In Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, Susan Petrilli introduces what she calls a detotalizing method as a necessary epistemological and ethical stance for contemporary semiotics. This method emerges from a critique of totalizing models of knowledge and communication, particularly those associated with globalization, technicism, and disciplinary separatism. Against these tendencies, Petrilli proposes a mode of inquiry capable of accounting for complexity, interdependence, and otherness without reducing them to closed systems.
Totality, Globalization, and the Risk of Reduction
Globalization, Petrilli argues, is often described as a unified and self-sufficient totality: a worldwide system of communication, production, and exchange governed by technological and market logics. Such descriptions, however, risk masking the deeper structures that generate and regulate this apparent totality. From a semioethical perspective, globalization must be understood as a historical–social–economic phenomenon that operates through interpenetrating levels of organization rather than as an autonomous whole.
Every totality, Petrilli insists, is always part of a larger totality. What appears as a closed system is in fact exposed to other systems, other contexts, and other forms of life. To treat any totality as self-contained is to fall into a reductionist fallacy that obscures interdependencies and legitimizes forms of domination and control.
Detotalization as a Method of Understanding
The detotalizing method responds to this risk by refusing to absolutize any system, model, or explanatory framework. Detotalization does not deny the existence of totalities; rather, it situates them within broader networks of relations. Understanding, in this sense, requires awareness of how partial systems are generated, sustained, and transformed within larger configurations.
Petrilli emphasizes that detotalization is not fragmentation. It is not a rejection of coherence or structure, but a critical stance toward claims of completeness and closure. Detotalization keeps inquiry open to what exceeds the system: to alterity, heterogeneity, and difference. It acknowledges that no totality can fully account for itself from within its own boundaries.
Architectonics and Critique
To articulate this approach, Petrilli draws on the concept of architectonics, explicitly recalling Immanuel Kant’s notion of the “architectonics of pure reason.” Architectonics, understood semioethically, concerns the art of organizing systems of knowledge while remaining aware of their limits and conditions of possibility.
In Petrilli’s reading, architectonics becomes detotalizing architectonics: a form of critique that operates across cognitive, practical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions. Logic, aesthetics, and ethics are not separable domains, but mutually implicative aspects of human semiosis. Ethical critique cannot be postponed to an external level; it must be integrated into the very structure of inquiry.
This perspective allows semiotics to interrogate global communication systems not only in terms of efficiency or functionality, but in terms of their effects on life, social relations, and the biosphere.
Against Specialism and Technicism
A central target of Petrilli’s detotalizing method is specialism, the fragmentation of knowledge into isolated disciplines that ignore their interconnections. Specialism, she argues, stands upon interconnectivity while simultaneously denying it. By focusing narrowly on specialized objects, disciplines risk becoming indifferent to the broader implications of their practices.
Technicism exacerbates this tendency by privileging operational efficiency over critical reflection. In a globalized world dominated by technological mediation, communication risks being reduced to message transmission, data exchange, and functional performance. From a global semiotic perspective, such reductions threaten the very conditions of communication and, ultimately, of life.
Detotalization counters technicism by restoring attention to the qualitative dimensions of semiosis: meaning, value, responsibility, and care.
Detotalization and Otherness
At the core of the detotalizing method lies an ethical orientation toward otherness. Drawing on dialogical traditions associated with Bakhtin and Levinas, Petrilli maintains that understanding is always relational and asymmetrical. No system can exhaust the meaning of the other; no identity can fully incorporate alterity without violence.
Detotalization therefore entails responsiveness to what lies outside identity–difference logic. It resists the temptation to neutralize difference by subsuming it under general categories or universal schemes. Instead, it keeps inquiry exposed to the other, to what interrupts and challenges established frameworks.
A Method for Global Semiotics
Within global semiotics, the detotalizing method becomes indispensable. As Thomas A. Sebeok emphasized, communication and life are inseparable. Any attempt to totalize communication risks obscuring its biosemiotic foundations and its ethical stakes. Detotalization allows semiotics to address the complexity of the semiosphere without imposing artificial closures.
In this sense, the detotalizing method is not merely methodological but ethical. It reflects a commitment to responsibility without alibis, to critique without domination, and to understanding without appropriation. Semiotics, practiced in this way, becomes capable of responding to the challenges of globalization while remaining faithful to its vocation as a science of signs and a practice of care.
Riferimento bibliografico: Susan Petrilli, Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, in Bloomsbury Semiotics. Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences, Vol. 3, Bloomsbury, 2023.
Abstract (italiano)
L’articolo ricostruisce la nozione di metodo detotalizzante proposta da Susan Petrilli come fondamento epistemologico ed etico della semioetica. A partire da una critica delle rappresentazioni totalizzanti della globalizzazione e dei sistemi di comunicazione contemporanei, il testo mostra come la detotalizzazione non implichi la negazione delle totalità, ma la loro reinscrizione in reti più ampie di relazioni, interdipendenze e alterità. Attraverso il richiamo all’idea di architettonica e alla tradizione della semiotica globale, viene messo in evidenza il carattere critico del metodo detotalizzante, orientato a contrastare specialismo, tecnicismo e riduzioni funzionalistiche della comunicazione. La detotalizzazione emerge così come condizione necessaria per una semiotica capace di integrare conoscenza, responsabilità ed etica della vita, mantenendo l’apertura al diverso e all’alterità che eccedono ogni sistema chiuso.