Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
ALEKSEI SEMENENKO
The Texture of Culture
Semiotics and Popular Culture
Series Editor: Marcel Danesi
Titles:
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)
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 Yuri Lotman’s portrait by Peter Gullers 8
1.2 TZS, or Semiotika 17
2.1 Saussure’s speech circuit 24
2.2 Speech act by Roman Jakobson 25
2.3 From thought to thought 26
2.4 The reverse translation 27
2.5 The Swedish speed limit sign 28
2.6 The creative function of text 29
3.1 The relation of text to culture 91
3.2 The “Poor Yorick” icon 106
3.3 [Hamlet] the sign 107
4.1 Text as a condenser of semiosphere 117
4.2 Communication in the semiosphere 118
Tables
1.1 Brief biography of Yuri Lotman 9
3.1 Typology of cultures 95
5.1 Hemispheric “specializations” 138
Series Preface
P
opular forms of entertainment have always existed. As he trav-
eled 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 func-
tions” of current pop culture forms such as sitcoms, reality TV pro-
grams, 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 semi-
otics, 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 relation-
ship 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 cul-
ture, 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.
x ● Series Preface
The books are written in clear language and style so that read-
ers 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 atti-
tudes 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 lec-
tures 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 espe-
cially 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 ver-
sion 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 artificial intelligence
EO Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
TMSS Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School
TRSF Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii (Papers on Russian and
Slavonic Philology)
TZS 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 inevita-
bly 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.
2 ● The Texture of Culture
Lotman’s Works
Lotman authored more than 900 publications in different languages
and left an ample archive that is still under the process of systemati-
zation. 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 ● 3
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 men-
tioning a number of studies on Lotman in Estonian, Italian, Polish,
Spanish, and other languages. In Russian, there are only two mono-
graphs 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 atten-
tion of Western scholars, and it is not entirely surprising that in
4 ● The Texture of Culture
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 disserta-
tion by Maxim Waldstein (2008), which is, to date, the only history
of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School in English. This study is writ-
ten 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 ● 5
Contexts
February 28, 1922 Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is born in Petrograd (now Saint
Petersburg), Russia.
1939 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.
1940–1946 Conscripted into Soviet Army, participates in World War II in
an artillery regiment, returns home only in December 1946.
1950 Moves to Tartu, Estonia; teaches at the Teachers Institute and
Tartu University at the Department of Russian Literature.
1952 Defends his candidate dissertation at Leningrad University.
1954 Associate Professor.
1960–1977 Chair of the Department of Russian Literature.
1961 Defends his doctoral dissertation at Leningrad University.
1963 Professor of Russian literature.
1964 First Summer School and first volume of TZS,
Lectures on Structural Poetics.
1970 The Structure of the Artistic Text, Essays on the Typology of
Culture.
1972 Analysis of the Poetic Text.
1973 Semiotics of Cinema.
1980 Commentary to Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.
1981 Pushkin’s biography.
1987 Creation of Karamzin.
(1989) Unpredictable Mechanisms of Culture is written, to be published
only in 2010.
1990 Universe of the Mind (first published in English).
1992 Culture and Explosion;
Department of Semiotics is founded at Tartu University.
October 28, 1993 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
10 ● The Texture of Culture
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 pre-
viously despised structuralism. Apart from that, a number of peri-
odicals on cybernetics and even a series with the slogan-like title
Cybernetics to the Service of Communism were established. The influ-
ential 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 human-
ities 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)
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 gen-
eral stance, Pasternak in fact does not so much criticize the formal-
ists; 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 develop-
ing 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 cam-
ouf 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 con-
trast 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.
Contexts ● 19
Culture as System
Figure 2.1 Saussure’s speech circuit (adapted from Saussure 1966, 11).
Culture as System ● 25
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 psy-
chological 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 commu-
nicate 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 pos-
sible 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
the text
Figure 2.3 From thought to thought (adapted from Lotman 1990, 11).
Culture as System ● 27
Text 1 Text 2
(Language 1) (Language 2)
T2´
C1
C2 T2´´
T1
n
C
n
T2
Figure 2.6 The creative function of text (adapted from Lotman 1990, 15).
