Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman

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СКАЧАТЬ The Honest Mirror of Youth^xii prescribes young people to approach education as receiving knowledge, “… wishing to learn from everything, and looking not in cursory fashion. …”¹³ We are talking here precisely of orientation, insofar as on the level of textual reality any culture is composed of both aspects of communication. Besides, the feature I have noted is not peculiar to culture in modern times; one can find it in various forms in different eras. Emphasizing the European culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is necessary because it has conditioned our customary scientific assumptions, specifically, our identifying information as an act, with reception, with exchange. Still, it is hardly the case that every phenomenon in the history of culture can be explained from these positions.

      Let us consider the paradoxical position we find ourselves in when studying folklore. We know that it is precisely folklore that offers the greatest bases for structural parallels with natural languages, and that it is precisely in folklore that applying linguistic methods has met with the greatest success. Indeed, here the researcher can observe a limited number of systemic elements and of easily articulated rules for combining them. Yet there is also a profound difference: language provides a formal system of expression, but the realm of content remains, as far as concerns language as such, extremely free. Folklore, especially in such forms as the fairytale, automatizes both spheres to an extreme. But such a circumstance is paradoxical. If the text were truly constructed in such a way, it would be completely redundant. One could say the exact same thing, too, of other artistic modes oriented toward canonical forms, toward the implementation, and not the violation, of norms and rules.

      The answer apparently consists in the fact that if these kinds of texts possessed a particular semantics at the instant of their conception (the semantics of the fairytale was apparently tied to its relationship with ritual), then these connections were subsequently lost, and texts started to acquire the features of purely syntagmatic organizations. If, at the level of natural language, they indisputably possess a semantics, then as manifestations of culture they gravitate toward the purely syntagmatic, that is, the texts become instances of “code 2.” This tendency of myth to transform into a purely syntagmatic, asemantic text, not a message about certain events, but the scheme by which the message is organized, is what Claude Lévi-Straus had in mind when he spoke of its musical nature.

      For culture to exist as a mechanism that assembles a collective personality with a shared memory and collective consciousness, it apparently demands the availability of paired semiotic systems, with the later potential for the texts’ subsequent translation.

      This is the kind of structural pair that takes shape in “I—HE” and “I—I” communicative systems (we must note parenthetically that the rule that one part of any culture-formative semiotic pair be presented in natural language or contain natural language appears to be the law, one that, it seems, we can take for a universal feature of culture on earth).

      Actual cultures, like artistic texts, are constructed according to a principle of a pendular swinging between these systems. Yet the orientation of one or another kind of culture toward either autocommunication or receiving the truth from outside in the form of a message becomes a dominant tendency. The orientation is especially pronounced in the mythological image that every culture creates as its own ideal self-portrait. This model of oneself has an impact on cultural texts, but it cannot be conflated with them, as it is sometimes the generalization of structural principles hidden behind textual contradictions and sometimes a representation of their direct opposition. (In the realm of cultural typology, it is possible for a grammar to emerge that essentially does not apply to texts in the language it pretends to describe.)

      Cultures focused on messages have a more mobile, dynamic nature. They tend to multiply the number of texts infinitely and provide for a rapid increase in knowledge. The classic example might be European culture of the nineteenth century. The reverse side of this kind of culture is the society’s sharp split into transmitters and receivers, the appearance of a psychological predisposition to receive the truth in the form of a readymade message about someone else’s mental effort, and the rise in social passivity among those who find themselves in the position of the message’s recipients. It is obvious that the reader of the European novel in the modern era is more passive than he who listens to a fairytale, who is still faced with having to transform the clichés he has received into the texts of his own consciousness, just as one who visits the theater is more passive than one taking part in the carnival. The tendency toward mental consumerism constitutes the precarious side of a culture focused unilaterally on receiving information from outside.

      Cultures focused on autocommunication are capable of developing great spiritual activity, yet they frequently turn out to be significantly less dynamic than the needs of human society demand.

      Historical experience shows us that the systems that turn out to be most vigorous are those in which the struggle between these structures does not lead to the unconditional victory of one over the other.

      At present, however, we are still quite far from the possibility of providing anything like a sound forecast of which cultural structures are optimal. Before that day comes, we must still understand and describe their mechanisms, if only in their most typical manifestations.

SEMIOTIC SPACE

      Translated from Iu. M. Lotman, “Semioticheskoe prostranstvo,” in Semiosfera, 250–256. Lotman first proposed the concept of the semiosphere in an article published in Sign System Studies [Trudy po znakovym sistemam] in 1984. The flexibility of this model, in the way it pits highly structured metalanguages produced from the center against displacements, disruptions, and recodings from the peripheries, can be highly productive, and the model has been used extensively. It presumes a degree of semiotic fluidity that renders justice to the complex ways in which communication circulates within a society. However, it may be less applicable to such cases, where the semiotic traffic is between plural centers, or directly between peripheries, however construed. Ultimately, the dialectic of center and periphery remains dependent on a monocentric view of communication. This has the advantage of implicitly incorporating a consideration of the semiotic ways in which political and social power are manifest in society, but it risks eclipsing communications that elude this dialectic. On Lotman’s concentric view of culture, see also Semenenko, The Texture of Culture, 51–54.

      Our discussions up to this point have been constructed according to a standard scheme: first we have the discrete, isolated communicative act, and then we examine the relationship between addresser and addressee that arises from it. This approach assumes that studying an isolated fact reveals all the basic features of semiosis that can then be extrapolated into more complex semiotic processes. Such an approach satisfies the famous third rule from Descartes’s Discourse on Method, “to adhere to a certain order of thought, beginning with the simplest and most easily recognized of objects and proceeding gradually to know the more complex. …”¹

      In addition, this speaks to the scientific habit, a product of the Enlightenment, of performing a Robinsonade: singling out an isolated object and later imparting the significance of the general model to it.ⁱ

      However, in order for such singling out to be appropriate, it is necessary that the isolated fact allow us to model all the properties of the phenomenon to which conclusions will be extrapolated. This cannot be said of this instance. A setup consisting of an addresser, addressee, and the sole channel connecting them will not yet work. For that, it should be immersed in semiotic space. All those who participate in communication should already have some kind of experience, some practice at semiosis. In this way, paradoxically, semiotic experience should precede any semiotic act. Were we to zero in on the semiosphere through an analogy with the biosphere (Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept), it would become obvious that this semiotic space is not the sum of separate languages but rather consists of the condition for their existence and operation and, in a certain respect, precedes them and constantly interacts with them.ⁱⁱ In this respect, language is a function, СКАЧАТЬ