Section 2 - Syllabus and recommended literature

Paolo Volonté, Facoltá del Design, Politecnico di Milano
Pamplona, February 1st-3rd, 2010

Syllabus

Globalization is a main subject in communication studies today. But too often it is interpreted in terms of majors monopolizing the media markets all around the world, of trans-national interconnections among information systems, of Internetworking, and of a resulting mcDonaldization of world cultures. Too often communication is just identified with the media. This is a consequence of the original postulate that communicating primarily means speaking (verbal communication).

In our lectures we will rather take our stand on two main points: a) Globalization is not only a matter of communication, but first of all a matter of a mutual economic and cultural approaching of national and local societies, leading to a new kind of social structure, where communication holds a crucial role. b) Communication is not primarily a matter of language, but a matter of bodily relationship, whereas spoken language must be understood as a refined advanced processing of bodily communication. As a consequence, we must be aware of the fact that the process of globalization – that implies a general increase of economic welfare, an improvement of social mobility, a loss of reference points for the construction of self-identities – involves for the individual in western and westernized societies a broader and broader use of environmental means of communication to interact with the other: objects, actions, spatial displays.

Communication has become a pivotal factor in the “social tactics” (Baudrillard) that today’s people have to implement to cope with their everyday lives. But such pivotal communication has less to do with spoken language than with the display of our physical environment.
This circumscribes the set of issues we are going to deal with.
Accordingly, our three lectures will face the following three topics:

1) What does it mean communicating? The traditional “hydraulic model” that explains communication in terms of a transmission (or sharing) of contents between two (or more) subjects will be discussed. Jakobson’s well-known schema will be referred to. As a better explanation a phenomenological-inferential model of communication will be presented and recommended.

2) The fundamental role of environmental communication. As a consequence of the new model, it becomes clear that communication is primarily a matter of display of the other’s physical environment on the basis of a (partially) common culture. The function of objects as means of communication (“media”) will be considered as well as the social role of their independent biographies.

3) Objects as means of communication are a response to the increasing incidence of immaterial needs in the setting of human beings’ everyday life. The new condition in postmodern societies, where social relationship, inclusion and order are more and more mediated through communication, will be described. At the end the crucial relevance of communication, i.e. of environmental communication in today’s society should become manifest.

Some References:

Baudrillard, Jean (1972), Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe, Gallimard, Paris (chp. 1).
Jakobson, Roman (1960), “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics”, in Th.A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 350-377.
Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre (1986), Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Blackwell, Oxford (chp. 1).
Volli, Ugo (2000), Manuale di semiotica, Laterza, Roma-Bari (chp. 1).
Volonté, Paolo (2009), El creador de moda como creador de comunicación, in “Revista Impresa y Humanismo” XII, n. 2, pp. 193-225.
Volonté, Paolo (2009), Oggetti di personalità, in A. Burtscher, D. Lupo, A. Mattozzi and P. Volonté (eds.), Biografie di oggetti | Storie di cose, Bruno Mondadori, Milano, pp. 11-26. (English version available here)
Volonté, Paolo (2010), Designing Communicating Objects, in S. Vihma and T.-M. Karjalainen (eds.), Design Semiotics in Use, Helsinki (in print, available here).