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1DOI: 10.31249/metodquarterly/02.01.02
Yu. M. Lotman1 Talk at Tartu State university March 13, 1981
Abstract. Transcript of a seminar with Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman held on March 13, 1981, as published in the journal Slovo.
Keywords: asymmetry of semiotic systems, isomorphism of the brain and culture, transmitting and the receiving encoders, en abîme and the principle of nesting, self-reproduction, mother-infant language of gestures and smiles, bipolarity, self-description.
For citation: Lotman Yu. M. (2022). Talk. March 13, 1981, at Tartu State university. METHOD: Moscow Quarterly Journal of Social Studies, 2(1), P. 12-27. http://www.doi. org/10.31249/metodquarterly/02.01.02
Vadim Lvovich [Deglin]'s talk has made it much easier for me to speak; it covered much common ground, and in the end, even erected some bridges which I will now try to go along. I want to say that the assessment of the problem itself now seems to me non-debatable. At the least, I will refer to the recent publication of Roman Osipovich Jakobson's The Brain and Language, where a deservedly high assessment is given to the works of both Lev Yakovlevich [Balonov] and Vadim Lvovich, as well as to other colleagues from our group. It provides some directions as well as something that can be promisingly extracted for semiotics.
Studies on the asymmetry of semiotic systems coincided, in an interesting way, with cultural observations that, to a certain extent, were carried out independently and separately and, due to our (or at least my own) ignorance, were for a long time completely unknown to mejeading to those different opinions that were already discussed at our fourth school, when the question arose of how to explain the very high redundancy of semiotic systems. Why do we have more than one communication channel in working semiotic systems, which, according to classical, generally accepted and traditional semiotic models should be enough in most cases. Why can a system with a minimum of two alternative channels be considered an elementary model of culture, as was stated in the abstracts at
1 © Tallinn University. Estonian Semiotic Heritage Foundation. F 1 (Y. Lotman).
the fourth school? This question, in fact, remained unanswered.
It was an observation of a real fact, associated with a number of other "whys?" which, in the traditional classical works coming from Saussure, remained unanswered. In fact, the question of why we observe a variety of individuals in a system of social communications remained unanswered. It would seem that the variety of individualities can be attributed only to the fact that we are dealing with, say, a variety of models made according to one drawing of a machine but with the technical impossibility of producing exactly the same specimens. Thus, the subject of attention turned out to be, so to speak, a drawing—that which is uniform—while that which belongs to the field of discord, to the field of the supersystem, in general turned out to be outside the theory. The theory considered systems...
Incidentally, the fact that, psychologically, semiotics has taken the path of overcoming this was very clearly stated at the second school by the same Roman Osipovich Jakobson. Let me recall his words from memory. He said that he was no longer interested in structures. He was interested in texts, and in general, it is interesting to reconsider Saussure from the point of view of texts. This psychological turn was common for us, because everything that could be obtained from the study of structures as such, in the field of semiotics, was already quite easily clarified, giving indisputable results.
But the question remains, firstly, why are there so many texts, why do such an abundance and such a redundancy of messages circulate, and in the end, why are we all different. Is this only an outlay made by nature as an insufficiently good engineer, or is it instead rather a benefit, a condition for the semiotic life of the Collective? It was assumed <drawing on the board> in some of our initial ideas, that the purpose of transmitting a certain message is to give an undistorted, unaltered and completely identical transmission from the transmitting to the receiving text; thus, if something changes, the channel only corrupts ,—any change in the channel is noise, and in the ideal model we neglect it.
From this seemingly indisputable position, on which the foundations of communicative ideas are built, it is easy to come to such antinomies, in fact, to absurdity. Since, if the text is transmitted completely and without any changes, then we assume in advance that the encoder of the transmitter and the encoder of the receiver are completely identical. What does it mean that the transmitting encoder and the receiving encoder are completely identical? This means that in the semiotic sense they represent one person, and that then this circulation produced in the ideal case is absolutely unnecessary. This is the same as shifting something from the left pocket to the right. This does not increase any amount. So in fact, we come to some kind of contradiction; on the one hand, we really encounter a continuous process of communications, but we must assume that it is defective in principle, because in real life we do not find that the text arrives from the transmitter to the receiver without changes.
