Cultural Semiotics Research Articles

Междисциплинарный статус тартуской семиотики культуры

The paper presents the interdisciplinarity of scientific knowledge as a necessary principle of the semiotic study of culture. The arguments used are: the studies of representatives of the Tartu school, the opinions of experts in the field of modern philosophy of science, metatheoretical constructions around the Russian semiotic tradition. The interdisciplinarity of Tartu semiotics has been verified in many aspects. The article substantiated a) the relevance of interdisciplinarity in the modern scientific picture of the world, b) the need to develop a common language as a condition for interdisciplinary dialogue, c) the fundamental connection of the interdisciplinary paradigm, systemic and structural research approaches. The conclusions of the article lay the foundations for extrapolating the ideas of cybernetics and systems theory into the boundaries of metatheoretical constructions around the Tartu semiotics of culture.

Pop Culture Art as Educational Bridge: Connecting Generations through Games and Animation Movies in Classroom Environment

This article seeks to shed light on the use of content from pop culture found in audiovisual media, especially those that have great appeal to younger generations. Starting the discussion from the critical principle that visual media today have enormous popularity among different age groups in our society, we seek to understand how the visual elements of pop culture were being engendered in a generalized way around the world. Based on these perceptions, we will understand how such elements can be used in the classroom as a pedagogical instrument with the use of theories of culture semiotics and edu-semiotics, where socio-cultural references will be verified in the perspective of creating bridges between students and teachers, carrying out a process known as the transgenerational process. Finally, the article contemplates the use of pop culture as an instrument of education and arts by presenting its essence, called heART, where artistic elements and social connection are essential to maintain a society in the constant flow of exchange of ideas and consequent life. In conclusion, it is clear that pop culture is still underutilized in educational contexts and that its achievements for the exchange of experiences with different generational peers are enormous.

Research on the Innovation Path of the Carved Symbols of Shuangdun from the Perspective of Cultural Semiotics

Research on the Innovation Path of the Carved Symbols of Shuangdun from the Perspective of Cultural Semiotics

Актуализация вестиментарного кода в контексте советского дискурса моды 1960-х гг. (аксиологический аспект)

The article characterises the Soviet fashion discourse of the 1960s with a special emphasis on the value system of the period under analysis. Fashion is considered and analysed as one of the semiotic systems. The concept of “the vestimentary code” (R. Barthes’s term) is studied, which is preceded by an analysis of the concept of “fashion” in the context of various types of cultural semiotics that make up the interdisciplinary field of research. The present work is based on the definitions of the concept of “fashion” given in various dictionaries, characterising its understanding as an interdisciplinary phenomenon in such fields as philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, cultural studies, sociology, psychology, linguistics. It is shown that the ambiguous attitude to this concept is due to its multidimensional nature; fashion covers many areas of human activity, so that both everyday and scientific views on this phenomenon are formed. As a phenomenon of everyday life, fashion is understandable to every individual, and from the point of view of the theoretical representation of its status, fashion symbolises the totality of sociocultural and historical processes, acting as one of the culture codes. The scientific novelty of the proposed study lies in the fact that the problem of the Soviet fashion discourse of the 1960s is for the first time considered as a linguistic problem. The fashion of the analysed period is characterised, on the one hand, by its revolutionary nature, expressed in its various directions (including in the styles of youth subcultures – mods, rockers, skinheads, hippies), and, on the other hand, by the specificity of its adaptation in our country, taking into account the sociocultural and the ideological contexts. The relevance of the topic under study from the point of view of discursive realisation arises from the need to determine by what means the features of the vestimentary code are represented in the context of the Soviet official fashion discourse of the 1960s. It is revealed that the specificity of the vestimentary code has a clear value benchmark that characterises this discourse unfolding on the pages of the Soviet media. The conclusion is made about the importance of the verbal component of the vestimentary code in the fashion discourse of the analysed era in our country.

Lotman in the Anglophone world: General trends, two new anthologies and a Companion

This article reconstructs the main foci and changes in the reception of Juri Lotman’s work and Lotman-related scholarship in the Anglophone world. The first part of the article presents a brief critical overview of the history of the translations of Juri Lotman’s works into English and of Anglophone scholarship on Lotman from 1973 to the present. The second part of the article considers more closely three volumes entirely dedicated to Lotman’s work which have most recently been published in English: the anthologies of translated texts by Lotman Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics (2019, ed. Marek Tamm) and Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux. An Anthology of Major and Lesser-Known Works by Juri Lotman (2020, ed. Andreas Schönle) as well as The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (2022, eds. Marek Tamm and Peeter Torop).

