Latour for Semiotics

Abstract

After highlighting the role played by the theory of signification in the development of an original research project aimed at exploring the paradoxes of a modernity that stubbornly strives to reaffirm the separation between nature and culture, denying the existence of those hybrids that it itself is unable to curb, it is now possible to change perspective, reversing the point of view assumed so far, focusing attention on the impact exerted by Latour’s work on contemporary semiotic research. There are at least three areas in which the dialogue outlined in the previous chapters appears most intense and potentially fruitful. A first area of study concerns the debate around an extended theory of enunciation, developed in parallel with the broadening of the phenomena of signification explored by contemporary semiotic research. A second direction starts from overcoming the nature/culture dichotomy and revolves around rethinking the relationship between semiotics and cultural anthropology, recognising the need to investigate the different modes of existence at play in contemporary phenomena by considering notions such as multinaturalism and internaturality. The third, finally, takes shape from the need to account for the sociosemiotic dimension inherent in artefacts, in their design, in the practices of their use, also in reference to the emerging signals of a new society of smart devices, marked by the irruption of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, technical and social innovations enabled by increasingly extensive, complex, and pervasive networks of hybrid agents.

5.1 Resumption and Relaunch of a Dialogue on the Search for Meaning

After highlighting the role played by the theory of signification in the development of an original research project aimed at exploring the paradoxes of a modernity that stubbornly strives to reaffirm the separation between nature and culture, denying the existence of those hybrids that it itself is unable to curb, it is now possible to change perspective, reversing the point of view assumed so far, focusing attention on the impact exerted by Latour’s work on contemporary semiotic research.

Following this approach, there are at least three areas in which the dialogue outlined in the previous chapters appears more intense and potentially fruitful.

A first field of study concerns the debate around an extended theory of enunciation, developed in parallel to the expansion of the phenomena of signification explored by contemporary semiotic research.

A second direction starts from the overcoming of the nature/culture dichotomy and revolves around the rethinking of the relationship between semiotics and cultural anthropology, recognizing the need to investigate the different modes of existence at play in contemporary phenomena considering notions such as multinaturalism and internaturality.

The third, finally, takes shape from the need to account for the sociosemiotic dimension inherent in artifacts, in their design, in the practices of their use, also with reference to the emerging signals of a “new society of devices”, marked by the irruption of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, technical and social innovations enabled by increasingly extensive, complex, and pervasive networks of hybrid agents.

5.2 Towards an Extended Notion of Enunciation

Latourian reflection on enunciation and modes of existence has aroused lively interest, fuelling reflection on the implications of rethinking these concepts for a theory of signification. Moreover, upon closer inspection, semiotics is widely involved in Latour’s work on modes of existence, to the point of manifesting itself, albeit implicitly, at every level.

I. In the enunciative conception on which the definitions of modes of existence are based, (II) in the trajectories that are defined as mediations capable of establishing beings and giving birth to meaning in action, (III) in the definition of a meta-mode of existence, that of the network [NET] which, as a direct descendant of the actor-network, is based on an actantial logic that allows subject and object to be traced back to a series of established positions and not to radical and absolute entities. (my trans.; Famy, 2017: 15)

Latour’s position towards semiotics, as developed in the previous sections, remains in any case on a dialectical plane, particularly regarding the centrality that, in his opinion, is still recognized by the latter to the linguistic-textual dimension of signification. Specifically (1996a), he comes to explicitly recognize semiotics as the only organon that can effortlessly maintain the diversity of modes of existence, allowing ethnomethodology to extend to metaphysics, but only at the price of resorting to the notions of language and text, a problematic restriction that should be overcome, extending to things themselves the too restrictive definitions of semiotics. This critical position is particularly evident and problematic in AIME, where the domain of language is not only relegated by Latour within one of the modes of existence, namely [FIC], but above all is reduced to the sole dimension of natural language, to the faculty of “saying”, to “speaking” rather than to the more general ability to produce meaning, to signify. A position such as this, in the current context of semiotic research appears decidedly reductive, as Fontanille (my trans.; 2017a: 51) effectively highlights:

It is not the option of semiotics today, which is instead interested in all semiotic regimes, regardless of the modes of expression and forms of textualization. Certainly, the terminology used (enunciation, utterance, textualization) testifies to the anchoring of this semiotics to research in the theory of language, but the definition, extension and use of these terms are not reduced nor reducible to verbal language and cover all observable manifestations of signification.

The evolution of semiotics testifies, in fact, to a significant expansion on the level of the phenomena of signification considered, with increasing attention, as we will see, directed to what can be defined as the “sense of modes of existence”.

First of all, it is important to reiterate that within the field of semiotics there has long been a broad debate that does not at all exclude the possibility of extending the notion of enunciation well beyond the strictly linguistic dimension of signification. As proof of this, as highlighted in the first part of this volume, are the perspective of sociosemiotics¹ advanced by Eric Landowski (1989), which assigns a central role in the phenomena of signification to interactions, and the work of Jean-François Bordron (2011) who postulates the presence of a semiotic dimension in the act of perception. Again, regarding the question of the relationship between linguistics and semiotics, it is necessary to highlight how Latour’s overcoming of the notion of débrayage as a projection of the categories of subject, space and time is correlated to the explicit distancing from the Saussurean notion of langue. This key concept,

entirely acceptable for a linguist or a semiotician, who needed to consider language as a system and to take speech acts as individual actualizations, to get rid of the army of sociologists, historians, psychologists, and critics who claimed to speak directly about the context of discourse (my trans.; Latour, 2017: 10)

is considered incompatible with the concept of existence, understood as a concatenation of actions of passage-transfer between actants. However, it is important to remember that the overcoming of the notion of langue occurred, in part, also within semiotic studies, when the enunciation was re-evaluated, within a broad debate on its different modes of articulation, as a decisive tool to account for the mechanisms of formation of cultures, of the meaning that is implied in objects, in spaces, in everyday life practices.²

5.3 The Centrality of the Notion of Enunciative Praxis

Within the debate generated by the progressive rethinking of a cornerstone of semiotic theory, a concept that has assumed a growing relevance is that of enunciative praxis, a principle that aims to bring the social dimension of culture within the textuality, thus postulating the presence of an intrinsic sociality of semiosis. This concept, originally developed within the project of a semiotics of passions (Greimas & Fontanille, 1991) to explore the complex issue of the link between the cultural component of passions and the different modes of their manifestation in signification, has been widely taken up and developed since the Nineties (Floch, 1995; Bertrand, 2000; Fontanille, 1994, 2017b; Fontanille & Zilberberg, 1998), to the point of prompting a reformulation (Marrone, 2003, 2007). The central idea is that the enunciation cannot be circumscribed only to the action of appropriation of the potentialities of the language by a subject or an individual anthropomorphic instance endowed with speech, but rather constitutes a decidedly more extensive process, attributable to a collective and impersonal instance that manifests itself through a series of culturally situated acts, in other words through a praxis that takes shape in the use of languages.

The theoretical perspective advanced with the introduction of enunciative praxis thus consists in placing at the centre of reflection no longer the transition from the system of language (langue) to its individual realization (parole), but rather the way in which the collective dimension of the semiotic use that characterises, for example, common sense, stereotypes, genres of discourse, is able to influence signification, to the point of permeating the virtual system of language itself.

As Gianfranco Marrone (my trans.; 2003: 3) clarifies,

unlike Benveniste, who emphasized the importance of subjectivity in language, it is about insisting on the collective instance that is behind, or within, any enunciator: I who speak am not an I except in function of the socio-cultural instance that crosses me, and that speaks in me.

The enunciation is thus conceived as a procedure that consists in taking up and transforming preconstituted blocks of signification, in a supra-individual and potentially circular process of meaning production. In the proposal advanced by Fontanille and Zilberberg (1998), the enunciation is described in terms of a praxis of mediation that involves different modes of existence, as a sequence of transformations articulated in four steps: virtualization, actualization, realization, potentialization (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1

Enunciative praxis, original scheme taken from Fontanille, Zilberberg (1998)

The first part of the sequence concerns the process of signification and defines the way in which meaning emerges in the passage from the repertoire of virtual entities that defines a system of signification (paradigmatic axis), to its manifestation. In the next phase, the dimension of use comes into play, understood in the perspective of Hjelmslev, that is, as the set of habits, both linguistic and cultural, elaborated by a community over time. It is in this movement that the dynamics of the enunciation manifests itself in the form of praxèmes, that is, expressive resources capable of feeding the virtual system of the language, thus contributing in some cases to implement it, modifying its articulation. The dynamics of the enunciative praxis unfolds in four elementary operations of mediation: the emergence (from the mode of virtual existence to the actualized one), the appearance (from actualization to realization), the decline (from realization to potentialization), finally the disappearance (from potentialization to virtualization). These four steps respond to two opposite movements whose tension is responsible for the functioning of the enunciative praxis: the first ascending (emergence and appearance), the second descending (decline and disappearance). In the test of textual analysis, significant evidence emerges: the minimum condition that ensures the functioning of this process consists in the juxtaposition of two different modes of existence, to the point that it is possible to outline some recurring combinations that bring out a “tensive field of existential modalizations”. In particular, the term revolution designates the transition from one linguistic form to another, as happens in commutation; the fluctuation consists in the oscillation between two isotopies within a text, as in the mechanism that ensures the functioning of the rhetorical figure of the metaphor; the distortion is the outcome of a movement in which the emergence of one form corresponds to the progressive decline of another; finally, the remaniement (reorganisation) consists of a type of enunciative action that determines the prominent diffusion of a linguistic form at the expense of a pre-existing one, as in the case of the common use of terms that come from a foreign language and that render obsolete the forms previously in use within a community of speakers.

In any case, what is relevant is the idea that a figure implicated within a discourse can assume an enunciative thickness that relates it to “social exchange, the circulation of semiotic objects and discourses that take place in cultures and communities that retain or reject innovative or fixed uses and that somehow make ‘canonical’ the creations of discourse” (my trans.; Fontanille & Zilberberg, 1998: 134).

