Sémiotique et innovation

Abstract

The article first presents a brief overview of the potential of semiotics as a discipline to support innovation. This is followed by the description and analysis of a spontaneous innovative practice : that of a police officer who, at a major intersection in Manila, transforms the coded gestures associated with his traffic control function into a veritable Michael Jackson-style dance that attributes new meaning to a banal scene of urban life in a perfectly unexpected way. From this description, a series of constants emerge, allowing to sketch the premises of a semiotics of innovation : i) innovation never stands on a vacuum; it springs from preexistent semiotic materials ; ii) it comes about from the conflation of two or more semiotic systems ; iii) it detects deep structural similarities among these systems, similarities that were unseen before innovation took place ; iv) it always imposes the disruption of semiotic habits and compels the reconfiguration of a society’s culture ; v) innovation is always risky because it is a communicative process whose success depends on the encounter between an intentio auctoris and an intentio lectoris through an intentio operis ; vi) whencver successful it entails contagion and imitation, and imitation sinks innovation into platitude.