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1DOI: 10.31249/metodquarterly/02.01.08
The Fifth Centenary Debate of February 28th.
For citation: The Fifth Centenary Debate of February 28th. (2022). METHOD: Moscow Quarterly Journal of Social Studies, 2(1), P. 105-122. http://www.doi.org/10.31249/ metodquarterly/02.01.08
Mikhail Ilyin: Today we do not only have this difficult tragic problem which is also a problem of languaging which cannot be language in the most adequate forms, and probably this is a case for us to consider how to do languaging in the moment of crisis.
Sergey Chebanov: We must remember the moment of activity we get from defence of culture and language situation Ukraine, i.e. a semiotic situation. There is a technique of performative.
Mikhail: Yes, performative action and utterances are okay. Anyway, juts to move on and I think we have a great day ahead of us today counter to the centenary. The very day of Juri Lotman's birthday and its very symbolic that as friends are meeting Suren Zolyan is not with us and Kalevi Kull who wasn't able to join us. They are in Tartu at the cemetery and paying tribute to Yuri Lotman so I think we can also do the same and the best way to pay tribute to Lotman is to practice in a constructive languaging helping all of us to not only overcome the current crisis but also to work on effective ways to overcome other crisis and everyday situations.
I am particularly happy that Stephen Cowley is with us, he joined our debate and must leave very soon. So, Stephen if you would like to say a few words you are welcome and would very much like to hear your contributions. But if you do not feel like speaking right now it's okay with us, since we are a very informal circle.
Stephen Cowley: That is very kind of you, but I think what I would like to do is speak in half an hour when I have more of a sense of the languaging which is been going on and where I might be able to contributes with. After what you said, it is a constructive process and I can contribute to the constructing rather than just saying something which is what I would have to do now. So please call me back a little bit later
Mikhail: Okay, then I think Gabriela wants to say something. Do I interpret that your finger is raised? 82
Bob Hodge (on the screen Gabriella Coronado): [Laughter] That is right. I was just saying that the conjunction of the themes of war and semiosphere seems to be a huge opportunity for us to try to draw together different threads about Lotman and do it in Russia is something which I think is a distinctive challenge to his theory of semiosphere. War is a kind of archetype principle of distraction; how do systems of meaning are impacted by violence inside and outside meaning.
It's hard to say but because when you look back at the condition for semiotic production for Lotman and for Soviet semiotics. It was under a continues stage of war and so how do you understand the different kinds of stages of war and the conditions for Lotman's semiotics and the conditions for [AL') which just seems to me to be fruitful question. The two things the conjunction Lotman's centenary and this terrible event we can bring on board.
Mikahil: Further comments? Probably we can continue the debate on what we discussed. Okay, Paul wants to say something. Please go ahead.
Paul Chilton: I am not in any way an expert of Lotman as I said earlier, I am afraid. But I am involved in analysis of what you are calling languaging and more like pragmatics and discourse analysis. I think it is worth bearing in mind that Russian military doctrines from what I hear of it includes communication and regards military actions on the grounds continues with preparatory phase of propaganda, manipulation of information. And scholars of language and languaging have a key role to play here.
Mikhail: Okay, thanks. I must confess, guys, that it is interesting. Myself and Valery we were students in Moscow State studying philology in the 60s. Actually, we had a military training, and our specialisation was called special propaganda. We were supposed to do this in Soviet Army. Lucky enough we were never enlisted in the army but we were taught special propaganda techniques. In other words, we had some inside experience of what Paul had mentioned about the link between the would-be military activities and certain communication efforts. I was not very happy about it but you had to live with it, rules of the game.
Sergey was to contribute, please go ahead.
Sergey: I think we have a situation of very slow connection between Lotman at the current moment. First - Lotman took part in liberation of Donbass and Crimea in 1943 and second - a fundamental feature of Russian culture is polarity, which predetermines the fact that explosions occur in it from time to time. Such an explosion has taken place now.
