Pandemic and Ideology. For a Semiotics of Racist Discourse in the Pandemic Crisis

In this text, I will start from the concept of ‘ideology’ as elaborated by the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921-1985). Criticising the traditional Marxist-Engelsian meaning, Rossi-Landi did not understand ideology as a mere state of ‘false consciousness’: rather, he highlights both its verbal-discursive character as well as its practical-teleological perspective. Particularly, starting from the semiotic model of Charles Morris (1901-1979), Rossi-Landi showed how ideological discourses operate on the ‘semantic dimension’ to structure the validity claims of their arguments, putting in place specific strategies of constructing truth. Analysing the relations between ideology, discourse and argumentation, Critical Discourse Analysis seem to have developed an approach convergent with that of Rossi-Landi. Furthermore, I will illustrate how Rossi-Landi’s semiotics of ideology can be completed with Colette Guillaumin’s (1934-2017) sociology of ‘race’; the reason of this research proposal lies in the fact that Guillaumin understands racist ideology – including racist behaviour – as a signsystem produced by social interpretative processes. From this perspective, Guillaumin’s theses can provide a concrete scope of application for Rossi-Landi’s theoretical framework. Hypothesising a dialogue between Rossi-Landi’s semiotics, Guillaumin’s sociology of ‘race’ and CDA, this contribution will focus on the rhetoricalargumentative operations put in place by racist ideological discourse in the narration of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a particular reference to the African continent.