The aim of the article is to elaborate ecosemiotics towards practical methodology of analysis. For that, the article first discusses the relation between meaning and context seen as a possibility for an ecological view immanent in semiotics. Then various perspectives in ecosemiotics are analyzed by describing biological and cultural ecosemiotics and critically reading the ecosemiotic works of W. Nöth and K. Kull. Emphasizes is laid on the need to integrate these approaches so that the resulting synthesis would both take into account the semioticity of nature itself as well as allow analyzing the depiction of nature in the written texts. To this end, a model of nature-text is introduced. This relates two parties intertwined by meaningrelations — the written text and the natural environment. In support of theconcept of nature-text, the article discusses the Tartu–Moscow semioticians’ concepts of text, which are regarded as broad enough to accommodate the semiotic activity and environment creation of other animals besides humans. In the final section the concept of nature-text is used to describe nature writing as an appreciation of an alien semiotic sphere and to elucidate the nature writing’s marginality, explaining it with the need to interpret two different types of texts.

The article views the development of the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school from the analysis of texts to the study of spatial entities (semiosphere being most well known of them). It comes to light that ‘culture’ and ‘space’ have been such notions in Tartu–Moscow School to which, for instance, the ‘semiosphere’ does not add much. There are studied possibilities to join Uexküll’s and Lotman’s basic concepts (as certain grounds of Estonian semiotics) with Tartu–Moscow School’s treatment of culture and space through the notion of ‘semiotic subject’. Such an approach allows to see transdisciplinarity, which has come to issue only during the last decade, already in the first conceptions of Tartu–Moscow School where transdisciplinarity revealed itself in the symbiotic use of ‘culture’ and ‘space’.

The article is based on theories of meaning creation and the concepts of archaic mind of Juri Lotman and Giambattista Vico. It compares the notions fantasia, ingegno, memoria and poetic logic by Vico with Lotman’s concepts of text, memory and modelling systems. Donald Phillip Verene’s and Marcel Danesi’s interpretations of Giambattista Vico’s work are also taken into consideration in the analysis. The article aims to bring out the characteristic features of archaic meaning creation. The archaic mind is considered to be fundamentally poetic. Its main mechanism of generating new meaning is metaphorical identification of two otherwise separate elements. The creativity of this act lies in the presumption that imagination is needed to bring these two elements together — they cannot be identified with each other by the means of syllogistic logic. The archaic mind does not operate mainly with generic concepts, as rational mind does. It forms imaginative universals instead, which are based on the sense of identity between objects or their parts, not on the sense of similarity/ dissimilarity of distinct features of objects. This process forms the basis of poetic modelling, which is primary in relation to verbal modelling.

The article concentrates on the possibilities of bringing into dialogue two different theoretical frameworks for conceptualising social reality and power: those proposed by Ernesto Laclau, one of the leading current theorists of hegemony, and Juri Lotman, a path breaking cultural theorist. We argue that these two models contain several concepts that despite their different verbal expressions play exactly the same functional role in both theories. In this article, however, we put special emphasis on the problem of naming for both theorists. We propose to see naming as one of the central translating strategies in the politico-hegemonic discourse. Our main thesis is that through substituting some central categories of Laclau’s theory with those of Lotman’s, it is possible to develop a model of hegemony that is a better tool for empirical study of power relations in given social formations than the model proposed by Laclau, who in his later works tends more and more to ground it in psychoanalytic ontology.

Roland Barthes was suspicious about the ability of music and voice to signify, as revealed in many of his writings. However, his somewhat limited views on music and voice need not to restrain from profiting his semiotic theorising and his reasoning, which can be adapted for musical instances in ways not envisaged by Barthes. The Neutral (Le Neutre) is a recurrent topic in Barthes’s oeuvre from his first book, Writing Zero Degree (1953) up to his 1978 lecture series on The Neutral in Collège de France (published in 2002). This paper explores how Barthes’s Neutral may enhance a special kind of listening. The enigmatic sonorities emitted by the Invisible Choir in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) serve as the foil in this task, more precisely a phrase voiced by female altos and male tenors (“Nehmet hin meinen Leib [...]”, Act I). It is not its semantic content mediated by (written) language that is of interest here but how this phrase has been voiced, andfurthermore, how Barthes’s Neutral may be heard in and beneath it. Several commercially available live recordings made in Bayreuth have offered playground for listening to and for The Neutral. As my analysis shows, the audible Neutral is not a separate entity but works in conjunction with other modes of signification: visual, textual, biographical, spatial.

