(semiotics And Popular Culture) Aleksei Semenenko (auth.) - The Texture Of Culture_ An Introduction To Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory-palgrave Macmillan Us (2012).pdf

S E M I O T I C S A N D P O P U L A R C U LT U R E

The Texture of Culture An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory

ALEKSEI SEMENENKO

The Texture of Culture

Semiotics and Popular Culture Series Editor: Marcel Danesi Written by leading figures in the interconnected fields of popular culture, media, and semiotic studies, the books in this series aim to show the contemporary relevance of cultural theory. Individual volumes offer an exercise in unraveling the socio-psychological reasons why certain cultural trends become popular. The series engages with theory and technical trends to expose the subject matter clearly, openly, and meaningfully. Marcel Danesi is Professor of Semiotics and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Among his major publications are X-Rated! ; Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things ; Vico, Metaphor, and The Origins of Language ; Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence ; The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life ; and Brands. He is Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica , the leading journal in semiotics. Titles: The Objects of Affection: Semiotics and Consumer Culture , by Arthur Asa Berger Media Literacy and Semiotics , by Elliot Gaines The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory, by Aleksei Semenenko

The Texture of Culture An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory

Aleksei Semenenko

THE TEXTURE OF CULTURE

Copyright © Aleksei Semenenko, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-1-137-00714-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978-1-349-43529-6 ISBN 978-1-137-00854-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137008541 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Semenenko, Aleksei. The texture of culture : an introduction to Yuri Lotman’s semiotic theory / Aleksei Semenenko. p. cm.—(Semiotics and popular culture) 1. Lotman, IU. M. (IUrii Mikhailovich), 1922–1993—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Semiotics. 3. Culture—Semiotic models. 4. Semiotics and literature. 5. Mass media. I. Title. P85.L68S46 2012 401⬘.41092—dc23

2011052886

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2012

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Series Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Notes on Transliteration and Bibliography List of Abbreviations

xiii xv

Introduction

1

1

Contexts

7

2

Culture as System

23

3

Culture as Text

75

4

Semiosphere

111

5

Universal Mind

125

Conclusion: The World as a Text

145

Notes

147

References

157

Index

171

Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2

Yuri Lotman’s portrait by Peter Gullers TZS, or Semiotika Saussure’s speech circuit Speech act by Roman Jakobson From thought to thought The reverse translation The Swedish speed limit sign The creative function of text The relation of text to culture The “Poor Yorick” icon [Hamlet] the sign Text as a condenser of semiosphere Communication in the semiosphere

8 17 24 25 26 27 28 29 91 106 107 117 118

Tables

1.1 Brief biography of Yuri Lotman 3.1 Typology of cultures 5.1 Hemispheric “specializations”

9 95 138

Series Preface

P

opular forms of entertainment have always existed. As he traveled the world, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote about earthy, amusing performances and songs that seemed odd to him, but which were certainly very popular with common folk. He saw these, however, as the exception to the rule of true culture. One wonders what Herodotus would think in today’s media culture, where his “exception” has become the rule. Why is popular culture so “popular”? What is psychologically behind it? What is it? Why do we hate to love it and love to hate it? What has happened to so-called high culture? What are the “meanings” and “social functions” of current pop culture forms such as sitcoms, reality TV programs, YouTube sites, and the like? These are the kinds of questions that this series of books, written by experts and researchers in both popular culture studies and semiotics, will broach and discuss critically. Overall, they will attempt to decode the meanings inherent in spectacles, popular songs, coffee, video games, cars, fads, and other “objects” of contemporary pop culture. They will also take comprehensive glances at the relationship between culture and the human condition. Although written by scholars and intellectuals, each book will look beyond the many abstruse theories that have been put forward to explain popular culture, so as to penetrate its origins, evolution, and overall raison d’ être human life, exploring the psychic structures that it expresses and which make it so profoundly appealing, even to those who claim to hate it. Pop culture has been the driving force in guiding, or at least shaping, social evolution since the Roaring Twenties, triggering a broad debate about art, sex, and “true culture” that is still ongoing. This debate is a crucial one in today’s global village where traditional canons of art and aesthetics are being challenged as never before in human history.

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The books are written in clear language and style so that readers of all backgrounds can understand what is going in pop culture theory and semiotics, and, thus reflect upon current cultural trends. They have the dual function of introducing various disciplinary attitudes and research findings in a user-friendly fashion so that they can be used as texts in colleges and universities, while still appeal to the interested general reader. Ultimately, the goal of each book is to provide a part of a generic semiotic framework for understanding the world we live in and probably will live in for the foreseeable future. Marcel Danesi University of Toronto

Acknowledgments

M

ost of the material in this book has been used in lectures and seminars at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. I am deeply grateful to Professors Lars Kleberg, Peter Alberg Jensen, Irina Sandomirskaja, and Lazar Fleishman, who have read and provided helpful comments on portions of the manuscript at various stages. I also wish to thank my students and colleagues from Stockholm, Tartu, Tallinn, and Venice and especially the participants of the 2011 Summer School of Semiotics, with whom I have had an opportunity to discuss the many topics addressed in this book. My thanks are due to Tatiana Kuzovkina and Olga Utgof at the Lotman Archive at Tallinn University and to Peter Gullers for his kind permission to use his photoportrait of Lotman. Last but not least, I express my gratitude to the Baltic Sea Foundation (Östresjöstiftelsen) and the Center for Baltic East European Studies at Södertörn University for financial support and friendly practical help.

Notes on Transliteration and Bibliography

R

ussian names are transliterated according to a simplified version of the Library of Congress (LOC) system, apart from internationally known names such as Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sergei Eisenstein, and others. By the same reasoning, in the text of the book Lotman’s first name is given as Yuri (and not Iurii). In the bibliography, however, all Russian names are spelled according to the LOC transliteration system. In order to maintain the chronological order in the bibliography, the spelling of some names has been standardized (e.g., all of Tynianov’s works are listed under Tynianov, not Tynjanov or Tynyanov); the references in the text, however, show the original spelling of the publication. When citing multivolume editions, volume number is indicated in Roman numerals followed by page number (e.g., Lotman 1992–93, I.202). Charles S. Peirce’s works are cited in the text traditionally as (volume.passage) according to the edition of Collected Papers (Peirce 1931–34). Shakespeare is cited according to W. J. Craig’s Oxford edition (Shakespeare 1914) with the traditional indication of (act. scene.lines) in the text. All emphasis in citations is original, and all translations from Russian sources are mine unless otherwise indicated.

Abbreviations

AI EO TMSS TRSF TZS

artificial intelligence Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii (Papers on Russian and Slavonic Philology) Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Sign Systems Studies)

Introduction

T

his book is about understanding and studying culture as a unique characteristic of human beings in the light of the ideas of one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, the Russian literary scholar and semiotician Yuri Lotman. The beginning of the twenty-first century saw a somewhat revived interest toward Lotman’s profound and versatile legacy. More and more scholars find Lotman’s ideas worth studying and developing; his works are being read and interpreted in different contexts, from the polysystem theory to the study of universals. Nonetheless, the marginality of Lotman’s theory in English books on semiotics of culture is rather noticeable. For many students and scholars, Lotman still remains terra incognita , confined within the territory labeled “structuralism” and “Soviet Semiotics.” This book attempts to offer guidance to this yet to be fully explored area and to demonstrate how Lotman’s theory, transcending the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines, offers a holistic and genuinely interdisciplinary approach to culture. One of the main aims of this study is to make Lotman accessible to a larger (academic) audience not limited only to specialists in Slavic studies and semiotics. That is why it is also necessary to mention what this book is not . This book is not a history of Soviet semiotics, although I inevitably discuss different stages of development of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School (TMSS). Nor is this book Lotman’s (academic) biography, although I write about different periods of Lotman’s career. In other words, this book is not a historical study in a strict sense of the word. Instead of peering into the past and “immuring” Lotman in a certain epoch of the history of semiotics, I try to look at the future, offering a new approach to Lotman’s theory that can be used as a basis for further research by scholars of various disciplines.

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In a certain sense, I focus not on Lotman the person but rather on Lotman “the text,” that is, his works in their afterlife. Lotman’s theory is usually described as an evolution from structuralism to cultural semiotics, where the later period is believed to be a sort of refutation of the earlier approach. From this perspective, it would be impossible to describe the main principles of Lotman’s works of the 1960s and 1990s using one metalanguage. This book, however, offers a different approach and focuses on the continuity and integrity of Lotman’s ideas and the connections of his earlier works with later ones. In my disposition and interpretation of Lotman’s theory, I emphasize some aspects and leave out others, which is an unavoidable consequence of any metalanguage that is applied to such a complex semiotic phenomenon. In other words, I act in accordance with the principles of textual analysis that Lotman himself applied: I establish the boundaries of “the Lotman text”—the hierarchy of its elements, its core, and its margins—and present a more or less unified picture of his theory. In doing so I emphasize the points that are pertinent to contemporary semiotics but also indicate those that are no longer relevant in the modern context. This book is designated first and foremost to researchers and students who are interested in cultural analysis, semiotics, and interdisciplinary research. For some scholars, this book can serve as an introduction to Lotman’s works, and some, I hope, will find it useful in their own studies. Lotman’s Works

Lotman authored more than 900 publications in different languages and left an ample archive that is still under the process of systematization. It is located in two Estonian towns, one part in the library of Tartu University and the other in the Lotman Archive at Tallinn University. To date, the largest collections of Lotman’s published works in Russian are the three-volume edition of Selected Writings printed in Tallinn (1992–93) and nine thematic volumes of Lotman’s selected works (1994–2003) published in Saint Petersburg by the publishing house Iskusstvo-SPB. In English, apart from the monograph The Structure of the Artistic Text (1977), the most known edition is the book Universe of the Mind (1990), which is partly a compilation of Lotman’s works of

Introduction

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the 1980s. This book, translated by Ann Shukman, first appeared in English and only later in Russian in 1996. The last book by Lotman, Culture and Explosion , was not translated until the end of 2009, although it existed in Estonian, Spanish, Italian, and Polish. The last two books, Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture and Culture and Explosion , stylistically and thematically differ from previous works. Being seriously ill, Lotman dictated both books to his wife and secretaries in the period between 1989 and 1992 (Kuzovkina 1999). Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture was not published in Russian until 2010 for economic reasons (see its publication history in Kuzovkina 2010) and first appeared in 1994 in Italian translation under the title Cercare la strada: Modelli della cultura . Culture and Explosion was first published in Russian in 1992. Lotman himself wrote in one of the letters in 1991 that Culture and Explosion would probably be his “main book ” (Lotman 2006, 425), and several researches readily proclaimed it “Lotman’s testament.” However, it could be called “testament” only in the sense that in this book Lotman explores new perspectives that he has not previously studied and he would have explored further if he had a chance. It is therefore misleading to consider this book to be a sort of synthesis of Lotman’s lifetime work because it commits the fallacy against which Lotman many times warned: in retrospect, the last book always turns into “the final word.” Culture and Explosion leaves the impression of an unfinished sentence rather than the conclusive statement and not so much continues the research delineated in Universe of the Mind as it offers a new outlook on the study of culture. Works on Lotman

A number of monographs are dedicated exclusively to Lotman and Soviet semiotics. Since this book is oriented to a broad audience, I list only the works published in English and Russian, not mentioning a number of studies on Lotman in Estonian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and other languages. In Russian, there are only two monographs so far: Lotman’s biography written by Boris Egorov (1999), a close friend and colleague of Lotman, and Kim Su Kvan’s (2003) book that deals with the evolution of Lotman’s theory, describing it in different stages. Soviet semiotics from the very beginning drew a lot of attention of Western scholars, and it is not entirely surprising that in

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English there are many more monographs about the TMSS and Lotman in particular: an external observer often sees a bigger picture than the insider. The first study of Lotman’s writings is the monograph by Ann Shukman (1977), which is devoted to the period up to the early 1970s. Not only did Shukman present the history of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School and Lotman’s role in it, but she also analyzed his first publications, including Lectures on Structural Poetics and The Structure of the Artistic Texts , offering the English audience the works not yet translated from Russian. Edna Andrews (2003) focuses on “updating and contextualizing Lotman for Western theorists” (xv). In the first part of the book, Andrews concisely describes Lotman’s main ideas in the context of contemporary Western semiotics (comparing Lotman with T. Sebeok, C. S. Peirce, J. von Uexküll, R. Thom, and others). In the second part, Andrews applies Lotman’s ideas in her analysis of Bulgakov’s and Zamiatin’s novels and discusses the relation of Lotman’s theory to cognitive science. One of the most interesting cases of appropriation and development of Lotman’s ideas is the collection of articles Lotman and Cultural Studies (2006), edited by Andreas Schönle. The authors engage and extend Lotman’s ideas in the context of cultural studies, looking for a way to make Lotman compatible with such terms as discourse, power, ideology, and so forth. It is noteworthy that the authors conceive of culture quite differently from Lotman, listing various facets of life that make up culture as a whole—“political, economic, social, erotic, and ideological” (Schönle and Shine 2006, 22)—but this list does not include “artistic” or any other terms that are central in Lotman’s works. Finally, the most recent work on Soviet semiotics is the dissertation by Maxim Waldstein (2008), which is, to date, the only history of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School in English. This study is written from the sociological perspective and attempts to present a social and institutional history of Soviet semiotics. Despite their differences and sometimes contrasting approaches, all these works signify that the process of (re)conceptualization of Lotman’s legacy is in its initial stages and that there is much to explore for the researchers not only in Slavic studies but in other disciplines as well.

Introduction

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5

Outline of the Book

The book is divided into five chapters. For the reader’s convenience, at the end of chapters 2 to 5 I list the key premises discussed in these chapters. Chapter 1 presents Lotman’s short academic biography and offers a historical introduction to the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School, outlining the main historical, academic, and cultural contexts in which Lotman’s theory has been formed. I describe the connection of semiotics with the cybernetic discourse of the 1960s and its self-appraisal not only as a new approach that unified humanities with natural sciences but also as a universal method (universal language) for study of human culture. I further discuss the sociopolitical context of the TMSS that made, to a certain extent, the exceptional position of the school even more palpable. In chapters 2 and 3, I delineate the core concepts of Lotman’s semiotics and demonstrate how they work in practice as an effective tool of cultural analysis, illustrating Lotman’s theoretical premises by examples from various cultures. Chapter 2 focuses on macrostructures (systematicity) of culture and chapter 3 on microstructures (textuality) of culture. The key questions that I attempt to answer in these chapters are: • • • • • • • • • • • •

What is culture in terms of communication? What is the place of art and other modeling systems in culture? What are the basic elements of culture? How can text be defined? What is the relation of texts to signs? What are the qualities of the artistic text? What is myth and how mythological texts are different from nonmythological ones? Why is translation so important in the context of culture? What is meaning? How is it generated? What is “the collective memory”? Are there any specific “laws” of cultural development? Why is unpredictability crucial for any culture?

Chapter 4 focuses on the notion of semiotic space or semiosphere, arguably the most important and productive concept coined by

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Lotman, which to some extent encompasses all other key concepts and has a potential to replace the concept of culture itself. I explore various characteristics of the semiosphere (heterogeneity, asymmetry, binarism, and others) and its connection with the concepts of cultural memory and text memory. Finally, I discuss the essential duality of the concept of semiosphere as a metaconcept and also as the space in which all communication takes place. Chapter 5 delves deeper into the question of collective versus personal semiosphere and focuses on one of the most crucial postulates in Lotman’s theory—that culture is a reflection of human mind. I scrutinize Lotman’s usage of terms consciousness, intellect , and thought , demonstrating how Lotman’s concept of semiosphere at certain point turns into a model of cognition.

CHAPTER 1

Contexts

Short Biography of Yuri Lotman

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman was a Russian philologist by education, specializing in Russian literature. His works, however, exhibit a clear tendency to surpass the traditional boundaries of disciplines; the scope of Lotman’s truly encyclopedic knowledge is not limited solely to Russian literature and includes European history and literatures, classical history and art, and other disciplines. What distinguishes Lotman from many other theoreticians is that he never developed any theory for the sake of theory and even his most theory-laden works were as a rule based on actual historical material, ranging from medieval to modern literature. Table 1.1 presents a short account of Lotman’s academic biography and main monographs (the year of the first publication is indicated) The Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School

Lotman is widely known as one of the founders of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School1 (TMSS). One of the events that led to the establishment of the school was the Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems held in Moscow in December 1962. The symposium united the scholars who a couple of years later became active participants of the school: Viacheslav Ivanov, Boris Egorov, Vladimir Toporov, Boris Uspenskii, Aleksandr Piatigorskii, Isaak Revzin, Aleksandr Zholkovskii, Iurii I. Levin, Dmitrii Segal, and others. At

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Figure 1.1

Yuri Lotman’s portrait by Peter Gullers (1988).

the symposium, such notions as semiotics, sign system, model, and modeling system were introduced for the first time. One of the main topics of discussion was the problem of artificial languages and the application of structural linguistics and information theory in the study of various sign systems (language, literature, art, etc.). The methodological framework of the symposium was to a great extent based on the semiotic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev. Yuri Lotman was not present at the symposium but a year later became acquainted with Ivanov, Piatigorskii, and Revzin and invited the Moscow semioticians to Tartu. So began the long-term cooperation of the Tartu scholars with their colleagues in Moscow and Leningrad.

Contexts Table 1.1

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Brief biography of Yuri Lotman

February 28, 1922 1939

1940–1946 1950 1952 1954 1960–1977 1961 1963 1964 1970 1972 1973 1980 1981 1987 (1989) 1990 1992 October 28, 1993

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is born in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), Russia. Begins his studies at Leningrad State University at the Faculty of Philology. Among his teachers are such prominent scholars as G. Gukovskii, B. Eikhenbaum, B. Tomashevskii, V. Propp, M. Azadovskii, and N. Mordovchenko. Conscripted into Soviet Army, participates in World War II in an artillery regiment, returns home only in December 1946. Moves to Tartu, Estonia; teaches at the Teachers Institute and Tartu University at the Department of Russian Literature. Defends his candidate dissertation at Leningrad University. Associate Professor. Chair of the Department of Russian Literature. Defends his doctoral dissertation at Leningrad University. Professor of Russian literature. First Summer School and first volume of TZS, Lectures on Structural Poetics. The Structure of the Artistic Text, Essays on the Typology of Culture. Analysis of the Poetic Text. Semiotics of Cinema. Commentary to Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Pushkin’s biography. Creation of Karamzin. Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture is written, to be published only in 2010. Universe of the Mind (first published in English). Culture and Explosion; Department of Semiotics is founded at Tartu University. Dies in Tartu, Estonia.

The year 1964 is considered the birth year of the TMSS, which appeared to be an exceptionally productive academic group of its time and became a phenomenon of academic life not only in the Soviet Union but in the Western world as well. In 1964, the first summer school was organized and the first volume in a new series of Tartu University, Trudy po znakovym sistemam (TZS , or Sign Systems Studies), was published. The journal produced 25 volumes during the period 1964–1992 and is still being published in English and Russian. Looking from the twenty-first century back at the 1960s, it becomes obvious that Lotman, as one of the leaders of the school, was the one who held this academic community together and made

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it possible for Soviet semioticians to conduct their work in a friendly environment in Tartu. The Cybernetic Context

The rise of semiotics in the Soviet Union is closely related to cybernetics, which experienced a curious turn in the 1950s. In the early 1950s, cybernetics was banned as pseudoscience: the Soviet Short Philosophical Dictionary from 1954 defined cybernetics as follows: A reactionary pseudo-science arising in the USA after the Second World War and receiving wide dissemination in other capitalistic countries; . . . Cybernetics clearly ref lects one of the basic features of the bourgeois worldview—its inhumanity, striving to transform workers into an extension of the machine, into a tool of production, and an instrument of war. (Rozental’ and Iudin 1954, 236–37; translated in Bowker 1993, 111)

During Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” however, cybernetics quickly took the dominant position in Soviet academia. Several key works on cybernetics were published in Russian translation: in 1958, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society , and in 1959, Ross Ashby’s Introduction to Cybernetics . In 1961, cybernetics finally became officially approved by the Communist Party, having formed an integral part of the official focus on “the scientific and technical revolution.” In the new edition of Philosophical Dictionary in 1963, the article on cybernetics was revised and all accusatory epithets were removed (Rozental’ and Iudin 1963, 197–98). As Slava Gerovitch (2002) convincingly shows in his study, in the Soviet context cybernetics was perceived not just as a new discipline but also as a new methodological and philosophical paradigm. The reformist cybernetic discourse served as a tool of de-Stalinization of science and in many ways was an attempt of some Soviet scientists to get rid of the official ideological phraseology that had dominated academia for decades: By promoting cyberspeak as a new universal language of science, Soviet cyberneticians challenged the dominant role of newspeak, the vague and manipulative language of Stalinist ideological discourse,

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and began undermining the discursive basis of the Stalinist regime. (Gerovitch 2002, 155)

The adoption of cyberspeak opened many doors that had been shut before. In the 1960s, Soviet academia saw the rise of new institutes and departments that focused on cybernetics, structural linguistics, and semiotics, thus officially (albeit reluctantly) acknowledging previously despised structuralism. Apart from that, a number of periodicals on cybernetics and even a series with the slogan-like title Cybernetics to the Service of Communism were established. The influential academicians A. N. Kolmogorov and A. I. Berg, head of the Research Council on Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, played a significant role in the promotion of cybernetics and development of semiotic studies in the Soviet Union. Semiotics was largely considered to be an indivisible part of cybernetics, and the project of the Institute of Semiotics was initiated in 1960, though these plans never materialized (Gerovitch 2002, 243–45). One of the conspicuous features of cyberspeak was its explicit scientistic orientation that Soviet semiotics fully shared as well. V. Ivanov’s words in the preface to the conference proceedings of the Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems are most symptomatic because they stress the role of semiotics as a universal science: The fundamental role of semiotic methods for all the related humanities may with confidence be compared with the significance of mathematics for the natural sciences. Nonetheless, on the one hand, mathematics itself as a system of signs lies within the range of objects for analysis by semiotics, and on the other hand, semiotics, like all the other humanities, is gradually becoming imbued with mathematical ideas and methods. (Ivanov 1978b, 202; see also Ivanov 1994, 487)

Many of Lotman’s works exhibit an explicit scientistic character as well. One of his articles published in 1967 is entitled “Literary Criticism Must Be a Science” (Lotman 1967), 2 in which he responded to several attacks on structuralists by stating that this criticism is directed toward the scientific approach itself and that a new type of philologist must ideally be a combination of a mathematician, a linguist, and a literary scholar. As Lotman wrote in one of his letters in 1969 (cited in Egorov 1999, 103–4), “the main ethos of our scientific

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direction is the achievement of essentially verifiable results.” Lotman further compares mathematical problems with humanistic ones and regrets that the latter are not usually perceived as those that require methodological explanation and verification. Mentioning Descartes, he argues that the focus of semiotics should be on how to obtain the truth (i.e., on methods), not on the truth itself. By proclaiming semiotics as a new humanistic science, Lotman indirectly attempts to rehabilitate the status of the humanities in the 1960–70s, which became overshadowed by “more important” hard sciences. The scientism of the early years of Soviet semiotics is manifested, among other things, in the axiomatic nature of their statements and also in the application of “exact” metalanguages—linguistic, mathematical, or even musical—to cultural phenomena. As an example, let us take two articles from 1965: in one of them, cartomancy (fortune-telling using playing cards) is described in the metalanguage of linguistic terminology (Lekomceva and Uspenskij 1977); in another article, Iurii I. Levin (1977) introduces a classification of Russian metaphors that is formalized in mathematics-like formulas.3 The very question of the validity of such an approach—would not the metalanguage predetermine the results of the analysis?—was not raised. It is noteworthy that Lotman, as a literary scholar, already in 1964 saw certain problems with the application of the linguistic metalanguage to all semiotic (nonlinguistic) phenomena, questioning the status of linguistics as the semiotic metalanguage. For Lotman, linguistics imposed unnecessary limits on the humanities, as did other “mechanistic” applications of one sign system onto another. In one of his articles, Lotman mentions Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to create a metalanguage of myth on the basis of the laws of musical narration as an example of the “semiotic oversaturation” of the mid-twentiethcentury culture (Lotman 1975, 337–38). In that sense, Lotman seeks in structuralism and semiotics not a new academic dogma but a way to develop an adequate methodology and a metalanguage for the description of semiotic systems. Thus semiotics “is not for Lotman the philosophy of the sign, or its logical relationship with referent or interpretant” (Shukman 1977, 179), but rather a method, the principles of which are outlined in this book. The other distinctive trait of Soviet semiotics was its universalism. Similar to cybernetics, semiotics was perceived not only as a new approach that unified humanities with natural sciences but

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also as a universal method (universal language) for study of human culture. One of the programmatic articles of the TMSS (Zaliznjak, Ivanov, and Toporov 1977), in which the term “modeling system” is used for the first time, is characterized by “the belief in some absolute impersonal and ‘scientific’ knowledge that can be achieved and that could be expressed in a universal language” (Shukman 1977, 20). Many other articles of Soviet semioticians in the 1960–70s embraced the same universalistic stance. This factor, among other things, predetermined the apparent interdisciplinarity of the TMSS members, who had published hundreds of articles and books covering a broad spectrum of fields, from literary studies and linguistics to mathematics and anthropology. This is hardly unusual because structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, and other critical idioms of the twentieth century have a tendency to diffuse the traditional disciplinary boundaries (Moran 2002, 84). What concerns particularly semiotics is that its orientation toward interdisciplinarity and scientism was pronounced not only in Soviet academia but also in the West: in Umberto Eco’s (1978, 83) definition, “semiotics, more than a science, is an interdisciplinary approach . . . it may be a sort of unified metatheoretical point of view governing a new encyclopedia of unified science.” Universalism of Soviet semiotics was manifested, on the one hand, in the holistic approach to culture (especially in Lotman’s works), which allowed studying texts from a truly broad perspective. On the other hand, a great number of semiotic studies were devoted to elucidation of universals, that is, hypothesized common features of every language and/or culture. This problematic was extensively explored by many structuralists and semioticians, from Claude Lévi-Strauss, who explored them in myth, to Noam Chomsky, the author of the theory of generative grammar. It is obvious now that the conviction that cybernetics or semiotics can be presented as a universal language of science is itself a reflection of the old myth of universal (“ideal” or “perfect”) language, a metalanguage that can reveal “the truth” or at least most objective results. In the TMSS, the universalistic discourse was especially pronounced in the study of myth (see chapter 2), cultural typology (chapter 3), and the asymmetry of the human brain (chapter 5). The cybernetic context played an ambiguous role in the fate of Soviet semiotics. Its symbiosis with cybernetics in the 1960–70s

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undoubtedly contributed to its survival but at the same time led to the fact that after the fall of the Soviet Union, semiotics was perceived as a marginal field, closely tied to its Soviet context. To some extent semiotics mirrored the fate of cybernetics, which survived its role as a revolutionary science in the 1950s and as a fashionable trend in the 1960s to become part of dominant discourse in the 1970s (Gerovitch 2002, 288–92).4 Many semioticians and the TMSS members became deeply disillusioned and criticized semiotics for its scientistic pretense and universalism, thus posing a question of the academic relevance of the school. The Sociopolitical Context

The TMSS is undeniably a sociopolitical phenomenon of its time, and the Soviet context made the exceptional position of the school even more palpable. It is apparent that if not for Tartu University, and its “provincial” location in Estonia, the TMSS could have never become reality. The political climate in the Estonian Socialist Republic was much milder than in Moscow or Leningrad, and for many scholars the periodicals of Tartu University were the only chance to get published (Chernov 1988, 16). Semiotics was not officially banned; the new edition of Philosophical Dictionary in 1963 featured a separate article on semiotics, which was defined as a comparative study of sign systems (Rozental’ and Iudin 1963, 400–401). However, it was still a “suspicious” discipline, especially unwelcome in Moscow after the 1962 symposium, to which the officials at Moscow University reacted very negatively. The summer schools organized by Lotman were therefore a unique opportunity for the scholars to meet and communicate in a friendly academic atmosphere. The first three meetings were held on the university sports base in the village Kääriku, some fifty kilometers south of Tartu. No wonder that this place, “a province in the province,” became mythologized as a realm of academic freedom devoid of ideological control, a sort of “safe haven” and a getaway for oppressed intellectuals and scholars. This idyllic picture was, of course, far from reality. Although the intellectual atmosphere in Tartu in the 1960s was indeed much different from the metropolis—in many respects that was due to the university rector, Fedor Klement, who was very sympathetic to the publications of Lotman’s department—in the 1970s, the situation

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changed significantly. The TMSS scholars experienced all varieties of the state control: censorship, delayed and banned publications, canceled conferences, and interfering university officials. In January 1970, the KGB agents even searched Lotman’s home for illegal literature but luckily did not find anything. In the beginning of the 1970s, Lotman and his colleagues faced even more pressure from the authorities, which made it impossible to conduct summer schools: the fifth “summer” school was held in the winter of 1974 and was called Symposium on Secondary Modeling Systems. It is hardly surprising that in the 1970s many active members of the TMSS emigrated to the West (Aleksandr Piatigorskii, Boris Gasparov, Dmitrii Segal, Aleksandr Zholkovskii, and others). Apart from the pressure from state authorities, the semioticians faced attacks from Soviet mainstream academics (see Waldstein 2008, 25–28). These attacks, formally presented as an academic polemic, were purely ideological; the structuralists and semioticians were initially in a very vulnerable position, and all their opponents needed was to engage the power of obscure newspeak and declare them anti-Soviet, antihumanist, or anti-Marxist. Soviet semiotics experienced one such attack in 1972 when a special “Resolution on Literary Criticism” (O liternaturno-khudozhestvennoi kritike) had been released after the twenty-fourth Communist Party Congress. The real meaning of the resolution was the beginning of the official campaign against “ideologically wrong” disciplines in Soviet academia. For example, Soviet sociology—which was banned as a “bourgeois pseudoscience” in the beginning of the 1930s and was rehabilitated for a short period of time in the 1960s—also experienced attacks from the party functionaries, and in 1972, the development of sociology as a discipline was “frozen.” The resolution represents a classic case of Soviet newspeak: criticizing the activity of literary critics, it reconfirmed the status of socialist realism as the main (and the only) method of Soviet literature and outlined the direction of the Marxist-Leninist literary criticism, which in fact consisted of a number of ideological imperatives and slogans, such as “to reconfirm the principles of Party-orientedness and national ethos,” “to fight for a high ideological and aesthetical level of Soviet art,” “to focus on critique and self-critique,” and similar others. The main ideologemes of newspeak (together with the concepts of “socialist realism” or “Marxist criticism”) were never

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clearly defined and functioned as empty signifiers and a handy tool of control: any statement or work could be criticized as ideologically flawed according to any pseudocriterion—for instance, “Partyorientedness” (for more on “the principle of uncertainty” of the Soviet ideological discourse, see Gerovitch 2002, 21–26). The loyal academics readily reacted to the resolution (e.g., Khrapchenko 1972, Miasnikov 1972). Apart from that, a new official organ of literary scholarship in the Soviet Union was established, the annual journal Kontekst . The first volumes of the journal opened with prefaces that directly linked the journal to the infamous resolution and emphasized the opposition of Soviet literary methodology to the Western dominant approaches, which were defined as existentialist, phenomenological, Freudian, and formalist (Khrapchenko 1972, 7). In 1973, Kontekst published several critical articles on Lotman’s theory and in particular on his book The Structure of the Artistic Text . The academician Mikhail Khrapchenko (1973, 23–28), one of the main propagators of the “new line” in literary criticism and head of the Department of Literature and Language of the Soviet Academy of Science, saw contradictions and flaws of Lotman’s theory in that it had no “scientific grounds,” was very subjective, and exhibited a peculiar “semiotic fetishism,” having depicted semiotics as a general theory of cognition. Another article by Iurii Barabash (1973) was even more critical and stated that Lotman’s model had nothing to do with historicism, the “truth of life,” and realism. Barabash accused Lotman of inconsistency and connected Lotman’s method (which he interpreted as “an immanent interpretation of the model of art”) to formalism and structuralism. It is quite clear that these critiques were not just part of academic polemic but rather an accusation toward Lotman of deviant and ideologically faulty behavior, which could have had a serious bearing on Lotman’s career. Quite expectedly, in order to avoid being controlled and to continue their work without compromising with the mainstream ideology, nonconformist academics developed their own strategies of mimicry and adaptation (Waldstein 2008, 30–32). For example, the cybernetic context served quite a practical purpose for semioticians: cybernetics was used as an umbrella term for semiotic studies, as a “safer” alternative for the word semiotics. A 1965 article by Viacheslav Ivanov is typical for this case. Ivanov outlines the main tasks of

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cybernetic/semiotic study of mankind, which include the elucidation of common features of natural languages, translation between scientific languages, and the study of human behavior and man as “a mechanism that performs operations on signs” (Ivanov 1977, 28). More importantly, the article presents an apologia of semiotics, legitimizing the new “suspicious” science in the context of cybernetics. The cybernetic aegis was used for publication of many semiotic works (for example, Ivanov’s books Essays on the History of Semiotics in the USSR and Odd and Even and several volumes of TZS ). Apart from that, the official title of the new series at Tartu University, “Sign Systems Studies,” avoided the word semiotics, but informally it was always called Semiotika , and Σημειωτική (in Greek script) was printed on the book jackets (see figure 1.2). In this context, not only semiotics but also literary history turned out to be an arena of ideological battle. A significant part of the TZS publications was dedicated to the studies in Russian literature and culture of different periods, from ancient Russia to the early twentieth century (the so-called Silver Age of Russian Literature). It is this last period that draws one’s attention because many of the writers and poets of this epoch were found “problematic” by the authorities

Figure 1.2

TZS , or Semiotika.

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and were not normally studied or for that matter read. The TMSS assigned itself a mission to preserve “the forbidden legacy” of Russian culture (the works of the formalists, Sergei Eisenstein, and others) and managed to publish and study many names that could have been otherwise forgotten. For example, the works of the Russian religious thinker and theologian Pavel Florenskii were for the first time printed in TZS 3 (1967) and 5 (1971). How the Tartu semioticians managed to study the forbidden subjects and at the same time avoided the censor’s ban can be illustrated by the 1971 publication of Boris Pasternak’s letter to Pavel Medvedev, dated August 20, 1929. The letter with Gabriel Superfin’s comments was published under the title “B. Pasternak as a Critic of the Formal Method” (Pasternak 1971). In this letter, Pasternak responds to Medvedev about his book The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Although sympathetic with Medvedev’s general stance, Pasternak in fact does not so much criticize the formalists; on the contrary, he states that the author is “unjust” to the formalists in details. Pasternak goes on to argue that the ideas of the formalists are “heuristically very long-range” (dal’noboinye) and the only thing that puzzles him is that they have stopped developing their ideas “on the most promising heights” (529). Since the formalists and Pasternak himself were not the best subjects for an academic publication, the document was published under the camouf lage of the “loyal” title. Considering all the aforesaid, it is easy to conclude that the TMSS is a direct product of Soviet reality and that one should describe its evolution exclusively in terms of dissidence and struggle with the oppressive regime. This context played a crucial role in the reception of the TMSS in the West in the 1970s.5 Soviet semiotics was received by many Western scholars through the prism of French structuralism as an “exotic” but at the same time marginal scholarly phenomenon. The multidisciplinarity of Soviet semioticians was also in stark contrast with their more “disciplined” Western colleagues (Baran 1998). The Tartu scholars in their turn were often skeptical toward Western structuralists (see Waldstein 2008, 98–102). Apart from that, most of Western scientific literature was simply inaccessible in the Soviet Union and personal contacts with Western semioticians (e.g., Sebeok 2001) were extremely rare; so at that time there was no substantial dialogue between the Eastern and Western semioticians.

