A Brief Introduction to Cultural Semiotics

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1105.

Sachin Ketkar

Professor,

Department of English

Faculty of Arts

The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda

Vadodara, Gujarat, India

sachinketkar@gmail.com

This is a brief outline of the theoretical model of cultural semiotics as elaborated by the scholars of the Tartu- Moscow School of Semiotics under leadership of the Russian cultural theoretician Yuri M. Lotman (1922-1993). Cultural semiotics or the Semiotics of Culture , a Soviet branch of poststructuralist cultural studies, critiques and goes beyond the Saussurean and the Peircean model of semiotics and communication by applying more holistic approach, and incorporating findings of information theory, cybernetics, natural sciences and mathematics, especially the ideas of chaos, complexity and system thinking. It also draws upon the ideas from soviet philosophical schools like the Russian Formalism and the Bakhtin circle and the thinkers like Vernadsky and Vladimir Propp. One of the critical distinctions in cultural semiotics is the description of culture as given by the participants of the culture as distinct from the description provided by the researcher of the culture.

Lotman and Uspensky (1978) point out that ‘culture' in cultural semiotics implies “the nonhereditary memory of the community, a memory expressing itself in a system of constraints and prescriptions”. Culture can be presented as an aggregate of texts; however, from the point of view of the researcher, it is more exact to consider culture as a mechanism creating an aggregate of texts and texts as the realization of culture. “The fundamental "task" of culture… is in structurally organizing the world around man. Culture is the generator of structuredness, and in this way it creates a social sphere around man which, like the biosphere, makes life possible; that is, not organic life, but social life. But in order for it to fulfill that role, culture must have within itself a structural "diecasting mechanism." It is this function that is performed by natural language.” Natural language is thus considered to be the ‘primary modelling system'.

Literature belongs to what Lotman terms as ‘secondary modelling systems'. The secondary modelling systems are the ones which are modeled upon the primary modelling system i.e. natural language and involve translation into natural language. Explaining these concepts, Umberto Eco (1990) notes, “Semiotic systems are models which explain the world in which we live (obviously, in explaining the world, they also construct it, and in this sense, even at this early stage, Lotman saw semiotics as a cognitive science). Among all these systems, language is the primary modelling system and we apprehend the world by means of the model which language offers. Myth, cultural rules, religion, the language of art and of science are secondary modelling systems. We must therefore also study these semiotic systems which, since they lead us to understand the world in a certain way, allow us to speak about it.”

Lotman in an article “Culture as a Subject and Object for Itself” notes that the main question of semiotics of culture is the problem of meaning generation (Cited by Peeter Torop, 2005).

The conventional understanding of communication and meaning generation can be captured by the famous Jakobson Modelof communication (1960) which demonstrates how a message is transmitted by an addresser, to an addressee using an identical code and connected by a channel. Here is the celebrated Jakobson's model of communication: