The authors analyse Lotman's semiotics in a series of temporal contexts, starting with the rigidity of Soviet-era ideologies, through to the post-Soviet de-politicization that - paradoxically enough - ended with the reproduction of Soviet-style hegemonic discourse in the Kremlin and ultimately reignited politically divisive conflicts between Russia and Europe. The book demonstrates how Lotman's ideas cross disciplinary boundaries and their relevance to many European theorists of cultural studies, discourse analysis and political philosophy. Lotman lived and worked in Estonia, which, even under Soviet rule, maintained its own borderland identity located at the intersection of Russian and European cultural flows. The authors argue that in this context Lotman’s theories are particularly revealing in relation to Russian-European interactions and communications, both historically and in a more contemporary sense.
The authors analyse Lotman's semiotics in a series of temporal contexts, starting with the rigidity of Soviet-era ideologies, through to the post-Soviet de-politicization that - paradoxically enough - ended with the reproduction of Soviet-style hegemonic discourse in the Kremlin and ultimately reignited politically divisive conflicts between Russia and Europe. The book demonstrates how Lotman's ideas cross disciplinary boundaries and their relevance to many European theorists of cultural studies, discourse analysis and political philosophy. Lotman lived and worked in Estonia, which, even under Soviet rule, maintained its own borderland identity located at the intersection of Russian and European cultural flows. The authors argue that in this context Lotman’s theories are particularly revealing in relation to Russian-European interactions and communications, both historically and in a more contemporary sense.
Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political
228
Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political
228eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The authors analyse Lotman's semiotics in a series of temporal contexts, starting with the rigidity of Soviet-era ideologies, through to the post-Soviet de-politicization that - paradoxically enough - ended with the reproduction of Soviet-style hegemonic discourse in the Kremlin and ultimately reignited politically divisive conflicts between Russia and Europe. The book demonstrates how Lotman's ideas cross disciplinary boundaries and their relevance to many European theorists of cultural studies, discourse analysis and political philosophy. Lotman lived and worked in Estonia, which, even under Soviet rule, maintained its own borderland identity located at the intersection of Russian and European cultural flows. The authors argue that in this context Lotman’s theories are particularly revealing in relation to Russian-European interactions and communications, both historically and in a more contemporary sense.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783488346 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2017 |
| Series: | Reframing the Boundaries: Thinking the Political |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 228 |
| File size: | 508 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Alexandra Yatsyk is guest researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the University of Uppsala, Sweden.
Read an Excerpt
Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political
By Andrey Makarychev, Alexandra Yatsyk
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Andrey Makarychev and Alexandra YatsykAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-834-6
CHAPTER 1
Boundaries and the Political
A Cultural-Semiotic Contribution to the Debate
Debates on politics and its disavowals have a long-standing legacy in both academic and political discourses. Politics as a socially constructed concept eludes shared definitions and sometimes might even be left unexplained, being applied to, for instance, economic spheres or cultural production, as if the notion itself is self-evident due to its frequent (over)use. In the meantime, deeply political issues of collective identity-making or religion can be discussed without mentioning the word "politics."
In political parlance, too, politics is referred to in many contradictory contexts. It might have behind it negative — even derogatory — connotations and thus become a synonym for manipulations, ambitions, and morally reproachable misconduct: "political games" usually is a negatively marked expression, opposed to ethically unquestionable behavior. In the meantime, politics may be a key word for striking compromises, pacifying militant opponents clashing with each other, and reconciling antagonisms ("political process," as opposed to military fighting). Depending on a school of thought, politics can either be distinguished from the domain of security that necessitates a turn from "normal" policy procedures to extraordinary measures of emergency for the sake of survival (as the Copenhagen school of international relations would presume) or from administrative and managerial technicalities that need more coordination than leadership (the argument shared by the New Left, critical theory, and poststructuralist scholarship).
