Introduction 3

A Brief History of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School 4

Creative biography of Lotman Yu.M. 7

Semiotics of behavior and other ideas of Lotman Yu.M. ten

Conclusion 23

References 25

Introduction

Semiotics appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. and from the very beginning it was a metascience, a special kind of superstructure over a whole series of sciences operating with the concept of a sign. Despite the formal institutionalization of semiotics (there is a semiotic association, journals, conferences are regularly held, etc.), its status as a unified science is still debatable. Thus, the interests of semiotics extend to human communication (including using natural language), animal communication, information and social processes, the functioning and development of culture, all types of art (including fiction), metabolism, and much more.

In the 20th century semiotics has developed in very different directions. In American semiotics, various non-verbal symbolic systems, such as gestures or animal languages, have become the object of study. In Europe, on the other hand, a tradition dating back to Saussure initially dominated. Semiotics was developed primarily by linguists - L. Elmslev, S.O. Kartsevsky, N.S. Trubetskoy, R.O. Yakobson and others - and literary critics - V.Ya. Propp, Yu.N. Tynyanov, B.M. Eikhenbaum and others.

Two main semiotic centers interacted in the USSR: in Moscow (Vyach.Vs.Ivanov, V.N.Toporov, V.A.Uspensky and others) and Tartu (Yu.M.Lotman, B.M.Gasparov and others) . At the same time, there is good reason to talk about a single Moscow-Tartu (or Tartu-Moscow) school of semiotics, which united researchers on the basis of both substantive and organizational principles.

In Tartu, the department of Russian literature became the center of semiotics, where M.Yu. Lotman, Z.G. Mints, I.A. Chernov and others worked. In 1964, the first collection Proceedings on sign systems, and in the same year the first Summer School on secondary sign systems was held, bringing together two centers, as well as scientists from other cities. Within ten years, five Summer Schools were held. Schools in 1964, 1966 and 1968 were held in Kääriku at the sports base of the University of Tartu, schools in 1970 and 1974 were held in Tartu, the latter being officially called the All-Union Symposium on Secondary Simulation Systems. Much later - in 1986 - another, the last school took place. R. O. Yakobson took part in the second Summer School (1966).

Within the framework of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, two traditions united: the Moscow linguistic and the Leningrad literary criticism, since Yu.M. Lotman and Z.G. Mints belonged to the latter.

Short story.

There are more than enough materials about the academic "phenomenon" of the Tartu-Moscow school. At least three voluminous monographs are devoted directly to the Tartu-Moscow School (TMS), and the number of references and references that in one way or another affect the topic of TMS cannot be counted at all. Finally, 25 issues of "Works on sign systems" (published during Yu.M. Lotman's lifetime) speak for themselves.

The temporal boundaries of the Tartu-Moscow school (with its "classic" composition of participants) can be defined as follows: the beginning of the 60s - the end of the 70s. (early 80s). People came to TIS in different ways and left in different ways. They were united by one thing - dissatisfaction with the existing methodology of science (engaged by Marxism in the understanding of scientific functionaries), the search for new ways and opportunities, and the ethical rejection of the conformism of late Soviet academic life. The school was not only a search for a new language, it was also a way to be, that "invisible college" whose password was the semiotic language of description and inner freedom.

Formally, TIS began its history in 1964, when the "First Semiotic Summer School" organized by the humanitarians of Tartu and Moscow was held in Kääriku (a sports base of TSU near Tartu).

The development of structuralist methods by Yu.M. Lotman and the Moscow participants of the Tartu School took place in parallel and independently of each other - with Lotman in the form of lectures on structural poetics (1960-1962), published in 1964, with the Moscow section - in the form of a symposium on the structural study of sign systems (which was preceded by the opening of a number of departments of structural and applied linguistics at several universities), held in 1962 under the organization of the Institute of Slavic Studies and the Council for Cybernetics. However, 1956 should be considered the year of the “foundation” of structuralism in the USSR: “That year (1956, - ​​I.V.), on September 24, the seminar “Some Applications of Mathematical Research in Linguistics” began to work at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University - the first seminar on mathematical linguistics in the USSR".

We will not dwell on the description of what place Tartu occupied in the former Soviet Union, and how exactly the mental climate of Tartu and the general mood of the first summer schools in Kääriku influenced the formation of TIS. Much has been written about this, and perhaps even more than enough. If we talk about the emergence of the structural method and its spread in the USSR, then this process was initiated by a symposium on the structural study of sign systems, held in 1962 under the organization of the Institute of Slavic Studies and the Council for Cybernetics in Moscow.

Here is how B. A. Uspensky describes the first period in the development of Soviet semiotics and the Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems in the article "On the Problem of the Genesis of the Tartu-Moscow School": "Thus, the symposium was a completely new phenomenon in our science, and this attracted people to There were presentations on the semiotics of language, logical semiotics, machine translation, semiotics of art, mythology, description of the language of non-verbal communication systems (in particular, such as traffic signals, the language of card divination, etc.), semiotics of communication with the deaf-blind, semiotics of ritual. P. G. Bogatyrev, V. V. Ivanov, V. N. Toporov, L. F. Zhegin, A. A. Zaliznyak, and some others took part in the symposium. our program was outlined and the main provisions of each of the reports were formulated. These theses were destined to play an important role in the dissemination of our ideas. It was from this booklet that they learned about us as our opponents nts, ​​and our future supporters and colleagues.< … >At the University of Tartu, an active scientific team had formed at the Department of Russian Literature by this time (the actual creator of it was B.F. Egorov, the participants were Yu.M. Lotman, Z.G. Mints, I.A. Chernov and a group of students), interested in the methods of analysis of a poetic text, as well as the study of ideological models of culture. In the 1960/61 academic year, Yu. M. Lotman began to read a course of lectures on structural poetics. The reading of the course continued in subsequent years, and in 1962 the book "Lectures on Structural Poetics" was put into print, which was published in 1964 and became the first issue of "Works on Sign Systems".

Shortly after the 1962 Moscow symposium, I. Chernov arrived in Moscow and, having made contact with its participants, brought the theses to Tartu. So this little book of theses fell into the hands of Yu. M. Lotman (who was not a participant in the symposium, but independently arrived at similar problems). He became very interested in her and, having arrived in Moscow, offered to cooperate on the basis of the University of Tartu. Since that time (1964), the publication of "Works on Sign Systems" began.<…>and holding conferences. Conferences 1964, 1966, 1968 were held in Kääriku, 1970 and 1974. - in Tartu. The atmosphere at the conferences was exceptionally relaxed. They played a big role in developing common views, a single platform, in rallying heterogeneous ideas into a single direction. The reports naturally turned into discussions, and the main role was played not by monologic, but by dialogic forms. What distinguished these meetings was the complete absence of any organization whatsoever.<…>So, the Tartu-Moscow school began with the activities of the Moscow group, and this determined its initial focus. As already mentioned, the Moscow representatives are professional linguists, each with his own specialty (Ivanov is a Hittologist, Toporov is a Baltist and Indologist, Revzin is a Germanist, Lekomtsev is a specialist in the Vietnamese language, Zaliznyak and I are Slavists, although Zaliznyak can equally be considered Indologist, Semitologist). However, we are all united by an interest in structural linguistics, everyone has works in this area, and our studies in semiotics directly go back to studies in structural linguistics, representing their natural logical continuation. This circumstance initially determined our approach and, I would say, the specifics of our direction - what I would propose to call the linguistic approach to semiotics.<…>At first, this connection with structural linguistics, i.e. the linguistic platform of our studies was very clearly felt (I mean the 1960s). 1960s - this is a period of search, first of all - the expansion of the object of study, the extrapolation of linguistic methods to more and more new objects. In turn, the attraction of new material inevitably influenced our methods, eventually stimulating a break away from purely linguistic methodology.

School timeline:

1964 - 1st summer semiotic school in Kääriku. Foundation of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. Works on sign systems become a periodical publication (within the framework of scientific notes of TSU).

1966 - 2nd summer school.

1968 - 3rd summer school

1970 - 4th summer school.

1974 - 5th "winter" school (All-Union symposium on secondary modeling systems).