Mikhail: Right, Lotman's interpretation of this notion of explosion implies the fundamental crisis and that is what happens. So, culture and explosion are the tittle of his masterpiece book and we just started to discuss it. But interesting is that culture and explosion Lotman interpretation is not some antagonistic nature because culture cannot exist without crisis of some kind. You must control crisis and explosion unfortunately. And that is the most tragic thing, we cannot control the war as a political scientist since that is my official degree and the morphology of politics. And the morphology of politics.
Evolution morphology of politics implies that violence is getting gradually controlled and war and different types of warfare are forms of control.
Unfortunately, in the missile of the last century this became paradoxical and more advanced forms of warfare has become uncontrollable. Kind of a paradox and the general logic is that there are more rules, more limitations, and restrictions and they are all semiotically mediated and that is where we can contribute in a way. To put into actions some of the existing... but the cultural and explosion is one of the key points.
We started the first debate discussing this book and during the debate we returned repeatedly to the seminar of 1981, I forwarded it to you this morning but it's in Russian. We have discussed the option of translating it into English, but it seems at this time we do not have the resources to do so.
Another topic discussed at the seminar was dialogue and the interaction of hemispheres of our brain, two aspects of our minds semiotic entities related to our brain. Sergey and other colleagues were very productive in interpreting types of dialogue that are ongoing. Sergey introduced the notion of enlogue as something. probably he can explain it better than I can. But I understood it as an enlogue of different parts of your mind with total entities that you as a subject act as a mediator and independent communication with each part of your psyche. Probably I may have misinterpreted it, Sergey what will you say?
Sergey: Enlogue is a special inter-relation between two entities, events, or organisms or one of them. In such an interrelation, there is a projecting of the organization of one being onto another. Various types of such inter-relation (enlogues) can be discussed, ranging from different kinds of mechanical interrelation, various kinds of electrodynamic inter-relation, etc., further, of course, biological interrelation and cultural interrelation as there are many interrelations without semiotic means and language in full sense and interrelations using signs and language, i.e., interactions both below and above the semiotic threshold. I prefer to discuss enlogs rather than dialogues in recent events that are important to you.
Mikhail: I hope you can do this, and we can circulate it anyway, I promised to circulate some things on languaging and failed to do so because of the same reasons but I hope to catch up during this week and circulate it as well. Let us turn to Stephen then. Please go ahead.
Stephen: I thought it might be a suitable time to say something before things get too complicated for me to talk. It is fascinating to crash into languaging like this and to wonder how to orient oneself as a shaper of a semiosphere which you already know your way around. It strikes me that perhaps it's quite useful to use Paul as my counterpoint here. Paul said that he thought languaging was somehow the same as pragmatics or discourse analysis. I would like to just take you through some of the ways I would like to dispute that claim. I think that pragmatics, discourse analysis and indeed much of semiotics are primarily concerned with interpretation. Of course, it would be crazy to throw that away. But the shift to languaging and the return of languaging has a great deal to do with construction and often this confused with interpretation. In a sense, interpretation is the opposite of construction. 84
It struck me as Sergey was speaking -which is really why I put up my hand at that moment - is although I do not know his concept of enlogue or Lotman's concept of explosion, what goes on is often the focus of semiotics and not this notion of how an explosion happens, how something comes to be done or perhaps comes to be said or interpreted. And of course, the emphasis usually falls on what comes to be interpreted. But what comes to be done is every bit as important as what comes to be interpreted. Why am I saying this now? You don't know and I do not know either. Rather, it is part of trying to enter this web. So, we shift the emphasis from interpretation to construction and to production or how actors perform in the semiosphere. We perform not just as producers but as produced and as being produced: we are constructivists (when we turn to languaging).
So how do we tie this to the tradition on languaging? I suppose why I was invited to join this group is that I have done some systematic reviewing of the literature on languaging. It is rarely appreciated but this is a traditional English term that I have traced back to the 16th century. And I have no doubt it goes further than that; it has reappeared dozens of times over the centuries and it always has to do with marginal things and people. Typically, it is opposed to writing and grammar and 'correct' speech and other varieties. Bad poetry for instance or the languaging of children or how we chisel ideas as we speak —not how we speak finely and that sort of popular linguistic concerns.
