Literatura in semiotika (predgovor)
Jelka Kernev Štrajn, Aleš Vaupotič
Današnja emancipacijska družbena gibanja se praviloma navezujejo na opredeljevanje razmerij med naravo in kulturo, na njuno razločenost in povezanost, na skrajno prepustnost meje med njima. O tem razmišljajo naravoslovci in humanisti ter, seveda, umetniki; v zadnjih letih se namreč čedalje intenzivneje povečuje in spreminja ravno doseg pojma kultura. Enako intenzivno potekajo tudi raziskave kompleksnega polja diskurzov in dispozitivov. Literatura (in tudi druge umetnosti) ima pri tem pomembno funkcijo, ker tematizira obstoječa razmerja in hkrati kot inherentni družbeni dejavnik vpliva na dogajanja v družbi, na človekovo razmerje z naravo in na njegov odnos do z novimi informacijskimi in komunikacijskimi tehnologijami preoblikovanega sveta.
S spreminjanjem človekove izkušnje se spreminjajo tudi načini repre-zentacije in komunikacije. Kultura nasploh je namreč neposredno povezana z vprašanjem reprezentacije; ta pa je, kot je ugotovil Charles S. Peirce, možna samo skozi možnost znakovnega: »Znak [...] je nekaj, kar stoji za nekoga namesto nečesa v nekem oziru ali pristojnosti.« (CP 2.228) Reprezentacija pa pomeni, da nekdo ali nekaj nekoga ali nekaj predstavlja. S tem izraz reprezentacija aludira na vrsto področij od filozofije in umetnosti do politike, ekonomije in naravoslovnih ved, kar pomeni, da je tudi zgodovina pojma reprezentacija povezana z vsemi temi področji.
Pojma znak danes ni moč misliti neodvisno od teorije in zgodovine jezika. Semiotika kot samostojna veda, ki naj bi skušala koncepte različnih humanističnih znanosti narediti primerljive v njihovih podobnostih in razlikah, se je izoblikovala sočasno in v tesni prepletenosti z jezikovnim obratom v zahodnem mišljenju. Ob tem je intenzivno raziskovanje kodov in konvencij nejezikovnih znakov privedlo do nadaljnjih teoretskih obratov: kulturnega, slikovnega, medijskega, prostorskega itn. Pri obravnavi znaka nasploh in literarnega znaka posebej potemtakem ni mogoče odmisliti vizualne razsežnosti. Četudi bi se omejili zgolj na besedo, bi morali upoštevati tudi njeno vizualno razsežnost, njeno semiotično »drugost«, torej pisavo in njen dvoumni status podobe in besedilnosti, o čemer je že dosti pred Derridajem razmišljal Sv. Avguštin. V razmislek o znakih je torej treba vključiti tudi problematiko pisave, še posebej zato, ker je mogoče razpravo ravno prek nje odpreti tudi nekaterim alternativnim motrenjem razmerij med besedami, podobami in stvarmi.
Tudi historični plati te problematike se ni mogoče izogniti; znakovne prakse in strategije literarno-umetniške reprezentacije se namreč vselej dogajajo v določenem prostorskem in časovnem kontekstu.
