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5.1. Reproduktiivsuse terminoloogiline liigendamine Käsitlus reproduktiivsuse vormidest lähtub Juri Lotmani ja Tartu–Moskva märgiteadusliku koolkonna kultuuritüpoloogilise analüüsi traditsioonist ja taotleb rekonstrueerida, aga ka täiendada J. Lotmani poolt “Loengutes” visandatud, kuid välja arendamata jäänud ideid intellekti semiootiliste algoritmide süsteemist. Mitmed mõisted, mida J. Lotman implitsiitselt kasutas, said eksplitsiitse kuju hoopis hiljem. See puudutab kõigepealt intellekti mõistet. Osutagem siin veel kord intellekti kolmele universaalsele põhioperatsioonile, milleks on suutelisus: esiteks, salvestada ja vahendada informatsiooni (intellektil on kommunikatsiooni- ja mälumehhanismid). Intellekt valdab keelt ja on võimeline moodustama reeglipäraseid teateid; teiseks, teostada algoritmiseeritud operatsioone, et neid teateid reeglipäraselt teisendada; kolmandaks, moodustada uusi teateid. (Lotman 1978: 3)
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4.1. Vaatepunkt ja ülesanded Ettekujutus maagilise ja teadusliku diskursuse vastastikku pöördvõrdelisest arenguloogikast uusaegses maailmas on olnud petlik. Allpool selgub, et seda tõsiasja on mõneti kombanud psühholoogid, kulturoloogid, filosoofid ja keeleteadlased. Juri Lotman on maagilisust analüüsinud kui kommunikatsioonilist algoritmi, millel on universaalne kultuuriline algupära ja spetsiifiline semiootiline struktuur. Neljandas peatükis asetatakse maagia avaramasse interpretatsioonilisse ja metodoloogilisse konteksti, et sellega luua alus intellekti algoritmide kui terviksüsteemi kirjeldamiseks. Püütakse rekonstrueerida olulised strukturalistlikud ja fenomenoloogiast inspireeritud lähtekohad, millele Lotmani semiootilised vaated maagiast (ja ühtlasi ka teistest universaalidest) toetuvad.
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Nabokov’s dictum on the merging of “the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science” in a work of art has been often cited. Somehow it’s always seemed familiar to me: I was lucky enough to learn from people who appreciated the precision of poetry and the aesthetical bliss of scientific adventure. I’m speaking of an informal circle of humanitarians later called the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school: Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Mikhail Gasparov, Eleazar Meletinsky, Aleksandr Pyatigorsky, and others. The importance of their work and their presence in Tartu is hard to overestimate.
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The irreversibility of Time [...] is a very parochial affair: had our organs and orgitrons not been asymmetrical, our view of Time might have been amphitheatric and altogether grand, like ragged night and jagged mountains around a small, twinkling, satisfied hamlet. (V. Nabokov. Ada) Science and philosophy of the turn of the 20th century postulated existence of different, often incompatible time models. Psychologists (Ribot, Janet, Minkowski, etc.) discovered a diversity of peculiar pathological types of time organization besides the social time construction (Durkheim) and the temporality of perception and consciousness (Bergson). The study of time embraced physics, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, art theory and other fields. The elements of the philosophy of time are incorporated into Nabokov’s fiction. In Ada (1969), “terrology” (the science of Terra) is defined as “a branch of psychiatry” (Ada, 20) and thus might have served as a cover term for the philosophy of time. Aqua’s case is similar to the psychiatric cases depicted by Janet and Minkowski to examine the “aberrant” or alternative types of time in order to explain and describe the “normal” time construction.
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The aim of the present study was to explore the ways in which the categories of poetics, i.e. fictional time, space and point of view construction, are related to cultural encoding and the artistic practices of the modernist and postmodernist age. Whereas classical narratology, employing the ready-made “container” metaphor, often defined the narrative as the representation of events in time and space, my purpose was to use the developments of postclassical narratology and to show that time, space and point of view are themselves complex constructions, emerging as a result of both the author’s individual sensibility and cultural factors. Time and space may be described as either physical containers of action or innate categories of consciousness or, finally, as a result of human activity in the world. In the latter case, the construction of fictional worlds is only part of a broader experience of orientation and working hypotheses about “reality”, which was for Nabokov “an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and unquenchable, unattainable” (SO, 10–11).
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At the turn of the 19th century the concept of identity was analyzed and put into question by psychoanalysis, physics and philosophy. There appeared different models of shared identity (Pesic 2002), some of them based on old schemata of mythological thinking, e.g. the archaic metaphors of “double” or “shadow” re-interpreted by Freud and his pupils. The rich semiotic potential of the screen as “mirror” has been activated in film art. The three-dimensionality of the film space seems to be deceitful: “Nevertheless, we are never deceived; we are fully conscious of the depth and yet we do not take it for real depth”; “we have reality with all its true dimensions; and yet it keeps the fleeting, passing surface suggestion without true depth and fullness, as different from a mere picture as from a mere stage performance” (Münsterberg 1970: 23). The same conflict of perception is typical of mirror images, which are seen on the plate surface but perceived as being at a distance behind the glass.
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From ancient Greek times and through the Latin Age from Augustine to Poinsot, the human being was defined as a “rational animal”, animale rationale, linked, as animal, to the rest of nature, but separated, by reason, from nature’s control. Through reason, instead, the human animal was to be the master of nature. In modern times, this idea was carried to the extreme, in both directions. In the one direction, Descartes suggested that the use of reason consisted simply in thinking, and, in the other direction, that the reality of nature consisted simply in a world of bodies devoid of thought or feeling extended in space. To mark this supposedly clearer, distinctively modern, realization of the human condition Descartes rejected the classical definition of human being as rational animal and proposed that the true definition of the human being is a “ thinking thing”, res cogitans. The first and (as it turned out) last problem for this thinking thing was how to get beyond its own self to reach a knowledge of anything besides or outside of itself. Kant declared the problem insoluble but irrelevant, once we realize and accept the fact that it is the structure of our minds that makes things appear as they do. The nominalist view that relations are creatures of thought alone dove-tailed with this central Kantian doctrine, and together they formed the quintessence of modern philosophy.
