Introduction: Otherness, Extraneousness, and Unawareness in Inter-Cultural Semiotics

The essay pinpoints the core mission of cultural semiotics as an attempt at problematizing aspects of social life that, appear trivial to most because they have been “naturalized” but that, if read through the lenses of e discipline, che reveal the deep structures that produce meaning in a society and its culture. From this point of view, cultural semiotics is able to perceive otherness and, therefore, meaning, there where common sense would see just banal familiarity. To this purpose, the essay emphasizes the pervasiveness of the experience of otherness (the face of the other, the self as other, but especially otherness that emerges through media from the creativity of artists); it articulates three levels of unfamiliarity: otherness, extraneousness, and unawareness. Through examples taken from Chinese literature and China’s everyday life in comparative perspective with the West, the essay suggests that, whereas otherness can be appropriated through a preexistent code, and whereas extraneousness requires the creation of a new code of translation, unawareness implies the incapacity to perceive naturalized otherness, until an extraordinary experience (travel, for instance) leads to its epiphany. Whilst otherness and extraneousness are discovered in alien cultures, unawareness is revealed in relation to one’s own culture, thanks to the encounter with the alien one.