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 39.2 (2016)
PKn, letnik 39, št 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2016
Izhodiščni impulz skupine razprav, ki sledijo, je bilo prepričanje, da se semioza začne tam, kjer se začne življenje, mišljeno v najširšem smislu, tj. kot organsko in anorgansko življenje. To pomeni, da semiotiko razumemo kot transdisciplinarno vedo in nikakor ne zamejeno samo na tisto obdobje, ko se je o znakih najeksplictineje govorilo, to je v šestdesetih in sedemdesetih letih dvajsetega stoletja, ko je semiotika vzporedno z razcvetom strukturalističnih metod dobila status posebne vede in postala univerzitetna disciplina. Strukturalisti so reaktualizirali de Saussurjevo pojmovanje znakov in ga aplicirali na številne pojave zunaj lingvistike. Na podlagi njegovih ugotovitev so skušali vzpostaviti spoznavanje znakov-nosti predvsem na sinhroni, teoretski ravni, kar je bilo v nasprotju z dotedanjim hermenevtičnim interpretiranjem, ki je vselej upoštevalo določeno zgodovinsko situacijo v smislu celostnega konteksta in pomena. Prav zato se zdi smiselno vnovič premisliti pojmovanje znaka v luči razmerij med strukturalizmom, poststrukturalizmom in hermenevtično tradicijo, še bolj pa v luči razlike med saussurjevsko semiologijo in Peircovim semiotskim izročilom. Tu gre za dvoje različnih pojmovanj znaka: govorimo lahko o diadnem in triadnem znaku. Temeljna razlika je v tem, da je saussurov-ski znak v osnovi arbitraren in konvencionalen, peircovski znak pa je vse tisto, kar je interpretirano kot znak.
Tematski sklop, ki sledi, sooča vrsto zelo različnih pogledov na znakovne prakse poetičnega in/ali strategije reprezentacije v literaturi, saj se je tako rekoč nemogoče sporazumevati o čemer koli na kakršen koli način, ne da bi uporabljali znake. Pristopi, ki jih nanizajo posamezni avtorji, tako prikazujejo možne eksplikacije vseprisotnosti znakovnega, in to z gledišč, ki omogočajo, da znakovnost sama postaja iz tega ali onega razloga bolj vidna.
Eden izmed teh kontekstov je intermedijskost, ko razmerje med komunikacijo v različnih medijih, ki jim pripadajo tradicije, povezane s stanovskimi, izobraževalnimi in drugimi družbeno-zgodovinskimi oblikami urejenosti medčloveške interakcije, obelodani znakovne prakse in jih ponudi v refleksijo. Vladimir Martinovski v razpravi Ekfra%a in intersemiotska transpozicija: literatura, likovne umetnosti in kultura pogleda na problem literarnih znakov z vidika prevoda med likovnim jezikom slikarstva in literarnim, natančneje pesniškim jezikom. Uvodoma predstavi tipologijo inter-semiotskih odnosov med besedilnostjo in slikovnostjo Lea Hoeka, nato pa na izbranih primerih iz svetovne in sodobne makedonske poezije pokaže na kompleksnost prehajanja med znakovnimi sistemi, ki so vsakič prežeti s kulturnimi konteksti tako na produkcijski kot na recepcijski strani, na večplasten način tako v — npr. v ekfrazi — opisanem likovnem delu kot v sami pesniški reformulaciji. Gledališče kot večpredstavnostna umetnost je
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Jelka Kernev Štrajn, Aleš Vaupotič: Literatura in semiotika (predgovor)
v ospredju prispevka Tomaža Toporišiča Nekaj poglavij iz zgodovine (kratkih) stikov (post)semiotične upri%oritvene teorije in prakse. Gledališko besedilo črpa svojo posebno vznemirljivost iz napetosti, ki izvira iz premičnih poudarkov v razmerju do opozicij med besedilom in uprizoritvijo, linearno in nelinearno komunikacijo, teorijo gledališča in gledališko prakso, teatralnim in performativnim in ne nazadnje med umetnostjo in družbo. Intermedijski, interinstitucionalni in interkulturni dialog med ekstremi je produktivno jedro, množični mediji pa kontekst, ki ni več nekaj, kar bi bilo mogoče odmisliti iz gledališke komunikacijske situacije. Toporišič se posebej posveti novemu razumevanju uprizarjanja v živo v kontekstu mediatiziranih oblik kulture in pri tem obravnava projekte slovenskih avtorjev: Emila Hrvatina (Janeza Janše), Dušana Jovanovica in Simone Semenič.
