Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Semiosphere" in English language version.
Embedded in the playful heteronym used throughout the book, 'Office for Soft Architecture' (inspired by architect Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture), is Robertson's belief that the hard structural form of a building, city, or poem is less important than the 'soft' environment created by its surface effects.
Robertson's soft architecture—not so much a bounded place as a poetic-intellectual approach to the sediments and ruins of urban facades—updates flânerie to the 21st-century global metropolis. The flâneuse archly observes patterns of consumption while remaining herself an arbiter of surface; the soft architect is similarly interested in the surface but attends to the waste and excess that might resist the 'utopia of the new.'
The relationship between structure and skin is similarly developed in Robertson's work when, for example, she describes the Rubus armeniacus as: 'an exemplary political decoration, a nutritious ornament that clandestinely modifies infrastructural morphology' (112) ... The clandestine subject most often is some version of soft architecture, for in 'Occasional Work', Robertson considers the most ornamental of possible subjects: color, clothing, furniture, and fountains.
Our intuition of reality is a consequence of a mutual interaction between the two: Jakob von Uexküll's private world of elementary sensations (Merkzeichen, 'perceptual signs') coupled to their meaningful transforms into action impulses (Wirkzeichen, 'operation signs'); and the phenomenal world (Umwelt), that is, the subjective world each animal models out of its 'true' environment (Natur, 'reality'), which reveals itself solely through signs.
The first type of sign is the symptom. ...A second type of sign is the signal. ...The next three types of signs are taken from Peirce's classification of signs as icons, indexes, and symbols. ...The sixth, and final, type of sign to be discussed in this book is the name.
Messages can be constructed on the basis of single signs or, more often than not, as combinations of them. The latter are known as texts. A text constitutes, in effect, a specific 'weaving together' of signs in order to communicate something. The signs that go into the make-up of texts belong to specific codes.
Umberto Eco preferred this analogy and used it in his 'Introduction' to Lotman's Universe of the mind: Imagine a museum hall, in which art works from different periods are exhibited, along with inscriptions in different languages; in the meantime, there are visitors and museum staff in the hall preparing guided tours, with all kinds of reference materials (Lotman 2000: xii). To the best of my understanding of the museum analogy, semiosphere is a mega-structure (the museum hall), comprising various sign systems (galleries for the art of different periods); the interactions among them and the interactions between them and the mega-structure make the systems work, and make the semiosphere function. Probably this is why Lotman used the term 'universe' to refer to the semiosphere, since it works like a galaxy that consists of a solar system and other systems.
[L]ighting techniques could also have a 'psychological effect,' creating 'reassuring' and 'less formal' spaces—characteristics typically expected of the domestic environment. Color choice, Kelly advised, also affected the mood or psychological conditions of the interior. ... The lack of scholarly attention given to the soft architecture of the domestic environment—including window treatments, textiles, interior finishes, and electric lighting—is surprising, given the significance it holds in the design and experience of the modern interior.
All organisms communicate by use of models (Umwelts, or self-worlds, each according to its species-specific sense organs)
Human beings are capable of launching an enormous number of novel messages appropriate to an indefinite variety of contexts ...the message-as-formulated must undergo a transductive operation to be externalized into serial strings appropriate to the channel, or channels, selected to link up with the destination. This neurobiological transmutation from one form of energy to another is called encoding. When the destination detects and extracts the encoded messages from the channel, another transduction, followed by a series of still further transformations, must be effected before interpretation can occur; this pivotal reconversion is called decoding.
Linguists who employ the expression 'zero sign' (zero phoneme or allophone, zero morpheme or allomorph, and the like) must mean either 'zero signifier,' or, much more rarely, 'zero signified,' but never both; if taken literally, the notion of a 'zero sign' would be oxymoronic. (On the use of zero in linguistics, see Jakobson 1940, 1966; Frei 1950; Godel 1953; Haas 1957.)
Biosemiotics proposes the primacy of the 'semiosphere' over the biosphere; it is concerned with living systems as nested sets of surfaces. The surface is where multiple signaling processes act on the cell membrane according to contextual recognition.
Any environment accommodates numerous organisms, and the plurality of Umwelt in communication constitutes a semiosphere. Semiospheres are emergent systems structured by the triadic logic of signs rather than ecological niches structured by adaptive mechanisms.
