Corps de l’article

1. Linguistics and Marginalist Economics in Saussure’s Cours

In Cours de linguistique générale (1916), Ferdinand de Saussure related ordinary language to economic language and linguistics to economics, the latter are both concerned with the question of value, though economics does not deal specifically with verbal signs or verbal values. Two chapters in particular evidence analogies between political economy and linguistics in terms of method and object of study : chapter three, “La linguistique statique et la linguistique évolutive” (in “Première partie. Principes généraux”) and chapter four, “La valeur linguistique” (in “Deuxième partie. Linguistique synchronique”). Specifically on the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, the Cours (1916) recites that

Most other sciences are unaffected by this radical duality […]

On the contrary, that duality is already forcing itself upon the economic sciences. […] the works that have recently appeared on these subjects point up the distinction. Proceeding as they have, economists are – without being well aware of it – obeying an inner necessity. A similar necessity obliges us to divide linguistics into two parts, each with its own principle. Here as in political economy we are confronted with the notion of value; both sciences are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders – labor and wages in one and a signified and signifier in the other.

Saussure 1959 [1916] : 79

With Saussure linguistics encounters “pure economics” from the School of Lausanne, oriented in the sense of marginalism which was dominant at the time he was delivering his courses (important representatives include Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto). Saussure mentioned “recent” works in economics that tended to “scientificness” and distinguished between political economy and economic history – most probably Pareto’s Manual of Political Economy, 1906 (French translation 1909; cf. De Mauro 1967, note 165 : 423). Other significant representatives of the “marginalist revolution” (authors of the “recent” works in economics alluded to) include Carl Menger and William S. Jevons who voiced a need for greater scientific precision than ordinarily practiced in the economic sciences (see Vitello 1973 : 15ff.).

Saussurean theory of linguistic value presents important analogies with the Lausanne theory of economic value, in particular value theory as conceived by Walras and Pareto, which Saussure believed was well applied to language (see Walras 1883; 1886; 1900; 1974). From economic theory he translated such aspects into his linguistics as the principle of formalization, mathematics, deduction, the “point de vue statique”. Saussure in fact described his notion of the langue as “a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms” (1916, Eng. trans. : 80), where “value” is based on the theory of general equilibrium and interdependency among economic quantities, expressible in a mathematical formula. All the same, though distinct from other marginalists, the approach adopted by Walras and Pareto continued to neglect the question of cause, the relations of production in which the system under study is engendered.

No doubt the Lausanne school with Pareto and Walras diverges from the individualistic and utilitaristic perspective which characterizes Jevons’s and Menger’s marginalism as much as the approach of other exponents including Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen Böhm-Bawerk. According to Pareto, “the entire theory of economic equilibrium is independent from the notions of (economic) utility and use value” (1906, “Appendix” to the 1909 edition, p. 462, our trans.; see also Pareto 1896; 2015). All the same, though value in the Lausanne school is not considered as a property of things, but rather as the contingent expression of exchange relations manifest in market price, by giving up a causalistic interpretation the fetishistic vision of economic value persists and obstacles the capacity for critique. A correlate consequence is that Lausanne marginalism fails to investigate the historically determined social relations of production that constitute the economic system.

In Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s interpretation as formulated in his groundbreaking monograph of 1968, Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato (Eng. trans. Language as Work and Trade, 1983), the Saussurean approach to language makes a similar mistake by failing to investigate the question of linguistic production, the system of social relations at the source of exchange relations between signifié and signifiant, between one sign and another sign (cf. Bernard et al. 1994; Ponzio 2008, 2012a). Similarly to the price system in marginalist economic theory, Saussure described the system of linguistic values as a social system and linguistic values as social products. Just as the price of a product on the market is not established arbitrarily, linguistic value is not decided by the individual speaker. Price is determined in the general relation between demand and supply and the individual product is subject to the result. Analogously Saussure described linguistic value as the result of “social forces” that evade the individual will. But while “language” is social, the “acts of language” – where language is “both the instrument and the product” – are individual (Saussure [1916] 1959 : 19). The social (langue) for Saussure is the result of individual actions, what he described as “a sort of average” (ibid. : 13). The social bond that constitutes language (langue) is the sum of individual acts, a treasure stored in the parole. However, the problem in Saussure is that the social is reduced to a purely exterior unit, the result of the faculty of reception and coordination proper to the individual and the sum of all associations operated on the basis of such a faculty :

If we could embrace the sum of word-images stored in the minds of all individuals, we could identify the social bond that constitutes language. It is a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential system in each brain, or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity.

ibid. : 13-14

According to Rossi-Landi linguistic value in Saussure lacks a theory of labour value which results in reducing linguistic value to exchange value. The foundation of exchange value is identified in relations of interdependency among the signs of language, in the “momentary arrangement of its terms”. This leads to the distinction between language as a “social fact”, where the processes and structures of social production are not taken into account, and the parole as individual activity which though an expression of social linguistic production is not taken into account as such :

To go back for a moment to Saussure, or perhaps better to his interpreters, it is indeed singular that in language they saw only the mere sum or co-presence of langue and parole, and then declared this sum to be “unknowable”. Similarly, it is highly revealing that parole was taken to be necessarily individual, whereas collective speech was got rid of by inventing the ambiguous, amorphous notion of a “speaking mass”. Such a schema has a marked ideological imprint, the nucleus of which is constituted by a refusal to recognize the founding power of work and thus also the explicative and revolutionary power of the notion of work.

Rossi-Landi 1968, Eng. trans : 151-152

Ideology aside, in a Saussurean framework linguistic value is conceived in terms of exchange value with interpretive-cognitive implications no different from those involved in reducing a product to its phenomenic form and its value to exchange relations with other products on the market.

2. Linguistics and Economics from Rossi-Landi’s Perspective : Questions of Method

On his part, beginning from the mid-1960s, Rossi-Landi studied language through categories of political economy in its classical Ricardian-Marxian phase. This approach implied a shift from the level of linguistic exchange, the linguistic market, to the level of linguistic production, that is, to the social relations of linguistic production, “linguistic work”.

Communication is centrally important in a Marxian critique of political economy. Marx himself dedicated particular attention to the “language of commodities,” the “arcane of commodities” (cf. Marx 1962-62, 1974). His critique of political economy overturns the fetishistic vision of political economy which considers the relation among commodities as a natural relation among things instead of as a culturally specific relation among social individuals. From this point of view, Marxian critique is inquiry in a semiotic key that analyzes the structure of commodities as messages at the level of production and exchange. A product is a commodity not only when it is produced and consumed as use value, but also as exchange value, as a message. To keep account of such aspects means to elect economics as a branch of semiotics (see Rossi-Landi 1975). The structure of commodities and of the relation among commodities emerges as the economic structure of human relations, precisely relations of social production. From this perspective, the Marxian approach to structure is exemplary for semiotics.

Marx’s analysis of commodities and capital can be applied to anthroposemiosis generally in order to trace the structure of relations among human individuals, where previously only relations among things and individuals reduced to the status of things had been identified. From the perspective of general semiotics, this means to take a listening attitude towards semiosis in the human social world, verbal and non-verbal, and thus recover the dialogical dimension no less than foundational to the life of signs. Such an attitude favours understanding the sense of the relation to the other, opening to the other (see Petrilli 2019a : 121-156). In Rossi-Landi’s view, semiotics facilitates scientific inquiry into the relation between structure and superstructure, where recurrent difficulties derive from neglecting the mediating element in these relations, the totality of verbal and non-verbal sign systems operative in all human communities. The result is that the levels in question are not two but three – beyond modes of production (structure) and ideological elaborations (superstructure), the mediating work of sign systems.

In his “Preface to the American Edition” of his 1968 book, Language as Work and Trade (1983 : xi), Rossi-Landi clarifed that many of his ideas “were already present, if only in an embryonic form, in the 1961 book,” his Significato, comunicazione e parlare comune (Meaning, Communication, and Common Speech). Rossi-Landi’s 1961 book is the object of analysis in Umberto Eco’s essay, “Whatever Lola Wants. Rilettura di una rilettura,” contributed to the collective volume Per Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (in Petrilli 1987 : 13-24). But in the light of his project for linguistic-semiotic reflection oriented by historical materialism, in 1968 his “parlare comune”, his “common speech” hypothesis, seemed “mentalistic” to Rossi-Landi himself. He thus proceeded to reformulate the notion in terms of “social work” (see Rossi-Landi 1992; Petrilli 2014a : 282-298). As observed by Jeff Bernard in his essay “The Social Philosophy and Socio-Semiotics of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi” (in Bernard et al. 1994: 69-94), Rossi-Landi contextualized the “integral locus of signs” in the “general framework of human performance”. According to Bernard this meant to enter “paradigmatic socio-semiotics” and evade “every immanent danger as within ‘idealistic’ semiotics, i.e., of slipping into boundless pansemioticism”. The upshot is that Rossi-Landi’s approach no less than “removes the mentalistic tendencies of Saussureanism/structuralism, the sometimes formalistic tendencies of Peircean semiotics, and the shortenings of the bio-evolutionary approach, and at the same time points the way to their propelling synthesis” (Ibid. : 69).

Rossi-Landi’s “language as common speech” hypothesis, as proposed in Si.gni.fi.ca.to, comunicazione e parlare comune (1961), describes language as a system of common operations that subtend the different historico-natural languages. The notion of “common speech” is a model with interpretive functions, a theoretical construct and hypothesis applicable to different languages, not a direct description of real processes, though it refers to real processes, but a model capable of explaining linguistic usage. In Language as Work and Trade, as anticipated, Rossi-Landi developed and re-interpreted his “language as common speech” hypothesis in terms of his “language as work” hypothesis in response to the need of avoiding mentalistic temptations.

The notion of “common speech” should not be confused with “ordinary language” (Oxonian analytical philosophy), nor with “communicative competence” and “generative grammar” (Chomsky), nor with the “momentary arrangement” or the “state of a given language” (Saussure). According to Rossi-Landi, such notions and others still including “linguistic behavior” (behaviorism), “linguistic use” (Wittgenstein), “taxonomic” analysis (Martinet’s “double articulation”), “linguistic relativism” (which traps worldview in a given language, Sapir and Whorf) are all limited to describing language. Instead, with his notions of “common speech” and “linguistic work,” Rossi-Landi aimed to supercede the level of mere description and explain the social relations of linguistic production. It was important to investigate social structures and processes and understand how they produce the different historico-natural languages we live by.

In light of a Marxian critique of political economy as his model and in the effort to overcome the tendency to descriptivism in language theory, including Noam Chomsky’s, Rossi-Landi shifted his focus from the level of the linguistic market to the level of linguistic work. In spite of his genealogical approach to linguistic phenomena and his efforts to explain and not just describe them, Chomski supports the “innate universal grammar” hypothesis which too results in the tendency to hypostatize language. In other words, Chomsky fails to distinguish between the genotypic and the phenotypic levels of language, a shortcoming which Rossi-Landi aimed to avoid with his shift from the “linguistic market” to “linguistic work” (cf. Ponzio 1977, 1981, 2012b).

