DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-025

Aldo Moro University of Bari, Italy

giorgioborrelli83@yahoo.it

Abstract

One of the main points advanced by the Marxian critique of political economy concerns what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities”: exchange does not occur among commodities but among human beings. Starting from this standpoint, the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921–1985) underlines how economic exchange could be understood as a form of human social communication. More specifically, communication is signs exchange: production of signs and messages, exchange of messages, consumption of messages and signs.

According to Rossi-Landi, commodities could be understood as messages which circulate in the economic sphere according to specific exchange-programs. From such a perspective, economics could be understood as a sector of semiotics, that is, as the study of commodity-messages. Particularly, in line with the Marxian theory of labour-value, Rossi-Landi proposes to analyse the entire trajectory of commodity-messages, focussing attention on the production-exchange-consumption programs which turn certain human artefacts – that is, a certain products of human linguistic work – into commodities. The meaning of commodity-messages will be constituted by the totality of these semiotic programs.

Only by studying human communication relations it is possible to understand the “language” of commodities. Therefore the Marxian orientation – as Rossi-Landi maintains – is a specifically semiotic orientation.

1. Homology and social reproduction

In his “Ideas for a manifesto of materialistic semiotics” (Rossi-Landi 1992: 277–280).[1] Rossi-Landi affirms that: “a materialistic semiotics must be a semiotics founded on social reality, on the actual ways in which men interact among themselves and with the rest of the living and nonliving world. It cannot examine sign systems apart from the other social processes with which they are functioning all along.” (Rossi-Landi 1992: 278) And the best way – in his opinion – to “describe social reality at large is to approach it in terms of social reproduction (gesellschaftliche Reproduktion). Social reproduction is the totality of processes by which any society – from a primitive tribe to contemporary highly developed societies – proceeds in time, preserving itself while at the same time administering some changes in its own internal structure” (Rossi-Landi 1992: 278). To understand why the category of “social reproduction” assumes such a relevant role in Rossi-Landi’s theoretical framework, and to understand how semiotics could be founded on social reality, it seems appropriate to shift the focus to another fundamental concept in his semiotics, that is, to what he defines as homological method.

First of all, what does “homological” actually mean? Rossi-Landi borrows this term from biological sciences, where it refers “to a fundamental similarity due to community of descent, to a correspondence in structure and in origin” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 72, note 25) between different species. From such a perspective, homological methods consists in constructing a theoretical model through which certain similarities and correspondences – between boundaries of analysis which appear as completely disconnected – can be identified (Ponzio 2008: 8); the result of this theoretical construction is a structured totality in which all the parts are reciprocally connected. More specifically, the homological method consists in connecting the two sub-totalities of linguistic production and material production in a wider totality constituted by the human being, understood – from a Marxian point of view – as product of its own work. It means that, according to Rossi-Landi, the Marxian thesis on the anthropogenic character of work should be extended, including the thesis on the anthropogenic character of language, understood in its verbal and non-verbal dimension: human beings produce themselves through their social work, and, in this sense mankind is the result of the general process of social reproduction; but a relevant part of social reproduction is constituted by the linguistic production.

In this regard, it seems opportune a terminological – and, of course, theoretical – clarification. In his monograph Linguistics and economics (1977), Rossi-Landi specifies that the term “language” – and thus, the adjective “linguistic” also – refer to the verbal sign systems, more specifically, to “verbal (oral and written) codes and messages.” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 17) Of course, he is well aware of the fact that this kind of connotation could be “rather conservative,” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 17) but he underlines also that such a terminological choice depends on the will of distance himself from semiotic theories which assign priority exactly to the verbal sign-system; that is, from those theories which assert that non-verbal sign systems depends on the verbal ones. Hence, distinguishing language from non-verbal sign systems, Rossi-Landi intends to recognize

[their] reciprocal structural independence and at the same time [their] reciprocal influence. This does not mean that there was no hierarchy imposed by real needs on sign systems; but it does mean that all basic social sign systems are ‘primary modelling systems’ – according to the terminology of Lotman, who considers primary only the system of language, and secondary instead all non-verbal sign systems. (Rossi-Landi 1977: 18)

Actually, this latter consideration about the primary modelling system seems to be – notwithstanding a terminological discrepancy – perfectly in line with the hypotheses advanced by Ponzio and Petrilli (2004) about the possible comparison between Rossi-Landi’s concept of linguistic work and the concept of language as primary modeling as structured by Sebeok (Ponzio, and Petrilli 2004: 218).

