Abstract
By the time that Thomas A. Sebeok ventured into the Soviet-held city of Tartu, Estonia to meet with the émigré Russian semiotician Juri Lotman in 1970, a rich half-century’s worth of semiotic scholarship had been steadily accruing behind the Iron Curtain’ under conditions that would have been barely imaginable to Lotman’s academic counterparts in the West. Born five years after the Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd, Russia on February 28, 1922, Lotman entered Leningrad State University in 1939 to study “philology” under the renowned literary analysts Boris Eichenbaum (1886–1959) and Vladimir Propp (1895–1970). Eichenbaum and Propp had come from a long tradition of Russian “formalist” literary analysis whose interest in pre-Revolutionary texts and folklore, and whose belief that literary structure was not strictly the product of Marxist historical dialectic, was officially outlawed under Stalin’s reign. Indeed, to the extent that the tenets of Literary Formalism were incompatible with those of Soviet Realism, avocation of the former “was a heresy that could lead to deportation to Siberia” (Liukkonen 2008: o.l.).
Juri Mikhajlovič Lotman (1922–1993)
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Notes
- 1.
“Secondary refers to the idea that while all [such systems] are founded on the primary system of natural language, they also acquires supplementary structures” of their own, writes Janet Paterson, “Modeling suggests that the secondary system represents a structure of elements and the rules for combining them that is analogous to [that present in] the entire sphere of the object of knowledge” so modelled (1993: 209). In 2000, Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi will articulate a comprehensive Modeling Systems Theory (MST) for the investigation of all varieties of sign systems discoverable in the natural world; one that replaces human “language” with Uexkullian “umwelt” as the Primary Modelling System upon which all subsequent semiotic systems are constructed (Sebeok and Danesi 2000, Deely 2007).
- 2.
Twelve years later, in 1996, molecular biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer, at that time unacquainted with Lotman’s work, would open his seminal work on biosemiotics, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, with these words: “This book deals with something for which there is, as yet, no standard word in layperson’s language, though there most definitely ought to be. Please forgive me, therefore, introducing at the outset the term we lack: semiosphere. The semiosphere is a sphere just like the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the biosphere. It penetrates to every corner of these other spheres, incorporating all forms of communication: sounds, smells, movements, colors, shapes, electrical fields, thermal radiation, waves of all kinds, chemical signals, touching, and so on. In short, signs of life” (1996: vii). For a comparison between Hoffmeyer’s and Lotman’s notions of “semiosphere,” see Kull (1998).
- 3.
Proceeding from a Peircean, as opposed to a Lotmanian, perspective, neurobiologist and bioanthropologist Terrence Deacon arrives at a strikingly similar conclusion in the excerpt from The Symbolic Species that is included in this volume. The reader may wish to take a look at Deacon’s diagram of a similarly recursive and meaning-bearing matrix of enacted interpretations (Fig. 18.3, this volume) to obtain a diagrammatic depiction of a Lotmanian “semiosphere” seen from a Peircean perspective.
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Favareau, D. (2009). Excerpts from Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture . In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_5
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