Applying categories from material production to linguistic production was part of Rossi-Landi’s larger project for the development of a “homological method” (Petrilli 2020a). From his letter dated 20 March 1965 to Charles Morris :

I am working on language, for a change — this time trying to take seriously what linguists and economists say about it. Linguists, for the obvious reason that most “linguistic philosophers” take so little account of linguistics as it is; economists, for the non obvious reason that I found an intriguing correspondence between certain analyses in the two fields (economics and linguistics).

In Petrilli, ed., 1992 : 99-100

The homological method identifies relations of resemblance of a structural and genetic order among objects from different fields of knowledge, normally thought to be separate. It searches for homologies and not analogies, tracing structural-genetic similarities (homologies), rather than relations of resemblance of the immediate surface order (analogies). Ultimately, in spite of apparent separation and different disciplinary status, material artifacts and linguistic artifacts can be considered as part of the same totality insofar as they are the result of human work (cf. Ponzio 1973a, b; 1988).

The homological method enables Rossi-Landi to critique hypostatization in language studies, the tendency to reify the parts forming a totality. To hypostatize or reify language means to decontextualize its parts and consider them separately from the totality they in fact constitute. “The homology between linguistic production and material production” is the title of a chapter in Rossi-Landi’s 1977 book, Linguistics and Economics (pp. 70-120), reelaborations includes “Omologia fra produzione linguistica e produzione materiale” in his 1985 book, Metodica filosofica a scienza dei segni (pp. 47-84), and “Articulations in Verbal and Objectual Sign Systems” in his posthumous 1992 book, Between Signs and Non-Signs (pp. 189-232). On the basis of his homological method, Rossi-Landi critiqued separatism among the sciences which he contributed to overcoming (cf. Perron et al. 2000; Petrilli 2008; Sebeok 2000) :

The homological element breaks with specialization : it obliges one to keep account of different things simultaneously, it disturbs the independent play of separate sub-totalities, and appeals to a vaster totality, whose laws are not those of its parts. In other words, the homological method is an antiseparatist and reconstructive method, as such unpopular with the specialists.

Rossi-Landi 1967-72 [1971], 16-17 : 62; now in Rossi-Landi 1985a : 53

During the last few years of his life, in a phase of development where material work and immaterial (intellectual) work, material production and immaterial linguistic production in capitalist society were still separate, Rossi-Landi knew that the two were destined to unite, even identify with each other. This was effectively achieved with the production of computers where hardware, a material body, and software, a program, a system of logical relations had at last come together. The homological relation between material production and linguistic production is confirmed by social reproduction today, “globalization,” the economic system dominating our present day world across the globe (Petrilli 2009, 2016a). In globalization communication is no longer limited to the exchange phase in social reproduction circuits (production-exchange-consumption), but also invests the production and consumption phases. Not only do we exchange communication, but we also produce and consume communication : not only are commodities messages, but messages too are commodities. Thanks to progress in technology linguistic work and material work were all one. As he observed during a seminar which we organized at the University of Bari (April 1985), just a month before his untimely death :

One can ascend along what I called the homological scheme of production up to a certain point where something incredible occurs: the two different types of productions merge into each other. This is something that has happened over the past few decades: in the production of computers, hardware (in technical language), that is, a material body (where material is elaborated to form a computer) combines with software, that is, a program, so that a system of logically expressible linguistic relations merges with the hardware. Therefore, the nonlinguistic, the objectual and the linguistic have merged into each other at the highest levels of elaboration, under our very noses so to say.

Rossi-Landi 1985b : 171; now in Rossi-Landi 1985 : 43; see also Petrilli 2010 : 137-158

As anticipated in the title of his 1985 book, Metodica filosofica e scienza dei segni, by contrast to the general “science of signs” (semiotics), philosophy of language as “philosophical methodics” investigates the conditions of possibility of the production of signs and of the sciences that study them. Thus interpreted, philosophy of language proceeds to interrogate sense and signifying implications, to investigate the production processes of signification, communication and understanding. According to this orientation philosophy of language is oriented by alterity, which in truth is inherent to signs and languages. In the expression itself “philosophy of language,” “of language” is a “subject genetive” alluding to philosophy whose viewpoint is language, and not an “object genetive,” philosophy applied to language, as its object. Associated with philosophy of language that does not lose sight of the sense of its task, and evidencing sign relations where it seemed there were only mere “facts” and relations among things, the general science of signs with its unifying vision (achieved through continuous shift in perspective) is in a position to identify new interdisciplinary relationships and interpretive itineraries, new cognitive fields and languages.

This approach characterizes Rossi-Landi’s research when he associates linguistics to economics pushing beyond pre-fixed boundaries that circumscribe and limit the semiotic field, beyond the pars pro toto fallacy and its mystifications, beyond reification of signs and meaning. Rossi-Landi critiqued the unquestioning acceptance of such notions as “system,” “code,” “equal exchange” applied to the study of language from economics, considering them reductive and oversimplifying, just as he critiqued specialism when it translates into overspecialization and separatism among the sciences. Given that man communicates with his whole social organization, for Rossi-Landi general semiotics converges with a general theory of society. As he remarked in “On the Overlapping of Categories in the Social Sciences” : “Man communicates with his entire behavior in several verbal or nonverbal, conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional ways” (Rossi-Landi 1992 : 165); and in “Introduction to Semiosis and Social Reproduction” : “No man can operate without consciously or unconsciously using some sign systems, and it is in fact with his whole social organization that man communicates” (ibid. : 174) :

In other words, every human action, whatever else it may be, must also be sign action. This is why it is social; or, perhaps with a more conservative formula, this is the main reason why we call it social. (Notice that “private actions” are themselves just a species of the kind “social actions,” in fact, the very opposition “private or individual” and “public or collective or social” is a social opposition).

ibid.

