Lucia Re

the sign revisited

position within a system, and it acquires its value only because of the other phonemes to which it is opposed. Yet, for an &dquo;emic&dquo; unit to be recognized, it must be formulated somehow as &dquo;etic.&dquo; In other words, phonology builds up a system of oppositions in order to explain the functioning of a number of phonetic presences which, if they do not exist prior to the system, nonetheless are associated with its ghost. Without people uttering sounds, phonology could not exist, but without the 274 system postulated by phonology, people could not distinguish between sounds. Types are recognized through their realizations into concrete tokens. One cannot speak of a form (of the expression or of the content) without presupposing a matter and linking it immediately (neither before nor after) to a substance. 5.4 The Predominance of the Signifier. The answer given to the preceding question could confirm a further critique of the notion of sign. If the sign can be known only through the signifier, and the signified emerges only through an act of perpetual substitution of the signifier, the semiotic chain appears to be just a &dquo;chain of signifiers.&dquo; As such, it could be manipulated even by the unconscious (if we take the unconscious as being linguistically constituted). By the &dquo;drift&dquo; of signifiers, other signifiers are produced. As a more or less direct consequence of these conclusions, the universe of signs and even of sentences would dissolve into discourse as an activity. This line of thought, derived from Lacan, has generated a number of varied but essentially related positions. The basis for this critique is actually a misunderstanding, a word-play. Only by substituting &dquo;signified&dquo; every time the word &dquo;signifier&dquo; appears, does the discourse of these theoreticians become comprehensible. The misunderstanding derives from the fact that every signifier can only be translated into another signifier and that only by this process of interpretation can one grasp the corresponding signified. It must be clear, though, that in none of the various displacement and condensation processes described by Freud however multiplied and almost automatic the generative and drifting mechanisms might appear-does the interplay (even if based on assonances, alliterations, likeness of expression) fail to reverberate immediately on the aggregation of the content units, actually determining the content. In the Freudian passage from ‘Herr’-‘signore’ to ’Signorelli’, a series of expression differences is at work, based on identities and progressive slidings of the content. The Freudian example can, in fact, be understood only by someone who knows German and Italian, seeing them as complete sign-functions (expression + content). A person who does not know Chinese cannot produce Freudian slips interpretable in Chinese, unless a psychoanalyst who knows Chinese demonstrates that his or her patient had displaced linguistic remembrances, and that he or she unconsciously played with Chinese expressions. A Freudian slip, in order to 275 make sense, plays on content figures; if it plays only with expression figures it amounts to a mechanical error (typographical or phonetic). This kind of mechanical error is likely to involve content element3 only in the eye of the interpreter. But in this case it is the interpreter who must be psychoanalyzed. 5.5 Sign vs. Text. The so-called signifying chain produces texts which carry with them the recollection of the intertextuality which ncurishes them. Texts generate, or are capable of generating, multiple (and ultimately infinite) readings and interpretations. It was argued (for instance by the later Barthes, the recent Derrida and by Kristeva) that signification is to be located exclusively in the text. The text is the locus where meaning is produced and becomes productive (signifying practice). Within its texture the signs of the dictionary (as codifying equivalences) can emerge only by a rigidification and death of all &dquo;sense.&dquo; This critical line takes up Buyssens’ argument (communication is given only at the level of sentence) but it goes deeper. A text is not simply a communicational apparatus. It is a device which questions the previous signifyng systems, often renews them and sometimes destroys them. Finnegans Wake-a textual machine made to liquidate grammars and dictionariesis exemplary in this sense, but even rhetorical figures are produced and become alive only at the textual level. The textual machine empties the terms which the literal dictionary deemed univocal and well-defined, and fills them with new content figures. Yet, the production of a metaphor such as ’the king of the forest’ (where a figure of &dquo;humanity&dquo; is added to &dquo;lion&dquo; and an &dquo;animal&dquo; quality reverberates on the class of kings) implies the existence of both ’king’ and ’lion’ as functives of two previously codified sign-functions. If signs (expressions and content) did not preexist the text, every metaphor would be equivalent simply to saying that something is something. But a metaphor says that that (linguistic) thing is at the same time something else. The ability of the textual manifestations to empty, destroy or reconstruct pre-existing sign-functions, depends on the presence within the sign-function (i.e., in the network of content figures) of a set of instructions oriented towards the (potential) production of different texts (this concept will be further developed in § 9). It is in this sense that the thematization of textuality has been particularly suggestive. 5.6 The Sign as Identity. The sign is supposed to be based 276 on the categories of &dquo;similitude&dquo; or &dquo;identity.&dquo; This presumed fallacy renders the sign coherent with the ideological notion of the subject. The subject as a presupposed transcendental unity which opens itself to the world (or to which the world opens) through the act of representation, as well as the subject that transfers its representations onto other subjects in the process of communication, is supposedly a philosophical fiction dominating all of the history of philosophy. Let us postpone the discussion of this objection and see now in what sense the notion of sign is seen to be coherent with the (no longer viable) notion of &dquo;subject.&dquo; Under the mask of socialization or of mechanistic realism, ideological linguistics, absorbed by the science of signs, turns the sign-subject into a center. The sign-subject becomes the beginning and the end of all translinguistic activity, it becomes closed up in itself, located in its own word, which is conceived of by positivism as a kind of &dquo;psychism&dquo; residing in the brain (Kristeva, 1969, p. 69). The above statement implies the identification of the sign with the linguistic sign, where the linguistic sign is based on the equivalence model: p --q. In point of fact, Kristeva defines the sign as &dquo;resemblance.&dquo; The sign brings separate instances (subject-object on one hand, subject-interlocutor on the other) back to a unified whole (a unity which presents itself as a sentencemessage), replacing praxis with a single meaning, and difference with resemblance (ibid., p. 70)....The relationship instituted by the sign will therefore be a reconciliation of discrepancies, and identification of differences (ibid., p. 84). The notion of sign as resemblance and identity does not appear in Peirce: &dquo;A Sign is something by knowing which we know something more&dquo; (C.P., 8.332). The sign is an instruction for interpretation, a mechanism which starts from an initial stimulus and leads to all its illative consequences. Starting from the sign, one goes through the whole semiotic process and arrives at the point where the sign becomes capable of contradicting itself (otherwise, those textual mechanisms called &dquo;literature&dquo; would not be possible). For Peirce, the sign is a potential proposition (as even Kristeva notes in 1974, p. 43). In order to comprehend this notion of sign, we need to reconsider the initial phase of its historical development. Such reconsideration requires the elimination of an embarrassing notion, that of linguistic sign. Since this notion is after all a 277 late cultural product, we will postpone its treatment until later.

Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman

Interpreters of futurism are often fascinated by its most violent and misogynistic aspects, ignoring its other sides, and the liberatory effect that its attack on bourgeois values had on a considerable number of women. Yet one of the elements which make the complexity of futurism evident is the substantial participation of women in it. Valentine de Saint-Point, Enif Robert, Maria Ginanni, Irma Valeria, Rosa Rosà, and Benedetta (Marinettis wife) were inspired by its groundbreaking, transgressive energy. As futurist writers and artists they contributed to alter and enrich the movement and its language, countering its misogyny, and taking futurism in different directions. Mina Loy, one of the greatest and most influential among the experimental writers of the twentieth century, was inspired by futurism to seek her personal and intellectual liberation as a futurist-feminist woman, and started out her literary career essentially as a futurist poet and iconoclast. Her work, although written in English (a language that Marinetti did not know), is some of the best and most interesting in the literary history of futurism.

‘Barbari civilizzatissimi’: Marinetti and the futurist myth of barbarism

Abstract In light of the specific cultural history of Italy and of Marinettis African provenance, the persistent self-proclaimed primitivism and barbarism of the Italian futurists is discussed in contrast to other versions of modernist and avant-garde primitivism. Postcolonial critics have highlighted the complicity and affinity between primitivist avant-gardes and European imperialism in Africa. Yet Italian futurism cannot be simply assimilated to the imperialist European incorporation of the African ‘other’. Italy (especially southern Italy) was traditionally perceived and represented by northern Europeans as an inferior, barbaric ‘primitive’ other akin to Africa, in opposition and contrast to ‘civilized’ Europe. The Italian futurists ironically reclaimed, embraced and valorized both Italys southern-ness and its African-ness. At the same time, the futurists exposed barbarism and civilization in technology-driven modernity as two faces of the same coin.

Eleonora Duse and Women: Performing Desire, Power, and Knowledge

Abstract The article explores Eleonora Duse’s particular take on feminism before World War One and the influence she had on intellectual women through her acting, her letter-writing and her persona as a liberated, professional and creative woman. Duse is seen as a precursor of later feminist practices of affidamento (entrustment) in Italy. Through both her creative performance and interpretation of women’s stories on stage and her complex web of often-intimate female friendships, Duse fostered a new sense of legitimacy for women’s thought, women’s writing, and women’s autonomous subjectivities. The autobiographical narratives about Duse by Ofelia Mazzoni and Enif Robert are examined as exemplary cases.

