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CHAPTER 34
JURI LOTMAN AND LIFE SCIENCES
Kalevi Kull and Timo Maran
What is similar in animals and humans is very interesting, and in general I think
that zoosemiotics should become a part of linguistics or linguistics a part of
zoosemiotics – we will not argue about ranks, but it seems to me that a zoologist
should be linguist, or maybe a linguist must be zoologist.
– Juri Lotman (1990b: 19)
Apart from an impact on and belongness to the local intellectual sphere – in Juri Lotman’s
case both to Estonian (Tamm and Kull 2016) and to Russian (Torop 2019) cultures – the
work of a scholar can contribute to scientic understanding in general. Lotman’s major
and deep theoretical interest was (in addition to the poetics of text and the theory of
culture) in semiotics, the area in which he became a classic author. His relationships with
life sciences exist mainly via his fundamental eect on general semiotics, the potentials
of which are far from entirely explored.
Lotman’s life-long project was to understand the mechanisms of artistic text.
For the Tartu-Moscow School the shi from gradual processes to explosive
moments was determined when the centre of scholarly attention was relocated
from the eld of linguistics to the semiotics of art. Art is a child of explosion. e
work of art is born in a moment of explosion and cannot be understood without
taking into account the very nature of that birth. (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 87)
Moreover: ‘e actual artistic text reproduces that interlacing of the predictable and
the unpredictable that brings it near to life itself, not just to a model of life’ (Lotman
[1994/2010] 2013: 220). Because ‘it is not so that the artistic texts are extreme expressions
of some normal non-artistic texts, but I think that non-artistic texts are a special case
of artistic texts’ (Lotman 1981: 7). Going the long way of studies through the various
aspects of such modelling, Lotman’s theory of semiotics was built.
e semiotics of the 1960s and 1970s was mainly limited to human sciences
and logic (and to some extent cybernetics). e application of semiotics to biology
and the development of biosemiotics has grown to a noticeable extent only since
the 1980s, and more extensively since the 1990s. erefore, it is rather obvious that
semiotics for Lotman mainly speaks in human sciences. However, as much as his
work on general semiotic models describes the deep mechanisms of meaning-making
and communication – the mechanisms that are general throughout the entire area
of semiotics – his work unwittingly contributes to biosemiotics and to a theory of
life. is connection through general semiotics is the aspect of Lotman’s relation to
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462
biosemiotics – and via this to life sciences in general – that we focus on in the following
paragraphs.
Sources
While the main topic of Lotman’s works in the 1960s and 1970s was structural poetics
and semiotic theory of culture (Żyłko 2016), in the 1980s he turned towards the problems
of general semiotics, and accordingly there are more connections to life sciences in
the works from that last period of his life. International reception of Lotman’s work in
general semiotics grew aer the publication of Universe of the Mind in 1990; his work
appears in the international anthologies of semiotics only since 2000 (see Kull 2011).
In addition to Lotman’s published works, there is also a link to life sciences via his
talks to and conversations with biologists, and these too have not been without inuence.
We can thus list four types of source that deserve attention when reviewing the Lotman–
biosciences bridge:
(A) Lotman’s writings in which he formulates principles of general semiotics. ese
are particularly his works from the last decade of his life (Lotman [1984] 2005;
1990a; [1992] 2009; [1994/2010] 2013), however, a scattering of these principles
can also be found in several works from the 1960s and 1970s.
(B) Various examples and expressions in works on dierent subjects in which
the features of non-human life were briey characterized or discussed or
mentioned in the context of comparison with the phenomena of human culture
(e.g. Lotman 1967).
(C) A few writings in which biological problems were directly addressed. ese
include a couple of short articles (Lotman 1984; 1988), two interviews (Lotman
1990b; Kull and Lotman [1992] 2015) and some lectures he gave by invitation
of a theoretical biology group in Tartu.
(D) Talks (e.g. Lotman 1981), correspondence (Raudla and Pern 2011) and
conversations in which biological questions were explicitly or implicitly
addressed.
Since the Tartu-Moscow school of the 1960s and 1970s did not include biologists, both
their works and the main literature about the school has said almost nothing (with very
few exceptions, like Andrews 2003) on the topic of Lotman and life sciences.
