[ecrea] CfP for VS. – Quaderni di studi semiotici // Special Issue: forms of life / forms of the body: case studies

Call for papers for VS. – Quaderni di studi semiotici, n. 128 (01/2019)

Special Issue:

*FORMS OF LIFE / FORMS OF THE BODY: CASE STUDIES*

Edited by Gianfranco Marrone and Francesco Mazzucchelli

**

The semiotic notion of “form of life” is somehow self-evident and 
confused at once. After being explored and discussed at length for 
years, today it is used by many scholars in different contexts and with 
various purposes, making of it a typical blanket term. At the same time, 
the current debate inside the science of signification seems to ignore, 
or even dispense with, several issues related to such notion, declaring 
it out of date by default, despite of its obvious relevance.

On the one hand, the question posed by the notion of “form of life” 
echoes various contributions from philosophy of language (Wittgenstein) 
and sociology of consumption (with their assonance with another notion, 
that of ‘life styles’), as well as from phenomenology of perception (the 
concept of “coherent deformation” proposed by Merleau-Ponty). On the 
other hand, it is rooted in the dispute against the alleged universality 
of the Canonic Narrative Scheme, from which the idea of beau geste 
proposed by the last Greimas – thanks to which ethics and aesthetics 
seem from time to time to prevail over the algorithmic projectuality of 
narrativity. Beside “pragmatic subjectivities”, based on cognitively 
controlled decisions, other kinds of subjectivity and experience emerge, 
more interested towards affectivity, aesthetic expressivity, self-care 
and body-ostentation, or towards the achievement of a more or less 
ascetic – and sensual – well-being.

Lots of examples could be provided: from the beau geste of the 
contemptuous medieval knight to the Brazilian sambas watered with beer, 
from the bungee-jumping of teenagers in search of strong emotions to the 
silent ritual of sharing a coffee or a cigarette, from an hallucinated 
and solitary mescaline experience to the everyday urban prêt-à-porter 
fashion performances along city streets riddled with global brands. In 
any event, what is at stake is always the same need of theatralization, 
the same desire of showing off a personal way of life in the evanescent 
stage of the world.

These are not accidents: the possibility of staging a form of life seems 
to be part of it. Without the exhibition of personal ways to reshape 
social codes, the very existence of a form of life would be undermined. 
On the one hand, this theatrical aspect links together ethics (which in 
principle should be from the producer side) and aesthetics (which vice 
versa lies on the interpreter’s side): urged by an unexpected act and 
“caught in wonder”, the spectator reconsiders his values, comparing them 
with those of the others, and eventually reshapes the intersubjective 
shared social value (‘How things really are’). On the other hand, the 
showed-off gesture emerges, so to say, metonymically, representing 
itself as part of a whole which is waiting to be told. It is well-known, 
a text is not just a fragment of a broader culture, it can effectively 
express the whole form of that culture, that is being condensed in it. 
In the same way, a small gesture, the detail of an action or a behavior 
shall express the form of life of who, assuming it, publicly puts it on 
display, and thus the entire system of value from which his everyday 
practice, choices of life, tastes, decisions, ethical and political 
beliefs are organized. As everybody knows, a way of dressing can be a 
way of life, in a deep tension between condensation and expansion, 
manifestation and deepness, textuality and narrativity, going far beyond 
the world of dressing to encompass any event or process of individual 
and social lives.

In Semiotics, to talk about a form of life, a Subject is requested to 
select a semantic category (e.g., at an aspectual level, perfectivity 
rather than an incompleteness, iterativity, rather than terminativity), 
framing it as a dominant one inside his existential organization, as all 
the other categories should be derived from it, or somehow traced back 
to it, in an incessant movement between expansion and condensation. 
Given this, the notion of form of life naturally interacts with another 
semiotic phenomenon, which is, by definition, a massive mover of 
significance: body and physicality. In Semiotics (as well as in the rest 
of Humanities), there is an immense literature on the body, but a 
focused reflection on how its social uses produce veritable forms of 
life has been rarely proposed. As mentioned earlier, clothing and 
dressing are themselves forms of life, but similar consideration could 
be done for many other (anthropologically and semiotically assorted) 
phenomena. The aesthetics of everyday life – from Lotman to De Certeau, 
from Barthes to Greimas and many others – are simply a combination of 
body social uses and forms of life.


Hence, our decision to dedicate a special issue of Versus to the 
relationship between forms of life and forms of the body. Articles on 
this topic are requested, with a specific preference for those focused 
on case studies, in a necessary and constant dialogue with analogous 
research which are being conducted in Ethnology (e.g. the ontologies 
studied by Descola), Social Sciences and Philosophy (e.g. the modes of 
existence by Bruno Latour), but also in Linguistics, Philosophy, 
Sociology, Literary Studies, Psychology, Cognitivism, Anthropology, 
Cultural Studies etc.


