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THE SURROUNDING AND THE SURROUNDED. DYNAMIC CITY-SUBJECT RELATIONS IN THE LIGHT OF EXISTENTIAL SEMIOTICS // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2019. Issue 1 (19). P. 106-119

The article presents the study of urban space form the existential semiotics point of view. The main notions presented in this paper are the surrounding (i.e. the environment – landscape – city space) and the surrounded (subject – an individual human body). Maintaining the structuralist way of semiotic thinking, the author refers to the concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure (langue and parole), Algirdas-Julien Greimas (englobant / englobé), Michel de Certeau (strategies and tactics) and finally Eero Tarasti (existential semiotics, highlining the figure of the subject). The nature-culture relation discussed here is being presented in the perspective of biosemiotics also. The main part of the article contains the author’s proposal of applying Tarasti’s concept to the city space: firstly, his concept of the landscape semiotics (from 2000) and next the concept of the dynamic “Z-model” (from 2015). As the result, there is presented a complex semiotic study of the city space in the frame of the paradigm of existential semiotics.

Keywords: Semiology, structuralism, existential semiotics, biosemiotics, nature-culture relations, landscape, urban space, subject, environment, Z-model, surrounding, surrounded, tactics, strategies