LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /339

VLADIMIR E. ALEXANDROV

Biology, Semiosis, and

Cultural Difference in
Lotman’s Semiosphere

W HEN IURII LOTMAN, the leading figure of the Moscow-Tartu school of

semiotics, assembled his Selected Essays shortly before he died in 1993, he
opened the first volume with “On the Semiosphere” (“O semiosfere,” 1984).1
This essay, which functions as a prolegomenon to the entire rich collection, and
which has the most ambitious theoretical reach of anything he wrote, distills
decades of his research on a wide variety of topics in literary and cultural theory,
semiotics, and Russian literature and culture. It also makes several innovative
moves to “naturalize” human culture by suggesting links and analogies to such
scientific phenomena as biogeochemistry, the structure of the brain, and
molecular symmetry. Lotman’s aim is to propose a model of how culture works
everywhere around the globe.
The breadth, boldness, and eclecticism of Lotman’s model are appealing. But
closer scrutiny reveals that it needs to be refined or modified because a number
of his central arguments appear to be flawed. In the first place, the link between
biological and semiotic phenomena is undermined by fundamental differences
between them. Second, despite the variety of issues over which Lotman casts his
conceptual net, his understanding of culture and selfhood is predicated on a few
basic assumptions. When these are considered from the perspective of the emerg-
ing discipline of cultural psychology, they reveal a specifically Western cultural

1
Because of the prominence Lotman gave this essay, and because he revisited some of the argu-
ments first presented in it on later occasions, it is important to understand its publication history
and how he viewed it. The essay first appeared in Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta
641 (Trudy po znakovym sistemam, vol. 17: Struktura dialoga kak printsyp raboty semioticheskogo mekhanizma)
(1984): 5-23; see Kiseleva 469. In “Vmesto predisloviia” (“Instead of a Foreword”) to the first volume
of Selected Essays (1992), Lotman explains that all the pieces in it were originally conceived as parts
of a coherent book, even though they were written over more than twenty years (10). In “Posleslovie”
(“Afterword”) to the third volume of Selected Essays (1993), Lotman states that he chose not to make
any changes in the essays that he reprinted because they are themselves “a fact of contemporary
culture” (“fakt[. . .] kul’tury nastoiashchei”; 439). Given these comments, which were published
eight and nine years after the semiosphere essay’s first appearance, there seems to be little justifica-
tion for assuming that differences between arguments as they appear in the essay and in some of
Lotman’s writings published prior to the Selected Essays, such as Universe of the Mind (1990), are
necessarily due to Lotman’s changing his mind or deciding to correct past errors. Indeed, Universe
of the Mind is unique among Lotman’s publications because it is a book-length summa of his life’s
work that has yet to appear in Russian.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /340

bias, which diminishes the relevance of Lotman’s global scheme to other parts of
the world. Finally, there are contradictions between several of Lotman’s funda-
mental theoretical principles in the essay and aspects of his own scholarship,
which typically shows great awareness of the varieties of human self-conceptions
and a deep understanding of the sui generis nature of semiotic phenomena.

I. Science and the Semiosphere

Central to the essay is Lotman’s view that our planet is enmeshed in a vast and
multileveled polyphony of voices, texts, and languages that fill the “semiosphere,”
the abstract enclosed space or continuum in which all semiosis occurs.2 Lotman
explains that he based his neologism on the term “biosphere,” which Vladimir
Vernadskii (1863 -1945), the influential Russian earth scientist, father of geo-
chemistry, and philosopher of science, defined as the sum total of all living
organisms on the Earth (“O semiosfere” 12).3 Vernadskii’s signal contribution to
twentieth-century scientific thought was the theory that throughout geological
history the varied forms of life constituting the biosphere have converted solar
energy into chemical and mechanical forms that caused massive transformations
in the inanimate matter at the uppermost layers of the Earth—from the creation
of the present atmosphere, to the formation of mineral deposits, to the pro-
cesses of mountain building. The appearance of human beings, whose activity
constitutes the “noosphere” in Vernadskii’s terminology (from the Greek nous :
“mind”), marks a dramatic new phase in the same process because of the effect
that humans have had on nature (“Biosfera,” “Neskol’ko slov”). Lotman’s con-
cept of the “semiosphere” is comparably far-reaching: he intended it to provide
nothing less than a semiotic explanation of how all levels of culture work every-
where—from the relations between the hemispheres of the brain, to dialogue, to
the production and consumption of cultural artifacts, to large scale changes in
national cultures.
Lotman’s decision to devise a cultural model on the basis of a biogeochemical
theory probably reflects a general belief in the rigor and precision of science,
which is a hallmark of the intellectual tradition to which he belongs. That tradi-
tion is rooted in Russian Formalism, the theoretical movement during the sec-
ond and third decades of the twentieth century that focused on the literary work
as a specially organized linguistic phenomenon and on methods of study appro-
priate to it. As has often been noted, Russian Formalism bears some resemblance
to the later Anglo-American “New Criticism,” which also privileged the work itself
and attempted to introduce quasi-scientific methods into the study of literature.
Although Formalism was suppressed in Russia around 1930 for political reasons,

2
Similarly, in Universe of the Mind Lotman defines the “semiosphere” as “the semiotic space neces-
sary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of all different languages”
(123). Lotman’s distinction between actual semiosis and the locus where it occurs appears con-
nected to his problematic conception of the semiosphere as defined by spatial parameters, which,
in his view, interdicts analyzing it into its components (see note 11).
3
Vernadskii acknowledges his debts for the term in “Neskol’ko slov o noosfere” (354). See also
Lovelock 9 -11.
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /341

it continued to exert influence abroad, in large measure due to the efforts of

Roman Jakobson, who had been a prominent member of the movement. During
the interwar period, Jakobson played a major role in the development of Czech
Structuralism and structural linguistics (an explicitly scientific discipline), and
in the early 1960s he collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss to launch Structural-
ism in the West.4
As a result, Slavic and Western theoretical trends began to converge, despite
important differences between them. (Western Structuralism places greater em-
phasis on the synchronic analysis of functional relations among elements of sem-
iotic phenomena, while the Czech and later Russian version is more concerned
with functional relations in the light of historical change.) Interest in Structuralism
prompted the translation of Russian Formalist works into all the major Western
languages. Simultaneously, Jakobson’s decades-long legacy was becoming known
in his homeland, where it fed into an indigenous structuralist-semiotic move-
ment, which was inspired in part by cybernetics and mathematics, and which also
resurrected aspects of Formalism. This is the movement within which Lotman
quickly rose to prominence.5 In the 1970s, two of his books and numerous ar-
ticles were widely translated in Europe and the United States, thus marking the
apogee of Western interest in his work. Following this, however, Russian and
Western trends diverged. While in much of the West Structuralism was replaced
by “post-structuralist” critiques of earlier theoretical assumptions about objectiv-
ity and the like, Lotman and his colleagues continued to develop their approaches.
No strict periodization is possible, but in general the focus of Lotman’s volumi-
nous and brilliant scholarship broadened over time from questions of literary
structure, Russian cultural history, and what he called the “poetics of everyday
behavior,” to general semiotic theory, and ultimately to cultural theory.6 Lotman’s
work remains highly influential in Russia, among Slavists around the world, and
with semioticians in Europe, especially in Italy (de Mikiel).7
Lotman’s commitment to scientism—to a humanistic scholarship dedicated
to the ideal of objectivity, but tempered by a clear sense of the inescapable vagar-
ies of human experience—remained constant throughout his long and distin-
guished career. What changed was the kind of science on which he relied. In
4
For Lotman and Russian Formalism, see Uspenskii, Shukman 5-7, and Baran 448-49; for Russian
Formalism and New Criticism, see Thompson, Erlich 272-76, Marshall 7, 36, 43-44, and L. Searle
528; for Jakobson and Structuralism, see Pomorska, Striedter 11-12, and Schleifer.
5
For the rise of the structuralist-semiotic movement in the Soviet Union see Uspenskii, Shukman,
and Baran. The designation “Moscow-Tartu school” reflects the fact that most of its members were
either at the University of Tartu in Estonia, where Lotman taught, or at several loci in the Soviet
capital. A dogmatic “socialist realism” was enforced as the official artistic doctrine throughout most
of the rest of the country.
6
A relatively rare, later instance of cross-fertilization between Lotman’s ideas and American theory
occurred in 1987 when Greenblatt (14 n. 10) used the concept of the “poetics of everyday behavior”
in connection with his analysis of dominant American cultural traits. Lotman’s Universe of the Mind
was published in the United States in 1990, but it does not appear to have had much resonance
outside Slavic circles.
7
There are also some signs of new interest in his work in the United States, as evidenced by the
conference “The Works of Yury Lotman in an Interdisciplinary Context: Impact and Applicability,”
held on 29 October 1999, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The conference included both
Slavists and non-Slavists from such fields as anthropology, history, and political science.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /342