The period of semiotic upsurge in the USSR, the period of "storm and onslaught" ended, in many respects, not because of internal, objective differences between the participants in this process, but because of pressure on the school from outside. Some of the TIS members were forced to emigrate, the publication of "Proceedings on sign systems" was repeatedly delayed, and the articles of TIS participants were censored. There were, of course, internal reasons that contributed to the extinction of the impulse set in the early 60s. This was a rejection of a somewhat simplified view of semiotics as the creation of some global terminological dictionary of culture. This approach quickly proved to be utopian and untenable, and TIS members moved to a new stage in understanding cultural studies, where culture was understood not in a mechanistic aspect, but in a more complex, organic one. In many ways, the difficulties of the school were also caused by the general crisis of structuralist methodology, which made itself felt already in the 1970s.

Having learned a new semiotic language, TIS participants went further along their own paths, and although these paths often crossed, from now on, each of the former "Tartusians" uses it rather in the field of their scientific interests. As such, the Tartu-Moscow School no longer exists (although this position can be disputed), having split into two branches - the Tartu School of Semiotics and the Moscow School.

Creative biography of Lotman Yu.M.

Lotman Yuri Mikhailovich (1922–1993) - Russian literary critic, semiotician, culturologist. Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Corresponding Member of the British Academy of Sciences, Member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. Creator of the well-known Tartu semiotic school and founder of a whole trend in literary studies at the University of Tartu in Estonia (until 1991 Estonia was part of the USSR).

Lotman was born in Petrograd on February 28, 1922. As a schoolboy, Lotman listened to lectures by the famous G.A. Gukovsky at the philological faculty of Leningrad State University. In 1939–1940 he studied at the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad State University, where brilliant philologists taught then: V.F. Shishmarev, L.V. Shcherba, D.K. Zelenin, V.M. Zhirmunsky, V.Ya. Azadovsky, B.M. Eikhenbaum, B.V. Tomashevsky, V.V. Gippius and others. In 1940 he was drafted into the army, demobilized in 1946.

In 1946–1950 he resumed his studies at the Faculty of Philology of the Leningrad State University, where he headed the student scientific society of the faculty. After graduating from the university, he could not get a job in Leningrad, because at that time the well-known “struggle against cosmopolitanism” began. In 1950 he received a position as a senior lecturer at the Pedagogical Institute in Tartu.

In 1952 he defended his thesis on the topic "A.N. Radishchev in the fight against the socio-political views and noble aesthetics of N.M. Karamzin." In 1960 he defended his doctoral thesis: "Ways of development of Russian literature of the pre-Decembrist period."

Lotman's entire later life was connected with Tartu, where he later became the head of the Department of Russian Literature at the University of Tartu, where, together with his wife, Z.G. Mints, and B.F. Egorov, he attracted talented people and created a brilliant school for the study of Russian classical literature. Throughout his life, Lotman studied Russian literature of the second half of the 18th - mid-19th centuries. (Radischev, Karamzin, Decembrist writers, Pushkin, Gogol, etc.). Lotman introduces an active study of the facts of life and behavior of the corresponding eras into the sphere of purely literary criticism, creates literary "portraits" of famous Russian people. Commentary on Eugene Onegin and Lotman's research on the life and behavior of the Decembrists became classic literary works. Later, Lotman gave series of lectures on Russian literature and culture on television.

Lotman was especially interested in the relationship between “literature” and “life”: he was able to detect cases of the influence of literature on life and the formation of human destiny (for example, the idea of ​​“Northern Hamlet”, as if prejudging the fate of Emperor Paul I). Lotman was able to reveal the hidden content of the text by comparing it with reality (for example, he proved that Karamzin's true journey through Europe differed from his route in Letters from a Russian traveler, and suggested that the true route was hidden, because it was associated with the participation of Karamzin in the society of Masons). Such comparisons allowed Lotman to conclude that there were "lies" in the memoirs and epistolary texts of a number of figures of Russian culture (for example, the Decembrist Zavalishin). Significant and new for Pushkin studies was the discovery by Lotman of a meaningful dominant antithesis in Pushkin's texts: "gentleman - robber" or "dandy - villain", which could be embodied in different character models.

Lotman's significant innovation was the introduction into the analysis of a literary text of an appeal to the geographical space described in it, which, as Lotman showed on the example of Gogol's stories, often performs a plot-forming function.

An important moment in Lotman's creative biography was his acquaintance in the early 1960s with a circle of Moscow semioticians (V.N. at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The complex of new ideas of the early 1960s - cybernetics, structuralism, machine translation, artificial intelligence, binarism in cultural description, etc. - attracted Lotman and forced him to largely reconsider his original Marxist literary orientation.

In 1964, in Kääriku (Estonia), under the leadership of Lotman, the First Summer School for the Study of Sign Systems was organized, which brought together representatives of new areas of science. These schools then met every two years until 1970. R. Yakobson and K. Pomorskaya were able (with great difficulty) to come to one of the schools.

The rapprochement between Moscow and Tartu was embodied in the famous series Proceedings on sign systems, published in Tartu (the 26th issue was published in 1998) and for a long time served as a tribune for new ideas. Lotman wrote joint theoretical works with a number of participants in summer schools, in particular, with A.M. Piatigorsky and especially with B.A. Uspensky, with whom Lotman collaborated a lot ( cm. famous work Myth - Name - Culture. - Proceedings on sign systems, 6, 1973), where fundamental questions were raised about the essence of the sign.

The persecution of the authorities, which Moscow semioticians experienced immediately after the Symposium, as well as the general tightening of the Soviet regime, also affected Lotman's position at the University of Tartu: he left the post of head of the department and was forced to move to the department of foreign literature. Semiotic works were published more and more with great complications. Summer schools ceased. But Lotman's popularity continued to grow during these years: he often came to Moscow and Leningrad with reports and lectures. Lotman's works began to be translated abroad.

Passion for semiotic ideas led Lotman to in-depth study of the semiotics of cinema, artificial intelligence, and the functioning of the cerebral hemispheres. The central work of this period was a generalizing book Universe of the Mind, prepared for the English edition (in the Russian version: Inside thinking worlds, 1996). Considering the symbol as the most significant type of sign for cultural studies, Lotman mainly deals with symbols (to a lesser extent - indices and iconic signs) and shows the preservation of symbols when changing cultural paradigms.

Lotman owns the definition of the semiosphere - semiotic space, which is fundamentally heterogeneous and which he compares with a museum, where a number of ordered semiotic spaces function: exhibits, file cabinets, employees, exposition, etc. The "plot" begins when one goes beyond the semiosphere; such a role is played, for example, by Dostoevsky's "scandals". Lotman considers a miracle as a way out of the semiosphere, the combination of scandal and miracle is a gambling game for the same Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Territorial exit beyond the border of the semiosphere characterizes a special layer of personalities: a sorcerer, a robber, an executioner. They live, as a rule, in the forest, and communicate with them at night. Center and periphery in the semiosphere can change places: St. Petersburg becomes the capital, hippies become respectable citizens, Roman generals turn out to be from barbarian provinces, and so on. Referring to geographic space as part of the semiosphere, Lotman shows the role of the boundary in Dante's Ade and demonstrates the combination of geographical and moral movements in the poetics of the Middle Ages. Also significant is Lotman's introduction of spatial opposition in Bulgakov's work, in whose works "heaven" is equal to the House as opposed to "hell" - the Soviet communal apartment.

The second important work of recent years is the book Culture and explosion(1992), showing the influence of the ideas of I.Prigozhin and R.Thoma about the explosion and catastrophes as the engines of history.

In the post-Soviet period, Lotman's popularity contributed to a new wave of publications of Tartu publications and books by Lotman himself, as well as his contacts with a number of Western European universities and academies. In 1992, the Department of Semiotics was established at the University of Tartu under the leadership of Lotman.

Semiotics of behavior and other ideas of Lotman

We can represent the history of Russian semiotics in the form of three successive periods, the last of which is the Moscow-Tartu school, which ended with the death of Yu. Lotman and the emigration of its main participants.

