Every theory of culture must at some point explain how a culture transforms itself without ceasing to be recognizable to those who inhabit it. The most widespread answers tend to revolve around two models: progressive accumulation, according to which the new results from the continuous development of what already existed, and rupture, according to which the new can only take hold through the destruction of what came before. In Kul’tura i vzryv [Culture and Explosion], published in 1992, a year before his death, Yuri Lotman proposes a formulation that displaces this alternative. Cultural dynamics would result from the coexistence of gradual and explosive processes, which unfold simultaneously, at different rhythms, in the different layers of a single culture (LOTMAN, 1992; 2009).
I return to the concept of explosion for two reasons. The first is theoretical: it develops, on the level of temporality, what the notion of the semiosphere had formulated on the spatial level, introducing into cultural semiotics a systematic reflection on the unpredictable. The second concerns the research I have been conducting in science and health education, in which the question of how to identify and interpret changes in meaning-making arises frequently, and almost always in a more difficult form than assessment instruments would suggest.
The book starts from a distinction of two types of dynamics, which coexist in any culture. Gradual processes are characterized by relative predictability. In them, each state of the system can be understood as an unfolding of the previous one, and continuity ensures the transmission of texts, codes and practices from one generation to the next. Lotman does not treat them as a lesser form of dynamics, since without them a culture would lose the memory that secures its identity. Explosive processes correspond to moments in which the system ceases to be predictable from its previous state. At the point of explosion a bundle of possibilities opens up, and the one that is actually realized cannot be deduced deterministically from the preceding conditions, even though those conditions delimit the field of what can happen.
The distinction gains relevance if we recall that, from a Lotmanian perspective, a culture is never homogeneous. Spheres such as science, fashion, politics, religion or art move at their own speeds, and an explosion in one of them may coexist with gradual processes in others. Cultural dynamics thus results from a plurality of rhythms that influence one another, which makes insufficient any model that attempts to describe the transformation of an entire culture by means of a single developmental curve. This temporal heterogeneity is consistent with the image of the semiosphere as an internally differentiated space, with a centre, peripheries and boundaries, which I discuss on the page Cultural Semiotics: Lotman, the Semiosphere and Education.
The unpredictability of the explosive moment contrasts with the way that moment tends to be remembered. Once one of the open possibilities has been realized, culture tends to reorganize its own trajectory retrospectively, presenting as necessary what, at the moment it occurred, was only one of several alternatives. The unrealized possibilities disappear from view, and the event comes to be narrated as the logical consequence of earlier causes (LOTMAN, 2009). Historiography, collective memory and even individual biographies frequently resort to this mechanism, making of chance a regularity and of unpredictability a causal chain.
This observation has epistemological consequences that go beyond the theory of culture. It suggests that retrospective explanation, however coherent it may appear, carries a selection effect: it reconstructs the past from the known outcome and therefore tends to underestimate the role of contingency. Lotman’s formulation preserves the possibility of historical explanation, although it requires distinguishing the way a process unfolded from the way it came to be narrated, recognizing that this second movement is itself a semiotic process, conditioned by the languages and the self-description needs of the culture that carries it out.
The way a culture narrates its explosions also varies, and Lotman seeks to describe this variation through a typology that has been widely discussed. In cultures he characterizes as binary, change tends to be conceived as the complete destruction of the previous order and the establishment of something radically new, so that explosion is experienced as catastrophe or as the promise of an absolute new beginning. In cultures with a ternary organization, explosion in certain layers coexists with the preservation of others, allowing elements of the past to be incorporated into the new state of the system. The author associates the first model with Russian history and the second with the Western European tradition, a comparison that takes on more explicit contours in the final part of the book.
I read this typology as a heuristic resource, more useful for thinking about a culture’s modes of self-description than for classifying national cultures. Generalizations of this kind tend to erase the internal heterogeneity that Lotman himself describes so insistently, in addition to favouring essentialist characterizations of entire cultures. Even so, the distinction remains productive for observing how different collectivities narrate their transformations: some organize memory around the idea of total rupture, others around transformed continuity, and this narrative choice affects the ways in which the new can be received.
It remains to understand where explosions tend to originate, and Lotman’s answer points to the function of the boundary in the semiosphere. In Universe of the Mind, he had already suggested that new meaning arises above all from contact with what is only partially translatable: a fully translatable text produces no new information, and a completely untranslatable text fails to establish any relation with the system that receives it (LOTMAN, 1990). Explosion can be understood, in this key, as the moment in which the tension accumulated in these spaces of imperfect translation reorganizes the system itself, altering its hierarchies and redefining what counts as centre and as periphery. I have discussed this relation, as applied to teaching, in a pedagogy of the boundary framed by Lotman.
Lotman assigns art a particular place in this process. Being organized in systems of rules that can be deliberately transgressed, art would function as an experimental space in which unpredictability is modelled and explored without the direct consequences it would have in other spheres of social life. The figure of the madman, which the author contrasts with that of the fool, fulfils a similar function: while the fool acts in a predictably inappropriate way, the madman introduces behaviours that escape the available codes, producing, in certain circumstances, possibilities that the system had not yet formulated (LOTMAN, 2009).
Implications for educational research
I return, then, to the problem that motivated this reading. In research on science and health education, it is common to compare what students say before and after an activity and to interpret the difference as an effect of the intervention. The concept of explosion suggests two cautions. The first concerns the nature of change: moments in which a new translation becomes possible, in which a sign comes to occupy another position in someone’s repertoire, or in which a question shifts a classificatory boundary could hardly be described as the linear outcome of a teaching sequence, even though the sequence created some of the conditions for them to occur. The second concerns interpretation: the narrative the researcher constructs after knowing the outcome tends to reproduce the mechanism described by Lotman, presenting as necessary a trajectory that held other possibilities.
This second caution guides the way I have been rereading the corpus discussed in Technoscientific Imaginaries: Science and Technology in the Construction of Future Perceptions. Rather than asking whether the intervention changed the students, I am interested in reconstructing the semiotic conditions that made a given reconfiguration possible and, as far as possible, recovering the alternatives that were open at the moment it occurred. The task is more laborious, because it requires incorporating into the material hesitations, contradictions and silences that an outcome-oriented analysis would tend to discard.
The initial question, about how a culture transforms itself without ceasing to be recognizable, receives from Lotman an answer that dispenses with the exclusive alternative opposing continuity to rupture. Transformation results from the interaction of different rhythms, and a culture’s identity depends less on the absence of explosions than on the capacity of its memory to reorganize them into a coherent narrative. The price of this coherence is the erasure of unrealized possibilities. Recognizing this price does not make explanation impossible; it makes it more aware of its own limits, which, for educational research, means admitting that part of what we observe as learning can only be understood if we keep in view what could have happened and did not.
References
LOTMAN, Iúri M. Kul’tura i vzryv. Moscou: Gnozis; Progress, 1992.
LOTMAN, Juri. Culture and Explosion. Ed. Marina Grishakova. Trans. Wilma Clark. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009.
LOTMAN, Iuri M. Cultura y explosión: lo previsible y lo imprevisible en los procesos de cambio social. Trad. Delfina Muschietti. Barcelona: Gedisa, 1999.
LOTMAN, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: a semiotic theory of culture. Trans. Ann Shukman. London: I. B. Tauris, 1990.
This text is part of the guide Cultural Semiotics: Lotman, the Semiosphere and Education.
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