Culture as Text

Abstract

This chapter will take a closer look at the concept of text, which is indubitably one of the cornerstones of Lotman’s theory. It may be argued even that Lotman’s semiotics is definitely “textocentrist.” We have seen so far that in Lotman’s terminology the definition of text is much broader than the concept of literary work: it is multimodal and polyglot and transcends the limits of literature, “acquiring semiotic life.”¹ Text has also become one of the “trademarks” of the TMSS: Igor Chernov (1988, 13) states that “the text (its structure and functions etc.) has been the main hero of Tartu semiotics through the seventies.” Viacheslav Ivanov (1976a, 3) maintains that the Russian (Soviet) approach to semiotic problems (in which he includes Mikhail Bakhtin and other scholars) is different from the Western semiotics by virtue of focusing on a coherent text, in opposition to following Saussure’s and Peirce’s lead in prioritizing the sign.² Mihhail Lotman (2002, 37) notices that the center of Peirce’s semiotics is the sign, whereas in Tartu semiotics, the sign is the product of the analysis. It is remarkable that in all these statements, the concept of text is opposed to the sign, but how exactly do the TMSS scholars define the sign?