On an empirical level, consider the functioning of some rhetorical figures whose effectiveness depends on the relationship between a perceived content and a latent one, on the coexistence of two meaning effects whose different salience can be described in terms of an enunciative depth, as happens in the link that in a visual text is established between the foreground and the background. As proposed by Gianfranco Marrone (2003), enunciative praxis thus proves to be particularly useful for understanding the functioning of socially relevant genres of discourse, such as journalism, in which the narrative of a political event can take shape against the background of a non-political one, or the narration of a stock market situation lends itself to be represented by recalling social issues. Or, again, the evolution of brand discourses, which in the most relevant cases, from a semiotic point of view, reveal themselves increasingly less focused on the promotion of a product in itself than rather on the construction of complex valorisation strategies in which the commercial function emerges against the background of political and social themes. It is in this way that the different relationships between the contents that are established at the deep level of discourse can manifest themselves at the surface level according to a multiplicity of combinations (modes of existence), concretizing various logical relationships such as cause-effect, means-end or contradiction, to the point of substantially modifying the structure of the text and its meaning.

On a theoretical level, the innovation brought by enunciative praxis thus consists in the possibility of inserting, alongside the dimensions of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic organization of discourse, a third dimension, provisionally defined praxématique, potentially useful to account for the way in which within specific places and/or moments, actual connotative taxonomies take shape thanks to the presence of three basic conditions: the intersubjectivity, the iteration and the typification.

If each act of enunciation thus potentially stands out against the background of a much more extensive, general and collective field of enunciative manoeuvres, signification can actually be rethought as the manifestation of a polyphonic type of praxis, that is, as the set of actions of re-appropriation and transformation of pre-existing enunciations.

The interest aroused by this notion is therefore also revealed in the connection with the semiotics of culture. The idea that within a discourse an element acquires an “enunciative depth” thanks to the way in which different degrees of existence are put into perspective, explicitly refers to Lotman’s notion of semiosphere, to the distinction between the centre and periphery of a culture, understood as expression of a collective enunciation.

The research focused on overcoming a strictly linguistic perspective of enunciation has thus developed parallel to a significant expansion of the perimeter of the phenomena of signification analysed, fuelling a debate on the validity of the consolidated notion of textuality, with particular reference to the logics that determine the emergence, stabilization and evolution of practices and forms of life that permeate social life. In particular, the idea that stereotypes, as well as discursive innovations, constitute the product of a praxis that unfolds over time, acting against the background of a “collective memory” in which each text participates in a network of references to other expressive resources, has generated a heated debate on the overcoming of the limits of the temporal immanence of the text itself.

It is within this context that in recent years the evolution of reflection on enunciation, as a praxis that transcends the individual dimension of the linguistic act, has significantly coincided with increasing attention for Latour’s theory. In particular, in the reflection on the way in which experience acquires a semiotic dimension, is endowed with a meaning, the perspective advanced by Latour on overcoming the asymmetry between subject and object is explicitly recalled. The starting point of this reflection on the emergence of meaning outside the canonical dimension of narrativity consists in recognizing the impossibility for a subject to define in advance the boundaries of what takes shape and unfolds on the plane of experience, as in the case of practices. Practices indeed have a very peculiar articulation; they manifest themselves in the form of

courses of action open at both ends of the chain [...] whose "object" (and consequently the "subject" who observes it) remain indeterminate and blurred throughout the course of action at least until the meaning of the latter is definitively fixed, from within the practice itself, through the actors involved in it (my trans.; Fontanille, 2014: 2).

This premise is particularly significant because it implies a change of perspective on the side of the theory of enunciation. Given that a course of action has a dynamic articulation that makes it entirely different from a narrative text which, by definition, is intended as a construct endowed with a closure, the signification at play in practices cannot be examined by resorting to a narrow perspective of enunciation based on the subject/object dichotomy and on notions such as embrayage and débrayage. This does not mean, as previously highlighted, that the notion of text is obsolete, nor, even less, that a sort of opposition between a semiotics of texts and one of practices takes shape. Rather, what emerges is the progressive consolidation of a perspective according to which textual semiotics is not reducible to the analysis of narratives properly understood, that is, “objects” endowed with pre-established boundaries, but instead consists in a model of analysis of social phenomena where closure is not ontologically given but rather constitutes a criterion for textuality to occur. Therefore, if the knowledge of modes of existence is configured as an exploration that cannot be predetermined, because “there is no longer any preliminary separation between something to be built and someone who builds it” (my trans.; Fontanille, 2014: 3), how can we attempt to account for the signification in action in the courses of events that we commonly call practices? One of the possibilities lies precisely in taking into account the proposal advanced by Latour on how signification takes shape from the ability of an entity (human or non-human) to perpetuate itself over time, overcoming obstacles and trials, establishing dynamic relationships with other elements. We recall that Latour, to account for the fact that modes of existence cannot be defined a priori by a subject but are rather the result of the trajectory outlined by an entity in the succession of mediations in which it is involved, uses the term instauration, an expression taken from Souriau and useful to underline the non-anthropomorphic, impersonal dimension of meaning. The minimum conditions that guarantee the existence and meaning of a course of actions should therefore be sought not in the presence of an external subject of enunciation, but in the intensification and extension of heterogeneous entities related to each other that in this way acquire permanence, endowing themselves with an identity.

Now, the idea of an agency distributed among a multiplicity of actants capable of assuming different forms is not at all incompatible with the perspective of a semiotics of practices that hypothesizes that the signification implied in a course of action can manifest itself in the form of a concatenation of tensions, of forces, in a propensity to movement (Fontanille, 2014). In particular, the question from which Latour’s theoretical operation starts coincides with that from which a significant part of contemporary semiotic research also starts and concerns the identification of the preconditions that make the experience of meaning possible. It is, in fact, in each case an attempt to account for the ways in which the experience of alterations in existence generate demands for meaning

It is therefore because experience is tied to existence, and vice versa, that we can hope to witness the emergence of meaning, that we are able to feel and suffer the 'lack of meaning' or the 'demand for meaning' and, therefore, commit ourselves to construct it (my trans.; Fontanille, 2017a: 51).

It is therefore significant that the term instauration is used in the metalanguage of semiotics to account for the way in which the elements involved in a practice progressively assume an articulation, acquire a meaning, revealing themselves in all respects as actants capable of contributing to the maintenance of the course of action. According to this perspective, instauration can then be considered as “the general and primary form of enunciation” (my trans.; Fontanille, 2014), not attributable exclusively to an external or even omniscient subject, but rather to a plurality of instances capable of assuming a multiplicity of configurations in the set of dynamic relations that are established between them. “Therefore, we need to have a conception of enunciation that is able to take on this assumption: an impersonal enunciation—without object or subject—, diffuse—without identities set a priori—and in motion” (my trans.; Fontanille, 2014: 5–6).

Also, thanks to the comparison with the Latourian philosophy of enunciation we thus witness an evolution of the notion of enunciative praxis, now understood in terms of a sequence of acts that act on a plane of immanence very different from that of textuality, that is the experience.

Something is instaurated but starting from what? For transformation or for conversion of which other entity? [...]. Our answer: it is about the transformation of experience. The human experience in search of its own meaning becomes a semiotic practice since it itself is accessible to experience. This elementary reflexivity is the starting point and the minimum condition for the search for meaning. It is precisely within this reflective experience that the necessary intensity and extension are perceived and grasped for there to be "instauration" (my trans.; Fontanille, 2017b: 7).

In the research on the “sense of modes of existence” there certainly remain distinctions between the positions of Latour and the perspective of post-Greimas’ semiotics which, postulating the presence of a true and proper canonical sequence of practical enunciation, marks a clear distance from the network conception of meaning developed within the ANT, but the path towards an extended notion of enunciation is more than evident.

In any case, there are increasing signs that this key word in the field of semiotics is beginning to be considered, rather than as a fixed concept to be applied, as a “conceptual device” (Tore, 2016), an “epistemology” that implies a multiplicity of options and theories against the backdrop of a common style of investigation of the phenomena of signification.

"Enunciation" today can teach us that the source, the "origin", is not the subject or society, nor even language; it is rather the open and incessant production of meaning, the linguistic games and semiotic tools constantly at work and being remade, of which the "subjects", "society", "language" are only fixed and partial images. Or guard rails, at the edges, and not always necessary, of the paths of meaning. (my trans.; Tore, 2016: 27)

5.4 An Extended and Unified Theory of Enunciation

Further proof that some of the most fruitful repercussions of Latourian thought revolve around the extension of the concept of enunciation and the overcoming of an anthropomorphic approach, can be found in the growing interest in the process of mediation-delegation that presides over the production of meaning. On this front, there is a line of research (Paolucci, 2010, 2020) committed to enhancing the compatibility between the philosophical approach to enunciation developed over time by Latour and the theoretical framework of interpretative semiotics. The proximity between these two perspectives lies precisely in the importance assigned to the logics of mediation-interpretation that make the emergence and circulation of meaning possible. The rethinking of enunciation as a chain of mediations between human and non-human actors, in which meaning is formed according to a sequence of translations, would indeed allow us to detect a resonance with Peirce’s theory of interpretants and with the notion of encyclopaedia at the foundation of Umberto Eco’s semiotic theory. We recall that Peirce conceives semiosis as a dynamic process in which what characterizes a sign is the potential to activate a virtually infinite chain of interpretations and translations where a decisive role is played by a mediation element: the interpretant. In this perspective, moreover, the notion of sign is very extensive: it can manifest itself in a multitude of ways that transcend the linguistic and textual dimensions to include experience itself. A further element of potential affinity with Latour’s approach to modes of existence, and specifically to the role played by the domain of habit [HAB], is still in the mechanism of ‘arresting’ the unlimited semiosis described by Peirce and identified precisely in habit, understood as a consolidated practice of attributing a meaning to a sign within a context recognized as familiar. An indispensable reference in the reflection focused on overcoming the primacy assigned to the subject with respect to the process of semiosis is also the semiotic theory of Umberto Eco who in Semiotics and Philosophy of Language (1986: 44) states “[...] the sign always opens up something new. No interpretant, in adjusting the sign interpreted, fails to change its borders to some degree”. And again: “[...] The sign as the locus (constantly interrogated) for the semiosic process constitutes, on the other hand, the instrument through which the subject is continuously made and unmade. The subject enters a beneficial crisis because it shares in the historical (and constitutive) crisis of the sign” (1988: 45). The semantic space, understood as an encyclopaedia, has a rhizomatic type of articulation, thus excluding the possibility of anchoring the activity of production and circulation of meaning to a stable and predefined starting point.³

The characteristics of a rhizomatic structure are the following: (a) Every point of the rhizome can and must be connected with every other point. (b) There are no points or positions in a rhizome; there are only lines (this feature is doubtful: intersecting lines make points). (c) A rhizome can be broken off at any point and reconnected following one of its own lines. (d) The rhizome is antigenealogical. (e) The rhizome has its own outside with which it makes another rhizome; therefore, a rhizomatic whole has neither outside nor inside. (f) A rhizome is not a calque but an open chart which can be connected with something else in all of its dimensions; it is dismountable, reversible, and susceptible to continual modifications. (g) A network of trees which open in every direction can create a rhizome (which seems to us equivalent to saying that a network of partial trees can be cut out artificially in every rhizome). (h) No one can provide a global description of the whole rhizome; not only because the rhizome is multidimensionally complicated, but also because its structure changes through the time (1988: 81–82).

