Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions
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Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions
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Overview
In this volume, edited by Andreas Schönle, contributors extend Lotman's theories to a number of fields. Focusing on his less frequently studied later period, Lotman and Cultural Studies engages with such ideas as the "semiosphere," the fluid, dynamic semiotic environment out of which meaning emerges; "auto-communication," the way in which people create narratives about themselves that in turn shape their self-identity; change, as both gradual evolution and an abrupt, unpredictable "explosion"; power; law and mercy; Russia and the West; center and periphery.
As William Mills Todd observes in his afterword, the contributors to this volume test Lotman's legacy in a new context: "Their research agendas-Iranian and American politics, contemporary Russian and Czech politics, sexuality and the body-are distant from Lotman's own, but his concepts and awareness yield invariably illuminating results."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780299220402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wisconsin Press |
| Publication date: | 11/02/2006 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 394 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Lotman and Cultural Studies
Encounters and Extensions
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Copyright © 2006
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-22040-2
Chapter One Dante, Florenskii, Lotman Journeying Then and Now through Medieval Space
DAVID BETHEA
Given his interest in complex semiotic structures and in a "semiosphere" whose ever ramifying interactions model the vast physical cosmos, it is not surprising that Yuri Lotman paused in his writings to discuss the most elaborate of all texts, the worlds within worlds of Dante's La Divina Commedia. Indeed, these two authors seem almost made for each other, for their passion for meaning (and meaning making) against a moving backdrop of epistemology and geo- and astrophysics are uncannily similar. In Universe of the Mind Lotman juxtaposes the vertical journey of Dante the pilgrim and the horizontal journey of the curious, courageous, yet "morally indifferent" Ulysses as symbolic of the seam separating the medieval and the Renaissance worldview. Homer's "wily king of Ithaca," argues Lotman, "becomes in Dante the man of the Renaissance, the first discoverer and the traveller. This image appeals to Dante by its integrity and its strength, but repels him by its moral indifference. But in this image of the heroic adventurer of his time ... Dante discerned something else, not just the features of the immediate future, the scientific mind and cultural attitudes of the modern age; he saw the coming separation of knowledge from morality, of discovery from its results, of science from the human personality" (Universe of the Mind, 184). Lotman's key point is that Ulysses' journey-in Dante, if not in Homer-is only over space per se (however new and mysterious), that is, it embraces the notion of pure contiguity, whereas Dante the pilgrim's journey is down and up symbolic space, which is to say, space that is perceived as attached to meaning every step of the way and that is embodied textually through the logic of metaphor and transference. Thus Ulysses and his crew can see what eventually becomes Mount Purgatory before their shipwreck in the Southern Hemisphere but have no idea what it is (what it means-i.e., this place where there is supposedly no landfall) and will be unable to make their way to it. Hence, Dante the pilgrim and Ulysses the pagan traveler are "doubles" and "antipodes," just as their respective journeys are, in Lotman's reading, symmetrical yet antithetical (183-85).
Curiously, however, Lotman does not come alone to his analysis of these two quintessential journeys in the Commedia. He too has a double and an antipode, as it were: the priest, philosopher, and mathematician Pavel Florenskii, whose remarks in Imaginary Spaces in Geometry Lotman takes as his point of departure. Of all the possible commentators on Dante's work, Lotman singles out Florenskii and his unique way of incorporating issues of faith and spatial poetics in a post-Einsteinian world as his initial and, as it turns out, only interlocutor in this section of Universe of the Mind (177-85). After citing at length a crucial passage from Imaginary Spaces in which Dante and Virgil are described as experiencing something like the "bending" of space as they climb the bulge of Lucifer's haunch in the Inferno, Lotman concludes that "Florensky in his eagerness to show how much closer to the twentieth century is the medieval mind than the mechanistic ideology of the Renaissance gets somewhat carried away (for instance the return of Dante to earth [Paradiso, I, 5-6] is only hinted at and there are no grounds for assuming that he travelled in a straight line); but the problem of the contradiction in the Commedia between real-everyday space and cosmic-transcendental space, which he highlights, is a crucial one, although the solution to this contradiction has to be sought in another direction" (179). In other words, Florenskii appears to have the correct conceptual instincts but has lost his bearings, so to speak, with the result that the "solution ... has to be sought in another direction." We might say then, if we agree with Lotman, that the philosopher-priest is, despite his piety and heroic life, a kind of Ulysses (but ironically, a faith-based, Christian one) of Dante studies-a bold but misguided traveler. In this essay I expand on this dialogue between Lotman and Florenskii about the meaning of spatial poetics in the Commedia and try to ascertain how Lotman's and Florenskii's different readings of the Dantesque viaggio provide insights into their respective views of Russian culture. I will suggest that Lotman, with his Enlightenment orientation, saw himself commenting on Florenskii (i.e., on Florenskii reading Dante) in a manner analogous (but in a reversely symmetrical way) to Dante's own "correcting" of Ulysses' "amoral" navigation of pre-Christian space-time. Put simply, Dante the pilgrim is to the ultimately shipwrecked Ulysses of the Inferno (canto 26) as the Lotman of the Universe of the Mind passage is to the "over-reaching" Florenskii of Imaginary Spaces.
