The semiospherical approach to semiotics and especially to semiotics of culture entails the need of juxtaposing several terminological fields. Among the most important, the fields of textuality, chronotopicality, and multimodality or multimediality should be listed. Textuality in this paper denotes a general principle with the help of which it is possible to observe and to interpret different aspects of the workings of culture. Textuality combines in itself text as a well-defined artefact and textualization as an abstraction (presentation or definition as text). In culture, we can pose in principle the same questions both to a concrete and to an abstract text, although an abstract text is only an operational means for defining, with the help of textualization, a certain phenomenon in the interests of a holistic and systemic analysis. The practice of textualization in turn helps us to understand the necessity of distinguishing between articulation emerging from the textual material itself and articulation ensuing from textuality or textualization — the former provides for comparability between texts made from the same material, thelatter makes comparable all textualized phenomena irrespective of their material. Textuality is a possibility that culture offers to its analyser, and at the same time it is an ontological property of culture and an epistemological principle for investigating culture.

Michel Paladian. Function of characterization in present tense. This article is devoted to a field in cognitive and semantic analysis where stylistics and grammar meet: it concerns the function of characterisation in the Present tense. In general, linguistic works, which are devoted to the Present tense, take into account only the time and the aspect. However, from a point of cognitive view, the values of the Present are not limited to the Verb; they also relate to the values of the Adjective. We must thus take into consideration not only the Time conceptualisation (time features), but also the Space conceptualisation (space features). We know, since Davidson, how the event, which the Verb represents, can be broken up into phases; it is to the one of these phases that the function of actualisation is attached. Actualisation is parallel to the function of characterisation specific to the Adjective. As such this phase seizes, retains and assimilates entities and processes of the world in their instantaneous appearance. This cognitive operation can also be analyzed on another level: on the level of visual work.

The paper is devoted to the problem of the linguistic grounds of the semiotic model of history, according to which history is described as a communication process circulating within a society. An analogy of principle between language and culture is the theoretical premise of that semiotic approach. Proceeding on this assumption semiotics (B. Uspensky’s case for instance) regards historical process as the process of text outcome and reading, while at the same time control over communication is provided through the cultural code or in other words — through the grammar of history. But the description of history as just the functioning of a single and unified grammatical code doesn’t make it possible to explain the appearance of new meanings or history par excellence. J. Lotman interpreted the rhetorical mechanism of text outcome as the working of two (at a minimum) interplaying semiotic systems. It is the principle of its working that he takes as abasis of his semiotic version of cultural diachrony. And at the very point semiotics finds itself in front of the choice: either to stop at the decomposition the rhetorical machine on separate cultural codes and at the description their separate grammars, or to conceptualize a historical event as un-grammatism, grammatical error, “wrong text”. The analytical way leads to an extremely reduced theoretical construction; the synthetic way undermines status of the semiotic model of history as a positivistic scientific project.

This paper presents the notion that verbal discourse is structured, in form and contents, by metaphorical reasoning. It discusses the concept of “metaphorical network” as a framework for relating the parts of a speech act to each other, since such an act seems to cohere into a meaningful text on the basis of “domains” that deliver common concepts. The basic finding of several research projects on this concept suggest that source domains allow speakers to derive sense from a verbal interaction because they interconnect the topic of discussion to culturally-meaningful images and ideas. This suggests, in turn, that language is intertwined with nonverbal systems of meaning, reflecting them in the contents of verbal messages. Overall, the concept of metaphorical networks implies that human cognition is highly associative in structure.

The paper analyses the formal features of the characters of Oresteia in Greek tragedy. The protagonists and the minor characters are compared, for which the rhythmical liveliness and variability of the personages’ utterances, the length and number of utterances, and the number of dialogue verses in the metrical repertoire of the corresponding personage are taken into account. The analysis revealed that the data of Sophocles and Euripides are more close to each other both in the respect of general “liveliness” and the “liveliness” of characters’ utterances. Certain differences in the metrics and rhythmics of the main and minor characters’ verses become most obvious when we compare Electra’s part with minor characters (e. g., in Electra’s part there is always the biggest proportion of lyrical parts, more unstandard settlements, more verses with splits than any other character). The index of liveliness of Electra’s part is almost the same in all the authors. Although the same tendencies in Orestes are more schematical, the metrics and rhythmics of his utterances are rather similar to those of Electra. Thus, in respect of the proportion of lyrical verses, he always comes second after Electra; he also has quite many split verses. The parts of minor characters are usually made up entirely of iambic trimesters, the rhythmical variety of their speeches is higher than average, but there are no splits in their parts (except for Aegisthus). However, there are characters which parts have unstandard rhythm, e.g., the pedagogue in Sophocles or Chrysothemis, who is a contrast to Electra by her nature as well as her rhythmics. The contrast with other minor characters is even bigger. Clytaemnestra’s part is both rhythmically and metrically intermediate: inAeschylus her utterances consist entirely of iambic trimeters, but in Sophocles and Euripides she pronounces also a couple of lyrical verses. There are alsosome splits in her verses which usually do not occur in minor persons.