This line of research, aimed at demonstrating the legitimacy of an extended and unified theory of enunciation, in recent years has been further relaunched by the publication of Latour’s research on modes of existence. In particular, Claudio Paolucci (2020), starting from a philosophical reflection on enunciation focused on the work of mediation-translation carried out by multiform delegates, emphasizes the need to definitively overcome the consolidated perspective that theorizes this notion from the ways in which the anthropomorphic simulacra of a subject (enunciator and enunciatee), manifest themselves within the space of the text. In this proposal, enunciation, understood as an act, cannot be conceived as the performance of a subject external to the discourse, as the creative action of an instance that can be described in terms of a syncretism of I-here-now, but rather as a concatenation composed of different dimensions that manifest themselves in the form of a delegation process.

The focus thus shifts from enunciation conceived as the projection of categories founding the structure of the text (débrayage) to enunciation understood as a set of acts that allow different enunciating instances to prolong themselves through absence, passing the word to messengers-utterances, in other words, to persist by hiding under different forms. To clarify this proposal that considers enunciation as a polyphonic and impersonal act, reinterpreting it in the light of a theory of absence, recourse is made to the different etymologies of the term “person” in Greek and Latin. In both languages, albeit with inverse paths, two very distinct meanings emerge, one relating to the human person, the individual, the other to the character, the mask. As Paolucci clarifies, these different meanings correspond to what can effectively be considered two major theoretical perspectives on enunciation.

The first, consolidated in semiotic studies and therefore prevalent, is that of the Benvenistean tradition of enunciation understood as communication in presence between subjects. The second, clearly found in the philosophical proposal advanced by Latour, instead assigns a central role to delegation processes and conceives enunciation, well beyond the dimension of natural language, as the set of sending, mediation, translation acts that allow us to persist thanks to the actions carried out by a chain of messengers.

Starting from this last position, the possibility thus opens for semiotics to rethink enunciation both as an act and as a praxis, that is, as the action that allows a subject to shape a homogeneous utterance from a semiolinguistic point of view, but only through the mediation exercised by a multiplicity of elements and modes of existence connected to each other. “The body speaks, the language speaks, the norms speak, the uses and habits speak and enunciating means actualizing or potentializing some magnitudes that pulsate in the utterance, realizing or virtualizing others” (my trans.; Paolucci, 2020: 35–36).

The risk to avoid is therefore that of reducing the heterogeneity of the instances involved in the production of meaning only to the presence of a single culturally situated human actor. For this reason, the project of an extended theory of enunciation aims to overturn the perspective, conceiving subjectivity from the way it is expressed in a multiplicity of languages, and trying to rethink enunciation as a property of the different languages to prefigure for the subjects a series of positions to occupy when they use them. The Latourian conception of the role played by delegates in the construction of social phenomena manifests all its relevance here. The origin of meaning transcends both the presence of an instance capable of sending a messenger (nuncio), and that of a messenger called to act as a spokesperson. It rather must be sought in the possibility of operating a passage between the two, in the process of mediation-translation.

No instance of enunciation and no messenger stated before the act of sending in which we pass the ball to someone who speaks for us, even when we will be absent. Enunciation is an act that simultaneously establishes the categories of the utterance (not-I, not-here and not-now) and those of the enunciation (me, here, now), defining a principle of differentiation between them (my trans.; Paolucci, 2020: 38).

In this proposal that aims to rethink subjectivity from a semiotics of enunciation, a relevant aspect therefore concerns the emphasis placed on the performative and prosthetic nature of impersonal enunciation,\ that is, on the ability of modes of existence to act on the subject, to induce a transformation, provoking a change on the sensory, cognitive, and narrative level. Among the areas to explore to verify the validity of a non- anthropomorphic theory of enunciation on an empirical level are cinema and video games⁴, in which technological devices act whose peculiarities in terms of signification cannot be described by resorting to categories such as “enunciator”, which flatten the dimension of enunciation on the simulacrum of an external subject.

According to this perspective, the formal apparatus of enunciation does not manifest itself as a trace, a simulacrum that refers to an out-of-text that remains absent from the experience of signification, but rather as a series of surrogate stimuli that enhance or reduce the perceptive and cognitive potentialities of the subject, acting as prostheses endowed with agency. As an example, consider the functioning of media experiences that prefigure types of immersive fruition that are not simply reducible to simulacra of subjectivity, but rather to avatars, sensory prostheses that allow a subject to wear multiple and reconfigurable masks.

The determining role assumed by surrogate stimuli in prefiguring for the subject the possibility of accessing an engaging experience in terms of signification would thus allow us to move from a simulacral and anthropomorphic conception of enunciation to a performative one. In this perspective, the apparatus of enunciation is rethought, not by chance, in terms of a device formed by the concatenation of multiple instances that act in the utterance as “a third messenger who speaks for us” (my trans.; Paolucci, 2020), creating the conditions for the experience of meaning to be maintained and at the same time renewed over time, rather than being reduced to an act of unrepeatable creation that takes shape from an individual creative action.

In continuity with Latour’s invitation to replace the conception of homo faber with that of homo fabricatus, an inversion of perspective is therefore reiterated with respect to the idea of enunciation as the action of an intentional and transitive instance, as an individual and foundational gesture of the utterance. In the effort to build a unified theory of enunciation, semiotics thus carves out the possibility of adopting a tactical approach, reiterating the presence of a potential and fruitful continuity between the Latourian perspective on modes of existence and the Peircean theory of semiosis:

It is no longer the structures of enunciation that are projected out from a "subject", but it is the structures of already enunciated utterances that define the possible acts of an enunciating instance. Therefore, we will no longer only have traces of enunciation in the utterance, but also subject positions within the semiotic movement (my trans.; Paolucci, 2020: 38).

If in the process of semiosis signs turn back and “make say”, it must be recognized that every instance capable of participating in the enunciation must be considered as part of a network of discourses already realized and recorded in the encyclopaedia as interpretants, understood as mediation tools to access the experience of the world.

On the side of research revolving around an extended notion of enunciation, it is evident that the link between Latour’s work of rethinking and conceptual extension and the field of semiotic studies is thus anything but dated or episodic. What emerges is rather the scenario of a potential mutual enrichment whose outcome largely depends on the ability to recognize that the separation between these perspectives is once again mainly played on a methodological rather than epistemological plane.⁵

5.5 Between Semiotics and Cultural Anthropology

The renewed interest of semiotic research in Latour’s investigation of the paradoxes of modernity is also due, in part, to recent developments in the field of anthropological studies dedicated to exploring ontological pluralism within collectives of humans and non-humans.

The overcoming of anthropocentric prejudice, the emphasis placed on the notion of agency in the construction of associations between distinct entities and the radical criticism advanced against the nature/culture dichotomy define a research perimeter in which the dialogue between Latour and some central authors in the panorama of contemporary anthropology has proved particularly fruitful, generating significant repercussions for semiotic research. In particular, the primary objective of anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is to uncover the ideology inherent in the so-called “great division” that opposes and at the same time legitimizes the categories of nature and culture, hindering the recognition of ontologies based on distinct modes of association between multiple entities. It is not the aim of this book to retrace the complex research work developed by the two scholars, but rather to simply highlight the productive dialogue developed with Latour, an exchange of research perspectives that prefigures the possibility for semiotics to account for the way in which meaning is generated, circulates and transforms in the concatenation of material and immaterial entities, both human and non-human. As we have seen, in the elaboration of the Latourian critique of modernity, the recourse to an anthropology defined as “a bit different”, symmetrical, assumes a central role, to the point that “Network analysis extends a hand to anthropology, and offers it the job that has been ready and waiting” (Latour, 1993: 104). On the other hand, Descola, in the famous work Beyond Nature and Culture (2021), repeatedly recalls the works on the anthropology of the moderns and the politics of nature in the belief that dualism conceals, like a mask, the presence of a series of practices that contradict it. Against the backdrop of this common horizon of critical reflection, what particularly interests the French anthropologist, unlike Latour, is not a critique of the aporias that characterize the thought of the moderns, but rather the effects of a prejudice described as a “distorting prism” on ethnology and that hinders the elaboration of a “general grammar of cosmologies”.

A sociologist of the sciences may well incur Latour’s criticism if he believes that humans and nonhumans exist in separate domains, but nevertheless he will remain faithful to one dimension of his object. In contrast, an ethnologist who thinks that the Makuna and the Chewong believe in such a dichotomy would be betraying the thought of those he studied (Descola, 2013: 53),

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the theoretical and methodological option advanced by Latour to respond to the inconsistency of the binomial that opposes nature/culture does not consist so much in denying its terms as in highlighting the presence of a plurality of ontological combinations (nature-culture), assigning a priority role to the relationship rather than to the elements, to the concatenation that allows a heterogeneous collective to take shape and maintain itself over time, rather than to its individual components. Descola’s work, on the other hand, aims to demonstrate the lack of relevance of the radical opposition between nature and culture, proposing its overcoming in favour of a different kind of dualism, the one that distinguishes interiority and physicality, laying the foundations for the development of the famous classification of entities into four great ontologies: animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism. The difference in perspective, compared to Latour but also to Viveiros de Castro, is certainly not insignificant and revolves around the conception of ontology. As Sedda (my trans.; 2021: 24) points out:

[...] while in the first two the ontologies tend to open the cultural space, to multiply worlds, to generate ontological alternatives, in the case of Descola the ontologies refer to schemes of relations that unify practices, generate internal homogeneity to the different collectives, overcome time, create stability and resistance to change.