It is important that we see the semiosphere not merely as a network of human and artificial intelligence, a kind of world-wide technological exchange but, in keeping with Lotman's view, as a membrane of human conscious acts, which makes communication possible, but cannot be reduced to mere communication and exchange of 'know how.'
Lotman's semiosphere derives from Mikhail Bakhtin's logosphere, itself adapted from ... Vladimir Vernadsky's notion of the biosphere. ... Lotman acknowledges his debt to Bakhtin's suggestive notion of the 'logosphere,' that 'dialogic sphere where the word exists' ... (Bakhtin, 'From Notes' 150[).] ... Vernadsky's ecological theory embeds humanity in the biosphere by positing conscious thought on the planet as a distinct geological force—the 'noosphere' (named from the Greek vóoç 'mind').
The ontic Reality (which does exist, but is forever unknowable) ... [t]here is a Kantian epistemological gap between the ontic Reality and the semiotic sign system that attempts to grasp that elusive Reality.
Paraphrasing Saussure, it is the task of the symbolic interactionist to determine the exact place of semiotics in social psychology.
Lotman's metaphor diverges from actual biological praxis, in which procedures analogous to the hermeneutic circle are the norm (Wilson 211). ... If Shweder's hypothesis is correct, Lotman's conception of the self as a monad may indeed have universal, albeit circumscribed, validity because it may account for the earliest stages of human development.
Both notions presuppose that semiosphere is separated from the external space surrounding it; hence the great importance of the notion of boundary. ... it acts as a special filter, a device selectively letting in texts from other culture-domains, as well as nontexts. ... messages from the outside have to force their way through to become facts of a given semiosphere.
At the center of his theory of cultural semiotics stands the assumption that every narration is provoked by the transgression of borders. Lotman expands this basic consideration, influenced by Russian formalism, to claim that every narrative transgression is simultaneously a cultural transgression.
New information in the semiosphere can be produced only as a result of a dialogue between different codes, by which [Lotman] understands not simply different human or artificial languages, but different ways of organizing reality into coherent cognitive structures.
Symbols take form from external objects; the manner in which we form them is such that the apparent becomes material. ... Symbols are a simplified and sometimes banal representation of reality.
Drawing upon French philosopher and literary critic, Paul Ricœur, [J. Nicholas] Entrikin argues that the key element straddling this relationship — or 'getting between' place — is the process of emplotment (25). This is a form of narrative which gives structure to the particular connections people have with places … But all of this begins with a tacit assumption that place is dualistic to begin with
Barthes ([1957] 1972, pp. 11, 109-110) defines myth as a type of speech or discourse that draws from everyday life. Myths are reflected in newspaper articles, in photographs, films, and in advertisements. Myths, for Barthes, are semiological systems that tell a story, while veiling or hiding particular meanings. Myths, or mythologies, are based on everyday phenomenon [sic]. They constitute language systems, with their own codes and structures of meaning.
This process of relating one's own organism to the others in the interactions that are going on, in so far as it is imported into the conduct of the individual with the conversation of the 'I' and the 'me,' constitutes the self. ...We are taking the attitude of the community and we are responding to it in this conversation of gestures. The gestures in this case are vocal gestures. They are significant symbols, and by symbol we do not mean something that lies outside of the field of conduct.
Perinbanayagam (1985, pp. 9-10, 39-52, 84-100) offers the most advanced dramaturgical theory of those human social acts that produce meaning. ...Drawing on Mead ...Incorporating elements of Chomsky's theory of syntax ...incorporates Kenneth Burke's pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) is then put forth. Perinbanayagam's view of the sign and the signifying act may be diagrammed as follows: Signifying Act: Sign: Symbolic Meaning⁄Vocal Gesture Meaning⁄Object
chronotope (literally 'time-space'—representation and conceptualization of the artistic time and space, derived by Bakhtin from Einstein's theory of relativity) …This type of narrative time-space …are associated with the trials, sufferings and tests one cannot avoid on a difficult journey.
Generally speaking, literary structure is not neutral with respect to philosophies of time. It strongly favors closed temporalities. It is therefore comparatively easy and common to make the shape of a work reinforce a fatalistic or deterministic view of time ...Such repetitions happen forward, not backward, and they require no underlying structure; but once they happen, they can always be narrated as if a plan were simply revealed over time. In fact, the conventions of narrative favor such a presentation, because narratives are told after the fact. To repeat: narratives are predisposed to understanding in terms of structure.