In addition, (C) and (D) belong mainly to the period when active collaboration
within the Tartu-Moscow school was over (cf. Avtonomova 2014: 219–27). e relevant
texts for (C) were both not published in Russian, and appeared in editions outside the
interests of the Slavists.
e previous works in which Lotman’s relationships to life sciences (or the topic of
Lotman and biology) have been analysed include, in particular, Alexandrov (2000),
Andrews (2003), Favareau (2010), Kotov (2002), Kotov and Kull (2011), Kull (1999;
2005; 2015a), Kull and Lotman (2012), Kull and Velmezova (2018), M. Lotman (2002),
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463
Machtyl (2019), Mandelker (1994), Maran (2020), Marinakis (2012), Markoš (2014),
Nöth (2006), Patoine and Hope (2015), Sebeok (1988; 1998), Semenenko (2016) and so
on. Remarkably, almost all these belong to the twenty-rst century.
Lotman’s general semiotics and its relevance for biology
Lotman was interested in general principles of meaning-making from his works of the
early 1960s. For instance, in 1964 he says that art has features that enable it to specically
describe life. In saying this, Lotman attempts to describe how the non-verbal aspects
of life can be best modelled by non-verbal aspects of poetic description. ‘Art learns life
recreating it. [. . .] Art is a modelling system’ (Lotman 1964: 18, 27). Without having
in mind non-human examples, what Lotman was to discover was a deep and general
mechanism that includes the working of forms of non-human life. In the conclusion to
the same work, Lotman provides an explicit comparison between the study of art, and
biology:
e parallelism between the phenomena of life and the phenomena of art has,
for all its conventionality, one additional aspect. Just as in the science of a living
organism we understand that the phenomenon of life, being a qualitative specicity
of biological processes, cannot be represented for a single moment outside the
material structure of cells; just as the materialist biologist understands that by
linking life with a certain system of relations and organization of material substance,
he does not humiliate life, but only fences himself o from vitalism, – the art
theorist must clearly understand that the idea of art, constituting its basis, cannot
exist outside the material structure of the work. Talking about a useful idea and
poor performance is the same as studying the ‘life force’ that exists outside of living
cells. (Lotman 1964: 189)
Or, for instance, another simple example of Lotman’s generalization, which states that
‘in examining the nature of semiotic structures, we observe that the complexity of a
structure is directly proportional to the complexity of the information transmitted. As
the nature of the information grows more complicated, the semiotic system used to
transmit that information grows more complicated’ (Lotman [1970] 1977: 10). is rule
is probably applicable on all levels of semiotic systems – from a cell, from vegetative and
animal semiosis to culture and its structures.
roughout his many writings, Lotman formulated a series of characteristics that
describe various universal aspects of a general semiotic process – of semiosis (cf. Lepik
2008). rough these characteristics or principles, he built a model of semiosis that – as
we assume – would describe semiosis from its emergence in the rst meaning-making
living systems.
e model of semiosis, as based on Juri Lotman’s approach, can be described as
consisting of a series of logically connected basic principles (cf. Kull 2015a):
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464
(1) e principle of code plurality – one code is insucient for semiosis, and
at least two codes are necessary; ‘semiotic dualism is the minimal form of
organisation of a working semiotic system’ (Lotman 1990a: 124);
(2) e principle of incompatibility or nontranslatability or confusion or conict –
meaning-making requires an incompatibility of codes; incompatibility is
the source of indeterminacy, non-predictability and freedom; ‘transmitter
and receiver use dierent codes [. . .] which overlap but are not identical.
