Lotman Continues to Astonish: Revolutions and Collective Emotions

ABSTRACT

Between 1988 and 1993, Yuri Lotman composed a series of reflections on “the voice of the anonymous mass”: a collective voice that, in particular situations linked to a cultural crisis, is the bearer of striking passions, which can deeply influence history. In his late works, the Russian semiotician postulated, therefore, the idea of a semiotics of emotions as an object of study to understand the dynamics of culture, especially during periods perceived as revolutionary or transitional―namely, when the anonymous mass manipulates the events or, when looking back, gives them a distorted interpretation. Lotman focused in particular on the relationship between great historical fractures, the self-propagating mechanisms of fear, and the cultural creation of scapegoats. This paper is devoted to framing Lotman’s reflection on persecution, paying particular attention to women during the phenomenon of the witch hunt.

KEYWORDS:
Yuri Lotman; Semiotics of emotions; Semiotics of fear; Social behavior; Witch-hunt; Scapegoat

Resumo

Entre 1988 e 1993, Iúri M. Lótman formulou algumas proposições sobre “a voz da massa anônima”: uma voz coletiva que, em certas situacões ligadas a crises de caráter cultural, é portadora de paixões violentas que podem produzir interferências profundas no curso da história. Em seus últimos trabalhos, o semioticista russo postulou, diante disso, a noção de uma semiótica das emoções como objeto de estudo para entender a dinâmica cultural, em especial de períodos tidos como revolucionários ou de transição, a saber, quando a massa anônima é capaz de manipular os eventos ou quando, revendo o passado, confere aos eventos uma interpretação distorcida. Lótman focalizou, principalmente, a relação entre as grandes fraturas históricas, os mecanismos de autopropagação do medo e a criação cultural de bodes expiatórios. O presente estudo visa abordar a reflexão de Lótman sobre perseguição, com especial atenção à figura da mulher durante o fenômeno de caça às bruxas.

Palavras-chave:
Iúri Lotman; Semiótica das emoções; Semiótica do medo; Comportamento social; Caça às bruxas; Bode espiatório

Introduction

The title of this contribution recalls a well-known book in semiotic circles (COBLEY et al., 2011). That’s right: semiotics continues to astonish, and so does the thought of one of its foremost representatives, Yuri Lotman. This monographic edition devoted to the famous Russian scholar is the expression of the vast phenomena of dissemination and adoption of the Lotmanian approach that, in the last decade, has extended from the literary sciences to various disciplines: biosemiotics, political studies, anthropology and postcolonialism, communication and translation studies, aesthetics and philosophical studies on postmodernism, and media ecology.

In addition to the constant editorial work carried out by Tatiana Kuzovkina, Mikhail Lotman, Igor Pilshchikov, and Mikhail Trunin (just to name a few) through the series Bibliotheca Lotmaniana,¹ we encounter the publication of very recent studies that makes central the review of the Lotmanian approach and the intellectual movement from which it is born, namely the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School (and its links with Peircean and structuralist semiotics). Consider, for example, Makarychev and Yatsyk (2017), Torop et al. (2015), Velmezova (2015), Lorusso (2015), Grishakova and Salupere (2015), Pilshchikov (2015), Lang and Kull (2014), Semenenko (2012), Favareau (2010), Avtonomova (2009), Kantor (2009). To these we have to add the works of the journal Sign System Studies with its fifty-five years of scientific tradition (1964-2019).

If, then, we refer to the Latin American environment, we cannot forget the works of Irene Machado and Ekaterina Vólkova Américo in Portuguese, and Silvia Barei and the GER (Grupo de Estudios de Retórica), Pampa Olga Arán, Ana Camblong, Julieta Haidar, and Katya Mandoki in Spanish (even here, just to mention a few names).²

Personally, if I reflect on our author today, in current times, I think there is more to say about his thought, and there are still unexplored horizons worthy of note. I would therefore like to take the opportunity with this special issue to talk about a topic very dear to the “late” Lotman, which is a central part of the reflection on contemporary culture and its languages: emotions.

In this review article I first intend to retrace the inaugural writings in which Lotman introduces the concept of socio-cultural construction of the barbarian (or the enemy): an elusive subject, who breaks the “regulators of behavior,” and is marked by vulnerability. This condition will be connected to the woman, following Lotman’s reflections on the phenomenon of witch-hunting, where fear, as a social inhibiting regulator that generates order and norms, is what eventually makes abnormality explode (see first section).

Second, I will focus on a period of particular interest to understand the conditions that lead a community to build a scapegoat: an expression of an unreasonable and fictitious threat. I am talking about the Renaissance, to which Lotman has devoted much attention throughout his intellectual parable. It represents a turning point in the sphere of human thought but also an amalgam of irrational and mystifying behaviors, of which, once again, the witch-hunt is a glaring example. This last phenomenon is inseparably treated by the author with regard to the “semiotics of fear” (semiotika strakha), the only human/animal emotion that he theoretically developed even if we can deduce by his last writings that he was interested in the broader topic of the psychology of mass consciousness dealt with in a semiotic perspective (see second and third sections).

