Farewell to representation: text and society

Abstract

Cultures develop the criteria to construct and recognize their texts, and pose them as normal, usual, ‘natural’. For us a book is a text, in Middle Ages for everyone a city was a text. But when it is necessary to critically inspect such a culture by analyzing its texts, it becomes necessary to understand their conditions of possibility and their functioning. So, from the semiotic point of view the text is something that needs to be recognized and constructed at the same time, that is to say invented according to the double meaning this word has for the ancient rhetoric (recovering) and for modern science (creating) (Marrone 2014). This is true for the semiotician who search for the fundamentals of any possible social and cultural meaning but, before that, for any subject, individual or collective, looking after his own identity. On one side the text is the starting point of any semiotic investigation, a model produced to examine and interpret a given cultural reality, on the other such a cultural reality exist because it is textually formed. This is very briefly the thesis that I will try to demonstrate in this paper, from which it descends a new role for the semiotic analysis of text: that of a new way of criticizing culture.