There have been a number of attempts to tackle politics from a cultural-semiotic perspective. Thus, a semiotic study argues that "social relations in semiotic acts and in social formations are constituted by relations of power ... Every social group is characterized by processes of conflict and struggle, and by mechanisms for resolution and mediation, between different social categories based on class, race, gender, age and other aspects of group formation." In the literature there are also narrow accounts of political semiotics as analysis of cultural contexts in which electoral campaigns are embedded or different leadership styles can be contextualized through analogies with literature genres. Indeed, from a cultural-semiotic perspective political events, processes, and institutions can be studied as cultural phenomena, and more specifically as literary texts with an ample variety of genres. Yet even more important is that cultural practices/forms are ontologically political and therefore ought to be addressed from this perspective.
Most studies in political semiotics presume a well-structured nature of political processes and place political actors in institutional landscapes, which is largely due to a strong structuralist legacy in this field of research. However, in this chapter we deploy the political in a more nuanced context and treat it through the concept of the boundary that has a deep legacy in Lotman's school.
We start this chapter with an introduction to Lotman's conceptual vocabulary, followed by a general projection of Lotman's understanding of the boundary to the field of critical border studies, an influential subdiscipline located at the intersection of comparative politics, regional studies, and sociology of international relations. Then, based on this translation, we explain the centrality of borders and boundaries for political vocabulary. We continue the exploration of political problematique with singling out three modalities of the political, each one grounded in its own model of boundary thinking. We finish the chapter with a case-study analysis of national identity-making in two post-Soviet borderlands, Ukraine and Georgia, focusing on their peculiar semiospheres as repositories of political meanings.
A BRIEF GUIDE TO LOTMAN'S CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY
Yuri Lotman is known for his basic concept of semiosphere as a broad notion that encompasses the incipience and production of cultural meaning through procreation and generation of signs, mostly in literary texts. Meanings are inseparable from the dynamics of communication that Lotman tackles not only as a process of distributing and conveying messages, but also from the viewpoint of their cultural generation which is impossible beyond the communicative context that always implies translation and recoding as communicative policies of the participating agents. Lotman singled out different communicative modes, including bilateral (from the receiver to the sender), which can be conceptualized as intersubjective, and autocommunication, in which the roles of the two merge, and the ensuing discourse does not require an approval or justification from outside the discourse. Autocommunication is a key element for self-enclosed systems that can be found everywhere — in political discourses, academic theories, arts, and so on.
Lotman's theory was strongly influenced by exact sciences. This is what he recalls:
I remember a feeling of jealousy that I have experienced at the onset of my academic pathway in the end of the 1940s towards mathematicians capable of exposing their ideas in the language that forbids any ambiguity and different interpretations ... Since the times of Nietzsche the whole culture that established itself after the domination of positivism in Europe in the end of the nineteenth century ... became overwhelmed by a political language with its wide spread of metaphors and essay-writing. I ... used to observe how easy this language turned from a means of academic cognition into a tool of propaganda and demagogy, which discredited humanitarian disciplines.
This is why Lotman was so open to embracing methodology borrowed from the fields of cybernetics and structural linguistics and to applying methods of exact sciences in cultural semiotics.
However, Lotman ultimately did recognize the limits of utilizing mathematics in humanitarian disciplines:
We, the proponents of approximation of mathematics and humanitarian sciences, understood it simplistically: we thought that as soon as we translate the objects studied by linguistics into the language of programming, the issue would be solved. That is why we initially paid attention to the most elementary objects, such as the language of street signals, mass culture in arts, detective stories in literature, canonic genres in folklore. Yet soon we found out that the scientific tasks we face are much more complex.
The comprehension of this complexity is well illustrated by Lotman's ambivalent approach to differentiation of the semiotic world from a non-semiotic reality.
The specificity of individuals as cultural beings requires their distinction from the world of nature, understood as an extra-cultural space ... In some of the aspects of its existence human beings belong to cultural sphere, while in other respects they are related to the extra-cultural world ... Therefore, the boundary is blurred, and the definition of each specific fact as belonging to either cultural or extra cultural spheres is highly relative.
