Existencial semiotics: theory basis and research methodology

• Grant number: 16/26121-7
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: March 02, 2017
• End date: April 18, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications
• Principal Investigator: Ana Claudia Mei Alves de Oliveira
• Grantee: Ana Claudia Mei Alves de Oliveira
• Visiting researcher: Eric Olivier Landislas Landowski
• Visiting researcher institution: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Sciences Po), France
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Landowski's visit will have as its theme an existential semiotics. Considering Greimas's scientific project existence for over sixty years, Landowski has been postulating a living semiotics. Through his perspective, he aims that the discipline firstly serves to study any phenomenon, but specially, to be destined to men and their daily experiences in the construction of meaning. In order to make the theoretic apparatus at everyone's reach, it is necessary to invest on the education of the semioticians inserted in the meaningful practices and freer to act in alliance with other disciplines.After considering the sensible dimensions of meaning in its specific materiality, which is felt in the co-presence of interacting bodies and by working on the ways of presence of the other, Landowski dedicates himself to construct a grammar of the sensible in which the aesthesia develops its on making in the construction of meaning. Inserted in the dynamics of the regimes of meaning through the specific types of interaction, he knotted those to the types of risk one decides to take on. Guided by these theoretic grounds, which aim to handle the dynamics of meaning (Risky Interactions, 2014); the researcher has been exploring the apparatus of the making of meaning in opposition to the one of having meaning. From apprehension to recognizing of meaning, he studies the open transit from one to the other and how this come and go allows a bigger descriptive and analytical density to the semiotician. Alert to the configurations of the effects of meaning experimented by the subjects in presence, he has insisted in the distinct treatments of the matter, on the lines of Françoise Bastide, and incorporated the analyses to the aesthesic and pathemic dimensions to account for the sensible affects. With the purpose of making available in Portuguese classic texts of semiotics, CPS is preparing the publication of the translation of Bastide's "The treatment of the matter" to be released and debated in the occasion of Landowski's visit, which will so contextualize the importance of such studies in current semiotics. With such theoretic scope, Eric Landowski's mission of work in São Paulo will take place along with PUC-SP Communication and Semiotics Post Graduate program, where he co-directs the Sociosemiotics Research Center (CPS), and will act mainly advising the researches currently being developed which are situated in the following axis: 1) Smart Cities, sociocultural capital and cultural inheritance; 2) Traced territorialities by the everyday population flows in the city of São Paulo; 3) Practices of life and production of meaning in São Paulo: visibility regimes; interaction regimes and rewriting regimes; 4) Greimas and the usage of semiotics conceptual apparatus in the fields of knowledge in Brasil. By conjugating the various actions the visiting researcher will also minister an intensive course in which he will present and discuss about his most recent reflections in the field of Sociosemiotics. He will also proffer lectures and conferences in different universities in the state of São Paulo, in which he will take part on encounters and meetings with researchers and post graduate students with the aim of meeting and talking about their accomplished studies, always concerned with the interconnections enabled in semiotics making, which is what enables inter-institutional contacts to be made. His work aims still to promote a deepening in Sociosemiotics methodology currently used in CPS's research projects, which now faces the studies of social practices as their biggest challenge. Along with the described work, which will be developed throughout his period of stay, he will actively take part both in the scientific area and in the organizational part of the International Colloquium honoring the centennial birth of Algirdas Julien Greimas, to be celebrated at PUC-SP. (AU)