Abstracts

Albrecht Koschorke (Konstanz)

On the Functioning of Cultural Peripheries

This paper proceeds from scattered and partially unimplemented reflections of Yuri Lotman, in order to sketch on two levels a single “grammar of the periphery.” With respect to the periphery of power spaces, structural agreements will be worked out between cultural semiotics and the theory of power (Michael Doyle, Michael Mann). With a view toward the margins of semiospheres, we will discuss models of small and large border traffic between the self and the alien. In both cases, particular attention will be paid to the tipping phenomenon (Kippphänomen) between hegemonial order and peripheral countermovements.

Michael C. Frank (Konstanz)

Spheres, Borders and Contact Zones: Yuri Lotman’s Spatial Theory of Culture from the Perspective of Postcolonialism

In the Kulturwissenschaften, the border has not only received special attention since the recently proclaimed spatial turn. George Simmel, Michel Foucault, Fredrik Barth and Edward Said had already conceived cultures—yet differently accentuated in each case—as spatially thought units that created internal coherence over a demarcation vis-à-vis the outside. Although Yuri Lotman also repeatedly placed the border at the center, despite other shifts of emphasis within his heterogeneous work, the parallels have been overlooked until now between his narratological and cultural-semiotic work and the aforementioned approaches, which developed in part close to the same time. On this basis, his two books, The Structure of Literary Texts and The Universe of the Mind as well as some essays written in their shadow, my contribution wishes to illustrate the advantages of Lotman's model in relation to static concepts of the cultural setting of boundaries.

On the one hand, Lotman foregrounds at the outset the transgression of the border, the transformative potential of which he stresses. On the other hand, a strictly binary model of space that stresses the separating character of the border yields in his late texts on the semiosphere to a model which illuminates the processes of transfer and translation. The border now appears to be an outside dividing line rather than a peripheral “contact zone,” a realm of the in-between, which at the same time separates and connects. The “mobile figure” thus receives a new significance with the right to trespass borders into its “bilingualism.”

Through exemplary readings of English novels from the era of high imperialism, Lotman’s cultural theory will be tested for the ways it operates with spatial concepts, although the dynamic connection between center and periphery (as a contact zone between two cultural spheres) will be the primary center of attention. While on the one hand, the richness of the Lotman' concepts will be demonstrated, on the other hand, aspects will be clarified that can be expanded upon—above all the power asymmetry between center and periphery, as these are highlighted in analogous postcolonialist models as well as the role of temporal demarcations.

Peter Selg (Tallinn) / Andreas Ventsel (Tartu)

Towards a Semiotic Model of Hegemony

The paper discusses the relationship between the theory of hegemony as elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and the semiotics of culture of Yuri Lotman. The discussion is not merely expository, but attempts to contribute to the theory of hegemony. We believe that there are several shortcomings – despite many apparent advantages – in Laclau's model and that some central insights of Lotman can be of service in overcoming them.

In our view, Laclau represents one of the most far-reaching perspectives in the poststructuralist tradition of political philosophy that tries to avoid any essentialist theorizing of society and power. Especially fruitful is his notion of the “empty signifier” as the central category for defining a hegemonic relation. But the main problem with his theory is that it is basically a social ontology that provides almost no clues on how to formulate research questions for studying power relations in concrete social formations. We believe that the problem is not merely factual, but follows partly from the very logic of his categories. In his later works, Laclau uses the psychoanalytic notion of affect in explaining the mechanisms or “forces” that make hegemonic relations possible. We believe that this development closes many doors for empirical social research and try to substitute the problem of affect in the theory of hegemony with the problem of translation between different cultural coding systems. And that is where Yuri Lotman becomes the central figure.

The ground for believing this incorporation of the two thinkers to be successful is the very apparent theoretical congeniality between them. Both belong to the Saussurean ontological terrain. The main functions that Lotman attributes to semiosphere (asymmetry, boundedness, binarity, and heterogeneity among others) play the same functional roles as do Laclau's central categories when he specifies his notion of discourse.