In the 20th century in philosophy, it comes from two major developments. One was due to the great America philosopher Wilfred Sellers who was concerned to naturalise Kant. That may sound outrageous to you but that was what he tried to do. So he turned to something that sounds very much like Sergey's enlogues; he turned to the languagings we produced. Languagings are individual explosions which may give rise to thoughts, sayings or may simply be implicit in doings. These are overt and covert languagings. Sellers builds on Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning by denying that pictures are about facts. Rather, we draw on the place we find ourselves and set up isomorphisms that we place in our languagings.
So, what I am doing, in Sellers terms, is drawing on my first 15 minutes of you to shape my languaging in relation to this place. And this is a fundamentally constructive process of because I find myself saying things I had not thought before and I find myself producing myself in ways I have not done before. And I think this is an extremely important idea. It connects with Michael Halliday's idea of languaging as being based on semogenesis. He was a Marxist and was struggling to come to terms with how ideology could be challenged and get started without making appeal to vulgar Marxism and top-down processes.
As my old friend Valery well knows the second major source is Maturana. It comes from a different tradition and Maturana had not read anything of what I am talking about at the moment. Very few people have put these sources together. By the concerns link with semiotics and by Lotman of course in that they unify the cultural and biological and, at the same time, understanding how humans differ from other animals (with the emphasis on animals). He didn't think that we weren't animals but rather, was determined to seek what made us
different. Maturana is a radical constructivist (perhaps not radical enough), but that gave him a rather subjective focus of languaging, where we can construct ourselves through our languaging. While occurring in a wider semiosphere, he saw that as being something we do as individuals who language with each other in a 'consensual domain'. So, he has an over-constructivist view which I think can be critiqued: his view of interpretation becomes, on the one hand, very conventional -one can interpret as others interpret as we strive to understand each other to the best of our abilities. On the other, he also has a subjective notion of languaging which this little community is not terribly sympathetic as in Russian theory and semiotics generally.
Don't forget that we in the west have always been cursed by this computation of the mind and the notion that representation is somehow in the head. So, it is very difficult for westerners to get their heads around an idea that constructing a world is something we can do so. Or that we are constructing a world within which that constructing occurs. That is an idea which fits much more closely with languaging as I understand it.
And Russian thinking generally or usually what westerners attribute to people like Vygotsky. I am not challenging Paul views that this is a bit like pragmatics and discourse analysis. I remember very well when Steve Levinson's book on pragmatics came out. People like myself thought it was the best thing we had ever read in linguistics because it seems so new and finally had broken with a straitjacket of ultimately Chomskyan linguistics. I think this return of languaging is another significant move that it takes us far beyond linguistics and explores, not just the interpretive, but also the constructive. It fuses the biological with the cultural in stressing doing things, not saying things, not science. My own contribution is to argue strongly that biosemiotics needs biomechanism and simplex systems -not to define itself as speaking against mechanism. We need to understand that mechanistic and semiotic co-function and the constructive (or explosive) depends on both. But that is going beyond languaging into how I see the connection between languaging and semiotics.
I know that was an awful lot and said very quickly. I suddenly remembered it was being recorded and I am very curious to know what I actually said. But I want to place a weight on constructive explosions and say that languaging asks us to investigate those are and of course what we do to ourselves. But also, how we do it in this public space with and through and for other people. The emplacement, I think, is very interesting
Mikhail: Thank you Stephen, but just one question I recognize, and I believe everybody will recognize that you cannot reduce languaging to pragmatics, but don't you think that even your image of finding your place implies that wat you start with as a point of departure is a certain action, a certain orientation that far has these pragmatic qualities. You are finding not only the place, but you also find what you are doing there and with whom you are doing this not necessarily articulating this vocally. You could just smile, or you could just share a meal or do anything and that is how it begins coming to interpretation. It comes in very intricate and syntactic constructions morphology and everything else. 86
At a point of departure, you start with opening the door and of course it's an image of course and not only opening doors of course it is an imagery. But you are doing something, and this act is the starting point.
