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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferruccio_Rossi-Landi
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-Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Linguistics and Economics,
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-Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Language as Work and Trade. A Semiotic Homology for Linguistics and Economics,
"The Italian philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921-1985) conducted pioneering work in semiotics and the philosophy of language from the 1950s to the second half of the 1980s. One of the main aspects of his research is his critique of language and subsequently of ideology in relation to sign-production processes, considered, in turn, in relation to the overall process of social reproduction. Present-day social reality confirms Rossi-Landi's updated definition of the ruling class as the class that controls communication channels together with the rules governing the formulation and interpretation of messages, as well as his theory of the sign-mediated character of the relationship between so-called structure and so-called superstructure.
The above-mentioned years covering Rossi-Landi's intellectual production coincide with the formation of a new phase in the social reproduction process, as well as with a period in which the fundamental role of signs and of verbal and nonverbal communication programs in the production process of capital was accentuated. It would not have been possible to study the unconscious programs underlying verbal and nonverbal behavior before the assertion of neocapitalism, just as the demystification of bourgeois economy would not have been possible, with its consequent unveiling of man's exploitation and oppression within the production process, before the full development of capitalism and, therefore, before the progressive weakening of the organic structure of capital and of the value of workers in favor of that part of capital which remains constant. As Rossi-Landi writes (1972b: 18-42):
Man acts according to programs in any socio-economic situation whatever and certainly not in the neocapitalist one alone. [But] that such program ming has emerged is the result or at least has been favored by the neocapitalist alteration of the organic structure of capital.
We have now reached such a highly advanced stage in this type of social reproduction that programming processes and the role of subjects in these processes have become difficult to perceive to the very point that, as mentioned, the end of ideology has been proclaimed, and the critique of alienation and of the exploitation of man described as anachronistic. The overall impression is that this system cannot be set aside; it appears as the natural result of human history so that all theory and criticism and all forms of revolutionary praxis are considered as devoid of realism, as mere Utopian fantasies.
This could be another reason for returning to such concepts as Rossi-Landi's "linguistic work," "linguistic capital," "homology between material production and linguistic production," which are of particular interest today. Such notions put Rossi-Landi in a position to interpret merchandise as messages and messages as merchandise in his project for the constitution of a general semiotics which is historical and materialistic in orientation. According to Rossi-Landi, production systems, sign systems and ideologies require and complete one another and impose unitary developments. The demystification of ideologies and of the very notion of the subject is only possible through a critique of signs that keeps account of the specific social context in which such signs are produced and circulate." (pp.X-XI)
"Giovanni Vailati (1863-1909) was one of the first Italians to have understood the importance not only of Charles S. Peirce's (1839-1914) semiotics, but also of his pragmaticism. Vailati was also in contact with the English scholar Victoria Lady Welby (1837-1912) at a time when her theory of meaning, or Significs, was generally ignored. Welby's work is only just now claiming attention in its own right (despite her intellectual exchanges with Peirce and her influence upon such authors as C.K. Ogden and I. A. Richards)." (note 88 p.XXV)
"Rossi-Landi's intellectual formation was heavily influenced by his critical confrontation with Morris (among other things he translated Morris's important 1938 book, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, see Rossi-Landi 1954d), with American pragmatism, operationalism, English analytical philosophy and especially the studies of Ryle (Rossi-Landi 1955a is a free translation of Ryle's The Concept of Mind), and with Wittgenstein. Furthermore, Rossi-Landi also revived the minor Italian tradition, which boasts such significant figures as Giuseppe Peano, Giovanni Vailati, Mario Calderoni, Federigo Enriques, and the same Eugenio Colorni, with respect to dominating idealism, symbolized at the time by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile.
Rossi-Landi was soon dissatisfied with the notion of ordinary language as it had been elaborated by the English analytical philosophers (the object of his studies while at Oxford between 1951 and 1953). In particular, he questioned the notion of linguistic use which, all things considered, was no more than the study of the characteristics of a given historical language, in this case English, mistakenly thought to represent ordinary language in general (an error involving such a renowned linguist as Chomsky even). On his part, Rossi-Landi was intent upon identifying the general conditions of languagethought at the basis of linguistic use and which as such are valid beyond the scope of a given historical language. This project led Rossi-Landi to his 1961 book, Significato comunicazione e parlare comune, in which he developed his theory of common speech with the aim of constructing a general model for the explanation of linguistic use, a model of speaking as Rossi-Landi called it, by identifying those elements that are common to and constant in the different single languages. The notion of common speech refers to the fundamental techniques underlying speech, operative in all languages ; it refers to the whole set of general conditions which make such operations as signifying and communication possible. In this context "possible" is intended in the Kantian sense, so that Rossi-Landi's research unfolds as the study of the a priori in language in his effort to identify the operations inevitably accomplished when we speak [...]
