Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political

Andrey Makarychev, Alexandra Yatsyk

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783488322
• eBook ISBN: 9781783488346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was a prominent Russian intellectual and theorist. This book presents a new reading of his semiotic and philosophical legacy.

The authors analyse Lotman's semiotics in a series of temporal contexts, starting with the rigidity of Soviet-era ideologies, through to the post-Soviet de-politicization that - paradoxically enough - ended with the reproduction of Soviet-style hegemonic discourse in the Kremlin and ultimately reignited politically divisive conflicts between Russia and Europe. The book demonstrates how Lotman's ideas cross disciplinary boundaries and their relevance to many European theorists of cultural studies, discourse analysis and political philosophy. Lotman lived and worked in Estonia, which, even under Soviet rule, maintained its own borderland identity located at the intersection of Russian and European cultural flows. The authors argue that in this context Lotman's theories are particularly revealing in relation to Russian-European interactions and communications, both historically and in a more contemporary sense.

Chapter One

Boundaries and the Political

A Cultural-​Semiotic Contribution to the Debate

Debates on politics and its disavowals have a long-​standing legacy in both academic and political discourses. Politics as a socially constructed concept eludes shared definitions and sometimes might even be left unexplained, being applied to, for instance, economic spheres or cultural production, as if the notion itself is self-​evident due to its frequent (over)use. In the meantime, deeply political issues of collective identity-making or religion can be discussed without mentioning the word “politics.”

In political parlance, too, politics is referred to in many contradictory contexts. It might have behind it negative—​even derogatory—​connotations and thus become a synonym for manipulations, ambitions, and morally reproachable misconduct: “political games” usually is a negatively marked expression, opposed to ethically unquestionable behavior. In the meantime, politics may be a key word for striking compromises, pacifying militant opponents clashing with each other, and reconciling antagonisms (“political process,” as opposed to military fighting). Depending on a school of thought, politics can either be distinguished from the domain of security that necessitates a turn from “normal” policy procedures to extraordinary measures of emergency for the sake of survival (as the Copenhagen school of international relations would presume) or from administrative and managerial technicalities that need more coordination than leadership (the argument shared by the New Left, critical theory, and poststructuralist scholarship).

There have been a number of attempts to tackle politics from a cultural-​semiotic perspective. Thus, a semiotic study argues that “social relations in semiotic acts and in social formations are constituted by relations of power ... Every social group is characterized by processes of conflict and struggle, and by mechanisms for resolution and mediation, between different social categories based on class, race, gender, age and other aspects of group formation.”¹ In the literature there are also narrow accounts of political semiotics as analysis of cultural contexts in which electoral campaigns are embedded² or different leadership styles can be contextualized through analogies with literature genres.³ Indeed, from a cultural-​semiotic perspective political events, processes, and institutions can be studied as cultural phenomena, and more specifically as literary texts with an ample variety of genres. Yet even more important is that cultural practices/​forms are ontologically political and therefore ought to be addressed from this perspective.

Most studies in political semiotics presume a well-​structured nature of political processes and place political actors in institutional landscapes, which is largely due to a strong structuralist legacy in this field of research. However, in this chapter we deploy the political in a more nuanced context and treat it through the concept of the boundary that has a deep legacy in Lotman’s school.

We start this chapter with an introduction to Lotman’s conceptual vocabulary, followed by a general projection of Lotman’s understanding of the boundary to the field of critical border studies, an influential subdiscipline located at the intersection of comparative politics, regional studies, and sociology of international relations. Then, based on this translation, we explain the centrality of borders and boundaries for political vocabulary. We continue the exploration of political problematique with singling out three modalities of the political, each one grounded in its own model of boundary thinking. We finish the chapter with a case-study analysis of national identity-making in two post-​Soviet borderlands, Ukraine and Georgia, focusing on their peculiar semiospheres as repositories of political meanings.

A BRIEF GUIDE TO LOTMAN’S CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY

Yuri Lotman is known for his basic concept of semiosphere as a broad notion that encompasses the incipience and production of cultural meaning through procreation and generation of signs, mostly in literary texts. Meanings are inseparable from the dynamics of communication that Lotman tackles not only as a process of distributing and conveying messages, but also from the viewpoint of their cultural generation which is impossible beyond the communicative context that always implies translation and recoding as communicative policies of the participating agents.⁴ Lotman singled out different communicative modes, including bilateral (from the receiver to the sender), which can be conceptualized as intersubjective, and autocommunication, in which the roles of the two merge, and the ensuing discourse does not require an approval or justification from outside the discourse. Autocommunication is a key element for self-​enclosed systems that can be found everywhere—​in political discourses, academic theories, arts, and so on.⁵