Stephen: One could argue, one could play some word games but emplacement is fundamental to languaging. And emplacement includes us, of course, when I just don't smile but also when I use the air which I breath. Then one can say that is the start; but there isn't really a start we are all caught up in languaging. This is one of the greatest strengths of Maturana's vision of languaging, we find ourselves in it and we become ourselves through it. Any starting point is arbitrary. But what is seriously missing in all views which begin with the verbal is a focus on the emplaced. And I didn't contrive this; rather, I chose not to speak until I had something of the sense of the place where I am. And of course, it is ironic that the place is a virtual place; but it is also real, the sun shining in Denmark on a dreadful day. At least we can escape from a dreadful day and share in creating the new which is always interesting or what we live for I suppose. So, I don't disagree with you Mikhail, I think it depends on what we want to analyse as to what we take the starting point to be since we are always in the middle of things
Mikhail: A very good point, excellent, so we must do just like the four courses of Aristotle, we must take all the four and you cannot stop with one. Anybody would like to comment? Okay Sergey, then Gabriela.
Sergey: I think we now have an interesting situation of illocutionary suicide and semiotics do not describe what will be after iniquitive (iniquitous?) situation but now we have such situations and we see the details of what can happen in such a situation. This is a problem for deep understanding, what happens after committing illocutionary suicide in the referential world.
Mikhail: Okay, thank you, Bob please continue.
Bob: Thank you for a delightful and seductive talk Stephen, I loved what you were doing with discourse, namely creating a kind of code politeness that most people have full of deep respect which is the kind of thing that makes a group like this work well. I just want to obey a demon within me which says sorry Steve we need the explosions we need a space in the theory for explosion which are going to be two strong for politeness to contain them. Theories if I could refer to Misha's very interesting and seductive ideas of things getting better and better.
I read the research on violence which says that we are getting more and more peace loving and people invoked that theory in response to Putin that says that Putin is just a deliberation and have failed to realise that we know have laws in place that outlaws the kind of behaviour he's engaged in so he's a dinosaur and he's going to be struck by some command and disappear from the face of the earth, I just like the theory and I wouldn't disagree with it. It's beautiful and encompassing, I agree with you, everyone agrees with you. It's a kind of theory in discourse which brings us together and that is just fantastically important; humans coming together can do so much more than people of war.
However, back with the provocation I stand with, war and the semiosphere views Lotman's term explosion and culture. So, if we shift to the way he
phrased it he brings explosion to bear with most other theories. I t could be said to [inaudible] those real explosions do not happen as are semiotics, as are the semiospheres. We need to create a space in which we recognize and confront the ever-present trait of real material of semio-violence disruption which is not just sanitize creatives which is often. But let's see it as a provocation, unassimilated explosions what do we do with them? And this is a very real question because the anthem going on with the world, had we rethought semioticians I admired like Lotman and your theory Stephen.
Stephen: My 'theory' is just a brief sketch of how I understand some of the literature. Personally, I think there is a problem with the word 'constructive', its conventionally use. Of course, you might want to ties it to Piaget or someone like that and it is often bound up with the construction of the individual. Perhaps it is better to think of the individuation of the person or the construction of the individual, I think many of you might agree. I think the important point of explosions (plural) and not being polite is exactly the space where it gets difficult to take a fully interpretive view. That is what biology does and what all living systems do from the start is that they try to reduce entropy. They must find ways of simplexifying or in other terms; grasping what the world is. That of course is true for processes within the cell or indeed an explosion like having a thought or even realising that the thought is somehow implicit in how one has moved one's finger. What one uneasy about is - so I think that you need to acknowledge this -is that fundamentally this (semogenesis) is a chaotic process. It is one to which we as artificial actors in artificial systems can bring partial ways of controlling the explosive nature of the events which are occurring. We must rely on them but if we do not do that in constructive way as individuals, as implied by some of the language traditionally used about this, whether one can take this as a source of parable like the situation in Ukraine. I don't think I really want to go there because I don't think there is anything, we can do about that situation here and now. I think we can do something when we close our computers and get on with our lives. But it is an inviting comparison I agree.