The notion of common speech was subsequently developed in terms of Rossi-Landi's notion of linguistic work (the original result of his studies on G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Classical Political Economy). Indeed, Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune, which intends to explain rather than just simply describe linguistic use, marks the beginning of a research itinerary that Rossi-Landi was to continue in his fundamental book of 1968, Linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato (English transl. 1983b), in which the Wittgensteinian notion of linguistic use is overtly criticized. This critique is put forward in Marxian terms with the consequence that Rossi-Landi maintains that the limit of Wittgenstein's theory of linguistic use is the absence of the notion of labor-value:
that is, of the value of a given object, in this case a linguistic object, as the product of a given linguistic piece of work. From the linguistic object, he [Wittgenstein] moves only forward and never backwards. (Rossi-Landi)
Wittgenstein too was often at the center of Rossi-Landi's attention, playing a fundamental role in his intellectual formation. Rossi-Landi himself drew our attention to this when, for example, he shifted the chapter on Wittgenstein (significantly entitled "Towards a Marxian Use of Wittgenstein") in his 1968 book to the beginning of the volume in the new Italian edition of 1973. To use the words of the title of one of the books listed above, Dall'analisi alla dialettica, this change may be interpreted as a sign of the determining influence exerted by Wittgenstein on Rossi-Landi in his transition "from analysis to dialectic."." (XIV-XV)
"Methodos, subtitled A Quarterly Review of Methodology and Language Analysis, was founded in Italy (Milan) in 1949. The main languages for publication were Italian and English though other languages were not excluded. This was rather exceptional at the time in Italy, a real effort to eliminate residues of cultural provincialism. In addition to his collaboration with Methodos, Rossi-Landi was constantly involved in editorial work for various other journals, which he often directed. He belonged to the editorial committees of the journals Occidente (1955-1956), Nuova corrente. (1966-1968), and Dialectical Anthropology (1975-1985) ; he founded the two journals Ideologic (1967-1974) and Scienze umane (1979-1981) ;14 he also founded and directed the small publishing house "Edizioni di ideologic" (Rome) ; and together with Tomás Maldonado, Luis Prieto, and Adam Schaff, he directed the book series "Semiotica e pratica sociale" (Feltrinelli-Bocca).
In addition to Rossi-Landi's own contribution, the same issue of Methodos (vol. 5, no. 18, 1953) includes Morris's important paper of 1952, "Significance, Signification and Painting" in the English original. Rossi-Landi's paper is substantially a study of Morris's esthetic theory, the subject of yet another study of 1967 entitled, "Sul modo in cui e stata fraintesa la semiotica estetica di Charles Morris" (On how Charles Morris's Esthetic Semiotics Has Been Misunderstood). This was subsequently included in his 1972 book Semiotica e ideologia (Semiotics and Ideology) though it originally appeared as the introduction to the Italian edition of three papers by Morris published in Nuova corrente (42-43, 1967): "Esthetics and the Theory of Signs" (1939) ; "Aesthetics, Signs and Icons," written in collaboration with D.J. Hamilton (1965) ; and a "Foreword" presented by Morris especially for the occasion. As in the case of Wittgenstein, then, Rossi-Landi often returned to Morris throughout his lifelong studies thus continuing the work begun with his monograph of 1953 ; in fact, though their research itineraries were different, they frequently intersected.