Özkan Ezli (Tübingen)

Amorphous Negotiations: German-Turkish Literature and Film at the Borderlines of the Semiosphere

According to Lotman, a border or line of division within a semiosphere performs a two-fold cultural function. On the one hand, and from the point of view of cultural semiotics, a semiospheric line of division can reinforce and stabilize identity. It creates specificity and opposition vis-á-vis other spheres, thus constructing a stable center. On the other hand, this boundary can function as a “realm of accelerated processes” which is active from the periphery and actively penetrates and alters structures at the center.

With regard to German-Turkish culture, the first function has been realized within political discourse especially after 9-11. It oscillates between constructions of segregation (a “parallel society”) and integration (German Islam) and interprets German-Turkish agency from the perspective of cultural difference. The second function of the borderline within the semiosphere is to be found in German-Turkish literature and film productions. As medial meta-discourses, literature and film address the difference-enforcing political discourse of the first function of the borderline and replace the static and monocultural arena of agency with an amorphous arena of negotiation. This field of negotiation points towards a kind of pre-individual communication that precedes any difference-focused readings of culture and thus calls such constructions into question. My paper will focus on the second function of Lotman’s theory of the borderline in relation to its first function within the German-Turkish semiosphere.

Annette Werberger (Tübingen)

The Borders of the Semiosphere I: “Border Tales“ in the Western Ukraine

This paper begins with a general overview of the relevance of Yuri Lotman’s spatial semiotics for studying transnational spaces and intercultural contact. In the process, I will pay special attention to asymmetrical conditions in the semiosphere, which according to Lotman determine the dynamics in the cultural-semiotic space. Here I reveal clearly the derivation of the term “semiosphere” from the life sciences. Lotman describes the semiosphere as a pulsating mechanism in which processes of cultural exchange take place between the undetermined and the determined, between uncertainty and certainty, between self-description of the core and counternarratives from the periphery, and between amorphous marginal zones and processes of ideological leveling.

A short comparative case study follows on literature from Galicia/Westukraine, an area historically distinguished by a multiplicity of visible and invisible borders—religious, linguistic, ethnic, and so on.

Katharina Eisch-Angus (Regensburg)

Border, Memory, and the Clock Figures of Prague: Semiotic Demarcations on Ethnographic Paths of Research

“That maliciously twisting fate,” which turns once per hour alongside the figures of Prague’s astronomical clock in Joseph Hahn’s poem “Bohemia,” takes (and took) place at the peripheries of Bohemia, not only in the border regions but also in the interethnic zones of meeting and separation in the multilingual, central/east European cultural sphere. Political upheavals and code switching—the central breaks in contemporary European history – were experienced here since 1918 as cyclically returning events of opening, transgressing and closing of the borders. The disasters of nationalism and totalitarianism, war, expulsion, occupation, but also the transmitted practices of cultural contact and meeting left their marks on the landscape, at the same time writing themselves deeply into the memory of the border populations of the Czech Republic. Living at the boundary for them means being shut off at the margins of order and civilization as much as it means being inspired and cultivated through border-crossing exchange. However, their own border situation finds itself time and again bound to the experience of a ongoing cycle of history.

This contribution is based on ethnographic field research carried out in different Czech-German border areas since 1987. We will ask to what extent cultural-semiotic methods can analytically grasp the disparate, mostly narrative, and subject-related textual foundation that emerge from field research that is open, procedural and situationally-based. To what extent can the models of the semiosphere and semiosis structure and contextualize this apparently unordered, associative set of texts with their repetitions, overlappings, and oppositions? With the help of the cultural semiotics of Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspensky, and others, we can understand the border dynamics of a concrete cultural field of contemporary history. We can also comprehend how spatial boundaries are translated into temporal breaks, in interactions, stories, biographies, identities and collective memory—and vice-versa.

The potential of European ethnology and cultural semiotics to supplement theory and methodology will be illustrated using common research approaches that are procedural, interactive, and self-reflective as well as those that focus on border and memory, looking at the peripheries of culture, of disintegration and culture transformation.