some of his earlier writings, he used concepts from physics and mathematics,
experimented with algebraic formulations of “textual entropy,” and considered
applying cybernetics to literary study.8 However, he subsequently abandoned these
“hard” sciences, and, as the semiosphere essay shows, shifted to certain branches
of biology and geology, sciences that he appears to have believed are more ap-
propriate to culturology because they are “softer,” more descriptive, and more
integrative than analytical mathematical-physical ones.
It is also possible that Lotman was influenced by trends in the philosophy of
biology. As I will argue, his use of Vernadskii’s ideas in a theory of culture leads to
difficulties. But as two current biological lines of thought demonstrate, the prob-
lems in Lotman’s theory stem not from the fact that he was attempting a rap-
prochement between cultural and scientific phenomena, but from the kind of
analogy that he tried to draw between them.
One of these lines is represented by the distinguished evolutionary biologist
Ernst Mayr, who has argued against using physics as a model for biology because
“there is more difference between physics and evolutionary biology . . . than be-
tween evolutionary biology . . . and history.” Mayr has also insisted that the higher
levels of biological integration need to be approached through “historical narra-
tives” (This is Biology 19, 37, 64-65; Lewontin [118-19], another well-known biolo-
gist, has made a similar argument). This conclusion is relevant for Lotman because
literary history always figured prominently among his interests. From this per-
spective, therefore, Lotman’s use of Vernadskii can be seen as a valid attempt to
locate human culture within a narrative continuum that includes the natural
world. This is also very much in the spirit of Vernadskii’s own integration of
humanity into geological history. Similarly, Lotman’s enterprise is congruent with
what the biologist Edward O. Wilson has recently called “consilience,” or the
unification of all knowledge from the biological sciences to the humanities.
A second line of thought that lends support to the general character, albeit
not the specifics, of Lotman’s syncretic endeavor is represented by “Biosemiotics.”
This discipline focuses on the manifold possible connections between biology
and semiotics, such as studying biological processes from a semiotic perspective
and communication from a biological perspective, or searching for a way to theo-
rize biological phenomena (Laubichler “Introduction”). For example, one biol-
ogist has recently argued that “functional concepts” in organismal biology, such
as “hormone” or “species,” which describe biological processes and entities in
terms of the functions of their constituent elements, are in fact “structurally similar
to concepts of meaning in that they are intrinsically context-dependent, and
quasi-independent of their material realization” (Wagner 299). Another biolo-
gist comes to a similar conclusion by applying Peirce’s triadic conception of signs
to biological concepts, and argues that this has major implications for the theo-
retical structure of the entire discipline of biology (Laubichler, “The Nature”
251). However, Lotman’s project is even more ambitious than both of these lines
of thought because he attempts to equate the organization of biological and
semiotic entities.
8
See Lektsii po struktural’noi poetike 4-6; Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta 36-43, 257-58; “Mif-imia-
kul’tura” 73.
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /343

II. The Semiosphere and Textual Semiotics

In order to grasp the nature of the problem stemming from Lotman’s reliance
on Vernadskii, it is first necessary to identify how Lotman structured his scholarship
throughout his career. Much of his best-known work focuses on late eighteenth-
century and early nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. In all cases,
Lotman’s concern with understanding the cultural matrix within which particu-
lar works arose and functioned never eclipsed his respect for the organization of
meaning within the works themselves, or led him to see them simply as reflec-
tions of larger cultural forces.9 Similarly, in his earlier theoretical books—such as
Lectures on Structuralist Poetics (Lektsii po struktural’noi poetike, 1964) and Structure
of the Artistic Text (Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta, 1970)—Lotman’s methodol-
ogy entailed a systematic and hierarchical accumulation of data ranging from
sound repetitions to broad ideological formulations and never dissolved an indi-
vidual work’s sui generis patterns of meaning in larger considerations such as
ideology, genre, or period.
It is striking, therefore, that Lotman was influenced by Vernadskii to reject the
“bottom-up” organizational and analytical hierarchy that typifies his own work
and to advocate a problematic “top-down” approach to studying culture and cul-
tural artifacts. In “On the Semiosphere,” Lotman quotes with approval Vernadskii’s
argument that the interdependence of all living things is so great that they can
be understood as constituting an undifferentiated “unity” (“edinstvo”) covering
the earth like a “membrane” (“plenka”) (“O Semiosfere” 12). Vernadskii expressly
sets aside any attempt to define “life” itself, which he relegates to philosophy,
folklore, religion, and art—i. e., those realms that constitute culture, Lotman’s
primary concern—and speaks instead of a homogenized “living substance”
(“zhivoe veshchestvo”). In his view, this is the only term appropriate for science
because it is the product of “countless empirically unquestionable facts that are
known to all and easily and accurately observed” (“vsem izvestnykh i legko i tochno
nabliudaemykh beschislennykh empiricheski besspornykh faktov”; “Neskol’ko
slov” 351). Given the kind of scientist that Vernadskii was, it is obvious why he
would be motivated to defend the existence of an objective reality. However, this
view cannot be reconciled with Lotman’s profound grasp of the relativity and
value of individual perceptions in the cultural sphere, which is one of his funda-
mental principles in the semiosphere essay, as well as throughout the first vol-
ume of his Selected Essays.
Vernadskii’s conception of human beings is also at odds with Lotman’s.
Although Vernadskii acknowledges the massive human transformations of the
biosphere, his concern with vast and long-term processes leads him to focus not
on particular individuals but on “a freely thinking humankind as a unified whole”
(“svobodno mysliashchee chelovechestvo kak edinoe tseloe”; “Neskol’ko slov”
356). In fact, Vernadskii’s global perspective leads him to view all forms of life,
including human beings, as determined: “no single living organism exists in a
free state on Earth” (“ni odin zhivoi organizm v svobodnom sostoianii na Zemle
ne nakhoditsia”; 351). When Lotman likewise states that human beings are “func-
9
See, for example, the articles in his Izbrannye stat’i: Tom 2 ; Kiseleva.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /344

