VLADIMIR E. ALEXANDROV

              BIOLOGY, SEMIOSIS, AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN LOTMAN'S SEMIOSPHERE

WHEN IURII LOTMAN, the leading figure of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, assembled his Selected Essays shortly before he died in 1993, he opened the first volume with "On the Semiosphere" ("O semiosfere," 1984). This essay, which functions as a prolegomenon to the entire rich collection, and which has the most ambitious theoretical reach of anything he wrote, distills decades of his research on a wide variety of topics in literary and cultural theory, semiotics, and Russian literature and culture. It also makes several innovative moves to "naturalize" human culture by suggesting links and analogies between it and the concept of the "biosphere" developed by the geochemist Vladimir Vernadskii, as well as the structure of the brain and molecular symmetry. The aim of Lotman's grand new synthesis is to propose a model of how culture works everywhere around the globe.

The breadth, boldness, and eclecticism of Lotman's model are appealing. But closer scrutiny reveals that it needs to be modified because a number of his central arguments appear to be flawed. In the first place, the way he tries to link biological and semiotic phenomena is undermined by fundamental differences between them that center on the importance of "emergence" in biological systems. Secondly, despite the variety of issues over which Lotman casts his conceptual net, his understanding of culture and selfhood is predicated on a few basic assumptions about the centrality of individuality and novelty. When these are considered from the perspective of cultural psychology, they reveal a specifically Western cultural bias, which diminishes the relevance of Lotman's global scheme to other parts of the world. Finally, there are contradictions between several of Lotman's fundamental theoretical principles in the essay and characteristic features of his own scholarship, which shows great awareness of the varieties of human self-conceptions and a deep understanding of the sui generis nature of semiotic phenomena. Nonetheless, the fact that Lotman's own concepts can be used to analyze phenomena that undermine aspects of his model is evidence of the power of his insights into semiosis and the varieties of human experience, and of the possibility that his model can be refined.