Andrea Hacker (Tübingen)

Lotman’s Theory of the Semiosphere between Enlightenment and Globalization

The immediate association evoked by Lotman’s model of the semiosphere is V.I. Vernadskii’s theory of the biosphere. Indeed, Lotman built his approach to cultural theory on the work of Vernadskii whose most fundamental principles can be discerned in Lotman’s theory: the principle of an open system; boundaries; and the organic interrelation of the macro- and microcosmic. These affinities with the scientific discourse of biochemistry are not only obvious in the name “semiosphere,” but they also seem to offer an approach to intercultural, even globalising cultural processes that circumvent any politicised and politicizing assumptions. Some critics question this scientific neutrality. In his critique of Lotman’s semiosphere, Vladimir Alexandrov highlights Lotman’s allegiance to the ideals of the German Enlightenment and early Romanticism. Semiospheric globality, claims Alexandrov, corresponds with universalism, and the semiospheric microcosm with individualism. The problem resulting from this critique is that Lotman’s promisingly “neutral” (at least in the sense of non-ideological) theory is based on Western notions, thus limiting its applicability to issues of cultural globalisation.

The theoretical problem posed by the seemingly inevitable European Enlightenment also troubles scholars of other approaches who attempt to shift the weight of dominant, Western cultural historical discourse. Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, in his book “Provincialising Europe,” points to the inevitability of Enlightenment ideas. Postcolonial cultural reality, he contends, cannot juxtapose these ideas with a matching philosophy of its own.

My paper will discuss the following questions: To what extent do Alexandrov’s reservations really limit the applicability of Lotman’s model? Is it possible to reach an accord with contemporary, non-Western theoretical approaches such as Chakrabarty’s and to productively employ the semiospheric model in discussions of globalisation? Or should the semiospheric theory be restricted to the Russian or perhaps Slavic cultural realm and its interaction with the West?

If time permits, these questions will be illustrated with a case study from the Russian avant-garde.

Michail Lotmann (Tartu)

Impossible Communication: The Structure of Hymn

Yuri Lotman distinguishes two different types of communication in principle which create a channel of communication for themselves. First of them is the interpersonal communication (channel of communication “I – he”; maybe more precise would be to formulate it in Martin Buber’s sense “ich – du” channel). Second is the autocommunication (channel “I – I”). According to Yuri Lotman on the individual level the interpersonal communication should be considered normal, but if we observe culture as a whole, then the intensity and frequency of autocommunication is remarkably higher than that of the intercultural communication. In the same spirit we could assume that if we treat semiosphere as a whole, then only autocommunication is possible, even on the theoretical level.

In my paper I will attempt to approach problems related to communication beyond our semiosphere. These are, first of all, the attempts of human being to communicate with gods (both with polytheistic gods and transcendent God). I will distinguish three types of communication, according to what the logical-communicative structure of a message is: a) prayer, b) psalm, c) hymn. The most paradoxical is the structure of hymn. Proceeding from the logic of speech acts it has a completely senseless message. The analysis of it has important consequences from the perspective of semiotics of culture and speech act theory.

Edna Andrews (Duke University)

Lotman and the Cognitive Sciences. The Role of Auto-Communication in the Language of Memory

The following paper will present various aspects of Yuri Lotman’s modeling of the semiosphere, his contributions to a theory of linguistic signification and communication, and their relevance to the contemporary cognitive sciences. One of the questions that arise in this context concerns how Lotman’s semiotic constructs may or may not be compatible with both structuralist and non-structuralist semiotic theories. In order to address these issues, I will look specifically at Lotman’s definition of the minimal units of discourse, speech acts, and how they fit into a larger semiotic tradition, including the works of R.O. Jakobson, C.S. Peirce, T. Sebeok, M. Bakhtin and L.S. Vygotsky.

One specific focus of this work is a reframing of Lotman’s construction of autocommunication vis-à-vis Vygotsky’s different types of speech (R: речь). A comparison of the works of Lotman and Vygotsky demonstrates that Lotman, who acknowledges his debt to Vygotsky, has developed a mechanism that is fundamentally different from Vygotsky’s egocentric and internal speech types, on the one hand, but at the same time has important complementary coherence that brings a new reading to Vygotsky’s work. By recontextualizing the realization of different forms of language in semiospheric space, Lotman provides the groundwork for a new approach in defining collective memory and understanding the principles that guide and model human perception.

Urmas Sutrop (Tartu)

Language as a Modelling Communicative System

The main objective of my presentation is to show how a theory of language as a structured modelling system and its components (code, translation and history) can be developed if we take into account the ideas of Yuri Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow school as well as more recent treatments of language as a modelling system (e.g. Sebeok 1991, Sebeok and Danesi 2000).

