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1HERITAGE OF JURI LOTMAN LOTMAN'S SEMINAR MARCH 13, 1981
DOI: 10.31249/metodquarterly/02.01.01
Suren Zolyan1 Preface to the publication of Yuri Lotman's talk
For citation: Zolyan S. (2022). Preface to the publication of Yuri Lotman's talk. METHOD: Moscow Quarterly Journal of Social Studies, 2(1), P. 7-11. http://www.doi.org/10.31249/ metodquarterly/02.01.01
This text of Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman, published with the kind permission of the Estonian Semiotic Foundation, has a special character. It is a comprehensive research program far ahead of its time. None of the issues raised in it have lost their relevance; moreover, it contains clear methodological guidelines. Precisely because Lotman saw much farther than others, he developed this program, essentially, alone.
If we briefly characterize it main content, the talk gives, in summary form, not so much results but directions of research into the processes of meaning generation and textualization. Although it does not use the term "semiosphere," which will appear a little later, it does schematically outline the main semiotic mechanisms for organizing semiotic systems (languages) and semiotic spaces, described as the interaction of "semiotic monads" (sometimes Lotman used other terms: "semiotic I," "intelligent device," etc.). In fact, this talk gives the main statements of a new semiotic theory: in it, the main unit is not elements, or even individual texts or isolated systems, but semiotic space, being a complex of meanings, languages and texts considered in their dynamic interaction. The works of Lotman in the 1980s and 1990s are usually regarded as a new word in the semiotics of culture. Retrospectively, looking at this talk from 1981, we can expand on this interpretation. They laid the foundations for a new semiotics that studies the space of interaction of heterogeneous sign systems and mechanisms as a single meaning-generating organism. That is why, although we can put Lotman's subsequent extensive articles into correspondence with one or another of the talk's aspects, the text still does not lose its novelty. The announced program turns out to be new, and a new generation of both semioticians and semiotics is destined to complete it.
The question arises: if we attribute such an important role to this talk, why is it so little known, being published only now? After all, since the 90s, a
1 Suren Zolyan, Dr. Sc., professor, Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad, Russia; surenzolyan@gmail.com
significant number of archival texts have been published, thanks to the excellent work of researchers from Tartu and Tallinn. One can only guess. Lotman himself constantly turned to the talk's issues, expanding and concretizing them. As for other scholars, I would venture to ascribe to them what I confess for myself: this is a misunderstanding of the breadth of Lotman's horizons. Only now are we attaining an understanding of the concept of the semiosphere, while this topic is but one of the concretizations of the issues that the talk raises.
Hence, it was not only unpublished, but even forgotten. As far as I know, it was first mentioned in (Salupere 2017, 88), which cites it as a link: Talk on March 13 at the Institute of Evolutionary Physiology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Tallinn University. Estonian Semiotic Heritage Foundation. F 1 (Yu. Lotman). Typescript. Subsequently Kalevi Kull, having come across my last name in the talk, in personal correspondence asked me to clarify the details, since he had no other information.
In all likelihood, when deciphering the tape recording, they decided that the talk was given in Leningrad. In fact, it was the other way around. It was St. Petersburg (Leningrad) colleagues who came to Tartu. These are the circumstances. In February 1981, I received a letter from Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman with an invitation to take part in an informal seminar on the problem of brain asymmetry and the intrasystemic organization of semiotic systems. The letter came with the theses typed out on three pages (subsequently, their main ideas were published in Lotman 1981; 1982); the key metaphor of meaning and text as a "self-growing logos" also appeared there. Theses and questions for discussion opened up a new perspective for research focused on the problems of text and meaning.
I am trying to understand why I was among those invited. As far as I remember, I was the only non-local philologist (T.V. Chernigovskaya was among the "St. Petersburg crowd"). At this time (1976-1977), Mikhail Lotman and I were attempting to develop what we called the foundations of generative poetics, or a general theory of formal languages. The idea was to determine the minimum conditions for the organization of language, making it possible to distinguish three simplest cases: on the one hand, there is a finite chain, and its limiting case turned out to be a language of one character, which is why the text and the sign coincide (tentatively: "picture"), on the other hand, there are two infinite chains, in one of which the alphabet was limited to one character ("metric," an endless repetition of the same element), and vice versa, a language with an open alphabet, where any element could become a segment, with the condition that it had to be different from the previous one ("cinema"). It was assumed that all poetic systems (poetics) could be derived from these three basic languages as their "creolization." Yuri Mikhailovich was familiar with it and, although as usual, he referred to this idea ironically and skeptically, the very idea of a text as a result of generation by different languages underlay his methodology. In modern terms, this can be described as the interaction of the mechanisms of recursion, transformation and symmetry.
