In the typology outlined by Guido Ferraro, subjectivity is no longer merely collective or intersubjective, but appears fragmented, plural, and unstable. It is the subjectivity of the age of complexity: a composite identity made up of elements that are at times even incoherent with one another. Not a higher synthesis, but a dynamic and often contradictory interweaving.
Ferraro begins with a provocative question: does the encounter between different subjects and cultures really lead to new, more mature syntheses? Or are we instead learning to accept — and even to appreciate — forms of “wobbly,” internally divided, eclectic subjectivity?
To support this idea, Ferraro refers to research in the sociology of culture and consumption, particularly the works of Gianpaolo Fabris. The so-called “postmodern consumer,” according to Fabris (2003, 2008), moves in a disordered, syncretic, unstable, multidimensional way. It is a “turbulent” subject, Ferraro writes, escaping the compact and predictable models of traditional identity.
However, Ferraro distances himself from certain sociological alarmism. In his view, semiotics can offer a more solid interpretative framework, because it does not reduce subjectivity to a sum of individual behaviors, but conceives it as the effect of a complex system. Sociological research, he argues, tends to read multiple subjectivity as an “anomaly of the individual,” whereas semiotics recognizes in it a systemic mode of functioning.
To support this perspective, Ferraro cites a Lotmanian passage reported by Gianfranco Marrone in L’invenzione del testo (2010, p. 64):
“A culture is a set of similar yet different languages, asymmetrical, in dialogue and conflict with one another, coexisting thanks to a broader cultural meta-mechanism.”
This image suggests that individual subjectivity is not an isolated point but a path within the network: each discourse, each position, is defined in relation to a map of possible cultural positions, to a constellation of collective subjectivities.
Ferraro offers a telling example: contemporary political discourse. It no longer follows a coherent argumentative line, but functions as a trajectory that connects, absorbs, and hierarchizes the “projectors of subjectivity” present within the social space. In essence, it is a strategic montage of viewpoints, made compatible only at the moment of enunciation.
Ferraro concludes that semiotics, when understood in this way, can play a decisive role in studying contemporary cultural complexity — precisely because it is equipped to think the multiple, the disordered, the unstable.
Bibliographic reference: Cinque tipi di soggettività in semiotica, Guido Ferraro.