tions of the biosphere” (“funktsii biosfery”; “O Semiosfere” 12), he contradicts

the overwhelming importance he ascribes the individual and free cultural devel-
opment throughout his other works.
The tropes Lotman uses to translate geochemical perspectives into the realm
of cultural semiotics compound the problems caused by his reliance on Vernadskii.
Moreover, because Lotman introduces these tropes at the conclusion of his essay’s
introductory section, they function as the essence of the lessons gleaned from
Vernadskii. He begins by invoking the hypothetical possibility of seeing “a semiotic
unity as an aggregate of separate texts and languages that are shut off from each
other. Then the entire building would look as if it is composed of separate little
bricks” (“Mozhno rassmatrivat’ semioticheskii universum kak sovokupnost’
otdel’nykh tekstov i zamknutykh po otnosheniiu drug k drugu iazykov. Togda vse
zdanie budet vygliadet’ kak sostavlennoe iz otdel’nykh kirpichikov”). However,
because Lotman does not explain who views texts and languages in this implausible
way—one can think of examples in early Russian Formalism, but these have long
been abandoned10—the building metaphor may be merely a heuristic device to
advance his argument. Lotman then shifts to a metaphor stressing the functional
interrelationship of parts: “However, the opposite approach seems more fruitful:
the entire semiotic space can be seen as a single mechanism (if not an organ-
ism). Then what will be primary is not one or another brick, but the ‘big system’
that is called the semiosphere. The semiosphere is that semiotic space outside of
which the very existence of semiosis is impossible” (“Odnako bolee plodotvornym
predstavliaetsia protivopolozhnyi podkhod: vse semioticheskoe prostranstvo
mozhet rassmatrivat’sia kak edinyi mekhanizm [esli ne organizm]. Togda
pervichnoi okazhetsia ne tot ili inoi kirpichik, a ‘bol’shaia sistema,’ imenuemaia
semiosferoi. Semiosfera est’ to semioticheskoe prostranstvo, vne kotorogo
nevozmozhno samo sushchestvovanie semiozisa”; “O Semiosfere” 13). Finally, to
make his point even more forcefully, Lotman develops the hybrid metaphor and
vivifies it: “Just as we will not wind up with a calf if we glue together separate
cutlets, but will get cutlets by cutting up a calf, we will not get a semiotic totality
by summing up separate semiotic acts. On the contrary, only the existence of
such a totality—the semiosphere—makes a particular signifying act into a real-
ity” (“Podobno tomu kak, skleivaia otdel’nye bifshteksy, my ne poluchim telenka,
no, razrezaia telenka, mozhem poluchit’ bifshteksy,—summiruia chastnye
semioticheskie akty, my ne poluchim semioticheskogo universuma. Naprotiv,
tol’ko sushchestvovanie takogo universuma—semiosfery—delaet opredelennyi
znakovyi akt real’nost’iu”; 13).
The last sentence alludes to the semiotic principle that the meaning of a sign—
or utterance—is dependent on the larger system of signs in which it exists. This

10
See, for example, Shklovskii’s manifesto “Iskusstvo, kak priem” (“Art as a Device,” 1917); for a
discussion, see Striedter 22-27. On the one hand, Lotman saw the limitations of this early, addititive
Formalist view as far back as Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta (121), where he insisted that the
significance of artistic devices lies in their “relation” (“otnoshenie”). On the other hand, it is also
possible that Lotman had in mind some of his own earlier formulations, such as his remark that the
distinguishing characteristic of a semiotic border is its “impenetrability” (“nepronitsaemost’”; Struktura
khudozhestvennogo teksta 278). He would later characterize borders as characteristics of the semiosphere
and as loci of intensified semiotic exchange via translation.
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /345

is entirely unobjectionable and is as true of individual words in natural languages

as it is of “signifying acts” such as novels, whose ontology and general meaning
are functions of the cultures in which they appear. However, Lotman goes be-
yond this principle because he explicitly denies the utility of constructing mean-
ing from the bottom up, creating intractable problems for anyone who tries to
imagine how to apply Lotman’s “top-down” metaphor to studying a work of lit-
erature or a particular culture.11
First of all, Vernadskii’s totalizing approach cannot usefully be applied to phe-
nomena among which differences are as important, or more important, than
similarities. For example, when considering chemical weathering on the Earth’s
surface during the upper Pleistocene, which is the kind of phenomenon that
concerned Vernadskii, it makes little difference if ground water is acidified by
the decay of sphagnum moss in what is now California or birch leaves in the
Moscow River basin. But it is obviously not very useful to view The Grapes of Wrath
and Anna Karenina as largely equivalent because both are examples of the genre
“novel.” That Lotman would have agreed with such an elementary argument—
which in fact undergirds virtually all of his own scholarship—is an indication of
how inappropriate his application of Vernadskii’s ideas to culturology actually is.
Lotman’s metaphor for correctly understanding a cultural artifact—a calf can
produce cutlets—is also misleading because it implies only half of the herme-
neutic circle of interpretation that is inherent in any act of meaning construc-
tion. One may in fact be able to cut up a calf without any prior knowledge of its
anatomy; however, the result will not be cutlets (correct understanding) but some-
thing too messy to contemplate and bearing little relation to the internal struc-
tures that make the hapless creature what it is. In fact, Lotman’s metaphor diverges
from actual biological praxis, in which procedures analogous to the hermeneu-
tic circle are the norm (Wilson 211). The same holds true for something like a
11
The calf metaphor does not appear in the section dealing with the semiosphere in Universe of the
Mind (123 ff), which repeats arguments from the semiosphere essay, albeit with some changes.
(Paradoxically, Eco’s “Introduction” to Universe does refer to the calf metaphor [xii-xiii] because it
is based on the first publication of the semiosphere essay; see note 1.) Nevertheless, Lotman’s dis-
cussion of the semiosphere in Universe preserves traces of his objection to “bottom-up” analyses of
semiotic totalities and also sheds some light on his reasons. The key seems to be that Lotman associ-
ates the semiosphere primarily with the kind of spatial modeling of cultural phenomena that is
carried out by the right hemisphere of the brain, which produces an “iconic continuum” (Universe
203). As a result, the semiosphere’s spatialized textual totality is primary, and there is “difficulty in
isolating its component signs,” a process which, moreover, “smacks of artificiality” (Universe 36). By
contrast, the left hemisphere of the brain, which is the normal locus of linguistic functions, orga-
nizes information in discrete units that combine into larger ones in a way that makes the individual
units primary and the chain into which they combine secondary (Universe 36). This is a relationship
that could be understood as “bottom-up.” Thus, according to Lotman, “top-down” analysis of funda-
mentally spatial concepts like the “semiosphere” is problematic because of the “semantic tension
between the continual and discrete semiotic pictures of the world” (Universe 203). Even though the
semiosphere contains spatially organized “texts,” it remains unclear why Lotman gives primacy to
these. Perhaps the heuristic utility of modeling the semiosphere on Vernadskii’s biosphere led Lotman
to reify the model in predominantly spatial terms. However, elsewhere in Universe Lotman does
carry out “bottom-up” analyses of various cultural phenomena and even raises this practice to a
general principle: “The laws of construction of the artistic text are very largely the laws of construc-
tion of culture as a whole. Hence culture itself can be treated both as the sum of the messages
circulated by various addressers . . . and as one message transmitted by the collective ‘I’ of humanity
to itself” (33). It is tempting to reconcile and extend Lotman’s ideas by hybridizing the semiosphere
into fields that are predominantly spatial or temporal.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /346

novel, because in the case of a system of signs no one can explain how the system
comprises the parts without understanding how the parts enter into the system,
and vice versa. Identical principles also apply to the realm of cultural systems.
Clifford Geertz has argued that one should try to learn alien cultures in the same
way that one reads texts—by understanding how details fit the whole and the
whole defines the details. In short, Geertz sees the study of culture as also relying
on the hermeneutic circle, which is “as central to ethnographic interpretation,
and thus to the penetration of other people’s modes of thought, as it is to liter-
ary, historical, philological, psychoanalytic, biblical, or for that matter to the in-
formal annotation of experience we call common sense” (“From the native’s”
134). Any number of Lotman’s earlier and later textual analyses can attest that
he realized this perfectly well. For example, in his concluding essay in the first
volume of Selected Essays, “Vmesto zakliucheniia: o roli sluchainykh faktorov v
istorii kul’tury” (“Instead of a Conclusion: On the Role of Accidental Factors in
the History of Culture”), which was first published in German in 1988, or four
years after the semiosphere essay, and which functions as a kind of coda to that
essay’s overture, Lotman repeatedly discusses relations between cultural parts
and wholes, and vice versa.
Another problem with Lotman’s calf metaphor is that it leads to a confusion of
biological and semiotic principles. On the surface, Lotman’s argument that it is
impossible to understand a biological phenomenon on the basis of its constitu-
ents has the seeming virtue of resembling the critique of “reductionism” that is
currently widespread among biologists and that entails their rejection of attempts
to “reduce” biological phenomena to chemistry and physics. Necessarily also im-
plicated in Lotman’s argument is the complementary biological concept of
“emergence,” which holds that the biological entity is greater than the mere sum
of its parts.12 In fact, however, an examination of scientific discussions of “reduc-
tionism” shows why Lotman’s objection to this kind of procedure is misguided
when it is applied to semiotic phenomena.
Mayr has identified three major kinds of reductionist arguments. The first, or
“constitutive reduction,” is unobjectionable from his point of view because it
simply recognizes that complex phenomena can be dissected into their constitu-
ents. However, “explanatory reduction,” his second kind, is problematic because
it “claims that all phenomena and processes at higher hierarchical levels can be
explained in terms of the actions and interactions of the components at the
lowest hierarchical level.” By contrast, modern biologists claim “that new proper-
ties and capacities emerge at higher hierarchical levels and can be explained only
in terms of the constituents at those levels.” Mayr also adds that, because biolo-
gists typically study highly complex systems, they are in fact concerned with com-
ponents “several hierarchical levels above the level studied by physical scientists”
(“Is Biology an Autonomous Science?” 11). Lotman’s position in the semiosphere
essay is entirely congruent with this rejection of “explanatory reduction,” but
only because he appears to overlook a fundamental difference between semiotics
12
Elsewhere in the essay Lotman remarks that the parts of the semiosphere enter into the whole
like “organs into an organism” (“organy v organizm”; 17), a statement which can also be read as
supporting an interpretation of higher semiotic complexity as an “emergent” property.
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /347