As is well known, modifying the notions of primary and secondary modeling systems as structured by the Moscow-Tartu School, Sebeok develops a modelling systems theory (Sebeok, and Danesi 2000) based on three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary modelling system is the system that “allows organisms to simulate something in species-specific ways” (Sebeok, and Danesi 2000: 45); according to Sebeok, human animal shares such a device with the other species; indeed, every living being uses its “sensorium” (Sebeok 2003: 174) to structure a sign system through which an interpretation of – and a life in – the external word could be possible. Nevertheless, human species distinguishes itself from the others exactly for its typical and innate capacity for simulative modeling: the language, which fundamental property consists in what Sebeok defines as syntax (Sebeok 2003: 178). As Ponzio and Petrilli explain, syntax is

(…) what makes it possible for hominids to have not only one ‘reality’, one world, but also to frame an indefinite number of possible worlds. This capacity is unique to human beings. Thanks to syntax human language is like Lego building blocks, it can reassemble a limited number of construction pieces in an infinite number of different ways. As a modeling device language can produce an indefinite number of models; in other words, the same pieces can be taken apart and put together to construct an infinite number of different models. Thanks to language not only do human animals produce worlds as do other species, but, as says Leibniz, human beings can also produce an infinite number of possible worlds. (Ponzio, and Petrilli 2004: 215)

From such a perspective, the term “language” does not refer to the verbal sign system, but rather to “a mute verbal modeling system” (Sebeok 2003: 175) which Homo Habilis – the first species of the genus “Homo” – “must have had lodged in its brain, but it could not encode it in articulate, linear speech.” (Sebeok 2003: 175) Indeed, it is necessary to wait until the appearance of  Homo sapiens for this modeling system to be externalized, and speech to arise as secondary modelling system. According to Sebeok, “language evolved as an adaptation, whereas speech developed out of language as a derivative ‘exaptation’;” (Sebeok 2003: 176) this means that, in the course of hominization process, language “was built by selection for the cognitive function of modeling” (Sebeok 2003: 176) and, only with the appearance of the Homo Sapiens, such a primary system “came to be ‘exapted’ for communication, first in the form of speech (and later of script, and so forth).” (Sebeok 2003: 176) Thus – according to Sebeok –, becoming a communication-oriented device, language enhances the nonverbal capacity with which human beings were already endowed, allowing them to operate both on the verbal, and nonverbal level (Sebeok 1998: 25); in this way, using this enhanced capacity, human animals can structure their tertiary modeling systems; and, from these highly abstract, symbol-based modeling processes, human cultural systems finally emerge.[2]

In the light of all these theses, it should be stated that, when Rossi-Landi asserts that verbal and non-verbal sign systems are both primary modelling systems, he draws attention to the fact that the syntactical capacity is incorporated – as Sebeok (2003: 178) would say – in both of them. To explain such a statement, Rossi-Landi takes as example a common human utensil, as a table knife: being an utensil, indeed, a knife

(…) has the level of complexity and the utility not just of  a mere word  or of a syntagm, as complex  as this may be, but of a proper sentence or judgment. The utensil in fact consists in parts which are produced and put together according  to certain rules, like the sentence (…). Now, in what has been called the language of things (in our terminology a set of nonverbal sign systems) everything that can be done with a knife is equivalent to everything with which a knife can be put into a real relation, and thus constitutes the discourses (groups of interconnected sentences) of which the knife can be part. The syntactic relations of sentence ‘knife’, suitable for generating finished and meaningful discourse, depend on its semantic value, upon what it tell us. (Rossi-Landi 1977: 22)

