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0DOI: 10.31249/metodquarterly/02.01.03
Essential quotes from Juri Lotman
For citation: Lotman Yu. M. (2022). Essential quotes from Juri Lotman. METHOD: Moscow Quarterly Journal of Social Studies, 2(1), P. 28-36. http://www.doi.org/10.31249/ metodquarterly/02.01.03
Universe of the mind
"The very fact that one and the same poem can be translated by different translators in many ways testifies to the fact that in place of a precise correspondence to text T, in this case there is a certain space. <...> Instead of a precise correspondence there is one of the possible interpretations, instead of a symmetrical transformation there is an asymmetrical one, instead of identity between the elements which compose T1, and T2, there is a conventional equivalence between them." [p. 14]
"The text is not only the generator of new meanings, but also a condenser of cultural memory. A text has the capacity to preserve the memory of its previous contexts. Without this function, there could be no science of history, since the culture of preceding ages (and more broadly speaking, its picture of life) inevitably comes down to us in fragments." [p. 18]
"Functionally speaking, a text is used as code and not message when it does not add to the information we already have, but when it transforms the self-understanding of the person who has engendered the text and when it transfers already existing messages into a new system of meanings." [p. 30]
"The laws of construction of the artistic text are very largely the laws of the construction of culture as a whole. Hence culture itself can be treated both as the sum of the messages circulated by various addressers (for each of them the addressee is 'another', 's/he'), and as one message transmitted by the collective 'I' of humanity to itself." [p. 33]
"Cultures, oriented to the message, are more mobile and dynamic. They have a tendency to increase the number of texts ad infinitum and they encourage a rapid increase in knowledge. <...> The reverse side of this type of culture 24
is the sharp division of society into transmitters and receivers, the rise of a psychological tendency to acquire truth in the form of pre-packaged information about other people's mental efforts, an increase in the social passivity of those who find themselves in the position of receivers of information." [p. 35]
"The trend towards mental consumerism is a dangerous aspect of the culture which is lopsidedly oriented towards the acquisition of information from outside." [p. 35]
"A pair of mutually non-juxtaposable signifying elements, between which, thanks to the context they share, a relationship of adequacy is established, form a semantic trope. Tropes are not, therefore, external ornaments, something applied to a thought from the outside — they constitute the essence of creative thinking, and their function extends beyond art. They are inherent in all creativity." [p.37]
"The transformation of the world of objects into the world of signs is founded on the ontological presupposition that it is possible to make replicas: the reflected image of a thing is cut off from its natural practical associations (space, context, intention, and so on), and can therefore be easily included in the modelling associations of the human consciousness." [p. 54]
"Communication with another person is only possible if there is some degree of common memory. However, a text addressed 'to everyone', i.e. to any addressee, is in principle different from a text which is addressed to one particular person known personally to the speaker." [p. 63]
"For the period of the reading, an author can make a reader as close as he or she wants. At the same time the reader does not stop being a person with a real relationship to the text, and the play between the reader's real pragmatics and that imposed by the author is what constitutes the special experience of the literary work." [p. 67]
"For a simple message-transmission to become a creative process a condition is that the semiotic structure of the text-receiver be more complex and be a personality." [p. 69]
"Text and readership as it were seek mutual understanding. They 'adapt' to each other. A text behaves like a partner in dialogue: it re-orders itself (as far as its supply of structural indeterminacy allows) in the image of the readership. And the reader responds likewise, using his or her informational flexibility for the restructuring which will draw him or her closer to the world of the text." [p. 80]
"A symbol is a profound coding mechanism, a special kind of 'textual gene'. But the fact that one and the same primary symbol can be developed into
25
different plots, and the actual process of this development is irreversible and unpredictable, proves that the creative process is asymmetrical." [p. 101]
".a symbol both in expression level and in content level is always a text, i.e. it has a single, self-contained meaning value and a clearly demarcated boundary which makes it possible to isolate it from the surrounding semiotic context." [p. 103]
"The stable sets of symbols which recur diachronically throughout culture serve very largely as unifying mechanisms: by activating a culture's memory of itself they prevent the culture from disintegrating into isolated chronological layers." [p. 104]
"A symbol, then, is a kind of condenser of all the principles of sign-ness and at the same time goes beyond sign-ness. It is a mediator between different spheres of semiosis, and also between semiotic and non-semiotic reality. In equal measure it is a mediator between the synchrony of the text and the culture's memory." [p. 111]
"All participants in the communicative act must have some experience of communication, be familiar with semiosis. So, paradoxically, semiotic experience precedes the semiotic act." [p. 123]
"The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language but the whole semiotic space of the culture in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere." [p. 125]
"Translation is a primary mechanism of consciousness. To express something in another language is a way of understanding it." [p. 127]
"Every culture begins by dividing the world into 'its own' internal space and 'their' external space. How this binary division is interpreted depends on the typology of the culture. But the actual division is one of the human cultural universals." [p. 131]