Finally, I will propose some research paths that would be developed starting from Lotman’s reflection (LOTMAN, 1998a, p.65) on “the voice of the anonymous mass” (see conclusions).

1 The Enemy, Fear, and Mass Hysteria

Since the writings of the seventies and eighties, Lotman had glimpsed the importance of what he defines as collective emotions (affekty) for the study of culture. Between 1970 and 1975 Lotman published two fundamental essays: On the Semiotics of the Concepts of “Shame” and “Fear” in the Mechanism of Culture[O semiotike ponyatiy “styd” i “strakh” v mekhanizme kul’tury] (2000 [1970]) and The Decembrist in Everyday Life (1984 [1975]), from which a very clear concept of the cultural “we” emerges. The collectivity is conceived like a sort of body ordered by “regulators of behavior [...], such as shame, fear or honor” (LOTMAN, 1984 [1975], p.71), which define the degree of adhesion to or transgression from the norm. These regulators shape “cultural figures” (the fearless and the shameless,³ the transgressor, the corrupt, the izgoi,⁴ the madman, etc.) who are the counterparts of the “normality.” They constitute, in other words,

specific forms of historical and social behaviors, epochal and social types of reactions, as well as general conceptions as to which actions may be considered correct or incorrect, permitted or forbidden, valuable or worthless. […] The individual’s consciousness is, as it were, plugged into complex ethical, religious, aesthetic, practical and other semiotic forms, on which is constituted the psychology of group behavior (LOTMAN, 1984 [1975], p.71).

How can an individual (or an entire group of individuals) be considered an offender of these regulators of behavior? In 1984, Lotman answered this question by writing the essay Dynamics of Cultural Systems [La dinamica dei sistemi culturali] (LOTMAN, 1985 [1984], pp.131-145) for the edition of an important anthology of his writings in the Italian language, La semiosfera. At this juncture, he offered an interesting reflection on the cultural construction of the barbarian―namely, the one who is foreign and alien since, according to Greek etymology ( βᾰ ́ρβᾰ ρος), he babbles and is incapable of making himself understood. Focusing on the characteristics of the typological opposition between civilization and barbarism, he underlined how civilization (symbolized by order, rule and stability) shapes the barbarian in a spatial as well as “quantitative” way. In the first case, he is projected beyond the boundaries of culture (ideally but also physically), becoming an outcast,⁵ an “irregularity” of the system-culture, a subject that does not fall within social expectations and that so has to stay in the periphery (for instance on the outskirts of the city).

In the second case, the barbarian takes the role of a “minority,” although in reality he is not. According to Lotman, in history the most fitting examples of this “mechanism” were women were because “naturally from the numerical point of view they were not inferior to that of men”⁶ but, especially in precise historical moments, they were considered a minority, “a perfidious ‘Satanic army’ punishable by annihilation” (LOTMAN, 1985 [1984], p.142).⁷

Already in the early eighties Lotman introduces us to the theme of social persecution. In fact, the Russian semiotician returns to this idea later in the essay Witch Hunts: Semiotics of Fear [Okhota za ved’mami. Semiotika strakha] (written in 1988 but only published in 1998 in Sign System Studies) and stresses that when a society-due to the reasons we will see-is overwhelmed by fear, it looks for an enemy on which to pour its anxieties. In Lotman’s perspective one of the most emblematic phenomena was, in this sense, witch-hunting:

How is this enemy portrayed by a fear-stricken society? The first basic idea of witches can be formulated as follows: witches are a dangerous organized minority.

The primary feature of the object of fear is the fact that it is a minority. Society chooses its most vulnerable component, namely the element that suffers the greatest number of social grievances, and elevates it to the rank of the enemy. In the period of interest to us [the early modern age], women undoubtedly constituted this minority (LOTMAN, 1998a, p.70).⁸

In the phenomenon of witch hunts, an entire group of individuals not only seems to be a (vulnerable, peripheral) minority that violates the regulators of behavior-namely not a real threat-but it ends up being interpreted as an aggressive collective subject: fear is no longer an “inhibition” that regulates society (limiting it and “rationalizing” it) but, on the contrary, it becomes a collective emotion that destroys the social fabric, making absolutely normal, coherent and legitimate those behaviors that actually are exceptional (i.e. the accusation and systematic killing of minorities). This, as we will see in the next section, happens in specific historical moments marked by the “short-circuit” of mass hysteria.

Returning to the essay Dynamics of Cultural Systems [La dinamica dei sistemi culturali], Lotman emphasizes that the semiotic researcher cannot ignore the study of the “explosion of collective emotions” since “the waves of culture move in the sea of the human spirit” (LOTMAN, 1985 [1984], p.144),⁹ and this inevitably generates contradictions, uncertainties and crises. The idea that will dominate his late writings gains ground, namely that culture is crossed by abrupt and lacerating changes, sources of epidemic waves of terror (LOTMAN, 1985 [1984], p.145) but also of new unpredictable paths.