The article examines Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977) in conjunction with du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) in order to present an argument about the similarities they share with the male masochistic fantasy as theorised by Deleuze in his Coldness and Cruelty (1989). Barthes’s insistence on the connection between art and love directs my approach. Trilby deals with love and aesthetics in the contexts of art, music, and narrative. The discourses of Trilby’s competing lovers over the same woman serve as a point of comparison against which I read Barthes’s dramatisation of a lover’s discourse. I argue that Barthes’s lover shares a number of central discursive figures with the Deleuzian masochistic lover. I examine Barthes’s suggestion about the tension between the non-narrative discourse of love and the metalanguage of conventional love stories. I focus on those figures in a lover’s discourse that Barthes identifies as keeping this discourse from turning into a love story. My argument is that many of these figures are among the hallmarks of the masochistic fantasy. In particular the formula of disavowal safeguards the lover’s discourse, hindering it from turning into a conventional narrative about love.

Semiotic and linguistic studies of the 20th century have been important mostly in two senses — (1) they have opened a road for comparative research on the origin and development of language and other systems of signs adding a new dimension to the history of culture; (2) they have shown a possibility of uniting different fields of humanities around semiotics suggesting a way to trespass separation and atomisation of different trends in investigating culture. In the 21st century one may hope for closer integration of semiotics and exact and natural sciences. The points of intersection with the mathematical logic, computer science and information theory that already exist might lead to restructuring theoretical semiotics making it a coherent and methodologically rigid discipline. At the same time, the continuation of neurosemiotic studies promises a breakthrough in understanding those parts of the work of the brain that are most intimately connected to culture. From this point of view semiotics may play an outstanding role in the synthesis of biological science and humanities. In my mind that makes it a particularly important field of future research.

Roland Barthes’s work has confronted contemporary culture with the question of what happens when an object turns into language. This question allowed Barthes to “construct” well known cultural objects — from novels to music, from images to classical rhetoric, from love to theatre — in an unthought way, and to create new, even more unknown ones — from contemporary myth to fashion, from Japan to food culture. In this paper, Barthes’s cultural criticism is considered alongside with the issues raised by Cultural Studies. More specifically, Barthes’s constant reflection on the myth undoubtedly entitles us to connect his cultural criticism to the work that, in those same years, was being produced by the English forge of Cultural Studies, namely the so-called “Birmingham school”. Even today, Barthes’s work makes it possible for semiotics to be, to use his expressions, both “the science of every imagined universe”, and a mathesis singularis, rather than universalis, that is to say a systematic way to approach the singularity of the objects of knowledge. On the basis of this “transcendental reduction”, we can therefore wish for a “second birth” and a transvaluation of linguistics and of semiotics, both to be applied through varied and disseminated forms ofintellectual activism.

This article addresses Barthes’s development from a structuralist semiotician towards an affectively responding reader in terms of ‘postrational’ subjectivity. In light of his whole oeuvre, Barthes anticipates the understanding of emotion as an integral part of cognition presented in contemporary social neuroscience. To illustrate Barthes’s growing awareness of the importance of this epistemological move, the article starts from his textual ‘reality effect’ as a critical vehicle of realist representation. It then shifts to his attempt at conceptualising an affective reading which resists the universalising idea of one ideologically determined signified. Barthes’s progress towards embracing the actual reader’s embodied self-feeling is prompted by two conceptual milestones: the obtuse meaning found incinematic stills, and the experience of punctum felt in photos. In light of his lectures in the Collège de France, Barthes substitutes the Husserlian disembodied method of introspection with the Chinese wu-wei as a reading practice. As a result, his Zen-Buddhist concentration on bodily feelings elicited by visual/verbal images becomes a method capable of creating a fruitful link between language and wordless cognition. Finally, the article proposes an idea of the ‘embodied reality effect’ by reading affectively two similar scenes interpreted by the early and late Barthes himself.

