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Signata 18 / Failure, Care, and Repair

Semiotic and Socio-Technical Perspectives on Fallibility and Maintenance of Meaning
Juan Alonso Aldama et Carlo Andrea Tassinari

Contacts and Timetable

Please send your papers to the following email addresses: carlo.tassinari3@unibo.it; juan.alonso@parisdescartes.fr and signata.annales@gmail.com

  • October 31, 2025: deadline for receiving the first versions of the papers

  • March 31, 2026: deadline for receiving the final versions of the papers

  • June 31, 2026: corrected proofs

  • October 31, 2026: publication of the special issue

Special Issue

This issue of Signata intends to foster reflection on the role of vulnerability in the semantic and narrative organization of experience, particularly as related to the objects of meaning emerging from contemporary ecological and political tensions. Our main objective is to explore the organization of the “anti-universe of meaning” that appears as a counterpoint to success and achievement, putting failure, care, and repair at the center of the debate.

We propose to deal with such aspects following two main directions. On the one hand, we call for a reactivation of the dialogue between semiotics and the social sciences (Greimas 1976; Landowski 1989; 2004), informed by the sociology of science and technology, extending the issue of the fragility of relations to a “social” world populated by both humans and non-humans (Latour 2005). On the other hand, this fragility questions the relevance of narrative models (Greimas 1983) that seem to presuppose—and take for granted—the material stability of the world (Bonnet, Landivar & Monnin 2021; Pontille & Denis 2022).

Hence, could the ecological crises and the fragile materialities they bring to light offer an opportunity to rethink how we make “what is going on” intelligible—and actionable?

Indeed, the fragility of interactions, both structured by and structuring the social order, is a classic topic in Goffmanian sociology (Goffman 1952) and American ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967; Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1992), which have been key references in sociosemiotic research (Fabbri 1988; Marsciani 1991; Tore 2011; Cervelli 2018; Landowski 2017; 2019). However, in the 1980s and 1990s, a critique began to emerge of the exclusive focus on human actors’ interactional abilities, which seemed to ignore the contribution of material infrastructures and technological artifacts to the definition of social roles, values, and practices (Callon 1986; Bijker & Law 1992; Akrich 1993; Latour 1992). It is precisely the fallibility of non-humans that opened a breach in the sociological imagination: far from being merely “circumstant”, namely a simple backdrop to human actions, they become stakeholders of societal projects—likely, as humans, to succeed or fail.

Today, the environmental tensions filling the pages of newspapers are linked precisely to the renewed discovery of the instability and fragility of “things”, just as, in the “Anthropocene”, humans are being objectified by Earth system sciences as “major geological forces” (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2007; 2011). A crucial issue in the environmental humanities (Bird Rose et al. 2012), this collapse of social and geological scales (Chakrabarty 2009) invites us to radically reconsider “modern” sociological imagination (Latour 2005; 2012; 2015; 2017), particularly as related to the unexpected but decisive links the categories nature/culture and success/failure.

Consider the case of scientific discourse and practices. When a scientific statement is deemed “successful”, it is because it has managed to conceal its ties to its “social” production context, presenting itself as a pure “natural fact” (Callon 1986; Latour 1991). Conversely, any “scientific failure” is marked by an exposure of the result’s attachment to a particular lab, a specific observational circumstance, or worse, an “ideology”, a “bias”, or a given scientist’s “interest”. Yet the economic, legal, or political ties of a lab are as much part of successful scientific statements as of failed ones. The same could be said of major industrial disasters (Pinto 2023), which appear as the perfect inverse of scientific success. Economic initiative, as an unquestioned social value, often obscures the weight and pervasiveness of the material infrastructures that make it possible—until environmental and community effects emerge in the public sphere, sweeping away the associated social aspirations. The “miracle” of scientific success, purified of human involvement, is mirrored by the “apocalypse” of industrial disasters, in which non-humans appear only in retrospect, as if by some inexplicable eruption.

Yet it is by symmetrically analyzing failure and success (Callon 1986; Latour 1991), and the human/non-human assemblages characterizing them both beyond the nature/culture divide, that we might better understand techno-scientific practices as a whole. The COVID-19, climate change, and the broader habitability crisis of the Anthropocene are just a few examples demonstrating the urgency of such a re-description.

Now, it seems that the way Greimasian semiotics—inspired by the model of folktales (Propp 1965)—has conceptualized the narrativization of experience tends to privilege success and effectiveness over the hero’s failure and the fragility of their tools (Zilberberg 2007). With its teleological orientation, structure of successive trials, and drive toward the realization of values, the canonical narrative schema implies success as the general condition of meaning, while treating failure—though anticipated in the model as “negative sanction”—as a point where semiosis halts. This is made explicit in Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (Greimas & Courtés 1979), where the only entry explicitly addressing the success/failure opposition—on the narrative “duplication” of two successive sequences — unambiguously states that when the first sequence ends in “failure” and the next in “success”, it is solely to emphasize the latter, for failure “shows the difficulty of the test and underscores the importance of the success” (Ibid., Engl. trans. 1982, p. 95). Yet, as Zilberberg (2007) writes, “for the modern [subject] it is no longer foresight, anticipation, and the [heroic] success that set the norm, but the failure of all forecasts, failure, and disaster” (our translation). Even beyond the crises seemingly marking the end of modernity in the Anthropocene, there exists a logical and anthropological possibility of a meaningful world that is alternative and correlative to “success”—i.e. an “anti-universe” that, far from being a space of non-meaning, has always generated a rich repertoire of practices of acceptance, repair, and maintenance, both of relationships and of things.

