Challenging identity: Lotman’s “translation of the untranslatable” and Derrida’s différance

Author(s): Daniele Monticelli / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2012

The concept of “cultural identity” has gradually replaced such discredited concepts as “race”, “ethnicity”, even “nationality” in the conservative political discourse of recent decades which conceives, represents and performs culture as a closed system with clear-cut boundaries which must be defended from contamination. The article employs the theories of Derrida and Lotman as useful tools for deconstructing this understanding of cultural identity, which has recently become an ideological justification for socio-political conflicts. In fact, their theories spring from a thorough critique of the kind of internalizing self-enclosure which allowed Saussure to delimit and describe langue as the object of linguistics. The article identifies and compares the elements of this critique, focusing on Derrida’s and Lotman’s concepts of “mirror structure”, “binarism”, “numerousness”, “textuality” and “semiosphere”. An understanding of mediation emerges which is not reducible to any kind of definitive acquisition, thereby frustrating the pretences of identity, constantly dislocating and deferring any attempt at semiotic self-enclosure. My comparison suggests that Lotman’s “translation of the untranslatable” (or “dialogue”) and Derrida’s différance can be considered analogous descriptions of this problematic kind of mediation. The (de)constructive nature of culture, as described by Lotman and Derrida, challenges any attempt to view cultural formations as sources of rigid and irreducible identities or differences.

The image of neighbours: Latvian and Lithuanian literature in Estonia

Author(s): Anneli Mihkelev / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2012

The translated text has a specific value in the new culture: it can be a translation of a literary text, and it can be a translation of culture, i.e. a synchronic text of a cultural system. There are two principal concepts which are used in the present article: ‘translation’ and ‘reception’. Reception begins with the selection of the author, literary or historical epoch, literary style, or ideology. So, every translation and reception begins with reading, and every reading creates meanings. At the same time, reception is also translation: it is a moment when two distinct cultures mix, and this situation needs understanding of the other. The translated texts create the image of the translated culture and/or nation. The article examines texts from Latvian and Lithuanian literatures from the second half of the 18th century to the early 20th century which have been translated into Estonian: what kind of texts are translated in different periods and by different translators (the selection of the authors and the texts); what the purpose of the translations is; how these translations translate Latvian or Lithuanian culture into Estonian; and how Estonians understand and accept these translated texts. And, finally, how these translated texts create the image of the translated culture and/or nation.

The city as a mediating device and as a symbol in Finnish poetry of the 1960s

Author(s): Harri Veivo / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2012

In Finnish poetry of the 1960s, the city, and above all the capital Helsinki, is the scene where the metamorphosis of Finland from an agrarian into an urban society is staged, analysed and commented. It is also a symbol that serves to situate the country in the global context, with all the contradictions that were characteristic of the position of Finland in the cold war system. Writing about the city was a means to reflect on the transformations of social and political reality and of the physical environment, a means to represent the confusion these transformations produced or to work towards understanding them. The article analyses the city in texts belonging to the “new poetry” of the 1960s, as well as in texts representing the modernist poetics of the 1950s, arguing that the very co-existence of two contrasting poetic discourses was crucial for the semiotic development of Finnish culture in the period of time in question.

On the semiotic description of autogenesis in culture

Author(s): Tomi Huttunen / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2012

The article is devoted to the notion of autogenesis and mechanism of unpredictable emergence in culture. The notion is treated in the context of the semiotics of culture and the theory of semiosphere. The examples are drawn mainly from Russian avant-garde culture.

The history of humanities as reflected in the evolution of K. Vaginov’s novels

Author(s): Ekaterina Velmezova / Language(s): English Issue: 3-4/2012

In the late 1920s – early 1930s, the Russian poet and novelist Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934) wrote four novels which reproduce various discourses pertaining to the Russian humanities (philosophy, psychology, linguistics, study of literature) of that time. Trying to go back to the source of the corresponding theories and “hidden” quotations by identifying their authors allows us to include Vaginov’s prose in the general intellectual context of his epoch. Analysing Vaginov’s prose in the light of the history of ideas enables us to understand how a number of philological and philosophical trends were interpreted by particular groups of Soviet intellectuals (for instance, writers and poets who were Vaginov’s contemporaries). Besides, it allows us to propose a new interpretation of Vaginov’s novels and their evolution which corresponds to his perception of humanities around him: their many tendencies and peculiarities become unacceptable for the writer in the 1930s.

From stage to brain: Montage as a new principle of scientific narrative

Author(s): Oksana Bulgakowa / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

German Dadaists, Italian and Russian Futurists and Constructivists created in their experiments multi-medial orthopedic bodies as products of collage and montage. Sergei Eisenstein, who was influenced by these experiments, organized his theatrical productions as a chain of independent fragments capable of entering any possible combination/recombination and labelled this method “montage of attractions”. He used the same montage principle not only for a new theatrical or cinematic narrative but also to conceptualize the expressive movement of the theatrical or cinematic body created on stage and on screen. Finally he conceptualized montage not only as a means of conveying movement, but also of conveying a way of thinking. This inspired him to create a new form of scientific narrative in his two unfinished books. The subject to be analysed in the first book from 1929 – montage – inspired him to look for a new structure by organizing different texts in the form of a sphere. This form defined the method of writing his second project on the theory of the arts as a hypertext. Eisenstein gave this book the title Method (1932–1948).