30 ● The Texture of Culture
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 mini-
mal act of elaborating a new message is
It is important to keep in mind that the division into iconic and con-
ventional languages is just one of the possible cases and represents the
ultimate pair of mutually untranslatable languages. The most obvi-
ous 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 picto-
rial 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 con-
cerns 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?
32 ● The Texture of Culture
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
34 ● The Texture of Culture
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:
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 infor-
mation, producing multivalent messages or texts. In nonartistic sys-
tems, where the transfer of information is of primary importance,
noise constitutes an entropic force that interferes with the trans-
ferred 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
36 ● The Texture of Culture
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 empha-
sized: Roland Barthes (1972) notably studies modern myths as vehi-
cles 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 func-
tion if it is interpreted as a model of reality. Lotman (1990, 30–31)
gives an example from Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin , in
Culture as System ● 41
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):
In semiotic terms, Juliet states that the (verbal) sign is purely arbi-
trary 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 ven-
geance in general) is a structure peculiar exactly to mythological
consciousness because by its logic all members of a family are consid-
ered 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 mod-
ern 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 contex-
tuality and referentiality: most jokes, apart from being “funny,” also
define a certain worldview. Being closely connected to certain phe-
nomena 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 bro-
ken, its effect is close to nothing.5 Joke is therefore essentially an
44 ● The Texture of Culture
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 fol-
lowing morning, but my neighbor wasn’t lazy and reported me right
away, so that is why I am here.”
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 con-
crete 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 fundamen-
tal principle of semiosis, Lotman follows both “fathers of semiotics,”
Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles S. Peirce. Saussure argues that
in language
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 mean-
ings; by juxtaposing the first and the second element, the viewer cre-
ates 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 junc-
tion 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 typi-
cal 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 meaning-
ful, 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 inter-
preted 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 ulti-
mate truth because this contradicts the premise of dialogicity of
communication.
Culture as System ● 47
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 lit-
erature 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 dif-
ferent 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 ade-
quate 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 con-
verge: 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 para-
phrase of Lotman’s description of the relation of a text to culture.
50 ● The Texture of Culture
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 predeter-
mine 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 distin-
guishes 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 forefa-
thers 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 begin-
ning. 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 develop-
ment. (Bakhtin 1984, 106)
on the periphery); now jeans are spread all over various layers of fash-
ion, in most cases having neutral connotations as the most casual
and common apparel.
Just like the top-bottom dichotomy, the center-periphery meta-
phors are very common in culture. The metaphor of culture as a con-
centric structure is often manifested in the hierarchical organization
of living space. For example, the structure of the city with its divi-
sion 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 cit-
ies 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 descrip-
tion of the normative core of a culture is often presented as its typi-
cal “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 estab-
lished norm of the observed culture (Lotman 1994, 115). But the
outsider’s viewpoint provides a defamiliarized picture (also the for-
malist 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 for-
eign norm but notice the deviations from the normative core of our
domestic system. For example, if we see a strangely dressed person,
Culture as System ● 55
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 sit-
uations or texts, ignoring the multiplicity of meanings (Lotman
1992–93, III.138). The reason for this is that any message con-
sists, 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 manifes-
tation 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 translatabil-
ity (Lotman 1977a, 96). On the whole, the basis of every act of
56 ● The Texture of Culture
Metalevel of Culture
Another concept inextricably connected with the concept of bound-
ary and the center-periphery relationship is the notion of metalevel
of culture. The highest form of the structural organization of a cul-
ture is the point of self-description, which any developed culture
inevitably reaches (Lotman 1990, 128):
In the final analysis, each dialogic situation begins with the delin-
eation of the own and the alien. The intersection of different semi-
otic codes that are explicitly or implicitly used to produce messages
Culture as System ● 59
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” (pro-
ducing 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 lit-
erature 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 recep-
tion of foreign material usually takes the following pattern of the
dialogue: inertness — saturation — text generation .
