Conclusion

the world as a text

Amy E. Varela

pp. 145-146

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

Abstract

Different researchers and critics create different portraits of Lotman as a theoretician: he has been depicted as a structuralist, a cybernetician, an "organicist," and a philosopher. A s we have seen, in L otma n's writing one ca n indeed encounter structuralist dogmas and scientistic/universalistic idioms; there are traces of cybernetic discourse, references to various disciplines, and also rather philosophical reflections on history and culture. As regards philosophy, there were several attempts to expose the philosophical grounds of Lotman's theory, characterizing it as Hegelian (Egorov 1999, 252–53), Marxist-dialectical (M. Gasparov 1996), Platonian (Vetik 1994), or Kantian (M. Lotman 1995). Such a broad spectrum of opinions can be explained by the fact that Lotman never explicitly pointed out any "father f igure" that had shaped his views but on the contrary demonstrated the flexibility of his approach: in various works Lotman refers, most notably, to Ferdinand de Saussure, Emile Benveniste, Iurii Tynianov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Andrei Kolmogorov, Ilia Prigogine, and Vladimir Vernadsky. Each of these theoreticians—whose ideas Lotman absorbs, develops, and incorporates in his own theory of culture—contributes something to Lotman's theory and reflects a different side of Lotman's multifaceted personality.