and biology. Because semiotics is ultimately concerned with the conditions and
nature of meaning formation, in a semiotic system there is an isomorphic con-
tinuum from the simplest to the most complex meaning and vice versa. Thus, no
qualitatively different kinds of meanings can be said to emerge on higher levels
that are absent from lower ones. For example, the meaning of a “small” or “lower
level” semiotic entity such as a metaphor arises from the relation established
between two things, which is in fact the minimal condition necessary for any
form of what we call “meaning.” 13 The meaning of a “large” or “higher level”
semiotic entity such as a novel or a culture is the integrated network of all the
lower level meanings of which it consists. Consequently, understanding a meta-
phor is not qualitatively different from understanding a novel; the difference
between the two is quantitative.14 In the case of biology, however, as Wilson has
explained, even when one is dealing with the lowest, adjoining levels of organiza-
tion it is not possible to predict such phenomena as “the three-dimensional struc-
ture of a protein from a complete knowledge of its constituent atoms” (83). This
is obviously even more the case with widely separated levels of organization, so
that, for example, the behavior and properties of proteins cannot possibly pre-
dict the emergence of consciousness in human beings, an emergence which can
be explained—assuming it ever can be—only via reference to something on a
comparable level of complexity, namely, the brain ( J. Searle).
Another way of putting this is in terms of the algorithms relevant to the two
fields. In biology, the organizational rules for more complex structures differ
unpredictably from those that operate on simpler levels, while in semiotic sys-
tems the same rules work on all levels. For example, Jakobson has argued that
two fundamental types of relationships, rooted in different kinds of mental oper-
ations, structure all linguistic/semiotic entities: the “syntagmatic” or “metonymic”
versus the “paradigmatic” or “metaphoric.” The first entails relations based on
contiguity, the second on similarity or substitution. Jakobson also generalizes
that these operations play dominant roles in structuring the basic modes of en-
tire literary discourses as well as other art forms: thus, the lyric, Romanticism,
and Symbolism are predominantly metaphoric, whereas narrative, “Realism,”
painting, and film are predominantly metonymic (“Two Aspects”). The complexity
of a novel’s meaning and ambiguities, which are different sides of the same coin,
obviously increases enormously as one reads it, and may well be beyond the ken
of any one individual; but both the meanings and the ambiguities are a result of
a vast number of integrated permutations of connections—both syntagmatic and
paradigmatic—among textual elements of varying dimensions. Indeed, because
a single metaphor yokes together what is both similar and different, ambiguity,
and the resulting indeterminacies that allow readers to project their own experi-
ence, are inherent in metaphors as well as in larger constructs.
An additional, albeit incidental, implication of this conception of how mean-
ing is constituted in semiotic phenomena is that the use of organic metaphors
for literature, which was especially widespread among the Romantics, and which
13
See Jakobson, “A Few Remarks” 35; Todorov, “Sign”; Eco, A Theory 17, 48, 49, 61, 66, etc.
14
In Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta Lotman similarly argues that an entire work can be seen as
one complex “whole sign” (“tselostnyi znak”; 31).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /348

resurfaced among several of the Russian Formalists who were Lotman’s intellec-
tual ancestors, proves more obfuscatory than illuminating.15 The intent of such
metaphors was presumably to characterize the cohesion and organizational com-
plexity of literary works. Because of the centrality that is given to “emergence” in
current conceptions of biological systems, however, continuing to use organic
metaphors for literature would implicate one in the untenable position of seem-
ing to believe in a mysterious generative process that causes higher levels of mean-
ing to arise unpredictably from lower ones.
Mayr’s third critique focuses on “theory reduction,” which “postulates that the
theories and laws formulated in biology are only special cases of theories and
laws formulated in the physical sciences, and that such biological theories can
thus be reduced to physical theories” (11). Lotman makes the same kind of argu-
ment at the beginning of the semiosphere essay when he says that in order to study
cultural phenomena properly it is necessary to find an alternative to the linguis-
tic model on which semiotics has been based ever since it developed out of Peirce’s
and Morris’s theory of signs and Saussure’s and the Prague School’s distinction
between “langue” and “parole.” Although the resulting analytical method was
useful at an early stage in the development of semiotics, he continues, it has also
led to a fundamental problem: the heuristic convenience of an analytical method
based on individual signs or utterances—wherein a complex object is understood
as the sum of simple ones—begins to be perceived as an ontological trait of the
object of study itself. Lotman’s argument is that the preceding “twenty-five years
of semiotic research” mandate a different view of things, namely, that “in reality,
sharply delineated and functionally simple systems do not exist by themselves, in
isolation from each other . . . They function only when they are submerged in a
semiotic continuum,” which is the “semiosphere” (“chetkie i funktsional’no
odnoznachnye sistemy v real’nom funktsionirovanii ne sushchestvuiut sami
po sebe, v izolirovannom vide . . . Oni funktsioniruiut, lish’ buduchi pogruzheny
v nekii semioticheskii kontinuum . . . Takoi kontinuum my . . . nazyvaem
semiosferoi”; “O Semiosfere” 11-12).
It is neither clear whom Lotman is criticizing for holding the false view that
systems could exist by themselves, nor how his own writings can be reconciled
with what he characterizes as the reductive theoretical practices of the past. For
example, in his later essays Lotman is able to integrate Bakhtin’s conception of
dialogue successfully into his own version of semiotics; and he does so despite
the fact that Bakhtin was hostile to linguistics and semiotics for reasons resem-
bling the ones that Lotman invokes in connection with the legacy of Peirce and
Saussure in the semiosphere essay.16 Similarly, twenty years earlier, in the open-
ing lines of his first theoretical monograph, Lectures on Structuralist Poetics, Lotman
applauds what he calls the current “tendency to move from observing and de-
scribing separate phenomena to an analysis of systems, which has long ago be-
come firmly established in the so-called ‘precise’ sciences, [and] is now
penetrating more and more into the natural and human sciences” (“stremlenie
15
On the Formalists see Steiner 68-98; on Romanticism see Todorov, Theories of the Symbol 168-69,
and Wellek 17, 47, 76, 136.
16
For Bakhtin’s negative views on semiotics, see Mandelker 386; Clark and Holquist 7.
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /349

