Breve historia topológica del mundo: Del muro a la red

The article proposes a topological understanding of the present-day political discourse. The semiosphere, i.e., the conceptual space within which a culture lives as a set of dynamics of meaning, is constantly teeming with the aggregation and disintegration of communities. Technological evolution accompanies, expresses, and alters this tension. In the medieval period, communities were made and unmade around geographical borders: people would kill each other for the possession of a fertile ground, or an access to the sea. In modernity, the Fight for the physical boundaries remained, but it inextricably intertwined with the conflict of ideologies: borders made of words and beliefs divided Catholic and Protestant Europe along lines that would overlap and complicate those of geographical boundaries. In modernity, it became more difficult to represent confines, to separate one’s own ones from the others, for systems of borders of different orders began to crisscross their lines: in the same country, in the same city, even in the same family would live and often hate each other Catholics and Protestants. The complication has exploded in postmodernity, especially with the production of meaning in the semiosphere becoming more and more digital. Communities continue to exist, but by membership systems of varying intensity, where members are both inside and outside the dividing lines, according to the adopted ideological registers.