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The political context comes to the fore even in recent publications on the TMSS. For example, Ebert (2003, 48) positions the TMSS in the context of Soviet culture and argues that (Soviet) semiotics is not an objective scientific method but its themes and its focus are confined within the boundaries of the semiosphere “Soviet Culture” as an anticulture that undermines the monopoly of the ideological culture. In a somewhat similar vein, Schönle and Shine (2006, 27) also emphasize the political background of Lotman’s work, which “rests on an ethical imperative of moral resistance to the Soviet regime despite outward tactical accommodation with it.” Some former members of the TMSS accentuate the sociopolitical context of the school as well. Among these recollections, Boris Gasparov’s reflections may be singled out: Gasparov (1998) maintains that the peculiarity of the school is determined by the social and psychological climate of the epoch and characterizes the TMSS as a hermetic community of scholars with its esoteric academic jargon, elaborated as a measure to alienate itself from the mainstream in an atmosphere of “pure” academic communication. The hermetism of the TMSS, argues Gasparov, was intrinsically connected with its utopianism, manifested in the totality of analytic thinking, in the pursuit of absolute synthesis, and in its “dialectical dualism,” a view of the world in polarized binary oppositions. Gasparov obviously touched upon a very sensitive subject—the ontological status of the school and its members—and his reflections provoked a wave of responses of other TMSS members (see Nekliudov 1998). Quite expectedly, they were also very different. For example, regarding the “esoteric jargon” of the school, Iurii Levin (1998, 82) asserted that the “gobbledygook” language ( ptichii iazyk) of the TMSS publications was a necessary camouflage to fool the censor, but Chernov (1998, 91) argued that, on the contrary, the scientific idiom of the TMSS was not a mere means of disguise. The same diversity of opinions is manifested in the discussion of the school’s integrity. Practically everyone related to the TMSS is unanimous in stating that the school was a very heterogeneous community of scholars, not united by some “common doctrine” or one method, but there are differing opinions as to whether this is a positive or a negative trait. One of the leaders of the TMSS, Viacheslav Ivanov (1999, 248), seems to concur with Gasparov when he argues that the unity of TMSS was maintained only by its opposition to

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“the official pseudo-science.” Ivanov recalls how Roman Jakobson did not react to Lotman’s request to sign “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures” (Lotman et al. 1975), the principles of the study of culture texts compiled by Lotman, Uspenskii, Ivanov, Toporov, and Piatigorskii that was considered to be a manifesto of the TMSS. Ivanov states that he does not consider this manifesto successful because different approaches to semiotics are united “rather superficially.” Many other members of the school express the opposite opinion about the integrity of the school: Sergei Serebrianyi (1998, 129–30) states that “the Tartu phenomenon” was much more than a school; it was an attempt to create a free academic environment in which scholars with very different interests could communicate. Peeter Torop (1995) maintains that the TMSS is not characterized by a universal methodological doctrine, or a unified metalanguage, or a canonized range of methods but is rather a special type of “semiotizing thinking,” of structural and systemic perception. Finally, Lotman (1998) himself in his response to Gasparov states that the diversity of the school is the unifying factor that has made the TMSS a viable organism. Lotman sees the value of the school in that it both united the scholars and also preserved their individuality: the continuous discussions and disputes between the participants only strengthened their individual thinking. Furthermore, the hermetism of the TMSS, its distancing from the outer world, was preconditioned by the orientation of the members toward scientific methods and not by their self-centeredness; another factor that united such different scholars was their “unconditional scientific honesty.” It is worth noting that even in this (self-)description, one of the main postulates of Lotman’s theory is evident: diversity as a condition of dynamic development. As one can see, the crux of the discussion about the status of the TMSS boils down to the question of whether the school must be viewed as an artifact of its time, predetermined by its sociopolitical context, or it has an academic value of its own. In the first view, Soviet semiotics is just a facade, a form of mimicry of intellectuals under suppressive conditions. Apart from the fact that this view is very reductive and one-sided, it commits the fallacy against which Lotman many times warned in his works: the retrospective view can easily reduce a very complex phenomenon to a predictable one,

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predetermined by its own “habitat.” These questions are directly applicable to Lotman’s legacy as well. The described contexts form an important background of Lotman’s work, and in the course of this book, I am going to specifically mention when they become actualized. However, as this study attempts to show, Lotman’s work can be presented as a viable theory that is not reducible to the phenomenon of the TMSS, the epoch of the 1960–70s, or a Soviet context in general.

CHAPTER 2

Culture as System

The Concept of System

Culture is first and foremost a semiotic system. One of the earlier definitions of a semiotic system can be found in Lotman’s 1967 article in which he defines a (modeling) system as a “structure of elements and of rules for combining them that is in a state of fixed analogy to the entire sphere of an object of knowledge, insight and regulation” (Lotman 2000a, 387; translated in Lucid 1977, 7). This definition may seem rather hermetic, but it points out the main features of a system: it is a structure of discernable elements with certain functions. Structure in its turn is a set of elements organized in a certain hierarchy (note that this word is used in a purely pragmatic sense without any axiological connotations) and with certain purpose, which makes this system distinct and different from other systems and nonsystems. The crucial point is that a system is a construction (“fixed analogy”), a methodological (and even cognitive) tool that is applied in the analysis. It is important to keep this definition in mind because Soviet semioticians and structuralists in general have often been criticized that in their writings it is not always possible to distinguish whether the term “system” is used as a working concept for description of certain phenomena or as an ontological category, when some specific “laws” of the system are “discovered” as an objective fact. In this book, I stick to the understanding of (semiotic) system as first and foremost an abstraction, a methodological construct that is used to describe the products of thinking activity of man such as language, literature, cinema, art, or culture in terms of periods, different and

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opposing tendencies, and other parameters as well as to analyze how we use and interact through them. Culture, language, or any other semiotic system can therefore be best compared with an interface or an operating system: they do not exist “on their own” but, on the contrary, entirely depend on their users who use, develop, change, or completely abandon them if necessary. The peculiarity of language and culture as a whole is that from an early age we absorb them as an indivisible part of our lives and rarely question how they operate, which becomes the focus of the majority of Lotman’s semiotic works. Communication and Generation of Meaning

The first feature of culture as system is that it serves as a means of communication between people. There are numerous ways to communicate in culture, and it is described by Lotman as a complex semiotic whole that in turn consists of a number of semiotic systems. In a broad definition, any system that facilitates “communication between two or more individuals may be defined as language” (Lotman 1977d, 7), so art is a kind of language that can be in turn divided into such sublanguages as literature, cinema, fine arts, and so on. But what are peculiarities of the communication process in art and culture as a whole? In order to answer this question, let us first turn to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the fathers of semiotics, and to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, the founder of the Prague school of linguistics and an important figure for the Tartu-Moscow semioticians. Saussure’s (1966, 11) scheme in Course in General Linguistics depicts an ideal process of individual communication in natural

Figure 2.1

Saussure’s speech circuit (adapted from Saussure 1966, 11).

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language between the speaker and the hearer in which “mental facts (concepts) are associated with representations of the linguistic sounds (sound-images) that are used for their expression.” There is, therefore, a direct correlation between the concept and the sound-image. The communication act is depicted as a very smooth connection unimpaired by possible “noise.” It should be noted, however, that Saussure emphasizes the physiological processes of phonation and audition, that is, the physical act of transmission of sound-images from one person to another and the subsequent psychological association of the image with the concept in the hearer’s brain (ibid., 12). His main focus is not on differences in individual speech acts but on the existence of some common denominator in the act of communication: Among all the individuals that are linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up: all will reproduce—not exactly of course, but approximately—the same signs united with the same concepts. (ibid., 13)

The latter statement may seem trivial, but what Saussure points out here is that all differences notwithstanding, we are able to communicate with one another exactly because we use “approximately the same signs” and their combinations. Saussure introduces the dichotomy of langue and parole, the former being the homogeneous system of signs and the latter the concrete messages that are produced on the basis of this system (ibid., 15). In the final analysis, the communication between individuals is possible because all individual messages are constructed upon one and the same system of language. Another widely known scheme of communication is authored by Roman Jakobson (1960, 353), who introduces six main parameters CONTEXT message addresser

addressee contact CODE

Figure 2.2

Speech act by Roman Jakobson.

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of communication that correspond to six functions of language. Jakobson describes these functions as referential (orientation toward the referent, the context), emotive (expressing the a ddresser’s attitude), conative (influencing the addressee, mostly through the vocative and imperative case), phatic (establishing and maintaining communication or contact), metalingual (conveying information about the code), and poetic (focus on the message for its own sake). We might notice that instead of langue, Jakobson uses code and instead of parole, message. But even in this scheme, there is only one code that is shared (fully or at least partially, as Jakobson notices) by the sender and the recipient and only one message that is structured by the code and is transferred within it. Jakobson also follows Saussure, defining contact as “a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee” (ibid., 353). Lotman argues that this scheme, although important, is not quite applicable in the field of culture. In his view, the focus must be on the text , the main vehicle of communication and the center of semiotic activity. Lotman quotes a conventional scheme of message transfer—and shows that this diagram presents only an ideal situation of information transfer and in reality accents only one function of the text: to adequately transfer information. If we consider this function to be the only one, in this case the text can be compared with a sort of box where the meaning is hidden. The addressee receives the parcel, opens it, and extracts meaning without any modifications or transformations, and the box does not even get damaged in the mail. This is certainly an ideal (if not utopian) scheme, and as Lotman argues, it may be applied only to certain

thought (content of the message)

thought (content of the message)

the encoding mechanism of language

the decoding mechanism of language

the text Figure 2.3

From thought to thought (adapted from Lotman 1990, 11).

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artificial semiotic systems that are especially designed to transfer messages with minimal distortion of information. In culture, any transfer of information is always a translation : The act of exchanging information ceases to be a passive transfer of a message that is adequate unto itself from one bloc of memory to another and becomes a translation, in the course of which the message is transformed and the striving for adequacy enters into dramatic conflict with the impossibility of its complete realization. The act of communication begins to include the aspect of tension within itself. (Lotman 1977a, 97–98)

Interestingly enough, a hallmark feature of a majority of artificial systems is that they are not able to produce new messages. Lotman defines a new message again through the concept of translation, accentuating the dialogic character of communication: If the translation of text T1 from language L1 to language L 2 leads to the appearance of text T 2 in such a way that the operation of a reverse translation results in the input text T1, then we do not consider text T 2 to be new in relation to text T1. (Lotman 1990, 13–14)

In other words, semiotic systems that exclude inner synonymy, in which texts are limited to only one interpretation, will be considered the systems that are not able to produce new messages. Note that Lotman uses the term translation in a broad sense; it is not limited to translation from one language to another and signifies any situation of text transfer between the semiotic codes that are not equivalent to one another.

Text 1 (Language 1)

Figure 2.4

The reverse translation.

Text 2 (Language 2)

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This can be illustrated by an example of the system of traffic signs as an artificial semiotic system that is designed for a very specific purpose and is used in many countries (with some local variations but nonetheless based on the same principle). This semiotic system has quite a limited vocabulary and a very simple syntax (the combinations of signs) because its goal is to eliminate ambivalence in interpretation of messages. Once you learn the traffic signs, you already know all possible messages that can be created by this system. In that sense, all the messages of the system are “old.” If I invent some new sign and put it on the road, it can be perceived as an odd or even a nonmeaningful message (and I will most likely get a fine for sabotaging the normal communication flow of the system). If we try an experiment with the reverse translation, as Lotman suggests, the Swedish road sign (figure 2.5) may be translated into English as “your speed on this road should not exceed 30 km/h,” and if we translate this phrase back into “the Swedish road sign language,” it will still be the same sign. In the same fashion, in the language of traffic signs only a limited amount of messages can be created; it is simply impossible to say, for example, “How are you?” This seems to prove the point that this communicative system is not able to produce new messages. Indeed, in order to introduce a new sign, the transport authorities use other languages to convey this information to the users of the system. If we communicate in the language of traffic signs, misinterpretation is practically excluded and the texts quite successfully serve the function of conveying the information as precisely as possible. In natural languages and especially in art, the situation is radically

Figure 2.5

The Swedish speed limit sign.

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different: we are able to produce an unlimited number of new messages that can be interpreted in different ways. If we translate even a simple English phrase into Russian and then back to English, the result may vary, sometimes significantly. One should not be deceived by machine translation programs, such as PROMPT or Google Translate, because these programs try to algorithmize the translation process, treating natural languages as if they were artificial. For such a machine, synonymy and polysemy are factors that only contribute to errors. In reality, even if both participants of the communication act share one language, there are too many factors influencing the communication act, which leads to the nonequivalence of the codes of the addresser and the addressee: their linguistic and cultural experience, competence, norms, pragmatics, and memory make the equivalence between them quite relative. And if we try to make a film based on a book, that is, to translate the book into the film language and then to write a new book based on this film, it is most unlikely that we will get two identical books as a result. Hence the first crucial feature of the communication act is the principle of asymmetry: Instead of a precise correspondence there is one of the possible interpretations, instead of a symmetrical transformation there is an asymmetrical one, instead of identity between the elements which compose T1 and T 2 there is a conventional equivalence between them. (Lotman 1990, 14)

T2´ C1

T1

C2

T2´´

n

C n

T2

Figure 2.6

The creative function of text (adapted from Lotman 1990, 15).

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Lotman’s scheme of communication act presupposes the initial nonidentity of the addresser and the addressee. Lotman expresses a paradoxical idea that not only understanding but also misunderstanding (or rather nonunderstanding, noncomprehension) is a necessary condition for communication: “A text that is absolutely comprehensible is at the same time a text that is absolutely useless” (Lotman 1990, 80). Furthermore, if we assume an addresser and an addressee possessing identical codes and fully devoid of memory, then the understanding between them will be ideal, but the value of the transferred information will be minimal and the information itself—severely limited. Such a system cannot fulfil all the multivariate functions that are historically attributed to language. You could say that, ideally, an identical addresser and addressee would understand each other very well, but they would not be able to talk about anything. (Lotman 2009, 4)

The essential difference between Lotman’s model and other diagrams of communication is that there is not just a single code serving as a channel of communication but multiple overlapping codes that produce a number of new texts. That is how the text both transmits messages and serves as a generator of new ones (Lotman 1990, 13). In other words, Lotman, unlike Saussure and Jakobson, focuses not on similarities but on differences in communication because only difference can create meaning. Note that the scheme emphasizes the fact that we always receive not one but several texts at the same time and, more importantly, that we can choose between interpretations and may consider several interpretations to be viable. The concept of meaning-generation lies at the core of Lotman’s theory and constitutes the creative function of the text. The creative function becomes primary in the context of art and culture and is intrinsically linked with the text’s polyglotism. The idea of the polyglot nature of the text is often repeated in Lotman’s works and appears as early as 1970: “The text belongs to two (or several) languages simultaneously ” (Lotman 1977d, 298). Lotman asserts that human consciousness is heterogeneous, and “within one consciousness there are as it were two consciousnesses,” one perceiving the world as a discrete system of coding and another as a continuous system. The basic unit of the former system is sign, and of the latter

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it is the text (Lotman 1990, 36). The thesis that the discrete and continuous languages represent the minimal pair of languages is one of the most oft-repeated in Lotman’s theory. For example, the minimal act of elaborating a new message is a result of the mutual tension between such mutually untranslatable and at the same time mutually interprojected languages as the conventional (discrete, verbal) and the iconic (continuous, spatial). . . . Iconic (spatial, non-discrete) texts and verbal (discrete, linear) ones are mutually untranslatable, and cannot in principle express “one and the same” content. At the points where they confront each other there is an increase in indeterminacy and this creates a reserve for more information. (ibid., 3, 77)

It is important to keep in mind that the division into iconic and conventional languages is just one of the possible cases and represents the ultimate pair of mutually untranslatable languages. The most obvious example is the cinematographic text that may incorporate verbal and visual signs; it is also simultaneously nondiscrete, perceived in its totality as a text, and discrete—composed of divisible elements, or shots (Lotman 1976b, 62). There are other possible “fusions” of codes: for example, the introduction of “theatricality” in the pictorial art, cinematographic “idiomatics” in a verbal text, and so on. It is therefore practically impossible to speak of purely monolingual texts, especially artistic ones. Let us reiterate that Lotman defines language very broadly, as a specific way of decoding a message, which extends from natural languages to codes, genres, jargons, and even idiomatic contexts— for example, “the languages of science.” All these codes are engaged every time we try to produce or decode a meaningful message, providing a multiplicity of meanings. In Lotman’s account, it concerns not only artistic systems but natural language as well; Lotman (1990, 18) states that “the entire sphere of language belongs to art,” referring to Roman Jakobson’s and Aleksandr Potebnia’s contention that the artistic component is inherent in natural language. Here we come to another paradox: it seems that in culture the text transfer is effectuated not in the easiest but in the most difficult way. How can such a system be sustainable? For all we know, it seems to be quite stable, but does not that contradict the very principle of communication, the correct transfer of information?

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Information and Entropy

The concepts of information and communication, as we remember, are historically and terminologically linked with cybernetics and information theory. However, there is an essential difference in how these terms are interpreted: information theory focuses on mathematical laws of transmission and processing of information and on channels of transmission of information, whereas the semiotic approach is concerned with meaning production (see Danesi and Perron 1999, 49–52). Cybernetics, which may be regarded as the twin sister of information theory, was intended to be a science of management and governance; one of its tasks was the construction of predictable (that is, computable) models. Two concepts are important in this regard: redundancy (predictability that is structured in a message) and entropy (unpredictability in the content or form of a message). Both terms are used to describe the information load of a message. In order to decode a message successfully, a certain degree of redundancy is necessary; otherwise entropy will be so high that the message will be almost unintelligible (O’Sullivan et al. 1994, 106, 259). Entropy is therefore considered to be a factor that hinders information exchange. Lotman outlines two basic functions of the text: communicative (transfer of information) and creative (generation of new information). In terms of information theory, the creative function of the text is by all means entropic: it seems to obstruct the communicative one because it increases the text’s unpredictability and ambiguity. Lotman, however, shows that in art and culture unpredictability is the intrinsic function of the system, and entropy (“noise” that accompanies the message) is a necessary condition for meaninggeneration. As an example, Lotman cites the prominent Soviet mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov, who has introduced the formula of language entropy or “information volume” (H) of any language: H = h1 + h 2. The semantic capacity of language, or the ability to transfer meaningful information in a text, is represented by h1, and h 2 is the language flexibility or synonymy, a possibility to transfer the same content by several means. Kolmogorov states that the machine and the human generate information in an essentially different way because the machine can produce only algorithm-based texts; in other words, “it cannot write

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poetry.” In artificial languages, in which language flexibility tends to or equals zero, poetic creation is impossible (Lotman 1977d, 26–31). Elsewhere, Lotman refers to experiments in which informants are asked to guess the development of different types of texts. Statistically, poems appeared to be much more unpredictable than newspaper articles, even though rhyme and meter usually facilitate prompting. This is hardly surprising: an article is more predictable than a poem because of its rigid and formalized structure, especially if this article is a leading article in a Soviet newspaper reporting politically important events; such an article almost entirely consists of standard clichés, which makes the text very redundant. The unpredictability of the creative text is greater because artists are much freer in their choice. Furthermore, as Lotman described his own experiments, poems intuitively perceived as good were guessed with greater difficulty than those that were regarded as bad (Lotman 1976a, 32–33, 282). This suggests that the value of the text is directly linked with its unpredictability: originality should be valued more than triviality. In one of his earlier works, Lotman straightforwardly speaks about the quality of the artistic text in terms of information load (Lotman 1964, 187, translated in Shukman 1977, 44): The information load of the literary text is considerably higher than that of the normal text and the redundancy at the level of literary communication tends to zero, although it is preserved at the level of language. When we learn how to measure precisely this redundancy we shall receive an objective criterion of artistic merit.

The statement that it could be possible to measure artistic merit objectively is an example par excellence of the early scientism of the TMSS, an attempt to directly apply information theory to literary texts. In his later works, Lotman’s opinion becomes more weighted, and he maintains that the correlation of the magnitude of information (which influences the factor of predictability) and the text’s value is not at all linear, giving the following example: If I discover that an event will take place which could happen, not in one or two but in ten different ways, the informativeness of the message increases sharply. But this may still not determine the value of the information. In a fine restaurant I select one of ten entrées. Answering the question “life or death?” I select one of two. In the first

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case I obtain much more information in binary quantities, but in the second the information has much greater value. (Lotman 1976b, 76)

Strictly speaking, Lotman does not speak of artistic texts here, but one understands the point he is trying to make. For example, the value of today’s TV report (or of a manual to a camcorder, or of a recipe, or of a dissertation) depends exactly on the information that we might learn from these texts. So if we do not receive any new information, we will consider these texts useless. However, if we want to measure the informativeness of the artistic text, the main criterion would rather be the number of possible alternative messages (meanings) that the text can generate. That is how the artistic text— a novel or a poem, for instance—appears to be virtually condensed with meanings: When an artistic text simultaneously enters into many intersecting extra-textual structures and each element of the text enters into many segments of the intra-textual structure, the artistic work becomes the carrier of meanings whose correlations are extraordinary complex. (Lotman 1977d, 300)

However, the value of an artistic text is not directly proportional to its information load or unpredictability. We have already mentioned that a text that is absolutely predictable is a text that is absolutely useless. Yet the opposite statement is true as well: a text that is absolutely unpredictable loses its value proportionally; it is on the brim of losing its textuality and risks being altogether rejected as a text. The recipient can consider it to be too marginal or even not recognize it as a text at all. On the general scale, the artistic text is much more unpredictable than the nonartistic one, but in some artistic texts predictability may be highly valued (for example in myth; see farther on). All in all, there are no “mathematical” criteria for textual value, and unpredictability is just one of the factors that may inf luence it. Art as Modeling System

Among semiotic systems, art no doubt takes an outstanding position. In a popular view, art is often synonymous with culture itself, as though all other expressions of human activity are not “cultural.”

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Moreover, art is a universal feature of all cultures, but its main function is not quite obvious. This problem becomes central in Lotman’s first semiotic work, Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964), published as the first volume of TZS . The two following books, The Structure of the Artistic Text (1970) and Analysis of the Poetic Text (1972), are the revised and extended versions of Lectures . All three books are closely connected with one another, and their methodological premises are almost identical ( Analysis focuses more specifically on poetry). In these books, Lotman starts with an old philosophical question of the relationship between art and life and postulates that art is a cognitive tool. The relation of art to life is that of similarity and analogy, not of identity, sameness; art perceives life not analytically but by re-creating reality by its own means. Hence the essential duality of the work of art: it is simultaneously part of material reality and a metaobject. That is how art becomes a modeling system: The artistic message creates an artistic model of some concrete phenomenon; artistic message models the universe in its most general categories. . . . Thus the study of the artistic language of works of art provides us not only with a certain individual norm of aesthetic communication, but also reproduces a model of the universe in its most general outlines. (Lotman 1977d, 18, 250–51)1

Modeling is the key property of semiosis and lies at the core of any semiotic system. The language of art re-creates a general picture of the world (cf. with the notion of invariant text in chapter 3). In doing so, art adds an additional layer of signification to any system: “As ballet turns movement into its representation, the artistic speech turns the word into its image” (Lotman 2010, 102). Returning to the question of entropy in communication, the modeling property of art is manifested in its capacity to transform “noise” into information, producing multivalent messages or texts. In nonartistic systems, where the transfer of information is of primary importance, noise constitutes an entropic force that interferes with the transferred information, diminishes it, and can finally destroy it. But in art, “noise” is involved in the sphere of structural relations and all “abnormalities” in art take on a structural meaning; that is, new structural elements do not cancel or “erase” old meanings but enter in semantic relations with them: “In a work of art deviations from the

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structural organization can be as meaningful as the realization of the latter” (Lotman 1976a, 120). For example, a statue tossed in the grass creates a new relation between the marble and the grass, which gives rise to a new meaning (Lotman 1977d, 75). Other functions of art can be summarized as follows: The new reality created by art is characterized by a much greater freedom (Lotman 2010, 166). Art makes possible that which is forbidden and that which is impossible, but in order to perceive it as such, art has to be looked upon from the point of view of life, in other words, art has to be perceived as art (Lotman 2009, 150). On the one hand, the most common critique of an artistic text is, as we all know, that it “has nothing to do with life,” that the depicted events and characters are not “real.” On the other hand, all “violations” or the usual order of things in the artistic text, all imposed conventions, and the existence of the artistic universe itself are quite easily accepted by the readers. This creates a certain tension between these two modes that reciprocally influence each other: “Unpredictability in art is simultaneously a cause and a consequence of unpredictability in life” (ibid., 77). Art thus “enlarges the space of the unpredictable—the space of information—and simultaneously creates a conventional world experimenting with this space and proclaiming mastery over it” (ibid., 122). It is therefore quite common when a concrete text is taken for the picture of the world; in other words, an imperfect (incomplete) analogy can be easily taken for a perfect analogy ( Anna Karenina is a novel about Anna Karenina, but at the same time it is about adultery as such). This means that the artistic text has the potential of being an invariant set, realizing itself in a plurality of possibilities. Furthermore, here is the essential difference between art and science: the scientific truth exists in one semantic field, but the artistic truth exists in several fields at the same time (Lotman 1977d, 249). One of the most important features of art is that it is a selfsufficient system. The sustainability of art makes it a universal language, “a universal tool for expression of other systems.” This statement is not just a reflection of the universalistic ethos of Soviet semiotics; Lotman states that art, as part of any culture, is capable to convey the generalized content, bringing together “different spheres of the artistic information” (Lotman 2010, 100–101). In that sense,

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art may indeed be considered a universal modeling mechanism typical of all cultures of the world. What Kind of System?

The notion of secondary modeling systems is one of the “trademarks” of the TMSS and at the same time probably the most controversial concept in semiotics. Sebeok (1988, 67) argues that the fundamental distinction between primary and secondary modeling systems was first introduced by Andrei Zalizniak, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Vladimir Toporov in their seminal 1962 article “StructuralTypological Study of Semiotic Modeling Systems” (Zaliznjak, Ivanov, and Toporov 1977). This work, however, did not use the terms in question and introduced a typology of sign systems according to the degree of abstraction and modeling capacity. One of the first definitions of the term secondary modeling system appeared in the editorial of the TZS 2 (published in 1967 after the first summer school). Secondary modeling systems (such as myth, folklore, ritual, literature, and fine arts) are formulated as those that are built upon natural language (primary system) and acquire supplementary secondary structure of a special type. Therefore, the secondary systems are somehow related to the language structure, and this relation has to be determined (Lotman et al. 1965, 6). In a number of programmatic texts of the TMSS, similar definitions appear: “Systems that have a natural language as their basis and that acquire supplementary superstructures, thus creating languages of a second level, can appropriately be called secondary modeling systems” (Lotman 2000a, 387, translated in Lucid 1977, 7). 2 In a 1973 article written by Lotman in collaboration with Ivanov, Uspenskii, Toporov, and Piatigorskii (Lotman et al. 1975), secondary modeling systems are defined as those that help us construct world models: “These systems are secondary to the primary natural language upon which they are built—either directly (as the superlinguistic system of literature) or as a parallel form, music or fine arts” (Lotman 2000b, 520).3 An apparent contradiction here is that if music and fine arts are parallel forms, how can they be built upon natural language? In other words, if all semiotic systems are constructed upon natural language, linguistics becomes a universal metalanguage

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of science. This postulate is probably the biggest fallacy in the history of semiotics that has haunted semioticians for many years. It is important to mention, however, that later Lotman and some of his colleagues rejected this idea. Already in his 1970 book Papers on the Typology of Culture , Lotman seemingly confirms the assumption that culture is built upon natural language and thus is a secondary system. But a few lines later, he states that culture can be regarded as monolingual only on a very abstract level, and in reality any culture is multilingual and its users are polyglot (Lotman 2000b, 396–97). In 1971, Lotman and Uspenskii directly question the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Benveniste’s contention that language determines one’s culture (and therefore consciousness) and argue that languages are inseparable from culture, thus approaching the concept of pluralistic semiosphere (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 212). Furthermore, in a 1974 article, Lotman discusses whether the secondary systems are indeed inferior or at least chronologically “younger” than the primary system of language and argues that it is impossible to establish any periods in human history without secondary systems (Lotman 1977a, 95). In a paradoxical manner, Lotman concludes that from one perspective poetic language (a secondary structure) is a particular case of natural language (a primary structure), but from another perspective, natural language can be considered a particular case of poetic language.4 In the system of culture, both types of language are in a state of mutual tension, so the difference is in the functional direction of the translation act: what is translated into what (98). Later, when the concept of semiosphere enters the theory, the question of primacy of some type of language will be considered irrelevant and the taxonomy of primary and secondary modeling systems will cease to be topical. To conclude this discussion, the term secondary modeling system is problematic and produces more questions than answers. First of all, it is linguocentric, and second, as some participants of the school have argued, it was created in 1964 as a euphemism for the word “semiotics,” which was in disfavor with academic officials (Chernov 1988, 11–12; Egorov 1999, 119). Apart from that, as we return to this question in chapter 5, natural language itself may be regarded as a secondary not primary modeling system.

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The Dialogic Principle and Autocommunication

It is noticeable that Lotman never describes cultural phenomena in isolation, be it the polyglot text or the system of culture itself. Lotman accentuates the principle of dialogism, the assumption of continuous interaction of semiotic systems and texts with each other. The principle of dialogism brings to focus such concepts as autocommunication, myth, and translation. The word “dialogue” has a Greek origin (διάλογος), from the verb διαλέγεσθαι, “to converse.” In the majority of modern dictionaries, dialogue is defined as “a conversation between two or more participants” and is often opposed to monologue, as a speech of one speaker only. But isn’t communication with oneself essentially dialogical as well? The communication act is usually described as “the I-s/he system” where the message is transmitted between two different physical entities, the addresser and the addressee. The communication in which a person addresses him/herself (“the I-I system”) is not usually problematized, but Lotman insists that it lies at the core of all communication in culture. The function of the I-I system is not only mnemonic—in that case it is similar to the I-s/he system, and one individual functions as two, transmitting a message in time (Lotman 1977d, 7)—but meaning-generating and is quite common in everyday communication. In the I-I system, it is not the message but the code and the context that change, and the message, which is already “received” by the addressee, acquires new meaning through reinterpretation. Quite simply, what Lotman argues here is that any communication is essentially dialogic, be it with other people or with oneself. A trivial example is our favorite texts—books, films, paintings, music, and so forth—to which we turn several times during our lifetime and which provoke a high degree of autocommunication. It is hard, if not impossible, to rationally explain why we read the same book or watch the same film over and over again, at some point knowing it almost by heart, unless we look at every individual as a certain cultural entity, a “miniculture” (more on that topic in c hapters 4 and 5). Favorite texts constitute the essence of our cultural self, and autocommunication serves as its homeostatic mechanism, one of the functions of which is to transform the self “into something desirable” (Lotman 1988, 120). In the final analysis, in

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order to keep this miniculture in balance, we need texts, and it is exclusively through texts that we are able to maintain our beliefs, to understand and reflect on our position in this world. Myth

The concept of autocommunication is closely linked with the notion of myth. Myth as a special type of texts that is not limited to folklore tales and fables has been extensively studied by many structuralists and semioticians, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Soviet semioticians. The common point of these studies is that myth does not belong exclusively to the past and archaic cultures but constitutes an intrinsic part of modern culture as well. Is there any difference between a note and a knot ? This question may seem strange at first glance, but Lotman uses this example to illustrate his point of two different types of text that require opposite techniques of reading: in the case of a written note, the message is contained within it and may be extracted, whereas a knot tied on a handkerchief (or a string tied around the finger or a cross drawn on the palm) performs only a mnemonic function—it refers to some message that the reader already knows. The point Lotman is making by this simple example is that some texts in culture function not as a source of information but as a catalyst of memory that provokes autocommunication (Lotman 2000a, 438, 440). Mythological texts are by definition autocommunicative. They can be compared with music by their effect on the recipient: myths do not convey some decodable message but rather make us listen to ourselves. Myths are designed to organize the world of the listener and thus are closely connected with the personal semiotic space: “Myth always says something about me” (Lotman 1990, 153). Apart from that, mythological texts serve an important social function, which is to preserve the model of the universe, a certain worldview. In structuralist works, this function of myth has often been emphasized: Roland Barthes (1972) notably studies modern myths as vehicles for perpetuating ideological schemes and exercising power. Myths are located at the center of culture and are not limited to the folktales. Any text may in principle serve the mythological function if it is interpreted as a model of reality. Lotman (1990, 30–31) gives an example from Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin , in

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which Tatiana reads romantic novels and turns them into a model for interpreting reality (in Universe of the Mind , Charles Johnston’s translation is used; I offer a newer translation by James E. Falen): And then her warm imagination Perceives herself as heroïne — Some favorite author’s fond creation: Clarissa, Julia, or Delphine. She wanders with her borrowed lovers Through silent woods and so discovers Within a book her heart’s extremes, Her secret passions, and her dreams. (Chapter 3, X; Falen 1998, 61)

Because myths reflect a particular worldview, they also represent a specific type of consciousness. In the article “Myth—Name—Culture” (originally published in 1973), Lotman and Uspenskii describe the structure of the mythological consciousness as opposed to the descriptive, “historical,” nonmythological consciousness. If the latter requires at least a pair of differently structured languages, the former is monolinguistic. Lotman notices that in the ritualized art any message is quite strictly delimited: if in Russian or any other language it is possible to speak about anything, in the language of folktale it is possible to speak only about certain things (Lotman 2000a, 438). Here Lotman refers to the works of Vladimir Propp (1968, 1984)—especially his Morphology of the Folktale (first published in 1928)—who demonstrated that a majority of folktales were based on a certain invariant structure that allowed for only a certain degree of variation, thus presenting a very restricted model of the world. Furthermore, the level of metadescription is peculiar only to the polyglot nonmythological consciousness, whereas the mythological consciousness lacks the metalevel in principle. It is because understanding in the first case is linked with translation in the broadest sense of the word (“Understanding is always a translation of an unknown object into the language of familiar concepts,” Lotman 2010, 166) and in the second, with recognition and identification. Formally, in myth no new messages are possible: the message can only be recognized, not learned. It is worth noting that general system theory singles out two similar approaches to cognition: the analytic approach provides an understanding by examining the parts of

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an object (i.e., acquisition of knowledge), and the holistic approach is based on “grasping the whole” (i.e., recognition of knowledge) (Rapoport 1986, 1–2). In the world as represented through the eyes of mythological consciousness, the objects are 1) of the same rank; 2) integral, indivisible into traits; and 3) unique, that is, not categorized. If for the nonmythological consciousness some objects can be classified as belonging to one class, for the mythological consciousness these objects will be considered one and the same object. The mythological consciousness does not allow for any logical hierarchy of objects, it perceives any object as unique. Therefore, for this type of consciousness, the sign is equivalent to a proper name. Myth constitutes an archaic layer of our consciousness not only in historical but in ontogenetic perspective: children’s consciousness is typically mythological because a child’s world consists solely of proper names and knowledge is identified with the process of naming (Lotman and Uspenskij 1977, 236–37; Lotman 2009, 32; cf. Ivanov 1976a, 35–37). As a consequence, names are essentially mythological, and no wonder that they have been and still are surrounded by numerous conventions, prohibitions, and rituals regarding naming and calling. The clear border between these types of consciousness (mythological versus logical, descriptive) is of course imaginary, and as always with binary oppositions of the TMSS, these types must be regarded as the poles of one axis, with uncountable intermediate variants. If we metaphorically compare culture with a cloth texture, these two types are the two sides of the same fabric, the mythological layer of culture being its “wrong” side. Apart from that, Lotman and Uspenskij (1977, 236) point out the ontological essence of proper names in the mythological identification of the name with the named and of the sign with its referent (and vice versa). In one of Juliet’s monologues, Shakespeare memorably united this problem with the problem of the arbitrariness of the sign. Juliet’s soliloquy is usually remembered for its two lines: “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” Yet Juliet’s lament is in fact much deeper and concerns the bigger problem of the sign-object relationship: ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,

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Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O! be some other name: What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name; And for that name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself. (2.2.42–53)

In semiotic terms, Juliet states that the (verbal) sign is purely arbitrary and questions the logic by which her beloved Romeo turns out to be her enemy. The tragic subtext of the situation is that Juliet most likely understands that in their world it is impossible to “doff ” one’s name. Romeo and his name are completely identified with each other, and not only that, Romeo happens to be a bearer of the sign that is more powerful than his own subjectivity. Vendetta (and vengeance in general) is a structure peculiar exactly to mythological consciousness because by its logic all members of a family are considered to be identical; they are part of one significant whole. Lotman (1990, 138) illustrates this mythological logic by an example of how Ivan the Terrible would execute disgraced boyars with their whole families and even serfs, treating them not as a group of individuals but as an inseparable whole (by the same logic, in ancient Egypt, for example, some pharaohs were buried together with their servants and even family members). And this is just one example that shows how signs (texts) have the power to model reality. Finally, humor actively exploits mythological mechanisms in modern culture. Jokes in particular (together with parodies, anecdotes, and alike) originate in myth through folktale (Propp 1984, 41–56) and can be seen as an effective delineator of cultural specifics. That is why among the most important features of humor are its contextuality and referentiality: most jokes, apart from being “funny,” also define a certain worldview. Being closely connected to certain phenomena of reality, they help create and maintain beliefs, attitudes, and stereotypes; they demarcate social and cultural boundaries, often violate established taboos, and thus serve as peculiar “friend-or-foe” devices. Apparently, humor exploits the mechanism of recognition to the full: if the referential connection of a joke is distorted or broken, its effect is close to nothing.5 Joke is therefore essentially an

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oral genre because the reaction to a joke is very important to the addresser: it shows if the implied subtext is understood, shared, or rejected by the addressee. The example of political anekdots in Soviet culture is illustrative here (I am using the Russian word to delineate a specific genre, which is not identical to anecdote; see Yurchak 2006, 273–75). One could easily get arrested for telling an “inappropriate” joke to a wrong person. That is why anekdots functioned as an instrument of “silent resistance,” and their status was almost existential. Here is an example of one such anekdot that also offers a peculiar metaperspective: A dialogue between the prisoners in a labor camp: “For what did they put you here?” “For being lazy.” “How so?” “Well, late at night I and my neighbor were telling political anekdots to each other, and I got lazy and thought I would report my neighbor to the KGB the following morning, but my neighbor wasn’t lazy and reported me right away, so that is why I am here.”

