Category: Authors

The goal of this paper is to describe a new perspective for semiotic studies. Thanks to the theoretical and interpretative guidelines of that general cognitive paradigm called today systemic (or relational, or complex) thinking, and thanks also to the existence of semiotic theories with a systemic approach, as Lotman’s semiotics of culture, we can try to rework and reorganize the main explanatory notions of contemporary semiotics, and specially the notions of knowledge, meaning, communication, text and culture.

I am sitting in the Coluzzi Bar at Sydney airport, regretting the state of flight and fear anxiety that caused me to book in luggage some three hours before my 6pm take off on my carefully prepared, three week three week exodus to Bangkok, Berlin, Finland and Vietnam. I am writing this note in my black and red bordered notebook as if it were intended for some audience at some time, but actually it has only been an hour or less since I decided to start making a journal of this trip at all. Let me explain.

In Bakhtin’s works “the theme in various stages of its development”, or “the emerging idea” is the notion of chronotope. This idea is already present in the text by Bakhtin from the early 1920s, “K filosofii postupka” (1920-24, bilingual Russian and Italian text in Bachtin e il suo circolo 2014)), where he introduces the notion of exotopy (vnenakodimost’). In this text he also introduces the notion of “architectonics” according to which all values, meanings and spatial-temporal relationships are characterized in terms of otherness: “I-for-myself, the other-for-me, and I-for-the-other”.