Semioethics and global communication

1 Semiotics from illusion to reality

Paul Cobley begins his “Introduction” to Part I, “Understanding semiotics,” in The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, 2010, with the question “What is semiotics?” He responds by referring to Thomas A. Sebeok, observing that, with respect to the “usual” answer, that is, “semiotics is the study of the sign,” Sebeok, a “key figure” in the development of semiotics with Peirce and Saussure, preferred another definition, “semiotics is the study of the difference between illusion and reality” (3).

We believe that this “definition” works when referred to the evolution of semiotics from Saussurean sémiologie to global semiotics as conceived by Sebeok himself. But it works just as well, indeed really well, when we pass – and this is our focus – from the conception of communication as exchange, which is an illusory and long-outdated conception, to the real situation of communication not only as exchange, but also before and after exchange, that is, communication as production, exchange, consumption, in other words, what communication effectively is today (Ponzio 2022b). This is communication in globalization, the reality of communication that semiotics is called to address in spite of the persistence of illusory ideas about communication (Petrilli 2008a, 2008b, 2016a).

With “global semiotics” Sebeok’s merit is his having questioned semiology and the conception of communication as consisting of messages passing from emitter to receiver (Sebeok 2001a, 2001b, 2003; see Cobley 2011; Cobley et al. 2011). Thus conceived, communication is limited to the sphere of the intentional, the arbitrary, and the conventional, and to anthroposemiosis. But communication is an altogether different phenomenon and far broader than is presented on the basis of the emitter, receiver, code, and message schema, as an object, that is, passing from one point to another. Already in his 1961 book, Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune (Rossi-Landi 1998; cf. “Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio,” in Cobley 2010: 308–309), Ferruccio Rossi-Landi took a critical stand toward this way of conceiving communication, which he ironically baptized “postal package communication” (cf. Ponzio 1990, 1993, 2008a).

In today’s world, a world characterized by globalization – the “human” world, but the “natural” world as well considering how we have anthropized the planet – communication does not only carry out a dominant role in the intermediate phase, that of circulation and exchange, the market. Thanks to progress in technology, automation, and computerization, communication also dominates the production and consumption phases – the production of commodities and also their consumption. In globalization, the consumption of commodities is fundamentally the consumption of communication: in other words commodities are messages, but messages too are commodities. The entire reproduction cycle is communication, and, vice versa, communication coincides with the reproduction cycle. So in globalization, communication and social reproduction converge. More precisely, communication today is the production, exchange, and consumption of communication itself, where communication also includes the communication-transferal of energy, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, etc. Consumption, the final phase in social reproduction, is the condition for the reproduction cycle to continue, for extended production. Thus described, communication is characterized as communication–production (Ponzio 1996, 1999).

Clearly communication is the supporting structure of the current reproduction system; indeed, all of social reproduction is communication. The European Commission, for example, is perfectly aware of this, beginning from Jacques Delors’ White paper on growth, competitiveness, employment, published in 1994. In this document, the development of European industry, European productivity, is based on communication at a world level as the pathway to competitiveness.

There is no doubt that in the reproduction cycle today, communication involves the circulation and exchange of commodities but is not limited to the circulation/exchange phase. Production is communication – not only in the sense that it occurs through communication and its networks (e.g. communication of raw materials through railways, roadways, pipelines, etc.), but in the sense that production too converges with communication – automation, teleproduction, telework, learning, and training (e.g. to stay updated with progress in technology, etc.). Furthermore, consumption, the third phase in the reproduction cycle, is not only consumption of commodities through communication (circulation of commodities, mass media communication, advertisement, etc.), but is also consumption of communication; consumption is communication (think of the global consumption of mobiles, television programs, commodity-messages in training, the professions, free time).

In a global communication world, war too is “communicated” as an essential part of the reproduction cycle: since the 1991 Gulf war, war is generally qualified as “preventive war,” “just and necessary war,” the “extrema ratio.” War, most recently described as a “special military operation,” has even been described as “humanitarian intervention,” a way of exporting “freedom and democracy.” War finds a response in war, war on war, thereby perpetuating what is intended to be eliminated. In global communication–production this means recovering and perpetuating the reproduction cycle of the war industry in terms that are ever more sophisticated: “infinite war” – as though in all this the end of the human species were not at stake (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2021, 2005: 491–494).

