Overview

May I have a coffee? How different the meaning of this statement is when it is uttered on a stage rather than in a cafe. What matters in one place does not matter at all in another. In the cafe, all that matters is the communicative-referential level of the message (attention focused solely on the concept of coffee), but on the stage everything else counts: the tone of the voice, symbolic, anthropological, and ritualistic values, etc. The first message is monosemic and the second polysemic, or open to an indefinite number of interpretations. What accounts for this difference? Is it the intention of the speaker or of the receiver? The statement's structure? Or is it the location in which it is uttered? The author privileges the role played by the contexts in which the message is emitted and, against current opinion in semiotics, hermeneutics, and aesthetics, illustrates their determining power.

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I must say that I agree with Nanni's thinking. Years ago, during a round table discussion at the University of Milan, I suggested to Eco that the claim of semiotics to account for all of human experience with its categories of sender, message, code, receiver, etc., was merely an ingenuous 'metaphysics' of communication: ingenuous because it is pre-philosophical and because it regards itself as proudly anti-metaphysical, just as the neo-positivists did when they thought they were elevating the logic of everyday discourse, which Nanni somewhat ironically calls 'cafe logic', and common sense perception (which differentiates between subject and object) to the level of universal criterion and sole truth for all times. (Carlo Sini, Professor of Philosophy, University of Milan) Reading Nanni is for me like putting myself in the care of an Alpine guide who takes me safely among the crags and crevices. I must confess that the world in which Nanni operates with such acumen is foreign to me and perhaps even a bit hostile: that is, the world of semioticians, etc. I have tried to read their works but found them tedious. Nanni has, however, given me the key to understanding that world by making a distinction between 'cafe logic' (instrumental communication) and that logic to which we must resort in order to understand poetry and art in general. We belong to two different worlds but the value I derive from Nanni's well-written texts has permitted me access to a world that, on my own, I would be reluctant to explore. (Rosario Assunto, Professor of Aesthetics, University of Rome) Thank you for your stimulating books. (Roman Jakobson, author of 'Fundamentals of Language')

Author Information

The Author: Luciano Nanni is Professor in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bologna. His areas of interest include literature (Artistic Objectification in Camillo Sbarbaro and Reading Svevo), semiotics, epistemology, and aesthetics (For a New Semiotics of Art, Contra dogmaticos, A Theory of Aesthetics: In the Form of a Response to Umberto Eco, The Cosmos and Method, and On Poetics). He has published three volumes of poetry (Song in the Form of a Painting, Parenklesis, and Shakespearean) as well as articles on the artistic avant-garde. Professor Nanni is also a visual artist.

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