Appoggiandosi sull'abbondante letteratura semiotica sul comico, l'articolo cerca di rispondere alle se-guenti domande: quali sono le occasioni in cui ridiamo a propositodel cibo, e quale valore ha tale umorismo nel far circolare politiche gastronomiche non scritte, col loro corredo di normatività diffusa ma non per questo meno stringente? In particolare, come si ride del veganesimo oggi? Quali ne sono le possibili cause socioculturali? E gli effetti pragmatici? Infine, che rapporto c'è fra il ridere dei vegani e il ridere di altre minoranze, gastronomiche (vegetariani, hallal, kasher) e non?
The article points out that the current expansion of the semiotic focus from signs and texts to whole cultures needs the development of a coherent method. It therefore proposes to establish it through an application of the topological theory of fractals to the analysis of different kinds of symmetries in the semiosphere. Having defined fractals as resemblance between two topological structures, the article first dwells on what "resemblance" means in the comparison of both visual and conceptual patterns; it then proposes a typology of fractal similarities, based on the topological operations of rotation, translation, and reflection. Examples of each typology are given from the fields of cultural and political analysis. The article concludes by hypothesizing that cultural semiotics might evolve into a "pattern science", challenging the customary disciplinary barriers between the study of regularities in nature and in culture.
This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face.
The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital face, exploring its biological and social functions, the concept of masks, the impact of COVID-19, AI systems, digital portraiture, symbolic faces in films, viral communication, alien depictions, personhood in video games, online intimacy, and digital memorials. The human face is increasingly living a life that is not only that of the biological body but also that of its digital avatar, spread through a myriad of new channels and transformable through filters, post-productions, digital cosmetics, all the way to the creation of deepfakes. The digital face expresses new and largely unknown meanings, which this book explores and analyzes through an interdisciplinary but systematic approach.
The volume will interest researchers, scholars, and advanced students who are interested in digital humanities, communication studies, semiotics, visual studies, visual anthropology, cultural studies, and, broadly speaking, innovative approaches about the meaning of the face in present-day digital societies.
The article focuses on past epidemics and previous confinements, looking for the art of journeying through immobility. It rekindles the plague that ravaged the city of Turin in the 1630s, as well as Xavier de Maistre who, confined in the military citadel in 1790, wrote the Voyage autour de ma chambre, perhaps the first example of modern "anodeporics", a neologism to designate immobility travelogues. The essay then explores other pandemics and subsequent attempts at imitating De Maistre. First, it concentrates on Wilkie Collins, the author of the 1852 short story "A Terribly Strange Bed", who remained stranded with his father William, the painter, at the frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont because of the cholera that broke out there in 1836. Second, it bears on Almeida Garrett, who resisted the siege of typhus-struck Oporto in 1832-3 and, ten years later, penned another classic of "anodeporics", Viagens na Minha Terra, also inspired by De Maistre. After consideration, from the perspective of semiotics, of what is needed to "journeying throughout immobility", the essay ends with a study of the most famous anodeporic tale in world literature, also containing ironic quotes by De Maistre: Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph, named after a fictional device for mystical travel confined in a basement of 1940s Buenos Aires. The conclusion of this semiotic exploration through pandemics, lockdowns, and immobility travelogues is simple: in case of forced immobility, the practice of exploring space through time can be replaced by the alternative practice of exploring time through space.
Abstract: The article focuses on past epidemics and previous confinements, looking for the art of journeying through immobility. It rekindles the plague that ravaged the city of Turin in the 1630s, as well as Xavier de Maistre who, confined in the military citadel in 1790, wrote the Voyage autour de ma chambre, perhaps the first example of modern 'anodeporics', a neologism to designate immobility travelogues. The essay then explores other pandemics and subsequent attempts at imitating De Maistre. First, it concentrates on Wilkie Collins, the author of the 1852 short story "A Terribly Strange Bed", who remained stranded with his father William, the painter, at the frontier of the Kingdom of Piedmont because of the cholera that broke out there in 1836. Second, it bears on Almeida Garrett, who resisted the siege of typhus-struck Oporto in 1832-3 and, ten years later, penned another classic of 'anodeporics', Viagens na minha terra, also inspired by De Maistre. After consideration, from the perspective of semiotics, of what is needed to "journeying throughout immobility", the essay ends with a study of the most famous anodeporic tale in world literature, also containing ironic quotes by De Maistre: Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph, named after a fictional device for mystical travel confined in a basement of 1940s Buenos Aires. The conclusion of this semiotic exploration through pandemics, lockdowns, and immobility travelogues is simple: in case of forced immobility, the practice of exploring space through time can be replaced by the alternative practice of exploring time through space.