To conclude the discussion of myth, it is pertinent to reiterate that these two layers of culture are almost seamlessly welded together, and it is practically impossible to find a whole culture that is totally oriented toward autocommunication and myth. Even surviving indigenous cultures cannot be described as totally mythological but rather as those where mythological structures occupy a significant part of culture. However, the elucidation of (possible) underlying mythological structures is an important part of cultural and textual analysis. We return to this question on the following pages. Translation and Differentiation

The dialogic principle accentuates translation as the key mechanism of meaning-generation. As seen earlier, Lotman uses this concept in its broadest sense and contends that it is virtually impossible to transfer any message without transforming it. Meaning is not contained in the message but is the product of the translation process. In Lotman’s view, translation is not a replacement of an element by another (it is impossible to replace something that is not there yet, isn’t it?) but the establishment of a dialogic relation between the elements of the whole semiotic space: a sign with another sign, a text with another text, and a culture with other cultures. By the

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same token, meaning is not hidden within the sign or the text but is the product of their dialogic correlation with other signs and texts. Apart from that, meaning is always a result of the dialogue between the text and the reader—and not some abstract reader but a concrete reader situated in a given historical context. Any sign or culture needs at least one partner in the dialogue because in isolation they cannot mean anything, nor can they produce any information, thus being completely useless for communication. It is obvious that by postulating differentiation as the fundamental principle of semiosis, Lotman follows both “fathers of semiotics,” Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles S. Peirce. Saussure argues that in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. . . . Applied to units, the principle of differentiation can be stated in this way: the characteristics of the unit blend with the unit itself. In language, as in any semiological system, whatever distinguishes one sign from the others constitutes it. Difference makes character just as it makes value and the unit. (Saussure 1966, 120–21)

Peirce (1931–34) goes even further (his well-known formula defines sign as “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity”) and extends this principle onto thought, arguing that thought is identical to the sign: From the proposition that every thought is a sign, it follows that every thought must address itself to some other, must determine some other, since that is the essence of a sign. . . . To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs. (5.253)6

Apart from that, no present actual thought (which is a mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value; for this lies not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts. . . . At no one instant in my state of mind is there cognition or representation, but in the relation of my states of mind at different instants there is. (5.289)

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Montage

The principle of differentiation is closely related to the concept of montage in its broadest sense. As Sergei Eisenstein notices, if some two “pieces” (shots) are put together, they produce a new “image,” a new meaning that is a result of their juxtaposition (Eizenshtein 1964, 157–58). Eisenstein perspicaciously remarks that this principle is almost universal and is not peculiar to the cinematographic text. Apart from that, montage increases the impression of the film text because it is the viewer who participates in the creation of new meanings; by juxtaposing the first and the second element, the viewer creates a new third element that is their product, not the sum.7 In the same fashion, in Semiotic of Cinema , Lotman (1976b, 62) describes the effect of montage of dissimilar shots as the activation of a junction of meanings. The idea of tension or collision as a meaning-generating “spot” in art is crucial in Lotman’s theory. For example, metaphor is a typical meaning-generating device because it generates new meanings exactly by bringing together dissimilar elements in an unexpected manner. Also, in The Structure of the Artistic Text , Lotman states that an established relation between two (or more) elements creates a new artistic effect, so all “noise” and “errors” become meaningful, as in the example cited earlier (a marble statue tossed in the grass). To formulate this idea succinctly, there are no accidents in art . For example, a cinematographic text might incorporate some details that are not intended by the director. From the author’s point of view, these details may be considered accidental and “wrong” but being included in the text, they immediately become connected with other elements of the text and inevitably acquire meaning. The film director Roman Balaian tells an anecdote how one of the viewers of his drama Polety vo sne i naiavu (Flights in dreams and in reality, 1982) assigned meaning to a number of details that the director himself considered insignificant. For example, in one of the episodes, the red soles of the protagonist’s sneakers were interpreted as a symbol of his alienation and loneliness. For Balaian this is a case of overinterpretation, but for the viewers it may be an organic element of the artistic text that enhances its perception. Thus the authorial intention should by no means signify the ultimate truth because this contradicts the premise of dialogicity of communication.

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Finally, Lotman has widely used the principle of contrasting juxtaposition in his own works as well, often illustrating important points by paradoxes, as we saw in many examples. As is known, in the most general sense, the paradox reveals the tension between two or more seemingly contradicting statements, producing an unexpected insight on the given problem. In other words, the paradox translates the untranslatable and is not just a rhetorical figure but also a methodological tool that allows scrutinizing a perceived situation from a totally new angle. Excursus 1: The Bakhtinian Dialogue

Dialogism as a semiotic principle inevitably brings to mind another Russian scholar, Mikhail Bakhtin. In the history of literary theory, semiotics, and philosophy, Bakhtin’s ideas are usually opposed to formalism, structuralist theories, and semiotics. A number of works attempt to describe the divergences and convergences of Bakhtin’s theory with Soviet semiotics and Lotman in particular (most notably Reid 1990). 8 Depending on the researcher’s perspective, Bakhtin can be equally described as a total antagonist of semiotic theories and as one of the founding fathers of modern semiotics. A noteworthy example of the latter approach is Viacheslav Ivanov’s article first printed in Russian in TZS 5 (1973), in which he accents Bakhtin’s significance for semiotic studies and portrays Bakhtin virtually as a semiotician, appropriating his work in the context of the TMSS. Among other things, Ivanov describes Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais and carnival culture as “indubitably structural in its principal a ttitudes . . . built on analysis of several fundamental binary oppositions, particularly the top-bottom opposition” (Ivanov 1976b, 336). Ivanov even finds Bakhtin’s writing congenial to Lévi-Strauss’s study of myth. Still, not all scholars close to the TMSS are that sympathetic to Bakhtin: for instance, Mikhail Gasparov (1979) in his highly critical article accuses Bakhtin of, among other things, hostility to poetry for calling it an “authoritarian monovocal language.” In this short excursus, I outline several “meeting points” and some essential differences between Lotman and Bakhtin and his circle (Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev 9). In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (first published in 1929), Bakhtin introduces the notion of a polyphonic novel where multiple voices, free from authorial

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monological control, coexist in a dynamic dialogue. In his later works, Bakhtin considered not only Dostoevsky’s novel but novel in general to be the polyphonic genre (as opposed to monological poetry). Bakhtinian heteroglossia emphasizes the uniqueness of individual utterances that are in constant dialogue with one another. Bakhtin and his circle thus position themselves as critics of Saussure in that they prioritize speech over language, parole over langue. Bakhtin (1986, 127) focuses on the multivocal reality of an individual utterance, which is “unrepeatable, historically unique individual whole,” determined by social context. In the same vein, Voloshinov defines sign as acquiring its meaning in its social context: “The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine—and determine from within, so to speak—the structure of an utterance ” (Vološinov 1973, 86).10 The speech is thus not a reflection of the system, langue, but a social expression of individual experience: “The whole route between inner experience (the ‘expressible’) and its outward objectification (the ‘utterance’) lies entirely across social territory” (ibid., 90). In Bakhtin’s view, any understanding and/or cognition is also by definition dialogic, and this is the point where the views of Lotman and Bakhtin come as close as possible. Any utterance exists only in relation to other utterances, thus forming an endless chain of dialogue: “The word wants to be heard, understood, responded to, and again to respond to the response, and so forth ad infinitum ” (Bakhtin 1986, 127).11 Moreover, the dialogic relation is the necessary condition for understanding: here, Bakhtin’s (1986, 107) statement that cognition (comprehension) is dialogic and that the essence of the text “always develops on the boundary between two consciousnesses, two subjects ” is directly congenial with Lotman’s premise of polyglotism of the communication act. In contrast to Bakhtin, however, Lotman pays attention not to different individual voices of presumably the same language (multivocal reality) but to the polyglot reality, the dialogue of different languages that create the minimal condition for meaning-generation. In stating that the monological mechanism is unable to produce any message at all, Lotman explicitly refers to Bakhtin’s ideas, although interpreting “dialogic” exactly as polyglot: No “monologic” (i.e. monoglot) apparatus could produce messages that are in principle new (thoughts), i.e. could be called a thinking

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apparatus. A thinking apparatus must have in principle (in the minimal schema) a dialogic (bilingual) structure. This deduction, incidentally, gives new meaning to the prophetic ideas of M. M. Bakhtin about the structure of dialogic texts. (Lotman 1979, 94)

The other point of tension in the dialogue of the two scholars was the concepts of code and text.12 In general, Bakhtin referred to Lotman directly only a couple of times; in “Response to a Question from the Novyj Mir Editorial Staff,” Bakhtin (1986, 2–3) speaks approvingly of Dmitrii Likhachev and Lotman and the fact that they approach literature as an integral part of culture. In his notes, however, Bakhtin criticizes Lotman for his interpretation of the multistyled structure of Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin13 as a multiple recoding on different levels. For Bakhtin (1986, 135), this perspective neglects the dialogic aspect of the text, and the dialogue of styles turns out to be a mere “coexistence of various versions of one and the same style.” This reproach is a reflection of a larger critique of structuralism (and semiotics) as “monologistic” discourse.14 For Bakhtin (1986, 135, 147), code is opposed to utterance because it presupposes “the content to be somehow ready-made” and is a mere “technical means of transmitting information,” a “killed context,” which deprives communication of its dialogic aspect. Bakhtin sees Lotman as an adept of structuralism, for whom the text is an immanent whole, and therefore criticizes the idea of “self-contained” text as not adequate to the essence of utterance, which cannot be defined in “either mechanistic or linguistic categories” (ibid., 136). Lotman’s retort if not directly to Bakhtin then to all the critics of structural approach can be found in The Structure of the Artistic Text : “Even an extremely schematic description of a text’s most general structural regularities does more to facilitate an understanding of its unique originality than any number of statements about the uniqueness of the text” (Lotman 1977d, 121). As we have seen, the discrepancies between Bakhtin’s and Lotman’s approaches are rather philosophical and ideological. Still, there are points in which the approaches of Lotman and Bakhtin almost converge: for example, in “The Problem of the Text,” Bakhtin (1986, 104–5) defines text as a unique “monad” reflecting all texts within a given conceptual (smyslovaia) sphere, which can be read as a paraphrase of Lotman’s description of the relation of a text to culture.

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Moreover, Bakhtin also states that the meaning of the word “is determined only with the help of other words of the same language (or another language) and by its relation to them” (ibid., 118), which remarkably accents the principle of differentiation of semiosis. Apart from direct references to Bakhtin’s works on carnival culture and Dostoevsky’s poetics, Lotman several times mentions Bakhtin as the author of productive semiotic ideas: for example, the principle of ambivalence that allows for the system’s reorganization and transformation into a new dynamic state is obviously agreeable with Lotman’s thesis of polyglotism of any semiotic system (Lotman 1977c, 204). One of the most valuable of Bakhtin’s concepts for Lotman is his definition of genre as a specific form of social interaction. “Speech genres” are defined as typified utterances that form and predetermine social actions: “Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances” (Bakhtin 1986, 60). Bakhtin distinguishes primary genres (simple, belonging immediately to speech) from secondary genres (complex, ideological, mostly literary genres). Secondary genres absorb and digest primary genres: for example, a primary genre such as “everyday dialogue” or letter, being included in a novel, assumes a special character and a new function (ibid., 61–62). In that sense, Bakhtin can be considered one of the forefathers of social semiotics (e.g., Halliday 1978; see chapter 3). Finally, Bakhtin introduces the concept of “genre memory”: A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development. (Bakhtin 1984, 106)

This concept was several times mentioned by Lotman because of its affinity to the notions of text memory and collective memory that will be discussed on the following pages. In conclusion, let me reiterate that if for Bakhtin the primary unit of language is an individual utterance, for Lotman it is the text. Also, both scholars advocate dialogism as the main principle behind any mechanism of meaning-generation. As a special tribute

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to Bakhtin, Lotman wrote an article (published only in German in 1984) in which he described Bakhtin’s dialogicity as in principle (and with certain corrections) congenial with the principle of dialogic interaction of semiotic systems (Lotman 1984b). The Structure of Culture: Core versus Periphery

Any system is organized in a certain manner, that is, it has a specific structure. In the description of the system structure, the inf luence of Russian formalism—which can be considered the first systemic approach to literature—on Soviet semiotics and Lotman in particular is especially evident. In a majority of his works, Lotman consistently transforms the formalist scheme into cultural semiotic theory, engaging the fundamental concepts of formalism.15 On the whole, Lotman concurred to the critique of the formalist view of literature as a (primarily) immanent system16 and criticized them for insufficient methodology and for their “mechanistic-inventorial” approach. Already in Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964), Lotman states that the formalists mechanically adopt the dyad “form-content,” which leads to the opposition of the former to the latter (Lotman 1964, 54). The most serious critique concerns the formalist-structuralist view of the text as a “closed, self-sufficient, synchronically organized system” (Lotman 2009, 13). For Lotman, the isolation of the text in time and space contradicts the very essence of this concept. In contrast, Lotman has always distinguished Tynianov among other formalists, and Tynianov’s inf luence on Lotman’s theory is obvious in many aspects. Although in one of the letters to Boris Egorov (July 31, 1984) Lotman clearly expresses his reservations regarding certain literary-historical ideas of Tynianov, calling them “false” and “biased,” he nonetheless states that “the general direction” of Tynianov’s works is exceptionally fruitful and has given a very powerful impulse to the humanistic science (Lotman 2006, 331). All these differences notwithstanding, Lotman follows Tynianov in the description of the general structure of culture and other modeling systems as a concentric system: The entire system for preserving and communicating human experience is constructed as a concentric system in the center of which are located the most obvious and logical structures, that is, the most

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structural ones. Nearer to the periphery are found formations whose structuredness is not evident or has not been proved, but which, being included in general sign-communicational situations, function as structures. (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 213)

In this citation, Lotman and Uspenskii complement the formalist scheme of literary system, where the center (or the core) of the literary system is occupied by normative (familiar) elements and the periphery with irregular, innovative, and/or foreign elements. The core of the system consists of the most established (“canonized”) structures and texts or, in Tynianov’s terminology, the dominant , the advanced position of a group of elements in the foreground of a system (Tynjanov 1978, 72–73). In the previous quotation, Lotman and Uspenskii complicate the opposition of the core and the periphery in terms of the relation of systemic and nonsystemic elements in the system; it is from the point of view of the core that the periphery appears to be nonstructured or irregular. On the periphery of the system, there are located more dynamic and “deviant” texts. It is therefore “brightly coloured and marked” in comparison with the more neutral center (Lotman 1990, 141). The periphery is the space of artistic experiments, that which is usually called “the avant-garde art.” It is also the space of explicit individuality, whereas the core is usually represented by a more impersonal “standard” or “ordinariness.” As one of the iconic examples of the “borderline” art that challenges the canonized repertoire, I may mention Sergei Eisenstein’s 1923 production of Wiseman , based on Alexander Ostrovsky’s play. During this production, Eisenstein formulated the method of “the montage of attractions,” which was designed to “mould the audience in a desired direction.” An attraction was defined as “any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence” (Eisenstein 1998, 30). Eisenstein’s eccentric and grotesque production that incorporated elements of circus and farce and focused on physicality of action shuttered the conventional border between the stage and the audience and influenced not only the theater but other art forms as well. In any artistic system at a concrete point of time (i.e., in a synchronic view), it is possible to construe a normative picture of the system, distinguishing elements that constitute the core from those

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located on “the outskirts.” Likewise, in the description of a culture it is possible to delineate what artistic systems are dominant at this particular period and which ones are marginal. For example, the genre of comic books was practically nonexistent in Soviet culture and is very marginal now in Russia, in contrast to the United States of America or Japan, where it occupies a very significant sector of culture. The core, however, is not static at all; it is subject to constant transformations and is to a certain extent relativistic: different cultural, social, and other groups and finally every individual in a given culture have a different perception of the structure of any artistic system and, consequently, the whole culture. The dynamism of the system is due to the centripetal force: the marginal elements try to invade the center, and the core elements resist them. The periphery challenges the accepted order of the system, and the core in turn attempts to subjugate or even destroy the marginal elements, proclaiming them nonexistent. In Tynianov’s account, this struggle constitutes the mechanism of (de)automatization that is the driving force of literary evolution.17 Because any system inevitably becomes automatized, it leads to the appearance of a new opposite “constructive principle” (Tynyanov 2000, 37) on the periphery of the system: At a period when a genre is disintegrating, it shifts from the centre to the periphery, and a new phenomenon f loats in to take its place in the centre, coming up from among the trivia, out of the backyards and low haunts of literature. (This is the phenomenon of the “canonisation of the younger genres” which Viktor Shklovsky has written about). (Tynyanov 2000, 33)

The examples of this dynamics are countless: in literature, one may mention the genre of epistolary novel that becomes popular in European literatures in the eighteenth century (epistle as a document and nonliterary form enters the domain of literature and occupies its core). In film, the amateur and/or (pseudo)documentary genre periodically bursts from the periphery to the nucleus; an example is the Dogme 95 movement that appeared as a rejection of mainstream cinematography and gained much popularity in the 1990s. In fashion, Lotman (1990, 141) gives an example of jeans that were specific working clothes (nonsystemic factor) and then were “expropriated” by the youth as a sign of nonconformism (the aggressive movement

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on the periphery); now jeans are spread all over various layers of fashion, in most cases having neutral connotations as the most casual and common apparel. Just like the top-bottom dichotomy, the center-periphery metaphors are very common in culture. The metaphor of culture as a concentric structure is often manifested in the hierarchical organization of living space. For example, the structure of the city with its division into downtown and suburbs, ethnic neighborhoods, and so forth clearly implies the division between the center (as a more important part) and the periphery. It does not mean of course that all cities are necessarily constructed concentrically, but it does reflect the fact that practically all modern cultures semiotize the space of the city in such a way that it is presented in a certain hierarchy, differentiating one part from another. The real city may be of any geometrical form but ideally it may be described as a circle (or as a square, as some ancient Eastern cities; see Ivanov 1986, 10). Furthermore, some cities are often proclaimed the center of the world, thus representing a model of the universe (Lotman 2002, 208). The Norm

The center of culture is the domain of the norm, and the description of the normative core of a culture is often presented as its typical “portrait.” In this regard, the problems of self-description and description of a culture from the outsider’s point of view come to the fore. To perceive an incident as the norm is a feature of almost all travelogues, and Lotman turns to this problem in several texts. In Conversations about Russian Culture , for example, he mentions the impressions of a Japanese captain who came to Russia in 1791 and described his experiences (including incidental events) as an established norm of the observed culture (Lotman 1994, 115). But the outsider’s viewpoint provides a defamiliarized picture (also the formalist term) of a culture, revealing some features that are “blurred” for the locals because for them the norm is obvious and represents the usual state of things. On the contrary, for the foreigner, the norm may seem a deviation or a peculiarity. This happens because when we confront a foreign culture, we do not actually see the foreign norm but notice the deviations from the normative core of our domestic system. For example, if we see a strangely dressed person,

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we can positively say that this dress cannot be worn in our own environment, but we do not know whether this dress is a norm of the foreign system (and if yes, what meaning does it have?) or also an abnormality. The other point of bias of the foreigner is the “literalist” approach to foreign culture: the tourist tends to miss the humor and irony (which presupposes a metaperspective of the norm), to understand figurative meanings as literal, and to misinterpret ambivalent situations or texts, ignoring the multiplicity of meanings (Lotman 1992–93, III.138). The reason for this is that any message consists, as it were, of two parts, what is told and what is not told (Lotman 1994, 387). Locals reconstruct the second part on their own because they are immersed in the actual cultural space, but outsiders lack this point of reference. Consequently, a historian attempting to reconstruct the past appears to be in the position of a tourist both in space and time (Lotman 1994, 388). The Boundary

The division between the center and the periphery is a manifestation of the fact that the semiotic space of culture is permeated with boundaries. The periphery is not “the end” of a system but a transition point between different systems and structures. The boundaries between systems are not exact but quite vague, subject to constant f luctuations, and resemble not an impenetrable wall but rather a filter or membrane. The function of the boundary “is to control, filter and adapt the external into the internal” and also serve as a catalyst of communication: “Because the semiotic space is transected by numerous boundaries, each message that moves across it must be many times translated and transformed, and the process of generating new information thereby snowballs” (Lotman 1990, 140). The dialogic principle presupposes a constant dynamic tension on the boundaries not only of different systems but also between different levels of any semiotic system. If there is no tension on the border, no translation occurs and therefore no new meaning can occur either. The tension is thus essential for the culture’s sustainability and is created by two tendencies: the given incomplete mutual translatability and the need for full translatability (Lotman 1977a, 96). On the whole, the basis of every act of

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communication is the paradoxical formula “equivalent but still different”: it should be conventionally equivalent in order to make the transfer of information possible, and it should be different in order to transfer meaningful information. What is located on the periphery of the system has an ambivalent character because it f luctuates between systemic and nonsystemic. The boundary/margin is the sphere of contact of different systems and subsystems; it both unites and divides, transforming (translating) noninformation—which comes from other systems—into information. If in nonartistic systems the contact with the extrasystemic leads to the decrease of information, in art it leads to the increase of information and reorganization of the system structure. Note here close parallels with the formalist legacy: Tynianov repeatedly argued that literature, as a part of culture, exists in close and complicated relations with other cultural series (riady) and at the same time depends on its immanent systemic laws. The first thesis of the article “On Literary Evolution” begins with the assertion that the immanent analysis of a literary system is insufficient because the literary and extraliterary series are in mutual interaction (Tynjanov 1978, 66); the same holds for the immanent analysis of a literary work, which is impossible without its correlation with the literary system. Tynianov argues that such an isolated study is an abstraction, as is the analysis of isolated elements of a literary work (ibid., 68–69).18 Artistic systems are closely intertwined with each other and other systems, but to consider art to be a mere arena for social and political struggle is to reduce a complex phenomenon to only one function, thus presenting a highly biased picture. Even when ideology attempts to subjugate art for its own needs, art always resists, sometimes in an unpredictable manner. The evidence of this reaction is abundant: in the Soviet Union, literature for many decades experienced a strong ideological pressure through censorship, repressions, revised curricula, and so on. The result, however, was far from the desired: literature appeared to be a very resilient and heterogeneous system with its “subcurrents” and niches, developing new forms that resisted the external pressure (e.g., for the situation in the 1920s–30s in Soviet literature, see Chudakova 2001, 309–37). To sum up, the boundary is a crucial structural element of any system, and to depict it more or less adequately we would need an

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animation rather than a static picture in order to demonstrate the dynamicity of the system itself, diffuseness of its borders and its subsystems, the constant flow of texts between them, and the interaction of systems with one another. Because any meaning-generating system—or even a semantic space, as Lotman (2009, 19) calls it—“may only be represented in a metaphorical sense in a two- dimensional manner with clear and definite boundaries,” these metaphors should not be taken for a precise analogy. Metalevel of Culture

Another concept inextricably connected with the concept of boundary and the center-periphery relationship is the notion of metalevel of culture. The highest form of the structural organization of a culture is the point of self-description, which any developed culture inevitably reaches (Lotman 1990, 128): Self-description demands the creation of a metalanguage for the given culture. On the basis of the metalanguage there arises the metalevel on which the culture constructs its ideal self-portrait. . . . The appearance of an image of culture on the metalevel signifies the secondary structuration of this very culture. It becomes more rigidly organized, certain aspects of it are declared to be non-structural, i.e. “non-existent.” (Lotman 1979, 92)

The appearance of encyclopedias, dictionaries, grammars, chronicles, criticism, literary canon, public forums, universities and various research institutions, academic works, among which are Lotman’s works and this book—all of them are manifestations of culture’s self-awareness and its attempt to comprehend itself as a whole. The metalevel of culture, together with the norm, is located in the center. That is why on the metalevel culture always describes itself as more logical and organized than it is in reality. Moreover, culture may proclaim some of its elements nonexistent if they do not fit its ideal self-portrait. For example, in 1674, the neoclassicist writer and critic Nicolas Boileau published his highly influential The Art of Poetry (L’Art poétique), in which he establishes the norms in theater and literature exactly because they are constantly violated; otherwise his efforts would be absolutely pointless (Lotman 2000b, 613).

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The Own and the Other

The fact that any culture is defined first and foremost by its boundaries actualizes the distinction between the inner space—that which belongs to our culture, “us”—and the outer space, that which belongs to the outside, “them” (Lotman 2003, 107–9). As a consequence, from the position of a given culture the outer space is usually defined as nonculture. There is no lack of examples of this practice: the word barbarian , for instance, appeared in ancient Greece as an echoic term for uncivilized nations that were thought to produce only unintelligible sounds, like “bar-bar.” From the point of view of ancient Greek culture, barbarians simply did not have any language and thus belonged to the sphere of nonculture. Another example is nemets, the word for “German” in many Slavic languages, which literally means “the mute,” “unable to speak,” and previously designated any foreigner. The principle, which is still used in everyday communication, is very simple: if I do not understand your language, I will not assume that you speak some other language (that you belong to some other culture) but will rather deny you the ability to speak (proclaim you noncultural). Nonetheless, the immanent development of culture and production of new information cannot be effectuated without the contact (dialogue) with the exterior, without the inflow of foreign texts (Lotman 2000b, 610). “The outside” can be represented by any element that is extrinsic to the normative frame of a given structure, whether it is genre, tradition, or culture as a whole: Thus, from the position of an outside observer, culture will represent not an immobile, synchronically balanced mechanism, but a dichotomous system, the “work” of which will be realized as the aggression of regularity against the sphere of the unregulated and, in the opposite direction, as the intrusion of the unregulated into the sphere of organization. At different moments of historical development either tendency may prevail. The incorporation into the cultural sphere of texts which have come from outside sometimes proves to be a powerful stimulating factor for cultural development. (Lotman et al. 1975, 60)

In the final analysis, each dialogic situation begins with the delineation of the own and the alien. The intersection of different semiotic codes that are explicitly or implicitly used to produce messages

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creates countless possibilities to delimit the own from the alien, to impose boundaries that would distinguish me from them . In language, for example, different accents, intonation, slang, and other markers have the power to transform an otherwise neutral word into a unique and personal (or group-specific) signifier. Cultures in Dialogue

The intrusions of foreign material are crucial for the sustainable development of culture. Cultures conduct their dialogue almost like human beings, “listening” (receiving texts) and “speaking” (producing texts) to each other, with the exception that these processes happen simultaneously. Nonetheless, in the history of culture, the periods of least activity are usually described as intermissions, so there can be defined several periods when a whole culture or an art form perceives itself in a state of “decline,” usually borrowing patterns from other systems and cultures. For example, Russian literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be generally defined as being “in the perceiving mode,” when many significant literary figures claimed that Russia “had no literature” (Lotman 1977c, 200–201). Another example is the two decades after 1991 when the statements of the death of Russian cinema were repeated quite often. According to Lotman (1990, 144–45), the process of active reception of foreign material usually takes the following pattern of the dialogue: inertness — saturation — text generation . 1. Inertness —Culture receives texts that are very different from its internal organization (i.e., it initially lacks any codes that can satisfactorily decipher them). New texts and textual structures from the periphery invade the core. 2. Saturation —Culture starts elaborating new codes on the basis of these texts. 3. Generation —When these texts are adapted and the language is mastered, the core (because, as we remember, the generator of the texts is located in the center, and the receptor mechanisms on the periphery) begins to actively produce new texts. It is important to note that the process of text transfer between cultures is never one-sided and happens with mutual influence.

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Culture always resists foreign material, trying to assimilate it, to adapt it to its domestic languages. As a result, the text can endure some serious transformations. A good illustration of this process is the story told by Laura Bohannan (1997), when she tested the thesis of universal intelligibility of “the greater tragedies” by retelling Hamlet to the elders of an African tribe. The result of her retelling was that the Shakespearean play was consistently adapted to the norms of the target culture and became completely “Africanized.” Bohannan’s attempts to orient her audience to the source text were considered “wrong” and were “corrected” according to the recipients’ expectations. In other words, in order to perceive Hamlet as a meaningful text, the listeners had to translate it into their domestic cultural idiom. Moreover, the anthropologist herself had to adopt the language of her audience. Clearly enough, it was practically impossible to transfer the text of Hamlet without serious deformations as a result of the great discrepancy between two cultures, two different worldviews. The opposite situation is also possible when a single text is capable of inf luencing the whole structure of the recipient culture. In some cases a new text may serve as a model, a new code for creation of other texts, constituting a whole new genre in culture. In a 1985 article, Lotman demonstrates how the transplantation of foreign cultural schemes changes the state of the system and yields unpredictable results: In 1730, Vasilii Trediakovskii, one of the pioneers of Russian literature, translated into Russian a novel by Paul Tallemant (le Jeune), The Voyage to the Isle of Love (Le Voyage à l’ île d’amour, 1663), one of the many texts of the French préciosité movement. The movement opposed itself to the mainstream c ulture of the French Academy by promoting the hermetic salon culture, closed for the general public and focused on intimate poetic genres and jocular behavior in general. Trediakovskii attempted to transplant the whole cultural phenomenon of salon onto Russian soil, but the transposition of a foreign text isolated from its cultural context produced an unexpected result: in Russia, the translation was received as a model of gallant conduct. On the background of a number of other instructions, regulations, and manuals, which were characteristic of the Petrine epoch, the book became an exemplary novel and a sort of handbook of romantic behavior (Lotman 1992–93, II.23–27).