3. On Language According to Rossi-Landi and Sebeok : Convergences

It is not incidental that the original version of Rossi-Landi’s Linguistics and Economics (1977) was promoted by Sebeok for publication as Part eight of volume XII (Linguistics and Adjacent Arts and Sciences) in the Mouton series “Current Trends in Linguistics”. The Italian edition only appeared posthumously in 2016. With his “global semiotics” and notion of “language as modelling,” Sebeok too contributes to developing new perspectives and research instruments for a better understanding of signs and language. Moreover, to read Rossi-Landi in light of Sebeok’s approach and vice versa is also helpful in this sense (see Petrilli 2015).

As a fact of signification the entire universe enters Sebeok’s “global semiotics” (an expression used as the title of his 2001 book, his last before his death) where the “life sciences” and the “sign sciences” converge and the human being is recognized as a sign in a universe of signs. Sebeok extended the boundaries of semiotics traditionally understood as sémiologie, what he tagged the “minor tradition” insofar as it was based on the verbal paradigm and vitiated by the pars pro toto fallacy, in the direction of the so-called “major tradition” as represented by Charles Peirce, John Locked, and early studies on signs and symptoms by Hippocrates and Galen. Global semiotics is at once recent if considered from the viewpoint of the determination of its status and awareness of its wide-ranging possible applications and ancient if its roots are traced back to the Greek physicians (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2001, 2002; see also Sebeok, Petrilli, Ponzio 2001).

A central problematic in Sebeok’s global semiotics is his reelaboration of the concept of modelling as proposed by the Moscow-Tartu school in semiotics (A. A. Zaliznjak, V. V. Ivanov, V. N. Toporov, Ju. M. Lotman). Beyond the latter’s distinction between natural language (“primary modelling system”) and human cultural systems generally (“secondary modelling systems”), Sebeok focuses on the specificity of human modelling contrasting “language” on the one hand to “speech,” and on the other to the Moscow-Tartu conception of primary modelling as natural historical language (1991 : 49-58). He develops a methodological framework, his “modelling systems theory” (which studies semiotic phenomena as modelling processes) at the interface between semiotics and biology (referencing Jakob von Uexküll and his Umwelt) (see Sebeok and Danesi 2000 : 1-43; on global semiotics, see Petrilli and Ponzio 2001, 2002). According to Sebeok, language (historical-natural language), which appears relatively late in human evolution, is a secondary modelling system. Consequently, cultural systems that presuppose historical natural language are tertiary modelling systems.

While all animals are endowed with construction models of the world, the human being’s modelling device is endowed with a specific characteristic which is “syntax” (Sebeok), or better “syntactics” (Charles Morris) – which determines the ability to use a finite number of elements with sign interpretant-interpreted functions to create an infinite number of combinations, thus significations. Given that language is syntactical, this capacity led Sebeok to use the term “language” for specifically human modelling. Endowed with “language” thus described, the human being is not only a semiosic animal, but also a semiotic animal (see Deely, Petrilli, Ponzio 2005), capable of metasemiosis, that is, of reflection, inventiveness, creativity and critique. Whilst metasemiosis and verbal signs are specific to the “semiotic animal”, the latter also has other types of sign in common with non-human animals, e.g. iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs.

The great multiplicity of different historical-natural languages (“external plurilingualism”) and of (special) languages (“internal plurilingualism”) derives from the human modelling capacity, human “primary modelling” or “language” (language as modelling and not communication), to invent multiple worlds. “Language” thus understood tells of the human propensity for the “play of musement” (Sebeok 1981). Before the appearance of communication through verbal language which also enhances communication through non-verbal sign behaviours, language is a “system”, a “procedure”, a modelling “device”, a model with the specific function of constructing new worlds, of signifying, interpreting, conferring sense. And to the extent that non-verbal sign systems are implanted in this linguistic syntactical modelling device, they too are languages, non-verbal languages) (Sebeok 1991 : 49).

While the notion of language as primary modelling explains the multiplicity of (historical-natural) languages, Chomsky’s linguistic theory does not in spite of insistence on the “creative character of language”. But when Chomsky discusses language his reference is verbal language and not language as modelling antecedent to verbal and non-verbal communication. Chomsky attempts to explain linguistic creativity, the multiplicity of historical-natural languages on the basis of a presumed Cartesian innate Universal Grammar, which means to remain at the level of verbal language.

In Sebeok’s “language as primary modelling” and Rossi-Landi’s “language as work” “language” is an a priori with respect to verbal linguistic communication, what makes it possible, what makes specifically human work possible, which as such cannot be explained in terms of communication. The notions of “language as modelling” and “language as work” critique theories that reduce the problem of language and its origins to a question of communication. As Rossi-Landi observes : “We must evidence the nonreducibility of language to mere communication, otherwise it would not be possible to place the capacity of language in a coherent framework concerning the phylogenesis of nerve structures and relative psychic functions” (1985a : 234, our trans.). This is language understood as the capacity for syntactic construction and deconstruction specific to human modelling in its capacity to produce an indefinite number of possible worlds which speech and historico-natural languages presuppose. Whether a question of goods (nonverbal messages) or verbal messages the problem is the same : the common source is human modelling, human work that produce messages and goods and puts them into circulation.

