Tartu School Research Articles

The Moscow–Tartu Semiotic School and Soviet Art History

Although the problems of art history did not form the core of the Moscow–Tartu semiotic school’s interests, its members often turned to the material of visual art within the framework of general and specific studies of sign systems. In turn, Soviet art history in general did not show interest in semiotics. Meanwhile, the selection of problems and the approach to them in art history (mainly of the Moscow school) indicated that the reflections of art historians and philologists starting from a certain time (in the late 1960s and into the 1970s) began to develop in parallel veins. The present article provides an overview of the main problems of visual art in the works of representatives of the Moscow–Tartu school (Lotman, Uspenskij, Ivanov, Toporov and others), as well as of the adepts of semiotics from the side of art history (Paperny, Daniel, Zlydneva). In addition, the article shows how despite not accepting the semiotic mode of thinking, in their texts art historians approached the semiotic problematics of art raised by philologists (in particular, interest in the problem of the border-zone and marginalia, correlation between a word and an image in visual art, and the poetics of the historical avant-garde, etc.). This antinomic (non-)meeting of semiotics and art history in the realm of Soviet humanities in the 1970s can serve as the manifestation of the power of the unified scientific episteme of the era.

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.

«Поздний» Лотман и Московско-тартуская семиотическая школа: «в тылу», «на передовой» или «в пути»?

The title of this text is based on images taken from a conversation between the late Lotman and the Estonian culturologist Peeter Torop, recorded in 1992. They appeared not on their own, but in response to the question about the destiny of the Tartu school, about its current state, about its place and role in science. Through the military metaphor of the late Lotman, who contrasted the rear and forefront, the article shows some current trends in the development of structural and semiotic studies. The author does not identify the methodological approach of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School (MTSS) and its embodiment in the work of its most prominent representative, but does not tear them apart, like those of modern critics who see in the post-structuralist sensitivity of the late Lotman an overcoming of the structuralist dogmatism of the school. Moving away from black-and-white assessments, the author shows the deployment in Lotman’s work of new (albeit attributed by him to the school as a whole) problems – multilingualism, cultural dynamics, openness of semiosis in space and time. The author sees the most interesting and philosophically significant conceptual move in Lotman’s interpretation of translation, where misunderstandings and un­translatabilities are no longer considered as obstacles to cognition, but as sources of new cultural meanings.

Translation as culture: The example of pictorial-verbal transposition in Sahagún’s primeros memoriales and codex florentino

Abstract Many items of culture which are conveyed from one culture to another may take verbal form, and then constitute what Jakobson called “translation proper.” If such diffusions involve a co-occurrent change of semiotic systems, they are of such a different nature, that we better reserve another term for it: transposition. Whether or not accompanied by transpositions, such as pictures, translational events may play an important part in the encounter between cultures, not only in the negative sense of deformations as postulated by the Tartu school. Particularly, when such transpositions make up a massive occurrence, as was the assimilation of the Greek-Muslim heritage in Middle Age Europe, or the more extended process by means of which Europe took on of the experience of the so-called New World several centuries later, such processes may actually enrich the homeculture. In this paper, we will study the latter process, zeroing in on a single, if protracted, event, the creation of the work ascribed to Bernardino de Sahagún, which really involved the collaboration of many scholars, many of them bearers of Aztec culture, exclusively or in combination with Western culture. This case interests us in particular, also because it involved the transposition of pictures, not, in the sense, of Western pictures being substitued for single pre-Hispanic picture, but rather as a kind of semiotic means contributing in different ways to the process of constitution.

Cat Cultures and Threefold Modelling of Human-Animal Interactions: on the Example of Estonian Cat Shelters

Interaction between humans and cats in urban environments is subject to dynamic change. Based on the frequency and quality of relations with humans, we can distinguish several populations of domestic cats (Felis catus): pedigree, pet, semi-feral, feral, and pseudo-wild. Bringing together theoretical perspectives of the Tartu school of biosemiotics and ethological studies of animal societies, we distinguish two basic types of cat cultures: the culture of street cats and the humano-cat culture of pets. The difference between these cultures is documented on the level of zoosemiotic interactions, ecological relations, and human representations. We introduce a threefold model of human-animal interactions in urban environments which steer a careful course between the Scylla of realistic ontology and the Charybdis of social constructivism. A case study on Estonian cat shelters illustrates the significance of cultural representations and institutionalized actions in human-cat cohabitation.

La traducción como acto doble de comunicación. Entre semiótica cognoscitiva y semiótica de la cultura. Parte I: De la comunicación a la traducción

Si la traducción es un acto de transacción de sentidos, la semiótica debeser capaz de definir su especificidad en relación con otros actos semióticos. En lugar de eso, siguiendo a las sugerencias de Roman Jakobson, de la escuela de Tartú y, de forma implícita, de Charles Sanders Peirce, la noción de traducción ha sido generalizada para cubrir más o menos todas las operaciones que se pueden llevar a cabo dentro de un recurso semiótico y entre varios recursos semióticos. En este trabajo partimos de una definición de la comunicación que nos permite caracterizar la traducción como un doble acto de significación, tomando en cuenta los casos de emisión y recepción de ambos actos involucrados, el primero en el nivel de la cognición, y el segundo en el nivel de la comunicación.

Phonemes as Modeling Devices

The study of how sounds in language are used to create words and other linguistic structures that are imitative of some sound property of their referents comes generally under the rubric of sound symbolism theory. While it has been dismissed by various approaches to language, the empirical and anecdotal support for sound symbolism is now too massive to ignore. From the database of evidence it now makes available, various hypotheses can be formulated about originating elements in word formation and, by extension, in seemingly diverse linguistic systems. One of these is the phoneme which bears suggestive meaning in itself as a primary originating element. It is thus a “modeling device” that leads, by extension, to the derivation of larger structures of meaning. Using an adapted version of modeling systems theory as developed by the Tartu School of semiotics, this paper argues that the phoneme is in fact more than a cue for distinguishing words – rather it is an elemental modeling device. This view potentially has some basic implications not only for sound symbolism theory, but also for the study of semiosis itself.

The Historical Semiotics of Hafez’s Poems

Semiotics is defined as the study of signs. It is a general field one branch of which is language. There are literary signs in literature, as part of language, that are encoded to provoke meaning. The signs or forms in Hafez’s poems will be assessed here to discover what meaning he has meant to convey. Failure in relating the right meanings to the signs deprive us from the right interpretation of the poems. Semiotic achievements can help us to study meaning related to the form. Saussure’s structural view and his overlooking context and cultural background and his proposed indissoluble link between form and meaning cannot in all cases provide us with the precise meanings of literary signs. Poststructuralists, on the other hand, postulate an unstable relationship between sign and meaning. According to them, under different circumstances different meanings can be attributed to signs. In the present research, the posed question was if taking cultural and historical background into account could shed light on providing us with the very meaning meant by the poet. Based on content analysis, the history of Hafez’s age as one aspects of culture as well as the achievements of modern semiotics were studied and then numerous signs Hafez has encoded in his poems were randomly assessed. The theoretical basis of the research is Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics. His “semiosphere” refers to the whole semiotic signs within a culture. The Tartu School has had a tendency to cultural history and cultural anthropology. It was clarified that historical awareness of the age in which the poet has versified his poems can lead us to the precise meaning the poet has meant to convey.

The semiotics of migrants’ food: Between codes and experience

AbstractThis paper sets out to analyze cultural semiotics of migrants’ food and culinary practices. Moving from the perspective of the Tartu school of semiotics, which views culture both as a grammar (a set of codes) and as a set of texts, food can be characterized as a specific cultural element where grammar and text (code and experience) are woven together. International migrants live one or more ruptures and changes in their status quo due to their adaptation to the receiving country, which puts their cultural habits into questions. In this framework, even “normal” and well-established culinary practices might need to change. In this relation, I claim that it is on the basis of migrants’ new experience abroad that it is possible to change culinary grammars. In order to move beyond a descriptive account of change, and understand the reasons why migrants construct a new semiotics of food, this paper also integrates elements from argumentation theory in order to analyze the reasons given by migrants to explain the changes they are making. The analysis proposed here is based on a corpus of interviews to migrating mothers of different origins, all living in the greater London area.

Private Lives and Public Spaces in Imperial Russia

Katherine Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia, xv + 304 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN-13 978-0199796991. $74.00. Andrew Kahn, ed., Representing Private Lives of the Enlightenment, x + 346 pp., illus. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation (SVEC), 2010. ISBN-13 9780729410038. $105.00. S. Iu. Malysheva, Prazdnyi den', dosuzhii vecher: Kul'tura dosuga rossiiskogo provintsial'nogo goroda vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX veka (Day of Celebration, Evening of Leisure: The Leisure Culture of the Russian Provincial Town in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries). 192 pp. Moscow: Academia, 2011. ISBN-13 978-5874443894. In recent years, historians have increasingly concentrated on the history of private life, inspired by the traditions established by the Annales school and Jurgen Habermas. (1) The historiography of imperial Russia has been enriched by dozens of studies of various aspects of private life in cities and in rural Russia. This review focuses on three recent studies of private everyday life in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. They have three elements in common. First, they examine how the idea of private life was interpreted by various social strata and under different circumstances. Second, most of their materials concern Russian provincial life. (2) Finally, all the works employ the microhistorical method and are based on little-used letters, diaries, and memoirs. Microhistory as a methodology in historical writing first appeared in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 197Os. (3) The USSR, then Russia, were latecomers, and the first similar studies based on Russian materials began to appear only in the late 1980s. Philological and cultural studies were the first disciplines to deploy this method (above all, Iurii Lotman's Tartu school); among historians, the first were medievalists studying Western Europe (for example, Aron Gurevich with his Categories of Medieval Culture). (4) Over the last 20 years, historical anthropology has finally become prominent in Russianist studies, both in Russia and in the West. But despite hundreds of articles of this kind, larger studies are still rare. This dearth relates to the difficulty of finding a compact and complete set of sources, such as the diaries of the US midwife Martha Ballard or the Russian merchant Ivan Tolchenov, which enable a full-scale microhistorical study. (5) The three books under review concern different historical epochs and different levels of practices of private life. The earliest chronologically is the collection edited by Andrew Kahn, which deals not only with Russia but other countries as well--France, Italy, and England. The 4 articles out of 14 that deal with Russia interpret the period from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great as the age when individualistic aspirations and desires first ripened within Russian society. The collection is interdisciplinary and includes articles from historians and philologists studying different aspects of private life: religious experience (Viktor Zhivov), gentry writing (Irina Reyfman), gardens as public space (Andreas Schonle), and the acquisition of self-knowledge through sexual experience accompanied by infection from venereal disease (Andrei Zorin). The monograph by Katherine Pickering Antonova presents virtually all aspects of the private life of a middling noble provincial family in the 1820s-60s: birth and death, illness and health, motherhood and fatherhood, economic life and interaction with neighbors, and the conceptualization of one family's position in provincial society and in Russia's estate hierarchy. Svetlana Malysheva's book examines the sphere of leisure and cultural communication, attempting to trace the development of free time and entertainment in the public sphere in 1860-1914, the period when Russian urban space became municipalized after the Great Reforms. …

A semiotic theory of life: Lotman’s principles of the universe of the mind

Literary scholar, cultural theorist and semiotician Juri Lotman (1922–1993) established the Tartu (and Tartu-Moscow) school of semiotics in the 1960s. Besides his pioneering work in semiotics of culture, he also developed a theory of general semiotics. We attempt to extract some principles from Juri Lotman’s formulations that characterise the core aspects of semiosis, applicable both in semiotics of culture and in biosemiotics. These include: (1) the principle of code plurality; (2) the principle of incompatibility, or non-translatability; (3) the principle of autocommunication, or translation; (4) the principle of semiosphere; (5) the principle of semiotic inheritance; (6) the principle of non-gradual evolution; (7) the principle of boundaries; and (8) the principle of modelling.