2 From ideologies as illusory planning to the reality of dominant ideo-logic

The centrality of “immaterial work” today recalls Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s position of the 1960s. “Immaterial work” is a widespread mass media expression and rather unfortunate insofar as it implies a vulgar conception of “material.” In any case, the notion of “immaterial work” reminds us of Rossi-Landi’s concept of “linguistic work” and the connection he established between material production and linguistic production and between linguistics and economics (Rossi-Landi 1977 [1975], 2016). At the time, this connection appeared to some as rather eccentric or as a mere similitude (Petrilli 1987, 2004, 2018; Ponzio 2008a).

Linguistics and economics is the title of a book by Rossi-Landi, first published in 1975 thanks to Thomas A. Sebeok (as Part Eight of Volume XII of Current trends in linguistics with the title Linguistics and adjacent arts and sciences, and subsequently in 1977; the original Italian edition by Rossi-Landi was published posthumously, see Rossi-Landi 2016). Rossi-Landi considered the general science of signs as a theoretical place capable of overcoming separatism among the sciences. From this perspective, he intended to investigate the relations that connect verbal production and exchange and material production and exchange:

I attempt to unite two totalities, linguistic production and material production, in a vaster totality, to then proceed to indicate its structures. (Rossi-Landi 2011 [1972]: 288)

Saussure, author of Cours de linguistique générale (1916), also relates linguistics to economics. But Saussure refers to economy as conceived by marginalism, which looks at the market without considering the social relations of production at the foundation. Rossi-Landi distances himself from this perspective throughout the whole course of his research from Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato (2003 [1968]) – the title in itself indicating the intention of considering together the characteristics specific to the human being as loquens and laborans, the speaking animal and the working animal – through to Linguistics and economics (1977 [1975]) and the essays collected in the last book published before his death (in May 1985), Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni (2006 [1985]). Rossi-Landi studies the phenomena of language with the categories of economic science, but from the Ricardian-Marxian phase of the latter’s development.

This means developing the Marxian approach to commodities which involves considering the latter as a fact of communication and not as resulting from relations among things. Political economy is thus described as part of the general science of signs, semiotics. Unlike marginalistic economics, the Marxian approach to language and communication extends beyond the mere level of exchange and linguistic use (the level of the linguistic market) to examine the social relations of linguistic production (the social relations of linguistic work).

In this framework, Rossi-Landi dedicated a large and important essay to the study of the relation between material work and linguistic work, first published in Ideologie 16–17, a journal he founded in the summer of 1967 (with Mario Sabbatini), and which he directed through to 1972, when it ended (cf. Ponzio 2021b: 29–74). The essay was titled “Omologia della riproduzione sociale” and was subsequently published in Semiotica e ideologia (2011 [1972]: 43–103; on ideology and social reproduction, see also Rossi-Landi 2005 [1978]). This essay was then reproposed and developed in Linguistics and economics (1977 [1975]) and again in Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni (1985). More precisely, Rossi-Landi was interested in the homological relation between material artifacts and linguistic artifacts, according to a method of analysis he described as the “homological method.”

Rossi-Landi’s method consists in identifying relations of similarity not in the immediate and surface order, as occurs with analogy, but in the genetic and structural order, homologies, being a question of identifying similarities among objects generally considered to be separate, part of different spheres of existence, or of different disciplinary spheres: material artifacts and linguistic artifacts can be considered as part of the same totality insofar as they both result from human work. The homological method contributes to critiquing the tendency to hypostatize parts separated from the totality they belong to constitutively. In the same way, it contributes to the project for interrogating and overcoming separatism among the sciences.

The homological element breaks with specializations: it obliges one to keep account of different things simultaneously, it disturbs the independent play of separate sub-totalities, it recovers a vaster totality, whose laws are not those of its parts. In other words, the homological method is an antiseparatistic and reconstructive method, as such undesirable to the specialists. (Rossi-Landi 2006 [1985]: 53, our Eng. trans.)

Globalized communication–production has confirmed Rossi-Landi’s interpretation of semiotics. And to evoke Sebeok’s formula once again, as the study of communication, semiotics effectively contributes to understanding the “difference between illusion and reality.”

Rossi-Landi had already foreseen what reality is today, that work itself was undergoing a metamorphosis: as occurs in multimedia, a symbol of current developments in communication–production, and as occurs in the work sphere where, too, linearity gives way to interactivity. The linear and hierarchical organization of work is being supplanted by co-participation, interactivity, interfunctionality, and modularity; the structures of organization are becoming more flexible, which favors innovation and inventiveness.