Morris and Rossi-Landi both dealt with the problem of values: Morris was particularly interested in esthetic and ethical value, Rossi-Landi in linguistic and economic value. Their regular correspondence, which lasted for more than twenty-five years -from approximately 1950 to 1976- testifies to the influence exercised by Rossi-Landi over Morris in the latter's studies on the relation between signs and values and, therefore, between semiotics and axiology, which were to find maximum theoretical expression in his 1964 book, Significance and Signification." (XVI-XVII)
"Rossi-Landi called the method he was concerned with the "homological method," which he theorized in "Omologia della riproduzione sociale" (Homology of Social Reproduction). (This paper was originally published in 1972 in the journal Ideologie and subsequently developed in both Linguistics and Economics and Metodica filosofica). The homological method pushes beyond the mere identification of analogies or similarities by integrating structural and dynamic analyses. As such it was already operative in Rossi-Landi's 1961 book, Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune, in which he constructed his common speech model on the basis of the identification of homologies between different languages. Beginning with the research flowing into Language as Work and Trade, Rossi-Landi investigated homological relations connecting the production, exchange and consumption of material goods with the production, exchange and consumption of signs: in this framework he examined both verbal and nonverbal language in terms of work. Such an approach amounted to the search for a homology between homo faber and homo loquens, which led Rossi-Landi to formulating his theory of the homology of production in general, that is, of both sign and non-sign production." (pp.XVII-XVIII)
"In Chapter One of Metodica filosofica [...] his 1968 book, Rossi-Landi now goes a step further by developing the concept of language in terms of work rather than activity. Activity is not programmed and is an end in itself; on the contrary, work mediates the relation between needs and the satisfaction of those needs, and to this end employs the specific instruments and materials of given models and programs with their specific goals. Moreover, the distinction between work and activity also concerns that between signs and non-signs. The footprints impressed upon the sand as the result of the activity of walking are not signs and persist in their non-sign status until they become the object of interpretive work.
But if the distinction between work and activity lies in the fact that work is planned, intentional and part of a program while activity is not, at the same time, however, work is not necessarily conscious of its objectives and programs. In fact, work can be "alienated" work as demonstrated by the Marxian analysis of capitalist society; or like Freud we may speak of "oneiric work," which implies that even the production of dreams is work. The unconscious is a social product and dreams are the result of work just as their translation into the discourse that narrates and analyzes them is the result of work, of interpretive work. That work may be realized without conscious programs provides "a special contact zone," says Rossi-Landi, "for the Marxian use of Freud or the Freudian use of Marx"." (pp.XVIII-XIX)
"The 1960s mark a break in Rossi-Landi's career, especially in relation to the Italian academic world. In 1962 he abandoned his Chair of Philosophy at the University of Padua owing to the incompatibility between the novelty of his ideas and an academic world that was intolerant of him. Consequently, Rossi-Landi left for the United States. He acted as visiting professor at Ann Arbor University in Michigan between 1962 and 1963 and at the University of Texas at Austin in 1963. He also taught at various European and American Universities between 1964 and 1965 and, furthermore, held courses in philosophy and semiotics at the Universities of Havana and Santiago (Cuba). [...]
Rossi-Landi returned to Italy in the mid 1970s initially as Full Professor of Philosophy of History at the University of Lecce, and subsequently as Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Trieste." (p.XIX)
"The concept dominating Rossi-Landi's research of the 1970s is social reproduction. Rather playfully echoing an expression from the origins of ancient Greek philosophy, Rossi-Landi maintained that social reproduction is the principle of all things. It is to social reproduction that the communicative process, verbal and nonverbal, must be attributed. Following Marx, Rossi-Landi divided social reproduction into three closely interrelated phases:
1. non-sign material production in which bodies are produced and not signs, but in which signs too come into play ;
2. exchange which simultaneously covers sign and non-sign material exchange or communication. Sign exchange includes:
a) sign production ;
b) sign exchange ;
c) sign consumption ;
3. non-sign material consumption in which bodies are consumed and not signs, and in which signs do not come into play.
The meaning of the title, Between Signs and Non-signs (established by Rossi-Landi himself), should now be clear. The reference is not only to the epistemological question of the relation between signs and things, though of course Rossi-Landi did not ignore this problem; indeed it is central to the essays collected in Part Four. Beyond this, however, the expression 'between signs and non-signs' recalls the fundamental fact that the relation between signs and things cannot be viewed separately from the global process of social reproduction. For Rossi-Landi, the relation between signs and nonsigns is the relation that constitutes social reality. All the social develops between signs and non-signs.
The relation between signs and non-signs throws light upon yet another major issue concerning the social system and its transformations; the relation, that is, between so-called structure and so-called superstructure, or between socio-economic reality and ideology. This is possible thanks to the introduction of a mediating element between modes of production and ideology (productive forces and relations of production); our reference is to sign systems, to sign systems in their entirety, verbal and nonverbal, and, therefore, to that important phase in social reproduction listed above as phase 2 -the combination of sign production, sign exchange, and sign consumption." (pp.XX-XXI)
"Rossi-Landi proposes the following five propositions [...]
(A) All signs are bodies
(B) Not all bodies are signs
(C) All bodies can be signs
(D) Signs are not bodies
(E) All bodies are signs
A, B, and C characterize the materialistic model of semiotics ; D and E the idealistic model.
