Human Sciences in Dialogue: Epistemology and Methods, Agreements and Disputes, Acquisitions and Projects. Starting from Paolo Fabbri’s Semiotic Research

Abstract

In 1973, a long essay by Paolo Fabbri titled "Mass Communications in Italy: a Semiotic Glance and the Evil Eye of Sociology" was first published on Versus (“Le comunicazioni di massa in Italia: sguardo semiotico e malocchio della sociologia”, then republished by Sossella in 2018). The work opened a wide debate in the social sciences, in light of new findings in Semiotics and Structural Anthropology, Sociolinguistics and Mediology. The extraordinary developments of mass culture stimulated, at that time, a reflection on several points: the epistemology of humanities and the crisis of Marxism, the dialectic between research methodology and objects of analysis, the nature of media and communication systems, the social function of media tech, the active role of the audience, the unequal competences among communication actors, the processes of socio-cultural creolisation, the centrality of discursive genres and, above all, the rethinking of information theory in a semiotic key. Thus, messages became texts, the sender and the receiver were reshaped in terms of actors of enunciation, the code switched into numerous subcodes, the phatic contact played a primary role in communication, the notion of context lost the referent anchor and changed into meaning.