Therefore, emphasizing that an instrument is syntactically structured – just like a sentence –, and that different utensils could be syntactically related according to certain uses – like verbal discourses – Rossi-Landi maintains that both verbal and nonverbal sign systems could be analysed in the light of the Marxian conception of work: the human capacity of generate, communicate and interpret articulated sounds can be understood as linguistic work, and it represents a further genetic development of human capacity of generate, communicate and interpret meaningful signs in general (hence, nonverbal signs also); a human capacity which the Italian semiotician defines as sign work. In this regard, Rossi-Landi suggests that Leroi-Gouhran’s researches could confirm the genetic precedence of the sign work in the hominization process; indeed, the French palaeontologist maintains that, since the most primitive technical levels, construction of utensils is planned; namely, all the operations through which an artefact is constructed are executed with a view to its future utilization (Rossi-Landi [1985] 2006: 228). In this way, every human artefact is the result of an abstractive process, and so, every human artefact is the product of a specific interpretative work: it is an interpretant for a specific human need.[3]

2. A Marxian conception of work from a semiotic perspective

Homological method could be understood as an application of the Marxian analyses on social reproduction to research on language and communication (Rossi-Landi [1968] 2003: 9). Thus, according to Rossi-Landi, social reproduction consists not only in processes of production, exchange and consumption of material artefacts, but also in processes of production, exchange and consumption of signs; and this is the reason why work – understood as economic material production – and language – understood as production of non-verbal and verbal signs – are homologous, that is, they are “two different manifestations of the same structure-in-becoming.” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 74) This structure-in-becoming is mankind in itself.

In the light of these considerations, it should be stated that Rossi-Landi’s homological method also allows us to see the Marxian conception of work in a new – semiotic – perspective; more specifically, it means that Marxian conception of work could be semiotically understood in two senses at least.

The first sense refers to the Marxian conception of work as zweckmässige Tätigkeit: if, agreeing with Marx, we consider human work as an activity conforming to a goal [zweckmässige Tätigkeit], we have also to admit that work is inherently semiotic, because that goal is actually a sign, that is, – as Rossi-Landi maintains – “a conscious or unconscious, desired or endured, ‘mental’ anticipation of the product” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 40); namely, a design or a project. Hence, language “determines the finalistic character of work, its taking place according to a program” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 40: emphasis mine); and a program is nothing else but an organized part of a certain sign system, that is, a set of instructions which are more or less implicit in certain forms of human social work. Furthermore, “work is human social activity” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 39) because it is based on learning, unlike every mere biological and physiological activity; and work implies necessarily teaching and learning several programs:

The individual learns to use many programs, or to obey to them. The programs are arranged in various types of sign systems, whose complete description would be equal to the complete description of culture. Only in a few cases does the individual learn the programs for use in a direct and explicit way, in the form of instruction given and received. In the great majority of cases he learns them only implicitly, while he is learning to execute them. (Rossi-Landi 1977: 45)

The second sense refers to work as specific production of sign systems. Particularly, it refers to the fact that

signs systems are systems of artefacts that could not exist in nature without the intervention of man, and if we don’t want to admit that something human exists for man without the intervention of man himself, we must hold to the principle that every artefact, however understood, is the result of work which man has done and can do again. Generalizing, between any product or human result as absent, and the same result as present, there is a difference that can be explained (for which reason can be given) only in terms of the work carried out by men to obtain it. The most general category of these products is man himself, the historical result of his own work (Rossi-Landi 1977: 32)

In line with the Marxian thesis of the anthropogenic character of work, Rossi-Landi considers work as the factor that, through the course of the evolutionary process, allows human animals to distinguish themselves from their primate relatives, but, according to Rossi-Landi, “when work emerged, it must have been from the beginning accompanied by, or better, inextricably connected to, signs of a new type, suitable for favoring working operations. We are speaking here of both verbal signs (or pre-verbal, e.g., in the form of cries), and non-verbal signs” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 56).

In other words, human work is semiotic, because it is constitutively articulated through certain organized (verbal and non-verbal) sign systems, and because it is necessarily based on human communication, and communication is, at one and the same time, based on the learning and execution of codified signs; but, on the other hand, language, understood in its practical-communicative dimension is work, because “communication is the execution of programs. Learning to execute the programs, one learns to communicate and become part of the process of ‘social reproduction’” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 27). Learning to communicate by adopting certain codified signs, one contributes to work involved in the construction of the social world.