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) - professor at the University of Tartu, began his career as a theater critic in Leningrad. During the period of the struggle against the cosmopolitans, he left for Estonia, where a center of semiotics was created in the former Soviet Union (thanks to a certain liberalism of the then local leadership). "Works on sign systems", which were published as scientific notes of the University of Tartu, played a big role in the formation and development of semiotics in the USSR. Today Alexander Zholkovsky recalls this period as follows:

"Structuralism in Russian Soviet culture was always some kind of extremist and marginal - Westernizing - thing. Boris Mikhailovich Gasparov wrote that the movement in Tartu was for us a kind of pre-emigration, both territorial and cultural - to the geographical periphery and from ordinary sciences to semiotics - and for many it turned out to be just a springboard for emigration. At the same time, Boris Uspensky emphasizes, unlike A. Zholkovsky, the Russian cultural tradition: "Yu. Lotman studied with Gukovsky, Zhirmunsky, Propp. At the same time, we directly communicated with R. O. Yakobson, P. G. Bogatyrev, M. M. Bakhtin. Until his death, P. G. Bogatyrev was an indispensable participant in our conferences and classes. R. O. Yakobson took part in one of the Tartu summer schools (in 1966 we celebrated his 70 M. M. Bakhtin could not take part in our meetings (he did not have a leg, and he was practically immobile), but he was keenly interested in our work ". And indeed, the first works of Yu. Lotman are to a large extent built on the development of the ideas of the Russian formal school. But we are interested in political semiotics in the works of Yuri Lotman, so we narrow the spectrum of our consideration after some introduction to the general problems of the works of Yuri Lotman.

Yuri Lotman is quite critical of R. Yakobson's model of communication, as if considering it to be too "technicalized". R. Jacobson's concept of "code" deserves special criticism. Yu. Lotman's opinion is that language is a code plus its history. He writes: "In fact, the substitution of the term "language" for the term "code" is not at all as safe as it seems. The term "code" carries the idea of ​​a structure that has just been created, artificial and introduced by instantaneous agreement. The code does not imply history, i.e. psychologically it orients us towards an artificial language, which is supposed to be the ideal model of language in general.

Yuri Lotman, in his model of communication, answers, among other questions, the following question: how is it possible, in principle, to generate a new message. "We will call new messages those that do not arise as a result of unambiguous transformations and, therefore, cannot be automatically derived from some source text by applying predetermined transformation rules to it." From this follows his fundamental idea that sign (semiotic) communication is a connection between autonomous units. If they coincide, then nothing new can arise between them. Continuing this idea of ​​non-coincidence, Yu. Lotman says: "The inadequacy of communication agents turns this very fact from passive transmission into a conflict game, during which each side seeks to rebuild the semiotic world of the opposite in its own way and at the same time is interested in preserving the originality of its counterparty" . From this follows the novelty of understanding the text not as isolated and stable, not as a constant. The creator and his audience are introduced into the concept of the text, and their ideas about the text may not coincide in their volumes.

In his first works, Yu. Lotman puts into his understanding of artistic communication the ideas of Russian formalists (V. Shklovsky and others), namely the ratio of automatism and informativeness. In this regard, Boris Tomashevsky distinguished between artistic speech and practical speech. In artistic speech there is an attitude towards expression, a form that is not found in ordinary speech. Y. Lotman formulates this in the following way, which already takes into account the dynamic aspect of such opposition. "In order for the general structure of the text to retain information content, it must constantly be removed from the state of automatism that is inherent in non-artistic structures. However, the opposite trend also works at the same time: only elements placed in certain predictable sequences can play the role of communicative systems. Thus, in the structure In a literary text, two opposite mechanisms work simultaneously: one seeks to subordinate all elements of the text to the system, to turn them into an automated grammar, without which an act of communication is impossible, and the other to destroy this automation and make the structure itself a carrier of information.

In his distinction between folklore art and non-folklore art, Y. Lotman inscribes another interesting communicative feature. Now we are talking about ritual communication. In the past, a person could read one book (the "Bible") all his life, today a person builds his information flow in a different way - he increases the number of texts. Yu. Lotman interprets these two variants of communication as receiving from outside (a set of texts) and receiving from within (the Bible).

"We can consider two cases of increasing the information owned by any individual or team. One is receiving from the outside. In this case, the information is generated somewhere on the side and transmitted to the recipient in a constant volume. The second is constructed differently: only a certain part of the information is received from the outside , which plays the role of an exciter that causes an increase in information within the consciousness of the recipient.

It means reading and thinking about what you read. Lotman explains: “The recipient of a folklore (as well as medieval) artistic message is only placed in favorable conditions in order to listen to himself. He is not only a listener, but also a creator. This is the reason why such a canonical system does not lose its ability to be information active. In another work, he separates these two processes as the "I - HE" process and the "I - I" process. "If the communicative system" I - OH "provides only the transfer of a certain constant amount of information, then in the channel" I - I "its qualitative transformation takes place, which leads to the restructuring of this very "I". The system "I - I" begins to work when from the outside, additional codes are switched on that change the context situation.As an example, he cites the impact of measured sounds (the sound of wheels, rhythmic music) on a person’s internal monologue.

Yu. Lotman distinguishes between binary and ternary systems of culture. If the "explosion" within the ternary system preserves certain values, moving them from the periphery to the center of the system, then this does not happen within our binary system. The explosion in this case covers everything. "A characteristic feature of explosive moments in binary systems is their experience of themselves as a unique, incomparable moment in the entire history of mankind" .

The special status of the visual language, namely the film language, was also the subject of research by Yuri Lotman. If in Culture and Explosion he speaks of art as the most developed space of imaginary reality, then in his works on cinema he rather speaks of the limitations imposed on this kind of reality. Thus, he notes that the cinema knows only the present tense. Distinguishing between "text that can be false" and "text that cannot be false," he speaks of photography as the most reliable text in the general system of cultural texts of the early 20th century. The art of cinema moves within the framework of discoveries designed to banish this kind of automatism. For example, such Soviet directors as S. Eisenstein and others in the era of the emergence of sound cinema defended the thesis that the combination of visual and sound images should not be automatic, but motivated.

Another feature of the cinema, noted by Yu. Lotman, is the mobility of the point of view. If in the case of a painted picture the position chosen by the artist remains unchanged, then in the case of cinema the situation is different. Lotman says that cinema is the only kind of visual art in which the point of view has mobility and therefore plays an important role in building the language of this art.

Yuri Lotman did a lot for the development of communicative ideas in the territory of the former Soviet Union. One of the shortcomings of the constructions he proposed was the orientation towards artistic communication. He paid much less attention to other contexts of language use, taking the features of artistic codes as a universal mechanism.

In his voluminous work “Conversations about Russian culture. Life and traditions of the Russian nobility (XVIII - early XIX century) ”, which was released after the death of the author, Y. Lotman examines in sufficient detail various options for the text of behavior, approaching it as a semiotic phenomenon. He begins his consideration with those hierarchical systems that existed in society and imposed their own framework on behavior. The first in this list is the concept of "rank". Yu.Lotman believed that without service it was impossible to get a rank, and a nobleman who did not have a rank would seem like a white crow. An undergrowth such and such is just a person who does not have a rank. Dishes were served to the ranks at dinner parties, and people completing this list could only see empty plates. The rank of the writer and the one to whom he addressed determined the ritual and form of writing. Chin determined not real, but, as it were, semiotic properties of a person - "his place in the hierarchy."

The next order that determines life was the system of orders introduced by Peter I. The general meaning of the change carried out by Peter was that instead of an award-thing, an award-sign appeared. If before the reward consisted in the fact that a person was granted valuable items, now he was awarded a badge that had only a conditional value in the system of state distinctions, "that is, we are faced with a clear semiotization of reality.

The same applies to uniforms: "All changes in uniforms were signed personally by the emperor, and for Paul, Alexander I and Nicholas I, as well as for the brother of Alexander and Nicholas, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, these classes turned into a real" uniform ". Another hierarchy was the nobility system "Each of these systems strove for an autonomous existence, but it was won over. So was the system of nobility: "As the independence of the nobility increased, it began to be more and more burdened by the two main principles of the Peter's concept of service: its obligatory nature and the possibility for a non-nobleman to become a nobleman by rank and service" , that is, it is precisely the violation of the autonomous existence of the system of nobility that causes rejection, arising from its intersection with the public service.

Yu. Lotman traces not only patterns of official, state behavior, but also texts of private life. Thus, he draws his and our attention to the phenomenon of "Russian dandyism." The art of dandyism, he argues, creates a complex system of its own culture, which outwardly manifests itself in a kind of "poetry of sophisticated costume." The costume is an external sign of dandyism, but not at all its essence. What is the essence of dandyism? It is impudence, covered with mocking politeness, that forms the basis of the dandy's behavior.

