"Looking at Complexity from the Humanities: Some Speculations"

The essay comes as a response to a challenging question that a group of scientists based in Bologna posed to a broader academic community in the occasion of an interdisciplinary workshop which took place in the summer 2005: is complexity a paradigm useful for other disciplines? The hidden goal was, in fact, to encourage people from both the humanities and the sciences to work together in order to explore new ways to interface knowledge. The exploration was not at all an easy one, ‘complexity’ being a concept leading to many situations in the various domains; and yet, what the different approaches seemed to have in common, be it in the humanities or in the sciences, was the fact that the term ‘complexity’ was understood not simply as the object of a given research, but mostly as a term which forced to reconceptualise the modes of investigation. As a consequence, to explore the idea of ‘complexity’ as a ‘useful paradigm’ triggered a series of speculations on the various methodologies pertaining to the various areas of study, in turn encouraging a deep analysis of given ontological patterns which, in some cases, could even lead to the breaking of traditional disciplinary statutes. Given those premises, the essays introduces some speculations on ‘Complexity & Humanities/Literary Studies’ taking into account three main issues: 1) Complexity as a useful paradigm for humanities & literary studies; 2) Side-Effects of Complexity on Literary Studies; 3) From Avant-Garde Experiments to Laws of Media: ‘field approach’ to a case study.