A text, writes Bakhtin, occupies 'a certain specific place in space [...and] our acquaintance with it occurs through time' (252). ...In Bakhtin's words: 'Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history' (84).
The discipline has been further developed by Jesper Hoffmeyer's argument for the primacy of the 'semiosphere' (or the world of signs and signification) over the biosphere, as well as the primacy of the sign over the molecule. ... A human body, Hoffmeyer notes, is made up of about thirty square kilometres of membrane structure. It makes more sense, he argues, to locate human personhood not in the brain but in the skin, which is the fundamental locus of sensory interpretation
A human body, Hoffmeyer notes, is made up of about thirty square kilometres of membrane structure. It makes more sense, he argues, to locate human personhood not in the brain but in the skin, which is the fundamental locus of sensory interpretation. ... In [Lisa Robertson's] the 'Sixth Walk,' she confesses a desire to know her guide, which is a wish to know the mechanism of interpretation through which her ambulatory encounters with the city have been framed. The guide, a pastoral architect, is literally a skin, a membrane that helps determine significance for the narrator.
[T]he Umwelt can be viewed as a cognitive construct within the semiosphere.
Pierce's semiotics is a doctrine of experience—indeed, a phenomenological doctrine of consciousness (Zeman 1977). But for Pierce and his man-as-sign conclusion, consciousness is of signs only; it cannot obtain an indubitable science of reality.
Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and his emphasis on the distinct Umwelt (self-world, or subjective universe) of living things.
In an accompanying note to a diagram of cryometric forms, Bök writes: 'Semiotic saturation increases from a solid state of monosemy to a fluid state of polysemy until meaning etherealizes itself in the region of cloud formation.'
The signs and the sensory and cognitive processes form the individual's Umwelt, which gives a sign meaning to the interpreter. Clearly, part of an individual's Umwelt comprises signals from other individuals, but it is also comprised of signs in the form of inanimate objects and energy in the semiosphere.
Jesper Hoffmeyer's understanding of biosemiotics, modeled in terms of parasitism, provides a way to conceptualize a conscience collective of organic animalism that is structured by communication and social reality, but not by the logic of alienation that extends from language through to a conceptualization of nature and culture in terms of Cartesian duality.
According to the definition offered by Hoffmeyer (1998), the term 'semiosphere' describes the dimension where signs occur and can be detected and/or relayed as signals. The concept of the semiosphere can thus be extended to cover all aspects of semiosis and is no longer restricted to linguistics (Kotov and Kull 2011).
Interruptions between an individual's Umwelt and the semiosphere include, for example; sensory impairment, cognitive impairment, chance occurrence and epigenetic factors.
Thus, the semiosis of tea may be explained by means of textual and dialectic processes that take place only inside of the semiotic space. Inside the semiosphere, tea was an early mythological characterization that recalls an opening text: a metatext that performs a metalinguistic function with respect to the other texts that form part of the semiosphere. Tea, in the first instance, is codified under the mythological consciousness, which is oriented towards mythopoetics.
Several anthropologists of music have recently called for greater focus on neglected sonic dimensions of social experience through multisensory ethnography...(Porcello et al. 2010, Samuels et al. 2010). These authors advocate research oriented toward the 'soundscape' concept, designed to 'contain everything to which the ear [is] exposed in a given sonic setting[']
The semiosphere is distinct from Umwelten, because the former is made up of physical, energetic and material phenomena, including electromagnetic radiation, sound waves, mechanical forces and chemical signs, which are translated to neural signals by the sensory apparatus of organisms (Lewis, 2020).
Umberto Eco preferred this analogy and used it in his 'Introduction' to Lotman's Universe of the mind: Imagine a museum hall, in which art works from different periods are exhibited, along with inscriptions in different languages; in the meantime, there are visitors and museum staff in the hall preparing guided tours, with all kinds of reference materials (Lotman 2000: xii). To the best of my understanding of the museum analogy, semiosphere is a mega-structure (the museum hall), comprising various sign systems (galleries for the art of different periods); the interactions among them and the interactions between them and the mega-structure make the systems work, and make the semiosphere function. Probably this is why Lotman used the term 'universe' to refer to the semiosphere, since it works like a galaxy that consists of a solar system and other systems.