Considering the possible intersection of the behavior of the dandy and political liberalism in the case of P. A. Chaadaev or Prince. P. A. Vyazemsky, Yu. Lotman still considers dandyism to be behavior, not ideology, since it is limited to a narrow sphere of everyday life. He names other examples of such an intersection: “It is precisely this duplicity that has become a characteristic feature of the strange symbiosis of dandyism and the St. dandy" Vorontsov was waiting for the fate of the commander-in-chief of the Separate Caucasian Corps, the governor of the Caucasus, Field Marshal General and His Grace Prince. Chaadaev, on the other hand, had a completely different fate - the official declaration of madness. Lermontov's rebellious Byronism would no longer fit within the boundaries of dandyism, although, reflected in Pechorin's mirror, he will discover this, receding into the past, ancestral connection.

The text of behavior is very often built on verbal patterns: Examples of how people of the late 18th - early 19th centuries build their personal behavior, everyday speech, and ultimately their life destiny according to literary and theatrical patterns are very numerous. This is also a reflection of the strong semioticization of the life of that era. Moreover, the texts that themselves imitated life (and these are Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) did not cause reader imitation.

It should be noted that here we are building a largely systemic world. "The life of the nobility in the 18th - early 19th centuries was built as a set of alternative possibilities ("service - resignation", "life in the capital - life in the estate", "Petersburg - Moscow", "military service - civil service", "guards - army" and etc.), each of which implied a certain type of behavior.The same person behaved in St. Petersburg differently than in Moscow, in the regiment differently than in the estate, in ladies' society just like in the barracks, but at the ball it’s different than at the “hour of a bachelor’s feast” (Pushkin).

Different variants of the collective behavior of people determined the biographies and styles of behavior. Thus, the fight simplified the forms of communication, abolishing the social hierarchy. "Where, besides the field of Austerlitz, could a junior officer see the crying emperor? In addition, the atoms of the social structure turned out to be much more mobile in their orbits in battle than in public life crushed by the bureaucratic law and order. That "case" that made it possible to bypass the middle steps of the social hierarchy, jumping from below directly to the top and which in the 18th century was associated with the bed of the empress, at the beginning of the 19th century evoked the image of Bonaparte near Toulon or on the Arcole bridge.

Another option for collective behavior is a parade, and here we can transfer Yuri Lotman's analysis to today's reality. He writes that the parade was the exact opposite - it strictly regulated the behavior of each person, turning him into a silent cog in a huge machine. He did not leave any room for variability in the behavior of the unit. But the initiative moves to the center, to the personality of the parade commander. Analyzing the situation of "Paul I at the parade", Y. Lotman writes: "The beautiful is tantamount to fulfilling the rules, and deviation from the norms, even the slightest, is perceived as aesthetically ugly and punishable in a disciplinary manner. The highest criterion of beauty is "slimness", that is, the ability of various people move uniformly, according to predetermined rules. The connoisseur is more interested in the harmony and beauty of movements here than in the plot. The question: "How will it end?" - both in ballet and at the parade becomes of secondary importance. "

This work grew out of the early work of Yu. Lotman on the everyday behavior of the Decembrists. Here again, the highly systemic nature of this study is evident. "It is indicative not only how a Decembrist could behave, but also how he could not behave, rejecting certain variants of the noble behavior of his time." The personal experience of the officers made people of action out of the Decembrists: "They were interested in political doctrines, as a rule (of course, there were exceptions - for example, N. Turgenev), not in themselves, but as criteria for evaluating and choosing certain courses of action."

The behavior of the Decembrists is based on the clash of two different canons. On the one hand, they learned the norms of European culture, on the other hand, they had a landowner's economy, service. It was this plurality of behavior, the possibility of choosing styles of behavior depending on the situation, the duality, which consisted in distinguishing between the practical and the ideological, that characterized the Russian progressive person of the early 19th century. Against this background, the implementation of the texts of the new behavior took place. First of all, the distinction between oral and written speech was abolished: high orderliness, political terminology, syntactic completeness of written speech was transferred to oral use. Famusov had reason to say that Chatsky "speaks like he writes."

One of the explanations for the different behavior of these people, from our point of view, may be an element of their early adulthood, which took place within the framework of a different culture. The following characteristic can serve as an indirect confirmation of this. “The Decembrists cultivated seriousness as a norm of behavior. Zavalishin characteristically emphasized that he "was always serious" and even as a child "never played." The attitude of the Decembrists to the culture of verbal play as a form of speech behavior was just as negative.

The strong semiotic behavior of the Decembrists forced them to generate both verbal and non-verbal texts with the help of uniform rules. The "unity of style" in the behavior of the Decembrist had a peculiar feature - the general "literary" behavior of the romantics, the desire to consider all actions as significant. On the one hand, this led to an increase in the role of gestures in everyday behavior. (A gesture is an action or an act that has not so much a practical orientation as a certain meaning; a gesture is always a sign and a symbol. Therefore, any action on the stage, including an action that imitates complete liberation from theatricality, complete naturalness, is a gesture; its meaning is an intention And vice versa: gestural behavior always seems to be theatrical to one degree or another.) From this point of view, the everyday behavior of the Decembrist would appear to the modern observer as theatrical, designed for the viewer.

The systemic nature of this behavior changes for Yuri Lotman the usual relationship between word and deed. The "literariness" and "theatricality" of practical, everyday behavior led to the displacement of habitual semantic connections. In ordinary life, a word causes an action: what is said in words receives a real completion in action. In the life behavior of the Decembrist, as on the stage, the order turns out to be the opposite: the deed as a practical action was increased by the Word - its result, evaluation, disclosure of its symbolic meaning. What was done, but remained unnamed in a theoretical recitation, in a historian's note, or in any other text, has disappeared from the memory of posterity and, as it were, does not exist. In life, a word exists if it entails an action; in the views of the Decembrist, an act exists if it is crowned with the Word.

Consistency, on the other hand, required the correlation of patterns of behavior with patterns given by the context. Yuri Lotman builds the following hierarchy: gesture - deed - behavioral text. If a gesture and an action acquired meaning by correlating with a word, then any chain of actions became a text (acquired meaning) if it could be clarified by its connection with a certain literary plot. The death of Caesar and the feat of Cato, the prophet denouncing and preaching, Tyrtaeus, Ossian or Bayan singing in front of the soldiers on the eve of the battle (the last plot was created by Narezhny), Hector leaving for battle and saying goodbye to Andromache - these were the plots that gave meaning to that or some other chain of household actions. This approach implied the "enlargement" of all behavior, the distribution of typical literary masks among real acquaintances, the idealization of the place and space of action (the real space was comprehended through the literary one). That is, the symbolic world here set the boundaries and norms of the real world, even prevailing over them.

And the last feature of that period: this type of behavior was included in all types of human behavior and relationships. "If for the subsequent stages of the social movement breaks of friendship, love, long-term attachments for reasons of ideology and politics are typical, then it is typical for the Decembrists that the political organization itself is clothed in the forms of directly human closeness, friendship, attachment to a person, and not only to his convictions. ". All participants in political life were included in some kind of strong non-political ties. They were relatives, fellow soldiers, comrades in educational institutions, participated in the same battles, or simply turned out to be close acquaintances." Interestingly, they felt the significance of their behavior for history: "The sense of the political significance of all their behavior was replaced in Siberia, in an era when historicism became the leading idea of ​​the time, a sense of historical significance."

Let us now turn our attention to some other semiotic ones. ideas of Yuri Lotman. Having singled out signification and communication as two basic semiotic spheres, U. Eco (Eco U. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington-London, 1976) left out the third sphere - dynamics, which should be understood as the laws of changing models of signification and communication as one time, as well as in different historical periods. This is not just a diachronic aspect, since in dynamics the ratio and interdependence of different systems of signification and communication in one synchronic slice is also illuminated. As an example, we can compare the coverage of the same event by different channels of mass communication (radio, TV, print), display it in literature, transfer this story to a film text, etc. It is, as it were, a problem of semiotic translation, a problem of semiotic transformation, when some structural elements are preserved while others change.

Yu. Lotman offers his concept of the dynamic aspect of semiotics in his work "Culture and Explosion". "Language is a code plus its history," he writes, rejecting the already traditional structuralist view of language only as a code.

Such dynamic aspects have always been in the field of attention of Russian formalism.

For the first time, Yu. Lotman proposed the main ideas of his concept in the preprint "Culture as Collective Intelligence and the Problems of Artificial Intelligence". Here he emphasized the importance of the diversity of individuals for society, since the presence of different people allows us to offer not one solution, but different versions of it, which is especially important in situations of uncertainty in which human society lives. In those years, these words sounded especially unusual in the conditions of the fundamental underestimation of the individual, personal principle, characteristic of a totalitarian society.