In Rossi-Landi’s view, the concept of “linguistic work” is the third element, a founding element with respect to the dichotomy between langue and parole, which the Saussurean approach fails to take into account. In Saussure the concept of langage is understood as “concrete heterogeneous material” from which linguistics cuts out its object of study, the langue, an “abstract object”; langage is also understood as a unit formed of langue and parole, and as the “faculty” of speech. But for Rossi-Landi langage is not reducible to the unit that results from associating langue and parole. “Language” in Rossi-Landi is “linguistic work” from which derive the single historical-natural languages, the product of linguistic work. Differently from the parole, language is collective rather than individual; and differently from langue language is work rather than a product. Historical-natural languages are reactivated, regenerated, revalorized by linguistic work in the parole. The parole is individual only because a particular operation is individual, but the “model of the operation is social” (Rossi-Landi 1968 [1983] : 39; see also Fano 1973; Tran Duc Thao 1973). In Rossi-Landi’s approach, the langue and parole bipartition is replaced by a tripartition : (collective) linguistic work which produces (collective) language (langue), from which derives (single individual) speech. Linguistic products flow into the same reservoir from which are drawn the materials and instruments of linguistic work (Rossi-Landi 1968, Eng. trans.1983 : 40-41).

In Rossi-Landi’s conception, “linguistic work” is species-specific to human semiosis. Specificity consists in the capacity for sign mediation where what mediates is “work” similarly to the production of all human artefacts (as observed by Hegel before Marx). Moreover, Rossi-Landi distinguishes “work” from “activity” : while “activity” concerns the level of semiosic interpretation traceable in all living beings, including the human especially at the level of endosemiosis, “work” thus “linguistic work” involves interpretation at the “metasemiosic” or “semiotic” level. Sign production involves working with signs as materials and instruments, based on models from earlier sign productions. And all this involves the human capacity for reflecting on signs as we have described it, Peirce’s “play of musement”, for deconstructing and reconstructing worldviews and deliberating.

But social systems today stand upon commodified and “alienated work”. In fact, “work” does not necessarily imply “awareness”, “consciousness”, just as “linguistic work” does not necessarily guarantee “critical linguistic consciousness”. Expressions like “labour commodification” or “alienated labour” (Marx evokes Hegel, see Marx 1973), similarly to the expression “oneiric work” (Freud 1901) indicate as much. Moreover, because of the condition of alienation associated with work in our social system, “work” in the expression “linguistic work” may seem juxtapposed to the “play of musement”, to “language” as modelling and creativity. Instead, the “play of musement” and “linguistic work” are in a relation of complementarity, play presupposes work. As Rossi-Landi maintains, there are no net distinctions and, if it is possible to identify two extreme zones in which to situate what is “work” and what is not, there is also a wide intermediate zone in which the determinants of the two extreme zones overlap.

Development of the human interpretive capacity and with it social communication call for development of critical consciousness concerning both linguistic and non-linguistic work, what today we identify as “immaterial” and “material” work (see Petrilli 2003; 2003b; 2018a; Petrilli and Ponzio 2003b, 2019a; Ponzio 2003; 2018a). Based on the capacity for linguistic work, Rossi-Landi (1970) critiques social and linguistic alienation where critique presupposes the human capacity to interrogate reality and construct different worlds, whether utopically or scientifically.

Moreover, conscious awareness implies recovery of dialogism proper to semiosis, verbal and non-verbal, thus proper to the acquisition of knowledge necessary to control programs, programming, and planning involved in the supply and organization of work, whether material or immaterial. From this perspective, Rossi-Landi’s approach to the life of signs can be associated with what we have designated as “semioethics” (Petrilli and Ponzio 2003; 2010; cf. also Petrilli 2010; 2019b : 169-188; 201-252). From this point of view, Rossi-Landi takes his place in an ideal tradition featuring such personalities as Mikhail Bakhtin, Charles Peirce, Victoria Welby, Charles Morris, and Adam Schaff.

Reading together Rossi-Landi and Sebeok, verbal and non-verbal work, the production of verbal messages and commodities clearly belong to the same type of semiosis, linguistic modelling semiosis, linguistic work with a modelling function. Consequently, whether a question of nonverbal commodities or of verbal messages, the production and exchange of nonverbal objects, or of verbal signs, the general science of signs or semiotics is faced with the same problematic, that of the work that produces objects and signs and renders exchange possible. According to Rossi-Landi, to study a given sign system in social reproduction can prove useful for the study of another sign system given that under study is fundamentally the same thing (Rossi-Landi 1968, Eng. trans. : 66-72; 1992 : 157-168).

As a philosopher of language interested in social communication in the human world, Rossi-Landi knew that an adequate understanding of single verbal languages and their internal special languages calls for an “extralocalized” gaze with respect to the specific object of study (cf. Bachtin e il suo Circolo 2014; Ponzio 1992), the capacity to look from the outside, at a distance, from a global perspective. For the case in point, an understanding of the linguistic object, thus of the relation between Linguistics and Economics calls for a semiotic and not merely a linguistic perspective. Indeed, today we know that an adequate perspective on language, verbal and non-verbal, calls for semiotics oriented in the sense of a global study of signs considered both in their relations of similarity and of heterogeneity, rather than for general linguistics as traditionally practiced, that is, modelled on verbal language and focussed on conventional and intentional signs.

The dominant approach to linguistics elects the verbal sign as the general sign model for both verbal and non-verbal signs, making of the verbal the general criterion of interpretability. This results in a glottocentric approach to historical-natural language where meaning is viewed reductively in terms of verbal meaning, falling into the pars pro toto fallacy characteristic of general linguistics (cf. Petrilli 2014c; 2016a: 45-68). Similarly to semiotics and philosophy of language as they have been traditionally practiced, general linguistics does not account for signifying processes in their complexity. These sciences tend to overlook contextualization of verbal language in the dialogic relation to the other – the organic and inorganic other, the human and non-human other, the natural and cultural other, the non-verbal other. The glottocentric approach to verbal language is oriented by the belief (whether implicit or explicit) that signs can generally be assimilated to the verbal order, indeed that linguistic signification converges with verbal semiosis, thereby denying the status of language, even of sign to expression that is not verbal. On the contrary, a theory of language that aims to be critical and explicative calls for a semiotic perspective that is at once global and detotalizing.

