Politiques de la sémiotique / The political stances of semiotics

Abstract

How does structural semiotics deal with the political field as an object of analysis ? The answer could be simple if only semiotics and politics did not constantly overlap. Indeed, the very models that have been developed in order to account for the construction of meaning (originally in narrative discourses and, today, in actual sociopolitical interactions) have in themselves a political bearing. Greimas’s standard narrative semiotics, based on manipulation, implicitly supported a view of society as a conciliation between democracy and the market. In comparison, the enlarged theory of interaction proposed today in socio-semiotics (conceived as an extension of Greimas’s approach) leads to advocate an almost entirely different political stance for the discipline, founded on the syntax of another regime of interaction and meaning, called adjustment. This regime favours ecologic rather than economic concerns, that is the recognition of the « other », at all levels — from interpersonal encounters to global policies regarding the environment —, as an equal subject whose potentialities should be respected and fulfilled, thus defining a condition for one’s own fulfilment. Endorsing such a view would mean, for semiotics, assuming and defending the political position which corresponds to the most advanced state of its theoretical development.