DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-006

CIFAL, Faculty of Languages, University of Cordoba, Argentina

laura.gherlone@gmail.com

Abstract

In 1989 Yuri M. Lotman, together with his Tartu semiotic School’s colleagues, proposed a space of reflection about “The great French Revolution and the Ways of the Russian Liberation Movement”, in commemoration of the 200^th anniversary of the great event: as if to assess the situation, he underlined the necessity to anchor the semiotic research in the horizon of historical sciences, in order to comprehend the deep links that exist between culture and history, language and plot, world view and conception of time.

Lotman dwelt in particular upon the concept of “mechanism of Troubles” [mekhanizm Smuty], hypothesizing a comparative historical semiotics [istoricheskaya semiotika] able to elaborate macro-typologizations of the historical movements (or rhythms).

This paper intends to deal with Lotman’s vision about the relations between cultural semiotics and cultural history, referring in particular to the textual corpus of Lotman’s last thought (1988‒1993).

1. Introduction

This paper is devoted to Yuri M. Lotman and his long reflection on the so-called “semiotics of culture”, an epistemological approach that he developed in his thirty years of research on the relationship between language, meaning and collective intelligence.

His aim was to explain how extremely complex “organisms” such as cultures can develop their own models of self-consciousness and self-description, in other words, their cultural identity. This question is even more poignant when they are living in times of crisis, marked by the encounter and clash with the “alien” [chuzhoe slovo, chuzhoe povedenie, chuzhoi mir], or periods of transition [promezhutok] from a status to its “post” condition. These last reflections constitute the theoretical core of the three years preceding Lotman’s death, the period on which now I am going to linger.

Lotman was in fact aware that the period between 1990-1993 was seeing the maturation of an “other” thought in respect to the previous intellectual production. In fact, although there were clear lines of thematic continuity, in the early 90s (due also to his precarious state of health) his way of expressing and speculating abandoned such orderliness and made more and more use of intuition, analogies and memories – reflective “explosions”, we might say[1]. He himself, as evidence of the need to give a physiognomy to this phase, had considered the idea of a potential collection of articles to be released by the publishing house, Aleksandra of Tallinn. The preface for the project is found in № 268 of Archive 136 (Isikuarhiiv) at the University of Tartu Library – a collection of 491 units, retraced by Tatiana Kuzovkina and Tatiana Shakhovskaya, in the 3-year period between 1997‒2000.

However, we can undoubtedly state that Lotman’s last thought is represented by the three monographs: Culture and explosion [Kul'tura i vzryv], Unpredictable mechanisms of culture [Nepredskazuemye mekhanizmy kul'tury], Inside the worlds of thinking: people – text – semiophere – history [Vnutri myslyaschikh mirov: chelovek – tekst – semiosfera – istoriya].

The first was written in 1991 and published in its final form in 1992[2]. The second was drafted in 1990 under the title of Physiology of explosion. On the transitional periods in history [Fiziologiya vzryva. O perekhodnykh periodakh v istorii]. Between 1991 and 1992, this version was followed by two others and a first publication in 1994 (in a short form) on the Valgaskii arkhiv (the first integral version appeared in Italian in 1994, while the final Russian version came out in 2010 by the Tallinna Ülikooli Kirjastus and the English one in 2013 by the same publishing house). Finally, the third monograph – which consists of three rather independent parts, drafted at different times (I. The Text as a meaning-generating mechanism; II. The semiosphere; III. Cultural memory, history and semiotics)[3] – was written in 1988 at the request of I.B. Tauris and therefore published in English under the title of Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture (the Russian edition came out in 1996 by Yazyki russkoj kul'tury, Moscow).

2. History

As we can deduce from the titles, between the late 80s and the early 90s Lotman was interested in the “physiology of the explosion”, namely the ways through which cultures overcome the periods of historical transition, creating unusual forms of semioticity: new metaphors in language, new customs in byt (or daily life), new and old forms of theatricality in gestures and behaviour, new literature (“literary fury is linked to political immobility”, Lotman [1994] 2013: 160)[4], and new forms of “semiotics of fear” [semiotika strakha].

According to the Scholar, the semiotic workings is what allows culture to interpret and interiorize the ongoing change, seeing it as an a priori encoded step, or as a moment of total, unpredictable opening. Several of Lotman’s unpublished writings from the period between 1990‒1993 are deeply linked to the three monographs and jointly thematize this interpretative “bifurcation”[5] of the historical crisis: towards newness or towards repetitiveness:

· № 266 Repetitiveness and uniqueness in the mechanism of culture (Povtoryaemost' i unikal'nost' v mekhanizme kul'tury. Chernovaya rukopis', 1991‒1992, manuscript, pages 14).