This means, in other words, that it is only the structure of the dominant discourse that defines the inclusion to — or exclusion from — the semiosphere. This is how the concept of boundary was introduced to his scholarship.
Therefore, putting in the center of his scholarship the semiosphere as a generalized notion encompassing an almost endless variety of cultural forms and representations, Lotman in the meantime tried to abstain from a static interpretation of this concept, making semiotic boundaries movable and flexible. That is why he refers to semiotization (ascribing meanings to objects or social phenomena and placing them in semiotic contexts) and de semiotization (a "battle with signs") as two divergent yet interconnected processes of meaning-(un)making. In this respect it is important that Lotman directly linked semiotization with relations of representation. In fact, he claimed that only objects or figures that represent something or somebody can play a genuinely semiotic role and therefore be considered as producers of meanings. He derives the core of semiotization from the medieval culture when "to become a socially meaningful fact, a certain form of activity should have turned into a ritual. A fight, a hunting, diplomacy and — in a wider sense — governance required ritualization." As for desemiotization, or semiotic exclusion, one of the possible examples could be silencing that in the Tartu-Moscow school comes in two versions. One aims to mask the truth through nonverbal practices of silence, while the other uses language as a tool for deception. Mikhail Lotman emphasizes "the intrinsic contradiction within the idea of sign that constitutes the phenomenon of lie: the latter does not exist in extra- or pre-signified world, and appears in conjunction with language; it is signs that produce lie."
In his works Lotman was interested in transformation of extracultural phenomena into cultural ones and thus in transcending boundaries between them, which can be considered as a transfer of nontexts into texts. Since Lotman considered texts as bearers of veracity, each text presupposes its own viewpoint, a speaking position "that makes truth known, and lie impossible." The rigidity of this and some other Lotman's statements suggests that his theory is a valuable tool of cognition in situations of domination of one discursive core — with its own system of normativity and veracity — over another, when key anchoring concepts are used in public discourses for stabilizing its meanings and avoiding semantic dispersion. Yet under the conditions of a lack of the dominant core and plurality of constitutive discourses and their competition with each other, one might need a different vocabulary, less skeptical to opening concepts for multiple interpretations as the core condition of the political existence of concepts.
Lotman's analysis was sensitive to a plethora of issues developed and conceptualized in Western schools of semiotics and discourse analysis. Thus, he often mentioned cultural underpinnings of socially produced norm as consensually accepted practices and included in his analysis norms and deviations as cultural practices. In theorizing the self/other distinctions, he was close to accepting Louis Althusser's idea of acts of interpellation as the power of constructing others through name-giving. Lotman used the concept of language games and understood them as reinterpretations of old concepts borrowed from adjacent narratives, referring to Russia's adaptive imitation of Western ideas. He was fully cognizant of the dependence of semiosphere upon external discourses that serve as constitutive reference points for semiotic dynamics, yet he didn't theorize this dependence as conducive to the phenomenon of dislocated (split, unfixed, fluid, divided, internally disrupted, and ultimately non-self-sufficient) identities and discourses that sustain them. He was uncertain about deconstructing binary oppositions and dichotomies along with the ensuing hierarchies (racial, gender, social, etc.), proposing instead a transition from binary to ternary thinking. In the meantime, Lotman succeeded in unveiling the interdependence of cultural oppositions (for instance, East-West) and discovering third positions not duly grasped by dichotomies (e.g., in-between, or peripheral positioning as a source of dense semiosis).