Lotman’s theory was strongly influenced by exact sciences. This is what he recalls:

I remember a feeling of jealousy that I have experienced at the onset of my academic pathway in the end of the 1940s towards mathematicians capable of exposing their ideas in the language that forbids any ambiguity and different interpretations ... Since the times of Nietzsche the whole culture that established itself after the domination of positivism in Europe in the end of the nineteenth century ... became overwhelmed by a political language with its wide spread of metaphors and essay-​writing. I ... used to observe how easy this language turned from a means of academic cognition into a tool of propaganda and demagogy, which discredited humanitarian disciplines.⁶

This is why Lotman was so open to embracing methodology borrowed from the fields of cybernetics and structural linguistics and to applying methods of exact sciences in cultural semiotics.

However, Lotman ultimately did recognize the limits of utilizing mathematics in humanitarian disciplines:

We, the proponents of approximation of mathematics and humanitarian sciences, understood it simplistically: we thought that as soon as we translate the objects studied by linguistics into the language of programming, the issue would be solved. That is why we initially paid attention to the most elementary objects, such as the language of street signals, mass culture in arts, detective stories in literature, canonic genres in folklore. Yet soon we found out that the scientific tasks we face are much more complex.⁷

The comprehension of this complexity is well illustrated by Lotman’s ambivalent approach to differentiation of the semiotic world from a non-​semiotic reality.

The specificity of individuals as cultural beings requires their distinction from the world of nature, understood as an extra-​cultural space ... In some of the aspects of its existence human beings belong to cultural sphere, while in other respects they are related to the extra-​cultural world ... Therefore, the boundary is blurred, and the definition of each specific fact as belonging to either cultural or extra cultural spheres is highly relative.⁸

This means, in other words, that it is only the structure of the dominant discourse that defines the inclusion to—​or exclusion from—​the semiosphere. This is how the concept of boundary was introduced to his scholarship.

Therefore, putting in the center of his scholarship the semiosphere as a generalized notion encompassing an almost endless variety of cultural forms and representations, Lotman in the meantime tried to abstain from a static interpretation of this concept, making semiotic boundaries movable and flexible. That is why he refers to semiotization (ascribing meanings to objects or social phenomena and placing them in semiotic contexts) and de​semiotization (a “battle with signs”)⁹ as two divergent yet interconnected processes of meaning-​(un)making. In this respect it is important that Lotman directly linked semiotization with relations of representation. In fact, he claimed that only objects or figures that represent something or somebody can play a genuinely semiotic role and therefore be considered as producers of meanings. He derives the core of semiotization from the medieval culture when “to become a socially meaningful fact, a certain form of activity should have turned into a ritual. A fight, a hunting, diplomacy and—​in a wider sense—​governance required ritualization.”¹⁰ As for de​semiotization, or semiotic exclusion, one of the possible examples could be silencing¹¹ that in the Tartu-​Moscow school comes in two versions. One aims to mask the truth through nonverbal practices of silence, while the other uses language as a tool for deception.¹² Mikhail Lotman emphasizes “the intrinsic contradiction within the idea of sign that constitutes the phenomenon of lie: the latter does not exist in extra-​ or pre-​signified world, and appears in conjunction with language; it is signs that produce lie.”¹³

In his works Lotman was interested in transformation of extracultural phenomena into cultural ones and thus in transcending boundaries between them, which can be considered as a transfer of non​texts into texts.¹⁴ Since Lotman considered texts as bearers of veracity, each text presupposes its own viewpoint, a speaking position “that makes truth known, and lie impossible.”¹⁵ The rigidity of this and some other Lotman’s statements suggests that his theory is a valuable tool of cognition in situations of domination of one discursive core—​with its own system of normativity and veracity—​over another, when key anchoring concepts are used in public discourses for stabilizing its meanings and avoiding semantic dispersion. Yet under the conditions of a lack of the dominant core and pluralit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Lotman and the Post-​Soviet: 
An Unfinished Novel
• Chapter One Boundaries and the Political: A Cultural-​Semiotic Contribution to the Debate
• Chapter Two Beyond the Semiosphere: Signifying Corporeality and Displacements
• Chapter Three Excavating the Soviet: From Explosion to Erasure
• Chapter Four Playing Games with Europe: Between Accommodation and Subversion
• Conclusion How to Read Lotman in the 
Twenty-​First Century?:
• Notes on Transliteration and Empirical Data:
• Index