· № 271 Evolution – complication or simplification (Evolyutsiya – uslozhnenie ili uproschenie, 1991‒1992, manuscript, 14).

· № 272 Waiting for language (on the eve of the explosion) (V ozhidanii yazyka (nakanune vzryva), 1992, manuscript, 21).

· № 273 In an open world (V otkrytom mire, 1992‒1993, manuscript and typescript, 28).

№ 279 Repetitiveness and explosion in dynamic processes (Povtoryaemost' i vzryv v dinamicheskikh protsessakh, autumn-winter 1992, manuscript, 15).

· № 282 Breakthrough outside the space. The boundaries of the infinite (Proryv za predely prostranstva. Granitsy bezgranichnosti, 1992‒1993, manuscript and typescript, 37).

· № 286 The present day between East and West (Sovremennost' mezhdu Vostokom i Zapadom, 1992, typescript, with changes dated 1997, 41).

The thread that ties these writings together is the adoption of the Russian chemist and physicist Il'ya R. Prigozhin’s theory of complexity, as an interpretative framework for understanding the dynamics of culture. According to Lotman (Lotman 1990: 230), his reflection, enriched by Isabelle Stengers’s works,

has revolutionary significance for scientific thinking as a whole because they have tackled the problem of chance in the sciences and have moreover demonstrated the function of random phenomena in the general dynamics of the world.

имеют глубокий революционизирующий смысл для научного мышления в целом: они вводят случайные явления в круг интересов науки и, более того, раскрывают их функциональное место в общей динамике мира. (Lotman 2000: 348)

Lotman introduces the concept of “non-equilibrium” thermodynamics to explain the moments of historical explosions – those moments when unpredictable paths seem to open, moments in the face of which human beings must make a choice. This may consist in the reiteration [povtorenie] of already experienced cultural plots or in the responsible acknowledgement of the “dark night” (the crisis), in search of the ongoing “day” (the creativity and the newness): “In such times a clearly formulated question or even a profoundly experienced doubt turns out to be more productive than customary answers reiterating customary truths.” (Lotman [1994] 2013: 37)[6]. According to Lotman, the Russian Revolution was precisely an example of a customary, “usual”, imitative answer to the crisis underway, which followed the script of the French Revolution (uniting it with the typical “hyperbolism” of the Russian mentality) in order to overtake the historical stalemate – the Scholar termed this phenomenon “mechanism of Troubles” in memory of the Time of Troubles [Smutnoe vremya, 1598‒1613] (significantly, in 1989 he promoted a community reflection about this topic during the conference “The great French Revolution and the ways of the Russian Liberation Movement”[7]).

These considerations introduce another important theme of the last Lotman: the role of art in the dynamics of culture. In this regard, the unpublished articles

· № 293 The role of art in the dynamics of culture (Rol' iskusstva v dinamike kul'tury, May 1993, manuscript, typescript, 81).

· № 278 Fire in the vessel (Ogon' v sosude, 1992‒1993, manuscript, typescript, 26).

· № 280 Portrait (Portret, 1992, manuscript, with changes dated 1993 in typewritten form, 107).

· № 270 The function of art (Funktsiya iskusstva. Chernovaya rukopis', 1991‒1992, manuscript, 43).

are linked as much to the aforementioned monographs as to the tele-lectures on Russian culture that Lotman gave from 1985 to 1991 for Estonian Television (Eesti Televisioon). In 1990 he recorded the 4^th series of lectures on Man an d art [Chelovek i iskusstvo], which was followed by the 5^th and final series on Pushkin and his entourage [Pushkin i ego okruzhenie][8].

Art is a key dimension of the Lotmanian theory, perhaps the most important one. Since the 60s, analyzing the poetic and literary texts according to a structuralist approach[9], Lotman became progressively aware that “The artistic work is a thinking structure, a generator of new information. Art is one of the hemispheres of the collective brain of humankind.” (Lotman [1994] 2013: 220)[10]. The study of this kind of language suggested to him that if we want to understand the culture (synonymous with kollektivnyi intellekt), it is necessary to analyze its expressive (or artistic) forms, which are thinking-generating “devices”. Their cultural function consists not only in the mere transmission of information, but in the production of a semantic excess, which means newness, unpredictability, uniqueness and evolution; the art forms have such a semiotic capacity that they can be “modelling” [modelirovanie] (also translated as “modelising”)[11]: in other words the art forms are able to return the essence of the extra-cultural reality to the culture, causing a never-ending dialogue between the culture in itself (the “known” world), and what is beyond its boundaries and requires a modelisation[12] (Lotman [1992] 2009: 73).