Rossi-Landi isolated the sign totality or "cell," as he called it, described as a unit consisting of a signans and a signatum (he introduced this Augustinian terminology with the intention, apart from anything else, of avoiding the mentalistic ambiguity of the Saussurian signifté), and on this basis he elaborated the concept of sign residue. Irreducible residues of a bodily and of a social material order are present both on the side of the signans and of the signatum. On the side of the signans, bodies, either natural bodies or artefacts but in any case social - act as sign vehicles. On the side of the signatum, social residues are classifiable as interpretants in Peirce's sense intended both as intension, sense, lekton, and as extension, referent or designatum. In other words, the sign is characterized by a double materiality, physical and socio-historical, which determines the specificity of semiotic materiality.
Though Rossi-Landi distinguished between signs and non-signs, it was not his intention to establish two different modes of existence: things that are signs and things that are not signs, as though signs are signs of their own accord, by nature and independently of communication and interpretation processes, of socio-historical relations among human beings. It is common knowledge that not all things are signs, which does not exclude the fact that there is nothing that cannot become a sign once it has been caught up within the web of semiosic processes. The point for Rossi-Landi was not to distinguish tout court between signs and non-signs, but rather to study the ongoing transformation processes from the status of sign to the status of non-sign and vice versa, and of explaining the conditions that make such operations possible -something which further clarifies his choice of the word 'between' in the title of the present volume. Against trends colored by a sort of semiotic panlogism and according to which the world is uniquely populated by signs, against sign fetishism, and against arbitrary separations imposed by recourse to abstract categories, Rossi-Landi worked on notions that not only provided common ground for an adequate analysis of signs and non-signs, but were also able to account for the mechanisms underlying the very production -and reproduction- of signs and their multiple diversity." (pp.XXII-XXIII)
-Susan Petrilli, Introduction à Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Between Signs and Non-Signs, John Benjamins B.V., 1992, 322 pages.
"I am, or was in different periods of my life, sufficiently fluent in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish, not to speak of some knowledge of other languages and of a long though forgotten training in Latin and Greek) ; it also amounted to existential experiences which I had by living many years in countries other than Italy, especially in England and the United States, and by marrying (this time not contemporarily) two non-Italian women with whom I had five bilingual or plurilingual daughters. On the other hand, my mother was a bilingual (Italian and German) Austrian subject who became Italian after World War I. Thus it happened that I felt, and still partially feel, that I belonged not only to the Italian tradition, but also, to an important extent, to the cultural traditions of Austria and Germany, England, and the United States.
In fact, after a degree in French literature soon after the Second World War, in 1951 I earned another degree ("dottorato" in Italian terminology) in philosophy, and the subject was American semiotics. In 1953 I published a monograph on Charles Morris as the refounder of semiotics (the founder, of course, was Charles Sanders Peirce whose work I had been studying since the early 1950s). As far as my knowledge goes, it was one of the first books in semiotics as the general theory of signs which ever appeared in Italy and possibly also in Europe. But the time was not ripe for it." (p.1)
"My favorite authors were, and in the main still are, Hegel, Marx, and some of their German and Italian followers down to this postwar period." (p.2)
"On the European Continent people thought that I was a semiotician, or a linguistic or analytical philosopher who did not give sufficient importance to history and society ; while in the English-speaking countries people thought I was a historicist and not an analyst, or that I was only Hegelian, or only Marxist, and so on. I can report that when I was traveling between England and Italy in the 1950s I really had the impression of entering into a different world each time, and that communication between the two worlds was impossible or at least extremely difficult, or that the times were not ready for working contemporarily in the two of them. This impression lasted partially also in the 1960s and even in the 1970s, during my American trips." (p.2)
"I was trying to solve, or at least to raise interdisciplinary problems, or problems that in my opinion did not receive adequate treatment by any given discipline and were usually disregarded by specialists." (p.3)
"If I were now to choose myself some sort of a general formula for describing the bulk of my production, I would say that in the main it is a synthesis of historical materialism on the one hand and analytical philosophy and semiotics on the other: the framework is historico-materialistic, the mentality and the techniques are, at least partially, analytical and semiotical. A synthesis, I said ; and quite a few critics would agree. But perhaps it is only a mixture. Paraphrasing a famous saying by Wittgenstein, this is for the public to decide.
My two main hobbies are classical music and sailing, and this is not for the public to decide." (p.4)
-Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Between Signs and Non-Signs, John Benjamins B.V., 1992, 322 pages.
