K ulturwissenschaftliches Institut für Europaforschung


    PROJEKTE

    research fields: culture science and culture


    Culture Science and its relevance for understanding the European semiosphere

    The cultural texture

    Culture Science uncodes the various meaning production layers

    a- The expressive layer of culture

    The most basic and primitive type of cultural meaning is its expressive meaning, the product of the expressive function of thought, which is concerned with the experience of events in the world around us related with affective and emotional significance.
    On this expressive level we can have no distinction between appearance and reality. The emotional world does not consist of stable and enduring substances that manifest themselves from various points of view and on various occasions, but rather in a fleeting complex of experiences bound together by their affective and emotional "physiognomic" characters. Here, there is no essential difference in efficacy between the semiotic differentiation of the name of an object and the object itself.


    b- The representative layer of culture

    The representative meaning, a product of the representative function of thought, has the task of precipitating out of the original emotional flux of physiognomic characters a world of stable and enduring substances, distinguishable and reidentifiable as such.

    Working together with the fundamentally pragmatic orientation towards the world exhibited in the technical and instrumental use of tools and artifacts, it is in natural language that the representative function of thought is then most clearly visible in a unified spatio-temporal order. Within this order each designated object has a determinate relation to the speakers potential range of pragmatic activities. Here, we are able to distinguish between appearance and reality.

    c- The signifikative layer of culture

    The distinction between appearance and reality leads to a new layer of analysis of systematic inquiry into the realm of relations. Here we encounter the third layer of cultural meaning, the significative, which is exhibited most clearly in categories of relation.

    For it is precisely here, in the scientific view of the world, that the pure relational concepts characteristic of culture such as the categories of space, time, substance and causality are freed from the bounds of sensible intuition.

    The result of this analytical approach is the work of culture science in which the intuitive concept of substantial thing has finally been replaced by the relational-functional concept of universal law of culture.



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