Pasolini vs. Calvino, One More Time: The Debate on the Role of Intellectuals and Postmodernism in Italy Today

From Dante on, writers and intellectuals have played a crucial role in Italy, acting as a sort of collective “critical conscience” and providing some sense of a common identity in spite of the country’s chronic socio-political, economic and cultural fragmentation. In recent years, the usual laments over the “decline” and failures of Italian intellectuals, bemoaning especially the disappearance of impegno in the postmodern era, have multiplied and turned into a peculiar genre of its own. Many scholars have repeatedly issued indictments against the postmodern in all its guises, taking it as a betrayal of Marxism, Gramscian theory, the politics of commitment and even of historical truth itself. In this article, I discuss recent works in light of the wider context of the current debate, and I highlight some of the pitfalls that derive from framing the question of intellectual commitment in oppositional terms, pitting “Pasolini” and his realist myth against “Calvino” and his putatively irresponsible postmodernism.

Italy's first postcolonial novel and the end of (neo)realism

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that Ennio Flaianos Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947) is both the first Italian postcolonial novel and a highly complex literary work that should be acknowledged as a major text of twentieth-century literature. I discuss the hermeneutic function of parodic intertextuality in Tempo di uccidere, and its relationship with Dantes Commedia. Tempo di uccidere not only subverts many tenets of neorealism (and may therefore in some respects be compared to Italo Calvinos Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno), but it also exposes the violence inherent in the realist novel as a mode of representation. The article shows how Flaiano highlights hermeneutic issues of misreading, misrepresentation, and the violent erasure of the other, ironically prophesizing its own misreading by critics. Critics and readers have in fact – the article shows – consistently misrepresented, obfuscated, or glossed over the rape and murder of an Ethiopian woman that Flaiano unequivocally places at the centre his text. Tempo di uccidere is a multilevelled, modernist and ultimately postmodernist and allegorical text that – well before Edward Said articulated his own critique – disavows the violence of the realist novel and its complicity with European imperialism.

Futurism and the Feminine: New Perspectives

The critical study by Silvia Contarini (professor of contemporary Italian literature and civilization at the University of Paris X at Nanterre) and the anthology edited by Cecilia Bello Minciacchi are among the latest significant contributions in a growing wave of publications dealing with the woman question and the role of women in the futurist movement. Futurism, whose official birth was marked by the publication of its founding manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro on February 20, 1909, was the first artistic avant-garde to develop in twentieth-century Europe, and has always been identified as a hyperbolically masculinist and misogynist movement (though Surrealism is probably not far behind). From the late 1970s, however, scholars have begun to study more in depth both the image and the role of women and gender in futurism. Initially the tendency, especially among neo-feminist scholars, was to criticize futurist women (whose work was and largely remains usually very difficult to find and on whom information was and generally still is scarce and unreliable) for failing to elaborate ‘‘authentic’’ feminist models or images of femininity. Historical, archival and editorial work since the 1980s and 1990s has been more evenhanded, and has allowed the picture to become increasingly clearer. Contarini’s book offers a thorough and highly readable survey of the theme of ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘the feminine,’’ especially focused on the work of the futurist leader F. T. Marinetti, from the early 1900s to the early 1920s. The texts discussed range from the exuberant 1905 ‘‘satirical tragedy’’ written in French, Le Roi Bombance, in which woman and the feminine first appear as haunting, detestable and yet central images, to the allegorical novel Gli indomabili (The Untamables), published in 1922, at the time of what is conventionally called Marinetti’s ‘‘return to order’’ and his submission to both Mussolini’s fascism and to the institution of marriage (in 1923 he married the artist and writer Benedetta Cappa, who signed her work simply ‘‘Benedetta’’). Contarini thus chooses to discuss only the so-called ‘‘heroic phase’’ of futurism, bypassing almost completely the later phase or ‘‘second futurism.’’ As has been the norm in most studies of futurism, Marinetti plays the central role here, and the women remain marginal. The essential merit of this study is to demonstrate that the proverbial misogyny and virilism of Marinetti’s movement were not monological as is usually assumed, nor in any way original (misogyny being a deeply ingrained, ancient Italian and European tradition), but rather constituted a profoundly ambivalent, even aporetic and always opportunistic ideology which paradoxically yet effectively allowed Marinetti to attract men and, from 1912, also women to futurism. On the one hand, the seductive, captivating strategies of Marinetti the man and the leader contrasted