Semiotics has mainly been influenced by linguistics and was later applied to aesthetics and visual communication like architecture, painting, or film. ... For the architectural sign, the behavioristic, dyadic, glossematic, and triadic sign models play a central role (Nöth 1990).
By expanding Umwelten, [Lisa] Robertson's poetics enact communicative complexity. ... Her research into these sites is deeply concerned with the 'aboutness' of information in the semiosphere of the city.
Pataphysical poets employ methodological constraints in experimental poetic composition in order to parody reductionist scientific analysis and to complicate questions of perspective and meaning. ... Pataphysical poetics push social constructionism to the extreme, parodying it not as a means of undermining it, but of expressing the contingencies and interconnections in the overlapping worlds of signification that constitute cultural and biological environments
The pataphysics of Robertson and Mouré engage the environment, not according to the objective realism of scientific materialism, but rather as a complex set of semiotic relationships where diverse forms of signification and alternative realities interact.
[L]ighting techniques could also have a 'psychological effect,' creating 'reassuring' and 'less formal' spaces—characteristics typically expected of the domestic environment. Color choice, Kelly advised, also affected the mood or psychological conditions of the interior. ... The lack of scholarly attention given to the soft architecture of the domestic environment—including window treatments, textiles, interior finishes, and electric lighting—is surprising, given the significance it holds in the design and experience of the modern interior.
Occasionally we have experiences which we say belong to the atmosphere. The whole world seems to be depressed, the sky is dark, the weather is unpleasant, values that we are interested in are sinking. We do not necessarily identify such a situation with the self; we simply feel a certain atmosphere about us. ...There are other experiences which we may at all times identify with selves. We can distinguish, I think, very clearly between certain types of experience, which we call subjective because we alone have access to them, and that experience which we call reflective. ...The physical object is an abstraction which we make from the social response to nature. We talk to nature; we address the clouds, the sea, the tree, and objects about us. We later abstract from that type of response because of what we come to know of such objects. The immediate response is, however, social; where we carry over a thinking process into nature[,] we are making nature rational.
Saturation…Its key affordance lies in its ability to express emotive 'temperatures', kinds of affect.
Semiotics became useful for analyzing stage lighting and the communication between the performer and the audience and to identify lighting signs associated with productions (Moran 2007).
Necessarily also implicated in Lotman's argument is the complementary biological concept of 'emergence,' which holds that the biological entity is greater than the mere sum of its parts.
According to Lotman, dialogue is the universal law which stipulates how semiosphere exists. ... ranging from the individual's cerebral hemispheres to the cultural contact on the national and international scale ... [a]s a consequence, semiosphere consists of levels, which range from each person's autonomous semiosphere to the overall semiosphere of the contemporary world—what used to be called the global village.
He [Lotman] tries to envision a kind of 'second-degree semiosphere' that would encompass all human meanings in a harmonious whole.
Lotman explains that he based his neologism on the term 'biosphere,' which Vladimir Vernadskii (1863-1945) ... defined as the sum total of all living organisms on the Earth ... The appearance of human beings, whose activity constitutes the 'noosphere' in Vernadskii's terminology ... Lotman's concept ... : he intended it to provide nothing less than a semiotic explanation of how all levels of culture work everywhere—from the relations between the hemispheres of the brain, to dialogue, to the production and consumption of cultural artifacts, to large scale changes in national cultures.
The breakthrough took place in his treatise On Semiosphere, a work vital for the development of cultural semiotics.
In 'On the Semiosphere,' Lotman uses terms of reproductive biology when he discusses how meaning is generated and transmitted. ... [Lotman's interpretation of Vernadsky's biosphere] gains a sacral-sexual character
Lotman invests the semiosphere with the feminine attributes of passivity and gravidity, characterizing it as inert, a brake on cultural evolution and on the creation of new meaning—an entropic absorber of semiotic energy. Energy is generated outside, and it penetrates the semiosphere, causing 'excitation' of the 'mother text', which then rearranges its constituent elements to give birth to new meanings.
While the shifts in cultural Umwelt that result from the deterritorialized pastoral can be read, like Mouré's text, in the terms of Uexküll's unorthodox science, I propose to read Robertson's concern with surfaces and membranes of civic memory in the context of biosemiotics and its extension of Uexküll's Umwelt theory.