pereiti ot nabliudeniia otdel’nykh fenomenov i ikh opisaniia k analizu sistem,

davno uzhe utverdivsheesia v tak nazyvaemykh ‘tochnykh’ naukakh, vse bolee
pronikaet v estestvennye i gumanitarnye”). In this book Lotman’s conception of
the functional interrelationship among systems is also clearly indebted to an even
older tradition of intellectual ancestors—the Russian Formalists.17 Lotman’s ear-
lier scholarship and theoretical positions thus already manifested the principles
that he proposed as necessary innovations in the semiosphere essay.
A second point needs to be made with regard to Lotman’s insistence on a new
theoretical paradigm that would accord better with the nature of human com-
munication. Over the years, theorists from opposite ends of the ideological spec-
trum have argued in their own ways that there is an unbroken continuum between
natural language and verbal art, an argument which implies that the methods
appropriate to studying the former apply to the latter as well. At one end,
Jakobson’s well-known structuralist view is that any act of verbal communication
can be analyzed in terms of the same six basic and universal aspects or “func-
tions” of language (“Closing Statement” 353-58; Waugh). Thus the difference
between an everyday utterance and a sonnet, for example, is that the “poetic
function”—which, in Jakobson’s terms, entails a focus on the message itself—is
dominant in the latter and not in the former. The difference is one of quantity,
not quality. On the other end of the spectrum, the Marxist Terry Eagleton denies
that there is any such thing as an intrinsic quality called “literariness” and argues
that what is called literature is merely a function of value judgments that vary in
accordance with social ideologies (16). Thus, for both Jacobsen and Eagleton
there is no inherent qualitative difference between what is and what is not litera-
ture. The same conclusion, albeit reached from a different direction, is suggested
by Bakhtin’s mimetic conception of the novel, a literary construct which ideally
replicates the dialogic relationships prevalent in the social sphere (“Discourse in
the Novel” [“Slovo v romane”]). Given this degree of agreement among these
three theorists, who otherwise differ markedly, Lotman’s insistence on the need
to approach cultural phenomena with a new sense of the holism appropriate to
them is not fully persuasive.

III. The Semiosphere and Varieties of the Self

A different set of problems emerges when we turn to the body of Lotman’s
essay, in which he discusses the main features of the semiosphere on the basis of
examples drawn from a daunting variety of cultural phenomena. In contrast to
the introductory section, which relies on Vernadskii and which stresses homoge-
neity at the expense of individuation, Lotman now reverses himself and under-
scores the opposite. At the same time, because he generalizes about all human
culture on the basis of what can be understood as a paradigmatic individualistic
Western conception of the self, he also inadvertently demonstrates the danger

17
See Tynianov’s and Jakobson’s “manifesto” of late Russian Formalism: “Problemy izucheniia
literatury i iazyka” (1928); and Striedter 110 -11.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /350

inherent in a “top-down” analytical approach based on assumptions alien to the

phenomena under investigation.
Central to Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere is the idea of discreteness, which,
as we have seen, is of no interest to Vernadskii. In Lotman’s view both individuals
and the cultures they constitute are defined by borders that are functions of the
differences between them. Indeed, it is the existence of separate entities, be they
individual or collective, that actually creates the ground and need for semiosis:
the “structural heterogeneity of semiotic space forms reserves of dynamic pro-
cesses and is one of the mechanisms of generating new information within the
sphere” (“strukturnaia neodnorodnost’ semioticheskogo prostranstva obrazuet
rezervy dinamicheskikh protsessov i iavliaetsia odnim iz mekhanizmov vyrabotki
novoi informatsii vnutri sfery”; “O Semiosfere” 16). Similarly, in a later essay
Lotman says that the “invariant model of a sense generating unit presup-
poses . . . its specific boundedness, self-sufficiency . . . This allows the definition
of sense generating structures as sui generis semiotic monads . . . including the
separate human personality” (“invariantnaia model’ smysloporozhdaiushchei
edinitsy podrazumevaet . . . ee opredelennuiu ogranichennost’, samodostatoch-
nost’ . . . Eto pozvoliaet opredelit’ smysloporozhdaiushchie struktury kak svoego
roda semioticheskie monady . . . vkliuchaia i otdel’nuiu chelovecheskuiu
lichnost’’; “Kul’tura kak sub”ekt” 369). In other words, it is the differences be-
tween distinct individuals and cultures that, via a process of translation, make
possible the generation of new meanings; and these new meanings are, accord-
ing to Lotman, the distinguishing feature of cultural change and therefore of
culture in general.
The idea of novelty thus goes hand in hand with the idea of discreteness. In the
semiosphere essay Lotman also underscores this point and simultaneously departs
from Vernadskii’s paradigm when he states that “the dynamic development of
elements of the semiosphere . . . is in the direction of increasing their specificity,
and therefore, its internal variety” (italics added; “dinamicheskoe razvitie
elementov semiosfery . . . napravleno v storonu ikh spetsifikatsii i, sledovatel’no,
uvelicheniia ee vnutrennego raznoobraziia”; “O Semiosfere” 20). And in the essay
“The Phenomenon of Culture” (“Fenomen kul’tury”) he lists the ability to “for-
mulate new communications” (italics added; “obrazovyvat’ novye soobshcheniia”
as an essential defining characteristic of any “thinking entity” (“mysliashchego
ob”ekta”; 34).
Lotman of course recognizes that hybridization occurs between cultures and
speaks of change as occurring especially rapidly in cultural borderlands. He
also argues that individual cultures are actually constituted by transactional
semiotic exchanges with other cultures. But this does not vitiate the importance
for him of an originative cultural discreteness, which is a larger-scale variant of
the kind of difference that also undergirds his conception of the dialogic rela-
tions between individual human beings, and which cannot readily be reconciled
with the “top-down” approach he advocates in the introductory section of the
semiosphere essay.
Virtually all of Lotman’s later essays revisit this complex of relations among
alterity, selfhood, and new meaning. One of his basic ideas is that thought, like
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /351

meaning, can arise only as a result of relations between—at a minimum—two

different entities. He follows Bakhtin in seeing consciousness as “profoundly
dialogic” (“gluboko dialogicheskoe”) and posits that “in order to function ac-
tively, one consciousness requires another” (“soznanie nuzhdaetsia v soznanii
. . . chtoby aktivno rabotat’’; “Tekst v tekste” 153, “The Text Within the Text”
378). Thus, according to Lotman, no form of thinking “can be mono-structural
and monolingual: it absolutely must incorporate heteroglot and mutually un-
translatable semiotic formations” (“nikakoe mysliashchee ustroistvo ne mozhet
byt’ odnostrukturnym i odnoiazychnym: ono obiazatel’no dolzhno vkliuchat’ v
sebia raznoiazychnye i vzaimoneperevodimye semioticheskie obrazovaniia”;
“Fenomen kul’tury” 36). Lotman’s emphasis on the “untranslatability” of differ-
ent languages underscores the pivotal role of the “new” or the “other” in the
generation of what he understands by “meaning.” “Untranslatability” should not
be understood as the absolute impossibility of translation, because it is clear that
without at least some common ground between any two entities, no negotiation
of the differences that distinguish them could ever take place.
That new meaning is a function of differences among discrete entities holds
on all possible levels of Lotman’s theory: within a sign; between signs; between
phrases, sentences or utterances; between larger subdivisions of a language such
as dialects or jargons; between individuals; and within the phenomenon we call a
conscious self. Lotman goes even farther in this great chain of semiosis—to the
antipodes “below” the self and “above” an individual language—when he hypoth-
esizes an explicit parallel between the functioning of the large hemispheres of the
human brain and the workings of entire cultures: “in both cases we discover as a
minimum two fundamentally different methods of reflecting the world and of gen-
erating new information, with the result being complex mechanisms of textual
exchanges between these systems” (italics added; “v oboikh sluchaiakh my
obnaruzhivaem nalichie kak minimum dvukh printsipial’no otlichnykh sposobov
otrazheniia mira i vyrabotki novoi informatsii s posleduiushchimi slozhnymi
mekhanizmami obmena tekstami mezhdu etimi sistemami”; “Ritorika” 168). He
becomes even more daring in his speculative reach when he refers to “left and
right spins in the structure of matter” (“levoe i pravoe vrashchenie v strukture
materii”) as being the deepest level of the symmetry/asymmetry relation (difference
within similarity, or similarity encompassing difference) that is fundamental to all
meaning creation (“Kul’tura kak sub”ekt” 371). Similarly, in “On the Semiosphere”
he posits that the mirror symmetry between right- and left-handedness underlies
ever ything from “the genetic-molecular level” (“genetiko-molekuliarnogo
urovnia”) to the most complex processes of meaning generation (24).
Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture thus has much to say about how the hu-
man mind works. What happens if we consider his ideas from the perspective of
disciplines directly concerned with the same issue? I have argued elsewhere that
Lotman’s conception of the human mind can be coordinated with findings in
developmental psychology (Alexandrov 100-102). However, this generalization
appears true only if one specifies that it pertains to a Western conception of
developmental psychology—an essential qualification. In general, this scheme
hinges on the role of transactional exchanges between self and other in the pro-
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /352

