The Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School is a scientific school of thought in the field of semiotics that was formed in 1964 and led by Juri Lotman. Among the other members of this school were Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Mikhail Gasparov, Alexander Piatigorsky, Isaak I. Revzin, and others. As a result of their collective work, they established a theoretical framework around the semiotics of culture.
History
The Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics developed an original method of multidimensional cultural analysis. The languages of culture are interpreted as secondary modelling systems in relation to verbal language. This method permits a productive understanding of the use of different languages of culture.
This school is widely known for its journal, Sign Systems Studies (formerly published in Russian as Труды по знаковым системам), published by Tartu University Press. It is the oldest semiotics journal in the world, established in 1964.
In its first period, the 1960s and 1970s, TMSS followed a structuralist approach and was strongly influenced by Russian formalism. Since the 1980s, its approach can be characterized as post-structuralist (highly dynamic and complex), and is connected with the introduction of Juri Lotman's concept of semiosphere and its relation to organicism.
From 1990s, TMSS has been succeeded by the Tartu Semiotics School, which is based in the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu and led by Kalevi Kull, Peeter Torop, Mihhail Lotman, Timo Maran, and others.
Semiotics of Culture
The Semiotics of Culture is a research field within general semiotics founded by the Tartu-Moscow School. It originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the ideas of Russian Formalism, and the Prague Linguistic Circle, alongside various individual theorists, although the theories developed in the Semiotics of Culture (especially its later iterations) depart radically from these influences. Juri Lotman is considered the main representative of the Semiotics of Culture.
Terms central to the semiotics of culture include “text,” “modeling system,” “language,” Lotman's conception of the “semiosphere,” and of course “culture” itself. While its ideas were being formulated in the 1960s, an official birth year for the semiotics of culture could be marked as 1973, when Lotman alongside Vjacheslav V. Ivanov, Aleksandr M. Pjatigorskij, Vladimir N. Toporov, and Boris A. Uspenskij first published the manifesto Theses on the semiotic study of cultures (as applied to Slavic texts). The Text, considered the foundational tool of the School, is used to view the boundaries of a material creation, experience, occurrence, etc., particularly those things that are culturally integrated or artistic. With the boundary of content set, the interrelations between it and exterior texts can be more clearly examined. As the boundaries are variable there is no strict definition of how a Text can be made of subject matter, and instead it emphasizes the cultural signification seen in comparing the boundaries of the text to its use in society. A general statement of the research program of the semiotics of culture is that it aims to examine the entire aggregate of sign systems as united by culture, to ascertain their number, their hierarchy, their mutual influence, or their functional correlation, both synchronically and diachronically.
Semiosphere
The semiosphere is a concept of Juri Lotman's and one that is central to the later semiotics of culture, and as a concept it is given explicit characterization in an article of Lotman's first published in 1984.
The semiosphere is the semiotic space outside of which semiosis cannot exist. The semiosphere precedes any individual text or isolated language, it is the “greater system” outside of which language does not only function, it does not even exist. The principal attribute of the semiosphere is the presence of a boundary, which translates external communications into understandable information. The division between the core (completely semioticized) and the periphery (partially semioticized, in constant flux with the asemiotic) is a law of the internal organization of the semiosphere. The semiosphere is an exceptionally dynamic mechanism with synchronic and diachronic dimensions and multiple codes engaging with each other.