Mikhail: Thank you. I think now it is the turn of Paul. I hope you are provoked by Bob and Stephen on something you would like to comment. So, Paul, it's your turn now.
Paul: As I mentioned earlier, I am very much a novice in this domain and approach to language, but I am learning as I am listening so thank you to Stephen and Bob and you too Misha. Can you all hear me? Good. I just like to respond very briefly as I am going to have to leave the meeting shortly. To Stephen's point and to a point Misha made, I think the connection to Lotman to do with the brain and the two hemispheres and replying briefly to Stephen. Thank you for your contribution from which I learnt a great deal. I think regarding pragmatics I do not agree with your description of the way pragmatics fuses language. I think primarily interpretive and not very much concerned with languages action and we see this from the early language philosophers and classic workers, so it has to do with speech acts and speech actions. 88
The tradition of discourse analysis which Misha and I have been involved in from years ago has very much to do with constructions in the sense of constructing perspectives and representation of the world the construction of ideologies. So, I think its common ground here and potentially common ground between different strands of thinking and thinking into different language.
And will like to mention cognitive linguistic which is also another paradigm which I work myself. Which is very much concerned with the way language meaning and action is rooted in orderly experience and from another perspective there is now plenty of research which shows the connection between mental systems and motor systems and language systems in the brain. This brings me to the point Misha made when he was talking about the two hemispheres, and I am afraid my background in Lotman how that is very limited by I just wanted to mention that there is now very interesting but specific research into the way that language works in the brain. The two hemispheres are crucial, and they have different characteristics as we know and there is an interesting piece of research from the linguistic angle is a piece of research that has been dome recently into the direct effect of vocabulary lexical items on specific region of the amygdala bilaterally their mental concept with emotions. Particularly emotions such as fear and anger.
And what the empirical research show, and they did this with MRI scans so you can see the neural areas in the brain lighting up in response to words associated with threat. So, you get a direct response, and you can see it graphically in the use of language and directive act on the brain as well as on behaviour.
I think we can already observe this in the language coming from Putin and Kremlin and other similar authoritarian populist leaders; one of the first things they do is stimulate fear response by using threats. As discourse analysts we can analyse the linguistic output in term of the potential effect it has on subject receiving it. What I think I am being to understand about Lotman and languaging philosophy that surrounds it relates the linguistic side of human behaviour and the social side of the cognitive. This gives us tools for analysing actively what is going on around us when we leave in such a dangerous world of dictators and demigods.
Stephen: Let me try to formulate a brief response; and let me be myself this time and talk about my own position. I have identified myself as a radical ecolinguist and so I will take a radical ecolinguistic position. Paul is completely right that pragmatics is about language in action and discourse is about representation and interacting. So, let's take that slowly. If we construct a representation, we do that, in the end, because of interacting or because of the exploding we do before it. Well, a radically ecolinguist will say we do it because of the exploding. Is the interaction a result of the explosion too? Well it can be? In any case, it does not determine either the exploding or the results: Rather, it's a post hoc analysis. So the radical linguist will play down interaction. Is it action in language? Or language in action? Well, I will want to argue that it is action in language, not language in action; hence, there is the break with pragmatics again.
So, what is radical ecolinguistics? It is also coming from cognitive science in many respects it is often described as a strong view on embodiment where we reject all forms of representationalism. We reject the idea that content in the brain can play a causal role; so, we deny that the brain can represent content (as people often say) 'offline'; rather, we bring forth content in the place of action -- we bring it forth through the action which takes place.