Linguosemiotic Content and Functional Characteristics of Food Rituals (Using the Example of Chinese Grocery Stores)

The article examines the linguosemiotic content and functional characteristics of food rituals, which are a symbolic representation of folk beliefs, tra- ditional knowledge and collective experience relevant to this society. The study of the semiotics of gastronomic culture involves the analysis of factors that have influenced the modern cultural context in which certain gastronyms are endowed with symbolic properties. The article gives a classification of symbols by form and content: 1) according to the degree of complexity: simple (egg, noodles) and complex (Fish Ceremony); 2) according to the level of abstraction: concrete (lotus, round gingerbread) — abstract (dragon, phoenix); 3) according to the form of their expression: graphic (hieroglyphs chun lian 春联, chūnlián) — wishes of happiness, well–being before the New Year and subject (flashlight, seeds); 4) auditory — songs and poems dedicated to the Moon Holiday; 5) gestural — the choice of dishes for the festive table; 6) by origin: natural symbols (bamboo, fish) — artificial (yin and yang). Depending on the functions, the article examines two groups of culinary symbols: mythological (egg — Food of the five virtues) and moral symbols (ducks — happiness). Semiotic studies of gastronomic linguoculture bring us closer to understanding not only the culture of individual peoples, but also the aesthetic universals and psychological constants of humanity.

The Late Lithuanian Greimas: Intentions and Reception

The main research material consists of Algirdas Julius Greimas’s texts written during the transition period, when Lithuania was parting with Soviet rule (1989–1991), mainly his “Baltos lankos” column in Literatūra ir menas weekly periodical as well as various texts by other authors on Greimas’s texts along with memoirs, letters and obituaries. The study has two aims: 1) to find a conceptual approach for analyzing Lithuanian texts by the late Greimas, 2) to identify points of change in the semiosphere of Lithuanian culture. Greimas’s own semiotic method, namely, a structure of four Senders is used to describe his texts. The theoretical context of Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics is a more permanent intellectual context for this study, and some of the terms are useful in more than one aspect. The readers’ attitudes towards Greimas’s texts highlight how the core and periphery change in the semiosphere: the period of cultural activity and openness and the internal cultural barriers appearing at the same time, the gradual passivation of culture and cases of sporadic creative relationships.

Demolition of Monuments as a Phenomenon of Culture in Global and Local Contexts: Iconoclasm, ‘New Barbarity’, or a Utopia of Memory?

This article is devoted to the study of ‘demolition’ (destruction) of monuments as a cultural phenomenon, which unexpectedly emerges in certain historical periods. Whereas for a long time it was believed that one of the main functions of culture is the preservation of material achievements and the conservation of memories of the past in monuments and other ‘memorial signs’, recent years have demonstrated that, occasionally, various nations undergo a ‘civilizational explosion’ as a result of which representatives of the nation feel a need for a radical change of the memory, prompting a rejection of the past that is expressed in the destruction (demolition) of monuments. The purpose of this article is to analyze the cultural semiotics of the destruction, their origins, and the results of these radical transformations of the signs of the memories of the past. These transformations in people’s cultural behavior are studied in global and local contexts. Considerable attention is paid to the semantics of the demolition of monuments in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, in the context of the historical experience of this city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Juri Lotman’s Typologies of Culture

One central concept in Juri Lotman’s semiotics of culture are cultural typologies, the objective of which is to describe the basic types of cultural codes, define the universals of human culture, and to create “a grammar of culture”, i. e. a unified system of the general structure of the universal characteristics of the “culture of humankind”. Lotman compares culture with a living organism as well as with a work of art, above all emphasizing the dynamicity of culture that is effected by two poles (i. e. consciousnesses) throughout the whole of cultural history: cyclical-continual (mythological) and linear-discrete (historical). The article views Lotman’s different conceptions of cultural typologies as a whole, where one and the same binary opposition is described in different ways and with different emphases, conclusively from which two universal types of culture are drawn out.