Jean Rouch: etnograafilise filmi semiootika

Author(s): Irene Portis-Winner / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

Jean Rouch (1917–2004) is considered to be the greatest ethnographic filmmaker in the world. His films, which focus primarily on the Songhay of the Upper Niger in Africa, have fundamentally changed the spirit, goals, and methods of ethnographic filmmaking. I ask how Rouch established contact with those he filmed, how his invented semio-ethnic terms and his understanding of twoness and the other informed his practice, and in what sense his films were “shared anthropology” (his term).

Preface. Montage principle and the semiotics of culture

Author(s): Tomi Huttunen / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

Приватизация бунта: “вторая жизнь” раннесоветского монтажа

Author(s): Ilya Kukulin / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2-3/2013

This paper deals with montage in the broad sense of the term: it is discussed not as a principle of film editing, but as an aesthetic method based on the contrasting combination of elements; in the case of literary narrative, montage can be defined as a contrasting parataxis. Being understood in that sense, montage became an international “grand style” of the post-WWI epoch. In the Soviet Union this new method had many ideological connotations. It represented history (the historical process as such) as creative and cruel violence. Otherwise, art montage was a method of designing the utopian vision. The following development of montage in Russian culture could be defined as a change of its semantic. It was expelled from the Socialist Realism mainstream (excluding poster graphics), but survived in unofficial art of the 1940s and became postutopian. During the “Thaw” period (the late 1950s to the early 1960s) montage methods could indicate the connection of an author with the Soviet or Western European avant-garde of the 1920s. The reconsideration of those methods followed two different ways: imitation of the “resurrection of revolutionary impulses” or deconstruction of Soviet historical and social imagination – also with the tools of montage. This very intensive dialogue with the aesthetic tradition of the 1920s came to an end at the beginning of the 1970s. The authors of uncensored art and literature in that period polemicized not with the 1920s, but with the 1960s. The “living” translation of the early Soviet montage aesthetics has been settled.

The place of language among sign systems: Juri Lotman and Émile Benveniste

Author(s): Remo Gramigna / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

This paper seeks to shed light on an unwritten chapter in the history of Tartu semiotics, that is, to draw a parallel between Juri Lotman and Émile Benveniste on the status of natural language among other systems of signs. The tenet that language works as a ‘primary modelling system’ represents one of the trademarks of the Tartu-Moscow school. For Lotman, the primacy assigned to natural language in respect to other systems of signs lied in the fact that the former functions as a ‘model’ for the latter thus regarded as ‘secondary modelling systems’. Yet how does language carry out its function of being a model for other sign systems? Is language the only primary modelling system? This paper seeks to foster the abovementioned claim of the primacy of natural language and argues that this issue deserves a closer inspection. In order to follow this route, it suggests a parallel between Lotman and Benveniste arguing that there exist several points in common that lead to a convergence of positions between these two remarkable scholars. The paper explores such a possibility, arguing that Lotman’s and Benveniste’s positions open up an interesting debate with specific reference to the relations laid down between language and other system of signs.

Table Of Content

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

Punkt – paatos – totaalsus

Author(s): Mikhail Yampolsky / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 2-3/2013

Two situations are possible when two fragments are confronted in montage. First, we can have a continuity corresponding to some established narrative codes. For instance, a character crosses the right border of the frame and reappears from behind the left side of the next frame. Such a figure will be read as a representation of continuity, but shown not in its integrity. The gap in spatial continuity is compensated here by the continuity of a story. On the other hand, we can have a junction that has no support by any code and that opens up opportunities for the display of metaphors, metonyms and allegories. There are also possibilities for violent conflicts and shocks as in Godard. We do not really know how all these non-codified figures of montage work. There is no generally accepted theoretical model that could explain how we are able to synthesize two heterogeneous pieces.

Montage in Russian Imaginism:Poetry, theatre and theory

Author(s): Tomi Huttunen / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

The article discusses the concept of montage as used by the Russian Imaginist poetic group: the montage principle in their poetry, theoretical writings and theatre articles. The leading Imaginist figures Vadim Shershenevich and Anatolij Mariengof were active both in theorizing and practising montage in their oeuvre at the beginning of the 1920s. Shershenevich’s application of the principle in poetry was called “image catalogue”, a radical poetic experiment in the spirit of both Walt Whitman and Sergei Eisenstein. Mariengof ’s main contribution to the montage poetics was his first fictional novel The Cynics (1928). The article also discusses the Imaginists’ writings on the essence of theatre as an autonomous art form – Shershenevich’s actitivy in the OGT (Experimental Heroic Theatre) and Mariengof ’s participation in the work of the MKT (Moscow Kamerny Theatre).

