System and Structure. Semiotics as Encyclopaedic Theory of Complexity

Semiotics has perhaps missed the complexity train. It missed it when it was, as Umberto Eco used to say, an «imperialist discipline», at the heart of the cultural project of many other disciplines who adopted its models and very particular point of view. It certainly missed it later, when this cultural centrality was lost and semiotics — instead of accepting new cultural challenges—opted to restrain itself to a descriptive discipline of «cultural objects» (texts), handled through a series of «heuristic-oriented analysis models». Perhaps—and this is a thesis that I will attempt to argue and revive in this work—the cultural centrality of semiotics was lost precisely because it was unable to meet the challenge of complexity. I will also try to show how this can be done.