Drawing upon French philosopher and literary critic, Paul Ricœur, [J. Nicholas] Entrikin argues that the key element straddling this relationship — or 'getting between' place — is the process of emplotment (25). This is a form of narrative which gives structure to the particular connections people have with places … But all of this begins with a tacit assumption that place is dualistic to begin with
Biosemiotics proposes the primacy of the 'semiosphere' over the biosphere; it is concerned with living systems as nested sets of surfaces. The surface is where multiple signaling processes act on the cell membrane according to contextual recognition.
Any environment accommodates numerous organisms, and the plurality of Umwelt in communication constitutes a semiosphere. Semiospheres are emergent systems structured by the triadic logic of signs rather than ecological niches structured by adaptive mechanisms.
It is important that we see the semiosphere not merely as a network of human and artificial intelligence, a kind of world-wide technological exchange but, in keeping with Lotman's view, as a membrane of human conscious acts, which makes communication possible, but cannot be reduced to mere communication and exchange of 'know how.'
Lotman's semiosphere derives from Mikhail Bakhtin's logosphere, itself adapted from ... Vladimir Vernadsky's notion of the biosphere. ... Lotman acknowledges his debt to Bakhtin's suggestive notion of the 'logosphere,' that 'dialogic sphere where the word exists' ... (Bakhtin, 'From Notes' 150[).] ... Vernadsky's ecological theory embeds humanity in the biosphere by positing conscious thought on the planet as a distinct geological force—the 'noosphere' (named from the Greek vóoç 'mind').
The ontic Reality (which does exist, but is forever unknowable) ... [t]here is a Kantian epistemological gap between the ontic Reality and the semiotic sign system that attempts to grasp that elusive Reality.
Paraphrasing Saussure, it is the task of the symbolic interactionist to determine the exact place of semiotics in social psychology.
Lotman's metaphor diverges from actual biological praxis, in which procedures analogous to the hermeneutic circle are the norm (Wilson 211). ... If Shweder's hypothesis is correct, Lotman's conception of the self as a monad may indeed have universal, albeit circumscribed, validity because it may account for the earliest stages of human development.
Both notions presuppose that semiosphere is separated from the external space surrounding it; hence the great importance of the notion of boundary. ... it acts as a special filter, a device selectively letting in texts from other culture-domains, as well as nontexts. ... messages from the outside have to force their way through to become facts of a given semiosphere.
At the center of his theory of cultural semiotics stands the assumption that every narration is provoked by the transgression of borders. Lotman expands this basic consideration, influenced by Russian formalism, to claim that every narrative transgression is simultaneously a cultural transgression.
New information in the semiosphere can be produced only as a result of a dialogue between different codes, by which [Lotman] understands not simply different human or artificial languages, but different ways of organizing reality into coherent cognitive structures.
Symbols take form from external objects; the manner in which we form them is such that the apparent becomes material. ... Symbols are a simplified and sometimes banal representation of reality.
Drawing upon French philosopher and literary critic, Paul Ricœur, [J. Nicholas] Entrikin argues that the key element straddling this relationship — or 'getting between' place — is the process of emplotment (25). This is a form of narrative which gives structure to the particular connections people have with places … But all of this begins with a tacit assumption that place is dualistic to begin with
The connection between 'place' and 'metaphor' is evident. Paul Ricœur remarks that 'as figure, metaphor constitutes a displacement and an extension of the meaning of words; its explanation is grounded in the theory of substitution ' (The Rule of Metaphor 3; italics added).
Barthes ([1957] 1972, pp. 11, 109-110) defines myth as a type of speech or discourse that draws from everyday life. Myths are reflected in newspaper articles, in photographs, films, and in advertisements. Myths, for Barthes, are semiological systems that tell a story, while veiling or hiding particular meanings. Myths, or mythologies, are based on everyday phenomenon [sic]. They constitute language systems, with their own codes and structures of meaning.
Perinbanayagam (1985, pp. 9-10, 39-52, 84-100) offers the most advanced dramaturgical theory of those human social acts that produce meaning. ...Drawing on Mead ...Incorporating elements of Chomsky's theory of syntax ...incorporates Kenneth Burke's pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) is then put forth. Perinbanayagam's view of the sign and the signifying act may be diagrammed as follows: Signifying Act: Sign: Symbolic Meaning⁄Vocal Gesture Meaning⁄Object
chronotope (literally 'time-space'—representation and conceptualization of the artistic time and space, derived by Bakhtin from Einstein's theory of relativity) …This type of narrative time-space …are associated with the trials, sufferings and tests one cannot avoid on a difficult journey.
