On the independence of the humanities: Tartu–Moscow School and official Soviet politics of science

Review: Maxim Waldstein, Soviet Empire of Signs: A History of the Tartu School of Semiotics

Hegemonic signification in photograph

[Abstract] The present paper attempted to distinguish certain hegemonic strategies of encoding for depicting «the people» in the photography of the public space of communication during the Stalinist period. These were, on the one hand, photographs that had acquired the status of an icon in the public space; and on the other, the internal principles of construction of these «iconic» photographs, for which the following means of encoding were distinguished: 1) the dominant text as the dominant element of the process of signification depicted in the photograph; 2) code-text as the principle of organization of the mutual relationships between elements depicted in the photograph. It seems that the Soviet public scopic regime is characteristic of the type of culture that Lotman has characterized as a collection of texts, as opposed to the type of culture that creates the collection of texts (Lotman; Uspenskij 1994, 245). In this type of culture, the content of the culture is pre-given with respect to the selfunderstanding of that culture, it consists of the sum of normalized, «correct» texts: «iconic photographs» that have been encoded according to a unitary canon

SÕNALAHINGUD

Review of: Saara Jantunen 2018. Infosõda. Tlk Tuule Meri. Tallinn: SA Kultuurileht, 280 lk. Thomas Elkjer Nissen 2015. Sotsiaalmeedia kasutamine relvasüsteemina. Tänapäeva konfliktide omadused. Tlk Kaili Tamm. Tallinn: Tallinna Raamatutrükikoda, 208 lk

Hegemonic signification from cultural semiotics point of view

This paper attempts to integrate discourse theories, mainly the theory of hegemony by Essex School, and Tartu–Moscow School’s cultural semiotics, and sets for itself the modest task to point to the applicability of semiotic approach in political analysis. The so-called post-foundationalist view, that is common for discourse theories, is primarily characterized by the rejection of essentialist notions of ground for the social, and the inauguration of cultural and discursive characteristics (such as asymmetry and entropy; explosion; antagonism; insurmountable tension between organization and disorganization, regularity and irregularity, etc.) into the wider social scientific paradigm. Customarily, those characteristics have been attributed to contingent or peripheral events and phenomena that by nature do not belong to the social structure proper. Grounds for such ‘groundless’ contingencies are found in philosophy (Marchart), or for instance from the psychoanalytic notion of affect (Laclau). Many discourse theorists proceed here from Derrida’s position that in the process of signification there is an overabundance of meaning which renders final closure impossible (Howarth; Glynos). However, it seems that despite placing communication at the heart of their conceptions of discourse, the communicative character of constructing power relations remains undertheorized in those conceptions. This article attempts to approach the above mentioned problem by way of the concepts of communication and autocommunication(Lotman). The outcomes stemming from the latter are unavoidable,since the result of any possible research (text) itself belongs to culture or a larger discourse and opera tes as the organizing function of the latter. Hence, research practice and its results always need to be looked at as mutually affecting each other

The construction of the ‘we’-category: Political rhetoric in Soviet Estonia from June 1940 to July 1941

The article asks, how one of the basic notions of cultural-political identity — we — is constructed in mass media, viz. which kind of semiotic and linguistic facilities are used in constructing a political unity. The approach used in this article is based on Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture and on the analysis of pronouns in political texts, using Emil Benvenist’s theory of deixis. Our case study concentrates on the years 1940–1941 which mark one of the most crucial periods in Estonian nearest history. The source material of the analysis consists of speeches of new political elite in power, all of which were published in major daily newspapers at the time. In outline, first year of soviet power in Estonia can be divided in two periods. First period would be from June 21 to “July elections” in 1940. In political rhetoric, new political elite tried to create a monolithic subject, the unity between themselves and people (people’s will) by emphasizing activity and freedom of selfdetermination. Nevertheless, starting from “elections”, especially from the period after “accepting” Soviet Republic of Estonia as a full member of Soviet Union, a transition of we-concept from an active subject to mere passive recipient can be detected. From that time on, people’s will was envisaged as entirely determined by marxist-leninist ideology and “the Party”