Moreover, we will come to the conclusion that the more complex the cultural codes, the more defective the system. As a matter of fact, the following question arises: what is the communicative ideal, say, a street alarm system or a 12
poem by Pushkin? Because Pushkin's poem obviously cannot be transmitted in an adequate way. Is this some kind of communications defect which should be somehow artificially brought to unambiguity? Or is it the most complex and most advantageous kind of mechanism? That is, we face a number of contradictions, but these lead us to the fact that the identity of the sender and receiver is only an extremely hypothetical case, or, most likely, an ideal model that is convenient only in certain scientific abstractions, while in real social communications we deal with a pronounced difference between them.
Moreover, we can say that the whole system of cultural—and even— before that—biological development does not strive to erase differences, but to increase them. This can be easily shown, bearing in mind that the more complex the social structure, the more complex the individual set, the combinations of coding devices. Thus we come to a contradiction, which very naturally leads us to the conclusion that the transmission of a certain message is an ideal or, I would say, a polar case. As a trend, it is always present—in its pure form, apparently, it is almost never found. But as a trend, it has a countertendency, consisting in the fact that this mechanism is not considered as a passive transmitter, but as a device that generates a new message, a device within which the message shifts and acquires new informational properties. And then we have transmitter and receiver as two poles of a single working mechanism, and they work not only because they are the same in a certain respect, i.e., one mechanism, and in this sense some mutual understanding is possible, but also by the fact that they are different in another respect and represent different mechanisms. And their difference works just as well as their similarity. In fact, neither one nor the other appears in their pure form, but rather we find a gamut of oscillations between the transmission of a message, a strictly communicative act, and the creative consciousness of developing a new message.
All types of possible communicative acts fluctuate between these two tendencies, which brings us to the fact that the elementary cell for creative consciousness is the minimal bipolar system, which is distinguished by such a unity of mutually exclusive qualities.
In a sense, they are one mechanism, and what is very important, they are not only one mechanism; since this is consciousness, then the question of self-consciousness immediately arises—here is one of those mechanisms that takes on the function of representing the mechanism as a whole and is aware of itself as one thing. For example, when we say, "Some natural language," then it will be easy to show later that this is a heterogeneous system, being a mixture of several systems; but it is very important that, at the same time, it is aware of itself as one language, and that this complex system is aware of itself as one, which ensures its internal circulation.
By the way, with regard to the role of self-awareness, how it plays out in different hemispheres, this occurred to me in the course of your talk. For a good example of a voice shift, remember in Bulgakov's "Theatrical Novel"— "I said in a low sonorous voice:—Well, you had a voice," said Bombardo, "thin, squeaky, angry." It is quite natural that he really worked with one hemisphere,
one dominant system, and was conscious of himself with the other. Thus, this system is defined as unified, and at the same time, it not only includes various semiotic formations, but it also includes developing linguistic untranslatability. That is, up to a certain threshold, the difference and the difficulty of translation are the source of the creative shift of messages—the fact that we do not have a simple automatic transformation of a text according to unambiguous algorithms, but instead an unpredictable transformation into a new message.
This kind of elementary cell, whether we call it a text, or a separate human personality, or some sort of semiotic structure of a larger plan, leads to various kinds of consequences. First, our understanding of the text according to the classical Saussurian dichotomy changes. I don't, God forbid, of course I don't want to cast a shadow in any way on the classic works of Ferdinand de Saussure, which we all stand upon. As Pushkin said, you shouldn't bite the breast of your wetnurse just because your teeth have grown out. But at the same time, of course, the time comes to reconsider essential things. In particular, the relationship between text and language. The classical scheme presents the text as a kind of materialization of a system. And it conceives what is significant in it as already present in a language. The text was, therefore, some kind of packaging, some box that conveyed the system of values <drawing>. Here the box was opened, the message was removed, and the container was thrown away.
