Chronillogicalities : Déjà vus and hallucinations in the digital semiosphere

Abstract The semiotics of phenomena like déjà vus and hallucinations constitute a limit-field of a theory of the sign, but one that offers opportunities to question the fundamental principles of the discipline while at the same time offering the opportunity to address their underlying cognitive processes. The article describes the cognitive nature of déjà vus and hallucinations, briefly reviews the literature about them, and reads them as cognitive perturbations in the light of a semiotics of mental simulacra related to perception, apperception, awareness, memory, and imagination. The article then uses such cognitive and semiotic modeling in order to develop a critique of present-day digital culture, in which the uncritical adoption of a mnemonic ideal based on digital memory jeopardizes one of the key features of embodied memory: imperfection and, as a consequence, the possibility to access aesthetic and temporal singularity. A collective memory prone to déjà vus and hallucinations ensues.