Semiological Guerrilla Warfare 2.0: Claudio Paolucci’s Version

Abstract

The article reconstructs the concept of pre-truth and semiological guerrilla warfare 2.0, as presented within the frame work of the European research project Fakespotting by one of the last disciples of U. Eco, the Italian semiotician and professor at the University of Bologna, C. Paolucci. Drawing on the theoretical foundations laid by M. Foucault and B. Latour, Paolucci argues that social representations of truth and falsehood should be understood as derivatives of the relationship between knowledge and power, which, in turn, are contingent upon communication technologies actively engaged in the reconfiguration of the network of social actors. The contemporary technological revolution in the sphere of communications has engendered a new iteration of semiological guerrilla warfare 2.0, which diverges significantly from the model proposed by U. Eco in the latter half of the 1960s. This revised framework posits that the generation of messages that serve as alternatives to the dominant informational mainstream is no longer confined to the output stage of the communicative chain; rather, it is localized at the point of entry, as consumers increasingly assume the role of content producers. Digital communication, predicated upon the algorithmic production of documents, has fostered conditions conducive to the resurgence of the medieval conception of truth as trust – a paradigm rooted in personal experience and manifested in the form of anecdotal facts disseminated by online users. The semiotic structure of such anecdotal facts privileges experience over knowledge. Consequently, it is more precise to refer not to post truth but to pre-truth, wherein the articulation of truth becomes the digital counterpart of the medieval notion of “doing truth” (“facere veritatem”).