Inhalt | Table of Contents | Contenu 15 Nr.| Trans | Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 15. Nr. | Juli 2004 | |
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1.2. Signs, Texts, Cultures.
Conviviality from a Semiotic Point of View / Buch: Das Verbindende der Kulturen | Book: The Unifying Aspects of Cultures | Livre: Les points communs des cultures |
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Tomislav Brlek (Zagreb)
Summary: In his various writings on the subject, T.S. Eliot develops the notion of culture as a comprehensive and highly complex system of meaning production, wherein social, political and other contexts are constitutive of experience formation, while the experiences thus formed are what the cultural system consist of. The multiform dialectical interaction that is culture crucially involves the notion of community and postulates ongoing interpretation as the lifeline of all cultural activity, predicated as it is on the ceaseless semiotic feedback between the heterogeneous codes that comprise it and the communicative exchange with the "outside" through which its "inside" is actually brought about. Such considerations closely link Eliot's understanding of culture with Lotman's concept of the semiosphere.
A new civilisation is always being made
(T.S. Eliot)
Whatever else he may be taken to be, T.S. Eliot is generally not thought of as a semiotician, and his work, poetic as well as theoretical, has apparently not received much attention in the form of semiotic analysis. This is somewhat surprising as it would seem that Eliot has a lot to offer from the point of view of both pure and descriptive semiotics as defined by Morris (1971: 303), and termed respectively the inward-turning and outward-turning tracks in the tradition of semiotics by Sebeok (in Deely 1982: x-xi). Not only has Eliot studied under William James and Josiah Royce and read Peirce attentively, he has also exposed himself to and absorbed in his work a variety of other doctrines of signs, from Aristotle and St. Augustine to Indian Buddhism. Indeed, the semiotic interest seems to be dominant even when we turn to less obvious sources - one of Eliot's favorite authors, the 17th century Anglican divine Lancelot Andrewes, has of late been described to have held "a semiotic view of reality," maintaining that "all things are also signs" (Shuger 1997: 53), while the mysterious figure of "the third who walks always beside you" in The Waste Land has been read as defined by a "multitude of coordinates" as a figure of the interpretative act predicated upon "this 'third' term" and proposed as one of the most important moments in the text (Kearns 1987: 213). Moreover, if it is true, as has been argued by David Zilberman, that "the skeptical state of mind seems to be the only genuine pre-condition of semiogenesis" (quoted in D'Amato 2003: 188), Eliot's cast of mind would be exceptionally suited to such an enterprise, since for him skepticism, as "the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for delayed decision" was "a highly civilised trait," one of the principal features of development of a culture (Eliot 1962: 29; for an extensive treatment see Pearl 1989).
In his discussion of the indicators of changes in "the metalingual structure" of what he calls the semiosphere, Lotman singles out "the studies of 'unknown' and 'forgotten' writers" as well as, on a smaller scale, the appearance of works on the subjects "such as 'the unknown Dostoevsky' and 'Goethe as he really was'" (Lotman 1990: 137) as particularly revealing. Remarking in a similar manner the dependence of a meaning of a term on its contextual positioning with respect to the dominant code, Eliot has written that as "a doctrine only needs to be defined after the appearance of some heresy, so a word does not need to receive this attention until it has come to be misused" (Eliot 1962: 13). From this point of view, it is perhaps only to be expected that semiotic readings of Eliot should eventually appear, as indeed they have, though of what is this indicative remains to be seen. In his recent survey of a host of Eliots construed by contemporary critical readings, Donald Childs includes a section on "The Semiotic Eliot" (Childs 2001: 32-33), although it consists of but two members, the articles by Walter Benn Michaels (1980) and Michael Beehler (1999). The aim of this paper, however, is not to produce "the real" - semiotic, of course - Eliot by means of demonstrating his semiotic credentials, though these are by no means negligible, but to indicate a certain important affinity between culture as conceived by Eliot and Lotman in the light of the general topic of this conference, the unifying aspects of culture. The form of the argument, particularly its somewhat indulgent reliance on direct quotation, is a result of the need to exemplify this notion on a different level, taking the semblances of the theoretical insights underpinning the respective constructs to indicate unity, with the important differences in vocabulary and expository manner at the same time demonstrating variety.