Poezija nasploh in lirika posebej praviloma do skrajnosti zgoščata in do zlitosti spajata obe svoji razsežnosti: sporočilno-idejno in izrazno-kon-strukcijsko. Jezik poezije ni navaden jezik, kar je nedvomno eden od razlogov, zakaj je njegova semiotska razsežnost tako zelo zanimiva. Božena Tokarz v razpravi Pesniške reprezentacije negotovosti razmišlja o fenomenu negotovosti na primerih besedil pesnikov krakovske avantgarde (Tadeusz Peiper, Julian Przybos) in povojne poljske poezije Tadeusza Rožewicza in Wislawe Szymborske ter z njimi povezanih treh različnih pesniških modelov. Negotovost, ki jo avtorica obravnava v luči semiotskih modelov sistemsko zaprte de Saussurjeve tradicije na eni strani in odprte tradicije, povezane s Peirceom, Ecom in stuttgarsko skupino (Bense), ima v poeziji konstruktivno funkcijo zbujanja radovednosti, izražanja dvomov in postavljanja vprašanj. Liriki je posvečen tudi prispevek Varje Balžalorsky Antic, Kako pomenja pesem: Benveniste, Meschonnic, Michaux. V njem predstavlja povezani teoriji pomenjanja v pesniški govorici, kakor ju opazuje pri Émilu Benvenistu in Henriju Meschonnicu. Metodološko gre za poskus preseganja omejitev strukturalistične semiološke tradicije, ki koncept govor (parole) odriva na obrobje. S tem se ta pristop nekoliko približa teoriji diskurza Mihaila Bahtina, čeprav ohranja povezavo s strukturali-stičnimi koncepti (podobno kot npr. pozni Jurij M. Lotman v svojem delu o semiosferi). Predstavitvi metodološkega ogrodja sledi študija primera, interpretacija pesmi La Ralentie (Upočasnjena, 1937) Henrija Michauxa, in sicer s posebnim poudarkom na ritmu in semantični prozodiji.
Jelka Kernev Štrajn v besedilu Zoper »naravni« red sveta spregovori o vprašanjih, ki sta jih postavila Deleuze in Guattari. Besedilo se povezuje z avtoričinim ukvarjanjem z ekokritiko v literarni vedi in se zato nujno naveže tudi na politični vidik semioze. V svojem branju romana Prowad^ swojplugpr%e%. kosci umarlych (Pelji svoj plug čez kosti mrtvih, 2009) Olge Tokarczuk raziskovalka pokaže transčloveško vizijo sveta, opisljivo z jezi-
PKn, letnik 39, št 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2016
kom Deleuza in Guattarija, predromantičnega pesnika Williama Blakea in omenjenega romana. Besedilo pokaže na pogosto nereflektirano omejevanje semiotičnega na človeškost. Ko se sklicuje na Jakoba von Uexkulla, zatrjuje, da vsa živa bitja — ne samo ljudje — niso naravi podrejeni objekti, ampak tudi subjekti s svojimi lastnimi svetovi, znotraj katerih so tudi živali zmožne zaznavati znake. Na povsem drugačen način se politično vprašanje odpira v razpravi Alexa Goldi^a Ideologija semioze v romunski prozi pod komunizmom. Pokaže mehanizem kolonizacije tega koncepta za politično-emancipatorično akcijo. Semioza kot koncept je v romunski književnosti postala ideološki povezovalni element, ki je nasprotoval uradni ideologiji, povezani z arbitrarnim ustoličenjem socialističnega realizma v književnostih vzhodnega bloka. V sklepu razprave Goldi§ razločno prikaže asimetri-jo med marksistično naravnanostjo sodelavcev revije Tel Quel in vzhodnoevropskimi formalistično-strukturalističnimi gibanji, ki nasprotujejo, sicer na drugi ravni delujočemu, marksizmu.