So what Paul is right the importance of the amygdala and indeed most parts of the brain coming to play as we language. But it's even more important that Lakoff and Johnston are fundamentally mistaken when they assume that the body somehow forms the basis for conceptual metaphor and that language is metaphorical. Indeed, they are borrowing ironically un-generative semantics which builds on generative syntax and the view that the brain somehow enables linguistic actions -- as opposed to how the brain evolves as part of how nature reduces entropy and enables action and interpretation.
So, our much better target would be not where, for convenience, I started; it would be cognitive linguistics and its focus on representations or its rootedness in computational metaphor. This woke up my interest in biosemiotics in the first place because although biosemiotics has a lot of subjectivisms in it, mainly because of American and Peircean influence, semiotics was the first distributive theory of mind. Of course, I am speaking for a radical embodied and distributed mind. There's a lot more to say. I am sorry I cannot stay, but I have to take my leave in the next 5 minutes to prepare some lecture notes.
Mikhail: I shall write to you since I have been provoked by your submissions to particularly about this action in language which is a very good idea. Ludmilla, please take the floor. Unfortunately, Maria had to leave us. And now Stephen is leaving too. Please, those who are really under pressure please speak first.
Ludmila: Thank you, I am not under pressure, but I wanted to use the opportunity to speak before Professor Cowley leaves us so thank you very much for giving me the chance to speak. I want to react to Professor Cowley trying to differentiate languaging from pragmatics or from discourse analysis and I think it is crucial for this group and I started going in this direction last week to define how languaging is different from languaging and classical linguistics or discourse analysis.
And I agree with some of you here, that it's not so much about constructing and interpreting because the very first pragmatisian such as Wittgenstein, Searle or Austin who have theories about construction, but it is more about today's pragmatics and how it developed into another field and to my understanding its closer to analytic philosophy. Or they try to use language tools to make language interpretable in the view of prepositional logic for instance. So, I think this is one of the major differences between languaging and pragmatics or discourse analysis.
I also spoke about the whole conversation about the brain and bio-linguistics, or cognitive linguistics field and I agree with all of this and in my view, language is more about synthetics rather than the analytical approach and we do not try to analyse language and de-construct it into smaller pieces but rather to bring it together and make synechism in [inaudible] viewpoint. 90
I was so happy when Professor Cowley mentioned biosemiotics because I also think it can be a good adapter for spreading this idea of languaging and to connect languaging to biological but not from Chomsky's biolinguistics but from another perspective which seems more promising. I take this opportunity to remind you of the deadline for biosemiotics today, but the deadline will be extended so we are still waiting for your submissions for the June conference, and I will put the email in the chat where you can send your abstracts.
Mikhail: Thank you very much indeed. I intended to mention it too, In Palacky University this summer they are having two big events and one is the congress on biosemiotics and another is a big conference on code-biology and this code biology is also interesting and quite semiotical because of codes. It was initiated by Marcello Barbieri, who introduced this whole direction. An interesting thing about this approach. On the one hand Marcello and his colleagues seem to be reductive and define a simplified way of codes, but the trick is they insist that different codes are being operated simultaneously. So, they are simple and reduced but they are numerous even biologically. Usually when we mention codes, we things genetical codes are prototypes but that's not all as there are about 3 or 4 dozen codes working in our bodies simultaneously. And besides our bodies there are semiotic codes which are also equally numerous and from this point of view there are not just pragmatic codes but also syntactic codes. This conflicting plurality of codes creates explosion.
Stephen: I can't resist coming in again, I know Marcello very well and I have no doubt he is very right about organic coding being the best possible model in thinking about living systems and how they emerge. But Marcello is completely wrong about language and the brain. I recently edited a special issue of an Italian journal on biosemiotics and languaging and I can share the link with you. One of the authors in there says that Marcello is really going back to Locke with his view of language as something represented, coded, and spread between people. There is a great deal to be said here because Marcello's version of constructivism is not based on codes; it is unfortunate that he highlights the code word. It is based on adaptor systems, and in evolution, they depend on the RNA. This changes faster than the genetic material which is largely frozen. So biological systems have built-in scales of multiscalarity which enables code-makers to construct codes. And I think that is important because it links with biosemiotics, especially American biosemiotics or Peircian biosemiotics, by allowing absolute novelties and non-linear changes. These cannot be described in terms of the interpretation of ontologies of sign systems. So, one must reject semiotic ontology at least. Interestingly in the special issue 6 of the 9 authors all explicitly write against a semiotic ontology; yet all of us are sympathetic to the use of semiotics as a way of exploring nature of nature.
