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A Semiotic Theory of Culture UNIVERSE OF THE MIND UNIVERSE OF THE MIND A Semiotic Theory of Culture YURI M. LOTMAN translated by ANN SHUKMAN Introduction by UMBERTO ECO I.B. TAURIS & CO. LTD Publishers London . New York Published by LB. Tauris & Co Ltd 110 Gloucester Avenue London NW1 8JA Copyright ©1990 by I.B. Tauris Note: All translations of quotations are by Ann Shukman unless stated otherwise. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Redwood Press Limited, Melksham, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the mind: a semiotic theory of culture. - (The second World) I. Culture I. Title II. Series 306 ISBN 1-85043-212-0 Contents Introduction by Umberto Eco vii Preface 1 Notes to Preface 6 PART ONE THE TEXT AS A MEANING-GENERATING MECHANISM 1 Three functions of the text 11 2 Autocommunication: T and 'Other' as addressees 20 3 Rhetoric as a mechanism for meaning-generation 36 4 Iconic rhetoric 54 5 The text as process of movement: author to audience, author to text 63 6 The symbol as plot-gene 82 7 The symbol in the cultural system 102 Notes to Part One 111 PART TWO THE^SEMIOSPHERE 8 Semiotic space 123 9 The notion of boundary 131 10 Dialogue mechanisms 143 11 The semiosphere and the problem of plot 151 12 Symbolic spaces 171 1. Geographical space in Russian medieval texts 171 vi Contents 2. The journey of Ulysses in Dante's Divine Comedy 111 3. The 'home' in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita 185 4. The symbolism of St Petersburg 191 13 Some conclusions 203 Notes to Part Two 204 PART THREE CULTURAL MEMORY, HISTORY AND SEMIOTICS ^4 The problem of the historical fact 217 15 Historical laws and the structure of the text 221 16 An alternative: culture without literacy or culture t before culture? 245 17 The role of typological symbols in the history of culture 254 18 Can there be a science of history and what are its functions in the cultural system? 269 19 Conclusion 273 Notes to Part Three 21A Index 281 Introduction UMBERTO ECO In the course of his intellectual career, Yuri M. Lotman has applied his mind to a wide range of disciplines: aesthetics, poetics, semiotic theory, the history of culture, mythology, and cinema, in addition to the principle themes of the history of Russian literature of which he is Professor at the University of Tartu in Estonia. His works range from the analysis of cultural phenomena such as blue jeans, and observations on demonology, through readings of poetic texts and consideration of the problems of interpretation, to references to mathematics and biology. However, even readers unfamiliar with the entire range of Lotman's work will be able to identify in this book the broader theoretical approach on which Lotman's work is built. It may be useful, however, to outline here certain aspects of Lotman's work which contribute to a fuller understanding of the themes and methods at work in this book. During the Sixties, two disturbing words erupted into the calm waters of the European academic world: semiotics (or semiology) and structural- ism. The centre of this research paradigm was Paris, although the phenomenon spread steadily throughout Europe and to many North and Latin American universities. The devastating effect created in Britain by these new approaches to language (and, as a result, to the study of the languages of art) is recorded by David Lodge's novel Small World, (clear proof that literary works can often be much more informative about the world and our society than many scientific treatises). Small World was published in 1984, at a time when the series of English translations of Russian and Soviet semiotic texts produced by L.M.O'Toole and Ann Shukman, Russian Poetics in Translation, had already been in in progress for several years. However, during the Sixties and Seventies, Lotman's works were more widely known on the Continent than in Britain. Interest in structural studies of language had led (particularly through the influence of Roman Jakobson) to an interest vii viii Introduction in the works of the Prague School, and at the same time to the re- discovery of the Russian Formalists of the Twenties. Up until this time, the Formalists had been known only at second hand through the seminal text Russian Formalism by Victor Erlich.1 In 1965, Tzvetan Todorov translated many of the Russian Formalist texts into French,2 and little by little, in steady progression, the most important works of Shklovsky, Tomashevsky and Tynyanov were translated into the European languages (especially into Italian). Alongside this growth of interest in Russian Formalism, during the early Sixties scholars in Italy and France were beginning to discover the semioticians at work during this period in Russia - principally in Moscow