With the digital revolution the division between manual work and intellectual work is no longer relevant. Until not long ago, “linguistic work” and “non-linguistic work” commonly appeared as two distant and separate realities, with researchers like Rossi-Landi (toward the end of the 1960s) looking for connections and homologies. These two realities have now come together in the computer (cf. Petrilli 2021b: 75–105).

Rossi-Landi was already aware that the computer, a unit formed of hardware and software, of material work and artifacts, and of linguistic work and artifacts, is an emblem of the connection. With his studies of the 1960s on linguistic work, the market and linguistic capital and on the homology with “material work,” he had already foreseen what today is obvious concerning the determinant role of communication and of so-called “immaterial resources” in the productive process. The programmatic assertion of the centrality of “immaterial work,” “immaterial resource,” “immaterial capital,” and “immaterial investment” for development and competitiveness in the so-called knowledge society (see the European Commission, beginning from Delor’s “white book”) proves how right Rossi-Landi’s analyses were. However, by contrast with dominant ideology, Rossi-Landi conducted his investigations – based on the notion of “linguistic work” – in a critical key.

Beginning from his book Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato (snubbed by human science specialists as a hybrid in critique of the language sciences and critique of political economy) and based on the connection identified between communication and production, Rossi-Landi formulated the thesis that the concept of “dominant class” called to be redefined (see Rossi-Landi 2005 [1978]). According to Rossi-Landi the dominant class is the class that controls communication, communication as it presents itself today inextricably connected to production and profit. In Semiotica e ideologia, published for the first time in 1972, he had already proposed the following definition: “the class that has control over the emission and circulation of verbal and nonverbal messages forming a given community” (2011 [1972]: 203–204, our trans.).

Rossi-Landi’s analysis is highly topical in the context of global communication, where he also identifies a close connection between communication and ideology (Petrilli 2019b; Ponzio 2018). This is no simple task considering that “ideology” in Rossi-Landi’s definition is “social planning” and that, in globalization, ideology as social planning pervades the entire reproduction cycle. In other words, dominant ideology, that is, prevailing ideology today, is functional to global and globalized social reproduction, wholly supportive of the reality of communication–production without the least inclination for the “linguistic work” of critique in any radical sense of the term “critique.” Dominant ideology tends to identify with the logic of capitalist production in its current phase of development, thus appearing as a sort of “ideo-logic” which has generated the idea of the “end of ideologies” between the idola fori and idola theatri of our time (Petrilli and Ponzio 2019b).

The ideology functional to society today identifies with the being of this particular social system as the communication–production system; ideology identifies with the being of communication as it characterizes social reproduction (Ponzio 2004a, 2021a; Schaff 2022). Supported by dominant ideology, this being seems necessary, inevitable, unmodifiable. At the present-day high level of developments in the economic, cultural, and scientific-technological spheres, according to a growth process conceived in linear terms, this social system would seem to be connatural to humans. But all this is delusory, a widespread, indeed worldwide, illusion promoted by dominant ideology (Bonfantini et al. 2006; Ponzio 1993).

The reality is that maintaining the being of communication as it now presents itself in communication–production stands in net contrast with social reproduction itself and with the reproduction of life over the planet. Maintaining the being of communication–production as it presents itself today is destructive. Indeed, reproduction of the same production cycle is destructive (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: 526–527, 555´–557).

The productive cycle destroys

1. machines, which are constantly replaced with new machines – not because they are worn out but because they are no longer competitive;

2. jobs, because the production cycles make way for automation, which further increases unemployment;

3. products on the market, in which new forms of consumerism are elicited that are completely ruled by the logic of reproducing the same productive cycle;

4. pre-existing products, which once purchased would otherwise exhaust the demand, and which in any case are designed to become immediately outdated and obsolete so that new and similar products can be introduced to the market; and

5. commodities and markets, which are unable to resist competition any further in the context of the global communication–production system.

The conatus essendi of communication–production destroys natural environments and life forms. It also destroys different types of economic systems just as it destroys cultural differences, which tend to be eliminated by the processes of homologation operated by market logic. In today’s global communication–production world, needs and habits of behavior are rendered identical (although the possibility of satisfying such needs is never identical); even desires and the imaginary tend to be homologated and rendered identical. Also, the conatus essendi of communication–production destroys traditions and cultural patrimonies that conflict with or impede the logic of development, productivity, and competition, or that are simply useless or non-functional to such logic (Petrilli and Ponzio 2015, 2017b).