Besedilo Aleša Vaupotiča Semiotika in realizem konstruira model peir-ceovske semiotike kot alternative strukturalistični in jo poveže z realizmom v literaturi devetnajstega stoletja, izhajajoč iz teorije realizma Hansa Vilmarja Gepperta. Pokaže na različne možnosti semioze, ki se odreka sinhrono-sistemskemu pogledu. Vendar pa tovrsten premik ni preprost: ob soočenju z nepričakovanim fenomenom interpretacija ne vznikne iz nič in ta postopek zahteva pojasnilo, od kod pravzaprav pride novi pomen v kontinuirani peirceovski semiozi? Zato avtor, sklicujoč se na razpravo Ivana Mladenova o marginalnih idejah C. S. Peircea, sklepa o nujnosti referenčnosti, ki za primerjavo zahteva arhivski vzročnik, kakršnega je Mladenov našel v Peirceovem nerazvitem konceptu iztrošenega uma (effete mind).
Tematski blok sklene polemično naravnan prispevek raziskovalca in literarnega avtorja Iztoka Osojnika Ikonoklazem brez-umetnosti brezimnih: nezavedno in skrivnost, kjer z naslovno sintagmo ni mišljena samo kritika neoliberalne tržne ekonomije, pač pa tudi kritika in zavračanje vsega, kar je ujeto v »revolucionarni pogon subverzivnosti«, tiste subverzivnosti, ki si jo aktualna oblika »Umetnosti« sproti prilašča, računajoč na svojo avtonomnost. Znaki, tudi umetniški, so namreč vselej povezani z oblastjo, ki je nujno oblast nad nekom. To se kaže med drugim tudi v obliki recenzira-nih znanstvenih člankov. Ne nanašajo se na vnaprej obstoječo resničnost, ampak reproducirajo diskurzivne prakse. Njihova referenčnost zapira horizonte možnega, kar je poglavitni razlog, zakaj je tako pri rabi znakov kot tudi pri refleksiji te rabe nujna posebna čuječnost.
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Literature and Semiotics (An Introduction)
Jelka Kernev Strajn, Ales Vaupotic
Today's emancipatory social movements are generally linked to considerations of the relationship between nature and culture, to the differentiation and affiliation of the two spheres, and to the extreme permeability of their borders. This topic is being pondered not only by natural scientists and humanists, but also by artists. It is precisely around the scope of the term culture that developments and changes have occurred in recent years. Research in the complex field of discourses and apparatuses (dispositif) has been equally intense. Here literature (and other arts) have an important function because they call into question existing relations and, at the same time, influence, as an inherent social factor, social processes, and man's relationship with nature and his attitude towards the world, transformed by new information and communication technologies.
With changes in human experience, methods of representation and communication are also changing. Culture in general is directly attached to the question of representation, and representation is possible only through the existence of the sign. That is to say, it closely depends on the understanding of the sign, as these two partially overlapping definitions show: "A sign [...] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (Charles S. Peirce, CP 2.228); and representation, for its part, means that someone or something is representing someone or something. In this, the expression representation alludes to a number of fields, from philosophy and art to politics, economics, and the natural sciences, which means that the history of the term representation is also linked to all of these fields.
The notion of the sign cannot be conceived of independently of the theory and history of language. It is therefore no coincidence that semiotics, as an independent science purporting to make concepts found in different humanities comparable by means of their similarities and differences, took shape at the same time as, and in close association with, the linguistic turn in Western thought. At the same time, intensive research on the codes and conventions of non-linguistic signs led to further theoretical turns: the cultural turn, the pictorial turn, the spatial turn, the media turn, and so on. In handling the sign in general and the literary sign in particular,
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PKn, letnik 39, st 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2016
it thus became impossible to avoid the visual dimension. Although it is tempting to remain at the level of the word, one must also take into account the visual dimension thereof, the semiotic "otherness" of the word; that is, writing and its ambiguous status as both image and textuality. Long before Derrida, St. Augustine pondered this subject. It therefore becomes necessary to include the problematic of writing systems in considerations of signs, and this is particularly so because writing systems can open the way to certain alternative observations of the relations between words, images, and things.
Although the purpose of this collection was not to study the history of the sign, one cannot ignore the historical dimensions of this problematic, nor would it be desirable to do so because the practices of the sign and strategies of literary-artistic representation always unfold in a given spatial and temporal context.