While it is well known that Roland Barthes consecrated his last lecture series at the Collège de France to the theme of the preparation of a novel, it is less known that his first writings on literature focused on the same question, but from a less individual point of view. The interrogation that motivates Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) and many of the essays in Essais critiques (1964) is the question of how to write, of what procedures one can follow in preparing a literary work of art. At the two ends of Barthes’s career one finds the same themes of writing as action and of the writer’s possibilities and motivations in writing. The article explores the hypothesis that there is ground for a positive theory of the author in Barthes’s work. It seeks to discover similarities between writings from the early and the late period that concern three themes: (1) writing as action, (2) the deferral of its achievement, and (3) writing as representation. The article ends with a discussion on the relationships between Barthes’s positive theory of the author and related important issues that have been discussed recently in literary criticism.

In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978–1979, Barthes focuses at length on the activity of ‘la notation’ (in English, notation): grabbing a fleeting event or impression as it happens, and registering it in your notebook. This article explores the ramifications of notation, as outlined in the lectures (where it is associated with haiku, Joycean epiphany and Proustian impressionism), linking it to Barthes’s longstanding interest in the ontology of modes of signification. Allied to his concept of the ‘third meaning’, and to later terms such as the incident and the romanesque, notation is seen to be central to the preoccupation with affect, subjectivity and individuality we associate with Barthes’s later work. Linked with the fantasy of writing a novel, notation also chimes with the “fantasmatic pedagogy” of Barthes’s lectures where ideas are explored in a highly personal way through the accumulation of discontinuous traits. Through notation the affect-driven, decentred Barthesian subject finds its voice.

Vasilij Zhukovskij’s Sel’skoe kladbische, a translation of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, occupies a special place in Russian literary history. First published in 1802, it was so widely imitated by later Russian poets that it came to be regarded as a “landmark of Russian literature”, not only at a boundary between two cultures (English and Russian) but also at a boundary within Russian culture itself — the transition from Neoclassical to Romantic aesthetics. Zhukovskij’s translation of Gray can be read as the end result of a long process of personal education in the sign system of Sentimentalism, in both its European and its Russian variants, which then reproduced itself in an impersonal way within his culture as a whole. Zhukovskij did not merely reinscribe Gray’s poem into Russian. Rather, he used it to deploy the developing Russian Sentimentalist (Karamzinist) style within a wide range of lyric registers, thereby providing models for other Russian lyric poets. In this sense, his work exemplifies Juri Lotman’s dictum that “the elementary act of thinking is translation” — it made itpossible for Russian poets to think within an entirely new, though by no means foreign system of signs.

If one wants to understand translation, it is necessary to look at all its aspects from the psychological to the ideological. And it is necessary to see the process of translation, on the one hand, as a complex of interlinguistic, intralinguistic, and intersemiotic translations, and on the other hand, as a complex of linguistic, cultural, economic, and ideological activities. Translators work at the boundaries of languages, cultures, and societies. They position themselves between the poles of specificity and adaptation in accordance with the strategies of their translational behaviour. They either preserve the otherness of the other or they transform the other into self. By the same token, they cease to be simple mediators, because in a semiotic sense they are capable of generating new languages for the description of a foreign language, text, or culture, and of renewing a culture or of having an influence on the dialogic capacity of a culture with other cultures as well as with itself. In this way, translators work not only with natural languages but also with metalanguages, languages of description. One of the missions of the translator is to increase the receptivity and dialogic capability of a culture, and through these also the internal variety of that culture. As mediators between languages, translators are important creators of new metalanguages.