In Universe of the Mind, the study Vladimir Alexandrov called "a book-length summa of his life's work" (2000: 339), Lotman proposes the notion of semiosphere as the model for a semiotic explanation of the way culture works, the semiosphere being defined as "the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages" (Lotman 1990: 123), the background or context always already necessary for any semiotic act to take place, including all cultural activity: "The semiosphere is the result and the condition for the development of culture" (Lotman 1990: 125). In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, a study originally published in 1947, surveying many of the issues addressed elsewhere in his writings, Eliot, using a similar dialectical figure, conceives of culture "as the creation of society as a whole: being, from another aspect, that which makes it a society" (Eliot 1962: 37). The scope of his enquiry is no less impressive than Lotman's and the claim made for culture is just as enormous: "the baffling problem of 'culture' underlies the problems of the relation of every part of the world to every other" (Eliot 1962: 27). For Eliot, as for Lotman, culture is a comprehensive and highly complex system of meaning production, wherein social, political and all other contexts are constitutive of experience formation, while the experiences thus formed are what the cultural system consist of. It can therefore by no means be reduced to mere entertainment, however lofty, or relegated to the status of a marginal aspect of life - for indeed culture can tentatively be defined as "that which makes life worth living" (Eliot 1962: 27).
The specifically semiotic aspect of Eliot's theory of culture is to be found where it is perhaps least expected, namely in his emphatic insistence on the crucial relation of culture to religion, which are seen as the product of each other, depending on the point of view of the observer (cf. Eliot 1962: 15). As is often the case with Eliot's idiosyncratic pronouncements, this particular contention has tended to discourage even otherwise well-disposed readers (see e.g. Scott 1994 and Shusterman 2002) from further serious engagement with the text in its totality, dismissing its basic stance as reactionary, and setting about salvaging what they can from it for more progressive causes. Yet it is precisely what Eliot terms the religious that informs culture with meaning, for a religion is understood to be a shared code of a society: "A religion requires not only a body of priests who know what they are doing, but a body of worshipers who know what is being done" (Eliot 1962: 24). Eliot's attempt at a definition of religion in terms of information-circulation, as a master-code informing all aspects of human activity - and he makes it perfectly clear that he does not reduce the meaning of the term to specific rituals of worship, pointing out that "bishops are a part of English culture, and horses and dogs are a part of English religion" (Eliot 1962: 32) - renders it akin to Lotman's understanding of culture as simultaneously the sum total of the messages circulated within a social structure and as the comprehensive message the society is constantly addressing to itself, which enables him to conceive of "human culture as a vast example of autocommunication" (Lotman 1990: 33). For if "we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep," then not only is it clear how "that way of life is also culture" (Eliot 1962: 31), but it is also clear that this religion-culture continuum is a semiotic space, very much like Lotman's semiosphere.
Like Lotman's, Eliot's understanding of culture takes language as its privileged model: "it must be remembered, that for the transmission of culture - a peculiar way of thinking, feeling and behaving - and for its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than language" (Eliot 1962: 57). Starting from the assumption that "culture is built on natural language" and that consequently "its relation to this natural language is one of its most essential parameters" (Lotman 1977: 216), Lotman draws the conclusion that "the laws of construction of the artistic text are very largely the laws of construction of culture as a whole" (Lotman 1990: 33), which permits one to analyze it using the hermeneutic tools fashioned for semiotic readings of literature. Furthermore, the notion of culture as an all-encompassing semiotic mechanism enables both Eliot and Lotman to see everything produced by a given society as "instruments for preserving and transmitting information" (Lotman 1977: 213), and take "even the humblest material artefact" for "an emissary of culture out of which it comes" (Eliot 1962: 92). At the same time, being the basic structural matrix of our experience, it can never be completely grasped: "Culture can never be wholly conscious - there is always more to it than we are conscious of; and it cannot be planned because it is also the unconscious background of all our planning" (Eliot 1962: 94). Since by definition "the semiotic experience precedes the semiotic act," as every communication is only made possible by there always already existing a set of codes by means of which to communicate, "the semiosphere has a prior existence" (Lotman 1990: 123) with respect to any give languages it comprises, and therefore also to any individual use of them.
