Pedro Atá: Final seminar
Welcome to the weekly IMS seminar!
This week we have the final PhD seminar for Pedro Atá, where he and invited
opponent Anna Cabak Rédei will go through his provisional thesis draft Surprise in Process Semiotics.
Quoted from the introduction, the thesis deals with:
A break of communication, the unexpected turn of a conversation, a sudden insight, a discovery, an exponential growth of knowledge, a leap of thought, an unpredictable association of ideas, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, overinterpretation, shock, trauma… At the core of processes of meaning – semioses – is the capacity to surprise. This capacity is what makes semiosis creative and transformative, but also difficult to control, subject to incoherence and abrupt change, destructive. The practices through which we make meaning together are practices that try to deal with surprise. It is counter to the threat of surprise that we develop and institutionalize trust: formalizations and standardizations of systems of signs, strategies for communicating clearly and interpreting fairly, norms of truthful reasoning, and even systems of punishment to enforce stability of meanings. On the other hand, it is in alliance with surprise that we experiment and seek novelty, feel curious to investigate what we don’t know, question well-established beliefs, explore the boundaries of coherent reasoning, communication, and interpretation, develop strategies for tapping creativity and for boosting chances of discovery. I invite the reader to view semiosis as a game of surprises, in which stability of meaning is conditional and bound by actual and potential breaks of meaning. Whenever we communicate, interpret, think, or create, we are – together with other minds, and with the world – trying ways of being surprised and avoid being surprised by shifting boundary conditions for stable meaning. (Ata: thesis draft, 2020)
The seminar is, as always, Wednesday at 10.00 – 12.00 (CEST). The seminar is open for distance participants, contact us at ims@lnu.se, if you want to participate via an online platform.
Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen