Bodies and Signs. For a typology of semiosic materiality

This article takes up and develops my 1986 article, "On the materiality of signs," commissioned by Thomas Sebeok for publication in Semiotica. Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, which he founded in 1969 with Umberto Eco, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva and others, and directed until his death in 2001 (Petrilli 1986). The aim is to continue analysing the different levels, aspects and functions of sign materiality in light of semiotic studies today. The concept of "sign materiality" does not only allude to physical bodies necessarily implicated in semiosic processes, but also to the social materiality of human work necessarily distributed in semiosis. The initial focus on sign and linguistic work engaged in modelling sign material in social-ideological practice, presented in my 1986 article, is here contextualized and developed in the framework of Sebeok's "global semiotics" according to which semiosphere and biosphere converge. The result is a more complete, therefore a more complex typology that aims to account for semiotic materiality and that is better able to explain the functioning of our current globalised world.