We add that, not by chance, the same notion of collective, of which Descola recognizes the relevance, assumes in his work a partially different meaning compared to Latour’s elaboration. Indeed, if on one hand the conception of a set composed of strongly heterogeneous entities is taken up, on the other the absence of any functional or finalistic dimension (the desire to live together) leads to an overcoming of the network perspective.

In short, it is not so much linguistic limits, the perimeter of a commercial network, or even the homogeneity of modes of life that mark out the contours of a collective. Rather, it is a way of schematizing the experience shared by a more or less vast collection of individuals (Descola, 2013: 176).

In this sense, Descola clarifies, the limits of a collective do not depend, as happens in a network model, on a preliminary decision of the researcher, forced to cut out the perimeter of the field of study based on the quality of the data to which he has access, but rather “from the area of influence of a particular scheme of practice”. The borders that distinguish one collective from another are thus to be sought in the manifest discontinuities “with respect to other ways of being present in the world”, in a perspective heir to structuralism that does not in any way preclude the possibilities of dialogue with post-structuralist semiotics and that rather further fuels the debate on the validity of a network model at the foundation of associations between humans and non-humans.

In any case, it is clear that the overcoming of nature/culture is revealed as a very difficult goal to achieve, to get rid of naturalism is indeed a task that takes on the characteristics of a real enterprise for a subject who lives modernity, as Descola himself recognizes in this passage:

Although we may from time to time indulge in the type of ontological judgments that other modes of identification suggest, it is out of the question for any modern subject fully to become animist or totemist (as ethnographic experience attests) or even to return consistently to the ancient attractions of analogism (Descola, 2013: 149).

The way out proposed to avoid falling into the prejudice that assigns moderns privileged access to understanding nature, consists therefore in moving from the epistemological perspective long dominant in anthropology, the so-called particular universalism (Latour, 1991), to the option of a relative universalism, where the adjective refers to something concerning relationship. The foundation of this perspective is not to be sought in the idea of nature nor in that of culture but, Descola argues, in the

[…] relations of continuity and discontinuity, identity and difference, resemblance and dissimilarity that humans everywhere establish between existing beings, using the tools that they have inherited from their particular phylogenesis: a body, an intentionality, an aptitude for discerning differential gaps, an ability to weave with any human or nonhuman relations of attachment or antagonism, domination or dependence, exchange or appropriation, subjectivization or objectivization (2013: 151).

The project of an anthropology of naturalism is far from a consolidated enterprise, as Latour himself reminds us of when commenting on Descola’s work, highlighting the lack of ethnographic data compared to the other three great ontologies, a scarcity of empirical evidence already pointed out in We Have Never Been Modern⁶

Descola himself recognizes several difficulties in this definition of “naturalism”: first, as far as the 16th century, they were still devoted “analogists” and it is only during the “scientific revolution” that they seem to have changed their mode of identification; but second, and more troubling for the present inquiry, while the three other modes depend on detailed ethnographies of the practice of collectives, “naturalism” is largely based on the theories developed by philosophers, theory that is so far from their experience.⁷

If Descola aims at overcoming the nature/culture dualism, the option advanced by Viveiros de Castro is different, and is shaped by the reversal, by numerous peoples of the New World, of the meaning commonly associated in the West with the two terms on which the Great Division is based. In the Amerindian conception “Every existent is a center of intentionality apprehending other existents according to their respective characteristics and power” (Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 54). What is defined as an alter-anthropology of indigenous thinking thus forces us to redesign the established conceptual maps, in other words to redistribute the attributes commonly associated with the paradigmatic terms of nature and culture such as: “universal and particular, objective and subjective, physical and moral, the given and instituted, necessity and spontaneity, immanence and transcendence, body and spirit, animality and humanity, and so on (2014: 55–56)”.

Compared to the primacy of multiculturalism claimed by the moderns, Amerindian thought is therefore characterized by the presence of a multinaturalism. Where Western cosmology is based on the assumption of a uniqueness of nature (guaranteed by the universality of bodies and substance) and the multiplicity of culture (result of the variability of spirits and meanings), “the Amerindian conception presupposes, on the contrary, a unity of mind and a diversity of bodies. “Culture” or subject as the form of the universal, and “nature” or object as the particular” (2014: 56). On the one hand, therefore, the presence of a similar “soul” is revealed, that is, a similarity of “perceptive, appetitive and cognitive dispositions”, on the other hand, a profound difference emerges in terms of modes of expression and perception. This is the phenomenon of perspectivism, according to which “The way humans see animals, spirits and other actants in the cosmos is profoundly different from how these beings both see them and see themselves” (2014: 56). The outcome of the perspectivism inherent in what is defined as a “powerful indigenous intellectual structure” (2014: 55) is therefore twofold: on the one hand, it consists in the ability to operate a counter-description of the way in which Amazonian thought has been represented by the dominant paradigm of Western anthropological studies, on the other hand, in the opportunity of “returning to us an image in which we are unrecognizable to ourselves” (2014: 55).

In this work, the relevance of the dialogue with Latour's work is more explicit than ever, if on the one hand the French scholar recognizes the Amazonian concept of multinaturalism as playing an essential role in demonstrating the inconsistency of the binomial multiculturalism/mononaturalism, on the other hand, the relational and trans-ontological approach implied in the notions of collective and of actor-network constitutes one of the main references of Viveiros de Castro’s work in the development of an indigenous cosmopolitical theory.

There are thus multiple reasons why the debate on multinaturalism has generated interest in the field of semiotic research, signalling the opportunity to relaunch the dialogue with cultural anthropology. A dialogue useful, on one hand, to re-evaluate the nature/culture dichotomy long considered as the foundation of the theoretical framework of the study of signification and, on the other hand, to rethink the methodologies of analysis for understanding the meaning at play within associations composed of a multiplicity of multiform actors, human and non-human. A proof of this growing attention is represented by the efforts of theoretical elaboration involved in the development of the notion of internaturality (Marrone, 2012, 2019) and the recent development of anthroposemiotics (Fontanille & Couégnas, 2018).

5.6 Multinaturalism and Internaturality

The first area of research concerns the potential for theoretical renewal that the different meanings of multinaturalism prefigure for a theory of signification that, in its most widespread manifestations, seems rather to be based still, predominantly, on a mono-naturalistic type of paradigm. As Marrone (2019) highlights, the growing interest sparked by the critique of naturalism, supported by the empirical evidence of contemporary anthropological research, helps to illuminate an aporia of semiotics that transversally affects the epistemological, theoretical, and methodological dimensions. On the first front, it is well known that for Greimas the distinction between nature and culture, laid out in the logical articulations of the semiotic square, assumes a universal value. It should also be clarified that this articulation does not have an ontological characterization but rather a semantic one, to the point that its various manifestations are not considered as states of the world but rather as effects of meaning generated discursively.

If /nature/, in particular, is the product of a certain articulation of meaning, it is, in principle, plural, and it proposes itself as existing in function of changes in isotopies, discourses, narratives, cultures. (my trans.; Marrone, 2019: 11)

The aporia of semiotics thus consists in the presence of an epistemological mono-naturalism that implies a multi-naturalism on the methodological plane. This peculiar misalignment is further complicated if we consider the theoretical level, where one of the most significant contributions, as previously described and recognized by Latour himself, consisted in favouring the overcoming of the notion of character in favour of that of actant, understood as a syntactic position within a narrative grammar, as a force endowed with a variable level of agency, capable of assuming a multitude of configurations at the discursive level, of which the anthropomorphic one is only one of the possible options. In the narratives that shape many cultures, non-humans play roles that are anything but marginal or passive. Objects, spirits, animals, and plants commonly reveal themselves as narrative forces capable of helping or hindering, endowed with cognition, emotionality, in other words, capable of expressing an interiority, a soul. From the perspective of a dialogue with the positions taken by some of the most authoritative scholars in the panorama of the anthropology of nature, it is not then unreasonable to find in semiotic theory, that is supported by a rich tradition of analysis of narrativity, some distinctive traits of animism that contribute to strengthening the sensation of an ambiguous position of the discipline in the debate concerning the complex theme of a critique of the idea of nature.

[…] as semioticians, we find ourselves in an anthropologically embarrassing situation: at the epistemological level we are mononaturalists; at the theoretical level we are animists; at the methodological level we are instead multinaturalists. Semiotics as a rigorous scientific system is at risk. (my trans.; 2019: 11)

Against the backdrop of these reflections, the solution proposed to distance oneself from what effectively appears as a risky impasse consists of a tactical move aimed at recognizing the primacy of the empirical level in the study of signification, in particular in giving priority to the practice of analysing the ways in which meaning emerges and circulates in society in the form of a multitude of narratives, discourses, and practices that contribute to the production and circulation of socially relevant phenomena. In other words, it is about starting again from the perspectives of sociosemiotics and semiotics of culture, particularly claiming the usefulness of notions such as that of semiosphere, to be used to try to understand whether, and to what extent, naturalistic ontology is actually the only accessible in the context of Western society (according to a logic of a paradigmatic type that excludes other possible ways of attributing meaning to everyday life), or whether being “modern” does not instead consist in combining different forms of valorisation of entities, whether human and/or non-human, according to a logic that could be defined rather of a combinatorial type. For example,

we can easily imagine someone who is a scientist (naturalist), consults the horoscope every morning (analogist), loves his cat by including it in the family status (animist) and drinks so-called natural wine (totemist). The problem will then be, following Jakobson (1935) and Lotman (1985), to understand which is the dominant ontology and which others are in hierarchy to it. (my trans.; 2019: 12)

The potential that arises from a comparison with the positions expressed by Latour and Descola becomes clear here.

On the one hand, a semiotics of everyday life, founded on overcoming a narrow conception of textuality, potentially stands in continuity with a symmetrical anthropology that also recognises in the collectives of moderns the presence of a work of association between distinct elements whose forms it is essential to first reconstruct.