It should be emphasized that not only intellectual baggage is associated with the name of Yu. Lotman. Lotman recreated the climate of culture, the status of a humanitarian, lost during the decades of the triumphant rule of Soviet power. The University of Tartu in those years was an island of intellectual heretics throughout the former Soviet Union, and Professor Lotman rightfully occupied the head of this school. I remember how in the seventies I attended one of the Tartu seminars on the study of secondary modeling systems (as semiotics was then paraphrased). And I well remember one direct feeling of that time: if Yu. Lotman had recruited slaves for himself at that moment, I would have immediately joined their number. Such was Professor Lotman in the perception of a graduate student of the seventies.

In the latest book, Lotman describes culture as an integral mechanism. In its essence, he sees a dynamic element of two kinds - evolution and explosion. Each new school, each new direction is an explosion, because it was not predictable. Therefore, cultural phenomena are recognized as authorial, in contrast to the technical world, where, due to the evolutionary nature of changes, authorship is not so significant. “The fact is that the creativity of even a bad singer is personal in nature,” writes Yu. Lotman. “The creativity of even a good engineer, as it were, dissolves in the general anonymous flow of technology. If the bridge failed, the engineer’s name would probably be remembered, because it would be a remarkable event. A good bridge dissolves in the general flow of the state of the art ".

Here, Yu. Lotman returns to the idea of ​​deautomatization, which is characteristic of the structure of a literary work, which is characterized by ambiguity. "A literary text does not have one solution," therefore it is meaningless to say that I have already heard this symphony, although it is possible that I have already solved this problem.

At every moment in time, any society has its own models of signification and its own models of communication, recognizing some of them as more central, others as peripheral. This is similar to the problem of recognizing that there is truth, that there is a lie, as M. Foucault wrote about in his time. Society is struggling to recognize certain texts as more correct and necessary. Some of them begin to crowd out others, doing this through the attention of criticism, inclusion in the lists for compulsory reading at school and at the university, etc. From this point of view, the problem of impeachment becomes semiotic - Nixon or Yeltsin begin to be seen as figures who cannot be president because they do not behave according to the model.

Z. Freud, in general, built his reasoning in a close area, when he dealt with issues of repression, sublimation, slips of the tongue, etc., which again take place because of their inconsistency with the correct model from the point of view of the subject.

We see a similar problem today in the fact that the film text on the TV screen displaces the book text in the hands of a person. Here the correspondence no longer lies in the realm of reality equivalence, but rather in the image of an idealized reality. It is to him that the film text satisfies to a greater extent. He is also more referential, since the hero of the movie has a lot of details that still need to be thought out in the case of a book. In general, this is more commercial art, which, as Lotman notes, always wins over the real.

Real art is a manifestation of the unpredictable. Many pages of "Culture and Explosion" deal with the phenomenon of normal/abnormal behavior. In this regard, the behavior of both the smart and the fool seems predictable, but the status of a madman allows any revelations. Therefore, in the past, such deviant warriors fell into the number of combatants, with their incomprehensible behavior they confused the enemy. In Soviet history, the role of such carriers of abnormal behavior was played by dissidents, whose actions did not at all coincide with the patterns of behavior accepted in a given society. They spoke when they should have been silent, and they were silent when they should have spoken.

Yu. Lotman also includes fashion in the sphere of the unpredictable. He says that the audience should not understand fashion and resent it. In the aspect of unpredictability, Yu. Lotman also sees the difference between human and animal behavior: animal behavior is ritualistic, human behavior tends to invent something new, unpredictable for opponents. From the point of view of man, stupidity is attributed to the animal, from the point of view of the animal, dishonesty (disobedience to the rules) is attributed to man.

In another work, Y. Lotman connects the emergence of writing with this moment of unpredictability: “in order for writing to become necessary, the instability of historical conditions, the dynamism and unpredictability of circumstances, and the need for a variety of semiotic translations that arise with frequent and prolonged contacts with a foreign ethnic environment are required” .

Yu. Lotman concludes his reasoning with a comparison of binary and ternary systems, the former, in his opinion, are characteristic of the Slavic world, the latter - for the Western. An explosion within the ternary system does not destroy everything that exists. In binary systems, the explosion covers everything. A characteristic feature of explosive moments in binary systems is their experience of themselves as a unique, incomparable moment in the entire history of mankind. Lotman sees modern life in the CIS countries as an attempt to move from a binary system to a ternary one. At the same time, he believes that the emerging order will not become a copy of the Western one, because "history does not know repetition. It loves new, unpredictable roads."

Associating the phenomena of culture with explosive processes, it seems to us, Yu. Lotman somewhat exaggerates the real situation, deliberately coarsens it. In contrast to this, it should be emphasized that culture is rather based on the predictable unpredictable, otherwise we would gradually come to complete chaos, but even in the unpredictable there is an element of order before us.

The sphere of the unpredictable is much wider than the sphere of the predictable, but because of its unstructured nature, we cannot experience it as a single model. Often, however, this area is within the scope of permitted behavior. Thus, the text is constantly built on the element of the unpredictable, since deautomatization is introduced into it. A certain element of unpredictability is embedded in elementary everyday conversation. That is, unpredictability should become the same object of semiotic study as the predictable has become for linguistics. Grammar is a canonization of the predictable. The unpredictable and the predictable can be related to each other by analogy discourse/text, where the discourse includes the social, and the linguistic text - the aspect of the same phenomenon.

In reality, the work of science is characterized by an expansion of the sphere of the predictable and a contraction of the sphere of the unpredictable. “What is given and what seems to be content to an untested researcher is resolved into a more complex system of forms and stratifications of forms, the deeper he delves into this content. Such is the progress of science, resolving each content into a system of forms and each “object” into a system of relations ", such is the progress of poetry. The measure of the content that fills a given form is the determination of the level to which our analysis has penetrated," G. Shpet wrote back in 1923. In general, the realm of the unpredictable, like the realms associated with psychoanalysis, should be covered in semiotics. Before us is a single sphere of human mentality. Increased research attention to this aspect will simultaneously give an answer to many other questions of the semiotic structuring of society, man and literature.

In conclusion, we note that some of the ideas of Yuri Lotmam are almost verbatim formulations of certain provisions that are part of the basic background of public relations. Let's take a look at some of them.

1. The category of authority, its degree and its sources plays a paramount role in Russian culture. Thus the focus shifts from "what" is said to "by whom" it is said, and from whom the latter has received the authority to say so;

2. Criticism of classicism as the "age of posture" does not at all mean a rejection of gesture - it simply shifts the area of ​​significance: ritualization, semiotic content move into those spheres of behavior that were previously perceived as completely non-significant. Simple clothing, a careless pose, a touching movement, a demonstrative rejection of signs, a subjective denial of a gesture become carriers of basic cultural meanings, that is, they turn into gestures;

3. The life of a symbol in culture acquires an active character only when it moves to its original place alien to it;

4. Any cinema creates its own world, its own space, which inhabits its own people. But here the suggestive nature of vision comes into play. If I hear this, then I fully admit that the information may be false. It is another matter if I see something myself;

5. Fashion is always semiotic. Inclusion in fashion is a continuous process of turning the insignificant into the significant. The semiotic nature of fashion is manifested, in particular, in the fact that it always implies an observer. Speaking the language of fashion - the creator of new information, unexpected for the audience and incomprehensible to her. The audience should not understand fashion and resent it. This is the triumph of fashion. . . . Outside a shocked public, fashion loses its meaning;

6. No culture can be satisfied with one language. The minimum system is formed by a set of two parallel signs, for example, verbal and pictorial. In the future, the dynamics of any culture includes the multiplication of a set of semiotic communications.

Only a few statements have been selected here, but in reality their number is endless, since Yuri Lotman deeply analyzed the phenomena of culture as a communicative process. This is what allowed him to take a fresh look at both Russian literature and Russian history.

Conclusion

The Moscow linguistic tradition was based on the methods of structural linguistics, cybernetics and computer science (in particular, therefore, the concept of a secondary modeling system became one of the main ones). For Yu.M. Lotman, the key concept was the concept of text (primarily artistic), which he extended to the description of culture as a whole.