2 The Renaissance as an Explosive Historical Period: A Trans-Spatial and Trans-Temporal “Model” to Understand the Cultural Dynamics in Times of Crisis

History is a tangled web, not at all like a thread that unfolds neatly from beginning to end. People make it so multifaceted with their interpretations and their discourses, transforming events into a “plot” (syuzhet) and conditioning them with their deepest and archetypal passions. As emphasized in the introduction to this work, great historical upheavals throw people into uncertainty and push them to make sense of the present through new ways of communication, which aren’t always rational. Our author dedicates many of his last reflections to this theme.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, Mikhail Lotman, in the editorial note to the publication of the article Witch Hunts. Semiotics of Fear [Okhota za ved’mami. Semiotika strakha], highlighted how the semiotics of social cataclysm was part of the intellectual explosion that his father had experienced at the end of the eighties with the discovery of the complexity theory:

To my knowledge, Yu. M. Lotman twice stated that he had to completely retrain, or even learn anew. The first crisis occurred at the beginning of the sixties and was associated with an interest in cybernetics, information theory, and such mathematical disciplines as logic, game theory and, in a special manner, topology. The second crisis was connected to the study of processes lying at the intersection between semiotics of culture, history and the psychology of mass consciousness (LOTMAN, 1998a, pp.61-62).¹¹

Lotman sees in mass psychology an important object of study for the understanding of history, especially when it is about periods characterized by social dynamics linked to fear. The goal of the historian could then be to build models of the “destructive” collective passions and the related self-propagation mechanisms.

The “object of fear” emerges as a particularly thorny research topic, according to Lotman, especially when it deals with an unknown threat. In fact, there are historical periods in which fear has solid reasons for existence: the spread of an epidemic, imminent war, or the incursion of foreign invaders. However, there are others in which feelings of terror spread without a real cause:

In this situation, mystified addressees arise, constructed in a semiotic manner: it is not the threat the cause for fear, but fear that shapes threat. The object of fear is a social construction, the product of semiotic codes, through which the society [sotsium] encodes itself and the world around it (LOTMAN, 1998a, pp.63-64, emphasis mine).¹²

Through the manipulation of language (the symbolism of propaganda),¹³ society builds the image of a sacrificial victim (the unreal threat), the agent of a fatal conspiracy. On this mechanism, again returning to the history of humanity, Technological Progress as a Problem in the Study of Culture (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988]) is focused. This essay should be read together with Witch Hunts. Semiotics of Fear [Okhota za ved’mami. Semiotika strakha] (LOTMAN, 1998a) with which it shares some fragments on the theme of xenophobic persecution and cultural creation of the scapegoat, elsewhere defined by Lotman as a real mythologem [mifologema] of human conscience. To these it is necessary to add the aforementioned afterword that Lotman wrote in 1989 at the conclusion of the first Russian edition of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, entitled A Way Out of the Labyrinth [Vykhod iz Labirinta] (LOTMAN, 1998b [1989]).

The Russian semiotician sees in the Renaissance-a term in itself full of conflict¹⁴-a key age to understanding the sociosemiotic mechanisms underlying the creation of the alien in times of change and crisis. Early modern Europe was, in fact, a particularly contradictory cultural epoch, full of centrifugal and centripetal forces that dragged on until the end of the eighteenth century (also affecting the French Revolution).

It is an epoch that sees the expansion of geographical horizons, with the discovery of virgin and “wild” lands, and, contemporaneously, the erection of new political-territorial borders, with the affirmation of national languages; that witnesses the specialization of sciences and methods of research and, at the same time, the fragmentation of medieval universalism; that contemplates “optimistic belief in the omnipotence of human genius” (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.785) and the unconditional diffusion of hysterical fear (in an occult evil that is always placed outside); that exalts the enlightening power of technological and scientific progress and, at the same time, the mythology of danger and conspiracy.

The Renaissance was the time of utopias, of trust in human virtuosity but also of a radical transformation, in an anthropocentric key, of the relationship between man and world. Lotman writes: “The worship of human creativity had, however, a seamy side: nature was viewed as raw material or as enemy territory, to be conquered and transformed” (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.785). The efforts of scientists were directed toward changing the natural order of things.

The manipulability of the world is expressed above all in the desire to transform the dimensions of space and time. The Renaissance Man is projected as much into an infinitely (and illusively) deep canvas¹⁵ as into a geography that, with the implementation of connections and transports, seems to be more accessible: space, in other words, is no longer something that is given and absolute but rather a domain to be traveled, discovered, conquered, and exploited in extension and depth. In the same way, the absoluteness and inscrutability of medieval time seem to break in front of his desire to eliminate randomness (and irrationality) from history. The symbol of this dream is the clock¹⁶ which, by measuring and mathematizing the time, controls it and makes everyday behaviors marked, organized and predictable.

