created 2025-06-30, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025lostcomputerscomplexitysemiotics
rel: Survey of Being Lost Mazes and Labyrinths - Their History and Development by Matthews
Why I’m reading
While reading this – The Semiotics of Religious Amazement which drew connections to recent topics of study (weaving, lost, incomprehensibility, music etc)
Interestingly, Umberto Eco has labeled “fuga di interpretanti” [litt. “fugue of interpretants”] this erratic burgeoning of interpretants. “Fugue” is both a musical term, designating the contrapuntal composition mastered by Bach, and a psychiatric term, indicating the loss of one’s identity, the sinking of the psyche into anguishing disorientation. These two semantic lines seem to reproduce those that intersect in the etymology of “maze”: on the one hand, the frightening feeling of losing mental control; on the other hand, the playful evocation of infinity as something that can be traveled through, guided by faith and cunningness.
Xenakis spoke of fugue as automaton.
Continued,
There is no lack of attention in semiotics toward labyrinths and mazes. Umberto Eco devotes paragraph 2.3.5 of his Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language to “The Encyclopedia as Labyrinth”, proposing a typology of labyrinths, mazes, and rhizomes as well as positing the encyclopedia as model that captures the “flight of interpretants”. The title of one of Eco’s last books on the semiotic theory of knowledge, From the Tree to the Labyrinth, also bears on the topic.