For Lotman, the semiotic space of the semiosphere is crucially brought about by "the unifying factor of the boundary, which divides the internal space of the semiosphere from the external, its inside from its outside" (Lotman 1990: 130). Eliot in turn opens his book on culture with the epigraph from the Oxford English Dictionary definition of "definition" as "1. The setting of bounds; limitation (rare)" (Eliot 1962: 3). Already in his doctoral dissertation, written in 1916, he had maintained that it is only by means of differentiating itself from something outside itself that anything can come about: "Experience is certainly more real than anything else, but any experience demands reference to something real which lies outside of that experience" (Eliot 1964: 21). Even though for Eliot the insight that "in any cognition there is never more than a practical separation between the object and that which apprehends it" (1964: 25) was fundamental, perhaps due to his extensive first-hand knowledge of Eastern schools of thought (on which see Kearns 1987; on subject and object in Buddhism see D'Amato 2003: 194), while Lotman remarked only in passing that the concepts of subject and object are "the results of a particular (European) cultural tradition at a particular moment of its development" ("Kul'tura kak sub"ekt i sama-sebe ob"ekt" 1989; quoted in Alexandrov 2000: 358), the basic similarity of attitude is of the essence in the present context, since in both cases the identity of the subject is seen as the ongoing process of self-formation against the contextual background, dependent on the dialectics of ceaseless interpretation. It is only the permanent semiotic feedback between the heterogeneous codes that comprise the collective, as well as the individual subject, and the continuing communicative exchange with the "outside," through which the "inside" of this subject is actually brought about, that provide the subject with whatever identity it has. Just like personal identity is a result of a semiotic process, as "one of the primary mechanisms of semiotic individuation is the boundary, and the boundary can be defined as the outer limit of a first-person pronoun" (Lotman 1990: 131), so cultural identity is only possible through contact with other cultures: "One people in isolation is not aware of having a 'culture' at all" (Eliot 1962: 90).
For both authors the life-line of any past, present or indeed every conceivable culture is the constant exchange of information, and its existence is predicated upon two conditions, the semiotic difference and the shared code, i.e. upon there simultaneously being something to communicate and the available means of doing so. While "dialogue without semiotic difference is pointless," when "the difference is absolute and mutually exclusive dialogue becomes impossible" (Lotman 1990: 143). Likewise, in relation between any two cultures, "without the attraction they could not affect each other, and without the repulsion they could not survive as distinct cultures" (Eliot 1962: 61). If culture is information (cf. Lotman 1977: 213), it follows that
the country which receives culture from abroad, without having anything to give in return, and the country which aims to impose its culture on another, without accepting anything in return, will both suffer from this lack of reciprocity (Eliot 1962: 121).
In the light of an understanding of culture as a semiotic mechanism, it becomes clear why "a world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all" (Eliot 1962: 62).
The exchange of information does not, however, occur only between two cultures or two semiospheres, it also takes place within a given semiotic space, "in a vertical direction" in the form of "complex dialogues between the levels," as "all the elements of the semiosphere are in dynamic, not static correlations whose terms are constantly changing" (Lotman 1990: 130, 127). Similarly, a culture, "if it is to flourish, should be a constellation of cultures, the constituents of which, benefiting each other, benefit the whole" (Eliot 1962: 58). Moreover, the various parts of the complex social mechanism should create "friction" between themselves, since without it there can only be ossification: "the friction, not only between individuals but between groups, seems to me quite necessary for civilisation" (Eliot 1962: 59). The multiform dialectical interaction that is culture crucially involves the notion of community and postulates ongoing interpretation as its mode of being. "Any assertion about the world, or any ultimate statement about any object in the world, will inevitably be an interpretation" (Eliot 1964: 165).
The exchange of information that culture consists of takes place across time as well as across space, for a culture is not only a synchronic semiotic space but a diachronic one too. "In fact, everything contained in the actual memory of culture is directly or indirectly part of that culture's synchrony" (Lotman 1990: 127). It is precisely on account of the insights about the dialectical relation of the present and the past under the rubric of tradition, of course, that Eliot is most famous (cf. e.g. Eliot 1975: 37-44). What he wrote about tradition can equally be applied to culture, as in his later writings the terms can be understood interchangeably (cf. Shusterman 2002: 142): "Tradition cannot mean standing still" (Eliot 1932: 25). Apart from the contact with other cultures, the renewal of a culture depends on it being capable of going back to its own sources (cf. Eliot 1962: 113), in other words, re-interpreting itself. These considerations become especially relevant with respect to the possibility of radical change and improvement of the culture(s) we are part of. Since the culture we live in forms the all-encompassing context for our cognition, being the total background informing all our activities, "we can imagine no other" (Eliot 1962: 18). Nor can we reach beyond it: "Outside the semiosphere there can be neither communication, nor language" (Lotman 1990: 124). Every civilization, another term Eliot uses interchangeably with culture (cf. Eliot 1962: 13), defines its members, and a new civilization would mean a whole new mental set-up: "the people who live in that new civilisation will, by the fact of belonging to it, be different from ourselves" (Eliot 1962: 18) and we would have no way of comprehending the aspects of their culture that make it different from our own. If we can conceive of some aspects as changed, than they obviously already are part of our culture: "A new civilisation is, in fact, coming into being all the time" (Eliot 1962: 18). It is precisely this ceaseless interpretative activity that actually keeps tradition, culture or civilization alive.
