Tamm, Marek , and Peeter Torop , ed. The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.

London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2021. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 8 Dec. 2024. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350181649>.

Accessed from: www.bloomsburycollections.com

Accessed on: Sun Dec 08 2024 14:04:41 czas środkowoeuropejski standardowy

Copyright © Laura Gherlone. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
CHAPTER 21
EXPLOSION
Laura Gherlone

Introduction

The concept of explosion in Juri Lotman’s scientific thought originates from an existential
experience – the vivid awareness that ‘in life, unlike chess, we cannot predict even two
moves ahead’ (letter to Boris Uspenskij, end of January 1984; Lotman and Uspenskij
2016: 573). This conviction led him to investigate the ways in which humans culturally
shape the experiences of randomness, unpredictability and creativity inherent in life.
Without doubt, Lotman’s encounter in 1986 with Ilya Prigogine’s theory of complex
systems (Lotman [1989a] 2002: 135) was instrumental in his theorization of explosion,
as demonstrated by his last two monographs, Culture and Explosion (Lotman [1992]
2009) and The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013), as well
as a considerable and consistent body of essays. However, although it is a concept that
essentially identifies the Lotman of the later years, we can find the roots of this horizon
of reflection in his early writings. ‘Explosion’ is the tip of the iceberg of a community’s
intellectual path – the Tartu School’s noosphere (see Lotman [1982] 2016) – marked by
a strong internal evolution within the field of human communication studies: a change
of vision that saw the transformation of ‘static models of information theory [. . .] into a
fascinating picture of interrelations, conflicts and transcoding’, which, in turn, converted
‘semiotic research into a dynamic portrait of the spiritual life of society’ (Lotman [1983]
2005: 76).1
In this chapter I will address the concept of explosion in relation to two problem
areas: knowledge and evolution.2 I will make use of both theoretical writings and
documents such as Lotman’s letters, autobiographical interviews and television
lectures for the general public. This array of sources will contribute to showing how
his scientific thought, feeding on metaphorical images and ‘explosive’ insights, is
inseparable from his aesthetic sensibility and, in general, from real life understood as
ongoing creativity.

Human communication: Superfluous

over-abundance or an engine of culture?

In the 1980s, Lotman postulated the idea that human semiotic activity is, in essence, an
enormous communicative effort capable of generating a translation-driven intertextual
sphere (or semiosphere) through which we can culturally and holistically know our
surroundings (see Chapter 22).3 In other words – as he pointed out in his unpublished
 Explosion

article ‘V otkrytom mire’ (In an Open World) (Lotman 1992–93a) – in order to have
access to a culturalized form of the world (or extracultural reality), we need to interact
through an ‘unstable, porous, non-reducible semiotic layer [which] immerses us in a
world of different viewpoints. By crossing, colliding and contradicting each other,
[these viewpoints] give us such a variety of different projections of the world’ that they
come ‘to lend our knowledge a volumetric [ob’ëmnyi] character’. This would explain ‘the
wastefulness of culture in particular, and of human knowledge in general, which we
cannot otherwise justify. [. . .] Why so many sciences? Why more and more new art
forms? Why do we need cinema if there is theatre and novel if there is drama? Why this
monstrous squandering of the best intellectual forces of humanity?’.
If it is true that the mutual translation of different ways of seeing things can offer us
a multifaceted knowledge, will we ever come – Lotman wonders ([1990] 2005: 538) – to
achieve ‘a general encompassment [okhvat] of the reality’? Against the background of
this question stands the issue of the unexpected; and ‘the unexpected brings explosion’
([1992] 2009): 120).

The spark of the untranslatable

Despite the ‘exuberance’ of reality, human beings have become accustomed to thinking
of knowledge as a space full of holes that must be progressively saturated. The holes
represent untamed information, which is perceived as disorder, randomness,
contradiction. They are under the illusion that achieving full knowledge is tantamount
to dominating information, that is, to identifying an ordering principle and, together
with it, ‘unbending repetitions’ (Lotman [1990] 2005: 521).
However, human beings’ real experience of knowledge contradicts this ideal because
– as mentioned earlier – life is not a chess game. While trying to model reality, giving
it a sense and in some way an order, their semiotic action appears as a ‘monstrous
wastefulness’ (chudovishchnaia rastochitel’nost’): an apparently entropic production of
information. If human beings aspire to order knowledge, why then do they dissipate so
much semiotic energy? And where does this redundancy of information go? Wouldn’t
it be less expensive and more ‘efficient’ (rentabel’nyi) to communicate through artificial
language (Lotman [1993] 1994: 443–4)?
Lotman identified translation as the source of our knowledge of reality but included
the unexpected as a constituent element of human communication and not as ‘noise’ to
be ousted. He stressed that, paradoxically, translation is all the more effective the more
it leaves a margin for untranslatability. This, in fact, is a symptom of the fact that the
reality we mean to grasp is so semantically rich and/or culturally distant that it can
only be expressed through approximation. The surplus of meaning that flows from the
untranslatable is not actually a waste since it is never lost but rather ‘hovers’ in culture,
entering a state of potential (meaning repository). We can picture the untranslatable
like air filled with pollen: impalpable, ungraspable but potentially able to bear fruit
in unpredictable times and places. When this happens, it can suddenly reveal new,

