Rhetoric and Ideology in Communication Today: A Semioethic Perspective

This article describes how the concept of communication isreconsidered under two aspects, theoretical and historical-social relatively to today’s world. The first: communication cannot be reduced to a process of exteriorisation according to a limited view of communication. This contrasts with global semiotics(Sebeok) and the fact that being, life is communication. The second: with respect to economic reality, the industrial revolution of automation, globalisation of communication, universalisation of the market, communication in the production, exchange, consumption cycle is present in all three phases and not only in exchange. The dominant communication-production system tends to present itself through massmedial communication, and through the rhetoric of itsideo-logic asthe only system possible, to maintain and reproduce at all costs, despite its openly destructive character. Semiotics must cultivate a global vision, which as semioethics and in a “semio-dialogic” perspective will interrogate dominant ideo-logic and propose new forms of living together.