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In my book, Basics of Semiotics ( 1990; 2005), I examined the many parts and aspects of semiotics in its development as the “doctrine of signs”, in order to sort out the basic notions. There are subdivisions of semiotics, to be sure; but there is no “higher order” of knowledge that is independent of the action of signs, not in the sphere of finite beings. Having seen the parts in relation to the whole, here I would like to present an attempt to see the whole of semiotics in relation to its parts, in three senses: first, in the sense of how we got to where we are today as students of the action of signs, the 20th century transition from semiology to semiotics proper; second, in the sense of considering the reach of the action of signs quite independently of human study or awareness of it, but perforce doing so from within anthroposemiosis and with the help of linguistic communication in particular; and third, in the sense of the ethical implications for human conduct that grow out of the awareness of sign-action, what Petrilli and Ponzio (2003; Petrilli 2003) have termed so felicitously “semioethics”.
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In the United States, in contrast with the predominantly literary and linguistic development semiotics has undergone in the more typically European contexts, the development of semiotics has taken a rather different turn, influenced especially perhaps by Thomas A. Sebeok and the many projects associated with the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies which he chaired at the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. This development shows promise of providing for the semiotics movement as a whole a new and larger framework for the conduct of research, one that is, to tell the truth, more in keeping with the possibilities contained in Locke’s original adumbration of the place of semiotics among the sciences, natural and human alike.
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The object or subject matter of semiotic inquiry is not just signs but the action of signs or semiosis. This action, we now see, occurs at a number of levels that can be distinguished or identified as specific spheres or zones of sign activity. Semiotics, therefore, contrasts with semiosis as knowledge contrasts with that which is known. Semiotics is knowledge about semiosis; it is the theoretical accounting for signs and what they do. This is actually an important distinction, because, if we are right in what we have said about the extent of semiosis, the history of semiosis and the history of the universe, at least insofar as the universe inclines toward a species of our linguistic type as part of itself, are the same thing. But the history of semiotics, by contrast, is quite another matter and, while complicated, is considerably more manageable. It will be the story of the attempts, more or less fitful, to take account of that which underlies semiosis and makes it possible, namely, the sign. What is a sign such that it makes possible semiosis?
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If we ask what it is that semiotic studies investigate, the answer is, in a word, action. The action of signs. This peculiar type of action, corresponding to the distinctive type of knowledge that the name semiotic properly characterizes, has long been recognized in philosophy in connection with investigations of the various types of physical causality. But in that connection, the “ideal” or objective factor, the pattern according to which the investigations themselves were able to establish the material, formal, and determinative dimensions of causality in the productive or “efficient” sense, appeared as something marginal. This objective factor pertains more to the observation than to the observed in its independent existence. Hence this factor was not clearly pertinent to the results of investigations which did not have as their aim the establishment of any essential connection as such between observer and observed, such as would make “observation” — an extrinsic formal connection between subject knowing and subject known — even possible in the first place.
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There is a story according to which Professor Sebeok was on a panel of distinguished speakers who received from the audience a challenge to show cause why the basic ideas of semiotics, such as that of Umwelt, were not simply one more version of solipsistic idealism. Each of the speakers in turn addressed the matter, each beginning with a protestation (outdoing in earnestness the previous speaker) to the effect that, “Of course, I am not a solipsist”. Finally, Tom’s turn arrived. He shrugged, and said simply: “I’m a solipsist”. It was one of those seminal moments, of which Tom created so many, like the time in Toronto where he mentioned in passing in his main remarks that “ Everyone thinks of language in terms of communication. But language has nothing to do with communication.” In the question period, the very first question challenged him on the point. “ You said that language has nothing to do with communication”, the audience member reminded him. “Why did you say that?” “Because it doesn’t”, Tom answered pointedly,1 and proceeded to call on the next questioner.
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Deductive logic applied to ideas clearly in mind is hardly the sufficient instrument of philosophy. For history viewed philosophically (which cannot be done when ignorance and narrowness of purview is cultivated in the name of philosophy) proves the very laboratory of philosophical ideas, the one place where long-range consequences of philosophical proposals become unmistakable, as Gilson liked to point out.
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We noted in chapter 3 that Peirce, by bringing the action along with the being of signs into the focus of a thematic inquiry, took one of the decisive steps in establishing the full possibilities for developing a doctrine of signs. This step marks the difference between the contemporary development of semiotics and all earlier stages, historically speaking, of a move toward semiotic consciousness. For, while the being proper to signs exists actually only within the context of experience ( in precisely the sense that experience presupposes cognition), the action that underlies this possible being by no means presupposes cognition.
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Juri Lotman has once said that semiotics is a field that one should not begin with. Moreover, it has also been said that it is not meant for those who are not yet familiar with some field of study other than semiotics. Such a view of semiotics as a superior, highly intellectual discipline, however, brings along an unexpected and interesting conflict with statements about the role and importance of semiotics. According to some opinions, semiotics binds the methodologies of the humanities together and offers a common theoretical basis for all qualitative approaches. As such, it appears as an equivalent to the emperor of quantitative science — physics. Alongside that timeless function semiotics also has a specific mission relating to time: it is supposed to be the knowledge of the 21st century as John Deely has underscored — and he is not the only one to hold this view.
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