Lotman writes (Lotman [1994] 2013: 171‒172):

The function of art in the general system of different cultural spheres involves the creation of a reality much freer than the reality of the material world. […] The meaning behind the old definition of the “arts” as “liberal” is profound and perhaps not fully understood. […] objects of art constrained by the laws of reality acquire freedom in art, enter into new relations and bonds whereby they reveal their deep inner meaning.

Функция искусства в общей системе различных сфер культуры и состоит в том, что оно создает реальность, гораздо более свободную, чем реальность материального мира. […] Старинное определение искусств как свободных имеет глубокое, возможно, не всегда осознававшееся значение. […] скованные законами реальности объекты искусства получают в нем свободу, вступают в новые отношения и связи, тем самым раскрывая свои глубинные внутренние значения. (Lotman [1994] 2010: 140‒141)

In Lotman’s thought and, more generally, in the Tartu-Moscow School’s theoretical framework, art has not only paved the way for the investigation of the text as a meaning-generating mechanism (essential for understanding the dynamics and the semantic richness of the culture in terms of new information) but it has marked the scientific and ethical-anthropological breakthrough towards the thematization of the explosion: “For the Tartu-Moscow School the shift from gradual processes to explosive moments was determined when the centre of scholarly attention was relocated from the field of linguistics to the semiotics of art. Art is the child of explosion.” (Lotman [1994] 2013: 87)[13].

It is not by chance that Lotman defines art a “laboratory (or workshop) of unpredictability” [masterskaya nepredskazuemosti]: the reality receives freedom from art, saving itself from utopia and from the “usual”, bearer of already beaten paths or customary truths.

3. Everyday life

Lastly, a well-beloved topic by Lotman is everyday life, often regarded as a “low”, residual phenomenon in respect to the great events of history or cultural events, everlasting in the cultural memory. As stated by the Scholar, there is a sort of recursiveness between the history of humanity and that of the individual, according to a dynamic of mirroring or isomorphism (Lotman 1994a: 389) which gives life to the culture, where the daily gesture, collectively lived, is kept in the memory of history.

This reflection is well represented by the monograph dated in the summer 1992, Literature in the context of the 18^th-century Russian culture [Literatura v kontekste russkoj kul'tury XVIII-go veka], published in Russian in 1996 in the 4^th volume of the miscellaneous collection From the history of Russian literature. 18^th – beginning of the 19^th centuries [Iz istorii russkoj kul'tury. XVIII – nachalo XIX veka][14]. This is specular to the Lotmanian collection dated 1994 Conversations about Russian culture. The way of life and traditions of Russian nobility (18^th – beginning of the 19^th centuries) [Besedy o russkoj kul'ture. Byt i traditsii russkogo dvoryanstva (XVIII – nachalo XIX veka)][15].

Lotman reviews the themes developed since the sixties, when his interest was directed to the genesis of historical phenomena such as the Russian Enlightenment, the post-Petrine era, the Decembrist current, to name but a few: a genesis that Lotman locates both in the great authors (Radischev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, etc.) and in the byt embodied in history, as revealed by the meaning systems of ranks, honors (uniforms, medals, titles), duels, matchmaking, women’s education, games, dandyism, and domestic and urban architecture. In the essay Architecture in the context of culture (Arkhitektura v kontekste kul'tury, 1987), Lotman underlines that all that surrounds us (or the symbolic space) is the result of a thick semiotic dialog between the architectural organization – in and of itself historically stratified and full of meaning – and the non-architectural one (i.e., the ritual, daily, religious, mythological semiotics). This spatial-temporal dialog creates complex systems of codification of the cultural memory and casts light on the present: present which is interpreted through the workings of daily life. Being particularly interested in the historical crisis, Lotman emphasizes the close connection between the “great” space-time – represented by “the layout of Valletta (in Malta), Nancy, Petersburg, Lima”[16] or by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Lotman 2000: 679‒680) – and the “little” space-time: according to the Scholar, people invent various forms of etiquettes, rituals, norms of behaviour, and subdivisions of domestic spaces[17] in order to interpret, mediate and “control” the change, the reason for which the cultural researcher has to search for the symptoms of historical passages in scenicity and in the theatricalization of daily life. These passages will be viewed as more “scenic” as they are bearers of uncontrolled news.

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