4. Linguistic (“Immaterial”) Work and Non-Linguistic (“Material”) Work

The distinction between “linguistic work” and “non-linguistic work” or in current terminology “immaterial work” and “material work,” reflects the ideology of the division of labour in a historically specified social system. Apart from the zoosemiosic level in the human body, human behaviour is always connected to modelling, reflection, programming, mediated by linguistic work (where “linguistic” derives fron “language as modelling”), even if at differing degrees (see Petrilli 2001; 2018b). As anticipated above, we know that Rossi-Landi had foreseen – though not experienced directly himself – that in globalization communication would pervade the entire social reproduction cycle and not only the so-called “communication-production” phase (cf. Petrilli 2014a; Petrilli and Ponzio 2001; Ponzio 2009a), where commodities are messages and messages are commodities. As anticipated, communication does not only occur in the intermediate phase in the production cycle, that of exchange, circulation, the market, but is also present, indeed is essential to the two extremes in this cycle, the initial and the final, the production and consumption phases. (On messages and communication viewed in the marketplace from a semiotic perspective, see Sebeok, “Messaggi al mercato”, in Petrilli, ed. 1987 : 60-68, the Italian translation of Sebeok 1987; see also H. Walter Schmitz, “‘Linguistic money’. F. Rossi-Landi and the tradition of a simile”. Ibid. : 69-80).

We know that the capitalist social system traditionally separates labour force from the instrument of production – labour is freely possessed by the proletariat, the instruments of production by capital. Today, there are two aspects to the separation between labour force and the machine : the first concerns access to the machine as required by a given job; the second access to the machine as required by formation and training. A situation is created whereby unemployment is doubled on competetive grounds : in the first instance, people who are not adequately equipped to renew their formation on a continuous basis are excluded; in the second, ever more qualified people end up jobless. Extromission and rejection are two conspicuous consequences of automation today in the context of capitalist development.

Given that specifically human qualities are involved (the capacity for language, for sign behaviour at a semiotical level, complex inferential processes, the capacity for innovation and inventiveness), the work elicited by the intelligent machine is in net contrast with the measurement of social wealth in terms of labour time, typical of the capitalist social system. In these circumstances, human work reveals its irreducibility to measurement in hours, and to equivalence on this basis. Human work presents itself in its constitutive incommensurability, thereby revealing its essentially qualitative character. Quantity is subordinate to quality proper to work, such that quantity cannot become the criterion and the norm regulating work. The time of creativity, inventiveness and innovation, of interactive response is a time that spills over with respect to prefixed limits, consequently it is not the time of mechanical repetition. The time of creativity and innovation can be a short time or a long time, depending on conditions and requirements, nor can time be reduced to negotiated time, to time and duration as established by contract. The difference between live work and reified, alienated work is manifest at a maximum degree, in relations where live work cannot be managed as though it were merchandise. Nonetheless, despite its incommensurability as the source of historico-social value, in the capitalist system today work has been typically subjected to the process of commodification, reduced to the status of merchandise, as quantified abstract work, measured in hours. Paradoxically, this is the condition for the constitution and reproduction of the presentday social system.

A homologous form of commodification has occurred in the past with respect to linguistic work. Rossi-Landi speaks of “linguistic alienation”, an expression that gives the title to his essay of 1970, “Linguistic Alienation Problems” (originally published in Italian and English in the same volume, now in Rossi-Landi 1992 and in Petrilli, ed., 1992; see also Rossi-Landi 1968, 1972; Petrilli 1987). Never before as in the current phase of capitalist production, the communication-production phase, has capitalist profit relied so heavily on the commodification of linguistic work. Such expressions as “immaterial investment”, “valorization of human resources”, “human capital” are symptomatic of this demand. They imply linguistic work, therefore intelligence, talent, study, inventiveness, now become the indispensable means of productivity and competitiveness. Therefore, never before has the contrast been so obvious between the incommensurability of human work, its excess and irreducibility with respect to quantification, to indifferent abstract work in capitalist society, on the one hand, and the expectation of treating immaterial work as any other commodity, on the other.

This contradiction between the irreducibility of work and its effective treatment as though it were a commodity is exasperated in terms of the contradiction between linguistic work (an “immaterial resource”) and the labour market. Moreover, in today’s social reproduction system, the communication-production system where the quality of work understood as linguistic work is exalted to a maximum degree, this contradiction presents a new face in the relation between work and the intelligent machine (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005 : 502-515; Petrilli 2014a : 248-265). Involving linguistic work as much as non-linguistic work, the contradiction is also that between the commodification of work and the intelligent machine itself, given that because of these machines jobs are continuously decreasing and unemployment is on the rise despite the fact that capitalist social planning encourages education and training functional to comunication-production and operativity in relation to the machine.

6. Language and Social Communication in Semioethic Perspective

Semioethics is a developmnent on general semiotics in the direction of the study of the relation of signs and values. It investigates the widespread signs of social malaise in our globalized world at a planetary level, as it results from discrepancies in social systems of the likes just described à propos linguistic and non-linguistic work and the contradictions involved (see Petrilli 2007a, b, 2014a : 322-344). With its focus on the need to overcome malaise in social reproduction today (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2003b, 2010; Petrilli 2010, 2014a, b; Russo 2018, 2020), semioethics contributes to revealing the implications involved in the connection established by Rossi-Landi in terms of linguistic work between Linguistics and Economics.

For a better understanding of the issues at stake, fundamental from the perspective of the present essay is the relation of collaboration and mutual listening between the general sign science, the “doctrine of signs” (Locke 1690, Part IV, Chp. X) and the philosophy of language (see Petrilli and Ponzio 2016; Ponzio 2012). Both disciplines share a common interest in a central issue as is the other. The question of the other is the question of the word, of the word as voice, recognized as a demand for listening – the notions “word” (or “utterance”), “listening,” “other” are clearly interconnected.