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An example from a more recent period could be the story of the Fantômas films (a trilogy directed by André Hunebelle, released in 1964–67) and their unexpected reception on Russian soil in 1967. These films, featuring Jean Marais as Fantômas and Louis de Funés as the commissaire Juve, were in fact a parody of the whole James Bond genre that was highly popular in the Western world at that time. When the first two films about Fantômas were released in the USSR, the authorities could not predict that this seemingly harmless comedy would cause a wave of crime among the youth. Gangs of adolescents would scare people, rob kiosks, and perform other acts of vandalism, all with a necessary reference to Fantômas, the master of disguise. The situation became so serious that the authorities had to launch a campaign in the media including a TV program to explain the parodic nature of the film and to call the young troublemakers to order.19 In order to explain why this film has led to such consequences, one will have to look at the general context of Soviet culture at that moment. As stated earlier, the Soviet audience lacked the referential background to which Fantômas referred, and the text was perceived not as a parody but as a new genre. Moreover, it was received in the context of the discourse of underground struggle that was prevalent in the official canon of Soviet culture. As Elena Markasova (2008) persuasively shows, this discourse was dominant in the school education, and for several generations of Soviet people it came as invisible baggage. From a very early age, a young Soviet individual was practically bombarded by the texts in which the heroes were secretly fighting against the czarist regime (as in Valentin Kataev’s Beleet parus odinokii , 1936), the White Army during the Civil War of 1917–23 (as in the film trilogy Neulovimye mstiteli , 1966–71, and the TV film Makar-sledopyt , 1984), and the Nazis during World War II (as in Alexander Fadeev’s novel Molodaia gvardiia , 1946). The most peculiar example of this discourse is Arkadii Gaidar’s iconic story for teenagers Timur i ego komanda (1940), which shows a group of young pioneers who create an underground organization with the goal to secretly help the elderly and war veterans. The very fact that even help is given in secret is quite an illustrative manifestation of the power of underground discourse. The main message the school was supposed to convey to young people was that of self-sacrifice for the right purpose, but it also connoted the idea of justification of

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illegal activities. Paradoxically, the Soviet system consistently taught its citizens the tactics of partisan struggle: how to organize small units of fighters, how to distribute proclamations, how to perform terrorist acts, and so on. No wonder that when the first anti-Soviet youth groups were disclosed, it turned out that they were prepared by the very ideology they were fighting against. In the case of the Fantômas films, the teenagers did not know anything about James Bond and the clichés these films parodied, but what they immediately recognized was the discourse of clandestine struggle. The ideological message (to fight the enemy to the point of self-sacrifice) appeared to be less powerful than a certain behavioral model (of the partisan fight) that youngsters so willingly imitated. This is of course not to say that this discourse was the only frame of reference for the recipients, but it certainly was one of the reasons for this unexpected reaction. Ideology as Delimitation

The tendency toward isolation is not infrequent in culture. Culture’s boundaries are intrinsically associated with the notion of autocommunication, myth, and of course ideology, the metalevel of culture that is oriented primarily toward delineation of borders. Mythological texts constitute the core of certain microcultural elements, the so-called subcultures, especially those with specific hermetic organization. Neo-Nazi groups, totalitarian sects, football hooligans, and many others are oriented toward maintaining rigid and palpable boundaries, exhibiting hostility toward the other. The oppressive regimes and ideologies always attempt to introduce a specific discourse that from a semiotic point of view defies the dialogic principle of communication: repressive ideological discourses use binary logic not as a tool of analysis but as ontological categories of own and alien, right and wrong; they tend to make the boundaries of the culture firm and visible. Furthermore, they more than any other system are oriented toward autocommunication, that is, they focus not on the production of new messages but on the preservation of the existing order. Thus most messages in such a system become ritualistic reaffirmations of the established hierarchies, in this sense making the communication in culture return to its archaic structures. In the context of cultural studies, the concept

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of autocommunication is connected with power and is applied to the political sphere as “a way to recycle old stories while displacing the accents and reconfiguring the self-understanding, cohesion, and resolve of the group from which it emerges and to which it is addressed” (Schönle and Shine 2006, 10). In Soviet times, it was obviously impossible to analyze contemporary ideological discourses in writing. However, to draw parallels between the past and the present and “to read between the lines” was one of the habits of a Soviet educated reader, and that was partially the reason why the works of Lotman and Uspenskii on the bipolar organization of Russian culture could be read as the implicit description of Soviet times as well. In any way, the conceptual methodology used in the works of the TMSS scholars proves valid nowadays (see Schönle 2006 for recent applications of Lotman’s theory in cultural studies). There is a peculiar irony in the fact that in the 1980s the KGB approached Boris Uspenskii with a query if it was possible to apply semiotic models for the description of Soviet reality as well. Uspenskii gave a negative answer with a pretext that there were no methods developed for this task. 20 Rhetoric and Metaphor

We have so far discussed the effects of external factors upon the system. The boundaries exist, however, not only between large semiotic entities such as culture or artistic systems but also in the inner structure of any semiotic system. In the system of literature, for example, these boundaries are located between genres, subgenres, traditions, styles, and, finally, texts. The interposition of different structures generates “hot spots” of semiotizing processes, the points of high tension where new meanings are created. Moreover, this effect is manifested in natural language as well. The mechanism that creates the inner polyglotism of a verbal text (for example, a written text in English) is rhetoric. Lotman does not construct an elaborated theory of rhetoric and metaphor but describes them as an instrument of meaninggeneration. In the 1979 article “Theater Language and Art (On the Problem of Iconic Rhetoric),” which has been incorporated in Universe of the Mind , Lotman (1990, 62) defines rhetoric as “the transfer into one semiotic sphere of the structural principles of

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another.” The rhetorical text is again described as polyglot; it is “a structural unity of two (or more) subtexts encoded with the help of several, mutually untranslatable, codes” (ibid., 57). Rhetoric is thus a tool for merging different artistic systems in one text, for bringing together different types of signs. The rhetorical devices that produce new meanings are tropes. Trope is a rhetorical figure that changes the usual meaning of a word. Theories of tropes are known since Aristotle, and it is usually stated that tropes pertain to literary and poetic language, but in another view they are an indivisible part of language. According to Lotman, a trope is born at the crossing of two languages, at the juxtaposition of two nonequivalent elements. Thus rhetoric, or metaphor in a very general sense, becomes the minimal dialogic device that shifts the normative structure of language and is closely related to translation. Lotman rejects the theory that considers metaphor to be an intrinsic element of language; on the contrary, he argues that metaphor brings “the alien” from the outside (ibid., 49). Metaphor increases the semantic unpredictability of the text, at the same time belonging and not belonging to it. Rhetoric does not arise automatically from language but on the contrary reinterprets and complicates its structure. In a nutshell, Lotman assigns metaphor and tropes in general a role of a special cognitive device that is identical to creative consciousness. Lotman’s assessment of metaphor as a cognitive device rather than a figure of speech concurs with the widely accepted view that all (human) understanding is in principle metaphorical. Metaphors perfuse our life to such an extent that practically every instance of communication, every action and thought, cannot do without metaphors (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). This fact, however, does not necessarily make metaphor part of natural language but instead might be a manifestation of a specific semiotic capacity of humans (see chapter 5). Unpredictable History

We have been thus far analyzing the structure of culture from a synchronic perspective. The diachronic perspective brings to focus the questions of cultural development, periodization, and predictability of history. The word system often implies some structure that is functioning in a predictable manner, at least to a certain extent. On

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the contrary, Lotman consistently asserts that unpredictability is an inherent characteristic of culture. As he argues in an interview for the Semiotic Symposium in Imatra, Finland (1987), “Predictability does not exist. Not in the history of mankind, not in the history of culture, despite several thousand years of experience” (Lotman 1988, 117). I mentioned earlier that unpredictable intrusions do not hinder the development of culture but on the contrary are critical for its vitality: “If the system did develop without these unpredictable external intrusions (i.e., it formed a unique, enclosed structure), then its development would be cyclical. In its ideal form it would represent a continuous repetition” (Lotman 2009, 77). And if culture were totally predictable, it would become redundant and unusable because it would cease to produce anything new. In his last two books, Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture and Culture and Explosion , Lotman focuses on the problem of historical development and attempts to outline an approach to some of the core questions regarding historico-cultural dynamics: • How do semiotic systems correlate with the world that lies beyond their borders? • How can a system develop and yet “remain true to itself ”? • Is historical development in principle predictable? • Do cultures develop in a linear or circular manner? • What is the place of an individual in history and culture? • Finally, how does one understand “the language of history”? Historical Periods?

The description of historical development is closely associated with the problem of periodization. Obviously, the segmentation of the past in epochs and periods is one of the ways to understand and reflect on our place in the world. But are these periods just a metaconstruct, or are they real just like seasons of the year? Either way, how do periods succeed one another and is there a certain law of this succession? The most conventional way is to describe history as a succession of periods. There are also models of cultural development that present a “rhythmical” pattern of structural change in art and ideology. In this scheme, two archetypical styles or types—which may

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be defined, for example, as “classical” versus “romantic”/“Baroque” art—are opposed to each other and alternate in history. Although Lotman in his works often uses the traditional names of the periods, such as romanticism or classicism, he rejects the idea of the mechanistic alternation of “period A” with “period B” and instead introduces a dialogical model of culture where periods of relative stability alternate with periods of destabilization and rapid development (Lotman 2000b, 601–2; 2009, 138–39). Stability is understood here as the state of balance between at least two contrasting tendencies, and destabilization is the period when the balance between these tendencies is disturbed and one of them assumes dominance. During the period of destabilization, the boundaries between life and art can also become transparent: for example, Lotman describes the Renaissance, the age of Baroque and romanticism, as the epochs when art “intrudes imperiously upon everyday life,” aestheticizing it (Lotman 1984e, 159). On the methodological level, Lotman asserts that a synchronic section of a culture does not define the totality of a cultural period, and the homogeneity of a certain period (e.g., classicism, romanticism, etc.) “is a mere illusion resulting from the descriptive language we have adopted” (Lotman 1990, 103). One might notice a contradiction here with Lotman’s own works on cultural typology that allowed for a great degree of generalization (see chapter 3). Explosions in Culture

The periods of destabilization are the periods of cultural explosions. Explosive and gradual processes are mutually complementary, and both are required for the dynamic development of culture: “The destruction of one pole would cause the disappearance of the other” (Lotman 2009, 7). Cultural explosions coexist with gradual processes because different layers and elements of culture develop at different rates (for example, language, politics, fashion, and literature all have various “speeds”; Lotman 2009, 12). An explosion may remain local, influencing only a specific cultural process, but some explosions may affect all levels of culture. The gradual and explosive tendencies can be presented in terms of continuity and discontinuity: continuity represents “a perceived predictability,” and discontinuity is perceived as an abrupt change, an explosion.

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The cultural explosion is defined as a moment of drastic change in the state of the system when its conventional balance gets disturbed. In terms of the core/periphery dichotomy, the explosive moment can be imagined as a gravitational collapse: centripetal forces make peripheral elements burst into the core and virtually destroy the balance of the system. The normative core becomes vague and “shaky,” ceasing to be the tentative point of departure in comprehension, interpretation, and/or creation of texts. At the moment of explosion, the information load of the system drastically increases, and unpredictability increases proportionally. Like a virus that provokes the immune system to respond, the new elements occupy a significant part of the system and make it deploy countermechanisms in order to accommodate the system to a new, changed state. The difference is that for the organism’s survival the virus should be destroyed, whereas culture transforms (changes its structure) every time it receives something foreign, slowly and gradually or rapidly and radically. The metaphor of explosion should not be understood literally, as something that happens very quickly with an immediate effect. The moment of explosion may last several months or years (Lotman 2010, 46n8), depending on the ability of the system to restore stability. The explosion can be viewed as if consisting in three stages. When an unpredictable moment of explosion happens in culture, our modeling consciousness transforms it on three levels: the actual moment of explosion, the realization of the explosion by consciousness, and the moment of redoubling of explosion in the structure of memory, when the moment is replayed retrospectively (Lotman 2009, 150). Note that these stages functionally correspond to the described phases of reception of foreign material (Lotman 1990, 144–45) discussed earlier: inertness, the state of reception of the foreign texts; saturation, development of new languages for adaption of these texts, and production of new texts based on the elaborated languages. Furthermore, explosions inevitably provoke dampening processes, as is especially evident in the example of technological revolutions that are usually depicted as “leaps” forward in the history of mankind (e.g., invention of writing and printing, technology of travel, new weaponry, or the Internet): Every abrupt change in human history releases new forces. The paradox is that movement forward may stimulate the regeneration of

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archaic cultural and psychological models, may give rise both to scientific blessings and to epidemics of mass fear. (Lotman 1991, 798)

Fear and disorientation often follow cultural explosions because explosions break the chain of causality, violating temporal boundaries and creating the field of unpredictability: Each time we speak of unpredictability we have in mind a specific collection of equally probable possibilities from which only one may be realised. In this way, each structural position represents a cluster of variant possibilities. Up to a certain point they appear as indistinguishable synonyms. However, movement from the point of explosion causes them to become more and more dispersed in semantic space. Finally, the moment arrives when they become carriers of semantic difference. (Lotman 2009, 123; see also 1990, 231)

The thesis of equally probable possibilities at the moment of explosion brings to mind the concept of “bifurcation” coined by the physicist and chemist Ilia Prigogine in his works on irreversible processes in thermodynamics. The bifurcation is a point of development of the system when the system reaches the point of “choice” between two possible scenarios; this is a random process that can be compared with a coin toss. Lotman refers to Prigogine’s theory (in this context, he also mentions Isabella Stengers and Ross Ashby) as congenial to his antideterministic view on history and emphasizes the role of unpredictability at the moment of instability: future choices come by chance, not by the laws of causality or probability (Lotman 2009, 14). Impersonal Chance and Individual Choice

The concept of unpredictability has a specific meaning in Lotman’s semiotics. First of all, it should not be confused with such terms as improbability or indeterminacy used in physics and mathematics (e.g., an analogy with the uncertainty principle in physics might be misleading). Secondly, in Lotman’s usage, “unpredictable” should not be confused with “chaotic”: Unpredictability should not, however, be understood as constituting a series of unlimited or undefined possibilities for movement from one state to another. Each moment of explosion has its own collection

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of equally probable possibilities of movement into a sequential state beyond the limits of which lie only those changes which are f lagrantly impossible. (Lotman 2009, 123)

So the explosion is the sphere of explicit unpredictability, so to say. With the same connotations, Lotman uses the word sluchai or sluchainost’ , which can be translated as “chance,” “accident,” or even “random event.” In the context of culture, “chance” does not mean “anything at all” and an accident “is not really so accidental” (cited in Torop 2009, xxx) because at this moment the conscious choice of a thinking individual becomes an active factor of historical development, which differentiates “human systems” from biological and artificial in particular (Lotman 1992–93, I.469–70). Thus the mechanisms of human psychology turn into the mechanisms of history (Lotman 1985a, 98). This is Lotman’s answer to the eternal question whether history is a totally impersonal process or a conscious one in which individuals play their important role: for him, “the interlacing of historical events” and “the randomness of individual human fates” are both (contrasting) elements of the same process (Lotman 2009, 134). In this context, Lotman extensively explored a topic that he termed “the poetics of everyday behavior.” Everyday life is now a broadly studied subject, but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s–70s, this field was practically nonexistent. Lotman dedicated a number of works to this problem, including the book Conversations about Russian Culture, in which he studied the culture and everyday life of Russian nobility (Lotman 1994). One of the well-known cases of these studies is an article on the Decembrists, a group of noblemen who attempted a coup d’état against the newly ascended Czar Nicholas I in 1825 (Lotman 1985a). The coup failed, but as Lotman argues, the cultural importance of the aristocratic revolutionaries was that the Decembrists created a special type of historical and social behavior that was clearly distinct from the norm of that time (Lotman singles out their action-orientedness, frankness of opinions, theatricality of actions, etc.). It is important to note that for Lotman this is not a purely psychological problematic: he studies individual behavior as a historical category because without it the historical process will be presented as overly schematic. Thus he accents the “human factor” as an indivisible part of history, which

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is in apparent contrast with the dogmatic view of historical process as an impersonal force. Another problematic that Lotman explores in these works is the study of how semiotic systems exert influence upon everyday life (e.g., the Decembrists who molded their behavior according to the romantic literary model; see also Lotman 1984a, 1984d, 1984e, 1985b). Lotman notes that the individual component in the description of any process is usually connected with unpredictability: unpredictable processes tend to be described as a succession of names (e.g., literary history), not as an anonymous process (e.g., development of language): “The space of proper names is the space of explosion. It is no accident that historically explosive epochs push ‘great people’ to the surface, i.e., they actualise the world of proper names” (Lotman 2009, 136). In Culture and Explosion , Lotman (2009, 38) discusses a ternary model, “the fool—the wiseman—the madman,” that can be read as the scheme of the relation of individual behavior strategies to the system. In this triad, the wiseman represents the norm and predictable “correct” behavior. The fool is the opposite of the wiseman in the sense that he never follows the rules and constantly violates the norm, thus being totally predictable as well. The madman’s behavior is totally unpredictable because he is an explosive element in the system and exercises much more freedom in violating the rules. So this ternary structure is in fact the product of the analysis of the main opposition “the fool versus the madman” which is reduced to a set of binary oppositions (the wiseman versus the fool, the wiseman versus the madman). Another opposition may be added as well, for example, the holy fool (iurodivyi ) versus the madman (later in the book Lotman mentions the type of iurodivyi as one of the roles that Ivan the Terrible assigns to himself; ibid., 84–85). The madman and the holy fool may be presented both as antonyms and synonyms: from one perspective, the holy fool is as unpredictable as the madman, but from another, his unpredictability is directly opposed to that of the madman. The holy fool is believed to know and to follow some higher truth, inconceivable to others, so he represents a “legitimate madman,” as it were. If the madman is obviously an external, entropic factor of the system, the fool for God is one of its components, although a marginal one. This brings up the question of subjectivity and agency in Lotman’s theory. In one view, the power of individual is seen as an intrusive

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force in the historical process, but in another, individual acts can be regarded as systemic factors. That is why Lotman states that from the systemic perspective, at the moment of explosion the system “acts like an individual.” It may seem at first that for Lotman the systematicity of culture is primary in relation to its agents; in every text and individual he sees the reflection of the system. Nevertheless, there is no contradiction in Lotman’s assertion that culture combines these two antithetical tendencies and that unpredictability and individual choice are closely bound up with the opposing tendency to make events foreseeable, continuous, and comprehensible. It is one of Lotman’s paradoxes that reflects the dynamic nature of culture. For Lotman, the problem “individual versus system” is also a very personal topic that is closely associated with the idea of self-creation. It becomes especially clear in Lotman’s biography of Alexander Pushkin when he discusses the final days of Pushkin and his tragic last duel. Lotman explicitly rejects the common opinion that Pushkin has fallen victim to evil social and political powers. On the contrary, maintains Lotman, Pushkin did not let the circumstances take over his life and emerged victorious in his heroic effort to protect his dignity and his home, even though at a cost of his own life (Lotman 1981, 245–49; see also Boris Egorov 1999, 178–81). It is obvious that, for Lotman, Pushkin appears not only as a role model (Reyfman 1999, 441) but also as the epitome of self-creation. The same idea is central in another of Lotman’s books on the Russian writer, poet, and critic Nikolai Karamzin, the forefather of modern Russian literature, the reformer of Russian language, and also the first Russian historian. Lotman’s reconstruction of Karamzin’s travel to Europe in 1789–90 becomes “a story of self-creation, creation of oneself as another, new person, ‘Russian European’” (Grishakova 2009, 177–78). These books and many other of Lotman’s works on literary history express his strong conviction that the power of an individual is a significant historical force. The Retrospection

If the development of culture is always to an extent unpredictable, how can one analyze its past? Lotman scrutinizes the common assumption that the historical analysis is able to explain (reconstruct) the occurrence of certain events of the past and thus predict

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the future events. Lotman observes that history is not like a clew that one can unroll into a single thread (linear predictability) but rather resembles an avalanche of self-developing live matter (Lotman 1992–93, I.469). In this regard, Lotman (1990, 235; 2009, 126) cites Friedrich Schlegel’s aphorism that the historian is a prophet who predicts the past; that is, the view of a historian is always retrospective, it inevitably transforms the past. In retrospect, that which has occurred is declared uniquely possible, and all other (not taken) paths are declared to be impossible. Furthermore, explosions are transformed into linear development, random acts become regular, and chaotic events turn organized, predictable, and predetermined (Lotman 2009, 16–17). The retrospection also tends not to count the human factor, treating the system mechanistically. Apart from that, there are other factors that influence the gaze of the historian, and it has to do with “the psychological need to alter the past, to introduce corrections and moreover, to treat this corrective process as genuine reality” (Lotman 2009, 127). The transformation of memory does not necessarily occur because of the direct political need to rewrite history in order to make it “ideologically adequate” but also happens in all cultural fields because the retrospection selects certain texts and inexorably excludes others: The conversion of a chain of facts into a text is invariably accompanied by selection; that is, by fixing certain events which are translatable into elements of the text and forgetting others, marked as nonessential. (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 216)

Lotman’s theorizing here is similar to the general idea that the observer inescapably influences the object of the study. The historian’s position, however, is even more unstable because he or she attempts to re-create the object that does not exist as an objective reality. Elsewhere, Lotman (2002, 342–49) repeats the idea that the historian, in order to reconstruct the past events, has to deal with texts, and this complicates the task immensely because one has to distinguish between what is considered to be an event for the author of the document and what is an event in the view of the historian. In this respect, Lotman’s main methodological principle is that any historical reconstruction should not turn into the deterministic, formula-like explanation of the past from the point of view of the present.

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Recent examples of “the power of retrospection” are the historical studies on the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A great number of works that have appeared since then are dedicated to explaining the collapse of the USSR as a logical and historically predetermined event. Ironically, these studies mirrored the practice of the mainstream Soviet historiography, which tended to describe the 1917 revolution as an inevitable event, “elucidating” its “preconditions and prerequisites.” The main problem is that there is no distinction between the metaperspective of a post-Soviet observer and the synchronic perspective of the contemporaries of the Soviet era. Alexei Yurchak (2006) convincingly shows that neither during perestroika nor in the beginning of the 1990s was it possible to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, and most of the terms applied to the Soviet period emerged later in retrospect. As a very recent example, one may mention the events of 2010–11 in North Africa when nobody could predict that the regimes of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya would shutter under the waves of demonstrations. What is especially interesting is that many journalists linked the fall of the Tunisian regime of Ben Ali to the Wikileaks publication of the documents revealing the corruption of Ben Ali’s family. Whether this publication was indeed the spark that provoked unrest all over the country (it is doubtful that Tunisians knew nothing about the corruption in the president’s family), the role of the text as a catalyst of explosive processes is per se very significant. Chapter 2: Key Premises

• Culture is a complex system consisting of several languages or codes. • Text is essentially polyglot and belongs to at least two languages simultaneously. • Any communication act is a translation. • Entropy and unpredictability are an indivisible part of semiotic communicative systems. • Art is a cognitive tool that models reality by its own means. • Any communication is essentially dialogic. • Autocommunication is the homeostatic mechanism of the self. • The primary function of myth is to preserve a certain worldview. • No culture/text/sign exists in isolation.

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• Meaning is the product of the dialogic correlation of one semiotic element with other elements. • The core of culture is the domain of the norm and the culture’s self-portrait. • The tension between the core and the periphery is the basic mechanism of cultural dynamics. • The boundary serves as a filter that adapts the external into the internal. • Rhetoric is a dialogic device that shifts the normative structure of language. • Cultural explosion is the disruption of the conventional balance between conflicting tendencies. • The conscious choice of an individual is one of the factors of historical development. • In retrospect, the gaze of the historian inevitably deforms the past, diminishing the element of unpredictability.

CHAPTER 3

Culture as Text

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his chapter will take a closer look at the concept of text, which is indubitably one of the cornerstones of Lotman’s theory. It may be argued even that Lotman’s semiotics is definitely “textocentrist.” We have seen so far that in Lotman’s terminology the definition of text is much broader than the concept of literary work: it is multimodal and polyglot and transcends the limits of literature, “acquiring semiotic life.”1 Text has also become one of the “trademarks” of the TMSS: Igor Chernov (1988, 13) states that “the text (its structure and functions etc.) has been the main hero of Tartu semiotics through the seventies.” Viacheslav Ivanov (1976a, 3) maintains that the Russian (Soviet) approach to semiotic problems (in which he includes Mikhail Bakhtin and other scholars) is different from the Western semiotics by virtue of focusing on a coherent text, in opposition to following Saussure’s and Peirce’s lead in prioritizing the sign. 2 Mihhail Lotman (2002, 37) notices that the center of Peirce’s semiotics is the sign, whereas in Tartu semiotics, the sign is the product of the analysis. It is remarkable that in all these statements, the concept of text is opposed to the sign, but how exactly do the TMSS scholars define the sign? The Sign: Peirce versus Saussure

As is known, there are two widely accepted models of sign in semiotics, dyadic and triadic. The bilateral model is traditionally attributed to Saussure and the ternary to Peirce. On the general scale, Saussurean and Peircean traditions can be juxtaposed as

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two contrasting approaches, where the Saussurean, structuralist branch is often criticized as linguocentric, restrictive, and confined in its binary logic (see, e.g., Merrell 1992, 3–38). Without going into much detail, it is worthwhile to note that these two models are not necessarily antithetical but can be complementary to one another. Saussure defined sign as a dual entity, consisting of two sides: the signifier (sound pattern—because he was discussing solely linguistic signs) and the signified (concept). This dyadic model has been accepted and reformulated by many authors and is often presented as a dichotomy of form (expression, representation, signans, etc.) and substance (content, meaning, signatum, etc.) of the sign. In Peirce’s (1931–34) analytical philosophy, the sign is triadic: A sign, or representamen , is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object . It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. (2.228).

Peirce’s representamen can be compared with Saussure’s signifier, but the interpretant is only roughly equivalent to the signified. What distinguishes Peirce’s sign from the dyadic type is that the interpretant is a mental model of the sign in the recipient’s mind. Elsewhere, Peirce defines sign as “anything that determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so ad infinitum ” (2.303). This means that a sign is never isolated; it is a link in an endless chain of signs. The concept of interpretant accentuates the relativity of perception as well: one and the same sign may evoke different associations with different individuals. If Saussure described exclusively the signs of natural language, emphasizing the arbitrariness of the sign,3 Peirce came to define 10 trichotomies and 66 classes of signs. However, he never thoroughly described them and they are rarely mentioned in semiotic works.

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The most well known of Peirce’s trichotomies defines three basic types of signs as icon, index, and symbol (2.247–49). • Icon: “Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an icon of anything, in so far it is like that thing and used as a sign of it.” • Index: “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object.” • Symbol: “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object.” In the works of the TMSS, the sign is defined as a rule within Saussure’s tradition. Peirce’s typology is rarely used or referred to; even the trichotomy of symbol, icon, and index is not always used in the Peircean sense. Lotman, for example, actively uses icon and symbol as contrasting types of signs (the first nondiscrete and the second discrete, see chapter 2), practically ignoring index or assigning the precursory function to the iconic sign as well. Moreover, he treats symbol in accordance with the Saussurean tradition, as a conventional sign with elements of iconicity in it (Lotman 1990, 111). Lotman also assigns symbol a function of a specific cultural entity that does not express some definite content but rather refers to a specific semantic field (more details in chapter 4). On the whole, Lotman never wrote exclusively on the concept of sign, nor did he follow the Peircean or Saussurean nomenclature “by the book.” In several articles, Lotman and his colleagues specifically point out that they treat symbol differently from Peirce and define it in the context of myth; symbol is thus a sort of micromyth, and myth is a “symbol with the plot” (Barsukov et al. 1987). In that sense, symbol is close to metaphor because both are products of the translation of myth into the nonmythological sphere: “The mythological text is perceived as symbolic when translated into the category of nonmythological consciousness” (Lotman and Uspenskij 1977, 240–41, 250). Like his colleagues in the TMSS, Lotman (2005, 205) also opposes the text to the sign and distinguishes between two scientific

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traditions: one that goes back to Peirce and Morris and prioritizes the sign as the basic element of semiotic systems, and the other, which he himself advocates, based on Saussure and the Prague school, which focuses on the text and the opposition of langue and parole. Lotman reformulates the Saussurean dichotomy as follows: langue is “an abstract system of invariant relations” (here he is in slight contradiction with Saussure, who actually states that language is no less concrete than speech; Saussure 1966, 15), and parole is “a stream of individual messages” (Lotman 1977d, 13). Therefore, for Lotman the concept of text is of primary importance: it is the basic entity of culture, the product of communication and the main object of semiotic study, and in that sense is opposed to the concept of sign. Moreover, Lotman (1977d, 22; 1964, 140) argues that in art, the artistic text is an integral sign, meaning that it is perceived in its entirety.4 In the 1981 article “Semiotics of Culture and the Concept of Text,” Lotman describes two tendencies in semiotic studies of the last 15 years, one focusing on models and models of models and the other on semiotic functioning of actual texts. In the latter case, the nonsystemic and occasional features are central, whereas the former removes or neutralizes these contradictions through building models. The second tendency also focuses on those semiotic aspects of speech that deviate from the structure of language. Clearly advocating the second approach, Lotman describes semiotics of culture as a discipline that studies the cooperation of differently organized semiotic systems, cultural polyglotism, and the inner asymmetry of the semiotic space (Lotman 2002, 158). The Structure of the Artistic Text

The study of textuality of semiotic systems has always been central for Lotman, and it is no wonder that his first monograph was on the structure of the artistic text. It has already been mentioned that the modeling properties of art make the creative function of the artistic text prevail over the informative one. Apart from that, Lotman (1977d, 51–53) distinguishes three main characteristics of the artistic text: expressedness, delimitedness, and structuredness,5 which are closely associated with one another. Let us see how they are revealed in the text’s structure.

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Text // System

The expressedness of the text manifests itself in the realization of the system in a text. In a 1968 article, Lotman and Piatigorskii introduce the notion of text function , which they define as the text’s social role, “a mutual interrelation between the system, its realization and the text’s addressee-addresser” (Lotman and Pjatigorskij 1977, 125). Here it is again evident that the TMSS semioticians follow the formalists’ footsteps: Tynianov defines the literary function as “the interrelationship of a work with literary order” (Tynjanov 1978, 74) or, in Lotman terms, of a text with the system: The interrelationship of each element with every other in a literary work and with the whole literary system as well may be called the constructional function of the given element. . . . The very existence of a fact as literary depends on its differential quality, that is, on its interrelationship with both literary and extraliterary orders. Thus, its existence depends on its function. (Tynjanov 1978, 68, 69); A work is a system of interrelated factors. The correlation of each given factor with the other factors is its function in relation to the whole system. (Tynianov 2003, 565).

Likewise, the question of definition of literature, which is historically variable, becomes less important than the selection and distinction of literary facts: what text may be called literary, what is considered to be literature and what is not, and so forth. In other words, expressedness is what makes a text a text; it is what allows us to define a text as belonging to any category, be it literature, genre, or any other criterion. In practice it means that any time we communicate with a text—for example, a new novel—we unavoidably compare it on different levels with some superstructures as genre, subgenre, style, and others, thus forming the impression of this concrete text.Because a work of art lies at the intersection of several deciphering codes, “the relationship of text and system in an artistic work is not the automatic realization of an abstract structure in concrete form, but is always a relationship of struggle, tension, and conflict” (Lotman 1976a, 123–24). This assertion is an important correction of the essentially Saussurean idea that texts are concrete manifestations of la langue. Finally, expressedness also refers to “the

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material envelope” of the text: how it is expressed in any medium, be it the sounds of natural language, images on film, or symbols printed on paper or shown on the computer screen. What is essential here is that when a text is expressed in some material substance, this substance becomes semiotized as well, acquiring additional meanings (consider such phrases as “the noble marble of a tombstone” or “the gleam of a glossy magazine”). Structure // Meaning

To be perceived as a semiotic whole, any text must also be organized in a specific way. That is why its elements (signs) are connected with one another not only syntagmatically but in a complex interrelationship on all levels. The text is hierarchically structured, and in its structure signs are packed, as it were, inside one another like matryoshka dolls (Lotman 1977d, 23). The structure of the text is not something accessory to it. “Beauty is information ,” states Lotman (1964, 100) aphoristically, pointing out that the structure of the artistic text already bears some potential information. Furthermore, if the structure of an artistic text is meaningful by itself, an altered structure will convey a different idea (Lotman 1977d, 12). As an example, Lotman describes the concept of repetition that transforms the “normal” system of relations in language into a specific one. Following Tynianov’s works on the peculiarities of the poetic language, Lotman states that the tendency toward repetition is one of the constructive principles of poetry: “The tendency toward repetition can be treated as a principle of verse construction, and the tendency toward conjunction as a principle of prose construction” (Lotman 1977d, 79). 6 If in “normal” everyday communication repetitions are usually perceived as redundant, needed only if the recipient failed to grasp the information, in the artistic text repetitions create a difference; every repetition establishes a correlation that is at the same time a rapprochement, comparison, and juxtaposition. In myth, the function of repetition is even more evident: repetitions are widely used in rituals (not necessarily sacral but also profane that are recurrent in everyday life) and, in a broader sense, magic, where the signs are often identified with objects.7 Lotman (1977d, 132) shows that repetitions in the artistic text are never identical and on the contrary increase the semantic

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diversity of the text and reveal its structure. Lotman (1964, 74) summarizes this principle of “similarity in difference” and “difference in similarity” as an essential formula of art that “represents the two inseparable halves of the unity of consciousness” of human beings (Lotman 2009, 147). Meaning-altering devices manifest themselves on various levels in the artistic text: syntagmatic, phonological, rhythmical. Rhyme is one of the illustrative examples: semantically different words become correlated by a phonological (or sometimes graphical) similarity, which produces the semantic shift. Another meaning-altering structural device in poetry and literature as a whole is rhythm. Tynianov (1965) notably describes rhythm as the constructive factor of verse and introduces the phrase “the compactness of the verse series,” which means that the line structure in verse deforms and subordinates syntactical and semantic connections between words. In general, even “formal” elements of the text structure (e.g., chapters and paragraphs in the written text or montage and other techniques in film) are meaningful and significantly inf luence our perception of texts. Form // Content

The structure of the text is often identified with the text’s form, which in turn raises the question of the relationship between form and content in the text. 8 Already in 1924, Tynianov (1965, 27) pointed out that all spatial analogies (e.g., content is contained in form as wine in a glass) that are applied to the concept of form have connotations of a static and auxiliary function. Lotman and his colleagues fully share the formalist statement of the unity of form and content: “Under the complex operations of meaning-generation language is inseparable from the content it expresses” (Lotman 1990, 15). Indeed, if the content is much more important than the form in which it is concealed, as many would argue, then the whole point of art must be considered futile. Why bother to write a novel if one can summarize its main ideas and make them public? The fact that it does not happen signifies that the author’s idea is inseparable from the artistic structure in which it is expressed, and the artistic text is therefore a complexly constructed meaning (Lotman 1977d, 12; 1976a, 35).9 To prove his point, Lotman cites Leo Tolstoy’s letter

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from 1876 where he replies to the critics’ attempts to formulate the main idea of Anna Karenina :10 If I wanted to say in words all that I intended to express by my novel, then I would rewrite it just as I wrote it from the beginning. . . . I have been guided by the need to assemble ideas linked together for the expression of myself, for each idea expressed by words alone loses its meaning, is terribly diminished, when it is removed from that conjunction in which it is found. (translated in Lotman 1976a, 34)

Tolstoy emphasizes the fact that the meaning of the artistic text cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas. Besides that, Tolstoy, in quite a structuralist vein, unequivocally states that the essence of art is in the “infinite labyrinth of couplings” (stsepleniia), as he puts it, and that the meaning of the artistic text is inseparable from these c onnections—that is, the text’s structure. If we return to scheme 2.6, which depicts the creative function of the text, it becomes clear why Lotman does not call the multiplicity of T2 a plurality of meanings that can be extracted from one text. In this view, meaning is something external to the text, which contradicts the premise of the unity of form and content. To further illustrate this point, let us compare the artistic text with the scientific one as two contrasting types of texts with different creative potentials. If the scientific text “gravitates towards monosemy,” the artistic text, on the contrary, because of its creative function, creates a field of possible interpretations (Lotman 1976a, 122). The nonartistic text can be reduced to a simpler structure that can be considered the invariant meaning of the text. It is possible in the scientific (scholarly) text because “the ideas of a scientist can be extracted from the text they are expressed in,” but “the ideas of an artist are a text ” (Lotman 1990, 237). For example, it is possible to reformulate practically any phrase in this book so that it becomes clearer to the reader without serious alteration of meaning, but if someone translates the phrase “To be or not to be” as “To die or not to die,” something seems to be lost in translation. Here we return to the concept of unpredictability of the text. A scientific text is much less unpredictable because the conventions of scientific metalanguage are much more rigid and its vocabulary is much more limited, which is necessary in order to decrease the

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unpredictability of the message. The unpredictability (of the artistic text) presupposes an interpreter; the scientific text aims at eliminating the mediator. Lotman explains it by the fact that the scientific text “looks at the world as something already made, constructed” and the artistic text creates a world of its own “in which are embedded mechanisms of unpredictable self-development” (Lotman 1990, 236). Put differently, scientific texts are designed primarily to convey information, whereas artistic texts are created to generate new meanings. That is also the reason why artistic texts are focused on autocommunication much more than scientific texts. Myth-Texts versus Plot-Texts

One of the textual typologies that Lotman uses is that of myth-texts versus plot-texts. I have already mentioned that myth is oriented toward recognition and identification and is supposed to maintain a certain worldview. That is why myth-texts are nondiscrete, meaning they do not allow segmentation and analysis. They are perceived as a whole and usually have a cyclic structure. On the contrary, discrete texts (or plot-texts) allow analytical approach, are linear, and may be subdivided into smaller elements. The concept of plot is thus broader and is not limited to narratives; it is an important developmental element of any semiotic system. Myth is a stabilizing element of the system that preserves order, norms, rules, and the world picture in general, whereas plot introduces dynamicity, being a “revolutionary element” in relation to the world picture (Lotman 1977d, 238). A hero in a plot-text is able to cross the established boundaries and break the existing rules, and plot therefore is always superimposed on the basic mythological plotless structure (Lotman 1990, 151). The dichotomy of mythological versus plot-texts is of course ideal. It is hard to find “pure” plotless texts, and Lotman uses this opposition primarily in order to illustrate how the structure of culture is reflected in the artistic texts. In the artistic text, there is always a combination of these two polar tendencies, innovation and recognition. As Lotman (1976a, 127) argues, “To write poetry well is to write both correctly and incorrectly at the same time,” that is, the text has to combine the expected and unexpected elements in it. As a very recent example, one may mention the highest-grossing film in the history of cinematography so far (as of October 2011), James

