Augusto Ponzio - Böcker

The more human knowledge increases, the more signs grow and, with this expansion, the more the boundaries of the science that studies signs also grows. In Semiotics Unbounded, Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio explain the explosion of the sign network in the era of global communication and discuss the important theoretical responses offered by semiotics. Providing a much-needed introductory guide to the subject, Petrilli and Ponzio explore the ever-growing frontiers of semiotics through the thought of prominent sign scholars such as Charles Peirce, Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Charles Morris, and Thomas Sebeok. In an era of global communication, a global approach is necessary, and what may seem to be the whole, is only a part – a view being at once globalizing and open. Each and every sign is never self-sufficient and closed but exists always in a relation of otherness. This is true of the signs forming animals and human beings, individuals and communities, and involves the implication of all living beings in the life of all others. Semiotics Unbounded offers a new and original survey of the science of signs, evaluating it in relation to the problems of our time, not only of a scientific order, but also the problems concerning everyday social life.

De-Sign in the Transmodern World integrates design and sign by revealing the mutual reciprocities between design and semiotics, and bridging the gap between humanities and sciences. By recognizing the global scope of semiotics and tolerating the uncertainty associated with design, human beings can go beyond absoluteness and become able to envision a desirable reality in the transmodern world. This publication examines the fusion of design and semiotics, which is at the core of evolutionary love that encourages us to go beyond what we conventionally perceive into what we are imaginatively capable of interpreting. As semiotic animals, we are capable of developing awareness, relationships, and mediation toward semiosis of an undivided wholeness in flowing movement. Human beings have unlimited »semioethical« responsibility toward each other and toward other-than-human systems. This ethical implication depends on our ability to liberate ourselves from the fallacy of absolute reality.

The Global World is a pivotal formula in present-day «Newspeak». The book’s leitmotif – if it is true that the faces of today’s global world are manifold – is that language opens to the other, that the word’s boundaries are the multiple boundaries of the relation to others, of encounter among differences. Otherness logic is in language and life. The aim is to evidence how, contrary to implications of the newspeak order, new worlds are possible, critical linguistic consciousness is possible – a «word revolution» and pathway to social change. The method is «linguistic» and concerns the language and communication sciences. But to avoid that the limits of the latter influence our perspective on «the global world and its manifold faces», this method is located at the intersection of different scientific perspectives. As such it pertains to «philosophy of language», but in dialogue with the science of verbal and nonverbal signs, today «global semiotics», therefore it is also «semiotic». And given that how to understand «the global world» is not just a theoretical issue, but concerns how we relate to others, to differences in all their forms and aspects, the method proposed with this book is also «semioethic».