5. 3. Semiotics of Culture

Semiotics of Culture studies the upper threshold of semiotics.

culture can be studied from a semiotic perspective. Semiotics is a discipline that can and should deal with the entirety of culture

The field began to take shape in the 1970s when the idea of the semiotic nature of culture became widespread among semioticians.

Well-known semioticians turned their focus to cultural processes: in France, François Rastier; in Germany, Walter Koch, a proponent of so-called “pansemiotics.”

Clifford Geertz, who introduced the semiotic approach to American cultural anthropology, believes that “the concept of culture […] is semiotic in nature”

In Russia, where the works of the Tartu School had paved the way for the development of this field, a group of prominent scholars emerged and became the authors of the first “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Culture.”

They state:

From a semiotic point of view, culture can be considered as a hierarchy of particular semiotic systems, as a sum of texts and their related functions, or as a kind of mechanism that generates these texts […] as a kind of collective mechanism for the preservation and processing of information.

Uspensky and Lotman claim that:

Semiotics of culture is not just about the fact that culture functions as a sign system. The important thing is to emphasize that the very attitude towards signs and signification is one of the fundamental typological characteristics of culture.

The main postulates of the semiotics of culture are as follows:

“Culture is considered only as a section, as a closed area against the background of non-culture.” It is the marked member of the opposition: “against the background of non-culture, culture manifests itself as a sign system“
The primary function of culture is the structuring and organizing of the surrounding world. “Culture is a generator of structure, and through this, it creates a social sphere around humans, which—like the biosphere—makes life possible, not organic life, of course, but social life”
Its structuring mechanism is natural language, which has the status of a primary modeling system.
Culture itself is a secondary modeling system. It “is superimposed over natural language, and its relationship to it is one of its essential parameters”
“The dynamism of the semiotic components of culture is related to the dynamism of social life.” The development of culture is avalanche-like (like a self-growing logos), and in this process, language plays the role of a stabilizing factor.
Culture is “a mechanism for organizing and preserving information in the collective consciousness”. It is “a collection of non-hereditary information that various collectives of human society accumulate, preserve, and transmit” “Defining culture as the memory of the collective raises the question of the system of semiotic rules by which humanity’s life experience is transformed into culture; these, in turn, can be viewed as a program”
“Culture can generally be represented as a collection of texts, but from the researcher’s point of view, it is more accurate to speak of culture as a mechanism that creates a collection of texts and of texts as the realization of culture”
“Every cultural text (in the sense of ‘type of culture’) can be viewed as a single text with a single code and as a collection of texts with a corresponding set of codes”. Culture is a complex hierarchy of codes.
A distinction is made between:
1. Cultures oriented towards expression as a collection of normative texts, where customs dominate as ritualized forms of behavior. The dominant opposition is right/wrong.
2. Cultures oriented towards content as systems of rules for creating texts, where laws dominate as metatexts. The dominant opposition is ordered/disordered.