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Cameron’s Avatar. On the level of story line, the film is a variation of a trivial plot exploited in numerous texts across many cultures about an invader in a foreign civilization (here, a distant planet) who takes the side of the alien people and starts fighting for their freedom. The combination of a highly predictable storyline and innovative, even revolutionary technology of filmmaking combined with CGI and a clever promotion campaign resulted in a mixture of the recognizable and the new that proved to be highly appealing to many viewers around the globe. The Boundaries of the Text

One of the features of the text is seemingly too obvious: the text is delimited. The boundaries of the text, its actual or metaphorical frame, is what distinguishes it from other texts, extratexts, and nontexts. The iconic gesture of photographers and filmmakers—when they form a frame out of their fingers—is especially illustrative here: when a piece of reality is enclosed in a frame, it becomes the artistic text. The presence of the frame influences practically every aspect of its perception: the picture can now mean something. In the cinematographic text, the frame (shots that delineate the boundary of the artistic space; Lotman 1976b, 24) is always marked for the audience. The play of markedness or unmarkedness of the boundary creates additional points of meaning-generation; for example, in the theater, the space of action is usually delimited by the stage and may be deliberately broken in order to produce a new effect on the audience. The concept of the text frame is developed by Boris Uspenskii in his book Poetics of Composition . Uspenskii (1970, 181–214) argues that any text creates a special world with its space and time, the world to which we are related as outside observers and the rules of which we have to accept in order to make sense out of our interaction with it. In addition to that, any text is necessarily perceived in relation to what is situated outside the text and the idea of nontext as well. If the recipient does not notice the frame, the text is considered to be a nontext. There are many anecdotes that are constructed around the problem of invisibility of the frame of an artistic object: when a painted object is taken for a real one, as in the famous contest

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between two renowned Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios,11 or when a cleaner at a modern art museum mistakes an exhibition item for trash and throws it away. Establishing the boundaries of the text naturally plays an important part in its perception: for example, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita , it is easy to neglect the “Foreword” by the fictional John Ray Jr. as seemingly not Nabokov’s text, which significantly influences the perception of the whole story. It is therefore important to consider not only those elements that are present in the text but also those that are not present. Already in the 1962 article “The Problem of Similarity of Art and Life from the Structuralist Point of View,” Lotman (2000a, 383) asserts that the artistic text is always functional, that is, the text is perceived in its relation both to what is being re-created (life, reality) and to what is not being re-created (the multiplicity of possible texts). As we have seen earlier, the idea that the recipient always perceives the text in a dual way—what is encoded in it and what is not—is frequent in Lotman’s works. Elsewhere, Lotman refers to molecular physics and the concept of a hole, which means not just the absence of matter but its absence in a structural position, so the hole can be measured in negative terms (there are “light” and “heavy” holes). In the literary text, there are “light” and “heavy” holes as well; Lotman introduces the term “minus-device,” the meaningful absence of structural elements that influences the perception of the text.12 In the same manner, a senseless combination of sounds will be perceived as such, whereas an unknown word will most likely be perceived as a “minusmeaning.” For example, in Eugene Onegin , some lines and stanzas are omitted, marked by lines of dots, which turns the absence of text into a “minus-text,” a meaningful omission. Finally, in a literary or cinematographic text, some elements may not be shown/described but the reader would logically deduce them. Formally, these elements do not exist in the text, but at the same time they are its intrinsic part, being located “between” the sequences of the film or the passages of the written text. Another type of textual boundary is to be found in narratives. In the narrative text, the boundaries are temporal: regardless of how the plot is constructed, the narrative unfolds in time and its elements are perceived consequently and not simultaneously as, for example, in a picture or sculpture.13 Naturally, the narrative has the beginning and the end, and these structural signposts become semantically loaded

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because they reflect the human tendency to understand reality, to ascribe sense and purpose to it. The beginning and the end introduce segmentation to the continuity of life, making it discrete and meaningful. Lotman returns to the question of relation of art and life and states, “As the concept of art is linked to reality, notions of text/ text boundary are also inextricably incorporated into the problem of life/death” (Lotman 2009, 162). The ending thus becomes a textual counterpart of death in life and gains special importance because it influences the perception of the whole text; it is what makes a text meaningful: “That which is without end is without sense” (ibid., 161). The rejection of the end in a text is no less meaningful and only emphasizes its structural importance, creating a “minus-position,” a meaningful absence. Aside from the classical example of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey,14 open and alternative endings are very common in literary and cinematographic texts and are even dominant in certain genres. Isomorphic Textuality

After our discussion of the structure of culture and the structure of text, we have come to another crucial point of Lotman’s theory, the description of culture as text. If I had to formulate the essence of “the Lotman approach” to culture very generally and in one sentence, I would probably put it as follows: Lotman studies culture as a very complex polyglot text, which is isofunctional and isomorphic to individual intellect. This assumption lies at the basis of Lotman’s theory and makes up the law of cultural isomorphism. According to this principle, culture is both a “collective mind” and an invariant text. We have seen so far that Lotman describes the features and functions of the text similarly to the features and functions of the system. This is not a coincidence but a reflection of the law of isomorphism: culture is studied as an exceptionally complex text that consists of a hierarchy of “texts within the texts” (Lotman 2009, 77). The metaphor of matryoshka doll springs to mind again: the whole is structurally identical to its parts; subsystems are isomorphic to systems (e.g., art is functionally similar to culture, literature to art, etc.), and any text reflects the whole culture in itself. Culture is thus both a mechanism that generates texts and a text itself (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 218).

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The principle of cultural isomorphism is the main ethos of Lotman’s works on Russian cultural history and is brief ly summarized in the conclusion to Conversations about Russian Culture : “History, ref lected in one person, in his life and gesture, is isomorphic to the history of mankind. They are ref lected in one another and are comprehended through one another” (Lotman 1994, 389). In other words, Lotman always sees the general in the particular and vice versa, describing the ref lection of system in a text and the ref lection of culture in the life of an individual. In the concept of the semiosphere, this principle will become even more pronounced. The Invariant

The idea that culture as a whole may be considered a complex text is recurrent in Lotman’s works, occurring in early texts as well as in his last book. What exactly does Lotman mean by that? As Lotman states in 1969, when describing a group of texts that are believed to belong to one culture, it is possible to “obtain a textual construct which will be the invariant of all the texts belonging to the given cultural type.” This “culture text” will also represent the worldview or “the most abstract model of reality” of the given culture (Lotman 2003, 104). Consequently, in the context of autocommunication, culture can be regarded as a message transmitted by the collective “I” of humanity to itself (Lotman 1990, 33). The concept of the invariant has immediate practical applications. Texts that are not familiar to the recipient—a genre or even an artistic system—will be perceived as identical because the attention of the reader will be focused only on the macrostructure, not on individual peculiarities. For an unprepared audience, for example, all religious icons may seem identical, just like all faces of a foreign race might seem identical at first glance. That is why when we describe a group of texts as one text of a higher level, it will contain only the systemic elements or an invariant system of relations (the romantic text, or a comedy, or an artistic text) (Lotman 1977d, 54–55). In textual analysis, it is therefore possible to elucidate groups of texts with a similar invariant structure. The invariants may be found on different levels, from a group of texts to an invariant text of a culture, bringing into focus the concept of genre.

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Genre

Genre is one of the oldest and most disputed concepts in literary criticism, much older than the term “literature” itself. Genre underwent a long process of transformation and evolved from the notion of “literary kinds” to a social and communicative concept that transcended the boundaries of the literary domain. It also moved from the level of static and normative taxonomies to the level of dynamic and structural discursive devices.15 The term is now widely used in sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines; genre theory is an essential part of any discussion on literary history and/or theory and an object of many separate studies.16 Lotman understands genre as an invariant structure of a group of texts. He focuses on the cultural function of genres as an effective mechanism of preservation of information in culture, and he links the concept of genre to the concept of text as a modeling mechanism and to the concept of cultural memory, a capacity of culture to preserve and reproduce information (see the section on collective memory later): The existence of memory in the channel of communication can also be associated with the ref lection, in the structure of genres, of communication features which sometimes can be traced back to the preceding period (the “genre memory,” according to M. M. Baxtin). (Lotman et al. 1975, 67)

Lotman’s notion of the invariant is in many ways congenial to the description of genre in structuralist and modern semiotic theories. The first immediate connection is the mentioned Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale , which studies genre as an invariant structure, and the formalist theory. Tynianov focused on the structural function of genres in the context of literary evolution as a dynamic system in continuous transformation: old genres become obsolete and new ones move to the center from the periphery: The evolution of genres consists in changing the relation between the parts of the system. . . . It usually results in a combination of genres or even the total extinction of certain genres, i.e. the re-organization of the whole genre system. (Tynianov 1977, 301)

Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of speech genres, as we have seen, moved beyond literary boundaries into the sphere of sociology. Tzvetan Todorov’s works drew upon both the formalist theory and Bakhtin’s

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ideas. Todorov (1990, 15) describes the evolution of genres in a rather formalist way: “A new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one, or of several: by inversion, by displacement, by combination.” As genres derive from speech acts, their main function is social: “A genre, whether literary or not, is nothing other than the codification of discursive properties,” which each society codifies in accordance with its ideology (ibid., 18). Institutionalization allows genres to function as mediating devices between writers and readers because genres function as “horizons of expectation” for readers and as “models of writing” for authors. The social function of genres is addressed in the works of such researchers as Carolyn Miller (1984, 159), who defines genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations,” and Anis Bawarshi (2000, 336), who argues that genres are rhetorical environments within which we reproduce practices, situations, and identities. A genre is therefore “the textual instantiation” of a situation (ibid., 357), the textualization of a social event. From this point of view, genres become synonymous with the concept of discourse and are primarily seen as containers of values and ideology.17 The social function of genre highlights the idea of textuality of everyday interactions. However, the overestimation of the social function of genres seems to derive from the (intentional) confusion of literary genres with the types of “recognized social situations.” For instance, it is obvious that the main function of the genre of the Patient Medical History Form, one of Bawarshi’s (2000, 353–54) examples, is rather pragmatic: a sociorhetorical condition is especially designed to facilitate contact between the patient and the doctor. The function of literary genres is much more complex, and even if they can function pragmatically (structuring the productionreception process), the poetic function (or sign function) of genres is more important and cannot be equated with the social one. The sociology of genre focuses on the main participants of the generic situation: the recipient (e.g., the reader) and the sender (e.g., the author). In this view, genre functions as an interpretive context that facilitates—and to a certain degree predetermines—interpretation (cf. the heuristic and constitutive function of genre in Hirsch 1967, 78).18 Many theoreticians emphasize the interpretive (and communicative) function of genres: John Hartley describes them as “the recognized paradigmatic sets into which the total output of a given medium (film, television, writing) is classified”

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(O’Sullivan et al. 1994, 127), John Swales (1990, 46) defines genres as “shared set[s] of communicative purposes,” and Jonathan Culler (2002, 137) speaks of literary competence—“a set of conventions for reading literary texts.” From this perspective, genre appears to be a special code shared by the addresser (creator of a text or a group of texts) and the addressee (recipient of such texts) or a set of conventional rules that serves as a mechanism of predictability of textual structure that shapes the reader’s expectations. Because genre describes the relation between texts and functions as a frame of reference, it evolves to be an intertextual concept (see Wales 2001, 221). The mechanisms of intertextuality come to the fore especially in the context of artistic production/reception and are inextricably intertwined with each other. The basic intertextual mechanisms can be generally defined as imitation and transformation (e.g., pastiche and parody).19 These two processes were described in Tynianov’s influential works on parody as a powerful device that enables literary evolution and accounts for the shifts in literary systems. Tynianov differentiates between the parodic function ( parodiinaia funktsiia) and the parodistic form ( parodichnaia forma) where the latter is “the use of parodistic forms in a non-parodic function,” as when a work is taken as a model (maket) for creation of a new work (Tynianov 1977, 290). 20 It is worthwhile to note that in Tynianov’s view, as well as in many modern works on parody, the intertext becomes not so much a matter of the writer’s intention as of the reader’s perception. To summarize all the aforesaid, Lotman’s understanding of genre as an invariant intertextual structure is one of the key notions in the description of textuality of culture. In this context, genre can be finally defined as a certain dynamic model of the structural organization of any text and an intertextual link between the participants of the dialogic situation (Semenenko 2004, 137). It is a device that is used both as a modeling mechanism (used by the author for production of texts) and as a form of identification of texts by the recipient (genre helps predict the text’s structure and even its content). Genres also make the readers sensitive to the appearance of new forms in literature and the process of their transformation. We can depict this relationship in a form of inverted pyramid, where the tip represents a single text and the invariants are located according to the level of generalization, or again as a set of matryoshkas inserted into one another (figure 3.1).

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Culture

System (Literature)

Genre (Tragedy)

Text (Hamlet)

Figure 3.1

The relation of text to culture.

Hamlet as Model

The relation between genres and texts is subject to mutual inf luence, and the example of Hamlet is especially illustrative here. For more than 400 years, Hamlet manages to survive the oblivion, successfully securing its place in the literary canon of many countries. It is no longer a “normal” text; after centuries of exceptional popularity, it has come to function as a model for creation of other texts as well. It has spawned numerous translations of the play into different languages and thousands of films, theater productions, parodies, and other texts that somehow refer to the Shakespearean classic. The modeling function of Hamlet is especially noticeable in Hamlet production: the theater director Daniel Mesguich notices that when staging Hamlet , one stages “the fact that it is a classic” (quoted in Heylen 1993, 124). That is, the director always has to deal with the history of the play’s production and criticism in order to present something innovatory to the audience. Given that the audience

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already expects something new, a traditional production of Hamlet may evoke a negative reaction. It is enough to look through the latest reviews of any Hamlet production to see that in most cases the critic’s attention is focused on certain “nodal points” of the play and on the interpretation of these episodes by the director and/or actor(s). For example, Peter Holland (1997) describes several performances of Hamlet on the English stage in the 1990s with reference to some particularly recognizable scenes and their interpretations. Performances are also evaluated along the axis of their originality and/or connection to a certain tradition: whether or not the contrast between dramatic text and theatrical performance produced the desired effect on the audience. One of the consequences of the text’s canonization is that its structure can be used as a framework for referring to sociocultural events: the text becomes a sort of “container” filled with a new content every single time. How Hamlet is perceived as such a structure is well illustrated by usage of the play in a political context, in which the conflict between the hero and “them” becomes dominant: Hamlet is portrayed as a rebel opposing the authorities (or masses/ mainstream, etc.) and is used as a symbol of nonconformism, liberal thinking, and dissidence. It appeared in contexts only remotely connected with the tragedy, to the point that sometimes the tragedy was used as a form of Aesopian language, a canonized structure where the creators and translators could express their critique or protest (see Semenenko 2007, 141–42). All these examples show how Hamlet serves as a model for creation of other texts, being a sort of “one-text genre.” It is obvious now that the process of genre formation consists of the combination and transformation of existing genres not only on the upper level of categories, models, and paradigms but on the level of concrete texts as well. The usual perception of genres as a system that works deductively—that is, from the general to the particular—must be complemented by the mechanism of canonization, when a unique text moves on to the upper level of models and functions as a specific (sub)genre, as it happened to the Shakespearean classic. This idea was in a sense anticipated by Tynianov (1977, 210–12)—who argues that automatization of an obsolete device results in the production of the new model, which in turn becomes a prototype for further texts—and also by Tzvetan Todorov (1990, 15), who states that “no sooner is [the work]

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recognized in its exceptional status than the work becomes a rule.” Also, in his earlier book The Fantastic, Todorov (1975, 7) formulates the principle of analysis that Lotman applied in his works as well: “Every literary study must participate in a double movement: from the particular work to literature generally (or genre), and from literature generally (from genre) to the particular work.” Typology of Cultures

If cultures can be described as texts, it is then possible to classify them according to the principles of their textual structure, to create a sort of “vocabulary” of cultural idioms. The problem of typology of cultures—the classification of the main culture types and the description of developmental dynamicity of semiotic systems—is one of the central topics of interest for the TMSS scholars. Lotman has published several works on this problem, including the collection Essays on the Typology of Culture (1970). In one of his first articles on this problem in 1967, a “die-hard” structuralist approach is evident. Lotman formulates the goals of the typology of culture as 1) description of the main types of cultural codes on the basis of which the “languages” of individual cultures, with their comparative characteristics, take shape; 2) determination of the universals of human culture; 3) construction of a single system of typological characteristics relating to the fundamental cultural codes and universal traits that constitute the general structure of human culture. (Lotman 1977b, 214)

Apart from that, Lotman formulates the future task of cultural typology as “the creation of a grammar of cultural languages” (ibid., 216). Lotman argues that the number of fundamental cultural types is relatively small and the historical diversity of cultures is the result of their complex combinations. This static approach is of course in stark contrast with the parallel attempt to describe the dynamic variety of cultures (Thompson 1977, 236). As an example of contrasting cultural codes, Lotman describes the cultures of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment: the former is based on the iconic relation between the sign and its content and the latter on the conventional relation. If medieval culture is highly semiotized and the sign is

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placed at the top of cultural hierarchy, Enlightenment disapproves of the very principle of signs, emphasizing their conventionality. The icon/symbol opposition remains at the center in another article, coauthored with Boris Uspenskii in 1971, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.” Lotman continues the description of cultural grammars, paying special attention to the relation of culture to the sign and the process of signification. This principle—what kind of invariant text a culture constructs of itself—is basically the main criterion of the comparative description of cultures. The authors distinguish between the expression-oriented cultures and the content-oriented cultures: “Cultures directed primarily towards expression have this conception of themselves as a correct text (or aggregate of texts) whereas cultures directed mainly towards content see themselves as a system of rules” (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 218). Furthermore, these two types of culture may be defined as oriented toward the opposite types of signs: for the expression-oriented cultures, the ritual (which is based on the iconic, one-to-one correlation of the level of content with the level of expression) is the main type of sign, whereas for content-oriented cultures it is the symbol (the arbitrary/conventional correlation). The ritual presupposes the content to be inseparable from its expression, and therefore, to the expression-oriented culture, “the entire world can appear as a sort of text consisting of various kinds of signs, where content is predetermined and it is only necessary to know the language; that is, to know the relation between the elements of expression and content” (ibid., 217). In such a culture, the ritualized forms of behavior and the notion of correct designation constitute the core of the system. As an example, the authors refer to the medieval ideology, but it is obvious that the official Soviet culture can also be characterized in exactly the same way (Lepik 2008, 66–68). In the opposite type of cultures, “some degree of freedom is assumed both in the choice of content and in its relation to expression” (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 218). Furthermore, in its selfdescription, the content-oriented culture opposes itself to chaos/ entropy/nonculture and therefore sees chaos as the sphere for its potential expansion, whereas the expression-oriented culture constructs the image of the other as anticulture or the wrong culture and therefore attempts to separate itself from it by all means. In summary, the outline of these two types can be presented in the oppositions listed in table 3.1.

Culture as Text Table 3.1

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Typology of cultures

Culture 1

Culture 2

• • • •

• • • •

Expression-oriented Correct text Ritual Opposed to anticulture (correct vs. incorrect) • Inward isolation

Content-oriented Set of rules Symbol Opposed to nonculture (organized vs. unorganized) • Outward expansion

Although cultural typology allows effectively elucidating differences between cultures, the problems with this contrasting description are obvious. In different works, the members of the opposition become confused with one another: if in one article (“Canonical Art as the Information Paradox,” 1973) the neoclassicist and medieval cultures belong to the same “aesthetics of identity” type, in another article (“On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” 1971), they are contrasted: the neoclassicist model is based on the orientation toward rules and the medieval toward texts. Furthermore, neoclassicism is also opposed to European realism of the nineteenth century: both cultures require rules as “a minimal condition for the creation of culture,” but in the neoclassicist model the critic is much higher in the hierarchy than the creator of the text, whereas in the realist model the critic follows the writer (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 219). In other words, cultural types may be classified differently, depending on which characteristics are taken as the main criteria for description. For instance, in the article “Canonical Art as the Information Paradox,” Lotman differentiates between cultures oriented toward following/executing the rules (ritualized art, the “aesthetics of identity” that characterizes folklore, the Middle Ages, and neoclassicism) and cultures oriented toward breaking canons (“aesthetics of contrast”; e.g., the nineteenth-century culture) (Lotman 2000a, 437; cf. Lotman 1977d, 290). What is especially noteworthy in these works on cultural typology is that Lotman and his colleagues use the words epoch, culture, ideology, and consciousness interchangeably, with the meaning of a typical worldview of a certain social group. Given that the goal of typological description is to elucidate the similarities and differences between cultures according to the principle of construction of their semiotic sphere, the typology of cultures is not limited to historical

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periods. For example, the type of “medieval consciousness” can refer to a specific period (the Middle Ages or neoclassicism, for example) and even not-time-bound entities such as folklore. It is therefore obvious that the “culture one” type in table 3.1 resembles what Lotman, Uspenskii, and other TMSS scholars used to call the mythological consciousness. Another feature of these articles is that the opposing, “modern” consciousness is usually described quite vaguely and in less detail, serving as a necessary opposition for the first element of the dichotomy. On the whole, it is evident here how Lotman approaches culture as an expression of collective consciousness, which brings cultural analysis to the boundary with sociology and psychology. This approach will become more evident in his latest works, which will be discussed in detail in chapters 4 and 5. In general, the main problem of the invariant is the universalistic generalization that tends to ignore the deviations from the norm, thus focusing entirely on the ideal self-portrait of culture. This view nullifies the differences between concrete texts, reducing them to some common denominator, which is the problem that Lotman himself mentioned in his works. Furthermore, the method of description of culture types in binary oppositions constitutes yet another problem that requires a separate excursus. Excursus 2: The Problem of Binarism

The notion of binary opposition is one of the most disputed ones in structuralism and semiotics. Opposition as a universal principle of description and cognition has been propagated by many scholars (Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Lyons, Halle, etc.) and can be traced back to Aristotle. In the works of the TMSS scholars, as we have seen, dual models are a significant part of their terminology. It is, however, important to distinguish between the two sides of this concept: binarism as, so to say, an intrinsic, ontological quality of any semiotic system and binarism as the principle of semiotic analysis and interpretation. In the first case it is a prescriptive concept, and in the second a descriptive one, but in many structuralist (and semiotic) works it is sometimes difficult to distinguish these two poles. In the interpretation/description of any continuum (such phenomena as time, culture, language, etc.), binary oppositions become elementary devices for reducing the continuous to the

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discrete (Culler 2002, 16). The principle of opposition is also a necessary instrument of cognition: the most trivial way of making sense of a new phenomenon, alongside comparing it to something (defining it through synonyms), is to define it negatively, as opposite to something: “A is like B but also opposed to C.” In one of his earliest works, Lotman (1977d, 265) observed that only that which has an antithesis is meaningful—that is, he emphasized the cognitive function of binarism. The greatest advantage and at the same time danger of binarism “lies in the fact that it permits one to classify anything” because practically any two elements can be placed in a binary relation (Culler 2002, 17). Apart from that, a classification just for the sake of classification never explains anything. One of the pitfalls of binarism is that when operating exclusively within binary logic, the deduced elements may be assigned some functions they do not possess in reality, and some other functions of the studied phenomena may be totally ignored. Consequently, the analysis may yield oversimplified and/or biased results. Lotman often used oppositions in the structuralist sense, for example, describing the structure of the plot as a complex of oppositions: “us/them,” “up/down,” and so on. In Universe of the Mind , Lotman defines binarism as “a principle which is realized in plurality since every newly-formed language is in its turn subdivided on a binary principle” (Lotman 1990, 124). Here Lotman speaks of a growing number of art languages that appear as a result of inner subdivision, giving an example of cinema that can be subdivided into documentary films, entertainment films, cartoon films, TV, and so forth. So in this context, binarism must be understood as multiplicity that can be reduced to binary models. Although Lotman does not abandon the idea of binarism in favor of the principle of plurality and polyglotism, I would suggest that, in his idiom, this concept is less structuralist and more formalist, close to the concept of differential quality (see a similar proposition by Shukman 1977, 39). The multidimensional character of culture can therefore be represented by a diagram where each of the main oppositions is an axis with uncountable intermediate variants that in their turn can relate to other elements of the system. In Lotman’s semiotics, binarism thus can be described as the principle of differentiation in the context of the postulate that the text

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belongs to at least a pair of languages simultaneously. In this context, one might note that if a language that consists of only one element cannot exist, a pair of elements is already sufficient for creation of a language that can produce and transfer information; a vivid example of this is the binary code, which consists of two elements represented by the digits 0 and 1. In his late works, Lotman introduces ternary models and opposes them to binary ones. In one of his articles, Lotman (1992, 85–86) discusses the difference between binary and ternary models and states that if the first proceed from models to reality, the second move from reality to models. However, it appears that a ternary model is a combination of at least two binary models and is therefore contradictory, in contrast to binary models that are consistent. The opposition of ternary versus binary structures is central in the last typology of cultures that Lotman develops in Culture and Explosion . Lotman contends that there are cultures in which the explosive model of development dominates and there are cultures in which gradual changes are more evident. Consequently, the former are based on dual models and the latter on ternary. This is a followup to an earlier 1977 article by Lotman and Uspenskii in which they analyze the history of Russian culture up to the end of the eighteenth century as based on dual models. A culture dominated by binary structures is extremely polarized, with sharp boundaries between the poles and “without an axiologically neutral zone” (Lotman and Uspensky 1985, 31). In such a binary system, an abrupt change “penetrates life in its entirety” and tends to destroy the order in its attempt to realize some unrealizable ideal, whereas ternary structures adapt the ideal to reality, bringing new elements from the periphery (Lotman 2009, 166). Lotman illustrates this point with the example of Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century, when “the simultaneous turn to terror tactics by both government and democrats” triggered the explosive events of the beginning of the twentieth century (ibid., 169). As an example of a binary structure that transforms into a ternary one, Lotman refers to the transition period of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Russia (perestroika, the collapse of the USSR, and the independence of former Soviet republics). This is a rather precarious point of Lotman’s theorizing because, on the one hand, it is directly linked to the turbulent period of the 1990s to which Lotman was

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a witness, and on the other, it treats the proposed dichotomy too loosely and generally. Russia as a culture based on dual structures is opposed to the Western ternary culture, and the implied difference between them is that in the latter there is a “neutral zone” between the extremes, which mitigates revolutionary tendencies and facilitates gradual evolution of the system. It is also remarkable that this essentially historiosophical problem is presented as yet another opposition of binary versus ternary, which comes quite abruptly in the book and is not sufficiently developed. Apparently, in the last chapters of Culture and Explosion , Lotman explored new perspectives that were unfortunately never meant to materialize. Internet as a Metatext of Culture

As a side note in this chapter, I may separately mention that Lotman’s study of textuality of culture also emphasizes how saturated with texts and textual structures our life is. To indicate a topic for further exploration of this area, the Internet should be mentioned as a suitable candidate. The Internet can be seen as a model of culture that copies (translates) its structures with an additional degree of organization and can therefore be considered a global metatext of culture, one of its dynamic self-portraits. The very term hypertext — which signifies any text in digital form—reflects the connotations of a more complex, multidimensional structure that exhibits greater flexibility and connectivity than “traditional” texts. The interactive participation of the users with the hypertext also makes it a dynamic rather than static structure and the center of the Internet activity. In the same manner, the textuality of social interactions, which may be implicit or blurred “in real life,” in the Internet becomes more palpable and explicit, sometimes especially emphasized. This phenomenon is especially evident in social networks, which provide various formats of communication and self-presentation but also offer some features that simply do not exist in real life. On the whole, the exceptional popularity of Facebook, for example, can be explained by the fact that the offered structure of social interaction is much more organized than in reality, which makes it easier to interconnect and receive feedback, to live one’s social life in general. The formats of communication imposed by social networks can be quite restrictive, thus seriously limiting users’ possibilities. Nonetheless, despite

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these limitations, the most important feature of social networks is that they offer a unique opportunity to modify one’s personality and even to create multiple personalities with various features; in other words, they are erasing the boundary between the artistic and nonartistic sphere. Culture as Collective Memory

The description of textuality of culture cannot be full without the concept of collective memory, which functions first and foremost as a mechanism of self-preservation and self-propagation of culture. Collective memory rests on texts, and from an early age, we absorb different texts that shape our semiotic space: family stories, tales, school and university curricula, media stories, and many other textual entities that compose our individual cultures. In the article “The Concept of Memory from Culturological Perspective” (1985), Lotman defines culture as collective intellect and collective memory, or a mechanism that preserves and transfers messages, simultaneously producing new ones (Lotman 1992–93, I.200–202; see also Lotman 1979; Lotman and Uspensky 1978; Lotman and Uspensky 1985, 65). Cultural memory is panchronic and defies the division of time into past, present, and future; because memory plays an active role in creation of new texts, “the past” in culture has not really passed, but it is “always there.” Consequently, culture in principle cannot repeat its past because it constantly re-creates it. Semiotic systems are designed to preserve information in quite a peculiar manner: memory appears to be “not an immobile store, but an apparatus for active and ever new modelling” (Lotman 1979, 95; see also Lotman 1990, 272). That is why meanings in cultural memory are not stored statically, like books in the library or bytes on the hard drive, but transfigure, serving as an active background for decoding and interpreting texts. As is obvious, practically any text that is not quickly forgotten and is “stored” in the memory of an individual is not preserved exactly in the same form because individual memory is in the state of constant transformation. Memories (i.e., texts), therefore, are not “retrieved” but are dynamically re-created every single time. 21 Just like individual memory, the memorizing mechanisms of collective memory vary according to their function: for example,

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writing (and also various audio- and video-recording techniques) is a form of memorizing and one of the most important means of preservation of discrete events, whereas oral tradition focuses on nondiscrete texts. Writing (recording of fixed texts in general) concentrates on memorizing anomalous and unusual occurrences, thus accumulating the historical material, and oral tradition focuses on preservation of information about the established order and is therefore mythological (Lotman 1990, 246). Writing and oral tradition are bound up with natural language, but apart from these, there are many other systems that play an equally important role in culture’s dynamics (especially in the era of digital media that becomes more and more oriented toward audiovisual texts). It is also apposite to note that the Internet in many ways dissolves the boundary between the written and oral traditions and questions the criteria of fixedness of the text. Another feature of cultural memory that Lotman has always emphasized is its nonhereditary nature (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 213; Lotman 1977b, 213; Lotman 2000b, 395, 652). That means that it is a social phenomenon and does not come as an “invisible package” with innate codes and structures, as the adherents of the “naturalistic” approach would argue (see Zylko 2001, 393). This question becomes topical in the discussion of the origin of language and culture, and in that context, Lotman emphasizes the historical variability of cultures and the unpredictability of their development. As any language contains many dialects, jargons, and idiolects, culture too consists of many “dialects of memory” that are specific to different groups or “subcultures.” These cultural dialects are organized differently; for instance, one can distinguish between texts belonging to “high culture,” or to “emo culture,” or even to the culture of an individual family. The boundaries between these subgroups may often be quite vague, but certain groups may exhibit clear hermetic properties, producing almost esoteric texts, incomprehensible to other cultural collectives. Such texts, when surpassing their original cultural boundaries, might need supplementary material or metatexts that would make them accessible to other collectives (commentaries, lexicons, textbooks, translations, etc.). In general, every instance of text interpretation presupposes the common memory of the addresser and the addressee, which significantly affects reception: the less memory is shared, the more

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creative is the decoding process on the part of the addressee. The text that meets its designated audience is comprehended faster and requires less interpretation. In the 1977 article “The Text and the Structure of Its Audience,” Lotman (1982) affirms that not only the text is transformed in the process of transfer from the addresser to the addressee, but the addressee is shaped by the text as well. This happens because any text has the image of the recipient imbedded in it; it has a “presumption of author and audience” that does not always coincide with the real author and the real audience. The text lies at the intersection between the author and the reader, which makes it “a functional rather than a stable object with constant properties” (Lotman 2009, 115). Functionality of the text also means that it is not a fixed object but a dynamic one: the text is inevitably included in some context, diachronic (historical) and/or synchronic (conventional); the author’s context, status, and ideology; and the reader’s context, competence, and ideology. The reader therefore does not really “decode the text” but is positioned in a dialogical relationship with it and is shaped by the text as well. One of the crucial properties of collective memory is, paradoxically, forgetting. Just as nonunderstanding is equally important for communication, just as individual memory normally cannot function without forgetting mechanisms, the possibility to forget is also crucial for the dynamic development of culture: Culture continually excludes certain texts. The history of the destruction of texts, of the purging of texts from the reserves of the collective memory, proceeds alongside the history of the creation of new texts. Every new movement in art revokes the authority of the texts by which preceding epochs oriented themselves, by transferring them into the category of nontexts, texts of a different level, or by physically destroying them. Culture by its very essence is against forgetting. It overcomes forgetting, turning it into one of the mechanisms of memory. (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 216)

Apart from forgetting texts (sometimes as a result of “natural” causes, sometimes deliberately, through censorship and different restrictions imposed on text production and distribution), the process of “recollection” of forgotten texts is also part of cultural mnemonic processes. One of the most spectacular cases of such recollection is the

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“rediscovery” of Shakespeare by German romantics at the end of the eighteenth century when the Bard was made the center of the European literary canon. In the seventeenth century, as is known, Shakespeare was found problematic by many neoclassicist authors, and the English theater in general was considered to be in the margin of the European canon. 22 Automatization

Automatization is one of the features of individual memory that is reflected in collective memory as well. It is a truism that any action, when repeated a number of times, becomes automatic. For example, when we are learning to dance or to fence, first we learn certain movements, reflecting upon them and trying to “understand” them; with time, and after a number of repetitions, we perform all of these actions almost automatically. A similar principle is valid for nonmotor memories as well: to understand something is to adapt the new information to the old one, activated at this particular time. The difference is that instead of performing a sequence of motor actions, we establish a relation between the texts and signs of numerous semiotic systems. When we receive a new text, we “connect” it to our personal knowledge and cultural competence, our semiosphere (see chapter 4). The more similar texts we receive, the more automatized becomes this relation; we “understand” (i.e., translate) texts faster, and they become more and more predictable. Meeting someone is a typical example: the initial stage of such an interaction is almost ritualistic, close to automatic, because possible messages are quite limited and often strictly codified. Comprehension and understanding (i.e., generation of meaning) can thus be depicted as a process of establishment of the correspondence between the new and the known elements of our cultural memory (let us reiterate Lotman’s statement: “Understanding is always a translation of an unknown object into the language of familiar concepts” [Lotman 2010, 166]). Since meaning directly depends on the principle of differentiation, the faster the relation between the elements is established, the more automatized meanings become, inevitably “washing out” (the case of metaphors is illustrative here). One may also mention the formalists who notably described the center-periphery relationship in terms of automatization: the center

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is occupied by most repeatable, automatized, and predictable elements and the periphery with more diffusive ones. Remembering and, in a broad sense, understanding is not a process of addition of an item to a registry but a complex interaction of a new item with those stored in memory, the continuous process of disruption and restoration of our personal cultural homeostasis. In a way, to understand means to remember something that one did not know. It may be also argued that this dynamics is what makes up the conscious experience of the human being. In this context, the mythological text could be defined as one that is to a high degree automatized. Automatization creates mythologies, so the power of discourse mentioned earlier hides exactly in the exploitation of automatized cultural codes that allow for manipulation and control. Memory of the Text

Cultural memory consists of texts, but, as we know, the texts are not stored in memory like books on the shelf but rather function as active links that connect them with other texts, codes, and contexts. That is why the mnemonic function of the text appears to be no less important than the informative and creative ones. The mnemonic function of the text accentuates its intertextual quality: every text is packed with meanings and links to other texts, not necessarily as direct citations or references but often as part of the text’s “meaningspace”: The sum of the contexts in which a given text acquires interpretation and which are in a way incorporated in it may be termed the text’s memory. This meaning-space created by the text around itself enters into relationship with the cultural memory (tradition) already formed in the consciousness of the audience. As a result the text acquires semiotic life. . . . Nowadays Hamlet is not just a play by Shakespeare, but it is also the memory of all its interpretations, and what is more, it is also the memory of all those historical events which occurred outside the text but with which Shakespeare’s text can evoke associations. (Lotman 1990, 18–19)

It is not surprising that Lotman uses Hamlet as an example of the text with the great “burden” of cultural memory. This vast baggage does

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not hinder the text’s perpetuation through time but on the contrary greatly facilitates its preservation in culture. Hamlet has become an integral part of various cultures, and one can hardly find a person in Europe and in most of the world who has never heard about the Prince of Denmark. Hamlet ’s persistence in cultural memory is due to a number of factors, and the most important of them is the process that can be termed hypersemiotization, the expansion of the text into various semiotic modes and the reduction of the text to different types of signs. One of the factors is the early separation of Hamlet the character from Hamlet the play. The hero’s personality had become such a commonplace that the hero became dissociated from his Shakespearean context (Conklin 1957, 23). This in turn gave birth to the phenomenon of Hamletism, 23 a tendency to interpret Hamlet as a symbol, which embodies certain philosophical, social, psychological, or political characteristics and represents a certain type of behavior. It is normally stated that such representation is not necessarily identified with the context of Shakespeare’s tragedy, and therefore the symbol “lives on its own” as a sort of universal sociopsychological archetype. As Iurii Levin (1978, 192) rightly points out, the nature of Hamletism is different from the practice of calling a jealous husband Othello or a bloody tyrant Richard III. What is interpreted is actually Hamlet’s character, not the play’s story line. The phenomenon of Hamletism is part of what Lotman described as the mythological layer of culture. As we remember, myth is the space of proper names and recognizable types that become such a natural part of our cultural vocabulary that we classify into them some other meaningful events of reality. Thus Hamlet the character has come to function as a conventional sign, the meaning of which can vary in time and which is subject to continual change. As in any symbol, the relation between the signifier and the signified is conventional—that is, there is no inherent connection between them—and at the same time, this symbol is not arbitrary but culturally motivated. The symbolic meaning can vary in time, but there are some features that are stable even in different representations, and they originate from (or can be reduced to) a core formula that more or less fully comprises the invariant structure of Hamletism: Hamlet is a lonely (and tragic) hero in conflict with the world and/or himself who finds himself in a position of choice,

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whether he is put there by the circumstances or by himself. Also, when Hamlet is used as a metaphoric referent, depending on the context, it will most probably include the semantic fields of alienation, opposition, doubt, melancholy, oppression, and so on. During four centuries, numerous interpretations attempted to solve the assumed mystery of Hamlet’s character and the controversy of his actions. Hamlet wore many masks through time: he has been gentle and melancholic, ref lective and irresolute, passionate and brutal; he has been an avenger and a “superf luous man,” an intellectual and a freethinker, a Philistine and a decadent, a maverick, a messiah, and “despair personified.” The crucial point here is that Hamletism and Hamlet the play cannot be separated as completely different entities, one as “the text proper” and the other as “the psychological (cultural) type.” One the contrary, they are interrelated: the text’s canonical status strongly depends on Hamletism; every new symbolic meaning assigned to Hamlet means that the memory about the text is active. This inevitably inf luences the production, translation, and interpretation of the text, and thus Hamletism becomes one of the means by which the text is expanded through time, a powerful (extra)textual mechanism that shapes the perception of the text by the recipient and establishes the frame of reference in which the production-reception process occurs.