This article attempts to analyse Russian postmodernist poetics, proceeding from the concept of the “trans-semiotic stairs”, as presented by J. Faryno for describing the avant-garde. Examples from various texts are used to demonstrate how postmodernist texts contain divergent processes: the culturally specific and unique dissolves in tautology, meaningful entireties are dispersed into atomized empty particles. The significant teleological model of the avant-garde ceases to function here. A play by J. Brodsky, Marble, is examined on this background, as well as the position of the author that differs from the “postmodernist” context.

Are pictures signs? That pictures are signs is evident in the case of pictures that “represent”, but is not “representation” a synonym of “sign”, and if so, can non-representational paintings be considered signs? Some semioticians have declared that such pictures cannot be signs because they have no referent, and in phenomenology the opinion prevails that they are not signs because they are phenomena sui generis. The present approach follows C. S. Peirce’s semiotics: representational and non-representational pictures and even mental pictures are signs. How and why pictures without a referent can nevertheless be defined as signs is examined on the basis of examples of monochrome paintings and historical maps that show non-existing or imaginary territories. The focus of attention is on their semiotic object and, in the case of non-representational paintings, on their interpretation as genuine icons, not in the sense of signs that represent most accurately, but in the sense of signs that represent nothing but themselves, i.e., self-referential signs.

Diagnostics of a mental disorder completely bases on an estimation of patient’s behaviour, verbal behaviour being the most important. The behaviour, in turn, is ruled by a situation expressed as a system of signs. Perception of a situation could be seen as a function, which depends on the context resulting from the previous situations, structuring personal world. So the world is not given — it is being formed while the person is in action. We argue that distinctive features of behaviour, including its abnormal variants, can be explained not in categories of characters and diseases but in terms of situations taking place in individual worlds. The situation in which a person perceives himself is not simply a site in a three-dimensional space at a certain moment, but a part of the world and an episode of his life. Like a text composed of words, individual world is composed of situations. Each of them needs certain context to cope with ambiguity. This context is induced by the world as a whole. And the world, in turn, is presented as a chain of situations. If the context cannot help to interpret a situation adequately, uncertainty can be eliminated by actions clarifying a situation, which is changed in a predictable way. Thus, purposeful activity, skills to make predictions and corrections of one’s own actions are crucial. Weakness of any of them inevitably leads to the distortion of the presentation of the world, to wrongevaluation of situations and, as a result, to inadequate actions that finally reduce the activity as being ineffective. Thus, the lack of activity becomes the key factor in the development of disorder, being simultaneously its cause and effect. In periods of insufficient activity conditions for violated (and violating) sign processing arise. Possible variants of sign malfunction are: oligosemia (reduction of the number of perceivable signs), hyposemia (decrease of significance of signs), hypersemia (increase of significance of some signs at the expense of others), ambisemia (uncertainty of sign, when situation remains unclear), cryptosemia (recognition of signs not obvious for other observers), and parasemia (perverted interpretation of signs influenced by a false context).

Maria Goltsman. On some graphic regularities of perception in painting and dance: Mnemonic form of dance. The present article handles some problems of the mechanisms of visual perception in painting and classical ballet. It proceeds from the assumption that the interaction between those arts is based on the similarity of their formal languages. The main attention focuses on the questions of how and why does the classical ballet use the code of painting? The interaction between pictorial art and ballet occurs through the theatre, which is considered to be a picture coming alive in European tradition. This principle is taken here as a main method of analysis of ballet art and it is used in two ways. The first handles a problem of composition of a ballet as a theatrical performance. The second analyses the movement itself — the language of the choreography as such. The last part of the article contains the answer to the question — why does the ballet need such aspects of pictorial code as frontal composition of a picture coming alive, memory photo, multiplication of the similar images and repeating movements. Dance is dynamic, picture is stable. To represent a movement, the painting uses the rhythm and visual repeating of lines and contours. It helps to construct an illusion of motion and brings the temporal aspect into a static piece of art. Whereas different stops, poses and fixations in ballet help it to visualize the movement, to capture the space. This is one of the ways for ballet to leave its trace in space as much as in the memory of the spectators, to become fixed in space, to prevent the dispersion of dance in the thin air and to surmount in such a way the ephemera characteristic of it.