Paradoxically, however, this predictability is compromised by a new habitus, opportunism: the belief that man, because he is unlimitedly capable of imprinting his will on things (namely, to manipulate them), is also able to create his luck. This means transforming almost every situation into an opportunity. Randomness for Reason does not exist or, better yet, it is an opportunity to self-address. Furthermore, any means becomes legitimate by virtue of “the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” (BACON, 1974 [1906], p.288 apudLOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.785).¹⁷ In this way, history becomes the unfolding of human cunning on the path towards ever more “virtuous” (convenient) relationships between means and profit; however, it is a history that is not at all predictable, and is completely in the hands of a calculating Prince who seems to gamble with events.

It is here, according to Lotman, that the sphere of language and communication undergoes irreparable transformations, also thanks to the invention of printing. The medieval Word, pronounced by God or by one of his (spiritual or secular) spokesmen, is humanized and becomes “word,” an ordinary, subjective, arbitrary expression, no longer free from any possible ambiguity:

It became clear that the word might receive different meanings, depending on the intention of the speaker. The word became as cunning as politics, individually significant. […] The capitalized Word, the unique, highly authoritative, transparently referential Word, was supplanted by the common, popular word. It had become democratic but had lost its authority and credibility (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.797).

By losing these attributes, the word becomes scheming and deceptive. The communication pact within the social pyramid is thus undermined and the suspicion regime becomes increasingly pressing.

From these reflections Lotman draws an important deduction: the scientific and technological revolution is always accompanied by social crisis and outbreak of irrational behaviors, thus presenting itself as a culturological problem. Again, it is about a paradox because the growth of rationality and techno-pragmatic efficiency should weaken collective misgivings rather than stimulate them. Instead the novelty, which is perceived as eccentric, particular, unknown and unharnessed, leads to a loss of orientation and ends up instigating fear and the search for a guilty “other,” a scapegoat. In the aforementioned article On the Semiotics of the Concepts of “Shame” and “Fear” in the Mechanism of Culture [O semiotike ponyatiy “styd” i “strakh” v mekhanizme kul’tury] (2000 [1970]), Lotman had already stressed that “Fear and coercion determine our attitudes towards the ‘others’” (LOTMAN, 2000 [1970], p.664)¹⁸ and give life to the precise figures of the outcast (izgoi; the stranger). This happens through a backward movement, which is the exhumation of archaic psychological and cultural models, in which the unknown is obscure.

The fabric of Renaissance and then Enlightenment rationalism is in fact stitched with the thread of the irrational and the obscure other: sciences are accompanied by esoterism, medicine by alchemy, the light of the ratio by “the golden age of Satan” (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.790), and The Prince by the legend of Doctor Faust.

In his 1983 essay “Ode, vybrannoi iz Iova” Lomonosova [On Lomonosov’s “Ode Paraphrased from Job”] Lotman wrote:

The Renaissance was an exceptionally complex phenomenon […]. In certain respects, it was preparation for the “century of reason,” while in others it gave rise to tumultuous waves of irrationalism and fear. While preparing for its triumph, Reason often put on the mask of Mephistopheles. (LOTMAN, 1992 [1983], p.32)^{19 20}

Above all else, as we have seen, this period is stitched with the “witch hunts,” a true collective psychosis that lasted three hundred years (from the mid-fifteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century)²¹ and spread throughout Europe.

3 History between Change and Progress: The Emergence of the Alien Woman

What exactly happened during those three centuries of stakes and torture? In the first place, the witch hunts took place during a period of fierce political-religious conflicts, which created deep lacerations between Catholics and those who passed on to the Reformation in its various versions: we talk about religious wars-among which the ruthless Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) is included-to define in reality a phenomenon that made use of faith to legitimize interminable disputes of a strictly political-economic nature. It is no coincidence, Lotman emphasizes, that the greatest moment of explosion of fear occurs between the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, precisely in those lands²² (such as Eichstätt, Würzburg, Bamberg, Fulda or Ellwangen) that were more affected by this ambiguous and destructive social cataclysm.

In the second place, during the Renaissance the fragmentation of the theocentric cultural unity, the exaltation of the new techno-scientific knowledge, and the secular character of the nascent culture lead to an eradication of the habitual way of life and the search for the guilty: “When life loses its foundations anyone who dresses, thinks, or prays differently sparks fear” (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.790). Consequently, the space of the cultural core is filled with terror and becomes “phobocentric.” Lotman writes:

There is an undoubted relationship between the rapid technical and cultural progress of Renaissance Europe, the acceleration of the rhythm of life, the dynamism of unfolding historical processes on the one hand and, on the other, the amoralism of the cultural elite and the terror that had taken possession of the popular, backward-looking social layers of the fifteenth-eighteenth centuries.

The consequence of this epidemic wave of terror was the revival, in large segments of the population, of the most archaic superstitious ideas or, in other words, the activation of ancient models of conscience-the belief in witches and in racial prejudices. Going forward generated a move backward. Confidence in the power of man and the fear of the bad consequences of this power walked hand in hand. Similar circumstances are also observed in the twentieth century. The study of the semiotics of culture thus leads us to the semiotics of “cultural emotions” (LOTMAN, 1985 [1984], p.145).²³

Xenophobia towards religious and racial minorities thus can become a collective neurosis. This is exponentially true for the woman, an obscure figure who, in the Renaissance, plays an increasingly active role in society.²⁴ For the confused masses, it is enough that she demonstrates unusual behavior by becoming the incarnation of the future kingdom of Satan and burning; it is generally about a behavior related to the sexual sphere (the copulation with Satan or the “magical” deprivation of virile power) or the sphere of social betrayal (conspiracy, intrigue). All that, in short, can undermine the survival of the androcentric society at its root.