But I must go now, but I so much liked Ludmilla's point the aesthetic coming back to the fore. I think this is crucial and I do not know how we are going to make more of this again. It is something that has been massively played down in western European conditions. Croce, the Italian philosopher, is strong in semiotic traditions of course and my good friend Paul Cobley and I love to
fight and agree to disagree. But we agree so strongly about the importance of an actional ethic and also on bringing aesthetic to the fore. This is something that has not been done although the special issue has an interesting article on languaging and the aesthetic by an Italian woman (Camilla Robuschi) and this is something we need to pursue in detail.
And what is right in appealing to an aesthetic is that it is associated with being in the world and becoming in the world; that just sounds just like semiotics to me and that will have to be my last words for the day. Forgive me for having said so much and I wish you well and I will go and do what I am supposed to be doing which is preparing lectures and I do hope we have future contacts.
Mikhail: For sure, good luck! Goodbye. Who would like to take the floor? Probably Valery, Ivan, or Laura?
Ivan Fomin: As I can see it think Bob raised his hand? To comment on mostly about what we were discussing the last time and we ended with a contrast difference between semiosis semiocizing and languaging, so it does makes sense to differentiate between the two. I guess that if you really push and stretch that of these concepts, they do complement each other. But if we can productively use this difference, I guess we can keep semiosis to this very broad concept because if we push semiosis to meta[inaudible] area. I strongly agree with [inaudible name] with indexes we end up with difference between semiosis and languaging and the difference is an inter-subjective aspect of languaging that does not need to exist in semiotics.
Probably this is something that has to do with construction, maybe not all construction but social construction so if we interpret construction according to Lotman how science systems are used intersubjectively. Even though it is about semiotics strictly speaking it is about languaging. If we try to summarize the difference between semiosis and languaging, we will realise that is a prototypical of the world because one is doing and the other like we do. Languaging is something going on between people with some degree of shared habits and shared science systems.
The recent events provoked me to comment on this; war can be seen as a way of sending messages there are multiple agents trying to interact in some way, but they are not doing languaging at that moment even though they are exchanging some signals and semiosis is still ongoing but languaging not so much. To an extent there are still habits and events going on, but it is very rudimentary.
This also brings me back to a conversation I had with Bob when I asked if there are any semiosis which is social, and I realised that we can also distinguish semiosis in general from social semiosis. Which can be reduced to lexical, physio-semiosis and interaction or cannot be reduced and has to have habitual scaffolds. Okay that was what I wanted to add.
Mikhail: Okay thanks, Valery, Laura?
Bob: Misha, I had my hand up. I only insist Misha because if we do not take science seriously who in the world will, so I rebuke you as a defective semiotician. That was just a joke. I have been an enthusiastic part of the discussion and constantly referring to Lotman and asking myself how, why Lotman is important. 92
It is productive for us to continue to ask this question because as we ask there us an inevitable process where he will become more and more important. So, I wanted to crystalize for myself and perhaps for everyone why and unless different people contribute it seem to me that the newcomers Paul and Stephen inevitably did not know our other conversations or Lotman himself and the effect of that for me was dispersing, an unproductive dispersion. What was created was an object that was not connected for very good reasons was not connected with the growing, accreting, and richer objects, complex meanings, and relevance of Lotman. I thought that those two people could have come in and said more interesting things between them than the rest of us have laboured for over time and it this raise acutely the question what are doing this kind of exercise for? It seems to me that if we focus on a movement waiver it becomes a case that we are left with index distinctions for instance pragmatics first discourse analysis vs semiotics. That kind of thing which is natural to us as academics however dissipates. It does not leave a simple complex productive object growing before us. I just felt like whatever good will or personal experiences and so on we need to keep our focus on Lotman and ask how we keep our focus on Lotman, which is not hierographic or any other, but it is productive.
