Book Publication : Bruno Latour in the Semiotic Turn. An Inquiry into the Networks of Meaning

Peverini, Paolo. Bruno Latour in the Semiotic Turn. An Inquiry into the Networks of Meaning. Cham: Springer, 2024

This open access book highlights the link between Bruno Latour’s works and the semiotic perspective on social phenomena analysis. 
It identifies and relaunches a dialogue that was as heated as it was fruitful, but still little recognized within the social sciences. It asks why the theory of signification has so far been only sporadically acknowledged in literature derived from Latour’s work. 

Starting from these premises, the book explores two interrelated dimensions, the initial one of a “semiotics for Latour”, which looks at concepts from semiotics in Latour’s study of social phenomena (actor/actant, enunciation, narrativity), and extensively for the first time, a symmetrical one accounting for the impact of Latourian inquiry on contemporary semiotic research.

Here, three major areas of research

The first concerns the debate around an extended theory of enunciation, developed in parallel to the expansion of the phenomena of signification explored by contemporary semiotic research.
A second direction starts from the overcoming of the nature/culture dichotomy and revolves around the rethinking of the relationship between semiotics and cultural anthropology, recognizing the need to investigate contemporary phenomena in light of notions such as multinaturalism and internaturality.
The third area finally takes shape from the urgency to deal with a “new society of objects”, in which increasingly extensive and complex assemblages of humans and non-humans give shape to ever more pervasive devices, as clearly emerges from the growing diffusion of the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence in everyday life.