On the other hand, the answer to the view that moderns cannot escape the ontology of naturalism, except by occasionally accessing other modes of identification, consists in emphasizing the need for a change of perspective in the study of signification. In continuity with a semiotics of culture, this perspective privileges, in the definition of identity, the study of the different modes of relationship between distinct elements rather than the identification of traits pertinent to individual ontologies. It values, in other words, the logics of negotiation and conflict that allow different cultures and modes of identification to associate with each other, establishing a relationship based on translation.

It is from these considerations that emerges the proposal to overcome the term multinaturalism, considered misleading because potentially associated with a conception of modes of existence understood as completely independent forms of life, in favour of that of internaturality which, in continuity with the expression interculturality, rather highlights the processual, dynamic and translative dimension at the foundation of the experience of signification, understood as expression of a multiform social body.

As evidence of an open dialogue with the anthropology of nature, it is in any case important to emphasise how the invitation to adopt the expression internaturality once again signals continuity on the epistemological level. Highlighting the primacy of the relationship over the inventory of distinctive traits, means recognizing that the different ontologies, like cultures, are constituted according to a series of correlations that manifest the presence of a combinatorial logic (Descola) and that the task of a critique of modernity consists primarily in unveiling the naturalistic alibi that disguises the presence of a complex work of mediation, association, reconfiguration unthinkable without the involvement of a multiplicity of distinct entities (Latour).

At the same time, it is particularly on this last point that semiotics can carve out a space that is both distinctive and enriching compared to the anthropology of modernity, for example, helping to account for the different ways through which ontologies such as animism, potentially inherent in relationships with non-humans so widespread as to often be indispensable, like animals but also, as we will see, the latest generation of wearable or domestic technological artifacts, are actually the result of a series of social discourses (science, media, politics, advertising, art etc.) that prefigure types of cognitive and affective relationships, shape expectations, contribute to naturalizing new kinds of social actors.

It is, after all, a matter of rediscovering and re-actualising a dual vocation of semiotics: that of a discipline founded on the development of rigorous procedures for decomposing and analysing the phenomena of signification, at the service of a critique of culture.

5.7 Anthroposemiotics

A recent proposal aimed at further deepening the dialogue with the anthropology of nature is that of anthropo-semiotics (Fontanille & Couégnas, 2018) which identifies, precisely in the work of Descola, Latour and Viveiros de Castro, the opportunity to rethink some theoretical assumptions and methodological tools at the foundation of the analysis of signification, with the intention of relaunching the fruitful dialogue between semiotics and cultural anthropology initiated towards the end of the fifties. The premise is that anthroposemiotics would not constitute an “object-semiotics”, that is, a new branch of the study of signification, but rather an epistemological and methodological point of view on the ways in which meaning takes shape and circulates in everyday life. The reference to the perspective of a symmetrical anthropology in the study of modernity is more evident than ever. On the one hand, notions such as collective and actor-network are explicitly evoked, on the other hand, the legitimacy of a research perspective on modes of existence is highlighted, which, while recognizing the presence of some paradigmatic realizations characteristic of zones of the world and circumscribed periods, conceives ontologies as “nomadic”, that is, capable of circulating in time and space and “combinable”, that is, potentially associable with each other in any place and at any time.

We semioticians belong to a naturalist type of world, but we gladly adopt a totemist position if we are lovers of wine, of vines and terroir, an animist position in the relationship that we maintain with our dog or with the plants in the garden that we take care of. We ourselves are also (structurally) animists when we consider that objects, elements of the landscape or, in general, non-humans can manifest the presence of narrative actants. Finally, we can also adopt an analogist position when we start to take seriously, and not as a rhetorical device, a metaphor or an allegory. (my trans.; Fontanille & Couégnas, 2018:14)

Anthroposemiotics therefore starts from the conviction that criteria such as proximity and distance that separate the researcher from the object of analysis have long ceased to be relevant to circumscribe the field of study, to identify the otherness to explore. The task of a semiotics in dialogue with the anthropology of nature will therefore be to offer an alternative perspective compared to that of ethnology, a “complementary point of view” on the meaning implied in everyday life, focused on the ability to analyse the different components that contribute to defining a network or a collective in properly non-anthropomorphic terms, therefore as actants capable of assuming different configurations. The distance with the positions previously mentioned in the field of anthropological studies is once again traced back to the methodological level rather than the epistemological one, as emerges in this passage where the assonance between the two research perspectives is manifested: “Otherness is what is confronted with what is conformity, with dominant usage, with fixed or imposed representations, with doxa, evidence” (my trans.; Fontanille & Couégnas, 2018: 14).

The epistemological anchoring of anthroposemiotics, the horizon of its field of action are therefore traced back to the Hjelmslevian principle (1961) according to which there is no universal formation, but only a universal principle of formation. According to this perspective, the object of semiotic analysis is identified in the presence of “small ‘local ontologies’” “at work in a more or less explicit way in all practices endowed with meaning whatever their dominant actantial scheme (predation, exchange, attachment etc.) and their privileged domain of manifestation (law, technique, hunting, environment, social networks etc.)” (my trans.; Fontanille & Couégnas, 2018: 230–231).

Faced with the irreducible plurality of modes of existence at play in what is proposed as a “concrete” semiotics, the object of the analysis is no longer understood as the outcome of a generative trajectory of meaning regulated by conversion operations between different levels, nor of a deduction made from a logically pre-existing founding principle, but rather as an “instauration”,⁸ where meaning, in its becoming, “finds the risky path of existence at the mercy of repetitions, transpositions, translations, remediations, etc. in function of the plurality of conceivable semiotic systems” (ibid).

In what appears as an attempt, still underway, to reposition the epistemology of the discipline, the project of an anthroposemiotics is therefore explicitly based on the perspective of a situated epistemology that presupposes as a precondition the diversity and plurality of signification, where “it is no longer a question of understanding what kind of relationship scientific models have with an inaccessible being [...] but rather what worlds they establish there” (2018: 34).

If on the one hand fundamental notions of structuralist semiotics such as that of actant and narrative program are maintained, as well as the attempt to identify the planes of relevance (the empirical one of the phenomena that impose themselves on attention, that of semiosis that accounts for the underlying general cultural configurations, and finally that of the discourse-description of the research, here defined as “presentation”), on the other hand, the need to adopt a flexible method of analysis capable, from time to time, of being adapted to the distinctive characteristics of the “world” explored is reaffirmed. Thus, in the empirical analysis (focused, in the work of Fontanille and Couégnas, on the peculiar traits of a rich French regional culture, the Limousin) recourse is made each time to narrativity, to tensive semiotics, to enunciation, the latter explicitly re-read considering the Latourian perspective.

The belief that the field to be explored is composed of collective formations, whose meaning manifests itself in the form of distinctive ontologies, where the analysis is only valid within an established world, on the one hand signals the precious effort of part of contemporary semiotics to develop models capable of accounting for the signification at play in the numerous manifestations of everyday life, on the other hand, it raises a series of questions that have long been of interest to the epistemological status of the discipline. As Anna Maria Lorusso argues by highlighting a passage from the work of Fontanille and Couégnas (2018: 257) claiming that “an opportunity emerges and unfolds, that’s all we can say about it intuitively”

The idea of an initial "semiotic occasion", of a moment of contact with reality, to be developed according to a logic of imprint (empreinte) and influence, is a suggestive and perhaps realistic idea (a thousand times things really happen this way, all starting from an occasion-stimulus), but it is not enough to save us from the accusation of subjectivism and constructivism. Is the occasion the same for everyone? Or is it only for those who can grasp it (because they have particular abilities)? If the presence of an occasion is the moment of contact between the world and semiotics, how can we move from the singularity of this contact to a more abstract level of generalization? And how can semiotic knowledge, if it moves from one occasion to another, be constructed as coherent knowledge? (Lorusso, 2020: 11)

It is clear, in any case, how this recent research direction foreshadows, if not a turn on the level of a general theory of signification⁹ (think again about the long-established perspective of sociosemiotics proposed by Eric Landowski focused on overcoming assumptions such as intentionality, linearity, and rigidity inherent in the narrative structures of exchange), certainly an attempt to re-actualise semiotics, the success of which significantly passes through the ability to face the paradoxes of a modernity that is all the more difficult to explore the more apparently familiar, in the belief that the contribution of a discipline with a critical vocation is more precious than ever to account for the different modes of existence implied in common sense. Following this perspective, anthroposemiotics should not be understood so much as the attempt to define a general semiotics, but rather as the effort to offer a different point of view on a general theory of signification. And this is where the comparison between semiotics and a “sister” discipline, cultural anthropology, can be valuable, in the need—no longer avoidable as emphasized by Francesco Marsciani (2019)—to develop rigorous procedures for decomposition and analysis of the phenomena of signification without reducing the richness of the signification at play in everyday life to excessive formalism. In other words,

to account, not so much for the articulations, logics, grammars and combinations of events, which risk conceding a lot, too much, to a pre-definition of the object for which we will never be responsible, but for their signification, their articulation of value and the specific ways in which they do so” (ibid).

5.8 Objects as Social Facts

Another area in which Latour’s work has proven particularly stimulating for contemporary semiotics, both on the level of theoretical reflection and empirical research, concerns the study of the signifying capacity expressed by artifacts.

The interest of semiotics in objects is certainly not recent, just consider the seminal project of semiological investigation by Barthes (1957) dedicated to the exploration of the mythologies of everyday life. Since the first phase of semiological studies, what has aroused interest is the fact that the meaning of objects exceeds their use (Barthes, 1966), the signifying capacity of things in fact extends far beyond the perimeter of the function they perform. The semiotics of objects started precisely from the need to account for a paradox: “[...] these objects which always have, in principle, a function, a utility, a purpose, we believe we experience as pure instruments, whereas in reality they carry other things, they are also something else: they function as the vehicle of meaning” (Barthes, 1988: 182). The case of a functional object par excellence, like the telephone, for Barthes is paradigmatic, it indeed always has a meaning that is revealed independently of the function it fulfils “[...] there are bureaucratic telephones, there are old-fashioned telephones which transmit the notion of a certain period (1925); in short, the telephone itself is susceptible of belonging to a system of objects-as-signs” (ibid).

These pioneering studies thus contribute to defining the role of a semiotics of objects: that of revealing the naturalistic alibi that reduces the meaning of things to the evidence of their function and materiality, denying their capacity to signify in an articulate manner.