Abstract The earliest extant depictions of the human face are not simply realistic but represented through specific technologies (means) and techniques (styles). In these representations, the face was probably idealized in order to empower its agency through simulacra. The history of art sees humans become increasingly aware of the impact of technology and technique on the production of visual representations of the face. With photography, and even more so with its digital version, technology is developed, hidden, and miniaturized so as to democratize and market technique. The result, however, a naturalization of technology, is increasingly problematic in the era of algorithms: artificial intelligence absorbs the social bias of its engineers. This is particularly evident in the domain of "digital cosmetics": successful apps are used to process and share billions of facial images, yet few critically reflect on the aesthetic ideology underpinning them. This is an urgent task for visual, social, and cultural semiotics.
El artículo propone una comprensión topológica del discurso político actual. La semiosfera, es decir, el espacio conceptual dentro del cual vive una cultura como un conjunto de dinámicas de significado, está constantemente llena de procesos de agregación y desintegración de comunidades. La evolución tecnológica acompaña, expresa y altera esta tensión. En el período medieval, las comunidades se formaban y deshacían alrededor de fronteras geográficas: las personas se mataban entre sí por la posesión de un terreno fértil o de un acceso al mar. En la modernidad, la lucha por las fronteras físicas se mantuvo, pero se entrelazó inextricablemente con el conflicto de ideologías: fronteras hechas de palabras y creencias dividieron a la Europa católica y protestante en líneas que se superpondrían y complicarían las de las fronteras geográficas. En la modernidad, se hizo más difícil representar confines, separar los propios de los demás, ya que sistemas de fronteras de diferentes órdenes comenzaron a cruzar sus líneas: en el mismo país, en la misma ciudad, incluso en la misma familia vivirían y a menudo se odiarían católicos y protestantes. La complicación ha explotado en la posmodernidad, especialmente con la producción de significado en una semiosfera cada vez más digital. Las comunidades continúan existiendo, pero mediante sistemas de membresía de intensidad variable, en los que los miembros están dentro y fuera de las líneas divisorias, de acuerdo con los registros ideológicos adoptados. ; The article proposes a topological understanding of the present-day political discourse. The semiosphere, i.e., the conceptual space within which a culture lives as a set of dynamics of meaning, is constantly teeming with the aggregation and disintegration of communities. Technological evolution accompanies, expresses, and alters this tension. In the medieval period, communities were made and unmade around geographical borders: people would kill each other for the possession of a fertile ground, or an access to the sea. In modernity, ...
El artículo propone una comprensión topológica del discurso político actual. La semiosfera, es decir, el espacio conceptual dentro del cual vive una cultura como un conjunto de dinámicas de significado, está constantemente llena de procesos de agregación y desintegración de comunidades. La evolución tecnológica acompaña, expresa y altera esta tensión. En el período medieval, las comunidades se formaban y deshacían alrededor de fronteras geográficas: las personas se mataban entre sí por la posesión de un terreno fértil o de un acceso al mar. En la modernidad, la lucha por las fronteras físicas se mantuvo, pero se entrelazó inextricablemente con el conflicto de ideologías: fronteras hechas de palabras y creencias dividieron a la Europa católica y protestante en líneas que se superpondrían y complicarían las de las fronteras geográficas. En la modernidad, se hizo más difícil representar confines, separar los propios de los demás, ya que sistemas de fronteras de diferentes órdenes comenzaron a cruzar sus líneas: en el mismo país, en la misma ciudad, incluso en la misma familia vivirían y a menudo se odiarían católicos y protestantes. La complicación ha explotado en la posmodernidad, especialmente con la producción de significado en una semiosfera cada vez más digital. Las comunidades continúan existiendo, pero mediante sistemas de membresía de intensidad variable, en los que los miembros están dentro y fuera de las líneas divisorias, de acuerdo con los registros ideológicos adoptados. ; The article proposes a topological understanding of the present-day political discourse. The semiosphere, i.e., the conceptual space within which a culture lives as a set of dynamics of meaning, is constantly teeming with the aggregation and disintegration of communities. Technological evolution accompanies, expresses, and alters this tension. In the medieval period, communities were made and unmade around geographical borders: people would kill each other for the possession of a fertile ground, or an access to the sea. In modernity, the fight for the physical boundaries remained, but it inextricably intertwined with the conflict of ideologies: borders made of words and beliefs divided Catholic and Protestant Europe along lines that would overlap and complicate those of geographical boundaries. In modernity, it became more difficult to represent confines, to separate one's own ones from the others, for systems of borders of different orders began to crisscross their lines: in the same country, in the same city, even in the same family would live and often hate each other Catholics and Protestants. The complication has exploded in postmodernity, especially with the production of meaning in the semiosphere becoming more and more digital. Communities continue to exist, but by membership systems of varying intensity, where members are both inside and outside the dividing lines, according to the adopted ideological registers
The article focuses on frontiers from a semiotic perspective. They are a classic object of research for human and social sciences, especially in geography and cultural anthropology. They have become a phenomenon of much relevance and global visibility, in the often controversial center of the attention of citizens, politicians, and the media. On the one hand, as always in the history of cultures, attention has grown for displacements of people throughout the world have increased, because of the geopolitical crises that they suffer on the planet, but also thanks to the new facility with which these displacements are now imagined, organized and carried on. On the other hand, public attention towards frontiers grows because the conditions of their media representation change too.