[. . .] e asymmetrical relationship, the constant need for choice, make
translation in this case an act of generating new information’ (Lotman 1990a:
14–5). ‘Particularly indicative is the situation where it is not simply dierence
which exists between codes, but mutual untranslatability (for instance, in the
translation of a verbal text into an iconic one)’ (Lotman 1990a: 15); ‘across any
synchronic section of the semiosphere dierent languages at dierent stage
of development are in conict, and some texts are immersed in languages
not their own, while the codes to decipher them with may be entirely absent’
(Lotman 1990a: 126);
(3) e principle of asymmetry – semiotic structures are inherently asymmetrical
or in imbalance; this principle is present in dierent topics and discussions
for Lotman as, for instance, relations between le and right hemisphere of the
brain, between centre and periphery of culture, between inside and outside of
semiotic space and so on; the principle of asymmetry leads to the dynamic and
developmental view of semiotic systems and processes;
(4) e principle of autocommunication or translation or negotiation –
autocommunication is the most general form of communication; it must
be present for sign interpretation; autocommunication underlies the ability
to qualitatively restructure and translate; ‘culture is a vast example of
autocommunication’ (Lotman 1990a: 33);
(5) e principle of semiotic inheritance – every sign comes from another sign,
every text from another text; ‘semiotic experience precedes the semiotic act’
(Lotman 1990a: 123); ‘the semiotic situation precedes the instruments of
semiosis’ (Lotman 1990a: 144);
(6) e principle of the semiosphere – the principle of the relationality of semiotic
systems: semiotic space must be regarded as a unied mechanism; semiosis
cannot exist outside of the semiosphere, of ‘that synchronic semiotic space [. . .]
without which separate semiotic systems cannot function or come into being’
(Lotman 1990a: 3);
(7) e principle of non-gradual (punctuated) evolution – in the development
of a semiotic system, explosive or disrupted and continuous or orthogenetic
processes alternate and co-occur; ‘Neither a system made up of explosions
alone nor a system devoid of explosions can exist as a healthy organism. [. . .]
Gradual evolution and shis to unpredictability must form a complex whole.
[. . .] Unpredictability experienced in the realm of art can be carried over into
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465
reality in a form free of catastrophes, similar to the way an injection provides
an organism with immunity’ (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 131);
(8) e principle of modelling – semiotic systems are themselves modelling
systems; ‘A modelling system is a structure of elements and rules of their
combination, existing in a state of xed analogy to the whole sphere of the
object of perception, cognition, or organization’ (Lotman [1967] 2011: 250);
(9) e principle of boundaries – boundaries are the source of diversity and
creativity of semiotic systems; ‘One of the fundamental concepts of semiotic
delimitation lies in the notion of boundary’ (Lotman [1984] 2005: 208). ‘e
border of semiotic space is the most important functional and structural
position, giving substance to its semiotic mechanism. e border is a bilingual
mechanism, translating external communications into the internal language of
the semiosphere and vice versa’ (Lotman [1984] 2005: 210);
(10) e principle of unpredictability and choice – semiosis presupposes the
situation of unpredictability that forces a choice; ‘Every time when we talk
about unpredictability, we mean a certain set of equipossible choices, of which
only one becomes realized’ (Lotman 1992: 190); ‘e unpredictable element
becomes an act, is unavoidably subjected to interpretation, and is attributed
with additional motivation aer the fact’ (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 67); ‘e
translator is forced to make a choice’ (Lotman 1990a: 14).
ese interconnected principles can be seen as the universal characteristics of a meaning-
making mechanism, the semiosis, wherever and whenever it may occur. And as much as
semiosis is widely existent in living organisms, these principles should unavoidably be
applicable to non-human forms of semiosis – that is to say, in the realm of life sciences.
Links via shared methodology
In addition to semiosis as a shared object between anthroposemiotics and biosemiotics,
Lotmanian approach also shares something with biological (biosemiotic) methodology.
Firstly, this is an emphasis on a scientic approach, oen repeated by Lotman.
Semiotics is viewed as science, according to Lotman. is emphasis does not characterize
all schools of semiotics, but in the case of the Tartu school it is certainly important
(see also Salupere 2011). Its roots are, of course, in structuralism and attempts to
apply mathematical models to literary studies, which was the main context during the
formation of Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics in the 1960s. However, in Lotman’s case
the view of semiotics as a science persisted, even into the 1990s.