Lotman’s contribution to semiotic theory, anthroposemiotics, the study of artistic texts and defining the relationship between language and culture represent some of the most powerful work produced within the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics. The importance of translation is one of the central principles that unites all of Lotman’s work. In the following paper, we will consider Lotman’s definition of translatability in the context of (1) the definition of semiospheric internal and external boundaries and the importance of crossing these boundaries, (2) the role of no fewer than two languages as a minimal unit of semiotic meaning-generation, (3) culture text-level generation of collective memory, and (4) the ever-present tension in the communication act. In our concluding section, we will offer an extended model of the communication act, based on the fundamental principles given in Jakobson, Sebeok and Lotman, in order to specify important moments of the translation process.

Jakobson, in his essays, has tried to insert Peirce’s typology of signs (icon, index, symbol) in his own binary logic, in which every feature of a text may be considered or dismissed either with a 0 or with a 1 (absent, present). In so doing, he used the features “similarity versus contiguity” and “imputed versus factual”, and discovered that the notion of “imputed similarity” was not covered by Peirce’s triad. Hence the search for it. In this article, whose ideological basis and quotations are mostly from Jakobson’s essays, the author tries to show that the notion of “translation” may be the missing link. Starting from Peirce’s main triad, and its initial incomprehension among Western scholars influenced by Saussure, the interpretant is then viewed as the subjective, affective component of sign and its interpretation. Syntax, considered in Peircean and Jakobsonian terms, is iconic. The evolution of meaning, characterizing all communication, is possible thanks to construction and thanks to metaphoric and metonymic connections. In the last part of the article, cultural implications of communication — and translation — are considered.

How anything acts depends upon what it is, both as a kind of thing and as a distinct individual of that kind: “agere sequitur esse” — action follows being. This is as true of signs as it is of lions or centipedes: therefore, in order to determine the range or extent of semiosis we need above all to determine the kind of being at stake under the name “sign”. Since Poinsot, in a thesis that the work of Peirce centuries later confirmed, the proper being of signs as signs lies in a relation, a relationship irreducibly unifying three distinct terms: a foreground term representing another than itself — the representamen or sign vehicle; the other represented — the significate or object signified; and the third term to or for whom the other-representation is made — the interpretant, which need not be a person and, indeed, need not even be mental. The action of signs then is the way signs influence the world, including the world of experience and knowledge, but extending even to the physical world of nature beyond the living. It is a question of what is the causality proper to signs in consequence of the being proper to them as signs, an indirect causality, just as relations are indirectly dependent upon the interactions of individuals making up the plurality of the universe; and a causality that models what could or might be in contrast to what is here and now. To associate this causality with final causality is correct insofar as signs are employed in shaping the interactions of individual things; but to equate this causality with “teleology” is a fundamental error into which the contemporary development of semiotics has been inclined to fall, largely through some published passages of Peirce from an essay within which he corrects this error but in passages so far left unpublished. By bringing these passages to light, in which Peirce points exactly in the direction earlier indicated by Poinsot, this essay attempts a kind of survey of the contemporary semiotic development in which the full vista of semiosis is laid out, and shown to be co-extensive with the boundaries of the universe itself, wherever they might fall. Precisely the indirect extrinsically specificative formal causality that signs exercise is what enables the “influence of the future” according to which semiosis changes the relevance of past to present in the interactions of Secondness. Understanding of this point (the causality proper to signs) also manifests the error of reducing the universe to signs, the error sometimes called “pansemiosis”.

Metalinguistic operations signify understanding and translation, specified in Jakobson’s varieties of six language functions and his three types of translation. Both models were first presented in the 1950s. This article is rooted in Jakobson’s models in connection with Peirce’s three categories. Bühler’s three functions with qualitative difference anticipated, perhaps not accidentally, Jakobson’s distinctions indicating qualitative difference within literary forms and structures as well as other fine arts. The semiotic discovery, criticism and perspective of elements and code-units settle the numerical differences as well as the differences in realistic messages and conceptual codes. Jakobson’s intersemiotic translation is updated in vocal translation, which deals with the virtual reality of opera on stage, reaching a catharsis of the operatic mystique. The word-tone synthesis of opera (or semiosic symbiosis) will demonstrate the typological unification of verbal and nonverbal languages.