Irish on the walls: the branding of a language

By the time the Belfast City Council launched a new logo in 2007, rebranding Belfast had become a central issue. The symbolic center of Belfast, the City Council building, presents itself as a post-modern and fully globalized space, neutralizing the memory of an area stigmatized by decades-long violence known as The Troubles. Like other cities with a traumatic past, such as Berlin, Belfast tries to promote itself as a modern and lively place, well aware of the importance of exploiting memory as a tourist attraction. The article examines the Irish language’s resemantization in Belfast, particularly in the Gaeltacht quarter area, during and after The Troubles. Based on a paper by Siun Carden (2017), the article tries to connect the core of the author’s observations to language’s phatic function. The idea is that the contemporary branding of Irishness through the use of the Irish language on Belfast’s murals works as an effective mythomoteur, a concept comparable to the mythe projectif elaborated by Bertrand (2019) in the case of Paris’s rebranding.

Symbols and narratives of Europe: Three tropes

Throughout history, attempts have been made to identify Europe as a geographical, political, social, and cultural entity. Recent efforts to establish key symbols and narratives of Europe have focused on a set of central signifying elements, even if there is a wide and contradictory range of ways to define, structure, and interpret them. An introductory remark on the current debate on the need for renewed European self-reflection paves the way for some conceptual clarifications of my approach to concepts like culture, meaning, identity and mediation. A methodological reflection accompanies this on how to use semiotic tools in cultural studies based on critical hermeneutics. The concept of culture used here is based on the signifying practice of mediating meaning-making, linking imagination to communication in a triangular dynamic between texts, subjects, and contexts. Examples are given from two research projects on a broad and diverse range of European symbols and narratives, illustrating such interpretive research results. European identifications are crystallized and spun around three dominant tropes: supreme universality, resurrection from division, and communicative mobility. Their intricate tensions and interrelations attest to how deeply Europe remains a highly contested and dynamic meaning cluster.

Framing right-wing populist satire: The case-study of Ghisberto’s cartoons in Italy

Over the last few years, right-wing populism has increased its popularity and political weight, successfully merging with Euro-scepticism, nationalism, xenophobia, religious symbolism, and aggressive forms of conservatism (e.g., anti-feminism, homophobia, and, in general, patriarchal politics). Several studies have focused on the communication strategies of contemporary populism, examining the latter’s use of traditional and new media. So far, however, little attention has been paid to the role and language of right-wing populist satire. Our study draws on the ideational approach to populism to explore how right-wing populism is expressed in satirical cartoons. This approach perceives populism as a thin-centered ideology, based on a Manichean division between ‘good people’ and ‘evil elites,’ which regularly combines with other ideological components (e.g., nationalism, Euroscepticism, xenophobia). Our analysis focuses on the Italian cartoonist Ghisberto, known for his provocative and frequently controversial work. We examine a sample of Ghisberto’s vignettes using multimodal analysis tools and Greimas’s notion of isotopy. The aim is to investigate how right-wing populist satire constructs its different targets (the EU, left-wingers, migrants, NGOs, women, etc.) and how populist ideology exploits cartoons’ communicative resources and power.

Critique sémiotique du populisme

Comment rendre compte de la faveur dont jouissent aujourd’hui tant de leaders populistes dans le monde? Les explications des politologues combinent généralement trois facteurs contextuels: le pouvoir de séduction des idéologies ‘anti-système’ (facteur de base) est renforcé par l’impact de la crise socio-économique (deuxième facteur) et par diverses données conjoncturelles — scandales, attentats, catastrophes naturelles, etc. (troisième facteur). Reste un facteur moins exploré, à savoir la force des liens d’ordre sensible (ou ‘esthésique’) que ce type de leaders établissent avec leurs partisans, presque indépendamment de ce qu’ils ont de précis à proposer en termes de politiques publiques. Cerner les conditions et les effets de telles relations revient à proposer (conformément à un des principes qui fondent l’approche sémiotique) une explication du phénomène dans son immanence, c’est-à-dire focalisée sur l’analyse des rapports de contagion thymique qui se nouent entre l’hexis du tribun populiste et chacun de ses partisans. D’où résulte un simulacre de démocratie ‘directe’ (par opposition à ‘représentative’) qui, par interdéfinition, trouve sa place dans une typologie sémiotique des régimes politiques.

One word to rule them all: ‘Civic-mindedness’ and Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen’s Nationalist Covid-19 rhetoric

The essay is a case study critically engaging the Danish Prime Minister’s rhetorical leadership during the early phase of the COVID-19 crisis. Through conceptually oriented rhetorical criticism of a series of press conference speeches given by the PM, the essay demonstrates how her rhetorical leadership in the early stages of the corona crisis relied on communitarian appeals couched in nationalistic terms whereby contributing to stopping the spread of the virus gradually became inscribed in a Social Democratic narrative about community and solidarity and which eventually was presented as part and parcel of an essential ‘Danishness.’ The argument is that the PM’s speeches successfully framed the national response to the epidemic as just that, a national or even nationalistic response. Analysis of the salient phrases ‘standing together by keeping apart’, ‘civic-mindedness,’ and ‘taking care of Denmark’ inform the characterization of the PM’s rhetorical strategy and its ideological underpinnings. The term ‘civic-mindedness,’ specifically, was used as a short-hand referent for all the government’s instructions, advice, and admonitions to change the public’s behavior, and functioned as a guideline for the people in Denmark regarding their understanding of and reactions to the corona epidemic. One word to capture many words, and one word to guide, even rule, a people.

