Contre la sémiotique du prétexte

Semioticians obsessively talk about texts and their analysis. Yet, in the history of semiotics, few texts have been analyzed. Indeed, semioticians, including the fathers of the discipline, have rather turned texts into pretexts: what mattered in their analysis was not to bring about a hermeneutic result (for instance, changing the way in which the meaning of a text is received by a community) but to demonstrate the validity of a methodology (for instance, reassuring a community, usually composed of other semioticians, about the epistemological soundness of a certain analytical procedure). The paper suggests that one of the chief reasons for which semiotics has been mainly developed as methodological discourse without precise object is that semioticians have rarely been encouraged to reflect on the rationale of their pre-textual choices. Furthermore, the paper contends that if semioticians want to escape from their methodological limbo, they should stop asking themselves (only) — as they maniacally do — “how am I going to analyze this text?” and should start asking themselves, instead, “why am I going to analyze this text?”. More importantly, they should start wondering: “for whom am I going to analyze this text?” Finally, the paper argues that, in order to fruitfully answer this last question, semiotics should not merely develop a further (meta)level of methodological discourse about semiotic analysis conceived as enunciation process but relinquish its solipsism and imagine itself as in dialogue with society. The passage from a semiotics of pretexts to a semiotics of pre-texts means that the work of semioticians should not simply satisfy the methodological worries of other semioticians, but the thirst for meaning of a larger community.