. The second col-
umn is, somehow, the negation of the first; if we wished to exemplify
using a mathematical equation, it would be 1 : 2 = 3 : 4. This equation
is, in a way, the structuralist matrix of the myth of Oedipus.
The identification of this structuralist matrix is therefore the out-
come of a complex inferential and interpretative activity that must be
properly conducted, building sets of comparable elements, and then
establishing relationships among them.
Figure 1.1 The structural units of Oedipus’s myth.

Source : L é vi-Strauss, 1958, Eng. transl., p. 214.
This is, indeed, the way I wish to fully exploit the structuralist les-
son: being structuralist, for me, means, first and foremost, undertaking
an interpretative work capable of raising up and identifying the forms
that structure meaning, an organized view of the elements, arranged in
hierarchies and levels. By taking said levels into account it is possible to
pinpoint a typological criterion capable of describing different cultural
experiences, comparing them, and detecting their compatibility or lack
of the same.
Such a semiotics, based on the study of codes and the pinpointing of

the internal organization of systems, is by no means rigid or abstract,
as criticism often directed at structuralism would suggest. Indeed, quite
the opposite is true. This is an approach that insists on the local system
of relationships set by each text and it aims at individuating how a cer-
tain code evolves through multiple and diversified manifestations (such
as how the cuisine code can be expressed via courses of a meal, recipe
books, novels, cooking schools, and so on).
If we follow this approach to the problem, we are brought toward the
work of Roland Barthes, another one of the key references for any semi-
otic approach to culture.
Codes and Structuralism in Roland Barthes

The critical dimension of semiotics and the inevitable cultural vocation
it takes on are two of the cornerstones on which the long, unsystematic,
and apparently rhapsodic reflection by Roland Barthes is organized.
In his work not only his interest in popular culture and the significant
forms of mass society are crucial, but also, and above all, his will to
use semiotics to demystify the ideological and cultural systems these
forms underpin. This is why, when reflecting on a cultural perspective
in semiotics, we cannot neglect the lesson of Roland Barthes. His crit-
ical analysis is well known: first, we have Myth Today (Barthes, 1957a),
which focuses on objects ranging from washing powders to toys, to the
typical dishes of a given culture (steak fr îtes for French culture), to
Citro ën cars; then, we have the focus on fashion, starting with the vol-
ume Syst è me de la mode (1967); then, the essays on Japanese culture and
society (1970b); and various writings on city planning, medicine, and
advertising (as in 1985).
In all of his writings (of which we have provided only a handful of
examples), Barthes does not actually define a true and proper general
theory of culture, nor does he explain the logic, the mechanisms, or
the rules by which culture tout court functions (unlike Lotman and Eco
who define valid categories for each cultural system and design relevant
typologies). Barthes simply reflects and asks himself questions on a spe-
cific type of culture—mass culture, his culture, the one in which he is
immersed. Therefore, rather than developing a semiotics of culture, he
develops a critique of culture —rethinking semiotics as an “unmasking”
practice (it is not by chance that his work has become a key part of the
paradigm of cultural studies, in which the critical approach plays a cen-
tral role).
However, although Barthes fails to establish a general theory of cul-

ture, we believe his contribution to a semiotics-based understanding
of how culture works is crucial, at least for some of the acquisitions he
granted, and which we brief ly summarize below:
● The idea that all sign phenomena are both social and systemic (and
they therefore speak about the social system of which they are part,
as well as being spoken by it).
● The fact that by virtue of the social and structural nature of mean-
ing, the semiotic analysis is bound to integrate increasingly diverse
layers of meaning.
● The belief that culture (or, at any rate, mass culture) works through
discursive mediations ; that is, stratifications and translations of
codes that prevent language from being innocent and “pure.”
This last point is probably the most interesting one, the one that
continues to be central to a semiotic understanding of culture. When
one looks at it from a semiotic point of view, culture looks like a palimp-
sest of discursive mediations , a fabric of languages and translations that
are not pure representations of the “social” and “real,” but rather forces
that act on society and reality, offering repertoires of identity to their
subjects. The “proprium” of the semiotic perspective regards exactly
this level: the intersection and the mutual influences of different dis-
cursive levels.
As Hawkes notes:
The codes act as agencies—whether we are conscious of them or not

which modify, determine and, most importantly, generate meaning in a
manner far from innocent, far from untrammelled, and very much closer
to the complicated ways in which language itself imposes its own medi-
ating, shaping pattern on what we like to think of as an objective world
“out there.” (2003, p. 89)
So let us now proceed in the order noted above:

1) All semiotic phenomena are both social and systemic, due to the mere
fact of being based on signs. Their cultural value derives from their being
an integral part of a holistic and structured system that gives them mean-
ing. There is no such thing as an autonomous semiotic phenomenon:3
every discourse, every practice, every linguistic pattern is informed by
the general system (cultural and social) to which it belongs, and the semi-
ologist’s work focuses on this precise issue, capturing the “systematic”
behind the singularity, the codes (general in nature) that inform the
(singular) processes. In other words, it is not enough to understand
the communicative scope of a given semiotic phenomenon (what it says,
locally; which type of information a discourse delivers). What is neces-
sary is an understanding of its signification ; that is, an ability to see the
semantic-cultural system expressed through it. As we have already said,
it is necessary to understand the category of code as autonomous from
the category of communication , binding it more generally to significa-
tion and semiosis. To signify does not mean to communicate: it means
to recur to structured systems of signs—essentially, systems of differ-
ences, oppositions, and contrasts.
These systems of differences, oppositions, and contrasts are those that
“speak through us,” those that make us implicitly compare one value to
another, those that make ideology implicit in any act of signification.
Every semiotic process, every act made of words is given only because
it is supported by a system that is, at the same time, a system of differ-
ences (as described by Saussure) and a system of rules, prescriptions, and
institutions and norms, to use terms often used by Barthes.
Of course there is a difference between the differential paradigm of
Saussure and that of Roland Barthes. When Saussure in his Course in
General Linguistics says that meaning is given only in order to differen-
tiate, his intention is to emphasize how signs have an intrinsic meaning,
but that the meaning of signs is determined only on the basis of the
relationships, of the oppositions, of the functions, and of the differences
they have with other signs.
We can consider his famous example of the 20:45 train to Geneva.
The train leaving at 20:45 today for Geneva and that which will leave
tomorrow at the same time have no a material identity—the coaches
change, the locomotive changes, people who take it are different.
However, it is the same train because its identity does not depend on its
material characteristics, but on its position within the railway system,
and on the fact that it is not the train to Lyon or Strasbourg, nor is it
the 15:00 train to Geneva. Since there is no reason why that train (that
precise train) is called the 20:45 train to Geneva, the only “reason” for
its identity is relational, positional, and then differential.
This differential approach in Barthes assumes various nuances.
Barthes’s vision, in fact, suggests a semiotic system that tends to seem
motivated. Meaning is constituted by differences but, little by little (as
we will see here in the next few pages), the signs become stable and “nat-
uralized.” The links between signifier and signified become so repeti-
tive and rigid as to seem natural, and the arbitrary nature of the sign
becomes less and less noticeable. To grasp this arbitrariness, a real anti-
ideological work is needed to bring the rules to light.
These unspoken rules, which constitute an ideology (Umberto Eco
shares a similar view, as we will see later on, in chapter 3), are not sim-
ply rules that act on content (interdictions, dampening, inclusions), but
rules that stealthily regulate form. Barthes is very clear in this regard:
one of the possibilities and specificities of semiology is to provide tools
for analysis that make it possible to individuate ideology at the level of
forms (not content), so where it is not usually sought. The ideological
side of content has been observed for a long time, but the ideological
dimension of forms is and remains, in a certain sense, an opportunity
for semiotic study—and one in which semiotics and anthropology can
meet (here I am thinking, e.g., of the studies of Kroskrity, 2000, and
the contribution made by Irvine & Gal, 2000 4).
In this sense, the scope of Barthes’s work is enormous: the essays
on food, fashion, advertising, Japan. He uses the same approach each
time, starting from the acts of parole, moving onto the rules of the social
operations they presuppose, and, as such, tracing back the form of the
ideological and cultural systems (which are in turn also institutional)
behind them. Clothes, for example, should be described not in terms of
aesthetic form or psychological motives, but in terms of institution; the
scholars have to explain the rules of selection and use, the constraints
and the prohibitions, licenses and waivers. They should register not
“images,” or dress used according to particular customs, but relation-
ships and values. In this way, by focusing on the values, they will show
the axiological dimension of a certain semiotic code and their work will
become an anti-ideological work.
Everything for Barthes is of axiological order, because everything
lives within a structural dimension; a holistic system that gives impor-
tance to some values and neutralizes others, makes certain categories
pertinent and eliminates others. For this reason, Barthes’s semiology is
very much tied to the purpose of this book: although he does not pro-
pose a general theory of culture, he invites us to deduce the underlying
cultural code, from the analysis of a single phenomenon, thus adopting
a cultural perspective for his semiotic work.
This brings us to the second point on our list.
2. By virtue of the social and structural nature of meaning, the semiotic
analysis is bound to integrate increasingly diverse levels, layers of sense, thus
becoming (according to Barthes’s lexicon) “trans-linguistic.”
As we have already explained, the universes of meaning are, for
Barthes and according to the structuralist approach, systemic. It is
society that makes them systemic by organizing sense via oppositions,

repertories and differences. The structuralist method for Barthes, there-
fore, derives from the social constitution of the universes of meaning,
which societies never cease to structure.
According to Barthes’s theory (which we believe to be rather con-
vincing when considered from this point of view), structuralism and
systematicity are a type of organization that society gives itself and the
cultural forms that traverse it, so as to manage and order them.
This approach has two consequences. On one hand, it is necessary
to proceed with a structural method when analyzing a relevant semi-
otic phenomenon; on the other, it is necessary to locate, within that
phenomenon, the social labor, the restructuring work the phenomenon
requires. Obviously these two aspects are not factually independent from
one another (the in-depth research of one often leads to a revelation or
breakthrough for the other, and vice versa), but they are independent
in terms of principle. On one side we have to analyze and decompose
everything that comes under the semiologist’s gaze, on the other we
have to reconstruct a form of archaeology, reconstructing the process
that has generated it (in the last chapter of this book we will return to
the archaeological dimension that should, in our opinion, belong to
semiotics). So, while on one side there is an immanent analysis, on the
other we have a reflection on and interrogation into the social processes
that led to the production of that text (this latter approach is often used
in Marxist circles). This point is an important suggestion for today, in
order to clarify the authentic “vocation” of semiotic work. This is not
an abstract analysis limited to the simple text, abstracting it from con-
text, but it is—in its best examples—a work that locates itself between
the immanence of the text and its dependencies on the context. We will
come back to the role and the “need” of context in our last chapter.
Barthes provides several explicit indications of the first type of semi-
otic work—immanent analysis. One of the earliest and most repeated
indications is about the application of the commutation test discovered
by Louis Hjelmslev, in order to distinguish what is significant from
what is not.
Hjelmslev’s commutation test enables one to identify the smallest
elements of meaning within a system, such as phonemes in the case
of the study of language. It works through a process of substitution,
assessing the extent to which a change in the signifier leads to a change
in the signified. For example, if I replace the letter /d/ with the letter
/f/ on the plane of expression (e.g., in the words /dog/ and /fog/), I will
provoke a change in meaning, and can therefore conclude that /d/ and
/f/ are two phonemes (i.e., two minimal significant constituents) of the
expressive plane.
When Barthes uses the Hjelmslev’s logic of commutation, he broad-
ens its scope to encompass not solely the plane of expression and the
linguistic system (on which Hjelmslev worked), but also that of signs
(unions of expression and content) and process (the evolution of signs,
as well as their organization within a synchronic moment). He uses this
to ref lect, for example, on French cuisine and see which of the more tra-
ditional elements has been replaced in contemporary cooking, and what
effect this has had on the general identity of the French cuisine.
He suggests to separate what is significant, meaningful, from what
is not, then to reconstruct the differential system of the signifier by
building categories of foods, so that the units we found (a certain kind
of bread, a certain type of meat, etc.) may be used to build systems,
syntaxes (menus), styles (diets).
Although a certain abstraction from the empirics is always at work,
the empirical principle and the idea that one should always start with
observation remain two mandatory criteria of the research, as the iden-
tification of the opposing axes that hold a system up can never predate
analysis. We cannot imagine beforehand which are the resulting catego-
ries of a given semantic universe, or we would end up in constructivism
or even petitio principii . Nor should the classification necessarily be
those suggested by common sense; it is necessary to understand, on a
case by case basis, the type of opposition, the type of logic (binary, com-
plex, serial, or otherwise) that is necessary for a meaning phenomenon.
And the oppositions are not obvious, because they too are not already
defined. Each discourse builds its own oppositional axes.
Just to give an example, let us consider Barack Obama’s first pres-
idential campaign. As George Lakoff (2009) pointed out, the opposi-
tion axis on which the then-future president based his speeches was
not “liberal values vs. conservative values” (the opposition presumed by
common sense), but rather “liberal values vs. non-American values” (a
strategic opposition, constructed by Obama’s discourse to ensure that
all the American citizens identify with the liberal party), thus neutral-
izing any chance for opposition.
This is why the semiologist’s work is never mere taxonomy and never
a simple verification of categories and oppositions that have already
been given. The semiotician has to individuate, in the portion of real-
ity that he is analyzing, the progressive levels of integration of semiotic
units. For Barthes there is the need to move from the analysis and the
classification of signs to the “rules of word production” (Lakoff, 2009,
p. 104)—with a lexicon and sensitivity that we believe to be rather con-

sonant with that of Eco who, as we will see in chapter 3, invites us (in
his Theory of Semiotics) to study the “modes of signs production.”
By moving through subsequent integrations, along increasingly
broad syntagmatic chains, the semiotic analysis encroaches upon the
contingent and factual limits of the object from which it started, arriv-
ing at more general and social understandings. He identifies the social
repertoires from which the basic units draw, the discursive embeddings
in which the units occur, and consequently the connotation layers in
which they appear.5 When Barthes speaks of “connotation,” he is once
again referring to Louis Hjelmslev, who has proved to be a central ref-
erence point for the French philosopher.
Hjelmslev (1943) had explained the mechanism of connotation
through a sort of progressive overlap. That is, when an initial relation-
ship between expression and content develops into a further relation-
ship with another content, this second content is a connotative one. For
example, if we pronounce a word (itself a relationship between expres-
sion and content) with a particular accent, we will add to its conven-
tional content an additional (connotative) one—in this case, regionality.
The accent is the element connotator.
Hjelmslev also provides a list of possible types of connotators, ele-
ments that add connotative content. Among them are stylistic forms
(verse adds literary value), tone (a sad tone of voice can add a connota-
tive meaning of negativity), idioms (dialectal pronunciations can add a
connotative meaning of regionality), and so on.
As always, when Barthes takes a theory, he expands upon it and gives
it a more sociological reading. Barthes follows Hjelmslev saying that we
have connotation when a sign that has already been formed becomes the
level of expression of another sign, as exemplified in figure 1.2 (where /
Sn/ refers to Signifier and /St/ to Content):
Thus, for example, the sign “home” becomes the signifier of the
sign “affection,” because /home/ is often associated with the content /
emotions/.
Barthes’s interest, however, lies in the regularization of these con-
notative associations, in the stereotypic regularities that traverse our
Sn St
Sn St
Figure 1.2 Barthes’s schema for connotation.

cultural universes. The connotative meanings reveal “fragments of ide-

ologies,” says Barthes, fixed stereotypical combinations that are at work
in different languages (think of the visual language, e.g., where the
figure of a house is enough to allude to a world of traditional affection
that is explicitly unspoken).
Shifting his interest toward connotative and ideological mean-
ings, Barthes transforms linguistic work (à la Hjelmslev) into semiotic
work.
The language of semiology, Barthes specifies,
is not quite that of the linguist: it is a second order language, with its uni-
ties no longer moneyed or phonemes, but larger fragments of discourse
referring to objects or episodes whose meaning underlies language, but
can never exist independently of it. Semiology is therefore perhaps des-
tined to be absorbed into a trans-linguistics, the materials of which may
be myth, narrative, journalism, or on the other hand objects of our civili-
zation, in so far as they are spoken (through press, prospectus, interview,
conversation and perhaps even the inner language, which is ruled by the
laws of imagination). (Barthes, 1964a, Eng. trans., pp. 78–79)
Societies are in continual development, in a parasitic way, in terms of

language, secondary systems of sense, and it is thanks to this continu-
ous layering and retranslation that semiotic study has to be parallel with
anthropological or sociological study.
Barthes’s approach evidently continues to be strongly linguistic in
nature, but in a “trans-linguistic version” focused on verbal language
and discursive dimension, while today, contemporary semiotics stud-
ies tend to focus on the equal importance of nonlinguistic processes
and objects, getting closer and closer to the analysis of anthropology
(I already mentioned, in the introduction, the key concept of “mean-
ing in action”). However, what must, in our opinion, be appreciated in
Barthes’s approach is its integrative and palimpsest-like logic (see also
chapter 4). He proceeds to progressive layers of integration, first taking
into account given texts, and then gradually placing them in a broader
context, making it a cultural analysis.
The layers of analysis he considers are of various types:
- There are the textual layers , I mean what we today would call syncretic
texts, such as mass communication discourses (advertising, fashion,
and so on). They exploit verbal language, using it in their own texts
and, most of all, using its lexical classifications (so that the point,
according to Barthes, is not that a commercial has a verbal claim,
but rather that the pictures it shows on an iconic level are in any case
formed by linguistic classifications : elegant versus ordinary, luxury ver-
sus economy, and so on).
- There are the connotation layers, which we have just discussed
- And last there is the “ life of signs ,” which implies that, for example,
food is not just a collection of products to be subject to statistic or
dietary studies, but that it is also, at the same time, a system of com-
munication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and
behaviors.
Precisely because of all these layers, there is a moment of the analysis

in which semiotic observation of a text comes into contact with the cul-
tural system in which this text is inserted. Each text can be understood
as a fragment of ideology and can be seen as being in close communica-
tion with culture, knowledge, and history.
Society and its languages (culture, in other words) live on discursive
mediations and signs that circulate at progressive levels of inclusion,
and the semiologist’s work consists in clarifying this dependency net-
work, in exposing the connections between the different texts and the
different languages of society. And so we have come to the third point
on our list.
3. This is, after all, exactly what Barthes started doing at the beginning
of his career as a semiologist (in 1957, in Myth, Today) and that he contin-
ued to do until the end: a continuous, tireless work of cultural critique, of
peeling back the text’s various layers of meaning.
Whatever level Barthes worked on, be it individual myths of mass
society (from catch wrestling to Citro ën) or complex anthropological
levels (food, fashion), literary texts, or critical analysis, his attention
remained focused on the stratification of discourse and the intertwining
of codes that make obvious what is simply preexisting.
In Myth, Today (Barthes 1957a), Barthes, as an ethnologist of con-
temporary society, analyzed all advertising myths of the world around
him, specifying that myth-making processes do not depend on the
“substance” of the subject that is turned into myth (due to its greatness,
exceptionality, or whatever it may be), but rather on the way objects
are treated and presented within the discourse. Myths are discursive
constructions of a given society and as such they need to be unmasked .
There is nothing natural or universal in seeing water as a symbol of
purity, or certain elements as “patriotic” icons of one’s country. Myths
must be denaturalized . It is the ideology that masks a product of his-
tory as a phenomenon of nature, and semiotics can and must unmask it.
Ideology, by making a myth of the everyday, builds stereotypes that run

through us and speak with our same language.
If, in analyzing mass discourses, the ideological element lies in the
undeclared connotation chains that naturalize certain symbols, in the
scientific and literary fields the ideological element lies in the ghost
of objectivity and neutrality. In Criticism and Truth (1966c), Barthes
attacks the abstract and universalist language of literary critique, which
seems to wish to bestow a scientific nature upon a practice that, in its
highest and most honest form, can only unmask the subjectivity behind
any discourse.
Our language, he says, is full of commonplaces, which are, in a way,
the weapon of power. By shamelessly repeating certain themes, they
contribute to imprinting ideas, values, and alibis that, in the mind of
the public, function like a true mental “nature”; the commonplace is
“that which goes by itself.”
In “Textual Analysis of a Tale” (in Barthes 1985), at the apex of the
textualist stage, 6 he continues his search for the “already been said,”
the implicit cultural elements that underpin even the most individual
discursive act—the literary act—reflecting on codes in general, and,
specifically, on code of knowledge:
Codes are merely associative fields . . . the instance of the code is, for
us, essentially cultural: codes are pre-defined types of the already-seen,
already-read, already-done: the code is the form of this “already-,” that
constitutes the writing of the world.
Although all codes are cultural, there is one, among all the ones we have
met so far, that we will call cultural code: this is the code of knowledge,
of rather of human knowledges, of public opinions, of culture as it is
transmitted by books, teaching and, in a more general way, by all of the
sociality; this code’s reference is knowledge as a corpus of rules drafted
by the society. (“Textual Analysis of a Tale,” 1973, in Barthes, 1985,
p. 210)
For Barthes, all of culture (both mass and literary) lives through codes
that need to be analyzed, decomposed, and observed in action without
any “old-school” prejudice regarding communication. Semiology does
not believe in the existence of a spontaneity that is free from the inf lu-
ence of codes.
In this rebuke of false spontaneity, in this exhortation to always
think of meaning as a product (and therefore an effect) of underlying
significations that must be detected and unmasked in all forms of social
discourse lies the core of Barthes’s legacy that finds its greatest expres-
sion today in the (predominantly European) field of socio-semiotics,
with exponents such as Eric Landowski, Jean-Marie Floch, Gianfranco
Marrone, Isabella Pezzini, and Maria Pia Pozzato.
The Balzac’s analysis carried out in S/Z (or the analysis of Acts of
the Apostles or Genesis in Barthes 1970a and 1985) represents, in a
way, Barthes’s most extreme approach to codes. It consists, first of all,
in decomposing the text in “lexies,” “breaking down” the text into sev-
eral signifying units. The length of such units is entirely variable: there
are eight-line lexies and three-word lexies. This measurement does not
depend on predefined criteria but on the perception of the analyst, who
may attribute meaning to a very short syntagm or focus on a longer
chain. It is necessary to move “step by step” and perform a “slow-motion
reading,” rather than an explication du texte. The only possible “expli-
cation ” (in the French sense) would be that which refers to the purely
etymological explication , unfolding, unravelling the text or volume as if
it were a roll of parchment. The structural analysis has worked, so far,
on macrostructures; now, Barthes says, the time has come to work on
the “small veins of meaning”: details, minimal variations.
The relationship between micro-level and generality (even on the
social level) of meaning is maintained by Barthes through the notion of
code. “Code” here is not used according to its most basic definition (the
one used in information theory, which we have already criticized), as a
fixed translation device that translates the language of the issuer into
the language of the receiver, but rather as a “reservoir” of already-saids,
a portion of an “encyclopaedia,” to borrow a key term from Eco, which
I will explain further.
Thanks to this idea of code, and the definition of five codes (Empirics,
Person, Science, Truth, and Symbol7 ), the text is transformed into a net-
work in which meaning plays, swinging between repetition and varia-
tion. The codes allow Barthes to recognize and decipher certain paths
of meaning, but not to exhaust them, neither in a numerical way (there
are more paths of meaning than codes), nor in a semiotic way, because,
in the comparison with the code, something is always left over, the
already-said is in excess.
Meaning in this phase of Barthes’s work cannot be depleted, and
therefore no method can be prescriptive. If semiotics is necessary to
unmask the ideology hiding in any text, rhetoric (in Barthes’s view) can
teach us, more than anything else, about the plurality of meaning, and
the presence of excessive, subversive, and inexhaustible senses.
Codes, Ideologies, Superstructures

Before dealing with some of the outcomes of Barthes’s textualism, we
would like to pause for a moment at the critical vocation of Barthes’s
semiotics, which, as we have already explained, is strongly connected
to the deeply structuralist vocation of his theory. For Barthes, one of
the crucial tasks for semiotics is to identify the ideology underpinning
the linguistic systems, the connotation chains, the unsaid that speaks
through us without us ever realizing.
In our opinion, it is important to point out the proximity of this
position to the Marxist-inspired reflections on ideology that have been
present in the debate in English-speaking countries since 1970s, and
that continues to be a key point of reference in socio-semiotics, or social
semiotics (see Hodge and Kress, 1988 and 1993).
The relationships between semiotics, Marxism, and structuralism
have never been simple or immediate. While the relationships between
structuralism, semiotics, and linguistics are evident (and the case of
L é vi-Strauss, as we have already seen, proves this), the relationships
between structuralism and Marxism are far more complex. As Kurzweil
(1980) pointed out, the ahistorical and potentially abstract perspec-
tive of the most uncompromising structuralism and historicism, or
rather Marxist historical materialism may look like two very different
approaches. Marxism considers culture in terms of superstructure, while
the semiotic perspective thinks of culture in terms of structure. For the
former, culture depends on the historical and the material, while for
the latter (particularly with textual structuralism) culture is viewed as
autonomous, dependent only on its own logic.
We, however, believe that the points of contact between structural-
ism and Marxism are many, and that they can be summarized in the
supra-individual and anti-ideological approach.
As regards the supra-individual approach, that which we have already
outlined, using references to L é vi-Strauss and Barthes, should be enough
to clarify their proximity to Marxism. In the Marxist approach, as in
the structuralist one, the individual is not the object of the analysis;
instead, the object is a social level that goes beyond the individual,
conditioning it and giving sense to it. The illusion of centrality of sub-
jectivity, which belonged to phenomenology and existentialism, does
not belong either to structuralist or to Marxist lines of approach. Their
focus, from the outset, is on the social, general, and systemic, and not
on singularity, as this is a focus we share and it is that which pertains
to a semiotics of culture.
The Marxism’s interest in ideology is even more central to our per-

spective. Signs and messages (which we would refer to today in terms of
texts and discourses) are the result of material conditions and of social
work, which constitute their meaning, even though it is sometimes hid-
den. It is therefore necessary to reconstruct and analyze the social praxis
that lies behind the social production of sense. In the Marxist view
there is no separation between text and context. As one of the top rep-
resentatives of Marxist semiotics R è znikov (1964) pointed out (using
language that is now a thing of the past), there is an “objective connec-
tion” between reality and its signs—they are isomorphic phenomena.
For this very reason there is a need for a “global semiotics of social
codes” (Rossi-Landi, Language as Work and as Trade, 1968, 235) that
goes beyond Saussure’s dichotomies of materiality and ideality of the
sign. 8
Of course, nobody in semiotics today speaks of an “objective con-
nection” between language and reality, nor we would use the terms
structure and superstructure, as this would imply a kind of causality, a
direct determination that does not correspond to our concept of com-
plex inf luence. It is, however, necessary to focus on the relationship
that connects any semiotic form to its context, to the social and cultural
setting within which it operates, and on the performative aspect that it
presupposes and realizes. Only in this way is it possible to perform the
de-naturalization of meaning that is shared by both the Marxist and
the structuralist approaches, focusing on the formation, migration, and
genealogy of a given set of codes, projects, and texts.
One of the most significant supporters of Marxist-influenced semi-
otics, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1985, p. 176) is rather open about this
issue and his thoughts continue to be a valid tool to be used in order
to explain the relationships between history and social praxis. Reality,
according to him, is the result of three types of “work”:
- social praxis (the work carried out by people within a particular

society)
- social reproduction (the means invented and built by human beings
to produce history)
- history (the product of social praxis).
Using this threefold division, Rossi-Landi states that nature expresses

itself through social modification and reproduction, opposing any myth
of “natural nature” (see Descola, 2005), and that any previous product
represents the material and tools of a new kind of work.
Next to this de-naturalizing dimension it is evident, as we have

explained earlier, that in its ref lections on ideology and ideological
structures, Marxism introduces a reflection on history that is absent
from original structuralist thought, but that, from our point of view, is
rather precious. As Hodge and Kress (1988, p. 35) point out:
One decisive superiority of Marxist social theory over other structuralist

forms has long been its recognition and theorization of history; and we
believe that no adequate social semiotics can afford to neglect the dia-
chronic dimension.
This emphasis on history is, from our point of view, crucial to a full
comprehension of cultural logics and we will return to this belief in the
final chapter of this book. Unmasking the ideology underlying a semi-
otic form does not simply require a clarification of the social praxis that
produces it, but also the study of historical evolution that allowed it, gen-
erated it, and that continues to leave its mark, albeit in simulated forms.
It is a stimulus that Umberto Eco’s semiotics (see chapter 3) and our
perspective (see chapter 4) broadly develop, in the belief that the sepa-
ration of synchronic and diachronic dimensions in the study of social
code is counterproductive.
It is through genealogical reconstruction that the semiotic analysis of
culture radicalizes its critical scope.
Destructuring Structuralism: Deconstruction

by Jacques Derrida
The genealogical dimension is also shared by the theory we are about
to discuss: deconstructionism. However, even more present here is the
textualist dimension , which represents a point of tangential contact and
a bridge between semiotic structuralism and Jacques Derrida’s decon-
structionism. The names of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida are
often associated due to their refusal of the exhaustibility and decodabil-
ity of meaning; both were convinced of the excessive nature of mean-
ing and, as such, the impossibility of exhausting the meaning of any
given text. While Barthes failed to found a particular school or develop
any theories within the “institutional” field of semiotics, Derrida, con-
versely, powered American deconstructionism, which, since his work,
has moved toward textualist analysis.
We, however, believe that conflating these two names is misleading
for a number of reasons. First of all, we have already shown that Roland
Barthes’s thought has a strongly structural vocation that, while gradu-

ally gaining f lexibility (shifting from a “strong” structuralism into the
concept of “structural activity”) never actually loses the belief that soci-
ality is organized through codes, regular patterns, systems of already-
said that constitute the object of semiotics and the reason for its critical
vocation. On the contrary, Derrida never adheres to the structuralist
paradigm, not even in the earliest stages of his work.
Second, Derrida’s theory is not, in our opinion, in any way a semiotic
theory, even if it indeed touches upon many topics related to semiotics.
Derrida’s theory is, in fact, a philosophy, and one with a strong theoret-
ical vocation, while semiotics is a theory with a strong heuristic-meth-
odological bent that, even if it does not put itself to the test in the field,
still believes to be able to effectively analyze texts and language.
We do not deny that there are contact points that make the semiotic
and deconstructionist approaches comparable, and we know that, even
if in Europe (where semiotics is most highly developed) their relation-
ship is not considered to be particularly strong, in the United States
semiotics and deconstruction are very often associated. Indeed, in the
following pages we will try to thematize and focus on the points the two
approaches have in common. However, despite all this, we believe it is
also important to point out the incompatibilities that mark Derrida’s
theory as non-semiotic.
We will start by considering the reworking that the deconstruction
proposes of the lesson of Saussure and Peirce.
Just as Saussure is widely acknowledged as a founding father of semi-
otics, likewise, deconstruction identifies a precursor of one of the key
principles of meaning in Saussure’s theory of the sign: the principle
of difference. Meaning does not have a primeval or posthumous core
or identity that can be reconstructed through a process of deduction.
Meaning exists only in the difference; in its being unlike something
else, even a previous version of itself.
The differentiality that, for Saussure, was at the core of the structure
of the linguistic system (where there is no “complete” unit existing a
priori but only a continuum that any culture can shape and “edit” as it
pleases) becomes, in Derrida’s theory, a principle of constant non-satu-
ration of meaning. In Derrida’s writings the value of a sign, therefore,
can only be defined by the simultaneous presence of other signs that
generate relationships and differences (as in the theory of Saussure and
in the subsequent semiotic theories). In addition to this, the same value
is always relaunched in a sort of shift, in a form of difference-deferral.
Difference, therefore, is not just the criterion that defines the identity of
each unit from inside a system of relationships (so that A is such because
it is different from B and from Z), but, according to Derrida, difference
is also the law that confers dynamicity upon the units, rendering any
attempt at defining the meaning of a unit impossible or pointless, even
if that definition is a temporary or systematic one. Difference is, there-
fore, not a distinction criteria but a principle of constant alteration that
removes credibility from any attempt to fix the meaning of language.
Starting from this shared, yet different, assumption of Saussure’s
principle of differentiality, Derrida’s theory then faces another key trait
defining the semiotic theory of sign: the deferral , inspired by Peirce’s
semiotic theory. For Derrida, difference (in French diffé rance, with an
a to distinguish it from the standard form diffé rence) is the continuous
shift of sense in a new direction, with language working through “dif-
fering to other things.” Thanks to this endless shift of meaning, thanks
to this continuous deferral of meaning, signification enters a state of
constant undecidability and undefinabilty.
Let us now return to Derrida’s parallels/divergencies with semiotics.
On one hand, there is the reference to the category of deferral (“ren-
voi”), which is made by citing two key figures in semiotics—Ferdinand
de Saussure and C. S. Peirce—while, on the other hand, the same prin-
ciple is radicalized and turned into a metaphor. Very often Derrida
moves through metaphors and semantic empowering. He starts by tak-
ing a word, such as “renvoi” (deferral, in English), and defining all of its
semantic paths and recurring uses (“renvoi” as postponement in time,
“renvoi” as new sending and so on). By taking different paths, he uses
the word almost in a metaphorical sense, as a term used to speak of
something different, adding semes to the literary meaning one is trying
to express.
According to semiotics and Peirce’s theory, the deferral of the sign
is the relationship that unites one sign to other signs, that is any inter-
pretant to other interpretants,9 in a chain in which there is no separa-
tion, but instead, solidarity and the constant translation of a sign into
another sign (so that “house” refers to both “building” and “family,” to
“protection” and so on, while “family” refers to “control,” “institution,”
and so on). On the contrary, in Derrida’s theory deferral is no longer a
relationship involving a form of “filling with meaning,” so the genera-
tion of meaning is, rather, a constant state of suspension of signification
and continuous deferral, the consequence of the absence of a here-and-
now, a transcendental present, an origin, in a “movement of ‘unmotivat-
edness’ that makes any stabilisation impossible”10 (see Derrida, 1967a,
pp. 47–49).
As often happens in Derrida, the concept of deferral is taken and

radicalized until it becomes synonymous with the continuous, can-
cerous proliferation of signifiers and signifieds, which represent a theo-
retical justification of that typical deconstructionist writing that moves
from one word to another because of associations between the signifiers
rather than the signifieds.
We can see, then, how Derrida’s theory, starting from the referral
category, takes a double path.
One path is fully shared by our approach, that of genealogical analy-
sis: deconstruction means rebuilding a chain of referrals (shifts, sus-
pensions, translations) to which certain Western categories have been
subjected, thus unmasking the presuppositions and values with a gene-
alogical approach.11 We will return to the suitability of said approach in
the last chapter of this book.
On the alternative path, Derrida, taking the category of referral as
his starting point, engages in a sort of game of deferral, developing argu-
ments that are never stabilized by an objectivized, full-fronted treat-
ment of the issue, but rather turns into a series of comments and notes
based around a given keyword.
The two theoretical problems that become apparent at this point are
context and metalanguage. Derrida’s position on context is well known,
as he claims there is no such thing as out-of-the-text (“il n’y a pas d’hors
texte”). As a result, it is not possible to distinguish a text from its bor-
ders or a discourse from its context. In the name of the constant motion
of différance and deferral, every text goes outside itself, overf lows itself,
exceeds its limits and its identity (as we had said before, every sign con-
stantly differentiates from itself ), defers to something else and therefore
cannot be exhausted in one form of self-consistence (structural unity)
or another, but, rather, it can only be crossed through in the opening
points. The world is a textual fabric in which there are no distinctions,
in which anything can be connected with everything and separations
lose value.
We are evidently quite far from the semiotic idea of a continuum
that is organized and “put into shape” by semiosis: articulated, differ-
entiated, and distinguished within itself. In the Derrida continuum, in
which there is no such thing as out-of-text and there are only differ-
ences, there is a continuous deferral to something else, which suspends
meaning.
If there is no distinction, there can be no objectification and, there-
fore, no metalanguage. Semiotics and deconstruction are deeply dif-
ferent in this respect. Semiotics bases its own epistemology on the
concept of maintaining a distance from the object of its own analy-

ses. The possibility of semiotic analysis is provided by the possibility
of distinguishing and defining a plane of objectivity. For some authors
(the heirs of the Hjelmslev lesson), the distinction between these two
planes (the plane of the object and the plane of the heuristic categories)
is part of semiotics’ “scientific” epistemology. In these cases (partic-
ularly in French structuralism and linguistic glossematics), the semi-
otic project is an explicitly metalinguistic project, in which semiosis
is developed as a discipline capable of analyzing texts and discourses
via a metalanguage shared within the same community, regardless of
the subjectivity of aesthetic and critical judgments. For other authors
and in other traditions (especially in the wake of Peirce and Eco), there
is no “natural” distinction between the plane of the object and the
plane of analytical tools, but a merely local distinction (that changes
according to circumstances) between the cultural units that are ana-
lyzed and those that are used as an analytical instrument. This means
that a category such as “home” can be either the object of the analysis,
or the conceptual tool with which to explore a certain cultural uni-
verse of meaning. However, both semiotic “schools” are grounded in the
shared belief that good analysis proceeds through the delimitation of its
object, the distinction of analytical levels, and the definition of its own
metaterms, rather than confusion between and overlapping of explanans
and explanandum . The deconstructionist project, on the other hand,
does not believe in metalanguage and leaps at any opportunity to dele-
gitimize it. Deconstructionism does not believe that the seriousness of
one’s work derives from objectification and the subsequent distancing
from the object of analysis, believing it necessary to stay inside and as
near the object of analysis as possible.
The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the
outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate
aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a cer-
tain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does
not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the
strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure,
borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate
their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in
a certain way falls prey to its own work (Derrida, 1967a, Eng. trans.,
p. 24).
In other words, the deconstructionist approach may seem textual (as
with the semiotic analysis of text) but it is not, because there is no dis-
tinction between object and method, the plane of reference and that of
epistemology. Deconstruction is mimetic by nature: it imitates and takes

the language of the authors it analyzes because it wants to live within
these texts, get inside them, acquire their vocabulary in the belief that
this is the only way to deconstruct it.
Derrida’s mimetics often reaches a true mise en abyme. Not only does
he use, on both a methodological and an heuristic level, the same cat-
egories as the text he analyzes (mixing language-object and metalan-
guage), but he also builds the argument structure of his own discourse
according to the design of the categories it uses. If speaking about sur-
vival he divides the text into two parts, with the upper part living on
(in French: sur-vivre, meaning both living on and surviving) the other
(see Derrida, 1979). If speaking about a tympani, he sorts the text in
two columns, with one echoing the other (see the essay “Tympani” in
Derrida, 1974). And if speaking about the double bind, or deferral, or
mirror, he builds a volume, like Glas, where the two texts are placed
opposite one another (see Derrida, 1972).
This practice of the mise en abyme represents, quite evidently, another
point of differentiation between the deconstructionist approach and the
semiotic one. Once again, there is a common basis: the idea that one
should not simply look for the meaning of a text in the authorial inten-
tion of the subject producing it (such as the author who has written a
novel or the host of a TV program), but meaning must also originate
from the text itself, from the interpretation that defines and highlights
the relationship at its base and connects it with other, similar texts.
However, if for semiotics the sense of text lies in the text (it is the struc-
tural configuration that regulates it; Eco calls it intentio operis12), the
Derrida perspective seems to show a much stronger hermeneutic heri-
tage, interspersed with psychoanalysis. The sense of text is given in the
almost agonistic relationship that the interpreter forms with it, a rela-
tionship widely conditioned by desire (Derrida mentions several times
the reader’s desiring relationship) and with the concept of motivation
running through it. Derrida’s reasonings and reading pathway are moti-
vated by the etymology of words, by the homologies between language
and analytical practice (the mise en abyme we mentioned earlier), the
semantic paths of certain key words, and the homophony between dif-
ferent terms, which are deemed to have something in common by the
mere fact that they have the same sound.13
By pursuing the idea that reading should imitate, put into play,
relaunch (a concept similar to deferral) all the categories in a text being
analyzed, Derrida also bestows a central role upon the idea of graft,
or greffe in French. If sense lives through deferrals and differentiation,
every sign remains somewhat incomplete (unsaturated) and ripe for

“colonization.” Every term becomes a space for raids and evasions,
the subject of deferrals and the target of deferrals originated in other
meaning pathways. In this way, a new meaning can be grafted onto
any text, any sign. The sign, though remaining suspended in the defer-
ral, is in constant need and is constantly subject to a supplement of
meaning, a supplement that is grafted on, transplanted like an organ
in the body.
This constant graft criterion opens deconstruction up to a textual
practice that is radically citationist. Like semiotics, deconstruction
also sees intertextuality as a constitutive principle of meaning, but
while semiotics sees the intertextual network of deferrals and referrals
as selected and radically reduced by the text system (which, from this
point of view, closes and selects the possible pathways), for Derrida,
intertextuality is a deposit of “potential sense” that must be triggered as
much as possible, even if only on a phonetic association basis. The text
that is analyzed does not draw limits and borders within the network of
its own intertextual references, but rather makes itself available to the
widest radius of sense grafts, in the belief that through reference from
one text to another a supplement of sense is created, and not a loss of
meaning.
It is evident that in such a concept, given the very nature of such
textual practice, the relationship between sense and structure becomes
quite complex. Derrida does not dismiss structuralism with indifference
or haughtiness, quite the opposite: he deals with it thoroughly in one
of his key works, Writing and Difference (Derrida 1967b). He speaks of
structuralism in terms of obsession, invasion (see the chapter on “Force
and Signification”), arguing with those who see it as mere “fashion,”
explaining how there is more to it and how it is unavoidable. There is no
way we can deny that we are all, in some way, children of structuralism.
As we have already mentioned, and as Derrida himself explains in the
aforementioned essay, intentional conscience and the myth of authorial-
ity were overcome thanks to structuralism; the idea that meaning is a
whole that creates its own networks of solidarity is another, unavoidable
structuralist idea.
However, for Derrida, structural emphasis on the form undermined
the importance of the forces of significance, often reducing analysis to
some sort of geometricism. One of the ideas that shapes this faith in the
geometrical organization of the forms of meaning is the idea that struc-
tural organization develops from a center. According to Derrida, struc-
tures exist only if one attributes to them a beating, pulsating center.
If instead we wanted to dismantle the ideology of structuralism, that

is the way in which “structurality of structure” is conceived, we should
start from the belief that there is no center, that there is no fixed place,
but rather a function, a kind of non-place where endless substitutions
of signs are produced.
In other words, Derrida believes that we should view the matrix from
which structure originates as a function that cannot materialize in more
than one form and that does not create fixed schemes.
This particular line of thought is rather close to semiotics, and, as we
have already said when discussing Barthes, the concept we have taken as
our own, and that we wish to further here, is precisely that of a “struc-
tural work,” a constant structuring activity that runs through all that is
social and reorganizes it.
However, while we believe it is necessary to understand the rules
governing this creation of structure, the hierarchy that springs from
them, and the valorization that makes them legitimate, Derrida believes
we should rather empty, dismantle, and delegitimize them. As the very
name of Derrida’s philosophy suggests, deconstruction is a radically
destructuring philosophy; it does not stop at understanding how the
universes operate—it wants to make them explode, disassemble them,
and reassemble them in a different way through grafts, deferrals, sup-
plements, and de-marginalizsations.
The structuralist lesson that runs through much of semiotics is, on
the contrary, analytic and rather “conservative”: the structural method
is useful for achieving a better articulation and structuring of the levels
of meaning in a text, and for highlighting the overall unity of the text,
that which binds it together, as opposed to dismantling its structure.
This aspect emerges quite clearly if we focus on the forms and empha-
sis embraced by the structuralist lesson of text theory and text analysis
itself.
Structuralism and Textual Analysis