According to Lotman, each modelling system can be viewed as language (1967). Natural languages, including Estonian, should be viewed as primary modelling systems. Languages of the culture constitute secondary modelling systems.
In his early book, “Analiz poétičeskogo teksta. Struktura stix” [Analysis of the poetic text] (1972), Lotman defines language (as common in semiotic disciplines) as “a sign communication mechanism which serves to preserve and communicate information.”

My approach relies on Lotman’s definitions of the concepts language and code in one of his later works “Kul’tura i vzryv” [Culture and explosion] (1992). He warns that equating language and code in a communication process is not as harmless as it seems, for code does not presume history: “Language – it is a code with history” (cf. Andrews 2003). In brief, the above can be summed up as the following equation: language = code + history.

My approach relies on linguistic relativism which also characterises Lotman’s approach to language. Links between Lotman and relativism have been referred to by e.g. Susan Bassnett (2002). She writes that Lotman’s view, according to which language is a modelling system -- and art and literature as secondary modelling systems have been derived from language as a primary modelling system -- is directly related to Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis (2002: 22).
My thesis is that languages have evolved as a result of communication between different languages, which is possible only through translation from different cultures and language codes. The question I am interested in is: How has translation changed the code of a language throughout history?

Neena Gupta-Biener (Konstanz)

Critical Reflection on the Application of Lotman’s Concept of Communication Processes in Understanding Discursive Asymmetry in Intercultural Interactions: The Case of Intercultural Communication Between Germans and Indians

When communicating between different cultures, the discourse narrative takes place outside the institutional tradition established within each culture and between levels in the same culture. There are usually no tools available for the actors that may help them in decreasing the discursive asymmetry. It is further heightened (a noise factor) in the asymmetry since no frame of reference is available. In intercultural interactions, this happens where instruments for communication cannot be used for interlevel communication.

Using examples from failures in intercultural communication between Germans and Indians on different levels, this paper critically reflects on the tradition of interpretive methodologies for understanding intercultural interactions. Further, hermeneutical traditions will be analysed as a possible solution for modelling communication as a means to create new knowledge and to share old knowledge. The paper will also try to define the semiotic space of Indian culture and discuss the role of semiotic context in shaping meanings in the realm of intercultural communication between Indians and Germans.

Renata Makarska (Tübingen)

Translation between Periphery and Center: Bronisława Wajs and Mariella Mehr

Bronisława Wajs (1910-1987, also called Papusza), one of the first Romani writers ever, came close to possible integration in her Polish surroundings by means of her (self-taught) knowledge of writing. She wrote down her own songs (gila) that were then translated by Jerzy Ficowski into Polish and edited by him (1956, 1973); they are also very esteemed by Julian Tuwim. On the one hand, these songs brought her renown. On the other hand, they resulted in an almost complete exclusion from her authentic milieu. She was confronted with the accusation that she had betrayed her own community and their (secret) language. As a result, she suffered repeatedly from a psychological disorder and her lyrical output was silenced.

While in Papusza’s case, the attempt is made to move the periphery of a society to its center by processes of cultural and linguistic translation (with the ultimate consequence of being silenced), Mariella Mehr (born in 1947 in Zurich) is an example of a forcible “amputation” of the periphery from Swiss society. Mariella Mehr as the daughter of Jenische (also called “white gypsies”) [English Yeniche] fell victim to the “integration project” of the so-called welfare organization “Children of the Highway,” which between 1920 and 1970 forcibly separated Jenische children from their parents in order to “integrate them into society” in the service of the Swiss state. Mehr’s coerced “path to integration” led her through several children's homes and educational institutions, even psychiatric hospitals. The consequence of this “amputation of the periphery” became in her case a linguistic eruption because Mehr tries in numerous works of prose (Steinzeit 1981, Das Kind 1995, Angeklagt 2002) to translate her childhood trauma into a text.

With the help of concepts from Lotman’s cultural semiotics, I plan in my contribution to describe the cooperation of the majority society and its cultural and linguistic minorities (Roma and Jenische) using the examples of Bronisława Wajs and Mariella Mehr.