Secondly, and this is related to the foregoing, the emphasis on mechanisms. For
Lotman, it is natural to speak about the mechanisms of meaning-making, mechanism of
semiosis, mechanisms of cultural dynamics and structure. is, of course, has nothing to
do with mechanicism. e roots of his view were rather, rst, in the semiotics of Russian
formalism (where the term ‘mechanism’ was widely used, cf. Steiner [1984] 2014), and
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second, in general systems theory, which largely stemmed from biology, from the works
of Ludwig von Bertalany.
irdly, again related to the latter, is the emphasis on modelling. On the one hand,
modelling is seen as the general means of cognition, and on the other hand the means
of knowledge transfer from one eld to another (supported by the popularity of general
systems theory in the 1960s and 1970s – Sistemnye issledovaniia, in Russian – which
emphasize modelling as the basis of interdisciplinarity). eoretical biology and
semiotics became neighbouring disciplines in this context.
And fourth, holism, organicism. Organicism does not characterize all approaches
in life sciences, although it is certainly an essence of biology. Lotman’s semiotics was,
no doubt, holistic. He writes: ‘we are proposing a “semiotic physiology”, a study of the
functional connection between the dierent languages in the single functioning whole.
By posing the question: “In what way is this particular language essential for the general
functioning of culture and what is its special function in the single cultural organism?”
we will be able to elucidate what is specic in each language’ (Lotman and Uspenskij
1984: ix).
One of the fundamental features of semiotic systems, according to Lotman, is the
incompatibility or partial untranslatability of the languages or codes that are included in
the semiotic system (see aforementioned principle 2). Using the ways in which dierent
elds deal with (logical) incompatibilities or conicts, a rather clear distinction is
observable (see also Kull 2015a: 263):
e arts – use incompatibilities (oen implicit) to make meanings;
e sciences – make the incompatibilities explicit:
●either removing them (physical sciences) so that objects do not include
incompatibilities
●or describing them (semiotic sciences) so that objects can include
incompatibilities.
Indeed, life (the research object for biology) as well as art (the research object for
Lotman) both essentially include incompatibilities: conict is what drives them, what
makes them alive.
Semiotics of animals in Lotman’s works
Lotman uses a very broad concept of language (see also Chapter 8) that enables the
creation of a connection between human cultural semiosis and semiosis of other
organisms:
Every system whose end is to establish communication between two or more
individuals may be dened as language ([. . .] the case of auto-communication
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467
implies that one individual functions as two). e common allegation that language
implies communication in human society is not, strictly speaking, binding,
for, on the one hand, linguistic communication between man and machine,
and today between machines themselves, is no longer a theoretical problem
but a technological reality. On the other hand, the existence of certain forms of
linguistic communication between animals has also ceased to be questioned.
In contrast, systems of communication inside an individual (for example, the
mechanisms of biochemical regulation or of signals transmitted through an
organism’s nervous system) are not languages. [. . .] Every language makes use of
signs which constitute its ‘vocabulary’. (Lotman [1970] 1977: 7)
He admits that ‘it would be possible to identify cases of sharp, individual markings,
especially in pairs of animals during the mating period. But still there remains one
indisputable fact: the language of animals does not “know” proper names’ (Lotman
[1992] 2009: 30).
In his article ‘Natural Environment and Information’ (Lotman 1988), Lotman
analysed animal communication that is based on movement. He states that animals with
elaborate repertoires of movement can play, in which case ‘the movement system can be
viewed as language’ (Lotman 1988: 46).
e problem of dierence between human beings and animals is discussed, for
instance, in some chapters of the books Unpredictable Workings of Culture (Lotman
[1994/2010] 2013, ‘A Dialogue in Dierent Languages’, ‘Fashion and Dress’, ‘A
Workshop of Unpredictability’, ‘In Place of a Conclusion’) and Culture and Explosion
(Lotman [1992] 2009, ‘inking Reed’, ‘e World of Proper Names’, ‘e Fool and the
Madman’, ‘e Moment of Unpredictability’). In many of these contexts, animals have
been used as a counterexample to highlight human cultural and semiotic abilities. For
instance, in Culture and Explosion Lotman stresses the rituality and regularity of animal
communication (in courtship behaviour, in conicts to regulate social hierarchies,
in territorial disputes), contrasting this to creativity and inventiveness in human
communication. Accordingly, ‘From man’s point of view, animals are stupid; from the
animal’s point of view, man is dishonest (he doesn’t play by the rules). Man constructs
his view of the animal as a foolish person. e animal constructs his view of man as a
dishonourable animal’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 29).
