Încercare semiotică asupra memoriei
Semiotic Inquiry into Memory

Summary/Abstract: This study employs the scientific framework of cultural systems semiotics, as practiced by the Tartu School, to establish a scientific premise in service of a qualified definition of culture. The approach begins with the assumption that the human being inherently possesses a semantic vocation. Thus, culture can be studied as a system that generates and organizes meaning. In this regard, the semiotic paradigm is highly useful; cultural semiotics, formalized by Yuri Lotman, provides the necessary concepts and operations. It proposes an examination of the ‘semiosphere’ as a “world” of statements and texts (i.e. significant and meaningful works). Simultaneously, it investigates the structure, relationships, invariants, and constitutive functions of a cultural system, deducing its laws (and its “autonomous model,” its autopoietic principle) prior to any doctrinal or emotional fluctuations. However, since culture is an informational system, and information is transmitted through an inheritance ensured by the linguistic and cultural environment over a broad temporal interval, it follows that cultural semiotics is essentially a semiotics of Memory. Furthermore, as the semiotics of Memory also reveals its genetics, and as cultural memory materializes in a canon (the substance of which consists of works and major issues: “culture... the unique artwork of humanity,” in Lotman’s vision), it follows that the proposed approach provides the premises for a genetics of the cultural canon. In turn, this can serve as a premise for a new cultural theory. This study aims to highlight the possibility and relevance of such an understanding of culture – as a collective mnemonic system with the sense of mentally constructing the world and specifying community identity. The utility of the study is both theoretical (a scientific framework for modeling the concept of culture) and pedagogical (raising awareness of the meaning or function of cultural objects for the community, as well as for individual consciousness).

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