Soo-Hwan Kim (Seoul)

From “Influence” to “Dialogue”: Yuri Lotman on Intercultural Communication

One of the most crucial matters in relation to globally-changed cultural conditions is to reconsider the traditional “center – periphery” paradigm that is developed on the presupposition of cultural interchange between the West, the center, and the third worlds, the peripheries. However, contemporary cultural circumstances mainly resulting from globalization hardly lead us to draw a strict dichotomized line between the center and the peripheries. Global media networking and disseminating “global culture,” for example, make it increasingly difficult to distinguish the development of indigenous cultures from those facilitated by foreign influence. Just as the center is pluralized, so the third worlds themselves are differentiated into the center and the peripheries.

These substantially new types of cultural contact occurring on a global level accompany some important changes that cannot easily be analyzed by the traditional model because it demands a critical reexamination of the existing paradigm in order to see current cultural interactions. A traditional paradigm that divides “the native” from “the foreign” turns out to be “inadequate” or “problematic” because this one-sided perspective is not able to grasp properly the overall process of rearranging the center and the peripheries in a global world of “complexity” and “hybridity.”

Global cultural circumstances that are changing rapidly and substantively require for alternative model capable of compensating for the outdated character of the traditional model. For this reason, this presentation raises major questions such as: Is it possible to find any other model that can overcome the one-sided character of cultural interaction and ensure the reciprocity of communication? Where can we find the possibility to refashion the cultural logic of globalization as a process of compromise and active cultural interpenetration, rather than as an occupation or pollution?

In this short presentation, I will attempt to demonstrate that the mechanism of cultural interaction in Yuri Lotman’s semiotic theory—which can be summarized as progressing “from influence to dialogue”—can provide a suggestive answer to these questions. Additionally, I will examine contemporary Korean “B-boying culture” as an interesting case study of intercultural communication that is conditioned by global cultural circumstances. I hope that this attempt will be a chance to reveal how appropriate and applicable Lotman’s approach is for the current cultural situation we are facing.

Valerij Gretchko (Japan)

Yuri Lotman’s Model of Communicative Asymmetry: Its Origins and Implications

The term communication has a central place in Lotmanian cultural semiotics. Communication is thereby regarded not as empty exchange of texts, but proves instead to be a translation in which the texts of the culture are being coded and decoded in (at least) two different types of ways. Because of the basic incompatibility of these codes, an exact translation is not possible. However, precisely this difference is of exceptional significance. New texts that develop within this process of “nontrivial translation” represent the basis for a creative development of culture.

My paper investigates the question of the genesis and formation of Yuri Lotman’s communicative model, discussing its theoretical implications for cultural research from this approach. I will show that the fundamental idea, according to which semiotic or communicative processes can appear in two basically different forms, is a red thread throughout the greater part of Lotman’s oeuvre. Although the idea still refers primarily to texts in the 1960s, Lotman later extends its range of application to human thought processes as well as to culture as a whole. The static model in which two different codes exist parallel to one other is supplemented by a dynamic aspect presupposing an ongoing reciprocal effect between them. For possible sources from which this approach developed, we could draw on both on the theoretical conceptions of the dialogicity (Vygotsky, Bachtin) as well as neurophysiological work on the asymmetry of the large brain hemispheres.

Thomas Grob (Konstanz)

Two Times Lotman. Yuri Lotman’s Conception of Cultural Historical Dynamics between Law and Coincidence

As is well known, Yuri M. Lotman focused intensively in his last years on the question of evolution and process, clearly shifting his accent in favor of “the coincidental,” the abrupt and the unpredictable. This contribution asks not only what the new position is but also how it can made consistent with older or alternative concepts—whether they be biographical or epoch-related—underlying its historical research. This (incompletely consistent) constellation will be expanded upon by the question of how well suited Lotman’s methodological approach is for conceptualizing nonlinear forms of historical dynamics and their plurality.

Sergej Zenkin (Moskau)

Continual Models after Lotman

In his articles “The Phenomenon of Culture” (1978) and “Asymmetry and Dialogue” (1983), and then in his book Culture and Explosion (1992), Yuri Lotman has pointed out the importance of the opposition discontinuous/continual for the typology of cultural models. That duality, which Lotman based on the functional asymmetry of the human brain, proves to be one of the essential oppositions of our thought. Its further exploration can lead to an extension of the semiotic field and to a connection between semiotics and other cultural discourses.

Three large categories of continual models may be found in common use and in modern research, specifically:

1. the image (mostly discussed by Lotman himself under the name of iconic sign), which is perceived as a complete entity without ruptures or quantifiable articulations;
2. the sacred, understood in a broader sense than in Lotman (and closer to the modern sociological use of the term), imagined in its relationship to fluid efficient substances (like primitive manna, or blood as an archetype of sacred substance), that circulate in the world and invest in living beings;
3. the body, considered less as a process of acculturation and “civilization” (a point of view which seems to dominate modern human sciences) than as a genuine source of phenomenological experience, related to an evidence of body as continual totality.

A difficult question arising from critical review of these problems is: to what degree may the continual models be used for a rational, and especially scientific inquiry? Put differently, to what degree can these be translated into articulated (discontinuous) language and opposed to such models in the general configuration of culture?

Daniele Monticelli (Tartu)

Dialogue, Periphery, Explosion. Some Political Implications

The later works of Lotman clearly mark a shift of his thought in a poststructuralist direction. Problematic topological notions such as “boundary“ or “periphery“ and problematic historiographical notions such as “explosion“ place into question the very same idea of totality, both in the form of a self-enclosed system and that of a teleological process.

My presentation will be an attempt to develop Lotman’s detotalizing intuitions into instruments for a critique of contemporary political discourse which is hegemonized, on the one hand, by the logic of globalization (“end of history”) and, on the other, by the appeal to essentialist identities (closed communities). The idea of the definite eclipse of any emancipating politics depending on the open possibilities of history and the contestation of identitarian exclusions is the immediate corollary of the discursive hegemony just mentioned. What Lotman’s semiotics enables us to think today is, on the contrary,

1. a general mechanism of disidentification (“dialogue“ or “translation in cases of untranslatability“);
2. the opening and possibly disruptive insistence of the removed, the excluded, the forgotten on the borders (the ”periphery“) of any given semiotic space;
3. interruption, discontinuity and choice as generators of unpredictable and anomic newness (“explosion“, “irreversible processes“).

The political relevance of these Lotmanian concepts will be shown by means of a comparison with similar notions to be found in the works of such contemporary political thinkers as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Giorgio Agamben. The leading questions will be: can a (detotalizing) politics of emancipation be characterized from a theoretical point of view? What would be its elements today?

Irina Wutsdorff (Tübingen)

Yuri Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics between Russia and Europe

Yuri Lotman developed the greater part of his cultural theory based on examples from Russian cultural history, although comparisons with Western European developments also repeatedly formed an axis of his thinking. Relevant here is the juxtaposition of textual and rule culture in his fundamental research on cultural semiotics in the 1970s. A comparative view of Russia and Europe is sustained by the later modeling of culture as a dynamic semiosphere and the stress on the cultural productivity of periphery and border as well as of translation processes. The modeling of power is also always implicitly involved.

Against this backdrop, several questions will be raised on the basis of Lotman’s works in comparative studies. To what extent is Lotman’s cultural semiotics, which operates with a broadly conceived notion of the text, even part of a Russian culture described as text-obsessed? How do the natural-scientific metaphors of Lotman’s later models relate to the order of discourses, which is traditionally less differentiated in Russia? Does Lotman’s terminological eclecticism represent a key for connections between his models, one which in particular makes unregulated systems describable? In what ways are power or the possibilities of subversion located in Lotman’s cultural models and which role is played in them by the comparison between Russia and Europe (a static, power-centered system versus a dynamic system of code switching)?

Renate Lachmann (Konstanz)

Reading Lotman’s Concepts for Literary Studies as Cultural Semiosis

In Yuri Lotman’s semiotics, “text” and “culture” take on different relationships. On the one hand, analogies are manufactured between text and culture, permitting concepts to be transferred in both directions (with metaphorical implications). On the other hand, culture is determined or intensified as an ensemble of text, appearing in fact as the sum of its texts.

In both cases, we can proceed from a textomorphic structure of culture subject to the same descriptive procedure as the text. Similarly, a descriptive, analytic and axiological vocabulary – itself part of the context of the theoretical formation of cultural semiosis – can be transferred onto the text. The question now is how the mutual transferability of the terms operates. In one case, cultural procedures can be described by categories and concepts that should describe completely the techniques of self-interpretation and self-modeling by which a culture describes itself (self-description, auto-modeling, cultural meta-language or meta-text, cultural grammar, system boundedness, organization or non-organization). In another, cultural semiosis oriented toward dichotomy proceeds from a mechanism that brings about a movement alternating between openness and closure, dynamism and stasis; this mechanism also postulating a binaristic typology that distinguishes between those cultures tending toward monosemy and those tending toward polysemy. In a third possibility, the descriptive language dedicated to the text (particularly that directed at literary texts) operates with terms such as “transformation,” “re-coding,” “set” – with borrowings from mathematics, linguistics and (in cases of determining what is new) cybernetics, offering a reductive concept of the sign that denotes at the level of expression and content and which falls back on formalistic terms (e.g. the concept of procedure from which the term “minus procedure” emerges) in determining textual structure and semantics.

In order to visualize the overt and covert interrelations between culture and text, this paper attempts to interpret the formation of a theory that led to the establishment of structural poetics (in Lotman’s early phase of structuralist thinking) as a model for cultural semiotics.

Jelena Grigorjeva (Tartu)

From Formula to Evidence – The Evolution of Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Method

My presentation deals with problems in the evolution of Lotman's approach to cultural phenomenon. This is seen as a certain shift from structuralist positivistic algebraic method to a method that could be defined in Carlo Ginsburg's terms (Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) as an evidential paradigm.

The first method was based on the ideas of constructing artificial intelligence in the domain of cybernetics. This application of humanistic knowledge marked an attempt to transform the language of social disciplines into scientific language. The first programmatic articles in semiotics by Lotman (Statji po tipologii kultury) described its object in the most general terms with the help of algebraic formulas. Simultaneously, Lotman practiced a traditional historical approach and studied literature and culture starting from the premises of the Russian historical school (A.Veselovski, G. Gukovski, G. Makagonenko). The historical approach, which is very attentive to details, margins and deviations, provides a serious correction to the generalizing semiotic concept of culture and sign as such (algebraic abstract symbols vs. indexical idiosyncratic symptoms).

Those two opposed methods merge in Lotman's later works on semiosphere (Universe of the Mind). Reading historical material in symptoms and generalizing an outcome with the theory of asymmetric dialogical mind results in a specific configuration of understanding, according to which a cultural phenomenon is treated as a readable structure of evidences and clues (Lotman's theory of cultural memory as a generator of new cultural meanings).

Ülle Pärli (Tartu)

Reception Aesthetics and Lotman’s Analysis of an Artistic Text

Yuri Lotman’s monographic treatments of artistic texts, published in early 1970s, are part of an era when reception aesthetics and ”reader-response“ criticism were on the rise in literary studies in the West. This presentation attempts to reveal the ideas in Y. Lotman’s semiotics of literature that bring his text-centric examinations of literature closer to basic issues in reception aesthetics such as the problem of the text’s target or addressee, the role of the reader (including the present cultural context as a reader) in shaping the text’s field of signification, re-coding, and the dialogic nature of texts. At the same time, the particulars of interpreting the relationship of text to reader in Lotman’s approach to literature are made clear by examining this relationship as only one aspect in his general conception of literary analysis (or literary culture). Such analysis is, by its nature, synthetic, bringing together various possibilities in a creative (and frequently paradoxical) fashion.

Elize Bisanz (Lüneburg)

Symbolic Forms and Cultural Intelligence. Interdisciplinary approaches to the cultural body by Charles S.Peirce, Ernst Cassirer und Jurij Lotman

The symbolic characteristic of cultural constructions forms the basis for a comprehensive cultural analysis. Different approaches, both in the humanities and the natural sciences, describe a path towards approximation. Not coincidentally, we find these especially in the philosophical tradition of symbolic forms as well as in semiotics, logic and pragmatics, where they provide a far reaching approach for the study of the human mind by analyzing its capacity for cultural communication and interpretation. In this context, culture and everything that it contains is understood as both a condition and a product of our symbolic systems, since symbolic systems are the means for simultaneously internalizing and mediated acquired talents, information and habits.