The structuralist thought within the context of textual semiotics is
strongly connected to the name of Algirdas Greimas. We do not have
time to delve into his very complex theory here, but we would like to
sum up some of its traits, namely those in which its relationship to, and
the legacy of, the structuralist lesson is evident.
In line with L é vi-Strauss’s universalist approach, Greimas defines a
logic of sense— a form of recurring organization through which human
semiosis manifests itself. This form is of a narrative type. In other
words, for Greimas, meaning is always expressed through narrativ-

ity. Narrativity, therefore, does not represent a quality shared by cer-
tain texts and not others (i.e., fiction as opposed to nonfiction), or the
only dimension bound to action or the verbal tale (as in storytelling).
Meaning, from an anthropological point of view, is organized, accord-
ing to Greimas, in a narrative way and it is in that same way that we
understand and process it.
In other words, the development of meaning follows a predetermined
model based on the fact that the subjects become active to get some-
thing, because of a kind of desire. This model is, for the most part,
polemic (subjects want something that is the object of a dispute, as there
is an anti-subject that desires the same thing), it separates opponents
and helpers and presumes an instance of destination (i.e., an instance
that prompts the subjects to desire),14 which may be more or less explicit,
more or less manipulative, and more or less ideological.15
This concept of narrativity is by no means exhaustive in its capacity
of grasping meaning and semiosis. It does, however, provide a heuristic
tool with which to understand and analyze it; a powerful tool that is not
simply just one more option to be chosen from many others, but rather,
it represents the logic of sense, the key fundamental structure through
which meaning is organized.
This logic of narrativity becomes, therefore, the key instrument
through which texts (in the broader sense of “any object of semiotic
analysis”) are approached. With Greimas, the idea that text shall not
be perceived as an empiric object but rather as a model is established
in semiotics. A text, in other words, is that piece of reality taken as the
object of the analysis, and in which it is possible to locate such consis-
tency and cohesion as to make it possible to speak of a unit of mean-
ing. The text is correlated to the view of the analyst; it is not a piece
of reality defined by the presence of an author. So, a text is not simply,
for example, War and Peace, but also a series of news broadcasts, a TV
series (an episode or a selection of episodes), the entire opus of a direc-
tor, a range of design furniture: everything can be considered an object
of semiotic analysis.
This applicability of the textual model to experience can be even
pushed further, and some European semioticians (see Gianfranco
Marrone, 2009; Eric Landowski; and so on) have done so, taking the
concept of text and expanding it to encompass any expression of mean-
ing (behavior, a particular social practice, a ceremony even). It is our
claim that, as part of a semiotic study of culture, it would be more useful
to use this model for everything in culture that has an attestation ;16 that
is, that which is established, stabilized, with a communicative intention

and publicly available (an advertising campaign is attested by its com-
mercials and its press releases; a journalist’s argument is attested by its
articles; a trial is attested by judgments and written petitions; a political
movement is attested through communiqué s, symbols, and so on). Not
everything that makes sense is, in our view, a text (not, e.g. a certain
set of intentions or a behavior in progress), but only that which has an
established, stabilized (even if only temporarily), and publicly available
expression in our society.
The idea of a text as a model, and not as an empirical object, there-
fore poses the problem of setting up a corpus that, in our opinion, is
always central to the semiotic study of a complex dimension such as
that of culture. We will return to this in the final chapter of the book.
The objects, the corpus of semiotics of culture, are not “objects of the
world,” but sets and series that are made consistent through the gaze of
the analyst. “The text is the correlated element of a theoretical project of
description” wrote Greimas and Courté s in their Semiotics and Language
(Greimas and Courté s, 1979). The point is, therefore, to define criteria
in order to build sensible and significant corpus, and not inconsistent
or artificially built sets.
Another aspect that strongly derives from structuralism, and which
we would like to address now, is the breaking down of texts into lev-
els. Unlike the textual practice in Derrida (and in the later works of
Barthes)—characterized by a free raid on the text that is often “fixed”
on a number of key terms while entirely neglecting other aspects of the
text being examined—the structuralist and Greimas’s textual analysis
aims to acquire an all-encompassing, well-ordered view of the text that
captures its overall signification. In order to manage this ambition for
completeness, the semiotic method articulates and breaks down the sig-
nificance of text on different levels. These levels are, of course, selective
paths taken by the analytic gaze and not fully autonomous parts of
the text. They represent levels of gradual abstraction and specification:
every text has a base level shared with many other texts, in which basic
semantic values and narration and syntactic organization (subjects,
anti-subjects, adjutants, opponents, and so on) are given, and further
levels of increasing specification (whose subjects become specific actors,
with a name, a role, an inner characterization, and the actions take
place in specific places and times) that converge in the uniqueness of
the analyzed text. These levels select different relevancies of the text:
the enunciative level, for example, deals with everything that has to
do with the voice that speaks or organizes the text; the narrative level
pertains to the plane of the text’s actions; the figurative level focuses on
the iconic figures that actions and passions take up in a text; the cog-
nitive level deals with the knowledge employed and/or presumed by the
reader and so on.
The most important aspect in this breaking down of the text into
levels is that it provides a grid of categories with which to standardize
analyses and make them comparable, accepting this by taking the sci-
entific approach to the text we have already mentioned (to differentiate
from it) when dealing with Derrida.
Moreover, such a level-based structure makes it possible to assess
how interwoven the text is; that is, the networks of solidarity, redun-
dancies, and internal relationship created within it. By examining each
level’s traits it is possible to facilitate a transversal comparison between
them, thus facilitating a definition of how the text is woven .
The structural legacy of the above is fairly evident: what actually mat-
ters, that which defines a good interpretation, is the ability to capture the
relational network that defines the object of analysis. The text is a coher-
ent organization; or rather, it should be. The stronger the text’s network
of internal relationships, the more coherent and effective it will be.
The relational dimension, in this approach, has structure-building
capabilities that can be viewed from another point of view. One of the
priorities of semiotic analysis is, in fact, identifying which values are at
the core of a text and in which mutual relationship they appear. With
this in mind, Greimas drafted a logical diagram (the semiotic square, a
structure in the very L é vi-Straussian sense) to highlight how the values
underpinning the texts (that is not the moral “values” but that which is
indicated as what matters in a given text, including even, e.g., the death
for a murderous antihero) are organized and how action in the text is
organized. The basic values of a text respond both to a differential orga-
nization built on semantic oppositions17 and to a pragmatic investment
from the subject’s point of view. As the differential organization built
on semantic opposition, a value takes centrality and acquires meaning
because it opposes another value within the texts (freedom, for instance,
is opposed to fidelity in Madame Bovary, but it can also be seen as being
in opposition to respect in Freedom by Jonathan Franzen). As with the
pragmatic investment of the subject, a value takes centrality according
his or her action and his or her formative journey, which is marked pre-
cisely by moving from one value to another.
The semiotic square, therefore, is a diagram that represents the dif-
ferential relationships entered into by the structuring elements of a text,
and, within these, the central relationship is the contrariety relationship
(A-B), which is different from the contradiction relationship (A-not

A). Therefore, taking Madame Bovary as our example, we could draft
figure 1.3.
Emma switches her initial fidelity to betrayal, then to self-sacrifice,
in order to conquer the state of total freedom, perceived as loss of any
vital restraint.
We will try to explain these structural assumptions and the analyt-
ical advantages they bring forth using a concrete example of textual
analysis. What we want to highlight here is that beyond the closures and
rigidity that are often attributed to the structural theory of Greimas,
there are still some epistemological and methodological assumptions
of that theory which play a central, inescapable role and that are quite
evidently imports from structuralism:
- the idea that the text shall be perceived, first and foremost, as a form
of organization
- the interest in the text’s relational dimension and in its intertwined
levels
- the central role of the text as a model: texts are not what they are
because they exist empirically but because they are perceived and
“built” as organic units by the (structuralist) work of analysts.
Case Analysis: The Representation of Pain in

Humanitarian Websites
Let us now give a direct example of analysis to illustrate what it may
mean to actually accept and use the presumptions and ref lections
Contrariety
Freedom Fidelity
A B
Non B Non A
Betrayal Sacrifice
(non-fidelity) (non-freedom)
Figure 1.3 The semiotic square of freedom in Madame Bovary.

described here. We would like to show what the structural perspective

allows us to understand in texts, along with those aspects that manage
to deepen our comprehension and those that are left in the background,
the critical aspects presented and the risks it exposes us to.
We will do this through the textual analysis of a number of pictures
included in the websites of major humanitarian organizations: Human
Rights Watch (www.hrw.org ), Medecins Sans Frontières (www.msf.
org ), and Unicef (www.unicef.org ).18 Our field is, thus, that of human-
itarian or “concerned” photography—a type of photography increas-
ingly common that helps NGOs to draw the attention of the media and
the wider world.
Unfortunately, due to problems of copyrights, we are not always able
to include the images in the text. In such instances, we will indicate the
link in which the images are visible.
Constitution of the Corpus

The first problem the semiotician is faced with, regardless of the meth-
odological paradigm he has chosen, is finding a corpus of analysis to
build up. Every semiotician, in fact, believes that the object of his analy-
sis is not something that exists in reality as such, but rather the result
of a subjective cutting, a subjective pertinentization (i.e., a selection
according to a research interest) within a potentially enormous set of
objects. This very first “cutting” ref lects the first interpretative hypoth-
esis: by selecting some elements instead of others I already have a certain
reading pathway in mind.
In the case in point, the hypothesis is that it might be possible to
define certain “aesthetics” in portraying suffering and pain; that is, that
it may be possible to define recurring depiction models. It is there-
fore necessary for us to use a comparative approach, as L é vi-Strauss
taught us.
Comparative approaches, however, have a problematic status in semi-
otics. Comparison is one of the key strategies in semiotic analysis, but
despite this, it is often of a limited scope. Semiotics, which features a
qualitative analysis that focuses on the micro-aspects of the text, hardly
ever works with very large corpus, and even less so with fully com-
prehensive corpus (as, e.g., L é vi-Strauss suggested when he invited us
to take all cases of a given type of object). However, we believe that,
in terms of a semiotics interested in culture, it is more beneficial, if
not necessary, to work in extension, without focusing on a single text.
By taking into account several cases at once, and a discrete number of
objects, it is possible to better understand the social relevance of that

which we are analyzing.
In other words, semiotics needs to select significant and representative
corpus, but it must avoid both the logic of exemplum (taking a single case
and postulating a posteriori that it explains everything else) and the most
extreme derivation of constructivism (by defining an ad hoc corpus that
confirms the original hypothesis and that, therefore, does not really test
it or have the ability to modify it). In this respect, the difference from
deconstructionist approaches is extreme. While in deconstructionism we
proceed by digging inside a single case—all the better if it is exceptional—
chosen in a rather idiosyncratic manner, in semiotic analysis we explain
our research hypothesis and our own corpus building procedures, avoid-
ing extraordinary examples and focusing instead on a series of ordinary
cases that are significant because they demonstrate regularity. But this
first phase is a risky one in the corpus’s constitution, because there is a
clear circularity: we can use a particular criterion to select a corpus (mak-
ing it an interpretative hypothesis), but we have to find something new in
our corpus, respect our interpretative hypothesis; if we do not, knowledge
does not advance. Not only do we have to choose examples that confirm
what we have in mind, but we do have to have something in mind in order
to choose a given corpus. When we are unable to examine all cases of a
certain phenomenon (à la L é vi-Strauss), the risk is even bigger.
We think that the only way to overcome this risk is to select a corpus
according to a general theoretical interest (i.e., to study the aesthetics
of pain, without any preconception about which aesthetics we will find)
and collecting cases (a relevant number) that are similar and, as such,
comparable (because of the object they refer to, the language they use,
the medium they choose, the communicative aim they have, and so on).
We will now show this being put into practice.
Let us focus on the case in point. We have chosen to work on three
very important humanitarian organizations working in the social
sector—Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontières, Unicef. We
are assuming they are representative of the culture in which they oper-
ate, and we have examined their websites, monitoring those parts of the
sites in which photographs play a lead role rather than an ancillary one,
and in which they actually help developing an argument.
In order to further restrict our corpus we have focused on one case
per site:
Photo essay, “Burma: Untold Miseries,” Human Rights Watch (HRW;

http://www.hrw.org/features/burma-untold-miseries).
Photo essay, “Surviving Pakistan’s Floods,” Unicef ( http://www.unicef.

org/photography/photo_essays_all.php?pid=2AM4082OMTP4).
Photos related to the topic HIV on the website Medecins Sans Frontières19
(MSF; http://www.msf.org/search?keyword=HIV ).
The entire project consisted of looking at little more than fifty

photographs.
The Level-Based Analysis

As we have noted, semiotic analysis with a structuralist approach is
chief ly level-based . Looking at every picture with the same implicit ana-
lytical grid facilitates and guarantees comparability between the exam-
ined texts. In every picture, therefore, we have focused on the following
dimensions:
● the narrative
● the enunciative
● the figurative
● the pathemic.
These levels do not exhaust the complexity of the texts; another

analyst could choose different levels of analysis, focusing, for example,
on the relationship between author and audience, or on their intertex-
tual dimension. As we have already said, structuralist analysis is (like
all other types of analysis) interpretative by nature; this means that
it is based on a choice that selects the facets of the text in which the
interpreter is most interested. We are conscious that this partiality is
a potential weakness, but, like many ethnographists or anthropolo-
gists, we are convinced that the consciousness of the partiality of the
researcher’s own analysis is the first and basic guarantee of his transpar-
ency, and protection against any efforts to provide an ideological expla-
nation. Therefore, in this and in the following two chapters we will try
to underline the advantages and the limits —at the heuristic level—of
the theoretical perspectives explained, so that, at the end of the book,
we should have a richer, more critical, and more effective view on our
potential to analyze culture.
Let us briefly explain what we mean with the abovementioned dimen-
sions. The narrative dimension includes everything that has to do with
the history told or presumably told by the image. Every image is a still
of a moment in a given process. This moment can be the initial, the cen-
tral, or the final part of the process that one wishes to recount.
It can represent the moment of the performance or the preparatory
stage. For this purpose we shall recall Greimas’s definition of a canon-
ical narrative scheme (Greimas and Courté s, 1979); that is, a standard
scheme of process development that goes through the following stages:
— manipulation , when the subject of the story is pushed, manipulated

into performing a certain action;
— competence, when the subject acquires the skills and competence to
implement the desired program;
— performance, the moment the subject actually performs the action;
— sanction , when the work of the subject is evaluated, judged.
Looking at our corpus, it is already evident that there are highly rel-
evant recurring elements and differences. First of all, HRW and Unicef
build authentic “visual histories,” “visual chapters” about given subjects
while MSF proposes some single pictures and then suggests (through
the tags) some associations, some elements related to the same issue. In
doing that, HRW and Unicef tend to portray a whole process, whereas
HRW represents several different stages of the process, thus creating
an impression of completeness and internal structure; Unicef, on the
other hand, focusing only on performance and, occasionally, on sanc-
tion. MSF, on the contrary, doesn’t give a narrative characterization to
its matter and mixes the pictures placing them in no apparent order.
In addition to that, if we look at the narrative dimension of these pic-
tures, we will notice that they portray different subjects. In any event,
in fact, it is possible to identify different possible stories. To put it quite
banally, one can choose to tell the story of the murderer (who plans his
murder, moved by clearly defined reasons or an outbreak of madness)
or the story of the victim (who went to bed relaxing after a tiring day,
thinking about what he would do the next), and it is also possible to
identify different “mandators” (Greimas uses the word “destinants”):
the murderer may be moved by his inner evil, or if he commits a murder
of passion, he may be driven by his lover to kill his wife, or he may be
driven by the myth of wealth that our society has built.
In our case, HRW and MSF concentrate mainly on the stories of the
weaker subjects they portray (the subjects of the action are refugees or
Burmese or HIV patients), while Unicef chiefly focuses on the story of
relationships between two subjects: the Unicef doctors and the Pakistani
citizens. The focus on the latter is particularly strong, to the point that
the Pakistanis seem almost to be the Unicef staff ’s only object of interest.
If, therefore, in the first two cases that I mentioned (HRW and MSF) we
have mainly photographs showing refugees or patients as main characters,
in the case of UNICEF we have photos that often feature the doctors.
We would like to say something more on this last case because it
allows us to connect to a problem that has become apparent several
times in this chapter: ideology.
By portraying the Unicef doctors as the subjects and the Pakistani as
the object (of their care and attention, but “objects” nonetheless) is quite
different from representing the Pakistani as the subject and Unicef as
the helper. It is clear that the implicit logic of power and subordination
in either case is completely different, and the point is not superficiality,
sensitivity, or distraction: the point is the ideology underlying these
representations, the unspoken assumptions that the texts convey. If the
Pakistanis are the object of our care, we are staging a significant mani-
festation of Eurocentrism and this assumption surfaces in the fact that
the photo essay’s cover photo (which is particularly relevant) includes a
doctor with some Pakistani children looking up to him, as if they were
expecting something from him. It also appears evident that in the story
narrated by the images (in an apparently chronological order) the cen-
tral focus is on the doctors, who provide assistance and advice.
Another central aspect of the narrative dimension is that of defining
the actors, the subjects being represented. Which of the roles played by
the refugees, the Pakistani and the Burmese, at the core of our corpus
have been “fixed”? Does the comparison highlight significant recurring
elements or differences?
We will stick to highlighting the most relevant aspects here. In
some cases (HRW, in particular) the actors are primarily plural, or to
be more precise, the actor is plural in itself. Unicef also does this but
with a strong presence of doctors, as stated before. What we have under
the spotlight is a community, a population made of many people but
appearing as a single unit, a single collective subject, and this is because
it has been portrayed as homogeneous with a focus on its shared, social
places and spaces. Thus we find a small group in the village, a class in
the school, a small community in the place of worship: a plural group in
a very communitarian place.
On the other hand, MSF focuses much more on the individuals
(mother and child, single children, etc.) and what seems to be relevant
is their special story not their typical story as member of a community,
as in the photos given here (figures 1.4 and 1.5).
Figure 1.4 Young girl from HIV support group from Bulawayo. Operational Center of
Brussels.
Note: Photo by Juan Carlos Tomasi.
Figure 1.5 Philomène and her daughter.
Note : Photo by Rosalie Colfs.

By considering this one aspect we can easily outline two very dif-
ferent “readings” of these foreign countries. On the one side there is a
social, cultural vision, the idea of speaking with a population, with all
of its rituals and habits. On the other, we have the idea of telling per-
sonal, individual stories, which have a meaning regardless of the social
and cultural dimension they are located in.
In addition to this, in the HRW website the represented subjects
are more often than not active: they do, listen, speak. They look like
“complete” subjects partaking in a complex social life. Conversely, with
MSF, the individual representatives of the populations are mostly look-
ing or showing something (sometimes themselves or a part of them-
selves): looking into an empty space or into the lens, but only rarely they
actually do something. Their gaze seems to be their only action: a gaze
that, of course, calls out to us (the Western people) inviting us to pay
attention (see figure 1.6 ).
All of these remarks on the actors and on their narrative role are
directly related to the other dimensions of the analysis: the figurative,
passionate, and enunciative dimensions.
We will start with aspects of the passionate dimension because it is
probably the most immediate one.
Figure 1.6 Rubaya displaced camp in Masisi, North Kivu.

Note: Photo by Colin Delfosse.
As mentioned earlier, HRW mostly portray the subjects in the act of

doing something, as part of a broader picture of social, community life.
This corresponds to a facial expression that tends to be concentrated,
focused on the task at hand, almost unaware of the camera shooting
them. The Unicef pictures, conversely, though sharing the similar ten-
dency to represent the subjects in the act of doing, feature a completely
different level of passion. All the faces of the Pakistanis portrayed are in
pain, incredibly sad, hopeless. Even when they do something (cooking,
moving, or even just sleeping) they clearly do it in a “state of emer-
gency” and not as part of their ordinary life; whereas the socially ordi-
nary life that was evident in the case of HRW, where the school, though
tough, poor, and clearly in a bad state, was in any case an “institutional”
moment of their lives. The faces in the Unicef pictures, instead, seem
to be relaxing in only two pictures, in which groups of women sign
forms with the Unicef staff, and once again the focus shifts to the help
brought by the Western staff.
If we then look at the pathemic dimension in the MSF picture we
will find yet another solution (see figure 1.7 ). As we anticipated, here we
find mainly individuals, portrayed in the act of looking or, more radi-
cally, in the act of showing us something.
Figure 1.7 MDR TB patient taking his Direct Observation Treatment Short Course medi-
cation at the Nhlangano TB Ward supported by MSF.
Note: Photo by Giorgos Moutafis.
The concentration of their gaze or the isolation of their gesture makes

them, first of all, the subjects of an appeal, albeit a wordless one. Their
gaze or their gesture is a question posed to us. The passion level is not,
therefore, dramatic; it does not feature a display of intense passion (as
with the suffering shown in the Unicef pictures), but rather an interpel-
lation, an attitude that keeps on looking with a fixed stare without the
need to add anything else.
This theme of the gaze (and of the spectators and onlookers that are
part of the text) is strongly related to the enunciative dimension, that is,
the level of text related to the text creator’s simulacrum. The basic idea
is that, once a text is given, we no longer find the author there inside the
text, but “traces” of his communicative intention, which constitute his
simulacrum. It may be that this simulacrum is very strong and evident
(as in the cases in which the enunciator speaks in first person, or where
we find particularly subjective comments), or it may be that the enunci-
ator tends to hide, allowing the text to seem neutral, transparent.
Among those we have chosen, there are cases in which the simula-
crum of the enunciator is extremely transparent, almost imperceptible;
reality seems to be shown without any human or artistic intervention—
as is the case of the HRW pictures, in which the Burmese are portrayed
in their own world and social dimension and do not care for those who
look at them, that is, those who create the photographic text. The result
is that the text appears to be more neutral, without subjective traces
of those who have produced it. Beside these, there are other cases in
which the enunciator is one of the actors in the photos—as with the
Unicef photos, in which Unicef staff, as we have already said, feature
in the photos and, indeed, are the protagonists of the story being told.
In some cases, then, the enunciator’s presence is strongly manifested by
its “absence.” In the MSF pictures, for example, MSF operators never
appear in the scene (so the enunciator is not an actor), but the scenes
are built with such a strongly subjective perspective (focusing on the
details, color contrasts, on shadow and light play, and so on) that the
presence of an author becomes easy to detect. The relationship between
the observer and the observed is clear: the enunciator-observer is there,
very closed (see figure 1.8).
It is now time for some remarks on the visual dimension. According
to Greimas’s approach, there are two types of language in the visual
field: figurative language, which pertains to the iconographic portrayal
of the “figures of the world” (subjects, environments, objects), and plas-
tic language, dealing with lines, shapes, colors, and so on (see Greimas,
1984).
Figure 1.8 Dressing of a Buruli ulcer plague.

Note : Photo by Albert Masses.
If we take a quick look at our corpus we will notice that, once again,
very different routes have been taken. With HRW and Unicef the level
of “figurative density” is quite high, meaning there are many details
and particularly solid representations, while with MSF the figurative
density is dampened in favor of a symbolic density. In this latter case,
the figures are often quite isolated and they stand out in contexts made
of light and shadow that often blur the outlines and “neutralize” con-
texts, environments, and backgrounds. The natural dimensions of the
individual elements and the internal relationships with the elements of
a scene (a person and the horizon, a tree and the horizon, a hand and
the wall) are often altered by the framing, frequently including scenes
shot from below or from the side, thus creating ad hoc effects (altered
proportions, close-ups). The presence of figurative models that have a
strong impact in our culture (the woman-Madonna with child, a per-
son’s shoulders watching the horizon as in a painting by Friedrich, the
composition with a very strong perspective) leads us to see these MSF
pictures as true works of art: artistic discourses even before they became
discourses of denunciation. If, in the case of HRW, the effect of reality
is maximum—the subjects seem to be unaware of the presence of the
camera, the social and institutional dimension is quite strong and easily
recognizable, all of the focus is on the everyday activity of the repre-

sented subjects—in the case of MSF, the photos have the maximum
level of artistic expression, as if the portrayed drama was the potential
drama of every man in every part of the world at any age, of every per-
son aff licted by HIV anywhere in the world.
The Comparative Approach

All of the aspects and levels of the analysis we have mentioned could
obviously be further explored, but what we are interested in is how semi-
otic analysis has been evidently carried out in two phases: first, through
a decomposition of elements, and then, after decomposition, through a re-
composition of the said elements, thanks to a reading that focuses on the
network of relationships connecting the various elements in the text.
As we described in the previous paragraphs of this chapter, one of
the lessons of structuralism is the knowledge of the relational and orga-
nized structure of the manifestations of meaning, and this is what we
hope this example has managed to show. The discourses, the textual
manifestations, have a “logic,” they show a coherence, and it is up to the
analyst to be able to grasp it.
Of course, as we have already underlined, the main risk of such an
approach lies in the selection of the corpus. If we chose only texts that
confirm our interpretative schema, we could not advance any knowl-
edge: we would find only what we expect. But if we choose texts with a
criterion of comparability and pertinence, and we elaborate our interpre-
tative schema according to the “semiotic material” that texts offer us,
then we become truly able to gain a deeper insight into cultural logics,
discursive positions within a given social group, and the expressive pos-
sibility of cultural subjects.
In our case, with the analysis completed, we have been able to define
a number of photographic “aesthetics,” styles, models that we think
could be traced back to other textual manifestations.
The HRW photo essay20 features low-drama photos, surely not sub-
ject to the logic of horror that often underlies trauma photos, which
seem, first and foremost, to want to represent a certain type of com-
munity: its places, days, habits, and protagonists. What the pictures
focus on, in this community, is doing: work and actions that are not
organized ad hoc for the benefit of a Western watcher, but rather actions
that flow from the will and self-determination of these people. The
pathemic level has not been entirely reset but is instead rather limited.
Indeed, the pictures arouse a social and cultural interest: we are facing
an anthropological aesthetics that wishes to observe the Other for what

she/he is and does.
The Unicef photo essay21 has a strongly narrative structure. It begins
with an introduction on the place, the causes, the scope of the tragedy
(many pictures are taken from above, from a distance, placing natural
and human landscapes side by side) to gradually focus on action: that
which has been done, to whom and how, with pictures that gradually
“close in” on certain actors, certain faces, certain treatments, and cer-
tain priorities. The subjects of this “action” are, first and foremost, the
Unicef operators that go to these places to bring services, assistance,
and medicine. Only by meeting with Unicef do the desperate faces of
the Pakistanis seem to find some solace. Therefore, if one portrays trag-
edy in some way, one also represents a positive evolution, a form of at
least temporary victory. The portrayal seems, in other words, rigged
with an optimistic humanization of the events, a humanist aesthetics that
believes in people and in humanitarian assistance. Those who watch
these pictures are not asked to learn and become curious, understand-
ing the culture of the Other (as was the case with HRW), but rather to
be part of humanity in order to be a part of great things.
The case of MSF is entirely different. The images show an emphasis
on particularly creative, arresting, and visually engaging images. 22 We
find creative photos (photos therefore with a high “aesthetic rate,” at
least in terms of originality), arresting (with something that must shock
you at least for a while, as the image of a foot in figure 1.8 .), with an
ethical potential (visually engaging), and prompting or soliciting. The
user is involved through a mechanism of exploration made up of key-
words. Everything seems to be focused on solicitation, both visual and
ethical. By acting through the strong image, attention and awareness are
raised and everyone is urged to undertake a personal exploration.
As Susan Sontag reminds us in Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag,
2003), the shock may also be a criterion of value in this type of pic-
ture, and it clearly is here. In taking this path, the features of the pic-
tures we find are always the same: high aestheticization, often partial
and fairly detailed points of view (allowing the picture to be explicit,
without claiming to be objective), and a tendency to iconify. The shock
caused by these pictures is the shock that unites all human tragedies:
these figures are icons of pain, trauma, injustice. As these pictures are
abstracted from their context (or their link with the context is weak-
ened) they become symbols of suffering, part of an aesthetics of pain,
which transposes the story into an existential condition and leads us to
identify with the others’ pain.
CHAPTER 2
Unity and Pluralism: The Theory of

Jurij Lotman
Culture, Communication, and Translation

One of the cultural theories in which the influence of linguistics and
structuralism is far more evident (and more debated) is that developed
by Jurij Lotman (1922–1993).1 His theory is, in fact, flooded with ref-
erences, both explicit and implicit, to Jakobson, Trubeckoj, and L é vi-
Strauss, among others. Indeed, Lotman dedicated to Jakobson one of his
most important works, On the Semiosphere (Lotman, 1984), on which
we will focus in more detail in the following pages.
Moreover, Lotman is the first person to speak in terms of “semiotics
of culture,” focusing on the systematic cultural circle in which every
text is implicated. In fact, despite starting out looking at textual semiot-
ics (his first works deal with the analysis of poetic texts) he immediately
adopts a new perspective: essentially, that the analysis of texts is sub-
ordinate to the identification of general-scale cultural processing and
transmission, and every text is a place where many codes intertwine,
forming new relationships and structures.
As we will see later on, Lotman was not the only semiotician to
address the subject of culture in Europe during the mid-1970s and
1980s. Indeed, the semiotic reflections of Barthes and Greimas (which
we have already examined) and Umberto Eco (as we will see in chap-
ter 3) are laden with observations about and themes pertaining to cul-
ture: from the anthropological logic of sense (as in Greimas’s narrative
theory), to the laws of semantic organization (as with Eco’s encyclopedic
model) and its languages (see Barthes’s studies on fashion, kitchen, and
advertising). However, Lotman’s view is different and features another

aspect: regardless of the object of analysis (a text, an object, a space, a
behavior), always focuses on the system of relationships between object
and context, unity and plurality, trying to distinguish dominant mod-
els, so as to be able to proceed to a typification of cultures.
It is quite clear that, in defining and shaping his approach, Lotman
assumes and explicitly questions several aspects of structuralism: the
central role of the information category, the need to identify the mecha-
nisms that generate structurality, that is, a systematic order that is both
organized and dynamic, and the linguistic characterization of almost all
his theory.
Even the definition of the category of “culture” clearly highlights the
importance of Jakobson’s legacy and, more generally, communication
studies of the 1950s and 1960s. In his works written during the early
1970s, often with Boris Uspenskij, Lotman speaks of culture in terms of
“the non hereditary information and the means for its organisation and
conservation” (see Lotman, 1977a).
Information is not an optional feature of culture, but rather an essen-
tial one, and from that stems the need to deal with the problem of
transmission and preservation of information, as well as the problem
of the relationship between culture, language, and texts, in terms of
the relationship they have with the rest of the universe to which they
belong. The text, in and of itself and also as an expression of culture, is
an information device and this links it inextricably with the rest around
it. It is, therefore, precisely because of its structure that it cannot be
regarded as an isolated element, regardless of the type of dialogue into
which it enters.
There are two elements that, according to Lotman, define culture:
(a) that it contains information and (b) that this information can be
exchanged and passed on. These are clearly two functional elements
that contribute to and describe the functioning of cultural systems. In
other words, in order to function, culture must achieve two goals: it
must elaborate new contents and transmit them, both in a synchronic
(communication) and a diachronic (memory) way.
From the point of view of the definition of the category of culture,
Lotman (“On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” in Lotman and
Uspenskij, 1971, Eng. trans.) found that, at the base of the many avail-
able proposals, it is possible to find two recurring aspects, in which all
theories ostensibly concur—and these are two aspects, typical of the
linguistic-structural approach:
Unity and Pluralism ● 69
● that it is possible to identify distinctive traits within culture

● that culture thinks in terms of, and expresses itself as, a system of
signs
This assumption, of course, amounts to the acceptance of a systematic-

structural idea of culture: based on these early traits and specifications,
culture is organized (i.e., a system), it has a semiotic nature (as it is made
up of signs), and it is limited (otherwise it would not have distinctive
traits). As Lotman and Uspenskij pointed out, from the aforementioned
assumptions it follows that “culture is never a universal set but rather a
subset with a given organisation ” (Lotman and Uspenskij, 1971, empha-
sis added). Therefore, from the moment culture becomes the object of
analysis, it can never include everything, but it can be grasped only as
a subset of the whole, like a closed area standing in the background of
nonculture.
Over the next few pages we will see how the relationship with non-
culture, with the Other, lies at the core of Lotman’s thought and is
repeatedly stated as such. For now, we will point out that, even in the
earlier stages of his theory, Lotman treats the category of culture with
an approach based on a specific perspective: culture is never absolute
and it cannot be grasped in a unique reading and turned into some-
thing “total”, but rather it must always be viewed as a function of certain
subjects, in relation to a given situation, with a structure-building role :
culture organizes the part of the world that belongs to the subjects that
live in it; it has a structure-making capability that the individuals use
to understand, define, circumscribe, and develop a general view on their
overall experience.
The fundamental “task” of culture, as we will try to show, is in struc-
turally organizing the world around man.
Culture is the generator of structuredness, and in this way it creates
a social sphere around man, which, like the biosphere, makes life pos-
sible; that is, not organic life, but social life (Lotman and Uspenskij,
1971, p. 213).
In order to do this, in order to provide information with a struc-
tural order, culture needs a stereotyping device, a medium that makes
it possible to standardize and compare its different and heterogeneous
means of expression. This stereotyping device is, for Lotman, natural
language.
The central role of natural language within culture is continually
insisted upon by Lotman. Already in 1970, in his text The Analysis of
the Poetic, Lotman had separated the existence of natural language from
secondary languages (myth, religion), as communication structures that
grow on the natural linguistic level.
Later on, Lotman explains that language has two features that set it
apart from all other media: it is a system inherently structural in nature
(i.e., one made up of elements and rules) and it is naturally accessible to
the speaker, thus representing a model that is fully available to concep-
tualize, devise, and design other systems.
There is a functional link between natural language and the semiotic
systems of the human culture, a link that lies precisely in the fact that
language operates as a sort of “sample” model, as a natural ref lection
of the sign systems (and thanks to this very system all recoding types
become possible), while the various partial sign systems often have a
secondary function in the system of linguistic activity, as they are sys-
tems built upon it (see, on this point, the essays included in Lotman,
1977a).
Here Lotman describes both primary modelling systems and secondary
modelling systems.
Natural language is primary, both from the immanent and the func-
tional points of view; language is indeed organized as a complex sys-
tem (immanent point of view) that is so exemplary it can be taken,
in Lotman’s words, as a sample or model, and is also (from a func-
tional point of view) the most accessible and easiest tool with which to
describe other systems. We speak of art, religion, architecture, dance,
and fashion. Every one of these cultural spheres has its typical shapes,
its rules, its spaces, and can, in turn, be used to express specific aspects
of culture, but, in order to take a semiotic circulation it needs natural
language, it needs to become the object of a discourse. In addition to
this, we think about art, fashion, architecture, and so on, as languages.
We are therefore prone to search these different forms of expression for
an organization of signs that is analogous to or resembles that of lan-
guage. Natural language, therefore, works both as a tool and as a model
for the other cultural languages that thus become secondary. Its model-
ling and functional “power” is such that all culture, in every expression
and manifestation, can be conceived as a language and, therefore, as
communication.
The fact that the different cultural models organize and structure
themselves according to language and in compliance with its way of
working confers an impressive unitary nature upon culture. The fact
that culture consists of several languages and that all of these languages
are, at a certain level , similar is something that is at the same time both
unitary and plural .
Only if one distinguishes the different levels and series within the
heterogeneous set of the culture, will the analysis avoid getting lost in
the confusion and be permitted to build correct typologies of the various
cultural functions, identifying the structural isomorphism that makes it
possible to compare different types of systems. If we cut the hetero-
clite, irregular set of culture in the correct way, if we properly identify
different series on different levels, then culture will indeed appear as a
complex hierarchy of languages, but also as a complexity that can be
traced back to an order, an unifiable (from some given points of view)
complexity.
Analysis alone is not enough to understand culture, it is always nec-
essary to contextualize the analysis within a broader context, to have
an all-round view and capture the homologies that are found on sev-
eral different system levels. Those who think that structural analysis
should consist of mere analysis of the object on the immanent scale
are mistaken. According to Lotman, this is not the correct concept of
structuralism, or at least, it is not the structuralism that one can apply
to culture.
All the thoughts and ideas expressed so far clearly point out that, in
Lotman’s vision, one of the most important defining traits of culture is
its plurality of languages. There is no monolingual culture, and, most
importantly, there cannot be one.
According to Lotman, creativity (both cultural and vital) can only
stem from interrelationship (the relationship with the Other, the differ-
ent, the outside world, or, in other words, with another language), so
pluralism, therefore, is not simply a trait of culture but rather a condicio
sine qua non of it.
At the root of this assumption there is another idea, a concept that
originates in the heart of interpersonal communication (that a dialogue
between two people, in order to be fruitful, needs to feature an exchange
between two “worlds” that are, at least partially, different one from
each other; if the two participants said exactly the same thing, that
would be simply repetition), which Lotman slowly and gradually moves
onto a broader plane, including the general mechanism of culture. An
isolated semiotic system, even a perfectly organized one, cannot be a
culture: the minimum mechanism required is a couple of correlated
semiotic systems” (see “Theses on the Semiotic Studies of Cultures,”
in Lotman, Uspenskij, et al., 1973). No thinking mechanism can be
monostructural and monolingual. According to Lotman, a prerequisite

for any intellectual structure is its internal semiotic heterogeneity. A
monolingual structure can explain the system of communication rela-
tionships, the process of circulation of already formulated messages, but
it cannot form new messages.
Lotman, however, does not simply delve into the world of linguis-
tics and communications, but researches also science, in particular,
biology. While he draws the idea of linguistic pluralism from the the-
ory of interpersonal communication, he draws the idea that plurality
and self-sufficiency can coexist from biology theories. The modelling
metaphor (which is left unsaid in this excerpt but is more explicit
in others) is the metaphor of the human body, which is, at the same
time, one and united, yet made up of organs that constitute a system
in itself:
The sign systems unite organizations that are completely indepen-
dent of each other, with an autonomous structure, capable of existing
separately, bodies that, though being part of a more complex system,
acquire secondary properties that are unique to the parts of a whole, and
all of this without losing their autonomy on a lower level (in “Culture as
a Collective Intellect and the Problems of Intelligence,” Lotman, 1977b;
author’s trans.)
In other words, culture’s languages, subsystems, and regions are, to
a certain degree, autonomous; however, they are nevertheless “in need”
of a relationship at another level. They are structurally organized as
individuals but, in order to evolve, grow, and create new life, they need
to relate to heterogeneous systems.
The conclusions that Lotman draws from this are of an almost ethical
nature (or have, in any case, a strong ethical impact). Plurality, in fact,
is not only necessary for the vitality of the system but often becomes
a need for the Other, for comparison, interaction, dialogue. Since cul-
tural systems only function properly and produce life in the heteroge-
neity we have described here, it follows that nothing and nobody, by
themselves, can be vital.
Precisely because of this need for the Other, another fundamental
paradox of the way culture functions emerges (the first paradox being
that of the coexistence of plurality at a certain level and self-sufficiency
at others): heterogeneity is inevitable, confrontation with the Other is
necessary, but on the whole, it generates standardization, neutralization
of the otherness, uniformity. The moment at which we confront and
relate to the world around us, we assimilate it, bring it inside our space,
our cultural life: the Other becomes de-othered.
In this way, pluralism reveals its limits: despite any irenics, coexis-
tence not only generates life, dialogue, and unrestrained cohabitation,
but also standardization and domination strategies.
As early as 1973 Lotman wrote, along with other authors, in “Theses
on the Semiotic Studies of Cultures” (Lotman, Uspenskij, et al.,
1973) that the mechanism of culture is a device that transforms the
outer sphere into the inner one, disorganization into organization, lay-
men into initiates, sinners into saints, entropy into information, and by
doing so it standardizes something that was not.
The drive toward diversification (comparing oneself with the other)
and the trend of unification (assimilating the Other inside oneself ),
pluralism, and centripetal backswing always come together.
This is the most frequently recurring theme in Lotman’s thought:
culture needs the Other and its difference (as with dialogue, we
develop only if the other person does not think exactly the way we
do); this guarantees pluralism and internal heterogeneity and yet,
when culture welcomes the other it standardizes diversity, and adapts
it to itself.
In a subsequent stage of his ref lections, Lotman attributes an epis-
temological role to semiotics, which is dependent on this understand-
ing of culture. The semiotics of culture should, indeed, stand as the
“science of the functional correlations of the different sign systems”
(as Lotman said at the opening of the IV Summer School, from 17 to
24 August 1970, in Estonia), and investigate the way in which a cul-
ture’s various internal systems relate to one another, the kinds of plu-
ralism they produce and to what effect, the translation modalities, the
amplifications, losses, standardizations, distortions, and betrayals it
undergoes. It must “explain the functional needs of the cultural pluri-
lingualism,” study the mechanisms of the unit and reciprocal inf lu-
ence of the different semiotic systems; it must explain the definition
and pretence of cultural universals, and the non-translatability of some
languages and texts.
This plurality of languages and the need to relate them places the
problem of translation at the forefront.
Lotman believes that communication has an inherently translational
nature. He goes beyond the Jakobson model 2 and states that communi-
cation cannot possibly be conceived as a simple passage of information
from subject A to subject B. The two supposed subjects necessarily have
a different identity (in terms of knowledge and memory) and, therefore,
at least partially different codes. They are heterogeneous, as we have
already seen, and this heterogeneous nature produces informational
value. The misunderstanding, according to Lotman, lies in thinking

that the language (that which comes into play in communication) can
be thought of in terms of pure informational code. The concept of “lan-
guage” cannot be replaced with the concept of “code,” because the code
does not have an underlying history; it is a structure and it is abstract.
“Language—is a code plus its history” (in Lotman, 1993, Eng. trans.,
p. 4).
In this assumption we can see a central point of Lotman’s approach
to culture: the constant focus on the diachronic dimension of systems
and codes. We will return to this issue later on, but we hold it is nec-
essary to underline from the outset how Lotman and his interest in a
diachronic approach controversially questioned one of the aspects that
more markedly characterized classic structuralism and the teachings of
Saussure’s:3 the idea of choosing to study the single states of a language,
synchronic cuts of the cultural-linguistic evolution. Lotman believes
that every state holds within it both history and memory, and basing
itself on its hereditary patrimony, it then opens up to the future in a
way that defines its identity. There is, therefore, no synchronic state
that can be studied without applying diachronic concepts and remarks.
There is no code that can be studied as separate from history. And it is
precisely this “burden from the past” that differentiates the participants
in any dialogue. Different memories and histories create asymmetries
and tensions.
From the imbalance between the languages of the speakers always
comes tension and loss. The need to cut obstacles down to the mini-
mum by employing mutual translation creates a need to eliminate vari-
ety, in the name of regularization of the whole set. Something, however,
in the standardization process always escapes us, something that dif-
ferentiates the initial message from the translation. In other words, new
information is always being created.
The utmost expression of the tendency to reduce the lack of homo-
geneity and define uniformity is represented, according to Lotman, by
the metalinguistic and metatextual formations, in particular the self-
descriptions that every semiotic subject (both single and collective) gives
itself. According to Lotman, the key mechanism used by culture to
eliminate the residues of heterogeneity is the metadescription of him-
self: nobody describes him/herself as contradictory; in their eyes every
semiotic subject is coherent (see “Culture as a Collective Intellect and
Problems of Artificial Intelligence,” Lotman, 1977b).
The tendency for self-description and the active role they exercise
is also one of the traits that sets apart cultural evolution from natural
evolution (see Lotman and Uspenskij’s postscripts to the Theses on the

Semiotic Study of Cultures, in Lotman, Uspenskij, et al., 1973).
Models and Typologies of Culture

Lotman maintains that, by virtue of the plurilingual nature and dynam-
ics of culture, semiotics should be a “synthetic theory of culture,” capa-
ble of describing culture as a complex hierarchy of languages, different
from each other but, from a scientific point of view, unifiable. The
application of a uniform (semiotic) method with different semiotic sys-
tems can make it possible to enucleate structural isomorphisms between
different types of manifestations, making it possible to build semiotic
typologies.
This interest in semiotic typologies is a major distinguishing feature
of earlier reflections by Lotman (from the late 1960s to mid-1970s)
and is closely connected to the role of self-description we mentioned
previously. Every culture that wishes to be defined as such has at least
two features (“On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” Lotman, and
Uspenskij, 1971, p. 222–223):
o the possession of a high modelling potential, which must describe the

broadest possible range of objects;
o a systematic nature, which could work as an instrument to order what
is amorphous.
Creating its own concept of cultural development, every culture

creates its own typology of culture. Every culture speaks about itself,
defines its texts, placing them in a broader structure and giving them
a place and a role. Cultures, as we have already seen, need to contain
and keep under control their internal heterogeneity and, in order to do
so, they need to create a unitary image of themselves, a consistent self-
description. This need for a unifying synthesis is even more pressing
because heterogeneity represents the laws of existence of a culture from
several points of view: every culture has an extracultural background
on which it stands and, as such, it is heterogeneous; but every culture
also has, within itself, particular, heterogeneous spheres with a differ-
ent organization, islands inserted in culture but gifted with a different
organization, which have as their sole goal the increase of structural
variety. Since the cultural traits are disseminated , as we have seen in
chapter 2 with L é vi-Strauss, it is important to identify and define a self-
descriptive narrative that can collect and coalesce them into unity.
In defining how an auto-model can work, Lotman (in an essay of

1971, included in the Italian anthology by Lotman and Uspenskij,
1975, p. 73)4 outlines at least three:
● Some auto-models aim at outlining a state that can be clearly rec-

ognized as the true state of things (the home page of a company or
an association, for example).
● Some auto-models are very different from reality and they are
designed to modify reality. Many religious models work in this
way. For example, we know a Catholic should behave in a partic-
ularly way but that model, rather than describing an individual’s
behavior, actually works as a guide, an encouragement to behave
in that way; it is an incitement to improvement.
● Last, there are auto-models that work as an “ideal self-conscience”
even though they are destined to remain separate from reality.
This is the case, for example, with symbolic ceremonies, such as
the opening of the Olympic Games, where we see the ideal expres-
sion of the host country.
In drafting these self-descriptions, a key role is played by the

topological categories. Very often, in order to describe itself, culture
employs spatial models. It is indeed evident that the first problem
facing a subject that wishes to define itself is the definition of its
space and borders: their delineation and a consideration of what lies
beyond. In other words, it is necessary, on the one hand, to define the
borders dividing the space into two parts (inside and outside) and to
differentiate the “our” space from that of the other; while on the other
hand, it is necessary to imagine the world beyond the borders and direc-
tions of inf luence—this can refer to either the inside pushing outward
or the outside pushing onto a single cultural universe as shown in
figure 2.1.
This opposition between inside and outside takes several different
actual forms depending on the characterization and the orientation
inside and outside take.
First of all, when defining the outside, there are a series of basic
options:
● One can think of one’s own culture as unique, a universal space,

opposite to the nonculture waiting beyond its borders (i.e., beyond
the borders there is not a different organization, but rather, there is
ES ES
IN IN
ES ES
Figure 2.1 The spatial dynamics of cultural universes.

