Life’s practices. Between semiotics, communication and politics.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is both to reaffirm and discuss the need of a sociosemiopolitical and communica- tional perspective on the practices of life. It is defended that such approach should be based on two theoretical and methodological movements: (i) on the construction of bridges between the analysis of micro and the analysis of macro configuration of meaning, meaning it should look and individuate the links between the practices and the other practices, the texts, the discourses and the ideologies of the sociocultural universe in which they are inscribed in order to unravel the relations of power which are hidden in the interstices of our existence as well as the resistance that people oppose to it; (ii) on the link between the ethnosemiotic analysis of the practice and the analysis of its discursive representation, whether the representation produced by the subjects involved in the practice or other representation produced by external enunciators. From this perspective, what defines the identity of a practice is not only the performance or the predicative scene itself, but also the narratives – particularly the mediatic narrative – that, in some way, shape and direct the actions and the interactions among the subjects, contributing, using Paul Ricoeur’s terms, to configurate, refigurate and, in some cases, prefigurate its meaning.