Communication–production tends to destroy those productive forces which escape the logic of production. It penalizes intelligence, inventiveness, and creativity, which are overruled by or subjected to “market reason” (which cannot be avoided at a time when production must necessarily invest in “human resources”).

The destructive character of today’s production system is also manifest in the fact that it produces growing areas of underdevelopment as the very condition for development, areas of human exploitation and misery to the point of non-survival. This logic underpins the expanding phenomenon of migration, which “developed” countries are no longer able to contain owing to objective internal space limitations – and no doubt this problem has reached greater dimensions today than in earlier phases of the development of the global social system (cf. Petrilli 2017).

Worldwide communication–production is destructive also because it is the communication–production of war. War constantly calls for new and flourishing markets for the communication–production of conventional and unconventional weapons. War also requires widespread approval acknowledging it as just and necessary, as “preventive war,” a necessary means of defense against the growing danger of the menacing “other,” a means of achieving respect for the rights of one’s “identity” and of one’s “difference” (Petrilli and Ponzio 2019a; Ponzio 2022a).

But the truth is that identities and differences are neither threatened nor destroyed by the “other.” The real menace is today’s social system, which encourages and promotes identity and difference while undermining them, rendering them fictitious, phantasmal. And this is exactly why we cling to identity values so passionately, so unreasonably, according to a logic that fits to perfection the logic of the communication–production of war – and for the war industry, as is more than obvious, all this works to perfection (cf. Petrilli 2014a: 326–330).

3 Semiotics as semioethics

Globalization of communication–production does not only involve the extension of communication channels across the planet and expansion of the market. It also concerns englobement of human life into communication–production circuits, whether in the form of development, wellbeing and consumerism or of underdevelopment, poverty, impossible survival; in the form of health or illness; bulimia or famine; integration or emargination; employment or unemployment; migration functional to the work force characteristic of emigration or that connected with the demand for hospitality connected with migration as it presents itself today and most often denied; whether in peace or war; whether connected with the circulation of legal commodities or with the trafficking of illegal commodities, from “drugs” to “non-conventional” arms.

As anticipated, englobement is not limited to human life alone. All of life over the planet, “la zolla che ci fa tanto feroci” (“this petty area o’er the which we stride So fiercely,” Dante, Paradise, XXII) is implicated (indeed compromised and put at risk) in communication–production.

Today more than ever, the space inhabited by humans cannot be fenced. All environments are part of a broader environment. This is so on the level of nature, of the semiobiosphere, and on a historical-social level, of the anthroposemiosphere. Obviously these two levels (as evidenced by ecological crisis) are not separable: there do not exist natural environments that are not somehow implicated in the historico-social process. The situation is that of exposition, of necessarily being exposed, subject to the outside.

Two factors explain this interpermeability among spaces, territories, environments, architectures: technological development and worldwide expansion of the market. The first factor is now such that the effect of a human action can reverberate over the entire planet (it will suffice to think of the possible effects of nuclear energy). The second factor involves dependency of any product on a totality that is far broader with respect to the market relative to those same products and to the entire national market. What is involved, instead, are the structures of world exchange overall. But these two factors are in turn parts, the surface of a more profound structure: that of the social relations of production.

We are beginning to realize ever more that if semiotics, according to the usual definition, is “the study of the sign – full stop” (Cobley 2010: 3), then it must also take the responsibility of helping to understand the meaning and sense of communication–production at a global level.

If semiotics recovers its initial vocation as semeiotics (beginning with Hippocrates and subsequently Galen), that is, as symptomatology which studies symptoms of illness for the sake of keeping life healthy, it may well deserve to be defined as “the study of the difference between illusion and reality.” We propose the term “semioethics” to name an approach, an attitude toward signs and their uses now necessary more than ever before in the context of globalization (Petrilli and Ponzio 2010: 150–162; see also Petrilli and Ponzio 2003; Petrilli 2014b: 127–251). Semioethics is also an answer to the question regarding the destiny of semiosis proposed by Sebeok (1991). The intention is to evidence the responsibility of semiotics toward semiosis, consequently proposing that Sebeok’s “global semiotics,” which is founded in the general science of signs as conceived by Peirce, now be developed in terms of “semioethics.” This is a far cry from dominant trends in twentieth-century semiotics that reduce the study of signs, verbal and nonverbal, to a question of message exchange viewed separately from the historico-social relations of production processes and from the relation between signs and values. On several occasions, we have noted the inadequacy of such trends which imply a view of the human subject reduced to mere exchange value (cf. Petrilli 2014b: 152).

