Finally, a last point about innovation and the semiotic approach to it: Youtube is now replete with short videos showing dancing cops in different cities of the Philippines or even in other countries. Some of them don Santa Claus clothes on Christmas time, some others dance with alternatives moves. The point is that innovation never freezes in time. On the contrary, as soon as it turns successful, it is immediately imitated, sometimes with little variations that nevertheless never feature the same innovative potential of the first performance. The first cop who directed traffic while dancing was a genius, the second one was just an epigone. This is true about every innovation: copied, imitated, taken as a model, an innovative communicative artifact or act is doomed to be reabsorbed by a society and its culture, turned into one of the routines it was supposed to react to.
To sum up, these are the points on innovation semiotics that the performance of Ramiro Hinojas exemplifies:
1) Innovation never stands on a vacuum; it springs from preexistent semiotic materials;
2) Innovation comes about from the conflation of two or more semiotic systems;
3) Innovation detects deep structural similarities among these systems, similarities that were unseen before innovation took place;
4) Innovation always compels the reconfiguration of a society’s culture;
5) Innovation imposes the disruption of semiotic habits;
6) Innovation is always risky; the first risk of innovation is not to be recognized as such;
7) Innovation is a communicative act whose success depends on the encounter between an intentio auctoris and an intentio lectoris through an intentio operis;
8) Successful innovation entails contagion and imitation, and imitation sinks innovation into platitude.
9) Semiotics is the right discipline to study, recognize, and device innovation processes;
10) We are working on it.
[1] The video can be retrieved at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PfKsF0B7Uc (last access June 2, 2012).