cess of individual maturation. This is central to Jean Piaget’s influential theory of

how a child’s system of knowledge is progressively modified and restructured to
allow for the assimilation of new information, an activity which during the later
stages depends heavily on natural language and other selves. The recognition
and negotiation of alterity, whether of things or other persons, also lies at the
heart of Lev Vygotskii’s conception of how adults help children achieve ever
higher levels of linguistic competence via incremental steps through heretofore
unknown areas of knowledge and experience. Similarly, Jerome Bruner sees hu-
man development as a process of learning and manipulating new arrangements
of already existing sign systems about the world—especially narrative art—which
in their ensemble constitute what is known as “culture.” Support for a concep-
tion of human development that depends on language and the necessary alterity
of the “other” can also be found in the biological theory of the mind advanced
by the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. His view of how a distinctly human con-
sciousness is formed is based on an argument that the individual’s relations with
others are mediated by the same kind of process of meaning formation that un-
derlies semiotic exchanges in general.18
However, although the conception of selfhood underlying Lotman’s theory
resembles Western models of psychological development, the models themselves
are far from being representative of humankind in general. This inadequacy is
one of the most important findings of the discipline known as “cultural psychol-
ogy,” and it inevitably raises questions about the extent to which Lotman’s
“semiosphere” is relevant to the various cultures existing on the Earth. The disci-
pline cultural psychology emerged from efforts by cultural anthropologists and
practicing psychologists to understand the psychological specificity of the indi-
viduals in the cultures they were studying. Richard Shweder, one of its leading
exponents, defines cultural psychology as “psychological anthropology without
the premise of [the] psychic unity [of humankind]. It is the ethnopsychology of
the functioning psyche, as it actually functions, malfunctions, and functions dif-
ferently in the different parts of the world” (“Cultural Psychology” 17).
An axiom of cultural psychology is that the investigator’s frame of reference is
a form of mediation that can occlude the specificity of the culture under exami-
nation. In Kenneth Gergen’s formulation, “[t]o enter the field with a given view
of the nature of human understanding is to circumscribe a priori the range of
conclusions that may be drawn about the persons one wishes to understand”
(573-74). From this general caveat, Gergen moves to what he sees as a spe-
cifically Western bias: “by virtue of the commitment to understanding as inter-
subjectivity, there is an abiding tendency in Western ethnography toward
individualization of the other. That is, others tend to be characterized in terms of
individual units, and to be understood as viewing each other in the same
terms . . . [And] if understanding in general is achieved by treating persons as
separate or individual entities, then other cultures must be constituted by such
entities” (574). This conclusion closely resembles Lotman’s assumptions about
18
See Alexandrov (102) for additional parallels among these theories of individual development,
Lotman, and Bakhtin’s conception of dialogue. For differences and similarities between Lotman
and Bakhtin, see Mandelker.
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /353

all levels of cultural dynamics (and also bears on the conception of selfhood
advanced by Bakhtin and Edelman).
Gergen’s view is echoed by Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Markus, two psychol-
ogists who argue that conceptions of the self are inevitably tainted by Western
attitudes because “virtually all Euro-American research on the self, which is to
say 99% of all research on the self and identity, has been done on one particular
population—contemporary, secularized, Western, urban, white middle-class
people . . . The self is conceived of as an autonomous bounded entity” (369).
As a result of such conclusions, psychologists in both Europe and the United
States now routinely approach their tasks with a heightened awareness of the far-
reaching clinical implications of different conceptions of personhood that de-
rive from ethnographic evidence. Hope Landrine cites research indicating that
of the many definitions and meanings cultures take for granted, those regarding the self are the
most basic, the “deepest,” the furthest from awareness, and are thus rarely ever made explicit.
Simultaneously . . . they also are the most powerful and significant assumptions behind and beneath
our behavior. This is because what we assume a self is by and large predicts our assumptions about how a self
relates to others, takes control, develops, “ought” to behave, think and feel, and “goes wrong.” . . . Lack of aware-
ness of the Western cultural definition of the self . . . can lead to misdiagnosis and failed treatment
of minority groups. (italics added; 745-46)
Landrine also underscores the connection between clinical psychology and ethics
when she explains that because of the tacit assumptions in the West about “an
unequivocal, irrevocable distinction between that which is the self on the one
hand, and that which is the nonself on the other . . . it follows that Western cul-
ture defines the failure to construct and maintain a distinction between self and
nonself as psychopathology (i.e., failure to maintain ego boundaries, enmesh-
ment, identity diffusion, delusion, or psychosis)” (746). By contrast, the Western
self—and Lotman is certainly no exception here—is “presumed to be a free
agent . . . that does what it wishes. Thereby, the self has rights . . . [and is] as-
sumed to be morally responsible” (748).19 Thus, Kant’s “categorical imperative,”
for example, insists that one must appreciate fully the uniqueness of the other
because to fail to do so is to deny that other an essential measure of humanity—
an ethical view clearly predicated, as are Lotman’s views, on a conception of the
self as an autonomous entity that is free to develop in unforeseen directions.20
Indeed, cultural psychologists have identified a variety of different concep-
tions of personhood around the world. For example, Shweder cites Kenneth
Read on the Gahuku-Gama people of New Guinea, whose conception of man
“does not allow for any clearly recognized distinction between the individual and
the status which he occupies.” As a result, the individual has no “intrinsic moral
value,” and being human “does not necessarily establish a moral bond between
individuals, nor does it provide an abstract standard against which all action can

19
It is of course reductive to speak of “the West” or of any other large geographical area without
differentiating among its various constituent cultural traditions (e.g., see Kleinman 646); I do so
not because I think these are unimportant, but for the sake of simplicity and to illustrate a principle
that can and should be applied to smaller cultural entities.
20
Mohanty, 117 n. 9, enlists Kant’s argument on behalf of multiculturalism. However, as my subse-
quent discussion implies, his reliance on Kant unintentionally recapitulates the kind of bias that
characterizes Lotman.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /354

be judged.” Rather, the “specific context,” or the particular occasion, “determines

