La sémiotique visuelle entre voie moyenne et nouvelle avant-garde

Once an avant-garde discipline, visual semiotics today finds itself representing a sort of middle way, focused on textuality and its enunciative traces, which no longer seems to fully satisfy the hermeneutic challenges of the contemporary world. Reassigning a strategic position to visual semiotics is less a question of abandoning past theoretical elaborations than of reintegrating unfinished or little-exploited paths, such as the history of forms (i.e., the diachronic dimension) and the symbolic and institutional dimension of meaning. But is this recovery of incomplete and promising paths sufficient to ensure a less marginal role for visual semiotics? Should we imagine a new avant-garde, and on what epistemological foundations? Our contribution is an attempt to thematize opportunities for contemporary semiotics as a collective project.