From Expressive Sign to Denotative Sign: On Some Semiotic Passages Connected to the Invention of Writing

In How Things Shape the Mind, a book that deals with the way in which the engagement with material objects shapes our cognitive skills and gives birth to cognitive leaps and cultural progressions, Lambros Malafouris (2013) tries a semiotic opposition between a denotative sign and an ex- pressive sign. It is important to understand the terminology not connected to the classical semiotic one: ‘denotative’ has nothing to do with what Ro- land Barthes (1964) used to call ‘denotation end’; ‘expressive’ has nothing to do with what Hjelmslev (1943) used to call ‘expression’. However, in my view, there is something important there. According to Malafouris, ‘denotative sign’ is somehow connected to ‘linguistic sign’ and, of course, to writing thought in its ‘fully coded form’, as Ferrara (2021) has claimed. On the contrary, ‘expressive sign’ is tied to material culture: According to Malafouris (2013), archeological objects are expressive signs.