the moral character of a particular action” (Thinking Through Cultures 123). Al-
though some elements of this conception are familiar in the West—for example,
the military convention of “saluting the uniform,” an act that defines certain
kinds of interpersonal relations, and “not the man” wearing it—in their totality
they constitute something quite different from the view of the self in contempo-
rary liberal Western democracies (at least in political theory), in post-Kantian
(or generally Judeo-Christian) ethics, and in Lotman’s image of the individual as
a “monad.” Indeed, Landrine provides a lengthy list of cultures that shows how
widespread the devaluation of individuality and the implicit rejection of innova-
tion actually are: “in Indonesian, Polynesian, many Asian (e.g., Hindu), several
Southeast-Asian, and many Native-American cultures . . . the self is understood
as a mere vessel for immaterial forces and entities; the individual is understood
as a more or less irrelevant and dead shell through which the spirits of ancestors
and a multitude of immaterial entities pass, thereby lending the appearance or
illusion that the individual has characteristics” (757).
As Clifford Geertz puts it in his well-known essay “‘From the native’s point of
view,’ On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding”: “the Western concep-
tion of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational
and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and
action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against such
other wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorri-
gible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s
cultures” (126). Thus, Geertz points out, traditional Javanese beliefs include the
view that the inside life of the self is “at its roots at least, identical across all
individuals, whose individuality it thus effaces.” The outside life is also “conceived
as in its essence invariant from one individual to the next.” Moreover, these two
aspects of “personality” are not seen as functions of each other, but as “indepen-
dent realms of being to be put in proper order independently” through religious
discipline on the one hand and elaborate etiquette on the other. The result is
“an inner world of stilled emotion and an outer world of shaped behavior [that]
confront one another . . . any particular person being but the momentary locus,
so to speak, of that confrontation, a passing expression of their permanent exist-
ence, their permanent separation” (127-28).
In Bali, on the other hand, there is
a persistent and systematic attempt to stylize all aspects of personal expression to the point where
anything idiosyncratic, anything characteristic of the individual merely because he is who he is
physically, psychologically, or biographically, is muted in favor of his assigned place in the continuing
and, so it is thought, never-changing pageant that is Balinese life. It is dramatis personae, not actors
that endure; indeed, it is dramatis personae, not actors, that in the proper sense really exist. (128)
A fear of acting out of character, which Geertz sees as likely to occur because of the
“extraordinary ritualization of daily life,” guides social relations along “deliber-
ately narrowed rails,” for the Balinese “dramatistical sense of self” is a form of
protection “against the disruptive threat implicit in the immediacy and sponta-
neity even the most passionate ceremoniousness cannot fully eradicate from face-
to-face encounters” (130). This conclusion is especially interesting not only
because it underscores how Balinese and Western conceptions of selves differ,
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /355

but also because it suggests a connection with Lotman’s idea that the negotiation
of alterity underlies all cultural change. I will return to this below.
Finally, in traditional Moroccan society, Geertz argues, “men do not float as
bounded psychic entities, detached from their backgrounds and singularly named.
As individualistic, even willful, as the Moroccans in fact are, their identity is an
attribute they borrow from their setting” (132). As such, Moroccans resemble
ideal Bakhtinian dialogists who acquire their identities—here, their names and
social faces—from specific interactions with others, interactions which are ren-
dered in terms of different permutations of the names of peoples, regions, tribes,
families, and religious sects. The result is not a personality with a given coher-
ence, but a kind of additive, mosaic-, or collage-like assemblage of products of
dialogic moments. There is no privileged perspective from which all the parts of
the mosaic can be viewed as coalescing into a totality with the kind of implied
metaphysics of personhood or duration in time that is usually assumed in mod-
ern Western culture, a conclusion that contrasts sharply with Lotman’s sugges-
tion in his final book that personal names may be the most striking manifestation
of human nature because they underscore the role of individuality and unique-
ness in it (Kul’tura i vzryv 54).
Another major difference between Lotman’s theory and the findings of cul-
tural psychologists involves the issue of novelty, or the creation of new informa-
tion. Lotman of course recognized that there are “traditional” societies that resist
change, but his global model of culture does not focus on them, and they are
certainly not the ones dearest to his heart. The reason for this may lie in Lotman’s
conception of how human beings communicate. He made it axiomatic that they
could not escape what he calls “noise in the channel of communication” (“shum
v kanale sviazi”)—the inevitable misunderstandings that arise from the fact that
no two individuals see things or express themselves in exactly the same way (be-
cause each is different from the other). These miscommunications are one of
the most important causes for the appearance of “the new”—something that was
not necessarily sent by the speaker, but that was received by the listener—and are
one of the reasons why cultural stasis is impossible in the long run (e.g., “Fenomen
kul’tury” 42-43).
However, using findings like Geertz’s, one could respond that members of
cultures that conceive of internal and external behavior in terms of transindividual
and transmundane paradigms already know what their interlocutors are likely to
say to them: the repertoire of their discourse is fixed. Thus, their practice would
be to translate what we might consider “noise” or “miscommunication” into fa-
miliar terms and categories, a practice that effectively eliminates the possibility
of novelty. In their approach to communication, or to “reading” each other,
members of such “traditional” societies would function like orthodox believers
in any fixed religious, philosophical, political, or psychological system: for them
all experience reconfirms fundamental truisms regarding human beings and the
world. This kind of belief goes against the grain of one of Lotman’s basic criteria
for human “intelligence”: the ability to create “new information, that is, texts
which are not simply deducible according to set algorithms from already existing
information, but which are to some degree unpredictable” (Universe 2).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /356

The ethical consequences of such self-conceptions as those found in Java and

Bali would also be antithetical to Western norms. Value lies not in the tolerant
acceptance of the other’s independence, freedom, or uniqueness, but in having
all members of the society conform to the regnant, “monological” cultural norms
(even if these allow for structured traditional conflicts according to various cri-
teria). As Gergen puts it, “a communitarian ethic is not a congenial companion
to a logocentric conception of individual functioning” (575). This conclusion is
supported by a moving example that Geertz provides. The wife of a young man
in Java unexpectedly dies, and even though she had been the center of his life
since her childhood, he greets “everyone with a set smile and formal apologies”
for her “absence,” all the while striving to “flatten out, as he himself put it, the
hills and valleys of his emotion into an even, level plain” (128). In his own cul-
tural terms, the man can hardly be called “hard” or “unfeeling.” Neither does it
seem accurate to think of him as trying to “rationalize” his “pain” or to “deny it”
in a way that evokes a priori Western assumptions about selves, how they func-
tion, or the relations between them.
However, despite the divergence between the findings of cultural psychology
and the assumptions underlying Lotman’s global theory of culture, there are
also some areas where they converge. For example, in a response to Geertz’s
essay, Shweder hypothesizes that interactions between very young children and
their physical and social worlds “would quickly lead to a universal differentiation
at the skin of the self from others and external events. Certainly by age three,
and perhaps much earlier, all children in all cultures would be expected by most
developmentalists to have this ‘Western’ conception—the idea of being bounded,
self-motivated, of associating their observing ego and their will with their body
and so on” (“Preview” 12). As a result, Shweder adds, “there must be a point of
transition” from this Western sense of self to the kind Geertz discerned in Bali:
“It seems that in Bali the adult cultural system does not build on the child’s early
experience in self-definition, which may emerge out of precultural or at least
‘brute’ interaction with the world. In fact, it seems that the adult cultural system is
capable of reversing early childhood understandings of the self . . . The Balinese three-
year-old may be more like a Western adult than like a Balinese adult” (italics
added; “Preview” 12-13). If Shweder’s hypothesis is correct, Lotman’s concep-
tion of the self as a monad may indeed have universal, albeit circumscribed, validity
because it may account for the earliest stages of human development. It may also
be relevant to all cultural groups, or collectives, which, as Lotman argues, always
distinguish between themselves and outsiders (“O Semiosfere” 14-15).
The validity of Lotman’s model may also increase somewhat as the time spans
to which it is applied increase. No culture can resist novelty or change indefinitely.
As we have seen, Geertz acknowledges that even highly ceremonious Balinese
behavior cannot escape entirely the disruption that is potentially present in all
personal encounters (130). This view recalls Lotman’s concept of “noise in the
channel of communication,” which he saw as a fundamental motor of cultural
change. In other words, the dissonances that arise among members of a tradi-
tional culture may accumulate to the point that change becomes necessary. But
in addition to such inherent instability within a culture, an instability which will
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /357

