Introduction to Semiotics of Cultures, 2010
Juri Lotman – Universe of the Mind
Vesa Matteo Piludu
University of Helsinki
Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (Russian: Ю́рий
Миха́йлович Ло́тман, Estonian: Juri Lotman)
 1922, Petrograd (Russia)
 1993 Tartu (Estonia)
 Unable to find an academic
position in Russia due to antiSemitism (he was unable to
apply for a PhD program)
 Lotman went to Estonia in
1950 and from 1954 began his
work as a lecturer at the
Department of Russian
language and literature of Tartu
University
 He became head of the
department
Universe of the Mind
 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.
(Translated by Ann Shukman, introduction by Umberto Eco.) London
& New York
 Other relevant books/articles:
 1976. Semiotics of Cinema. (Transl. by Mark Suino.)
 1976. Analysis of the Poetic Text. (Translated by D. Barton
Johnson.)
 1977. The Structure of the Artistic Text.
 2005. On the semiosphere. (Translated by Wilma Clark), available on
internet!
Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School
 Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, Vladimir
Toporov, Mikhail Gasparov, Alexander Piatigorsky
 This school is widely known for its journal Sign Systems Studies,
published by Tartu University Press(formerly in Russian as "Труды
по знаковым системам")
 the oldest semiotics journal in the world (established in 1964)
Yuri M. Lotman
 Another scholar interested in
many fields
 Aesthetics, poetics, semiotic
theory, history of culture,
mythology, cinema, Russian
literature
 Cultural phenomena:
demonology, blue jeans, poetic
texts
The spaghetti connection:
the Lotman monument in Tarttu
Lotman communicating in the semiosphere
What’s his first name?
Eco lost in his own Medieval semiosphere
Eco’s code
Who’s who?
The Eco’s introdution to Universe of M.:
old Russian Formalist
 In the west, the work of formalist has been known for many years
only at second hand by the text Russian formalism by Victor Erlich
 In 1965 Tvezan Todorov translated many of the Russian formalist
text into French
 According to old formalist (‘20, Propp and company)
 A work of art was a semiotic device that could be analyzed in a set
of rules and inversions (sound familiar? Lévi-Strauss was
influenced by these ideas) and pre-fixed effect and conscious
modification of socialized codes (here there is a difference: for
Lévi-Strauss even the changes are unconscious: the humans don’t
know when they are “doing history”)
Formalists’/Structuralists’ contraddictions (Eco)
 They had not fully understood that the putting into a form of a work of
art has also to involve the organization of awareness
 The individual devices or social system of rules analyzed by many
formalist and structuralists were valid only within the confines of one
specific genre:
 Propp: fairy tales
 Lévi-Strauss: native American cultures
 Even so, many structuralist tried to build up universal theories, based
on specific cultures
Formalism, Structuralism, Cinema
 The models of Propp, Barthes,Lévi-Strauss has used in cinema
analysis with uncritical simplicity: not all the films or narratives are
simple myths or fairy tales, cinema has its own aesthetical values
and codes
 In the films of Federico Fellini there is no opposition hero-obstaclevillain – solution of the struggle with the victory of the hero
 narrative is not binary, is fragmentary, divided in several sub-plots
(Amarcord or 8/2)
Eco: positive/negative critics on structuralism
 Eco admit that structuralism is a method which has been shown to
be extremely useful in the explanation of linguistic systems (verbal
language in particular):
 Sassoure, Hjemslev, Jakobson
 Eco is more critical to the application of the same methods on
cultural systems (Lévi-Strauss)
 Eco hit light that there are semioticians, like Pierce and Morris, that
propounded a semiotic theory which was no means structuralist
Eco: problems of structuralism
 Certain systems, through communication (historical) processes,
changed also radically, not only on the superficial level
 Today the native American aren’t the same of the ’30, the native of
the West Coast are living in Vancouver and maybe watching hokey,
not carving marvelous masks
 Sometime is difficult to identify clear codes or rules, or there are
evident conflicts between codes, existing in the same
community
 (Baptists vs. native religions or Afro-American cults – generational
gaps – jazz/soul vs. hip-hop – rock vs. pop)
The Tartu / Moskow school (Eco)
 Work of art as an individual re-costruction of the store of the
procedures that buid up the social fabric in which the communication
works
 Universal semiotic theory – method: the rules governing each
communicative sector are variations of more general codes