The original impetus of the treatises gathered here is rooted in the belief that semiosis starts at the point where life itself starts, life meant in its broadest sense; that is, as organic and inorganic life. This means that semiotics is understood as a transdisciplinary theory and, as such, does not limit one to that period when discussions of signs were at their most explicit—that is, to the 1970s—when, in parallel with the rise of structural methods, semiotics gained the status of a special science and became an academic discipline. The structuralists reactivated Saussure's definition of the sign and applied it to a number of phenomena outside linguistics. Based on Saussure's findings, they sought to establish an awareness of the sign primarily at its synchronous, theoretical level, a move that went in the face of the prevalent tradition of hermeneutic interpretation, which always took into account the specific historical situation in the sense of a comprehensive context and meaning. For this reason, it is prudent to re-examine the definition of the sign in light of the relations between structuralism, post-structuralism, and the hermeneutic tradition, and even more so in light of the distinction between Saussure's semiology and the semiotic tradition of Peirce. Here there are two distinctive definitions of the sign. Loosely speaking, there are the dyadic and triadic sign. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that Saussure's sign is in its essence arbitrary and conventional, whereas Peirce's sign is everything that is interpreted as a sign.
The thematic section that follows juxtaposes a great variety of views on the practices of the sign and/or representational strategies in literature. This was to be expected because it is practically impossible to communicate about anything in any way at all without using signs. The approaches adopted by the individual authors thus offer possible explanations for the
Jelka Kernev Štrajn, Aleš Vaupotič: Literature and Semiotics (An Introduction)
ubiquity of the semiotic, from points of view that allow semioticity or signhood itself to become, for one reason or another, more visible.
One of these contexts is intermediality, in which the relationship between communication in the various media to which traditions linked to guilds, education, and other sociohistorical forms of regulation of interpersonal interaction belong sheds light on semiotic practices and offers them for reflection. In the article Ekphrasis and Intersemiotic Transposition: Literature, Visual Arts, and Culture, Vladimir Martinovski looks at the problem of literary signs from the point of view of translation between the artistic language of painting and literary (or, more precisely, poetic) language. He begins with an introduction to Leo H. Hoek's typology of intersemiotic word and image relations and then uses selected examples from world poetry and contemporary Macedonian poetry to illustrate, in a multilayered manner, the complexity of the transition between sign systems, which are always imbued with cultural contexts on both the production side and the reception side, both in the work of art described (e.g., in ekphrasis) and in the poetic reformulation itself. Theatre as a multimedia art form is in the foreground of Tomaž Toporišič's article A Few Comments on the History of (Mis)Understanding between (Post-)Semiotic Performance Theory and Practice. The theatrical text draws its special excitement from the tension deriving from the changing emphases in relation to the oppositions between text and staging, linear and non-linear communication, dramatic theory and theatrical practice, the theatrical and the performative, and, last but not least, art and society. Intermedial, interin-stitutional, and intercultural dialogue between extremes is the productive core, and mass media are the context, which is no longer something that can be left out of a theatrical communication situation. Toporišič devotes particular attention to the new understanding of live performance in the context of mediatized forms of culture, and he considers works by the Slovene artists Emil Hrvatin (a.k.a. Janez Janša), Dušan Jovanovic, and Simona Semenič.