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 intro-
duce a specific discourse that from a semiotic point of view defies
the dialogic principle of communication: repressive ideological dis-
courses 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 hierar-
chies, in this sense making the communication in culture return to
its archaic structures. In the context of cultural studies, the concept
Culture as System ● 63
Unpredictable History
We have been thus far analyzing the structure of culture from a syn-
chronic 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
Culture as System ● 65
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 meta-
construct, 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 pres-
ent a “rhythmical” pattern of structural change in art and ideol-
ogy. In this scheme, two archetypical styles or types—which may
66 ● The Texture of Culture
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.
Culture as System ● 67
Every abrupt change in human history releases new forces. The par-
adox is that movement forward may stimulate the regeneration of
68 ● The Texture of Culture
archaic cultural and psychological models, may give rise both to sci-
entific blessings and to epidemics of mass fear. (Lotman 1991, 798)
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 (recon-
struct) the occurrence of certain events of the past and thus predict
72 ● The Texture of Culture
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 retro-
spective, 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 correc-
tive process as genuine reality” (Lotman 2009, 127). The transfor-
mation 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 retro-
spection selects certain texts and inexorably excludes others:
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 recon-
struct the past events, has to deal with texts, and this complicates the
task immensely because one has to distinguish between what is consid-
ered 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 method-
ological 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.
Culture as System ● 73
Culture as Text
T
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 ter-
minology 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?
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 for-
mer 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 advo-
cating 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).
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:
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 interrelation-
ship on all levels. The text is hierarchically structured, and in its
structure signs are packed, as it were, inside one another like matry-
oshka 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 poten-
tial information. Furthermore, if the structure of an artistic text
is meaningful by itself, an altered structure will convey a differ-
ent idea (Lotman 1977d, 12). As an example, Lotman describes the
concept of repetition that transforms the “normal” system of rela-
tions 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 prin-
ciple 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 redun-
dant, 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 neces-
sarily 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
Culture as Text ● 81
diversity of the text and reveal its structure. Lotman (1964, 74) sum-
marizes 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) simi-
larity, which produces the semantic shift. Another meaning-alter-
ing 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., chap-
ters and paragraphs in the written text or montage and other tech-
niques 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
82 ● The Texture of Culture
Tolstoy emphasizes the fact that the meaning of the artistic text can-
not 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 some-
thing 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 dif-
ferent 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
Culture as Text ● 83
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 sen-
tence, 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 iso-
morphism: 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).
Culture as Text ● 87
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 artis-
tic system—will be perceived as identical because the attention of
the reader will be focused only on the macrostructure, not on indi-
vidual 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 cul-
ture, bringing into focus the concept of genre.
88 ● The Texture of Culture
Genre
Genre is one of the oldest and most disputed concepts in literary
criticism, much older than the term “literature” itself. Genre under-
went a long process of transformation and evolved from the notion
of “literary kinds” to a social and communicative concept that tran-
scended 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):
(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 transforma-
tion (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 liter-
ary 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 func-
tion,” 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 dia-
logic 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).
Culture as Text ● 91
Culture
System
(Literature)
Genre
(Tragedy)
Text
(Hamlet)
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, success-
fully securing its place in the literary canon of many countries. It
is no longer a “normal” text; after centuries of exceptional popular-
ity, 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 pres-
ent something innovatory to the audience. Given that the audience
92 ● The Texture of Culture
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 typol-
ogy 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, includ-
ing 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
Culture 1 Culture 2
• Expression-oriented • Content-oriented
• Correct text • Set of rules
• Ritual • Symbol
• Opposed to anticulture (correct vs. • Opposed to nonculture (organized vs.
incorrect) unorganized)
• Inward isolation • Outward expansion
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 nonmo-
tor 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 semi-
otic 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 correspon-
dence between the new and the known elements of our cultural mem-
ory (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
104 ● The Texture of Culture
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 pro-
cess 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 com-
monplace that the hero became dissociated from his Shakespearean
context (Conklin 1957, 23). This in turn gave birth to the phenom-
enon 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 iden-
tified 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 hus-
band Othello or a bloody tyrant Richard III. What is interpreted is
actually Hamlet’s character, not the play’s story line. The phenom-
enon of Hamletism is part of what Lotman described as the mytho-
logical 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 meaning-
ful 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 signi-
fier 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,
106 ● The Texture of Culture
Symbol
Hamlet the character
representing
melancholy, reflection,
messianism, etc.