In Mikhail Bakhtin’s view, listening is a constitutive element of the word. Listening is not an external phenomenon, a concession made by the subject towards the other, but an attitude of the word itself, a prerogative of the word, structural to it, such that we may speak of “listening” as the “art of the word” and of “philosophy of language” as the “art of listening” (see Petrilli, ed., 2007c; Ponzio 2009b). Listening calls for involvement, participation, interconnection, intercorporeity, for the condition of dialogism, responsiveness and non-indifference, of responsibility as necessary components of social communication. The word looks for listening and wants a response, indeed the word is a response in itself (cf. Petrilli 2014a : 111-122, 226-246).

Today the social is dominated by commodities, merchandise, a reality that Marx had foreseen and duly denounced (Marx 1867-94, I, 1). In fact, merchandise presents itself not only as the essential form of capitalist production, but also as the essential form of dominant semiosis in social reproduction, as the basic cell in the communication network. The language and sign sciences are called to address such problematics considering the pervasiveness of the “language of merchandise” at a global level and the consequences for humanity in terms of “social alienation” – with Rossi-Landi also “linguistic alienation” (see Terry Threadgold, “Rossi-Landi’s higher dialectical level. Some observations on linguistic alienation, relativity and ideology,” in Petrilli, ed. 1987 : 81-98).

Through dialogue among the sciences and transcending the boundaries of specialisms, with his notion of “linguistic work” Rossi-Landi recovers the human dimension of alterity. As regards the state of presentday humanity, the widespread condition of exploitation and poverty, social narrativity where the dialogism of interpretants is repressed by unilinearity and a monological worldview, in sum the condition of alienation, Rossi-Landi’s homological method is a model for the disalienation of signs, language and communication, thus for the work of humanization. In this context, the Marxian critique of political economy can be assumed as a model for philosophical-semiotic studies. In other words, Marxian critique shows the way to unmasking mystifications of a society that imposes the world as-it-is, with its social programmings, ideologies, languages, as though the world as-it-is, “being” were the inexorable destiny of the real where in fact the partial is exchanged for the whole, the particular for the general, where a given historical system is considered as the only one possible, natural and essential (see Levinas 1974).

Instead, as illustrated by Rossi-Landi, the Marxian critique of political economy teaches us that a transition is necessary from the surface, the “sign market” and the logic of exchange value, to underlying structures. As anticipated, this approach serves to evidence the presence of social relations among human individuals where only commodities and relations among commodities were thought to exist. In other words, the Marxian approach evidences relations of communication and signification in the social that are irreducible to relations of exchange and undifferentiated human work.

The alterity of signs is a dimension of semiosis that the human sciences (which address the problem of alterity specifically) share with the philosophy of language understood as the search (in languages) for sense. Both philosophy of language and general semiotics developed in the direction of semioethics investigate sense in terms of alterity, dialogism, intercorporeity. This is not sense understood in terms of the world as-it-is, of being, of identity, of the totality, sense as understood in the official order of signification. On the contrary, this is a question of sense beyond indifference and separation among individuals sacrificed by the interpretants of dominant ideology (Petrilli, ed. 2004; Ponzio 2004).

A question of vital importance today concerns education and training capable of responding to the modern world of globalized communication actively and not passively, that is to say beyond instrumentalization aiming to render education functional to business and the “work market”. Dominant social practice tends to level human behaviour onto the market values of productivity, efficiency and competetiveness. On the contrary, if the aim is to liberate the human individual from social and linguistic alienation, cultural systems, education and training must aim to valorize the single individual as a value in itself, in one’s uniqueness and non-functionality (Nöth, Stables, Olteanu, et al. 2018; Petrilli 2020b, 2020c; Ponzio 2004, 2019).

The semioethical approach recognizes alterity, dialogism, intercorporeity, listening, singularity of the human individual, non-funcionality as essential features of the interpersonal relationship and its languages. Contrary to the tendency to render signs and values absolute, to reify them, semioethics promotes critique and reconstruction of the social processes that effectively produce them, as Rossi-Landi had already indicated with his theory of language as work, “linguistic work”. This method contributes to overcoming the condition of linguistic alienation provoked by the monological global market order, safeguarding the health of a dialogical sign universe, which means to safeguard life over the planet. Nor does this vision exclude support from the intelligent machine and social media, on the contrary the communitary dimension that characterizes them can be put to advantage.

From this perspective, to recover the sense of language as primary modelling and the sense of dialogism, alterity, dialogized plurilingualism that properly distinguishes language as communication is a starting point for the development of new project – a project for the regeneration of human social relations, for a new humanism, “humanism of the other man”, humanism of alterity (Levinas 1972 ; Ponzio 2019). Contrary to the “humanism of identity”, where “identity” is understood as myopic and egocentric “closed identity”, the “humanism of alterity” – to safeguard humanity (which means to safeguard the totality, a detotalized totality, of which humanity is a part) – privileges opening to the other, to humanization of humanity become ever more inhuman, too inhuman (Petrilli and Ponzio 2019b).

7. Appendix. For Saussure

Rossi-Landi refers to Saussure of the Cours de linguistique générale, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (1916), as “the official Saussure”. Robert Godel and Rudolf Engler have the merit of reconstructing Saussure’s research and teachings on the basis of his manuscripts. An extraordinary contribution to revealing Saussure’s work in fieri has also come from Tullio De Mauro on the basis of the manuscript sources of the three courses held in Geneva (1907, 1908-9, 1910-11). From 1972 onwards the Cours de linguistique générale has been supplemented with a critical apparatus by De Mauro from his Laterza edition which most new translations other than the Italian take into consideration.