To sum up – concluding this part of the paper – it should be stated that the homology between work and language consists in the fact that “man has never produced linguistic artefacts without producing material artefacts at the same time. It is only by abstraction that we place the former under examination without the latter (…). A civilization that is ‘only material’ or ‘only linguistic’ does not exist in reality” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 70). Work and language are inextricably connected.

3. Commodity as message: a semiotic interpretation of the Marxian labour-value theory

According to Rossi-Landi, starting from the homology between linguistic and material production, it should be possible to analyse human communication in the light of Marxian labour-value theory. In this regard, it seems opportune underline that the expression “labour-value theory” was not coined by Marx, but by one of his most famous and most bitter critics, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (Fineschi 2012). Obviously, it will be impossible to discuss here all the implications of the labour-value theory; nevertheless, at least the main thesis of the theory should be underlined: the value of commodity derives from the quantity of labour contained in it, and such a quantity can be measured through the labour-time expended producing the same commodity. However, as Fineschi (2012) remarks, the set of theses which constitute the labour-value theory is controverted by another interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy: the so called value-form school. The several theorists of this approach – such as Hans Georg Backhaus (2009) –  hypothesise that exchange value represents the real core of the Marxian theory, because commodity can manifest its value only in the moment of the exchange, in the form of exchange value; hence, only this latter represents the form in which value can be actually measured. More recent interpretations (Bellofiore, and Fineschi 2009) underline that both approaches are on the right regarding certain theoretical aspects, but – at the same time – that both of them present some lacks, overlooking – for example – the Marxian analysis of money, and the central role played by the commodity-form in general, understood as contradictory union of use-value and exchange value.

In the light of these considerations, it seems difficult to set Rossi-Landi’s semiotics in the theoretical framework drawn by those analyses deriving from the so called Neue Marx-Lektüre, and, of course, this is not the purpose of the paper. Nevertheless, it should be stated that, trying to apply the labour-value theory to research on language and communication, Rossi-Landi does not  ignore neither the theoretical relevance of commodity, nor the dialectic of the value form (Rossi-Landi 1977: 160). Indeed, he tries to structure a “semiotic elaboration of the two social processes which we can identify as the ‘production and circulation of goods (in the form of commodities)’ and as ‘the production and circulation of sentences (in the form of verbal messages)’.” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 5) More specifically, following Marx’s 1867 Einleitung – that is, the introduction to the Outline of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–1858) – Rossi-Landi maintains that the economic moment of exchange comprehends in itself the tripartition between production, exchange, and consumption. From such a perspective, the general exchange process could be understood fundamentally as a communication process; namely, communication could be understood as production of signs and messages, exchange of messages, consumption of messages and signs.

It should be stated that, according to the Italian semiotician, when a human sign – understood in its semantic, syntactic and pragmatic dimension – is generated to be exchanged, then such a human sign becomes a message; and this process could be based on communicative programs – derived from previous sign work – which are independent from the awareness of the sender and receiver. In a few words, humans can exchange messages ignoring the several codes on which such an exchange is based. Therefore, one of the main hypotheses of Rossi-Landi is that “between material production and consumption, the process of exchange is inserted as something unitary and dual at the same time” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 60). It means that two processes take place at the same time: “one is that of material transfer of a physical body from one pair of hands to another pair of hands. The other is that of all the sign work that must take place so that the transfer may have a complete sense of exchange for the two men to whom the two pairs of hands belong. It is within the sign aspect of exchange that we find production, exchange, and consumption again” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 60). The semiotic character of commodity can be understood only analysing such a dual process.