In Lotman’s earlier writings, we can see some occasional comparisons between
literature and biological (non-human) life, pointing to analogies of cultural and textual
phenomena in prelinguistic life. For instance, he has compared the functional structure
of literary text and living organism:
Relationship between the artistic idea and the construction of a literary work
reminds one of the relationship between life and the biological structure of a cell.
In biology, there is no vitalist any more who would investigate life outside the
real organization of matter, its carrier. In the science of literature they still exist.
Also, a listing of the material ‘inventory’ of a living tissue cannot unlock the secrets
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468
of life: the cell is given as a complex functioning self-accommodating system.
Realization of its functions turns out to be life. A literary work is also a complex
self-accommodating system (indeed, of an other type). e idea represents the
life of a literary work, and this is similarly impossible in a body dissected by an
anatomist or outside this body. Mechanicism of the former and idealism of the
latter should be replaced by the dialectics of functional analysis. (Lotman 1967:
97, our emphases)
It is interesting that in some contexts Lotman denies the existence of sign processes inside
the organism (‘systems of communication inside an individual [. . .] are not languages’),
and in another context speaks about the similarity between the dynamic structure of the
brain and of culture. Such contradictions can be at least partly explained by the datings
of the works, as Lotman’s views change gradually from structuralism towards more open
post-structural and organicist semiotics.
In the article ‘Culture and the Organism’ (Lotman 1984), Lotman lists some
general features, which are common to the organism and to culture, at a certain level
of abstraction – memory, the symmetric mechanism of homeostasis and asymmetric
mechanisms generating new information, the explosive growth of information content
in certain stages of development and so on. He adds: ‘Similarly to the living organism,
whose normal contact to the insentient nature means the prevenient “translation”
of information into the structural language of biosphere, also the contact of every
intellectual being with outward information requires its translation into the sign system’
(Lotman 1984: 216).
In some denitions of semiosphere, Lotman has explicitly included all living beings:
e semiosphere, if pictured in the momentary lm-still of a synchronic cross-
section, should include in itself all the totality of semiotic acts, from the signals of
animals to the verses of poets and the call-signs of articial satellites. (Lotman and
Uspenskij 1984: x)
and
By analogy with the biosphere, our planet is surrounded by a real semiosphere,
synchronously including all the variety of signals from bird singing to radio signals
from articial satellites, and diachronously including the entire cultural memory of
mankind, from ‘recordings’ of neurons in the brain and genetic memory to libraries,
lm collections and museums. Each semiotic system functions, being in certain
relations with other systems and levels of the semiosphere. (Lotman 1991: 4)
While accepting semiotic activity in other living species, Lotman pointed out a strong
dierence between humans and animals. We may not agree with the source of that
dierence as described by Lotman, but at the same time his descriptions of semiotic
mechanisms are widely applicable.
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469
Ecosemiotic aspects
By ecosemiotics we mean the study of semiotic aspects of human relationships with
nature, and in connection with this, with semiosic relations in ecosystems and the
biosphere. Juri Lotman has made some remarkable observations in this area.
In his work of 1970 (Lotman [1970] 2002: 151), he writes: ‘Mastering of the world
via turning it into the text, its “culturization”, includes two opposite approaches.’ In the
rst case, the world is considered as text (either made by God or by the natural laws of
nature, or by the absolute idea, etc.). en its mastering means the deciphering of this
text and translation of the nature’s text to the language of human culture. is is largely
the way characteristic to the medieval, baroque and romanticist relation to nature. e
book of nature is rather stable, and accordingly this approach rather sustainable. In the
second case, the world is not a text. In this case, a deep divide between nature and culture
appears:
the culturization means giving to the world the structure of culture. [. . .] is is
analogical to the concept of mastering the ‘barbarian’ world by introducing into
it the structures of civilization [. . .]. In this case it is not a translation of a text,
but turning a non-text into a text. Turning a forest into a ploughland, drainage of
swamps or irrigation of deserts – i.e. any transformation of non-cultural landscape
into a cultural one – can also be seen as turning a non-text into a text. (Lotman
[1970] 2002: 152)
As noted in Maran (2020), Lotman’s cultural semiotics includes several concepts with
ecological potential, for example semiosphere, cultural boundary and semiotics of space,
but what is most relevant among these is probably the idea of semiotic modelling (see
also Chapter 12). Lotman describes cultural boundaries as semi-permeable translation
mechanisms that allow culture–nature relations to be redened based on modelling
and semiosis. In this vein, Kati Lindström (2010) has applied Lotman’s concept of
autocommunication to analyse landscape as a source of secondary code for culture;
and Maran (2014) has used Lotman’s concept of text to study literary representations of
nature.