Over time, objects have acquired an increasing relevance in semiotic studies, fuelling a rather intense debate during the Sixties and Seventies, the outcome of which, thanks also to the involvement of experts and design scholars, was to sanction the transition from empirical functionalism to a research perspective and theoretical reflection oriented toward enhancing the symbolic dimension and practices of use.

In the following years, as Gianfranco Marrone (2002) observes, both the interest of designers in semiotics and that of the latter towards objects have faded, to the point of progressively highlighting a marked distance between the two disciplines.

However, the scenario changes again at the end of the Eighties, corresponding to the expansion of the field of analysis of semiotics and the development of a theoretical apparatus capable of supporting the analysis of the signification at play in the various areas of social communication. On a theoretical level, the abandonment of the notion of sign and the overcoming of any conceptual difference between text and context is crucial, a step that marks the birth of sociosemiotics.¹⁰

The renewed interest of semiotics in the meaning of objects and design thus materializes in a series of publications, among these a monographic issue of the magazine “Protée”¹¹ edited by Eric Landowski and Gianfranco Marrone, subsequently published in an Italian volume (Landowski & Marrone, 2002) with the addition of Latour’s essay “A Sociology without Object?”. In the introduction to the volume, an essential theoretical junction is highlighted regarding the outcome of research on the meaning of objects developed over time from the perspective of semiotics. The symbolic value of things is not at all reduced to a secondary function, the ability to express a meaning that transcends functionality is no longer understood as a simple connotation through which the object maintains “memory” and transmits the idea of an era, as in Barthes’ pioneering study. Rather, the ability of objects to signify consists in the set of possible relationships that they contribute to realize and stabilize with a subject, in a process of valorisation that can vary depending on the life project of the latter.¹² This acquisition proves decisive for semiotic theory as it allows us to overcome the idea, rooted in common sense, of an asymmetric relationship between subject and object, of the conception of things as simple tools at the service and under the control of the human actor. At a time when objects in everyday life manifest, more often than we are willing to recognize, the capacity to act as subjects, to exercise, through delegation by human actors, a number of functions, expressing at the same time a variety of social meanings, they must therefore be recognized as constitutive elements of the society in which they act, as social actors.

Society, in other words [...] also includes all those objects to which purely human functions have been delegated. Social beings are human subjects, but also those "non-human" subjects that are objects, as well as, if not above all, those "hybrid" subjects, human and non-human together, born from more or less casual, more or less lasting encounters, between human and non-human actors (my trans.; Landowski & Marrone, 2002: 27–28).

On this level, the link with Latour’s work proves to be explicit and fruitful in taking up and deepening an idea implicit in semiotic studies (the relevance and depth of the concept of the actant), making it possible to address the emergence of new subjectivities formed by the unprecedented union of human and non-human actors, with particular reference to the sphere of technological artefacts and the practices of their consumption.

Certainly, there remain differences with the perspective of semiotics, in particular regarding the impossibility according to Latour of reducing an actor to a field of forces or a structure.¹³ However, the centrality assigned to the concepts of actant and mediation as translation allows to highlight once again the affinities on the epistemological level, highlighting the question of the constitutively social nature of objects.

However, objects are not means, but rather mediators-just as all other actants are. They do not transmit our force faithfully, any more than we are faithful messengers of theirs […] In order to deal with the social body as a body, we need: a) to treat things as social facts; b) to replace the two symmetrical illusions of interaction and society with an exchange of properties between human and non-human actants; c) to empirically follow the work of localizing and globalizing (Latour, 1996b: 240).

Again, on the level of metalanguage, note the common recourse to the term interobjectivity which manifests the presence of a shared theoretical assumption that consists in recognizing the growing relevance assumed by the interactions that are established between the artifacts in the unfolding of daily life.

Progressively in semiotic studies there is thus an overcoming of the perspective on signification that characterized the research of the Sixties and Seventies (Mattozzi, 2010) in favour of a relational perspective. Significant in this sense, are the publication of a monographic number of the magazine “E|C”¹⁴ (2009) dedicated to the renewed opening of semiotics towards design and artifacts, which includes a contribution by Latour,¹⁵ as well as a dialogue in the form of an interview (Mangano & Mattozzi, 2010) in which the latter is once again involved on the subject of design.¹⁶

In the same years, a further effort to fuel the dialogue between the theory of signification and the sociology of technique was realized with the collection and translation into Italian (Mattozzi, 2006) of a series of important socio-anthropological research focused on the meaning of technical objects, including two essential essays to situate the relationship between actor-network theory and semiotics (Akrich & Latour, 1992; Akrich, 1992).

Further proof of the renewed interest in Latour’s work on semiotic reflection aimed at exploring the phenomena of signification at play in society is the recent publication (Latour, 2021) of a series of his contributions that in various ways address the theme of the meaning implied in artifacts, their circulation, and the set of their uses and reinventions. The title of the collection, ‘Politiche del design. Semiotica degli artefatti e forme della socialità’, alludes to the crucial role played by objects in the construction of social phenomena and the overcoming of an anthropomorphic perspective on agency. The volume highlights the contribution of the theory of signification in Latour’s research on the paradoxes of modernity, while also outlining some fruitful lines of research for a semiotics of artifacts aimed at exploring the ways meaning emerges in a contemporaneity marked by an increasing complexity of relations between human and non-human actors.

In particular, the conception of the domain of technique as a process of transferring agency between multiple actors, located in distinct spaces and times, proves particularly fruitful because, as argued in the preceding pages, it presupposes at its core an extended theory of enunciation. The attention given to objects is in fact justified by the consideration that their meaning, far beyond the functional dimension they express, lies in their capacity to act as place holders, that is, literally, in their capacity to contribute to the realisation of an objective (action programme), acting by delegation of a human, taking the place of an absent subject, committed to extending his/her own range of action through a process of displacements, delegations, deviations. Studying and analysing the constitution, evolution and decline of the hybrids produced by technique thus becomes essential to reconstruct that process of deviation of agency¹⁷ without which society cannot take shape and, above all, to reveal how the separation between things and subjects is the outcome of a process of stabilization (naturalization) that ultimately refers to the exercise, however disguised, of power.

It is not a matter of machines or mechanisms. These have never existed without mechanics, inventors, financiers, and machinists. Machines are the concealed wishes of actants which have tamed forces so effectively that they no longer look like forces. The result is that the actants are obeyed, even when they are not there (1988: 204).

Several times in the previous chapters, we decided to use the term “dialectic” to define the relationship between the semiotic perspective and the decades-long research on the paradoxes of modernity. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that even with reference to the field of investigation on the meaning of objects, distinctions emerge on the level of metalanguage. Where, as Ventura Bordenca (2021) reminds us, the French scholar outlines an extended notion of enunciation employing a series of terms used as synonyms, namely débrayage, delegation, mediation, deviation, sending or translation, for semiotics it remains essential to set the analysis of a social phenomenon in terms of a process articulated in clearly interdefined levels. A delegation action can therefore be understood as the outcome of a process that involves logically distinct planes, from the surface level of semio-narrative structures (with the presence of a series of abstract and distinct actantial roles such as that of the sender of a delegation and the addresee, or of possible helpers and opponents) to that of discursive structures, in which the same roles are liable to assume a figurativization, to manifest themselves as actors, anthropomorphic or not.

In any case, it is precisely in the effort to overcome the asymmetry between people and things that the open debate with the perspective of semiotics becomes evident, a confrontation that can be described in terms of a sort of double movement that runs through much of Latour’s research on the modes of existence of contemporaneity. The attempt to defend an anti-essentialist theory of action based solely on the principle of anti-reductionism, according to which there is no primacy of one entity over another, but only more or less stable and effective associations capable of withstanding a series of trials, leads to a peculiar double position expressed towards semiotics: on the one hand open criticism, on the other hand a revival of certain epistemological assumptions.

As Ventura Bordenca (my trans.; 2021: 31) highlights:

On the one hand, he criticizes structuralism, linguistics, and semiotics as domains of the symbolic, which would not be adequate to explain the world, as for Latour there is no "symbolic" added to "things"; on the other hand, asserting that there is no "proper" meaning different from a "figurative" one and that the world operates through a continuous process of shifts and translations, and that there is no "pure" language opposed to the world of "things", in fact, he makes a highly semiotic gesture.

Besides, it is worth recalling once again, the Latourian critique of the opposition between symbols and things, between proper and figurative meaning, dates back to a period of semiotic research that goes from the late Eighties to the mid-Nineties, to a scenario that is still centred on the notion of sign, where the weight of the notions developed in linguistics is still preponderant. Having made this clarification, it is then evident how the reflection on the paradoxes of modernity moves forward, marking a distance from the developments in semiotic theory that does not, however, lead to a rupture, to an unbridgeable distance, but to a distancing from the challenge of extending the tools for analysing natural language to a world characterised by hybrid associations.

Moreover, it suffices to recall how already in Greimasian theory the domain of the natural is conceived as semiotically relevant, as a “signifying world made up of both “nature” and “culture” (Greimas & Courtés, 1982: 374), a space in which the individual is inscribed from birth and whose meaning emerges through a process of integration guided progressively by learning.

The presence of a common epistemological horizon appears thus, once again, inescapable: if indisputable facts (matters of fact) are rethought as problems to interrogate (matters of question), it is because nature and culture are not dimensions given a priori, but rather areas to explore in the complex set of translations that are established between multiple entities (Latour, 1991, 1999), therefore, as meaning efects, in the sense of Greimas’ semiotics.

The overcoming of a clear distinction between the domain of materiality and that of the symbolic leads, thus, to the radical criticism of another dichotomy particularly consolidated in modernity, the one that opposes the facts to the fetishes, that is the reality of nature revealed by science (the evidence of the data) to the mysteries of religion and magical thinking. Our contemporaneity appears marked, rather, by the coexistence of facts and fetishes, the so-called factishes (faitiches), a Latourian term taken up several times in contemporary semiotic research. How else would it be possible to explain phenomena that are anything but passing or as irrelevant like the “telephone-man” (Dusi et al., 2002), in which the meaning of the technological device is to be found precisely in the overcoming of a separation between subject and object, in the function of a mediator capable of quickly generating and consolidating new types of relationships, behaviours, and affections, to the point of making them appear taken for granted, spontaneous, indispensable, in other words “natural”?

