The semiotics of auto - poiesis . A catastrophe - theoretic approach

This paper has a dual purpose. On the one hand, it suggests ways of making autopoietic theory more precise and more operational for concrete communication analysis. I discuss concepts such as distinction, system, boundary, environment, perturbation, and compensation. The explication of the concepts is based on catastrophe theory, and in order to make them operational I emphasise their affinity to traditional semiotics and communication theory. On the other hand I propose changes to the semiotic tradition in order to incorporate insights from autopoietic theory, namely that the human condition is characterised by the phenomenon of self-reference and therefore also by the unavoidability of paradoxes. Firstly, this means that truth cannot be a basic semiotic concept; instead the notion of stability is suggested. Secondly, in order to act in a paradoxical context, we need to unfold the paradox in time, which again calls for a dynamic theory of meaning. Science and experience The humanities and the social sciences are cleft by a deep dichotomy which can be labelled “science” versus “experience”. The scientist (e.g. a structuralist) tries to put himself in an observer’s position, and seeks to discover regularities and laws that are objective in the sense that they belong more to his environment than to himself, and in the sense that other researchers applying the same methods to the same material would discover the same patterns; in opposition to this, the experiencer (e.g. a phenomenologist) claims that all knowledge is basically a subjective phenomenon: knowledge presupposes a knower and since this knower is already immersed in the world he tries to analyse, it is impossible to assume an objective observer’s position, which makes objective knowledge an illusion. Whereas the scientist will typically believe in a world with laws that exist independently of the observer and will focus on discovering these laws, the experiencer will favour a constructivist view where the world, in so far as it is ac-