Market, Materiality, and Moral Metalanguage

1991

2025

Marxist semiotics provides a comprehensive and critical framework for understanding and challenging the contemporary information society's socioeconomic dynamics. By integrating Marxist theory and semiotics, this paper is to examine how commodities function as both material objects and carriers of meaning, and how digital advancements have intensified phenomena, such as alienated labor and symbolic consumption. Secondary data sources, including case studies and theoretical analyses, are utilized to explore real-world contexts that demonstrate the material and symbolic roles of digital commodities. Currency, as a meta-sign, interprets commodity signs and shapes societal values and relationships. The study addresses the information society, where the production, circulation, exchange and consumption of information form a cohesive trinity of media, intelligence and consumption. The fundamental arguments include the transformation of human survival in the digital age and the need for new academic interpretations, which contributes to both policy and theoretical discussions by bridging the gap between economic production and symbolic consumption. The study concludes with recommendations for further research on the socioeconomic implications of digital technologies.

2016

1. Semioticians have rarely discussed, in an explicit way, on economy, beyond the well-noted and important relationship between semiotics and marketing, particularly with a scholar like Jean-Marie Floch. (For a wider review concerning advertising and economy from cultural studies point of view, see McFall, 2004). In history of semiotic theories we find a first critical focus on economy in debates between semiotics and marxist critique of political economy. This is partly an argument for historians of ideas, partly an argument currently studied: Ferruccio Rossi Landi's theory is above all the unique object of study (see Cinzia Bianchi's and Cristina Zorzella's papers). The problem about semiotics in relationship to a marxist, or neomarxist, approach is indeed related to the question: in which epistemological and theoretical terms is marxism still a valid tool? An answer to this question is really possible only taking in account new forms of economic practices and theories...

The analysis in Notes towards a critique of money highlights the functions of money both in the organization of the capitalist symbolic order and in the constitution of subjectivity in the market. Combining Lacanian psychoanalysis and Baudrillardian structuralism, the book creates a universe where price and sign are entangled, giving rise to the dominant organizing form of capitalism. The fantasmatic management of desire enforces this structural principle on the subjective level and encourages the libidinal investment in the dominant representations of social reality as they are produced by the combined principles of signification and economic valuation. Here, money signifies the particular content that hegemonizes the universal ideological construction of capitalism providing a particular and accessible meaning to economic value, which colours the very universality of the system of prices and accounts for its efficiency. Being conscious of the limitations of the theoretical analysis, the book employs along with rational arguments a series of artworks that are used both to illustrate the argument and to challenge the unconscious links between the market and the subject, as it is mediated by money and ideology. Notes towards a critique of money does not only aspire to raise a theoretical challenge against capital and to open up possibilities of emancipation, but to point towards a new aesthetic of political analysis.

The commodity is analyzed from a semiotic stance. Rather than systematically unfold a subject-object dichotomy (via Hegel's history as dialectic), it systematically deploys a sign-object-interpretant trichotomy (via Peirce's logic as semiotic). Rather than conflate economic value and linguistic meaning through the lens of Saussure's semiology, it uses Peirce's semiotic to provide a theory of meaning that is general enough to include commodities and utterances as distinct species. Rather than relegate utility and measure to the work of history (as per the opening pages of Marx's Capital), these are treated as essential aspects of political economy. And rather than focus on canonical 19th-century commodities (such as cotton, iron, and cloth), the analysis is designed to capture salient features of modern immaterial commodities (such as affect, speech acts, and social relations). The conclusion details the relation between neoliberalism, semiosis, governmentality, and commensuration.

Ocula, 2015

Frontiers in Human Dynamics: Institutions and Collective Action, 2024

Anthropologists have persistently diminished the importance of the market and marketplace exchange in premodern, preindustrial times. This strident anti-marketmentality, derived largely fromthe writings of Karl Polanyi, underpins an ideological and politicized argument that neither sets useful guideposts to advance anthropological research, nor does it yield the necessary insights or empirically valid foundations to comprehend the deep historical origins of modern economies or polities. In fact, by envisioning the past that is categorically caged from the modern, the school of thought crystalized through Polanyi’s perspectives circumvents the role of diachronic processes that are at the heart of a truly historical social science. Although it is not our principal aim to relitigate the vast literature pertaining to the rise and fall of Polanyian thought, our approach expands on prior arguments about his project both by highlighting critical perspectives on capitalism that long predated Polanyian thought and by identifying a veritable bounty of new evidence and theory concerning premodern and contemporary marketplace economies that enable us to transcend these now-entrenched claims. The scheme we present that distinguishes between open and competitive marketplaces, on the one hand, and the capitalist impulse, on the other, we believe, adds depth and breadth to the analysis of price-making markets and their divergent social and economic outcomes across time and space. KEYWORDS anti-market mentality, economic anthropology, capitalist impulse, marketplace economies, K. Polanyi, markets

Materialism and Politics

This chapter identifies a materiality of social bonds that is not reducible to the logic of exchange value between alienated subjects. It analyses different forms of relationship of the human body to the milieu, following Marcel Mauss’s techniques of the body and André Leroi-Gourhan’s definitions of evolution. The producing body, it is argued, does more than only embody norms in a process of subjectivation. The externalization of the body in gestures cannot be reduced, therefore, to the evolutionary level that produces ethnic and social norms.