Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture Indiana University Press, 2000 ISBN 025321405X

Humanity in Its Cultural Space

Research into mind, language and culture always fascinates the scientists and attracts much attention. Universe of the Mind by Juri Lotman is an adventurous elaboration of the semiotic approach to the intellectual world of human beings. His study of semiotic systems created by humanity over the course of its cultural history has led to the unexpected finding that these functions are also characteristic of semiotic objects. Three parts of the book reflect three functions of semiotic objects outlined by the author: (1) the transmission of information ; (2) the creation of new information, and (3) the capacity to preserve and reproduce information.

1. Text and Meaning

Part One, The Text as a Meaning-Generating Mechanism is a very illustrative analysis of the mechanism of meaning generation described as a result of the tension between two languages: conventional (discrete, verbal) and iconic (continuous, spatial). Assuming that both the individual and the collective consciousness, contain two types of text-generator, one of which is founded on discreteness, the other is continuous, Lotman shows that there is a constant exchange of texts and messages between them. The author calls this exchange "semantic translation", the results of which are "not precise translations, but approximate equivalences determined by cultural-psychological and semiotic context common to both systems" (p. 37). These approximate translations provoke new semantic connections and give rise to new texts, or in other words, they form a semantic trope. The semiotic approach adopted by Lotman treats tropes not as external ornaments applied to a thought from the outside, but the essence of creative thinking, and their function extends beyond art.

Lotman summarizes two approaches to text interpretation: according to one, the rhetorical structure automatically emerges from the laws of the language and is nothing more than their realization on the level of whole text construction. From the other point of view, the rhetorical structure does not arise automatically from the language structure, but is a deliberate reinterpretation of the latter and is brought into the verbal text from outside. Lotman favors the second approach and claims, that "the rhetorical structure not only objectively involves introducing into the text from...