As the historian Merry E. Wiesner points out in Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, the studies conducted throughout Europe on trial archives show a profound correlation between the accusations aimed at women and the persistent presence of Satan in popular culture:

By the late sixteenth century, popular denunciations for witchcraft in many parts of Europe involved at least some parts of the demonic conception of witchcraft. This spread of diabolism led inevitably to a greater feminization of the witchcraft, for witches were now the dependent agents of a male devil rather than independently directing demons themselves, and it fit general notions of proper gender roles to envision women in this dependent position; even witches could not break fully with masculine norms. In areas of Europe in which the demonic concept of witchcraft never took hold, such as Finland, Iceland, Estonia, and Russia witchcraft did not become female-identified and there were no large-scale hunts. In Finland and Estonia about half of those prosecuted for witchcraft cases were male, and in Iceland and Muscovite Russia, the vast majority of those prosecuted were men charged with sorcery or using their skills as healers to harm people or animals instead (WIESNER-HANKS, 2000, p.275, emphasis mine)

A woman is, in certain ways, like science and technology: a novelty. Each of her peculiarities ignites an accusation because it is an element that upsets the normality; in fact, again Wiesner-Hanks emphasizes how witches were associated with disorder, that is, with non-ordinal and abnormal dimensions.²⁵ It is not by chance that the defendants or, simply, the suspects were the opposite of the stereotypical “good wives and mothers”-free women (widows or unmarried), without children or otherwise considered “bad mothers” (Wiesner-Hanks, 2000, p.276). In Witch Hunts. Semiotics of Fear, Lotman also speaks of female eccentricities that evoke suspicion and automatically generate accusations (a foreign woman, a woman with physical handicaps, a fat or, on the contrary, very beautiful woman). Furthermore, he acutely notes: “The accuser’s appearance also emerges: it is the average mass, devoid of marked characteristics and suffering from fear, hatred and envy towards those who possess any eye-catching quality” (LOTMAN, 1998a, p.72).²⁶

In most of Europe the fires are isolated cases or result from small hunts involving one or only a few suspects. Yet in some countries (such as the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland and parts of France), they are the expression of mass panics, the outcome of “the learned stereotype of witchcraft as a Devil-worshipping international conspiracy” (WIESNER-HANKS, 2013, p.438). In these cases, the accusations go beyond the stereotype stricto sensu of the witch and are extended literally to anyone.

The accusers become victims of the fears that they themselves instigate and create precisely that atmosphere of social betrayal they intend to prevent: the everybody against everybody destroys the foundations of the collectivity and the very concept of common good, giving rise to fractures that will no longer be repaired. The epidemic of witch hunts is, in short, an exemplary culturological phenomenon for Lotman, and not only because, with different traits, it is continuously repeated in history, but also because it hides another important collective psychological mechanism.

The fear of Evil takes place in the period of the foundation of rationalism, which lays the groundwork for the definitive self-exaltation of Reason. When fear in Europe disappears (thanks to the “domestication” of technological discoveries and a more stable structural situation) and the psychological atmosphere becomes enthusiastic, “whatever seemed possible and natural only yesterday appears impossible and incomprehensible” (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.793). For consistency, the awakening and the enlightenment of Reason cause history to lose its connection with the recent past, chronologically dissociating from it, and pushing it further into the past (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], pp.793-794). With a backward movement, the illuminist and then positivist chronicle ends up imputing the extermination of witches and sorcerers to medieval darkness. Despite that, it is precisely during the period of witchcraft persecution that there is an “amnesia” of the judicial tradition that grew in the Middle Ages through the simplification of legal procedures, the cancellation of the rules of defense and the abolition of all limitations regarding the use of torture: “The famous humanist Jean Bodin wrote: ‘Not one witch in a million would be punished if the procedure were governed by ordinary laws; suspicion is a sufficient reason for torture since rumors never appear in a void’” (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.791). The “word” (the scheming and misleading rumors), combined with the suspension of all legal guarantees and the conquests of civilization, becomes a powerful weapon that silences and distorts events.