Bakhtin states that the chronotope, or conjunction of time and space, is a 'formally constitutive category' (84) of literature ...According to Bakhtin, the chronotope's central role in literature derives from the fact that, in order to be communicated and understood by others, any meaning must take on the form of a sign, or temporal-spatial expression that is audible and visible to us. 'Consequently, every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope' (258).
Generally speaking, literary structure is not neutral with respect to philosophies of time. It strongly favors closed temporalities. It is therefore comparatively easy and common to make the shape of a work reinforce a fatalistic or deterministic view of time ...Such repetitions happen forward, not backward, and they require no underlying structure; but once they happen, they can always be narrated as if a plan were simply revealed over time. In fact, the conventions of narrative favor such a presentation, because narratives are told after the fact. To repeat: narratives are predisposed to understanding in terms of structure.
A text, writes Bakhtin, occupies 'a certain specific place in space [...and] our acquaintance with it occurs through time' (252). ...In Bakhtin's words: 'Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history' (84).
As cultural biosemiotician Wendy Wheeler writes, '[a]n organism's Umwelt is, therefore, what signifies for it; and through it, it perceives stimuli and responds to them. An Umwelt, in other words, is a space of semiosis' (The Whole Creature 103).
Pierce's semiotics is a doctrine of experience—indeed, a phenomenological doctrine of consciousness (Zeman 1977). But for Pierce and his man-as-sign conclusion, consciousness is of signs only; it cannot obtain an indubitable science of reality.
Jesper Hoffmeyer's understanding of biosemiotics, modeled in terms of parasitism, provides a way to conceptualize a conscience collective of organic animalism that is structured by communication and social reality, but not by the logic of alienation that extends from language through to a conceptualization of nature and culture in terms of Cartesian duality.
Several anthropologists of music have recently called for greater focus on neglected sonic dimensions of social experience through multisensory ethnography...(Porcello et al. 2010, Samuels et al. 2010). These authors advocate research oriented toward the 'soundscape' concept, designed to 'contain everything to which the ear [is] exposed in a given sonic setting[']
By expanding Umwelten, [Lisa] Robertson's poetics enact communicative complexity. ... Her research into these sites is deeply concerned with the 'aboutness' of information in the semiosphere of the city.
Necessarily also implicated in Lotman's argument is the complementary biological concept of 'emergence,' which holds that the biological entity is greater than the mere sum of its parts.
According to Lotman, dialogue is the universal law which stipulates how semiosphere exists. ... ranging from the individual's cerebral hemispheres to the cultural contact on the national and international scale ... [a]s a consequence, semiosphere consists of levels, which range from each person's autonomous semiosphere to the overall semiosphere of the contemporary world—what used to be called the global village.
He [Lotman] tries to envision a kind of 'second-degree semiosphere' that would encompass all human meanings in a harmonious whole.
Lotman explains that he based his neologism on the term 'biosphere,' which Vladimir Vernadskii (1863-1945) ... defined as the sum total of all living organisms on the Earth ... The appearance of human beings, whose activity constitutes the 'noosphere' in Vernadskii's terminology ... Lotman's concept ... : he intended it to provide nothing less than a semiotic explanation of how all levels of culture work everywhere—from the relations between the hemispheres of the brain, to dialogue, to the production and consumption of cultural artifacts, to large scale changes in national cultures.
The breakthrough took place in his treatise On Semiosphere, a work vital for the development of cultural semiotics.
In 'On the Semiosphere,' Lotman uses terms of reproductive biology when he discusses how meaning is generated and transmitted. ... [Lotman's interpretation of Vernadsky's biosphere] gains a sacral-sexual character
Lotman invests the semiosphere with the feminine attributes of passivity and gravidity, characterizing it as inert, a brake on cultural evolution and on the creation of new meaning—an entropic absorber of semiotic energy. Energy is generated outside, and it penetrates the semiosphere, causing 'excitation' of the 'mother text', which then rearranges its constituent elements to give birth to new meanings.
Symbols take form from external objects; the manner in which we form them is such that the apparent becomes material. ... Symbols are a simplified and sometimes banal representation of reality.
The term 'room' means more than just the physical space in which the performance takes place; it is the term used to summarise a combination of factors which include the nature of the space, the way that space is set up, the character of the audience and more.
