Massimo Leone

Religious Conversion and Identity: the Semiotic Analysis of Texts

1. Introduction 2. The Distabilization of the Self 3. The Crisis of the Self 4. The Re-Stabilization of the Self 5. Conclusion

Representing Transcendence: The Semiosis of Real Presence

The double function of representation as “standing for” and “making present again” is explored in two case studies of ancient Egyptian cult statues and medieval Christian eucharistic transubstantiation. The experience of the “real presence” of the transcendent accomplished by ritual action is, in both cases, mediated by regimenting metasemiotic texts that proclaim and justify sacramental ontologies of transcendent realities that provide, in turn, models for their very representability in perceptible semiotic mediators. The concept of the “circle of semiosis” is proposed as a counter to scholarly efforts to anchor the variability of solutions to the paradox of representing the nonrepresentable in terms of their positioning relative to an “axial breakthrough” or to analyze metasemiotic texts as being primarily post hoc interpretations of universal psychological tendencies to see beyond the here and now.

Begging and belonging in the city: a semiotic approach

Citizens develop routine spatial enunciations through which they “domesticate” both the intensity of transition and the extension of distance implied by moving across a city and smooth out the frontiers between environments of belonging (e.g. home) and environments of non-belonging (e.g. the streets). Yet urban “accidents” constantly threaten the impermeability of such routine spatial enunciations. Beggars represent, from the point of view of citizens, an instance of such urban “accidents”. The primary goal of urban beggars is to intercept the routine spatial enunciations of citizens, stop them, and convince them to donate part of their money. In order to achieve these goals, beggars develop a series of micro-strategies that can be analyzed as both semiotic practices and urban performances. At the same time, citizens constantly reabsorb these micro-strategies in their routine spatial enunciations, pushing beggars to the elaboration of new strategies, and so on and so forth, in a continuous struggle between the citizens’ desire to protect their feeling of sedentary belonging and the beggars’ need to invade it. From this point of view, routines of sedentary belonging are a manifestation of power. But why are citizens willing to have their routine spatial enunciations through the city be stopped by all sorts of agencies (for instance, the commercial agency of advertisement), whereas they cannot wait to expel beggars from the urban landscape? Perhaps this discrepancy depends on the elimination of the spiritual discourse of charity from the urban arena?

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

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

My schoolmate: protest music in present-day Iran

The article examines the role of sounds, and particularly of music, as expressive means of protest that stemmed from the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election. On the background of the cultural history of music in Iran, semiotic analysis dwells on slogans, on the classic anti-establishment song ‘Yār-e-dabestānī-e-man’, as well as on underground and diaspora contemporary Iranian music. The article concludes by characterizing the musical protest scene of present-day Iran as a paradoxical consequence of governmental censorship of music in the country; simultaneously, it stresses the unresolved and ambiguous link between such musical protest scenes and that which took shape during the 1979 revolution.

Rituals and Routines: A Semiotic Inquiry

Abstract The article proposes a semiotic comparison between the phenomenological structure of rituals and routines, and claims that they share the same features of repetition through time, impossibility of change, unavailability of choice, and transcendental conception of origin. If a modern, structural conception of meaning based on alternative is adopted, both rituals and routines can be considered as meaningless. However, if the non-structural, pre-modem conception of meaning based on repetition is embraced, rituals and routines appear to be meaningful, although they do not have a meaning according to the structural semiotic ideology. The sense of belonging that emerges from rituals and routines (from routines as rituals) relies exactly on the feeling that no alternative is possible, that meaning depends on a subjects repetitive frequentation of a physical or conceptual space, and that dis-placement does not exist. The section concludes by focusing on the main phenomenological difference between a ritual and a routine- whereas the former is collective, the latter is individual-, contending that this is the main reason for which the existential value of rituals in pre-modem societies is not satisfactorily replaced by that of routines in contemporary societies. Routines offer to (post-) modern subjects an alienating feeling of belonging that fails to replace the sense of belonging guaranteed by pre-modem rituals. Only through rituals do subjects feel part of a collective routine that secures their feeling of belonging.