Icon Index
the “poor Yorick’’ “To be of not to be’
icon, etc. etc.
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 sur-
vive 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 rhetori-
cal. 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 mecha-
nisms of culture. Lotman defines symbols as semiotic units that per-
meate 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 evi-
dent 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
Culture as Text ● 109
Semiosphere
message, context, contact) are still not a sufficient condition for com-
munication act to occur unless this system is immersed in the semi-
otic space. By the same token, one must have some prior semiotic
experience before initiating communication. Thus the traditional
scheme of communication
turns “backward”:
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 charac-
ter 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 numer-
ous 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 dia-
lect, 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
114 ● The Texture of Culture
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 semio-
sphere was coined, in many of his works, Lotman had been widely
using “spherical” metaphors when describing the structure and orga-
nization of culture. The semantic flexibility of the concept is dem-
onstrated 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 asymme-
try, 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 struc-
ture of the semiosphere is therefore identical to other semiotic systems
Semiosphere ● 115
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 reiter-
ate 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 intel-
lect, a network of individual minds in constant interaction. Likewise,
culture is described as a whole isomorphic to its parts, that is, indi-
viduals (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
116 ● The Texture of Culture
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 isomor-
phic 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.
text
SEMIOSPHERE
Umwelt 1
(text1)
Semiosphere
Umwelt 2
(text2n)
Semiosphere as Method
The concept of semiosphere is essentially dual, that is, it is simulta-
neously 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 semi-
otic 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 semio-
sis, 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 evolu-
tion, 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.
Semiosphere ● 121
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 unequivo-
cally states that the semiosphere is a primary condition for any cul-
ture 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 con-
text 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.”
Universal Mind
T
he principle of cultural isomorphism and the concept of indi-
vidual semiosphere inevitably raise the question of defini-
tion 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 pos-
sible 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, psy-
chology, and neuroscience.
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
Universal Mind ● 127
It is evident that the idea that “I” is always expressed through “the
other” refers to the principle of differentiation in the context of cul-
tural 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 behav-
ior of animals in order to illustrate the uniqueness of human con-
sciousness (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
128 ● The Texture of Culture
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).
Universal Mind ● 129
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 analy-
sis 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 cyber-
netics, teleology is understood as purposeful behavior controlled by
feedback—humans, animals, and machines are functionally identi-
cal to each other and therefore can be studied by the same methods.
This view was shared by many Soviet academics as well; in fact, man-
machine 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 trans-
lation, 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 proj-
ect” 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 orga-
nizations, 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 con-
clude 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
130 ● The Texture of Culture
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)
human thought all that exists is that which falls into any of its lan-
guages” (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 remi-
niscent 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 decomposi-
tion.” 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 some-
body’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 atten-
tion to the study of inner speech (internal self-directed speech) and
egocentric speech of children. Unlike Jean Piaget, the psycholo-
gist 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 autono-
mous 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
Universal Mind ● 135
LH “controls” a RH “controls”
D
ifferent researchers and critics create different portraits of
Lotman as a theoretician: he has been depicted as a struc-
turalist, a cybernetician, an “organicist,” and a philosopher.
As we have seen, in Lotman’s writing one can indeed encounter struc-
turalist 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 explic-
itly 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 theoreti-
cians—whose ideas Lotman absorbs, develops, and incorporates in
his own theory of culture—contributes something to Lotman’s the-
ory and ref lects a different side of Lotman’s multifaceted personal-
ity. 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 cre-
ates 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 constit-
uents of his theory to marginal ones, thus dramatically diminishing
146 ● The Texture of Culture
1 Contexts
1. The school is called differently in different publications: the Tartu-
Moscow 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 sev-
eral 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
148 ● Notes
paragraph 6.2.0 and after this sentence: “Thus the analysis of Slavic cul-
tures and languages may prove to be a convenient model for investigating
the interrelations between natural languages and secondary (superlin-
guistic) semiotic modeling systems” (Lotman et al. 1975, 78).