Source : From Lotman and Uspenskij, 1969.
no organization at all, a non-organization. This is what happened

for example with the traditional colonialism).
● instead one can presume that the universal space is inhabited by
different types of cultures and that, therefore, each description is
strictly connected to the context and the perspective from which
it comes (i.e., the one from inside a given culture system: in other
words, inside the borders stands one culture, beyond them stands
another. And this is what sustains any minimal form of postcolo-
nial multiculturalism).
Since the inside space is closed while the outside space is open
(as in figure 2.1), translating the inside–outside opposition with the
organized–non-organized one could be considered a natural choice.
Therefore, the first two types of culture, which we tend to oppose,
are chaotic versus orderly cultures, but from this first opposition come
a series of oppositions between pairs of traits. Lotman in particular
noted, in the chapter already quoted, that the following oppositions
were particularly common:
INSIDE OUTSIDE
My/our people Foreign people
Sacred Profane
Culture Barbarism
Intellectuals Commoners
Cosmos Chaos
As he also stated in other works (see “Theses on the Semiotic Studies

of Cultures,” Lotman, Uspenskij, et al., 1973), from this approach in
which inside and outside depend on the position of the describing sub-
ject, it follows that every type of culture has its own corresponding type
of chaos, which, as a consequence, is not primary nor immutable and
always equal to itself, but rather representative of an all-human and cul-
tural creation. The way in which chaos reflects the internal order and
how it speaks about cosmos is therefore very interesting; it betrays the
culture that produced it as a particular kind of chaos.
However, not everything, as Lotman points out, can be traced back
to the opposition of order/chaos. There are other ways of thinking about
the relationship between outside and inside.
The outside, in some cases, can have a positive connotation (e.g., the
Christian afterlife) and reflect on the inside (the mundane life). The
Middle Ages are the best example of how people led their mundane
life following in the footsteps of the divine (spiritual) life. In other
cases, the outside is an Other, different from us but not in a polemic
relationship with us; rather, it is in constant dialogue, sometimes even
a positive dialogue (we can run away, f lee to the outside), just think of
fairy tales. In some cases, the inside is (ontogenetically, in a way) part
of the outside (in Hegelian Historicism, e.g., the material reality we live
in—IN—is merely a stage of the reality that lies beyond the material
world—OUT—which is the Idea).
That which remains constant, according to Lotman, is the need for
a border, a frontier of sorts. Social identities, in order to describe them-
selves and, therefore, shape themselves and other cultures, must position
themselves and give a place to the rest of the world. The need of spatial-
ization for the subject is so strong that, at the end of his life, Lotman
conceived topological language as a primary modelling system, just like
natural language.
In order to provide a complete typological characterization of a par-
ticular culture, it is necessary for us to also consider the way in which
culture represents its origin and its semiotic nature, and the way it
relates to signs. Some cultures represent themselves (and behave) as
an aggregate of texts , while others act as system of rules (see “On the
semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” in Lotman and Uspenskij, 1971,
p. 218).
The cultures that present themselves as sets of texts (“textualized”
cultures) are more focused on expression, while those more deeply
linked to rules (“grammaticalized” cultures) are more content oriented.
In the former case, behavior is strongly ritualized and stylized, valuing
authenticity over accuracy (we usually do not classify a text as being

“correct” or not, but rather we say that it is authentic, true, expressive).
Strongly rule-oriented cultures, on the other hand, are generally drawn
to content and order. Authenticity is not taken into account, but order
and accuracy are held to be positive traits.
Thus, there are cultures (those based on expression, as per Lotman)
for which everything that exists is correct, while for others, only that
which is correct does and may exist (see Lotman and Uspenskij, 1971).
The former are the textualized cultures, in which the basic principle
is that of practice, habit, customariness, while the latter are the gram-
maticalized cultures, which claim law as their ruling criterion. A clear
example of this can be seen in the difference between Roman Law and
Common Law. The former is strongly grammaticalized, the other is
based on precedent and case (customariness). In Roman law, the prece-
dent, habit, custom needs first to be made into a written law or rule to
have any force. In Common Law, however, precedent can immediately
have the force of law, influencing and regulating a practice and then,
by the sheer force of being a precedent, becoming a true part of legal
code. Another example can be that of Classic versus Baroque style in
European architecture. If the first one, in the eighteenth century, was
based on the respect of a canon, of proportions, of precise “rules” of
beauty, the second one was based on free creativity, on fantasy, on sur-
prising inventions.
These models (textualized and grammaticalized) shall not, in any
case, be regarded as the unchangeable “nature” of society. In other
words, no cultural communities function in one single way. Indeed,
cultural systems are always subject to evolutionary forces, while gram-
mar, codes and legal systems also grow old. No text, not even grammar,
is eternal. Rules also tend to ossify and when their redundancy becomes
apparent, cultures start to elaborate textual forms of “reaction,” in order
to renew that which has become too rigid and, as such, out of touch
with reality.
If the typological categories are necessary for self-representation and
typification, in order to define the typologies of cultures, another level
that allows us to further identify and differentiate cultures is the one
we might refer to (from a semiotic point of view) as the “patemic level.”5
Some passions do have a particular power to characterize and model
within the precise borders of their cultural contexts. Such passions (and
their description in the texts belonging to the analzsed age) are both the
mirror and the instrument of the society they live in (on this issue see
also Pezzini, 2008).
One work on this topic is Lotman’s 1967 essay on the opposition

between honor and glory (in the Italian anthology by Lotman and
Uspenskij, 1975) in Russian culture. Here Lotman compares the roles
of these two passions in feudal and eighteenth-century Russian cul-
ture to highlight how the sense of words and concepts is established
only in relationship to the model of which they are part. While in the
feudal culture honor required a material token, glory was instead a
higher, immaterial reward. Honor belonged to the vassal who, once it
was bestowed upon him, was bound to loyally serve the lord who had
granted it. Glory, however, belonged to the Lord, had no material char-
acter (in this sense it had a semiotic and immaterial nature), and could
also be obtained by the subject’s successors. The lord may gain glory
thanks to his power and his nature; the vassal achieved honor (e.g., on
the battlefield) with the compliance and respect of certain duties.
In the time between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century the
meaning of these passions undergoes a palpable revolution: in the eigh-
teenth century honor becomes more important than glory and, as such,
the exclusive right and privilege of the highest echelons of the aristoc-
racy. Freed from the need to prove itself via practical results, it becomes
a prize, a reward in itself. Glory, on the other hand, loses any supernat-
ural traits and becomes merely a mundane token of reward.
Lotman notes this change to once again underline both the inherent
relativism of every natural system (and, subsequently, the perspectivism
inside each view of the world in which every model assigns a given value
to its own internal terms and concepts, a value that cannot be general-
ized and extended to all works ages and societies) and the unitary nature
of cultural models that bestow a sort of “consistent distortion” on every-
thing that falls within its space. The pervasiveness of cultural models
is inescapable and it is this very fact that guarantees a sort of “sincerity
of texts,” because they simply cannot avoid expressing the culture of
which they are part and in which they are immersed. Regardless of
what the texts actually say, they all have an underlying view of the world
that is never questioned and always taken for granted, the overall set of
assumptions that constitute common sense, and on which every subse-
quent argument stands.
Lotman carried out also an analysis of the concepts of shame and fear,
similar to that of honor and glory (always in the Italian anthology by
Lotman-Uspenskij, 1975). These two passions are, for Lotman, instru-
mental to one of the most essential components of the life of any cul-
tural system: the need for rules and limits. Shame and fear both require
a distinction between an “us” and a “them,” regulating the relationships
between these two groups. Shame mostly regulates the internal relation-
ship within the “us” sphere, while fear regulates the us–them relation-
ship; that is, the relationship with the outside. The aristocratic society
of eighteenth-century Russia, for example, as I stated before, was ruled
inside by the logic of honor (with shame falling on those who failed to
adhere), but chief ly used the logic of shame in its relationship with the
“outside” (poor people, peasants, and so on).
Lotman concludes:
The complementary nature of the relationships between shame and fear,

as psychological mechanisms of culture, makes it possible to develop
typological descriptions that range from these systems where hypertro-
phy of the “fear” component causes shame to lose any inf luence on those
for which shame is the only regulator of bans and rules. (Lotman and
Uspanskij, 1975, Italian edn., pp. 274–275, author’s trans.)
Indeed, Lotman returns to fear also in subsequent works (Lotman,

1998), ascribing to it a peculiar semiotic relevance, particularly in cases
where it does not stem from an actual threat but from a more indefinite
one:
This is where counterfeit, adulterated receivers, developed by semiotics,

are made: it is not the threat that causes fear, but the fear that creates the
threat. The object of fear is a social construct, it is the birth of semiotic
codes with whose help the “socium” in question codifies itself and the
world around it. (Lotman, 1998, p. 4, author’s trans.)
The ref lection on the role and the side-effects of the logic of honor
(which, in turn, fuels the logic of shame) allows Lotman to develop
reflections on the role of conventionality in social behavior.
The logic of honor is, according to Lotman, linked to a strong degree
of behavioral conventionality; as we have seen, from the eighteenth cen-
tury onward it became a “semiotic,” conventional reward. For example,
the whole system of state honors and ranks, introduced in the eigh-
teenth century as a system in direct competition with the hereditary and
absolute nobility, was based on exchanging “merit” with the “sign” (in
“‘Agreement’ and ‘self-giving’ as archetypal models of culture,” 1979, in
Lotman and Uspenskij, 1984). However, in the eighteenth century con-
ventionality was enhanced to such a degree that it acquired increasingly
ritualized forms. And it was then that the culture of nobility started to
cultivate etiquette and to dramatize every aspect of life. The semiotics
of corpustist honor rose in popularity and the practice of dueling, the

ritual procedure of restoring lost honor, was developed in these times.
Instead, for those models in which conventionality did not appear
within a cultural model, there are two different hypotheses: in higher
classes the absence of conventionality may produce a certain kind of
behavior that causes the whole semiotic system to drift toward sym-
bolism, while in the lower social classes it may cause behavior to tend
toward a purely practical behavior with a null semiotic level.
Conventionality also appears, in a multifaceted, transversal way, in
another cultural typology, which compares magic -based relationship
models with religion -based relationship models.
The key traits of the magic model are: reciprocity (there is no unilat-
eral action: both the magical strength and the “sorcerer” that triggers
it are active subjects); forced reactions (some actions must necessarily
cause specific reactions); equivalence (magic mostly offers exchanges
based on conventional signs: if you want to be loved by him you must
carry out a series of operations); a strongly contractual relationship
between the parties (which, by the way, makes betrayal possible: if there
is agreement, this agreement may be breached); and, on the whole, a
high degree of conventionality.
The religious relationship, instead, is not based on an exchange but
on a surrendering of oneself to an unlimited power. The main traits of
this modality are: one-sidedness (the power is unidirectional); no forced
reaction (one of the parties gives everything, the other may or may not
give); the nonequivalence of relationships (the means used in religious
practices are not conventional signs but symbols in which expression
and content have a relationship of inherence and motivation); and the
nature of unconditional gift the relationships have (they are not agree-
ments but “grace” given by the power or deity).
According to Lotman, these ref lections on conventionality point out
that, despite being strongly heterogeneous inside and based on a dis-
semination of traits, cultures conceive themselves (in the self- descriptive
stage), or can be conceived (in the analytical stage), in a consistent and
unitary way, giving an impression of unity to those who watch them
from afar. The members of a culture are not necessarily aware of the
standardizing power of the models they assume (this awareness is,
instead, found in some hegemonic institutions wishing to impose cer-
tain models over others), but in any case, they are conditioned by them
and, though variable, spontaneously comply with them.
These modelling criteria can be the key passions of shame, fear,
honor, or glory; they can be certain types of social relationship like the
logic of gift and that of exchange, which, as we have just seen, rule the
religious and magical sphere respectively; there can also be different
types of semiotic attitudes (conventional or creative, as in the gram-
maticalized cultures and in the textualized ones), they can be topolog-
ical categories, such as inside, outside, beginning, or end (it is possible
to distinguish between cultures focused on the beginning and cultures,
like those that view themselves as the beginning of a new world, and
end-oriented cultures like those focused on apocalypses), and they can
even be single words:
There are words that, thanks to their importance and frequency,
have acquired a stable meaning, have developed situational relation-
ships, and have undergone a process of mythologization. They become
signal-signs of other texts. They are “themes.” Some themes become
tools for modelling the space (the house, the street), others instead
model the internal structure of the community (the parade, the
prison, the ward), while others again model the nature of conf licts
(the duel, the fight, the game) (“The Themes of Cards and Game in
Early-nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” Lotman, 1978, author’s
trans.).
In any case, what Lotman helps to focus on is the fact that each cul-
ture bases its identity and its stability on a criterion that runs through
many aspects of the social life and unifies them.
The Life of Texts

Texts play an important part in the ref lections on the typologies of cul-
ture. Lotman’s semiotics is not properly textual ; it is, rather, a semiotics
of culture that cannot do without texts (which are seen as its instru-
ments), because the texts are the main source for the self-descriptions
of culture on which Lotman focuses, and because the texts propose the
models of meaning that condition lives and the behavior of those who
belong to any given culture.
We find in Lotman, therefore, that central role of texts that we have
indicated, since the Introduction in this book, as one of the specific fea-
ture of the semiotic approach to culture.
The text is significant for Lotman in several ways:
— It offers a model of culture that could be seen to represent, on a

smaller scale, the culture to which it belongs. Like culture tout court ,
the text often finds in such categories as “limit,” “frontier,” “begin-
ning,” and “end” parameters that are essential to its definition.
— It conditions the life and even the behavior of the culture, sometimes
undertaking a regulatory role.
— It functions as the culture’s memory.
The idea of “text” that Lotman has in mind is broad and compre-
hensive and includes not just verbal and literary texts (despite the fact
that these, as far as Lotman is concerned, are the most interesting). The
text is, for Lotman, the prime element—the base unit—of culture (see
Lotman, Uspenskij, et al., 1971) and anything that has a significant role
in a culture can be regarded as a text, from an architectural structure to
a toy, a painting, a fashion, or a doll. Lotman speaks of texts as cultural
functions, cultural organs —which makes it possible to extend the defini-
tion of a text to other such items. He says, being a novel, a document, or
a prayer means carrying out a given cultural function and delivering an
overall meaning. There is no textuality without cultural organization
and specification.
In addition to this, texts for Lotman do not obey a pure and simple
need for expression: texts inf luence behavior, enter people’s lives, and
modify them.
A cornerstone in the text–behavior nexus is the essay Lotman wrote
on the Russian Decembrists (Lotman and Uspenskij, 1984). This essay’s
main topic is the behavior of a very small social group that no longer
exists—the Decembrists, a group of Russian revolutionaries of aristo-
cratic origin. Lotman is interested in them because their “behavioral
style” differs from that of both the revolutionaries and the liberal noble-
men of the same time. Their behavior shows traits that are entirely
“exclusive,” such as impressive loquacity, complete autonomy, and clar-
ity of judgment (which, at the time, was considered improper), their
habit to assign a label of value to every action, a mark demonstrating
how an action belongs to a given axiological system, and an exaggerated
language of gestures. Lotman’s aim is to find the meaning of this eccen-
tricity, the semiotic significance of this apparent unjustified behavior.
This is what Lotman says about their gesticulation:
Gestures are actions that do not have a purely practical purpose, but
that also make reference to a meaning. The gesture is always a sign and
symbol. [ . . . ] From this point of view, the everyday behaviour of the
Decembrist would look calculated and theatrical to an onlooker. But
one should understand that the “drama” in that behaviour must not
cause it to be labelled insincere or otherwise negative. It is nothing more
than a sign of the fact that the behaviour has taken a meaning that goes
beyond that of the mundane, everyday gesture, i.e. it has become the
object of attention and the symbolic meaning of deeds, through which it
is not solely the deeds that are evaluated. (Lotman and Uspenskij, 1984,
author’s trans.)
For the Decembrist, Lotman points out that the usual relationship
between action and words is inverted. While words usually correspond
to and are followed by actions, in the Decembrist universe actions are
followed by words; gestures have a value when their “semiotic” sense is
made explicit by verbal signs. In other words the Decembrists have the
task of naming, lexicalizing and then evaluating explicitly and publicly
the actions carried out, thus gradually weaving a behavioral “text”; that
is, a well-defined sequence of movements with a positive value that is
consequential to their own goal. Behavior is made increasingly less spon-
taneous and more “codified” in comparison to sequences of gestures,
which are openly valorized as being significant. Behavior becomes texts
and texts become models, and as such they influence behavior in a semi-
otic cycle typical of cultural functioning.
Lotman writes:
The hierarchy of significant behavioural elements consists of the

sequence: gesture-action-behavioural text. The latter shall be regarded
as a finite chain of actions closed between intentions and results. In
real people’s behaviour, which is complex and ruled by several factors,
behavioural texts can remain unsolved, they become new texts and inter-
twine with parallel texts. But when one turns to the ideal interpretation
that men give of their behaviour, the texts always form meaningful pat-
terns; if they did not, human activity would be impossible. Therefore,
at action level, every behavioural text corresponds to a well defined
behavioural programme at intention level. [ . . . ] The daily behaviour of
the Decembrist remains incomprehensible unless we take into account
not only gestures and actions, but also single, finite higher level units:
behavioural texts. [ . . . ] Every action becomes a text if it can be con-
nected in an enlightening way with a given literary subject. (Lotman and
Uspenskij, 1984, author’s trans.)
It is therefore easy to understand how Lotman does not simply

broaden the category of text but makes it strategic in relation to the
complex dynamics of social life.
Behavior is influenced by texts (even those texts that seem most
removed from everyday life, such as literary canon texts) and, by select-
ing meaningful gesture patterns, become a text itself.
Behavior, indeed, becomes such only for those observing it and try-
ing to understand its significance (thus transforming it into a “text”). If
this does not occur, it is no more than a chain of gestures and actions
without any “design.” Behavior, be it verbal or somatic (gesture), looks
unitary only from the point of view of the observer. To the eyes of an
onlooker that pursues other goals the behavior will always paint a color-
ful picture of constantly changing signs. Uniformity and the agreement
on what shall be regarded as significant and what shall be excluded
from the text depends only on the conventionality of the code that the
(structuralist) analyst finds in the elements observed. In general, we
consider everything that repeats itself or, conversely, that which cannot
be repeated, to be significant. Both the regular event and the unique
one make sense but, as we have already underlined about structuralist
analysis, the strategies of selection and making the elements relevant are
more than one and they depend on the interests of the observer.
Texts, behavior, and model behavior no longer inhabit separate parts
of the life of a society but, rather, they place themselves within a unitary
fabric in which experiences, texts, models, gestures, and code commu-
nicate with each other and, thus, work.
Lotman is quite clear on this: one must reject the concept of an artis-
tic work—or any text, for that matter—as something isolated, removed
from context, and always identical to itself. This kind of text does not
exist, but even if it did, it would be totally useless from the cultural-
functional point of view.
A text needs an exchange in order to exist; it thrives on exchanges,
as we have already seen.
The central role of texts played in cultural life is due to their “nature,”
which corresponds to the living nature of culture (both chaotic and
ordered at the same time).
The text is a culture-generating mechanism, and this mechanism has
two main features:
● It has an internal heterogeneity, which causes complex semiotic

processes to occur within it.
● It requires a continuous semiotic exchange obtained via transla-
tions (or, more precisely, a complex system of interpretations with
a different degree of approximations) from the text to other differ-
ent contexts: text/reader, text/other texts, and text/different semi-
otic systems (languages) in a given culture.
The text is a mechanism that lives as long as it functions. A text

taken out of context is like an exhibit in a museum, a depository of
constant information that is always identical to itself and not capable of

generating new information f lows. The text in context is a mechanism
in function, continuously recreating itself, changing its physiognomy,
and generating new information.
In Lotman’s theory “function” has at least two specific meanings
(not derived from the functionalism that characterizes a certain field of
anthropology, such as that of Radcliff-Brown):
—The idea of function as an active component in the system, an organ

(to use the biological metaphors Lotman is so fond of ) that contrib-
utes to vitality, to keeping a system alive, in the holistic sense of the
word.
—The idea of function as a semiotic relationship (closer, in a sense, to
the mathematical and logical idea of “function”), a device used for
relating linguistically and culturally different planes and systems.
Based on these two meanings, the equation text = function implies

both the vision of the text in the light of culture (the text is a body of
the culture, and therefore ref lects it, acting as a mirror) and the shift-
ing of the analyst’s focus from the immanent description of the text to
the description of the network of relationships and dialogues formed by
the text inside a culture. The limits of the text , in this approach, tend to
blur, becoming porous and changeable depending on the analyst, but
this, for Lotman (and for us), is not a limit of the theory, but rather one
of its strong points.
Lotman says:
An essential difference of contemporary structural analysis when com-

pared to formalism and the early stages of structural studies lies in the
very isolation of the object of analysis. The concept of the separate, iso-
lated, stable, self-sufficient text was the cornerstone of the latter schools.
Text was the constant, and the beginning and the end, of the study. The
concept of the text was, actually, a priori .
Contemporary semiotic study also considers text as one of the basic
research concepts, but text itself is considered as a functional rather
than a stable object with constant properties. Both the individual work,
its parts, the compositional group, the genre, in the final analysis—lit-
erature as a whole, may emerge as a text. (Lotman, 1993, Eng. trans.,
p. 115)
In addition to having relative and variable borders, the text, accord-

ing to Lotman, shall be investigated from the point of view of its
communication and effective role; it is therefore necessary to study the

relationship the texts have with their public (or at least asking ourselves
the question of the real public of a certain type of texts), the relationship
between the texts (in terms of intertextuality or intersemiotic transla-
tion), their relationship with behavior (as we have seen in the case of the
Decembrists), and their relationship with the overall value system of a
society (a system that can request or refuse the circulation of certain
types of texts). Moreover, as we have already asserted, the most impor-
tant point is to understand why, and under which conditions, in some
cultural situations a stranger text becomes necessary.
In brief, it is all about questioning why a given cultural system
produces certain texts. Synchronic analysis is not enough to find the
answers to questions of this kind; here, a diachronic consideration of
the evolution of cultural systems is required.
Indeed, a purely synchronic approach would fail to perceive the con-
tinuous meanders inherent in a text. In Lotman’s view, the texts (which,
in order to be observed, need the modelling categories of beginning and
end) change continuously precisely because of the network of relation-
ships on which they stand and act.
It is this relationship network that gives the text meaning. Cultures
thrive on the acquisition and loss of texts, and the way they define and
modify their codes and their memory. Texts from the culture’s past
are constantly returning, subjected to a re-encoding that makes them
sources of new information. Each coding system is then correlated with
other systems at the synchronic level and with its previous states at the
diachronic level. 6
The Semiosphere as a Space of Relationships

This overall set of “horizontal” relationships (relationships with the
other texts and other languages that circulate in the same historical
context in which we function, both inside and outside one’s own envi-
ronment) and “vertical” relationships (the way texts and codes of the
past have influenced the present day and model, to some degree, the
future) is what constitutes the specificity of each cultural state. It is this
network of relationships that defines that f leeting, ever-changing, retic-
ular, mobile, and widespread entity that is culture.
Lotman, in a ref lection written in 1974 (“Chudo ž estvennyj ansambl’
kak bytovoe prostranstvo”), in order to explain the inclusive and exclu-
sive characterization of the category of culture, uses the concept of
“ int é rieur.” As in any house or dwelling, like any “inner” space, the
artistic and cultural space is never filled solely by works and objects
that are synchronous with the moment of their creation. Every room
includes elements from different ages and dates, without including (or
wanting to include) everything. There is a selection principle (perhaps
unwillingly), making some elements compatible and others, utterly
inadequate. The characteristic of each age and culture is the existence
of fixed and typical relationships together with very specific incompat-
ibilities, says Lotman. It is not, therefore, enough to oppose an internal,
orderly sphere to an external, chaotic one. Cultural universes, thanks
to their internal organization, allow for some possibilities and exclude
others, and these “included” possibilities are subsequently organized
and ordered, sorted. As the culture mechanisms grow increasingly
complicated, the simple juxtaposition of the “cultural” (organized)
and the “noncultural” (not organized) space is replaced by a hierarchy,
and within any closed space, stand increasingly elevated hierarchical
sectors.
This inherently and overall organic nature (every int é rieur has its
own style) and the importance of considering all cultural phenomena as
“unitary” (even if quite different inside), always related to one another,
like macro-units in a mutual relationship, push Lotman to consider the
cultural world chiefly as a space of relationship.
The idea that the starting point of any semiotic system is not the
simple isolated sign (word), but rather the relation between at least two
signs causes us to think in a different way about the fundamental bases
of semiosis. The starting point occurs not in a single isolated model,
but rather in semiotic space. This space is filled with a conglomeration
of elements whose relations with each other may be encountered in a
variety of ways: they may emerge as a semantic collision, oscillating
in the space between complete identity and absolute divergence. These
multilingual texts simultaneously include both possibilities, that is, one
and the same text may find itself in a state of non-intersection in rela-
tion to a given semantic range and in a state of identification with yet
another. This variety in the possible connections between semantic ele-
ments creates a multidimensional point of view, which can only be fully
understood in terms of the ratio of each element to the other and all
elements to the whole. Furthermore, it is necessary to keep in mind the
fact that the system has a memory of its past states and an anticipation
of potential “future states.” Thus, semiotic space is simultaneously mul-
tidimensional in both the synchronic and diachronic senses. It benefits
from f luid boundaries and the capacity to incorpuste itself in explosive
processes (Lotman, 1993, p. 172, author’s emphasis).
As time went on, Lotman’s insistence on the need for a global,

organic, and relational perspective became increasingly central, to the
point that it became the trait to characterize the semiosphere.
As it is known, Lotman introduced the word “semiosphere” in 1984,
in his essay “On the Semiosphere,” inspired by Vernandskij’s studies on
the biosphere7 and proposing a theory of culture that highlighted the
similarities between cultural, semiotic, and biological life. He develops
the concept via an analogical reasoning, identifying the contours of a
great cultural mechanism, or culture producing system, that is both
general and unique, and within which all the cultural operations are
carried out. In this way, he promotes an analogic equation: the aspects
of cultural life have the same relationship with the semiosphere that the
elements of biological life have with the biosphere.
The main analogy between culture and the biological sphere is
obtained via organicity; that is, the consistence and systematicity of an
organization that lives and works as a whole but still holds within it a
series of individual “subjects.” Just like the sum of all biological beings
constitutes the biosphere of the planet, which is a necessary condition
for the existence of life, the global sphere of culture is a necessary con-
dition for the existence of thought. Semiosphere (as whole sum and
organization of texts) is, in this way, the condition for the existence of
any other form of cultural life: culture lives and derives from culture; it
would be impossible for culture to develop from a void with no past.
There is no renewal of meaning (that is, cultural life) outside an envi-
ronment that is already significant in itself precisely because it contains
memory and information. Inside this unitary and organic environment
it is necessary to find a space, a role, a function that gives sense to its
semiotic individuality.
The bodies that characterize biological life have at least two etymo-
logically evident aspects: they are organized entities and they also have
organs.
If the idea of culture as an organized whole is rather obvious, it
is not equally obvious to use the concept of “organs” within culture.
Nevertheless, Lotman does so many times, pointing out that the semio-
sphere is not similar to the biosphere just because it is equally organic,
but also because, like a human body, it assigns a function to everything
within it, while that which serves no function is rejected. The parts of
the semiosphere are not details or sector-specific aspects of a whole,
but organs of an organism whose “genetic pool” holds all the wealth and
knowledge of the body to which they belong. However, these organs
retain a certain specificity, as morphological as it is functional.
This functional insistence, that we have already met in his approach

to texts, is probably of Jakobsonian heritage: every semiotic identity, in
order to remain inside the semiosphere of its culture, chooses a role and
has a function.
As in any other organism, cultural organs are the subjects devoted to
ensuring good overall functioning, and the first problem that a complex
mechanism like the biosphere has to face is managing variety, the inev-
itable heterogeneity that characterizes it.
It is because of this that, within any synchronous state there are
always two opposing trends: one that pushes toward autonomy of ele-
ments and the other pushing toward integration. The result of this
duplicitous tendency is a single structure in which every part is at the
same time a whole, and every whole works as if it were a part. Like in an
organism, every organ is an autonomous entity but, at the same time,
acquires meaning only through the function it plays in the overall life
of the organism: a lung, by itself, would have no a function as it would
have no body to provide oxygen to. In this complex, integrated system,
each unit is part of a hierarchy of constructions of higher levels and
constitute, at each of these levels, the “personality” of a socio-semiotic
group, which is, in turn, included as part of more complex units.
The task of integrating this complex internal differentiation and external
integration mechanism into the semiosphere is performed via stabilization
and destabilization mechanisms. The former have the task of standardizing
and reinforcing the identity of the whole, while the latter carry out evo-
lution and differentiation. Let us think, for example, of the destabilizing
function that an extremist political group can have within a society (e.g.,
Isis fundamentalists), or the way in which the introduction of a text may
lead us to review certain parameters or accepted attitudes (there is no need
to bother Copernicus, just think about the publishing of Naomi Klein’s
book No Logo, which has radically changed consumerist purchasing logic
focused on the cult of the brand). On the other hand, a good example
of stabilizing function is a ritual ceremony, such as the Royal Jubilee or
the Olympics, in which a given collective subject (Christianity, United
Kingdom, Greece, China) shows itself to the world (we have already dis-
cussed this in chapter 2 , in reference to autodescription).
The semiosphere is, in other words, a “lively” universe, made up
of internal contrition, external pressures, destabilizing inventions, and
troublesome contacts:
Any dynamic system is submerged in a space in which other equally

dynamic systems exist, together with fragments of those structures
which have been destroyed; peculiar comets of this space. As a result, any
system lives not only according to the laws of its own self-development
but also incorpustes a variety of collisions with other cultural structures.
[ . . . ] That which is regular in “its” own system appears as “random” in
the system with which it has suddenly collided. [ . . . ] The history of the
culture of any population may be examined from two points of view:
firstly, as an immanent development; secondly, as the result of a variety
of external inf luences. (Lotman, 1993, p. 65)
This ongoing relation with what is internal and external is another

typical feature of the semiosphere, which, being an organism, has organs
and transductive membranes, layers through which life (cultural life, in
this case) runs, transforms, metabolizes, preserves, recycles, and expels
itself.
Semiotic space appears before us as the multilayered intersection of
various texts, which are woven together in a specific layer character-
ized by complex internal relationships and variable degrees of translat-
ability and spaces of untranslatability. The layer of ‘reality’ is located
underneath this textual layer—the kind of reality that is organised by a
multiplicity of languages and has a hierarchical relationship with them.
(Lotman 1993, p. 23–24).
The semiosphere (namely culture) consists of the relations that form
these layers, with transversal levels of homogeneity and differentiation.
In fact, a semiosphere can only be considered in its immanent isolated
aspect from a heuristic point of view. It only works when it receives
input from the extratextual world, and when it has translated this exter-
nal world into its internal part. Its layers, like membranes, filter the new
information, metabolizing—each one in its own way (translating in its
own way)—what they think is more adequate, excluding all the rest.
This work of “absorption” is not always straightforward; indeed,
it is often complex and chaotic, filled with moments of friction and
rupture.
As we have seen, information never passes through without changing.
At each passage, it is altered, no matter how subtle this modification may
be. Therefore, the logic underpinning this change is one of translation,
as each time it alters we see a reformulation, a rewording, which is the
base level for translations. The borders, the membranes that protect and
differentiate a certain cultural organism from the outside, are defined
by Lotman as translation filters . They allow external information to
pass through, but, at the same time, they filter it, adapting it to the
inside. Think about the formats for certain television programs (e.g.,
Big Brother), they enter our media’s cultural system by being readjusted
in line with certain key values or stereotypes of our culture; similarly,
the menus in McDonald’s throughout the world differ slightly depend-
ing on the tastes of the country in which they are located. In Italy we
find sandwiches made with Parmesan cheese, something that is unlikely
to be found in China. Something local (the American McDonald’s)
becomes universal (moving outside its own borders), but by doing so, it
has to adapt and lose its specificities: it has to adjust.
The filtering and translation process affects not only that which is
external to and different from us, but also that which is internal, inside
our space. In fact, as well as space extraneity (that which lies outside our
borders), there is also time extraneity. The past—although it is our past,
the past of our country, of our family—may be as unknown and distant
from us as the present of another “tribe.”
Lotman is very clear about this. The internal conflict of culture also
involves time. Not all of a culture’s “cells” evolve at the same speed—
look, for instance, at the difference between stable systems like language
and mobile systems, such as fashion. Different epochs exist within every
moment of the culture there, even though at the meta-level (the way
in which culture describes itself ) this variety is eliminated. The meta-
mechanism of these descriptions is not limited to creating a specific
canon of the synchronic state of culture, they also produce their own
version of the diachronic process. They select not only the texts of the
present but also those from the culture’s past, those which “sit natu-
rally” with the image that a given culture, in a given moment, would
like to project.
Culture is made up of layers that develop at different speeds so that
any synchronic cut to culture shows the simultaneous presence of var-
ious stages. These different speeds can vary from the slow slog of tired
progress, to the explosiveness of a sudden and unforeseen change. The
latter are defined by Lotman as explosions.
Explosions express the need for a reorganization of the system.
Conversely, the moment in which the explosion ends is defined as a
turning point: not only the starting point of a future development but
also a moment for self-knowledge (see Lotman, 1993, p. 27).
In the moments when the system “explodes,” it is forced to reorga-
nize its entire structure, its hierarchies, its spaces. These moments are
those with the highest level of information, where something truly new
is circulating (think of the movements in 1968 or think of 9/11 in the
United States). However, they are not casual or entirely unforeseeable.
An explosion is unexpected, but this is not casual: 1968 would never
have happened in the beginning of the 1900s. History is always a cer-

tain, specific complex of possibilities.
One of the reasons for such explosiveness is the fact that the differ-
ent layers of culture work at different speeds—fashion changes quickly,
while architecture, for example, moves slowly. The fact that there is
this difference in speed among the different cultural “organs” is not a
problem for the system, since the explosion of a process triggers a devel-
opment. “The aggression of one does not subdue but, rather, stimulates
the development of the opposite tendency” (Lotman, 1993, p. 12). The
coexistence of time periods and different speeds is necessary for the
continuation of cultural life. To better explain his view in this, Lotman
speaks of culture in terms of a museum.
Imagine a room in a museum, where exhibits from different eras
are laid out in different windows, with texts in known and unknown
languages, and instructions for deciphering them, together with
explanatory texts for the exhibitions created by guides who map the
necessary routes and rules of behavior for visitors. If we place into
that room still more visitors, with their own semiotic worlds, then
we will begin to obtain something resembling a picture of the semio-
sphere. The structural heterogeneity of semiotic space creates reserves
of dynamic processes and represents one of the mechanisms for the
creation of new information inside the sphere. In peripheral areas,
where structures are “slippery,” less organized, and more f lexible,
the dynamic processes meet with less opposition and, consequently,
develop more quickly. The creation of metastructural self-descrip-
tors (grammar) appears to be a factor that dramatically increases the
rigidity of the structure and slows down its development (Lotman,
1984, pp. 213–214)
The presence of both static and dynamic aspects inside semiotic sys-
tems is central for Lotman, who continues to ref lect on the alternative
between synchrony and diachrony in linguistics. Lotman does not want
to choose between these two poles, because he believes it is impossible
to separate one from the other: diachrony is the evolution of the system ,
and it clarifies the essence of the given synchronic organization.
At the beginning of Culture and Explosion , Lotman carefully explains
that in order to tackle the issue of culture properly, it is necessary to
reflect on the following problems:
● the relation between the system and the extra-system,