We will thus be discussing three central positions on the logic of symbolic communication: Charles S. Peirce’s triadic event, Ernst Cassirer’s logic of symbolic forms, and Yuri Lotman’s concept of cultural activity. On the basis of central categories such as synchronicity, symbolicity, and polysemy, we will additionally work out the dynamic and spherical characteristics of cultural logic and the relevance of Lotman's interdisciplinary approach for explicating cultural intelligence.

Schamma Schahadat (Tübingen)

Cultural Semiotics, Poetics of Culture: Readings

The starting point for my considerations is the typological similarity between the Anglo-American direction of New Historicism or poetics of culture under the aegis of Stephen Greenblatt and the Moscow/Tartu school of cultural semiotics.

Greenblatt’s poetics of culture has some precursors in Russian formalism and in Russian cultural semiotics that, even though they have hardly been acknowledged by research in the West, aim in the same direction. These are: the formalists with their studies of literaturnyj byt, of everyday literary life and their work on the biographical and literary personalities of authors (e.g. Tomaševskij); Yuri Lotman’s investigations of a poėtika povedenija (poetics of behavior); Lidija Ginzburg and Irina Papernos research on the construction of the literary persona in Romanticism and Realism.

All these approaches, from the formalists to New Historicism, are concerned with correlation of a poetics of individual epochs with extraliterary “sets” that attain the status of a poetics (a poetics of behavior). At the same time, the Russian theorists are concentrated in stronger measure than their Anglo-American counterparts on the shaping of personality in this discursive field of aesthetics and society, of poetics and politics. They direct our view to the construction of individual lives, which is expressed in highly diverse practices of representation.

Following a short comparison of the theoretical premises of the poetics of culture and Russian cultural semiotics, we will read against and alongside of each other a Lotmanian analysis of the poetics of behavior in Russian Romanticism and an analysis by Greenblatt of the English Renaissance, in order to work out their similarities and differences in detail.

Marlene Heidel (Lüneburg)

The Unpredictability of Poetic Meaning

In Lotman’s last book “Culture and Explosion“ (1992), the fundamental relevance of unpredictable processes for cultural dynamics – and for the function of culture in general – becomes clear.

Lotman understood the artistic text as an ideal type for realizing unpredictable processes and assumed for its existence an interrelation to cultural mechanisms of stability and of gradual progress. A more detailed discussion concerning the interrelation between unpredictable and stability-oriented, gradual cultural progresses remains a desideratum for research in the humanities.

The term unpredictability exists not only in the field of Kulturwissenschaft but functions in general as an interface between it and the natural sciences. As experiences in the field of artificial intelligence show, the still unsolved technical problem of reconstructing human beings does not depend on the extensive calculation and codification of the structures of acting, seeing and speaking, but on the “reconstruction“ of the fundamental human quality to react adequately (but in new ways) to unpredictable situations and to even generate unpredictable actions, artifacts and thus also artistic texts and poetic meanings. Precisely this human quality is a basis for culture.

In referring to “Culture and Explosion,“ the paper will deal with the following questions: What is the function of the “unpredictability of the poetic meaning“ within the semiosphere? What relevance does the term have for European Kulturwissenschaft? Which connections can be established between the “unpredictability of poetic meaning“ and Lotman's previous works about the language of the artistic text, the natural scientific/philosophical work of Ilya Prigogine, and the “Eastern“ versus “Western European“ traditions of semiotics?

Dieter Mersch (Potsdam)

Hybrid Semiosis: Yuri Lotman on the Question of Cultural Creativity

In his theory of the semiosphere, Yuri Lotman develops the interesting thought. At sites of rupture, the transition between different cultural spaces, increasingly strange, amorphous and open codings develop which are responsible for the dynamics and productivity of cultural semiosis. If relatively stable and dominating systems are at the center, overlappings of varying systems develop at the periphery which are then hybrid at the border pathways. What also emerge are incompatibilities, at times even paradoxical compositions that can become horrifying for the question of creativity. This paper will pursue hybrid constellations, distortions, and undecidabilities as aesthetic procedures, in order to draw connections from them to some considerations of a “theory of the new.”