2024-01-04 08:39:38
As long as we have human heads converted into millions of battlefields, we need a scientific body, of a new kind, to critically intervene in the production of signs and solve, at the root, many semiotic problems imposed on our people. This implies a dialectical task that, while deactivating the hegemonic sign machinery, contributes to creating a “new world order” in the production of meaning. We need scientific instruments capable of moving forward with the vanguard of decolonized and decolonizing thought; that has the “gift” of ubiquity and speed; that he questions everything and himself, in the praxis that mobilizes the new social production of knowledge. Science against the dictatorship of the market and against the most odious vices in the fields of research. Science of the general movement of meaning processes and their metabolisms. Emancipatory semiotic science at the service of social struggles. We are in danger if we remain an immense archipelago of unconnected semiospheres. Enough of illusionism.
“Semiotics” here means: science for the praxis that intervenes in the processes of production, distribution and consumption of “meaning”, in its causes and its ends, in the networks of signs and the dialectical processes of signification, decoding and transmission. . That shows the depths and backgrounds of all meaning, its economic roots and the sign mechanisms that express them. That analyzes and denounces the techniques of “symbolic manipulation” and critically produces hypotheses, theses and mobilizations with models for a “new world order” of emancipatory semantics, syntax and dialogic against the context of economic hegemony and oppressive ideology. .
It is a trap to separate economics from ideology, infrastructure and superstructure. Between the infrastructure and the superstructure there is a dialectical, unequal and combined relationship, characterized by tensions and complex struggles that do not admit simplisms or silly linearities in the face of the mixture of interests, objective and subjective. These tensions and contradictions – of the class struggle – also produce “signs” that are historically determined social products to “represent” specific interests, facts, phenomena or actions. Very few objects, natural or cultural, (and their mixtures) have been, in their historical development, exempt from meanings (direct or indirect).
Perhaps the most complete example of our time, where the signic convergence of all the class tensions in dispute is best exemplified, is the commodity. In every commodity there lives a corpus of ideological “sense” that has been converted into a commodity, even Work has been converted into a commodity and a sign. And also the raw materials that have become merchandise have been touched by the hegemonic production of meaning that, in turn, has also become merchandise. “The devaluation of the world of men,” Marx thought, “is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.”
Let Semiotics not be reduced to a commodity itself because we need it “emancipated” and capable of revealing the ideological plot that is the nerve of commodities under capitalism. Not a semiotics for concealment. If the ideology of the ruling class is based on indoctrinating the world under the dogma of “accumulating” a lot, at low cost and with little ethics, accumulating based on the work of others and making them believe that it is for their own good; Our Semiotics should be the science of the production of emancipatory meaning, its means and its ways. Semiotics that dismantle the common ideological denominators (false consciousness) of the hegemonic machines of meaning production: religion, family, state, law, education, morality, philosophy, science, art, etc…. imposed by capitalism, because they are nothing more than special modes of production and reproduction of the system subject to the general law of producing surplus value for a few, increasingly fewer and more powerful. “It is easier to disintegrate an atom than a prejudice” Einstein.
We know well that “the ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas in each era; or, in other words, the class that exercises the dominant material power in society is, at the same time, its dominant spiritual power.” We know that there is no science immune to the ideologies that surround it. That there is no “immaculate” science. That is why here we prefer that you identify and declare your philosophical frameworks, this time humanist of a new kind and emancipatory, as opposed to the old method of trafficking ideologies “under the table.” We need an emancipatory Semiotics that assumes its responsibility of direction and social force to intervene in the mode of production and in the relations of production of scientific knowledge, also, because at present the dominant mode of production of scientific knowledge has been reduced to a symbol. of knowledge-commodity.
It is a mistake to believe that to overcome capitalism it is enough to deactivate its economic forces and it is false that only by combating the ideas of the ruling class does the structure of the capital-labor contradiction weaken. We need scientific instruments that not only serve to analyze but also serve to transform. Science incubated by the dialectical praxis of critical thought and action. Emancipatory science and emancipated from the dictatorship of the market. Interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, trans-disciplinary science capable of nourishing itself with objective problems and producing solutions for the short, medium and long term. Dismantle the anti-values of consumerism, individualism, and bourgeois morality based on hypocrisy that passes off its treacherous drive for surplus value and alienation as philanthropic.
Science, furthermore, that deactivates the history, development and consequences of the psychological war unleashed to intoxicate the minds of people with enslaving ideological devices. Fears, anti-politics, hatred, banalities, vulgarities, lies, complexes, addictions… Science born by the Philosophy of Praxis (Sánchez Vázquez). Objective explanation of the universe, its forms and processes, its internal links and connections, its reciprocal actions and human intervention possible under the necessary conditions and means. (Eli de Gortari). We need an emancipated Semiotics for emancipation, which understands that the economic base does not mechanically determine the superstructure but that they are inseparable and that matters a lot because the symbolic life of society, subject to the accelerated processes of monopolization of “media” and speeches, has turned human heads into millions of battlefields. The Symbolic War.
Taken from TeleSur
#Philosophy #Semiotics #revolution #meaning #desirable #achievable #perfectible