● the relation between statics and dynamics relations,
● how a system can develop by remaining itself.
In this regard, he clarified that the extra-systemic dimension involves

dynamism, but that dynamism, although necessary to the evolving sys-
tem, may hinder the need for persistence and homogeneity, which the
system needs in order to keep on recognizing itself as such. Change
and continuity are the two words that have to be studied, regardless of
the semiosphere being considered; they are simply the f lip side of the
diversification/homologation, pluralism/unitariness we have already
discussed.
In a culture that is based on this bipolar scheme, periods of stability
alternate with periods of evolution. The former are characterized by a
balance between opposite tendencies, and during these periods, the dia-
logic exchange occurs inside the same synchronic cut. For example, dur-
ing the Cold War, Western culture worked closely with Muslim culture
since they shared the same program against the Soviet regime. During
a more dynamic stage, however, one of the two identitary tendencies
(the Western and the Muslim tendency) becomes more active. The pre-
dominant culture becomes more organized and, therefore, more mono-
lithic; it also produces a structural meta-level. During these periods,
the dialogue moves toward the diachronic, historical axis: the Western
culture begins a dialogue with its past and, for example, tries to find its
Christian origins in order to deny space and legitimacy to Muslim cul-
ture − with which it had previously seemed to have a peaceful dialogue.
Similarly, Muslim culture looks into its own history to find moments of
extraneity and opposition to the West.
Hence, in this way, in each synchronic state there is a double “risk of
corruption,” there is a double potential extraneity: that of the time lay-
ers other than the current one, and that of the cultural layers external to
its own space. This double extraneity is the main source of dynamism,
the main source of change and novelty, which each culture has at its
own disposal.
When talking about “extraneous” or “extrasystemic” we do not neces-
sarily have to think about something chaotic. In fact, there are different
types of extra-systematicity in every culture. Instead, we have to think
of extraneous as being far away. The tendency to view as distant that
which is (even slightly) different from oneself is, according to Lotman,
universal. The space articulation of center and periphery offers an axis,
a model, through which it is possible to organize the relationship with
that which is alien. At its center lies the identity core that corresponds
to “us”; that which is extraneous exists on the periphery, on the edges,
at different degrees of removal. Likewise, at the center there is what can
be described, since it is known and corresponds to the self, while at the
edges lies that which has no description. The space of a structure, there-
fore, is not organized in a uniform way: it includes central organizations
and peripheral organizations.
This articulation of alien and own is not rigid or “ontological,” but
totally mobile and prospective; the expression of life styles and values
that can totally change. One can stay at the center of his own space by
promoting its value (and considering one’s own normality as a form of
universality), or one can stay in his own territory with the feeling of
a degraded, reduced, and meaningless normality (and looking outside
for the abnormality that gives sense to the rules). As Lotman notes,
the conventional model according to which anything out of the bor-
ders of Rome was defined as barbarian and excluded from the sphere of
culture, necessarily identified Roman citizens with the idea of correct-
ness and regularity. This overlap between self and normality ensures
that its own identity loses specificity, because it is taken as a univer-
sal value, dissolved in the general categories of human culture. This
is why the first descriptions of the specificities of a population usually
come from foreigners: only foreigners see the limits and the differential
features of what is dominant. The opposite may also sometimes occur:
detached from their environment, human beings enter other people’s
world because they are looking for something unusual, irregular, not
standardized. This position is typical of romantic people: what is “own”
is also seen as “vulgar,” without any distinctive traits, usual, banal, pre-
dictable. The passage to the sphere of the “others” is seen as a renewal.
In between , between own and alien, internal and external, known and
unknown, every culture places intermediate figures, having the task to
exorcize the fear of the alien by building a relationship with it, while
maintaining one’s difference from it. Lotman quotes, for example, the
case of shamans, witches, doctors, priests, hangmen, even doctors—
they are all objects of hostility and fear-respect at the same time.
Although efficient and essential, these mediators do not change the
state of constant asymmetry in which each culture tends to work. The
presence of such intermediate figures in all cultures confirms the bipo-
lar structure of every culture. Asymmetry is the organizational law of
any semiosphere; it can be structural, like the asymmetry of sexes, or
functional, like the asymmetry of domination–subordination relation-
ship, or other types of hierarchical relationships between individuals.
The fact that there are always asymmetries that cause tensions in one
direction or another creates a dynamism that forces the system to evolve
and process new information; it forces the system to translate and, by
translating, to produce meaning.
An “external” culture in order to enter into our world must cease to be

“external” to it. It must find for itself a name and a place in the language
of the culture into which it seeks to insert itself. But in order to change
from “alien” (chuzhoi ) to “own” (svoi ) this external culture must, as we
can see, submit to a new name in the language of the “internal” culture.
(Lotman, 1993, p. 133)
If translation is necessary, every culture will obviously be able to

choose in its own way and according to its own capabilities; what tends
to happen is that single elements of the other culture are gradually
introduced and translated, but the intrusion can be so strong that it
introduces an entire language. Traditional research represents culture as
something tidy but in reality, cultural dynamics are continuously char-
acterized by pushes, coincidences, external incursions, and so on.
It is also the asymmetrical structure of culture that “generates” pas-
sions capable of managing and dealing with culture, as Lotman effec-
tively clarifies in his study on fear (Lotman, 1998). At the center of
his study is the fact that the object of fear is a social construction, the
representation of a subject that, with its negative traits, is functional to
the stabilization of its own image. A case where, according to Lotman,
the results of this dynamic were particularly clear was the witch hunt,
which reached its paroxysm in Western Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
In the numerous witch trials of that time, the recurrence of a collec-
tive enemy is clear. There is no single witch, identified and to be iso-
lated, but it is rather the evocation of a witch that is part of a dangerous
minority. This is no coincidence. Fear causes the enemy to be seen as a
dangerous collective, Lotman notes in the quoted essay.
And this enemy, although bestowed with various and diverse char-
acteristics, always has one feature: antipodicity to the average charac-
teristics of adult men at that time, meaning for example, that a witch
was either extremely old or very young, ugly or beautiful, very poor or
very wealthy. Each time the enemy was described as having highly pro-
nounced characteristics, while the face of the accuser assumed the traits
of the medium-level mass, without any particular traits and with envy
toward those who own a certain stand-out quality.
In brief, collective emotions speak about the individuals who express
them and about their culture. In the pluralist fabric of the semiosphere,
fears (just like emotions) ref lect semiotic identities and their positions
in terms of center and periphery, extraneity and habit, accuracy and
the absence of rules, comprehensibility and lack of communication. By
doing so, they work as a powerful regulatory force for internal heteroge-
neity: they create stereotypes and categorize the average individual, col-
lecting and holding together all those people that recognize themselves
in the average individual.
Memory
Within the dynamic of continuous exchange and translation that char-
acterizes the semiosphere, there also lies that particular aspect of cul-
ture known as memory. Memory is never conceived by Lotman as a
source of knowledge, an archive of knowledge, but rather as a constant
source of “work” capable of redefining the past and translating the past
into the present.
Also, when he focuses his attention on the processes of the archiving
and preservation of culture, from the beginning of his cultural ref lec-
tions Lotman is very clear about the textual, modelling, and translating
nature of memory. Alongside Uspenskij, he writes: “The implanting of a
fact into the collective memory, then, is like a translation from one lan-
guage into another—in this case, into the ‘language of culture’” (“On
the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” Lotman and Uspenskij, 1971,
p. 214).
It is a matter of creating a dialogue with a text, with the past, with a
subject, recovering meaning but also, inevitably, filtering it through its
own cultural schema.
We must also bear in mind that the memory construction process
is asymmetrical, as the two parts of the relationship (past and pre-
sent) are, by definition, distant and heterogeneous. Lotman repeatedly
states that, in reality, the addresser and the addressee will never share
exactly the same code: the different volume of memory and cultural
experience, the variety of codes inherited from the collective, and the
possibilities of every semiotic sphere—and of single personalities—in
order to continuously generate new codes, excludes the possibility of
two individuals sharing a semiotic identity. So memory enters those
communications that characterize cultural exchange and influences on
them. Communication-translation dynamics are deeply affected by the
hereditary memory of the protagonist.
Here we can say something even more radical: in Lotman’s theory,
culture and memory coincide.
Culture is, in fact, “the nonhereditary memory of the commu-
nity” 8 (Lotman and Uspenskij, 1971, p. 213) and it can evolve in three
ways:
● through the quantitative increase of the volume of knowledge;

● with the redistribution of already-owned knowledge, with subse-
quent change in the concept of “memorable fact”;
● through oblivion.
While the first modality is obvious, the second is interesting, because

it places more importance on the issue of translation. Redistributing
already-owned knowledge means giving more value to one thing over
something else, changing the “weight” of things, translating them
according to other criteria, giving something a strategic meaning for
the present (by doing so, converting it into a “memorable fact”) and
rethinking the value of other events that had been considered as central
until that moment.
Memory is always an active point of strength in society. What is
memorable are not only changes in themselves (if this were the case they
would become meaningless or more central), but how they also affect
everything else, the social context that surrounds memory, and by doing
so, the present is reinterpreted.
Lotman clarifies this point by ref lecting on symbols.
In culture, certain phenomena have been attributed a special role as
carriers of memory; among these “exceptional” phenomena are texts
that take on the role of symbols. On one hand, symbols in culture play
an unchanging role (by definition, a symbol repeats itself, migrates, but
keeps an essential core that does not change): they are the messengers
of other cultural eras (and of other cultures), and act as a reminder of
the ancient origins of culture. On the other hand, symbols have an
active relationship with the cultural context where they find them-
selves, and transform themselves based on that context, and vice versa.
The unchanging essence of symbols is manifested in its variations and
translations.
From Lotman’s point of view, this is true for any “memorable fact”:
the re-proposition (or repetition), the unchanging continuity exists only
within the continuity of a process based on local variations.
According to Lotman, the third modality is also interesting, partic-
ularly when it comes to understanding the way in which culture-mem-
ory changes: that third modality is oblivion, meant not as pathology
of memory or a nonevent, but rather as a constituent part of culture.
Obviously Lotman sees the ambivalence of the oblivion—both a tool of
memory and the cause of its destruction—but he has no doubts, stating
that “culture overcomes forgetting, turning it into one of the mecha-
nisms of memory” (Lotman and Uspenskij, 1971, p. 216).
After all, the link between memory and oblivion is so tight that it is
always present in every action and moment of cultural production: “In
this sense every text furthers not only the remembering process, but
forgetting as well” (p. 216). By keeping something from itself, exclud-
ing some values and meanings from its universe of meaning, every text
eliminates something, narcotizes it, does not revitalize it, and, by doing
so, contributes to oblivion.
In a way, this is the “good” form of oblivion, the involuntary one that,
notably, has a significant influence on cultural evolution. Then there
is the more treacherous form of oblivion: planned oblivion, requested
or imposed, the one that is the result of more or less explicit and vio-
lent manipulations by the society. “It is worth recalling that one of the
sharpest forms of social struggle in the sphere of culture is the obliga-
tory demand to forget certain aspects of historical experience” (Lotman
and Uspenskij, 1971, p. 216)
Let us think about what has happened infinite times in history, in
the case of dictatorial regimes: the sociopolitical control was simulta-
neously a control of memory and involved a precise selection of the
things to be remembered and mentioned, together with a parallel elimi-
nation of all the things that were not to be known (including the death
of many people).9
The processes of induced or imposed oblivion act on the past in
order to clearly impact the present (and perhaps also the future). In fact,
according to Lotman, memory has a double directionality: it is not only
directed to the past, as we tend to suppose. Therefore, it is not a pure
recovery and reactivation of something that is inside us. It is a project,
an opening through which one can build new, possible futures, and it
can also have the task of programming and instructing in order to build
new texts. As, so often, the main orientation of culture is toward future
experiences, culture can build a certain conventional point of view where
the future looks like the past; for example, when texts are conceived in
order to be kept by descendants (Lotman, Uspenskij, et al., 1973).
Moreover, memory manages to model the structure of a culture and
individuals in that culture so deeply that people can even “remember
what they did not know,” says Lotman (“The Text and the Structure of
Its Audience,” 1977c).
This is due to two reasons:
(1) Because the past shows itself and let itself be grasped in two ways:
“internally—in the direct memory of the text, personified in its
structure, its inevitable contradictions, and the immanent battle
with its internal synchronicity; and externally—in its correlation

to extra-textual memory” (Lotman, 1993, p. 13). So, every text
carries the memory of many more things than expected and this
“unaware memory,” not explicit but inside the text, reemerges in
ways that cannot always be foreseen.
(2) Because, as we have already seen with regard to the structuring of
the semiosphere, every fragment of the semiotic structure, along
with every text, holds the mechanisms with which to reconstruct
the whole system. Therefore, it is possible, with just one part of it,
to reconstruct the entire event, and define a memory of the event
that is much more detailed than you believe you remember.
This applies on both individual and collective levels. There are

exceptional structures of memory that have an exceptional reconstruc-
tive capability. This leads to the paradox that from the memory of cul-
ture it is possible to extrapolate much more than what was introduced.
The “modelling power” of memory acts from a prospective and ret-
rospective way. From the prospective point of view, memory models
the codes where people live in the present and think about the future.
Retrospectively, when people look at past events, thanks to memory the
casual becomes motivated, what looks unforeseeable becomes conse-
quential, if not unavoidable.
Events (as Lotman often states in Culture and Explosion) have mul-
tilayered interpretations, are subject to corrections, revisions. The
construction of the historical event is nothing but the translation of
something into the language of memory; it is far away from being the
objective selection of important events.
We find in this regard as well the radical perspectivism of Lotman’s
theory: any vision of the world, image of the self and the other, the con-
ception of time and its main events, perception of meaningful behavior,
depend on the observer’s position. It is his situation that can explain his
look and vision.
This cultural theory of memory is widely “absorbed” by the most
recent studies on this topic, which do not deal with memory from a the-
oretical or semantic point of view, but rather from an anti-ideological
point of view, in order to focus on the topic of uses and abuses of memory.
Listing all those studies would not be easy; however, we should at least
mention (due to their belonging to the semiotic sphere or their prox-
imity to our methodology) the studies conducted by Aleida Assmann
(1999), Jan Assmann (1992), Cristina Demaria (2006, 2007, 2011),
Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1950), Pierre Nora (1984), Paul Ricoeur
(2000), Tzevan Todorov (1995), Patrizia Violi (2009, 2012, 2014), and
Michael Rothberg (2009).
For all these scholars, due to its relative and translating nature, mem-
ory is a social discourse, or rather, the result of many social discourses,
constructed as such and relative, like all other public discourses.
By ref lecting on this link between society and memory, social uses of
the past and memorial discourses, as well as the textual, modelling and
translating nature of memory, our attention is drawn to two aspects:
—the filtering of memory and

—the externalization of memory.
Both have to do with the fact that the culture of a society is run
through, and consists of a multitude of enunciations that interact and
compete by creating discourses in which some practices assume a mod-
elling value. In fact, some texts become anonymous and stereotypes
of reiterated social circulation, they become obvious, beyond discussion ,
and acquire, therefore, a modelling power over other texts.
In memory processing, this process of naturalization of meaning
(which we have already discussed in chapter 1 when looking at Barthes’s
theory) is the base for the filtering operations carried out by every cul-
ture on their own past. These interpretation habits, in fact, deposit
some “information packages” into the common knowledge, which then
become selection criteria, functioning as “primitives” of meaning.
The social frames that legitimize some collective memories and
exclude some others (and which can be found at the center of funda-
mental studies into these issues, as with Halbwachs, 1925) are made up
of impersonal discourses, collectively shared, whose responsibility can
be traced back, but whose modelling efficacy is fundamentally impor-
tant for the “preservation” of memory, for its social circulation.
The common sense of collectivity works not as a fixed reference,
but rather as a structure of plausibility. The society, through that set
of enunciations that have become stereotypes and habits, selects that
which is plausible, acceptable, by filtering what can be remembered
against what has no need to further exist , not even in the memory. Thus,
the option is not between being remembered/not being remembered,
but between being remembered/not existing, never existed.
This is how the “rules of remembrance” are created, setting up
specific memory communities that in the meantime exist as subjects
because they have specific memories attributed to them. This is how
memories are invented : the inventions of tradition (see Hobsbawm and
Ranger, 1983)—of which monuments, anthems, foundation rites, folk

dances are frequent examples—they are based on what the discourses of
a certain society declare as legitimate from the points of view of value
and passion.
V. Nü nning (2003) speaks in terms of “fictions of cultural memory”;
that is, inclinations, provisions, values, and epistemological habits that
provide shared interpretation codes and cultural traditions of the ways
in which we view the past and present worlds, helping to shape cultural
and national identity.
So, talking about filtering immediately implies overcoming the idea
that memory is a mere transmission of memories and knowledge, the
idea that memory is an individual and conscious process, and also that
memory is a close reservoir of memories. Instead, memory is a com-
plex network of ongoing enunciations, some of which are considered as
undisputable, certain, and work as selective criteria or at least as orien-
tations for later enunciations, which then compete in order to acquire
space, legitimacy, and “depth,” trying to position themselves at the base
of other discourses.
Among collective practices, individual enunciations, and forms of
life (behavior, ethics, and aesthetic values within a group) that slowly
crystallize, despite predominant configurations, there is a constant,
relentless processing of memory. Even those moments that might seem
to be a weakening of collective memory and lack of awareness are actu-
ally processes of oblivion that comply with politics of memory or denial
practices that equally “construct” the concept of sociality. Very often,
communities are built on the removal of certain memories (i.e., some
countries of the former Soviet Union have removed their past, starting
from the removal of the Russian language), demonstrating that obliv-
ion is only another facet of memory and another reflection of the social
frameworks that characterize a certain environment.
This culturality and relativity of criteria transforming an event into a
“memorable one” makes the issue of memory a social problem.
There is, therefore, another crucial aspect of the semiotic approach
to memory that should be underlined here.
The semiotic attention paid to the issue of cultural memory is, in fact,
focused not just on the criteria that trigger certain memories instead of
others upstream (i.e., a certain idea of Holocaust, institutionalized at
school, makes it possible for some survivors to give their testimony and
write many books on the subject), but equally, on the frameworks of
meaning and social processes that, downstream , allow certain memo-
ries within the discourse of a society to resist, get stronger, or simply
circulate (i.e., a certain current of racism might reinforce the success

of certain stereotypes and could model private memories according to
these). The space of society is not a neutral environment, but rather a
group of dynamic interpretative practices that potentially modify its
discourses at every moment.
This is how we shift from a totally subjective (as an expression of the
individual’s needs and experiences) or totally objective (as a set of traces
filed in material supports) interpretation of memory to, semiotically, an
“environmental” approach, which sees memory from an interpretative-
relational point of view, as a meeting point between different types of
enunciations that mutually “react.” A semiotic perspective on memory
encourages a notion of distributed memory (Rothberg, 2009, speaks in
terms of multidirectional memory), not located in the objects or subjects,
but circulating in dynamic and heterogeneous configurations with multi-
ple agents, linked between them.
Since, in this framework, it is essential for the life of memory (and its
survival) to circulate, to have a semiotic life, and to produce interpre-
tants, memory has to be externalized . We have already mentioned this
aspect in our introduction. The Peircian category of interpretant (which
lies at the basis of our idea of semiotic process) is something “tangible,”
semiotically perceived, not because it always materializes into some-
thing, but because it has to circulate between those who communicate
(and is, therefore, external to the interiority of the person who thinks
it) and produce effects in order to exist. As the Italian semiotician Ugo
Volli reminds us (2008), exteriority is a fundamental category if we are
to grasp the nature of meaning and communication, and of memory as
well—if, according to Lotman, memory is a synonym of culture and
as such it carries information. Meaning, in order to be exchanged and
transmitted, needs to have an existence that is external to a pure interi-
ority (mental or affective) of the person that elaborates it. In this way, it
has a life in space and time.
There is no effective memory if it does not socially manifest itself
through semiotic mediations, through interpretants, making itself pub-
licly available. There is no social memory if it does not express itself in
signs and texts that are semiotically tangible and external to the pure
individual’s psyche (and the presumed unconscious or collective knowl-
edge). Cultural memory is the processing and ref lection of a set of val-
ues, habits, and projects that are (on the whole) not explicitly declared
but present, and which can be observed in society.
Leroi-Gourhan (1965) has already pointed out that this externaliza-
tion is one of the main specificities of human memory, when compared
with animal memory, and it represents the limit but also the freedom
of human beings: limit with regard to collectivity, freedom against any
form of determinism, thanks to the symbolic nature of externalized
memory.
The memorial discourse is often the externalization of an identity
project and a desire. As works by Violi (2014) or Mazzucchelli (forth-
coming) excellently demonstrate, very often it is the future that guides
the reconfiguration of the past. Monuments (such as those to war vic-
tims), memorials (remembering severe losses of human life, particularly
traumatic ones), and anniversaries are celebrated in order to display a
certain side of the self, in order to impose a certain image of one’s iden-
tity on society, rather than recover the past with philological or archeo-
logical intent.
The invention of tradition, as we have already mentioned, is always
based on a project; either that for the identity of a nation, an eth-
nic minority, or a marginalized community (see the pivotal book by
Anderson, 1991). Europe has demonstrated this over recent years. As it
has not known what it wanted its role to be—an economic supranational
entity, a political supranational entity, or a super partes supranational
entity not interested in being an active party at international level?—
Europe has fought to build its own unitary tradition by drawing on
religious tradition (the Christian origins of Europe), cultural tradition
(the roots of Greek culture), the presumed certainties of History (the
Middle Ages as a common experience), and by trying to imitate and
offer an alternative to the United States, precisely as the United States
of Europe.
Case Analysis: The Madres de Plaza de Mayo

Let us now see to what extent Lotman’s ref lections can provide us with
useful tools in order to observe and understand the social phenomena
surrounding us.
As at the end of the previous chapter, we have chosen a type of “text”
that we believe would be particularly successful when analyzed using
the theoretical perspective described here. We want to emphasize once
more the fact that not all theories are good for all types of text: some
theories, in our opinion, are more productive on certain texts, other
theories on others. The analyst’s relationship with the text must be
one of “listening,” in which analytical ability is also found in the most
heuristic “methodological tool kit” for that specific case. We must also
remember that no theory allows us to see all of the text. Rather, it will
focus only on certain pertinences—those that are crucial to the chosen

text.
In the present case, the “text” selected shows a strong social and topo-
logical dimension: it is a communicative event that (more than ever)
can only be understood in relation to the cultural context in which it
is given, and within the boundaries (even properly spatial) of its own
expression. Moreover, it is a communicative event closely related to a
memory dimension and that—even for this—seems particularly open
for consideration according to Lotman’s terms. We will propose a num-
ber of ref lections on a political and social subject that has established
itself over a number of years; a subject that has matured and acquired
global recognition, that has undergone internal struggles and ruptures,
and which, in other words, has had a rather complex “career” comparing
itself with complex historical contexts and with the culturally central
problem of memory. Finally, this is a case where it seems particularly
fruitful to think in terms of modelling languages, looking at how ver-
bal, spatial, gesticular systems condition one another, in order to condi-
tion in turn the political sphere, the sphere of religion, and so on.
The subject we are referring to is the Madres de Plaza de Mayo: the
group of mothers who lost their children during the Military Junta in
Argentina (1976–1983) and who decided, from 1977 onward, to form
an organized group to pressure the government and civil society into
shedding light on the sudden disappearance of their children (who
came to be known as the desaparecidos).10 Over many decades the group
grew and, even after the end of the military junta’s rule, and the public
acknowledgment and legal recognition of their status as victims of a dic-
tatorship, along with the military’s admission of political responsibility
in the disappearance/death of their children, the Madres (Mothers) are
still active today as defenders of civil rights. However, the group has
progressively split: first into the groups Madres and Linea Fundadora
(the latter accepted the refund the State offered them for the death of
their children), and then a subsequent split, the Abuelas (grandmoth-
ers), who focused on finding and identifying their biological grandchil-
dren, those children who were taken away from their mothers soon after
they were born and given up for adoption to the families of politicians
and military staff.
Gradually, over the years, the identity of this group changed along
with their agenda and the subject against which they fought. In Lotman’s
terms, it is evident that the boundary separating the Madres from the
rest of society is constantly moving, excluding and including different
subjects as time goes on. We will go back to this later. Before that, we
wish to focus on the initial, founding stages of this group, which fea-
tured at least three points of semiotic interest and legibility in Lotman
terms:11
● First, this is a clear case of a public constitution of a new social

subject through self-definition, positioning, and programmatic
statements.
● It is also an interesting example of discursive elaboration : the new
subject shall indeed find a language of its own and, in order to do
so, it often acts as a “parasite,” imitating its enemy’s discourse with
an extremely high degree of conventionality (in Lotman’s sense of
the word).
● Last, we find that a key position is taken by the issue of memory,
the problem of drafting a continuity between past, present, and
future via an explicit program of transmission of the truth of the
past.
The first and the second point stress out an issue that is of crucial
relevance if we want to clarify the way we will proceed: the Madres
de Plaza de Mayo are a social subject with a high semiotic activity,
continuously committed to enrich and renew their own discourses.
This intense activity provides us with a great deal of useful material
for our analysis, which is based on the Madres official sites ( http://
www.Madres.org/navegar/nav.php; http://www.madresfundadoras.org.
ar/ ), the many interviews (often collected in books; see the video-inter-
views included in Le Madri di Plaza de Mayo, a documentary by Daniela
Padoan, 2006), and the printed testimonies to be found in a book by
Padoan (2005); the many videos (institutional or otherwise) available
on YouTube, like Institucional Madres de Plaza de Mayo by Patricio
Plaza; 30 añ os de vida venciendo a la muerte (1976–2006) made by the
Asociación Cultural Casa del Barrio de Carabanchel in Madrid, Madres
de Plaza de Mayo, by Josh Mabry, Desfile Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and
Madres de la Plaza by Bandidourbano83.
It is evident here that, even if our aim is to say something about a
practice, our corpus of observation is all textual . We go back, thus,
to highlight the “textual vocation” that we have already identified as
proper of semiotics. Obviously we could have analyzed this same object
(the ritual behavior of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) doing participant
observation during the demonstrations that they still organize; or we
could have done interviews with the Madres still alive, and make a
comparison between the Madres that became active in 1977 and those
that are part of the Association today. Instead, we decided to analyze

the descriptions and self-descriptions that the Madres have produced,
in the conviction that these texts are particularly eloquent for semi-
otic analysis (that has traditionally analyzed texts) and that from them
emerges the way the Madres have “attested” themselves in society: that
is, the way in which their identity has been stabilizing, the position it
has been occupying, the traits that it has assumed.
The public constitution of this new social subject—the Madres de
Plaza de Mayo—is our starting point.
The first time the Madres met as a group there were only 14 of them.
It was April 30, 1977, and they arranged to meet in Plaza de Mayo, in
front of the Casa Rosada (the seat of the government) to ask for infor-
mation, hoping that their questions would have gained more attention
if they acted collectively.
Their children had been taken by the military in different circum-
stances (at home, in the workplace, on the street), but they had never
returned from what seemed to be a “routine” questioning. When asked
about those missing, the military, the civil staff, all institutional sub-
jects claimed they knew nothing and had not seen them. They had
vanished into thin air: desaparecidos (disappeared).
The Madres, on April 30, 1977, met in front of the Casa Rosada
demanding information, but nothing happened. Indeed, after a while
they were urged to move on because it was forbidden for groups of peo-
ple to stay too long in the same place—a practice considered a threat of
the government. So, in order to avoid being subject to this ban without
giving up their fight, the Madres started to move in circles, as if in a
procession. Their group grew larger, and in just a few months, they had
given rise to a true celebration that would take place (and still does)
every Thursday.
What happened in this passage from the improvised meeting of a
handful of mothers to the regular organization of a weekly protest?
How have the requests of 14 people become a political movement that is
still in operation even after 40 years?
A collective subject was established, a subject that managed to clearly
identify its Other, the enemy (the government, in front of which it stands
every week), a space (the square and the obelisk around which activity
in it is organized), a rhythm (every week, at the same time), and then it
started to establish a number of identity signs.
Lotman’s spatialization logic works perfectly in this case. The
Madres clearly separate the inner space (the space of self ) and the outer
space (the space of the Other, the enemy, the different) and, through
a semiotic action, began to push outward in a continuous and gradual

way, and ended up creating a new third-party space that was neither pri-
vate (as it was the space from which they all came) nor institutional (the
space they oppose); public yet personal, collective but not institutional:
the square, Plaza de Mayo. In an impromptu, unpredictable explosion
(in Lotman’s sense of the word), the Madres have not taken on a lead-
ing, central role in politics: they did not invade or take over the seat of
government. On the contrary, they moved to the center of their semio-
sphere (near to the center of power, the square housing the Government
Palace, despite the fact many of them came from the countryside or
other cities) and defined their own perimeter within it: a perimeter that
is not physically delineated but entirely “virtual,” constructed through
their march. They reinforced their semiosphere and filled it with new
signs of belonging until they went from being housewives, wives, mostly
women that were not politically active, to being a politically active and
dangerous subject.
The first sign of belonging we find here is a symbol that also serves
for members to recognize one another. It is a white handkerchief worn
on the head, which was originally a nappy that had been used by each
woman’s child, as a sign of maternity. Then came the banners, originally
with the slogan “Aparición con vida” [Alive again], which stated clearly
their will to see their children reappear. Then came the habit of hanging
a picture of their disappeared child/ren around their neck; and the deci-
sion to continually march in the same “abnormal” direction—described
as such because they moved counterclockwise: while the clockwise
direction expresses a gradual, constant walk toward death, the Madres
wished to subvert the “naturalness” of the diachronic direction.
Through these signs—from the nappy-headscarf to the affirmation
that since they are a subject of political opposition they are “generated
by their children,” in the sense that they have become what they are due
to their disappearance—the Madres not only established a group, but
reinforced the idea that they are a group of mothers. They insist very
strongly on this point; in Greimas’s term we could call it the structur-
ing isotopy.12
It is interesting to note that this strengthening of identity has taken
place employing two kinds of discourse moving in parallel. The first is a
discourse with the Politics and the Other as target; that which Lotman
(1977e) would call a “I–He discourse,” a discourse with a subject dif-
ferent from ourselves, that in this case is the discourse realized through
manifestations and requests addressed to other persons: politicians,
institutions, and the like. The second is the internal discourse within
the group of the Madres, which Lotman would call an “I–I” discourse,
the discourse that we address to ourselves or to the members of our own
group in order to know how to proceed, which strategies shall be used to
hide or recognize each other. The fact that the Madres group, to avoid
being accused of being subversive, had to remain informal and some-
how invisible, further reinforces the I–I discourse; that is, a collection
of semiotic practices focused not on transitively communicating some-
thing to someone else, but focused on defining and reinforcing their
sense of identity and belonging.
According to Lotman, in the I–I communication the message does
not change, apparently, but acquires new codes, in a continuous move-
ment of retranslation. This mechanism is clearly at work in the Madres
activities, which, starting from a relatively simple semantic core (struc-
tured on the issues of maternity and on the demand that the disappeared
children return) end up developing a redundant discourse universe, lay-
ered and consistent, in which maternity is expressed through differ-
ent signs (from the handkerchief to the speeches, to the family picture
around the neck, and so on) that look like reinforced variations of the
same topic.
Besides, as it is clear from what the Madres have themselves declared
(as reported by official sites and in books), the main “glue” that kept
the movement united and reinforced their solidarity was fear: the fear of
being imprisoned and of ending up like their children; the fear of doing
more harm than good.13 Fear, according to Lotman, strongly fuels the
I–I discourse, as the subjects that feel threatened feel the need for self-
assurance and to recognize themselves as members of the same group, as
opposed to those who do not speak the same “language.”
Although Lotman claims that the logic of fear is what regulates
the relationship with the outside world (thus regulating relationships
between those who hold the power and those who suffer it, as opposed
to the logic of honor, that regulates relationship inside the group), we
feel it necessary to point out that fear at the same time feeds the inter-
nal discourse, reinforcing the codes. Fear feeds the secret and blocks
the free circulation of communication. This is why it reinforces the I–I
discourses.
And since it is strongly centered on the I–I axis, the Madres’ dis-
cursive space becomes increasingly more symbolic. The gestures and
signs that the Madres express became gradually less casual and more
willingly semioticized. Their semiotic sphere is highly conventional , and
in a very short time this subject, at first nonexistent, assumed a strong
and specific identity (which was necessary to battle such a powerful
enemy as the Military Junta). They began to recode signs and “pieces”
of their everyday life in order to build the tools for their battle: the
pictures from their family albums (that they wear around their necks),
the nappy (that becomes the symbol of the group), their particular way
of walking (which became the March of the Plaza de Mayo), the gesture
of officially denouncing the disappearance of their own child (a ges-
ture repeated infinite times in order to overcrowd and overload all gov-
ernment offices), and so on. This conventional nature of the Madres’
discourse contributed to the creation of a true rite (the weekly march)
and other strongly repetitive and conventional behavior whose symbolic
value slowly prevailed over the empiricist-pragmatic discourse.
This extreme conventionality generates that which Lotman, writing
about Russian Decembrists, defined as “behavioral text.” The Madres
were well aware of the relationship between gestures and words and
understood the importance of “lexicalizing” what they did; and thus
they gradually defined a model of political opposition. Their marches
ended with banners and verbal slogans, each one of them (especially in
the beginning) was invited to keep a diary and as soon after the fall of
the Junta as was possible, they released interviews and recounted their
experiences, telling their stories and testimonies on their own websites
and through other means. Although the movement started in a spon-
taneous, nonorganized way, by meeting in the square in the hope of
gaining some attention, these women developed a strongly metasemi-
otic ref lection on themselves, on their language, and on their practices,
and as a result, they reinforced some traits and made others marginal,
thus defining a consistent behavioral text.
We could maybe claim that the splintering into more than one
group (the Madres, the Linea Fundadora, the Abuelas) occurred when,
more recently, the concrete actions of group members were no longer
consistent with the behavioral text defined at the time the Junta was
still in charge. According to the ideal model of this text, every gesture
had to testify the opposition to a power that had negated the Madres
even the right to mourn their dead (as the government did not even
return the bodies, but instead hid behind the “mysterious” disappear-
ance of the young people in question). And every gesture had to be
consistent with the affirmation of maternity as the key basis for their
actions. But when some of them (the Madres that would then become
the Linea Fundadora) accepted the government’s refund for the death
of their children, essentially reaching a compromise with the govern-
ment, and others (the Abuelas) were viewed as having retaliated on their
own biological grandchildren removing them from their “normal” life
and negating it forever by revealing the tragic secret of their lives,14 and
all of this in the name of a blood relation, some of the original Madres
felt the need to separate from the movement to remain faithful to their
own behavioral text, which entailed neither accepting compromises nor
inf licting suffering on the innocent children of their children.
The extreme conventionality that seems to characterize the Madres’
behavior comes also from their frequent play with the original, literal
meaning of words or gestures, and is part of their semiotic awareness
and the high conventionality of their discursive practices, as well
as the “double meaning” the Madres’ actions often employed. The
Madres often took the “vices” of those in power and deprived them
of their meaning by apparently following and honoring them. For
example, when the police asked them, even during the earliest meet-
ings in Plaza de Mayo, not to stand in front of the Casa Rosada, they
responded by obeying their request literally, and started to move:
they marched and were therefore no longer standing still. When they
were rounded up by the police during their marches and arrested,
they were the first to present their documents thus requiring their
personal information to be taken (as had already happened several
times before) and causing bureaucracy to choke on its own rules.
When police lined them up in the square, they would shout “Shoot!”
first, depriving the police of their enunciative role (that of those who
give the orders).
Faced with this subversion of meaning brought about by a mimesis
strategy (mocking the Power), the Junta called them locas (mad); their
actions appeared senseless and, in some cases, even suicidal, considering
the risk involved. But this was the opposite of madness; by acting this
way, the Madres would rather draw attention to the madness of the oth-
ers, of those who did these same things, but seriously and spoke those
same words, but meant them: the Military Junta.
In addition to this, the Madres seemed fully aware not of just the
power of language per se, but of its modelling power. A perhaps banal
example of this is their walking, which they prefer to call “marches” and
not “rounds”: “We prefer to call our walking a march. We do not like to
call it a ronda (rounds). To do rounds means to always revolve around
the same thing, while to march is to walk towards something, and we
believe that, even by walking in a circle, we are heading somewhere; we
have a goal.” (Padoan 2005, pp. 94–95, our translation). However, it
is their most meaningful slogan, Aparici ón con vida that fully demon-
strates the semiotic awareness they employ when choosing their lexicon,
as they forbid themselves to use words of death, mourning, murder.
They do not want the discourse to show something that was not, in
reality, granted to them: the right to mourn their children’s death. For
this reason they keep fighting their battle on the same semiotic plane
as their enemy and ask for their children to “reappear”, even after many
years, when it has become clear to everyone that the children are no
longer alive. The Madres, like the Military Junta, know all too well that
language “creates” reality and defines its categories.
To the deliberate denial of a government that makes people disap-
pear in order to relieve itself from the burden of handling the corpses,
thus nullifying the existence of these people in life and death alike, the
mothers reply symmetrically: by continuing their illusion of life, plac-
ing themselves in a suspended, blocked time in which their children
could reappear at any time and resume their place in life.
The Madres’ choice to “play with time” is particularly interesting
from a semiotic point of view. As the years went by and their shared
experience was strengthened, the Madres gradually became the spokes-
people for many battles and, thus, remained “locked” in their roles of
mothers—“We will forever be pregnant with our children” is one of
their slogans. In such a role time never passes; it is an existential con-
dition that justifies their feelings of forever being on the same side and
in the same condition. Indeed, this existential, out-of-time condition of
being mothers is projected onto all of those who are ready to accept it.
They say “we are socialising maternity” and the Argentinian President
Kirchner (who is close to and supports the Madres) declared in 2003,
“we are all the Madres’ children.” The complementary roles of moth-
ers and children become cultural dimensions to be occupied by those
who share a given universe of values. These roles are neither justified by
blood nor defined by a given space–time setting, but rather by abstract
(and therefore eternal) conditions that cannot age, go out of fashion, or
lose legitimacy.
The Madres’ relationship with time is a complex one. As Lotman
repeatedly pointed out, any semiosphere is crossed by different speeds
and temporalities. Every semiosphere is, in this sense, a multichronic
as well as a poly-linguistic space. The Madres’ semiosphere, established
under the momentum of an urgent traumatic present (in which their
children were being taken away), sees not only the persisting wounds
inf licted by an overbearing and coercive Power, but also the values of a
traditional and familiar temporality whose present is radically aligned
with the past of tradition. As we have said before, these women were
often from country villages where they held traditional roles and were
in marriages that were entirely male dominated; they could not escape
these roles, but they did not oppose them, instead they continuously
reiterated their status as mothers, wives, and housewives.
Together with the punctual present15 that irrupts in their lives (with
the disappearance of the children), in parallel with the durative conti-
nuity of the past, which confirms its role models in the present, there is
also the almost atemporal experience of a timeless duration of maternity
of which we have already spoken. Maternity too is an individual experi-
ence that lays foundations, creates continuity; the Madres do not wish
to break that continuity that is part of their generation, but they insist
on their desire to position themselves at its very heart, determined in
their waiting for their children to return. All mothers are mothers for-
ever; the Argentinian Madres are mothers with awareness and a sense
of reclamation.
However, past and present are not enough to temporally define the
semiosphere of the Madres. Inside their actions there is always a con-
stant admonition for the future. Even though they know full well that
their children will not return, the Madres do not give up their fight
because they feel they are engaged in a battle for the future (an incoative
future, which begins with them), a battle for the memory of the genera-
tions to come, who must know what happened. It is an unpredictable,
uncharted, “inverted” future: that is why the Madres march counter-
clockwise, so as to avoid associating their walk with a walk toward the
end, toward death, because they want to go against the f low of events
and invert its direction.
In addition to different “times,” the Madres run through and con-
tinuously cross different kinds of space: the intimate space of the house
(from which they bring handkerchiefs, candles, and family photos)
and the public space par excellence, the space of Power; the closed space
of the prison (in which they are often taken to stay for days or hours)
and the open space of the square; the interpersonal space of the face to
face meetings and the intangible space of the media into which they
enter at any given opportunity.
This plurality is, in our opinion, one of the strongest points in the
Madres’ experience, as well as the reason why this experience did not
end with the dictatorship, therefore obtaining answers from the govern-
ment as well as institutional recognition. The Madres evidently began a
project of memory transmission that went beyond the biographic borders
of testifying to a personal injustice and beyond the borders of a battle
against a certain idea of power. With hindsight we can tell that the
real polemic goal of the Madres was oblivion in its various facets: the
oblivion implied in the systematic denial of the killing of prisoners by
the Junta, but also the oblivion brought about by those (the Church,
the politicians that ruled the country after the Junta and did not com-
mit the same crime) who, in the name of national interest, were and
still are ready to deny what happened and protect the culprits from
punishment.
Before a Truth Commission was established and started work in
Argentina, and even while it operated, the Madres had established a
heterogeneous semiosphere (plural from many points of view) that was
solid and tightly bonded over one issue: the fight against secrets, the
battle for the disclosure of facts, which could be acted upon only from
the moment in which they were recognized as existing. In other words,
a fight for Memory: for the possibility of having a Memory and to make
History possible.
CHAPTER 3
Interpretation and Culture:

Umberto Eco’s Theory
O
ne of the semioticians who, together with Lotman, made the
most significant contribution to the systematic study of the
culture is undoubtedly Umberto Eco. His theory is a rather
complex one, following several different interests, ranging from seman-
tics and history of semiotics through to the theory of text interpretation
and cognitive theories. However, there is no doubt that his interest in
cultural dynamics is a fil rouge running through his work, from the ear-
liest studies with their more aesthetic approach (The Open Work, 1962;
Apocalypse Postponed , 1964) to those published most recently. Semiotics
is, for Eco, strictly cultural in nature: its semiotic functioning and its
usefulness as a discipline are cultural. He does not believe it possible
to explain semiosis outside the cultural logic in which it exists, and if
there is one field for which semiotics is useful, it is social and cultural
analysis.
Eco’s idea that semiotics is a form of social analysis and intervention
is clearly explained in what is probably the most programmatic of all
his works, A Theory of Semiotics . Even in the book’s introduction, the
author clarifies that “the aim of this book is to explore the theoreti-
cal possibility and the social function of a unified approach to every
phenomenon of signification and/or communication” (Eco, A Theory
of Semiotics , 1975, Eng. trans., p. 3) and, closer to the end of the book,
he claims: “semiotics is also a form of social criticism and therefore one
among the many forms of social practice ” (p. 298).
Semiotics, in other words, is an understanding of culture, and thanks

to its analytical power, it becomes a critical, unmasking discipline and,
therefore, an effective one.
Eco does not think that semiotics is a form of anthropology tout
court ; he, instead, believes that, becoming increasingly complex, semi-
otics may, through cultural typologies, f low into cultural anthropology,
going to study its objects and emancipating itself from the study of pure
and simple sign systems.
Semiotic research finally shifts its attention to phenomena which it

would be difficult to term sign systems in a strict sense, nor even com-
municative systems, but which are rather behaviour and value systems.
I refer to systems of etiquette, hierarchies and the so-called “modelling
secondary systems”—under which heading the Soviets bring in myths,
legends, primitive theologies which present in an organized way the
worlds vision of a certain society. (p. 12)
Shifting his attention to more complex objects, it becomes clear that

for Eco that culture not only could be perceived as a semiotic object,
but rather the whole of culture should be studied as a communicative
phenomenon based on signification systems. This means that not only
can culture be studied in this way but only by studying it in this way can
certain fundamental mechanisms be clarified (p. 22).
If, in fact, we wish to observe even the most basic anthropologi-
cal phenomena (the production of tools that transform the man–nature
relationship, the kinship relationship, and economic exchanges, to
use Eco’s own examples) it is easy to see that what comes into play,
each time, are not just the most material aspects, but also attributions
and acknowledgments of functions that have to do with attributions and
acknowledgments of values that determine and presume names and labels
of a strictly linguistic type. It is in the relationship between social func-
tions, values, and signs that the semiotic intertwining of culture and
society lies, and for this reason, the semiotic approach is also necessary
to achieve a good understanding of the cultural world, even its most
concrete and material aspects.
It may indeed not seem properly cultural to use a given instrument
to carry out a particular task, but it is part of the culture to understand
how the function may be repeated and to transmit this information; in
keeping with Roland Barthes ( Elements of Semiology, 1964a), Eco states
that “once society exists every function is automatically transformed
into a sign of that function. This is possible once culture exists. But
Interpretation and Culture ● 119
culture exists only because this is possible” (Eco, A Theory of Semiotics,

p. 24).
Moreover, since culture also works at the most elementary, less
abstract, and most material levels via signs (which, according to
Saussure’s lesson and to structuralism as a whole, have, by their very
nature, a differential value), it works acting on differences, building
specific dimensions of heterogeneity, opposition, and contrast. Another
example by Eco mentions that “car” is not just the meaning associated
to a given expressive chain /C-A-R/ but also what sets it apart from
other units like bicycle, chariot, feet, scooter. A car is such because it
opposes other entities within a certain culture.
Culture is, therefore, based on categories and signs that are necessary
to communicate and it is organized into a system at the level of mean-
ing. For this reason:
To look at the whole of culture sub specie semiotica is not to say that cul-
ture is only communication and signification but that it can be under-
stood more thoroughly if it is seen from the semiotic point of view. And
that objects, behaviour and relationships of production and value func-
tion as such socially, precisely because they obey semiotic laws. (Eco,
A Theory of Semiotics , p. 27)
In other words, Eco’s semiotics is a cultural perspective on semiotics;

that is, a semiotics whose deep roots and meaning lie in interrogation
and analysis of cultural systems.
There are four main reasons for this “cultural vocation”:
● First, Eco’s theory is a semiotic theory based on the idea that

meaning shall be conceived as a cultural unit;
● second, this theory believes that meaning is, and has always been,
a matter for public and intersubjective negotiation;
● third, since 1975 Eco has posed himself the problem of sign pro-
duction , of semiotic work, of the praxis with which we manage,
exchange, and produce sense; he delves into the matter of the social
production of sense ;
● and last, from the outset, Eco has conceived semiotics as an anti-
ideological force that works on culture and for culture, in order to
unmask its presumptions and paralogia.
In the following pages we will try to further clarify each of these

reasons.
Meaning as a Cultural Unit

In order to explain the way Eco’s theory of meaning is connected to an
implicit theory of culture it is necessary to go back to the category of
code (which we have already mentioned in our Introduction) and see
how Eco overcomes their limits.
The complexification to which Eco submits this category begins by
freeing the idea of code from the idea of a simple list of homonyms
and equivalences; the code is a complex semiotic operator that corre-
sponds to a complex system of rules, rules of decoding but also rules of
production .
In order to identify these two facets of codes (interpretation and
production), Eco (see Eco 1976 and 1984, Chapter 5) carries out an
“archaeological” recognition of the concept, distinguishing between the
three original meanings of the term (paleographic, institutional, and
correlational) we have already mentioned.
Ref lecting in particular on the cryptographies, which Eco views as
an excellent example of correlational code (i.e., a code that associates
term A to term B), and on the examples of the codes used in information
theory, Eco notes that cryptographic correspondence is never just mere
substitution correspondence. The code does not just state that A is in the
place of B, but rather it sets the instruction that if A is found in a given
context or in given circumstances then it can be replaced by B.
Think about the grammar and linguistic code: it does not just set
correlational rules (expression/content: the word /train/ corresponds to
a given concept of this vehicle), but rules governing combination and
syntax as well, which prevent us from saying “the train has given birth
to a child” because the “inanimate” mark cannot be combined with a
verb that requires the “animated” mark in its subject (unless of course it
is a metaphor or another rhetoric figure).
Codes, in other words, involve instruction processes that select com-
binations and circumstances. They do not predispose pure operation of
substitution but rather activate inferential processes that, in some cases,
are strongly automated.
This is the theoretical core at the basis of A Theory of Semiotics: lan-
guage is not simply a matter of relationships between expression and
content (and a system of codified relationships), and semiotic identity
is not simply a differential value (like in the Saussurian paradigm),
but language is also and always a matter of inferences: each sign opens
an interpretative game and “can be used in order to lie” (meaning: in
given circumstances, each sign can signify something different from
its “normal” meaning). Contextual circumstances and interpretative

praxis are essential parts of signification. There is no semiotics before
and beyond these dimensions.
Through gradual focussing of the instructional-inferential compo-
nent of the code (the fact that it is a rule to use a word in a certain way
in a given circumstance, and in a different way in another circumstance
and so on), Eco overcomes the old idea of code’s binary nature (a = b,
regardless of context) and the rigid idea of sign as equivalence, because
each sign starts to change or adapt its meaning according to context and
user/interpeter. The cultural paradigm in which Eco places the life of
signs becomes gradually new: it is no more a semantic universe where
an order is given that cannot be disputed, but a universe where inter-
pretation is inescapable and where meanings are f lexible and negotiable.
Each sign is the locus of a semiotic action, and each sign enters into a
complex relationship with the other signs. In this way, Eco gradually
approaches the idea of a semiotic universe made not so much of signs,
but of cultural units ; entities that absorb and ref lect the inf luence of
the culture in which they find themselves, and which are no longer
the lemmas of a rigid system of content organization (a dictionary) but
rather the nodes of a network of meanings that can be treaded upon in
multiple directions, depending on the inferences and the interpretation
connections one chooses: a semiotic universe that takes the shape of an
encyclopedia .
This concept of encyclopedia is perhaps the most important theoret-
ical contribution Eco made to semiotics. As Violi (1992, p. 99, author’s
trans.) notes:
The encyclopaedia is not just a quantitative enlargement of the structur-

alist idea of code: it undoubtedly constitutes its overcoming and opening
( . . . ), but the most important difference is of qualitative type and marks
the transformation of the code from a rule that defines signification and
interpretation, into the idea of a system of possible inferences, in which
even a principle of choice, of freedom, or of interpretation may find a
place.
Semiosis and cultural systems are not governed by norms but are locally
regulated , in given circumstances and depending on the interpretative
praxis of the subjects. There are no fixed associations of expressions and
meanings in this frame, or rigid dependencies. On the contrary: cul-
tural systems, because of the multi-directionality that they allow, tend
toward contradictions, inconsistencies, where only localized regions of
coherence and consistency can be built. In a culture conceived as an

encyclopedia, the hierarchies fall , because the priorities and the depen-
dencies change according to circumstances (and thus locally). Cultural
units do not have a universal or abstract meaning, but they are rather
situated and dependent on context.
This “cultural” vision of meaning is developed by overcoming a purely
componential idea of semantics, through the “grafting” of Peirce’s semi-
otic theory onto an essentially linguistic-structural framework (derived
from Hjelmslev’s works). Eco’s key aim in this fundamental book— A
Theory of Semiotics— is to find a way to combine C. S. Peirce’s prag-
matic and interpretative semiotic theory with the semantic and struc-
turalist theory by Louis Hjelmslev, derived in turn from Saussure (for a
critical reading of this aspect, see Traini, 2013).
The semantic content of a term—as Eco underlines in this book—is
not a sum of traits, as pointed out by such linguists as Pottier (1965),
who explained that the difference between an armchair and a canap é is
the fact that the former has the following traits: “made for sitting + feet
up + for one person + with armrests + with backrest” while the latter has
only the first two traits as it may not have backrest or armrests and is
surely made for more than one person, or by structuralists like Greimas
in Structural Semantics (1966), who identified the defining traits of the
lexeme “head” in “vertical” + ”end” + “upper.”
This componential approach is aimed at finding, on the plane of
meaning, a limited number of well-defined figures, as happens on
the signifier plane. As Hjelmslev claimed, if we assume the parallel
between Expression and Content (in itself an evolution and overcoming
of Saussure’s signifier and signified), then we should adopt a similar
“componential” approach. If we can make a finite list of the signifier’s
elements (the phonemes, which in each language are in a limited num-
ber), we should do the same for its content (and find a limited number
of content’s units). Just as the phonetic traits can be used to distinguish
the signifiers, the semantic marks should be used to define meanings,
SHEEP HUMAN CHILD HORSE
SHE ewe woman girl mare
HE ram man boy stallion
Figure 3.1 Semantic componential analysis of some animals.

according to figure 3.1 (which identifies a ram as a sum of sheep + male;

a mare as a sum of horse + female, and so on).
As Eco says in A Theory of Semiotics , and confirms in Semiotics and
the Philosophy of Language (1984), if this were true we should be able
to explain how to identify these “primitive” components and how to
restrict their number. The categories /male/ and /female/ (she/he) for
example are primitive or cultural? Is the classification ontological-
natural or experiential? But more important than this is the question:
what does “sheep” or “child” mean? The components scheme does not
explain. It offers us those traits as unexplained, primitive.
This is the heart of the question for Eco. When we start explaining
what “sheep” means, we will use other words, and in a never-ending
virtuous or vicious cycle we will use, for example, “ovine” to explain
“sheep” and “sheep” to explain “ovine.”
The encyclopedia about which Eco speaks is precisely this cycle.
No small unit is left out of the game of interpretation; each unit has
to be defined, explained, referred to something else. No unit is self-
sufficient.
The units through which this circle lives are referred to by Eco
(quoting C. S. Peirce) as interpretants and they constitute a continually
expanding group of possible signs that, thanks to their social circulation
and activation (i.e., their becoming interpretation templates), tend to
become organized, to reach a regularity:
Each interpretant of a sign is a cultural or semantic unit. These units

constitute, in full independence, a culture with a system of oppositions
whose global interrelation is called the Global Semantic System. They
usually constitute Semantic Fields or even simple Oppositional Axes.
(Eco, 1971, p. 148, author’s trans.)
Interpretants can be observed and maneuvered only if and insofar as

they are part of the global system of the encyclopedia or of the culture;
the cultural units, in fact, are the things with which we have to deal
empirically, beyond any naive realism (signs are not physical objects but
interpretations), beyond any behaviorism (signs are not always and not
only behaviors, and even if they are, they are behaviors as they are also
interpretations) and any form of mentalism (signs are not pure concepts
that exist solely in our head).
In the encyclopedia, everything we find and do in order to make
semiosis progress (i.e., in order to continue to produce meaning) cause
us to make connections and create relationships and interpretative paths.
These local paths enable us to move from one term to another and allow
us to design increasingly broader and sometimes contradictory semantic
areas. Our semiotic work, as human beings, is interpretative: to create
connections and build areas of coherence, paths of coherence. We will
see this in the last part of this chapter, which focuses on an actual case
of semiotic and social intervention.
These interpretative paths may be very different, depending on the
subjects and context that activate them. In order to understand the
meaning of “rayadito” I may say that it is a bird that belongs to the fam-
ily of Furnaridae or ovenbirds, and in order to explain what an oven-
bird is, I may say that it is a bird that builds oven-shaped nests (and, of
course, I must therefore know what an oven is). Or, in order to explain
what a rayadito is, one may refer to that rare breed of birds for which
the main character in Jonathan Franzen’s book Freedom is searching,
but then one may have to explain what Franzen’s Freedom is, and I may
then have to explain who Jonathan Franzen is. In each of these paths,
we do not simply connect singular semantic traits (as it was with ovine,
baaing, placid, and so on), but shall use complex units with expression
and content.
Encyclopaedia is, therefore, the semantic model and the metaphor
that tells us how we produce semiosis (how we explain terms, how we
connect them, how we think and move from one concept to the other);
in other words, the way in which we connect syntax, semantic, and
pragmatic units (to use a code-related terminology).
On a purely semantic plane, the Encyclopaedia is based on the model
that Eco, in A Theory of Semiotics , had called the Revised Semantic
Model. The Revised Semantic Model, compared to the simpler and
classic semantic models (the dictionary trees, like the ones that classify
living beings: among animals, Chordata are divided into vertebrates,
cephalochordates, and urochordates; vertebrates are divided into mam-
mals, reptilians, fishes, birds, and amphibians; mammals in turn are
divided into more than 4,500 species and so on), required the pres-
ence of a context, because of the plasticity of meaning with respect to
different circumstances. In the Revised Semantic Model, in addition
to the defining semantic marks, we also find connotations and con-
textual and circumstantial selections. By “contextual selections” Eco
means the registration of “other sememes (or groups thereof ) usually
associated with the sememe in question” (skull-death), and by “cir-
cumstantial selections” he refers to the registration of other signs (or
groups thereof ) “belonging to different semiotic systems, or objects
and events taken as ostensive signs, usually occurring along with the
sign-vehicle corresponding to the sememe in question” (Eco, 1975,

Eng. trans., p. 106).
In this way, the Revised Semantic Model (forerunner of the
Encyclopaedia) clarifies that for Eco, as early as 1975, semiosis can no
longer be thought of as a function of abstract and universal semantic
systems, but only as a function of local and cultural paths and as a func-
tion of a given chain of connections.
In the encyclopedia model as developed in the 1980s, “sensitivity to
context” becomes a constitutive component of meaning while, at the same
time, encyclopedic meanings become increasingly regulated culturally. In
the encyclopedia, connections are not entirely idiosyncratic and have a
certain amount of predictability. In order to explain what an ovine is, it is
very unlikely that one needs to refer to the concept of a heater; it is more
likely that one refers to the broadest idea of mammal, or to the Bible,
where goats are sacrificed by slitting their throats. However, nothing pre-
vents someone from describing an ovine is an animal whose hide can be
used to produce wool, which radiates heat: “think about a heater! An ovine
may have the same function for a person—it provides heat using its outer
hide.” But this kind of connection—from heater to ovine—would be such
a strange path that, although possible, it would be highly unlikely.
The encyclopedia is, in other words, an organization in which all
connections are possible, in which some are more straightforward
than others, but none are impossible. It is impossible to refer simply to
that which is outside a given encyclopedia; that is, that which belongs
to another cultural universe. For this reason, the encyclopedia of a
Westerner will allow for an explanation of “rayadito” via the story of
the ornithologist in the novel, because it includes Freedom by Franzen,
while someone living in Bali may not be able to do this. In the average
Balinese citizen’s encyclopedia, Franzen does not exist and the connec-
tion is therefore impossible.
It is not by chance that we have said “average Balinese encyclope-
dia”; one of the ways the “encyclopedia” category can be understood is
exactly as the general knowledge of the whole sub-society .
Violi (1992, p. 103) notes in a review of the various meanings of the
category of “encyclopedia” in Eco:
● It can be a general, abstract level, that of the Global Encyclopaedia,

the archive of all knowledge in the world, the registered set of all
the interpretations, the ideal background for the storage of all pos-
sible information and that, because of this, it is a “limited” con-
cept, a theoretical postulate.
● But it is then possible to take the general map and extract smaller
size portions, properly bordered, and dependent on the context
being used. These are the local encyclopaedias, which can be char-
acterised with a social and semantic approach.
● Then there is the encyclopaedia as the collection of the average
knowledge of a culture (that can be considered analogous to the
category of episteme developed by Foucault).
● And lastly, there are encyclopaedias as individual skills: what
an individual has to know because he/she is member of a given
culture.
What all of these meanings share and what constitutes their pre-
sumption of validity is the fact that meaning exists only within a con-
text, a field, and depends on the temporarily and locally designed path,
and not on predefined, universal hierarchies.
Meaning does not work in an ahistorical way; it works universally
in an encyclopedic way—that is, in relationship with social-cultural
universes of knowledge that every subject runs through of his/her own
accord, depending on their own interests. For this reason, semantics
and pragmatics in Eco’s semiotics are always intertwined. The cultural
units are not just defined historically, culturally, and socially, but they
are also connected, activated, and put into play in semiosic operations
depending on individual relevance. As we will see in an example of
analysis at the end of the chapter, the “cultural operations” are always
the result of someone’s initiative (individual or group), and even when
they resume old “signs” (figures already used in the past), they choose
only certain traits, those instrumental to a new path, to a new encyclo-
pedic pattern. It is quite unlikely that the encyclopedia of culture may
hold something radically new, but it is also quite uncommon that it
holds something completely repetitive. The game of meaning consists
of variations and reprises and the semiotician’s work consists of tracing
back the networks of referrals in which any new cultural phenomenon
lies.
This is why in the Encyclopaedia a complex dialogue between indi-
vidual initiative and social background is opened. The interpretation
paths are generated by personal interests but regulated by social hier-
archies. Meaning lives in a cultural dimension that is both social and
statistical; it is not determined by laws but regulated by recurring events
and collective preferences that constitute the substrate, the material of
individual choices. Meaning is, first and foremost, a social habit, which
means that it is constituted through the repetition of regularities and

through its concrete and pragmatic effects.
It was Peirce that introduced the idea of habit in interpretation to
semiotics, and who clearly inspired Eco:
The whole function of thought is to produce habits of action; and that

whatever there is connected with a thought, but irrelevant to its purpose,
is an accretion to it, but no part of it. If there be a unity among our sensa-
tions which has no reference to how we shall act on a given occasion, as
when we listen to a piece of music, why we do not call that thinking. To
develop its meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits
it produces, for what a thing means is simply what habits it involves.
Now, the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not
merely under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such
as might possibly occur, no matter how improbable they may be. What
the habit is depends on when and how it causes us to act. As for the
when, every stimulus to action is derived from perception; as for the how,
every purpose of action is to produce some sensible result. Thus, we come
down to what is tangible and conceivably practical, as the root of every
real distinction of thought, no matter how subtle it may be; and there is
no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible
difference of practice. (Peirce, CP 5.400)
Peirce’s Legacy
Both Eco and Peirce share the idea of meaning as something dynamic,
not fixed in a combination of Expression and Content, forever codified,
but resulting from a process—a triadic process. For Peirce, in fact, the
sign (which may mean a single sign, a letter or ideogram, or a textual
construction, a whole discourse) has a triadic not dual structure, as
was the case in the linguistic-structural tradition (for Saussure the sign
is a two-faced entity: signifier and signified; for Hjelmslev it has two
planes: expression plane and content plane).
We cannot, of course, summarize Peirce’s semiotic theory in a few
pages. Pierce’s work is immense and in no way systematic. It is made up
of fragments that have been collected in no discernable order, despite
being numbered (the so-called Collected Papers1— CP —are, in fact,
individuated by a number). They deal with logic, mathematics, epis-
temology, semiotics, always with a special interest in the knowledge’s
theory and with a pragmaticist 2 approach (which essentially means that
every knowledge, every sign, every action is significant in relation to the
practical effects it produces).
However, we would like to highlight those points that are central to

Eco’s theory and its cultural dimension; in particular, the role of inter-
pretation and of the habits.
It is the triadic nature of sign and semiosis that introduces the inter-
pretance principle (on which Eco’s entire theory of semiotics is based)
into the heart of Peirce’s theory.
A sign . . . [in the form of a representamen] is something which stands to

somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses some-
body, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or
perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the inter-
pretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object . It stands
for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which
I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. (CP 2.228)
The schema that represents this idea is given in figure 3.2 .

From figure 3.2 , the extent to which Peirce’s semiotics is realistic
(the sign, as a matter of fact, is based on an object, on a reality data)
and how it is also constitutionally interpretative is clear, because there
is no biunique correspondence between an expression and a content,
but a relation connecting an object, a sign (the representamen), and an
interpretation. Semiotic triangulation is, in other words, an unavoid-
able transition from a reality, through signs (repesentamen), to an inter-
pretation of the same.
Interpretant
Representamen Object
Figure 3.2 The triadic structure of Peircian sign.

Pierce splits this “reality,” the object of the sign, into dynamic and
immediate objects. The dynamic object is “the Object as it is” (CP 8.183),
something that we cannot really reach, while the immediate object is
“the Object as the Sign itself represents it” (CP 4.536, 8.314, 8.343):
the reality as we perceive it. Just to give an example: the dynamic object
might be that particular weather phenomenon known as the rainbow,
the immediate object that set of colored lines we usually associate with
the end of a rainstorm. Both are “reality” but what we perceive is the
latter: the colored lines.
In his ref lections on cognition, perception, and semiosis Eco too
reprises this distinction. At the root of the sign lies not just a reality (a
dynamic object) that, so to speak, pushes semiotic activity, demanding
to be interpreted and expressed, but also a reality that is already medi-
ated (we recognize that peculiar weather phenomenon as a rainbow,
since we have seen it in thousands of movies in which the rainbow is
associated with a rebirth, we have drawn it thousands of times when
we were children, we may even have read Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow)
and that undergoes semiotic mediations each time, generating new
interpretants.
There is, therefore, a “triadic rhythm” in semiosis that moves for-
ward from reality (always mediated by signs, knowledge, previous inter-
pretations) through signs-representamen, until new interpretations that
stabilize locally and temporarily, eventually becoming the immediate
objects of other semiotic triangles.
This unstoppable triadic f low is what Peirce (and Eco) called
unlimited semiosis or interpretants’ run . Interpretations, as signs, in
these semiotic f lows are always ready to return to the interpretation
dynamic, becoming the object of other signs. A sign only ever captures
certain aspects of its object, which does not mean, but rather implies,
that there are other possible aspects that can be expressed and that are
pertinent to a particular object. Each sign, saying something, excludes
other meanings, thus becoming only a partial interpretation of reality.
This is a point that Eco reprises and develops thoroughly in his the-
ory of encyclopedia, where he claims that any interpretation is local,
any sign makes sense in given circumstances: the interpretative paths
cut the encyclopedia in their own way, without barring other possible
paths.
The assumption that semiosis works through interpretants is
what causes the revision of the old code category. As Eco points out
in describing the critical, corrosive power of this idea, the Peirce inter-
pretant can assume different forms:
● It can be the equivalent (or seemingly equivalent) sign-vehicle in

another semiotic system. For example, I can make the drawing of
a dog correspond to the word /dog/
● It can be the index which is directed at a single object, perhaps
implying an element of universal quantification (“all objects like
this”)
● It can be a scientific (or na ïve) definition in terms of the same
semiotic system, e.g. /salt/ signifies ‘sodium chloride’
● It can be an emotive association which acquires the value of an
established connotation: /dog/ signifies ‘fidelity’ (and vice versa)
● It can simply be the translation of the term into another language,
r is substitution by a synonym
[ . . . ] Insofar as a theory of codes provides a description of all the mark-

ers attributed by one or more codes to a single sememe, then the inter-
pretant is clearly a category that may suitably take its place within the
framework of a theory of codes.
[ . . . ] The very richness of this category makes it fertile since it shows
signification (as well as communication), by means of continual shifting
which refer a sign back to another sign or string of signs, circumscribes
cultural units in an asymptotic fashion, without ever allowing one to
touch them directly, though making them accessible through other units.
[ . . . ] Semiotics explains itself by itself. (Eco, 1975, Eng. trans., p. 70)
As Peirce explained, the only thing that can stop this shifting of
meanings that may render any communication impossible or ambigu-
ous (and that could dangerously drive interpretation toward that toxic,
carcinogenic production of semantic sliding typical of the hermetic par-
adigm) and thus stabilize interpretations is the formation of a habit . In
the pragmaticist perspective to which Peirce subscribes, in fact, signs
and interpretative praxis make sense because of their effects. The hab-
its are the pragmatic consequences of the interpretative activity; they
are “stabilized” interpretants. Even interpretants, in fact, since they are
effects conveyed by the sign (see Peirce, CP 5.473), go through differ-
ent stages. First, a representamen produces an immediate interpretant;
that is, an immediate reaction in the mind of the interpreting person.
This effect then takes its place and shape inside the thought (maybe
even reorganizing the system of meaning in force up to that moment)
and therefore becomes a visible effect, a dynamic interpretant. Last

this effect becomes the final logical interpretant, a representation that
blocks, albeit temporarily, the flow of possible interpretations of that
single object. When a logical interpretant modifies the person’s dispo-
sition to the act that produced it, and thus becomes public and avail-
able to the community that person belongs to, then there is a change
of habits, a belief that becomes a trend toward a certain behavior and
the modification of the reality of origin. And so, the gradual sliding of
meanings included in the progressive constitution of the interpretants
is halted, albeit temporarily.
The community is the only subject that can temporarily stop the con-
tinuous production of interpretants and “ratify” the interpretative habit
as a guarantee of mutual understanding, communication code, and
mutual translation. For this reason, the interpretative reading of the
sign is, both in Peirce and in Eco even more so, radically culturological
and “sensitive to the social.” Interpretations are also stabilized thanks to
the communities that ratify and normalize them locally. Since, accord-
ing to Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, “what a thing means is simply what
habits it involves,” in order to establish the meanings of signs and texts
it is necessary to question ourselves on their effects, on what they cause
both pragmatically and publicly.
Social Negotiation of Sense

This kind of semiosis—structurally processual, public and therefore
social—introduces a key dimension of sense, which is equally cultural:
the negotiable nature of sense. If sense were governed only by the strict
rules of correlation—that is, by nonf lexible signification codes—com-
munication and interpretation would simply be a matter of exchange
and decoding. Instead, as we had already pointed out, the codes are plu-
ral and the associations between expressions and contents are variable
and culturally sensitive. This gives signification a “playing margin” that
paves the road to negotiation processes.
Negotiation is, for Eco, essential at social and cultural levels, cen-
tral at cognitive level, and unavoidable at communication level in
translation.
In Turning Back the Clock, he writes:
The principle of negotiation governs not only the market economy, trade
union struggles, and (when things are going well) international affairs,
it also lies at the very base of cultural life. Negotiation occurs in a good
translation (in translation you inevitably lose some of the original text,
but you can work out ways to compensate for this) and even in how we
use words: you and I assign different meanings to a certain term, but to
communicate, we agree on a common core of meaning that allows us
to understand each other. [ . . . ] A principle of negotiation also operates
in the interpretation of a text (be it a poem or an ancient document),
because, no matter how much we may have to say about it, we are faced
with that specific text not another one, and a text is a fact too. (2007,
Eng. trans., p. 247)
Negotiation is basically a strategy of mutual adaptation,3 not just

among different speakers, but among different instances that partici-
pate in the normal process of semiosis (also in a solitary interpretation).
In Kant and the Platypus (Eco, 1997), this idea lies at the heart of signi-
fication itself. Meaning is constituted through hypotheses and gradual
approximations , in the passage from a perception experience to the artic-
ulated definition of a concept. In comparison with the outside world in
which the subject is adapted via primary iconism, the subject forms his/
her own private Cognitive Type that it then gradually perfects, adjusts,
corrects, enriches in socialization and sharing of itself in the commu-
nity it belongs to, until a nuclear content is reached. A nuclear content
is a parameter with which, socially, it can confront itself and with which
the members of a culture have to “cope” and negotiate. As Eco himself
admits:
If I repeatedly use the idea of negotiation to explain the processes of

translation, it is because it is under the banner of this concept that I
would place the notion of meaning, which has until this point not been
quite clear. We negotiate the meaning that the translation should express
because we always have to negotiate, in everyday life, the meanings we
attribute to the expressions we use. (2003, p. 88, author’s trans.)
If we have to negotiate (with the culture and society to which we

belong) the meanings of the words we use, we also have to negotiate
the meaning of the texts we read, the cultural practices we develop,
and even certain facts (History, with its events, massacres, wars, is part
of this negotiation).4 All of semiosis is, in fact (as Lotman also claims)
replete with translation dynamics.
For Eco, the problem with translation, both at a semiotic and, more
generally, a cultural level, is of particular significance. He started deal-
ing with it in 1983 (translating Queneau’s Exercises of Style into Italian),
continued in The Search for the Perfect Language in the European Culture
(1993), thematized it at the end of the 1990s first with the translation
of Sylvie by Nerval (1999), then with two long essays published in Versus
(see Eco 1999 and 2000b), and finally in Experiences in Translations
(2000).5
The crucial point (even more important for our culturological reflec-
tions) is that translation never occurs—to use the “formula” that Eco
uses—between two dictionaries, but between two cultures. Indeed, to
understand the sense of foreign words we need to be familiar with the
system of that culture. A mere list of equivalences is not enough.
Eco often quotes, on this point, a key essay by Quine, “Meaning
and Translation” (1960) in which Quine considers a population that
has had no contact with our culture, which means that the translator
can only watch its linguistic behavior. The translator first of all tries
to recreate a list of correspondences between the linguistic behaviors of
the native speakers and some words of his/her own language. However,
if when a rabbit passes the native cries “gavagai,” the translator could
still not be sure that “gavagai” means rabbit as it may mean “part of
a rabbit,” or holophrastically the sentence “Hey! A rabbit!” or “Let’s
run for it! It’s a rabbit.” The point is that we can make meaningful
hypotheses on the meaning of a term only if we can find a systematic
connection between the internal terms of a culture, only if we have an
explanation that builds a system. The priority of the cultural and of the
systemic is vital in the identification of the local. Translation, in and of
itself, is marked by a lack of determination. Sense and, consequently,
translation function holistically, as a whole. Therefore, all translation
is a negotiation between cultures, and our semiotic activity is usually
based on a logic of translation with constant adaptation and reformu-
lation, depending on the interlocutor in any act of communication. As
such, this requires a general and unavoidable cultural pertinence of
semiosis.
In addition to that, as translation occurs between systems and not
languages, it is, according to Eco, a process -based phenomenon and not
a system -based one. 6 As such it implies disambiguation in the context
(only by operating within the context is it possible to remove ambiguity
from the term /tenor/ and identify the different meaning it has in the
sentences “the tenor’s performance was excellent” and “I expected an
answer of a different tenor”) and implies an evaluation of the connota-
tions that depend on the substance of the expression (regional accents)
and style.
Even considering all possible phenomenological varieties of transla-
tions (there are, as Jakobson says, intra-linguistic, inter-linguistic, and
inter-semiotic translations),7 there is a common element in every act

of translation: the fact that the faithfulness criteria (usually associated
with translations) is not based on the evaluation of lexemic correspon-
dence but of textual analogy. /Faithful/ does not mean literally identi-
cal, Eco says, because the point is always to create the same effect of the
source text in the linguistic processes of the other language, and this
is almost always possible, even using strategies different from those of
the source text. Languages and cultures are different but comparable ;
the mistake is thinking they can overlap one another. What is at stake,
in negotiation, is textual and cultural, rather than the meaning of the
single word.
Ref lecting upon a diagram (taken from Nida, 1975) that compares
the terms to run, to walk, to hop, to skip, to jump, to dance, to crawl ,
and noting the absence of a “pure” Italian translation of to hop, 8 Eco
writes:
Thus, by starting from terms whose meanings are known and working
to interpret by various means (perhaps including gestures) terms whose
meanings are not, proceeding by successive adjustments, an English
speaker would be able to convey to an Italian speaker what the phrase
John hops is all about. These are possibilities for more than just the prac-
tice of translation; they are the possibilities for coexistence on a conti-
nent with a multilingual vocation. Generalized polyglottism is certainly
not the solution to Europe’s cultural problems ( . . . ) The solution for the
future is more likely to be in a community of peoples with an increased
ability to receive the spirit, to taste or savour the aroma of different
dialects. Polyglot Europe will not be a continent where individuals con-
verse f luently in all the other languages; in the best of cases, it could be
a continent where differences of language are no longer barriers to com-
munication, where people can meet each other and speak together, each
in his or her own tongue, understanding, as best they can, the speech of
others. In this way, even those who never learn to speak another language
f luently could still participate in its particular genius, catching a glimpse
of the particular universe that every individual expresses each time he or
she speaks the language of his or her ancestors and his or her own tradi-
tion. (Eco, 1993, Eng. trans., pp. 350–351)
Only if we are ready to negotiate can we recognize the Other, under-

stand its “genius” and uniqueness and, at the same time, any common
traits it may share with us, and consequently start a dialogue with it.
The need for interpretation, the opportunity of translation, the
availability for negotiation, all of these are not just communicative and
semiotic constants; they are the cornerstones of a view of culture that

demands ethical commitments also.
Eco and Geertz: Two Theories for the Interpretation of Culture

Many assumptions of semiotics have long become part of modern anthro-
pological sensitivity, in its various approaches. If linguistic anthropol-
ogy has developed especially the semiotic lesson of C. S. Peirce, and
visual anthropology was largely based on the lesson of Roland Barthes,
we can say that the semiotic lesson of Umberto Eco has been absorbed
mainly by the interpretative anthropology of Clifford Geertz.
We think it is interesting to point out a number of analogies between
Eco’s theory and Geertz’s theory. Geertz’s relationship with semiotics
is, indeed, not just an association thought up in our minds but a con-
sonance that Geertz himself has often pointed out. As he said at the
beginning of The Interpretation of Cultures while introducing the idea
of an anthropology that he defines as interpretative :
The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below
attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with
Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to
be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpre-
tative one in search of meaning. (1973, p. 5)
This very definition already highlights some key traits of Geetz’s

approach—meanings, networks, interpretations—which bring it into
a harmonious relationship with the semiotic position that we have
described so far, both in Lotman and Eco.9 These concepts in particu-
lar seem to constitute a common ground:
— the idea of webs of meaning,

— the differential principle,
— the central role of inferentiality,
— the idea that culture lives in an “externalized” dimension,
— the anti-intuitionism,
— the central role of translation.
The most structurally meaningful idea among these is the one men-
tioned in the previous quotation: the idea of webs of meaning. Geertz
is indeed convinced that culture’s organization is predominantly
inherently network-based, just like Eco’s encyclopedia. There is no iso-

lation of elements that have an identity in and of themselves, but rather
interdefinition and mutual relationships that give meaning to each ele-
ment. Meaning, in other words, is neither an essence nor an inherent
feature of objects,10 but rather a function that changes depending on
the relationships it is part of and that cannot, therefore, be understood
if isolated: it can only be understood “in context.” We have put this
expression in commas because for Geertz (and for the semiotic outlook
as a whole), the category of “context” is factually inadequate. There is
no possible separation between a presumed text or object and a context,
perceived as a neighborhood, separate and ancillary. Meanings occur
only in the interdefinition of objects and of their boundaries, in the
building of borders for portions of networks.
Like in Eco’s encyclopedia, Geertz’s webs of meaning also feature
relationships and, locally, organization , but there is no preformed hierar-
chy, meaning a given symbol or rite can therefore become part of differ-
ent relationships, with a more or less founding or defining nature, such
as taking into account the sorting into social classes the society being
taken into account undertakes.
The notion, still quite widespread in anthropology, that culture is a seam-

less web is no less a petitio principii than the older view that culture
is a thing of shreds and patches ( . . . ) The problem of cultural analysis
is as much a matter of determining independencies as interconnections,
gulfs as well as bridges. ( . . . ) The analysis of culture comes down there-
fore not to an heroic “holistic” assault upon “the basic configurations of
the culture,” an overarching “order of orders” from which more limited
configurations can be seen as mere deductions, but to a searching out of
significant symbols, clusters of significant symbols, and clusters of clus-
ters of significant symbols—the material vehicles of perception, emotion,
and understanding—and the statement of the underlying regularities of
human experience implicit in their formation. (Geertz, 1973, p. 407)
When we move to the anthropological-cultural plane we find a

heated debate not unlike the one Eco leads against the modelling of the
semantic universe in the shape of dictionaries. The culture tree cannot
be climbed because there is no tree with a vertical organization that
mirrors an orderly hierarchy.
The work of the culture researcher (semiologist or anthropologist) is
to find regularities in the assignment of sense to signifiers and conglom-
erates of signifiers, so as to define the networks of interconnections,
bridges, and surroundings that define the dominant configurations of a
given culture. In a certain way, the analyst “sits on the shoulders” of the
local inhabitant, in order to see (with him and thanks to him, but from
a slightly higher vantage point) the homologies, the recurrent patterns
that are visible in a given situation. Any observation, in this sense, is
local and dependent on the local informants; it searches for the “logic”
of the local situation.
This outlook is as differential as the semiotic one. In defining the
object of his study Geertz points out:
[It is] a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which

twitches, winks, face-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies, are pro-
duced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not
(not even the zero-form twitches, which as a cultural category are as much
non winks as winks are non twitches), in fact exist, no matter what anyone
did or didn’t do with his eyelids. (1973, p. 7, author’s emphasis)
Meanings are cultural units because they are different from other
cultural units.
From that stems a fully holistic and localist approach (exactly as in
Lotman and Eco), because no knowledge can be geographically or chro-
nologically generalized; instead, it can only be attributed locally to a set
that is part of a given culture, and this has the benefit of neither restrict-
ing nor tying up the analysis with preconceived categories, but rather
showing “respect” for the object from the beginning of the observation.
In this, obviously, lies the major divergence that separates Geertz’s
interpretative anthropology from L é vi-Strauss’s structuralist anthro-
pology. Geertz’s polemic is recurring and explicit: it is not correct to
think about fixed correlations and atemporal structures that seize the
“nature” and meaning of social phenomena. Anthropology is an unmis-
takably historical subject and the knowledge of man cannot help but be
local, with well-defined coordinates:
For structuralists, L é v-Strauss cum suis, the product side of thought

becomes so many arbitrary cultural codes, diverse indeed, with their jag-
uars, tattoos, and rotting meat, but which, when properly deciphered, yield
as their plan text the psychological invariants of the process side. Brazilian
myth or Bach fugue it is all a matter of perceptual contrasts, logical oppo-
sitions, and relation-saving transformations. (Geertz, 1983, p. 150)
For Geertz, logical oppositions are only contextual and the terms of
the oppositions can vary according to the semantic network, of which
they are part.
For this reason he prompts everyone to observe all correlations in

the situation . It is not enough to do as L é vi-Strauss did (and the debate,
once again, is quite open; see Geertz 1973), to see the internal structure
of the phenomena (symbols, rites, or texts). Instead, it is necessary to
see how they circulate and operate within the context in which they
exist—not unlike the way Lotman urges the reader to study how the
texts operate in the semiosphere or within their cultural setting, and not
only the texts in and of themselves.
Meaning, in other words, never has a fully defined, fixed semantic
content, but it is always and exclusively accessible via a sequence of
mediations, in context, through other interpretants.
Just as there is no atemporal definition of sense, so there is no direct
access to sense, either in terms of observation or in terms of introspec-
tion and self-determination. We are always in need of an interpreta-
tive mediation (in this sense, on the shoulder of a local inhabitant)
and for this reason interpretation is always at the starting point for
everything.
This radical anti-intuitionism is tangent to Peirce’s anti-intuitionism
(see in particular CP 5.265) and it is clear exactly how this common
base, this shared recognition of the interpretative nature of each semi-
otic expression, leads both Peirce (in the past), and Eco and Geertz
today to conceive knowledge in a basically hypothetical-inferential
form. There are no “pure” ideas that have always been present in
our minds and closed off from any discussion. Every idea, even the
most metaphysical one, is derived from an interpretative process of
acquisition.
Just as Eco pointed out in “Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypothesis
on Three Types of Abduction” (in Eco and Sebeok, 1983) and in almost
all of his other publications through the 1970s and 1980s, the inferen-
tial nature of knowledge makes the semiotician’s work comparable to
that of the detective or physician. Similarly, Geertz explained the activ-
ities of the culture researcher in terms of hypotheses and inferences:
To generalize within cases is usually called, at least in medicine and

depth psychology, clinical inference. Rather than beginning with a set
of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law,
such inference begins with a set of (presumptive) signifiers and attempts
to place them within an intelligible frame. ( . . . ) In the study of culture
the signifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symptoms but symbolic
acts or cluster of symbolic acts, and the aim is not therapy but the analy-
sis of social discourse. (Geertz, 1983, p. 26)
This analysis—precisely because everything is interpretation and

there is nothing natural, innate, or intuitive —must necessarily start
from the set of stereotypes and commonplaces that characterize every-
one’s culture (both the culture of the analyst and that of the object he
analyses).
Geertz dedicates a lot of attention to common sense : “Common sense
is not what the mind creates or can spontaneously apprehends; it is what
the mind filled with presupposition concludes” (Geertz, 1983, p. 84).
It is not, therefore, a sort of natural substrate of thought or of being
in the world, but rather the summing up of the effects of meaning (both
on the level of sense and that of the pragmatic) generated by a series of
cultural beliefs (the habits Peirce refers to). Everything in our mind is
associated spontaneously and automatically to a number of given cate-
gories, and does not stem from a natural semantic inherence but from
a well-rooted cultural habit that renders the absolutely social entirely
natural. It is what Roland Barthes (see chapter 1) discussed, though in
a different way, and also what we will now look at in Eco, though he
refers to it as “ideology”:
If common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of expe-

rience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever,
then it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected
to historically defined standards of judgement. It can be questioned, dis-
puted, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught, and
it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a
cultural system. (Geertz, 1983, p. 76)
Semiotic Praxis and Ideology