Lotman’s broad understanding of text as an internally organized semiotic structure
makes it possible to analyse parts of nature as semiotic in relation to human culture.
Lotman and Piatigorsky ([1968] 1977: 129) consider the concept of text to cover
also ‘inscriptions le by a population that has already disappeared from a region,
ruins of buildings of unknown purpose’. Alfred Siewers has elaborated on Lotman’s
perception of the volatile boundaries of culture in the concept of ecosemiosphere as
‘an ecolog ical bub ble of meani ng’ (Siewers 2014: 4) that ‘extends earlier denitions of
specic symbolic cultures as semiospheres, or meaningful environments, into physical
environments’ (Siewers 2011: 41; cf. the concept of semiobiosphere in Ponzio and
Petrilli 2001).
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470
Conversations with biologists
Reviewing the link between Lotman and biology, it is obvious to ask what were Lotman’s
(personal) relationships to life sciences.
Lotman had an interest in biology during his school years before the war (Lotman 1994:
468). Later, however, he did not read much on biological research; instead, his biological
knowledge was mainly kept up-to-date via conversations with biologists. His son Aleksei
Lotman, who expressed early interest in zoology and studied biology at the University
of Tartu, played an important role among those with whom he held conversations on
biology. Among Juri Lotman’s students and colleagues, there were no biologists. However,
he may have had some conversations with Aleksei Turovski, who oen appeared in the
circles of Lotman’s students (Ve l m ez o v a a nd Ku l l 2 0 16 ); and perhaps with Oleg Mutt,
a philologist, who helped in the translation of abstracts for Lotman’s journal Trudy po
znakovym sistemam (Sign Systems Studies) and had an interest in zoosemiotics (Vaiksoo
2018); and on some occasions with Kalevi Kull, and with the biologists in theoretical
biology seminars which Lotman attended (among these ‘Biology and Linguistics’ in 1978
in Tartu, and ‘eory of Behaviour’ in 1982 in Puhtu – see Kull 1999; 2006).
A group of biologists with whom Lotman shared an interest and had many
conversations were neurophysiologists, who studied the phenomena of hemispheric
asymmetry in the brain – Lev J. Balonov, Vadim L. Deglin and Tatjana V. Chernigovskaja
from Saint Petersburg. On 13–15 March 1981, Lotman and his colleagues organized
a seminar titled ‘Functional parallelism between the asymmetry of functions of the
cerebral hemispheres and the semiotic asymmetry of culture as a mechanism of collective
consciousness’ in Tartu (Egorov et al. 2018: 516). e meeting was attended by, among
others, Suren Zolyan (with a talk), Mihhail Kotik and Aleksei Lotman.
Biological ideas for a theory of culture?
Did Lotman give ideas to life science or rather did he receive inspiration from biology?
Amy Mandelker’s analysis tends to favour the latter:
e spatialised and biologised concept of the semiosphere enhances the earlier
Moscow-Tartu school notion of inner and outer cultural perspectives. [. . .] e
sphere also invites the borrowing of some suggestive topics from biophysics and cell
biology: enclosure and disclosure, resistance and responsiveness to penetration,
and the assimilation of intruding and extruding elements. [. . .] Lotman’s sphere of
silence embraces, encloses, and embodies the utterance just as the biosphere [. . .]
embraces all life and lies passively open to men’s husbandry. (Mandelker 1994:
390, 392)
In addition, the reconstructions of the formation of the concept of semiosphere via
Lotman’s reading on the history of the concept of biosphere in Vladimir Vernadsky
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471
tells us that Lotman received ideas from life science. It may also be that Lotman had
more personal contacts with biologists aer the end of 1970s. Be that as it may, it is
important to see that the ideas taken from biology were not of the kind oen meant by
biologization, that is, the struggle for existence and natural selection. Not at all. e ideas
that attracted Lotman were those of living memory – omne vivum e vivo – of a boundary
that translates, of asymmetry, of the organic whole.
