La strategia della partecipazione. Il caso italiano del MoVimento 5 Stelle

After a brief survey of the peculiar semiotic conception of expression and content, I analyse in this paper the case of Five Stars Movement: a non-party founded by a comedian and a computer entrepreneur which, in the context of the more general collapse of the left vs right opposition in the political domain, has become in less than ten years one of the main political forces in Italy. I define its political strategy a strategy of participation, as opposed to a strategy that stresses, on the contrary, the role of competence (in a professional but also in a semiotic narrative sense). Participation, in fact, is not only the main value expressed by the statements of Five Stars Movement, but is the most distinctive feature of its enunciation itself. All its objects and practices, from the annual conventions to the “operating system” Rousseau, aim at distributing and multiplying the places, the time and the actors of political enunciation. In this way, the political model of representation and proxy which came out of the French Revolution is challenged in its own “cartographical” foundations.