4. 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.
5. The same holds for parody, which is also based on the “familiar-
in-unfamiliar” situation (apart from literary parody, impersonat-
ing 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).
6. 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).
7. Cf. Tynianov (1977, 337), who argues that meaning is produced
between the shots and montage is the “differential succession of shots.”
8. Reid’s comparative work on Lotman and Bakhtin attempted to dem-
onstrate that Bakhtin, usually perceived as a philosophical and schol-
arly 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.
9. 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 sep-
arate from Bakhtin’s.
10. Cf. “Expression-utterance is determined by the actual conditions of the
given utterance—above all, by its immediate social situation ” (Vološinov
1973, 85).
11. Cf. “Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the
next” (Vološinov 1973, 102).
12. Bakhtin never clearly defines the concept of text and uses it sometimes with
opposite meanings; in some contexts, text means the same as utterance,
Notes ● 149
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 representa-
tion 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, sub-
ject/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 lan-
guage 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 ● 151
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).
5. I use Shukman’s (1977) translation because it is more precise than
Ronald Vroon’s “expression,” “demarcation,” and “structure.”
6. 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.”
7. 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.
8. 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).
9. Vroon translated “slozhno postroennyi smysl” as “intricately con-
structed thought ,” but I use the more precise “meaning” here because
Lotman aphoristically summarizes his description of the text as a
meaning-generating mechanism.
10. 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.”
11. 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).
12. 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.”
13. 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 nar-
ratives on the basis of one text, depending on the order in which the
chapters of the book are read.
14. 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.
15. 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,
152 ● Notes
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 man-
kind 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
154 ● Notes
rebuild the province of his life by his work and thought, rebuild it radi-
cally in comparison with the past” (Vernadsky 1999, 99).
2. The Russian noun razum is multivalent and may be translated as mind,
intelligence, reason, ratio; and the adjective razumnyi , accordingly, as
intelligent, rational, sapient.
3. Note the similarities with Peirce’s statement that “every thought must
address itself to some other, must determine some other” (1931–34,
5.253).
4. 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 “appara-
tus” 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).
5. 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 lan-
guage, 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).
6. In a similar manner, Terrence Deacon (1997, 135) asserts that children
remember “the most global structure-function relationships of utter-
ances” while they cannot reproduce concrete words. In other words,
first they learn the structure, and then they differentiate between indi-
vidual 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.
7. 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.”
Notes ● 155
8. The 1966 article and an excerpt from the 1975 book on EO are pub-
lished in English in Hoisington (1988).
5 Universal Mind
1. The assertion that intellect and thought are not limited to human con-
sciousness 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 under-
lying combinatorial phonocode.”
6. However, Geertz (1973, 44) sees culture as “a set of control mech-
anisms—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 anthro-
pological 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 writ-
ing 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
156 ● Notes
state that “common sense” and the spatio-visual picture of the world
are indeed semiotic systems.
9. Cf. Saussure (1966, 23), who defines the object of linguistics (i.e.,
language) as “the social product deposited in the brain of each
individual.”
10. See Sebeok and Danesi (2000) for the detailed account of the trichot-
omy of modeling systems.
11. 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).
12. Alexander Luria (1902–77) is a renowned Soviet psychologist and neu-
rophysiologist, 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.
13. 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 impair-
ments 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 under-
going the treatment of unilateral shocks were asked to perform various
tasks, and deviations from the norm in their behavior were recorded.
14. 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.