The initial stage of the work of the Moscow-Tartu School was characterized by an extraordinary variety of topics covered, while the study of “simple” systems was widely represented: road signs, card games, divination, etc. Gradually, however, the interests of the members of the school shifted to "complex" sign systems: mythology, folklore, literature and art. The main conceptual category used in these studies was the text. The semiotic analysis of texts in the broadest sense of the word includes, for example, studies of the main myth (Vyach.Vs.Ivanov, V.N. Toporov), folklore and author's texts (M.I. Lekomtseva, T.M. Nikolaeva, T.V. .Tsivyan and others). Another direction related to this concept is presented in the works of M.Yu.Lotman. In this case, we are talking about the text of culture, and the very concept of culture becomes central, in fact, displacing the concept of language.

Culture is understood as a sign system, which is essentially an intermediary between a person and the surrounding world. It performs the function of selecting and structuring information about the outside world. Accordingly, different cultures may produce such selection and structuring in different ways.

It is this tradition that prevails in modern Russian semiotics, however, with the active use of linguistic methods. So, we can talk about the semiotics of history and culture, based on linguistic principles (T.M. Nikolaeva, Yu.S. Stepanov, N.I. Tolstoy, V.N. Toporov, B.A. Uspensky and others).

Of particular interest is the reflection on the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school and its comprehension as a special cultural and even semiotic phenomenon. The bulk of publications (including those of a purely memoir nature) came from the late 1980s and 1990s. Among the various descriptions and interpretations of the Moscow-Tartu school, one can single out an article by B.A. Uspensky On the problem of the genesis of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school(first published in Works on sign systems in 1987), the main provisions of which, apparently, are generally recognized. The most controversial was the article by B.M. Gasparov Tartu school in the 1960s as a semiotic phenomenon. It was first published in the Wiener Slawistischer Almanach in 1989 to a wide range of responses. Gasparov considers the school as an integral phenomenon (he practically does not mention names), which is characterized by a Western orientation, hermeticism, esotericism and the emphasized complexity of the language, utopianism, a kind of internal cultural emigration from the Soviet ideological space.

List of used literature.

1. Lotman Yu. M. Culture and explosion. M., 1992.

2. Yu. M. Lotman and Tartu-Moscow School, Moscow, 1994

3. Lotman Yu. M. Phenomenon of culture // Semiotics of culture. Proceedings on

sign systems. Issue. X. Account. app. Tart. un-ta, vol. 463. Tartu, 1978.

4. Lotman Yu. M. Some thoughts on the typology of cultures // Languages ​​of Culture

and problems of translation. M., 1987

5. Yu. Lotman. Conversations about Russian culture. Life and traditions of the Russian

nobility (XVIII - early XIX century)

6. Lotman Yu. M. Culture and explosion. M., 1992

7. Lotman YuM. Theses to the semiotics of Russian culture // Yu. M. Lotman and

Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. Tart. university Issue. 308. Tartu,

8. Lotman YuM. Culture as Collective Intelligence and Problems

artificial mind. Pre-publication. M., 1977.

9. Lotman Yu. M. The structure of a literary text. M., 1970.

10. Lotman Yu. M. Canonical art as an informational paradox //

Problems of the canon in the ancient and medieval art of Asia and Africa.

11. Lotman YuM. On two models of communication in the system of culture // Proceedings

by sign systems. Issue. VI.

13. B.A. Uspensky Preliminary for readers of "UFO" to semiotic

to the messages of A.N. Kolmogorov // New Literary Review No. 24, 1997

14. Uspensky B. A. On the problem of the genesis of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic

schools // Yu. M. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. M.,

15. Shpet G. Aesthetic fragments, II. Pg. , 1923

16. Jacobson R. Linguistics and poetics // Structuralism: "for" and "against". M.,

B.A. Uspensky Preliminary for readers of "UFO" to the semiotic messages of A.N. Kolmogorov // New Literary Review No. 24, 1997.

Yu. M. Lotman and TMSh, M., 1994, S.270 - 275

Uspensky B. A. On the problem of the genesis of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school // Yu. M. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. M. , 1994. S. 268

There. P.189

Lotman Yu. M. Some thoughts on the typology of cultures // Languages ​​of culture and problems of translatability. M., 1987. S. 11

Shpet G. Aesthetic Fragments, II. Pg. , 1923, - S. 101

Lotman Yum. Theses on the semiotics of Russian culture // Yu. M. Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. S. 407

At the end of XIX beginning of XX centuries. the need for the need to create a science of signs received a preliminary solution in the works of Peirce, Morris and Saussure. Peirce's and Saussure's ideas about the essence of semiotics were quite different. Peirce saw semiotics as a "universal algebra of relations", which is tantamount to a branch of mathematics. Saussure called the science of signs semiology, it "would be part of social psychology."

The basic concept of semiotics is the concept of a sign, but the sign is understood differently in various intellectual fields: either as a material carrier of another entity - a philosophical tradition dating back to C. Morris and R. Carnap - or as a two-sided entity, after the "Course of General Linguistics" . The elements of the two-sided essence have received various names: the material carrier is the "signifier", "expression plan", "form". Synonyms for “signified” are the terms “content”, “plan of content”, “meaning”, in Frege - “meaning”.

The works of C. Peirce, C. Morris and F. de Saussure prepared the transition to new areas of research in the field of semiotics. Starting from the second half of the 20th century. semiotic research appears in various scientific disciplines, conferences and summer schools on semiotics are held. One of these schools is called the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School. Yu.M. Lotman (1922-1993). The participants in this direction were Vyach. Ivanov and B. Uspensky, B. Gasparov and S. Averintsev, A. Zholkovsky and I. Melchuk and other famous scientists. Initially, research was carried out within the framework of purely philological studies. But even this seemingly common platform for them had its own personal differences. If for Yu.M Lotman it is Russian literature of the past centuries, for B. Uspensky it is the Russian language in a rather distant period, for Vyach.Vs. Ivanov - the Hittite language, the interests of A. Zholkovsky and I. Melchuk are modern linguistics in its informational aspect. A common approach was required that would satisfactorily combine the specifics of the “materials” presented. The theory of culture, but formulated as a semiotic theory of culture, becomes such a unifying property. The culture of the past can only be studied from texts, which is why new areas of science appear as independent areas of science: “text linguistics” and “culturology”. Here is how Yu.M. Lotman writes about the importance of culture in human life: “We live in the world of culture. Moreover, we are in its thickness, inside it, and only in this way can we continue our existence. Hence the importance of the concept of "culture" and, at the same time, its difficulty to define. This difficulty is not only and not so much in the complexity and versatility of this concept, but in the fact that it has an initial, primary character. ... Culture is a device that generates information. Just as the biosphere transforms the inanimate into the living with the help of solar energy (Vernadsky), culture, relying on the resources of the surrounding world, turns non-information into information.

As stated earlier, the beginning of semiotics lies in two scientific traditions. The first goes back to Pierce-Morris, the second was based on the work “Course of General Linguistics” by F. de Saussure. Yu.M. Lotman adds the "Prague School" to the second tradition. According to Yu.M. Lotman, there is an important common feature in these directions: “the simplest, atomic element is taken as the basis, and everything that follows is considered from the point of view of similarity with it. Thus, in the first case, the analysis is based on an isolated sign, and all subsequent semiotic phenomena are considered as sequences of signs. The second point of view, in particular, was expressed in the desire to consider a separate communicative act - the exchange of a message between the addresser and the addressee - as the primary element and model of any semiotic act. Note that the so-called "atomic element" is extremely important. Without it, there would be no further progress, and besides, their isolation and fixation is a heuristic necessity. Of course, a clear fixation of "the simplest, atomic elements" does not imply their functioning in isolation. Similarly, R. Jacobson's communication model:

Rice. sixteen

is a simplified version of communication that requires further clarification. One of these clarifications is the thesis of Yu.M. Lotman: “In fact, replacing the term“ language ”by the term“ code ”is not at all as safe as it seems. The term "code" conveys the idea of ​​a structure that has just been created, artificial and introduced by instantaneous agreement. The code does not imply history, that is, psychologically, it orients us to an artificial language, which is supposed to be an ideal model of language in general. "Language" unconsciously evokes in us the idea of ​​the historical extent of existence. Language is a code plus its history. That's right, but if you are doing semiotics, you should pay more attention to the term "code". Still, at least some difference from linguistics and literary criticism.