In a few words, Rossi-Landi maintains that when signs – hence, verbal signs also – circulate in the form of messages, they are commodities. Indeed – just like a commodity – a message is used, transmitted and received, not only according to its use-value, but also and principally according its exchange-value; more specifically, a message “is manufactured as use-value but transmitted as (exchange-) value; it is received as (exchange-) value but interpreted as use-value” (Rossi-Landi 1977:159). Indeed, on one hand – just like a commodity – a message must have a use-value, that is, it must be able to satisfy some need. More specifically, a message must be able to satisfy a communicative need; furthermore, a message has an exchange-value, which corresponds to the phenomenal form of value tout court (or, simply, value), that is, the value understood as the substance of the generic social work incorporated in every human artefact and sign. But on the other hand, when goods circulate in the form of commodities they are messages; in this regard, Rossi-Landi underlines that the Marxian analysis of commodity-form could be understood fundamentally as a semiotic analysis of commodity as message; more specifically, the internal contradiction between use-value and exchange value constitutes a distinction between two levels of signification. Precisely, “a commodity appears on the market as the bearer of several layers of signification; interpretation must distinguish between these different layers and trace them back to the sign-system they belong to” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 127). From such a perspective, starting from the level of production, we could analyse the use-value of a commodity as a semiotic program concerning the way in which an artefact must function to satisfy a specific need. The execution of that program corresponds to the use – or consumption – of such a specific artefact. But, actually, this is just one layer of signification, and, furthermore, a layer which generally regards the artefact understood as a product – as a use-value –, rather than its commodity-dimension. On the contrary, commodity – according to Rossi-Landi – derives its semiotic specificity from certain particular social relationships and programs of communication (Rossi-Landi 1977: 127); for example, the fact that a commodity is exposed in a shop window represents an important part of the sign work which is necessary to codify a product into a commodity; but the exchange value – which is the peculiar aspect of commodity, and the value form which gives to commodity the semiotic property of being a message – does not depend on these layers of signification. Rossi-Landi is well aware of this, and, indeed, he does not limit his semiotics to those surface levels, but he explains also how the exchange value of commodity is codified, that is, what kind of semiotic processes originate the exchange value of a commodity.

As already observed, Rossi-Landi develops his homological model in line with the labour-value theory, and in doing so he can affirm that generic sign (and linguistic) work constitutes “the substance of value – the ‘measurer’ of exchange value” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 162). But he is well aware of the fact that value can be expressed only as exchange value:

a commodity acquires its own phenomenal form – by witch its ‘value’ is expressed – in the relationship between different commodities (…). It is not that a commodity, even in isolation, doesn’t possess a ‘value’ corresponding to the portion of undifferentiated work pertaining to it; the point is that such ‘value’ cannot emerge until a commodity enters into relationship with at least another commodity, whereupon its ‘value’ becomes manifest as exchange value. Or, a commodity acquires a full-winged status as a commodity only by entering the situation of exchange. (Rossi-Landi 1977: 160)

Shifting to the sign level, Rossi-Landi affirms that the possibility of structuring and that exchanging messages depends on the existence of “rules which regulate the use of signs, that is, the modalities of codification, decodification, and interpretation of messages” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 10). On the verbal level this set of rules is represented by speech, understood not only as concrete linguistic exchange, but also as code, that is, as an ensemble of the “programs which pre-delimit all the possible exchanges, that is, all possible messages” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 165); but on the level of the economic exchange such a code is constituted by money, understood as the “dialectical nucleus, the minimum and original structure” (Rossi-Landi 1977: 164) of any possible exchange of commodities.

4. Conclusions

It seems that Rossi-Landi does not develop his analysis on the relation between money and commodity further; nevertheless, thanks to his homological method he has shown the way to a better understanding of how certain highly-formalized nonverbal sign systems influence the production of commodities; in this regard, an effective example is provided by certain strictly interconnected systems such as the price system, credit system, and financial system. Obviously, these extremely complex layers of signification cannot be thematised in this paper.  Nevertheless it should be underlined that, considering language as work and trade – understood as mercantile exchange–, Rossi-Landi proposes a theoretical model which applies certain categories from the Marxian critique of political economy to linguistic structure and its practical-communicative use. But, his main goal is to lay the foundations of a scientific critique of the sign. Rossi-Landi demonstrates how economics could be considered as a specific sector of semiotics, and how the categories of economics can contribute to a better understanding of semiotic processes. In this way, Rossi-Landi’s thesis on the possibility of a semiotic interpretation of the Marxian labour-value theory could be framed in new research perspectives.

The work of Rossi-Landi demonstrates the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of semiotics and how fundamental for other disciplines could be the set of instruments that semiotics has produced.

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