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-Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Linguistics and Economics,
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-Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Language as Work and Trade. A Semiotic Homology for Linguistics and Economics,
"The Italian philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921-1985) conducted pioneering work in semiotics and the philosophy of language from the 1950s to the second half of the 1980s. One of the main aspects of his research is his critique of language and subsequently of ideology in relation to sign-production processes, considered, in turn, in relation to the overall process of social reproduction. Present-day social reality confirms Rossi-Landi's updated definition of the ruling class as the class that controls communication channels together with the rules governing the formulation and interpretation of messages, as well as his theory of the sign-mediated character of the relationship between so-called structure and so-called superstructure.
The above-mentioned years covering Rossi-Landi's intellectual production coincide with the formation of a new phase in the social reproduction process, as well as with a period in which the fundamental role of signs and of verbal and nonverbal communication programs in the production process of capital was accentuated. It would not have been possible to study the unconscious programs underlying verbal and nonverbal behavior before the assertion of neocapitalism, just as the demystification of bourgeois economy would not have been possible, with its consequent unveiling of man's exploitation and oppression within the production process, before the full development of capitalism and, therefore, before the progressive weakening of the organic structure of capital and of the value of workers in favor of that part of capital which remains constant. As Rossi-Landi writes (1972b: 18-42):
Man acts according to programs in any socio-economic situation whatever and certainly not in the neocapitalist one alone. [But] that such program ming has emerged is the result or at least has been favored by the neocapitalist alteration of the organic structure of capital.
We have now reached such a highly advanced stage in this type of social reproduction that programming processes and the role of subjects in these processes have become difficult to perceive to the very point that, as mentioned, the end of ideology has been proclaimed, and the critique of alienation and of the exploitation of man described as anachronistic. The overall impression is that this system cannot be set aside; it appears as the natural result of human history so that all theory and criticism and all forms of revolutionary praxis are considered as devoid of realism, as mere Utopian fantasies.
This could be another reason for returning to such concepts as Rossi-Landi's "linguistic work," "linguistic capital," "homology between material production and linguistic production," which are of particular interest today. Such notions put Rossi-Landi in a position to interpret merchandise as messages and messages as merchandise in his project for the constitution of a general semiotics which is historical and materialistic in orientation. According to Rossi-Landi, production systems, sign systems and ideologies require and complete one another and impose unitary developments. The demystification of ideologies and of the very notion of the subject is only possible through a critique of signs that keeps account of the specific social context in which such signs are produced and circulate." (pp.X-XI)
"Giovanni Vailati (1863-1909) was one of the first Italians to have understood the importance not only of Charles S. Peirce's (1839-1914) semiotics, but also of his pragmaticism. Vailati was also in contact with the English scholar Victoria Lady Welby (1837-1912) at a time when her theory of meaning, or Significs, was generally ignored. Welby's work is only just now claiming attention in its own right (despite her intellectual exchanges with Peirce and her influence upon such authors as C.K. Ogden and I. A. Richards)." (note 88 p.XXV)
"Rossi-Landi's intellectual formation was heavily influenced by his critical confrontation with Morris (among other things he translated Morris's important 1938 book, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, see Rossi-Landi 1954d), with American pragmatism, operationalism, English analytical philosophy and especially the studies of Ryle (Rossi-Landi 1955a is a free translation of Ryle's The Concept of Mind), and with Wittgenstein. Furthermore, Rossi-Landi also revived the minor Italian tradition, which boasts such significant figures as Giuseppe Peano, Giovanni Vailati, Mario Calderoni, Federigo Enriques, and the same Eugenio Colorni, with respect to dominating idealism, symbolized at the time by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile.
Rossi-Landi was soon dissatisfied with the notion of ordinary language as it had been elaborated by the English analytical philosophers (the object of his studies while at Oxford between 1951 and 1953). In particular, he questioned the notion of linguistic use which, all things considered, was no more than the study of the characteristics of a given historical language, in this case English, mistakenly thought to represent ordinary language in general (an error involving such a renowned linguist as Chomsky even). On his part, Rossi-Landi was intent upon identifying the general conditions of languagethought at the basis of linguistic use and which as such are valid beyond the scope of a given historical language. This project led Rossi-Landi to his 1961 book, Significato comunicazione e parlare comune, in which he developed his theory of common speech with the aim of constructing a general model for the explanation of linguistic use, a model of speaking as Rossi-Landi called it, by identifying those elements that are common to and constant in the different single languages. The notion of common speech refers to the fundamental techniques underlying speech, operative in all languages ; it refers to the whole set of general conditions which make such operations as signifying and communication possible. In this context "possible" is intended in the Kantian sense, so that Rossi-Landi's research unfolds as the study of the a priori in language in his effort to identify the operations inevitably accomplished when we speak [...]