Before turning to what Eco means by the category of “ideology,” it is
useful to brief ly ref lect on the processes that lead to the social produc-
tion of semiosis. The two issues are anything but separate.
At the beginning of this chapter we pointed out that another reason
for which Eco’s semiosis appears to be strictly cultural is the attention it
pays to social processes of sign production; that is, its interest in practices
of meaning’s management and not simply in the systems of organization
and the semantic structuring of sense.
This has been fairly evident ever since 1975 when, in A Theory of
Semiotics , Eco asks himself the question of the modes of sign production .
After having discussed a wide-scoped “Theory of Codes,” while trying
to define both what a sign actually is and what, consequently, a code is
(a code is, as we have already seen, the rule of correlation that is at the
root of any semiotic system) and also how a semantic universe is orga-
nized (with the passage from trait-based, dictionary semantics to the
Revised Semantic Model, the forerunner of the Encyclopaedia), Eco
asks himself the question of what a subject does with the messages it
receives, and how it processes the signs that make up its semiotic life.
Dissatisfied with the types of signs that circulated in the debate at that
time (including the Peirce triad of icon-index-symbol), he decided to
move the problem onto the production processes of the signs, defining a
typology of the ways of producing signs, rather than a typology of the
products:
The labour performed in shaping the expression-continuum in order

to produce the concrete occurrence of a given sign brings into imme-
diate evidence the fact that there are different kinds of signs. If a
general theory of codes, providing the notion of sign-function along
with the notion of segmentation of both the expression and the con-
tent levels, seemed to offer a unified definition for every kind of sign,
the concrete labour of producing these signs obliges one to recognize
that there are different modes of production and that these modes of
production are linked t a triple process: i) the process of shaping of
the expression-continuum ii) the process of correlating that shaped
continuum with its possible content iii) the process of connecting
these signs to factual events, things or states of the world [ . . . ] At the
same time one realizes that what are commonly called types of sign
are not the clear-cut product of one of these operations but rather the
result of several of them, interconnected in various ways. (Eco, 1975,
Eng. trans., p. 157)
What stems from the above is an idea of semiosis that is concretely

rooted in social life, a concept of semiotics that chooses to tackle the
variety of semiotic processes launched by the way signs are physically
produced, or rather: launched by the way in which it is possible to pro-
duce the expressions that are then correlated with content, and give rise
to the signs.
This “physical” interest clearly shows Eco’s openly stated principle-
driven choice, and this represents a point of divergence from Lotman,
who instead keeps on assigning a higher status to language throughout
all of his works. Eco’s insistence is on the irreducibility of the semio-
sis to a purely verbal language, and thus the need to examine different
types of different signs, in which the plane of the signifier is represented
by extremely different matters:
Even though verbal language is the more powerful, it does not totally sat-
isfy the effability requirements; in order to be so powerful it must often
be helped along by other semiotic systems which add to its power. (Eco,
1975, Eng. trans., p. 174)
This way, the field of semiosis broadens and the semiotic research
has to take into account a much wider range of languages, praxes, ways
of expression in a direction that immediately opens up to culture as
a whole (including material culture, the object of so many works in
contemporary anthropology), and not just to texts as we traditionally
understand them.
According to these assumptions, among the semiotically relevant
dimensions of sign production we find:
● the physical work needed to produce expression being brought into

play;
● the type-occurrency relationship;11
● the continuum to be formed, that is, the matter of the expression;
● the modality and complexity of its articulation (this can range
from very precise combinational units to complex and inarticulate
textual systems).
From that it is possible to develop a diagram like figure 3.3, artic-

ulating four types of expressive production: the recognition (which is a
strange type of expressive production, in that it does not actually pro-
duce an expression but takes an expression as the signifier of something,
making an expression functive of a sign function), the ostension work,
the replica work, and the invention work (of an expression that did not
exist before; painting is a good example of this)—in an articulation in
which the first type of work (recognition) acts as an implicit premise for
all the other works (which are, in any case, different forms of complexi-
fication and development).
If some of these works imply more clearly and immediately then
others an intersubjective dimension (ostension, e.g., is always an act
focused toward someone), all of them require a social background any-
way, because all of them exist in a dimension we can define as public,
outer. This is the point.
The signs do not exist as mental artifices, terms of an individual’s
internal language; the signs circulate and materialize, and in doing so
immediately acquire intersubjective status. The physics of signs, their
being substantiate and external, rather than mental and internal,
TABLE 39
Typology of Modes of Sign Production
PHYSICAL LABOR
required to produce RECOGNITION OSTENSION REPLICA INVENTION
expressions
IMPRINTS VECTORS CONGRUENCES
Ratio
difficilis PROJECTIONS
EXAMPLES SAMPLES FICTIVE STYLIZATIONS PROGRAMMED GRAPHS
SAMPLES
STIMULI
PSEUDO
COMBINA- COMBINA
Ratio TIONAL
TYPE/TOKEN RATIO
SYMPTOMS TIONAL
facilis CLUES UNITS
TRANSFORMATIONS
UNITS
CONTINUUM HETEROMATERIAL HETEROMATERIAL

HOMOMATERIAL
to be shaped (MOTIVATED) (ARBITRARILY SELECTED)
Mode and rate Pre-established (ccded and overcoded)

Proposed undercoded
of GRAMMATICAL UNITS
TEXTS
ARTICULATION (according to different modes of pertinence)
Figure 3.3 A typology of modes of sign production.

leads directly to their being shared in the public spaces of society and
culture.
In this “public” space, which is the intersubjective space of semiosis,
it is hard to separate the dimension of signification (the organization of
meaning) from the dimension of communication (that of the effective
exchange of meaning). Even if there seems to be a theoretical priority in
signification, which makes it possible to study the codes without taking
into account their use, Eco quickly states the unavoidability of a prag-
matic dimension in any semiotic analysis.
From this comes a very complex and dynamic vision of semiosis
whose theory of modes of sign production does not mark a passage from
the signification plane to the communication plane, but rather the pas-
sage from the consideration of semiotic systems to the consideration of
semiotic processes , the concrete practices of meaning production.
By drafting the typology of modes of sign production Eco tried to
map the strategies available to us for using the matter of the world in a
semiotic way (as expressions of the contents we wish to express), dealing
with repetition, conformism, invention, and originality. He is not inter-
ested in defining how we communicate, but rather in understanding
how we can create signs (by ostension, replica, invention) if we wish to
communicate. Among the possibilities he identifies, he first points out
recognition, because even when we just assume something to be signifi-
cant with respect to something else (we recognize it as “symptomatic”
of something else or “indicating” something else) we produce signs: it is
our interpretative behavior that produces signs, there are no signs apart
from and beyond it.
The vicious and virtuous cycle that was already a feature of the
encyclopedia returns because at the basis of the table of the modes of
sign production, and at the basis of the encyclopedia, there is a similar
assumption: the interpretative nature of semiotics. The sign production
work is interpretative because it is only with recognition (and, therefore,
from abductive processes of implication, which are, as such, interpreta-
tive) that signs can be produced. On the other hand, the encyclopedia
is inhabited by interpretation because it does not connect atemporal
primitives but cultural units, which are the result of social negotiation
and interpretative habits. This is why Eco’s semiotic theory is a radically
cultural theory.
At both levels—that of sign production and that of the encyclope-
dia—uses and rules intertwine with regularities and inventions. The
definition of meaning depends on the practices (of sign production and
running through the encyclopedia) that define meaning and, when it
repeats socially and regularizes, these become norms. There is no prior-

ity between the two principles.
It is when semiosis’ interpretative circularity does not become
explicit, or when “palimpsestic” nature of meanings is denied that ideo-
logical discourses are born; when this archeology of sign production is
not assumed and sense is naturalized as if it was a nucleus of meaning
“having been always true” or being “a fact of nature.”
As we have already said several times so far, since culture has a sys-
tematic character, it is organized by laws of correlation, regularities,
implications that guarantee its ability to function. Obviously, these
relationships are not always explicit, but they are always in oper-
ation and organize the relentless work of sign production typical of
societies.
Every cultural expression (gesture, object, rite, or texts) is consis-
tent with a given system of meanings that is not explicit but assumed,
and this system constitutes the implicit ideology of this expression,
of the semiotic assertion. Denying the existence of this system that
relativizes meaning to specific contexts means producing ideological
discourses.
The bond between codes, ideology, and culture is, for Eco, a tight
one and the semiotician cannot neglect it. Eco has been dealing with
this issue since 1968. In La struttura assente he writes:
The word “ideology” lends itself to several decodings. There is an ide-

ology acting as a false conscience, masking the real relationships between
things; and there is also an ideology that acts as a stance towards reality,
be it philosophical, political, aesthetic and so on. We wish to assign a
rather broader meaning to the word ideology, coupled with rhetoric: by
ideology we mean the universe of knowing of the target and the group he
belongs to, his systems of psychological expectancies, its moral attitudes,
its acquired experience, its moral principles (we would say “culture” in
the anthropological sense of the word, if rhetorical systems were not part
of this concept of culture). (Eco 1968, Chapter 5—fully dedicated to
this issue, pp. 93–94, author’s trans.)
Ideology is the system of meaning that a given sign, text, discourse

assigns itself, and since this system (that is nothing but a given culture)
responds to communication conventions (those same conventions that
usually supervise and direct the language), then by analyzing these con-
ventions (semantic codes, lexical codes, rhetoric codes) the semioticians
may rebuild the presumed system.
Semiology shows the universe of signs, arranged in codes and lexicons,

the universe of ideologies that are ref lected in the preconstituted modal-
ities of language. (Eco, 1965, p. 95, author’s trans.)
Eco’s interest in the codes-ideologies-culture-semiotics link would

not fade for several years. The connection that keeps these terms
together in an increasingly explicit way is their interpretative nature.
Codes and ideologies refer to “interpretation frameworks for the world”
and as such have a semiotic pertinence. In addition to that, in the clos-
ing of A Theory of Semiotics Eco writes:
A semantic system or sub-system is one possible way of giving form to

the world. As such it constitutes a partial interpretation of the world and
can theoretically be revised every time new messages which semanti-
cally restructure the code introduce new positional values. [ . . . ] But in
general any addressee will turn to his own cultural inheritance, his own
partial world vision, in order to choose the subcodes that he wishes to
apply to the message. To define this partial world vision, this prospec-
tive segmentation of reality entails a Marxist notion of ideology as “false
conscience.” [ . . . ] For a semiotics of codes there is no need to establish
how the message comes into existence nor for what political or economic
reasons; instead, it is concerned to establish in what sense this new cod-
ing can be called “ideological.” (p. 290, Eng. trans.)12
Identifying the partiality of any semiotic act, being able to see and
analyze the ideology implicit in any act of sense management is what
confers upon semiotics the power to unmask and, in this sense, a polit-
ical role. Eco, like Roland Barthes (who more or less operated in the
same period) and like Geertz, does not believe in the innocence of any
language, either the others’ language or of one’s own language:
Semiological research that takes into account the code-message dialec-

tics, the continuous differentiation of codes, the connections between
rhetoric and ideological universes, the enormous presence of all real-life
circumstances that direct the choice of codes and the reading of messages
in a fatalistic way, becomes motivated, biased and non-objective. (Eco,
1968, p. 415, author’s trans.)
It is also in this radical assumption of the impossibility of objectiveness ,

in this vigorous statement of the perspective nature of semiotic analysis,
that the culturological nature of Eco’s research is made clear. Both sig-
nificant and interpretative practices are, therefore, culturally located .
No subject is innocent and the only way to avoid misleading universal-

ism is to make as explicit as possible the relativity and history of one’s
own assumptions.
Case Analysis: Anonymous

All practices, as we have said, are culturally located. They are all estab-
lished within a network that is, from the beginning, both semiotic
and interpretative. Each cultural network is already loaded with sense;
some of its interpretative paths have already been carved, some asso-
ciations have already been established, and some cultural units have
become joints and knots of many semantic paths, while other units have
remained unused, inactive for a long time, but are still nevertheless pre-
sent and available.
We will now try to reflect, using the Eco’s interpretative model of
semiosis as our basis, on a social-political phenomenon that has recently
spread through several Western countries, to gauge (as we have already
done at the end of the previous chapters) the heuristic potential of this
theoretical paradigm and assess how useful it is in understanding and
analyzing cultural phenomena. We will examine the case of Anonymous,
the online community that, through initiatives on the web and on social
networks, has supported a great many of the protests that characterized
our present years (in particular, here we will base our observations on
the years 2011–2012). We will do that by focusing in particular on the
net and palimpsest of interpretations that we see at work in this social
and semiotic phenomenon, trying to highlight how certain interpretative
habits became regularized throughout the centuries and how these habits
have, at a later time, interacted with new cultural interests, new demands
of meaning. What we will have the chance to better understand (thanks
to the heuristic “tools” of Eco’s semiotics) is the way in which culture
stratifies its meaning and builds or modifies (through local semiotic prac-
tices) its semantic systems. As always, we will base our analysis on tex-
tual “material”: the icon of Anonymous and some of their discourses (the
online videos). We won’t focus on the chain of their actions nor will we
examine a certain limited period considering everything they say. We will
limit ourselves to some textual expressions they have produced, looking at
the intertextual and palimpsestic networks these texts open.
In the case of Anonymous the stratification of meaning is particu-
larly crucial, because Anonymous is a case of contemporary and unex-
pected recovery of an old cultural unity: that of a key figure in English
history, Guy Fawkes.
Anonymous is a collective name for a group of individuals and com-

munities that takes planned, coordinated action against controversial,
debate-stirring subjects (their first target was Scientology in 2008; they
then moved to institutional targets like Courts, major media stakehold-
ers like the Wall Street Journal, symbolic individuals such as John Pike,
a police lieutenant guilty of applying repressive measures in a peace-
ful demonstration), spreading video messages and computer viruses
across the web (often with true and proper cyber-crimes and hacking
actions that cause protests, legal action, and have even led to a num-
ber of arrests). The community “meets” and coordinates its work via
the Internet, using as meeting points certain sites and portals, such
as: 4chan, 711chan, Encyclopaedia Dramatica, IRC, and YouTube
channels.
When the Indignados and Occupy social movements appeared,
Anonymous switched its focus to targets similar to theirs, backed up
their protests, and almost offered to be an Internet “supporter” of the
movements. This became particularly apparent in February 2010 with
the birth of “The 99 Percent Movement,” based on the idea that 99 per-
cent of American population has no true political representation. In
truth, as we will see, the Occupy protesters gradually distanced them-
selves from Anonymous or at least pointed out their differences.
It is this distancing that I’m interested in explaining. Analyzing the
semiotic identity of Anonymous I will try to understand the reasons for
this distancing.
Why do we consider this phenomenon to be relevant from a semi-
otic point of view? It is not simply for its social relevance (Anonymous
is an international subject that has managed to build itself a space and
draw attention to itself in several Western countries), not just because
it employs a strategy of communication and direct action that could be
considered unique from many points of view, but because it creates its
identity (and that of its members) and its protest action through the
revival of several figures and icons that were already part of our culture
but that with Anonymous became true symbols. Anonymous, in other
words, acts in an evident citationist and parasitic way on cultural units
that were already part of the Western encyclopedia. Its “proportion of
invention” is very limited, and yet its communication strategy is truly
original.
Anonymous is, therefore, a clear example of how identities (even
those of new social subjects) are often not radically new inventions, but
rather code creations based on the recycling of elements that already
existed within the encyclopedia of a given culture. Without a preexisting
network of meanings and cultural units that could be connected in

myriad ways (the encyclopedia), there would be no possibility to cre-
ate new meaning, because semiosis (as Peirce and Eco have showed us)
never starts from intuition, but always from other signs.
What can happen (and what happened with Anonymous) is that
some elements stay dormant, so to speak, and so while they have not
yet received the attention of any particular social group, they are nev-
ertheless available and ready to become active again. When the “dor-
mant” element of the encyclopedic network is triggered by new subjects
within different ideological frameworks, it connects with new elements,
becoming part of a new, previously unseen path that crosses through
the encyclopedia in an original way while maintaining a memory of its
own past. This dialectic between novelty and memories, citations and
originality is precisely what we would like to focus on here.
Let us now look at what happened with Anonymous.
The first element we would like to focus upon, which is also, argu-
ably, the most interesting, is Anonymous’ mask (see figure 3.4). The
second element we will focus on, of broader scope, is the rhetoric strat-
egy used by the movement in its video messages.
Figure 3.4 Guy Fawkes mask.

It is not, as we have said, an invention, but rather the revival of a

mask that is part of our encyclopedia as contemporary Western citizens;
it already exists, and as such, it requires “archeological” work. In Eco’s
encyclopedia, in fact, every knot of the network is a palimpsest in which
all the meanings a single knot has acquired over time are layered on top
of one another, and this palimpsest structure requires an archeologist to
dig up all previous uses and meanings.
The first time the mask appeared was in the seventeenth century,
belonging to Guy Fawkes. If we look at the story of Guy Fawkes we can
see that a number of key elements stand out: Guy Fawkes is a conspirator
who chose the English Parliament as his enemy and plotted to blow it up
using a massive amount of gunpowder. However, his plot was thwarted,
leading to his failure and arrest. Fawkes is also associated to an annual
folk commemoration held on November 5, known as Bonfire Night,
originally established by the sovereigns to celebrate the failure of Guy
Fawkes’s plot. Thus—it is important to underline—despite his elevation
in status through the successive “versions” of his story, Guy Fawkes is
not a hero in his country and even today, the celebrations on November
5 celebrate his being captured and killed. He is seen more as a villain, a
terrorist, in the popular mind; not someone to trust or to imitate.
Anyway, the mask did not reach Anonymous from the pages of mod-
ern English history, but via its use in two recent texts of youth cul-
ture: Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta (1982–1985) and James
Mc Teigue’s film of the same name (2005), drawn from Moore’s work.
These two texts, though strongly connected, are not identical.
The graphic novel is set in a future dystopia with Great Britain ruled
by a totalitarian regime, which not only holds power but also controls
the media and attempts to extend this control to the lives of the people.
The protagonist, V, is an anarchist who survived a death camp and, as
a result, has now become particularly strong. His agenda consists of
revenge. V, in other words, is not an ideological anarchist; he is rather
the victim of a regime, which he now plans to destroy in an act of
revenge, believing that the destruction of the regime (even in a violent
way) will be of benefit to all humanity. With this in mind, V starts to
kill his enemies, assisted by Evey (with whom he has a relationship).
There is no happy ending in this tale: V dies as a result of an attempt on
his life. Evey, however, sets up the funeral V wanted, leaving the mask
on his face to respect his last wishes, while the people in London rebel
and days of chaos ensue, leading potentially (the book does not go so far
as to guarantee redemption) to a time of radical social renewal, of the
“wilful anarchy” that V had so wanted.
The movie, being an adaptation of the graphic novel, follows Moore’s

basic plot. There are, however, some differences, two of which are par-
ticularly relevant for the purpose of our analysis:
• In the movie the reference to Guy Fawkes is more explicit as, at the
end of a series of assassinations, V wants to deal the final blow by
burning down the parliament with an explosive-loaded train (the very
thing Guy Fawkes had hoped to achieve). In the graphic novel, how-
ever, it is Evey that uses a train to bomb 10 Downing Street.
• V has prepared this last attack with painstaking attention to detail
and dramatic effect, having even sent a Guy Fawkes mask to every
citizen. Therefore, when the train hurtles toward parliament with V’s
corpse inside (as he has been severely wounded and the task is com-
pleted by Evey), London’s citizens f low into the streets to celebrate,
wearing the mask that makes them equal and anonymous, only to
remove it and restore their original identity once they know the oper-
ation has been a success and that they have probably seized control of
the whole city.
Even from this short recognition we can see that there are a number
of recurring semantic values that, in these different interpretations of
Guy Fawkes, are associated to the mask:
- political rebellion,
- revenge,
- heroism.13
The narrations associated with the mask hint at a well-defined indi-

vidual–society relationship: the anonymous hero is anonymous only for
the Power, not for other people (as many either know his identity or
soon learn it).
V is not, therefore, devoid of personality or background; indeed, these
are his distinguishing traits. The mask is a way of becoming ambiguous,
indistinct for those in power, but it does not create confusion on the
action plane. Differentiation and hiding are, both in the movie and the
novel, intertwined with one another and they define different “identity
regimes”: on the plane of doing, the identity lives in differentiation and
activism (V is a special, individual subject); on the plane of seeing, the
identity lives in hiding and homologation (V is not visible and likes to
be confused with “normal” people). On the plane of knowing, we may
add, the identity becomes something universal through an ideal: V, in
the end, is not just a man but, like all heroes, a model. In the graphic
novel he says it himself to the man that has just fatally shot him: “Did
you think to kill me? There’s no f lesh or blood within this cloak to
kill. There’s only an idea. Ideas are bullet-proof.” In this universaliza-
tion, there is no negation of identity but rather the eternalization of a
model.
In the graphic novel, anonymity is maintained even in death out of
respect for V as a person (therefore with a strongly individualized func-
tion: anonymity belongs to the hero, he deserves it while others do not).
However, in the movie, anonymity is circulated among those invited to
wear V’s mask. The mask becomes a tool and a witness: it is something
used to threaten the government, to protest in the streets without being
recognized, to become one of a new kind of faceless people, a mass capa-
ble of scaring the government (unlike those masses that went before,
which were subject to it). Anonymity, therefore, is no longer a cover or
a distinguishing trait of one’s heroism, it is a means to share, to allow
mass mobilization.
It is evident that the social movement Anonymous has focused on
this last step, implicitly inviting each of its members to put on the
mask. It is no coincidence that of all this symbol’s “layers,” of all
the interpretations of Guy Fawkes, the filmic one is also the most
recent.
However, there are some short-circuits we must point out, which are
probably also the reason for Anonymous’ lack of success when compared
to Occupy and the other such “indignados” movements the world over.
The Occupy movement, far larger, has only partially crossed roads with
Anonymous and gradually highlighted the differences between them.
The two movements did not succeed in finding a common identity and
merging or overlapping; instead they met and crossed paths at the local
level and then gradually distanced themselves.
It is obvious that when a new identity and social subject reuse a pre-
existing cultural unit (Guy Fawkes’s mask and V for Vendetta) connect-
ing it to new interpretative paths, contexts and values belonging to that
same identity may not be perfectly consistent. Some semantic traits,
some contextual and circumstantial elements (to quote Eco’s theory),
may not be immediately compatible and it may be necessary to carry
out true semiotic work in order to “domesticate” the new symbol and
make it consistent. Anonymous probably did not carry out this adapta-
tion, thus exposing a number of flaws and inconsistencies that made it
impossible to share a common path with Occupy.
Let us now look at some of these.
First of all V, in V for Vendetta , wants to bring anarchy and fights

for this reason. Maybe some members of Anonymous would also like to
bring anarchy, but that is not the aim of the Wall Street Occupiers who
instead desire a new government, possibly direct and participatory.
Second, both Guy Fawkes and V are icons of a rebellion that is
strongly connected, even in its “popular” and contagious form, to an
individual heroism capable of upsetting and changing the status quo,
rallying and driving the crowds and becoming an ideal model, while
Anonymous prizes the anonymity of an undifferentiated action that
has neither representatives nor heroes. In this case there is a double
inconsistency: first of all the cult of the hero (V) is opposed to the ano-
nymity of Anonymous movement; then, the value of anonymity (born
and developed via computer hacking activities) is opposed/overlapped
to the cult of egalitarian anonymity (the anonymity of the Occupy pro-
testers) that does not believe in anonymity as a means of relinquishing
one’s responsibilities but rather in anonymity as equality: equality of
the 99 percent of people, whose name does not matter as they are “the
Country,” the people as a whole.
The lexeme “Anonymous” therefore includes three different semantic
paths that not only cannot be superimposed, but that clash fiercely with
one another:
- A semantic path that comes from the history of the symbol-protago-

nist and whose core is the hero’s rebellion.
- A semantic path that comes from the contemporary practice of the
subjects that introduced this symbol on the Internet; the core of this
path lies in hacktivism (a rather popular neologism, a portmanteau of
activism and hacker) and, consequently, in placing a great value in
non-punishability (you don’t know who I am, therefore you cannot
denounce me).
- An even more recent semantic path that has come from the politi-
cal movement of the indignados, whose core is egalitarianism : we are
anonymous because we are not important as individuals but we are
many and have the same rights of the rich and inf luential minority:
all of us are equal. The mask, in this case, is not used to hide but to
equalize. These “anonymous” want a face that ensures they are not set
apart from one another, rather than a tool to hide them.
From the patemic point of view, each of these three interpretative

paths possesses entirely different values.14
Guy Fawkes and V are violent (i.e., they do not hesitate to kill) and
want revenge.
Hacktivists are not violent in their actions, but as we will see here,
their rhetoric is rather violent. They do not seek revenge, but in their
rebellion they often assault and threaten.
Indignados are explicitly pacifist and have always clearly affirmed
their stance; their actions are aimed neither at revenge nor at threats,
but at protests and raising awareness among the masses. Because of this,
because of their nonviolent nature, they have no need to hide: they do
not need masks.
In order to provide a better description of these differences we will
now examine Anonymous’ rhetoric style, looking at the features of the
videos they make. We would highlight the fact that rhetoric strategies
are a crucial object of interest for the semiotician, because through their
analysis we can bring to light that which is implicit and ideological in
these unspoken discourses. Unsurprisingly, Umberto Eco, within his
research on the interpretative logic and negotiations of culture, has paid
much attention to rhetoric, with studies on metaphor, irony, hypotypo-
sis, and so on.
Thus, if we look at the rhetoric dimension of the videos made by
Anonymous, we see that they are rather homogeneous, and that their
enunciative style is highly recognizable,15 even if there is no explicit
individual author (Anonymous does not allow personal signatures).
They are recognizable from a stylistic and rhetorical point of view,
with the viral videos circulated so far sharing more or less the same
characteristics, three of which are particularly important:
- they all start with a theme, similar to a newscast opening theme;

- the theme ends with the picture of a logo, not the V for Vendetta logo
but the image of a headless man in a suit (the “headless suit”);
- they all use the post-9/11 alarmist rhetoric: America is in danger.
Let us now turn to the first feature: the opening theme. First and
foremost it represents a signature, making all the videos similar: all
videos that begin with that tune are from Anonymous. In addition to
this, it is also modelled on newscast opening themes, complete with the
image of a rotating globe on a night blue/grey background, while the
theme itself is quite lively, with a catchy rhythm. Anonymous then pre-
sent their speeches as coming from an informed and authoritative source.
Anonymous is the new newscast, the new global information agency.
The second point is even more important, as it is another identifying

symbol of Anonymous, almost an alternative to the mask: the headless
suit (see figure 3.5). As we have pointed out earlier, the globe in the
opening theme turns into a circle with a man in a suit featuring a ques-
tion mark instead of a head. The suit is encircled by a symbol resem-
bling the UN symbol (see figure 3.5)—the symbol of a supranational
association whose very name inspires principles of confederation and
unity (United Nations).
This headless suit is another of the symbols belonging to
Anonymous; sometimes representing an alternative to the V mask,
sometimes appearing alongside it (in some videos the theme ends
with the headless suit while the message is read by an “anchorman”
wearing the V mask). If the two symbols were consistent with one
another there would be no problem. However, they are not; the
two symbols actually trigger semantic paths that cannot always be
superimposed.16
Both symbols certainly play on the negation of identity (as well as
on a chromatic analogy, both using black and white only); however, this
negation takes two different paths:
Figure 3.5 The headless suit.

- The mask does not deny the existence of an identity; it simply hides it
and therefore makes the individual unrecognizable.
- The faceless suit instead “denies” that men have a head and a personal-
ity (as it has been replaced by a question mark); this therefore makes
the individual inactual as a category of the existence. If, on one hand,
this symbol avoids the negative trait of “unlawfulness” usually asso-
ciated with the anonymity of a mask, it also generates another dys-
phoric connotation, that of the headless/brainless man.
In other words, the two symbols are not exactly compatible but, for
different reasons, they create problematic interpretative paths; partic-
ularly for those who wish to be perceived as sensible subjects who can
walk with their head held high for all to see precisely because they are
fully aware of their rights.
If one of Anonymous’ targets is the individualism of our society (to
which it associates a narcissist cult of personality and an economic race
for personal advantage), both these symbols are only partial successes:
the first symbol denies the narcissistic pleasure of showing one’s face
but not the individualist nature of the action (as both Guy Fawkes and
V acted alone), the second indeed denies the presence of a head, and as
such, a person’s ability to think.
In addition to this, if the mask symbol is truly individualistic (there
is just one subject, who hides behind it) the faceless suit focuses much
more on the “we.” It does so at least in two distinct ways: first of all by
using the UN symbol, a symbol of unity and confederation, and also by
sometimes having the following message slide along part of the circle
occupied by the wreath: “we don’t forget, we don’t forgive, expect us,”
which insists on the first person plural in the three phrases.
The inconsistency in this case is huge and can be summarized as
follows:
- The faceless suit encircled by a UN-like laurel wreath represents the

Anonymous spokesperson, an “interchangeable” man whose indi-
vidual identity is irrelevant but who, instead, represents a collective:
someone representing everyone.
- However, a headless man also becomes the potential representation of
a brainless man.
- In addition to this, the man is wearing a business suit and (as we have
already said in the last endnote) this may lead some to think that the
unidentified man does not represent the Anonymous member eman-
cipated from the narcissism of the ego, but rather the negative image
of Anonymous’ enemy: the men in charge, with their dark suits, rul-
ing the world without using their brains.
Everything in these videos, from the statements to the use of sym-

bols in the videos lead us to conclude that the headless man represents
the desired overcoming of individuality and of the defense of individ-
ual interests. However, we cannot help but notice that these seman-
tic paths are present and interpreting them is legitimate, thus making
interpreting the Anonymous’ video speeches rather ambiguous. As we
have already had the occasion to say, our cultural encyclopedia is con-
tradictory to their internal one; their coherence is local and built by the
selection of the interpreter.
Let us now turn to the third recurring trait of the Anonymous videos:
that which we have already called the post-9/11 alarmist rhetoric. Very
often these videos are structured as appeals to the nation: “America is in
danger,” “America is under attack.” The words are exactly the same as
those used to react to terrorist attacks, but this time the danger comes
not from terrorism but from capitalism, finance, information control,
and Scientology (which, indeed, was the first target of Anonymous’
attacks). The definition of enemy is not monolithic or repetitive, but,
on the contrary, it is variable: the enemies are many. Indeed these slo-
gans and videos may very well appeal to those who supported the war
on Islamic terror, those who voted for George W. Bush, and who, from
other points of view, should be at the opposite end of the values spec-
trum to Anonymous. However, Anonymous’ polemic stance is quite evi-
dent: their battle is first and foremost a battle against something and not
in favor of something (a choice that has its own risks).
This rhetoric of terror is often matched by a true rhetoric of control:
since there is an enemy attacking and invading us, the surveillance level
shall be increased. And Anonymous’ slogans such as “We are watching.
Expect us,” “We will go around, over, beyond you,” are very explicit in
this regard (see Salerno, 2010).
Once again, however, there are semantic inconsistencies. First of all,
the spread of Anonymous is worded sometimes as the diffusion of con-
trol (with metaphors of watching, looking) and sometimes as the viral
diffusion of a performative action (not just observation but action, i.e.,
hacking): “we will spread as a wildfire.” A wildfire is not an act of seeing
or knowing, but a concrete act of destruction, as aggressive and violent
as the 9/11 rhetoric that Anonymous has adopted. There is therefore a
swaying between a subject that observes (defensive) and a subject that
attacks (aggressive).
Second, by adopting the official post-9/11 rhetoric Anonymous par-

tially overlaps with the government, taking the same position and the
same enunciative style: although it wants to attack and delegitimize the
government, it uses the same speeches.
As a result, these videos often end up conveying an ambiguous and
somewhat violent message, which can hardly be described as consistent
with the battle for the rights that Occupy and many Indignados want
to promote.
The appeals in the Anonymous videos resemble a call to arms,
because à la guerre comme à la guerre— if it will be necessary to use vio-
lence and break the law, everybody must do exactly that.
Sometimes, aware of the potential misunderstanding, Anonymous
videos clearly state that “this is not a call to arms but a call to rec-
ognition.” However, leaving aside what is said explicitly, in order to
evaluate the overall sense and effect of these videos it is necessary to
assess the overall discourse, and it (made up of opening theme, images,
lexemes, rhetoric, and so on) is strikingly close to aggressive and mili-
tarist discourses.
By ref lecting on both the mask and the videos, it becomes clear that
in all contexts opened up and managed by Occupy there has been no
overlapping or joining of forces with Anonymous, because of a contin-
uing semantic incompatibility clearly evident in some points of the dis-
cursive universe employed by both subjects.
The knots of the encyclopedia that Anonymous reactivated were nei-
ther neutral nor fully original, but rather parasitic references to seman-
tically charged texts and discourses of the past (Guy Fawkes, the V for
Vendetta graphic novel and movie, the newscasts, the UN, post-9/11
government rhetoric, and so on).
By using this parasitic technique, Anonymous did not perhaps take
into account the fact that some semantic traits of the source texts were
still active, albeit latently, and that such cultural units were so semanti-
cally charged that their contribution could not be fully neutralized, thus
causing local incompatibilities that gradually generated different discur-
sive spaces, separating the universe of Occupy from that of Anonymous.
If Anonymous uses its mask and video rhetoric to say things such
as “We Are Anonymous We Are Legion We Never Forgive We Never
Forget United As One Divided As Zero To ALL Governments Expect
Our Full Fury,” it is evident that there is hardly any room for Occupy’s
democratic, pacifist, or even egalitarian position.
These slogans bring to mind a violent invasion, one that requires
the use of weapons instead of discussion. The Encyclopaedia never
“forgets”: the interpreters can always recover the semantic traits that
were part of the original cultural unit featuring the face of Anonymous
(Guy Fawkes), or of the previous cultural units that used to express
themselves with the rhetoric of invasion (war activists).
The sense is always a matter of negotiation between the semantic
values conserved in the encyclopedia, the contextual and circumstantial
demands of a given situation, and the personal interest of the subjects;
and this is why social and cultural life is often full of conf lict: every
social battle is, first and foremost, a battle over the meaning of certain
words, certain values, certain heroes.
CHAPTER 4
Ideas for an Archeological Semiotics
Between Synchrony, Diachrony, and Regularity

So far we have outlined some of the recurrent distinguishing traits of a
semiotic approach to culture. To recap, these are:
- its holistic way of working, in that no phenomenon is understandable

without a reference to the system of which it is part;
- its internal constitutive relational structure, meaning that no phenom-
enon can exist in isolation;
- the tendency to order and to build correlations, from which it follows
that homogeneous areas and a system of homogenization arise despite
the general, overall heterogeneity;
- its internal mobility, which renders any internal order of the culture
both local and contingent, against any atemporal universalism.
In addition to this, as we have already had occasion to recall several

times, our approach to culture remains largely mediated by texts. The
texts are (as attestations of practices, forms of identity, passions, and
relationships) what the semiotician goes to analyze, with a methodol-
ogy that brings together textual analysis and cultural analysis. The texts
are not studied as much as representations, sets of content, but as forces
acting in the world, subjects among other subjects, and as places of mod-
eling, both reality and practices.
In particular, by revisiting Lotman’s and Eco’s semiotics we have
understood how essential it is to take into account elements such as the
semantic thickness, the diachronic layers, the internal memory (latent
or explicit) in order to understand cultural identities. The last sample
of analysis that we proposed, which looked at Anonymous, highlighted

this point.
This issue constitutes a central problem for a semiotics of culture, a
problem that has to do with temporality and the diachronic develop-
ment of semiosis.
There have probably been a number of misunderstandings about
the importance of diachrony in semiotics. Saussure’s thought has been
reduced to synchronic linguistics, L é vi-Strauss’s structuralism has been
reduced to an achronic and supratemporal semantics, and Propp’s for-
malism has been reduced to a synchronic study on fantasy fairy tales.
This interpretation is surely neither random nor ungrounded and,
indeed, it is justified by a real thematization, carried out by the authors
we have quoted, of the need to escape from the historicist approaches
that have dominated linguistics, literature, and the study of cultures
since the nineteenth century, later perceived as inadequate.
However, in focusing on the synchronic option offered by these mas-
ters, the scholars and intellectuals that came after them have overlooked
some equally important aspects of the pioneering works of the masters.
Saussure wrote an extremely important chapter (Chapter II in Course
in General Linguistics) on the problem of the “immutability and muta-
bility of the sign,” in which he outlined the debate between persistence
and evolution, continuity and change, and underlined the crucial role
of the time factor. “Time which ensures the continuity of language,
has another effect apparently contradicting the first: that of altering,
more or less rapidly, the linguistic signs” (1916, “Beginning,” § 2). It is
therefore the time dimension that modifies language, but that anchors
it at the same time to persistence with the weight of tradition, in a
rather complex dialogue between innovation and repetition: the princi-
ple topic of this chapter.
At the same time, other authors such as L é vi-Strauss and Propp do
not neglect the time factor. L é vi-Strauss’s attention to transformations
is well known; all of his works on myths and folklore treads particularly
carefully when it comes to the diachronic transformations of a given
text, from one shape to another. Similarly, Propp, in his study on magic
tales, does not simply focus on a synchronic analysis (such as the one he
describes in Morphology of the Folk Tale— Propp, 1928), but also on an
equally complex diachronic study, with The Historical Roots of the Magic
Tale (Propp, 1946).
In a nutshell: taking a diachronic approach would not be a new
choice, but rather a return to a road already taken but never fully devel-
oped in semiotics.
Ideas for an Archeological Semiotics ● 161
We think that it is necessary to take the evolutionary dimension into

account if we are to achieve a suitable understanding of cultural phe-
nomena, as each project, subject, practice, symbol, and fragment of cul-
ture is strictly palimpsestic in nature. What we wish to underline by using
the term “palimpsestic” is the fact that the objects of a culture cannot be
born from or in a void, but they emerge from a past, from previous stages,
from previous interpretative tokens, which interact with each other in a
system of borrowings, answers, translations, reactions, differences; in
short, in a network of relationships (to get back to a key term) that make
any approach that views understanding as isolation useless.
The meaning lives of transformations and this should be our focus:
to understand the passages of state of texts, symbols, objects, through
different stages (therefore in an explicitly diachronic temporal thick-
ness) or through different spaces within the same era. Since these spaces
are different, they (as Lotman points out) each move with a different
temporality and speed, thus posing the additional problem of time,
memory, and layers.
This is why we would aim at renewing a diachronic semiotic approach.
We are not interested in a chronological history of ideas, but in the evo-
lutionary processes of semiosis, along with its contradictions, its pauses,
its accelerations, and finally its stabilizations.
The lesson taught by Michel Foucault is crucial to gaining a better
understanding of this aspect. By means of his reflection on history we can
also find new stimuli for further reflection on the category of structure.
As highlighted by Paul Veyne, one of Foucault’s key interpreters:
The diachrony-synchrony or genesis-structure opposition is a false prob-

lem [ . . . ] Genesis is nothing more than actualisation of a structure [ . . . ]
genesis does not move from a term to another and there is no origin to
speak of. There are only subsequent structures, each with its genesis.
(Veyne, 1978, p. 417)
The complementarity between Foucault’s position and the semiotic

approach will be explored in the following pages. We will not, in this
work, summarize and review Foucault’s thought, which is, as we are all
aware, extremely complex and wide-reaching. However, we would like
to point out those key features of this approach that we consider to be
essential to our ref lection and strategy. In particular we will focus on:
● Foucault’s relationship with temporality and his way of returning

historicity to cultural phenomena;
● the category of “evenementiality”;

● the category of “archive”;
● the idea of “politics of truth.”
Foucault’s Archeological Approach