Being engaged in semiotics, it is not enough to say that "Semiosphere is that semiotic space, outside of which the very existence of semiosis is impossible." . But even having said this, it must be added that the semiosphere is understood not as independent of man, but as generated by him. If the biosphere, about which Yu.M. Lotman arose independently of man, then the noosphere and semiosphere are the creations of man. No man - no noosphere and semiosphere.

It is hard to imagine that Yu.M. Lotman considered the scientific method as intuitive, but let's see what he himself writes about this: “The concept of the semiosphere is associated with a certain semiotic homogeneity and individuality. Both of these concepts (homogeneity and individuality), as we will see, are difficult to define formally and depend on the system of description, but this does not negate their reality and good separability at an intuitive level.” [Emphasis in bold by me - OK.].

You can find quite a lot of similar examples, for example, "other semiotic texts" - there are no examples, a few lines below - "semiosphere is a semiotic personality", earlier the semiosphere was defined as "semiotic space". In the following sentence, Yu.M. Lotman understands the identity of a particular person: “for example, a wife, children, unfree servants, vassals can be included in the personality of a husband, master and patron in some systems, without having an independent individuality, and in others they can be considered as separate individuals ." This historical fact can be regarded as a certain cultural structure. With regard to semiotics, each person acts as a sign of his activity, artists, for example, are signs of the images that they perform.

I would also like to know what Yu.M. Lotman "semiotic situation". Simple declaration and no explanations.

There are many more such examples, but I will give the last example: “The semiosphere has a diachronic depth, since it is endowed with a complex memory system and cannot function without this memory.” Initially, the semiosphere was declared as an abstract formation, now it is declared the owner of memory.

Tartu school.

The Tartu school, headed by Yu.M. Lotman. An important moment in Lotman's creative biography was his acquaintance in the early 1960s with a circle of Moscow semioticians (V.N. Toporov, Vyach. Vs. Ivanov, I.I. Revzin, and others). The complex of new ideas of the early 1960s - cybernetics, structuralism, machine translation, artificial intelligence, binarism in cultural description, etc., attracted Lotman and forced him to reconsider his Marxist orientation.

In 1964, the First Summer School for the Study of Sign Systems was organized in Kääriku (Estonia) under the direction of Lotman. These schools then met every two years until 1970. The rapprochement between Moscow and Tartu was embodied in the creation of a series Proceedings on sign systems, published in Tartu (in 1998, the 26th issue was published), which existed for a long time as the only free tribune of new semiotic ideas.

The main ideas of the semiotic school. The structure of the text. His communication features

Yuri Lotman is quite critical of R. Jacobson's model of communication, as if considering it to be too "technicalized" (Yakobson R. Linguistics and poetics // Structuralism: "for" and "against". M., 1975). R. Jacobson's concept of "code" deserves special criticism. Yu. Lotman's opinion is that language is a code plus its history. He writes: “In fact, replacing the term “language” with the term “code” is not at all as safe as it seems. The term "code" conveys the idea of ​​a structure that has just been created, artificial and introduced by instantaneous agreement. The code does not imply history, i.e. psychologically, it orients us towards an artificial language, which is supposed to be an ideal model of language in general” (Lotman Yu.M. Culture and Explosion. M., 1992, p. 13).

Yuri Lotman, in his model of communication, answers, among other questions, the following question: how is it possible, in principle, to generate a new message. “We will call new messages those that do not arise as a result of unambiguous transformations and, therefore, cannot be automatically derived from some source text by applying predetermined transformation rules to it” (Lotman Yu.M. Phenomenon of Culture // Semiotics of Culture. Proceedings on Sign Systems, Issue X, Academic Record of Tartu University, Issue 463, Tartu, 1978, p. 4). From this follows his fundamental idea that sign (semiotic) communication is a connection between autonomous units. If they coincide, then nothing new can arise between them. Continuing this idea of ​​non-coincidence, Yu. Lotman says: “The inadequacy of communication agents turns this very fact from passive transmission into a conflict game, during which each side seeks to rebuild the semiotic world of the opposite in its own way and at the same time is interested in preserving the originality of its counterparty” (Lotman Yum Culture as Collective Intelligence and Problems of Artificial Intelligence Preliminary Publication Moscow, 1977, p. 13).

In his first works, Yu. Lotman puts into his understanding of artistic communication the ideas of Russian formalists (V. Shklovsky and others), namely the ratio of automatism and informativeness.

“In order for the general structure of the text to remain informative, it must be constantly removed from the state of automatism that is inherent in non-artistic structures. However, the opposite trend also works simultaneously: only elements placed in certain predictable sequences can play the role of communication systems. Thus, two opposite mechanisms work simultaneously in the structure of a literary text: one seeks to subordinate all elements of the text to the system, turn them into an automated grammar, without which an act of communication is impossible, and the other - to destroy this automation and make the structure itself a carrier of information" (Lotman Yu. M. Structure of the artistic text. M., 1970. P. 95).

In his distinction between folklore art and non-folklore, Y. Lotman inscribes another interesting communicative feature. Now we are talking about ritual communication.

“Two cases of increasing the information possessed by any individual or collective can be considered. One is receiving from outside. In this case, the information is generated somewhere on the side and transmitted to the recipient in a constant volume. The second one is built differently: only a certain part of the information is received from the outside, which plays the role of an exciter, causing an increase in information inside the recipient's consciousness ”(Lotman Yu.M. Canonical art as an informational paradox // Problems of the canon in ancient and medieval art of Asia and Africa. M. , 1973. S. 18-19).

Yu. Lotman distinguishes between binary and ternary systems of culture (Lotman Yu.M. Cultures and explosions. M., 1992). If the "explosion" within the ternary system preserves certain values, moving them from the periphery to the center of the system, then this does not happen within our binary system. The explosion in this case covers everything. “A characteristic feature of explosive moments in binary systems is their experience of themselves as a unique, incomparable moment in the entire history of mankind” (p. 258).

«… Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman and, in general, the Moscow-Tartu school, the structuralist-semiotic direction, were for us, for ideas "the logics of the dialogue of logicians", for our philosophy of culture - one of the most urgent Interlocutors. Without communication with this Interlocutor, our thinking would be impossible, somehow flawed. (Another equally vital Interlocutor was, of course, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Bakhtin's poetics of culture. But I have already spoken and written a lot about this.) In general, creative work, especially in humanitarian thinking, on the verge of philosophy and philology, is impossible without such Interlocutors who are internally vital for you, who in almost everything do not coincide with your constructive views, but who formulate those questions, the answers to which our own thought lives. Our thought lives on, that is, our question lives on - in this case - the semiotic Interlocutor ... But now I will clarify in what sense I am talking about Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman as such an Interlocutor of mine on the eve of the 21st century.

Three points. The first one is almost formal and... almost socio-cultural. Tartu school Yu.M. Lotman and his friends has become over many decades - the first scientific direction, a scientific school, in the strict sense of the word. With a clear formalism of terminology, with its own, constantly updated language and form of thinking, with a clear outline of those questions and those answers, the meaning of which is ... the meaning of the concept of School. It was that amalgam of scientific and human commonwealth, which somehow borders on the knightly Order of Thought, or (and) on the game of such an Order. The absence of such schools has become a real cultural disaster. Outside the hard shell of the school “We”, the maturation of an independent “I” is impossible, real conversation is impossible, there remains a withered “academicism”. Just as a chicken matures in an egg, so in a group, in a school, in a scientific direction, only a person can mature, further dramatically breaking the shell of the school and direction. The fact that in our country - approximately from the end of the 1920s - the theoretical schools (and even more so their playful beginning ...) disappeared, meant an almost insurmountable difficulty in the formation of an intelligent personality, an independently thinking individual. Yes, we still need to take into account the main thing: the totalitarian nature of our society-state, in which the individual could never, not for a minute, remain alone, a friend with himself, and, repeating, arose only in pairs "with a single people" or in a faint reflection " bright future...

In such an almost impossible environment Yu.M. Lotman and his associates were able to form and internally close the scientific School, and thus the conditions for the formation of creative personalities. And it was a school, around the questions and answers of which - the answers and questions that arose after and on the basis of OPOYAZ, after and against the background of Western structuralism, questions and problems, uniquely independent, our humanitarian thought was really formed; Philology of Russia in the 70s-80s.

