Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman
of Romanticism that characterizes all the forms of art (and at times adding still other spheres of culture), chronology is decisively sacrificed. The same applies to the Baroque, Classicism, and many other “isms.”
If, however, we were to speak not of artificial models, but of the modeling of a real literary (or, more broadly, cultural) process, then we will have to admit that—continuing with our example—Romanticism encompasses only a certain segment of the semiosphere, wherein diverse traditional structures, which at times reach deep into antiquity, continue to exist. Beyond that, none of these stages of development is free from collision with texts that enter from outside, from cultures generally situated up to that point beyond the horizon of a given semiospshere. These incursions—sometimes individual texts, sometimes whole strata of culture—exert diverse disturbing influences on the internal order of a given culture’s “world picture.” In this way, in any synchronous cross-section of the semiosphere we see a tension among various languages, various stages of their development, some texts turn out to be submerged in languages that are inappropriate to them, and the codes that would decipher them may be quite absent. Let’s imagine, as a kind of uniform world caught in a synchronic cross-section, a museum hall where exhibits for different eras are displayed in different windows, and there are captions in familiar and unfamiliar languages, instructions on how to decipher them, explanatory notes to the exhibition formulated by pedagogues, diagrams for walking tours and the regulations for visitor conduct. Let’s go on to furnish this hall with guides and visitors, and let’s picture all of this as a unified mechanism (which is what, in a certain respect, it is). We will have an image of a semiosphere. In doing this, one ought not to lose sight of the fact that every element of a semiosphere is not static, but in fluid, dynamic correlation, constantly changing the formulae of their mutual relations. This is especially noticeable in traditional instances drawn from the culture’s earlier manifestations. The evolution of culture differs radically from biological evolution, and here the word “evolution” often performs a poor, misleading service.iii
Evolutionary development in biology has to do with the extinction of species rejected by natural selection. Only that which is synchronic with the researcher is alive. Somewhat analogous is the situation of technological history, where the instrument that technological progress has pushed out of use finds refuge only in the museum. It is transformed into a dead exhibit. In the history of art, works related to a culture’s long-past epochs continue to take an active part as living factors in its development. The work of art can “die” and be reborn; having grown obsolete, it can be made contemporary or even prophetically indicative of the future. What is “operative” here is not the last temporal cross-section, but the whole depth of the culture’s texts. The model of the history of literature built according to the evolutionary principle was created under the influence of concepts from the natural sciences. Consequently, what is considered to be the synchronic state of literature in any given year is the roster of works written in that year. Meanwhile, if one were to draw up lists of what had been read in that year or another, the picture would likely be different. And it is difficult to say which of the lists would most characterize the culture’s synchronic condition. Thus, for Pushkin in 1824 and 1825, the most current writer was Shakespeare, Bulgakov experienced Gogol and Cervantes as writers contemporaneous with himself, and Dostoevsky seems no less current at the end of the twentieth century than he did at the end of the nineteenth. In effect, everything contained in the current memory of a culture partakes, directly or indirectly, of its synchrony.
The semiosphere’s structure is asymmetrical. This is expressed in the directional system of internal translations permeating the whole depth of the semiosphere. Translation is the fundamental mechanism of consciousness. The expression of some essence by means of another language is the basis by which the nature of this essence is revealed. And insofar as the various languages of the semiosphere are semiotically asymmetrical in the majority of cases—that is, they do not possess mutually unambiguous signifying correspondences—the entire semiosphere can be regarded in its totality as an information-generator.
The asymmetry manifests itself in the relation between the semiosphere’s center and its periphery. The languages that show the most development and structural organization constitute the center of the semiosphere. First and foremost, this includes the given culture’s natural language. One can say that if no one language (the natural language among them) can function, not being immersed in a semiosphere, then no semiosphere, as Émile Benveniste has noted, can exist without a natural language as its organizing core. The point is that alongside structurally organized languages, in the space of the semiosphere specialized languages are jostling for position, languages capable of serving only discrete cultural functions and quasi-lingual, half-shaped formations that can be carriers of semiosis if they are inserted into a semiotic context. This can be compared to the fact that a stone or fancifully twisted tree trunk can function as a work of art. The object assumes the function that is ascribed to it.
In order to perceive the whole mass of these constructions as carriers of semiotic meaning, one must hold “the presumption of semioticity”: the potential of meaningful structures should be a given in one’s consciousness and in the semiotic intuition of the collective. These qualities are produced through the use of natural language. Thus, for example, it appears obvious that, in some cases, the structure of the “family of gods” or other basic elements of a world picture depends on the language’s grammatical composition.
The highest form of structural organization of a semiotic system is the self-descriptive phase. The very process of description is the ultimate level of structural organization. The creation of grammars, much like the codification of customs or of juridical norms, raises the descriptive object to a new level of organization. That is why a system’s self-description is the last stage in the process of its self-organization. Meanwhile, the system gains in its level of structural orderliness, but it loses the inner stores of indeterminacy to which its flexibility, its ability to increase its informational capacity, and the reserve of its dynamic development are bound.
The need for a self-descriptive stage is connected to the threat of excessive diversity within the semiosphere: the system can lose its unity and distinctiveness and can “fray.” Whether we are talking about linguistic, political, or cultural aspects, we are facing analogous mechanisms in all cases: some one segment of the semiosphere (as a rule, one that falls within its core structure) creates its own grammar in the course of its self-description—real or ideal, this depends on the description’s inner orientation toward the present or the future. Next, attempts are made to extend these norms across the entire semiosphere. The local grammar of a single cultural dialect becomes the metalanguage for the description of culture as such. Thus, during the Renaissance, the Florentine dialect is made into the literary language of Italy, the juridical norms of Rome into the laws of the entire Empire, and court etiquette in the era of Louis XIV into the court etiquette for all of Europe. There arises a literature of norms and prescriptions in which the later historian sees the real portrait of actual life in this era or another, its semiotic praxis. This illusion is supported by the testimonies of contemporaries, who are actually convinced that this is precisely how they conduct themselves. The contemporary argues roughly as follows: “I am a person of culture (meaning, an Athenian, a Roman, a Christian, a knight, an esprit fort, an Enlightenment philosopher, or a Romantic genius). As a person of culture I enact the behavior that is prescribed by such-and-such norms. It is only that portion of my behavior that corresponds with those norms that one can consider an action. Yet if I, out of weakness, illness, inconsistency, or other reasons somehow deviate from the given norms, it is meaningless, irrelevant, it simply does not exist.” The list of what “does not exist” in a given system of culture, despite its happening in praxis, is always an essential typological feature of the accepted semiotic system. Thus, for example, the famous Andreas Capellanus, author of De Amore (between 1175 and 1186), a tractate about the norms of fin’amor, in subjecting courtly love to thorough codification and demanding of the lover faithfulness toward his lady, silence, attentive servir, chastity, chivalry, and so forth, blithely permits violence towards a female peasant, since in this world picture she is “as if nonexistent”; what is done to her stands outside of semiotics—that is, it is “as if it never happened.”
The world picture created in such a way