Figure 3.2

The “Poor Yorick” icon.

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In my study of Hamlet textuality (Semenenko 2007), I have demonstrated that in cultural memory Hamlet the text is represented in the form of three basic types of sign: symbolic signs (as in the prior examples, e.g., Hamlet as a “superfluous man”), the precursory signs (indices), and iconic signs. The most known index of the tragedy is of course the line “To be or not to be.” Referring to the text by synecdoche, it is used most often among other phrases that also acquired idiomatic status and serve as verbal indices of Hamlet the text, such as “I must be cruel only to be kind,” “Poor Yorick!,” “Gertrude, do not drink,” and others. The most recognizable iconic sign is undoubtedly the depiction of a man holding the skull (of Yorick) in front of him (see figure 3.2).24 All of these signs comprise the complex semiotic entity [Hamlet]— written in brackets to separate it from Hamlet the character and Hamlet the text. In Lotman’s terminology, it corresponds to “the meaning-space” that the text creates around itself in cultural memory (Lotman 1990, 18). Figure 3.3 best illustrates this relation. This picture is of course rather idealized because in reality these signs often overlap: they may in various degrees, and sometimes indirectly, refer to one another, to the actual text of the tragedy, and

Symbol Hamlet the character representing melancholy, reflection, messianism, etc.

Icon the “poor Yorick’’ icon, etc.

Figure 3.3

[Hamlet] the sign.

Index “To be of not to be’ etc.

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to other signs. Apart from that, they rarely function as “pure” icons, indices, or symbols but on the contrary combine all three functions. Peirce (1931–34, 4.448) argued that the most perfect sign is “in which the iconic, indicative, and symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible.” There are no objective criteria that define “the perfectness” of the sign, but it is without doubt that if some semiotic entity is represented in all three modes, it has better chances to survive in cultural memory. After all, one of the main functions of all the representations of [Hamlet] is to activate the collective memory about the text in the consciousness of the recipient. The question that may be anticipated here is how we can equate the reduced or “condensed” representations with the actual text of the tragedy. Indeed, Hamlet seems to be known by “everyone,” but how exactly is it known? How to distinguish among knowing a text, knowing about a text, or not knowing it? What are the criteria for text knowledge? To remember its every word? This is of course possible, but very uncommon and absolutely unnecessary. To remember the plot? But this knowledge can be gained from a third party. To have read the book at least once? But people tend to forget what they read. Is seeing a theater performance or a film equal to reading the text? What about audiobooks? All these questions are to an extent rhetorical. There are no fixed rules for deciding if a person “really knows” the text or not, and even if there were, such a rule would be just a conventional construction, not the ultimate criterion. Paradoxically, for cultural memory there is no difference between Peter who rereads the play every year and knows several soliloquies by heart and Paul who is only acquainted with some of the [Hamlet] signs. It appears that culture consists not only of “texts proper” but also of numerous signs such as [Hamlet] that function as unifying mechanisms of culture. Lotman defines symbols as semiotic units that permeate almost all levels of culture and serve as mediators between different languages of culture, preserving culture from disintegrating into isolated chronological layers (Lotman 1990, 104). It is now evident that it is not necessarily symbols but such units as [Hamlet] that perform this function and serve as an efficient tool of dissemination of texts in culture. These signs occupy primarily the “world of oral memory,” the mythological level of culture that is full of mnemonic signs (ibid., 247–50). Apart from oral memory, this function is also performed by the “subsidiary” texts in culture such as TV commercials

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and advertisements, posters, slogans, (user-generated) news aggregates on the Internet, and other similar texts. The proposed mechanism has certain similarities with the process of preservation of all sacral texts, especially religious ones that are represented in memory in different semiotic modes and are often ritualized. For example, in Christian church hymns, icons and rituals represent and refer to Holy Scripture. If in the church such unity is deliberate and conscious, in secular/profane canons such as [Hamlet] this feature is more implicit and the process of its formation can be less controllable. In this connection, it is appropriate to mention the concept of microcanonicity. Mikhail Gronas (2011) defines “small-scale canonicity” as the situation when the minimal fragments of literary canon—for example, expressions or idiomatic phrases—become recognizable and reproducible in culture (in that respect microcanonicity is close to idiomatics and phraseology). Memorable quotations, recognizable situations, jokes based on the text, parodies, imitations, related merchandise—practically anything that may function as a reference to a certain text—constitute the mnemonic mechanisms of culture and secure the text in cultural memory, playing a significant role in the reproduction of texts. It may, however, happen that the verbal indices are used so often that they detach themselves from the source text: the signified is forgotten but its signifiers are still in use. There are many examples of phrases from books, films, and commercials becoming speech clichés and entering the folklore as separate idioms, but this question requires a separate study. 25 The mechanism of hypersemiotization that creates microcanons is peculiar of many texts of the so-called popular culture; for instance, George Lucas’s film saga Star Wars (1977–2005) or J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) gave birth to whole subcultures with rich semiotic vocabulary. Chapter 3: Key Premises

• • • •

In the artistic text, the content is inseparable from the form. The artistic text is a complexly constructed meaning. The “frame” is one of the key features of the text. The absence of structural elements in a text is as meaningful as their presence. • Culture is a hierarchy of texts within the texts.

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• Culture is both a generator of texts and a text itself. • Genre is both a modeling mechanism and the framework for identification of texts. • Culture is a nonhereditary collective memory. • Collective memory is a dynamic mechanism of self-preservation and self-propagation of culture. • The text’s meaning-space consists of several types of signs that facilitate its preservation in cultural memory.

CHAPTER 4

Semiosphere

The Semiotic Space

The key notions of Lotman’s semiotics that have been described in the previous chapters—text, system, memory, dialogue, translation, and so on—have finally crystallized in the concept of semiotic space or semiosphere. The concept of semiosphere first appeared in the 1984 article “On the Semiosphere” (Lotman 1984c), published in the issue of TZS that was dedicated to the concept of dialogue as the basis of semiotic systems. In this article, Lotman for the first time mentions “a specific semiotic continuum, which is filled with multi-variant semiotic models situated at a range of hierarchical levels” (Lotman 2005, 206). This continuum is termed the semiosphere by analogy with Vladimir Vernadsky’s concepts of biosphere and noosphere.1 Let us see what exactly caught Lotman’s attention in Vernadsky’s theory and why he considered it important to indicate this connection. Vernadsky was a mineralogist and geologist whose study of living matter on the earth’s surface inf luenced many fields, including ecology, biogeochemistry, and studies of ecosystems. In his seminal work The Biosphere (1926), Vernadsky, after the geologist Eduard Seuss, describes biosphere as “a life-saturated envelope of the Earth’s crust.” The uniqueness of Vernadsky’s concept is that in his view living mater is not an accidental creation but is the geological force that inf luences all geological forces on the Earth: “Without life, the crustal mechanism of the Earth would not exist” (Vernadsky 1998, 58). Vernadsky studies the living organism of the biosphere as “a particular body that cannot be entirely reduced to known

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physico-chemical systems” (ibid., 52) and emphasizes the idea that during all geological periods there has never been any evidence that a living organism could be created from inert matter, nor have there been any geological periods devoid of life. These ideas strongly resonated with Lotman’s views on the principles of semiosis and the process of meaning generation. In a 1982 letter to Boris Uspenskii, Lotman (2006, 629–30) writes that he is struck by Vernadsky’s ideas, especially the postulate that life comes from life and cannot emerge from inert matter. In a similar vein, Lotman states that any text must be preceded by another text and any developed civilization by another developed civilization, and any thought can originate only in another thought: “Only the existence of the semiotic sphere makes message a message. Only the existence of intelligence [razum]2 explains the existence of intelligence.”3 In other words, Lotman reformulates—once again, in a paradoxical form—the crucial law of semiosis, arguing that the complex is primary and the simple is secondary, not vice versa. Just as the text is primary in relation to the sign, the unit of semiosis, “the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space of the culture in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere ” (Lotman 1990, 125). Lotman especially stresses that the semiosphere is not just the sum total of semiotic systems but also a necessary condition for any communication act to take place and any language to appear: The semiotic universe may be regarded as the totality of individual texts and isolated languages as they relate to each other. In this case, all structures will look as if they are constructed out of individual bricks. However, it is more useful to establish a contrasting view: all semiotic space may be regarded as a unified mechanism (if not organism).4 In this case, primacy does not lie in one or another sign, but in the “greater system,” namely the semiosphere. The semiosphere is that same semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist. (Lotman 2005, 208)

Formulated in this manner, the concept of semiosphere fundamentally changes the structure of communication. In Universe of the Mind , Lotman introduces the concept of semiosphere through the description of communication act, once again referring to Jakobson’s scheme: he argues that all six parameters (addressee, addresser, code,

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message, context, contact) are still not a sufficient condition for communication act to occur unless this system is immersed in the semiotic space. By the same token, one must have some prior semiotic experience before initiating communication. Thus the traditional scheme of communication language > text > dialogue

turns “backward”: dialogic situation > real dialogue > text > language.

The dialogic situation “precedes both real dialogue and even the existence of a language” (Lotman 1990, 143), and therefore, the text creates not only its own context (M. Lotman 2002, 34) but also its own language. It is essential to point out that this scheme is not just a paradox for the sake of paradox but represents quite a pragmatic approach to communication. Indeed, the need to impart a message comes even before the message is created. For example, if we need to express somehow that we like this particular sunset, we will structure the message using one or several semiotic systems, based on the character of the assumed dialogue and the way we want to impart it to an addressee. To a person next to us, we may tell this in English or in any other language or may just make a gesture; we may take a picture of it in order to share it on the Internet or just keep it for ourselves; we may even write a poem or create a painting—there are numerous possibilities, which in turn create numerous texts that are not equivalent to each other. Not only does the text structure existing languages, but it also creates new ones! As an example, Lotman refers to the situation when the need for dialogue between the mother and her newborn child creates unique messages and languages. Indeed, any parent knows that a child first develops some idiosyncratic dialect, understandable mostly by his/her family, and only then learns the normative language. To continue this thought, the “mystery” of language acquisition5 by children may be explained by the fact that an infant starts his/her semiotic experience by interacting with the semiosphere as a whole and only then learns to distinguish separate languages and signs.6 The semiosphere therefore turns out to be not

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a static conglomerate of separate fixed languages but a unique ability of mankind to create countless texts and semiotic systems and communicate through them. There is still a question whether semiosphere is an objective (material) substance or an abstract concept. In a 1984 article, Lotman specifically points out that in difference to the noosphere, which is a three-dimensional material space, the space of the semiosphere carries an abstract character. This, however, is by no means to suggest that the concept of space is used, here, in a metaphorical sense. We have in mind a specific sphere, possessing signs, which are assigned to the enclosed space. Only within such a space is it possible for communicative processes and the creation of new information to be realised. (Lotman 2005, 207)

So on the one hand Lotman does not suggest that the semiosphere is a material space, but on the other he insists that it is real and concrete in the sense that it belongs to the mental sphere in which semiosis occurs. It should be noted that even before the term semiosphere was coined, in many of his works, Lotman had been widely using “spherical” metaphors when describing the structure and organization of culture. The semantic flexibility of the concept is demonstrated by Chang (2003, 7–8), who gives a comprehensive list of various instances of usage of the word sphere in Lotman’s works (e.g. “the sphere of organization,” “the sphere of culture,” “the sphere of natural languages,” “the sphere of the unconscious,” etc.). It appears that Lotman treats the term quite loosely, which may be explained by the fact that for Lotman, “sphere” reflects all important features peculiar to his model of culture: the core and the periphery, the boundary, and the holistic model of cognition and communication. Other important characteristics of the semiosphere are asymmetry, polyglotism, heterogeneity, binarism, and isomorphism. Asymmetry

Already in the 1970s, Lotman and Uspenskii described “the entire system for preserving and communicating human experience . . . as a concentric system in the center of which are located the most obvious and logical structures” (Lotman and Uspensky 1978, 213). The structure of the semiosphere is therefore identical to other semiotic systems

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and is built on the asymmetrical relationship between the center (the core) and the periphery, as discussed in chapter 2. The core is occupied with the most organized systems (languages), and the less organized ones are located on the periphery. Natural language takes the central position in the semiosphere because it permeates almost all semiospheric levels and quite a number of semiotic systems are based on it (e.g., literature and partially cinema and theater). Polyglotism and Heterogeneity

The semiosphere is essentially polyglot and consists of a diversity of semiotic systems or languages. These languages are not equivalent to one another but at the same time are mutually interprojected and have various degrees of translatability. The continuous dialogue between these languages creates tension that is necessary for communication and the generation of meaning. This makes the semiosphere the universal mechanism of meaning-generation. Binarism

Lotman lists binarism as one of the features of the semiosphere as “a principle which is realized in plurality since every newly-formed language is in its turn subdivided on a binary principle” (Lotman 1990, 124). The problems arising from the application of binary logic have already been discussed (see chapter 3), and I will reiterate my point that in this context binarism should be understood as multiplicity that can be reduced to binary models. Isomorphism

Finally, Lotman compares the semiosphere with the collective intellect, a network of individual minds in constant interaction. Likewise, culture is described as a whole isomorphic to its parts, that is, individuals (Lotman 2010, 58). All levels of the semiosphere—from an individual person to various levels of culture and finally to the whole semiosphere—are “semiospheres inserted into one another” (Lotman 1984c, 22),7 like matryoshka dolls. Each of them is simultaneously “both participant in the dialogue (as part of the semiosphere) and the space of dialogue (the semiosphere as a whole)” (Lotman 2005, 225; see also 1977d, 23). Consequently, a part of the semiosphere

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may function as a whole and the whole may function as its part. As we know, Lotman asserts that just as any single text is isomorphic to its culture, an individual mind (or individual semiosphere) is isomorphic to the collective semiosphere, so the semiosphere may be described as the universal mind. The whole semiotic sphere may therefore be conceived as a net of individual semiospheres. Umwelt, the Individual Semiosphere

The concept of individual semiosphere—a complex combination of explicit and implicit knowledge of the world of a human being—is congenial with the concept of Umwelt (plural Umwelten), coined by the theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944). According to Uexküll, Umwelt is a phenomenal self-world, the reality that surrounds an organism as the organism perceives it: “Each species thus lives in its own sensory world, to which other species may be partially or totally blind” (Francois Jacob, cited in Sebeok 1988, 73). That means that all external stimuli are perceived through a kind of filter of the organism’s Umwelt. Consequently, an organism will not be able to perceive any signs or texts that are not part of its Umwelt (Andrews 2003, 64). If for lower organisms it is a biological limitation, for humans this “blindness” is of cultural/psychological character: A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something that does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. (Thoreau 1961, 212–13)

That is why it is sometimes stated the unknown can become known only if it is partially known. In this respect, it is necessary to mention that in semiotic terms, the totally unknown may simply be ignored because it will be perceived as a meaningless “noise.” In other words, new messages are interpreted always on the background of the interpreter’s cultural memory. What is even more important, in order to perceive something new, one (and it concerns individuals as well as cultures) has to be predisposed to a dialogic situation, be ready to

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experience the other. Similar to humans, cultures (as we remember) tend to perceive everything that is external to them as a domain of nonculture, trying to assimilate it on their terms. One pivotal factor that makes humans very different from all other living beings is that they are able to reflect about their own modeling, conceive of other types of modeling, and construct new ways of modeling as well. In other words, it is our capability to imagine reality that is external to our own Umwelt and to understand that other beings may have different Umwelten . In the final analysis, it appears that human beings need other Umwelten for their own existence. An isolated person, culture, or text is not able to survive, let alone develop without other persons, cultures, or texts—this thought is recurrent in Lotman’s writing and echoes in the works of many theorists, from the Enlightenment era to modern semiotics (see the discussion of “I” versus “the other” in chapter 5). The dynamic development of semiotic systems is the result of a continuous dialogue between interconnected Umwelten , which together constitute the semiosphere as a whole. Text as a Condenser of Semiosphere

The concepts of semiosphere and cultural memory are closely related; since the semiosphere is represented as a net of Umwelten , it can also be regarded as a network of individual memories. If individual memory is preserved in the mind, collective memory rests on texts. Here we return to the notion of culture as a complex text. The relation of culture to a concrete text manifests itself in the fact that the text, as a basic element of culture, translates and condenses its culture in itself. Any text contains the memory of its semiosphere and functions as a condenser of cultural memory, which is depicted in figure 4.1.

text

SEMIOSPHERE Figure 4.1

Text as a condenser of semiosphere.

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The concept of text as a semiospheric condenser makes us modify the scheme of communication one more time. In the initial scheme (see figure 2.6), the source text is received through a number of overlapping codes, thus resulting in a plurality of texts as well. Now one may state that instead of a variety of codes it is the membrane of personal Umwelt that serves as a meaning-generating mechanism both when the message is created and when it is received (figure 4.2). Because the recipient inevitably receives the text through the filter of his/her semiosphere, the process of “condensation” (creation of the text) and the process of its interpretation cannot be equivalent by definition. The range of interpretation largely depends on to what extent the communicating Umwelten are overlapping. It also creates the main problem for historical analysis of text: it is practically impossible to reconstruct the text’s initial semiosphere in its entirety because the “packing” mechanisms of text creation, as Lotman insists, are not algorithmic and are to a degree unpredictable. It is therefore highly improbable to reconstruct an invariant text of a culture inductively, on the basis of one or very few texts: a text is just one of the uncountable ways to “condense” a culture, and one has to consider other possible (and impossible) ways as well. The law of unpredictability of meaning-generation may be termed

Umwelt 1 (text1)

Semiosphere Umwelt 2 (text2n)

Figure 4.2

Communication in the semiosphere.

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the law of irreversibility of semiosis: any interpretation (or “reconstruction” of the original semiosphere) does not eliminate meanings but on the contrary creates new meanings as well. Along with the text, one of the key vehicles of cultural memory is symbol. Following Saussure’s definition, Lotman (1990, 111, see also Lotman 2010, 111) states that the symbol “is distinguished from a conventional sign by the presence of an iconic element, some likeness between expression level and content level.” However, it is not this trait that makes the symbol special; it is its function: Lotman assigns to the symbol an important role of mediator between different languages and levels of culture: Since symbols are important mechanisms of cultural memory, they can transfer texts, plot outlines and other semiotic formations from one level of a culture’s memory to another. The stable sets of symbols which recur diachronically throughout culture serve very largely as unifying mechanisms: by activating a culture’s memory of itself they prevent the culture from disintegrating into isolated chronological layers. (Lotman 1990, 104)

As discussed earlier, by symbol Lotman understands not a specific type of sign as in Peirce’s classical definition but something in between the sign and the text, a certain textual entity that virtually “holds the culture together.” The cross, the heart sign, the pentagram, the circle—to mention a few “elementary” symbols— are recurrent in many texts of many cultures throughout centuries. These “simple” symbols are less fixed than texts, but because of their mnemonic function, their referential capacity is also larger than that of the sign. At the same time, they have a very high semantic capacity and flexibility, being incorporated in thousands of texts of different semiotic systems: A symbol, then, is a kind of condenser of all the principles of signness and at the same time goes beyond sign-ness. It is a mediator between different spheres of semiosis, and also between semiotic and non-semiotic reality. In equal measure it is a mediator between the synchrony of the text and the culture’s memory. Its role is that of a symbolic condenser. In general terms we can say that the structure of symbols of a particular culture shapes the system which is isomorphic and isofunctional to the genetic memory of an i ndividual. (ibid., 111)

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That is why national or area boundaries of cultures are often defined by the stable sets of symbols. Given that symbols recur diachronically, they unite the past and the future of a culture and occupy the nucleus of the collective memory: the core symbols of a culture “go back to pre-literate times when certain signs . . . were the condensed mnemonic programmes for the texts and stories preserved in the community’s oral memory” (ibid., 103). Even in our “literate times,” cultures are permeated with signs that function exactly as condensed mnemonic programs. The most recurrent of them constitute the “semantic halo” of a particular culture. More complex symbols often originate in the so-called classical (canonical) texts and preserve their interpretive potential through many years, as seen earlier on the example of Hamlet . Semiosphere as Method

The concept of semiosphere is essentially dual, that is, it is simultaneously an object and a metaconcept. As a metaconcept, semiosphere is “a construct of semiotic method” (Kull 2005, 184) that takes a holistic approach to culture, and as an object it refers to a given semiotic space that is studied in the analysis. Somewhat paradoxically, it is possible to say that “semiosphere is studied by means of semiosphere ” (Torop 2005, 164–65). For that reason, one might distinguish between the semiosphere, the totality and precondition of semiosis, and a semiosphere, a specific semiotic space that is described or reconstructed in the analysis. The concrete applications of this method constitute the core of Lotman’s textual analysis. Even before the term semiosphere was coined, Lotman’s analyses had followed the principle of re-creation of the cultural history of a concrete text. Lotman departs from the conceptualization of historical processes involved in the text’s evolution, attempting “to relate the structure of the work to the structure of the culture in which it was created” (Shukman 1977, 117). The goal of cultural analysis is “to approach the reader to the semantic life of the text ” (Lotman 1980, 415) or, in other words, to reconstruct the text’s actual semiosphere. Apart from that, Lotman focuses on the relation between the meaning-production space and a particular message and attempts to reconstruct the (ideal) audience of the text, thus delimiting the direction of the textual interpretation.

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One of the best examples of this approach is Lotman’s commentary to Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin (EO ). Lotman has published several articles about this text and two books—one in 1975, a follow-up to his specialized course at Tartu University, 8 and another in 1980, the comprehensive commentary to the novel. This later text is an exemplary reconstruction of the semiosphere (including “the image of the audience of the text”) of the 1830s, which combines the description of a typical intellectual background of the epoch with textual commentary. The book is subtitled “A Textbook for Teachers,” although the depth of the commentary is obviously far beyond the requirements of the school program. Before the actual commentary, more than 100 pages are devoted to several introductory texts that are supposed to reconstruct the “semantic life” of a typical reader of the 1830s. The introduction consists of several subsections: “The Chronology of Pushkin’s Work on EO,” “The Inner Chronology of EO,” “The Problem of the Prototypes,” “Main Literature on EO.” The next chapter is entitled “The Everyday Life of a Noblemen of the Onegin Epoch” and also has subsections. The topics covered in this excursus are property status, education and service of noblemen, interests and activities of noblewomen, noble house in the city and the countryside, entertainment and daily activities of a nobleman, the ball, the duel, and transportation. The following 300 pages are the actual commentary. To emphasize the particularity of Lotman’s approach, let us turn to the duel between Onegin and Lenskii in chapter 6 of EO. I will compare Lotman’s commentary with another, most detailed and scrupulous book by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1964. Lotman (1980, 12) refers to Nabokov’s text on several occasions, noting nonetheless that Nabokov’s comments are sometimes subjective and often excessive, taking many turns and side paths that have a very remote relation to Pushkin’s novel. One of the main questions that puzzle today’s reader is why Onegin does not try to avoid killing his friend Lenskii in the duel. Nabokov (1990, 16–17) states that Lenskii sending Onegin a cartel of defiance is “the only logical course” for an honorable man but is too bewildered by Onegin’s “odd” behavior when he does not attempt to evade the duel and even “fires first and shoots to kill.” In his opinion, Onegin could have reserved his fire, discharging the pistol in the air.

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Lotman’s commentary can be seen as an indirect response to Nabokov to demonstrate that the latter misinterprets both the motivation of the character and the logic of the code of honor of that time. Lotman argues that the one whose behavior is questionable is actually Zaretskii, Lenskii’s second. The nobleman Zaretskii, “in duels classicist and pedant,” has many serious reasons to cancel the duel but, however, ignores them: he does not discuss the possibilities of peaceful solution of the conflict when delivering the cartel; he violates the rule that both seconds should discuss the course of the duel a day before and also ignores the direct insult to him when Onegin shows up with his valet Guillot as his second. Finally, Zaretskii has a formal right to state that Onegin has forfeited the duel when the latter appears much more than 15 minutes late but does not do this either. In other words, Zaretskii behaves as someone who is interested in the most scandalous and bloody outcome of the conflict, not as a nobleman and “pedantic” second (Lotman 1980, 98–99). With respect to Onegin’s behavior, Lotman states that Pushkin undoubtedly wanted to make him an involuntary murderer. Lotman gives several examples to illustrate his point: first of all, a duelist who wants to kill his adversary in the duel never fires first from the farther distance but waits for his opponent to fire and then fires at the unmoving target from a minimum distance. Apart from that, Onegin does not reserve his fire nor discharges the pistol in the air because according to the code of the duel only the opponent who fires second may fire in the air. The one who fires in the air first risks to insult his adversary because the latter is compelled to reply in the same manner (ibid., 100–102). On the other hand, Pushkin also demonstrates the ambiguity of Onegin’s behavior: although Onegin (in quite a dandyish manner) shows his contempt and irritation for the situation by violating the rules of the duel code, he still cannot resist the accepted order of things and becomes “a doll in hands of the impersonal ritual of the duel” (ibid., 103; see also 303). The idea Lotman emphasizes in his commentary is that for Pushkin’s contemporary this was the semiotic field in which the text was perceived and interpreted, and the reader of the 1830s would not have asked such questions as Nabokov. In other words, reconstructing the semiosphere of Pushkin’s text, Lotman does not present an unlimited encyclopedia of the time but holds the text in the center, tying its texture to concrete cultural contexts.

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This is just one example of Lotman’s cultural analyses, which demonstrates that Lotman systematically describes various aspects of cultural life of the past that other historians and literary scholars simply ignore. An immediate question that arises in this context is how accurate Lotman’s semiospheric reconstructions are. As we have seen earlier, Lotman seems to be fully aware that any description of cultural phenomena cannot be nonintrusive and that it is the observer who decides what pertains to the system and what is considered to be outside of it. The major difficulty of this position is that there are no exact criteria for judging whether any historical reconstruction is adequate or biased. The main principle that can be deduced from Lotman’s analyses may be formulated as follows: the plausibility of this or that interpretation depends on how well it is possible to reconstruct the “semantic life” of an analyzed text in the given period—that is, to demonstrate the correlation of the text with its cultural context, its semiosphere. In other words, Lotman attempts to see what the text tells about its culture and what culture reveals about the text. It is beyond the scope of this book to attempt to prove or disprove the results of Lotman’s historical studies, but it is pertinent to mention that these works clearly distinguish themselves on the background not only of ideologically laden Soviet historical literature but of many modern studies as well. Semiosphere versus Culture?

Semiosphere is probably the most productive and flexible concept in Lotman’s theory, which was one of the reasons why the term gained much popularity after its introduction. Kalevi Kull (2005, 178–80) gives several examples of different scholars defining the semiosphere in their own way, as • • • • • •

the sphere of communication, the world of multiple truths, the space of meaning-generation, the set of all interconnected Umwelten , the space where distinguishing occurs, where distinctions are made, the totality of interconnected signs.

It is obvious that each of these definitions emphasizes one aspect of this multifaceted concept, and which meaning is preferred depends

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on the angle of the research. There is still a question of how the terms semiosphere and culture relate to each other. Is semiosphere identical to culture? Can semiosphere replace the concept of culture altogether? First of all, semiosphere as a concept is much more flexible and at the same time broader than culture. In many aspects, the semiosphere and culture are undoubtedly isofunctional, but Lotman unequivocally states that the semiosphere is a primary condition for any culture to come into existence. In that sense, a culture is a concrete manifestation of the semiosphere, and that is why it is traditionally understood as delimited by some boundaries, historical, political, geographical, or social. In the final analysis, if culture is the product of human semiotic activity, the semiosphere is a model of the unique semiotic capacity of human beings (see chapter 5). The semiosphere as a multidimensional space that produces equally multimodal messages always emphasizes the situation of dialogue between different “dialects” of culture. The national context is a traditional delimiter of a given culture, but it is quite a crude criterion because national boundaries often presuppose cultural monoglotism and therefore may neglect other phenomena that do not fit the culture’s self-description. Apart from that, semiosphere as a metaconcept allows describing larger entities of semiosis that transcend national borders (e.g., film noir, rock-n-roll music, or art nouveau architecture) as well as “microcultures” of various groups or even “individual cultures.” From the methodological point of view, such a f lexible concept turns out to be more accurate than the historically and politically laden concepts of “national culture,” “subculture,” or “mass culture.” Chapter 4: Key Premises

• The semiosphere is the precondition of semiosis. • The dialogic situation precedes any language or text. • The semiotic space can be depicted as a net of interconnected personal semiospheres. • Any text translates and condenses its semiosphere in itself. • The semiosphere is both an object and a metaconcept.

CHAPTER 5

Universal Mind

T

he principle of cultural isomorphism and the concept of individual semiosphere inevitably raise the question of definition of consciousness. Lotman comes close to the domain of cognitive studies when he discusses such terms as thought, intellect, and consciousness, and it is time now to scrutinize this topic in more detail. How does Lotman define consciousness and thinking? How exactly may culture be presented as the “collective mind”? Is it possible to speak of the “collective intellect”? This chapter is going to establish if Lotman’s approach may shed additional light on these questions that lie at the intersection of semiotics, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Intellect and Consciousness

The term consciousness has several meanings in Lotman’s idiom. The most recurrent definition of consciousness has to do with the oftrepeated postulate that there are at least “two essentially different ways of reflecting the world and working out new information” (Lotman 1990, 36). In this context, Lotman uses the words language, consciousness , and intellect as synonyms with the meaning “the modeling property [of the mind]” or “a way to recreate the world picture.” As we remember, Lotman described all semiospheric levels from human personality to the text to larger semiotic unities as “semiospheres inserted into one another” (Lotman 1984c, 22). Consequently, if individual consciousness (intellect) is isomorphic to culture, culture/ semiosphere becomes an extension of human mind—the universal

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mind—and an individual mind in turn becomes a microculture.1 Culture has therefore many synonyms in Lotman’s works, such as “collective consciousness,” “social consciousness,” “collective intellect,” “collective personality,” and “collective memory.” Collective consciousness thus designates a paradigm of thought of a given period, a specific worldview of a particular group of people, and/or the invariant text of a culture. We have seen many examples of how Lotman describes several periods as characterized by a specific type of consciousness: for example, Lotman (1990, 105) describes the collective consciousness of the nineteenth century as a desymbolizing one, that which interprets symbols as simple messages, opposed to the symbolizing consciousness, which interprets simple messages as symbols. The conscious mind has a capacity not only to model a picture of the world but also to generate new information, that is, to produce nonalgorithmized messages. From this perspective, culture as a mechanism is comparable with the individual creative consciousness (Lotman 1990, 1–3). In the same manner, Lotman singles out three parameters of human intelligence that correspond to the three functions of the text discussed earlier: informative, creative, and mnemonic. Functions of semiotic mechanisms are equated with human intelligence in this view. Lotman draws parallels with human personality and extrapersonal semiotic entities on different levels, and it is not a coincidence that one of his last books is entitled in English Universe of the Mind and in Russian Inside the Thinking Worlds . It should be noted separately that the very term mind , which is much more semantically loaded in the Western tradition, appears in the English translation of Universe of the Mind as an alternative translation of the Russian word soznanie, consciousness (“medieval mind,” “collective mind,” “modern mind,” etc.). Apart from that, the word mind may evoke associations with the “mind-brain problem,” on which Lotman never wrote directly. Later in this chapter, I will try to clarify his position on this matter. Self-Consciousness

Lotman defines the concept of self-consciousness in the semiotic context as well. In his last book, Lotman reinterprets his own thesis of polyglotism—that in order to reflect a given reality, at least two

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languages are needed—as “a condition of existence” that dictates the necessity of the other. “I” and “other” represent two sides of the same coin, inseparable in the act of self-consciousness: “Only in human consciousness do ‘I’ and ‘all others, except me’ hide within themselves something that is both unified and conflicting at one and the same time” (Lotman 2009, 33). This thesis goes back to Fichte’s idea of “not-I” as a necessary condition of self-consciousness, which is frequent in Peirce’s writing as well:2 We become aware of ourself in becoming aware of the not-self. . . . And this notion, of being such as other things make us, is such a prominent part of our life that we conceive other things also to exist by virtue of their reactions against each other. The idea of other, of not , becomes a very pivot of thought. (Peirce 1931–34, 1.324)

It is evident that the idea that “I” is always expressed through “the other” refers to the principle of differentiation in the context of cultural dialogism, which has been discussed on several occasions in this book. This principle is manifested on all levels of semiosis, from individual consciousness (the self needs the other, mind requires other minds) to the text (as opposed to other texts and nontexts) to culture (versus other cultures and its image of nonculture).3 Anthropocentric Semiotics

It has been several times noted that Lotman focuses entirely on human semiosis and even more specifically on semiotics of culture, not paying attention to such branches of semiotics as biosemiotics, phytosemiotics, and others.4 For example, already in The Structure of the Artistic Text , Lotman (1977d, 7) refuses to call biochemical regulation of signals in the nervous system a language. Nonetheless, Lotman in his last books discusses symbolic behavior of animals in order to illustrate the uniqueness of human consciousness (Lotman 2009, 27–29, 34). The dialogue between animals essentially differs from the dialogue between humans: animals use one concrete language that eliminates ambivalence in communication, and the interpretive possibilities of any message in animal interaction are predetermined.5 Human communication, in contrast, always presupposes the conflict between collective and

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individual memory, between various individual languages (Lotman 2010, 38–39). Put differently, Homo sapiens are the only species that can create multivalent and unpredictable texts, that is, “art.” The law of cultural isomorphism is also the main principle of human culture that distinguishes us from other species (ibid., 57). Apart from that, animals are subordinated to the law of repetition: their world develops in a cyclical, repeatable motion in contrast with the linear development of humans. Humans are subject to the biological law of cyclical reiteration only partially, and this trait makes us unique: if animal behavior is ritualistic, humans are able to break the rules and become unpredictable; animals “play by the rules,” humans may “cheat.” Thus from the “cybernetic” point of view, which is not far from the Cartesian view of animals as “automata,” animals may be considered something in between the machine and the human: they seem to be “programmed” by their nature, and deviations from the “hard-wired” code are anomalous and rare. From Lotman’s theorizing, it follows that it is culture that makes human beings different from other species. Even more, it might be argued that man’s hegemony on the planet is the direct result of us being “cultural animals.” Culture is therefore not something accessory to Homo sapiens ; quite the opposite, culture is a conditio sine qua non of human existence. It is apposite to note here that this contention is agreeable with the ideas of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who asserts similarly, Tools, hunting, family organization, and, later, art, religion, and “s cience” molded man somatically; and they are, therefore, necessary not merely to his survival but to his existential realization. . . . The cultural resources are ingredient, not accessory, to human thought. (Geertz 1973, 83)6

On the general scale, the contention that Homo sapiens are first and foremost cultural/semiotic/symbolic species (Homo culturalis or Homo symbolicus, in Terrence Deacon’s terms), characterized by a unique capacity to create and use countless sign systems, echoes in the works of many philosophers and theorists and most obviously in Ernst Cassirer’s An Essay on Man . Inspired by Uexküll, Cassirer termed man animal symbolicum , “a symbolic animal,” conceiving of the outer world through the membrane of symbolic meanings (Cassirer 1944).