The present paper is devoted to the relation between changing historical identity of Russian Formalists in the second half of the 1920s and their individual evolution — as writers, members of society, figures of culture. Formalists with their aggressive inclination to modernity are opposed here to structuralists, the bearers of a conservative, traditional ideology (relating to the idea of Revolution). It could be explained by the specific “romantic” identity of Russian Formalists whose purpose was to appropriate cultural values renamed and renewed by their revolutionary theory. As a revolutionary ideology, formalism was imported from the West. But the Stalinist “Renaissance” made the idea of Revolution both in mind and society senseless at the end of the 1920s. That is why Russian Formalism lost its mainstream positions and began to work out a new, adapted form of intellectual resistance (private life, domestic literature) in the next decade.

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has drawn enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of “[eating] food at another’s [side] table”. This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on the notions of Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and structural coupling (Maturana and Varela). It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly surveythe literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible ‘parasitic’ relationship between language and biology.

At present the theory of Russian Formalism becomes actual once again owing to the rapid development of cognitive science. Aesthetic theories recently put forward within the framework of cognitive science turned out to be consonant with the Formalist’s views on the general principles of artistic activity. In my paper I argue that (1) the theory of Russian Formalism contains a number of methodological assumptions that are close to a cognitive approach; (2) some of the main principles of the Formalist theory (e.g., “elimination of automatism of perception” or “the dominant”) permit the reformulation into cognitive terms; (3) such reformulation is not only possible, but useful because it makes the theory more powerful for explanation of the artistic phenomena. The findings from the new field of cognitive science not only prove some Formalist theses, but deepen and specify them as well.

Semiotics, the body of knowledge developed by study of the action of signs, like every living discipline, depends upon a community of inquirers united through the recognition and adoption of basic principles which establish the ground-concepts and guide-concepts for their ongoing research. These principles, in turn, come to be recognized in the first place through the work of pioneers in the field, workers commonly unrecognized or not fully recognized in their own day, but whose work later becomes foundational as the community of inquirers matures and ‘lays claim to its own’. As semiotics has matured, the work of Jakob von Uexküll in establishing the concept of Umwelt has proven to be just such a pioneering accomplishment for the doctrine of signs, and in this paper I trace out some of the lines of development according to which Uexküll’s concept came to occupy its central place in semiotics today.

The emergence of novelty in the realm of the living remains, despite the long tradition of evolutionary biology, unwelcome, calling for explanation by old, established knowledge. The prevailing neodarwinian evolutionary paradigm approaches living beings as passive outcomes of external (and extraneous, hence “blind”) formative forces. Many teachings opposing Darwinism also take the existence of eternal, immutable and external laws as a necessary prerequisite. Ironically enough, authors who oppose Darwinian theory, and admit that living beings possess a “self”, often accentuate internal, ideal and eternal harmony,which is incompatible with historical changes; moreover such harmony is again imposed by external, atemporal “laws”. I describe here a third approach embodied by the names of two unrelated scholars, Stuart Kauffman (biology, physics) and Juri Lotman (semiotics, culturology). Their approach suggests thatthe evolution of organisms, minds, cultures — is a continuous negotiation (semiosis) of ‘laws’, driving to ever broader spaces of freedom and constantly larger autonomy of existence.

Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting, among other things, of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll who has been hailed as a precursor of semiotics, developing his theory of “sign” and “meaning” independently of Saussure and Peirce. The juxtaposition of “sign” and “meaning” is revelatory because one can equally legitimately claim Uexküll as a hermeneutician in the same way as others having claimed him as a semiotician. Such a novel temptation can be justified by Uexküll’s prolonged obsession with Sinn and Bedeutung since his first book in 1909. This paper attempts to reconstruct the immediate intellectual horizon of Uexküll’s historicity, a discursive space traversed by his contemporaries Frege and Husserl, in order to see how Uexküll’s discussions of Zeichen and Gegenstand, Sinn and Bedeutung, were informedby other philosophers of language, and to establish Uexküll as a phenomenological hermeneutician in the tradition of Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer. To forestall and counter possible criticism that hermeneutics is primarily concerned with textual interpretation, while Uexküll is at most an interpreter of animal life, the paper will discuss his unfinished parody of the Platonic dialogue Meno, which is entitled Die ewige Frage: Biologische Variationen über einen platonischen Dialog (1943). It is through such textual practice that one witnesses the emergence of an Uexküll who embodies at once the addressee exercising his understanding of ancient texts as well as the second addresser recoding his explanation to another group of targeted addressees. This textual practice already goes beyond the confines of biology and in fact involves the linguistic pragmatics of rhetoric and speech act.

The first part of this essay outlines Cassirer’s philosophy of biology in the context of philosophy of science in the 20th century, giving an overview of Cassirer’s different writings on the philosophy of biology. The second part outlines his treatment of what he took to be the chief philosophical problem in the philosophy of biology: the conflict between mechanism and vitalism. Cassirer interpreted this conflict as a methodological debate, not a metaphysical problem. In Cassirer’s eyes, each point of view is justified within specifics limits. The third part explicates Cassirer’s critique of Darwinism. Although Cassirer was critical of particular conceptions of Darwinian evolution, he did not reject evolution and, in fact, asserted that the concept of emergence was also of far-reaching importance in other fields besides biology. Part four offers concluding remarks about the importance of the philosophy of biology for Cassirer’s general philosophical orientation and for his conception of the tasks of philosophical theory.

Jakob von Uexküll’s evolutionary views are described and analysed in the context of changes in semiotic and biological thinking at the end of Modern age. As different from the late Modernist biology, a general feature of Post-Modern interpretation of living systems is that an evolutionary explanation has rather secondary importance, it is not obligatory for an understanding of adaptation. Adaptation as correspondence to environment is a communicative, hence a semiotic phenomenon.

In strict opposition to the prevailing positivist conception of nature as senseless and deprived of meaning Jakob von Uexküll claimed that a certain planmässigkeit was operative in nature. This idea however might be taken to mean that organic evolution is not itself a creative process but a gradual, if majestic, unfolding of Nature's own master plan. Such an idea would threaten to restore determinism in the center of biological theory, and this would seriously contradict the vision of biosemiotics shared by most of its proponents. It lies at the heart of biosemiotics and of Peircean cosmological philosophy that indeterminacy is primary, that “habit taking” or interpretation are real processes in the world, and therefore that belief in the law of necessity is unfounded. It is suggested that Uexküllian planmässigkeit is in fact reconcilable with a modern non-deterministic understanding. In a certain sense the Umwelten of animals have indeed developed in accordance to a natural planmässigkeit, but this is a plan that incessantly traps life in certain strategic choices and in the same time diversifies the dimensionality of options for dealing with these choices, i. e. “the adjacent possible” in the terms of Stuart Kauffman.

Symbol formation is a term used to unify the view on the interdependencies in the research of the Hamburg University before 1933: the Philosophical Institute (William Stern, Ernst Cassirer), the Psychological Institute (Stern) with its laboratory (Heinz Werner) in cooperation with the later joining Umwelt Institut (Jakob von Uexküll). The term, definitely used by Cassirer and Werner, is associated with the personalistic approach: “Keine Gestalt ohne Gestalter” (Stern), but also covers related terms like “melody of motion” (Uexküll), and “relational content” (Cassirer), discussing the term “empirical scheme” (Kant). All this scientific interest addressed personal forces to structure thresholds in equivalent stimuli. This view on intermodal formation allowed research in common aspects in the environments of animals, of children and adults to meet there the symbol formation of artists (Weimar Bauhaus) and poets like R. M. Rilke, a friend of Uexküll.

This paper aims to give an insight into developments that contributed to the significance of the work of Jakob von Uexküll and stresses the importance of his occupation in Hamburg. A biographical survey pays tribute to the implication of the historical pretext and context. A scientific survey describes findings and ideas of Uexküll that proved important for the development of biology and the cognitive sciences. In addition, this paper sets out to reject the common notion that Uexküll’s concepts were ideas of a purely theoretical and philosophical character. It confirms that in fact the central aims of his work were to sustain the empirical method in biology and to give biology a sound epistemological basis. Some examples show how historical and theoretical developments converged at Uexküll’s Institut für Umweltforschung in Hamburg and ignited a productive research activity.