First, some additional background on Florenskii. As recent studies have made abundantly clear, every crucial question of ontology had for Florenskii an antinomial structure. Whether he was speaking about icons, language, dreams, the creative process, non-Euclidean geometry, the interior of a cathedral, or even St. Sophia, he visualized two separate and seemingly self-canceling categories and then showed, against logic (rassudok), how these categories could suddenly occupy the same space in a privileged "crossover zone," what Steven Cassedy has termed, following Heidegger and Roman Ingarden, the "ontically transitional." Thus we have the board, glue, gesso, and gold leaf of an icon, on the one hand, and the unmediated "Mother of God," on the other; or the composition (that which the artist, with the concrete materials at hand, conceives from his or her vantage) of a work of art, on the one hand, and its construction (that which the viewer perceives from his or her vantage), on the other, and so on. Florenskii constantly asks the reader/viewer of his spatially arranged formulations to see two or more points of view simultaneously, to, as it were, look back from the far side and forward from the near. The icon is a sacred object because the viewer sees the boards qua boards and the Mother of God qua Mother of God; this is achieved by stepping through the window of belief where separation equals identification.
Pivotal to Florenskii's antinomial thinking-cum-faith system is the notion of "sanctuarial barrier," the limen without which the philosopher cannot envision his crossover zone. The iconostasis is an ideal expression of this precisely because of its flat surface and its function as a threshold separating sacred from nonsacred space. As Cassedy summarizes, "Florensky's method was always to start with a duality ... and demonstrate the metaphysical inadequacy of that duality. The two members of a duality simply reflect each other and offer no chance for movement to a higher state. A third member is always needed to transcend this aporia, and the result is the completeness of trinity.... What is remarkable, though, is how deeply entrenched in the pretrinitarian stage of his thinking Florensky's mind seems to be. It is as though he knew in good conscience that a Christian worldview required trinity for completeness, but put the third member of the trinity in its place almost by a kind of intellectual artifice." Even Florenskii's definition of a symbol partakes of the visually constructed figure of the crossover zone (here a "window") and reveals its author to be a true child of the Symbolist epoch: "A symbol is larger than itself.... A metaphysical symbol is that essence whose energy bears within itself the energy of another, higher essence, and is dissolved in it; its joining with it and through it manifestly reveals that higher essence. A symbol is a window to another, not immediately given essence." The symbol is neither "itself" (presumably the phenomenal reality of its "essence") nor the energy that is "larger than itself" (presumably the noumenal reality of the "higher essence"), but precisely both brought together through the image/iconic surface of the window.