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Artificial Intelligence

According to Lotman, culture is a feature that distinguishes our species not only from other animals but also from other forms of intelligence and especially from those that are assigned to machines. As mentioned in chapter 1, in the 1960s–70s, cybernetics permeated almost all levels of Soviet academia, having positioned itself as the universal science. In the context of “the scientific and technical revolution,” the problem of artificial intelligence naturally became one of the dominant themes; after all, the cybernetic viewpoint practically eliminated the essential boundary between man and the machine. As Norbert Wiener and his colleagues state in a 1943 article, “A uniform behavioristic analysis is applicable to both machines and living organisms, regardless of the complexity of the behavior” (Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow 1943, 22). So according to the teleological point of view—in cybernetics, teleology is understood as purposeful behavior controlled by feedback—humans, animals, and machines are functionally identical to each other and therefore can be studied by the same methods. This view was shared by many Soviet academics as well; in fact, manmachine metaphors became such a commonplace that they needed no special introduction (Gerovitch 2002, 224). The TMSS semioticians were involved in the study of artificial intelligence as well, with various degrees of interest—if Viacheslav Ivanov directly participated in the experiments with machine translation, Lotman’s interest was focused mainly on the differences between artificial communicative mechanisms and culture. But the most interesting case of the semiotic study of AI was “the lunar project” in which semioticians from Tartu and Leningrad took part. Boris Egorov (1999, 206–10) tells a story that now seems to be unreal: in the 1970s, he got acquainted with Prof. Mikhail Ignat’ev, chair of the Department of Cybernetics at the university that is now called Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation. The department used to receive special contracts from military organizations, and one of them concerned the development of robots for the planned moon exploration (obviously, a very “hot” topic after the 1969 Apollo moon landing). Ignat’ev had a possibility to conclude subcontracts and hire specialists outside his department, and that was how Egorov’s colleagues at Herzen Pedagogical Institute and Lotman’s department at Tartu University were included in the project. Their task was to design special communicative systems for

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the community of lunar robots. In that context, the collaboration of cyberneticians with literary scholars (i.e., semioticians) did not seem unnatural. Lotman’s department was assigned a specific task to develop metalanguages of different strata of culture in the context of artificial intelligence. Yet the spectrum of themes explored in the framework of this project in 1973–75 was not limited solely to artificial intelligence and included such topics as cinematography, mythological language, functions of metamechanisms of culture, dynamic models of semiotic systems, problems of collective psychology, semiotic typology of eighteenth-century Russian culture, models and programs of behavior, and many others. A special term was coined for this “cybernetic-like” discipline by analogy with bionics: artonics, from Latin ars — artis. The discipline was supposed to study the structural laws of artistic systems that could be applicable in information theory and cybernetics. As is obvious, to a degree the project was just a cover that allowed Tartu scholars to conduct their own research, which had only a remote relation to the problem of AI or the moon exploration. It was not entirely unexpected when in 1976 the officials terminated all side contracts with literary scholars in Tartu and Leningrad. One of the articles, written by Egorov, Lotman, and Ignat’ev as a conclusion of this “lunar project,” was only published 20 years later (Egorov, Ignat’ev, and Lotman 1995). It is devoted exclusively to the problem of AI, which is seen as a metamechanism or metasystem of culture, that is, a superindividual intellectual system manifested first and foremost in common memory. Among other metamechanisms of culture, the authors single out myth and natural language. The metamechanism of AI functions as follows: on the periphery of the system there are located “semiotic individuals” that serve as “outer sensors” of the system, receiving information from the outer world and then transferring it to the core, thus translating it into the metalanguage of the cultural whole. There is an essential tension between the unifying system of metalanguage and the increasing variety and relative independence of cultural subsystems, which makes up a complex equilibrium necessary for normal functioning of any culture. If the metastructure of culture, its ideal self-description, submits all individual subsystems, culture will cease being a dynamic system and will ossify; on the other

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hand, if the tendency to independence of subsystems prevails, culture will risk disintegration (ibid., 280–81). 7 As is obvious, the authors use the term “artificial intellect” in a rather metaphorical sense, only indirectly related to technological problems. In the 1977 article “Culture as Collective Intellect and the Problems of Artificial Intelligence,” Lotman singles out several problems that make the definition of intellect very difficult: first of all, “intelligent” should not be equated with “human-like,” as in Alan Turing’s test (whether the human can tell the machine from the human being during a conversation); second, all attempts to distinguish one single feature that constitutes intellect or without which intellect would be impossible greatly reduce the task; as a consequence, any artificial model that tries to imitate some cognitive operations cannot be equated with intellect as a whole. Lotman goes on to argue that collective intellect as a model for AI has several advantages over individual intellect because it is a more explicit mechanism, represented and recorded in a variety of texts and languages. After all, one of the characteristics of intellect is the capacity to “go out of one’s mind”: a thinking mechanism must in principle be able to “go mad,” as an alternative to rational behavior. Culture, in this respect, can be described as a mechanism of collective intelligence because it too has “pathological,” irregular periods in its functioning. Lotman mentions that most common definitions of intelligence boil down to “a capacity to behave, in radically altered conditions, in a manner that is both new and expedient” (Lotman 1979, 85). Lotman reinterprets this definition in the semiotic context as a capacity to create new languages and texts; that is, he once again declares the meaning-generating function the central feature of intellect. Speaking apart, this could be the reaction to a narrow definition of creativity that caught Lotman’s attention in the article “The Processes of Creative Thinking” by A. Newell, J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, translated in a collection of articles on the psychology of thinking (Matiushkin 1965, 500–513). Lotman marked a couple of passages in his copy of the book where the authors equate creative thinking with the behavior that simulates human problem solvers. They state that creative activity appears to be simply a special class of problem-solving activity characterized by novelty, unconventionality, persistence, and difficulty in problem

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formulation. They demonstrate some successful algorithm-based programs that utilize the method of trial and error but admit that such creative tasks as the composition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony are beyond the scope of their analysis. For Lotman, such a narrow and mechanistic definition of creativity was obviously inacceptable. In other articles (“The Phenomenon of Culture” [1978] and “Brain–Text–Culture–Artificial Intelligence” [1981]), Lotman is even more skeptical toward the possibility of creation of AI by analogy with individual human intellect. He singles out three main characteristics of artificial systems: omniscience (in the limits of its own system), lack of doubts (any action is unambiguous), and the full identity of the addresser with the addressee. There is therefore an essential difference between the predictability of artificial devices and the variability of a human individual. After all, concludes Lotman, it is not at all in our interest to create AI as an exact copy of human intellect because in that case such machine would become “neurotic” and would be prone to ignorance, misunderstanding, and doubts (Lotman 2000b, 577–78, 589). Even 30 years later, the main points of Lotman’s theorizing are valid. Indeed, the best features of modern robots and computers are not at all identical to human features because they are designed with the purpose of surpassing humans in their abilities. Computers are constructed in many ways as opposite to human beings: they are able to perform millions of calculations per second, and their memory is built exactly as a storage device. A computer that “forgets” the stored information or distorts it in different ways (i.e., behaves like a human being) is worthless. This once again proves that unpredictability, which is considered to be an error factor in artificial systems, is essential for human mind and culture. Obviously, for Lotman the most important point in this respect is to emphasize the similarity of human intellect and culture to put them both in opposition to the machine intellect. The Thinking Worlds

The ability to think is without doubt the central feature of intellect. In the general context of Lotman semiotics, thinking (myshlenie) can be defined as the process of meaning-generation. Moreover, the

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essential unpredictability of meaning-generation seems to be the key feature of man’s thinking ability. Lotman consistently blurs the boundary between the individual and the collective, stating that it is not only human mind but also cultures and texts that can be called the “thinking worlds.” In other aspects, Lotman’s account of thinking has similarities with both Saussure and Peirce. First of all, for Lotman thinking and consciousness are impossible without semiotic expression. Lotman stresses that our consciousness is simply indivisible from the level of expression, that these two entities are firmly fused together: “Thought is within us, but we are within thought, just as language is something engendered by our minds and directly dependent on the mechanisms of the brain, and we are with language” (Lotman 1990, 273). Among all forms of semiotic expression, natural language takes the central position as the most powerful sign system:8 We are immersed in the space of language. Even in the most basic abstract conditions, we cannot extract ourselves from this space, which simply envelops us, and yet it is a space of which we are also a part and which, simultaneously, is part of us. . . . We need to exert a tremendous effort to push ourselves beyond the limits of language and it is precisely to language that we ascribe our lies, deviations from the norm, and the majority of our defects and perversions. (Lotman 2009, 114)

This can be read as a reference to the power of discourse, but here it is first and foremost a manifestation of a more general principle of cultural isomorphism, the ref lection of cognitive properties in the structure of semiotic systems. This thesis echoes in the works of Peirce (1931–34), who argues that human consciousness is the sum total of our semiotic capacity (to express something in a language): My language is the sum total of myself; for man is the thought. . . . But the identity of a man consists in the consistency of what he does and thinks, and consistency is the intellectual character of a thing; that is, is its expressing something. (5.314–15)

Consequently, by “thought” or “idea” (mysl’ , ideia) Lotman usually understands something that has to be expressed in some language: “For

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human thought all that exists is that which falls into any of its languages” (Lotman 2009, 134). As we remember, one of the schemes of text transfer (figure 2.3) illustrated the process of text generation as a path from the thought (as the content of a message), via encoding mechanisms of language, to the text. This idea is of course reminiscent of Saussure’s contention that language “ is a form and not a substance ” and that thought is “only a shapeless and indistinct mass” or “a vague, uncharted nebula.” Because thought is amorphous by nature, it “has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition.” The relation between thought and sound is illustrated by the metaphor of air in contact with water, which creates waves (Saussure 1966, 122, 111–12). This idea seems to be supported by Lev Vygotsky (1986, 251), who wrote in 1934, “Thought, unlike speech, does not consist of separate units. . . . In [the speaker’s] mind the whole thought is present at once, but in speech it has to be developed successively. A thought may be compared to a cloud shedding a shower of words.” Indeed, any thought can be structured by some specific medium, but it is obvious that not every thought needs to be expressed in speech or in any medium at all. An old cliché of “reading somebody’s thoughts” as reading them literally as a written text is explainable because thought is otherwise very hard to describe in any of the existing metalanguages. But if we do not think in words, how do we think? Vygotsky asserts that language functions as “the social means of thought” (ibid., 94).9 In this connection, he pays special attention to the study of inner speech (internal self-directed speech) and egocentric speech of children. Unlike Jean Piaget, the psychologist known for his studies of children’s thinking, Vygotsky defines egocentric speech of the child as “a phenomenon of the transition from interpsychic to intrapsychic functioning, i.e., from the social, collective ability of the child to his more individualized activity— a pattern of development common to all the higher psychological functions” (ibid., 228). Thus inner speech is defined as an autonomous speech function and “a distinct plane of verbal thought .” Both egocentric and inner speech would be incomprehensible to others; one would need to translate one’s inner speech in order to produce an intelligible message. The reason for that is one of the most crucial features of inner speech: the word in inner speech is “so saturated

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with sense that . . . it becomes a concentrate of sense” (ibid., 247). Thus, in order to produce a message, one has to disentangle a knot of meanings and construct a syntactically articulated combination of signs. The similarity with Lotman’s concept of text as a semiospheric condenser is not a coincidence here: semiosphere designates not only the semiotic space but also a model of thinking as well. To continue Lotman’s theorizing, in the context of semiosphere, thought is provided by a variety of semiotic mediums and codes that we have acquired during our lifetime, and in order to produce a message intelligible to others we have to considerably reduce—or “condense”— this variety into one palpable message. Returning to the scheme of communication in the semiosphere (figure 4.2), it should be reiterated that although Lotman emphasizes the dependence of thought on the expression plane, it is not one single natural language but polyglot semiosphere that makes possible the thinking processes of man. The semiosphere thus allows delimiting and, so to say, “neutralizing” our specific and unique thoughts in the collective mind in order to make them accessible for other individuals. From this view, thinking appears to be not a text or its content or an “uncharted nebula” but a continuous process of synthetic processing of information. In other words, we think “in the semiosphere” but have to express our thoughts in concrete languages. Thinking is thus characterized by simultaneity, continuity, and synthesis, and the process of “precipitation” of a particular text is characterized by successivity, delimitedness, and discreteness. Therefore, in terms of discrete languages, it is possible to describe only the product of thinking activity but not the process. The Semiotic Capacity

In one of his books, Thomas Sebeok advocates the notion of prelanguage semiotic capacity and argues that language is in fact a secondary, not primary, modeling system “by virtue of the all-but-singula r fact that it incorporates a syntactic component” (Sebeok 1988, 77). In his view, language evolved as an adaptation (when an organism changes in order to better suit its habitat in the process of evolution) and speech developed out of language as an exaptation (when a trait that originally serves one function becomes adapted to serve

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another function). The primary modeling system is thus the “nonverbal modeling” employed by animals or infants; it is primary “in both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic sense” (ibid., 75). Therefore, those systems that are called secondary by the TMSS scholars are in fact tertiary modeling systems because on this level both verbal and nonverbal “sign assemblages blend together” (ibid., 78).10 The supposition of existence of a certain semiotic capacity peculiar to all humans is shared by many scholars including the eighteenthcentury philosopher Etienne de Condillac (2001), who speaks of a protolanguage of the speech that he terms “the language of action,” and Saussure (1966, 10), who equates this general faculty with the linguistic capacity: “There exists a more general faculty which governs signs and which would be the linguistic faculty proper.” Lotman does not mention the notion of semiotic capacity directly, but it is certainly congenial to his concept of semiosphere as a precondition of any semiotic system, including natural language, and as a space where all semiosis and communication takes place. In this respect, a new question arises whether the notion of semiosphere may receive some biological or even neurological foundation. Culture in the Brain?

In the late 1970s, Lotman reformulates his thesis of bilingual organization of consciousness in a new context: A thinking apparatus must have in principle (in the minimal scheme) a dialogic (bilingual) structure. . . . The analogy between the asymmetry of culture and the asymmetric structure of the brain highlights the problem of the correlation of discrete and non-discrete languages and the problem of the mutual equivalence of the texts created in them. (Lotman 1979, 94)

In this article, Lotman refers to Viacheslav Ivanov’s study of “semiotic specialization” of hemispheres, in which Ivanov states that the left hemisphere is oriented toward discrete and the right hemisphere toward nondiscrete languages (myth). Lotman thus makes a suggestion that an artificial thinking machine must include “the block of child consciousness” or “the mechanism of myth-generation” that would correspond to the functions of the right hemisphere of the human brain (ibid.).

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Lotman repeats the thesis of correlation of the cultural asymmetry with the brain asymmetry even in Universe of the Mind : To our surprise, observations about the bipolar asymmetry of semiotic mechanisms has [sic] been paralleled by research into the functional asymmetry of the large hemispheres of the brain. The discovery of mechanisms in the individual thinking apparatus which are functionally isomorphous to the semiotic mechanism of culture has opened up a wide field for future semiotic study. (Lotman 1990, 2–3; emphasis added)

It is understandable why Lotman refers to neurological studies: it appears that his postulate that culture is minimally a two-channel meaning-generating structure receives an unexpected confirmation in the anatomy of the brain. The analogy is thrilling: it suggests that the structure of human culture is predetermined or at least influenced by the brain structure. Nonetheless, Lotman—unlike Viacheslav Ivanov, for example—does not develop this topic further, and we would need to reconstruct the context of that period in order to understand Lotman’s outlook on this problem. In the 1970–80s, the semioticians associated with the TMSS took great interest in the then-hot topic of the functional asymmetry of human brain as a possible neurophysiological basis of thought and consciousness.11 The leading researcher in this field was Viacheslav Ivanov, who in his several works, primarily in the book Even and Odd (1978), took up the question of brain asymmetry together with the problem of artificial intelligence. Ivanov had been interested in this problem since the 1950s and participated in, among other things, the work of Alexander Luria’s12 laboratory in the Institute of Neurosurgery in Moscow. At the same time, he was involved in the cybernetic experiments with the creation of computers that could model human intellectual abilities. In his book, Ivanov describes asymmetry as a universal feature of semiosis that has its foundations in the structure of the brain. The central idea is that culture is isomorphic to the brain (which is defined as “the minimal cybernetic community”) and not on the abstract but on the physical plane. Ivanov straightforwardly states that the hemispheres are functionally different—each of them reflects and models the world in an essentially different way, being in constant dialogue with one another. As a consequence, in order to create AI, one would need to build

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two-machine computing complexes that could be able to reconstruct the dialogue between the hemispheres. Another scholar close to the TMSS who actively studied possible neurophysiological foundations of language was Roman Jakobson (see Jakobson 1980). In the 1980s, the Tartu semioticians were in close contact with the group of the Leningrad neurophysiologists led by Lev Balonov and Vadim Deglin that was specializing particularly in studying the functional asymmetry of the brain based on clinical observations of patients who were treated with unilateral shocks.13 The result of this cooperation was two volumes in 1983 and 1984 in the TZS series dedicated almost exclusively to the problem of functional asymmetry of the brain. TZS 16 is entitled Text and Culture, and TZS 17 is dedicated to the structure of dialogue as a principle of functioning of semiotic mechanisms. These volumes together with other similar publications of Soviet semioticians presented a unified picture of semiotic specialization of the hemispheres of the human brain that are summarized in table 5.1.14 One can see that these studies have presented a very harmonious picture of the hemispheres as representing two “languages,” two models of consciousness that reflect the world in different ways. Because normal functioning of an individual depends on the Table 5.1

Hemispheric “specializations”

LH “controls” a

RH “controls”

social reality; cognitive perception; language and speech; sign-concept relation; signifiers;

worldview; immediate recognition; gestures; sign-referent relation; signifieds (i.e., “meaning” that does not depend on the sound pattern of a sign); reproduction of stored entities, language clichés/ formulas (e.g., “Hello!”); non-discrete, iconic entities; paradigmatic relations; nouns and names of concrete objects, hieroglyphics; face and voice recognition, music composition, movement in a concrete space, etc.

production of new sentences; discrete entities; syntagmatic relations; verbs and abstract words; grammatical analysis and synthesis, logic, etc.

a LH is the dominant hemisphere of the majority of people. There are, however, people with dominant RH and there are people with almost equal redistribution, although statistically they are less than 10% of the world population.

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constant dialogue between the hemispheres, any hindrances in their dialogue lead to the distortion of normal perception. This binary principle appears to be fundamental for any culture and is manifested, for instance, in the organization of the space of archaic tribes (Ivanov 1978a, 20–21). The very fact that the problem of functional asymmetry of the brain became central in a semiotic journal demonstrates the broad spectrum of interest of Soviet semioticians, but it also reveals a pronounced universalistic and “naturalistic” bias of these publications. Most results of these studies were interpreted exclusively as the manifestation of universals in culture, and it was not a coincidence that Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar was often used as a reference point, especially his opposition of “deep structure” versus “surface structure.” In Chomsky’s theory, any concrete sentence is built upon an underlying deep structure, which in turn reflects an innate universal language system peculiar to each individual. Consequently, in the description of hemispheric functionality, the right hemisphere becomes responsible for deep structures, with the left hemisphere “translating” them into surface structures. On the whole, the discussed works are one of the most vivid attempts of semioticians to fuse humanities with natural sciences under the umbrella of semiotics. Interpreted very broadly in the neurological context, binary oppositions appeared to be universal ontological categories, peculiar to all semiotic systems and predetermined by the very structure of the brain. Almost every study treated the obtained data as unequivocal evidence of the bipolar semiotic mechanisms that govern our semiotic abilities, hence the tendency to generalize the context-specific experimental results. As Grzybek (1993, 5) notices with regard to Ivanov’s book Even and Odd , “It becomes very clear how much semiotic terminology and related semiotic concepts influence the interpretation of neuropsychological findings.” The main problem with this fundamentally “phrenological” and deterministic approach was that it raised more questions than it attempted to answer: Is it possible to speak of brain functions exclusively in terms of hemispheres? What about subcortical structures? Why does nobody pay attention to the differentiation of functions between the lobes of the cerebrum? Isn’t the assumption that the brain is divided into two language systems in fact an inverse look at

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the thinking process, an attempt to describe thinking as “speech”? In case of electroconvulsive therapy, doesn’t the method directly inf luence the results of these studies? The most striking feature of these publications is that no concerns were expressed as to the ethical implications of using the data from experiments on mental patients. Even at that time some scholars—among them Rozenfel’d (1983) and Lotman—made several reservations as to the danger of direct analogies and the application of binary logic, especially if the brain functions are described in terms of linguistic dichotomies. In a revised edition of Even and Odd , Ivanov (1998) corrected and reformulated a number of arguments and eliminated practically all cybernetic discourse, especially the analogies between the brain and the computing machine. Nevertheless, the “hemispherical dichotomies” remained the core of Ivanov’s analysis,15 although he stated in the preface that “the limitless optimism” of the 1960s–70s had been replaced with a more reserved approach. Quite expectedly, since the 1980s, the problem of brain asymmetry in semiotic studies has been raised quite rarely. The newest neurological findings corrected and refuted many previously accepted assumptions, having shown that lateralization and brain asymmetry are too general concepts to serve as an explanation for all or a majority of brain functions, let alone for human thinking. For example, the preface to the volume The Asymmetrical Brain , edited by K. Hugdahl and R. Davidson (2003, x), opposes the folk mythologies that have been fixed in the discourses on the brain functions (e.g., the analytic left hemisphere versus the emotional right hemisphere or two “consciousnesses” that are represented by each hemisphere); it states that the crude division of all functions of the brain into one or two gives a highly inaccurate picture and that asymmetries exist on all levels of the nervous system. On the whole, the question of correlation of brain anatomy with higher psychic functions is still far from being resolved. Professor Tatiana Chernigovskaia, who actively participated in the work of the Balonov group in the 1980s, in a recent article maintains that the new achievements in neuroscience only emphasize the discrepancy between the metalanguage and the obtained data: “It becomes more and more obvious that some breakthrough of methodological and even philosophical nature is needed” (Chernigovskaya 2007, 108).

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As to Lotman’s attention to the study of brain asymmetry, the early 1980s may be considered a brief period of his attention to the problem. Lotman discussed these problems with the neurologists Balonov and Kaufman, who happened to be his dacha neighbors (Ivanov 1994, 490). In Lotman’s library, there are a number of books on the functional asymmetry of the brain from clinical and physiological perspectives, on psychology of speech, psycholinguistics, physiology, and biochemistry of memory. They include Balonov’s and Deglin’s books (e.g., Balonov and Deglin 1976, Balonov et al. 1979, and Deglin 1984), the translations of Richard Atkinson’s Human Memory and the Learning Process (1976, translated in 1980); Culture and Thought by Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner (1974, translated in 1977), Friedhart Klix’s Erwachendes Denken (1980, translated in 1983), Herbert Krause’s Gehirn contra Computer (1976, translated in 1982), and Peeter Tulviste’s doctoral dissertation, “Cultural and Historical Development of Verbal Thinking” (1987). Nevertheless, Lotman did not take the results of neurological studies for granted and his attitude to this problem was quite ambivalent. He considered it to be a serious shortcoming that most of the experiments with unilateral shocks were conducted with mental patients, not healthy subjects (Ivanov 1994, 490). Apart from that, the gender aspect of brain lateralization caught Lotman’s attention in a 1983 translation of Sally Springer’s and Georg Deutsch’s Left Brain, Right Brain (1981): he marked the statements that lateralization is less evident with women and that space and speech skills of women are more bilateral than those of men. Apparently, for Lotman it was an important correction of generalizing dichotomies regarding the functional asymmetry of the brain. In the article “Asymmetry and Dialogue” (TZS 16), Lotman warns against straightforward analogies between cerebral asymmetry and the asymmetrical structure of culture but at the same time states that the idea of asymmetry of cultural mechanisms (culture as a two-channel structure that connects different semiotic generators) receives now a neurotopographical foundation (Lotman 2000b, 598–99). Lotman describes the “simplest intellectual mechanisms” that lie at the core of higher forms of consciousness as the oppositions of “discrete/non-discrete,” “iconic/conventional,” and so forth. The asymmetry of semiotic structures makes texts circulate, being constantly recoded from one system to another. Just as external

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impulses are transformed and interpreted in the central nervous system, the extracultural phenomena enter culture and then transform in accordance with its languages, giving start to an “avalanche of information,” which makes possible the dynamic development of culture. Lotman uses “hemispherical” metaphors for the description of cultural development as well: culture combines “left hemisphereand right hemisphere-tendencies” that during the periods of stability are in a state of a balanced dialogue. During the periods of dynamic change (destabilization), some tendency assumes dominance and culture becomes more rigidly organized, suppressing the opposing tendencies and pushing them to the periphery. In The Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture, Lotman (2010, 184) offers another metaphor: “Art is one of the hemispheres of the collective brain of the mankind.” As is obvious from these texts, Lotman actually does not discuss the functions of the brain but rather uses neurological metaphors for description of cultural mechanisms, although contradicting his own warning as to the danger of direct parallels between culture and the brain. Apparently, this idea was still very tempting to him, but apart from the statements cited previously, Lotman never explored this topic again, and his colleagues also testify that Lotman’s interest in this problem had much decreased after the discussed period. One of the reasons for this was undoubtedly the realization of the fallacy of the “anatomical” explanations of cultural mechanisms. In conclusion, it is clear that the controversial statements regarding brain anatomy and the structure of culture found in Lotman’s texts are in principle redundant. Paradoxically, it was exactly on the background of this “semio-neurophysiological” works that Lotman coined the concept of semiosphere, which essentially defies “naturalistic,” deterministic, and “phrenological” approaches of culture. Lotman’s attention has always been focused on the “external” side of semiosis; even when he speaks of consciousness, he means, so to say, the cultural fabric of consciousness manifested in texts. Thus the concept of semiosphere does not require any materialistic foundation, which is undoubtedly the main reason for Lotman’s decreasing interest in neurology. By the same token, Lotman does not construct any specific theory of mind but instead focuses on the actual product of our thinking activity, that is, culture. In a nutshell, what Lotman’s semiotics tells us is that in order to understand how we

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think, it is not necessary to go deep inside the brain and attempt to find the answers in its microstructure, but on the contrary, we have to look around ourselves, at the semiotic space that envelops us and makes up our conscious experience. Chapter 5: Key Premises

• Collective consciousness is both the worldview of a particular group and a paradigm of thought of a given period. • The self exists only in relation to the other. • Culture is what makes Homo sapiens different from other species. • The semiosphere is congenial to the notion of semiotic capacity, the precondition of any semiotic system. • The semiosphere may also be presented as a model of cognition and thinking.

Conclusion: The World as a Text

D

ifferent researchers and critics create different portraits of Lotman as a theoretician: he has been depicted as a structuralist, a cybernetician, an “organicist,” and a philosopher. As we have seen, in Lotman’s writing one can indeed encounter structuralist dogmas and scientistic/universalistic idioms; there are traces of cybernetic discourse, references to various disciplines, and also rather philosophical ref lections on history and culture. As regards philosophy, there were several attempts to expose the philosophical grounds of Lotman’s theory, characterizing it as Hegelian (Egorov 1999, 252–53), Marxist-dialectical (M. Gasparov 1996), Platonian (Vetik 1994), or Kantian (M. Lotman 1995). Such a broad spectrum of opinions can be explained by the fact that Lotman never explicitly pointed out any “father f igure” that had shaped his views but on the contrary demonstrated the f lexibility of his approach: in various works Lotman refers, most notably, to Ferdinand de Saussure, Emile Benveniste, Iurii Tynianov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Andrei Kolmogorov, Ilia Prigogine, and Vladimir Vernadsky. Each of these theoreticians—whose ideas Lotman absorbs, develops, and incorporates in his own theory of culture—contributes something to Lotman’s theory and ref lects a different side of Lotman’s multifaceted personality. In that sense, Lotman can be compared not with a disciple who truly follows his teacher; rather, he is like a translator who does not attempt to be true to the original but becomes inspired by it and creates his own original work. I hope this book has demonstrated that it is impractical to reduce Lotman’s multifarious personality to only one dominant philosophical/methodological/political paradigm or discourse because it in fact switches the focus from the core constituents of his theory to marginal ones, thus dramatically diminishing

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its applicability. It is this “synthetic” quality of Lotman’s approach that makes his theory unique. In my disposition of Lotman’s theory, I attempted to distinguish what is time-specific and what has a potential for further development and application, at the same time showing that Lotman’s method is based on certain discernable principles, which I have expounded in this book and which I summarize as follows: The core principles of Lotman’s semiotics can be formulated as the principle of cultural isomorphism —which postulates that all semiotic entities from individual consciousness to the totality of human culture are based on similar heterogeneous mechanisms of meaning-generation—and the principle of textuality of culture, the assumption that culture is an exceptionally complex text that in turn consists of texts within the texts. Both principles are closely connected with one another and together constitute what may be called the Lotman approach to culture. In other words, the metaphor of “reading the world as a text” in Lotman’s interpretation receives tangible methodological, and even philosophical, implications. In a nutshell, this approach concentrates on connections of any single text with its semiotic space and of any person with their cultural space; it focuses on the essential dialogism of text production and perception; it asserts the primacy of the text—the real unit of communication—over metaconstructions such as language or code; it aims at the elucidation of underlying textual structures in our everyday life; finally, it sees culture as an external representation of mind, as a model of reality expressed in texts, and as a manifestation of our unique semiotic capacity.

Notes

1

Contexts

1. The school is called differently in different publications: the TartuMoscow Semiotic School, the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School, the Tartu School of Semiotics. In any case, the Tartu component, as Liubov’ Kiseleva (1996) argues, is undoubtedly central. 2. It should be mentioned that in the Russian language, the word nauka (and its derivatives) is more general than the English science ; it can refer both to natural sciences and humanities and to scholarship in general. 3. For instance, the metaphorical construction “Willows weep, poplars whisper” is presented as follows: A 3(v1,n 1) & A 3(v2 ,n 2). 4. It is also noteworthy that cybernetics (derived from the Greek root κυβερνώ, to steer, to govern), intended by its creator Norbert Wiener as a discipline studying governance, control, and communication, is now associated mostly with the computer and sci-fi jargon (hence such derivatives as cyberspace, cyborg, etc.). 5. The works of the TMSS scholars were published in English in several collections, e.g., Sebeok (1975), Baran (1976), and Lucid (1977). A number of articles appeared in the journals Tel Quel , Semiotica , New Literary History, etc.

