This book represents the culmination of the life's work of one of Italy's foremost Marxist theorists. In it, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi illuminates the complex issues raised by the concept of "ideology." Through his penetrating analysis of the intimate relationship between language, consciousness, and power, his treatise not only offers a valuable review of the history of the notion of ideology and the debate surrounding it, but represents an original and comprehensive revision of the classic Marxist theory of ideology. (...) While retaining the conceptual framework of historical materialism, the author addresses three major developments in post-war human sciences: the recognition of Marxism's shortcomings as a predictive and strictly empirical system of thought, the relativism which has invaded every academic discipline, and the emergence of semiology and linguistics as major fields of enquiry. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es revisar críticamente la perspectiva actual de la literatura especializada sobre el papel del lenguaje en el modo de producción capitalista contemporáneo. Para llevarlo a cabo, se han examinado tres momentos clave en la relación entre marxismo y lenguaje, y ello nos ha permitido identificar los componentes teóricos y epistemológicos de las propuestas de la filosofía del lenguaje que animan el debate actual. Nuestra intención es promover una discusión con la literatura citada en relación con (...) dos puntos críticos fundamentales: en primer lugar, desde una perspectiva marxista, se cuestionan ciertas distinciones elaboradas por la literatura especializada entre trabajo productivo e improductivo; en segundo lugar, se busca profundizar en la comprensión del trabajo como lenguaje y en la distinción entre praxis y poiesis. (shrink)

As already emerges in his 1961 book, Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune, Rossi-Landi reflects on sign and language relatedly to the American tradition in pragmatism from Peirce to Morris (he published a monograph on Morris in 1953). He also recovers the contribution made by Giovanni Vailati, who was among the first in Italy to recognize the importance of Peirce’s pragmatism. Through Peircean pragmatism, Rossi-Landi oriented his work from the very beginning in the direction of a semiotics (...) of interpretation in contrast to a semiotics – or better semiology in this case – of the code, of decodification. His “philosophical methodics” continues to be characterized in terms of “pragmatism,” from his works of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, 1968, and Semiotica e ideologia, 1972), to his last book Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni (1985, the year of his death), in which recovering Wittgenstein he reconsiders the question of the “traps of language” in the Marxian terms of “linguistic alienation.”. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the semiotic foundations of sociolinguistics. Starting from the definition of “sociolinguistics” given by the philosopher Adam Schaff, the paper examines in particular the notion of “critical sociolinguistics” as theorized by the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. The basis of the social dimension of language are to be found in what Rossi-Landi calls “social reproduction” which regards both verbal and non-verbal signs. Saussure’s notionof langue can be considered in this way, with reference not (...) only to his Course of General Linguistics, but also to his Harvard Manuscripts.The paper goes on trying also to understand Roland Barthes’s provocative definition of semiology as a part of linguistics (and not vice-versa) as well asdeveloping the notion of communication-production in this perspective. Some articles of Roman Jakobson of the sixties allow us to reflect in a manner which wenow call “socio-semiotic” on the processes of transformation of the “organic” signs into signs of a new type, which articulate the relationship between organicand instrumental. In this sense, socio-linguistics is intended as being sociosemiotics, without prejudice to the fact that the reference area must be human,since semiotics also has the prerogative of referring to the world of non-human vital signs.Socio-linguistics as socio-semiotics assumes the role of a “frontier” science, in the dual sense that it is not only on the border between science of language andthe anthropological and social sciences, but also that it can be constructed in a movement of continual “crossing frontiers” and of “contamination” betweenlanguages and disciplinary environments. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the semiotic foundations of sociolinguistics. Starting from the definition of “sociolinguistics” given by the philosopher Adam Schaff, the paper examines in particular the notion of “critical sociolinguistics” as theorized by the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. The basis of the social dimension of language are to be found in what Rossi-Landi calls “social reproduction” which regards both verbal and non-verbal signs. Saussure’s notion of langue can be considered in this way, with reference (...) not only to his Course of General Linguistics, but also to his Harvard Manuscripts.The paper goes on trying also to understand Roland Barthes’s provocative definition of semiology as a part of linguistics as well as developing the notion of communication-production in this perspective. Some articles of Roman Jakobson of the sixties allow us to reflect in a manner which we now call “socio-semiotic” on the processes of transformation of the “organic” signs into signs of a new type, which articulate the relationship between organic and instrumental. In this sense, socio-linguistics is intended as being sociosemiotics, without prejudice to the fact that the reference area must be human, since semiotics also has the prerogative of referring to the world of non-human vital signs.Socio-linguistics as socio-semiotics assumes the role of a “frontier” science, in the dual sense that it is not only on the border between science of language and the anthropological and social sciences, but also that it can be constructed in a movement of continual “crossing frontiers” and of “contamination” between languages and disciplinary environments. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the semiotic foundations of sociolinguistics. Starting from the definition of “sociolinguistics” given by the philosopher Adam Schaff, the paper examines in particular the notion of “critical sociolinguistics” as theorized by the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. The basis of the social dimension of language are to be found in what Rossi-Landi calls “social reproduction” which regards both verbal and non-verbal signs. Saussure’s notionof langue can be considered in this way, with reference not (...) only to his Course of General Linguistics, but also to his Harvard Manuscripts.The paper goes on trying also to understand Roland Barthes’s provocative definition of semiology as a part of linguistics (and not vice-versa) as well asdeveloping the notion of communication-production in this perspective. Some articles of Roman Jakobson of the sixties allow us to reflect in a manner which wenow call “socio-semiotic” on the processes of transformation of the “organic” signs into signs of a new type, which articulate the relationship between organicand instrumental. In this sense, socio-linguistics is intended as being sociosemiotics, without prejudice to the fact that the reference area must be human,since semiotics also has the prerogative of referring to the world of non-human vital signs.Socio-linguistics as socio-semiotics assumes the role of a “frontier” science, in the dual sense that it is not only on the border between science of language andthe anthropological and social sciences, but also that it can be constructed in a movement of continual “crossing frontiers” and of “contamination” betweenlanguages and disciplinary environments. (shrink)

The contribution that may come from the general science of signs, semiotics, to the planning and development of education and learning at all levels, from early schooling through to university education and learning should not be neglected. As Umberto Eco claims in the “Introduction” to the Italian edition of his book Semiotica and Philosophy of Language (1984: xii, my trans.), “[general semiotics] is philosophical in nature, because it does not study a particular system, but posits the general categories in light (...) of which different systems can be compared. And for general semiotics philosophical discourse is neither advisable nor urgent: it is simply constitutive.” To the title of their book Semiotic Theory of Learning, at the centre of our attention in the present text, Andrew Stables, Winfried Nöth, Alin Olteanu, Sébastien Pesce, and Eetu Pikkarainen, rightly add the subtitle New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education. This multivoiced contribution to research in learning and education in a semiotic framework has a unifying reference in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, but without disregarding an array of other distinguished exponents of the teaching and education sciences from different disciplines, semioticians and philosophers alike. This book, a polyphonic effort, with its appeal to “act otherwise,” and to do so investing in learning and education, no doubt makes a significant contribution in such a direction: education for transformation, for humanizing social change. Beyond evidencing what to us are particularly interesting aspects of the topics under discussion in Semiotic Theory of Learning, we also propose to continue and amplify this multivoiced dialogue. While highlighting still other aspects and contributions made by the same semioticians and philosophers presented by the authors of this book, involving such figures as Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, etc., we have further introduced other voices made to resound throughout, whether directly or indirectly, like that of Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Marcel Danesi, Augusto Ponzio, and Genevieve Vaughan. (shrink)