Foucault’s philosophy, much like his semiotics, is essentially anti-his-
toricist and critical. However, such anti-historicism does not translate,
in Foucault’s works, into a refusal of the temporal dimension; indeed,
it expresses itself in a radically “temporal” approach that first gave life
to a so-called archaological stage, comprising all his early works, from
The Birth of the Clinic (1963), to The Order of Things (1966) up to1969’s
Archaeology of Knowledge. Scholars have identified in his work a sec-
ond stage, the genealogical one—with Discipline and Punish (1975a) and
The History of Sexuality (1976–1984))—which “uses” the archeologi-
cal method as the basis for an analysis more focused on the empirical,
political, and concrete dimensions. We would have, in short, a passage
from the discourses of the archeological stage to the material devices that
make some policies more effective (prisons, clinic, etc.) in the genealog-
ical stage.
In both these stages the central role played by the evolution dimen-
sion and the need to reconstruct the time layers behind the sentences
(the cultural “data”) are well evident and beyond doubt. It is only thanks
to this “stratigraphy” that the analyst can unmask the utter partiality
and contingency of the reality of today.
This recognition of the past, in other words, is of no use to Foucault
in his task of tracing back the evolution of the world and of the spirit.
Indeed, as he points out several times, the very category of evolution is
radically wrong, ill-phrased, as it makes one think about a continuity
of development that does not occur in reality, as the world is mostly
made up of fractures, drifts, deviations, accelerations, abrupt halts, and
nonorderly contaminations.
As he had already pointed out in a 1968 paper “On the Archaeology
of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle” (and reiterated
in Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969), we need to get rid of a series of
notions related to the postulate of continuity—tradition, inf luence,
development, teleology, evolution—and assume the dispersion of his-
tory, events, cultural life.
Foucault is so afraid of the historicist, hereditary continuity that
he wishes to cast away yet another ghost, another postulate of mean-
ing that had taken shape over those years (and is even stronger today):
memory, perceived as has-happened and has-been thus giving meaning

to the here and now in a random way. In one of his essays on Nietzsche
he denounces the fact that too often memory becomes a metaphysical
entity, when we should actually be paying attention to the counter-
memory—what is not said and not recalled, but that is nevertheless
active in our cultural processes.
Recognizing the past of the discourses and objects (against any
idealistic hypostatization of memory) is necessary in order to under-
stand their uniqueness, unpredictability, and their radically contingent
nature, the system of conditioning and influences in which all things
come to life. In brief: recognizing the past of discourses and objects is
necessary to grasp their actual meaning, the discursive position that
they occupy today.
It is necessary, as Foucault states in other works, to identify and
find the space of scattering, dispersion, and contradiction, which marks
the worlds of culture, rather than a heritage or evolution that narrows
down the spectrum of possibilities. The analyst’s attitude toward purely
evolutive hypotheses should be critical. As he clearly points out at the
beginning of Archaeology of Knowledge, it is necessary to first identify
the discontinuities rather than the continuous lines of evolution, but it
is also necessary (and this we think is a very important suggestion for
our work) to “specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive
of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break, mutation, transformation)”
(Foucault, 1969, Eng. trans., p. 5). The criticism of the evolution cate-
gory does not, in other words, consist of banally getting rid of the past
but rather of distinguishing the various types of relationships that the
sentences of the present may have with the past, without narrowing
them all down to an implicitly random scheme.
Culture is made up of elements that disappear and then return with a
new semantic value, which are then reused in other contexts (as we saw
in the previous chapter with the revival of the image of Guy Fawkes,
ignored in all countries but England for many centuries). The subse-
quent stages of meaning do not exist in a linear and progressive dimen-
sion, where there is no possibility of coming back. On the contrary: the
different interpretations interact with each other and can be revitalized.
Having an archeological vision means seeing which winding and com-
plex past the object of the present we are studying comes from, while
trying to disregard and avoid the inf luence of the most obvious and con-
solidated evolutionary schemes. The archeological method begins with
a sort of suspension of beliefs, which it is necessary to de-automatize
in order to understand. In other words, we should restrict ourselves to
observing-describing the object from a distance and with the gaze of an

entomologist, trying to grasp its contingent role and then reconstruct-
ing the network of conditionings and derivates, focusing on the system
in which it exists and in which it acquires meaning. Foucault men-
tions several times the critical distance that we should have from the
meaning of the sentence we analyze, the same distance we have from
sentences that are not about us and which, therefore, we find impossible
to understand.
The aim of the analyst is to bring to light the set of conditions that
regulate, in a given moment and in a given society, the appearance of
enunciations, their preservation, and the links that they form with one
another. Foucault believes that a series of elements actually constitute
a local system and that they therefore condition the discursive events
that follow. Just as Eco speaks of a semantic system (the encyclopedia),
which is ruled and controlled at the local level and operates systemati-
cally in different zones thanks to interpretation paths that stabilize and
can represent undisputed cultural units of common sense, so Foucault
believes that, in the dispersive disorder of culture, some paths of struc-
ture-building and conditioning rules arise and generate a series of phe-
nomena that can be traced back to the same episteme. In Foucault, as in
Eco, a certain set of interpretations assumes regularity and in so doing,
by constituting an archive, becomes normative, ruling the multiplicity
of culture.
By this term (archive) I do not mean the sum of all the texts that a cul-
ture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past, or
as evidence of a continuing identity ( . . . ) The archive is first the law of
what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements
as unique events. But archive is also that which determines that all these
things do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they
inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor they disappear at the mercy of
chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct fig-
ures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, main-
tained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities. (Foucault,
1969, pp. 128–129)
This is what Foucault refers to as an archive: not just a storage place

but the whole (nonmeasurable and nonexhaustive) set of the rules and
conditions that make it possible for certain cultural objects to appear
while, at the same time, making it impossible for other phenomena to
arise. Eco mentions a “filtering of the encyclopaedia” to highlight its
key function of “barrier”; Lotman speaks in terms of “membranes of

translations.” We see that there is a thread linking these authors.
In any given context there are literally unthinkable elements, which
are such not because of explicit bans but because of “social frameworks”
that do not allow these enunciations to be thought, guessed, and trans-
lated into concepts so that, as such, they simply do not exist.
As we will see over the next pages of this chapter, this is an inter-
mediate level between langue and parole, between an abstract system of
rules and local enunciations: a level that is conditioned by normaliza-
tion and that tends to create repetition and uniformity:
Between the language (langue) that defines the system of constructing

possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that
are spoken, the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that
causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events,
as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. [ . . . ] between tradi-
tion and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements
both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general
system of the formation and transformation of statements. (Foucault,
1969, p. 146)
At the beginning of this book, and subsequently thanks to Eco’s les-

son, we have recovered the category of “code,” apparently obsolete, and
tried to complexify it in a temporal and programmatic sense (i.e., think-
ing of the code as a context-sensitive system of semantic and pragmatic
instructions). The rules Foucault speaks of when he describes his idea
of archive do not seem too far from what we have intended here with
the code category, and it is not by chance that in the beginning of The
Order of Things , Foucault himself uses this term:
The fundamental codes of a culture—those governing its language, its

schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hier-
archy of its practices—establish for every man, from the very first, the
empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will
be at home. (1966, p. XX)
The archive, therefore, is simply a set of codes, rules of apparition and

plausibility; a set of things that make possible and constitute the various
orders of discourse that generate cultural life. Every “cultural situation”
exists within a given set of conditions, rules, possibilities, and inf luences
and, in the background of this network, it takes on an organization,
an internal architecture, specific discursive forms. In other words, it

becomes a recognizable set of relationships, a given episteme:
The fundamental codes of a culture—those governing its language, its

schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hier-
archy of its practices—establish for every man, from the very first, the
empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will
be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are the scientific
theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain why order
exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account
for it, and why this particular order has been established and not some
other. But between these two regions, so distant from one another, lies
a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is
nonetheless fundamental: it is more confused, more obscure, and proba-
bly less easy to analyze. It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating
from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, insti-
tuting an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their origi-
nal transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees
itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only
possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with
the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders,
things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a
certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. (Foucault,
1966, p. XIX)
An episteme, is, in a nutshell, first and foremost a system of relationships

and structuring conditions , and this is what makes it semiotically read-
able. Its relational nature is such that, in order to understand it, it is
first of all necessary to take an archaeological approach; that is, bring
to the surface its underlying relationships.
In Foucault’s opinion (one shared by Lotman and Eco), holism and
contingency are complementary: since the elements take their sense from
the global (yet partial) system of which they are part, no meaning can
be conceived, be it nuclear, transcendent, or universal. Meaning is con-
ferred in the network of relationships that is created over time. And the
elements that are the object of our questioning are such (significant)
only in that given type of system; in another system they would have
another differential and significant identity, and so would either be dif-
ferent elements or not elements at all (i.e., they may not be significant
units).
The archeological work reconstructs the genesis of the element subject
to analysis, the path that led to its emergence, the space of relationships,
and the system of transformations that has taken the meaning we have
assigned it.
In chapter 2 we quoted Lotman’s idea of culture as a mechanism
that creates correlations. We would like to recall this here because it is
relatively close to Foucault’s position. Culture establishes itself through
systems of relations that are not fixed, rigid, premade, but always local,
subject to revision, temporary, and that represent everything, so that
outside that system of relationships, outside the archive there is nothing
of any significance.
Let us now see more precisely what the archeological approach can
reveal.
When asked what its historical-critical method actually studies,
Foucault (1968b, p. 91) answered that it describes a set globally defined
as an archive, divided into:
- the limits and forms of expressibility,

- the limits and forms of preservation,
- the limits and forms of memory,
- the limits and forms of reactivation,
- the limits and forms of appropriation.
Such a research program is clearly radically semiotic in nature. The text

we are referring to pertains to the most “discursive” stage of Foucault’s
work, the stage (which is also the one we are most interested in) in
which discursive forms stand at the center of his study rather than con-
crete power devices. However, the common thread running through
Foucault’s thought is, in our opinion, a structural semiotic sensitivity,
based on the belief that any social fact is a culturally constructed fact
that has, as we have already seen, an intrinsically relational nature.
As regards the above list, we would rather focus in particular on the
last category—“appropriation”—which seems to be one of the points
where, more than in other places, archeology and semiotic approach to
culture could meet. It is indeed essential for semiotic analysis not just
to perceive the objects’ discursive nature, but also to understand the
continuous game of reassignment of values, translations, reuses, trans-
formations to which meaning is submitted.
Meaning is not established once and for all in a specific form: a text,
a ritual, a set of investigative tools, a legal code, and so forth. Rather,
it continuously transforms itself because each one of these forms of
culture undergoes continuous appropriations by subjects that differ in
their identity and personal history, interests, memberships, competence,

contexts, and so on.
These appropriations are, in semiotic terms, new translations, new
paraphrases, new formulations of the sense that takes legitimacy and
efficiency only in relation to the network in which they operate. Eco
spoke, in this context, of “negotiations,” as we saw in the previous
chapter. An appropriation is nothing but a singular form of negotia-
tion, the translation of the “already existing” and “already established”
we are dealing with, made in accordance with one’s own interests and
competences.
In order to better define this ever changing game of appropriations,
it is important for the semiotic vision to revive the idea of context, not
as an empirical background in which discourses arise, nor as an her-
meneutic horizon of meaning that acquires an ultimate sense, but as
a network of contingencies in which discourses reveal their meaning,
their origins, their path. We have already spoken several times of con-
text in this book, but we should dwell a little more on this controversial
category.
Texts and Contexts

Semiotic has, maybe too often, neglected the contextual dimension,
especially in the analysis carried out by its most pronounced structural
branches (in particular the Greimas school). In the name of an ideal of
immanence, it has preferred to focus on the internal relationships of
systems. In this book we have tried to relocate the sense in its context,
and we have referred to a contextual approach several times (Lotman’s
semiotics is entirely contextual, because of his attention to the life and
functioning of signs; Eco’s semiotics is “sensitive to context”). We do
not believe that the value of immanence implies the consideration of
texts, discourses, and signs out of their contexts. The study of the imma-
nence, in semiotics, means to not stop at the manifestation of signs (i.e.,
the level of explicit meanings, of the evident authorial intentions) and
to dig deep in the system of relationships from which the text comes.
This “immanent” view is entirely consistent with a systemic and holis-
tic (contextual) approach. The logic of meaning, the logic of a given
semiotic practice, the logic of a discursive field is something immanent,
systemic, and contextual, because the meaning of each unit depends on
a complex set of external relationships.
Foucault has also made quite clear the key role played by context,
accompanied by the reaffirming of the strictly positional role of the
enunciations. In Archaeology of Knowledge he underlines how every

enunciation takes its meaning from a network of local and contingent
logic. It has a preexisting identity but it is not translated into differ-
ent modalities of appropriation. It does not constitute a self-consistent
unit:
There is no statement in general, no free, neutral, independent statement;

but a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role
among other statements, deriving support from them and distinguishing
itself from them: it is always part of a network of statements, in which it
has a role. However minimal it may be, to play. (Foucault, 1969, p. 99)
This “play,” as clearly highlighted by Foucault, is neither neutral nor

innocent. Every appropriation that composes cultural life is purpose-
ful and political. The “appropriation game” characterizing an episteme
brings up the politics of truth in which we are immersed, to the extent
that we are not even aware of them, and this is because they are part of the
world’s background and thus removed from our topics of discussions and
the shape that the world takes for us in any given moment. The appropri-
ation and renovation of a neighborhood by a new city plan, just to give
an example, is not a neutral act. The building policies are not “political”
only and because (from our point of view) they are based on authoriza-
tions and supports that are discussed and approved at a political level,
but also because they assume and make operational a certain idea of the
past, a politics of the past. This idea can be that of repeating the past in the
same way (“ à la manière de”) or the idea of evoking the past in a symbolic
way (as with Berlin’s Jewish Museum, where the cracks in the wall clearly
evoke the wounds of the Holocaust), or instead the idea of overcoming
the past radically, as we see in those cases when a structure is demolished
and rebuilt in an entirely different way, as with the Reichstag in Berlin.
Nor is TV programming neutral, because it chooses to broadcast
only a certain type of information, whose ideological component lies
not in its focus or in the precedence of certain news items depending
on the current government’s policies, but more radically in not ques-
tioning the idea of fact, verifiability, reliability, the distinction between
nature and culture (all categories that have their own historical origin,
whose validity is by no means universal and that can be referred to or
inferred only in some given contexts, not everywhere, not forever, and
not always).
To continue: there is nothing neutral in the success of natural food
and natural eating habits that has led fast foods like McDonald’s to be
replaced by “slow food” restaurants, using local raw materials and prod-
ucts (so-called zero-mile products) that undergo little or no refining
process (as with wholegrains), which are served in containers made of
natural materials, such as bamboo, wood, paper—in short, not plastic.
In brief, there is nothing neutral in everything we take for granted,
everything we do not formalize into a “problem,” because everything
responds to implicit forms of value assignment that make true that which
they do not make explicit .
The point is not what is made explicit, but rather the “truth” effect
that is built through everything we say (to return to the previous exam-
ple, it is not just the fact that we are invited to eat more wholegrains, but
the fact that we are led to believe that by doing this we become party to
a form of nature that is truer than others, a way of being eco-friendly
that is more eco-friendly than others) and the practices that, through
the different discourses that circulate among the society are built, pro-
duce, and feed.
It follows that a truly critical approach to these discourses should, as
Foucault suggests, derive from a suspension of any pretense of truth of
the enunciations, and have the purpose of criticizing from such a dis-
tance the “seriousness” of any discursive act, checking it, reconstructing
it through the recognition of the layers, the conditions, and the system
of relationships, of the episteme that acknowledges and adds seriousness
to that discursive act.
The archeological approach does not search for an arch é, a founding
beginning, but rather it searches for the principles that have made pos-
sible and given sense to a specific form of culture, the principles that
make a certain type of enunciation seem true and meaningful.
This view on the dynamic between discourses and contexts, enuncia-
tions and practice effects, the belief that the context helps to create the
sense of a discursive scene, of a semiotic act, is one of the points that
makes semiotics absolutely tangent to anthropology.
According to the view of such scholars as Alessandro Duranti, Charles
Goodwin, Elinor Ochs (see Goodwin and Duranti, 1992; Ochs, 1992;
Duranti, 1997, 2004; and others)—just to consider linguistic anthro-
pology—talks form the context for other talks and, at the same time,
are contextualized by other talks. There is no possibility to escape this
circle where each element becomes the context of something more and
is inf luenced by something external; that is, its context.
That much is clear for me as it is for Foucault, as it is for linguistic
anthropology; the context is not something given and “objective,” but
an ongoing process, selected by a given talk, a given semiotic act.
Peirce, with his notion of indexicality, is useful for gaining a better

understanding of the relativity of the context. The concept of indexi-
cality stems from the Peircean category of “index,” the kind of sign
that has some existential or physical connection with its object (i.e., an
arrow is an index because out of context its meaning—i.e., the direction
it sets—is not definable).
Why indexicality can be useful in a cultural analysis? Because this
category underlines the existence of a special link between words and
contexts, a link that is mandatory to understand if we want to under-
stand the discourse in exam. Both certain single signs and discourses
point to certain states of affairs, certain contexts, and this connection
that gives sense to discourses and signs is not always accidental, but it
can be regular, predictable, implicit. The sense of our words and of any
semiotic act implicitly assumes some given and regular contexts; Violi
(1997) wrote that words build their own context, in the sense that they
select and prepare some specific contextual sets in which they make
sense. This view is opposed to the traditional one, because it affirms
that words do not derive sense from contexts, but set their own contexts.
Or rather, both these movements are actual, because the relationship
between discourses and contexts is a reciprocal one, where each inf lu-
ences the other. We can’t escape indexicality and we have to understand
it as a living relationship between language and reality, which some-
times follows cultural, regular paths.
To better understand the sense of our semiotic processes, the scholar
must put his/herself at the level of common, ordinary discourses—that
is, at the level of what is actually told, of the customs and observable
transformations—and confront a certain type of repetition .
Formation of Habitus: The Lesson of Peirce

In the semiotic approach that we would like to take here, the problem of
regularities is central. It is the reason why we think that an archeologi-
cal approach is crucial. As we have just shown, we believe an archaeol-
ogy of culture to be, first and foremost, a study of the rules (and thus
of the regularities) that allow discourses, practices, and texts to exist in
a given culture, creating a given context in the same moment that they
ref lect it.
The problem of regularities is a problem that we have already touched
upon in this book, through the theory of Eco and Lotman. However,
we believe that a semiotic study of culture not only cannot do without
it, but must make it entirely central, as culture exists, in our opinion,
in regularities and in habits; customs and habits acquire power, struc-

ture, and identity as they become regular, condition the subjects, fil-
ter out the possibilities, set hierarchies, and connect relationships. An
extemporaneous gesture, if truly unrepeatable, would be very unlikely
to acquire a cultural significance. There are a number of rather glar-
ing exceptions, of course: great events, great single gestures or battles
that acquire the status of memorable facts. However, even these facts
live and gain power through the regularization of their identity, the
evolution of their version over time and through their continuity. An
absolute hapax does not make culture or, if it does, this happens within
frameworks that regularize it, stabilize it, and connect it to a fabric that
works as an intelligibility continuum.
In the semiotic field, C. S. Peirce paid particular attention to this
dimension of regularity and this aspect of his theory represents, in our
opinion, one of the most original facets of his thought. He deals with
the regularity of semiosis using two categories: the idea of “collateral
experience” and the better-known idea of “habitus.”
As for “collateral experience,” this is a category that Peirce intro-
duces when speaking about the object of semiosis. As we remarked in
the previous chapter, he distinguishes between a dynamic object and
an immediate object. The immediate object is the reference of the rep-
resentamen, but it is already grasped in a sign (“the Object as the Sign
itself represents it”), while the dynamic object is “the Object as it is” (CP
8.183), something that we cannot really reach, because it is pure, ideal
reality before any semiotization has taken place. In order to explain
how, within in the semiotic process, we understand each other and the
reference to reality (even if we have no access to the dynamic object),
Peirce states that we need a “collateral experience” of the object: we
have to share a basic knowledge on the reference of our discourse. This
knowledge is useful to delimit the frame to which we are referring; it
does not indicate anything particular, but it selects the horizon of plau-
sibility of our discourse. It selects the context of each discourse.
In indexicality is a concrete relationship between a talk and a partic-
ular state of affairs, the collateral experience is something more abstract:
the implicit net of knowledge that surrounds the talks.
Peirce says:
By “collateral observation,” I mean previous acquaintance with what

the sig denotes. Thus if the sign be the sentence “Hamlet was mad,” to
understand what this means one must know that men are sometimes in
that strange state; one must have seen madmen or read about them; and
it will be all the better if one specifically knows (and need to be driven to
presume) what Shakespeare’s notion of insanity was. (CP 8.179)
The collateral experience is, in short, a prerequisite of semiosis. This is

always radically interpretative, reminding us that the acts of interpre-
tation do not occur in the void of semiosis. They occur on the basis of
previous knowledge, which constitutes the common ground of a com-
munity, of a group, of a given society, and which represents that which
allows the members of this community to share and handle meaning.
We could call this common basis (using Eco’s terminology) the “ency-
clopedia” of a given community.
This common basis of knowledge is constituted by shared mean-
ings, interpretations that have become regular, so that listening to the
word “mad” we have an idea of what this means, but we have also an
idea of the Shakespearian interpretation of madness. We know, in other
terms, the meanings regularly associated to the concept of madness (see
Bergman, 2010) and, thanks to this previously acquired general knowl-
edge, we are able to use signs in a correct way and to elaborate pertinent
interpretents.
For Peirce the regularization of meanings is crucial. In order to
understand one another, in order to handle our semiotic life, in order to
acquire advance knowledge, we have to assume a set of regular mean-
ings and decide on a set of regularized interpretations, which can be
taken as “normal.” It is this that makes up our “common sense.”
It is in this dimension of “common sense” that Peirce’s category of
habit assumes importance.
The category of habit in Peirce’s theory complexifies the category of
conventionality. While the sign is traditionally conventional and arbi-
trary, it also seems trapped within an intentional and knowing residual:
the category of convention, in fact, is related to the categories of pact
and social agreement. Habit, however, is a form of agreement that stems
from an unaware disposition, a regularity that does not derive from a
statutory moment.
Some aspects of Peirce’s theory of habit are particularly essential for
us.
First of all, the habit is an interpretative disposition ; it is that which
makes it possible to interpret signs (by virtue of a regularity that is usu-
ally called conventional but is actually, more simply, shared and has
social agreement). It is therefore an essential instrument of semiotic life.
Since signs are arbitrary, they do not stem from similarities or direct
connections with things, their readability is guaranteed only by the
interpersonal sharing of certain meanings, certain habitus. As Peirce

says, “symbols represent their objects, independently alike of any resem-
blance or any real connection, because dispositions or factitious habits
of their interpreters insure their being so understood” (The Essential
Peirce (EP ) 2:460f.)
However, the assumption that habits are only interpretative disposi-
tions does not mean they should be conferred a role just for the sake of
a secondary moment of interpretation of the world, that following the
moment of signification and communication. We must not forget that
Peirce’s semiotic theory requires an interpretative flow in which the sign
always produces an interpretant; that it lives in interpretative media-
tion. The habits can, therefore, be thought of as the effects produced by
a given sign, the disposition to action that a given object produces in
us. They are interpretative elements in that they represent “translations”
of a sign, effects that will become useful in order to feed new semiotic
f lows.
In the unexhausted interpretation chain that Peirce identified as
being the basis of semiosis there is no interruption, as we know. Every
representamen “derives” from an object (and its collateral aspects), pro-
duces an interpretant, which in turn is the representamen of another
sign, and so on and so forth. Habits, in this process, are interpretants
that somehow, even temporarily, stabilize themselves and acquire a
shared reach and, as such, aid the reading of a certain portion of semi-
osis (on this point, see also “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” and “The
Final Logical Interpretant”). They therefore work as “dispositions to
act,” as schemes of “legitimate” reaction to a given object, a given sign,
a given symbol, perhaps one that is unknown. These are internalized
dispositions, driven by an imagination and a knowledge, which are, in
turn, based on and conditioned by other social habitus. They therefore
live somewhere between internalization and social conditioning. They
are triggered individually but they are not subjective.
In this sense (being between outside and inside), the Peircian idea
of habit is rather similar to Bourdieu’s idea of habitus. We do not have
time to delve into the sociological theory of Bourdieu here, but we can-
not help but refer to it, given that Bourdieu is one of the most important
scholars on this topic. He has been using the word “habitus” since the
1960s (see Bourdieu, 1962), making it central to his study of the Kabyle
population in the 1970s (Bourdieu, 1972), and continuing his use of it
in his studies on distinction and practices (Bourdieu, 1979, 1994).
Since 1962, the habitus has been for Bourdieu a corporeal, embodied
habit. By studying farmers and the management modalities of marriage
in rural societies, Bourdieu revealed how farmers initially stood out due
to a “deformation” of their bodies (e.g., the bowlegs of the men), mak-
ing them immediately recognizable and the target of a series of (gener-
ally derogatory) stereotypes. The cause of this bodily deformation could
be the labor they carry out, their rhythms. In any case, regardless of its
cause, this deformation is “naturalized,” neutralized, it becomes part
of normality, of everything that goes by itself and, as such, begins to
sustain itself. There is no discipline or social system that attempts to
correct it, but rather a set of body techniques and social institutions that
presume and confirm it. The social-semiotic circle is easily described by
Bourdieu: the corporeal habitus becomes a sign (becoming the first fac-
tor of recognition of the subject in question), it becomes the main vehi-
cle of social recognition, constitutes the perception that others assume
of a given subject (bow legs –> farmer), and the subject under exami-
nation internalizes the image they perceive of him, using it to such an
extent that he adapts to it without ever bringing it into question.
There are several passages in this essay, all strictly semiotic, in which
a peculiar stance (perhaps induced by a given working system, socio-
culturally regulated because of its very nature) acquires a certain fre-
quency; it therefore becomes a sign of identification, recognition, and
synthesis; as such, it represents an excellent material with which to cre-
ate a stereotype. As the habitus becomes a sign, it starts circulating
beyond its empirical expression, taking on a discursive existence. The
society talks about it even in absentia (it is not necessary to adopt that
posture to recognize it and speak about it); it takes on a role and a func-
tion, as it is through it that it is possible to recognize a certain class of
people. This is how it becomes a regulation, a norm of some kind: norm,
in this case, meaning that which is normal for a certain type of people. It
also means that it cannot be questioned. Breaking this norm, question-
ing someone with words or fact is a complex operation, meta-semiotic
in nature: what we need is to question a certain system of social identi-
fication. And this is how the bodily habitus becomes a repeated habit:
a stance that is repeated, a rule for a certain type of people, a tool for
interpretation; we do it, let us repeat it once again, because from our
point of view it is central, it is a sign.
The habitus is, thus, structured by discursive circulation, the system
of social normalization, the body technique that characterizes a cul-
ture and does not question it, but perpetrates it. At the same time it
is structuring because it regularizes, simplifies, connects, synthesizes,
bringing order to the nonorderly set that any social and cultural form is
in statu nascendi . This is one of the reasons why the habitus gain power:
because they are as powerful as a true language, they have a structuring

power. Habitus are distinctive and, by virtue of this power to differenti-
ate (based on a linguistic and differential heritage that Bourdieu explic-
itly attributes to Benveniste but that had been mentioned by Saussure
before that), they are significant: they create and distribute meaning.
The habitus, in addition to this, brings a memory of the past, of pre-
vious experiences; it lives in continuity and transformation, and as such
offers matrixes of understanding.
Even if Bourdieu does not thematize this issue, we can indeed state
that the interpretation dimension of the habitus is crucial. A habitus is
not just a social sign (a sign for identification, distinction, recognition),
but also an interpretation resource both for the subject that experiences
it and for the subjects that observe. The former uses it as a tool for self-
understanding, with which to gain a place in the world, perpetrate a
tradition that “reads” the world in a certain way; the latter needs it as a
tool for classification and orientation.
There are countless examples that fit this view. Just think of the
behavioral habits that identify us immediately as either foreign or local,
those that allow others to recognize us as Americans or Italians and
that, in any case, are unable to convince us not to behave in a cer-
tain way: to gesture like an Italian or greet like an American. Or, even
more banally, just think of the physical habits we develop in domestic
contexts and in interactions with the family, habits of opening, folding
back, coiling, stiffening, stretching, each loaded with different messages
and meanings, and different mental conditions depending on whether
they are aimed at our parents, partners, children, and so on. These hab-
its, which seem quite obvious and legible, are not evident and cannot
be universalized, because a different (e.g., Eastern) culture would use
an altogether different system of reference. “The habitus, the product
of history, produces individual and collective practices, and hence his-
tory, in accordance with the schemes engendered by history” (Bourdieu,
1972, Eng. trans., p. 82).
There is no nature that precedes the habitus or that is autonomous
from them. There is no presumed distinction between nature and cul-
ture, inner and outer world, individual and society, power relations or
symbolic relations (see Bourdieu, 1994, Chapter IV). The world lives
in this continuous self-structuring that produces regularities, embodies
habits, gives structure to the layouts and dispositions, conditions the
spectrum of possibilities, and produces a continuum between inner and
outer, cognition and action, individual and society that is increasingly
being placed under analytical scrutiny.
In this continuity between nature and culture, between internal

experience and external worlds, between signs and practices, we find
great similarity in the positions taken by Bourdieu and Peirce. We can-
not forget that one of the crucial aspects of Peirce’s theory is sinechism:
the continuity between nature (animate and inanimate) and human fac-
ulties. Semiosis, from this perspective, occurs through individual acts,
individual interpreters, but becomes fully autonomous from individuals
through the regularization and formation of habits. Saying that a habit
is an interpretative disposition does not mean that it belongs to the
subject that is part of the habit itself. This disposition to develop habits
belongs to everything, it is part of the world and it is not a heuristic tool
of speakers or analysts. Speakers and analysts incorporate certain habits,
assuming them without even being aware of doing so, and in doing this
they conform to the signs. As Nöth noted in an essay dedicated to the
role of the habit in Peirce:
Habit serves as a synechistic bridge to overcome two dualisms which

have prevailed in the history of semiotics, the dualism of culture vs.
nature and the dualism of the conventional vs. the innate, i.e., between
signs culturally transmitted by teaching and learning and signs geneti-
cally inherited and interpreted by instinctive dispositions. (Nöth, 2010,
p. 84)
The habits by which symbols procreate are not the ones of their inter-
preters, in whom they are merely embodied. The purpose of the sign can-
not be determined by its users since, independently of their individual
intentions and purposes, the sign is determined by its object. [ . . . ] Being
determined by the habits of the symbols they use, the symbol users, in
a way, turn out to be the instruments of the symbols they believe to use
and whose message they convey in the process of semiosis. (Nöth, 2010,
p. 87)
This is a crucial point shared by all ref lections on the “habitual”

nature of cultural life, from Foucault’s practices to Bourdieu’s habitus,
to today’s anthropology.
The fact that there are supra-individual dispositions to regularity,
repetition, or generalization create a circle in which personal practices,
symbols, concepts, classifications, and, therefore, thoughts, subjects,
and scientific laws are related to and inf luence one another. The iden-
tity of each of these elements may be understood solely through the
reconstruction of the network in which it exists.
Last, we would like to underline a final feature of Peirce’s theory
of habit that is particularly pertinent to our ref lections. Reality and
semiosis are directed by a common tendency to continuously form

habitus in a never-ending chain of processes that slows down only
temporarily in a provisional habitus, that it then quickly questions
and doubts, and then produces new interpretations and new habitus.
This means that there is no such thing as a theory of universal truth
but that truth (like everything else) is only a belief (albeit a more sta-
ble one that is not subjective), a general and supra-individual idea
that is, in any case, reviewable, social and dependent on interpretative
habitus.
Ref lecting on cultural regularities, on the network of reciprocal con-
ditioning in which culture exists, on the archive of norms, on the trans-
formations of its systems, inevitably leads to a radical relativization of
truth systems.
Norms, Rules, Usages

So far we have focused primarily on the problem of regularity or that of
cultural norms—a problem to which semiotics has not paid very much
attention, even if in the field of linguistics, decades ago, at least two
important contributions were made: the theory of Jan Mukarowsky and
the theory of Louis Hjelmselv (both linguists close to the structural
sensibility).
Jan Mukarowsky, a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, in his
Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts (Mukarowsky, 1970),
clearly connects the problem of the aesthetic value to the problem of
social norms and processes of reaction, respect, and the overcoming of
dominant canons. Unfortunately, Mukarowsky’s inquiry is limited to
aesthetic value and he offers no ref lection on the wider field of semio-
sis. In any case, his approach is very close to what we are interested in:
the fact that meanings, valorizations, processes of cultural innovation
are influenced by sets of rules that are not untouchable, “genuine” laws,
but a matter of constant negotiation according to the preferences of
society. They are general but revisable, historical but independent from
singular cases, they have a structuring power but it is normal that they
are exceeded.
We have already said that from our point of view this is a crucial
problem, but we now choose to strengthen and further clarify our posi-
tion by saying that the specific feature of a semiotic approach to cul-
ture would consist in focusing on this level, in taking into account this
dimension of semiosis that is neither a pure parole fact nor a simple
ref lection on the langue. The proper role of semiotics is, according to
this position, to study this level of social habits, norms, and rules. We
should, of course, avoid being too simplistic: it is evident that every act
of parole (a text, a discourse, a practice) is the actualization of a system
of rules of a social and collective nature. It is therefore clear that there
is no parole that can exist without a dimension of systematic regular-
ity. Analogously, the langue is formed through the complex ensemble
of parole acts and cannot be observed in isolation. It is not possible,
therefore, to conceive either studies exclusively focused on parole, or
studies exclusively focused on langue. However, we support the idea that
it is necessary for the semiotics of culture to make a specific selection
regarding its focus: observing semiotic facts (which are inevitably acts
of parole) in their normative dimension; focusing on an intermediate
level between langue and parole for that which concerns all features
that are common, regular, habitual in the acts of parole; trying to clar-
ify that circle, which exists in its very own specific way in any portion
of encyclopedia, between individual interpretations, collective habitus,
common practices, recurring conceptualizations, norms, and individual
acts.
In order to better clarify what we are referring to, we will revisit a valu-
able suggestion made by Louis Hjelmslev (member of the Copenaghen
School of Linguistics, whose lesson is central to Eco’s work).
Rethinking Saussure’s dichotomy of langue and parole, Hjelmslev
proposes to replace it with four positions: schema, norm, usage, and
act.
He initially defined the first three terms (schema, norm, and usage)
as specific parts of the langue category, reserving the word “act” to
define the parole.
In “Langue and Parole” (1943b), he invites us to see the langue as:
- a pure form, defined independently of its social realization and its

material manifestation;
- a material form, defined according to a specific social realization, but
still independent of a specific event;
- a simple set of habits adopted in a given society and defined according
to events observed.
So we will call (he says):
- scheme, the langue as pure form;

- norm, the langue as material form;
- use, the set of habits.
Soon afterward, however, he moved from an A type scheme to a B type

scheme:
(Scheme A)
langue schema
norm
usage
parole act
(Scheme B)
constant schema
variables norm
usage
act
Let us now look at the definition that supports this change (taken from
the same essay):
- The schema is “the constant, that is to say what has to be presupposed,

while compared to the standard scheme, the norm, the use and the
act are the variables.”
- “The object of the theory of execution . . . is what so far we have called
the norm, the use and the act. Norm, use and act are intimately linked
together and lean naturally to constitute but one subject: the use is an
abstraction compared to the norm and the act is its concrete form.”
And later on, in the essay “La stratification du langage,” Hjelmslev

states:
The parole is defined as the “inter-layers” set of relations actually

executed.
The use, in turn, is obviously what is stabilized within the parole.
Differently from the use, the norm should be the “inter-layers” overall
relationship allowed.
On the contrary, the semiotic (and linguistic) schema is outside this
conceptual context.
Norm, usage, and act therefore are part of the same order, while schema
is part of another linguistic level: that of constants, independent from
execution.
In this work Hjelmslev is trying to solve the problem of regularity of

the parole.
He probably wants to operate in a similar way to Saussure and thus
distinguishes langue from parole, assigning langue all the social and con-
ventional components of language, and to parole the individual aspects
of language, but then he gradually came to understand that norms and
usages too are variable and therefore part of the execution .
In other words, norms and usages (and acts as well, but that goes
without saying) therefore turn out to be, at the same time:
- social,
- regular,
- variable,
- dependant on discursive executions.
They are, in other words, very similar to what we have so far defined
“habitus”: general, supra-individual but, despite that, historical, vari-
able, and subject to continuous transformations. They are what define
and regulate the discursive spaces, that which oversees the formation
of individual enunciations (a category we have met multiple times in
Foucault’s works).
Our hypothesis is that this level of norms and usages is the most
specific to the semiotic study as it is the place in which a number of cul-
ture’s key aspects manifest themselves: first of all, the supra-individual
dimension of culture (a parole, were it unique and unrepeatable would,
as we have already discussed have little cultural significance, while
everything that has a dimension shared at a collective level has some
degree of cultural relevance); the historical-evolutionary dimension of
culture (usages and norms express an interpretative and semiotic strat-
ification; they are what is deposited and what adapts to new cultural
contexts, through persistence, negotiation, and reformulation); the nor-
malizing power of culture (as we have seen, in the structuralist approach
and also in Peirce’s approach, culture, though internally heterogeneous,
has an inherent tendency to self-organization, regularity, creation of
homogeneous zones).
Therefore, what really matters is acquiring a better understanding of
what it means to focus on norms and usages.
First it is important to try and distinguish different forms of
“normativity.”
Let us start by pointing out, as Hjelmslev did, that norms are one
thing while usages are different. While the former define what is allowed
in a given culture, the latter define what is regular. In Hjelmslev’s hier-

archy, the former are superior to the latter and thus define the different
possible contents of the latter. Norms represent the repertoire of our
possibilities: that which is conceivable in our culture.
In the broader category of the norms (which define and set what is
possible and allowed within a given space), we think there may be a first
radical distinction between written, explicit norms and unwritten, non-
formalized norms, but this difference is not based on the written word
versus the spoken word, but rather on the power of grammar versus the
power of habits (e.g., habits set forth by traditions). Lotman offers a
rather enlightening point of view when he distinguishes between gram-
maticalized cultures and textualized cultures: although all cultures tend
to organize and arrange themselves, some of them (or some areas of
them) are organized by means of explicit statutes and grammars, while
others prefer implicit modes made from examples, models, stories, and
so on.
This opens a very broad field of stimuli and materials for a semi-
otic approach to culture. Indeed, the world of true and proper “norms”
is, from a semiotic point of view, immense and scarcely explored (just
think of the semiotics of law, and its many fields of application: laws on
foods, on religions, on city and street planning, on immigration, and so
on and so forth). It is evident that these sets of codes, and local inter-
pretations thereof, the exceptions to them and their history represent a
crucial level of culture that, in Foucault’s view, is the level of systems of
regulations that define the policies of truth and power of a given cul-
ture, implementing practices, defining positions and rules of the sub-
jects, opening and closing fields of legitimacy. But beyond that, norms
implicitly express well-defined forms of valorization and axiologization,
a well-defined idea of power, action, subject, and so on, which is a series
of structuring categories that condition and form culture, not only at
the moment the law is applied but, with a more global approach, via the
normalization of a given vision of the world.
Let us now make a banal, yet sufficiently explanatory example: any
given immigration control policy, in addition to and even before defin-
ing who can be granted access to a country and how, implicitly assumes
a specific idea of nation (either “territorial” or “cultural” in nature), a
concept of border (linear or diffuse), a certain idea of belonging, mem-
bership (by blood or “experience”), a specific view of the “migrants” (as
threats or resources), and so on and so forth. These assumptions, which
are an implicit part of the otherwise explicit rules set forth in a given
policy, are that which defines common sense, that which is taken for
granted and that therefore constitutes the corpus of assumptions and

beliefs shared by a group and characterizing it.
It follows that a semiotic work on the systems of values and simu-
lacra underlying the norms and proper rules, laws, of a group would
represent a precious contribution to denaturalization of thought (and
power) systems.
Another level beside that of the implicit values of explicit norms is
that of implicit, “textualized,” and non-grammaticalized norms; that is,
norms that are not codified in a form explicitly reminding of a set of
rules. Just think, for example, of the infinite ocean of examples, iden-
tity models, behavioral codes that condition any subject in its society.
As regards this specific point of view, we would like to focus on the
importance of the narrative dimension that qualifies cultures. By “narra-
tive dimension” we do not just mean the traditional dimension of writ-
ten works (books)—although novels, diaries, biographies are certainly
important and significant, they are not the only form of narration with
relevance from the cultural point of view. Narrative dimension, in our
opinion, encompasses a much wider and more widespread level of nar-
ration, including multimedia texts, from cinema to television to adver-
tising, in addition to the mythopoeic narrations, the likes of which are
often found in political speeches.
In this field semiotic research can and should build a dialogue (a
rather profitable one in my opinion) with recent advances in sociology
and cultural anthropology that, from Jeffrey Alexander onward, have
thematized the central role of the narrations through the building of a
set of nonexplicit widespread social norms. Social codes form and rein-
force themselves more often than not via narrations.
Stories indeed have a semiotic advantage: they are both textual and
public, and as such, easily identifiable.
As Jeffrey Alexander (2003) points out:
Social narrations are not written by some invisible Hand of History, nor
do they appear all of a sudden. The new tragedy, the traumatic experi-
ence [of the Holocaust] was built up bit by bit. It was made up of this
small story and that other, this scene and that other, this film and that
book, this TV broadcast and that play, and by the snapshots of moments
of torture and suffering. (Alexander, 2003, pp. 74–75)
The analysis of narrations diffused in a given social group allow us

on that specific plane of “conditions” (according to Foucault’s strictly
archeological approach, which as we have already seen works on the
palimpsest making certain enunciative events possible) that underpins

the emergence of a given type of normality and normativity. In other
words, “how” and “what” we should think about a given problem is
widely defined in the dominant narrations that supervise the circula-
tion of models, values, roles and that, once again, place some presup-
positions and assumptions in the “taken for granted” and “not to be
questioned” box.
Among the other sociologists who have ref lected rather deeply on
these issues are Arthur W. Franck (2010), Margaret Somers (1992,
1994), and Francesca Polletta (2006). Franck speaks in terms of “nar-
rative habitus”:
People are disposed to certain stories just as they are disposed to partic-
ular foods. Food to which I am disposed not only tastes good; such food
tastes right in the sense that eating that food affirms who I am and ought
to be. (Frank, 2010, p. 52)
Some narratives, therefore, not only build the horizon of plausibility

and common sense, but they also define the profound identity of indi-
viduals and the legitimacy of some of their actions. In that sense, as
Franck himself says in the pages immediately following those we just
quoted, a narrative habitus implies a thematic-narrative repertoire (built
by a person and shared by a group), a competence (required to use said
repertoire), a taste, in the sense of a style, and a certain sense of justice,
a sense of the right .
People are driven to act in a certain way by projections, expectations,
and values derived from a limited (and easily traceable) repertoire of
narratives. There is, therefore, a rather broad field of semiotic action,
one that might and should ref lect on the practices using, as the basis for
this discussion, the norms from which they stem, norms whose circula-
tion and origin is narrative and therefore genuinely semiotic.
The debate between narrative restraint and individual initiative that
originates from this discussion sheds new light on the debate between
structuralism and ideology, steering clear both of the universalizing
shallows of certain structuralist currents and the intangible abstractness
of certain ideological viewpoints. The study of narratives makes it pos-
sible to focus on the structural (and consequently ideological ) conditions
that restrain identities and actions:
The fact that we can isolate narratives in discourse and can isolate
different versions of the same narrative makes it possible to trace the
careers of particular stories, exposing not only the political processes by
which they come to be tells le or authoritative but also the dynamics by

which newly legitimated stories produce new modes of action and new
terrains of contention. This should help to identify the structural con-
ditions in which culture has independent force in defining new interests
and new identities. (Polletta, 2006, p. 7)
From all of this it becomes quite evident how the archaeological and
the structural approaches end up being coincident or at least fully com-
patible, as they both tend to focus on the “career of cultural habitus,”
their transformations, the conditions controlling them, and the manip-
ulations they perform in the space under their control.
Below the level of norms lies the level of Hjelmslev’s usages ; that is,
the level of regularities that derives from and follows what is allowed
on the plane of norms. Among the allowed forms there are some that
become dominant, more frequent, and, therefore, regular.
From this point of view we would like to point out how the study of
usages is influenced by a key problem: that of corpus and their delim-
itation. The study of usages is the study of what becomes regular and
dominant, and this can only be done through the analysis of a large
body of work, the equivalent of the long on-field surveys typical of
ethnography. At this level, the semiotic vision seems to have to become
one with the approach of the ethnographer (whose field of study is more
focused, indeed, on the practices and the behaviors of people). In order
to establish the regularity of a usage one should observe the diffusion,
repetition, and continuity of a series of forms. While the ethnographer’s
action is often restricted to a specific set of space–time coordinates, the
semiotic approach (if we follow Foucault’s theories) allows us to think
in terms of regularity throughout time and space, beyond the borders
of a given place and time, making connections and observing homolo-
gies, and it may indeed be interesting for this very reason. Just think,
for example, of certain fashions in clothing or certain teen “rites” or
religious rituals: they move well beyond their allotted borders. Even
today, Western women wear saris, sushi is eaten everywhere, and on
Western beaches, people do breathing exercises that belong to Oriental
concentration techniques. The time–space unity of the ethnographic
survey is, today, in a certain way, in crisis. It therefore becomes more
and more crucial to carry out a comparison that, while representing
from the very beginning one of the most characterizing features of the
semiotic approach, at this moment is simply unavoidable, especially in
the study of the usages. We will return to this point later on.
However, the most relevant problem, from our point of view,
is understanding semiotic specificity in the study of usages: how the
semiotician’s work can be set apart from the ethnographer’s? If we use