15. For instance, Ivanov (1998, 453–63) assigns consciousness to the left
hemisphere and the unconscious to the right hemisphere, thus follow-
ing 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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References ● 169
analogy, 23, 35–6, 57, 136–7, 140–1, Benveniste, Émile, 38, 145
153 Berg, Aksel’, 11
Andrews, Edna, 4 bifurcation, 68
anekdot, 44 Bigelow, Julian, 129
anthropology, 13, 60, 88, 128, 155 binary oppositions, 19, 42, 47, 62, 70,
arbitrariness, 42–3, 76, 94, 105, 150 96, 99, 115
Aristotle, 64, 96 binary models, 62, 115, 139, 140
art, 37, 41, 63, 65, 66, 73, 95, 97, 130, biosphere, 111, 153, 155
148, 151 Bohannan, Laura, 60
as cognitive tool, 35, 73 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 57
as modeling system, 32, 34–7 boundary, 43, 48, 55–9, 62–3, 66, 68,
vs. life, 35–7, 66, 85–6 74, 83–6, 88, 98, 100, 101, 114,
artificial intelligence,129–32, 136, 137 120, 129, 133
Ashby, Ross, 10, 68 Bowker, Geof, 10
asymmetry brain, 25, 126, 136–43, 153, 154,
of the brain, 136–41, 156 155, 156
in communication, 29–30
of culture, 78, 114–15, 136–7 Cameron, James, 84
Atkinson, Richard, 141 canonicity, 52, 53, 57, 91–3, 105–9, 120
autocommunication, 39 see also microcanonicity
automatization, 53, 92, 103–4, Cassirer, Ernst, 128
149, 155 center vs. periphery, 2, 51–4, 59, 62,
Azadovskii, Mark, 9 67, 74, 114, 115, 130
CGI (computer-generated image), 84
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 47–51, 75, 88, 145, chance (in history), 68–9
148, 149, 155 Chang, Han-liang, 114
Balaian, Roman, 46 Chernigovskaia, Tatiana, 140
ballet, 35 Chernov, Igor’, 19, 75
Balonov, Lev, 138, 140, 141, 156 choice (of an individual), 68–71, 74
Barabash, Iurii, 16 Chomsky, Noam, 13, 139, 154
Baroque, 66 cinema see film
Barthes, Roland, 40, 150 city, 54
Bawarshi, Anis, 89 code, 25, 26, 30, 39, 49, 60, 90, 98,
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 138 112, 146
172 ● Index
cognition, 6, 23, 48, 64, 97, 114, 133, discrete vs. nondiscrete, 30, 31, 77, 83,
138, 143, 150 86, 97, 135, 136, 138, 141
see also art, modeling dominant (in formalism), 52
Cole, Michael, 141 Dostoevsky, Fedor, 47, 48, 50, 152
collective memory, 50, 88, 100–4, 108, duel, 71, 121–2
110, 116, 117, 120, 126, 130
comic books, 53 Ebert, Krista, 19
Condillac, Etienne B. de, 136 Eccles, John, 156
consciousness Eco, Umberto, 13
archaic, 42 ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), 138,
children’s, 42, 136 140, 141, 156
collective, 95–6, 125–7, 142, 143, Egorov, Boris, 3, 7, 51, 129–30
146 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 9, 151
medieval, 93–6, 126 Eisenstein, Sergei, 18, 46, 52
mythological, 41–4, 68, 77, 96 ending (of a text), 85–6
self-consciousness, 126–7, 156 Enlightenment, 93, 94, 117
content vs. expression, 31, 32, 51, 76–7, entropy, 32, 35, 70, 73, 94
81–3, 90, 93–5, 109, 119 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 149
core (of culture) see center vs. periphery everyday behavior, 69–70
Cortázar, Julio, 151 explosions (in culture), 66–73
creative function see text expression see content vs. expression
