Return to Saussure

 To Mateo Introduction Karl Marx’s distinction between base and superstructure remains central to social theory. By grounding culture, politics, and ideology in the organization of production, he offered a powerful framework for explaining how societies reproduce themselves. Yet the transformations of late capitalism—marked by mass consumption, media saturation, and digital technologies—raise questions about whether this hierarchy still holds. Jean Baudrillard provides one of the most radical challenges to this model. Rather than simply reversing the relation, he calls into question the very categories through which this distinction is made. This essay argues that Baudrillard destabilizes the base/superstructure distinction by showing that production, value, and reality are themselves structured by systems of signification. In the digital age, this process intensifies: code emerges as an operational logic that reorganizes both economic and cultural life, rendering the distincti...

Introduction Not everything that can be thought can be said, and not everything that is said is destined to circulate. This intuition, formulated with particular clarity by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the order of discourse, remains a privileged key for understanding the present. In the contemporary digital landscape, shaped by networks, platforms, and systems of algorithmic feedback, the problem no longer takes the classical form of socially enforced censorship. What is changing is the locus at which control over what counts as admissible in the public space operates. The filter has not disappeared; it has been displaced. To grasp this displacement, and its effects on power, enunciation, and the constitution of the subject, requires a return to Foucault, not in order to apply his concepts mechanically, but to read in his work the mutations of a discursive regime that today manifests itself in unprecedented forms. The Policing of Discourse In L’ordre du discours (1970), F...

Asynchronous Interaction. AI image Introduction In recent years, observers have noted a distinctive behavioral pattern among younger people: delayed acknowledgment, minimal expressivity, and a neutral or opaque gaze in face-to-face interaction, often labeled the “Gen Z stare” (Gen Z stare, n.d.). Far from being a sign of indifference, rudeness, or disengagement, this comportment can be read phenomenologically as an adaptation to new communicative environments. Digital spaces (social media, messaging apps, and other online platforms) normalize asynchronous interaction, where presence does not automatically entail immediate response. The habit of deferring reactions, cultivated online, migrates into the body, shaping real-world interactions and subtly transforming expectations of social reciprocity. This article proposes that delayed response is an internalized bodily reaction to digital communication norms. It emerges from continuous exposure to mediated environments where individua...