Legal Controversies About the Establishment of New Places of Worship in Multicultural Cities: A Semiogeographic Analysis

“Semiotic landscapes” are patterns of perceptible elements that individuals come across in public space. “Semiotic scenes” are patterns of perceptible elements that individuals come across in private space. Whereas semiotic scenes are mostly controlled by individual agencies, and are therefore relatively stable and transparent, semiotic landscapes are mostly controlled by collective agencies, and are therefore relatively unstable and opaque. Large migratory phenomena usually modify the semiotic landscapes of contemporary cities. New somatic features, new kinds of cloths, new gestures, postures, and movements, new feelings of distance and proximity, new music, new food, new sounds and smells, new buildings, new ways of experiencing the body in space and time, new conceptions of private and public, individuality and collectiveness become increasingly conspicuous. Individuals and groups may react to these changes by either semiotic engagement (modifying their semiotic habits) or by semiotic disengagement (contrasting changes so that semiotic habits are not modified). The point of equilibrium that a certain society reaches between semiotic engagement and semiotic disengagement manifests itself also in legal sources. Legal controversies about the establishment of new mosques in Australia are analysed in order to investigate the nature of this point of equilibrium in present-day Australian society. The semio-cultural analysis of one of these controversies shows the existence of a gap between the way in which multiculturalism is conceived by the political, legal, administrative, and bureaucratic discourse at the federal and state level, and how it is embodied in local reactions toward difference. Suggestions are made about policies that might help filling such gap. The semiotic engagement of the Australian society is compared with that of the Italian one. The semio-cultural analysis of a recent project of law concerning the establishment of new mosques in Italy shows that the leading socio-political framework in Italy is still relatively monocultural. A vicious circle between the religious majority and its mediatic and political referents brings about discriminatory attitudes toward religious minorities. These attitudes might be contrasted if Italy adopted policies that have already proved successful in societies, like the Australian one, which have already developed a long experience in managing cultural and religious difference.

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

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

Transcendence and Transgression in Religious Processions

This article analyzes the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies, thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them to believe in its omnipresence, in the reassuring idea that their entire existence takes place (literally and metaphorically) under the protection of transcendence. On the other hand, “accidents” caused by the persistence of individual agencies within the collective one constantly “threaten” the symbolic efficacy of religious processions: the tentative expansion of the sacred environment into the profane results in a symmetrical expansion of the latter into the former.

Divine Dictation: Voice and Writing in the Giving of the Law

The Giving of the Law is one of the most important events inJudeo-Christian civilisation. Variously interpreted by Jewish andChristian exegetes, profusely represented by poets and painters, sourceof interminable theological discussion and referential text ofnumberless doctrinal positions, the description of this momentouscommunication has deeply influenced Western civilisation. This influencehas not been neutral, but guided by interpretations and translations.The Hebrew text of the book of Exodus which recounts the Giving of theLaw (second tablets) contains an ambiguity: it is impossible todetermine whether this communication is direct or mediate, whether it isthe finger of God or the hand of Moses which has sculpted the Law in thestone. A detailed analysis of Christian exegesis, from the first Fathersof the Church until Medieval interpretations, reveals the way in whichthe choice between these two possible exegetical options has exercised along lasting influence on the Western conception of both Law andWriting: the content of the tablets and their expressive form.From Augustine, who is the first Christian author to pay close attentionto this interpretative dilemma, until the last Fathers of the Church,who fundamentally articulate this same exegesis, a typologicalinterpretation is progressively built, which explains the second tabletsas a reference to the New Testament. As a consequence, the writing ofthe Law is gradually spiritualised, in order to become the symboliccounterpart of the word of Christ. This provokes a dematerialisation ofwriting itself, which is a powerful semiotic myth of Westerncivilisation.