However, when Ramiro Hinojas decides to direct the traffic of Manila with the dancing moves of Michael Jackson, not only two expressive codes, but also two communicative rationales merge: his postures, gestures, and movements are not simply speech acts anymore, but a performance that turns car drivers and pedestrians into spectators. The cultural consequences of this transformation are huge: the street turns into a stage, the arid functionality of a crossroad into a creativity arena, where passersby are suddenly snapped from the meaningless routine of their daily commute and reminded that human life is all about meaning, and that meaning is all about surprise. These are two further points one should keep in mind about innovation semiotics: first, true innovation is never only a matter of expression; true innovation reshapes the semantic form a society adopts, and the vaster and deeper the reshaping is, the more compelling innovation will be; second, innovation takes place only when semiotic habits are shaken and reconfigured, as Peirce would have said. There is no innovation in routines, and every innovation disrupts routines, engenders signs that force receivers to produce other signs to interpret them, and so on and so forth until innovation turns into a new socially established semiotic habit and, ultimately, into a new routine.
There is something else Ramiro Hinojas’s performance can teach. First of all, that there is no innovation that does not entail a certain amount of risk; second, that the greater the innovation, the bigger the risk; third, that the first risk every true innovation runs, is that of not being recognized as such. What is the risk involved in directing traffic with MJ’s moves? By opening up a new arena of meaning in the scenario of everyday meaningless routines, the conflation of pragmatic and aesthetic communication runs the risk of determining the failure of both: pedestrians and drivers will not pay attention to the cop’s gestural orders and will get distracted by his show, to the detriment of traffic fluidity. Simultaneously, their being caught in traffic, and not sitting in a theatre, will prevent them from fully enjoying the aesthetics of the performance, also because they receive it without any soundtrack. By merging two cultural dimensions, innovation therefore is always at peril of dissatisfying the requirements of both.
However, semiotics should emphasize that innovation exactly consists in such risk: every innovation that matters imposes a reconsideration not only of the systems of signs involved in its expressive rearrangement, but also of the cultural configurations that they convey. Ramiro Hinojas’s innovative performance, for instance, should encourage observers to reconsider the whole lifestyle in which metropolitan citizens are caught: a rat race where any meaningful contemplation immediately becomes a hindrance to the meaningless motion of the city; the magic transformation of the cop’s gestural orders into MJ’s dancing moves should also hint at the nightmarish work conditions of traffic control enforcers in a metropolis like Manila: hours and hours surrounded by dangerous cars, noise, pollution; hours and hours performing the same gestures in the attempt at putting order into chaos. In this frame, the metamorphosis of traffic control into dance should be received like an epiphany of meaning into the meaninglessness of contemporary urban life.
Nevertheless, another important semiotic point about innovation is that, like any other communicative artifact, innovation too entails simultaneously an intentio auctoris, an intentio lectoris, and an intentio operis. On the one hand, there are the intentions of the innovator. From interviews with Ramiro Hinojas, it is known that his purpose was not to make an existential statement about the alienation of urban life. More pragmatically, he was a 55 year- old man previously fired by a company, a man whose only goal was to have his temporary contract as traffic control enforcer be converted into a permanent one. His motivations were therefore similar to those of every innovator: to be noticed, to emerge from the background, to produce difference and therefore meaning; to turn such meaningful difference into socio-economic benefit. Yet, besides this intentio auctoris there is the intentio lectoris of innovation, what receivers of an innovative communicative artifact actually make out of it. Here reactions may vary: Ramiro Hinojas’s performance will entertain some, annoy others, and introduce a few to a whole new reconsideration of their daily existence in the urban environment. Finally, there is the intentio operis of innovation, that is, innovation as it emerges from the way it plays with the structures and codes of a society and its culture. The disciplinary aim of semiotics is to understand the intentio operis of innovation, but also to comprehend why innovation can succeed or fail depending on the way its inner structure is communicated and received.