stark in the language’s grammatical self-description, appear in semiotic reality as blurry and replete with transitional forms. There is neither communication, nor language, outside of the semiosphere. Of course, a single-channel structure also exists in reality. A self-sufficient, single-channel system is an acceptable mechanism for transmitting exceedingly simple signals and, in general, for actualizing the first function, but it is decisively inadequate to the task of generating information. It is no accident that we can view such a system as an artificial construct, but under natural conditions working systems of a completely different kind emerge. The very fact that the dualism of arbitrary and figurative signs (or, more precisely, of arbitrariness and figuration, which are present to varying degrees in these signs or others) is universal in human culture can be regarded as a clear example of how semiotic dualism is the minimal organizational form of a working semiotic system.
Binarity and asymmetry are the obligatory laws for constructing a real semiotic system. Binarity, however, ought to be understood as a principle that is actualized as multiplicity, insofar as every newly formed language is fragmented binarily in turn. All living culture has a “built-in” mechanism for multiplying its languages (we will see later that in parallel there is a mechanism of unifying languages that works in the other direction). Thus, for example, we are constantly witness to a proliferation in the languages of art. This is especially noticeable in the culture of the twentieth century and in past cultures to which it is typologically comparable. Under conditions where basic creative activity shifts into the audience’s camp, the following slogan becomes operative: art is anything that we take for art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema turned from a fairground amusement into high art. It was not alone, but was accompanied by a whole cortege of traditional and newly invented spectacles. Back in the nineteenth century, no one would have considered the circus, the spectacles of the fairground, folk toys, signboards, or the shouts of street merchants as artforms. Once it became art, filmmaking immediately split into narrative and documentary, live-action and animated, each having its own poetics. And in the present time yet another opposition has been added: cinema versus television. True, at the same time as the range of languages of the arts has been expanding there has also been a contraction: certain arts are almost dropping out of the active repertoire—so much so that one ought not be surprised if a more thorough study were to discover that the diversity of semiotic means within one or another culture remains relatively constant. But the essential thing is that the composition of languages entering into the active cultural field is continually changing, and what is subject to even greater changes is the axiological appraisal and hierarchical position of the elements entering that field.
At the same time, in the entire space of semiosis—from social, age-specific, and other jargons, to fashion—there is also a continuous renewal of codes. In this way, any discrete language turns out to be immersed in some semiotic space, and it is only by virtue of its interaction with this space that it is able to function. We ought to regard as an indivisible working mechanism—a unit of semiosis—not the discrete language, but the entire semiotic space inherent to a given culture. It is this space that we define as the semiosphere. Such a designation is justified, insofar as, like the biosphere—which is, on the one hand, the aggregate and the organic unity of living matter (as defined by Vladimir Vernadsky, who introduced this concept), and on the other the condition for the continued existence of life—the semiosphere is both the result of and condition for the development of culture.
Vladimir Vernadsky wrote that all “concentrations of life are intimately connected. One cannot exist without the other. This connection between different living strata and concentrations, as well as their unchanging nature, are the perennial feature of the mechanism of the earth’s crust, manifest within it across all geological eras.”2
This notion is expressed with particular specificity in the following formula: “… the biosphere has a quite specific structure, one that defines everything occurring within it, without exception. … Man, as he is observed in nature, is, like all living organisms, a specific function of the biosphere within its specific space–time.”3
As early as his notes from 1892, Vernadsky pointed to man’s (mankind’s) intellectual activity as an extension of the cosmic conflict between life and inert matter:
… the lawlike nature of conscious labor in national life has led many to deny individual influence in history, though in essence we see throughout history the continuous struggle of the conscious (that is, “not natural”) ways of life against the unconscious order of nature’s dead laws, and within this exertion of consciousness is the entire beauty of historical manifestations, their original place among all other natural processes. One can use this exertion of consciousness to appraise the historical era.4
The semiosphere is distinguished by its nonuniformity. The languages that fill semiotic space are diverse by nature and related to each other along a spectrum from complete mutual translatability to equally complete mutual non-translatability. The nonuniformity is shaped by the languages’ heterogeneity and heterofunctionality. In this way, if we, as a thought experiment, were to picture a model of semiotic space in which all the languages appear at the very same moment and are compelled by identical impulses, we would still be faced not with one coding structure, but by some plurality of connected, yet diverse, systems. Let’s say, for example, that we build a model of the semiotic structure of European Romanticism, arbitrarily delineating its chronological boundaries. Even within such a space, which is completely artificial, we will not achieve uniformity, insofar as a different measure of iconism will inevitably create a situation of notional correspondence rather than of mutually unambiguous semantic translatability. Of course, Denis Davydov, the poet-partisan of 1812, could compare the tactics of partisan warfare to Romantic poetry when he demanded that as leader of a partisan detachment one should appoint “not a methodist of calculating mind and cold spirit. … This walk of life, imbued with poetry, demands a Romantic imagination, a passion for adventure, and this is not supplied by dry, prosaic daring. It’s a stanza from Byron!”5
However, one need only look at his historical-tactical study Toward a Theory of Partisan Action [Opyt teorii partizanskogo deistviia], which is full of plans and maps, to be convinced that this beautiful metaphor speaks only to the conjoining of the incommensurate within this Romantic’s contradictory consciousness. The fact that the unity of diverse languages is established through a metaphor speaks better than anything else to their fundamental difference.
But one must also account for the fact that different languages possess varying periods of circulation: clothing fashion changes with a rapidity incomparable to the rate of change in the manifestations of literary language, and Romanticism in dance is not synchronous with Romanticism in architecture. In this way, at the same time as some segments of the semiosphere will be experiencing the poetics of Romanticism, others might already be moving toward post-Romanticism. Accordingly, even this artificial model will not provide a homologous picture in a strictly synchronous cross-section. It is no accident that when people endeavor to provide a synthetic picture of Romanticism that characterizes all the forms of art (and at times adding still other spheres of culture), chronology is decisively sacrificed. The same applies to the Baroque, Classicism, and many other “isms.”
If, however, we were to speak not of artificial models, but of the modeling of a real literary (or, more broadly, cultural) process, then we will have to admit that—continuing with our example—Romanticism encompasses only a certain segment of the semiosphere, wherein diverse traditional structures, which at times reach deep into antiquity, continue to exist. Beyond that, none of these stages of development is free from collision with texts that enter from outside, from cultures generally situated up to that point beyond the horizon of a given semiospshere. These incursions—sometimes individual texts, sometimes whole strata of culture—exert diverse disturbing influences on the internal order of a given culture’s “world picture.” In this way, in any synchronous cross-section of the semiosphere we see a tension among various languages, various stages of their development, some texts turn out to be submerged in languages