Lotman's semiotic legacy was interpreted by some scholars as sympathetic with a universalized language with a "single finite truth" that "occupies the core of the semiotic space" and "functions as the basis of what Lotman defines as the transcendental unity of self-consciousness." It is at this point that "'a central codifying mechanism' appears as a kind of generator of transcendental signifiers which are imposed as universal expression forms into the different contents circulating within the semiotic space, and which transforms the latter into an ordered and hierarchical totality." This is how, according to some Lotmanian scholars, we can unpack the semiotic mechanisms of foreclosure:
If the human mind is a autopoietic system, that is one that permanently constructs its own world, then representation can only be self-referential in nature. Self-reference has, furthermore, been declared to be a characteristic feature of postmodern culture. If postmodernity is confronted with a loss of the referent of the signs ... the remains of these signs thus deprived of their function of representation can only become self-referential.
The most essential question at this point is this: How do discourses stabilize themselves and arrest the endless flow of differences? One of the ways of thinking in this direction would start with claiming that it is metalanguages of self-naming and self-description that stabilize dispersed discourses. From a cultural-semiotic perspective, semiosis is an endless process of self-reproduction and proliferation of signs:
The interpretant of a sign is another sign, which the previous sign creates in the interpreter ... By being a sign the interpretant determines another sign that acts, in turn, as an interpretant: therefore, the interpretant opens to a new semiosis, it develops the sign process, it is a new sign occurrence ... Signs are characterized by their semantic and pragmatic flexibility which makes them continually available to new and different contexts.
Thus, the whole tradition of semiotics "conceives of the sign as a structure that is only constituted by other signs and, hence, can never represent anything that is nonsemiotic."
In the centering of the semiosphere on the basis of nodal points, or master signifiers, "the movement of difference is effaced and removed to the outside, while boundaries are traced in order for the system to be a self-contained and coherent whole." Each identification with a value system can potentially give a totalizing effect. Yet in the meantime, some of Lotman's contemporary followers do find in his writings a powerful inspiration for identifying practices that can escape and resist totalization. Lotman indeed paid attention to "the play of differences" that might be incorporated into any system of signs.
The procedure of detotalization — infraction (of the boundaries) — does not contest the system from the perspective of a reversal by which external forces would destroy it. On the contrary, it borrows the resources of subversion from within(-outside) of the "old structures" themselves ... The work on the border, by rethinking the relationship between the inside and the outside ... functions as an interruption of totalization.
Semiotic approaches are important for many social sciences. For example, popular geopolitics as a discipline studies different representations — in cartography, arts, mass media, urban cultural landscapes, and so on. A biopolitical reading of semiosphere, as we shall show later, places at the center of attention the human body and practices of corporeality that are deeply inscribed into the semiosphere. The theory of securitization also contains a strong semiotic background: it claims that security is a discursive practice of creating images and representations of risks, threats, and dangers, with the circulated signs of security and insecurity being susceptible to self-reproduction. In a securitization act — when security concerns are articulated and legitimized — politics is constrained or superseded, and the unthinkable becomes parts of the discourse. This raises the issue of drawing a boundary between the spheres of politics and security that might not be external to politics but rather intrinsic to it. The contours of these boundaries depend on the meanings attached to the concept of security.
Apart from academic value, the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics might have practical implications since it is instrumental in understanding mechanisms that stabilize discourses and prevent them from fragmentation and dissipation. In particular, a strong emphasis on binary oppositions might be helpful for solidifying the hegemonic discourse on the grounds of accentuating its radical dissimilarity with any other sources of epistemic authority. If postmodernism celebrates "the liberation of signs from dependency on well-defined signifieds ... [and] from the strict confines of normative, foundationalist doctrines," it is this permissive semiotic reality that authoritarian hegemonic discourses might use for the sake of internal stabilization of their hegemonies. For authoritarian self-referential discourses the change of reality is not an issue; it is changes in the system of signs and messages, as well as in the repertoires of representations and performances, that become the semiotic core of their hegemony. Denial of ultimate truth, acceptance of constructed nature of power relations, and blurred lines between the fake and the real become central for adaptation of many post-Soviet dictatorial regimes to the global world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political by Andrey Makarychev, Alexandra Yatsyk. Copyright © 2017 Andrey Makarychev and Alexandra Yatsyk. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.