Looking at the stars in the twenty-first century: Lotman's semiotics, progress and utopia

ABSTRACT

In the article, we consider special cases of technological progress and social dystopia studied by Yuri Lotman from the point of view of the inhabitants of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The analysis is illustrated by works of literary fiction: Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian novels Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and the Sun (2021).

Among the central issues discussed are the limits of technological progress, the ethics of the relationship between man and a highly intelligent artificial device, the revival of archaic models of human consciousness, the prospect of (im)possible worlds.

At the end of the article, we point out the problem of maintaining the ethical memory of mankind as the mission of a scientist and humanities writer, indicated by Lotmanian perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Semiotics of culture
• technical progress
• social dystopia
• ethical memory
• biosphere
• semiosphere

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the 20s of the 21st century, the image of "possible worlds" suddenly gets a new development as a result of a pandemic. According to French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, when in 2020 he sent photos and videos from orbit to Earth, it seemed to him that his viewers would quickly get tired of seeing all these pictures. However, it turned out that for people blocked at home in self-isolation, the information from Pesquet became an opportunity to imagine that they are traveling with him, together “building a possible world” outside the Earth. And in this sense, his mission can be considered successful

(« Une bonne partie de la mission est réussie » : Pesquet 2022).

2 « Un monde possible ne se trouve jamais dans le texte, il y est seulement suggéré en puissance, d'où l’adjectif possible. » (Perusset 2016, 265).

3 In the same book Ensemble. Pour une anthropologie sémiotique du Politique, devoted to the semiotic anthropology of politics, Jacques Fontanille cites the words of the anthropologist Philippe Descola, which are also close to Lotman's concept of "infinite variability of the world": « Quant à ″vision du monde″, c’est une formule que j’essaye d’éviter […]. En effet, la ″vision du monde″ suppose qu’il n’y a qu’un seul monde, une seule nature, un seul système d’objets, dont chaque culture aurait une perception particulière. Or je suis persuadé au contraire qu’il n'existe pas un monde qui serait une totalité autosuffisante et déjà constituée […] mais plutôt une diversité de processus de mondiation, c’est-à-dire d’actualisation de la myriade de qualités, de phénomènes et de relations qui peuvent être objectivées ou non par les humains […]. » (Descola 2015; 238. Quoted by Fontanille 2021a, 225).

4 Tolstoy, L. Letter to N. Strakhov dated April 8, 1878. Tolstoy's letter is quoted in Shklovsky, V. 1981, 32.

5 We devoted two of our articles to these works of Lotman: Merkoulova, I. 2020. « Le voyage à l’Ile d’Amour de Vassili Trediakovsky : une lecture sémiotique des passions par Jouri Lotman » ; Merkoulova, I. 2022. « Memorable Dates and Symbolic Spaces : Lotman and Dante ».

6 See Collection of semiotic reflections on the pandemic: Merkoulova 2021a. New normality, new life forms: semiotics in the era of crises. https://arxiv.gaugn.ru/s978-5-6045843-2-30000619-4-1/?sl=en

7 Fabbri writes that the instance of "We" is not reduced to a simple multiplication or expansion of "I" : « … le Nous n’est pas la simple multiplication, l’expansion ou la diffusion de la singularité concentrée du Je […], l’instance du Nous se définit toujours, de manière transitive, par rapport à un Vous et à un Eux. » (Fabbri 2019, 1)

8 Fontanille writes about the parabola as the main feature of the style of semiotic reflections of Fabbri himself : « … l’utopie parabolique est une utopie acceptable, voire applicable, et qui tire son aménité de ses spécificités sémiotiques : elle propose un compromis raisonnable et une conciliation réaliste. […] La forme parabolique permet d’obtenir la collaboration involontaire de l’adversaire. » (Fontanille 2019, 11, 14)

9 “We will therefore use the analysis grid which is based on the opposition between a programmed and a random interaction and which then develops by identifying the positions of a manipulative (non-random) interaction and one by adjustment (non-programmed).” (Sedda 2021, 129)

10 In the publication Future Past, special attention is paid to the connection between the future, temporal regimes and utopian/dystopian space, in particular, by such authors as Jorge Lozano (“The Space of the Future”), Jacques Fontanille (“Presences of the Future. The Experience of the “Block Universe” at the Time of the Pandemic”) and Jenny Ponzo (“The Contagion of Passions: the Epidemic as Dystopia in two 20th Century Novels (Cerami and Angelini)”).

11 In this part of the article, we develop some of the points presented for the first time in French at the SaISie Intersemiotic Seminar in Paris, dedicated to the semiotic approach to collectivities. For details see: « Les collectifs transhumains en littérature. Un regard sémiotique sur les limites de la créativité. » (Merkoulova 2021b)

12 « L’imperfection apparaît comme un tremplin qui nous projette de l’insignifiance vers le sens » : Greimas 1987, 99.

13 As Fontanille (2015, 27) points out, « en somme, dans « vivre avec » […] c’est « avec » (faire avec) qui est le premier et auquel on peut donner une forme syntagmatique reconnaissable […], et c’est « vivre » qui est second, et qui reçoit les contenus propres à la vie humaine (modalités, émotions, passions, normes, etc.). »

14 Lotman cites the text of Goethe in Russian translation by Boris Pasternak:

Нам говорят «безумец и фантаст»,

Но, выйдя из зависимости грустной,

С годами мозг мыслителя искусный

Мыслителя искусственно создаст. (Goethe [1808], 1986; 249. Quoted in Lotman [1979] 2005, 231)

15 Fabbri uses an expression by Roland Barthes to present the Tower of Babel parabola as a “counter-utopia” that has become the “happy” utopia of the emergence of languages. For details see : « La Tour de Babel est un mythe dévastateur transformé en mythe des origines heureuses du langage » (Fontanille 2019, 12).

16 We use Franciscu Sedda's term «imperfette traduzioni» (Sedda 2006, 7).

17 This work was prepared with financial support within the framework of the State Assignment of GAUGN on the topic “Modern information society and digital science: cognitive, economic, political and legal aspects” (FZNF-2020-0014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Inna Merkoulova

Inna Merkoulova, PhD in Linguistics and Semiotics, is Associate Professor, Founder and Director of the International Center for Semiotics and Intercultural Dialogue at the State Academic University for the Humanities in Moscow; associate Researcher at the «Sense-Text-Informatics-History» team of the Sorbonne University. Her research focuses on literary semiotics and intercultural dialogue, the theory of translation, the means of graphic expression in literature. Among her most recent publications: Semiótica de la Cultura. De Yuri Lotman al futuro. Semiotics of Culture: from Yuri Lotman to the Future. deSignis HS 02 (co-ed. with M. Martı́n, F. Sedda, P. Arán, J. Lozano, 2022); New normality, new life forms: semiotics in the era of crises (ed., 2021), Semiotics, Graphics and Enunciation in Contemporary French Prose (2019). Translator of the books: Culture and Explosion, by Y. Lotman (in French, 2004); The Semiotics of Passions: From States of Affairs to States of Feelings, by A.J. Greimas and J. Fontanille (in Russian, 2007); On imperfection, by A.J. Greimas (in Russian, 2022). Author of the project STUDSEMIOTICDAY – International Day for students of Semiotics.