Filosofia e Scienze dell'Educazione (DFE)

Riassunto The relationship between the philosopher Walter Benjamin and the playwright Bertolt Brecht opens to original theoretical implications. This paper highlights some of them, bound to the artwork and the role of the intellectual. Following a chronological line, it depicts the idea that this encounter had been extraordinary and misunderstood both from the Institut für Sozialforschung and the Jew Academic School, represented by Gershom Scholem.

It has been a long time since the concept of iconic signs was proposed
by C. S. Peirce. From that time on, we have been increasingly realizing that semiotic systems are for the most part established just on some type of similarity. But the more we see the sphere of analogical signification expanding its realm, the more we become aware of how inadequate is the notion of a simple relationship connecting locally a physical object with a second object, or with a mental entity.
There is, on the other hand, the more refined theory of sign conceived by
Ferdinand de Saussure, but this theory, by its very definition, addresses a
restricted domain, and definitely does not include the field of those signs which rest on analogical associations.
The main purpose of this article is then to show how the more polished
Saussurean model can act as a starting point for a general restatement, primarily intended to embrace the signs that rest on an analogical basis. We may so speak of a “neoclassical”, innovative semiotic theory, able to join the latest “sociosemiotic” approach with the most precious foundations of our discipline.

Narrative is firstly a formal organization, but it is a form that interprets the events giving them meaning. Starting from a reinterpretation of the classical Morphology of the Folktale by Vladimir Propp, we can now note how narrative form and cultural meanings interact with each other. Thus, we remove the “formal” dimension from its traditional segregation to a universe of insubstantial non-things, returning it to the arena of human strategic action and social practices. We may conceive a story as a route performed by a subject on a social and categorical map: so, a narrative configuration is essentially a set of dynamic relations, lying between a procedural and a systemic dimension. We find the basis of everything in the fundamental Saussurean view that interrupts the ordinary separation between “things” and “relations”: identity, meaning, and structure are the effects of systemic relations. In this light, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers us the most elaborate picture of narrative systems, where textual objects are seen as secondary outcomes of transformational tensions: every text is by nature a remake; it exists only through other texts. The most radical feature of this original perspective is indisputably the adoption of the theoretical model expounded by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his famous book on the morphogenesis of zoological species, On Growth and Form. Textual theory emerges greatly innovated, linked to a view of cultures as systemic networks of connected texts. And this applies also to products of our culture, as the concluding examples (the Alien film saga and Puccini’s Bohème) should positively illustrate.

Edgar Degas, one of the leading figures of “realism” in painting, was also an enthusiast photographer. However, the somehow “photographic” quality of his artistic production does not depend on a direct influence of the new medium; rather, it is mainly the effect of a new way of thinking and representing reality: a way that actually reminds features that we associate to photography. Think of the occurrence of accidental elements, the defective organization and delimitation of the visual space, the compromises with light conditions, the visual compositions with manifold focal centers, and consequently a stronger expression of a sense of the occurrence in time, of transience and contingency.
In semiotic terms, we cannot define “realism” on the basis of some “iconic” correspondence between the materiality of the painting and the “things” of our experience. What we think as “realism” is grounded on a profound relation between expressive structures and a way of thinking the world: the pictures adhere not to objects but to the plan that provides them a sense. A new reading of the foundations of semiotics, in a key that we may call “neoclassical”, suggests a more suitable theory about how analogical signification works, so as to also better acknowledge the constructive, not merely representational nature of visual texts.