Culler, Jonathan, 90 expressedness (of a text), 78–82
cybernetics, 10–14
cyclicity, 65, 83, 128 Fadeev, Aleksandr, 61
Falen, James, 41
Davidson, Richard, 140 Fantômas (film), 61–2, 149
Dawkins, Richard, 153 fashion, 53–4, 66
Deacon, Terrence, 128, 154 Fichte, Johann G., 127, 150
death, 86 film, 23, 24, 29, 31, 39, 46, 53, 59, 61,
Decembrists, 69–70 81, 83, 85, 86, 89, 97, 109, 115,
defamiliarization, 54 130, 149
Deglin, Vadim, 138, 141 fine arts, 24, 37
delimitedness (of a text), 78, 84–6 Florenskii, Pavel, 18
Descartes, René, 12 folklore, 37, 40, 44, 95, 96, 101, 108,
Deutsch, Georg, 141 109, 120
diachrony, 64, 102, 119, 120 form see content vs. expression
dialogue, 27, 39, 45, 46, 47–51, 55, 58, formalism, 16, 18, 47, 51, 52, 56, 79,
59–62, 64, 66, 73, 74, 102, 113, 81, 97, 103, 149, 154
115, 116, 124, 127, 136–9, 146, functions of language (Jakobson), 26
148, 155
differentiation, 44–6, 50, 79, 97, 103, Gaidar, Arkadii, 61
127, 148 Gasparov, Boris, 15, 19, 20
discourse, 4, 5, 10, 13, 14, 16, 49, 61–3, Gasparov, Mikhail, 47
89, 104, 133, 140, 145, 152, 154 Geertz, Clifford, 128, 155
Index ● 173
Lieberman, Philip, 154 metaphors, 12, 46, 57, 63–4, 77, 103,
Likhachev, Dmitrii, 49 114, 142, 147, 154
linguistics, 8, 11, 12, 13, 25, 29, 49, 76, meter, 33
139, 140, 147, 150, 156 microcanonicity, 109, 153
as metalanguage, 12, 37 Miller, Carolyn, 89
literature, 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, mind-brain problem, 126
37, 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 63, 66, minus-device, 85–6, 151
71, 75, 79, 81, 86, 88, 90, 93, 115, mnemonic mechanisms, 39, 40, 102,
120, 149, 154 104, 108, 109, 119, 120, 126
literary canon see canonicity modeling, 23, 34–8, 78, 88, 90, 91,
literary evolution, 53, 56, 88, 110, 117, 125, 135–6, 151, 156
90, 148 montage, 46–7, 52, 81, 148
literary facts, 79 Mordovchenko, Nikolai, 9
Lotman, Mihhail, 75 Morris, Charles W., 78
Lucas, George, 109 music, 12, 37, 39, 40, 138
Luria, Aleksandr, 137, 156 mythological consciousness, 41–4, 68,
Lyons, John, 96 77, 96
mythological texts, 40–4, 62, 73, 77,
magic, 80, 151 80, 83–4, 104, 105, 136
Markasova, Elena, 61
markedness (of a text), 84 Nabokov, Vladimir
Marler, Peter, 155 Commentary to Eugene Onegin,
mathematics, 11, 12, 13, 32, 34, 68 121–2
Matiushkin, A. M., 131 Lolita, 85
McQuail, Denis, 152 narrative, 83, 85–6, 151
meaning see differentiation, neoclassicism, 57, 95, 96, 103,
polysemy, text 151, 152
meaning-generation, 30, 39, 44, 46, neuroscience, 125, 136–40, 142,
48, 50, 55, 57, 63, 64, 81, 83, 84, 152, 156
103, 110, 112, 115, 118, 119, 123, Nicholas I, 69
131–3, 137, 146 nonculture, 58, 94, 95, 117, 127
Medvedev, Pavel, 18, 47, 148, 151 noosphere, 111, 114, 153–4
memes, 153 norm, 33–5, 52, 54–5, 57, 58, 60, 64,
memory, 30, 40, 103, 104, 128, 132, 67, 69, 70, 80, 83, 96, 113,
152 133, 156
collective, 50, 88, 100–4, 108, 110, Novalis (Friedrich Leopold, baron of
116, 117, 120, 126, 130 Hardenberg), 150
forgetting, 72, 102
of text, 50, 104–9, 117 oral tradition see folklore
Mesguich, Daniel, 91 Ostrovsky, Aleksandr, 52
metalanguage, 12, 13, 20, 37, 82, 130, other, 58–9, 62, 94, 117, 127,
134, 140 143, 155