And thus, the text was an active carrier of some existing structural content outside the text. This naturally follows from the idea that a text is a text in one language, that a text is a material expression of a language—a fixed expression of a language, a message limited in space and time, expressed in some units. But, probably, no one could ever see such a text, if you think about it. And we see other texts. We see texts that are material expressions, heterogeneous formations, decipherable in at least two languages. Most of our texts are deciphered in the system of visual, verbal and....there is no need to resort to cinema, but any text, even a simple verbal one, the most elementary, is therefore bilingual and represents <drawing> some kind of double bipolar generator.
The simplest example is a metaphor. And at the same time, there is no relationship of complete translatability between its different poles; they are put under mutual strain, and in this sense, we can say that it is not languages that create texts, but texts that create languages. First, some texts are given, which, as Titus Lucretius Carus believed, float about in space, like legs, arms, and heads, which then stick together. In general, of course, the question of which comes earlier and which comes later is, in general, an idle question, which shouldn't be raised. But if we formulate it in such a way that the text, apparently, is always richer than language, and it is at the level of the text that <drawing> we observe the elementary process of generation.
In a sense, the text knows more than the one who created it. Because it has a capacity for multiple interpretations. I mean now literary texts. But I believe that we can make such an extremely conscious, maximalist statement because I used to think that nonfiction texts are extreme expressions of some normal nonfiction texts, but now I think that nonfiction texts are a special case of fiction 14
texts. That is, that the productive, active, meaning-generating function of text communication is expressed most fully in literary texts, but is still inherent in all texts in general. In the same way as the function of passive transmission exists in literary texts, but it manifests itself to the extreme, probably in street alarm systems.
In addition, the system appears to us somewhat differently. It does not take on the form of a conjugated sum of separate, relatively autonomous, semiotic systems, such as different arts, different cultural formations, but rather is built; here <drawing> according to the principle of nesting dolls. Representing something whole and being at some level divisible into polar formations, it retains this principle, and as soon as we divide it according to some principle.... For example, according to the principle of prose/poetry, then each system will instantly be divided according to the same principle, etc. And it will depart, as in heraldic systems there is such an expression, en abîme (Fr.) "into the abyss" <drawing> imagine such a coat of arms, here, say, lilies, here is a hand with a sword, this is a tower, and here is this coat of arms, lilies, a hand with a sword, a tower, here is a coat of arms, lilies, a hand with a sword and a tower and so on— here is such a gap, which in fact is a given principle that already works through self-reproduction.1
And we observe this in a number of extreme cultural cases, when, say, for example, the function of a word being a word can be attributed, on the one hand, to all texts 2and even the Universe, and on the other hand, it can be attributed not only to the phoneme, but also to the differential feature of the phoneme. And probably.. ..as soon as we learn to distinguish something deeper in meaning, then the function can apply there as well. This, by the way, brings me very close to the idea, stated at the beginning, that in fact, it is not about such a rigid distinction between left-brain and right-brain thinking, but that thinking takes place here and there, and that these are in fact principles that we approximately designate, but it is very likely that they will also be capable of more subtle things, say, within each hemisphere. But here I do not dare to intrude into an area in which I absolutely do not understand anything.
And at least in the field of culture, apparently, this is so. A certain
1 I remember this drawing: Yu. M. Lotman drew a shield divided into four quadrants; in the fourth (which Lotman calls a "gap") the same shield was reproduced in a reduced form, and an even smaller copy of the previous one was placed in the fourth quadrant of this reduced shield. etc. Actually, Yu. M. Lotman speaks about the fractal self-organization of semiotic systems, predicting a phenomenon that was still completely unknown outside the narrow spheres of mathematics. We recall that the study of Francois Mandelbrot that gave him the name "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" was published in 1977 . Compare this with his subsequent formulation of this idea: "Since all levels of the semiosphere—from the personality of a person or a separate text to global semiotic unities—represent, as it were, semiospheres nested into each other; each of them is both a participant in the dialogue (part of the semiosphere) and a dialogical space (the whole semiosphere)" (1984: 22).