Edmund Krüger and his archaeological collection from Lithuania in the Courland Province Museum

Pastaruoju metu Rytų Baltijos regione vis didesnio su­sidomėjimo susilaukia archeologijos istorijos tyrimai. Organizuojamos konferencijos, leidžiami katalogai ir straipsnių rinkiniai. Vis dar menkai Lietuvos (ir ne tik) tyrėjui žinoma ir prieinama medžiaga apie Kuršo pro­vincijos muziejaus (1818–1939 m., toliau KPM arba Muziejus1) rinkinius, jo narių veiklą. Kita vertus, dar mažai tyrinėta iki Pirmojo pasaulinio karo veikusių kultūros ir mokslo draugijų veikla bei jų indėlis į kraš­to mokslo ir kultūros plėtotę. Šios draugijos, nesant arti humanitarinio profilio aukštosios mokyklos, tarsi atstojo universitetų poreikį. [...]

THE FIRST LATVIAN PHILOSOPHER JĒKABS OSIS AND THE SEARCH FOR SUBSTANCE

1. Introduction Jekabs Osis is known in the Latvian history of philosophy as the first academically educated Latvian philosopher. His works and academic accomplishments influenced the development of Baltic intellectual thought during the first half of the 20th century. Even though Latvian philosophical thought only started developing at the beginning of the 19th century, Osis already had a solid foundation for his philosophy. Nevertheless, the comprehensive study of his legacy remains a work in progress. Osis spent most of his life in Tartu. Initially, he studied theology at the University of Tartu and later taught religion at a local gymnasium. However, not long after Osis resigned and decided to study philosophy instead. His choice was influenced by Gustav Teichmuller (1832-1888), who was professor of philosophy at the University of Tartu. After Teichmuller passed away, Osis became the professor of philosophy. From 1893 to 1905, Osis was the dean of history and philology, intermittently fulfilling responsibilities as head of the university. Osis taught logic, psychology, epistemology, history of philosophy and conducted seminars. His contemporaries described the professor as a true scholar, devoting his life to intellectual pursuits, adhering to a strict daily regimen (Jurevics 1948:8). As evidenced by the published works of Osis, as well as the lecture notes of his students, the philosopher represented what he described as a branch of thought pioneered by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) and Teichmuller (Oze 1890:83). In Tartu Osis found himself among other followers of Teichmuller, such as Evgenij Aleksandrovic Bobrov (1867-1933), the Polish philosopher, Vincet Lutoslawski (1863-1954) and the Lithuanian philosopher, Wladimir Szylkarski (1884-1960). The aforementioned thinkers by Latvian and Russian philosophy historians are often referred to as the 'Tartu school of personalism' (Priedite 1991:9). Osis defined personalism as a worldview whereby the subject assumes a critical point of view and comes to a new understanding of cognition. He realizes that the external, seemingly existing world is merely a projection of himself (Oze 1896:14). Philosophers representing personalism were united in the search of new metaphysics that could serve as a theoretical foundation for the acknowledgement of personality as the highest value. Personalists focused on the history of philosophy and acknowledged Leibniz as one of their predecessors. However, after analysing the teachings of Leibniz on the subject of substance, Osis rejected his insights. This paper focuses on Osis' critique of Leibniz, revealing why Osis opposed the philosopher's work, and how he thus demonstrated the necessity of Personalism philosophy. 2. The Tartu school of personalism Russian and Latvian historians of philosophy tend to refer to Osis as a representative of the Tartu school of personalism. However, to place the contemplations of the philosopher in a broader context, it is important to ask--who were the personalists of Tartu? The arrival of German philosopher Teichmuller in Tartu can be considered as the beginning of the Tartu school of personalism. Heiner Shwenke noted personal considerations as one of the main motives behind his arrival. Teichmuller was in need of a larger salary than one offered by the University of Basel, in order to provide for his family (Schwenke 2006:49). However, the question can also be framed from another angle by asking why Teichmuller was offered a position at the University of Tartu, which was part of Czarist Russia at the time. During the 18th century there was no university network in Czarist Russia. However, the emperor Peter the Great, inspired by Leibniz and other thinkers, supported the proliferation of universities, academies and scientific societies. In this process, one of the main issues was the lack of prospective students, as well as academic personnel. …

