Modernity and the Intersemiotic Condition

By the term intersemiosis, I refer to that condition where we, in semiosis, constantly face signifying wholes which we are forced to interpret on the basis of contextual self-evidences other than those which informed their emergence. In such conditions, the emergence of meaning is not controlled by an individual actor but follows a pattern which we could, in deploying a biochemical and genetic metaphor, call the mechanism of ‘cultural chiasma’. It is characteristic of the mechanism of cultural chiasma that when chains of signs are transmitted from one context to another, their interpretation in the receiving context will differ from that in the transmitting context. This can be evaluated by two short case examples.