Field Theory can be applied to the whole domain as well as to the study of communication and signification.
J. V. Uexküll with his notion of Umwelt has emphasised that every organism has its own subjective environment, which is different from any other, and in the case of different species of animals these differences can be very large.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)Thus, the semiosis of tea may be explained by means of textual and dialectic processes that take place only inside of the semiotic space. Inside the semiosphere, tea was an early mythological characterization that recalls an opening text: a metatext that performs a metalinguistic function with respect to the other texts that form part of the semiosphere. Tea, in the first instance, is codified under the mythological consciousness, which is oriented towards mythopoetics.
Saturation…Its key affordance lies in its ability to express emotive 'temperatures', kinds of affect.
It is important that we see the semiosphere not merely as a network of human and artificial intelligence, a kind of world-wide technological exchange but, in keeping with Lotman's view, as a membrane of human conscious acts, which makes communication possible, but cannot be reduced to mere communication and exchange of 'know how.'
Lotman's semiosphere derives from Mikhail Bakhtin's logosphere, itself adapted from ... Vladimir Vernadsky's notion of the biosphere. ... Lotman acknowledges his debt to Bakhtin's suggestive notion of the 'logosphere,' that 'dialogic sphere where the word exists' ... (Bakhtin, 'From Notes' 150[).] ... Vernadsky's ecological theory embeds humanity in the biosphere by positing conscious thought on the planet as a distinct geological force—the 'noosphere' (named from the Greek vóoç 'mind').
The ontic Reality (which does exist, but is forever unknowable) ... [t]here is a Kantian epistemological gap between the ontic Reality and the semiotic sign system that attempts to grasp that elusive Reality.
Both notions presuppose that semiosphere is separated from the external space surrounding it; hence the great importance of the notion of boundary. ... it acts as a special filter, a device selectively letting in texts from other culture-domains, as well as nontexts. ... messages from the outside have to force their way through to become facts of a given semiosphere.
New information in the semiosphere can be produced only as a result of a dialogue between different codes, by which [Lotman] understands not simply different human or artificial languages, but different ways of organizing reality into coherent cognitive structures.
Symbols take form from external objects; the manner in which we form them is such that the apparent becomes material. ... Symbols are a simplified and sometimes banal representation of reality.
chronotope (literally 'time-space'—representation and conceptualization of the artistic time and space, derived by Bakhtin from Einstein's theory of relativity) …This type of narrative time-space …are associated with the trials, sufferings and tests one cannot avoid on a difficult journey.
Generally speaking, literary structure is not neutral with respect to philosophies of time. It strongly favors closed temporalities. It is therefore comparatively easy and common to make the shape of a work reinforce a fatalistic or deterministic view of time ...Such repetitions happen forward, not backward, and they require no underlying structure; but once they happen, they can always be narrated as if a plan were simply revealed over time. In fact, the conventions of narrative favor such a presentation, because narratives are told after the fact. To repeat: narratives are predisposed to understanding in terms of structure.
A text, writes Bakhtin, occupies 'a certain specific place in space [...and] our acquaintance with it occurs through time' (252). ...In Bakhtin's words: 'Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history' (84).
Thus, the semiosis of tea may be explained by means of textual and dialectic processes that take place only inside of the semiotic space. Inside the semiosphere, tea was an early mythological characterization that recalls an opening text: a metatext that performs a metalinguistic function with respect to the other texts that form part of the semiosphere. Tea, in the first instance, is codified under the mythological consciousness, which is oriented towards mythopoetics.
Umberto Eco preferred this analogy and used it in his 'Introduction' to Lotman's Universe of the mind: Imagine a museum hall, in which art works from different periods are exhibited, along with inscriptions in different languages; in the meantime, there are visitors and museum staff in the hall preparing guided tours, with all kinds of reference materials (Lotman 2000: xii). To the best of my understanding of the museum analogy, semiosphere is a mega-structure (the museum hall), comprising various sign systems (galleries for the art of different periods); the interactions among them and the interactions between them and the mega-structure make the systems work, and make the semiosphere function. Probably this is why Lotman used the term 'universe' to refer to the semiosphere, since it works like a galaxy that consists of a solar system and other systems.