283
The Companion to Juri Lotman

unexpected, inconceivable, apparently illogical and inexpressible relationships between

things.
Lotman calls this revealing moment an explosion, that is, ‘the moment of supreme
tension [which] removes all boundaries of untranslatability and unites the incompatible’
([1992] 2009: 22). The explosion, while taking place in a specific space–time frame, entails
the suspension of the limits within which meaning is generated and the emergence of
something radically new, the result of a non-synthetic unity of differences – ‘a world of
supreme clarity, which cancels out the contradictions in their particular deep-level unity’
([1992] 2009: 22). This is the instant in which a breakthrough (proryv) seems to happen
between cultural reality and extracultural reality (or ‘noumenal world’, as Lotman
defines it in his later writings), as if suddenly what is fatally unknowable presents itself
to knowledge without the need for semiotic interpolation, although in reality the latter
never disappears.
Focusing on explosion, Lotman inevitably has artistic inspiration in mind (poetry
first and foremost), which sprung him into action from the very beginning. In his later
writings, he speaks in general of the experience of ‘unpredictable creativity’ ([1992]
2009: 20; [1990] 2001: 101) that humans can potentially live – a way of opening up to the
world with the mind and the senses that allows one to grasp, ‘as if in a magnesium flare’
(Lotman to Uspenskij, late April 1978; Lotman and Uspenskij 2016: 430), the profound
meaning of heterogeneity and even of the contradictions of reality.
It is no coincidence that the monograph The Unpredictable Workings of Culture –
the first version of which was titled Physiology of Explosion: On Transitional Periods in
History (Kuzovkina and Shakhovskaia 2001: 26) – is basically a long reflection on the
role of art in human history and on its epistemological significance. In Lotman’s vision,
art – as a form of thinking and modelling reality – is what gives life its inexhaustible
randomness. While ‘taking charge’ of the culture within which it arises (i.e. material
and immaterial limits such as constraining codifications), the artistic-creative thought
is endowed with an intrinsic transcendent capacity that allows it to disarticulate the
expected meanings. A thing as banal as a worn-out pair of boots (just think of Vincent
van Gogh’s Shoes, 1886) can become an uncanny subject precisely because in art objects
‘constrained by the laws of reality acquire freedom’ (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 172) and
reveal an untranslatable vagueness that Lotman calls unpredictable explosion.
Such ‘iridescent’, ‘twinkling’ meanings, as Lotman ([1967] 2011: 264) guessed from
the very beginning, are carriers of the unexpected because they shed light on facets
of reality that would otherwise remain hidden or non-perceptible to most people.
A depicted face can reveal, for example, the co-presence of mixed emotions, shifting
expressions and different temporalities (Lotman [1990] 2005: 533–6; 1992–93c;
[1993/1997] 2002; 2016): a glimmer of childhood can blossom between the wrinkles
of a shrivelled face, thus revealing that time has a multiple, even ‘ghostly’ nature
(Tamm 2015).
The ‘essence of artistic cognition’, Lotman sums up ([1994/2010] 2013: 84–5), ‘is
located in the explosion in meaning that arises at the intersection of non-intersecting
(in other situations) images of reality’. We can deduce that this type of cognition is an

284
 Explosion

indispensable component for humanity and, with its unpredictability, it is the closest
there is to real life.

Otherness, freedom, imperfection

Three considerations may be drawn from what has been discussed so far. Firstly, the
concept of explosion in its deepest meaning is a thinking of otherness. In fact, explosion
implies that difference is a constitutive element of human life and knowledge, otherwise
there would be no need for translation (i.e. the precondition of the explosive moment).
If that were the case, we would be a mass of ‘billiard balls’, which can ‘replace each other’
without any margin for misunderstanding (Lotman [1988] 2005: 464). However, human
beings’ real experience of reality passes through the communicative exchange, where the
need for incomprehension is paradoxically as relevant as the need for comprehension
([1990] 2005: 527). It is precisely because of the recognition of the other’s diversity that
human communication is so semiotically rich, redundant and contradictory – so much
so that it generates thresholds of untranslatability but also, through the artistic cognition,
moments ‘of tension’ which make ‘the untranslatable translatable’ (Lotman [1992] 2009:
23). The otherness is ultimately what makes reality knowable in its many facets.
Secondly, explosion maintains an indissoluble relation with freedom. Lotman writes
([1990] 2005: 532): ‘as soon as we move on to real life, we enter a world where it is
necessary not to get rid of contradictions or consider that contradictions are a mistake,
but to understand that contradictions are our treasure.’ Seeing contradictions as a treasure
means thinking in an antinomic way, that is, accepting the co-presence of a thing and its
opposite in the space of the semiosphere: for example, to recognize that past, present and
future can simultaneously coexist. This refusal to compartmentalize is linked to Lotman’s
belief that freedom is, first and foremost, the possibility of tapping into information.
Mutilating reality by dividing it into self-excluding oppositions actually results in giving
up the wealth of information that a multi-perspective view can grasp: that is, depriving
oneself of what can greatly influence the ‘possibility of choice’ ([1990] 2001: 226).
Thirdly, accepting the contradictions inherent in life means assuming that human
semiotics is fundamentally imperfect and incomplete – Lotman speaks of nepravil’nost’
(incorrectness, irregularity). But it is precisely this imperfection that enables the explosive
moment to constitutively include a crisis of meaning, that is, what allows human beings
to evolve. During an interview between Kalevi Kull and Lotman, the latter stated the
following:

It happened to a Greek philosopher who was not from Athens. He arrived in

Athens and there at the market a vendor told him: ‘You are a foreigner’. Of course,
he was Greek, but not from Athens. He said: ‘How do you know?’ ‘Because your
Greek is too correct’, he replied. You see, so too correct is a clue that reveals the
alien, while what is ours keeps a reserve for permissible incorrectness, admissible
variants, uniqueness. So [. . .] this freedom of the system, its irregularity, is what

285
The Companion to Juri Lotman

ensures its survival, its possibility for evolution and, in general, makes it live. You
see, life is incorrect by nature, but it is incorrect because it is profoundly correct.
If it was only incorrect, it would be death. (Kull and Lotman [1992] 2015: 176–7)

Here we find the basis of Lotman’s question: Can humans ever come to achieve a general
comprehension of reality? The answer is no if the model of knowledge is the too correct
one of a ‘great teacher’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 158) who knows everything in advance, but
it is yes if the model is that of a scientist open to unpredictability.

The arrow of time: Entropic death or creativity?

A model of knowledge that excludes the unexpected becomes, from a historical

perspective, an interpretative framework through which humans self-describe their
development over time, idealizing it as a path towards a state of predictability.4 The
movement of history takes on a predetermined character, thus affirming a vision of
time in which life progressively takes possibilities away: ‘a person comes into the world
being able to choose many paths; as this opportunity for choice gradually runs out, to
the extent that it is reduced, also the information decreases. The longer a person has
lived, the easier it is to predict what will happen to him/her in the future’ (Lotman
[1990] 2005: 539).
It is a Weltanschauung based on the idea of irreversible time as ‘entropic death’:
an idea that is, in humans’ sociocultural life, continuously questioned by the daily
experience of reality, where instability and uncertainty as well as the need for choice in
conditions of high improbability and the creative implications of the decisions taken are
commonplace, right up to the ‘last exam’, as Lotman defines death (Lotman [1983/1995]
2005). It follows that this vision hinged on predictability is extremely inconsistent and
therefore lacerating for people.
When making this reflection, Lotman has in mind the work of Nobel laureate in
chemistry Prigogine, who studied the so-called dissipative structures – typical of living
organisms – that is, ‘ordered systems maintained far from equilibrium by external
constraints’ (Lebon, Jou and Casas-Vázquez 2008: 136). Since they exist in a dynamic
state, during their evolution these thermodynamic systems may encounter points of
instability (or bifurcation) – which are also the most unpredictable and therefore only
probabilistically treatable – and change direction unexpectedly and irreversibly, bringing
to light their creative dynamic. In Lotman’s vision, Prigogine’s great teaching is to have
highlighted that life stands out as a non-linear something and that the arrow of time (or
irreversibility) is not necessarily synonymous with time-degradation (as the second law
of classical thermodynamics postulates), but can manifest itself as time-creation.
The thought of the Belgian scientist of Russian origin had an explosive effect on
Lotman, who had already been reflecting for some time on the role of chance in the
dynamics of culture and, more generally, on the relationship between culture and
history, which led him to question the structuralist-semiotic approach to culture

286
 Explosion

oriented towards regularities (see also Chapter 25). Following Prigogine, he came
to think – as he observed in his unpublished article ‘Evoliutsiia: uslozhnenie ili
uproshchenie?’ (Evolution: Complexification or Simplification?, Lotman 1991–92) –
that evolution is a cosmic extensive laboratory: something extremely dynamic, the
result of the liminal position in which the human being finds himself ‘situated in the
boundary of the “dual abyss” (Tiutchev’s expression) of the world that creates him
and the world that he creates’ (where the first one, Lotman writes in Culture and
Explosion, ‘is transformed into an inexhaustible source of information, like the Psyche,
in which dwells the inherent self-growing Logos about which Heraclitus spoke’,
[1992] 2009: 159). This ‘dual abyss’ – the threshold between extracultural and cultural
reality – is what coalesces the history of cosmos and the history of humanity in a single
evolutionary-information process.
History, in Lotman’s vision, is in fact the path of ‘appropriation’ (through the semiotic
sphere) of the potentially infinite information contained in extraculture. This path
advances with the development of thought (the precondition of the semiosphere; see
Lotman [1990] 2001: 150), which ‘is by no means direct and fatal and is not unambiguously
predictable’ as it includes ‘a great deal of chance and disorder’ (Lotman 1991–92). The
randomness inherent in the evolutionary process continuously opens up the possibility
of choice to human beings. And choice – as has already been partly highlighted – is what,
on the one hand, extends the ‘space of information’ ([1992] 2009: 122) and, on the other,
amplifies (i.e. enriches, refines and educates) thinking consciousness, without which this
process would be a mechanical and uncreative movement.
Lotman’s postulate is the ‘translation’ in historical-culturological terms of the
Prigoginian idea of ‘bifurcation’, whereby periods of predictability are interrupted by
explosions whose outcome is unpredictable – a translation that led him, like Pushkin,
to see in ‘Chance, the god of invention’ (Lotman 1991a; [1992/1995] 2019: 123) but also
to ask himself: Why is history often perceived and described as a ‘train travelling at an
unusually high velocity’ ([1990] 2005: 519) when in fact it is ‘an irreversible (unstable)
process’ (Lotman 1991b: 173), open to creativity?

How does explosion act?