In the discussion of Lotman, I felt that we need to clear the noise on the issue of the opposition between explosion and culture. How are these two concepts simulated and how are they unassimilated. There is no single answer as a complex field of though generated by this constant probing of what is this explosion for Lotman and what he does not include. What could we include in explosions for instance which will productively get a more interesting concept in its place? I keep on being mindful of another reason that poses to why we want to do this which is we are surrounded by a world that needs better theories of some kind to help us understand [inaudible] and at very basic level what issues become salient for us that unifies many of us with Lotman. Yes, call to arms but Lotman is not the focus, and he is still an account to be settled. I think the things that go around as we settle the account of Lotman is what gives a general value to liberation of this group and to myself and to all of us. Thank you.
Mikhail: Thank you Bob. Well, I am sorry to say but Laura had to leave us so Valery the floor is yours. It seems your mike is not working and there is some problem with connection It seems that there some technical difficulties. Valery is trying to get in touch with us again
Valery Demyankov: Now can you hear me? I had to reconnect. Well, I have not prepared anything special for this day, but I have been impressed by the paper distributed by Suren, a paper by Lotman on the interconnections between text and language. The main idea that strikes me very important is why say anything if it is already included in the system, why do we ever talk about it. So, this makes me prone to be silent anytime I think if it's worthwhile saying or not, deciding, to say or not to say. Why do we say anything if it is trivial? From the point of view of informaticians this idea is clear but it raises a greater question which makes us silent. Lotman's solution is a sort of a "catastrophe theory", that is, anytime we speak we give up the older version of the system and we impose
on our audience a different type of a system of views. Thus, languaging looks like a by-product of the newer version of the system.
There may be different solutions to this paradox, for instance, why not question the notion or the concept of system as a basis of our languaging. Why not think that language is not a system at all? Scholarly studies show that this hypothesis is very feasible when we observe how the language use and language system evolve, changing from time to time from input to input and from location to location. We must conclude that there is a grain of truth in it although no doubt that there are other solutions to this paradox, too. One of the main conclusions may be that language is not only a system. This is an intermediate solution to this paradox as well. All these ideas make me silent when I consider the paradox of Lotman.
Mikhail: It is a great idea that language is not only a system. Maybe, it is not yet a system and already a system or even an assemblage of many overlapping phenomena transforming from not yet a system to an advent of a system and then to not quite a system... It is very much a languaging situation.
But I actually I want to ask Sergey as a person well versed in biology. Is ecosystem actually a system?
Sergey: No
Mikhail: Why not? I guess it is. We may have some languages or ecosystems which are not quite systems and that is it.
Valery: That is the problem of the day, analogous to the following observation made by a wise man: at a distance, whales look like small fishes but if you come closer and closer to them you see that they are quite big 'fishes' which are not fishes at all.
Sergey: This is organism and only because I used the term bio-semiosis not ecosystem
Valery: The 'system' we are talking now is not a system, just like the outcome is not always equal to coming out [laughter].
Mikhail: Language games again.
Sergey: I am formally [inaudible] of liberty and we discussed this question with him many years ago; system or ecosystem and vice versa.
Mikhail: Further contributions? Ivan, do you want to say something?
Ivan Fomin: No, I am okay
Mikhail: Okay then, guys, let call it a day. And let's go and do something nice and constructive to make this day really Lotmanian and not just a day of explosion we are experiencing. I will share with you all the recordings and transcripts. We are going to have publications so there will be access to materials of our debates. We will continue with publications of other seminars; we will be publishing stuff in methods in the yearbook and the quarterlies. Also, there will be a special issue of linguistic franchise and I am looking forward to working on this issue. After this debate it looks like a very encouraging idea to publish this special issue. Okay good luck then.
Ludmila: Thank you so much, bye
Valery: Good bye.