[L]ighting techniques could also have a 'psychological effect,' creating 'reassuring' and 'less formal' spaces—characteristics typically expected of the domestic environment. Color choice, Kelly advised, also affected the mood or psychological conditions of the interior. ... The lack of scholarly attention given to the soft architecture of the domestic environment—including window treatments, textiles, interior finishes, and electric lighting—is surprising, given the significance it holds in the design and experience of the modern interior.
Saturation…Its key affordance lies in its ability to express emotive 'temperatures', kinds of affect.
According to Lotman, dialogue is the universal law which stipulates how semiosphere exists. ... ranging from the individual's cerebral hemispheres to the cultural contact on the national and international scale ... [a]s a consequence, semiosphere consists of levels, which range from each person's autonomous semiosphere to the overall semiosphere of the contemporary world—what used to be called the global village.
He [Lotman] tries to envision a kind of 'second-degree semiosphere' that would encompass all human meanings in a harmonious whole.
The breakthrough took place in his treatise On Semiosphere, a work vital for the development of cultural semiotics.
In 'On the Semiosphere,' Lotman uses terms of reproductive biology when he discusses how meaning is generated and transmitted. ... [Lotman's interpretation of Vernadsky's biosphere] gains a sacral-sexual character
Lotman invests the semiosphere with the feminine attributes of passivity and gravidity, characterizing it as inert, a brake on cultural evolution and on the creation of new meaning—an entropic absorber of semiotic energy. Energy is generated outside, and it penetrates the semiosphere, causing 'excitation' of the 'mother text', which then rearranges its constituent elements to give birth to new meanings.
The discipline has been further developed by Jesper Hoffmeyer's argument for the primacy of the 'semiosphere' (or the world of signs and signification) over the biosphere, as well as the primacy of the sign over the molecule. ... A human body, Hoffmeyer notes, is made up of about thirty square kilometres of membrane structure. It makes more sense, he argues, to locate human personhood not in the brain but in the skin, which is the fundamental locus of sensory interpretation
A human body, Hoffmeyer notes, is made up of about thirty square kilometres of membrane structure. It makes more sense, he argues, to locate human personhood not in the brain but in the skin, which is the fundamental locus of sensory interpretation. ... In [Lisa Robertson's] the 'Sixth Walk,' she confesses a desire to know her guide, which is a wish to know the mechanism of interpretation through which her ambulatory encounters with the city have been framed. The guide, a pastoral architect, is literally a skin, a membrane that helps determine significance for the narrator.
Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and his emphasis on the distinct Umwelt (self-world, or subjective universe) of living things.
In an accompanying note to a diagram of cryometric forms, Bök writes: 'Semiotic saturation increases from a solid state of monosemy to a fluid state of polysemy until meaning etherealizes itself in the region of cloud formation.'
Pataphysical poets employ methodological constraints in experimental poetic composition in order to parody reductionist scientific analysis and to complicate questions of perspective and meaning. ... Pataphysical poetics push social constructionism to the extreme, parodying it not as a means of undermining it, but of expressing the contingencies and interconnections in the overlapping worlds of signification that constitute cultural and biological environments
The pataphysics of Robertson and Mouré engage the environment, not according to the objective realism of scientific materialism, but rather as a complex set of semiotic relationships where diverse forms of signification and alternative realities interact.
While the shifts in cultural Umwelt that result from the deterritorialized pastoral can be read, like Mouré's text, in the terms of Uexküll's unorthodox science, I propose to read Robertson's concern with surfaces and membranes of civic memory in the context of biosemiotics and its extension of Uexküll's Umwelt theory.
As cultural biosemiotician Wendy Wheeler writes, '[a]n organism's Umwelt is, therefore, what signifies for it; and through it, it perceives stimuli and responds to them. An Umwelt, in other words, is a space of semiosis' (The Whole Creature 103).
Drawing upon French philosopher and literary critic, Paul Ricœur, [J. Nicholas] Entrikin argues that the key element straddling this relationship — or 'getting between' place — is the process of emplotment (25). This is a form of narrative which gives structure to the particular connections people have with places … But all of this begins with a tacit assumption that place is dualistic to begin with
Semiotics has mainly been influenced by linguistics and was later applied to aesthetics and visual communication like architecture, painting, or film. ... For the architectural sign, the behavioristic, dyadic, glossematic, and triadic sign models play a central role (Nöth 1990).
Semiotics became useful for analyzing stage lighting and the communication between the performer and the audience and to identify lighting signs associated with productions (Moran 2007).