The expression “semioethics” refers to what is commonly understood by “ethics,” not in the sense of undersigning a moral code but of the responsibility of each individual toward every other, including the planet that hosts us. Moreover, “semioethics” also recovers the term “ethics” as understood by Emmanuel Levinas (see the entry “Emmanuel Levinas,” in Cobley 2010: 257). In Levinas, “ethics” refers to the condition of inextricable intrigue in the relation with the other, as involvement of one’s own life in the life of the other (see Levinas 1967; Ponzio 2019).

As “biosemiotics,” Thomas A. Sebeok’s “global semiotics” has evidenced the semiosical interconnection among all lifeforms over the planet. It has also shown how “anthroposemiotics” is involved in the “interconnection,” “intrigue” to recall the language of Levinas. As a result, after being identified by semiology as the general science of signs, anthroposemiotics today is aware of its status as one among other special semiotics with which it is inextricably entangled. The special semiotics are no longer identified as sectorial languages internal to anthroposemiotics, but rather as connected to different lifeforms in the biosphere upon which human life is dependent (Petrilli and Ponzio 2002, 2007, 2011).

The situation of compromission and involvement, of human responsibility, cannot be ignored. The human animal is a “semiotic animal” (Deely et al. 2005), which means to say it is not only capable of semiosis like all other lifeforms, but also of “semiotics,” where “semiotics” is understood in the sense of the capacity to use signs to reflect upon signs and deliberate. Nor can this situation of intrigue, of co-implication, be ignored by semiotics as the general science of signs and communication, in particular by semioethics as we understand it (Petrilli 2010; Petrilli and Ponzio 2017a).

To live and operate in the illusion of isolation is no longer possible. All totalities are part of larger totalities. The capacity to understand the internal characteristics of a totality, its logic, needs, equilibria, and the consequent possibility of planning a new totality does not simply depend on the capacity for analysis internal to the totality. There are no shelters, barriers, walls, boundaries, able to isolate and guarantee security and autonomy: this is the situation today (see Petrilli 2021a).

4 Semiotics, humanities, and education

This section takes its cue from Paul Cobley’s essay “What the humanities are for – a semiotic perspective” (in Bankov and Cobley 2017: 3–25), which opens Section 1, “Semiotics in the world and academia” in the volume Semiotics and its masters. To Cobley’s arguments concerning the contribution from semiotics and the important role of the humanities for education and training, we add the following.

Among the human sciences referred to by semiotics, philosophy, in particular the philosophy of language, is an essential actor. On this account, we undersign Umberto Eco’s words in Semiotics and philosophy of language when, on discussing semiotics, he claims:

I believe its nature is philosophical. This is because [semiotics] does not study a particular system, but because it posits the general categories in light of which different systems can be compared. And for general semiotics; philosophical discourse is neither advisable nor urgent, but simply constitutive. (Eco 1984: 12; our Eng. trans.)

Education is an essential condition for a critical vision of the role carried out by human individuals in verbal and nonverbal cultural programs and in social reproduction overall. In this context, an important part is carried out by the humanities (see Danesi 1998, in particular Section 5, “Implications for education,” 61–70, dedicated to the implications of global semiotics for teaching; see also Danesi et al. 2004).^[1]

On the basis of Paul Cobley’s observation à propos deployment of the concept of Umwelt by contemporary semiotics, we will begin by underlining the central importance of media – multimedia computers, iPads, tablets, etc. – in terms of instrumentation and as a privileged reference point in the school context. The objects just mentioned are only instruments of learning which as such can be introduced into educational programs, subordinately to their function with respect to the goals and aims of the programs. Like other traditional instruments and like audiovisuals (introduced more recently into the school context), such things as computers and recourse to multimedia are part of the technology now used for education, but do not represent the totality. In comparison to traditional educational instruments, they are not “more efficient” in an absolute sense, but only relatively to the goals set at each occurrence, programmatically. New media increase the number of languages the student is exposed to, and from which further interpreted and interpretant signs can be drawn. The sign network provided by immediate context as much as the remote context is considerably amplified, with a corresponding increase in interpretative and referential potential.