The notion of common speech was subsequently developed in terms of Rossi-Landi's notion of linguistic work (the original result of his studies on G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Classical Political Economy). Indeed, Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune, which intends to explain rather than just simply describe linguistic use, marks the beginning of a research itinerary that Rossi-Landi was to continue in his fundamental book of 1968, Linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato (English transl. 1983b), in which the Wittgensteinian notion of linguistic use is overtly criticized. This critique is put forward in Marxian terms with the consequence that Rossi-Landi maintains that the limit of Wittgenstein's theory of linguistic use is the absence of the notion of labor-value:
that is, of the value of a given object, in this case a linguistic object, as the product of a given linguistic piece of work. From the linguistic object, he [Wittgenstein] moves only forward and never backwards. (Rossi-Landi)
Wittgenstein too was often at the center of Rossi-Landi's attention, playing a fundamental role in his intellectual formation. Rossi-Landi himself drew our attention to this when, for example, he shifted the chapter on Wittgenstein (significantly entitled "Towards a Marxian Use of Wittgenstein") in his 1968 book to the beginning of the volume in the new Italian edition of 1973. To use the words of the title of one of the books listed above, Dall'analisi alla dialettica, this change may be interpreted as a sign of the determining influence exerted by Wittgenstein on Rossi-Landi in his transition "from analysis to dialectic."." (XIV-XV)
"Methodos, subtitled A Quarterly Review of Methodology and Language Analysis, was founded in Italy (Milan) in 1949. The main languages for publication were Italian and English though other languages were not excluded. This was rather exceptional at the time in Italy, a real effort to eliminate residues of cultural provincialism. In addition to his collaboration with Methodos, Rossi-Landi was constantly involved in editorial work for various other journals, which he often directed. He belonged to the editorial committees of the journals Occidente (1955-1956), Nuova corrente. (1966-1968), and Dialectical Anthropology (1975-1985) ; he founded the two journals Ideologic (1967-1974) and Scienze umane (1979-1981) ;14 he also founded and directed the small publishing house "Edizioni di ideologic" (Rome) ; and together with Tomás Maldonado, Luis Prieto, and Adam Schaff, he directed the book series "Semiotica e pratica sociale" (Feltrinelli-Bocca).
In addition to Rossi-Landi's own contribution, the same issue of Methodos (vol. 5, no. 18, 1953) includes Morris's important paper of 1952, "Significance, Signification and Painting" in the English original. Rossi-Landi's paper is substantially a study of Morris's esthetic theory, the subject of yet another study of 1967 entitled, "Sul modo in cui e stata fraintesa la semiotica estetica di Charles Morris" (On how Charles Morris's Esthetic Semiotics Has Been Misunderstood). This was subsequently included in his 1972 book Semiotica e ideologia (Semiotics and Ideology) though it originally appeared as the introduction to the Italian edition of three papers by Morris published in Nuova corrente (42-43, 1967): "Esthetics and the Theory of Signs" (1939) ; "Aesthetics, Signs and Icons," written in collaboration with D.J. Hamilton (1965) ; and a "Foreword" presented by Morris especially for the occasion. As in the case of Wittgenstein, then, Rossi-Landi often returned to Morris throughout his lifelong studies thus continuing the work begun with his monograph of 1953 ; in fact, though their research itineraries were different, they frequently intersected.