"The asymmetry of the human body is the anthropological basis for its semioticization: the semiotics of right and /eft are found just as universally in all human cultures as the opposition top and bottom. And the fundamental asymmetries of male and female, living and dead, are just as widespread." [p. 133]
"The outside world, in which a human being is immersed in order to become culturally significant, is subject to semioticization, i.e. it is divided into the domain of objects which signify, symbolize, indicate something (have meaning), and objects which simply are themselves." [p. 133]
"The notion of boundary is an ambivalent one: it both separates and unites. It is always the boundary of something and so belongs to both frontier cultures, <...> it is a filtering membrane which so transforms foreign texts that they become part of the semiosphere's internal semiotics while still retaining their own characteristics." [p. 136-137]
"Because the semiotic space is transected by numerous boundaries, each message that moves across it must be many times translated and transformed, and the process of generating new information thereby snowballs." [p. 140]
"Since in reality no semiosphere is immersed in an amorphous, 'wild' space, but is in contact with other semiospheres which have their own organization (though from the point of view of the former they may seem unorganized) there is a constant exchange, a search for a common language, a koine, and of creolized semiotic systems come into being." [p. 142]
"Discreteness, or the ability to issue information in portions, is the law of all dialogic systems. But on the structural level discreteness may be apparent when there are different degrees of intensity in the material realization of a continuity." [p. 144]
"The function of myth as a central text-forming mechanism is to create a picture of the world, to establish identity between distant spheres." [p. 152]
"The text stands between the event 'as it happened' and the historian, so that the scientific situation is radically altered. <...> The historian then has to act as decoder, and the fact is not a point of departure but the end-result of many labours. The historian creates facts by extracting non-textual reality from the text, and an event from a story about it." [p. 217-218]
"The event itself may seem to the viewer (or participant) to be disorganized (chaotic) or to have an organization which is beyond the field of interpretation, or indeed to be an accumulation of several discrete structures. But when an event is retold by means of a language then it inevitably acquires a structural unity." [p. 221-222]
"The history of a language is a typical mass and anonymous phenomenon, a process of longue durée. But the history of a literary language is a history of creativity, a process which is bound up with individual activity and which is highly unpredictable." [p. 225]
"By definition every text has limits. But not all of these limits have a similar modelling weight. Some cultures and texts are oriented towards the beginning and give it semiotic significance, others are oriented towards the end." [p. 237]
"Writing is a form of memorizing. Just as the individual mind has its own memorizing mechanisms, so the collective mind, which has to record what is held in common, creates its own mechanisms." [p. 246]
"A literate culture tends to regard the world created by God or Nature as a text, and strives to read the message contained in it. Meaning then which is to be found in the written text, whether sacred or scientific, is extrapolated from the text onto the landscape." [p. 252]
"Modern science from nuclear physics to linguistics sees the scientist as inside the world being described and as a part of that world. But the object and the observer are as a rule described in different languages, and consequently the problem of translation is a universal scientific task." [p. 269]
"Just as different prognoses of the future make up an inevitable part of the universum of culture, so culture cannot do without 'prognoses of the past'." [p. 272]
Culture and Explosion
"The fundamental questions relating to the description of any semiotic system are, firstly, its relation to the extra-system, to the world which lies beyond its borders and, secondly, its static and dynamic relations. The latter question could be formulated thus: how can a system develop and yet remain true to itself? Well, both these questions are of the most radical and the most complex type." [p.1]
"The idea of the possibility for a single ideal language to serve as an optimal mechanism for the representation of reality is an illusion. A minimally functional structure requires the presence of at least two languages and their incapacity, each independently of the other, to embrace the world external to each of them. This incapacity is not a deficiency, but rather a condition of existence, as it dictates the necessity of the other (another person, another language, another culture)." [p. 2]
"The relationship between multiplicity and unity is a fundamental characteristic of culture. It is here that logical and historical reality diverges: logical reality constructs a conventional model of an abstraction, introducing a unique situation, which must reproduce an ideal unit." [p. 3]
"Different forms of contact - where normal lingual communication is situated in one of the poles and artistic language in the other - represent displacements from a neutral central point both towards the facilitation of
understanding and towards its opposite. But the absolute victory of any of these poles is theoretically impossible and, in practical terms, fatal." [p. 6]
"Gradual processes represent a powerful force of progress. <...> The greatest scientific ideas have, in a certain sense, an affinity with art: insofar as their origins are like an explosion. However, the technical realization of new ideas develops according to the laws of gradual dynamics. Therefore, scientific ideas may be ill-timed." [p. 7]
"Culture, whilst it is a complex whole, is created from elements which develop at different rates, so that any one of its synchronic sections reveals the simultaneous presence of these different stages. Explosions in some layers may be combined with gradual development in others. This, however, does not preclude the interdependence of these layers." [p.12]