The introduction of multimediality as much as multimodality in the school context is perfectly in line with linguistic education planned as education to plurilingualism and the dialogization of languages. The languages forming our culture are multiple. Once they become multimedial and multimodal thanks to technology, they come together in a totality where each supports the other and carries out different functions to a common end. But all instruments must necessarily be employed in “orchestral” terms, ready to operate at the right moment, to carry out a special role didactically in the performance of a pre-established program. And the teacher is the person who can arrange the various didactic technologies, optimizing integration and interaction.

Technological progress not only demands and elicits amplification of the knowledge of languages, but also their interaction, mutual translation, opening, to dialogue. Audiovisuals and multimedia, analogical and digital multimedia integrate and mutually support each other, and participate in the construction of texts that are not homogeneous in terms of the sign material which constitute them. Nor do new technologies establish relations of mutual exclusion between words (whether written or oral), images, books, audiovisuals, photography, visual arts, graphics, design, word processors, and multimedia. This is a mystification resulting from prejudice and misinformation. On the contrary, multimediality favors the proliferation of different languages, thus enhancing the potential for dialogue, the acquisition of knowledge, and new lines of development (Petrilli 2016b, 2020).

The multimedial hypertext potentiates the human capacity for writing, which contributions from semiotics have shown to be quite different in its various manifestations from writing in the sense of transcription (Petrilli 2016a: 35–37, 52–58, 233–264; Ponzio 2015, 2016).

Writing as we understand it here corresponds to modeling procedure, proper to human language (as distinct from speech, according to the distinction established by Sebeok, see, e.g. Sebeok 1986 and 1990; see also Sebeok and Danesi 2000). Writing involves any type of sign, the human body, external physical means, and all may be employed to confer sense and construct multiple possible worlds. With this approach, the prejudice about the “present-day crisis of writing,” largely due to confusing “writing” with the “written sign,” “writing” with “transcription,” is at last proven to be a fallacy (Petrilli 2019a; Ponzio 2004b).

Writing as modeling procedure, as the deconstruction and reconstruction of sense, as inventiveness and experimentation, is all but in crisis in the present day and age. Writing is developed and empowered by new technologies and the expressive possibilities they make available, including through image and sound and the generation of multimedial hypertexts (Ponzio 2008b). Thanks to new technology, this is now the “civilization of writing” and not the “civilization of the image” (which is reductive). Only exchanging writing for transcription and the false opposition between writing and image can lead to speaking of the “crisis of writing,” of the “loss” or “debasement” of “writing,” well and truly a misunderstanding (Petrilli 2013; Ponzio 2017).

To recall Paul Cobley’s considerations in “What the humanities are for – a semiotic perspective” (in Bankov and Cobley 2017: 3–17), we believe that the human sciences and semiotics are called to carry out a crucially important role in terms of the work of critique and demystification for a better understanding of the function of “human resources” and “immaterial work” in the development of globalized communication–production (Petrilli 2014a).

While the wealth represented by intelligence, communication, languages, formation, innovation, research through the increase in and improvement of social relations is widely recognized, all this continues to be measured in terms of “work time” and invested as a function of profit. So the current social production system – where investment in “human resources” is necessary – no less than mortifies intelligence, inventiveness, creativity, by trapping and subjecting them to “market reason.” The ambition is to measure human intelligence and creativity in hours and not only when it is a question of remunerating their performance in the employment phase, but even when evaluating them, as occurs in the education system, at university, in terms of “credits” (CFU).

Education and training are oriented as a function of communication, or better communication–production. In other words, education is understood as the capacity for organizing oneself, for acquiring undated information, for renewing one’s competencies in the communication–production circuits of merchandise, where all is functional to the reproduction and amplification of the communication–production system itself, and ultimately to profit. Thanks to new technologies and in whatever collective sphere, professional identity and relative competition are functional to the market. And paradoxically all this contradicts the non-identity community which global communication inevitably involves, where indifference and disinterest toward the other is ever more difficult to maintain.

The capacity to critique, question, imagine, for relations that are other is not foreseen by education functional to already constituted social reality, to social relations as they are, to reproduction of the identical. Reaching such goals requires an ongoing effort, lifelong learning and education. The latter is intended to favor adaptability to the “new.” In truth, however, despite new technologies, new information, and relative infrastructure, the “new” is no more than reproduction of the identical, amplified.