2 There is apparently an uncorrected typo in the typescript; printed: "text," however, another reading is possible: the function of the word to be a word is attributed precisely to the text.
principle of difference has been set, a tendency has been set for the growth of these differences, for an increase in mutual untranslatability, and for the erasure of these differences, to work towards ultimate conductivity, 1 and both of these mechanisms, working in different directions, give all the diversity, both of different types of arts and different types of self-orientation, from the orientation of different cultures and personalities, well, roughly speaking, let's say, to left hemisphere and right hemisphere consciousness. In this regard, a very significant question arises, the question of contacts between these types of texts, consciousnesses, cultures or different things. Contact, which has always been thought of as something automatic.
Two personalities are given <figure>,2 a language is given, and it is assumed that the contact after that is given, as it were. Let me draw a parallel. In her Ph.D. thesis, Elena Vladimirovna Dushechkina very interestingly showed how medieval literature does not raise the question that a word cannot be heard; if someone said it, then everyone must have heard it.3 If it is said somewhere, then everyone knows it. It is assumed that the contact itself is given almost automatically, or quite automatically. Apparently, in the light of these facts, ideas and all sorts of diverse scientific approximations, which in fact come from different directions, from very different scientific impulses, but in general converge on one thing; rather imagine the contact as something very dramatic, as Tyutchev said, "like a duel fatal," as something very dramatic and never completely satisfactory. Because the mechanism itself works according to its own definite tendency, and a fruitful tendency, one of two opposite fruitful tendencies, the difficulty of contacts. In this regard, for communications between these two systems, the concept of dialogue is more appropriate; again, I must say that the concept of dialogue also arises to a sufficient extent in different tendencies and from very different angles.
Let me remind you of the beginning of the 20s, even earlier, of the work of the philosopher [Martin] Buber, I and Thou.A Now it largely gives the impression of philosophical journalism. But when we talk about the pioneering role of Bakhtin's works, then this is essentially international, such a context of very intense thought, the search for "THOU." Given that the concept of dialogue is conceived as....and again, it is very interesting that at certain cultural moments
1 it is written in the typescript. Perhaps this is a typo, since it is more about "translatability." However, we can also understand conductivity as a newly introduced characteristic of a text. The situation is reminiscent of the idea, repeatedly used by Yu. M. Lotman, of extra-systemic elements of the text (noise, deformation, errors, typos) serving as a mechanism for the formation of new meanings.
2 As far as I remember, a common communication scheme was drawn from linguistics textbooks: two heads exchanging clouds
3 This refers to the Ph.D. thesis of E.V. Dushechkina done at the Department of Russian Literature of the University of Tartu under the guidance of distinguished professor D. C. Likhachev. The artistic function of the speech of another in the Kiev chronicle." The dissertation was defended in 1972, written in 1966-1969. As we see, this idea interested Yu. M. Lotman long before his interest in the mechanisms of the brain.
4 In the typescript: "'Apology of Thou' (question) Buber."
a model of the monologue as communication is put forward, and the image of culture and the type of personality and everything else are built accordingly; and in others, a model of dialogue is put forward.
So, without talking about different approaches to this, and different questions, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that dialogue—in the sense in which it is a dialogue, is almost always a conversation in different languages. But at the same time, oddly enough, this is a conversation in different languages with a presumption of interested mutual understanding and with a consistent orientation towards transmission and reception with interruptions.
Here, we have the question of pauses, and this is very important, at least for cultural researchers, because it brings us to another unexplained question. Starting with the creators of the philosophy of history, from Voltaire and his followers up to and including Hegel, we assume that history is a certain process of stages <drawing>, within which....or baroque, or something else, it is painted in some unified structural tones, then there is a breakdown....and some other < arises— S.Z.>. In fact, one has only to digress from this familiar model, since we can see that what we call a word is diffused over time. It does not coincide with different directions of human text formations; it sets out different overlapping sinusoids. For example, as a rule the development of a certain type of text formation in some types of activity does not coincide with the development of a similar type in other types of activity.
As a matter of fact, the mechanism works; not only the mechanism of unification, but also the mechanism of diversity inside it, which we can't always explain. And it is all the more inexplicable why at certain periods, say, culture identifies itself with cinema or with poetry, with the search for a homunculus or with alchemy, with the Crusades or something else. Such a self -building model chooses one trend and gives it the meaning of a general language. This question hangs in the air—why is this so. This, apparently, is due to the need for internal dialogues and the fact that these dialogues are accompanied by discrepancies and transitions to reception.