Autocommunication in semiotic systems: 40 years after the Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures

Author(s): Anti Randviir / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

Autocommunication in semiotic systems: 40 years after the Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures (Tartu Summer School in Semiotics 2013)

Lotman’s epistemology: Analogy, culture, world

Author(s): Laura Gherlone / Language(s): English Issue: 2-3/2013

According to Jeanne Parain-Vial and others, humans are characterized by their need for analogy, together with the need for logic and intelligibility, and this need is expressed by a continuous research of models in the scientific field that can, in some aspects, bring to light some properties of reality, namely be analogous of them. The knowability of things is founded on analogy; thus, they are not exhausted by a single model of knowledge but rather through multiple and autonomous forms of comprehension. As also pointed out by Juri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij, mythical thought was the first to postulate the possibility of establishing a relationship of likeness among very different realities, as in the archetypical cosmological model of world: a possibility that, as they explain, has survived in post-archaic man, constituting a fundamental component of cognitive activity and scientific modelling. The article is dedicated to the use of analogy in Lotmanian semiotic theorization and to its heuristic and epistemological value.

Meetriline montaaž: polümeetriliste kompositsioonide teooriast

Author(s): Mihhail Lotman / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 2-3/2013

The theory of polymetrical compositions was founded as late as in the 1970s by Pyotr Rudnev, a scholar of the University of Tartu. While Rudnev approached the problem from the paradigmatic aspect, in the present paper the priority of syntagmatics over paradigmatics is emphasized: the effect of polymetricity is based on the contrast of segments, which is, in its own way, a montage with means of verse technique. Just like in the case of video montage, here as well we can distinguish between straight cut (closed polymetrics in Rudnev’s terms) and dissolve (open polymetrics in Rudnev’s terms). The given types of montage use different semiotic mechanisms and have different semantic effects. The theoretical standpoints are illustrated with examples from Alexander Pushkin’s poetry.

The two pragmatisms in the philosophy of Ivan Sarailiev

Author(s): Andrey Tashev / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2013

Th is article focuses on the views held by the early Bulgarian representative and interpreter of pragmatism Ivan Sarailiev (1887–1969) on the two trends of this doctrine – the method for ascertaining meaning proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce, and the theory of truth propounded by William James. Sarailiev applied and propagated the pragmatist ideas of the doctrine’s founders in Bulgaria in the 1920s, and is thus one of the fi rst followers of Peirce in Europe and the very fi rst in Eastern Europe. How deep was Sarailiev’s understanding of the two types of pragmatism? How did they shape his philosophy and what was their role? Th is article will try to address these questions as well as presenting the overall reception of pragmatism in Bulgaria in the Interwar period through Sarailiev who was its only serious proponent both at the time and long aft erwards.

Augustine on lying: A theoretical framework for the study of types of falsehood

Author(s): Remo Gramigna / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2013

Th is paper presents a theoretical investigation of the issue of lying from a semiotic perspective and its specifi c aim is the analysis of the theory of the lie as conceived by Aurelius Augustinus, bishop of Hippo (354–430 A.D.), also known as Augustine or St. Augustine. Th e latt er devoted two short treatises to the issue of lying: De mendacio (On lying) and Contra mendacium (Against lying), writt en in ca. 395 DC and 420 DC, respectively. Th e paper will focus on duplicity and intention to deceive as fundamental and necessary features of the lie. Augustine’s chief contribution to the study of human deception was to have severed the assessment of what is a lie from factual falsity. For Augustine, at the kernel of the notion of lying lies the idea of intentionality. Following this line of thought, the paper singles out two types of intentionality, namely the intention to assert a falsehood and the intention to mislead. On the basis of this double nature of intentionality, the present paper seeks to outline a theoretical framework for the study of species of falsehoods. Th e outcome is a typology of untruthfulness that envisages a fourfold inventory of falsehoods based on the diff erence between jokes, errors, lies and pretences.

Man, nature, and semiotic modelling or How to create forests and backyards with language

Author(s): Prisca Augustyn / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2013

Th is paper explains how we create concepts such as the forest or the backyard through language. Refl ecting on Andreas Weber’s hope for a revolution of the life sciences and a re-evaluation of the role human beings play in nature, this paper adopts as a starting point Bruno Latour’s characterization of the distinction between nature and culture as an illusion that came with Modernity. Th eoretical notions from modelling systems theory and cognitive linguistics explain that while language plays a key role in constructing new models of nature, new cognitive habits and changes of belief depend on face-to-face and non-verbal communication with other organisms, human and non-human.

Contents

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): Issue: 3-4/2012

TOC of the Issue 3-4/2012