Longing for the past: a semiotic reading of the role of nostalgia in present-day consumption trends

Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to designate a pathological longing for distant homeland, the word “nostalgia” was soon rearticulated temporally, to refer to a lost epoch one yearns for as one's home. Nostalgia is not a new topic for semiotics. Emotion essentially stemming from absence, it epitomizes the semiotic mechanism: semiosis is the ontological result of something staying for something else, but nostalgia is the emotional result of it. Nostalgia – an essential figure in Greimas's structural outlook on passion, an umbrella concept in Baudrillard's mourning of reality behind the simulacra, and a key notion in Culler's and Frow's dissection of the semiotics of tourism – has become a buzz word in both critical and marketing studies, the former trying to unveil beneath it the foundations of ontology or the contradictions of postmodern society and the latter, seeking to exploit nostalgia as what critical theory could deem the last Trojan horse into the agency of the consumer. On the basis of a copious and manifold literature on nostalgia, the article hints at an unexplored direction: can one talk, today, of nostalgic trends of consumption in Europe? Where hipsters, vintage furniture, and retro TV channels are nothing but symptoms of an emerging mentality?     

To be or not to be Charlie Hebdo: ritual patterns of opinion formation in the social networks

The social sciences have mostly focused on the formation of social opinions from a semantic point of view: given a certain semantic field, interviews, statistics, and other analytical instruments are commonly deployed in order to map the distribution of views, their evolution, their conflicts and their agreements. Socio-semiotics, social semiotics, and the other semiotic branches that bear on social inquiry have contributed to the effort by providing semiotic grids of categorization. These grids too, however, have been mostly related to semantic contents circulating through societies and their cultures. The present article pursues a different hypothesis. After briefly recalling the events of 7–9 January 2015 in the Parisian area, the article seeks to survey and map the syntax of progressive differentiation of opinions circulating in the social networks about such events. Some patterns are identified and semiotically described: (1) cleavage; (2) comparative relativizing; (3) blurring sarcasm; (4) anonymity; (5) unfocused responsibility; (6) conspiracy thought. A new semiotic square is created to visually display these patterns, their positions, their relations, and their evolution.     

The Semiotics of Fundamentalist Authoriality

The essay seeks to single out, describe, and analyze the main semiotic features that compose the fundamentalist understanding of authoriality. Given a definition of authoriality as the series of semiotic dynamics that induce a reader to posit a genetic relation between an author and a text, the fundamentalist authoriality is characterized as displaying six main traits. First, centrality of the written text: in order to postulate a perfect coincidence between a transcendent intentio auctoris (intention of the author) and an immanent intentio lectoris (intention of the reader), fundamentalist exegetical and juridical hermeneutics must be anchored to a stable message, canonized into a written verbal text or into a corpus of written verbal texts. Second, fundamentalist authoriality rests on the assumption of the immutability and mono-centrism of the religious semiosphere that irradiates from the written text. Third, literalism, infallibility, and non-contradiction are attributed to the relation between the written text, its exegetical hermeneutics, and the pragmatic normative orders to which it gives rise. Fourth, fundamentalist authoriality rules out any potential duplicity of the operations that ‘extract’ meaning from religious texts. Fifth, the assumption of the immutability of the religious text leads to exclusion of any operation that might alter the form of both its expression and content, hence to stigmatization of translation. The sixth feature of fundamentalist authoriality encompasses all the previous ones: in fundamentalism, a religious text is not actually a text anymore, but a mirror, whose passive reflection of the exegete’s mind undermines the semiotic nature of the relation between the reader and the text.     

Intracultural Awareness in Legal Language—Silvio Berlusconi’s Iconography of Law

Against the assumption that legal and normative systems are coextensive with geopolitical units and national spaces, the article advocates for the need to study how different legal and normative semiospheres, within the same geopolitical unit and national space, often give rise to ‘normolects’ that are transversal to socio-economic classes, ethnicities, and cultural lifestyles. The concept of legal and normative ‘imaginaries’ is useful to come to terms with the legal and normative semiotic ideology of such normolects, including their non-verbal dimension and legal-normative semiotic ideologies. More generally, the article prompts legal scholars, and particularly semioticians of law, not to focus exclusively on inter-cultural awareness in legal-normative language but to concentrate also on intra-cultural awareness. As a case study, the article analyses a drawing through which the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi visualized and advertised for a bill of reform of the Italian judicial system by his Minister of Justice, Angelino Alfano. The semiotic analysis of this visual artifact casts new light on the controversial political and judicial figure of Mr Berlusconi. The drawing is read as a visual embodiment of the conflict between two different legal and normative ideologies within the present-day Italian political and judicial arena. The paradoxes that underpin this iconography of law and mar a rational confrontation of legal-normative arguments in contemporary Italy are uncovered.     

Criminal Law beyond the State: The European Model

This article will analyse two models of criminal law beyond the State, which are here termed ‘eunomic’ and ‘dialogic’. It will then focus on one case study, European criminal law, which was inherently ‘dialogic’ until the last decade of the past century but has now quite unique features. In accordance with classic liberal views, criminal law has always been conceptualised as one of the most salient attributes of the sovereign State. The monopoly on the use of violence was to be legitimised by the State's concern for the sphere of autonomy of the individual. It is submitted in this article that it is precisely this condition that is lacking in the current European model, which promotes security‐oriented paradigms of self‐fulfilment and effectiveness. However, criminal law, if properly conceived, could in theory function as a powerful vehicle of integration.     

The “first match” between high-tech entrepreneurial ventures and universities: the role of founders’ social ties

The Journal of Technology Transfer - This paper studies the collaborations between entrepreneurial ventures and universities by investigating the “first match”, namely, the probability...