Translation and other acts of meaning: In between cognitive semiotics and semiotics of culture

AbstractIf translation is an act of meaning transaction, semiotics should be able to define its specificity in relation to other semiotic acts. Instead, following upon suggestions by Roman Jakobson, the Tartu school, and, more implicitly, Charles Sanders Peirce, the notion of translation has been generalized to cover more or less everything that can be done within and between semiotic resources. In this paper, we start out from a definition of communication elaborated by the author in an earlier text, characterizing translation as a double act of meaning. This characterization takes into account the instances of sending and receiving of both acts involved: the first one at the level of cognition and the second one at the level of communication. Given this definition, we show that Jakobson’s “intralinguistic translation” is, in a sense, the opposite of translation and that his “intersemiotic translation” has important differences and well as similarities to real translation. We also suggest that “cultural translation” has very little to do with translation proper except, in some cases, at the end of its operation. Peirce’s idea of exchanging signs for other signs is better understood as a characterization of tradition.

On the “New Tartu School”

Abstract This is an interview in which six questions formulated by J. Peng on the contemporary developments in semiotics at the University Tartu are addressed by K. Kull. The questions concern the role of Juri Lotman’s semiotics today, its relationship to the works of Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok, the importance of the concepts semiosphere and umwelt, and more.

On the Cultural Turn of Translation Studies in China in the New Millennium: A Semiotic Appraisal and Prognosis

Abstract In the early years of the new millennium, Chinese scholars in translation studies were still debating, belatedly, the “cultural turn”, particularly with regard to two issues: (1) the distinction between the ontology of translation and the ontology of translation studies, and (2) the so-called “paradigm shift” triggered by the cultural turn. Stemming from a critique of the two ontologies and questioning the paradigm shift, this paper serves the following critical purposes. It appeals for a return to textuality by reinstating the role of language in translation studies; i.e., it seeks to clarify how language functions on the boundary between translation and non-translation on both the object-language and meta-language levels, and calls for a new meta-theoretical orientation of translation studies. Scholars participating in the Chinese debate over the cultural turn have regrettably overlooked the fact that semiotics has long since renovated translation studies, especially in terms of the discipline’s system-specificity and intersystemic relationships. Semiotic input on translation studies may enable the Chinese researcher to better formulate, pose and answer the crucial question: What is translation? Four versions of a semiotic approach to translation studies can be identified or envisaged: (1) the influence of Peircean “semeiotics”; (2) a structural linguistics-informed methodology, such as that of the Russian formalists and their Slavonic followers; (3) the impact of biosemiotics; and, finally, (4) the influence of cultural semiotics represented by the Tartu School. This essay provides a critical survey of the Chinese debate on the cultural turn and suggests a prognosis based on the aforementioned semiotic approaches.

The Past in the Present. Lessons on Semiotics of History from George H. Mead and Boris A. Uspensky

This article examines the parallels between George H. Mead's theory of time and Boris A. Uspensky's semiotics of history, looking for implications relevant to the symbolic interactionist theory of historical processes. It suggests that Mead's theory of time and theory of communication hold important implications for semiotic analysis of the historical dimension of sociocultural phenomena. A further aim is to link the symbolic interactionist tradition of the Chicago school with the Tartu school and its semiotics of history. This would fuel the further development of both theoretical orientations.

Tartu Semiotics in 2012

Abstract Semiotics can be defined as the study of what can err, thus generalizing Umberto Eco’s definition. Introducing the fourth section on the Tartu School of semiotics for Chinese Semiotic Studies, the focus is put on the recent developments and the current state at the center of semiotics in Tartu.

The Tartu School and Catalan Scholarship: A Book Review Article of New Work in Reception and Communication Studie

The Tartu School and Catalan Scholarship: A Book Review Article of New Work in Reception and Communication Studie

On the independence of the humanities: Tartu–Moscow School and official Soviet politics of science

Review: Maxim Waldstein, Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics.