**3. Complexity and conceptual blending**

Chaos theories speak of a deterministic (paradoxically) chaos; since there is order in the disorder, there is a profound—though sometimes inaccurate connection between all systems at all levels of its dynamic. According to Gregersen [20], there are, however, differences between chaos theories and complexity theories. Complexity studies try to understand the principles that guide complex systems in order to try to explain how structures are self-organized and ordered without a conscious control organizing the process. These structures arise, are maintained, and develop in a process driven by local agents within the system, and the twists and distortions of this agents produce, very often, consequences that affect the entire system. Complexity theories try to understand these rules of order propagation in "real-world" systems, both natural and social.

Both research on complexity and chaos theories deal with nonlinear processes in which small and simple inputs can generate larger and complex outputs. It is easy to think here in the different dynamics produced by the image-schema relations and the most complex blends both in oral everyday language and in narratives as self-organized systems: while the various trajectories of chaotic systems are highly contingent on the exact values from the initial conditions, complex self-organized systems may arise from a wide variation of initial conditions.

**5**

science [24].

*Cognitive Semiotics and Conceptual Blend: A Case Study from* The Crying of Lot 49

What do we mean by the nonlinearity of a system? Said in a very simple way, particular effects cannot be assigned with particular causal components because all the components interact with each other. Here, we can easily see an example of what we find in conceptual blending: inputs do not only give place to a blended space, they do it dynamically for their interaction, which is continuous and subject to change (different interpretations through time, emotional states of the mind activating the blend, and the type of context which surrounds it are all variables that influence the emergence of meaning). We can differentiate blends in their material expression and even describe how they function—old and new hermeneutic theories about meaning construction cannot be ignored—and the conceptual blending model offers a description of the different parts conforming to them. However, one

Could this lack of equilibrium explain the poetic vibrance and esthetic experience of the macro-blend we will describe later in this paper? Cognitive semiotics should include this kind of questions in its quest. The highest levels of complex self-organized systems, despite arising from local and simple initial conditions—"never ignoring, of course, the' bottom-up 'effects of parts on wholes which depend for their properties on the parts being what they are" ([21], p. 191) continue to influence the lower levels, and these over others. In this way, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the blended space is not just the sum of the

In *The Way We Think*, Fauconnier and Turner [22] attribute this characteristic of the blended space to the emergence of meaning in the blend integration model; thus, new meanings are the imaginative products of blending, whether simple or complex, and they are not predictable in the ways that evoke them. The mapping schemes, however, are predictable in the forms of language used to evoke them that are explained in the description of the blend model itself as described by Turner and Fauconnier. The meaning of "the whole" is not predictable from the meaning of the parts, but the mapping scheme of "the whole" is predictable from the mapping schemes of the parties. That is how the blending process is described: this compositional aspect of the forms is an exceptionally ingenious, useful, and efficient characteristic of the forms that guide meaning. This must be proven, however, in studies designed from neuroscience in all kind of forms of human

communication, and not just in linguistic constructions made ad hoc.

**4. Meaning in postmodern narratives: the approach to cognitive** 

Living beings are organized as immensely complex dynamic hierarchies where immensity is defined in an infinite number of possibilities too broad to cover and whose complex nature implies that they, as we have mentioned before, cannot be modeled in a reductionist way. Biological hierarchies reach these immense complexities through chaotic emergency processes [23]. The visible characteristics of postmodernism are closely linked to this immeasurable breadth that is living: the nonlinear dimension of existence. The unpredictable nature of dynamic systems and the inability to determine or establish a stable origin mark the postmodernist literature—this paradigmatic shift towards disorder was analogous in literature and

According to Katherine Hayles [25], dealing with complex self-organized systems, chaos is a precursor to order, and not the opposite: from chaos spontaneous

emergency emerges and dissipative structures arise from systems far from equilibrium [26]. In the words of Lotman [27], "self-organization processes in

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92606*

different inputs that conform to it.

**semiotics from biopoetics**

can only see that we are at the doors of something bigger.

#### *Cognitive Semiotics and Conceptual Blend: A Case Study from* The Crying of Lot 49 *DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92606*

What do we mean by the nonlinearity of a system? Said in a very simple way, particular effects cannot be assigned with particular causal components because all the components interact with each other. Here, we can easily see an example of what we find in conceptual blending: inputs do not only give place to a blended space, they do it dynamically for their interaction, which is continuous and subject to change (different interpretations through time, emotional states of the mind activating the blend, and the type of context which surrounds it are all variables that influence the emergence of meaning). We can differentiate blends in their material expression and even describe how they function—old and new hermeneutic theories about meaning construction cannot be ignored—and the conceptual blending model offers a description of the different parts conforming to them. However, one can only see that we are at the doors of something bigger.

Could this lack of equilibrium explain the poetic vibrance and esthetic experience of the macro-blend we will describe later in this paper? Cognitive semiotics should include this kind of questions in its quest. The highest levels of complex self-organized systems, despite arising from local and simple initial conditions—"never ignoring, of course, the' bottom-up 'effects of parts on wholes which depend for their properties on the parts being what they are" ([21], p. 191) continue to influence the lower levels, and these over others. In this way, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the blended space is not just the sum of the different inputs that conform to it.

In *The Way We Think*, Fauconnier and Turner [22] attribute this characteristic of the blended space to the emergence of meaning in the blend integration model; thus, new meanings are the imaginative products of blending, whether simple or complex, and they are not predictable in the ways that evoke them. The mapping schemes, however, are predictable in the forms of language used to evoke them that are explained in the description of the blend model itself as described by Turner and Fauconnier. The meaning of "the whole" is not predictable from the meaning of the parts, but the mapping scheme of "the whole" is predictable from the mapping schemes of the parties. That is how the blending process is described: this compositional aspect of the forms is an exceptionally ingenious, useful, and efficient characteristic of the forms that guide meaning. This must be proven, however, in studies designed from neuroscience in all kind of forms of human communication, and not just in linguistic constructions made ad hoc.