Lotman’s thought, which sees semiotics as the study of correlations
between languages , we believe that we can immediately identify a first
point of specificity. The point is understanding the network of relation-
ships that makes a certain set of semiotic forms consistent and possible,
unifying them in regular uses. It is therefore necessary for the semioti-
cian to understand how different forms become compatible, in order to
constitute forms of regularities that are both structured and structure-
building.
Let us return to the example given above, people practicing breath-
ing exercises on the beach: how did a key element of Eastern spirituality
become compatible, and bond (therefore creating a system) with Western
narcissistic individualism, epitomized by the light, leisurely atmosphere
of a beach, the public and often crowded dimension in which these
exercises are often put into practice? Are there implicit “codes” with
which one can interpret the usefulness of carrying out a mystic exercise
while sunbathing?
These are not, quite evidently, explicit rules but rather systems of
compatibility and co-occurrence facilitated by a number of shared
traits (semantic, rhythmic, enunciative) and further reinforced by well-
defined discursive forms.
These discursive forms—as we have already had occasion to say—are
the textual material on which, as semioticians, we can work better. In
parallel, by analyzing concrete practices looking at semantic enuncia-
tive, narrative features, obviously we try to apply a textual method of
analysis also to sets that are objects of world, behaviors, practices in
progress.
The Corpus of Culture

Rethinking the study of culture from this perspective (with our atten-
tion focused specifically on the regularity and palimpsestic transforma-
tion that characterizes semiosis) poses a number of problems because
its corpus is rather unwieldy. In its early decades, applied semiotics was
unable to focus too much on this problem, working on well-defined
texts—that is, “traditional” texts, such as literary works, advertising
texts, movies, and so on—the object of their analysis.
But in the very moment that semiotics moved to a cultural-type sur-
vey, with the aim of focusing on the transversal logics of culture, norms,
habitus, and series of transformations, the corpus problem takes on the
utmost importance.
Foucault expresses the analyst’s difficulties very clearly:
The constitution of a corpus poses a problem for my research, but a

problem that is most likely different from that of linguistic research,
for example. When one wants to make a study of linguistics, or a study
of a myth, one is obliged to create a corpus, define it and establish the
criteria for its constitution. In the far less delimited field that I study,
the corpus is, in a certain sense, indefinite: one will never manage to
constitute the complete collection of discussions on madness, even when
limiting oneself to a determined period in a determined country. As
regards the prison, there would be no sense in limiting the discussions
to those about prison, as there are also those that come from prison:
decisions, rules—elements that constitute the prison—its very workings
with its strategies, its unformulated questions, its astuteness that, after
all, belongs to no-one but is nevertheless experienced; all these guarantee
the functioning and continuance of the institution. And all this needs to
be collected and made apparent. The work consists more in making these
questions apparent in their strategic connections than in constituting
them in order to exclude other questions. (Foucault, 1975b, “Entretien
sur la prison: le livre et sa mé thode”; author’s trans.)
Foucault’s point is that there is maximum dispersion and that the num-
ber of elements that could fit in the scope of a cultural analysis is near
unlimited. Since everything is cultural, everything could, theoretically,
be included in the corpus of analysis.
For this very reason the moment the corpus is established is vital and
shall be regarded as a radically interpretative stage, and by no means as
one of mere “storage” (in the most trivial sense of the word, as in storing
significant items). In order to study the regularities, recurrences, habi-
tus, and therefore logic, we shall select certain sets or (if the word “set”
has a too strong connotation of “closed, secluded”) build up a number
of series that are made homogeneous by “strategic connections.” The
formation of these series is regulated by a preliminary interpretative
moment: a hypothesis, an abductive hazard.1
Archaeology of Knowledge, from this point of view, is a well of ref lec-
tions and thoughts, each one invalidating the certainty of premade
object units, even in the case (which seems, at first glance, unproblem-
atic) of literary works. At the beginning of the book, Foucault uses the
rather successful expression “questioning the document” (1969, p. 5) to
suggest to the analyst an accurate task, which consists of working on
his/her own objects and documents from the inside. The documents
on which the analysis will be based shall be processed . When faced with
the document-object of his work, the analyst “organizes the document,

divides it up, distributes it, orders it, arranges it in levels, establishes
series, distinguishes between what is relevant and what is not, discov-
ers elements, defines unities, describes relations” (p. 7). The analyst,
therefore, does a job that is intrinsically interpretative, as he identifies
relations and structures them according to an explanation hypothesis
that legitimates his choices. No description is a simple registration of
the object. Every selection of a detail (shape) of an expression is based
on hypotheses of content and, for this very reason, even the mere iden-
tification of the relevant and significant objects, each with their own
boundaries, is itself related to an interpretative hypothesis.
Under these conditions, several problems are unleashed in a chain reac-
tion that the analyst must always take into account, and which Foucault
identifies with great accuracy (see Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 11–12, of
which we propose paraphrases since their meaning is quite clear).
In addition to the problem of the establishment of homogenous and
consistent corpus of documents (open or closed, finite or indefinite cor-
pus), there is also:
The problem of defining a selection principle (“depending on whether we

would like to examine the document mass thoroughly or carry out
sampling according to statistical means of data retrieval, or even try
to identify the most representative elements in advance”).
The problem of defining the level of analysis and the elements relevant to
it, the problem of specifying an analysis model (“quantitative treatment
of data, breaking down of data basing on a given number of assign-
able traits of which correlations, interpretative decoding, analysis of
frequencies and distributions”).
That of defining sets and subsets in which the researched material is
subdivided.
That of identification of relationships that make it possible to character-
ize a set (“there can be numerical or logical relationships, functional
relationships, causal and analogical relationships; these can also be
signifier/signified relationships”).
All these problems are understandable and essential also from a semiotic
point of view; in fact they sum up, in a way, what we have tried to do in
the previous chapters with our case analysis:
- To show how to establish a homogenous and consistent corpus of doc-

uments, selecting elements comparable among them (the video by an
NGO, the expressions of a memory ritual, the different “versions” of

a cultural symbol).
- To define a selection principle, a criterion that would work as a theo-
retical hypothesis of the analysis.
- To clarify the level of analysis (for us, these would be narrative in the
first case, communicative 2 in the second case, semantic3 in the third
case).
- To identify the basic relationships that constitute the structure of the
object considered.
In Foucault, as in our work, there is a full awareness that there are

no preset subject-object-meta-language hierarchies, but rather an ever-
changing game of positions in which subjects are shaped up by the
practices they employ (including practices of analysis), and in the very
moment they employ them.
In this space of dispersion and circularity, “the problem is to consti-
tute series: to define the elements proper to each series, to fix its bound-
aries, to reveal its own specific type of relations, to formulate its laws,
and, beyond this, to describe the relations between different series, thus
constituting series of series, or tables” (Foucault, 1969, p. 8).
Mukarowsky in his Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social
Facts (Mukarowsky, 1970) had already mentioned the analytical prob-
lem of building good series. But it is Foucault who best explains how to
do this and how to avoid the temptation of limiting the work to objects
that have already been built.
Foucault considers four possible criteria with which to move within
the dispersion space of the culture and select objects for analysis that
can be matched together and “arranged in a series”:
● the criterion of the object of reference (e.g., “the madness,” although

as we have already seen, this criterion loses its effectiveness since
madness is not the object that a series of discourses and practices
share as a reference, but the object that a series of discourses and
practices build );
● the criterion of sharing a given style, of a certain constant character
of the enunciation (although it immediately becomes evident that
the discursive style is just a part of a broader system that includes
ethical vision, instruments, information techniques that condition
and relativize the significance of the “pure style”);
● the criterion of “permanent and consistent concepts ” implied by some
discursive forms (e.g., the category of subject, attribute, judgment,
and so on), though we often find that these concepts are not in
any way permanent but rather subject to constant evolution and
enrichment;
● and last, the thematic criteria : persistence of certain themes within
certain well-defined discursive forms, though we quickly find that
the same themes can appear and be played in completely differ-
ent fields (a critique that we consider valid still today and that is
not adequately focused on in thematic analysis, particularly in the
fields of literary criticism, sociology, or media).
Foucault regards these criteria to be as inadequate when taken indi-

vidually; each of them has a crucial weakness, which we have men-
tioned. For this very reason, Foucault insists that we do not need to look
for predetermined areas of consistency, but for correlation sets between
these different criteria; wherever there are recurrent systems of correla-
tions between these elements, there are also discursive formations.
Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements, such
a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement,
concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order,
correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say,
for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive forma-
tion—thus avoiding words that are already overladen with conditions
and consequences, and in any case inadequate to the task of designating
such a dispersion, such as “science,” “ideology,” “theory,” or “domain
of objectivity.” The conditions to which the elements of this division
(objects, mode of statement, concepts, thematic choices) are subjected
we shall call the rules of formation. The rules of formation are con-
ditions of existence (but also of coexistence, maintenance, modifica-
tion, and disappearance) in a given discursive division (Foucault, 1969,
pp. 41–42).
A discursive formation therefore derives from the recurring correla-
tion between specific forms of expression (style, enunciation), forms
of valorization (objects), encyclopedic paradigms (concepts), and argu-
ment forms (thematization).
It is not just about bringing up recurrences of single units within reg-
ularities, but rather about focusing on the regular correlations between
different semiotic plans, since it is from the tapestry of correlations that
the meaning of single units stems.
The object of the analyst is, therefore, not just the texts, practices,
or objects in and of themselves. Neither of these sets can be defined as
more “cultural” than another, not one of them defines an “ideal” sphere
for the semiotician or a hierarchy of the possible object. It is more about

trying to understand their relationship, in a perspective that includes
discourses, practices, codes, scientific enunciations, objects, and so on,
and manages to focus on how the values and hierarchies of the former
translate, adapt, and turn into the values and hierarchies of the latter.
In this task the semiotician, in our opinion, has privileged access
through the textual route. It is an easier way because working for decades
with texts has allowed the semiotician to streamline and optimize her/
his “methodological tool box” (traditionally, semiotics has focused on
textual analysis, thus it has a very rich set of categories with which to
analyze texts), but it is also an easier way because that level or regular-
ity, habits, normativity that we have indicated as the key object of our
approach is, in our opinion, a level that, by its very nature, tends to
textify itself, taking a public, discursive form. It tends to become a doc-
ument, to become stable in the form of codes, narrations, regulations,
grammars, textbooks, catechism, pamphlets, reports, archives, and so
on.
As Michael Silverstein has underlined (see Silverstein and Urban,
1996 and Silverstein, 2004), culture lives in twofold movements: entex-
tualization and contextualization . Experiences and social interactions
tend to find coherent and stable manifestations that can be detached
from the local context in which they occur, which represent the texts
(a sort of canon) of the culture considered. These texts are numerous,
contradictory, radically historical, and, in a certain way, contingent, but
at the moment they are created, they represent a reference point for the
members of a given culture. They are instructions, laws, literary texts,
advertising, manifestos, website, videos, critical accounts. They are not
definitive and they are always questionable, but they act as a stabilizing
force on living, pragmatic exchanges. If we look at them as semioti-
cians, with the textual “sensibility” and epistemology this title entails,
we will find the values, the roles, the relationships, the hierarchies, the
practices that are central to a culture. Here, we can find, as Silverstein
says, the “sociocultural unconscious” of a group. “Cultural knowledge
lives and dies in textual occasions” (Silverstein, 2004, p. 634).
Of course, a culture is not made up solely of texts: “to equate cul-
ture with its resultant texts is to miss the fact that texts (as we see
them, the precipitates of continuous cultural processes) represent one
phase in a broader conceptualization of cultural process” (Silverstein &
Urban, 1996, p. 1). Even if, as semioticians, we can be passionate about
texts, we cannot forget that culture is a living entity, it has constitu-
tive pragmatic facets created through effective actions, practices, and
interactions. Silverstein is undoubtedly correct to focus on the fact that

there is a cycle, a constant movement between entextualization and con-
textualization, and not two separate sides of culture. Texts and practices
are not two different elements of culture, but the temporary stages of
the same cultural semiosis.
What we would like to support here is the idea that the semiotic
point of view on culture could favor in particular the “textual stage,”
namely through the provision of a specific expertise in textual analysis.
Moreover, we can conceive entextualization as the moment of regulari-
zation, stabilization: the moment where culture builds its references, its
canon, its norms.
Texts unify practices, in a way, making them manageable, transmis-
sible, homogeneous, regulated, and texts very often build relations with
other texts, other experiences, other cultures. Correlations between the
various elements of a culture are, for the most part, textually “regis-
tered.” As Lotman claims, language (and written language in particu-
lar) has a structuring power (as it is a primary modelling system) that
orders and establishes relations, while positioning and defining codes.
For this very reason the texts of a given culture represent a major
resource. They register and regulate, establish criteria and possibilities,
and reflect even non-grammaticalized norms.
In short, we would like to renew a sort of textual semiotics, which
chooses to stay focused on texts even if with a basic interest in cultural
logics and dynamics; a textual semiotics that is not reduced to simple
close-reading, but one that is open to the process of contextualization,
correlation, negotiation in which texts are involved.
Therefore, the semiotics of culture that we envisage and would like
to see is, like Foucault’s genealogy, “grey; accurate, patiently document-
based. It works on tangled and scraped parchments, with several drafts
[ . . . ] It requires the accuracy of knowledge, a large store of materials
and patience . . . a certain tenacity of learning” (Foucault, 1971, author’s
trans.).
This knowledge is based on textual and archive analysis, beside and
before field observation. It is an interpretative form of knowledge, albeit
not in the hermeneutic sense of the word, which believes in palimp-
sests over horizons of meaning, in archives over its phenomenological
experience.
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 ref lection 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 ref lects 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.
13. As explained above, the text 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 Hébert, “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.
20. http://www.hrw.org/features/burma-untold-miseries .
21. http://w w w.unicef.org/photography/photo_essays _ a ll.php?pid=2 A M
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. De Saussure’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. All these problems were referred to as
being on a “patemic” level, different from the narrative level, the enuncia-
tive level, the cognitive level, the iconic level (and so on) typical of texts.
See Greimas and Fontanille, 1991.
6 . This is the point at which the analogies between Lotman’s position and
Eco’s encyclopedic view of culture (on which we will focus in the next
chapter) are quite strong. It is the encyclopedic network, according to Eco,
that takes care of stabilizing or sedating certain interpretation paths, cer-
tain recontextualizations or content/expression associations. It is the ency-
clopedic paths within the network that stabilize certain types of memory,
causing it to “forget” other contents.
7. For more on the Lotman theory and the developments of contempo-
rary scientific theories, see “Semiotiche” no. 5/07, Ananke, Turin, 2007,
“Lotman,” edited by Manuel C à ceres S à nchez and, in particular, the essay
by C à ceres S à nchez and Mirko Lampis. See also research by Kalevi Kull at
Tartu University (www.zbi.ee).
8 . Lotman speaks in terms of “non-hereditary memory,” meaning everything
that is not biological, as part of the genetic legacy of the individual.
9. The reformulation of the historical past, with the subsequent oblivion of
certain events, may reach some extreme cases, as with Holocaust denial.
10. It is important to remember that in the early 1980s the Argentinian
President Alfons ì n established a National Commission on the Disappeared
Notes ● 197
(Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas—CONADEP),

which, in 1984, submitted a report called “Nunca m á s.” Acknowledging
that the atrocities committed against thousands of young people were not
occasional episodes that occurred during a state of emergency (which the
military junta called the “dirty war”), but rather a habitual practice used
by the junta to maintain control.
11. For a further, more semiotical in-depth reading of the Madres practices,
see Demaria and Lorusso, 2012.
12 . An isotopy is a semantic redundancy. When within a text there are many
semic units belonging to the same semantic field (see war, entertainment,
religion, etc.), we talk about it as spectacular, religious, or whatever it may
be, isotopy. Of course, the presence of one or more isotopy means that a
text is strongly coherent and intertwined.
13. Their fears were, sadly, well justified. Azucena Villaf lor, one of the original
14 Madres was indeed imprisoned, tortured, and “ disappeared.”
14 . As we pointed out earlier, this view of the Abuela movement as something
wreaking havoc in the otherwise “normal” life of their biological grand-
children is, of course, one-sided and not objective: it is the view of those
Madres who distanced themselves from this group. However, many others
have claimed that the Abuelas’ actions were legitimate and even appropri-
ate, as they believed that the truth was something their grandchildren had
a right to; not damage but, instead, compensation.
15. We will use some aspectual features of temporality: punctual, durative,
incoative. In linguistics the aspect represents the point of view an implicit
observer has of the temporal process: he may perceive the action in its
completeness (perfective aspect), in its initial moment (incoative aspect),
in its repetition (iterative aspect), in its continuity (durative aspect), in
its extemporaneousness, in its restrained nature (punctual aspect), and
so on.
3 Interpretation and Culture: Umberto Eco’s Theory

1. The work collecting and editing Peirce’s papers started in 1931 and is still
not complete.
2 . Peirce prefers the term “pragmaticism” to “pragmatism” to differentiate his
theory from that developed by William James.
3. Besides, Eco’s concept of adaptation also plays a central role at a percep-
tion-cognitive level, in terms of primary iconism.
4 . One example in this respect is the controversial memories of dictatorships
or cases of genocide, from Rwanda to Armenia. And indeed, even with
more consolidated memories like those of the Holocaust, there are some
people who, in spite of the global culture’s inclusion of the Nazi’s extermi-
nation of the Jews in its own encyclopedia, still claim death camps never
existed. As regards negationism, see Pisanty, 1998.
198 ● Notes
5. This last book was first published in Canada (Eco, 2000). A similar Italian
version is Dire quasi la stessa cosa (Eco, 2003), but this is not a direct trans-
lation of the first.
6 . Hjelmslev separates systems from processes, restructuring Saussure’s dif-
ference between langue and parole, and between syntagmatic and par-
adigmatic relationships. While the language system is suprapersonal and
abstract, the parole process and act represent the concrete expression of the
language in its discursive and individual acts.
7. Intra-linguistic translations are the actions of rewording and paraphrasing
within the same language; inter-linguistic translations are translations in
the current sense; inter-semiotic translations are transpositions from one
language to another (i.e., from a novel to a movie).
8 . Which means jumping twice on one leg and twice on the other.
9. Geertz never openly quotes Eco, as far as we know (neither does he quote
other semioticians), but he has clearly read him, either directly or from
secondary sources.
10. We are using the word “object” here with no intention of reification and,
most of all, with no empirical-materialist assumption. By “object” we mean
“cultural object,” any element of culture (material or immaterial) consid-
ered as the matter of observation.
11. This relationship is the basis for the distinction Eco makes between ratio
facilis and ratio difficilis (Eco, 1975, p. 217 and further on), where “ratio”
means the relationship between a signic function that unites expression
and content. This relationship can be, in the languages (like the verbal
language) that have a langue, a fully conventional relationship; conversely,
it can also be fully idiosyncratic in these cases where there is no a pre-
made type of expression already preformed and capable of expressing the
contents in one’s mind, and therefore it is necessary to create one such rela-
tionship starting from the content we wish to express.
12 . In 1975 the Marxist slant of this inspiration is made explicit and among
Eco’s interlocutors and the authors he quotes, we also find Rossi-Landi,
who is known chief ly for having made Marxist and semiotic theory com-
municate with one another and translate themselves. Many of his writ-
ings are, therefore, pertinent to the semiotics-culture-ideology issue (in
particular, see Rossi-Landi, 1968, 1972, 1974). Here we will reproduce a
programmatic statement that is a good indication of the overall tenor of his
ref lections and that we think it is still important to remember: “In no case
shall linguistic work be understood as an interior activity of the subject, as
an ‘intentional act’ or ‘mental operation’ that should take place necessar-
ily in each individual’s conscious and unconscious psyche as realistically
understood (which implies a residual of subjective idealism); in no case the
study of this work may be perceived as gaining awareness of already exist-
ing acts and operations; And lastly, in no case the results of said study shall
be perceived as acts of enlightenments bestowed upon those who make
Notes ● 199
these deeds or operation but are not, unluckily, aware of it. By follow-
ing profound indications by Hegel and Marx—indications that are totally
extraneous to the neo-idealistic mentality that, together with the biologis-
tic one invalidates a large part of contemporary semiotics; the work we are
talking about here is instead social praxis on one side and model-making on
the other” (Rossi-Landi, 1972, p. 35).
13. We speak of “heroism” not only in a positive sense, because we have seen
that the traditional version of the Guy Fawkes’s legend is negative, but in
the sense of a very strong egocentric protagonism.
14 . We are making reference here to the semiotic theory of passions presented
by A. Greimas and J. Fontanille in 1991, through which they aim to inte-
grate the semiotic comprehension of the logic of actions with a semiotic
approach to the internal life (passions, feelings, etc.).
15. These are available on Youtube. We started studying them at the end of
2011 and over the course of more than a year we have noticed no signifi-
cant differences. This is why here we do not refer to any videos in partic-
ular within our specific corpus of analysis. You can select them randomly
because they always confirm these features.
16 . We want to clarify that we interpret this symbol as referred to the subject-
Anonymous and not to the “enemy,” the polemic object of Anonymous (the
men in black who hold political and economic power). We know that this
is a possible reading of the symbol, but the fact that it appears at the end of
the theme (as a logo) makes us to lean toward the first interpretation: the
headless suit is the symbol of Anonymous.
4 Ideas for an Archeological Semiotics

1. The abduction is among the three forms of syllogism individuated since
the time of Aristotle, alongside induction and deduction. Peirce, in par-
ticular, has focused on abduction. With deduction, the conclusion arises
automatically from the premises: date rule and the case, the result cannot
be different and is simply making explicit what was already implicit in the
evidence. Induction, on the other hand, allows us to hypothesize a rule
from a case and a result. It is based on the assumption that certain reg-
ularities observed in a phenomenon continue to appear in the same form
also in the future. Unlike deduction, and like abduction, induction is not
logically valid without external confirmation. The abduction, in which a
hypothesis is established in order to explain a number of empirical facts,
is (according to Peirce) the only form of reasoning that can improve our
knowledge, because creating hypotheses allows us to imagine new ideas,
to guess, to predict. In fact, all three identified inferences allow for an
increase of knowledge, to a certain extent, but only abduction is entirely
dedicated to this growth. It is also true, however, that abduction is the
inference most prone to risk of error.
200 ● Notes
2 . By “communicative” we mean the fact that we focused in particular on the

forms of communication with the Other, as represented by the group of
“Madres of Plaza de Mayo.”
3. We say “semantic” because the main interest of the analysis is in focusing
how, through the transpositions from one media to the other, some central
semantic values of the first identity of the hero Guy Fawkes were betrayed,
marginalized, or kept alive.
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Index
abduction/abductive, 138, 143, 187, 79, 81, 86, 88, 98, 101, 103, 110,
199 120–1, 124, 129–31, 137, 139,
actant/actantial, 14, 195 140, 143–5, 147, 165–6, 167, 183,
aesthetics/aesthetic, 32, 46, 54, 55, 64, 183, 186, 191, 192, 194, 196
65, 103, 117, 144, 178, 189, 193, common sense, 34, 80, 102, 139, 164,
196 173, 182, 184
Alexander, Jeffrey, 183 commonplace, 38, 139
Anderson, Benedict, 105 communication/communicative, 13,
Appadurai, Arjun, 6 15, 22, 31, 36, 37, 38, 51, 55, 62,
archeology/archeological, 18, 19, 105, 67–74, 88, 97, 98, 104, 106, 110,
144, 149, 159, 162–8, 170, 171, 117, 118, 119, 130, 131, 133, 134,
183 143, 144, 147, 174, 189, 196, 200
archive, 19, 98, 125, 162, 164, 165, 167, comparative (approach), 3, 25, 27, 54,
191, 192 64–5
Assman, Aleida, 101 competence, 15, 16, 57, 168, 184
Assman, Jan, 101 connotation/connotative, 35, 36, 37,
attestation, 50, 159, 195 38, 40, 78, 124, 130, 133, 155,
auto-model, 76 187, 194
axiological/axiologization, 32, 84 content (vs signifier), 5, 10, 15, 17, 32,
34, 35, 78, 79, 82, 120–4, 127–8,
Bal, Mieke, 7 131–2, 138, 140, 143, 159, 182,
Barthes, Roland, 29–39, 40, 42, 43, 188, 196, 198
49, 51, 67, 102, 118, 135, 139, context/contextual, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15,
145, 194 16, 18, 19, 26, 33, 36, 41, 45, 63,
behavioural text, 85 65, 68, 71, 77, 79, 86–8, 99, 106,
Benveniste, Emile, 176 120–2, 124–6, 133, 136–8, 144,
Bergman, Mats, 173 151, 158, 163, 165, 168–71, 172,
border, 23, 26, 45, 48, 76–9, 87, 92, 176, 196
93, 96, 136, 182, 185 contextualization, 191–2
Bourdieu, Pierre, 174–7 contingency, 162, 166
convention/conventionality/
Clifford, James, 15 conventional, 18, 22, 24, 35,
code, 2, 4, 9, 18, 21–2, 24, 25, 26, 27, 81–3, 86, 96, 107, 110–12, 144,
29, 30, 31, 32, 37–43, 67, 73–4, 173, 177, 181, 198
214 ● Index
corpus, 51, 54–6, 58, 64, 107, 165, enunciation/enunciative (level), 15, 16,
185–8, 199 51, 56, 60, 62, 102–4, 112, 153,
correlation, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15–17, 21, 22, 157, 164, 165, 169, 170, 181, 184,
73, 101, 120, 131, 137, 138, 140, 186, 189, 190, 191, 196
144, 159, 167, 186, 188, 190, 192 episteme, 126, 164, 166, 169, 170
critical [approach], 10, 21, 29, 37, 40, expression/expressive, 5, 10, 13, 14, 15,
42, 43, 46, 118, 162, 167, 170 26, 33–5, 70, 78, 79, 82, 119, 120,
Culler, Jonathan, 195 121, 122, 124, 127, 128, 131, 133,
cultural studies, 1, 7, 10, 29 140–3, 190, 193, 196, 198
cultural unit, 11, 13, 46, 119, 120–7, externalism/externalization/
130, 137, 143, 146, 147, 148, 151, externalized, 12–13, 102, 104,
157, 158, 164 105, 135
deferral, 43–9, 195 Featherstone, Mike, 193

Demaria, Cristina, 101, 197 figurative (level), 15, 16, 52, 56, 60,
Derrida, Jacques, 21, 42–9, 51, 52, 195 62, 63
Descola, Philippe, 41 filter/filtering, 92–3, 98, 102, 103, 164,
diachrony/diachronical, 11, 12, 25, 42, 172
68, 74, 88, 89, 93–5, 109, 159–62 Fontanille, Jacques, 196, 199
difference/differential/differentiality, form (vs content or meaning), 10, 11,
6, 7, 11, 18, 21, 27, 31, 33, 34, 12, 13, 15, 16, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33,
43–5, 47, 52, 57, 91–2, 119, 120, 35, 41, 48, 49, 167, 179–80, 193
134, 135, 137, 145 formalism, 87, 160
discursive (practice, act, position, Foucault, Michel, 9, 19, 126, 161,
formation…), 16, 19, 30, 35, 162–8, 169, 170, 177, 181, 182,
36, 37, 38, 64, 112, 157, 163, 183, 185, 187–90, 192
164, 166–8, 170, 175, 181, 186, Frank, Arthur W., 184
189–91, 198 frontier, 78, 83. See border
distinction/distinctive, 11, 44, 45, 46, function/functional, 7, 14, 18, 22, 31,
80, 174, 176 49, 68–73, 84, 87, 90, 91, 118,
Duranti, Alessandro, 4, 15, 16, 170 125, 136, 140, 141, 193, 196, 198
Fusaroli, Riccardo, 193
Eco, Umberto, 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 19, 21,
22, 29, 32, 35, 39, 42, 46, 47, 67, Geertz, Clifford, 3, 4, 5, 15, 16, 135–9,
117–46, 148, 149, 151, 153, 159, 145, 198
164, 165, 166, 168, 171, 173, 179, general, 9, 12, 15, 16, 24, 29, 30, 31,
195, 196, 197, 198 39, 40, 67, 69, 90, 125, 165–6,
effect of reality, 63 169, 178, 181
embodied, 174, 177 global/globality, 26, 90, 106, 123, 125,
encyclopedia/encyclopedic, 18, 19, 67, 166, 167, 193
121–3, 125, 126, 129, 136, 143, glocal, 26, 193
147–9, 156–8, 164, 173, 179, 190, Goodwin, Charles, 170
196, 197 grammaticalized (system, model...),
entextualization, 191–2, 195 78–9, 83, 182, 183, 192
Index ● 215
Granelli, Tommaso, 193 intersemiotic, 88

Greimas, Algirdas, 49–53, 57, 62, 67, intertexuality, 26, 48, 88
109, 122, 168, 195, 196, 199 invention, 102, 105, 141–3, 147, 149
Gumperz, John J., 15 Irvine, Judith T., 32, 194
isomorphism/isomorphic, 41, 71, 75
habit/habitus, 3, 11, 12, 60, 79, 102,
103, 104, 126, 127–8, 130–1, 139, Jakobson, Roman, 4, 22–3, 67, 68, 73,
143, 146, 171–8, 179, 181, 182, 91, 133, 193, 196
184–7, 191
Halbwachs, Maurice, 101, 102 Kress, Gunther, 40, 42
Hawkes, Terence, 24, 30 Kroskrity, Paul, V., 32
heterogeneity, 11, 72–5, 86, 91, 94, 98, Kull, Kalevi, 195, 196
119, 159 Kurzweil, Edith, 40
hierarchy, 49, 71, 75, 85, 89, 91, 136,
137, 165, 166 Lakoff, George, 34
Hjelmslev, Louis, 33–6, 46, 122, 127, Landowski, Eric, 39, 50
178–82, 185, 193, 198 langue (vs. parole), 5, 165, 178–81, 198
Hobsbawm, Eric, 102 Lash, Scott, 193
Hodge, Bob, 40, 42 Latour, Bruno, 14, 193
holism/holistic, 30, 32, 87, 133, 136, Leroi-Gourhan, André, 104
137, 159, 166, 168 level, 16, 28, 30, 32, 34, 38, 39, 46, 49,
homogeneity, 11, 74, 92, 95 51–3, 56–66, 71, 72, 79, 85, 91,
Hutchins, Edwin, 14, 15, 16, 193 92, 95, 165, 179–83, 185, 188–9,
191, 196, 197. See layer
ideology/ideological, 9, 10, 19, 29, 31, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 18, 21, 22–8, 40,
32, 36–42, 49, 50, 58, 101, 119, 49, 52, 54, 55, 67, 75, 137, 138,
139, 144, 145, 148, 153, 169, 184, 160
194, 198 linguistic anthropology, 1, 15, 135, 170
immanence/immanent, 26, 33, 70, 71, linguistics, 1, 6, 8, 21–5, 31, 36, 40, 67,
87, 92, 100, 168 72, 94, 160, 178, 179, 187, 196, 197
indexicality, 171–2 local, 11, 12, 15, 18, 29, 31, 93, 99, 121,
inference/inferential/inferentiality, 27, 122, 124–6, 129, 131, 133, 136–8,
120, 121, 135, 138, 199, 200 146, 151, 156, 157, 159, 164, 165,
information, 31, 39, 68, 69, 73, 74, 87, 167, 169, 182, 191, 193–4
88, 90, 92–4, 96, 102, 104, 120, logic of sense, 49–50, 67
196 Lorusso, Anna Maria, 197
instruction/instructional, 22, 100, Lotman, Juri, 2, 5, 29, 67–115, 117,
120–1, 165 132, 135, 137, 138, 140, 159, 161,
integration/integrative, 34–6, 91 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 182, 186,
intentio operis, 47, 195 192, 195, 196
interpretant, 13, 44, 104, 123, 128–31,
138, 174, 194, 195 manipulation, 57, 100, 185
interpretative anthropology, 3, 15, 135, Marxism/Marxist/Marxian, 10, 33,
137 40–2, 145, 198
216 ● Index
Mazzucchelli, Francesco, 105 organization/organized/organizational,

memory, 1, 10, 11, 19, 24, 68, 74, 84, 11, 18, 24, 28–9, 33, 43, 45,
88, 89, 90, 98–105, 106, 107, 114, 48–53, 64, 67, 68–77, 89, 90,
115, 148, 159, 161, 163, 167, 176, 94–6, 119, 121, 123, 125, 136,
189, 196 139, 143, 144, 165, 181, 182
metalanguage, 45, 46, 47
model/modelling, 14, 15, 17, 23–4, 27, Padoan, Daniela, 107, 112
50, 51, 53, 54, 63, 64, 70, 75–83, palimpsest, 19, 30, 36, 144, 146, 149,
85, 86, 95, 98, 101, 102, 106, 111, 161, 184, 186, 192
112, 150, 151, 152, 159, 183, 188, Paolucci, Claudio, 193
195, 196, 199 parole (vs langue), 32, 165, 178–81, 198
modelling system, 70, 78, 192 pathemic (level), 56, 61, 64
(semantic) model, 124–5, 136, 140, Peirce, Charles S., 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 43,
146 44, 46, 122, 123, 127–35, 138,
modes of signs production, 35, 139, 139, 140, 148, 171–8, 181, 194,
142–3 197, 199
Mukarowsky, Yan, 178, 189 pertinence/pertinentization, 5, 7, 54,
myth, 5, 25–9, 36–8, 41, 48, 57, 70, 64, 106, 142
83, 118, 137, 139, 160, 183, 187, Pezzini, Isabella, 39, 79
194 phonology/phonological (method), 8,
24, 193
narrative (level, model, scheme…), 15, Pisanty, Valentina, 197
16, 17, 18, 49–51, 56–8, 60, 65, pluralism, 67, 72, 95
67, 75, 183, 184, 186, 189, 195, Polletta, Francesca, 184, 185
196 Portis-Winner, Irene, 4, 5
narrativity, 50 positionality/positional, 31, 34, 145,
naturalization, 41, 102, 183 168
negotiation/negotiability, 10, 14, 119, Pottier, Bernard, 122
131–5, 143, 153, 158, 168, 178, Pozzato, Maria Pia, 39
181, 192 prague (school)/prague (thesis), 5, 8,
network, 14, 15, 26, 37, 39, 48, 52, 64, 23, 178, 193
87, 88, 103, 121, 126, 135, 136, process (vs. system), 2, 11, 13, 31, 33,
137, 146, 148, 149, 161, 164, 166, 34, 37, 93, 94, 98, 102, 104, 120,
168, 169, 177, 178, 186, 193, 196 127, 131, 133, 139, 140, 143, 170,
Nida, Eugene, 134 178, 191, 198
Nora, Pierre, 101 Propp, Vladimir, 160
norm/normative, 18, 19, 31, 121, 144,
164, 175, 178–86, 189, 191, 192 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 133
Nöth, Wilfried, 177
Ranger, Terence, 103
oblivion, 99–100, 103, 114–15, 165, regular/regularity/regularization, 3, 11,
196 14, 18, 19, 25, 35, 43, 55, 74, 86,
Ochs, Elinor, 4, 15, 16, 170 92, 96, 123, 127, 136, 143, 144,
organ/organic, 18, 48, 72, 84, 87, 89, 159, 164, 165, 171–3, 175–82,
90–4 185–7, 190–2, 199
Index ● 217
relativism, 80 structuralism/structuralist, 1, 2, 4, 6,
representamen, 128–30, 172, 174 8, 11, 18, 21–66, 67, 68, 71, 74,
rhetoric, 39, 144, 145, 148, 153, 156–8, 86, 119, 121, 122, 137, 160, 181,
194 184, 193
Ricoeur, Paul, 5, 101 structurality, 18, 49, 68
Robertson, Roland, 193 structure/structural, 4, 11, 14, 15, 18,
Rossi Landi, Ferruccio, 41, 198, 199 22–4, 28, 30, 31, 33, 40–2, 43,
Rothberg, Michael, 102, 104 46, 48–50, 52, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70,
rule, 22, 24, 29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38, 49, 72, 74, 75, 91–4, 96, 97, 100–2,
70, 78, 79, 80, 81, 102, 120, 121, 137, 138, 149, 159, 161, 164, 175,
131, 140, 143, 164, 165, 171, 178, 176, 186, 188, 189, 194
179, 182, 183, 186, 190 synchrony/synchronic, 11, 25, 34, 42,
68, 74, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 101,
Salerno, Daniele, 156 159–61
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, syntax/syntactic, 34, 51, 120, 124
23, 31, 41, 43, 44, 74, 119, 122,
127, 160, 176, 179, 181, 194, 195, Tartu (school), 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 18, 196
196 textualist, 6, 11, 38, 42, 194
Sebeok, Thomas, 3, 4, 138, 196 textualization, 16, 191–2, 195, 196
Sedda, Franciscu, 194 textualized (system, model…), 78–9,
self-description, 14, 74, 75, 76, 83, 108 83, 182, 183
sememe, 124, 125, 130 Todorov, Tzvetan, 102
semiosphere, 67, 88–98, 101, 109, 113, topological, 76, 78, 83, 106
114, 115, 138 Traini, Stefano, 122
semiotic square, 52, 53 transformation, 19, 23, 27, 121, 137,
series, 9–13, 15, 22, 23, 27, 51, 71, 164, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167, 171, 176,
169, 182, 185, 186–9 178, 185, 186, 190
sign production, 119, 139, 141–4 translation/translability, 10, 13, 16, 18,
sign system, 3, 5, 70, 72, 73, 118 30, 39, 44, 45, 67, 73, 74, 86, 88,
signification, 31, 38, 44, 48, 51, 117, 118, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 130,
119, 121, 130, 131, 132, 143, 174 131–5, 161, 165, 167, 168, 174, 198
signified, 31, 33, 45, 122, 127, 188. trans-linguistics, 36
See signifier typology, 75, 82, 140, 142–3
signifier, 31, 33, 34, 35, 45, 122, 127,
136, 138, 140, 141, 188. See unconscious, 24, 26, 104, 191, 198
signified universalism/universalist, 38, 49, 146,
Silverstein, Michael, 14, 16, 191, 192, 159
195 Urban, Greg, 191
Singer, Milton, 3 usage, 178–81, 185
social work/social praxis, 41, 42, 199 Uspenskij, Boris, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75–81,
sociosemiotics, 39, 40 84–5, 98–100
Somers, Margaret, 184
Sontag, Susan, 65 Violi, Patrizia, 102, 105, 121, 125, 171
stereotype/stereotyping, 14, 17, 35, 36, Volli, Ugo, 104
38, 69, 93, 98, 102, 104, 139, 175 Voloshinov, Valentin, 194

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S E M I O T I C S A N D P O P U L A R C U LT U R E

ANNA MARIA LORUSSO

Anna Maria Lorusso

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Semiotics. 2. Culture. I. Title.

List of Figures vii

1.1 The structural units of Oedipus’s myth 28

A New Semiotics, or a Return to a Authentic Semiotics?

Given this picture, the book aims at illustrating how a semiotic

As such, I will not choose between the two apparently alternative

As early as 1977, Sebeok already believed that the semiotics of cul-

structural-linguistic approach and the pragmatic-philosophical one, but

[There is] the necessity of creating a semiotic theory of culture born of

According to Sebeok, semiotics is essential if we wish to achieve what

Her work also showed a particular interest in the Tartu school.

- the langue /parole dichotomy, because no text is the pure expression of

1. a focus on the correlation between sign systems as opposed to

It is evident that, according to these premises, a semiotics of cul-

defining traits. I rather think that culture is a profoundly malleable and

I find myself frequently troubled by the word culture as a noun but

Like Appadurai, I believe that viewing culture as a substantial activ-

The field of cultural analysis is not delimited, because the traditional

philosophy, but rather a theory-for-analysis), many sections of this

I will, in a nutshell, try to rethink the old text/context dichotomy and

of view and what a theorist of semiotics may find interesting about

diachrony as an internal dimension of synchronic states, both in terms

energies: in order to become and be perceived as such, cultures must

In fact we can “touch” interpretants (i.e. we can empirically test a cul-

Conceived in this way—as the ever renegotiable and revisable result

different languages included there than on the microdynamics inter-

This way of considering semiosis as something systemic and made

The Book’s Path

● a structural vocation (chapter 1),

Structural vocation refers to the aforementioned idea that culture

from another point of view as the context or intertext, for instance, of

The Structuralist Perspective

From a paleographic point of view, the code is essentially a book; a

Each of these three meanings shares an element that helps us give a

The Linguistic Structuralism of Lévi-Strauss

as an anthropologist would have bordered on impressionism. Instead,

First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made

As a premise to this definition of “structure,” while revealing his debt

First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguis-

This lesson by L é vi-Strauss remains a must for the semiotic study of

The code guarantees the dialectics of synchronic and diachronic ele-

The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

and culture: the advertising of beauty products, for example, in which

course, an artificial one, an abstraction, built on all of its tokens, but

Figure 1.1 The structural units of Oedipus’s myth.

Such a semiotics, based on the study of codes and the pinpointing of

Codes and Structuralism in Roland Barthes

However, although Barthes fails to establish a general theory of cul-

The codes act as agencies—whether we are conscious of them or not

So let us now proceed in the order noted above:

society that makes them systemic by organizing sense via oppositions,

p. 104)—with a lexicon and sensitivity that we believe to be rather con-

Figure 1.2 Barthes’s schema for connotation.

cultural universes. The connotative meanings reveal “fragments of ide-