I will allow myself to refer to a very interesting work.... <blank; end of tape. Second side of the cassette>.... close to the old position of Rousseau.1 The position that there is a language, a special language of communication between an infant and its mother. And Rousseau, a man who does not require measurement of his genius, and in particular, his significance for semiotics, Rousseau here very presciently pointed out a very interesting thing, that by the way, Lusson (?)2does not take into account that, not only does the child switch to the language of the mother, but also the mother switches to the language of the child, that the child
1 Yu. M. Lotman highly appreciated Rousseau's ideas about the origin of language; see his review of them in (Lotman 1989).
2 There is probably an error in typing. In an article published a year later (1983, 20), Lotman cites John Newson's research from Dialogue and Development: Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language. Ed. by A. Lock, London-New-York-San-Francisco, 1978, pp. 32-40.
masters the systems presented to it in dialogue, Lusson (?) refers to very interesting works carried out in America—photographing the gestures of infants—which, in slow motion, turn out to be copies of the gestures of adults, which is not visible because of the speed of infant gestures and their immersion in chaotic, purely physiological movements; but at the same time, starting from four months, it already represents the acceptance of the mother's gestures. Moreover, he sees the matter as follows: any, as he believes, physiological activity of mammals is built like this <drawing on the board> with pauses, some peaks and pauses. This creates a material basis for the possibility, during this pause, to focus on the transmitting personality.
Here, so to speak, transmission takes place <drawing>, and here reception is possible. And this creates a mechanical basis for dialogue. Further, as he believes, the mother, talking with the child and all the time smiling and playing, and in every possible way contacting him <sic—S.Z.>,_offers him meanings for his movements. And he accepts this language and begins to use his movements as having meaning.
But Rousseau rightly pointed out that, in this case, the mother gives up verbal human language. The scheme of communication is set, there is already a presumption of language. Here, by the way, here is something.... something that.... what we once talked about with Boris Andreevich <Uspensky> in connection with the controversy at the fifth school around the problems of Freudianism, that very often in the act of social communication there is someone, a language-giver, say, an adult who brings a huge language apparatus to a child who does not even have a need for it yet, who receives the apparatus before he can use it 1.
This <occurs - S.Z.> in culture repeatedly. European culture received the antique apparatus about, well, 700 years before it could use this culture. Yes, probably, we still haven't used what we got somewhere, it's not clear from whom. But at least there is such a strong invasion, an invasion. And thus, such a strong dominant language is introduced with its own empty cells in concepts that are filled with something later, a ready-made scheme of communication.
But, apparently, in order for dialogue to take place /<drawing on the board> the opposite is also necessary, for example, the mother's refusal to communicate with the baby in verbal language and the transition to the language of exclamations. As Rousseau said, the language of gestures and smiles, which creates a generally different type of communication. Thus, we tend to diverge, and the mechanisms of dialogic connection, which are of exceptionally great importance, and in fact, each text is, I would say, a frozen dialogue, merely a grain that ought to sprout. As soon as it enters a communicative situation, it yields a dialogic structure.
From all that has been said, one more question, and I'm done. The question is related to this. Indeed, in the presence of bipolar, I repeat, it is not at all necessary that bipolar is minimal. I'm not talking about real physiology, but about an abstract possibility. And probably systems have.... i.e., in reality, they have in culture.... a tendency to rapidly increase, but most likely, according to a
1 This refers to the article (Lotman 1974).
binary principle.... they can probably be ultimately reduced to binary oppositions, although perhaps this is a matter of our description.... perhaps, I don't know. But here's what's important; in this system, as I have already said, in the very nature of dialogue, some hypothetical dominance is implied.
So, if <drawing> a personality is formed.... a cultural personality.... maybe this cultural personality is called—the Italian Renaissance—is made up of such a system, then it determines itself by this <drawing>, and this, <drawing> it kind of gets rid of, as far as it's concerned, although in a real mechanism it is still active. But this creates very great difficulties in research, especially for us, who work not on living experimental material, but on texts.