Saussure’s Écrits de linguistique générale was published in 2002. These writings consist of a series of notes and annotations recovered in 1996, traced back to approximately 1891, associated with Saussure’s time in Paris (1881-1891) and probably written at least in part during his stay there. On De Mauro’s account, this finding has contributed to reconstructing a more authentic intellectual and scientific image of Saussure and a better understanding of his linguistic ideas which have been influencing international culture profoundly for many decades now, but only through his posthumous Cours (see Saussure 2005 : vii; Ponzio 2018b).

In his Écrits – Saussure was working towards a book as we understand from his comments and notes – what he subsequently expressed in terms of “synchrony,” the “synchronic” is that part of language as it presents itself to the speaker. This is not language from the point of view of the linguist, language in its totality, an abstraction, or in transformation, viewed diachronically. Saussure’s reference here is to language as the speaker “sees” and “perceives” it in use, language from the perspective of the utterance, whether a question of the act of speaking, deciding what to say, or comprehending, deciding what to understand.

Saussure’s Écrits de linguistique générale contributes to a better understanding of the meaning, sense and function of certain concepts proposed and developed in the Cours – langue and langage, langue and parole, signifiant and signifié, diachrony and synchrony –, and not because they are better defined in the Écrits. Indeed, some of these terms are not yet present in the Écrits and if they are they are not clearly delineated (whereas linguistics is already contextualized within the framework of semiology). It is simply that in the Écrits and correlate notes the intent of Saussure’s research and teaching are made clearer, another benefit deriving from all the work involved in tracing the manuscript sources of the Cours and identifying what belongs to which course forming the Cours in the (often arbitrary) order established by the editors.

Investigation of language from speaker perspective, the parole, the utterance leads Saussure of his 1907-11 lessons to use signifiant and signifié instead of signe as the external form of the parole. Moreover, to consider language [langue] from the viewpoint of the parole, of the speaker, that is, synchronically, leads to distinguishing between signifié as a value concerning the langue and signification or sens as a specification of such value in the parole.

The place of transformations in language, as Saussure explains, is always “the discursive”. That is, in speaker language, relative to the parole, innovation occurs on the basis of improvisation, by speaking, produced in the sphere of discursive language (see Saussure 2002 : 108).

It is not a move away from Saussure of the unpublished manuscripts, nor of the notes taken by his students to claim that what characterizes verbal language is not the declarative utterance (a minority linguistic act), but its non-functionality, its gratuitousness, its “phatic” or “contact” function (Jakobson). What prevails in the verbal relation, the utterance is the focus on speaker sense more than on reference, which means to say on the interlocutor more than on word content.

Said otherwise, what counts most is saying more than the said (Levinas 1974), implied, additional meaning more than explicit meaning (Rossi-Landi 1961), interrogation, the demand of listening, the request of accord, agreement, collaboration, of responsive understanding more than response to interrogation (Bakhtin), recognition of the other free to respond as other.

Summing up : to consider language as work means to consider the possibility of its alienation, “linguistic alienation,” the possibility of “alienated linguistic work”. “Linguistic alienation” is directly connected to the question of “ideology”. Linguistic work can be oriented ideologically according to planning (ideology is social planning) that does not keep account of speaker interests. Speakers work linguistically through programs, programming, planning that are not their own. This state of affairs evidences the importance of the relationship between language and political economy, the need to investigate linguistic values taking economics as the model science given that both Linguistics and Economics are value sciences. From Rossi-Landi’s perspective, verbal language in the form of alienated linguistic work concerns the fact that dominant interests – those of the dominant class, the class that controls communication networks – maintain a production system that no longer corresponds to the real level of “production forces,” to the needs of real life. This approach has proven to be “unsustainable,” ecologically disastrous even (cf. Medlin 2020; Petrilli 2016b, 2017, 2020d).

Sign, language (including the language of economics) and ideology, therefore social planning are closely interconnected. Knowledge, standpoints, choices and preferences, individual and collective projects, political and broadly cultural programmes are conditioned ideologically. In political economy, Marx and Engels had perceived the connection; in semiotics it has been theorized systematically by such figures as Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle (Russia), Charles Morris (USA), Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Adam Schaff and in the same tradition Augusto Ponzio (Continental Europe) (on European trends in semiotics and Marxism, see Zhang Bi and Tang Xiaolin, Eds., 2016). For what concerns Rossi-Landi (whose work on the relation between signs, language and society and the sciences that study them semiotics, Linguistics and Economics is our special focus in this text), Ponzio successfully resumes the general sense of the intellectual work of a life-time, the importance of his contribution with the following considerations here reported from a text in memoriam :

Viewed in this totality, Rossi-Landi’s theoretical research may be considered as leaving a vast and powerful wake among the different philosophical and theoretical currents with originality and leaving signs certainly destined to last. The havens towards which Rossi-Landi sails and from which he is always ready to set off, are primarily English analytical philosophy, Marxian dialectics and the semiotic science of Peirce and Morris, visited, furthermore, in historical moments when such havens were still largely ignored or misunderstood.

Ponzio 1986 : 3

Considering that Linguistics and Economics, more generally semiotics and economics are oriented by the same ideological assumptions, a task for both economics and semiotics today is to critique dominant political economy and official linguistics / official semiotics and thus analyze the social structures of production, economic production and linguistic production, sign production overall. And given the connection between Linguistics and Economics, between sign, language, political economy and ideology, we propose that “semiotics” today be reconsidered in terms of “semioethics” and concentrate on the signs (in this case “symptoms”) of social malaise in our globalized planetary system, the world of so-called “global communication”.