"Both gradual and explosive processes play equally important roles in a structure which operates synchronically: some ensure innovation, others succession. In the self-appraisal of contemporaries, these tendencies are regarded as hostile and the battle between them is construed as a battle to the death. In reality, these represent two parts of a unified, integrated mechanism and its synchronic structure, and the aggression of one does not subdue but, rather, stimulates the development of the opposite tendency." [p.12]
"Facing the future, the audience is immersed in an array of possibilities, which have not yet met with potential selection. The uncertainty of the future allows significance to be assigned to everything." [p.13]
"The historical process can be compared to an experiment. However, this is not the kind of experiment that the physics teacher demonstrates to his audience, where he knows the exact results in advance. This is the kind of experiment where the scientist puts himself to the test so as to discover those laws which are, as yet, completely unknown to him" [p.14]
"Semiotic space appears before us as the multi-layered intersection of various texts, which are woven together in a specific layer ctualizend by complex internal relationships and variable degrees of translatability and spaces of untranslatability. The layer of "reality" is located underneath this textual layer - the kind of reality that is ctualize by a multiplicity of languages and has a hierarchical relationship with them. Together, both these layers constitute the semiotics of culture. That reality which is external to the boundaries of language lies beyond the limits of the semiotics of culture" [p.23-24]
"Cyclical reiteration is a law of biological existence; the animal world (and the world of man as part of this world) is subordinate to it. However, man is not
fully submerged in this world: as a "thinking reed" - he constantly finds himself at odds with the basic laws of his surroundings." [p.28]
"Perhaps the sharpest manifestation of human nature is in the use of proper names and, linked to this, the isolation of individuality, the uniqueness of the individual personality as foundational values for "other" and "others"; "I" and "other" represent two sides of the unified act of self-consciousness and one is impossible without the other." [p.31]
"The history of the culture of any population may be examined from two points of view: firstly, as an immanent development; secondly, as the result of a variety of external influences. Both these processes are closely intertwined and their separation is only possible in the modality of scientific abstraction. <.> any intersection of systems sharply increases the unpredictability of future movements." [p. 65]
"The semiotic nature of the artistic text is fundamentally dualistic: on the one hand, the text simulates reality, suggesting it has an existence independent of its author, to be a thing amongst the things of the real world. On the other, it constantly reminds us that it is someone's creation and that it means something." [p. 73]
"Culture as a whole may be considered as a text. However, it is exceptionally important to emphasise that this is a complex text, which consists of a hierarchy of "texts within the texts" and which, moreover, generates a complex network of texts." [p. 77]
"Many systems encounter others and in the midst of flight change their appearance and their orbits. Semiological space is filled with the freely moving fragments of a variety of structures which, however, store stably within themselves a memory of the whole which, falling into a strange environment, can suddenly and vigorously restore themselves." [p. 114]
"[The artistic text] forces us to experience any space as the space of proper nouns. We oscillate between the subjective world, which is personally familiar to us, and its antithesis. In the artistic world, the "alien" is always our "own" but at the same time our "own" is also always "alien"." [p. 118]
"The moment of explosion is the moment of unpredictability. Unpredictability should not, however, be understood as constituting a series of unlimited or undefined possibilities for movement from one state to another. Each moment of explosion has its own collection of equally probable possibilities of movement into a sequential state beyond the limits of which lie only those changes which are flagrantly impossible." [p. 123]
The First Centenary Debate of January 19th
"When we look into the past, reality acquires the status of fact and we are inclined to see it as the only possible ctualizen. Unrealised possibilities are transformed into possibilities which could not be ctualiz. They acquire an ephemeral character." [p.125-126]
"Thus, an "external" culture in order to enter into our world must cease to be "external" to it. It must find for itself a name and a place in the language of the culture into which it seeks to insert itself. <.> The process of renaming does not take place without leaving a trace of that content which has received the new name." [p. 133]
"The randomness of individual human fates and the interlacing of historical events, which occur on many different levels, populate the world of culture with unpredictable collisions. The harmonious picture sketched out by the researcher of a single genre or an individual closed historical system is an illusion." [p. 134]
"The space of proper names is the space of explosion. It is no accident that historically explosive epochs push "great people" to the surface, i.e., they ctualize the world of proper names." [p. 136]
"The structure of the "I" is one of the basic indices of culture. "I" as a pronoun is much simpler in structure than "I" as a proper name. The latter is not a welldefined linguistic sign." [p. 147]
"The genius of art, in general, is a mental experimentation, which allows us to test inviolability of the various structures of the world." [p. 151]
"In ternary social structures even the most powerful and deep explosions are not sufficient to encompass the entirety of the complex richness of social layers. The core structure can survive an explosion so powerful and catastrophic that its echo can be heard through all the levels of culture." [p. 166]
References
1. Lotman Yu. M. (2009). Culture and Explosion. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, NY.
2. Lotman Yu. M. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Indiana University press.