We receive texts passed through this prism and deformed in accordance with the language of one system. Therefore, it is very easy for us to assume that only this is real and exists. It is no coincidence that as soon as we take some kind of cultural material, we are immediately faced with the fact that a huge number of <texts—S.Z.> are, as it were, not considered a text. What is not translated into this language, canonical for a given era, system, culture, genre, personality—all the same—these are different steps—it is, as it were, discarded. Although in a real process, it works.
But here's what's even more difficult. When we, already armed with distrust of the picture that self-description gives us.... we get an era, a personality, not a personality of a patient, which you can work on.... but, well, let's say, the personality of a writer as a system of his self-assessments, as the system of his self-expression, as the sum of the texts he creates, which includes his model of himself. We no longer trust this, we know that this is only a deformed and shifted truth, or a part of the truth, and we need to penetrate here <drawing on the board> and here we find ourselves in a completely hopeless situation, from which I still see no way out. We do not have the apparatus for this. We can only describe this <drawing> in terms of this <drawing>, which inevitably leads to a re-transformation and a shift. So, when we say that one or another <system— S.Z. >, here we say that the alchemical system is irrational. What does it mean? This means that it is not described in terms of rational philosophy. But this does not mean that it is not described in its own terms. But we can describe it only by those means by which it is not described, and as a result we obtain the squaring of the circle.
And now, a huge class of non-discrete, or semantically smeared (or I don't know what word <to use > here, because we can hardly study this material), these texts escape our attention, and so far, we have no apparatus. Naturally, when we use methods that are acceptable for discrete texts, we get the fact that everything is systemic. And I think that one of the most important tasks, what science can be about now.... Maybe all of us present will somehow think about it—this is an apparatus for describing what can hypothetically be called the right hemisphere consciousness, or the consciousness of some semantic spots. And this is the question that, I think, should now be one of the most urgent for us.
Thank you for your attention.
Balonov - Yuri Mikhailovich, this is ... and the language of psychoanalysis?
Lotman - Hmm, the language of psychoanalysis? You see, I cannot consider myself an expert in this field. But I believe that this is an example of how the material that is presented to us as the most diffuse, in fact, is the product of superstructuring. Here, let me explain.. A broadly working cultural model consists of, so to speak, structures of the organized.... (drawing on the blackboard), well, organized means, where is our left?
Balonov - Well, come on, the one on the left.
Lotman - Well....so to speak, from space and chaos. What is considered primary? It is natural to assume that chaos is primary, and space is secondary. But in the realm of culture, this is not the case. Culture creates its own chaos. It needs a reserve because, as a dynamic system, it needs a reserve of dynamics. And how does cultural chaos arise, say, for Tacitus? These are the Germans. What are the Germans? This is the anti-Roman myth. Who the Romans are, he knows very well. He knows them both in their manifestations, so to speak, and in their text, and in their language. And he creates such a mirror opposite, which he calls primitive, disorganized and elemental.
Twentieth century.. Yes, it's like this all the time <drawing>, first they are Europeans, and then Asia or Africa, then we are on Earth <drawing on the board>, and this will be outside the Earth. Or we are in the area of consciousness, but there <drawing> will be the subconscious. We construct our....at least, I am deeply convinced that in the form of the subconscious, created by Freud, to a large extent—the construction of the twentieth century. Excuse me—this is very risky and, perhaps, just wildly sounding for psychiatrists.... but, you see, because you read texts, you see experimental material, and I read these texts—I see a coincidence with philosophers, poets and numerous trends in culture that amount to the same thing. I'm not convinced that everything here is from experimental, scientific penetration into the right hemisphere, and not much of a culture's myth of non-culture. Let me make such an almost roguish statement.
Zolyan - Isn't the notion of non-discrete languages somehow a negative projection of what we know about semiotics.... just as Tacitus projected onto the Germans what he knew about the Romans....
Lotman - No, I would not like to agree with this; I think that perhaps this is an attempt to construct a semiotics of a contrasting type, which.well, for example.... Let me give you a small example: in connection with the first talk today, a very interesting question arises about the nature of such things as rhythm.