inevitably increase over time, cultures are also subject to extrinsic destabilizing
forces, especially in the present day, when cultural contacts are accelerated by
modern communications technology. Indeed, a constant stream of ethnographic
evidence shows that traditional societies and varieties of selves are forced to change
because of incursions from the outside world, which most often means “the West.”
In other words, if you watch any particular culture for a sufficiently long period
of time, Lotman may turn out to be more right than wrong. However, this advan-
tage comes at a considerable price, because as time spans increase, the fine-
grained, shorter-term events and experiences that actually define distinctive
cultures tend to shrink and disappear from view. For this reason Lotman’s model
of the semiosphere can have only limited relevance for something like the cur-
rent interest in the globalization of literary study.
The extinction of languages provides a concrete illustration of this inadequacy.
In the semiosphere essay, Lotman argues that the dynamic processes within the
semiosphere lead inevitably to an increase in its internal specificity and variety.
He also celebrates the kind of informational ferment that occurs in cultural bor-
derlands, or wherever distinct linguistic and cultural entities come into contact
and have to negotiate the differences between them. This is undeniably true in
many cases. However, as the Endangered Language Fund has found, globaliza-
tion has accelerated the destruction of smaller languages by larger ones. At least
half of the world’s six thousand languages will become extinct during the next
century, and only five percent are likely to survive in the longer run because they
currently have at least one million speakers or receive governmental support. Of
course, as languages disappear, so do the specific cultures and world views they
express. These trends parallel a rapid decrease in biological diversity as wilder-
ness areas are cleared under pressure from agriculture, industry, and population
growth (“With the World Opening Up”). Thus, from the perspective of natural
languages, the semiosphere (like the biosphere) is becoming less, not more het-
erogeneous, a development which suggests that Lotman’s basic model of cul-
tural exchange may be overly generous and optimistic (even though there is
abundant evidence throughout his work that he was well aware of darker aspects
of human behavior and cultural processes around the world). An obvious
countertrend to this cultural homogenization is the present day attempt to pre-
serve and promote the study of European languages that were close to disap-
pearing: Breton, Gaelic, Friulian, Frisian, Saami, and others (Simons). But this
effort is a highly selective process that is more likely to occur in richer parts of
the world than poorer ones; furthermore, it is unclear to what extent it will suc-
ceed. In defense of Lotman’s views, however, it is also important to underscore
that his argument about the semiosphere’s internal variety does not need to be
understood exclusively in terms of numbers of natural languages (although this
still has a bearing on the relevance of his model to different aspects of the real
world). If we judge the current state of the semiosphere in terms of the quantity
and novelty of information it contains, then it seems reasonable to argue that
there has been a global increase over time due to such areas of intense activity as
the sciences and technology, all of which can be seen as generating “languages”
specific to themselves. But is it possible to ascertain if, in an abstract sense, this
growth “compensates” for the decrease in linguistic and cultural diversity?
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /358

IV. Conclusion: Lotman’s Own Perspectives

In order to try to understand more completely what underlies Lotman’s think-
ing, I would like to conclude by turning to some comments that he made regard-
ing his own cultural orientation. There is no question that he was well aware of
cultural differences, both within the Russian tradition and elsewhere. As his later
writings demonstrate especially vividly, his interests were literally world-wide, and
he was able to to illustrate his arguments with a dazzling array of examples, large
and small, from all continents and eras.21 But it is curious that he did not see
this as requiring him to modify his global theory of culture. One reason for this
apparent paradox may be the issue of time frames and the inevitability of change
that I mentioned above. Lotman’s long-term, megascopic, biogeochemically in-
spired perspective tends to lose sight of the shorter-lived and smaller-scaled
phenomena on which cultural psychologists focus, even if these are still numer-
ous and important, especially to those who live them.
It is also possible that Lotman may have consciously chosen not to modify his
ideas. Such an interpretation is suggested by his late essay “Culture as Subject
and Object for Itself” (“Kul’tura kak sub”ekt i sama-sebe ob”ekt”; 1989), in which
he states that the concepts “subject” and “object” “emerge, on the one hand, as
universal instruments of description of any culture as a phenomenon in any of
its manifestations, and on the other, they are the results of a particular (European)
cultural tradition at a particular moment of its development. A.M. Piatigorskii has repeat-
edly called attention to the inapplicability of these categories to Indian cultural conscious-
ness” (italics added; “vystupaiut kak universal’nye instrumenty opisaniia vsiakoi
kul’tury kak fenomena v liubykh ee proiavleniiakh, a s drugoi, sami iavliaiutsia
porozhdeniem opredelennoi (evropeiskoi) kul’turnoi traditsii v opredelennyi moment ee
razvitiia. Na neprimenimost’ etikh kategorii k indiiskomu kul’turnomu soznaniiu, v
chastnosti, neodnokratno ukazyval A.M. Piatigorskii.”) However, Lotman then im-
plies that he chooses to “remain within the European cultural tradition”
(“ostavat’sia vnutri evropeiskoi kul’turnoi traditsii”) and in effect drops the sub-
ject (369). Thus, despite acknowledging the cultural relativity of the subject/
object opposition, he continues to use it as if it were a universal concept relevant
to all cultures. Lotman does something similar in the essay “Some Thoughts on
the Typology of Cultures” (“Neskol’ko myslei o tipologii kul’tur”; 1987), where,
after discussing at length and with great insight the differences between literate
and illiterate cultures, he then cites with obvious approval Kant’s celebration of
the literate, enlightened, and intellectually “mature” human being who decides
for himself how to think and act (104). This choice also suggests a connection
between Lotman’s theoretical orientation and the difficult ideological condi-
tions under which he spent most of his career, for it is quite probable that his
cultural preferences were influenced by his distaste for the monologism, coer-
cion, ritualization, and brutality typical of the former Soviet Union.

21
See, for example, his description of “mythological consciousness” in “Fenomen kul’tury” 36 -37,
and the conception of collective personhood in Muscovite Russia in “O Semiosfere” 13 -14; see also
“Neskol’ko myslei o tipologii kul’tur”; Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta 293-94; and Universe of the
Mind 68, 151-53, 238-41.
 LOTMAN’S SEMIOSPHERE /359

Another aspect of Lotman’s ideological orientation that may bear on the limi-
tations of his theory is his conception of religious faith in terms of semiotics, not
metaphysics. For example, when discussing the likely evolution of human thought,
he argues that an increase in its complexity inevitably gives rise to increasing
uncertainty and anxiety. One of the two ways human beings were able to com-
pensate for this “was by turning toward beneficent and omniscient beings. It was
no mere chance that the appearance of religion coincided stadially with the ap-
pearance of the phenomenon of thought” (“[estestvenno bylo] vozmestit’ rost
neuverennosti i neznaniia [bylo] obrashcheniem k pokrovitel’stvuiushchim
sushchestvam, obladaiushchim vseznaniem. Poiavlenie religii, sovpadaiushchee
stadial’no s vozniknoveniem fenomena mysli, konechno, ne sluchaino”; “Fenomen
kul’tury” 44). On another occasion he roots religion in linguistics, suggesting
that the “structure of the ‘families of the gods’ and of other basic elements of the
world-picture are often clearly dependent on the grammatical structure of the
language” (Universe 128). Both this “demystification” of religion and Lotman’s
preference for a secular, Western conception of the human condition may be
related to his desire to reduce cultural differences to the one paradigm with
which he was most familiar and comfortable. It is not surprising, therefore, that
Lotman sees culture as a second institution developed by human beings to com-
pensate for their existential difficulties. In his view, culture is a “transindividual
intellect” (“sverkhindividual’nyi intellekt”) providing the reserves of meaning
and the ways to generate new ones that human beings lack themselves (“Fenomen
kul’tury” 44).
The kind of value that Lotman places on novelty indicates that his conception
of culture is not only descriptive but also precursory and even optimistic. And
this points to a final problem with his theory. The persistence, indeed the resur-
gence in recent years, of various forms of chauvinism, religious fundamentalism,
and political reaction around the world implies that the devaluation of individu-
ality and resistance to change still hold sway over large areas of our planet. Such
developments, which, on an abstract level, share typological features with some
“traditional” societies, imply that cultural change is not necessarily an evolution-
ary process, with “primitive” societies and mentalities giving way to those that are
more “advanced,” as Lotman appears to hope, and as his essay on the semiosphere
appears to predict. Nonetheless, the fact that Lotman’s own concepts can be
used to analyze phenomena that undermine aspects of his model of culture in
“On the Semiosphere” is evidence both of the power of his insights into semiosis
and the varieties of human experience, and of the possibility that his model can
be refined and its capacity increased.

Yale University
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /360

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