4 Conclusions: An Open Horizon

We have seen how history (the core of the “last” of Lotman’s reflections) undergoes continuous distortions by the mass consciousness-a sleeping conscience²⁷ that, to be coherent with itself, projects outside its caesuras, its contradictions, and its fears in search of the enemy. This happens, above all, during transition periods, when-Lotman writes in A Way Out of the Labyrinth [Vykhod iz Labirinta] (LOTMAN, 1998b [1989]) - people feel the ground shifting beneath their feet, the past loses credibility, and the future is drawn in tragic tones. In these situations, the greatest danger is that an emotional epidemic (a mass hysteria) runs wild and people form mobs, overwhelmed by atavistic myths. The witch hunts of early modern Europe are just one of the many moments in Western history that gave the scapegoat several names: “sorcerer,” “witch,” “enemy of the people,” “mason,”²⁸ and the “intellectual” (LOTMAN, 1998b [1989]). Suffice it to say that Lotman closed with the following words in the first Russian edition of The Name of the Rose by Uberto Eco: “But not only utopia is dangerous, any truth is dangerous, excluding doubt. […] Truth undoubtedly gives rise to fanaticism. Truth beyond all question, world without laughter, faith without irony is […] the plan of modern totalitarianism” (LOTMAN, 1998b [1989]).²⁹

In Lotman’s references, the analogy of the stakes of the modern age with the Terror of contemporary totalitarianisms is clearly apparent. He witnessed firsthand that the “voice of the anonymous mass, those deaf and dark conversations, rumors and gossip that are generated by an atmosphere of fear and without which this atmosphere would be impossible” (LOTMAN, 1998a, p.65).

In 1988, during a series of educational television lectures entitled Relations Between People and the Development of Cultures [Vzaimootnosheniya lyudei i razvitie kul’tur], Lotman commented:

[W]hen history develops rapidly, situations change, traditions are broken and new conditions are created, people cannot communicate in old ways, and the new ones are not given up so easily. And then uncertainty takes possession of the individual. He does not know how to express his feelings (chuvstva). He looks for a way, namely, the words to express his thoughts; very often he feels without a language, like a stranger. This internal dissonance generates a very painful feeling. After the great historical fractures, an enormous cultural effort is required so the individual can create around him that communicative sphere, a space where he will confidently find interlocutors and feel understood again (LOTMAN, 2005 [1988], p.441, emphasis mine).³⁰

In other words, bewilderment in the face of an abrupt change has a great deal to do with the search for (and development of) new ways of communication. For this reason, according to the Russian semiotician, the contemporary era has witnessed a huge enhancement of communication (through its marriage with technology), which tried to solve the issue of reciprocal comprehension, namely “one of the most complex problems for mankind in general and for the human person in particular” (LOTMAN, 2005 [1988], p.463).³¹ It is a problem often marked by contradiction-a contradiction that generates conflicted feelings, the desire to meet the other but also the anguish in front of his or her irreducible diversity. It is no coincidence that in the last few years Lotman spoke about the need to consider the “semiotics of fear” as an object of study to understand both the past and the present.

In a world that was converging, our author was hopeful about the possibility of becoming one global family.³² However, he also felt the fear of what this inexorable merging process could produce: the cancellation of differences, the simplification of thinking and the “truth,” the flattening of views, the discoloration of communication (namely, the negation of the other as an unfathomable alterity), and the transformation of the euphoria in mass hysterical terror.³³ He could not imagine the explosion of digital communication that occurred in recent years, but without a doubt, he was aware of the deep bond that unites emotions to great historical and social transformations, of which on the verge on 1990s he glimpsed their inexorable approach.

The framework that emerges in this article intends to be a starting point for further reflections that-I personally believe-could focus especially on Lotman’s contribution to the understanding of contemporary communication (see for example LEONE, 2018 and DANESI, 2016)³⁴ in the light of the so-called “affective turn” (Clough; Halley, 2007).³⁵ He undoubtedly leaves us with a highly topical legacy at this moment in time when languages, meanings, and the “voices” of cultures are increasingly converging and crossing boundaries and, concurrently, when the destructive emotions often induce people to perceive the other in an aloof, estranged manner.