And in this regard, there are some things here that directly echo the material of the first talk, I will allow myself to give a very interesting example, with Tyutchev. Tyutchev was a poet and wit, a well-known wit. His wit was according to the principle of French wit, consisting in finding a play on words and concepts. At the same time, he was a poet and mastered metric systems, although he did not master them immediately, but with great difficulty; this can be seen from his children's poems. And in the course of his poetic activity, he allowed strange violations, about which we still cannot say whether they are arbitrary or involuntary. But when he had a paralysis, which was right-sided, since he did not lose his speech, he did not lose the ability to be interested in politics—his last 20
words were a question—after taking Holy Communion—a question about the success of the expedition in Khiva. He retained the ability to joke, but completely lost his sense of meter, and his poems show that he did not hear the meter, which is non-trivial, because, say, the crazy Batyushkov lost everything except the sense of meter....; Well, for Tyutchev, this directly repulsed him along with his right hemisphere, which in itself leads to some conclusions so simple that they cannot be commented on.
But what is interesting is that this variety of elementary cuts <drawing on the board> apparently do not always play the role of segments, and do not always generate discreteness, and sometimes, oddly enough, generate the opposite, generate some idea of the isomorphism <drawing> and the sameness of these pieces. This is how, let's say, in archaic thinking, the notion that every day, noon, morning, evening, midnight, week, month, year, life, century is one and the same. They are, so to speak, completely isomorphic, and precisely because they are divided, time is divided not according to meaning, not according to such syntactic formations, but according to an automatically working counter, such a metronome forms its syntagmatics according to the phrase system, but according to....<inaudible> , with the full conviction that the year and the day are one and the same, and this is reflected in all languages in such metaphors as "the morning of days," "my stormy days at a cloudy sunset."
We do not even bother explaining these metaphors, it is so natural for us to assume that an hour, a day, a year, a life.... we also say, "the evening of the world" or "the twilight of the gods," and it is natural for us to consider that these are one and the same. Thus, such discreteness gives rise not to articulation at all, but to isomorphism. I think that it is completely wrong, it would be naive to assume that scientific thinking is possible only here <drawing> like if linear constructions push to cause - and - effect: before - after, then such constructions <drawing> pull towards the equally important scientific idea of isomorphism, which in the history of science is by no means a lesser engine. But meanwhile, in fact, between the ideas of isomorphism and the ideas of cause and effect there is a certain profound semiotic difference. I think that just as it is possible to construct a science-mythology, like ancient thinkers did, which is by no means less a science than post-Cartesian science, so it is possible to construct such a science.
Deglin. -_The isomorphism of the brain and science, this does not apply, or the isomorphism of the brain and culture as a whole, this does not apply to this mode of thinking, Yuri Mikhailovich?
Lotman: Here I can only.... you see, here we are entering such an area.... Naturally, with each construction of some scientific theory, the question always arises to what extent it belongs to the metalanguage of the creator. One can only say that as long as I believe in this, then what I say. I can't say anything else right now1.
Translated by Jason van Boom and Elizaveta Podkamennaya.
1 Because of the importance of this idea. we note that, in our opinion, Yu. M. Lotman very soon gives a positive answer to the question of V. L. Deglin about the isomorphism of the brain
References
1. Lotman Yu. M. 1974. "On the Reduction and Deployment of Sign Systems (On the Problem of 'Freudian-Ism and Semiotic Cultural Studies.')." In Materials of the 1st All-Union, (5) Symposium. On Secondary Modeling Systems, 100-108. Tartu.
2. Lotman Yu. M. 1977. Culture as Collective Intelligence and the Problem of Artificial Intelligence. Moscow: Scientific Council on complex problems. "Cybernetics." Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Preprint
3. Lotman Yu. M. 1981. "Brain—Text—Culture—Artificial Intelligence." Semiotics and Informatics 17: 13-17.
4. Lotman Yu. M. 1982. "From the Editor." Sign Systems Studies: Typology of Culture, Interplay of Cultures, Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis 576, 15: 5-11.