Mind the Gap! On the Discursive Construction of Collective Political Identities

This article explores, from a theoretical perspective, the dynamics underlying the discursive construction of collective identities within the political domain. Specifically, it: (1) presents a general mapping of political sphere studies carried out from a semiotic perspective; (2) attempts to bridge different paradigms within the semiotic tradition; and (3) establishes a dialogue between political theory and semiotics through the analysis of certain ideas belonging to the former whose semiotic nature has not yet been adequately examined, even if they are of a discursive nature. The article pays particular attention to the role that the ‘political gap’ – i.e., the space of indetermination between the various collective political identities that compete against each other in the ‘contest over meaning’ of politics – plays in the discursive construction of those identities. Arguing from a constructivist premise, establishing relational differences is a constitutive feature of the meaning-making, dynamic, and gaps between collective identities, a necessary precondition for their discursive emergence and the political sphere’s existence.

A ‘semio’ approach to fashion discourse: critical perspectives on the luxury industry

This book offers rich and clear critical perspectives on the luxury fashion industry and its market mediations. It relies on a multi-layered methodology and deals with a wide variety of materials: texts, images, but also objects, experiences, exhibitions, buildings, interiors. By doing so, Mouratidou demonstrates the unity (in other words: the standard format) of the politics of re-presentation in the luxury fashion industry and the unity of the semio approach she defends. Grounded on the semiotic analysis of discourses (from Greimas to Dondero and Fontanille), this approach includes the numerous insights of the most recent works in Communication studies. The book also offers a fruitful overview of the French tradition of critical works on cultural industries and mediations (from Barthes to Jeanneret); it also sheds light – most appropriately – on this tradition’s Critical Theory background (Benjamin, Adorno & Horkheimer, Debord). In addition, we must also highlight Mouratidou’s terminological creativity. In her case studies, she proposes a range of stimulating theoretical terms, such as re-presentation, semiotic capital, culturalisation, fictivation, event-formula, and others adopted from theatre studies.

To laugh or not to laugh? That is the question.

We usually think of comedy and tragedy as opposites, but perhaps we should consider them as two sides of the same coin. As Morreall (1999: 21) suggests,“[t]he most basic belief [which the comic and the tragic visions of life] share is that life is full of incongruities, discrepancies between the way things ought to be and the way they are. The difference between the two visions of life is more in their attitudes than in any beliefs about matters of fact.” They involve different and usually opposite ways of evaluating the same human condition. In other words, comedy and tragedy are built on incongruities assessed and framed to generate positive and negative emotions, respectively. Furthermore, comic/humorous and tragic/serious elements may co-occur in the same text, even if the text is primarily intended as funny. In such cases, texts become a blend of humorous utterances/parts and serious or even tragic ones – the latter constitute what Attardo (2001: 89) calls serious relief in humorous texts.

Governmental propaganda in Mexican comics. The case of El Libro Vaquero.

This article aims to analyze comic books’ use as vehicles for political communication. Employing socio-semiotic methodology, we describe the discursive operations utilized to disseminate governmental propaganda (a particular type of political communication) in Mexican popular culture. Our corpus comprises institutionally commissioned comic inserts in one of the most iconic magazines of contemporary Mexico: El Libro Vaquero [‘The Cowboy Book’]. According to our findings, these comics tend to make citizens primarily responsible for implementing public policy, ignore the structural causes of the social problems they represent, reducing them to a sum of individual issues, and, finally, downplay state responsibilities while painting a positive image of the different State institutions. Consequently, we should take these comics as a type of institutional propaganda rather than as social marketing.

Le discours du pouvoir

Il importe de repenser, aujourd’hui, le discours du pouvoir, en se fondant sur l’articulation sémiotique de quatre instances: l’énonciation politique, l’expression de l’identité de l’acteur dans son discours, la spécificité politique de la performativité du pouvoir et l’expression d’un inconscient politique dans le discours. Trois éléments définissent la spécificité de l’énonciation politique. Le premier est la définition d’enjeux propres à l’énonciation politique. Le second est la définition de ce que l’on peut appeler une écologie énonciative. Enfin, l’énonciation politique inscrit dans la communication des représentations des enjeux du pouvoir. L’énonciation du discours du pouvoir articule l’identité de l’énonciateur et un statut d’acteur politique. La communication politique se fonde sur la manifestation d’une confrontation entre les acteurs dans l’espace de l’énonciation. La performativité politique se fonde sur l’identification de l’énonciation et de la manifestation d’un acteur politique. Cette performativité propre au politique se caractérise, dans le cas du discours du pouvoir, par deux faits: l’imposition des modalités de l’énonciation et de l’interprétation et, donc, de la communication, et l’imposition des enjeux de la communication, des références qui lui donnent sa consistance. Comme toute énonciation, l’énonciation du discours du pouvoir est l’expression d’un inconscient du pouvoir. On peut définir et analyser cet inconscient politique en se fondant sur ce que l’on peut appeler la connotation politique, qui définit une sémiotique du non-dit dans la communication politique.