Lotman’s influence on biosemiotics
Lotman’s inuence on biosemiotics is obvious. Without Lotman’s semiotics in Tartu, the
Tartu biosemiotics group would either not exist or have a rather dierent form. And
later via biosemiotics, Lotman may have had an indirect eect on theoretical biology
and ecology.
Some fundamental ideas on general meaning-making mechanisms – code
incompatibility and the related code plurality and untranslatability – are used in
works on the mechanism of semiosis (Kull 2015b). When comparing the description
of communication with that provided by omas Sebeok, Lotman adds an important
aspect to the understanding of the mechanism of meaningful communication, that of
incompatibility, the necessary dierence.
e concept of semiosphere, which is widely used in contemporary biosemiotics, has a
separate source from the works of Jesper Homeyer (1996; 1997; 1998), who introduced
the concept initially without having read Lotman; however, later he reconstructed the
link to Lotman (see Kull and Velmezova 2019: 374). Kaie Kotov (2002) has claried the
relationship between these concepts. at Donald Favareau (2010) included a chapter on
Lotman in the major anthology of biosemiotics is both a reection of Lotman’s existing
role, and its further propagation.
Since Lotman’s denition of culture, which uses as a criterial feature the non-
hereditary information (‘we understand culture as the nonhereditary memory of the
community, a memory expressing itself in a system of constraints and prescriptions’ –
Lotman and Uspensky [1971] 1978: 213), is applicable – due to common epigenetic and
social inheritance – in many species other than humans, an additional path opened to
use Lotman’s general model of cultural semiosis in the pre-human realm. Anton Markoš
(2014) speaks along these lines about lineages as cultures and concludes that semiosphere
is coextensive with biosphere.
Lotman’s theoretical models have been used in various analyses of non-human life, for
instance in studying urban trees (Magnus and Remm 2018), hedge mazes and landscape
gardens (Kaczmarczyk and Salvoni 2016), and human interpretation of river landscapes
(Kruis 2017).
In addition to the results gained in post-Lotmanian-era Tartu semiotics, one of the
strong trends has been the synthesis of Lotman’s and Uexküll’s theories, including the
relationships between umwelt and semiosphere (Kull and Lotman 2012; Kull 1998a;
Kotov 2002). Uexküll-Lotman conceptual proximity has been noted by several scholars
The Companion to Juri Lotman
472
(Andrews 2003; Andrews and Maksimova 2008; M. Lotman 2002). Indeed, reading, for
instance, the following, it is hard not to recognize a similarity to Jakob von Uexküll’s
description of umwelt:
Any act of semiotic recognition must involve the separation of signicant elements
from insignicant ones in surrounding reality. Elements which, from the point
of view of that modelling system, are not bearers of meaning, as it were do not
exist. e fact of their actual existence recedes to the background in face of their
irrelevance in the given modelling system. (Lotman 1990a: 58)
Integration of umwelt and modelling system approaches was clearly one of the main
points of Sebeok and Danesi’s project (Sebeok and Danesi 2000; with an earlier attempt
in Sebeok 1988). As John Deely believes, ‘Jakob von Uexküll and Juri Lotman [. . .] the
heritage of these two gures have proved to be the foundation-stones, in some ways
more important even than the, so far, more widely recognized gures of Ferdinand
de Saussure and Charles Peirce – for the future of semiotics within university life and
intellectual life generally’ (Deely 2012: 214).1
Note
1. Acknowledgements: we thank Silvi Salupere, Tatiana Kuzovkina and the Juri Lotman
Semiotics Repository for their help in supplying material for this research, Marek Tamm
for helpful comments, and the Estonian Research Council (project PRG314) for their
support.
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