Between Automatisms and the Automatisation of Language Practices

Discover the second session of the 2025-2026 International Seminar of Semiotics in Paris: "Between Automatisms and the Automatisation of Language Practices: Towards a New Semiotics of the Stereotype".

This year, the seminar focuses on the formation, persistence, and dissolution of discursive stereotypes, whether in verbal language or other forms of expression. These stereotypes originate not only from habits, rules, grammars, and conventions, but also from repetitive practices in work, learning, and other fields, which become automatisms. They are also produced by automatisation of language and other practices (scientific, reasoning-based, etc.).

The seminar will emphasise automatisms that involve:

• bodily, psychic, and cultural reactions characteristic of human and animal species;
• linguistic constructions stabilised in formulas and highly recognisable formulations (motifs, topoi, or stereotypes).

These discursive productions are highly useful—they even condition communicability as a "commonplace"—and are easily transferable from one discourse to another. Unlike motifs and topoi, which are often the basis for intertextuality and creative reappropriation, stereotypes have frequently been relegated to the background, associated with folklore or popular discourse. Nevertheless, they play a central role in political and artistic discourse.

• Pierre Cassou-Noguès – Paris 8 University
  The new strangeness of stereotypes
• Federico Montanari  – University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
  Some thoughts on “conditioned reflexes.” Between socio-semiotics, philosophy, and anthropology