Insisting on reaffirming the primacy of reason over the symbolic, the dominion of man over things means falling back into the risky paradox of a sociology without an object, incapable of recognizing that without artifacts the social, and with it the human, are unthinkable. At the same time, accusing these kinds of bonds of fetishism, as often happens, means inevitably falling back into the paradox of a reductionist attitude incapable of accounting for the multiplicity of assemblages that are established between humans and non-humans, denying their meaning, understood as the ability to generate transformations not only on a pragmatic level but also and above all on an existential one.

The misunderstanding to grasp and circumvent then consists in not reducing the phenomenon of anthropomorphism, central in generating close ties between humans and technological devices, to the simple projection of a subject’s behaviour onto a non-human. Rather, as Latour (1993) highlights starting significantly from the dictionary definition of the term “anthropomorphic”, an artifact should be considered as such to the extent that it meets three conditions:

• It was conceived by a human being;

• It acts on his/her delegation, replacing a series of actions (place holder);

• It contributes to shaping the human, that is, to progressively generating a series of habits, so consolidated as to seem ordinary, which contribute to redefining the very existence of humans.

The implications of this anti reductionist perspective on the phenomena of social signification are valuable for a semiotics of artifacts, united by the need to overcome the anti-fetishist prejudice and committed to making visible the construction of what appears ordinary, to account for the ways in which meaning emerges and circulates in relations between humans and non-humans. Just think, as Dario Mangano (2021) reminds us, of the evolution of a technological object that has quickly established itself as a true symbol, the meaning of which is to be found far beyond the functionalities it is able to perform: the iPhone.

Today, the telephone no longer has a pragmatic but an existential value [...] it is no longer a telephone, it is a device [...] that has only one characteristic: to perform a mediation. This is how it becomes a hub, a 'concentrator', that is, the point where processes converge—or from which they depart—that invest and shape not a more or less ample number of aspects of existence, but existence in its entirety (my trans.; Mangano, 2021:352).

The use of the personal pronoun thus explicates the overcoming of the subject-object dichotomy in a product valorisation strategy that celebrates the advent of a renewed symbiosis between the individual and technology, fostering the emergence of a new mythology of contemporaneity. The union between human and non-human becomes so close and consolidated that it gives life to a new actor, the delegations assigned to the artifact on the cognitive, pragmatic, and affective level are so extensive that they transform the product into an extension of the subject, in a naturalization of the digital experience that makes the technological tool an integral component of one's identity. Thus, far from any reductionism, it must be noted that in everyday life technology and symbol reinforce each other, to the point that when a human measures himself/herself against an artifact of which he cannot fully grasp the potential, this commonly ends up being perceived as a “magical” object.¹⁸

5.8.1 A New Category of Non-human Agents: Smart Objects as an Anthropomorphic Device

The acceleration of technological innovation applied to common objects in everyday life has contributed to making the social dimension of things increasingly manifest, prompting semiotics to recently put the notion of hybrid back at the centre. The mobile phone analysed with the tools of semiotics soon revealed itself as the ancestor of a new object intimately connected to the sphere of ordinary action: the smartphone. This, in turn, can only be considered as one of the many tools that animate the transition to a new phase of the relationship between human and non-human actors, namely smart objects, a term commonly used to designate a category of devices as wide and varied as possible, characterized by the use of artificial intelligence and advanced forms of interconnection. This vast category of products includes widely distributed objects designed for intensive and daily use, equipped with various levels of agency and autonomy, able to interact, at various levels of complexity, with other entities. In short, the characteristics that make these new products distinctive are identification, connection, position, the ability to process data and interact with the external environment. Smart objects therefore distinguish themselves from traditional products in two fundamental ways. First, they manifest unique abilities to interact with other entities, whether human (consumers) or non-human, like other objects (interobjectivity), secondly, these abilities allow them to express a series of peculiar roles during interactions that users can intuitively recognize. A paradigmatic example concerns the widespread smart speakers like Amazon Echo, whose functioning is enabled by Alexa, a popular cloud-based voice assistant. The voice exchange for managing Echo ensures a mode of interaction with the device’s services that can be defined - at least phenomenologically—as “natural”. In fact, it is not necessary to use a screen or interface of any kind: it is enough to say the name “Alexa” to order dinner, hire transportation, control the house lighting, listen to music, etc. With the proliferation of this kind of product, the overcoming of the asymmetry between subjects and objects is evident: the meaning of these devices emerges in the function of mediators that they are able to exercise in the concatenation of humans and non-humans in which they take part, in the ability to solicit and nurture new types of interaction, carrying out on delegation, in autonomy, an increasing number of everyday actions.

What we are witnessing and participating in is therefore the emergence of a new ecosystem of digital agents with particularly advanced agency, with an unprecedented ability to simulate and, at the same time, to stimulate “natural” interaction with humans, to fit effortlessly into the spaces and times of everyday life, exploiting the potential of artificial intelligence.

In this perspective, smart objects thus clearly represent the most striking evolution of the processes of interobjectivity/intersubjectivity at work in technical objects (Peverini, 2021; Finocchi et al., 2018), foreshadowing a new scenario in which the device’s ability to express a ‘personality’, to favour the identification of the subject with an assemblage composed of heterogeneous entities, acting in connection with other enunciating instances (human and non-human) within extended, implementable, reconfigurable networks, takes on relevance.

Already 20 years ago (Dusi et al., 2002), as previously mentioned, within the framework of semiotic studies, the perspective of actor-network theory on technical objects was explicitly taken up, highlighting how behind the uses of the mobile phone unprecedented forms of relations between subjects and objects were concealed. The ties between humans and devices were described as characterised by unprecedented levels of pervasiveness, made effective by more and more extensive networks of action, characterised by a process of delegation without return, in which it was clear that what was delegated to the devices was at best returned as a service, certainly not as power.

Today, the increasingly close relationships between human and digital agents have taken on the traits of a real cohabitation, where the experience of new types of technological objects is so intuitive as to appear natural (think of the ease of activation and interaction of the intelligent vocal assistant through wake word like “Alexa” or “Siri” that allows even a child to interact with the product). This is actually the result of a sophisticated commercial process of collection, processing, and strategic use of data in which multiple entities are involved, some of which are in no way reducible to anthropomorphic categories such as “I” “you” or “he”. What we are therefore witnessing and in which we are progressively more and more involved is the emergence and progressive consolidation of new forms of relations between humans and non-humans supported by unprecedented assemblages, in a process of enunciation, understood with Latour, as mediation-delegation between multiple actants, all the more sophisticated as it is unattainable for the consumer.

In the environment that takes shape from the complex interweaving of relationships between the development of artificial intelligence and a set of social, cultural, political and economic factors, where the seemingly natural spread of smart objects manifests itself in the ability to perform, by delegation, a large quantity and variety of tasks, in addition to the concept of interobjectivity, a notion that assumes increasing relevance and must be re-examined is that of device. This notion defines a complex phenomenon that is articulated on three interrelated levels of relevance, albeit in a non-linear manner and with very different lines of evolution: technological, socio-anthropological and finally cultural, discursive and strategic (Eugeni, 2021).

The first level concerns the functioning of an object understood as a device, that is, as an instrument with peculiar technological characteristics. This first level interacts with a second dimension that regards the experiential situation of which the device is part and which in turn contributes to regulate/redefine its functioning. This second conception of the device is defined as assemblage and refers to the ways of concatenation that are established between multiple human and non-human entities.

Finally, to describe the whole set of conditions that make devices and assemblages imaginable and practicable Eugeni proposes to use the term apparatus. This third level, which clearly refers to the seminal work of Foucault, implies “the interaction of knowledge and powers from which the conditions of the subjects’ experience, its activation and its forms derive” (my trans.).

The strong tendency to naturalize the experience of post-media devices calls for an in-depth analysis of the way assemblages work and hide the logics of their own functioning. Although in the perspective of media studies the reference to Latour’s work is sometimes implicit, the similarities with his notion of device appear significant. The meaning of a device in fact extends well beyond the technical function it fulfils, it must be sought in the (always reconfigurable) process of mediation of which it is part, in the circulation of agency made possible by the concatenation of multiple entities, in the capacity of modifying relations between humans and non-humans by prefiguring new forms of life.

The critique of an anti-fetishist perspective therefore appears decisive to approach such a pervasive and complex phenomenon, in particular the rethinking of the notion of anthropomorphism proves particularly useful to account for the meaning implied in the functioning of these artifacts, understood semiotically as the ability to assume an identity, fulfilling a multitude of thematic roles, acting on different levels: cognitive, emotional, pragmatic.

From the point of view of their design, the smart objects are evidently the result of a massive investment effort involving market-leading companies, engaged in the development of artificial intelligence solutions capable of evolving interaction with human beings to a higher level, encouraging an increasingly broad and diversified adoption. Certainly, in the pervasive use of this kind of product, the ability to express a personality is essential, however, what appears even more significant are the repercussions of this simulation on everyday life, the ability to “give a new shape to the human”, assuming by delegation the management of a series of relevant intersubjective relationships, such as the increasingly widespread practice of entrusting the reading of a book to a child before they fall asleep.¹⁹

In a scenario marked by the proliferation of smart devices in which “new devices seek to establish new assemblages” (Eugeni, 2021), the research prospects that emerge for the theory of signification appear potentially relevant. It has been 20 years since the pioneering study on the semiotic dimension inherent in the rapid rise of the mobile phone from innovative product to mass device, an essential component of new forms of life in which function and symbol interpenetrate in an inseparable way. Today the enormous diffusion of smart objects calls for an in-depth study of the meaning they assume in the set of relationships that unfold in everyday life. Smart objects can thus be considered as non-human (but at the same time anthropomorphic in the Latourian sense) agents interacting with other agents (other devices but also other human beings) giving rise to identification processes destined to ‘refine’ and evolve with the circulation of information and the self-feeding of knowledge of individual devices—as well as of the assemblage as a whole. Interaction with Alexa or Google seems to take the form of a kind of discursive-processual identification between the components at play in the assemblage, soliciting a flexible post-medial experience (Eugeni, 2015) (my agency is modelled on that of the smart object which, in turn, constitutes its own from the interaction with me and/or with all the other networked components that determine ‘its’ actions).

