Art as a thinking structure and generator of new worlds

Abstract

The theoretical corpora of Lotman trace, from different perspectives, a common pathway focused on the artistic texts capable of depiction [izobraženie], that he considers as the language that characterize the human being as a semiotic animal. Lotman’s “culturological” type of approach defines the text as a “cultural text” with a specific creative/aesthetic/poetic function, with social and ethical value, and with connections to reality in its chronotopical dimension. His studies have assigned a special centrality to artistic texts because they assume a specific languages as a model and an instrument that is essential to understand the Culture as a system of social practices. According to this approach the artistic vision and its intersemiotic aesthetic refractions

are of vital importance for the renewal of the “real” and for the accountability of the life of signs in a semioethical perspective. Lotman is today considered one of the most creative semioticians and, specifically, as a “modeler”, a builders, an innovators of the “real”

These studies have assigned a special centrality to artistic texts, to “secondary discourse genres” (in the Bakhtinian sense of literary genres). As a reflex, this has made it possible to assume the artistic text and its specific languages as an essential model and instrument in the study/understanding of Culture which by nature is dynamical and heterogeneous. Culture in fact is not easily described, it cannot be reduced to models characterized by codification-decodification, it cannot be uniformed/unified, situated in a system (langue). Instead, cultures presents itself  as a system of social practices.

This approach opens up to the possibility of recognizing/reestablishing the vital importance of the artistic vision, with its intersemiotic aesthetic refractions, in the renewal of the “real”. This occurs both as the result of the interrelation between writing and images of the world, as well as through a particular meta-semiosical lens. What is implied is a responsibility for the life of signs in a semioethic perspective. Lotman today figures among those authors considered as the most creative in the semiotic field, and specifically as “modellers”, builders, innovators in the face of the “real”.