 Semiotics aims to study the entire range of sign systems
Eco: critics on Lotman
 Lotman
 started from a structural approach
 … but does not remain bound by it
 In the Sixties, Lotman stressed the usefulness of structural approach
and the application of exact methods to the study of literature
 He remained more or less faithful to Saussure, Jacobson and
Information Theory
Lotman’s article:
Exact methods in Russian Literary Science (´67)
 In the Italian Journal Strumenti Critici
 Elimination of opposition exact sciences-humanistic sciences
 Literature should be studies as a part of the history of social thought
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Not only techniques of literary phenomena (formalism)
But also linguistic structuralism
Semiotics
Information theory
Cybernetics
Mathematical-statistical analysis
Lotman’s article:
Exact methods in Russian Literary Science (´67)
 Semiotics systems are models which explain the world in which we
live (in explaining the world, they also construct it, cognitive theory)
 Language is a primary model system (see Barthes)
 Myths, cultural rules, religion, art, science are secondary
modeling systems (see Barthes)
 If the text represents model of the world, the web-set of texts which is
the culture of a period is a secondary modeling system
Lotman’s article:
Exact methods in Russian Literary Science (´67)
 It’s necessary to attempt to define a typology of cultures
 1. To discover universal aspect common to all cultures (see LéviStrauss)
 2. And to identify specific systems, as the language of Medieval
culture (Eco’s specialization) or Renaissance culture
 If a culture is analyzed as a code or system, the processes of use
are richer and less predictable than the semiotic model which
explains them
 The model doesn’t explain all the empiric phenomena
 The model try only to explain why that culture has produced the
phenomena
Eco:
Lotman goes further than other structuralists
 No historical period have a sole cultural code
 There are simultaneously various codes
 Move: from dogmatic structuralism to a more complex and
articulated approach
 Lotman introduced the difference between grammatical learning
and textual learning
Eco: Lotman’s Cultures
 Can be governed by a system of rules
 OR
 By a complex repertoire of texts imposing several model of behavior
Eco: texts according to Lotman
 The society initially propose models, to be followed and imitated
 After texts, generated by combination of discrete units, judged
correct or incorrect according to their conformity to the
combinational rules
 Texts are macro units which rules can eventually be inferred
Grammar-oriented culture
 Depends on a handbook, a code which permits further messages
Text-oriented culture
 Depends on the book, a text, generated by an unknow rule which,
onece reduced to a hand-like form, can suggest new way of
producing further texts
Lotman: Adult language learners
 Introduced to an unknown language by means of rules
 They receive a set of units with their combinational laws, and they
learn how to combine these units in order to speak
 It’s funny to see that often the Language’s book’s chapter are really
called Units 1
Lotman: Children’s learning
 Learning to speak, is trained through an exposure to a continuous
textual performance and s/he is expected to absorb competence
even thought not completely conscious of the underling rules
Lotman: cultures as a set of texts
 cultures are set of texts
 And non-hereditary collective memory (structuralism + critic to
sociobiology)
Tarzan learned to act as he act in his
environment (jungle or Rome’s election)
Even Tarzan has leaned behavioral rules,
at least the basic ones to built up a kind of Tarzan family,
with members acting as Tarzan
And batman has is non-biological family
of neurasthenic vigilantes, acting as him
Lotman: notion of boundary
 Fusion of structural method (mostly synchronic, even if the
structuralists declared their interest in history)
 And his vocation as historian, interested in:
 explaining how a culture is formed
 and how different culture systems, distant one another in time,
can be compared
Lotman/Eco: Medieval culture
 Comparison of Middle age and Englitenment
 Middle age:
 Culture in which everything (not only words but things, animals …)
 Signifies a higher reality and where objects themselves are
important not for their physical nature or their function
 But rather in so much as they signify something else
 Functionalism (Malinowski) doesn’t work at all with medieval theory
Eco: Art and Beauty in the Middle Age
1958 / 1986
Eco/Lotman: Englinthment
 Cultural system where the world of object is real
 And the word and signs in general are conventional construction,
possible vehicles of falsehood