In this context, which in all respects appears as a transition dense with social repercussions in the construction/reconstruction of the meaning of everyday life, it is necessary to reiterate that it is not certainly the “materiality” of different categories of smart objects that is decisive, but rather the ability to camouflage their presence, to equip themselves with a “familiar” identity, to spread and consolidate themselves as common use objects.

Let’s go back for a moment to smart speakers. Here it is no longer a question of some form/function dialectic because nothing, in these devices, authorizes some motivated or oriented valorisation of this relationship. The materiality of the object does not play a decisive role, much less does the design prefigure its functions, because these are by definition indefinite (or left to the potentialities of the indefinite assemblages between subjects and SO and/or between SO and SO through the network). In this regard, the considerations advanced by Betti Marenko (2014: 234–235) appear relevant:

Precisely because they possess an information shadow, a digital presence in the datasphere, their designs tend to become increasingly uniform […] The uniformity of design language has nothing to do with the old modernist dictum “form follows function.” Rather, it is predicated upon a different premise […] the physical forms of objects with which we are entangled are increasingly neutral, standardized, and rational, while their content is understood via a combination of irrational and somatic competences. Fascination and magical thinking, triggered in great part by the fact that we typically do not know how these devices work, are meshed with intense somatic and sensorial activity.

A sociosemiotics of new smart objects is thus called upon to measure itself first and foremost against the process of “natural” cohabitation that affects the new assemblages between humans and non-humans, to account for the ways in which technological tools become devices, the more efficient (and powerful) the more apparently harmless and controllable, the more semiotically relevant the more apparently familiar.

Moreover, the fact that the great commercial success of this type of product is a far-reaching sociosemiotic phenomenon is clear from the proliferation of texts and discourses extolling or criticising their distinctive features, making smart objects real social actors. Consider, on the one hand, the brand discourses emphasising the usefulness of smart objects, their reliability, their ability to fit naturally into everyday life, the playful dimension inherent in the user experience and, on the other hand, the growing criticism of gender stereotypes associated with the use of the female voice, the use of personal data, and privacy risks.

Where then, to begin to explore the meaning of a “new society of objects”? To understand the meaning of the new non-humans that inhabit our daily lives, one cannot fail to explore, first of all, how they are talked about and the relationships they have with us humans within the social discourses that define and consolidate their identity. In continuity with the proposal advanced by Marrone (2019), a theoretical and methodological perspective that appears fruitful is that of a sociosemiotics open to the theme of internaturality, committed to accounting for the naturalization at play in the new assemblages of humans and non-humans. A good tactical solution is to start from a selection of texts and discourses that play a decisive role in prefiguring and orienting new forms of everyday life in which what appears particularly significant is the ability of the devices to work while concealing the logic of their own functioning, to act and to make do in a ‘spontaneous’ way. In taking the first steps of this exploration, one cannot therefore ignore the role exercised by brand discourses in the definition of a new society of smart objects, a proposal that may appear paradoxical considering actor-network theory’s criticism of a semiotics too anchored to the analysis of narratives, but which is justified in the light of the internaturality inherent in numerous advertisements, more precisely of a sophisticated work of valorisation of objects, oriented towards defining their identity according to an animist mode of existence.

5.8.2 The Naturalization of Smart Objects in Brand Discourses

Given the constitutive indeterminacy of digital agents, the project of a sociosemiotics appears even more urgent in the task of reconstructing the ways in which new technological objects assume and claim a marked identity, display “naturalness” and “empathy”, thus contributing to conceal or reassure us about the complex power apparatus of which they are an integral part. In this regard, it is significant how in brand discourses the relational dimension in which the agency of the device is manifested is rendered in a way that is anything but descriptive. For example, analysing a large textual corpus composed of commercials of smart speakers produced from the year of their entry onto the market (2016) to the present day, it is possible to note how in many cases brands’ discourses do not focus at all on the technical characteristics of the product, understood as a device, but rather as an assemblage, an entity capable of contributing to the construction and strengthening of intersubjective bonds, helping to generate a transformation of everyday life and the different contexts in which it unfolds.

In numerous commercials, what takes on importance is certainly not the narrative function attributed to the technological product (the narrative role is clearly that of the helper who acts by delegation of a human, performing autonomously and effectively a series of daily actions), but the thematic roles that it acquires by delegation, contributing to shape new types of relationships with consumers. The exemplary case is that of Amazon, which since the launch of the smart speaker Echo for the Anglo-Saxon market (2016),²⁰ has presented the device as a component of a family, capable of assisting a father in entertaining his young daughter by performing numerous tasks in the absence of a maternal figure, in a process of familiarization with the intelligent vocal assistant, which culminates in the reading of a story to the girl before going to sleep, representing a practice, as we have seen, far from extraordinary. The ability to act by delegation, taking the place of an absent subject, is emphasized again in an Amazon commercial for the French market (2018) titled “Rayan et sa mère”. In the story, Alexa helps a mother to re-establish a dialogue with her teenage son, allowing her to extend her to enter a precluded place, the boy’s room, by remotely playing a song, until complicity and harmony are restored in a family unit in which the father figure is absent (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2

Amazon commercial “Rayan et sà mère” (2018)

The effectiveness of the device, explicitly portrayed as a mediator of conflictual relationships, is reiterated in another French commercial from 2018, in which a teenage girl, after several failed attempts to reveal to her parents that she is engaged to a girl her age, turns to the smart speaker with intelligent voice assistant as a close friend, a person she can confide in, and thus finds the courage to proudly reveal, again through a song, her homosexuality (Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.3

Amazon commercial “Faciliter son coming out avec Echo ‘Alexa’” (2018)

If in the previous cases the role played by the smart object consists in acting as a mediator of intersubjective relationships, in the most recent brand discourses, signals of a more symmetrical, equal, relationship between subjects and objects emerge where the relationships between human and non-human agents are mediated by both. Paradigmatic is the case of the “Alexa’s Body” commercial, significantly presented by Amazon on the occasion of the Super Bowl (2021), in which the smart speaker embodies the actor Michael B. Jordan, the object of the fantasies of a young female Amazon employee, who identifies his athletic body with the curvilinear and flawless shape of the device, until developing an erotic relationship with the unprecedented male alter ego of Alexa, portrayed in an ironic way (Fig. 5.4).

Fig. 5.4

Amazon commercial “Echo ‘Alexa’s body’” (2021)

But what is semiotically most relevant in Amazon’s communication is the marked tendency to represent, in an ironic way, artificial intelligence as a presence as irreplaceable as it is imperfect, plausible because unpredictable.²¹ In the American brand discourse Alexa loses her voice, fails to control connected devices, is responsible for sudden blackouts, does not respond to human commands but instead satisfies the desires of their pets to have access to huge amounts of food by executing online purchase orders.²² Finally, it jeopardizes the “serene” life of two celebrities (Scarlett Johansson, Colin Jost) by revealing intimate thoughts and embarrassing behind-the-scenes moments to the partners and their friends (Fig. 5.5).

Fig. 5.5

Amazon commercial (2022)

The enunciation at work in these brand discourses thus serves to endow the device with a “personality”, dressing the product with an animistic ontology (continuity of interiority/physical discontinuity), a choice that is anything but trivial if, conceiving enunciation in an extended (Latourian) perspective, one considers that the complex process of delegation (from human to non-human) and mediation (complexity and number of entities involved in the process of data collection, analysis and processing) that allows the product to function is inaccessible to the user. Nothing more relevant, in short, than the irony about the ‘human’ imperfection of the technological product, a sign of a meta-discourse that is anything but predictable or superficial about the limits and potential of a new society of intelligent objects.

5.8.3 Towards a Conclusion. New Devices and New Hybrids

The “telephone-man” (Marrone 1999) was configured as a hybrid-prosthesis, a new agent generated by the unprecedented association of human and non-human actors. Not only has this type of hybrid by no means disappeared, but today it is declining in a multiplicity of new assemblages that include wearability as a necessary condition to enable their functions (think of the very popular smartwatches).

If the hybrid-prosthesis recalls the famous example of the man-gun, different is the case of intelligent objects that do not include wearability as a prerequisite and whose functioning is rather entrusted to vocal interaction. With this type of technological artifacts, designed to integrate into domestic spaces, what is lost is the process of fusion and incorporation between the device and the human body. Is the notion of hybrid destined to lose relevance here? What about the body of this agent? Is it perhaps a disembodied assemblage? Questions that are anything but extemporaneous, just think of the statements made by Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s vice-president and scientist in charge of the brand’s artificial intelligence development, according to whom, in the near future, 60 s of recorded audio will be enough for Alexa to faithfully reproduce the voice of a human, assuming by delegation the place of a human, perhaps simulating the presence of a deceased person to alleviate the grief of their loved ones. The trace of the voice will thus lend itself to be used to exhibit the permanence of a human that can however only be simulated, to flaunt a reproduction that does not attest a “was there”, rather stages a “is still there”. After all, the voice has now proved decisive in the anthropomorphism that governs our daily relationship with an ever-increasing number of non-humans; suffice it to say that the voice assistant is already able, during interaction, to modulate the volume to the point of whispering and recognising the emotional state of the subject with whom it ‘dialogues’ from the analysis of the sounds he or she emits. In the face of the ‘humanisation’ of the device made possible by the delegation of human beings to the product and the company that manages its functioning, a new kind of actor seems to be emerging, whose agency is based on a new and pervasive form of mimicry, in which the ‘human’ voice camouflages an assemblage of composite entities, all the more relevant from a semiotic point of view, as they are less and less perceptible.

In short, if the corporeity of this new assemblage may seem absent at first glance (unless one traces it back to the materiality of the smart speaker, but that would be really reductive given the anthropomorphisation mentioned above and the overcoming of the form-function axiom of the artefact), it remains, nonetheless, evoked by a voice that, it is worth reiterating, is as impersonal in the manner of its production as it is realistic, ‘human’, endowed with a ‘grain’ that is far from lacking in semiotic depth and yet to be explored in the meaning effects it takes on itself. It is then up to a sociosemiotics of collectives to explore the emerging signals of new forms of life, where fears raised by the pervasiveness of assemblages combine with reassurances about the possibility of interrupting their functioning, or at least, as refined brand discourses suggest, of making fun of the irreplaceable presence of our non-human companions.