Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions

6. The Ever-Tempting Return to an Iranian Past in the Islamic Present Does Lotman’s Binarism Help?

History thrives on the exploration of human diversity in time and space. Its seductiveness lies in the ability to recognize something that is totally different yet fully human in that we can comprehend it. History also provides the reader with a multitude of stories about past transformations , the dynamics and processes of which remain ambiguous, for texts do not spell out the mechanisms of change. These may be inferred from signs and symbols encoded in texts. And the task of the historian lies in contextualizing symbols to uncover meanings and texture, layer by layer, recreating and imagining the landscapes in and about which texts were recorded in the past. As a cultural historian I have been influenced by the works of Clifford Geertz and his interpretations of culture as a web of meanings encoded in symbolic forms (languages, artifacts, rituals, calendars). I think Geertz and Yuri Lotman share in their understanding of semiotic systems and in the tight fit they observe between clusters of symbols and the moods, motivations, and behaviors that these symbols shape. Memory is a cultural phenomenon that speaks through signs and influences behavior .1 Culture, however, is mutable. Geertz’s methods are essentially 159 6 The Ever-Tempting Return to an Iranian Past in the Islamic Present Does Lotman’s Binarism Help?   synchronic; that is, they tend to help us understand one face of history as a temporal complex. But the other face of history as transformation, the diachronic aspect, remains untapped in his notion of culture.2 Here is where Lotman’s meditations on culture help to make sense of change in time.3 Lotman and Uspenskii’s work on the semiotics of Russian culture in the light of history focuses on sites of conflict, dialogue, and change within cultures that speak different languages. They conceptualize cultural difference at the intrasociety level. Although Geertz tends to emphasize differences between societies, writing comparatively about “the Javanese” or “the Berbers,” Lotman disturbs this “single functioning whole” by proposing a “semiotic physiology” that posits a dynamic between different languages embedded in the whole (semiosphere), privileging heterogeneity within Russian culture (Universe of the Mind, 125– 26). Lotman opens an analytical space to consider how cultural systems are transformed within complex, or, as he calls them, “collective” cultures , raising the possibilities for disjunctions or continuities.4 The Bakhtinian trope of heteroglossia allows for a refinement of such processes of change, for an approach sensitive to the diversity of social voices uttered through language.5 For Bakhtin language is alive; its vitality lies in the process of becoming. Its transcription is not only a product of its context but is also subject to multiple refractions and meanings that encompass a variety of worldviews, group behaviors, and fleeting tendencies. Such stratification and heteroglossia highlight a dynamic between cultural systems and the particular language of social groups. The life and development of language can thus be explored as an expressive system born of social, religious, and political milieus in perpetual dialogue and movement. One can see both continuities and discontinuities in the fragments from the Irano-Islamic past that I study, and I am fascinated by the ways in which this Iranian past blends with the Islamic present, in different forms and shapes as well as in degrees of transmutations. The problem of trying to explain cultural continuities amid change lies at the core of this essay. To conceptualize such a dynamic process without losing a sense of multiplicity within an ever-evolving system is difficult. Lotman’s binary model of change, based on his reading of medieval and early modern Russian history, is useful when examining the Iranian case, where a similar transformation from a dualist past to a monotheist present was occurring. The questions arises whether patterns of change are contextually specific, in that they pertain to similar historical 160 :      moments, or whether a deeper cosmological affinity must exist for such paradigms to be pertinent. Theoretical formulations derived from one cultural system may be even more relevant when applied to another culture that possesses similar blueprints or templates. Lotman’s meditations may be telling us about those cultural landscapes that tend to be rooted in a binary worldview. Russian and Iranian cultures share dualist systems that permeate the ways in which they give meaning to their universe and configure their social and political realities. Lotman suggests that we apply a binary framework to explore cultures according to their own...