Poetry in general, and lyric poetry in particular, tends to condense two dimensions—the communicative-ideal and the expressive-structural—to the extreme, and to merge them to the point where they fuse together. The language of poetry is not ordinary language, which is undoubtedly one of the reasons why its semiotic dimension is so interesting. In her article Poetic Representations of Uncertainty, Božena Tokarz considers the phenomenon of uncertainty in examples of texts by poets of the Krakow avant-garde (Tadeusz Peiper and Julian Przybos) and the postwar Polish poetry of Tadeusz Rožewicz and Wislawa Szymborska and the three different poetic models connected with them. Uncertainty, which the au-
PKn, letnik 39, st 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2016
thor deals with in the light of the semiotic models of, on the one hand, Saussure's systemically closed tradition and, on the other, the open tradition connected to Peirce, Umberto Eco, and the Stuttgart Group (Max Bense), has the constructive function of awakening curiosity in poetry, expressing doubts and posing questions. Lyric poetry is also considered in Varja Balzalorsky Antic's article How Does the Poem Signify: Benveniste, Meschonnic, Michaux. In it, she presents the linked theories of signifying in poetic language, as observed in the works of Émile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic. In methodological terms, it is an attempt to overcome the limitations of the structuralist semiological tradition, which pushes the concept of speech (parole) to the margin. This approach is quite close to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of discourse, although it maintains the connection with structuralist concepts (rather as Yuri M. Lotman does in his later work on the semiosphere). The presentation of the methodological framework is followed by a case study—an interpretation of Henri Michaux's 1937 poem La Ralentie (Woman in Slow Motion)—with a particular emphasis on rhythm and semantic prosody.
In her article Against the "Natural" Order of the World, Jelka Kernev Strajn discusses the questions raised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The text links up with the author's commitment to ecocriticism in literary science and is therefore necessarily also tied to the political aspect of semiosis. In her reading of Olga Tokarczuk's novel Prowad% swoj plugprze^ kosci umarlych (Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead, 2009), she shows a trans-human vision of the world that is describable in the language of Deleuze and Guattari, the pre-Romantic poet William Blake, and Tokarczuk's novel. The text draws attention to the frequently unreflecting limitation of the semiotic to humanity. When she cites the biologist Jakob von Uexkull, she is asserting that all living creatures—not only human beings—are not simply objects subordinated to nature but also subjects with their own worlds, within which animals are capable of perceiving signs. A political question is raised in e.g. a completely different manner by Alex Goldi^'s article The Ideology of Semiosis in Romanian Prose under Communism. The article explores the mechanism of the colonization of this concept for political-emancipatory action. In Romanian literature, semiosis as a concept became an ideological connecting element that opposed the official ideology linked to the arbitrary installation of socialist realism in the literatures of the Eastern Bloc. In his conclusion, Goldi§ clearly illustrates the asymmetry between the Marxist orientation of those that collaborated in the literary journal Tel Quel and eastern European formalist-structuralist movements opposed to Marxism—albeit Marxism operating at a different level.
Jelka Kernev Štrajn, Aleš Vaupotič: Literature and Semiotics (An Introduction)
The article by Aleš Vaupotič, entitled Semiotics and Realism, constructs a model of Peircean semiotics as an alternative to structuralist semiotics and links it to realism in nineteenth-century literature, taking as a starting point Hans Vilmar Geppert's theory of realism. It points to the various possibilities of a semiosis that renounces the synchronous, systemic view. However, such a shift is not simple: when faced with an unexpected phenomenon, interpretation does not simply appear from nothing. The process requires an explanation of where new meaning actually comes from in continuous Peircean semiosis. The author, citing Ivan Mladenov's article on the marginal ideas of Peirce, thus concludes that referentiality is essential, which for comparison requires an archival cause—something that Mladenov finds in Peirce's undeveloped concept of the effete mind.
The thematic section concludes with a polemical article by the researcher and literary author Iztok Osojnik entitled The Iconoclastic Anonymity of Freedomfrom-Art: Unconsciousness and Mystery, the title of which is not intended merely as a critique of the neoliberal market economy, but also as a criticism and rejection of everything caught up in the revolutionary impetus of subversiveness, that subversiveness that the current form of "Art" constantly appropriates, counting on its own autonomy. Signs, even artistic signs, are in fact always connected to power, which necessarily means power over someone. This is something that also appears in the form of peer-reviewed scholarly articles. They do not relate to pre-existing reality, but reproduce discursive practices. Their referentiality closes the horizons of the possible, which is the main reason why particular care is required, both in the use of signs and in reflection on this use.
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