This vision of education is ideological and involves reducing the human being to instrumentality, to the status of a “resource” to be exploited, capital to valorize. Education thus conceived promotes learning for the entire course of “active life,” that is, productive life, life still functional to reproduction of the same production system. This vision of learning and education is wholly internal to the current communication–production world, where values considered fundamental are development, efficiency, competitiveness (through to the extrema ratio of war).

An important task for the humanities, and thus for semiotics, is to recover the sense of humanism of humanitas. Humanitas does not derive from homo, which is wrong etymologically, but rather from humus (the earth made fertile thanks to joint collaboration). Humus is also at the origin of humilitas: humanitas and humilitas, the same etymology.

5 Semiotics and humanism

Again, this section is occasioned Paul Cobley’s “Semiotics in the world and academia,” with special reference to § 5. “Anti-humanism” (in Bankov and Cobley 2017). Evoking Louis Althusser (1969) (Petrilli and Ponzio 2015) and the problem of the relation between humanism and Marxism, Cobley reflects on the relation between humanism and antihumanism (see also Cobley 2007). The problem of whether Marxism is a form of humanism or antihumanism leads back to an important debate which took place during the mid-1960s. Initially, this debate only involved French communist intellectuals. Subsequently, however, it spread beyond France and its national boundaries, in circles with a similar political orientation and at a time when Stalinism essentially was collapsing. What follows are our considerations on the theme of humanism and antihumanism (see also Petrilli 2014a: 220–225).

There is no doubt that after what various authors have demonstrated, including in the semiotic sphere, apart from Althusser (Cobley refers to Peirce, Sebeok, Hoffmeyer, Brier, Badiou, and Deely), it is no longer possible to place “the individualized human at the centre of existence” (Cobley 2007: 14). However, this is true of the individual taken abstractly, and not of the concrete individual, defined by Marx in his VIth Thesis on Feuerbach, as “a set of social relations” (das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse). An exchange of ideas between Adam Schaff and Lucien Sève was published on the topic in the French journal L’homme et la société in the early 1970s (for details concerning the translation of the VIth thesis, see Schaff 2022; see also the entry “Adam Schaff” in Cobley 2010: 313–314; and Petrilli 2014a: 211–220).

As maintained by Schaff on several occasions and in various writings, “man” as understood by socialist humanism (recovering Marx’s original conception, which had been misinterpreted, even falsified by so-called “orthodox Marxism” functional to “real socialism”) is not man in general, an abstract entity, but the concrete individual, effectively living in given historical conditions (see Schaff 1965, 1974, 1977, 1997).

In contrast to the idea of “two Marxes” – that is, the Marx of “humanist socialism,” the ideologue and “pre-Marxist” Marx of his early works, and the Marx of “scientific socialism,” of his later works, who maintains that the real historical subjects are not individuals, but social classes – Schaff brings the problem of the human individual back to the center of Marxian thought (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2012; Ponzio 2002).

On this account too, the correct information is necessary to evidence the humanistic nature of the Marxian conception of socialism and what it means today. For both the young Marx and the mature Marx, there is no higher value than that of the human being. This is not the human being conceived egoistically in terms of identity, but rather in its indissoluble connection to others. The single individual’s difference materializes in non-indifference to the difference of others; the human individual’s “greatest wealth,” that of the “humanely rich,” is the “other man,” which is the message launched by Marx.

In terms of humanism, this conception of socialism presents many spaces in common with other humanistic trends, both of the religious and lay orders, opening it to ecumenical social dialogue, to “ecumenical humanism” – the expression is Schaff’s (1994). Given social emergency, it is now necessary to understand the demand for “ecumenical humanism” as Schaff has described it (cf. Petrilli and Ponzio 2021: 25–27, 190–193, 311–357). This is a question of responsible and far-sighted planning, called to address economic and cultural reality as it is transforming irreversibly in globalization.

In 1965, Schaff published Marksizm a jednostka ludzka (Marxism and the human individual), where he argues for the importance of recognizing the problem of the human individual as essential to Marxism from both a theoretical and political perspective (see Schaff et al. 1975). His claim is that socialism can only be effectively reached in terms of humanism. Limitations on individual freedom in socialist countries can be explained and eventually justified in many different ways, but they cannot be attributed to the substantial character of socialist society with respect to which it is a deviation.