Morris and Rossi-Landi both dealt with the problem of values: Morris was particularly interested in esthetic and ethical value, Rossi-Landi in linguistic and economic value. Their regular correspondence, which lasted for more than twenty-five years -from approximately 1950 to 1976- testifies to the influence exercised by Rossi-Landi over Morris in the latter's studies on the relation between signs and values and, therefore, between semiotics and axiology, which were to find maximum theoretical expression in his 1964 book, Significance and Signification." (XVI-XVII)
"Rossi-Landi called the method he was concerned with the "homological method," which he theorized in "Omologia della riproduzione sociale" (Homology of Social Reproduction). (This paper was originally published in 1972 in the journal Ideologie and subsequently developed in both Linguistics and Economics and Metodica filosofica). The homological method pushes beyond the mere identification of analogies or similarities by integrating structural and dynamic analyses. As such it was already operative in Rossi-Landi's 1961 book, Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune, in which he constructed his common speech model on the basis of the identification of homologies between different languages. Beginning with the research flowing into Language as Work and Trade, Rossi-Landi investigated homological relations connecting the production, exchange and consumption of material goods with the production, exchange and consumption of signs: in this framework he examined both verbal and nonverbal language in terms of work. Such an approach amounted to the search for a homology between homo faber and homo loquens, which led Rossi-Landi to formulating his theory of the homology of production in general, that is, of both sign and non-sign production." (pp.XVII-XVIII)
"In Chapter One of Metodica filosofica [...] his 1968 book, Rossi-Landi now goes a step further by developing the concept of language in terms of work rather than activity. Activity is not programmed and is an end in itself; on the contrary, work mediates the relation between needs and the satisfaction of those needs, and to this end employs the specific instruments and materials of given models and programs with their specific goals. Moreover, the distinction between work and activity also concerns that between signs and non-signs. The footprints impressed upon the sand as the result of the activity of walking are not signs and persist in their non-sign status until they become the object of interpretive work.
But if the distinction between work and activity lies in the fact that work is planned, intentional and part of a program while activity is not, at the same time, however, work is not necessarily conscious of its objectives and programs. In fact, work can be "alienated" work as demonstrated by the Marxian analysis of capitalist society; or like Freud we may speak of "oneiric work," which implies that even the production of dreams is work. The unconscious is a social product and dreams are the result of work just as their translation into the discourse that narrates and analyzes them is the result of work, of interpretive work. That work may be realized without conscious programs provides "a special contact zone," says Rossi-Landi, "for the Marxian use of Freud or the Freudian use of Marx"." (pp.XVIII-XIX)
"The 1960s mark a break in Rossi-Landi's career, especially in relation to the Italian academic world. In 1962 he abandoned his Chair of Philosophy at the University of Padua owing to the incompatibility between the novelty of his ideas and an academic world that was intolerant of him. Consequently, Rossi-Landi left for the United States. He acted as visiting professor at Ann Arbor University in Michigan between 1962 and 1963 and at the University of Texas at Austin in 1963. He also taught at various European and American Universities between 1964 and 1965 and, furthermore, held courses in philosophy and semiotics at the Universities of Havana and Santiago (Cuba). [...]
Rossi-Landi returned to Italy in the mid 1970s initially as Full Professor of Philosophy of History at the University of Lecce, and subsequently as Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Trieste." (p.XIX)
"The concept dominating Rossi-Landi's research of the 1970s is social reproduction. Rather playfully echoing an expression from the origins of ancient Greek philosophy, Rossi-Landi maintained that social reproduction is the principle of all things. It is to social reproduction that the communicative process, verbal and nonverbal, must be attributed. Following Marx, Rossi-Landi divided social reproduction into three closely interrelated phases:
1. non-sign material production in which bodies are produced and not signs, but in which signs too come into play ;
2. exchange which simultaneously covers sign and non-sign material exchange or communication. Sign exchange includes:
a) sign production ;
b) sign exchange ;
c) sign consumption ;
3. non-sign material consumption in which bodies are consumed and not signs, and in which signs do not come into play.
The meaning of the title, Between Signs and Non-signs (established by Rossi-Landi himself), should now be clear. The reference is not only to the epistemological question of the relation between signs and things, though of course Rossi-Landi did not ignore this problem; indeed it is central to the essays collected in Part Four. Beyond this, however, the expression 'between signs and non-signs' recalls the fundamental fact that the relation between signs and things cannot be viewed separately from the global process of social reproduction. For Rossi-Landi, the relation between signs and nonsigns is the relation that constitutes social reality. All the social develops between signs and non-signs.
The relation between signs and non-signs throws light upon yet another major issue concerning the social system and its transformations; the relation, that is, between so-called structure and so-called superstructure, or between socio-economic reality and ideology. This is possible thanks to the introduction of a mediating element between modes of production and ideology (productive forces and relations of production); our reference is to sign systems, to sign systems in their entirety, verbal and nonverbal, and, therefore, to that important phase in social reproduction listed above as phase 2 -the combination of sign production, sign exchange, and sign consumption." (pp.XX-XXI)
"Rossi-Landi proposes the following five propositions [...]
(A) All signs are bodies
(B) Not all bodies are signs
(C) All bodies can be signs
(D) Signs are not bodies
(E) All bodies are signs
A, B, and C characterize the materialistic model of semiotics ; D and E the idealistic model.