Now - the second moment, for me the extremely essential. Already in today's first report, it seems to me, it was very precisely emphasized that for all creativity Yu.M. Lotman had two poles. The first pole: a constant deepening into formal structuralist terminology, the discovery of a single - but constantly restructuring formal matrix, fundamentally separated from artistic matter. And - the second pole - stubborn and purposeful resistance of the material, amazing density, originality, "savoryness", the joyfulness of artistic details, which not only do not obey "their" formal scheme, but constantly live by overcoming the given schematism. And the point here is not only in the personal characteristics of talent Yu.M. Lotman, combining the amazing accuracy of stylistic vision, the ability to realize the uniqueness of each artistic detail and - at the same time - the chilled detachment of semiotic schematization. It's about the concept itself. […]

And, finally, the last and most important point (however, it is largely projected from everything said above). Yu.M. Lotman, especially in his latest work, always pushed semiotics to the point where it can no longer work, where it must justify and fulfill itself... by rejecting all its original concepts (sign, meaning, code, signified, signifier, information, etc.).”

Bibler V.S., Yu.M. Lotman and the future of philology / On the verge of the logic of culture. Book of Selected Essays, M., 1997, "Russian Phenomenological Society", p. 327-329.

Short story

Writing about the Tartu-Moscow School (sometimes called the Moscow-Tartu School) is, in a sense, a thankless task, since there are more than enough materials about this academic "phenomenon". At least a few large-scale studies (both collections of articles and monographs) are devoted directly to the Tartu-Moscow School (TMS) itself, and the number of references and references that in one way or another affect the topic of TMS cannot be counted at all. Finally, 25 issues of "Works on sign systems" (published during Yu.M. Lotman's lifetime) speak for themselves.

First of all, a few words about chronology.

The temporal boundaries of the Tartu-Moscow school (with its "classic" composition of participants) can be defined as follows: the beginning of the 60s - the end of the 70s. (sometimes indicate the beginning of the 80s). We can say for sure that by 1986 the school actually ceased to exist.

People came to TIS in different ways and left in different ways. They were united by one thing - dissatisfaction with the existing methodology of science (engaged by Marxism in the understanding of scientific functionaries), the search for new ways and opportunities, and the ethical rejection of the conformism of late Soviet academic life. The school was not only a search for a new language, it was also a way to be, that "invisible college" whose password was the semiotic language of description and inner freedom.

Formally, TIS began its history in 1964, when the "First Semiotic Summer School" organized by the humanitarians of Tartu and Moscow was held in Kääriku (a sports base of TSU near Tartu).

The development of structuralist methods by Yu.M. Lotman and the Moscow participants of the Tartu School took place in parallel and independently of each other - with Lotman in the form of lectures on structural poetics (1960-1962), published in 1964, with the Moscow section - in the form of a symposium on the structural study of sign systems (which was preceded by the opening of a number of departments of structural and applied linguistics at several universities), held in 1962 under the organization of the Institute of Slavic Studies and the Council for Cybernetics. However, 1956 should be considered the year of the “foundation” of structuralism in the USSR: “That year (1956, - ​​I.V.), on September 24, the seminar “Some Applications of Mathematical Research in Linguistics” began to work at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University - the first seminar on mathematical linguistics in the USSR. (See: V.A. Uspensky Preliminary for readers of "UFO" to the semiotic messages of A.N. Kolmogorov // New Literary Review No. 24, 1997.)

We will not dwell on the description of what place Tartu occupied in the former Soviet Union, and how exactly the mental climate of Tartu and the general mood of the first summer schools in Kääriku influenced the formation of TIS. Much has been written about this, and perhaps even more than enough. If we talk about the emergence of the structural method and its spread in the USSR, then this process was initiated by a symposium on the structural study of sign systems, held in 1962 under the organization of the Institute of Slavic Studies and the Council for Cybernetics in Moscow.

This is how B. A. Uspensky describes the first period in the development of Soviet semiotics and the Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems in the article "On the Problem of the Genesis of the Tartu-Moscow School" (See: Yu. M. Lotman and TMSh, M., 1994, p. 270 - 275): "Thus, the symposium was a completely new phenomenon in our science, and it attracted interest. There were reports on the semiotics of language, logical semiotics, machine translation, the semiotics of art, mythology, the description of the language of non-verbal communication systems (in such as traffic signals, the language of card divination, etc.), the semiotics of communication with the deaf-blind, the semiotics of ritual.P. G. Bogatyrev, V. V. Ivanov, V. N. Toporov, L. F Zhegin, A. A. Zaliznyak and some others. A small edition of a collection of abstracts was published for the symposium, which outlined our program and formulated the main provisions of each of the reports. These theses were destined to play an important role in disseminating our ideas. but from this little book both our opponents and our future supporters and colleagues learned about us.< … >At the University of Tartu, an active scientific team had formed at the Department of Russian Literature by this time (the actual creator of it was B. F. Egorov, the participants were Yu. M. Lotman, Z. G. Mints, I. A. Chernov and a group of students), interested in the methods of analysis of a poetic text, as well as the study of ideological models of culture. In the 1960/61 academic year, Yu. M. Lotman began to read a course of lectures on structural poetics. The reading of the course continued in subsequent years, and in 1962 the book "Lectures on Structural Poetics" was put into print, which was published in 1964 and became the first issue of "Works on Sign Systems".

Shortly after the 1962 Moscow symposium, I. Chernov arrived in Moscow and, having made contact with its participants, brought the theses to Tartu. So this little book of theses fell into the hands of Yu. M. Lotman (who was not a participant in the symposium, but independently arrived at similar problems). He became very interested in her and, having arrived in Moscow, offered to cooperate on the basis of the University of Tartu. Since that time (1964), the publication of "Works on Sign Systems" began.<…>and holding conferences. Conferences 1964, 1966, 1968 were held in Kääriku, 1970 and 1974. - in Tartu. The atmosphere at the conferences was exceptionally relaxed. They played a big role in developing common views, a single platform, in rallying heterogeneous ideas into a single direction. The reports naturally turned into discussions, and the main role was played not by monologic, but by dialogic forms. What distinguished these meetings was the complete absence of any organization whatsoever.<…>So, the Tartu-Moscow school began with the activities of the Moscow group, and this determined its initial focus. As already mentioned, the Moscow representatives are professional linguists, each with his own specialty (Ivanov is a Hittologist, Toporov is a Baltist and Indologist, Revzin is a Germanist, Lekomtsev is a specialist in the Vietnamese language, Zaliznyak and I are Slavists, although Zaliznyak can equally be considered as Indologist, Semitologist). However, we are all united by an interest in structural linguistics, everyone has works in this area, and our studies in semiotics directly go back to studies in structural linguistics, representing their natural logical continuation. This circumstance initially determined our approach and, I would say, the specifics of our direction - what I would propose to call the linguistic approach to semiotics.<…>At first, this connection with structural linguistics, i.e. the linguistic platform of our studies was very clearly felt (I mean the 1960s). 1960s - this is a period of search, first of all - the expansion of the object of study, the extrapolation of linguistic methods to more and more new objects. In turn, the attraction of new material inevitably influenced our methods, eventually stimulating a break away from purely linguistic methodology.

School timeline:

1964 - 1st summer semiotic school in Kääriku. Foundation of the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. Works on sign systems become a periodical publication (within the framework of scientific notes of TSU).

1966 - 2nd summer school.

1968 - 3rd summer school

1970 - 4th summer school.

1974 - 5th "winter" school (All-Union symposium on secondary modeling systems).

The period of semiotic upsurge in the USSR, the period of "storm and onslaught" ended, in many respects, not because of internal, objective differences between the participants in this process, but because of pressure on the school from outside. Some of the TIS members were forced to emigrate, the publication of "Proceedings on sign systems" was repeatedly delayed, and the articles of TIS participants were censored. There were, of course, internal reasons that contributed to the extinction of the impulse set in the early 60s. This was a rejection of a somewhat simplified view of semiotics as the creation of some global terminological dictionary of culture. This approach quickly proved to be utopian and untenable, and TIS members moved to a new stage in understanding cultural studies, where culture was understood not in a mechanistic aspect, but in a more complex, organic one. In many ways, the difficulties of the school were also caused by the general crisis of structuralist methodology, which made itself felt already in the 1970s.

Having learned a new semiotic language, TIS participants went further along their own paths, and although these paths often crossed, from now on, each of the former "Tartusians" uses it rather in the field of their scientific interests. As such, the Tartu-Moscow School no longer exists (although this position can be disputed), having split into two branches - the Tartu School of Semiotics and the Moscow School.