On semotics of war

Review of War and Semiotics: Signs, Communication Systems, and the Preparation, Legitimization, and Commemoration of Collective Mass Violence. (Jacob, Frank, ed.) London, New York: Routledge, 336 pp

Towards a semiotic theory of hegemony: Naming as hegemonic operation in Lotman and Laclau

The article concentrates on the possibilities of bringing into dialogue two different theoretical frameworks for conceptualising social reality and power: those proposed by Ernesto Laclau, one of the leading current theorists of hegemony, and Juri Lotman, a path breaking cultural theorist. We argue that these two models contain several concepts that despite their different verbal expressions play exactly the same functional role in both theories. In this article, however, we put special emphasis on the problem of naming for both theorists. We propose to see naming as one of the central translating strategies in the politico-hegemonic discourse. Our main thesis is that through substituting some central categories of Laclau’s theory with those of Lotman’s, it is possible to develop a model of hegemony that is a better tool for empirical study of power relations in given social formations than the model proposed by Laclau, who in his later works tends more and more to ground it in psychoanalytic ontology

Autocommunicative meaning-making in online communication of the Estonian extreme right

This article analyses the online communication of the Estonian extreme right that appears to be characterized by an echo-chamber effect as well as enclosed and hermetic meaning-making. The discussion mainly relies on the theoretical frameworks offered by semiotics of culture.One of the aims of the article is to widen the scope of understanding of autocommunicative processes that are usually related to learning, insight and innovation. The article shows the conditions in which autocommunicative processes result in closed interactions, based on reproducing stereotypes and redundant content. We detect antithetical meaning-making, an orientation towards normative (“correct”) texts and the prevalence of phatic communication as the main dominants that guide closed autocommunication. Such communication leads to polarization of dissimilar views and hinders dialogue. Our case study focuses on the discussion that arose in the context of the European Refugee Crisis that started in spring 2015

Semiotics of threats: Discourse on the vulnerability of the Estonian identity card

This article analyses various e-threats that were expressed in media texts that focused on e-threat discourses concerning the Estonian identity card’s security risk in 2017. The discourse of cyberthreats contains strong and controversial meanings because the peculiarities of cyberspace remain intangible for average readers who do not possess expert knowledge regarding ICT. The wider aim of the paper is to suggest how the topic of e-threats could be given public coverage without fuelling irrational anxiety and unwarranted threat scenarios. Our theoretical basis combines the frameworks of the Copenhagen School of security studies and ideas of cultural semiotics. We explain the semiotic logic of phobophobia (i.e. the abstract concern with the devastating impacts of the collective feeling of fear) and the discourse of fear that is characterized by a significant reliance on analogies, drawing vague demarcation line between reference objects and the dominance of negative emotional tonality. Our study demonstrates that the main actors of threat and the consequences of the identity card’s security problems were associated with unknown hackers and the damaging of the reputation of Estonia as an e-state

Paremäärmuslik sõnavabadus eesti rahvusradikaalide veebisuhtluses

The article focuses on the processes of identification in hypermedia, trying to explicate the strategies of self-description that prevail on the websites of the activists of the Estonian extreme rights. The extreme right movements tend to use generally accepted discourses for the purpose of legitimising their own ethnocentric media practices. Extreme nationalist ideas form equivalences with concepts from the discourse of multiculturalism (‘justice’, ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom of speech’), though at first sight they are incompatible. To explain this paradoxical situation, the authors employ the concepts of the hegemonic logic of signification and the empty signifier, as elaborated by Laclau, as well as the theoretical framework of cultural semiotics. The case-study is based on the extraordinarily forceful public feedback that followed the discussions about ACTA ratification in Estonia. ‘Information-freedom’ became an ambiguous core signifier: it played an important part in public discussions, but it also had a central role in the self-descriptions of Estonian radical nationalists. NO ACTA functioned in this case as an empty signifier, which united into a discursive whole these contradictory signifiers and self-models. The concept of a self-model is useful for explaining why some signifiers have a greater potential to become discursive dominants. It seems that in Estonian extreme-right meaning creation there are certain relations of equivalence between signifiers that are more likely to aggregate the discourse than the others, and these depend on the abstract level of the self-model