metalevel (of culture) see self- “own vs. alien,” 58–9
description see also other
Index ● 175
paradigms, 89, 92, 126, 138, 143 repetition, 65, 80, 104, 128
parody, 43, 61, 62, 90, 91, 109, representamen, 76
148, 152 retrospection, 20, 67, 71–4
parole, 25, 26, 48, 78 Revzin, Isaak, 7, 8
Pasternak, Boris, 18 rhetoric, 47, 63–4, 74, 89, 151
pastiche, 90, 152 rhyme, 33, 81
Peirce, Charles S., 4, 45, 75, 76, 77, 78, rhythm, 81
108, 119, 127, 133, 148, 154, 155 Riccoboni, Luigi, 152
perestroika, 73, 98 ritual, 37, 41, 42, 62, 80, 94, 95, 103,
periodization, 64–6 109, 128
periphery see center vs. periphery romanticism, 60, 66, 70, 87, 103, 150,
philosophy, 12, 47, 76, 125, 140, 145 151–2
Piaget, Jean, 134 Rosenblueth, Arturo, 129
Piatigorskii, Aleksandr, 7, 8, 15, 20, Rozenfel’d, Jurii, 140
37, 79
Pinker, Steven, 154 salon, 60
Pliny, the Elder, 151 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 38
plot, 77, 83–4, 85, 97, 119, 151 saturation, 12, 59, 67
plot-texts, 83–4 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8, 24–6, 30,
poetry, 33, 35, 38, 47, 48, 57, 60, 64, 45, 48, 75–9, 119, 133–6, 145,
80, 81, 83, 89, 148, 150, 151, 155 150, 156
polyglotism, 30, 38, 39, 41, 48, 50, 63, Schlegel, August von, 150
64, 73, 75, 78, 86, 97, 114, 115, Schlegel, Friedrich von, 72, 150
126, 135 Schönle, Andreas, 4, 19
polysemy, 29 scienticism, 11–13, 14, 33, 145
polysystem theory, 1, 149 Scribner, Sylvia, 141
Potebnia, Aleksandr, 31 Sebeok, Thomas A., 4, 37, 135
préciocité movement, 60 secondary modeling systems, 37–8,
predictability see unpredictability 135–6, 147, 148, 149
Prigogine, Ilia, 68, 145 Segal, Dmitrii, 7
primary modeling systems, 37–8, self-description (of culture), 54, 57, 74,
135–6 94, 96, 99, 124, 130
proper names, 42, 70, 105 semiosphere, 38, 87, 103, 111–25,
see also mythological texts 135–6, 142, 143, 153–5
Propp, Vladimir, 9, 41, 88 semiotic capacity, 64, 124, 126, 128,
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 9, 71 133, 135–6, 143, 146
Eugene Onegin, 9, 40–1, 49, Serebrianyi, Sergei, 20
121–2 Seuss, Eduard, 111
Shakespeare, William, 42, 103
Rabelais, François, 47 Hamlet, 17, 60, 91–2, 104–9, 120
realism, 95 Romeo and Juliet, 42–3
redundancy, 32–3, 65, 142 Shine, Jeremy, 19
Reid, Allan, 148 Shklovskii, Viktor, 53, 151, 154
Renaissance, 66 Shukman, Ann, 3, 4, 97, 151
176 ● Index
Tynianov, Iurii, 51–3, 56, 79, 80, 81, Uspenskii, Boris, 7, 20, 37, 38,
88, 90, 92, 145, 148, 149, 152, 154 41–2, 52, 63, 84, 94, 96, 98,
typology (of cultures), 13, 38, 66, 112, 114
93–6, 130
TZS (Trudy po znakovym sistemam), Vernadsky, Vladimir, 111–12, 145,
9, 17, 18, 35, 37, 47, 111, 138, 153–4, 155
141, 149 Voloshinov, Valentin, 47, 48, 148
Vygotsky, Lev, 134, 151, 156
Uexküll, Jakob von, 4, 116, 128
Umwelt, 116–17, 118, 123 Waldstein, Maxim, 4
universalism, 35–6, 96, 115, 125–7, Wiener, Norbert, 10, 129, 147
154 Wikileaks, 73
universal language, 5, 10, 12–13, 20, writing, 67, 101
37, 139
universals, 13, 93, 139 Yurchak, Alexei, 73
unpredictability, 5, 32–4, 36, 56, 60,
64–5, 67–71, 73, 74, 82–3, 87, Zalizniak, Andrei, 13, 37
101, 118, 128, 132, 133 Zholkovskii, Aleksandr, 7, 15