Cultural Semiotics as Fluxorum Scientia

The article is a caveat vis-à-vis the typological excesses of cultural semiotics. Structuralism naturally inclines toward the formulation of grids where cultural artifacts are recognized as tokens of types. Nevertheless, the article argues, such methodological attitude is not ideologically neutral. Pushed to the extreme, it risks overlapping with a politics of rigid articulation of humanity that 20th-century totalitarianisms tragically embraced. The antidote would be to pursue a paradoxical effort of cultivating cultural semiotics as “fluxorum scientia”, as science of fluid, iridescent phenomena.