Semiotics and Economics

Abstract

In this essay we offer a series of considerations about the way in which new technologies have already changed, and might further change, our cultural, artistic and philosophical geography and practices; and some suggestions about how we might deal with such changes. At a moment in which postmodernity seems to be giving way to what Fredric Jameson has called a ‘geo-political aesthetic’ (Jameson 1992), two modes of analysis are particularly useful, in our opinion, to account for the complexity of contemporary changes: semiotics and poststructural feminism. Together, these two modes of analysis can radically undo the presuppositions of the modern aesthetic by installing a critical awareness of what life in the ‘global village’ implies. To inhabit the technological polis, we shall see, situates us at the crossroad between old and new conflicts, tensions and problems, but it means, above all, to take a critical standing vis-à-vis modernity’s underpinnings: the notion of the subject, the idea of objective knowledge, the logic of realism, authorship, identity, the subject/object split and so on.

[La storia del denaro] è la storia del rapporto fra uomo e Tecnologia (o, se si preferisce, fra uomo e Cultura), dove finiamo immancabilmente per essere soggiogati dai meccanismi che abbiamo creato, ragni prigioneri della propria tela.

(Massimo Fini, ‘Il denaro, sterco del demonio’)

[The History of money] is the history of the relation between man and technology (or, if one prefers, between man and culture), within which we ineluctably end up enslaved by the very mechanisms which we ourselves created, like spiders imprisoned in their very own webs.

(Editors’ translation)