This special issue shall then include contributions aimed at relaunch 
the semiotic research on forms of life, moving from an empirical 
perspective, and based on the analysis of observable semiotic processes, 
caught in their textual or discursive dimension. Possible areas of 
interest include (but are not limited to):

-Forms of life and narrativity: how may the notion of form of life be 
integrated within the classic paradigm of narrativity, meant as the 
basic mechanism of any form of signification? And how, conversely, can 
this notion contribute to shed a new light on it, underlining a 
diversion from the most canonic forms and in direction towards 
aesthesic/aesthetic and passional dimensions? How can the narrative and 
strategic dimension of social behavior be accounted, not just in terms 
of adhesion to (or deviance from) given cultural codes, but including 
the processes of subject construction, as well its inclusion in 
practices of (auto and hetero) representation?

-Forms of life and Semiotics of Culture: from Lotman’s pages (e.g. his 
essay about the Decembrists, where the investigation of “group behavior” 
relates to the observation of “historical and social types of reaction” 
and “mechanism of behavior adjustment”) up to the recent theoretical 
proposals by Fontanille (who expressly includes the analysis of forms of 
life inside a plan of reconstruction of “great syntagmatics of 
semiosphere”), the study of form of life evokes unavoidably themes and 
problems usually addressed by Semiotics of culture: what is the 
heuristic potential of this notion, compared to a perspective which aims 
to address the “logics of culture”? May it bridge textualist and 
culturalist Semiotics?

-Forms of life, life-styles, aesthetics of the everyday: on the one 
hand, forms of life have often been analyzed by Semiotics and especially 
Sociosemiotics, although sometimes using different phrasings and 
concepts (practices, social behaviors, life-styles, etc.), on the other 
hand, many disciplines close to Semiotics (Philosophy of Language, 
Aesthetics, Anthropology, Sociology of Cultural Processes, Cognitive 
Sciences, Literary Studies...) have used it, or theorized on it, in 
forms which are more or less compatible with Semiotics. What is the 
semiotic specificity of the notion of form of life and its semiotic 
pertinence in relation to the phenomenona it wants to designate?

More precisely, with regard to body social uses, the areas for which we 
are requesting papers are, for instance:

-Fashion and clothing: a classic topic for Semiotics which, if reframed 
in terms of forms of life, could pinpoint new directions of research. 
This thematic area may include also tattoos, piercing and scarification 
cultures, which lie midway between fashion trends and anthropological 
rituals, highlighting the cosmetic treatment of the body as an authentic 
lifestyle; but also, more widely, all those objects with which bodies 
continually relate producing “hybrids” of various types;

-The so-called “food tribes” – vegetarians, vegans, raw foodists, paleo, 
sushists, gluten-free people, no-carb people, etc. – for which food is 
an actual ideology, defining also an ethics, a metaphysics and a 
politics as well. Dietology and all the related issues trace back to 
such “food ideologies”, recalling the ancient Greek notion of “good 
citizen”, which combines dietary regimes and meaning regimes;

-Sports, including gyms but also all the strategies of body reformation 
(transformation) and conformation (alignment to standards), not just for 
recreational purposes, but in view of processes of (both individual and 
social) identity claiming;

-The long-standing point at issue with regard to medical science and 
health discourses, which lean more and more towards a mythological 
acclamation and/or a social downgrading of it: whatever happened to the 
ill body standing in front of the medical eye? And to what extent does 
the latter aim at re-establishing health rather than simply to a 
performance improvement (at all levels) of the healthy body?

-The recurrent theme, in Semiotics, associated with the manifold 
developments of life/death semantic opposition, whose apparent 
universality maybe deserves today a theoretical rethinking, in the light 
of the current differing ways to consider the beginning and the end of 
life, as well as practices of commemoration of the dead.


*_Submission and deadlines:_*

- 05/10/2018: submission of an abstract no longer than 500 words (plus a 
bibliography and a short biography)

- 15/10/2018: notification of abstract acceptance or refusal

- 31/01/2019: full paper submission

Abstract will be selected through a preliminary editorial review. All 
papers will be double-blind peer reviewed.

Abstract and papers must be sent to the following addresses: 
(redazione.vs /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(redazione.vs /at/ gmail.com)> 
(gianfranco.marrone /at/ unipa.it) <mailto:(gianfranco.marrone /at/ unipa.it)> 
(francesco.mazzucchelli /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(francesco.mazzucchelli /at/ gmail.com)>

Accepted languages: English, French, Italian.

Publishing style guide at http://versus.dfc.unibo.it/VS_guidelines_ENG.pdf

http://versus.dfc.unibo.it/index_en.php



--
*/Francesco Mazzucchelli/*
/Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor/

*Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna*
Dipartimento di Filosofia e Comunicazione
Via Azzo Gardino, 23 - Studio 210
40122 Bologna, Italy

Email:
(francesco.mazzucchelli /at/ unibo.it) <mailto:(francesco.mazzucchelli /at/ unibo.it)>
Webpages:
http://people.unibo.it/it/francesco.mazzucchelli
https://unibo.academia.edu/FrancescoMazzucchelli

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