From the second half of the 1980s, the discovery of Prigogine’s thought stimulated
Lotman to rethink his cultural theory from a historical perspective. Although this
idea had been present since his linguistic-typological writings of the 1960s and 1970s,
in the Lotman of the later years this perspective is amplified and bears an ethical-
anthropological reflection on the triad knowledge–memory–self-consciousness caught
in the individual-collective antinomy. This is a necessary and urgent reflection as it is
only through the awareness of their action and ‘performativity’ in history that humans
can learn to protect themselves from the blind alleys that have often characterized their
historical-cultural journey. How? By learning to interpret uncertainty through different
eyes. This alternative look is explosion.

287
The Companion to Juri Lotman

We may synthetically say that explosion, in Lotman’s history-oriented later writings,

is a sort of breakthrough in humans’ historical path, which is seen as a combination of
gradual (or predictable) development and unexpected contingencies.5 When it occurs,
‘the moment of explosion breaks the chain of cause and effect, causing an entire area to
rise up and a collection of identically probable events to come into view. Following from
the logic of the preceding developments, it is essentially impossible to predict which of
those events will actually occur’ (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 64).
Explosion is that moment when humans, finding themselves at a crossroads
(perceived as vagueness of information), choose a direction. What looked like a spatial-
temporal force field, an ‘array of possibilities’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 13), becomes
retrospectively for the individual-collective self-consciousness ‘the only possible option’
(Lotman [1992] 2009: 154). It is as if the moment of explosion is variably (i.e. neither
rigidly nor deterministically) articulated into two stages. In the first one, the space of
the possibilities – the unpredictable – opens up in all its extension and informativity,
thus bringing down the law of causality. In the second stage, which is ‘the turning point
of the process’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 15), the observers involved in the explosion are
inclined to drive back to the starting point and to interpret the image of the explosion
that took shape in their consciousness. This gives rise to a new, powerful process of
description (and self-knowledge) able to ‘explain what has occurred’ (Lotman [1992]
2009: 15). Failing that, ‘innovation would remain unnoticed, lessons from the explosion
unlearned’ (Torop 2009: xxxvi).
Reality presents itself as a limit (since choice necessarily implies the exclusion of other
possibilities) but also as an opportunity to increase information through selection. The
appearance of two divergent artistic paths, like Pushkin’s and Gogol’s, can be seen as
the cut-off point for multiple potentialities (‘why him and not others?’) but, at the same
time, as a selection that led humanity to take a huge leap forward: the moment when
– Lotman writes (1993) in the unpublished article ‘Odin: Ob iskhodnykh poniatiiakh’
(One: On Basic Concepts) – the demon of art seemed to have raised Russian literature
to the mountain top.
Explosion is presented by Lotman through three main properties. Firstly, he
generally speaks of ‘moment of explosion’, suggesting that it is a shifting, transitory
temporal conformation. At the same time, it is spatial because it implies the existence
of a (collective and individual) subject who perceives, interprets and evaluates it and
who is inevitably situated in the geographic-social-symbolic location of a given culture.
Secondly, rather than giving a definition of explosion, Lotman describes it through the
actions it performs, that is, through its agency. If we consider the two main monographs
mentioned earlier, we can observe that explosion ‘breaks’, ‘changes’, ‘carries over’, ‘throws’,
‘involves’, ‘forces’, ‘occurs’, ‘renders’, ‘creates’, ‘generates’, ‘ends’, ‘results in’, ‘changes’,
‘expels’, ‘loses’, ‘penetrates’, ‘ruptures’. Thirdly, as an agent force – almost with its own
intentionality, which encounters/clashes with the individual-collective subject’s force – it
seems to be a mnemonic-affective-sensory intelligence that makes use of familiar images-
symbols from the past (something similar to archetypal schemas) to become present and
graspable.

288
 Explosion

In light of these properties, the Lotmanian concept of explosion is very close to

that of atmosphere, if we understand the latter as ‘a contingent and fluid outcome
of our perpetually configured surroundings, sensory perceptions, subjectivities and
imaginations’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2019, loc. 187; see also Trigg 2020) – an outcome
that, in the hic et nunc of its manifestation, releases meanings able to ‘move forward with
people, continuing to shape [the] understandings of their experiences’ (Sumartojo and
Pink 2019, loc. 211) (different reminiscences and anticipatory insights into the future,
pre-existing views of things, bodily capacities, cultural narratives via daily discourses and
objects). Such ‘atmospheric eruption’ or explosion does not always present itself as the
space of a free choice (and therefore bearer of newness and generator of original meanings),
but can be conditioned by a mnemonic-cultural load that undermines the result. This is
because ‘the moment of explosion is not only the point at which new possibilities take
shape but also the point at which one becomes conscious of another reality, a moment of
dislocation and of the reinterpretation of memory’ (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 69).
The agency of explosion, as mentioned earlier, can push towards the ‘exhumation’
of ancient experiences (symbolized by familiar images) which, instead of helping to
embark on the path to novelty, reproduce a pernicious past in an apparent new guise:
a sort of reinterpreted script. This may happen especially in those moments marked by
high uncertainty, when ‘“historical memory” can lead to errors that are at times tragic
in their consequences’ (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 166). We may define such a situation
as a fallacious explosion because, while presenting itself as a moment of suspension, it
actually does not break the chain of cause and effect, nor does it generate substantially
new information (or generates it at a very high cost, i.e. the cancellation of previous
information). On the contrary, an authentic explosion, as Lotman underlines in the
unpublished article ‘Monostruktury i binarnost’ (Monostructures and Binariness)
(1991a), entertains a fertile bond with the past because it can awaken in it latent,
unexploded forces with great information capacity – forces capable of healing the past
itself.6
Starting from this vision, Lotman worked on two lines of research: the issues of (1)
historical self-description and (2) collective emotion(s), with a particular focus on mass
fear.