5. Lotman Yu. M. 1984. "On the Semiosphere." Sign Systems Studies: Structure of Dialogue as the Working Principle of the Semiotic Mechanism, Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis 641, 17: 5-23.
6. Lotman Yu. M. 1989. "Word and Language in the Culture of the Enlightenment." In Age of Enlightenment: Russia and France, edited by I.E. Danilova, 6-18. Moscow: A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.
and culture, highlighting precisely the isomorphism of information processing mechanisms: "We can distinguish at least three classes of intellectual objects: the natural consciousness of a person (a separate human unit), the text (in the second sense), and culture as a collective intelligence. Structural and functional similarity can be established between all these objects. Structurally, all of them will be characterized by semiotic heterogeneity. The right and left hemispheres of the human brain, multilingual subtexts of the text, the fundamental polyglotism of culture (with bilingualism is the minimum model) form a single invariant model: an intellectual device consists of two (or more) integrated structures that model the outside reality in a fundamentally different way.. ..But precisely because these images are not rationally translatable and their integration requires effort, they represent an important stage on the way to the emergence of the asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres. The structure of other systems of sense formation is similar. The invariant of all these systems will be a bipolar structure, on one pole of which a generator of non-discrete texts is placed, and on the other pole of discrete ones. At the exit of the system, these texts are mixed, forming a single multi-layered text with diverse internal interweaving of mutually non-translatable codes. Passing any text through this system, we get an avalanche-like self-expansion of meanings. If we connect to such a device a block of new messages, which, in accordance with some rules, will be recognized as 'appropriate,' and 'a storage device designed to store such messages, we will get an invariant frame'" (Lotman 1981c, 16). Something else seems incomprehensible. Lotman came up with the idea of isomorphism between the brain and culture as early as 1977, directly pointing to a popular science article by Deglin: "We observe a striking isomorphism between culture, the mechanism of collective consciousness, and individual consciousness. We mean the fact of the fundamental asymmetry of the human brain—semiotic specification in the work of the left and right hemispheres," and the sources are gilven in the footnote: "Deglin V. 'Functional asymmetry is a unique feature of the human brain.' Science and Life. 1975, no. 1; Ivanov Vyach. V. 'On the prehistory of sign systems.' Proceedings of the All-Union Symposium on Secondary Modeling Systems. 1:5. Tartu, 1975; Ibid. Essays on the history of semiotics in the USSR. M., 1976. pp. 2223; Milner P. Physiological psychology. Moscow, 1973; Jackson N. 'On the nature of the duality of the brain,' Selected Writings, Vol. II, London, 1932," (Lotman 1977), cit. by (Lotman 2000). Probably, both Deglin 's question and Lotman's evasive answer are due to the fact that both of them considered the problem not clarified enough to bring up for public discussion. 22
7. Lotman Yu. M. 1990. "Three Functions of the Text." In Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, translated by A. Shukman, 11-19. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
8. Lotman Yu. M. 1999. "Three Functions of the Text." In Inside Thinking Worlds: Man-Text-Semiosphere-History, 11-22. Moscow: Languages of Russian Culture.
9. Lotman Yu. M. 2000. Semiosphere. Culture and Explosion. Inside Thinking Worlds. Articles. Research. Notes. Edited by Yu. M. Lotman. Saint Petersburg: Art-SPB.
10. Lotman Yu. M. 1983a. "Asymmetry and Dialogue." Sign Systems Studies: Text and Culture, Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis 635, 16: 15-30.
11. Lotman Yu. M. 1981a. "Semiotics of Culture and the Concept of Text." Sign Systems Studies: Structure and Semiotics of the Artistic Text, Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis 515, 12: 3-7.
12. Lotman Yu. M. 1981b. "Rhetoric." Sign Systems Studies: Structure and Semiotics of the Artistic Text, Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis 515, 12: 8-28.
13. Salupere S. 2017. On Yuri Lotman's Metalanguage: Problems, Context, Sources. University of Tartu Press.
14. Zoylan S. T. 1981. "The Semantic Structure of the Word in Poetic Speech." Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Literature and Language Series, 40 (6): 509-20.