Home Movie as a Text of Cultural Memory

The aim of this article is to define home movie as a text of cultural memory and reveal the dynamics of its meanings in culture. The personal and the collective maintenance and transmission of memory is a complex mechanism that operates within a dynamic cultural model. The analysis of this mechanism considers the way in which something that first appears to be culturally irrelevant – a private home movie of a family – is brought into the public space and circulates as a cultural text contributing to the preservation and formation of cultural memory. The analysis describes home movie in the framework of semiotics and reveals the meaning shifts that occur when private memory texts begin to circulate in a more general cultural context. The mechanism of the dynamics of cultural texts and the problematics of memory are explored using Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics approach. The example of Lithuanian director’s Dovilė Šarutytė’s debut feature film A Feature Film About Life (2021) is used to describe in more detail the transformations of meaning that home movies undergo after becoming a cultural text.

Tales from the crypt: A psychoanalytic approach to disability representation in advertising

Representation is key in the politics of mass-mediated consumer society. Although previous research has noted that representation in advertising generates greater societal visibility for people with disabilities, focus has largely been on negative unintended consequences from a psychological or socio-cultural perspective. The purpose of this study is to explore the complexities involved in the making of a collective psyche related to disability, pointing instead to how the psychic and the social are mutually constitutive. By focusing on market-mediated representation in the form of advertising campaigns, we highlight both potentials and pitfalls of social transformation such as reducing stigma. We use, as revelatory cases, two relatively recent campaigns that sought to include people with disabilities on the Swedish market. We build upon Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic theorizing to offer a novel approach of studying market inclusion in the context of disability representation. By delineating the “social crypt,” we elucidate two processes by which stigmatized narratives enter the public consciousness: incorporation (i.e., a process by which stigma is reproduced in the collective unconscious) and introjection (i.e., a form of gradual awareness leading to destigmatization). We find that the inclusion of disability in advertising can potentially work to reduce stigma, but also to inadvertently serve as a subtler form of market exclusion by intensifying the cultural semiotics of capitalized ableism.

The Cognitive Processus Behind Neolithic Schematic Rock Art. Archaeological Implications and Research Hypothesis

The issue addressed in this article is essentially whether the same cognitive processes are at work for mimetic prehistoric graphic productions and schematic ones. Holocene schematic rock art is one of the main graphic expressions of European prehistory, from the Iberian peninsula to Italy. Despite its wide distribution and the incomparable insight it may provide on the functioning of prehistoric human groups and the cultural geography of the western European Neolithic, this rock art's imprecise chronology and geometric and schematic nature has often led to its exclusion from research on these societies, particularly in France. This paper proposes a study of schematic rock art from the perspective of the pragmatic and cognitive semiotics of visual culture and suggests that the production and purpose of diagrams, which compose so-called schematic rock art and which are common to all human societies, are different to those of figurative images, as is their cognitive origin. This demonstration sheds a new light on schematic rock art and the social practices it involved and invites us to rethink its coexistence with the Levantine imagery from the Spanish Levant.

Du Flâneur au traceur: playful bodies in urban spaces

Abstract This paper investigates how play practices affect players’ relationships with the urban environment through the bodily movement and performances that characterize them. Building on a definition of playful behavior derived by semiotics of culture, we investigate urban play from the perspective of motor praxology to outline how movement is central for the experience of the players. We then concentrate on the role of semiotic valorizations in different urban contexts, notably the famous typology of Metro users by Floch and different kinds of ludic mobility. Finally, we combine these two perspectives with the zemic model realized within existential semiotics in order to create a typology or urban players as well as urban playful enunciation modes.

Istoriya vospriyatiya semioticheskoj mysli Yu. Lotmana v Kitae

Yu.M. Lotman's ideas on cultural semiotics were introduced in China in the late 1970s’ and have been developing for more than 40 years since then. The process of dissemination of Lotman's ideas in China can be divided into three stages: initial introduction (1979-1993), in-depth research (1994-2004), and multiple expansion (2005 - present). The given paper studies the reception of Lotman's thoughts on semiotics in China from a diachronic perspective, and it summarizes the characteristics of different stages in order to understand the whole picture of the research on Lotman's semiotic ideas in China.

Cultural semiotics as the foundation of political semiotics

ABSTRACT Our paper relies on the cultural semiotics of Lotman which we bring to bear on political theory in order to develop a methodological framework that we have referred to as “political semiotics” in our previous work during the past decade. In our first section, we synthesize the core categories of the Essex school (Laclau, Mouffe, and others) of political analysis and the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics. In the next section, we move further to putting forth a concrete methodological framework for analyzing social/political reality by relating theories of power, governance, and democracy to the Jakobsonian model of communication. We call this method “political form analysis”. The guiding idea of the latter is that it is not the content (i. e. substance) of communication, but rather the form (hierarchical relations of the aspects of communication) is the crucial focus of political analysis. In the final section, we illustrate our approach by explaining the constitution of the COVID-19 crisis and their governance in Taiwan. The country has had enormous success in containing the crisis during its first waves, but has also been surprisingly unsuccessful in the third phase (starting in the spring of 2021).

