Some Marginal Notes on Historic Perspectives of Y. M. Lotman

Abstract

The humanistically orientated historicism of Lotman is based on a tolerant openness to the other and their otherness in context, which sees contemporaneity as a diverse multitude of historical events in such a way that it does not impose itself or its environment on the other as “the final aim of history”, but rather regards itself and its contemporaneity in a dialogue with the other as two possibilities realized in the process of history. – Lotman always remained true to the postulate in the title of his 1967 treatise The Study of Literature Must Be a Science, yet he never devised a closed scientific system; he critically upgraded his views by interacting with exciting contemporaneity (structuralism, semiotics, Bakhtin, post-structuralism, cybernetics, information theory, etc.), as well as embracing revived initiatives from the past (e.g. the Russian formalism and especially Tynyanov). – In the fifties, when he spent most of his time on literary-historical research based on Hegelian-Marxist historical methodology, Lotman consistently opposed the Soviet teleological concept of and ideological approach to history. – His enthusiasm for cybernetics, semiotics and structuralism in the sixties and seventies made Lotman search for a new methodology as a solid scientific ground to encourage scientific creativity in literary science and human sciences in general. In this search, Lotman didn’t discard Hegelian dialectics, but he did reject the Marxist concept of freedom as a recognized necessity and indicated a departure from the Hegelian concept of history as a purposeful process. In this period, by stressing the advantages of the diachronic perspective (with partial regard to synchrony) and applying the semiotic historical perspective in his approach to the issue of the code, Lotman went beyond structural dogmatics and combined the structural method with historical research, which turned more and more to history and the typology of culture and, above all, to an “organic” integration of literature into culture. – In Lotman’s historical thought, the eighties brought about the notions of “explosion” and “unpredictability” (derived from Prigogine), as well as, in approaching culture as a “semiosphere”, the functional aspect of the relationship between people and semiosphere. Lotman also critically researched new historicism, the retrospective historical perspective and the influence of narrative models on a historian-scientist. All this broadened Lotman’s historical perspectives and strengthened his understanding of history as a process that is not only conscious, but also not only subconscious; his belief that a historian has to view history as an asymmetric and irreversible process; and at the same time the fact that a realized possibility in history is accompanied by a multitude of unrealized possibilities, especially at the point of “explosion” and reduced predictability; in history, the mechanism of randomness, and not only the mechanism of conscious choice, is at work. – The particular character of history and historical fact as a text that is not absolute, but rather a result of a prior analysis, binds the historian to taking into account the plurality of historical perspectives; and, besides the necessary dialogue, according to Lotman, a historian should also regard “all-encompassing cosmic information” which from the perspective of the ideas of cybernetics, conditions order, the structure of life and a responsible freedom of choice as a counterweight to chaos and destruction.