  • 1 This is reminiscent of the reference to “topics” of action in pragmatist-inspired sociology, from B (...)

Up to now, semiotics has only sporadically addressed this “anti-universe”. It is seen in filigree in On Imperfection (Greimas 1987), where the hesitations bordering on the existential abyss of failure reveal a new horizon of meaning. Against this backdrop, an elementary typology of error gradually takes shape. On the one hand, we find “quantitative” or “technical” errors: those that occur when we do too much or too little, but which, being always reversible, do not call into question the criteria of relevance of the action (Landowski 2004, p. 55; Latour 2012; Basso 2025, p. 165), nor its underlying models, and can be corrected indefinitely. On the other hand, we find qualitative errors: those which, like the “quiproquo” (Landowski 2004, p. 56), reveal a logic of interaction different from the expected (the appearance of the “logic” of chance in a programmed action, of the sensible in a logical argument, of the accident in the flow of adjustments, etc.)1; or which, like “category errors” (Latour 2012), reveal the interference between different “cultural practices” (Fontanille 1999; Lotman 2004)—such as, for instance, seeking psychological satisfaction in a legal ruling, political argument in a scientific statement, or factual description in a religious discourse—which poses the problem of an “ecology of translation” (Basso Fossali 2017) between semantic domains.

Through this movement of deterritorialization of the criteria of relevance of action, the error becomes a “form of life”, inviting the subject to constantly consider new objects of value: those which constitute the condition of possibility of his autonomy, and which at the same time form the network of dependencies making him vulnerable (Fontanille 2008; Zilberberg 2011; Shaïri 2012; Basso-Fossali 2025). In the face of this, “care” and “reparation” (Fisher & Tronto 1990; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011; Marres 2012; Jackson 2014; Pontille & Denis 2022) seem to outline strategies of narrativization whose contrast deserves to be explored further. Here is a possible articulation.

  • 2 What we seem to be talking about here is extending a “semiotics of machines” (Zinna et. al. 2005) t (...)

First, the “mode” of repair would suggest that between the functioning and the breakdown of an object or interaction, not much happens. It keeps value on the side of socially recognized use, without fundamentally questioning the “discontinuity” at the core of the ideology of innovation and progress. In the end, we find ourselves within a fairly classical conception of narrative logic: the occurrence of a breakdown corresponds to the virtualization of the subject, who intervenes after the fact to resume their quest for socio-technical order. Think of the figure of the repairman, the “fixer”, the providential man, or even the avenger-hero—often represented as masculine and solitary—who single-handedly restores justice through a decisive act: from finding a technical solution to a socio-environmental problem to restoring the “truth” of “facts” against “false” social representations. These roles fit well within the teleological structure of narrativity: a succession of states and transformations eliminating a lack of meaning. It seems to us that even object semiotics has largely adopted this perspective: focused on the “everyday” uses (Fontanille & Zinna 2005) of end-users, it is concerned (for good reason, admittedly) with optimizing their communicative effectiveness (Deni 2002), interface (Zinna 2004), or transformative power over the world (Groupe m, Édeline & Klinkenberg 2013). Less attention has been paid to the becoming worn-out of things and of the entire human and non-human infrastructure that enables us to continue using them.2

Care (Denis & Pontille 2022), on the other hand, seems to pay attention to the singular modulation of modes of existence that makes this double movement cohabit: on the one hand, that of the quest for objects of value, defined by recognized and accepted cultural practices; on the other hand, that of the seizure of the material resistance of objects, with their own trajectories of degradation or transformation, always in progress. The subject who cares for things, unlike that of repairing them, does not need a breakdown to intervene: they are already engaged in a network of both human and non-human actors, often outside the bounds of conventional cultural practices, for whom breakdown—as potential fragility—is always present. Whereas the repair of an object makes all the relations that keep it functioning while it is in “working condition” invisible, reinstating the subject’s “sovereignty” over the non-human, the care supposed by maintenance tends to open usage practices up to the emergence of the unexpected, shifting the boundary that defines the scope of a practice’s relevance—whether work-related or recreational.

Here, we glimpse two distinct modes of intervention that also differ in terms of temporality: as related to repair, the kairos of the man for the moment, like Ulysses; as related to care, the relatively impersonal labor that inhabits, continuously, the assemblage of human and non-human in which it is entangled. Thus, narrative modalities, forms of temporality, and strategies of permanence seem to constitute relevant tools for systematizing the network of parasynonyms that structure the universe of repair and maintenance practices.

