Searching for a practice of semiotics as an instrument of social intervention

Abstract

This article starts from questioning the self-referentiality of Semiotics -often accused of intellectual hermeticism- and proposes taking these accusations seriously in order to recognize that this discipline should be removed from its tendency to self-absorption. To achieve this aim, we asked ourselves "What is the use of Semiotics?" taking into account the well-known definition of Juan Ángel Magariños de Morentín (2008), and highlighting the operativity that throws it to the world. It is through operations, and not only through concepts, that anyone can explain the meanings that rule a particular historical moment in the life of a given society. Thus, Semiotics becomes the methodological instrument endowed with a specific scientific accuracy to analyze real meanings and, specially, to collaborate in the transformation of the socially instituted, an enactive function that allows its postulation as a socially defined matter. Regarding this, this article borrows the concepts of social imaginary and the institutional minority/instituted majority opposition (1983, 1989) from Cornelius Castoriadis, to analyze two aspects of the contemporary socially instituted imaginary that subordinates the modalities through which we mean ourselves in our daily existence: brand and advertising. We are in the presence of a properly imagined imaginary: an imaginary lacking in symbolic thickness, not embodied in a social truth that we all should hold to, but remaining on the surface of its own imaginary nature. A Semiotics of social intervention must be directed towards the unveiling of the instituting nature of apparently innocuous social and individual actions, and of the non-truth that exists in them.