As mentioned, an important debate took place in the early 1970s between Schaff and Sève – the “orthodox” philosopher representing the French communist party. The immediate topic of discussion concerned the correct translation of the Marxian expression “das menschliche Wesen.” Schaff interpreted the expression as the “human being,” that is, the concrete human individual; Sève instead as “human essence” (which corresponds to the official translations of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach) (the writings connected to this debate are collected in Italian translation in Schaff 2022). Social relations make the human being, this is Marx’s stand, and not human essence as Sève maintains on the basis of a mistaken translation.

Another book by Schaff relevant to the question of the human individual relatively to humanism as advocated by socialism is Entfremdung als soziales Phänomen (Alienation as social phenomenon, 1977). He reiterates the centrality of the problem of alienation in Marxist theory and in socialism. The problem of alienation had already been addressed by Schaff in earlier writings, as he considered it closely connected to the question of humanism. On the topic of socialist humanism particularly significant in his 1977 book is the chapter titled “Socialism and alienation.” Schaff lucidly analyzes countries affected by alienation despite proclaiming socialism. Interesting to observe is also how he contrasts “socialist humanism” – with its focus on creating the structural conditions necessary to end the exploitation of human work – to “humanistic socialism,” which, based on vague moralism, leaves current social relations unmodified.

Schaff paid a high cost for the critical orientation that characterized his theoretical work from his early publications. His meditations on the question of socialist humanism and on the relation between Marxism and humanism, his critique of orthodox Marxism and of real socialism, brought heavy consequences in terms of his life as a militant communist in socialist Poland.

À propos “humanism” and the human individual, reference to Emmanuel Levinas is also relevant here. His interpretation of the term “ethics” (inextricable intrigue, entanglement that bonds one to the other) has entered our “semioethics.” The fact that Levinas attended the famous meeting between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos significantly influenced his own conception of “humanism” (cf. Ponzio 1995, 2006). It led to his awareness that a certain type of humanism had come to an end, that is, traditional humanism traceable in neo-Kantism, and to the demand on his part to radicalize philosophical interrogation on the sense of man. Humanisme de l’autre homme is the significant title of a book by Levinas, published in 1972, a collection of essays from the 1960s, representing an important phase in his meditations on the topic (see Levinas 1972).

In 1951 Levinas published another important essay “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” (Levinas 1991; now in English translation in Levinas 1998: 1–12), where he shows how the relation with the other escapes Heideggerian ontology. “It is not in terms of being in general that he comes toward me,” says Levinas (1998: 9). What does come to me from the other person in terms of being in general is what offers itself to my understanding and my possession: “I understand him in terms of his history, his environment, his habits,” but “what escapes understanding in him is himself, the being” (1998: 9). The “other” cannot be reconducted to an “Us,” it cannot be reduced to “being with,” to the Heideggerian Miteinandersein; the relationship with the other is not an ontological relation. The relation with the other neither consists in understanding him like an object, nor, as a being (étant), in letting him be (être). The essay “L’ontologie est-elle fondamentale?” ends with these conclusions, which prefigure Levinas’s 1961 book Totalité et infini, for which they act as a premise. Another significant statement with which Levinas concludes this essay is that the human only offers itself to a relation that has no power. His words would seem to respond to the 1929 Davos meeting between Heidegger and Cassirer and to announce his 1972 book, L’humanisme de l’autre homme: “The human gives itself only to a relationship that is not a being able” (Levinas 1991: 11).

In Humanisme de l’autre homme Levinas characterizes the individuality, the singularity, of each human as being outside the different identities. The individuality of each one is made to consist in responsibility without escape, without alibis for the other (autrui) (Petrilli 2022; Ponzio 2020).

The humanity of each single individual comes from the other; it does not derive from some essence of the human person, from belonging to the genre Homo, but rather it is responsibility for the other. Singularity, uniqueness, the self, and freedom are reached in the relation with the other, in the condition of unreplaceability, non-permutability, of exposition, in extreme vulnerability, non-indifference, in answering for and to the other. This responsibility is unlimited, without guarantees, without alibis, and as such has nothing to do with the responsibilities assumed or rejected in the world, with responsibilities connected with commitments made, with pacts and contracts; it does not concern the human person understood as the individual of a genre or as an entity situated in some ontological region. Nor does such responsibility concern others insofar as they are bonded to me based on belonging to some genre. This would involve the possibility of substitution and of reciprocity in the relation of responsibility.