2

Culture as System

1. Cf. Sebeok (1991, 12), who states that semiotics “is not about the ‘real’ world at all, but about complementary or alternative actual models of it. . . . what a semiotic model depicts is not ‘reality’ as such, but nature as unveiled by our method of questioning.” 2. Cf. Lotman (1977d, 9): Secondary modeling systems are “built as superstructures upon a natural linguistic plane,” or “constructed on the model of language.” 3. Translation mine; in both English versions published in 1973 and 1975, this passage is missing. In the Russian version, it can be found just before

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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paragraph 6.2.0 and after this sentence: “Thus the analysis of Slavic cultures and languages may prove to be a convenient model for investigating the interrelations between natural languages and secondary (superlinguistic) semiotic modeling systems” (Lotman et al. 1975, 78). In a similar manner, Lotman (1977d, 101) asserts that artistic prose has arisen against the background of the poetic system as its negation, so the view of prose as “ordinary speech” and of poetry as “specially constructed” speech is in fact misleading. The same holds for parody, which is also based on the “familiarin-unfamiliar” situation (apart from literary parody, impersonating somebody is just one example of the everyday use of parody). However, as Tynianov shows in his works, parody belongs not only to the domain of humor but serves as an intertextual device and a vehicle of literary evolution (see chapter 3). In a similar manner, Peirce (1931–34) states that a thought “is always interpreted by a subsequent thought of our own” (5.284) and thus, “one concept is contained in another” (5.288). Cf. Tynianov (1977, 337), who argues that meaning is produced between the shots and montage is the “differential succession of shots.” Reid’s comparative work on Lotman and Bakhtin attempted to demonstrate that Bakhtin, usually perceived as a philosophical and scholarly antagonist of structuralist and semiotic theories, has many points of convergence with Lotman’s semiotics. On the problem of Bakhtin and Soviet semiotics, see also Matejka (1973), Titunik (1976), Danow (1988), Grzybek (1995), Egorov (1999, 243–58), and Emerson (2003). There are several other works on Bakhtin and Lotman that are beyond the scope of this excursus. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) came out under the names of Bakhtin’s disciples Medvedev and Voloshinov, respectively, and the debate about the authorship of these books has been going on for quite a long time now. The matter is still not resolved, and there are different opinions as to the degree of participation of Bakhtin in these two works. For example, Ivanov (1976b, 366) argues that Bakhtin is their immediate author. For our purposes, this problem is not of primary importance, and I will therefore refer to Voloshinov’s and Medvedev’s works as separate from Bakhtin’s. Cf. “Expression-utterance is determined by the actual conditions of the given utterance—above all, by its immediate social situation ” (Vološinov 1973, 85). Cf. “Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next” (Vološinov 1973, 102). Bakhtin never clearly defines the concept of text and uses it sometimes with opposite meanings; in some contexts, text means the same as utterance,

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sometimes it is directly opposed to utterance, and in other instances it is synonymous with work. For a more detailed account of Bakhtin’s concept of text in relation to Lotman’s, see Reid (1990), Grzybek (1995). Bakhtin most likely refers to Lotman’s 1965 article in TZS 2, “On the Problem of Meaning in Secondary Modeling Systems,” where Lotman argues that the problem of content is the problem of recoding (Bakhtin 2002, 610–11). Bakhtin might have also read Lotman’s 1966 article in TRSF, “Khudozhestvennaia struktura Evgeniia Onegina,” or Lotman’s description of Eugene Onegin in The Structure of the Artistic Text . It is necessary to mention that all these texts are quite different from the later book of 1980. On the context of this polemic, see detailed comments in Bakhtin (2002, 610–15, 722–25). Another theory that “originates” in formalism is the polysystem theory by Itamar Even-Zohar (1990, 88), who defines polysystem as “the ‘system of systems’ . . . a multiply stratified whole where relations between center and periphery are a series of oppositions.” Even-Zohar also refers to Lotman’s earlier works as emerging from almost the same tradition. Peter Steiner (1984, 127) argues that Tynianov “saw literary development as determined mainly by the internal conditions of the literary system and regarded the extraliterary context as secondary, merely complementing the internal developmental causes by providing literature with speech constructions fitting the needs of the de-automatizing principle of construction.” It should be noted that the formalists in their programmatic works criticized the study of literary history as “a history of generals” (Tynjanov 1977, 66; Brik 1977, 90) and studied literary development as an impersonal process. The TMSS scholars in many ways continued this tradition as well. Cf. “The question of a specific choice of path, or at least of the dominant, can be solved only by means of an analysis of the correlation between the literary series and other historical series. This correlation (a system of systems) has its own structural laws, which must be submitted to investigation. It would be methodologically fatal to consider the correlation of systems without taking into account the immanent laws of each system” (Tynjanov and Jakobson 1978, 80–81). These statements, by the way, seem to contradict the common critique of the formalists as focused exclusively on the immanent laws of literature. The Fantômas mania among the youth is ref lected in the 1974 film Aniskin and Fantomas , in which a country police detective named Aniskin finds out that behind juvenile Fantômas-inspired hooliganism there is an adult criminal who used teenagers for his dark purposes. Personal communication at Tartu Summer School of Semiotics, August 22, 2011, Palmse, Estonia.

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3

Culture as Text

1. Cf. similar approach to text by Roland Barthes (1977) in his essay “From Work to Text.” 2. This seems to be an exaggeration; for example, the text is central in Roland Barthes’s writings as well: “Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object” (Barthes 1989, 72). 3. It is necessary to note that Saussure was most probably inf luenced by the German romantic theory when advocating the arbitrary nature of the (linguistic) sign. August Schlegel was the first to state that the signifier and what is signified are tied by a very loose bond and not in fact the same: “There is in the human mind a desire that language should exhibit the object which it denotes, sensibly, by its very sound, which may be traced even as far back as in the first origin of poetry. As, in the shape in which language comes down to us, this is seldom perceptibly the case, an imagination which has been powerfully excited is fond of laying hold of any congruity in sound which may accidentally offer itself, that by such means he may, for the nonce, restore the lost resemblance between the word and the thing” (Schlegel 1846, 366). Friedrich Schlegel expresses similar ideas, stating that if the criterion of truth is understood as the correspondence of the representation with the object, then the object has to be compared with the representation. But this is not possible because one can only compare one representation with another (Bowie 1997, 74). Novalis summarizes the problem in the following way: he maintains that the confusion of the symbol with what is symbolized (picture/original, appearance/substance, subject/object) and the belief in true complete representation is the cause of “all the superstition and error of all times” (ibid., 66). Fichte defines language as “an expression of our thoughts through arbitrary signs” (Behler 1993, 264–65). Finally, Wilhelm von Humboldt emphasizes the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign by stating that all forms of language are symbols that are “not the things themselves, nor signs agreed on” but sounds that are found in real and mystical connections with the objects and concepts they represent (Berman 1992, 152–53). 4. In a 1967 article, Lotman identifies artistic texts with iconic signs and formulates the crucial difference between the sign and the model: “2.2. The difference between the sign and the model is that the latter not only replaces a certain referent but effectively [ polezno] replaces it in the process of cognition or organization of the object. Therefore, if in natural language the relation of language to the referent is historically conventional, the relation of the model to the object is determined by the structure of modeling system. In that sense only one type of

Notes

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signs— iconic signs —can be equated to models. 2.3. Works of art are constructed as iconic signs. This means that the information enclosed in a work of art is inseparable from its modeling language and from its structure as a sign-model” (Lotman 2000a, 388). I use Shukman’s (1977) translation because it is more precise than Ronald Vroon’s “expression,” “demarcation,” and “structure.” Cf. Tynianov (1977, 55): “The constructive principle of prose is the deformation of sound by meaning, and the constructive principle of poetry is the deformation of meaning by sound.” Magic is a separate semiotic problem and a form of semiosis; see an overview in Nöth (1990, 188–91). See also Lepik (2008) as a case of application of Lotman’s theory in the study of magic. Cf. Pavel Medvedev, who asserts that “meaning of art is completely inseparable from all the details of its material body” and that the work of art is “meaningful in its entirety” (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1991, 12). Vroon translated “slozhno postroennyi smysl” as “intricately constructed thought ,” but I use the more precise “meaning” here because Lotman aphoristically summarizes his description of the text as a meaning-generating mechanism. Tolstoy’s formula has gained much popularity and is quoted, for instance, by Lev Vygotsky in The Psychology of Art (1925) and in Boris Eikhenbaum’s article “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.” In the Elder Pliny’s account, Zeuxis painted grapes so convincingly that birds started to peck the painting. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasios to remove the curtain so that he could see the painting behind it, but it turned out that Parrhasios’s painting was the curtain itself (Pliny 1968, 111). Lotman also uses such terms as “minus-rhetoric,” “minus-trope,” and “minus-context.” The term “device” ( priem) is obviously borrowed from the formalists, although Lotman (1964, 59; 1977d, 103) claims that he defines it more precisely as “the structural element and its function.” Attempts to break the linearity of the narrative are manifested in the discrepancy between the story (events in chronological order) and the plot. For example, Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch (Rayuela) realizes the metaphor of the hopscotch game by presenting (at least) two narratives on the basis of one text, depending on the order in which the chapters of the book are read. The last sentence of the book reads, “So that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s—”. This example is also cited in Viktor Shklovskii’s Theory of Prose. Without delving into the history of genre definitions, it is important to note that the romantics played a pivotal role in shaping what has now become modern genre theory. Opposing the neoclassical model,

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the romantics significantly reconceptualized the Greek/Roman theory of genres. They advocated the infinite changeability of genres and the emergence of new literary forms instead of a fixed and static hierarchy; they opposed the creative power of genius and imagination to the mimetic and subsidiary nature of art. In general, if the neoclassicists viewed genre as a stable, prescriptive entity (an order), the romantics rejected all generic rules and lay emphasis on individual works (see Behler 1993; Szondi 1986, 75–94). See, for example, Strelka (1978). One of the most recent works on genre theory is an anthology edited by David Duff (2000). For a recent example of the discussion of genre in ancient Greece and Rome, see Depew and Obbink (2000). As McQuail (2005, 370) argues, genre (especially in the mass media) can function as a practical device for the economic (and commercial) needs of customers. Also, as it is defined in social semiotics, genre is a mediating category between the micro and macro structures, between texts and discourses: genre is “the site where social forms of organization engage with systems of signs in the production of texts, thus reproducing or changing the sets of meanings and values which make up a culture.” Genres, therefore, “only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them” (Hodge and Kress 1988, 6–7). It must be noted that Hirsch’s theory is essentially intentionalist, positing authorial intention as the only criterion for interpretation. For instance, according to Gérard Genette’s (1997, 28) diagram of hypertextual practices, the structural difference between parody and pastiche is that the former is a transformational device, whereas the latter is imitational. In his work on Dostoevsky and Gogol, Tynianov analyzes Dostoevsky’s novel Selo Stepanchikovo as an unrecognized parody of Gogol. Because it has not been identified as such by readers, the text is taken out of its context ( plan), and the work itself is inevitably changed. As Tynianov (1977, 226) states in this article, “If a parody of tragedy is a comedy, a parody of comedy may result in a tragedy.” In neurological terms, memory is a spatiotemporal pattern, and memory revocation is presented as a resonance of an active spatiotemporal pattern with the “old” one(s) (Calvin and Ojemann 1994, 129–30). See, for example, General History of the Stage by Luigi Riccoboni (written in 1738, translated into English in 1741): “If some time or other the English Poets would submit themselves to the three Unities of the Theatre, and not expose Blood and Murder before the Eyes of the Audience, they would at least partake of that Glory which the other more perfect modern Theatres enjoy” (quoted in Bailey 1964, 6).

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23. The problem of Hamletism (and particularly Russian Hamletism) has been addressed in many works; see Levin (1978), Rowe (1976), Clayton (1978), Foakes (1993, 12–44), Holland (1999), and Semenenko (2007, 139–42). 24. The history of how the “Poor Yorick” icon came to signify the emblem of the tragedy and why the “To be or not to be” soliloquy became the most popular excerpt from the play is described in detail in Semenenko (2007). 25. One should differentiate between these “fatherless” idioms and memes. Richard Dawkins coined the concept of meme in 1976, and the term gave birth to a whole new discipline of memetics. A meme is defined by Dawkins as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Dawkins argues that memes—among them are tunes, ideas, catchy phrases, etc.—propagate themselves from one brain to another by the process that is close to imitation (hence the origin of the word: an abbreviated version of mimeme, from a Greek root, “to imitate”). The problem with Dawkins’s definition is that he insists on direct analogies with Darwinian evolution and the biological process of genetic replication, arguing that memes are “living structures, not just metaphorically but technically” (Dawkins 1989, 192). Texts cannot of course replicate on their own, and such analogies are essentially misleading. Another problem with this understanding of memes is that practically anything can be called a meme, which simply devaluates the concept and exhibits a very superficial approach to the textuality of culture. Memeticists developed many different, sometimes contrasting approaches to memes, but in popular usage this word signifies a virus-like textual entity that is copied from one user to another. Especially abundant viral texts are in the Internet because of the ease and speed of text dissemination and reduplication. However, even superficial analysis reveals that memes have a very flexible (sometimes indefinable) semantic field, and their main function is actually referential, as in a majority of mythological texts. Memes do not directly transmit any information but rather serve as unifying contexts, creating the common field of memory among the users. Ironically, the current usage of the word suggests its provenance from the word “memory” rather than “mimesis.”

4

Semiosphere

1. In 1930s, Vernadsky adopts the concept of noosphere as the last stage of the evolution of the biosphere in geological history, in which mankind is reconstructing the biosphere in the interests of humanity: “The noösphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it for the first time man becomes a large-scale geological force. He can and must

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rebuild the province of his life by his work and thought, rebuild it radically in comparison with the past” (Vernadsky 1999, 99). The Russian noun razum is multivalent and may be translated as mind, intelligence, reason, ratio; and the adjective razumnyi , accordingly, as intelligent, rational, sapient. Note the similarities with Peirce’s statement that “every thought must address itself to some other, must determine some other” (1931–34, 5.253). The epoch of technical revolution of the 1950s–60s and the dominance of cybernetic discourse suggested an abundance of machine metaphors, so the usage of such terms as “system,” “mechanism,” and “apparatus” in semiotic terminology is not surprising. However, Lotman often uses “mechanistic” and “organicist” (Mandelker 1994) metaphors interchangeably. This is probably the inf luence of the formalists, who also deployed “biological,” “morphological,” and “technical” models in their studies of the literary techné (especially Shklovskii) and were first to describe literature as a system (Tynianov) (on main models in formalism, see Steiner 1984). The hypothesis of the existence of a special “language acquisition device” in the brain, as propagated by Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, has not been confirmed with substantial evidence and quite expectedly provoked a wave of criticism. For example, Philip Lieberman (2000) attacks the notion of universal grammar and argues that language, as any other skill, is not an innate instinct but “a learned skill, based on a functional language system (FLS) that is distributed over many parts of the human brain” (Lieberman 2000, 1). He shows that language makes use of a distributed network, including neocortex and basal ganglia (“our reptilian brain”). Subcortical basal ganglia play a crucial part in FLS: among other things, they are involved in learning particular patterns of motor activity and play a part in sequencing the individual elements that constitute a motor program (ibid., 82). In a similar manner, Terrence Deacon (1997, 135) asserts that children remember “the most global structure-function relationships of utterances” while they cannot reproduce concrete words. In other words, first they learn the structure, and then they differentiate between individual symbols, which is a remarkable ref lection of Lotman’s idea of the primacy of the text before the sign: the text creates its language, not vice versa. Deacon’s idea that language as a social phenomenon represents “a virtual common mind” (ibid., 427) can too be read as a paraphrase of the concept of semiosphere. The English translation of this article (Lotman 2005, 225) gives “are a seemingly inter-connected group of semiospheres” instead of a more accurate “are semiospheres inserted into one another, as it were.”

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8. The 1966 article and an excerpt from the 1975 book on EO are published in English in Hoisington (1988).

5

Universal Mind

1. The assertion that intellect and thought are not limited to human consciousness is found in Peirce (1931–34), who assigns thought even to the material world: “Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there” (4.551). 2. In Bakhtin’s works, the dialogical principle also presupposes the other; “I for myself ” is perceived against the background of “I for the other” (Bakhtin 1984, 205); see also “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” in Bakhtin (1990). 3. Cf. “For its own existence every semiotic entity (sign, text, mind, or culture as a whole) needs the other ” (M. Lotman 2002, 35). 4. Several semioticians extend Lotman’s ideas to a larger field; e.g., Petrilli and Ponzio (2005) use the term semiobiosphere, merging together Lotman’s semiosphere with Vernadsky’s biosphere (cf. Nöth 2006, 258). 5. To continue this thought, it is essentially erroneous to equate human language with animal communicative systems, as has been shown in a number of studies. For example, Marler (1998, 15) demonstrates that even if we can find some animal sounds that have symbolic meanings, “these particular signals come as an indivisible package, with no underlying combinatorial phonocode.” 6. However, Geertz (1973, 44) sees culture as “a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’)—for the governing of behavior” and studies first of all the symbolic dimensions of social action (art, religion, science, law, morality, etc.). For a comparative overview of semiotic versus anthropological view of culture, see, for example, Posner (1988). 7. The authors point out the increasing autonomization of individuals as a result of the growing number of recording techniques, from writing to tape recorders, which they consider to be the subsystems of AI (Egorov, Ignat’ev, and Lotman 1995, 284–85). 8. In Analysis of the Poetic Text , Lotman postulates that apart from natural language people have at least two other naturally acquired (stikhiino dannye) systems that actively but tacitly form our consciousness—the system of “common sense,” that is, our everyday knowledge, and the spatio-visual picture of the world (Lotman 1976a, 133; 1972, 132). Lotman mentions these systems in order to show how poetry is able to break their automatism. Otherwise, it is of course very problematic to

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10. 11.

12.

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state that “common sense” and the spatio-visual picture of the world are indeed semiotic systems. Cf. Saussure (1966, 23), who defines the object of linguistics (i.e., language) as “the social product deposited in the brain of each individual.” See Sebeok and Danesi (2000) for the detailed account of the trichotomy of modeling systems. At that time, the topic of brain asymmetry was actively explored both in the West and in the USSR. See, for example, Bogen (1973), Dimond (1972), and Winner and Gardner (1977). Alexander Luria (1902–77) is a renowned Soviet psychologist and neurophysiologist, Lev Vygotsky’s disciple, and the founder of the Soviet neuropsychology. Among other things, Luria and Vygotsky initiated the study of higher psychical functions as functional systems. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), introduced in 1938 by Ugo Cerletti and Lucino Bini, has been widely used in treating manic-depressive psychoses, different varieties of depression, and schizophrenia. This procedure is still controversial and may lead to various memory impairments and is now used only as the last measure in treatment. The peculiarity of the unilateral electroconvulsive therapy is that only one hemisphere is stimulated by electroshock, which leads to temporary inactivation of this hemisphere and reciprocal activation of the other hemisphere. This procedure is considered to be a milder alternative to ECT (see, for example, Fleminger, de Horne, and Nott 1970). During the experiments conducted by the Balonov group, the patients undergoing the treatment of unilateral shocks were asked to perform various tasks, and deviations from the norm in their behavior were recorded. The table is based on the following articles and books: Ivanov 1978a, 1979, 1983; Jakobson 1980; Chernigovskaia and Balonov 1983; Deglin, Balonov, and Dolinina 1983; Kaufman and Trachenko 1983; Nikolaenko 1983; Nikolaenko and Deglin 1984; Chernigovskaia and Deglin 1984 and 1986; Trachenko 1986. For instance, Ivanov (1998, 453–63) assigns consciousness to the left hemisphere and the unconscious to the right hemisphere, thus following Eccles (1989, 218), who considers human self -consciousness to be exclusively bound with the left hemisphere and consciousness with the right hemisphere. See also Ivanov (2004).

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Index analogy, 23, 35–6, 57, 136–7, 140–1, 153 Andrews, Edna, 4 anekdot, 44 anthropology, 13, 60, 88, 128, 155 arbitrariness, 42–3, 76, 94, 105, 150 Aristotle, 64, 96 art, 37, 41, 63, 65, 66, 73, 95, 97, 130, 148, 151 as cognitive tool, 35, 73 as modeling system, 32, 34–7 vs. life, 35–7, 66, 85–6 artificial intelligence,129–32, 136, 137 Ashby, Ross, 10, 68 asymmetry of the brain, 136–41, 156 in communication, 29–30 of culture, 78, 114–15, 136–7 Atkinson, Richard, 141 autocommunication, 39 automatization, 53, 92, 103–4, 149, 155 Azadovskii, Mark, 9 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 47–51, 75, 88, 145, 148, 149, 155 Balaian, Roman, 46 ballet, 35 Balonov, Lev, 138, 140, 141, 156 Barabash, Iurii, 16 Baroque, 66 Barthes, Roland, 40, 150 Bawarshi, Anis, 89 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 138

Benveniste, Émile, 38, 145 Berg, Aksel’, 11 bifurcation, 68 Bigelow, Julian, 129 binary oppositions, 19, 42, 47, 62, 70, 96, 99, 115 binary models, 62, 115, 139, 140 biosphere, 111, 153, 155 Bohannan, Laura, 60 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 57 boundary, 43, 48, 55–9, 62–3, 66, 68, 74, 83–6, 88, 98, 100, 101, 114, 120, 129, 133 Bowker, Geof, 10 brain, 25, 126, 136–43, 153, 154, 155, 156 Cameron, James, 84 canonicity, 52, 53, 57, 91–3, 105–9, 120 see also microcanonicity Cassirer, Ernst, 128 center vs. periphery, 2, 51–4, 59, 62, 67, 74, 114, 115, 130 CGI (computer-generated image), 84 chance (in history), 68–9 Chang, Han-liang, 114 Chernigovskaia, Tatiana, 140 Chernov, Igor’, 19, 75 choice (of an individual), 68–71, 74 Chomsky, Noam, 13, 139, 154 cinema see film city, 54 code, 25, 26, 30, 39, 49, 60, 90, 98, 112, 146

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Index

cognition, 6, 23, 48, 64, 97, 114, 133, 138, 143, 150 see also art, modeling Cole, Michael, 141 collective memory, 50, 88, 100–4, 108, 110, 116, 117, 120, 126, 130 comic books, 53 Condillac, Etienne B. de, 136 consciousness archaic, 42 children’s, 42, 136 collective, 95–6, 125–7, 142, 143, 146 medieval, 93–6, 126 mythological, 41–4, 68, 77, 96 self-consciousness, 126–7, 156 content vs. expression, 31, 32, 51, 76–7, 81–3, 90, 93–5, 109, 119 core (of culture) see center vs. periphery Cortázar, Julio, 151 creative function see text Culler, Jonathan, 90 cybernetics, 10–14 cyclicity, 65, 83, 128 Davidson, Richard, 140 Dawkins, Richard, 153 Deacon, Terrence, 128, 154 death, 86 Decembrists, 69–70 defamiliarization, 54 Deglin, Vadim, 138, 141 delimitedness (of a text), 78, 84–6 Descartes, René, 12 Deutsch, Georg, 141 diachrony, 64, 102, 119, 120 dialogue, 27, 39, 45, 46, 47–51, 55, 58, 59–62, 64, 66, 73, 74, 102, 113, 115, 116, 124, 127, 136–9, 146, 148, 155 differentiation, 44–6, 50, 79, 97, 103, 127, 148 discourse, 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 16, 49, 61–3, 89, 104, 133, 140, 145, 152, 154

discrete vs. nondiscrete, 30, 31, 77, 83, 86, 97, 135, 136, 138, 141 dominant (in formalism), 52 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 47, 48, 50, 152 duel, 71, 121–2 Ebert, Krista, 19 Eccles, John, 156 Eco, Umberto, 13 ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), 138, 140, 141, 156 Egorov, Boris, 3, 7, 51, 129–30 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 9, 151 Eisenstein, Sergei, 18, 46, 52 ending (of a text), 85–6 Enlightenment, 93, 94, 117 entropy, 32, 35, 70, 73, 94 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 149 everyday behavior, 69–70 explosions (in culture), 66–73 expression see content vs. expression expressedness (of a text), 78–82 Fadeev, Aleksandr, 61 Falen, James, 41 Fantômas (film), 61–2, 149 fashion, 53–4, 66 Fichte, Johann G., 127, 150 film, 23, 24, 29, 31, 39, 46, 53, 59, 61, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89, 97, 109, 115, 130, 149 fine arts, 24, 37 Florenskii, Pavel, 18 folklore, 37, 40, 44, 95, 96, 101, 108, 109, 120 form see content vs. expression formalism, 16, 18, 47, 51, 52, 56, 79, 81, 97, 103, 149, 154 functions of language (Jakobson), 26 Gaidar, Arkadii, 61 Gasparov, Boris, 15, 19, 20 Gasparov, Mikhail, 47 Geertz, Clifford, 128, 155

Index generative grammar, 13, 139, 154 Genette, Gérard, 152 genre, 44, 48, 50, 53, 60, 61, 63, 79, 86–7, 88–93, 110, 151, 152 social genres, 89 speech genres, 50 Gerovitch, Slava, 10 Gogol, Nikolai, 152 Gronas, Michail, 109 Grzybek, Peter, 139 Gukovskii, Grigorii, 9 Halle, Morris, 96 Hamletism, 105–6, 153 Hartley, John, 89 hemispheres (of the brain) see asymmetry heterogeneity, 30, 56, 114–15, 146 see also polyglotism Hirsch, Eric, 89, 152 historical development, 64–73 Hjelmslev, Louis, 8 Holland, Peter, 92 holy fools, 70 Homo sapiens, 128, 143 Hugdahl, Kenneth, 140 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 150 humor, 43–4, 55, 148 Hunebelle, André hypersemiotization, 105, 109 hypertext, 99, 152 I-I system vs. I-s/he system, 39 icons (religious), 87, 109 ideology, 4, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 40, 49, 50, 56, 62, 72, 89, 94, 95, 102, 123 Ignat’ev, Mikhail, 129–30 inertness, 59, 67 information theory, 8, 32–3, 130 informativeness, 33 intellect and intelligence, 100, 112, 115, 125–6, 141, 154, 155 see also consciousness

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artificial intelligence, 129–32, 136, 137 interdisciplinarity, 1, 2, 13, 150 Internet, 67, 99–100, 101, 109, 153 interpretant, 76 intertext, 90, 104, 148 invariant, 35, 36, 41, 78, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 94, 96, 105, 118, 126 irony, 55 isomorphism, 86–7, 114, 115–16, 119, 125, 128, 133, 137, 146 Ivan IV, the Terrible, 43, 70 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 7, 8, 11, 16, 19, 20, 37, 47, 75, 129, 136, 137, 140, 148 Jakobson, Roman, 20, 24–6, 30, 31, 112, 138 Karamzin, Nikolai, 9, 71 Kataev, Valentin, 61 Kaufman, O., 141 KGB (komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti), 15, 44, 63 Khrapchenko, Mikhail, 16 Khrushchev, Nikita, 10 Kim Su Kvan, 3 Kiseleva, Liubov’, 147 Klement, Fedor, 14 Klix, Friedhart, 141 Kolmogorov, Andrei, 11, 32, 145 Krause, Herbert, 141 Kull, Kalevi, 123 language acquisition, 113, 154 artificial, 8, 27–9, 33, 69 natural, 24–5, 28–9, 31, 37–8, 63, 64, 76, 80, 101, 114, 115, 133, 135, 136, 148, 150, 155 langue, 25, 26, 48, 78, 79 laterality see asymmetry of the brain Levin, Iurii D., 105 Levin, Iurii I., 7, 12, 19 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 13, 40, 47, 96

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Index

Lieberman, Philip, 154 Likhachev, Dmitrii, 49 linguistics, 8, 11, 12, 13, 25, 29, 49, 76, 139, 140, 147, 150, 156 as metalanguage, 12, 37 literature, 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 37, 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 66, 71, 75, 79, 81, 86, 88, 90, 93, 115, 120, 149, 154 literary canon see canonicity literary evolution, 53, 56, 88, 90, 148 literary facts, 79 Lotman, Mihhail, 75 Lucas, George, 109 Luria, Aleksandr, 137, 156 Lyons, John, 96 magic, 80, 151 Markasova, Elena, 61 markedness (of a text), 84 Marler, Peter, 155 mathematics, 11, 12, 13, 32, 34, 68 Matiushkin, A. M., 131 McQuail, Denis, 152 meaning see differentiation, polysemy, text meaning-generation, 30, 39, 44, 46, 48, 50, 55, 57, 63, 64, 81, 83, 84, 103, 110, 112, 115, 118, 119, 123, 131–3, 137, 146 Medvedev, Pavel, 18, 47, 148, 151 memes, 153 memory, 30, 40, 103, 104, 128, 132, 152 collective, 50, 88, 100–4, 108, 110, 116, 117, 120, 126, 130 forgetting, 72, 102 of text, 50, 104–9, 117 Mesguich, Daniel, 91 metalanguage, 12, 13, 20, 37, 82, 130, 134, 140 metalevel (of culture) see selfdescription

metaphors, 12, 46, 57, 63–4, 77, 103, 114, 142, 147, 154 meter, 33 microcanonicity, 109, 153 Miller, Carolyn, 89 mind-brain problem, 126 minus-device, 85–6, 151 mnemonic mechanisms, 39, 40, 102, 104, 108, 109, 119, 120, 126 modeling, 23, 34–8, 78, 88, 90, 91, 110, 117, 125, 135–6, 151, 156 montage, 46–7, 52, 81, 148 Mordovchenko, Nikolai, 9 Morris, Charles W., 78 music, 12, 37, 39, 40, 138 mythological consciousness, 41–4, 68, 77, 96 mythological texts, 40–4, 62, 73, 77, 80, 83–4, 104, 105, 136 Nabokov, Vladimir Commentary to Eugene Onegin, 121–2 Lolita, 85 narrative, 83, 85–6, 151 neoclassicism, 57, 95, 96, 103, 151, 152 neuroscience, 125, 136–40, 142, 152, 156 Nicholas I, 69 nonculture, 58, 94, 95, 117, 127 noosphere, 111, 114, 153–4 norm, 33–5, 52, 54–5, 57, 58, 60, 64, 67, 69, 70, 80, 83, 96, 113, 133, 156 Novalis (Friedrich Leopold, baron of Hardenberg), 150 oral tradition see folklore Ostrovsky, Aleksandr, 52 other, 58–9, 62, 94, 117, 127, 143, 155 “own vs. alien,” 58–9 see also other

Index paradigms, 89, 92, 126, 138, 143 parody, 43, 61, 62, 90, 91, 109, 148, 152 parole, 25, 26, 48, 78 Pasternak, Boris, 18 pastiche, 90, 152 Peirce, Charles S., 4, 45, 75, 76, 77, 78, 108, 119, 127, 133, 148, 154, 155 perestroika, 73, 98 periodization, 64–6 periphery see center vs. periphery philosophy, 12, 47, 76, 125, 140, 145 Piaget, Jean, 134 Piatigorskii, Aleksandr, 7, 8, 15, 20, 37, 79 Pinker, Steven, 154 Pliny, the Elder, 151 plot, 77, 83–4, 85, 97, 119, 151 plot-texts, 83–4 poetry, 33, 35, 38, 47, 48, 57, 60, 64, 80, 81, 83, 89, 148, 150, 151, 155 polyglotism, 30, 38, 39, 41, 48, 50, 63, 64, 73, 75, 78, 86, 97, 114, 115, 126, 135 polysemy, 29 polysystem theory, 1, 149 Potebnia, Aleksandr, 31 préciocité movement, 60 predictability see unpredictability Prigogine, Ilia, 68, 145 primary modeling systems, 37–8, 135–6 proper names, 42, 70, 105 see also mythological texts Propp, Vladimir, 9, 41, 88 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 9, 71 Eugene Onegin, 9, 40–1, 49, 121–2 Rabelais, François, 47 realism, 95 redundancy, 32–3, 65, 142 Reid, Allan, 148 Renaissance, 66

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175

repetition, 65, 80, 104, 128 representamen, 76 retrospection, 20, 67, 71–4 Revzin, Isaak, 7, 8 rhetoric, 47, 63–4, 74, 89, 151 rhyme, 33, 81 rhythm, 81 Riccoboni, Luigi, 152 ritual, 37, 41, 42, 62, 80, 94, 95, 103, 109, 128 romanticism, 60, 66, 70, 87, 103, 150, 151–2 Rosenblueth, Arturo, 129 Rozenfel’d, Jurii, 140 salon, 60 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 38 saturation, 12, 59, 67 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8, 24–6, 30, 45, 48, 75–9, 119, 133–6, 145, 150, 156 Schlegel, August von, 150 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 72, 150 Schönle, Andreas, 4, 19 scienticism, 11–13, 14, 33, 145 Scribner, Sylvia, 141 Sebeok, Thomas A., 4, 37, 135 secondary modeling systems, 37–8, 135–6, 147, 148, 149 Segal, Dmitrii, 7 self-description (of culture), 54, 57, 74, 94, 96, 99, 124, 130 semiosphere, 38, 87, 103, 111–25, 135–6, 142, 143, 153–5 semiotic capacity, 64, 124, 126, 128, 133, 135–6, 143, 146 Serebrianyi, Sergei, 20 Seuss, Eduard, 111 Shakespeare, William, 42, 103 Hamlet, 17, 60, 91–2, 104–9, 120 Romeo and Juliet, 42–3 Shine, Jeremy, 19 Shklovskii, Viktor, 53, 151, 154 Shukman, Ann, 3, 4, 97, 151

176

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Index

sign arbitrary, 42, 76, 94, 105, 150 conventional, 31, 93–4, 105, 119, 141 function, 89 iconic, 31, 77, 93, 94, 107, 108, 119, 138, 141, 150, 151 index, 77, 107–9 Peirce’s model, 76–7 Saussure’s model, 76 signified, 76, 105, 138, 150 signifier, 16, 59, 76, 105, 138, 150 symbolic see symbols vs. text, 75–8, 112, 146, 154 socialist realism, 15 social networks, 99–100 sociology, 4, 15, 88, 89, 96 speech, 24–5, 35, 39, 48, 78, 109, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 148 egocentric, 134 inner, 134 speech circuit (Saussure), 24 speech genres, 50, 88–9 Springer, Sally, 141 Steiner, Peter, 149 Stengers, Isabella, 68 Sterne, Laurence, 86 structuralism, 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 23, 40, 47, 49, 51, 76, 85, 88, 93, 96, 97, 148 structuredness (of a text), 52, 78, 80–3 subjectivity, 43, 70 Superfin, Gabriel, 18 Swales, John, 90 “symbolic animal,” 128 symbols, 77, 94, 95, 106–8, 126, 150 as unifying mechanisms, 119–20 synchrony, 51, 58, 66, 102, 119 synonymy, 27, 29, 32 syntagmatic relations, 80, 81, 138 compare paradigms Tallemant, Paul (le Jeune), 60 technological progress, 10, 67

ternary models (of culture), 70, 75, 99 text artistic, 31–6, 46, 78–87, 109, 150 cinematic see film as condenser, 117–18 creative function, 29–33, 78, 82, 104, 126 invariant, 35, 36, 41, 78, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 94, 96, 105, 118, 126 memory, 50, 104–9, 117 as model, 91–3 mythological, 40–4, 62, 77, 83–4, 104, 153 narrative, 83, 85–6, 151 vs. nontext, 84, 102, 127 sacral, 80, 109 scientific, 82–3 vs. sign, 75–8, 112, 146, 154 value, 33 text function, 79 textuality, 5, 78, 89, 99–100, 107, 146, 153 theater, 52, 57, 63, 84, 92, 103, 115, 152 thinking and thought, 26, 45, 48–9, 64, 112, 125–7, 128, 131–7, 140–3, 148, 150, 155 TMSS (Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School), 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, 14–21, 33, 37, 42, 47, 63, 75, 77, 79, 93, 96, 129, 136, 137–8, 147, 149 Todorov, Tzvetan, 88–9, 92, 93 Tolkien, John R. R., 109 Tolstoy, Leo, 81, 82, 151 Anna Karenina, 36, 82 Tomashevskii, Boris, 9 Toporov, Vladimir, 7, 20, 37 Torop, Peeter, 20 translation, 5, 17, 27–31, 38, 39, 44, 55, 60, 64, 73, 77, 103, 111 Trediakovskii, Vasilii, 60 tropes, 64, 151 Tulviste, Peeter, 141 Turing, Alan, 131

Index Tynianov, Iurii, 51–3, 56, 79, 80, 81, 88, 90, 92, 145, 148, 149, 152, 154 typology (of cultures), 13, 38, 66, 93–6, 130 TZS (Trudy po znakovym sistemam), 9, 17, 18, 35, 37, 47, 111, 138, 141, 149 Uexküll, Jakob von, 4, 116, 128 Umwelt, 116–17, 118, 123 universalism, 35–6, 96, 115, 125–7, 154 universal language, 5, 10, 12–13, 20, 37, 139 universals, 13, 93, 139 unpredictability, 5, 32–4, 36, 56, 60, 64–5, 67–71, 73, 74, 82–3, 87, 101, 118, 128, 132, 133

●

Uspenskii, Boris, 7, 20, 37, 38, 41–2, 52, 63, 84, 94, 96, 98, 112, 114 Vernadsky, Vladimir, 111–12, 145, 153–4, 155 Voloshinov, Valentin, 47, 48, 148 Vygotsky, Lev, 134, 151, 156 Waldstein, Maxim, 4 Wiener, Norbert, 10, 129, 147 Wikileaks, 73 writing, 67, 101 Yurchak, Alexei, 73 Zalizniak, Andrei, 13, 37 Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, 7, 15

177