Language in Complexity by Francesco La Mantia Ignazio Licata & Pietro Perconti

Author:Francesco La Mantia, Ignazio Licata & Pietro Perconti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

I believe we can glimpse a theoretical and epistemological fear in Morin. The concept of structure drawn from structural linguistics is understood as an intrasystemic order that does not allow neither morphological changes nor the interconnection between different heterogeneous systems (hence the final appeal to «simple objects»). However, as we have shown, we cannot agree with Morin on this interpretation, since behind the «linguistic turn» of semiotics, there was no «desire to reduce systemic phenomena and organisational problems in terms of structures». On the contrary, behind the semio-linguistic idea of system, there was more than in nuce a new sensibility that moved towards complexity theory.

It remains clear, though, that Morin’s reading was largely motivated by the direction that semiotic epistemology took later, particularly in its generative form, which ascribed itself the legacy of the structuralist linguistic turn, when it was only its constitutive betrayal. As I have shown elsewhere (Paolucci 2010, Chaps. 1 and 2), it was precisely the expulsion of plurisystemic-ness that belongs to the first dimension of Saussure’s value that lead semiotic epistemology to adopt an intrasystemic theory made of homogeneous dependencies within a single semio-linguistic system. In rejecting the Saussurean transcendent meaning of value,13 semiotics in fact ended up identifying, in Greimas’ school, (i) structure with the reciprocal determination of the elements within a single system (rejection of the Saussurean translatability with the «outside»); (ii) this single system with the «semantic microuniverse» later called «text»; (iii) the structuring of this semantic microuniverse with the textual «clôture» («no salvation outside the text!»).

This expulsion of complexity from the semiotic structure is perfectly embodied in the semiotic square, which in generative semiotics represents the idea of structure itself, i.e. an «elementary structure of signification» grounded on a «semantic microuniverse», where relations are generated from a basic binary combination, which perfectly embodies that «destruction of complexity» that Morin ascribed to the idea of structure and structural semiotic epistemology.

However, in semiotic tradition, there were essentially four models that sought to determine more accurately what Saussure generically defined as «system»: the tree, the structure, the matrix and the rhizome. The four theoretical objects that «emblematically» represent these different models are Hjelmslev’ hierarchy (p: 114), Greimas’ semiotic square (1970, 1983), Fontanille and Zilberberg’s tensive structure (1998) and Eco’s encyclopaedia (1984, 2007). The first two models aim towards simplicity, the latter two aim towards complexity, but it is the rhizomatic encyclopaedia14 alone that is thought of as a system made of other systems, able to express and make the Saussurean idea of semio-linguistic system operational.

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