and Tartu. These were such figures as Ivanov, Revzin, Uspensky, Zolkovsky, Sceglov, Segal, Toporov and Egorov, as well as two names from the earlier generation, the linguist Saumijan and the mathematician Kolmogorov. However, at the centre of this new field of research, as both link and fulcrum (through the series Trudy po znakovym sistemam [Works on Sign Systems], produced in Tartu) stood the figure of Yuri Lotman. According to the teachings of the Formalists, a work of art was a semiotic device which could be analyzed as a set of rules and inventions, of pre-fixed effects and conscious modifications of socialized codes. The new Russian and Estonian semioticians took up the notion of 'device' and 'de-familiarization' and took one step further the techniques involved in the creation of a work of art as an individual re-construction of the store of procedures which go to make up the social fabric in which communication works. Unfortunately, in their attempts to explain the artistic 'mystery' in terms of an analyzable device, the Formalists had become entangled in a series of contradictions. They had been unable, for example, to free themselves completely from the aesthetics of the image as an ineffable event. In addition, as may be seen in the work of Levi-Strauss and Propp in particular,3 they were not able to achieve the passage from formal analysis to full structural awareness. They had not fully understood that the putting into form of a work of art has also to involve the organization of content; they had therefore been working on signifying systems without taking into consideration those semantic systems which the new Russian semioticians were able to re-discover at the level of religious systems and world views. A final difficulty may be evidenced by Tomashevsky's or Shlovsky's theories on the structure of the novel. Here it becomes clear that the Formalists had at most brought to light individual devices or systems of rules which were valid only within the confines of one specific genre. In this sense, then, the neo-semioticians went a step further. The advent of Information Theory, of Gatne Theory and of structural analysis Introduction ix in Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology allowed them to distinguish and postulate a universal field of communication phenomena. It is not possible to distinguish the rule system appropriate to a given com- municative phenomenon without at the same time postulating a structural homology with the rule systems which apply to all other communicative phenomena. The new Russian semioticians developed a universal semiotic theory (and method) whereby the rules governing each communicative sector were to be seen as variations of more general codes. In order to understand the interest aroused by these critics, who had been up until now unknown in the West except to a few Soviet Studies experts, it must be remembered that semiotics and structuralism form a highly complex pair of terms. Semiotics aims to study the entire range of sign systems (of which verbal language is the most important) and the various processes of communication to which these systems give rise. Such a study also involves the demonstration of the existence of sign systems even where least immediately apparent or expected. Structuralism is a method which has been shown to be extremely useful in the explanation of linguistic systems, in the work of Saussure and, later, of Hjelmslev and Jakobson. In the Sixties, especially in France, this method was also used to explain other systems, one of which was (and the work of Levi-Strauss is pre-eminent here) the system of cultural phenomena. However, not all semioticians used the structuralist method. Charles Sanders Peirce and Charles Morris, for example, propounded a semiotic theory which was by no means structuralist. This is a point which bears emphasis, for LQtman, in my view, is a critic who started from a structuralist approach to the phenomena of signification and communi- cation, and indeed retains much of this method, but who does not remain bound by it. This may be seen clearly in this book. For example, the first theoretical problem which the structuralists of the Sixties found most difficult to deal with was the fact that certain systems, through communication processes (which are historical processes, that is processes which take place in time) changed. The second problem was that given that a semiotic system was seen as a code, or rather as a system of rules, how could there be communication processes in which it was difficult to identify codes or where there seemed to be a conflict between different codes? It is these problems which hold the key to an understanding of the evolution of Lotman's thought.
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