Unfortunately, Mikhail and I, having ended up in different cities and leaving behind free student life, did not bring this theory to completion. At the same time, 8
Preface to the Publication of Juri Lotman's Talk
each of us, respecting one another's authorial rights, did not publish the idea itself; rather, we were already using our own developments of its consequences. However, at that time, since I did not know anything about brain mechanisms, I connected this invitation with my work on poetic semantics. This is why, and in agreement with Yuri Mikhailovich, I gave a talk on the topic "The Semantic Structure of Words in Poetic Speech" (Zolyan 1981). I tried to reveal the lexical mechanisms of the generation and structuring of ambiguity. Our Leningrad colleagues were interested in the operations, as they put it, of left hemispheric processing of results from right hemispheric activity. Perhaps (if memory does not throw up false clues), they meant that the semantics of a poetic text can be revealed less by the structural analysis of lexical units than by a method of associations. Yuri Mikhailovich responded to this discussion in a somewhat unusual way. He appealed to the fact that, in addition to associations that can be "read," there can also be unpredictable individual ones. For example, despite
all supposed connections, the author or reader associates a given word with....
chocolate. I remember exactly about the chocolate bar because I did not accept this argument. I then believed that nothing that could not be substantiated should be taken into account. We have linguistic data, fixed in texts and mediated by dictionaries, while one can only guess about individual perception. Apparently, I was much more of a structuralist than Yuri Mikhailovich, which is why I was somewhat surprised by the argument that Yuri Mikhailovich made when he "protected" me from the St. Petersburg people.
The transcript contains my question, which Yuri Mikhailovich answers for quite a long time. Indeed, then (and still today), referring to the mysterious mechanisms of the brain serves as a substitute for scientific explanation, especially when it comes to right-brain mechanisms, where logic does not work. This opened up the possibility for all sorts of fantasies. (I even allowed myself, then or later, to parody popular articles on this topic by calling them "from the fairy tale genre of 'there are miracles, there the goblin roams.'"1) I think that is why Lotman paid such attention to this issue, the answer to which can already be seen in his publication of the same year (Lotman 1981).
Unfortunately, as far as I know, the only active seminar participants who are alive today, besides me, are Mikhail Lotman and Tatyana Chernigovskaya. We hope that other participants-listeners will also respond. We have tried to resume that dialogue after forty years. T.V. Chernigovskaya restores the very important context of that discussion and describes the development of the ideas that inspired Yuri Lotman. I tried to complete the unaddressed connection between semiosphere and biosphere—which arises precisely as a result of their activity— exploring in what way a developed semiotic system, and the semiosphere as a whole, act as "a subject and as its own object." It seems to me that Lotman's statement about heterogeneous language-mechanisms for the generation of meaning can be saliently manifested in the description of the processing of
1 Zolyan here references a line by Pushkin, which has attained nearly proverbial status, being used in conversation to allude to legendary worlds.- JVB and EVP
genetic information. Grigory Tulchinsky, who did not participate in that seminar but worked on similar problems of interpretation and semiosis, was able to reveal new aspects of Lotman's concept of meaning formation.
It so happened that those who were then thirty year old, but who are now older than Yuri Mikhailovich was at that time, have responded directly to the publication. This is a special topic of continuity and development of scientific knowledge, especially if we bear in mind the ability of a text, as indicated by Lotman, to be filled with new meanings in a new context.
For a text, like a grain of wheat which contains within itself the programme of its future development, is not something given once and for all and never changing. The inner and as yet unfinalized determinacy of its structure provides a reservoir of dynamism when influenced by contacts with new contexts. (Lotman 1990, 18).
Yuri Mikhailovich's talk was aimed at the future. We will be glad if today's thirty-year-olds continue this discussion, so that there is someone to revive it after half a century.
We think this is what makes this publication relevant. We have limited ourselves to the most superficial comments given in the notes. In publishing this talk, the content of the typewritten text was preserved (with several purely technical digressions or stutters removed). We hope for further factual clarifications. The excellent work of colleagues from Tallinn and Tartu on the publication and systematization of the heritage of Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman and Zara Grigoryevna Mints will help to supplement this publication with missing data.
In conclusion, we would like to thank our colleagues from the Estonian Semiotic Foundation, who granted permission to publish this wonderful manuscript.
The work on this publication was supported by the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University's "Priority 2030" program of strategic academic leadership.
Translated by Jason van Boom and Elizaveta Podkamennaya.