• 1
  Recently, a conspicuous collection of writings dedicated to Zara Mints has been published (KUZOVKINA et al., 2017). Between 2017 and 2018, Conversations About Russian Culture. Television Lectures (LOTMAN, 2017) and The Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School in the Correspondence Between Yu. Lotman and B. Uspensky (LOTMAN; USPENSKY, 2018) were translated into Italian. Examples of recent essays on Lotman and his reinterpretation include Restaneo (2018), Epstein (2018), Kroó and Torop (2018), Torop (2017), Gramigna and Salupere (2017), Novikova and Chumakova (2015).
• 2
  In particular, two recent texts, such as Lecciones sobre la cultura y las formas de la vida (BAREI; GÓMEZ PONCE, 2018) and Problema semiótico em pesquisas de comunicação e cultura (MACHADO et al., 2016) are an expression of an actual choral work brought forward by research groups in semiotics of culture. Cf. also Machado (2007) and Arán and Barei (2002).
• 3
  See Lotman (2000 [1970], p.666).
• 4
  The outcast, the social pariah, the rejected, the exiled, the excluded.
• 5
  This is a topic that had been extensively developed a few years earlier-together with Boris Uspensky-further exploring the figure of the izgoi (LOTMAN; USPENSKY, 2002 [1982]).
• 6
  Original text in Italian: “naturalmente dal punto di vista numerico non era inferiore a quello degli uomini.”
• 7
  Text in Italian: “‘un esercito satanico’ perfido e passibile di annientamento.”
• 8
  Original text in Russian: “Каким же рисуется пораженному страхом обществу этот враг? Первое основополагающее представление о ведьмах можно сформулировать так: ведьмы - опасное организованное меньшинство. Первая черта объекта страха - быть меньшинством. Общество выбирает реально наименее защищенную свою часть, часть, терпящую наибольшее число социальных обид и возводит ее в ранг врага. В интересующий нас период таким меньшинством, бесспорно, являются женщины.”
• 9
  Original text in Italian: “le onde della cultura si muovono nel mare dello spirito umano.”
• 10
  For deepening, see Gherlone (2015).
• 11
  Original text in Russian: “На памяти публикатора Ю. М. Лотман дважды заявлял о том, что ему приходится полностью переучиваться, даже учиться заново. Первый кризис пришелся на начало 1960-х годов и был связан с интересом к кибернетике, теории информации и к таким матема тическим дисциплинам как логика, теория игр и, осо енно, топология. Второй кризис был связан с изучением процессов, лежащих на стыке семиотики культуры, истории и психологии массового сознания.”
• 12
  Original text in Russian: “В этой ситуации возникают мистифицированные, семиотически конструируемые адресаты - не угроза вызывает страх, а страх конструирует угрозу. Объект страха является социальной конструкцией, порождением семиотических кодов, с помощью которых данный социум кодирует самого себя и окружающим его мир.”
• 13
  In early modern Europe, examples of propaganda included “[i]llustrated pamphlets and broadsides that portrayed witches riding on goats or pitchforks to sabbats where they engaged in anti-Christian acts such as spitting on the communion host and sexual relations with demons” (WIESNER-HANKS, 2013, p.435). Also, public executions, spectacles in themselves (with the list of charges read out for all to hear), were a form of propaganda (WIESNER-HANKS, 2013).
• 14
  The Renaissance is a term that in itself opposes a luminous culture to a dark world of barbarism (as in fact the Middle Ages was perceived by posterity).
• 15
  The creation of Alberti’s concept of perspective in 1435 (Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura) as an “open window” on the world and as a “point of view” reinforced the camouflage suggestion of the image, which was made to perceive space as an eye of infinity.
• 16
  During the 15th and 16th centuries, clock-making flourished.
• 17
  Lotman refers to Francis Bacon’s work Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (1605). The Russian semiotician speaks of a “philosophy of luck” that fueled the Renaissance spirit of amorality and adventurism (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.788).
• 18
  Original text in Russian: “Страх и принуждение определяют наше отношение к ‘другим’.”
• 19
  Original text in Russian: “Ренессанс был явлением исключительно сложным […]. Одними своими сторонами он подготавливал «век разума», другими вызвал к жизни бурные волны иррационализма и страха. Готовясь к своему торжеству, Разум часто наде'вал маску Мефистофеля.”
• 20
  It is interesting to note that in this essay Lotman mentions an idea that will be the fil rouge of his last monograph (LOTMAN, 2013): the intellectual is the one who can save the society from fanaticisms. In fact Lomonosov’s work Ode, vybrannoi iz Iova-inspired by the biblical Book of Job, written, perhaps, in 1742-1743 and published in 1751-was composed in the attempt to “zoologize” (from zoologizatsiya; zoologization), namely to rationalize, the biblical figures of the beast Behemoth and the sea-monster Leviathan. These figures were interpreted in modern Europe as signs that foreboded evil’s action in earthly reality, thus becoming the symbols of the demonic and lecherous conception of witchcraft, since-as is well known-witches were often represented in the company of beasts (a winged goat, for example). The interpretation that Lomonosov offered of Behemoth and Leviathan made it possible to return from the demonic world to the natural world (LOTMAN, 1992 [1983], p.37). The essay “Ode, vybrannoi iz Iova” Lomonosova [On Lomonosov’s “Ode Paraphrased from Job”] was defined by Mikhail Lotman as the inaugural writing of a series of Yuri Lotman’s late research dedicated to the analysis of the semiotics of social cataclysm (LOTMAN, 1998a, p.61).
• 21
  “Witch trials died down somewhat during the first decades after the Protestant Reformation, when Protestants and Catholics were busy fighting each other but they picked up again more strongly than ever in about 1570” (WIESNER-HANKS, 2013, p.435). The “legal” actions against witchcraft reached their apex in Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the last one in the Holy Roman Empire took place around 1775.