This is where Dante and Florenskii's discussion of the Commedia enter the picture. In 1921, on the six hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante, Florenskii wrote a short but remarkably dense and provocative pamphlet in which he tried to prove that the latest theoretical discoveries in math and physics actually confirm what Christian mystics had for centuries been calling revelation-namely, that infinity could be knowable. His term for this was aktual'naia beskonechnost' (actual infinity). The booklet, which has since become a bibliographical rarity, was called Imaginary Spaces in Geometry: The Expansion of the Domain of Two-Dimensional Images in Geometry (Mnimosti v geometrii: Rasshirenie oblasti dvukhmernykh obrazov geometrii) and was published in 1922 by the Moscow publishing house Pomor'e. Several of the names that Florenskii cites as sources for his ideas are well known in modern accounts of the geometry of space and anticipate in interesting ways Einstein's general theory of relativity: Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and A. F. Moebius. In essence, what Florenskii contends, contra Euclidean geometry and contra its variations in Leibniz, Newton, and Kant, is that the universe can and should be imagined as (in contemporary terminology) "a finite homogeneous galactic system." That is to say, we can conceive of a universe that is both finite, in that it is bounded, and homogeneous, in that it has no fixed center. To put it another way, there is no other space beyond space, and yet space is not infinite. How can this be so? By seeing space as curved, as non-Euclidean, as having no properties extrinsic to itself by which to fix its dimensions, by imagining the intrinsic relativity of any position one is able to take in space. Those visual prompts, including Klein bottles, Moebius strips, and Escher drawings, that fascinate us because we cannot isolate their boundaries do so precisely by playing with or "bending" our perspective. From our three-dimensional space we look on their two-dimensional surfaces as optical illusions, for their bending does not pierce our space (i.e., it is not measurable outside itself) just as the Einsteinian 3-sphere cannot be empirically charted.
These are some of the ideas Florenskii engages in his booklet. Intriguingly, the print by Favorskii decorating the cover of Imaginary Spaces is itself a kind of non-Euclidean geometrician's Moebius strip: it presents two sides of a plane-the left side, which is visible, and the right side, which is imaginary. Florenskii asserts the integrity of the plane that can be seen from both sides simultaneously. Certain details from the visible side (the letter O) show up on the imaginary side, but fragmented, reversed in perspective, and, most important, bent or distorted. Here the author is suggesting, as on a chart, the essential curvature of space. Whereas the basic distinction in the Gauss-Riemann-Einstein model is a universe that is finite and homogeneous, that is, it has no fixed center (all galactic units being bounded equally by all other units) and thus no outer limit to be crossed over or pierced, the Orthodox and otherworldly Florenskii still telescopes these antinomies in perhaps his most audacious crossover zone: "A shred of the real side, while located on the border of imaginary [space] ... conveys the fluctuation of the geometrical figure at the point where it collapses through the plane, when it has not yet been fixed in place [or "determined," opredelilas'], being at once both real and imaginary." If the modern scientist must conclude that "it is hopeless [that is, in the absence of extrinsic criteria] to imagine curved space as being mysteriously bent through a fourth dimension," no such doubts assail Florenskii, for that is exactly what he is asserting-that the intrinsic becomes extrinsic at this "crossover zone." In short, Florenskii, with the aid of Favorskii, has constructed what might be termed a mathematical icon: rather than the antinomies of boards versus Mother of God, we have the antinomies of three-dimensional versus four-dimensional space. When Florenskii says of the cover sketch that it "does not merely decorate the book, but enters as a constitutive element into its spiritual make-up," he is asking his reader to step through that same limen of faith we have witnessed elsewhere.
Florenskii concludes Imaginary Spaces with an ingenious discussion of how Dante's work, in its presentation of the other world, was not only "ahead of contemporary science" but in fact startlingly prescient about notions such as the bending or breaking of space at conditions-imaginary yet no less real-beyond the speed of light. As we recall, this is the same passage that Lotman cites as his point of departure (both into Dante and from Florenskii) in Universe of the Mind. Thus, the Russian scientist-priest anticipates by almost sixty years the work of such physicists and mathematicians as J. J. Callahan and Mark A. Peterson, who have argued in their publications that Dante's vision in the Paradiso of the harmonious interrelation between the heavenly spheres (which increase in size and turn more rapidly the higher the pilgrim goes) and the Empyrean (whose nine concentric circles decrease in size but, paradoxically, increase in rotating speed the closer they come to the blinding point of light at their center) is in fact a rather accurate replica of Einstein's "finite and homogeneous" galactic system known as the 3-sphere. The reader is left with "the almost inescapable impression that [Dante] conceives of these nine angelic spheres [of the Empyrean] as forming one hemisphere of the entire universe and the usual Aristotelian universe up to the Primum Mobile as the other hemisphere, while he is standing more or less on the equator between them.... Taken all together, then, his universe is a 3-sphere." Or as Florenskii himself formulates the paradox of relativity in his own strikingly similar terms, "Dantesque space is precisely like elliptical space. This [realization] sheds a sudden bundle of light on the medieval notion of the finite character of the world. But these ideas concerning geometry in general have recently received an unexpected concrete interpretation through the principle of relativity, and from the point of view of modern physics, universal space should be conceivable precisely as elliptical space and is acknowledged to be finite, just as time is finite, enclosed in itself.... The realm of imaginary space is real, comprehensible, and in the language of Dante is called the Empyrean."