Este artículo está escrito en primera persona, pero sostiene que, para comprender el sentido de una selfie, hace falta articular distintos niveles de análisis. Primero, hay que diferenciar entre el sentido de la práctica misma de tomarse selfies y el sentido de las selfies mismas como imágenes. Además, hay que considerar que hay selfies cuya naturaleza de selfie se oculta en la comunicación de estas imágenes (cripto-selfies), así como hay imágenes que circulan como selfies pero que en verdad no lo son desde el punto de vista de su producción empírica (pseudo-selfies). Hay, entonces, cripto-selfies, pseudo-selfies, e incluso meta-selfies, es decir, representaciones de contextos sociales en los que se sacan selfies (este último sub-género, como veremos, es muy utilizado por los políticos). La práctica de sacarse selfies y las imágenes que produce dan lugar a sentidos que se pueden distribuir según la famosa tripartición hermenéutica formulada por Umberto Eco. En las selfies hay una intentio auctoris, o sea un sentido que el sujeto quiere expresar de manera más o menos consciente a través de este formato fotográfico y de su contenido; luego hay una intentio lectoris, o sea el sentido que se desprende de una selfie o de un conjunto de selfies cuando sean observadas e interpretadas por un público; pero incluso hay una intentio operis de la selfie, o sea, un sentido que esta práctica, su formato, y los textos que producen implícitamente conllevan en el marco de la historia de la cultura y sobre todo en la estructura de la semiosfera actual. ; This article is written in the first person, but maintains that, in order to understand the meaning of a selfie, it is necessary to articulate different levels of analysis. First, we must differentiate between the meaning of the practice of taking selfies and the meaning of selfies themselves as images. In addition, we must consider that there are selfies whose nature is hidden in the communication of these images (crypto-selfies), as well as there are images that circulate as selfies but that are actually not such from the point of view of their empirical production (pseudo-selfies). There are, then, crypto-selfies, pseudo-selfies, and even meta-selfies, that is, representations of social contexts in which selfies are taken (the latter sub-genre, as we will see, is widely used by politicians). The practice of taking selfies and the images it produces give rise to meanings that can be distributed according to the famous hermeneutical tripartition formulated by Umberto Eco. In selfies there is an intentio auctoris, that is, a meaning that the subject wants to express in a more or less conscious manner through this photographic format and its content; then there is an intentio lectoris, that is, the meaning that emerges from a selfie or a set of selfies when an audience observes and interprets them; but there is also an intentio operis of the selfie, that is, a meaning that this practice, its format, and the texts it produces implicitly entails within the framework of the history of culture and especially in the structure of the current semiosphere.
Abstract The semiotics of phenomena like déjà vus and hallucinations constitute a limit-field of a theory of the sign, but one that offers opportunities to question the fundamental principles of the discipline while at the same time offering the opportunity to address their underlying cognitive processes. The article describes the cognitive nature of déjà vus and hallucinations, briefly reviews the literature about them, and reads them as cognitive perturbations in the light of a semiotics of mental simulacra related to perception, apperception, awareness, memory, and imagination. The article then uses such cognitive and semiotic modeling in order to develop a critique of present-day digital culture, in which the uncritical adoption of a mnemonic ideal based on digital memory jeopardizes one of the key features of embodied memory: imperfection and, as a consequence, the possibility to access aesthetic and temporal singularity. A collective memory prone to déjà vus and hallucinations ensues.
The article investigates the socio-cultural meaning of the face in relation to its natural and biological features, focusing on the particular domain ofmating habits. After surveying the role of the 'face' in the sexual behaviors of several non-human animals, and especially of primates, the article ponders on the crucial role that the face plays in the seductive discourse which precedes and accompany mating in all human cultures and also in many primates' behaviors. It, then, deals with the transformation that these seductive patterns of signification and communication undergo in the passage from face-to-face intercourse to digital dating. Here, the gap between the necessarily realistic representation of one's bodily face and the idealized version of it allowed by digital picture editing widens, to the point that new epistemic parameters start to circulate throughout the digital semiosphere.
