Semiosphere

Kaie Kotov

pp. 111-124

in: Aleksei Semenenko, The texture of culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

The key notions of Lotman's semiotics that have been described in the previous chapters—text, system, memory, dialogue, translation, and so on—have finally crystallized in the concept of semiotic space or semiosphere. The concept of semiosphere first appeared in the 1984 article "On the Semiosphere" (Lotman 1984c), published in the issue of TZS that was dedicated to the concept of dialogue as the basis of semiotic systems. In this article, Lotman for the first time mentions "a specific semiotic continuum, which is filled with multi-variant semiotic models situated at a range of hierarchical levels' (Lotman 2005, 206). This continuum is termed the semiosphere by analogy with Vladimir Vernadsky's concepts of biosphere and noosphere.¹ Let us see what exactly caught Lotman's attention in Vernadsky's theory and why he considered it important to indicate this connection.