Let us return, then, to the analytical field opened up by such considerations. This irruption of the unexpected, which remains to be described, and which causes repair practices to bifurcate toward inter-actantial scenarios of care, seems to us a privileged vantage point for grasping the properly semiotic relevance of ecological tensions, both at the individual and collective levels. Consider, for example, the practice of cycling. It may aim to bypass traffic, reduce emissions, or take care of one’s health. But through the lens of care and maintenance, it is also invested with an attention to the material transformations endured by its objects (wheel deformation with use, gradual brake wear, metal corrosion from rain, screw loosening from disuse—but also, why not, the welcome “breaking in” of the mechanism, or a patina on the worn-out paint one grows fond of). All this involves a whole bundle of actors and actions that contribute to keeping both the object and its user within their course of existence (Fontanille 2015). We could just as well consider the social life of a large infrastructure—for transport, energy production, or housing (Sample 2016; Hall & Smith 2017): while repair forces us into the realm of social purpose—the foundation of large development plans—care and maintenance add an additional plane of relevance to usage: the socio-technical network that makes the practice functional, with its human and non-human actors, more or less rendered invisible in the normal course of things. The transformation of modes of existence and the regimes of visibility of these networks is, moreover, the central goal of maintenance art (Molesworth 2000; Duffy 2007; Kofman 2012; Reser 2017; Pontille & Denis 2022)—another topic we invite contributors to engage with. We can see that, relatively independently of scale, maintenance calls forth new temporalities, competencies, intensities, and interactions. Within the care that maintenance demands, error indeed seems to take on the shape of a “form of life”, one that opens the horizon of existential relevance without erasing the horizon of ordinary use. The subject is thus led to make co-exist, within the same practice, both the state and the transformation of things, through a curious modulation of modes of existence—constantly retranslating the effects occurring to the used thing into the very practices of use itself. This could equally apply to the care of intra- and interpersonal relationships, including the subtle arts of politics and diplomacy, where relations wear out, stretch, deform—continuously placing under strain the values exchanged and the valences that render them actionable (Alonso Aldama 2023).

Hence some ideas for a symmetrical re-politicization of matters and relationships that seem more likely to account for repair practices, as well as for the negotiation and reorientation of values imposed by the Anthropocene (Bonnet, Landivar & Monnin 2021; Monnin 2022), emerge: when should we—individually and collectively—deploy the care necessary to remain in touch with our objects of value and their silent evolutions?
When should we rather let it go, seeking realization in other courses of action or with other objects altogether? When and how should we restructure the values that bind us to things and relationships, along with the valences that—often silently—prioritize them in our eyes?

Building on these observations and questions, we propose to examine vulnerability and failure, also considering the rich semantic constellation of figures associated to them—i.e., setback, fiasco, defeat, failure, malfunction, breakdown, accident, mishap, etc. Moving beyond mere retrospective judgment based on the comparison between a planned program and its actualization, our aim is to explore the world of counter-programs that such a gap evokes—uncovering the substrate of repair and maintenance practices upon which not only the feeling of continuity in the “normal” course of things rests, but from which original and unforeseen trajectories and correspondences emerge.

Hence, in the aim to broaden the narrative perspective of transformation to include failure, repair, care, and maintenance, this issue of Signata invites to focus on the following non-exhaustive set of topics:

  • The various discursive domains and actional universes of rupture and maintenance: from romantic fiascos to economic failures, from technical malfunctions to environmental controversies, from military defeats to political breakdowns, from industrial collapses to crisis management, from professional setbacks to social embarrassments and missteps—not to mention the recursive stagings produced by the activist-artistic movement of maintenance art”.

  • The thematic roles and narrative figures tied to defeat, vulnerability, care, and repair: the loser, the dropout, the fixer, the maintainer, the tinkerer—but also the strategist and the “redirectionist” toward new universes of meaning (as exemplified in France by this emerging figure within ecology and spatial management).

  • The junction between materiality and action, which raises questions about the links between the semiotics of objects and the life-forms of error, repair, and maintenance.

  • Tactical-strategic and temporal orientations of the reversibility of failure: from a posteriori repair to preventive maintenance, from the adaptation of the irreparable to the aspectual articulation of these processes.

  • The affective pathways linked to failure and care: from frustration to patience, from anger to despair, from solicitude to apathy, from denial (climate denialism?) to anxiety (climate anxiety?).

  • Failure, incompletion, and rupture pose the broader problem of the value of values at stake—that is, of the valences regulating the emergence and arbitration among such values. Under what conditions can we speak of success or failure, breakdown or rupture? To what extent is it worthwhile to find a strategy of repair, or to shift toward adaptation—to tactically retreat, to lose in order to win, to redistribute by re-founding compromised values, to renounce in order to preserve? How, in short, might we define reference points for navigating situations that require arbitrating the value of the values that underpin our relationships and our things?

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Notes

1 This is reminiscent of the reference to “topics” of action in pragmatist-inspired sociology, from Boltanski & Thévenot (1991) to Bidet (2008).

2 What we seem to be talking about here is extending a “semiotics of machines” (Zinna et. al. 2005) towards a semiotics of infrastructures, bringing to the fore the machinic apparatus of humans and non-humans that enable machines to function.

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