• 22
  In the Holy Roman Empire (the epicenter of the Thirty Years’ War), persecutions were most widespread.
• 23
  Original text in Italian: “Esiste un indubbio rapporto tra il rapido progresso tecnico-culturale dell’Europa rinascimentale, l’accelerarsi del ritmo di vita, il dinamismo dello svolgersi dei processi storici da un lato e l’amoralismo dell’elite culturale e il terrore che si era impossessato degli strati medi e retrivi della società dei secoli XV-XVII. La conseguenza dell’ondata epidemica di terrore è stata il ravvivarsi in ampi strati della popolazione delle idee superstiziose più arcaiche, l’attivarsi di antichi modelli di coscienza: il credere alle streghe, ai pregiudizi razziali. L’andare avanti ha prodotto un andare indietro. La fiducia nella potenza dell’uomo e il timore delle brutte conseguenze di questa potenza hanno camminato mano nella mano. Fenomeni analoghi si osservano anche nel XX secolo. Lo studio della semiotica della cultura ci conduce così alla semiotica delle ‘emozioni culturali’”
• 24
  Just think of “Doritte Nippers, who was convicted and executed for witchcraft in 1571 in Elsinore, Denmark, despite refusing to confess even when tortured. She was the leader of a group of female traders who refused to stop trading when ordered to by the town council” (WIESNER-HANKS, 2000, p.277).
• 25
  Merry E. Wiesner uses very similar words to those of Lotman when she speaks of the binary opposition between civilization and barbarism: “modern scholars have searched for underlying intellectual concepts which would have supported the link between women and witchcraft. One of these was the dichotomy between order and disorder, one of the primary polarities of both Greek and Christian thought. […] Related to this order versus disorder dichotomy were those of culture versus nature, reason versus emotion, mind versus body, all dichotomies in which men were linked to the first term and women to the second” (WIESNER-HANKS, 2000, pp.275-276).
• 26
  Original text in Russian: “Вырисовывается и облик обвинителя: это средняя масса, лишенная маркированных свойств и испытывающая страх, ненависть и зависть по отношению к тем, кто обладает каким-либо бросающимся в глаза качеством.”
• 27
  Lotman observes: “The eighteenth-century man felt himself to have awakened from a deep and heavy slumber (see Goya’s picture The Sleep of Reason)” (LOTMAN, 1991 [1988], p.793).
• 28
  Nazi propaganda, as with the Soviets, portrayed and disseminated the international “Jewish-Masonic” conspiracy.
• 29
  Original text in Russian: “Но опасна не только утопия, опасна всякая истина, исключающая сомнения. […] Истина без сомнения рождает фанатизм. Истина вне сомнения, мир без смеха, вера без иронии - это не только идеал средневекового аскетизма, это и программа современного тоталитаризма.”
• 30
  Original text in Russian: “Но когда история развивается быстро, ситуации меняются, традиции сломаны и создаются новые положения, человек не может общаться старыми способами, а новые даются не так легко. И тогда человеком овладевает неуверенность. Он не знает, как ему выразить свои чувства. Он ищет способ, слова для того, чтобы рассказать о своих мыслях; очень часто он себя чувствует как бы без языка, чужим. Это - разлад с самим собой, очень мучительное чувство. После больших исторических переломов требуется большое культурное усилие для того, чтобы человек создал вокруг себя ту коммуникативную сферу, то пространство, где он опять будет уверенно находить себе партнеров и чувствовать, что его понимают.”
• 31
  Original text in Russian: “одна из сложных проблем для человечества вообще и для человека в частности.”
• 32
  “The whole world is made like our family” (LOTMAN, 2016 [1982], p.688), Lotman writes in 1982, quoting an Italian proverb (“Tutto il mondo è fatto come la nostra famiglia”). The author dedicated this essay to the university and to the contemporary scientific revolution, the expression of an unprecedented inter-penetration of sciences, languages and visions of the world.
• 33
  As pointed out by Lyubov Kiselëva, “The mythologization of history, the dogmatism of thinking, and the inability to perceive reality in an open and unprejudiced manner (which is characteristic of mass consciousness) were considered by Lotman to be the result of ignorance, immorality and an internal lack of freedom. […] Although Yu. M. did not attribute religious foundations to his own activity, his faith in the immutability of the moral laws of the human condition was inherent in his persona. He was a thoughtful researcher of the mechanisms of shame, fear and honor in the history of culture, and the words ‘conscience’ and ‘honor’ are among the most frequent in his social commentaries” (KISELËVA, 2005, pp.607, 609). Original text in Russian: “Мифологизацию истории, догматизм мышления, неспособность к открытому, непредвзятому восприятию действительности (что свойственно массовому сознанию) Лотман считал результатом невежества, невоспитанности и внутренней несвободы. […] Хотя Ю. М. не прилагал к собственной деятельности религиозных обоснований, вера в непреложность нравственных законов человеческого бытия была ему свойственна. Он был вдумчивым исследователем механизмов стыда, страха и чести в истории культуры, и слова “совесть” и “честь” недаром принадлежат к числу наиболее частотных в его публицистике.”
• 34
  Lotman’s thought horizon could be, for example, put in relation with Marcel Danesi’s recent work, The Semiotics of Emoji. In this book he underlined how a (possible) global revolution is taking place, that crosses language barriers and is linked to the world of verbal-visual language precisely in relation to the need to universally express and share emotions. Danesi wonders in fact if it is a passing trend or really a communication revolution-a revolution actually based on a retrieval of hybridity in writing, namely the combination of picture writing with phonetic writing.
• 35
  See for example Lünenborg and Maier (2018) and Giaxoglou and Döveling (2018).

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  14 Nov 2019
• Date of issue
  Oct-Dec 2019

History

• Received
  19 July 2018
• Accepted
  11 Aug 2019