Binary and ternary systems

Those moments when historical memory proves to be a poor guide are the junctures in
which the individual-collective self-consciousness thinks of binariness (cf. note 3) not
in terms of coexistence of ‘one’s own’ and ‘the other’ but in terms of exclusion of one of
the two poles. Binariness turns into a way of interpreting historical development that
absolutizes the (apparent) newness by declaring ‘the alien’ – namely what preceded it –
non-existent.
In such sociocultural situations – called ‘binary systems’ – utopia prevails, that is, the
conviction that the unrealizable ideal can be concretely actualized and that, in the name

289
The Companion to Juri Lotman

of such ideal, it is necessary to annihilate everything that exists as it is ‘considered to be

irremediably corrupt’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 166). The ‘cleaning’ – from circumscribed
symbolic objects, such as religious images or books of poetry and literature, to entire
peoples, with their language and their set of spiritual and material-cultural values –
becomes the strategy to achieve the utopia.
Explosion entails a transforming effect in the sense that the binary system actually
takes an irreversible path, but the ‘bifurcation point’ is retrospectively described as
an inevitable and necessary choice, not as one among many possibilities. This feeds in
the individual-collective self-consciousness a model of historical path as fatalism (or
eschatologism) whereby the moments of suspension – when space–time ‘is no longer’
and ‘is not yet’ (Lotman 1994: 220) – are emptied of their creative possibilities.
In the so-called ternary systems, on the contrary, there is a sort of mediation
between the ideal and the reality whereby ‘certain values from the antecedent period’
are preserved and transferred ‘from the periphery to the centre of the system’ (Lotman
[1992] 2009: 166). In spite of not embarking into a deep analysis of the concept of
ternariety (ternarnost’) from a historical viewpoint, Lotman succeeds in conveying that
it is linked to his reflection on the need to think of reality in terms of a ‘complex unity’
(Lotman 1991a). The application of a complexity filter makes it possible to see the poles
of binariness from a holistic perspective, that is, of grasping them in their reciprocity
and unity, albeit the existing diversity – Lotman talks indistinctly about ‘deep unity’,
‘higher unity’ and ‘dynamic unity’, taking inspiration from the image of the Holy Trinity
([1994/2010] 2013: 80). The concept of ternary system in a historical sense is therefore an
attempt (only sketched) to explain how in certain periods of transition thinking ternarily
means identifying ‘variable geometry’ solutions to achieve a non-destructive change.
The dynamics of binary and ternary systems could not be explained, Lotman realized
between 1988 and 1993, without considering an agent force that seems to have a
collective face: fear.

The issue of mass fear

At transitory historical junctures – both in binary and ternary systems – society feels that
the complex of discursive and material relations that sustains it has entered into crisis
(in the etymological sense of the term, as an ‘act of separating’). Objects (like a flag) or
words (like ‘roots’), which until recently had been constitutive elements of its unifying
‘great narrative’, are now perceived as something strange. Several reasons can trigger
crisis: the emergence of a new and unpredictable threat, the conflictual nature of border
areas (such as subcultures) that push towards a radical break, the unleashing of ancient
pernicious experiences that act as a script, the change of image and function of the ‘alien
culture’ (see the unpublished writing ‘Chuzhoi mir, chuzhoe povedenie’ [Alien World,
Strange Behaviour], Lotman 1992–93b).
The void created in the interim (Lotman 1994: 220–3), that is, the shadow of
insignificance over the meaning built up until that moment, releases cognitive, emotional
and semiotic-pragmatic energies aimed at the reunification and reconstruction of

290
 Explosion

meaning. These periods generally present themselves with a high degree of vagueness;
it is difficult to decipher them, and the nebulosity they carry brings innovative forces,
but also diffused affective waves (insecurity, fear, suspicion, etc.). These are periods
when, according to Lotman (1989: 480–1), a ‘psychology of the “fortress besieged”’ may
be more easily developed, a kind of spatial-temporal and sensorial configuration that
pushes people to let themselves be carried away by an impalpable but real air of fear
(Lotman speaks of an atmosphere of collective hysteria); to unearth ‘atavistic myths’, that
is, to feed discursive plots soaked in fictional elements (which speak of ancient but living
traumas); to search for ‘dangerous but invisible enemies’, by identifying a category or
a sector of society often already persecuted in the past; to transfer to this dangerous
figure the image-symbol of the ‘culprit of all the troubles, the participant in an invisible
conspiracy’; to extend this guilt to all those who, in some way, defend or are involved with
the stigmatized subject; in the most extreme cases – as in the case of binary systems –
to accept that legal guarantees be cancelled, legitimizing repressive actions (for further
exploration, see Gherlone 2019). Lotman observes: ‘it is not surprising then that a rigidly
binary model is so conducive to displays of intolerance and destructive social emotions.
Expressed with classic completeness in the formula “If you’re not with us, you’re against
us”, this model historically comes to the surface whenever creativity is pushed aside by
destruction’ (Lotman [1994/2010] 2013: 79–80)
This destructive emotional wave goes hand in hand with, and contributes to feeding,
the construction of a monolithic truth (Lotman 1989: 479), which basically means loss
of information as it severs a multi-perspective, creative look. Only the rehabilitation of
such generative creativity can overturn the course of events.