Thus far we have been setting the stage for Lotman and his view of Dante's journey by focusing on Florenskii as interlocutor, in particular the latter's antinomial thinking and his unique way of reading a non-Euclidean curvature in the space-time continuum into the "geometry of salvation" in the Commedia. Now I would like to bring into play Lotman's argument in Universe of the Mind by showing how it foregrounds, without explicitly saying so, the profound and irreconcilable differences between Dante's medieval Catholic worldview and Florenskii's Symbolist-tinged Orthodoxy. Along the way I shall also demonstrate, with Lotman's help, how these competing faith systems implicate very different histories and-this is the central point-different ways of negotiating a "middle space" on earth.
I will begin by introducing two additional works by Lotman to support my argument. First, his well-known study of binary models of culture (coauthored with Boris Uspenskii), from which the following passage is taken:
In Western Catholicism, the world beyond the grave is divided into three spaces: heaven, purgatory, and hell. Earthly life is correspondingly conceived of as admitting three types of behavior: the unconditionally sinful, the unconditionally holy, and the neutral, which permits eternal salvation after some sort of purgative trial. In the real life of the medieval West a wide area of neutral behavior thus became possible, as did neutral societal institutions, which were neither "holy" nor "sinful," neither "pro-state" nor "anti-state," neither good nor bad. The neutral sphere became a structural reserve, out of which the succeeding system developed....
The Russian medieval system was constructed on an accentuated duality. To continue our example, one of its attributes was the division of the other world into heaven and hell. Intermediate neutral spheres were not envisaged. Behavior in earthly life could be either sinful or holy. This situation spread into extra-ecclesiastical conceptions: thus secular power could be interpreted as divine or diabolical, but never as neutral. ("Binary Models," 31-32)
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments....................viiA Note on Transliteration and Referencing....................ix
Introduction ANDREAS SCHÖNLE and JEREMY SHINE....................3
Power SEMIOTIC COLLISIONS AND THE ETHICS OF ESTRANGEMENT 1. Dante, Florenskii, Lotman: Journeying Then and Now through Medieval Space DAVID BETHEA....................41
2. Lotman's Other: Estrangement and Ethics in Culture and Explosion AMY MANDELKER....................59
3. Pushkin's "Andzhelo," Lotman's Insight into It, and the Proper Measure of Politics and Grace CARYL EMERSON....................84
POLITICAL REALITIES AND RHETORICAL BOUNDARIES 4. Post-Soviet Political Discourse and the Creation of Political Communities MICHAEL URBAN....................115
5. State Power, Hegemony, and Memory: Lotman and Gramsci MAREK STEEDMAN....................136
6. The Ever-Tempting Return to an Iranian Past in the Islamic Present: Does Lotman's Binarism Help? KATHRYN BABAYAN....................159
Margins and Selfhood SELF-REFLECTION AND THE UNDERGROUND 7. The Self, Its Bubbles, and Its Illusions: Cultivating Autonomy in Greenblatt and Lotman ANDREAS SCHÖNLE....................183
8. Lotman's Karamzin and the Late Soviet Liberal Intelligentsia ANDREI ZORIN....................208
ICONIC SELF-EXPRESSION 9. Bipolar Asymmetry, Indeterminacy, and Creativity in Cinema HERBERT EAGLE....................229
10. Post-ing the Soviet Body as Tabula Phrasa and Spectacle HELENA GOSCILO....................248
NEGOTIATING THE EVERYDAY 11. Eccentricity and Cultural Semiotics in Imperial Russia JULIE A. BUCKLER....................299
12.Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau JONATHAN H. BOLTON....................320
Afterword: Lotman without Tears WILLIAM MILLS TODD III....................345
Bibliography....................353
Contributors....................359
Index....................363