For Eliot as for Lotman, both individuals and cultures are defined by the boundaries which are functions of the differences between them, which give rise to and are negotiated by semiosis. Since it is the semiotic differences that produce new meanings and interpretations, and the constant production of new meanings and interpretations is what constitutes cultural change, which in turn alone makes culture possible, it is obvious that culture by definition can be neither uniform nor universal. While the semiosphere is constituted by its heterogeneity, "defined both by the diversity of elements and by their different functions" (Lotman 1990: 125), culture can only ever exist as a series of variations based on a template that can only be theoretically constructed, for "common culture is only actual in diverse local manifestations" (Eliot 1962: 62).
It should be noted, however, that for both Eliot and Lotman, in order for the interpretative system that is culture to function, too much diversity should be avoided no less than the entropy of total unification, otherwise, "the system might lose its unity and definition and disintegrate" (Lotman 1990: 128). The consequences are the same in both cases: "Excess of unity may be due to barbarism and may lead to tyranny; excess of division may be due to decadence and may also lead to tyranny: either excess will prevent further development of culture" (Eliot 1962: 50). Although Eliot and Lotman conceive of culture as a structure (cf. Lotman 1977: 213; Eliot 1962: 15), they both take great pains to emphasize its dynamic character by means of organic metaphors - although culture consists of the arts, social systems, habits and customs, and religious practices of a people, "these things added together do not constitute the culture," for "just as a man is something more than an assemblage of the various constituent parts of his body, so a culture is more than the assemblage of the arts, customs and religious beliefs" (Eliot 1962: 120). In the Russian-language version of his essay on the semiosphere, Lotman uses a strikingly similar language: "Just as we will not wind up with a calf if we glue together separate cutlets, but will get cutlets by cutting up the calf, we will not get a semiotic totality by summing up separate semiotic acts" ("O Semiosfere" 1984, quoted in Alexandrov 344 and in the introduction by Umberto Eco in Lotman 1990: xii-xiii). The semiotic totality must generate internal and external differences, or its meaning-production will come to a halt; at the same time, precisely because it is heterogeneous, the semiotic sphere must be considered as a totality, lest its diversity, plurality and multiplicity accelerate the interpretative activities to so frantic a speed as to render the system inert: "Like molecules rushing about haphazardly in a Brownian movement, a culture bustling with activity and change may nevertheless be static" (Meyer 1967: 102).
The title of this paper appropriates the word Eliot coined in his poem "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" (Eliot 1963: 57), fusing the parts whose meanings include the notions of "plurality," "liking/affinity" and "creation," all of these - together with the self-reflexive manner in which the form of the word performs its compound meaning - being crucial components included in his tentative definition of culture, as we have attempted to demonstrate. Foregrounding as it does its multiple checks and balances, as well as its self-perpetuating potential for unlimited semiotic generation, the particular contribution an exploration of Eliot's notion of culture can make to the discussion of the unifying aspects of culture is that these can only come about through diversity.
© Tomislav Brlek (Zagreb)
REFERENCES
Alexandrov, Vladimir E. (2000). "Biology, semiosis and cultural difference in Lotman's semiosphere". Comparative Literature 52(4): 339-362
Beehler, Michael (1999). "Semiotics/psychoanalysis/Christianity: Eliot's logic of alterity". In: Davidson, Harriet (ed.). T.S. Eliot. London: Longman, 75-89
Childs, Donald J. (2001). From Philosophy to Poetry: T.S. Eliot's Study of Knowledge and Experience. London: The Athlone Press
D'Amato, Mario (2003). "The semiotics of signlessness: A Buddhist doctrine of signs". Semiotica 147(1/4): 185-207
Deely, John (1982). Introducing Semiotics: Its History and Doctrine. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Eliot, T.S. (1932). After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Eliot, T.S. (1962). Notes towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber
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Lotman, Yuri M. (1977). "Problems in the Typology of Culture". In: Lucid, Daniel P. (ed.). Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology. Transl. by Daniel P. Lucid. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 213-221
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Michaels, Walter Benn (1980). "The interpreter's self: Peirce and the Cartesian 'subject'". In: Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.). Reader-Response Criticism: from Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 185-200
Morris, Charles (1971). Writings on the General Theory of Signs. The Hague: Mouton
Pearl, Jeffrey M. (1989). Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and After Eliot. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press
Scott, Peter Dale (1994). "The social critic and his discontents". In: Moody, A. David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 60-76
Shuger, Debora Kuller (1997[1990]). Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (=Renaissance Society of America Reprinted Texts 6). Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press
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For quotation purposes:
Tomislav Brlek (Zagreb): Polyphiloprogenitive: T.S. Eliot's
Notion of Culture. In: TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften.
No. 15/2003. WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/01_2/brlek15.htm