Conclusions: On astonishment

All these reflections led Lotman (1991b: 175) to assert the need for a ‘semiotics of history’,
that is, a science capable of providing ‘an analysis of how [. . .] the human individual, in
the process of making choices, imagines the world’. Interestingly, he does not talk about
description but imagination of the world. This means that the process of making choices
involves not only the realized occurrences but also the imaginable ones, namely the intuitive
‘anticipation of potential “future states”’ ([1992] 2009: 172). How? Lotman sees in art a
form of thinking and modelling reality capable of (re)presenting to humans pictures of the
world of unrealized paths. Art becomes a space of freedom because it is capable of opening
up a range of possible choices (e.g. through the cognitive-emotional dialogical relationship
with literary characters’ voice) that real life inevitably limits.7 Moreover, it shows that the
‘history of what-might-have-been [nesluchivshegosia] is a great and fundamental history’,
offering us the chance to experiment ‘an immense second life’ (Lotman [1990] 2005: 522),
an overcoming of the inevitability of death (see also Lotman 1992b).8
Finally, embracing artistic thought means educating ourselves to conceive reality as
ongoing possibility, escaping from the temptation to evaluate the future through the lens
of the past. When explosion occurs, art-educated thinking is able to see in uncertainty

291
The Companion to Juri Lotman

and even in crisis not closing routes but horizons that open up. After explosion, one
‘discovers with astonishment that the most likely paths have been bypassed, and what
was realized is the least probable or even considered impossible’ (Lotman 1993). In other
words, one discovers that a leap has been made in knowledge and evolution.

Notes

1. I quote Lotman describing Jakobson’s intellectual path, which he deemed similar to his own.
2. For further reading, see Deotto et al. 1996; Avtonomova 2009, 2015; Torop 2009; Grishakova
2009; Lotman M. 2013; Pilshchikov 2013; Kim 2014; Kull 2015; Lorusso 2015; Semenenko
2016; Gramigna and Salupere 2017; Kull and Velmezova 2018; Restaneo 2018; Tamm 2019;
the essays in Machado and Barei 2019; Demuru 2020; Monticelli 2020; Salerno and Lozano
2020; Zolyan 2020.
3. This idea is based on Lotman’s belief that human thought is grounded on the fundamental
opposition between ‘one’s own’ [svoi] and ‘the other’ or ‘the alien’ [chuzhoi], specifically the
co-existence of two poles ‘simultaneously similar and functionally separate’ (Lotman 1991a) or
principle of binariness and asymmetry. This generates an infinite range of binary oppositions
from a micro one between two languages modelling a text to a macro one between culture
and extraculture (Lotman 1992–93b), whose mutual dynamism (or tension to translation) is
at the basis of our knowledge of reality.
4. For an overview of this topic, see the essays included in Lotman 2019 as well as Lotman 1989;
1998; [1989b] 2002; [1992a] 2002; [1992b] 2002).
5. In Culture and Explosion, the process of gradual development is seen as an ‘objective narrative
of the third person’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 35), that is to say, something codified, consolidated
and common to the observers, and therefore predictable – Lotman talks about ‘space of
common nouns’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 117). The explosion, on the contrary, is the realm of
the ‘first person’ (or the ‘space of proper names’), namely of uniqueness and particularity, a
reason why it calls into play a tremendous collective effort of decoding and interpretation.
Furthermore, ‘it is no accident that historically explosive epochs push “great people” to
the surface’ (Lotman [1992] 2009: 136), by symbolizing the irreplaceability of ‘individual
creativity’ (especially in art).
6. It is noteworthy that Lotman’s theory offers a set of interesting ideas for nourishing a cultural
affect theory and decoloniality (Gherlone, forthcoming).
7. In the realm of art, reality is transformed into the ‘world of proper names’, that is, a world
‘experienced in an emotional and intimate way’, where ‘the “alien” is always our “own” but
at the same time our “own” is also always “alien”’ (Lotman ([1992] 2009: 118). In this way
humans can live subjectively and personally even those experiences with which they might
not in principle be familiar, such as the death of a son, a psychiatric illness, a situation of
captivity or exile, and so on.
8. A detailed study of this topic can be found in Kuzovkina 1999.

References

Avtonomova, N. S. 2009. ‘Pozdnii Lotman’, in N. S. Avtonomova, Otkrytaia struktura: Iakobson –

Bakhtin – Lotman – Gasparov, 215–23, Moscow: ROSSPEN.

292
 Explosion

Avtonomova, N. S. 2015. ‘Le Lotman des derniers travaux: à l’arrière, au front ou tout
simplement “en route”?’, in E. Velmezova (ed.), L’École sémiotique de Moscou-Tartu / Tartu-
Moscou. Histoire. Épistémologie. Actualité, 311–35 (Slavica Occitania 40), Toulouse: Université
de Toulouse.
Demuru, P. 2020. ‘Between Accidents and Explosions: Indeterminacy and Aesthesia in the
Becoming of History’, Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso 15 (1): 83–109.
Deotto, P., Nortman, M., Pesenti, C. and Verch, I. (eds) 1996. Slavica tergestina (Nasledie Ju. M.
Lotmana: nastoiashchee i budushchee), 4, Trieste: Edizioni LINT.
Gherlone, L. 2019. ‘Lotman Continues to Astonish: Revolutions and Collective Emotions’,
Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso 14 (4): 163–83.
Gherlone, L., forthcoming. ‘Semiotics and Cultural Affect Theory’, in A. Biglari (ed.), Open
Semiotics, Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan.
Gramigna, R. and Salupere, S. 2017. ‘Umberto Eco and Juri M. Lotman on Communication and
Cognition’, in T. Thellefsen and B. Sørensen (eds), Umberto Eco in His Own Words, 248–57,
Berlin, Munich and Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Grishakova, M. 2009. ‘Afterword: Around Culture and Explosion: J. Lotman and the Tartu-
Moscow School in the 1980–90s’, in J. Lotman, Culture and Explosion, trans. W. Clark, ed. M.
Grishakova, 175–87, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kim, S.-H. 2014. ‘Lotmanian Explosion: From Peripheral Space to Dislocated Time’, Sign Systems
Studies 42 (1): 7–30.
Kull, K. 2015. ‘A Semiotic Theory of Life: Lotman’s Principles of the Universe of the Mind’, Green
Letters 19 (3): 255–66.
Kull, K. and Lotman, Y. [1992] 2015. ‘Au sujet de la sémiotique de la vie et de l’évolution.
(Entretien de Kalevi Kull avec Youri Lotman. Tartu, juin 1992)’, in E. Velmezova (ed.), L’École
sémiotique de Moscou-Tartu / Tartu-Moscou. Histoire. Épistémologie. Actualité, 165–82
(Slavica Occitania 40), Toulouse: Université de Toulouse.
Kull, K. and Velmezova, E. 2018. ‘O paradokse “semiotiki zhizni”: raboty poslednikh let Iuriia
Lotmana’, Slovo​.r​u: Baltiiskii aktsent 9 (4): 6–14.
Kuzovkina, T. 1999. ‘Tema smerti v poslednikh stat’iakh Ju. M. Lotmana’, in B. Egorov, Žizn’ i
tvorchestvo Iu. M. Lotmana, 259–70, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.
Kuzovkina, T. and Shakhovskaia, T. 2001. ‘Lotman, Juri. Fond 136. Inventarinimistu’. Available
online: http:​/​/dsp​​ace​.u​​t​.ee/​​bitst​​ream/​​handl​​e​/100​​62​/46​​412​/f​​​136​_l​​otman​​.pdf (accessed
21 November 2020).
Lebon, G., Jou, D. and Casas-Vázquez, J. 2008. Understanding Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics:
Foundations, Applications, Frontiers, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer.
Lorusso, A. M. 2015. ‘Unity and Pluralism: The Theory of Jurij Lotman’, in A. M. Lorusso, Cultural
Semiotics: For a Cultural Perspective in Semiotics, 67–115, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lotman, J. [1967] 2011. ‘The Place of Art Among Other Modelling Systems’, trans. T. Pern, Sign
Systems Studies 39 (2/4): 249–70.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1982] 2016. ‘Universitet – nauka – kul’tura’, in Ju. M. Lotman and B. A.
Uspenskij, Perepiska 1964–1993, 679–88, Tallinn: Tallinn University Press.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1983] 2005. ‘Poslednii ekzamen, poslednii urok . . . (Neskol’ko slov o Romane
Osipoviche Iakobsone)’, in Ju. M. Lotman, Vospitanie dushi, 74–7, Saint Petersburg:
Iskusstvo–SPB.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1988] 2005. ‘Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Televizionnye lektsii – Tsikl vtoroi.
Vzaimootnosheniia liudei i razvitie kul’tur’, in Ju. M. Lotman, Vospitanie dushi, 414–69, Saint
Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1989. ‘Vykhod iz labirinta’, in U. Eco, Imia rozy, 468–81, Moscow: Knizhnaia palata.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1989a] 2002. ‘O roli sluchainykh faktorov v literaturnoi evoliutsii’, in Ju. M.
Lotman, Istoriia i tipologiia russkoi kul’tury, 128–35, Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB.

