Conversations with Lotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature and Cognition (review)

The book has a modest but possibly misleading title: Conversations with Lotman. It may be misleading because a casual reader, at first glance, would hazard a generic guess that the book is a collection of interviews with the great Russo-Estonian semiotician. This is perhaps the author's intentional design. But behind this modest-looking appeal is perhaps the author's more ambitious intention of engaging Lotman in different fronts, as suggested by the subtitle: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature, & Cognition. Therefore, a more sophisticated reader would situate the title (and hence the book) in the Lotmanian context of semiotics of culture, a mechanism of which happens to be dialogue.

Whilst Lotman is never ostentatiously concerned with dialogue as a phenomenon of quotidian pragmatics, either dialogue or conversation, as far as the book is concerned, can only be partial because the late Lotman is no longer available as an interlocutor, but remains a deceased allocutor, a dramatic situation I have termed elsewhere as "Controvert the Dead." This reading into the title, to be sure, does not rule out the possibility of parodying, amongst so many tomes bearing "Conversations with [. . .]" such a book as Conversations with Neil's Brain, which the author uses to radically update Lotman and to relate the latter's semiotics to the current discussions of neurology-based cognitive science.

According to Lotman, along with dialogue, translation is another mechanism that characterizes intercultural process. The author uses, as far as possible, all of the primary and most of the secondary materials in the original Russian, and is courteous enough to make them available through her own translations. In this way, she has paid due homage to Lotman via the capable practice of linguistic transcoding. Given the fact that only about one-sixth of the Lotmanian corpus has been rendered into English, the author plays a much-needed and laudable role in mediating her Russian sources and her English readership. For instance, her life account of Lotman is based mainly on Russian texts, such as B. F. Jegorov's biography, izn I tvor estvo Ju. M. Lotmana (Moscow, 1999), a work relatively unknown to readers outside Russia, including the reviewer himself.

The book is conveniently divided into three independent parts, which can be construed as carrying on a kind of self-dialogue or, pace Lotman, auto-communication. Part one is a critical exposition of Lotman's theory in relation to other comparable theoreticians, including Charles Sanders Peirce, Jakob von Uexküll, Roman Jakobson, and René Thom; part two consists of applications of Lotmanian semiotics to Russian texts by Mikhail Bulgakov and Evgenij Zamyatin; part three outlines the author's own proposal of semiotics as cognitive science. Apart from auto-communication, such tripartition may pose a structural problem, a lack of unity, as one may say. However, it has the advantage of appealing to three groups of readers: those interested in Tartu semiotics in general and Lotman in particular; those concerned with semiotics' more recent advances; and those working on contemporary Slavonic literature and contemporary standard Russian (CSR).

The following paragraphs will focus on the two theoretical parts because the reviewer believes that although application of a theory can be said to follow naturally, it nonetheless raises the meta-theoretical question of relevance of theory to practice.

In Part One, the author gives an adequate and very fine exposition of some key notions of Lotmanian semiotics, such as culture and text, code and message, communication, and the increasingly popular semiosphere. She traces the origins and developments of these concepts and negotiates other theories within the larger framework of general semiotics. Particularly noteworthy is the part in which the author compares and discusses the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Jakobsonian and Lotmanian models of communication. Whilst almost totally abandoning Saussurian semiology, the author opts for the Peircian infinite semiosis and attempts to understand the Lotmanian semiosphere in the latter context.

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