Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman
the tremendous temporal and spatial distance between Camus and Yan Vyshatich, the commander of the military campaign against the pagans in eleventh-century Rus, they had an identical concept of the semantics of high and low. Before executing their soothsayers (shamans), Yan asked them where their god resides, and (according to the monk-chronicler) he received the following answer: “He rests in the abyss.” To which Yan explained authoritatively: “What kind of god rests in an abyss? That is a demon, for God is in the heavens …”
This turn of phrase delighted the chronicler, and he pressed it into service, in almost the same words, in quoting a pagan priest from near Lake Peipus (Estonia): “Says he [the Novgorodian]: ‘Tell me, then, where do your gods live?’ Says he [the sorcerer]: ‘In abysses. For they are black in appearance, winged, they have tails. And they ascend skyward, obeying your gods. For your gods are in the heavens.’”5
The asymmetry of the human body formed the anthropological basis for its semiotization: the semiotics of right/left is as universal for all human cultures as the opposition of high/low. Equally primary is the asymmetry of male/female, living/dead, that is, moving, warm, breathing, versus immobile, cold, not breathing (the treatment of cold and death as synonyms is affirmed in an enormous number of texts in various cultures, and it is just as common to identify death with petrification, with being turned to stone: consider the numerous legends about the origins of certain mountains or cliffs).
Vladimir Vernadsky remarked that life on earth flows in a special spatial-temporal continuum that it has created for itself:
… it is logically appropriate to construct a new scientific hypothesis that when it comes to living matter on Planet Earth we are dealing not with a new geometry, not with one of Riemann’s geometries, but with a special manifestation of nature that is as yet peculiar only to living matter, with a manifestation of space-time geometrically incommensurate with space, where time is manifest not as the fourth dimension, but as a change of generations.6
Conscious human life—that is, the life of culture—also demands a special “space-time” structure. Culture organizes itself in the form of a defined “space-time” and cannot exist outside of such an organization. This organization is actualized as a semiosphere and, simultaneously, with the help of the semiosphere.
The outer world, in which a person is immersed in order to become a factor of culture, undergoes semiotization: it splits off into a realm of objects that signify, symbolize, indicate something, that is, that have meaning, and objects that represent only themselves. At the same time, the various languages that fill the semiosphere, that hundred-eyed Argus,ii mark out different things in external reality. The resulting stereoscopic picture assumes the right to speak in the name of culture as a whole. Simultaneously, for all the diverse substructures of the semiosphere, they are organized within a general system of coordinates: on the temporal axis is the past, present, and future; on the spatial, inner space, outer space, and the boundary between them. Extra-semiotic reality—its space and time—is recoded in this system of coordinates as well, so as to be rendered “semiotizable,” capable of becoming the content of a semiotic text. This side of the question will be discussed later.
As has already been mentioned, the extension of metastructural self-description from the culture’s center to its entire semiotic space, which, for the historian, unifies a whole synchronic cross-section of the semiosphere, in fact creates merely the appearance of unification. If at the center the metastructure comes across as its “own” language, then at the periphery it appears as a “foreign” language incapable of adequately reflecting the semiotic praxis underpinning it. It is like the grammar of a foreign language. Consequently, at the center of cultural space, segments of the semiosphere that have been raised to the level of self-description assume a strictly organized character and simultaneously achieve self-regulation. But they simultaneously lose their dynamicity and, having exhausted their reserve of indeterminacy, become inflexible and incapable of evolving. On the periphery—the further from the center, the more pronouncedly—the relationship between semiotic praxis and the normativity imposed upon it becomes ever more fraught. The texts born in accordance with these norms are suspended in air, deprived of a real semiotic environment, while organic creations defined by a real semiotic milieu come into conflict with artificial norms. This is the realm of semiotic dynamics. It is precisely here that the stress field where future languages are produced comes about. Thus, for example, it has long been noted that peripheral genres in art are more revolutionary than those situated at the culture’s center, enjoy a higher prestige, and are perceived by their contemporaries as art par excellence.7 In the second half of the twentieth century we have been witness to the violent aggression of marginal cultural forms. One example might be the “career” of the cinematograph, which has transformed from a fairground spectacle, free from theoretical limitations and regulated only by its own technical possibilities, into one of the central arts and, what is more, particularly in recent decades, into one of the most described arts. The same can be said about the art of the European avantgarde as a whole. The avantgarde has undergone a period of “periphery in revolt,” has become a central phenomenon, dictating its own laws to the era and tending to paint the entire semiosphere in its color and, having effectively congealed, has become an object of intensified theorization on the metacultural level.
The same regularities can appear even within the limits of a single text. Thus, for example, we know that in early Renaissance painting it is on the periphery of the canvas and in the far distances of a landscape that genre scenes and everyday elements are clustered, given the canonicity of the central figures. This process reaches its apex in Piero della Francesca’s enigmatic The Flagellation of Christ (Ducal Palace, Urbino), where the peripheral figures have stepped boldly into the foreground, while the flagellation scene has been set back, its tones muted, providing a sort of background meaning to the colorful triple portrait up front. Analogous processes can be deployed not in space, but in time, in the movement from draft to final text. There are numerous cases of preliminary versions, in painting as well as in poetry, connected more boldly to the aesthetic of the future than is the “normalized,” self-censored, final text. Many examples of shots that directors have removed in the editing process speak to the same point.
An analogous example in another sphere might be the activity of semiotic processes during the European Middle Ages, in those provinces where the Christianization of the “barbarians” did not change pagan popular cultures but sort of draped them in an official mantle, from the remote regions of the Pyrenees and the Alps to the forests and swamps inhabited by the Saxons and Thuringii. It is from precisely this soil that “popular Christianity,” heresies, and finally reform movements later emerged.
When such a situation stimulates vigorous semiotic activity, it leads to the accelerated “maturation” of peripheral centers and to their producing their own meta-descriptions, which can in turn appear as pretenders to a universal structure of meta-description for the entire semiosphere. The history of culture provides many examples of such competition. Essentially, the attentive cultural historian detects in each of the culture’s synchronous cross-sections not one system of canonizing norms, but a paradigm of competing systems. A typical example might be the simultaneous existence in seventeenth-century Germany, on the one hand, of “language societies” (Sprachgesellschaften) and “the Fruitbearing Society” (Die Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft), which assigned itself the task of purification, of cleansing the German language of barbarisms, especially of Gallicisms and Latinisms, and grammatically normalizing the language (Justus Georg Schottelius’s grammar) and, on the other, of the “Noble Academy of Faithful Ladies” (also called “The Order of the Golden Palm”), which pursued the opposite goal, propagating the French language and a precise style of conduct. One might also point to the rivalry between the Académie Française and the chambre bleue salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet. The latter example is especially revealing: both centers work actively and consciously to create their own “language of culture.” If épurer et fixer la langue was indicated among the principal mandates when the Académie Française was founded (the king signed the charter on January 2, 1635), then for “salon culture” the question of language was likewise the first priority. Paul Tallemant wrote:
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