293
The Companion to Juri Lotman

Lotman, Ju. M. [1989b] 2002. ‘V perspektive Frantsuzskoi revoliutsii’, in Ju. M. Lotman, Istoriia i
tipologiia russkoi kul’tury, 371–5, Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB.
Lotman, Yu. M. [1990] 2001. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. A.
Shukman, London and New York: I.B. Tauris.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1990] 2005. ‘Besedy o russkoi kul’ture. Televizionnye lektsii – Tsikl chetvertyi:
Chelovek i iskusstvo’, in Ju. M. Lotman, Vospitanie dushi, 515–44, Saint Petersburg:
Iskusstvo–SPB.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1991a. ‘Monostruktury i binarnost’, Tartu University Library, Collection 136, n.
268, 6 pages.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1991b. ‘Semiotics and the Historical Sciences’, in B. Göranzon and M. Florin
(eds), Dialogue and Technology: Art and Knowledge, 165–80, London: Springer.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1991–92. ‘Evoliutsiia: uslozhnenie ili uproshchenie?’, Tartu University Library,
Collection 136, n. 271, 14 pages.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1992a. ‘Povtoriaemost’ i vzryv v dinamicheskikh protsessakh’, Tartu University
Library, Collection 136, n. 279, 15 pages.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1992b. ‘V ozhidanii iazyka (nakanune vzryva)’, Tartu University Library,
Collection 136, n. 272, 21 pages.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1992a] 2002. ‘Povtoriaemost’ i unikal’nost’ v mekhanizme kul’tury’, in Ju. M.
Lotman, Istoriia i tipologiia russkoi kul’tury, 67–70, Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1992b] 2002. ‘Iskusstvo na peresechenii otkrytykh i zakrytykh struktur’, in Ju. M.
Lotman, Istoriia i tipologiia russkoi kul’tury, 174–88, Saint Petersburg: Iskusstvo–SPB.
Lotman, J. [1992] 2009. Culture and Explosion, trans. W. Clark, ed. M. Grishakova, Berlin and
New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1992–93a. ‘V otkrytom mire’, Tartu University Library, Collection 136, n. 273,
typewritten version, 10 pages.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1992–93b. ‘Chuzhoi mir, chuzhoe povedenie’, Tartu University Library, Collection
136, n. 289, 4 pages.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1992–93c. ‘Ogon’ v sosude’, Tartu University Library, Collection 136, n. 278,
26 pages.
Lotman, J. [1992/1995] 2019. ‘The Role of Art in the Dynamics of Culture’, in J. Lotman, Culture,
Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics, trans. B. J. Baer, ed. M. Tamm, 115–30,
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1993. ‘Odin. Ob iskhodnykh poniatiiakh’, Tartu University Library, Collection
136, n. 294, pages 4 of 174.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1993] 1994. ‘Nam vsё neobkhodimo. Lishnego v mire net . . .’ in А. D. Koshelev
(ed.), Iu. M. Lotman i tartusko-moskovskaia semioticheskaia shkola, 442–51, Moscow: Gnozis.
Lotman, Ju. M. [1993/1997] 2002. ‘Portret’, in Ju. M. Lotman, Stat’i po semiotike kul’tury i
iskusstva, 349–75, Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt.
Lotman, Yu. 1994. ‘Theses Towards a Semiotics of Russian Culture’, Elementa 1 (3): 219–27.
Lotman, Ju. M. 1998. ‘Okhota za ved’mami. Semiotika strakha’, Sign Systems Studies 26: 61–82.
Lotman, J. [1994/2010] 2013. The Unpredictable Workings of Culture, trans. B. J. Baer, ed. I.
Pilshchikov and S. Salupere, Tallinn: Tallinn University Press.
Lotman, J. 2016. Juri Lotmani autoportreed. Avtoportrety Iu. M. Lotmana. Juri Lotman’s Self-
Portraits, trans. P. Peiker, ed. T. Kuzovkina and S. Daniel, Tallinn: Tallinn University Press.
Lotman, J. 2019. Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics, trans. B. J. Baer, ed.
M. Tamm, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lotman, Ju. M. and Uspenskij, B. A. 2016. Perepiska 1964–1993, Tallinn: Tallinn University Press.
Lotman, M. 2013. ‘Afterword: Semiotics and Unpredictability’, in J. Lotman, The Unpredictable
Workings of Culture, trans. B. J. Baer, ed. I. Pilshchikov and S. Salupere, 239–78, Tallinn:
Tallinn University Press.

294
 Explosion

Machado, I. and Barei, S. (eds) 2019. Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso 14 (4), available
online: https​:/​/re​​vista​​s​.puc​​sp​.br​​/inde​​x​.php​​/bakh​​tinia​​na​/is​​sue​/v​​ie​w​/2​​280​/s​​howTo​c (accessed
21 November 2020).
Monticelli, D. 2020. ‘Thinking the New After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Juri Lotman’s Dialogism
of History’, Rethinking History 24 (2): 184–208.
Pilshchikov, I. (ed.) 2013. Sluchainost’ i nepredskazuemost’ v istorii kul’tury: Materialy Vtorykh
Lotmanovskikh dnei v Tallinnskom universitete (4–6 iiunia 2010 g.), Tallinn: Tallinn University
Press.
Restaneo, P. 2018. ‘Lotman, Leibniz, and the Semiospheric Monad: Lost Pages from the Archives’,
Semiotica 224: 313–36.
Salerno, D. and Lozano, J. 2020. ‘Future: A Time of History’, Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici 2:
189–205.
Semenenko, A. 2016. ‘Homo polyglottus: Semiosphere as a Model of Human Cognition’, Sign
Systems Studies 44 (4): 494–510.
Sumartojo, S. and Pink, S. 2019. Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods,
Abingdon and New York: Routledge (Kindle File Format).
Tamm, M. (ed.) 2015. Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Tamm, M. 2019. ‘Introduction: Juri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory’,
in J. Lotman, Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics, trans. B. J. Baer, ed.
M. Tamm, 1–25, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Torop, P. 2009. ‘Foreword: Lotmanian Explosion’, in J. Lotman, Culture and Explosion, trans. W.
Clark, ed. M. Grishakova, xxvii–xl, Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trigg, D. 2020. ‘The Role of Atmosphere in Shared Emotions’, Emotion, Space and Society 35: 1–7.
Zolyan, S. 2020. Iurii Lotman: O smysle, tekste, istorii. Temy i variatsii, Мoscow: Izdatel’skii Dom
IASK.

295