Esprit de corps. Sulla rilevanza della nozione peirceana di 'persona' per lo studio della nozione di 'identità' nei social media

Abstract

This contribution is the first survey on the relevance and the possible fertility of the notion of "person(ality)" as emerging from Peirce's cosmologic and metaphysical essays published on The Monist in the 1890s (see CP 6.268 ff.) and set in the frame of some semiotic and socio-psychologic questions connected to the New Media. The article is preceded by a short reflection on the peculiar way some Peircean terms can be set in the semiotic debate. My proposal consists in the application to the study of identity management in today's social networks (in particularly Facebook). Both the pars destruens (radical devaluation of individuality) and the pars construens (the idea of person as "coordination and connection of ideas"), together with their intersections, help us draw a perspective (based on the notion of continuity) that may support us in focusing on the most recent trends of the social networks as, for instance, the progressive shrinking of the "private" dimension, and in particular the irruption - up to sheer invasion - of corporeality in the digital universe, though the body seemed, at the outset, to be banned or at least concealed. The Peircean devaluation of individuality implies, indeed, that the body is not more individual than the mind (as Rossella Fabbrichesi has recently and brilliantly shown), becoming at any time potentially available to public existence and fruition.

Keywords

• peirce
• social networks
• persona
• individuo
• identità
• corpo