Qanons, anti-vaxxers, and alternative health influencers: a cultural semiotic perspective on the links between conspiracy theories, spirituality, and wellness during the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Scholars have highlighted the bond between conspiracy theories, new-age spirituality (conspirituality), and wellness. This paper contributes to this scholarship by critically analysing the underlying semiotic mechanisms that govern the overlap between QAnon, antivax, and Covid-19 related conspiracy theories, new age spirituality and wellness. From a Lotmanian perspective, I draw a critical semiotic analysis of the links between these three discursive realms during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially focusing on alternative health influencer Christiane Northrup’s Facebook page. To do this, I rely on Lotman’s concept of translation, as well as its development in the field of cultural semiotics. Combining Lotman’s theory of translation with Greimas’ discursive semiotics, I claim that the bond between conspiracy theories, spirituality, and wellness is based upon the translations of five semiotic cultural elements: (i) basic narratives plots; (ii) themes and thematic roles; (iii) figures; (iv) plastic features; and (v) collective passions. Drawing on this analysis, I also seek to detail how Lotman’s translation works, looking at which semiotic features are exactly translated when two or more semiosphere come into contact, as well as what logics this translation is based on.

For a semiotics of culture as a critique of culture*

ABSTRACT The text aims at investigating the vitality of Lotman's thought, focusing on its theoretical specificities (compared to other methodological approaches), on its recurring themes, but above all on its analytical, somehow “operational” utility. In particular, the authors reflect on the critical scope of Lotman's thought and on how the traditional unveiling vocation of semiotics finds in Lotman an adequate renewal for the problems posed by the contemporary world (populisms, new media ecosystems, new forms of collective subjectivity…).

Inside Facebook’s semiosphere. How social media influence digital hate and fuel cyber-polarization

ABSTRACT The journey inside Facebook’s semiosphere revolves around the present-day controversy on how algorithms foster polarization and discord in one of the biggest and most popular social media platforms, namely, Facebook. The present work focuses on the so-called Facebook Files as a specific case study. By drawing on these investigations, the present study discusses what are the principles used by the Facebook algorithms in order to select a certain type of content and to direct attention to it, whilst generally discarding other types of content considered not enough engaging. By drawing on the perspective of the semiotics of culture, this paper makes an analogy between Ju. Lotman’s model of the “semiosphere” and the Facebook’s digital semiosphere with the goal of unpacking how the selection, diffusion, and suppression of online content is geared towards the polarization of ideas.

Cultural Semiotics in Serdemi Gryani Balqis-by Jabar Jamal Gharib

Abstract Cultural Semiotics in Serdemi Gryani Balqis-by Jabar Jamal Gharib is the title of this research which the concept of Semiotics has explained, the relations between cultural semiotics and literary texts have shown, and there, language, as the most important item which collects both of them has focused on. In another section, the most significant features counted and analyzed, cultural semiotics takes these features as a princips to undrstand cultural sems and signs through them. Also in practical part of the research there are two major sections, the first is about local cultural signs in the novel, and the second is about universal cultural signs, there is no doubt that there are both types of cultural signs in the novel.

The study of modern culture through semiotic analysis

The article’s methodological foundation is the cultural principles of semiotics, the study of any phenomenon in its development. It defines the interaction between semiotics and culture through symbols, shows the relationship between semiotics and culture, and discusses the importance of different levels, semiosphere, semiotic space, and so on. This allows us to deepen our understanding of the cultural space and recognize human culture in its essence. Modern culture, which manifests itself in various forms, such as hyper semiotics, hyperrealism, and hypermodernism, reflects the development of different communities in our society, and thus different rules of the game have also emerged. An important problem in hypersemiotics is the excessive use of symptoms in modern life. This is expressed in many characteristics: changing signs, immanent principle, difference, conditional language games, modeling, and break. Therefore, the study of the philosophy of symbols in modern culture is a necessity to deepen our understanding of semiotic research. This conclusion is confirmed by the study of modern culture, the discussion of semiotics of modern culture, which uses the structure of symbols in the form of icons, signs and symbols to abstract the meaning of life. Semiotics is considered as a method of studying modern culture and analyzed from the point of view of its attitude to culture as a whole