Rossi-Landi isolated the sign totality or "cell," as he called it, described as a unit consisting of a signans and a signatum (he introduced this Augustinian terminology with the intention, apart from anything else, of avoiding the mentalistic ambiguity of the Saussurian signifté), and on this basis he elaborated the concept of sign residue. Irreducible residues of a bodily and of a social material order are present both on the side of the signans and of the signatum. On the side of the signans, bodies, either natural bodies or artefacts but in any case social - act as sign vehicles. On the side of the signatum, social residues are classifiable as interpretants in Peirce's sense intended both as intension, sense, lekton, and as extension, referent or designatum. In other words, the sign is characterized by a double materiality, physical and socio-historical, which determines the specificity of semiotic materiality.
Though Rossi-Landi distinguished between signs and non-signs, it was not his intention to establish two different modes of existence: things that are signs and things that are not signs, as though signs are signs of their own accord, by nature and independently of communication and interpretation processes, of socio-historical relations among human beings. It is common knowledge that not all things are signs, which does not exclude the fact that there is nothing that cannot become a sign once it has been caught up within the web of semiosic processes. The point for Rossi-Landi was not to distinguish tout court between signs and non-signs, but rather to study the ongoing transformation processes from the status of sign to the status of non-sign and vice versa, and of explaining the conditions that make such operations possible -something which further clarifies his choice of the word 'between' in the title of the present volume. Against trends colored by a sort of semiotic panlogism and according to which the world is uniquely populated by signs, against sign fetishism, and against arbitrary separations imposed by recourse to abstract categories, Rossi-Landi worked on notions that not only provided common ground for an adequate analysis of signs and non-signs, but were also able to account for the mechanisms underlying the very production -and reproduction- of signs and their multiple diversity." (pp.XXII-XXIII)
-Susan Petrilli, Introduction à Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Between Signs and Non-Signs, John Benjamins B.V., 1992, 322 pages.
"I am, or was in different periods of my life, sufficiently fluent in Italian, English, French, German, and Spanish, not to speak of some knowledge of other languages and of a long though forgotten training in Latin and Greek) ; it also amounted to existential experiences which I had by living many years in countries other than Italy, especially in England and the United States, and by marrying (this time not contemporarily) two non-Italian women with whom I had five bilingual or plurilingual daughters. On the other hand, my mother was a bilingual (Italian and German) Austrian subject who became Italian after World War I. Thus it happened that I felt, and still partially feel, that I belonged not only to the Italian tradition, but also, to an important extent, to the cultural traditions of Austria and Germany, England, and the United States.
In fact, after a degree in French literature soon after the Second World War, in 1951 I earned another degree ("dottorato" in Italian terminology) in philosophy, and the subject was American semiotics. In 1953 I published a monograph on Charles Morris as the refounder of semiotics (the founder, of course, was Charles Sanders Peirce whose work I had been studying since the early 1950s). As far as my knowledge goes, it was one of the first books in semiotics as the general theory of signs which ever appeared in Italy and possibly also in Europe. But the time was not ripe for it." (p.1)
"My favorite authors were, and in the main still are, Hegel, Marx, and some of their German and Italian followers down to this postwar period." (p.2)
"On the European Continent people thought that I was a semiotician, or a linguistic or analytical philosopher who did not give sufficient importance to history and society ; while in the English-speaking countries people thought I was a historicist and not an analyst, or that I was only Hegelian, or only Marxist, and so on. I can report that when I was traveling between England and Italy in the 1950s I really had the impression of entering into a different world each time, and that communication between the two worlds was impossible or at least extremely difficult, or that the times were not ready for working contemporarily in the two of them. This impression lasted partially also in the 1960s and even in the 1970s, during my American trips." (p.2)
"I was trying to solve, or at least to raise interdisciplinary problems, or problems that in my opinion did not receive adequate treatment by any given discipline and were usually disregarded by specialists." (p.3)
"If I were now to choose myself some sort of a general formula for describing the bulk of my production, I would say that in the main it is a synthesis of historical materialism on the one hand and analytical philosophy and semiotics on the other: the framework is historico-materialistic, the mentality and the techniques are, at least partially, analytical and semiotical. A synthesis, I said ; and quite a few critics would agree. But perhaps it is only a mixture. Paraphrasing a famous saying by Wittgenstein, this is for the public to decide.
My two main hobbies are classical music and sailing, and this is not for the public to decide." (p.4)
-Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Between Signs and Non-Signs, John Benjamins B.V., 1992, 322 pages.
